skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I asked if they had a preferred vendor (all do). She said yes, but state law said they need at least 3 bids before they can purchase. I asked if our bid would be taken seriously. She said no.

That is just a pointless law, if it requires 3 bids, but you can ignore them.

Mind you, fixing that isn't trivial either; the EU has very strict rules on government procurement, where the government organisation has to write down very detailed rules on how the procurement will work and will be evaluated, and then they have to follow those rules. Of course that has lead to companies gaming the bidding system: they design their bid to win, but it exploits all the holes in the rules; either it will be lacking in quality in an area the customer failed to specify, or it will go way over budget and the customer will be responsible for those costs, etc.

My wife has been involved in bids like these where one bid was clearly the best one, but another was technically the winner according to the rules. So they redid the bid and rewrote the rules to better fit what they wanted, but I think that had to go to court. It's a hornet's nest, no matter how you turn it.

In a distant past, I worked for a small web development company with a pretty good open source CMS, and we were hired to do a few government websites. The actual bidder wasn't us; it was one of those big companies that specialised in winning those bids. We just did all of the actual work. We probably didn't get all of the actual money. It's a weird market.
Previous discussion about the drop of value: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30494626
It’s possible that Wolfram has some latent narcissism, and this is what people don’t enjoy. Perhaps they are even jealous. I don’t make that speculation based on any “petty” aspects of his personality or communication, but rather the sweeping and self sufficient way he develops his theories. If he’s doing valuable science, I for one would like to cheer him on.
> grandparents of people alive now would’ve been making food during the initial popularity of microwaved and canned foods.

Those two things weren't even roughly contemporary.
I can relate a bit.

I'm 36 and often ask myself, what did I do?

My parents had kids with 20.

My father and grandfather were managers with 25.

I met a bunch of people who founded a company before they were 20.

Friends of mine traveled from Europe to East Asia as hitchhikers in their 20s.

Many of my fellow students work for FAANG. Two are CTOs at middle sized companies and one is even a professor at university.

In contrast to that I always feel like a slacker.
https://pawelgrzybek.com

Another blog about web stuff…
As someone with ADHD - our society places a high value on being a “focused worker bee.” Individuals with ADHD do not fit this mold, even if they bring value with increased curiosity, inquisitiveness, and creativity.

I think ADHD is a genetic trait that was evolutionarily selected for, and individuals with it made effective explorers, inventors, and creators, providing substantial benefit to humanity. It is an explorer's gene, though society today finds little value in that.

It's so frustrating and incredibly heartbreaking because I think people with ADHD are 100% totally valid in their own right, as it is likely an adaptive trait [1, 2], and yet our society has abandoned them as disabled.

[1]: "ADHD as a disorder of adaptation" - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9401328/

[2]: "ADHD sucks, but not really | Salif Mahamane | TEDxUSU" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fWCocjh5aK0
>The ones that get the most business are in dense urban environments, which in most major cities are now infested with homeless people.

Er, and? How does the presence of homeless people negatively affect a prosperous laundromat business?
"I'm responsible for me - my success, my failures... Fulfilment comes from within, not externally."

What's external and what's internal?

Where do your desires come from? Your hopes?

Some people think they are the masters of their mind, that what they feel come from them, but what about the influence of their parents, their friends, the movies they watch, the books they read, advertising, music, social media?

We swim in a cultural ocean where things that seem on the inside might have actually come from the outside.

That's if there's even an actual distinction between inside and outside in the first place.

"Get a win, then get another win."

Is winning the point? What if someone doesn't care about winning?
So each time you charge, you have to go inside the air conditioned gas station. Sit down. Have a coffee or something. A snack. Waste money and time.
So strange, I remember the Fahrenheit (32, 212) and Celsius (0, 100) numbers, but the precise Kelvin number (which is hard-required for all the good physics equations I've forgotten), that is how much lower than 0C absolute zero is, I only vaguely remember as 272 something. However that's just a well known constant. Very reasonable to include it in the reference dataset.
https://adambennett.dev/

Mostly Android + Kotlin with a recent foray into interviewing, and I'd like to write about leadership/culture a bit more. I've gotten out of the habit of writing recently due to burnout but I'm starting to feel that motivation again.

It's a Hugo static site ontop of Firebase Hosting, and I just commit to GitHub and Actions builds and deploys the site for me. I recently started using http://forestry.io/ which is a nice GUI over the top for content management.
Given that Americans like to replace OU with O [colour > color, labour > labor, favour > favor, etc] shouldn't you be changing ROUBLE to ROBLE, not RUBLE?

At least be consistent in your English language mangling!
This is part of the reason people assumed the worst about the imprecise and inconsistent language in the public statements / FAQ pages. I think there is a remaining effect that people can’t book holidays within Russia or Belarus. But that was covered by the announcement they were ceasing operations there (ie no more listings in geo area, no need to check where customers are from). Basically terrible comms by a company whose product is an app and thinks of everything else as secondary. A lesson to tech companies everywhere, to grow up.
> Doesn't China supposedly have a significant influence on the WHO?

This is evidence that China in fact doesn't have as big influence as people believe.

"China has taken over WHO" is just a dishonest, evidence-free narrative by people who politicize the issue because they don't want to accept the WHO having anything good to say about China.
There are a lot of static site hosting options, all of which have a different idea of "easy".

What I'm not seeing is what the easy dynamic hosting options are, other than a little VPS. Things like FaaS look easy once you've learned their lengthy setup and configuration process, and there's always the risk of a cloud billing nightmare.

Basically I think there should be a cloud version of Visual Basic.
So, chiplet designs are a way around the issue of small defects making a big chip unusable, by splitting big chips into several chiplets. But these chiplet chips can only be properly tested when all the chiplets have been assembled into a package - just like non-chiplet chips. And if it turns out that one of the chiplets is bad, they have to throw out the whole package anyway. So, in order to really benefit from using chiplets, they have to figure out how to test them before they are assembled.
This seems backwards to me, since live action film is a lot more expensive than CGI animation. It's true that high-quality cameras and video editing software have become more of a cheap commodity, but this does almost nothing to impact the actual factors that push the cost of live action film up. Look at what people post on video sites, that's a far better representation of what's actually "cheap" in video.
The underwhelming impact of software engineering research
https://ertdfgcvb.xyz

It’s just a splash page but it uses the same engine of my ASCII playground:

Examples, demos, manual and link to the repo: https://play.ertdfgcvb.xyz
This plagued me for a long time. It felt like the only way to validate my value is based on what someone else said about it. However, what really happened was that relationships are fleeting, attention from others tends to be weak and a lot of the time, no one really does care. Also, I overemphasized process, that certain things must be done in a certain way for them to have a certain truth to it. It is and was crippling.

One thing that changed for me last year was that I finally got the passion to get through that list of random topics I wanted to get through without the pretense of trying to prove anything to anyone. It really did work, even though the feeling towards those pretenses still linger a bit.

Here on HN, there was once something that stuck along with me, on an article about how people found success in one-person companies. One said that he did what he needed to do and then just find what could be sold from that. It's a simple statement, but what it says lacks that pretense of finding the truth in something, like finding success in other people or even unattainable quality of work.
I found my zen when I was told that, "always know you are the best". No matter what, you are better than everyone by some metric.

I also figured out quite recently that, never compare yourself to anyone because there is always going to be someone far better than you. Far luckier than you.

I was binge watching a YouTube channel called "Geoguesser". Self explanatory. I was mesmerized by how skilled he was. Even if he was thrown into a literal no where, he was fairly accurate in his guess.

Then I watched him compete with other people. He is good but he was no where as good as the other competitors. My reality was shattered. He is not a miracle but he was just skilled at a niche, that's all. There are better guessers but they were not miracles either they were more skilled AND more lucky.

So the pursuit of skills and ambition never stops. It is not a thirst, it is greed. So stop comparing, embrace the mediocrity and convince yourself you are better. Start by finding the small things that makes you better than most.
Rather than bang on about my JS canvas library's site, I'll post a link to my personal poetry website - https://rikverse2020.rikweb.org.uk/

My aims for the site were: 1. Put the poems first (I hate poet sites that are all about the poet and only link to a handful of poems); 2. Get rid of the backend database; and 3. Make it easy to find poems using a bespoke tagging system.

I blogged about my experiences building the new site in a series of posts starting here: https://blog.rikworks.co.uk/2020/02/01/Recoding-the-RikVerse...
No. 1 can be solved by adopting a conservative life style, ideally two "steps" below what your current income would permit you.

2. and 3. are totally independent from each other, both are made easier by No. 1 so.

Just a general advice, if I may dare, stop putting those things in order, relax and let some things in live just happen. And enjoy the journey as much as possible.

Obviously, that advice only works if you are living in a stable environment. If you don't priorities are going to be topped by, worst case, living to see the next day.
Forget the recruiter pipeline unless he can find a recruiter (also an older person) who will take the challenge. He might be able to network with older coders in order to find companies that value older workers. Look for local tech greyhairs socially or online and reach out to them. Pitch as a no-hassle guy who is mature, flexible and willing to pick up any stuff that others don't want to do as temp, perm or part-time. Above all, find many ways to talk to many people about their work and his interest in current stuff. Try not to go CV, then F2F - that's a losing game for older workers. Find any way to do F2F or chat first and CV if there's interest as a formality after.
Whether it's a big or small company, for anything vital, you will always need assurances for the continuity of the work. Large companies can also go bankrupt or decide this type of work isn't viable for them. What you need, in those cases, is access to everything: the source code, the deployment passwords, everything. Let them be kept in escrow until the vendor becomes unable or unwilling to fulfil their duties.
Thanks so much for your comments! Super helpful!

One question: what sort of things do you think I could write as a novice in these fields?? I don't think I'm interested in writing study notes or summaries etc. I think I'm more inquiry-inclined, something more critical, more engaged.
Fascinating input, thank you.
Ask HN: What bank is available for Atlas companies that is not SVB?
We are based in the EU and are looking for a bank that will open an account for us.

SVB is not a good fit because of the fees and the experiences people have with them.

Brex declined us (Probably because we're bootstrapped and don't have enough money in the account).

Anyone has good experiences with another bank?
So...

I think Dunbar's number exemplifies a failing in our social science culture, or maybe our epistemological tendencies. .. or maybe it just shows what happens when MBA texbooks adopt something.

We don't really know what to do with a piece of insight or knowledge like Dunbar's number. When is it "true?" When is it relevant? What does it say about how we should organize? What does it say about how organisations of different sizes function? What kind of successes or failures does Dunbar's nunber suggest we encounter.

I'm not saying that Dunbar's number is wrong. I'm suggesting that for it to be profound in a scientific sense, it needs to have consequences. Prediction, prescription, insight about existing structures, something.

We intuitively agree that working at an 80 person company is different from an 800 person could company. I don't see Dunbar's theories adding much beyond that, no predictions or insights about how such organisations work.

Mostly it's a piece of theory that can be thrown onto slides, in support or objection to something as needed.

Is there a there, there? Do I have this wrong?
But it says that soldiers were fed 4000 to 5000 calories. Sounds pretty hard to exercise enough to burn that off.
Another question, if you don't mind: What sort of things do you think I could write as a novice in these fields?? I don't think I'm interested in writing study notes or summaries etc. I think I'm more inquiry-inclined, something more critical, more engaged.
Potty-mouthed System/360 fix revealed to all and sundry
I would probably pay good money to have a OLED painting in my house that I can just tell what kind of painting to generate each day.

Imagine waking up and telling your (preferably locally hosted) voice assistant that today really feels like a Rembrandt day and the AI just generates new paintings for you.
If Japan had shut down all of its plants, decommissioned them and built new plants it would have spent less money than cleaning up Fukushima.

The fact that nuclear advocates keep saying newer generation power plants are safe is basically useless because they also advocate for keeping all the unsafe ones online. Tanks have modular power plants that can be replaced and serviced outside the tank. Why isn't the same true for nuclear power plants? Why not just update to the latest version instead of keeping old versions with vulnerabilities? Oh right, because they are monoliths that are a pain in the ass to upgrade. You need to rewrite them from scratch.
System/360 Announcement (1964)
Quite the opposite, this implies their man inside fed and intel.
I think it’s more about living more in a literary world than in a real one. As a person with book worm tendencies, I understand quite well how it can be harmful.
Thanks so much for all these! So eye-opening!
It seems counter-intuitive, but I've found that this works for me also. For example, I could never learn basic mathematical concepts until I had seem them in action as a part of a larger framework or practical problem.

For example, differentiation by itself is just pushing symbols around according to some arbitrary-seeming rules. It's not until I did physics that its purpose made sense. I studied calculus for years, and it never "clicked" for me, and I forgot most of it promptly. Then in just a semester of physics where I was applying it in the context of complicated problems, it suddenly felt like second-nature. I had to basically re-learn all of it from scratch, but with the context of my physics problems it was so easy!

I've had similar experiences teaching programming to junior staff. Anything you talk about in isolation goes in one ear and out the other. They have to encounter the problem in something larger that they are solving for the solution to make sense and motivate them to learn.

An example is string-escaping. E.g.: how do you represent the quote symbol in a quoted string? This seems trivial, but it trips up everyone when they are getting started. I mean literally everyone. So okay, I make sure to cover it in like... lesson #1 or #2 because string literals are everywhere, and escaping is common. Every single time, the people that sat through that lesson will ask me a week later to help me fix as program that has a literal like 'O'Brian' in it, and they can't figure out why it's broken. But once I show them that they should have used 'O''Brian' or 'O\'Brian', it all makes sense to them and they memorise the technique.
FYI, GP wrote "the archive" and meant the index page: https://danluu.com

Article's Last-Modified header says 2022-04-06.
I thought I'm quite good with my about 7 foreign languages with basic competency. I only ever became really fluent in English though. My latest addition was Arabic, and the Duolingo course wasn't exactly deep.
Because he pretends to have a theory revolutioning all kinds of sciences, while not revolutioning even one. That's typical of crackpots
https://blackpirate.tech

Source code: https://github.com/blackpiratelive/blackpiratelive.github.io
Never did I think I would hate the phrase “Violence isn’t the answer”
Is plain-text already minimalism? https://evilcookie.de/
https://renatello.com

My best decision was starting a personal blog more than 10 years ago.

It brought me new clients and friends.

Also https://tapvise.com/ is my side project. Still wip.
I would argue that it is not harmless.

Let's say that you have a P2P application for sharing MP3s. There are many millions of MP3s, but if an attacker sees a download of a particular size, then they have a pretty good idea of which MP3 has been downloaded.
> Those who support Wolfram typically are busy doing research and don't care about commenting

Who is doing NKS-based research these days?
Stephen Wolfram basically lives my dream as an "entrepreneurial scientist". He is successful in academia and business and has his own money to fund his own research ideas. I am nowhere near as prolific as he is but I have to admire him for how he managed to pursue his dreams.
We didn’t lock down society for 2 years because of Covid either.

You can’t even call the US response a lock down. My friends abroad had to register with the government to leave their homes to visit a neighborhood market.

We didn’t have anything like that.

The US had a more coordinated and stricter response to BLM protests, sending the national guard in to enforce curfews and shooting paint rounds at citizens sitting on their suburban porches.
We Moved from Helm to Gitpod Installer
A lot of great personal sites here. Mine is just a simple GitHub Pages site which I recently set up. It contains some of my hobby projects and CTF writeups.

https://heinandre.no/
Shutterstock is a direct competitor of iStock and is a $3B company. I personally pay them $200/mo. Maybe you just don't know enough about this industry?
Is there a super-upvote on HN?
https://evilcookie.de/

As a low-level developer, I love to read man-pages and thus thought about making a "content-first", plain-text site.
I also get distracted really fast and thought this would be the best way to get rid of all the noise and just show things as pure and down-boiled as they are.
Conservatives for the rich with a modicum of backbone to appeal to people who wouldn't vote for corruption scandal parties like CDU but Christian Linder seems to be losing his backbone as well.
> and perhaps even necessary

> is far from the determining factor.

Pick one. There is a reason why low class kids are heavily underrepresented and high class privileged kids are highly overrepresented among VC-backed founders.
Ask HN: What is On-Call compensation like at your company?
What is your company's on-call compensation scheme like?

Are there any unique benefits or perks that you think work well in combination with financial benefits?

How much do you get per period of on-call?

Do these rise in line with inflation or cost of living increases?

There was a post that delved into this a while ago, but times have changed dramatically with more people now working remotely and inflation currently massively up.
In both the US and (at least parts of) Europe you have two types of "Farmers markets". One where actual farmers sell in season produce from their actual farm, and one where middlemen buy/import stuff from all over the place and resell it in a market like setting. In both cases the first one is cheap and the second one is expensive.
They're all shorthand abstract systems that define static relationships between a fairly small number of symbols arranged in a fairly small number of ways to define a fairly small set of meanings.

Example: a circuit diagram. You have a transistor and some other components, and if you know the language you can recognise it as an emitter follower. It's a very concrete and clear mapping.

There aren't many things you can do with a transistor. When you've learned them all, that's basically it.

Human languages are much bigger. If you ignore the alphabet level and start with words, there are thousands of symbols (tens of thousands for advanced users). And most of language is about implication and context.

If a partner says "What time will you be back tonight?" that can mean anything from "Because my car is still in the garage, can I borrow your car?" to "Are you still having an affair?" to "Will you make it in time for curfew?"

In most conversations and a lot of writing, the words are hints, not explicit mappings to defined meanings. You can parse an immediate meaning without knowing the context, but not the full meaning.

So it's a much harder problem. You have to learn basic grammar and vocab for tens of thousands of symbols, then learn standard basic exchanges in social situations, then special forms, idioms and social register, then implication and subtext.
Even among Germanic/Northern Germanic languages you'd need some formal learning and practice to actually have some competency. Mutual intelligibility doesn't really cut it for "having learnt a language". I'd never say I speak danish or Swedish even though I can understand it somewhat.

The languages the man from the article has learned are considerably different from each other. Not all of them, of course. Still, even going from Spanish or French to Catalan and Portoguese is no picnic. Same for slavic languages. Flexibility with Grammar and already having the mental infrastructure can help, of course!
I like your site, but it took me 10 seconds of waiting to understand that you're just looping animations for no reason instead of using them as a loading animations lol
I am surprised that someone mentions this. I think thermal power plants are quite amusing. You build this huge monolithic power plant and then the rivers can't cool it because it's too big. So you instead place it near the ocean and then get hit by a tsunami instead. Wonderful.
How Chrome treats your privacy explained with simple comics
For me I'm modestly good at both.
These are KGB's top brass and not just some agents.

I am saying that KGB ceased to be in 1991 and FSB was created in late 1993. You are saying it is a conspiracy theory, because "because".