skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I was fortunate in this regard. My wife inherited her mother's wedding ring. When it came time for us to get married, we took that ring to a jeweler who mounted the diamond in a setting that my wife picked out. The ring has great sentimental value for my wife at a modest cost. We never had to have the conversation about a mined diamond vs a synthetic diamond.
TIL the soldering iron is the DIY qualifying tool of self-cobbling...
Those are all great bundlers/dev servers but they aren’t as ambitious as Rome. Rome aims to be the one tool that handles everything: compiling, bundling, testing, linting and everything else.
And some health conditions are not obvious until there is an incident or until the person gets a checkup. High blood pressure is often referred to as the "silent killer" as many people that don't get their BP tested won't necessarily know it has been creeping up. Most big grocery stores sell the BP testers. It is a good cheap investment. Some of the stores have a free BP testing station.
Today, Ethereum uses about 1/6 energy consumption of bitcoin, while providing much more utility. But will change later this year as it transitions to proof-of-stake, at which point Ethereum's energy consumption will be negligible.

https://www.wired.co.uk/article/blockchain-cryptocurrency-en....
It would make more sense to sell this as an NFT if it were paired with a thematically related artwork. A wealthy buyer would be able to display the NFT in their home and brag about all the lives they saved when they bought it.
A related story is the border between Belgium and the Netherlands that was recently moved[1].

Not because some war was imminent, but because of very practical reasons: Belgian police could only reach that piece of Belgium by boat; so "exchanging it with NL" was the easiest, because the Dutch police could just drive there.

It makes me happy to see that we're down to "practical exchanges of land" from centuries of war over the most silly pole, church or "slight".

[1] https://nos.nl/artikel/2112869-nederland-krijgt-belgisch-sch... Dutch only, sorry.
I know, but I deliberately didn’t mention that because it’s the exception, not the rule.

If you pick up a random item in Costco, it’s paid for and sold by Costco.
It's an interesting comparison. Looking back in the history of software, "A pattern language" was an architectural treatise which inspired the software concept of "software design patterns".

Similarly, I can see that considering the known issues with top-down vs. bottom-up city planning/evolution could be beneficial for software-centric organizations too; the issues with badly-fit top-down city plans seem to match very well with the pains of an ill-fit software architecture that's mandated from an ivory tower, complete with users using the planned cities "wrong".

I'm sure there are differences though. You have a lot more observability into your software systems, and at the end of the day, they are orders of magnitude less complicated than cities, so you can comprehend more of the system at once, and truly find common usecases to standardize around. This is in contrast to cities where it's impossible to really know every citizen's unique needs, temperament, and usage patterns.

Worth thinking about more; given the relatively low cross-pollination rates between the fields, I suspect there are more lessons that software engineers could glean from architecture and city planning.
AFAIK, you're still subject to some sort of vetting process when getting acqui-hired, so you'd still be studying for that anyway.

So it is probably more work than simply studying and rolling the dice over and over.
We're incredibly honored that you chose us!
> I'm not sure why this is an NFT

That's what I've said about every existing NFT.
I'm from the future. Stadia (was) a platform that tried to change gaming and replace consoles or gaming PCs by using the cloud to play games on any screen. Unfortunately, the gamers said no and ignored it. Then it shut itself down and went to the Google graveyard.

The fact no-one cared about their free trials, their own studios closing, Apple still barring Stadia and now many of the Stadia team leaving should be enough to tell you that Stadia's existence is almost over.

How is it that people are 'still' waiting and scrambling for PS5's and Xbox Series X|S consoles since last year rather than going for Stadia's 'no-hardware' cloud gaming platform? If you can't grow during last year's strange times then you're really off to a slow start.

So I'll sit back, relax and go back to my PC/console device?
They aren't destroying anything. They are just not allowing the material on their site. Are you saying that anyone who creates a video hosting site must allow ANY content on their site? I don't see any practical basis for that contention.
Do you have plans to have new grad in NYC?
If Covid were Polio then we would have 140% of people getting the vaccine. Some people would get 5 shots. But Covid isn't' Polio. It mostly effects older fat people. Yes anyone can die, but that's with any virus.
Duty is a bit strong. I think maximizing vaccination is the best course for our situation, but it is still an optional individual action that each person has to weigh and decide themselves. Unfortunately the table has been set, and it looks like enough people have been swayed not to attend.
I didn't view it as gaslighting, I viewed it in the way I said it: she may have not wanted to demand a 'genuine' diamond, so she left it open-ended. What woman wants to demand that when asked for preference? Demanding it would remove the sincerity and meaningfulness of the man's gesture.

On the note of carnations for Valentine's Day, I'd view it in much the same way. Unless she's told you how much she adores and prefers carnations on Valentine's Day, roses are the best bet.

My partner and past partners have always fit that type, and I don't think either is lucky or better or right. I personally enjoy the tradition and the unspoken symbolism in the gifts, and striving to make her happy without it being spelled out for me.

I'm happy you have someone who makes you feel lucky, and who matches your preferences for communication and a relationship — finding that is possibly the greatest feeling in life. I simply aim to point out that either are valid, normal preferences and dynamics, as opposed to one being gaslighting.
Nose size indicates maximum penile length
Yeah, total clickbait. The headline is not true at all. Annoying
> Together, we’re announcing that we’ve raised $4.5 million in seed funding, led by A.Capital Ventures and OSS Capital.

VCs fund startups which has the potential to 100x their returns right? How is that going to work here? How will they monetize a javascript library? Will we have an IPO for a javascript library? Or are they betting on a big tech company to acquire a Javascript library for 100s of millions of dollars? I am confused.
Man bites dog is amazing, a noir mockumentary american psycho.
If larger companies are not innovative they will fail. The giants of today haven’t been giant for very long.

There is plenty of money around to invest in alternatives.
My Web Development Skills Went from Zero to One
Tiobe Index for May 2021 (Python back at second position; C at first position)
It's probably poverty and the fact that the government bureaucracy doesn't do an extensive job of tracking its citizens. It's possibly the same in Africa. It just so happens that I know about Asia.

Western countries are unbelievably wealthy and they have crazy effective information infrastructure. I suspect this is not common across the globe. Many people may barely have a birth certificate.

In many of these countries, the infrastructure is like the UK pre-Domesday-Book. There may be people living in a village that is unmarked on the maps.

For the people my friends last worked with, they were in a fishing shanty town in the Indian state of Karnataka that was unnamed (officially) until recently. Strange, eh? People just agglomerate somewhere without incorporating a municipality or anything because they have to survive.
A PDF of my Watsi donation and credit card statement is just as good without any blockchain Rube Goldberg mechanizations. By all means, digitally sign the PDF [1] if you want to be fancy and hip, but you don't need a blockchain, nor is it going to tell you if the healthcare donated towards was actually delivered.

If the argument is, "It's on the blockchain for trust purposes!" my retort is, "Do you not trust the nonprofit? And if you don't, why are you giving them money?"

Please, do donate to non profits that align with your philanthropy interests, but don't get caught up in hype.

[1] https://helpx.adobe.com/acrobat/using/certificate-based-sign...
But buying a wedding ring is not only about showing off, it is an old method of psychological trickery that is supposed to make relationships and marriage more durable.

It used to be "sunk cost" for a man, since until recently it was expected that if you break the engagement your ex-fiance would keep the ring (right now in most of the states law require it to be returned). Expensive wedding party is another sunk cost.
No, those are Costco’s suppliers which are completely invisible to the customer and completely different.

Costco purchases the items from the suppliers, generally. They then resell them to you for a markup.

With few exceptions, every single item in Costco is sold by the first party seller: Costco. So my point stands: third party sellers are generally not a part of the Costco experience.
I'm sorry to hear that, and thanks for sharing your thoughts. I hope your children are currently doing well.

> As they would talk through what had happened, it would become apparent that it wasn't the tech - it was the people. The tech was just where the kids were communicating.

I think this is clearly true, but I think the idea is that tech has enabled new modes of interaction that can cause much more damage much more easily, and that we haven't built social antibodies to yet. I tend to roll my eyes at the doom-and-gloomers claiming that global connectivity hasn't done anything but cause psychological problems, but I did assume that there were significant societal costs currently being realized by this upheaval in the way humans connect to each other, and found the study to be quite an interesting finding.
I had hoped PG would write an essay on crypto/NFTs, as he seems enthused by them and is good at explaining things.

But he explains nothing here. Noora seems good, but that’s a feature of Noora, not NFTs.

As for what is going on, I looked at Noora’s post, it seems PG has placed the sole bid on the NFT, valued at $2.6 million at current market prices of ETH.

In return he will get a token that says he did it.

One part I’m unclear on: if someone outbids him, do only they get the token and pg pays nothing, or do both pay and are the contributions etched into the NFT?

> But the higher the price of this NFT goes, the more lives will be saved. What a sentence to be able to write.

Noora sounds like a good charity but what is different here from simply saying “the more people donate to Noora, the more lives will be saved”

Since Noora knows their ROI they should be able to calculate lives saved from a donation whether it is a normal donation or an NFT purchase.

If so, what does the NFT do?

Many smart people I follow, who are ordinarily good explainers, are inordinately enthused about crypto. And yet on this single topic none of them have produced any public writing explaining the reasons for their enthusiasm.

It is maddening. There may well be something there. But if there is it ought, in principle, to be explainable.

———-

I should also note you can’t take this and say “NFTs contributed $2.6 million”. You have to consider opportunity costs. The closest alternative to this post would be PG writing exactly the same essay except stating “I donated $2.6 million to Noora and you should too!” with a donate now button.

This post hit the HN frontpage, so surely many would have donated. Whereas nobody has donated other than PG.

Measured against this alternative, the NFT vs a normal funding mechanism has plausibly cost lives. Not to mention the money that Noora will take out of its funds to do a carbon offset.

Perhaps I am misunderstanding how this works, but if I have understood it properly and PG would have done an essay either way this might have cost lives.
What a missed opportunity. It's a hard nut to crack, for sure, but Google doesn't seem to have the chops or the product mentality to innovate beyond... Search, really.

Even GCP, despite being a multi-billion dollar #3 in the cloud wars, is still far away from being profitable. I'd say there's a chance that it will not survive many years.
The competitors are ready for prime time from the moment the console reaches the doorstep.
Fixing the Introductory Statistics Curriculum
You generalize and project your own life preferences on others. Please don't tell what is best for me. There is no problem to solve whatever.
No Bullshit Guide to Statistics progress update
> It's gotten to the point where interviewing is so competitive, exhausting, opaque, and ultimately random, that it might actually be easier to do a bootstrapped start-up for a year and get bought by Facebook than it is to grind leetcode and interview-prep for a year and roll the dice on the interview circuit.

Not sure about founders but sometimes you have to interview with the Big Tech Co. as well to keep the job after acquisition.
You are looking at today - this is about the history.

In 2002, Microsoft was the dominant force in consumer electronics because everyone assumed they needed ‘PC compatibility’ or even to integrate Windows CE.

If you worked in the industry then, Microsoft was discussed in every meeting and was a major player in standards bodies.

That started to change with the introduction of the iPod.
> Nose size was highly related to stretched penile length in Japanese male cadavers.
Indeed! Very useful for shell wrote as part of OS course last year.

Compiling with debug (-g in gcc) lets valgrind report which function's allocating lost memory
Even worse is that all of this data can be used to infer other data. Once you know enough about a person, you can start making some alarmingly accurate guesses about them. I'm hoping for a lot more than a tax on this kind of data, myself.
I always thought it ironic that Linux killed Sun rather than Microsoft.
Might not be "necessary", but sure as heck makes all that a lot easier. Sure, one could design their own system that accomplishes all of those features, but why if there's an existing infrastructure layer that anyone can build on that already offers it? Especially a non-profit that likely lacks the technical expertise and resources?
Cargoboard | Berlin, DE | Onsite/Remote DE | Backend Engineer | cargoboard.de

Cargoboard is Europe's leading groupage logistics platform. Founded in 2019, we have already served more than 18.000 customers and are steadily growing. Unlike many startups, Cargoboard has been profitable from the very beginning.

We are looking for a backend engineer with a solid understanding of DevOps processes and technologies to join our tech team. We offer flexible working hours, competitive salary, and many growth opportunities.

To apply, please send an email to wind@cargoboard.com
> If you can't grow during last year's strange times then you're really off to a slow start.

Exactly this
How to avoid bad crypto presale projects?
TCL keeping it real as usual in his recent video explaining how to avoid bad crypto presales.
Do you guys think VC’s deliver new crypto projects as much value as the VC’s profit? I mean I get that they offer some guidance and connections to key people in their network but the discount on tokens they get seems excessive.
I find it remarkable how well MCTS works. Even without the value or policy net, the vanilla algorithm is capable of finding meaningful results by solving the MDP.

A nice writeup that helped me understand MCTS: https://tianjun.me/static/essay_resources/Lets_Play_Hanabi/p...
Most people only know who Thomas Pynchon is, is from the guy with the paper head over his head who appeared two times on the Simpsons as a throw away joke.
Why don't you believe the principle of electromagnetic action effecting the algorithmic process vis-a-vis the mathematical transformation of the quantities of motion is irrelevant?
DIY Instructions for Building a Lisperati1000 Computer
Branding and artificial scarcity
I agree with you, which is why I put real diamond in quotes here. Lab or earth grown, both are real. Sadly, not everyone sees lab grown as having as much desirability as earth grown diamonds. While I would be open to receiving a lab diamond, I've met many people for whom it would be seen as a budget option.

Although through an objective lens they are the same, for a lot of people there is an emotional difference between buying (or receiving) a lab grown vs earth grown diamond which means they can't be treated like-for-like in every situation.
You can make the same argument for just about anything they say.
Every console was hacked to allow mods. e.g. the smash bros community built mods such as Project M for the modded gamecube and Wii, and even mods of smash ultimate for the Switch.
I try to tell people I don't have a birthday anymore. Because if I tell people not to get me anything, sometimes they hear please get me something. Ugh.
> My primary goal is to get hired as the product manager for this new business.

Then the first step is to apply for PM jobs at those companies.

The bad news is that your idea has a value of $0 right now, no matter how good it is. Companies don’t buy ideas, they buy businesses and/or patents. You could try to patent your idea but that path usually isn’t as simple or as lucrative as it sounds. You could try to build a company around your idea, but if it can’t stand alone as an independent company then that’s a dead end.

The good news is that FAANG jobs pay well, so simply getting one of those jobs might let you achieve your goals.

Don’t let this idea get in the way of actually making progress, though. It’s better to actually land a well paying job than to hold off on applying while you try to perfect an idea.
Payoff time calculations shouldn't include opportunity costs. Calculating opportunity cost would require knowing about every other possible project.

The right procedure is to calculate payoff periods for each project separately. Then, when deciding which projects to fund, you choose them starting with the shortest payoff times until your budget is used up.
> In order to know if anything you are reading anywhere is reliable you have to already be knowledgeable about the topic.

Not necessarily. Consider a good textbook or paper on, say, physics, for example. The textbook will not just tell you things, perhaps with a bunch of references. It will actually construct the theoretical model(s) it is going to use, step by step, starting with premises that are either common knowledge or are supported by experiments (an example of the latter is the premise that the speed of light is the same in all inertial frames, which Einstein used to construct the theoretical model of special relativity in his famous 1905 paper). You don't have to already be knowledgeable about the topic to evaluate what you're reading. You can evaluate it on its merits: are the premises true, or at least reasonable? Is the construction of the model valid?

There are some articles on Wikipedia that actually try to do this; but the ones that do it correctly, that I've seen, aren't on topics that are at all disputed. That's why I put that qualifier in my statement.

> The thing about Wikipedia is that for most popular topics that you aren't knowledgeable about you can be sure they've been reviewed by thousands of users and kept somewhat reliable and up to date

You must be joking. Most articles on Wikipedia have only been reviewed by a small number of people. And for any topic that is at all disputed, those people are all partisans, and usually they are mostly partisans of one side, who revert or overwrite any contributions they disagree with. In some cases, when there are vociferous partisans on both sides, the whole process breaks down and it's basically impossible to get any useful content into an article.
There's no shared wall clock between the server and client with HTTP-based streaming. There's also no guarantee the client's stream will play continuously or even hit the same edge server for two individual segments. That's state an edge server needs to maintain and even share between nodes. It would be different for every client and every stream served from that node.

For streaming you actually want the client to have a buffer past the play head. If the client can buffer the whole stream it makes sense to let them in many cases. The client buffers the whole stream and then leaves your infrastructure alone even if they skip around or pause the content for a long time. The only limits that really make sense are individual connection bandwidth limits and overall connection limits.

The whole point of HTTP-based streaming is to minimize the amount of work required on the server and push more capability to the client. It's meant to allow servers to be dumb and stateless. The more state you add, even if it's negligible per client, ends up being a lot of state in aggregate. If a system meant edge servers could handle 1% less traffic that means server costs increase by 1%. Unless those ones of ad impressions skipped by youtube-dl users come anywhere close to 1% of ad revenue it's pointless for Google to bother.
Does Stephen Fry have free will? If not, then in what sense would he "like to" remind us?
It's kind of a meme in Belgium that flemish people have french last names and walloons have dutch last names.
Huh, I didn't know that, but I highly recommend the hard cover!
>Would you also oppose controlling fox and deer populations in Australia?

By using genetic engineering? Yes I would.
bad examples - the better one is Deno.
Can HN help me understand this: When people say that free will doesn't exist, is that a falsifiable position? What would it take to convince you that free will does exist?
You can theoretically stop all mutation, but the users might start to complain!
As I understand it there are several publishers not allowing games to work on GFN (but I too love the service when I trialed it)
If the ~$1000 per life figure is accurate, the GiveWell[1] guys will be all over this.

[1] http://givewell.org
Yes, seeing an otherwise healthy, and free-thinking human being turn through their behaviour into almost a sub-sentient machine running pre-programmed scripts, would errode a bit of the soul in almost everyone. As some of their childhood naivete is forever extinguished. At least now they’ve gained through this experience a deeper perception of the true nature of reality.
I have the same issue. I want to expand my friendships beyond my employer, but I'm not certain how. I feel like I've got just enough time outside of work to spend time with my family, and very little left over to go to meetups or wherever else it is that people find new adult friends.
Agree 100%. I've bootstrapped, I've been acquired, and I've gone through the FB/G/etc. interview processes. Going through those interviews took a few weeks of light prep, whereas bootstrapping to acquisition was a multi-year slog. Just the due diligence portion of the acquisition too many, many, many times the effort of job interviewing.
It’s a difficult, painful problem - meaning there’s an opportunity. Sebastian has the grit to deliver. What’s the business model?
Great interchange of comments.
He's uh, not so popular here these days, but I recently heard a quote by Peter Thiel and thought it was insightful. Not sure where it was from, exactly.

"The way to build a big company is to never get acquired."