skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For those who want a rough programming analogy here -- this sounds like support for multi-row transactions in a SQL database where only single row edits were allowed before.

Now you can describe "buy goods A and B at $10 maximum, commit" and have the transaction either succeed or fail. Before you had to edit those rows individually and there's risk that you end up in a weird partial state, hence having to lower your bid to cover your risk.

Really exciting tech and it'll be great for these costs in market-making to be eliminated!
How to Make Package Signing Useful
I've been watching Dopesick, and the part, where they are chasing down the "1%" study, is pretty damn sobering.
Agree. Looking at HN, Blind, Glassdoor, very rarely do I remember seeing an engineer that would openly state that they love working there.
That's why controversial and new are the only worthwhile comment sortings on Reddit.
Haha, yes. I'm just a big fan of people trying. I'm also a big fan of anti-gatekeeping.
inter alia: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16515822
> That land gets its value from the city.

Land in the middle of bumblefuck costs more than $500/acre. But this doesn't matter anyway because that high value for land around cities exists presently. An acre of developable land 5 miles outside of Seattle proper is probably worth at least half a million dollars even if there's no infrastructure running there.

> One can imagine border taxes (tolls, employment taxes, et cetera) funding those land purchases.

One can imagine many things that are unrealistic. Cities cannot tax people outside their incorporated territory so this idea that they'll just tax people to death for living outside the city is unrealistic. They could certainly add tolls, but not at the volume that would be needed for this. And if they tried, the state legislature would doubtless swoop in and make it illegal. e.g., In Washington, road tolls can only be applied to road improvements (indeed only to improvements to the road being tolled). Any city that goes overboard trying to tax outsiders aggressively will just get shut down by the state.

> But as the city buys and razes the writing will be on the wall. If that starts pushing down prices...

This is pretty ridiculous. If the city starts reducing supply, costs will go up, not down.

The purchasing scale needed to achieve this is insane. This would absolutely require many billions to achieve. Even if a city could manage to get their citizens to agree, and the state to allow it, and structure the burden so it falls on outsiders, it would still take decades to fund and execute, and in that time land value would go up due to the squeeze, making this more and more difficult for the city.

> Though that would largely obviate the need for a green ring in the first place.

This I agree on. City density won't be improved by preventing suburbs but by allowing more density.
The post does come off as a touch arrogant, but I believe the core issue was that the role was misadvertised:

> I was hired as a frontend developer, which turned out to be misleading. [...] In order to triage this, I worked on a number of frontend projects in my spare time at a pace that was admittedly draining.

The author thought they were going to be doing frontend, but a significant portion of their work was not. So they quit. That seems extremely reasonable.
Indeed: https://www.lego.com/en-us/product/lego-large-creative-brick...

The promotional photos even echo that long-ago Lego ad the author laments as a bygone era, with a little girl building a house with no instructions (albeit the modern version is perhaps unrealistically restrained for something a kindergartner supposedly came up with).
> The counter-argument is [...]

There's also the fact that trying to establish any serious amount of competition within a specific route pretty soon runs into capacity limitations, especially since open access operators seem to focus mostly on faster long-distance trains, meaning that on mixed-traffic railways they'll conflict with both freight and regional/local trains. To maximise the capacity of a route, you need to coordinate the schedules of the various trains, which is of course an anathema to the dogma of free, unrestrained competition.

Another thing is that since its impossible to offer direct connections from anywhere to anywhere, especially at anything like a reasonable frequency, the railway system must rely on connections. Attractive connections with not too long waits are only possible between a very limited number of trains. Something like the integrated clockface schedule in Switzerland works only because there's one set of long distance trains that need to be taken care of and integrated with the schedules of regional trains and even other non-railway public transport.

> Of course the EU is trying to recreate the UK model EU-wide, we'll see how that goes..

At least the UK kept a common ticketing system with through-ticketing still available from anywhere to anywhere, plus – albeit with some teething trouble – somewhen in the last decade or so they finally settled on accepting that split tickets purchased independently by a passenger in order to save some money should get the same protection in terms of passenger rights (most importantly: if you miss a connection through no fault of your own, the railway needs to accommodate you, i.e. the ticket remains valid on later trains, you get a taxi/hotel/… if it was the last train of the day, alternatively you have the right to abort the journey and claim a refund, etc. etc.) as through-tickets bought in one transaction.

In the recent EU passenger rights reform, the parliament did try mandating something similar re more through-ticketing, but a number of member states were apparently heavily opposed to this (unfortunately including Germany it seems), so sadly it was dropped…
Of course the mainstream does nlt care as they internalized the cultural hegemony of workaholism. The sub and splinters remain a fringe far left anarchist ideology.
No that's definitely true, I should have been more specific. In my case, I was referring to some past acquaintances who are very vocal about their views on social media.

Specifically, the perspective I'm bothered by, is that of being pro-police intervention when it's for a cause you don't support, but calling to defund the police when they're disrupting a protest you _do_ support.
How a Program Gets Run: Linux
Even Stonehenge is larger
It was mentioned in the top level comment.
Move to the U.S. where your skills have a much higher value?
100-200k is incomprehensibly large for me
TED talks are overwhelmingly people wanting to be successful in capitalism. To have a talk pointing out the flaws of a system people desperately want to succeed in is abrasive and probably causes discomfort for the general TED audience.
At my work we go through interview training because if an employee is not hired, and believes they were treated unfairly or turned down for reasons that could be human rights violations and files a grievance, they can request copies of all documentation and notes from the company's side as part of their interview process.

That's mostly why we are told "write down things that were said, not your opinions", but I've definitely seen interview notes that include things that would not be appropriate to share back with the candidate.
Is there a heat map of Uber activity? That might be interesting.
Communism has never worked because the people in power who decide exactly how to divide the wealth fairly are humans and humans are greedy, selfish assholes.

Who evaluates your land value?

Also, if we all do what we want to do who is gonna pick up the garbage, who is going to slaughter cows for your burger that no one wants to flip?

I mean, these are the easy things I can think of.

Additionally any of the welfare states and experiments with UI are with small scale countries who have simpler socio-economic makeups. Try doing what you are prescribing in America where Trump, Bezos, and any number of psycho CEOs and politicians are doing very well for themselves. Not to mention the fundamental myth of America is bootstrap to individual prosperity.

Edit: to expand on "doing what you want", what if what you want to do is build a huge multi national corp and accumulate stinking piles of cash and yachts? What are you going to say to all those folks?
> On the other hand, maybe we're just so socioculturally fucked that it requires massive authoritarian investment to keep a crummy level of peace. I'm undecided.

I think people both understate how splintered the US society really is, and overstate the importance of this divide.

Imagine a country with a HUGE historical and current influx of immigrants that bring tons of different cultures and ideologies into the mix. The country has traditionally been hard to govern, especially at the federal level, precisely because it encourages freedom of thought and expression through both law and immigration policy. Its economic structure further encourages division by being one of the most meritocratic systems on the planet, where material gains for good decisions are quite the norm, but where the divide between the haves and have nots is always growing, and always on display.

In a country I describe, why is it any surprise to anyone that criminal behavior will be more common than in a more cohesive environment, therefore necessitating a more strict policing approach? And in what world does it make sense to reduce police powers in such a country without suffering the obvious increase in crime that will follow that?

It's not that US is fundamentally broken or fucked up, it's just a very different place compared to the "liberal utopias" of Northern Europe, so often cited by leftist activists in the states.
This: https://www.saastr.com/why-if-you-quit-every-year-you-wont-m...
The sweet spot is in the middle. Small/medium sized towns and cities 50,000 people or less probably. Walkable and bike-able, train services, and then the surrounding area contains small farms and other recreation areas (parks, hiking trails, etc.) and all of this is accessible by car, bus, or bike.

Basically European towns and small cities.

Higher density is fine but high density like Hong Kong or Mumbai is an anti-pattern just as suburbs are.
>Who would use this and why?

This isn't clear to me - are your buyer's institutional investors? Are they buying your technology to create trade options for their end users i.e. an individual investor? I don't know what an ATS is so I gather that I'm not a direct user of your technology - perhaps I would be an indirect user? Would E-Trade, for example, leverage your technology to provide me with a combinatorial buying option?
To be honest I think this story is overplayed a bit. I've heard of that tipping point idea before, or the positive to negative ratio thing, but I think most in the field didn't take it more seriously than an observation that couples, groups, etc that function well are more positive and supportive.

It's good to call this stuff out but part of the reason no one else did is because outside of a certain subsubfield no one took it that seriously.
Offshore workers get weeks or months off at a time, alternating with their weeks of solid working.

Military deployments are hard on families. Not sure what to add to that but it's a fact.
Wow, that was quite a ride!

I think the most interesting subject is the question of just how are we going to manage the climate shift? It seems to me that we have all the technology we need already, and it's a matter of organization and motivation. We even have negotiation and communication technology (I'm thinking of things like Nonviolent Communication here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonviolent_Communication ) that we can utilize.
> I accepted. Despite the downlevelling, despite the fact that compensation was well below market, Shopify was a big step for me.

There are lots of good reasons to leave companies fast if they aren't a fit, but this statement was almost everything I needed to know. The author started the job feeling undervalued precisely because he didn't have negotiating skills on the comp package on the way in, and then had his feelings confirmed, possibly by presenting as someone who believes they are undervalued (which is as attractive to be around as it sounds) but also, shopify's HR reps saw the poor bargaining position and offered him even less (a downleveled position) and he still took it.

(Note to recruiters and HR people, if you make people feel either over or undervalued on the way in, they're going to act that way, and then you're going to be mystified wondering why your culture is broken - but in this case the author left so much on the table, I'll direct this to him.)

I'd posit the author left because his professional negotiating skills aren't mature, and in their current state, they're producing poor and disadvantaged deals and relationships. I'm not going to take it so far as to say that the author has that rare martyrly quirk that they seek out disadvantaged relationships because it keeps them feeling righteous and justified - but not setting and signalling boundaries on what you will personally accept, and then blaming others for offering you what you don't want is within sight of the horizon of that anti-pattern. I learned this in a much harder way, but even putting it charitably still feels like it has a hard edge. It's not intended that way.

The implied expectation was that he was "senior," and good at what he does, and independent of what he might be able to do for the company, this by itself demands some kind of consideration. Like when someone says they have a master's degree and wants an extra 30% salary for it, but the degree is in some kind of theory. I interpret that the author may have been indexed on counterfactuals about reciprocity and value going into the negotiation.

It's great to mature as a developer or a hacker, but after a point, there are also diminishing marginal returns on investing in those skills, and making big expensive sacrifices for those skills seems like a substitute for taking risks for success, and this doesn't have anywhere near the yield that reading a book on negotiations or sales wouldn't return in a few hours.

Sure, get Shopify on your CV, become the best <foo> developer you can, I'd even love to work for them, and though I know I too moralize my own blindspots, in this case, I'd posit this was a negotiations failure between the author and the Shopify recruiters.
this is cool. i wanted to try this w/ redpanda (i'm a maintainer https://github.com/redpanda-data/redpanda), but I didn't see it using testcontainers or docker or anything like that.
If it meant lower police funding it would have been "cut police funding." The initial movement in Minneapolis was outright defunding 100%.
The reason that this keeps getting repeated is that it's a not-unreasonable summary/digestion of Peter Thiel's position, though you're correct that it's not precisely what he's saying.

Reading that quote by him in context, Peter Thiel's nuanced stance is more along the lines of "The extension of voting rights to women has likely resulted in an America that I think is worse/less preferable to the one that would probably exist if women were not allowed to vote".

So no, he hasn't advocated for taking away the vote from women in as many words, he just makes it known that he wishes they had never been allowed to do so. One can reasonably see how these positions are similar enough that some people have editorialized slightly. Especially since, given these views, it seems also reasonable to suppose that were the question of women voting to be put forth once more, he would probably vote against.
Caetano Veloso Revolutionized Brazil’s Sound and Spirit
The core observations of the universal basic income drive are that:

a) The amount of actual human labor required in the developed world to maintain an acceptable standard of living for everyone in the society is decreasing (with no end in sight),

b) Much of the profit and control of that decreasing cost of providing for the society is concentrating in the hands of a very small number of extraordinarily wealthy people

c) The process you noted:

> The government prints money and gives it away for free, nobody has to work?

... is already how things work, we just dress it up in a byzantine (and expensive!) welfare/social insurance/corporate bailout system and the proliferation of "jobs" that provide no meaningful value to society [0].

If a system could be created that replaces the indirect spending with direct spending, the people who need to be could still be motivated to do the societally valuable jobs (because people want more things still!), and the people who want to do things that are prosocial but not well-remunerated by the capitalist system (arts, education/research, activism/humanitarianism/social work [because there will assuredly still be problems]) will be more able to do so.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs
It's still a reasonable design, it even allows for passing around zero copy buffers, or streaming large data.
Well, they are correct. Geographical center of Europe is in Poland.

You are confusing eastern block with eastern Europe.
Google started the same way:

> Brin and Page filled the garage with desks made of old pine doors set on sawhorses, a turquoise shag carpet, and a Ping-Pong table.

https://www.vanityfair.com/style/2014/04/sergey-brin-amanda-...
disagree with the climate change thing.

We need to be working on finding better solutions.

My current goal is to make enough money in the software industry to go back to school so I can learn biochemistry in order to devise bio-technologies that can reverse pollution.

If you've got some spare time, energy and imagination, your help would be greatly appreciated. ^_^
Read this article and the related studies: https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2020/2/19/21112570/univer...
I surely agree with you on that.
bi-modal (at least) distribution.

Discussion here is often about a bump to the right of the graph :)
Agreed. I don't play these kinds of games so I don't care. However, I do play some more casual games and I would immensely care if an anti-cheat kernel driver were necessary for A. Steam to run or B. Any game to run. At that point steam is dead to me as I don't need steam.
If your plan is to live your career, why not just stay single?
For an MVP I don't think supporting the specifics of 0.01% of internet users is an "important point".
PAIP is still on my list to work through.

Last time I tried I got as far as the first substantive program (https://github.com/norvig/paip-lisp/blob/main/lisp/gps.lisp), was generally confused by the code, and was then not surprised when the following sections pointed out all the faults (i.e. bugs) with the initial approach and suggested various improvements. I've come to trust my own "how can this possibly work?" confusion as a strong signal that a design is probably buggy or fragile, so it was nice to see it confirmed here.

Which is not to say that what this book teaches is not useful, but I wouldn't go to it looking for best practice and robust software engineering techniques. Much of what I saw in this book wouldn't pass code review in many situations ("too fragile" or "too clever"). Most of what he's talking about are techniques that "allow a programmer to delay making decisions". This is a different kind of programming than very the very concrete kind of programming that can dominate day to day professional work. I suspect that these kinds of "delayed decisions" are best applied sparingly, but applied correctly they can be powerful.

To get a flavor of the "Norvig approach" to things, his Advent of Code solutions in IPython notebooks are fun: https://github.com/norvig/pytudes
hard to get visa. and I don't fancy trekking across the mexican desert to get in the other way.
I'm not providing discovery. I have demonstrated that it's trivial to dig up evidence. Regardless, it's considered common knowledge in other parts of the world and the US is one of the remaining battlegrounds. J&J quickly discontinued the talc-based baby powder (in the US) when the claims started to pile up.
Unfortunately I’m not sure that STEM in and of itself is the antidote.

It’s very easy to just routinely apply methods without properly reasoning about the underlying assumptions.
A renowned community of quilters is taking on copycats – and winning
I guess this only changes the stable salary component, which will bring the first year's comp to more comparable levels. Amazon pays an insane amount of cash bonus the first two years to make up for their backloaded vesting and capped salary. Even then the total compensation was pretty high. It might be the case that their stock isn't growing as expected leading to employees to be unhappy.
> But on the other hand, when you think about it, once the main architecture is put down and the main issues are solved, most software engineering jobs are just repeating the same trick over and over again, copy / paste / edit some names, done.

I don't know. I think it gets less and less true as you get away from web development. The fundamentals stay the same but how they intersect with what you are doing can vary widely. If you want to, you can encounter domain knowledge intersecting with the problems you are trying to solve, different architectures for complexe systems coming with their own set of constraints, different project structures, different ways to deal with end users requirements.

I think they are plenty of opportunities to do boring things and plenty to do interesting things.
Surprised nobody mentioned Drew DeVault's blog (https://drewdevault.com). He's pretty well-known.
Not many, but Apple had MPW Projector.

http://preserve.mactech.com/articles/mactech/Vol.14/14.06/Ve... also lists CVS, Perforce, VOODOO, Visual SourceSafe, and PVCS, but that’s from 1998. That’s Mac OS 8 territory.
OP, is this your book? If so, can you talk about it? I never came across the first ed. It looks extremely practical compared to a typical comms book. I suspect that's due to the author coming from an extensive industry background.
I'd say that's more or less a standard thing in EU, for desk jobs.
Mac only solution but I just use DEVONthink and their mobile app. Works like a charm.
Automation technology has allowed a machine to create 100,000s to millions of a product with very little input from a human to put in the raw resources into it.

GDP grows instantly by at least 13% (in the US) if doing a $1,000/month UBI, for example.

Etc.

Andrew Yang has looked into this a lot - his last two books: “The War On Normal People: The Truth About America's Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future”, and “Forward: Notes on the Future of Our Democracy”
Well, not really. While it isn't necessarily a mainstream view, many people do believe that the police in the United States function an unaccountable armed militia/gang, killing at will, and paid for by the public. Hence, the view that the public should defund the police.

Another facet of the same view is that the police are assumed to be inherently so far gone and corrupt that reform is not possible, and to assume that it is is futile.
Given how big a drop in price that tiny drop caused last week, maybe it's all a ploy.

1. Zuck drops facebook/insta/meta out of the EU

2. huge drop in MAU

3. larger/similar drop in share price (how much lower can it honestly go?)

4. then, any MAU drop will seem meaningless after the big EU MAU drop. FB avoids weeks/months/years of slow stock price deterioration at 5% or so (compounding) in exchange for a one-time 25% drop. Seems like a deal.
I hope we don't, I really love the idea of useful anonymous websites that grumpy digital rights idiots don't know who to send a court summons to.