skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> The occupations of an American farmer’s descendents would not make sense. We might say to the farmer of old, “you are the last person in your family’s thousand year lineage who will ever farm the land,” and he would say: “well what will my descendents do?” And we’ll say “well, they are mortgage brokers, web designers, yoga teachers, tech support, Airbnb hosts” and he would say, “What? None of those make sense. No one could make a living doing that. It’s impossible.” As are the driving directions on the phone in your pocket.

To some extent, this is selling the "farmer of old" short. Some of those occupations are just new names for old jobs:

An AirBnB host is basically an innkeeper. I'm not sure how far back you would have to go to find people who weren't familiar with the idea, but you would end up somewhere in prehistory. The same goes for rideshare drivers who are essentially coachmen, or before then drovers.

Once you got past the unfamiliarity of the tools involved, web design shouldn't seem particularly foreign to anyone owning and running a printing press that produces flyers, handbills, broadsides, pamphlets, posters, and newspapers (not to mention the innumerable advertisements peppered throughout). Small presses and their owner/operators have been a mainstay of American agriculture for generations.

Tech support is a function that should be familiar in a manufacturing context to any tool & die maker of course, but more relevant would be the agricultural extension agent that is extremely familiar to any American farmer. The job is literally tech support for the adoption of agricultural tech of all sorts.

And anyone who doesn't think American farmers would recognize a mortgage broker when they saw one is suffering from a deeply ahistorical and pastoralist view of farming.

Yoga instructor is more of a stretch than the others, requiring a bit of reasoning by analogy. But physical instructors (from dance to unarmed combat) of all sorts have certainly existed for a long time, though they would be more of a big town/small city phenomenon.

That isn't to say that occupations that fit the bill for incomprehensibility couldn't be identified, but this set seems poorly chosen on KK's part.
Nice little allowance.
Do you offer an API?
Apple has always put the absolute least amount of memory in these tablets they could get away with, around ~half of competitors. They made up for it with very tight memory management optimizations.

That worked for a while, but the world has moved on to bloated websites and apps using up cheap memory. In short, with fixed-size soldered memory, obsolescence of these tablets was pre-determined at the outset.

Not much after our iPad 2 purchase, we needed to buy two MBPs around 2013. They also came with soldered RAM at that point. I made a special point to insist both be purchased with 16GB of RAM. A few people scoffed, salesperson said it wasn't necessary. Our late 2013 is still running well today. iPad abandoned five years ago, maybe more.

Even putting Linux on it like some recent posts mention is not worth it. Raspberry PI 4 has a lot more memory and oomph.
Is this supposed to be a critique of all financial investment or speculation? I'm not sure what else I'm supposed to take from this.

Also talk about moving the goalposts, we've gone from "no one knows about crypto or cares about if its good or bad" to "they don't really use it they just trade it"
May be you are looking at a much fine grained composition/decomposition tier to arrive at breaking down "all" software engineering towards simplicity, but anything real world usecase would end up being an aggregate so big, your composition/decomposition tier itself would add to complexity rather than reduce it.

BPMN and all of the UI pallet, drag drop coding applications try to do this very thing, this is super successful at smaller scales but breaks the first real world application.
I think there is a good amount of overlap.

Operating the reactor is of course specialized. But once you have the steam, the rest of the power plant is conventional. Steam turbines, generators, and all the grid tie-in would be mostly the same as a coal plant.
We've already seen this happen with Google and browsers. In this case, they extend so quickly and also manage to spread much propaganda about how their way is better, that they're basically using change as their weapon.

Protocols aren't the solution when people are so easily manipulated. Perhaps stagnation is the solution. Something that stays static for a longer time is also going to have more implementations.
What a great example. This stuff should be fixed by default.
>an exercise left to the reader

So it turns out that startups also want a culture of meaningless and arbitrary brainteasers instead of building cool shit that works?
Which part is a mixed bag?
I use it every few days to create game videos to share with friends. I like that it's super easy to extract and combine segments from multiple videos and easy to add a second audio track (like from a microphone). It's never crashed on me and it feels relatively polished compared to the other free applications I've used (the names of which escape me).
Wow. I wanted to call you out for just being an asshole, but seriously - is this account just a bot? And who cares about karma on HN?
> you cannot turn it on or off quick enough to to react to hourly changes in demand

Surely you'd want actually want suppliers to react to changes in spot price, not just demand? If it's windy and sunny, it might not matter if demand is high! If it's calm and cloudy, you have a problem.

If the spot electricity price is high, you want providers to jump in and supply electricity. If it's low, or indeed goes negative[0], you want them to shut down.

Nuclear just doesn't fit this model, since investors appear to want the strike price guaranteed for several decades before they'll even start pouring concrete for their plant.

[0] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S266679242...
I would disagree with that sentiment for every single item on that list. All those tools are amazing and have improved steadily over decades and I would absolutely put them in the “great engineering” category.
Thanks for the correction.

I should hold off on commenting until I'm well caffeinated.
Developers, developers, developers! was because Microsoft sold a platform, and the only thing that makes a platform valuable is third party content.
Type signatures (or ASTs) are structured data, and Copilot mainly works because GPT accepts any text and doesn't have to deal with your logical fully recursive concepts like ASTs.

I feel like it wouldn't work if you could actually mathematically constrain the outputs to be syntactically correct either. That's probably one of those Gödel things.
Flexport is on an impressive run. It's not going to keep that run going by dropping to a 4 day work week, that isn't gonna happen.

I wouldn't write off the compensation though, Amazon tends to pay very competitively across the whole company, from bottom of the company to the top. If flexport doesn't, I assume it will soon.
My take: It worked excellent for unserious work a couple of weeks ago.
Well, I'm trying out Vivaldi on Android. I've been using Firefox for, well, forever, but the tab handling[1] is bad enough that I'm willing to jump ship.

So far it's... different? The tab handling is better, and I think I like having actual tabs in a mobile browser. I'm disappointed that the tab groups don't work as well as in Chrome. I like the link preview feature, in fact I could imagine all links opening like that by default (but that's not an option).

I don't find it all that customizable, that only seems to be true for the desktop version. For example, I can't get seem to rid of the history button (which is styled like a sidebar button despite opening full screen).

There is no reader mode. There are page actions, which let you apply all kinds of nonsensical CSS effects such as blur. But no reader mode. The built-in content blocker doesn't remove cosmetic annoyances as effectively as Ublock does, which makes me miss reader mode all the more.

There don't seem to be any add-ons.

Overall, not entirely convincing.

1. https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/issues/20012#issueco...
>Our website looked good, our app looked stellar thanks to Ryan's design skills, and everyone we talked to said that what we were building is awesome (not "awesome" enough to give us any money though).

This reminds me of "The Mom Test" and why even people who are nice and helpful give you completely useless information and advice if you don't know how to parse it.

As an aside, "parasitic software" is often how you approach these kinds of things - someone complaining about a process in Salesforce or Outlook that they have to do manually probably won't switch to another database or email client, but if you can sell them an app or plugin that works with what they use and does remove the pain point, they'll be much more open to it.
I tried Songs of Syx a few weeks ago and, coming from a background that includes Dwarf Fortress, Rimworld, SimCity 2000, Cities Skylines, and Oxygen Not Included, I thought Syx was kinda meh. The novel thing about it that was cool is that it seemed to mix Dward Fortress with SimCity in a completely novel way where you see the individual "sims" or "dwarfs" but they are cattle not pets and the thing you're building is a city.

In the end, the city-building aspect quickly became rote for me, I find the direct overhead view disorienting and unnatural, and the game didn't have a lasting hook that pulled me in (opposite of Factorio, which maybe had TOO MUCH of that).
I think that's a big factor. This is what RSUs and bonuses are supposed to solve: You entice employees to stay rather than job hop. However, companies have gotten too greedy and RSUs amount to a pittance, a vestigial perfunctory play act mimicking a bygone era.
I'd like a vacuum that picks up hairs with no suction and is super quiet. Anything that accomplishes this? I really hate the sound of a vacuum and have some hairy animals in the house.
You knew Jeff too?

I'm at the new company and I can confirm that's what he is still doing.
I almost never "review" PRs people send on my repos through the GitHub UI. I "review" them in the sense that I look at them, and comment when needed of course.

This "achievement" is not indicative of anything at all.
I would not describe latency as "excellent" in Go, unless you're measuring average or p90.
It's not what they were so limited, but more what to fully utilize them you need a vast experience and an ability to seriously think out of the box.

Given the tight schedules and and overall pace of the things back then it is understandable why it didn't flew the way it could be.

Totally unrelated but somewhat relateable anecdata: a couple of weeks ago I decided what I needed some more notification sounds for my two phones and bazillion apps which trigger notifications. Being (mentally) a greybeard I decided to use some sounds from Duke3D. After extracting VOCs from DUKE3D.GRP I came to realisation what if you exclude monsters sound variants (roam, attack, death etc) - there is overall a pretty pale palette of sounds. Yet, back then (and even now - it is only a couple of years since I did kick those alien asses) it were perceived as a wonderful, submerging experience. Duke3D shipped on the CD, with only 35Mb of data used.
Entirely lacking details; but I don’t think anyone would be surprised at this point that shady things were happening at Terra Labs.
They're less concerned with getting top talent among the enlisted men -- that's what officers are for -- and instead want to avoid really dumb soldiers. That's what the minimum cut-off scores are for. There was an experiment during the Vietnam war where they waived these restrictions [1], and the results were a disaster for both the army and the low-scoring people who were let in.

[1] https://www.gwern.net/reviews/McNamara
Yeah, leetcode type of test got popular because hugely successful Microsoft and Google used to use them to pick the smartest geeks for amazing technical challenges for their times. Now that leetcode is being abused by both companies and candidates, we really should find a different way to interview.
One of the largest problem is the concept of cost-plus contracts, where the construction doesn't have a fixed cost from the beginning. Government could in theory avoid this problem by doing the design first and then have companies bid on the construction without a cost-plus contract. This assumes that the regulations remain constant from start to finish, as well as the contractual obligations.
Red states versus blue states is still a meaningful axis even on top of the urban/rural divide. Georgia voted for Biden and has two Democrat senators, but on say abortion it's closer to deep red Ohio than to Connecticut. Democrats in Baltimore or Philadelphia, moreover, have only a vague resemblance to Democrats in San Francisco or New York City.

I guess my county (Anne Arundel, MD) is technically "blue" at the moment--it went for Biden +14. But in 2018's "blue wave" it went for Larry Hogan +38. Maryland, despite being solidly Democrat, is pretty conservative in a distinctly mid-Atlantic way.
> You're the one who's saying the odds change when the door is opened.

No, I said the player's odds of winning improve if they switch (to the unopened door).

If the host randomly revealed a goat or deliberately revealed the goat is immaterial. A goat was revealed, that's all that matters.

The player has 3 doors to choose from. 1 is selected, 2 are not. That means the other two have a combined 2/3rds chance of holding the prize. The selected door has a 1/3rd chance of holding the prize. A goat is revealed behind one of the two unselected doors. The remaining closed, but unselected, door has a 2/3rds chance of being the one with the prize.

The selected door's odds of being the winning door remains 1/3rd after the reveal. The player's odds of winning improve if they switch.
I attended a Common Lisp convention at MIT around the year they did away with the SICP course and replaced it with a course using Python to program robots. It came up in the Q&A of one of the talks and the question got kicked to Sussman who was in the audience and gave an explanation.

He said that it used to possible, practically speaking, to treat software like discrete components so that you can reason about how to combine the units and predict the result, etc. By contrast, much programming today is bodging together a bunch of libraries whose behaviors are often poorly defined or otherwise opaque so that one often enough has to treat them like black boxes against which you have to apply scientific reasoning to understand how to use and integrate it. Hence Python and robots.

Presumably the new course teaches skills around managing this complexity, but the shift in model advocated -- from the metaphor of well-behaved discrete components in composition to opaque units whose inputs and outputs (possibly depending on hidden state) must be discovered was interesting to me, and ultimately adds to the accidental complexity of doing software now.

Do you think this sort of problem may have a distinct visual representation that would fundamentally reduce the complexity of library-dominated development? Or are you imagining a whole programming ecosystem built around your idea, so that the fundamental problem Sussmen described is somehow obviated? Or are you really trying to address essential, not accidental complexity?
This is GTA Online, so while it's a "shipped game" that JSON changes, Rockstar decides to offer the "Pfister Astron Custom" for $2.5M and they just change the JSON. I don't know whether it's fetched from their servers on startup, or whether it's on disk and just updated periodically, but either way choosing JSON is not as crazy as you seem to think.
Upvoted for creativity in offering a fun recreational option. Do folks have others to suggest?
I agree with the trend here. It's inevitable that solar will displace fossil fuels eventually (especially when you consider that fossil fuels will gradually increase in price as the cost to extract goes up).

The problem is that moving to solar solely by riding out the market-led transition won't happen fast enough. We would need to subsidize a lot more to avert the worst outcomes of climate change.
"I have noticed that at interviews, I struggle to build a proper narrative and talk coherently."

Is it only at interviews? Than it would be merley the pressure, you cannot stand.

In either case, why not practice talking with logical flow and coherence every time, you have a actual conversation?

I am not a fan of learning verbal conversation by books. I learned english for 10 years in school like this (and had quite good grades). Then I went backpacking into the world - and I allmost could not communicate with native english speakers at all. Very, very frustrating. The only thing that helped, was practice, practice and practice.
Hey Michael,

I love this. It's so cool! I just wish it worked in my slack app on Linux too. But I know you're working on that. Or at least that's what compose.ai thinks ;)
Many of those did need something approaching a rewrite and even got one of sorts, but just were big enough that there was plenty that was unaffected by whatever big change was needed.

The Linux kernel for instance gets big changes. The BKL took a very long time to fully remove.

The GNU utils needing a rewrite would be weird since most of them implement a pre-existing standard, so the need for a huge rewrite is very unlikely.
What makes you think they didn’t understand the developers’ point of view? Maybe they understood it, but didn’t agree with it.
Or just steal someone's account. Instagram bots do it a lot.
This feels very similar to my experience. I built a CultureAmp competitor and ran into the same problems.
Extend? How do you address it?
And are happening. Luna2 got a people pouring money and it is gone now almost. It is not over.
Odd

I thought it was caused by every little piece of software being tied to giant product teams full of MBA majors that want to add 50 features a week
> The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has been investigating Kwon Do-Hyung for violating the Securities Act, claiming that the blockchain service that made it possible to buy US equities with Terra was a violation of the Securities Act.

FWIW this is the important part, not the fact that he was allegedly sending himself money.
SEC investigates Do Kwon’s Terraform Labs for possibly breaking securities laws
As if earthquakes, wildfires, and mudslides are something people look forward to.
> Simplicity of design sounds great in theory, but it might not win you many plaudits from your peers. A complex design means more teams to manage more parts of the system, more for the engineers to do, more meetings and planning sessions, maybe some more patents to file. A simple design might make it seem like you’re not really doing your job. “That’s it? We’re done? We can clock out?” And when promotion season comes around, it might be easier to make a case for yourself with a dazzling new design than a boring, well-understood solution

I couldn’t disagree more. The vast majority of companies I worked with recognized and rewarded simpler designs, the vast majority of software engineers I worked with would rather delete code than write code, rather throw away a complex design to a simpler one, and with some NIH here and there, YAGNI and KISS seems to be triumphant and what would get you promoted, not adding more arrows and boxes.
Man wins Marathon while pushing his 2-year-old son, asleep in his stroller
The Status Quo of Go Custom Generics
If we were getting good value for our dollar I would agree that we are spending too much. Even though we spend the most out of any country on things like medical care and our military, we aren't getting a good return on investment. Large corporate interests have greased enough government wheels to keep the big payouts rolling their way.

If you want to decrease spending, fine lets start by lowering the costs of medical care and medicines, and start looking at getting better value out of our military spending.
> you are always going to have a certain minimum demand for power generation in a geographic location. Congratulations, you have identified base load.

If it's - say - sunny and windy, your renewables are always going to undercut all other generators. So when they undercut nuclear, basic market forces should mean nuclear doesn't get to supply a single MW, and if that means investors lose out, well, tough.

Base load should always be supplied by the cheapest supplier. Not the least flexible and/or the ones with the highest fixed costs.
Sounds like degraded storage tbh.
Yes, washing the carpet is absolutely necessary. But: how the heck did you find time to wash your carpets every month?? I'm guessing your apartment was pretty small... I takes me a whole day or more to wash all my carpets.

I try to do the bottom floor every 3 months and the upper floor every 6 months. If I do it more frequently I start getting clean water out of the machine, especially in the upper floor.

That said, we don't use shoes inside our home. I think that makes a great difference.
I use an iPad 4 with iOS 7 on it. Just for browsing websites, so apps and web apps are out of the question.

For blocking ads, I run an Alpine Linux VM with dnsmasq and a massive block list. This VM masquerades as a DNS server.

Last fall I had to install a Letsencrypt certificate to have more websites working.

Lately I've been experimenting with Squid (caching proxy) to enable SSL bumping to get Wikipedia to work (they use TLS 1.3 and Safari 7 doesn't understand it). The experiment was successful, but I don't like how Squid behaves in other respects.

So it is possible to squeeze some more life out of these devices, but they remain limited because of Apple tying the browser to the operating system.
Interviewing 101:

1. Know what you're interviewing for. You should clarify this with the recruiter before accepting an interview.

2. Learn about the company that you're interviewing for. This shows that you have put thought into being a part of the company and that you are diligent about ensuring that you think about the tasks you are undertaking.

3. Learn how to concisely describe what you've done in the past. Nobody needs a complete history. They just want to know that you're competent enough to do the job.

4. Be sure to answer the question asked. I recently interviewed a candidate for a SDET role and asked her about her experience performing simple database queries. Her eyes rolled into the back of her head and she went on a 5 minute recitation of the steps she went through to do Selenium testing. It's not the information I asked for.

5. Behave as if you are in a position of equality with the interviewer. You lose nothing but your time if you don't get the job. Don't be meek. Show confidence. Any good manager is never going to hire someone they wouldn't want to work for in the future.

6. Practice your answers. We all know that interviewers generally ask the same subset of questions. You should be able to answer them immediately.

7. Tied in with #5, prepare questions that you wish to ask the interviewer. Show them that you are serious about evaluating them for the possibility of joining the company. Show that you believe in yourself.

8. Practice. As a former recruiter, I don't need to do this very much, but if you are new to the game, then it's never a bad thing to get your answers and response time down.
Pedantry: it doesn’t have to be flat - for example a triangulated parabola could also have that configuration. You only get a topological result from just knowing edge and vertex counts. Now if the triangles are identical equilateral then you’re in business.

What if the triangles are all congruent but not equilateral? Can that even happen? That’s a fun one, so I won’t spoil it.
Whether he reveals the goat by luck or because he knew which door had the prize is the entire point of the problem.
I'm picturing him showing up in a bright red Ferrari like Richard Pryor in Superman 3.