skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I completed mine last August, and I haven't used it to strongarm my employer into giving me a raise (yet), nor have I started looking for other jobs (yet) because I enjoy my current position; so it's provided me zero financial benefit thus far.

That being said, I definitely think it was worth it. I enjoyed the time back in academia after a few years off after my Bachelor's extremely enjoyable, and I feel like I learned a lot and grew significantly as a learner during that period. I am reading CS research and fundamentals texts in my free time, and I feel as if I continue to benefit from those couple years every day. I also forged relationships that haven't yet "paid off" in any discrete sense but still bring me joy to reflect on.

Certainly, I could have done all of these personally beneficial things without the degree, but I probably wouldn't have, and I highly doubt it would have been as fun.

Granted, as an American, I now have a few extra tens of thousands of dollars of student loan debt as a result, but that hasn't yet begun to destroy my life, so I'm mostly just hoping that either I'll be able to pay it off eventually without much hassle or the federal government will get its act together and wipe it away (fingers crossed).
Interesting, contrarian thinking
Someone told me that there were a lot of warez sites hosted with OVH.

Anyone know of any casualties?
I repaired a new-ish TV - cost me £30.

https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2020/10/replacing-the-motionengine-...

If you can find me a new TV at that price, please let me know!

Yes, getting in a professional at £X per hour means it is probably not economical to repair a cheap washing machine. But if the parts and manuals are easily available, it suddenly becomes a lot quicker and easier to repair it yourself rather than replace.
That's fine. I'd rather give an old broken fridge for free to someone who'll actually fix it, than throw it away.

Like with old computer stuff. I go out of my way to find someone else who needs it, because 1) I hate the waste and environmental impact, and 2) in my poorer days I was the recipient of "old garbage computer stuff" as my only computer stuff.

I had an old shitty laptop with no battery, that I found an old motorcycle lead-acid battery I could hook up. With a couple of diodes I could even charge it through the laptop. I could never afford a real laptop, but this was a computer on the go for me.

A friend of mine couldn't afford batteries for his calculator, so he took a scrap power adapter and hooked it up to its battery terminals.

I'm fine with someone getting $50k of tooling and then being able to create a reuse market. Better to not need it, but it's also not realistic to have a law that mandates that all electronics must be repairable with a screwdriver and a pair of plyers.
It seems to be a static site, which seems reasonable since it aggregates a lot of data and might encounter high load when something goes wrong, so generating it live without caching is not viable. So maybe the server that normally updates it is down too (not that this would be a good excuse)?
It's been a while since I've read it, but doesn't someone get decapitated in that clever test of knightsmanship?
Phone purchases outside of a contract are also partially tax deductible if used for your job in Germany. And while many deals are attractive only if you buy a device, not all of them are. Right now I could get a 24 month contract from Vodafone for an average price of 12 EUR/month with 20GB of mobile data.

On the other hand, Lidl Connect (which uses Vodafone's network) charges 12.99 EUR/4 weeks for 6GB of data w/o contract. If you know of any non-contract options that offer significantly better value, please do let me know.
My partner and I took a year out for all of 2018 and travelled for 365 days, aged 34. We went to 21 countries during that time, the route:

UK
India
Hong Kong
Vietnam
Cambodia
Laos
Thailand
Russia
Mongolia
China
Tibet
Japan
Malaysia
Indonesia
Australia
New Zealand
Fiji
Hawaii
North America
Chile
Bolivia
Peru
Colombia
Brazil

We saw many wonders of the world (from various lists) including Taj Mahal, Angkor Wot, Great Barrier Reef, Machu Picchu and Christ the Redeemer.

We drove coast to coast in the US (LA to New York via the South) over a month.

We took the Trans-Siberian Express train across Russia to Beijing (St Petersburg, Moscow, Kazaan, Yekaterinburg, Novosibirsk, Irkutsk, Lake Baikal, Ulaanbaatar, deeper into Mongolia and stayed in a Gerr and Beijing).

We also looped around China by train including going to Tibet via Xinning. Tibet is like nowhere else we have been in the world.

We spent a couple of weeks driving around New Zealand South Island in a campervan.

We did the classic backpacker route around South East Asia, traveling overnight on sleeper buses, visiting the tourist destinations, site seeing, going on a booze cruise party island in the middle of a site of natural beauty (Castaways), visiting temples, full moon party. All in all a bit of everything. We were at the absolute age limit of some activities and accomodation, where although they were willing to show some flexibility, you wouldn't want to be much older as the majority of people were about 20. At times we felt old and past it, but we were happy we went ahead and did it.

Whilst a lot of the trip we just planned and booked ourselves, small parts, like Australia, we went on an organised trip. It wasn't one where we follow a tour leader, instead we were given vouchers for accomodation and activities and transport that went from Cairns down to Melbourne and followed it ourselves. It included dolphin feeding, scuba diving at the great barrier reef, driving around Fraser Island on 4x4s and staying a couple of nights, going on a boat tour of the Whitsundays and seeing White Haven beach with the softest sand I have experienced.

We could have done a fraction of the amount of stuff we did, and seen more or each place. We could have recouperated more rather than end up exhausted. But it was one hell of a trip.

I worried about finding work when it was over, but had several job offers before I returned so that turned out to be a false worry!
No One Lives Forever 1 and 2:
http://nolfrevival.tk/

The Dark Mod:
https://www.thedarkmod.com/main/

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Anomaly:
https://www.moddb.com/mods/stalker-anomaly
There are non-Halon systems, using agents such as FM-200. Those are not as toxic and do not destroy the ozone layer.
Fire destroys servers at French data company OVHcloud
It depends where. Under skills seems silly, but under interests seems reasonable.

I have a single line on my resume with interests. I don’t list chess, but list cryptography. Because I’m interested in it.

I just have that line to help with chitchat during the interview. If some interviewer interpreted that to mean I was a professional cryptographer and that I sucked at it, that would be dumb of them.

I also list an interest in kayaking, even though I suck at it.
What's the point of a positivity rate in this case though if the testing is so varied. For example, you can't really give an accurate picture if one day 1000 tests are performed and the next day, 9000 ?
OVH data center burns down knocking major sites offline
What's reactionary is your comment history.
CEO Says Fire Has Destroyed OVH’s Strasbourg Data Center (SBG2)
Transform Maps into Mosaics
The Space of Developer Productivity
OVH Data Center Fire Darkens Popular Sites Worldwide
Interesting! I got the news from my local package courier website. They warn, their services can be unreliable due to the fire at OVH.

It's all connected.
You should not group Afghanistan and Pakistan together. Afghanistan is not a safe place to visit. Pakistan is absolutely safe as long as you don't visit the western tribal region. Land in Lahore, travel to Islamabad and then to Peshawar and northern areas. You will have a good time. Lots of tour companies also arrange the trips. If you're feeling more adventurous, you can visit Multan, Bahawalpur, and Karachi.
I'd wager he meant 200MB, particularly given the software listed, my Windows folder on my Dosbox install of WFW 3.11 on its own clocks in at about 26MB (though admittedly Windows 3.0 was probably half that size)

I recall my IBM PS/1 at the time had maybe a 340MB hard drive which I quickly filled with games :)
I’ve never really had a problem with internet etc.

On travel days I let people know I’m offline.

I stay in Airbnb’s a lot and find a coffee shop backup nearby usually.

I have local SIM card when generous data plan when I arrive at the airport. This is good tor sharing with my computer in a pinch.

Asia has great internet - better than Europe, Australia or North America so that is rarely a problem.

Transport is generally reliable and effective and on time so one rarely will be away and offline for a while.

Being unavailable is truly not something that comes up on the radar more than a couple times a year.

(Unless you woke up naked in a drug induced stupor in a ladyboy’s room in Pattaya 2 days after an all-nighter) hahaha.
Server written in js using node. Interesting. If i wanted to change its state from outside it shouldn't be that hard should it? , eg let me take sold seeds or whatever from market and export to another instance...

I'm looking at linking this game to others.
How Is Artificial Intelligence Used in Human Resources?
Depends on how you define "running code".

1. Download container description (Dockerfile)
2. Upon image build it "compiles things" (e.g. processes/assembles javascript)
3. Build fails, because it pulls architecture incompatible library (or does not pull architecture mandated library)
4. Fix build scripts, rebuild container image
5. Verify container
6. Pull repo
7. Reproduce changes, commit
8. Push

Nothing apart clone-edit-push happens on the repo. The code can be executed on a remote, hardened, isolated system. With proliferation of containers I guess this scenario will become more and more common among ops people.
>> Softstar quality starts from the ground up with our materials: sustainably sourced and eco-friendly leather, sheepskin and VibramTM soling. We are constantly looking for the highest standards of quality and sustainable practices in our vendors and are proud to carry the finest leathers and soling in the world. Our day begins inspecting every inch of incoming material for adherence to quality standards.

https://www.softstarshoes.com/how-made
Looking on Wayback, It's a collaboration system that 'links up' people with similar skills and interests who attend the same events and conferences. Was acquired by Eventbrite.
React AMA (webinar)
If you liked the "Library of Babel", let me highly recommend another story by Borges, "The Immortal". It is perhaps an even stronger match for Ballard's story here and has an especially good depiction of the sort of results that you get from procedural generation:

> /This palace is the work of the gods,/ was my first thought. I explored the uninhabited spaces, and I corrected myself: /The gods that built this place have died./ Then I reflected on its peculiarities, and told myself: /The gods that built this place were mad./ I said this, I know, in a tone of incomprehensible reproof that verged upon remorse--with more intellectual horror than sensory fear. The impression of great antiquity was joined by others: the impression of endlessness, the sensation of oppressiveness and horror, the sensation of complex irrationality.

(There's more to it, but I don't want to spoil it. Suffice to say that this one has something of the antithesis of the nice, neat hexagons in "Library".)
>My colleagues teach songwriting and electronic music/sound design to hundreds of pupils without it. People teach instruments without it and make performing careers without it.

Sure, I mostly write electronic music myself, with some small piece/band music thrown in, and I only use full notation for the latter.

But the chord names, mode names, tablature, chord diagrams, piano rolls in a DAW, tunings, chord tracks, arpegiators, etc, are all still western music notation, nomenclature and theory (and usually tonality), they're not some local ethnic tradition.

So "My colleagues teach songwriting and electronic music/sound design to hundreds of pupils without it" is kind of strained to my opinion. They do use it, and what other stuff they use is still 100% westernized, they just don't hand out the typical orchestra score sheet.
It is absolutely worthwhile doing any of the immersion techniques you mentioned. Volunteer work would probably be the most important thing that you're missing. And I don't mean 'gap year help build a library' kind of volunteering, that stuff is implicitly pre-college, instagram stories and expat heavy. I mean exchanging a few hours of light work for bed and board (the language exchange is free). You can be pretty picky in most countries with sites like workaway or helpx, and probably find a little family to hole up with and do work remotely. And yes, you will find (single) people of all ages doing this.

EDIT: i see I'm supposed to say how traveling changed my life personally. pretty simple if you are me because studying language is my favourite hobby, and, as an amateur linguist, it is essential for my life satisfaction to immerse in something new every couple of years.
> Manufacturers will be legally obliged to make spare parts for products available to consumers for the first time – a new legal right for repairs.

I take it that third-parties will not get any new freedoms then, and that things like design patents will continue to apply there. I wonder if the law will have anything to say about price-point, if there's no competition.

I was surprised to see no mention of the matter of companies deliberately engineering their products to be hostile to user repairs. I was under the impression that forbidding that kind of thing was the main point of right-to-repair legislation.

(For example, one part of the system might verify that a peripheral has some cryptographic key to prove that it's an authentic first-party part. With this technique, third-party products either don't work, or are set upon by lawyers for breaking copyright law in cloning the key.)
Quantum Field
The quantum field outside? Well, actually speaking, everything exists inside the quantum field. It lies everywhere across the space and time. Quantum field works as a measurement, assigned to all points in space. https://bit.ly/38haS6N
I agree. Assuming it is happening is different than approving of it or agreeing that it is ‘ok’ when the subject comes up.
I really hated ColdFusion. It made PHP hacks seem like beautiful poetry.

So it’s funny that ColdFusion folks would complain about any stupid recruiter. But CF peeps are people too.

My opinion is based on having to fix a lot of CF code from people who were “faking it until they could hire prepend to make it.”

It’s funny that Allaire now runs RStudio and when I learned that I considered not using it anymore because of some lurking, unknown to me technical debt. But I’m sure he’s a smart person and CF was not terrible due to him being bad. So I’m still using RStudio.
It was a branch office of one of the big UK recruitment companies - I can't remember their name (it was ~10 years ago).

I suspect the management knew that berating people in a semi public area added that extra level of humiliation - their managers were all pretty scary and I didn't even work for them!
Honestly, the thing I hate the most about IT is how bad it is while no one admits to it.

These are problems I've encountered at several companies:

* No budget for tooling. Be that software outside the ide or be it for hardware.

* Cargo cult is so much bigger than anyone will ever admit.

* The lack of caring about other departments. We're a team and we need to work as a team so the company can make money to pay our salaries. I've seen it to the point where one guy was willing to cause two departments weeks worth of work to avoid doing two days worth of work.

* The amount of stuff that is just broken, people keep complaining about it being broken and it causes a pile of hassle for other people but just stays broken. Or it's point out it's broken and a big meeting is called to deal with it and then nothing is really done.

* The amount of people who don't know what they're doing. So many people seem to have 1-year * x experience. They reach a certain level and they just stop.

* The amount of people who don't even know what they're talking about - https://toggl.com/track/developer-methods-infographic/ a prime example, kanban is literally how they make cars it's we work on one bit and the next area deals with the next part. The image should have a car manufactoring factory as is. But instead they have nonsense.

* The amount of patting themselves on the back saying we're doing a great job while the system sucks and nothing is getting better and employee churn is sky high.

Honestly, I think if people from other industries worked in IT for a year they would be completely shocked at how crap it is. I don't even think the hiring part is wrong, I think the entire management process of IT is wrong and causes more chaos so you end up with people who are heavily specilised in tools who are considered expert engineers but can't read UML.
My VPS in SBG3 stopped pinging around 9am.

My impression is that they tried very hard to maintain uptime, which was probably a bad idea when we see the extent of the damages. This VPS just hosts external facing services and is easy to set back up.
> By using a machine you switch from having one well understood, pretty standardized ui paradigm: put stuff on track, tracks goes to checker, checker checks them through, you pay and bag your stuff

Even this is not universal. In Sweden the checkouts have that divider so the checkout clerk can start scanning the next customer's products while you're packing.

In the UK, you can't move on until the other person has bagged and removed which you're expected to do before paying, which makes self-checkout considerably faster because you're already bagged.
English note: To suck is a verb, never put “is” before.

I agree that the Tokyo Olympic situation sucks. Rather, it’s the worst of both worlds.

I still remember that Tokyo started removing swastikas around the city because of the olympics around a year ago and that felt so backwards already then, before COVID.
The Biggest Payoff from Stockton’s Basic Income Program: Jobs
I'm not OP, but as someone who traveled for a few years without the goal of 'finding myself' i actually found the experience pretty transformative to my character.
Yes, Some of the more 'backpacky' memories do fade(might also have to do with the excessive drinking associated with it).

I still found that by immersing yourself in other cultures and ways of living you can gain more perspective about your own goals in life and your personal choices.
Whither capitalism?

Why are companies not marketing along the lines of: "You can tinker with this. Our product does not treat you like the product."

I'd pay a 20% premium or so not to be spied upon and enslaved. "Freedom isn't free. There's a heavy [FLOWERBED] fee."
Maybe in this case, you could learn what they considered beauty.
I wouldn’t put “chess” onto my resume unless I was at least titled. Otherwise, what is a signal that it sends to the hedge fund crowd of overachievers? That you have a hobby that you managed to not get good at?
Some strange tunes to be found at:
https://soundcloud.com/asaaki

If you love long tracks, listen to
https://soundcloud.com/asaaki/plane-of-the-frost-demons

And lately experimented with short audio-visual stuff:
https://youtu.be/UBsz7vgTvjY
Xenon2 classic dos game in JavaScript
These laws might not go far enough but they might be more of a threat to corporations. Corps may start making their products just friendly enough to avoid new laws which would be stricter and out of their control.
Ahh, very interesting, thanks for sharing! Do you have any thoughts around why that is? I presume that's due to Oniguruma supporting a much broader feature set and something like fancy-regexp's approach with mixing a backtracking VM and NFA implementation for simple queries would be needed for better perf? (I am aware you played a role in that) [1]

I have been playing around with regex parsing through building parsers through parser combinators at runtime recently, no clue how it will perform in practice yet (structuring parser generators at runtime is challenging in general in low-level languages) but maybe that could pan out and lead to an interesting way to support broader sets of regex syntaxes like POSIX in a relatively straightforward and performant way.

[1] https://github.com/fancy-regex/fancy-regex#theory
Most gotcha tests like this are trying to filter for a general attribute with a overly specific response. Which, coincidentally, turns out to be the exact response that the interviewer would have had. They're good for determining if the test taker is the test author, and not much else.
I’ve gained perspective that I can get into important rooms because of my background, easier than I can in my own country. It makes considering to fight for inclusion in my home country seem to be a waste of my life and that I can choose causes to spend energy on without feeling like I was neglecting an obligation to my gender or heritage or race/ethnicity.

I’ve gained perspective that there are a mixture of political systems in countries that have redeeming benefits and seem more advanced than my home country. This tells me that I don't have to subscribe to the limiting choices presented to me, by people in my home country. Or perhaps that there might be an opportunity to inspire the people in the future.

I’ve gained in depth knowledge of obscure regulations in obscure autonomous regions that I find useful.

I’ve gained perspective that I can be seen as more desirable in some places for dating, hook ups, I can be accepted by families readily as an individual. In my home country, the go-to is to make this as awkward as possible, and it has been nice and endearing to understand how and why this isn’t the experience everywhere.

It helps me really resonate with the concept of going where you are treated the best, and building a life where that is possible. This has been a overwriting of the indoctrination of tying my identity to my national, even its currency, which is now absurd to me.
Nope, exactly the same here (on landscape phone).
Insights into HTTPS-Only Mode
Halon is pretty much banned for years now, other agents have been introduced.
Sadly, making an actual full test of a gaseous extinguishing system (such as FM200 or Novec 1230) can be prohibitively expensive (mainly costs of the "reloading" of the system with new gas). Those are just mostly tested for correct pressure in tanks and if the detection electronics are working fine, making an actual dump would be very impractical (evacuation of personnel, ventilating the room afterwards etc.)
I had a front-end long-term contract many years ago that required expertise with C#, WPF, Silverlight and something else I forget. I had those things covered, but I soon learned that I was also supposedly an expert in SharePoint and an experienced graphic artist. The reality is that if they had given me any requirements for SharePoint I could have built that for them even though I had never used it. But graphic design I had no interest in. A few weeks in there was a lunch with recruiters and contractors for the project and one of the other recruiters (not the one who submitted me for the job) asked me something like, "when did you first realize that you loved to draw?" or something. I told her honestly I was horrible at drawing and not interested in it.

One of the reasons I got fired from that contract eventually (aside from a fight with a manipulative SOB who was fresh off a career as a local TV news personality and was holding the project up in his backend role) was that they were disappointed with my lack of interesting user interface designs.

I never told anyone I was a graphic artist. Even if I did have that skill (or interest) (which I had neither), I was too busy dealing with new WPF/XAML/C# features and software design etc.