skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
LOL, we've had that offer; we turned it down. We could have bought two or three times the house we have now with cash on hand and kept our same jobs with the companies we work for now.

That wouldn't be what we want in life. So we have a little house in a big city with a little garden and the ability to bike with our kids anywhere that's worth going. There are music venues, and museums, and restaurants, and lakes, and ocean, and beaches. With a weekend drive there are mountains and forests. Week nights can get you an $8 dollar show with a good band just around the corner and most nights there is a choice of 6-8 bands within a mile.

Most of the people I know and live around could live in cheaper places as well, either apartments, or cities, but they live here because that's where they want to live.
My argument would be - don't convince people to move there, hire the people already there. Identify the pioneers who do want to move and incentivize them to do so as well.

Here's an example from a recent client in Seattle. Two year old company, approx. ten employees, hiring at least one person a month. Couple hundred square feet of class-a office space, likely $42/square foot and increasing. Turned over nearly all of their staff on a yearly basis because they couldn't compete with comp at Amazon, Microsoft, etc. Had a number of entry-level type clerical jobs that they were outsourcing to India but doing so unsuccessfully (IE: the resources they had weren't particularly cheap but also didn't really have the necessary skills). Same entry-level jobs couldn't pay quite enough in Seattle to incentivize someone to either stick around or be willing to commute from the suburbs (unless they were really desperate).

My point to them time and time again was - they were a small company, undercapitalized like many small businesses, and they were spending stupid money every month on people and office space that made no sense given their business. They could have moved to Spokane, Yakima, the Tri-Cities or lots of other cheaper places even in the same state and been able to find the talent they need and cut their office costs in half. Given the nature of their business, sure, maybe they needed to keep a couple people (mostly sales / execs / bizdev) in Seattle - but even those could have worked from home.

Last I checked, the largest concentration of PhDs in the country is in... the Tri-Cities, Washington. The state with the greatest number of college graduates per capita is... Iowa. These are not exactly places on anyone's radar. Bend, Oregon has a growing number of people who "commute" to Silicon Valley. I live in the middle of nowhere, but there are a growing number of people from Seattle willing to move here (and occasionally take the 45 minute commuter flight) in order to escape the cost and crowding of living over there. Boise is growing entirely by people fleeing from coastal cities.

Someone in this thread posted Paul Graham's essay about startup hubs, which I recall reading and it gels exactly with my thinking as well - go to these micro hubs around the country and be part of growing them from within.
Been a while since I've done Haskell, but the essential breakdown as I understand it is this:

At lowest level you have the Control.Concurrent primitives: forkIO and MVar. forkIO allows you to spin up new Haskell threads (not OS threads) and MVar's can be used to communicate between them. MVar's can be empty or full and block when the operation can't be completed immediately (writing to a full MVar or reading from an empty MVar). They also have single wakeup semantics, so if you have multiple readers blocking on an empty MVar read, only one will be woken up when someone writes to it.

STM has transactional semantics. You can write to multiple STM variables atomically in a transaction, and your transaction will restart if any of your input variables have been written to while your transaction was running. Useful if you need to maintain consistency between several variables at all times.

Async is a wrapper around STM and provides common functions you would often write yourself to express common patterns, but more battle tested.

Strategies are about optimistically evaluating Haskell thunks in parallel. For example if you map a function over a list, now you have a list of thunks. You can use Strategies to now evaluate those thunks in parallel. Key thing with Strategies is that if you remove them from your code (or use a non-threaded runtime) it doesn't affect the semantics of your program, it just might make it slower due to loss of parallel evaluation.

The Par Monad isn't used much, but the key idea there is you build an explicit dependency graph of the values in your computation and the runtime tries to parallelize the nodes in the graph that it can. Similar to what make does if you run it with -j.
You already own property, so you're probably not the prospective demographic who would be willing to move to one of these cities.
CPPFLAGS are meant to be passed to the C preprocessor, while CXXFLAGS are passed to the C++ compiler.
I like glob for getting the list of files:

import glob
list_of_files = glob.glob("*.csv")

You can also use Pathlib:

from pathlib import Path
dir = Path(".").glob('*.csv')
Tech experts couldn't hack a solution for Iran's internet shutdown. Here’s why
Sabbath Mode Appliances
The extent to which Google and Microsoft have switched places from where they were a decade ago is hilarious.

https://amp.businessinsider.com/images/50a25c45eab8ea8c41000...
The SEC Is Asking About ESG
If anything, this escalation would seem to _discourage_ backups. Backups are another way to leak data.
Absolutely, and that’s why good access shouldn’t be so concentrated. My comparison to San Francisco was in the sense that it’s difficult to find good and equitable and affordable residential access in the country’s tech capital much less across the vast rural areas inland.
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/13/googles-settlement-on-speech...
Rubik's Cube Algorithms
Yes, unfortunately. It doesn't help that Americans are culturally unable to process the idea that we are not "the best" even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
I would order from BestBuy. I just did this for an M2 and I knew that if there's any issues, I can just take it to the nearest store. They also price match, but you need to go in store or call a customer service line to do it. I just went in store. Less convenient, but less risky for larger purchases.

edit - best buy may not have everything you need but typically you can find a decent drive.
They have a "under 30" plan.

http://thein.fo/youngpros
They ended up adding many jobs in NYC anyway, so there want much point to subsidizing their taxes there.
Looks like they're doing our job.

First, the message was "backup your data". Now, they also added "encrypt your data"!
It's only one part of the story (scheduler) and not even good enough idea considering non-locality overhead.
Curious about what others think of the price. $399/year is pretty steep. Compared to, say Ben Thompson who I do subscribe to for $120/year. For younger (<=30) folks, there's a $199/year discounted price.
No.

No CTO who valued their career would go with GCP. “No one ever got fired for choosing AWS/Microsoft”. Even if Azure isn’t held in as high esteem as AWS, businesses trust Microsoft.
Since there is no other discussion, I'll try to start.

I posted this today because someone else has posted one of Phil's 2002 essays: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21808425. Phil was a professor at UCLA, and wrote early and presciently about the social aspects of the internet, and how it was going to change society.

Then eventually he went silent, and in 2009 he was reported by a relative as "missing". He was reported as "found" a few months later, but in a way that left a lot of mystery as to what had actually happened. I have no personal knowledge, but my impression from the outside is that his work made him so depressed that he gave up on society and just dropped out. I'm sure there were other psychological factors involved, but also at least some elements of a cautionary tale.

I learned about Phil from his Red Rock Eater News Service (https://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/agre/rre.html) which I subscribed to in the mid to late 90's. RRE was a curated collection of links, with commentary and occasionally essays. While I don't know of any direct link, I think of RRE as being one of the philosophical ancestors of Hacker News. Thus since you are reading this on HN, whether you've heard of him or not, you might in some small way owe a small thanks to Phil.
The person you have to hire to manage that would cost 10x a public cloud bill
No, Journalism and Software are not the same. Would you make the same argument that software on the 737 Max should be shipped and then fixed later? Absolutely not. Journalists need to understand that what they write has real-world impact and can actually lead to lot of unnecessary anguish if they publish things that are not true. Truth should always be paramount to speed in journalism. You can't always correct your mistakes as a journalist because most people only see 1 version of your draft and don't wait around for later corrections before jumping to conclusions.
Smart company leaders are already doing this by hiring remote worker teams. They don't need to "drag" anyone. FAANG are woefully behind the curve in this regard and would rather waste money building office empires in big cities. Nobody wants to relocate their entire life across the country away from family/friends just for some BS tech job that could just as easily be done from home.
And "Rich Dad, Poor Dad"!
This as a whole just doesn't look good for Google/Alphabet, but then again the optics of a lot of their choices lately have looked very poor from the outside looking in.

Honest question for long term(4+ years) Google Engineers reading... has the change in culture and bad press lately had any effect on your feelings towards your employer? Do you think it is eroding their culture at G? Do you see any of this leading to a loss of talent?
You don't own your sister's DNA; you don't get to tell her what she does with it.
But those areas are not chosen on merit or for the benefit of the country are they its all about greasing the hands of the local politicians.

The challenger disaster was caused by this as for "political reasons" the plant that made the boosters was a long way away and thus required the design with the O rings.
Have you been following Google?
Lowering meat consumption writ large, even just more people only having one meat meal a day, would be huge too. Meat production is super resource intensive. Have to grow grain for them to eat, water that grain, transport it, provide water for the livestock, etc.

> According to calculations of the United Nations Environment Programme, the calories that are lost by feeding cereals to animals, instead of using them directly as human food, could theoretically feed an extra 3.5 billion people.

> Feed conversion rates from plant-based calories into animal-based calories vary; in the ideal case it takes two kilograms of grain to produce one kilo of chicken, four kilos for one kilogram of pork and seven kilos for one kilogram of beef.

- Global Agriculture[1]

Your point re: human living space density in cities is totally spot on. Urbanism is much more efficient than suburban sprawl. Rigorous public transit makes having a car optional / disadvantageous if you live in a city. It's no wonder the automobile industry has always sought to stifle transit.

Look at the successes of the Houston light rail system METRORail. Opened in 2004 and has cut back traffic and lead to high-density apartments, shops, and offices near stations.

All that is evidence of why population growth isn't a real root issue. It could be problematic, depending on what other systems are at play to mitigate increasing resource needs of people. Even so, our current food production is enough to feed the projected 2050 population of 9.7 billion[2].

[1]https://www.globalagriculture.org/report-topics/meat-and-ani...
[2]https://www.elementascience.org/article/10.1525/elementa.310...
Actually with ebay I can more easily trust. Because they don't co-mingle, I know that someone with 100,000 positive reviews on ebay is unlikely to sell a counterfeit. With amazon I don't have that trust, since even if the seller is great, one single bad actor, who isn't the person I'm buying from, could infiltrate the system causing me to get a counterfeit.
Yes I would call it a political message.
Same here, G2019S brother.
The thing that gets me is that this isn't a "message board" or email, or forum... or anything like that. They needed 2 approvals to put this message out there.

It doesn't sound like just anyone could do this, but only people with specific privilege and approvals.

A company being "legally required" to do something doesn't mean that individual employees can decide for themselves to implement that policy... Otherwise you could ask random employees to Right-To-Be-Forgotten and delete you from Google...

I think the real questions are: 1) Was it part of their job? [no] 2) Was it a message board? [no] 3) Was it protected speech anyway? [unsure]
The Unicode Technical Standard [1] (different from Unicode Standard) recommends treating identifiers (filenames, variable or fuction names, email adresses, usernames, etc.) different from normal text. There is a special class of 'identifier characters' which already exludes a lot of sneaky characters like invisible punctuation and obscure scripts that are not in modern use.

Additionally there are 5 additional restriction levels for identifiers depending on your specific situation:

1. ASCII only

2. single script

3. single script or Latin+{Japn, Hanb, Kore}

4. single script or Latin+{any, excluding Cyrillic, Greek}

5. Not containing any characters in the recommended blacklist of characters for use in secure contexts

6. No restrictions other than normal identifier restrictions

For any specific strings that might be confused, there is an algorithm to compute the visual 'skeleton' of a string and match it against that of another string to test if they are confusable.

[1] https://www.unicode.org/reports/tr39/
It doesn't seem like anyone has actually RTFA. The Brookings contenders for the next Silicon Valley aren't random farming towns in the Great Plains. If you look at the chart at the bottom they include Madison, Minneapolis, Albany, Portland, Nashville, Detroit, Pittsburgh, Columbus, Charlotte. A lot of these cities are already up and coming to the point of rapidly escalating rents.
> TB seems to be supporting the growth of the company.

PE "support growth" for forcing loans on the company with expectation they'll be paid back, which makes the company operate very differently than a VC-backed growth startup.
To anyone who receives counterfeit items sold on Amazon: alert the company that makes the real items. Amazon is violating the law by selling counterfeit products, and the companies can go after them for doing so.
Why not abandon a project that isn’t successful just because you invested billions? Doing the opposite is the definition of the “sunk cost fallacy”.
>Make half as much and live in a house that you can sell for half as much profit when you retire!

Housing should not be an investment.
"You are paying to help the company make money with your data" also describes Amazon, Target, and my local gas station. In this day and age, it's hardly an indictment.
What does your car know about you? We hacked a Chevy to find out
They hire you to make money off your labour, and pay you less than you make them, none of that involves "partnership".
86 Trees
Prior discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10825536
> Do you think Google and Amazon might consider building out smaller regional offices in St Louis, Omaha, Cleveland if they weren't able to scam off thousands of workers on of H1B, L1, etc. visas each year to come work in SV and Seattle, instead of being forced to search for talented citizens outside of their areas?

This doesn't make any sense. Google or Amazon could "scam thousands of workers on visas" to come work in St. Louis, Omaha or Cleveland too.
> "The busses became rolling homeless shelters"

That makes me wonder if that would be a viable way to handle homelessness. Build mobile homeless shelters with beds and toilets. Have them stop at places with services for homeless persons like showers and laundry. I wonder if it would cost more than just paying for a rented apartment or hotel room?
This has to be fake even though they have history of doing just that?
Perhaps gun suicides are preventable, but murder has been a disease that humans will likely always suffer from. We did it long before we had firearms, and we'll still be doing it when we all have blaster rifles.
I don't really understand why its a duopoly, if you restrict yourself to a few basic services surely you can easily switch?
Wow, that they're not profitable is really surprising given how much money AWS makes.
It's a classic pre-mature optimization. Source: Guy who manages 'private cloud'
I was pointing out an obvious counter-example to their point. Telling the truth is not being "cynical".
I don't think the differences between Uber and Amazon are that large. Lack of regulation, constant growth. Sure Uber was toxically funded from the get go, but amazon now being a near monopoly enjoys letting the system roll without caring anymore.

Anyway, lesson learned.
Also the people arguing for giving the employee a "talking to" instead of firing I think are not considering the game theory aspect to this.

If the precedent is "a talking to" with future offenses resulting in a firing, then smart Google employees will realize that they can create an internal activist email list, get new hires to join it, and then when an opportunity for activism presents itself get an employee with a clean record to perform the activism, rinse repeat.

Of course the message in this case wasn't terribly harmful, so I'm sympathetic to the argument of "it's not such a big deal". But the problem is, Google doesn't want to wait for the big deal (for example a chrome extension change to search exec's TextAreas for keywords a "whistleblower" might want to report on) to actually happen and then fire them. They want to prevent employees from thinking they should ever try doing that in the first place which means putting the foot down before the inevitable happens.
> This all presupposes the employees aren't inherently lazy. But, that's been my experience - "lazy" developers aren't generally lazy, just bored.

Laziness is lack of motivation, for whatever reason. Am I working on a project that's ever going to be used? If not, do I at least feel like I'm getting something out of it?

I can enjoy working on a project I personally don't intend to use if I know someone will get value out of it, and I can enjoy working on a project that only I will ever use if I foresee getting sufficient use out of it or if I'm learning interesting stuff along the way, but if none of those things are true, it all just becomes a chore, my mind goes blank, and my productivity begins to dry up. I can power through, but I dread the work.

Empirically, for me, creating "boring" report-generation software is plenty fun if I know someone's going to read and use the reports, and that those reports will make a difference to them. I'm not "making a report" as much as I'm spending minutes of programming time to save them hours of hunt-and-peck work getting the same information manually. I like doing that, even if there's nothing to it, from a programming perspective.

Contrariwise, the worst project I was ever on was an "interesting" one which involved automating web browsers, essentially writing something like Protractor for automating website testing. It had plenty of little technical rabbit-holes to go into, plenty of stuff I could do to learn more about the technology, and I hated it because it devolved into a make-work project I knew nobody was ever going to use. The fact it was a school project, which meant there was no work-life balance and I felt obligated to work on it every spare moment, certainly didn't help.

Most software development is internal software which will never be sold. That shouldn't discourage anyone, because it means most software developers will know who's using their software by name, and possibly have friendly relationships with them.
VideoAsk
The US system's drug payment policies being broken is somewhat independent of the net utility of developing new drugs for the world at large.
Yes, very reassuring for the remaining 99.98% of us, I'm sure. Besides, while it's still a great salary, cost of living for most of those people is insane.
The cycle will always continue. I went through a Newegg era, then an Amazon era, now a similar B&H era as you, and who knows what store will be my go-to a few years from now. The only constant is the cycle of death of the old and something new taking its place. I’ve come to view it as a feature.
I feel like none of the replies to my comment read my second sentence.

Yes, there are many cities in the US with enough density to support public transit. Most of them have it.

My point is that public transit is not a large part of American culture and history which significantly depresses demand for it.

Most Americans grew up in families that owned a car or two and used them to get everywhere. When you ask an American how to get groceries, their immediate mental image is getting in a car, taking a long drive to a big store, and filling up the car with a week or two's worth of stuff. Tell them they can't own a car and all of a sudden they don't know how to solve mundane problems like this anymore. There are other perfectly fine solutions, of course, but they don't know those solutions yet. It's not part of their culture.

Also, most Americans live or at least grew up in cities whose urban planning was designed around automobiles and parking lots. They are spread out to make room for parking lots, which in turn makes public transit slower and less economical. People need cars because cities are too spread out for transit because people prefer to drive because they have cars because cities are too spread out...

There is a huge path dependent effect here where most cities aren't laid out for public transit and most people don't prioritize it.

People from outside of the US love to criticize how stupid Americans are for not having great buses and rail everywhere, but few want to acknowledge that no country is free of its own history and culture. Cars are a big part of ours. We are making progress, but the physical topology of cities and the culture loaded into the heads of several hundred million people cannot be refactored as easily as code.
Un-shortened URL https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1I4peNHCG23vDYDKdSPbY...