skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I recommend Episode #857 of Planet Money, which talks about how postal rates are set by the UPU, and the impact on e-commerce.

https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2018/08/01/634737852/epis...

Transcript: https://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?stor...
> procurement team or relationship manager will want to discuss this

The trick is to find clients who have authority to make decisions without approval from HR or Procurement or wherever.

Despite being a one-person consultancy, I did a multi-month project for a global telecom company. As you would expect, this company has a complicated vendor management system, project approval process, budget approval process, and so on. But because my client was a decision-maker (and not a mid-level manager), none of that mattered...

They wanted my help and they needed it fast, so they told me not to worry about the red tape and that they'd deal with it. The only time I heard from procurement/AP was a friendly request for my W-9 form.

Getting pushback from other departments about value-based billing means you're not dealing with the right person. The right person, a decision-maker, will make those problems go away if they really want to work with you.
Nitpick: the miss-alignment of the rendered shadow with the direction of shadows in the surface photos they comp over is maddening.
If you were a billionaire, and 100k was 0.01% of your net worth? If someone owned a €300k home with neither mortgage nor investments, that’s the equivalent of €30.

I’m may not be impressed with their blasé attitude to money, but I bet I looked more wasteful than that to a Nairobi friend of my partner when I visited on a plane ticket that cost half their annual rent, £350.
LIFX bulbs work without the need to connect to the internet. They have a LAN protocol that's pretty easy to use.
What do you mean "pad things"? Most of my clients have a set word limit for each article. They set the limit, and I simply don't go over it, although sometimes I do because there is a lot more to say. And sometimes I write a lot less because there isn't much else to add to the topic.

I find that clients are more receptive to the per-word system because it gives them some control over how much they have to pay.

If you write some bullshit articles about "1000 ways to be happy instantly must-see immediately" -- then sure, pad away. Personally, I take great pride in my portfolio and want my content to be read, shared, promoted, etc.

It's an entirely different attitude. And certainly a lot less straining on your brain.
It's another clever feature of Hacker News, in my book.

Perhaps YCombinator omitted the downvote button because it can be abused. For example, if there is a story that is bad news for a certain company, that company could organize a downvoting campaign to hide it. But the upvote button can also be manipulated, as you say.

However, which is worse? (A) To write a silly story and have it rightfully downvoted into obscurity, or (B) To write a silly story, have it upvoted into the limelight, but be littered with comments that expose its flaws.

I think that as long as I remember that just because a story is on the front page doesn't mean it's right, then Hacker News has a nicely curated set of moderation rules.
If you're from the working class and too introverted to network properly, don't try freelancing.

I got out of school in 2012 at the peak of newspapers bleeding to death. All my contacts (a small pool given my non-flagship university) suggested I freelance for a living because I was young and mobile.

But trying to be a freelance reporter in a hyper-competitive industry PLUS being an introvert PLUS being based in Texas PLUS not having credentials from the state's major journalism school (University of Texas in Austin) meant I was in an uphill battle.

Unlike most would-be journalists I didn't have rich parents to send me money while I played newspaper reporter. So between getting offers to write for free "a great chance to pad my clips" I ended up doing low-skill blue collar jobs.

Eventually I got hired by a small-town newspaper in a city you never heard of. It was worse than the blue collar jobs. Lasted about three months.

Fast forward five years and I write business news. It's more money than I've ever made, it's real, impactful content, and it's in a major metropolis.

Freelancing these days is for trust-fund kiddos like the author of the story. There's no place for working-class writers who are too socially introverted to play the network game.
Walmart has QA, where they actually test and source products, ensuring quality and legal compliance. Buying direct from China runs the risk of toxic paints, metals, and that sort of thing.

There was a HN article yesterday about Washington State suing Amazon for selling toxic toys. That's why you don't buy direct.
so I worked in the automobile industry in a prominent company working with all prominent car manifacturers, and I was one of the PMM experts there (the dynamic electrical motors).

By far the best PMM's worldwide are made by Kessler, Germany. They are way ahead of everyone else, but they can only manifacture about 200 units per year. Hand-made, like a Ferrari. Many of these PMM's for Formula 1. All the good german carmakers know about these very well, the prices, principles and tricks. They are far ahead of most others, including Tesla.

What Tesla did well was bringing parts of this technology to market. In record time.
All software is a model of side-effects, but if you delegate the execution of your side-effects to a third party (usually the language's runtime or an application framework) all of your code can be side-effect free. If neither of those things is available, you can at least isolate your side-effect peforming code to a small footprint.
Fixing history enables powerful second level tools , such as bisect and cherry pick. Being able to pinpoint a problem to an exact commit is incredibly powerful for debugging, but it does require your commits to be as healthy as possible. If you fix a bug 10 commits after it was introduced , now the 10 commits between them are harder to work with; you always have to keep in mind that unrelated bug. And cherry picking is lovely between branches , but if a commit introduced a bug and another fixes it, now you always have to cherry pick them together. Easier to fix it and keep them atomic.

A clean git history is not a vanity project. It can be used as a tool in further code building.
I'm a writer myself, and somehow I've managed to maintain a steady freelance career for 15+ years. This article hits uncomfortably close to home. The low pay, the uncertainty, the bending of your ethics to pay rent. There are upsides, of course, including the fact that I've been a remote worker for most of my adult life, but there are days when I have to convince myself the pros outweigh the cons.

The push towards clickbait makes it easier for gig writers to pick up work, while the lower cost of hiring them means publications can create more of it. Journalism does indeed suffer from this cycle, but how do we break it? I have a few ideas from my own time contributing to this monster, but implementing them isn't easy, nor guaranteed.

Like several in the comments, I tried the web dev route, learned to code, etc. It didn't take, it just wasn't satisfying, and I was competing with people who lived and breathed this stuff. Maybe if I had stuck with it for a few more years I would learn to like it, but I just felt like I was purposefully ignoring what I enjoyed.

I would love to toss my current mid-grade writing contracts and get back into real investigative journalism. Depth of reporting, of storytelling, is sorely needed. But doing that means dedicating more time than the gig economy allows. Hopping off the hamster wheel means falling ungraciously to the floor. Writing rarely provides a financial safety net.

I'm sure other industries suffer somewhat from the gig economy, and I'm sure they gain from it as well. I don't think it's going away, but we do need to find a way to save and promote quality as we fight for quantity.
How is this any different from the sunk cost that's a consequence of going with _any_ particular technology stack?

I mean, if you chose Python/Postgres/etc., presumably, you'd have to rewrite/retool everything if you went to a different stack.

If you're talking about open vs closed source: the C# compiler (Roslyn) is completely free and open source, as are a number of .NET components: CoreFX - Core foundational libraries, CoreCLR - runtime.

As well as PowerShell, VS Code, Typescript, ASP.NET Core, MVC, Blazor, F#, Z3 Theorem Prover, etc.

And that's from just the first few pages of their Open Source page: https://opensource.microsoft.com/
YMMV.

https://www.cultofmac.com/162823/linux-creator-linus-torvald...

Apple doesn't always make things easy, but they do have a highly-uniform component set, which can simplify configuration so long as all elements are supported, and senior Linux devs running kit is an incentive to solve hardware issues.

I'm not implying either that all devices are supported (I don't know which are/aren't, though I've had success on Apple kit myself), or that Linus still uses an Apple laptop (he seems to have moved on). But some well-established Linux users have turned to those devices and ben satisfied.
With regards to bandwidth from pages you do not want to visit, sites can already include content that you do not care about in the page manually as part of the initial HTML or later via AJAX. In fact, the use case for portals covers this in that news sites commonly add other IMO irrelevant articles at the end of articles that I am reading.
I don't know what theme he was using but my setup looks so much nicer. It depends a lot on the theme, font choice and rendering.
It didn't sink. It wasn't even diving. Water got in a hatch while in harbor and damaged some pipes in the reactor. They fixed them and it is now back in operation, although it took ten months.
What I really like to do is make actual fixup (or squash) commits during a code review and just push these to the branch normally. That way reviewers can easily keep up with the changes. Right at the end, the maintainer requests that the original developer does a rebase --autosquash before the branch is actually merged.

This works really well but I rarely see people talk about it. It means you don't have to use something complicated like github or gitlab to keep up with rebases. It works for everyone.
1. I would read "The Secrets of Consulting" by Gerald Weinberg

The biggest lesson (I think it was in that book) was that you're being hired as an expert on a topic. to be a Successful expert you must A) have an expert level of knowledge about the topic and B) LOOK LIKE you have an expert level of knowledge about the topic. Those are two separate, but essential things.

2. Go for 70-30 split of listening to talking.

3. Read Million Dollar Consulting by Alan Weiss

4. Make sure to read a lot in the early days, but don't expect to get more than two or three insights from any particular book (for example the insight in the Weiss book that has proven most useful was "Clients that are difficult in good times will be nightmares in bad times". That has been true in each and every case in 17 years in business)

5. By the time you're in front of someone (physically) your primary job is not to sell them on anything, but to de-risk your offering to them.
This has been posted so many times!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19852989
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19866575
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19851169
I had a very high maintenance roommate and friend who is really into the easy smart-home devices. My understanding is he just likes the world to bend to his will as he maneuvers around in life. The doors unlock automatically, Nest changes our home temperatures as we walk in, "hey Siri, change lights to dance party", "play top radio". "What's the news today".

Even though he earned a degree in computer science, he wasn't very interested in the hacker/tinker/development side of things.
Anyone who knows how to use a machine shop can duplicate any key. For most keys there are specific machines that don't require skill to operate that duplicate it. The skill required to duplicate the other keys, combined with the "do not duplicate" stamp on the other keys means that such keys are rarely duplicated.
Exploiting 10k Devices Used by Britain’s Most Vulnerable
This is still a problem that could be solved by having governments that actually acted in the interest of their constituents and not just their cronies.
It’s a real shame you still can’t install a third party content blocker easily in the default browser on Android. Setup a VPN and PiHole for sure works, but my goodness what a lot of effort when simpler approaches exist, even on Safari on iOS... I’m aware other browsers exist that can do this, but this basically forces me to use a different browser on my phone versus my desktop.

Such is the reality of using an OS made by an advertising firm I guess.
That would only be true if their unit profits were low or negative. On each ride they make a lot of money. They lose money because of their huge, ride-count-independent fixed costs, like legal defense and marketing. So it's not necessarily true that giving the riders a larger cut would widen the loss, if it came with a scale-back on all the marketing.
Hmm, I've never heard anyone else object to mid-function returns. Usually guard clauses are considered a good thing. What's your objection to them?
I got burned by this as well. A very well known silicon valley company found me here, on HN (I solved one of their puzzles for fun). We agreed on a fixed-priced project. The project wasn't specced well, just a bunch of screen designs without describing exactly how they work. I kept asking for the specs, they always replied "yeah, coming soon, nothing to worry about!". I trusted them. Most of the screens were trivial, a few were complex. At first glance it all made sense. Started working, went through about a third of the project, till I got to one screen with some convoluted UI. It wouldn't work they thought it would, would require a massive redesign, lots of extra work affecting other parts of the app. I told them about it. At first they didn't believe. Then they agreed. Then they wanted me to do all the extra work as "in scope". I declined. Lost two weeks of pay.

Again, this was not some cheap and poor startup, a major company that just raised a ton of money with lots of tech media coverage.

In the end, it's my fault for not going through the exact UI logic on each of the designs, but it's easy to miss when there are 100 designs.
That's not true. In Austria at least, a landlord certainly can't enter a rented-out apartment unannounced.
The drivers want to make enough money so working for Lyft makes sense. It’s pretty simple.
> Please explain this dramatic conclusion more.

Not OP but I'll try: have you ever looked at the massive consolidations that happen in the news space? A couple of truly independent but small papers and public TV/radio stations remain, but the rest? Owned by Murdoch, Sinclair, Axel Springer and a couple other billionaires.

Coincidentally or not, Murdoch/Sinclair/Springer media massively lean towards the right/hardcore conservative edge, which basically means that the population is fed a heavy bias in news (and some programs don't even deserve that name anymore, they're outright propaganda). And these media conglomerates are those defining current politics, simply because of their massive reach capability.

Media needs to be broken up if democracy is to survive - and similar with entertainment, given that Disney basically owns all major movie franchises now.
Within the western markets Walmart might be kinda crappy, but it is crappy... within it's own quality standards.

Other places, Walmart might be pretty good.
Does anybody know how security updates work with these devices? I assume Samsung will continue supporting S7 and S9, but for how long, and do these patches make it to /e/? I'm always skeptical of privacy grandstanding when little information is available about the security properties and processes of a system. One can have security without privacy, but certainly not the other way around.
> Scala (2003) tried to be a better Java by adding definable operators to it.

That's totally wrong. The reason d'etre of Scala is merging FP and OOP in a simple and elegant way. And actually there was no "fall" in rise-and-fall adoption of Scala. The adoption is growing.
Nah. It's a UI issue. Even when you know the primitives, the counterintuitive randomness of what is a command vs. what is a switch on a different command vs. something that can be done in three different ways using different combinations of commands and switches makes it a clusterfuck to interface with until you memorize everything. Contrast to something like mercurial where once you know the concept, you either know how to do it, or you know the command that will give you the help for how to do it. It's generally not going to be some switch on an unrelated command because the UI was actually designed and not simply cobbled together.
Sorry, but what should one do with posts that are just blatantly false?
It's sad because the concept of IoT in the home has such great potential, but the execution so far has just been atrocious.

https://twitter.com/internetofshit
That's a good thing, there are too many people in the world already. Funny how values change when you actually have to deal with the consequences of your actions, though.
Contrary to the article's title, it doesn't sound like the sub was actually sunk:

> Water “rushed in as a hatch on the rear side was left open by mistake while [the Arihant] was at harbor” in February 2017, shortly after the submarine’s launch, The Hindu reports. Since then, the sub “has been undergoing repairs and clean up,” according to the paper: “Besides other repair work, many pipes had to be cut open and replaced.”
Say Goodbye to Passwords and Hello to Fast
>With revenues of $776M, which perhaps are mostly recurring, doesn't that seem to bode well for the future?

Isn't the majority of that going to drivers which gives them a lot less room to maneuver financially?
The effect of the strike on profitability must be offset somewhat by an increase in revenues due to surge pricing.

[Edit: Is that incorrect? Why would this be down-voted.]
5% of $1M is $50,000. Not exactly pocket change.
Also science in general, and the betterment of society.
It's a sort of thing that you build when money is meaningless. And at that point you can still have very valid priorities - helping other people out, setting up charities, etc etc. Your house just happens to have a cinema room - it's no different "luxury" than having underfloor heating in your bathroom. It's comparably unnecessary, just on a different financial scale.
Humanity has been engaged in perpetual growth for millennia now. Heck, the universe has been growing since day zero!
What, No Python in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8?
Newegg is okay for computer parts. The various online outdoor equipment stores aren't flooded with knockoffs. And you can always go to the manufacturer.

Amazon is still fine if you're looking for a name-brand item, but as soon as you leave that path, who knows what you'll get? Don't take my word for it, but I even remember reading about their "Fulfilled by Amazon" program substituting items from different sellers with the same SKU. The result was predictable: people scammed the system by mis-labeling cheap knockoffs.

Now that Amazon makes so much money off AWS, maybe they could use a bit of it to put third party sellers in their own "Wild West" tab, and taking a bit of responsibility for what they sell.
Most locks are very easy to replace... with the help of YouTube anyone could change a standard lock. I’ve done it everywhere I’ve lived at a cost of £3-10 a lock.
I had a partner who was afraid to charge extra fees to clients, for things like making small updates, adding features and tweaks, etc. he was under the assumption that the more sacrifices you do for the client, the client will be more committed.

but guess what, the client later left to another company who charged twice our cost. i fired my partner after that and not making that same mistake ever again.
Arguably, vocabulary is the easy part.
Things I do with gbit fibre at home:

* Buying a game on steam and playing it very soon after.

* Buying a movie right before I leave on a trip and still being able to watch it on my iPad offline.

* Putting a video on a cloud hoster and not needing to wait until I can give a shareable link out.

It's all things you can do with 50mbit, but the speed difference really makes a difference. I rarely get the full gbit though, with steam (after I tinkered around a bit with regions) it's more like 60 megabytes per second for example.
Pipshow – Show details of any Python package, whether its installed or not
Last I tried, you couldn't type direct paths into the fileselector or the file browser, basically requiring that you mouse your way around. I found that extremely aggravating and went back to KDE almost immediately.
A Reporter’s Long, Strange Trip into the Darkest Parts of the American Mind
From the summary in the child twitter link:

>We hope in the future there will be driverless cars and that we can then make money because no drivers but other people are developing them too.

Nice! It's common to think that self-driving cars will be Uber's salvation, but even then, they'll have to come with other SDC providers, so there's no moat. They'd have lower costs, but so would everyone else, and so they'd have to cut fares proportionally.

In theory, they can have such a lead time on a workable SDC that they get a great moat until everyone catches up. But that would be ~2 years at the absurdly optimistic end; not enough to pay back the costs of the program and throw off the huge returns investors demand. And in reality, Uber is lagging on this.
What a disingenuous headline. Should read, "Damaging a $3B Indian submarine by forgetting to close a hatch"

With follow up on how much in damages that incident caused as obviously a 3 billion loss didn't happen.
All my smart home devices (excluding Alexa, one day I'll get around to setting up snips.ai, but for now at least it's only an extra interface and nothing I depend on) will keep working without internet – without a problem. The problem is with the always-on things. It's the same with computer games. But as long as people keep buying singleplayer games that require an internet connection and smart home devices that stop working without one, companies will keep producing them.
Start with Mike Weinberg, it's a terrific primer.

Chapter 14: Planning & Executing the Attack is brilliant > https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15863998-new-sales-simpl...

The Sales Tuners Podcast occasionally has good food for thought > https://www.salestuners.com/
When do people commit suicide: An examination of suicide timing
Why appraisals are pointless for most people
I bought two nest outdoor Cameras on the general recommendation that they were the best all around for the job. I have them hooked up to my home automation system so that they sync away statuses - now this is pretty much kaput.

How much would it possibly cost for Google to just keep the Works with Nest Apis on maintenance mode? I personally will never buy another Nest (or I guess Google Nest) product since apparently this is how they are treating folks.
What do you use your git history for? History is either worth keeping, in which case you should maintain it like any other artifact, or it's not, in which case you should squash down master to a single commit every time you merge.

But maybe you use your history for something else that I haven't considered.
Sounds as though you could be earning a lot more. Why should the client not pay for work just because you learned something along the way? What does the cost of a phone bill have anything to do with the value of having an expert on-call? (Would you set pricing for a SaaS product based on hosting costs?)