skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is my favorite example of the Monte Carlo method. I first learned it as a farmer needs to estimate the size of a circular pond surrounding by a square fence he can't see over, and he's given an infinite supply of pebbles. It's a wonderful learning tool. One question that comes up involves the finite precision of the variables you're using. In this post, it would be this part:

(x - 0.5)**2 + (y - 0.5)**2 <= 0.25

In C, it's easy to state the limit on how precise the final estimate for pi can be because you have to state the type of the variable you're using to store it, and you know have many bits that type gets allocated. In Python, this doesn't seem so simple (https://docs.python.org/3/tutorial/floatingpoint.html#repres...).

I question whether Python knows internally to use a heap to keep scaling how many digits can fit in the pi estimate as the Monte Carlo goes on, or if there's a limit to existing pre-defined sizes that caps out the precision. Also, it isn't readily obvious to me how to parameterize the np.random call to keep getting more and more digits in the values for x and y so the above calculation can keep getting more precise. It'd be cool to see a Python implementation that really can scale until an arbitrary amount of available memory is used, and see the relationship of memory used to pi digits calculated.
I'm feeling kinda weird about this. Programming is a craft, it's specific set of skills which enables you to develop computer software. If your intent is to sell your skill eg. time to employer then you are probably never going to be "rich". I think that software development have one of the lowest financial barriers to go into own business even as a freelancer. This attitude makes author think that it's his "worst choice". Obviously not the fact that he have clearly above the average salary.
It is possible for a programmer and a janitor to both not like their jobs and voice their opinions online about why.
Useful Tips to Keep Your Skin Looking Its Finest
There was no hate intended in my comment, but I can understand how you came to that conclusion. My experience posting on r/javascript of Reddit has taught me some developers are insecure, extreme conspiracy-theory paranoid insecure, about working without their favorite framework.
So which boot bootcamp did he start with?
Although still new I'm wondering whether Kotlin could be admitted to the boring technology category given that it was built to dovetail with Java and has first class Spring support?
I can easily see how someone could end up in such a mental trap despite having chosen a career that is arguably one of the best paid one for something that's not requiring a top level education.

My first employer was a service company selling programmers to big companies to do routine maintenance and evolution job. They would staff you in really boring departments, doing really uninteresting job, and would happily keep you in that same situation for years if the client was ready to pay. I could have stayed there, learning nothing, being employed to the minimum of my abilities, and wake up ten years later once the end customer didn't have any need for that particular skill anymore.

It's one of the most dangerous situation to be in, as a developer. You feel comfortable, you earn a decent pay, and then wake up one day in a state of crisis, realizing you're now completely obsolete and on a precarious situation.

Luckily for me, people close to me had warned me of that kind of trap very early, and so I stayed there only for a year then moved on to a start up (where i could work on great tech and great problems with great people, and being paid for that).
I tend to agree, but there's been two competing posts on HN today, one about attracting developers like ants to honey with exciting new technology and the other about avoiding hype and delivering products with stable tech.

If i were a lawyer, I'd go to school once, and reap benefit form that education as an assets and build on it with experience.
Software is not like that. Yes school is an asset, but it dates, and so does experience when the market moves constantly.

Again I'm not complaining, but it's a thing.
There must always be punishment. The comments above are too summarized to get into it, but when that kind of amnesty happens, it is never complete.

But if the punishment is so crass that the people prefer to lose their lives instead, that's a clear signal that your society has a problem, and your new regime isn't all that good either.
>so that once you’re bought into their ecosystem it ties you to Apple products in perpetuity.

Only because of the seamlessness (within reason) of the experience.

Otherwise, there's nothing to switching to another OS for all or any part of it.

Many (most?) apps people use everyday are web- or Electron based, so they can switch to any other Windows or Linux with e.g. Chrome.

Their music is in some streaming service (Spotify, Apple Music, Google Play, etc) all of which play on other OSes (and in any case, they can change subscription and they haven't lost anything). Or, for the fussier, it's mp3 or flac files, they can easily move. Even bought music (aac) from the iTunes Store is playable in other platform (since Apple has removed the DRM for a decade or so).

Ditto for movies. It's all streaming nowadays, and you can just switch to another streaming service (and all play everywhere anyway).

As for professional apps, most heavy ones (MS Office, Adobe Suite, Cubase, Live, Resolve, etc) run just fine in both OSX and Windows, and come with dual installers, so you can switch if you like (some even allow for multiple computers at the same time).

(If you're using Logic or FCPX, then sure, you'll need to find another program, and go through the pain of migrating your projects).

For mobile it's the same thing. E.g. you can sync just fine with an Android phone (you just don't get niceties like Handoff, Scan-to-Notes, etc).

So there's nothing special to "tie you to Apple products in perpetuity" except "I might lose the use of some apps that are Mac Only" (so same thing that would have tied you to Windows or Linux in perpetuity).
Astronomers publish map showing 25,000 supermassive black holes
I believe there is a teapot (too small to be detected) orbiting the Sun between the Earth and Mars, and no one has been able to disprove it. Don't quote me on this though.
In some countries is one of the safest way to get a job. Trying other careers may get you more free time, but it could be too much free time because you can't get a job at all. I'm not sure about if its a good long term strategy, but you need to survive the present to reach the future.

And you can get outdated in other careers too, there are a lot of advancements all over the field, and a lot of it is related to IT (i.e. data processing).
If you need another data point, my partner and I only pay about 25% of our combined after-tax salary in rent, living in a "major German city" (both employed in STEM). Factor in an additional 10/15% for living costs and we are left with significant disposable income, in my eyes.
There are ways to make programming an excellent career. I've found quite a few of them - some more lucrative than others, and some more creative than others. I don't think author of this article is on their way to finding any of them.
Bitcoin is, at this point, an ecological disaster and a crime against humanity.
If the company really provides value the employee wont leave just to work on a new framework. If your employee leaves you simply didn't provide enough value to them.
100th Anniversry of Communist Party of Italy [video]
100 anni del Partito Comunista d'Italia. Quella fiamma arde ancora nei cuori di chi lotta per il socialismo, contro l'ingiustizia di questo sistema. I padroni non hanno ancora vinto, li faremo tremare di nuovo. Il sol dell’avvenire sorgerà di nuovo.
I never got into this career for its earning potential, but because I just always loved programming. Somehow I've ended up in a FAANG making a lot of money, but the actual "programming" (writing code) portion of my job is small. I feel like there's some paradox there, but really, I just want to complain on the Internet. If you asked me at 10 what I wanted to be when I grew up it was "computer programmer" and here I am, though I took a very zig-zagged path to get there (no degree, and half a philosophy BA for example). And I'm living far from where I grew up and my parents and brother, because this is where the work is. etc.

So I'm not sure how much sympathy I have for this article. I kind of understand the tone, but frankly, my dad was a machinist, another kind of skilled labour job and until he got a job teaching it, he was miserable and mistreated and I got to see, growing up, what real blue collar sweatshop work was like and what real job dissatisfaction, underpay, severe long term unemployment, etc. was like.

The money I make is nice now, and I have a nice life, though I feel trapped. Maybe I can retire early and make skis and walk in the woods with my dog more.
But now you need to build an ETL system and run a data warehouse. And you need a team of people who know how to build and maintain those.
I suppose people cracking passwords might buy otherwise outdated CMP cards. Could be a boon for that space.
Felix Zulauf’s Guide to ‘Crazy’ Policies, Investment Bargains, and Bitcoin Mania
That article is very specific to the author's case, and to be sincere, it seems to be most because of the author's fault than the career he chose. He says coders are badly paid and it is getting worse but this is not true for many regions and niches.
For example, a backend Java Programmer specialized in Commerce Platforms (Hybris, SFCC, etc) earns very well in Latam because naturally after the pandemic there is a rush after the online channel and we have a shortage of professionals. I'm sure the same just applies to different programming areas and regions around the globe.
Another great advantage of the coder profession is that you can do it from anywhere in the world, so if you make the effort of learning which country/job pays the best (and accept english speaking coders) you can live in a place with low living costs earning a very decent salary (I mean, director level salary). I met many coders in Brazil that work for companies in the US and earn 5x what a local company would pay for the same job/skill.
So it is just a matter of better exploring the options you have and lose the neighborhood job mindset. It's not the career it's you.
When I think of something to be reminded about and I am near Alexa, I ask her to remind me.

Otherwise I have some temporary notes on paper, phone or laptop.
If you’re a programmer and tired of being a cost center then work at a company where software is the product not a cost of doing business. Then you’ll find the company is focused on growing you and your team instead of trying to minimize your effect on the bottom line.
I activity encourage folks to avoid Elixir. After working with Elixir, it's very difficult and demotivating to go back to Ruby, Java and the like.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedonic_treadmill
Investors love data. So why not dig into sustainability metrics?
This equally applies to a company's business process. Focus on a specific scalable business model that scales - don't make a special niche process for every "opportunity" that comes by.

It also applies to managing your life, personally. Know what things you do, what your personal goals are, and don't let yourself get distracted by the latest and greatest social media trends or stuff your friends are doing.

Focus. Mature. Achieve.
Reminds me of this video: https://www.reddit.com/r/nonononoyes/comments/lop1kw/united_...

CNN story about it:
https://www.cnn.com/2021/02/20/us/united-airlines-flight-ret...
It has warmed up a lot. It’s 50 degrees in Austin right now. On Monday it was 9. Yesterday it was 20 something in the morning.
Drugs are not “functionally legal” in the area you’ve pointed out, and the issue you point to is economic in origin not drug related. This is not a coherent argument.

Now the argument you’re getting to is somewhat coherent, which is it could be dangerous to let advertisers loose with severely dangerous and addictive drugs like heroine. But the answer to this is rather easy, you don’t. The same way tobacco advertising is regulated, you regulate drug advertising and provide outreach for those who are addicted.
£70k ($92k) seems like a pretty good salary to me? Probably quite a bit more than median income in both the US and UK, no? Doesn't seem like the worst choice of career even as experienced by OP, if we're talking about that in terms of income, which the OP largely is.

While the center of the short essay on it's surface is about income, I suspect, maybe, the real dissatifaction is that the author simply doesn't enjoy their job on the day-to-day, they find it unpleasant?
Yeah but one of the two is in the position to easily change careers while the other isn't.
Very common practice amongst top schools in the UK.
£55k is average for someone in the South outside of London. In London you can add £20k to that, and maybe another £10k in the City. (At least you could until recently.)

The answer is contract work. If someone can dodge IR35 rules and call themselves a "consultant" or a "solutions architect" they'll earn a lot more for almost identical work, with the useful option to leave gracefully if a project is toxic and on fire.

The other answer is to leave the UK. Engineering jobs pay much better in some EU countries, and engineering gets a lot more respect as a profession.
Indeed; £55k is well over median UK income. I’m quite a senior software engineer in the UK and I don’t earn anything like that — forget about £70k! That’s because I don’t work in finance and I’m fine with that. The hedonistic treadmill is not worth getting on, imo.
I think they run the risk of people giving up on pc gaming completely or never getting into it in the first place. A market that has and should be growing will shrink instead.
And at the same time, it lets them cut out the scalpers and sell straight to the miners who'll pay twice the price for a card - without the price-gouging upsetting gamers.
> How I thought I would make a huge buck while doing nothing
and found out that I'm wrong
As someone who quit a graduate program:

- it looks really really really bad on your CV to not finish a graduate degree. I dropped out for health reasons with an A+ GPA and still have to delicately explain what happened to interviewers. It looks worse than just having a masters degree.

- “just one more year of misery and then your career prospects will increase dramatically” is a very powerful argument and not just a sunk-cost fallacy.

- young people in PhD programs tend to have a lot of identity and psychological investment in getting their PhD and working as a researcher. For most PhD students, the occupation that most fulfills them is their research. It strikes me as very strange that you think PhD students have some secret marketable passion that they would pursue but instead they somehow got stuck in graduate school. Speaking for myself: a PhD program was the only feasible part for me to do something fulfilling. My current work as a software developer is tedious and boring by comparison and, frankly, not at all what I wanted to do with my life.

- PhD students rarely have any savings and their meager stipends are the only income they have. So “pursue [something] that actually fulfills you” is most likely impossible, since that ‘something’ is probably not a routine office/engineering job.
They'll be able to find value in nonmonopolized and nonalgorithmic versions of the services that Facebook has gobbled up, just like they did before Facebook existed.

I'm not making that call, I'm making a prediction and hoping it comes true, and contributing to a discussion that may possibly, in some small way, contribute to it coming true. If you look around this thread, you'll notice some other people that seem to be aligned to this. I'm not the first to point these things out, and I won't be the last. As a former Facebook employee, I have a responsibility to speak up.
But this was not on an M1.

This was on an AMD64 system that was far less Apple-specific as far as I know.
I work in the exact same industry as him and earn considerably more. As always coding jobs are not fungible and finance coding jobs are not fungible either (a .net back office programmer is not going to earn the same as a front office quant dev doing C++).

I should know, I worked my ass off to transition from one to the other via a startup (which I sold shares in for $500k) and tech firm.

I didn't just accept my initial job was the end of my career (my first job I was on £19k, first finance job £24k or so), I made things happen in spite of being set back massively due to serious issues at uni which was not my fault (long story).

So unfortunately my sympathy is zero. If you don't like it, work at changing it, or shut up.

Also the idea that programming is not in demand is truly laughable. I interviewed 200+ people throughout my career. Trust me the issue is not on the demand side.
Douglas Trumbull | Silent Running (1972) | the making of

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9xtsNdLj1F4
If you wish to be happy at your job why wouldn't you leave if you are unhappy?
Citation needed?

My understanding was that gaming cards are pushed far harder, at higher temps, with fluctuating power and thermals, which causes more issues than a single stable power limit and temperature
The World’s Leading Resource for Climate Solutions
So now we are using the climate as an excuse to attack bitcoin? Weak propaganda.
I think that misses the OP’s point. They point to the lack on “innate” or intrinsic value in the job. In other words, the article seems to be selecting the wrong metric in determining a career choice that is meant to maximize happiness
This reminds me of Google’s mysterious new operating system “Fuchsia” that they’ve been developing semi-publicly, which was said to mainly be a “senior talent retention program”
Unix Portability Notes
Not that I know of, but my understanding is that electricity is basically back for everyone, except for some isolated cases where the transmission lines are still being repaired.
Capturing the °Climate Factor
I run Linux natively on a MacBook just fine. In fact I had to, when High Sierra went out of support not that long after I’d upgraded my RAM and HDD to SDD. It now flies and honestly I don’t know why I waited until High Sierra went end of life as I feel Mac OS X has got worse and worse. Also the hardware has got less and less upgradable/fixable in that time too.
Keep in mind that bulk of crypto mining is quite centralized around the places with cheap elictricity so it's also mean cheapest source give highest advantage.

Unlike actual people mining farms can be placed right next to power source so it's easier to use Nuclear / Wind / Solar / Hydro for such purposes.
Billion Dollar Hack-YouTube
I feel obligated to mention the name "Enron" because I feel Texans deserve to be reminded.
not sure if this is what you wanted but

https://commitlog-web.herokuapp.com
>Why should there be a fundamental difference in a person's ability to modify one of the above, but not the other?

Because one could trivially modify the first, and people do all the time (and screw the law), whereas the second is, as you said, "next to impossible" to modify even if you want it.

>Just because the laws of Physics don't allow mere mortals to so (not at least without a highly sophisticated nano fabrication lab) doesn't seem like a very convincing principled answer

In what universe do "the laws of physics prevent this to be done easily without millions of dollars" is not a convincing answer?
I'm sure there's a small section of society for whom this statement is true, but I think most people of my generation in the UK take the American view that it's the money that counts. There are probably more extremely high-paid banking and lawyer jobs in the UK than there are programming jobs though
Based on title I was thinking of ageism and no matter how much you like the job your career (the series of jobs you do) will end one day and you are forced to move on to a role with more responsibility or be undervalued on the job market because of your age. Nope, not even that, the article is about a guy who is applying to terrible companies.

When I was 20 I was extremely worried about ageism and how I will have trouble finding jobs 20 years in the future. I found a lot of potential investments that will help me once that day comes. It's just a matter of putting in enough capital and since the job is paying well it's just a matter of switching companies regularly and staying employed for 20 years.

Contrast this with low paying jobs with no hope of building equity. It's not even close.
I've had that experience on multiple occasions. Initially, when younger, I did attribute it to myopism. Today, I recognize that credibility also needs to be earned. All architects are unhappy except those who manage to find the right client. The client-architect relationship is fundamental. A successful architectural undertaking is minimally a two variable equation. Client (aka stakeholders) are hugely important.

(this is related imo to your post: https://brooker.co.za/blog/2020/10/19/big-changes.html - )

On a related tangent, I've been re-reading "The Open Hand - Essays on Le Corbusier". Specifically, the "Le Corbusier at Pessac - Professional and Client Responsibilities" essay by Brian Brace Taylor.

https://www.worldcat.org/title/open-hand-essays-on-le-corbus...

Pessac: https://www.archdaily.com/940878/le-corbusiers-cite-fruges-l...

That project basically failed its intended purpose. The client, M. Frugès, was apparently an enlightened capitalist, willing to invest in the vision of the young architect, even when incurring financial losses, because of Pessac. Corbu also learned, on the job, how to, and how not to, build his modernist vision. The whole thing was a fiasco on many levels. But it was a necessary project for progress in the field.

Which is the point: architectural innovation is costly and even great architects leave a trail of failed early projects. Yes, Corbu went on to master his field, and he did deliver (opinions of course vary) on the program of modern, afforadable, mass housing for the urban working class:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit%C3%A9_d%27habitation

But then:

"You know, it is life that is right and the architect who is wrong." - Le Corbusier (!)

https://libquotes.com/le-corbusier/quote/lbz6x3v

It's a problematic vocation (bricks or bytes). Love it or leave it.
Again why then are they investigated, your story sound too easy and one-sided, if you dont have an argument, you just say "we can just speculate."

Fact is:

-Aung San Suu Kyi defended actively a genocide for not being one, while speaking in The Hague.

-The civilian government was informed and partially included in the genocide.

Both points are fact, and NOT speculations.
A side-effect of actions like this is it makes it much easier for governments themselves to justify censorship or internet restrictions.

See, e.g., this interview by Der Spiegel w/ the president of Uganda:

> DER SPIEGEL: Observers complain that they have been denied access to social media.

> Museveni: If you're talking about the all-powerful rulers of Facebook, I can tell you it was the other way around. Facebook blocked my party's accounts. Is that freedom of expression? If the people at Facebook think they're silencing me, they're wrong.

> DER SPIEGEL: It wasn't just about Facebook. The entire internet was blocked in Uganda for days.

> Museveni: That was done for security reasons. The internet was misused to stir up trouble. The opposition spread misinformation about the election results. The block has long since been lifted.

https://www.spiegel.de/international/world/interview-with-ug...
Any specific recommendations for de Montaigne or Kant?