skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree with this, picking individual stocks is effectively a full time job. Most people looking for a moonshot only want to invest based on a "theme". E.g. you bet on the entire EV market.
I have a flatrate pass for most of the German public transit [1]. The sticker price is 4000 € a year, but my employer pays for it (in lieu of a company car), so I only have to pay income taxes on it, which comes out to about 170 € a month for me. For that price, I can get on any train whenever I want any time I want (except for overnight trains where a reservation is required), and I also get free local transit in over 100 cities, including the one where I live.

Now, since my commute is rather short, I would certainly be cheaper off if I just had a subscription pass for my city's local transit and bought train tickets as needed, but it's such a vast quality-of-life improvement to be able to, for instance, decide on Friday to visit my parents for the weekend without any extra hidden costs.

(Caveat: All of this does not apply right now since I'm not entering any vehicles with other people until my vaccination has taken effect. But I'm still renewing my subscription because I already know the date when that happens.)

I know that that's only one thing, but the other similar-sized line items in my ledger are much more mundane (rent, utilities, insurance, and such).

[1] https://www.bahn.com/en/view/offers/bahncard/bahncard_100-co...
Impressive, home page link

https://spaceuptech.com/
Wow! A lot of plugins:

https://pidgin.im/plugins/?publisher=all&query=&type=
Disney Got a Themepark Carveout from Florida's Social Media Moderation Bill
Where in my reply did I mention forcing lactation on cows? My comments were directed at the statement that all mammals need to give birth to lactate, which is incorrect.

If you are having difficulty ascertaining this point, you definitely need remedial reading comprehension.
The 'Nike' approach: I just did it.

I wasn't independently wealthy, but I am pretty good with money, and had a fair bit of capital tied up in my house, so I had enough runway to last a few years without earning a penny.

Although I am first and foremost a software engineer, I had also worked a bit with sales in a software consultancy, and had also had a few years as a CTO where I had to hire consultants (its not super common to have experience in all three of these areas). Additionally I had a few semi-successful projects on GitHub (~2k stars, 1m+ downloads a year), so I had a modicum of tech-credibility.

So as it turned out getting work was super easy. I knew the sales process pretty well from a vendor and customer perspective, and I could also do the work myself. I had expected it to be harder than it was.

What was a bit unexpected was getting somewhat "stuck". 2-3 years in I began to realize that being a "super consultant" is a bit of a poisoned chalice. If you are always billed out 100%, then it doesnt really make sense to work with other people because you either have to partner up, in which case you can only make the same or less money; or you have to run a stable of less qualified consultants, which basically means a lot less money until you have got 10-20 or so, and then going hard after government contracts or subcontracting to more established consultancies. Consultancy is a bit of a grind, and thats a shame, because the exciting thing about software is that you can make stuff that can become really popular and really lucrative, really quickly. Tech consultancy is quite similar to corporate law- you make _quite_ a lot of money, but you wont get properly rich, and you will really have to work for it.

If I was to do it again, I would partner up with some like minded people, get financing for a couple of years and build a product company. It might do well, it might not, but it would be more fun.

(Also, practical advice for being a consultant: ask for much more that you think is reasonable- they quite often say yes to whatever terms you suggest)
Neighborhood research for house hunters anywhere in the US
It's awfully ironic, given how Basecamp has built their entire brand off of good management, and running a non-toxic workplace.

Regardless of what people think of the specifics of the policy, it's a good case study in how not to do something like this. Releasing a blog post that results in 1/3rd+ of your employees resigning is bad management.
Well done. According to the author's Patreon, this is his first article that's "Paid for by patrons" though no details are given. His Patreon is set up so that donations happen whenever he publishes a new article. I guess the advantage over recurring donations is that it doesn't pressure him to crank out content - he can just do it on his own schedule, and donations are always justified.

https://www.patreon.com/ciechanowski
Your fuel tank was only allowed to hold a certain amount of fuel because if you had more, you could go farther between pit stops, thereby covering more laps while the other drivers were stopped for gas.

He would temporarily meet the small tank regulations during inspection, but under race conditions, the ball would burst, allowing for more space in the tank, which would get filled up with more fuel than his competitors at the first pit stop.
Mars Helicopter Flies Again and Gets a New Mission
No, certainly not. There's a good reason for the current ranking system. If you want newest, click "newest"
"... Making this language actually quite pleasant to use due to its gigantic ecosystem." but I see your point. Lombok is really just a collection of bandaids and some cool stuff and @SneakyThrows as mandatory footgun.
Yep! I've been a part of that community for a while. I guess I'm just feeling generally "unsure" of what to do.

- Not sure if I have enough $$$ to comfortably "retire"
- Not sure what I'd do if I stopped working
- Not sure what other people in tech/this space do personally
That's the point! Inflation causes fake capital gains on held property, which then turns into a wealth tax if you ever try to exchange the asset for another one!
Not that I've ever heard. The only justification I've heard is that long-term investing is good for the overall economy, and therefore should be encouraged.
As soon as governments get serious about CO2 emissions, Hybrid powertrains will end up as a "worst of both worlds" position.

Already across most of Europe all subsidies and discounts that applied for "eco friendly cars" no longer apply to Hybrids.

That leaves few people wanting to buy a hybrid - it won't be cheapest or most eco friendly.
New TikTok CEO Shouzi Chew First Came to Know ByteDance CEO Zhang Yiming
And yet interchange rates in Europe are capped at around 0.2%. 2% is still a lot of money.
I suspect that it increased the fuel capacity from the nominal "max" at race start, so when you hit a pit stop you can put more in.
The alternative is that China will continue to salami slice and break every marginal norm they can to choke and bleed out the (ideological) competition.

Taiwan has to worry about large scale invasion but they also have to worry about China using size, lack of attention to the "small stuff" and inertia to much the same effect.
Seems like it would be fairly trivial to write a bash script that ran the hugo build, then optimized the images with the squoosh cli.

Squoosh is available in npm, which should make this pretty easy: https://www.npmjs.com/package/@squoosh/cli
> Thank God electric cars are becoming more available, although I fear increasingly complex cooling and battery management and the 1000 things a software guy is going to add to them.

I'm hoping lithium iron phosphate starts to be used more in midrange vehicles; partly because they can be scaled up while sidestepping the potential resource bottlenecks around cobalt and nickel, and partly because they're very durable and cooling isn't usually much of an issue. Though heating might be an issue in the winter time (most LFP cells don't like being charged when temperatures are below freezing; heating might be necessary in winter).
Same here. I'm not too sensitive about the tools I used.

For work I use the keyboard of my 2019 MacBook Pro and I like it. It doesn't get in my way and I don't really notice it. So it's perfect for my use case.
I was on my own for 15 years (ending in 2019). It was a great ride, and if factors outside the business itself hadn't put the brakes on it I'd still be doing it today.

re: sustainable business on short engagements - I had a mix of long-term contracts and short-term gigs. The short term gigs were the most fun, but most stressful, so I always tried to bill them at the highest rate (and didn't mind if I didn't get the gig because I was bidding too high). I valued the long-term gigs tremendously for the "stability" they provided.

Having a diversity of Customers was the key to my piece-of-mind. As long as I didn't do something so bad that my name would appear in the newspaper I knew I could screw-up with one or more Customers and still have a livelihood, even if I did have to tighten the belt for awhile.

I can't agree w/ the statement re: considering yourself a small business enough.

Definitely have an accountant. Learn bookkeeping if you want to minimize accountant expense. Take a 100-level college accounting class and you'll know enough for a solo venture.
22nm is ivy bridge, Intel ça. 2011. I wonder what the perf would be with a modern design on this process.
You used to be able to use the tv view for chrome and then control it via other devices. Looks like they killed it.

https://9to5google.com/2019/09/16/youtube-leanback-tv-interf...
Yeah, I've got to say, that kind of offer, even if I liked working for a company, would be hard to turn down. Especially right now. Take the summer off, enjoy things after this hellacious year, get back into a position somewhere in the fall. I don't imagine that it's going to be a black-balling mark for these people.
Some people are willing to stick to their principles even if it costs them. We need many more such.
When all you have is a hammer …
Fuel capacities are reduced to minimize the fire in fiery crashes. But lower fuel capacity means more pit stops, which the racer wants to minimize.

Temporarily reducing fuel capacity means the car passes tech inspection, but really has more capacity.
Once again: real developers may want a lot of things. I've seen developers want bluetooth and location APIs in the browser. And yet, both Apple and Mozilla (note: not just Apple) consider these APIs harmful as currently presented and specified and haven't found/can't find a way to implement them in a non-harmful way.

And these APIs are the most visible. There are many other APIs and features that don't make their way into WebKit not because Apple "doesn't listen to real developers", but because the specs are extremely poorly written, or contain known bugs, or can't be implemented efficiently, or...

The scary thing is, these days Firefox devs are increasingly often on WebKit's side (because whatever your opinion of Apple is, WebKit devs want the same thing that Firefox devs want: a safer web web for people with properly implemented features). Whereas Chrome just plows through (because Google's raison d'etre is the Web, and Google wants to subsume and replace the web with all things Google).
Yes you are right as far as LS engine builders there's loads. I could have ordered a crate engine from Texas Speed and been done with it. And yes for hours of my time spent vs hours of money saved I lost a ton of money. But all it takes is one very small mistake to make an engine short lived with these exacting tolerances. I'd rather blame myself than deal with someone kicking the blame back. It was also a personal satisfaction thing.

My wife's engine had an issue and it was the middle of winter so I said whatever let's just have a shop fix it. In the process they "flushed the transmission" and it failed 4 days after we got the car back. Of course they stonewalled us and I can't prove they broke it. So I ordered a late model wreck transmission and replaced it and 3 years later still running strong.

But I then decided that I would never be in that position again where someone could tell me it wasn't their problem and get me aggravated. With this engine I built it from raw parts. I had the block machined, and I had the tools to verify.

It was certainly not worth my time, but as you said I love working on cars too.
The Color of Surveillance: Monitoring of Poor and Working People – Reading List
I'm glad I don't have to fit my expenses into a minimum wage budget, but some of your numbers are pretty high.

I buy gas once every 2 or 3 weeks and spend $45 on a phone plan with 4 GB of LTE (US; I guess that can fit the definition of basically no internet). My car insurance (with collision and unlimited medical) is less than $500 for 6 months.

I would probably balk at paying much more than $800 in rent. The rental market here is pretty thin (I think part of it is I don't know where to look), but I see a listing for $1100 for a 4 bedroom house. Electricity+water+gas would be in the range of $250 for 1 person (and less for several as heating is a major utility cost here).
2-4. I usually have one ambitious project, and sometimes I’ll pick up smaller projects that are easier to build momentum. If an idea seems like it could take a weekend, then I’ll jump onto it. The danger is typically with scoping.
Flow Forecast Version 0.956 released
> Give your web server access to writing to outbox and you can send email.

SES is already in the mix, so why not just use it directly to send emails from your web server?
Maybe the transition to Proof of Stake is the time to change terminology. Proof of Work is really a lot like mining, digging around to see if a nugget is there, while Proof of Stake is a community of self-interested institutions sharing the same signature.
The Tesla can go 300 miles by making it light, aerodynamic, brakes that recharge the battery, not turning on the heater, etc. Yes, it's a significant engineering accomplishment, but in the heavy long haul world when analyzing break-even points what matters is range improvements due to an increasing energy/weight ratio, not range improvements due to reducing air resistance and inertia. This is because the form factors of the boxcar are basically set by shipping container needs and the weight is going to be determined by the load you are carrying. Munro is advocating for hydrogen powered trucks and planes as hydrogen has similar power/weight characteristics to gas -- electrification of these is going to be a challenge.
Fuel tank capacity is required to be 10 gallons. Say, 20 laps or so.

They check, at the tech inspection, that your tank doesn't hold more than 10 gallons. Great.

Except, once you deflate the basketball (or get creative with routing fuel lines all over the car), you actually have 11-12 gallons onboard.

Which means, at the end of the race, when everyone else has to pit, you can make the "risky option" to skip the final pit stop, keep rolling, and, well, surprise of surprise, make it over the line (in first place) before you flame out.
I wanted to write: "Again? They don't learn to use robust patterns do they".

But if they discontinued it, then they have little reasons to put money into improving it.
Inside Moderna, one of biotech’s most secretive startups (2016)
When you qualify, your fuel tank is only allowed to hold X gallons. With the basketball inside, it held X gallons.

When the basketball sprang a leak and deflated, the tank held X+Y gallons, netting a slight advantage between pit stops (an extra lap or two over 500 miles adds up)
So, this is a tax on certain kinds of income rather than all income. And it exempts the first $250K, so it's a progressive tax. So...
There are other places in the world Taiwanese talent can work. And other sources of FDI in Taiwan that can create wage competition -- see other comments about Google.

China is uniquely and specifically trying to destroy Taiwan. The exception makes sense and doesn't have a totalizing effect.
I got this list (that I found on HN a while ago btw) and used to showcase my new simple web app (a list of links creator). I hope you enjoy both the content and the form.
I don't see a lot more there, besides referring to (long) past events to justify continuing with specific policies and actions.

In fact, it's definitely smart of Basecamp to realize that the kind of politics and ideology we encounter today in the US are anathema to any workplace and may lead to paralysis and rot-from-within outcomes. I expect more companies to follow suit.
I appreciate that now. Thank you to everyone for the education.

>The hydraulic brakes have nothing to do with the regen system.

I strongly suspect that they interact for antilock.

I wonder how Teslas deal with parking brakes, historically kind of an issue with disks.

It does seem to me that an entirely regenerative braking system would imply additional expense in terms of the strength of the half shafts, u-joints, transmission if any.
Definitely an instance of "to each their own" for me, starting a project in Audacity was refreshingly straightforward the first time I tried it. The non-destructive effect stacking mentioned in the video sounds pretty awesome.

The project you mentioned seems nice and clean, but looks like it's Linux only (specifically GTK2 only). For me that would limit the ability to share editing projects with others way too much, since so many are on Windows.
Also, the 8 track limit might be frustrating for musicians.
How I Use My Apple Watch as an Autism Aid
Antitrust law focuses on the restraints of trade. Companies that are minor players in the market have been successfully pursued for antitrust violations, because it does not require a monopoly, or even market dominance. Monopoly law was the origin of antitrust law, but today is merely a subset of it. (For example, bid rigging, market allocation, and price fixing are all antitrust violations.)

Antitrust generally requires a substantial market position, and the use of that market position in one of a number of enumerated anti-competitive manners (the list differs between the U.S. and E.U.). One antitrust violation both the U.S. and E.U. have is the abuse of market position in one market (i.e., mobile devices) to anti-competitively establish market position in a different market (i.e., streaming music).

Apple has approximately 1/3 of the EU market for smartphones, which is a substantial enough market position for a single market position that antitrust concerns come into play. (Legally, the comparison is not Apple vs Android; it's Apple vs Samsung, LG, Huawei, etc.) Note that Samsung, etc., would have similar antitrust concerns if they tried to launch their own streaming music services in the same fashion as Apple did.

Note that if Apple had required an industry-standard fee for processing iOS subscription payments (generally, 2% or less depending on territory), or didn't require Spotify to use iPay, then there wouldn't have been any antitrust issues.
One problem here is that the specific way in which the API is down right now (for an app that I work on, at least) is that when you make a login request through the JS-SDK, to get authorization to use other features/APIs, it never responds. The listener is not unavailable, but the API never responds, so from our point of view, we call their JS SDK login function, which takes a callback, the callback is never called. The best we can do is set our own timeout that gets deleted in the callback and if that doesn't happen before the timeout callback is called in the callback, we go down another path, either displaying an error or doing some other fallback code, but this login method is almost always used to get access to another API, so it starts with a user wanting to do something that some time later they'll be notified that they can't. That's just a bad user experience with no other way around it, if they can't quickly return an error.

Also, _WHY_ do these large scale API providers think that just letting the connection hang is in any way acceptable. Their load balancer, cache layer, proxy, literally anything in front of their API can return an error immediately instead of just waiting for the API. Even just returning a 504 for gateway timeout (which is probably the right thing to do) would be better than just sitting there and never returning anything.
China's Space Station Is Closer to Reality with Launch of Core Module
Which is what EU intends to fix.
Great overview. Would it be correct to characterize the fwrite capability as one of the more concerning potential exploits (ie. esp. when combined with other browser vulnerabilities)?
That makes sense, thanks. Clever!
MuseScore is such a great piece of free software, I assume this will be beneficial for Audacity!
It's a funny Tweet, but Rails is much, much bigger than Basecamp now. There's enough money invested in the Rails ecosystem at enough large and medium sized companies that Basecamp could go away entirely and Rails would continue to persist.

(I realize that there's always the possibility that this post could age like milk, and everyone might be pointing at laughing at me in 5 years. But that's also pretty much true for any piece of technology, and not unique to Rails' current situation.)
I don't think HN ever used to ban accounts for that reason. It must have been something else. We might be able to figure out what from the logs, but that's time-consuming and probably not worth it.
Work Safety: OSHA Tells Employers When to Record Adverse Vaccine Reactions
Invest in more Apple like things: vertical integration, cross-device compatibility, app quality, more device types, more accessories, more spinoff platforms (similar to MagSafe, AirTag, etc)
For the record, I didn't mean to imply any sort of moral judgment about Google itself, I was merely relating facts about Google perks and reports of how some employees reacted to them. The point, in fact, is mostly about the employees, who have often been characterized as out-of-touch with the workings of the world outside Google.
1 - i see that "pool" shows up in the nav when we go to there, but why not let it show up by default on the home page? that way it would be more discoverable. or is that the eventual plan?

2 - ciechanow.ski's post on Internal Combustion Engine is currently #1 on HN, but also #8 on the second chance pool - whats the thinking behind offering duplicates? i can see an argument for it (makes /pool a mod-curated HN frontpage) and an argument against it (confusing as to whether or not this page is really for second chances)
About 17 years ago, I had to solve the same problem, but since I used regexes, I had two problems at the end of it - memory usage and performance.

/* RFC2396 : Appendix B
As described in Section 4.3, the generic URI syntax is not sufficient
to disambiguate the components of some forms of URI. Since the
"greedy algorithm" described in that section is identical to the
disambiguation method used by POSIX regular expressions, it is
natural and commonplace to use a regular expression for parsing
^(([^:/?#]+):)?(//([^/?#]*))?([^?#]*)(\?([^#]*))?(#(.*))?
12 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

(Modified to support mailto: syntax as well)
*/

But at least it wasn't the problem I started with.
Even if I liked the job I would take it. Six months paid holiday would be too good to pass up.
Ah, that explains the fuel lines as well. Very interesting!
I've heard more than one Java programmer dismiss macro based compile-time meta-programming as way to complicated while happily littering codebases with annotation and classpath based runtime meta-programming.
The solution is to stop fiddling with proprietary streaming whose entire purpose is to create these headaches, and just torrent the content instead.
I wonder if they're regretting the "no employee equity" policy now.
So cool you've automated this. I keep a collection of internal links ("web log"). And I review them every month or so. Information is meant to be sifted imho.

Also reminds me of Last Chance Kitchen.
Good for the CEO to stand by their principals and not be bullied into a view they do not believe in.
That's assuming each issues lasted 24 hours right?