skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There were periods in my life when I was obsessed with productivity. I found out that I can do about 3 to 4 hours of highly concentrated work a day. On extreme days, I could pull off 6 hours of concentration. But I always paid back that time in the days after.

Now I can't do those hours in 1 go, there need to be pauses in between. Spending 40 hours a week doing 15 to 20 hours of highly concentrated work seems reasonable to me.

It's possible that I'm highly unproductive with my 3 to 4 hours a day, but there are clues in my life that say otherwise. I have a masters degree in CS, and at work always got good to great reviews. So comparing myself to others, I'm doing pretty great. Never have I met anyone who was 2x or more productive than me (when I was not in my unproductive periods). I met plenty of people who were way smarter than me.

Another clue: while studying, I would do 75% of my study material before lunch, then had to struggle the remaining 25% in the afternoon and early evening. At 20:00, I was completely done. I would read 1 sentence, and it just would not stick in my head. It was impossible at that point for me to learn.

I know people who study way into the night, and I always wondered how they were able to pull this off. Well, in the end it turned out they didn't do shit in the mornings.

So for me, I'm very skeptical about working 60 to 80 hours a week. I think a lot of people are just fooling themselves. Sometimes you hear stories like Elon Musk or John Carmack, who seem to be able to work crazy amount of hours. But still I'm highly skeptical about their reporting. Let's just say I would love to see it with my own eyes if they fit into my theory or not. If they don't fit, I would love to know how they are able to do it.

I've seen others online that report the same as me. 4 hours a day of highly concentrated work. That you can sit in meetings 60 to 80 hours a week, I have no doubt. But I don't think it would equate into 60 to 80 hours of productive work.

Anyway, if you have more on the topic, I would love to hear it. Also, check out this video, which is also very informative and comes from a pretty reliable source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LH1bewTg-P4
You're not alone, but it can help to identify the patterns and habits that led you down this path. There was a recent piece in entrepreneur - https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/424454 that may offer some insight, and I think the author does some coaching around burnout if that's something you think can help.
The SAMO Graffiti
Side rant:

> 4) Don’t get a home warranty.

Sellers are basically obligated to provide them, because it's what everybody does. They serve to lubricate a deal with a checkbox, while releasing the seller from some obligations.

I'm pretty sure selling RE agents get a percentage on referrals (in US). I sold a house without an agent and phoned one of these companies to simply buy a warranty to hand to my house buyer. They were baffled how to do this without my agent id number until some manager said just sell it to him.

The whole thing is a reception line of parasites waiting for some homebuyer blood.
FYI it's still operational, although not used for day to day ops.

From what I heard, back during the communist times, power sometimes failed and people were left stuck at their tables. So they had to keep a ladder close by.
Damn, I didn't think this post would get so popular. I actually forgot to update my profile here. My current project is https://propertysquares.com :(
I've taken multiple six month stints off, and in the UK no one has ever asked about it.
I actually laughed out loud, and really needed that today. Thank you.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31548548 was great too. You should turn these into TikToks or do standup or something.
the IP itself isn’t a problem

the problem is that you are forced to sign off your work to corporations else you can’t feed your family, because they’ll find somebody else who is desperate enough and will sign it

the only solution is unionizing and voting against IP transfer between individual and corporation
Do people still write software for discs outside of console games? I don’t think this comeback is very clever either way. Being paid $100 for a product worth $1000 in total sales is pretty reasonable. Being paid $50k to resolve a $2k seems to be a very unusual outcome. It just raises the stakes of the case by 25x.

It seems very unreasonable that a losing party could need to cover so much from their opponents end especially as they get no say in the total stakes.

If it was you paying $50k to your lawyer regardless of whether or not you won, sure, that’s just your choice. This is a $50k extra being thrown at your opponent and there’s no incentive to be reasonable about it because it sounds like your own client doesn’t get hit with it. Idk if it applies in this context but if it goes both ways then you’ve got a prisoners dilemma. Spending more on lawyers increases the probability of winning, but also increases the total pot of lawyer money. That’s so fucked up.

I would vote for you’re liable for at mode the amount you spent on lawyers personally. If they do 50k on a 2k issue and you don’t even get a lawyer, you may lose 2k but they lose 50k. Incentives to escalate lawyer fees sounds stupid as shit to society.
Perhaps you should read "The 48 Laws of Power" by Robert Greene. I first read it in my early thirties and got depressed for a while. I used to be 'people pleaser' too. Expecting everyone to do the 'right' thing or reason in a certain way. That book made me understand that people may be guided or driven by laws or maxims different from mine. I had been very naive about how the world worked for so long and that made me sad. I certainly wasn't going to court attention at all costs, or keep people dependent on me, but I was now aware that these were principles followed by some people and expecting them to behave otherwise was foolishness. Then learn some Stoic philosophies. The daily stoic by Ryan Holiday is good recommendation.
Guardian launches Tor onion service
I've taken sixth months off and mostly played video games and no one ever cared or asked??!
VW isn't struggling, it is the biggest EV manufacturer in Europe.
Water intoxication is a separate issue, an acute electrolyte imbalance, a dilution of blood; probably nothing to do with not peeing but with rapid drinking. If her kidneys had time to shed all the water she would have wet herself and not died.
IMO something is wrong with this database: most of the pre-seed startup entries have market* salaries.

--

*) might be below today's market, but still not something a pre-seed startup could pay their employees.
It is interesting how most of the commenters, even here, automatically think about a dystopian future where "a bad result => eliminate the embryo, abort it".

This is a specific kind of dystopia in which genetic damage is "read only" and cannot be altered. But genetic therapies are being developed, too. One day, we will be able to fix quite a lot of those problems already in utero.

This may yet breed another kind of dystopic nightmares, but I would expect a much more mixed scenarios; a better future for some people who would either be aborted or suffer from debilitating conditions for all their lives.
That's what surprised me the most too. Like... it's 2022, I'm sure we have banking systems capable of transferring miniscule amounts of money on demand, everywhere in the world. Right? For the amount of tech that comes from US, it seems to be incredibly backward on a lot of things.
You can also point with a sword, it's not necessary to smash it straight on someone's head to make a point.
Definitely deserving a seat reservation on Ark Fleet Ship B
Maybe this should be replaced with the English version, which is also not behind a paywal: https://www.spiegel.de/international/world/after-xinjiang-re...
I love it.

Contacts are awesome. I got humanitarian aid logistics training and the teacher taught us: always make a written contract, for any agreement. You don't need to be a lawyer to make a useful contact. The process of writing and signing it clarifies the situation to you and the counterparty. Most disagreements can be solved in informal arbitration, especially when one party can show, look we agreed to this and then I did this and you did that. Humans do better removing emotion and ego when there's some rules written down.

I also faced a situation where the contract a former logistician had entered into had become wildly unfair to the vendor, not through his fault. He started giving me problems and I offered to break the contract and find a new compromise that met my needs and his. Happiness all around, for a small amount of reasonable, ethical cost to my organization.
I suspect that documentation quality is part of "by veterans", people old enough to have a considerable part of their programming biography set in the days before Google driven development. Slightly ironic.
>- Made by really famous veteran language designers

- Backed by Google

Looking at decades of how various programming languages gain popularity, those proposed reasons don't seem that convincing when we look at counterexamples.

E.g. counterexamples of unknown (at the time) creators creating popular languages : Bjarne Stroustrup (C++), James Gosling (Java), Rasmus Lerdorf (PHP).

E.g. counterexamples of famous computer scientists creating languages that were not widely adopted : Alan Kay famous for Smalltalk but Squeak is not widely used, and Niklaus Wirth famous for Pascal but later Oberon not widely used.

I think Go's popularity is mostly explained by technical reasons:

1) compiles to a single executable that's easy to deploy. This is a compelling advantage over Java,C#,Python,Ruby that require runtimes or complicated virtual environments.

2) a good enough standard library that's useful for quickly programming middleware type of apps on servers. Server-side infrastructure apps are Go's sweetspot. Go's a better productivity baseline than C++ and Javascript with their bare standard libraries that requires researching "what's the best library?" on Stackoverflow or browsing NPM repos.

3) "go routines" which some think of as the "killer feature" because that concurrency mental model is easier than threads or async/await.

I'm guessing those 3 tech reasons attract more programmers than people that think "Rob Pike and Ken Thompson are famous guys at Google so I'll use Go". Regardless of celebrities, the language itself still has to have some compelling technical advantages for it to grow in usage.
Very strange that this chap mentions Tychos. I've recently looked into an alternative cosmology (alternative to the Copernican model) based on tychos work:

https://www.tychos.space/

I'm unfamiliar with this area, but it seems impressive to me that a lot of astronomical quirks are resolved:

https://book.tychos.space/chapters/31-list-of-puzzles
> Senna was one of ten babies to take part in the first trial of this groundbreaking therapy

I'm very happy with this result, but I really want to know what happened with the other 9 babies.
Show HN: Hacker News web app with 2 UI's and some additional features
Hello HN! Author here :)

I've finished upgrading the Hacker News reading app that I made sometime earlier.

Among previous features, I added some new ones - which include:

- the ability to bookmark any story or comment, which you can read later, and the newly added comments are highlighted (the ones you did not see or read earlier);

- the ability to search through comments, and find the one that you are interested in;

- the ability to reply to comments (but you must be logged in at original news.ycombinator.com website to do so).

The app is using offical HN API to get the data, and it's client side rendered.

The technologies used for making this web app are: React (Router, Redux) and vanilla CSS.
Let me know what you think about the app in the comments.

Thanks!
> Billionaires generally do well in countries of hard-working, educated people.

What does that mean? Are you able to provide examples of “countries of lazy[1] people” and how one reaches that conclusion? Which metrics do you use to define who is hard-working, and how do you confidently apply the categorisation to a whole country?

[1]: Or however you want to define the antithesis of “hard-working”.
Every program has bugs, every program has inefficiencies. Therefore every program can be eventually reduced down to a single instruction, which will be incorrect.
Totally agree on the click to reveal pin feature. But mine came up right away.
I don't know how it was a few months ago. From what I heard, it would be like you said. It wasn't. It somehow searched my whole code stack and figured out my naming conventions, my preference for quotes (` ' ") in different languages, figured out how I bound variables that were passed JS > JSON > PHP > MySQL or JS > Node and was able to complete data structures that it had no fucking business knowing from the limited structural references it was provided. It was always wrong in every suggestion, but close enough to run. It seemed to even cue in on which version of weird little libraries I was using; for instance in one project that's been stuck in Bootstrap 4.0 Alpha it wrote the right event closures and referenced the right classes even though those are totally deprecated. In another case it identified the version of JQuery 3.2 in a project. When I had to throw an upload dropzone in a spot, it literally wrote the whole thing without me linking Dropzone.js and was within one or two slash-dots of identifying the upload target in an almost totally random new folder I'd created.

What kind of usage info it's pulling from every other thing you touch in VSCode is a source of wonder...
> No, one couldn't argue that. It has no basis in reality whatsoever. Certainly there are facts that various vested interests like to spin in a way as deleterious to Israel as possible, but that's not the same as facts that actually support such vile claims.

Yes, it can. Both Amnesty International and B'tselem have both accused Israel of the crimes of Apartheid. The documented evidence is plentiful.

> Again false. Israel has had arabs citizens in its governments, in the high court, bedouin as high-ranking army officers, and other positions of power, influence and authority for decades.

Again, always in the minority.
When I got myself an espresso machine, I experimented with various settings and types of beans, all kinds of single-origin specialty-store gourmet stuff, 5 or 6 different arabica/robusta ratios…

And I came to the conclusion I liked a specific brand of 100% dark-roasted robusta the most, by far. And I like it black.

Now I have to live with the fact that I’m a philistine, a lover of bad coffee, and an enjoyer of burnt tire smell. But hey, at least I can get the stuff I like on the cheap. More discerning types can have their expensive hipster lemon juice (which I also enjoy, but to a much lesser extent).
I love how eveyone is pretending that these revelations are anything new.
Everybody knew this was going on for years and choose to pretend nothing was going on. All our western, democratic values are just a pathetic distraction in the face of our endless greed.
It's a printed manual. They did have typesetting back then. I like the wide margins with subheadings in them. I bet a lot of copies got written in.
Dependency-Track
Unicode is wonderful!
Cookiecutter v2.1.0
Weightlifting has definitely helped me. There's something very simple about the progress (but incredibly complex when you really get into it), and it helps that your whole body just starts feeling better. One tip I have is to make sure you can activate your core before starting stronglifts. Practice breathing into your stomach and bracing, laying flat on your back and lifting your legs up while engaging your core, etc. By learning how to engage your core properly, you'll avoid injury early on.
> my contract had a sneaky clause in it that said both parties are responsible for 50% of attorney fees.

Which contract? The one you did the arbitration?

If the consumer law says the winner has to pay the fees, how can such a clause be legal?
Fast and Furious inspires heist of 40 luxury cars in India
AGPL strikes a balance between the needs of users, upstream and intermediate developers.

Here [A]GPL is Schrödinger's license. At the same time people complain that it's too restrictive and not restrictive enough.

If you want to completely prohibit any SaaS usage closed source is the only option, like BSL. And I'll stay away from your software.
My wife (Polish) frequently gets the cold treatment in busy places when asking for help but my ridiculously rubbish attempts at polish[1] end up with 5 star service and smiles. Smiles in ex-communist small shops are not a thing afaict, except when a foreigner tries to speak Polish.

Me speaking English gets the cold shoulder too. We’ve tried this out in different situations where we don’t make it known we’re together just so we can compare and contrast the treatment.

[1] trying to buy a medium size bottle of water with “nie duze, nie male woda nie gazowana po prosze”
Glumpy: NumPy and OpenGL Visualisation Library
Why is Israel held to a higher ethical standard than its neighbours in international media? It's almost as if not all countries are exactly the same and we have to talk about them within their context.

"No one is talking about X" is pretty much only ever said about political situations which generate enormous (disproportionate) amounts of discussion.
That will go nicely with their automated ATM machine.
Though see gwern's skeptical take.

https://www.gwern.net/Hydrocephalus#problems-with-the-case-s...
A counterexample: HIV is pretty deadly, but slow to progress, so it infected a lot of people. In countries with insufficient healthcare infrastructure (Subsaharan Africa), it actually killed a significant percentage of the population, precisely because it was so successful in spreading. Without modern medicine, it could have wiped out entire cultures, especially those that were more sex-positive.

(An interesting question to chew on is: what was the impact of religious sex taboos in pre-modern and early modern era? If monogamous couples were more likely to have healthy offspring and nurse their kids into adulthood, it might explain some of the societal swings towards puritanism in the 16th-19th century, which was a period of endemic syphilis.)
> Of course, they refused to pay. Trying to find someone at HWC who could show an iota of free-will and thinking was hilarious and impossible.

This always annoys me; a 100 sellers for every person working in any type of customer care/support role seems to be the norm. If you can actually get in contact with someone in customer care/support their job always seem to be to brush you off nicely, not really help you.
Tangential: The cookie accept dialog is the perfect dark pattern: none seem pre- selected, until you scroll down.
> The scaling hypothesis regards the blessings of scale as the secret of AGI: intelligence is ‘just’ simple neural units & learning algorithms applied to diverse experiences at a (currently) unreachable scale. As increasing computational resources permit running such algorithms at the necessary scale, the neural networks will get ever more intelligent.

I think this is what I believe i.e. that animals and humans are just evolved machines, with no divine spark. Not sure that I agree that it's unpopular or that it allows you to make decades long predictions on progress that'll come true.

I'm also not sure why you'd want to do this if smaller models are meeting your needs. Feels a bit like the future of flight being predicted as a man with flapping wings rather than a jet engine.
I don't think the situations in East Turkestan ("Xinjiang") and Palestine are even remotely similar?

There are no re-education camps in Israel that Israel declines? And on the other hand, in Israel, there is Gaza where they have no real authority and which is actively antagonistic against them?

Sure, Israel is occupying power on West Bank and preventing Gaza from getting supplies, but, it's on a different scale than what is happening in China?

I don't know enough to say how much power does Palestinian Authority actually have in West Bank; but it is much more self-governing anyway than anything they have in Xinjiang with Communist Party.
> On a related note, this "gap in resume" thing needs to stop being a thing at all. I don't know when it became a thing, but it feels distinctively like forcing a wage slave class to keep their head down and continue wageslaving.

I think you can better make sense of it as a vestigial organ of hiring process from before background checks were widespread, no "wageslavery" explanation needed.
A is the starting value, in the one case it's half as much as in the other case.
> I also knew an Italian, who had a strong accent, but a better command of English than most native speakers. I think he deliberately played his accent up.

Italian here with a decent grasp of the English language.

1) some sounds are harder to learn how to pronunciate, especially for American English, and especially 'R' based ones

2) with time I've grown fond of my accent and wear it as a distinctive badge. Most of my English speaking, European colleagues do the same. Everyone has their own and it makes part of our personality.
> This personal assertion ignores the fact that there are plenty of alternatives that considerably improve over C++, let alone C (?!)

While it is easy to improve on C++ it's proven difficult to improve on C[1].

C++ is an exceptionally large language, with lots of features that interact in subtle ways which trip-up even experienced programmers from time to time. It includes all the footguns from C, and adds an order of magnitude more.

C is a dead-simple language with only a few really dangerous footguns (which are also present in C++), mostly related to memory errors (corruption, leaks, races, etc).

I view C++ as "C with more footguns".

I view Go as "C without the memory error issues".

It's not really comparable to C++ because it is a better C, not a better C++.

[1] I think that only Go has managed to improve on C.
I wrote up a pretty detailed analysis of this problem a while back here: https://mindbowling.wordpress.com/2020/09/14/two-envelope-pa...

At the end I constructed a super weird example where regardless of what you see in your envelope, you should switch (this seems to go against the symmetry argument, but is sort of saved by a divergence in the expectation value).
Hype and marketing. Go has been pushed pretty hard by Google to make developers easier/cheaper to hire and replaceable.

The quotes are very telling:

http://nomad.uk.net/articles/why-gos-design-is-a-disservice-...
You don’t have priors or evidence - those are logical concepts that don’t exist in our fuzzy not-so-logical real world. You have some starting beliefs called priors, some new beliefs called evidence, and metaphorically applying one to the other causes you to be overly proud of the result because you feel like a rational process did it instead of your brain.

As the page I linked says, the real lesson is “don’t be too sure of stuff” but that doesn’t require pretending you’re doing math or joining any religions.
I wonder if they had some collision avoidance protocol? Possibly at the speed it was operating on, it wouldn't be too bad -- but I like to imagine that there were some harmless collision between two archivists who got completely submerged in their work.
I just re-read that comment, and had the same question. If the company is trying to include such a provision in its contract with you, such a provision, would be illegal, unconscionable, void against public policy, etc etc.

I’ve never seen anything like that in all of my arbitrations.

What you will see for B2B claims (not consumer claims) is an agreement that the parties will split the cost of arbitration. But that’s different than their respective attorneys please.
You don't have to learn tons of poor ideas and local maximums the people had.
When you learn physics now, you can skip aether theories altogether, or infinitesimals in math.