skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't share your optimism.

From what I see in France, there's a ton of competition in "consulting". Not freelance, mind, but body shops renting out developers. The end clients have a tendency to think of those devs as completely interchangeable (that's the main reason they give when asked why they don't hire directly).

I have a hard time seeing how telling them to pound sand can have a serious effect, especially since your employer (entity signing your paycheck) is not the same as the entity for whom you actually work. So aggravating a few too many clients might start having adverse effects with your actual employer.
Quality is not at odds with cost and delivery speed. That's a common misconception, but empirically all sorts of people (perhaps starting with Shewhart) have discovered that a good process leads to lower cost, higher quality, faster delivery.

If anything, low quality is what increases cost and delivery time, by adding expensive inspection, re-work, warehousing of defective product, missed returns on development time, customer disappointment, loss of feedback.

Quality achieved by exhortation ("Try harder!") is at odds with all sorts of things. Quality achieved by straightening out a process designed to produce defects in large numbers -- not at odds with anything, except perhaps office politics.
How silly of him to assume the top hacker news comment was related to the specifics of the linked article and not a hypothetical
A lot of the initial iOS "slowness" after updates is generally attributed to background indexing, and beyond that the phone likely becomes a victim of an aging battery which is fixable with a new one every 1-3 years - Androids are often stuck on old versions susceptible to malware.
Optimization of .NET applications: a big result of small edits
Does anyone understand how OneDrive and Dropbox can be so cheap compared to S3?

- 2 TB on Dropbox is £7.99 / month

- 1 TB OneDrive is £59.99 / year

- 1 TB on S3 is $23.99 / month

How can Dropbox and OneDrive be cheaper than S3 at all, let alone after providing value add on top? Is it something to do with lower reliability and availability guarantees? Is it possible to buy direct access to their underlying storage?

https://www.dropbox.com/individual

https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/microsoft-365/onedrive/compa...

https://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/
In fact, no. Those are specifically the trades that always have work and don't depend on new construction. "General Construction" is very boom&bust.

There are also many specialties available in plumbing and electrical that demand top dollar. The average electrician where I'm at in the US working for themselves is making $80-150 an hour (market depending) without any specialties involved.

Related: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xP0egqOivKc
Creating a Space Game with OpenAI Codex
Most people will not hold their own wallet. They just buy cryptocurrency through an exchange and let it sit as an "investment". They don't manage the wallet themselves and don't use the cryptocurrency for transactions. They simply think this is a quick way to make money and see it more as a more volatile alternative to the stock market.
Sam is doing an awesome job. On an M1 mac, the official dropbox client is a total no-go from a resource usage point of view. Maestral is a lifesaver for me/my memory usage.
> Just ask your parents or your non-tech friends if it's "ok" to scan people's phones to find those "bad pedophiles" in order to jail then up for the rest of their life. You will be surprised how much support Apple's initiative has in the broad public.

My Dad is an old teacher today and was formerly a farmer.

My view is he clearly understands these issues and has done since I was a teenager sometime in the last millenium when I followed him around the farm and we talked about stuff.

Maybe your parents are like what you describe but don't underestimate other peoples parents. They might not agree immediately, but if one is careful many actually aren't unreasonable.

Also everyone: stop this defeatist attitude. Instead of asking leading questions, talk about it calmly and politely.

Just explain that once this system is in place it will be used for anything, not just photos (or otherwise bad guys could just zip the files). And when everything is scanned some people will add terrorist material (i.e. history and chemistry books), other will add extremist material (religious writings), blasphemous material (Christian or Atheist teachings in Saudi Arabia), and other illegal content (Winnie the Pooh, man against tank etc in China).

In the paragraph above there should be something to make everyone from Ateheists through Christians, Muslims, nerds, art lovers and Winnie the Pooh fans see why this is a bad idea.
I honestly think they are using the copyright lawyers as a scapegoat.

The have to do all sorts of Infrastructure tricks and optimizations to have the performance that they currently do.

They most likely realized they had a non-insignificant number of vpn connections (that can change country in short notice) and this probably introduced a massive spanner in the works on their Infrastructure/Optimizations.

I doubt the studios understand half of what Netflix has to do backend wise to appreciate any of it on a negotiation table.
I am not saying it is easy, just that it can have value. If anything, the fact it is hard makes it more valuable.

I don't think it's hopeless though, the AI already does something similar. As a very naive implementation, you could for instance run your AI logic on the current state of the game and compare your move to the expected AI move. A bit like with a chess engine.
A dehumidifier. We lived in London,until a few weeks ago, and it has absolutely saved us without a slightest exaggeration. We kept humidity at bay it was super handy when drying washed clothes. Couldn't recommend high enough.
Whoops looks like I confused algebraic datatypes and algebraic effects. Actually this confusion / realization because of your comment just clicked something for me, so thanks!!
This article probably originated as someone from The Economist looking for a way out of journalism and stumbling across a story...
I agree that we agree :)

And I am a very active Facebook user, too (the use case of keeping in touch with many friends scattered across the nation/world is covered pretty darn well there).

The value I derive from these platforms is orthogonal; there's a place for both.

I am not a fan of Google because they keep changing things and killing off the projects that I like. Believe it or not, I was completely sold on the Circles premise of Google+, and nothing has come close to that ever since. The most important downside of G+, of course, isn't privacy — it's that it no longer exists.

So I'm just waiting for someone to finally figure search out. That's the only thing keeping me there (I use an IMAP mail client, so can switch easily; Maps aren't a unique proposition; Docs aren't something I use).

I tend to write a lot in enthusiastic agreement, so I'll just say yes, if people were more willing to think about why people like Trump in 2016, we probably would not have had Trump (..nor Clinton running against him, for that matter).

The feeling of belonging, acceptance, and power drove disenfranchised poor male white rural Americans to Trump like a magnet, and the Dem party decided that they don't need to care about that because Trump is so obviously bad. It's very frustrating to think about like 100 different ways that scenario could have played out differently.

I feel like that's what I see now with this TikTok discussion. I literally had to defend against accusations of being a parasocial relationship addict for stating my point. Because, apparently, one must be a lifeless addict to be enthusiastic about that platform sigh.

My doomsday prediction is that TikTok will continue to dominate social media, with PRC being intelligent enough to wield influence softly enough for it not to be noticeable (unlike FB literally enabling genocide). Where that will land us in 10 years is an interesting question to consider.

Who knows, maybe we'll get our government to spend less on rockets, and give us healthcare and education instead. Isn't that a win for Chinese geopolitics? I would hope it is! :) Somehow.

(Off-topic, but in the same way, the Bolshevik revolution of 1917 happened with quite a lot of help from the Germans, who figured it's going to kick Russians out of the war - which it did. Whether it was good for the Russians is to debate to this day.)
I'd hate to go back to working in an office. I live in the countryside now and it's great.

However I realise it may not always be so easy. So:

- I'm self employed. Foreign companies aren't going to set up a branch office just to employ me. Purchasing my services however is easy.

- I've niched down to a business vertical, and I'm starting to niche down more technically as well. No more "I'm a full stack developer with a track record of delivering results across multiple industries".

- I write software for the agricultural sector. It's not an industry that tends to cluster as much in big cities. A lot of companies are based in regional areas, and it's not realistic for them to source all the talent they need locally. People are open to networking online.

It's not a raging success yet but it's a lot better than working in an office everyday in the city was for me.

YMMV if you live in a US tech hub.
A Distributed Database Middleware Ecosystem Driven by Open Source
It was a major carrier, prepaid, with BYOD. (I don't want to say which, in case that might wrongly get the helpful CSR in trouble, in the way that sometimes happens with huge companies blaming downward for problems higher up.)

The CSR said that suspending the line happens any time the SIM is moved to a device without first calling them with the IMEI of the device. (Calling is a major production, maybe 1+ hour on-hold with a loud repeating talking ad that wouldn't stop, and even minimum volume on that iPhone was too loud. Web sites got nothing on customer support dark patterns.)

I asked if there was a way to get my line exempted from this, so that I could move the SIM frequently between phones without calling them. I mentioned this was an original purpose of SIM cards.

He said no. But he did say they used to have a Web form where the customer could enter the new IMEI, but they removed that, as part of some kind of move. I didn't ask further.
I don't get your reasoning on why you expect that people will have to take a pay cut for working remotely. Would have thought it would be the opposite. Office space, hardware and energy cost a bit.
Nextcloud works decent for normal file stuff but doesn't really have a solution for photos. You can turn on the auto photo sync for a folder but after a few thousand files it gets unusably slow.
The last homie
Google is already looking at this...

https://eu.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2021/08/11/remo...
I’m totally talking out my ass, so don’t be too shocked. :-)

It could be that the decision about which service gets European access rights is made only after the decision about which content will even be allowed for broadcast in a region.

It could be that in these huge corporations, the business side of the company negotiates regional access rights. The totally separate legal department enforces the geofence, and they are driven more by their contact with content producers’ anti-piracy legal departments, squeaky wheel style.

Anyhow, like I said, just speculation.
Another one by randy korotev:

> Think of it this way: If you see it driving down the freeway and it has 4 wheels, 2 headlights, and a trunk, it is probably an automobile, not an alien spacecraft.

https://sites.wustl.edu/meteoritesite/items/some-meteorite-r...

I wonder just how many times he's been contacted about meteorwrongs to write that flowchart.
Going a bit on the side track over here, due to MFC being mentioned.

Given the current state of C++/WinRT tooling, even the aging MFC is more productive for Windows applications.

It doesn't matter it isn't modern C++, is full of CWhaterver, it is still more than good enough for those use cases where .NET isn't an option for whatever reason and C++ must be used.
Yeah, I hear you. I'm a US citizen, but live in South Africa. So I have to do extra auth steps to login to banking, when not on a VPN. And also, lots of places now are cracking down on VOIP phone. I very nearly couldn't login to my bank because they wanted a phone number with a physical address attached. Netflix is an annoyance, but its the general trend that is worrying.
How long will it last though after the pandemic is open?

Would be good to have a company where we can still socialise with colleague like half a week, then I would just travel around while working. Flexibility all the way!
Indeed a fairly profound part of the system. In Donatella Meadows' leverage points, incentives fall under "Rules of the system", i.e. pretty far out!

https://miro.medium.com/max/1280/1*f60gJ4MELQIdOoLwTilk-w.pn...
They tried to steal $1B. They succeeded with $101M. They got away with $63M.
It's started already: https://www.reuters.com/world/the-great-reboot/pay-cut-googl...
I completely agree with the sentiment!

I do wonder whether new releases are required to benefit from fixes and performance enhancements in libraries. Or is everything dynamically linked?
India's National Education Policy 2020
>Yes, but there is a very low limit to the number of people that can be on the other end of the violence, and with guns, that limit is even much lower.

I don't really understand what you mean here?

You pull your gun out and threaten a government representative, and you will be dead or in handcuffs within 30 minutes.

Maybe your idea of civilian government overthrow could come true if you could somehow gather thousands of people with guns who are against the government simultaneously, but other than that, it's over. And even if you do manage to gather those people, it's over when the national guard arrives.

Escalating violence doesn't work when you're massively outgunned, or do you have your own Apache helicopters, armed drones and tanks? Do you think they will hesitate to attack armed terrorists trying to overthrow the "democratically elected" government?

I'm not American so please explain what I'm missing here.
Apart from search, ANNs can be use for recommendations, classification, and other information retrieval problems.

Currently, ES and Solr, both based on Lucene, can't really manage vector representations, as they are mainly based on inverted indexes to n-grams.

ANNs potential applications extend to audio, bioinformatics, video, among any modality that can be represented as a vector. All you need is an encoder! How nice.

Faiss is definitely powerful. I have been running experiments using 80 million vectors that map to legal documents, and vectorizing protein-folds (using Alphafold). While it is an interesting technology, at this moment, perhaps for my usecases, I see it more as a lib or tool than a full-featured product like ES or Solr.

For instance, ATM, updating a Faiss index is a non trivial process, with many of the workflow tools you would expect in ES missing. There is also the problem of encoding the input into vectors, which takes a few milliseconds (do you batch, parallelize, are you ok with eventual consistency?).

I recently been found with pgvector (postgres + vector support) https://github.com/ankane/pgvector. Perhaps less performant, but easier to work with for teams. With support of migrations, ORM, sharing, and all the postgres goodies.

Another interesting/product-ready alternative is https://jina.ai.

And Google's ScaNN, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0SvrDtnUgV4
Don't underestimate trivial inconveniences[0]. There's a difference between being able to install employee surveillance in principle, and having it handed to you on a golden platter.

Some manager may toy with an idea of getting IT to install and manage monitoring software, but ultimately reject it as not worth the cost. But if the company starts to work over something like Codespaces - even if only for purely technical reasons - then suddenly they'll find themselves having a dashboard for free, and for sure they'll start using it.

--

[0] - https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/reitXJgJXFzKpdKyd/beware-tri...
Regardless of jobs containing "onsite" or "remote", the metric that really matters is - how many people are actually applying...

Companies can advertise "onsite" all they want, but from all the stories I've heard about how hard it is to find good developers, and how developers are leaving their work-from-home jobs as soon as they're told to come into the office, you have to draw the conclusion that it's a buyer's market and employers are either going to have to fold to devs, or have their vacant roles stay open for longer than usual.
Can confirm, Melbourne is absolutely gigantic. No really, so big it didn't make sense to me.
Avoid Diet Coke and other artificially sweetened diet drinks! The artificial sugars in them are full of enantiomers that reverse their nutrition. I have been slowly getting back to normal by Activating the organic ingredients I eat, and it takes a long time to get rid of the traces this stuff leaves in your metabolism.
That's a proper slave mentality right there. I suggest you instead think like this "what will I do to continue working remotely? Which company will I pick?".
The phone, but only when you have iCloud photos enabled and only when you live in the US
There's really no excuse for not making every computer encrypted by default.
Rather than oppose a measure to protect children because of the fear of a few false positives, why can't you accept the fact that the societal benefit outweighs the potential risk?

A few innocent men might be condemned to rot -- or be murdered -- in prison, but Apple has developed a system that mostly protects your privacy and could save the lives of potentially millions of children around the world. The rights of a few harmed innocents must be balanced against the greater societal good.

(/s in case you were wondering)
Free conversion of tests from walrus.ai to testRigor
If there are walrus.ai customers looking for a different testing system right now, we are happy to help and convert all the tests to testRigor free of charge.
I’ve owned localho.st for 20-odd years.
Most users aren’t storing anywhere close to 1TB. For every user using 1TB there are probably a hundred using 1GB or less. Case in point: I subscribe to Office 365 reluctantly but don’t use OneDrive.
This will only happen at companies that required people to live in extremely expensive areas like silicone valley. I’m not in that situation, but I’d quit immediately and go somewhere else. For example Google is doing this, there is no reason Google needs to save money on these developers. None at all.
Managers cite efficiency losses in terms of communication, team building, training new staff, and idea generation in general.

Not my arguments, just what I've seen written...
It's not that novel. SARS-CoV-2 is genetically quite similar to both the original SARS-CoV and HCoV-OC43.
I don't doubt your anecdotal data. However there is a difference between being a trades worker and running a business. Usually running a business means managing a team of trades workers and that comes with it own set of headaches. If you look at the BLS data on median income for traders workers, the data is not so impressive ~60K for plumbers, electricians and other workers.
I mean take roofing for example. Of course roofs need replacement eventually. But after a construction boom the fraction of new roofs is high, so those don't need replacement for a while. Wouldn't that mean that roofers have less work?
I found plenty of remote opportunities for several years prior to the pandemic just by sticking to my guns, passing and passing and passing on all non-remote opportunities.
I was roommates with a heavy equipment mechanic in his >$500k house. He barely spoke English and when his company got terminated from their contract on a tunnel he was rehired the same week for a $40k pay raise. He quit that job for another $30k raise to work for a different company on the same tunnel project a week after that.
Tend to agree. I'm not looking to move but for what it's worth whenever a recruiter HR messages me on LinkedIn I make it very clear that I won't consider jobs that aren't fully remote - just putting that energy out into the universe.
I've used Thunderbird for many years, but recently switched to KMail because that has proper search functionality. In KMail, I can instantly search for a keyword in all my emails from the last one and a half decade, whereas this takes several minutes in Thunderbird, and during the search the UI is unusable because the result list is incrementally populated which makes it impossible to actually click on results reliably, or even just scroll.

Other than that, Thunderbird works great. I'm just puzzled why search has not received more attention, as it seems like a pretty important feature to many people.

edit: I know about NotMuch by the way, and actually used that to search and then navigated to the result in Thunderbird afterwards by sorting by date. But that got annoying in the long run.
Well, any rational conversation about Japan has to start with the observation that cases are at an all-time high right now:

https://www.asahi.com/topics/word/%E3%82%B3%E3%83%AD%E3%83%8...

I don't think changing rates of masking can explain that change.

> Anecdotal, how do you explain the non existing flue season (last autumn ) and the low incidences in Japan? We got higher rates during the Olympic.

I haven't seen any data on flu during the olympics, so I can't comment on that. Covid cases, of course, were shooting up long before the first athletes even arrived in Japan (see above).

To answer your question, nobody knows why flu "disappeared" during the last year. My hypothesis is a combination of two things:

1) it didn't disappear, it just spread less due to to the dramatic reduction in international travel (plus maybe closure of schools).

2) we stopped testing for flu at rates necessary to detect it. Our prior surveillance system for influenza was pretty limited, and most of it switched to Covid in 2020.

In general, I think people fixate on masks far too much, because they're visible. Even in Japan, what qualifies as a mask would make Americans in the "mask compliant" cities laugh out loud. I routinely see people wearing these on Instagram and on television:

https://www.superdelivery.com/product_image/812/8/8128738_10...
And my point is that there are many things beginners should and could do that they do not know about. Yes of course, once you have the advice you need to train and not everything is actionable. But for beginners something like a build order is actionable, and if you don't know about them, inventing them by yourself is going to take a while.
This is unfortunately not the experience I have had in Australia.

I looked into a few jobs earlier in the year, and spoke with a few recruiters. Despite the initial remote-friendly job description, it ended up being full time or more, with 1 day work from home a week.

I look forward to when remote working is common, with internal processes and culture adapted to suit multiple modes of working.
Grand coalition is basically political stand still. That isn't too negative in these times though.
When my own code presents a bug I tend to chase it back to it’s “philosophical roots”.

I tried to work out edge cases from the beginning; to handle invalid data; to swat the bugs before they appeared.

A bug reared it’s little insectoid head.

Now I’m wading my way through every piece of code that remotely affects the issue and making damn sure that my perfect vision is realised.

On the other hand, fixing a bug in someone else’s code doesn’t have all these personal implications. If I fix the bug without causing regressions I’m a hero! After all, it’s not personal to me.
Still no conversation view for emails. Might have to roll up my sleeves and do it myself.