skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It’s great if you worked crazily hard and, against all odds, somehow paid for college, landed a job with an amazing salary, and have remained clear sighted about necessities vs. desires. You might just be the only truly self-made man in America.

If so, in all seriousness, congratulations on a remarkable accomplishment.

I would, though, caution you against thinking that your own experience is reproducible in any reliable way, or that it can serve as a useful prescription for success for others. When folks complain about privilege, they aren’t talking about you.
> Nobody wants to be the elected official who irradiated their constituency

Ummm... I wish it were that straightforward but I can't be confident of that. Power doesn't balance out as much as we'd like it to. There are a lot of elected officials who are ok with doing as bad to their constituency and they get away with it fine. And by get away that might mean they don't get another term but they take their money and go live a life of leisure. No jail time, nothing of major consequence. And usually they'll keep playing the political corruption game using the connections built up. (Eg: bringing in "preferred investors" for a "commission")

Reality around political power is ugly af :(
IMO that's the easy part. Getting in $100K+ that isn't going to be taxed at 50% is going to be the hard part (The Netherlands, fun place).

The trick to affording things is mostly about earning. Saving definitely has its place, but if you don't earn enough, you can't save it either.

And I know that there are quite some hedge fund managers out there wasting money left and right, but in all honesty, it's tougher to get to that point than just to save.

At least, when you're me. I suppose for some people it's easier to make bank and spend it as much as possible as well. They wouldn't know how to save up.
>You don't get to be a billionaire by being bad at managing your money, nor do you get to be a billionaire by investing in less productive investments.

Since close to half of America's billionaires inherited their fortunes, that's not really something you can prove. And that fact that it makes money doesn't necessarily mean it's beneficial to society, nor does it even mean it's the most economically productive possible use of resources.

>By taxing the 1%, you are removing money from the most productive investments.

Billionaires aren't the 1%. And "the most productive" investments isn't something you can prove or even make a semi-convincing argument for.
It's a problem in the US. The Galileo high accuracy service (HAS) is broadcast on 1278.75 MHz (the E6 signal). But the 1240 to 1300 MHz band is not allocated to satellite radionavigation in the US. It's allocated to radar with a secondary allocation for amateur radio.

Because of that allocation, the FCC cannot guarantee that Galileo HAS receivers will not be interfered with.

https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/FCC-18-158A1.pdf
When wages increase, so do prices. Happens every time. So I really don't think that's a solid start for America, at all.
Usually some kind person posts an Outline link or an Archive link to the full article in the discussions. But I’ve also seen those get buried in the discussions about the article. My problem with paywalls is that even if you pay, most of them [1] still thrust trackers (including third party ones) and scripts on you. I find that to be evil. So I refuse to play that game with them and stay away.

To your point, what I’d like to see is a non-paywalled link, whenever shared by someone in the discussions, “pinned to the top” without any votes for it (or assigned a fixed number of votes). Considering that the default interface of HN is all about minuscule fonts that most people won’t even notice, the “web” option is not discoverable by everyone (and seriously, what does “web” even mean when you’re already on the web?). Hence a pinned comment with the same font and size as the rest of the comments, but with an indicator showing it’s pinned.

[1]: As an exception, Ars Technica is the only bigger site I know where a paid subscription means you don’t get any ads or trackers.
Yes, I like being able to see my licence expiry, demerit and rego expiry all on one place.

Our rego is all digital in SA and we don't have rego stickers. I have been getting text reminders for years but sometimes you just want to check when things expire without logging into a website and navigating through lots of layers.

I expect NSW is the same but our app also takes boat licences, heavy vehicle licences, occupational licences as well as vehicle reg. I get that it isn't for everyone but it is a convenience.

For comparison:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=au.gov.sa.my
Do you always verify them with the QR reader app? It'd be pretty easy for somebody to display fake data on their own device.
Tips and Tricks to supercharge your chatbot
React Suite 4.1.0 release, support for RTL
Show HN: Website for sharing and learning about animation and comics
Heck, if you save 120K per year and work for 2 years, you can basically retire to places like Thailand and live like a king.
I think most software falls into this category these days. The majority of software based companies are automating processes that humans can or could do manually - they're just being integrators, linking things and tasks together in useful ways.

I don't have a statistic, but I'd be willing to bet the majority of code in existence is not algorithmic in nature.
The magic of money supply ie Quantitative Easing.
Lessons from Stockholm’s bold congestion-reduction plan
To fund education and to avoid people to be crippled by college debts at 24.

To fund healthcare and to avoid diabetics to go bankrupt and die because they saved on insulin shot ; or all the people who have to take a second mortgage for basic cancer treatment, if they can, and finally go also bankrupt.

To fund crippling public infrastructure and investment.

To fund cultural events and promote art and diversity beside that culturaly dead hollywood movies pipeline ; scientific research ; libraries ; promote intelligent television programming not only motivated by a quick buck by pushing deep in your throat stupid ads for Coca-Cola and their fake, Mac Donald and other companies responsible for promoting detrimental products for health or envirronement ; to fund compagn to raise awareness on foundamental issues like global warming and stop the spread of misinformation by corporate chills or religious nutjobs.

The list go on and on...

All these public expense are the source of wealth redistribution.
No, that's category 3, pi^2, or roughly 10 times the estimate.

Category 1 is

>I've written a script to get the data from tables 1 to 24 of this database, now I need to write one for table 25. It should take me an hour.

>Oh look, it took me nearly 2 hours because I forgot that table is owned by a different user to all the other ones and I didn't have the right permissions.
If you can break them down to such a lower granularity, doesn't that imply the software is trivial?

No it doesn't imply this. One granular piece of Waymo's software is "develop a component that understands the external environment as well or better than a human". It's easy to say that, and it's even relatively easy to break that down into risk scenarios etc.

But developing it is.. non trivial. And there are parts in it which it was unclear if they were possible.

But that is because large parts of Waymo were a research project, not software engineering.
This is completely and factually wrong, you should delete.
Whoa this is really cool. I've seen janet on HN a few times now!

It's a pretty great language
Ballet has destroyed the emotional well-being (and, in some cases, adolescent bodies) of every woman I know who participated. They all have extreme issues with body image, self-esteem, and the perception of achievement, and all of them ascribe these problems to their ballet teachers.

(To be more specific, I'm talking about four women. One of them was semi-pro before changing her mind and going to college. The others just did it for fun as kids, not unlike other kids playing recreational basketball.)
Does anyone use Swift (in production) for backend services not related at all to the Apple ecosystem? It seems like a better Golang to me, but the tooling space only targets Apple stuff.
Show HN: Multiclass Adaboost using SAMME
Hey powerbroker, would love to have your opinions over at https://collective.energy
From the same guy: https://craftinginterpreters.com great stuff
No, if anything they should be prioritized (though perhaps below ShowHn, AskHn, and notable bloggers.

Where hacker news aggregates articles interesting to the technology community, many of the best researched articles are going to be from outfits that are selling articles instead of a captive audience.

Given the ire of digital advertising, invasive targeting, Amazon fake reviews, Facebook uninstalls, and Google avoidance; it seems that paying publishers for articles would be the top course of action to avoid bias, idea pollution, clickbait, etc.

The next similar source of topical information that's not tracking, only selling viewers as consumers, and has any viability is volunteers posting personal non-monetized blogs... Which would lack funding or efforts to journalistically research. That is at least absent state media companies like the BBC.
I've seen this in the Persian community as well. I was dating a Persian woman and she was telling me how proud of her brother she was-- he had become a bank vice president and bought a home (at the absolute height of the first housing crisis, think 500k condo in Anaheim), and even purchased a Nissan GT-R (100k give or take). Eventually, it got out that he was making 80k, which I was making a multiple of and wouldn't even CONSIDER these extravagances.

I also have several Persian friends who seem to piss away money like it's not a thing, but that's the most egregious example. Still, love them to death :)
I like the concept of encoding properties, like a boolean of non-empty, in an object.

Beyond that, this article further convinced me type systems are for the pedantic. A given function signature is impossible? Seems like just another strength of a dynamic language.
That’s the idea. Get big enough and you can afford to hire a small country to maintain the tech debt (and in many cases rewrite certain parts).
Sure, but what about the history of technology leads you to believe that would be the case? Are smart phones only owned by the super wealthy? Computers? Antibiotics?
It was controversial at the time, resulting in the US kicking NZ out of their security alliance (something that was of no detriment to the US), and continues to be controversial every time the topic of a US ship coming to NZ is brought up. The fact that the only outcome this policy has ever achieved is the prevention of allied navy visiting NZ is a very consistent source of controversy in NZ. To claim otherwise is simply rewriting history.
MoSCoW, I learned this studying CS
I think Neumann's package, especially the $185 million "consulting fee", was particularly disgusting and outrageous.

That said, I think 4 months of severance is quite generous, so not sure what these folks are complaining about.
Datadog has ~9000 customers. I imagine the respective open-source tools have many more customers than that, which says something about the perceived value of the two approaches. Also, Datadog wraps many tools into one whereas the open-source solutions have singular purposes. It's an apples to oranges comparison.
Tl;Dr 4 months severance

But we are supposed to be mad that the largest and founding equity holder got money for his equity commiserate with the market value that another equity holder requires so they dont get bonesawed by their own limited partners
Do you know about the law of large numbers? Basically it says that in the long run "things even out." Suppose you flip a coin 100 times. It can happen that you only get one heads in those 100 flips, but would you worry about it?

In my city the electric scooter companies have carpet bombed the city centre with their vehicles. When I'm downtown can I be certain that one is available to take me from place A to B? I can't and in the worst case I'll have to walk a block to find one to ride on. Big deal.

The electricity grid works the same. It doesn't matter if one wind farm isn't producing because there are so many of them. As long as the total output from them is big enough. Think of it like a RAID system.
Better article with more facts and less hyperbole here: https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2019-11-07/peter-thie...
By providing them a job with a decent living wage.
Interesting to see how much more excitement there is for AI in the developing world. They're the ones with the biggest problems so it makes sense. Seems NA/Europe feels like they have the most to lose. While the reality should hopefully be win-win, it does seem likely to level the playing field around the world. But a hyper-capitalist country like the US is definitely going to have the biggest social challenges adapting to job losses.
You can. You just have to write your own code instead of using NPM. Node itself comes with a few libraries, but they are fairly minimal.
As a non programmer who doesn't use dev.to, can anyone ELI5 what is dev.to and what is it's value prop/attracted funding?
Approximately. Not all annuities have the protections of a pension, such as inflation adjustment.
I wish I could be surprised by stuff like this. Feels like this stuff is the norm, not the exception. Unfortunately, I don't see how this is going to change anytime soon.
Newtonian mechanics fails only at extreme scales as far as mass is concerned, to break it completely you need to solve it for the entire mass of the universe, or for a singularity (the latter breaks GR too).

Newtonian mechanics is still the primary tool for astrophysics, and anything we do in space.

In some cases PPN is used but no one is solving non linear equations outside of extreme cases which are usually theoretical.
Questions for Prospective Managers (2018)
I'm mostly just tired of all the hype, and at this point really wouldn't mind another AI winter.

Machine learning ended up being a useful technique to add to the classical computer vision toolbox to do things like object identification and semantic segmentation. These things were almost impossible to do robustly before, and now they're relatively straightforward, if still a bit challenging.

Same with audio identification and synthesis. It's a lot better than the old Markov chain based systems for these specific tasks.

But that's about it - it's useful as a tool for certain classes of highly specific tasks, but has been largely crap everywhere else.

The promised super smart products that were end-to-end "AI" never really materialized. Smart speakers are shitty and pointless. And IBM renamed all of their products Watson.
See also: Compile-Time Snake
https://github.com/mattbierner/STT-C-Compile-Time-Snake
The GPS constellation is considerably more robust to a ground station outage. If the ground station goes out, the satellites themselves are a distributed network and they use each others' data to correct themselves. It can operate in this mode for something like 60 days before it's unable to continue correcting itself.

Of course, if the ground station failure was a soft failure, and instead of ceasing to upload, it began uploading incorrect data, the GPS location results would be arbitrarily bad to unusable. It's not clear to me whether the Galileo outage was because of a hard ground station failure or a soft one. But given that one of the contributing factors was that the backup system was not online, it would indicate to me that this was a hard failure that GPS would have been able to correct.
Oh! Thanks for the tip! Will try it out!
Thank you for this. I wasn't aware of the filter. I had heard of which plants were most beneficial for the compound they remove and that Kamal recommended growing the plants hydroponically.
One problem may be that not all roads have cell phone coverage, at least where I live, so a cop pulling you up may have no way to access an online database. It's also possible for the communications or back-end database to fail at any time.
The problem here is not specificity, it's 'unknowns'.

You run intro problems you don't foresee until you hit them.

The second unspoken Elephant in the room is 'changing requirements' which is the #1 reason for software delay.

Lastly, I would say that Engineers themselves have a tendency to overthink a lot of things and develop all sorts of micro-features that they might think are 'obviously useful' but really just represent bloat. Good example of this is when building an API for another team are the various overridden variations of functions. "Hey they'll obviously need an async version of that" when really it's not obvious.

So combine: unknowns, micro pivots and needless complexity ... and you have 500% over schedule.
I had this idea two days ago, but to do it with Douay-Rheims. Then I fiddled around and came to the conclusion that my laptop is too bright for heavy reading even with white text on black background. Maybe an OLED laptop would alleviate eye strain for long reading at night, can anyone confirm?
That’s true, but not unique to sidewalks. Much of the same arguments likely apply to bike lanes.
This is one of the core reasons why we've built https://saasify.sh, an extremely simple solution to launch FaaS-based businesses and start validating product / market fit in hours instead of months.

I agree with the author in terms of estimates and their assessment of the process, but the point I'd like to make is that the vast majority of those 12 weeks it took them to launch the MVP weren't spent on core, differentiating functionality, but rather on boilerplate that's common to every SaaS product.

Important but non-core features like billing, accounts, documentation, and a marketing site end up causing many projects like this to fail before they even get launched.

If you can launch MVPs like this significantly quicker albeit in a more constrained yet platform-agnostic way (e.g., using serverless functions as an abstraction), it becomes really powerful for makers like the author of this article to focus on core value and ship quickly instead of wasting time on all of this other stuff.
"The promised super smart products that were end-to-end \"AI\" never really materialized" What do you have in mind?

IBM and Watson definitely hyped their shit beyond anything reasonable. Open AI is also responsible of this. And smart speakers are definitely pointless.

Still I think we are seeing some really cool things, like voice recognition, translation, google answering questions directly, fancy camera stuff, etc.
> Complete externalization of the problem for a nominal fee.

If you call $750MM/year a nominal fee, your definition of nominal is maybe a bit non-standard?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_Waste_Policy_Act#Nucle...
What does your dynamic language do when you take the first element of an empty list? There is no obvious "correct" thing to do. Furthermore, whatever you do return is unlikely to be the same sort of thing that is returned for a non-empty list.

A dynamic language will have a behavior that corresponds to some sort of type signature, and it's not possible to write behavior that corresponds with the type signatures given as examples of "impossible" in the article.

A type signature is merely a statement about behavior, so it's nonsensical to make a false statement about the behavior, and Haskell catches this.
"We were not out to win over the Lisp programmers; we were after the C++ programmers. We managed to drag a lot of them about halfway to Lisp." - Guy Steele, Java spec co-author
It happens because building things to be completely indestructible is expensive and impractical.

Yawn. In other news, if you drop a laptop onto concrete, it will break.
At least the general AI community acknowledges it’s overhyped, unlike blockchain and fintech.
The photo permission is to verify someone else's digital ID by capturing their QR code.
Completely agree, it’s decreasing my engagement because to me those articles are just noise.

I had an idea, perhaps HN could wrap content in outbound links (ie trackable) and disallow commenting/voting on content for users who haven’t followed the outbound link? I have a sneaking suspicion that a lot of the voting is done based solely on headlines (and this is often reflected in the comments addressing the headline much more than the article - not that I’m completely innocent of that myself). People would probably be less likely to upvote something if they got paywalled
It's just micro scale production apparently. More of marketing hype than anything else.
When you join a startup as a normal employee, the vast majority of the upside goes not to you but to the founders and investors. Assume they make at least 100x what you will, or more like 1000x. So if you get a $100k payout in a very good exit as a normal employee in a startup, likely the founders made at least $10mil.

So none of this is surprising except the startup crashed so spectacularly.
The Tech of Pixar: Piper (2017)
Laying off employees and expecting them to sign non-competes for a month of severance (since they are required by WARN to provide 3 of the 4 months) feels very miserly and in bad faith. Why the non-compete?
That's true. I wanted to maintain good continuous delivery practices while minimizing the need to worry about individual resources (e.g. web server, database server, DNS), which is why I opted for Elastic Beanstalk. Then I fell down the Terraform rabbit hole.

Docker definitely gets the job done, but I would still have to worry about dealing with data backups, DNS, and deploying to the server. Heroku worries about all of that for me now.
That severance is way above the market rate of nothing
Sex, Drugs and Fraud: I spent 6-figures on a nightmare of a SaaS Company
So to clarify: what the top-level poster here is calling “non-trivial” you are calling “category 3”, and heuristically estimating that it will take 10x longer than anticipated.

But this (a) is still quite optimistic, and (b) ignores variance. The potential time a new research project could take is unbounded.
Erlang vm is fully preemptive and schedules on something called a reduction. You can call an external function with EFI that can screw things up, but otherwise it's not necessarily on what you might consider a function call .
There is a capital class and there is a non-capital class

The only difference between now and feudal society is that the peasants knew it