skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes, and the stability of all those things come from scale. Institutions are strong for several reasons, but one of the most important is size.

You would, or at least, should, trust a small bank less than a large one, all else equal. You should trust a small government less than a large one, all else equal. This is a simple function of incentives. If a bank is large, your size relative to it is small. You can't damage it financially, you can only damage it asymmetrically via its reputation. Since your assets are tiny compared to the value of its reputation, it pays to treat you well enough to avoid reputational damage. A small bank, on the other hand, gains more in relative terms from taking your money.

To address you more specifically:

> And rule of law requires institutions, and ultimately a central authority, that must be able to use coercive force to maintain law and order and to enforce private contracts. A decentralised system is incompatible with that.

Which coercive authority is more powerful, 1 guy with a gun, or 2? How about 100 vs 1000? Trust comes from power and relative size. If you are small relative to a powerful actor, and that actor's power derives from collective trust, screwing people over is bad, unless the person they're screwing is large relative to them.
If two people throw a stone at your head, and one misses and the other hits, then there are (probably) two crimes involved: Both people assaulted you, but only one battered you.

These two crimes have different punishments. It's quite normal to have outcome-based laws.
Not me but my wife started an Etsy store during COVID to sell the art she was making. She now does custom watercolor house portraits and has a variety of prints for sale as well.

https://www.etsy.com/shop/UrbEmSketches
For me, https://unitprice.org and https://okaycup.com — These track prices on Amazon for certain sets of products and finds the best price per unit, which isn’t always the largest quantity item. Revenue is all from affiliate links.

Edit: Oh, you said $500, not $5. Oops!
I think I agree with you - but this post suggests going below that point. This is about holding on by the skin of your teeth blaming everything on being new until you’re fired.
Bitcoin is highly divisible. When I say $100/day what I really mean is something around 0.0016 BTC per day. This number fluctuates a lot so it’s best to look at the average over a week or month.

The best way to learn IMO is to try it yourself with your gaming computer. I personally use a platform called NiceHash (not sponsored, nor am I advocating for them, there are alternatives) which pays out in Bitcoin. Try it out yourself, depending on your GPU you could be making $3-10 per day. Run it for a month or two, or longer. Transfer that Bitcoin to an exchange of your choice (Coinbase, crypto dot com, etc.) and sell it for cash. Then use that cash to buy more hardware (or beer).
You join a pool and mine collectively. The pool takes a small cut and then distributes any rewards amongst the pool members.
Would stealing from your employer be ok as long as he doesn't notice?
There is so much wisdom in the title of this post (a quote by Walt Whitman) and it applies to so many situations in life. Happy to see it used as the title to this post (and on the homepage of HN :)
Not that I endorse this, but this seems the wrong way to do this. Take one job and do well at it. Get a reputation that you don't need to be managed. Work hard. Identify a niche for work that needs to be done but is currently underserved. Take over some of that niche while telling everyone how hard it is. In reality the niche takes 20 or fewer hours a week.

Get the second job lined up. Take some vacation from the first and come out the gate hard at the second job. Attempt to more or less repeat what you did.

If you can get yourself setup on the right little niches you could probably keep three or four jobs going. If you are just kind of jelly fishing along though eventually people will notice how all the other juniors in the same surface area out perform you. You want to be the person who went off, slew some dragons in a specific area, and we need to keep this person around to ensure the dragons don't repopulate.

I basically get promoted doing that. Of course I'm using my spare hours to go help other people in the org, build relationships, get noticed, etc. All while having an easily defended core area to handle. Just do that but collect other jobs instead of promotions.
Since we're on the topic of automated algorithms, one thought I had, which I have trouble wording the right way (maybe someone can help me out here):

My problem with a lot of big tech compared to traditional companies is that they get to benefit from the economies of scale of software that affords them great profit margins and not deal with the consequences. For example, people constantly say that there's too much content for Facebook to moderate, etc. Then maybe this is a broken business model? Compare this to a mortgage servicer that is regulated to have sufficient customer support. Their budget to do this grows much more linearly while Facebook's budget for support, moderation etc grows far more logarithmically simply because they barely have any support.

I'm not suggesting Facebook should be policing content per se, but they should be required to handle incidents in a timely fashion whether it's removing illegal activity (or reversing a mistake thereof), helping victims escalate harassment to authorities, or whatever.

Yes, this costs a lot, but perhaps that should be the inherent cost of running such a platform.
4 Stages of Psychological Safety - when they feel it's safe to communicate, the team trusts each other more and makes unblocking easy.

The First 90 Days - good book for planning out any transition to a new role.

The Manager's Path - basic primer for leading in tech

Accelerate - If you're inclined to measure how well your team does.
Even if that were the case (it does not seem to be), that would probably still be too little vs the number of users.

https://onezero.medium.com/facebook-is-too-big-to-moderate-9...
Signup asked for email/password and complained of invalid phone number.
Nice catch about one of the company being bankrupt.

I've taken a deeper look at Lyten and it does not seem to be a savior here either:

1. They need to produce graphene at scale and they don't yet have a solid plan to do that.

2. Lyten batteries are only 200 cycles.
That's not what Christians believe. I've had Muslim friends who prayed for me when I had tough times and I didn't complain because I didn't practice their religion. It's the thought that counts. I think you focus on that part instead of the fact that somebody wishing happiness on you, probably from some existing resentment of Christians.
I wonder how many deaths have been caused by attempting to prevent prescription drug abuse without providing treatment or alternatives.

There’s no question opioid addiction is a problem, but taking controlled doses away from addicts and their turning to street drugs was inevitable and always a recipe for disaster.
If you don’t mind me asking, what are the e-commerce sites? Also, how does one get into such a business? Were you interested in this space beforehand or did you simply acquire a business that looked promising?
Nice thats a lot of profit! Is there a “catch”? Are you getting super cheap electricity. Whats the depreciation like on the gear per day?
Every single useful open source program that was made by a community
Back in the early times, 'solo mining' was trying to find actual block target values and would yield the full reward, winner takes all. Mining pools were invented, that aggregate a whole bunch of miners all working on the same thing. Although there is only one true winner a block, the rewards are shared among all the miners, prorata their submitted hash rate. Care was taken by miners not to use one big pool, and keep the number of blocks produced to be <50% to any one pool. Came close a few times over the years!

The pool accepts 'shares' of 'close but not quite' values to prove that the client is actually doing work.
Then, you had the emergence of marketplaces of hash power -- you could bid on or sell a specific number of hashes a second for a given time. The highest bidder would be able to point your mining hardware at their choice of pool with their payout credentials.
Ask HN: A way to make some money only using a phone/tablet?
Given there is no access to PC/laptop, is there a way to make some money using a phone or a tablet, without going through tough entry barriers? Barriers like building reputation on a freelance site and/or looking for clients, for instance.

I'm thinking a site or a chat group which one could use to pick up simple, but tedious tasks, and start doing them immediately.

Not going to put much hard requirements, but:

- the tasks should be doable on a mobile device without having an external setup (monitors, keyboard + mouse, etc)

- the pay should be somewhat reasonable (I don't expect much, though). Say, at least $200 a month spending about 4 hours a day

- (preferably) Work is submitted via browser, not apps
Discussed at the time:

This Page is Designed to Last - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21840140 - Dec 2019 (446 comments)
Normal websites used to be one file way back in the day. It was a "pro tip" to split out the JS & CSS into a separate files.
Ohhh. Now I get it. Thanks for clarifying

liquidates life savings
> Quite a few people are of the opinion that Amazon (excluding Web Services) is on the decline.

Based on what, anecdotal evidence from squeaky wheels on the internet? I've heard the same claims, but the 10K and 10Q filings the original commentor linked to suggest the opposite.
Here is a one-liner standard library version:

from itertools import groupby
keyfunc = lambda x: x['thing']

[{'thing': name, 'count': sum(t['count'] for t in things)}
for name,things in groupby(sorted(mylist, key=keyfunc), keyfunc)]
Money, time and caring.

Money for bringing people together, giving them swag and making them feel part of a community.

Time for people to gel and start to care about each other.

Caring because if you, the community organizer (presumably) don't care, people won't care, and the community won't form.

Other things that help include an overarching mission and a way for community members to get to know each other.

Suggest you listen to https://www.communitypulse.io/ podcasts and read https://rosie.land/ articles for more.
>people that criticize the entire concept of crypto assets frequently point to thefts of crypto assets and never apply the same standard to financial systems that they respect because they are completely unknowledgeable of the frequency and size of unreversible transfers in the traditional financial system

My comment was not intended to promote the idea that the existing financial system is comparable in the frauds and crimes that happen, just that it's an overstatement to say people never steal millions in an irreversible way.
Real estate title is a good example of something that could be handled this way more cheaply than it is now. Title to any physical asset could be handled this way, too.
Yasha Levine's "Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military History of the Internet" (2018). I ended up reading it side-by-side with Ed Snowden's "Permanent Record" (2019) which was useful as they have somewhat different takes on domestic and global mass surveillance.

The one take-away I'm still thinking about is how the Tor Onion Router system works, and if the primary purpose behind Tor was to allow spies in various locations around the planet to communicate with known headquarter locations without leaving any traces. That's what Levine implies, anyway, and Snowden sort of confirms that, as I read things.

Overall, some people believe putting advanced technology in the hands of individuals is a solution to authoritarian control, some people believe political reforms are the solution to authoritarian control. Interesting debate certainly.
I run an e-commerce store as a side-hustle: https://drinkyourdailywater.com/

We sell glass water jugs targeted at desk workers, to help remind you to drink enough water. I created it because I wasn't drinking enough water.

Running paid ads has been very hit or miss, and I don't have a knack for the marketing. But word-of-mouth has been good for us and we get the odd corporate sale here or there.
If you want to get paid like that be a contractor and charge an hourly rate.

If you want the security of a full time salary then you should work the 40 hours you agreed to work in your contract for the amount of money you agreed in the contract.

(And yes, I believe this goes the other way and that overtime should be paid or compensated with TIL at the employee's convenience).
It's also why employers are tempted to install monitoring software.
How long have you been actively buying and selling? How often do you "lose" (meaning, you bought and it goes down, you've sold too early, etc?)
When COVID first hit Italy, they started calling up retired doctors and also sending people in medical school into clinical support positions. And it just wasn't enough.
I've earned about $1500 a month for the last ten years helping senior citizens use Windows PCs. I also sell refurbished laptops for about 1/2 of what new laptops costs. I've sold over 200 laptops in the last 3 years.

All it takes is a little patience. I only charge $25 an hour and have more work than I can handle.
What, you've never seen a contract which states how many hours a week you work? Maybe it's differnet in Australia but every single salary job I've had has specified that.
So stop using chrome... Why use a browser that is literally killing functionality to help there business model instead of favouring privacy?
And the linked site garnered some discussion as a "show hn":

"Show HN: A simple way to make HTML websites":
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25170078
Yup, and nope (I wasn't at the HQ office in SF but the Bellevue office, formerly Seattle). Look at https://www.levels.fyi/company/Salesforce/salaries/Software-... (I never added mine there; Glassdoor is also useful https://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Salesforce-LMTS-Software-En...) and pay special attention to years-at-company. I'd get more if I returned, at least $300k, but... What was amusing is that the next tier, "Principal", has many employees at it where even if they're at HQ they were making less than me as a Lead (and some Seniors). (And it's still the case for levels data judging by the distribution if not the exact numbers.) The next level after that, "Architect", is where significant stock grants actually start happening at that company, but it's rather more work to get there and as far as my interests go not really desirable since almost always it meant you stopped coding in any meaningful way.
Oh, shit, I knew I was doing something wrong.
I think that trading is ultimately a creative endeavor and no matter how one trades whether it's based on phases of the moon or insider information, one needs to know when they are entering and exiting the market. Trading is an incredibly fun and creative endeavor and as long as one takes the time to precisely define what they are doing, it is great <3
Honorable people are honorable in spite of what other people do.
How much did the setup cost?

I saw a similar post where the poster was making a decent amount but wasn’t yet profitable because of $30k in startup costs.
Biggest question that comes to my mind - if you can make this profit so consistently, why not triple your rig? Or even x10, or x50?
I used to be pro-UBI but no longer. Here's why: most people will stop working and become largely disconnected from society. They will only worry that the UBI is still coming in. A smaller percentage of people will continue working because they are internally compelled to work. These people will make all of the decisions in society. The power will be concentrated in an even smaller pool of people than today, leading to lesser freedom over time for the masses.

What you actually want in society is for as many people as possible to have the means and motivation to contribute to social progress, to keep it as fair as possible. You want more independence, not more dependence.
Overdoses are at record highs, and opium/opioids are the largest contributor.
Always good advice. When I see something I don't understand that seems off or weird, one way I avoid judgement is to ask the five whys to myself.

It is also good to recognize that most everyone is doing the best they can, and if you ship a light with a weird way to reset it, there were probably (as the author suggests) constraints that you don't know about.

What if you're wrong and they wanted to inflict anguish on their users? Well, the market is pretty good about fixing those problems, at least with commodities like lights.
One man show.

E-commerce business selling medical supplies. Net ~ $4k/month.

Stack: iPhone, Shopify, Instagram, PayPal, Google (Sheets, Gmail)
That’s really cool. Good luck.
Isn't this why some places are moving from driving while intoxicated (DWI) to driving under influence (DUI)? Doesn't matter the influencer so that it's not specific to alcohol.
It's possible - if not common - to setup the underlying smart contract to send some amount of funds back to the creator when an NFT changes hands. So that turns selling a piece of art once to pay the bills into selling it once and then subsequently collecting royalties (potentially indefinitely).

As far as I know, that's a pretty novel offering.

EDIT: for grammar
What bias do you see in that link? That seems even-handed to me.
Then you should probably work for yourself. Though of course you're still working for someone who writes you checks.
Yes, for all four books, I got book deals with traditional publishers.

A small number of top-tier authors -- those whose books are virtually guaranteed to be bestsellers from day 1 -- tend to have marketing and publicity teams that will continue to be active well after publication.

But for midlist authors like myself, the publisher will do a marketing/publicity push around your publication date, but after a few months, it tends to die out. Which is not to say that they won't seize a good opportunity if it presents itself. But generally it's the author who's setting up their events after that point and figuring out other creative ways to spread awareness of their book, e.g. writing regular blog posts to maintain their brand.
Hmm, but people also say "the market is forward looking". It's quite clear Wall Street loves growth (over the last decade, at least) and isn't at all obsessed with short-term profits.
SLAs for SMS are also about 98%. 1 in 50 messages isn't going to get to its intended recipient in any reasonable timeframe, which is pretty bad for a time-sensitive public safety feature.
I would also love to know more about the process.
> I know that this is a fairly contrarian take, but I strongly believe than the emphasis on idiomatism is more harm than good.

My response is that adherence to common idioms is simultaneously beneficial and harmful. It is beneficial because shared assumptions and shared understanding facilitate cooperation, yet it is harmful because it impedes innovation. Whether it is more beneficial or more harmful on balance depends on the situation and on individual taste.

I'd like to think that our perspectives are compatible.

> > Not having to deal with "invisible control flow" in Rust is one of the things that makes me much more confident that the code actually does what it looks like it does.

> no, you just choose to ignore it.

I guess you could characterize things that way. For example, in the Rust library code I write, I choose to ignore certain unrecoverable errors — e.g. out-of-memory panics from allocating ordinary sized objects, even though such panics can theoretically occur.

But the distinction here is that I also expect e.g. invalid argument values or "file not found" errors to be handled via Rust's Result type. I don't choose to ignore such events — I expect all recoverable errors to be handled via visible control flow, where you can identify every location in the code that such an error might occur. This makes it easier to reason about control flow for all circumstances save unrecoverable errors.

> My sweet spot is to have a few catch handlers around the main loop which catch 99% of the unrecoverable issues

Yes, that's an Anders-Hejlsberg-endorsed way of doing things. "The exception handling should be centralized, and you should just protect yourself as the exceptions propagate out to the handler." https://www.artima.com/articles/the-trouble-with-checked-exc...

I think the preference for one way of doing things can depend on what problem domain you work in. That approach is highly suitable for applications programming.

(Duffy has done a lot of work on operating systems; my biggest projects have been libraries.)

> Consultants sure do love selling it as one though.

EDIT: I'm not very happy about that take, and I originally wrote up a lengthy response — but it turns out I had incorrectly recalled that this was not the first such interaction we've had. (I was recalling an obnoxious post from a different European with the first initial "j"). I've deleted my response because it's OT and not worth dealing with if it's not something recurring.
> A Tesla service subscription to get access to schematics and troubleshooting help cost $3178 per year. Contrast that with GM's $550 annual charge and you will see the bleak future of Tesla repair.

That doesn't sound all that unreasonable, at first. Auto repair business average between $250K-$500K in annual revenue, but average annual profit might only be $100K. I suspect many that repair domestic ICE vehicles don't bother with subscriptions and rely on the experience of their mechanics. There must be some threshold of Tesla repair customers to make a subscription worthwhile. Though, I live on the East Coast, rural setting, but I have travelled from PA to FL more than a few times since 2019, and it just occurred to me that I have never seen a Tesla in the wild.
I spend all of my days reading PDFs.

I want an 8.5x11 device with large-size microUSB.
Nothing fancy, no markup, no net connection, huge battery.
Simple page turning (could be touch or button).
Simple file handling. Memory of where I stopped reading.

You could sell these things in volume, the first venue
being libraries and bookstores.

Students with school library access could use them to carry
all of their papers. Profs could use them for research.

Sci-hub would be a perfect research match.
Infra is pure cost center.

A few hours downtime is not going to justify double cost, and worse whose benefits can only be demonstrated during those few hours.

It will get shutdown immediately.

And what is more important, corporate world really don't care that much about downtime, not as much as they care about who to assign the blame, in this case AWS is a perfect irresistible externality much like a natural disaster.

Disclaimer: Ex-AWS employee
You're not wrong. It's an imperfect solution right now; but it is a step in exploring what's possible. And exploratory steps are really helpful for iterating on a good solution.
I have tried to make money at Mechanical Turk and the past and have given up.

I found an unlimited number of receipt reading tasks where you were supposed to read receipts that the A.I. couldn't read. Most of them were mostly readable but had spots that were utterly impossible to read. Even if I put hours into scrutinizing the receipts I don't know if I could do them accurately enough to not get booted.
I can see how a lot of it would be theoretically valuable if people had 5 year careers at companies, but that is not what happens.

You are a very old hat at two years everywhere I have worked.

I am in Canada, and we don’t really get equity like Americans do, and even if we do, not a lot of it so many people have 1 year stints everywhere.
Did you really build all of it in a weekend? And customer support is fully automated?