skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My merchant account is cheap (interchange plus 0.1% or so) and the gateway they set me up on is Authorize.net. Still using it after 17 years or so, although indirectly via Spreedly.

If you go to a craft show or popup market or anything like that, every vendor has a Square reader to take cards. They're super successful with "offline solopreneurs" -- the independent one-person small businesses.

One of my many side gigs is selling laser-cut wood stuff of all sorts, and I make a set of Square Reader docks that sell really well. I just made several this weekend.

https://www.etsy.com/shop/ligninandlight?section_id=26787311
Tiny bit of nitpicking - he declined the prizes. I know that's what you're saying but phrasing it that way ('which denied') makes it sound like he was denied the prizes by someone else. He just didn't want them.
They are making new languages far too often

It started with XPath, then came XPath 2, then XQuery 1, then XPath 3.0 and XQuery 3.0, and then XPath 3.1 and XQuery 3.1.

Six new languages each more expressive than previous one. That is why it takes forever to implement them. And now people are working on XPath 4.0 and XQuery 4.0.

And Perl got Perl 6 and Perl 7 and Raku
IMO it's a correlation rather than a causation.

A hiring binge could be a 'hail-mary' attempt to try and save a sinking product because everyone's busy putting out fires.

Or it could be a genuine sign of growth where product development and refinement cannot keep up with the demand for it.
Was naive and told them everything at the first sign of trouble thinking they'd let it go cause I was only 16.... Boy was that a great life lesson.
Maybe I should have called it "industry web standards" to explicitly exclude "google forced web standard"?
Is Widevine L1 "just software"? If its key distribution can somehow remain uncracked for years then maybe it could also do client-side watermarking.
I do the same thing (want to iterate on some complicated jq query -- or, let's be real, blunder around with my loose grasp of jq). I use https://github.com/lotabout/skim#interactive-mode instead of fzf.

function jqsk {
sk --tac --ansi --regex --query . --multi --interactive --cmd '{}' \
--bind 'enter:select-all+accept,ctrl-y:select-all+execute-silent(for line in {+}; do echo $line; done | pbcopy)+deselect-all' \
--cmd-history=${HOME}/.sk_history --cmd-history-size=100000 \
--no-clear-if-empty \
--cmd-query "cat $1 | jq --raw-output --color-output --exit-status '.'"
}

I run it like `jqsk file.json` and then change the `'.'` in the cmd-query to whatever I'm trying to do with jq.

I'll definitely look into some of the other mentioned solutions for this though. I settled on skim a year+ ago and haven't revisited.
Architecture is simple: it is that in your landscape that is hard to change. Making design decisions that are wise is the task of an 'architect', which is just another word for 'designer' (though it has been sold as something else). How you organise architecture processes depends on how you organise development, but the subject is the same. For instance, too much yagni is awful: everybody ends up waiting when something is needed that was not clear before. Finding those elements that improve your future speed is part of a good architecture process. Secondly, users are very focused on features and defects, but architecture is potential features and defects, and users are not a good source for those.
This sounds likely. It's like asking, "So you keep your savings in a box under your bed, huh?" If you reply with exasperation at how the interrogator found out, the irony is that you just told them. :)
The original saying is 'μακάριοι οἱ πραεῖς, ὅτι αὐτοὶ κληρονομήσουσιν τὴν γῆν' [1] which refers to 'οι πραείς' - 'the meek'.

[1] taken from Novum Testamentum Graece, κατά ματθαίον 5,5 (pp.9/26X - 28th ed, 2012) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novum_Testamentum_Graece
Journalism seeks lenses and frames for its stories. Tech giants are both known and high profiles, as well as illustrating burden-of-payment issues and the question "if they can't afford this then who can?"
What I witnessed was a feast and famine cycle. Senior leaders were always ravenous for headcount. In good times they would get it, and allocate it to increasingly dubious ideas. In bad times they would be forced to lay off even more than they had hired. Everyone from the dubious ideas, plus some of the maintainers of business-critical stuff, would be let go. The remaining engineers would (rightly) complain that they were understaffed and bereft of vital institutional knowledge. As times got better the gaps would be backfilled. But the company never had the restraint to stop there, it would just go right back into the cycle.

Add to that a not-invented-here / not-invented-by-me problem. A platform with some warts probably could have been fixed by those who understood it. But those people were gone. So the team genuinely needed larger headcount than before the layoffs, in order to rewrite the thing.

If I had to root-cuase it, it's that senior leaders get no points for delivering outsized results with a small contingent of engineers; their prestige and leveling is all about the headcount growth occurring beneath them. So there's no pushback on headcount growth, until there is.
You'd likely need to do several things, but one mitigation is to set up a network-wide firewall to block everything except IPs and domains you explicitly add to allowlist, and only connect your devices through the firewall.

For iOS, I don't believe a capable on-device firewall exists; but even if it did, NSO likely may have compromised it too.

Also: If it amounts to unlawful tapping where you live [0], you may want to consider a legal recourse (like signing up for a class-action?).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_tapping#Legal_status
>But they will harass your visitors with captchas for no good reason.

The other fun part about those captchas is they also gatekeep blind people in a way. They're using a service called HCaptcha which doesn't offer an audio alternative like ReCaptcha does. Instead they give you an "accessibility cookie" delivered to your e-mail address, which you can then use to automatically pass the captcha. (Very useful for everyone btw; give it a try.) The problem is that this cookie--and the e-mail address it's attached to--allow CF and potentially HCaptcha to track you around the internet. There's no way to anonymously browse the net through TOR or a VPN unless you create a throwaway e-mail address for that session.

HCaptcha recently expressed interest in creating a text-based alternative, but I wonder how this will stack up against modern AI. For now, it doens't bother me because I don't encounter it often and I have throwaway e-mail addresses, but it's just one more step I have to go through to remain anonymous where any sighted person could just click the traffic lights.
Two of us at school kind of earned the "hacker" badge. Far from being expelled, the teachers expressed admiration for our work and ability to dig into a completely unrelated area to schoolwork.

We never did anything stupid or caused damage. I think the relationship was somewhat based on an implicit statement of mutual trust.
How is a zero-interest payment plan loan shark-esque? Total late fees appear to be capped at the lesser of 25% or $68, which also seems less predatory than any credit card.
You think plastics should end up in the ocean? Why? It definitely should not, and if waste is managed correctly, it doesn't.

And I'm not saying decomposition doesn't happen at all in landfills; it very clearly does, but the sort of decomposition that takes place is incomplete and slow, because landfills aren't ideal places for decomposition to occur. But that doesn't matter. Once it's buried, who cares if it takes 300 years to decompose?
Do the opposite? Buy an extra soul from Satan? Why?
habitrpg / habitica had me going for a while but got sort of complicated
Thank you for the nice quote. You seem to think it contradicts what I said, but I don't see it that way. The importance of foreign investment was exactly my point.

Maybe because I said that he "abondoned organizing the whole sphere of the economy"? But the economy is no longer 100% state-owned like it was in 1978, is it not? (I'm having trouble finding reliable figures, but I vaguely recall it being around 40% of GDP nowadays.) Of course GDP has grown 40x since then, so even just 40% of that represents 16x growth and Deng wasn't wrong about the socialist sector benefiting from foreign investment. It's just that the private sector grew even more.
Yeah it really sucks. I'm well-thought of in my current job, I make enough. There's of course the temptation to squeeze the market for whatever it's worth, but man the interviewing process is such a game and a headache to boot. It's easy to let inertia take over and focus on enjoying other aspects of life.
Ya but companies genuinely don't care about that. We'd all like them to, but when the first step of an interview process is an automatically generated global talent test, administered by an hr person, there's no room for this sales pitch really. "Lets hire this guy who tells us he can learn, or let's hire this new grad who's been grinding leetcode for 2 years straight and happens to test well on the tech we bet our whole codebase on".
Architects that sit constantly in that abstract realm are useless (and they are not architects in my view). But there are architects that do exactly what you describe in your ideal world.
Well... extremely difficult, since all known climate evidence directly contradicts your proposition. 420ppm is not super great, but to call it "unprecedented" takes a mind-blowing quantum of scientific illiteracy.

https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/global-warming/early-eocene-period

May I suggest adopting a mental model where you care about accuracy more than outrage?
The most impressive part is that Blizzard managed to give everyone a reason to hate them. For you, it is international politics. For others, it is about employee treatment. Others may have something against loot boxes and microtransactions. And for most, it is simply the massive drop in quality of their games.

Concerned about ethics? Blizzard bad. Who care about ethics, I just want good games? Blizzard bad. They don't seem to have any idea about their core market, they can't even do damage control properly. I understand that shareholders want profit but here, it is as if Activision wanted to deliberately destroy the Blizzard brand. I don't know about how shareholders think, but a once well respected brand like Blizzard must have some value.
> The Macintosh was not text-oriented internally.

I'm not sure what you mean by this specific part; Windows is not "text-oriented internally"; neither is let's say Gnome. Actually if that's about how often e.g. DOS commands would be run by various GUI elements, it was likely even less a practice on Consumer Windows than on NT based systems, given the DOS command window was a VM with limited and/or weird interactions with the host OS.
Thanks for the post. An enjoyable read.
Well in hindsight that sounds like you got compensated for the risks you took. Especially since you didn’t say $8000 out of how much moved…
Go someplace with a lot of beach airbnb's. Offer to set up umbrellas and chairs everyday for the guests. Peopleeat this up when it's available Add upsells such as a cooler of drinks, sunglasses, kids toys, floats, etc. Put flyers near all the units. Contact the owners and have them add a flyer in the unit. Set up a website so people can schedule a setup. Buy used chairs and such online. Hire local kids to do the work. Franchise the model ...
The partner distribution network Microsoft has cultivated for decades is a real differentiator over Googles misguided approach to partner sales.
Are Afterpay really to blame for this? Credit cards have been around since the 80s and are far more predatory. Pawnbrokers have been around for centuries.

Even without debt, so many people have an impulse to spend as much as they can and put themselves in a financially precarious situation where one emergency bowls them over.

I'm not saying Afterpay are ethical, but I'm sure you'd find a similar amount of people foregoing necessities to make dumb impulse purchases regardless of payment method.
You may want to setup a company to simplify things and have a stable entity in a single jurisdiction.

In terms of personal taxes, generally wherever you last spent 6+ months in a fiscal year last. more than half a fiscal year somewhere you are deemed resident there. If you haven't spent 6+ months somewhere you're still resident in the country you were resident last year.
Still, I know some nomads who just don't pay taxes and have some third world country as their last residence: they just hope they won't be bothered given their situation is hard to investigate.

If you're US then you also pay US taxes on top (unless you just ditch your citizenship).

Things may get more complicated based on having property / a family somewhere and laws / exceptions in some specific countries.
The issue is that yes, property graphs are very popular. And also yes, they create yet another data silo just as the old sql databases do as you make a custom data model each time.

SPARQL and RDF are powering the new decentralized web with a global interoperable api in the form of Solid (by the inventor of the web) - you'll likely be hearing a lot more about this as it rolls out commercially in the coming months
FWIW, I completely agree with you. It would be unreasonable of me to expect a response today. Edit: And, in fact, it was a bad idea for me to send the tweet I did a few hours ago when this hit the HN front page. Apologies to any Cloudflare folks whose weekend I interrupted.
Xiaomi Poco M3 Pro 5G Specs and Price in Nigeria
“Shop now. Pay over 6 weeks.”

How is this technically different from a credit card? Just a longer timer period?
This bums me out. On two levels:

* The company doesn't have a clear idea of what they want, so they fall back on 'years of experience'. Lazy. I've written job descriptions and I know it's hard, but c'mon.
* This will turn off talented folks that might make great team members (esp folks who don't apply unless they have 100% of the qualifications).
I got hopeful when I read "Scheme Implementation," but unfortunately lisp for financial services doesn't seem to be the goal. Maybe someday.
Historically Windows has had better "day one" hardware support while Linux has better support for old or obscure hardware.
> is not a terrible thing

It is a terrible thing. It's possible to do without them, and you'll like your code better. Your symbolic debugger and syntax directed editor will work properly. The poor schlub who has to fix the bugs in your code after you leave will be grateful. Your spouse will be happy and your children will prosper.

For example,

#define foo(x) ((x) + 1)

replace with:

int foo(int x) { return x + 1; }

The compiler will inline it for you. There's no penalty.

#define FOO 3

Replace with:

enum { FOO = 3 };

or:

const int FOO = 3;

Replace:

#if FOO == 3
bar();
#endif

with:

if (FOO == 3) bar();

The optimizer will delete bar() if FOO is a manifest constant that is not 3.
We're in a gigantic bubble
It's worth noting that their margins have improved significantly this year and will presumably continue to do so over the following years.

For comparison, their loss in Q2 2021 was $591m compared to $1.42b for Q2 2020 (https://www.sdxcentral.com/articles/news/google-cloud-losses...).
I Changed Astronomy Forever. He Won the Nobel Prize for It. [video]
To be frank, all public social sites have resulted in less honest discourse. LinkedIn is a cesspool. The public blogs posted here by identifiable people are often fluffy and part of their self-branding strategy. The public people on Twitter virtue signal relentlessly.

Anonymity is it’s own type of filter where you can say bullshit and also have your bullshit called out. It’s something we have to protect. This is very important for adults who understand enough about life to self censor out of politeness. It’s not an issue for the kids on Reddit because they are kids who like to talk shit anyway all day. But for working professional? Yeah, sorry, the adult thing to do is not bring our identity into it.
You're right it doesn't make sense, this isn't normal corporate finance. Its dotcom funny money.
China and India house 50% of world population
That is probably a good example of the _bad_ architects the article mentions
These same organizations were the #1 source of lobbying to keep marijuana illegal in the state I was in when they were passing legalization legislation.
Todo apps are unfinished ticket management tools. What the author sees in Trello is exactly that: a tool aimed at actually managing tasks, not merely trying to keep track of them.

Also

> In fact the advanced solution technology lies in the hands of productivity enemies: social media apps and games.

Please let’s not. Harvesting dark patterns also has mental side effects that we are well aware of now (either you deplete your good will or you keep going on fueled by negative emotions)
If anyone is interested in this from the point of view of folklore or mythology, or as a source for worldbuilding, I suggest the Youtube channel Esoterica[0] which covers historic occult rituals and texts. The Lesser Key of Solomon, referenced in the article, is discussed here[1].

[0]https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCoydhtfFSk1fZXNRnkGnneQ

[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M0HyPIwco38

Edit: a depressing number of people in this thread seem to take this stuff seriously. A lot of your parents wouldn't let you play D&D or listen to Black Sabbath as kids, huh?

Let go of your fear of the boogeyman, he isn't real.
This also means that if you can afford to hire junior folks, you can get some real go-getters for a great (read, favorable to the company) salary.

But even junior salaries are going up, I've noticed.
> Microsoft dangles carrots for Azure, but the Microsoft sales culture will start beating customers over the head with the carrots.

I reckon a good deal of Oracle sales force now works at AWS. Thomas Kurian, GCP CEO, is ex-Oracle and has likely hired more in leadership positions. MSFT would do fine, if not better, with their in-house sales team.
Same as employees.

There is nothing special about contractors, it's just a tradeoff fiscal benefits / employer's flexibility.
I actually agree. MS went for readability on standard screens for ages, MacOS went for staying true to the typeface's design and printed look, which was laudable, but IMO a mistake on screens before the dawn of high-DPI.
And no spyware besides your documents being in Google's storage.
No interest, no credit check, late fees are capped, and it won't ever ding your interest rate or credit history if you do miss a payment.
> I generally never buy anything online that I can't afford to pay for it outright so I have never used them before.

They are designed to let people buy impulsively without annoying restrictions like not having enough money. Who would have though this was either an addressable market or a good idea.

I don't get why they are so popular either, or worth this much. They also don't have any moat - any payment provider can offer to do the same thing they do with less hassle for the customer (PayPal has started doing this for example). There are many direct competitors in addition (eg Zip).
Randolph: https://www.randolphusa.com/collections/aviator-best-sellers

Rudy Project: https://www.rudyproject.com/ww/en/
$29B is a pretty significant, even for an all-stock acquisition and a company of Square's size.

It would be interesting to see the motivation for this beyond a "shared mission" or "economic empowerment."
> The issue is that companies want to be cheap by letting other companies do the training and then taking them.

It's not cheap if they are willing to pay for it. That's why senior salaries keep going up. It's a tradeoff--they are willing to pay more for the privilege of not losing the time.
Wait, Google Reader was the summum of the "Good Internet"?
It's pretty simple for me. Anything that suggests that government and taxation is the solution and not the problem is to the left.
If a library has a restrictive license like that, then it had better be polished and extremely user friendly, or I'm not using it....

Whereas, if it's a permissive license like; MIT, then I'm personally more likely to be much more forgiving and even try and fix problems.
Sounds like a super example of 'loosely coupled spaghetti'
or if it's actually the police and not a scam
When this happens, tree shaking is acting as a workaround for unfortunate library design. Utilities should be split up based on what they depend on.

Otherwise, you end up downloading lots of libraries you don’t use, and then tree shaking prunes them. The final result is okay, but this results in unnecessary compiles and makes builds slower.
Ask HN: Share your side project
What have you been working on in your free time lately? Links to GitHub repos, websites, pictures/videos (not all side-projects are software!) of your creation in action, or whatever else best showcases what you've made would be great. Don't worry if your project is half-baked! I've personally found that getting feedback from the community can be a great source of ideas and motivation, even if the project is at a relatively early stage.
I'll kick things off. About a month-and-a-half ago I posted a "Show HN" for a nifty CLI tool I built called fcp [1], a significantly faster alternative to the classic Unix cp(1) command, copying large files and directories in a fraction of the time. Since posting about it (and receiving a lot of excellent constructive feedback from the HN community), I've continued to improve it, ensuring it gracefully handles edge-cases (e.g. attempting to copy a directory into itself) and further increasing its performance while reducing its memory footprint.

[1] https://github.com/Svetlitski/fcp
The other large aspect is that the technology has the same major issue as pumped hydro when compared to lithium-ion batteries. They don't give a clear return of investment.

Long duration general means that the intended target has a long charge cycle, and the longer the charge cycle is, the longer it will take to get an return of the investment. In contrast, lithium-ion batteries (with solar) is used with a daily charge cycle which means that calculating a return of investment is almost trivial. Every day the sun go down, demands goes up, batteries are discharged. Long duration storage tend to be combined with wind, and so you discharge during days of calm weather.
The axiom of excluded middle is that for every proposition, either that proposion is true or it is false. That's a universal quantification, so any counterexample makes it false. "This proposition is false." is such a counterexample (it can't be true, because than it's false and your logic is inconsistent, and it can't be false, because than it's true and ditto). This reasoning applies to pretty much any recognizable system of propositional logic (including, per Godel nineteen-thirty-something, systems that explicitly prohibit the basic self-referential counter example, as long as they're expressive enough to describe arithmetic), so it's at least colloquially correct to simply dismiss it as false, even if the pedantic version is that it's a axiom that cannot be part of a consistent set of axioms.

The theorem of included middle doesn't prevent specific classes of propositions from being exclusively divided into true and false, though. As a simple example, any proposition of the form "natural number SSS...SS0 is prime" will be either true or false, and there's nothing inconsistent about (say) "for every proposion P matching regex /(S)*0 is prime/, either P is true or P is false". Just like there's nothing weird about a linter that can reliably tell you that "while(1) {...}" doesn't terminate, halting problem or not.
The fixed costs (chunky engineering & product salaries) are ~ the same no matter how much revenue you have. Just take a napkin and do the math thinking through each part of the cost structure v AWS.