skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> - Allowing the plugin API itself to not be beholden to GPL. This stops a lot of commercial plugin developers from supporting Blender.

Chaosgroup solved that problem by using the process boundary. They have an integration plugin in GPL and then execute a standalone version of their renderer that they offer separately.
Again, it's country specific, but in almost all western countries totally legal as long as you consent, which you did as part of the user agreement.

As I understand it, Google currently don't bother as your search history, purchase history, emails and location data all do a better job of predicting what you will buy than voice. Plus those are easier to process. But yeah, they can.

Edit: I guess Amazon are more likely to be doing this with voice data from Echo as they don't have your email/location etc the way Google and Apple do. I think they're more tight lipped about what they do though.

I think the USA recently tried to bring in some restrictions on tracking and compiling data (not just voice) on under 13s. But this is the internet: everyone is 18 apparently and it's honestly not possible to check or enforce on any scale.
Decentralization: An Incomplete Ambition
No _liquid_ chemicals... Airborne fiberglass threads are a lot more dangerous.
Ask HN: Which Vim plugins do you use?
There's one simple metric for SETI progress that I would like to see and have always had trouble finding.

What is the radius within which SETI can exclude the existence of a civilization currently using Earth-like electromagnetic communications technology and how many star systems are believed to lie within that radius ? How will proposed SETI efforts expand that radius ?

I think this is kind of a key metric that could tell us a lot about how widespread technological civilizations might be in the galaxy.
Though for really sketching , blender’s 3D grease pencil tool is pretty cool. That was in 2.8 I think.
This resonates strongly with me. I founded a startup as the technical co founder and now do a mix of product and engineering management.
I agree with many of the others here: a small company / startup as an early engineer or a technical product manager sounds like it would fit well. Or, if you have the desire, founding your own company means you get to wear many hats.
> (mainly TypeScript) - Insufficient reflection capabilities

You can always use the compiler api to extract type information. Sure, a bit tricky but doable.

The compiler api exposes a lot of awesome things, I'm suprised there aren't that many tools that use it.
If not some version of BSD, we might be using Minix or perhaps Hurd.
I'm not convinced looking for aliens is basic research. Its more like applied science.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_research

Life expectancy for the US is dropping. Multiple modern issues of maladjustment are likely causes. Spending searching-for-aliens money on schools, education etc instead would be actually beneficial. Schools have active shooter drills now. That is NOT an indicator of increasing quality of life.
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/09/us-life-expectancy-has-been-...

Plenty of cracks in society. Pure research might actually help. We actually know far less about nutrition than we could - thats just one example.

We're much better off going to the moon, mining asteroids and living in space rather than searching for aliens. Plenty of the tech, knowledge and experience from even attempting to live in space has already had tangible benefits for those on earth.
Here's the repo for obtaining the tweets, if anyone's interested: https://github.com/mathdroid/twitter-dev-salaries-scraper
These manual back office tasks is exactly why I hired an office manager.

She chases down invoices and handles back payments for all of our clients.

The mental overhead of handling these things was significantly hampering my technical work, and the moment she took over, a huge weight lifted off my back.

Part of the aggravation is that you can't automate chasing down invoices, yet. As a person who likes to automate all the things, this would just not do. So I sourced it out.
Kind of silly in a lambda though, as lambdas do not run concurrently. A bash script would suffice.
People’s responses to Harari remind me very much of Murray Gell-Mann Amnesia[0]. Everyone seems to be impressed by his work until they get to their area of specialism, which is the only area they think he falls down in. I’ve had a number of conversations like this with people from different fields, all of whom think his analysis in their area was significantly flawed. It feels like he writes stuff that’s very plausible for a lay audience, but subject it to any intellectual rigour from someone who knows their stuff and it crumbles.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#GellMannAmn...
Then you probably want to use lists.

This is a technical reference, though you should get a notion of capabilities from it. The UI controls are under the "Getting Started" pane, or individually on List or User panes.

https://docs.joinmastodon.org/methods/timelines/lists/

I have about three primary ones, simply "A", "B", and "C", by priority.

"A" is small and a select set of high-quality contacts I interact with frequently. "B" is far more generous. "C" is mostly oversharers. In practice I don't have that visible.

I'll pin "A", "B", and "Home" (all following) most often.

There are a few additional utility lists, infrequently used. Two sets for press/media ("Press" and "Voluble press", the second rarely gets used). One of a set of Mastodon admins.

You'd probably want "Family" and "Family I Have to Follow" or something like that. And can probably figure out which goes where and what to do with them.

Another option would be to have your general and family-specific accounts / instances, and treat those as you prefer. No reason not to segregate your social circles as suits you.

I follow ... just under 666 profiles. That's a lot, though lists keep the flow managable and interesting.

My pinned toots give a few other suggestions. This being one I live by, effectively, block liberally:

https://mastodon.cloud/@dredmorbius/102504802435025145
Wrong way of showing the data. Column order of the data should be Name Company Salary City ..... and so on. Irrelevant details should be towards right end so that people don't have to scroll to see the relevant data.
Oregon had an active nuclear power plant for many years (trojan), that survived peacefully.

portland is home to an active nuclear reactor that's been running since 1968 (reed college), that has also survived peacefully.

I think there's room for informed protests against pipelines in the same place where nuclear was pretty much ignored.
It has always been important but again not for everyone.

I would like a similar treatise but for synchronous single threaded operations.
I recently found a 1980s Cray installation guide which has a lot more detail on the power, cooling, and other physical requirements. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22284518
Applying Deep Learning in Brain-Computer Interface Aint Easy
okay thanks.. still seems like a stupid decision
So I'm looking back over what he wrote:

> Immune therapies, which seek to stimulate immune responses to cancer, have generated enormous excitement. Two researchers won the 2018 Nobel Prize for work related to immune therapies, and a new book, The Breakthrough: Immunotherapy and the Race to Cure Cancer, claims that they represent a “revolutionary discovery in our understanding of cancer and how to beat it.”

> According to a 2018 report in Stat News, drugs firms aggressively market immune therapies, and patients are “pushing hard to try them, even when there is little to no evidence the drugs will work for their particular cancer.” A 2017 analysis by oncologists Nathan Gay and Vinay Prasad estimated that fewer than 10 percent of cancer patients can benefit from immune therapies, and that is a “best-case scenario.”

Perhaps he's implicitly acknowledging that there are benefits, but in an article that essentially claims that cancer treatment doesn't accomplish anything, I interpreted it as being dismissive of the benefits. Maybe your reading of it is more reasonable.

The analysis underlying the 10% figure is basically correct. In fact, I think that article [0] is a narrower form of what this article would be if it were better: a harsh acknowledgment that immunotherapy, as the most meaningful breakthrough in the last couple decades, is being overhyped. The benefits are real, but writing books about it with subtitles like "The race to cure cancer" is deeply irresponsible.

Again, though, it's a matter of interpretation. They derived that 10% figure basically by multiplying: ~31% of cancers have approved use for immunotherapy, and it averages a 26% response rate. That 31% is a bunch of solid tumor cancers that didn't really have any particularly effective options beforehand. So for the 1/3 of least tractable cancers (~600k cases per year in the US), we now have something that benefits a quarter of patients. Is that enough? No. But it's still pretty amazing.

[0] https://www.statnews.com/2017/03/08/immunotherapy-cancer-bre...
What is the Superhuman of Calendars? or Building better productivity apps
The Level Design of Dead Cells: A Hybrid Approach
You completely missed the GPs point and I suspect you even agree with him. Look at the list of entities.
Throughout my career I have only seen a desire for more women. Perhaps looking at those candidates a little more openly and giving then a chance.

I haven't seen a racial aspect where whites only hire whites either. I have worked in places that only hired white/black/asian and in others that only hired white/black/indian. I have never seen a true mix of asian and indian aside from government work. I've always wondered about that.

It feels like white/black/brown/yellow is not as acceptable yet. But various combos are.

A lot of it is nationalist or language based. A black person from the US is treated as the same as a white person from the US vs a white person for Europe generally because of language differences.
Homo Faciens made a page about the mechanical side of this process last year:

https://homofaciens.de/technics-machines-3D-printer-Zonestar...
>it asks me to link my phone. No option for any other signup. NOwhere in the download process or on main site does it warn me that this is a phone-only app.

It isn't a phone-only app. I think it wants a phone in the flow above to authorize your desktop install. They use the phone, and its E.164 address as the root of trust. But the app works just fine on Windows.
A person in Nigeria may work remotely for a US company, therefore the information about salaries may be useful.
And I can't see concatenative programming languages.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concatenative_programming_lang...
This helps:

https://www.levels.fyi/

From my experience (I manage folks in one of those companies) it seems to be pretty accurate.
2-3 A WEEK? Want to trade phone numbers? That sounds like heaven. I get at minimum that per day, sometimes per hour.
This doesn't seem particularly useful, as the data set is small, and biased toward those who are willing to report their salaries on twitter. Aside from the possibility that at least some of these reports misreport the actual salary, and likely over-state, it also seems likely that those who report salaries on twitter make above average relative to their peers.
SEEKING WORK | US UTC-05 | REMOTE

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I'm a senior full-stack developer with 15 years of experience (7 as a contract software consultant). I specialize in prototype/MVP development, product rewrites, automation and process improvement, and IT augmentation as a drop-in developer for your team.

I've helped business in a wide variety of sectors: finance, politics, charities, academia, startups, mapping, agriculture, insurance, marketing.

Looking for projects starting in March 2020 onward, with roughly 2-week to 6-month timelines and budgets ~US$10k-100k. Prefer to bill hourly or day rate, but by milestone is fine too.

Strong communication and time-management skills. Have worked with clients found via HN/Angel, some for many years. References available.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Preferred tech stack:

- Backend: Python/Flask, Ruby/Rails, Clojure
- DB: PostgreSQL or NoSQL
- Frontend: Responsive HTML5, moderate JavaScript/Vue, ClojureScript
- Platform: AWS, Heroku, Linux VPS

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Site: https://jeffkayser.com

Portfolio: https://jeffkayser.com/portfolio/

Contact: https://jeffkayser.com/contact/ or hn.2020-01@firesteel.consulting

GitHub: https://github.com/jeffkayser

Angel: https://angel.co/jeff-kayser-1

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffkayser
Seems like a lot of work where a simple session id would suffice. JWT’s are not the appropriate solution where session-like behavior is wanted.
This template project has a REST back end (sounds like you already have that) and demos connecting to it from native clients and from AngularJS. You don't have to do anything special to hit Windows/OSX/Linux with it. The one project will compile to all 3.

https://community.embarcadero.com/article/16560-deep-dive-ho...
Cheap $5/mo VPS + WireGuard/OpenVPN (Google search for any number of tutorials).

Of course, now you need to trust your VPS provider but I'd trust someone Digital Ocean before I'd trust a cheap VPN provider.
The people who don't know what they are talking about (or are maliciously feigning ignorance) are those who look at 5 yr survival without considering the effect of increased surveillance/screening. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead_time_bias
In my experience https://www.levels.fyi provides much better information than random tweets. Not everyone works for a FAANG, but it's useful to know what their influence is in the market.
Linear Regression vs. Logistic Regression for Classification Tasks?
Make your own software product. Requires to be a jack of all trades. Coding, marketing, writing, customer support, design. Because it's only you, you don't have to feel like "being the smartest person in the room". Downside: Takes quite some time to take off.
> look much more competent and friendlier to customers

How exactly are you measuring "more competent"? Once you pay for support levels you also don't have the problem that Google is a black hole where you don't get any answers like if you are just a free user on Gmail, YouTube,...

It also depends on which services you use, if you are just running everything in Kubernetes and are not locked into proprietary services of any cloud provider it's not that hard to move between clouds. I find it a bit odd to make blanket statements about a company based on some consumer products or Google Reader being killed off years ago.
Pascal has the solution for that. Nested functions:

procedure foobar;

procedure helper1;
begin
end;

procedure helper2;
procedure subhelper2;
begin
end;
begin
end;

procedure helper3;
begin
end;

begin
end;

Only the foobar function can access the helper functions.
Different people are good at different stuff. In my experience the best teams are those with a diverging skill set: Alice may be really good at asking these kind of "why" questions, whereas Bob is really good at quickly implementing things from a spec, and Chris may be very good at databases, etc.
'Wall-E' Was Partly Inspired by Amazon and Apple, Director Says
Interesting to find this on HN as I'm reading a book on Seymour Cray and his supercomputer adventures (Charles J. Murray's "The Supermen: The Story of Seymour Cray and the Technical Wizards behind the Supercomputer"). Not too much technical intricacies there, but still an interesting read from a general/histori perspective.
NetBSD 9.0
U.N. warns that runaway inequality is destabilizing the world’s democracies
Depends on what you do every day. Revenue is made by doing stupid pen tests. Since you are a revenue-driver, you gotta do them. And most are boring. The cool stuff like hacking hardware, reverse engineering and whatnot doesn't pay money. It's mostly a marketing gag to find new customers. Maybe you're lucky and can fill such a position.
3D-printed houses could become concrete reality
The Future of Mastering: Loudness in the Age of Music Streaming
You think "people are switching away from using the traditional phone system entirely" isn't enough incentive? And how, exactly, does an Indian scammer paying a bill to an Indian telco incentivize US telcos to drag their feet? You can blame the Indian telcos, but they also don't have incentives to tolerate scammers--their business would benefit a lot more if calls from Indian numbers weren't automatically assumed to be scams.

While you don't understand the problem, you can't possibly have anything of value to say about the solution.

There may well be perverse incentives causing certain entities to tolerate scammers, but we shouldn't pretend we know what those perverse incentives are when we can't even trace the calls. On the other hand, it is much more likely that once the spoofing problem is solved, the incentives are all already in place and the vast majority of scam calls will be solved.

If a rational person only knows how to use a hammer, they pause when they come across a problem that isn't a nail. But when the HN crowd comes across a problem that isn't immediately solved by incentives, they argue that the people who actually are qualified to solve the problem with other tools, should be using incentives!
Copitalism
DevOps

I had the same issues for many years, but the past 2 positions have been official "DevOps" positions and they more often than not have me doing so many random things that require all sorts of skills. I love it. It keeps things interesting, and it makes me very valuable to the company because I can do whatever they need.

Sure, some places have a very narrow definition of DevOps, but that's usually the large companies/teams. If you can find something a bit smaller, then you'll have more of a jack-of-all-trades role. At least in my opinion.
NodeJs, in particular, out performs all language run-times in terms of AWS Lambda cold-start time (<200ms), and is second-best for warm-starts (<11ms) behind Python (<9ms).

https://levelup.gitconnected.com/aws-lambda-cold-start-langu...
I used to be a big fan of SETI but I've come around to thinking it's probably a complete waste of time.

This will probably get dismissed as "optimistic futurism" but I find the argument compelling that the future of any civilization is a Dyson Swarm for many reasons such as:

- Planets are inefficient uses of mass to create living area. IIRC 1% of the mass of Mercury could make enough living area from habitats to house at least a million times as many people as we have now.

- Gravity is a tyrant. Spinning a habitat achieves much the same thing without the negatives (as in the cost of launch).

- This is entirely feasible on solar power alone. The importance of this is that practical fusion power is not a prerequisite.

- This requires no new science. It's largely an engineering problem (albeit a significant one).

I deliberately use the term "Swarm" here not "Sphere", which is true to the original concept. "Sphere" suggests this is a solid shell. That was never the intent. No known or theorized material could support a solid shell around the Sun.

If you accept this premise then it's about the most un-subtle thing you could do and should be easily detectable millions of light years away in the IR spectrum. Why? Simple:

- Stars generate heat

- If the habitats hit by the energy from the star will heat up

- In space you can only radiate heat away

- If you don't remove that heat you'll ultimately fry

- The wavelength from radiating heat is determined by the temperature of that object

The standard counter to this is:

Q: What if you recycle the heat instead?

A: You can improve the efficiency but you can never perfectly consume all that heat. To do so would be to violate thermodynamics. If that's possible, well then all bets are off.

A thousand years ago we were stabbing each others with swords. In a thousand years the above scenario is far from overly optimistic (IMHO). So in a cosmic blink of an eye we go from undetectable (from a SETI perspective) to being detectable from tens or hundreds of millions of light years away.

So that's why I think SETI is pointless.

Some say "you never know what fruit science will bear". While true, taken further this means it doesn't matter what science you invest in so why is SETI special?
> Without the decades of IP theft, the R&D achievements never happen.

Because they're incapable?
Contrarian view: salary disclosure destroys value for people with negotiating skills, which are among the most valuable and useful skills of all.

Disclosure advantages people who collude to apply political pressure (gang up) instead of appealing to principles or leveraging their skill and the value they bring. There is general social and economic harm to facilitating this behaviour.

Disclosure lowers all boats in that it causes mean-reversion in the sample, and reduces opportunity and incentive for people to apply themselves and succeed, and prevents valuable and exceptional people from joining the company because their salary expectations are not "to scale."

Disclosure absolves managers of the need to negotiate effectively, which means you get managers who can't negotiate, which is the worst possible outcome for a company, since what is their job again?

It's great to have data for negotiating. I use a bunch of different data sources and options, and I also avoid organizations who say they "don't negotiate," because it means they literally just bully people.

Have at it.
Ask HN: Best resources for learning enterprise software sales?
When I learned that the (more talented) women on a team earned less than the men (maybe less negotiating, IDK), I said something to the team manager. No idea if it did anything, but I hope it did. And I certainly wouldn't have said anything if I hadn't known the discrepancy.
Sleeping with Half a Brain
Plug-in electric vehicles in Norway
I agree, as a consultant I have grown into a generalist over time, and consulting rewards those that do.

As a concrete example, I'm at Red Hat Consulting. We have products that range from RHEL, to Kubernetes/OpenShift, to language runtimes/tools/middleware, and finally to more process focussed transformation. You can specialize, but the more of these you are competent in the more useful you become. I am in more of a leadership role now, and in any one project I am likely involved in all of the above.

The key skills you haven't mentioned are the "Soft" skills: mentoring, client facing leadership, presentation skills, etc. If these are a strength for you, then consulting would be perfect.

Shameless plug at the end, Red Hat is hiring: https://careers-redhat.icims.com/jobs/search?ss=1&searchCate...
>what devops was supposed to be but nobody does it that way.

Can you elaborate on this?