jkeisling/hacker-news-corpus-2007-2022 huggingface dataset:
The PhD example late in this essay is one that I have lived. I am a failed PhD student who worked for 4 years on my research with no first author publications to show for it. The professors from my old school always express surprise and confusion that I didn't succeed since I apparently have the right combination of smarts. But, to me, my failure is more down to bad luck and unfortunate circumstance than any inate ability.

I would love to hear other's experiences with PhDs in the context of the essay's example.
There are many conflicting stories about the origin of AWS, but the whole "our infra is underutilized except during Christmas, let's rent it out!" is one that I never hear repeated by anyone with any claim to knowing what was actually happening. I think it's an "Omidyar Pez Dispenser"-tier story: fully bullshit.

It kind of doesn't even withstand a moment's scrutiny. What was Amazon going to do during Christmas? Like, if they lease all this spare capacity during non-peak, what happens to those customers during peak? There are spot instances now, but the first two AWS products, S3 and EC2, didn't come with some sort of, "Except during peak" contract. So Amazon needs exactly as much hardware to meet demand during Peak as it did before, and now it's got a bunch of customer workloads it also needs to serve during peak. I don't see how this would've solved any problems.

Most stories about the origin of AWS have a few things in common:
(1) There was limited support for the idea of AWS at senior executive levels
(2) The early AWS products were not used by for any significant Retail workloads within Amazon for quite a long time (as in, several years)
(3) As recently as a few years ago, there were major organizational pushes to move legacy Retail workloads onto AWS
(4) As recently as last year, there were still so many teams on Oracle that everyone with an Oracle dependency was required to have an OKR to get off it. I include this because IIRC this is public-- after Oracle was making hay with the "Amazon sells Dynamo/RDS but runs on Oracle" campaign, Amazon publicly released information about their Oracle Annihilation roadmap. So it supports the theory that it's taken Amazon quite a long time to shift certain Retail workloads to AWS, even in cases where an AWS product that's suited to the workload has existed for quite a long time.

I've never worked for Amazon, so I don't know, and it's impossible for all the stories I've heard from ex-Amazon people to all be true, but I think there's a pretty good argument against the "we should put this spare off-peak capacity to use" AWS origin myth.
While I have hoped that Julian will win this one I'm happy that both the winner Zuckerberg and runner-up Assange are one:

Hackers.
> one can imagine Zuckerberg looking like a pretty plausible choice

I agree. Facebook is after all the second most popular website.

> The most egregious recent example is Rudy Giuliani instead of Osama bin Laden in 2001

Indeed. They chickened out.
I thought this was a typo. Flagged.
Full disclosure: I work for this company.
But this story was to good. ;-)
I was listening to Dan Ariely's podcast a while back and one of the topics was on the hidden benefit of brain drains.

The theory goes like this. Only a few highly educated people have the opportunity to emigrate, say 1 out of 10 college graduates. But the benefit of emigrating is so huge, improving well being by 10x or 20x, more people will still pursue higher education even though they may not actually have the chance to emigrate.

So although 1 out of 10 top people end up leaving for the United States or Europe, the developing nation will still net gain the 9 out of 10 educated people that couldn't emigrate who will help improve the nation overall.
Thanks for writing this, it was entertaining and somewhat educational. Mostly because to those of us who have never been sued, being sued is kind of a huge scary unknown, so hearing other's stories, even anecdotal ones, sheds a little bit of light on what to expect.

The whole time I was reading your article I kept thinking about the recent stories and discussion about kids being bullied. I've tried to teach my kids not to pick fights, to play nice, but to always stand up for themselves and other kids who are being picked on. That's how I read your article; don't pick fights, but always stand up for yourself.
Well, he has got loads of people to persecute him for a rape he probably didn't commit, isn't this what popularity whores do all the time for a little bit of fun. Righttttt?
I agree, the Google Checkout tagline looks like it would be more part of the page than the Paypal one.
It sounds like that might be better for a statically-typed language where you might need specific types in the data file. But I would argue that not only is it overkill in a dynamically-typed language, it's bad. We're talking about data here. There's no reason to couple it to data types in your code.

Plus, serialization to JSON in a dynamically-typed language is pretty much automagic compared to what you have to do with XML.
I wonder which of the current projects are acquisition targets.
And it's much, much rarer but equally as important corollary: UTFM (Use TFM). UTFM means: when you're designing a system, adhere your design so f**ing tightly to standard usage. RTFM/UTFM with standard tooling gets you so, so far to building high-quality software.

Edit: I actually just made up (as far as I know) UTFM, but I really wish it were a thing.
I think it's important to document anything, be it at home or for business. I've done good and not so good jobs with this at times, and you feel like a hero when it's well done and you suffer through reinventing things if it's poorly done.
I agree you should have config files and backups, but like with work, I think it would be good to go through a "disaster" where you have to build a version of your config from an unconfigured environment.
A colleague had built such a config for a small office (10 people), but it depended on a specific DNS that ... wasn't set up until 1/2 way through the config. It worked because in testing they were using the network with a DNS that was already working. Small things like that are hard to catch in a working environment.
Correct, this technique works on a page by page basis. It's the only way to do it with userfaultfd as the technique relies entirely on the first page fault being a read and not a write. Im working on a feature that returns an allocation that straddles 2 pages to catch reads of structure paddings but it will come at the cost of an additional 4k of memory and/or possibly returning unaligned memory.
No, that's unacceptable. Would have raised the issue immediately.
“ “Scary though if it isn’t a deepfake,” Shamook added. “This could be the start of people being able to discredit real evidence by simply saying ‘deepfake.'” “

This.

I have been in a jury, and I wouldn’t be surprised if image based evidence won’t always be discounted by defense attorneys. It probably is already starting for the high paid ones (e.g. the notion itself will protect the rich.)

It brings up an interesting future where you can’t trust any witness testimony (because people do misremember) or any video, image, or audio evidence due to this technology.

The only societal workaround will be to implant cryptographic keys inside of bodies and monitor all interactions on some blockchain /s?
>This article is about how the Texas legislature wants to double down on its "wind is the problem" lie by shifting the costs of establishing grid stabilization services exclusively to renewable energy producers in order prop up the profits of natural gas producers.

Lets look at this from another prospective. Yes renewables are great and cheap, Texas has the highest renewable energy production in the country. But by relying on renewable energy means you also need to have large amounts of fossil fuel capacity that is sitting idle, just in case renewable production falls off. Having fossil fuel plants with idle capacity is very expensive. This is the hidden cost of renewable energy and why even though wind/solar power is cheaper than natural gas, grids with lots of wind/solar power have very expensive electricity. I'm looking at you Germany.
This brings me back to Snowcrash and Altered Carbon so hard...
Just come out and say you irrationally hate cars already, Jesus Christ.
Honestly, I dislike plaintext formats a lot. It is more accessible because it’s human readable. But, this only extends to humans who happen to speak the language the protocol uses for keywords. While it’s not a huge ask, I still suggest this is mostly not that interesting of a benefit.

Parsing and emitting plaintext formats, meanwhile, is a rabbit hole. It’s human readable which makes you tempted to make it human writable. Should you accept extraneous whitespace? Tabs vs spaces? Terminating new line? Unix or DOS line endings? Case sensitivity? Unicode normalized forms? Etc.

Binary data may seem less accessible, but I blame the libraries. There’s tons of easy (if inefficient) ways to parse text. You can use string.split, atoi and scanf in your language of choice. What is there for binary?

In Go, the encoding/binary package actually implements something really cool. A simple reflection-based mechanism that can read and write binary data into a structure in a defined and simple way.

lunixbochs extended this to struc[1], which adds additional tags for advanced reading and writing of binary structures, including variable length structures. I went further and maybe a bit off into the deep end with Restruct[2], a similar concept but with a lot more features, designed specifically so I could handle advanced structures quickly.

The end result is that I can define some Go structs with integers, strings, byte arrays and corresponding tags, and be able to serialize and deserialize from those structures to their corresponding binary representation. For an overdone demo of what you could do with Restruct for example, see this (incomplete) PNG demo: https://github.com/go-restruct/restruct/blob/master/formats/... (It is mainly incomplete because I had moved focus to develop a codegen for restruct, to improve runtime performance, although such work has since stalled.)

Most of my inspiration for newer advanced features like expressions comes from Kaitai Struct[3], an excellent project I have also contributed to a bit. I learned about Kaitai after having written Restruct thanks to a friend, though its lack of write capabilities has lead me to continue using Restruct for many hacks, such as some tools I wrote that modified FL Studio Project files.

[1]: https://pkg.go.dev/github.com/lunixbochs/struc

[2]: https://pkg.go.dev/github.com/go-restruct/restruct

[3]: https://kaitai.io
At least engadget is witty.
"Or, build apps, lots of them, keep them alive, find distribution channels to push them through (platforms), improve the winners, sideline the losers, find a niche, build apps for the niche, keep slugging away at it, build up a portfolio of complementary things.."

Isn't that a business? :)
Excellent resource! Thanks for this.
I would not allow some random stranger to be able to remotely view my desktop at any time just to see if I am "procrastinating". What happens if I jump over to view my bank account or am sending a personal email? If I have to block them every time I want to do something that is personal the tool is useless at that point, because now I can block them when I want to procrastinate.

For it to work properly both parties really need to be in sync and want each other to stop the other from procrastinating. But even then there is a privacy issue that can be difficult to overcome. In my opinion I don't see much of a market for this.
Even though this lowers my average comment score, I think it's worthwhile linking to this just-issued FCC report, "Internet Access Services: Status as of December 31, 2009": http://www.fcc.gov/Daily_Releases/Daily_Business/2010/db1208...

It seems to contradict the BoxTop statistic of 90.5%; it shows only 60 residential fixed connections per 100 households faster than 200kbps in at least one direction in 2009 (p.11).

I find it deeply disturbing that in 87 pages of statistics about access speeds, there is not one single mention of whether these connections include publicly-routable IPv4 addresses, static IP addresses, or IPv6. (Unless I missed something?)
Yes. The fact that a suburban house with electricity, running water, heating and assorted other amenities costs more than a cave with a firepit is not inflation.

Similarly, it's also not inflation for cheese fries to cost more than french fries.

How you actually define real wages doesn't matter so long as it is the same for both groups you are comparing.

This is true only if you want to make a relative comparison. I wasn't making a comparison at all, I was simply pointing out that everyone in the US, in every decile, has a lot more today than they did in 1980.
Except that (a) it's more real-time than CL and (b) CL has done little to innovate in what is now a mobile/location-based world.

Ignoring that, it's still not a bad thing to be compared to CL.
You can label anything fascism. Trump was labeled a racist and it's as stupid as calling Biden communist.

You should have protections so the corporations and bankers don't have too much power over politics.
The fact it's filtered makes a big difference.

I've been mislead too many times by filtered stories to have any trust in them.
I tried JIT mode, loved its features like arbitrary styles, but eventually I switched back to default tailwind config.

So, when you use JIT you no longer get all tailwind classes in chrome dev tools only the ones you applied to components. I know it's by design to keep css lightweight. But that also means I can no longer design UI using Chrome dev tools. Only when I apply tw classes directly to component in editor like vscode it reflects the change in browser. this back and forth cycle between editor and chrome took the fun away from me :(
It's strange to me that people love to shit on FAANG life so often.

Every perk is scrutinized, as if serving dinner in the office means I MUST stay for dinner (I almost never do), or having a doctor or laundry service on campus is some nefarious thing.

At the end of the day, you get paid a huge amount of money to do a moderate amount of work. It's the dream, to me.

And then every once in a while people burn out and make it seem like it was the free dinner that did it. "I found my own doctor; I cook my own food." What does that have to do with anything?

(Sure, HR is shitty and that's something to care about. But that's an industry wide issue, not a FAANG specific issue.)
Hi, I'm the author,

Thank you all so much for your comments. I didn't expect this will be this high on HN. I'm aware there are more simple solutions for self-hosting, even partially. I'm also aware that my setup is not perfect - that's why this post was created. I was hoping to get some feedback. Not from that many of you, but some friends. :) Ask me anything you like, I'll try to answer every question.
"He's no anarco-libertarian--he has a very strong belief
in the ability of the state to improve society."

And herein lies the problem, whose definition of "improve" are we working with?

The definition of improve is so wholly subjective as to be useless. To me improve means more freedom. To someone else, it may mean more security. Two different definitions of improve can be totally at odds with one another.

The other word there that is very subjective, enough so to be downright dangerous, is "society". Is society defined as just the United States and it's citizens and to a much lesser extent our allies? Or is it defined as all of humanity, regardless of your citizenship or country of domicile?

For me, society === humanity. I fear the actions of those who define society more narrowly than that because it almost always means the improvements to the in-group they consider "society" come at the expense of the well-being of the groups not included in their definition of "society".

My experience has been that people with a narrower definition of "society" tend to think of solutions in terms of a pareto optimality and not seek out solutions that maximize welfare via a nash equilibrium.
Pretty cool! I just signed up. I think its an interesting line of dialog to have going in the background, and am hopeful it will make the path to starting and running a startup clearer for me.

The signup process is kinda neat, but some of the questions made me go "errr..."

edit: i see they(you?) use typeform for the signup form; never heard of them before, but pretty neat!
On average, you and I eat half a chicken.

I'm not the one considering one single outcome, if anything I feel like I'm the only one in these comments considering a different possible side effect of the trick.
>It's the only way that a person can look themselves in the mirror and be truly proud of what they see.

Other people have different value systems to you.
Volenti non fit injuria
Plan 9 has appealed to me since I first heard about it in 198x, but it wasn't available until long time after we started FreeBSD.
Just checked back and see it on the site, awesome! Can't wait to mess around with some open D tonight
It likely isn't in the contract now, but it might be in the future in way form or another.
I thought the ultimate goal was to have enough in guaranteed fixed income (annuities, CDs, whatever) that no matter what happens you cover expenses. But maybe that's too conservative, even for those guys.
>> "With so many people and students around the world working from home, we really need some easy to deploy shared whiteboard solution. This is especially important for pre-college students who may not have access to high end hardware."
>Just add a new mode to videoconferencing, where both parties get a white screen and both can start drawing and the resulting image stays in sync on both clients? (I feel like this solution is so obvious, I'm about to fly out a window - what am I missing?)

Author here.

There have been a few proposals in this space for the past 25 years including hangouts extensions, using a virtual camera that just exports the screen (if people remember the old mbone tools wb and vic; I myself wrote an extension to replace the camera with a snapshot from a configurable region of the X screen), and my own shared whiteboard which gives parties a shared screen that they can edit modify replay ...

http://info.iet.unipi.it/~luigi/wb/

There are two main reasons (in my opinion) why this space has been neglected:

- almost nothing matches the convenience, speed and _resolution_ of writing and drawing with an actual pen.
Pads with sufficient resolution and decent lag are only appearing now, and they are fragile and expensive.
Graphic tablets are cheap but lack the visual feedback and looking at the output on the screen still has significant latency.
They are moderately usable, but takes time to get used to them, and you need a real 10+in screen to use them effectively.
Using a finger or a conductive pen on a phone screen is only good for small sketches, not for writing longer sentences or formulas.

- the main users of such products would be non commercial entities (pre-college schools, students) so there are no paying customers.
Even at college level lectures are increasingly based on slides prepared in advance. Businesses, of course, use slides or meet in person, and the whiteboard style of collaboration is generally done in person.

Social distancing now may actually create more use cases and perhaps returns (in terms of actual money or social appreciation) that stimulate software solutions to appear.

The Apollo13 problem still stands: even if we had good and cheap technology for writing, at this time it would be impossible to build and sell such products to customers, so we have to find solutions that use hardware already in possession of the users.
Location: Croatia

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies:

• Back-end: .NET and .NET Core (C#, ASP.NET MVC and Web API)

• Front-end: Javascript, Typescript, Vue.js and AngularJS

• Databases: SQL Server and PostgreSQL

Resume: https://brunoalfirevic.github.io/Bruno%20Alfirevic%20-%20Res...

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brunoalfirevic/

Github: https://github.com/brunoalfirevic

Email: bruno.alfirevic@gmail.com

My name is Bruno, I'm a full stack software developer and have been programming profesionally for about 18 years. Most of the experience is in the .NET world, with addition of client-side development as needed (most recently using Typescript and Vue.js). I've done greenfield projects, jumped in on existing legacy systems and spent a lot of time as a team lead.

I'm interested in remote part-time contract work.
Location: Maine

Remote: Yes, please

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: Java, Python, JavaScript, SQL, Docker, etc. Security+ certified.

Résumé/CV: https://joeclark-phd.github.io/assets/files/joeclark-resume-...

Email: joe@joeclark.net

---

Software and database developer with broad and deep experience (over 20 years with many technologies). Ph.D. in information systems. I have a stable gov't job and am looking to add about 20 hours per week freelance or contract work.
I will read that, thank you.

You know, it seems like most of my quality of life improvements over the past 20 years has been due to my peers and I finally acting on much older information. The future is here, it's just unevenly distributed.

It is only infrequently I encounter something that still feels properly new under any kind of scrutiny, instead of revealing itself to be a refinement of something that already was known. Off the top of my head, I can think of escape analysis, Burrows Wheeler transform, and the object ownership semantics in Rust. I'll throw Raft on there since the joke is that only 12 people understood Paxos.
It's called RSS. and a feed reader.

I swear, people are too busy re-inventing the wheel when it already exists. use one of the literal hundreds of free services to write what you want and syndicate it. and use the same system to ingest exactly what you want.

We hit the nail on the head 2 decades ago. It's been rusting since.
> Disgusting abuse of power manages to catch a criminal. Is that our only metric for success now?

looking back over the years, from the outside, I think that's been the american attitude all along.
Right, should we assume they're too incompetent to read where the spec says to do multiple keys? That's not good.

Maybe they're too lazy to do the work?

They're actively trying to discourage good practice?

There aren't any good excuses.
Maybe hiding the other side of the road in some way would help.
When asking this sort of question, you have to get people thinking in near mode. "Would you be willing to have $X less available to spend on groceries, in order to [some advantage Xobni gives]?" would be much less ideal-invoking.
Exotic is an interesting word to choose, since I normally associate it with geological separation, rather than the reasons C-style and Lisp-style syntaxes were designed so differently.
So there is no dollar figure. OK then. Pretty much my point.

But since we're not dealing with a dollar figure, as your original post indicated and many of your follow ups required, you're right. Nothing is priceless and in exchange for killing off an entire species I require everlasting world peace. Make it so, number 1.
The Vorbis encoder is hardcoded turned off in the 0.6 release, not just marked experimental. This is r23416, but the branch isn't visible on gitweb.
Funny how different the response I got from them yesterday versus what you got today. “Not in our roadmap to have an option to go back” is rather dramatically different. Power of outcry I guess, I’ll take it!
I am sorry, was that sarcastic?
Well, I've come across people who hate programmers of specific programs, but, this is the first time I've seen someone who hates all programmers for no better reason than envy.
It's not overlooked, it's mentioned in every related forum of discussion I have seen today.
And it would still likely be correct. The market reacts to news - not met expectations.