skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Virtual Team Building?
My remote employer has horrible communication among developers. Almost non-existent. In the long term, this hurts both the company and its employees. If it doesn’t change, I will be looking for a new position, as I am a senior/staff level engineer and feel like my professional growth is stagnating. That said, I still hope to learn a thing or two from this scenario, no matter the outcome.

To wit, I am looking for open source tools that can be used to increase communication and collaboration among my team and across the organization. It needs to be OSS as it will be deployed on a spare machine as a side-project, in order to bootstrap management buy-in. A prototype that yields proof will be worth more than a story.

I am looking for the virtual equivalent of trust falls, bridge building, and similar interpersonal relationship and team building scenarios. What does your remote team do to onboard/revitalize developer communication? What solutions would you like to try or would be sure to avoid in the future?

To be clear, I do not want planning, scheduling, and other kinds of systems that would be useful if we actually communicated better. We already use such systems, but their efficacy and utility would benefit tremendously from better overall communication.
So in public communications in a big cosmopolitan and diverse city like San Francisco, words with any potential dogwhistle implicatoins matter. It will be quite distracting to many who read this op-ed all the way through that the author, smart expert that he is, chose to invoke a metaphor about a ROPE with respect to a black man in leadership. I absolutely have zero reason to believe the author ever thought through those possible implications. But the particular choice of invoking a rope is an unforced error, and the metaphor wasn't particularly useful to the broader point he is making.
This is the rating that the famous blogger Philip Greenspun got as a professor at Florida Atlantic University:

https://www.ratemyprofessors.com/ShowRatings.jsp?tid=2741982

Maybe he should stick to blogging or teaching statistics at Harvard Medical School or flying planes.
Readers what do you think?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Greenspun

His wisdom on investing and money:

https://philip.greenspun.com/materialism/money
SQLite database can be stored in git which seems like a great benefit. But I wonder would it also be possible to have different "branches" of the database and then merge them at some point?
Rust Belt company = company in the rust belt that hired me to write software/tech.

Pretty sure we were talking about tech jobs in the midwest (rust belt incl.). Its not a tech startup, but its sure a tech job.
No, it's not. This is a well studied phenomenon, and completely unrelated to healthcare affordability.
Just a note that there are significant features of SQLAlchemy that don’t work with SQLite such as ARRAY columns, UUID primary keys and certain types of foreign key constraints.
My middle school had a "parental override" of some sort that parents could use to deny their children access to certain books of certain topics. Worked great.

In terms of "but is the library stocking enough books on conservative views", who knows what that even means. Is there a book out there that serves as a sufficient counterpoint to Roots? Does a library have to offer The Turner Diaries if they're going to stock Dawn?
In practice, all the code in distributions has built in environments with 64 bit time_t. Some end-user legacy code may not be, but it probably isn't much: most things just don't care about a field getting wider behind the scenes.

The big pain, IMO, at this point is the big cutover where all libraries need to move to the new ABI.

This still doesn't prove things as 2038-safe, but it at least means things reasonably can be 2038-safe on 32 bit if they choose... while today it's impossible for practical purposes.
Not sure if this is still true, as most of these sorts of companies have gone public, but there was a period between 2015 and 2019 where these sorts of late stage startups were paying comparable base salaries but were giving what was essential double the amount of equity. For people who got this deal and held onto their stock until today they're better off by a lot than had they worked at FANG.
Yep. One of the worst disasters in school histories. The app autocorrected 'disaster' to 'shooting'. I edited my comment. But the point here is the inclusion of a disaster that killed hundreds of children, not my grammar. To be clear--since this is HN--I haven't read the book and don't have an opinion about it's inclusion in a school library. But I do resist the temptation to accept articles like this at face value, without context or critique.
When hankchinaski says 'managed' I think they really mean that there's some capital-A App dashboard somewhere, on Digital Ocean or wherever, and they log in and click 'new database' and that's it. No ssh-ing to a VPS, and choosing the file location where the sqlite file will sit, figuring out backups and so on. But as you say, while you can wrap postgres or redis in that sort of 'just take care of it for me' approach, given the simplicity of sqlite it doesn't fit that paradigm, so perhaps hankchinaski is just misunderstanding what sqlite fundamentally is and how it works.
Still about 100x more alarming than funny.
Never mind, even if you got the $180K in one lump sum it would not quite cover the downpayment on a home in the Bay Area.
If you are trying to check what OS you are running wouldn't system-type be better? (eq system-type 'darwin) You could be running X on multiple different systems. Although I checked the output on netbsd and openbsd, both return berkeley-unix as the system-type... which isn't quite as helpful. At least I know if I'm on gnu/linux vs a BSD I guess. The docstring helpfully lets me know that a value of gnu means I'm running on Hurd. It also recognizes gnu/kfreebsd apparently because you can't throw a rock without hitting one of those.
Both the mayor and the author of the ordinance (and SFGate op-ed) are playing semantics. Yes the police can access real-time video (i.e. without complex pre-approval process from board of supervisors), but only when there's imminent risk of "danger of death or serious physical injury."

This of course hampers enforcement against quality of life crimes, but even for potentially violent crimes puts the police at risk of breaking the law if it's later determined that their use case didn't meet the criteria. It's very likely police officers are hesitant to use the tools at knowing the high likelihood of prosecution.
email, as ancient and flawed as it is, is a shining example of the Lindy effect in play - the future life expectancy of a technology or an idea is proportional to its current age.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect

Any replacement will have to keep the above in mind because there's no test like the test of time.
I think the VCs are stuck between a rock and a hard place. It makes sense to invest in "web3" because of the potential power law returns if someone figures out how to make something useful. However, I think we've had enough time to evaluate enough of these technologies to claim that the emperor has no clothes. It may take a few years but I think every single web3 investment will have to be written off as a complete loss. There is just no problem being solved there that couldn't be solved more efficiently elsewhere.
> what could possibly compel you to encourage people of a certain political persuasion to move to a specific region so as to topple the existing, different-than-yours, popular political persuasion

My daughters' human rights as women supersede the misogynist wishes of Texas politicians

> why can't you and everyone that agrees with you politically find another state to take your political values to

I was raised to stand and fight for my rights. I don't need carpetbagging coastal elites like the Bushes telling me what texans want.

> what makes you think that your perspective on how things should be should matter more than the millions of people already living there, such that your ideal worldview should replace the existing popular one in a specific state, via interstate mass migration?

Texas has more democrats than republicans. My views align with the majority. Texas republicans are so terrified of democrats winning, they made it illegal to vote straight party line on ballots.

So I feel pretty god damn good telling people about the problems in this state and how they can be fixed.
Find some problem that requires a ecosystem. Create this ecosystem and carry a large stake in it. Have the stake be a part of the ecosystem somehow. In the future, once the problem has a solution/ecosystem, start selling parts of the stake.
I unreservedly endorse adafruit, as a delighted customer and frequent user of their excellent documentation. Tx for mentioning them.
Then it's clear why texas might not stock a book right?

I let my kids look at Nat Geo Kids. I don't have them looking at hustler. This is parenting 101 stuff. Every study shows that letting kids be kids is a good thing for their development.

Yes, some kids (often without good parental involvement) get exposed to "adult" topics much earlier. This is correlated with plenty of miserable and sad outcomes.

Let me ask you this. Why should you, who is not a parent of the kids in this school, have a right to force violent imagery on those kids? Or force the procurement and availability of this material? Or of any material?

Answer that question - and you will answer your own question.

Some reviews here:

http://commonsensemedia.org/book-reviews/out-of-darkness/use...

Example:

This novel crosses some legal boundaries with the adult/child abuse and rape scenes. It is VERY detail, vivid, and graphic. It includes descriptive scenes of the main character being sexually abuse by her father. Years later, her pastor encourages her to marry her stepfather as a child.

This book continues to get worse as it include graphic images of children violently harmed. Eventually, a bomb goes off at school and her little sister is killed- graphic descriptions of her body parts are all over.

This novel is a canvas, showcasing child abuse. There isn't any healthy themes or solutions.

The poster demands your child be exposed to this - no regard to age or your own parental views.
The stigma of using the most popular database in existence?
> Spam calls rarely leave voicemails.

This is quickly becoming not the case! I get several spam voicemails every week now. They're intentionally hitting my voicemail by placing a "dummy" call to my phone, then another call a second later (forcing it to my VM due to the first call being in the middle of setup). The first call is disconnected before I have a chance to answer it. It's only there to force the next call to voicemail.

The voicemails all follow a similar pattern. Here's one:

Hi this is Josh calling. We spoke some time ago about solar for your home but the timing was bad so I wanted to reach back out because we have a brand new program that's only for a limited time...

and it goes on from there. I've never once spoken to "Josh" about solar for my home.

These are call placement patterns that should be trivial to detect on the carrier's end.
You mistake pessimism for questioning the utility. The HN search should lead you to starting points and long threads of comments. I recommend keeping an open mind and broadening you scope. Economics, anthropology, history, and behavioral psychology are all important to understand as well.

At this point is more a cultural movent, fad or not remains to be seen. I personally have a hard time finding interesting use cases that couldn't be solved better without blockchain. At this point web3 is marketing term and used where it doesn't apply. NFTs might be interesting as a ticket for entry, but as a certificate of support (like art) I suspect is fad and will die out or cycle around assets as general fads do. Still, I could do everything NFTs do with stripe and reputation.

Would it be more prestigious to have your name in the credits or on a creator's website? (rather than self posting an NFT?) Many creators already do this for their patrons. Certainly they can be considered a better source of truth than an unregulated market. There are many cases where artist's work is NFT'd by someone else and they seem to be getting upset about it as a community.
In theory, these web3 platforms would still need to function as a business to continue existing. Moving the platform onto a blockchain removes the need for centralized servers, but it necessitates massive amounts of distributed compute power to keep it going.

Every blockchain project knows that they need to incentivize their miners somehow. This is usually a combination of fees from users and new tokens minted via built-in inflation (yes, inflation ironically powers much of the crypto space and will continue to do so for a long time).

So I always aks:

1) What problem are these web3 platforms solving?

2) Who are they solving it for?

3) Are those people actually willing to pay the blockchain premium to use a web3 platform over a centralized platform?

The theory, of course, is that blockchain will evolve over time to become less resource hungry and therefore cheap enough to compete with incumbents, but that's a long way away. Many projects have started cheating by smuggling centralization into their architecture but emphasizing their blockchain and hoping nobody cares enough about the difference.

But where do VCs come into the equation? They're not setting up the mining operations that will power these businesses and collect the fees in the future. They're investing in tokens that will ostensibly be used to pay the miners in the future.

The whole game is about introducing artificial tokens, quietly giving a huge number of those tokens to founders and early investors (in exchange for actual money, of course), and then hyping the platform to the moon so everyone can cash out their tokens to a new wave of speculators.
What consumer-facing or B2B startups currently fit this description?
I clearly did not express myself correctly. Being all these managed solutions (heroku, do app platform) running on an ephemeral fs it is not possible to use disk as long term storage as sqlite requires. So I’m basically forced to manage an attached disk to my container which needs to be backed up, monitored and so on
I love to see that more projects are using SQLite as their main database.

One thing that I always wondered though: does anyone knows a big project/service that uses Golang and is backed by SQLite? This because SQLite would require CGO and CGO generally adds extra complexities and performance costs. I wonder how big Golang applications fare with this.
Note -- the single process write at any one time is a killer for most web apps, where for example within SaaS you have many users doing things at the same time.
Economists love to hear an apocryphal story about a bounty on dead cobras backfiring, then generalize it until they do incalculable damage to society.
Guy thinks information should be free. Thinks an informed society is important. Thinks journalistic freedom is necessary for that. Thinks Julian Assange should be free.

Video is about the circumstances around the foiling of the plot to get Julian Assange out of the country by means of becoming an Ecuador diplomat. There was a meeting between JA and an Ecuadorian diplomat during the final stages of the plan (end of 2017 I think). This was high priority for US intelligence. One company inspected the fire extinguishers just before the meeting. The fire extinguisher was later found to be bugged. Each day around the time of the meeting there was a Ford Focus or a police car parked in front of the building allegedly collecting signals from the bugs and being ready to rock if necessary (often there were multiple dudes in the car, once 8 cups of coffee were brought to a police car). High quality surveillance of one such car reveals a dude holding case notes mentioning what to do in case the video surveillance goes out and JA tries to leave the building, including shooting out tires. Mentions operation kudo (meaning has something to do with “friend”), which the presenter suspects to be a joint operation between the CIA and the London metropolitan police since it used MS7 (something like that) and MET acronyms. This would all be very much a breach of inviolability of diplomatic missions from Vienna convention. Lawsuits are underway apparently. In the end Ecuador gave up on this plan due to diplomatic pressure from US.

Presenter was himself surveilled on behalf of the CIA but things have calmed down since a yahoo news article last year described some of the circumstances above, though he said it was also filled with some misinformation.

Might not be 100% accurate. I was distracted.
There's two ratings here, 5 stars and 1 star. Not exactly the kind of statistically relevant sample he would teach about, right?
I would argue we have two leftist parties and no conservative parties, but I suspect I lean to the right of US mean and you lean to the left of the US mean?
They (PiS) are unfortunately well trained in the dark arts of minority rule. All they are doing is applying the extreme right wing playbook [1] to ensure their 30% us enough.

[1] https://www.politico.eu/list/politico-28-class-of-2021-ranki...
I'm not confident all adults can handle listening to Joe Rogan, but I'm not running around trying to limit its access.
How about much simpler scenario, no threat at all. Just dumb bug in software that puts your computer in DFU mode that says, please connect it to another Mac. Nice isn't it? And then you should run and find 'another mac'. What if there are no other macs around? What if you travel and have no connection to the internet or it's limited ? This is not a hypothetical situation, this is exactly what have happened in my case. And then you are stuck in the field without any way to recover your machine. Nice isn't it?

"When Apple's servers go down you lose the ability to do low-level recovery on these machines anyway, since DFU flashing requires phoning home to get a ticket for your machine as well as low-level configuration data"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29704923
Huh, one can fill pages of this.

How ‘fact-checking’ can be used as censorship
https://www.ft.com/content/69e43380-dd6d-4240-b5e1-47fc1f2f0...
- covers how Trump's vaccine prediction was 'fact-checked' as false, how the Wuhan leak report was 'fact-checked' and also heavily censored as false, how the reports of Biden's memory boopers were 'fact-checked' as false.

Many of these issues were already discussed on HN. Anyone could dig up dozens of such cases with a bit of searching...

https://crowkingblog.wordpress.com/2017/03/15/quick-example-...

https://investortimes.com/freedomoutpost/fact-checking-the-f...
Multiply by the number of employees mostly saturated in a radius around the office. Perhaps still not a big impact but surely noticeable if that's your neighborhood.
It's well known that unfounded conspiracy theories are hallmarks of the right, not the left. An example is the irrational and dangerous suggestion that George Soros has been doing what the Koch brothers have clearly been doing for decades.
It’s pretty remarkable he’s been able to keep secret for this long.
Quite a few languages can access their own ASTs, but I don't know of one other than C# (and VB.NET--Roslyn is the compiler for both) where the API is so deeply integrated and hence useful.

The Roslyn SDK exposes its syntax tree, symbol table, and semantic model, with the primary use being for custom code analysis. I surprisingly easily made a linter ('analyzer') for a personal style preference, along with 'code fix' (lightbulb suggestion that appears in Visual Studio) through the quick-start tutorial. The resulting .NET assembly integrated impressively with msbuild and Visual Studio, my custom analyzer being indistinguishable in UX from the built-in ones. Seeing the actual syntax tree, especially where the compiler had recovered from syntax errors, also seemed a great learning experience for getting a feel of how the compiler treated errors.

It seems to now be fairly common for .NET projects to develop their own analyzers to enforce specialized best-practices; I wonder if other languages have similar customs?

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/csharp/roslyn-sdk/
That's the point here...this book is available to middle schoolers without parental consent. And video games are available to children if their parents purchase them...the same as kids seeing rated R movies if accompanied by an adult. People aren't outraged by violent video games or the newest rated R movie because society has setup a consent system...that's not the case in most school libraries so the parents have no oversight.
https://www.levels.fyi
Open food facts is an example of an open database that doesn't need snake oil to thrive. If you really want to decentralize access to data then the focus should be on open source and publicly available data dumps.

https://world.openfoodfacts.org/data
>In Russia the equivalent isn't even called a PhD.

Are you thinking of Candidat Nauk or habilitation?
The tech big companies are getting too big for their own good. Their core business is not large enough to satisfy the growth demands so they have to branch out into other sectors. Give it a few years and Apple, MS, Google and others will basically offer the same products and services. I really wish they would get broken up so one division doesn't have to do shady things to satisfy the needs of other divisions.
This argument is interesting to me because why wouldn’t the same apply to email spam?
I thought you were talking about my "autofocus" project (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PrbyPmq_Z7Q). The arducam-12mp-pan-tilt-zoom uses the same sensor (IMX477) as the HQ. Thus, the resolution claim should be the same ;).
I'd say that this product (https://kinopio.club/) is an implementation of the ideas of Zettelkasten[0], or at least shares a lot of DNA. However, lots and lots of things "are" Zettelkasten, or can work like Zettelkasten, or incorporate ideas of Zettelkasten. Examples of things which can be used like a Zettelkasten include:

- Org mode for Emacs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Org-mode

- Vimwiki for Vim https://github.com/vimwiki/vimwiki

- Notational Velocity, an OS X note-taking application https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Notational_Velocity

- Obsidian, a cross platform personal knowledgebase where its "DB format" is folders full of Markdown files https://obsidian.md/

- A folder full of text files which you open in your favorite text editor can even work like a Zettelkasten (grep helps in this case though)

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zettelkasten
Was your answer "I expect a full scientitic report by tomorrow."?

Hypothesis : Parents are fat liars"

Methodology : Put teeth under pillow without telling parents.

Result : Where's my money?

Analysis : The results show that the tooth fairy is fake and my parents are liars."

Conclusion : The current results tend to show that parents are liars, but we need more experiments to know the extent. To expend on the results, I should also be as evil as possible for the incoming year and verify if Santa Claus indeed does give me coal.
> Instead of saving $70 million a year as planned, the report said that the cost to taxpayers to fix Phoenix's problems could reach a total of $2.2 billion by 2023.

Ouch.

And for those who think software engineering other than medical devices, aviation, or nuclear power plants isn't life-or-death:

> Pascale Boulay, a Quebec coroner, determined that the 2017 death by suicide of a 52-year old woman from Val-des-Monts, Quebec, was preventable. The coroner assigned blame on the "flawed Phoenix pay system" that had "led her to emotional and financial ruin."