skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Throwaway for obvious reasons.

I became a convicted felon a hair after my 18th birthday, for a trespassing charge I received while out-of-my-mind high on drugs.

Long story short, by the time I started highschool, I was experimenting with drugs and skipping school. I was in and out of youth prison for drug-related stuff, and never finished highschool. My life spiraled out of control, in full-blown drug addiction, until I finally landed a year in jail and this felony charge right when I turned 18.

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<Begin relevant part>

When I got out, I got my start in a program similar to this, a software apprenticeship program for "at-risk" youth. It wasn't targeted towards formerly-incarcerated (in fact I think I was the only one they ever had) but I was completely transparent about my situation and past.

I had been doing code stuff for fun, through video game scripting (Lua, some Visual Basic) ever since I was a child and it really paid off.

Today, I have a career in a semi-well-known upstart tech company and live a life I never could have dreamed. But it could come crashing down at any moment. I'm still on felony probation almost a decade later for something I did when I was 18, due to massive debt I have to pay off.

It makes it nearly impossible for me or my wife to find housing, since felons aren't a protected class (IE, you can legally discriminate against us, unlike people with disabilities or on the basis of race).

By no exaggeration, I went through nearly a dozen interview processes while my wife I were working minimum-wage manual labor jobs on the brink of homelessness, to be given an offer letter and then rescinded due to HR blanket "no-felons" policies. "We're so sorry. We would be happy to recommend you to anyone else, though." It became a running joke. I'd do multiple interview rounds which all went well, have a good sense I'd get an offer, and feel nothing from it because I knew I'd have it yanked out from under me on a technicality.

Even today, I live in constant terror that my current employer or coworkers would find out. It's been ~10 years for christ's sake, I've never done anything else in my life. I can't express to you all how absolutely fucked it is to go to prison and become a convicted felon.

Actions speak louder than words, but I'm saving up enough to quit my job and try to secure state funding to back into prisons and teach development + give other people a reason to wake up every morning.

It's really hard not to neck yourself when you're staring at doing multiple years/decades in one of our country's fine estates.
Could the global Covid death toll be millions higher than thought?
I used to think like this and ran Linux on Macbooks.

I have to say that overall, nowadays, the environment doesn't affect me much, most of the time is spent inside a text editor and the rest is inside a browser.
The widespread use of docker removed the need for most package management (the worst thing about Windows and Mac).
I use nix-darwin to manage most dependencies on Mac which is okay, albeit not a great experience (nowhere close to nixos on Linux).

I'd rather use Linux + sway when given the choice but I can, stoically, make work with pretty much anything.
Pretty much all of AWS and Amazon runs on Dynamodb.

Google has Firestore as one of their approved databases for internal use.

Those are ones I have first hand experience with.

I know from friends that Microsoft runs things on Cosmos.

Netflix is pretty invested in Cassandra.
That's just flat out wrong. The majority of SS personnel ( outside of the Waffen-SS) were volunteers.

Furthermore, even draftees often had at least some choice, and could ask for a reassignment.
Not for me -- I see "Rust is a multiplayer-only survival video game developed by Facepunch Studios."
We could design human flight like that, what are we waiting for? Literally self-powered flight; human pedals, the A.I. directs the flap mechanism.
Now that I think about it, the worst code seem to lead to situations where the top developers can really show their value.

I mean if the code base is quite good and is kept that way, then a normal developer can deal with it quite well.
But if you get a legacy mess, then the hard-core developer can make really drastic changes that have enormous value to the maintainability, future development and bug-wise.

If a normal developer tries to tackle that mess, it's easy to get into trouble and drown in the sea of opportunities and not see the big picture and take a proper road plan to improve things.

So in a way -1 developers enable the top developers to show the gap between them and the normal devs.
Not for me -- even in private mode, not totally sure if that makes a huge difference. I get the Rust survival game.
Legally, I think yes? You can definitely run macOS under ESXi when it is installed on a real Mac, so I can't imagine the difference between a type 1 and type 2 hypervisor making a difference.
> Facebook is an abomination which ate up the entire Web in some 3rd-world countries.

That's because they actually paid carriers to provide Facebook access for free to people. See Facebook Zero and Internet.org. The latter is particularly insidious because it looks like a charity offering internet access to those who can't afford it. It is not the whole internet, but there is a list of mostly educational websites, like Wikipedia, but in the middle of that list, there is of course Facebook. So really, they are offering Facebook access under then name "internet".
In a world of garbage electronics they’re actually a name I trust on some level. They build pretty decent stuf- with stupid caveats.

My Galaxy Buds Plus are pretty good and have unparalleled battery life - but you can’t use the companion app on Android because it won’t work unless you give it access to your contacts.

My Samsung TV is quite snappy and, besides my model being a special edition that doesn’t come with Bluetooth and them not specifying it anywhere, it’s actually pretty alright. Cold-boots quickly, has a snappy UI, theoretically comes with all the smart features you want ... but it’s full of ads the moment you enable internet access, plus you know the spying allegations. I guess I’ll still have to figure out proper firewall rules.

I’m going to guess that their other appliances are similar. Pretty good hardware, pretty good software underpinnings, just severely held back by some anti-consumer software decisions.
What do I do with this, though?

I think I get what it means but how do I act on it?
Wow ... I'm realizing what a completely unremarkable education and career I have. I've been a CTO twice but perhaps this shows what it would take to be a deputy CEO.
Fundamentally ethical and reliable? Wow. It says a lot that Fox and OAN are your basis of comparison.

Search CNN.com for Donziger and see how many results you get. I'll save you the effort; it's ZERO.

Here's a CNN page full of facts on the kids in border camps - https://edition.cnn.com/interactive/2021/04/politics/biden-a...

People will read that, and think to themselves, oh what an even handed tone. What a large number of facts, and nice graphic breakdowns. But the crucial context is missing - who is running those camps, and what are their contracts like? Those people are making money hand over fist, on the back of the misery of children in tin-foil blankets drinking water out of toilets.

Same with their "fast facts" section on Assange - an exercise in misinformation. The information might be "factual", but it's carefully selected to give a particular impression. Crucial information isn't there, such as the US' key witness admitting he gave false evidence, or Nils Melzer's observations.

Yes, a search for Nils Melzer yields TWO articles - compare to a search for 'Kardashian', which yields 1,700 hits. There are more stories about the Kardashian's shoe line than the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture.

A search for 'Chomsky' yields 7 result; none seem to be about him or his observations. Yes, SEVEN, the single digit number. 'Zizek' yields ONE (and 'Žižek 'yields zero).

'Snooki' yields 116.

That's not News bud; not any more than Fox. That's entertainment. If you want to learn about a fire in California there are hundreds of ways to do it, and they're probably mostly better than CNN.
21. is that management cannot, will not, and will never understand why open plan offices are the worst for reducing productivity. You don't want the plebs to also have their own offices.
It doesn't make any sense for a pizzeria to concern themselves with buying a domain, creating a website; finding a hosting; advertising the website; and maintaining it. The point of FB is being easy to set up, and much more importantly, getting the traffic. Ask yourself, how hard is it to cook, yet how often people are eating out? (pandemic constraint excluded)

A contractor of mine gets most of his business via his FB page, and he knows absolutely nothing about coding. He complains a lot about labor shortage. Imagine he'd have to worry about finding a web developer as well.
Yes, but some people generalize their experiences much much better and therefore can master domains and adjacent things to a degree others will never reach.
Its 2021 and one should be able to deploy websites in one click from their mobile phones.
Is this meant to be "code is for the reader, not the compiler", or "people are the ultimate end users of your software"?
I’m not sure I understand the question. I have pretty nasty ADHD and do not struggle to shut off from work.

I’m not working for free so when I hit 35 hours I stop paying attention to it.
Agree. This is one hill I would choose to die on, data is so much more important and valuable than code.

Database design - normal form, relations, etc - was a major part of my education. Surely that's not unusual?
VCs and preying on the weakest of our society with miserable wages and horrible work conditions for the benefit of a few tech bros and bourgeois, name a more iconic duo.

You can wait a full day for your groceries to be delivered. There is absolutely nothing that justifies full on immediate groceries delivery. As for the other comment that goes "your kid just took a dump", you do what we've always done: clean up your kid and take them to the shop.
Read from other posts that a win10 ameliorated unofficial build exist.

Seems functional and depends on how much you trust the guys behind it. (or compile your own)

https://ameliorated.info/

Another option is to buy a ltsc win10 license (if you can find it cheap online)
> Vaccination isn’t long-term exposure but a brief immune trigger — this is very different from medication being taken over a long term

What could be the risks of taking booster shots every 6 months?
> I assume that my CPU works

This is not a blind assumption that you make, but one based on lots of evidence (for example you are aware of the testing procedures and QA processes of the CPU manufacture, and you are aware that millions of people and companies use the same CPU model as you and if there were bugs they would have detected them).

If you were to buy some CPU that someone shady made themselves in their basement, them you would probably not make the assumption that the CPU works.

A lot of times programmers make assumptions without properly verifying that the assumption is true, and that is when problems happen. for example, when working with a library function, the programmer might test that it works with certain types of inputs and then just assume that it also works with other types, without actually checking the documentation or verifying
Microsoft had to make fundamental changes to stop its slide into irrelevance, and the old corporate culture is still trying to reassert itself. There's a battle of cultures happening and it might turn out New Microsoft was a last gasp.
I wonder if this is really more of an easy way to downsize their workforce without having to deal with severance. They did it once before with their "back to the lab" initiative, where remote employees were terminated if they didn't return to a physical office.
May 11, 2019 - https://trade.kraken.com/charts/KRAKEN:USDT-USD

Took me all of 10 seconds to find this.
Xkit (YC S18) Is Hiring a Senior UX Engineer
As a parent of a kid almost out of nappies, I cannot imagine ever getting to the point where we run out them. Not having the preferred brand stocked and having to make do with a supermarket brand? Sure. Running out altogether? That's like running out of toilet paper: you just don't let it happen.
Understanding SWAV:self-supervised learning with contrasting cluster assignments
Following are the four common challenges of regression testing
Building a Startup with Rust
Liberty Will Win If Dierdre McCloskey Wins the Nobel Prize
Video games are an active form of entertainment, while movies are passive. There is a spectrum from forms of entertainment requiring a great deal of active involvement and attention to purely passive entertainment: playing physical sports, board games, competitive video gaming and stuff like day trading, single player video gaming, casually dancing, watching sports with some friends (heightened attention due to emotional involvement), reading a book, watching a movie or a play, listening to a podcast (roughly ranked by how actively involved you need to be to participate).

Activities at roughly the same level of required attention can to some degree replace each other (like how watching a play went from an everyday activity to a niche after movies appeared) but I think we have seen throughout the past century and a half that this doesn't happen when the activities require different levels of attention. The day only has 24 hours, of course, so when a new popular activity appears it may steal some attention from existing popular activites, but I think humans will continue to participate in activities at all the different levels of required attention.

Just like good books continue to be written every year despite not being as culturally dominant as they were in the 19th century and before, good stories will continue to be expressed through the medium if film in the future. It's common to say that video games and movies are suited for different types of stories and while that's true to some degree, I think it's simpler to say that people will continue to make good movies because there will still be an interest in that kind of passive entertainment.

As a side note: I use movies as a shorthand, but I might as well have said movies/TV. As ekianjo said below (above?) "movies are not at the forefront of anything for a long time already" -- not sure I'd fully agree with that, but a lot of attention and storytelling talent has moved to TV because the two mediums have been on a path of convergence in the past 20 years. As TV and movies are roughly the same from the perspective of required attention, it might be that TV comes to dominate and feature-length movies dwindle to a niche scene. Similarly, the popularity of sports and e-sports (one or both) could be threatened if a hybrid (like one of those sci-fi American football 1000 years into the future concepts) appeared.
Yeah, imagine the holocaust with these drones, or any of the surveillance tech we have these days.

If a G7 state were to change in that way again, they would almost certainly achieve their eradication goals
The US has never defaulted on its debt – except the four times it did
> This waters down case rates in the unvaccinated group and ends up lowering the vaccine efficacy estimates.

Okay. Let's be clear on something.

Telling the truth is never a downside.

It is not a negative that the U.S. doesn't pretend that immunity due to prior infection is due to the vaccine. Suggesting that these cases should be counted in favor of vaccine efficacy is brazenly dishonest.

This article is flamebait.
Hmm the population of El Salvador is a bit over 6.5 million, which would mean an average of 1 transaction per 100 seconds per person. That seems unlikely.
It's an idea well worth looking at as it eliminates the need for long distance flights. The only issues I am concerned with is air supply in case trains break down in the middle of nowhere.

With an extensive network it'd be nice to be in New Zealand within four hours from the UK
You also have many animals in the woods that will show up on thermal camera. It's a different level of scale, sending humans with thermal cameras, walking slowly and identifying if someone is human or animal versus dozen drones doing the same things autonomously and much faster than human.
crypto is absolute trash. stop wasting our time and get real
> someone will pull some comparison out of the analogy and use that to detract

> to great popular success

This is an HN audience issue, not an analogy one.
Nobel put the same clause in for all the prizes, but in all other categories, this clause was ignored even for the very first Nobel prize in each category: They've been mostly consistent in awarding them as recognition of life works, at most for topics that have been recognized in their field for longer, but were of recent public interest and thus could fall within the 12 months clause based on reporting on such older works that stood the test of time.

The peace prize is the only one that regularly ignores this informal guideline and goes for what must be assumed to be cheap publicity grabs.
Well, I don't know, obviously.

It's not just easy to make money right now, it's been like that for over a decade. Crypto in general is still growing exponentially (in usage and holders) at a rate faster than the rise of Facebook and the internet.

It's being mainstreamed, Wallstreet discovered it, the first nation has implemented it, VCs are massively investing, the first batch of musicians/artists are embracing it and Twitter is about to integrate both Bitcoin and NFTs.

There's plenty of very serious signs for further growth. It's still early in a way.

But I could be wrong, but that doesn't invalidate the point. Sizable downside risk, far larger upside potential. If you want something risk-free, just stay out.

Note that earning 400% is not only achieved by buying low and selling high. You can drastically speed up earnings using derivatives and leverage. Which is also the fastest way to lose it all, so don't. It's for the pros.
Rust vs. C++: Which Technology Should You Choose?
> they only give out trophies for feats accomplished years ago

And yet, that's how all the other Nobel prizes work, not just in the "hard sciences", but also literature. Why is the peace prize the only exception?
Information Overload and a few tips on how to deal with it
No no no, the second letter functions like a power button. i means on, and o means off. "Song" means the vocals are off.
The customers get to make the choice, not the merchants. You can offer a 5% discount for purchases in your favorite stablecoin, but outside of a few specific niches, most customers will actually prefer CC payments instead of the discount.
Thanks for sharing the link, best thing I have seen on effective writing, ever.
Yes, visual feedback reduces the chance of errors with mode switching. I believe (correct me if I'm wrong) it's one of the improvements vim has on old vi. Unlimited undo is another one vi certainly didn't have from the start.

I did say the stakes are much lower. But shouldn't we make less critical interfaces with the same care we make more critical ones?

And yes, many things we still have in UIs are arguably mode switching and bad, it's just we haven't figured out better ways to deal with it. With editing we did, long ago.
I wonder if this is all part of the game China and the US are playing. US gives AUKUS nuclear sub tech, China bops one of our most advanced nuclear sub classes...
For UK readers:

USAians use the term "cider" to refer to what UKians call "apple juice". What we refer to as "cider", they refer to as "hard cider".

I have no idea what term USAians would use for spirits distilled from apple liquor, e.g. Calvados; or fortified cider, such as apfelkorn. I would be interested to learn.

I've never seen apfelkorn for sale in the UK, and Calvados is only available from specialist merchants. I don't know why UK apple producers don't make these strong apple drinks; it's not as if we don't grow enough apples here.

@schoen: Um yes, it's the "lasers" bit that dragged me to the article; that was clickbait. It's just about making fermented apple-juice at home. Which is not that hard; it will ferment all on it's own, you don't need to add yeast or anything. Cider is the natural end-state for apples.

There was a young lady from Clyde
Who ate a bad apple, and died.
The apple fermented
Inside the lamented
And made cider inside her inside.
its been the case for at least the past 5 years. the last thing people ever talked about in movies was avatar 10 years ago.
“The Palestinians” are not even a unified polity:

"""officially governed by the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and claiming the West Bank and Gaza Strip with Jerusalem as the designated capital; in practice, however, only partial administrative control is held over the 167 "islands" in the West Bank, and Gaza is ruled by a rival government (Hamas). The entirety of territory claimed by the State of Palestine has been occupied since 1948, first by Egypt (Gaza Strip) and Jordan (West Bank) and then by Israel after the Six-Day War in 1967.""" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_of_Palestine

I don’t know how much I don’t know about the conflict; about who (if anyone) is using Palestine as a proxy to attack Israel without the risk of direct retaliation; about the proportionality or otherwise of IDF responses; about the legality or otherwise under international law of any given village or town in Palestinian territory created and occupied by what are called “Israeli settlers” in some newspapers, nor even do I know if those settlers are or are not officially endorsed by the government of Israel. Everything I learn about this, at every level of detail, has been a surprise to me, literally everything, starting with “antisemitism wasn’t eliminated with the death of Hitler”.

Yet: treating “the Palestinians” as a unified bloc like “the Taliban” or “the USA” seems unhelpful in this case.
USPS should expand into other services like Registered Agents, corporate bank accounts, etc.
The 10x programmer is a silly myth. The idea that someone can produce in 1 day what another competent, hard working, similarly experienced programmer can produce in 2 weeks is silly.

You know, 10x is an optimistic number here. Some programmers will do in 1 day what you wont achieve in a life time. And not understanding that makes you a bad programmer by my book simply because this is the foundation of the job.

So let me give one advice: you are not producing code, you are engineering code. Some will find solutions that the others will not find. Thats where the 10x programmer thing come from. The guy who wrote bittorrent said something like the following: "I've written bittorrent in a way you would never have thought about".

You think John Carmack was the only one trying to make 3d games when Doom came out? Thousands of programmers where trying to. Does that make him a 10x programmer in your opinion? Or more like a 1000x?
In 1939, when Shannon had been working on his equations for some time, he happened to visit the mathematician John von Neumann. During their discussions, regarding what Shannon should call the "measure of uncertainty" or attenuation in phone-line signals with reference to his new information theory, according to one source:[10]

> My greatest concern was what to call it. I thought of calling it ‘information’, but the word was overly used, so I decided to call it ‘uncertainty’. When I discussed it with John von Neumann, he had a better idea: ‘You should call it entropy, for two reasons: In the first place your uncertainty function has been used in statistical mechanics under that name, so it already has a name. In the second place, and more important, nobody knows what entropy really is, so in a debate you will always have the advantage.

[10]: M. Tribus, E.C. McIrvine, "Energy and information", Scientific American, 224
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_entropy
CargoMetrics Cracks the Code on Shipping Data (2016)