skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've done 65 hires on Upwork and spent $20k+ on the platform, though not all were software contractors. I've had some fantastic hires from the platform, but I've also had lots of duds that wasted my time and money.

There’s one underlying maxim that governs my hiring philosophy for any skilled position:

* Talented people choose their employers selectively

Some employers force freelancers through tedious and time-consuming hoops without pay. They assume that contractors are so desperate for work that you can demand anything you want from them by dangling the mere potential for a job, but they're actually just filtering out talented candidates.

Maintain expectations that it will take you several months to save time by hiring a contractor. The more complex the work, the longer it will take before you come out ahead on your time investment. The easiest jobs I've outsourced have been for UI tasks, where it's either correct or not. Finding a general skills developer is much harder. Outsourcing requires a lot of up-front effort in the form of writing job postings, writing thorough, clear specifications for what you want, interviewing candidates, and reviewing work. Once you find someone good and find a good rhythm with them, it's a great way to save yourself time, but you're likely to find a lot of bad candidates first.

The #1 thing I look for in any candidate is communication. Miscommunications are extremely expensive. Avoid candidates who ask vague questions or need re-explanation of things you've explained clearly. The best people I've hired tend to be people who are highly specific and detailed in their communication.

Take ratings with a grain of salt. On platforms like Upwork or Fiverr, most of the people are hiring for things they don't know how to do themselves, so a terrible freelance programmer might have a 4.9 rating because their clients can't tell that they produce code that's hacky and unmaintainable. Similarly, some legitimately good freelancers have dings on their record from unreasonable clients who gave them a 1.0 rating because the freelancer refused to do extra unpaid work.

Resist the temptation to hire cheap contractors. You'll always get bids that are tantalizingly low (like $12/hr for "senior-level" Python development), but they often can't deliver what you ask for with reasonable quality. The freelancers who are good can command a good wage. With the bargain basement freelancers, you'll spend so much time managing them and fixing their work that you won't save time overall.

Finally, start small. Don't hire someone to build an entire mobile app from scratch; it's far too complicated. Start with a job that should take a few hours (and set a cap on their hours so there are no miscommunications). As you get into a groove of working well with your freelancer, gradually give them more hours and more complex tasks.
Welcome to open source.

That’s a perfectly valid business model for open source software and there are people and companies using it.
Beginner Board Games for Adults for 2019
Mistletoe and Medicine
To get an idea of the game you can try out the original version on archive.org: https://archive.org/details/MZX102
Giant surveillance balloons are lurking at the edge of space
Well I guess you can't see AI as a played out field yet. More likely it is just starting to take off. Say you find a new exciting spin on ERPs to replace e.g. SAP solutions that will have a large surface area. At least that is how i read the linked post.
Valley of Love
So what? Raising is not success.
Space Heater: Scientists Find New Way to Transfer Energy Through a Vacuum
Tricorder.
Whatever, please remove my posts because they're my intellectual property.

Cancer caner cancer cancer cancer cancer cancer cancer cancer cancer.
A rough summary of his points:

* It is not given that the "Von Neumann Bottleneck" is what generates flabby, verbose programs.

* Computers execute programs, human reason about them. There's no reason to expect the same tools to apply. This has similarities to Linus' objections to C++ in the Linux kernel - kernel code is an implement of high level concepts and there's no to have the language structures partly support or impose these high level concepts; instead one should understand abstractly and then bring them to implementation.

* The operations of functional programming aren't efficient in their naive implementation. They can be made efficient with an optimizing compiler but this effectively results in the programmer thinking about more, not less, elements.

* Dijkstra takes issue with Backus' assumption that functional programs will make program proving accessible to the average programmer. I think Dijkstra wants to up the skill of the average programmer rather than expecting that functional programs will make proving easier. (this one I'm less sure of but it seems like you have any situation where only "unaverage" programmers are going to be using functional languages).

Dijkstra closes: "In short, the article is a progress report on a valid research effort but suffers badly from aggressive overselling of its significance, long before convincing result have been reached."

And I think the situation now is that FP has shown itself to be definitely useful in some domains but still suffers from publicity that implies it is a paradigm that will "eat" ordinary software engineering.

That it has huge mind-share for what it isn't might be as bad as it not being widely used for what it is useful for.
As a long-time pg supporter, it pains me to say this: I think at this point pg could write anything and it would show up immediately with critical acclaim.

It was more charming when he had to work hard to make his points known.

But hey, fame, right? Just famous people things.

There's so much more to say in this case, though! How do you avoid the traps? Waving a wand like "Just love something" leaves far too much to the imagination. Pointing at a prior essay at loving your work is helpful, but different.

Often, you have to actively offend people in order to find good problems to work on. The idea that people have devoted their lives to the wrong thing is inherently offensive to them. That's a point not covered here.

For example, I imagine that a lot of people who've studied 3D rendering for their entire lives are about to feel very outdated the moment neural network renderers displace them. And that's also a good counterexample to the point that "Often, the best place to search for new ideas is a place thought fully explored." It might often be true, but it's not always true.

And then there are the in-betweens. Bitcoin was in a field both thought fully explored (crypto + finance) and also unexplored, in a certain sense.
I built a website uptime checker and I'm looking for feedback
I know there are other website uptime monitors and checkers so you may be wondering why this is any different?

It checks the uptime very frequently to show the true website uptime present and passed.

Runs from multiple locations

Lightweight

easy to use

URL: https://isitup.site

Purpose
To check the uptime of websites both current and historic.

Technologies Used
DEBIAN 10, PHP7, REDIS, Bootstrap, ChartJS

Feedback Requested:

General Feedback of use, any suggestions?
File System vs. Storage System
What are subtle differences between these two?
Pavlos worked for Booking.com in the past.
How does it help to have the sensing laser at the same wave length as the pulsing laser, if the pulsing laser is triggering sound waves which have a different wavelength?
Seems pretty realistic to me. Some people have more influence than others. Connecting with them is partially up to luck. A connection with such a person is a valuable resource.
A lot of statistical and methodological crimes being committed here.

"Patients... were queried on their use of supplements at registration and during treatment".

Hazard ratios.

The blender approach of looking at all the reported vitamins at once, and picking anything that looks significant.

People with the money to buy supplements take supplements...so this runs right into the health/wealth correlation.
Yegor Bugayenko (yegor256) gives the most direct advice I've ever seen about hiring remote programmers, generally remote teams. The advice could be scaled down a bit for an individual developer. The general thrust is to keep things incremental: demand access to source at all times, one click build processes, regular independent code audits, change the team regularly so no one becomes essential to the process, demand a list of risks be updated regularly, etc., etc.

[0] https://soundcloud.com/yegor256/shift-m15-how-not-to-trust-p...

[1] https://www.slideshare.net/YegorBugayenko/how-to-avoid-outso...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLk_5BmgTVk
Well, I have a hard time thinking of a field that I believe is fully explored. History has shown time and again that it's really easy to be fooled in that respect.
You're looking for Kepler's third law, which is a result of inverse square law and Newton's laws:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kepler%27s_laws_of_planetary_m...

For all planets, the ratio of the (cubed) distance from the sun to (squared) period is a constant which only depends on the mass of the sun, regardless of the mass of the planets (all assuming that the sun is far massive than any other planet.)
Windows does something similar now too. It used to be that USER32 (which owned the windowing system/window manager since Windows 95) would render the wallpaper - but ever since a semi-recent release - either Windows 8 or Windows 10, Explorer.exe became responsible for rendering the wallpaper - and there's definitely some tie-in with the DWM too (you can see this because whenever you kill your session's explorer.exe your desktop wallpaper will disappear). I'm curious what goes on, exactly.
Why is that the best way, or even a good way?

How is allowing current owners to assert control (via regulation) over land they don't own, to serve their own private interests, better than allowing that land to be developed for higher-density use, in the interest of a larger number people?

Society isn't obligated to protect people's investments at the expense of its least fortunate members.
What are the advantages of using your custom engine instead of unity, unreal engine?
Seems like the other languages were for the frontends. C++ core, Java for Android, objC for iOS, php for web
It is and is shared by many other people not commenting. Creating a product targeted at children and then naming it the same as a dangerous addictive street narcotic is not a wise decision.
Is anyone trying to back this up with a proper scientific study of whether users find it easier or harder to use? Seems just like opinion and debates about aesthetics otherwise?

If I wanted to claim that JavaScriptCore was getting slower and I didn't post any data to back that up people would laugh me out of the conversation.
It's a reasonable concern, but all studies are flawed in some way. From the perspective of clinical practice, this is how most clinics assess supplement use - by asking the patient. In the absence of any better data (and it surely could be better) it at least offers some guidance when patients ask if they should or shouldn't take supplements during chemotherapy. I would tell them that there's limited evidence, but it points towards avoiding supplements.
This is a great example of short content that draws you into wanting to watch longer content to get deeper insight.
Professor Mark Blythe: Gobal Trumpism and the Future of the Global Economy

https://youtu.be/KGuaoARJYU0
> Then there was the Shuttle, which was supposed to have a less than 1% chance of losing a crew and managed to kill 14 astronauts in 130-something flights (and had a couple more very close calls).

That seems like a misleading way to frame it. It was 14 astronauts out of 833 who flew, or 2 crews out of 130, so 1.5%. Not far off the estimate. And with that high a percentage, a number close calls are also expected.
Apple has fallen into the same trap that Microsoft has -- changing their UI not to advance the state of the art, but just for the sake of changing it so they have something new to sell.
We applied this one debaiting trick that will amaze you: s/the/a/.
I’m sure this is a serious question but I lol’d when I read it. I’m going to use that line at a party or a meeting some time to sound smart.
As I said, I haven't given a lot of thought about this so please take my opinion with a grain of salt - but I believe that once you split the log out of PostgreSQL, a lot of functionality of this ilk could start to be considered. When/if added, I think it would make for a stronger PostgreSQL in the end. However, I do understand this is an insanely hard amount of work. In a way, it bears some similarities to splitting GTK out of GIMP, for instance; extremely difficult thing to do but ultimately it turned out to be a massive win for both projects. This would be even harder, but ultimately, greatly advantageous.
Fashionable problem. Played out field.

So, essentially, yes - fashionable fields will be well explored; the essay is about not getting sucked into fashionable problems in whatever field you're working in.
How long did it take you to reach 250k players, and has there been marketing involved?
Right, my point was that I shouldn't need to enforce this. Gitlab yaml allows and often goes out of its way to encourage non-portable practices.
Not sure why anyone's downvoting you, but I suspect the name is 100% on purpose - it would be quite the coincidence otherwise. I remember a game called Speedball in the 90s, which was very successful - this is nothing new!
Following this advice you will work with 0 competent developers. No developer of any worth will give you turn-key offer for a non-trivial project.
Star Wars must at least share the "invented the motion picture blockbuster" status with Jaws, which came out the year before.

Star Trek TOS was not that internally consistent or realistic.

Consider that within a couple of years they discovered that Jack the Ripper had actually been due to a non-corporeal alien, that aliens had visited Ancient Greece, resulting in the Greeks worshiping them as gods, and that Methuselah, Alexander the Great, Leonardo da Vinci, and Brahms were all the same person, still alive at about 6,000 years old .. and that Cochrane was still alive.

The odds that there are many others alien visitors, and ultra-long-lived humans, is very high. That should have a big impact on how humans try to understand their own history and cultural evolution, but it's never mentioned.

Or, think about how the ancient Greek myths influenced the later Roman ones, and how the Roman culture influenced even the German culture nearly 2,000 years later. The strong similarities between human history and the Roman-like culture of 'Bread and Circuses' (with the gladiator having the Greek name Achilles) and Nazi Germany ("Patterns of Force") or even US culture, as in 'The Omega Glory' with the Yankees and Communists, and holy words identical to the US Pledge of Allegiance and Preamble to the Constitution seemly written on Omega IV several hundred years before they were written on Earth.

This is hand-waved as Hodgkin's Law of Parallel Planetary Development. Given that we know that aliens influenced Earth history, and other planets seem to have a similar history, shouldn't they be thinking how odd it is to still have parallel development? Does it mean that equally powerful aliens are affecting all of the other cultures too? Why don't humans meet any of them?

And, if mental powers can be created through an injection, why aren't more people doing it? Where is the research into understanding how that works?

> the first attempt (that I'm aware of) to portray an internally consistent, realistic future society onscreen.

The Quartermass Experiment? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Quatermass_Experiment It was near-future, but still in the future.

> most of what happens in Star Wars would be plausible in many "hard SF but with FTL" settings

I don't understand energy in Star Wars.

Why don't the imperial troops fire at the escape pod? So what if no life was detected. It's ret-conned that droids aren't allowed to use escape pods. But you can still place the plans in the droid, turn it off on a timer, stick it in the escape pod, and eject the pod, yes?

We know droids can be shut down because C-3PO shuts himself down for the night to conserve power. They've got two suns, plenty of land, and no excess solar power? And it's relatively cheap to get a flight off the planet, which requires loads of power - and potential energy is easily converted to kinetic. So, why is it accepted that C-3PO needs to save power?
"I refuse your reality and substitute my own." - Adam Savage, a man ahead of his time.
Is the connection really valuable? I know in a discussion like this it has an abstract perception of value, but I wonder whether one can really assign value to most Twitter-based connections with so-called influencers.
Had the same thought.

Some of his essays, no one else could have written them and brought a fresh, nuanced perspective.

These couple paragraphs wouldn’t get any attention if not for the name of the writer. Maybe that’s fine—great writers have their share of banality—but does reveal how susceptible we are generally to brand name over substance.
Explanation of Betelgeuse's dimming: Seasonal sources of noise
In one sentence: Excel seems magic because when you copy and paste cells the references change to still work, but you can understand in less than a minute exactly how and why that happens if you learn R1C1.

In two more sentences: Specifically if you're in cell A1 and you enter =B1 what is actually stored is =RC[1] (same row, one column more relative to this cell). So if you copy that into cell H50 it will still be RC[1] and now evaluate to I50.
this recent article might have an answer or two for you:

Estimating Flight Characteristics of Anomalous Unidentified Aerial Vehicles

https://www.preprints.org/manuscript/201908.0233/v1
Fighter Pilot Podcast had him too. It was great to listen to - https://www.fighterpilotpodcast.com/episodes/035-ufos/
It's someone who used to be at Booking when the software was written.
Humanity as a whole as problem solving algorithm might be similar to particle swarm in very complex neighbourhoods and topologies.

Particles (individual humans or small groups) move around in problem space as particles with position and velocity. Each individual's movement is influenced by its best known position locally but also the the best known global positions in the search-space. When better positions are found by others, individual change their course (take hints) and move towards them.

The problems would be the same. Too much randomness and it's just a random search. Too much convergence leads to local optimums.
You know I had this bouncing around in my head and I had to come back to say: How dare you.

How dare you so flippantly cast an entire planet's worth of individuals for whom you claim it is so essential to preserve the liberties of, up to and including the extermination of those individuals on a biblical proportion, how dare you cast those lives into the proverbial fire to suit your narrow view of the world.

It is a profound, disgusting, and offensive train of thought to say that "these are the ideas that matter, and if the whole planet dies because of them, so be it." HOW DARE YOU! Billions of lives that you're ready to march into a grinder to suit one individual-centered belief system that's barely been in proverbial charge for a couple of centuries.

Thankfully, people who think like you are hopelessly outnumbered and their minds can change. But I must say this conversation has been a reminder of just how big the human ego can get, how assured of itself it can be, even as it marches itself to it's own demise, head held so high and proudly.

Honestly, just, astonished at this level of arrogance. Well done sir. I sincerely hope that people better than you are able to save your life, since it is obvious you yourself will not.
Any update on telemetry? Looks like nothing in release notes.
If you search Google for "Angeldust", literally the first 5 results for me are about the drug PCP. I have no idea how on earth you can even deploy something without Googling it first.
Or maybe my personalised results are different?

Also i may be wrong about the importance of these results - is it easy to push those down?
I'm guessing in order to achieve the same body penetration characteristics on RX and TX.
It’s doable. It’s just you need to know how to make it work. Also keep improving so afterwards people not on those licenses keep buying and paying for it.

Re lifetime licenses, if you offer it for a certain amount of time or until you reach a goal. it can work. At that point, hey! You have funding and you bootstrapped your product/company.

Then you switch to whatever licensing scheme you want.
> everyone who wants to make a living writing software needs a recurring revenue stream

You can have a recurring revenue stream with pay once software. Every day, hundreds of thousands of new people are born who don't have a license yet!

It's really easy to make the same amount of money with pay once licenses compared to subscriptions: just take the average number of months that someone uses your app, multiply with monthly price, make that the "pay once" price, done! Now you have the same revenue but don't need to charge for subscriptions, and you get all the money up front!
Also profile photos are frequently reused between sites. Easy way of connecting handles, though they're not always real since some people create fake profiles on one network from real profiles on another.
This article is just a rant without many concrete examples, studies, or suggestions for improvements.