skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Why not just be honest about it, instead of spouting all this pablum about 'defending democracy and human rights'?

Maybe the actual decisionmakers of the world all already know how the world works.
Appropriate question for a Monday morning.

I’ve been running my company which focuses on helping people find purpose (novel job app). I’ve been building it for almost 5 years. When I started it was only for foodservice and when Covid hit I lost all my customers overnight. So I pivoted to include all industries. I’ll mention here I’m a solo founder with no tech background and I live on and off in South America with my outsourced team - constant bugs, behind deadlines by six months, extraordinary high bills for terrible quality of work in my opinion. I’m the product manager, QA, sales and marketing, etc. they just drop the ball and I’m running around picking up the pieces for things I don’t even understand - I didn’t go to school for this stuff.

Anyway, after years of +12 hour days seven days a week - I’ve taken about 4 weeks off total these past years - I can say that I super burnt out and have been for some time.

There are times when I can’t do anything, literally. It is terrible. But I just push through - I have no choice as my whole life and all my money are tied into this. Plus, I am really passionate about what I’m doing to help others (even though it seems almost everyone is trying to just rip me off as I delegate work).

Anyway, the thing is - from my life and observing others that I’m helping find jobs and purpose…you must have purpose or inspiration or you will get burnt out. If you don’t you will think what’s the point of working if you don’t find a purpose in your job or that you are really creating value in anything. Or if you have nothing going on in your personal life with purpose, then you will get burnt out on that. Without purpose you just always think what’s the point- why do anything, it’s a waste - bad place to be when the world is very full of opportunities.

You need goals and intrigue to keep going and not flop from your burnout. The burnout will probably always be there, it’s just having the inspiration to continue, like small wins towards that purpose. Small wins for me are seeing the amazing reviews on the App Store…like higher rated than the incumbents without cheating ;)

It was the win the other month speaking in front of my state senate to successfully lobby a bill that passed that will help a lot of people. It is the progress I’m making on writing my book about how to find more opportunities in life - a kids book for adults. It’s the fact that I’m in my late 30s and live with my dad who I never had a great relationship with (single dad raised me since I was 1) and I now do after trying so many years to have one. My purpose, my small wins. They keep me going.

So, if you feel stuck, the only thing I can say is keep changing things, trying new things, challenging things - the way you think and what you do. With enough change you will find something that inspires you eventually I hope. The rate of change you allow will determine how quickly that happens.

Best of luck - just remember there is a lot of stuff in this world, enough to keep you occupied with something interesting until you die I hope.
It's sometimes the only way you get to communicate with all of the team during the week.
So it's more of a social ritual than anything else and those are important too.

One way to avoid burnout is to achieve progress in the form of milestones.

Another one is the pure joy from achieving a difficult goal, e.g. a difficult problem that has eluded you for some time.

Those two things are what I am for to avoid burnout. And if there is no longer joy from the second option, then it might be time to call it quits.
> I live for the weekends

Why are you not trying to find some part-time positions, and then maybe decrease your SWE work to 20 hours per week and try out other things in the remaining time? I think this could be a good fit for your situation, and possibly be a transition to see if you really want another work or if not without completely leaving the field.
These are facts but don't explain why OP sees it as a pyramid scheme*. I'm not say it it's not (or that it is), but I think an explanation could be helpful. If you said the stock market or something was a pyramid scheme then okay I can see that, but what does it mean for capitalism to be one.

> *A pyramid scheme is a business model that recruits members via a promise of payments or services for enrolling others into the scheme, rather than supplying investments or sale of products
A franchise makes good theoretical sense. The franchisee gets an operations manual and the ability to use valuable trademarks to streamline you business, and pays a percentage that is lower than what movie stars and athletes pay their agents. The customer gets knowing that McDonalds, which values their trademarks, is standing behind the restaurant with higher (or at least different) standards than the health department in terms of quality, and the menu and deals will be what they expect. The franchise parent company gets to expand without capital costs. Done properly, all three parties benefit.
I think an MLM business can be described as a business model that is mathematically proven to not work and is intentionally employed to make the founders rich off the money of other people.
A business that simply needs to reach a certain scale to be profitable by itself is not an MLM.

For example a new chat application might require 10.000 users to pay off for the computing power needed to run the servers, so until you reach those 10.000 users you need to lure them in promising everything will work just fine. If you reach that threshold then everything will indeed be fine, but if you don't and run out of money you'll have to let a lot of people hanging. An MLM cannot possibly reach that threshold.
Google Will Now Rewrite the Title to Match the Primary Language of the Content
GameChanger | Cloud Security Engineer, Back-End engineer (typescript), Mobile devs (iOS and Android openings), Engineering Manager, QA Analyst | USA | REMOTE | Full time | https://gc.com

GameChanger is a sport technology company that builds products for youth sports teams and their communities with features like live video streaming, scorekeeping, statistics, and team management. We're a smaller company of around 100 employees and growing fast so there's a lot of opportunity for both career growth and to help us define our future tech patterns and practices.

We are currently looking for software engineers for various product and platform teams (security, iOS, Android, QA). You'll work on a cross-functional team that gets to set technical and product direction for the team's features/personas. We're growing fast and looking to continue to invest in the product and developer experience. Specifically for our Platform roles, we're looking for a back-end engineer with typescript experience to help us as we migrate to a service-based architecture and improve developer experience (reduce compilation time, parallelize tests, etc.), as well as a Cloud security engineer to help us define the future security state of our cloud environment.

Our tech stack is primarily Node/Typescript on the backend (running entirely within containers on AWS), Kotlin on Android, and Swift on iOS, and React on web, with the usual Python/terraform/etc. on the cloud infrastructure side.

Benefits: Tech stipend to buy a machine, a WFH budget, unlimited PTO (that we actually use), flexible working hours, and 401k + match, health, leave, etc. benefits through our parent company. We're fully remote and will remain that way, but we have an office in NYC that you're welcome to use if you're local and would prefer.

Find out more about the company and positions & apply at: https://gc.com/home/careers
Reminds me of a quote attributed to Picasso: Inspiration exists, but is has to find us working. The hard engineering work and planning is what enabled the good luck to exist.
They make the same mistake earlier on:

> And associated to the number 55 (5 × 11) would be all multiples of 55 whose smallest prime factor is 11 (therefore excluding all multiples of 2, 3, 5 and 7).
yea, 5 yrs experience and MS..

It's a really easy field to be burnt out in I think. Taking time off to focus on other goals in life. Ideally...I'd like to work on my own accord. entrepreneurship or consulting.

Doesn't help that the interview process is extremely taxing.

Just interviewed at 3 MAANG companies back-to-back..Felt like cramming for finals
An AI shopping app that was just using humans
I mean in a world where a 32-bit microcontroller with flash in the 1-2MB range and a few hundred KiB RAM can cost less than $2 why make things harder on yourself :P

If you're using a chip without the bells and whistles for precise timing reasons, then you're probably gonna program it in assembly too anyways
I'm currently working on a social Audio take tied into podcasting (which is very much alive). The idea is to have live podcasting a la Twitch or YouTube live, including chat and tipping. You can also invite other people to record the show with and even bring in members from the audience. At the end, it let's you download everything as Mp3 for post editing and publishing as a podcast. The live discussion will remain open as part of https://podbabble.com.

The thesis is that while social Audio with proprietary recordings and time bound broadcasts failed, adding a social aspect to the fastgrowing podcasting space while retaining creator control and open formats will succeed.
And if they do, they can appoint that someone else on their own -- it's how the world's free countries operate, after all; and a country is bigger than a company.

That's still a "manager" someone to manager better coordination. The point here is that such a role is required to get work done.

Sure, there are weird things that happen when the manager stops being a bottom-up appointee and starts being a top-down ruler. Heck that is incredibly common. But that does not mean we should do away with central figures that handle coordination. You still need those central figures.
> I started contracting instead, billing hourly

This is a huge struggle for me. I have difficulty estimating tasks I don't know how long it will take. Then I can't provide cost estimates to customers who want pricing on things they don't understand to begin with. If I am lucky to deal with technical people its ok but I find intense social pain and failure when it comes to getting these important details across to people with a financial interest in not understanding or negging me down.

I really wanted to make consulting a thing for a while but the pain of working with non-technical people makes it almost unbearable.
It would be interesting to see the reverse; I've definitely had python code break in interesting when upgrading the interpreter.
The plain concept of the specialization of labor demonstrates that this is false, at least as a blanket statement. Sales is a skill. Making products is a skill. The people who have these skills is not always the same person or organization.

Information or power asymmetry is the problem. Sometimes it’s the other way around. E.g. a large retailer selling a small company’s products.
At least Go debugging in Jetbrains' Goland is a smooth and effective experience, on the other hand. I think their other language IDEs are more or less on par.
> Party leadership is allowed to have preferences; the party isn't the public, it's a party.

It's a club and you ain't in it, isn't really going to get the young people to the polls.
Rebooting the Arsenal of Democracy
Someone forgot to turn the spreadsheet up to eleven:

- Diablo Swing Orchestra - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m2mZVOd0jWY

- Igorrr - http://igorrr.com - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UZzYxGZ7Hmc - Note: Pre-pandemic.

- Sumo Cyco - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MW2fWXQHzz4 Someone watched "They Live".

- The Hu - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oJZfEh3EciU "That’s not Mongolian you’re hearing though, it’s a language created with the band that’s unique to Star Wars"
I am burnt out, but not just from programming/software engineering. The older I get the more blatant it is that the 40+ hour work week, toiling away on some tiny part of something questionably significant is not the way we as a species should live. If I had a vocation, and not just a job, I'm sure it would be different but I've never found that "love what you do and you'll never work a day in your life" vocation. I've worked at jobs I've liked with good people. I just cannot fathom the point of getting up 5 days out of 7 to work the best part of the day and pretend it's OK, because it's not. I fear how juvenile that sounds but the fact that so many people waste their lives in toil for large corporations is maddening, and I'm a cog as much as anyone else. The older I get the more apathetic to work and career advancement I become. Money is vital, of course, but we're slaves to it at the end of the day...
Yep. It's getting really hard. Used to not matter much as people didn't talk politics or religion outside of small groups.

I'm finding more and more that company meetings are open grounds to bash white males. Particularly any straight and / or Christian ones. The people that preach inclusiveness are the most bigoted people I know.

Nothing like having co workers explain to me how reluctant they were to hire me based on race. Only that there were desperate for someone that could actually do the job.

Decades spent trying to treat everyone fair and equal is now out the window and you're called a racist for doing so.
They are if you build your own using a used bike. Check out ebikes.ca and https://endless-sphere.com/forums/
>Is there somewhere you can go to see what's been released? I'm still under the impression the bulk of what he said he had has yet to be released

Most of what he took he gave to reporters so it wouldn't be released, that's why he didn't release everything online.

The several organizations he gave information to continued to go through it for a couple of years, periodically releasing stories based on the disclosure. They all slowly stopped funding going through the documents, until only the Intercept was left.

They continued with a limited staff until 2019, and it's end is one of the reasons both Poitras and Greenwald have left the organization.

For what has been released, see

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_surveillance_disclosure...

And https://theintercept.com/collections/snowden-archive/
You're wondering about the software industry specifically, but what you're really asking about is the education industrial complex.

Universities are not in the business of properly meeting labor demands of the market with skilled workers, and they never have been. Their goal is to increase enrollment and capture as much grant and tuition money as they can. Universities don't care if too many lawyers, chemical engineers, etc. are being trained.

There are several paths into software engineering, many of which bypass the education industrial complex. It's getting easier to access just the education needed to do a technical job like programming.

> Is it that we are so unproductive and failure-prone that we guarantee ourselves full employment?

I think there's some truth to this, but I also speculate that software devs are much more productive as a cohort than we like to let on. Just think about quickly everything in the industry changes. There's a new way to write JS apps every 3 months and a major breaking, paradigm-shifting change to React every couple years it seems like, and that's just the web side. Most workers don't have to deal with the amount of change throughout their careers as programmers do, and it is absolutely exhausting.
That's why I said "morally". The fact that I can take the SQLite code (for example), change a few lines so it's now TotallyNotSQLiteDB, compile it and sell it as my own, without me ever contributing anything back, is not really morally right. The fact that the licence allows such use is a different thing. And you're free to do immoral, but otherwise perfectly legal things. The thing here is that if you're going to do immoral things, people could have have a problem with respecting you or your project. I don't respect people who rebrand open source projects. If you fork a project and add significant work, then that's great and in the spirit of open source (e.g. Electron taking Chromium and Node and making something new and great, Mariadb forking Mysql and going their way with it etc. etc.), but rebrands suck.
Computer Programming Jobs
can't be disrupted by O2 if there's no O2 in your environment
That implication has no textual basis.
I wasn't necessarily trying to address what we can look for. I was trying to ask, what are things we are even capable of looking for? I am aware of Dyson swarms, but is it not the case that the enumeration of objects that emit infrared large?

The Fermi paradox is not really a paradox of sorts, especially given when it was formulated. Because if we aren't even capable of detecting life, then how can we ask where is it?
Sort of.

As you go up the scale the Big-O values are almost always dominant. It's very rare to see a situation where you would choose the algorithm with the higher value.

However, when two algorithms have the same Big-O there can still be a big difference in performance, especially in the face of how a cache influences things.

(There are cases where the memory accesses are so important that they can make the "bad" approach better. A while back I did some time testing and found the Sieve of Eratosthenes inferior to brute force because of all the cache misses.)
> 60 hours/week in the right environment is very different to 40 hours/week in the wrong environment.

Yes, exactly. Such an important thing to know. Even one day in a horrible position can be absolutely brutal.
> I still have no idea if he's an adversarial plant by some government

He was an Aaron Swartz type who just wanted information to be free. It is clear Snowden wasn't a mole. He just hated closed-doors spying on innocent people, & having their privacy invaded at every instance. His legacy will not be forgotten[0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowden_effect
> I'm tired of Markdown hacks to try to justify not using Microsoft Word or LibreOffice. Every kind of functionality you can imagine already exists in open formats with powerful programs designed to make it easy for you to compose rich documents. For the love of god, use them.

> Yeah, those large documents don't work well with Git and other line-by-line diff systems. That doesn't mean line-by-line is better, it means we're too lazy to build a better version control system. Our tools should adapt to us, not the other way around!

I've used (and still use) all those tools. Our tools shouldn't adapt to Office applications, because Office applications can't even adapt to themselves! Anyone who has ever tried to copy/paste even between Microsoft applications knows the pain and headaches involved. There is no way you'd be able to offer clean diffs for all that garbage. The reason pure text editors are popular is because we've known this for a long time.
Consider the manager who tries to put in a couple hours a week helping with filing (as in, organizing paper files). Let's say the filing system is very busy and constantly evolving to meet new needs.

Odds are they're just going to mess things up and annoy the people who do it as a major component of their job. Now, it may still be worth it, to keep the manager somewhat aware of how workers are doing their jobs, but it's not going to be helpful.

You need literacy to work on filing, as you need programming ability to do software development, but in either case it's not sufficient. If you're just dipping in here and there, you'll likely be screwing things up more than you're helping. There's too much context required.

Reading, writing, and programming may be forms of literacy, but if you try to jump in with tiny and inconsistent efforts to help someone write a novel—and I mean the actual writing, not helping them with organization or sales or something—you're probably doing more harm than good. Collaboration is possible even on novel-writing, of course, but very part-time efforts aren't likely to improve anything.

Programming is the same, and that's why once someone gets past about half-coding-half-managing it gets harder to keep helping with the coding, productively. It's not about literacy—the person trying to help with an hour or two of novel-writing a week is literate, after all—it's about context.
The example they give is basically Zapier for data?

"For example, you might want to figure out if the customer who just submitted a ticket is a high-value customer by checking the matching subscription in Stripe's data and whether there are any associated high-value deals with that customer's company in Salesforce."

No guarantees on traction, but folks doing integration work have gotten a fair bit of use. So as always - this might fail.
19 minutes into video for him to realize its a death machine :o. Death by robots is no joke. First one ever recorded https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Williams_(robot_fatalit...

https://www.automate.org/industry-insights/robot-safety-ever...

"Over a 30-year span 37 robot-related accidents occurred, according to a search of OSHA incident reports. Of that number between 1984 and 2013, 27 incidents resulted in a worker's death.Aug 20, 2015"
The fact that the magnitude of positive constant factors is irrelevant doesn’t mean it makes any assumptions about the cost of operations.
Congrats on getting this open sourced! Wundergraph takes a really interesting approach to solving stitching APIs together, taking care of a lot of production concerns around security, performance, and caching that can come into play with GraphQL.

This also uses the awesome graphql-go-tools (https://github.com/wundergraph/graphql-go-tools) under the hood which is way more performant than other JavaScript GraphQL implementations.
Marketing being that important tells something really bad about innovation. (Just as high lawyer salaries tell something bad about a government.)
Why is the planet becoming more green over the past three decades (per NASA observations) if there's a net loss?
No. However, I used to feel that way. I interviewed for 18 months and I failed all the interviews. FAANG would not even grant me a graduate software engineer phone screen. I was bitter because of that since I studied/worked 8 years for that. In those 8 years I obtained 2 bachelors (one in information science), 2 masters (one in computer science) and 2 years of working experience (one year as an iphone dev, the other as a web dev bootcamp instructor). My GPA was high yet crickets.

My issue was that I only wanted to work for FAANG and being really honest. So whenever I applied for a non-FAANG company I wasn’t enthusiastic. It probably showed.

This whole ordeal toon 4 years. My resume is ragged, because it has been reactive since I almost never got a shot at working for the companies I wanted to work for.

So what changed?

Becoming less honest helps. Now I don’t mention that companies aren’t on the top of my list, I simply mention the positives and give them the impression that that is my comprehensive opinion of them.

The second thing that changed is not caring anymore where I work and not caring about the mission of the company. All I focused on was good working conditions. I now work 4 days per week, remotely. That is IMO the best quality of life boost that I have ever gotten as I am now traveling around Europe chilling wherever I go. The pace of the company is chill as well and it just so happens that I like their industry. The pay is okay for European standards and since I live frugally it’s more than I need (I save 30%).