skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Why re-think what is already working? Because it will give us the ability to reach new customers?

That, unfortunately, doesn't add up. Many low-value customers is not what we need.

We need (and have) predictable revenue from stable base of customers we know and trust. (And who trust us.)

We need (and have) reliable sources for new long-term customers.

We don't need lots of (random) people paying us $1 or $2 every couple of months. Frankly, that sounds like an awful business to be in.
Good call out. I own physical copies of both the books :D. Really enjoyable stuff!
Don't you worry, emigration to low tax States will take care of that.

How about that speed train project - is it still a thing? Why not cancel it to save the world? While trains may be greener than planes, WfH beats both.
"Coding" as a subject is emerging with all the requisite teacher training materials, state board approved curricula, etc. It bears about as much resemblance to actual software engineering or even hobbyist programming as the AP CS exam does ;)

The best experience I've had so far is just creating simple games and simulations in Processing (P5JS) with kids. The online IDE is very forgiving. But as of yet, I don't think there is really a set of instructions that allow them to think like a Computer Scientist. In many aspects, 1980s style Turtle Graphics and DOS BASIC were more advanced "mind-openers"

https://editor.p5js.org/
Ask HN: You've got $300 to fill an empty library. What do you choose?
I'm looking to put together a modest home library and am particularly interested in the classics. I've budgeted $300 for the task. What would you deem a 'must-have'?
It may be reasonable, but it's very poor optics. It makes it seem like they are trying to coverup any possible COVID exposures within the force.
Yes, this. Sum types in most languages are approximated by something like kotlin's sealed classes. Sometimes you don't want to declare a whole new class hierarchy, you just want to say "this function can either return this or this".
I think the article improperly conflates Rick and a 10x developer.

I have an essay I wrote a while ago lying around that talks about the Intermediate Programmer - Rick sounds like a perfect example. The IP is the one that has the gumption to try out various inventions and experiments, usually focusing on the trying to solve a problem with a perfect Beautiful Machine, but that doesn't yet have the perspective to know how code needs will change in the future, and how to design code to make it easy to change.

I've had people on my teams that can code circles around me in various ways, and whose gorgeous intricate multi-level generics-heavy code was also regularly deleted a few weeks/months later in favor of something literal, boilerplate, small, and easy to understand and change. (Don't get me wrong, multi-level generics-heavy code is GOOD in some cases, but you have to know when.)

The good IPs learn from these lessons without letting their ego get in the way, and eventually become advanced programmers. The bad ones claim they are advanced and cause problems. Sounds like Rick was a 0.5x developer or less.
I think a lot of this comes from the superstar model implicit in the VC ecosystem. One perennial theme in the SV approach to business is the idea of making a lot of bets with skewed upside. Like buying call options, the vast majority won't pay out. But if you do it right, a small handful of homeruns will make up for the rest.

I think this mindset easily carries over from the investing side into the hiring side. What is an employee, if not a risky upfront investment? Especially at a hyper-growth startup that's already bleeding cash flow. Very few 23-year olds will be productive enough to justify a quarter million in compensation. But a handful of very talented ones, when put in a high-impact position with a ton of responsibility will knock it out of the park.

The median 40-year old experienced engineer is almost certainly more competent and productive than someone fresh out of school. But Silicon Valley doesn't optimize for the median, it optimizes for fat right tails. Hire or invest in a 23-year old SWE and there's always a small chance that you be scooping up the next Elon Musk. At 40, Elon Musk definitely wasn't browsing through monster.com.

However, I believe this paradigm rests on a faulty premise. A more reliable way to create an exceptional organizations is to build an exceptional culture, not try to bottle the lightning of individual superstars. Unfortunately, that approach involves sacrificing some sacred cows of Valley ideology.

Building a strong corporate culture requires effective managers, as well as brilliant engineers. The typical founder does not fit the mold of an effective corporate manager. 28-year olds can be good managers, but a 50-year old with decades of experience is almost certainly more likely. Replacing the founder with a professional CEO is anathema is the modern "founder-friendly" culture.

Beyond that a professional manager at the helm very likely means a more button-down corporate orthodox environment. Not necessarily because it's better, but just as a byproduct of how the CEO is used to operating. Mitt Romney runs a very different shop than Adam Neumann. Put Mitt in charge of the next startup, and things are going to start looking uncomfortably more like Initrode rather than the typical hipster startup.
I think the UK app does indeed have such a pause feature, and NHS staff were one of the specific use cases it was aimed for.
> Didn't have time to read the article yet.

Then how do you know you're not offering the exact same messaging that the author wrote?

Can't imagine the conceit required to see the headline and think you don't have time to read the article but you do have time to write up a full comment because clearly YOUR opinion MUST be more valuable and insightful than whatever was posted.

Shaking my head...
Netflix doesn't win or lose customers based on programmer performance, they win by having content that people actually want to watch. I don't care if the UI is 10% less slick, as long as they have stuff I want to watch.

The only reason I've ever considered dropping Netflix is "why am I paying for this when there is nothing I want to watch". Fortunately, they have come through with some interesting content recently, and I'm still paying them. But give it a month or two with nothing I want to watch, and I'm pulling that plug, and no amount of 100x programmers will be able to keep me as a customer.
Parent was asking about lights from Phillips. The software update for that is initiated by the Phillips app one presumably has installed on their phone.
Its not a good idea to ask users about features because users are not good at identifying the next features of your product. Instead the questions should be

1) What is the hardest part [about doing this thing]? (Identifies the pain-point of customer)

2) Tell me about the last time you encountered this problem? (Identifies the context of user's problem)

3) Why was that hard? (Identifies the specifics of the problem)

4) What have you done to solve this problem? (Identifies if user is already exploring the potential solution to that problem)

5)What dont you love about the solution that you have tried? (This is the exact question about the features but just in more efficient way)

All of the above questions are summary from YC partner Eric Migicovsky's youtube video on "How to Talk to Users". Its a great informative video.
Especially considering how much math is required for a computer science education. It scared me off, and I became exposed to programming through another field which was far more pleasant due to avoiding all that horribly difficult math.
Depending on where you live, you might be able to buy live chickens and have them butchered for cheaper than $10/lb. If you get really lucky, you might also be able to find a farmer that raises, butchers, packages, and sells chicken directly. We've got a place like that here (Idaho), but it's really out of the way. When we shop there, it's usually 3-4 hours to get out there, buy a bunch of meat, and drive back. Really high quality stuff though -- it's a night and day difference from the stuff you buy at the grocery store. Same applies to beef, especially if you've got freezer space for large quantities. Occasionally, we'll split half a cow with one or two other families. It's a few hundred dollars of expense up front, but in return, you can be really picky about how the cows were raised, know exactly where the meat came from, get specific cuts of meat, etc.

If meat is important to you in your diet, I highly recommend looking around for something like that! It's a bit of work but I've found it to be extremely worthwhile.
Re-reads Yes. It is a bit of work, but not huge:

- Use natural in-repo CI configuration like GitLab and Travis. That way a fork of the project can easily establish an identical pipeline. I can't imagine going back to Jenkins or the like at this point, where the CI pipeline is this massive snowflake waiting to break down, and always being out of sync with the code.

- The current code base has 97% coverage which is verified by the CI pipeline. I'll reiterate the old trope about this making the development faster, in no small part because we can do fearless refactoring.

- Linters and formatters check the style pre-commit (only changed files) and in CI (all files).

- I run a script nightly to reset my dev env completely. It + some documented configuration is all a new dev needs to get started.

- Keeping the documentation in the repo makes sure that every change is peer reviewed. That not only sets a minimum bar for the quality but also makes sure at least one other person has already read it once it's available to everyone.
Don't get your hopes up about Disney+
Bay Area officials approve work from home plan to reduce greenhouse gas emission
„ Zuse is the nerd's nerd. Not only did he build the first programmable computer, he also was the first dude to grok digital physics and the idea that the universe may be a computer.
Zuse's book 'Calculating Space' was written in the 60s, years before Fredkin et al. People thought he was insane. Consequently, he thought his intellectual life was over and actually went into startups later in life.
Today, his ideas about the universe being computation are very trendy. Before his death, he was invited out to MIT and shown some love for his pioneering work.“ [0]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9200896
> It’s thought that any underground lakes on Mars must have a reasonably high salt content for the water to remain liquid.

This means that any lifeforms in that water are unlikely but is it possible that the water remains liquid through something other than salt? Because the other alternative would be a lifeform that isn't influenced by salt as much as any that we know.
Interesting piece from last week comparing OT, CRDT, and Figma's hybrid approach (good explainers of each too): https://hex.tech/blog/a-pragmatic-approach-to-live-collabora...
> She's "black" but not ADOS (descendant of slavery).

How not? Surely most black Jamaicans are descendants of slaves.
Yeah, it’s a bet on which API is more durable. Some other minor factors are that you might want a newer SDL anyway, because the library comes with a database of different models of gamepads (https://github.com/gabomdq/SDL_GameControllerDB) and if you link against SDL dynamically, you get support for newer gamepad models for “free”.

One of the other factors here is that the ability to play old games is in some sense about the preservation of culture. If you have an x64 Linux binary that uses SDL + OpenGL, I have a strong feeling that you’ll be able to play it 20 years from now, although it might inconvenient to get working.
Diversification: What Investing Can Teach Us About Threat IntelLigence
Although definitely very helpful to YC folks (YCS12 here), I do find it kind of funny that YC-preferred funds have emerged, since they introduce the same biases YC was meant to remove.

It's a natural process, and there is no such thing as not being biased (as it is a bias in itself), but the signaling of being part of YC is definitely huge, especially first time, and for outside of the Bay.

Investors are people too.
please don't be swayed, he uses lots logical phallusese, in this thread for example: taking the US electric consumption at face value as being the power to be displaced 12 hours.

note how this assumes that every joule you consume must have come from the storage system as if there were zero overlap between consumption and demand such that all energy had to pass indirectly through the battery system

also note how he typically treats reminders by others as claims of silver bullet panaceas: even if governments had devoted to fully switching to renewables and had solid plans distributed over multiple sources (solar, wind, tidal, geothermal, ...) and over multiple storage systems (synthetic fuel, batteries, flywheels, ...) in a way it sufficed our needs, it's not surprising that pointing at just one energy source or just one storage type, you'd arrive to the conclusion batteries, or solar won't suffice... even though in combination they might.
That's an overly pessimistic way to put it.

I think it's more accurate to say that maybe you can remove elements from your set... unless another actor wants them in the set.

That's not always the behavior you want. But if it is, it's great.
So much of astronomy and planetary science focuses on water right now. Here are some more recent results about water:

- The bright, salty deposits that NASA’s Dawn spacecraft spotted on Ceres likely come from briny water escaping from a 418 km across underground reservoir 48 km below the surface (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-020-1138-8). Two reservoirs were spotted by analyzing the dwarf planet’s gravitational field. The salt deposits are young, suggesting that Ceres, the largest asteroid in the solar system, is still an active world. Ceres joins the growing list of solar system bodies that likely host hidden oceans: Enceladus (now with recently detected fresh interior ice), Europa, Ganymede, Pluto, and subglacial lakes on Mars.

- Some of Earth's water may have come from the breakdown of organic space-born molecules (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-64815-6), while the rest could have come from hydrogen locked up in enstatite chondrite meteorites (https://science.sciencemag.org/content/369/6507/1110), instead of being delivered by comets and carbonaceous chondrite meteorites that formed beyond the snow line, as has been previously assumed.

- Juno took the first image of Ganymede’s north pole (https://www.missionjuno.swri.edu/news/nasa-juno-takes-first-...). Ganymede, a moon larger than the planet Mercury, is made mostly of water ice. The ice near its north pole appears to have been altered by Jupiter’s intense radiation to become an amorphous material without crystalline structure.

Oh, and here's a recently-released mission poster for NASA’s upcoming Europa Clipper mission to study the Jovian moon’s icy shell and liquid saltwater ocean: https://europa.nasa.gov/resources/173/europa-clipper-journey...

Our next issue of Orbital Index (https://orbitalindex.com) is coincidentally all about water.
Nowadays, FAANG includes Microsoft, it's just the M doesn't fit into the acronym as nicely. As far as I understand, it's a high profit margin, high paying, high growth business with the ability to scale at extremely low marginal costs and collect lots of rent, hence lots of upside.
Some additional context would be helpful
Yup, though has there been official statements about the Flying Canoe or similar activities? Otherwise it'll all be hiding and hoping that we don't have another string of -30 weeks keeping us from leaving the house entirely for January A nice winter evening walk can work wonders for moral assuming you're not dealing with eyelashes frozen shut and air that hurts to breathe in.
Unfortunately this is a multibillion dollar company. I'm pretty sure they didn't even flinch.

The only negative thing to them I know of is that one of the top US law firms dropped them because of this. They felt that this was very disgraceful behavior and sent us both a note that they need to protect their reputation with founders and they will no more work with them.
M.2 case for Raspberry Pi 4

https://www.argon40.com/argon-one-m-2-case-for-raspberry-pi-...
Zig is the legit successor to C++ , not Rust.

In a sense that it will feed your family and get you a job in the future.

Sure, Rust is even smarter and a savy Rust hacker is likely to run circles around the herds of mediocre Zig hackers.

But Zig hackers will come in legions while Rust hackers will die in beauty.
>I'm pretty confident that the current cost of the above-cited ordinance is zero, and at one point in the past the value it provided was a small positive.

What I was trying to say in my first post was that it's not the current enforcement. It's just an example of the government becoming too large and the robot police force of the future will use these dead laws to enforce. This will lead to disenfranchisement.

>Sounds pretty dumb, right? However, Bear wrestling matches are (or were) a thing, and it seems like it came to be (rightly) considered a form of animal mistreatment:

Personally I like said bear law. This isn't about silly laws, it's about how unenforced laws have become. The size of government wants to grow, but right now the resources of the law enforcement dictate the size. In the near future the resources of law enforcement will quickly allow growth of government again.

Another example is grass. In many cities it's illegal to have long grass. However, enforcement is non-existent or at least requires someone snitching on you. In the future there will be robot cops who will go around and inspection the entire city on a regular basis providing fines.

Or snow, you have laws normally that say, you have until 10am to clear the snow from the city's sidewalks and keep it free of snow and ice for the remaining day. You are typically in constant violation if you arent actively cleaning it all day long.

Out of curiousity, do you think there will be cities that have robots that cut everyone's grass or shovel to snow? Or will they be punitive with $500 fines.
This seems like something I might actually be able to fix, so I think I might do that.
Branching Can Change Your Life
Don't click on a link if you're unsure - from the title or URL - the content is relevant to you.

It's equally "disrespectful" to waste reader's time on 101 content if that's now what the post is about.
Seems like another one (based off the article) is ease of use as well. I'm not familiar with either algorithm, but sounds like OT is less complex and easier to understand, which IMO is a decent tradeoff worth considering.
Sure, so the one magic bullet we have as a field is that we can pretty much woah them with the possibilities of learning this stuff. So you play Fortnite or sit on Reddit all day? This is how you build that.

A good simple game engine would do wonders for programming education.

Take something like React, not exactly a learners platform either.

We never really build apis like that anymore (or ever have it seems), where we literally ask ‘could a kid do this?’.
In my early 20s I mistakenly feel into the trap of thinking certain kinds of rounds were validation or better.

Like, for some reason, I criticized and looked down on a company for having a convertible debt round instead of a "real Series" where they sold equity.

Or I criticized a company for not having X, Y, Z investors closing rounds.

The reality is that I found myself in situations, as an employee, where I had to actually explain myself to founders about my thoughts on why revenues were important. That particular startup failed to sell more equity in the necessary time period and closed up shop.

In more broader circumstances, the dilution and liquidity preferences are more harmful to founders and employees.

And as a founder, I specifically do non-dilutive things, such as doling out %'s of specific revenue streams or % of products created. Obtaining the same support and sometimes capital or things booked as unearned income, while keeping much more control or total control and upside.
My programming teacher at age 16 directly answered this as a rhetorical question to the class. He just said, I love teaching, I love living here (no tech sector), and I love programming. He found teaching 16-18 year olds programming really rewarding. I found him a realy great teacher.

He didn't want the stress of moving to a city and programming for others. That was 20 years ago though. It might be different now.
If it were just the movement of manufacturing, then the entire country would be poorer. TFA is about the fact that the wealthy people have grown much wealthier, and that requires additional explanation.

Overseas manufacturing is part of it, but the US still makes tons of money, often in industries other than manufacturing. Some of them do have entry-level jobs in the $75k range, but rarely with just a high school education.

Programming is one of those fields, and realistically, we ought to figure out how to do more with the self-taught developers, sans a $200,000 degree. That won't solve all of the problem -- far from it -- but it's indicative.
> Most of what i read is through links from others: Hackernews, Flipboard, or facebook, Google news.

This is the sea-change that has happened. Newspapers used to be hugely profitable, because they owned and controlled the primary source of news for most people. Their platform – direct distribution directly to people's homes – was immensely powerful for many decades. That platform was disrupted by the internet. Newspapers are no longer the primary platform most people use for media consumption. Those platforms are now, as you say, places like HN, Facebook, Flipboard, Google, etc.
MySQL's Gotchas
I use CRDTs in production at Jackbox for audience functionality and honestly I don't know why the only thing that people talk about when it comes to CRDTs is collaborative text editing. Like, sure, cool, but that's literally a single problem domain and like, Google Docs already exists and works well for the majority of users so how many developers actually need to create a collaborative text editor? CRDTs are an incredibly abstract and versatile concept; collaborative text editing is a tiny problem domain. I would really like to see more writing about CRDTs that is NOT about collaborative text editing.
Is it because they want to be reflective of what they see you as? Contractors. My understanding is that Netflix hires/fires agressively. (The entire team gets removed if the project fails) Also there was phrase for it: "Enjoy your time while you're here" (As in.. everyone has an expiration date)
This is gold. Beyond the second level (or third level if they're thin levels) of SWE/IC, promotions are at least as much about there being whitespace that needs filled as they are about your individual trajectory/ability.

If the entire pie is expanding at a breakneck, nearly unsustainable pace, there's so much whitespace that modest performers can get quick promotions. If the entire pie is static, even strong performers will be promoted far more slowly.

Because the first few promotions are (mostly) about the individual ability/capability, it can be tempting to assume that mid-career and late-career promotions are "more of the same". They're not.
I would never trust a DB migration tool written in Bash.