skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
We need reform in the system, though. I know two heterosexual couples in different states with decent jobs, good finances, deep desire to adopt, commitment. (I mention heterosexual only because there has long been stigma against same-sex couples adopting, and this is a stigma these folks don't face.) They've gone through the foster training, the adoption training, the social worker meetings, the enormous legal fees. They've both been working to adopt for over four years. One couple, I think matches have fallen through three times? They were trying to adopt an older kid through the foster system and were willing to take siblings, so you think they'd be home free. But no. Match, courts change their mind; match, courts change their mind, etc. The other has had only one match fall through -- it was a baby and they got the clothes, got the crib ready, and mom changed her mind.

Something is wrong with the system in America when I've got a child who can now write their name and that took less time from beginning to present than getting a single adoption from the foster system accomplished. Those matches that failed? Those kids are still in foster care.
When did Yemen become a western nation?
Flood plains. Though... in some areas people live in them and complain to the Army Corps and local government every time they get flooded out.
A solar-powered one with an actuator to reset itself probably isn’t too difficult to build.
To quote my old OS professor: "people who xor pointers deserve what happens to them."
What we need is a fleet of teleoperated VASIMIR-engined trawlers with electromagnetic fishing nets to clean up space garbage. What about funding? A levy on satellite launches and operators under the polluter pays principle. Perhaps this could be structured as an addition to insurance premiums, considering the purpose is perpetuation of access to Earth orbit and outer space for the sake of future generations and for all mankind.
@dang, I thought paywalled articles weren't allowed.
stupid 'hackers' being stupid 'hackers' as always. what should concern you if not global commodification of personal data?
No, because when software "engineers" are told to build a bridge, two weeks before the bridge is set to open, the dependencies change because they found out no one was using the bridge, so now it's a train bridge. Also instead of going over a river, it's going over a highway, also it's 1/3rd the length. Just need to change some function calls right?
> I had an uncle who died in the early 80s and there is no trace of him

Hmm, I wouldn't be so sure. Ancestry, FamilySearch, and other genealogical databases may yet have him in there, along with tons of information that ancestors literally voluntarily supply, including photos (for posterity). I see that as a good thing though. I can learn about my ancestors and see pictures of them and read stories about them.
> If the game is rigged and you truly believe so, yes, it's one more reason for you to put skin in the game.

Uh, no? If you think a casino is rigged, that is a reason NOT to play, no?
People empirically do not understand probability in a useful way. Folks will, in aggregate, read that as "X% poisonous", not "X% chance to be kill you."

"Oh, that's only 25%, it'll be fiiine."
Staff Software Engineer
Williams-Sonoma is looking for Staff UI Engineer in San Francisco and Rocklin.
Please don't post unsubstantive and/or flamebait to HN. It leads to significantly lower-quality discussion.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Pretty sure this was outted as fake.

The idea of a van watching you is enough for many to change their behavior
Textbooks have nothing to do with reality of the markets. Those who believe in EMH - please check out what happened to price of Zoom in March 2020.
However, this is not enforced at all for software engineers.

So in lot of companies the official title is software engineer even without any accreditation.
Ask HN: How much time do you think you would need to find meaningful work?
That's not related to technology but to finding meaningful work, which I believe that many care about.
I studied electrical and computer engineering, then worked as a software engineer for two companies and am currently enrolled in a PhD under a Marie Curie fellowship.
None of my previous work felt meaningful. I dislike my PhD more or less since I started. I initially took the position because I thought it would allow me more room to learning and get passionate. Additionally, due to the well-paying fellowship I thought it would be less stressful and with lower risk. Unfortunately, I am 1.5 years into it and I feel totally lost and far from finding meaning in my work which is something I crave since I started working.
My current savings would allow me to not have to work for 3-4 years. Do you think that this time is reasonably long enough for finding a more fulfilling work? Essentially I want to invest all my savings in finding a job that I like. How much time do you think you would need to find meaningful work?
How to Leak a Zoom Meeting
I think that people are probably misleading themselves if they say they want it, but aren't willing to pay for it.

People fork over money for IAPs by the millions per minute, because they want the results.

I think if it were truly that desirable, people would have been happy to pay for it. I just don't think it provided that much value to the customer.
Audio is good when your busy doing something that doesn’t engage the language part of your brain, like workouts, driving, walks alone, washing dishes, standing room train commutes, etc
ICYMI, I wrote down my thoughts about this topic (both as a fellow consumer and as an author of commercial software):

https://photostructure.com/about/v-0-9/#-this-_really-will_-...
previous discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14433805
GPT-3 users are given an API link which routes to Azure, full blackbox.
Imagine the use of the word deplorable to describe certain people. This would be then used in an election campaign to favor an opposition candidate who would vote against Russian sanctions.
That's barely worthy the time to create a proof of concept and write up the bug, let alone all the time spent understanding and finding it in the first place. A full time engineer costs Google more than that each day.
Sales team certainly understand the sales cycle and different velocities involved.

Eg - two jobs we ago sold to finance playera from small hedge funds to huge asset managers to central banks and finance ministries. You could sell more small hedge funds by knocking on more doors but you understood that the big players took months and years to decide. And of course we always tried to hone the sales org and process to arm the sales people with tools and data to move faster. We certainly held them much more accountable than devs.

It's actually not a fair comparison - software development is often like golf - the only limit to your velocity is you while sales can't really move faster than customer's process in many cases.

(Yes I obviously know dev processes can have external dependencies too)
Thank you for your insight on this.

The tremendous collective insight of the HN community has led me to realize I need to do far more research before inserting my opinions into these writings (or simply not insert them at all), and I am rewriting all my analysis in Python with ready-to-download datasets so any claim is reproducible and verifiable by anyone. I truly did not expect this level of attention and take the responsibility to put out correct information seriously.
Weren't player pianos (and nickelodeons) a thing back then? Plus, if you've ever visited "House on the Rock" in Wisconsin the mechanical orchestras are pretty neat to watch.
I can answer this, also fostered then adopted a teenager. It actually does not help the kid, its the worst thing that could happen to them except all of the alternatives. Being placed in a foster home is trauma. Getting separated from their bio family is trauma. Continuing to be physically abused (in their bio fam) is unacceptable trauma. Extended family was also a bust and resulted in more physical abuse.
Okay, but read the first section of that link:

> The court ruled that, "Apple cannot get patent-like protection for the idea of a graphical user interface, or the idea of a desktop metaphor [under copyright law]...". In the midst of the Apple v. Microsoft lawsuit, Xerox also sued Apple alleging that Mac's GUI was heavily based on Xerox's. The district court dismissed Xerox's claims without addressing whether Apple's GUI infringed Xerox's. Apple lost all claims in the Microsoft suit except for the ruling that the trash can icon and folder icons from Hewlett-Packard's NewWave windows application were infringing. The lawsuit was filed in 1988 and lasted four years; the decision was affirmed on appeal in 1994, and Apple's appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court was denied.

And then later on:

> After the district court ruled in favor of Microsoft, Apple appealed the decision arguing that the district court only considered infringements on the individual elements of Apple's GUI, rather than the interface as a whole. The appeals court almost entirely affirmed the ruling of the district court, establishing that, "almost all the similarities spring either from the license or from basic ideas and their obvious expression... illicit copying could occur only if the works as a whole are virtually identical."

I'm not going to say that copyright expansion isn't a problem, and in general I think that software patents are a giant problem. But surely the answer to that isn't to encourage more expansion or to treat competitors cloning good features like it's something to be avoided.

We should be holding up cases like this as an example of why proprietary developers can't get monopolies on ideas, and we should be normalizing that way of thinking about software. It's not a problem if a proprietary app copies an interface idea from an Open Source app because interface and feature ideas are not copyrightable. We should reinforce in culture that already recognized legal standard whenever possible.
I seriously don't understand the obsession with estimates in the paradigm it is pushed in. Want to be steady at a reliable pace, work for a few months and figure out the average and deviations. Need a priority on tasks, use a priority queue using whatever method you assign it by, often a combination of deadline, value added, complexity and more.

Yes, I get on a high level, one needs to be able to say "yes we can make this before [date]", when using big deadlines. How often do people really have to finish something before a critical deadline or decide to drop it right then and there? I'd wager most software devs do not, let alone biweekly deadlines. Isn't agile methodology supposed to help us fight against artificially tight deadlines (customer collaboration)? Isn't the SaaS model combined with "deploy any time" designed to be profitable in accordance to features implemented? Then, why push estimates so strongly in whatever flavor of the month Scrum version BigCorp wishes to use today? What do they even add at that point? If they are really so important, why do we always feel the need to introduce human error when we can extrapolate former experiences with computer models?

Maybe it is just me being cynical. The entire need to hold so fiercely onto an estimate reeks of micromanagement and desire to push responsibility entire onto the lower ranks.
Who says I have a solution? Or that there even is one?
Your using it. The computer.

All the interesting things in the world compressed into a device that you mostly use while immobile.

Also, cost per calorie has never been lower, so technology has made it super cheap to feed us.
No, we are not! I just wanted to tweet today, that "Software Development is NOT Engineering it's ART."
> Only if you define freedom as the capacity to do whatever is allowed or at least not expressly prohibited by the state without legal consequence

So how do you define freedom? Anarchy?
So because someone heard something else said to someone else, I have to change what I say?

[confusion]
Yes I do. Since I can't visualize a triangle in my head, it's hard to visualize what is left over when I cut off at thirds.

The link states that this can be trained. Is that your experience as well?
Great to hear! Out of curiosity, would you prefer Divjoy offer the UI for that or would you want to roll your own (or use the official Tailwind UI)?
I have said this before and I will say it again...Dear BBC, please allow the rest of the world to pay for a subscription to the iPlayer. Just take my money, really, please?
This is just silly. Lots of hubris here. It's also silly to spend much time thinking about this.

Of course we are engineers. OP uses "building a bridge" as an example of 'real' engineers. This is patently ridiculous on the face of it.

The one thing that unites us is we like to build. Whether it's the great pyramids or the latest social network, engineers are the ones who get it done.

We build. That's what engineers do. We build something to solve some problem whether it's with bits and electrons or with larger physical mediums like slabs of concrete. Engineers are builders and they build to solve some particular use case.

"Scientists build to learn. Engineers learn to build"
I agree with the points here.

I came from backend development, writing mostly in C++ and Python for most of my career. I've always found modern JavaScript frameworks so difficult to reason about because it feels like I'm always working through nine layers of abstraction.

Last year, I read Julia Evans's article "A little bit of plain Javascript can do a lot," and it inspired me to try to push regular JS as far as it would go in my next project. It's now 8 months later, I have thousands of users, and I'm still using plain JavaScript.[1] No babel/webpack or anything. I do use Flask to aggregate source files together, but I purposely avoid any cleverness there. Overall, I find the code much easier to debug than any of my other web apps.

One nice advantage of using only vanilla JS is that it's easier to find contributors. If you're a React project, then only React developers can contribute. But if you're a vanilla JS project, you're not bound to developers of any particular religion. Vue, React, Angular, Svelte developers can all work in a vanilla JS codebase.

[0] https://jvns.ca/blog/2020/06/19/a-little-bit-of-plain-javasc...

[1] https://github.com/mtlynch/tinypilot
Software doesn‘t exist in a vacuum. The marketing team needs to know when the landing page / qr code (whatever) is implemented, because they need to plan their marketing budget. The customer care agent that gets shouted at because feature xyz is broken / not working as the customer expects, would like to give the customer an answer when it will be fixed. The customer care manager is also worried about her team members‘ retention.

So having a rough or concrete time line / roadmap is helpful for these parts of the business.

I also believe that a feature request is incomplete without an estimate. It is like a friend asking you to go buy him a car. What does he need a 3000$ subaru from 2003 or a 2021 Ferrari? Of course the friend can give you an insanely accurate list of specifications, but giving you a budget + some guidelines will probably be more effective for your friend and more fun for you. Especially considering that you know much more about cars (read software) than your friend. Knowing the budget you will be able to make much better choices.

If you take the allegory of a quote (which I think is correct) then you need to consider that the haggling process always also includes scope of the product. „I‘ll give you 5000$ for the car, but only if you include a free car wash“.
And you can always use an estimate as defense against feature creep. „We are running low on budget, I suggest descoping xyz into the next iteration. Otherwise we won‘t be able to ship on time“. If on time is not defined then you can never have this conversation.
AA illustration of why gcc is so slow.

https://twitter.com/i/status/1285217798642454531
Tip you'll probably need soon: the address bar also functions as the "Find in page" feature.
The key is fine. PGP--not so much.

https://latacora.micro.blog/2019/07/16/the-pgp-problem.html
tbh I think it's fine, this site is literally named "hacker news". they're using the term in roughly the same way.
I can think about L shaped one standing upright or lying down on the long side. I don't see them though.
The statistic is that 1/3 of previously hospitalized COVID patients return to the hospital.

We're definitely not seeing 1/3 of all COVID patients return to the hospital.

If a COVID infection progresses to the point that hospitalization is necessary, the situation is already quite bad.
perhaps, but there are also odd circumstances surrounding the rise of Parler and Russia influence. Now these are twitter posts, but from fairly serious individuals.

https://mobile.twitter.com/davetroy/status/13272539919364546...
https://twitter.com/davetroy/status/1327271037847867395?s=20
Wouldn't it make sense to just add the license fee/tax at the source of sale, just like electronic waste recycling fee etc.
Not sure if it applies to engineers, but there's a difference in the job description between defining and implementing. Sometimes someone knows some theory, does some math and is done. And his or her result is passed to another person that implements it. Sometimes it's the same person doing both, but probably less often. Sometimes the implementer grows and starts putting down some ground rules (becomes an architect) or the other way round (for example there because might be more jobs for implementers).

Perhaps another distinction is between trying something and see if it works, and knowing it will work (or won't work) before it's implemented. Then the difference is between knowing from experience and knowing from having studied the theory (and having worked through the proofs).
This article's thesis seems to be that medical professionals are not incentized to provide the best interventions, and as a result, wouldn't pay for this service. However, what the author fails to mention is the competitors in this space that are successful, such as Up To Date, which provides really high-quality research trial data: https://www.uptodate.com/home

Rather than building a product that informs medical professionals about effective interventions, I wonder if the creator would have had more success if he deeply explored what sources of information these medical professionals pay for now - do they pay for anything at all, such as UpToDate, and don't want to pay this because it's an additional expense? If the creator found which sources people are using, the creator could sell this database as a feature for these partners and widely disseminate this data through partner channels rather than creating a competing source of information. It seems to be a case of this being a good instance of a B2B2C model, where selling this service to other businesses that sell directly to medical professionals could be more viable than trying to sell directly to them.

Alternatively, if the creator wanted to sell to patients, rather than medical professionals, the blueprint here is all of the consumer reports companies, such as Wirecutter, which is one of the New York Times's most popular services. Here, again, a "Wirecutter for medical interventions" could be quite successful, and you could sell this service to media companies that provide consumer reports as a service that would bolster these companies.

It's bad the creator wasn't able to find traction, as getting more medical data into the hands of consumers could have a huge postive impact over time.
I literally did this earlier today. Funny coincidence. I'm using Vysor[0]. Worked out of the box for me. If you aren't pro, the display quality leaves some to be desired, but it works fine for me to make Android dev on hardware a bit more comfortable. It requires the device be unlocked though. It even has a web interface that uses WebUSB. I didn't try it, but seems like a neat option.

[0] https://www.vysor.io/
More important than estimating is knowing how to sequence the work. I often see teams try to build the entire DB schema first, or built the interface out one wire at a time. The agile approach of building small, vertical parts of each feature tends to work much better in my experience.

For example say you have a CRUD application with a page for editing and searching complex objects. Rather than building the entire search page with all of its filters, and then building the edit page with all of its fields, you build a simplified version of the search page with only a few filters and a simplified version of the edit page with fields that correspond to those filters. You also make sure the functionality integrates with the backend to form a cohesive, vertical feature that can go through QA, and possibly the client. Once that is working you expand the list of fields and filters.

This approach tends to surface design issues much faster, and is more adaptable to change requests from the client.
Rentech trades on extremely reliable (but constantly evolving) price movement patterns and levers them up to the hilt in order to generate their returns. This is one reason why they are capacity constrained and can't just compound their returns. When the coronavirus first knocked US markets out of orbit, because of this leverage, the medallion fund was actually close to losing all of their money due to many previously established patterns evaporating too quickly for their algorithms to adjust. I have heard this from someone with first hand familiarity with ren tech. As others have mentioned, they also understood at a very early stage the importance of solid data ingestion and infrastructure. They vacuum up anything that could plausibly be related to price movements.
I wonder if Starlink will eventually have on impact on this, maybe 10 years from now.

Some years ago we lived in an off the grid cabin in the mountains of Veracruz (Mexico) and the lack of connectivity was by far the main reason we left. We now live on the outskirts of a small city but I still really miss the absolute silence of living away from civilization.
Definitely a neat idea, but how would this work? Most identification starts with a spore print. What if instead of an AI to identify mushrooms it was software that used a classification system like what is described in "Mushrooms Demystified".

Edit: Should clarify most reading I have done on mushroom ID involves taking spore prints as an essential step but it's not always the rule.
The bounties can actually be rather good. This one just seems disproportionately low.
Same with web users apparently...
Yeh, it was sold as a jihad.

But I think Hyperion Cantos by Dan Simmons would fit better.
There is a third way to have a government issued electronic currency that provides privacy for the purchaser. So the government can't cut off an individual but they can still collect sales taxes.

* https://taler.net/
> Make something people want

That's a charity.

> Make something people want __and will pay you for__

That's a business.

You learnt the hard way.
This is valuable insight which anecdotally I agree with completely. Plenty of people got onto Parler from time-to-time and tried to throw in some reason and facts. They were silenced/ignored as quickly as those trying to throw lies/misinformation into Twitter discourse.

I'm taking a step back to think deeper on this before throwing out an impulsive personal opinion one way or another on this. I'd like to do some deep NLP analysis on comment threads to automate processing/understanding of the discourse.
Folks have already been doing something like this long before IPFS. What I am wondering is when something like this will go "mainstream".
Would you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to HN? You've unfortunately been doing a ton of that, and if it keeps up we're going to have to ban you.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

We've had to warn you many times about this kind of thing. The slack eventually runs out.