skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Not my own answer, but here's a fun story from the always-fascinating Robert Sapolsky (renowned neuroscientist, author, and a beloved teacher) telling us about how he got into writing[1]. (NB: it's a transcript of a verbal conversation, not a written response; hence the "Sos" and the slight meandering. I found the full transcript to be interesting.)

Interviewer: Where did that [ability to write] come from? I mean, did you begin writing for school – all of a sudden in third grade you got this delight?"

Sapolsky: Naaa...

Sapolsky: [...] I was OK with writing, and throughout college I didn't have a writer's block. So I had friends who would pull their hair out over it, and that was sort the central organizing emphasis of their life, and I never had a writer’s block. It was something that I was OK at, but nothing I took any great pleasure in. I never took a literature class in college, or any English course or anything.

And I was not particularly into writing, and it was not until after I finished college—right after, a week after graduation—I went off to Africa for a year and a half to begin to get my field work started, which I have been doing ever since for twenty-five years and it was fairly isolated site, where a lot of the time I was by myself. I would go 8 to 10 hours a day without speaking to anyone, I would get a mail drop about once every two weeks or so, there was no electricity, there was no radio, there was no anything, and I suddenly got unbelievably, frantically dependent on mail. So as a result you wind up sending letters to every human that you have known in your life in hopes that they would write back to you.

So what would happen is, all I could afford at the time were like these one-page aerogram things that you could sort of get in these big stacks, and something vaguely interesting would happen every couple of days or so. So you would write to somebody about it, and then you would write to the next person about it, and you would realize that before the end of the day, you had just written 25 versions of it, each of which was a page and a half long. [...]

[1] http://web.stanford.edu/group/howiwrite/Transcripts/Sapolsky...
I love articles about writing parsers by hand - it's really fun and teaches you a lot.

Last year I decided to write a complete compiler in Javascript, completely by hand. The idea was to compile a vaguely C-like toy language to WASM without any external dependencies.

Part of the motivation was that while I've written many simple parsers, I mostly used parser generators with BNF grammars and I didn't feel like I had a good sense of how the code I ended up generating actually worked for something with complex syntax and semantics. I felt like I was writing specs for a parser, rather than writing a parser.

My toy language has vaguely C-like syntax with block scope and infix operators with various precedences, so it was a bit more complicated than JSON, but I ended up using something like Pratt parsing/Precedence Climbing (see https://www.oilshell.org/blog/2017/03/31.html) and wrote the whole thing in a way that's - hopefully - pretty easy to read for folks interested in wrapping their head around parsing complex syntax (e.g. with scope and name resolution). The lexer, parser and language definition ended up being about 1000 lines of JS (counting some pretty extensive comments).

Any JS programmers that are interested in really getting into the nitty-gritty of writing your own parser/compiler should check it out. The source is here: https://github.com/j-s-n/WebBS (relevant files for parsing are in /compiler - start with lexer.js, parser.js and syntax.js).

If you want to play around with the language and inspect the generated ASTs and WASM bytecode, there's an interactive IDE with example code here: https://j-s-n.github.io/WebBS/index.html#splash
You don't necessarily need any plugins. Vanilla Vim with the occasional ctrl+N is often enough. If you need a more powerful editor, perhaps it's better to just use something like VS Code.
> You see a lot of talk about moneyball, but for some reason people are less excited about… trainingball? Practiceball? Whatever you want to call taking people who aren't “the best” and teaching them how to be “the best”.

I think this is the biggest insight in the article, and the one that's gotten the least traction, both here in this thread and in SWE culture more broadly.

This industry doesn't have a clear way to transmit knowledge and practices, and it DEFINITELY doesn't have a way to do so at scale. HN will debate about interviews (no wait! take-home tests! no wait! ..) all day long, but when it comes to how to make someone a senior SWE, we don't have anything other than 1) set up your dev environment (ideally the same way as I did) 2) dive in for a couple years.
You express exactly what has kept me from doing webdev with Clojure, despite my (now perhaps irrational) love for the language.

I will learn whichever language allows me to get my site/app done as quickly as possible at first. Later after I have refined and refactored enough to know what's up... then I may decide to change.

Nextjs (despite the javascript), Rails (Ruby is great!... not Clojure, but pretty good), Django (Python is low-pain, low-effort), etc. are all easy quick ways to actually get something done BEFORE you really know what you're doing. This is critically important for those of us who don't spend all our time doing public-facing web apps.
Please please please P L E A S E keep in mind that a lot of developers literally cannot work on many projects in their free time because the company they work for owns everything they do on and off company time.

Even contributing to open source efforts can become an issue because you're expected to ask for permission first and it can become a sticky legal issue of ownership. Companies expect and want people to work on personal projects but then don't give ownership of said projects to the developer.
Atom Finance’s free Bloomberg Terminal rival raises $12M
Scylla Scaled to One Billion Rows a Second
No, it adds to the learning curve because it adds new rules.

I also happen to think they are bad rules in this case, but that’s a separate matter.
Confirming, and far less than two years. If you have good credit, you can get a decent house, 3+BR with 5k-10k sqft lot, within reasonable commuting distance for $250k-$350k with $20k-$40k down which is pretty easy to save up in 6-12 months with a 100k+ salary in Houston.

The downside is that Houston is topographically flat, there's not much to do outside, and summer months are oppressively hot/humid.
You own your car but do you own every service your car is capable of? Your car is capable of picking up signals from SiriusXM radio, should that be free too? Your car has a 4G connection built in, should it allow unlimited data for free? My sister's minivan has screens in the back seats with a Netflix app, should Honda give every car a free Netflix subscription?

You own your car but you rent the GPS tracking service. This person chose not to rent that service and therefor is not entitled to the benefits of it.
reminds me of clang/gcc

ps: I honestly wonder if it's a competition feeling or just a side-induced motivation. Sometimes I look at people online and it revives the desire to do things they do that I couldn't before.
I see a lot of that in deep Blue country these days. https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anythin... is a good exploration of what's going on.

Everybody wants to pat themselves on the back about how non-bigoted they are because they stopped hating the last outgroup. In reality, there's just as much hatred and bigotry as ever, they just transferred it to a new outgroup.
Create Dangerously: Albert Camus and the Power and Responsibility of the Artist
James Hetfield talked about that as a reason he left.

"I kind of got sick of the Bay Area, the attitudes of the people there, a little bit. They talk about how diverse they are, and things like that, and it's fine if you're diverse like them. But showing up with a deer on the bumper doesn't fly in Marin County. My form of eating organic doesn't vibe with theirs."

https://www.blabbermouth.net/news/metallica-james-hetfield-m...
http://archives.insertcredit.com/features/dreaming2/

This article by the incredible Tim Rogers, makes a really compelling case for why MGS2 is avant-garde, and why it’s so special.
Yup. One of the windows to the stairwell on the left (towards the park) when you're standing behind it, if you are a local.
Explaining the Benefit of Simple Models
California's new employment law boomerangs and starts to crush freelancers
Few managers ask their employees to work long hours. That doesn't mean they don't expect them to work long hours.

"let them continue working on personal projects". How considerate of you to allow them to decide if they want to work long hours on their time or the company's.
My problem with C# server development until recently has been the reliance on visual studio. A lot of configurations need to be done through VS and lead to the creation of config files that cannot be edited or read outside of VS.

And a lot of the “magic” in the .Net server technologies mean that when things go wrong, there’s almost nothing you can do other than raise a ticket with MS, but you end up spending a lot of time and energy trying to figure out what might be wrong before going that route.

Fortunately, both of these issues have been resolved with the open source .Net Core, and while we continue to use .Net Framework, I’m looking forward to doing more .Net Core development going forward.
I get the idea but I don't think people expect you to do this all the time. It's more to back up a resume that's weak in other areas. (no name companies, no name University, etc. And this is all relevant to the area you're applying, what is no name somewhere is a name known elsewhere)

I found having some open source contributions was a positive for my resume. People knew I could ship something then. They could literally go online and check to see what I did.

I've done most of mine when I didn't have a job or knew I needed something to get the next job. So, it was not much different than investing time in interview prep.

Couldn't tell ya if I prefer leetcode or open source contributions. As for the last five years, I've mainly had to do leetcode every year cause no one gave much care to my contributions after a point. (leetcode is #1 in sv)
I think the key is this is a differentiator, not a requirement. If you're willing to pay top $$ you can be picky and get the most passionate people.
There are worse examples
http://www.nbcnews.com/id/39516346/ns/us_news-life/t/no-pay-...
I think it’s more of a power dissipation issue. The amount of charge, thus current, you are moving in and out of the gate capacitance is proportional to clock frequency. Sine power is I^2*R, then it is proportional to f^2.

Smaller transistors reduce the I, but R goes up with smaller interconnects. The RC time constant also adds delay, probably more so than length.

That being said, 3D stacking won’t help with heat, and dielets won’t help with delay. I rather have 4 cores at 10 GHz than 64 cores at 3 GHz.
It sort of guarantees that in a couple of years time half your stack will then be unmaintained, though (at least in my 10 years of Clojure experience).
"Google bigwigs regularly talk about the hiring data they have and what hasn't worked. I believe they talked about how focusing on top schools wasn't effective and didn't turn up employees that have better performance years ago, but that doesn't stop TrendCo from focusing hiring efforts on top schools."

As far as I know, that doesn't stop Google from focusing hiring efforts on top schools.

Anyway, I'm actually wondering about the future. Suppose you are one of the people hired out of school for $200k+. What happens in 10 or 15 years when you are no longer the shiny new thing, don't have the trendy skills, and have been working for boring companies? Do you still command a 2× salary (https://www.ziprecruiter.com/Salaries/What-Is-the-Average-So...)? Reversion to the mean? Salary cuts?
It includes a brief history of benchmarking scale. Let me know if we missed any performance numbers that you think are particularly impressive!
I've also thought about bots on Hacker News - they might be useful for somethings though I can't put a pin on what exactly.

I'm pretty sure the community won't really like the idea of bots on HN because of spam issues and such, but what is the official policy on this? Can't find anything about bots anywhere.
Life is about trade-offs. If you want to spend more time outside of work on things like friends and family, that's great. In fact, it's probably optimal. But to then say it's discrimination when someone who has made the choice to instead only focus on their technical skill, at the exclusion of friends and family, is better than you, is a little silly.
@findtap Founder here.

https://findtap.com/

AMA
I absolutely love the fact that the human-like figures are depicted with snouts and tails.
I kind of alluded to this in the first couple of reasons why people have to travel. Some companies, including this one, just don't have remote-friendly work flows/habits. Too many hallway conversations with outcomes that are never recorded because nobody can bother. Too many people who allow in-person interruptions to take unqualified preference over response to remotes. Too many people mumbling and/or talking over each other in meetings, so the remote has trouble following or breaking in. Inadequate videoconference and VPN infrastructure making that worse. Too many high-level planning or review meetings that are explicitly in-person for no good reason at all.

I could go on much longer. ;) The point is that accommodating remote workers requires significant cultural change, and people in mostly-colocated groups resist it. It's much easier for all-remote teams, somewhere in between for teams that are still mostly colocated but have already been "broken in" by someone like me. My last company was much better at this, though worse in other ways. Since there are only about five teams worldwide doing storage at the scale we are, and I want to keep doing that, it's a the "price of admission" and overall I think it's worthwhile. But it's still unnecessary and I'm still sad that it's not improving faster - for myself and others in similar situations.
You appear to be confounding a few different issues here.

1) Transistor density has continued to increase. The original naming convention was created when we just used planar transistors. That is not the case anymore. More modern processes create tertiary structures of "nodes" which condense the footprint of packs of transistors. Moore's law didn't die. It just slowed.

2) Clock speed is not correlated to transistor size. The fundamentals of physics block increases in clock speed. Light can only travel ~11cm in 1 billionth of a second (1GHz). Electricity can only ever move at 50%-99% the speed of light dependent on the conductor. What's the point of having a 1THz clock when you will just be wasting most of those clock cycles propagating signals across the chip or waiting on data moving to/from memory. Increasing clock speed increases cost of use because it requires more power so at some point a trade-off decision must be made.
From an American perspective: it's because police are idolized and worshipped on the nightly news just about every single day. Growing up, speaking ill of the police was second only to speaking ill of God himself, and this isn't an exaggeration. There are no cops in my family, but this reverence is still held. My family is quite religious, and I wonder if that plays a factor (I would suspect it does).
and multiple ravens are referred to as a "conspiracy" whereas a group of owls is a "parliament" and gather several vultures and you get a "venue"

I recently heard this used in a podcast and I got distracted by the term and looked up all this nonsense. TIL multiple jellyfish are a "smack"!
I think I've read some knowledgeable silicon guy saying he wouldn't bet a dime on 7nm quite a time after 2005 (2012~). But I forgot the details.
Oh, how could I have missed the JS Agent... thanks a lot for the hint!
But it looks like it's not node, so no npm modules and other node APIs.
44,000 years later as we enter the third decade of the 21st century...
"Ministry of Truth" has a nice ring to it [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ministries_of_Nineteen_Eighty-...
Autocomplete, autoindentation, and perhaps colors would be nice though!

To me, the main advantage of vim over IDE is it's there on any remote server.
Sadly it often makes Firefox Mobile generate popups about a script being slow on larger websites.

On a different note, I can change my bar topcolor in my HN profile, would be nice to be able to change the BG and font color as well.
It might be total coincidence, but both cars were 2002 Lexus IS300s. Additionally, I was unable to find any evidence that the 2002 IS300 had remote start as an available option. So I'm wondering if this was an enthusiast and an aftermarket part.
>For all intents and purposes jeans and sneakers already is the lowest reasonably acceptable way to dress for an interview, right?

I would think so.

As for jacket/tie (or even suit) I take it as signaling that this is a professional interaction that they take seriously and have gone to the trouble of dressing up for. I know I'm not part of SV culture but I can't imagine dinging someone in an interview for dressing up, especially when that would still expected in quite a few places.

I also know a number of people who dress up for speaking engagements and it's just sort of part of their style.

FWIW, last time I interviewed (and took the offer), I wore a jacket and tie to my interviews even though I knew that would be a step up from the business casual or business casual with jeans that the people I'd be talking with would be wearing. I didn't need to and it didn't matter one way or the other but it made sense to me.
This actually does feel like a step in the right direction. Having _any_ sort of appeals process in place is definitely a step up from the Google/YouTube approach of: you can be banned by an automated process for no apparent reason and if that happens there's absolutely nothing you can do about it except raise a stink on social media and hope your story gets enough traction that someone capable of doing something about it notices the problem and fixes it.
What about Patagonia vests?
As long as the water keeps flowing when the internet is down, we're good.
JS in Node and JS in browser is not that different. It's the same language, using the same JavaScript engine (v8 for chrome). The difference is in the APIs provided by Node vs Browser, which is pretty minor. Many popular JS libraries will run in Node just as well as Browser. That being said, JS is a pretty shit language and I don't know why anyone would want to use it for backend work.
That's what a present value calculation is for.
If this had been in EU then the owner could have requested the information under GDPR, as the tracking data is private information connected to the person.

Honda do not have a service where if you pay them they will track your car. Honda track car owners, and if you pay them will give you a copy of the data.

It is very questionable if user data is owned by the company that do the tracking. How would it look if Facebook withhold evidence that a victim requested in regard to information they themselves uploaded? Personally I found find it rather poor behavior if they extorted the victim before returning the victims personal information.

"Man got unknowingly data mined, company refuse to return private information to the victim of an ongoing crime." sounds like a story to me.

The key part of the article is that company is now saying that they did not track the car. If Honda never had the information then the argument that "Man didn't pay for service, company did not provide said service" make more sense.
If you interpreted my comment that way I apologize, but that's not what I said. I said the owner could pay for the service OR the police could get a warrant. In no way was I attempting to suggest the police need a warrant AND still have to pay.
I do use OSMand a lot for my bicycle tours. I download the map for the area and keep the phone offline so nobody bothers me and the battery lasts longer. However when planning the itinerary I keep looking at the satellite view of Google Maps because I want to get an idea of the terrain and of what the streets and intersections really look like. Then I place markers on OSMand and use them when I'm cycling. Using OSM and nothing else would give me many surprises on the road.
Eye of the Tiger. On repeat.
Hey I remember explicitly trying this option and the osm2pg instance died consistently after running for 4 hours. I could never figure out why. I worked on it for 4 days with no success.

I have no earthly idea how to get this to work.
If you haven’t seen it, you might be interested in Our Culture of Exclusion (2012):

“Let's be clear, I will turn down a beer any day of the week!”

— https://web.archive.org/web/20130413021020/http://ryanfunduk...
> You forget that we live in a society where we need people to use cars.

Even if this is completely true, it does not absolve the driver of any responsibility, so I don't really see the point of bringing it up.

> One day we won't be able to drive at all, it will be all self driving, and at that point, you'll no longer be able to do anything to avoid an accident.

When this day comes, who the operator is may change, but there is still an operator somewhere deploying and managing these vehicles to hold accountable. If the taxi you're riding in is involved in a collision, you're not responsible.
How do you avoid getting burned by chaos ? is the paycheck bonus that high ?
May I interest you in https://github.com/neoclide/coc.nvim which let's you use some of the most popular bits of vs code in neovim
Sometimes you paint yourself into a corner and no good options remain.

Trust is hard to earn and easy to lose.
Sort of like the Gnu Emacs / XEmacs split back then which divided the contributors. At least in case of Emacs one of these came on top, so there is no split anymore.
>If this had been in EU

But it wasn't, so none of the rest matters.
The millisecond I clicked on this article, the first sentence looks very strange:

> Facebook Inc. will pay $130 million to establish an independent board charged with reviewing how the company moderates its content...

First of all, isn't it ironic that the owner of the largest social networks in the world is attempting to fund a independent court / board for content with Facebook money? If they're not the only ones backing this, then both them and private corporations funding this whilst trying to maintain this institution's independent nature is going to have lots of trust issues.

Sounds like this is the establishment of the Facebook "Supreme Court" for Content.
I'm probably missing something here, but what is the value of this when you could write a script that would do just about the same? (Serious question, I want to know the answer, not rhetorical)
I can get into such deep focus when listetning to postrock. I found this genre a year ago and it is soo good.
I recommend this youtube channel:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC-wdveKCDbbjK0_rzR2XhVA
A podcast that hacks Ring camera owners live
Well if it becomes toxic waste they could force everybody currently using it into licensing it from them. They could even try and go for damages for previous use.
Just out of curiosity (and this goes into the subject of open source project dynamics of which I am really just a lay observer, and as someone who hasn't followed the history of either projects closely) - how is vim vs neovim organized as open source projects? Do both have a healthy ecosystem of contributor/maintaners? Are either in danger of running into "single person syndrome" or "hit-by-a-bus" syndrome?