skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
And DocumentDB is built on top of the same, proven, data storage tier as Mysql/Aurora and Postgres/Aurora.
Get legal advice. If they are not paying you now, they might well not pay other bills like unemployment insurance etc. That can ruin you later.

It's not fun but get qualified advice. With whom you can discuss your exact case.
22 May 2020 09:28:30 +5

is a perfectly unambiguous date stamp for human reading.

by all means use iso6081 for everything else, but i genuinely prefer the above in daily human facing use.

it’s in commmon use in the US military, and at least passingly common elsewhere. Not something normal people do here, but it’s be nice.
> Does anyone have a good explanation why companies do this?

1. To make more money
2. Because they can
A salary is made up of a bunch of things, and one of those things is an allowance for living and working in an expensive location, which is not tied to performance or role. If the allowance is for a specific circumstance, it's reasonable that it changes if the circumstance changes. It might be called a Cost-of-living adjustment which is discretionary income.
Categorically, the value of remote workers is lower than the value of local workers.

This is largely due to network effects and the higher efficiency of communication with co-located teams. I’m a software engineer, and like other software engineers, my job is something like 50% communication and 50% coding/testing/operations. As you go up in seniority and expertise, the ratio shifts more and more in favor of communication. A fresh graduate or more junior employee might have a larger share of coding/testing/operations.

The communication side of my job is suffering like never before during mandatory WFH.
Excellent points. I'm again reminded of this 2S[1] investment article about the value of gross margins. I find particularly insightful your comment about tech work done in tech hubs which is CapEx, creativity and presumably margin heavy as well (to support the first two). One could say, well isn't it possible for this work to dry up? And yet, on the other hand, the whole point of investing is to perennially keep a portfolio fresh and full of the most cutting edge, margin heavy firms (when adjusted for risk adjusted returns compared to the nominal risk free return rate). Well, theoretically anyways.

[1] https://twosigmaventures.com/blog/article/why-gross-margins-...
You still need a fixed mailing address for many things, so I assume they'd use that
Local workers don't compete with local workers in other locales, but remote workers do.

EDIT: But this implies that people in big cities can expect to see their pay go down to match the greater competitiveness of remote workers, not the other way around.
The demographic you're referring to - North Americans within the USA who don't know how 24-hour time works - are < 2% of the world's population.
I live in England.
Yes, but that's not what the written code does.
Just because it's hard to implement right doesen't mean Apple should get a pass. I mean, they aren't forced to create a voice assistant by regulation. If they can't make a good one, (and this applies to Amazon and Microsoft too) they should have just left it in the lab until they can.
Hi Stephen,

Thanks for sharing this. I am a mid / senior engineer trying to work smarter and I believe this newsletter will help me with thinking about problems in the correct context and asking myself the right questions.

I really appreciate the resources attached to this particular topic (the list of questions) as it is something I have personally struggled with in the past in my career.

Do you by any chance have a sneak preview on topics you will be addressing in the near future? I have just been made redundant so am taking the opportunity to learn as much as I can before I get into my next role.

Thanks again!
I heard plenty of first party accounts.

A salesman from the cell company comes to the maker of electric busses/trucks/LSEVs and says "resales of cells is strictly, strictly, strictly forbidden," and that they will unleash all torts imaginable if they found out.

And this is the prime reason why good offers popping on online auctions don't last long.

In comparison to margins of wholesale distributors of just any other industrial commodities in China, margins of large battery cell sellers look unbelievable.

In comparison, 18650 cells can be easily found in retail at under 125% of the wholesale price in China.
Domestic cats natural habitat is not a 40sqm flat without the possibility to go outdoors. Also, domestic cats were not bred by humans for domestic characteristics but to keep places clean of animals such as mice. Anyways, that's beside the point: cats reality is complete different to ours and trying to describe cats behaviour using human characteristics is a poor way to describe their behaviour. Even as mammals, they still have very different senses and perspective to everything. We have very limited understanding about their "feelings".
What you're proposing requires extra work to be threadsafe, is even less typesafe than normal C functions (you've lost checking that `ctx` is actually an `int`), requires you to reimplement it for each standard function you want to use, and is significantly syntactically more cumbersome even after you've done all that. If that's "first class" then how bad would things have to get before you called them "second class"?
Researchers recover typed text using audio recording of keystrokes
Although https://www.willus.com/k2pdfopt/ is meant for reformatting PDFs to view on e-readers, it does do a reasonable job of extracting text via OCR and storing as a PDF layer. The underlying engine can be either https://github.com/tesseract-ocr/tesseract or http://jocr.sourceforge.net/
They should be paying you more, because they are saving on office space rental when you work remotely.

So they are not only saving on salaries, but on rents as well. Cheeky bastards.
Are author’s now on the enemies list of the great and good? For every Stephen King there are 10,000 authors trying to eke out a few dollars from something which took them years of hard work. I hardly think the authors of the world are the problem here.
At some point, having everyone in golden handcuffs isn't necessarily a wholly positive thing. If you're working for Facebook in a low-cost area at a (high-end) SV salary, you've got a huge incentive to just tough it out even if you hate your job.

Companies adjust pay scales because they mostly can and I doubt there are a material number of large distributed companies that don't do so. If they pay competitive Bay Area salaries everywhere, then they're paying more than they need to in order to hire people elsewhere.
In what world is this human interest piece an attack on Elon Musk? Is any non-fawning coverage a hit piece?
Henry Wallace's essay from 1944, cited in the article:

https://www.nealromanek.com/danger-of-american-fascism-henry...
One example is interacting with complexity introduced by outgrowing a single database instance.

This scaling could work a variety of ways. Records might be horizontally sharded across a bunch of database instances. Caching is layered above the database to protect against hot database queries, etc. The generation logic now needs to understand how to partition a single GraphQL query across the shards and caching layers.

It's definitely not impossible, and in some circumstances it may be easy. But it couples your GraphQL implementation very tightly to your current database system in a way that may make it difficult to rearchitect your database system at the next order of magnitude scaling problem - "We really need to redo how we think sharding and caching, and our GraphQL's direct interaction with the data layer is going to make this a challenge." Maybe it's easier if the company is new and is GraphQL-only. An older company that has a mix of a few data access technologies might wish the GraphQL left the data layer concerns to the data layer.
I believe libinput's and synaptic's maintainer is the same person, and he started libinput because the synaptic codebase was a mess without tests whatsoever. I'm also using synaptics btw, as libinput gives me physical pain ...
in case you are on .net stack on your project I'd recommend take a look NReco.GraphQL. It's very easy to use, need just set up schema in json file and db connection string. Schema may be generated by script if you have lots of db tables. You may find a couple nice topics on ITNext (on medium platform - https://itnext.io/graphql-api-for-sql-database-in-net-af2fe3... ) regarding this component.
A Deep Dive into Litecoin
Thank you! I was getting really strong "you've read this before" vibes from the article but couldn't place the source.
> Also if the value and quality of work is the same... shouldn't the pay remain the same.

No, because you will find the same quality of people agreeing to work for less because their expenses are lower.

> Also this leads to income inequality. A person from a poor neighborhood/country gets paid less than someone in a wealthy area.

You have to look at net income after basic expenses. What good is it to earn more money but then also spend more for the same quality of life, because everything is more expensive?
Market. Say, now they're not limite to hire only people that want to live in the Bay Area but the whole world.
What would have happened if you would have brought these stocks daily?
Thanks for the term "characterisation testing".

I started doing this a few years ago while working on a Sphinx extension that defines new directives but also customizes a few output targets (including two ~plaintext output targets).

It's not only useful to avoid accidental output changes, but it's essential for iterating with confidence that tiny changes at the code level affected the output as-expected over a mostly-representative fraction of the documentation set.

I didn't have a term for it at the time. I guess about a year later I bumped into snapshot testing, but that's always felt like more of a metaphor.
Roughly like that, yes. And it really would only work for text messages, not only because of the voice issue but also because a phone call rarely contains actionable information before both sides have informally confirmed identity.
There’s also an xkcd for that
https://xkcd.com/1179/

(Because there’s an xkcd for pretty much everything)
This is in itself is an admission that capitalism doesn't work and that Facebook is a monopoly.
If the environment was truly competitive, then companies would not be able to conflate the value of employees' skills with their location.
It sounds like Facebook has the power to fully dictate the wages of their employees.
ocrmypdf and friends.

I've built an archival system based around Tesseract and PostgreSQL. It takes Images/PDFs, either scanned or generated, and rebuilds them as searchable PDFs before being extracted and inserted into Postgres' full-text search. I keep all of the original media because disk is cheap.

Originally I used Tesseract directly. But I found that ocrmypdf did a better job than my home-grown pipeline, so I switched.
I'm not a parent, so just speculating wildly, but there's a good chance your 3 year old has already cost more that $1750. Also, having met a few in my extended family I would doubt that a 3 year old not from London would actually know the time there, even if they could properly disambiguate the question. The phone seems like good value by that comparison
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Your pay is a function of supply and demand here, not value provided. Working for a company is an opt-in choice, so it's not theft. If you want a better agreement go work somewhere else. And when enough people do that, pay will go up to compete for those people. But if a company can get away with paying less, they will. And arguably, they have a fiduciary responsibility to do so.
See also: "Please select a state" dropdown with no "Not US" option.

TBF internationalisation is complicated and hard to do well. So is international shipping.

But compare with a European site like thomann.de, which not only handles currencies and taxes but also (mostly) translates the product descriptions into most European languages.
Laurene Powell Jobs Wants to Be a Press Savior, Not a Martyr
Desalination is extremely energy intensive to get potable water. If you're using RO extraction it's 10:1. 90-95% of water is returned back to the sea. That little bit of potable water is just the bonus of compressing saltwater into saltwater.
On that basis, a company could pay women less since it knows they are less likely to demand an equal salary. After all facebook is not a charity.

facebook is a MAJOR player in society, and reflecting societies values is not a charitable act it's a responsibility.
Yet, if someone says Charing Cross in London, they do probably mean London Charing Cross nevertheless.
That is one of the tactics used. Anger, even righteous, is an "argument lost" if the other person just "wants a rational discussion" even if they are flooding it with falsehoods, misrepresented information, logical fallacies, etc.

It reminds me of this trope: https://www.mumsnet.com/uploads/talk/201802/large-457127-lar...
> std::thread crashing in destructor when the user doesn't call std::thread::join, nor std::thread::detach.

this has been 'fixed' with jthread. FWIW I think it is a mistake, blocking in a destructor is can easily lead to deadlocks (I have first hand experience, it is not just a theoretical issue). Detaching is not an option either.
Red Hat is part of IBM now. Another post on the homepage right now is "IBM to cut thousands of jobs as coronavirus plays out" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23268191

Not saying that these IBM jobs are from the Red Hat part of IBM, but not the best time to hope they will hire more.
I'm surprised that there's no mention about the interplay of authorization and data fetching in the post.

This is one of the things that seems to be a little bit nuanced (surprisingly?) because it's not just about creating the right query to fetch data optimally, but it is also about making sure that it's handling data with the right authorization context of the current end-user.

This becomes especially tedious when you're fetching objects and lists of objects and the "resolvers" to fetch those objects need to mix in authorization rules in each resolver.

Hasura[1] tackles this by providing a model level authorization layer (similar to Postgres RLS, but at the Hasura/application layer) which makes GraphQL to SQL feasible even for apps. It's not just about a translation layer. Postgraphile does this using Postgres RLS.

Those are the key benefits that make Hasura useful for data-fetching in practice. Over the last few years we've been working with users with billions of records per table, especially in enterprise environments. And it's great to see how smooth things have been.

Especially as the number of tables and models explode, having a declarative system to specify authorization at a model level and then get a guarantee that an effective SQL query will get created is a nice thing to have. It allows our users to deal with higher level concepts, model data, setup authorization, make queries, look at query plans (which now show full SQL queries), add indexes, test, add to an allow-list, done.

[1] - https://hasura.io

(I'm from Hasura)
I loved Turbo Pascal back in the 90s, that was the first IDE I ever used.

I think Visual Studio 6 is equivalent in ease of use and user experience -- that's what I learned C++ on back in the early 2000s, before the influx of Java and Python into academia.
Salary is not the only payment. People accept those cuts, this means that those "ow paying areas" have something else to offer.
Also, usually remote opportinies still pay more than local is most places, with more remote, the competition for talent in those areas, and both local and remote opportunities will pay more.
Value also takes in consideration how easy you can get something, something easy to get is low value, this applies to everything including labor.
I expected it, and actually think that expecting otherwise is a little bit of _snowflake-thinking_.
You make technical decisions based on what happened a decade ago? Do you make all decisions based on ten year old information?
yeah, maybe, it is still early to say so but it is possible.
I transferred out of the Bay Area a year ago, and my FAANG salary was cut 15%. For them, salaries are based on “Cost of Labor”, or the cost of getting a person to join in that area, not “Cost of Living”.

I’m still doing just fine.
Show HN: Vesta – Get a competitive cash offer on your home in 24 hours
Same. I’m planning on retiring an old DID for my mom.

Plan is 6 months of “this phone number is retiring, please update to _______, update your records. we’ll connect you now.”

Then 6 months of “this number is retired, hang up and call _____”.

Then 3 months of dead-end (but will review CDRs).

When I cancel it, I plan on calling any new owner to ask them to forward any calls for her to us.
What good is it for the company to pay out more money ever? Why pay people to live in expensive neighborhoods at all?
> My gut feel would be that if Facebook continued paying same rate even though people weren't in the bay area anymore that nobody would ever be able to compete and therefore the retention would be much longer.

Does Facebook have a problem retaining in the Bay Area or anywhere else for that matter?
Covid-19 Tests, Confirmed Cases, & Deaths in the Most Populated Countries
It's just supply and demand. The willingness of a worker to supply labor at a certain price (i.e. salary) is, for normal human beings, going to vary with his cost of living.
s/should/can/. There are reasons in this world to do things that do not maximize immediate net profits.
Using SQL to Look Through All of Your iMessage Text Messages
> I really don't know what more a man could be to do be "good." Than Bill gates has done.

There are many people throughout history who have sacrificed everything to do the right thing. Bill Gates is not one of them.
IBM is big, and full of inefficiencies. Plus it has a very large external risk (due to it being a contractor of many other big companies), and now that externality reached them: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23271145
Krucible is hosted, so you're not running a VM that's consuming resources and that you have to manage—spinning up Minikube from within a CI environment isn't necessarily the easiest of tasks. With Krucible it's just a single API call to create a Kubernetes cluster. This also allows you to parallelise your test suite easily as you can spin up as many clusters as you need at the same time.

The snapshots feature is also a big differentiator: you can set up a cluster, take a snapshot and then share that with your team so that you're all running identical Kubernetes clusters.
It's not a cartel or conspiracy but a simple matter of demand being consistently larger than the available production capacity. Right now owning a battery factory is a good business because there are a lot of manufacturers that are not able to secure batteries. Several car manufacturers are being blocked by this or have reduced their production ambitions because of this.

I think people are also confusing manufacturing cost vs. price here. Obviously, those are not the same. The article is mostly talking cost.

The packaged products that e.g. Tesla sells (cars, battery packs for domestic/grid usage, etc.) include more than just the battery cells.

In any case, Bloomberg is being a bit vague. On one hand, they are predicting mid 2020s for the cost to drop below 100$ and on the other hand you have people guestimating that Tesla is close to that right now. You could of course argue average price, i.e. other manufacturers are not there yet.

Demand for batteries is going to continue to increase for a while. Tesla is talking about TW factories now. The giga in giga factory used to refer to GW. That's a good indication of what they are planning to do. At that scale, the average industry cost and their cost are going to be very similar unless others also grow production capacity at the same pace.
For those confused, this is just a recreation of an animated image of pacman, not a playable recreation of the actual game.

Impressive still, but not exactly what's lead to be believed by the title.
IMO it's not that much just Facebook, but the _market_ and now the market is suddenly bigger (all the good talent that didn't want to move to SF).
Show HN: Turn your fancy, expensive computer into a stupid typewriter
Brilliant, I will definitely use this now.
Love the simplicity!
Do you know of a single company that doesn’t do this?

Even HN darlings famous for being remote-first like Gitlab adjust salary to cost of living.
CMU has published before that probably Russian adversaries fused different groups in the social graph of Facebook in 2016 and basically got in control of both groups after the merge.

Bots are used to get attention, steer the conversation, introduce key retweeters to bot retweeters and merge a couple independent user groups at scale.

This is a highly specialist job not a couple of random amateurs, and could be the underlying mechanism at work here.

Big brands pay a fortune to execute similar tactics but are not even 10% as effective. Coke for example has an annual advertisement budget 7+ billion.
"should". Why? Their job is to be as profitable as possible.
The Rothschilds and Rockefellers fell out of favour as the conspiracy target I guess.
The lack of warning is the big issue. I think 'deferred pay' is a bad idea anyway: if you're taking founder level risk by working unpaid in the hope of future funding you should get founder level upside. But at least on the occasion 'deferred pay' was suggested as a future possibility for me to decline, it was done as exploring possibilities if the money doesn't come in exercise, not we're not going to pay you for the work you've done this month, but if you carry on working for free we might pay you if we ever have the money. I still made it clear I was happier reducing my contracted hours, including to zero.
It's hard to argue that "remote devs" are a protected group.
One funny thing about entitlement is that it only matters if those who hold the power decides it matters.

> This is disgusting. The value a worker provides the company does not magically go down just because their expenses go down. If I am providing the same value that another worker is, we should be compensated similarly regardless of where we choose to live.

You are not paid according to the value you provide to your employer. Despite our best efforts at magical thinking, your employer is interested in the least amount of money they have to spend to get XYZ business goals hit and it happens that your skills are useful to get make that happen. However, unless you are very exceptional in your area, you are a replaceable human resource as far as the org chart is concerned.

You're paid according to your ability to negotiate which is a function of many things ( biases, average market, internal business deadlines, perceived value to the business etc.). Sure, your unique ability to drive sales up 100% YoY is a nice skill but turns out someone else is willing to hit the same goals for 50k less than you are because they live in a cheaper area and don't need the extra cash to live a comfortable life. In that case, you may be valuable but you have no leverage in the negotiation anymore.

Since salaries and budgets are kept secret and employers will always offer the least amount they believe you'll accept first, you are entering the conversation severely handicapped already. We will certainly see suppression in wages over the next few years.
It's a good time for companies based on improving remote work/school...