skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Working less than 40 is nice but once you get down to 20 you have whole DAYS where you can do whatever you want

I spent around 10 years working about 20 hours a week doing freelance work.

It's good until it's not. Basically, yes you do have a lot of time and often times you can decide to be done at noon if you'd like. Taking entire days off is also possible unless it's expected to do something in a timely fashion such as meet with someone or produce results by XYZ day. I found in practice it wasn't possible to really drop off the grid for continuous 4 day weekends.

I came to the conclusion this lifestyle is only really worth it when you have more money than you would likely ever have if you worked this schedule for a long time. For example, if you only worked 3 days a week but had millions of dollars then this would be super interesting because you could go and do fun things all the time. Having $5,000 a month to spend guilt free to do whatever would be amazing if it didn't cut into any type of retirement fund because you're already set.

But if you're working for half a salary chances are you don't have millions of dollars tucked away unless remarkable things have happened to you. So what you really end up doing is finishing at noon some days and then procrastinating on everything while you do nothing productive or fun because you've done everything you could with your budget 100 times over after years of this lifestyle. At least that's what happened to me. Your mileage may vary.

I realized I'm happier when I feel like I'm maximizing my time. That doesn't mean always working but it means feeling like I'm making enough to where when I want to take off 2 weeks a few times a year to do something really fun it's fully enjoyed. Then I fill in the gaps between trips doing assorted fun but not crazy things. With 40 hours of payments this becomes less of a financial burden. Only problem now is having less time to do them.
Plutonium is not a propellant.
The fact that they traded options (probably deep OTM) is the cherry on top. How incompetent did they think the SEC was?
In the olden days when coal fires in open fireplaces were part of daily life, old newspapers were used to build up the base of the fire. You would scrunch up sheets of newspaper, pack them into the hearth, then add some kindling on top, then add a modest amount of coal, preferably dry coal.

With a single match you would then set light to the scrunched up newspaper, which would set light to the wood, which would get the coal started. Once the coal was glowing you could add more coal and the fire would be truly lit.

To speed up the process you could hold up a sheet or two of broadsheet newspaper over the fireplace, so air would be sucked in at the bottom to hold the flat sheets tight over the fireplace opening, making the fire roar. This was like 'turbo mode'.

This whole process was time consuming and you would generally be using newspapers that were a few days old. Frequently this 'news' had some real gems in it. Removed from the original context by a few days, the news articles often had details that were not important at the time, but, with hindsight, made them somewhat curious.

Because you might be holding this news up around the fireplace for a few minutes with it lit up by a roaring fire, you were sort of obligated to read beyond the headlines.

There were different wars at the time, as well as labour disputes. It was often that you would read something that foreshadowed the news of the day on the radio - which we called 'wireless' back then.

I found that the old news, read this way, was a lot more thought provoking. I found myself questioning more.

Nowadays you could go onto the Internet Archive and find the headlines for a given day. However, we tend not to do that. The news just morphs from one day to the next, lacking distinct daily episodes like it did in the days of printed papers. Articles can be edited and updated, to be the same but different.

I agree with the article and try to encourage relatives to stay away from the gogglebox. The TV news is utterly toxic. But I feel that it is end times for this mainstream media. Only boomers truly consume it, anyone under fifty isn't tuned in and were not around when the news informed a national conversation.

The blanket propaganda/news of today is not the same as the national conversation that was once a thing. The Overton Window has gone widescreen and narrow at the same time. If you are not with the mainstream narrative then you can only be deemed to be 'worse than Trump/Putin/Assad/Hitler/Farage'. Or a communist. What was the left has got old and conservative. Or co-opted, particularly when it comes to identity politics. It has become infantilised with the majority under fifty just opting out of giving a damn.
>If you're using information anyone could get with some research, then it's not illegal.

Then why were these engineers being charged? They used a role which very likely was open to anyone in the public to apply to do research into the performance of the company.
Eagerly waiting for the LinkedIn version to clean up my timeline.
Where did you find the tracker in the car?
Such an underrated computer. I think, "The Humane Interface" needs to be standard reading for anyone that designs computers or consumer electronics and ZUIs were such a good idea-- I wish there was a way to, "ZUIify" my Mac desktop so I could just have a massive, "nexus" of, "zoomimable" desktop spaces. I still don't understand why, "universal/forever undo" isn't a standard feature of modern computers. Perhaps in the future we'll see more of Jef's ideas put into practice.
If I remember correctly, in that period it was still EV-positive to guess if you could eliminate at least one incorrect possibility. Not everybody knew this, though. Simply having someone tell you that (or having the patience to read and understand the scoring rules) is a significant advantage over folks who didn't know.
So... people imitate the posting patterns of legitimately afflicted by schizophrenia people? To defend themselves against capitalism? Wait, did I just fall for one such post?
It must be weird living in a world where you think buying some land makes that land a separate country.

I’m 90% sure that I don’t get to issue passports for people living at my house.
That was probably accurate "back in the day". My wife owns/runs an after school learning center and I can say that 1st/2nd generation take extra-curricular activities very seriously. That is not to say academic is out the window, but academics is not the only interest.

As a matter of fact - I wrote a letter of recommendation for someone to volunteer at the library. Due to the competitive nature (I live in an area with lots of 1st/2nd generation, especially Indians)...she did not get a position. Imagine competing to work for free!
Such as?

I don’t disagree with you, but just saying “I’m not convinced” doesn’t advance your point of view at all.
It’s pretty important that you can’t schedule a bunch of trades and then cancel the ones that end up looking bad with nonpublic info.
Being able to choose the correct answer in a test environment by process of elimination or similar methodology is a useful skill to have in some non-test circumstances, but it’s not a great test of domain knowledge.

Anecdote: I recently did some tests where I read a bunch of material before hand and used a combination of short term memory and multiple choice trickery to pass with flying colors, but I still don’t have any real knowledge of the subject area. I barely remember any of it, other than a few bits of jargon.
Unless she is investing 100% of her fortune into stock picking those two numbers are completely unrelated and don't inform the discussion one iota.
I'm not sure what point you're trying to make, but you realize an MBA is an actual academic program and skillset? Just because your Madlib is syntactically correct doesn't mean it makes sense.

If you're trying to say that the material one studies in an MBA program isn't rigorous or relevant then say that.
Why is pattern matching not possible when types are removed after typescript is compiled?
Yeah, can we get the corollary that follows the people who disagree with the blocked parties but that has the same political alignment as the blocked party?
Metformin is the first resort in diabetes treatment. If it proves to truly increase birth defects by 40% that may have to change.

It was my doctor's first resort for me, but the side effects were too severe and I stopped it. He vaguely mentioned that it would help if I lost weight, but made no mention of what actually resolved my diabetes, a low carb diet. I hope that becomes the first resort. Apparently around here it's not even in the standard toolkit.
To a much, much lesser degree, yes.
Have you dealt with chickens, turkeys, horses, or cows in real life? Because it doesn't seem like you have. Horses are in no way more fragile than cows, especially wild stallions.

I've raised turkeys, chickens, cows, and horses. The turkeys and chickens people eat are not the same as wild turkeys, they would not survive without humans.
I'll submit that that's a solution.

But it's like, I have to turn my head around and stop doing one thing (globs), and switch over to another thing (find, xargs). The language has baited me down one way of doing it, when I shouldn't be doing it that way. I'm well aware of xargs (but not the -r flag). I typically avoid xargs, as our code has to¹ work on macOS & Linux, and xargs is one of those utilities whose available options differ between the two for even simple use cases. (Such as here, for the "does it exec on no args?".)

But it still proves the point: the equivalent Python is just so much more straight-forward, easier to read, and not apt to shoot me at a moments notice, and doesn't have bugs. A reader only familiar with Python's syntax can read and understand Python, and can write Python that is correct. Not so with bash, you have to understand, "oh, no, globs will screw you here, you need this flag from this utility" — no, it's lunacy.

Like, I can go down the road you're suggesting (and in the past, I did) and keep learning the nooks and crannies and intricacies of bash, each one adding to the nightmare fuel that is my understanding of shell. I can keep tweaking the script around various failure modes, letting each line fail in prod 3 different ways. Or, I can just re-write it in Python, or Rust, or any other sane language and have it never fail again, for reasons that would also either apply to bash, or apply and have worse consequences than bash. (E.g., the Python would raise, bash would just plow on with it.)

Your response is exactly the same as my response before I saw the light on PHP, C, etc.: "you're holding it wrong". No, it's a bad tool that guiles the user into holding it wrong. There are better tools that are easier to hold.

¹b/c despite all work being done for Linux, devs get MBPs, b/c the company can't manage more than exactly 1 type of machine, for everyone.
> and not have to do any of the other trivial stuff that demonstrates that they can participate in the society in which they live

How many DFW public schools have cricket or kabaddi teams? How many bands and choirs play primarily non-European music?

Are you sure that these students are one dimensional boring test-takers with absolutely no interest in being part of their community? Could it possibly be that many are very active members of a vibrant and deeply rooted immigrant community, but that this community involvement doesn't show up because they aren't either playing in a football game or putting on a half time show for a foot ball game?

(I'm also deeply skeptical that participating in band, choir, extra-curricular activities, or sports is actually indicative of much of anything in terms of community participation... playing unorganized pick-up games with friends feels much more participatory than leveraging the well-oiled pre-college apparatus of an upper middle class neighborhood to check the "scholar-athlete" box.)
This is a review of the book “Legacy of Violence” by Caroline Elkins [0], which came out a few days ago in the UK and will be released tomorrow in the US.

[0]: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/45877/legacy-of-vio...
> But I think it's a lot easier for someone technical to learn these things than for a business person to learn the tech.

That's the rub, people have been running businesses for millenia without requiring specialized education for it. SaaS was a huge change in the business model, but did it require an MBA to come up with the idea? Or was it someone who figured that their customers didn't want to wait for "vN" of the product?
Five square centimeters of electrode per watt of output doesn't seem very viable. It's a start, I guess.
Madeleine Albright
Thanks for sharing. I totally agree and have thought about this myself --- whenever there's this degree of resentment for another job in a community (PM, manager, politician) it's clear to me there's a lack of understanding of what that profession actually does and the constraints and incentives they face.

I'm a software engineer with a couple years' experience (and am graduating from Harvard college in a couple of months). I'm pretty familiar with the pressures of business that come from high-up, but I also understand where they come from in some cases. I'd love to learn more about business (what little I've seen I found fascinating) and I dream to someday find a balance between a happy technical team building a great product, and a healthy and profitable business.

How has getting your MBA helped you with your career growth (not getting leadership jobs, but actually thriving in them)? And how well were you able to integrate your engineering experience with the business pressures as you led a team?
When I saw "Browser" in the list with a Chromium icon (while I'm running Firefox), one of the sillier (yet fun) thoughts that crossed my mind is that you had somehow compiled Chromium to WASM, and you would be running a full-fledged Chromium instance inside Firefox.

I'm sure there are limitations with WASM that make this impractical to implement for the foreseeable future without a ton of work, but it would be fun to try out if it did exist.
You can do user testing, you can call up people in the industries and ask them, you can do a Kickstarter and spend a little on advertising it to see if it gets any traction, but mostly the reaching out to people in the target market and compensating them for a user interview
Not just there. The aquifers under the plains are also almost drained. A lot of that is not for those local people, but for food production for people nationally and internationally.
GPT-3 is likely tagging a small portion of its responses as requiring human review, not all of them.
That kind of feels like how I read it too. Thanks
Personally, I've found the western tech industry treats employees extremely well, compared to any other job I've had.

Flexible hours and dress code, excellent pay, light supervision, hundreds of employers, air-conditioned offices, great safety record, interesting and meaningful work for those that want it - and it barely needs a college degree. It's not perfect, but it's better than 95% of jobs out there.

(Of course, the games programming industry is to be avoided at all costs)
This resonates as well. I appreciate the effort on objectiveness
GDS[1] and HMRC[2] don't have much in common besides the fact that HMRC uses GDS's design system.

[1]: https://github.com/alphagov
[2]: https://github.com/hmrc
Vey cool. This has been my deal breaker. I need to play with x32 and x64 assembly all the time.

You know what would be awesome though? If qubes os with its Xen stuff allowed this sort of remote access.
people want to be good but debt and financial problems can negatively impact judgement. people take risks when they are desperate.

I’m sure it happens all the time, we just heard about the ones who got caught.

Personally I would never do it as I can make much more by keeping my job and the field I’m in is all about ethics and integrity. I would rather hustle with contracting or job shop to get a raise if I really needed the money.
Interesting, although I think your hypothesis would benefit from additional examples. It’s way too easy to cherry pick with a sample size of 2.
See @ 13min12s on klabb3's link

Note that presentation was from 2014, I wonder what that'd look like in 2022
Funny, I rely on those same skills in management all the time. So much so that I wish that the value of those skills, independent of educational subject matter, had been emphasized to me as a young person.
Also Japanese Yen value is declining and no good sign to going to opposite. USDJPY is raised 11% from a year ago. Fuel cost affects trade deficit significantly. Nuclear is good for this situation because there are local nuclear industry (Toshiba, Hitachi, Mitsubishi,.. but recently they don't build due to the situation) and fuel cost is negligible. For solar, there's no longer any big solar panel manufacturer in Japan. For wind, there are not much land to build and ocean wind is now starting developing.
May I ask on what basis you were against them? Was it just ignorance of the facts (like the canard that they just measure wealth), or did you change your opinion of something subjective?
This is exactly the kind of project a google employee would do with their 20% free time. It would also fit perfectly with the hundreds of custom search options in google search. But that is it. It doesn’t fit as a business by itself. Google has spoiled our brains into thinking anything that sustains user interest is a business. It’s valuable to google not for us!

It also doesn’t scale well as more papers come out they need more consultants to populate the database with it. So one option for OP was to sell to google but I dont think it scales well enough for them to buy either.
The Danger in Listening to Experts (2020)
>This is a moral absolutist take.

No it's the take by vote. You ask a normal person whether they think it's good they will give you a normal answer. You ask a billionaire, the billionaire will give you the same answer but secretly lobby against you.

It's not moral absolutist. Every economist thinks it's bad. Generally they are okay with a little bit as a necessity but the level at where it's at now is too much.

>Measuring contributions is not a trivial task, even philosophically. How much does my CEO contribute versus the work of us workers? That isn't something that can be measured, so any conception of the answer to that is going to be a matter of opinion. So I'm going to say "[citation needed]" on that one, and arguably there's a "[philosophical justification needed]" as well.

I never said it was trivial nor did I say it could be easily measured. But on a grand scale we know it's occurring. It's very trivial to see. Most CEO's don't deserve the salary they get, this is also trivial to see.

>First, that definitely is not true, especially if you believe that a portion of people in the system are overpaid.

You're way too pedantic. Of course I'm referring to a generality. 99% of people are fucked over. Very few people are overpaid.

>But secondly, if you are getting "fucked over," you should leave and join a different company that does not fuck you over.

All companies try to fuck you over. I just join the company that fucks me the least. I'm still getting fucked. That's what typically occurs. What you're referring to is different.

You're referring to Baumol's cost disease for wage competition, which is typically not what occurs. No overall economy is governed by this but you do see it happening in small bubbles or certain industries. I would say software in the bay area has this phenomenon occurring in the slight. Wages here are higher then the rest of the world BUT wages are generally not high enough to the point where most engineers aren't getting fucked.

>You are again stating this as though it's supposed to be taken as a given that it's bad. Acquiring capital and growing capital are two totally different roles and it's impossible to compare their true value to society. We need both, and it's not clear that acquiring capital (providing it) is less valuable.

It is bad, but let me clarify, ownership of human capital or other things that own human capital by proxy is the thing that is bad.

Just because things are hard to quantify doesn't mean we can't use our intuition to make a judgement. It should be self evident and obvious that ownership of human capital is bad but a necessary evil.
Wow, I didn't realize I was advocating for excess deaths. Thanks for clarifying that for the folks at home.

Maybe my point is more anecdotal than I realize. After all, I've never had a colleague from MIT who exhibiting any meaningful difference in characteristics that mattered. But at the same time, I resent being an unwitting participant in upholding MIT's legacy by being passed over for opportunities by people who are more credentialed and more well connected than me but otherwise the same in every way that counts. Maybe I belong on a different planet. I wonder sometimes. It seems my destiny has already been decided on this one.
Maybe if we stopped exporting agriculture from California to China, there would be plenty of water?

https://hayandforage.com/article-3388-thank-china-for-record...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/govbeat/wp/2015/04/03/a...

https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-26124989

edit: I am puzzled as to why eliminating this one massive water use needs to be clarified. Exporting to China (or any other country) is purely a for profit endeavor that is using a large % of CA's water. Many farmers argue for the need to feed the US and I am not against that idea (in principle).
Dealers do this to aid in repossession in case of non payment.
This arguments premise is flawed.

Cosmetics are not nearly that resource intensive to produce, so its not about 'wearing nice clothes' a-la real life, where good materials are more expensive to produce. Attaching a price tag is PURELY for the benefit of the publisher.

Attaching real world costs to purchases in games also disproportionately targets neurodivergent and fiscally uneducated people. That seems like a fairly malicious business practice.

Microtransaction apologism is not a tractable stance, ever.
I think that framing is one which makes sense (~10yr post-graduate engineering program).

I wouldn't restrict it to just engineers, but I would certainly focus it on early-career managers in any high-skill industry where the transition from IC to organizational leadership is a challenge.

The majority of my class was on the Ivy->Consulting/PE->MBA track, and though many of them were wonderful and well-meaning human beings, that did not prepare them effectively to lead in industry.
See e.g. Project Orion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propuls...
The purpose of college admission should make sure that students sitting in the same room should have similar learning ability. Denying the existence of uneven learning ability in students only makes things worse.
That's sort of what they have become. A couple generations ago, it was for working conditions.

For my coal mining grandfather, it meant safety equipment like respirators so you didn't get black lung, and that the company had to send down a meal for you if you were working a double (before that you had to rely on the next shift to give you items from their lunches, if they were willing to share).
Seems like another “no shit” moment. Do these things even have to be considered? What is happening these days in education?
> So you're saying only studying and not doing anything else to eventually become a doctor that serves a community in Dallas doesn't demonstrate enough participation in society as much as being able to play a sport?

To be fair, it is Texas. Plus, he also mentioned band. Someone needs to play in the halftime show, after all.