skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm a software engineer and the author of four books, but none are about software. (Three are pop-sci and one is pop-stats.)

First book (2013) did extremely well and continues to sell well. Lots of good press, translated into multiple languages, excerpts in a national magazine, promotion on a network TV show. Second book (2014) tanked hard. Third book (2019) looked like it would suffer the same fate as the second, but sales have been slowly inching up. Fourth book (2020) has seen abysmal sales, likely because of the pandemic, but it's a direct sequel to the first book and there are opportunities for cross-promotion, so I'm hoping sales eventually pick up.

I've been fortunate that throughout the course of writing these books, I've had a full-time job that pays the bills, so any advances or royalties have been gravy.

But if I could give advice to those who are interested in writing a book, it would be this:

* Unless this is purely a vanity project, do not go in the red. I would not have written my books if I hadn't gotten book deals. I wouldn't have put myself in the red by hiring an editor, a proofreader, an illustrator, a designer, a publicist, etc., which is what you likely will have to do to produce a quality book when self-publishing. A "you have to spend money to earn money" mindset is not the best mindset to have in a category where relatively few books succeed.

* Publishers these days aren't looking for good writers or great writers. They're looking for marketable books in established categories written by half-decent writers with solid platforms. There are certainly exceptions to that, but you can't hurt your chances by strengthening your platform or doing your own market research before even approaching an agent. (By platform I mean a built-in audience -- people to whom you can market the book. For better or worse, this means having lots of newsletter subscribers, YouTube subscribers, a big social media presence, blog readers, etc.)

* If you are an introvert, you will likely find being an author uncomfortable. You might have no problem with the often solitary task of writing the book. But the hardest part (and potentially the most time-consuming part) of being an author is not the writing itself but the marketing and promotion that comes afterward. Don't expect to be able to lean on your publisher for this. After a brief promotional blitz around pub day, you're likely on your own.

* There is a quote attributed to a number of famous writers: "I hate writing, but I love having written." I can all but assure you that if you're working on a book of any decent length or depth, you will reach an "I hate this" moment. But once the book is published, for the rest of your life you get to say that you're an author. It's a pretty cool feeling.
Why put it on a network?
What's interesting to me is that so many people believe that tertiary education should be nothing more than a jobs program, but they're happy to let students "waste" time in secondary and primary school on useless (for an office job) activities like sports, camping and reading fiction books.

The vast, vast majority of high school graduates aren't going to be professional athletes. But everyone (I hope) understands that we don't have PE in schools just so that schools can supply professional sports leagues with athletes. We have it because it helps people live better lives, even if it doesn't prepare them for a job.
Then you don't mean proportional and you mean something else like sufficient or something.
Am I the only one that thought this was an Apple ad? Apple execs are looking at the same problem and betting big that privacy must be deeply integrated into the brand. I think this will pay off enormously as these problems get more public discussion.
I understand this approach and I bet it works, but there is just something about giving to the zeitgeist is what makes me queasy.

I actually was told early on by one of the top VCs to find Stanford grad co-founder and they will invest with no problem. It's just not who I am, regardless how much harder it made it for us (and me of course).
That, and the fact that fuel-powered aircraft will shed half their takeoff weight during flight. Battery-powered aircraft either maintain constant mass or gain mass in the case of metal-air batteries, as energy is discharged.

Long-haul alt-energy aircraft utilise very low airspeed (low drag), extreme mass budgets (they're wonders of materials and structural engineering), and altitude profiles (potential energy0 to manage overall energy budgets and use.
NEVER buy a Samsung TV... they're horrible.

They have the same contempt for software that they do on their phones.

They NEVER update their firmware. It's amazingly slow and latent.

When they DO occasionally update they usually break things that were working or remote features you used.

About 2 years ago they implemented some weird/stupid popover commercial thing which you could eventually disable but they hid the feature.

I'd be watching Game of Thrones or something and in the middle of the show they'd bring up a popup for a new TV show or something along those lines.
There will be 20GB version of 3080 soon.
Oh, that. I completely forgot about it! I always liked it that in the mail clients I've used, this was always voluntary.
I'm quite charmed by the code editor aesthetics.
* “Starlink easily doubles the bandwidth” in comparison, Hall said, noting that he’s seen more than 150% decreases in latency. “I’ve seen lower than 30 millisecond latency consistently,” he said.

* Hall said that, with other traditional services, it typically takes between 30 minutes to an hour to set up a satellite connection, “with a lot less speed and bandwidth and a lot higher latency in a much larger package.”

* By comparison, Hall emphasized that it took him between five and 10 minutes to set up and connect a Starlink terminal. And a single person can set up one of the devices: “It doesn’t require a truck and a trailer and a whole lot of other additional equipment,” Hall said.

* “I have spent the better part of four or five hours with some satellite equipment trying to get a good [connection]. So, to me, it’s amazing,” Hall added.
Because money is limited and those routes lose money. Taking whatever is lost running those routes adds some more pocket change to fixing the routes that Amtrak should improve the most. Sorry to the handful of people who live in the middle of nowhere, but for every one of you Amtrak serves there are 10,000 people on the east coast that would use improved service.

The death spiral can sometimes be real, but lack of focus also is a death spiral. Amtrak has been around since the 1970s and most of the improvements to the east coast have been obviously needed and yet haven't happened. While we can (many do) debate what route to run new rails, what is the most important step to take first, and many other details, the big picture is the same to all observers.

Of course the reality is Amtrak exists for political reasons. Probably more realistic is to split Amtrak into two parts (with completely different leadership), one with the goal of making the east cost work well, and one with the goal of political appeasing people on in the middle of nowhere. The way you run the two systems needs to be very different and so there is no reason to keep them together as the concerns of each is a distraction from the other.
it seems like you are making two incompatible complaints in this thread: a) the payment structure incentivizes drivers to drive recklessly to complete the trip as fast as possible, and b) the payment structure incentivizes drivers to drag out a trip much longer than necessary to milk the fare. so which is it?
It's hard to say if, for the average user, it's easier/more likely that they will get to the Netflix app (whether on official store or not) by clicking a link from the Netflix website than by doing a search for it in the Play Store. If they see a Netflix ad with netflix.com address on it I imagine they'll just type that in their mobile browser. A page would open, which detects the platform and prompts them to click "here" to install app. And now that link can be outside of the Play Store, the user doesn't even visit it.

But for all those that might mistakenly look for it in the Play Store, you can have a stub app there that just redirects them (opens a browser page) to where to get the real, outside the store app,
>Ansible was sold to RedHat few years ago.

And RedHat is now owned by IBM
I disconnected Facebook, but have no choice now. You cannot be a SMB marketer without Facebook and its properties in 2020.
Do you think the lifespan of the topic or the delivery platform impacted your returns? I don't buy a lot of books anymore but used to drop 40-50 bucks on an O'Reilly book that would be used for years. My LP purchases probably top out under $10 and are for more immediate, short-lived topics (which seems to be what the platform targets with it's digital & updated content focus)
I doubt it's annoying on purpose to get more people on the phone. I could be wrong about that, but that's not usually the way Apple's particular kind of hubris tends to manifest. There's almost certainly people at the company -- and it only takes one or two in the right places -- who like the current UI for text selection, and would probably explain why they think so. Now, they may literally be the same people who think the Apple TV remote is good in the first place, so I want to make it clear I'm not saying they're right. :)

And, Apple should be better at UI design than this. They were once, and not that long ago, but I think the UI team they've had for the last, oh, let's say seven or eight years -- going back semi-arbitrarily to iOS 7, but steadily infecting all other platforms -- have prioritized aesthetics over usability.
1. 15 miles one way. 30miles x 1.6km x 1.12kg/km x 250 days = 1440 kg

2. Few people will move form US to Germany. It's more likely someone will move e.g. from Portland to San Diego. 275kg roundtrip, 550kg adjusted for radiative forcing.

So if you fly 3 times per year it's a wash, if you fly 6 times a year it's double the CO2 emission.
You can’t sign up for Facebook or Instagram without an email address.
> you want to restrict people from saying things because you think they're saying things you don't like

Of course not. How did you get that from my comment?
Supercook lets you search by what you already have at home. I just used it to learn about apple puff pancakes.

https://www.supercook.com
Not sure if its related, but this piece of news (https://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/21/business/a-shuffle-of-alu...) made the headlines several years ago.
A lot of this is dependent on class size and class level. It's not until you get to class sizes of less than 20 and at the 300 level and up classes that you get actual discussion instead of lecturing and leading questions. And even smaller class size and higher level isn't a guarantee of good critical dialogue.

I went to a large well ranked public university class in the United States, have both a STEM and non-STEM degree with over 200 credit hours over 4.5 years and I can think of exactly two humanities classes that had real discussions that weren't just being assigned books, largely uncritically accepting their contents and being lectured. Both classes with real dialogue were higher level classes with just over 10 people in them.

One class was about the intersection of art and technology and the other was a philosophy of science class.

There was way more critical thought and dialogue on average in my STEM classes.
It’s easy for the choice to be clear when you are entirely missing the point. What are the consequences of using these newly offensive words? What if you used the word but had no idea it was offensive? And how do we police that in a world where more and more things are offensive?
I don’t think you realize who the author of that reply is.

There’s nothing HN typical about him :)
Doesn't fit neatly in the diagram. Has e2e encryption, but only in private chats.
This whole concept seems overdramatic to me at least at present. Banks are making lending decisions based on steady income and payment history, not your online persona. Similarly for employment. If you have reasonable qualifications, you will have no trouble finding work, regardless of how "optimal" your persona is.

Advertising is the area in which the most persona research and targeting is implemented. I suspect the reason no one is trying to fake online personas is because it would only have noticeable impact on what ads you see.
What's the (pre-Ampere) GCP price for a V100? On AWS it was $3/hr, so at 100% use and market prices a Titan V would pay for itself vs the cloud inside a month. Is GCP significantly cheaper? Or are we talking about pricing at ~0% utilization?
I have a Samsung Galaxy phone and there are ads on my home screen. Luckily it's only a work phone that I haven't had to look at in several years.

I would never personally buy any product from Samsung at this point.
yeah, i read about this. Its facinating...
My religious beliefs are very strict, and I'm very good friends with people that don't follow my religious views.

Some of my friends have done things that my religion considers murder, adultery and sexual abuse.

My life is better for their friendship. Hopefully they appreciate me as well.
R2wars: Corewars but Within R2
One Plus naming is annoying because I want to add the two numbers together.
To give a different perspective: I co-authored a technical book 19 years ago.

It is listed on my resume, but i don’t mention it at interviews because it was so long ago.

Last year at a job interview, the interviewer told me he still had my book. I got the job.
If it was an alive frog before, but it is a boiled frog now, when did it become a boiled frog?
Disclaimer: I haven't written a book.

> Also, you sound overly modest to me.

This was my reaction as well. Absolutely no offense to the parent comment, but this sounds like a combination of being overly modest + getting bitten by dumb behaviors by bad companies.

There's also a big difference between:

- Strut into the interview. Drop a copy of your book on the table. "I literally wrote the book - hire me"

And

- "Tell me about yourself" ... "Well, I'm bla bla bla, passionate about xyz, oh, and passionate to the point that I wrote a book about xyz if you're interested in the details"

If you're an arrogant ass, yeah, the book is a liability. But unless you really dislike the thing you wrote and want to squash it, the fact that you wrote a book at all, much less the subject, says something about you as a person. Others in this thread have talked about the positive signals this sends so I won't re-hash those here.
That's a problem with the specification of sort, not with javascript using double by default. But yeah, that sort example is seriously bonkers.
Not the original commenter, but before Google fully pivoted to their present focus on monetizing search, the results were often strikingly useful, even for obscure searches. DuckDuckGo can’t (yet) replicate this now-lost magic.
Agreed, I never read any of Bentham's work, but Michel Foucault's "Panopticon" was the first thing I thought of.

Everything we do online's being processed and potentially stored, and while we may know what's considered wrong right now, we don't know what will be wrong in the future. Without knowing the rules it's very hard to play by them. Unfortunately, not playing the game isn't an option in the modern world, so we really do need strong privacy laws to protect us
Google Concedes on Fitbit Data
I guess the bigger question is why are you friends on facebook with someone you're not friends with in real life if that person has the power to negatively influence your career?
Show HN: Decentralized App Store for Android
There is a lot of good advice here but I wanted to add my 2 cents:

- understand where you are at financially. If you can make some easy cuts to improve your situation, then cut back where you can. Understand how long you can go without work. This will change what kind of work you should look for. If you are looking for anything that pays, there is plenty out there. If you are looking for something that will keep you busy for 5 years then you will need more time. Also, keep in mind, unemployment is not going to start coming in right away. It could be 10 weeks before you get an unemployment check. Just keep filing and assume some time they will get back to you.

- Right now, there are two types of companies: companies that are doing well and not doing well. Do not spend time looking for companies that are not doing well. If your usual social network is filled with companies that are not hiring you should search other places. The companies in your local area might be struggling. There are definitely companies that are hiring, they are just not great at getting the word out.

Relax. Find a cheap hobby. Stay healthy, presentable, and hungry and opportunity will reveal itself.
Watch out for hitmen...
Also travel outside your town (or even your part of town) was a lot less frequent then. People lived a lot closer to where they worked and shopped and socialized.

Cars were around, but nearly as common as they are now. In 1919 there were 72.5 cars per 1000 people in the US. It was 838 in 2018.
And Chicago - Milwaukee. We used to have a train that ran as often as the CTA that you could hop on on the Union Loop downtown that would take you to Milwaukee. Now? You still see some people commuting on the Hiawatha but there's still only 9 of those a day.
I was doing that, but now thanks to you I have to stop.
> While I think everyone can agree this is just yet another terrible design decision in JavaScript

I disagree. Double was the best choice they could have made for a dynamically typed language.
If one presumes a culture with an increasing overall complexity level, then the circumstance is not one of simply obsoleting technologies and skillsets being replaced, but of competition among multiple essential skillsets.

Complexity expands to meet all constraint boundaries.
I did say it was suboptimal. The fact that you chose to insult rather than put forward solutions tells me you either don't understand the strengths of such a system or know your own solution would fall short.
A gentle intro to Laplace transform
I mean, universities were born out of the need to train Christian ministers in the faith. Even the earliest American universities were of that form; Harvard was founded by the Massachussets colony to train clergymen.

So in a sense, they were always jobs programs. If today they seem secular, it's because society was able to reshape the institution over time. For example, the Morril Act, which established the land grant universities, made it's utilitarian purpose explicit:

> without excluding other scientific and classical studies and including military tactic, to teach such branches of learning as are related to agriculture and the mechanic arts, in such manner as the legislatures of the States may respectively prescribe, in order to promote the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes in the several pursuits and professions in life.

But it's not clear to me that universities _should_ exist as we commonly imagine them. Why are the worlds top researchers presumed to be the worlds top educators, when we have all the evidence in the world they are not and generally believe being recognized as a good educator is a career curse? And even if they were at least good at the job of educating, why are there 100+ courses independently designed without meaningful comparison?
Scientists Say–In a Real Journal –There's a Black Hole at the Center of Earth
How do you empower someone without helping them?
Differences to F-Droid:

- Fully decentralized, an app is bound to a domain name (like in a web browser)

- Every app can be published on SkyDroid, not just open-source apps

- The developer can directly publish his APK with his own signing key

- New apps and updates can be published almost instantly

- Faster syncing
They're lower emissions than cars, per capita.
Maybe the situation is like Idiocracy where a certain class of people are cooled but unreasonable, insensitive and hateful people do not.
If all Elon Musk accomplished in his entire life was "good enough" satellite internet, the impact would be immense. The fact that this isn't even the biggest accomplishment this year by one of his companies is sometimes hard to fathom.
Nothing a piece of foil can't... foil :-)
That used to be true, but Google search result quality diminished significantly in the past couple of year, because it started to get too creative with keyword dropping and substitution. I often see the single most important keyword in my query dropped to produce more results, or replaced with a more generic category (e.g. "Linux" replaced with "Unix"), or even replaced with something that's not actually a correct substitute at all (e.g. "FreeBSD" replaced with "Linux").
He Social Dilemma Is a Great Conversation Starter but What Does the Science Say?
I (as a vegetarian) sometimes use https://vegfaqs.com/high-protein-vegan-recipes/

You can filter by meal type and sort by macros.
thank you for the share. didnt sound legit but i looked at the site. the person has some deep experience... I dont have the need at the moment but great for someone who is looking for good advice for cheap.
> For one thing, state schools provide quality education (that is as good as any high-priced ivy league school). I'm not sure what the zero sum game you're referring to is.

I know UC-Davis provides as good or better an education than Stanford (not at all sarcastic and meant in an earnest way), but it seems willfully blind to not see that they serve different social and economic roles in the American class system.
Good experiences with Uber the few times I had to but I wonder if the drivers actually make a living.

Sure you get a weekly income but most drivers don't take into account the additional costs of depreciation and wear/tear on their cars.

Their big play is self driving transport but they are years away from that no matter the usual "within 6 months" predictions from Elon.
100% utilization is a pretty huge assumption.

And if you ARE actually running it that hard, you'd better budget for fairly frequent replacement cards.
How Amazon hid its safety crisis
Recently my close friend who still uses FB tried to send someone a link to a public tweet made by the president’s daughter.

FB messenger censored the private message and refused to send it, claiming it was against “community standards”.

These sorts of logged-forever, censored platforms are absolutely chilling speech, person-to-person, even in DMs, and you wouldn’t even know when it happens to messages sent to you.

https://twitter.com/atomly/status/1309632274908946434

> that's my only way to keep in touch with them

That means that you can’t communicate with them, even in DM, in a way that’s not logged for and filtered by a remote party whose interests are not your own. It’s only a matter of time until this is abused by the state.

https://sneak.berlin/20200421/normalcy-bias/
>2 of them are run by commercial entities. I don't think those are all that interested in reducing dependency on them.

Docker is also removing some old images and putting limits on existing images, it's too expensive for them to host.
Having read about tokamaks for thirty years, I'd be curious what specific breakthroughs and innovations have occurred since the 1980s, which lead to the optimism described in the article (which is otherwise frustratingly devoid of detail).

It's great there are seven-peer reviewed articles about SPARC, but plasma was not my specialty in physics -- would any specialists care to comment on whether there is anything particularly exciting here?
This reminds me of the Black Mirror episode "Nosedive".
Everyone has a publicly visible social score and they can vote their peers based on their interactions.

Since it's used for jobs, housing, loans etc. everyone becomes risk-averse and artificially nice. And more and more alike externally.

We're not there yet but excessive surveillance is definitely worth talking about.