skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: How to prepare for finding your first apprenticeship?
Hello,

I'd like to ask you for advice regarding career in programming.
I'm currently a first year student in software engineering (informatyka stosowana) at Polish university. In future I'd like to try my luck at finding an apprenticeship, so that after I'm done with studies I will have some experience.

How should I prepare for that task?
I know that the common advice for this is grinding Leetcode (i.e in general algorithms theory and so on) and having a good Github portfolio. But I've seen people being divided on that one, as I often found voices saying that most likely it is harmful.
Related to that, what constitutes a good project to show? I've been toying with ideas of making games in C++ with some graphic library, but all my ideas seem derivative.

What would be the tasks I would do as an apprentice? I know that this depends of a looooot of things, but on average what would I be expected to do? (our teachers often scare us that our only job would be making coffee).
One of the skills as a lead dev that I need to exercise more is knowing when a project needs more people, and then making the case for it to management.

Management seems by default to assign according to bus factor not getting it done. So we have like the same six projects in flight for over a year.

Also, on failed projects, where an understaffed team never completed the assignment, they finally staff it properly the second time around. But, the project still takes a long time to finish having to make sense of what the previous team did and even more time sucking, purging the unnecessary bits, frequently being the majority of the work. It takes 2x the amount of time to delete something than it took to make it.
> all the metals markets have massive indictments and settlements about how they were full of fraud and manipulation

Right. That’s the point. Indictments and settlements.

Meanwhile, we know e.g. Tether and its affiliates lied materially, they said as much to the New York DA. Yet no enforcement action. No oversight.
I'm assuming this must be for huge projects?

I just compiled my toy project (detecting anomalous parity in integers) in nim 1.6.6 (4.23s), go 1.17.7 (2.43s to create both aarch64 and x86_64 binaries), zig 0.8.0-dev.1140 (2.04s to create aarch64 and x86_64 binaries) and C via clang 13.1.6 (0.14s).

nim's compilation is 175% of Go, 207% of zig, and 3021% of clang.
If in the US instead of a president, all you could elect was party functionaries to an institution with the explicit purpose of being between the voters and the decision and they then voted somebody in as president against the popular vote, would you call that democratic?

Because that's what happened in 2016 and many times before that.

Glass House, stones, etc.
> A live birth is much less dangerous than the flu so this isn't really a good argument.

I don’t think it matters. Women do die from it. It is the woman’s choice to take that risk or not, regardless of how big or small that risk is.
There's just one Bitcoin-network, and 21 million bitcoins. All other cryptocoins are fake, because they are replicas of the original invention. Bitcoin can't be copied, because a copy is by definition a violation of absolute scarcity, which Bitcoin invented. There are thousands of copies, which try to convince otherwise, but they'll lose their value over time.

The energy requirement and limited supply means that no one can counterfeit the money, i.e. create it without cost. Production cost should be close to the current price of the coin. This ensures that the distribution of new coins is fair, and that savers are protected from endless money supply inflation.

Primary use and demand for money is for savings, which gives money its value. Medium of exchange is secondary.[0] Also, many people use bitcoin as a currency too, with Lightning Network.[1]

[0] https://vijayboyapati.medium.com/the-bullish-case-for-bitcoi...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightning_Network
They've been working on C2V for a long time now and even still it falls over quickly for anything other than the exact version of doom they are using. Multiline comments crash the tool for instance.
Yes, I expect Amazon to stand up against their demands and tell them to go pound sand.

Im not naive; I know they won’t. But I can still be disgusted that they won’t.
NixOS, ffmpeg, neovim, swaywm, zfs, home-manager, ImageMagick, yt-dlp, bash, fish
>much of their value is derived from the prospect of profits far in the future, whose present value is being eroded by rising interest rates

I've seen this finance meme over and over again, and it's mostly an irrelevant argument. Yes, of course interest rates affect the valuation of growth companies, but a successful startup might grow 1000x from early investment rounds to the time when it's an established company with lower growth and a world-dominating role in its domain. An interest rate increase on the order of 2% is laughably small in that context.

What's probably going to happen is that valuations will be a bit lower at all stages, but why should that affect motivations and outcomes? The most motivated people aren't primarily in it for the money anyway, and there is plenty of room for getting rich.

Tens of thousands of people got rich after the dotcom crash, and interest rates were much higher back then. Interest rates are just a minor scaling factor.
He sued Matthew Cook to stop him publishing a proof of a conjecture Wolfram made about 110
And the came the ESP32-C5 RISC-V IoT MCU which supports dual-band (!!) WiFi 6 (!), Bluetooth 5.0 LE…

As much as I like the Pico, it seems that Espressif is (finally) upping its game.

Dual band is highly relevant especially in hight density areas with crowded 2.4 GHz bands.
The whole purpose of this section in my website is to have sharable cheat-sheets that I own: https://www.codrut.pro/snippets/
Microsoft's project management tool is Azure Dev Ops (used to be called Visual Studio Team Services), I found it pretty comparable to JIRA for the most part.
Nah, digital goods are excepted, but there are steps that Nintendo need to take such as actively warning customers at the time of purchase:

https://www.gov.uk/online-and-distance-selling-for-businesse...
Jira can have a network effect.

ISO (the standards body) has started using it, I'm sure in part because large companies who contribute to standards were already using it. The committee that I am a member of switched from Bugzilla to it.
To sum it up, it's a complete mess and every country has different rules and also enforces them differently.

After all these years I still have no clue what is actually an official ruling of anything because I've had no problem showing my driver's licence when officially I'd needed my id card (in Germany). Then there's the decade old widespread rumour that you need to _carry_ any form of id, which is completely wrong (with a few exceptions).
One could say Jira is like SAP. Theoretically it's just a software, but in the end there is so much customization that the business starts to revolve around its processes.
A few high-profile examples:

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

You can also pick one, and check with a tool like this:

https://www.comparitech.com/privacy-security-tools/blockedin...
That supports my point, no? The paragraph you cited boils down to "there is an association between being less sick and not getting Alzheimer's (i.e. being less sick" + "there seems to be an association between literally any vaccine regardless of mechanism or target and less Alzheimers". These are not specific biological mechanisms of action, they're just correlations supported by an ultra-vague causal hypothesis of the form "maybe microbes cause Alzheimers". That's not actually a causal biological explanation.
> two companies (Visa, MasterCard) that have a global oligopoly and full control

For one set of rails. Wires, ACH, and a number of other payment rails exist and outclass Visa + MasterCard. (Also, technically, Visa and MasterCard are analogous to SWIFT. They process payment messages. Not the transfer of dollars per se. If they chose, they could execute transactions in Bitcoin with the issuing bank and merchant bank then settling the trade on the blockchain or whatever offline.)
Shrugs paying customer here - I emailed the devs about several significant bugs that were pretty much ignored. The client doesn’t support some important features, making it basically not useful as a daily driver.

It also has weird unread flagging behaviors that just drive you nuts.

Would not recommend.
Yes, and that's why ESP32 can be so cheap. They just run the WiFi stack on the same core, and they got very good know-how on the side of hardware<->RTOS interaction how to make it viable (very hard.)

Imho, non-wireless-intergrated MCUs will go extinct in IoT very soon.

They also have the best mixed signal out of every other scrawny IoT startup who uses off-the-shelf IP.
TikTok Pedagogy: Teaching Philosophy in 60 Seconds or Less
The alterntive for companies with many departments is usually using a variety of tools that all need to be in sync. Jira can be the one point that handles all workflows for all projects.
This article's finger is on the right place, but IMO the analysis is off.

Netflix, has recently excited the fundamental/rationalist investor camp. The huge valuations hot tech companies enjoy must eventually be justified by a "Thiel Monopoly." That's the only way to earn the 20%-50% margins that Google/Apple/Meta can achieve. Netflix sells a cheap consumer product. One product among several similar options. Consumers are savvy, with many jumping between subscriptions for deals and variety. Content producers have market power, because multiple buyers.

In short, textbook microeconomics is afoot. That means competition, efficiency and low margins. That means "startup economics" don't apply. The market is not going to let Netflix sit on massive margins and monopoly market share. Newschool tech investors see this as an abomination. Old schoolers see it as cosmic justice.

Anyway.. those who desire market rationality love Netflix and are applying the Netflix analysis to everything.

Atlassian is a different story entirely. They actually sell software. Enterprise software, really. There are no content producers squeezing them for a bigger cut. The companies who pay them aren't price sensitive, and they are locked in enough. This is not the "microeconomic normality" monster that bit Netflix. Atlassian's business model is fine. Competition isn't the problem, and neither is consumer bargaining power.

Atlassian's problem is that they haven't done good enough. The bar, set by both tech history and the $150bn peak valuation, is that Atlassian becomes a microsoft.. at least a SalesForce, IMB or somesuch. Where's Atlassian's challenge to AWS? When is Atlassian leading the WFH revolution. How will Atlassian become the organisational nervous system of the modern knowledge firm?

It just doesn't look likely that Atlassian is going to achieve that kind of big-hairy-goal. The products have a crusty, uninspiring feel. The take over the world vibe is missing.

So... Atlassian's valuation is down. I doubt the share price will ever approach "rational." Software companies have value, and the floor is set by opportunistic M&A. If stock markets don't want TEAM @ 10X revenue or more... someone will buy them.
In the year or so I used it, it was never updated.
> I love Wolfram stuff.

I'm with you 100% here, but I'm also 100% with sibling jiggawatts.

To me, Mathematica is a computation environment that conveys a Lisp Machine feeling of "the machine and I are working on this problem".

You know, that "assembling things live in the sky" Lisp feeling (Yegge's phrase, not mine).

The only other computation environment that is right there en par in flexibility and conveyance of the same trippy feeling is, of course, Emacs.

The company can still make money from academic and professional licensing and support contracts, and everyone else gets to have access to an awesome thinking tool as a matter of fact.

They've already gone that direction a bit with the Raspberry release, what's left now is just the final push.

So, if Stephen Wolfram ever reads this:

Open source Mathematica and it will have a chance at immortality.

Just like Lisp and just like Emacs, and the people will rejoice.

Disclaimer: I started with Mathematica 4.0 at age 14 (a pirate copy too, sorry!), turned on by that marvellous column in Quantum. But I was put off precisely due to the proprietary nature, and switched to C and Lisp. Consequently I became a CS guy rather than a Physics guy, because C and Lisp were accessible early on, while Mathematica wasn't (legitimately).
You can call it a “defense” or not as you like.

People and organizations have been putting money ahead of enlightened ideals as long as there’s been money or ideals.

I’m not trying to let Amazon off the hook here per se, but a cursory reading of history shows that such calls are on average, basically everyone ever.

We venerate King and Milk and Ghandi and others because they stand out.

This is business as usual not for Amazon, it’s business as usual in recorded history.
I'm using at least two products made by solo entrepeneurs: MailMate and Pinboard. Both are awesome. If anything, it's been my impression that the bigger the corp, the worse software they make (in an asymptotic progression, so I'm not saying that 5 people will do worse than 1).
Wasm can run pretty quickly, but can't access the UI directly. I think that would be the bottleneck.

I use Inkscape but only a small subset of what it does. I could probably work through a web page.
Your reasons make sense, and I'm sure I make similar choices.

But most end users? They have zero idea, and would never think of such things.

They'd just use an app store, or google for something, and click->install.
Quantum network at 50km distance achieves record synch at 5picosecond(5T/second)
GitLab’s valuation is pinned on charging enterprise customers for a system that replaces Jira and is more closely aligned with devops.

The problem is you can’t much go ala carte - you have to go all-in.
How well does Mycroft integrate with home assistant?

I've previously used rhasspy (by the author of this feature apparently, he got a job at mycroft and stopped development of rhasspy) with some custom scripts as glue to home assistant as my local-only smart home solution.

Can I do this with mycroft? Does it maybe come with a Home Assistant integration? My main worry is that mycroft seems to be doing a bit too much for my taste. Is there functionality overlap/conflict between HA and Mycroft?
Put simply: the right to decide what goes into and comes out of your body.

Your knife example has nothing to do with your bodily autonomy. It’s why you can’t be forced to donate a kidney or why you can choose to get a vasectomy.
Attackers disrupt AI and ML systems
> Americans always claim that countries with socialised healthcare have significantly higher tax burdens

That's a generalisation, although some conservatives do make the claim. It's nonsense, of course: the most other developed countries including the UK spend around a third as much per person on healthcare. Another victim of poorly regulated market consolidation (among other factors).
This issue has been debated ad nauseam on HN, practically every week. No offense intended to the asker, but I'm not sure this question is useful, given the social context. Round N in an N-dless debate. The question adds nothing new to it, and no detail ("it doesn't really make sense").
I think that “reasonable steps” here could be: “we asked the user to review their basket before checking out, and displayed a final list of everything in the order directly above the payment options at the last stage of the check out process.
I’m not sure what comparison you’re drawing. They have nothing to do with each other. The economics and purpose are entirely different.
A NATO VC fund? The memes will be glorious
> I hope one day all these countries, like Syria, will have their own museums to rival ours, and the peace and stability to enjoy them for centuries too.

I find the British pretext that they're keeping (often stolen) artifacts for safety reasons to be really flimsy.

Greece is a safe country that has built a world class museum quite some years ago [1] and the Elgin marbles are still in London.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acropolis_Museum
This is anecdata, but apparently Fæcesbook is like a religion in Sweden so I'm not surprised.
I run a very small audio plugin company as a side-hustle/just for the love of it. Refunds through my payment platform cost me money. I offer a very generous trial (3 weeks unrestricted, nag screens after that). I think because of that no-one actually asks for refunds (or perhaps my plugins are good enough that everyone who buys is satisfied). I do offer refunds for accidental double purchases though (usually I'm the one who notices and pro-actively contacts the customer).
My comment was specifically about "Why bother with nuclear". I'm not getting into discussions about climate.

You may not like it, but the Earth is kept warm enough for life to exist by nuclear reactions deep inside its molten core.

Nuclear fission is literally what sustains your life.

Otherwise, the planet would be too cold, and it would lack tectonic movements, both are crucial for the emergence of complex life.

Please review The Science(tm): https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/nuclear-fi...

FYI: plate tectonics affect the carbon cycle, help regulate the atmosphere, and thus ultimately contribute to keeping our planet's surface at a comfortable not-too-hot and not-too-cold temperature.

Nuclear is good. Windmills are dumb.
> This might be a shock to you, but people in Europe already have their democratic government - you may google "national elections" ;-)

People in Europe don't. People in the various countries do. This is just a level above, just like you don't say "oh why do we need the german government, can't the mayors do everything?".

Different levels of organization need different democratic governments. Tribalism is not the solution.
You scheduled an abortion. Planned Parenthood’s website could tell Facebook
Yes. Google's first decade was notorious for their terrible products. That's why nobody used anything made by Google before 2016.

Ye gods. What has become of that once great organization when this is the best response you can come up with?
If you have ever desired to get a paid online App or service for free, you would have searched for a free alternative…and maybe after hours and hours of research, you found one that suited you best.
They've repeatedly set out the problems with the bitcoin market that make it unsuitable for an ETF, responding to ETF applications over the past two years.

Every new ETF application has just blithely ignored the previous reasons for refusal, and Grayscale ignored them too.

At this point, the blockchain industry is just playing dumb and pretending not to understand.
>researchers often have trouble determining if they have accounted for all confounding variables.

You can't account for all confounding variables.

That's what makes them confounding to begin with.
This is a neat reply. I guess there could be other factors that would lead someone to stop their solo biz though...
Thanks for the data; that's what I call an elegant rebuttal.
Yep, this is my real problem. Install something that looks cool, then get wrapped up in the day-to-day and never make it muscle memory.

Sounds like I should be focusing on "one new workflow thing a week" and make it a daily habit to practice, or something.
Every DAC system I’ve seen has costs that are an order of magnitude higher than where current compliance markets are trading (like EUAs).
Ask HN: Where and how do you find your early adoptors?
I have been working on my side project (a productivity tool) for the past 5 months. I want to find some beta users for my software. With very limited time and resources, how and where can I find my first 100 beta users?
> Also, I wonder if we'll ever see a return of enthusiasm and
investment in tech related to the hard sciences. That's what I
originally went into, but career growth and earning potential
couldn't match soft tech so I ended up pursuing that instead.

I led the technical team of a London startup for a few years and it
was super exciting from a physics and electronics stance. We did did
R&D into acoustics, vibration, materials sciences, 3D printing and
manufacturing. We basically invented new kinds of surface microphones.

Slowly the smartphone and app ecosystem ate into our priorities. We
shut down the lab, binned the prototypes, shelved the designs. Nothing
got patented. I ended up saying in a meeting one day, "This isn't a
startup any more. We're all just employees of Apple". Everyone
nodded. Then carried on. I left when about 80 percent of the daily
grind was jumping through legal and PR hoops to get things past the
App Store gatekeepers, who I took to be hostile saboteurs.

Although the company lives on (and is doing well). looking back now
I'd say the pathological fixation on smartphones and apps circa 2015
killed a very promising transducer tech project.
8000 people and still a 3 years old useful feature like [0] is still in 'gathering interest' status.

[0] https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JSWSERVER-20097
It has a free version that is limited to the #general room which would mean for my random communities I wouldn't be able to test this out on the generic happenings. Nevermind a full blown work slack.

> I am not sure if refunds for software purchases is the norm. Does Microsoft offers Windows or office purchase refunds?

It is indeed the norm in the indie hacker world which this developer and product is part of. I don't think I've saw a software product that didn't come with a X-days money back promise.

And yes, you can get a refund for Windows. You can go here https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/all/return... and see a Microsoft employee explain how to get one.
I'd say that for many large companies, Jira is better than the alterntive of having multiple systems that need to be kept in sync. Steering any large company will be a mess, no software will ever make that easy. And any software designed to be that flexible will end up being slow eventually.
Depends on the software, naturally.

If it's a self-contained desktop software, it's one thing.

If it's a 24/7 online service, it's another.

If the online component is optional or not critical, it's the third case.
I've read a lot of HN interviewing discussing, but I've never seen this specific question asked.
Amazon is a private organization. They aren't mandated or required to give everyone a platform.
Special keyboard commando movement: point a browser to a certain DNS.

Only hackers can do this.
>I wonder if this will benefit startups that are more bootstrap style. Does less funding necessary for anticipated future growth imply less damage during a recession?

In general, I'd say it depends. If you're bootstrapped and are bringing in enough money to get by, you can continue in that mode for a long time. But if you don't have revenue, the piggy bank is likely going to empty faster.

As far hard sciences, typically more capital needed, harder to scale, longer time to revenue, etc. None of which makes it non-viable as either an investment or a career but it's not hard to see the attraction of pure software businesses. (Of course, as things scale up, especially for B2B, many of the costs associated with physical goods businesses apply to software as well.