skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
People who only get their understanding of Silicon Valley and the wider hacker and startup cultures from the mass media. Which mean the Ubers, WeWorks, and Googles. They think this is the sum of tech and it totally ignores the average day-to-day life of working in tech.

There's a million companies making millions or selling for hundreds of millions (or even 10s) who never make the headlines. They do weird obscure niche stuff that would take 20min to explain to an outsider.

And 99% of them are all run by normal hardworking nerds-from-high school type people who aren't pretentious or failed to grow out of University stereotypes of educated males, and yes males do a lot of dumb ignorant stuff in their late teens and early adulthood.

But the average entrepreneur isn't the 20 something prodigy the news fawns over, it's usually a 40+ guy whose been in the industry for a long time and found niches problem sets which they can specialize in and make a lot of money automates/dramatically improving how businesses are run in those markets.

Then there are the super nerds who work at Google and Tesla and Twitter, but mostly they are mid-teir nerds just happy making a living being able to work with other really-smart people. There isn't anything toxic about any of this. It's just highly curious people working on problems that interest them. And occasionally that involves pushing uncomfortable hard-changing solutions society isn't quite ready for - or nerds who weren't quite ready for society.

It's a learning process and SV will get better at interacting with the wider world. I hope too that the world starts treating SV (and the tech hubs around the world) with more respect.
But SICP and Feynman are highly nonstandard ways to be introduced to the topics. That’s why they’re unusual.
I think nylon jackets etc are ok, like the hard shell ski jackets etc. It’s more just and issue with soft fleece type stuff I believe.

Patagonia has some information about it on their site somewhere, they also stock the guppy friend bags.
I don't actually think it's better than this was pre-Twitter.

In the past, you could find more or less anyone in the phone book. Basically every person who succeeded in tech without family connections pre-1990 got their start by using this (Steve Jobs immediately comes to mind; he home-dialed Bill Hewlett (yes, that Bill Hewlett) as a child, asked for spare parts, and got a job because of it).

For a while, you could also do this before people were scared to post their mail addresses on the internet. Have a question for someone? Type USERNAME@DOMAIN.COM into the box, and they'll answer in a few days!

That's more or less gone, though.

That manipulation is now the standard should be looked on with incredible sadness rather than "Wow, what a huge opportunity!"
Anyone could’ve done that living anywhere. It’s not particular to living in SF.
> and single story ranch homes with sad little yards

This is so spot-on it literally pains me
A Dramatic Error in American Spaceflight
Ask HN: Complacency with Payment Processing on the Web
Stripe's pricing for payment processing on the web is 2.9% + 30¢ per successful card charge.
Paypal's is 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction within the US.

It's disappointing that a per transaction pricing model is accepted as the status quo. It adds up.

- Shouldn't an online transaction be a digital exchange of currency between two individual's bank accounts? Does it really cost that much?

- Is there a good resource to view a breakdown of the fees at each step in the journey of a transaction?

- What businesses are taking a cut that could be removed from the transaction?

- Is there a possibility for disruption here similar to the way that Robinhood.com disrupted the "fees per trade" status quo?

Thanks
There have been multiple Hollywood movies depicting how big business and agribusiness are screwing up the environment. The Big Short was a great film about how Wall Street is totally corrupt and straight up caused the housing crisis.

Should we have a movie made about ad tech and social media and their deleterious effects on society? Just to make it even.

Most of Silicon Valley isn’t working on ad tech, yeah, I get it. But for crying out loud what the hell are they working on? Thats my point. How this is interpreted outside of tech circles is that “tech” is just a thing to make “tech” people more rich.

Edit: I’d actually like to know what percentage of SV is working on ad tech, which I consider useless for American society at best and dangerous at worst.
> I would be surprised if the number of millionaires minted from being an employee (not founder) at a private tech startup founded in SF was over 1000 over the last 10 years.

That would be roughly 100 a year. Y Combinator definitely funds more than a 100 startups a year, and it funds a small minority of all startups. Given that there were over 250 yet to IPO unicorns as of 2018 and Google alone made over 100 millionaires when it IPOed I think you’re off.

> Employees working at the big cos likely made much more depending on how long they held on to their RSUs than your average startup employee.

Most employee stock options are more akin to joining Stripe now than to joining a company that just left YC.
Agile Manifesto[1], principle #3: Deliver working software frequently, from a couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a preference to the shorter timescale.

There's nothing inherently wrong with this, if 3 months are considered "frequent" in your industry (true for mission/safety critical systems, or systems that should not be upgraded frequently for some reason).

The idea is to deliver small, non-breaking increments to production frequently, rather than infrequent, big bang releases.

1. https://agilemanifesto.org/principles.html
You are moving the goalposts. A moment ago you were saying it wasn't happening in SF, now you're saying it happens everywhere.
I imagine GP was not specifically talking about paste-disabled confirm-email fields, rather just confirm email fields in general.
I'm kind of disappointed in most of the comments here, because I think most of them are so focused on pushing back against the "tech bro" characterization (and TBH I think pushing back against this characterization is totally fair), that they're missing the broader picture of "Hey, things have become kind of fucked up in our largest cities", and it's worth thinking about how to deal with that.

What do I mean by fucked up? I mean that the cost of living and housing has become so high that the broad cross section of people you need to produce a vibrant city (e.g. bankers, politicians, techies, policemen, teachers, fireman, waiters, paramedics, artists, etc.) can no longer all afford to live there, and this is a real, serious problem. Cities have always had rich areas and poor areas, but as inequality has grown over the past few decades, with wealth flowing out of rural areas and into urban ones (especially "supercities" like SF, NYC, Seattle, etc.), it means that these cities are having less and less room for anyone but the rich.

SF is just the most acute example because (a) the concentrated tech boom here has created enormous amounts of wealth and (b) the geography here more tightly constrains sprawl compared to most other cities. However, the same exact thing is happening in lots of other places. E.g. there used to be "good parts" and "bad parts" (Hell's Kitchen, Alphabet City) of Manhattan, but there are almost no cheap places in Manhattan anymore. Similarly, Austin TX was a "slacker's paradise" 30 years ago, now pretty much all central housing is looking at $300-400k or more just for lot value of a single family home.

I'm not sure what the answer is, but I think it's worth talking about how something feels broken in our cities, and what viable solutions would be, instead of just focusing on the "anti-anti-tech-bro" angle.
The SR-71 speed check story
It's called "housing", seems to me that the core functionality is to house, not to gain wealth. We might have comingled it with investing, but there's no need for that.

Also housing can't rise faster in value than inflation long term. It can for a while but eventually it'll reach a point where even with a 30 year loan you can't purchase it with any job in the area where the house is located.

So if housing is fundamentally unsuited for gaining wealth in the long term for anyone but the wealthy and if it's core function is to house people, then I don't see a need for housing cost to appreciate above inflation.
No, computers were not everywhere in, say, 1970s, so working with computers made you another kind of tech specialist, like working with, say, aircraft tech. Maybe cool, but your impact is limited; no way to make billions out of your job.

Now computers are literally everywhere, and literally always before people's eyes. Also, there's the internet that connects them across the globe. Now anyone with a good idea and good business execution can start a billion-dollar business from home or garage, and reach global audience with little technical effort.

On top of it, there are oodles of money looking for return, and high-risk, high-return investment looks better than no investment to many. This has radically changed the balance. As an engineer, you can build a very valuable, far-reaching company. Even if it's not turning profit yet, you have relatively much easier time to have millions invested in it.
The Plot to Murder Honduran Activist Berta Cáceres
> I'm at a company that minted over a thousand millionaires, assuming they held onto their options.

Okay, so that requires the company to be sold for at least $1B, the employees collectively own 100% of the company, and the stock is evenly distributed. Given the investor's share and uneven distribution among employees, for there to be 1000 millionaires, the company would have to sell for at the very least $5B (probably much more). There are only a handful of companies that have sold at that level, certainly not common.
The same Microsoft that puts Candy Crush and other ads in start menus and goes from windows 10 to windows vista or XP in control panel with 1 click?
Europe? Where is corporate crime punished effectively? With decades long prison sentences for the responsible executives?
This should have (2016) in the title. 'happy-go-lucky, you can probably still change it given the recency of posting.
Ok. So what’s a more realistic number?

Again if you’re granted .2% as a very early employee you will make low millions if it does IPO for over $1B. The 100th employee at that company is not making anything close to that, especially the non-technical ones.

Working at a unicorn and receiving equity does not automatically mean your grant is anything close to 1M. It completely depends on when you joined, job title, seniority, and whether it’s a technical role or not.
Cool! I hadn't realized that PCI and PCIe were successors to DMA, and it's nice to see an overview of how application processors shuttle data around quickly.

If you want to play with DMA concepts on a less complex level, most modern microcontrollers implement it in some form or another. If you write a program that needs to move a lot of data quickly, like drawing to a display or using an SD card, the difference in speed and reduced overhead is dramatic.

I guess it's a basic concept that most people here will find pedestrian and unremarkable, but I really appreciate how flexible and powerful it can be. You just have to configure a DMA channel pointing at two memory addresses, and then the data moves in the background while the CPU goes off to do other things. You can send data from memory to an external device, or vice-versa, or within the chip's internal memory. You can usually wire two peripherals together to implement 'dumb pipes' which require almost no intervention from the CPU to keep working. Most chips will also let you trigger DMA transfers from arbitrary signals such as hardware timers, so you can also 'set and forget' things like sending audio data to a DAC at a specific bitrate.

I can see how it would be inadequate for the enormous bandwidth required to host multiple devices like GPUs and Ethernet ports, but DMA is still fun. A more elegant protocol for a more civilized age :)
It could be uncharitably interpreted as, "You're not providing the value I expect. You should fix that."
My iPhone X on brave got really hot tough
Also wool is somewhat flame resistant while synthetic fleece melts to your skin and catches on fire
This book (although a bit older already) attempts to give an overview of the impact of a lot of stuff: https://www.amazon.co.uk/How-Bad-are-Bananas-Everything/dp/1...
Uh no. My point was that being a tech worker in SF, even at a “unicorn”, does not automatically mean you’re going to be rich, and that anyone who invested their savings in public equities available to anyone could’ve turned a modest amount of capital into something much larger without having anything to do with SF or working in tech.
I guess you meant -, not +. Indeed, though I know the relevant formula, my intuition so violently failed me that I didn’t even calculate it before deciding it couldn’t be so large.
While it's already kind of problematic to call nerds 'cast off from "normal" society' like they were an oppressed minority, I don't think the comparison is relevant. Most tech bros would have been working in finance or as lawyers or some other lucrative field. Many of them don't care about technology beyond how it can make them money, you see this attitude again and again on HN (countless posts about how the only value a programmer brings in business value). Most tech bros are not nerds that love technology for the sake of it, although there are of course people that work in tech that have this passion. The only way your comment works is if you apply "tech bro" to everyone working for a tech company...
There certainly can be an absence of value if the value isn't there. Think serialization or sparse arrays. A null may be represented by the absence of representation.
Sell anus
I think most French would be happy to switch to a system where it is easy to fire, as long as the social net was good. Thing is, these two things (strengthening the safety net and making the labor laws more flexible) are defended by different parties. The few that have pretended to do this transition ended up just removing labor law protections.
Yes a blog post would be terrific, thanks.
For me it's most IoT stuff. I really can't see the point in paying good money[1] to be able to do weird things with my lights, aircon or stove. Security system perhaps but not the other junk.

[1] - Also concerns about privacy and quick obsolescence of tech
> It has always been 'safe' to bully the nerds. No other group of people receives this level of public venomous screed.

It’s because nerds are too busy following our interests to bother attacking back. Defending oneself in general doesn’t work: attacking back does. The maxim “Never defend, always attack” is a maxim for a reason.

The only real “solution” here is to attack back and bully the people who bullied you in the first place. And is that really a solution?

If as nerds, we defend ourselves, then we stay in the frame of the bully. If we attack back, we become bullying nerds.

Society needs scapegoats. For decades and decades, nerds have been safe to pick on. It’s not until you get an extremely aggressive nerd like Bill Gates that a member of the “nerd class” even begins to defend themselves. And aggressive nerds are rare and generally self-interested. Rather than attacking back for the “nerd class” as a whole, they attack companies competing with theirs.

What is the solution to this quandary? Everyone who’s read Girard knows we need scapegoats. If not nerds — oh wait, I mean “tech Bros” — then who else can we scapegoat as a society? The answer should obviously be Wall Street IMO, but that moment seems to have passed when the Occupy movement got culturally supplanted by in-group identity politics.

IMO in order to stop the bullying, we must become bullies ourselves which poses two questions:

* do we really wanna do that?

* and would it even work since Occupy failed so dramatically?
Amazing to know elephant seal and cuviers beaked whale dived so deep.

One additional info that could be included is that of submarines and their depth rating.
There's a huge difference between an average person in a random place investing $10K left over after their bills are paid, and an SF tech employee working with at 5-10 times that amount.
Denver and Seattle are both already having extreme housing shortages, congestion, and in the case of Seattle an anti-tech backlash.
That sounds very familiar, but I'm not sure this is something that can be blamed on decoupling itself. An unpopular module is going to need as much attention as a micro service from code point of view. For upgrades / patching, there would be a company-wide process around it that doesn't care that much how the code is organised.
I don't think I've ever seen one that wasn't paste-disabled, though my knowledge is way out of date since I found out about the aforementioned config setting.
Windows handles wallpapers specially and always transcodes wallpaper images to JPEG (I think the default in Windows 7 was at 60% quality setting) even when the source image was PNG - or when a PNG version would be both smaller and have less errors than the JPEG version. There’s a registry setting you can tweak to change the quality and I think you can configure it to not transcode PNG images now - but I don’t think it’s the default.

As for the reason why - I think it’s to do with users using high-res photos (like 10megapixel) as wallpapers which would bog Windows down if used as-is - and users on roaming profiles causing a 10MB+ BMP image bring copied over the network every time they logon. Probably. I speculate.
Still, leachate control is nothing but a cost center to the people running a landfill. It's likely that plenty of landfills are not as compliant as they report, through intention or ignorance; and when the landfill operator goes bankrupt nobody takes over the maintenance. In a sense, leachate control is the low-tar cigarette of waste disposal
App engine isn't going anywhere. Don't be so dramatic.
> We’ll only generate web pages via React server side rendering, eliminating the Jinja server-side templating we’ve been using

I’ve been down this road. Deep down this road. Let me just give you a heads up on something I didn’t consider at the time: Most template languages do not parse every single node, one by one. In a sense they are just doing string concatenation. Not so with server side rendering and React. I’m not saying it can’t be done but just realize it is going to take a lot more compute power. Caching is great of course but won’t help you if you plan to customize user content during the server side rendering as well. My recommendation is that you don’t do any user authenticated stuff during SSR.

Also consider how you are going to handle cookies if you do plan to make authenticated requests to server side rendering. Also solvable but for some reason people had the hardest time understanding why we had to forward cookies to the domains we controlled in an API request and definitely not to any other servers.

I’m not sure I would pick React for an SEO driven website. It is hard to get a competitive “time to first byte”. Unless of course you can pre warm a cache of every one of your pages.

Lastly, you’re going to need Node for the SSR. I’m sure you know this but that might take you out of app engine and into cloud compute. Not a big deal but thought I’d mention.

Good luck! It is doable. If you ever want to chat about how we solved some of these problems I’d love to save you some time if I can. Hit me up in my profile email.
So long as your data has well-defined interface boundaries on it, this is a good way to de-risk rewrites. It really depends on the current state of the codebase. If there's a tangle of dependencies, then they have to be cleared out or facaded away to a testable interface, or else that part of the port will be a shot in the dark.

And if you have the interfaces in hand, the language itself becomes considerably less important, since more of the code is subsequently dependent on your own system and not really the outer ecosystem. It's the projects that have coded "to the metal" on their existing platform that have the biggest issues with keeping up their flexibility.
> Because of the factors that make it favorable to high-tech industry.

The main factor is the extremely high concentration of the best tech talent in the world, many of whom are immigrants. What else do you think is special about Mountain View and Menlo Park? The strip malls and shitty public transit?
Putting Feynman aside, this is how -all- teachers should be. I had maybe two in all my years of public school that came anywhere close. It's sad that teaching is not a highly paid and prestigious job. And it's a two way street, most of the teachers now are the same awful ones I had, latching on to statements like mine, yet demanding more money. It's a race to the bottom, and a detriment to our country.
statsd might be a good example there. Local coalescing before reporting upstream.

Basically they didn’t make the client smart, they made a proxy and spam loopback.
I read in an article a majority of the Pacific Garbage Patch likely comes from this discarded plastic.

Can’t cite at the moment...
The only people supporting nuclear are also on the left.

Nuclear's demise has nothing to do with the liberals blocking it (if they were so powerful their efforts against coal and fracking and oil pipelines may have been marginally effective) but rather the terrible economics of it vs solar/wind as well as natural gas.
Sad the author can’t be a dictator and make the world exactly as they determined it should be, as that sounds like their true passion, other than injecting smug into their veins every few hours. What an awful, meaningless article.
I’ll take the bait - I really liked SICP and feel like it stands out among many other things I’ve found. Your comment makes me feel there’s a lot I’m missing out on. Any recommendations?
“he writes on index cards whose order can be reshuffled, and always in pencil, which can be erased; he says he uses up the rubber end more than the graphite one. He only wishes that the point could stay continually sharp. The pencil, as over the pen, is like a whisper.”
Nerds are at best a subculture, not a social class. And usually it's not even a subculture, but a collection of different subcultures and interests and archetypes and stereotypes, often mutually exclusive and conflicting.
I would highly recommend https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYylPRX6z4Q as a way of framing the problem.

It seems like our options for ML are currently: self-play, dataset fitting, or human feedback. It's possible to solve any problem that can fit into one of those molds.

(Unfortunately the opposite is true: if a problem doesn't fit into those categories, it seems very hard to solve with any form of ML.)

But, now that I think about it a bit more, the sentence "use a trained net as a tool for building a controller with known continuity properties" seems neither obvious nor straightforward to do. I'm decently well-versed in AI techniques at this point, and I can't really think how I'd sit down and write a program that would generate such a system. Anyone have any leads?

Basically, the goal is to make a neural net that helps you design a system that can be predictable. One way would be to write a loss function that penalizes unpredictability, and then let it run until it converges on a predictable control system. But that's a bit like saying "Just draw an owl." Not so easy to think of the actual code to do that.
I have seen this before and it is truly disturbing for those who have come to the comments first. It shows a man locked in a tiger chair being questioned as to why he talked badly about the police on a forum. He is completely restrained. I can only imagine the feeling. This is disturbing so please be warned. How can we make a difference as an individual?
“Coding is 30% of the Job”
Western media reports on the Hong Kong protests tell just one of many stories