skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: How to determine my value as an employee?
Hey all-

I'm currently working as a consultant for a company, so I'm working hourly as an external contractor on a single project. Had a chat with my boss today (it's a small company so he also happens to be the CEO) and he mentioned that he was interested in offering me an internal position as a formal employee (currently I'm working as a contractor, 1099-NEC, all that fun stuff).

With this comes renegotiation and I am completely out of my depth. I'm a full-time college student, so I don't have any credentials to wave around. My boss mentioned that he considers me "intermediate" when he was talking about potentially hiring on more Junior SEs.

This is all very early in the process. I don't have a formal offer, and this was more a discussion of my future at the company than an interview or offer or anything; I just want to make sure I'm ready when the time comes.

So with all that, how exactly do you determine what you consider your value to be?
Coming out of the hangover of the last 4 years, I'm starting to see clearly now how both parties work to keep people in petty conflict and intense infighting. It allows the power players to get away with so much. The MSM has 24-hour coverage of inane and petty things. Our politicians take turns with their heads in the trough and enrich themselves in the open. I don't want to leave my children a legacy of endless war and endless poverty.
This is something I intentionally made available before I edited. But the clarification is important. “Both sides” certainly observe the same emotions in that respect. But one of the two peddles it and the other dabbles. I’ve seen people in both camps share awful, careless, unprincipled attacks. But one thing I’ve seen that’s an important distinction is that I’ve seen one side self-correct (eg a routine renouncement of body shaming and reminding people on the same side not to lower themselves to that), and the other side banish anyone who tries.

I guess that’s the other important (and still not political) distinction: one party and its cohort is self-reflective and has an internal corrective feedback loop. That broke down in the other over the last decade, quite notably after a very honest and sincere post-loss retrospective/postmortem.
The video goes through this in great details. When we close down nuclear energy plants we know from history what those replacement power plants are. They are fossil fueled energy plants, mostly coal and oil.

If a country can shutdown nuclear plants without adding more coal, oil and natural gas power plants to the grid then more credit to that country. If they can use that cheap solar and wind without a fossil fuel plants then that is what the market should do, but until that is the practical result of dismantling nuclear power plants then we should not continue the practice of replacing nuclear power plants with coal and oil. If that cost more money then it will have to cost more.

The single simplest solutions to all this debate over renewable costs is to simply impose a law which say nothing about nuclear or renewables. A simple law that forbids the construction of new fossil fuel power plants or the expansion of new capacity by existing fossil fuel power plants. What about the cost of nuclear? What about the cheaper price of renewable? We don't need the law to mention either. That should be up to the market to decide, because if we forbid the construction of fossil fuel power plants then the ever increasing demand for more energy will trigger market forces to build something, either nuclear or renewable.

I am not a nuclear advocate. I simply do not want more coal, oil and natural gas being burned when in the past my country (Sweden) has been pretty good at avoiding burning fossil fuels. When they recently turned of a reaction, a backup oil power plants suddenly found itself commercial viable to run all year round rather than just during the cold winters. I do not want oil in my air, I do not care if oil is cheaper, and I do not want Sweden to go down the path that Germany has with its replacement of nuclear in favor of more fossil fuel plants. There need to be a law, preferable internationally, which say that you can not replace non-nuclear energy capacity with fossil fueled energy capacity.
Aside from the parties and parades that would be thrown over the removal of third-party cookies (were we not in a no-parties-allowed situation in 2021), it does seem a little troubling that they appear to be repeating the AMP strategy here 1:1, with an "open initiative" to replace cookies with something that is clearly owned and operated by Google for their interests with industry participation instead of an actual collaborative effort.

On the other hand, who would they collaborate with? Mozilla is busy selling VPNs or something and Apple wants nothing to do with Google's ad practices. Unpleasant all around.
As others have mentioned, it makes more sense in the context of all 8 (eventually 9) books. The show is only around book 5 so far.
Why did the US have to systemically mass murder Native Americans and enslave Africans Americans and fight over seas wars in Vietnam and North Korea? If you can assert their atrocities, I can so also assert the US's. You are dodging, not me.
> That's not what I asked, but maybe I can try to rephrase it. It seems odd to be going to such verbose lengths to defend something you wrote but apparently don't want other people to see.

I appreciate the attempt at clarity but I don't see a question here.
> If you're fiscally and socially liberal but feel very strongly about preventing abortion you might end up holding your nose while voting for the R candidate.

Not to get into a flamewar or anything, but if you're trying to prevent abortion then voting for the R candidate isn't a sensible choice. Hand in hand with wishing to ban abortion, they generally are hostile to the very policies (free birth control, such as IUD, on demand) that are the most effective in preventing abortion. Colorado cut teen birth rate and teen abortion rate in half simply by offering free IUDs[1].

The thing with the two party system is that the real choice for voters happens in the primaries. This is the chance to swing the party in a different direction, since in the general election people will typically hold their nose and vote a straight ticket even if they don't like all the positions their candidate holds.

[1] https://www.colorado.gov/pacific/sites/default/files/PSD_Tit...
Not quite how it works. The SSD will never have a capacity lower than its rated capacity.

For the failures I've seen, once the SSD goes to do a write operation and there's no free blocks left, it will lock into read-only mode. And at that point it is dead. Time to get a new one.
How did Mozilla survive as a business? Why is Brave around?
I think the best way to think about it is, you have teams where hadoop queries take 5+ hours to run. You port that same data into arrow, now that same query takes 30 seconds.
Wow, that sounds pretty hardcore! I suppose what's considered "from scratch" evolves over time. I'm old enough to have written bytes to 0xA000 (and the pain of doing page-switching in VESA modes), so even this "putPixel() on a canvas" is not exactly "from scratch" from that perspective!
The left literally treated the last 4 years as an election fraud scandal that they refused to shut down.

I'm generally in the center, but dislike when one party treats the other as solely being the problem. While I can't think of a specific qanon level of craziness on that side, they have their own, different craziness.
Why did you select Bernie Sanders as the most extreme person in Congress on the left? Why not Maxine Waters or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez? Once you can answer that question, you might discover something you weren't expecting in why this divisiveness continues to accelerate.
How would Linux kernel development survive as a business?
In a given day I code in 3 or 4 different languages, and sometimes I'll brain fart and totally forget something like how to get the character at a specific index in a string for THIS language.

Sometimes my google queries are so entry-level that even I chuckle, but I do worry what my employer would think if they saw "how to create a date in java"
I feel like I did something stupid
In December I quit my job to start on my own, with no real funding. After working on the same project for five years I felt things were out of place. It’s probably a feeling of the times, things just didn’t feel right anymore. It was a project about applying natural language processing and machine learning technology to biomedical literature. The idea was solid, still is, in my head: apply named entity linking using ontologies, and use embeddings of those ontologies to analyze, navigate and recommend literature. Basically a search engine. It just kinda never took off. These problems are hard, harder than I expected them to be. Technically challenging, sure, marketing wise: darned near impossible.

I wanted to do something on my own, disrupt the academic publishing industry. And slowly an idea formed: build an academic reference manager, integrate ActivityPub for collaboration, and then add IPFS for sharing documents. As a desktop app, so as long as there were peers: it’d be very hard to turn off. If it would be a joy to use it’d be a triple whammy: great platform for the organizing references, social features to discuss and collaborate on published and gray literature, while transparently building a peer to peer network of those files and discussions. Monetize it with a subscription fee.

The idea mostly came out of sheer spite. Academic publishing felt like a scam, publishers take money from publicly funded institutes, never pay the authors, never pay the reviewers, and never contributes anything back to science except for conjured-up self important metrics like “impact”.

I romanticized the idea, thinking it could be done by myself. And it be done, just not by myself in the time I have before I’ve eaten through all my savings.
Just some musings of someone who got sucked into the whole “just say its AI and they’ll throw money your way”-hype. That’s not how that goes. Somewhat stuck now.
It's not moving to goalposts to acknowledge that the USSR beat us to space and that a large part of their collapse was due directly to the influence of the US.
Agreed. We'd be happy to host a conversation on that topic!
Interesting that this is now a much more generous title than, "Yellen Accepted $700K Speaking Fees from Citadel; Will Not Recuse from Hearing"
I'm done with Hacker News, you guys just upvote marketing and politics.
> For decades, I've been trying to get more people to engage in the financial markets because that's how wealth gets created.

You want more investors?

> You can have fun for a while, but soon the Wall Street machine will take notice – and then squash you like a bug.

No, you want more suckers.
Hey, I also worked at this company! (and left after 6 months)
For me part of the cultish ness is justified because I have to teach about 100 non programmers to use R and rmd every year. Tidyverse solves the big problem that R used to have was that there were hundreds of ways to do things, none of the functions had consistent naming or calling signatures and it was hard to Google sensible answers. Tidyvers is fast, consistent and has good docs. Pipes discourage lots of mutable state which is a major cause of errors in non programmers code. I think if you are going to be sharing your code with other researchers and are not using tidyverse then These days I think you basically are doing it wrong.
Then you have to do 1000x the sequencing, which can get expensive on long read technologies :)

That said, that’s basically how a lot of NGS works in things like cancer sequencing on Illumina platforms.
"The left literally treated the last 4 years as an election fraud scandal that they refused to shut down."

Please cite sources for Democratic senators, congresspeople, and/or party officials advancing these claims.
By auctioning the default search engine slot.
Thanks for such a thoughtful comment. I think I'm going to need to let this one percolate for a while!
I don't know anything about Stroustroup or Torvalds, but Wozniak wanted $80k to talk to my computing group at CMU back in the day. That's definitely 6 figures now.
Until four years ago this case might have been arguable. In 2016 it lost any cogency: a fringe candidate took the top job, and they voted for him again in even larger numbers four years later.

There is absolutely no fringe candidate on the other side with anywhere near that kind of power. The closest you get is a Presidential candidate who was rejected. The highest office holders an objective observer would identify as "fringe" are Representatives, or perhaps that one Senator.

None of them is very powerful. They receive outsized attention in the media, and are pushed by their opponents as having far more power than they do, but no rational person would compare that to electing and then re-electing a conspiracy theorist to the top job -- supported by large numbers of legislators at all levels.

We still have to deal with our own internal biases, as you say. But they're entirely insufficient to justify any kind of equivalence. The fringe really does run that party.
Extremely refreshing
Brave is terrible example. Brave is vc funded or ICO funded.
Mozilla depends on donations and selling the search engine slot.
You can now register for PyCon US 2021
I agree wholeheartedly. Another thought that comes to mind is the idea that laws are a weak guarantee of outcome.
People as smart as Rubin, Clinton, and Greenspan knew this was bad policy. Greenspan famously encouraged ARMs before the crash. After his chairmanship he was amply rewarded.

It could, of course, all be as you say and these are just instances of public servants doing what is in the public good who go on to get enriched by the industries their policies benefited. I don't think so though.
The idea is brilliant, I can imagine this enabling localized social apps all over the world to take off. However, the demo is not very compelling. If you're trying to get companies to trust your infrastructure to build on top of, you should really consider dogfood-ing your product to completion - show how a competing social app might look like and what customizations it offers.
That's exactly what the UK did, they ordered over 400 million doses of various vaccines before major trials had even begun, and intends on giving spare supply away, starting with Ireland.

Source: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-55274833

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2021/01/31/britain-give...
> We are talking about the general practice and not specifically Yellen.

> Are they all forms of bribery?

Reagan and Clinton didn't become cabinet officials after cashing in on speeches, and both the article and this thread center on Yellen. Don't attempt to move the goal posts.

> If you are going to accuse people of corruption, you need to have
> evidence that is stronger than the existence of a motive, which is
> basically all you have currently.

This is not how it works.

Read (b)(1) here: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/208

Then, read (d) here: https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/5/2635.502

Yellen disclosed the sources of her honoraria and acknowledged a financial interest (here: https://extapps2.oge.gov/201/Presiden.nsf/PAS+Index/18A4D129...). She received written permission based on the determination "that the interest is not so substantial as to be deemed likely to affect the integrity" of her work. The question isn't whether she has committed a crime (she has not), nor whether she has motive to unfairly benefit Citadel (she does). Rather, the question is whether that financial interest is substantial enough to likely affect her work (a discretionary call already made by a government official), and whether the process itself is fair to other market participants (I contend that it is not).
Murder on My Mind
Well this is amazing. Wow.
Curves I had to leave out, as many other things. I explained my motivations in this other comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26020311

Constructive solid geometry I do mention as an extension to the raytracer [0], but it doesn't have a dedicated chapter. Perhaps for the 2nd Edition? :P

[0] https://gabrielgambetta.com/computer-graphics-from-scratch/0...
SEEKING WORK, remote or Austin, Tx

Seeking collaboration across all phases of design and development with creators of instructional material. Highly experienced in the design and development of instructional content and applications in mathematics and physics. Experience includes successful time in instructional design in academia, as well as significant private sector development. Can address issues from the most subtle design to the most nuanced development with attention to value for the learner.

- Instructional design
- Visualizations and simulations
- Scientific computing and numerical methods
- OpenGL, WebGL, GPU computing
- Web based or installed applications

Website: http://www.vizitsolutions.com/

Email: akluge@vizitsolutions.com

Linkedin: http://www.linkedin.com/in/avkluge
I agree that one side is worse than the other, but people tend to think the difference between their own side and the opposition is 20 to 100. In reality the difference is probably closer to 60 to 70.
it doesn't because the virus is going to become more deadly. and kills lots of people in the us.
Exactly! They can't even consider the possibility it seems because they don't want to even consider it. Its almost as entrenched as what some might call faith that the US was superior to the USSR and if you even suggest the idea of anything else you are downvoted because you are the bad guy for even considering it.
Did you just compare Stadia to a console plugged directly into to your T.V. with a hardwired controller?

Your problem isn't with Stadia... your problem is with physics.

Yeah Stadia doesn't run with 16ms latency at 69fps.

But for casual gamers 30 to 60 fps and 40 milliseconds is perfectly adequate for a multiplayer game especially considering it's run in the browser...and what tons of people use all over the world everyday!
> There's a lot of cognitive overhead in pervasively-parameterized codebases

The lack of generics leads to occasional excesses in code generation (-cough- k8s/client-go -cough-) which can be even worse. I suspect that observing this in practice lead the Go core team to be more receptive to generics proposals.
If you like the idea, I highly recommend taking a look at "3d math primer for graphics and game development" which is a pretty easy read as well.
This is the first time i've heard of individual investors beating the market. If some can do so consistently, shouldn't they be running a hedge fund instead of twiddling with their retirement?
Please show me anyone that would think that running wayland with an unsafe kernel would make it safe?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Efforts_to_impeach_Donald_Trum...

Has plenty of names and links to read all about it, if you missed it.
Thanks for the kind words! But I have to say the business card raytracer is amazing <3
iOS blocks the word “Asian” if you enable Limit Adult Websites
Apple to Invest $3.6B in Kia Motors for Apple Car Production
“nobody has made a compelling argument for WGA for personalized med” is a huge overreach. It’s done routinely now at most academic cancer centers and often is useful for guiding treatment decisions. There are several multi billion dollar companies that do this already.
I happened to work a few years in German company that made fiber and carrier ethernet products for telecoms.
We had a lot of ethics and professionalism and really good feature set, even occasionally we out innovated other companies, but we didn't have the price point that Huawei can achieve, hence contracts went to China.
Don't be snarky. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Yup, when there is nothing a company can do in a situation to avoid anti-trust regulation, that is a pretty good indication anti-trust regulation should have already happened.
Insiders dish on what it's like to work for Andy Jassy, Jeff Bezos' successor
I recently finished the audiobooks for The Years of Lyndon Johnson. It was 14 months of on-and-off routine listening.

The thing about these books is not only that they're about a famous person, but that they also are about a person that left a huge paper trail, was extremely social, and died young, leaving lots of people who remembered Johnson and were eventually willing to tell the unflattering stories of his youth. In this way it would stand alone as an incredible literary or investigative portrait of a person. The fact that it covers the central political developments of the United States in the 20th Century is just icing on the cake.
Mozilla is financed directly by Google. Brave is injecting their own ads into websites.

Not really the best examples.
Rivendell is a complete radio broadcast automation solution
That's an interesting view to have - I know that at the start of Trump's term there was a lot of discussion about Comey's involvement and Russia that I really just wish people would shut up about. Most of that died down after the Mueller report. And by the end of his term Trump was (IMO) pretty blatantly trying to subvert the election. Where do you get your news, if I may ask?
1. Dependency resolution algorithm failed in places that Poetry handles fine.

2. When Airflow added a dependency choice (based on licences) the setup script required an ENV var choosing one to be set, pipenv swallowed the stdout output and dumped a Pip stacktrace that didn't help diagnose the issue.

3. Mysterious bugs on new pipenv releases that usually manifested as a Pip stack-trace or setuptools stack-trace.

4. Sometimes the bugs were installed Pip version dependent, which made replication hard.

There was other stuff, but can't quite remember off the top of my head.

But yeah, we spent a lot of time trying to figure out why pipenv had broken again. Poetry has been a breeze in comparison.
Is geothermal intermittent?
SMART monitoring.

In my experience the SMART data on SSDs is pretty good at pointing to failures.

Either that or the SSD simply disappears from the system. But that happens to HDDs also.
This was a talking point like 10 years ago which isn’t remotely true today
I am not on either side in the US, there isn't a party that represents me, but something stuck out to me.

>culminating in an armed assault that some now claim as a false flag operation?

We had to hear all summer about how it was really Boogaloo Boys/White Nationalists/The CIA and not BLM rioting. This is something I see as endemic to all sides. I think this must be perspective based as everything in the above list has a mirror image from the other party, and in both cases it seems like a fair criticism.
I have a reasonably clear view of the Uetliberg from my kitchen window, so of course I'm biased :)
If curious see also

2015 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9026403
Bring on the Chinese clones!
Human memory is truly fascinating. I recently was trying to remember the name of a software vendor sales contact who I dealt with early last year.

For the better part of the past week, try as I might I couldn't remember either his first name or last, but I had a vague feeling about the "fit" or "taste" for lack of a better word of his name. After a few days of conscious effort, yesterday I remembered his first name spontaneously and then suddenly his last name too. Almost like a AWS Glacier request.
> Giving people checks during a recession was unthinkable by Republicans as recently as 20 years ago (eg the 2001-2002 recession).

It was extremely thinkable in 2001 when George W. Bush did it[1].

[1] https://www.sfgate.com/politics/article/Bush-signs-1-3-trill...