skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Materials to learn web marketing/advertising?
I'm trying myself in e-commerce with a small webshop, the product is rather niche, but I'm willing to switch to/add another types of products too.
Currently, it is handcrafted vases, dishes and candles, maybe I'll expand with 3d-printed stuff like figurines in the future.

Could you suggest me some books/courses on webmarketing? Share you ecperience with different types of ads? And no, I'm not equating "ads" with "marketing", though I'd like to be covered from both sides.

One interesting observation: there's a supporting Instagram account with the products listed exactly as in webshop. Just tried both of the types of Ig ads (post and reel) - the conclusion is that noone really watches the posts, but the reels did get me just a few subscribers.

Any help is highly appreciated!
There are reader macros which provide a more math-like notation. Those are translating the math syntax into Lisp s-expressions at read-time.
Can anyone point me to a reliable source that explains in layman's terms why one cancels out the other and it's not possible to have both (say) delta and omicron at once.

Somewhat tongue in cheek, but since cancellation seems to be the case, could we not create a version that was 100x more transmissible than omicron but completely benign? Cane toads in Australia aside ;)
I read article from Israel. It wrote: "severe covid cases are low, but flu season just started". Pandemic will finish at spring, and hopefully will not start next winter.
I think leetcode medium level of questions can be fair game. With only a moderate amount of practice, anyone who writes software professionally should be able to spot common patterns, or at least get in the right direction by the end of the interview.

Even if you concede my position (and I know a lot of folks think all these questions are impossible / unfair), at the end of the day they're just a terrible signal of whether someone will be good at their actual job.

The folks that I've interviewed who really ace these puzzles often (but not always) end up writing terrible code, e.g. cryptic variable names, lots of use of indices into vector / array data structures instead of something more idiomatic like iterators and std::algorithm stuff.

My current approach is to show some subtle C++ gotchas and ask the candidate what will go wrong (e.g. where is the undefined behavior?). I don't even expect candidates to get all of them, as many of them are hard even outside of the interview set and setting. Then I ask them to write a hash table for values with large data (i.e. where using std::vector as a bucket would be a bad choice due to the 2x'ing of size on resizing) and just see what they write. The main thing I expect is for them to demonstrate that they know the stdlib stuff (e.g. std::list, std::forward_list, std::hash, templates, etc) and can explain the tradeoffs.

Surprisingly, far fewer people pass my interview despite it not being some obtuse mental brain teaser, but those that do have been great colleagues.
Is C&H text searchable? Great find otherwise!
There's also the example of people who die on their 100th birthday - their mission was to make it to that age.
Probably Huel
> These are a different in quality more so than a different in kind.

Sometimes the difference in quality is smaller. Communication by mail could have a cadence reminiscent of email, for example:

https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/24089/victorian-mail-del...
I really, really like the "diff" style for code fragments - it makes the tutorial so much nicer to read, and I don't see any significant downsides. This should be the standard for all tutorials where you progressively modify a non-trivial body of code.
I had a horrible experience with this type of stuff.

I rented a luxury micro studio, your kitchen is in your bedroom! And the fold out bed/ couch would never lock on place. It keep falling on me.

I ended up moving to a massive 2 bdrm, which was in an older building. My life was so much better overnight. No longer did I need to hear my neighbors and vice versa. And I got a normal bed which didn't try to collapse upon me.

That moving bed on the front page is going to kill someone. Even if it's fine out of the box, what about in 15 years. A conventional bed frame might just crack, it's hard to imagine it crushing you.

Give me a futon over this
I've noticed that this is something that also happened in YouTube video essays. I remember at the dawn of them when I thought it was so cool that there was people out there making these super in-depth videos on all sorts of topics.

But over the past few years it drew in the attention of people who really don't have much to say, and stretch these videos on, talking in circles, as if longer video = better/more interesting.

I recently saw YouTube recommend me a video essay on the Nickelodeon TV show, Victorious, that was literally more than 5 and a half hours long. Admittedly I haven't watched it (for obvious reasons) but I just can't imagine it really justifies that entire runtime.
Also, talk to your friends. I'm sure a number of them would actually want to do something sober, it's just that things just easily fall into that mode.

If you like watersports, suggest doing soemthing like that. Or go to the gun range. Or go to an origami course together.

If no one suggests anything then to the bar it is. But there's a lot of options, but it requires active thinking/planning/doing from both parties.
Which part is wrong? Some parts are obviously correct.

The US is definitely one of the most diverse large countries. India is probably more diverse along language lines. China is definitely not along any dimension. Even the EU states (that depend on US for defense and use oil to power their economies) are less diverse.
I'd love to start another side project, but my current job and other hobbies keep me busy enough as it is.
Not having an archive of links may be a feature -- relieving you of the responsibility to decide what to read.
A community edition/non-paid would be quite nice to be able to trial this out before paying.

This is how an old employer adopted CockroachDB because we trialed the non-enterprise version and then ultimatley bought a license.
Omicron evades the "natural immunity" that people were getting a hard on for. That explains a lot (not all) of the massive fitness it has - it can infect people that previously had Covid infections again.
There is a constraint the prevents (some) countries from more frequent debasement: if you debase your currency, then lenders will increasingly require that future debt be issued in an external currency. And even if you find lenders, the purchasing power provided in the debased currency remains constrained by external trade in non-debased currencies.
Developers are working more on weekend according to GitHub data
> 6 PhDs, knitted together

But that is regarding the implementation/specification. For the users it will be two new keywords and .ref. It will even ease the language by healing the rift between primitives/objectsz
People wait to get sick on the weekend, or on vacation. That's a common example of this phenomenon.
You got me to go looking at Videx stuff this morning.

I keep an Apple //e on my workbench, just like it was so many years ago. I use it for some light gaming, and the current games are whatever INFOCOM text adventure I am poking at and Nox Archaist. I bought that one new, and it was developed as a labor of love. Fantastic! ULTIMA style game as if it were seriously developed today, and I suppose it was, but I digress.

I also use it for writing and calculations and quickie tasks.

So, I just learned the Videx cards work in the //e machines just fine. I could have kept mine back then, but I let it go with the Apple 2 Plus I sold off a while back.

About 10 years ago, I decided to get a Platinum because the retro scene was heating up and I just miss having a good 8 bit workstation around for the occassional fun project.

Given the Videx cards work in all Apple 2 8 bit machines with slots, a clone makes sense! I would use it myself, ideally with CP/M and or Appleworks for writing.

But, it would also be cool to have it to do dual screen development too. So yeah, could be a fun project. Making an apple card and doing something with it is on my retro project list. Who knows? Next time I free up, I may look at this. I have been looking for a video related project for a while. Neat idea!

Just for fun, I am sharing my current setup.

FastChip 65C802 / 65C816 accelerator card. This one runs any clock from about 0.3Mhz up through a little over 16Mhz! Absolutely great card. Works reliably and comes with a little control and cable for you to adjust in real time, while programs are running! It does the job glitch free.

CFFA 3000 Storage emulation. This one makes modern storage available for use with the Apple.

Super Serial card, stock, unmodified.

Got a CP/M card in the mail due to arrive sometime this month.

These Apple machines are fun to just tinker with, and slowly build up to an interesting computer.

Hardware demand is actually respectable enough to support projects like this. I wonder how many others would be interested in a similar card?

I will ask around. Just curious at this point.
Yikes, and here I was thinking he was only interested in taking about the former USSR. :(
I wonder if people, especially young children, would be more interested in programming if all computers booted directly into a programming language.
Yes. I work as a contractor and freelance dev. So, my interviewing session per client is "Can you do this?" rather than "Can you do this to show me you can do that for me?".

It isn't that people are more pragmatic when hiring a contractor. But in fact contractors are hired to do specific tasks. These days, your traditional software engineers are asked to all sorts of things and asked to learn all sort of things as the company grow. I think that there was a probably a time where the scope was limited and recruiter knew what are the problems a candidate might need to fix. Tech stack wise I would guess we are in an era of ambiguity.

Disclaimer: Haven't worked a day as an employee anywhere.
In the same building, downstairs, a year after the commercial launch of the telephone tower in 1887:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e8/Allm%C3%...
Or as Scott Adams expressed it in chapter 1 of "The Dilbert Future":

Good trend: Computers allow us to work 100% faster

Unexpected bad thing: Computers generate 300 percent more work
That's also why we separate bodies into different categories during a mass casualty event. If someone who was shot sees the body of someone missing multiple appendages, they can go downhill real fast.
Of all our technology, I truly think the smartphone is one of the most impressive and futuristic things ever invented. It’s the kind of thing Star Trek thought was hundreds of years in the future and that most sci-fi failed to imagine. It is individually transformative in a way that space flight will probably never be. Our information tech is likely to continue racing forward and this current moment will look analog in comparison.
You can also catch the cold over and over.

1 or 2 colds a year is pretty typical.
> easier employment

Unemployment ranged from 5.40% to 10.4% in the 80s and is 4.2% now. Only the last few yeas of the 60s had lower unemployment than 2021. In 1960 people spend 24% of their income on food, vs 8.6% today. And for most Americans the food was FAR worse in 1960s, cold chain and logistics improvements mean that average Americans have access regularly to foods that were luxuries in 1980.

> nicer looking cars

Those cars were death traps. There were twice as many fatalities per 100k Americans in 1960 vs today with fewer people driving fewer miles per capita.

> more sustainable lifestyle

The US of the 60s and 70s was so choked by smog and industrial pollution that Nixon created the EPA. Cars now get 2x the mpg vs 1960. Forrest coverage was lower, and numerous species that have now recovered were going extinct, like the bald eagle.

> better off middle class

The middle class wasn't better off, it was larger. The poverty rate in 2017 was half of what it was in 1960. And since 1960 many families have moved from the middle income quintile to one of the top quintiles. The middle class in the US didn't disappear into poverty, most of it just became more wealthy.

The 1960s sucked, there was political upheaval, the Cold War, the Cuban Missile crisis, global spanning totalitarianism, frequent political assassinations, Jim Crow, and on and on.
Add Karlheinz Deschner to the list. He published the final (10th) volume of "Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums(Christianity's Criminal History)" in late 2013. 6 months later, he passed away.
"It really blows for the employer, but in a lot of cases, it's the job that makes you long-term sick in the first place"

So because some employers are bad apples, everybody has to pay up? For many employers, that would be the end of it. Employers are also just people in most cases.

As an example, I suddenly became employer when my kids joined a privately run kindergarden. The parents all together were the employer, and there were two nannies. Any nanny becoming pregnant would already be a huge strain on the whole organization.

People like to think of "companies" as black boxes with infinite money supply, but that usually is not the case.
Why? The email is from 1996. Gates wasn't worried about platforms that didn't exist in 1996.
Yes but prior to that you need to make software developers "professionals" with licensing and an ethics board. Without the ability to say, "I won't build this, and you can't replace me with someone who will" putting the onus on individual devs is pointless.
Yeah, you'd usually say "my friends are alcoholics".

Also, there aren't really that many actual alcoholics at 23. Actual alcoholism tends to take years to develop.
As an example of what I'm talking about, no reasonable person would prominently display a swastika even though it's technically an Indian symbol of divinity. That's because it has an immense amount of baggage now almost inextricably bound up with its original definition; if you display a swastika people (at least in the west) will immediately connect it to Nazism.

Similarly, if I went on TV and proudly claimed that we should be doing eugenics, many would assume that I want to forcibly sterilize an underclass using unscientific ideas about heritability, and that I'm probably racist, too. I would have to do a lot of work to convince people that, no, all I really mean is that we should be able to do genetic testing to see if babies-to-be have the correct number of chromosomes (and so on), and decide to bring them to term based on that information.

Maybe you want to rehabilitate the term, which, OK, fine. But it's a mistake to assume that you can take the original definition of something and assume that's all the word "means" to people.
Too bad they skipped a letter in naming it; it would've been some good PR for China.

https://www.rapidtables.com/math/symbols/greek_alphabet.html
I have recently had similar experience, but sending an email with my questions solved this problem. Of course if their HR or team is slow to answer it isn't worth that much, but still better than not writing that email (you can still point to it later). I was even thinking, maybe this is part of the test, to see how comfortable/proactive the candidate is with asking/clarifying a task.
There is evidence that traditional software engineering interviews[1] assess a candidate's ability to perform under pressure better than their ability to do the job. I find it crazy that you need to spend weeks studying leetcode-style problems after doing the job all day in order to prepare for an interview.

Coincidentally, I've started working on a product to help this[2]. The general idea is that tasks like pull-requests, bug fixes and realistic take home projects are a better way to test candidates. Everything is done using Github, the tasks are all realistic and candidates can use their own laptop and development environment. It's not fully ready yet, but if anybody wants to chat about it just use the info@ address for the site.

[1] https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/07/200714101228.h...
[2] https://devscreen.io/
Can confirm, when you have a small number of cattle at least some of them end up with names.
I honestly don’t think it’s an issue. If people are paranoid they can control their cookies via their browsers. Getting targeted advertising is a good thing not a bad thing to me (just my opinion).
You make a valid criticism. The estimates I've used are likely upper range. But even if we're off by a factor of 1/2 (which I don't believe) I feel the point being made still stands.

It also seems the increase in hashrate coincides with China banning Bitcoin mining? That likely puts a skew on the numbers, although I'm not immediately sure which way.
Practically everyone tracks. Not practically everyone prepares food in a facility that also handles shellfish, etc. It's not philosophical that op reports (being sick of) clicking cookie banner ads in each site they visit. It's not even surprising empirically.
Your boss isn't going to not dispute that it's illegal. He's going to claim that they had experts look at it and it's fine.
The vaccines were never purported to be 100% effective, and all the data and information was clear that they had lower effectiveness against Delta, and even lower against Omicron.

If people told you that the vaccines would lower your chances of contracting every known major variant and lower your chances of a serious illness, they were right. If they told you that the vaccines were guaranteed to completely prevent every variant of the virus, they were lying to you. If you heard the former but interpreted it as the latter, that's on you.
If you had posted that in the first place it would have been fine. Please avoid snarky one-liners, especially on divisive, inflammatory topics.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Technically true but in practice many SPAs will suffer form lower lighthouse scores which will affect page rank. Of course, this is not the case for SPAs that were optimized from the start, but that is rarely the case in the real world.
I am both accountant (actually educated) and developer. I will not rant (today) on how I disagree with unit testing and there are better ways to get the result.

I just wanted to point out double bookkeeping analogy is bad.

Double bookkeeping is there to make certain types of errors very visible.

Double bookkeeping comes from idea that things do not just show up or disappear, but they change state -- value appearing on one account must have come from another. And so double bookkeeping is basically saying -- we want to have a system where it is immediately visible or even impossible to write something down that does not preserve this invariant.

It has nothing to do with whether the operation is accounted for correctly. You can still mess up accounts very easily.

Double bookkeeping does not mean double checking. You just select two accounts and put the same value on opposite sides of those accounts. This is a single operation. Everything about it can be wrong -- the value can be wrong, the accounts can be wrong and nothing is going to catch that error.

Actually, using invariants is one technique I use to ensure my code works correctly. Has nothing to do with unit tests. I just write code, whenever it is possible, in a way that makes it impossible to put it in a wrong state.
> could we not create a version that was 100x more transmissible than omicron but completely benign? Cane toads in Australia aside ;)

You overestimate our abilities to make viruses that do what we want, let alone to make viruses that do what we want and won't evolve into viruses that do what we don't want after being released into the wild.

This is also basically saying "can't we make a transmissible vaccine", and as much as I like vaccine mandates, I think there would be significant ethical issues with that.
The problem with formal verification is that in practice, many problems can't even be formally specified. Try formally specifying the requirement "the GUI should work as expected" – it's hard enough even to test this, and impossible to formally specify.

Of the remaining problems, the complete, formal specification would be larger, more complex, and more bug-ridden than the implementation. "Hey adwn, can you add a button to the GUI so the user can export the current dataset to a CSV file?" Maybe 20-50 lines of code, but a full specification would be a multi-year project – and it would be almost certainly wrong.
Kafka and Zookeeper the hard way, on GCP
Interesting to see how sacrificing some freedoms to give more freedom to others in the short term, eventually enhances your same former freedoms in the medium or long term.
So? A middle class experience from 1622 is also affordable for most Americans today, and now we don't have to worry about raids from the natives! Clearly we have no right to complain /s

I'm not arguing things are equivalent to 1922 on an absolute scale, but on a relative scale they're closer than they were in the recent past. The prosperity of the previous century has shifted the goal posts for what defines upper, middle and lower class. But after a long period of shifting the goal posts in a positive direction, we've had three or four decades of things shifting in the opposite direction, and that trend appears to be accelerating for the moment.

As for upward mobility, that largely only exists for people with college degrees these days. And even then only a few select degrees are really worth anything. And college costs are insanely inflated compared to where they were in 1980, let alone 1922. Is it possible to better oneself in 2022? Sure, but I'd argue there were much more opportunities for middle class people just 40 years ago. A Unionized coal miner with experience could make an upper middle class salary without the burden of higher education that costs as much as a house. Ditto for many factory jobs.

A job at Walmart making minimum wage that hasn't been adjusted for inflation for decades does not have anything resembling the same purchasing power as a minimum wage job 60 years ago. Walmart jobs are notorious for requiring food stamps despite working full time hours.
If a law trying to decrease the number of murders actually doesn’t do much and then increase rapes, wouldn’t you think the law was a bad idea in the first place?
I was thinking of using a framebuffer version of VICE as 'init' to boot directly to a C=64 environment.
There's a premium placed on first-edition hardcover books.

As a prolific watcher of the show Pawn Stars, I can tell you exactly why this is. Imagine the first edition of Harry Potter and the Sorceror's Stone. JK Rowling is an unknown author, the original run is comparatively very small and there's nothing special about the book so people read them which adds wear and tear and worse they sometimes throw them away! So you're left with very few pristine copies of that first edition. It's rare as hell and there's nothing you can do to make more of them.

Subsequent editions sell about 107 million copies. There are tens of millions of later editions in pristine copy. People bought them explicitly to collect them and put them in plastic containers. There are tons of them!

So that first edition has real scarcity. You can never make more. Can't say that about NFTs.

NFTs are silly, but collectors are inherently silly

I don't think this is what is happening at all. I think NFTs are a tax scam that cause them to sell for ridiculous $100,000+ prices and then regular people see that and think they can get rich by getting into NFTs. All the while not realizing the real deal is to dodge taxes and this NFT collector stuff is nonsense.