skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The average Bachelor’s graduate in the US has $30,000 in debt on graduation, the price of a new car. That just isn’t that expensive for the magic piece of paper that gets you past HR. If you didn’t want to go into debt that’s fine but if you have a credible chance of graduating $30,000 over the course of a working life is not bad.

If you want a degree you can actually get a regionally accredited US one way cheaper, from Western Governors’ University or go even cheaper and munchkin transfer credit requirements and credit by examination like the people at https://www.degreeforum.net/

Or you can do like I did and fart about for years and go straight to getting a Master’s in Finance for ~£10,000 from CEFIMS by starting off studying Master’s modules as individual professional awards or in Software Engineering from Oxford more or less the same way.

https://www.cefims.ac.uk/programmes/ipa/

http://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/softeng/study/apply.html

> Admission criteria
Applications are invited from anyone with sufficient experience or proven ability in software, security, or data engineering. An appreciation of the challenges and practices facing professionals in the field is expected, together with an appropriate level of logical, mathematical, or analytical skills. A typical applicant will have at least two years' experience in a professional environment, and an undergraduate degree in a related subject. However, more extensive experience may compensate for a lack of formal qualifications
I think that the micro-celebritism is tiring and toxic for our industry, most of my open source stuff is stuff other people could write and I'm just glad I have the privilege to help.

I'm literally writing this comment from an airport at a country I wanted to visit and was flown into because of open source I wrote (they paid for a vacation for a conference). I'm having a hard time complaining :]

It's not like maintainer burnout isn't real and there aren't issues in open source but we also really need to fix the culture around it IMO.
"One being an nicer experience for the disabled (in my case, due to being a parent)."

I think it's incredibly disingenuous to compare your parental responsibility to being disabled, especially under the guise of experiences for disabled people.
How do you evaluate the quality of the bagging if you don't know how to do a good job?

Are they just faster?
I switched to AWS Route 53.
At least for .com addresses it’s $3 more than google domains but gets (I believe) full Whois privacy.
Well no, if you read the part about Secure Aggregation, Google has no way of knowing which piece of training results comes from which device, they can only see the aggregated results of a batch.

So sure, technically the training results based on your data are still sent to Google, but that's not really the concern they're addressing. They're addressing Google having a record in a database of every shop you visited in the last week and such and that data getting in the wrong hands (or being used wrong by them). What if they could benefit from training on that sort of data, without ever actually storing it themselves?
Sure... I was planning on buying the $27,500 (after rebate) version. As the rebates have expired, that theoretically priced Model 3 no longer exists. At $27,500 it was an amazing deal - better than an Accord or Camry.
Quite right; my family has a few plastic "coins" that work just as well.

Here in the UK, shopping carts used to take a £1 coin, which incidentally had very similar geometry to the Indian 5 rupee coin (worth about 5 pence) - that was a great little find for our family, who always had a few 5 rupee coins lying around from our time visiting family in India. Sadly they updated the design of the £1 coin, so this trick no longer works.
I love how straight and to the point Reuters reporting is.
I don't know how it works at other stores, but at the grocery store I worked at Christie handled all their own products. One of their reps came in to stock the shelves, do orders and take away expired products. Their products came in a special order and sat in the warehouse until the Christie Rep came. It was like that for all their products, triscuits included.
That is still wrong and would apply to everyone in org 102
One thing I really admire about General Magic is how gutsy they were. In comparison most of the companies today look like cowards, cranking out nearly-identical glass sandwiches with only internal specs and the occasional odd camera design to differentiate them.
If they want to compete with intel and AMD on performance, they will have to include the same speculative out-of-order architecture. These bugs are actually not bugs in the sense that the hardware does something it shouldn't do. It's 100% to spec. The problem is the spec.
AMD has less problems, but I'm not so sure this is only because they are more secure. I think there are more eyes looking for exploitts for intel CPUs than for AMD.
It wasn't a PR firm, it was this cartoonist: https://lucybellwood.com/

I mean, the comic addresses the fact the current model is bad for privacy right out of the gate and then shows how this team is trying to solve it, what more do we want from them?
Do the keep the meat, dairy, bread, and produce on the back walls like every other grocery store?
Wrt to depends, maybe their algo gradient descends on natural language first? This guy doesn’t need kids diapers anymore, lets try something less specific.
Because education is good for society and should be encouraged.
No, I live in the US. But from what I've heard about software engineer salaries in the UK, even at most large multinationals (except only Google?), it seems someone with 5 yoe as a store manager at Aldis in the UK makes (afaik) more than basically every software engineer with 5 yoe in the UK
Ask HN: Customising a WordPress Theme to Launch My MVP, Bad Idea?
As a founder with 0 coding chops, I've been exploring my options to get my MVP out the door.

One idea is to modify an off the shelf WP theme to produce a workable product. My goal would be to get an off the shelf theme like this:

https://www.appthemes.com/themes/clipper/

In the ball park of:

https://www.hotukdeals.com/

In terms of UI/UX; the needed features would be ability for a user to upload content, upvotes, plus some basic forum functionality, comments profiles etc.

How viable is this approach?
It could always end up being just fluff, but given it's an active research area and they've open sourced a framework based on the concept already, plus the fact the model is cost-advantageous given you get to offload training to a fleet of customer devices instead of paying for your own servers, it could be the real deal.

I started reading it looking at it from a cynical view, but ended it with a "hmm... this could actually work," especially after reading about Secure Aggregation. That's badass.
Hopefully it's not this again:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-targ...
I really like the slaughterbots: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HipTO_7mUOw
Isn't this the Hawthorne Effect?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect
This is a great comment, thanks very much.

I have almost nothing more to add, but I'll mention that I recall reading about Wal-mart's practice of making shelf stockers responsible for deciding which products get how much shelf space, and even for ordering the appropriate products -- the theory being that the shelf stocker is the guy in the best position to notice which products are or aren't flying off the shelves. (Whereas, according to what I read, at a standard grocery store, the shelf space itself is sold to a supplier, and they get to dictate what goes on it.) And when I read that, it made me think of the triscuits issue, and imagine that what was happening was that triscuit varieties were being stocked without bothering to look into whether they were popular.

If you have further things to say in this area, I will certainly read them with interest.
It's a new psf initiative, "blog network 4.0" to juice our Google stats for the big upcoming release.

Remember the new python official motto: what is dead can never die.
It's not a true story. People wanted less manure and fewer horse corpses. They were thrilled with the automobile because it neatly solved their top two transportation complaints.
The Jones Act is such a shit show. Almost no one in the mainland US knows about this Crony Capitalist act than enriches a tiny group of people, but makes life in Puerto Rico, Guam, American Samoa etc quite seriously more impoverished than there is any need for it to be.

https://reason.com/tag/jones-act/
Yeah, the three other grocery stores in a mile radius around our local Aldi are all quaking in their boots. It's just been exhausting, wondering if every day is going to be the last day you open the doors. They've each only been able to complete one renovation in the last two years, and I'm sure they'd double the number of auto-check out lanes if it weren't for that meddling Aldi!

In other words, I haven't exactly seen anything "upended" yet.
You get all kinds of new and exciting failure and fuck up modes in a decentralized architecture.
Looks like everyone gets the same model. So it won't be used for things like targeted ads.

Cynical view is that it's only used when Google doesn't want your individual data. This will help muddy the waters in discussions about privacy.
..what data department?
Amazing - you are given the power to choose your own license and choose how you want people to view your source code, yet people are STILL unhappy and surprised when you comply in the exact way you wanted them to.
I would be very surprised if AWS does not get spun off at some point.
That is smart, I would add "limit 2" to a single row update, so if it returns 2 rows updated I know it was wrong.
I set aside a day of the week, Tuesday, for all my planning for that week. Basically the deep work for that day is figuring out the plan for the week. The rest of the week is accomplishing that work. Basically Scrum applies to deep work.
Why is there no screenshots of the level app on the homepage or Github page? A picture of the app would help me decide whether I want to use it.
Ive gotten delivery tracking emails to my gmail from Amazon for crap I didn't order sent to an address ive never lived at. Apparently something like this was happening.

What scares the crap out of me is in the last week I've been getting bombarded with Zyrtek (an allergy med) ads. Now, I'd never seen an allergist or been diagnosed with an allergy until 9 days ago. The only person I communicated this to electronically was my father, and over SMS. I've not been researching allergies online, my doc gave me plenty of dead tree material.

So, how do Google and other advertisers know I have an allergy? Are they harvesting SMS as well? Are carriers selling SMS data for targeted advertising? If my health care provider is selling that info, thatd be a HUGE HIPPA violation. (Yes, I'm in the US).

Edit: grammar and clarity of thought.
As someone with a big healthcare client on Salesforce, you're not wrong. This was a massive issue for Salesforce Healthcloud users.
Immunised testimony is only covers certain events.

Seeking new testimony when complete testimony is already on file, leaves open the door to parallel construction of unrelated cases. The witness may be convinced to say something that violates the terms of previous deals.

If the judge truly believes her testimony might aid in convicting Assange they have no reason not to already use the extensive testimony on file. Manning has already been extensively interrogated about Assange, for a number of years. The court has those filings available to it.

There is no reason to expect that new testimony with new evidence is available.
It's much easier to have trust in a small unimposing culturally homogeneous country of 10 million like Sweden vs a 300+ million economic and geopolitical juggernaut.
Sure, it doesn't address that problem head on, however if they moved most stuff to a federated model, they're only a hop, skip, and a jump away from doing ad-selection on-device too, right? I think that if the model proves successful, it could end up proving out the concept enough to incentivize at least trying it out.
Humans absolutely don't just rely on impulses. Have you ever read about the evolution and capabilities of the human Brian compared to animals?
First thought - "that's just enabling bad budgeting"

But then I realized -- waiting a week, or two, or a month might be considered a loan to the business. Should you get a 2% annual interest for waiting to be paid? Or, because this is already the model everyone's been using for so long, does it not really matter? So now I don't even know where I stand on it.
Yeah totally, neuroscience is "simple speculation"...
For sure. I've worked in finance and we did tons of market research when before giving loans to companies like Rite-Aid, CVS, etc, knowing that they did their own market research, too. But, I'm not sure how far that carries over to tech. Even "commodity" ideas aren't always so commodity in this sector.
Thanks for your kind words :) !
Fun fact: in the first hour after I made it, this comment racked up about 25 HN "points", presumably from people who thought, "ha! that's goofy, I like it". Then, in the ten hours or so since then, it has fallen down to 17, presumably because the conversation turned from absurd to, "well, does this theory actually make sense?"

Which, given that HN points don't actually buy you anything, is fine. But, I wonder what it means that the first hour was mostly upvoting and the hours since then mostly downvoting. Maybe people are in a more positive mood in the morning? Or maybe it doesn't seem worth downvoting until a bunch of other people have commented on it.

Or, of course, perhaps the EAILD is attempting to bury it with 'bot downvotes. In which case, I guess we're already doomed...
There's sometimes other options available, but people who most need them don't necessarily know about them. And there's also a lot of predatory elements, like near-worthless diploma mills, that people have to know to avoid. It sounds like you did the best you could, under the circumstances (even back-and-forth didn't work).

I got turned down for financial aid that I needed for college (didn't even know I could try to appeal or argue it), and had to take a roundabout way to further education and credentials.

In my case, I was the eldest of six kids, my family couldn't help at all with college, I was already pretty much on my own, I didn't have anyone advising me, and apparently that part of the system didn't work right that time.

Thank goodness for community college, another part of the system, which I happened to hear of. Only ~$25 per credit hour (IIRC) while I worked in a store part-time. The community college had very dedicated instructors, and it also got me a lucky industry internship, with which I managed to support myself.

I wouldn't recommend the community college low-status route, iff you have the chance to go to an elite school, where further opportunity doors are not only opened, but you're practically carried through many doors. If you're not going to an elite magical door-opening college anyway, and you can't afford the 4-year college experience, then maybe it makes sense to do 2 years for a community college before transferring for 2 more years (find someone at the school you plan to transfer to, who will talk with you about that, and get something official about transferable credits, in writing).

(I eventually did get degrees from two fancy-pants schools, thanks in part to altruistic mentoring I was very lucky to receive. And also thanks to the willingness of the first fancy school to give me a chance.)
I wonder what kind of "brain" would even be possible to put in a robot this small, given the physical limit we're approaching. Could limit the potential for certain dystopian scenarios.
CMU has a course about building your own dbms and is what you're looking for https://15721.courses.cs.cmu.edu/spring2019/ note there is YouTube lectures, also check previous years offerings. It focuses on Peloton but numerous asides each lecture about pitfalls, what architecture decisions won't sell, what is bound to be a failed design strategy etc.This was all in the 2017 lectures I watched but I assume the most recent are similar.
That's what I'm saying, but I'd go further that even in 100/100 people tell you that they love your idea, that may translate into 0/100 using it. You shouldn't just try anything willy-nilly, but you won't know until you try it.
Would CEOs or Execs / Managers perform better with deep work?
> I spent the next six weeks building. By that point, my customers were loving the product – even my largest customer that started out highly skeptical of the paradigm. Everyone who had converted so far applauded the user experience and agreed Level was a beautiful product.

I wonder why they switched to Level and loved it when most were fine with Slack. Is it because they were fans, or do they have some real pain that drive them to action? Maybe the author accidentally hit a niche?

If it's me, I'd find that out before giving up. So most people are fine with what they have and won't switch, so what? Isn't that to be expected? Aren't you supposed to find some earlier adopters and grow from there?
...neuroscience? Are you implying that rabbits have the ability to understand the metaphysical concept of death like humans? If so where is your supporting evidence? Death is much more complex than simple things like language or long term planning and rabbits can barely do either.
I think a great example of the eat-your-cooking thinking is Slack itself. It started out as an in-house tool at Butterfield's now-defunct game company Glitch: https://readwrite.com/2013/08/14/stewart-butterfield-tiny-sp...
The carts still need collecting. And at least when I worked at K-Mart in the 1990s, there was no dedicated cart collecting person; it was the task of whoever had the free time, usually someone handling stocking, typically junior, and especially someone young (though these days they have the electric carts).

What you were told sounds like one of those slightly tongue-in-cheek excuses people sometimes use to justify behavior, though that doesn't necessarily make it insincere. For most of high school I worked dishwashing jobs. A typical task for a dishwasher includes picking up trash in the parking lot. People throwing trash in the parking lot weren't doing me or anyone else any favors.
Not sure about my particular anecdote, I can't verify that to be accurate or attribute it to Ford (I have heard it on many occasions, and even once saw a clipping from a newspaper but can't find it now), but https://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2017/01/get-horse-americ...
Short answer: they started out conceptually different (static vs dynamic graph), but seem to be converging lately (no pun intended!)
Reminds me of the puzzles for an iOS game I put out a couple of years ago: Little Broken Robots. In that game you had numbers but could “walk” out from a number that many spaces. You had to fill in all the empty spaces.

My strategy for generating puzzles was island based. I had a board checker that would scan through the grid and place all empty spaces that could be reached contiguously into a single “island.” I would then pick a random island (the first island was always the full grid), pick a random tile in the island, pick a random number with a max value of either the puzzle’s max (up to 8), and then drunk walk outward. In the event the drunk walk got “stuck” it would just pick a different starting tile within that island.

Recompute islands and repeat until there are no spaces left. Island with only 1 square are “dead” and just get filled in with blocker tiles.

Each puzzle had many solutions, but because there was always a “right” pregenerated solution we could give hints based on the canonical solution.
I think theoretically, you could make money refining rare minerals from asteroids (like platinum, gold, rare earths). The issue is that since the startup cost is so high, the mission is very risky (conservatively, it would probably cost in the 10s of billions to be able to refine anything at scale) and 10s of billions worth of rare minerals won't stay worth 10s of billions since the world only needs so much minerals - the price would fall substantially.

I think the only thing really worth doing in space, economically speaking, will be energy related. Maybe harvesting helium 3 will be lucrative. Maybe (I doubt it) there will be a profitable way to harness solar energy - could be more profitable if we can produce the panels in space by the asteroid they are procured from, but then the issue is transmission.

Actually, there is another thing. I think space tourism could be lucrative. Imagine if you set up a lunar colony for 20b that could house ~1k people with about 200 permanent staff. If 800 people are paying $100k/week (plus cost of transportation) to stay up there, you're making $4b per year. Personally if I were worth in the ~10s of millions I would absolutely shell out $100k to spend a week on the moon so I think this kind of thing could work
It’s funny then that Omni-Path originated with Intel’s purchase of the Cray interconnect team back in 2012.

https://newsroom.intel.com/news-releases/intel-acquires-indu...
The REAL answer is still the same as in 2016: the language is not mature yet. It will be fixed, in time, after other things that matter more.

Binary size has less priority than important goals such as feature completeness, compiler speed, optimization performance, target platform coverage, performance tooling support, library coverage, and myriad others. Memory has become cheap enough that excess binary size is not typically the limiting factor preventing deployment, where that happens.

As the language matures, numerous impediments to industrial deployment will fall, one at a time. The language and its ecosystem are maturing with impressive, even stunning rapidity, but it will still be ten years before the language is an obviously safe choice for any random project -- if it gets there at all. Historically, odds are against that, but the only real risks for Rust are whether its adoption rate can be grown fast enough to retain relevance, and whether its development jumps some unforeseen shark not easily recovered from.
I had some thoughts of writing some software a bit like that, and would be interested and hearing what would be the feature set for a minimal viable product. *

For example, if you could do things like

>I cannot for the life of me figure out bezier curves to create arc sections with proper radii that blends into another line, and abusing adding and subtracting shapes from each other is a cumbersome process and editing the final shape often requires me to start all over creating that composite shape.

and also

>I would like to have more technical and fine-grained control over the way my drawings are made, than what pulling with my cursor on those handles gives me.

But for everything else (color/fills etc.) you would export to other software

>It also needs to export to some standard format to be used for print, so using SolidWorks of Fusion360 isn't really an option, I can't export the vector 1-to-1 onto a pdf and do proper colors with those.

Would that still be a useful product?

* Disclaimer: Way back around 2001/2002, I worked on the Solidworks sketcher, and also before that used to work for D-Cubed Ltd. (SolidWorks and Autodesk Fusion 360 sketchers both implement their unbounded geometry constraints/dimensions using the D-Cubed DCM2 constraint management component licensed from Siemens PLM.) To implement what you want one needs at least some of the features from DCM2. Either implement one's own code, or one licenses from Siemens PLM (expensive) etc. Most licensees for DCM2 were 3D. There was one product that I recall that fits your description - Imagineer from Intergraph - but it got discontinued. I suspect that there is a market for what you describe, but maybe it's somewhat niche.