skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Devastating.

I'd like to point out a recent tweet @joeerl shared [0][1] that contained things he felt were good wisdom but lost over time:

--

Ideas that we forgot:

1. Flow based programming.

2. Pipes.

3. Linda Tuple Spaces.

4. Hypertext (=/= HTML).

Computer Science 101:

1. Observational equivalence.

2. Isolation.

3. Composition.

4. Causality.

5. Physics.

Two papers to read:

1. The Emperor's Old Clothes - ACM.

2. A Plea for Lean Software - Nikalus Wirth.

Two videos to watch:

1. The Computer Revolution Hasn't Happened Yet - Alan Kay.

2. Computers for Cynics - Ted Nelson.

Four old tools to learn: Emacs, Bash, Make, Shell.

Three books to read:

1. Algorithms + Data Structure = Programs.

2. The Mythical Man Month.

3. How to Win Friends and Influence People.

Correct a typo:

?? Learn git -> locate program that creates page -> locate typo -> correct -> send push [sic] request.

!! Select text -> type in correction -> people see change.

Two projects:

1. Link to content hash not a name (request content by sha256, immune to pepole in the middle).

2. Elastic Links (links should not break if you move an endpoint).

--

Easily one of the best thinkers of his generation [2]. RIP.

[0] https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Ds19oHnXoAAwlAp.jpg

[1] https://www.youtube.com/embed/-I_jE0l7sYQ

[2] https://learnxinyminutes.com/docs/erlang/
> If someone is a danger to themselves or others you can detain them and force them to take medication against their will.

It's possible to be someone who is not a danger to yourself, or others, and also be someone who is impossible to live next to. See: The 'harmless' guy who is screaming at invisible aliens at 3 am in the morning.

Do you let that guy into the shelter? Or do you let him carry that behavior out on the street?

What about the guy who is ODing over and over again? Can he be institutionalized? Or is he not being a danger to himself? When someone downs a bottle of sleeping pills once a week, we consider them suicidal, and we can mandate treatment - but shooting up heroin until you're passed out, barely breathing under an overpass isn't considered self-harm?
Revenue, maybe. Profit? I don't have any control over how you define profit, and you have an enormous amount of control over how you manage your revenue. Additionally, even a unicorn is going to stay in the red for years. Unless you have some financing structure that is radically different from typical startups and don't plan to reinvest in the business, profit sharing makes no sense.
> every single applicant he forwarded to us we interviewed and wanted to hire

But doesn't that support what the article says? It suggests he applies a filter with very few false positives, which generally can only be done at the expense of a lot of false negatives.
Not the OP but have avoided Packt books for years: I find them to typically exhibit quite low quality of writing and I assert without proof that they lack the rigor in the editing process that more 'serious' publishers have. Also I think it's pretty easy to become a Packt author; some people I've worked with and a friend have been approached by them. Typically I only buy Manning or O'Reilly but I've read a few garbage titles from the latter of late so I suspect that might not hold for much longer. It'll be interesting to see if perceived quality becomes a market differentiator or if tech books at some point become unprofitable.
I have lots of programming books (30-40) from half a dozen publishers and Manning is one of my favorite along with NoStarch Press. O'Reilly is probably third, but they don't make books anymore. Packt is alright, but you often don't get the same thing as a Manning book. They're more like a way for someone to quickly get something out that works, but there are definitely misspellings and grammatical errors, but nothing that would prevent you from learning.
Dentist here, 35yo, ask me anything.
That why I said a problem is languages aren't designed with that in mind. I think C# is pretty close since it was written with debugging as first class feature. But to really get the benefit you need a language that's tightly coupled to refactoring tools. And that means giving up on Unicode text as the file format.

There are other problems, anything more than naively comparing and diffing AST's is a hard problem. I've also seen some really bad things with editing non text data. Like the file you've been editing for a few days is corrupted.
Socialized programs ask you to pay according to your means, so if this person can afford 10K, they'll pay 10K, and if they can't they won't.
But HR isn't the only problem. In my experience having worked for a company that hired heavily for several years, it was the engineers who lacked the talent necessary to conduct proper interviews. Great candidates were being rejected by the truck load. Us engineers, we're great at engineering but many of the junior and mid-level ones don't have much experience interviewing people and usually no training whatsoever. So interviewers tend to ask different questions with every candidate (whatever they feel like it that day), then make some decision based on a random feeling they get. There's not much objectivity. There's not much thought that goes into the questions. Most engineers think intervewing is a game of "how to stump the candidate".

As an inteviewer, you're job is not to stump the candidate. Your job is to figure out how well they can do the job. The questions you come up with should reflect the actual job, and the actual tasks that will be assigned (that's where you should draw your questions/inspiration from), rather than some random data structures question you remember from college or some random questions you found on a google search.
I do as well.

The best part of the HSA is that you can save your receipts and reimburse for those expenses 30 years later instead of right away so that you can pay with gains rather than principal.
When I was hiring developers, I wrote the job role hoping for the perfect rock star candidate.

"Must have experience with the Home Depot vendor system"

I mean, what if someone fulfilled all my "musts"?!? That'd be the perfect person.

But you hardly ever find rock stars. And so you hire the best person who doesn't have all the required skills. Don't let job requirements stop you from applying. And don't think that I'm being unrealistic for asking for what I probably won't get.
Ask HN: How do you grow your startup after launching?
What an incredible guy. I’ve interacted with him and Robert briefly on the Elixir forums a few times, and I can’t think of anyone more giving, humble, and insightful. His presence will truly be missed.
These are good UX suggestions.
> My feeling is that most problems have already been solved - but
we write code because it's quicker to write code than discover it.

Fantastic quote.
> it is valuable to me that my company will not hire someone who doesn't think our business does something important

Is it not possible to identify those people without paying them less to prove it?

I'm not really sure what you're getting at here otherwise I would think if someone is a perfect fit with the org and the org isn't willing to compensate that person accordingly then all you're doing is picking up suckers who may not even be worth the reduced pay rate. A good engineer knows what they are worth.
> Why do I trust my WiFi cards disable pin, but not the "soft button" on my laptop that triggers it via the OS? I get that there is more software when it goes through the OS, but I trust that a whole lot more than the firmware on the WiFi card.

When using a physical kill switch you have to trust the hardware. You don't have to trust the firmware or operating system, as a physical kill switch usually disables the power lines to the device. That's something a remote attacker can't circumvent.
> I really wish this term had a different name because I see people on HN misusing it on a daily basis.

I find this mis-use of the term a useful and unambiguous signal that the commenter is not fully versed on the topic. (cf. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19707924 )
There was a similar discussion 2 years ago (article https://www.shellypalmer.com/2017/04/id-pay-500000-year-cant... comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14246760)

The ultimate problem is that people want "unicorns for peanuts". Google, Facebook and a few other large tech companies have hired most of the top of the labor market, the "ferraris" in your analogy. Most companies want the ferrari but can't afford the price when others are willing to pay much much more.

The only way to really balance the market is for more of the talented engineers to start their own companies (reducing labor supply and possibly increasing demand). Arguably the proliferation of one-person or small bootstrapped startups is a reflection of the state of the labor market.
The doses were different for legal reasons. Aspirin for children is unnecessarily risky in most cases but different countries set different cutoffs for restricted doses vs. unrestricted adult doses.

But ya, dosing is underrated. Something that's bad at X dose may be beneficial at 1/Yth the dose.
When you don't, trash picks you up
It is more an issue of supply. The inflow of new doctors and new healthcare business is constrained by the incumbent system. Besides the cartel network that has established, the new potential disruptors are prevented to enter the market all in name of regulation and safety measures. Now it is a positive feedback loop when the current players are incentivized to lobby for a new safety regulations to prevent new market entrants rather than improving the service.
How many new companies are profitable, and if they are, why would you want to work for a new company that isn't plowing all of its profits back into research, product development, and growth?
> Anyway... Went in for 4-5 interviews. Took me about 10 hours in total to interview with them.

The experience of the poster you are responding to doesn't seem to align with the situation you are describing. Sure posting an online job ad is pretty cheap. The rest of the hiring process, not so much.
When filing an H-1B, the employer only has to promise that the hiring won't have an adverse effect on employees already employed at the firm, NOT that they made a good faith effort to hire anyone locally, much less train someone into it.
> most people in the technical community

Not this member of the technical community; an engine is simply something that makes something else go or achieve an end. In my field we have calculation engines, these are neither electric nor cyclical.

And a motor is essentially the same thing. Engines can be steam, ICE, electric, programmatic, or even man powered (for instance a siege engine).

Perhaps it's different where you come from or, perhaps, there is more than one technical community.
That they moved away from the jurisdiction of the government in a town that in english looks like it could be pronounced “Fuck it”
Yeah, it does not completely replace quasiquotation, but in my experience the main things quasiquotation solves are (1) not having to write quote marks in front of every symbol and (2) not having to append lists yourself. MDL handles the first by making atoms self-evaluating (though the flip side is that you have to use , and . everywhere), and the second is handled by sequences. I agree that something like quasiquotation would make FORM construction in macros nicer to look at, though it is pretty nice that sequences work everywhere and not just inside quasiquotations.

As an example, consider the following possible implementation of PROG1 in terms of LET's implicit PROGN. They both evaluate a sequence of forms in order, but the first returns the value of the first form, and PROGN the last:

(DEFMACRO PROG1 (form1 &REST forms)
(LET ((temp (GENSYM)))
`(LET ((,temp ,form1))
,@forms
,temp)))

A MDL equivalent would be something like (though I admit I'm entirely going off documentation!):

<DEFMAC PROG1 (form1 "ARGS" forms "AUX" (temp (ATOM "temp")))
<FORM PROG ((.temp .form1))
!.forms
.temp>>

Without quasiquotation, the Lisp example would be (without capitalization this time---in Lisp symbols are auto-capitalized):

(defmacro prog1 (form1 &rest forms)
(let ((temp (gensym)))
(list* 'let (list (list temp form1))
(append forms (list temp)))))

I chose this example to demonstrate how sequences alleviate the pain of splicing things into the middle of things.

Backtick is not used in MDL, right? And you're somewhat free to extend the MDL used in Zilf, right? You could get the best of both worlds by adding either a PREFORM type or an REBUILD form. For example:

`< ... > or `< ... `> -> #PREFORM ( ... )

or

`struct -> <REBUILD struct>

The semantics would be that a PREFORM would be evaluated like a LIST, but then it would CHTYPE to FORM. Or, a REBUILD is an FSUBR that expects a structure, and it maps EVAL over the elements of that structure.

The macro would look like

<DEFMAC PROG1 (form1 "ARGS" forms "AUX" (temp (ATOM "temp")))
`<PROG ((.temp .form1))
!.forms
.temp>>

I don't know all the consequences of this change to MDL, though.
Interesting tidbit, but that’s not why hydrogen cars have not taken off. There’s currently no real infrastructure for producing, distributing, or storing hydrogen, and in-vehicle storage poses safety issues. Even if we put in the effort to solve those issues, we’d wind up with a monoculture like we have for gas now. It’s much better to use electricity as an intermediary, as we already have the infrastructure to handle it and you can use any kind of fuel to generate it.
Dentist here, AMA

By the way:
- there is scientific evidence in dentistry just like any other branch in medicine
- there are good and bad dentists just like in any other profession
- the good ones tend to be very scientific and evidence-based (I know I am, everything I recommend and do is based on solid evidence, and I provide links to pubmed to any patient that asks for information)
- a good dentist should be able to answer any of your questions or doubts in a split second, I often draw simple sketches to explain concepts to patients
- please use your common sense: even though it might be hard to prove with 3 standard deviations that flossing makes a big difference (for all sorts of reasons that statisticians know very well, including the difficulty of tracking a large group of patients), it's pretty obvious that removing rotting food from your gums is good and leaving it there to putrefy is bad, don't you think? same goes for all the other claims...a powered toothbrush is better simply because it does more iterations per minute than a manual one...again, common sense
> When I talk about a particular point in _history_, I use past tense. :)

When you read a novel written in the present tense, you don't assume it tells a story that is currently happening right? ;)
This is sick! Link to source:
https://github.com/djblue/tetris
Interviews take 2-3 man days from a company per candidate you end up doing a full onsight interview. That is on the order of $1000’s per interview, and you generally have to do several per role. Then for high demand roles even the best will take several months to ramp up which costs a large fraction, say 25-50% of their total compensation. So replacing a dev can cost you in total $100k+ at least.

That is not really cheap, I am sure technology has helped reduce the amount of man administrative man hours, and helped fill a pipeline, but you still need to train new hires and actually interview them, which is no cheap.
> many nations will jail centralized issuers

Central banks (and the related monetary presses) are “centralised issuers.” Nobody is jailing them.

Moreover, creating a private currency is legal in most states. (It usually takes the form of IOUs.) People don’t do this because it’s unprofitable. You need additional motivations, like cultural preservation, to counterbalance the economic cost.
Sometimes it’s the only debt that’s accessible to someone (borrowing from their future self).
I would need some firm data showing plenty of people are willing to work with people who may pose a danger to them. Retail work is considered to be bottom of the barrel because you have to deal with the general public, I don’t see people lining up to spend years of their education to deal with mentally ill customers.

At least not without significant compensation, which we as a society don’t want to pay for, considering the piss poor pay for social workers and lack of mental institutions.
This makes me think that an instance of a monad is not like an instance of an OO class which you interact with by calling its methods. An instance of a monad is such simply because it was returned by a 'return()' or 'bind()' and because those 'return()' and 'bind()' functions are related by the monadic laws and thus are in the monadic relationship with each other. A monadic value could be an instance of any number of monads at the same time.
That's why working in finance is nice. "I want to make money" is believing in the company.
> “Wait a second,” he said. “How do you know we’re the only time there’s been a civilization on our own planet?”

Imagine for a moment that we're Martians who managed to terraform Earth because of some runaway climate catastrophe on Mars. That now, we're in the early stages of repeating the same mistakes because of some extinction event in the past that wiped out all of our prior history and knowledge.
Successful businesses support the livelihoods of all of the families that depend on that business's continued success, including employees and clients. All such businesses matter very much to those people, regardless of their industry.
For the first case, free healthcare does work because they get institutionalised even if they don't have money. If you have a decent system, those places are a million times better than prisons.
I believe these services will fail if employment laws are ever strengthened, or held up more rigorously.

The 'not so dirty secret' of the American economy is that it 'depends' (i.e. in it's current form) on tons of cheating, illegal migrant labour, de-fact sub-minimum wage, skimping on health benefits etc. etc..

It's 'sustainable' only to the extent that some workers, particularly undocumented - are willing and able to take the crap for the opportunity for a new life. Which is only slightly fair (fair to the extent that were a foreign workers regime legalized, conditions would be ballpark where they are now, and it would legally be 'legit' and there'd be plenty of workers).

But in socialized countries, I just don't see it working, the numbers don't add up.

I see these services working in NY/SF/LA and 'parts' of Chicago, maybe Ft. Lauderdale, Boston i.e. wealthier areas - the rest - no way, at market wages. London of course, maybe Paris. Though probably most of Asia.

I just don't see this as mathematically viable in Scandinavian countries, or Canada, or most of the US.

The end-game will require more efficiency in delivery, for example like some kind of better pickup arrangements for buildings, maybe ownership by the grocery companies so there's fewer entities trying to take money from the pie, possibly some kind of 'weekly delivery/sign up' for longer term engagement etc..
1000% agree. Drives me nuts when they demand experience in xyz. Xyz = some SaaS or library that no one uses but would literally take anyone with a pulse an afternoon to become competent.
Interesting perspective, thank you.
Which makes sense, because there is (in general) not much point in protecting traffic between recursive and auth. servers if you don't protect the stub resolver.

At the same time traffic between stub resolver and recursive resolver is much more privacy sensitive.

So it makes sense to first get TLS between stub and recursive up and running. And that proves already hard enough.
Hey, thanks for taking the time to write a detailed comment!

Everything in the model runs by simulation, so we don't do any maths on appreciation rates. Since it's a simulation, I believe the combinatorics sort themselves out!

However... it's possible that something we are miscommunicating something — what gave you the impression that the appreciation maths was off?

You're right about the chart — we wanted the baseline model to be an extremely rough guide to compare the buy-to-rent scenario with, so didn't want to add volatility there.
I once had to edit a file while logged in on console and where I literally had nothing but the Bourne shell to work with. I eventually figured out a while loop which read a line at the time from the file, echoed it, then read a line from the tty, where typing just return meant to keep the line as is, else use the line I typed, and sent the output to a new file. I then used shell redirection to replace the old file. Maybe I had "cat" too.

That was tedious.

It was circa 1995 on an HP/UX machine that was nothing but an X terminal, but its root disk for some reason only had the minimum of files that it needed to mount everything else via NFS, but somehow all the automounts had become misconfigured.

As I recall anyway.

And here's a network calculator I wrote mostly in awk:

https://gist.github.com/jaysoffian/e41ca479d70e60efe59fded93...
I think it is worth noting that although some will over-engineer to pad their resume, there are other valid reasons why this may have happened.

It is entirely possible that the folks hired to do the job were better specialized at creating large scale solutions. Client/supplier may have assumed that as a big corp, this segment would scale quickly and a smaller solution would have to be re-engineered at a higher cost later on.

Unfortunately there is insufficient information from stakeholders to make a clear argument.
this is a big trend in business, startups, and HR right now (and growing for the last 10 years+). Don't rush to hire a good candidate, put time into the perfect candidate.

Good or bad, i think its debatable. but most of the experience and "meta" these days is to wait for a great candidate.
I’ve had bad experience from both Packt and Manning, it’s simply not trustworthy. I’m sure there are a good mix of bad and good books, but I’ve bought books that simply rephrased API docs of insert-popular-open-source-language.

I support independent publishing and small publishers, but as a consumer, you need to build trust in the quality of the content across the board, not just a handful. If I see a book from Springer or O’Reilly, I know I can at least trust some baseline expectations from a book - true there are some bad apples as well, but they are at least edible unlike Manning/Packt where I got a load of shit instead of an Apple for $29.
Ask HN: Why are startups all offering 140k base?
I worked for a startup that recently shutdown. I am interviewing for a new job and the offers are are starting to come in. Bizarrely, each startup is making the exact same initial offer of 140k base. The startups all different sizes, from 10-100 person companies. The roles are each different ex: frontend dev, fullstack dev, backend dev, or ML data infrastructure.

How can I possibly be worth the exactly same amount across each of my different skills to different business models in different niches? Is there some though leader going around in the startup space that is pushing a "140k should be enough for anyone" story?

I made 196k base previously (traded equity for more salary), and they were happy to have me. Am I just blowing the interviews and these offers are the bottom of the barrel grunt work? I mean 140k and maybe 30k worth of options (at latest 409a valuation) vesting over 4 years is a sharp new grad territory. When I ask companies how they calculated their offer, they all say the role "should be thought of as equivalent to an L4 at Google". That is obviously bullshit because I hear Google L4 total compensation is in range 250-350, not 147.5.