skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: How to build a resume/get a job as a perennial slacker?
Hey everyone, wanted to get some thoughts on my situation.

To be brief: I'm a capable programmer, have been programming since I was 16 (I'm 30 now), built websites, APIs, etc. I have no college education. I live in the US & was born here.

I've never been employed consistently in a proper software development environment, or had a real job. Always made enough money through side hustles, affiliate revenue, app revenue, freelancing sites, etc.

Reality has stricken and it requires me to make more money. I'm very intimated about presenting myself to others. What the hell do I say I've been doing for the last 10 years? Hanging out, surfing, reading books, playing video games, making just enough to get by, not worrying about a career? Because that's the truth.

I don't even know if it's realistic to get a full-time programming job. I want to work remotely 35-40hrs a week and make around 100k. I don't feel that's unreasonable, but maybe it is.

I would be very grateful for any guidance that anyone could provide me.
As someone who chronically ideates about suicide (but has never attempted), things like VR rock climbing and (real life) bungee jumping have just made me scared of jumping. But it doesn't make me not want to die, it just makes me want to do it a better way that's less scary
But it doesn't work for libraries people will be using in development. Often you are waiting for a handful of packages to introduce specific features or bug fixes and need them the moment they are available. NPM isn't user space, it's dev space. Timeliness is the maxim.
This is really captivating. I think I’m inspired to finally dust off my of TI-Forth for the 99/4a
What’s your workflow to query these and find what you’re looking for?
Related and recent:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20433851

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19889365

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19399543

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19346342

Not quite as recent:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18893252

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17841584

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17677698

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17409152

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16174719

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15888827
> People start a business first and foremost to profit by way of ROI.
I think that's as pessimistic as saying that people work just to make money.

This may have been the case a few decades/centuries ago depending on how lucky you are in terms of where you are born.

Today the majority of the founders I know of are not driven out of "ROI" - but instead they are driven out of some personal passion/interest to change/fix some aspect of the world. You can read the various manifesto posts from Paul Graham on the topic from "what we look in founders" http://www.paulgraham.com/founders.html to "why founders are kind" (cant find the link...)

From my side, my passion is .. I want to dismantle the local-work system that makes people's life/career being determined to a large extent from where they are born.

I hate that.
Why should those of us who are non-suicidal have to give up our ability to defend ourselves because some suicidal people are gonna shoot themselves?

(I don't own any guns but this screams nanny state to me)
> I think that is a very weak conclusion ...

That's kind of my point. It's not some knock-down argument, but it's a very nuanced result that achieved a few very neat things:

1) Formalized Anselm's "greatest of which can be conceived of" notion.

2) The concept of "accidental" (contingent) and "non-accidental" (necessary) properties had existed since antiquity, but modal logic essentially formalized the idea.

3) Showed that Anselm's argument was indeed valid. Again, this project took around 1000 years.

Plantinga did a lot of work in trying to make the premises more palatable, but of course, the argument for the existence of God still rages on. (As I'm sure it will far after we're gone.)
I don't know why landfills are so controversial. Shit doesn't decompose there which means it doesn't find its way into the ecosystem. Undisturbed in a big pile underground is a great place for all sorts of other nasty things.
It looks to me like you are comparing a lifetime figure against a yearly figure.

Suicide figures are usually given on an annual basis, but we often mistake the figures for lifetime risk, and we are then surprised with how common suicide is within our own experience/extended acquantancy.
You made quite the leap of logic there.

The article is about people whose suicide attempts failed, and ended up with them alive in hospital. Of these people, only about 10% will successfully suicide later.

There is no connection between these incidents and your justification for restraining suicidal people against their will. I am certain that there is evidence to support your claim, but this is not it.
But why do you have to compile PyPy on the same machine you’re testing it on?
People care about having more packages much more than abstract fears of security or quality of those packages.

At their own peril.
LiveCode (renamed from "Runtime Revolution"). Free for personal use: https://livecode.com/products/community-edition/.
In other words, practice makes perfect ;)

I found the use of the logarithmic scale to be a particularly useful idea—it's true that improvements in skill take longer and longer in the more advanced levels.
Despite calls to start over, US health system covers 90%
The electric car boom is in such early days now, I don’t know that anyone can even discern the shape of the curve yet.
My experience with mongo is the same. Works great, in RAM. As soon as you hit disk, it falls over completely.
Consumption of what?

For example: Virtually every food item is packaged in plastic. And it’s not consumers who decided it was more cost effective to use disposable plastic than wash a reusable container.
The last version of HyperCard that was released in 1995 and it was never made PPC native.

VB.Net is still pretty easy.
> Things like this have to happen at some point, and there are benefits to doing stuff like this during "work" hours (like having all of your staff online and available)

That sounds like a benefit to Coinbase and not to any of their customers.
This comment breaks the site guidelines. Would you mind reviewing them and using HN as intended?

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I’m not a JS developer so maybe I’m missing something, but how do you use a library during development and not use it in production?

In the C++ world, I can’t imagine a situation where you would need to depend on, for example, libjpg while developing, but not need to read JPEG files in prod/end-user-space.
Wow—and spread into 11 files to facilitate CI, linting, etc—and with 1kb worth of error checking. That is nuts!
Yes. On the other hand, this “sorting” makes people feel better. We don’t feel like we’re the baddies.

From a realistic POV, yes, make people put plastic in a “landfill” bin, from a psych POV, make them do busywork so we feel better about ourselves.
This is no big deal. Prices will tank and an equilibrium will be reached. This kind of stuff happens all the time when supply lags demand and then catches up and you have a little bit too much supply.
That was the idea behind AppleScript to an extent.
Not entirely true, Debian actually made OpenSSL less secure once: https://www.debian.org/security/2008/dsa-1571
I guess it's not a penalty if you are able to invest the money you get from the helicopter drop in assets, or a sweet gaming rig, while other people are just paying down debt?
> You prioritize features over Operations, and as a result guinea-pig your users. Just like any other SF startup. So just admit that to your end-users.

Wow, I'm not from any "SF startup" but I find that side jab quite cunning.
Russian Opposition Leader Navalny May Have Been Poisoned
VR marriage apps with faceapp induced aging.
Would you please not break the site guidelines, regardless of how annoying another comment is? We've had to ask you this before.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Was thinking the same thing. Seems people conflate java with the jvm. The jvm is almost as cool as the beam. Which got me thinking about the lfe, since we are in lisp land.
They say they can, but they don't act like they believe it. If I had to guess, I'd say new inventory might now be on separate shelves but some existing inventory is permanently in doubt.
Doubtful. If anything I could see it making people more comfortable with it. Could trigger a copy-cat-like effect where people already fantasizing about it could see getting through the VR experience as a "success" they are ready to emulate.
I think you could add keyboard shortcuts. You could definitely add menu items (http://folkstream.com/muse/teachhc/menu/menu.html) and you could intercept keydown events at the stack level.
Generally the issue only comes up for the terminally ill in the first place. They don't exactly have the option of deciding to live.

Quite a few patients refuse to continue treatment at some point, which has effectively the same result. They could back out of that at any time.
The Golden Girls Would Violate Zoning Laws
is this a literal example of survivorship bias?
Most developers feature creep on themselves
This doesn’t contradict my point. I never said that Debian maintainers are more trustworthy than upstream 100% of the time.

I merely said that Debian packages are built, uploaded, and vended by Debian package maintainers, not by upstream. Whether that makes them more trustworthy or less is a different question.
A stray border collie came home with me one day while I was biking around the woods. She was easily the smartest dog I've ever owned and I've owned many.

She knew when to be emotionally available, she understood body language and speech so well. A fantastic riding companion that knew how to pace herself for miles.

Not a very good mother, though. Her entire brood was eaten by coyotes over a couple of weeks.

I'm highly considering getting another border collie when the time comes for a new dog... if so I'll definitely be trying to push her like Chaser.
This would be great if some of the excellent components that work with qmail to make a nice email appliance also got updated.
qmail with vpopmail and qmailadmin used to make a great email appliance, but previously the overhead of maintaining it made it un-usable long term so I ditched it for postfix+dovecote+postfixadmin

but there was a lot to like about qmail+vpopmail+qmailadmin
Hello! Do you need someone to talk to? I’m not qualified or anything though, just your average software engineer. Ping me.
> The gains are small but quickly add up.

There are costs to these micro-libraries that outweigh the gains. This code is trivial; there aren’t really edge cases to be worked out.
Personal attacks will get you banned here, regardless of how provocative another comment was. Would you mind reviewing the site guidelines and using HN as intended? We'd be grateful.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
It looks like this app is based on whitelisting. While this would indeed be 100% effective at stopping spam calls, it would also be 100% effective at stopping urgent calls from numbers that you're unfamiliar with. For example:

- A hospital or police department calling to tell you that your spouse has been injured in an accident.

- Your doctor calling you back from one of several outgoing lines in her office whose number you don't know.

Do you want to rely on these callers being able to figure out how to get through your spam blocker in an emergency? They're calling from landlines, so they also can't text you or receive a text from your app.
Papara Kabul Eden Bahis Siteleri
See, .NET get a lot of hate from the open source community, but this reason is one of the big ones of why I prefer it. Even when you compare it to Java, I feel like it's way better in this regard.

If I want to work with JSON, I use Newtonsoft.JSON. If I want an ORM I'll use Dapper (lightweight) or Entity Framework. So many libraries that would you need if you're using Java or JS is just built in to the standard library.

I know it's not a 100% fair comparison, since I am biased. Part of it also might be because .NET is younger and less widely used, but I feel it's pretty true. Though, Python has ton of open source support and is better in this regard.
Where are we with compostable plastics? For retail packaging of products that move fairly quickly, it seems like a reasonable solution.
I understand broke founders who go after the boring startup projects with the goal to just make money. But once you have money behind you that's your rare opportunity to tackle the profound projects that capitalism doesn't really give a shit about.

eg tackle poverty, hunger, homelessness, climate change, freeing everyone from 9-5 jobs to pursue their own passions, reducing living costs to give everyone more free time to pursue their passions, creating new models for collective governance, helping communities to bootstrap collective intelligence, distributing the web and institutions, building models for open P2P accounting and supply chains, brain computer interfaces etc etc etc etc etc.

Attempting to monopolize the home improvement industry by becoming a middleman that routes tasks and takes a cut, with the goal of selling the company off is truly lacking imagination.

At the very least you could build Ergeon as a distributed and open network co-operative. Cap your team to a max of 20 people, pay everyone including yourself the same salary, either distribute zero shares to anyone (inc founders or investors) or equal non-transferable shares to all contractors + team (with dividend payouts), setup the company such that it can never be sold (whatever legal setup makes sense), have public transparent financials, charge a 1% transaction fee but cap your annual budget and pay back any excess to the network of contractors. That would be profound.
What is the frontend and the backend built on?
This really helps me understand the institutional desire to purchase bonds even at a negative rate (especially when combined with legal requirements around holding safe asset classes).

It seems relatively obvious in hindsight, but I was still having a little trouble getting my head around it until I read this.

Thanks!
> With advertising, we can enjoy many services free of charge.
Using google as an example, google maps, search, android, etc

Google gets much much more than just showing you ads. You surrender all your digital life using Google free services, and that info is priceless, because 95% of people did the same. What would you say if in 10 years, government, police and businesses will routinely use google data for background checks? It is just one use case.
A person and their family are 3x more likely to be shot if they have a gun in their house, so "defence" isn't a great reason to have a gun.
Before I learned Forth, I was very comfortable in Common Lisp. Now I miss the convenience when writing Forth and raw simplicity when writing Lisp.

I realize the problem isn't Forth, some people (such as the writer for example) are capable of pulling amazing feats for such a primitive tool.

But as a result, the programming languages [0] I've designed since have all been part Forth and part Common Lisp.

[0] https://github.com/codr7/cidk
How do the literal 0 comparisons fit into the language? Are they special purpose syntax or is it possible to write your own operator that only typechecks if the RHS is a literal 0?
The electric car industry hasn't remotely boomed. Electric cars are still deeply strangled by two key factors: industry inertia and the cost/supply of lithium batteries. Once those two factors are solved (and a build-up of lithium mines is key to that) electric cars will go from being a niche within a niche to utterly dominating the market very, very quickly.

Within the next decade we might see companies like Hyundai/Kia, Toyota and Honda selling more EVs than ICE. Take the Kia Niro EV as an example: if the cost of batteries halved and the supply was unconstrained, there is little stopping that kind of product from dominating the market—starting with two-car households with off-street parking.

With their lithium cell investments, Telsa are well positioned to benefit from this boom, but they need to think carefully about their positioning. Right now they're a luxury brand with no serious competitors; when Telsa's drivetrain advantage is substantially neutralised, their mind share is likely to stagnate.

In my opinion Tesla needs to prepare to be in the budget space. They need to partner with an external manufacturer to sell a product with normal door handles that competes with Hyundai and Toyota. Because once the cost of batteries falls, I predict a substantial slice of their market will simply disappear to the economy manufacturers. I suspect that many people who love Telsa really just love the idea of electric vehicles and they'll be buying something more like the Kia Niro EV.
The more you know, the more you know that you don't know...
If what we're doing is bad, surely it would be better to know that it is bad and be forced to internalize that and deal with the consequences (even be inspired to come up with alternatives!) rather than just being tricked into thinking everything's daisies, no?
Part of me wonders if software engineering becomes more and more like manufacturing jobs. The jobs move overseas to whatever country has the cheapest and most talented workforce. Be it India, China, Philippines, Eastern Europe, Africa, etc.

There are people willing to do software development for $3-$10 an hour all over the world.
So what you are saying, is all the code i see on blogs, demoing that cool little JS thingy, is actually just demo code, not prod ready. To get prod ready, u need to break the NPM dep, and vet everything on your own. So your telling me npm run serve isnt good enough for prod either?!

Lies, more lies and broken promises!
Would you please stop posting flamebait to HN? We've had to ask you this a ton of times already.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
(my conjecture) It’s human nature: your animalian instinct to avoid death takes over once you’re actually facing it
You also have to consider the percentage of the market controlled by China.

Look at what they've done with their control of rare earth metals.

Artificial scarcity and resource hoarding is something that needs to be considered.
Building a PEG Parser
I don't really use SO but thanks. I thought it was on topic for the post,my apologies.
Talk to a recruiter. They’ll help you make your patchy resume look as good as possible.

You may not be a slacker in a different field that you enjoy more, so a career change is also something to consider.
Followup events:

https://www.rferl.org/a/russia-s-navalny-hospitalized-with-s...
shinnn is claiming his account was hacked, and the hacker added the code. Generally if a hacker hacks someone's npm account and adds harmful code, that would be considered malicious and an exploit.
Ask HN: Anyone have experience owning a franchise
I'm interested in owning a profitable franchise for the long term. I think, I've enough capital (up to 500k) to own such a franchise. I'd however prefer to run this business passively, as I'd like to continue my lucrative career as a software engineer in big tech. I'm expecting to hear advice to use the money to pay off debt or buy a home. So, I'd like to point out that all debt is paid off and I own a home (condo). I'd also like to point out that I've looked into low cost index fund investments as an option. So, this request for advice is strictly for franchising.

I'd be interested to hear about experiences owning, running or passively running a franchise. Any stories related to the topic are welcome as well.

Thank you!
Oddly enough, when you play hangman, you should use this sequence instead:

ESIARN TOLCDU

In hangman, you are guessing words, not text. The high frequency of the trigram THE makes T and H more probable in a text corpus. But if every word is equiprobable as in a dictionary list of words, you get the above sequence.

http://datagenetics.com/blog/april12012/index.html
How to Do Handwritten “Thank You” Notes for Your Startup at Scale
I did read that section... that's why I said it's confusing...

It seems to me they're using different terminology for concepts that aren't different in math? In math, "equality" (=) already means the same thing as substitutability. A non-substitutable equality is already called "equivalence" (≡).

So in math we already have these:

[1a] Non-strict partial order: a binary ordering that allows incomparability (≼, ≡, ≽, ?)

[1b] Strict partial order: like [1a], but irreflexive (≺, ≡, ≻, ?)

[2a] Non-strict weak order: like [1a], but with all elements comparable (≼, ≡, ≽)

[2b] Strict weak order: like [1b], but with all elements comparable (≺, ≡, ≻)

[3a] Non-strict total order: like [2a], where the equivalence is equality (≤, =, ≥)

[3b] Strict total order: like [2b], where the equivalence is equality (<, =, >)

If I didn't make a mistake above, then:

- C++'s "strong total ordering" seems to be what in math we call "strict total ordering"

- Their "weak total ordering" seems to be what in math we call "strict weak ordering"

- Partial order is the same thing for both

Am I wrong here? If yes, how? If not, why did they randomly invent their own terminology? I haven't seen their definitions used elsewhere.
It is one sided: its the view of the Brazilian logger who wants to cut down his rain forest. It takes a more credible argument than vague promises of '[his] decedents won't die by the millions' a century from now to dissuade him when his relatives live in favelas today[1].

[1] Which is exactly the sort of activity we 'first-worlders' have been benefiting from.
To solve this issue, I've included:

The ability to set PINs, which means people who know your number but aren't whitelisted can reach you at any time (think doctor, police, school, etc).

When you list your number on any form just include a PIN. You can add as many PINs as you want and include a description for each.

When calling a CallStop number, an unknown caller hears this default message:

"You have reached a phone number protected by CallStop. If you know this person, press 1 to send a whitelisting request with a quick note. If you have a PIN to reach this person directly, press 2 and enter the PIN."
I assume you don't already have Lisp in production at your current company, because if you did, you would already know which Lisp flavor to start with. In that case, I would try to convince you that introducing Lisp to a company is not a good engineering move, and not a good career move either.

What are you going to achieve by running Lisp in production at your company? How would adopting Lisp improve uptime, performance, meeting feature deadlines, and being able to hire people?

No language is a magic bullet. I would highly recommend focusing on outcomes, such as increased performance or reliability or developer productivity, and picking a popular language to achieve those goals so you can convince management to adopt it, and hire people who are good at it.

If you really, really still want to do it, management will probably be more open to a JVM language like Clojure than to any other Lisp.
On the theory that everyone gets cash, and for those with debt, the cash goes to the debt first, sure. But If I'm reading the proposal correctly, the argument is to just drop money into the debts. Suckers who lived responsible lives up front are left in the dust. This seems ... not healthy for society in the long term.
Did we miss the party? See this website with scientifically-accurate information:
www.realyourbrainonporn.com
Simple, real scientists, and focused on falsification studies (more important to model testing).
Also: the way the library handles those edge cases isn't necessarily the way you want. Case in point: rate-map throws exceptions in situations where you might expect it to fail more gracefully.