skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think a lot of people feel like that - at least from time to time. It's not easy to find meaning in modern society and the corporate world.

I just shut it down while working and think what I want to achieve and do outside of work. Alternatives, are not really that much more meaningful. Even traveling gets boring after a while.
Humans are social creatures, just because we were predisposed in a certain way does not mean that there are not great skills to learn from the other side, which can improve our health and social status - COVID and remote work is an example.
It's clearly the Uber/WeWork playbook: masquerade as a tech company, even if you're not, because then you can lose money all the time without investors stopping their injections of fresh cash.
Basing your happiness from your work life is a recipe for unhappiness. You will always find something to nitpick about
The UAE is certainly a muslim/arab country and alcohol is certainly available outside of bars. And I would say from my experiences in Dubai, a lot more than "1 or 2" muslims are getting drunk here.
Books You Need to Master the Concepts of Physics and Math
> Time tracking is self sabotage.

That's a bit extreme. Lots of people track time and hourly billing is common in many industries. If it was self sabotage, the practice would have died out naturally.

> It's better to estimate the hours required, quote for those hours and agree a completion date in advance.

I think project-based pricing can work well if you have clearly-defined scope, if you've solved this kind of problem before and there aren't many unknown unknowns, and you invest in a lot of upfront planning and estimation.

Most of my work hasn't been like this. I'm usually filling a role, not completing a single, well-defined project. And I'm often solving problems that I haven't solved before, where a client and I are uncovering complexity as we go.

> With time tracking you're inviting unnecessary scrutiny and failing to establish work boundaries that can leave the client with no sense of beginning and end.

I could see this being the case with micromanagers and toxic clients. But I think time tracking and sharing a certain level of detail at regular intervals helps clients, and potentially other team members, understand the effort needed for various activities. That helps everyone build their sense of what it takes to complete the work.

> Upfront estimation with deadline gives them the peace of mind they need, establishes the boundaries and frees you to get on with the job.

Peace of mind comes down to trust. And trust can come from a SOW/contract, as well as from a relationship that's built through clear, regular communication and delivering incremental value over time. The contract is important, but that's the low bar of trust.

> If you underestimate do better next time, if you overestimate then great have a margarita.

In my experience, software project estimation is very difficult and the risks grow with the size of the project. At a certain size, if your estimates are wrong for a flat-fee projects, there may not be a "next time."

It's currently fashionable to hate on hourly billing, but I personally don't know how I'd make it as a consultant if I switched to project-based pricing. And yes, I'm familiar with Jonathan Stark's writing on the topic. More power to people that can make that work!
> Health insurance is a tricky one but the cost of adding a spouse vs getting two single plans is typically not that different.

Sure.

Where being married is cheaper for health insurance is when you have kids, at least with employer group plans.

(Premiums for 2-party plans tend to be about, often exactly, double single plans. Family plans, for 3+, tend to be about 2.5 times. If your coparent isn't eligible on the same plan the marginal cost of each of the first two kids is higher.)
As a single with no children I don’t need to work much, so I don’t. This lifestyle isn’t for everyone, but I’m pretty sure it’s for me. There’s a looong list of things I like to do with my time other than paid work.
Maybe try the Peace Corps and see if you can apply your skills there for a year or two. Might give some ideas or perspective.
Find a university research project that needs some help. Pay will be low but there will be many opportunities to get ideas that will help them. And all the grad students will go on to greater things and pretty soon you'll have a pretty high powered network of people who know your value.
Like others in this thread I'm not an expert, but it seems to me that the thing every cyclical housing market has in common is a heavily subsidized/credited/backed mortgage market. I think the counterexample is Germany? They build a good amount of housing every year, they watch housing prices very carefully and pull some levers if they tick up or turn down, and they don't store a huge amount of their population's wealth in their homes.

Anything else wildly perverts monetary policies. The mortgage market is suddenly the real bond market, there's extreme moral hazard, there are either explicit mortgage market safety nets or quasi-nationalized mortgage providers, etc. It becomes a weird monetary policy slush fund that is incidentally also where people live.
I don't see this is a disagreement with the GP. You say they (all engineers) can learn it, GP says they (few engineers) could tell you how it's done. Those are in perfect agreement. At any moment in time, there is likely no engineer who can explain fully every process used by their domain or object created by others in their domain. That doesn't mean that the majority of those engineers couldn't learn any arbitrary process or the details of an arbitrary object in their domain.
If you're minimizing challenge for your software engineers, you're making worse engineers over time
+1. Personal roots always lead to the environment around a person. How someone responds plays a role in the result, but that absolutely should not obscure the fact that the circumstances are an enormous factor.
“ People who have really great jobs(not talking about money ofc), how did you find them?”

Sticking with it for more than 5 years… the jobs ended up being great
Or one CTO for a lot less than that and a bunch of engineers for...also a _lot_ less than that. "Up to" makes the sentence meaningless, this is just for marketing.
Picking up major WeWork vibes from this.
Note that Intel’s implementation is on the PCH/chipset, and as such allowing users to freely swap CPUs.
Google is still the name of LLC most people are referring to. Rest of the Alphabet aren't the target. Facebook the company no longer exist. So I'll vote for MAGMA
I’ve never drank alcohol other than during a 1-year period 10+ years ago, when I tried to get into it at the urging of friends (it didn’t take).

I don’t recall feeling any overall mental differences in the period where I was drinking, although I was only doing it once a week or so.
I don’t really know anything about fashion, but I find it hard to believe that anyone would take Apple seriously as a high-end fashion brand. To me they seem like Target: undoubtedly more fancy than Walmart, but it’s not like that’s a high bar.

And sure, maybe the fashion eites of the world all use Apple products, but that’s more a consequence of the duopolies and a lack of choice for consumers rather than any actual merit of the brand itself.
doing mostly 'cog in a machine' type of work in order to make enough money to be safe and have some extra for fun and future planning is a core part of nearly every human life on the planet and most people get on fine with it, without wanting to kill themselves.

in fact for most people the situation is significantly worse, OP is in a privileged position in a relatively well paid industry with relatively non-menial work and is still complaining. there is no other way around it, there is something wrong with OP.

and before all of this corporate stuff developed, people were mostly farming all day which is hardly an improvement.

depression need not enter the picture. imo being a privileged baby having way too high expectations of what life is supposed to give you is all explanation necessary in this case. imo OP needs to stop being a baby and grow up. this might be caused by reading too much about how awesome other people have it and being jealous / not able to cope that OP is not in the same situation, but whatever the cause, the effect is obvious.
> Maybe I'm naive, but it just seems that almost every job out there is about squeezing more profit out of people, and absolutely nothing else, and it doesn't really make me want to work.

It's called a business. Maximizing profit is their entire point.
For what it's worth, I have ADHD and see a lot of myself in this. Grinding out code for some dry product is incredibly hard to sustain for me.
NK would be bad because of government repression, but Somalia might be doable.

- parts of the country are defacto independent of the state

- can hire a private army for security

- short hop on a private DC-8 to world class health care in the gulf
A lot that cover partners cover only registered domestic partnership, which was created as a lesser option to avoid providing same sex marriage, but has generally been retained because it's been adapted to other uses. But it's still a state-defined legal relationship, so if you are against that with marriage...
I think this is pretty cool. nice work @valkrieco
Learn the correct jargon and use it consistently
Jesus Christ, calm down. Someone not liking the current job landscape isn't a basis to diagnose them with depression. Unless you're a tenured psychologist, you shouldn't be handing out free advice online. Even then, the psychologists I do know refuse to spread that kind of FUD online. Everyone's situation is unique, trying to box things in to "similar situations" is a good way to make bad generalizations.
I saw this just today in London! I was like "where do I scan? oh... oooh!". I wonder what they're actually using to detect the items.
It's both. I don't think it's too much of a stretch to broaden what he meant by seen/unseen to also refer to econometrics models which incorporate only some things (that can be measured/seen) and not others (that are unmeasured/unseen).

The seen/measurable: employment in the production of windows.
The unseen/unmeasurable: missing employment in the production of suits.
Perhaps it has to do with aptitude and education and experience. Not everyone can be a SWE just like not everyone can be an artist or an athlete.

Also..maybe it’s not always about the money. I also find it rather charming that you think a SWE would not have to deal with long hours or certifications or hostile work environment.
But isn't building the system (0 to 1), harder than scaling (1 to 100)? Why do they need all the engineers now?
> "We are looking for people who can create new value and think about businesses from scratch, not consultants and those who worked at big corporations," Yanai said.

To me this shows Yanai's head is in the right place, but the question of how you achieve this in a big company. Offering big salaries is of little use if you can't create an environment conducive to iterating fast on big ideas. Essentially you need startup people, but in general startup people will be eaten alive by big company politics. Even in SV where you have more crossover it's still a rare breed that can do both. I have no idea if Uniqlo fits the stereotypical Japanese corporate culture, but if the senior ranks are full of lifers with a conservative bent then Yanai has his work cut out for him.
What a dream to be seeking personal fulfillment from a job rather than the means to survive. Not knocking your sentiment, I've been there, but this a great time to be alive.
Tesla is successful because people are being told they will be able to sleep or work in their Tesla while it drives on its own. Like, you know, actually be allowed to take their hands of the driving wheel. Not now, but… very soon, so soon it worth 10k additional dollars. So, sure, I can’t deny Tesla success, but it’s a successful scam. And you people supporting that means what? Businesses should now be on the edge of being a scam to not be left behind by big mouth CEOs and their mindless followers? I don’t want to live in such a world. I want honesty, integrity and responsibility from the industry leaders. Elon is the opposite, and yet he’s touted as the savior of humanity. That’s gross.
A TPM allows to detect this tampering if used properly for that use case. (To clarify, Windows with BitLocker bound to TPM and Secure Boot on does _not_ do this, taking a shortcut)

UEFI Secure Boot doesn’t have much to do with this, because this is about loading an altered UEFI firmware.
Here’s my heuristic:

1) Filter down to companies that don’t actively harm people/society (this narrows things quite a bit!)

2) Take pleasure/pride in the purely technical aspects of things: making a good system, a good UX, making things performant and elegant and robust, even if the end purpose feels very boring and/or pointless

Sometimes you can do a bit better than that- I’ve had a job whose product felt interesting but pointless, and I’ve had one whose product felt boring but arguably made some people’s lives better. But you have to go pretty far off the beaten path to find one that’s truly fulfilling on all axes. For me, my job is about the paycheck and some base satisfaction from technical execution. For everything else, there’s my free time (and to that end: work life balance is important too!)
> Frustration is very much a mindset-problem though. In part, it's misaligned expectations...

...Like the kind you might get from a misleading Who This Book Is For section?
Get some help. Most of the world, rich and poor find meaning and satisfaction in their lives. Look at happiness surveys from poor countries
There are three tools useful on machines of this era:

1. The aforementioned IDE/CF adapter. It helps that it's a dumb PCB since CF speaks IDE natively.

2. A Gotek Floppy Emulator (With the FlashFloppy firmware)

3. A SCSI2SD SCSI emulator.
My first job at computer store in high school I worked without pay initially just to get parts to build a 486-DX with it wonderful floating point unit so I could finally play Falcon 3.0 properly.

That same job taught me networking (Novell) and got me programming business apps in MS Access and the rest is history.

Unfortunately I didn't get into Linux until much later.
> “medical and scientific advice”

Curfew, masks while standing up and not when sitting down, cloth masks which data shows do nothing (from Bangladeshi RCT), etc.
I found great jobs by only working at seed and pre-seed startups (you have to be experienced/able enough to market yourself as a CTO). At this stage, there is no drudge, there's just adventures. Mostly failed adventures, but if you can get over that it's great!
Any tips for getting into this with only a standard development background?
> The fact that a library discourages you from learning it's internals is how you know it's well done. If you needed to understand it, you could. The reason you don't is because you've never had a compelling reason to.

I don't think we need to protect people from learning internals, they do that just fine on their own. I know many situations where we failed to understand internals even in the presence of compelling reason.

With apologies for continuing to quote myself:

"I want to carve steps into the wall of the learning process. Most programs today yield insight only after days or weeks of unrewarded effort. I want an hour of reward for an hour (or three) of effort." -- http://akkartik.name/about
'Type a' Personality Research Was Funded by Big Tobacco (2016)
It sounds like you want to work on something important to you. This will be different for everyone.

What matters to you?

For myself, I've had some great jobs, and some that just pay the bills. There are things I won't work on (gambling, weapons).

Even the jobs that pay the bills have been mostly OK, in that I've learned new things and met some lovely people. Sometimes they have led to better jobs indirectly. A very few jobs, with micro managers and bullies, I've resigned from.
https://dasung-tech.myshopify.com/products/dasung-25-3-e-ink...

Monochrome. It has "turbo refresh tech" but unclear what that really means; with e-readers, similar verbiage just means it's less bad. The resolution and pixel density is very nice. The prices would have to come down by at least a factor of 3 though, IMO. I'd take the under.
Basically impossible. They could be great niche monitors, for reading text or viewing mostly static content. At best maybe for kind of general web browsing, but even that is asking a _lot_ of the tech.
Type a Behavior and Coronary Heart Disease: Philip Morris’s “Crown Jewel”
It's not visible but I'm 99% sure it's RFID or something similar.
This would be so freaking easy to completely break.

Have a friend deposit some clothes in a booth => go get the clothes => checkout with all those clothes for free
Why not just install any linux desktop + nvidia drivers?

Thats what all the historic stuff was written on.

Also, much better to go with opencl than cuda for new developments these days (unless you are being funded in one of the nvidia startup programs)
They have a fantastic Theme park too
I read something a while back about AutoCAD using WASM.

Found this site after a quick google search but it doesn’t appear to be actively maintained : https://madewithwebassembly.com
How would you choose a colleague, or a friend, or a partner?
Someone trusted, for sure.

Is she/he gonna be exactly like you, or completely different?

How can you build trust and evaluate how a person would do in a different setting, in just a brief one-shot interview? Some relationships grow over time.

And how can you do that if there are thousands of candidates, who have other things to do in life than prove their worth to you, just to earn a living and have a house and medical care?

I guess the best way to build a fruitful work relationship is to try and see if there's a match. I think the interviews should be less like exams and more like meeting and knowing the other person.
It’s not just you. Under capitalism every business’ chief interest is to make profit - anything more meaningful than that is a useful side effect.

I would suggest you spend time doing other things, find work that is truly meaningful to you.

In this world people will look at you strange if you pursue meaning over money, but I think that’s better than a life of burnout and economic exploitation
I am afraid this hotel keeps its robots in inhumane conditions, stacked on to of each other in a dusty room. Time to alert Born Free Foundation.
Paper: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3477961/
I can't wait for a proper ACEP eInk device. I have a "colour" eInk with the RGB filter, but it's horrible. There is a very visible "screendoor" effect. Basically you can see each individual pixel of the filter layer. I wouldn't recommend it.
I shopped at a Uniqlo in Brooklyn and their checkout automation is very good. If you look carefully at the clothing tags, they have some RFID circuits in there. The result is you drop your clothing in a big self-checkout bin and it just rings up everything for you perfectly.
The devices I've seen with color e-ink need to intermittently flash the screen. I could live with a slow refresh rate, but having my screen flicker black once or twice a minute is a deal-breaker.
>pushing everyone into eating cheap to grow grains

There is more to plant-based food than grains. Seeds and legumes are full of nutrients. People can and do survive on way less meat.
No, you cannot do all those things and more while working. You can't even get a taste, it's more akin to looking through a store window.

It's not possible to fully experience a foreign country/culture in a 1 week vacation.

No idea about surfing, but it's not possible to even get a sense of what skiing has to offer in a couple of weekends a year.

Maybe, for a few people, it's possible to find the motivation and energy to fully immerse yourself in working on your own software after already having put in a full day of work, but they are in a tiny minority.
Its a list of cities with ambitions based around startups, technology, or creating a better planned city.
on Glen's note: A few paragraphs in, I got a sense that person's sudden revelation and change in career was due to psychedelics. Searched for "LSD" ah, there it is. "In several sessions over months I took LSD alone in my house with an eyeshade on listening to music." There seems to be common writing patterns from people who've used psychedelics heavily.
OP was me annoyingly quoting myself, and here's my refutation annoyingly quoting OP:

"Software libraries suck. Here's why, in a sentence: they promise to be abstractions, but they end up becoming services. An abstraction frees you from thinking about its internals every time you use it. A service allows you to never learn its internals."

"Confusingly, I've been calling Iverson's notion of subordination of detail 'abstraction', and Iverson's notion of abstraction 'service' or 'division of labor'. Though lately I try to avoid the term "abstraction" entirely. That seems on the right track. Regardless of terminology, this is a critical distinction."

As I hope these clarify, I have nothing against true abstractions as you describe them.
Well, the poster asked how people work a job without offing themselves.

Saying someone who is considering suicide might instead consider talking to their doctor doesn’t seem all that controversial to me?
Agreed. There’s another thing that must change as well: our (the US specifically) focus on profits above all else. We act as if our actions and decisions have no consequences and continually mortgage the future for profits today.

If we don’t change this, we’re dooming ourselves.
For whatever reason, unless you go super high end, beef in the UK tends not to be great. Given that it's much better in Ireland, which has the same climate, I don't really understand it.
What are they going to do, bump into all the humans?
RFID tags are very tiny, at Target we got them in stuff like the tags on dish towels. Not the paper tag held on by a plastic string but like the wash/materials tags.
You could also just walk out the front door with them, too.
> that almost every job out there is about squeezing more profit out of people, and absolutely nothing else

dude, where do you imagine the salaries come from?
Very nice! I would like to see... hear merge sort too!
I’m more interested in the other article:

How E Ink Failed to Bring Their Product to Consumers
I understand the point you’re trying to make but writing music is a creative process whereas marketing programming languages isn’t.

I was around at the time and C++ was trendy so Sun were
marketing it as the future for C++ developers. It was definitely influenced by what was in vogue at the time even if it doesn’t adopt all of the traits of C++.

I remember this because I wasn’t a fan of C++ back then as I’d come from the ALGOL family of languages so found C-style syntax a little alien (and tbh I still don’t like C++ now even though I’ve since warmed to C’s syntax) so it took me years before I warmed to Java.
Neat! One thing that has interested me about this game is whether or not there is an optimal first word. Is there is a word that contains the 5 letters which most commonly appear in the language? Preferably where more of the letters appear at their most common index? If so it seems one should use this word as the first guess each time given we have no other information other than the length of the word.
Out of interest, is there actually any evidence that patents are preventing developments in this area?