skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I know they are known for hot desks and all, but that actually accounts for very little of their square footage. For a solo freelancer it is a nice to have.

But have 6 people and growing, then it’s a different world. Hard to find places that aren’t WeWork. Get to 14 and growing still, and you are doing leases for expected size (say 65) and a long term lease. So you are getting much more than needed. Then you grow faster and you need an office for 200 and you still have your old 5-10 year lease for 65 and now you have to sublease that out and get your next 10 year lease, hopefully in a place with an option to expand. And you probably have that 12 person office lease too if you weren’t able to get out (we were in this story).
I was thinking about writing a lib like this... really useful
I was arguing the general principle of not being afraid of premature optimization, not this particular example. You make good points.
I don't think Google is particularly pro-union, so Google's standards on this front are probably not very different from expecting that partners remain within the bounds of law. I want to reiterate that it has not been established that any illegal anti-union activity has actually taken place. The only thing that we know for sure is that USW believes it has. I strongly doubt that Google is opposed to HCL being more responsive to workers ahead of a union vote, nor of having a consultant available to speak about unions, as long as the consultant is being honest and factual in the things that they say.
Many tech companies right now, Amazon and Microsoft included, specifically use contractors in order to deny them benefits their employees are entitled to and provide a level of plausible deniability or reduced liability. It is absolutely accurate to hold the big guys responsible for the ecosystem they're creating.
If you’re talking about programming... the reason programmers (of a certain sort) are paid a lot in the Bay Area is not because they are vastly “higher” skilled than other people. The average chef in the Bay Area is WAY more skilled than all but the most skilled coders.

There are two reasons why programmers (of a certain sort) make so much money:

1) It’s an area of speculation, how much revenue can such people produce? Because it’s well known that some white male programmers will make a fuckton of revenue happen, the rest of us get higher wages in the “glow” of that.

There’s not a cultural belief among capitalists that black women programmers, or talented chefs, are making “unicorn money” happen so there’s no glow there.

2) There are a ton of programmers who won a lottery of having that skill in a time when it was going to make you rich. That’s no longer true, there is more competition now and just being a coder in a position of privilege is not enough.... but there are now a big number of rich white male programmers in the Bay Area who are trying to “do it again” and so they are showering money on other programmers who remind them of themselves.

It’s a halo of money. It will disappear soon. It’s not based on skill. If you’re making it—good job... get that money. You may even be highly skilled, in which case—good job. That’s impressive. But don’t think your skills have anything to do with why other people aren’t making the same money as you.
So who decides what the DJIA and S&P 500 stocks actually are? A random number generator?
The website is blocked by FortiGuard Web Filtering.
>And having a breakthrough would mean it’s proprietary. Aka you didn’t buy it at the hobby store.

Now define a system that will verify that the technology is proprietary and not just assembled off the shelf components. Keep in mind that you can also have a breakthrough system that is made of existing components. And do it with minimal bureaucracy. Keep in mind that the person applying may honestly believe they have a breakthrough technology made from existing parts even if it's not.
And to be honest, that's probably not a bad thing. Majority here are worried about cross site tracking and not advertising itself.
When I went back to school
I found out about a thing called CourseHero. How? A classmate lab partner submitted the report we submitted for our work. He submitted it verbatim with his name, my name, a third person in our group and even the instructor's name.

The only reason I knew of it was a fellow classmate got a new phone and for kicks looked up his name and found the report at CourseHero.

By the looks of that website I'd say cheating is rampant. Being drawn into something you're not aware of then nearly expelled is maddening.
in lisp this would be

(defmacro dbg [expr]
(println '~expr ~expr))
What percentage of your life have you been being inculcated with the idea that your political opponents believe themselves to be temporarily embarrassed millionaires?
Giraffe pimp.

https://www.reddit.com/r/wholesomememes/comments/aafawp/gira...
People get downgraded to contract labor after being fired from FTE jobs all the time. This broader trend of increasing tenuousness of employment is part of what is driving the upswell in labor organizing.
Granted, but then putting Google in the title is still reasonable, since they're abetting the management of HCL.
Had mine stolen off a Toyota Sequoia. Done in the driveway, alarm on, bedroom windows open.

It was so clean, not even dust on the ground. Looked like it had been beamed away.

They hit the whole area in a couple of nights. Four wheel drive vehicles were popular because of easy access.

To get them replaced was a bit over 5k. My understanding is the thives get about 50 a piece.
Didn’t Magellan visit the Philippines previously, coming from the other direction?
London Clay
I understand the solution to this is to buy a car with a really small engine and park it next to cars with really big engines or hybrids. They have much more valuable catalytic converters so are likely to get nicked before yours is.

Also if you're in UK and have fully comp cover it should cover replacement cost minus excess if it's in the described location in the policy over night.
What SQL has taught me: Just learn Prolog.

"I'm seriously you guys." I was recently working with a Prolog-SQLite binding when it suddenly dawned on me that I should just skip SQL and use the Prolog engine directly as the DB. Modern Prolog systems can handle millions of records, for a lot of applications that's all you need. On the other hand they also have e.g. ODBC bindings.

SWI Prolog can internalize data in flatfiles
"Managing external tables for SWI-Prolog"

https://www.swi-prolog.org/pldoc/doc_for?object=section(%27p...

There's also a Prolog graph database coming out in October: TerminusDB.

https://medium.com/terminusdb
Very nice, thanks for creating that!
Couldn't agree more. How he got there is always overlooked. Bill is certainly very intelligent and competent. But could Bill start a company from scratch and be competitive today? One that is remotely close to MS and from competing fairly? I'm doubtful.
Has anyone spoken to you recently about orgmode :)
A Couple of New Unix Artifacts
Makes me think of this: https://unbreakableumbrella.com/product/unbreakable-walking-...

I own one and it’s a great umbrella that I have only ever used for conventional purposes. :)

Now I just need to learn this Kunfgu set ...

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=uWtZmKrENDE
We have -- we are all citizens. If you're a citizen of the United States, here is the first sentence of the document that instantiates that union:

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

At its core, it is about people agreeing to act together in order to live better lives.
Off topic:
Apparently, many classical websites use black on yellow colors. One can find this color scheme also in modern terminal emulators and various text editors.

Does someone have insights on why that is so popular?
One can be pro-organizing but not pro-union.
Why not use Newton’s method? Your computer is using numerical approximations for computing those roots anyway. The reason the cubic formula isn’t used is because it’s very convoluted and it doesn’t solve any problems you couldn’t solve with Newton’s method, unless you’re doing algebra and you need an exact solution.
QE was the bailout, primarily. It is what economists call monetary policy, with the other side of economic policy being called fiscal policy. The fiscal side of the bailout was much smaller, amost by 3 orders of magnitude. Anyways, it's Ok to be new to a subject but you shouldn't state as much in the first sentence and then start pronouncing what look to be conclusions in the second.
As long as the government can keep spending more every year, everyone is happy. This will apparently work forever. Best not to ask questions about how this affects the poor that don't have inflation hedges such as real estate or stocks.
> US politics is absurd to begin with: congress orders the US government to spend money (via the budget bill), but then forbids the US government from actually implementing that spending in practice (via the debt ceiling and refusing to raise taxes)

I believe it is actually even worse than that, because many government purchases of goods and services are pay on delivery. The budget authorizes some department or agency to make a purchase, they do so, and then later after the purchase is delivered and the bill presented--the department or agency can't pay the bill because of the debt ceiling.

The debt has already been incurred, so the debt ceiling does nothing to reduce the deficit or the national debt--all it does is stop us for making payments on debt already incurred.
Polygraph tests “work” because those being tested believe that they work. But people don’t believe in phrenology, so it wouldn’t work.
> Besides which, that sounds like a One-nation policy. That sort of sounds-sorta-racist/nationalist ideology won't fly in modern Australia.

Your first paragraph was fine. This is over the line. Bullshit like this is why people of opposing viewpoints can't discuss things - because assholes label them like this. "Oh, but i didn't call them racist!" Stop playing games. We aren't idiots.

If you can't keep discourse harming comments like this to yourself, you shouldn't bother at all, because you make it impossible for actually reasonable people to discuss different viewpoints.

Or you can just continue then wonder why politics are "so bad". Look in the mirror.
This is kind of how research at universities and public research institutes is funded by grants. You get money to do research, you publish a paper on your research and if it is deemed to have made enough impact, more grants will be funded and you get more money to continue.
Chef CEO says he’ll continue to work with ICE in spite of protests
Conversely, those same practices prevented others from being in a position where they could have likewise been generous. The iron fist of concentrated power, even when wrapped in a velvet glove of generosity, is simply bad for society.
The question is do we need nuclear and the risks? Can renewables like wind, hydro, and solar provide what we need cheaper and without the dangers associated with nuclear? If so, then why even mess with it?
I've been doing this with directories/text files/a handful of shell functions for the last few years. It's not _great_, so I'd love if there was a better tool that supported a similar "storage backend". Being able to grep everything, sort by modtime, etc. is pretty nice.
Right now workers often put in more "give back" than they get paid I often had to work 20 hours to get paid for 8, forcing workers to do 12 hours a day for free is a great deal even if it mentally and physically breaks them who cares they're just temporary. I didn't work for Google but I assume the culture is the same as those places who forced me to work that hard.
Safari's content blockers are super easy to circumvent by anti-ad-blocking tech.

That many publishers don't do that already is a mystery, probably because visitors with ad-blocking are still a minority and publishers don't want to piss them off.

As a disclaimer I was in a team working on such technology. The hardest to beat is uBlock Origin, being the most capable from a technical perspective. And we left it completely alone, a good strategy for angry users having a last resort solution to migrate to instead of investigating why AdBlock Plus isn't working.

And also by not having a company behind it, a partnership with uBlock Origin for "acceptable ads" isn't possible. Which is why the whole industry, Google included, is scared of it and it's no wonder that they've taken steps to kill it in Chrome for desktop ;-)
Because yields compress and realize gains ahead of time. Imagine someone issues a risk free 10% bond for 1 year, you buy it for 90 and it will pay 100 in a year. Next, imagine that the rate compresses to 5% within a week. The bond trades at ~95. You can sell it for a ~5% gain realized within a week.

Yields have been collapsing since 1981 (Volker inflation arrest):

https://www.multpl.com/10-year-treasury-rate

BTW: a similar thing happened to stocks, but with far more volatility:

https://www.multpl.com/shiller-pe
Did a minor variation on it which I think gives nicer colors on most screens:

https://www.colorbox.io/#steps=10#hue_start=119#hue_end=0#hu...
It’s simple math, a Nuclear power plant that can produce power at 90% capacity factor at 10c/kWh can be used to produce power at a 45% capacity factor but at ~20c/kWh. In effect that high capacity factor is also a demand to maintain cost competitiveness.

Granted, you can operate nuclear when the spot price is below your true cost to produce assuming it stays above your marginal price, but you now need to make up the difference.

As to seasonality, demand is also seasonal, which again is bad for nuclear. Further, when sourcing wind you can locate it based on seasonal considerations. The high correlation between solar production and AC usage ends up being a useful feature not a bug.
Opponents?

My political opponents are actual, non-embarrassed millionaires and billionaires from families of millionaires and billionaires.

My political allies are temporarily embarrassed millionaires, from the folks accepting below-market salaries to work at a potential unicorn to the folks buying literal lotto tickets at the corner store. A few of them are no longer temporarily embarrassed, having joined the right startup, which only goes to demonstrate that the worldview is correct. Things worked out for them without unionizing, clearly things will work out for me too one day.
the unions tend to have an effect in favor of union’s leadership
Couldn't resist posting this excerpt:

---

And while Boeing’s engineers toiled to get McDonnell’s lemon planes into the sky, their own hopes of designing a new plane to compete with Airbus, Boeing’s only global market rival, were shriveling. Under the sway of all the naysayers who had called out the folly of the McDonnell deal, the board had adopted a hard-line “never again” posture toward ambitious new planes. Boeing’s leaders began crying “crocodile tears,” Sorscher claimed, about the development costs of 1995’s 777, even though some industry insiders estimate that it became the most profitable plane of all time. The premise behind this complaining was silly, Sorscher contended in PowerPoint presentations and a Harvard Business School-style case study on the topic. A return to the “problem-solving” culture and managerial structure of yore, he explained over and over again to anyone who would listen, was the only sensible way to generate shareholder value. But when he brought that message on the road, he rarely elicited much more than an eye roll. “I’m not buying it,” was a common response. Occasionally, though, someone in the audience was outright mean, like the Wall Street analyst who cut him off mid-sentence:

“Look, I get it. What you’re telling me is that your business is different. That you’re special. Well, listen: Everybody thinks his business is different, because everybody is the same. Nobody. Is. Different.”

And indeed, that would appear to be the real moral of this story: Airplane manufacturing is no different from mortgage lending or insulin distribution or make-believe blood analyzing software—another cash cow for the one percent, bound inexorably for the slaughterhouse.
I had this for years, but recent security-changes to browsers make it not work:

https://github.com/skx/bookmarks.public

Will work if you move the bookmark data into the main script, but then it is less easy to maintain and less clear.
I'm going to be a bit bolshy here. Every time I see or hear the word Art, my back goes up. I'd never say that art is worthless, it might be one of the few valuable things in life, but a lot of Art that gets done seems to have no value, even aesthetic.

What art would you say is a valuable artistic endeavour? To note, I can quite consider science to be largely artistic (as well as applied philosophy), so it's not a clear area.
I can't remember where I heard it, but an interviewer asked Obama what his hardest decision was in office and he responded "the trillion dollars coin". In retrospect it seems absolutely massive in terms of setting precedence, but at the time it just seemed like part of the news cycle.
And it was posted by the same person too.
Hydro has killed more people and ruined more land than Nuclear ever will.
One of my undergrad neuroscience professors used to like to say that phrenology was based on three hypotheses:

1. Cognitive capacities or traits are often centered in particular regions of the brain.

2. The degree of expression or strength of those capacities is correlated with the size of the region.

3. Those size differences can be detected from the outer surface of the skull.

Only the third is false. (The first two are true to varying degrees for particular capacities or traits, of course...)
> both some of the poorest urban cores and wealthiest suburbs

> highly unequal, metro areas

You're saying the same thing as the article, IMHO.
I found it pretty surprising how much they romanticized his years of working instead of sleeping. That’s a dangerous thing to promote.
The answer is yes, we need nuclear because there's no chance we'll get to 100% renewable energy in time to make a difference, nuclear could fill the niche we need to make wind and solar generation feasible.
It's hard to pinpoint where it originated but anti-union sentiment existed conversationally my entire life. The view being that union's are big inefficient bureaucracies of lazy people who get nothing done.

It parallels the view of government I grew up with.

Never really questioned where this view came from though, but my guess would be persistent long term marketing by interested parties. "Nudging" if you will.

That's what socialism, union's, and co-ops are up against. A sentiment that's been groomed over a long time, that makes you feel like a Commie or a conspirator if you question it.

It's lead me to think that capitalism has become a religion. If you question it you get labeled subconsciously by otherwise reasonable peers.
Not sure how you square those two. Could you elaborate? Any less durable form of organizing seems likely to have its work undone by the very well-organized and durable cadre of owners/management
Union tech is a very interesting startup idea. How do union organizers keep track of members, handle dues, plan, and communicate?
I love DIY homes but, in the negatives it lists...

> Poor temperature control, noise level, and not so temporary

I'm wondering why you would build a yurt instead of one of the numerous more traditional wood frame green pre-fabs, which would essentially eliminate all of these negatives?
What performance? Build a DDA out of the union of all the patterns and run it over each URL. Now you have O(1) (with low constant factors) matching no matter how many patterns you have. The DFA itself takes space and memory dereferences aren't free either, but even huge DFAs can be very compact.
Why in the hell would they do that in this documentary?
Or the unions are composed of reprehensible bigots who support the Vietnam war and are bad on race
The trap that I’ve seen people get into is thinking they can just blindly step through code and they’ll eventually work out the problem. I think that’s the usage of debuggers that you’re describing. And it’s a bit of a trap, maybe you start out with a targeted breakpoint but then wind up stepping through stuff without any real idea what you’re doing, mostly treading water.

Effective use of printf and breakpoints is, IMO, as a tool in logically thinking through the problem. You work out some belief of the problem, you see how this belief being wrong could cause the bug but you can’t see how the belief could be wrong, so you use debugging tools to check your assumption. This is imo the easiest and quickest way to find something surprising. And once the assumption is either validated or invalidated, it’s time to go back to thinking through the problem logically.

Personally I prefer printf to breakpoints most of the time, because they leave a trail that I can keep going back to when thinking through the problem logically, and because they build up as I work through a problem. I think printf debugging suffers the “trap” issue less for this reason, but sometimes it’s nice to do a little exploratory debugging once the assumption is invalidated.
Blames everyone but herself? The subtitle of this article is ”As a young writer, my naiveté about the publishing process nearly led me to financial ruin. Here’s how to avoid my mistakes.”

Other quotes from the article:

”I’d somehow missed several critical aspects of the business, and that was on me (to some extent)”

”My publisher didn’t tell me I had to get that website. And no one said I should be buying fancy cocktails. That was all my choice”

”Despite making some poor choices”

”Let’s take a pause. What could I have done differently [list of 6 things she could have done differently] But I didn’t do any of those things.”

”All I could think was that I had wasted the one opportunity the universe had given me to write my way out”
It's certainly limiting, though you can write (or find implementations[0] of) custom types[1] that can be pretty powerful (void where prohibited, limitations apply).

[0] https://github.com/martin-georgiev/postgresql-for-doctrine
[1] https://www.doctrine-project.org/projects/doctrine-dbal/en/2...
Probably the most interesting and relevant part to HN

> It smacked of the sort of screwup a 23-year-old intern might have made—and indeed, much of the software on the MAX had been engineered by recent grads of Indian software-coding academies making as little as $9 an hour, part of Boeing management’s endless war on the unions that once represented more than half its employees
Productivity is measured by dividing GDP by total hours worked, with the assumptions that GDP is caused by work and that the relationship is linear. The latter assumption is false and the former is highly suspect.

You raise a good question about localization of GDP. The global economy is a highly-connected network. It's often unclear how to draw valid conclusions from national accounts, let alone the local accounting attempted here.

That said, I think there most likely is a trend of the kind imagined by the authors and that it's showing up in these figures. Showing up is the most it's doing though.
This seems like the right answer. If the polygraph is able to essentially determine some sort of nervousness beyond normal, then someone who really believes they work and is not used to lying is going to be really damn nervous trying to lie and get caught up.

But if someone knows what it really does, and then just knows you just have to be calm and say whatever you want, then it won't work.