skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I recently saw an open survey by a recruiter who I think works mainly with experienced software contractors. He was asking what everyone's priorities were when choosing their next gig.

Almost without exception the responses were a good rate, being fully remote and being outside IR35 (an infamous government regulation here in the UK that makes some types of gig very unattractive). The next most popular was having a simple application process with anything more than one discussion widely considered excessive for a short contract.

Obviously the rate is a money thing. You can only escape IR35 based on what your working arrangements are so if you're caught then you just have to accept that some people won't work with you. But for almost all software development gigs there is no sensible reason to exclude good people because they often prefer fully remote work and in the world of contracting you're just shooting yourself in the foot if you expect anyone good to go through "only" three or four stages of your application process.
I've had over 10,000 Uber rides, all black, some SUV since 2011. I would have no problem if they just focused on the higher end of the market where there's profit to be made. I never thought their going down market was a good idea.
talent and the capacity for determined effort, sometimes called ‘grit’, depend a great deal on one’s genetic endowments and upbringing.

Someone wanna tell me what they could be based on other than genetic endowment and upbringing? Is there any factor that isn't encompassed by those two categories? The unknowable will of the Flying Spaghetti Monster?

Meritocracy is not only wrong; it’s bad.

Meritocracy is the worst option there is, except for all the other options.
I'm kind of confused as to why they don't have a demo showing all the fonts. I'm not just going to blindly pick from system fonts, I want to choose which I prefer first. Yeah I could look them all up, but just seems like they missed showing off the core thing...
Thanks for sharing! I think it’d be nice for privacy if the data came after a # in the URL so it’s never sent to a server.
To those focusing on the URL’s TLD rather than the content:

> This article was originally published at Aeon and has been republished under Creative Commons.
I agree.

And IMHO the statement Churchill used to describe democracy also applies to meritocracy: "It's the worst of all possible systems... until you consider the alternatives."
> when you're on-call you might need to actually access private data.

When I was on-call and had to dive deep to solve customers' issues at one of those companies, we could only access anonymized data stripped of all PII (including emails and even IP addresses), to the point where the only non-scrambled things we could get were timestamps and error stacktraces/executed commands (which were also stripped of all PII, which made debugging a bit more difficult).

And every instance of access to that anonymized no-PII data required a physical authenticator, and it would automatically send an email to your manager (and some mailing group, i forgot) and create a special log that indicated "such and such was trying to access this anonymized ABC data for XYZ stated purpose".
How do you deal with cases where results must be ordered by some field and the data changes between page 1 request and page 2 request?
The Fed needs to keep raising interest rates.
Tao Downtown
One person's merit is another person's pedigree
It makes me feel good when I see one of my projects getting stars. When I star a project it is with the hope that another maintainer will have a similar good feeling.
I collect these things for fun and one of my big discoveries is that there's no "standard" system font stacks - here are my list of system font stacks and their sources: https://github.com/sw-yx/spark-joy/blob/master/README.md#fon...

some of them even come with annotations as to why they make the choices they make.

Github's font stack is

font-family: -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif, "Apple Color Emoji", "Noto Color Emoji", "Segoe UI Emoji", "Segoe UI Symbol";

VS Code:

font-family: -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, 'Segoe UI', Roboto, Oxygen, Ubuntu, Cantarell, 'Open Sans', 'Helvetica Neue', sans-serif

probably more "native" on mobile:

font-family: -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", "Roboto", "Oxygen", "Ubuntu", "Helvetica Neue", Arial, sans-serif;

apparently all modern browsers have this new shortcut that make it as simple as:

font-family: ‘system-ui’, sans-serif;

https://chromestatus.com/feature/5640395337760768
None of those will ever produce economically meaningful results.

So it is only a matter of what can appear to produce any apparent results, enough to unlock further grant funding.
Over 100 Young Crocodiles Find Refuge on Their Father’s Back
Why do you think that creating a new coin and trying to sell it is the easiest way to get bitcoin? Most people think that it's not very easy, and buy bitcoin from an exchange.
Onboarding is the very first time you realize you made a mistake.
This is an open source alternative that works quite well https://github.com/lukas-blecher/LaTeX-OCR
Worth noting that Infiniband RDMA and NVMeoF exists & is pretty similar to this proprietary GPUDirect Storage idea. Now that Nvidia owns Mellanox though, who the frak knows what the rest of the damned planet is going to do. Fart-balls!

That said, huge respect to Nvidia for chasing the puck/seeing the trend & bringing it to developers. This CuDF framework could not be better targeted:

> cuDF is a Python GPU DataFrame library (built on the Apache Arrow columnar memory format) for loading, joining, aggregating, filtering, and otherwise manipulating data. cuDF also provides a pandas-like API that will be familiar to data engineers & data scientists, so they can use it to easily accelerate their workflows without going into the details of CUDA programming.

Taking best of breed data-storage, Apache Arrow, and building a python library that hardware optimizes the storage<->gpu flow around it, is some excellent marksmanship.

It'll be interesting to see what Nvidia does next in this area. Nvidia is stuffing BlueField smart-fabric NICs into all their new Grace systems[1]. First less obvious would be some push-down optimization, do some filtering of the data coming off the NVMe at the NIC itself.

Amazon meanwhile has Nitro, which is a brilliant way to let cpus see disaggregated devices as though they were native/close, which bypasses the need for RDMA, kind of is an RDMA-like but in hardware system.

There's not a lot on my radar I can identify that can counter this, since Infiniband got left to rot. There's RoCE (RDMA over Converged Ethernet) but basically the mainstream market has forefit being good. Maybe some day CXL can be useful for GPUs?

[1] https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/taiwans-tech-titans-adopt...
The point of the system font stack is that your site’s typography resembles the typography of the entire platform. It might look differently on different platforms, but it matches the platform you’re on.

Sans-serif will get you ugly fonts, such as Arial on Windows, and likely DejaVu Sans or Liberation Sans on Linux.
China and the EU regulate AI, US speculates
I'll spare ya the trouble.

- Unrolled tweets: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1528494394604761094.html

- The merge commit: https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/lin...

- Some discussion: https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/YmlMGx6+uigkGiZ0@zx2c4.com/

- The commit from that discussion: https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/crng/random....

- Source code: https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/crng/random....

- More commits: https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/crng/random....
> Sadly not open source

Just to clarify this take, the source is available on Github [0] but licensed under the highly controversial Server Side Public License [1][2].

This license was originally written by MongoDB. They applied to get it recognised as an open source license with the OSI but later withdrew the application as it became clear it wouldn't have been approved.

OSI explained in 2019 [3] why it didn't consider the license to be open source.

[0] https://github.com/gravitl/netmaker

[1] https://github.com/gravitl/netmaker/blob/master/LICENSE.txt

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Side_Public_License

[3] https://opensource.org/node/1099
> Although widely held, the belief that merit rather than luck determines success or failure in the world is demonstrably false. This is not least because merit itself is, in large part, the result of luck. Talent and the capacity for determined effort, sometimes called ‘grit’, depend a great deal on one’s genetic endowments and upbringing.

Heads-I-win, tails-you-lose, or: since merit is mostly luck, you might as well choose your students at random. Show us how it works, Princeton!
"Another strategy of the supposed nonplayer is to demand equality in every area of life.Everyone must be treated alike, whatever their status and strength. But if, to avoid die taint of power, you attempt to treat everyone equally and fairly, you will confront the problem that some people do certain things better than others. Treating everyone equally means ignoring their differences, elevating the less skillful and suppressing those who excel. Again, many of those who behave this way are actually deploying another power strategy, redistributing people's rewards in a way that they determine."
I have an inflatable kayak, too! Love it.
Pocket was bought by the Mozilla Corporation over 5 years ago. It's a first-party Mozilla product.
Right here: https://imgur.com/a/COXJUwb
As Mozilla loses core dev resources, just like IE, Firefox will go extinct.

It will no longer be able to render modern pages as the web continues to grow increasingly complex.

Hopefully someday there will be a major backed FOSS project that forks web kit and can compete. But there are far too many more important problems out there for something as complex as a modern browser.
As a senior in software development, I frequently help out with the recruitment side of whatever companies I'm employed with, and an applicant with a formally accredited degree in computer science definitely stands out as a strong signal to pursue a potential interview with them.

I know at least nominally they'll have some passing familiarity with simulations, discrete mathematics, linear algebra, data structures and algorithms. You can learn all of this information on your own but it's more difficult for me to verify.

While this is not as true if I'm looking to hire a senior engineer, it is significantly more important for entry level positions.
whereas dads-money-ocracy is fine.
Meanwhile, in Gilroy (southern end of Silicon Valley), my choices are massively-oversubscribed cable (good luck getting usable speeds during Netflix-O'Clock, and straight-up outages are common) or, finally, StarLink, even though I live in town, in a suburban area. I can't help but shake my head at how far behind we are at times.
OT

It is.

Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—things like article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> Could you elaborate a bit on this part? Intentional sinking for
insurance purposes, or to avoid having to pay for it to be scrapped?

Sorry for late reply. Yeah, I was thinking of the latter, though both
might be possible. Contriving a marine accident, collision, fire. loss
in a storm etc would be physically dangerous and legally very risky. A
less serious but still illegal caper would be dodging the scrapage
costs by holing it. But when a registered vessel "disappears" that can
trigger serious investigations for all sorts of reasons I am sure you
can imagine.
"Believing" means taking advantage of it. In IT more skilled people should step out of system and start their own consulting company.

If you stay in system and expect to be rewarded for your skills because of believe in meritocracy, this believe is actually harmful.
Another key requirement that must be considered is packet ordering. With games you care about the latest state and thus discarding older out of order packets is a better strategy than waiting for packets to serialize them like TCP would do.
Yeah it's silly.

It's safe to skip the article as it doesn't bring anything special to the table.

All it is saying is that the recent wave of layoffs in the US, could make workers return to the office to secure a job.
We live 10 minutes from LAX. Taxi drivers get somewhat annoyed, but we give them $20 and that seems to make them feel better.

Also, we have a favorite taxi company we use to get to LAX. We make reservations a few days in advance, and they have always showed up on schedule.
I get many stars on my last project but no issues or PR. It feels quite lonely and, more importantly, I can't know if my work is going in a good direction.

I think people mainly use stars as bookmark.
This is one of the reasons it's interesting to be married to a former high-level athlete. We've had this very argument about various situations over and over again.

In games where the player about to be eliminated gets to challenge another player in a mini-game and the loser of that mini-game is actually eliminated, she feels like the only fair move is to challenge the player with the lowest score because "they're performing the worst anyway".

I get the intuitive appeal of that line of reasoning, but that's... not how chance works! Why would you penalise the unlucky one further? The fairest thing would be to pick someone at random.

(Similarly, I tried suggesting replacing penalty shoot-outs in soccer after a draw with a dice throw because that's what they pretty consistently end up being. She didn't even know how to respond to that.)
The actual font rendered as sans-serif can be changed via a browser settings. But the system font stack is usually resolved to the same font for a given OS.
Sounds a bit counterproductive if privacy is your goal isn't it? Why would you be signed into your browser.
Most revolutions end in authoritarian states, frankly. When a group is biased towards a will to power, that tends to give them a leg up when there’s a power vacuum.

As I alluded to previously, though, the Nordic countries were largely governed by socialist parties for much of the 20th century. They didn’t devolve into dictatorships.
You legitimately think you don’t need comparable level of education, work and skill between brain surgeon and leader of big, successful organization?

I assume you never actually lead anyy bigger team for significant amount of time. I’m not a manager, but I’ve lead teams of around 50 people as an IC. It’s tough job that requires very specific skill set to be successful.
What other notable improvements are there?
I don’t understand. Many of these fonts are very different from one another.
You can't evaluate rationality in context of small number of samples of a fat tailed distribution with wide uncertainty bands. Besides, startups can be a kind of success even in failure based on opportunities that arise as a result.
> Princeton telling people

"This article was originally published at Aeon and has been republished under Creative Commons."

> they can’t get ahead on merit

"This is not to deny the industry and talent of successful people. However, it does demonstrate that the link between merit and outcome is tenuous and indirect at best."
Not really - they’re buying debt just like a debt collector does, but don’t collect on it - just forgives it outright.
I would love to read more. Do you have any further information?
Check out the video. "Clifford Stoll talk from 1999" at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HvqFo-EU9W0 "The man is certainly eccentric."

"This is a video of a presentation given by Clifford Stoll at a Sequent User's Group 'Enterprise Solutions Summit' in Portland, OR. I happen to find this program on a DVD as I was cleaning out some old boxes and figured it was probably the only surviving copy of this presentation in existence. Of all the programs, presentations and lectures I've attended over a long career in the IT field, this presentation has always stuck with me and I figured it would be a shame if this were lost to the world forever. I hope you enjoy the presentation as much now as I did then." -- William Danger Newman
Hi from Argentina! I hope to give an external perspective.

My first recommendation is to go to thttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shootings_in_th... and make an excel file with the data of each incident, and try to make clear if the attacker was an immigrant "0", the son of an immigrant "1", the grand son of an immigrant "2", ... It's a strange metric, because if only one of your grandparents is an immigrant, do you get the same number in that field that if all your grandparents are immigrants.

My family is very weird, so some of my ancestor arrived recently and some a very long time ago. Try to imagine what would you write in that field for you and your friends.

Most immigrant are nice people. Some not.

Most people with long history of family there are nice people. Some not.

Most people with complicated ancestors structure are nice people. Some not.

In my opinion you are putting too much weight in the last case, and trying to fix it one detail that is not a common pattern and will not be useful to prevent next case.
emoji have their own font
i use this thing all the time, but wish i had the option to turn off the XKCD style charts to some thing more "professional"
Having moved away from such a belief I can intuit why this is: Believing in merit makes you inclined to seek extrinsic motivations to act, which are known to be less powerful than intrinsic ones.

If you instead separate the two things and see "doing work" and "getting credit" as nearly unrelated, you can operate more successfully when you run the rat race, and also study more effectively when you learn a new skill.

Ideally we could devise a society where they're closely related through technical means, but as of now that's usually only achieved in a limited sense by running a formal evaluation like a contest, and even then, the quality of the result is dependent on it being run honestly and fairly. A tournament where everyone cheats says nothing about who is more skilled.
Exactly. There is a deep-seated appeal to meritocracy for a reason — it should be cutting out those who would get places and opportunities due to nepotism & favoritism, but who don't have the chops to do the work in comparison to the competition. Yes, there will always be an element of luck — family situation, diet, social or economic states — but giving a chance to those with stronger abilities, as well as to those who are willing to put in the work needed (which certainly can help someone push past those with more inborn ability who don't put in the effort) is a feature of the system, not a bug. The main argument against it is usually that the favored groups/individuals of the arguer won't get the advantages they think they should get. Many in the corporate and government worlds seek to reinstate feudalism; meritocratic advocates don't want such a terrible future for themselves or for anyone else.
I believe in meritocracy as an ideal, but definitely not as a model of reality.

My main criticism of meritocracy as a model of reality is not privilege though; it's politics. As you approach anything resembling real success politics becomes a much stronger force than merit. I think I would have been much better off if I had understood this earlier in life, so I do agree with the idea that "belief in meritocracy (as a model of reality) is bad for you".
It's common to feel this way[1] while grinding leetcode. It's not common software engineering practice and so it's largely uncomfortable. The leetcode questions you pass in the interview you won't see on the job. Leetcode is primarily FAANG practice but has been adopted as a form of cargo culting by everyone else. It's like a form of fraternity or sorority hazing.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29804607
Link? I'm interested.

However, I suspect availability plays into it. Almost anyone can pick up a couple of rectangular HEPA filters and a box fan from the local hardware or big box store.

I've never seen a cylidrical HEPA filter. So, I probably need to order that from an industrial supplier.

And, aren't duct fans kind of noisy? Do they make quiet ones?

In addition, this fan/filter seems even easier:
https://smartairfilters.com/en/blog/cannon/
I was working with a client that was upset about the whiteness of the paper used for her new business stationery. After a lot of too’ing and fro’ing, I privately took a single sheet and cut it into 4 and gave the 4 “samples” to her as stock options. Despite all the options being completely identical, she chose option B as her definite preference, with option A as her second favourite.

Also this wasn’t some regular idiot, but a client that had overseen a marketing agency for 15+ years, so really she should know better.

As a bonus the paper I used for the experiment was the original stock that she was making a fuss over. (While paper is available in tints via different whitening approaches, those tints are noticeably different from one another.)

So it seems sometimes people have moments of perfectionism, it’s good to keep this in mind if we notice ourselves being fussy about a decision that probably doesn’t matter. It’s almost always better to just get on with it, than be paralysed by decisions.
Arguably doing the most to protect user privacy.
Wow, thanks! I had no idea it existed. I’ve searched for something like it not that long ago.
That is a fascinating use of idempotence, bravo!
If you do,layoffs, you will lose your worst people. If you cut salaries, you will lose your best people.

Good developers know their market rate. And they know hat your problems aren’t their problems.
> You are the oldest thing in the universe you can observe.

The moon is older than we are, due to gravitational time dilation. So is Mars. Even if you account for the time it takes for light to travel to here from there.
I disagree, I think countercultures must still exist. They always do, even if we can't see them.

Part of the issue is that you can't look for the counterculture in the places you expect to find it. If you do, you're probably just looking at a different corner of the same culture.

The other part of the issue is that even if you happen upon a counterculture, you may not like what you find.

For something to be truly countercultural, it couldn't just stand for the things we already agree with, it would have to genuinely shock or offend us. Because we are the culture, a counterculture would by definition be outside our context, and we would just dismiss it as ridiculous, rather than a movement.

We would probably not share it virally, or like it on Instagram. Thus, you won't find actual countercultures on popular forums. If you do, they've probably already been banned.

I think when we imagine a counterculture, we're actually imagining an edgier but still palatable version of the culture we're in. We think back to the countercultural movements of the 1960s-200s which have become simply the culture itself, and we think "Well, I agree with those movements, so I must be pretty countercultural". But no, that's just your culture. A counterculture is the thing that disagrees with you. An actual counterculture would read to us as ridiculous, dangerous, or even evil.
Most people barely notice or mind, which is unfortunate. Elden Ring has so much input lag but most dont even notice.
He he :-)

My point is worse than you think.

I'm denying the actual utility of the "do one thing and do it well" in practice. It's an awesome soundbite and you can't really argue with it (who would want tools that do "it" badly?), but it practice it wasn't ever respected.

So why treat it like a sacred icon?

Be practical instead, ergo systemd.