skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I did read that before I asked, I promise :)

I was curious more about how you think about your own time at this phase in your career -- are you mostly 'playing'? Is this "serious play"? Is it motivated by anything beyond personal interest?

I ask because I'm monitoring my own projects and time commitments more seriously as I hit my mid 40s and trying to make sense of how and when I've had the best impact, globally, personally, to my own happiness, etc.

One of the keys for me seems to have been to pay attention to what interests/intrigues me, and I'm curious what your experience is on that front as well -- you have a pretty unique amount of experience assessing and watching companies that have in some cases made a major amount of change in the world.

Anyway, I guess I'm just asking for a sort of 'mid career thoughts' essay from you, or at least wondering if you're thinking much about it.
It might surprise you to know that many people believe in, and is codified in law in most countries, the concept of intellectual property: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_property

In fact it is this very idea, and the notion that an author of a work should be able to dictate the terms under which it may be distributed, that underlies the concept of copyleft on which the GNU General Public License is based. If no-one respected intellectual property, then any company could take GPL code and incorporate it into their own closed-source products without distributing the resulting source code (as the license requires) or even acknowledge the original author. All other FOSS licenses similarly rely on intellectual property as a legal concept.

I do agree that the words like "stolen" or "theft" do not really make sense in the context of intellectual property or digital artifacts, due to their differences from physical objects. I'm not sure what other terms to use, though I'd like to see a consensus reached. Nonetheless, the fact that data can be copied for effectively zero cost does not make it moral or legal to do so when the author has made it available under specific terms.
"no price except an acknowledgement it would be more expensive than most"

So they were starting at the premium end.
I don’t think anyone is going to give you internal information, but think testing and infrastructure
Thanks a lot for that statistics!
Not Uber related, but as soon as ERP systems or warehouse management or logistics and supply chain management are concerned I sometimes have the impression that a lot of "start-ups" are falling in the same trap. There is simply no way to beat the likes of SAP, Microsoft or even Oracle in the sheer man hours, resources and research spent on their systems. And yes, they are cumbersome and UX sicks. But then they are extremely powerful out of the box, and completely auditable. Maybe it was necessary back when Amazon started due to limitations with webshop integration (or existaznce as far that is concerned). Nowadays not so much.
> Automatic token scanning

Nice. I hope we contributed to it in some way: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13667386
> Uber engineers used many bogus reasons to implement NIH projects

In my experience this is one of the most toxic diseases an engineering org can catch. It often comes from smart, technically capable engineers who are more concerned with impressing their peers than growing the company. They come up with a BS reason to re-implement some rock solid 3rd party tech, spend ages doing it, only to leave the company as it starts to comes crumbling down. At that point other engineers have to put in massive effort to rip out their buggy timesink, and replace it with the open source library/database/protocol/whatever that was the obvious choice from the start.

If people like this exist in your org, you either need to convince them of the error of their ways, or let them go. The damage they cause when left unchecked is just too great.
Potential bypass of Runas user restrictions
This is a great little write up, but the third bullet point should be:

- Select every button with a parent element that has the css class “grid-coupon-clip-button”
Ruby isn't an approved language at Google, I haven't heard it being talked about almost at all.

Python gets some dislike, and there are a few significant projects trying to get off it. As a blanket statement I don't think dynamic languages work well at a company like Google.
I absolutely love the knowledge he shares with the world. I wonder why he delivers the way he does. He's a character. Sometimes I wish I could get the knowledge without the character.
It's really not. I think you're giving Linux far too much credit. If it really did "just work" and was that easy, you'd see way more computers in the wild using it. It's literally a free alternative that can be installed on any computer. The two biggest barriers to adoption are non-existent with Linux and yet it still has a minuscule user base comparatively. Unless you don't exclude servers, Linux doesn't "just work" for most people.
A friend of mine posted https://kommunity.com/
Sure, a garbage tool licensed under the GPL isn’t all that useful.
They wouldn't make as much money if everyone clipped the coupon. However, most of the time, the coupons aren't really special. The loyalty club member price is already shown on the shelf anyway. Most "coupons" are more of an advertisement for the old folks who still do that. The incentive for the actually good coupons is to get you to come into the store and buy other stuff alongside the on-sale item. If I only have a few key items on my shopping list, I might be more inclined to buy more if the coupon app shows buy one get one half off for something. Or I might buy a different brand than I normally would because there is a coupon only on the app.
Yup, the myth of oppression

Australian aborigins or Navajo indians could say that they feel oppressed, and they have totally original cultures and languages.

This people instead are far, really far from being oppressed and show a severe case of being chronically spoiled.

They are richer than most spaniards, enjoy the best infrastructures and an excelent health care system (paid with taxes of all spaniards), have more job opportunities than many, and tailor-made markets and industries located there for their profit

They live in a fantasy world where you can just decide to ignore the law when and as you will, or close an airport or train station (because you are a "freedom figther" aren't you?), and say later that you just were joking and is unfair.
I've also seen startups destroyed by a founder divorce, but a pre-nup wouldn't/didn't help. The problem (in all 3 cases) was that the founder's concentration, drive, motivation, and confidence was destroyed. Divorce is hugely emotionally tumultuous: people going through it usually do not have the mental bandwidth to spend on something as attention-demanding as a startup. It also usually leads to big changes in lifestyle, goals, and motivations: many folks I know who have gotten divorced completely reexamine what's important in their life. (In some cases, this leads to the divorce rather than the other way around.) Very often a startup, or the specific startup they're working on, isn't one of those things once the dust settles.

The lesson I took from it wasn't to get a pre-nup, it was to invest time in your relationship even while doing the startup, and get your spouse on-board with it. That's somewhat incompatible with the Silicon Valley image of a maniacal laser-focused startup founder, but then, a large number of them have a wreckage of a personal life that ultimately ends up costing them a lot of what they've made in startups.
You need a lot more than shoes to run a marathon. The time and environment required to get there is much less accessible than something like soccer, football, or basketball.
Eh, that's who we thought until I was unconscious from a ski accident, and my gf (now wife) wasn't allowed access.
> You have a point, but I think you miss when you say this was a product of authoritarian rule. Catalonia is basically like an US State. They have control of their education, healthcare, police etc, they have their own parliament, and so on. Catalonia already has autonomy.

It's wrong to say that Catalonia is basically a US state, since US is a federation while Spain is a unitary state. This means the central government can overrule whatever the communities decide on. They don't have the same authority over ruling, as the central power has in the case of Spain.

Then I suppose one of the bigger issues remain in answering "Is Catalonia autonomous enough?" and "Who decides how autonomous Catalonia should be?"
I think the point of the article was that they used to get hundreds of dollars in CASH. they then had some fees they had to pay to the club, etc.. and they were contractors, so they got a 1099 for the transactions the club had on its record. Now that they need to pay a wage, ALL cash comes to the club, and then they get a percentage of it back as commissions. This means ALL of the cash is now accounted for, making their tax liability much, much higher, because its actually getting reported .
> I had to abandon some of my favorite tools when I left university.

Tools, or libraries? The distinction I'm making here is between code that gets distributed with the final product, and code that only runs on your machine or just internally in the corporate network.

I can understand a company not wanting to intermix GPL code with proprietary code that is shipped to customers, but not being able to use GPL software internally is a different matter and would be very strange.
This could really turn the tide for some open source projects. You should be able to use the credits for S3 storage, or EC2 usage (testing, etc.), or even using things like CodeBuild to build nightly archives. The only question I have is that since the credits expire after 12 months, can you renew them every year?

Yes, this might "hook" you into use AWS (that's why they are doing it) but it could also give smaller projects a leg up and help them become large projects. Seems like a win-win to me.
The idea works but might not be cost-effective.

Small steam turbines are not highly economical. If you are using salt water as a working fluid with intention to desalinate you will have to get rid of the salt effectively so it doesn't clog anything.

If you have a fresh-water closed loop then that simplifies things, and the ocean could be a good heat sink, but it competes with using some other kind of heat sink at a different location. For instance, thermal solar plants have often been built in desert locations so they get the most sunlight.

See

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concentrated_solar_power

and

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_thermal_energy_conversio...
It looks like the number of threads in the threadpool is fixed. If have 1 one thread in the thread pool, is it possible to dead lock it by queuing a Task A the blocks waiting for Task B to do something, where A starts executing before B?

Do you think it would make sense to dynamically adjust the number of threads in the pool? An example of a thread pool that dynamically adjusts the number of threads is .NET. The algorithm is described by Matt Warren[1] and a paper[2]. In addition to the C++ version Matt links to, there is a C#[3] implementation.

[1]: https://mattwarren.org/2017/04/13/The-CLR-Thread-Pool-Thread...
[2]: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.487...
[3]: https://github.com/dotnet/corert/blob/master/src/System.Priv...
I've never heard that folklore, and the Ruby team is more than welcome to apply for support.
An attempt at a polite way of saying "I'm not going to talk about it." Please take a hint instead of downvoting :)
Insurers just pass the costs through to consumers. Health insurance premiums have been going up a stupid amount, too.
That's exactly my point and you don't seem to catch it, it's not what you can build, it's what you can sell. Focusing on the engineering prowess is moot when there's no market for the beautifully built Gizmo you spent so much VC money on.
I've gone ahead and added this response to the docs here: https://docs.paperspace.com/gradient/notebooks/about#contain... :)
Well that doesn't contradict anything that I have said :) My question remains - what do you mean by coherence? I argue that it is precisely the property that there is a consistent order of operations a single memory memory location so you can't say that Relaxed operations don't satisfy coherence.
It's used all over the place. Around the time I was leaving (2016) I was hearing of some major projects that were planning their rewrite to include a migration to Ruby.

Amazon rarely likes to talk about how things are built at the nuts and bolts level.
XEmacs docs sound a little bit different: http://xemacs.org/Documentation/21.5/html/internals_3.html#T...

> As described above, Emacs began life in the mid-1970’s as a series of editor macros for TECO, an early editor on the PDP-10. In the early 1980’s it was rewritten in C as a collaboration between Richard M. Stallman (RMS) and James Gosling (the creator of Java); its extension language was known as Mocklisp. This version of Emacs-in-C formed the basis for the early versions of GNU Emacs and also for Gosling’s Unipress Emacs, a commercial product. Because of bad blood between the two over the issue of commercialism, RMS pretty much disowned this collaboration, referring to it as “Gosling Emacs”.

My impression is that "Gosling Emacs" is misunderstood as "Gosling wrote all of it", even though it just meant "the dirty commercial version of Gosling and RMS Emacs".
> All Gosling Emacs code was removed from GNU Emacs by version 16.56 (July 1985). with the possible exception of a few particularly involved sections of the display code. The latest versions of GNU Emacs (since August 2004) do not feature the skull-and-crossbones warning.
That is indeed an extreme example, given how matter of factly they teach transposons in molecular bio these days.

When we couldn't get a paper published, my old PI would always joke, "There's always BBRC!", referring to the journal biochemical and biophysical research communications. The impact factor was and still is quite low, and it would make the post docs bristle when he said it.

But I once asked him, why BBRC? and he explained that Aaron Ciechanover and Avram Herschko published their first paper on ubiquitinylation (how proteins get tagged for degradation in the proteasome) in that journal [1,2]. It won them a Nobel prize 26 years later and exploded into a huge field. You just never know sometimes.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/26325464/

[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0006291X78...

(The BBRC text is paywalled sorry)
I list like this can be taken as "books I want to read, amongst all those I end up reading" rather than "the books I must read to the last, before I read any others".
Right but now Safeway will update something that will cause this to break, and now people who use this super handy app will expect the maintainer to update it - even if it was just a one-off project that the original developer had no interest in maintaining.

So now people will complain and your inbox is flooded with "please fix this" because people feel entitled when all you really wanted to do was just try some cool thing.
I'm not a parent, but my sister, and many of my friends, are of the life stage where they have kids under 5. The amount of tracking I see them do, especially in the first year of life, is insane. Is there a medical use for it? Do parents share the data with their pediatricians? If not, what's the point? Since all these apps are free, I assume it all just feeds some giant data science model that helps diaper companies advertise better, or something else utterly annoying like that.

(Then again, I usually use a sleep tracker, and aside from a quick glance in the morning, never ever look at the data again. But I figure baby tracking has a decent amount of overhead, and parents are already overworked and overtired enough as it is...)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_hopper
I have often wondered if professional sports in an effort to increase profits, increase the number of games in a season (MLB 162 games, NBA 82, NFL 16) plus pre-season, training camp etc. I think they may actually be decreasing their profitability because the quality of play suffers from the grueling schedules, not only sleep depravation but injuries and etc. Also, there could be a factor of over saturation; the games seem less special if they are on every day.

It would be interesting if one of the major sports leagues would experiment with a reduced schedule to test that theory ? Never happen I know.
Married couples also have legal and implied rights that non-married partners do not have, especially if/when one of the people is seriously injured. There can also be financial benefits for taxes, especially if you have dependents.

If my partner is in the ICU and we're married, I can sit with them and have a say in the care they receive. If we're not married, I often can't sit with them, nor can I get most details about how they're actually doing (HIPPA laws; you can get around this if you put waivers in place before needed), nor have any influence on their care.
> What about spanish-speaking people? Are they not also catalans?

No, they aren't. They are spanish.

As Fernando Pessoa said: my homeland is my language.
Gitbatch – manage your Git repositories in one place
> it's a way of aligning incentives so that two people can each know that the other has their back

But it doesn't align incentives. Instead, it creates unaligned incentives.

In most relationships, one person is more of a spender and one person is more of a saver. Marriage is one big F-U to the saver.

As far as I can tell, the real reasons to get married are the medical decision making and visitation rights. That's about it.
No idea what "bro culture" has to do with what you're listing. All of those game types existed 25+ years ago. One of the first big competitive video games, with large prizes (Carmack's Ferrari), was Quake, which came out in 1996.
Most of what I am writing is pretty basic otoneurological knowledge. Researchers like Bohne, Harding, Dallos, Salt, Lichtenhan, Hudspeth, Moller, Kugler, Drexel et al. have published extensively on this issue. Some links to peer-revieved literature are listed in my Stackexchange post.
I find it interesting that you associate electric versions of lawn tools with less maintenance. It's been my experience that when they break, there's not much you can do (I guess that's where the less comes in) - fixing batteries and motors is harder or impossible compared to small engines for me. All of the other maintenance still applies: sharpening blades, replacing edging wire, oiling moving parts, etc.
Ok now I know to type that in any time getting gas at safeway.

Too bad? I don’t have a car
> it is important to be aware of what projects employees work on (with much less detail)

In my experience, employees get told which project to work on by management, usually through a formal budget / roadmap process which allocates resources to the initiatives being pushed by different stakeholders such as marketing, sales, IT (e.g. for maintenance projects), etc.

So the need is not so much to know what the employees are working on but rather how the projects are going. This is usually handled by steering committees or similar governance bodies, where each successive hierarchical level gets a broader (but necessarily more concise) overview of all the projects they are involved in.

What makes it through these different sieves depends on the company culture and what is considered the "right" level of information. In the worst cases, bad news will be edulcorated, then removed, until every line on the dashboard is green. In more result-driven companies, what makes it to the top is what is susceptible to impact business, so it's going to be the project delays and other bad news. But this process is like the "auto-summarize" feature in Word: a lot of nuance gets lost in the different layers and there's alsways a risk of ending up with nonsense. There's also a lot of mediation being done by middle management.

The closest I've come to direct feedback from the junior employees to the execs at large (>10k FTE) companies is when execs tour the office and come take a look at the grunts in the trenches (this will happen once or twice a year). Inevitably there's an awkward roundtable with a chosen team (usually the one working on the most visible project) where the exec asks each person in the room "what is blocking you and what can I do to help you" while that person's boss and grand-boss glare at them from the back of the room, silently promising retribution to anyone who raises any actual issue.
Gotcha, just got a bad vibe from the "sorry." after visiting apply.ycombinator.com/interviews. Thanks for all the work you all are putting into these
> It’s true that the vast majority of cars won’t be autonomous for “a very long time” so the vast majority of deaths won’t be prevented. But what’s your point? That if the vast majority of the problem can’t be addressed quickly it’s not worth exploring?

My point is that trotting out the 1.25M number when we are very far away from dealing with the vast majority of it is distracting at best. We should instead be talking about the numbers of injuries and fatalities on the countries where autonomous vehicles are most likely to be deployed, and how many of those people could have been saved.

> Cars don’t actually need to be better than humans, or even as good as the average human. They just need to be better than the bottom 5th percentile, prefer safe driving, and not get distracted/drunk.

That's very true, but orthogonal to the point of using realistic numbers.
That's not true for Germany, see my comment above. Germany has nearly completely replaced nuclear with renewables, and is now (slowly) phasing out coal. Coal has been mostly constant with a slight downward trend in the past 15 years.
> were previously obscenely profitable

How can that be. Wouldn't that simply increase the supply of strip clubs, from more getting into something thats that profitable.
It can only be as accurate as the employees reporting to you. Trust in your subordinates to collect and synthesize the right information that will produce the desired results. This strategy relies on the leader being transparent with their team around company and org goals, short comings, etc so they can properly report and frame data.
They already know electric motors and batteries. That gives them at least an edge.

And marketing bs aside, the motors themselves are an impressive technical feat. Although they're high rpm & low torque, so maybe not applicable.
Even as a non-parent, I found this really cute, and touching, and a novel use for data collection that I wouldn't have thought of.

Hell, given a lot of the other stories we're subjected to -- even on HN -- daily, I welcome a nice nerdy human interest story every now and then.
Both of your options already happen.

Basically anyone can apply to the NIH for a grant to run clinical trials. It's not easy: the funding rate for NIH grants in general is in the teens and you'll need to convince the reviews that a) the trial itself generally makes sense and b) you, specifically, can pull it off, but it can be done.

If you find a new use for an existing drug—and run a trial to prove it—the FDA will give you a period of "marketing exclusivity", wherein you will be the only one allowed to market that drug for that condition. It's not quite a patent, but it's meant to be a similar recompense/reward for doing the research.
And yet, the only time any states seceded from the United States, the US declared war on them to bring them back into the Union, then went on to win that war and brought the states back into the Union.