skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What you do is not terribly important, but your contacts are.

I had a really neat setup for developing API and apps really quickly 8 years ago and it didn't go anywhere. All my clients were getting that and I was able to get fixed contracts done very quickly (increasing my rate) but I never managed to build an audience and find a way to productivize it and sell it. Eventually I went out of sync with some clients who needed something else and I didn't want to pay the effort to maintain it, so I just use other off-the-shelf solutions.

The primarily driver in that change was that I got new contacts and working experience together with people earning more and I was able to charge a higher daily rate doing whatever needed to be done.
Most of the jobs don't find their way to recruiters, they're just word of mouth and they can be quite lucrative.

At the same time, even if I was making 500£ per day, I knew people making 900£-1000£ per day. Some of them were just incredibly specialised on something domain specific (there was a bit of a stereotype, the Java guy with finance experience contracting for a bank with water to their neck and charging 1000£ per day), but some of them were just your average frontend engineer who contributed to some cool sounding famous framework.

I managed to charge high amounts in some specific circumstances where my knowledge was needed, but I never managed to network with the people routinely making 1000£ per day doing your average job.

Recently I got to those numbers, but I think that happened mainly because my circle "upgraded" (aka people who trust me got into position of power with high spending power) and because of covid inflation. Money is just not worth much when there is so much of it around and assets keep growing.

Hope you find that helpful in your contractor career.

The second part of your post is about preferences. Preferences changes.

I used to enjoy city center life as well, partying in the cool places, going at tech events with famous people.
After a while going out started feeling tired, so I settled down and started a family. With a family a big city is not very attractive. I moved to a smaller city, so I don't have to drive and I pay significantly less for the same property. The events are much worse compared to city life, but all the amenities are there, walkable distance.

I'm in the process of moving to an even cheaper location, so I can buy an even bigger property and have a nice garden. There are also some tax, weather and societal considerations into that - but I'll have to start driving again. This may have felt like a big pain in the past but it's manageable right now.

If you read between the lines of the original posts, he's basically recommending to work smart so that a little of your work goes a long way economically and to live somewhere relatively cheap, so that it's easier to retain more money. It doesn't necessarily prescribe your life.
I support the basis of this study, I myself have benefitted from the practice. However, something that most overlook or simply aren't aware of is that the prolonged use of psychedelics, specifically psilocin (active psych in mushrooms) carries a cardio-toxicity[0]. Put simply, for reasons that aren't yet known, psychedelics over time will slowly erode the lining of certain heart / circulatory muscles.

0 - https://www.researchgate.net/publication/287756303_Psilocin_...
> Is it really that bad? It's plausible, but I'm skeptical.

Demean was too strong a word, I need to follow my own advice better :).

> Regardless, it is surely suboptimal. I wonder if there are more optimal approaches than "if you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all" (my Mom's advice)....can you think of any?

The three gates[0] are what I try (and admittedly fail miserably) to implement, though not in their original form.

I generally try for "Is it true", "Is it useful", "Is it kind" - in that order of precedence if they can not all be met.

[0] Is it true, is it necessary, is it kind.
Yes the model / simulation is incredibly simplified. The individuals instead should be proactive and competing each other for limited(or maybe constantly growing but still limited) resources, with varying success depending on their talent and luck.

Still the idea that they are trying to represent has it's own merits. People are not that different from each other - because we are the same species. That's how living things are - they are similar to each other because they are just copying from their parents. In that sense somebody having 10^5 times more wealth than somebody else cannot be because of some inherent difference in qualities. We all behave mostly the same, mostly reach the same conclusions and mostly the same speed and accuracy, and we all have the same amount of time. Contrary to popular belief everyone are mostly trying their best to live their lives to the fullest as well.

I want to see someone make a more sophisticated model that simulates the real world more. There are some complex factors like being "talented"/knowledgable in multiple fields that are better than being extremely gifted in one field if the goal is to maximize your wealth. A complex factor like that might happen to provide a huge boost to your chances of getting rich - but the factor has to be insane, orders of magnitudes large.
Outcomes of the study aside, it is great that despite the legality of these substances, we are seeing research beginning to bubble up into popular culture. I believe they can help a lot of people, and are so under researched!
AMA claims the real bottleneck is residency funding, since you cannot practice as a doctor without residency, and for some reason, only the federal government funds residencies, and the feds have not changed funding in many, many years.

Also, increasing class sizes is not without its down sides. Pharmacy schools cashed in and blew up the number of pharmacists in the last 10 years, and now the pharmacists’ employers have so much power in the negotiations due to so much supply of labor, that they can make pharmacists accept metrics which pharmacists know are excessive and unsafe since no one can possibly do the job properly in the time they are expected to check the medications and counsel people in.

A pharmacist family member says the law is to counsel patients, but the reality is anyone who did that would be fired and replaced so, in reality, people are not getting the counseling they deserve when they pick up the medications, and pharmacists are not able to properly double check the doctors.
This is unneccessarly snarky and disrespectful.
If post cards are also your thing you could also like Postcrossing [0]! There you will sent a post card to a stranger most likely in another country and in turn you will receive one from another person. I like the idea of combining online matching and offline letter sending.

[0] https://www.postcrossing.com/
It feels like the value of a cryptocurrency is indirectly proportional to its utility. If people are actually spending a cryptocurrency instead of holding it as a speculative investment, then the price of a coin won't go up (at least not anywhere near the rate it is now). If people want it to be used as a currency, then the price of a coin needs to stabilize but I doubt most pro-cryptocurrency people want that.
> Halfway of my Hand-entered data entry resulted in text box “reverting” back to empty.

I see. I just replicated that. If you focus the field, it resets the content. This is is to remove the placeholder text. (It's a contenteditable, so a placeholder text requires this hack, though of course you could check whether the content is really just the placeholder before removing it. The reason it's a contenteditable is to allow you to paste HTML.)

> Cut-n-paste resulted in same “back-to-empty” with no positive indication of having successfully entered in a link.

That means that dfeed either didn't find a feed or failed to parse it. Of course, it should show an error message in that case, but that's something I haven't implemented yet.

> Also, pressing return gave me a new line within the text box which is strange by itself.

That's also explained by the fact that it's a contenteditable. Paste submits automatically so hitting enter shouldn't be necessary.

> Otherwise, I marvel at the most simplistic web design since Google v0.0.4.

Thanks :-)
I did. An advantage of Toastmasters is that you start to learn to craft such phrases because they make excellent point in speeches.

A disadvantage is that you put in commas and -- for pause, not for correct grammar.
That doesn't change anything the post you're replying to said. Rational self-interest in that sense is a simplifying assumption made as part of the process of mathematically modelling economic behaviour. It's not a prescription for how a real world company like Amazon should behave.

Somebody will probably now bring up "fiduciary duty" and "shareholder value" which are almost as irrelevant.
For eBay, I just search "1u server" or a specific make/model ("dell r720") then filter down from there. Once you find a combo that works, then search by that specific model or view the seller's other listings. Many times they'll have pallets full of each type of server and may be willing to offer volume discounts.
This is ironically totally backwards.

The 20B+ / $2B/launch SLS program "innovation" is to not innovate! This is Apollo+, but heavier and in many ways worse and very expensive.

My own guess is that all in NASA / SLS cost per launch and program maint is probably on the range of $3B per launch if you look at the facilities list they have for this - which is super large.

Even weirder, NASA now says they want to be the anchor customer for 30 years of this boondoggle! Rather than just bidding out whatever heavy lift they need, they are going to get stuck with this crap for 30 years, which is a clear lock-in effort to avoid this thing getting cancelled out.
That is not a good metaphor for anything, really: no-one was enlightened; at best some reddit-grade snark was conveyed.
The history of Flash games in China
The main article begins with the heading "Flashing for Fun and No Profit".
The cosmic microwave background is 136000 times hotter, so I don’t think so, no.
A Tiny Little Drawing App
The difference is that video games have a way to enforce ownership. CS:GO skins are valuable because Valve doesn’t let you just upload your own skins.

I can download any NFT and use it as my own profile picture.
Pentagon announces new cloud initiative to replace ill-fated Jedi contract
It helps to observe how symmetrical something is, to understand how equitable it is. In this case, if you want more seats, they'll happily give them to you and charge more, so it would seem fair that they should also be happy to reduce the number of seats and charge you less or refund you. If they only accept increases and not decreases, it's not particularly equitable.
microservices is a fad, the only services we like are the ones that are rightly sized
FWIW, already picked up "The Mythical Man Month"
I’m curious if anyone actually feels like it’s real, or if it’s 99% speculation. I tend to think it’s the latter.
Even the honest ones sometimes get it wrong. No fun if your kit is in their facility and they go under. Doesn't happen too often thankfully (and to be fair could happen to a smaller VPS provider too, AWS less likely).
Most of us have been in a codebase for an issue that turns out larger or more complex than first understood. I don’t want to undergo surgery for cancer X, have the surgeon see nearby, related cancer Y and sew me back up and tell me I also have cancer Y but that he didn’t want to go over the estimate.

When asked for a choice by a medical professional (or a home improvement contractor for that matter), I will more often than not ask “if you were in my shoes, what would you do?” I don’t 100% of the time go with what they say, but I think it helps me understand their expertise and judgment better.

In the surgical case above, if the surgeon would have taken it out and given me a single recovery experience and told me about the bill when I woke up, I’m probably better off for it.
Kyle Rittenhouse found not guilty on all counts
No kidding, reading folks talking about the innovation in this program is laughable.
> What about that thing we all used 30 years ago called cash?

To steal cash, I need to know where it is AND I need to gain physical access to that location.

To steal crypto, I need to know your passcode. I can steal it from any location in the world.

The fact that cash theft requires physical presence makes it both easier to catch a thief and means you aren't dealing with international law to prosecute them (not likely they skip the country after robbing you).
Great data! I am no longer confused as to why the Binance Bridge between ETH and BSC is getting shut down…in six days.
> If an employee at the bank removes a zero, you can sue them

Only if you live in a democratic country with fair courts.
Yeah, I'm totally advocating burning books because I think it's not a great idea to get your hopes up when you send money to some random guy's Delaware company that was started yesterday.

Crypto is not QAnon (although they do share general cultish traits). I was using Q as an extreme example of another online movement that also gave hope to people hanging out in forums.
And the same would be true with a vendor who accepted Bitcoin and issued a receipt with a return policy.

Generous return policies are also a modern artifact; historically most interactions with cash took place under the terms 'all sales final'. Societies functioned decently well for thousands of years this way with similar financial instruments.
> cryptocurrency "influencers" are horrible. Follow the people developing the software instead, those are real and honest people (mostly).

Just want to /second this sentiment. There are hard problems and interesting work being done in cryptography, distributed systems, etc in the blockchain world. It's why it's attracted a number of the best universities to create dedicated research centers - MIT, Stanford, Cornell, etc.
Sandi Metz's talks, and Avdi Grimm's MOOM course.
I think pirates are winning.
You're welcome! It was a pleasure to share.

I like GraphQL because it aligns with how I think about frontend queries and data. I had spent a bunch of time with technologies like HATEOS that standardize sorta-similar REST-based approaches, but as soon as I saw GraphQL, in my mind it was immediately like: "THIS! This is it." There's just something about it for me. I can't say that that GraphQL is _important_ technologically, I'm sure I could have done it some other way, but it definitely is what has felt the most right of all other things I've tried, and I think that's really important. The front-end clients for GraphQL are also awesome. I've tried Relay and Apollo, and both are excellent. They normalize everything and provide reactive updates when something changes.

> For example, if your client makes the same dozen or so queries day-after-day, would it ever make sense to use that knowledge to write a more static API?

Hasura lets you turn GraphQL queries in REST endpoints! It's pretty amazing. But GraphQL also has this thing called "persisted queries" where instead of sending the queries every time that needs to be parsed, you send a hash for the queries, and the server already knows what the query is and has its representation stored in memory so it can satisfying it w/ the parse step. I can only hope to have to optimize like this :).

> Is computer time and space too inexpensive to worry about these things?

I don't think so... I've just been trying to ship without prematurely optimizing. It's been somewhat of a journey as it is :).
Mazda seems to be heading the right direction:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20200335
The WeeCee – Tiny Vortex86-Based DOS Gaming PC
I disagree with you on the Uyghurs but I think there should be more thinking people in politics. You should go into it.
> I would not give tech points in the category of meritocracy for that

Why? I'm not trying to argue here that tech is a meritocracy but so far as I've been able to discern it is more meritocratic than any other field offering middle class or above wages. If you disagree, I'd be super interested to hear which fields are doing a better job. If you agree, why not give credit to the industry for doing a better job at solving this very hard problem than anyone else?

> and not indicative of where most people with less-than-prestigious backgrounds end up

It's hard to tell how much this is an indictment of tech's process versus society at large. Anecdotally, I find a higher proportion of people from more prestigious backgrounds are more skilled at work. This should be unsurprising because people from those backgrounds have generally been given many advantages in life. In a former life I was an educator and was paid a lot of money to impart valuable skills to the children of rich families.

If we view meritocracy as judging workers as they are, and not accounting for what they might have been in a more equitable society, that's the outcome I'd expect from a meritorious interview process.

Again, I don't want to argue tech is some perfect meritocracy, just that I'm not aware that anyone's done better.
Yes but in that situation I'm no longer Leo DiCaprio, actor; I'm Appian Way Productions[0].

For me the missing piece (hence the question) is people doing that sales/biz-dev work and taking their cut, on behalf of people who would prefer to be independent and just do the projects, not build a consulting company.

Of course I'm assuming there are a lot of people like that, but as someone else commented, self-promotion skills and tech skills are not strongly correlated, might even be negatively correlated.

I've hired contractors who would never ever be able to be anybody's boss anywhere, but they were really good programmers. Those people aren't going to get very far by making companies, but a good agent could probably get them a lot more money.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appian_Way_Productions
> But for some reason the bridge too far is adults putting jpegs in their twitter profile pictures.

That's not the bridge too far. It's not about the JPEG, it's about the bullshit shoehorning of 'ownership' around infinitely-copyable bits put in place by a culture that seems to care more about ownership than equality.

Digital economies are a land of plenty, where nobody can own anything and bits copy themselves freely. NFTs shoehorn a scarcity economy on top of that, which suits those with no concept of the reality of the digital world. NFTs and DRM have no place in cyberspace, yet here they are.

The world is a much better place without enforcement of "ownership". NFTs and DRM go against the grain of our digital reality.

I can't find the link right now but I literally just read an article on here (not this one) explaining this far more eloquently than I can; it laments the death of open-source culture (openness, equality, egalitarianism) that underpins nearly everything digital.
This pop-up love is the stupids thing ever.

The reality - they are too lazy to just put in a bait email, watch it get sold improperly and prosecute. That's all it would take, no pop-ups needed.
The blockchain is a virtualized state - yes it executes on computers but the whole point is distributed consensus - you don't have to trust the computers, you trust the open source code being executed by the network.
For white jews, yes?
If anyone wants to read about EP in (a lot) more detail, here’s a great overview article: https://aip.scitation.org/doi/full/10.1063/5.0010134
Meanwhile pushing more scams on YouTube themselves -- I report scam ad's once a day and most of them are back online within a week.

The current ones are all targeting seniors offering "free" money from the CARES act.
Anyone have suggestions for sites in the tri-state area?

The biggest advantage to colo is crystal clear and consistent broadband. Fios fiber is as close as you'll get in an apartment or office, but in most cases "gigabit" service is around 800mbps down and a meager 40-50mbps up :( .

Also, if anyone here is looking to split a rack in NYC or within 1hr of Manhattan I'd be very interested in splitting a full rack of colo. I have some gpu hardware for a side-project I need to get out of my apt and connect to real broadband. My only requirement is 1G/1G broadband and around 1300W of power. (email: hydratedchia at gmail dot com !)
Microtransactions, but they use a million times more energy. Now we're cookin'
Austria used to have a mandatory smallpox vaccine until that proved effective enough to eradicate the disease.

Hopefully we can say the same about covid in a few years :)
Yes, it is also kind of silly to spend a lot of money on a skin in a game. But the difference is that video game companies are not claiming that their skins are revolutionizing the world.
> and you remind yourself of the sailing motto, "If the bearing does not change, a collision will occur".

It's also the anti-aircraft-missile's proportional guidance motto. (Being from a landlocked country, it doesn't surprise me that I learned about it from anti-aircraft missiles first.)
Core 2 Duos predate Intel adding any hardware decoding for JPEG. Some, but probably not all, of the rendering failures people are seeing may be due to software handing off JPEG decoding to hardware but some hardware not being able to handle the Arithmetic coding extension.

My guess is your JPEG rendering is being done by libjpeg, which has supported Arithmetic coding since 2009.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libjpeg
Charge $1 (per message) as a penalty for express "courier" delivery.
Having witnessed the terminal stages of several family members, additional days of being undead is not necessarily desirable for the patient.
Yeah, kinda like the NBA but the opposite.
via LGRs video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=USHvvSbYmJA

rasteri also did a couple of build videos:
Part 1: https://youtu.be/aJEp4ZUG7BI
Part 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2P1E2vjpcRo
Government regulation produces things like CAFE and Energy Star. They can work to some degree but the incentive to create back doors around them (I don't drive a car I drive a light truck) is enormous - doubly so because people have no commitment to the principle they try and serve because they aren't asked to have any commitment instead government tries to trick people to go along with the principle. I'm buying an energy efficient furnace that costs more then it otherwise might because those are the only furnaces available to be purchased.

It can work but only to a limited degree, if you really push the thing then it becomes more likely that people will catch on to the "trick" and elect people who will undo it. They'll do that happily because there's no commitment.
> For those of us who are "old-school" and prefer their cars without fancy digital gimmicks, which cars would you recommend?

Old cars. The problem is the lack of modern safety features which really makes me do a double take before considering them. I wish cannibalizing a new car and ripping out all of the useless electronics was common enough for there to be tutorials for some brands
Zstandard RFC 8878
Shouldn't the medical companies carry the responsibility?
"How dare people be angry about my favorite scam when other scams exist!"
Probably use software to implement pulse width modulation. I knew even 8-bit computers where people would bit-bang PWN to produce audio. Its just that storing all that data would be a major constraint in such limited computers.
I just updated my original post. A12 Bionic is my iPhone (XS).

Interesting if it's hardware assisted.
One attribute of a democratic society is what has been described as the tyranny of the majority. Like it or not, it means that if the majority is for a measure, it will happen over the heads of the minority that is against it.

Seems like this is whats happening here.