skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Basically the story of my teens and early 20s except that my grades were good enough to get into CS at UIUC... where I promptly drank/smoked my way into an academic suspension. Switched to an easier school and easier major and failed out again which prompted me to enlist in the Navy. Graduated with highest honors from my boot camp class--it's fucking amazing what a little structure can do for people who need it. 16 years later I have a BS in economics, MBA, MSCS, and now trying to beat the final boss and get a PhD before I turn 40.
Dell makes their money in the B2B space now. They used to have a great consumer facing business model with their catalogs and, relatively, fair and transparent pricing.

I find their products to be garbage as well, but honestly so is every PC manufacturer. Lenovo is maybe slightly better with their Thinkpad line as long as you don't mind the legacy Lenovo design quirks and layout (I know a lot of people here like it).

I would love to hear if anyone can firmly recommend a PC laptop manufacturer at this point. Are Razer laptops any good? Is the Framework actually good or just not actively bad? What are HP laptops like these days? I feel like when people say a PC laptop is good they just mean not actively bad.
> as opposed to those that are the most productive or the most capable.

Why wouldn't he select those that are the most productive or the most capable in the context of the job he has for them? I.e. if he's looking for an enforcer that will, with an iron fist, reign in a province that's talking about self-determination a bit too loudly, will he choose someone who's very virtuous, or will he choose someone who's happy, maybe even eager, to rule with an iron fist?

Did Putin make a deal with Kadyrov because he found him virtuous, or because he found him the most capable person available at the time for the job he needed him to do?
The Dagger Go SDK
I would call this a rant, not a serious critique, and that paragraph is appropriate enough for a rant.
Using software in accordance with the terms of its licence is not shameful.
Aside from all the patent nonsense, what is even up with that naming? “Advanced" -> "High Efficiency" -> “Versatile" is nearly as bad as USB marketing… Can we not just stick to h264 -> h265 -> h266?
I’ve stayed at some AirBNB/VRBO type places with terrible Wi-Fi. How do you know ahead of time which ones have “good” Wi-Fi?
"Spreading the word" isn't needed. There are plenty of low-friction tech solutions to public Wi-Fi onboarding and the people responsible for these systems know about them.

The persistence of stupid captive portals etc. is an intentional move by the hotel, coffee shop, wherever. Their marketing department values your eyeballs + any data you provide as part of sign up. It's stupid because you're trying to get online, you don't want to experience this friction, but it's a "customer touchpoint" and the venues don't want to lose it.

Source: have built large Wi-Fi networks for 15 years, helped develop Passpoint support on Android, ran large U.S. coffee shop Wi-Fi, ran citywide Wi-Fi in NYC.
It is not that they are irrelevant, it is that they are ableist, selecting for a narrow skill and ability combination, and creating a barrier for anyone else who lacks it, for whatever reason.
I feel like this is close to https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20150923-00/?p=91... since most people tend to treat Windows on their personal machines as a single-user system and always have the highest privileges anyway.
> Isn't it likely that there's just a certain kind of interface and functionality that both works and people have also gotten used to it over time?

This is what I meant by 'design of git lends itself to a very specific interface'.

Git has branches, commits, merging, rebasing, ... It makes sense for a UI interface over git to show data git itself shows.

I also find little wrong with copying UI elements, where it works. The result is better software all around.
Insulting, whether at an individual or at a group, is a lowly, immoral act in of itself despite one being slightly better than the other.
I imagine the site author is coming from the desktop world or the Mac world.

Dell is far from perfect from a QC standpoint but not nearly as bad as what's been described here. I have a $500 Dell Vostro from 2011 that is still running fine. It only needed a heat sink replacement that was covered by the Next Business Day in-home service warranty.
Well, Dell _did_ end up being targeted by Danish public TV for breaking consumer laws and having ridiculously long wait times for support calls. That's about the time I got out. Unfortunately, DR seems to have removed older seasons of "Kontant" from their online player.

I'd be surprised if Dell didn't do something to improve things after that, but as I said I'm not taking that chance.

Edit:

Found a reference to the TV show from a Danish tabloid. It's as much as I can say without doxing myself:
https://ekstrabladet.dk/forbrug/dinepenge/article4181606.ece

Edit 2:

An article about the affair in ComputerWorld:
https://www.computerworld.dk/art/54886/dell-faar-taesk-for-d...

Another one about Dell trying to spam DR's comment fields with positive comments after the show was aired:
https://www.computerworld.dk/art/127000/dell-bruger-lyssky-k...
The linked article is a bit confusing. The NASA release at https://blogs.nasa.gov/spacestation/2022/10/24/space-station... is clearer.
> "...with a family there is a requirement for a certain level of “life/living” if it was just me changing to be a taxi driver or something else would be possible as it’s easier to change your living situation if it’s just you..."

OMG, its like you have been reading my mind, and living my same life! :-) Let's hope we all get through this!
> "Holocaust denial" was the first use of the rhetorical technique, the term was thrown at people who denied the Holocaust had happened and those who were educating the world on the details of what did happen, equally.

Who are you thinking of that falls into that latter category?
I see zero discussion of test scores and people with learning disabilities. Those who cannot be properly accommodated will be unfairly represented and often have to put up with a lot more barriers (such as frequently messed up accommodations on test day leading to anxiety). Usually these accommodations help normalize the specific testing scenario and people with disabilities do not need as drastic accommodations in real job setups. The tests are designed for the average test taker but have lots of hiccups for those that deviate from the average.

It’s a difficult problem to solve, but it’s unfair if a student gets easily distracted or anxious when taking a test around others in a time constrained setting. Those types of external factors generally shouldn’t be represented in a student’s test results yet often are. If tests are to be a good indicator for all students, I think accommodations have a ways to go.

If tests are indeed a generally good indicator of a student’s success and are continued to be used in such a manner, I feel it’s important that the experience is fair for all types of test takers. Many US tests such as the CPA exam do a great job of handling accommodations. However, many others (like the PSAT) have a lot of room for improvement.
Suppose BB(8000) could be computed:
1) Compute BB(8000).
2) Run the program specified in the article until it either halts or it runs for BB(8000)+1 steps.
3) We then know if the program ever halts, and then have a proof within ZFC whether or not ZFC is sound.
Desired salary? As a required field? Not today Satan.

People don't complete online job applications because they have all the user hostility of modern nudge driven tech but implemented with the subtlety of a brick in a burlap sack.
Most of us book online any... so uhhh why not just ask for the mac address of the machine, add it to the network on check in, remove it on check out?
So many people go the other way on this :(
Board members are supervising operations and overseeing executives (or are supposed to - many get ‘captured’ by management depending on the company), not running them.

One thing that is REALLY helpful when supervising highly complex operations like a large corporation is knowledge of how similar operations are run at a large number of other companies

It makes it easier to identify things like pointless ‘not invented here’ syndrome, or where a company is being very inefficient in an area because they don’t know of any alternatives.

It’s common for companies to hire in outside consulting firms or independent contractors who also work for a great many companies in an industry for the exact same reason. It’s a way of keeping on top of what the industry norms are so the company doesn’t fall behind and lose competitiveness.

Plenty of pros and cons there, but that is a big part of why.

The other reason is the board of directors works for the shareholders, and represents their interests.

Institutional shareholders hold shares in a lot of different companies, and if they have someone they know , trust, and are happy with performance wise, most would prefer to have them on the boards of as many companies as they think they have the expertise to oversee.
Care to share more? How and why did you get blocked from Taleo?
https://twitter.com/simonbs/status/1585026888455659525
Casting lines to inspire others to work with you on a project you care about
Many projects (especially in open source) are single coder hero projects. They trudge on. But to make projects sustainable, developers ultimately need to find ways to cooperate and pool their efforts. (Despite the not-invented-here syndrome). But maintainers often find it hard to inspire other developers to get engaged in the same problems they care about. Everyone has their own pet projects, and time is scarce all around.

Vjeux, known for his work on React and React Native, proposes a solution in the linked post.

It would be interesting with a discussion on what ways have you've found successful in inspiring fellow developers to work with you on a project you care about?
The USB C ports get a lot of flex fast, but the connection remained stable in my experience, regarding both data & power.
Right, even if everyone knows the password, the four-way handshake makes it much harder to sniff other people's traffic.
Just throwing this out there, but you can put Prosupport on anything if you ask about it in their live chat. Even the refurbs from Warehouse.
Blackouts are not caused by Crypto (or any other) energy consumer.

Blackouts are caused by the perversion of market forces (more demand —> higher prices —> lower consumption + increasing supply), and politicization of production (force suppliers to build inferior/riskier supply).

Source: I live in an energy super-power (Alberta), and I and many friends have worked in this field for decades.

You are experiencing incompetence at industrial scale.

Don’t blame a few ASIC miners that can be shut off in a couple minutes. Blame your elected meddling incompetents bumbling their way to freezing you and your family in the dark.
How to not agree?
The fresh out of college situation is a good point - I’d recommend a cover letter in that scenario. There isn’t enough experience to assess a candidate so makes sense to counter it with a letter.
The project description:

µWebSockets is a simple to use yet thoroughly optimized, standards compliant and secure implementation of WebSockets (and HTTP). It comes with built-in pub/sub support, URL routing, TLS 1.3, SNI, IPv6, permessage-deflate
lenovo T490 with current ubuntu
Sounds like this law makes it much easier to frame people than planting drugs and calling the cops. /s
They closed a loophole that Facebook was exploiting, this is clearly a grave injustice (also Facebook already has another loophole they can exploit that mostly covers it).
I learned how to program on personal 8-bit computers using BASIC as a teenager in 1980.

There were no data structures besides arrays, and there was no theory. The internet was not available to mere mortals and books and magazines were expensive. There wasn't any other option at the time, and the only classes were in high school or university.

Half of what I learned was by reading source code to other programs that were shared (printouts from friends with access to universities, or from magazines).

I don't think I really learned how to program until I was in my late 20s and fell into doing it professionally. (At the time I thought I was a better programmer than I actually was.)

So, I do wish I learned to program in a better language, with data structures and a smattering of theory/discussion about algorithm efficiency. Probably a tutorial that progressed towards making something fun and interesting, like a simple space invaders-like or text adventure game.

But I would not change the part about reading source code.
Who uses a mobile app to manage (and pay for) their social-media strategy?
How the Innovator’s Brain Works
If you can get the work done, it's not unethical. Sounds like they weren't getting it done though:

>(their downfall was neither of them were meeting productivity expectations, not getting their work done)
I’m a big fan of this approach. The idea that your startup can only grow to be this huge unicorn if you can convince top talent to devote all of their loyalty and time to you is such a farce. You certainly want that in some of your key hires and core team, but good talent is hard to come by and you might be better served getting a fraction of their time than none at all.
I this subject interests you I recommend "Desperate journeys, abandoned souls : true stories of castaways and other survivors" available freely on the Internet Archive

https://archive.org/details/desperatejourney00edwa/page/n19/...
Is there evidence that the institutional prestige is a better signal? I thought there was a movement away from that because it wasn’t shown to be a particularly strong predictor.
Overseas Chinese Transnational Policing Gone Wild [pdf]
I think for XPS line Dell has always prioritized form over function. My wife(then GF) bought top of the line XPS13 somewhere in 2011-2012. It was red, thin and looked pretty amazing, except it had crippling overheating issues that required motherboard replacement 2 times (in India). The trend continues to this day ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bZpwCpubr_0 ) and hence I wouldn't touch XPS line with a 10 feet stick, if I can help it.
I suspected LSP would be awesome for it, but nothing existed like 3 years ago - kudos to you sir, I think it would make the experience 10x better.
I prefer to replace "grit" with "programs on my calculator". Turns out the calculator is still better at stoichiometry than the chemistry student with a lot of grit.
> If we get rid of targeted advertisements, then all the ads will be mega-corps and erection pills. Already seeing niche tech companies close shop because no one knows they exist.

The headline is more sensational than you're describing. This is the act of buying a specific kind of ad "boosting your content" which is more akin to a digital service consumed in-app than AdWords spend. They aren't taxing putting ads in your app.
Meanwhile, in a previous thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33315308

I think website notifications in Safari will be fine for techies and others who use HN. But it will make many "normal" people's phones look like notification hell.
Meta AI audio “hypercompression” ~10x more efficient than MP3
Are you sure we can't just keep the systems that ask for room number and last name with no rate limiting that just bills the occupant of that room when they check out? I'm a big fan of those. /s
Of course there's bias.

Most people go online to complain, not praise their computers. That is what the GPT model is being trained to summarize.
Getting a normal user to get you a MAC address would be... challenging. Especially on devices that randomize them.
Board members aren't creating IP. That's really the only issue I can side with on the employer's side.

I've worked a full time w/ benefits job and freelanced on the side. The only aspect of that I would feel that would be unethical is if I were to mix IP from the firms that should remain private.

Otherwise, who the hell cares. If I'm doing task work and meeting expectations then I'm holding up my end of the bargain. I'm not a slave and my work does not own me. Standing around the proverbial water cooler wasting company time is acceptable, but doing something productive during my downtime is not?
This actually looks like an interesting Tech
Hmm. How would this work for regular non-tech savvy users?

I doubt regular customers know what a MAC address is.
> all electronic devices become paperweights

Isn't this an exceedingly unlikely scenario? In the Carrington event, even extremely long conductors like telegraph lines only carried electricity in the "ouch" range, and as far as I understand the physics behind this, the longer the conductor, the larger the induction effect. So I guess most electronics should be fine even in a much worse event, as long as they're not connected to mains power, I doubt whatever gets induced into tiny electronics circuits would be enough to do damage.
So your VR app had properly working legs without additional external trackers?
In the name of securitay!
To be fair, HP's Thunderbolt docks are the exact same shit-show too. I've got experience with both and I hate them both.
To argue against this, a Word document has no business running arbitrary code with access to system drivers. I think it's more like opening a document in GEdit and realizing that your whole system got hacked.

Macros were another billion dollar mistake: https://www.zdnet.com/article/the-cost-of-ransomware-around-...
And then you'll end up with letting them take away features, introduce new bugs and other bloatware you never had before (seems to happen semiregularly with GPU drivers...), can't use hardware you bought because they broke its driver at some point, etc.

No, personal responsibility and community trust is infinitely preferable to corporate authoritarianism.
As a personal anecdote: I remember being at the ESRI Developer Conference back in 2019, and one of the keynote speakers spent a good amount of time talking about whether we were software "developers" or "engineers." I'm paraphrasing a bit, but ultimately he concluded that we were engineers because we follow scientific methods, identify problems, solve them quantitatively, and create solutions within the confines of external constraints, such as the laws of physics.

During the Q & A, someone stood up and proposed that by his definition, authors were literary engineers, since they approach writing a novel in the same way that we approached writing code.

I didn't have a horse in this race, but I remember thinking about how silly it was for my company to spend hundreds of dollars to fly me out across the country so I could listen to brilliant people discuss semantics at a software conference.
My experience with Dell laptops is, I had a 13" machine with some nvidia GPU, and ran World of Warcraft on it. It was rather hot to touch, but otherwise ran okay.

Until one day the laptop caught fire. Not metaphorically, it just sat on my desk and burned. Good thing I was next to it when this happened.
The upper class have agreed to it. Everyone else has to go along with it. Why would the majority of people with an average middling 5 figure salary agree that it’s cool people can make 5-10x+ the average income to go to a handful of board meetings?

Just because something is the status quo and it is happening without mass protests, doesn’t mean people are agreeing to it.
If you're using resistive heating then you're just heating the house with a different resistor.

If you're using gas, it depends on how your electricity is generated and how much heat escapes through your boiler's exhaust etc (some very old boilers are less efficient than a gas turbine + transmission losses).
Certainly by the time vaccine mandates came around, we had a pretty good idea of the contagiousness and lethality of the disease.
Chinese overseas police service stations tied to illegal policing in Europe
I worked for a Dell outsourced tech support center in America (Sitel, then ClientLogic). We only handled "busines" lines. In reality, it's a mix of business and consumers who used an employee purchase program. Systems are given a company number (might not be the correct name). The company number determines if a support queue handles that system. If it's not your numbers, transfer.

This was circa 2005-2007. I was in the pilot program for chat support in America.

Dell did not directly manage agents. They give a call center average metrics and it's up to the call center to hit them. Call centers are terrible places and want to cut corners and make money. 1 in 10 agents on our floor could actually fix your computer without help. Level 2 agents walk the floor to help the level 1 agents.

We did not have scripts past a greeting and maybe a closing. I don't think it was required, but you just start doing it.

There's an internal support decision tree from Dell. Once you follow it enough, you learn the shortcuts. For example, if a customer says they swapped a part to a new system and the problem follows the part, we can skip troubleshooting and replace.

Parts are split into cru and fru (customer vs field replaceable units). We tried to get customers to work with crus. Crus wouldn't get on site service. It can happen but takes approval. I never heard of a quota around this.

Second tier escalations were handled in house. That was me for technical and sometimes the customers bad day. I don't remember if there was a third level of escalation that got you to dell if you were out of technical options. If you were out of warranty by more than a grace period, I was your last stop.

Consumer systems are not as good as business grade. That's why their standard warranty is shorter. Business systems are easier to work on.

There is a level of support above business if you spend enough money where we will have a part leave the warehouse in 4 hours (maybe less). Usually, these companies have their own company numbers and presumably better agents.

I only buy Dell Latitude and above, though would consider business products from other companies. I buy them for my "business" which doesn't need any kind of proof.
Sometimes I wonder if all these people that talk on conference stages are nothing more than self-help gurus. All of these words like "productivity", "cleaner code", "maintainable" etc. etc. are like highly optimized words for our dopamine network. They don't add any value to the domain of software engineering. I first realized this when I flipped through Uncle Bob's "highly recommended" Clean Code and almost screamed in horror at the amount of bullshit that book has been able to infect into the industry. Yes, the words sound nice, but look at the code examples. Just look at them.
The customer at a cheap hotel is likely price sensitive, and is unlikely to pay for wifi. They'll either use their phone data, or just go without. So the hotel might as well just provide free wifi to compete with other cheap hotels.

For high end hotels, the customer is much less price sensitive, and is more likely to pay for the wifi without thinking about it. Many customers at high end hotels are also business travelers, who don't care about price because they aren't paying for it.
remember, I'm 5 years old.
In addition, the US govt says [0] this year should have added 46,100 MW to the total. Electrek, if they are accurate, predicted an additional 5,600 MW on residential rooftops in 2022 [1].

[0] https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=50818

[1] https://electrek.co/2022/08/29/american-residential-solar/
Last 4 years, work has been MacBooks, running MacOS.

For the most important use, my personal use, I've had a series of 3 or 4 Dell latitudes running Arch linux. You can get refurbished new ish Dells at a decent price that work well with Linux.