skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Agreed with ksec that this article is much better than the original submission—thanks! But the article says that the plan is to reduce payments to those who contribute to the grid, not to charge contributors. Are these conflicting reports, or just different spins of the same underlying facts?
Ask HN: How do generalists find a service/skill to focus on?
After reading both Range and Outliers there‘s one worry that has stayed with me.

I would like to start my sidehustle and start off with a blog, but whenever I pick out an area, I get an uncomfortable feeling.

Mainly because I have the feeling that only one area will bore me and that all other skills would remain unused.

I know that as a founder you need to master many things and I would love to develop software, but I can't code.

Whenever I think of a business that I could start, e.g. ecommerce or marketing service, I feel like I'm at a disadvantage because there are hundreds of thousands of competitors who do it successfully as specialists.

How do I deal with the worry if I want to focus on one subject area as a generalist, 1. leave other skills unused and 2. probably never become as good and ambitious as a specialist?

Have you guys ever dealt with this question and/or have any tips on this dilemma?
Yeah, framework-ification of this process has been the real differentiator in the last 5 years that has taken lambda from being obtuse and glitchy to work with to quite a joy if you just lean on your framework.

All of that said, I vastly prefer google cloud functions personally and would switch to that in a heartbeat if they had capabilities like API gateway but it's not there yet.

I also regret that there isn't a better cross-cloud solution currently, but that's something I have a lot of open source ambitions about creating soon. I don't like serverless that much so stay tuned for something from me in the coming years, probably in Rust.
I think Rails is great, work in it full-time, and would by default choose it for any web app I built, without some compelling reason to choose something else. But the points in that post are at least mostly true.

Ruby certainly isn't the fastest language around. I've found it fast enough for most purposes though. I don't think there's a real noticeable difference from other interpreted languages for most applications.

Our teams don't find it complex at all to build or host or set up dev environments for. No more so than other languages at least. I do recommend using CLI debuggers like byebug instead of VS Code or Rubymine, their GUI debuggers always seem to be a PITA to set up and keep running. CLI is definitely the preferred environment in Rails land.

I'd describe Rails as highly opinionated. It's baked-in opinions about most things are mostly high-quality, though not perfect for everything. If you go along with it, you can get a lot of stuff done fast. If you're determined to do things some other way, you may have a rough time. IMO, if you just want to get a webapp going and don't want to think too much about architecture, it's better to just do things the Rails way. There's decent options to refactor later if needed.

Ruby is an extremely dynamic and flexible language. This is both good and bad. Good in that you can do whatever crazy thing you end up needing to do in it. Bad in that if you end up with a codebase with 20 crazy things done, it can get awful hard to figure out what the heck your code is doing, where functions are defined, etc. There's a ton of Gems around that add various helpful features to Rails. My impression is the ecosystem has gotten much better in the last 5-10 years as far as popular mainstream Gems not doing crazy things with Ruby that make apps a huge pain to debug, but YMMV.

I do think ActiveRecord is the best ORM out there. It is also highly opinionated though - it's gonna be messy if you don't name your tables and columns in the patterns that it likes. It does mostly give you clear and efficient SQL for most situations, and make it straightforward to drop down to raw SQL when it's needed.

The lack of type-checking does mean that you'll want to write a lot of specs and run them often, since it's the only way to ensure your app keeps working. I used to kind of poo-poo thorough testing, but I've been bitten by really simple bugs making it through code review and initial deployment too many times.
CDC panel votes to recommend mRNA Covid-19 vaccines over J&J's
Good suggestion and question. Another challenge for bring-your-own-ONT is making a clean fiber connection without expensive tools, but I would imagine that's also solvable.
never needed min/max ?
Seasoned expert here. I think your reasoning is just wishfull thinking.

What if the seasonal expert is the 5 minutes work person, and the juniors the 5 hour work people (yeah, I said 4 hours because I don't believe any developer can output 6+ hours per day consistently)

On the other hand, as a seasoned expert, I sometimes solve an issue in 5 minutes which took a junior a day to still not figure it out.
In lieu of an economic system that redistributes gains in productivity, arguable anyone involved in automation SHOULD be "working" less and less. If your job duties are fulfilled by a weekly bash script , and you were hired to perform those duties weekly, i dont see why you shouldnt be paid for delivering the work and reap the reward of spending that time on personal projects / charity / hobbies

Also like others said passive processing - chewing on an issue for 4 days and having the breakthrough in 20 minutes - if you only were paid for the 20 minutes it would be completely unsustainable, you would constantly grind and not recieve the rewards for that exponential (and humanly impossible) rise in productivity
It's more about easiness of doing it in the moment when you need help or to demonstrate something. It's especially helpful for less advanced users.

Can't comment on Tabby as we never contact them directly or in-directly. The same about the font, our company name is Termius :-)
> Well, they said they don’t do anything some days and bullshit their way to the next standup. It is clear to me where they stand at.

But it's the agile standups that force the bullshitting. If you spent a day background thinking of best ways to achieve the goal while resting in your backyard hammock, there's no way you can say that out loud at the standup. So you're forced to come up with some random bullshit to fill your standup minutes.

That's why daily status reports are so incredibly toxic in any creative or intellectual field. Progress doesn't happen in neat daily chunks like that.
I'm hoping to follow after your example.... at some point. Really want to do something with my time that feels worth it. But the difficulty of starting over is this intimidating mountain that I look out my window at each day, behind a forest with no visible path. I wonder when I'll finally get fed up enough to strap on some boots and head out into the wilderness.
Yes generics / templates are mostly useful for general libraries. But if you afraid of programmers doing stupid things just for the fuck of it it is better not to hire such programmers, warn them if they're juniors or just hit them with the bat on code review.
With Dan Ammann leaving, Kyle Vogt will take over as interim CEO.

Kyle was removed from the CEO position at Cruise in late 2018 after failing to make adequate progress toward various technical milestones.

In contrast, Dan Ammann was an effective leader. He will be missed.

A sad day for Cruise and its parent company, GM.
The empathy gap, or why good-seeming ideas fail
Hi HN peeps, I did a write-up on the major lessons I learned doing ML research at Google and PathAI, including my time working with Samy Bengio and Ian Goodfellow.

The main questions I'm curious to answer are (1) why do so many good-seeming ideas fail? and (2) what should we do about it? So I'm curious to know y'alls answers on those questions too.
I think rails should have explained a bit more about what rails does... every single rails method call like has_one or belongs_to inside a controller is just a method call that sets up a few methods based on the name of the thing you pass into it. not that much magic there. it's just ruby. in fact the single best thing to know that they are not some spooky things to be feared but they are just simple method calls outside the scope of a method.

class Foo; puts "foo.rb was parsed"; end

is a simple example of nothing is really special.
I worked at Intel for 20+ years and I felt like I was worked into the ground until I had to quit from exhaustion. I was promoted constantly for the first 15 years, I always had more work than I could finish, and most of my work was a rush to meet a deadline.

No, I never lied. It was exhausting.
Max limit is 15 minutes now.

I agree streaming needs work, but if I had to deal with that I'd probably just use naked endpoints.
As mentioned in the FAQ, Apple Watch support is in beta. The reason is that the watch seems stubborn as to not wanting to sent frequent battery info to the Mac.
thank you for the feedback.
> You correctly observe that the PRNG has finite state, but its state isn't so tiny that it only emits a handful of the 256 possible bytes before getting back to where it started, nobody would use such a busted algorithm.

If the PRNG always loops through all possible states, then sure. But if there's a possibility, however small, of it getting stuck in a small loop, very rarely?
unbelievable

I dreamed about a coast to coast trip: no anymore :(
Most programmers will never use more brain power than a child learning long division. Still doesn't change the fact that they are rotting away 9-5 for their entire life.
This has been the reality in countries like Argentina for literal decades. It's created a ridiculous disparity since wages are shrinking so fast, and many people don't realize it, that there's desperate attempts to freeze the price of essential goods just so people can afford them. Conversely, tourists have never had better exchange rates. You can have an extremely fine meal for two at a very fine restaurant for $10-$20 bucks. Subway/bus trips cost about $0.10. It leaves visitors dumbfounded.

It's a good case study to find out what things are going to be like if left unchecked.
If you happen to have a PC with OEM-installed Windows, you can switch to Linux and use the Windows license (stored in firmware) to legally install Windows in a Virtual Machine (so the license is not wasted):

https://archived.forum.manjaro.org/t/howto-legally-use-windo...
Really? Wow, I would not have expected that to work. Might be one advantage of using this general model instead of a more specialized one.
I don’t mind working fulltime or overtime when the duty calls, but my professional sanity levels drop quickly after 4-5 hours a day, even if I want to do things. Sometimes faster. Some mornings I don’t even feel to care, and arrive only after noon (my superiors know that, I’m not lying to them). I also have observed and discussed it with other people, including management, and they agree that there is no reason to push developers to the limit in “peaceful” times, because 1) these reservoirs aren’t endless, 2) sometimes it’s better to just slack off than to hackathon yet another bullshit solution for a problem. Just go and sleep on it, you know. I also know a guy from mid-management of a huge local company and he said that even planned allocation in busy departments barely exceeds 40% (3+ hours/day) and bragged that he could bring it up to around 60%. I think they definitely have people who just do nothing on a daily basis, or report things like “I rotated keys in two servers yesterday, three more to go”, because nobody really knows anymore what that operation comprises.

Most of us developers and our managers perfectly understand that it’s not a paper-turning job and they really have no better options out there. In practice there is no supermen, only idiots who break things eventually in various ways. (Sorry if you, reader, are a rockstar developer. Nothing personal, but I’m tired to clean out these Augean stables)

The only exception is the flow, when I can shut the door and code straight through a day in a field that is completely my competence.
But also jax.numpy can do this quite a bit too.
Can you show me an example of a language that does syntax checking of build-system related directives at compile time?
I tried this route and what I found is either outdated or was of poor quality and the code examples didn’t compile. It’s easy to get the barebones up and running but once you need to start customizing is when things have many different ways you could go about getting them done.
> efani enforces 11-layer propriety military-grade client layer authentication

I'm sure they're an upstanding company, but using the word 'propriety' instead of 'proprietary' is an instant turnoff for me. Security is a details-oriented endeavor, and everything from marketing to implementation needs to be squeaky clean. But, maybe that's just me!
> But without children less and less people will need to take care of this large old age group. And they will need a bigger and bigger slice of the economy to survive.

Covid was fixing this, but then some renegade scientists came up with the vaccines and ruined everything. Again.
What you describe does exist, but not via the post office. For example when I started a new job I had to go to a tiny store that does fax, copy, postal, notary and similar services and have them physically verify my employment eligibility documents. Several similar providers exist all over the city (including FedEx, UPS, banks and more).

This is such a high barrier to entry, however, that people will simply not do it for something that isn't absolutely critical. Online services compete with each other to be as frictionless as possible, whereas this is the exact opposite of that.
Ask HN: Why is custom stripe integration so hard?
I'm working on a custom stripe subscription integration for my SaaS web app for more than a month now. I implemented the same thing 5 years ago, and it somehow feels a lot harder now.

The biggest part of added complexity is "SCA" (like 2FA for payments) which was enforced to the whole industry by the EU regulation. Writing custom JavaScript is now required to get custom integration working :/

But, despite this external complexity, I'm also constantly struggling with Stripe's API and the overall approach. Their docs are terse and concise - written like manpages: you have to have an overall understanding of the system to use them effectively. I turned to their tutorials and videos, but they're very simplistic: they explain only the most basic scenarios.

I find myself doing a lot of manual testing - using stripe's API with a variety of scenarios just to figure out how things work. Then, once I understand a certain feature I have to figure how it works with the rest of the integration.

Example feature: "only add product to the subscription once it's paid for". Not even Stripe support developers knew how to handle this correctly - they did point me to the right direction, but I had to do a lot of manual API testing.

TL;DR I feel Stripe's API became too complex, and too "low-level" to work with directly. I often wish there was a library that would handle all the communication with Stripe. Or at least an extensive video-course that would get you very familiar with all the scenarios.

Am I the only one that has this impression?
"Yeah, that's our racket!"
Thank you. I think these hacks will be seen as a historical curiosity with an influx of RISC-V chips that will be more open, ExpressIf is moving to it and hackable IoT chips are utilizing them more too.
I'm curious, has anyone leveraged bazel's package visibility rules to improve isolation within a monolith? one of the things i don't like about monoliths is that tight coupling is often silent rather than noisy, whereas if someone is editing package visibility rules to make library internals A visible to package B i know exactly what's going on.
This is a phenomenal achievement, that I didn't expect to see in my lifetime!

Gives me hope that P vs NP will be resolved in my lifetime too!!
Where they vaccinated or not?
Per LA Times [ https://www.latimes.com/environment/newsletter/2021-12-16/ca... ]

They propose to pay customers $0.05 / generated kWh instead of the $0.20-$0.30/kWh that customers pay in California. So you would have to generate an excess 160 kWh /month to cover the $8 fee (per installed kW of capacity). Your non-solar neighbor who uses your 160kWh of generated electrons will pay the utility $32-$48 for them, while reaping the benefit of lowered stress on the grid.
Yeah. And if you don't respond immediately, you starting getting friendly reminders. "Have you found the problem yet?" "What do you think it is?" "Can you fix it soon?" Ugh.
I do not believe that this is enforceable. It is also highly questionable, bordering on outright evil. I would look for another job just as soon as I could. I would not want to work for a company that had this in an employment contract, because it means that they are either morally flexible, or not diligent about drafting legal contracts, either of which make them a company I probably don't want to work for.
I put Win 11 on one of my laptops so I can test. But for the rest of my windows machines - I usually wait till the dust settles and it proves not to be yet another Vista or Win 8.
Agreed that being a politician should not be financially rewarding. There are lots of policy initiatives that can achieve this end. Using insider information is already illegal, but poorly enforced (probably the easiest step here). Implementing restricted trading windows or insisting that people plan their trades ~3 months in advance is also a reasonable policy that is common practice among senior executives at large corporations. Banning people from trading stocks outright is actually quite extreme in America. Basic things like saving for retirement or buying a home effectively require people to buy and sell stocks. Saying that someone can't own stocks just because their aunt is a congresswoman feels like it is going too far.
I use multiple platforms at work and that's really the biggest difference to me.

Linux is much faster, like a lot! Specially on older hardware. And not only the filesystem and that stuff. With recent gnome versions the interface is much more fluid too.
It's Jane Austen's birthday today. We're celebrating
This doesn't have to be either/or. Once upon a time, your "work" would've been weaving baskets or gathering berries or whatever, and you would get immediate satisfaction from seeing how you are improving your own life and the lives of those around you. Nowadays, for a lot of us, the connection between doing work and improving the world is very tenuous, maybe non-existent; but it doesn't follow that it never existed or that it's gone for good. I know a lot of people who genuinely get a sense of accomplishment from their job, including people who do stuff that seems pretty pointless (a lot of the software industry, honestly) in the grand scheme of things.

The bottom line is, you have to find a way to get satisfaction from somewhere to be mentally healthy, and if have to work anyway, getting some satisfaction out of it is preferable to not getting any.
> I've never even once had to resort to any interface{} trickery to express what I want, and I've written Go programs for Fortune 50 companies, as well as complex personal projects such as AST parsers/code generators.

That's pretty surprising to me. Have you never had to implement marshalers for unknown types and such? I have had to implement things like json.Marshal and json.Unmarshal for different encodings dozens of times in my Go tenure. I have had to use reflection a lot. I have had to deserialize into map[string]interface{} to handle ambiguous situations at runtime a lot. Have you never even had to wrap or build your own Printf equivalents that accept interface{}? No loggers? No custom containers? None of that which operates on unknown types?

I see use of interface{} all over the vast majority of Go projects. I think your experience may be atypical.
Is it like Schrödinger's Tardigrade?
Probably the expected market for advanced users who would need this particular feature is tiny. Like, for the Tor relay usecase, there are something like 6000 relays worldwide, most of them probably provided by various organizations (where a single operator runs many relays) instead of hobbyists, most of them outside USA, and the vast majority of them using some entirely different network connection not affected by this particular device model in any way. The described scenario ("10000s of concurrent TCP sessions") is literally an edge case for residental use; the article does follow up with "What about BitTorrent or cryptocurrency and Web 3.0 apps?" but none of those have network behavior like that.

Like, perhaps this problem is also affecting other kinds of usage, but the original article does not attempt to claim that, and purely from their example it would be generous to assume that literally dozens of individuals would need this feature and, well, it's not worth to make and test features (even if they're just a configuration option) in this case.
If you can get done in less than 10h what they expect you do in 40 then you have much more to give.

It can be anything from aiming at climbing up the ladder to working on your own stuff. You get like 2 decades of life where you have the most energy and potential, might as well make the most out of it.
Someone got their feelings hurt by a meme. (For some reason people's feelings suddenly turned into the most fragile and frail element in the Universe)
No, I am at a new job, so I don't have time for such fun (at least until the new company MacBook Pro arrives). Just knowing that the work seems to be moving forward was enough for me.
>So, my dear haters, I need to inform you that Log4j comes with a license that says "You are solely responsible for determining the appropriateness of using or redistributing the Work and assume any risks associated with Your exercise of permissions under this License". You shouldn't blame Log4j developers

Moving beyond the petulance of the post, I'm not sure why including an as-is clause implies that you should be free from criticism or blame forever. Faulty design is faulty design, regardless of the price tag or licenses.

Of course, the developers are under no obligation to fix it if they don't want to, or if they are put-off by the criticism. That is their choice to make. But you don't get to just slap on a clause like that and be forever free from blame or criticism.
The core analogy in the essay is flawed.

The difference between being a woman that everyone wants the Thing from and being a rich person that poor people want money from is that at no time in history have the poor people had their hands on political levers by which they attempt to control how the rich person gives away money.

Focusing on how women have "power" because they can deny sex obfuscates that men have always had true institutional power and have wielded it for centuries to control women's bodies.

It's possible that straight men are most incensed by this "power" women have because it's the one area left where they don't have domain (and hopefully will have less and less of it as time goes on).
> People aren’t just starved of sex, they are also starved of intimacy, romance, connection, eroticism, whatever.

If someone is starved of all human connection, their life is going to suck either with the sex bots or without them.

But not all people are in such extreme situations. Some have many "friends without benefits", and a sex bot might address the remaining need. Or there are partners who have different sex drives, and a sex bot might make their lives perfect.