skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
No operating system -- or desktop -- is perfect. But what would be a massive improvement is if all of the linux distros adopted a single desktop stack to support for enterprise/business clients while optionally supporting other desktops combos. I know this is more or less be asking the impossible of the Linux community who split hairs over everything but if a ten year "Okay, we'll all support this stack" was reached that would massively increase the Linux desktop market share and give app developers (eg: Adobe) a stable target for porting non-trivial applications.

The ultimate loser in such a joining of the clans would be Windows and macOS while Linux would rise rapidly in prominence. Why can't we do this?
Why are libllvm6.0 llvm-6.0-dev and libclang-6.0-dev needed for this?
Historically this has been true, and costs reducing is a part of Gordon Moore's original statement.

It has been true for Intel up until at least 2015, and I expect that ignoring the recent supply chain weirdness it will remain true for a while longer.

http://www.imf.org/~/media/Files/Conferences/2017-stats-foru...
Hatetris – Tetris which always gives you the worst piece
Introduction to Kill Bill using a fictitious vignette service
One reason for a senior engineer to move to consulting is that they are tired of being forced to prove that they know how to program every time they switch jobs.

Companies are far too risk averse when hiring, and the amount of hoops you have to jump through is getting more onerous every year.

I'm currently a full-time employee, but I've consulted for about a decade in total. Convincing someone to pay you 2 weeks up front for a contract is significantly less hassle than convincing someone to hire you full-time at a software company.
I see the lack of an Android app as a feature. People who really want to use it will just get a cheap iPhone, I gave Android using friend my old iPhone 7. Most of the fun is the mix of exclusivity while still being able to chat with B-tier celebrities on a whim. Supporting Android means more users, which means we will have to sift through even more “Hodl BTC Gamestonk xD” rooms to get to the interesting rooms.
I think the key there is the new domain/language.

One of the contractors was a rails dev, the other one was actually just a polyglot, although we had hired him for Ember.js help.

But the project is also a high impact, high stress, and challenging project (COVID vaccination software) so yes the domain, level of challenge, and impact helps tremendously to stand out.

As a tech exec and senior engineer myself, I find it highly appealing to do contract work mainly because there are many options/opportunities, and the ability to take a gap wherever you want. That's why I've had my own company for roughly 12 years.

I do think it'll remain that way for the foreseeable future. Many of the smartest people I know are happy to remain contractors because of the flexibility.

I will say though, that I would never do this without Obamacare (in the US). If not for that, I would be "stuck" in a W-2 job just so I could insure my family. (honestly not trying to pass judgment on people who have 9-5 jobs, I'm just not wired for climbing the corporate ladder, etc)

Which is why I always say, supporting Medicare for All is (ironically) one of the most pro-business moves we could make. It will unleash entrepreneurial spirit unlike anything we've ever seen in the US. The number of 1-2 person businesses will explode. All the talent that's stuck at large employers so they can get those health benefits for their families (even though, thanks to Obamacare, you really don't need to anymore) will get liberated.
I find the "ads are useful" argument frustratingly disingenuous. It's a transparent and deliberate attempt to move the discussion away from what people actually take issue with in modern internet advertising - tracking and data collection - and instead tries to frame it as something far more benign.

The ads. Aren't. The problem. The stalking is.

Ads can be useful. But no one is saying they aren't! So why is it constantly the case that when internet users make the simple and reasonable request "Please, can you just not stalk us everywhere we go?" the response is "but we're helping you!"

The parasitic advertising industry likes to pretend we're in a symbiotic relationship while conveniently ignoring the actual symbiotic solution (see e.g., DDG) because it won't make them nearly as much money.
I've been using Clojure since the summer of 2009, started a startup with it, using it exclusively on one project right now... and I agree about static types. I love many many things about Clojure, its my favourite language to use and I find it very well designed over all. But proper first class static types are the one thing I wish it had.

My dream programming language is basically a statically typed Clojure.

I've on and off poked at trying to make something like that (parsed using instaparse, type checked in Clojure, compiled to C++ using https://github.com/arximboldi/immer for the data structures), but haven't had the time to really get anywhere with it. Plus, even if I succeeded, I wouldn't have the rich Clojure (and by extension, Java and Javascript) ecosystem.
In my experience, that approach doesn't always succeed when the company has tens of thousands of employees, all of whom have signed a contract with the same wording. You have to be willing to walk away and, even then, you may fail to reach agreement on the terms.
Spin (1995)
The criticism of FLoC is that it makes profiling a lot easier because a website can access the ID with javascript.

And there are also a lot of design questions remaining that Google hasn't answered or is not sure about.

Eg. How will ad bidding work with FLoC?

Finally, and most importantly as it relates to this post - Google pays an enormous amount of money to employees to spend their time and intelligence on building better profiling tools. Building profiling tools is something ethically questionable because of the damage that can be done.
> Blaming technicians for the negative externalities of their industries is a dark path.

Disagree.

> Are we going to blame lawyers who defend rapists?

No, because I want there to be someone who defends that rapist's rights. In contrast, it's easy for me to blame a software engineer who's developing bad technology X, because I want the job of developing X to not exist.

> General Motors assembly-line workers? Engineers who work for oil companies?

Yes, but only if they have better options for earning a living: I can't blame anyone for not wanting to starve. Assembly-line workers often don't have better options, but software engineers usually do.

This path looks pretty well-lit to me.
I have tracking blockers set up all over, so I rarely get ads targeted at me.

Instead I get ads targeted at people who share my IP. I can often tell what my girlfriend has been browsing for from the ads I'm hit with, for instance, which is somewhat creepy.
The orphan tsunami of 1700 (2015)
Ah yes, the "highly skilled engineer paid at great expense but not allowed to have an extra pen" problem. Sounds ridiculous until you go and need to almost beg to get a pen.
The US is finally allowing vaccine exports. The ban lifted May 1. It will take time to ramp up though.
The problem though (unless I'm incorrect) is that without firmware updates, newer lenses may not perform proper in camera correction for the lens design; you'd be forced to post-process everything on a computer.
> An engineer building effective adtech is similarly behaving ethically according to their own career path

The phrase "Effective adtech" is really downplaying the amount of unethical shit involved in building it.

It could be effective without turning the internet into a race to the bottom. It could be effective without third party tracking, it could be effective without vacuuming every bit of data possible from every source imaginable. It could be effective without turning every device we own into an ad platform.

> It's either both or neither, and I'm not comfortable going down that path.

No, its not both or neither. That's absurdly reductive to suggest. It is possible for lawyers to behave unethically in their duties, but just defending the guilty (or prosecuting the innocent) is not unethical on it's own.

Similarly, it's possible for engineers to behave unethically in their duties. Just building software isn't unethical.

Building platforms that are deliberately and systematically eroding our privacy in every corner of our lives in order to make money absolutely is unethical. Turning society into a corporate-controlled panopticon is absolutely unethical. Absolutely scumbags
There are many, many cases where users choose pay options over `free'-but-ad-supported options. The pay options usually have a better/more honest financial model, and more aligned interests with their users.

And there certainly is a universe where we would pay for search, in the same way that we pay for countless other things. Google's business model scorched Earth the realm, though, so there isn't a lot of potential for that now, but it's a universe I could easily imagine.

"the advertising model for using Google search and watching Youtube videos works better for me as a consumer."

Do you use an ad blocker? I certainly do, as does most of HN. Layers of ad blockers. It works for me because I get the content for free and I don't have the scourge of ads, so sure it's a fine model.

When that podcast starts with six minutes of promos I just scrub right past them. I don't believe I've clicked on a single ad online in decades, at least not intentionally. I honestly don't even understand how that industry survives. My gut instinct is that it's a giant illusion and effectively a massive fraud.

A major reason many of us have such a laissez-faire attitude towards the detritus of the ad world is that it's something that other people endure.
> most friction-free

Maybe it's personal taste, but signing into an account is much more pleasant for me than watching an ad. As for the monetary cost, it only takes one ad per year that works on you to lose as much money anyway.

> Advertising should be open and transparent. If business of ads are truthful

Ads are not truthful because they are highly incentivized to lie
> I will sometimes pay to see ads. E.g. I pay $10 ticket for a home & garden convention show so the manufacturers in booths can advertise their wares to me.

I have to honestly ask why? What do you feel you are measuring other than the advertising budget of the sellers? Granted, such a convention would also allow you to evaluate the wares to some extent, but doing that is to ignore the ads.
The AskHistorians subreddit banned Holocaust deniers (2018)
I'm sure the Army, Air Force, or Marines would if they practically could. The promise of power density with no logistics tail is magic. They choose not to because of practical, operational reasons.
I wish somebody would take my wild ideas seriously.
My "radical" take is that we need to crush wages.

Mcdonalds cook - $40k/yr

Senior Dev - $130k/yr

CEO - $180K/yr

I don't know how something like this could be implemented, but we are on a fast track to 95% of wages going to 5% of workers.
I've been freelancing for... 10 years, but still don't see as many 'contract' positions vs ads for full-time positions. Even many 'contracts' are expecting fulltime, vs more flexible hours.

They exist, but perhaps are more prevalent in some countries or regions?
Every new processing node has been the most expensive processing node ever! Transistor costs have continued their trend of decreasing for every node. It's possible and likely that there will be a blip for the next two or so years due to the recent supply chain struggles, but I'm willing to bet they will continue decreasing for a while after this shakes out.

http://www.imf.org/~/media/Files/Conferences/2017-stats-foru...
"the govt is effectively hiding .5 of tax liability from the employee " <--- this. this is the important part.

that extra 6.2% isn't a tax on the employer at all! it is a tax on employment, and it really is part of the employee's taxation (in fact that 2 * 6.2% is a "socialized" part of the employee wage, that fraction of wage goes to the Social Security Administration to be put in a fund used then to pay out retirement pensions). Hiding this fact is the best part of tax: a tax you do not feel is the best kind of tax from the point of view of the tax collector... of course it is the worst kind of tax from the point of view of the taxed entity.

"Gig worker sees the whole .124, which is probably why govt wants more classed as employee." <-- that's right!
however one could argue that everyone should see the whole .124 so that they know better how they are taxed (I'm not saying this level is too high, on the contrary I think it's too low, but what irks me is that it is done under the covers...).
>In other words, I see no fresh insight and perspective in jefftk's writing,

May be I am living in my bubble, but most of the site I visit, mostly mainstream media news in tech, along with most of the social media post, has a flat out dismissal of Ads in general.

So while ads works to pay for X isn't a "fresh" insight, it was never really pointed out ( enough ) in most of the discussions. If the discussion in general was even slightly balanced in pros and cons, then pointing out ads do serve some usefulness wouldn't even be what OP labeled as "contrarian opinion".

>and conveniently ignores the actual ethical problems (e.g. large-scale collection of personal information).

In the context of Ads. Not all ads are large-scale collection of personal information. Which is what FloC was ( AFAIK ) trying to solve. As Apple did with their differential privacy. I often wondered if Google didn't decide to invent a new term called FloC and instead follow Apple and call it differential privacy would the backlash still be the same. But I think at the end of the day it is just a matter of trust. Whether you Trust Google or Apple. ( Or Facebook )
Oh wow, that's where I come from, at least the Island not that particular remote place.

I'm glad to see this in an international paper. There have been loval and French documentaries since the seventies on those postmen hiking for days across -at the time- dangerous terrain to these isolated communities.

The history of these communities is also interesting as most of them stem from the escape of either slaves into the mountains or poor Europeans who lost had no land or lost theirs when slavery was abolished.

The island is amazing for its scenery, including an active volcano, and its really diverse population.
Here is a free tip if you want to do it anyway.
DON'T CREATE ANOTHER F**ING TOKEN!

Build you product on an existing reliable fast and cheap blockchain that fits your needs.
Focus on the product not the price of tokens on said DLT.

You dont need a token. No, really you dont. Your tokens only use case is likely to transfer value and guess which token can do this better than yours? All of them! Simply because they already have adoption/liquidity/fiat on-ramps etc. etc.
You also instantly gain a community simply by using a token that has a community already.

And you avoid lots of legal problems.

Here are some companies that did/do this:

coil.com

sologenic.org

gatehub.net

forte.io

raisedinspace.com

(Very biased (they all use XRPL.org) because I simply dont know other projects. But you get the point, every DLT that actually works in a useful way should have people building on top - if not its probably garbage tech)
As a Snr Eng in one of the FAANG, my _personal_ list:

- interesting problem domain (which does not necessarily mean trendy): this is about selling to others why the problem and your company matters

- equity/career progression: (controversial comment incoming...) a strong Snr in a FAANG will most likely be a CTO/VP type of leader in a startup, so provide generous equity

- freedom in terms of decision making: present (business) problems and let people go and tackle them, you don't want to be micromanaging

- freedom in terms of work/life balance: let people manage their schedules, being fully remote, location independent - stuff that most FAANGs will struggle to compete with
$300 / week is $7.50 / hour.

$7.50 / hour is a pittance.

This is what the point of a social safety net is. If you can't work, you get a pittance, but enough to live on. And if nobody around wants to pay you enough to live on, you don't have to take their starvation wages.
Zynga agrees to buy mobile ad and monetization firm Chartboost
Yes, it is an odd coincidence, but as you write, a bad battery or just a weak contact is the likely explanation.

The alternative would assume that there are aliens, which are able to disable your smartphone from the distance, but are not able to make their vehicles somewhat look like current human vehicles. At minimum, they should paint "Pepsi" or "Nike" on them, and no one would notice them :)
> entry wage at McDonald's

"Entry wage" is a misnomer for jobs like that. There's no advancement at a job like that except to management, and there will always be an order of magnitude fewer managers than workers (and far less turnover.)
Wow thanks. Is there any good book like this that is talking about the scaling of web application?
Not only do you spend your day job helping to clutter our web experience, suck up our personal data, and track us across the web, but you want to spend your free time whoring out your blog to us to try to justify the career choice you feel guilty about?

Just stop. We get one chance on earth, do something of value.
advertising is the primary driver for clickbait and emotion-driven content. it enables The Daily Mail, it results in youtube's algorithm hell, it's why facebook exists. 'clicks = money' is bad for mental health. as long as wikipedia et al are free, give me subscription-based web all day.
As a mere amateur, how important is firmware to a camera?

I have two Sony cameras - an Mk1 RX100 and a A7R III, both acquired shortly after their initial releases. I don't think I've ever updated the firmware on the RX100, and just once on the A7R III (I believe it was to get the uncompressed RAW capability), mainly due to laziness. But for my amateur level use, I don't think I've ever had any problems.
We just need to lift it there with a space elevator and then nudge it into the sun.

And then in a few thousand years we will be kicking ourselves for incinerating incredibly valuable resources.
Yeah except Roadside Picnic was published in 1972 and basically invented the term.

From wikipedia:

The term "stalker" became a part of the Russian language and according to the authors, became the most popular of their neologisms. In the book, a stalker is a person who breaks the prohibition, enters the Zone and takes out artifacts from it, which they sell as a living. In Russian, after Tarkovsky's film, the term acquired the meaning of a guide who navigates forbidden and uncharted territories; later on, fans of industrial tourism, especially those visiting abandoned sites and ghost towns, were also called stalkers.
That expands your options even more. Workstation laptops of that age could take 32 GB RAM, unlike the shitty little subcompact ultrabooks that could only take 16 GB.

Man, imagine buying a laptop with only 16 GB RAM today.
You should be wary of projects that claim to be secure but have a history of game over vulnerabilities.
Are you going out of your way to give the most uncharitable possible interpretation of what I said? I struggle to see how any reasonable reader could infer that I believe what you wrote.

The structure of the argument is: because A is equivalent to B and I'm not comfortable with B, then I'm not comfortable with A either. Resolving the let binding in the variables A and B is left as an exercise to the reader.

EDIT: parent has been edited since this comment was written. Please disregard the belligerent tone, reply to parent no longer applies.
> In this case I see how it's worse for fishing sites, but not how it's bad for consumers

I have an example loosely inspired by real life.

Let's say I visit a fishing forum using the shared computer of my very, very vegan family. That website has now dropped the "fishing website visitor" cookie, and suddenly all my computer shows are ads for lure and fishing rods. My father is now furious, asking everyone in the house who has been visiting "those" websites.

I want the association between me and fishing gone. But who do I talk to? The website says they had nothing to do with this, the ad network won't even give me the time of day, and if the cookie is a supercookie then clearing history and cache may not be enough. And heavens help me if I get targeted mail, like Target used to do with pregnant women...

That, I believe, is the problem with targeted advertising: that my privacy is taken away in the name of helping somebody's website, it's leaked everywhere, and I have no real way to say "I don't want this".
I've used Clojure for going on 10 years now and it has been one of the most enjoyable programming languages I've ever used. But I've gone back to Scheme for a few ridiculous reasons.

1. TCO. Using `recur` in Clojure just breaks my thought process.
2. Difficulty in getting down to the metal when needed. Using JNI is painful. In Scheme, when needed, the FFI usually handles plain old C. Much easier in my opinion.
3. Community. Rich is a really smart guy and has made great contributions, but he doesn't suffer fools lightly and I am a fool. Great for a scientist, not so much for a "benevelent dictator for life" of a programming language.
4. Pragmatism over correctness. There was a long running conflict about some set operations that did not return correct results. To my mind, there is no argument against correctness.
5. Slow startup. Not always a problem except when it is.
6. ClojureScript. Could be my unfamiliarity with ClojureScript/JavaScript, but I find I have to revert to JavaScript too often to get something done. And if I can't just use ClojureScript, why use ClojureScript?

Like any Lisp, Scheme is easier to read than Python, Java, JavaScript, Haskell, PHP, Perl, Fortran, Forth, APL, etc. Pascal is pretty good in this regard though. Clojure might actually be better in my opinion.

Why not Common Lisp? It's pretty good and at least as powerful. The warts annoy me though.

So I will continue using Scheme while looking into Janet https://github.com/janet-lang/janet. Janet has most of the things I like about Scheme _and_ Clojure. More experience will tell. I just miss the way maps are handled in Clojure.
I try to stop being exposed to any electronic displays an hour before going to bed. There's enough to do, like meditate, read a bit, make lunch/es, shower, etc.
That's absurd. People need groceries. If the National Enquirer went to a paid subscription model or disappeared entirely nobody would riot.
People on HN usually aren’t fans of FLoC precisely because it doesn’t solve that problem, in addition to creating new ones (see https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/03/googles-floc-terrible-...).

I don’t see irony there!
You're actievly committing the sink cost fallacy. You need to ignore how much has been spent already and just look at how much it more it will cost from right now to host the Olympics, compared to potential value it would produce.
It doesn't take incompetence to make a mistake, any of us can make mistakes even in things we're highly competent in. Optical artefacts are particularly difficult to account for.

Take Go Fast for example, they're highly competent experienced aviators, but they still very clearly completely misidentified what, in hindsight, is obviously a bird. Clearly if trained operators can make a mistake like that, other mistakes are possible, so you can't just discount the possibility as absurd.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Le7Fqbsrrm8

I can easily see someone thinking an image is of a near object when it's actually a far object, and we know for a fact that highly trained operators can make terrible mistakes using complex tracking equipment.