skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Best dev tool pitches of all time?
Hey folks! I'm trying to actively get better at pitching developer tools. So I had the idea of collecting an inspiration list of the "best of all time". Would like to crowdsource this!

The vibe I'm going for is pitches that left you with a clear "before" and "after" division in your life where you not only "got it" but also keep referring to it from that point onward.

Obvious candidate for example is DHH's 15 minute Rails demo (and i've been told the Elixir Liveview demo is similar) and Solomon Hykes' Docker demo.

What other pitch is like that? (or successfully pitches a developer tool in a different way, up to your interpretation)
Many religions are cults, and many cults are religions. Ergo religious discrimination could certainly happen.
"Alchemists turned into chemists
when they stopped keeping secrets." -- Eric S. Raymond

Open Science (in the publishing sense) used to be fringe just a decade ago. It's very much mainstream now.

Open Data will be a much tougher (and long-term) battle, but it's inevitable.
Discontinuing Release Blog Posts
I'm pretty sure $1 of profit at a tech company puts you in the top 15%.
How the Treasury Department is waging economic war on Russia
That seems like a good (albeit cynical) strategy to be honest. 80% of your users only care about 20% of the features, and by offering as many different services as possible, you minimize the number of purchasing decisions that customers need to make. Are all your offerings just OK or even mediocre compared to the competition? Yes. Do most customers care? No, as long as it's adequate and doesn't actively cause problems. I can think of many purchase/usage decisions of my own where I prioritize convenience over optimization, because the apparent return from optimization exceeds the apparent cost.

I mean, just look at the Amazon retail operation - everyone agrees that the website is tired, ugly, and slow, but lots of people still do all their shopping from there because they're used to it and it's easier than maintaining accounts with 15 different retailers with 15 different websites. Amazon's bottom line seems to indicate that breadth-first algorithms work well on problems involving human populations.
Take increasing risks in search for higher yield? Check
Leveraged trading to ratchet up profits? Check
Margin called when the risky bet doesn't pay off? Check
Counter party risk? Check
Contagion + domino effect? Check
Fire sale of decent quality assets putting down pressure on its prices thus hurting the whole ecosystem? Check
No, AWS, Aurora Serverless v2 Is Not Serverless
The sun/moon button is unreasonably satisfying!
I guess the free speech absolutist isn't so absolute after all.
Totally fair on the implying bias strictly on the journalist (which may or may not be there).

Regardless of the awareness/intent of the given journalist, I do hope that we can find leaders (whether people/orgs/software) that can help improve our information environment to improve shared sensemaking.

In an ideal world, non-rigorous journalists, arbitrary deadlines, and corner cutting because of school pickups shouldn't impact the clarity of information being shared. That's the world of today, and it leads to a very muddied/confused information environment, but I don't believe it's the only possibility for us.
Isn't that designation basically BS? So was Etsy, and they ditched it and went full capitalism mode.
It's interesting to watch Tether's market cap decrease in this downturn - presumably as more and more Tether is redeemed by major holders. The question is: how much liquidity does Tether have to fund these redemptions? Is it 20B? 50B? Maybe it is fully-backed?
Are you implying these companies have done nothing to deter alternate forms of energy from succeeding?
The physicality of the underlying asset does matter though. Soybeans in and of themselves have some fundamental value (food, feed) the same way oil does (fuel, plastics, etc).

There is no underlying value in having answers to a random cryptographic problem attested to you.
> We're not slaves anymore.

True. And you're not entitled to the job, either. The employer/employee relationship is a voluntary one, for both parties.
I've been fascinated by FMT, but it also grosses me out. I'm super curious, was it tough mentally to take the pill if it was a pill?
For me the most satisfying needs immediate response, and unfortunately the "charge up" animation does not do that
High-paid/low-paid labor?
You can unmark the habit as completed, but you don't interact with "the big checkbox" to do that. Shortly after you interact with the satisfying checkbox described in the article, it disappears to show you a visual representation of a mountain that you're building and climbing by doing your habit. To mark a completed day as incomplete, you enter a different UI that has a calendar-style view, and tap on the completed day.
Go on reddit and you will see a lot of people who invested thousands or even hundreds of thousands of dollars in terra/luna, celsius, and various other crypto companies. There have been suicide help lines posted at the top of many of these forums.

Are these people adults? Yeah. Should they know better? Yeah.

The question is should we do anything about it? The Super Bowl is the most watched television event every year and there were lots of crypto ads this year.
Do people need to be protected from themselves?

We have regulate the traditional financial industry. We put warnings labels on cigarettes. My view is that we need even more regulation of the traditional finance industry and apply those same regulations to crypto.
isn't a better precaution to not store stuff on your stovetop
Sure, it was all about 5 people being distracting in a company with 12,000 employees, and nothing to do with what they were saying about who. /s
Yup, expropriating land and blocking main roads for months while you dig down and pour concrete for a station is expensive. Although some newer metro lines like Barcelona's line 9 are able to fit most of the stations inside the larger tunnel so that they only need to dig elevators straight down to them which ends up being a lot cheaper.
And that's the problem here. They would have ended up looking for different jobs anyway. Others will leave too. The only people working there will be other assholes.
The no-poach cartel that ruled big tech for like a decade would like to have a word.
In the meantime, Goldman went ahead and liquidated Archego's position.
Fiduciary responsibility is a myth. Company officers basically have to yell into a megaphone “I am making this decision to harm the company, there are no possible upsides to the company for this action” to be liable.
I don't understand unions for tech workers. We're not living in shacks rented to us by the company and can't afford a bus ticket to a new city or school to start a new life.

We're making six figures here. Want more pay? Sit on your butt and do leetcode or practice interviews and network with other rich programmers. Move to a tropical island and work remote. Heck, you don't even need to go to college and just about anything you want to learn is a $9.99 class away or free on in video format.
This argument is rather strange. Maybe for people who never interacted with different -fix notations ? Human language binds concepts with arguments in all kinds of direction .. I'd be surprised this is enough to annoy people.
I've been having a lot of fun with this developing tiny webapps using Fullmoon[1]. I love Lua, but I frequently bounce between a Windows PC and a Linux PC. Having redbean + Fullmoon has made it a breeze switching back and forth without having to deal with system Lua installs. SQLite and the thorough amount of built-ins[2] is also a dream. Lua also has a lovingly awesome hobbyist community, so having another outlet for me to leverage that ecosystem is great.

[1] https://github.com/pkulchenko/fullmoon

[2] https://redbean.dev/#functions
I'm not sure anyone's necessarily saying "this shouldn't happen", but more highlighting the irony of it happening given Elon's constant nattering on about free speech absolutism.
Unions might not prevent toxic personalities, but they certainly can protect against toxic managers.
There is enough housing for everyone. Many houses have more bedrooms than people and most bedrooms could hold more people than they currently hold. The supply is more elastic than you would expect just looking at number of houses vs. number of people.
I think unions are great for unskilled labor: When the employer sees employees 100% as a collective, then it makes sense that employees bargain as a collective too.

But it goes off the rails when there’s a big difference in productivity between employees, and it gets even worse when managers are allowed to unionize and use strict labor laws to protect them while they play corporate politics.

Source: I’m Swedish and have seen it myself from most angles.
‘A merry-go-round of buck-passing’: inside the four-year Grenfell inquiry
>> TradFi normally solves this by having a firm have oversite on everyones positions and have everyone pay money into a pot to help bail out failed counterparties so they don't spill over to other firms.

I'm curious -- in traditional finance, there are often daily collateral settlements which force both parties to change collateral based on valuations shifts by way of the exchange. is there such a concept in crypto? Wouldnt this resolve a lot of the issues you're speaking about?
Just move the office to a low tax country / state. Union people will refuse to move there.
> If retention and recruitment are impacted, then working hours become longer.

This statement is false in the general case. If the contract says 40 hours, I'm leaving after 40 hours, and if you want me to stay longer I better have a large share of the company. Your inefficiencies as a manager are not my problem as an employee, unless I'm also a shareholder.
MTA is great for MTA employees. The remaining 10 million or so New Yorkers pay the cost.

You can't assess these things in isolation.

If the Foxconn factory unionized, you can bet iPhones would cost hundreds of dollars more. Who bears that cost?

Consumers of iPhone/society at large (when extrapolating to other businesses)
It already is hostile to pro-union workers, usually. This is part of the resentment that sets in. After months of surveillance and harassment, your pro-union coworkers will be pissed that you chose to side with the people who surveilled and harassed them.
I understand that some catastrophe or economic collapse could cause all of that, but I don’t think it’s a necessity for unemployment to skyrocket if house prices dip 20%. Also what makes you think any of this is connected to crypto?
That's more promotion oriented architecture and design.

New services/businesses are how you get promoted. Maintenance or incrementally improve existing functionality and you'll never get promoted.

Amazon isn't really alone in that short sightedness though, it's just extra noticeable when combined with high churn
It's not moving the goalposts, the two actions are meaningfully different. Lead is basically always dangerous, so "no lead" is an easy call and has the desired effect. The lead, specifically, was causing the entire problem, and it'll keep doing so pretty much no matter how you arrange other elements around it. Some other compounds to replace it might be dangerous, but essentially every lead compound is going to be dangerous.

Carbon compounds, meanwhile, are practically endless and there's no one quality you can point to and say "that, that right there is the problem, ban that part". Piecemeal bans won't work.
"... are shorthands for the vectors encoding the two basis states of a two dimensional vector space." How many beginner's know what a basis of a vector space is -- how about unitary operators -- Eigen stuff?

The word "beginner" does a disservice to the level you need to be at to start wadding into quantum stuff. At a minimum, you better not be a beginner of linear algebra!

There is, imo, no better way to discourage people than saying this stuff is for "beginners".
One where people were expected spend more time working than being offended.
I wonder what Satoshi would think of Tether, or crypto-firms like Blockstream.
If you are into unionization and tech, it's worth exploring the platform co-op (worker co-ops) world a bit. An essential link list via their Facebook group page https://docs.google.com/document/d/1yL5-Q-uPgg1qGtxrKEYOXdsn...
Seeing no one complain about broken drag-and-drop functionality (in Gnome File Manager) in this thread has had me realise I must have a somewhat unique problem.

For the life of me I can't drag files out of File Manager into a program without a struggle.

This is an issue for drag-and-dropping e.g. images from FM -> Chrome (Jira stories / Gitlab comments / etc) or from FM -> Slack. Don't think I have tried much dragging into other programs.

What happens is either:

(~90%) nothing is dragged

(~7%) the file path is dragged and either causes an error or just pastes the path

(~3%) the actual file is dragged as expected

I've figured out some ways to improve the likelihood of the drag working - instead of just clicking and dragging the item, I first spin around in my chair twice, give a very specific exasperated sigh, and then use my arrow keys to select the file I want to drag and only then click and drag with my mouse. This works much more often - probably about 50% of the time.

Recently started always trying copy in FM -> paste in destination program and that generally works.

(I've had the issue for over a year, since the start of my OS install. Currently on latest Gnome (41? 42?) on Arch. Wayland. If someone sees this and has any ideas please let me know.)
Tech is not a monolith and there are certainly people employed by Tech companies who are engaged in technology oriented jobs who will benefit from unionization.
Is this something people can use immediately?
Isn’t it? My sister lives in a state where the true minimum wage is federal minimum wage. My teenager and her teenager both work at the same fast food place. My son makes $16/hour, her son makes $7.25/hour.
There's something real underpinning this essay, but the author only shallowly investigates it.

We live in an age where a person can't participate in normal life (parents, friends, school, work, shopping, public events) without leaking personal information to the entire world, personal information that is liable to stay online forever.

I wish the author had explored whether these 'zoomers' understand how much information is already out there, and the ramfications; are they tech-savvy enough to envision a future where info about a person is easier to locate and consolidate? I'd also like to know if they attempt to scrub existing information, and how they deal with parents and friends who overshare.

One can proclaim 'the personal brand is dead' but social media has already done so much damage that it isn't clear whether anyone actually can avoid a 'personal brand'
Actually most people were union-supportive but thought it either wasn't the right time or would negatively impact the company in the long-run. Only a small minority (maybe 15%) of the company were activist and the rest were "union? okay cool!".

There were some really dirty tactics used by the activist camps (on both sides) and even some press written about such at the time. Things like demanding that management accept the union without an employee vote (back when their internal polling showed that only 30% would vote to unionize...). Negative articles in the press, etc.

The tactics employed and employee-vs-employee culture caused a number of folks I know to leave. Some even from the pro-union side.
It's not possible that people who were anti-union could think that working conditions would not improve with the addition of a union?
> But are we at least done pretending that crypto currency (at least, as it exists now) will ever have any practical purpose beyond being a fungible entity upon which gamblers speculate?

No, I don't think that's happened yet. I still know tons of people excited to build for "web3".

I don't think we need "rich" websites with javascript, "smart" phones in everyone's pocket, or "social media" at all.

But those all happened, and it seems to be a lot of the same vibe for "web3" builders right now.
Every time I shop at Amazon I have a bad conscience about supporting such a worker-hostile company. Well the turnover they get from me has been well under 100 € / yr. for many years. And I have monthly AWS bill over $5 for some Lightsail stuff. Should move to some smaller player, but it's more work.
Who wouldn't want to move from a vibrant coastal city to a suburb in Arkansas?
What is the deal with its windows?
Unions do more than ask for larger wages.
Probably not so different. There were numerous dialogues and debates between Mexica priests and Jesuits, as many priests survived the collapse of Tenochtitlan so there's good second hand evidence about their beliefs. Nahuas were writing their language using the Spanish alphabet by 1528 and there are accounts written by Mexica that remembered the time prior to the arrival of the Spanish. There's also a lot of archeological evidence that's turned up in the lat decade including in 2020 a skull tower that scholars had previously thought was an invention of Spanish writers.
Do you think that it is possible that the OP is not the victim of a criminal conspiracy?

Edit: I don’t really understand the position of “you said a swear word so I will fundamentally disagree with your underlying point.”

If the OP has said fuck or piss or shit while describing their experience of being the victim of a criminal conspiracy, would your position on this matter reflect mine?

Thank you for your unsolicited advice, but I implore you to provide your (very simple) solicited opinion from the first sentence of this post. Namaste.
When Ayn Rand’s ‘Top Secret’ Atomic Bomb Movie Lost Its Way (2020)
Building 10 smaller tunnels actually costs more than building 1 regular tunnel; Boring Co's own projects in Hawthorne and Vegas demonstrate that on a per-mile basis they're only saving a few pennies on the dollar, and all of that comes from avoiding the things like fire escapes (the Vegas tunnels don't have any mid-tunnel), tunnels smooth enough for the vehicle/train to go through at fast speeds (the Vegas tunnels are so rough that speeds are limited to less than 35 mph), stations big enough to handle meaningful amounts of passenger (the biggest station can handle fewer than 1000 people an hour), high-strength concrete and surfaces for the massive volumes of traffic, etc.

In other words, Boring Co tunnels are cheap because they're bargain-basement quality tunnels with limited use and lifespan. And so Vegas is getting what they paid for: a "public transportation" system that has less throughput than a sidewalk.
Frankly, I like it. It is different than what you usually see and it gives a feeling. I wished software was more exciting for the end user. Today it is just consistent, super easy to approach, standardized, flat and cold.
SpaceX fires at least 5 employees over internal letter criticizing CEO Elon Musk
I guess with that kind of money you become acclimated to the company of sycophants, so critics become particularly vexing.
> When you're picking a file, you can even tap space to get a blown-up preview of an image or PRF. I use this feature almost every time I need to pick an image.

Wait, what? That would have been super useful, but how was I supposed to find out?
Factory farming is incredibly petroleum intensive. Subsistence farming is much less impactful if your efficiency metric is "number of tomatoes per ton of CO2 emitted".
Well, these are measures of the money supply. If the Fed "prints" money, then M1/M2 go up to reflect that. And they went up a lot. M2 went up by 40%, M1 it's harder to say because they adjusted the definition exactly at the time they started printing tons of stimulus money (what a coincidence). But it's definitely grown by a vast amount.

The consequences of money printing are extremely basic and well known since antiquity. You get both inflation and, less well discussed but more important, consequent distortion of production in the currency zone as resources are reallocated to wherever the newly printed money enters the economy. The Edict of Diocletian was an example of this from Roman times [1].

Unfortunately, in the last few years we've seen something very disturbing. Central bankers, who are theoretically chosen for their command of economics, have become delusional about this and started arguing that actually money printing doesn't create inflation at all [2]:

"But the current Fed chair, Jerome H. Powell, has dismissed claims that the Fed’s money-printing is fueling today’s price spiral, emphasizing instead the disruptions associated with reopening the economy. Like his most recent predecessors, dating to Alan Greenspan, Powell says that financial innovations mean there no longer is a link between the amount of money circulating in the economy and rising prices."

This is economic illiteracy and sets us on the path to absolute ruin. If it were true then after the economy had "re-opened" (whatever that means) we'd experience deflation as prices re-adjusted back to their pre-pandemic norms, but no such deflation will ever happen, because inflation is "always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon".[3]

In my view it's all a part of the same package of social phenomena you might call "government expertise failure". Anywhere you have the perception of expertise (whether justified or not), you create people who are incentivized to abuse that perception. Governments are filled with technocrats who claim to fully understand and control large systems, but their statements and beliefs seem to have been departing from what's actually correct at an ever higher rate. We are now all paying the price for their delusions at the checkout.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edict_on_Maximum_Prices

[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/02/06/federal-r...

[3] https://www.heritage.org/budget-and-spending/heritage-explai...
Print magazines still exist outside of the tabloids? Huh, color me surprised. I'd recommend either an e-reader, a cheap tablet, or just to throw your reading material up onto a second monitor to separate it from your Tablantic Ocean.
HQ Trivia
I think Everettian interpretations are secretly quite popular among physicists because the Copenhagen interpretation doesn't really get you that far. In Everettian QM, the evolution of the entire system remains deterministic.
A few days ago I visited a German provincial government website that had a cookie banner for the cookie banner provider. It's really funny if it wasn't so stupid.
Supply and demand also applies to the labour market. If you pay more, the best people want to work for you and you can hire the best people. Humans are not fungible, no matter how much businesses try to treat them that way.
I initially read it as:

> Polar bear population discovered that [they] can survive without sea ice

But now I think it's supposed to be:

> Polar bear population [was] discovered that can survive without sea ice

The latter still seems awkward to me. Is it even grammatically correct?
They appear to be using the Backbone.js/Marionette framework, which is super hardcore but also dates when this site was probably developed (I can't remember the last time I saw Backbone in the wild!)

https://builtwith.com/?https%3a%2f%2fwww.mcmaster.com%2f
Yes, but glyphosate and other herbicides have been used since before GMOs and would continue to be used if GMOs ceased to be planted
> Finally, if unions are so bad, why do many of the largest companies in the world continue to hire from unions?

Because it's illegal not to. I dunno if you know this but if you have a union shop, the company can't just hire non-union employees. (In most cases) Once your company unionizes you can hire union employees, or go out of business.

Realistically what companies do is incorporate a subsidiary in a non-union jurisdiction and outsource the jobs to the subsidiary.