skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
We’re arguing about different things it appears. This thread started with someone saying that a team coming in under budget should is “owed” that money in the future by management. I said this isn’t so and that it’s a self centered and myopic viewpoint. You are talking about punishment and reallocation, presumably by reducing the budget the next cycle. I’m not in favor of that unless it’s clear that the team is consistently over budgeting.

For example, if a team says they need $100 a year and comes in at $90 then I don’t think next year’s budget should be $110 while some people in this thread think it should be. That makes no sense. Neither do I think the budget should be cut to $90. Unless something has changed, the budget should stay the same.

Your point about average cost just means that you’re budgeting on the wrong timeframe. If you estimate your average dinner is $100 but you’re spending $75 most of the time except for one huge dinner every month then you should be budgeting $75 for dinner and then budget separately for one large dinner a month. Similarly, if a team says they need $10MM a year but half of that is them trying to amortize a $25MM cost over 5 years then they are budgeting incorrectly. Their budget should be $5MM with a $25MM side fund contributed to on a risk adjusted basis.

The worst case scenario is the team budgeting $10MM when they only need $5MM and losing control of their budget so that when the real charge comes due they’re fucked because they’ve been spending $10MM for the past 5 years without realizing the fixed charge is coming or, worse, realizing the fixed charge is coming but just ignoring it so they can buy new office furniture and exhaust their budget this year selfishly.
Very cool. I think we’re so used to a shortage of ports nowadays that “plug and play” seems like magic. Thank you for bringing it back better than ever in a compact user friendly form. I could plug a keyboard, mouse, display, camera, and gps antenna into my laptop with a big enough USB hub, but it won’t be as beautiful as this solution.
little bit of caution on "Yes we can do A, but that means we won't have the time/resources to do B" - this, along with Agile method of squeezing work every two weeks will lead to simply mediocre quality hacked together deliverables and accumulation of technical debt.

Sometimes you need to spend time upfront and do it properly from the beginning, otehrwise the software quickly can become unmaintainable
Seconded. Their CLI has all you need, even git hooks.
Personally I just use `neocities push .`
Show HN: "Perceptually-guided” tool for selecting objects in Vector Art
Hello everyone,

I have made a tool, as part of a research project, that tries to make it easier for people to edit Vector Art. In the study/survey posted above, I have implemented two algorithms that try to define what "perceptually-guided" might mean. I want to know which of the two is better and collect data on how people use this tool. To achieve this for each session, I randomly pick an algorithm and use it to drive inference when the tool is being used. I'm aware that neither of the two algorithms are close to perfect but want to know whether this line of work is relevant for creators of Vector Art.
BTC Fees – What's the smallest transaction you can make for with a 1% fee?
> Power to gas needs a source of carbon to produce methane.
Only if you want to produce syngas (methane).

If you store the resulting hydrogen directly, no carbon source is needed.
That makes storage more location dependent, because the cost-competitive options are salt-caverns, but we are talking about long term storage here...

Production of SynGas is more important to replace the current use of ground-pumped methane with CO2 neutral variants.

> Also, exist prototype power to gas facilities are ~50% efficient. Even with a 66% efficient combined cycle gas turbine, which is the best we have, net efficiency is ~33%.

Which is why there are proposals to go purely via hydrogen and reversible oxidation cells. That way you can get up to about 70-80%.

But again, we are talking about long term storage. ALL other options of energy storage are more expensive when you reach the "weekly to monthly" storage timeframe.
At that timeframe, the low efficiency becomes irrelevant, as storage cost ($/kWh) is dominating, and we are talking about renewables anayway.
You could have a car charger that is remotely controlled by the power companies and can be disabled to shed/elevate electricity consumption in the country.
It should match the original, unless you have a strong reason not to i.e. it breaks the guidelines somehow

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Even if they "Anonymize" the data? I don't really know all the specifics of GDPR. Do they currently offer people in EU a way to download/review/delete (for real) all their data?
I dislike defining seniority by your technical knowledge or skills. I have a different, I think more useful definition that I use. It overlaps a little bit but excludes knowledge, intelligence and focuses on mindset and ownership.

More senior person is one that has more mature approach to their work. One that can get better results with less resources. Typically more senior people can also accept wider variety of tasks.

What is better results and what is less resources will depend on the project.

It has nothing to do with the knowledge or experience, in my opinion.

You can have good senior person get better results in a technology they have no previous experience with compared to a very experienced / intelligent / knowledgeable person that has track record of making bad decisions. Senior person will use their good judgement to warn the manager they are running outside of their knowledge and to know when they need to use some resources (like help) from somebody more knowledgeable.

A knowledgeable but less senior person may think they know anything but not be able to recognize they are trying to achieve something that is outside their area of expertise or not be able to recognize or accept they are bad at something.

For me senior developer is somebody I can entrust they will put honest, worthwhile attempt at making good decisions when it is called for and recognize when they need to come back for further direction.

Senior developers show ownership in that they seek to uncover problems and discuss those problems with the team, proactively and productively. Senior developers can smell problems even if they don't necessarily know the solution. They can act on the signs of the bad smell and maybe seek discussion (with architect? client? manager? team?) to figure out what is going on and what needs to be done further.

Senior developers understand there are many ways/levels to solve the problem and sometimes solution isn't more code but maybe procedural change or a shift in paradigm.

Senior developers can meaningfully help/direct more junior team members individually without taking over their projects.

Senior developers can keep working relationships even with difficult people or people they don't like.

And so on.
Yup, no problem here, was just making an observation about how common such blocking was (and about the fact that some people were upset at being crawled by someone other than Google, despite not blocking them).

The company did respect robots.txt, though it was initially a bit of a struggle to convince certain project managers to do so.
So doesn't FP make similar claims about mutation, i.e., "make state manipulation safe" through mechanisms like closures? How/why are closures considered more palatable?
As good-intentioned as this is... it's the type of behaviour that just adds more barriers for women trying to break into tech.

When hobbies like these - video games made exclusively by white men [0], played (almost) exclusively by men - are used to assess a candidate's ability as a software engineer, who do you think benefits?

[0]https://factorio.com/game/about
Agreed. Just give people an option at least. Their current approach seems very divisive through being extreme.
Balsa wood is extremely fragile.

> Took us a long time to come up with a good carbon fiber tech tree.

I don't know what this is supposed to mean
Sure, if you have 1,000,000 different bands - that is far more bands than people. Otherwise you have someone who isn't good enough for the next band, but better than anyone else in the current band.
What a terrific article, certainly the only one I've seen to look at the science of this - and to point out that the ship didn't just hit sand: that section of the canal is lined - it went through "protective" boulders to reach that sand.

Favourite quote:

Sailors talk about hydrodynamics the way CEOs talk about macroeconomics: they either treat it with mystical reverence, or they claim to understand it and are wrong. Unlike with macroeconomics, though, if you know what you’re doing you can test the propositions of hydrodynamics on actual, physical models in a lab. As in: you build little boats and then you drag them through the water, in a towing tank. Hydrodynamics is what a five-year old would do, if a five-year old had a PhD.
Not only that, but if tech matters to the company, and it increasingly does these days, the broader organization really needs to have some technical savvy in order to avoid a bunch of anti-patterns that are running wild in non-tech savvy organizations:

* Setting bad expectations with stakeholders and customers

* Taking on bad opportunities, committing the organization to unnecessary technical debt for no monetary gain

* Fracturing teams across competing opportunities

* Top down decrees issued from abstraction that causes organizational thrashing

* Decisions made in abstraction with no understanding of the stubborn technical constraints that block fruition
As long as the members co-operators own 50%+1 you can take external funding - doesn't always workout as Poptel found
Yeah that's an interesting idea.

There are a couple of issues with it though.

Let's think about Signal, Twitter, Facebook and Tor.

The US government is putting increasing pressure on social media companies like Twitter and Facebook to shape their content.

US government funded open source projects like Signal and Tor allow for the spread of US shaped social media in countries that want to limit it.

So the propaganda machine thrives , it's just that it's the US one.

(note I like and use Signal and Tor, an against censorship in China. This is just one aspect of a set of complex relationships. Etc etc)
These companies are as much funds as they are companies, should there be a limit on capital pooling?

TBH, I think it might be good to put limits on company types i.e. what type of business a company can do at a certain scale; and very different rules for large vs small companies in general (and maybe private/low-majority-shareholder-count versus public corps) - that way a tech company can just go into another industry and dominate on the basis of better funding alone.

I'd also really like to see product based shares/corp-ownership; where ip, copyright etc for a product are held only by a co-op that issues shares/agreements with associated partners companies. That way instead of having a corp first, with its product to support it; you could have a product first, with a company to support it.
I still recall their 2016 full page add in the New York Times

"We realized a few years ago that the value of switching to Slack was so obvious and the advantages so overwhelming that every business would be using Slack, or “something just like it,” within the decade."[0]

They were right about the "something just like it" part.[1]

[0] https://slack.com/blog/news/dear-microsoft#.r90mkakwl

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2020/3/26/21195092/slack-new-user-r...
I agree, and packages and package private access is such a powerful tool in Java, that so many developers completely ignore.
Does depend on coop - a fully flat worker coop is very rare
> People who are willing to negotiate should get a higher salary.

Most people's take is that people who perform better should get a higher salary. While negotiation helps prevent you from being underpaid, it very often[1] is the reason people who perform poorer are getting a higher salary.

[1] As in, every single place I've worked.
Mumble is not an alternative to Discord and I don't know why people think it is.
>> and now with hindsight

Just to point out, back then with foresight there were plenty of people saying "this is a bad idea". The GAO found numerous issues as early as 2005 with the F35 (even earlier, as the article mentions, if you go back to the JSF), and I feel like I haven't gone more than a year without seeing yet another report of problems.
IANAProgrammer, to some extent I create my own GIGO issues which are like small instances of poorly defined behaviour. Sometimes you'll realise your whole world has ground to a halt and it's a conveyor backed up because one item arrived at an inserter and blocked it.

I play a bit of DSP but have at least 3 different mitigations which are akin to input sanitising. However, if you just stick a filtered inserter by a conveyor to grab errant materials then it can comeback and bite you ... though I've found either I can route them back to the proper channel or I can get away with the technical debt by throwing enough storage at them and leaving it until the thing needs refactoring.

You can have too much realism! I like that every green-circuit board works, rather than getting failures of systems that use that item with some random errors (that increase of your closer to the sun, say). I think that would be too frustrating.
Wow. What a beautiful sounding instrument, and a great performance, too. Now I want to hear all of Bach’s harpsichord works on this thing. Also, I encourage the construction of the katzenwerk, but with less cruelty—perhaps using graduate students instead of cats.
Nine things a (technical) program manager does
If a lower performing peer is getting the same compensation, then it is far from perfect.
That would work on website that have a naive check for just user agent. Google also publishes the IP address ranges their crawlers run on. Lot of websites check for that, and there's no way around that.

https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/crawling/...
No that model is a worker coop - its how Poptel in the UK was structured.
I admire this programatic approach to setting salary and the idealism of it, but the first time your competitor goes to poach your very best engineer and you won't bend due to it, I tend to see companies rethink it.
The Nokia N9 was very well-received. If you need lots of glowing citations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_N9#Reception

If anything, "promising" may be the wrong choice of words because it was arguably better and more mature than the equivalent debut iOS and webOS devices at launch. Of course that's cheating a bit, as the tech stack had some history behind it by that point. Still, for a line-incepting product it was very impressive execution, especially for a company that was still so hung up on a legacy product line at the same time (Symbian).

Personally, I used one as well and I don't find it very hard to imagine a version of the world where it could still be my preferred OS/ecosystem right now. It was truly a strange situation, and Nokia of the day one strange animal of a dissonant company. I don't know if Nokia would have made it without the MS interference -- but I think it didn't help.

This is a nice little nostalgia anecdote too that gets discussed on HN occasionally: http://nition.momentstudio.co.nz/2014/08/the-nokia-n9-alarm-...
> ...It looks as if it took the attackers three months to gain access back into the box and into the VM build...

How the attackers were able to gain access again after the developer used a VM in Windows? My guesses:

- The developer machine was compromised in a deeper level (rootkit?)

- The developer installs a particular application in each Linux box

- There is a bug in an upstream distro
Occam's razor suggests:

1. Such a pandemic (or other calamity) occurring simultaneously with overwhelming evidence a catastrophic asteroid impact is exceedingly unlikely.

2. Cross-species pandemic resulting in mass extinctions are similarly unlikely. Boom-bust population cycles perhaps. Mass cross-species extinction not so much.

3. Patterns of extinction (and survival) far more closely match the presently-accepted conclusion.

4. Precisely because an infectious agent leaves few multimillion-year traces, any defence of such a hypothesis can advance no further than "it might have happened". This is not evidence-based argument. (Traces of pathology might be preserved in fossil or amber substrates.)

Point remains that multiple highly consistent widely-distributed lines of evidence point to the asteroid hypothesis.

One unsubstantiated Hacker News comment points to the epidemic scenario.
With advances in drones and remote imaging, is there still a role for manned jets like this? I similarly wonder about manned spaceflight.
Ostensibly yes because landlords would get a larger share of the surplus, but as long as capital writes regulations, entities that extract more surplus will be better able to change the rules. Just look at how much was spent in California to keep gig workers as contractors.
Making promotion the only way to get a bump in salary can cause all sorts of problem when the responsibilities and requirements of the role change at the next level.

As an example, at big companies staff level engineer is more oriented around writing/reviewing and building consensus about technologies. This is a very different role to the level below and someone who is great at that role may not be great as a staff level engineer. They do however deliver a lot of value to the company.

Having a way to reward someone who’s doing an amazing job at their current level helps avoid this situation. I.e inventing projects to justify promotion to staff level engineer.

In most companies, the level below staff is a terminal position. I.e their isn’t necessarily an expectation that you need to get promoted to the next level. I think Facebook got the formula right with its performance based bonus that allows employees who go above and beyond to be rewarded.

This is a similar situation to when companies had career tracks that forced really good engineers to get promoted into management in order to get more comp. Just because you are an amazing engineer doesn’t mean you would be a good people manager.
New U.K. Currency Honors Alan Turing
For anyone wondering the UK's new carriers explicitly rejected the traditional CATOBAR approach to take-offs and landings in favour of a design that pretty much requires the F35B STOVL variant.
The demonstrated commands in this article aren't best practices in Talon, it's more like:

funky hello

slap

funk print

string hello
Ex-CDC head believes origin of the coronavirus pandemic is a lab in China
Honestly it's such a simple concept it shouldn't be hard to remember.
Right, it does depend on this perspective, which is why I say the distinction is often lost in practice. But from the perspective of hash table designers (at least historically), the hash can in fact change and is dependent on the size of the table. The distinction is important because the two operations are separable. I guess people didn't want to call one thing a "hash" and the other "hash mod k" because there are ways to do this other than mod. They could have called one "hash" and the other "post hash" but it is what it is.

All I'm trying to say is if you want to know more about hash tables, and you bother to venture into the literature or some textbooks, you're going to run into this distinction sooner rather than later, so I wanted to point that out here.
“better than anyone else” is not really how I think you should approach leveling, personally.
Global Chip Shortage for Automotive Industry
"The factory of the future will have only two employees, a man and a dog. The man will be there to feed the dog. The dog will be there to keep the man from touching the equipment."

- Attributed to Warren Bennis
>top-tier engineers are not generally qualified in terms of non-technical requirements

It's just that both sets of somewhat orthogonal skills are less likely to reside in one person.

An analogy from baseball is why are pitchers generally lousy hitters (even pre-DH)? Did they get less practice? Probably. But it's also the case that (again even pre-DH) any ability to do more than lay down a bunt was absolutely a nice little bonus but their job 1 and 2 and 3 is pitching the ball.

On the other hand, even the best fielding shortstop in the league still needs to have a half-way decent batting average, even if they can get away with a lower one than other positions.
Every Amazon Shareholder Letter in 1 PDF
>> They will still have all your messages <<

> this is why anything important to keep secret should be said in unclear terms so only those in on it will understand

Obscurity does very little if it actually matters (that is, you have an active adversary). Just like you shouldn't try to use innuendo and hinting to get at secret things when sitting in a public space, you shouldn't use it in text communications online. Even more so because those text communications can be held and reexamined later with new understanding.

> but they will have one less user, perhaps even a mass exodus if they decide to sell out.

The only way (and this isn't even guaranteed) for services like Discord to remain independent is if they're bringing in money from users or by selling access to users. How many users are paying regularly for access to parts of the service? How many would pay if they charged $5/year for basic access? An independent company can't afford (long term) to operate a free service of this scale without some form of selling out (advertisements/access to users) or selling services.
One of best React UI library for web applications
> I wouldn't ask someone to whiteboard it

I did. Works very well as an interview question.
I'm curious to hear peoples thoughts, who are very upset at the idea of a Microsoft takeover. Has not Microsoft been a relatively well behaved tech entity of late? I'm not naive, but is it reasonable to expect they will be worse behaved than Discord would be or has been on it's own?
Maybe not directly, but it can be useful with a buffer. The most obvious buffer would be batteries, e.g. installing a PowerWall on a building; but there are a whole bunch of more direct use-cases, which may be more efficient.

For example, we wouldn't want unpredictable/unstable bursts of heating and cooling for buildings; but it would be very useful for a heat source/sink, which a building's heating/cooling can use https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_storage_air_conditioning

Likewise, batteries which will be used on a known schefule don't need to be charged as quickly as possible (which is the current assumption for most charging). For example, we can slow/delay charging of commercial vehicles in case prices go down.

Datacentres can also spin up machines in seconds to take advantage of lower energy costs. Cloud providers like AWS allow resources to be auctioned off, e.g. we can put latency-insensitive tasks (backups, indexing, report generation, etc.) in a queue until resource costs drop below $X/minute (if it lingers for too long we can either re-insert with a higher threshold, or cancel and process at normal price).
It's really hard to figure if a text message contains PII or not, so they would have to anonymize everything, meaning transform the text message into random garbage. At that point the only thing that remains is the metadata about timestamps.

I haven't checked whether they're complying or not, but as an European citizen it is my legal right to download all my personal data hosted by them, and to have them migrate it for me to one of their competitors.
Doesn’t that only apply to Europe? Doesn’t seem to protect Americans at all.
Storm Engine source code now available through GitHub