skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hardware engineers may think they are more serious, but how many hardware engineers take the time to verify the numerics of the finite element, finite difference, or spectral method codes they rely upon for computational electromagnetics, fluid dynamics, quantum or classical mechanics modeling that they often are fully reliant upon to do their jobs. As someone who has spent a career writing tools for internal teams at hardware shops, or at software companies that cater to hardware engineers, I have seen far more rigor in my technical computing software colleagues than I have seen from my hardware engineering colleagues. Most of my hardware engineering colleagues have had no idea what version control is, don’t know or care how floating point calculations can wreak havoc on their models, and can’t craft anything more complex than a straight line Matlab script. Software written by hardware engineers is often atrociously bad, has no tests, and can only run on the machine where it was written. I know I can’t even consider ever asking most of my hardware design engineering colleagues to touch a C compiler or validate the numerics of their models. They just as often prefer to rely upon their magical point and click GUIs or back of the envelope spherical cow based scripts and spreadsheets.
I suspect (but don't know for sure) that sines and cosines converge uniformly but squares and triangles don't.

The math is also simpler with sines and cosines which makes a difference for both practical implication and learning.
The New Bioeconomy
Same with stackoverflow. I remember thinking when reading Joel saying they were doing this "what's the point, I can find answers on the web already"
Or just no one in power, like a horizontal governed political system.
I can relate to this, in a number of ways, including the complete inability to self-promote. Many years ago, I had an idea for some software, so I left my job and worked on it. (My wife was understanding and supportive.) I did not have a business idea, I had a technical idea. I worked with a "business guy", who turned out to be worthless. Every time I had to leave my desk, where I was having a blast programming, my stomach knotted. I just could not stand any activity related to marketing/selling.

I was finally acquhired (to use a term invented later) by a local startup that needed what I was doing, for a signing bonus, decent salary, and a big chunk of equity. (This was in the late 80s. My "plan", such as it was, would not work now, because software is basically given away.)

I guess the lesson is this: know your limitations, and work around them. If you hate doing X, then don't force yourself to do X, because you will suck at it compared to the many people who love doing X. And you will be miserable. Find a situation where you can do what you enjoy, and are good at, and somebody else does X.
He spent hubdreds of millions of dollar doing the exact opposite. You know what they say, put your money where your mouth is. He's lying in plain sight.
I haven't made it to the end of the video but here's my take on the subject: it is true - everyone is trying to create the exact same thing over and over again. But there are some key components that everyone misses. You can't replace facebook. People complain about facebook, but those of us who steer clear from it are a minority. And if potentially I were to create a facebook which solves the problems I have with the existing one, I'd be making a facebook clone that fits the requirements of a small subset of those who aren't on facebook. Basically insignificant market share and it would be a catastrophic waste of time, effort and money. Hence the reason why I'm not doing it(also because I find social networks inherently boring).

The second big misconception is that in order to make a billion or even a million dollar product, you need to focus on a personal problem you are trying to solve. Essentially your product should solve your problem. And this lures people into an entirely different rabbit hole - convincing themselves that "X" is their problem and that many other people have that problem. Often no one has that problem or it's so insignificant that no one will even bother giving it a thought.

The next big rabbit hole are apps. Don't get me wrong, apps are great and I rely on my phone heavily. However the Pareto rule is in full effect here. People will have 60 apps installed, and will use around 20% of those. And they will use heavily 20% of that subset. Say the average human being spends, say, an hour and a half on his or her phone a day. 80% of which will be messaging/social media, where you can't compete. So you are left competing with 10 other apps for the user's attention for a portion of the remaining 36 minutes. Sure, you could get a few thousand users out of several billion people. But again, Pareto's rule: most of your revenue will come from a small subset of those. Which often defeats the purpose. It's really hard to compete as a startup or an indie developer, when thousands of companies have thousands of astonishing developers at their disposal + the finances to back up any new project.

In addition, an idea in itself is worth nothing. It's what you do with it and how you market it that counts.

Which leads me to my final point. Billion dollar ideas are really hard to execute because the bar has been set very high. It's not something a single person or a small team can pull off. Those who do are the black swans. On a semi-related note, when the pandemic started, I was pretty convinced that many people will step up their game and come up with relevant products which will help the world adapt to the new normal. Which didn't happen to my big surprise. And I'm kind of disappointed that I didn't take on the challenge either(too much on my plate already + it's hard to work alone on a project). There were so many opportunities that were entirely missed... Shame but oh well... Next time maybe...
Curious; I not only don’t understand your world view, I don’t even have enough of a handle on it to know how to engage with it.

For example:

> The fungi will consume all of us some day and outlive us all. I mean some are among the oldest still living life on earth as it is. Like millions of years old and still going. How can you dominate something that's existed longer than you and will out live you and everyone you know?

Yet anti-fungals are trivially available at low cost. Indeed, the very claim of yours that:

> The Earth is a giant living system we're slowly killing and replacing with human technology.

Is literally not something I can only even understand as agreement that we have dominion, yet I know you intend to deny that.
I like and have bought into the IKEA system, but I have had a lot of trouble with their gu10 lights.

Some sets of three occasionally go into party mode and start flashing in a sequence. They reset themselves every month or so. I'm tall and my ceilings are not so it's quick for me to pair them again. It would be super annoying if they were too high to reach. Setting the white spectrum fails using the 5 button controller. Often one or two usually fail to set correctly resulting in a weird mix. I simply don't bother anymore. They work nicely with the app, when still paired.

I haven't had any problems with the e27's in the same rooms.

'Dumb' rf motion detector triggered under-counter lighting in the kitchen has been way better bang for buck. It just works. No smart home required.
> I can choose to drop Google any second

This is true, bit misses the point.

The point is that through whatever means, but including cheating, Google has become incredibly, obscenely powerful.

And one of the many reasons that is undesirable is the aforementioned cheating.
The US especially is an oligarchy and for-profit US tech companies dominate the tech industry. Those same companies are atrociously anti-user and notorious for selling data etc, so people don't trust them and I don't think there is broad awareness that there could be a decent software solution. And also we could just use paper.
Unless if you use two connected lasers. One pointing to the cloud and another to the target.
It's hard to tell if Google (and Microsoft, Apple, etc) are deliberately choosing to favor visual appeal or if they are just ignorant to usability fundamentals.
However in the exact same vane that "Nature doesn't care"... We as Humans should and DO care.

We are not Nature, and thus these existential defining issues should at least give us some pause to debate and evaluate the moral quandaries and responsibilities that this level of engineering power wields.
From what you say I assume you can upvote a dead comment? I guess that interseting perks come along with higher karma then?

It's funny that for 10+ years I didn't work on accumulating karma because of some 'what are internet points good for?' nonsense. I should probably reconsider that frame :)
- The current timeline in Wuhan, China goes back to Sept. for corona.

- one of the early indicators is the parking lots of Wuhan hospitals being full in aerial fotos in Oct:

https://abcnews.go.com/International/satellite-data-suggests...

- Wuhan (and Shanghai) have international airports.

So it's either a possibility, or instrument contamination.
I'm so sorry to hear it's bricked; thank you for warning me not to install the update on mine. Is yours a 13" model? I'd like to know if it breaks 15" models too.

Are you able to boot with Shift-Option-⌘-R into Recovery Mode from an older version?

https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT204904

What about Thunderbolt disk mode? (hold T at startup). Or booting from an external drive?
I read it this time, at least.

I'm not sure about the Internet and young people and groups. I think the internet may be magnifying the impacts more than we realise and that these political games are trends to be worn one day and taken off the next with not much fundamental change.

There certainly seems more polarization on Twitter for example but I wonder whether in reality it's like this. Loud people on Twitter make loud noises and newspapers hear loud voices. Most people can avoid joining sides quite happily, that they don't need to belong to any political club. I'm not American so it doesn't seem that polarizing where I am.

I think that on the Internet, we are not being taught skills for peace and co-existence. Ironically real tolerance and peace is not being promoted by any political group, mainstream or anti-mainstream no matter how much they are against intolerance. Seems like thats what religions used to do?
Not sure why you're being downvoted either. This scenario is completely true and it absolutely would've been marked as disinformation by Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, etc. It's being marked as disinformation now by Hacker News members without any actual discussion as to why. It's a very valid scenario and a great topic of discussion.
I have seem too many poorly (or more like manually) motion tracked memes to not make a tool for that. Would love to hear your feedback!
Inefficiency is a feature, having every state and every county slightly different makes systemic fraud very difficult.

All these phishing schemes that are extremely effective with IT workers and other security conscious people. I say just keep elections analog for the time being. Perhaps someday the technology will be mature, well understood, and distributed far enough to work but I don't see it happening this decade.
+1 to "There is no pro-choice argument for killing the fetus here"

There is no pro-choice analogy to make here.

As for the rest of your comment about feticide... I think there is room for discussion here.
Yeah if you have side effects you should look to switch meds or maybe stop. I was just pointing out I was afraid of side effects but never saw any.
Thank you for writing this. It is making me see what's at stake, which is basically this:

> So the real cost is more than the money I lost. I made my girlfriend stay home for a year, we didn't do anything, we didn't buy clothes and ate the cheapest food, etc.

---

> I got much more from the articles that I wrote here on Indie Hackers than from any of my projects. And I did those in a couple of hours.

I know you don't like that it only took a couple of hours. But if you got more from them, why not go further into that? 80/20 etc.

> Every time that I want to promote something, my stomach hurts.
If I share an article on Reddit I feel anxious for a week.
When I go to a Facebook Group to suggest my apps, I feel sick.
If I send a private message on Twitter or Linkedin, I can't sleep.
All the time I think people are going to hate me, tell me that I am an idiot, a con maker, that my ideas are terrible, that I suck.
And they did many times, and I can't handle that while making $0.
So, I quit.

That sucks. I'll be on the lookout for these signals as well. If I have them, then I either try to find a growth hacker type of person, or quit as well.

> I always wanted to write more. I love it. But I felt that I couldn't write if I wasn't successful. But I guess there are no rules.

Indeed, there aren't. When you write, you get to set the frame and tone of your message.
Well I took the time to reply toomuchtodo, so I'm just going to paste my response here.

It appears politically untenable in the US. But so does a new ICE ban.

Caifornia has passed a 2035 ban, but it has flirted with a carbon tax too in parts.

Canada has a carbon tax, and a 2040 ban. Australia had a carbon tax, with no ICE ban, but to our eternal shame repealed it when a conservative government regained power. India has an ICE ban scheduled and a carbon tax. Norway has their aggressive 2025 ban, but has had a carbon tax that covers about half their emissions since the 90s.

The EU doesn't have one yet, but I would bet a lot of money they will by 2030.

It's not clear to me that they're all that different in terms of political will required. The same countries are interested in both.

Although the specific level of tax that can be passed on carbon may not be sufficient for the desired result. An ICE ban is in theory blanket, although exceptions are going to creep in.
You mean like knowledge of Stripe at all?
It is popular among highly motivated students.

It is less mainstream so exclusivity increases the demand factor.

Amazon's work culture is not very positively seen. Facebook's product is often seen negatively upon although not that much. Google is seen positively.

Some of it is tied into recruiting as well. Apple has a very opaque intern and new grad recruiting process. Netflix simply doesn't hire SWE interns and newgrads.

For Stripe, Presumed High caliber engineering colleagues (party due to size and growth), especially because there is a lot of hype for Stripe and its documentation and process among tech professionals.

High potential for stocks rising at IPO, like Snowflake (although there seems to a value cap) so kids are not as excited about it as Databricks.
Bug fixes are backported to older releases. You don't have to update to Big Sur to have bugs fixes.
DevOps and Ransomware
Sounds like a huge security risk waiting to happen.
I get the reasoning behind this, and I agree with some of that. But I don't agree with this. For reasons:

1. You can't trust the front end. Backends must be written assuming that every call from the front end is malicious. Validations must be duplicated in both the UI (to show people that they can't do the thing), and the back end (to stop them from the doing the thing).

2. There will be multiple front ends. If all your business logic is in the front end, you'll have to duplicate it into all of them. Where it will rapidly get out of synch and you'll have different behaviours on different clients.

3. The entities that make the most sense for storing your data into a database are not the same entities that make the most sense for using in a UI. Forcing your UI to use the same entities as your database will mean more work for both, and often ends up influencing the database design badly.

4. There are ways of writing APIs that allow for rapid change. Uncoupling the storage entities from the display entities is a key step, so you can change things in the database without affecting the front end (and vice versa).

5. There are ways of writing database schemas that allow for rapid change. My favourite is adding a hstore "metadata" field that I can use to create "temporary" fields in the table for experimental features.

I've written a few back ends, and the advice in the article strikes me as dangerously sensible-sounding while being mostly wrong. I can see a newbie product manager buying into this completely and making a huge mess.
>> You can argue that GitHub and GitLab have UI that degrades a developer's experience. [...] And all of those arguments may be right. But right now, I'd argue that this design hurts mass adoption

> You seem to be stuck with confirmation bias: Just because the way things are doesn't mean they're optimal

I'm afraid you haven't understood my words. I'm not talking about optimal, in fact, optimal is explicitly made a non-goal in my comment. You can tell me about VHS vs Betamax, and all I can say is I had never even heard of Betamax until I saw people talking about it on HN. You can tell me Plan 9 is better than Linux, or that (insert obscure brand here) is better than Heinz. Mass-adopted solution != optimal solution. Mass-adoption doesn't even require products to attain local optima, let alone global optima. I use an obscure toothpaste that comes in tablets in glass bottles - totally obscure, likely will never reach mass-adoption, but it is better.

I was not aware that mass-adoption was not a goal of SourceHut, and I mistakenly assumed it was. Without mass-adoption as a goal, I can totally see how this mentality you expressed makes perfect sense, and I personally agree with it for less-well-adopted things that I use too: "If it does survive, then we all progress. If it doesn't, it was a great experiment"
Developmental biology has a whole lot of plasticity and works primarily by self-organization of cell populations. It’s not a computer program where you have to allocate memory for skulls, eyes, ears and more — it’s actually more like a population of organisms that align themselves towards specific goals (“hey team, we need a hand — now time for fingers! You guys in the middle, die off!”)

You can think of a gene for i.e. brain size just being an instruction that’s “you can press harder on the other populations to maximize your growth” and the other populations are likely to accommodate the stress during development, and change size and shape accordingly.

There are of course harmful mutations that are unable to be compensated for and lead to failure to thrive, but when you see a successful morphological mutation it’s because the systems are very adept at integrating new stimulus during growth.

(Similarly, social structures are emergent properties as well.)
Prevent them on hot and dry days with existing fires.
Allow controlled burns on colder non-windy days.
All public non-final methods in Java are virtual, so it is not _that_ trivial. You would have to check all subclasses that might get passed as an argument and check that again whenever new classes are loaded into the JVM.
I feel pretty simply, I feel a sense of sadness at the kinds of 21st century problems my kids and their kids are going to have to deal with.

At some point in the next 25 years I expect there to be a 'procedure' available, which consists of cultivating a persons stem cells from their bone marrow, using a genetic editing technique to add and/or delete and/or "correct" certain genetic sequences, and then to have a "bone marrow transplant" which is simply killing off your existing bone marrow stem cells and replacing them with the edited ones.

It will be touted as a durable cure for genetic disease and marketed underground to people of means who are looking for an edge in their chosen profession.

There will be lawsuits over people who have their their genetic sequences "appropriated" by a third party to re-sell as a product, and patent litigation on gene sequences that makes much of today's trolls seem quaint in comparison.

I expect to see dog shows and horse races ban "genetically modified" contestants. I expect to see lawsuits around the labeling of beef and chicken about being genetically modified (yes some of this is already happening).

The world will be profoundly different on the far side of generalized understanding of genetics and the means to manipulate them. At least as different as it has become pre-internet+computer to post internet+computer.
> it takes 4-5 seconds for the other part of the mind to come in and override the action, so as long as ... before that

Meaning, for the stone age feelings parts of the brain, to realize that "but I want to stay in bed"?

If one acts faster than that part of the brain, then it's harder for it to mess things up? (Like, feeling sad, worrying, doing nothing)
Maybe, but I don't know anyone I would trust with that kind of thing

Honestly the safest option seems to be relocating to a third-world country where the labor and the cost of living is cheap, so that said money can be stretched out over a few years. Or waiting til that pile of money gets a bit larger and living off ramen for a while
> Small attainable goals...

The USSR didn't go to full planning of the economy overnight, it was very much gradual, one "reasonable" plan after another.
WebP 2: experimental successor of the WebP image format
My partner and I are raising our child in unique ways with a focus on avoiding certain linguistic patterns. I'm interested in filming/recording our home, automating transcription, and creating a system for voice-driven video editing we can do on the fly to create highlights and capture discussions. I see this as a way to create a dataset they can use in the future to diagnose any trauma caused by our choices.
> and I am goal-directed.

OK, straight questiom goal directed towards what?

> And 'understanding' is a colloquial term that refers to a higher standard of fidelity than that required for control

Don't agree - further

> Few drivers know how their cars work. Most drivers can drive their cars.

Understanding is about understanding of aspects. They may well not understand the engine aspect (how it works precisely) but "Most drivers can drive their cars" means they control their cars, which means they understand what happens when a steering wheel is turned, and how not to grind the gears, and not to hit accelerator and brake together. They model it. That is the embodiment of their understanding. Without that they could not control a car.

> Why, thank you for...

Quite clearly there was a question mark at the end it to indicate my implied doubt. Science seeks better understanding of x so it can manipulate x more precisely. Please give me a couple of examples of complex systems which we don't understand but can control, so I can understand you better.
Family history can be a good indicator of risk too. Some societies have higher levels of cholesterol and still live long lives (that 1980s swimmer of Icelandic descent comes to mind). Also keep in mind that the cutoff for high cholesterol has been lowered over time. So if I were in your shoes, I wouldn't be too worried about borderline-high cholesterol. And you can always eat natural statins too which can be found in things like walnuts and oyster mushrooms.
I am not being at all disingenuous in any of the statements I'm making.

The "20% comment" was the one above me, I was just responding to it.

The average Amazon engineer is less talented than the average Google engineer. That is what I was saying. I wasn't making any claim about how talented you are or aren't!
Requisite West Wing scene[1] on the subject (which is probably always going to be my top YouTube search because it’s fantastic).

[1]: https://youtu.be/vVX-PrBRtTY
I agree with your observation that criticism is a reflection of the person giving the feedback. Still, the criticism leaves us with a desire to neutralise its effect, and avoid receiving it in the future. How do we do that?

This works great, starting with just 5 words

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zeDt9dgFXFk