skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A bit of a tangent, but I don't consider "unlimited time off" a perk, at least not automatically.

A guaranteed amount of time off means the company has to pay me for unused vacation if and when I depart. So for those of you who are offered unlimited time off, get a guaranteed and generous minimum, in writing.

After all, if it's unlimited, they shouldn't mind putting "a minimum of four weeks a year" in writing, should they? If they won't, they're probably going to shame you into working all the time and then won't pay you for the vacation you didn't take.
Poloniex | Crypto Wallet Engineer | Boston, MA, USA | On Site | Full Time | https://poloniex.com/

Poloniex was recently spun out of Circle into its own company with $100 million in backing https://medium.com/poloniex/poloniex-spins-out-from-circle-w...

I manage all wallet related engineering teams and am looking for new engineers to assist. Our stack is Java and our application for managing all of the blockchains is very sophisticated. This is very interesting software to work on, and if you are into cryptocurrency and blockchain in Boston, there is no better place to do it.

We don't have the jobs posted yet on the official careers page (https://poloniex.careers/) but feel free to email me directly at jseibel@poloniex.com if interested (all recruiters contacting me are ignored and marked as spam).
SEEKING WORK: San Francisco, CA, Remote

Morning! I'm a long-time startup developer who's spent the last few years working with small companies helping them get their products launched.

I do everything from strategy to backend development to mobile apps. Most recently I helped a launch a React Native mobile app in the App Store and trained two of their developers on best practices.

I've done Rails, Node, React, React Native, and Ethereum work. Let's work together!

Email: cj@cjbryan.io
>As a prospective remote, I don't care if you pay +20% in SFC. I am in another place, and if you can outbid my next best offer by 10% I win.

No you don't win. If you leave 100K on table, you lose.

I don't want "a good salary for my area". If I'm entrusted to deliver a million dollar feature for a Bay Area company, I want the max payout for that responsibility regardless of whether I delivered it from Iowa or Vietnam.

I want to have options for my family, for myself. We want to travel the world, own a home in a great neighborhood with great schools, have experiences that few others get. And you don't get those options in life with being content with "a good salary for my area" and then denying yourself coffee from Starbucks because you're still living on a budget.
Right, interesting.

Regarding closing down accounts — I recently made a detour into the Revolut subreddit and it's filled mostly with people gushing about their accounts being shut down without notice.

Now, I never know how much of that is on the company and how much is on the user doing something shady, but regardless, I would not dare to take such chances with my business.

Thanks for pointing that out — had not connected the dots until now.
SEEKING WORK in ALGO CRYPTO TRADING

Latest Project: https://bitcoinvsaltcoins.com

Location: Costa Rica / Europe

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: Yes

Technologies: Node JS, Postgres, Vue, AutoML, TensorFlow.JS

Résumé/CV: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hervefulchiron

Email: herve76@gmail.com
Another, not paywalled article: https://www.rfa.org/english/news/uyghur/cosleeping-103120191...
No government is going to give you the education required to overthrow them.
So true. Good leaders should be able to guide a team but far too often the teams are left to figure this stuff out on their own.
Deciding When to Collect Garbage
From my POV this is the natural continuation of an already-fucked-up situation.

The rights of children have historically been neglected, and so we inflict on them what we dare not inflict on ourselves.

I realized as a child that my parents were sending me to a fucked up place. They did it because they were out to lunch and not paying attention. I've never understood why most people, who sincerely love their children, send them to these places.

Education per se is the secondary reason for their existence. The primary reason is conformity, which they are much more successful at achieving (than education.)

The single, simple metric to tell whether or not your school system is actually educational is the ratio of teachers to children. The range of 1/6 is probably the upper limit. You might get away with 1/10 if the teacher is truly magical. The modern ranges pr 1/20 - 1/40 are absurd. Fucked up Lord of the Flies shit goes down when you get that many kids together w/o adequate supervision. You were all children once, you know what I mean.

Modern "school" systems are hell-worlds. If you love your children, don't send them to hell-worlds.
I don’t know why you are painting this as Swift vs Rust when they are apples to oranges. Why so defensive? They’re drastically different languages operating at different abstraction levels with different (though overlapping) use cases, with different motivations and design goals.
The Backend - Athens, GR link is not working.
> What I was most struck by in the conversation is that Zuck is actually doing some of the things Cowen advocates - policy experimentation, taking on long-term projects with uncertain payoffs, etc. at CZI.

I'm a big admirer of what Mark is doing with CZI (which is part of why Cowen/I agreed to the interview). Stripe is still a private company, but maybe I'll be able to intervene more directly over time. If I do, having CZI as precedent will be very helpful.
There is one: Pressreader. I think it does a decent job of it, and doesn't break the gestures. You just may need to exit the "scroll" part of the page (think microfiche reader?).

https://www.pressreader.com/canada/toronto-star/20191202/pag...
I 80% understand what this company is doing, but I 100% know that this team is awesome. I'm very much looking forward to more news and progress as it happens.
It is already in place since Jan 2017 I think. Energieeinspeisegesetz is the relevant keyword. But this redesign of the regulation is really complicated with a lot of different cases and exceptions. No concise summary in english I'm afraid.

edit: fixed typo
AWS API Gateway 101 from a beginner to beginners
> Nuclear technology scales horribly downwards

A small steam turbine is an apparatus with about the size and complexity of a car engine. But if it has to be licensed and inspected by the NRC then you can forget about it.

And you could make a little RTG that could power a phone for a decade. Even with the terrible efficiency of thermoelectric generators it would still be much smaller than a lithium battery that could store the same number of kWh, because it's ~10% of the efficiency multiplied by much more than 10 times the power density. The main limit you hit on size is practicality -- why make a tiny, tiny, tiny one that lasts for a month when you can make an only marginally larger one that lasts for ten years?
US schools is about certain school districts, not national policies.
when I visited 6 months ago, a face scan was required to enter the country, so they're going to get it either way.
Functinal Programming Paradigm in Kotlin
Are you looking for an intern position as well? I wasn't sure from the listing.
Spammers don't use cell phones to make their calls. Most often they just spoof calls using random peoples phone numbers. This would have no effect on spam calls. (I assume you mean phone-spam when you say phone scam?)

Not to be paranoid, but you really created a HN account just to add this comment?
Yeah, that matches my experience; their documentation on upgrades is excellent, and there's generally only issues not covered by their deprecation notices in places where you were doing something not supported by the documented API (E.g. monkey-patching, subclassing to override something, etc.), and even then, they often comment if it's a common type of modification.
I think comparisons like this ignore something fundamental, which is the values that both countries champion.

The USA is a democracy and has by and large championed democracy around the world. China is ruled by a 1974 style dictatorship, a country ruled by a single Party not the rule of law.

Comparisons between the US and the CCP conveniently ignore this, yet it is what really matters.

Law enforcement will always exist in a nation of laws, yet the simple fact that law enforcement exists both in a dictatorship and in a democracy does not lead us to conclude democracy and dictatorship exist on an equal moral footing.

The underlying values matter.
There absolutely is moral equivalence - they're trying to cut off all means of anonymous communication. It's difficult to get a SIM without providing ID in the EU as well, and you have to provide ID when renting a room. I wish the media were always sensitive to privacy erosion, not just when China does it.

I guess using Chinese surveillance tech is a roundabout way of getting them to pay attention, as happened with the Hikvision cameras.
That reminds me of deep learning. Investment in computing resources is definitely increasing exponentially over time:

https://openai.com/blog/ai-and-compute/

https://techcrunch.com/2019/11/10/the-post-exponential-era-o...

Tthere doesn't seem to by any evidence of exponential gains in performance, even on their own benchmarks (which importantly don't measure "intelligence", but something more narrow):

https://blog.piekniewski.info/2019/11/18/late2019-the-wizard...

Even though we are doubling the compute available to AI every 3.5 months, so a factor 10x per year, since say 2015, so some 10.000x, the classification performance as measured by top-1 accuracy on ImageNet had barely moved. Now arguably top-1 accuracy on ImageNet is probably not the best measure, but still that seems somewhat striking. The diminishing returns are visible elsewhere too, even that Open AI Rubic's cube is somewhat indicative.

From an outside perspective, it seems that everyone is coming around to the fact that self-driving cars is harder than expected. There are no "exponential gains" in that field -- to the contrary, it seems like 90% of the problem was solved several years ago, and you can now take undergraduate courses that teach the basics.

But going from 90%, to 99%, to 99.9%, etc. is taking decades, not months or years. There seems to be something fundamentally wrong with the current approach.

I believe at the time the OpenAI blog post was supposed to be "impressive". Certainly I felt a bit of that -- "hey something important is going on there!" I believe that in 10 years it will look like a waste of effort. There will be a different, more efficient approach to solving these types of problems.

----

Peter Thiel is one of the only "major tech figures" speaking out against AI, which I appreciate. And the "AI is communist" meme is pretty memorable, and I don't think wholly inaccurate. I listen to him for his contrarian opinions.

I just wish he didn't have these random "tribal conservative" outbursts. The most recent one was a video on here where he was rambling about Obama saying something far worse than George Bush and the Iraq war. I guess it was about sending their daughter to Harvard, but saying that lots of schools are just as good.

He was trying to get some points from his conservative audience. I guess it gets attention, but that kind of tribalism undermines the rational points that he generally makes.

(I realize the OP doesn't feature Thiel but he was brought up elsewhere in this thread, and is one of the people also lamenting the lack of technological progress despite investment, although maybe due to lack of investment in certain areas too)
Vaporware has been looked down upon in our industry for decades:

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

Until you have a product, there's nothing to talk about. Plenty of teams that seem good end up producing nothing. Announcements like this are a huge red flag to people who have seen this pattern many times over.
What's the difference>
Why? Not everyone on HN is a far leftist.
Do you have benefits at current job? Also maybe check into FMLA to see what kind a protections you have most places have to honor and sometimes pay a % of whatever your monthly salary is. FMLA protects your position, and job i believe for up to 12 weeks time off.
We can certainly quibble about the names given in a standard, but "local" is the term the Forth specification uses, so that's what I'm going with.

> All variables in Forth are local variables.

That's true in some sense (that is, all variables must be in scope to refer to them). However, I think that statement is a little misleading.

Traditional Forth variables often do have scope that extends to the end of your program (and possibly beyond). E.g., if your program says:

VARIABLE FOO

Then that's essentially a global variable in other languages; any function can read/fetch from foo (FOO @) or write/store to FOO (new-value FOO !). Indeed, you can read/write them after your program has completed.

Forth locals do not have this extent; they disappear when the function encompassing them returns. I note that Forth locals are allowed to be stored on the return stack, so that is one way to implement them. Thus, Forth locals are basically like "auto" in other languages like C.
I'm confused about the enforcement here. I just bought a temporary sim from https://www.3gsolutions.com.cn (which I've used multiple times before when visiting) and didn't provide any id.
"To use it, drag the following link to your bookmarks bar and use it on any page to leverage our innovative translation service"

What? Bookmarks Bar? Where's that?
> It's time to re-think the idea of housing as an "investment."

Shameless policy plug: part of the reason that property tends to be a good investment is that a significant portion of its value derives not from improvements, but from "location, location, location": proximity to businesses and community services. Some economists (Henry George, Milton Friedman) have advocated shifting property tax to be based on the unimproved value of land, rather than its total/improved value, thus offsetting the (arguably unearned) benefits of sitting on a lot while the surrounding community accrues value.

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism
>What would you call the police officer that came with a gun?

Superfluous, in this instance. It clearly would have been possible to arrest the guy without shooting him. (I believe that they only shot him on the off chance that the suicide vest was real.)
In the first quote yes, but who is really doing that talking and double counting? I suspect some strawpersons.

In the second quote the op is clearly complaining that schemes growing trees and burning them for fuel cant be carbon neutral, which is plainly false.
...but that sounds like monitoring?
I met him at FCI Morgantown. He's fairly bright, but a bit.. off. He's very young.
Swift for writing Metal shaders? That's the first I've heard of this, and honestly I find that doubtful but what do I know.
Thanks for the feedback and very much agreed: for many companies, E&O is a critical coverage and one that founders may not know much about. It's a core part of our offering for companies that have launched product and are scaling. Thanks again for the thought.
I'm south indian, and I routinely cook with at least 8 - 10 spices. Most common are the whole garam masala (bay leaf, cinnamon, cloves, cardamom, black pepper, cumin, coriander seeds, mustard and turmeric)
Ask HN: Best Cyber Monday Deals for Developers
Any good deals for developers and hackers?
Is the rising senior a strict requirement for the intern position?
> There are thousands of interesting people in tech. It's impossible to know of everyone.

Totally! If you aren't familiar with who Jessie or Bryan are yet though I think you're in for a treat. So keeping in mind these are largely impressions from their public personas and I know neither of these people personally...

Bryan is one of my favorite speakers / presenters. Virtually every one of his talks conveys his passion and knowledge for the subject at hand, and it's presented in as much depth as the time allows for and any nuance involved, and Bryan conveys a great sense of humor with little tolerance for BS. Here's a non-comprehensive list of talks Bryan has given from his blog: http://dtrace.org/blogs/bmc/2018/02/03/talks/ .

Jessie, to me, is like the Adam Savage of tech: curious, interested in a ton of different things, a maker and tinkerer, and just a generally hard working huge talent. I love her sense of humor, and she puts content out into the world just to share that with others. Like she got to go tour CERN back in May and shared a bunch of cool stuff from it like this https://twitter.com/jessfraz/status/1129845849054253056 which I really enjoyed. If you're on Twitter, I highly recommend following https://twitter.com/jessfraz .

If you have recommendations for other awesome interesting people worth knowing, I'd love suggestions!
Monograph | Frontend Engineer | San Francisco | Full-time, ONSITE

We do 4-day (32 hour) work weeks at Monograph, and we've been doing it for 3 years now. I believe we're one of the only companies in SF that are advocates for working less, but more productively.
Similar to Microsoft, we only have one 45-min meeting each week and then everything else is heads down work.

To maintain efficiency, we also have strict Slack protocols in place to keep everyone in deep work throughout the day. (No @ or DMs, everyone checks Slack at 11am and 4pm).

The major downside so far has been customer support, which the founders still manage to maintain our response rate.

Oh and we're hiring! If you're frontend engineer and like 4-day weeks + side projects, reach out directly moe@monograph.io

https://monograph.io/jobs/frontend/
> It's nice to see that the traditional desktop GUI programmers finally realize that the way the Web people do GUIs is right (React/Vue/...) and the way they did it until now (QT/GTK/WPF/...) is wrong.

c'mon, Qt has been doing declarative UI for the last ten years, before React and Vue even existed : https://patrickelectric.work/qmlonline/
> Let us start with the need for data, going straight to the point: one cannot build a competitive search without data collected from people.

Google had a very good search engine before they started to collect data from everyone, not after.

I don't have a metric to decide whether the search results from google got better or worse over the years. Subjectively and for me personally, they've gotten worse. And I'm not the only one who thinks this. I could be (and probably am) wrong, but I think the more personal data a search engine has, the worse the results.

When I think about it in that way, it makes senses why it has gotten worse. The search engine pays more attention to the data it think it has collected from me and how it relates to advertisers, etc... instead of paying attention to the actual words I wrote in the query.
Reddit | Backend and ML Engineers | Full-Time | New York, relocation offered

The Ad Relevance team is hiring backend and full-stack ML engineers in NYC! Our team is applying machine learning to ad quality, targeting, and relevance over our massive datasets. We're a new team, and there's lots of opportunity for individuals to make a difference.

Our technologies include ML in Spark and TF, low latency serving in Java, and lots and lots of python to fill the cracks. You'd be working on all stages of the ML pipeline, from modeling data science and modeling to implementation and infrastructure.

If you're interested shoot us an email at jobs+hn@reddit.com
What happens to the information from your explorations and experiments?
This is more meant to attack the idea of a primary residence being an "investment". If people insist on calling it an investment, then it's fair for me to insist that it's only covering a short position, because you need somewhere to live.

I think, if anything, this position is actually supportive of making an educated rent vs buy comparison, by discarding any kind of "investment" potential on the buy side.
Until you have a product, there's nothing to talk about.

Yeah ... if you’re a marketer. People who actually make stuff are allowed to be excited about what they‘ve been working on in their garages and get to tell people more about it on their own schedules. They don’t owe you a feature comparison table every time they talk about their project.

In fact, they don’t owe you anything at all.
Slides work when there's like 20 of them which highlight important information. Not 200 slides each with a paragraph of text that sometimes connects with the previous statement and sometimes not.

The latter makes more sense as an blog post or article.
If you think that's bad. Check this out:
https://www.wired.com/2010/10/webcam-spy-settlement/
The irony is that the people complaining about this are the same ones who are gleefully sharing their personal details and narrative on social media, and Facebook in particular. The only difference between mass surveillance in the US and China is that 99% of the US population happily opts in or doesn't care.
Sure, there are lessons here. And it’s certainly not “just work on anything”. It’s really that the initial idea is often overvalued, as you already said, that execution is more important than ideas, that you should constantly (re)validate your idea, and that you should be ready to pivot.

We know this from “The Lean Startup”, but practical examples can show why some aspects are important. And it’s not just small teams and solo founders from startups and young companies that may place too much importance on a great initial idea. It’s certainly also the general public, where most people belief that successful startups are the result of a genius having a clever idea. See basically every movie about inventions (and young companies). That general public also includes a lot of (potential) investors.
The UK is an abnormally successful democracy by world standards. I suppose you could quibble about the British Empire, but the main difference there is that Britain colonized much more of the world than America did.

The main question I have concerns Britain’s history of anti-Catholic discrimination. It’s all well and good to point out that Britain never disenfranchised black people during a time when approximately zero black people lived there. Although I suppose Britain is responsible for colonizing South Africa and Rhodesia....

But sure, let’s concede Britain for the moment. France, West Germany, and Italy were effectively fascist dictatorships until the mid-1940’s. (Vichy being a “puppet government” is a lie concocted to spare French pride—Petain was a fascist sympathizer since before the war and he took power within the French political system at the time—its not like the Germans overran the government and installed him like they did in other occupied countries.) Spain and Portugal until the 1970’s. Yugoslavia had a communist dictatorship until the 1990’s. Which is incidentally the same decade that Switzerland achieved universal women’s suffrage.
I think this is more true in the consumer space. If you're asking me to build a business on your product, I'm going to bolt at the first sign of flakiness (of which these vanity blog posts are a big red flag).