skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ah, contracting work is really really hard. I've only ever done consulting as part of a company, and the conditions there that made it sustainable seemed to be:

1) pick a specialty, so you have little or no competition, in a field where your clients all have a lot of money to spend and then must spend it on someone (with their only option being you)
2) have very skilled very connected sales people constantly getting your next contract, you need to have maybe a half year's worth of projects always lined up and ready to go
3) build a reputation, so then even amongst your very few competitors, people ask around when they need a job done, and your name always come up near the top of the list

When you crunched the numbers at the end, 60% of the employees were always making billable hours on a project at any time, and our clients paid the company maybe 4x per hour what they paid the employees. So very little profit total for the company, but enough to be sustainable. Oh, and the sales guys were the best paid by far, all making at least double what our founders/c-level made.

Now, if I was just on my own, I have no idea how I would be able to recreate those conditions. I don't currently have some kind of ridiculous specialty or reputation, so I'd just be nameless in an endless pool of candidates. Then with such a lopsided demand-supply balance, I'd get paid the minimum level humanly possible, and then even lower than that if they were willing to put up with remote workers from different timezones. There's no way I'm hiring a sales guy to build me a pipeline, and if I was that good at doing so myself, I'd be way better off just joining a company and get paid millions to sell much more valuable contracts instead. So, instead, probably once I find a client, I would probably want to maximize how many times I come back to them as a repeat customer. So then at point I'm basically now an employee of sorts, who gets paid as little as possible, and is actively trying to be replaced by someone cheaper at any time.

So, uh, yeah, that all just translates to, I'd always go for a salaried employee position. The calculus in the company's mind with regards to compensation just changes completely once you're at that point, more along the lines of what I've referred to previously.
Wow i must say that’s a pretty good approach to see the candidate communication skills
I've yet to see bitcoin produce anything close to the utility of something like M-Pesa for the unbanked.
I'm glad you said storage and not "batteries". Batteries are not even in the ballpark for this kind of usage.

The reasonable means of storage are hydroelectric (via water) and offsetting usage of fuels (coal/natural gas/oil/wood/biogas/nuclear). I'm pro-hydro because it is reliable (24h/day) throttable, significant, non-emitting, renewable, and behaves like a battery. The downside is that locals will lose their precious local ecosystem under the reservior. Some costs are worth paying. There has been concern that reservoirs emit methane - this is easily solvable by evacuating the plant material and topsoil ahead of time. As for the concrete issue, I don't have any good answers.

If you really want solar/wind at 4x demand capacity, then the hydro reservoirs could be refilled by pumping water from a lower reservoir. But I think a better mix is just more hydro: use wind/solar when you have it, hydro when you don't.

To back up my battery point, I'll quote Bill Gate's new book: "How many batteries would they need in order to power Tokyo for three days, until the storm passes and they can turn the turbines back on? The answer is more than 14 million [1kwh thought experiment varity $100] batteries. That's more storage capacity than the world produces in a decade."
Ah, last I had heard this project had been abandoned. I'm happy to see that a community team has picked it up, dusted it off, and is maintaining it.
Ok so HN is a bit annoying as I can't really reply to things you said directly now... but let me break a few things down.

Firstly, did we like become best friends or something? I love how you described homeschooling haha.

Secondly, really just want to say, yes... perhaps my use of the phrase "white savior complex" is a bit cringy and social justice-y, which I'm actually not really part of that camp. I'm just applying that based on some observation of what I see. I just wish the socio-political crap would mostly go away and let the technology of blockchain/bitcoin/whatever stand on its own. Some of the proponents I mentioned earlier in the thread also just make my skin crawl a bit. There is inherent dishonesty in their gospel, I personally feel.

I'm simply trying to point out what I feel is a dangerous game they play, especially with the massive boom and bust cycles bitcoin and its ilk undergo.

I'd feel far less cynical if there wasn't some pyramid-esque (no, bitcoin itself is not a pyramid scheme, but the community and proponents surrounding it make it feel like one in many ways) action going on around it, like all the activity between BTC and tethers and other shitcoins that makes it all look like painting the tape.

I'm of the opinion that currently, this all feels like a redistribution of the wealth in a weird casino like fashion, and not a legitimate growth in real value. That's just me though. For every rich-on-paper cryptocurrency fan, there are also plenty that have lost their shirts in this experiment.

Hope this ramble made any sense. I really appreciate you chiming in, imwillofficial.
It's so funny...

Once a person clings to Marxism / Socialism, it's like that expression "when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail." They begin to see Marxist-related thought patterns everywhere, such as "Competency? that must be due to [class based] privilege!" rather than a person actually investing their time, studying/experimenting/researching/inventing/creating, despite hardships.

Recently, during the winter storm, I cooked breakfast for a neighbor (a college student studying Journalism). His response to me giving him some free food: "You know what this is, right? It's socialism."

Me: "Uh... it's just sharing some food one time." while quietly thinking: "Gee, I hope he doesn't call every aspect of sharing "socialism" because that would be annoying and cringey."
Clubhouse suffers ‘data breach’ after developer designs app for Android users
I have one trouble with voice user interfaces: how difficult or feasible is it to localize them? I can easily translate the UI of a text-based application in an afternoon to my minority language. Especially if it uses gettext, it is a matter of editing a single text file. Will I be able to do that easily for a voice user interface?
It’s crazy that the function you call to remove an element from a list is `append`.
> everything but LTE (and I gues 5G)

Oh wow. Various types of monitoring use cellular, house alarms etc.

Are those things just using LTE now?
Yes, and all have been rejected thus far. Finding the right balance for those things seems to be hard.

See:

Problem statement: https://go.googlesource.com/proposal/+/master/design/go2draf...

Proposal one: https://go.googlesource.com/proposal/+/master/design/go2draf...

Proposal two: https://go.googlesource.com/proposal/+/master/design/32437-t...
Your quote is not literal. Here is the more relevant literal quotes:

"""

You may very well have statistics, but these statistics may very well be false, especially when it comes to including figures that represent quality of life (i.e. how anxious you are on a constant basis with respect to your property or being assaulted).

...

But, as it says in this very New York Times article, package theft goes completely unreported and is therefore not part of your statistics. Likewise, sexual assaults in subways are only very recently being tracked in New York.

"""
TypeScript Port of Denque.js
Most LANs have firewalls that only accept the model of a distant central server, though.
Languages that do Result + panic, or languages that do checked + unchecked exceptions. Which is best?

IMO, I think "Result + panic" works better because it's a cleaner separation in the sense that handling panics is strongly discouraged. Whereas handling unchecked exceptions happens all the time, and leads to confusion.

Edit: To clarify, I would consider Go to be "Result + panic" even though it doesn't have a Result interface. It has a convention of returning a tuple of "value, err", which is handled by the caller and is essentially an informal Result.
Currencies can be valued based on interest rate differentials.

Bitcoin is a bit underdeveloped there.
When I read the title of this thread, what I pictured in my mind was an e-ink version of a paper wall calendar or a monthly desk calendar; a grid 7 squares wide and 5 down that can display any month. The user could tap on a day to zoom into it, and hand write some notes/events/etc with a stylus like they would a paper calendar. Perhaps it could have an optional sidebar on the zoomed-in version that shows Google Calendar appointments.

I can imagine someone like my mom using such a device, she still tracks all of her appointments on a paper wall calendar.
> Can someone please explain to me the appeal of telegram (as opposed

Or Slack?
Wow, he was 66 when he authored an O'Reilly book on developing Chrome apps. That's very impressive. I wonder if I could have the same curiosity on future technologies when I reach that age.
About 15 € every couple of months, maximum 3 months allowed without charging, is the cheapest pre-paid I can remember around here.
Dude you're totally fine. No offense taken.

I'm actually of the opinion that I need to be offended once in awhile.

It makes me think.
Congrats!

One thing I worry about in such situations is the competence of my colleagues - if everyone got a promotion to take this job, is it a good environment to learn and grow in that role I got newly promoted to?
I've literally asked for this in every user satisfaction survey they've sent me for the last 5 years, and like you I hope this is a sign they're heading in this direction.

The competition in this space is large, but there are a ton of trade offs between various services and in many countries (hungary, for one) the local alternatives simply suck.
Opinion: Inflation Is Everywhere
All what you say makes sense, especially as one becomes more comfortable with tactics but I maintain formal proofs are a lot harder to parse than regular math proofs. Having to write for both machine and human distorts a proof's natural flow and reading them often feels like trying to understand partially commented code by executing it in your head.

Well commented proofs are good to communicate intent but if you also want to be able to reproduce a similar proof, it's often useful to understand why tactics were deployed as they were. The existence of the wonderful https://plv.csail.mit.edu/blog/alectryon.html bears out the importance and utility of this.

> For understanding math

My contention, which I believe is shared by the article, is that this understanding is often flimsier than most think, particularly as one leaves well trafficked areas held together by tacit knowledge and knowledge of multiple reinforcing paths shared within communities with relevant expertise. However, even that is insufficient for less used lemmas.

This structuring of knowledge will be useful for mathematics education and research both, especially from the perspective of an individual human trying to safely use results of proofs.

> we really need tools to help us visualize structure of proofs

The output proof is a program, so the problem of visualizing proofs is much the same as visualizing programs and visual programming, sharing the same hurdles. Perhaps friendlier naming and formatting of output code in proof tools will be useful. I believe something more useful would be queryable visualizations of how theorems and lemmas connect and relate to each other.
It's a really cool feature of sqlite. I use it in a prover benchmark tool [1] where each run produces a new sqlite file that I can rsync elsewhere. The tool can then list these files and connect to multiple files to do joins across them (to compare results from different runs). It's very convenient.

[1] https://github.com/sneeuwballen/benchpress
I would advice doing it in batches, you pay by percentage on doing multiple transfers doesn't affect you on the monetary level.

Concretely there should be no difference, but your spirit would be less impacted.

I did this when I first used TW many years ago, when I had no idea if the service was reliable and the transfers would take days.
I like the idea but putting a script to the home page is probably too invasive. Can you make it into a single static image or JSON/static HTML based?
One of the most difficult things I had to learn to do as an engineering manager was to be able to confront attitude problems and take action as quickly as possible.

Performance problems can be fixed. Attitude problems are much harder to solve. You will face this situation multiple times in your career as engineering manager.

I'm not very aggressive or confrontational by nature, so having that conversation with the engineer in question is absolutely not something I looked forward to. This obviously led to an unfair amount of work for the others in the team, a feeling of unfair treatment, resentment and a hit to morale and performance.

Two situations were so extreme that we've had to lay off the engineer(s) in question, which is one of the hardest things to do as a manager. I can tell you that in both instances the teams fared much better afterwards.
I mean, we don't call the Pope an influencer but we do Joel Osteen, we don't call Xi Jinping an influencer but we do Donald Trump, we don't call Satya Nadella an influencer but we do Elon Musk. It seems to be the dividing line between influencers is that they're using their influence for financial gain and that it's their primary asset. It doesn't have to be direct monetization but it has to be something where the motivation for them to influence is financial.
Say brand again, say brand one more time
Fixing bad things in somewhat inconsistent order is absolutely a thing we want to, and need to, do.

Otherwise we'll be gridlocked by trying to be foolishly self consistent, and we won't be able to rein back developments that make things worse in new ways.
Unfortunately I have come to believe there is no banking service that won't do things like this at some point. For example, I used to swear by N26 until I had a small issue (involving some tiny amount <€50). I told support very politely that I wasn't happy. Their response was full nuclear "pay everything immediately or we're sending your details to a collection agency". I was amazed, I had been a loyal customer for years and this was such a disproportionate response to something tiny. I had been intending to try and work things out,but from that response I simply withdrew all the money from my account and closed it. Now I use Transferwise, and have had no such problems, so far. But I'm under no illusions that I won't have problems in the future.
Im pretty sure that people said the same thing about the jews under hitler. Human beings are very good at denying and rationalizing away unpleasent truths.
Why not just make it into a mirror? People buy mirrors all the time. When they renovate, when the old mirror breaks, or when they decorate a new house. Its huge existing market. They are more likely to buy a mirror with an extra feature like a calendar, much easier than buy an e-calendar. Which they never buy, and might not see enough of a use of.
Essentially, making a mirror, already a primary useful device, more useful will sell better, than trying to create a new market for an e-device.
As someone without a ton of experience with Go, a good amount the Go code I have encountered "in the wild", has actually been more difficult to read and understand than code in more complicated languages because I have to read through and understand all of these patterns. Hopefully the addition of generics will help with that. But IMO the simplicity of go actually hinders readability.
What can we learn from Vietnam?
Also see this talk by Martin Klepmann on streams as materialized views:

"Turning the database inside-out with Apache Samza" (2015): https://www.confluent.io/blog/turning-the-database-inside-ou...

previous discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9145197
I’ll quote you on this next time someone on HN quotes him stating how “prophetic” he is. It’s not the first time and not the last time, so if the problem with me agreeing with it is flamebait (but the prophetic comment isn’t), then I’m not going to bother defending it. You’re being ridiculous.
> But he also says vaccinated people should keep wearing masks, because they could still get infected and be infections.

I wonder if, like when he "pushed" the numbers for the herd immunity threshold higher to push people to vaccinate he's deliberately omitting the data coming from Israel, which says that a full vaccination reduces the transmission of the virus and even prevents infection.

This is what irks me of the current public health policies worldwide. Every "good" news must be buried under a pile of terrorizing, negative news, because those in charge foolishly believe that hope for an improved situation might lower compliance with non pharmaceutical interventions.

In the end, they're either covering up for their failures (botched EU vaccine rollout) or just going to increase vaccine hesitancy (why bother, when everything stays the same?).
Stock traders co-opt government optical telegraph for HFT (1834)
> They use this to jack up the price

The Titan RTX is ~$2,500, which is incredibly well-priced considering that a 100G dual NIC is going to cost you $1,250.
> Go is not an easy programming language. It is simple in many ways

This, exactly. It’s worth contrasting this with Python, which has a reputation for being simple but is actually extremely complex - but it is easy (at least for small programs).

However, I can’t help thinking that the two shouldn’t be in opposition. IMO it should be possible for a language to be both simple and easy to use.
I would never be able to set foot inside a plane unless I knew that it can glide to safety without borh engines. Also TCAS.
> It's kind of facile to argue about a hypothetical future a thousand years in the future when we're facing crises right now that depend on solving energy issues yesterday.

Its facile to dismiss the negative of creating waste that has to be managed for thousands of years based on a sense of urgency for solving immediate problems. Thats payday loan mentality, not statecraft.

> Scenario 1: a hypothetical societal collapse happens and scientific knowledge and written language are somehow lost. A handful of people explore a dangerous area and are swiftly killed by radiation from tampering with a storage facility.

Society collapses and the remaining primitive population is decimated or eradicated because of unmanaged waste entering the ecosystem.

> Scenario 2: millions die from climate-related catastrophes and ecological collapse leads to famines that kill millions more.

You think society collapses to the extent that we can no longer manage the nuclear waste, and millions of people don’t die? Millions of people die in both scenarios, but in one they are greater risk of nuclear waste exposure.

> We know we're facing scenario two as a distinct possibility, or we'd be happily burning coal until we can't find any more.

What is your plan to get China et al to stop burning coal, by the way?

> Fuel reprocessing is a thing, modern reactors deplete the fuel much more thoroughly, and there isn't even that much of it. All of the spent fuel France has used since the 1970s fits in a small fraction of their basketball-court sized storage facility.

I can roll over my payday loan on a miminum wage paycheck, what could go wrong?
Yeah but just really rough plans, unlike the ones I made before with steps and others.
It would stand out in getting to the interview stage. If there are multiple applicants for the same position and if I had to decide who to bring in, then the profile makes a difference. Similarly, if I have multiple candidates who all cleared the interview at almost the same time and my open positions are limited, then I would pick the one with more open contributions. But generally, these situations (all else being equal) are pretty rare.
go code style is ugly.
I feel proud of what this young person accomplished, but I also really hope they didn’t skip some important life experiences in the late teens and twenties that can’t really be replicated later in life. That’s a special time.
> Giving maps a runtime penalty of random iteration in order just to punish devs who don't read docs is annoying

Can you explain what you mean by "runtime penalty?" Last I checked, the iteration is only random wrt its starting offset; after that, it proceeds linearly through the buckets. So you only generate one random integer per `range`, which seems acceptably cheap.
> I think you will find that there are lots of small utility programs and libraries that you won't have available to you in 10 years with this approach.

Then I'll either find an alternate source that has enough reliability to satisfy me, or write them myself, or do without.

(Or I'll end up building what amounts to my own distro. Which is something I have indeed thought of doing, because my preferences are rather idiosyncratic.)
The problem is bioaccumulation of radioactive isotopes.
I do the same, even just for my own notes. That way it's all there, accessible, searchable, in the same place. Far better than everyone squirreling their own critical data away in a different tree-trunk.
I would rather have policy push for interventions that have a better impact on transmission. While the latest ECDC report[1] says "use them, can't hurt", it acknowledges the lack of evidence of masks (and thus effectiveness) in preventing transmission in a community settings.

[1] https://www.ecdc.europa.eu/sites/default/files/documents/cov...
I think you whooshed on the point. Indeed, all those other guys were worse. And they're not here, and we are. China isn't the threat they're being presented as, they're just a convenient point of outrage for a demographic that craves outrage.

In fact, if the upthread point had labelled the PRC the greatest threat to global freedom of the past three decades, then I'd be inclined to agree! But that's not what it said. And we made it through the cold war just fine.
Yeah the fact that said service is the very first result on a major search engine, who's conveniently the owner of said service, has nothing to do with it. Organic congregation and all.
I think Silver is the straw that will break the camels back, it’s hard to know if it will be in 1 or 50 years but it’s fungible and affordable while also having increased industrial usage. At this point it is almost at parity for industrial consumption as it was in the 90s when silver was used to develop analog film. It’s certainly true that topological insulators may replace silver in many electron transfer applications. That being said medical uses due to the way it kills micro organisms through sulfur attraction, and it’s thermal properties, will possibly continue to expand industrial consumption.
This makes it very unclear what's going on. I had to test it to find that this specific use is special cased to not copy. And very surprisingly you don't even have to assign back to the same variable to get this no-copy behavior!

Edit: I didn't do my test quite right. It's not really special-cased. But it's still very surprising to see this happen:

Code:

s1 := []int{1, 2, 3, 10, 11, 12}
s2 := []int{4, 5, 6}
s3 := s1[:2]
s4 := append(s3[:2], s2...)
fmt.Println(s1)
fmt.Println(s4)

Output:

[1 2 4 5 6 12]
[1 2 4 5 6]