skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Two thoughts:

First, and most importantly, it seems that sometime over the past decade we transitioned from the belief that free and open discussion is more important than winning the argument. We now appear to rely on an entirely unnuanced framing where all discussions have maximum certainty, all harms are equal, and therefore silencing disagreement is always a valid and righteous (and even preferred) tactic.

Second, I listened to the first 10 minutes past the recommended point in the podcast, and heard the first two points made, but not the circular logic of the third point. It’s possible that occurs later, and I just haven’t listened far enough. As they have moved on to the “rot” portion, it seems that I should’ve heard the third point, but perhaps I’m just interpreting what they say more literally.
How to Fix Secure Boot Violation
I think the story went:

1. Hedge funds donate to endowments

2. Endowments invest back into hedge funds

3. Hedge funds list endowments as investors in their marketing

4. Clients invest with HFs thinking endowments must have done their due diligence.
I think it leaves a bad taste in people's mouth since hedge funds are typically a bit riskier than a savings account.
The most straightforward example of how this happens is:
- we're hiring a principal engineer. That is 10+ years experience
- engineering says required skills are ML & Graphics Programming.
- our handbook says graphics programmers have degrees

And the listing gets made by doing: for each requirement, (role number of years - 2) years experience in (requirement).
This software design classic has been hard to obtain lately. Co-author Rebecca Wirfs-Brock announced yesterday that it has been re-published now as a free download:

https://twitter.com/rebeccawb/status/1409951330957893633
When Orcs Were Real
Surely this reduces inequality? Instead of money congregating in big cities it gets spent all over the country/world. Instead of wealthy people gentrifying certain neighbourhoods as a group and pricing everyone else out, there can be more of a mix of incomes.
for me, the appeal of space is the idea of working on the frontier to expand human reach and resources. Space tourism would presumably have to wait until we were established and comfortable on other planets/moons, and I'd guess that the appeal would be the same as regular tourism; a change of scenery, a novel experience, and to be able to show off!
I just gave in my resignation at a college I worked for. Part of my decision was the fact that I'd have to go back to the office and teach in-person. I know in person learning is superior for students vs online but I got too used to working from home.
China's Most Surreal Tourist Spot Is Fake
This is bad for Bitcoin.

Embrace. Extend. Extinguish.

Not your keys, not your coins.
Can anyone think of a legitimate reason why there needs to be 135,000 test ballots to begin with?
Huh, when you mentioned that, it made me think this was a way to allow frequently compounding interest even when the amount of interest earned is smaller than the precision of the account (ie 1 cent). If you earned 0.01 cent of interest, instead of trying to keep more digits of precision, the account just gets a 1% chance of being increased by 1 cent.

It seemed like a really clever workaround to not having enough digits of precision (whether explicit or hidden), but now I see it’s just a regular sized lottery, a psychological tool to encourage investment. :)
Titles don't mean much without knowing the type of company that assigned them. Every second guy is a VP at a bank - it means merely something like 'senior SWE' in banking, often you wouldn't even have any reports. 5yoe is reasonable time to reach it. Another example - anyone can be a CEO of own company. But once you get acquihired by FAANG suddenly you're just a PM for your startup's team.
In Canada most temperature extrema are still from the first half of the 20th century:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_extreme_temperatures_i...
Ok, last comment, not sure I want to argue about this. It looks like an application, but it's not. It's a bunch of HTML, CSS and JS packaged in a specific way (using its own spec), but it's not an executable. It's just arcane. It can be opened and expanded in the same way that a .epub book can be opened and hosted on a static website like GitHub Pages. It's not obvious or easy, but it can be done.

Apple chose a packaging format, and they packaged it. It's not an executable. EPUB is a closer example. Can be opened, can be parsed, can be re-packaged to whatever format anyone wants.
Stop using Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. Use Signal, try to avoid email. Use Duckduckgo instead of Google Search. Use a good adblocker. Pay everything you can in cash. Something like that?
Don't get me wrong, I do quite well compared to a lot of people. I'm not unhappy with my career. I am just not great at networking.

I have also had bad luck with jobs so far. Everywhere I go, people above me seem more inclined to try and keep me where I am than help me improve and grow. I always have very good relationships with my teammates though, so I know I'm doing something right.
A tale of making company-wide standard psqlrc
I think ClojureScript + Reagent does.
Not a problem because it's possible to check if the code is verbatim from the training set (bloom filters).
Or ICANN can create policies about domain squatting like GP described.
My wife pointed out that the shipping is not, in fact, free, because we pay $100 (or whatever it is now) for Prime.
Former GS-employee here: The relevance of "gs.com" to the business of Goldman Sachs is pretty much zero. When I worked there in 2010 I was told somewhat tongue-in-cheek-ishly that up until the 2008 financial crisis, the telephone number for press inquiries went to a PR firm that was under strict orders to never answer any inquiries of any kind and never to engage the press for any reason whatsoever. This was the extent of their PR activity. The extent of their marketing & advertising was even less than that. GS.COM is there to serve that non-function within the business.

If you do business with Goldman Sachs or if they are interested in doing business with you, you already have communication channels with them, and there's nothing that GS.COM could do to augment that in any way that is in any way meaningful.

I'd be willing to bet that even a complete takeover of the webhosting behind GS.COM wouldn't get an attacker an iota closer to taking over any systems that actually matter to them.

I remember what it was like to get approval there to make them open a port in a firewall so we could send e-mail from servers co-located at stock exchanges back to ourselves in the office. ...getting that signoff was a serious ordeal because the co-location networks operated by the stock exchanges are treated by them as "hostile", and they fought nail-and-teeth for keeping their firewalls as tight as they could possibly be. Asking them to loosen their security on anything internet-facing by even just an iota is an ordeal I never ever in my professional career want to have to go through.
> Most degrees and professional certifications are meaningless to people who only care about the knowledge - there's no point in chasing paper that's out of date the minute the course is designed.

This is a stretch. Most of what you learn in a CS curriculum is extremely useful. Things like algorithms, computer organization, object oriented programming, operating systems, networking, mathematical approaches, etc. aren’t going anywhere anytime soon.
"Hungry" sounds like "salary wouldn't match".
It's plainly fallacious to say there is no difference in corruption, conduct, and outcomes of different governments and different forms of government. To say 'all governments are corrupt' is the same as saying 'all people are violent'; but some are murderers, some got in shoving matches with their siblings when they were 12, and there is the entire range in between.
If the person's actions cause lasting detriment to another person's peaceable enjoyment of their property then they are in breach of the basic fundamentals of private property ownership. So too bad
That's a really great counter argument. To be honest, I don't really know and am not claiming an exact answer. I imagine it's a little bit of both.

When I was a naive kid, I moved to a highly populated city just to find work (no plan in place). I'm saying that same take-a-chance opportunity that I had, may become just that much harder for others now.
Stories like remind me so much of bizarre inefficiencies caused by targets etc in the Soviet Union. Thank goodness capitalism is efficient, right? /s
I was extremely lucky to WFH during the first 12 years of my software career. When I finally got a job in an office I was shocked at how awful it was. The 2 hours commuting every workday, the flickering fluorescent lights, the noise of coworkers, the smell of burnt coffee or popcorn, the boss that drops by to see how you're doing and causes you to lose a hour of concentration so I might as browse the web until quitting time. I couldn't function in an office, so I was lucky to do my best work at home which I am still proud of. I'm not proud of anything I accomplished while sitting in office jail.
The mini Ice Age in the early 1800s would disagree.
I worked at a company where the DevOps team was having a hard time retaining employees. New engineers were staying on average for less than 1 year, and that was when we'd actually get candidates, oftentimes going months without a single person applying. This was a large employer in a small town that paid extremely well and had the best benefits I've ever had so I couldn't understand it. That's when I went on the website and read the job posting. Minimum requirements were several years of experience each in Java, Python, and JavaScript. The team didn't write code in those languages, why were they mandatory requirements? The people that did have those skills were unhappy once they realized they weren't going to be doing any coding on this team. It made more sense to me to only list things like Ansible or Terraform or Docker, things the team used on a daily basis, and be up front with candidates about the job responsibilities.

On the same team there were a couple people who came from non-coding backgrounds like Unix systems administration and production support, they loved the job and had been at the company for many years. Why weren't we looking for more of those people? My boss told me that HR was judged by the qualifications of the candidates they allow to proceed in the process. No one would ask questions if you raised the hiring bar, or you might even get kudos. This made no sense to me as that would be like an engineer who only did work one day per month, not taking any chances on touching systems or code that had any chance of introducing a bug.

This was my first job out of school and it taught me that in these large Fortune 100 companies, through no malice at all, silos can create policies that make complete sense to them that don't actually accomplish anything.
Maybe because 20%+ of the staff were laid off due to the sub-prime issues in 2008, and the poor dude who used to maintain this is a name no one can remember.

I'm not that dude, but I bet I used to know him.
That is a gross simplification isn’t it? While democracy isn’t perfect, it depends a lot how it is implemented. Just like you have badly implemented programs and right ones.
For math symbols I use Unicode characters, I have XCompose shortcuts [0] to easily insert them. I'm currently using WinCompose to use the same shortcuts on Windows. This works fairly well for my use cases (programming language theory and undergrad math), but doesn't support the fancy layouts that LaTeX does (fractions, large sub/superscripts).

I don't have a good solution for graphs/pictures/drawings. I don't think I've ever needed to, if I did I think I would just put the image in a folder alongside the note (`YYYY-MM-DD-ext`).

[0] https://github.com/CoderPuppy/.files/blob/master/XCompose
Late reply, I just listened to Michael Garfield's Future Fossils podcast with guest Leidy Klotz[0] last night.

The subject was subtractive design. Very interesting, part of the discussion regards an 'additive bias' in our thinking. Klotz recounts an academic study he undertook to measure the bias of adding VS subtracting to solve a given problem.

I mention this because I think this bias could be useful while analyzing these sort of errors.

[0] - https://futurefossils.net/
There are much bigger things in this world to worry about. I bet you that by the time that this AI has taken your job, it'll have taken many other jobs, completely rearranging entire industries if not society itself.

And even once that happens you shouldn't be worried about your job. Why? Because economically everything will be different and because your job isn't that important, it likely never was. The problems humanity faces are existential. Authoritarianism, ecosystem collapse and mass migration of billions of people.

So if you really want to "prepare", then try to make a difference in what actually matters.
This guilting of people for actions of industry is exactly what industry pushes. It's been a tried and true tactic for many decades now. Responsibility is always on the individual and never on the industry/government.

It's just sad that many people cannot imagine anything else besides individual responsibility these days. The brainwashing by industry to this condition has been extremely successful.
Well I'm sure React does too because Reagent uses it. And since it's a Clojurescript lib, it goes through Closure as part of compilation to JS.
https://github.com/reagent-project/reagent/
> You need to make sure you filter out highly political jobs during your job searches

I think this has been a big source of my grief so far. I keep winding up in heavily political companies.

Thank you for the advice. Networking is definitely something I intend to take more seriously. It's become much more clear to me how important it is as my career progresses.
> When AI inevitably outperforms humans on almost all tasks

Correct me if I’m wrong, but is that even possible? I kind of thought that AI is just set of fancy statistical models that requires some (preferably huge) data set in order to infer the best fit. These models can only outperform humans in scenarios where the parameters are well defined.

Many (most?) tasks humans regularly perform don’t have clean and well defined parameters, and there is no AI we can conceive of which are theoretically able to perform the task better then an average human with the adequate training.
> Someone uses copilot to generate a Windows clone

You could test this with one of Microsoft's products that is already on GitHub - like VSCode. I doubt you would get anywhere with just copilot.
Nature is truly amazing.
On average, people with degrees are way better than people without degrees. The most competent people I have met are usually out of the best schools.

Of course there are exceptions, and many people like to point them out and John Carmack is one of them. But really, someone who passed tests, spent a few years with a bunch of smart people, and took lessons, all that relevant to the work to be done has a high chance of being better at it than someone who did not do that.

There are some really smart people who are not fit for school, it it not uncommon. But what is a very common is really dumb people that are not fit for school.

Another common trope with successful college drop out is that they are usually entrepreneurs, certainly because as drop outs, they are better off doing that since it is harder for them to get hired. And then, you get into survivor bias. You only hear about the successful ones.

So, companies hire people with degrees, because on average, people with degrees are better. Easier for them than having to go through thousands of inadequate candidates in order to find the exception. They may miss out, but for most positions, it is not that big a deal for companies.

Degrees are a pretty good proxy for skill, not perfect, but I can't think of a better one right now for normal people. Of course, it doesn't apply for John Carmack. But when companies post mid-level job offerings, no John Carmack will answer the call.
> Out of laziness, most sites I run have their own 100-200 line Python static site generator that takes Markdown (if I'm really feeling it) or HTML files with Jinja templates and generates pages around them. The core generator code hardly ever changes year by year.

I maintain my site exactly the same way (minus the Jinja) and it is a workflow that works for me. Simplicity is best, even beating flexibility) when it comes to tools that help you express yourself. Otherwise you spend all your time wrestling with your tools rather than creating.
It probably feels bad to have built such an astounding building only to realize that few need or want it for its intended purpose.

Along with that; less control (over leaks, for example), less reality to the feeling of being One Happy Family, or being a king, surveying their loyal subjects.
Back in the mid-2000s I was really into computer security (still am) and managed to trick my school's truancy system using something called a silent termination test line. Basically what this does is cuts out the line entirely to test for line noise for a few minutes, like you pick up the phone and it'll still be connected to that number, no dial tone just silence. I just confidently went right up to the secretary and told her my new home phone number was the silent termination test line. There would be this automated truancy bot calling everyone but whenever it would reach my name, skipping around a class a day at one point (Still don't know how I actually graduated other than the teachers liking me and getting my homework done anyways), it would just fuck the entire system up and a bunch of people wouldn't get calls after me either.

Smoking drugs and hanging out with girls was way funner, completely zero regrets getting doing stuff like that out of my system early... considering the trajectory my life has been on I really didn't need post secondary. Can only imagine how stressful and expensive that would have been and to what depressing, indebted end.

There was a bunch of other fun stuff on that test prefix, but half of that is lost to the sands of time, the funnest I don't even know what the hell it was. I've asked random phone company linemen about it and they're basically just like "how the hell do you even know anything about this?", and can't tell me what this number I found was. I basically war-dialed it based on patterns from other numbers on the prefix and it'd give me 30 seconds and then a real dial tone (payphones around then actually used some recorded tone). Since I could call these numbers for free from the school payphone, it was easy to find, and that real dial tone was probably in the phone company HQ. We found this enormous list of interesting phone numbers from phonelosers.org (Wish those were archived!) and just started doing shit like calling the white house and the president of kenya's office. I think we only stopped after a friend of mine made a huge stupid mistake and tried to print the list out. The library printer just started spitting out REAMS of paper, the librarian was like what the hell and I just remember thinking damn he fucked up, and running away hahaha
says you; I prefer working in-office, in-person. The energy is 100x better, I can form real relationships with my co-workers instead of online bullshit relationships with zoom and goofy backgrounds. Partially remote teams are the absolute worst. I avoid remote positions like the plague.
He's a non-coder? Fine. He's a beginner. Have him sit in a beginner class and try to use one of the laptops to take the course.

Now, others have given several suggestions on how to make them at least somewhat usable. Those are good ideas. But even after doing them, there may still be a problem. If you want to show your boss the problem, he has to feel the pain of using one of those 10-year-old machines.
New York is vying to displace Florida as the USA's poster child for "just because a state is big doesn't mean it can hold an election".
Tangential, but I watched a video about maintenance on the Russian high speed train, Сапсан (sapsan), and when they started the train for a test the unmistakable sound of Windows XP starting was heard. It could have been for any number of systems on the train, but I found it funny. Admittedly it was US documentary, and they really butchered the translation for dramatic effect, so I wouldn't be surprised if that wasn't fabricated also.
When Are the Olympics–and Will They Even Be Happening?
> [Contributing to kernel development] requires having free time, a computer, and a reliable internet connection — something not everyone has access to. It also helps to have a good education and to be fluent in English. As a result, the community leans toward people with those privileges, largely white men.

This was quite a jarring leap in the article.

On the global scale that development of the Linux kernel takes place, this statement feels very neo-colonial. Does the author really believe that people in the rest of the world live lives devoid of free time and internet access?

Being generous, I have to imagine this is a careless application of US racial theory to matters of international significance, but it appears the author is unwilling to be that generous herself.
One of my friends got an internship doing dev there in like 1999/2000. They were already using 2FA (with a chunky but functional hardware dongle that had a small 8-segment display that updated every minute or two) to secure SSH access. Even with that, there were very tight limitations on what could be accessed at all over the network. I'm slightly impressed if I see an org that has a 2FA setup half that good now twenty years later (there are soooo many that don't).
Fair -- but let me be more precise then. I do like the idea of "use what you learned and are most comfortable in."

That being said, I think what I mean by "e.g. Python" is specifically - "older slash more text oriented slash proven"

If you like Javascript, fine. But I think there's a case to be made that there is a completely unnecessary "bloat" to Javascript -- especially even as the author himself has suggested that at the end of the day it's all string concatenation.

If that's the case, (as it frequently is) it ends up boiling down to "what handles text well and in an established and smooth way," and Javascript does not score high there, I'd suggest.
Oh, you're so witty, have you heard of content hashing?
I get what you're saying, but it's those same bright minds who are concerned about being in an office amid a pandemic. It's a reasonable concern.

Everyone has a right to make their own decisions, but calling somebody out as privileged over a legitimate health concern seems counterproductive. What does Apple or some other big company lose from having their employees work from home a bit longer? Productivity. Money. Maybe some projects run long.

What does an employee have to lose? Their health. Possibly their life. Even if you're vaccinated, you can be a carrier, you can still catch COVID--you're just not likely to have a bad case of it. That does not mean it is no longer fatal or that you can't have complications from a mild case.
I’d maybe get 1-2 hours of semi-productive time per day in. Write code 1 or 2 times per week. Honestly, I was pretty shocked at how I could get away with that and it was very demotivating to not have any reason to do more.

Now I’m firing on all cylinders for 7-9 hours a day, completing the entirety of a previous WFH day by 11 AM, and it feels _really_ good.
are you saying an environment is only appreciable if it's a biosphere? why? that seems utterly arbitrary.

i'd quite enjoy bouncing around in 1/4 gravity, or sailing over lakes of hydrocarbons if i could. sure it's equally arbitrary, but it would be more novel than any environment on earth.

what does selfishness have to do with it?