skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
These two threads seem contradictory to me:

1> For the employees, [post-acquisition] is business as usual for the most part. The goal is for the employees to not even notice.

2> You can buy companies and replace expensive people with a global remote workforce that is just as good (or better) and cheaper.

Can someone with more knowledge or experience of Tiny acquisitions explain which of these is true? Are they a holding company for SaaS companies with extra best practices, or a cuddly face on traditional PE cost-cutting tactics? The article itself doesn't seem sure. (And, oddly, appears not to notice the contradiction.)
Author here!
This article started as a short section in Chapter 3 of Zero To Production (https://www.lpalmieri.com/posts/2020-05-24-zero-to-productio...) to give some background on the decision making process I went through when picking the web framework we will be using to develop our email newsletter project throughout the book.

It eventually grew to be so long that it made little sense as part of Chapter 3 itself - I thus decided to publish it as its own article and link it in the introduction to Chapter 3 (hopefully to be released next week!).
> you could suddenly use any typeface you wanted because displays were all retina

You're thinking only of Apple land, right? Most displays in the world are still 1366x768 and 1920x1080, and huge fonts and widgets everywhere is exactly what I'm not going to miss about this era.
Heh, say that to Russia..
I think it’s build 3615, version 5.666, right?
Believe it or not we as a species are still stuck in a oral history despite the advent of the written word. What global communication has done, is kind of open the window of oral history to everyone.

This kind of communication is based on narrative. The ultimate problem is that when you have a conflict of evidence and narrative, you have people that want to keep theirs. So instead of changing the narrative, they change the evidence.

Find a way to be able to change your own narrative, and survive, given conflicting evidence, and you may be able to help change the world.
Someone took the “10 European castles that cost less than San Francisco condominiums” article seriously. That’s awesome!
> you just come across as an entitled white dude who doesn’t give a fuck about the problems in this country

Oh wow, first time a guy on the internet calls me a white dude. If you saw me in real life, or made any inferences based on my HN username, you would know better.
Tech deed I
How do you reach that conclusion? Lincoln believed that he was vindicating the founding principles. From the 1860 Republican platform: https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/republican-party-p...

> 8. That the normal condition of all the territory of the United States is that of freedom: That, as our Republican fathers, when they had abolished slavery in all our national territory, ordained that "no persons should be deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law," it becomes our duty, by legislation, whenever such legislation is necessary, to maintain this provision of the Constitution against all attempts to violate it; and we deny the authority of Congress, of a territorial legislature, or of any individuals, to give legal existence to slavery in any territory of the United States.
Yes you are naive. This is the exact line of thinking Europeans had before WW1 broke out.
> prefer duplication over the wrong abstraction

Such a strange advice.

If you're able to recognize the wrong abstraction right away, surely you would not use it, right?
But are Han Chinese sent to concentration camps?

> The state regularly subjects minority women to pregnancy checks, and forces intrauterine devices, sterilization and even abortion on hundreds of thousands, the interviews and data show. Even while the use of IUDs and sterilization has fallen nationwide, it is rising sharply in Xinjiang.

> But while equal on paper, in practice Han Chinese are largely spared the abortions, sterilizations, IUD insertions and detentions for having too many children that are forced on Xinjiang’s other ethnicities, interviews and data show. Some rural Muslims, like Omirzakh, are punished even for having the three children allowed by the law

> Leaked data obtained and corroborated by the AP showed that of 484 camp detainees listed in Karakax county in Xinjiang, 149 were there for having too many children - the most common reason for holding them. Time in a camp — what the government calls “education and training” — for parents with too many children is written policy in at least three counties, notices found by Zenz confirmed

> Seven former detainees told the AP that they were force-fed birth control pills or injected with fluids, often with no explanation. Many felt dizzy, tired or ill, and women stopped getting their periods. After being released and leaving China, some went to get medical check-ups and found they were sterile

https://apnews.com/269b3de1af34e17c1941a514f78d764c
An ambulance or fire engine only needs a 12' alley, not a whole street. That's plenty of room for pedestrians most of the time and maintenance or emergency vehicles on occasion.

I don't think anybody is suggesting no spaces between houses is a good plan
I don't think it's "whataboutism" to question the validity of a source as cartoonishly biased as the victims of communism foundation. These are the people that claim every covid death is a victim of communism.
I agree that relatively large functions aren't always an evil. As you say, sometimes there isn't a tidy way to further decompose it. At the same time though I don't think it's always a sin to write a function just for decomposition, without it doing any abstraction.

A 'helper function' might be tightly bound to some other function, i.e. the helper function is sensitive to the internal workings of the function it serves, and is not intended to be called from anywhere else.

And there's still no excuse for source files that are 5000 lines long, of course.

HN discussion of John Carmack's thoughts on how long functions are sometimes preferable: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8374345
Nothing I hate more than seeing two files or more, sharing 90% of the same code. No matter what justification one attempts to use, there's a mistake somewhere in the design / development process.

I can see a case for what the OP is saying, but I feel it should always be seen as a temporary measure.
Ah sorry, I mistook that comment as saying they don’t last that long. Yeah I think battery chemistry is one of the (patented) areas where Tesla is far ahead of the rest of the world.
> If you forgive someone yelling at kids because their basketball ended up in their garden you could feel better, but are enabling bad behaviour that should be challenged instead.

In the proposed solution of the article one would only forgive if the offending person did apologize. Probably after getting challenged or called out for what they posted.

So the comparison would be more that someone yelled at the kids, was called out for it and then apologized for their bad behaviour. Then they get forgiveness from the person calling them out.
> Surely if everyone was doing well, conversation would be encouraged

CCP encourage very open discussion on anything except political issues. While presumably one day that won't work, because absolute power brings absolute corruption. How long until that happens and backfires, it's not clear.
An individual function can quite reasonably be 500 lines long. A giant case statement handling routing is one example. More controversially, if I am gong to need to do a lot of ugly compatibility hacks then I prefer to consolidate them and thus keep most functions clean.
Quite a gutsy move making claims like that about a former employer
> Not hovering everything for five minutes until I can figure out what I can click

I really like the way material addresses this : any clickable element should use the primary color of your app.
This way, no guesswork. Button, switches, icons, links, they all use the same action color so if something uses it, you know it has to be clickable.
100 dollars for day trading is shit. You should never risk more than 2% of your account in a trade, that means on average you’d have to be satisfied with making a couple bucks of profit per trade.
The intent matters. Suppression of birth among Han Chinese was intended to limit population growth. Locking up 1.5 million Uyghurs in concentration camps, sterilizing them, and harvesting their organs is done with quite a different intent.

The UN guidelines that Zenz is following:

> In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
> I've rarely seen somebody critisized for copypasta or for overly stupid code.

Do you think that is in the realm of what the article is concerned with?
For many reasons. Anecdotally every BMW owner I know is constantly taking their car in for repairs.
That’s a gross over-generalization to assume that 200 lines is always a self-referential mess. Functions fundamentally transform data, and often that transformation is a linear process. If it’s not, sure, break it up in a more sensible manner.

Regardless, helper methods have a significant cognitive cost as well. It’s nice to pretend that a four word function name can entirely communicate the state transformation it does, but in reality you need to know what it does and mentally substitute that when reading the function using it. No free lunch.
> It's collapsing

any evidence of that?
> China desperately needs more babies.

No it doesn't. Countries needs to stop depending on more people and pushing the demographic challenges to the next generation.
yes, they want to abstract the new problem, and that's good...

I'm not sure that is good. I started off this way too, but now I like to think carefully about abstractions and avoid introducing them till I'm sure it will not hinder understanding, hide changes/bugs, bury the actual behaviour several layers deep, or worst of all make things hard that should be easy later (the problem in the article).

Building abstractions is world-building; it's adding to the complicated structure other developers (including your future self) have to navigate and keep in their head before they can understand the code. So perhaps because of your second point (that people rarely like other people's abstractions), it's better to keep abstractions simple and limited.
Parallel File Sharing Platform (Open-Source)
I agree it is not new.

I have long been a critic of of the public education system in the US for its failing to teach basic financial literacy in high school. I would be in a much better position today if I would not have screwed up my early 20's due to my ignorance on those topics.

I guess I should have not isolated "young people" more said there is a generally lack of economic education in wider population.

My parents who are just now retiring, bought into the US SocSec promise, so they had every little savings... Now me and my siblings are supporting them as we are more economically secure (and more economically successful).
I don't think that the mods deny the astroturfing happening. They're actively looking out for and removing it. I think it's more that they don't want arguments to become polluted with accusations of astroturfing against specific users.
> The reason why now this has changed - we do need to probably call it a genocide - is quite simply because the evidence now, for the first time, very specifically meets one of the five criteria set forth by the United Nations Convention for the Punishment and Prevention of the Crime of Genocide from 1948, which specifically says the suppression of birth
It's not really a McKinsey thing, they just have a mystique. The value a consultancy can offer requires understanding a concept related to "stakeholder salience," which is essentially the logic of how group decisions get made. Their networks are also valuable, since if McKinsey facilitates the introduction, the person is going to return the call. I've also seen some VC firms move more into this role where they use their brand to get enterprise exec meetings for their portfolio companies, and I think that model could be an endgame for a lot of VC firms, not unlike Bain's private equity/consulting plays. In this sense, some of McKinsey's near term competition might not come from big-5 accounting firms, but from tech VC firms leveraging the brands, networks, talent, and tech of their portfolio companies.
India is banning “the App Store Firewall”? Nobody knows what that means. First, ban paywalls. Only then can we begin to address whatever the fuck.
The Chinese social-credit-score system (where people are, among other restrictions, not allowed to travel outside the country if they’re e.g. anti-authoritarian) is a formalization of a long-standing practice.

Over the years, many mainland-Chinese university students (and tourists!) have been granted the funds and visa-arrangements to visit these other countries, specifically because they were known to be “patriots” of China—and moreover, to demonstrate “faith” in the Chinese government in the face of evidence against its character.

Until recently, you could spot tour-buses of these folks often in Hong Kong tourist destinations. The tours were always led by mainland-Chinese tour-guides, never locals.

I imagine the same applies to foreign University programs, but with even stricter selection criteria, such that the students won’t need a handler.

(The “nice” thing about the social-credit-score system is that it replaces all this manual background-checking work with a default-allow system with continuous blackballing. China can now portray itself as a country that allows its citizens to travel freely, while only restricting “those with criminal intent”—while in practice allowing only the same people to travel that it otherwise would have under manual background-checking.)
I recommend John Stillwell’s The Four Pillars of Geometry https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9780387255309. This book is suitable for all who want to cultivate a interest in mathematics.

The Four Pillars of Geometry approaches geometry in four different ways, spending two chapters on each. This makes the subject accessible to readers of all mathematical tastes, from the visual to the algebraic. Not only does each approach offer a different view; the combination of viewpoints yields insights not available in most books at this level. For example, it is shown how algebra emerges from projective geometry, and how the hyperbolic plane emerges from the real projective line.

John Stillwell is a great mathematician and writer. You won’t regret reading this.

PS. John Stillwell’s Mathematics and Its History is also worth reading. In fact, the book doesn’t aim to tell the story of mathematics. The book connects and the parts of mathematics with a historical perspective.
Sounds like the reverse kitchen debate where the national capitalism laughed the incompetence of the classic capitalism.
What kinds of grains have you milled with it? Is the mill included?
Their website.

https://www.victimsofcommunism.org/voc-news/2020/4/5/blame-t...

https://www.victimsofcommunism.org/press-releases/2020/4/10/...

> While the pandemic’s final human toll is still unknown, those who have perished from the outbreak must be included in the global count of 100 million deaths at the hands of Communism.
It's largely because they're dealing with an area with no theoretical tools. Any time you hit an area that are full of people "Designing" solutions/abstractions rather then "Calculating" an optimal solution/abstraction you know you've hit an area where there's very little theoretical knowledge and most people are just sort of wandering chaotically in circles trying to find an "optimal" solution/abstraction without even a formal definition of what "optimal" is.... I mean what is the exact definition of the "perfect abstraction"? What is bad about duplication what is a bad over abstraction and what is this "cheaper" cost that the title is talking about? It's all a bunch of words with fuzzy meanings injected with peoples biased opinions.

That being said theories on abstractions do exist. If you learn it you'll be at the top of your game; but it's really really hard to master. If you do master it, you'll be part of a select group of unrecognized elites in a world of programmers that largely turn to "design" while eschewing theory.

Here are two resources to get you started:

The Algebra of Programming:
https://themattchan.com/docs/algprog.pdf

Program Design by Calculation:
http://www4.di.uminho.pt/~jno/ps/pdbc.pdf

You will note that both of these resources talk about functional programming at its core which should indicate to you that the path to the most optimal abstraction lies with the functional style.
So who thinks FB is a good corporate citizen and does not control speech on its site with arbitrary decisions based on "because that's how we see it" policies?
"for almost all human beings on this planet, the goal of life continues to revolve around gaining wealth, recognition and power."

This is a really broad and very specific statement. Genuinely curious what you base this on.
The fallacy is assuming the nature of civilizations has changed or will continue to get better over time. Human nature is fundamentally warlike, with the subjugation of those tribes deemed lesser, or just in the way of some natural resource. While there is cooperation within individuals in the tribe, history has shown that tribes will conquer rather than cooperate with other tribes given the chance.

This is just the present manifestation of human nature. I assume, just as genocides and war has occurred in the past, they will continue to occur in the present and future, and we will never achieve world peace until human nature itself is changed, perhaps through some future genetic engineering that would make everyone exceedingly docile.
What years were you in college? What were the top dating apps then?
LIGO's 40-kg mirrors move in response to quantum fluctuations
Britain joined to stop Wilhelm making a blue water navy that could rival the royal navy. I don't think it's a given British hegemony would have lasted as long without joining ww1.
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The company can implement their own feature requests. I've opened some issues on some frameworks and when the maintainers agree with the issue the first thing they ask you is if you can submit a PR. Alternatively you can wait or sometimes pay for high priority handling. If you are unlucky you might wait forever because other people create issues too and those might be more important than yours.
It would be interesting to see how well this translates between small, long-lived dogs and the very large but significantly shorter-lived dogs- particularly how the differences there compare to those between other mammals.

There’s obvious reason to suspect that the aging process in mice (which occurs over ~3 years) is just a different process than the aging process in humans (which occurs over 80+ years), which would obviously be a big problem for all the research into aging that relies on animal models. If dogs, one species with a very diverse set of phenotypes, could serve as a meta-model for how aging processes differ between short- and long-lived creatures, that would be very useful.
Like many things, Moore’s law is garbled when adopted by analogy outside its domain.

What does “more transistors” mean? To you, it means just what Gordon Moore means when he said it: opportunity for more function in same space/cost.

The laypersons, marketing grabbed the term and said it would imply “faster”. Which then was absurdly conflated with CPU clock speed (itself an important input, though hardly the only one, determining the actual speed of A system).

The use here is of the “garbled analogy” sort which surely is the dominant use today.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adrian_Zenz ... the china expert

> Zenz co-authored the book Worthy to Escape: Why All Believers Will Not Be Raptured Before the Tribulation which links modern trends, including gender equality, homosexuality and bans on corporal punishment, to the power of the Antichrist.

The more I look at it, history is one ethnic group against the other. The winners do what they want, the weak suffer as prisoners of war.
The maybe most common problem with programmer comments or commit message is what I call "Assumed Context".

When you spend a few days deep in a problem, it's very easy to explain the finer details of it while forgetting the big picture of what does this module even do, what real world problem were we fixing, etc, because that has become completely self evident to you.

It's a bit like giving a street address without saying what city it's in.

I have trained myself to look at both code and comments in a "what if I was a new hire 6 months from now" mode, and it's an indispensable tool for me.
They can be bought and sold like any other realty. Some are owned by the state (esp. those used as public museums) and not up for sale, though.
Ask HN: Consulting in tech. How to start?
So, I've been thinking about starting consulting (not freelancing).

I am working on my own company that sells a news API. We've launched a month ago, it's fully bootstrapped. I have money for a few more months but at some time might search for a "job".

Does anyone here works as a "self-employed" consultant?

How do you find your clients?
https://www.victimsofcommunism.org/voc-news/2020/4/5/blame-t...

It’s a hilarious read:

> If Beijing had given the real number of infected people and deaths, other countries would have recognized the danger, and taken necessary steps.

No matter what transpired, eventually there was a warning, and most countries still took no steps until they had high numbers themselves. Hell, Italy could have been the warning and it would have helped.
I would say that if developers are hacking on an abstraction that is ill-suited to the task until the code base is a nightmare, they will take this advice and duplicate code until it's a nightmare.

The fact of the matter is every line of code that is written has an associated cost. Developers all too often pay that cost by incurring technical debt.
Just my anecdote...

The folder metaphor helped me grasp what was going on. The first computers I spent significant time with were BBCs. They had two filesystems: DFS and ADFS (I think). The Advanced Disk Filing System had folders, but all the documentation I found called them "files". Files could point to files and make a tree of files. 11 year old me just gave up on this. Why would you want a tree of files? Why should a file link to a file...? Nonsense.

Folders (in Gem and Windows) made MUCH more sense. Aaah... it's for organising ideas. Bingo!