skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes, Starlink is at altitudes that deorbit naturally in roughly 5 years.
Isn’t it common knowledge at this point that our browsing history is used to target ads? Who hasn’t had the experience of searching for a product and then seeing ads for it?
- Why did you get into the field? What did you focus on at first?

I was a gamer - I started by making websites for my team (we were competing on clanbase.com) and then eventually I branched out into various MMOs and made bots/cheats/etc. I then began selling those and realized it was a better source of income than my job at McDonalds (I was ~17 then) and ended up sticking with it.

- What are you doing at your job? Is it everything you dreamed of and more?

Currently doing a stint as a solutions architect but have been a CTO at a startup and Tech Lead at Twilio launching some pretty cool products since then (still at Twilio). I expect to return to the product side after honing my sales knowledge/skillset/improving soft skills.

- How did you break that first-job barrier?

I did a little contracting via some freelancer website, but I won my first real software job by finding a security vulnerability in sendspace.com. I let them know via their support e-mail and shortly after they asked if I'd want to join to fix it, and more. Then, to break into the US I took a job as a CTO massively below market rate at a YC startup with non-technical founders that were paying huge sums for outsourced development and surprised at the value I could bring quickly.

My offer at Twilio was in part from constantly hounding the team for improvements / changes / suggestions to which they suggested I come and help do it. I was also encouraged to apply at Shopify in 2013 after writing this post https://ma.rtin.so/posts/reverse-engineering-shopify-private...

- What were you doing before this?

Studying / part-time McDonalds

- Any tips for the rest of us?

Side projects. Building tangible software will give you a much softer transition into the professional world and a more practical skillset. Be curious. Don't give up, don't be intimidated, and be willing to take risks to get your foot in the door.
I wish you did though ;)
The computer should be more complicated to make things easier for humans. The computer is fast and reliable at performing complicated operations. Humans are neither fast nor reliable at computing tasks.

“Report (final).docx” vs “Report (Final).docx”
And?

"Modding" is like, whatever.

I grew up programming PCs in the 80s and 90s but when I look back on it, I didn't really tinker much inside the boxes even though I have mistakenly thought that I did.

Dad installed a Sound Blaster Pro I purchased in like 5th grade after I went to bed so that I wouldn't screw up his work PC.

Past that, I don't think I even upgraded RAM or a hard drive until I was in my 20s, mostly because they were just too expensive.

Had an NES, though. I turned out fine.

But I would have hated my dad if he was like, "no NES for you!" while shoving a screwdriver at me.
If they had a working BS detector, they would be into religion in the first place.

[EDIT]: meant to say "they wouldn't be into religion"
(Not OP)

> our optimism regarding the political situation is more misplaced than our optimism regarding the tech

Yeah, living in Germany I am afraid this is going absolutely nowhere. I've given up on seeing nuclear energy help us even a little bit in this emergency, but I do try to still inform people about how out of proportion the fatalities from coal and the fatalities from fission power really are. We're shutting down nuclear before coal? Environmentalists in Germany are handing out stickers for it and you see them on literally every third car or building. It's ludicrous. I've never seen a disinformation campaign more effective than this. It's like fear of flying but without the people claiming it's safe or faster than traditional methods. Not a one in Germany; no one I've spoken to was even neutral about nuclear. Next, when they realize their safety argument isn't logical, they turn to costs. What do they think the costs of extreme weather events, ecosystem collapse, and mass relocations will be?!

I just hope that, with better information, they will at least realize that we have a bigger problem than nuclear power, even if it doesn't mean they become neutral or in favor of building a new nuclear plant to help with the transition.
I would love to take this energy for fighting apple on the 30% fee and use it encourage them to adopt web notifications and other web apis.
Aren't cellular automata used in video games? One of the simplest ways of doing fluid simulation in 2D works on similar principles. Eg http://www.jgallant.com/2d-liquid-simulator-with-cellular-au...

A lot of simulations will likely be done in a manner that's similar to CAs. Pixel shaders run once per pixel, which make this type of abstraction quite attractive. You can take advantage of the massive parallelism of GPUs.
In Our Cynical Age, No One Fails Anymore – Everybody ‘Pivots’
Part 2: https://blog.yugabyte.com/yugabytedb-vs-cockroachdb-bringing...

Original post from CockroachLabs: https://www.cockroachlabs.com/blog/unpacking-competitive-ben...
I mean, physicists don't usually go around talking about superworlds, but maybe this corresponds to the concept you want?: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilbert_space
We also alert if any message is in the queue too long.

If anything, the alert is too sensitive.
> but the minute you make these users aware of the tracking and ask for their permission, the business model falls apart.

Unless you break the service in case the permission is revoked. Then users gladly enable the permission.
Floor heights do, but from the perspective of just getting as much usable data as they can so you can see the 3d buildings, whatever works, right?
The problem is, that lucky guy can take an indefinitely long time to show up.

I heard recently about the Scythe Project. Apparently, the scythe was never invented in some places, including India. That's a long time for the lucky guy to never show up.
Once I saw a TV show about the challenges of constructing a deposit for nuclear waste that is expected to operate for thousands of years.

In this show, they mentioned that they did not want to use skulls to represent danger, because skulls are not seen as dangerous in some cultures (with "Dia de los muertos" as an specific example).
Funny how this is downvoted, since when translated into "reddit-speak" GP's "clarification" gives exactly that.
Yea your right then political atmosphere around both of those situations had absolutely nothing to do with the engineering of the plant and therefore had no impact... ️

There are more industrial accidents in every other power generation source that hurt and kill more. 100% renewals is 100 years out.
Hey! Thanks for reaching out in HN comments! Unfortunately I'm not sure I have them any more I'm afraid, I've been dealing with a lot of images.

I was very diligent about submitting the crash reports, so you should have 10-20 examples. Not sure if you can see who they come from, but if you can hopefully you find them.
The change Apple is making keeps Facebook (and others) from using the advertising ID to track users between apps. Facebook's ability to notice that you have suddenly started posting a lot of baby pictures and choose to serve baby-related ads is unaffected.
what is sWe?
The foundational principle of Christianity (in America at least, in my experience) is believe something with no evidence it is true. They call it "faith". I was raised in small town Oregon and Texas going to Christian private schools and church for years, and that "faith" thing is absolutely their central belief. I remember clearly once when I was 9 finding the whole thing deeply illogical. Later in life I got a PhD in math, partly motivated by wanting to better heal my brain from how I was raised.

I'm not at all surprised Christians fall for Trump's lies and Qanon.
If you intend to start a facilities-based last mile access ISP, what last-mile tech do you intend to use? There's a number of resources out there for people who want to be a small hyper local WISP. But I would not recommend it unless you have 10+ years of real world network engineering experience at other, larger ISPs.
Perhaps you meant "wouldn't"?
>I’m continuously baffled by those that claim that nuclear power is safe. Look at Fukushima for example.

How many people died as a result of the accident?

Wikipedia lists only one. There'll probably be a few hundred in the coming decades as a result of cancers caused by radiation.

Now compare that to the number of people that have died since then, as a result of burning coal. Two, maybe three orders of magnitude more people.
> Look at Fukushima for example.

Look at Three Mile Island. That is the kind of accident profile with less shitty reactor designs than Chernobyl and Fukushima you should be looking at. Modern PWRs built today are even safer than TMI in accidents.

It is the 50 year old or soviet shitty designs that unfortunately caused the bad reputation of nuclear power. Plants which should have never started operating or should have been shut down a few decades ago, when the next generation (like TMI) came into being.
Labor costs have to be figured into $/KwH by convention right? They’re not zero for solar.
> To be fair if you add an opt-in step to anything, it will kill that thing.

That's like saying if you put a price on something, it will kill that thing. No, it doesn't.
http://wndw.net/book.html
To be fair, several hundred people died due to the Fukushima evacuations. Which doesn't change the result that nuclear power is extremely safe, even coming in under renewables in deaths per terawatt-hour: https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy
The incentives were different.
Neuralink Snout Boops
I thought the model was you had to ask permission, not that you just had to tell them.

E.g. it's not a cookie banner type thing, you provide the text for the dialog, and the dialog gives users a yes/no option.

So there's no ambiguity about what the user's intent in, and any developer who ignores it wouldn't be able to argue that they didn't understand.
Sure, just like a thermostat doesn’t experience the feeling of temperature, there is no need for human to feel it, so I understand that we need to explain why is it that we still feel the feeling rather than just observe the signal and react.

So why is it wrong to explain this by the necessary recursiveness of predictive modeling that includes modeling “self”? We observe the temperature but we also observe ourselves observing the temperature. First is the signal, second is the introspection of the model evoked by that signal - the feeling.
The business structures, ISP ownership and national telecoms have changed quite a lot in the past 25 years. But in terms of the physical OSI layer 1 challenges of laying cable across an ocean, that remains the most difficult and costly part of the process.
It seems like some continuous deployment strategies could work here, as long as you limit the number of schema changes in flight to a handful.

Customer A is running the new schema, so gets one cluster. Customer Z will get migrated in the next hour, and then none of the old system is running.
Big Oil Faded. Will Big Tech? (Today All of Exxon Is Worth Less Than Jeff Bezos)
FS2020 is literally like $5 if you just want to try it. Xbox Game Pass for PC is $1 for the first month then $5 after that (while still in beta).
That is only worth noting if you bring it along with a more detailed account of accident rates by government-owned facilities as compared to privately owned facilities.

Until then it's just an anecdotal bit of snark that serves a political world view without the evidence necessary to evaluate it.
We shouldn’t subsidize anything, the government is bad at picking winners. We should tax carbon, let the market figure out the rest.
Love all of these responses. I'll add mine into the ring as well.

I came in by photojournalism -> photoshop -> graphic design -> web design through the 90's.

I was never really good as a designer. I was capable, but I didn't have that "real talent" that I could see in others. Instead, I was always interested in the technical aspects of design. I enjoyed color separation and complex printing jobs.

At around the same time, I realized I was getting tired of handing my designs over to the engineers who would slop them together. So I started dabbling with Macromedia Director (predecessor to Flash for making CD-ROMS [when that was a thing]), then flash, and then HTML and kept going farther and farther back in the stack. This was in the time of PERL and ASP, and I'd devour O'Riley books trying to learn as much as I possibly could. A book on regex. A book on data structors. Learning SQL.

I then had the fantastic opportunity to work with a group of people that stuck together through a series of companies (myself as the designer). At the last company, I was incredibly fortunate to have the architect take me under his wing and have daily master/apprentice style problems and reviews with me. Today you're writing a binary logger. Tomorrow a reader. Now an HTML parser. The architect was brutal, and I'd go home sometimes in tears... until I realized it wasn't about _me_. I had to check my ego at the door, and that this could be a dialogue if I was willing to participate and not to get defensive, and be OK unlearning some bad practices (To this day, I still think he's one of the most incredible humans on the planet).

Twenty years later, it's been an excellent career. I've built a lot of cool shit, and finally even had a decent exit. I'm in management now, but I can still find some "fingers on the keyboard" time here and there.

If I can give any advice:

- Never stop learning. Never stop asking questions.

- Don't get hung up on being a particular language specialist—it's fundamentals, fundamentals, fundamentals... everything else is just syntax.

- Interviews are going to suck sometimes, because there's some asshole in the loop that biases towards academia and thinks you're not worth their time... but don't let it get you down (pro-tip: you probably don't want to work there anyway).

- Celebrate your journey, don't shy from it, and be proud that you're doing this on your own; because it's a damned hard road sometimes.
as someone in the midwest, i do not look back fondly on the days where i would get up to work and it's dark, and leave work and it's dark - all while spending my 9 hours in a windowless server room
I would agree if this was about "bad" code. But maintainability is easy to prove -- just give some random developers a feature or two to implement and see the results.

In every single project I ever joined there were people complaining about the quality and maintainability of the code. Yet some of the projects were truly stuck not able to deliver anything and others were chugging features at a steady pace.

Maintainability is difficult to define but it is definitely real.
It's not only about deaths. The area around the plant is now uninhabitable and they haven't solved the problem of what to do with the melted cores at the plant. You permanently lose a large swath of land. With coal you can just shut it off and the problem goes away.

And why is it always between coal and nuclear? With enough investment and infrastructure, renewables can serve the need as well.
The text on this page is a little hard to read. It could use more contrast.

Black?
You wouldn’t be the first, I swear I’ve seen an episode or 2 of Air Crash Investigations where some unsuspecting pilot forgets to retract the flaps, causing something disastrous.
A short story along similar lines, though less of a joke and more of an Aesop's Fable: That Alien Message by Eliezer Yudkowsky.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5wMcKNAwB6X4mp9og/that-alien....
Originality level 4: solve a better problem, in the process making your original problem disappear.
Yep, if you want California-style rolling blackouts.
I don't know why the parent poster brought it up, but it does seem relevant to me. The government isn't going after quick profits, so you can't blame it on that. You might be able to blame profits if it had been a private corporation though.
Have you come across “How to fly”[0]? X-Plane does have some guides, though they tend to be maybe too expansive sometimes.

That aside, there are folks who work on their pilot licenses and stream flight sims, I have learned a fair bit from watching them on YouTube.

Ideally as you say one should just be able to use real-world pilot training materials, navigational charts and aircraft checklists (for B737, for example, there is an unofficial iOS checklist app). Then all that’s left is documentation of sim’s limitations—a good sim should tell you in what aspects it fails to simulate the real world.

It’s actually really rewarding to be able to figure out (mostly) on your own how to complete an IFR flight, given just the charts and the 6 basic analog instruments.

(Same here, X-Plane and no MSFS—as far as I heard, the 2020 version is still outdated as far as simulation of the actual physics of flight is concerned and seems to not have changed much from FSX days.)

[0] https://www.x-plane.com/manuals/desktop/index.html#modernmea...
Drug cartel assassinates its enemies with bomb-toting drones
There is a chance that OP doesn't want his kids to end up like you though.
Only someone with absolutely no understanding of advertising would say this, because the effectiveness of targeting is a given, it's not controversial.

I would urge you to consider the real economics of the situation instead of propagating bad information, and embarrassing yourself.

Ironically, the evidence for the relative value of ads is right on Facebook Ad Platform itself!

You can run an experiment today, right now.

Create a Facebook ad, and send people to your web site, with some kind of intended action.

Send 'Ad 1' to a completely untargtted audience.

Send 'Ad 2' to a crudely targeted audience (say, nation and demographic)

Send 'Ad 3' to an interest based demographic.

You will right there, plain as day, in a single day, see that ads 1, 2 and 3 will each have an order of magnitude of a different conversion rate.

Most public commentary on ads is based on ignorance, which is somewhat understandable because it's domain specific knowledge, but because it's a 'personal issue' to some, they have an opinion about it.

Targeted ads are unambiguously better for everyone: sellers, marketers, exchanges, buyers.

The issue is privacy.
David Eagleman: Neuroplasticity and the Livewired Brain
Took a long time for me to notice since I didn't even think that it could be possible.
addendum - this was also before indianapolis adopted DST, the winter is just shit
Don't get hung up on the word "subsidize". Market forces clearly did not solve our problem, so shifting the incentives won't solve it either. Many do not believe that nuclear is the answer, and a carbon tax wouldn't address that. It is indisputable that solar and wind are far cleaner than nuclear and coal, so the question is whether they can be made to work for most of our energy needs, and I've never seen a good reason why not.
>Anti-nuclear sentiment seems to be one of those things that became widely fashionable, and Pro-nuclear became demonized.

There was a concerted effort to connect all nuclear power with nuclear weapons in the 80's and 90's. The effects of that are still with us.
Code in most of the popular languages has a lot of parentheses, particularly when you count in curly braces, and square and sharp brackets.
Only if its a problem. There is an Asian resturant I go to which has 7 pages of menu and everything I have picked has been superb.
Same. This is the most sane way, in my experience. It’s pretty easy to move a tenant out of this model and into isolation if needed (never had to do it, but I dry-ran it). It’s harder to go the other way. Deployments, total system queries for analysis, etc are all simpler with this approach.
Well if you have SQL injection bugs then you have bigger issues to worry about - I've used this to enforce multi-tenancy on database access level (like another poster said - preventing queries accessing wrong data by accident, which is far more common I think).
People add language features because they're easy to do in the implementation they already have, not because they're well-principled.

Concrete example from personal experience:

All objects in Ruby have a unique ID. The standard implementation of Ruby added a function to go from the ID to the object. This was easy on the standard implementation of Ruby, because the ID is just the pointer, so you can just cast it. It's a nightmare on more sophisticated implementations of Ruby where an object may not have a single canonical address that you can use as an ID, and you need to store a huge separate mapping.
Direct Instruction
There's a major missed opportunity here - you can create codeblocks but there's no way to _run_ the codeblocks.

https://github.com/marconilanna/REPLesent, a similar tool for Scala, supports this by pressing `r` on any slide - all code will be evaluated into the REPL.
Fair enough, obviously OP has the right to parent as he pleases. I think that my tinkering intuition has led me to many of my professional successes, and this talent was garnered by experimentation with computers as a child.
Feynman – Los Alamos from Below
This study says 13k: https://www.catf.us/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/CATF_Pub_TheT...

Estimates vary; some reckon it's more like 50k: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S13522...
All these stories about "menu engineers", and probably this new profession seem to come from

Menu Mind Games (2009)

https://nymag.com/restaurants/features/62498/
Using a Casio F-91W to access Tesla Model 3
>⌇ Possibility of a new generation quantum smartphones.

>⌇ Personal quantum computers

Yeah I can't take this seriously
Google doesnt use AI/ML for automagic photogrammetry, as a result they are really bad at things like balconies looking more like a glitch than a building feature. They also dont feed 3d models back into their maps. My building stopped existing on Google 2D map sometime 10 years ago despite having fairly accurate 3d model.
> Why did you get into the field? What did you focus on at first?

Worked in sales at a software / hardware company in the HVAC industry. Our software platform had a really easy way to customize the business logic in java. I started building utilities / scripts in java and worked my way into software engineering from there.

> What are you doing at your job? Is it everything you dreamed of and more?

I'm a software engineer working on a popular customer facing service at a FAANG. I do enjoy the work.

> How did you break that first-job barrier?

I went from sales to software engineer at my first company, moving from sales into custom customer solutions department.

> What were you doing before this?

Not much, the sales job was my first job out of college. I graduated with a mechanical engineering degree.

> Any tips for the rest of us?

You must be passionate about programming and seriously enjoy software development. You must respect senior engineers and learn from them as mentors. You must not be discouraged by the pedigrees of your peers (people with CS degrees), directly out of college, they may have a slight advantage, but after a few years, you will be on a completely level playing field.