skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I run a small-ish dev shop ($1.5m revenue) and there are a lot of things I wish I knew back in 2012 when I started.

1. Finding clients is hard. Think hard about what an awesome customer looks like and then figure out how to reach them. This is the most important thing IMO. I'm reading Standout of Die, it has good advice on this.

2. First attempt, I started with about $40,000 and blew it all quickly as I didn't have enough sales. Better to get the sales first then grow the rest. You can be transparent about this with potential clients.

3. If your costs are $400,000 a year, and you'll sell 44 weeks of the year allowing for holidays, sickness and wiggle room, then you need to sell $9,000 a week to stay in business. If you want to make 25% profit then you'll need to sell closer to $500,000 a year and $11.3k a week.

4. I'm in the UK, we pay someone to politely chase clients for payment. This was a game changer. Most agreed to pay monthly but never do without a good bit of nudging.

5. As for tips... There are so many good books and courses on building and running a service business, I wish they'd been there when I started. To name a few.

- Jonathan Stark.com - Hourly Billing is Nuts

- Gareth Healey - Standout or Die

- Jason Swenk - Agency Playbook

- Blair Enns - The Win Without Pitching Manifesto

- Blair Enns - Pricing Creativity

- Traction - Gino Wickman

Running a dev shop can be incredibly rewarding and fun, especially if you love the work you're doing. Building a business will be like learning a whole new career, so don't underestimate the learning curve the number of mistakes you can make (if you're like me haha). It's great that you're asking for advice, it will save you some headaches :)
Right, I think that's exactly the point of the article. In no world should free sodas make a substantial difference, but it's rather the signal it sends.

Much like a single cockroach at the entrance of a fancy hotel isn't by itself a problem if it's limited to exactly that cockroach...
The percentage of electricity stolen for mining is dwarfed by the amount of electricity stolen for other means. Energy company executives in my country are almost always sell it on the side, so thank you very much for your concern that some very small part of it is stolen to power bitcoin mining.

And it is known that all major mining pools which consume maybe 80% of all power run on energy bought at commercial rates.

I'm not a miner, nor I want to be one, but I can hardly stand this baseless smearing of bitcoin on the pretense that it hurts environment. Energy producers produce energy, and sell it at some price. Whoever buys that energy can use it however they like it. If you want to help the environment, well, advocate for building nuclear power plants instead of coal and oil ones.
For someone with decades experience in software industry, is it possible to take on part-time teaching positions in universities? Is it worth the balance? Seems kinda cool to teach students and come up with course materials.
You get what you pay for.
Hire an accountant? They'll ask questions, refer to the team etc.
Hire a CFO? They've been hired to make an impact.

Few companies are good at promoting from within.
I don't have numbers, but my expectation is that cost is of the same order of magnitude. I don't think coffee is all that cheap. I'm thinking of all the problems I've seen with the plumbing leaking, the machine being left on and burning requiring extensive cleaning, broken pots, and so forth, all on top of the material expense. Soda doesn't have to deal with the heat, but it does have pressure, so that probably kinda balances out.
Decriminalisation can lead to better control over who gets how much, information to users about usage and dosage and also getting the topic on the table for every normal househould. These effects don't need to be underestimated as they can lead to a more smart and healthy use of a toxic substance, thus leading to less overdoses.
They have an Android app (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.dgmltn.rad..., https://radiomg.pw/) but sadly it does not appear to be open-source.
Personally, the one feature from PDAs that I miss from modern smartphones is the Graffiti system of text input.
An elected official isn’t just your official. They represent everyone in your district. Even the people you disagree with on something. This is a big difference from your analogy.

They are going to listen to the squeaky wheel in their base.
You can run bridges on the client, but that is not well supported right now.
Oh, if anyone wants to argue that it’s “in the TOS” that sounds like a contract no normal person would sign and likely not enforceable (IANAL) if pushed. No “sane” person would say, “yeah, if you think I’m doing something wrong, just sell all my shit!”
I’m trying to understand the point of this anecdote. Plenty of people who use Cloudflare could post the same comment. And there are plenty of self hosting horror stories involving smaller solutions.

On the topic of hosting email specifically, I thought it was pretty universally accepted as a tricky prospect. It’s possible to get right, yes, but tricky nonetheless.
If there's zero offerings/competition, the job can't be filled. If they increase salary, there would be competition.
Looks amazing.

Will try tomorrow. Athena alone is a superior offer in my mind. Even TablePus, my favourite SQL client doesn’t do that :)

If you can add dbt integration it will be a killer product!

Thank you!
Have the graphs on your home page been updated to include the current downturn in 2022? Are there any guarantees on our money? e.g. do you have FDIC insurance?
If you're interested in diagramming system architecture in a top-down fashion, I'll pile on another recommendation to check out the C4 model[0].

As others have mentioned, to effectively communicate a system you must limit the context to particular layers of abstraction, and C4 is a good approach to doing just that. There's also a C4 plugin for PlantUML[1].

But don't forget that, as with all visualizations, audience and purpose are key.

Consider whether you are addressing short-term needs (eg identifying inefficiencies, modeling for a client pitch) or long-term needs (eg knowledge retention, managing complexity). If your audience's needs are short-term, you can certainly get by with much simpler tools (eg Inkscape, excalidraw/draw.io/etc, picture of a whiteboard, doodles on a napkin).

Also consider whether or not you actually have a problem better served by bottom-up (ie generated) visualizations (eg ERDs for database schema refactoring, heatmaps for profiling, GraphViz for debugging DAGs).

[0] https://c4model.com/

[1] https://github.com/plantuml-stdlib/C4-PlantUML
Luddites believe "machines are stealing our jobs", I don't. I worry we depend on them as if they were unable to fail us.
Very cool concept, I can see a lot of people being interested in this. The site does a good job of simplifying things to make it very accessible as well. After poking around in the FAQ, I don't see anything about selling your investment if you want out. Once you "purchase" some panels/shares, how and where do you sell them? And how is the price of that sale determined? Look forward to learning more about this.
ROI is only one factor - the other is risk. These are an interesting asset because, while they have some risk, that risk is at least partially decoupled from market risk. It could also be a hedge against energy prices rising (depends how the power purchase agreement is structured).
> prevented him from moving the domains to another registar

That sounds like theft to me
Yes! Absolutely!

In fact, any college will be thrilled that you're interested. Owing to several factors it's very, very difficult to find people who have a software engineering background and are looking to teach.

Please do look at part-time ("adjunct") positions at any universities, colleges, and community colleges near you!
Paying students for attendance, behavior and homework can boost achievement
It’s due to an interaction with the way drug possession is charged and prosecuted. 0.1mg of cocaine in a bag with 2.499 grams of wheat flour is successfully prosecuted as “possession of 2.5 grams of cocaine”.

Thus, 0.1mg of fentanyl on 2.499g of heroin can theoretically be prosecuted as “2.5 grams of fentanyl”.

I agree that 2.5 grams of fentanyl should not be considered a personal amount. But I also understand why the law is written this way.
Not all institutions are subject to "local laws".
> Until GitHub requires government-issued photo ID in addition to MFA, I don't think you are going to properly discourage bad or criminal actors.

As a nice bonus, this is a great way to stop people from contributing to projects for free out of the goodness of their hearts. /s
It took about an hour of practice to learn Graffiti, the PalmOS modified handwriting system. Humans are a lot better at adapting to computers than the other way around.

I was taught cursive in 1st, 2nd and 3rd grade... and it hurts my hand, and looks terrible, so I don't do that. My usual writing is a modified drafter's font.
Targeted layoffs of people everyone complains about because they are bad at their jobs and also terrible as team mates sends a way better signal than keeping them and removing perks from employees who do work.
I tend to agree. While asnyc/await (and callbacks and promises before) solves an efficiency problem via compiler magic and language extensions, it's not obvious whether it's necessarily the best solution to the problem. The approach that Lunatic seems to take is building another runtime in userspace which takes care of scheduling while allowing methods to continue to look synchronous. A stackful coroutine framework would probably have allowed for the same without requiring WASM, so I'm kind of wondering whether that was considered too.

But ideally we would just use kernel threads, and maybe look into fixing performance for the use-cases where they don't work that well at the moment (which are not a lot actually!). It's so much simpler to understand for most programmers, tools (like debuggers, profilers, etc) just work, and suffers much less from interoperability issues.
CH approach: Load the dynamic data into a JSON field and use materialized columns when needed for performance beyond calling JSONExtract().
Remote jobs:Why tech professionals are only ones who can choose where to work
Unfortunately, this anecdote re-enforces a stereotype. The CFO in this story is bad and so is senior leadership and the board for allowing the new CFO to run amok. Not all new CFOs are bad and not all CFOs with leadership will destroy a company.
ROI is not knowable ahead of time. This might fit one person's risk profile and not someone else's.

It's also a good asset for people who are OK with lower returns if the investment slows climate change, or for people who want to make a bet that solar will be in higher demand in the future.
That house is a third of a million dollars in a rural place, that's what I'm talking about.
Is this the "OpenDoc" thing that Steve Jobs trashed about in the famous video?
Other drivers are what concern me.

> I've known numerous motorcyclists throughout my life and very few of them have had a crash.

This surprises me. I know a decent number and more than half of them have had a crash, all have close calls. Mostly avoiding another vehicle or laying down because of gravel or oil on the road surface.
Even leaving aside that the password is sent to the server when using the web ui, seafile's security leaves a lot to be desired.

For example file names, modification dates, sizes, and other meta data is NOT encrypted. This is a big deal if you sync something like your home folder (things like your browser cache or even Downloads folder may leak a LOT of info).

The defaults on the (self-hosted) server are also very insecure and there's no mention of anything in the installation guide.

It's a shame because Seafile is so much better than things like nextcloud in my experience and there truly is nothing else like it; It really is just as convenient as using google drive!
> There is no objective way to determine the value of a thing outside of the economy.

Claims like this are in general not well-founded.
Note that ROI is not the only criteria for investment. Some people invest on lower ROI investments if they think the positive externalities align with their values, and risk is just as important as ROI anyway.

While I don't think this investment is effective either way, there is probably a market for people that want a more visible way to track their impact.
iPads are great for note taking, content consumption, some remote terminal things. The battery life is really darn good.

For most remote work and management I find a Windows tablet is much more useful. Even if it feels slower in use, having the same programs natively as a workstation is extremely convenient.

For content consumption or idling CPU use cases, iPads are tough to beat. For most anything else I think a surface go, small yoga, whatever is much more functional.
I mean if an electrician or whatever came into my house to do a job, and ate my food without being offered it, I'd consider that extremely rude.
Changing a program while it is running (Lisp)
The math here is pretty straightforward, however, it doesn't look like all of the components necessary to do the math are available.

1. How long do I "own a solar panel"? Indefinitely?

2. What is the wattage of the solar panel and where is it located? i.e. what wattage will it produce consistently YoY? What power market?

3. What percentage fees does Legends take?

Frankly, #1 is the most important factor here by a long shot.
> Web browser tech has gotten so advanced that it seems more like just a difference in frameworks between the two.

on older or lower end devices, or slower networks the difference can be pretty dramatic

just as an example, youtube on web vs app on a 5 year old ipad (that otherwise would be totally usable) is pretty huge, same with even banking sites like chase or amex is light and day in app vs web ui performance*

*please note i'm not advocating for closed technologies as much as pointing out that web and native still have differences that matter to a lot of customers
“32% spend more online than the average internet searcher”
My sister got a masters in education and taught for 5 years in the NYC school system, hating every moment of it. A big SaaS company took a risk on her and hired her as a salesperson. She is crushing it, working from home, and occasionally reminiscing about the night and day difference in well-being between working at schools vs a real company.
A company named "Legend Solar" had some heartburn in Utah, about 3-4 years ago. Cashflow problems, incomplete installations, customers left hanging, the usual story. Utah wanted to pull their business license. So is this "Legends Solar" a reboot? The name is spelled a little differently.
The 20% rape is a fiction. Patriarchy in university is a fiction based on the number of females graduating (even in science). Organizing protests is not a part university's mission.
It's not like universities are just lining their pockets. I'm a humanities professor at a small liberal arts college with a high tuition, and we struggle to pay professors fair wages (when compared to peer institutions, which doesn't even account for differences in cost of living, and we're in an HCOL city).

I do not fully understand the economics of higher education—they're complex and often opaque—but a few things to keep in mind:

1. Tuition seems absurd, but very few students pay the sticker price. At my institution, average cost after aid is 39% of average cost before aid, and less than some of the private K-12 schools in this city.
2. "These institutions" are not a monolith. See above—especially when it comes to prestigious schools, many students aren't paying close to sticker price.
3. Families and students expect much more from colleges than they did a few decades ago, both in terms of facilities and staffing. I don't know if anyone's done a study of student wellness center staff sizes, but I wouldn't be surprised if they doubled over the past two years.
4. The sciences (and things like conservatories) are particularly expensive because of equipment/lab costs. Someone has to pay for all this. I think more should come from the corporate America (not sure how), which benefits greatly from these programs, but I'd venture to guess most comes from tuition and government grants.
It's been getting like that for decades.

At least where I lived - you had mom and pop grocery stores in residential areas (small, family owned grocery stores, where you paid a bit more but it was convenient) - now it's been taken over by massive corporations like Wal-Mart and 7-11, etc. who have contracted out silicon valley companies to pay a pittance to contract workers who deliver you your groceries, when you could not that long ago just shop local, not need to drive, etc. etc.

You had many more opportunities to pick which grocer you liked, which butcher you preferred, where to get your fruits and vegetables, but global corporations like (again) - Wal-Mart, Safeway, McDonalds, etc. signing contracts with individual/large farmers - you can't compete as an individual/small business with companies that would be able to pay many times more than you just because of the cost of scale alone.

Globalization was a mistake for a _lot_ of things. The west has had it's manufacturing sector absolutely destroyed over the past half-century or more due to corporate interests/espionage/whatever. We rely on other countries to make our crap and ship it to us - how carbon efficient is that _really_? We'll never know because the corporations that own both the news/media and will tell us that it's okay, not to think about the consequences of actions, and to keep spending. "We're not going head-first into a really bad recession! No way!" (/s)

The west has basically taken all of our (soft? hard?) power and given it away to other countries (to simply save a buck? to intentionally weaken the western economy over decades by malicious actors? who knows?)
It's just marketing.
I assume the form has some dissuading text along the lines of, “Upon submitting, a goon squad will be sent for your immediate removal from the premises.” Or maybe they just send spiders through the ethernet. It’s a big company.
These days my solution is to put cloudflare in front of it and walk away.

Good game to add to my current daily routine (heardle, Wordle, quordle, worldle), but man is it hard!
> excellent for the phone lines it was used for

Unfortunately it was not. Thus, YMODEM and ZMODEM replaced it. ZMODEM is more complex, more reliable. YMODEM is same as XMODEM, but bigger buffer if I recall correctly.

XMODEM is “simple” implementation, but maybe not “fast” or even “low cost” implementation due to time needed to debug its issues :(
What I don't get is why one oar is rotated 90 degrees off the other one. It means whenever I use these double-sided paddles I have to rotate them ever so slightly whenever I make a new stroke. It's annoying and I don't understand why it's done. Does anyone know?
Labor Force Participation Rate:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CIVPART

There is a LOT of slack in the participation rate. Those workers exist and many of them will likely move back to the workforce if the wages adjust upward to be a more lucrative job due to scarcity.

Sure, it's not going to look the same in 2050, but the economy will just run at 80% participation rate then, rather than 62% now.
Right... and so consequently what is gained by hiding the evidence?
GOO

As a teenager I wrote a few implementations of X/Ymodem and Punter for the C64 in machine code back in the day. I was too poor at that age to afford an assembler.

I also wrote a native X/Ymodem utility for the IBM AS/400. I had to write the CRC calculations in MI (AS/400 machine interface language) in order to get enough performance to make it work well.
Recently, I started using the iPad at the lunch/dinner table. I've always lived alone and just ate lunch in front of the TV, but in trying to get away from that, I moved to a proper table with the iPad. This lets me watch videos from an online course or read some articles while eating. I prefer this to just looking at the wall. I guess one could think of it as a digital version of the back of a cereal box.

Back when I traveled more, the iPad was always a good option for watching movies or TV shows on the plane.
Hadn't seen natto before, but I agree that's pretty far out there! If you search images of Tableau Prep, that's more along the lines of what I had in mind. Although Tableau supports Python and R, it's not nearly as well integrated as what you've done with DataStation. In general, it's more geared towards Excel power user types, rather than programmers.
It’s sort of the natural evolution of companies as they grow in size. When they are small, things are just done, but as they grow and as they bring in more people, the cost of those resources also grow. The free sodas are a fun example (and here outlined as the wake-up call) but where it really starts is when someone higher up notices the cost of a department that has grown from 5 to 20 people, or something similarly eye raising, and then bring in the E&Y type consultants to help transition into a scalable business. Which simply involves reporting, cost-trimming and looking into efficiency. The sodas are where the rebellion break out, but the seed are sown long before that as the “bean counters” and “process people” slowly begin making business intelligence part of everything because it lets everyone report on everything.

You can’t even say that it doesn’t work, because it’s how every major company operates. On the flip-side, it’s not like Coca Cola has really invented anything of worth for like a 100 years. So while bean counters are financially good for investors, they are probably pretty terrible at running our society, because it’s the engineers that actually build things and the founders who come up with the saleable ideas.

Anyway, if my career has taught me anything it’s to do your thing. Being part of the transition from startup to enterprise can be a lot of fun as well, so long as you know that you can’t really fight the MBA types and win.
Thanks to this HN post, I just installed the Android app of SomaFM.
But, I can't find a way to re-orient the app to landscape mode on my tablet. Is this not supported?
A slightly strange article, whose premise feels like a strawman.

I've paddled a ton of whitewater, sprint, marathon, canoe polo, touring and sea kayaking.

The only time I ever cared about total length (rather than shaft length) was when I was a canoe polo goalie, and wanted to balance reaching the top corners of the goal (long) with fast acceleration and turns (shorter).
Giftedness is a crutch for the recognition of strong performance in educational systems styled from the industrial revolution on a production-line mentality. What is needed is not a continuation of the crutch but an overhaul of the mentality. All students can benefit from more responsive and personalized educational environments, opportunities and support, whether they are struggling, baseline bell-curve, or academically excelling. Technology offers this potential, but we are yet to realise it fully.

Alan Kay often discusses the failed potential for technology with respect to education. He has some great quotes like:

By far the best way to invent a healthy future is to invent the children who will invent it. - Alan Kay

Children need to learn how to use the 21st century, or there's a good chance they will lose the 21st century. - Alan Kay

With a good programming language and interface, one - even children - can create from scratch important simulations of complex non-linear systems that can help one's thinking about them. - Alan Kay

... via https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup