skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Good people and good ideas need funding, which dried up pretty bad during the last recession. The startup market got hit harder than any other part of tech. The established tech companies as of 2008 survived the downturn and IIRC most of them didn't even do layoffs.
I wonder if the old blog posts are even still up.

After they were bought by Match Group, all those experiments stopped, and the site became one with the borg. It's depressing that one shitty corporation, controls every fucking dating site, and has the money to buy pretty much any competitor at this point.
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro felt similar to Ted Chiang's carefully prepared and high-minded sci-fi. They both write with a poetic sensibility that puts the sci-fi elements in the background.
Lin and Larry Pardey are sailors and writers, known for their small boat sailing. The Pardeys have sailed over 200,000 miles together, circumnavigating the world both east-about and west-about,[1] and have published numerous books on sailing.

The Pardeys have sailed past all the great southern capes, including Cape Horn. Larry, assisted by Lin, built the two boats they used for two circumnavigations; both were under 30 feet and were designed by Lyle Hess. Neither boat had an engine.

Also some amazing videos of them -

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4rWY7bhaiAA

Interview:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_khg0g5fao

Playlist:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL32CAC8B7893D97F1
In some sense, it was a bait and switch. It didn't used to be this way etc etc. Once the momentum is on, it's hard to back out.
value isn't the whole story -- there's a large supply of programmers who are much cheaper than what a stanford grad makes (hacker schools and eastern europe / india are examples)

there are good arguments for why american companies can't outsource effectively for all roles, or the higher quality of a stanford grad, but they aren't simple arguments and they depend as much on low-quality managers as high-quality talent

even in a high-price city with a reasonable tech ecosystem like london, programmers aren't paid as much as SF or even NY.

comp is complicated
I agree with your point, just want to add; I think the point of existential deliberation at it's root is to overcome existential despair. I think for 'typical' people doing what feels right is an effective means to overcome this, but people who deliberate on it obsessively do so because they either don't know what feels right or are unable to extinguish their despair by doing what feels right, and are driven to search for answers. Like you said, trying to use reason to find some meaning in life is probably not going to be successful. Some people, I suspect, might be unable to stop obsessing about the meaning of life and that could be the cause of their despair. They'll never find an answer and get relief in that way, but they also don't have the power to stop themselves from trying
You can make magic lantern permanent and not require a card.
This project is the epitome of, “how not to use Elasticsearch.” Comments in this thread can be divided perfectly into two groups: people that have experience with Elasticsearch and people that don’t. Only the latter will suppose this project could ever be a good solution.
So do doctors, as per the example in the article, yet the barrier to entry is much higher for them.

This is not about value created -- it's about the dynamics of the labor market. If there were a bunch of people who could create as much value as you, but demand a lower salary, companies would hire them instead and pay them less.
This article feels like a vindication of sorts, for my own speed reading experience. Years ago, I read a book on speed reading, and just as we think everything that is in a book must be written by an expert, starting adopting the techniques without second guessing it. Blamed myself for not being smart enough for loosing comprehension when these techniques have obviously worked for everyone else. Reading this is somewhat liberating.
Even if women and black people make a fraction of what a white, male software engineer would, they’re still comparatively quite well off. That’s how much a software engineer makes.
>> Compensation appears to be proportional to the level of sacrifice

> This is a simplistic and profoundly incorrect view of economics and world in general, this is not how the world works.

How else could you explain the extreme wealth of people like Donald Trump though?
Here’s a slightly different take: The Secret Life of Programs (https://nostarch.com/foundationsofcomp ). It starts with a practical set of things and then ends with some survey overviews for people who want to know more.

A complement, not really an alternative, to this pdf.

(I fumble fingered this the first time and left out the link! Unfortunately I can't delete the confusing comment but fortunately it is being downvoted away)
What a horrible argument. Other professions have guilds that demand sacrifice rather than focus on skills, and programmers get paid well without that... and? Most business managers are far smarter than this post assumes. People pay more and more money for software because they experience and measure the value that it provides. Until the world is saturated with software solutions we are unlikely to see a major drop. According to the department of labor the demand for software engineers has continued to grow, not fall. Sure, 4 week bootcamps won’t suffice for many tasks, but the fact that those folks are getting hired says there is still a lot of low hanging fruit.
Does anyone know if there's a book like this? Basically intro to OS but conceptual stuff only - for someone who didn't take it in school and wants to learn the high level details, not to the level normally covered in a college course.
That's incorrect for these style of calls. The help is more akin to marketing - the company is arguing that they are doing better than the analyst thinks, and the analyst's company is offering their help to explain that to them and to other analysts.
> If I had a dollar for every engineer who writes unmaintainable, non-tested code that doesn't scale or even manage a company's current needs particularly well I'd be rich.

A lot of those engineers you describe are rich too, because engineering pay is not tied to skill as much as to being in the right company, e.g. FAANG companies pay large salaries to average engineers and startups pay low salaries to pretty much everyone.
Because you'll never make it back. It will just be a money pit. You still need to keep it secure, host it, maintain it. And free users are much worse than paid users in terms of how entitled they feel so you can be prepared for a never ending stream of crap from people telling you how you should run it but who wouldn't pay $0.05 if the life of the site depended on it.
If I ever buy a TV, my plan is to simply use it as a big HDMI monitor. Slit open the side of the HDMI cable and cut the Ethernet wires therein. Never connect it to my wifi. If other wireless networks are ubiquitous by that time, open it up and neuter their transceivers too.

Any internet functionality will come from a device I trust and control, with only the display portion handed to Spysung.
A business and its beliefs by Thomas Watson Jr. Seriously great.
The rumor mill of 1990 has our back :)
https://tidbits.com/1990/05/07/68040-macintosh/
... But there aren't.
So much kneejerk reaction to this perspective - it's understandable, I suppose. If you are leveraging your lifestyle against your skillset to the fullest extent possible, the idea that it could be unsustainable would be extremely threatening.

Think of it this way- if he's right, you've insulated yourself from catastrophe. If he's wrong, you have given yourself a trajectory for permanent independence from employment.

For people so good at optimization problems, this seems a no-brainer to me!
Why?

So you can be old and crippled finally going on the vacation you dreamed of? Barely able to walk out in to the ocean, much less surf like you dreamed of?

Nothing is guaranteed. Quit living off rehydrated beans and eggs like you’re winning a merit badge and start financially planning to see the things your heart desires.

If you have left over savings when you die, you did it wrong.
"Cash" is often used broadly to mean any low-risk, stable investment that could easily be exchanged for cash.

So for example a reporter might write that Google has "over $100 billion in cash", but if you look at the balance sheet, "total cash" includes both "cash and cash equivalents" and "short term investments." These investments might include short-term government and corporate bonds.
Darktable is an excellent RAW developer. I learned it without ever knowing lightroom since I was a full-time Linux home user before I got into DSLR photography. I learned by following this playlist of tutorials and am amazed at the possibilities of creative expression in the digital darkroom.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLsks-zRRM1ZVN_g7P6ZAs...

https://www.darktable.org/
Programmers in first world countries (and triply so the Bay Area) should plan for lower pay because there are increasing numbers of foreign (and some domestic-but-rural!) workers out there who’re skilled and will take less pay than you and be happy about it and will be able maintain a high quality of life in their area. I don’t mean the outsourcing/body shops (though some good ones exist) so much as individuals in Argentina or Mexico or the Philippines. They’re out there, they’re good engineers, they fluent in English, and as more companies become remote friendly these people are going to start taking some jobs. The market is slowly, but surely, going global.

And if you think you’re safe in Ukraine or Bulgaria give it 20 years until a bunch of Africans in nearly the same timezone come in and undercut you, too.
Individual HNers should lack visibility into who is downvoting them. How did you de-anonymize the downvote signal?
The article raises the question of why we can't explain the absence of such people, given how much easier it is to at least get your foot in the door in tech compared to other professions like medicine and law.
Is the profitable business of scientific publishing bad for science?
There are three different problems the post talks about:
1. High salary
2. Layoffs
3. Cost of knowledge acquisition

High wage:
The high wage problem is simple and is only around specific regions of the world, Silicon Valley pays more comparatively higher than the other parts of the world. The data showing the salary median $140K seems to not include the salary median for other regions which I'm assuming is around only $20K. So, based on this assumption the median salary for SWE all around the world might fall somewhere around $20K-80K.

Cost of knowledge acquisition:
This is also specific to region, the average cost to graduate from an ivy league school costs about $100K-200K, however if you compare this data to the other regions the average cost should be < $20K. This also impacts the salary one makes, after having graduated.

Layoffs:
This is something everyone is concerned about, irrespective of their region or place of work, however since the market size is very huge and there are lot of opportunities around the world, getting a job is not that hard.
The author didn't mention that another possible reason programmers are paid so well relative to other careers is that the same amount of programming work scales better than conventional work. By that I mean, one hour of programmer work can bring business value to all the users of the software, which can be in the millions/billions. On the other hand, one hour of work in most other conventional jobs typically only brings value to one person or several people.
> "It's a lot of work to become a good software engineer, and also requires certain talents and traits that not everyone has (just like doctors and lawyers)."

Is it? The chorus of HNers who say they didn't need to go to college to get software development jobs and telling others to skip college says otherwise. The significant quantity of bootcamp graduates also landing jobs does too. While both of those categories worked hard too, it's still an order of magnitude less than "doctors and lawyers".
I've been maintaining a list of books I've read over the past years at https://explog.in/books/list.html; some that come to mind –

1. Small Gods, Terry Pratchett (this might actually be more than 10 years ago, but I'll still list it)
I really like this one because it emphasizes the value of caring about the _core_ of anything instead of the _trappings_ that will spring up around it. Keeping this book in mind reminds me to focus on the thing instead of the appearance of the thing.

2. On Writing Well, William Zinsser
I'm a programmer, and I've often found that improving my ability to write clearly translates directly to programming well: On Writing Well is the best – and warmest – book I've read on writing nonfiction.

3. Incerto, NN Taleb
This series forced me to revisit several assumptions. Something that still resonates is valuing anything – particularly books – that has aged well across several years, because it's clearly valuable; and to discount the new shiny.

4. The Pragmatic Programmer, Andy Hunt & David Thomas
I started an open source project in my 3rd year at college – as part of Google Summer of Code; inevitably every release would break something and I started hungering for skills that would let me create new releases _without_ breaking the world every time. I stumbled across the pragmatic programmer in my 4th year, and immediately started applying it on my project. This carried through to work and helped me a lot early in my career.

5. The Art of Doing Science and Engineering, Richard Hamming
There are so many gems in this book: from the emphasis on fermi numbers for quick approximations, to a simple demonstration of the distance covered by a random walk as opposed to the distance covered by choosing a direction, to asking the question: "Am I working on the most important thing I could be? If not, why not?". He also predicted that great programmers will have one thing in common with great writers – clarity of thought.

There are some books I'm reading right now that I suspect will end up on this list: Psychology of Intelligence Analysis (available at https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intellig...) – for making better decisions with limited data; and The Power of Choice – to allow me to pay attention to the non-technical parts of doing valuable work.
I think it depends the 'how good, how fast' curve of automation

If google finds a way to run itself with 5k developers instead of 30k, that's a scary change

If on the other hand we develop tons of cool hands-on automation technologies that deliver lots of value but require programmer-like people to run them, that may sustain the labor demand for a while

there's an argument gap between 'AI is taking developer jobs unless you can do ML' and 'basic app development, even when non-fancy, is like pulling teeth and requires experts if you don't want to deliver crap that fails all the time'

I think we're still living in the 'basics are hard and require experts' world for 18-36 months and then the tooling fills in and starts to make magic easy
> So you can be old and crippled finally going on the vacation you dreamed of? Barely able to walk out in to the ocean, much less surf like you dreamed of?

> Nothing is guaranteed. Quit living off rehydrated beans and eggs like you’re winning a merit badge and start financially planning to see the things your heart desires.

I never said you should live on beans and eggs and skip vacations. Most engineers are paid well enough to live well on their base salaries while saving a reasonable amount of money.

What I'm advising against is stuff like spending so much on your mortgage that you will go broke if your RSUs drop in value or your annual bonus is less than you expected; in other words, live a lifestyle you can afford with your base salary.
http://web.archive.org/web/20191229051555/http://amaldev.blo...
This is an extreme, uncharitable interpretation of the parent comment.
I believe it is generally accepted definitionally that "mainstream" isn't radicalized (i.e. mainstream is defined as "not the radical fringe"). Can you think of an example of why that definitional assertion should be discarded?
The point is women and black folks generally don't get jobs. It doesn't matter how much a software engineer salary is if you can't even get hired. Or they do get hired but for the really shit positions. And a "fraction of" an entry-level male software engineer position is in fact shit pay.
I often think the only type of collapse we can expect is if we can develop a generalized AI capable of writing code. If we do that, no profession is safe -- what need is there for doctors if we have AI that can identify disease and treat symptoms with better accuracy. The point at which software developers get automated away is the point at which all white collar careers disappear.
A far better solution would be setting up their IDE to have autocomplete enabled, no time searching for variables, as they come up with the first few letters entered.

The search and copy suggests method they're not using their tools to their best extent.
Is it really just the recommendations? Sometimes it seems like people want the content that they don't agree with cease to exist but they don't want to go through the effort of filing a lawsuit and having both sides of the argument heard.
One of the best courses I ever took was a 2 week summer school class in typing in the 8th grade. We were taught to touch type on a heavy mechanical typewriter where you really had to hammer the keys.

Those few hours have paid off enormously for me. Not having to look at the keys while typing about doubles the speed. The letters painted on my keys have long since worn off anyway :-)
"'"The story that the iron content of spinach was a myth based on a misplaced decimal point is itself a myth.'"

Yes, I had read about that myth story and assumed it was correct.

I could have sworn I remember the article tracking down the original publication, with a 10x difference in the table compared to the correct number. But it seems I was wrong.
> It's a lot of work to become a good software engineer, and also requires certain talents and traits that not everyone has (just like doctors and lawyers).

That has virtually no relationship to economic value. Economic value is mostly supply and demand driven.
It is about value created. A programmer who can find a way to extract $1 per year, from a million users, is worth $1m. But doctors are constrained by their personal 1-1 relationships: no doctor can handle a million patients.
Spotify Becomes Latest Tech Company to Hit Pause on Political Ads
> Also, radicalized is such an interesting word. If the saudis ran the exact same study with their definition of "radicals", I wonder how that would turn out? What if the chinese or the russians? Are their radicals the same as ours? Also, are the liberal elites' definition of radical the same as conservatives or the general population at large?

If we want to be consistent, the founding fathers of the United States were radicalized, but that's usually not how people think of them.
AutoTiKV: TiKV Tuning Made Easy by Machine Learning
This article is basically just asking people to live responsibly, which is something everyone should understand intuitively.

This person appears to be spending half of their income on charitable donations every year, though, which is admirable but not a smart financial decision. (They've spent one million dollars on it! A million! With a standard savings rate, just throwing that into a bank account would ensure that you could just live off of the interest from that for the rest of your life in some countries.)

I'm not saying that you should be a scrooge with your dollars, but there's a reasonable amount to give and there's an amount that (while great!) means you should expect consequences from it.

Even if you're making far below FAANG rates, just by living within your means you'll be able to have a year or two's worth of padding saved up (especially if you're willing to move to a less expensive area while the theoretical crash happens) in no time at all.

To post an anecdote from a Hacker News comment:

Saw this happen in Houston in 2014. Engineers that had started their careers just after the housing crisis bounced back were sitting cozy on their 150k/year (in Houston that's gobs) roles, not really putting much into savings because "there's always Wells to drill."

When prices dropped from 90$ to 44$ a barrel, I saw candidates do some pretty stupid shit. Nuked the [remainder] of their savings on a new f150 was a classic drama played out over 2 weeks that my whole team was involved trying to talk him down in. Others had to move in with their parents, take roles in deer Park that were something like 2.5hr commutes one way, drop everything for a Saudi role and move out there... Their freedom of choice was essentially yanked away.

The only one that seemed to be handling it well was a fresh 3 years in engineer. No girlfriend, kids, house, and buckets of savings. He moved to Vietnam and weathered the storm on a beach, taking tiny sips of his savings.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19281509

If you're living within your means, you have nothing at all to worry about. It's really not that hard, and it'll save you a lot of stress when push comes to shove.

Edit: Changed a word because it came off too hostile. The line I changed is quoted by 'saagarjha below, if you're curious about what it originally said.
Damn. Thats actually kind of amazing
I would suggest to get a cheap local brand from South Korea which uses good panel and decent enough compute power to render your desired quality without any smart TV features and use external means for apps/content.
I'm saying that the d in durable is not the issue in elastic search. That's just being reliably written to stable storage which modern es does pretty well
It's a response to his statement that it's not too much work, if you read right above the line you quoted.
Yeah, I can't see CRUD app development providing top-tier salaries for more than 5-10 more years.
Not taking a piss, could you share your spreadsheet?
25-year-old game thought lost until creator sees someone stream it
> It's a lot of work to become a good software engineer, and also requires certain talents and traits that not everyone has (just like doctors and lawyers).

Sure, it takes work to be a software engineer, but I don’t think it takes all that much. You can be a pretty decent one with a few years of work.
FWIW, I'd note that Snowden was a CIA contractor, not operative or spy, so his understanding of why compartmentalization is done should maybe be taken with a grain of salt.

(For example, another---and if I understand correctly, the main---reason compartmentalization is done is so a single compromised agent can't give "the whole farm" to an enemy intelligence organization. It's not about protecting agents from 'the real story,' but from making sure the enemy doesn't have a picture of the agency's understanding of 'the real story').
Just like how social networks without censorship attract people who say things nobody wants to hear, this will attract people with faces that nobody wants to see.

There might be value in a dating site for really ugly people, but it's niche at best.
Piggybacking on this, a version of After Effects for Linux would allow me to completely switch from Windows. There's a few video editors for Linux to rival things like Premiere but no proper FX/GFX editors with things like particles, audio spectrums, all the nice-to-haves.

Once I can create the flashy animation style stuff I regularly create and not just Windows XP Movie Maker-level animations, I'd pay any price and switch to Linux in a heartbeat.
I agree with this in general but I feel like it's getting increasingly difficult to change jobs especially as you get older which has the effect of lower pay overall.
In my country I'm getting less than a school teacher with the same level of experience.