jkeisling/hacker-news-corpus-2007-2022 huggingface dataset:
Perhaps it is local familiary. Living in Oakland and working in San Francisco I made $175k and was able to save $4,500 per month after all of my living and familial expenses. When I’ve spoken to companies in London they seemed to max out around $100k.

Whenever I looked at apartments online trying to find an equivalent lifestyle (30 minutes door to door commute, nearby parks and restauranta, 1 br 85 m^2 with good amenities) the rent always came out about the same as what I was paying ($1,840/month).

The difference being home in Oakland My hood was mostly single family homes with yards (and a few yuppy apartment complexes like mine). In London everything within that commute range seemed to be a concrete jungle, and I couldnt figure out how to find an equivalent neighborhood withot really going far away from the tech companies.

Whenever I visit london my dollar never seemed to stretch far and food / groceries / transit felt reallly spendy.

London pubtrans is clearly better than anywhere in the USA, that goes without sayyng, but was also more expensive (if I went to the office I think I paid $4 each way for the transbay bus, with a 5-10 minute walk on each end of my commute).

It’s a great city (except for the traffic. I would be terrified to ride a bicycle there), and one of my favorite things to do in life is smoke a spliff and walk down the camden locks trail.
Definitely not over here in this post-communist country, and there are few standardized tests - most are invention of a teacher so good luck 'finding' them beforehand.
I wanted to give a quick shoutout to Hey [0] while giving K-9 a potential solution. Hey is fiercely approaching email like no other email client has in decades. It is a fundamental shift in the way we interact with email. For anyone who hasn't tried it, you're missing out on what email can be. They have a free trial but it isn't free nor is it ad supported or backed by a VC, which brings me to the point about funding. You shouldn't be sorry about charging your customers or feel only if some investor would give you money all your problems would go away. I gladly pay for Hey because it solves a real problem elegantly, sure it's not perfect, I still have to have my gmail on the side as sort of a backend to my email experience, but the problems it solves are well worth paying for. So if K-9 provides real value where no other email client provides the same level of value then their users should be more than happy to pay for it, I know I would. But if it provides some esoteric feature like PGP where even those who use it don't really know why they do and most certainly would not pay for then sure maybe you do need outside funding.

[0] hey.com
Lex is a pretty unconventional interviewer, but I actually think he's pretty fantastic at what he does. In particular, he is one of the best at thinking like a beginner and asking clarifying questions as his guests talk. He interviews a lot of brilliant people who can speak at some depth about topics that need context, and he does a good job of in real time figuring out where they need to clarify without obstructing their explanation. For example, I think he got one of the best interviews I've seen out of Wolfram.

I don't know if you've ever interviewed someone, but that kind of awareness and quick thinking is really really hard.
It sounds like you disagree with their argument, which is fine, but then you go on to harshly criticize an interpretation that you've imposed on it. There are plausible alternative interpretations which are both reasonable and likely, so why not assume best intentions? That's the bedrock of productive debate.
I have a feeling that many of the engineers who live in locations far off from SV such as Bangladesh, who do have the skills to make it as a FAANG employee (for example), already choose to move to SV/London/etc and collect that salary. If so, there shouldn't really be all that much untapped potential* in the third world. The way FAANG companies greedily hoover up the eligible talent pool (regardless of whether they have good project ideas for those folks to work on) makes me think it's not likely they'd overlook a vast pool of talent that's cheaper and just as productive.

*Not counting those who never had access to education or a computer to become fully realized engineers in the first place. Just commenting on ready-to-go software engineers.
Getting rid of advanced classes does nothing to solve the real problem: different kids have wildly different resources/home lives and those differences often cut across racial lines. Want to fix large difference in racial makeup between regular and advanced classes? Implement universal pre-K. Give all children free breakfast, lunch, and dinner that's healthy. Give parents $700 per child. Mandate that all homes have safe drinking water free of lead. Put social workers, psychologists, and nurses in schools. Tackle the material circumstances that tend to stifle a child's development and the rest will follow. Canceling classes doesn't do anything for anyone.
One simple trick is doing a bijective transformation between your constrained input space and the unconstrained optimizer space. For example, if you have x>0 in your input space, you take the input from your optimizer and apply e^x to it. Or if you have a<x<b you can do a+b*logit(x). What exactly you choose will depend on your prior on how your function behaves.
You eventually have to rewind, if you ever want to run a second program on your reversible computer.

Ideally you break things into small chunks of computation where you run it forward, copy the result (at some energy cost), then rewind it. Then you're only paying per bit of result.
You have a modifier key "Super", probably with Windows logo, which you can remap for the shortcuts you've had with command.
Being right isn't enough to be interesting. The key thing is the amount of information in the message. High-indignation, low-information messages produce uninteresting discussion on HN.

Actually Theo's message may not be so low-information in its original context, where there's a lot of shared state i.e. implicit information. But that doesn't carry over automatically. Posting a mailing list thread to HN is a lossy operation that way.
Limiting analysis to the personal impact of privacy / security issues arising in our rapidly evolving society is simply poor analysis and certainly not helpful in contributing to a well-planned, well-designed future society.

This narcissistic / short-term mindset is unhealthy, and is manifested in discussions around security ("I'm boring, who wants to hack me?") / privacy ("I'm boring, who's interested in me?") / liberty ("I have nothing to hide!") / environment (tragedy of the commons).

Someone working up a societal cost calculation as you outline clearly does not suffer from the narcissistic defect of security / privacy analysis that obviously rankles me. As long as people take a broader view it's perfectly reasonable to disagree on the importance / severity of a particular security / privacy breach.

In this particular instance the cost of modifying iOS to encrypt consolidated.db, store less data points, or allow users to easily opt out would be negligible.

If it was a little Silicon Valley startup they'd potentially go down in flames as HNers howled at them for taking such an amateur and reckless approach to users personal data. It'd certainly be a software defect that would quickly be patched by any little software house.
Jeff Bezos' job post looking for talented engineers to "pioneer commerce on the Internet"... A startup description that certainly delivered on that promise.
> WRT to Patrick Stewart / Picard - Roddenberry had this retort when asked about it by reporter about casting Stewart in Star Trek: TNG. "Surely by the 24th century, they would have found a cure for male pattern baldness." And Gene Roddenberry responded "No, by the 24th century, no one will care." Could by apocryphal, I'm too lazy to check.

I wouldn't be too surprised if Roddenberry took this position in response to outside questions once the decision was made, but if so it's a bit ironic given that it's also been widely reported (including by Stewart) that Roddenberry was openly anti-Stewart during the casting process for not having the look he wanted, in part because of his baldness.
This is what it appears to be based on:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fischer%E2%80%93Tropsch_proces...

So basically hydrocarbons of various molecular weights which gasoline or diesel also consist of, but one article mentioned there were only a dozen or two major components, rather than the hundreds of different hydrocarbons in each of the mainstream motoring fuels which have been refined from crude oil. This could be some pretty clean stuff.

The C10 to C20 straight chain hydrocarbons mentioned in the Wikipedia entry would be within the diesel range, and identical to the same straight-chain components found naturally within crude oil. Synthetically this process would be expected to yield much less of the branched-chain hydrocarbons found in petroleum-based diesel, and likely low to insignificant _aromatic hydrocarbons_ like the benzene, toluene, & xylene which are the major ones in the gasoline range.

I have made laboratory blends of these materials (still do) for decades as NIST-traceable reference materials for comparison to petroleum materials.

Gasoline engines need the next lighter fraction of refined crude than diesels use, plus straight chains are much lower in antiknock rating (R+M/2) so are not acceptable for gasoline engines. I imagine there has been some successful effort by Porsche/Siemens where some branched-chain hydrocarbons lighter than C10 can be preferentially yielded to substitute for petrol.

Diesel engines are supposed to _knock_ but not gasoline engines.

Remains to be seen, I'm sure to be part of the discussion on the ASTM Committee when it comes to specifications & testing before this could become mainstream.

It's an alternative fuel so I'll probably get some of the earliest samples.
There is a presentation, given by a Ukraine-Russia war observer to new officers at a US academy. The guy had talks with Ukraine generals and was analyzing the war.

He said that the ukraine air force was broken and destroyed by the russian system. The same thing happend to Israel, where at the time they had one of the best air force.

Any planes and helicopters werr forced to fly really, really low because of the S300 and S400. The information of a incoming object was given to a mobile squad who where anticipating and waiting for the plane. Then they simply shoot the plane down from atleast two sites with their portable and advanced SAMs.

He also said, that the US is not ready for that kind of war and is not trained for it. The US had always had the assumption of a given air superiority in any conflict. But air superiority is not given, if fighting close to Russia or China. And the russian system showed how easy it would be to contest it. For that reason, the US would lose air superiority in a conflict close to russian border and because you can't always count on stealth fighters, they are too unreliable, specially if fighting far away without a secured air base close to the conflict.
I am giddy with excitement over this project! Thank you sexy_year for making this. Got any screen shots posted?
So what you’re saying is, if someone gives you 1 BTC you will give it to me for free since it’s not useful to you?
> Building parks & hospitals doesn’t contribute to national defense

Neither does spending astronomical sums on a system that never reaches operational readiness.
The check engine light is a UI problem. LCDs are cheap now, it should be able to display the real problem. At least with a numeric code on the panel that you can look up in the owner's manual.
Yeah, there were a bunch more on there the other day. I saw one headed to my zip code, so I'll cross my fingers.

Of course, before I sent in my application, there were about 7 coming to this zip code, and none of those could be me, so it's something of a long shot.
Premise:
a) Many (most?) small software outfits, and software developers don't agree that software should be patentable.

b) Some of us would be willing to pay an insurance premium against patent trolls

Proposal: Form an organization (or convince an existing one like the EFF) funded (donations, I'd presume) by all of us to:

a) Lobby for changes to to the patent process and law.

b) Aggressively challenge obvious software patents as being obvious, or using prior art.

c) Serve as a communal defense fund/legal help for small businesses against patent trolls.

d) Maintain a community database of bad patents and potential prior art (to be used in defensive or offensive legal actions)
I think that is because the visualization isn't clear. I think it would be better if the movie bubbles were scaled to how many other movie connections it had, rather than just the number of arrows pointing to it, which doesn't work as well.

Also, we can't see what those connections are, and from what I'm looking at, it is difficult for me to understand.

Knowing that IMDB holds data on the actors, producers, etc. I was expecting that was the connection, x number of actors/producers/directors from film a worked on film b, but it doesn't look like that is what this does.

The beauty of pagerank is the simplicity. The IMDB movie connections has lost that simplicity I think.
He committed fraud, which is a crime and a violation of civil law.

Your characterization of his actions as "he made a verbal offer to buy goods at a certain price, and then backed out" leaves out the fact that he intended to back out all along, and that the lie was for personal gain. If he had intended to buy the tickets for $1,100 from her, he would not have first sold them to her for $620.
A designer breaking the rules will generally enhance their work. A coder violating an architecture will often just create long-term technical debt, at the expense of some short-term gain. That is, they'll get their piece done faster, but leave in its wake a nasty problem for someone else. Of course that only applies if the architecture is reasonable and its rules are correct from an engineering standpoint. In practice, many of the 'coding rules' are too brittle for the circumstances, thus making things worse, not better.

The difference is that one change is done purely for the improvement of the aesthetics, while the other is done because of some fundamental disagreement about the underlying engineering principles. One change is done irrationally because it "feels" right, while the other is a disagreement on the nature of the rules (or a lack of understanding of the purpose of the rules). But there are rules (whether or not they've been articulated).

Usually when programmers "hack" things, they cause a raft of other problems in their wake. As software development progresses from an art, to a science and onto engineering, hopefully the desire to hack at things will diminish. We can actually reliably build complex systems, but only when we choose to think about the right way to do it, rather than just react to our environment. Personally I don't think good programmers "hack". They build. It's very different.
This lead me to a question about DES. If no salt is provided it uses a static or default two character salt. In the gawker leak, the first two characters of the stored hash were the default salt. How is that two character default derived?
it's explained in the blog post. it's the result of running pagerank on connection/references between movies, and graphing the connections between the top 100. you can see the pagerank when you hover over a title.

maybe the size of a node should indicate the rank to make it clearer.
You could also make the same argument about "reading a book", "reading HN regularly", "allowing time to pass"... Don't do any of those things if you want to stay exactly the same!
First of all, thanks for the comment!
Although I agree that since a non-technical entrepreneur might not necessarily have enough knowledge to determine edge cases, it IS their responsibility to correctly lay out, to the extent of their knowledge, how the solution they are envision looks and works like.
Not providing enough information leads to poor estimations and it's very important that the startup owner can communicate his vision of the product to the rest of team so they can do their job as best as possible.
This is probably the best description of the politics behind climate change i've ever read.
I was being self deprecating - you can see from my other post in this thread and from my gameday Twitter posts ([0] for example) that I'm an NFL/Patriots fan.

[0] https://twitter.com/Anechoic/status/558381309115244545
Belichick specifically said he was not talking about atmospheric temperature conditions, but the conditions of the ball. Presumably whatever rubbing of the ball was necessary for preparation heated the air in the ball. He must have explained this in the most obtuse way possible to reduce the chance people call him a cheater for heating the air in the ball.
The legacy code should have been running in parrallel with the new code , atleast until it reaches feature parity ( or reduced features - with other features removed as they have not been used)
Yep, small accident between the brain and the typing fingers there.
Bad lesson from this (completely valid) analogy: by 1970s, Communism has become a full-blown religion, with it's pseudo-scientific roots being thoroughly debunked, but politicians resting on them stubbornly refusing to give way.
Would the down-voter care to explain their rationale?
I've had the same experience in Seattle. To the point where a couple times I had to ask my roommate to flag down a cab for me. With apps like Uber, Lyft etc I have not had the same issue.
Thanks for 8 amazing years. 4chan represented a chapter in my life that has changed me fundamentally. Good luck in whatever you're off to do.
"There is science available for writing software, it just gets ignored a lot."

Another important point is software engineering is a baby among the other disciplines. So in its first half century we've had a continuous stream of pitch men selling the new silver bullet that will fix everything, forgotten in a couple years of course. Oh but that NEW scam, its the real thing, this time, yup.

Compare to civil engineering, where the Romans were making great big piles of dirt 2000 years ago. Maybe not as well as we can or as fast as we can, but institutional experience does pile up.

Something to think about as a hard sci fi setting or similar, is a couple centuries in the future, being a programmer will be about as sexy as designing municipal sewer piping, and about as much room for creativity. So we should enjoy the fun while we can.
However, statistically correct.
> I always ask people to write code in a technical interview, and I usually start with a fairly easy warm-up question — some sort of a toy problem like an operation on lists or trees, often the kind of thing that has a neat recursive solution.

Interview questions that have a "neat" solution are usually bad interview questions and more a reflection on the fact that the interviewer is trying to feel smarter than the interviewee.

On top of that, if the interviewee writes the neat solution right away, what have you learned exactly? Either she's very good or she already knew the neat solution, so you're going to have to ask additional questions to clarify. Why not skip the gimmick question and get to the real interview part?
In Taiwan people do (e.g. plenty commute from Taoyuan to Taipei city, that's a round trip of > 50km).
Photographer has more photos here: http://reedyoung.com/project/whittier-alaska/r-young-whittie...

Also the full version of the article in OP's link
Winning the "ovarian lottery" means you were born with advantages that you didn't earn. Someone born in the US, has a huge advantage over someone born in a 3rd world country. Luck probably plays a bigger role than hard work (in success) due to these non-earned advantages. Many successful people would rather believe that their hard work was the reason for the success than admit their good fortune.

For example: I don't doubt the the Winklevoss twins are hard workers [you don't get into the Olympics without hard work] but I think it would be reaching to ascribe their current station in life to just hard work.
It doesn't seem that the author actually asks candidates to code up the Tower of Hanoi in an interview.

> I usually start with a fairly easy warm-up question — some sort of a toy problem like an operation on lists or trees, often the kind of thing that has a neat recursive solution.

Binary tree problems and some linked list problems often have fairly obvious recursive solutions -- perhaps that's what he's referring to. I doubt anyone would consider the Tower of Hanoi problem "easy". It's definitely an interesting one to investigate in a blog post say, or for one's own enrichment -- it seems like that's what the author is doing.

Of course there's no way of knowing the author's intentions unless he himself clarifies it, but this is what I think.
This is an excellent piece, my esteem for geohot got even higher. It vilifies Sony (rightly so) but also is balanced. The plumber analogy is spot on and funny:

"To me, a hacker is just somebody with a set of skills; hacker is to computer as plumber is to pipes. And the same ethics should apply, if you want to mess with the pipes in your own house, go for it. But don't go breaking into people's houses and messing with their pipes. (Note that I do not endorse water piracy)"
A bit of perspective. A decade ago, I occasionally participated in ongoing negotiations with the labels to license music for what became a well known subscription service.

In retrospect, I believe the labels (and the entertainment industry in general) are master negotiators and outclass 95%+ of the people I see doing bizdev / licensing on the silicon valley side. The negotiations I was familiar with went on for years, and often focused on minute trivia or sudden left field issues. Looking back, I'm pretty sure many of these things were simple delaying tactics, though that was far from clear at the time. The industry was developing a number of their own solutions (several of which would never see the light of day) and had more or less picked a leading industry platform that was a bit farther behind the first wave. Much of the rest ended up as simple pricing leverage, each DRM or anti-piracy or marketing requirement ending up being used simply to nickel and dime the negotiations to death.

In the end, when one major competitor came close to launch negotiations across the industry suddenly became much easier. Another consideration is the industry's significant inclination to punish people who they felt worked against them - and Mr. Roberts most certainly fits in this category.

There are a number of ways to interpret all of this, but I wouldn't suggest that these demands should be taken at face value.

In this light, I think Amazon's approach of "ask for forgiveness" makes a ton of sense. Especially if you assume that terms of these licenses will become much easier and rather standardized once a major competitor launches in this space.
I'm stumbling around this very issue right now, but his recommendations would not work if you need to interface with native hardware functions such as the camera. It would be great if there were a web interface into native functionality, however. What are the obstacles to os developers providing it?
Also, I will add, nearly every article you read on Hacker news is a blog post on the submittors own blog. Is their something wrong with doing this?

If you found it so terrible, why did you continue reading for a whole 5 minutes and not stop after 1, clearly it must have had some value.

Google makes the vast majority of its current revenue from search and email, not from Android. $1.3 billion is projected and is about 3% of $32 billion a year revenue, the vast majority of which comes from search.
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=GOOG