skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Something fundamental changes in your life when you become debt-free.

Being able to pay off a debt at anytime is equally freeing, for me at least. Paying off a loan with an interest rate significantly below inflation is not a great use of money[1] (and an opportunity loss). Putting that lumpsum into bonds (any bond with interest higher than the loan) is better, or even investing in stocks with a stop-loss. If I lose my job and have to flip burgers, that's when I'll pay off the loan and get a little extra from the investment/bond, thanks to the power of compounding interest.

1. Its the equivalent of someone offering you a 6- or 7-figure loan payable in 20/30 years at 2-3% when inflation is 6%, and you decline.
> He did not repeat himself

I never said he repeated himself. I just said his opening gambit in the conversation was a salvo that merely denigrated the other options without any information in defense of his view.

This tends to not invite productive discourse.
And the idea is generally wrong; you can mangle code into a pure shape but the conceptual model does usually involve mutation.
Oh cool! Never seen anything quite like this before, especially the concept of two search fields. Did you have any inspiration for creating this, OP?

Of course, the major problem with this (I just tested it) seems to be performance. Have you performed any performance optimisations / have anything in mind?
> So how did we lose the women in computing? They did not just leave; they were pushed out.

The problem is how we define "computing" in the first place.

The movie "hidden figures" [0] comes to mind. The three main characters are all "women in computing" and work as "computers"... meaning they perform computations manually [1] alongside other female computers (the term used at the time).

Computers before the 80's required a lot of support staff to operate. Programmers and Engineers didn't directly interact with the machine; typically programs were written on paper and then transcribed into punched cards by secretaries (who at some places would be referred to as "programmers" or "computer operators") and then organized to be batch processed. The results would then be retrieved once the computation actually happened as they tried maintaining the machines close to 100% usage.

That's where most of the confusion stems from. These were all accounted as "computer related occupations" back in the 50's through 80's. The personal computers and minicomputers made most of these positions obsolete, since the engineers could simply use the machine interactively.

But years after years people find this "collapse" of "women in computing" and interpret it as woman getting pushed out of engineering or proper programming positions.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden_Figures

[1] With the advent of the first numerical computers, they eventually learn programming, but it is implied that the human computers won't be needed once the machine can be directly programmed by them or the engineers.
Today is my last day at my current job. I had a colleague leave last year after he had some issues with his team, and I learned that a significant salary bump was pretty easy to get. I was _really_ bored at my role, and didn't see a strong future for our project and company, so I started looking.

I'll be starting a new job at the end of the month. Salary is over 2x my current pay, and if you include equity the total compensation will be 3.5x my current pay. I will have to relocate (which I wanted to do anyway), but I can't fathom why anyone _wouldn't_ be looking right now given the state of the job market.
Sorry to hear about your experience with Gusto, especially after just signing on with them. I work at a company called GoCo and we are an HRIS platform that specializes in companies your size. We have dedicated client success managers who are assigned to our clients accounts and are available via a direct phone number for support. If you are interested in hearing more about our services and why we are a top rated HRIS platform with payroll capabilities, please feel free to shoot me a DM and I will be more than happy to have an introductory conversation with you!
Can we agree that the new "best default" way of instantiating is... pretty damn weird?

auto foo = std::make_unique<Foo>(args);

Think about explaining this to a new C++ developer.

This will feel much more natural to most developers:

var foo = new Foo(args);
>to use it for long distance line haul service so this is going between Shenzhen and some customs clearing warehouse in the USA or central hub

Uh, why would FedEx not fly other international routes, e.g. to the Middle East?

>. This jammer is only useful against a threat where there's an urban built up environment around the airport.

No, the attempted downing of the DHL A-300 starting from Baghdad using a manpads was done from outside the city. The plane was at 2400m already.
I love Reddit, but it has the worst popularity to UX ratio I've ever seen. They try very hard at making their web UI annoying so you switch to their mobile app.
Are you saying that without mmap() there will be data races??
I believe there are DIRCM systems in use now which blind missile seekers using gimbaled laser beams.

The one offered by Elbit and in use on some Israeli airliners is called C-MUSIC: https://elbitsystems.com/pdf/c-music/
I have worked on code that took the OpenLDAP approach. It sucked, guiding to partial parsing and processing. The rest of your question misunderstands the nature of semantics I'm talking about. It's not that we can't make XML or JSON it's that programming languages often don't have types that map naturally to all of ASN.1 default not nil doesn't work in Go for example.
Sometimes you open the box. There could be 'cartridge reactors' that live in a stylish hutch and only get opened at the factory, but if this is the first one they will probably need to open it and poke around inside for some reason.

Even if it only gets opened at the factory then you have to worry about the factory.
I haven't shopped with them since they started sending extreme adult content to mailing lists they knew contained 13 year olds
If money isn't the issue then you won't mind us flipping salaries, will you, boss?
20-30% ?? What kind of money are you assuming most people make. at anything over 100k a year that is a lot of extra money anything less and it is probably needed. It could simply be used to retire a few years earlier if nothing else. It could pay for vacation. It could pay off a vehicle. It could pay down a mortgage or appraisal gap in this market.

A 20% raise is huge at any income level.
I highly support playing negotiation and/or lying+consequence board games with children. The skills are lifelong, and the stakes are much lower than when they have to exercise them in the real world.

Coup [0] and Love Letter [1] are both easy entry and quick play examples.

Also, I got in the habit of making my kids negotiate their own payment for household tasks. With agreement based on the skill with which they do so. ;)

[0] https://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/131357/coup

[1] https://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/129622/love-letter
The newest building codes (in New York, Seattle, and a few other places) simply ban gas hookups. You don't want that NO2 outside in a dense city, either.
They mention investigating another viral post farm back in November, which was discussed on HN here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29309201

Link to the November post: https://www.garbageday.email/p/when-the-traffic-firehose-is-...

All roads to monetization require engagement, so you just end up with groups that churn out "bait" like this.
I refuse to use chat bots. The technology never worked, and I don't want to waste my time with something that doesn't work.

What is happening is that some salesman is laughing to the bank. I few months ago, a salesman that I work with asked if we should put a chat bot on our website. (IE, with the tone that he wasn't going to take no for an answer.)

I responded that they don't work, and will frustrate people who come to our website. I also pointed out that we are a high-cost asset, with a high-touch sales process. Such a chat bot would be insulting.

His response was some form of "but everyone's using it and they're super-popular and work well."

I then pointed out that the article he read was probably written by the company that sells them.
Machines have a lot of advantages though like perfect, practically infinite memory, internet connectivity, the ability to learn from the cumulative experience of millions of humans, specialized sensors, omnidirectional vision, never getting tired, never being inattentive, never being intoxicated.

I wouldn't bet against machines' ability to brute force this. The failure modes will be different and scary, but much safer on average.
> The set of techies and the set of nordic people [...] don't overlap.

Huh? So there are no Nordic techies?!?
Smartphones are hell for thumbs and index fingers
I agree there are so many issues with coding education, (full disclosure, that's why I'm building Qvault.io) but I don't think the big problems are the ones presented here.

I see the following as the biggest unsolved problems:

1. Online learning rarely teaches you what you should be learning. Resources are useless if you don't know which subject matter is right for you yet.
2. Platforms don't give you a feel for "completion", e
g. when and how should I start job searching.
3. You don't get personal mentorship or cohort support like you would at school
4. Too many videos, not enough code. Almost all learning when it comes to coding should include writing code.
5. Healthy mix of guided and unguided learning. Courses are great for abstract concepts, projects need to follow so that you can apply what you learn on your own
I've thought before about making a "dialect" of C++ that doesn't add any new fundamental capabilities, but simply changes syntax to make the more modern options easy and natural and make old C features verbose and difficult. For example, using "*" to represent unique_ptr and std::legacy_c_ptr<...> to represent "bare" pointers. Ideally, such a dialect could be fully include-compatible with all existing C++ code (although macros could be difficult), similar to how Rust "editions" or go "language versions" work. If C++ compilers offered a "#pragma modern_defaults" would people be interested in using it?
You raise some good points and you ultimately might be right, but from my perspective, you're recycling lazy arguments without much backing.

I live in New York state (USA) and we have restrictive policies about how much solar we can build and push back into the grid. In some cases, even doing an investigation to see if an area can support pushing a significant amount of solar back onto the grid can cost upwards of $10k (so I've heard). This steers solar production to only provide solar to the facility that it sits next to and disincentivizes pushing solar back onto the grid.

Let's say I wanted to build a solar system, at dirt cheap costs, that could meet 3x the energy needs of my house. What do I do with the excess that can't be pushed back into the grid? You're absolutely right, I could smelt aluminium, scrub C02, or open a "smart" laundry mat, but all those require a large up front capital expenditure.

Put another way, let's say you're producing an excess of cheap energy as an individual, so maybe 100kWh per day. What technology can you install that's cheap to set up, can use the energy in a linear fashion (can scale up) and be profitable? There's other benefits, like transportability and relatively sporadic use, that might come into play as well. I would genuinely like to know what other technology could fill this niche. Cryptocurrency is one and it seems well suited.

In terms of sporadic energy availability, I've heard this argument in a video that Elon Musk did as well and I'm not sure I believe it. If the energy availability is consistent enough, say in a block of 6-10 hours in a day, then I could imagine that could provide enough stability to mine intra-day. Regardless, battery technology is coming down in price and it wouldn't be hard to install a battery system to give consistent power by increasing the solar installation cost by a factor two to three times.

In terms of your basic economic point about Bitcoin using energy that isn't available for anything else, that's like saying energy invested in supporting the networking infrastructure can't be used for anything else. The energy invested in the system is so that the system can be used as intended. If you don't believe Bitcoin/cryptocurrency has any value, then just say that.

In terms of the Visa/scaling/energy/transaction limit, yes, Bitcoin can't use "layer 1" as the payment processor at scale, but maybe providing "layer 2" solutions, like Lightning or something similar can work out. This is what places like El Salvador are using and is why people are invested in Lightning development.

Again, you might ultimately be right, but my plea is for better discussion on this topic here. Especially for the "bitcoin mining needs consistent energy availability", I haven't seen any good resources to really refute or bolster this claim.
Yeah, but if the market crashes while you’re still overpaying your mortgage, now you’re out of a job AND potential savings that you can’t get back. With even inflation outpacing mortgage rates now, I’m not certain in what situation—even from a risk perspective—it makes more sense to pay down a mortgage more quickly than necessary. (With current rates at ~3%. Obviously in the late 80s it made sense to pay the house off as quickly as possible.)
SARS-CoV2 is in the title, that may be enough for being taken down automatically to avoid flamewars.
Notoriously, Margaret Thatcher used the royal/singular we once ("we have become a grandmother"), so it's not reserved strictly for monarchs.

It's at least less jarring than illeism, where one refers to oneself in the third person, I suppose...
Looking at the number of failed kickstarters for physical objects that are multiple orders of magnitude less complicated than a nuclear power plant with new technology might be instructive.
The wavelength of an atom (DeBroglie Wavelength) is much lower than that of a photon of visible light, so it follows that anything that makes the path of one beam even slightly longer, such as putting a mass near it, would be far more detectable in this manner.

There might be a small, very hard to detect optical interference shift if the experiment were re-run with a coherent laser beam.
When I was a kid, the train conductors would shoot salt rounds at us from their shotguns. I guess that's not the case anymore?
Land would appreciate significantly less if housing and zoning regulations were eliminated. While there is value in being near a city core, land isn't a strongly constrained resource. Meeting the onerous requirements to build a home near this city core continually grandfathers in present-day land owners with buildings from the early 1900s while requiring entirely different standards for the next generation.

We have intentionally sabotaged the ability for our youth to afford houses under guise of safety while simultaneously grandfathering in our own shitty run down structures that were built under much looser requirements. The result is land with a shitty old structure can be worth almost as much as a new one, under this restrained and captured supply.
I can definitely relate to the tedium and nervousness around following long dependency chains. It really makes reading code so much slower.

I'm a little surprised that he finds the lack of types such a hindrance. For me, without types it seems like the first visual scan of code is quicker since there's less for me to read and I can just focus on what's happening.

I love the idea of a decentralized login, and I hope something like MetaMask will gain a critical mass for it to be really common, but it the crypto part of it still just seems like unnecessary complexity. Of course I'm not as knowledgeable about encryption and stuff as the author of this post, so I could be missing something about why it's necessary.
Maybe by leaving you'll indirectly be helping them get the push they need to start look for something better themselves.

I know I dragged my feet but eventually enough people left that I was like, "Alright I have to find something new" and I ended up with a much better role and compensation as well, and probably should have left earlier. And I also like the people at the new place too, and keep in touch (somewhat) with my old coworkers.
I personally find it easier to remember what I've read, compared to what podcast/audio book I played while in bed.

It's also, curiosly, easier for me to follow written instructions, compared to spoken (at work for example).
Yea, I read through this thread a bit. I think everyone is mixing up skills and "thinking and reasoning". A game that is exercising a skill will be transferable to other times you use that skill, like mental math from Monopoly. However "thinking and reasoning" isn't a skill. I'm not sure how you improve them but I imagine it's a factor of [natural talent, diet, sleep, gut fauna, cardiovascular health, diversity of experience, self-esteem, sense of security, etc].
I agree. I can't find it right now, but there was an article on HN within the past few days talking about how software engineering is often more like writing and editing a book than engineering. That makes perfect sense to me. Code should be meant primarily to communicate with people, and only incidentally to give instructions to computers. It seems to be lost to the sands of time who said this first, but it is certainly true that code is read by humans many more times than it is written. Therefore, ceteris paribus, we should optimize for readability.

Readable code is often simple code, as well. This also has practical benefits. Kernighan's law[0] states:

> Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it.

Dijkstra says it this way:

> The competent programmer is fully aware of the strictly limited size of his own skull; therefore he approaches the programming task in full humility, and among other things he avoids clever tricks like the plague.[1]

Knuth has a well-documented preference for "re-editable" code over reusable code. Being "re-editable" implies that the code must be readable and understandable (i.e. communicate its intention well to any future editors), if not simple.

I know that I have sometimes had difficulty debugging overly clever code. I am not inclined to disagree with the giants on this one.

---

[0]: https://www.defprogramming.com/q/188353f216dd/

[1]: https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD03xx/E...
I do exactly the other way around on my smartphone: if there is a web app i won't install the app.
At the risk of sounding like a Reddit comment - I came here for this comment!
Thank you for sharing your DB course(s) videos on the YouTube. I'm a CMU staff member (Open Learning Initiative) that would never be able to enroll on-site, given likely my lower priority for getting a seat, but watching your videos online has been fantastic.
Tesla expands Nevada factory solar array toward goal to become world’s biggest
Exactly this! To quote myself from a couple of years ago:

I wish the style of teaching complex programming topics walked me through the pain of making something work, exploring a few alternative solutions, showing the tradeoffs, and then after the pain has been experienced by the learner, a proper solution is finally introduced and recommended. IMO it's a much more powerful technique for teaching if you walk the learner through the pains first, then arrive at a solution, and tell them that "you've just [discovered how ownership works in rust]"; i.e. the concept is given a name at the _very end_, not defined at the beginning as a solution to a pain the learner never experienced. Unfortunately very few books/tutorials take this approach.
I feel like the average person already knows why. They know what they want and they just want the info on how to do it.

I don’t think the order of teaching presented in the article as bad actually is bad. What I think the problem I and others had is learning from a book to start with is really hard. Stuff doesn’t get retained well or make sense.

Programming finally clicked for me when I did the codeacademy class for JavaScript in 2012. What helped was it wasn’t just shoving walls or text at me. It was “here is a very tiny concept, go try it. Now here is another tiny concept, try this”
Kids. We have 2 toddlers and are expecting again. Both of us had parents who were teachers, which meant their working hours lined up perfectly with our school hours and holidays. Raising multiple kids is pretty tough if you don't have that luxury! Tracking doctors, dentists, caretakers, after school activities, etc was exhausting, and for virtually all of these you need some kind of backup plan. Especially with a third child, there would be virtually no way for us to handle,say, a COVID wave. My wife is high earning and our tastes are pretty humble.

At one point, this might have been a hard decision, but COVID and a child on the way feel like we've had an extra nudge in this direction. The labor market is so tight and my specialty is in enough demand that I feel like I could jump back into my field in another few years if it makes sense for us.
Maybe the sophons should have paid more attention to Chinese literature?
I don't understand why something like arresting criminals has to be immediately seen as part of some sinister scheme. What's wrong with "cleaning up the cyberspace" being exactly that?
I never understood that kind of US/Western point of view. I will give a trivial example: my grandparents purchased their house in year 19xx and both died in the same house in 20xxs. How's the price of house even mattered all their life? There were living there, it's not something external. Today, I specifically asked my parents if they knew how much their house cost. Nope, they didn't know. It's an irrelevant information for them. Cost it 10k or 10m won't change a thing - they live in it, it's not something external. So house-asset (why it's asset?) is something more US-specific I think. Also it ... bad?
Change your workflow. You cannot expect a less powerful system to perform the same as a more powerful system.

Rather than watching YouTube directly, use youtube-dl with VLC. Rather than using HTML Gmail, use IMAP and a native email client. Rather than using Eclipse, use vim.

We all fall into patterns. We grow to find comfort in those. But, we can't expect to maintain those patterns when circumstances change.
What’s going on with Covid deaths data?
Imagine an Elon Musk company being total douchebags!
I'm saying it's a step in the right direction. No more starting at zero or even being "under water" like with ISO's. With RSU's they just grant you the stock like they used to only do for execs (with nonqualified options or whatever). As long as the company doesn't get delisted or something you're a stakeholder.
I left my job last April entirely due to compensation. It was also due to life balance, but I was willing to sacrifice some life balance in exchange for higher salary.

I was working 60+ hours a week and on call three nights a week at a consulting firm doing engineering. My manager told me I was doing a phenomenal job and the entire year-end review cycle agreed - I scored higher than 95% of my peers and told I was "invaluable" to my team. Most of that was less because of my engineering skills and more because I was just pouring my life into this job.

Then, I got a 2% raise (yes, 2.0%, about $100/month). meaning I was still paid less than everyone who had just been hired. Many of those new hires weren't even engineers! I quit pretty fast for an 80% raise.
Show HN: Yahoo Finance CLI Written in Rust