skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I was deeply unhappy in my job as a web developer. My co-workers were great but our department (attached to an IT support company) was treated as an afterthought. Our manager had no development experience and had bounced around from department to department. He was basically one step away from the door but the owner of the business didn't have the heart due to personal reasons.

A friend who owns an ecommerce business said that he would create enough work for me full time for my first 12 months if I set up on my own, as well as paying me the same as I was earning at my previous employer. My first job was to build him a new website which involved not only building the site but migrating all of his product and order data, which kept me occupied for the first few months. I jumped at the chance, splitting my time between home and his office at first.

This was 8 years ago and while growth hasn't been explosive, I've been consistently employed since then and now have 2 full time employees to help me out, with revenue slowly increasing year-on-year. I still have the original contract (he started another ecommerce business in the meantime which has grown to be the biggest in their sector) and have picked up a couple of others along the way, expanding into industrial software and interactive marketing. It's a mixed bag, and a lot of fun getting to pick and choose which projects we want to take on.

I honestly couldn't be happier with the way things went. My life is relatively stress free and I (and my employees) earn good money off the back of a very small number of stable long-term contracts. We have a nice office and nice working conditions. Everything I ever wanted and never got in my old job.

As far as what would have happened had I stayed? The company was acquired and the web department was eventually dismantled after years of sitting around with nothing to do. I hear the redundancy packages were half decent, at least.
> unless there were cases of extortion and outright murder we don't know about

You don't need violence to run a Mafia. Makes things easier, yeah, but open violence primarily attracts cops.

On corporate scale, there are far more attractive and especially legal things available: use price dumping backed by cheap VC cash to force your competitors to either match or close down (which is the entire business model of Uber), buy up competitors before they get dangerous and/or copy popular ideas from them (just watch what FB did to Instagram and Whatsapp, and how it then used that mass to strangle Snapchat), prevent key employees from switching companies (which they all did via NDAs or secret agreements), buy up key suppliers or lock them into exclusive agreements (sort of what Tesla is attempting to do with the Gigafactory), force restaurant operators to pay with cash to have fraudulent "user reviews" removed, ...
But you DO escape a meaningless job by giving it more meaning
They held a one day retrial after he requested a retrial of his 15 year sentence a while back.
David Maurer, the Dean of Criminal Language
Yes.

I joined a small startup because they had a product I really wanted to use. Now the product is used by many people.

But, even though it's meaningful, and I love my job, I still look forward to figuring out how to move on to something else. I've come to accept that, unless I'm financially independent, there's always going to be ups and downs with my job. That's just the reality of life.

I've also come to see people who are financially independent stick with a "stressful" job because they emotionally need the stress and ups and downs. They would get board if they quit, and get directionless if they tried to run their own thing.
If you read the article, you'll note that he was already arrested and convicted before all of this began.

It's his sentencing that is being used to "make an example". Clearly this is done for political reasons to "send a message" .. and judges in the US routinely use sentencing as a means to do the same.

The only thing here is the disconnect between the harsh sentencing and the perceived reasons for it.

I mean, you're not wrong, but I feel like you're missing the angle of what's going on here.
> <a href="javascript:;" target="_blank" class="cell">中文 / Chinese</a>

Why?
They are OK with harming other people, just not Chinese people. Kind of the same with every nation.
> more efficient and less costly than its closed-source alternative

This is just not true in reality. Open source projects cost generally the same as closed source projects. Companies like mongo and unity employs about the same amount of engineers to work on it and the idea of high cost savings due to thousands of randos contributing code is vastly exaggerated. Same cost + no profit + having to develop a secondary core competency in a competitive commodity business like support and hosting = dangerous and non-scalable model.

Also never heard of a game using the Blender game engine...
I used to think it wasn't. My jobs were, no matter how it was dressed up, trying to earn a massive retailer an extra percent or two on their already massive earnings over doing anything that impacted the consumer positively.

Since I started working for myself, I find it meaningful if only because I get to actually BUILD stuff.

But after all of the advertising I've done, I'd like for my next full-time job to be a net positive for society.
Yes, I’ve recently seen ads that say things along the line of “Create your Facebook account and connect with your friends.”
Dupe of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18902727 (which has comments)
S8 has this, but can be opted out (plus it has what I assume is a whitelist of pre-approved apps, but even those can be opted in, IIRC). It's clumsy, but sort-of works. It does break some old apps that rely on scheduled wakeups, though :(
I had the Kodak DC-3200 back in 2001: http://old-digitalcameras.com/MorePicts/MP42.htm. I recall it being great, and the CF card made it incredibly convenient.

It's weird to look at the history of Kodak's digital camera lineup[1]. It's often said that Kodak fell because they didn't invest in the technology early enough and were too late by the time they started to do so in the 90s.

I would argue that the existing user base of Canon and Nikon in the 80s probably contributed more to that - although Kodak made SLRs they didn't make lenses, and instead offered compatibility with Canon/Nikon's mounts. The problem is that the users of those lenses were more than likely to buy camera bodies manufactured by the same company, and not Kodak. Had Kodak offered bodies in the 80s then it's doubtful they would have sold to Canon/Nikon users due to the costs.

It seems they were damned by either going for too much (cost) too soon, or too little too late.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_products_manufactured_...
I'm working on a platform that uses spare change to pay off student loans. Both the savings itself for the user, and the educational angle about student loans feels more meaningful than most of the work I've done in other jobs at large corporations.
Ask HN: What are the UK/EU based remote-only companies or remote friendly?
essentially for backend software engineer (Java, GoLang, Microservices, *nix)
But isn't this a problem with the actual TSA and its policies instead of the workers who just follow them? These are still real people who have to rely on their paychecks to live.
I guess they have no tolerance for drug use in their country. Exporting it makes sense from an economic perspective. I believe US and EU(i.e. with GMO prosucts) is doing the same.
100 cm² (10×10 cm), not 10 cm² (3.16×3.16 cm).
How to Solve for Geofencing in the Low Power IoT
Exports are one thing, addicts inside China are another. They still remember how Britain used opium addiction to control them. The Communist solution was to kill all the addicts after they took over.
Making a Better iOS Tuner App
That's warfare.
I’d take a step deeper and realize that this is glorified tribalism that’s stuck in humans. We evolved into a civilized species but the idea of territorial tribalism is embedded deep into our very psyche.
Wow impressive collection !

I probably have one not listed somewhere... I'll contribute if I stumble upon it : Creative PC-Cam 300 ;)
> this gets the git branch to display when I cd into a git repo

It's early and I'm lazy... will this always parse the branch upon entering any git directory?
When we embarked on our migration into AWS, we thought about this pretty carefully. There wasn't anything that we couldn't move in a year. That provides a sufficient backstop (IMO) to anything becoming untenable in the AWS ecosystem. Most everything could be moved in a handful of weeks of effort, or at least enough parts to achieve the reason to move.

AWS is still in a battle for market share; I think they're extremely "friendly" to their customers at this phase of the game. Will that change in a half-decade or decade? Maybe, but I think they're earning their profits now and likely to continue to do so.
I guess the piercing of my suspension of hard sci-fi disbelief happened in the 2nd book(?), where post-Fall they rebuild into a militarily space capable society with relatively advanced weaponry.

If you're going to take 1,800 pages (English translation) to lay out your series, and you can't spare a few for 'well, now we're building giant fusion-powered warship fleets'? That's not anything approaching hard sci-fi in my book.

Yes, all the technologies used on the ships are extrapolated and believable, but the realignment of society, economics, and the organization of such a construction effort boggles the mind. And to say 'it just happens'? That's kind of like going from WWII to 'and so we landed on the moon' in a single page.
>Calling the phone home feature a required library is part of the malintent from Google.

It is code required for the WebComponents to function. It's also charged with optimizations such as sandboxing of iframes, making requests synchronous, and calculating layout to reduce paints.

Clearly it's not "phoning home". The script provides clear actions, as laid out on the amp project website.

>You don’t need that much time to load all the assets

On American broadband, perhaps. Other countries do not have the same infrastructure.

>that timeout is there only to punish people who block the AMP resources.

Citation, not speculation, needed.
Years ago, I sent someone cash payment and my picture to have them scan it so I could have it on my AOL signature.

I remember the alternative was contacting someone that had one of these new fangled digital cameras.

I'm old.
Chinese leadership doesn't want Meng Wanzhou to talk, revealing the full extent of Huawei misdeeds. The new sentence for Schellenberg is - I believe - a message of solidarity for Meng's consumption and less an attempt to manipulate the Canadian justice system. Keep in-mind Shellenberg was sentenced to 15 years. A re-sentencing like this is unusual and experts say manipulated. The sooner Meng is extradited to the US, the faster Canada can get of the middle... though I doubt it will help Shellenberg's plight.
I have a personalized set of 'meaningful indicators' I use to help answer that question whenever I am job searching or feeling less than thrilled about my current work.

1) Does the work have a positive impact on people in my community? (this could be a literal local community, or a shared interest community)

2) Do I feel energized by the work that is happening around me at my company? Not just what I am personally responsible for.

3) If I were to leave, would I still care if the product/mission of the company succeeded?

4) Am I making enough to support my family and provide myself with a healthy/active lifestyle?

5) Have I ever felt like I have directly contributed to, or worked for a company that has, deceived or taken advantage of its customers for the sake of profit?

Outside of these questions, I feel like trying to attribute any other type of meaning to my work would leave me anxious, depressed, and perpetually stuck in the "grass is greener" situation.

I am lucky enough that my current work checks all the boxes (1-4 as yes, 5 as no). With the bonus of having learn a ton and been given the opportunity for career growth multiple times over.
I do not see the connection between the sentencing and Huawei's case other than the timing.
Xenix tales: 8086 and Xenix 386 networking
Effort to convince non-terminal users
Incident Response Documentation
Not sure about China but in many Asian countries drug-related crimes are considered to be very, VERY serious, and often lead to death sentencies: Vietnam, Thailand, Phillipines all have very strict laws here.

For non-foreigners this normally means death sentence. Foreigners do sometimes get some sort of special treatment.
Things I learnt after quitting Google for a job at a hyper-growth startup
> health monitoring framework instead of the logging framework.

What is the difference?

Can you just extract metrics from logs via ES. Logstash even has a prebuilt JAVASTACKTRACEPART for java exceptions.
Well, I can pay for my mortgage and I can keep food on the table for my kids. Yep!
ClayGL: library for building scalable Web3D applications
> I wouldn't put Cixin Liu's trilogy as hard hard sci-fi, as it invents a few more, but all in all, there aren't that many "fantasy devices" there. It definitely has a flavour of hardness.

Even that much is being overly kind (at least to the first book - I gave up after that). Hard SF introduces a small number of well-defined ideas and then works through their logical consequences. Science fantasy introduces magical devices with particular consequences as and when the plot demands. The magical VR system and magical particle computer - essentially all the SF elements of Three Body Problem - were examples of the latter.
Put like this, it sounds like repaying for opium.
Arguable this is what MongoDB, Inc. sells as well. A big part of their package for enterprise clients is optimization and consulting services.
WebSQL literally just had a remote code execution bug showing exactly why it was right that browsers decided against WebSQL

https://blade.tencent.com/magellan/index_en.html
Show HN: Metachat – encrypted, feature-rich group chat
Why can't MongoDB can't compete with AWS? Aside from cloud vendor lock-in, and economies of scale that AWS has. Curious if anyone here has experience with hosting using Mongo's enterprise offering. The article makes the point that Amazon is targeting a lower version of the API, can't the enterprise version compete on features?
While I agree almost all phones are to large, I don't know they are that bad.

I recently overheard a conversation where someone was amazed by a colleagues small phone and wanted to know what it was.
"Wow, what is that phone its so small!"
"uhh, it's just a pixel."
"Aren't pixel's huge?"
"Those are pixel XL, this is a normal pixel..."

The pixel 3 is 37% larger in volume than the iphone 5. It is only 15% larger than the iphone 7... gosh but I wish phones release normal+ xl + compact.
No, they haven't solved it.
Thanks, I'll make sure to pack some rope.
Well, it's matter of perspective. It's not very possible that in 200 years or so, people are going to remember and study my work. That's reserved for the Newtons and the Gausses of the world, and even then, they are acknowledged from a tiny percentage of the world's population.

But I'm very grateful to work in a setting where I can solve exciting problems, get to collaborate and learn from really smart and passionate people, try (and fail) in designing software, and then sometimes find time for a hobby or two.

The 'safe 9-5 job' exists, and as programmers, we always want a fresh challenge, but in many cases it's in our hands to create the opportunities so it's not 'meaningless'.
I'm curious... can you post a link to these FB ads? Tks!
it was a leap of faith and the best decision i ever made.

i left my cushy consulting gig for a small startup that was acquired a year later. if i had decided to stay there, i would likely be doing the same meaningless projects for about 5% more than I was the year before.
My company produces medical devices that help a lot of people enormously, including my girlfriend. Her life was unbearable before we got the device. In addition she probably got the device only because I knew about it through work.

So the work should be meaningful but somehow it doesn't feel that way to me. Between bad technical decisions, bureaucracy and a lot of schedule pressure I don't like my job. I think I would be happier working on a less meaningful product but in a more technically interesting and challenging environment.

There are other people who get a total kick out of helping people but somehow this doesn't work for me.
Yes it is.

We build a machine that shaves of pennies from donations to orphanages and funnels them directly into hedge funds.

To do so we have to build a neural network! and in Tensorflow no less!

And here is the real kicker: I rewrote the interface in Haskell. If that isn't meaningful, I don't know what is!
He was already a convicted drug trafficker. I don’t see any indication that his original 15-year sentence was improper. It is possible that he was falsely convicted, of course, but I don’t know that this is more likely in China than elsewhere.

Suddenly changing his sentence to death is rather suspicious, but at least for me it doesn’t make a huge difference compared to a 15-year sentence.

Random anecdote: I just got back to the US from several weeks in China. By far the most uncomfortable and worrying law-enforcement interaction of the trip was going through US immigration control on the way back.
This is only harmful to tourism if you understand "smuggling ecstasy" as "tourism".
Views of the World from 9th Avenue
Is a safe 9-5 job inherently "meaningless" now?

I am good at software development. I help a company with software development 8 hours per day and they pay me for my time. They take care of hardware, air condition, desk space, social stuff, cleaning, internet connection, tax pre-deduction and regular payment transfers. I get to focus on what I'm good at.

My colleagues are pleasant and my work tasks are challenging.

In the evenings and weekends, I spend time with my family, make things for myself, or play games alone or with others.
After the whole Cambridge Analytica thing I even saw physical facebook ads on the train, talking about how they weren't creepy and fake news is bad. It was strange to see.
2.3 billion monthly active users later??? That is truly ridiculous.. too much cash to burn in their coffers perhaps?
I wrote a longer version of this before[1], but here it is in short form:

> Did you have a strategy or was it a leap of faith?

It was more of a loose plan. I'd been reading Patrick McKenzie's articles about consulting and knew I wanted to try it. When my 9-5 (more like 8-10) job pushed me to the edge, I decided to put in my notice and give consulting a shot.

I had about $30k saved up from four years of 9-5 work which helped A LOT because I made zero dollars for a few months. But that cushion was a result of good personal finance decisions, not because I knew I'd quit some day.

> Did you regret it later on?

No, never.

> Are you happy with the decision you made?

Absolutely. I still have challenging moments but they're the good kind of challenges; interesting and rewarding.

> Where do you think you would be today if you had decided to stay in that job?

Miserable. No way my mind or body would survive that long in that environment for that long.

In short: I made the right decision for myself, but it wasn't a rash decision. My savings cushion helped me survive for the first few months. Even if things didn't work out as well as they did, I would have no regrets for trying.

[1] https://www.gkogan.co/blog/how-i-learned-to-get-consulting-l...
If you lie to your company saying you live in SF when you live in Asia your going to have a hard time explaining why your never available during the middle of the day, what are you going to do when your asked to travel to somewhere in the continental US and you try and submit a travel expense for a flight from asia, etc...
Curated Search of Business Influencers
They have a contract that requires that they do so.

One of the things about unions is that there's really no grand conspiracy... they are quite open about what they want, and getting it generally involves a contract between two parties.
PyDev of the Week: Lance Bragstad
Edit: ugh, nevermind it _is_ early. I know that answer. Thanks for the cool functions.
I used this site to Inter-rail around Europe back in 2009, and ever since anytime I get to mainland Europe I try to fly back from another city, and catch the interesting trains and sights.

So impressed that it's been kept not just running, but up-to-date and so well written (enjoyable to read)
Creating GUI Applications with WxPython Kickstarter
I don't see any benefits over services such as discord where you can do the same more or less using a prefix and a word like that, and then just search for the prefix and word

Edit: Aside from the end to end encryption
We've got a winner. Tensors "do" something; they're functions.

In the rank-1 and rank-2 case these functions can be represented as objects familiar to linear algebra. 3-tensors are not the same as stacked two-tensors, however.

I wonder if "neural networks as ODEs" will catch on. I could use some of my masters work and go get a PhD.
That is: no tolerance for foreigners smuggling drugs to China and contributing to problems of domestic drug addiction. China historically fought wars against the British Empire over this issue, and see it in a context of anti-colonialism.
Specifically SQLite had a remote code execution bug, and since all browsers that shipped WebSQL used SQLite as the backing engine, they all inherited the vulnerability and exposed it to all web-pages out there.
Multiple popular tourist destination countries execute people for drug offences and it doesn't seem to be that big of an issue.
Ah that explains it. I was under the impression that I was looking at a simple website, not some super fancy front-end application. I block all external domains with ublock-origin.

Since when do you need to serve emojis from a third party? I thought you can just insert them straight into your HTML. Or is that not cool enough?
When the protests were in egypt, tourists stopped visiting the country. This had a major impact on the economy. So this kind of stuff can definitely have an impact. The situation in China is different though. Egypts economy is very dependent on tourism, while China's isn't. On the other hand, country wide protests with anarchy are a different thing from a government killing one individual in some shitty trade war.
Also the Samsung variant will not kill the app or service that is showing a notification as it should. So the three problem is limited to apps relying on dumb running in background.

Alarm scheduled wakeups get rounded to a minute in power saving mode though.
An Informal Exploration of Structural Sharing and Copy-On-Write Semantics
International relations become a lot more comprehensible once you realize that it is the one example of a true, pure anarchy you can find on this planet.
Thanks, yep, I ad-block external domains by default.
As these networks grow they start exhausting normal growth strategies and often have to resort for paying for users.

If your customer acquisition cost (CAC)is less than the lifetime value of the customer it's an obvious calculation.

If you pay $15 for a user but they make you $100 ... do it!
Impossible here in Belgium now since the terror attacks.

Tourists are having a hard time buying sim cards when they come here. Don't even know if it's possible at all.

Dealers don't rotate their numbers so much any more, so I was told.
Key word "export".