skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I wonder what would happen if more software engineers viewed themselves like landscapers/plumbers/electricians. That is, you have a skill, people in your community need it, now you just need to find those people.

A friend of mine used to work in the bizdev side of a non-profit, managing donations and tracking groups to thank and follow-up with and so on. Incidentally she started complaining about how bad the user experience of the software she was using was, which got my ears tingling. What if people in her position at other non-profits had the same experience to the extent that I could distribute the cost of developing something this group of users found value in (increased efficiency/productivity) that their organizations would be willing to switch to?

I ended up not following through for personal reasons and there are some of the normal "cost of switching" stuff one would have to get past to make this work, but little things like this wouldn't generate hockey-stick revenue but could bring value to the world. If the Thibault can make a decent living making a good free open source chess website or Tarn can make a decent living making the most in-depth fantasy world simulator the world's ever seen, surely there are other modest opportunities out there to be the change we want to see in the world (interestingly both examples here live on donations rather than selling a service/product).
This is an Angular app rendered entirely on the client. Sorry we don't provide any server side rendering or fallback. It's targeted at Devs that usually have JS enabled.
I've had the same idea. Operationally, what's needed is speed.

I do not care to learn some obscure, poorly documented API by trial and error. If I could write a failing test or three in a playground then post it in an appropriate chat window and have two or three people claim it at once, with the winner earning 50% of the prize, I would utilize this with some frequency.

The problem with an SO-style solution is that I don't get confirmation that anyone is working on it. So if my project is under a stiff deadline then I have to keep trying myself.

That said, yes, someone please build this. There is a market for people like me that have wasted days on ffmpeg just to get X to do a Y without a Z.
Just discovered this favicon "trick" the other day in RSS-Bridge code:

https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge/blob/5e664d9b2b0cb0...
> and requires developers to be experienced

Ah the old PS3 argument ;)

We don’t provide the ‘easy to program for’ console that (developers) want, because
‘easy to program for’ means that anybody will be able to take advantage of pretty
much what the hardware can do, so then the question is, what do you do for the
rest of the nine-and-a-half years?
Assuming intelligence and brain size correlates? Neanderthals had bigger brains than us.
Yes and most of that is wrong. Physics doesn't deal with probability but with explanations. (Yes also in QM)
Large org here. We're not planning to move to Win11. We moved from Win7 to Win10 and consider this a short term release.
I doubt 75k is the 20x monthly income financial professionals suggest to carry in case of unexpected unemployment for this position. Works out to less than 15.50/hr.
SoundHound used to do that, looks like it can still be used through: https://www.midomi.com
There were a few attempts at this in the past, even before StackOverflow existed and they always failed. I remember listening to a podcast which dissected the success story of StackOverflow and how it improved on its predecessors. One point I remember taking away was that all predecessors that used money to attract answers were less effective than the counterparts that solely relied on non-monetary rewards such as upvotes, karma, a simple "thank you" and other kinds of social approval.

Sorry for not being able to back this with the original sources.
https://gitcoin.co/bounties/funder
I can tickle my feet but I won’t laugh. To me that’s the difference. If another person tickles my feet I will laugh.
> Secondly, the vast majority of strike craft aren't ready for war in peacetime.

If you can't maintain your aircraft in peacetime, what do you think will happen when you go to war? Aircraft become more difficult to repair because the op tempo increases and lower echelon maintenance must be performed in theater. There is a thing called 'readiness' and you're attempting to normalize the lack of it.

> Second point was a known flaw with a long history that was overlooked,

Yeah it doesn't look good for the defense industry when they knowingly build stuff that is overpriced and doesn't work as a 'jobs program.'

> Third point, this is a point on maintenance of some super large ships - which is both difficult and can only be carried out at ONE shipyard in the whole USA for the two newest carrier classes (Newport News).

Sounds like my point still stands, we can't build new technology that works and we can't keep the old stuff going because of a lack of defense industry capability.

> You've selected three problems on complex systems in a country that makes hundreds of different defense products. I think my point still stands.

This might work to persuade some bureaucrats but when you go to war, the enemy doesn't care about why you can't keep your war machine functional, they just like it that you can't (because they get to win). These are just high profile instances of a general malaise. There are dozens of examples we could discuss.
I haven't seen it. I was thinking more like gladiatorial games - doesn't Zuck see himself as a Neo-Augustus type leader?

https://www.businessinsider.com/mark-zuckerberg-haircut-expl...
Apple is a proven product innovator. "Meta" is just the same old PHP website it's been since 2005, only with some acquisitions and low-value in-house stuff tacked on.
Maps, Slice and the Go Garbage Collector
> Middle class americans' toxic nihilism and self loathing is exhausting to read sometimes.

One of the reasons I enjoy this site in addition to all the tech stuff is the way a random comment can so perfectly capture my thoughts on an issue. Indeed, I like to like things, even if everyone else likes the same thing!
Theoretically if every outstanding note called the balance due then default is inevitable. It's not a practical milestone but it's a milestone nonetheless.
Considering it’s hackernews it’s likely many here can’t touch their feet.
trying to figure out why they posted that, because it hasn't been updated
Or overnight. If you could post a simple problem to fix and its done by the next morning that would be awesome. Would play to strengths of Asia time zone too.
RPi Meteor Station
> There is a market for people like me that have wasted days

Days? I know I must have wasted weeks, in total.

And not to mention how this can pull you down emotionally/mentally, when you just don't find the solution to your problem. Having someone pull you out of a deep hole is worth money.
I'd play hardball. You have to remember anyone they get to replace you will take 6 months to ramp up (at least). You've got a huge amount of leverage there, and the company would know it.
In my experience talking to FB devs of varying report at conferences, they are often highly motivated and may thus quickly gain a deep understanding of the technology they get to work on, but their overall knowledge tends to be fairly shallow. Most skills are likely transferrable but a kid joining Facebook fresh from college to move on to another job three years later is still a rookie due to their lack of experience.
> There is a market for technical questions that few people _can_ and/or _want_ to answer or work on.

You think there is a market.

Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood discussed this on their podcast back in the early days about making Stack Overflow. They believed that having monetary rewards would create perverse incentives and the psychology of involving money would discourage people from participating - people would balk at $n/answer/vote/whatever thinking it's not worth their time, but would happily spend their free time answering questions for free.
> Without geo-locking, pricing strategy gets much more complicated, but it's a fair guess that consumers in regions 3-6 (that is, the majority of humanity) would have either paid more or gotten movies later.

You are missing the most likely option: they would have "pirated" those movies. So again, the geo-locking is not realy for the good of the consumer but to ensure every last bit of profit can be extracted.

Meanwhile, the main thing selling things cheaper to designated poor reason does is keep those regions from demanding fair payment for their work thus making them no longer poor regions that can be exploited.
> Also, please don't execute payloads on your laptop. That seems really stupid.

I would never execute a payload that I didn't manually vet on my computer :) That's why I didn't actually execute the full stage-two, but just pieces of it so it would decode what it was reaching out to. I also replaced the `eval` in the next stage to an `echo` to see what it was doing!
It would be neat if you could get this to work.

But I can't help but think anyone who launched such a service would end up spending most of their time adjudicating disagreements about whether there should be a payout when a poorly stated question gets a low-effort unhelpful answer.
I suppose you could calibrate Mr. Hum with some known-date video material, but I agree that the data should simply be made public. Further, even if the data is released, you would be assuming that Mr. Hum captured his electrical data with the correct time attached to it. So, hopefully, he's either got a Cesium clock connected to his capture device or he's using NTP, or the like. This would further assume that he has maintained this same data capture regimen continuously since he began his capture in 2016.

This definitely raises some questions and shows that its likely not something that should be left to entities outside of standards-setting agencies (that could offer some assurances and certifications).
If you’d like to see a great parody of Wes Anderson check out this short SNL did some years ago: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=gfDIAZCwHQE

I hadn’t seen it before watching the French Dispatch and it nails him perfectly.
Doubtful that it would work. Many, if not most questions on stack overflow are poorly written. Good luck moderating that with payment incentives to people who provide an answer. Or if someone does provide an answer and the question asked simply says it doesn’t work in good faith or bad faith. Or if someone provides a bad viable answer before you get around to submitting an excellent answer and you lose the reward. Or if a bunch of non English speaking folks start spamming the forum with low quality links to random pieces of documentation.

The power to determine who gets and does not get the money is going to be a very difficult moderation challenge.

And on top of it; the money pool is likely to be very small imo, because there’s already stack overflow which is free.
I cover what's happening inside Facebook for software engineers, and I have confirmed that the 15% needs improvement target was not set as guideline for engineering teams, based on talking with several engineering managers within the company. However, this article is making its round amongst software engineers as well, creating lots of fear and uncertainty.

Right now, for engineering, what is happening is the revamped performance review process running its course. As with every year, the target for "needs improvement" is 10%, which is not new. Those going on "needs improvement", in the past, did not all go on PIPs. Also, PIPs at Facebook have not been nearly as draconian as at Amazon. With all these details, I find it a very strong stretch to say that "15% of Facebook's workforce may lose jobs."

Originally I wrote in a lot more detail about all of this - and why the Business Insider article likely doesn't apply to engineering - behind a paywall. Seeing this trending on Hacker News, which article I find misleading - an article referencing a public Blind post! - I un-paywalled my reflection, and my own analysis on the situation at Facebook. I personally doubt there is a need for layoffs at Meta, and I'm surprised no other publication points this out. Analyzing the financials gives a very different picture on whether or not any form of layoffs would be needed.

My response / reflection: https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/meta-layoffs/
Structured to avoid the "WARN Act": https://www.dol.gov/agencies/eta/layoffs/warn

That is, a bunch of people coincidentally ending up on performance plans, to Meta, might not be a "layoff".
> 15 per cent of the workforce could be cut within the next few weeks

> some 12,000 employees could be out of jobs soon.

> "It might look like they are moving on, but the reality is they are being forced out,"

If Meta is going to fire 15% of their staff within the next few weeks, it's not going to be quiet. The way they usually fire under performers isn't abrupt. People get consistent bad evaluations over a couple of halves, then go to a performance improvement programs. I'd assume that this type of things is a legal requirement in Europe.

Not sure how this is going to work.
No and no.

https://historyforatheists.com/2020/12/pagan-christmas/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJq70tf0AsY
I mean.. at a loss for words..

Agree to disagree I guess.
> why you're so angry about it

Am I?

You suppose a lot of things about me from literaly a bunch of words.

"A 'tiny probability of memory corruption' can easily become a CVE" is still FUD, because is simply not true in most cases. The words "tiny" and "easily" show the bias here.

The rest of the conversation seems a symptom of Hypervigilance: Fixation on potential threats (dangerous people, animals, or situations).

Fortunately, the decision isn't up to you either.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_Kessler_(author)

I have nothing to add about the article, but the author has a technological background and an interesting career path.
Monetary value is real value. That's literally the entire point of money, a physical and finite object to represent the value people place in the items they purchase. Where you spend your time and money is what you value.
Credit Card vs BNPL market analysis.
What is TuM'Fatig - klingon or something?
Even for DVDs, the region locking also applied to computer drives (which typically only had a limited number of region changes) where NTSC vs. PAL were not a concern.

Also, a 1.2x playback speed for the video is not even that noticeable - certainly a much better experience than no video. I intentially watch a lot of video contents sped up like that, even movies sometimes. Audio needs processing though to not pitch shift.
See also: http://thesiteformerlyknownas.zachtronicsindustries.com/note... with http://thesiteformerlyknownas.zachtronicsindustries.com/imag... linked in the comments.

I had a lot of fun writing a few small games with this method, don't think I ever shared them anywhere though.

Here are the key bits:

char* c = "Hello World!";
HWND hwnd = FindWindow("Notepad", NULL);
HWND edit = FindWindowEx(hwnd, NULL, "Edit", NULL);
SendMessage(edit, WM_SETTEXT, NULL, (LPARAM)c);
We had that. It was called Experts Exchange. SO ate its lunch.
If you watch the road, any given day < 1% of people tow. But ~20% buy a truck because they might want to tow.
Hete's Svante Pääbo (recent nobel prize winner) on "The Neandertal in Us"

https://www.mpg.de/914714/Neandertal
Yes, this is consulting but commodified and made more efficient on an open market. The legacy "consulting" business model probably includes lots of costs and inefficiency priced in such as time wasted getting set up with a new team, time wasted in meetings, cost of sales, insurance etc.

How much value can really be added though in the question-answer format that you can't already get for free on StackOverflow?

The answer probably lands somewhere on a sliding scale between "quick answer to an easy coding or api question" at 0 and "team of programmers speccing out and working on a project with delivery by a deadline" at 100.

StackOverflow currently sits at 0 to 10. Gig sites like fiverr at 50, and legacy consulting at 80-90. Maybe the value here is at 25 or 30 on that scale?
It's very difficult to get diagnosed and there are many possible causes - hormonal disruptions, nutritional deficiencies, sleep apnea, covid, depression... Depending on your healthcare provider it might be difficult to even to be taken seriously.
My sincere belief is that there are a large number of employees whose total comp is over $400k and they provide far less value than that. But the arms race between FAANG drove up salaries to illogical levels. As people are pushed out they will not be able to hop to another FAANG. While total comp at startups might be similar but the equity isn’t liquid like FAANG is.

Additionally the skillset to succeed at a large corp is very different from a startup. It will be a psychological shock to go from a FAANG environment to a small company.

In summary I think there will be some hard life lessons for some previously extremely well compensated tech folks. I hope they saved a lot of their past salaries.
I'm finding conflicting reports about this. Some say it's been fixed for all houses in Flint, others say there's 2000 houses where it still hasn't been fixed.

But there's apparently a lot of people who simply don't trust it because they're been lied to for too long.
For someone who completely missed the 2008 bubble he certainly was insightful on stuff that did not matter
Quite an interesting read. I’d make a distinction between tired and drained. There are EOD that I feel tired but deeply satisfied because I did what I had to do, was productive, and what I did was something worth doing. On the contrary there are EOD when I’ve been very busy, meetings, complicated conversations, disagreements, and such… those days I just feel drained, exhausted and don’t really find any joy in that.

Two things come from that, the first being that doing nothing is terribly unsatisfactory for me, it is in doing that I find that my hours have been well used, and is not just $WORK but being intentional about doing and then having the satisfaction of having done.

The second is that a day when I’m tired in such fashion is often the time that I’m inspired to make some dinner or spend time with family, call a friend, or some other thing that I usually consider healthy, while the days that I’m drained usually have evenings wasted on hours of YouTube or Netflix that I really didn’t care for, thus wasted, all just a blur only to realize that is past midnight…

Thus nowadays I strive to be more tired and less drained :)
update : apparently shot himself in the hip ...
https://www.lapresse.ca/actualites/justice-et-faits-divers/2...
The problem with this study is that the analysis is based upon intention to treat. Only 42% of those who were randomized to get a colonoscopy actually got one. The cancer incidence was 18% lower among all people who were invited to get a colonoscopy. If we assume rate among people who were invited to get a colonoscopy but did not go through with it is the same as the rate of people who did not get a colonoscopy then the cancer rate would be more like -2/3 among those who got a colonoscopy.
Was trying to figure out why my website randomly got way above its normal daily usage, looks like I found it.

FWIW, I went ahead and removed it on the blog post pages.
Well then the title is indeed misleading. It's not the colonoscopy that's failing to reduce cancer death rates, treatments are. Indeed the title should have been: with colon cancer deaths unchanged, screening and pre-malignant treatments are ever more important.
It's complicated... the fed should manage the economy in such way so people are not forced to move in a couple of megacities to find jobs.
If you scroll to the top there's a camera icon. If you click, you can view photos from the actual lecture
That already exists!
What will happen is that people wil compete on speed (first to get accepted gets the money don't they?) and the quality of the answers will be comparable to first tier of outsourced tech support.
Yeah, when I decoded the B64 params, I did see the `cid` keyword, and briefly thought that this might be just really good adware. However, the following stages were too sophisticated for some person to just serve me an ad.

And I'm not sure if a coffee shop farther outside of Tyson's (not going to ask why you specifically said that area) would've helped. I'm very confident that they tore down their C2 after seeing either a (in their eyes) successful callback, or me badger their server with follow on requests.
So headphones and watches are "crazy bets" now. Good lord.
It shouldn't hijack it, but you're the second to complain on this specific topic, so I went ahead and removed it on the blog post screens.

I was initially trying to figure out if someone was DDoS'ing my website, but it seems as though the post just made it to HN. :P
Well put. Seriously.
I realize I’m in the minority here but as a Christian (Catholic) I’d like to draw a distinction between folk customs and the actual religion. For example, with Easter, if we are to believe the Venerable Bede, the word comes from Eostre, an Anglo-Saxon celebration and goddess. Many customs we associate with the holiday also come from them. But to say Easter the holiday comes from Eostre and is just Christian syncretism is highly Anglo centric. The celebration of the resurrection in Christianity is called Pascha and similar names in other languages, clearly associating itself with Passover just as the story of the Passion does.
Likewise other cases, such as with various saints, often it is not that local gods were changed to be saints and kept as such, but the folk practice was redirected towards something more suitable for Christianity. Sometimes this did result in a lot of old folklore sticking around. I know this might sound 90 percent the same to many, but the 10 percent I would like to be clear on.
> Facebook infamously allows for redundancy in development (each team developing its own solutions instead of trying to solve the problems across multiple teams)

Example or sources for this claim? I spent close to a decade working there and this doesn’t sound familiar at all.
Laughably misinformed and naive article. But thanks for proving that the National Review is now garbage political propaganda aimed at simpletons.

There is no reason that we shouldn’t immediately begin to acquire more of our current interceptors for all of our systems

Uhhh, yes there is. Our current interceptors are totally ineffective against hypersonic missiles which our largest enemies have now deployed.

In order for a "bullet to hit a bullet", the interceptor must travel significantly faster than the target. Otherwise, the target will be gone by the time the interceptor gets there. Also, getting up to the speed required to intercept takes time. And, last but not least; the target bullet must follow a predictable trajectory.

Fast forward and try to apply this logic to a maneuverable target missile travelling really fast --- like 5-10X the speed of sound --- hypersonically. By the time the target is detected and acquired and the interceptor is fired and gets up to speed, it's game over --- the target missile has either changed it's trajectory or already struck.

The only thing with a realistic chance of reliably shooting down a hypersonic missile is a "Star Wars" directed energy weapon of some kind with nearly instantaneous flight time. Which doesn't exist yet.

Proposing more money thrown at our "current interceptors" may make for "feel good" political propaganda but it won't make us any safer --- and the top brass at the Pentagon know this and have said as much.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/china-hypersonic-missile-sputni...
Joel, one of the founders of StackOverflow, has a blog entry about why this won’t work:

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/08/09/the-econ-101-manag...

It is worth the read
Thank you!

Yes, I was there. Got into the biz in 1988, but was a hobbyist before then.