skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I personally dislike podcasts that are distributed through CDNs that "personalize" the file by injecting ads (they truly resemble radio ads, in the sense that they are irrelevant and way louder than the episode).

On mobile, I use a VPN that blocks ads or malicious websites, and it happens to block the whole episodes from downloading on such podcasts.

I do agree that some ads can be enjoyable (like the sponsored narrations of the authors endorsing a product in a playful manner -- think "No Such Thing as a Fish" or "Comedy Bang Bang").

I try to support artists that accept donations through Patreon (on a per episode or monthly basis), but this quickly gets expensive.

I would like some sort of way of actually prorating a set amount of money between the podcasts I'm listening to (something like Brave browser, but with more accountability).
Get a lawyer and get a contract ASAP. This gets harder every single day that passes.

Also IANAL but if you wrote it all with no agreement you probably have the rights to all the code you developed, unless you biz partner's last name is Winklevoss.
I get the tone of your post

But have you considered that prosperity preaching is the bigger issue here? The idea that “success” = wealth or that they are correlated in any circumstance aside from coincidence, and that other combinations are part of a therefore broken system

The reason I bring it up is because its a set of rules exclusive to lower socioeconomic groups, as opposed to a more effective set of rules
The space looks really nice.
I don't think so, the people who would use this are likely to be the same people who click the skip 30s button now and wouldn't buy things from ads anyways. The only reason this doesn't work out in browser based ones is because we block at the HTTP level and they pay per impression not per spot/per download like podcast advertising.

But if you do happen to be right and the model falls apart, that's even better. I'll gladly chip a bit of money to creators who are worth it, but right now there's no easy and affordable way to do that. I actively want to see advertising based business models fail so we can see those systems evolve. I hate ads.
They are. You need to have a good amount of extra money to afford the membership and the cost of buying 6 months of toilet paper in advance. Those are cheap items that you will need, if you are not poor you probably don't even think about it. However when you are poor it doesn't matter if it is cheaper or not to buy in bulk because you don't have the cash to afford it. (you also are unlikely to have the storage space for all of that)

Costco serves the upper class.
> because the compiler/interpreter abstracts that detail away

This assumes the first point though.
But retail is low-margin. The whole point of a minimum wage is to force EVERYONE to pay the same.
Yeah, even simple no-name usb cables can be dangerous. A friend had purchased a pack of cheap microUSB cables on eBay, and was charging his phone in my car with one of them.

The cable itself started getting uncomfortably warm to the touch. Glad we noticed before things got worse.
>Paying employees more is supposed to work because it results in employees who do their job better.

I'm sure above certain threshold, which is probably low, raising wages doesn't make employees do their job any better.

In other words, unless you pay your workers literally peanuts, they will do the same job more or less.
Thanks for the comment - My hypothesis is that people growing up today in their 20s and 30s who would have normally bought gold in their 40s and 50s will buy crypto instead. So it will be a generational shift versus a replacement for existing older gold holders. (Could be wrong of course).
My first online shopping experience was with Sears over Prodigy in 1991.

You could browse online, or order from the paper catalog (which is more likely what you'd do because NAPLPS graphics didn't lend themselves well, or at all, to product depictions). Then they'd ship to you, or you could go to the order pickup area at your local Sears store.

They had a touchscreen kiosk there where you'd punch in your order number, and be directed to a cubby where your stuff was waiting for you.

They had today's "buy online, pick up in store" thing, but nearly three decades ago.
Lampert might have "saved" AutoZone, which AFAICT was the feather in his cap to make him "the next Warren Buffert", but if you asked me I'd be hard-pressed to tell you how the shopping experience changed. I speak from ignorance, and the laziness that prevents me from researching deeper, but I assume he did some accounting tricks, sold a few inefficient assets, etc. But as the owner of some old vehicles and a frequent shopper of auto parts stores, I couldn't tell you when Lampert took over AutoZone based on any changes to the shopping experience. So when it comes time for a new WhatsIt for the '81 VW, I'd just as soon go to the local NAPA because they'll probably actually have the damned thing.

This brings me to Sears: did he ever shop at his own stores, or was he busy pouring over the books and figuring out new ways to implement corporate versions of The Hunger Games? Because the shopping experience at Sears was never great, IMO, and it only got more depressing when Lampert took over. Tool quality went to shit, appliance quality went to shit, and the shopping experience sucks. You can juggle books all you want, but that won't get customers in the door. And if I do make it in the door, the lack of service and the dingy store will ensure that I never return.

So in summary, I argue that Lampert either got lucky with AutoZone, or what worked there did most certainly not work for Sears because at the end of the day customers ask themselves, "do I want to shop there?" And Sears in recent years gave customers very little reason to say, "Yes".

As a sidenote, WTH is he willing to throw good money after bad with his $4.4 billion bid? I'm stumped as to what rabbit he thinks he can pull out of that hat.
SEEKING WORK | Remote only (based in NYC) | Part-time, moonlight only

I'm a full-stack software engineer with over 7 years of experience. I've spent most of my time building software with either Ruby on Rails or JavaScript/React and its related tools, but I also have some experience up and down the stack from container orchestration to CSS/SASS/JS-in-CSS, etc. I used Java professionally several years ago and can ramp up quickly on most technologies.

I'd love to find an arrangement where there is ongoing product development / maintenance work that I can contribute to 10-15 hours per week on a consistent basis, but am open to short-term engagements as well.

Links are in my profile
There's a lot of stuff I don't buy online.

Clothes -- I like to try them on first.

Tools -- I like to see if they are well made and how they feel in my hand. Photos on a website don't provide this.

Food -- I want to check produce and meat before I buy it. And it's easier to stop at shops I'm passing on my way home anyway.

Household supplies -- I don't want to deal with disposing of shipping boxes, styrofoam peanuts and air pillow packs for stuff I can just grab off the shelf at the local Target.

Big-ticket items (appliances, furniture, etc) -- I want a local business standing behind the product and the warranty.

Stuff I buy online are typically things like books (no local bookstores anymore) and odd items that are hard to find locally (like the mic/audio splitter cable my kid needed for his X-box controller).
I'm going to spin it around: It reduces revenue from ads, thereby reducing advertising. Now the question is, how much content do you think is both something you truly want to listen to and something few people are willing to directly support financially. Personally, I'm starting to think that maybe all the crud advertising enables is just another downside to ads, not the benefit in the cost-benefit analysis.
Considering how much these mega-funds put in, I would wager that 'Investment strategies and research methods' are about selling the vision of WeWork more than anything else. They need the valuation to stay up if they want to divest at a profit.
Good point in terms of mentioning biopharma. I stayed tech focused in this blog post but lots going on in bio.
Prince Street Pizza Claims Former Cook Stole Famed Slice Recipe for New Parlor
There was an enormous Sears near where I grew up. It always felt shabby and badly run. They had lost the recipe even then, when they still had the catalog business.

I get the impression from Sears and other big companies that lose their way that they become the playgrounds of big management egos that want to leave a mark and get written about in business publications, whether or not their ideas work.
> Many years ago I had to clock in and out of a job with a fingerprint scanner.

Interesting, I don't think I've ever heard of a company doing this. Was it like a second factor in addition to some type of card reader?
We just need a Lazarus target for webassembly and we'll be good.
Bungee-open source music app made with flutter , node js and firebase
Then give us your best ideas.
Costco does sell in bulk but it's not a Family Dollar. It's for the middle class to save some on their name brand groceries because they can afford to pay more at the register to go a little longer between trips to the store. It's not really aimed at people that can barely afford to shop at the discount Aldi every few days because they can't pool enough money together for a biweekly Costco trip.
With respect you're being pointlessly petty. The argument is not that Google should donate to starving people in countries in which it's not operative. The argument is that instead of further pampering it's extremely privileged workforce indirectly via reinvestment or directly via higher pay, it should contribute more back to the global society from which it profits by paying its taxes fairly.

How can you argue aginst this when Google workers are collectively amongst the best remunerated in the world, Google is notorious for massive-scale tax avoidance and hundreds of millions of men, women and children around the globe are dying because they lack basic resources for life: Food, water and healthcare.

Each to his or her own I guess.
9 Secret Ingredients to a Great Customer Experience Strategy
Their margins are high like the others because many households renew memberships each year but do not make much use of them. I also think their membership does skew more affluent than many other retailers.
Abstract | Software Engineer | San Francisco | Remote or Onsite | Fulltime

Wanna work for a diverse and inclusive company that puts people first? Here at Abstract women represent a third of our employees, two-thirds of senior leadership and half of our investor board. African American and Latinx employees represent 20% of our company. LBGTQ+ people represent at 14% of our company.

If you've got solid experience in Obj C, C++ or Go then reach out so we can talk! We care more about your ability to learn and solve problems than your specific language experience.

Details: https://boards.greenhouse.io/abstract/jobs/4037890002

Interested? Apply above or ping me at rob@goabstract.com
> It's a good example to those that claim companies should pay employees liberally.

Is it? Paying employees well isn't what killed Sears. Sears has been a ghost town for years, and anyone who's been in one in the past 20 years can probably tell you why. The customer experience simply sucks. Help is hard to find, checkout is slow, their warranties are garbage and a pain to exercise, and their once-great store brands have been either penny-pinched into mediocrity or sold off.
I hate ad and meta content on highly produced podcasts like 99% Invisible. They waste at least 2-3 minutes at the beginning and end on credits and ads, plus additional ad time in the middle. I already skip past it, it'd prefer if it was skipped automatically.

The same goes for public media beg-a-thons. We get it, you want people to donate. Don't waste 30 min of our time begging.
All problems in computer science can be solved by another level of indirection.
There’s big data which is like crud mixed with systems programming and some data structures + algorithms. And there’s of course regular systems programming too.

At certain companies there are definitely people who get paid to write compilers or develop frameworks (for any which thing), operating systems, backend cloud tech, robotics, etc. but it would probably be seriously hard to break into this without a CS degree or relevant experience
"The same traits needed for outlier success are the same traits that increase the odds of failure… So be careful blindly praising successes or criticizing failures, as they often made similar decisions with slightly different levels of luck."

I think this was Ray Dalio in his TED talk.
That's not a good thing, e-commerce only pushes garbage quality with top tier marketing goods.
Yeah a single customer is dangerous, you're more like a consultancy if that continues for too long.
I will miss the $2 credit for every Uber ride :/. I think I got $400 in free stuff from Sears/Kmart last year.
You meant figurative peanuts right? That is what a lot of people get paid in retail.
That's one way to implement case-insensitive lookup. OTOH, for a programming language symbol table, maybe you want to look up with case sensitivity first, then a second time with case insensitivity so you can emit a warning about the discrepancy (for a case-insensitive language) or an error with suggested spelling correction (for a case-sensitive language) and you don't want to maintain two separate hash tables for every scope.
The Egg Thief
It's this binary distinction I'm objecting to. Is the choice really "Wordpress" or "React"? There's a huge number of projects that don't fit either of these templates very well. I'd still argue that people building web "sites" (which can still be way beyond the complexity sweet spot for Wordpress) rather than web "apps" should not be building SPAs.
US Marine Corps:
-Traveled all over the world.
-I essentially got a new job every 2-3 years.
-Forced physical fitness (but I like exercise)
-Constant challenge
-But there were downsides, but I liked those as well

Web Develop:
-I have had positions in web development, where I'm the only developer. So I get to call the shots and my hours.
-Work from home, has got to be the best perk of any job
-Free postage meter
This was years ago so I don’t have a reference. But one of my business professors in college assigned a case study that contained the memorable (to me) stat that the average Costco shopper had a higher net worth than the average Nordstrom shopper. Something to do with small business owners vs people going into debt to look more affluent than they really are...
Hmm, seems neither current gcc nor clang can compile this even with -ansi or -std=c89
Is this even that compelling? X forwarding always sucked for me unless I was on the same switch as the source device.
That doesn't really rebut the argument, since they'll only end up with an inventory of thousands of cars if they get self-driving cars to work productively, which would immediately propel them out of any "conventional" category they could have been assigned to.

I don't think they will get there with self-driving, but by the same token they're not going to end up owning a zillion cars either.
All my major appliances were bought online. Amazon delivers home improvement services now (via partners) in some markets. These may be things that move online slower, but they to move.
FWIW, using M3.Mediums at Spot with AWS Batch, the per vcpu rate works out to 0.0067/hr. Fargate is still ~600% more expensive.
Avoid borimg people.

It is your fault if you cant find what it is interesting in others.
150 years ago, philosopher showed why pointless to start arguments on internet
I agree there may be some hindsight bias. At the beginning of this blog post I call it out as well:

"Sometimes this creates a very backwards looking view, as the most obvious signals are in companies that have been working well for a few years and the trend is really over."

I do think DevOps is an exciting market with a lot going on. (I am an investor in GitLab, PagerDuty, and other related companies)...
Whenever I hear smart and reasonable people argue well for both sides of an engineering issue, my experience is that it will turn out that we're arguing the wrong question. The perspective is wrong. We can't get past thinking in terms of our old terminology.

What we all really want is a VCS where repos can be combined and separated easily, or where one repo can gain the benefits of a monorepo without the drawbacks of one.

Another crazy tech prediction from me: just as DVCS killed off pre-DVCS practically overnight, the thing that will quickly kill off DVCS is a new type of VCS where you can trivially combine/separate repos and sections of repos as needed. You can assign, at the repo level, sub-repos to include in this one, get an atomic commit hash for the state of the whole thing, and where my VCS client doesn't need to actually download every linked repo, but where tools are available to act like I have.

(This will also enable it to replace the 10 different syntaxes I've had to learn for one project to reference another, via some Dependencies list and its generated Dependencies.lock list.)

In a sense, we already have all of these features, in folders. You can combine and separate them, you can make a local folder mimic a folder on a remote system, and access its content without needing to download it all ahead of time. They just don't have any VCS features baked in. We've got {filesystems, network filesystems, and VCS}, and each of the three has some features the others would like!

I don't have much money right now but I'd pay $1000 for a good solution to this. I'd use it for my home directory, my backups, my media server, etc.
> 1- Firefox Reality is actually "Servo" ie the Rust based browser Mozilla has been developing for years.

Firefox Reality currently uses GeckoView, Gecko repackaged in a WebView-like embeddable Android component. The Firefox Reality team is still working on experimental support for Servo:

https://github.com/MozillaReality/FirefoxReality/#experiment...
Even at a 1/5th of that scale the problems become obvious.
IIRC, Windows 3.x didn’t have a TCP/IP stack. One had to install additional software such as Trumpet Winsock in order to connect to Internet.
dig into the back story; aside from the public challenges of a traditional brick&mortar retailer, Lampert actively accelerated it's downfall to enormous personal gain. He literally destroyed the business (let the retail stores fall into disrepair) while he sold off it's most valuable assets like the brands and milked it for cash as a major creditor.

He is a modern day robber-baron with none of the mystique or cachet that time has granted the railway and oil families; He's nothing more than a butcher (no offense intended to actual hard working butchers).

>> What’s the place of Sears in the modern age?

Sears was the original amazon from the analogue-internet days; they were well-poised before Lampert showed up and missed their chance.

There is still a huge amount of money in traditional retail and Sears could have owned a lot of the market that the Walmarts, Staples and Home Depots have moved into: bigger, high-ticket physical goods like appliances, home furnishings, gardening & outdoor living, even building supplies in package form.

I think they will go down in history as one of the great miss-steps of the modern age of retailing. From the defacto go-to for an entire continent to nothing.
> which means it requires much less capital

They burned through billions of dollars of capital. That's quite a lot for a business that requires very little capital. What would they burn if they needed lots of capital? Trillions of dollars?
Functional Programming and Unit Testing with Microservices
In concept yes, but I dont think this deal will work out for the CEO’s hedge fund

He tried to take an activist position to create a market for the bonds he bought, and it failed.

Everything related to a nostalgic middle america mall space that also employed people is just irrelevant.
"5 core markets (Devsumer, Real Estate, AI hardware, Transportation and Logistics, Crypto) and 2 emerging ones (Legal, Defense)"

Devsumer? For sure. Simplifying dev work seems like an area with pretty much eternal growth potential. But I find it hard to get excited about many of the others.

Interacting with the government (defense) still seems to take buckets of money, and there are already large companies that do software in that space, even if their names don't come up much.

It will be a while before people look a crypto as anything other than a sick joke I suspect.

I kinda thought that the software+real-estate process had a whole lot of established players, but I could easily just be ignorant of some of the growth areas.
This has the advantage that your database operations run a heck of a lot faster, but has the potential disadvantage that primary key uniqueness may not be maintained, if you think that alternate ways of writing the same characters in unicode matters for that.
Being too early is as bad as being wrong.
I'm using data I collected myself. No guarantee that it's comprehensive but it seems not far off the data collected by Pitchbook per this report [0]

Don't have the data in front of me but I think the change happened a bit before november

[0] https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/silicon-valley-bank...
I agree that having that tool in your toolbelt is important - it's not want the parent post was saying. He was arguing that you're either a Wordpress "not really programmer" or you're a front-end "big-framework-first" developer.

As someone who's neither I rather disagree.
If you get private insurance you pay extra to cover inner London hospitals unless you live there.

I haven’t used the NHS for the 6 years that I’ve lived here tried it once when I was looking for some physiotherapy for my knee got told by the GP that it will take 3 months called AXA which was then my provider and got an approval for 3 sessions which was then extended to 12 the same week.

I don’t even book GP appointments via the normal NHS route any more all of the GPs are technically private anyhow they just accept NHS patients and getting a booking via private health care is just that much more convenient since they see you within 24 hours and evening appointments are much more available.
Docker/k8s
Rebuilding trust and brand value will take years or decades. Don't undervalue accounting tricks, reorganization, focusing on efficient assets, etc. Getting rid of dead weight is much more important than trying to reinvent the retail experience. You need to stop the bleeding first.
My grandparents shopped at Montgomery Wards. My Parents shopped at Sears. Both forgot how to make money and are gone. I wouldn't be surprised to see Amazon gone before Wal-Mart, but I don't expect either to be around in 200 years (note that medical science currently offers me little hope of living beyond either).
This doesn't require what I would expect from an undergraduate degree in math, let alone a master's. It's not a reasonable option for what the OP is looking for.