skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Freelancing while going back to school?
Over the last 18 months, I've been taking university courses in mathematics and physics for the first time (I'm a self-taught engineer), and I've found myself wanting more and more to commit fully to study. I daydream quite a bit about pursuing a masters in mathematics, focused on statistics/ML-relevant math, while freelancing 10-20 hours a week to cover my cost of living.

I'm a software engineer with enough years of experience to qualify for a freelancing service like Moonlight, and I have a good enough network to find contracts on my own if need be.

I was hoping someone in the HN community could share their experiences with a similar life move. Have you ever taken time off from your career to go back for a Masters, and if so, was freelancing a viable option, or was the workload too great? Did you find it set you back in your career in anyway?
Perhaps we need more sustainable economic models or ‘logistically effective mitigations’ as you say: ie. moving stuff around the world more efficiently? Perhaps the clever people that read this site can help develop technology or software to help? What other choice do we have as a species?
…as for your ‘possibilities’:
1) the truth: we could do a lot to ‘mitigate’ it tomorrow given sufficient political and popular will. The problem is that some powerful and influential people would lose a lot of money and some countries’ economies are precariously built reliant on eg. fossil fuels, logging, non-sustainable farming etc. that will take time to transition from/implement alternatives to…
2) see my above post - if you doubt it: prove it/provide evidence!
3) how do you define ‘cost’? Do you have kids/grandkids/relatives?
Sailboats can already go downwind faster than wind by sailing at an angle, no additional equipment required.
The IBM Thinkpad was probably the most well known laptop brand for 10-15 years. Even now I would guess people still equate “Thinkpad” with IBM even though they sold it off to Lenovo 15 years ago.
It really isn't that hard. All protein on the planet comes from plants and photosynthesis. Dietary supplemental vitamins are needed on both a vegan and non-vegan diet. Human teeth cannot eat raw animal skin/meet, they don't cut it. Watch "The Game Changers".

Read the book Eat to Live. It is evidence based, written by an M.D. and has nearly 1,000 references/studies. I've been doing the ETL lifestyle now for 16 years now, and feel great on it!
> OS security is generally a shit show anyway. I don't think it's bad to lock down the OS for most users, but it should still be possible for expert users to get expert access.

Last I checked, it still is—IIRC, you have to run some specific commands in Recovery Mode to disable the protections, but for "trust me, I'm smart" developers, that shouldn't be a problem.

Personally, I haven't seen any particular need to do that. I can count the number of times I've been blocked by SIP from doing things I wanted to do on one hand, and none of them were critical.
Most low-code and no-code platforms go for junior dev empowerment, and senior dev replacement. This one also seems to be aimed at empowering juniors, but looks like it missed the senior replacement by miles.
> How do account 3 items that cost 1/3$ each (e.g. if in a bundle)?

You never account for fractional discrete items, it makes no sense. A bundle is one product, and a split bundle is another. For products sold by weight or volume, it's usually handled with a unit price, and a fractional quantity. That way the continuous values can be rounded but money that is accounted for needs not be.
Not as a matter of hard power because the outside shareholders are usually pretty docile. Management has the power.

Shareholder ideology can be used to justify all sorts of things, though.
It's a different sophisticated and mysterious brush for a human artist to use - but the AI is not generating any art. The human curating the AI's output through their lens of human experience is the Art.
SEEKING WORK

Location: UK

Remote: Yes

I’m a programmer with >10 years experience, primarily working remotely on a freelance or contract basis. My recent experience is around probabilistic programming language research, but I’d be happy to work in any technically interesting domain. I’ve done mostly Python, Javascript and a some Haskell recently, but I’m willing to switch languages as necessary. I have a growing personal interest in FPGA/RISC-V/embedded so would also be interested in opportunities to gain experience with those.

More info and contact details on my website: https://paulhorsfall.co.uk
Are you a dog?

This kind of personifying glib is what gives vegan/vegetarian ethics a bad name. It completely ignores domestication and how dogs evolved as human-following scavenger animals. Most dog breeds are not adapted to living without humans. Dogs in the wild live much shorter lives and get parasites.
I am sorry, but I genuinely do not see a difference in meaning between the first example and the second two. They all concern the social well-being of the whole (in fact, they’re all part of the _same_ definition).

Nevertheless, I just picked the very first definition that came up (literally, the one that Google presents on search), without any editorializing. Maybe you’re the one who is deliberately picking and choosing a narrow reading?
Well so long to Redhat improving the culture at IBM
I suspect that IBM would see both of those as competitors, which honestly makes it more embarrassing. They can't ask for help from people that know email at this scale because they are too busy trying to tell the F500 that they know cloud at this scale.
This kind of thing devalues the work that programmers do.

The head example they show is using a sentiment analysis API which is about the most useless use of technology there is.
If you're digusted by the thought of eating animal flesh, you should really see how milk is made.

And also, miss me with this bull. Either go vegan or shut the fuck up. Vegetarians are the worst.
> Deductions are the real "lever" that the ultra rich use, since you can lobby the feds to implement whatever you want. This is why when tax rates post WWII were "over 90%" in top brackets nobody actually paid those taxes. Ironically, in that period most people who would be subject to that tax just took sabbaticals (of sorts) and reduced their income.

Did they not pay because they had magic deductions or did they not pay because of sabbaticals and reduced income? Because the former means it was no better than today (and income differential stats around CEO vs line-level employer suggest this is not true), but the latter is by its very nature better than today. It's literally creating more opportunity for more people to earn money? If person A isn't doing the work and making the income, person B is. So inequality will be less!

That high tax rate disincentives a small set of super-high-earners from running ever-more parts of the world? Good!
It already is ;)
Can we have a Vim plugin pretty please?
Thanks for reporting that! I just tried myself and seems to have worked. If you have any repro steps or other bug reports please do let us know anytime on twitter or at support@napkin.io . Thanks!!
Yes. Hispanic refers to Spanish language and culture.
> loud and dangerous and hot and chaotic

I was a sysadmin for an on-site HPC cluster and this sounds familiar. Compared to a restaurant, it's probably less dangerous and chaotic but more loud and hot.
Every year we hear Tesla is going broke for the last ~10 years. Every year they survive. Regulatory credits are a legitimate revenue source as long as governments require legacy automakers buy them (who are profitable because they sell combustion vehicles without the externalities of burning fossil fuels captured in costs and prices). They’re growing units sold almost 100% year over year. Markets don’t care if one thinks regulatory credits are a handout (they’re not, they level the playing field against combustion vehicles). May they extract every bit they can to accelerate the electrification of transportation.

(no financial interest in TSLA besides being a customer)
Well, the highest four points on the graph are Chinese. Yes you can cherry pick a three year period that makes Korea look good, but you can do the same with China.
I grew up watching “this is your brain on drugs” commercials*, so yes I know what you’re referencing there.

“Girls who code” and similar programs don’t strike me as the 2020s version of the war on drugs, though.

* https://youtu.be/GOnENVylxPI
Neither did a child being born
We shouldn’t be depending on people that ruthlessly exploit others to gain their wealth. We should be shunning them.
Yes in an American court, they are the ones charging him with these crimes.

And it isn't getting any major oublisher coverage, searching "Julian Assange" on both DDG and Google news shows only Democracy Now covering the story.
Yep, America is a pinnacle of health when you see how many people have access to abundant meat and milk ...

Oh ... wait...
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Just because Alexa is not human doesn't mean I have to discard my humanity when I interact with it.
Is there a problem with flushing a toilet with salt water?
Most medical journals publish a lot of bullshit papers though. The only difference is that this one has political relevance, so in effect politics dictates what kind of bullshit people accepts.
>> Why doesn't the architecture use a model to generate sheet music / MIDI, then layer another model on top to create instrumentals?

there are various models that do this [0]... just doesn't have the same power to generate waveform music that jukebox does.

Jukebox effectively is a 2 step model a) a 3 layer VQ-VAE compresses the music (so think of this as the MIDI equivalent) and b) a transfomer then learns/generates sequences.

The compression is the expensive part of the model.

[0] https://towardsdatascience.com/how-to-generate-music-using-a...
And POW.. this just got removed from the front page. Someone has bias...
Found the titty sucking cheese lover!
Intelligence beyond "sufficiently competent to participate in society" is not consistently an advantage. "The kindest thing in this universe is our inability to correlate it's contents" applies to real life. High intelligence not really result in happier more productive people.
The uproar over Copilot is kind of hilarious. Maybe it's SWE's realizing that they might not be as irreplaceable as they seem but its an awful lot of salty comments. If anything I think Copilot is a really cool PoC and shows just how close we are getting to automating large portions of the code writing process which we should all welcome as more cycles can be spent on architecture and system design.
“World class operator” while employees pee in bottles on the warehouse floor to meet quotas. That’s not a world class operator, that’s a world class tyrant.
"Widows in the Middle Ages weren’t always the penniless, powerless figures we’ve made them out to be"

How dumb... "We" have never made them out to be _that_...
No I was not implying that at all. Congress also must be involved in giving the IRS more resources, either through budget or more information access.
Javascript books under "Law" is hilarious
I'm trying to get it going in a docker container asap.. I was slaving away on that today
For the past idk 10 years I’ve felt like nuclear power was really on the way out but over the past like 24 months I’ve noticed a huge resurgence in support for these types of projects. Maybe that’s just my bubble but it seemed like a serious inflection.
He is broadly considered a generic authority based on his long, deep thinking and publications about leaks and legal consequences.

I think your response is not weird but disingenuous.
I mean, it's honest. Using a human voice suggests that you're talking to an individual, only to that one device next to you. Saying "Ok Google" makes it abundantly clear that you're feeding (and being fed by) a planetary-scale hive mind.
The linked IRS inspector general report the article’s premise is based on is pretty interesting. Basically the IG is saying that the IRS is leaving a lot of money on the table because of gaps between different functions/departments (examination and collection). The report does acknowledge that workforce scale is a problem but it looks like that is stated without considering worker productivity.

https://www.treasury.gov/tigta/auditreports/2020reports/2020...
> even at peak IBM it was an office name, not a household name.

Even if this were the case, they would have been part of nearly every office in one way or another and they certainly are not now.
> as part of a process that includes development of policies to prevent getting back to the same state.

Can you give an example? I may just be out of the loop.
Right?

Even given all its initial problems, I don't see a world where people completely avoid using it.
The end of an era.

Jeff's concept of all of his workers being lazy has been pivotal in the concept of hiring to fire.

Jeff lead the way in his idea of firing people with cancer.

He lead in having the most people cry at their desk.

His concept of making people wear diapers instead of letting them go to the bathroom.

Don't get me wrong. I want my cheap stuff and to some degree they are the only game in town.

I do think that Amazon changed how we shop in a large way.
Same here, because I wanted to feel like I was on Star Trek. Although it can get confused, given that I teach computer science and talk about it a lot.
You can try not "owning" another animal. Problem solved. Make friends with the squirrels.
> If a child was "bullied" with Alexa once, it's a part of growing up: what doesn't kill us, makes us stronger.

Actually, childhood trauma causes all sorts of problems later in life. It doesn't make kids stronger, it makes them less resilient, more depressed and anxious, and more inclined to lash out and perpetuate the cycle of abuse when they have power over e.g. younger kids
Security flaws uncovered in EU vaccination passport
Being polite is for my benefit, not the for machines’. It feels nice to be nice.
> 95% of vegans don’t do a good job and are visibly malnourished

Uh, is it even worth asking for a source for this?
> chimps and gorillas for millenia and they are furry, cannibalistic, violent tribal monsters

Gorillas are largely vegetarian, and generally peaceful. Humans are much better example of “violent tribal monsters” than gorillas.

Cf. https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/1977/12/25/t...
It speaks to the standard of work they do at IBM.
To me this has way too many signs of vapourware:

• highly complex technology that has been around for decades, yet the team seems to lack any experienced members (judging from the photo)

• no existing solutions are beyond the test/prototype phase

• pretty renderings in an unrealistic setting

• lots of vague statements regarding the technology, yet they already know that the final product will be housed in stylish buildings (wtf?)

I don't have much confidence in this company, but I'd be pleasantly surprised to be shown wrong in a couple of years.
Totally valid concern. We plan to add Github integration soon which will also enable local development, code reviews, etc!
The “exact” version they wanted was full of approximations too. They just didn’t have enough numerical literacy to understand how to say how much approximation they are ok with.

I guarantee nothing in anyone’s time accounting system is measured to double-precision accuracy. Or at least, I’ve never quite figured out the knack myself for stopping work within a particular 6 picosecond window.
Only when it’s cheaper and only because we incentivize it.

We’re hopefully shifting away from fossil fuels for vehicles, but in the grand scheme of things I think everyone agrees it’s not going to be enough.

Just think of how we continue to encourage and glorify consumerism, disposables, and trivialities. These all contribute to the problem!

We often belabor that entire industries, parties, and regions are getting in the way; yet there’s no sense of shared sacrifice.

That is, it’s a “do as I say” and not “do as we do”, whoch never goes over well.

So even without the O&G lobbying I strongly believe climate change endeavors would be extremely steep battles.

The alternative, of course, is a Stalinist-style re-engineering and that way is…well, a way of desperation.
It's tricky, because once you start accepting user feedback, you need to moderate it, or else someone will poison your model for fun and profit.
Scientists discover a new class of neurons for remembering faces
I spend most of my time thinking about the problem, how to solve it, and considering ramifications of my decisions before ever putting code in the IDE. So Copilot comes around and it autocompletes code for me. But I still have to read what it suggested, making edits to it, and consider if this is solving the problem appropriately.

So, rather than helping people program better, all its done is replace a bunch of the offshore cut-and-paste shops with "AI."
Yeah. And like how would you even devise a metric? Like compile it down to assembly and see if it’s similar logic?
As far as I'm concerned, the term "PC" comes from the "IBM PC"[1]

> "The PC was IBM's first attempt to sell a computer through retail channels [...] they partnered with the retail chains ComputerLand and Sears Roebuck"

> "Reception was overwhelmingly positive [...] the IBM PC immediately became the talk of the entire computing industry.[38] Dealers were overwhelmed with orders [...] By the time the machine was shipping, the term "PC" was becoming a household name.[39] [...] Sales exceeded IBM's expectations by as much as 800%, shipping 40,000 PCs a month at one point.[40] The company estimate that 50 to 70% of PCs sold in retail stores went to the home."

It is worth noting how small the market was at the time though, "In 1983 they sold more than 750,000 machines" - Apple has just passed 100,000,000 iPhone 12s in six months since launch.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Personal_Computer
>> it takes ~9 hours to generate ~90 seconds of audio (even on a NVIDIA V100 GPU)

btw this is true if you upsample all 3 levels. I have found in practise that you are fine upsampling 2 levels and then using a DAW to "clean up"/"remaster" [0]... again will work for certain sounds better than others.

The last upsampling step is by far the most expensive. so cutting that down cuts total time by 75%

[0] simple hacks such as using a low-pass filter
Bioavailable copper, I assume.

Copper pipes should scale over.
Britain’s private schools lost their grip on Oxbridge
I mean, I think everyone agrees that way too much sugar or eating nondigestible plants is not a good idea.

But a vegan diet has been approved for humans at all stages of life, and the vegan dog food I'm aware of meets all AAFCO standards (nutrients, digestibility, protein:carb:fat ratio) as well as passing tests for dog interest/palatability.

There's a big difference between a well-rounded plant-based diet, and living off sugar or cellulose-heavy raw plants.
More importantly, it's already irrelevant ($1.6T) compared to bond sales ($8T).

I'll eat my socks if the economy doesn't grow by 20% after eliminating taxes.
I’m reminded of the old saying:

The best person to have on your team is a productive, high-quality coder.

The worst is a productive, low-quality coder.

Copilot looks like it would give us more of the latter.
A lot of my job is thinking hard about how to do [X], incidentally needing to remember how to do [trivial thing Y] and looking it up.

Like, I did it before, remember that it was trivial, I just forget the snippet and I have to break focus to look it up - often by scrolling through my own commit history to try and find the time I did [trivial thing Y] four months ago.

I do kind of wish I could automate that. Skipping the actual typing of the snippet is sort of gravy on top of that.
What a stupid rationale! So, they are not really using the Latin alphabet - just like with the Cyrillic, as they have their own letters. And, no, in times when Cyrillic alphabet is widely supported, their points are pretty lame. Maybe 20+ years ago it was tough to have Cyrillic fonts and keyboards, but in 2021, they are supported by virtually all operating systems, including mobile, so, I don't buy it, not at all.
Your username is fitting in relation to the title ;-)
Indeed - the dead sea has stupid high salinity because the only way water leaves is via evaporation :)

It is a very odd sensation to "swim" in the dead sea. Even floating is pretty hard because you are so buoyant. It's probably the closes to true weightlessness I will ever get.
Do you still use Amazon despite their bad conduct?
Excellent point! Illegal domestic spying in the US has mostly gone the way of the dodo bird because of certain whisteblowers.
Ok thanks !
I guess about a third of the users in our workspace would be using the tool in theory, so a variable pricing would be required by the higher ups^^
I wish you all the best
Does anyone have access to the reports from the scientists? I'd be really interested to see the kinds of stuff they predicted, in case there are any events that haven't occurred even on a small scale yet
There's a quote from the speech that I think is particularly apropos:

> Seventy-six years, though a good old age for a man, is but a mere speck in the life of a nation. Three score years and ten is the allotted time for individual men; but nations number their years by thousands.

Seventy-six years ago, it was 1945. Black soldiers were coming back from winning WWII in a segregated US military, only to be excluded from the GI Bill that helped build the suburbs and establish generational wealth for white veterans. Seventy-six years before that the nation was in the midst of Reconstruction, enacting literacy tests and other measures to exclude Black people from public life.

My parents were born in the twilight years of Jim Crow. They were alive to see MLK assassinated — now universally admired for a white-washed, toothless version of his legacy, he died opposed by a full 75% of Americans. The oldest people on HN probably have early memories of this themselves.

We are living in the shadow of the past. We didn't flip a switch that erased racism after slavery. We didn't do it after Jim Crow either. This is a necessary speech in its historical context, yes — but it's also a necessary speech in today's context. Because unless we understand how the US's deep legacy of racism still perpetuates now, we won't be able to do the hard, uncomfortable, crucial work of undoing it.