skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Bored with development – do I need a new project or role entirely?
I'm a developer who has worked for several years on big, legacy-ish codebases in the .net space. I've always performed pretty well, but I often get bored and I don't feel like I get enough interesting work.

I am trying to figure out if I'm not interested enough in or cutout for development in general, or if I just need a different type of project or technology to work on.

I also like working with people and have thought about going down the people/project management track, but am undecided.

I'm wondering if anyone else has had a similar experience and what your advice would be.
My current go to for this is using SQLite. It's basically made for this purpose. If that doesn't serve, I like the idea of Apache Avro, but some of it's C++ bindings are a little lacking in my opinion.
Thats very nice!
I've built a similar thing a couple of years ago:
https://aaron-fischer.net/tdn (german)
Yeah, that's called the free market.

If a company goes to Unity, they'll have to be careful that at any time they'll may remove your right to distribute your own game binaries. They don't even need to clone anything!
And Fastly Terrarium, that compiles WASM code to native code, and runs it server-side https://wasm.fastlylabs.com/
We are currently rewriting Buckaroo in F# (https://github.com/LoopPerfect/buckaroo/tree/buckaroo-redux ); previous versions were in modern Java. The productivity gains are tremendous... FParsec, async, asyncSeq, records, match expressions are all a huge leap over what most OOP languages offer. Deployments are also much easier thanks to Core RT.

F# feels like a secret weapon.
This post parallels Ted Kaczynski's "Industrial society and its future"
There's a big difference between "not using cutting edge hardware" and "unplayable games sold at full price that become literal trash before they're ever even opened".

The average game on a console is going to be higher quality than the average game on PC because the average game on PC has to include the game I made in Visual Basic 6 when I was in high school. With no gatekeeper ensuring basic quality, my VB6 game is every bit as legitimate of a game as Battlefield 5. They both hold the title of "PC Game", but only one of them could ever be called "Xbox Game" because Microsoft would never allow my game on their console.
I found myself instantly agreeing with your sentiment and then failing to explain it to myself.
I think the problem is that being good at something is not related to that "good" as an outcome and appreciated by others as such.

Let me try to explain with a bit of an overstatement: Most TV is crap, but year after year they keep making it. People making it cannot be good at it? Well actually they are. They found the sweet-spot by maximizing the profit in terms of eyeball captured they will make from the least amount of effort. That is success.

Now-a-day successful politicians are far better at making people vote for them than actually realizing the platform they are elected on. They are literally good at the game of democracy, but don't know what to do with the spoils. The difference between those two seems to be "fake-news".

Lets assume that the prolific reviewer on Amazon is completely legit. He is obviously good in the sense of efficient at reading and writing reviews. That we do not see the "good" in an outcome of having so many reviews written by the same person does not make his activity less good as an activity.
Thanks for the interesting and detailed info.

I mean the cost of hitting the disk/socket. The actual IO. There is also the syscall overhead but that doesn't matter /that much/ with IO usually, in comparation with the actual IO (unless, again, you are doing something very wrong - very small buffers etc ...). This of course depends on the deatils. And yeah, if it uses mmap then that syscall problem is no more. Problem I was refering was actual IO cost per message (fsync/msync per message?) to mantain consistency instead of caching for example or batching and grouping IO at the expense of consistency guarantees (maybe) or coherent data re. messages in realtime.

I agree that the stack is usefull and I see your point. But I would almost never resort to alloca. That is not a solution IMO. If you have that kind of costs with the joining of keys there are other solutions, I think. What about a dynamic string library, that over allocates (maybe a big chung on the first time in the 'new message' path) and then just uses the extra memory until you run out. Classic (and silly) strategy of allocating like n << 4 bytes every time you run out of space. This way you really just have a few allocations instead of hundreds maybe making it a non-issue (at the cost of prob. unused extra memory). Not as efficent as alloca but very close.

I you want to get fancy you can have efficent malloc pools to. But I think a semi-clever dynamic string lib would be able to handle the problem best.
I love his writing! Though I have to carve out time for the long-form posts. :)
> Yes, which is why I'm confused. I'm not asking why people cycle instead of motorcycle, or don't go to the fish shop instead of fishing.

Well, it's two sides of the same coin: why is "no motor" a restriction that makes for an interesting hobby but "crappy bike" isn't? My answer is that trying to be as fast as possible subject to x can be interesting provided there's a clear sharp line between x and not-x. E.g. plenty of people ride single-speed bicycles - but they'll still try to be as fast as possible within that restriction, and may well buy an expensive single-speed bicycle for doing so. Indeed the vast majority of cyclists follow UCI's decidedly arbitrary rules which are explicitly designed to make cycling a bit less pay-to-win (minimum bicycle weight so that bikes made with cheaper materials can still be competitive, arbitrary spoke/frame shape requirements to make wind-tunnel testing less effective and limit innovative designs).

You could say that people stick to the UCI rules so that they can compare to other UCI cyclists and be part of the same community, and I'm sure that's a part of that, but IMO that's a minor factor. The really important thing is having a ruleset that you can't easily change yourself: the UCI rules are external and fixed, whereas if I tried to follow my own definition of what a "crappy bike" was and be as fast as possible within that, there would always be a question of why that particular definition, and whether I could/should change something. If I got a new bike and was faster on it, would that be "cheating" because the new bike wasn't "crappy enough"? What about things I hadn't thought of in my ruleset? (e.g. when I first started cycling I hadn't even heard of cleats, so would switching to cleats have been breaking my rules?)
Why not start by becoming a consultant? I think that's always a good question to ask yourself. Consulting has many of the challenges you'd face running your own business, except the product you're selling is yourself.
Delete, Divert, Dilute: How to find digital wellness in 3 steps
> You're still speaking in terms of our current system being the product of some immutable natural law of the universe.

Because it is. Your entire response is so strikingly naive one has to wonder how old you are.

> The very idea of someone "paying for you" is built on the premise that some group of people is entitled to own and control such vast quantities of the planet's resources that they enjoy access to many orders of magnitude beyond what they need to subsist

No it isn't.

> The entire premise is asinine when you really think about it.

You haven't thought about, clearly, your entire argument fails to understand basic reality.

> And, it's even more so when you add the fact that the "accepted solution" to avoiding the dilemma

The "delima" is called survival, and it's not remotely something you're entitled to.

> If you're still not seeing it, then consider the simple phrase that is applied literally: "earn a living". I mean, really think about what that means.

I know exactly what it means, you apparently don't, you seem to think you're "entitled" to food, water, and shelter on someone else's back. You are not.

> Start with the fact that to earn something implies that one is not otherwise entitled to it

Because you're NOT. To be entitled to something means someone owes it to you, please do tell me who "owes" you food, want, and shelter?

> thus owes something in order to receive it. To whom do they owe this and why?

Not owes... since you're not entitled, then you must offer something in order to receive it, that's called trade. If you're not willing to trade for the things you need, then you will die. No one owes you the things you need.

Your entitlement is that of a child who still doesn't understand how basic reality works.
Improbable could simply comply with the licensing or negotiate a deal. Instead they pretended it as if it was just Unity being evil for no reason at all.

It's Improbable who acted badly here.
Ask HN: What are options available to build native app with no coding?
My compiler isn't optimized for performance, either! I didn't do much other than expanding a linear symbol search into a few more lines doing binary symbol search. And I've got string interning (hashing).

I've mostly optimized for clean "mathematical" data structures - basically a bunch of global arrays. This approach is grounded on the realization that arrays are just materialized functions, and in fact they are often the better, clearer, and more maintainable functions. If you can represent the domain as consecutive integer values, of course. So I've designed my datastructures around that. It's great for modularity as well, since you can use multiple parallel arrays to associate diverse types of data.

But anyway, your language looks impressive I must say.
I agree with this. I suspect that any community with “downvoting” or similar would skew more forward outliers, because the prevailing group-think will downvote contrary content and getting downvoted stings, scaring off many who might otherwise add diverse perspectives.

But even without voting mechanisms, nasty replies are just as bad or worse, so the general trend of chasing off the people who see things a little differently seems pretty universal to me.
This means: GitHub now also offers unlimited free web hosting - with free SSL certificates! Look into GitHub Pages and Jekyll. That is a big deal! And something most people overlook.
In principle, I agree. In practice, it's easier to miss an edge or corner case in a regular expression than it is in a series of conditionals. That's just another consequence of the complexity tradeoff.
Yesterday was Knuth's 81st birthday, and perhaps for that reason, a good number of videos have been made unlisted on the stanfordonline YouTube channel. Recording the links here for posterity:

• "Donald Knuth lectures" https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL94E35692EB9D36F3 (111 videos)

This includes several sub-series but the playlists don't have the videos in the right order:

• “Aha sessions”: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLoROMvodv4rNbeodV7vqx... (Knuth used to run a “problem-solving seminar” at Stanford; these are videos from one such year.)

Three lecture series on TeX that are now of historical interest (e.g. the TeX program has changed considerably):

• “TeX for Beginners” https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLoROMvodv4rN1PKcXvzjo...

• “Advanced TeXarcana” https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLoROMvodv4rNrDaAftaqM...

• “The Internal Details of TeX82” https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLoROMvodv4rM2JuHk3qBh... (I've found this invaluable as I try to read the TeX program)

The following two playlists are still unlisted and I no longer know how to get to them:

• Mathematical Writing https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLoROMvodv4rOrFl78-o6m...

• Computer Musings - Donald Knuth https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLoROMvodv4rNMsVRnSJ44...

(I happened to have them in my browser history… these playlists used to be linked from http://scpd.stanford.edu/knuth/ but as of yesterday they seem to have changed it up, and also made the videos public (why were they “unlisted” earlier? No idea).)

And completely unrelated, but if you happen to be interested in church organ music and the Bible's Book of Revelation, the world premiere of Knuth's Fantasia Apocalyptica (https://cs.stanford.edu/~knuth/fant.html):

• https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLvixIGKr5sJffdfwecygY...
RAM is plentiful even on many microcontrollers now, but it becomes much less plentiful when you start storing thousands of data points and need to start bit packing boolean flags and reducing the integer size to squeeze as much as you can in the data structure! Or you need to stream as much of that data over a serial link as possible as quickly as possible!

So I agree, knowing how data is stored is critical.
So no java fans out here? I used Spring Boot in production. It is high performant, super configurable and with lot of community support.
One of the reasons there's no science to be found here (in this thread) is that no one is bothering to actually read the APA guidelines before lashing out with their reactionary rage.
Abkhazia lost more than half its population. That would change things fairly dramatically.
> It's maddening as a safe driver, having to keep constantly alert and ready to slam on the brakes going down any unfamiliar piece of road.

You've just described what being a safer driver is. You _have to_ be alert at all times, and you _have to_ be ready to brake if something suddenly happens.
I'm hoping the financial power will help too.

Essential was able to have a decent camera, but the imaging software was rough and didn't improve quickly enough.

I'd like to believe there is someone who's worked on the closed source software for cameras who will learn how valuable their work actually is.. And might freelance to build the OSS code that may be needed.
As I replied in another place here: It depends on what you define as bulk.
My personal definition is what matters to me and everybody is free to have their own.
I can buy arguments that extra compliance efforts make some businesses not cost-effective in Europe, but this particular argument is nonsense.

It's like a factory that dumped toxic waste into a river complaining that, because of a ban on dumping toxic waste into rivers, they now "have to" dump them to nearby meadows instead, and that makes local customers unhappy.

"Detrimental effect on user experience" is an intended effect that clearly signals the company doesn't want to stop abusing its users.
This idea really resonates with me, and is a notion I've been working through without really having words that express it.

Could you share the untranslated phrase if I wanted to read more about it?
This is really cool. I especially like the rotating circles visualization. Another video that helped me finally "get" Fouriers is the 3Blue1Brown video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=spUNpyF58BY
Yep. If it's about programming, game design, board games, video games, writing, I'll feel confident I have something to say and/or want to contribute. But I also read discussion about music composition, hiking, art, diy, history, philosophy, etc, and I would almost never post in those subjects (at least not at this point in time), as those aren't my focus, just other subjects I'm curious about.
Ask HN: Launching a US startup in China
Any insights and recommendations from those that have been down this path?

What about Chinese accelerators [1, 2]? Would this be useful guidance to better understand the relevant market(s) and tech culture?

[1] https://blog.ycombinator.com/yc-china-qi-lu/

[2] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trade-china-startups/in-silicon-valley-chinese-accelerators-aim-to-bring-startups-home-idUSKCN1II0UG
Ask HN: Anyone up for mock interviews
Hi,
Im preparing for a google phone tech interview. Anyone interested in mock interviewing one another?
leisenming AT protonmail DOT com
> "I’m jealous. They have something they care about _that_ much and I can’t imagine ever having that."

I identify with this so much. I have some friends who just pour time into games, and sure you can say that's a waste, but to have the human experience of caring that much about something must have some merit.
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18458908
ML Slack community for beginners
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https://machinelearningforall.slack.com/

Regards,

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> The prolific commenters are molding the discussion in their image. ... In any case, there is a lack of diversity in general -- discussions are driven by the worldview of a few.

The most interesting point to me in TFA was the 99.8 - 0.2 - 0.0003 rate of lurkers, commenters, and prolific commenters. It's the 0.0003% who obsessively comment (or edit or play games or whatever) all day on anything and everything that I don't understand. I actually think 'insane' is not an unfair commentary on their behavior. They very often drown out the 0.2% who participate but not obsessively, and are often rewarded with special recognition and even 'untouchable' status on various sites.
> ARC as in atomic reference counting?

Automatic, I think, but yes.

> I mean, Rust literally has an Arc<> type!

Yes, but idiomatic Rust makes very limited use of it; if you do use an Arc in Rust you have visibility and control over when you unreference it. Whereas in idiomatic Swift you're doing unmanaged dereferences all over the place.

I mean, of course it's possible to implement garbage collection in your non-GC language. The difference between a GCed language and a non-GCed language is whether GC is implicit and pervasive, or explicit and manually controlled.
The ratio of cost per amount of content seems very low to me in comparison to other large scale games. Maybe that is just what it takes to create a game as polished as this. If that is the case then it doesn't seem economical to develop.

If you compare it to how much content is added to each major expansion of World of Warcraft and the cost per year of always being up to date then Destiny falls very short.
What is the barrel of wine in your analogy? Your personal inbox or email as a whole?
I don't think my inbox would be ruined by a single email from that particular guy.
19 Challenges for Human Civilization
Swift’s Arc is automatic reference counting. It’s implemented via atomic reference counting, as far as I know.

Rust’s Arc and Rc types are never applied automatically.
The military does run their stuff pretty hard but at the same time a commercial airliner pretty much runs 24/7 because every minute it's not in the air is a waste of money. Military stuff always has to be ready to go but that doesn't mean it's always actually doing something.
Try to understand it or find a way to automate it.
I don’t believe vim is an IDE, so it won’t be on the same level, but I’ve been writing Swift for websites in VScode for over a year now and using the command line to compile the code.
What if this is because a lot of internal Apple developers are using VSCode instead of XCode, and they wanted better support?
it blows my mind that, even in a community as technically literate as HN, people are hurr-durr on "facebook selling my data!"
I applied several times, and I do have a family. I have never considered it risky financially, for several reasons, mostly because get some 100k from YC, even if you are 2 or 3 founders, that will cover your costs for 3-6 months.

If your family don’t support you going to SF after getting accepted into the best accelerator in the world, they won’t be supportive of your startup in general.

Of course being away from the family can be tough, but considering that the chance of succeeding once you get in is so high, it should not be too hard to convince them that it’s a good idea. It’s also so much easier to focus on work if you are far away. I sometimes go away for a week so I can really focus, without feeling streesed about staying late at the office.
There are many startup related firms that have deferred fees or will give a good amount of advice for free. When you are really small, that's makes sure you don't mess up things that affect equity. The whole board member / investors to startup lawyer relationship is something founders have to be cognizant of...I could write for days about how perverse incentives work against the startup / founders.

However, there are tons of issues beyond just startup equity / corp governance / incorporating that can kill your company. Discrimination / ERISA (HR issues broadly), privacy, anti-bribery, IP, commercial contracts...the list goes on and on.

Most young founders don't even know what they don't know and silicon valley culture tends to err on the side of, "just get the the exit...that's bigCo stuff you don't need to get lawyers involved, just do this."

If you truly want to build a great company, hire a well rounded lawyer as an FTE much earlier than you think. They don't need to be a first 10 hire. However, if you are growing and want to build a high-quality company, you should think about hiring a well rounded lawyer somewhere between hire 25-50.
The word "system" is used a lot to describe many different collections. For example, the molecules that act on glucose to create ATP is considered a "system," as in something like an RF chip that has Tx/Rx on the same piece of silica. Can someone help provide a definition for what a system means in the Hacker News context? What is "low-level" as well.

For me, low-level is assembly, not C.
Works for me! Thanks!
Where is your evidence for that? A quick search and what I see is mostly negative news for the middle-class

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/01/5-charts-which-show-w...
http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2015/12/09/the-american-middl...
http://www.aei.org/publication/yes-the-us-middle-class-is-sh...
https://money.cnn.com/2018/04/12/news/economy/middle-class/i...
regarding actors, I actually disagree. Sometimes I will watch a movie made with second rate actors and they tend to be so much worse than first rate actors at acting, that often those movies are unwatchable.
Monopsonies can be as bad as or worse than monopolies.
This is interesting because the least toxic places on Reddit are highly moderated (askscience, and askhistorians are the two biggest examples). Indeed, Hacker News is just essentially a highly moderated subreddit, which is its attraction.
You can avoid the burden of GDPR entirely if you simply don't collect user data, and you can avoid most of it if you only collect data that you actually need.
There’s also one that exists, so that proves it can be done: https://github.com/thepowersgang/mrustc
You really have no idea how cold emails work do you? It must be a total mystery to you why companies like Constant Contact exist.
Please explain your perspective.
[paraphrase]
You keep using that phrase "no abuse". I do not think it means what you think it means ...
[/paraphrase]

Single paraphrased/modified quote from a movie, meant to mock the abuse that has, and surely will, happen, under the existing, and new regimes. Fair use, and parody all wrapped up in one sentence.