skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As a backend programmer, I really thought I had this nailed. I'm good at writing clean, mostly-pure code that composes well. The idea is to get the code to the point where the "what" and the "how" is communicated (clearly; avoid cleverness whenever possible) by the code itself, and to save the comments for the "why". That way if the "why" gets out of date, you can revisit whether that code should be there at all. The exceptions should be the highly tuned code that is hard to read - documenting what/how is more appropriate there, and that code should rarely change anyway.

But all that started changing with react hooks on the frontend. With contexts and state going everywhere, it's really hard to document. How do you document a state machine that by definition is spread between multiple code locations? You can document a hook's purpose but it doesn't tell you anything about complex behavior. It starts to feel as hard as documenting code that has a bunch of mutable global variables.
We used to have a plotter when I was a teenager, in the 90s. My dad was into any kind of tech, and bought it 2nd hand, even though he'd never done any kind of CAD or anything like that (he did that with all sorts of stuff). I think it was a Roland device, and I think it was A3 sized, but it might even have been A2.

I got a copy of AutoCAD from a warez site (downloaded over dial-up, obviously!), and learned how to use it, using the plotter to print my masterpieces - things like floor plans and building elevations - yeah, I was a weird teenager, and went through a phase of being interested in technical drawing. I thought I'd end up as a draftsman or an architectural technologist.

Anyway, it was absolutely fascinating to watch the plotter at work! The pen would fly across the page at high speed to the next target site, then make all these incredibly quick, tiny, precise movements, before flying off to another part of the page. I can still remember the pleasing electrical whine of the motor as it worked. Wonderful bit of kit :)
The article's baity title is not the article. Please let's react to the latter, not the former.

It can be helpful to remember that at big media sites, headlines get written by headline specialists. It's their job to sex up the title, and the rest of our job (the rest of us's job?) not to take the bait. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

I've replaced the title with a suitably neutral, representative sentence from the article body. There nearly always is one.
The reason for this is pretty simple.

A) the US allows for a greater dispersion in economic outcome. More poverty = more crime

B) the US has more citizens owning weapons per capita than any other nation. More guns = more gun deaths

C) When you combine above average crime levels with above average levels of gun prevalence, you get more dangerous police encounters and more deaths

While this is extremely easy for the rest of the world to understand, I’m confident the US will never figure this out because:

D) the US is above-average at monetizing their media industry and creating distracting narratives, so they will spend decades of attention on the wrong things
Gas-Loving Texans Pile into Home Solar, Batteries After Freeze
My two cents.

The first time I read this post was two years ago. I was working a problem: how to practice Japanese. I had users and revenue, but no growth. Simple maths told me my product would never grow as a startup, and I had no way out of the niche. This post helped me confirm my worry: my market is too small.

What I learned: add a filter to the problem I want to solve. Is the problem big, or is it going to be big? This is expecially important when I am working on something I am passionate about. There is confirmation bias and wishful thinking when it comes to what I love.

Now I am working on a problem I care about, and the problem is big.

This post expresses an idea that I can easily relate to, given my experience. In this sense, it is useful.
Fighting Workplace Surveillance
Large number of boards from

https://smallcomputercentral.wordpress.com/
You have to consider the problem from first principles.

A startup is always: creating value by addressing a need for a group of people.

Skill and luck weave through all of this. Finding the group of people? Maybe you strategize and seek those out, often they end up being the group you’re a part of or adjacent to (luck or skill?). How about finding that need for that people, and an important need too? If you have past experience maybe you know where to look, maybe you know how to filter the opportunities better and what to focus on. The process of creating value? Maybe you went into a discipline seeking those skills specifically for a startup, or you just happen to know people with the necessary skills to execute.

Overall: it’s a hard problem with constantly changing rules and strategies, and often you end up competing with other smart and talented people. Skill stacks the odds, but the problem is so complex that what we call luck is just the lack of deep understanding of the problem.

There is probably a set of steps that you could take one after the other that guarantees you’d make $1 billion dollars. Figuring that out is so difficult and complex and changing that thus far the best one can do is be as skilled and hardworking as possible, optimizing where you can, but even that doesn’t guarantee the solution: hence luck. The whole thing IS a skill problem, but it’s so complex that all the parts we can’t fit in the equation we just call luck.

Serial founders have gone farther in deciphering that “luck” into skill, so luck is less of a factor for them.
This is good, but IMO you should also add the number of downloads because most of these apps seem to be very niche and likely have very few downloads.
Yeah that last one is indeed an idiot. Also, side note, why do people think that deserve respect? Very curious of this point of view.
> "employees (who yosito disagrees with) should shut the fuck up"

Please don't put words in my mouth. I said nothing of the sort.
I like your version of Foo and Bar - Fribblers and Borgles
In the GitHub video you said "you should never use π" (to use τ instead), an interesting comment. What is the reasoning for saying so?
Another link to explore the federation: https://the-federation.info/.
Ah he gets it. Shared libraries are a good idea if you only consider performance and idealized scenarios. In the real world, where users have to use programs that they want to not be broken, vendoring absolutely everything (the way Windows apps do it) is essential.
I don't know what you're getting at in the first sentence. If you restate it in the active voice, it goes: "Biologically scientific ergo naturally scientific principles presuppose your speech." That sounds pretty incoherent to me, but maybe it means something to you. I don't see how these principles could presuppose my speech given that my speech came after.

I would argue that any system of morality that is divorced from what humans think is right is of at best questionable utility.
No I very much dislike it.
This is uncharitable. Sometimes systems disproportionately favor certain outcomes, and systemic racism describes a subset of those systems.

If you were playing a boardgame, and the rules said I get to role 2 dice for every 1 dice you roll, at that point the game wouldn't be fair. If we were playing chess and I got to start with 2 queens, then you would be within your rights to complain that the game wasn't fair.

And if you complained about the rules of the game, and said that game wasn't fair, and I hand-waved that by saying that you were misusing fairness to push back against "any outcome where you lost", it would be reasonable to take issue with that.

Systemic racism isn't just any outcome where Black people get hurt, it describes a reinforcing mechanic in society where Black people are repeatedly hurt and where their disadvantages perpetuate themselves. Crime drives people into poverty, which imposes social and economic disadvantages which keep them from rising out of poverty, which drives them into crime -- increased attention on those neighborhoods leads to preconceptions and biases among officers, it leads to fewer opportunities for the people in those neighborhoods, and the cycle continues. It's reinforced by the system itself, and by people inside the system who mean well but contribute to it, and by people outside of the system that use it to support their own racist agendas.

It's a lose more mechanic that reinforces unequal outcomes for Black communities, and its a mechanic that was very obviously set in motion by redlining, voter and wage suppression, by explicitly racist housing policies, and by slavery itself. It is not an accident that poor neighborhoods tend to be predominantly Black, that happened deliberately. "Racist" is a perfectly fine word to describe the outcomes of that system, it's nothing like an asteroid.
(9) 10 Hilarious Ways Dogs Have Fallen Asleep
> I personally don't think these sorts of strategies should exist from a perspective of principals (it encourages capital to copy, not innovative, and further punishes those who take on the real risks who are disproportionately awarded) but they do.

To play devil's advocate - what about network effects? There are plenty of examples where a possibly inferior service built a moat around itself through network effects, preventing a potentially better rival from competing.
Yeah it's definitely caused by the team name being plural, or at least sounding plural - I've never heard anyone say "The Red Sox is good" either. Regardless of what is technically grammatically correct I think real life usage has pretty much settled on that convention, at least in the US.
> He told me there’s homebrew to connect it to a larger screen.

> Timing is everything.

Yeesh. I assume you know what homebrew means.

Perhaps putting features in your product is what mattered more than timing here.
College Textbook Scams
The problem with this entire mess is that there are things some trustworthy third party software needs to do, but are open to abuse by untrustworthy software using them for nefarious purposes.

In theory the answer to this is for the app reviewers to scrutinize any app using those capabilities to make sure it's not abusing them, but in practice the app approval process is actually kind of crap and doesn't do a good job of making those distinctions.

Your remaining alternatives are to prohibit that thing from happening whatsoever, which pisses people off, or to make it possible but a huge miserable ordeal, which pisses people off.
The same code can have multiple overlapping sets of maintainers. For example, one team can be responsible for business logic while another team can manage core abstractions shared by many product teams. Yet another team may be responsible for upgrading to newer toolchains and language features. They'll all want to touch the same code but make different, roughly orthogonal changes to it.

Semver provides just a few bits of information, not nearly enough to cover the whole gamut of shared and distributed responsibility.

The comparison with multithreading is not really valid, since monorepos typically linearize history.
Not necessarily. Bright people are often unhappy/depressed/etc and then lack the appropriate resources to succeed.
Central Bank Digital Currencies: A common misunderstanding
What I find interesting is that they are basically slamming the helicopter into the ground at a speed of 1 m/s to generate an unambiguously detectable acceleration as confirmation of landing. That they are relying on an inertial measuring unit (IMU) instead of laser ranging as a precaution against dust interfering with the latter sounds also clever - and even more that they then again only rely on this IMU for a split second, as precaution against errors accumulating during dead reckoning. De-risking is everything if nobody can walk over and put the thing on its landing legs again.

The helicopter consuming more than 200W of power while hovering surprised me as this is a lot more than I had expected. Can anyone compare that to the power consumption of a hovering drone here on Earth?
I have bipolar disorder and I would generally tend to agree with you, but this article reads more like a PR piece for her toy company. "Existential Depression" is more of a pop diagnosis. If you google it you'll see a lot of articles about gifted people and existential depression - it's the depression you can feel good about because it implies you are gifted.
Euro-Zone Vaccine Delays Mean Double-Dip Recession as U.S. Booms
Like many linguistic relics better left buried, the phrase is usually only disconnected from historical context for those who may not fully appreciate the complex circumstances surrounding its origin. Around those who do, to use it like in the specific example you gave would be a faux pas to say the least.
> It would likely imply they found a way to relatively cheaply attain faster-than-light travel, for example, perhaps by some kind of spacetime-manipulating mechanism like wormholes or Alcubierre/warp drives. (Which some scientists believe could maybe be theoretically plausible one day, given enough scarce resources.)

Not necessarily though. It could be a generational ship with mundane propulsion technology.
Watch this https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Grv1RJkdyqI
There are ways to avoid these copyright guys going after you with a truly decentralized system where node stores only a fraction of the content and there is no central place to ban content. Just like the concept of internet was DODs answer to a threat nuking communication there must be an answer to the threat of copyright trolling. I am very much waiting to a decentralized content platform to show up that is immune to content filtering abuse and much easier on the ISPs bandwidth wise than the current YT or similar sites.
> however, what is a reasonable alternative for a content creator who wants to publish their videos and be able to build an audience?

I think it's more instructive to look at it from the other side. What's the reasonable alternative for a video hosting service to doing this kind of policing? Remember it's not really an option to just throw video over the fence, DMCA requirements mean you have to be responsive. And thus there's a built-in incentive to cut a deal with the content owners to preemptively prevent the DMCA claims (which are expensive!) by doing this sort of automated policing.

It's true that not every host does this, but every host that doesn't do this either does it in violation of the law or eats significant overhead that needs to be recouped in some other way (i.e. by paying their content creators less! Check the author's channel, this is someone who's clearly on youtube for revenue. Would even she jump ship given that it would probably cost her money?)

Really, this isn't something Google can fix. It's a problem with the legal regime that imagines that all infringement is a bright line definition and that preemptive takedowns are the best solution.
Well, let's look at what exactly Bill Gates said. I don't see a direct transcript; the most explicit description I can find is:

Asked directly by Sky’s Sophy Ridge if he thought changing patent restrictions “would be helpful,” Gates answered with a quick and curt “no,” before continuing:

“Well, there’s only so many vaccine factories in the world, and people are very serious about the safety of vaccines. And so moving something that had never been done — moving a vaccine from, say, a [Johnson & Johnson] factory into a factory in India — it’s novel. It’s only because of our grants and our expertise that can happen at all. The thing that’s holding things back in this case is not intellectual property. There’s not like some idle vaccine factory, with regulatory approval, that makes magically safe vaccines. You know, you’ve got to do the trials on these things, and every manufacturing process has to be looked at in a very careful way.”

So, first of all, I think it's a mistake to take this and say Bill Gates is "opposed". He's just saying he doesn't think it would be helpful. Secondly, I think this rationale is very clear. He does not think waiving patents would be helpful because the intellectual property is not a bottleneck on developing vaccines, because it isn't straightforward to develop these vaccines in new factories.

One fact that I think is really important to this debate - Moderna announced they are not enforcing their patents, months ago when their vaccine got approved.

https://investors.modernatx.com/news-releases/news-release-d...

However, there aren't any new factories springing up making the Moderna vaccine without Moderna being involved. In all this news coverage discussing whether waiving patent rights is urgent, it seems pretty important that Moderna is already waiving these rights! And it isn't making any difference.

I am not a vaccine expert but to me the most obvious conclusion is that Bill Gates believes what he said, that waiving patent rights won't really help that much. He might be wrong but his position really isn't obviously malicious or anything like that.
These findings supported the
prediction that administrators may seek to justify an ineffective course of action by escalating their commitment if resources to it.

It sounds like maybe they were trying to make it work rather than justifying it.

In a section titled Norms for Consistency, it talks a bit about President Carter and the importance of your convictions.

I think most likely this is really about the importance of leaders being wise and knowledgeable to a degree that exceeds the comprehension of the average person. People who don't understand your decision judge you based on how unflinchingly confident you are in it's correctness even though other people don't understand it, don't think it's a good idea (presumably because they don't understand it) and are against it because they have some conflicting agenda (such as personal gain).

It's 11 pages. I can't manage to finish it in one sitting but it looks like a worthwhile read.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xDcvPf78g1k&t=12s&ab_channel...

The irony and hypocrisy of this are incredible.
> Modern psychiatry and psychology seems to have a norm in mind and people who don’t fit that norm have an illness.

This isn't it. The diagnoses usually have criteria for the symptoms being a problem for the persons functioning. People don't seek help because they're a bit diffeent but because they're suffering to the point of having difficulty living.
Exactly, a truly innovative company would be working on a way to make WFH as immersive, productive and social as an office rather than trying to make the office function during a pandemic.
You farm these days with all the benefits of technology and mass production. You are not doing subsistence farming. Making your own soap, making your own clothes, making your own tools, chopping wood for the stove, making your own barn, etc.
This is a very bad security advice...
Explain this to my mom please. P50 users of the internet could not give two shits about these entities.
This is cool, you should sync with a domain registration affiliate program.
I was actually listening to a podcast that went into AltaVista a few months back. One of the folks involved in AltaVista originally hired me into my current role but the public episode hasn't dropped yet. https://www.redhat.com/en/command-line-heroes
Yeah, it’s sad they didn’t make it an official feature. Apple adds common jailbreak tweaks to official iOS releases all the time.

You would think Sony could at least iterate on their product with features the gaming community wants instead of shuttering the product line permanently.
> The US is not unusual in containing multitudes.

The different regions are the size of countries though.

Instead of comparing it to any European country, comparing it to the EU might make more sense. You have Denmark, Sweden, Luxembourg and the Netherlands, but you also have Bulgaria, Romania, Portugal and Croatia, each with their distinct culture and much more autonomy than a region in the UK, more like US states.
As I remarked, the surge in population without the food says everything.
I'm a wage slave, but years ago I helped a struggling consulting agency blow up.

It's usually marketing. That's probably why revenues are low too. Once we had marketing sorted out we had more work coming in than we knew what do do with. So we promptly raised our rates and became small but profitable.

Don't quit your day job until you have too much work to do it.

I don't want to dump a rant (but I did anyways) but start online and start local. Do geofenced ads on Google and Facebook. Put in your ads that you're close by. Even in online age companies they can drive by and see have a huge edge, so this is best place to start with ads, you will have a solid handicap against powerful national ad campaigns. Know your market, for instance, we discovered a lot of older guys running small businesses listen to certain AM radio stations and ads there are super cheap. Some of them still read newspapers too. Lots of little insights like that eventually give you an edge. Marketing is all a big competition for eyeballs at the lowest price.

Another plus was partnering with an IT company. We gave them IT work, and they gave us software dev work when there wasn't an off the shelf fix. After years of this the owners merged the two companies for good profit.

Organic reach is just as important as ads, if not more. Figure out what problems you could solve for clients and start writing articles about them. Don't outsource this to ad agencies. They write fluffball articles with no substance and Google will deepsix you. Find the most knowledgeable person on the subject that doesn't want a fortune or even who wants to promote their own shit that doesn't compete with you. Humble-brag but I have some articles related to my specialty that still rank #1 on Google for our targeted keywords a decade after leaving that place. At one point 20 articles that I wrote brought in 70% of traffic. No idea what their metrics look like now, but I'm sure they still bring in tons of traffic to this day. TLDR: organic reach is super important because unlike ads, it's free.

Your best bet early on is copying successful competitors. There's a lot of services out there to monitor competitors ad campaigns and website organic reach/links. Mimic your competitors at first, leaning on closer physical distance to make up for worse targeting until you got your beat then rise up against them or find your own niche.

Again small advantages build up. One of our biggest local competitors used a help widget on every site they wrote. I eventually found all of their clients from this using DNS and we systematically called them all and took a good fraction that had issues with their hosting.

I am convinced it's all marketing. Software consulting is a generic business like a restaurant unless you specialize in military guidance systems or Fortran or something. Just like a restaurant, the food matters but marketing is what makes or breaks you
Why not just use Rails then? Several years ago, I attempted to rewrite our main app (running on Railo and FW/1) in Wheels, and ultimately, that process led me to determine that Rails was a better fit for our project.
We've warned you repeatedly not to use HN for political, national, or religious flamewar. Since your account has shifted into using HN primarily for that, I've banned it. I hate to ban an account that's been here since 2007, but what you're doing is clearly an abuse.

If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Price is a really poor metric. Would be more interesting to look for high volume of sales / low rating
I just tried to add G2 to my list but they immediately get you on captcha, so they really dont wish to be crawled :D