skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What a nice story :) Reminds me of how I got my first job!

It was 1994 or 1995, I was probably 14, I had outgrown the ZX Spectrum and had a 486 at home. My dad and I were in a computer parts shop, and near us was this guy my dad's age having trouble with his own computer. He was having random crashes, and nobody at the shop seemed to figure out what it was.

My dad suggested I offer my help. We approached the guy, an architect like my dad. They chatted, and in the end I got the guy's computer home. In theory this was about "reinstalling Windows" or something.

Reinstalling Windows didn't help, and I don't know how, but I figured out that one of the four 1 MB SIMMs (this was before DIMMs!) was bad (I think by trying different combinations of 2 SIMMs at a time until I isolated the one that caused the crashes). I triumphantly announced this to the guy, got paid some trivial amount, and he took the machine away. I was proud, my parents were proud.

A couple of days later, the guy calls again. He had gone to the seller, gotten new SIMMs, and the machine was still crashing. My dad told me he had an "oh, fuck" moment right there (but he didn't tell me).

I stood by my diagnosis. I must have sounded confident enough, because the guy took the machine back to the seller again - and they confirmed that the new SIMM was also bad!

Everyone was suitably impressed. The guy offered me a super part-time job, I think 2 or 4 hours a week. He ran a small architecture/building studio, himself and an architecture student.

I was "the computer guy" for a while. I set up the LAN (all coaxial cable and T-junctions - we're talking prehistory here). I designed a logo in MS Paint. Later I got my most ambitious task: to write a system to track the monthly payments for the flats they were building.

My C++ knowledge was extremely limited, having only recently outgrown QBasic. But I took Borland C++, wrote a text-mode windowing system (with mouse support!), and the payment tracking system, which even printed invoices. Sounds impressive, it worked, and it looked OK, but under the hood it was an abomination. Off the top of my head: I didn't understand dynamic memory, so each "window" had a hardcoded limit of 10 edit fields, 10 buttons, 10 labels,...; I didn't know the first thing about databases, so the state was serialized to disk by writing the raw contents of the structs to a file ("works on my machine!"); I was oblivious to the idea of event-based anything, so the whole thing was polling constantly and possibly using 100% of the only CPU in the system - but it was the DOS time, there wasn't anything else running on the computer, so why not? :)

I kept that job for a couple of years, I believe until I started university and got a part-time dev job, then got a full-time dev job, then quit it to start and run my game development company, which I quit 10 years later to leave South America behind, and make the jump to Google Zürich.

Here's to humble beginnings!
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Presumably the providers of the software also provided the editor, it was just to silo you in.
Yeah, experimenting is the worst thing to do until you've mastered a few things like temperature, fats, amount of liquid etc. I made so many horrible experiments.
The way the system and companies (liability mostly) work, felons have a very hard time getting any sort of job.
C++ is a nightmare language but this specific complaint is completely overblown. The compiler isn't going to format your hard drive (I know that one blog post exists - that is a deliberately constructed example).

A C++ program with UB is just buggy. Same as a java program with bugs. The program does something you don't want it to do. That's what a bug is. The compiler isn't going to maliciously introduce code that you didn't write to order pizzas.
Types of Recruiting Software
>and this was put in as a sop to the former slave states.

Citation please.

While the prison population was much lower at the time they were being used as municipal labor. The "except prisoners" loophole was intended to grandfather in that system so as not to turn upside down the prison systems of all the states in the union at the time.

Furthermore "a sop to the former slave states" was the last thing congress was doing at the time. They were far more interested in maximizing the legislate utility of time spent without having southern reps present to vote against northern interests. The threat of more states (MD, TN in particular) seceding was the line they were trying to walk up to but not cross.

Edit: Is my analysis wrong or just inconvenient? I would be very interested in any source that can show that the northern states included the prison exemption in the 13A as a means to give the south a way to cling to some part of their slavery economy as opposed to a pragmatic "we'd rather not upset our prison systems, we already have a war and lots of unrest on our hands" exemption.
The savings part you are right. They should go back to the taxpayers or ONGs.
An Abridged Guide to the Enterprise Linux Landscape
This happens everywhere in the world. Also among more "normally" paid teams.

Look out for it and you will realize. In my experience, there is always someone who has a very hard life (money or time) and you do not even realize but hurt them without bad intent.
Bitcoin plunges to $40k as China widens its crypto crackdown
The fact that it's a single bit confuses me. If it was a full null byte (0x00) it would be easier to explain. C strings are null terminated, so you could assume the editor stopped reading when it hit "the end of a string" but BASIC still executed it?

Or if it was some unreadable ASCII character, maybe it worked like an EOF in the editor? But the fact that he switched it from an F to an E gives me no clues. This stuff is unfortunately before my time, I'm sad I never got to play around with stuff like this in my youth.
>no one should be making money off of keeping people in cages.

Prison guards should work for free? How about maintenance workers? How about contractors who build the prisons? Are they all incentivized to keep people in prisons? What if a government-run prison outsourced management of prison to an outside company - is that OK?

I understand your sentiment, but I think private prisons is one of those non-issues that are blown way out of proportion (like the idea that somehow prisons are full of non-violent drug offenders). Nothing changes if you get rid of private prisons. I suspect you know that because your primary objection is philosophical rather than practical. You just don't like the 'idea' of them.

>If we as a society have to do that, fine, but it's unconscionable that it be a profitable venture.

Again ... WHY?! Vilifying profit as this great evil is a common trope among the internet intelligentsia. In each case though, the individual exempts their wage and savings (i.e. profit) from this rule.
The DS is really just a GBA where you added a bit more every single thing there was in the GBA, and a really weird 3D chip. A bit more RAM, a bit more memory, a bit faster ARM, a few more graphics plane modes, and so on.
No relation, IIRC HyperCore was called DAT when I chose the Hyper Hyper Space name

\o/
did you want to share more details?, like sales numbers, time it took to build, why you decided to return to a normal job, etc.
I filled potholes and fixed roads for 4 summers and it's one of my fondest memories.
It's interesting to me that the draft was censored and mentioned a buyer, while this one only talks about control. For me, it paints the situation worse.

Still sad to see FreeNode fall. This will lead to a lot of split communities and dead links.

EDIT: Fuchs finds some harsher words[0]:

> In the past few weeks, this has changed[2], and the existance of a legal threat
to freenode has become apparent. We cannot know the substance of this legal
threat as it contains some kind of gag order
preventing its broader discussion within staff.
The democratically elected heads of their respective teams,
development, infrastructure, projects and communities
were removed by force[3] and have been informed that they are not
entitled to act in their respective capacity.

> [...] A contract in which christel, former head of staff, allegedly sold freenode, surfaced.
And while I personally think that this would have neither included any servers
or code or user data, since that did not belong to christel to sell, I am not a lawyer
and apparently some of our volunteers got pressured very hard and their personal life
could have been ruined easily should we have fought against this apparent contract.

This makes it look far more hostile than the linked note. Sad to see.

[0] https://fuchsnet.ch/freenode-resign-letter.txt
Rare extragalactic objects are now easier to spot
>> To reach this number ... searched ... for any mention of animals making noises during play sessions

Too arbitrary to search only for audible laughter. As though laughter were inconceivable amongst say humans without the capacity for vocalisation.

I would characterise laughter as a patterned break in any measurable intra-species communication channel. Immediately followed by reestablished communication at lowered tension. Laughter has to be cathartic.

Not easy to get enough big data, and labelling those patterns would be problematic. Yet it could be feasible. I imagine that we'd eventually be remarking upon species that lacked laughter as being exceptional.

Such an approach might help address long-term failures such as dolphin NLP. Rather than aiming to solve an entire species, instead aim to solve common communication patterns across many species.
> C++ is pretty hygienic and safe these days.

Ask developers to safely define a string constant that is accessible outside of that translation unit. Now do it without C++17, which many companies aren't using yet.

Things have gotten a lot better, but even these incredibly basic needs can be really tricky.
Interesting! Any ideas of how to log which mode it's in to help debug this further? Would disabling unused modes help prevent this?
Why was this ever a commercial entity?
oh boy. where to begin

> We built a few services

So you never really committed to it in the first place. Also, this complicates the deployment problem.

> after a few years some of the original people that introduced it left the company

Probably left for a company that actually committed to Elixir. :P

> and it became very difficult to hire for

In a world where everyone is remote and where 10 Elixir people apply to every job, this product must have been pretty unappealing

> New hires were either people wanting to learn (so we had to spend a good bunch of resources into teaching + end up with a system built by noobs to the language) or very expensive developers with a lot of experience in erlang and elixir.

"We didn't want to pay employees their worth and instead bitched about what we couldn't get without hiring those employees"

(Why couldn't you hire an assortment? One experienced guy and a couple noobs?)

> We also found many times missing libraries, or found libraries which are incomplete, or unmaintained or just not well documented

Alright, fine. Sometimes you have to "roll your own" in this space, still.

> Tooling is just terrible. The VSCode plugin is crap

You should not use the word "tooling" here because VSCode is not an IDE, Elixir should not require an IDE, and moreover, Elixir should not be judged because "there is no good IDE for Elixir". "Tooling" should refer to the support libs and tools that ship with the language, all of which are excellent.

> At that point you're just reinventing your crappy undocumented and untested version of delayed_job.

Spotted the guy who never heard of Oban https://github.com/sorentwo/oban Benefit of the doubt: Perhaps it didn't exist yet.

> Most of what you get from elixir in terms of redundancy, high availability, etc you can have that anyway from kubernetes, heroku or any PaaS

This is entirely missing the point. If a bug or runtime error crashes your Ruby interpreter, you better have another one ready to go from a pool (because Rails stacks can take a while to load), and then you better not exhaust that pool! If such an error crashes Elixir, it just restarts the process, which only takes a millisecond because forking an immutable language's state is trivial compared to a mutable language's state.

> Liveview

I actually haven't played with it much yet so can't comment

> In the end, we are back to Rails and much happier

"We can underpay cheap devs again"

You also repurchased entire classes of bugs that are impossible in Elixir such as: mutation bugs, monkeypatch bugs, and concurrency bugs (just forget running your test suites in parallel). Also, these are literally the hardest types of bugs to fix (nondeterministic behavior), and will likely cost you more in the long run than any differential salary you balked at (I have spent entire months debugging something in the Ruby space, you'll remember my comment once this bites you in the *** one day).
This one made me wonder:

> I knew I was the only poor person at my tech startup because I had gotten married younger than any of my coworkers.

Do I understand correctly it means they got married in order to lower the cost of life rather than wait for the person they would truly love?
Yes, what people competing to get their children into the 0.9% miss is that 1. There are going to be other tests and hurdles in the future which differentiate your child from those with very high natural aptitude. 2. If your child worked 10 times as the top achievers to attain a similar level, at the next stage they will have to work 20 times as hard, then 100 times as hard, until it simply becomes impossible. 3. While they are sacrificing their youth for this, they are missing out on discovering what they are good at and do want to do.
It only works because the LC circuit has a high "Q" and it peaks up at resonant frequency, at the expense of current. It is sort of like a torque convertor for electricity.

Now in most applications a minimum voltage is required and you will counter the small current by using a capacitor to accumulate power, at a usable voltage, until you have enough to briefly do something.

I would make a YouTube video if I could be arsed, but way to busy right now.
TUF Issue N6:Personal logo,learning 3D,headspace design,dynamic CSS Mask/GSAP
Reminds me of John Scalzi's masterful Being Poor (written as a rejoinder to those who were asking why the poor in New Orleans didn't just up and leave when Hurricane Katrina arrived):

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2005/09/03/being-poor/
I just got a message from the staff on freenode:

[Global Notice] Hi all. It feels like my moral responsibility to inform all users that administrative control of freenode and its user data will soon change hands, and I will be resigning from freenode staff effective immediately. It's been an honour to help you all.

Sad to see a hostile takeover of Freenode.

Its controlled by Private Internet Access now.
This takes too long to load and with no context or explanation for the title.
It's not really designed to model collaboratively edited text (yet?) but as the backend for multi user apps (social, workspace, commerce, etc)
Seeing some of the cool stuff people on HN get to work on, and how much they get paid to do it, can make me quite depressed sometimes.
Being poor stinks (even more when you're constantly reminded of it), but it's not something to be ashamed of. Not sure exactly what I'd've done in such an environment but probably would've tried to learn what I could from others, and try to just be a friend. If learning I was poor would make them ashamed of me, then the real problem is being surrounded by judgmental a-holes all day, not really being poor. (And unfortunately there are judgmental a-holes in all walks of life, rich and poor.)
Previous discussion, from when the draft was posted here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27153338
By "place to dock", you mean like a USB port or something else?

Lots of keyboards obviously have that already - including at least some of the Das Keyboards (mine does...)
This is every bit as cringe as PG's Fierce Nerds post. I think it's great both of them are working through some of the insecurities from their youth, but attempting to extrapolate their personal issues into some overarching social model is solipsistic naval gazing at its finest.
Best VS Code Extensions for Nuxt/Vue Projects
I thought the Foenix was canceled. We had a discussion about it the last time the Commander X16 came up: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23801266
That would mean listening to the radio was stealing power - they don't care, they want you to listen to their advertisements...
"Three paychecks is a month and a half of income (rent and two car payments by my fevered calculations, which never stop)"

Pay attention to those last three words. This is very important. I've been on both sides too, and to me those words are like a slap in the face: stark reality.

If you're poor enough (relative to the costs of your life) you are at a constant exhausting deficit because you CANNOT stop calculating and recalculating the mechanisms of your basic survival. Even if you're not juggling bills and having to gauge what will blow up worst, you're projecting worst-case scenarios and trying to plan against adverse situations, which will come up more often for you (example: old car problems)

"which never stop"

Consider those words seriously. You can improve the quality and performance of a person a great deal by allowing them to function as they 'normally' would, rather than in constant emergency mode.
My favourite: “I cannot give any scientist of any age better advice than this: the intensity of the conviction that a hypothesis is true has no bearing of whether it is true or not.”
Yeah if we are talking about lunches and people on 6 figure salary this is a fairytale
Any antitrust should look at this and immediately open a process to fine Nvidia for market dominance, or split it, or whatever. The ability for a company to do such a thing is in itself enough to grant such an action.
Yes, you are correct that it is useless without your physical Security Key.

Technically what's happening is that the valuable private key is in a sense in that file you're not worried about. But, you're safe not worrying about it, because it was encrypted by the Security Key, and only the Security Key knows how to decrypt it, so even though in one sense it's the private key and very important, because it's encrypted it's not a big deal if anybody learns it, as they couldn't possibly decrypt it. The contents of the file are given back to the Security Key when you use SSH to connect to (say) GitHub and in fact it will decrypt them to discover your private key, then use it, and then forget it again immediately, but it could (hypothetically) instead store a library of all credentials and use the random contents of the file to just look up the right credentials in the huge library. That would cost $$$ and Security Keys are (relatively) cheap.

It's OK to completely forget that technical description, the designers of Security Keys specifically intended that you needn't care how the magic is done, I have explained it only to reassure anyone puzzling how this could possibly work.
Yes.

The buyer would might have been willing to pay $15,000+, but wanted to anchor (and start low) so went $4,500. The real max was introduced when the seller gave the $15,000 number... buyers never want to or will reveal their number (i.e. the $7500 was a lie.)
Setting up a lightweight Server-Client VPN with WireGuard (2020)
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Interesting opinion Henry, what did you make of Robert S. McNamara back in the day?
Von Neumann had a uniquely sharp mind. His daughter was very successful and seemingly above average intelligence, but it's not clear that she had his same potential. I do think it's too bad that the brightest minds don't tend to have a lot of offspring.
I'm sure there's nuance in these scenarios the author describes. But not every blog post has to be an objective evaluation.

This post is accurate in that it chronicles their feelings, and feelings happen regardless of external factors, there's not a whole lot correctness one needs to ask for. I applaud the author for their bluntness in communicating how these interactions made them feel. No need for them to alter their tone to come across differently, it's their blog, not mine. I have to manage an international team of very diverse backgrounds. This post is a great reminder that even those small interactions can contribute to someone belonging. And I've noticed that belonging directly correlates to software velocity.

To me the takeaway is not that any of other people in these scenarios needs to change or correct behavior, but that as a manager if you're aware of an employee coming from a different background, you should make efforts in 1:1's to ensure they're feeling like they belong. Also shame on their hiring manager for letting them come on at such a low salary compared to others. Where's that peron's sense of human solidarity? If someone comes on to my team in a role, they are paid commensurate with others. If I'm worried about their performance they come in at the role that we both agree is suitable, and at all times there's honesty and transparency in what we feel works. Any hiring manager or company trying to "get a deal" on an employee has no business managing.
>> Bob was reading through a local Linux User Group (LUG) mailing list and he saw a name he recognised: mine.

I had the opposite happen.

I took a job doing some programming, some Linux administration, some helpdesk. I came across a convoluted database setup, nobody in their right mind would run multiple servers on the same machine this way... After researching the issue, I found that it was totally unnecessary, and likely a holdover from an earlier (like 15 years earlier) version of the software, because now it was natively support.

During my searching, on a mailing list I found a message from my now-boss. Asking how to do the exact thing they were still doing. And a couple messages from developers of the software basically saying, "If you did it this way, it would in theory work, but it won't ever be supported"
Part of the appeal of old school computing was always lusting after the next computer in magazines that was way out of your price range. It's not like nowadays where an unnafordable PC plays games at a better framerate than what you have now. New computers were a huge leap in power.

So people want to evoke the spirit of their dream computers. Hardware that they always wanted but could never afford (or often never even existed)