skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thanks!

Dropping by would be harder to do, but a dream interview would be to put him in a room with Guido van Rossum to talk about Python and SICP.

I now need to get over my irrational fear of cold calling someone I don't know already (heck, I don't even do that with people that I do know - it's always "what's a good time to call"?)
I understand that, my point is: you're still sitting at home when you could be out doing other things. It then should be paid as regular or OT hours, not 2/3 or 1/3 of regular pay or anything like that.
My data is pretty old, old enough that the person on call carried a pager (remember those?), but very similar comp structure. I remember, because the on-call costs hit my budget directly.

1. Time on-call was paid at 25% of normal hourly rate. (Maybe holiday premium boosted the base rate? I can't remember.)
2. Issue-resolution pay was the normal overtime rate, including shift premium and holiday premium, from the time the pager went off until the issue was cleared.
3. The person on call had to: a) be able to get to the plant in 20 minutes, if necessary, but remote support was perfectly fine and paid the same. Only resolving the issue mattered, not where you did it.
4. The person on call had to remain sober and work-ready the entire time on call.

It's 3 & 4 that justify the 25% pay for carrying a pager. Friend having a party? I'll have cranberry juice, thanks. Fresh snow in Tahoe? I'll have to miss it this weekend.

Restricting someone's movements and social life without compensation is simply abusive. As an industry, we need to stop.
> let's for a moment ignore that YAML can go REALLY nuts, and think only of the simplest version of it

But we can't ignore it… we have to validate and make sure it isn't going too nuts. And we will probably fail at that.
The base salary is literally irrelevant to this discussion, which is about compensation for hours worked outside of normal business hours at whatever the rate is.
> For example, most of the carbon offset operations in California are being destroyed by wild fires

Shouldn't the corresponding carbon contracts be bought by the state, in that case, to keep the accounting correct?
What, and break down all the monitoring and alerting silos we built by hiring a Devops engineer to come in and break down the development and infrastructure silos that were built when the company went ham adopting "Capital A" Agile?
I grew up in a city in a section where the poor had higher asthma rates than the wealthier areas. I am not advocating foisting pollution to where the poor people live at all.
With plants that remain part of the life cycle? Sure. But growing plants can lock away carbon more permanently depending how it is disposed of.

Consider https://charmindustrial.com/. They take bio waste products (for example corn husks and cobs), turn it into oil, then put that back into wells. So growing plants (in this specific case, food) winds up permanently locking waste away.
Why is the elephant in the room, agriculture and cattle so little discussed compared to transport.

A burger pollutes more than driving an suv for 50 miles,yet the enemy is always transport.

Forget a family of 4 in a single lunch can easily pollute much more than they would with transport in a week.
Yeah, but what the hell is possibly important enough to wake up someone's family more than 2-3 times a week?
Maybe 2 or 3 big companies.

I'll never understand why those companies can't bother to set up an internal mirror.
Compilers have improved a lot, to the point where you don't need to read this book for many of the tricks. For example, if you divide by a constant in gcc, you can see the tricks from this book being applied if you look at the disassembly.

Still, this is a standard textbook for little tricks. Knowing these kind of tricks used to be enough to make you a hacker in the original sense. I greatly enjoyed reading it and still recommend it even today.

It really is a delight for hackers.
This is stats 101. Mean and median are measured of central tendency, and the median is generally better for skewed distributions. The 5 number summary (or your 5 percentiles) gives slightly more information, but ultimately you are summarizing a complex distribution with a few simple stats. There are upsides (it’s fast) and downsides (it’s incomplete) to doing so. The real problem is how few people understand stats 101, which makes them easy to mislead.
Black masking tape. It's not opaque enough to block the light entirely; this means you can do a few layers to dim it to taste. Once that's sorted, a quick trim with an x-acto blade will tidy up the edges and make it all look intentional from a distance.
Is Munich 15-minute city ready?
Don't even look at GDP, look at happiness of people instead.

Fetishizing the GDP will only accelerate the climate problem.
Complete bullshit.
The 99% rate is NOT because the system (prosecutors, judges) is "good", the rate is so high because system is structured to bully anyone arrested to admit to the crimes. You're basically coerced into confession, whether or not you did it.
I think most companies do not set up mirrors. There is no way millions of individual companies are downloading daily the same pieces of code. And if they had caching they'd download them only when a new release happens, not daily.

There aren't that many companies in the world basically.
Is that perhaps because the sense of smell is one of the few that we cannot yet, at least with consumer grade electronics, emulate artificially?
Programmer readable, not user readable. It's far easier to learn what it means by just looking at an example than by reading some abstract documentation as you would have to with binary data or some home-made format.
Whilst I don't at all doubt your testimonies, I am still sitting here wondering what programs everyone here is using, if not programs usually tailored for Debian. I feel like I've seen more software that runs natively on Debian (Ubuntu, really) and made specifically for dpkg.
But I suppose a lot of applications also come with "snap" these days, but I avoid "software stores" like the plague.
I personally have had very little contact with Arch, but I realise that is me that is strange, I personally dislike Arch very much and can recognise that, that might be the reason I don't see it around as much; a negative confirmation bias of sorts, if you will.
99% of the time when I have an issue and I just google it, I'll end up on the Ubuntu forum, that's no lie. But I do seem to remember using the Arch wiki years ago. I'll admit, I'm probably just a diehard fan of Debian.
Phew, when I read these posts, I often wonder if I said something dumb in the past and I think I can easily be proud of my comments there, though I missed the JSON5 thing[0]. Fortunately, the thing that keeps me from saying dumb shit about other peoples' tech is:

* my belief that people who execute on some project are inherently superior - they made a thing to solve a problem! Automatically superior to people who didn't make a thing

* the Blub Paradox http://paulgraham.com/avg.html I can only judge projects accurately where I am operating at a higher-level of thought. If I don't get the need, then I am probably not operating at a higher-level than the author. I prefer to be able to have sufficient Theory of Mind thinking that I can inhabit the author's mind to see why they need something, make the best case for it, and then reject/accept it if I have to. There are many places where I can't. The most trivial example which everyone grasped before I got there is GraphQL as an API specification and IDL, which I only recently really grokked.

In any case, I had a figment of the idea that you talk about which is the "people who won't be your users". Thanks for citing the thought around that.

Congrats and good luck!

0: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
I have a kid, so sometimes I can't drop what I'm doing. If I am required to be on-call at 5min response, that means I'm hiring a nanny/babysitter. That's what you all don't get here, people have complex lives outside of work and workplaces should not be shortchanging you or I in order to scrimp and save on customer support.

If it is important for the application to be up 24/7, the company needs to pay for it at the usual rate!
The other issues are important as well, but semis run everything we use. For instance, nearly half the world's display drivers are made in Taiwan. These can be made elsewhere but will take time to find production capacity.

Do we have the technological capability to recycle old semis to work with current systems to keep things running? Do enough people have this skillset? I'm sure we figureit out, but I doubt it there are enough people to really get it moving. With a severe lack of chips we'll see systems falter or all out crash as components wear out and can't be easily replaced. I think you're underestimating how much runs on what Taiwan produces and I don't think "economics" can bring more production online in a meaningful time frame.
That's Windows' problem and it's not even a real problem anymore because make runs fine in WSL. Microsoft has pretty much gotten their act together in the last four years in supporting open developer tools. They've got bash and ANSI support. It's great. Give them credit where credit is due. It's time to say goodbye to shoehorning unix devops into win32. Doing that gets sillier each year. Especially since, as Microsoft has been generous in supporting tools, they've certainly been boiling the frog with their win32 environment. The last time I extracted a zip file containing dev work on Windows, it extracted at 64 kilobytes per second to the local hard drive, because their virus technology was scanning and uploading everything I was doing. How can you build software in that kind of environment? And why is it that it's always the voices coming from our own community who insist that we should. People shouldn't fall that far in love with an operating system because even with perfect support, builds are still going to go slow on Windows. Use WSL.
maybe!

serious question tho - how do you learn about local events in your inbox? i basically only use twitter so i need to bubble burst a bit.
I think the real lesson is that popularity is a poor way of understanding whether something is actually useful or good, it can indicate those qualities but meaningless without also applying our reasoning faculties too. The author appears to remain oblivious to any of the very good reasons why people don’t like alternative json formats and incapable of incorporating that into their understanding of people’s reaction. Citing market mechanics as a justification of “popularity = value” is blowing past the many examples of where free markets produce terrible approximations of value.

Also, I think it’s very poor character to say on one hand that people’s reaction doesn’t bother them and dedicate a third to a half of the article to Mitchell’s criticism specifically. I think Mitchell’s criticism is completely reasonable (I remember this as an era of “solving json” through multiple alternative formats) and drawing attention to what seems in retrospect as a mean-spirited act is actually quite a cynical attempt to strip the context of it and deliberately cast Mitchell in a poor light. Mitchell’s intention is very clearly a technically minded one to nudge people away from trying to massage long term, durable standards in often trivial, subjective ways with an end goal that can only result in format thrashing that doesn’t ever address anything substantial.
I love A Fire Upon the Deep much more, myself. Sure, the characters aren't quite as good, but in epic scifi I don't think that matters so much.

The idea of the Beyond and Transcend is just so compelling, and it's comforting in a way to have Earth located in the Slow Zone -- a place completely safe from the godlike intelligences that roam further out, but also utterly stifled by the structure of spacetime. It's nice to imagine that somewhere out there in the universe, the unbearable distances of space don't matter so much.

For weird spiders encountering interstellar explorers (the premise of Deepness), I thought that Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Time was better. Although Deepness is still very good.
Have previously found sitting down with potential client and pre-release of software to be useful, particularly when allowing client to go "hands on".
It was Bavarian minister Aigner that in 2015 blocked/delayed the improved North-South connection. Environmental organizations opposed the connection completely despite the clear environmental benefits.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suedlink#Wilster_%E2%80%93_Ber...

The whole Suedlink process has been a triumph of pseudo-environmental Nimbyism over the actual environment and now threatens the whole energy stability of Germany in the coming energy-crunch winter.
> Someone has conned you into accepting less. I'm sorry.

The Kool-Aid was really good though! XD
And to support what sibling said, I open the Teams app on my phone, not dial in, join the meeting and go walk the dog around the neighborhood. Unless you simply don’t have a smartphone (or an app for your meeting software), I can’t see how one would more simply solve your problem.
I was looking for same thing years ago but
after a while the voice will no longer feel robotic (edit: it still feels robotic just you no longer notice it unless you focus on teh voice instead of the content), and you can try increase the speed slowly until you will be able to have text read to you at super speeds.

This days I use my custom scripts that use eSpeak under the hood.
Perhaps the fact that it's popular is exactly what those nay-sayers were worried about. They didn't want a more fragmented world of incompatible standards.
This. Equifax exposed 147 million identities. They should not exist today, but somehow that resulted in ‘free services’ for us instead.

As was pointed out earlier, that just updated their database.

Not only are we the product, but we can’t opt out. This industry is gross

https://www.ftc.gov/enforcement/refunds/equifax-data-breach-...

Edit: fixed autocorrect’s incorrect fix of Equifax name
If there's light, I see the back of my eyelids, if the light is moving I might see patterns like in a cloud or jesus-in-toast kinda thing. I've only ever mentally visualized once while high on opiates (surprisingly hallucinogens don't make me visualize, even when I get visual effects).
I don't think there's a perfect 1:1 correspondence between compilers and libc versions on Windows today, but even if there were, it's still a distinction worth making. For example, if two libraries both statically link the C runtime, that counts as separate ones (and so a malloc in one paired with a free in the other will wreak havoc), even if they're the exact same version.
> I also really dislike the "corporations are trying to avoid responsibility by passing it on to the people!"

Oh come on... People like Leo Dicaprio and Taylor Swift fly on their private jets to tell Johnny Average here, that he should bike for 15 miles to his workplace. Organizations are the same... look at coca cola for example, some water, sugar and aromas, in a plastic bottle, plastic cap, plastic sticker, packed in a sixpack wrapped in plastic, on a pallet, wrapped in more plastic. Reusable glass bottles? Nope (atleast not in my country). Just look at packaging of most items.. clamshell packaging, toothpaste double or tripple wrapped, shrinkflation (less product, same amount of packaging, more packages bought), single peppers wrapped in plastic, bananas wrapped in plastic, electronics literally designed to be unrepairable, tractors going that way too, cars following, user replacable batteries are usually too expensive to replace on 2 year old devices, sotware updates slow down devices, big corps requiring computer-bound workers to come to office, instead of working from home, clothes companies replacing cotton clothes with synthetics, leaking microplastics everywhere, companies catchign fish in US seas, or even meat, shipping them to china to be cleaned, cut and packaged, and then shipped back to US, zero regulation on 3rd world, where corpos either mine raw materials or "recycle" stuff (and recycling copper means burning the insulation off first... literally burning heaps of plastic),... and lets not forget the "accidents" when companies like BP ignore safety and cause fucking huge oil spills and destroy huge areas with their carelessness, and they don't even get properly punished for that.

But no... let's pass the blame on people, who have no alternative on the market, and let's ban straws, because "that'll surely help the environment".
I have two stories like this:

One thrift store had a DEC TU-58 tape drive. I bought for $20 and immediately sold on eBay for $400 (I would have kept it, but have no DEC stuff to use with it at all).

Another thrift store had a late 60s / early 70s electronic calculator that used acoustic delay line memory and a CRT for display. I think I paid $100, played with it for a while, then sold it for $600. Unfortunately, it was damaged in shipping (it was well packed), and UPS had to pay up.

I bought a Curta recently, but is was not a good deal. Prices just keep going up on them.. I wish I had bought one in the early 2000s when they were still below $500.

Other mechanical calculators are reasonable. Aside from the Curta, only the really early ones are expensive.
And yet research on this topic suggest the opposite.
"These days everyone seems to thinks that "planting trees" is an important solution to the climate crisis. They're mostly wrong, and in this paper we explain why. Instead of planting trees, we need to talk about people managing landscapes." [1]

[1] https://twitter.com/ForrestFleisch1/status/13062214459331297...
How tight is the correlation between tweets and users though? Anecdotally I know quite a few people who play every day but only ever share their results in private channels. For those that want to compare their results with the general population there is now also WordleBot which probably eats into the tweetshare.
If we had stayed on the path we were on, it was a path to over 5 degrees of warming.

If we keep our commitments, like the ones various nations have made to ban gas cars by 2035, we'll limit our warming to about 2.5 degrees.

The difference between 2.5 degrees and 5 degrees is the difference between a really bad time and an apocalypse.
In videogames, "If there are enemies ahead of you, then you are going the right now."

I have long held the belief that if the audience of Reddit or Twitter or Slashdot or Hackernews universally hates something with such vehemance that you doubt your own thoughts then you are probably doing the right thing.

In the words of Casey Neistat, in his video "Do what you can't." - "To the haters, the doubters, my 7th grade vice principal, to everyoneone who has ever anyone with a dream they can't..."
That's true but it's just a reality of being employed by a saas company these days. Customer support, sales, etc have those too (and usually less formalized and unpaid) so why are engineers immune to this? You can still probably find some shops that ship an offline distribution but that's becoming more rare.
I wrote a python library.

Someone online told me another library (released after mine) was doing the same thing.

Turns out other library has very obvious bugs, is 20x times slower, but it has 8x more downloads.

Yep downloads are not a metric of quality.
Yes, but the 1st gen SE was discontinued.
Now take this Gell-Mann type observation and apply it broadly. The internet is full of highly confident people that, if you are lucky, skimmed a Wikipedia article.

Sorting the gold from the dross is THE contemporary skill.
Congrats to your launch. Wanna share why you built it? What are some queries it can solve that the official search does not handle well? Also, how does it work internally, and what challenges did you have to overcome when building it?
And then what? We're left with two other credit bureaus that aren't much better? Another company takes its place that isn't any better, or maybe is even worse?
I know the rate for three other German companies are are percentages. I think time and a half for “activation” is relatively common. I’m less sure about inactive time.
I hope this brilliant work has been merged into the relevant open source libraries.

Something that’s unfair about the world is that work like this could reach billions of people and save a million dollars worth of time and electricity annually but is being done gratis.

It would be amazing if there were charities that rewarded high-impact open source contributions like this proportionally to the benefits to humanity…
There is also a nice new datastructure called Zip Trees [1] which is isomorphic to skip lists in the sense that it performs exactly the same comparisons on insertion/deletion (but it can skip some redundant ones). I would expect zip trees to be faster than skip lists in practice.

[1]: https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.06726
I'm really puzzled by "JSON is for machines, not for humans" types of comments here. FFS, JSON has whitespaces, that alone should answer who it was made for. And making human-readable formats more human-readable is a good thing. JSON5 is awesome.

If the performance of your module suffers from parsing its inputs, you are doing some Really Terrible Thing with your inputs. And if the nature of the task really requires you to parse data quickly and on a big scale, it would be better to ditch JSON altogether and switch to a binary format like protobuf instead.
Right. We can achieve heaven if we just punish every sin. Not trusting almighty Google's algorithm is just too much sacrifice the good people are making.

Promoting publicly editable database as authoritative is high bar we must achieve at the cost of just banning juvenile behavior.
Your said cloning, which is a technology we have today, but which implies growing a fully functioning human being.

It may be possible in the future to grow parts of human bodies without the conscious bits, but we definitely don't know how to do it today beyond style very simplistic tissues.

It's also important to note that there is no reason to believe that it is possible to grow a human body without a head or brain. It may be, but it may well not.

Also, the brain and head age like the rest of the body, and a full body transplant would be just about the most extreme kind of surgery you could undorgo. I see no reason to believe that such extreme surgery would succeed in prolonging life, except in the most dire of circumstances (imminent vascular failure, terminal metastasized cancers that happen not to affect the brain). In most cases, for relatively healthy aging humans, it would certainly be a significant reduction in lifespan with anything similar to today's medical technology, even if you had a young healthy donor body.
I guess there are different levels on which you can look at this. If a rapist escapes from prison I certainly don't celebrate that. I want him to get captured again as quickly as possible. But I do not think it should add anything to his sentence, at least not for the attempt itself. If he hurt anyone, broke/stole something on his way out that's a different issue.
Transportation is 27% of US carbon emssions vs 11% for agriculture.
Everyone should absolutely at least once pronounce every letter from the alphabet and look at a spectrogram, it’s fascinating.

Try a rolled “r”, vowels, consonants, “p”, “f” (“eeeffff”) etc.

Also try whistling if you can.

——

Online spectrogram options:

Sort of works on mobile, go to landscape and tap the mic button:
https://spectrogram.sciencemusic.org/

Doesn’t work on mobile anymore? But should be good desktop option: https://musiclab.chromeexperiments.com/Spectrogram/