skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think that I have relevant experience to talk about the advantages and disadvantages of working from home. In 1998 my wife and I moved from California to the mountains in Central Arizona. Until 2016, I almost exclusively worked remotely and sometimes I took long periods off work to write books and enjoy nature hikes. For about a decade I only accepted about 20% of offers to provide service.

Working remotely got old. In 2016 I worked on a project at Google so we lived in Mountain View for a while. I really enjoyed the change of working in an office (and the food was good). After we returned home, I accepted a gig to work for an AI company in Singapore and after that worked onsite managing a deep learning team at Capital One (an excellent company to work for, BTW).

We are back home now, and I am retired except for writing and working on a commercial software product (in Common Lisp) in the semantic web/linked data space. Frankly, as much as I love my day to day life, to be honest I really miss working in a team with face to face brainstorming, etc.
Consider a subscription to the British newspaper The Economist. It began publication in 1848 in protest against the British corn laws. The writing is superlative written with a rather sly sense of humor.

In particular, they collect and graph enormous amounts of data to augment their articles. It's much better than random posts found on the internet.
This is currently the minimal (maybe even less) viable project. Would welcome feedback on:

- Is this useful?

- Killer features

- Bugs
This looks like a handy and clever script. Would you consider testing for OS? uname -o. gdate is just Mac ports / brew way of adding GNU date AFAIK. If you see GNU in uname -o, then you should be able to call date vs. gdate and remove a step (alias) for Linux users.
Another fun bit of trivia about "Smells Like Nirvana" - when shooting the music video, they used many of the same props, actors, camera angles, and even the same sound stage as the original "Smells Like Teen Spirit" video: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smells_Like_Nirvana#Music_vide...
Kai is that you? :)
Hegel: JavaScript with types
Video calls are all the social interaction I need with coworkers.

Probably more than I need.
>That's great, so bear the actual cost of your lifestyle and let the price ripple through the system.

I don't set the prices of the commodities I sell. Those are set at a national/international level and make their way to the local grain elevator. For that to happen, it would, essentially, be a tax on your food to subsidize me living here to make the food.
I think the parent comment means that in "normal" circumstances the kids are not at home all day making it less of an issue. I don't think he meant that they will move out (plus in the area where I live there was a sharp rise in rents in recent years and it's now much more common for people to stay with there parents _much_ longer. Like meeting a 24 year old person living with their parents (again) isn't that uncommon. (Not that common either)).
Personally it took me at least two years to learn to work from home. The key for me is actively rebalancing your social life and interactions on outside of work activities. That's not intuitive because we are so used at getting some interactions everyday automatically in a job, so if you don't take action you will end up in a social deficit very fast.
We decoupled from the gold standard in 1971, so there was quite a bit of digestion that had to occur with the switch to fiat. I agree the Fed has acted to keep a lot of money out of the economy but our M1 money supply is still only just over $4 trillion. However, if you look at dollar denominated debt in the world it is probably more than $100 trillion...so ironically there's more demand for dollars than there ever has been (as those debts must be paid in dollars), which has caused deflationary pressure on the USD.
Oh come on guys, I know that was a flippant comment but you see my point right? Due to the short term election cycle every politician has an incredibly short time horizon; in this case trump is trying to make things go back to normal by November and it’s just an impossible task. So the only thing he can do is massive stimulus and prayer.

I guess this being HN people are more used to long winded soliloquies than single sentence terse remarks, served me right I suppose.
Hey Hackers!
It’s 2020 and yet getting paid (especially on time) is still a major issue for freelancers.

In the UK where I'm based, freelancers spend 7.5% of their time chasing payments, and roughly another 7.5% doing work they won’t end up getting paid for. That’s 1.5 hours a day wasted if you work 10-hour days!

I've come up with a process for freelancers to get paid on time, every time. Freelancer Protocol (https://www.freelancerprotocol.com/) is the web app I've built around it, enabling any freelancers and their clients to use that process.

Here's how it works:

1. Projects are broken down into intermediary steps - we call them milestones. A milestone has a deliverable and a price, as well as a start and end date.

2. We (a third party) charge the client when each milestone starts and pay the freelancer when it ends, given the deliverable is marked as delivered by the deadline.

It’s brand new so I’d love to hear your feedback on both the landing page and the actual product.

Thanks for checking it out!

Elliot
I am in the camp of, it works for some but for a majority of workers and more important, managers, companies need to put forward some effort to train them to be effective. some are ineffective in the use of their time and subject to distraction. training can mitigate this.

however we also need consider that some corporations are way too proud of their headquarters or other buildings and having them fully staffed is part of that pride. something that also needs to be addressed.

now work from home can also means it can end up in a situation where you need to compete more on a world stage for employment. once some companies adapt to having remote workers does it really matter where they are? this can lead to wage erosion and even at times cultural conflicts.
If we want to deal with this pandemic and technological tools like tracking apps are deemed essential to that goal then my view is that these tools should be built and deployed with effectiveness in mind, not privacy.

The privacy aspect should then be dealt with by enacting stringent time limits on the use of these tools, not by constraining them.

Here in Europe I see discussions and arguments that such tools cannot be deployed because they would breach privacy, or that people will refuse to use them for the same reason.

I think that this is like arguing about dinner on a sinking ship.
Seems like all the people in charge at Microsoft in the 2000s have moved over to Google, as the product strategy seems the same – create something, watch it fail, kill it, hastily rebrand the old thing as a new thing and repeat.

E.g. MSN Music/Zune Marketplace/XBox Music/Microsoft Store/Groove Music
This emulator enables a masochistic nostalgia meta-game - pick a grimy EGA port of a popular 1980s Amiga title. Pick an hateful, underpowered & obscure hardware combo that is the box claims to support. The game is just to work out the CONFIG.SYS, HIMEM & drivers to make it launch without graphical glitches & sound crackles. Enjoy!
> The key for me is actively rebalancing your social life and interactions on outside of work activities. That not intuitive because we are so used at getting interactions automatically in a job, so if you don't take action you will end up isolated very rapidly.

This seems reasonable. It's a shame it's a bit hard to try out these days ;-)
I find constant "WFH" isolating and a bit depressing. I prefer to work out of a coffee shop, but obviously that is not possible these days.
1. Though people are being asked to purchase YT Music, they're being given their original, grandfathered price. They're not being asked to pay more (aside from the person who moved from AUD -> USD).

3. The modern public terms don't seem relevant here. YTM also doesn't have a $7.99/month plan, yet that's what's being offered to you. Is there any compelling evidence that accepting Google's purchase links means surrendering your lifetime price guarantee?
The unemployment rate isn't even close to the 10% we saw after the '08 recession. Only about half. Does that mean that twice as many people are going to become unemployed, than are right now?
I started getting what I now think are probably anxiety attacks a few years ago. I have asthma and now some GERD symptoms, so every once in awhile, I get symptoms that mirror the online warning symptoms for heart attack: numb left arm, tingles throughout my body, lightheadedness, skipped heart beats, chest tightness, chest is painful to the touch, etc.

I'd go to urgent care and they'd always be like "well you have a normal EKG but you should go to the hospital to be sure" and then the emergency room will talk to me, take my blood, monitor me for a few hours and take my blood again (sometimes it takes awhile for the markers of a heart attack to show up), and then tell me it was probably just heartburn.

I've gone five times in the last 2 years for this same song and dance (I skip urgent care now). I have had these feelings happen about 20 times besides that, so I'm not even going every single time, there's just some especially scary ones that make me go "It's probably nothing, but just in case!" Last time I was driving and could barely focus on the road, which was new. I was pretty close to an ER and even then I pulled off the side of the road and tried to calm down for 20 minutes before finally deciding to go in.

I'm only in my 30s, but I have seeing more and more stories of people dying from heart attacks that young (I know it's still rare, but it can happen), so that doesn't help. And if for some reason it ever does become a heart attack, I probably won't tell the difference and might not go in for it, and end up dead.

So yeah, anxiety over heart attacks can be no joke. I have real symptoms that manifest over it. Sorry you're going through this. I don't know if it'll ever go away for me, myself. Worried it might just be something I have to live with from now on.

But I'm fine normally except for the rare attacks. Even this pandemic isn't really bothering me too much, although I'm doing my best to avoid getting it, especially since I have other issues that could lead to a bad outcome (like the already mentioned asthma).
If you're not familiar with Mongolian (and I dare say most people aren't), give this a listen:

https://youtu.be/DewnbIcSr8U

As a widely read linguistic amateur who tackles new languages for a hobby, I find the phonetics of Mongolian to be off-the-charts unusual, and on my brief visit to the country I don't think I ever got a decent grip even on "hello" or "thank you". I can read Cyrillic, so you'd think I could at least sound out words in the current script, but pretending Mongolian is pronounced like Russian won't get you anywhere. The language bears virtually no resemblance to any other major language, and even recognizable loan words seemed to be few and far between.
The requirements to start as a freelancer, in any kind of economic climate:

* You have an accountant

* You are not afraid to draw up a contract

* Have a skill that has higher demand than supply and will remain so for a foreseeable time

* Have worked on paid side projects a few times

* One existing customer is interested in hiring you for 3 months (worth of money) or more

Ensure you set aside 50% of which 2/3rds for tax and 1/3 for bad times. Maybe you pay less tax in the end. Yay! "Free" money! Never get in the reverse situation.

If you don't have customers: don't do it. I have been making a lot of contacts in the 15 years+ I have as a professional and it's still hard to find work right now. If you're good for a few months then we're out of the pit in terms of demand for sure.
> "the internet when he first conceived it, he thought it was a place that we would all leave the world and go to. Whereas in fact, it came here."

Somehow this reminds me of the difference between various editions of Shadowrun, a cyberpunk-fantasy rolepalying game in a dystopian near future where magic and dragons returned (though the magic is irrelevant to my point here).

In the earlier editions, from 1989 through the 1990s and early 2000s, the Matrix (their 'internet') was all virtual reality, and the 'Decker' using it would disappear into that world and barely interact with the rest of the team.

In more recent editions, written after smartphones and wireless internet became common, everything was connected. Everything is connected to the Matrix. In combat, a Decker can hack the opponents' guns to disable them, for example. It's not a world to disappear into; that world has come to the physical world and merged with it.
It seems likely though that lots of people after the lockdowns will simply be re-hired once lockdowns are over.
Singapore made wearing mask compulsory outside of residence
> "And then I woke up the morning after the election, looked at my computer, and realized that the manuscript I'd been working on was actually set in 2017, but it had become a 2017 that no longer existed," he says. "And it was so organic, and so fractally complete a change that it just crushed me. I thought 'that's dead, that whole thing I'm working on.'"

Charlie Stross has also written about this kind of thing; it gets harder and harder to write near-future SF as the present is in flux. Especially to write post-apocalyptic SF.

SF in general tends to rely on the "whig view of history": technological development and social progress moving forwards. This remains true even in apocalyptic scenarios, which are always tied to the worries of the present at the time of writing.

But we're now faced with a rise in post-rationalism and nonlinear chaotic events. Things like the "5G causes coronavirus" nonsense remind me of what Carl Sagan called the "demon-haunted world".
I don't get what the point of still using the term "recession" is. Even if it's temporary, this is a full-blown depression right?
Sounds familiar! I really did enjoy the work and helping people, but I could never find anyone to help me, and it's a 24/7 thing. I have basically never been offline since 2002. There's been a few exceptions, but I'm always on call. It's been a good ride, and I know I'll be sad when I cancel that last server next month. Let me know if you need help, I'm available now :-)
It is easier if you stop programming in your work, at least as primary responsibility.
I think economists have done pretty well overall. It got termed the "dismal science" for opposing slavery in the 19th century ("They'll be more productive if they get paid") and generally being against imperialism ("Can't we just trade with them?"), being against the corn laws, etc.

And if I go look at the Wikipedia page Eugenics in America[1] and read through the bios of the first few supporters I can find I get Francis Galton (Polymath uninvolved in economics), John Harvey Kellogg (Doctor), Charles Davenport (Biologist), Henry H. Goddard (Psychologist), Harry H. Laughlin (Sociologist), Madison Grant (Conservationist), Karl Pearson (Biostatistician), Alexander Graham Bell (Inventor), David Starr Jordan (Biologist), Luther Burbank (Botanist), and Margaret Sanger (Feminist).

I don't want to say that economists are blameless here. Henry Rogers Seager famously used eugenics as a reason for a minimun wage writing “The operation of the minimum wage requirement would merely extend the definition of defectives to embrace all individuals, who even after having received special training, remain incapable of adequate self-support.”

But overall it seems that when economists disagreed with the predominant intellectual milieu they've mostly been right and they've mostly only been badly wrong when they've followed along with it.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics_in_the_United_States
Supporting Korean startups: Seoul Business Agency (SBA) providing space and care
Not everyone has all these downsides when working in an office.

1. I walk to work.
2. It's a 25 minute walk each way. I don't consider it lost time,
Agree with 3 and 4.
5. I can and do go to the gym whenever I want. Typically at 2 or 3pm to avoid the lunch crowd.
Well they'll certainly fail next time, that's for sure.
Puppy Linux BionicPup 8.0 – Small and feisty
> Most of these don't look so intractable any more, even if we haven't solved them, yet.

who's we ?
Well, maybe scala conferences are hosted and attended by people who are interested in those concepts and find them attractive to talk about ? "conference people" just develop their own meta over time

Also, I just clicked on the most recent conference on
clojure.org : https://clojured.de/schedule/ , and there is a talk mentioning monads while promising to not talk about monads :-D So it kind of reinforce my point that basic theoretical concepts are silently everywhere ^^ (and fully not necessary for almost everything).

But I don't think conferences are representative of the "on the ground production experience" that you have, or at least can have.

I personnaly wouldn't submit a paper to a conference with a talk "Here's how I made a whole backend stack using boring scala, and it just works" because as you say, I feel it's just full of theoretical speakers and that wouldn't interest anyone.
Meanwhile, I also did code a whole backend in boring scala, and it in fact just works, and it feels good :-)
If you have watched any of the daily Coronavirus Task Force Press Briefings you will no doubt have heard Trump championing "If I didn’t do that, we would’ve had hundreds of thousands more people dying"...

To my understanding the ban only stopped direct flights from China. In other words flights to china were still able to travel everywhere else in the World and then from those layovers the Chinese were still able to fly into the US indirectly.

The virus made its way to US anyway and when it got out of hand the healthcare system was overwhelmed, the economy shutdown, supply chains broke down, we reached essentially 20% unemployment overnight...so I am not sure how his decision saved lives, it seems to me, his travel ban only delayed the virus...so assuming the travel ban wasn't put in place it seems to me the virus would have just been on our radar sooner and we would have done the same poor reactive responses. In other words, from the time of the ban in January to Trumps "15 days to slow the spread" how many test kits were ordered? How many N95 masks were ordered? How many ventilators? How much PPE? What did Trump do to prepare for the virus and save lives beyond travel bans, because it seems our healthcare systems were not prepared/supplied nor was FEMA prepared and mobilized until March.

Can you explain how his ban saved lives as opposed to delayed the virus?
There will be huge shift in structure of business.

Many small mom and pop shops are not coming back. Big chains, and franchises survive.

Permanent changes in customer behavior. Many people with resistance and habits against 'new ways' are forced to learn internet shopping and delivery. Their habits can change permanently.
So what do people think about having a feature in the C language akin to the defer statement in GoLang?

The GoLang defer statement defers the execution of a function until the surrounding function returns. The deferred call's arguments are evaluated immediately, but the function call is not executed until the surrounding function returns. It looks like an interesting mechanism for cleaning up resources.
> It's not a matter of "they haven't come around to my opinion yet, but they will."

Exactly right. That's my primary problem with all of these opinion pieces that WFH is the future.

Having managed remote/WFH teams for several years, including a lot of WFH veterans, I've seen a lot of the downsides of WFH that aren't immediately apparent in the first few months.

It's difficult to convince people that long-term WFH has downsides because so many people want to believe that they are more productive and happier never leaving their own homes, when in reality that's not true for everyone. Especially over the long-term.

For example: In my experience, the people who were most confident that they would be more productive at home were most likely to have performance issues after several months. Ironically, the people who were concerned that WFH might negatively impact their work were more likely to succeed because they made no assumptions and instead put in the effort to make their WFH experience a success.
It doesn't further your cause that you present your point of view as a widely agreed-upon truth. Last time I checked, the government in Poland enjoyed a wide support of a majority of the population.
This one's tricky. I've driven fish daily for years, and it's definitely snappier than my old omzsh setup (I much prefer this style of history), but you can get bitten by certain tools not using shebangs properly.
A collection of graph clustering research papers with implementations
I reproduced it by eliminating aspects of the scenario and combing through logs. For example, for a long time I only knew it was happening sometime after the laptop went to sleep, but that's all. After paying attention to my patterns, I isolated out the case where the laptop would sleep only for a few minutes on or off power. Then I did the same thing but either pulled the power cable or plugged it in after it went to sleep. Then I tried variants of those after letting it sleep for a long time. Nothing was reproducible for a very long time until I noticed that the specific case of first using it till the battery was dead, then letting it sit for a while, then plugging it in and then opening the lid caused the kernel panic. It persisted through two screen replacements and one motherboard replacement if memory serves. Not totally sure how that happened, but it could have been a faulty SSD or something.

It was extremely satisfying to finally isolate it to 100% reproducibility. Peak of my career right there.
I think that you are just generalizing something that can't be easily generalized. I'm not happy with what's happening in the world - as I hope most aren't - but the work from home situation isn't a problem for me. I'm loving it. I have an older kid and both him and my wife, who's a stay-at-home mom, are doing a great job maintaining a quiet environment in the house.

One thing that makes a huge difference is having a dedicated room for work. I'm fortunate to be able to afford an extra room just for myself and I set up a mini office in there. It's so much better than an open office environment, I can't even compare. I really get "in the zone" there and instead of getting interrupted every minute in my sad FAANG open office environment, I can actually get stuff done.
This certainly feels real to me. Yesterday, I was laid off from my job at Easypost. We had a very big and very painful layoff because my company took on way too much leverage. The circumstances of COVID19 were tough to foresee but I really wish we hadn't taken on so much debt while times were good.

I have experience in Go, Ruby, Python and I'm excited to hack again.
I don't see less work on a similar platform, but I do notice that the competition for that work is more fierce. Though I expect given the fact that the demand never slowed down the musical chairs game will be over soon and the supply of developers will dry up.
It's also more problematic right now because of the lack of childcare/school. If that resumes, then the child distraction problem goes away (but leaves other issues like: lack of social interaction, sub-par home office situation, etc).

Personally, even though my commute sucks, there is something to be said for having 8+ hours around adults. I've also noticed I am less eager to interact with my 4-year-old now because she's always around, always needs something, always loud (even with the office door closed), and I feel guilty that she's not getting the attention she needs. Schools re-opening would totally change this.