skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Four day workweek on H1-B – 4x8 options?
Hi, I currently work for a FAANG type company as a Software Engineer with about 3 years experience. I have a Masters in CS from a top 30 university. I work in the US on a work visa ie. H1-B. As an Indian, there is at least a 10 year wait before I can get a green card which allows me to work freely in the US.
I don't think I really enjoy writing code as my day to day job and working 5 days a week seems to be taking a big toll on me. That doesn't mean I slack on my job or try to just get by. I diligently put in the 40 hours I am paid to do and have always received good performance reviews.

I have been reading about the 4 day workweek and I'd love to try it out. The only thing I am concerned about is my visa status and whether an employer will be interested in going through the additional trouble.

For my background, I consider myself an average FAANG level engineer. I am good at problem solving, writing robust production code, and have fairly good communication skills. I am by no means a prodigy FAANG level engineer so I am not expecting the company to make a special case to retain me.

Does anyone here have more information on this? Is a 4 day workweek on H1-B visa even possible? Is there a path that I can focus on that can allow me a 4 day workweek at least a few years from now?
Terrible event in American history.

We mustn't forget the events of the past (this one is approaching 100 years ago), and must never repeat them. Thank God we've gotten better.
The garbage is collected in one huge explosion. And then even more garbage is made, so that's why we don't mind leaks...... xD
> the
ultimate in garbage collection is performed without programmer intervention.

Brilliant.
Bacterial coexistence driven by motility and spatial competition
AIUI, there are some hardware architectures where even creating a wild pointer might be undefined behavior, regardless of whether that pointer is subsequently dereferenced, and C inherits these requirements. This means that it might be desirable to restrict creation and manipulation of raw pointers to unsafe code in Rust as well, if this can be done without introducing undue incompatibilities.

(Rust editions would naturally allow for this: Rust 2021 would warn on creating/manipulating raw pointers in Safe Rust, and stop warning for "unnecessary" use of unsafe deriving from these operations; Rust 2024 would make these a hard error ouside `unsafe`.)
Wow, ublock origin blocks 42 trackers on this one page, and if it does, you can't read the article.
You had a good comment going until the last sentence.

When your job is performing an analysis of the code, five minutes asking for a dangerous feature to be justified is ridiculously far from a "waste of time".
KeyDB – Faster Redis Alternative with Active Replication
I think the killer app here will be... literal apps. While I'd love a tricorder in the abstract sense, I don't really know what I'd do with it. There need to be useful applications before the hardware can take off - and that probably means software.
>Most business software, on the other hand, is treated as an operation. If you cannot discern the difference between a project (temporary) and an operation (living) your software will never be released as a product to a specified level of quality by a specific date.

I never really thought about that. There is so much truth to it and why so much Saas is a never ending feature factory! I assume Basecamp thinks of their Saas as a project and that's how they are able to escape the never ending Big Ball of Mud software craziness.
Look for the "Lego Classics" line.
That’s one of a whole host of issues raised by the idea of tagging packets on the internet. Attackers could assign priority to their DDOS attacks for example. I don’t have the answers but I think this is the direction the conversation should go in. The discussions I see on the topic almost never competently address the issue I’m raising. Nobody should be arguing that all traffic should be equal, we should be discussing which traffic gets priority and how that decision is made.
PipeWire 0.3 – JACK compatibility layer with comparable performance to JACK2
Oh, I'm sure you'd make a killing! :D <3
There is a legal binding contract in marriage. You can walk out of a relationship without having to settle/split assets etc. You cannot in marriage.
> Didn't we start by trying to plan ahead? There's a reason we have moved to agile.

"Everything was waterfall and then came agile" is myth, but yes, it looks like it's fashionable to no longer try to plan ahead. I'm not convinced the reasons are good, and I'm not convinced the craft of planning ahead was ever perfected to the point that anyone could say it doesn't work.

Scrum, XP, Agile all date back to the 90s when one server running PHP or Perl (with SQL injections) passed for software and others were still re-inventing basic data structures in C (and then gasp C++ with templates!) from first principles... The methodology, tooling, rigor, and collective experience in software development has taken leaps in the past two to three decades. Likewise, understanding systems and planning ahead has become so much easier. If only people took it seriously and spent as much effort on it as they spend on fad-of-the-year frameworks.

People just stopped trying, and when I look in software projects now, there's hardly ever anything resembling a model of the software that you could use to test new ideas "on paper" to see how they fit the given problem and current application.

People aren't even trying, just like they aren't even trying to achieve correctness: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22224054

The less you try, the harder it will be.

> In software if you know what you are doing ahead of time you are not really innovating and you might as well be using an existing system.

I think the vast majority of software is boring and not even meant to be innovative and indeed would be best written using an existing system, but customizing these to the specific needs is just another can of worms. As with bridges, you can't just copy & paste an old bridge to a new location and use it as-it is, you need to design it given the locale and other constraints. It's still probably going to be yet another relatively boring bridge with no innovation.

And indeed a lot of software work is all about using existing systems, but perhaps at a lower level than you posited. Customizing complete off-the-self packages does happen, but it's more common to glue something "new" (but not innovative) using existing frameworks, libraries, services and glue languages.

You still need to design to do it right. But even here people seem to rush ass-first into whatever kit looks fashionable now.
Show HN: Dream Eaters, Fight procrastination one day at a time
I am building an app-game to help one make some progress on their dream, that thing that you are yearning to do. Get your close friends and relatives to keep you accountable and keep them informed by answering a simple question everyday “Did you do anything yesterday to achieve your dream?“

Would love to get your feedback about the mockups, the landing page and the problem/solution. If you find this interesting please signup for the beta access.

https://www.producthunt.com/upcoming/dream-eaters

Ahmad
Happy they're finally going to be available for streaming[1]. Studio Ghibli movies are literally the last physical media I still use.

1. Though it'll only be via HBO Max in the US/Canada.
So the price has remained constant, even if just reduced a little. That actually surprises me more than any other change; Hasn't the manufacture process changed? How the royalties on sets based on 3rd party Intellectual Property play into the costs? How the logistics costs impact the price? Has there been any impact on the Chinese knockoffs?

I recently bought some knockoff sets that are no longer made by lego. Not only they were cheaper than the second hand market which we can agree is crazy, but also they were cheaper than the retail price when lego sold them. I certainly don't notice anything wrong with the set quality, so I would expect the difference in price to be by not paying IP.
I mean, it’s all down to personal preference, really. I’d hate to live somewhere where I couldn’t walk or get around by rapid public transport. Car oriented suburbs (or, worse, rural areas) are my idea of hell. And if I want to go to a mountain or a beach (which is something I want to do way less than, say, going to work or the supermarket or going for a drink with friends, all of which are walking distance) I can get on a train.

Mind you, this is a city of 1.5 million people; mega cities like Paris have their own challenges.
> I noticed when my kids were little was that so many of the kits came with special-purpose parts

I noticed that and I hate that change. Before a plane set was a plane, made of a lot of small parts [1]. Now, there is one or two giant hull piece that makes of the plane, with few traditional parts here and there [2]. This totally breaks the modularity of a set.

[1] https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51TtoiWamRL...

[2] https://shop.r10s.jp/shop-angelica/cabinet/imgdir/12/7557.jp...
Regulation is also vulnerable to abuse. The naive “solution” to that is more regulation. This is great for successful incumbents since it raises barriers to entry for potential competitors.

There will always be competition for resources. It’s my observation that every proposal to eliminate that coincidentally allocates more resources to the proposer or a group he identifies with.

Laissez-faire is no exception. In fact I’ve never heard of one.
> That's not a scenario net neutrality regulation would affect.

I'm not sure that's true. Netflix must pay a premium to the ISP to get prioritized access within the ISP in order to get their edge cache in position to compete against the ISP. That's three ways in which the ISP is not acting as a dumb pipe.

The Wikipedia understanding of network neutrality is: the principle that Internet service providers (ISPs) must treat all Internet communications equally, and not discriminate or charge differently based on user, content, website, platform, application, type of equipment, source address, destination address, or method of communication.
Buffett and Munger (the combination) are national jewels.

They demonstrate sound investing principals, and they exemplify humble and humorous manner. We're lucky to have them.
Maybe we shouldn't be encouraging more corruption than we already have...?
Former Bloomberg LP Employee Hired by Bloomberg to Speak About Her Experience
For many professionals, it would just be the same amount of work in less available time.
Netflix pays Comcast in order to have that fast lane. It's more than just an infrastructure investment.
This, along with the cost of development, is why I have a pet-peeve for hard-coded business logic directly in the code (in most cases). I.e. when a frequently changing business process like a finite state machine for an approval procedure is only change-able by a developer that means there's always the cost of that developer's "need-to-know" for a straight forward change in the business operations. The cost of a given change is greater than a declarative capability that took into account operational changes in the first place.

That said hard coding business logic is often so much quicker to deploy that in many situations you just want to hard code the logic, deploy, get feedback, then introduce flexible to the kind of change needed then continue. If you have engineers who know how to ask the kind of questions that get to the real requirements (usually not juniors) you can have a maintainable code base.
Worst case scenario is if you have the "yes I shall do anything and everything with my new code power" developers who just implement out of eagerness and conflict avoidance; this can be the worst of every world: hard coded business logic so convoluted only the junior knows how to make changes.
The direct conversion stuff doesn't seem that critical. If that doesn't work out immediately, surely the first generation can use good old steam rankine power conversion (or sCO2 Brayton, if that is deemed mature enough).

My worry is whether the specific fusion reactor concept itself is viable.
> First, I logically agreed that the missiles were supporting our armed services and I believed that our government was generally on the right side of history and needed the best technology to continue defending our freedoms

I hope you are not writing about the US government. I don‘t think the US military can be described as protecting our freedoms after interfering and starting wars all over the world in the past. We are sadly mostly the aggressors and not the defendants.
> Where can someone (i.e., in my case a software engineer who's working with Kotlin but has used C++ in his past) read more about modern approaches to writing embedded software for such systems?

The JPL coding guidelines for C [1] are an amusing, first-hand read about this stuff. Not sure if you would qualify them as "modern approaches".

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_of_10:_Rules_for_Dev...
Read the last twenty years of Buffet's letters.

No snark intended. His letters intended for investors are the best use of your time rather than a book someone wrote for vanity.
This is fixable; some cities have effectively banned Airbnb. More should.
Could you talk a bit about the kinds of things you had to fight the compiler on?

Can you identify any idioms or approaches that seem normal or natural in other languages, but which are problematic in Rust?
If, to 'reproduce' means 'copy your own dna' then that makes sense. But by another view the wasp egg is just another stage in reproduction, still needing trillions of chemical reactions to become another wasp.
OpenBSD's VMM vuln: “the guest still can write to host memory”
Do these make it clear that they are being paid for this campaign?

This is fraud in the sense that it creates fake wave. Being a genuine supporter is one thing and being a supporter because you are paid to be so is another.
Why would you RDP into a Windows machine running on an iPad in a VM rather than just directly interact with the UI? That doesn’t make sense.
Don’t forget that large companies internally are very similar to a communist planned economy. They have five year plans and central planning. Everything flows from the top. They value predictability over everything else. So it makes sense to run everything like an assembly line where every position knows what they are supposed to do and can easily be trained. Only a few elite people get to work on the big picture and be creative. Personally I don’t like this but I’ll admit that it works.
Thinking for Programmers [video]
Vine Made the Internet Fall in Love with Short Videos
> Now, there is one or two giant hull piece that makes of the plane...

Making cheap custom parts like that is a feat of engineering. But has a negative effect on the imagination of the users of Lego...
This one of those cases of: "were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should"
I think this article predates a drop in brick quality which happened in the last 5 years. I bought a number of small sets a few years ago and every single one of them had pieces that split up the side after very little use. This may have been around the time they were trying to use plant based plastics, or possibly having issues due to new factories, but I now have a perception that they are not as durable as they used to be 30 years ago.

I’m curious if this is reflected on bricklink prices. You’d probably have to be clever in how you do the analysis though.
Yep second. The Creator line is also good but centered around models but the kits are designed to build usually 3 different models out of the same kit.

I bought a set of classic bricks too just to have around for the odd idle day.
AFAIK, this is a relatively recent development ?
And when you even have some millionaires and billionaires that are asking to be taxed more...
AppRun – Elm inspired JavaScript library for building web applications
It's definitely part of the job. If you don't understand what the problem is that you're trying to solve, how can you verify that the constraints you are working with actually make sense?
Really cool article. My kids have just gotten interested in LEGOs, and I have to admit I thought they must have gotten more expensive, too. I think the authors point at the end is the best explanation for this perception:

> As I showed before, LEGO has had $100+ sets for a while. However, only recently have they produced sets even more pricy than that. When we were kids, the $100 set was the pinnacle of LEGO. It was the set we all aspired to own. It was the set we all went straight to at the store. Of course we rarely ended up with that set, but that was our dream.

> Now, the dream set is closer to the $400 range. It doesn’t mean that LEGO doesn’t make sub-$100 sets. They do, and more than ever. It just means that in comparison the $25 set looks a lot smaller than it did when the largest set was only $100.

At another point in the article the author points out these new mega sets aren’t really for kids, they’re for the adults, and Legos targeted at adults didn’t really exist 20 years ago.
>>Stressing unknown harms

We have to measure and make decisions about unknown harms every day. We're not always good at it, but it's unavoidable. With respect to vaping, we know of very little in the way of foreign chemicals that can be safely inhaled. I think it's fair to say that available medical knowledge about inhaling chemicals points to a non-negligible chance that it might be bad for you. You seem to be saying we should mostly avoid reasoning about such uncertain risks. I'm saying it's not unreasonable to tell people, "we know inhaling many type of chemicals is harmful to your health, so there is potential for harm here as well. We'll know more in about a decade, and be fairly certain in 30 or 40 years."

Scientific rigor does not preclude reasoning about these risks before those 10 to 40 years are up.
But we're talking about basic stuff here like buying bread...
Yeah, I remember reading that Lego goes heavy with the IP licensing because that is the only thing they can do to differentiate; they can't patent or copyright the brick design, so knockoffs can copy any plain brick design.

They do a lot of license agreements for IP so they can have unique offerings. I bet that is a big part of the price.
In before someone from rust evangelism strike force chimes in saying rust is actually very simple and borrow checker takes 2 days to get familiar.
A lot of companies brand themselves as “free range”. Just read some job ads and see how happy people are and how much fun they have at work. And like with “ free range eggs” you have to a very close look to see how true the claims are.
> Why should Uber give any guarantees?

First, "guarantee" is the wrong word to take too literally here. Depending on how you want to look at it, there are no guarantees, even with guarantees.

But looked at more loosely, answering that is really Uber's responsibility. Why did they release it? If it is just a PR release, fire-and-forget works fine for that.

If they want to see wider adoption outside of their firm, there are some fairly obvious things they should do to foster that. Sometimes you release just the right thing at just the right time and everyone else does your evangelism and support work for you, but it is much more normal for your next great thing to take a while to build a user base.
Compile using what? It’s form of emulation has never been complete enough to run a compiler (heck even interpreters like Python have been very brittle) in my experience as a user since the beginning, so I’m curious what you’ve seen success with.
Gitlab 12.8 Released
I've often wondered how many people prefer a bucket of bricks to the sets. I never liked the sets. I had a bucket of Lego and a bucket of Ramagon pieces and I had a lot of fun building my own stuff.
Why is this being downvoted? It’s accurate: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2020-election/bloomberg-spe...
I read years ago about an anklet that contained 16 tiny vibrating motors, and whichever one was north facing at any given moment would pulse rhythmically. Wearing this device for a few days resulted in the conscious signal fading, but a wild increase in the accuracy of the wearer’s mental mapping and navigation abilities.

Seems like a fun thing to try out, and probably simple to build.
That's not what I said, but don't let that get in the way of a good rant.
Not fulfilling user requirements however, just means that your product is bad.

Thus the success of discord.
Ditto for correctness, importance, and strength.
In effect the four components are like numbers you
can multiply together to get a score for
usefulness. Which I realize is almost awkwardly
reductive, but nonetheless true.

Cue the page ripping scene from Dead Poets Society...

PERRY: Understanding Poetry, by Dr. J. Evans
Pritchard, Ph.D. To fully understand poetry, we
must first be fluent with its meter, rhyme, and
figures of speech. Then ask two questions: One,
how artfully has the objective of the poem been
rendered, and two, how important is that objective.
Question one rates the poem's perfection, question
two rates its importance. And once these questions
have been answered, determining a poem's greatness
becomes a relatively simple matter.

Keating gets up from his desk and prepares to draw on
the chalk board.

PERRY: If the poem's score for perfection is
plotted along the horizontal of a graph, and its
importance is plotted on the vertical, then
calculating the total area of the poem yields the
measure of its greatness.

Keating draws a corresponding graph on the board and
the students dutifully copy it down.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LjHORRHXtyI

:)
Being 'wrong' and being 'normal political campaigning' are very far from mutually exclusive.
> A bit OT, but I wonder how I'd feel if I was offered a job working on software for missiles.

Unless you are an extreme pacifist (which is a perfectly reasonable thing to be), you'll acknowledge the legitimate need for the existence of an army in your country. In that case, the army better be equipped by missiles than by youths carrying bayonets. Then, there's nothing wrong in providing these missiles with technologically advanced guiding systems.

On the other hand, if I worked in "algorithmic trading" or fancy "financial instruments" I would not be able to sleep at night without a fair dose of drugs.
For the military... not really. They have a concept called “high year of tenure” which limits how long a soldier can remain in a rank without being promoted. You are meant to advance and if you don’t advance you will be separated out.

For example if you join the Army as a specialist (E4) you have 8 years to get promoted or you’re essentially kicked out.
Freeing memory (or running a garbage collector) has a cost associated with it, and if you are freeing memory (or closing files, sockets, etc) before exiting a program it's time wasted, since the OS will free all the resources associated with the program anyway.

And a lot of languages, and for sure newer version of the JVM, do exactly that, they don't free memory, and doesn't run the garbage collector since the available memory gets too low. And that is fine for most applications.
X-Macros in C
GCC works reasonably well.
If you are in the .NET world, then definitely prefer F# to C#. However be aware that it differs in some significant ways from OCaml. E.g., it does not have a separate module language (module types, functors, first-class modules). Its design is in a different, more object-oriented direction, with support for classes and interfaces.

Basically, if you do use F#, be aware that it has its own idioms that you must learn; it's not a drop-in replacement for e.g. OCaml/Haskell/etc.