skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Is there a good step by step guide to starting freelancing?
I'm thinking about the logistics of it, so questions like:

- What do I do for health insurance (for US citizens)?

- Do I form an S Corp or LLC or what? How do I go about that?

- Do I need a lawyer? How do I find a good one?

- Do I need an accountant? How do I find a good one?

- How can I be sure that my contract protects me?

- What are some rules of thumb for how much money I need to set aside for dry spells, etc.?

- How do I decide between T&M vs. project based vs. retainer billing?

Does anything like this exist? I'd love if it were community maintained but really I'd just be excited to find anything that guides you through things like that.
Evidence for a new fundamental of particle thrills and baffles physicists
Following the links at the top of the tools.ietf.org interface, you can arrive at the earliest draft of that earlier RFC, which was indeed from January 27, 2014: https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-nir-cfrg-chacha20-poly1305...
Yoga is a Hindu concept. Buddhists don't do yoga. Meditation, absolutely; yoga, not quite.
I think what the author actually wants from (1) is a transformation of common (or maybe all) UB to be more strongly specified as implementation-defined. That could be reasonable, with specific scope. I'm having trouble determining the proposed scope from the post, though.

(2) seems like it is already specified; the trouble is in determining what "the semantics of the program" are. This relates to (1) although it doesn't seem like the author has a completely solid grasp of the legalities of the language.
Agree. At that point it's just better to go back to Java or <insert your favorite statically typed language here>. Java has a broad solution to type safety and a standard doc format for code. Sure there are awkward corner cases around things like type erasure but I find Java for the most part just works.
One of my favorite pieces of deconstructive criticism:

http://www.fudco.com/chip/deconstr.html

How To Deconstruct Almost Anything

My Postmodern Adventure

By Chip Morningstar, June 1993.

"Academics get paid for being clever, not for being right."
-- Donald Norman
I've never been in the US and stories like this make me imagine it as a bizarre authoritarian dystopia.

How are the parents not reacting to this? How is there no law protecting the privacy of workers and children? Why is this not in the front page of a major newspaper?

Please do something about this. By the time those technologies trickle down to smaller countries there's very little we can do to counter the external pressure to implement similar "solutions".
Dear Graduates, You’re Not “Junior Developers”
Got it. As I said I'm certainly not a developer but you've given me a lot of great info here. I do a good bit of compiling from source on Slackware for packages not available in the official or third party repos, and I've rarely had build issues similar to this one. Now I know one more thing to look for.

Thanks again!
Tether releases law firm report attesting to $2.55 billion USD reserves
ICTP-SAIFR Minicourse on introduction to quantum computation and simulability
Agreed. The majority are beginning to realize that strong type systems are actually helpful instead of a mandatory annoyance.

Most programming I've done in the past has been with python (no type hinting) or languages with weak static type systems (java et al). Having to verbosely specify the types in java was always just painful, while the upfront speed and freedom of python felt much nicer. However after getting a taste of better type systems by dabbling in rust and elm, now every time I write something in python I'm thinking "was argument a string or a foo class?" or "that runtime error would not have happened if the type checker caught it".

Python type hints now are a huge plus for the language. It still seems a bit "hacky" though. I'd love to see something that adds more syntax sugar and feels more built in. Maybe it's just me.
I went to the movies this past Sunday. Two medium sodas and an Icee was $19.00. Fucking ridiculous.
I'd love to have an answer to this too! Unfortunately, it seems to be a field that's too difficult for non-specialists to make any conclusions in at all. I'd say almost everyone who believes it was caused by humans does so because of peer/political pressure or trust in authority directly telling them that fact. All explanations I've ever heard don't have the conclusion logically following from the information we know. For example "CO2 contributes to the greenhouse effect so our CO2 actually caused the observed global warming." or "The increase in CO2 is dramatic so that must cause dramatic warming.".

I don't understand how even scientists can be so sure of the causality because in a complex system, proving that a one-off event caused another one-off event is supposed to be impossible, isn't it? You can't replicate it. You can't do a controlled experiment. It seems you can only model it and notice that your model shows causation. What if the model is wrong? It's too complicated for laymen to understand. It seems to be even harder than nuclear physics which even school kids can use to make predictions about nuclear reactions.
I have noticed a greater preponderance of downvoting in recent months as well. However I've attributed that to the growing influence of Reddit, a forum in which brigading is common, voting is less about noise cancellation and more about memetic conformance, and where people will downvote if they disliked your punctuation or are simply having a rough morning.
Sounds like you're looking for a different word from "high". Maybe "continuous"?
See also flow [1] which does the same and allows you to migrate function by function. :)

[1]: https://flow.org/
Couldnt they simply borrow $2.55 billion for a day, put it in a bank account, show lawyer, then transfer it out? Such as borrow from the company founders who have made a fortune selling tether?
The behavioral economics guide 2018
At least it's safer than newbies picking up javascript or php. ;)
People are generically bad at reliably setting states. The problem isn't so much that someone failed to do something (an action) but that they failed to notice that the action was not done (the state was wrong).

Often times people forget the "check" part of the term "checklist" and treat them as a list of things they must do. The result is less reliable because it is easy to skip a step, even if you end up ticking a box. A checklist involves two steps, first doing the thing (possibly from memory) and then consulting the checklist to see that the appropriate state is set.

This is a particular issue for programmers as programmers are constantly involved with lists of actions that are performed in sequence. As a result there is a tendency to let the list run the human in a way similar to how a computer runs a program. Computers are way better at states than humans are however...
(Kazuo Ishiguro is British.)
I live in Colorado. We've had fully legal weed for 4 years.

Plus, our govt doesn't restrict sales to govt run stores.

California, Nevada, Oregon, Washington, Maryland all beat Canada to this. Hilarious that you seem to be oblivious to this.

BTW, California alone has a higher population than all of Canada.
The argument against that idea is that YouTube freely offers the choice to monetise or not monetise any video, if popular videos being hosted without monetisation is an issue for them then it's their duty to make it clear that clicking that button might mean having your entire channel destroyed without warning or explanation.

Which is frankly ridiculous anyway, if they want to change the rules for unmonetised videos, they should actually change the rules, have a setting on the button that says "if the video becomes popular enough, YouTube reserves the right to run our own advertising against the video" and just run ads.
Democrat with financial ties to AT&T just gutted California's net neutrality law
Blender org's YouTube videos are now unblocked... at least for some
Most YAML users don't need to look at the source for a YAML parser. I appreciate elegant simplicity, but I don't think parser complexity is the most important metric by which to judge a data interchange format.
Tide pods are not actively marketed as toys, they are indeed marketed as household chemicals.

I agree CPSC should not be able to ban the sale of magnets in general, but it seems reasonable to me that they be able regulate how products are marketed. Bare rare-earth magnetic material is probably inherently unsafe for use as a kids toy and should not be marketed as such.

https://www.amazon.com/s/?ie=UTF8&keywords=neodymium+toy
https://www.aliexpress.com/wholesale?SearchText=neodymium+ki...
select region, count(*) from projects, unnest(region_ids) as region GROUP BY 1;
Reminds me of our corporate codebase after 10 years of A/B testing
If you've got rogue software running on your machine, all bets are off.
I love this, it’s a fun story, and especially funny to read all the long-winded science-y sounding explanations that humans came up with rather than consider the self deprecating simple fact that we’re just eating them all.

BUT I am definitely not happy that this is going to be one of those weaponised stories that the anti-science brigade will start telling and re-telling everywhere, lending credibility to other lies they believe in.
9% is small - and it is shrinking
>>evolution doesn't encapsulate.

I'm not a biologist or geneticists but from everything that I've read about cellular biology and genetics I get the strong feeling that there is a lot of encapsulation going on. Sure, it isn't 100% percent perfect but there is still encapsulation going on. Evolution would probably be way harder without it.

One hint is the human body, there are lots of encapsulations: eyes, heart, kidneys, digestive system, etc.

Evolution can repurpose an existing system for a completely different use with just some tweaking.
We actually have this in Germany for over a decade [1], if not two. Personally, I'd say we got more packaging not less. So I am not sure such we can say it failed, but it's not really working either.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Dot_(symbol)
What should I use for config files?
its sort of worse than that, a lot of these recycling programs that local councils start running are in fact just rubbish offshoring.

They do deals with big Chinese companies to send recyclables to china to be recycled. Three big problems with this:

1) the climate impact of actually shipping this stuff over seas is huge.

2) There is no oversight on how these companies behave, there has been numerous reports of them NOT recycling at all and many reports of slave labour being used to "sift" the rubbish

3) China is now clamping down on it, they no longer want the rubbish, many councils have no backup plan for this eventuality and yes its likely to head to infill.
Firefox is back. It's time to give it a try
A few thoughts from someone who has used checklists extensively for many years:

1. Use a spreadsheet. The flexibility to change the structure as you go, and to create a 2-dimensional checklist is great. All the other power of a spreadsheet is at your fingertips, including automation.

2. Visualization is extremely valuable, and I think necessary. If you have to read through the text of the checklist to understand the current state, it's too cumbersome (other than for small lists) and hard to process. If spreadsheet cells change color based on status, and if their location indicates, via visual memory, what they represent, then now you have a dashboard which tells you the state of the project at a glance.

3. Human beings are terrible at following and updating checklists. I don't know why - it seems easy in concept - but I've never met anyone who could do it without forcing themselves. And everyone starts instinctively skipping steps after awhile. Keep it as simple as possible, with as little detail and as few updates as are necessary to keep things going.
I understand all that. I'm still missing the part about how this random stranger would get on my feed.
> 1. A single state is not representative of the entire country

Yes that's why I said hundreds of thousands of kids are being negatively impacted and not millions of kids.

> All of this to say that your kid getting slightly less time in K-6 education

You mean an incredibly sub-par education for kids key formative years!

Why do you seek to downplay the issue? Why not seek to solve the issue - perhaps in other ways?

> I don't see how you can justify that.

It's an easy justification to make - you just don't care because you aren't personally impacted.

A couple of thousand kids temporarily separated from parents who are knowingly breaking the law in exchange for ensuring hundreds of thousands of kids get a proper education is an easy decision to make.

And that's only looking at a single issue!
I worked for a place that did something similar, they were running a server on their local machines listening to https://localhost.company.com:someport (resolving to 127.0.0.1) so their javascript frontend hosted at example.com could communicate with their local machine. It was set up so the server would only respond to requests originating from company.com. They distributed the private key for the certificate localhost.company.com which was trusted by all browsers.

What kind of risk is there to having the private key to localhost.company.com?
It reminds me of the old "IT employee gets revenge" stories that were so popular ten or twenty years ago.
The other thing I absolutely love about pipes is the ease of writing custom utilities. I'd refactored a filetype for use with a game last week, and needed to insert several lines into ~1.5k ASCII files. 1/2 hour to make a hacked c++ program to make the changes, and pass the outputs of grep to that.

Although I'm unfamiliar with using pipes to provide parallel processing, could you elaborate? If you can pass to another thread I will be kicking myself for missing that.
I trust the receiver.

I don't trust future bad actors who get hold of the device, including the receiver should they turn.
It seems like there could be unexpected interactions with other services running on 127.0.0.1, which don't even have to be HTTP to cause problems - eg what if there's a service that echoes back the request in the response if it receives a request it doesn't understand? A remote web page could probably use that to bounce its request to your service but appear to come from 127.0.0.1.
> Whitespace is explicit in some (markup) languages, and there's nothing plicitly wrong with that.*

Whitespace is never explicit. It only exists as the gap between other characters. You only perceive its absence.

> If you're trying to do any kind of editing of a (markup) language that relies on sensible indentation with an editor that doesn't understand whitespace then you've probably got bigger problems.

Which is why they should not be used for configuration files.
Disagree, performance is a side-effect of type safety... it's main use is to prevent bugs and help devs reading code. Also we use Python for the library ecosystem, easy to read syntax etc. which Java will probably never match. For performance, use Go or Rust and get everything Java has plus an active modern community.
Can anyone who has used pyup.io give a review? I'm curious to hear an on-the-ground experience.
Isn't abstraction just the emergence of simpler, lower fidelity, and higher density structures of information? Are we not a part of nature?
Oh yeah I agree on that front entirely, I just wanted to comment on the other piece.
Not always. I use them to force hash joins. This way you can filter table A on an index, and filter table B on an index, then join them with a hash join. In a straight join postgres would try to use the same index for all of the joins. At least that was my experience. Maybe I'm not understanding the docs properly or using the correct terminology. I know that the end result was 10x faster than any index I could come up with.
You don't know when you'll need to generate or parse your config files with something that either can't read, write or execute your language.

Django's settings.py sucks. I've used Django since the 0.9 days. It's extremely impractical and needs to be worked around constantly.
Why do you think static languages are easier to pick up? I have had the opposite experience. In managing people who do not aspire to be software developers, but do need to write simple programs to perform basic job functions, I’ve seen much more openness to Python than to more structured alternatives. If you have suggestions that set the bar for working code lower than we can get with Python then I would love to hear them.
> It just makes me wonder what the hell they thought they were doing all that time...

The YAML project was a convergence of several different efforts at information representation including people from Perl, Python and Ruby, each with our own ideas. I happened to be involved in the outer ring of the XML community, in particular a group SML-DEV where we were looking for a better information model more suitable to data serialization that would use an XML compatible syntax.

At that time, especially since serializing data with XML was all the rage, "ML" or "Markup Language" was commonly associated with data serialization. In fact XML is very inconvenient for actual markup, even though it derives from SGML (of which HTML is an example).

The "YA" part did deliberately come from YACC, the reason why is that XML (and we hoped YAML) would be the basis of domain specific serialization languages. Hence, you can think of it as a meta-language for building sub-languages, like the application I was working on, a serialization for accounting data.

Hence, that's the origin of YAML acronym, which happened to have a domain name open. In fact, you can look at archive.org starting in 2001 and you'll see the 1st public pass of YAML more closely followed XML like bracket syntax. I disliked it, but, it was what came out of the SML-DEV collaborations. Even so, the important thing was the information model, which was a simple typed graph and not an element tree.

The syntax evolved with many revisions after the model and goal were set, with lots of feedback to address concerns and usability tests with domain experts. The syntax got more and more lightweight, inspired from RFC0822 (email) while adding dashes for list items. Testing the syntax with domain experts, e.g. accountants and the like, was exceptionally important part of the process. Users liked this serialization syntax since it made their data "pop".

So. A year or so passes while we focus on getting things to work and helping people. Then, the product differentiation question comes up. Since XML had the dominant position in the data serialization mind share, how does YAML compare? Well, the YAML model was a typed graph, while XML was an element tree. One required no special libraries to manipulate, the other require a DOM to translate. But perhaps more importantly, it's because XML borrowed its model and tags from SGML and SGML was a true "markup language". So, XML was a "markup language" where it was impractical to do actual markup. Then, it dawned on us, well, of course a data serialization language isn't markup problem. I'm not sure any of this was obvious at the time.

Anyway, in a very fun chat, Oren pointed this out and then Ingy said: well then, YAML Ain't Markup Language! So, the new name actually represented what we had set out to do in the first place. Further, I would suggest that the industry understanding of how serialization languages are poorly supported by markup approaches (XML) is at least somewhat due to our name change and fun filled articulation at conferences.
> There's a very good reason we don't run experiments to test, e.g., the hypothesis that a certain chemical might cause birth defects: the
consequences of the hypothesis being accurate are morally abhorrent.

Just because we don't know if it causes birth defects doesn't mean every untested chemical certainly does cause birth defects. In fact it's obvious that since we don't know, we don't know! You might save people by telling them that lie but it's still a lie and won't help anyone understand nature.

You're really confusing "We don't know if ignoring the environment will wipe us out" with "Let's ignore the environment and see what happens.". I'm not proposing we conduct that experiment, just pointing out that we don't know what the outcome will be.
The difference is that you can actually go to a dealer and buy those other cars right off the lot if you so desire. Can't do that for a Model 3.
What we learnt from launching our app in 5 Months for $5k
Corporate aviation is a very different place than Part 121.

It is cool to see the author point out that the Part 121 world has largely insulated itself from the "corrosion" of the normalization of deviance. (And that acknowledgement coming from people like us who chafe under the structure and rigidity of 121, but still give a shit about actual risk mitigation.)

The topic is interesting since the "dark ages" mentality of so much of corporate aviation is worth exploring as what stunts its growth, innovation, etc. (And I'd extend that to Part 135 too.)
Python and Javascript mostly. I just use online job boards, communities like HN and reddit, slack communities, etc. Close to zero networking, though I'm sure it would help. I wrote an article a little while ago about how I approach finding remote jobs, if that helps

https://hackernoon.com/how-i-find-six-figure-remote-software...

The contracts are usually full time equivalent and I usually only have the one, so tracking time is pretty easy.
I'm kinda sad that JSON has been struggling for like 15 years to get comments. Is there like some kind of gestapo that's saying no or something? All it takes is for the maintainers of probably 15 popular libraries to start handling comments.

At the end of the day I'm sure the reason we don't have JSON comments is somewhere listed in this page: xkcd.com/927/
The article above has nothing to do with Junk DNA. "All genes" is still about 1.5% of the genome. I think Junk DNA is a bad term for the parts of the genome that describe it. In human-engineered physical systems, we are used to all or most of the parts having a purpose of some kind, even if it is an aesthetic purpose.

The genome is more like source code that evolved over millions of commits, and has code from way back when, for different use cases. It also has "injected code" ie ancient viral DNA, and other weird artifacts that's not relevant to the functioning code base of today. Sure, it is useful from a meta-evolutionary perspective, those parts can be refashioned for another use... but so can real-world "junk" :)
Hell, I wish messaging services made conversation much more searchable. I hate having to scroll and scroll to find some past conversation topic that maybe had interesting thoughts/links/shared media.
US, yes. You mean the VC = investors, right? How do I check for accreditation? And it very much sounds like a syndicate as well. In your case, does the money flow through the VC, or comes directly from the high net worth individuals? Latter would mean I could see who transfers the money then, right?
The most expensive four words in the English language: “This time is different”