skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Are contractors cheaper than permanent employees? I always thought it was the opposite

Absolutely. Consider that the average salaried employee’s real cost per hour is around 2 * (annual_salary / hours_in_work_year). So if you get a contractor for less than that per hour, you win.

> that's why so many positions are "contract to hire". They'd rather have a perm employee, but they want to deal with contracting for a few months just to be on the safe side.

Ah, generally speaking no. Yes, contract to full time conversions happen but not terribly often. “Contract to hire” is most of the time just baiting someone to hop into a less desirable circumstance (contract versus full time), with the “promise” of being converted. After six months, oh dear, we couldn’t get funding for that full time position. Would you like to renew your contract?

Not saying there are companies that do a true “probation period” via contract to hire, but most of the time it’s BS.
In addition to the 11%, GM is also slated to earn up to 700 million dollars in cash.
"I can't participate or reply on the web interface, I have to sign up for something completely different to participate"

Let me correct this one: no, you don't have to sign up to anything: (1) click on a bug entry on https://updates.orgmode.org then (2) click on "try the mailto: link" link.

This is other way around: if Org goes to GitLab, GitHub-only users will have to sign up to GitLab just to report an issue, and same for GitHub.
Screen manufacture is a highly competitive market. ARM licensing isn't.
Show HN: My Life in Months using D3
Right now it is 1:1, but we're hearing that people would like to share one database among many repls. Something you can do right now is spin up a repl and have other repls talk to it over HTTP to share a database: https://docs.repl.it/misc/database#how-do-i-share-a-database...
Why are you assuming that such a probe is not targeted? Targeting radically changes the results. An interesting middle ground to explore is untargeted probes taking gravity into account
This will only help existing parties stay in power, and new parties will be doomed to fail.
I think they are referring to systems incentivise child birth. More carrot less stick.
I haven't been to Austria but numbeo seems to suggest what you say is incorrect on majority if not most of parameters https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?cou...
It was a PR move. All major business websites had a story about the news. They would have preferred that this didn't come out and NKLA was able to create a real company, but it isn't like they shut down all their factories in anticipation of NKLA making all the GM cars.
If "soon" is "less than a decade" I'd probably agree with you, but I still wouldn't be certain. The housing market took 6 years to go from front cover of the Economist to crash.

A large reason for the market strangeness is the helicopter money from the Fed and the essentially zero interest rate environment. The helicopter money might end soon, but the crazy low interest rates might be here to stay. We might have to redefine what the fundamentals are.
Show HN: Covid at School – Active Cases at Schools in Ontario
I recently started a community-focused software development studio this fall with five of my undergraduate students. Earlier this summer, we found the My Life in Month charts by Isabella Benabaye[0] and Sharla Gelfand[1] very intriguing! In addition to being a convenient way to share a visual
history of your life with friends and family, these charts can help you focus on the bigger picture and context of you life events.

We wanted to expand the appeal of My Life in Months beyond R programmers, so we ported the idea to JavaScript, using d3 waffle charts as the basis for visualization, and wrapped it up in a website where anyone can make their own chart. This is our first project working together, and its helped us gain a lot of web development and Github skills. We'd love to have your feedback for improvement, thank you!

[0] https://github.com/isabellabenabaye/life-chart
[1] https://github.com/sharlagelfand/mylifeinmonths
I don't live in the UK but I know that feeling of living in a small but wealthy European college town. It looks nice in photos but job opportunities are scarce for those who aren't doctorate alumni of the local university and also rents are expensive, there's no subway so everyone is bumper to bumper in cars.
> It's insane to me that an older programmer with decades of experience and multiple language fluency is somehow "worse" than a 25 year old who has been programming professionally for a few years at best and probably knows fewer languages.

Simple: the experienced older programmers will call out management for bullshit because they recognize bullshit when they see it.

Fresh, new ones won't object when management says "we're on the NoSQL train now, so that we can attract more fresh talent (and funding sources)!!!", which makes the managers happy, but by the time that the failure modes of new fancy tech (e.g. no ACID compliance, bazillions of edge cases, insecure defaults like MongoDB had) become apparent, the managers have already made their millions in bonuses and went off to ruin another company.

It's all about keeping us programmers as replaceable cogs - and to prevent as many of us as possible from rising in the "chain of command". Simply put, the supply of programmers is way bigger than there is a demand for managers or higher-level programmers. This will bite the whole industry in the ass when all those 20-somethings who make decent careers now after some coding bootcamp suddenly find out that there won't be any pay rises or opportunities...

edit: also, new programmers won't complain if you push them past everything legally allowed - many don't know the laws or don't care, so 80 hour work weeks with no paid overtime (=40 "free" hours of work!) can be done on young people, but as soon as they hit ~30 and want to settle down a bit (especially if they want children) companies get in trouble.
It depends on the circumstance. In the case of an investor, there's much more assumed due diligence than just "what a reasonable person would think".
Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer.

Well, we do have laws about

* False Advertisement
* Investors' Fraud

Unfortunately they are not applied, or not applied consistently; and this is just one of the many examples that I come across on a weekly basis.

What makes matters worse is that when talking about it with people at work or so, they don't seem to care enough and feel it's not a problem.

It is a problem, it's a slippery slope into lawless chaos.
Not a dumb question. It syncs read status across their web interface and every Fever supporting app on all platforms. You can also "star" items which then also gets synced.
Reverse IPO.

Meaning they merged with an existing "blank-check" public company.
I don't know if any of those things are fundamental limitations.

Israel manages to run a thriving high-tech industry, despite not belonging to any currency or trading bloc. As a standalone economy, the Shekel has far less global standing and negotiation power than the Pound Sterling. Yet, Tel Aviv is probably the most successful tech center outside the US or China.

I think the biggest thing holding back the British tech sector is the country's harsh bankruptcy laws. The UK's creditor friendly laws discourages risk taking and startups, which are the necessary pre-conditions for tomorrows tech giants.
C++ was very much more accessible than the alternatives (mostly Turbo Pascal) in the late 90s. As devs started moving to unix it became the most accessible option in the landscape (not counting C, which I would argue is in a different market) with djgpp, g++, etc.
PHP is too hard for me. I can't keep track of all the things I need to keep track of not to write unmaintainable, error-prone, insecure garbage. With typed functional languages I do a little better.
I almost took a short position on Friday. The risk is that Softbank does a front running scam again and you get caught down 300% before NKLA actually goes under.
> Everybody else does it.

Hahaha I wish.
https://archive.is/phwTX
Ask HN: Has anyone ever had to spy on their colleagues when they work from home?
I'm interested to hear if anyone's boss has told them they had to check their colleagues' productivity as they remote work (e.g. in the financial world), or if anyone has used "bossware" like Teramind and ActivTrak to monitor their team for an actually good reason. What was it like? How did it affect you?

I know a lot's been said about bossware - and it gets a really bad wrap - but I haven't actually heard from anyone who's done the spying before.
Does something like that exist? At a reasonable price point? (<10K)?
Can someone familiar with the languages elaborate on "generics in Swift are the opposite of the generics in Go"? It's an interesting offhand comment but I have no idea what it means.
Buying a stake in AAPL,FB, or any tech company would have netted higher returns for less effort than buying ARM. If anything, a 25% ROI in 4 years is quite poor.
This is of a piece with how various forms of discrimination are laundered through neoliberal meritocracies.

Instead of engaging in direct forms of discrimination, you build systems of arcane hurdle-jumping, whose outcomes produce the intended discrimination. That way, you always have a story about how this or that person “just didn’t measure up.”
At my work, i had to generate PDFs based on the outcome of a workflow. My first thought was to use xml, xsl-fo. I spent 100s of hours trying to get everything to work properly with Apache FOP (mostly a layout issue with the XML stylesheet. It seems really limited) [1]. In the end we went with PrinceXML [2]. Much easier solution.

1. https://xmlgraphics.apache.org/fop/
2. https://www.princexml.com/
> "okay, this is good but how would I change it?"

Otherwise known as Reversible Decisions. Any decision that can be undone easily does not require the level of scrutiny, the level of investment. Save that investment for the things you won't be able to change.

When faced with an irreversible decision, it's helpful to develop stalling tactics. Everything from distracting people with other issues to finding a way to get a 'taste' of the change without committing to it. It also helps if you stay on top of release notes for tools you use, and competitors of those tools. New opportunities might arise to use someone else's work to solve your problem better.
> I'd love to work for a UK company and support investment in the UK more, but the pay and working conditions just aren't competitive (how crazy does that sound, saying I have to go to North American companies to get better working conditions but it's true.)

Why is that crazy ? From what I've seen the standard of living in the US is actually really good if you're a skilled professional in a high demand field and the labor market is more competitive - better than the EU IMO.

Which is why I'm not sure why I see so much US negative comments around here and this smug EU stance - like just recently I heard from two former coworkers that got a job at similar role/experience level one in Munich and one in Chicago - the guy that went to Chicago got 60% higher salary and his cost of living is roughly similar (didn't go in details TBH).

Also on a personal and cultural level I prefer working with Americans - with Europeans there's so much posturing and pretending to be professional and formal (with skills usually lacking).
Or you just look through the communications surrounding this video during discovery to see if there was a pattern establishing intent to mislead investors.
yes but not just spy, they're eager to use the algorithm for propaganda purposes. Having it run by a trump loyalist is the outcome they wanted, they're going to turn it into Fox News for gen z.
>When I lack immediate feedback, I begin to doubt myself/my abilities.

He believes being conditioned by social media led him to that point, more specifically immediate-satisfaction instant-result culture.

That is not entirely true in my experience. Feedback is supposed to determine strategy, not your self worth as a person. He has been programmed, by the instant result culture or whatever, into emotionally charged reactions, not an objective response.

I have been working out and I hit a plateau, I should stop this is fruitless > I hit a plateau, I need to try a new workout routine. Not “I will workout for 3 years until I make any judgement.”

I have been blogging for months and nobody cares, I should stop > I have been blogging for months without any results, my current course of action needs adjustment. Not “I will blog for 3 years regardless.”

Reacting - Old habits/conditioning make you react to a situation

Responding - Taking in the situation and moving forward with calculated action.

The 3 year rule replaces his current reaction with another one, when he should be working on responding to situations instead. It takes you further, but will not take you further than if you were to correct that faulty outlook altogether.
Love these posts, here's a couple more that are similar:

Patrick Collinson- https://patrickcollison.com/questions

Gwern- https://www.gwern.net/Questions

Alexey Guzey- https://guzey.com/personal/research-ideas/

Anybody have more?
Yes, really true. Look at how hard it was to establish the presence of the PH3 absorption line on the planet right next door. We are not able to make that kind of observation on extrasolar planets yet, at least not beyond very rudimentary levels. Hopefully someday, but certainly not now.

Admittedly Earth's oxygen signature would be a lot easier to detect than a minute quantity of PH3 on Venus. But we wouldn't have been able to look for that either until just a few years ago. Even to a seasoned RF engineer, ALMA and JCMT are indistinguishable from magic.
If they are contained in their home systems for hundreds upon hundreds of millions of years then the Great Filter is interstellar travel, is it not?
I am from West Africa. Though I have lived in the US so I can make pretty apt comparison when taking about it.
Hey everyone, with schools opening back up this week in Ontario, I thought I'd put together a little website that pulls down the latest info from the Ontario Government and displays it in a more user friendly way.

Hopefully this isn't considered off topic since it's only really applicable to one province, but I'd love to hear what you think!
Most of these workers aren't programmers.

They are in various technology roles, especially at a place like IBM often aligned with some IBM-specific corner of tech. Definitely happens with other companies too. HP used to have an "up or out" policy where they would fire SMEs systematically for some stupid reason. I remember laughing my ass off when they flew some guy in to tell me that they were firing 8 people on one of my teams, which I replaced with the same people employed at a smaller company for 50% of the cost. The employees got a 25% raise in that case. HP lost 100% of the revenue, which probably earned some bureaucrat a bonus somewhere.
thanks for the feedback. i'll update the readme to reflect that.
Yeah I would expect a no from the legal team at the company I worked at last. Meanwhile I'd assume that most "randos on the internet" would be fairly comfy using that license for their own use.
I get it but I don’t understand it.

Can you imagine: on the one hand post industrial countries are inhabited by a bunch or multi centenarians, on the other hand poor countries are overpopulated by youngsters.

In the post industrial countries their minuscule pool of young people have no chance to dislodge entrenched old people who have the power.

There is less rejuvenation and less change in these multi centenarian societies and they become calcified, ossified. Old buggers hanging on for what? Will their minds be plastic? Sure, I don’t always agree with my young self or today’s young on all things, but I believe they should have the opportunity to shape their society in their time without obstructionist old timers.
Probably a couple reasons why it's coming up now. First the Japanese have a pretty good reputation as owners of UK businesses, they own quite a few Scotch distilleries and impressions are they manage things well.

Second, I think the world feels a lot more protectionist nowadays vs when the original buyout happened. I know it wasn't that long ago but the trade war tariffs between the US and China sort of set the tone.
I would like to understand what you know about ARM that it's board of director's didn't (doesn't) know? In my experience companies merge when they are forced to, not because they want to.

I have always assumed that their shareholders were offered so much of a premium on their shares that they chose to sell them rather than hold onto them. Clearly based on their fiscal 2015 results[1] they were a going concern.

[1] https://www.arm.com/company/news/2016/02/arm-holdings-plc-re...
Also a very good rule of thumb for recreational drugs and other illicit activities.
How about chemistry and materials science?

Think how 40 years ago lithium batteries didn't exist, and they only started becoming commercially available in this millennium.

Are equivalent improvements happening soon?
Also industry specific as well. I'm in the transportation technology industry and age isn't really an issue.
Colorado, and yeah we all talked privately about reporting him. One of the more upset staff members filed a complaint, I don't know if anything came of it. We never heard anything if it did. This is about 15 or so years back now.
Is it?

I want to talk with aliens as much as the next guy, but so far it seems like the vast majority of the universe is a vacuum--biologically speaking.
Does someone not being in jail somehow prove what they did is legal? Is someone always held individually liable for corporate misdeeds?

There have been multiple fines related to this scandal from multiple governments. There have been Congressional hearings on it in the US. There have been numerous lawsuits. I did say "potentially" in that first comment because I can't say definitively that they acted illegally, but there is a lot of smoke here. If people are going to make the accusation that it is a double standard, where is the smoke surrounding Obama's use of data?
> It is only with hindsight that we see how flawed these improvements were

I think some platforms existed that had already solved those issues, but it was a different time. Disseminating those ideas was harder, open source wasn't as much of a thing yet, so development was siloed, we didn't have blogs or youtube to aggregate and broadcast the danger of those footguns, and it was the evolutionary solution that did provide the most QOL improvements.
Try to dismount the blade from the axle (they're designed to be easily separable, at least in the model I own) and just have the axle rotate and do nothing?
There is actually the legal test of a Reasonable Person.

If they say they're going to sell trucks, and they present a truck doing truck things (moving), most people would assume it's a complete truck as portrayed. An empty shell is just fraud in the court, hopefully.
Importance of School Zone on Property Values
The UPS does have breakers though
Where are domain admins supposed to put installations?
> Why is that crazy ?

Because people think the big benefit of being at a European company that balances the worse pay is more vacation, more reasonable working hours, better work-life balance, working autonomy.

But that's not true. It's the opposite.

I get far better vacation, working hours, work-life balance, working autonomy at North American companies. And better pay. So what's the benefit of working for a European company?
I wouldn't call it "objectively bad", but two major warts:

- Lack of modules/packages

- Dynamic binding as default

The former is an annoyance, especially in a "living system". Contrast with C where the lack of modules and prefix-based naming is controllable by putting things into libraries. So your use of OpenGL functions prefixed with gl is contained in one area, and I never need to see it if my portion deals with network code or anything else. But with elisp, once you load that, all those functions are thrown into the same scope as everything else. If something isn't properly prefixed, or if prefixes collide, then there will be problems.

Dynamic binding (lexical binding can be enabled as an option) means that, coming from other lisps, some things do not do what you'd expect:

(defun make-adder (x)
(lambda (y) (+ x y))
(let ((x 7)
(add-10 (make-adder 10)))
(add-10 x))

With dynamic binding we get 14, with lexical we get 17. This can be addressed by enabling lexical binding, but like I said it's not the default.
> You raise an interesting point, but it is my understanding that Swift is by far not the only language that has a shaky foundation in terms of type theory. Other type systems can at least be unsound, I don't know if any of them is undecidable.

It's more common than you'd think: https://typing-is-hard.ch

> the type errors that Swift returned were simply wrong and to fix it you had to put in type annotations in a bunch of places (without necessarily knowing where, just from the error messages)

The diagnostics engine was completely overhauled in Swift 5.2, so this shouldn't happen anymore: https://swift.org/blog/new-diagnostic-arch-overview/
Cambridge Analytica was a pissant compared to the data political parties easily buy from advertising data companies. The whole controversy surrounding them is like getting upset about grocery store discount cards but ignoring that Facebook exists.

Also, campaigns don't have to buy or amass that data anymore. Facebook is the largest purchaser of consumer data. So now if you use Facebook for campaign ads you get all that "for free".

Lastly, wait until you find out what the NSA knows about you. Surely that data would never be used for nefarious purposes...
Para – general-purpose back end framework for the cloud
The solutions to climate change already exists and the status quo can be preserved. For proof, you only have to compare the per capita carbon footprint different countries like Sweden, Switzerland and France to to the USA, which has similar GDP and ~1/3 the carbon footprint.

Alternatively, you can compare France to China, which has a greater CO2 footprint per capita, and half the GDP per capita.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)...
HN discussion from 2 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18340693
I'm also aware of this one, doesn't have descriptions.
A photon rocket still has a preferred reference frame where the total momentum is 0.

Don't forget that photons still have momentum, even if they don't have mass.
I suspect one of Bill Gate's plans is to defend data against solar flares. Deeper the better.
I've seen so much conflicting information around 5G that it's frankly a little bit bewildering. Just earlier today I was reading that 5G showed no considerably-higher download speeds than 4G...

From what I can surmise, it seems like the labels 5G and 4G are a bit misleading. It seems like 5G is focused on improving reception in less populated areas, while 4G is still the general standard. Is that right? Or am I still missing something?
Finding an Audience for Your Side Business
China Has Built a Global Database for Hybrid Warfare
>Repl.it is already the best place to build your apps.
no...
If your app has a webview in it, on both iOS and Android, you have full access to run script inside that webview and take/set cookies for any domain. You can easily take the auth cookie.

Some Google auth cookies can only be used on the same tls session that created them[1]. That means the TLS session resumption information (which can be tied to hardware platform features like the TPM) is required to make use of a stolen auth cookie. Unfortunately while that approach has big security benefits, it's pretty anti-user-privacy.

[1]: https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2018/10/25/could-tls-sessio...