skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Predicting AGI: What can we say when we know so little? (2013) [pdf]
I truly do not understand this mentality. Why not simply check / look up the word? You don't even have to try a dictionary these days, google will give you definitions if you just use a word as a search term.
> To clarify:

Was it just me, or was it difficult to follow this article without already having a lot of background info on the principals? What ever happened to putting "who, what, where, why, when" in the first paragraph?
If one lives a modest life (no Ferraris/Great-Gatsby-parties), on a sensible financial management, one can have north of £/€/$1m on the side, in one decade(speaking for UK/EU/USA)(for contracts on IT/IT Sec/GRC/PM.
Ooh, nice. That sinks that part of my argument, I guess.

Still, it doesn't change the fact that some type systems are cumbersome in some places, yet valuable in other places. I think we're currently seeing a movement towards type systems that do more for you while getting in the way less, and that's certainly useful.
NASA contractor here. Our funding has been slowly declining in recent years, with some years better than others. It's currently about 20 billion USD, or about 0.5% of the US budget. We are not what I would call "quite well funded", but we manage. A project I support, WFIRST, is currently over budget (as most space telescopes have been) and is constantly under threat of being cancelled. The recent shutdown cost the Government far more that what is needed to finish WFIRST.

Details of the NASA budget can be found at the inevitable Wikipedia page:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA
These could also partially be language and tooling issues.

There are some languages that are so “powerful”, “flexible”, and unopinionated that every developer has dramatically different coding styles (JavaScript, Scala, etc.). On the other end of the spectrum are tightly prescriptive, constrained languages where everyone’s code looks the same (Go comes to mind).

No doubt team culture plays a part as well, but in team settings it is important to pick tools that are designed for team settings. These tend to prioritize regularity, lack of flexibility, syntactic simplicity, static analysis, etc.
How can that be possible? The DNS lookup takes longer than that and you still haven't even gotten to your site. Once there the first byte time from the initial HTTP round strip still take considerably more. This is all network traffic that does matter what the application is doing.
> For those of you who use moment-timezone there is a trick to reduce the size (if you can get away with 2012-2022 dates)

Lol, a 3 year solution. I immediately feel sorry for the future devs jumping into a codebase like that on New Year's 2023 trying to figure out what broke overnight.
I have had 4 different RPi boards in the past including the latest and the pi zero, and every single of them failed to work reliably. The hardware design and quality are poor. One of my board had soldering issue, another has power supply issue, another has SD card reader issue. You would run into lots of tough ones. Software eco is mostly for playing around. There're lots of frustration around but no good answers. I like the idea, I like its motivation, but they need to focus on the core values and make it work well.
I up-voted because I still think that it has good values for kids.
No one is claiming that this kind of argument constitutes a proof, but this kind of back of the envelope calculation is very powerful. For example in the theory of prime numbers there is a heuristic that says that primes roughly behave like randomly selected numbers where Prob(N is prime) = 1 / log(N) [this is a simplification, but that's the crux of it]. With this heuristic you can accurately predict whether a large class of statements about primes are true or false, and can get extremely precise estimates about things like "how many twin primes are there less than N", or "how many solutions in primes are there to p1 + p2 = 2*N, for some huge N", which is one way of phrasing two famous prime number conjectures.

It doesn't lead you directly proof - but often just knowing what the answer 'should be' can be a real guiding light.
...which still can take significant amounts of CPU and RAM, especially on busy and underpowered hardware that webdevs don't tend to test their apps on.
I’d argue that it’s impossibke to compare a Distinguished Engineer to a VP because the job functions are vastly different. Using a vague measurement like “impact” doesn’t overcome this.

I agree i’ve never heard an understandable explanation as to why a company with 1 or 2 principal engineer level employees can have hundreds of VPs.
As a web developer in a similar position, I look forward to it.
What is it about toilets in American companies? I often go to the bathroom and just sit there and cry for 10-20 minutes. It’s almost impossible to do in America. They remind me of Chinese corporate toilets. European ones are the best. Private area without anyone disturbing you.
Cool, now just make sure this works for your users all over the world, in all the use cases you need to cover, and don’t forget to have your UX designers sign off on it!
screams into a pillow

My least favorite job was at an investment bank where men outnumbered women 100:1. Urinals were always clogged with garbage, toilets were left unflushed, and sinks regularly filled up with human waste.
Seems like the answer to the question in the title is: Not that bad.
One thing I would like to add... I created my own solo S-corp and started on the path of contracting. I have been successful enough to minimize my payroll taxes using a solo 401k (~18k max contribution and then my company can contribute 25% of my w-2 salary). Now I am at the point where I am investigating how to setup a defined benefit plan for myself to defer 75-100k in payroll taxes. Most likely a cash balance plan.

I think most employees at FAANG don't realize how much they really give up paying CA taxes and a significant portion of Federal taxes.

Then I realize why FAANG companies don't have defined benefit plans... The tenure of most employees would not make it worthwhile.

I wish we had something like the SAG-AFTRA rate fees for programming. We don't so I guess my solo way of doing things will have to do for now.

https://www.sagaftra.org/contracts-industry-resources

Look at those rates!
Does the big tech company bear no responsibility for shifting as much work as it can out to subcontractors in order to cut costs? It seems to me that they're knowingly using the subcontracting mechanism in order to get away with offering Apex's 24 hours of paid leave per year, insufficient bathrooms, and other appalling conditions without tarnishing their sterling reputation. It says right in the article that Apple reviewed the Apex site and thought it was fine.

If big tech companies want to own up to being heartless mercenary capitalists who will wring every drop of sweat out of workers and spit them out as burned-out husks with no savings at the age of 35, hey, that's the system we live in. But something seems off when they want to have their cake and eat it too– that is, they want to seem like inspiring, human-friendly forces for good, but quietly use the glow from that reputation to get away with subcontracting away a huge amount of their labor to people working in miserable conditions. There's a reason that some labels moved away from sweatshop labor: it's bad press. If Apple is going to effectively use sweatshop labor (through a contractor, whatever) they should have to eat the bad press. Don't defend it as just the contractor's fault. It's literally the exact same situation as a clothing sweatshop.
It seems peculiar for stories to continue to ignore the economic situation inside China as a major cause for Apple's sales woes inside China, especially given the number of companies not named Apple that have also reported plunging sales there.

We've had reports of a worsening job market and reduced consumer spending inside China since last year.

>DONGGUAN, China — China’s consumers and businesses are losing confidence. Car sales have plunged. The housing market is stumbling. Some factories are letting workers off for the big Lunar New Year holiday two months early.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/14/business/china-economy-xi...
Yeah, that was me, sorry. I wasn't given a choice.
For the big bang theory?
Graphviz describing multi-stage docker builds
Hi, the insulin index Nutrita uses is a better predictor of the metabolic impact a food is likely to have because predictions based on blood sugar increases (GI) or the total carb load (GL) have many more false positive and false negative errors.

Nutrita's Insulin index has been extensively refined to minimize these errors.

The problems with GI and GL:

For example, 100g of carbs from a potatoe increases blood glucose less than 100g of carbs from potatoe flour. the Glycemic Load cannot distinguish that.

The Glycemic index looks at rises in blood sugar and suffers another problem, in that it can't tell you how much insulin it 'cost you' to maintain blood sugars. so you could be thinking "hey my blood sugars are normal this food is fine for me!" but in fact you're producing a tsunami of insulin to keep stable blood sugars. So the GI will miss prediabetes, basically.

Check out these podcasts and studies which go through the science papers demonstrating this https://www.breaknutrition.com/episode-8-starch-digestibilit... and https://www.breaknutrition.com/episode-7-processed-starches-...
I'm not so sure. I don't market at all; recruiters just have my CV, which looks pretty good apparently. Writing a good CV is absolutely a valuable skill to have. Maybe more marketing improves my rate or gets me more opportunities, but it also sounds like a lot of overhead that's not the kind of work I want to spend my time on.
This is great. I think that the state of computer science education is partly to blame. When I was a student, a disproportionate amount of time was spent on advanced topics that will almost never arise in the course of a typical programmer's day to day work (e.g. the Ackermann function, skip lists, b-trees). By contrast, very little time was spent on common sense reasoning about the sort of programs that most software engineers spend most of their time working on (e.g. noticing that you can use a set rather than a list, that you can cheaply cache all outcomes rather than computing them on the fly, etc).

The consequence is that students get proficient enough at the advanced topics to pass their, but don't acquire skills that they can carry forward. (They probably also forget what the Ackermann function is the minute they walk out the door.) I suspect the impetus is that the status quo naturally gives rise to the kind of grade distribution that we expect, and serves as an effective filter for FAANG companies and grad school admissions committees. But you're not adequately training the next generation of software engineers.

I am _not_ saying that schools should omit advanced algorithms and data structures from the curriculum. But I think they could get more creative about how they teach students to apply the basics.
RE: #3
I think Perl for Verilog metaprogramming is pretty common, but I'm not really sure, have rarely written the stuff myself. But I've seen it before.
I once worked at a place where everyone working there was recruited straight out of school. They were nurturing a mentality of "I don't have to learn things ever again". Mind you, they were using Delphi 2010 at the time but were stuck in their old ways, using DataSets like it was 1998.

I was hired and had about 3 years of experience back then. It seemed like they tought they knew everything about software development at that point and swore to themselves to would never learn something new again. They were perfectly happy with their "misc" file, containing somewhere near 45K lines of code, hundreds of functions that were totally unrelated. Nothing wrong with that, according to them.

So yeah, I spent 8 months there. One wednesday afternoon, I had enough and went to my boss, handed my resignation, and never stepped in that office ever again.
Too many burned-out American workers were using the stalls to cry, I guess.
Challenges to reproduce computer architecture research
I think they are talking about Hardware as a Service. Essentially a new way to describe hardware leasing that has been going on for decades.

Frankly, if that is what the OP is looking to research, I'd start with leasing companies and how they function as that is the basic model.
Hi, I just did a show hn yesterday about pianorolls using tensorflow.js that might interest you https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19128287
Yeah, it doesn't work that way.

It takes time to meet compliance standards, and when it comes to items like color choice, often you're against client-selected requests.

I can either 1) keep pissing into the wind only to eventually be put through the grueling algorithms grind of job-searching again...

Or 2) keep firmly pressing for better standards, but still do what I'm told to do.
haggling as a service
Supporting Gender Diversity in Tech
I’m very involved in this space. The company I work for wrote a library similar to Next.js before it was announced and before create-react-app. There are so many things that these solutions solve to only focus on SSR is missing the point. SSR is one benefit of many and others have already explained why they care about that. There are many use cases where both SEO and complex interactions make sense on the same page. Next.js is also going to help you with overall architecture decisions like routing, page level code splitting, where you fetch data just off the top of my head. Sure you can build these yourself, that’s what I did before Next.js was a thing but now that I have a deep understanding of all of the things we wrote. I would use an existing community backed solution before building from scratch in a new app. We are even very interested in migrating from our home rolled solution. Currently we are vendor locked into our own creation which means we have to continue to maintain it. It is way more expensive than any lock in that would have come with Next.js.
Very few people have $250K in liquid assets lying around, especially for such a risky venture.

I'll tell you a worse story: your company does allow early vesting so people exercise their options at grant time, long before the vest. This way you avoid the whole taxation problem were the exercising to be happening later.

But guess what? The company does a down round and lays off people, effectively 'buying back' the stock that laid off employees had paid for by 'early exercising' (i.e. the unvested remainder). Since the company buys back the shares at the same price employees bought it at, you think, hey - 'even stevens'? No! Because it's a down round, you're selling something 'above fair market value' (even though it's the price you paid) - and you have to pay taxes!

So consider that: you have to pay taxes on stock that you never properly owned, and never made a dime on!

Ex: you have 10K shares with strike price of 50 cents, vest over 4 years. You exercise them all right away (before vesting) at 50 cents. After 2 years, you get laid off, the company buys back 5K shares at 50 cents. Same price. But since there's a 'down round' the shares are only worth 20 cents each. You now owe taxes for selling 5K of something you bought at 50 cents, sold at 50 cents, but are only worth 20 cents, ergo 30 cents a share 'profit' - that you never realized on shares you never actually owned!

The company in the meantime, bought something at 50 cents only worth 20 cents and gets a tax write off.

The IRS is ballpark neutral, so it's really like the company taking money from employees they just laid off.

Now, the company can issue a ton more shares and wipe out the value of laid off employees equity, and issue new equity to the staff that stayed on to keep the current staff happy.

In terms of % ownership, this has the effect of simply transferring ownership from laid off staff to the current staff + owners.

This happened to me, I'm not sure how common it is, but surely it's not that rare.
This is one of many reasons I keep trying to stress that software "engineers" are not engineers. Writing software is wage labor, not a profession.

The sooner we come to terms with our situation, the sooner we can work to better it.
Yes. SAR testing uses a model of the head, with the phone held next to the ear. On a smartphone, you're essentially measuring the amount of energy coming out of the screen side of the device. When the device is being used handheld, this is effectively wasted energy, because most of it will be directed towards the sky rather than towards the horizon.
Had, don't worry, that's no longer a problem. Past tense.
>complaints about lines for the men's room after lunch? Spoiler alert: (non-contract) employees of big tech companies encounter those too.

Interestingly enough, that's one of my biggest complaint working @ Bloomberg.
We're very happy to be releasing this to the open source community. Do check out the github repo for more - https://github.com/dwstech/muster
Is Canada a dangerous bastion of socialism? According to Trump, maybe
I was hoping it would look cool and was disappointed to see it was the same glass and trash metal building we see in strip malls.
But that's so short-sighted. There are other things to consider. Word of mouth is powerful, and if you make it difficult people are going to remember that and tell their peers/friends/coworkers/whoever. And what's going to happen if you decide to pivot, create another product, or add additional value? If you made it so difficult the first time around why would I give it a second chance?
I am a software engineer who's been involved in the tapeout of a few ASICs (although none of the TPUs). Particularly when you plan to build a series of chips, the continuous approach taken by software is massively preferable. X v2 does what X v1 did, plus some additional things, and with all of the errata fixed. Also, you find the errata in X v1 after tapeout but before your driver team does, saving them an enormous amount of work trying to track down a driver bug that's actually a HW bug (maybe even one with a simple workaround).
lol I did it too once! We were making a PoC one time for a small app, and ended up needing a way to quickly determine some location information related to the zip. I remembered that I saw the ~5mb bundle once that had all the zipcodes in it, and found a library that would let me do that, and bundled it right in.

The PoC ended up working out, and we built the infra to correctly handle the lookups without needing to bundle the entire country from there, but man did that raise some eyebrows from a few other devs that noticed it!
If you teach your kid to read early you shift your kid's performance curve earlier than everyone else's kids so of course it corresponds to "better outcomes."

There's a huge amount of positive feedback loops involved in education so if you can give your kid an start that gives them a tiny leg up on their peers it's likely that they will carry that lead all the way through to adulthood.

It's the same arms race we see in athletics. Kids that start school a year later (and are bigger) have better athletics outcomes.

Few people really are naturally exceptional at anything. However, if you've managed to shift your kid's performance curve so they look "gifted" compared to the other kids then your kid gets the best the education system has to offer and this investment of resources compounds in a way that gives them better opportunities which at scale correlates a lot with better outcomes.

Basically parents that have the time/resources/will to game the system in favor of their kids have kids that out-compete the kids of parents who don't. Water is wet. More news at 11.
> I went from hourly, to per project, to weekly billings

I have tried all three, read all the HN favourites on why value pricing is the way; tried charging for roadmapping; and yet I come back to the most stressful of day-rate (hourly by any other name), unable to break this in 15 years of technical consulting.

Why? Because with per project billing I was losing 30-50% as client expectations were different to mine. When I added 30-50% to the prices, I didn't win the jobs. I could write a spec 80 pages long (which no client would pay for) and still there were variances which cost me.

On my current $50k+ project I've got the client to bear the risk because he's the worst client for cost overruns I've had, and it's on a time and materials system. However because he has no more money than the top range of estimates, and because he wants everything and more, I feel trapped and as stressed as if it was fixed price (which it's turning out to be).

It feels like I am missing something obvious that other developers/consultants have got. I want to price on value so I'm not stressed about every minute's productivity. My clients want fixed price so the risk is stacked on me; they won't/can't do sprints (often because their board of directors won't approve it, even if they say they see the benefits); and the projects are unique systems each time, so the estimation is not accurate.

I freelance/consult because it pays well, but this way of working sucks.
Have you had luck in this endeavour? As it stands most software devs aren't actually engineers and as such are held to no ethical standard, nor have the (professionally certified) credibility behind their words to demand specific design standards.
Her name is Concetta Antico. This is her website: https://concettaantico.com
NullableAttribute and C# 8
The point is, if there is no effect from ionizing radiation, then there would not have been an effect no matter what the dose of RF was. But there was a statistically relevant relationship between heart tumors and RF exposure.

So now that we know there is a relationship, the task is to dial down the RF radiation and see at what levels it’s not safe.
> American are persecuting a company that disobeyed American laws on American soil. No a single Chinese would blink an eye about persecuting American companies in China.

Hypocrites exist. The Chinese government was shamelessly hypocritical over the Meng arrest, complaining that it violated her "human rights," [1] while their utter indifference to them has yet again been made clear by the camps in Xinjiang. I doubt everyday nationalistic citizens would be any more thoughtful.

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/business-46465768: "A Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson told reporters: 'The detention without giving any reason violates a person's human rights.' ... Beijing has itself frequently been accused by rights groups of rights abuses including unexplained detentions"

> China is having economic issues, that's the major reason in sales' dip.

Nationalistic ferver drummed up by the Huawei arrest could compound the sales drop.
Approval Tests
Support for these things:

Smooth scrolling CSS: Not IE, Edge or Safari.
https://caniuse.com/#search=scroll-behavior

HSL: Everywhere. https://caniuse.com/#search=hsl

Details element: Not IE, Edge. https://caniuse.com/#search=details

Progress element: Everywhere. https://caniuse.com/#search=progress

Meter element: Not IE. https://caniuse.com/#search=progress

CSS variables: Not IE. https://caniuse.com/#search=css%20variables
Lenovo Yoga 900 that I've bought in 2016. It's running Fedora since day one and I only had two issues with it:
- Wifi driver didn't work with the Fedora version I was using but I fixed it by using next version's beta.
- using it with an external monitor with resolution different than the native display (4k) was an issue because of X. It worked, but the external monitor (1080) had a crappy resolution. Once Fedora started using Wayland, problem was solved.

In comparison, the MBP that I have to use at work is a nice piece of junk. Can barely handle 2 external monitors and had to be replaced twice because of filesystem encryption being corrupted.
Lessons from Pokémon Go's $800M in '18