skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
what's the state of agencies these days? back in the day they charged 100% overhead and paid by w-2.

is there a more lightweight model where for say 10-20% they'll handle searching, billing, rate negotiations, late payments and disputes?

i'm not sure if i'd go into contracting again without something like that. it takes far too much energy to be the asshole that is necessary to not get screwed in business (for yourself) and it detracts from the actual work and life satisfaction in general.
Lenin was already a murderer and brutal dictator. Stalin just followed in his footsteps.
Russian Ministry Recommends Fertilizer Producers Halt Exports
I tried their "Best toaster" query and one thing I want to say is just how hilarious it is that "best x"-of-anything webpage HAS to have $CURRENT_YEAR in the title. Yelp does something similar to its Google search results.

As if nothing good or the best in its breed ever came out from $PREVIOUS_YEAR or any previous years before that!

Tell me you're a garbage SEO website without telling me, just slap on "in $CURRENT_YEAR" or use some capital letters, I love how easy it is to tell the wheat from the chaff!

edit: someone with a more negative outlook/rant than my glee https://reddit.com/r/changemyview/comments/qowtws/cmv_seo_an...
Tell that to central bankers last year.

You might not personally agree with it but that was the prevailing wisdom amongst economists until fairly recently. The US Fed in particular didn't start discussing rate increases until early this year, well after FY 2021 was over and 2022 budgets were set.
This took me 15 s:

9^9^9^9^9^9^9^9^9^9^9^9^9^9^9^9^9^9^9^9^9^9^9
So…not an arbitrary number.
I’m only 7 years into my career and I’m technical roles but not a dev. I’ve never received a raise without a title bump. Are yearly or same-role raises common in general?
I heard horror stories but I managed to cancel pretty easily back when I did, just did it online.
No, that writing prompt would end in, "and then the US government exited Dollarcoin and left everyone else holding the bag." This writing prompt is, "What would happen if we lived in China?"
"Sacrifice" is a very dishonest way of referring to the mass murder Stalin routinely ordered.

You can look at the Soviet famine of 1932–1933 and argue about the real cause, and the Great Purge and crimes like the Katyn massacre had their own evil logic, but consider the Polish Operation of the NKVD -https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish_Operation_of_the_NKVD. They randomly selected Soviet men with Polish-sounding names, arrested them, and executed 80% of them.

The only thing that separated Stalin from Hitler was that Stalin sent 20% of the men to the gulag and didn't murder their families.
It cannot lead anywhere good, unless you desire a complete stagnation of society. Thank satoshi we have an alternative.
Wow lucky you got 5.5%. My bank employer gave me 0% raise and the best guy who worked for me got 3%
Until (which is already happening) marketers start using Reddit to game their recommendations. Next it’ll be hacker news. So basically it’s the red queen thing in the internet.
I didn't see many engineers the last two years demanding pay decreases because of the money they save by not having to commute to work...
I’ll chime in as a business owner. We peg our raises to the SSA cost of living adjustments. This means our bump for employees at the end of 2021 was just under 6%. If current trends continue, likely a similar number at the end of this year.

There are a few reasons I encourage other employers to peg annual raises to the same number:

- It’s usually a very fair number; never egregious for increasing costs.
- Someone else gets to do the math, and you have a very easy number to tell prospects in interviews for what to expect.
- It helps keep social security solvent.

We also use this number as a guideline for increasing our billable rate during contract negotiations. It has most of the same benefits.
Precisely as arbitrary as how you choose to measure it, or more.
I would have liked for this article (not really a review) to have talked more about Stalin's books!
Yeah Wawa rules. Growing up there never seemed to be much competition from larger chains. A 7/11 opened near me shortly before I moved, and the reason why became glaringly obvious: total garbage.

The Japanese sandwiches are trash too. It's not a bread country, so fair play, but this article is silly.
I’m glad it’s not just me. I’ve done so many fairly basic searches and gotten back absolutely awful results. I imagine most of the web isn’t even accessible through. This is an important topic that deserves even more discussion, especially since there isn’t even another solution yet
By not collecting that much data. Netflix is a streaming platform. So... stream the movie. That's it. Collect just enough data for performance analysis and for keeping track of where the user stopped watching.

That's mere millions of data points per day, not trillions.

Like... why do they need real time machine learning at that rate? No, really: Why!? Would it be catastrophic to their business if they ran ML as batch jobs? Do their recommendations need to change second-to-second?

Another crazy quote: "At that time, Netflix had ~500 microservices, generating more than 10PB data every day in the ecosystem."

Wat?

That's a 170 MB of logs pre customer per day! Most of those customers might watch an episode of a TV show per day, or watch one movie per day. Call it 2 hours of usage per day? These guys were blasting out 1.4MB of logs per minute per active user while essentially doing nothing much more than streaming big binary blocks of data from a CDN!

In my mind that's the crux of the issue. The architecture astronauts have gone amok, solving problems that shouldn't exist...

The argument / excuse is: "Many product features, such as personalized recommendation, search, etc., can benefit from fresher data to improve user experiences, leading to higher user retention, engagement, etc."

My experience with NetFlix is that their recommendations are garbage and getting worse over time. Exabytes of data won't solve this.
Yes. Late 1970s, early 1980s. Inflation hit 14%. The Fed wasn't really worried about deflation in those days...
Or, “what is China doing now that the west can achieve as soon as that Overton window gets in range.”
> Now that communications are instant, there does not appear to be any need for banks, end-users could interact directly with the CB.

Banks provide a distributed, face to face, customer service workforce. They do some sort of banking work like loans and what not, as well. IMHO, rather than replace banks with a government bank, the right path is to reduce transfer friction (which is happening anyway) and regulate towards mandatory zero cost accounts; zero cost accounts are already there in the marketplace, although with some hoop jumping and not so available if you've got a negative ChexSystems credit report.
You are conflating three issues at this point - taxes, regulations, and a government entity illegally taking people's money.
My employer paid for transportation, so…
Are all the CAs in your browser (and those of your site's users) trust list doing proper public logging now?
The article says the "deadly pathogens" in question are elements of peaceful scientific research, not bioweapons development, so it can't really be called "admitting it."
Would love to see an update on this with JPEG XL. I am still not convinced AVIF is the solution. Although libaom made quite a bit of intra-frame / avif specific improvement in the past 2 years so may be worth taking another look.
I sadly cannot say that I am surprised at the reply. "won't someone think of the children?" has been a convenient political go-to for so many years now.

seeing it with Earn-IT and also the "don't say gay" bill.

everyone thinks that they are "protecting the children."
It’s entirely possible I don’t understand how technology works, but I don’t understand how some sort of government encryption backdoor of various protocols would work.

Software, devices, protocols etc are not just used in a single country. They are used worldwide. If a backdoor needs to be supported for a several dozen governments, each with various levels of security practices, there’s no way it stays secret for long. It’s only a matter of time before a country or state like Georgia gets it’s old poorly configured IT infrastructure hacked and the attackers now have access to some backdoor keys. How do governments revoke old keys and create new ones across all applicable devices? It’d be pretty hard to do that without going to companies and saying “fix” or “get me that” with some type of warrant or court order. That is kinda like what we have now which is mostly limited user information located in the cloud somewhere.

I think the larger issue is that there is a coordinated push to get complete government access to everything. This is happening at a time where dystopian surveillance is not only quickly becoming possible, but also profitable. The government has the right to pretty much everything legally, but the potential for misuse in situations where the government gets access everything is really high. The ability for citizens to combat that misuse is reduced the more government gets.

This is my understanding of things. Let me know how I’m wrong.
I spent twenty years in the fertilizer industry. Fertilizer prices are already at record highs. For example I retailed anhydrous ammonia (NH3) which farmers use for nitrogen for between $220-$320 ton. The price now is $1000 per ton.

I saw one news account that said Russia accounts for two thirds of all fertilizer sales worldwide. This sounds way too high a number at least for U.S. fertilizer sales. The talking head economist said fertilizer price increases could result in a 25% increase in food prices by next winter. I doubt few Americans see that coming.
I notice this especially in Google Maps. Sometimes I want to search for things like "cafe" or "hotel" and get a list of all the actual matches nearby. Even for buildings that show up on the map itself when you zoom in. But no, google maps search has to get all clever, hide results, and only show "relevant" results. It's super annoying when I search "hotels" and all I get is the equivalent of an agoda.com or booking.com search, when I wanted to actually see all hotel buildings, including offline ones.
It's the standard framework used by Google also.
https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/blog/2022/03/ftc-knock...
> The same way that Google improperly handling quoted searches and returning pages _without that exact string_ is somehow a feature, not a bug.

Couldn't find it now but that was refuted by Danny Sullivan (I think) in an HN thread about the Google search results quality. They gave a pretty convincing explanation of why that may happen (spoiler: it has something to do with the tokenization of words on the website) and I, for one, believed them.

*Edit:* Here it is: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30356382
Best toaster: https://shop.panasonic.com/kitchen-and-home/kitchen-applianc...

It is, in fact, a 20+ year old design that's had some minor updates but is still essentially the same as the one it replaced.
I will say sometime I want the date in the title. For instance when looking up JavaScript topics where things move so fast, or even C++ where the year standArd can mean the difference between a language I want to use and not.
Any given measure of inflation is arbitrary, that doesn't mean the phenomenon itself is. Compare a concept like obesity and a common measure like BMI.
Serious question, how do you deal with FOMO? I’ve been at FAANG for about a year, coming from startups and lower-paying companies before.

Internally it’s nothing but complaints about comp and attrition, but to me it’s the best I’ve ever been paid. My idea was to stay here long term and learn a ton before thinking about leaving, but does anyone do that anymore? Maybe I’m being naive.
> "the commute is actually okay" is the reason people buy houses in the suburbs.

Speaking only for myself, I didn't buy a house in the suburbs because "the commute was ok", I bought a house in the suburbs because it was the only place I was able to purchase a place to live.

My rent on my 1-bedroom apartment near the city was $500 a month more than the mortgage+property taxes in the suburbs. The mortgage is constant, the house is appreciating value, some of the mortgage goes towards the principal and I "keep" that. The rent was going up 5-10% per year.

The commute was not ok. But I couldn't afford not to. $500 a month is $500 a month.

In the decade or so since, my house appreciated significantly in value, and I was able to purchase a house 5 minutes from work. But I could not have done that without sacrificing much of my sanity for a not-ok commute for nearly a decade.

The reality is that housing and traffic are deeply, deeply entwined.
This is a huge part of the dilemma for me. My equity has, on average, traded sideways. Equivalent offers or even worse offers from companies with better stock performance could end up being worth materially more.
It was pleasantly surprising to see the article cite Hacker News as a source ("“Google is dead. Long live Google + ‘site:reddit.com’ ”—became the No. 10 most upvoted link ever on the tech-industry discussion board Hacker News."), which likely inspired the pitch to write the article.

The article still adds value as the reporter got a Google spokesperson to comment, and also brings the issue to a much wider audience outside of Hacker News.
They vest over 4 years
I will see if I can find an archived comments page containing the reference because I'm extremely confident there was at the very least one extensive comment chain discussing it - I know a couple of discussion threads on the broader topic of individual investing in general got nuked due to obvious promotional spam/other flamebait topics. I know it was brought up on a discussion regarding robo-advisors in the last few months; I'll dig more aggressively and see what I can pull up.
It's gotten to the point that children or terrorists being mentioned at any point makes me automatically reject any argument.

Children in particular are the perfect political weapon. It's political suicide to challenge any claims because you end up looking like a pedophile.
You sure of that?

You live in a jurisdiction where the private banks are not issuing the currency based on debt? Where fractional reserves at the central bank do not reflect the circulating supply from mortgages?

Where is this magical land. I don’t believe you.
I just have one of the bread toasters with two slots. It was like 12$ and I can’t imagine a better toaster. What you’ve linked to is a toaster oven, which isn’t what Americans tend to think of when we hear “toaster.”
There are already a few automatic taxes - inflation, payroll tax, GST/VAT. This will just embolden more aggressive theft.
I mean something non-Software. I quite like their overall model and integrated experience. Along with Paypal support, while not getting any mention much in tech cycle it is surprisingly popular.
The bill is written in an intentionally obtuse way so that they can say they're not banning anything; they're just giving "requirements". But the only way to meet the bill's requirements is to eliminate E2EE.
This is a crtl-C ctrl-V of my own previous commentary:

I'm working on the wording of this that I intend to use in any such discussion of fake attempts at "think of the children":

Whenever a politician invokes "think of the children", ask them about their funding of Child Protection Services.

Any political action that's said to be under the umbrella of "think of the children" that doesn't provide massive amounts of additional funding into Child Protection Services (boots on the ground, education programs, etc), is hiding something, and actively working against helping children because it's distracting from the actual efforts that Child Protection Services are providing as well as spending money on entirely "something else".
I bet it still can’t make a toaster strudel that isn’t either burned or cold in the middle.
McStabbys shut down after the spate of crimes. It got bad enough at that corner that a restaurant that was (correctly) nicknamed McStabbys was shut down.
Once a country's central bank creates their own digital currency, you can be 100% sure that Bitcoin in that country will be rendered illegal immediately.
Saved.io
As I said above, given that the article(s) in question had loads of comment chains being deleted for promotional material and other low quality content, I wouldn't be surprised.
I have to wonder why anyone bothers to ever exceed expectations except for intrinsic reasons.

I assume from the day I start that I will be gone in less than 18 months.
I feel like a smuggler. I closed my Twitter account due to such shenanigans, and now read my favorite tweeters via Nitter RSS feeds. None of the various Twitter bovine excrement comes along for the ride, just the words of the people I intend to follow, in the order posted. No ads, no trending topics, no shocking takes from a friend of a friend of a friend. And for me the read-only nature of this arrangement is a bonus feature.

So it's probably just a matter of time before this route is plugged.
The act says that a commission will be formed, and describes how members of the commission should be chosen. The commission chooses what the exact best practices will be.

Full bill here: https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/senate-bill/353...
Oh man, that Geto Boys song is great, haven’t listened in ages and could hear it right away
Aren't his favorables better than Biden's and Harris's? [1]

https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/columnist/2022/02/18/...
I've written my senators, and I encourage everyone to do the same.

Also, I have a website that you can point politicians to: https://everyoneneedsencryption.gavinhoward.com/ .

Suggestions welcome on how to improve that site.
that the moral rules of liberalism are one big lie
It's not really about backdoors; they just want everything to go through servers which will archive unencrypted copies of everything so that it can be subpoenaed later.
I believe it's common. I got a similar number of RSUs last year.
> A JS engine can do this trivially

I'm not one to argue, computers are fast. However, this would be a huge paradigm shift for the JavaScript ecosystem, where compile-to-JavaScript-tools like TypeScript are dominant. These tools have explicit goals to do type checking at compile time only and avoid generating anything at runtime. Runtime checking is redundant in this paradigm.

Now if you're arguing that the JS engines like V8 should be able to use type information for performance gains, I understand that wish. WebAssembly seems to be taking over the performance angle these days though, as it was designed from the start for that purpose, unlike JavaScript.

> You're kidding right? .. will be stripped before a JS engine ever sees it?

Yes. We're talking JavaScript here - billions of lines of which are compiled every year to ES5 ;-; with polyfills. Throwing away hundreds of useful features of ES2016+. This is par for the course, part of the JavaScript paradigm which this proposal understands.

> sounds like a feature for your console

That is fair, though it seems unlikely Chrome would adopt such a feature for their console without motivation. Perhaps.

> Which enforced the types

Python does not enforce types at runtime? You might be referring to something I'm not familiar with. Fired up Python 3.9. This works fine even though I'm passing strings for int.

def add(a: int, b: int):
return a + b
add("not ", "used") # 'not used'

> the cost of a mode switch is massive

But earlier you said a JS engine can do this trivially? I don't understand how this is now difficult. Ultimately, if the types are enforced, you may as well go the full monty and support TypeScript in the browser, with Deno leading the way. Stop beating the JavaScript horse and all. That's the dream. This proposal is a compromise without a doubt, with the understanding that TypeScript in the browser is politically untenable at this point.
I guess that no registrar is exempt from angry customers but I'm wondering if there is some really whom are really over delivering
I'm American and don't think I know anyone who uses that kind of toaster. Lots of variety of experience in this country.
I don’t know that there’s any way to get handed a challenging problem on your JIRA board. But if you work at a place that’s big and complex enough, and you have visibility into enough projects, you will notice challenging problems lying around untouched. Maybe no one realizes they exist. Maybe they are too deep in the sprint grind to take serious swings at them. In any event, make a case that the problem has business value and that you have a good idea how to solve it. If you are sufficiently credible and your leadership is sufficiently forward-thinking, it will be approved.

This is one model for Staff-plus careers, by the way.
Could using a toll to discourage people from using infrastructure that can't be efficiently scaled to larger capacity be the best fix in some instances? Maybe people would then gravitate towards less cumbersome commuting patterns.
Demurrage is an evil concept. When you steal the time value saved of a man’s labor, you rob him of his future. There is no reason the unit of account should change day to day or year to year. Saving is good. For most of human history things were relatively stable, we didn’t need these games to amplify, leverage and drain.
I don't know about that. In socal, everyone says "the 5", but also omits "the" for PCH.
> As if nothing good or the best in its breed ever came out from $PREVIOUS_YEAR or any previous years before that!

Try to apply this to software (e.g., "I want the December 2018 version of Chrome, it was the best version of Chrome so far.") and observe the reaction you get.
How long can you keep hoping jobs like that in the long run though?
Isn’t that because of COPPA, which makes it illegal to retain any personally identifying information about or from people under age 13?
Some of us have our doubts about private companies and known scoundrels running experiments on US populations without their consent.

https://www.the-scientist.com/news-opinion/gm-mosquito-proge...
Apple makes an effort to keep bluetooth and wifi always-on by requiring the user to go into settings to turn the settings off. The control center (quick setting toggles) does not fully turn off wifi nor bluetooth. If either is toggled off, the phone turns both on automatically back around midnight. The iphone also can connect to devices like airpods via bluetooth while being in the 'pretend off' state.
They're not aiming to be fair. They're aiming to reduce turnover. If they gave a flat amount to each person that would matter more to the lowest paid. They would in effect be penalising the higher earners. That's not "fair" either.
I'll tell you how my team did it when I was an architect: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3477132.3483572
Fwiw, I’m going to also vote that this shouldn’t have a year. They state quite clearly that the interview is from 2007 when it’s introduced.
> Fun fact, white flour combined with water makes a permanent glue that was used to stick wallpaper to walls.

And that is relevant how?
Problems with no solution: From math to politics, some things humans can't solve
+1 for Searx - love the idea of meta-search
Uh... I assume you don't have a problem with water. It's the white flour you have a problem with, isn't it? I've heard of people who are against white flour and white sugar. Does that describe you?
I don't think most people would have an issue if DDG and whoever else only removed disinformation and they never had any false positives. The problem is DDG is not perfect and will censor real information while calling it disinformation.

Look at all the covid disinformation that turned out to be accurate or potentially accurate. The media and fact checkers have been completely awful at determining facts. Why do you think DDG will have any better luck?