skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ahh yes, the old reality distortion field
That does sound like the right answer, posted in response to the wrong answer.
> SQLite will expand it to a double

Is that part a real problem? (The NaN thing certainly is.)

Doubles are a strict superset of floats. You don't risk losing any precision on the float to double conversion, and if you then convert the result back to float, you won't lose any precision either.
> Now here comes the clever bit. Loh points out that the numbers, R and S, add up to -B when their average is -B/2.

Is knowing to take advantage of that really any more intuitive than completing the square is?
Promoted to what though? A job with more responsibility but not really a good enough increase in pay to go along with it? No thanks.
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/27/stock-buybacks-surge-to-like...

Stock Buybacks (i.e. from corporate "investment") amongst other things.
> May as well make them more expensive, and divert some of that cash to useful purposes.

It’s very easy to wipe out an entire market by over taxing it, and lose not only the luxury tax, but also all the normal taxation. Not to mention all the black and grey market activities you incentivise.
But the "defamed person" may often end up being a politician or someone supporting the government's political aims. If the US had this law, I imagine it would make people reluctant to discuss Mike Lindell (the My Pillow guy), for example.

> "In a free society such as Australia where we value our free speech, it is only free when that is balanced with the responsibility for what you say," Mr Morrison said.

Another political leader had a similar view on human rights:

> “There is freedom of speech, but I cannot guarantee freedom after speech.” ― Idi Amin

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/9082497-there-is-freedom-of...
I was responding to the claim that a company advertising its own products meant it wasn't adware, not saying anything about whether or not iOS is.
SICP made me fall in love with programming
Heh. My local nuclear power plant was, just a few years ago, hiring programmers to maintain some of the robotics software written in PDP-11 assembly. Expected to remain in use until the 2050s when the plant is decommissioned.
Correct me if I'm wrong (seriously), but isn't a very contagious, but low-severity, variant a good thing? Wider spread, fast immunity, lower deaths, etc. than Delta continuing its march?
DocuSign does not have that source of authority exclusively. Competitors also have it.
> day dreaming to play out various scenarios like a decision tree to “workshop” how to interact with specific people

Seems like a reinvention of empathy.
> Why is Cruella a canicidal fashionista? Because otherwise Dodie Smith’s story would have been just a bunch of dogs running about.

I actually think that prequel did a pretty nice job of crafting Cruella's character. It's a lot closer to the common real-world theme of "the banality of evil" than some sort of fuzzy pop-psych story about deep trauma as seen wrt. The Joker. I'm not sure why OP felt like they needed to complain.
This is where we get into internal incentives and theory of a firm.

My first project at a FANG made something like $42M for the company its first year, about $100M in total. There were 3 engineers working on it, and it cost the company maybe $500K in total. Great return on investment, right?

Except my Director wasn't in charge of making money, his job was to increase user happiness, typically measured as the proportion of interactions that were "successful". And this project didn't do this - since it encouraged browsing behavior (poking around without a goal), it actually decreased "successful" interactions. So the project was canceled and threatened with unlaunching about 18 months in.

I was like "Well can I buy it off you? $42M might be rounding error for you, but I'd love to have a business with a $42M ARR." But ultimately this was a no-go as well, because it used company infrastructure, user data, sale relationships, etc and negotiating that contract (along with all the legal and reputational risks to the parent company) would've cost a bunch more than $42M. Ultimately he was like "Well, if it's making that much money, maybe it should be transferred over to department that's actually in charge of making money", and that's where it landed for the next few years, until $100M became rounding error in the company's annual revenue and it wasn't worth that executive's time to sponsor it.

Projects have to move the needle for the executive that sponsors them, otherwise it's not worth their attention. Zillow made about $2.7B in 2019, with 47% gross margins. If Zillow Offers was profitable but could only flip say 1000 houses/year at a profit of $50K/house, that's only $50M, basically 2% of their existing revenue. It just doesn't move the needle for the shareholders, which means it won't move the needle for the CEO, which means it's not worth his attention. They needed it to be a substantial fraction of sales in the U.S. - if it had made a profit of $100K on $3M homes/year, that's a $3B business, more than double Zillow's existing revenue, at potentially higher margins.
I do a lot of slow bike camping in Japan where the campsite will often provide firewood, but it's too large for the small solo stove I have. I've tried a saw, but what I really want is thinner wood split from the larger pieces, not lateral cuts. The axes being talked about are only about 470g, which doesn't bother me too much shoved in a pannier.
> All those problems were present in 1957 flu epidemic, the 1968/69 epidemic the 1977/79 flu epidemic

Those were all influenza A sub-types viruses which we've had experience with. The closest we've come to COVID is SARS/MERS both of which had significantly high case fatality rates (~10% for SARS, 33% for MERS), but neither of those resulted in a pandemic of the same scale. Even then, early COVID symptoms puzzled doctors and there is now mounting evidence that it isn't a pulmonary disease but a cardiovascular one so its long term effects aren't clear. At the start it wasn't even clear we'd develop a successful vaccine for COVID, whereas we've had plenty of experience with vaccines for influenza A subtypes.

> it's like they don't know that sooner or later they'd die anyway and that the secret is to live in the moment and enjoy life , stumbling on their way to the grave with a smile on their face due to the fun they had along the way.

Sure, some people need to let up a little and accept that the risk of death is inherent in life. But most people are and have been figuring out what level of risk is acceptable to them given a novel threat to them where the risk is uncertain.
The article is titled: Five Books that Changed My Career as a Software Engineer

The operative words being "My Career". The article is a subjective listing of books that the author found to be useful in their career and at the stage of their career they read them. Not an edict of what every SWE needs to read to progress in their career.

I have read 1 of the 4 books on your list (and read another partially) and haven't found them to be remotely helpful in my career progression. They may have huge impact on someone else at another stage of their career, that is the point of lists like these.
Is starlink uncensorable? India has a high number of internet shutdowns and maybe doesn't want to lose control of that.
I wonder if the guest API of virtualpc is emulatable?
> No discussion in the article about where this money came from.

The reason why there is no discussion of it is that it's a category error. Money is not used up when spent, but is immediately available to the seller who can use it again as he becomes the buyer of something else. Money is a stock. Statements about the increasing sales of ETFs are statements about flows. All of those could have "come from" a single dollar. And still the dollar would remain, standing proud, undefeated, not-used-up, and waiting to be spent on something else in yet another flow.

But wait, there's more. When the government "gives money" via covid payments, that, too, is a flow. The government merely sells a bond for cash to the bond markets, and then sends a check to a household, who deposit the cash in a bank, and the bank uses that cash to buy a bond from the bond markets, thus returning the cash to the same money markets from which the government borrowed it.

All of the 6 Trillion dollars in deficit spending could, in theory, require only a small amount of cash to support, because again the dollar is a stock and the deficit spending is a flow.

So the point of all of this is to understand that money markets can be used to generate trillions in ETF flows, or to support trillions of deficit spending, with no problem at all. Thus you should never ask where money to make an investment comes from, because it always comes from the money markets.

Instead, you should ask "are these assets fairly valued"? As long as the answer is "yes", then there will be money to buy them, completely independent of how much cash there is in the economy. Never believe anyone who says "there isn't enough money" to fund some investment. That's always cope for "I can't convince the capital markets that this investment will earn a good return".

And by the same token, never believe anyone who says "the government is injecting money into the economy in order to fund more investments", because it's impossible for the government to increase or decrease the amount of money held by the non-financial sector - at least the way our financial markets are currently structured.

All the government can do is deficit spend and adjust interest rates. Money is neither an enabler nor a constraint on any investment decision, but lowering interest rates could turn previously unprofitable investments into profitable ones, which means they will be funded once the capital markets are convinced of their profitability, and this is true whether or not any stimulus spending is provided by the government.

/rant
So what happens when people get scared again and we have another large downturn? The idea people seem to have is that the Fed will step in. Maybe buying stocks like it buys bonds? It's following the Bank of Japan playbook so that's next, I suppose.

At that point, doesn't inflation become a major concern, though?

The reason people aren't holding bonds and cash anymore is not that they are fearless or that there is no return on the money like there used to be. They're actively fearful that holding cashing or bonds is just being a chump for when the indirect money print ramps up.

There are only two ways I see this going. Rapid inflation followed by a new currency made with a real promise of backing (probably not crypto). Or a stagnation of the economy for a long time.

Maybe there is a third way. I'd love a different perspective because both of these sound pretty painful.
It's great that exists (I have long legs), but an extension for...legroom? Why is something that important treated as esoteric and not a native search feature or setting?
An opinion article in the New York Times about how people in California are/should be moving to Texas. With no mention in the text about NYC or NY State. Might be a fine article, but not the first source I’d choose for an insightful discussion about this topic.

Re HN discussion, Austin << TX. Many Texans who know both States would posit Austin is to TX what Berkeley is to CA. Take that for what it’s worth.
It boggles my mind that this is being presented by the author as if it were a legitimately good idea and not another step on our collective descent into a dystopian hellscape.
In Chromium based browsers the quickest method I've found is "right click -> Inspect" the image then click the sources tab in the dev tools window. From here you can drag or save the image shown without issue. My guess as to why this works is the sources view seems to pull from the loaded content of the page rather than fetch the content based on the lack of packets trying this with a packet capture running.
Free speech has won another victory at Cambridge
I think I wasn't clear enough that I was referring to the nest camera the parent was talking about.
I did. And it is. There is no such book out there that covers breadth and sufficient depth at the expense of minor pedantry (that you're alluding to) without losing much meaning. For most engineers, being familiar with pros and cons of technology is far more important than nuances of terminology. They can and should investigate each topic more deeply when time comes.

I repeat with emphasis: It is exceptional in every way possible. Improvements that you suggest should be addressed if it doesn't take away from the breadth + detail and only make it more clear.
That's true. I've started coming around to that and thinking it's a lot like the art business, especially if you look at an artist like Andy Warhol who stamped out his works on something akin to an assembly line and left an estate estimated to worth $220 million. Art is worth what someone is willing to pay for it. I guess NFTs are the latest manifestation of that world. Perhaps some like the margins of the art world and want to extend it with more features.

Edit: I get my knowledge of Andy Warhol from these three documentaries, which have some conflicting information but paint a picture of a man who wanted to make a lot of money.

Andy Warhol - The Complete Picture
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KnhqRiJ4KH8

The Life of Andy Warhol
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDIdjvezp2U

Andy Warhol Documentary Film
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQXpqQO4vaE

The art business is a game for rich people. I don't think I'll bother with because I can't compete at that level due to lack of funds.
> Being an engineer is just that - an engineer. It's different from being a leader.

I disagree. In fact, the third or fourth stage of your promotion will often be a leadership position (junior, senior, principal/tech lead). If you're okay with being a "senior engineer" until you're 45, you're going to be in for a rough time when you get inevitably laid off.
I received some ZIP files from macOS users which contain a directory called __MACOSX .
Ask HN: Best current options for an FAQ site?
I'm creating a new Q&A site, and wondering what the current good platforms would be. I could code this from scratch, but holy cow I'd really prefer not to. :-)

My use case: I'm a domain expert for the content, and also a senior dev. I'm comfortable with most programming languages and tools.

Is Discourse a good choice? I don't necessarily need the forum, although its forum support is fantastic. Does it have good support (maybe with an extension) for FAQs?

The Ghost Blogging platform also looks like very high quality, but on the downside it's not really a collaborative platform out of the box.

How about static site generators? Jekyll or something else? If the Q&A is GitHub based, then that'd work, but it wouldn't be very accessible to non-techie people.

Anything else I should consider? I'm ok with for-pay in addition to hosting my own.
Right click copy is faster.
Exactly, why are you chasing promotions? Isn't it ok to be happy with where you are and have satisfaction? My title is Sr Software Engineer. My boss keeps bringing up in our 1 on 1s about what we should do to carve out a path for a promotion to "Principal Engineer" but I don't care. The small amount of pay bump is just not worth the added responsibility (not to mention the hoops they make you jump for the promotion).
Math is not an easy subject by any means. I see the same thing when people give programming tutorials and call it “easy” and “simple”. However, once the student starts to encounter difficulties with the subject later down the road, they feel stupid and lied to, since they were promised by their teacher that what they were learning was “easy”.

I agree that depending on the implementation, a subject can feel easy, but let’s not pretend that there are no difficulties in learning and teaching these concepts, and that it continues to feel “easy” later down the road.
Ive been using 4 for a while now and its awesome. Still getting used to all the syntax changes. Got my material maker and unionbytes painter flows setup (both godot based tools) so suddenly my blank spaces are coming to life w textures. I love reading the change log (recompile often) and feel like I might actually be learning about cpp because of it.
This kind of utilities are language specific. I am interested in this as it is not something I would abstract out as a reusable library in many cases.
I love my Merkur safety razor. The gap between blade and the blade holder is great.
I've always felt that this is the kind of service that a government should offer. It seems a little silly to have to pay a private entity for this kind of service and also a bit unreasonable that a private entity like Docusign is so enmeshed with the legal system.
The US eSign Act is a good read. Its only 3 pages, but gives an idea of what is required for compliance in the US.

The top solutions in this market must know the sSign compliance rules in many countries, and industry-specific compliance within each country.

Long-tail eSign solutions that are able to focus on a specific industry, country, or niche are more likely to charge per transaction, or a low subscription fee.

So for your lease agreement use case, the Lenders/Landlords likely have several SaaS options at their disposal for one-off transactions.

https://www.fdic.gov/resources/supervision-and-examinations/...
Most mainstream things are like this now.
That's very kind but it seems like consent is a ship that has already sailed in this case.
I’ve also used HelloSign for lease agreements and the like, and it has been totally fine. It does not seem to have timestamps more granular than date (e.g. no hour/minute), but that seems unlikely to be actually necessary.
I find Outliers' chapter on Chinese people and rice field preposterous. It was like reading astrology: The entire Chinese people have grit, and their grit came from growing rice because it was such a laborious job. Really? Really? Really? Did the author even know that for thousands of years, it was the Northern China that dominated the history, and Northern Chinese largely grew wheat? And the book said Chinese were good at math because Chinese digits are short to pronounce. I'm sure Apollonius of Perga, Newton, Euler, Gauss, Hibert, Poincare, and countless others are rolling in their graves. Besides that fact that arithmetic is tiny part of maths, China produced good students in the past decades because Chinese invested in modern education, believed that a nation needed to have many great scientists and engineers, and relentlessly pushed students to learn more maths and science. The Qing Dynasty was a laugh stock in front of the rest of the modern world. The entire nation of China felt the pain and humiliation for not catching up with modern civilization.

They will fuck anyone over for telling them they must lower their standards for the crap like being inclusive or no kids left behind, as if everyone can learn advanced maths. They's how they got better at maths. That's how they produce good students: they believe everyone's potential, and push students as hard as necessary. They still have catch-up to do, but they are getting closer everyday.
I hadn't heard about the site, so I looked it up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UnHerd

It's paid for out of the pockets of a hedge fund billionaire who used to support the Liberal Democrat party in the UK, but who has since become a major Conservative donor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Marshall_(investor)

He's also a major funder of the recently launched UK News, whose biggest draw appears to be far-right politician Nigel Farage: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GB_News
Yep, I write scripts to clean up zip files because the default behavior is so bad for cross-platform.
Yes, it’s almost as if the author suddenly noticed that grownups have learned that one-dimensional villains aren’t very interesting or realistic. Why this needs to be “blamed” on anything is beyond me. We might as well try to assign blame to the person who decided stories should be more interesting than watching the nth iteration of a good guy just barely saving a damsel that’s tied to the railroad track.
> as a run-of-the-mill engineer, you quite literally have no say in what the work/office culture of your employer is.

Who hurt you?

My experience has been quite the opposite. Creating a great work culture is well within the ability of even new engineers. I would probably suggest the opposite of you, in fact, and suggest that, between engineers and the VP/C-Suite level, mid or senior level engineers probably have the most sway over company culture. As an engineer, you have time, inclination, and ability. VPs don't have the time, CEOs don't have the inclination, and, frankly, no one but the boots on the ground have the ability.
Dana Gioia – “Why Beauty Matters” (2020) [video]
Sounds like click-bait fake news.

Are these dollar amounts adjusted for inflation? As a percentage of disposable income? Etc.
Then you do not know what a genocide is.
This is all true, but even that small amount of friction can be a nuisance, especially if the signer is not particularly technically savvy. I use HelloSign’s free tier and am happy to not have to explain to the leasee how to annotate a PDF.
> "In a free society such as Australia where we value our free speech, it is only free when that is balanced with the responsibility for what you say," Mr Morrison said.

Just leaving this here for the record, Australia does NOT have the concept of "free speech" that Americans are familiar with codified into the legal system.

https://www.ag.gov.au/rights-and-protections/human-rights-an...

https://www.findlaw.com.au/articles/4529/do-we-have-the-righ...
I recently wrote my first Android (and iOS) app, and decided on React Native. I just wanted to make something quickly, cross platform, and easy to understand -- React Native fit the bill.

No affiliation, but Expo made it very easy and FAST to get up and running for testing and building. Highly recommend it.
Team Lens – Provides 300k users with free (limited) dev cluster
The government can barely keep a port open or bomb a proper target, and we want to give them control over what is true and what isn't?
In 2005. We used Python to extract video info from websites, preprocessed the data for a video search app.
Have you considered trying books filled with structured exercises?

I worked through The Little Lisper when I was at university and I got a lot out of it, for example.
Can anyone guess what exactly the hackers want with a particular person's IG? Why don't they just auto/synthetically generate a fake face if they just want to sell or scam something? Is it to exploit the person's friend network?
The “rubber ducky” explanation isn’t bad because it tries to explain a character, but because it’s a bad explanation.
>is a shame it has to come laden with bogus rationalisations via the occult or pop-quantum physics

I'm guessing those help them though. The more you believe in it the better it works so having plausible (to laymen) explanations and talking as if the characters are real people improves the experience.
Parts of the US government will reject this and other types of electronic signatures including stylus/apple pencil type devices. The regulations explicitly mention 'wet-ink', and even when they allow copies, they have to be copies of wet-ink (i.e., scan of an actually signed doc). There are a lot of ass-backwards policies even in the west, and I can assure you that it's much worse in the rest of the world. So you really need to know where the document is going.