skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As someone who spent years contracting, realize that for the most part you're not competing on price. You're competing on value. Day rates aren't usually higher than the fully loaded cost of an employee - but they are higher than the salaried cost.

The flip side is that many people (myself included) frankly were tired of the abuse of full time, and not valuing our time. Contracting eliminated all of that - it was pay to play. You'd be shocked how the second you become a contractor (in the right org) you're actually doing significantly more of the work you were hired to do - whether that's coding, architecture, or stitching. But these come to mind immediately.

1. Provide interesting problems that need solving. Be specific about them.

2. Ship; one thing I've noticed repeatedly is that many organizations are "allergic to shipping".

3. Go global. There's a massive talent pool, and many people are more than happy to work 'perm' from not your location.

Don't make the mistake in thinking that a permanent employee is more engaged than a contractor. A professional is a professional regardless of contract type.
Show HN: Search 1B web pages and find out that French people are polite
Don't forget war. I imagine when two groups of humans whether it be two caveman tribes or two Napoleonic armies, massive numbers of young males were killed off.
Probably terrified of outrage mobs.
I find it excusable for Hollywood. Contentment doesn't look like much on a screen. Real life isn't dramatic enough to be interesting to others for most people most of the time.

But (looking from Germany) the American obsession with smiling while a large fraction of the population is on antidepressants, anti-anxiety medication and so on does seem a little insane. Happiness as a performance parameter, if you're not happy you fail.
HN likes to think it is better than reddit, but boy oh boy you better not talk about vegetarianism or wealth taxes.
Leadership Risks
Show HN: Stickies – A fun visual way to curate, organize, and manage your work
Knotend: Flowchart editor optimized for keyboard shortcuts
Branch predictor: How many “if”s are too many?
Browsers should again be user agents and just let me set a default. 'dont bother me with notification requests. ever.' is perfectly valid and implementable setting.
I was going to try Mighty but even in my somewhat relaxed work environment item 4 is not really solved by Mighty apart from "we will not access your data". Obviously they are very smart and will surely be working on E2E encryption but they do not seem to have it.
yes exactly. I did contracting when i was single and young. Contracting requires you to tolerate random loss of income, paying health insurance yourself ( in usa), traveling, unpredictable work schedules. Its impossible to afford health insurance for the family, traveling ect when you have kids.
One problem is that it's just as simple to implement an incirrect version of this function
SpaceX and Tesla came 'out of' PayPal.
I certainly agree that the UK market for senior tech people is very poor, you're right that past a certain point the only way to keep advancing in your career and keep raising your income is to strike out on your own this way.

I think it's incredibly short-sighted, but a lot of British businesses treat their software staff as equivalent to generic office inhabitants, rather than highly skilled software practitioners. They also seem to treat their tech staff like children.
National Staffing on Demand
I guess because I think that Hyperloop is a really dumb idea I must be extremely envious. This smells like a way to justify ignoring difficult criticism. The critics are envious, they're trying to look sophisticated, they're not real domain experts, etc.
It is fascinating to me how quickly people reject the premise of Mighty, even after PG lists all the good reasons for replacing judgment with curiosity.

I’ll admit, my initial reaction to Mighty was “I can’t imagine it ever being faster than my behemoth PC.” But then I stopped for a second and got curious. What is Mighty, really? It is a thin-client. That’s it. And are thin-clients a bad thing? Well, if latency is an issue, sure. But “high-ping” is a somewhat solved issue, whether in multiplayer gaming, in terminal utilities like Mosh, or even in optimistic GraphQL mutation updates. Where’s the use-case where near-zero latency is vital? The only cases I can think of are games like Rocket League: fast-twitch games where even the latency between my controller and my PC is something I happily spend hours optimizing — where latency prevents the necessary feedback loop for learning (akin to trying to learn how to hit a baseball while drunk).

But beyond near-zero latency use-cases, why would a thick client ever be better than a thin client? At the edge of performance, this question is easily answered: I would never attempt to train a PyTorch model on my admittedly powerful GPU. That’s what the cloud is for. So when it comes to my browser, why am I content to eat up memory and cpu-time with hundreds of tabs open that almost always include one or two that are broken, soaking up my resources, and have to be hunted down and killed off so that IntelliJ can return to its normal lightning-fast speed?

Might goes even further and asks why I would want to run IntelliJ on my machine at all. Wouldn’t I rather run IntelliJ like I used to run Vim over Mosh, where I never have to worry about storage space, about download/upload bandwidth, or about my computer becoming sluggish?

And that’s the killer idea here: that thin-clients almost always beat thick-clients. One could even argue that the entire internet is premised upon this reality.

I’d happily pay Mighty to try it out for a bit. Even if it doesn’t work, I’ve dropped more money of less fascinating ideas. At the very least, I’m rooting for their success, because it would change a lot more than how you consume content over the internet.
It's not an issue of it being technically hard - it defeats the whole point of using a PWA. Your users now need to download the app from the App Store and you're subject to App Store review policies.
Oh, is that supposed to be a sleep aid? I just don't want my phone to blind me with blue light after dark, it hurts my eyes. Night mode is for comfort, I still turn the darn thing off when I'm ready to sleep.
White House launches new artificial intelligence website
This was an interesting read, but it was written mostly as if cities were just surrendered to the forces of nature. In many or most cases, I would assume that when a building starts to succumb to the forces of nature, the city would either reinforce it or demolish it, and the city itself will continue to evolve. In some cases, I supposed cities may be abandoned, but in most cases, it will probably be a slow, evolving change barring some dramatic catastrophe.
> I worry greatly that we're entering a time when the government is going to become our dad/mom and we don't have to.

Unfortunately, that's exactly the goal for too many people anymore.
Creating album art using your phone
> "The biggest meaning is derived by elevating oneself socially"

I wonder what makes you state that in such certain terms.

I certainly don't feel a need to compete with everyone else all the time. Living somewhat below my means, supported by a decent, but not flashy paycheck in a society with a good safety net means I have no real financial worries, which eliminates a huge potential burden of stress off my shoulders.

My job won't revolutionize the world, but I do make a positive difference for people every day.

When I am off work, I am off work, my spare time is 100% mine and I spend it doing things that I enjoy, not trying to somehow monetize my hobbies as a "side hustle". I am not lacking for resources to hang out with friends, go on vacation or eat at interesting restaurants.

All of this means I am quite content, and especially content that I don't have to feel like I'm in some sort of constant competition with everyone else. It's nice to stop and smell the flowers, you should try it.
I have always been a user of f.lux [0] I tried Night Shift but it isn’t as red/orange as flux, I started having eyes issues as my eyes gotten used to flux. I switched back to flux and just better

[0] - https://justgetflux.com/
> the crux is that most ideas that turn out to be revolutionary just don't originate within the accepted circle of domain experts, exactly because being a domain expert makes you more unlikely to think out of the box.

I don't know about that... look at physics for example. You have plenty of experts who are total mavericks and then a bunch of outsiders spewing crankery and messing up on the basics.
I still run debian 32-bit on a P3 1GHz machine reasonably often - it's a legacy PC for gaming. Has 3DFX cards and everything!

Old windows of that vintage can no longer talk modern SMB but Debian i386 can just fine, so I boot debian on it to transfer data from the internet or other modern machines. LXDE is perfectly usable, although I admit I haven't tried a web browser in some time.
I see. It isn't the implementation, as I understood the argument to be about, but rather the environment around it. What you're concluding is basically the core difference between Linux distros and BSDs. Whereas the former are built as an assemble, the later define a base system making them more coherent. The better documentation can be said is result of this. Disappointingly the submitted article mentions nothing of those.
RIP. I recommend his book "Pioneering Portfolio Management" (2009) after one has read a more introductory book such as "Random Walk Down Wall Street" by Malkiel. One of Swensen's controversial ideas is that one should avoid corporate bonds as an asset class. He recommended Treasury bonds for one's bond allocation.
> it is absolutely survivorship bias to believe that every crazy idea from a domain expert worked out

Who believes that?
It would be survivorship bias if the author suggested a rule here - but this quote is only a statement that 'this can happen'.

Where the author suggest a rule: "Such ideas are not guaranteed to work. But they don't have to be. They just have to be sufficiently good bets — to have sufficiently high expected value." - it is hedged against survivorship bias.
Ten years of no-maintenance is unhealthy for any type of building.
That's kind of how we got into this mess in the first place - employers not giving COLA over decades.
ML Approach Brings Digital Photos Back to Life
A small UBI would end up being net zero for lots and lots of people. No burden, no benefit (except the knowledge it would still come in if their circumstances changed).
That's why it's the investment space that needs disruption - which is why crypto is met with so much pushback on HN. A year ago, crypto-related stories made front page much less often, if at all.
This test took into account which isps were already in that area. I don't see why you think this will be better. Clearly not all those places on the map had fiber.
Please stop with this false narrative. American conservatives have giant and pervasive media organizations that cover Biden negatively 24/7. You're selectively choosing which "media" to criticize.
"Disqus breached the accountability principle by wrongfully considering the GDPR did not apply to data subjects in Norway"

Interesting that Norway isn't part of EU, but they implement GDPR.
Not a CLI, but Pithos [0] works great.
[0] https://pithos.github.io/
you can start by working in consulting
If somebody wonders what those size actually mean, here are reddit threads with some enlightening answers, from the last time I digged into this:

https://old.reddit.com/r/ECE/comments/jxb806/how_big_are_tra...

https://old.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/jwgdld/what_is_...
Improving Explainable AI’s Explanations
I appreciate innovation. I also appreciate finishing a mobile browser that was utterly demolished, and hobbled to it's core.
And the text a little more to the left
To be quite cynical, I think this is a textbook sociological study. You take a loaded word like happiness, twist the definition into something that fits both A.) what you can easily measure on a survey and B.) gives you results that fits your own preconceived idea of who should be happy (the Nordics) . Then you publish your study claiming you've found the keys to happiness, or if you're too modest to do that then the lay media makes such a claim.
"Progressive Web Apps" comes from the notion of "Progressive Enhancement" [0] as opposed to "Glorious Degradation"

And its a very old concept in web design.

HTML5, PE & PWA is all the same thing. Just an evolution of standard practices & terminology.

[0]: https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/04/progressive-enhance...
To what others have said, billable hours are never 100%--and may be a lot less. When I was an IT industry analyst we billed something like $10K/day for a consulting engagement but we didn't bill for travel time and a lot of writing we did but didn't sell.

Any marketing/selling/administration/ongoing skills development (to say nothing of time you take off) is totally on you.
Yeah, I have mine cranked all the way to the most amber. And when reading in bed at night, I'll also have the brightness at the absolute minimum.

Sometimes even that's not enough and I'll use the accessibility settings to make things even redder.
In the original naming scheme, 2nm would be the length of the transistor gate, which is the smallest feature on the device, not a dimension of the whole transistor. It's not meaningful to compare 2nm to the area numbers given above.
I'm going to be a curmudgeonly contrarian in this thread. You can highlight the text of my comment to make it easier to read after the incoming downvotes. :)

I'm not desperately searching for work-life balance, using the latest fad of a technical stack, remoting, unlimited vacation, having the best free snacks in the break room, etc.

Sure, at a superficial level, all that stuff sounds great. I'll make use of the in-office climbing wall sometimes. But if you lead with that pitch, you give me no confidence that your company will even be around that long, much less provide me with room to grow professionally and financially.

I want a company to sell me on its vision for success in the market that I would be participating in. I want my co-workers to be motivated by the success of the endeavor in which we're all involved. I want an ESOP that will be valuable for my retirement.

Why do I want to work with a bunch of people who are mainly there for the freebies?

Look at what just happened to Basecamp. They cultivated a workforce that was more concerned with airing political grievances than they were with the success of the company. The second the politics were shut down, a third of their employees walked out. Imagine you're a developer at that company, trying to ship some product or feature to meet some bonus metric - and the people you're depending upon to do their part quit their jobs because they absolutely must argue politics during their work day.
>Now if someone asks me "Hey where can I go see that thing that was taken off of Youtube" I don't have a ready answer

Wait, did Whirlstah! get taken down too?
Cloud automation with Ansible series: Dynamic inventory
So it seems: https://schollz.com/blog/croc9/
I think most "crazy" ideas seem that way given the current constraints in that point in time and it's the domain experts that see the changing landscape which will make them viable.

It's hard to remember, but there was a time that YouTube seemed "crazy" as it was assumed that bandwidth costs would swamp the viability of any video startup.

See also: almost all the "dumb" early web startups that weren't dumb, but mistimed the market (Webvan, ePets)
> Car accidents are exactly that, accidents.

I disagree.

With car design, function and ownership as they are, we (the people) accept that there is an uncommonly high risk of a crash and serious injury to ourselves and to the general public.

We only call it an "accident" to abrogate that responsibility.

On the point about scale: some wikipedia browsing suggests road traffic deaths currently kill about 10 times as many people as wars, globally.
I read your blog. You and I share a common life experience:
Spending part of your childhood homeless.

Have a nice day.
The end game with starlink is to get government funding. It's far easier to close the business when you get free money without any obligations. In fact, the 900M they were given for rdof is under false pretenses since this data shows they are not meeting the 100Mbps everywhere.
Weird pop psy in the middle of this article. Forgive me if I don't just take your word on millions of people's motivations with no data or argument.
> Plus jumping on to a new project every few months keeps the work interesting

But contractors are usually hired for their existing skilsets where they can jump in and start contributing immediately. So you end up doing similar projects.

eg: If you are a backend programmer, no one will hire you to work on as a machine learning engineer on day rates.

This is a big myth that contractors are working on something new and exciting every few months. Most of contracting work is short term grunt work.

> rather than stagnating at the same desk for years on end.

No its the opposite. Companies invest in training and take a chance on you doing something new inside in the company.
Been contracting for decades. Wouldn't do it any other way.

The critical thing is to get a pipeline of folks you know that send work your way. So rarely idle. That was done by working 15 years in the field in a variety of companies. I keep in contact with many old colleagues and remind them I've got bandwidth.

I never made more money than I do contracting now. I've never had to 'chase down money' - never had a bad check, never been stiffed. Had some late checks for sure. Probably due to the quality of my contacts.
You just described a Netbook
The patent waiver doesn't require any Congressional changes to US patent law or require the President to unilaterally overrule US patent laws. US patent law only covers patents in the US.

The US and almost all other countries are in the World Trade Organization (WTO). The WTO has an agreement called TRIPS which covers IP requirements of member states. Part of the requirements of TRIPS is that most member states have to reciprocate patent rights for patents issued by other member states. The WTO can waive this requirement with a vote of the WTO General Council. This is what is being proposed and Biden has declared that the US now supports doing so. This is completely within his powers as President.
@timvisee I have no questions, but just wanted to thank you for your work on this!!! Thank you, thank you, thank you!
I know this doesn't directly answer your question, but here is why the company I work for currently is able to keep me.

1. Interesting work [0]. My day to day is not a slog. I find it challenging and stimulating.

2. I get to the freedom to make decisions. My manager tells me, "I know you have this, so just do it." If I fail (we all do occasionally. Some things just don't work), they don't let the bus hit me. We figure out a solution and then we present that together.

3. A good team. I highly respect every single member of my team. We all know each others strengths, weaknesses and areas of interest. I'm never embarrassed to ask any of them for help and I'm often asked for help/advice/opinion.

4. I have the freedom to learn about projects other teams are working on so I can understand how those projects might affect the project I work on. I can also go work on those teams for a while if I choose to. Those teams are made up of good people who don't mind sharing information.

5. Raises that matter. Not some 1 or 2 pct insult. There's no excuse for that. None.

Does the company have warts. Yup. But the above makes those warts tolerable.

[0] I'll take interesting work over tech stack any day. I don't give a rat's ass about language wars. Pick something suitable and let's get to making something great.
Does anyone have the inside scoop on why Sony seemingly abandoned the NEX platform? I bought the NEX6 in 2013, it was released at the end of 2012 and the last firmware update is v1.03 released ~15 months later. Based on my experience, they didn't run out of bugs to fix.

The alpha 6000 was released in 2014 and the last firmware update is 3.21 released in 2019.
I am reviewing for many journals. Most of the time reviewers have no idea what the articles are really about and just correct typos and design issues. And you get harrassed by publishers to review, for free, because there is so much crap in the pipeline that they need a way to process it. This system is completely broken and defended by scoentists that benefit from it. It is detrimental to science and society as a whole.
Anything that treats software development as an iterative research and development process, lets engineers self-organize, respects their time, and respects that time estimate certainty is asymptotic with respect to the time horizon.
This is one of my favorite parts about contracting... you still have to deal with a little bit of office politics and drama but you're mostly shielded from it. I love dropping in once a week or so, greasing the relationship wheels, and getting the heck outta there.
In case someone missed the story, Paul Graham is indirectly talking about the feedback received by Mighty App.

And in this particular case, I don't think this is a valid defense.

First, he clearly has too much skin in the game to be credibly neutral about it.

Second, he avoids addressing the main critique about this "new tech".

People are not claiming that it is a bad idea because it is infeasible or not valuable, but because it is dangerous and also because it sounds technically ridiculous. (thin client inside thin client)

https://www.mightyapp.com/
https://twitter.com/Jonathan_Blow/status/1387101172230672389
https://twitter.com/cmuratori/status/1387645578067124224
You bet your ass people are getting fired for any type of right leaning ideology. Not violence, discrimination, or any other extreme viewpoint.
If you like the direction Gleam is heading, you should really
support Louis! https://github.com/sponsors/lpil
No but it makes a lot of sense for Mighty App to be the middleman between your computer and the Internet. If I was them I’d just give it away for free and sell your data to Facebook (anonymously of course!)...
Ideal in this case might be to load images that are within one or two screenfuls of the current position, then someone scrolling down actually ingesting the content might not be bothered by the delay as they probably won't see it. That would require JS though, and you need to deal with page resizes as well as scroll events. Also make sure you include width & height settings for the image tag or you scroll position reference will be off when considering images further down the page. Maybe load a low-res placeholder for the other images in case the user drops offline as they scroll, either an "image not loaded" marker just so they know something _should_ be there or a very compressed version of the actual photo.
All I have to say to that is "You'd be surprised", particularly when you get a reputation for picking up new things quickly.

> Companies invest in training

Literally never happened for me in 12 years of perm work, for large and small companies. Discounting trivial/patronising things like security training. I've self trained or picked things up as I go along a few times as a contractor, just as I did when perm.
Metronome with strange time signatures like pi/4 or 6.9phi/7e
Phi Metronome is an app where you can enter pretty much any time signature you want, the only metronome where you can enter time signatures like pi/4, phi/3, 42e/6.9sqrt(2) or 13/11 at pretty much any tempo. Moreover, it allows for quite some customization of color scheme and sounds used for the metronome.
We part of the European Economic Area (EEA) which is quite close to being a EU member, but without voting rights. Norway voted two times on membership and the compromise was EEA.
Indeed, that's another red flag.