skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
No book. Just one course.

I was a rather humble support guy for COBOL applications, so I had to learn COBOL, which I did.

I was sent by my manager for a one-off, three-day "advanced COBOL" course.

It wasn't about advanced COBOL; it was an advanced course on the seven-pass Burroughs COBOL compiler. Memory was short in those days, hence the seven passes; intermediate results were files on disk. We learned that by nulling the executable for a chosen pass, we could hack the intermediate files, to do things COBOL programs weren't supposed to do, like calling OS functions.

I learned how parsers work, and how parse trees are represented. I learned about intermediate code, optimisers, interpreters, and code generators. I got interested in compilers, and wrote a source-level debugger. It was just a three-day course, but it was incredibly valuable to me. Perhaps life-changing.

Perhaps it's not so much that that course made something click that wasn't clicking for me; rather, it inspired an interest in me that simply wasn't there before.

As I said this was a one-off course. There was about seven of us, and I don't believe anyone else ever received that training.
I'm really good at time management.

Outside of work I love reading history, working out, I paint and write and do swordfighting and reenactment, which means i need to make a lot of stuff (learn leatherwork, clothes making, and do research!)

I try to be efficient with my time. I don't particularly enjoy watching TV or movies so that helps. A typical day for me is catching up on a history book while commuting, working, then gym for hour and a half (I use this time to listen to podcasts on history or art or whatever I feel like learning), then commute and reading, get home and do some cooking, and work on my art projects/writings until I'm sleepy. On the weekends I do swordfighting and then work on whatever project I need to get done before summer reenactment events happen.

But the key to all this is to do what I genuinely enjoy doing. I don't read because I want to be smarter than some voice in my head, I do it because I genuinely enjoy learning. I don't work out 5 times a week because that's what fitbros tell me to do, I do it because it relaxes me. I don't force myself to be "productive", I just do what I want to do and feel like doing and call that productivity.

Edit: one last thing to mention is that being constant matters more than investing significant chunks of time on it. People who believe you "need to choose" just can't keep a proper routine in my opinion.
To get started, are you a socialist?
I don't know enough about Meta to answer that.
> and employers don't seem desperate.

Hiring follows predictable patterns throughout the year, namely the last month of the quarter is usually relatively hot.

It's November now, so there's still ample time to fulfill recruitment KPIs. My experience is that hiring only picks up speed come mid-December, when there's simply fewer candidates than normally due to Christmas.

That being said this September, which usually burns through the backlog from the summer vacation season, was unusually slow.
Show HN: BoldContacts iOS app for elderly and people with disabilities
Hi HN, BoldContacts is an iOS app that shows your phone contacts one by one, using a big bold font, big bold buttons, and big bold photos.

I am creating the app to help my folks, who are elderly, and who have terminal Alzheimer's Disease and Parkinson's Disease. The app goes on their iPhones and iPads, and accesses their existing contacts, and helps them call people. The app is significantly easier for them to use than the default iOS Contacts app, and than Siri voice control.

Why would you try it? Because you want to help your folks, who are elderly, and they're having a harder time using the default Contacts app. With BoldContacts, you make it easy and friendly for them to see their friends and family, and easy for them to call and FaceTime.

I welcome contructive feedback. The aim is to help people who are starting to experience vision issues, cognitive issues, motor issues, and the like. Success looks like these people connecting more with their friends, families, and caregivers.

The app is free open source. To try it, search the Apple App Store for BoldContacts, or try the full source code in the git repo. You can email me at joel@joelparkerhenderson.com.

https://github.com/sixarm/BoldContacts

Ask me anything.
Is this first job in the industry or mid-senior level? I don't think I've ever sent 200 applications in any of my job searches. Last time I didn't send any; I just flicked the switch on LinkedIn and Hired and had almost 60 recruiters reach out to me (followed up with about 18, had initial interviews with about 8 companies, ended up with 4 late stage interviews and 2 offers).

And I wouldn't consider myself an amazing developer (I do alright, but I'm not 10x) or have an amazing portfolio and I don't have a FAANG on my resume, just a large corporation that no one has heard of, a couple medium-sized companies, and several smaller companies / failed startups.

Might be a bit different now, this was back in June/July 2021.
Ask HN: Should I quit without a new job lined up?
I'm a junior software engineer, almost 1 year into a job at $Bank. This is technically my 3rd job, my first being at $CompetingBank for 2.5 years and the 2nd being at $Bank but in a different role.
2nd job sucked, was in meetings 5/8 hours of the day, wasn't allowed to do anything outside of the strict confines of JIRA tickets ( no improving the dev / QA experience for myself or anyone else ), stuck with a manager and co-workers who nit-picked my code apart and treated me ( I felt ) like an idiot. Ended up being very little actual engineering work but having to stretch that out over a 8-10 hour work day, which drove me insane. The happiest time I can remember there was having to cover for 2 people so I actually had things to work on the entire week.
Transferred out into a new role which turned out to be the opposite; way too much work, little to no time, same pay ( that's now probably going to be cut because $Bank had a terrible year compared to last ). We're expected to put in 10-12 hr days to get our tickets done, while also being on support every other week, which might as well be a lost week cause that's all we're doing that week. I'm not learning anything from this role since the language is proprietary, I'm coming home having gotten nothing concrete done but feeling exhausted, and am starting to fall asleep later and later at night because I'm dreading having to get up and go back. Nothing I used to do feels fun anymore and I've started to stop caring, showing up late to meetings, etc.
I'm smart enough to recognize that this is really bad, should I just get out before this gets worse? Every weekend I tell myself to apply to other job and every weekend I just can't build up the energy to do it.
Reminds me of the legitimate freeway sign in Sacramento that says “Ocean City MD, 3073 Miles”

I never knew the story behind it but apparently they have the same thing there with miles to Sacramento!

https://www.capradio.org/articles/2016/05/06/two-coasts-two-...
> Now to be clear, some of these companies are hopelessly screwed.

I'm not sure about that. I imagine that for the founders and top executives of these "loser" companies, they are having the time of their lives: Earning top money fast without doing too much. So, from their point of view, the company is doing fine. Now, sure, employees are always screwed no matter what ;)
It's still industrial scale, and you have to walk before you run on something like that. If it works reliably at that size, there is no reason it can't horizontally scale to 10x that size and compete with others.
I am not worried about the financials of Sequoia, but I think this could be a big stain on their reputation.

They've been spectacularly wrong and lazy on this one.
This is pointless, because you seem to lack the capacity to follow a complex argument, and I disagree with you about what's relevant and irrelevant to the discussion. I'm done here.
Why would a single entity want to be decentralised?

Marketing. They might want to *appear* this way to help them sell something.
> Cryptocurrencies are a qualitatively new thing humanity has never had to deal with ever, no matter how insistent are cryptocurrency aficionados’ in calling it merely “a digital version of cash”. This serves their wallets, by suspending deserved wariness and encouraging unsophisticated people to invest into a financial pyramid, but not truthful description of reality.

Holding no cryptocurrency myself (I don't need to buy anything with it atm :D) I would hardly call myself an 'aficionado'. But you must understand that to compare does not mean to equate. All I was saying is that cryptographic currencies have some of the properties that cash has, but that they also have the ease of transport and storage afforded to us by credit.

I don't see the issue with being able to transport cash across the 'net. Governments can still regulate businesses, banks, so if you go and buy a car and your government wants to know to tax it, the business selling you the car can just report this income. If a bank held your asset for you, they could just be subject to similar regulations as when they hold other assets for you. Once you stop treating it like credit or like some amorphous blob that cannot be regulated, this stuff gets pretty simple to understand.
There is a separate TRUMP2024 token: https://ftx.com/trade/TRUMP2024

TRUMPLOSE is the 2020 one, so your point stands that there is no explanation for that account still having a huge amount of money. That said, we now know that internal labelling of accounts was not FTX's forte, so...
https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#datatracker-home
Correct, political science displaced science so quickly. Dark days are ahead unless the public is informed and able to resist. How did they force you to take a booster? Was it in order to keep your job?
This is really fascinating. I'd wanted a similar mode in many simulation-style games ever since I was a child, trying to record a video detonating TNT in a Minecraft world.

I've loved Godot since 2, and I didn't even know this was on the radar. Good stuff!
That's true. However, I also note this:

This specification is a work product of the W3C Digital Verification
Community Group [1] and the W3C Credentials Community Group [2].
Feedback related to this specification should be logged in the issue
tracker [3] or be sent to public-credentials@w3.org [4].

So, while it isn't (at least thus far) an IETF WG RFC, it comes from a W3C "Community Group" – which is a step below even a W3C Working Group, yet simultaneously a step above "J. Random Hacker has some idiosyncratic ideas and decides to upload them as an Internet Draft" or even "MegaCorp has invented a proprietary standard to meet the specific needs of their product and now wants it published unchanged as an RFC to give them an advantage over their competitors"
Kotlin has this, but the Map is (usually) a MutableMap under the covers, because it's Java bytecode at the lower levels. You have to go out of your way to footgun yourself, but it's still possible.
Integral Molten Salt Reactor
I can add my experience to this thread, as I was diagnosed with "atypical" pericarditis a little over a week after my first Pfizer shot.

This started with chest pains, gradually increasing over the course of a day or two before I went to the hospital. I had to ask them to test for myopericarditis, because they were pretty much only considering an embolism or a panic attack. In that sense I was lucky that I had read a paper a month or so before, indicating young men (such as myself) as having an increased risk after Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 vaccination. After diagnosis I had to go through a 3-month medication regimen which, I'll be honest, wasn't all that fun for my intestinal tract.

Thankfully I was deemed healthy after half a year, with low probability of lasting damage. Yet, the psychological weight of being confronted with heart disease in your mid-twenties is heavy. My opinions on vaccinations haven't really changed, though I think the legal and societal pressure to get everyone vaccinated was out of line and that opinion has gotten stronger. Especially after knowing that vaccination doesn't affects transmission as much as they hoped, I expected them to focus much more heavily on the at-risk groups, but that didn't happen.

The worst part about all of this though is the obstinate denial my cardiologists had of any possible relation between my Pfizer shot and the pericarditis. They'd point to the fact that young men can develop myopericarditis without vaccination. This is true, though it's almost always the result of an infection, and in my region of the world the vast majority of these cases result from flu infections. However, when I had my diagnosis there were barely any flu cases in the country, it just wasn't the season, and most of all I wasn't ill. Pointing to the close proximity to the vaccination was met with immediate and absolute denial.

I think that's what bothered me most: I did my part, I tried to protect society by getting a shot, but when confronted with negative fall-out I had to fight for a diagnosis and was pretty much laughed out of the room for suggesting a relation to the booster. I don't think I've processed this yet. It really feels like I did everything I was told, giving up much of my hobbies, social life etc., but when my health was on the line... "Ho pal, can't be saying anything that could be contorted into criticism of vaccination".

Little of it seemed "fair".
For me it was Propositional Calculus in my undergrad... was being super thick headed about picking it up and failed the mid-term. A friend and I (who was also having problems) sat down with a stack of exercises and just started doing them. I can almost remember hearing the click when I finally got it and it all made sense. Was probably the original click that made me ultimately end up in programming as I found how all the rules worked together to form a way to express ideas beautiful.
Can confirm. For me a reboot, administered immediately after 3 consecutive crashes a few hours ago, seemed to fix the issue.
_Advanced C++ Programming Styles and Idioms_ by James O. Coplien

It showed me how to really use C++ effectively back in the 1990's. It was at the time in a class by itself. (Pun intended).
It's not about losing other people's money only. What I'm worried about is: are extremely over-leveraged and able to get the returns they have by doing tax and regulatory dodges that their competitors aren't participating in? Did SBF learn how to operate in the financial world from seeing how Jane Street operates?
The compiler can optimize memcpy with a known size into a small number of move instructions so they are identical to copying stack values.

Try playing with memcpy on Godbolt and you'll find that the compiler will compile the memcpy to a single mov instruction when the size is small, and some movdqu/movups when the size is slightly large, and only a function call when the size is huge.

> memcpy is usually used to copy heap memory

memcpy is often used in low-level serialization / deserialization code since you can't just cast a buffer pointer to a uint32_t pointer and dereference that; the solution is memcpy between variables that are often both on the stack.
Yeah. Often, writing out the type explicitly is just busywork. But it seems it would have paid off here.

If you were forced to stop and think what type to declare, I bet you'd write "var rule *Rule". Even if you don't think deeply and just look at the return type.

And then if you assigned "r[i]" to "rule", you'd get a type error.
How long have you been at it? Recruiting at non-FAANG employers works differently. The father you get from FAANG or startups, the less urgency you will find on the part of your prospective employers. Don't let this discourage you. Have you had to job search much before? I've found it's often a months long process. You might not be at the beginning, but at the middle of it.
The data is very unclear on this. Sure you found sources that back your claim, but plenty of replies with sources that say the contrary (From reputable sources). So in the meantime, given the conflicting nature of all the reports, mandating vaccines should NOT be a thing.
Shotgunning resumes does not work. You need to tailor each application to the employer. Most importantly that means finding someone at the company who will vouch for you.
I am aware of alternatives, but I was trying to come up with examples from competing companies that many people use. People don’t seem to be up-in-arms about all SaaS products but just those that are owned by corporations that they have a particular bias against.

But my argument is more that we’ve already given up a lot of our privacy by interacting with today’s technology. ISPs, cellular providers, credit cards, banking, the list goes on and on regarding areas where we have give up privacy for the sake of convenience.
It means after inserting the needle you draw back on the plunger to see if any blood is drawn into the syringe. If so it means you hit a vein and should reposition the needle because the shot is meant to go into the muscle rather than directly into a vein.
What's the rationale for this project? In other words, what makes it different than other embedded libc projects like Newlib or uClibc-ng or musl? Not seeing any documentation which answers this question.
That has nothing to do with what has been presented here.
Gender identity is frequently visible. I don't think many people are going to fraudulently represent their gender identity for a misguided chance at a job.
I haven’t had any trouble with it.
> What's the insurance company's rationale for denying the claim?

They didn't, if the parent poster only got billed $10k. Two weeks in the hospital costs more than $10k; that amount is likely their insurance plan's annual deductible, coinsurance, and copays.

These expenses were a thing pre-ACA, to be clear; deductibles, coinsurance, and copays existed before it. The ACA capped the amount you can be charged.
I like Fedora and Pop_OS! I'd recommend Pop_OS! first for newcomers but Fedora is great for a work desktop if you're reasonably technical and don't mind upgrading at least once a year. Pop_OS! offers an LTS edition so you can stay with a release for several years.
> FTX shot its customer money into some still-unexplained reaches of the astral plane and was like “well we do have $5 billion of this Serum token we made up, that’s something?” No it isn’t!

The upcoming series of FTX articles will be better than the Elon saga I think.
I seem to recall that the heartbeat bug was in a library where the author received (very little) monetary compensation for their work.

Who’s responsible for compliance in that case, the dev or the thousands of companies who used the library in a critical role?

I know this is supposed to fix such a situation but they aren’t going to be taking hundreds of thousands of website operators to court who used the freely provided library without auditing the code.
Making the statistically best choice is still the best choice even if you get an undesired outcome.

Good poker players can lose all their chips at the table to an unlucky draw and walk away knowing that they made the right play and that they'd do it again, even if they got unlucky on the river card. Good basketball coaches will still draw up plays to get the ball into the hands of their best shooter at the end of the game even if they miss sometimes.

If you're choosing between option A that has a 0.0001% chance of hurting you and option B that has a 10% chance of hurting you, and you choose A and still get hurt, that doesn't mean you made the wrong choice or that if you have it to do over again you should choose B.
I use DDG as my search engine on 16.1.1, and live in Florida (the English speaking part), but I couldn't reproduce it.

Must be something else more complicated.
I turn off search suggestions, auto-complete, auto-correct, intellisense and its ilk, everywhere I can.
how does it cost $1,500 a year to maintain it?
> blackhole independent actors

Freedom doesn't mean the requirement to spend the community's resources propagating material that the community agrees is harmful or objectionable. That would be the opposite of freedom.

The ability to refuse actors that the community doesn't want to spend resources on is essential to freedom.

Every actor has the freedom to choose whether to conform to community norms, or to form their own communities with different norms.
It's easy to avoid the functions with global state and Newlib can be built to minimize or eliminate their RAM consumption.
Yes, that's the problem. We treat police as "laborers" instead of the highly skilled and trained specialists they should be.
Males who take analbolic steroids can permamently supress natural testosterone production. There is an injectable that they can take after they stop taking testosterone which restarts the natural testosterone production, but some guys are not careful enough to do this which can lead to permanant damage -> this leads to low or no testosterone production, which in males causes depression since the male body is designed for a certain physiological dose of T in the blood -> if it's too low -> damage, depression, illness,...

Messing with hormones is one of the most dangerous things as you can:

a) Cause the body to shutdown the natural production, which can lead to the death/diminishing of the tissue that produces it.

b) You can cause a hormonal disruption system-wide, a domino like chain effect which can wreck havok on the body.

To believe that one can simple "adjust a bit of hormone A, then a bit of B" and that there would be no side effects is horribly naive.

But modern doctors are horrible naive, as anyone who has done reading a lot around this topic will naturaly come to understand.

First you get pill A, then you get pill B to manage side effects of pill A, then you need pill C to manage side effects of pill B, then you need a surgery because pill A supressed cholesterol too much which is a crucial building blocks of the body (50% of each cell membrane is cholesterol for example, so tell me again how cholesterol is bad), then you need pills D, E, F...
Palantir and Peter Thiel remind me of Edward Heath's choice phrase "...the unpleasant and unacceptable face of capitalism".
Unfamiliar with Yngwie.

If you are going to look for excellent storytellers, I suggest Jerzy Kosiński, whose Painted Bird is a autobiography, that is pretty much known to be false, (but true in some sense) and probably not written by him. His books are far more interesting than anything Gladwell wrote.

Gladwell once said "If you don't like my writing, don't read it" (not sure if this quote is exact) or equivalent. I'm likely to go one better and recommend that friends don't read it as well.

If you are looking for compelling not-true but claimed-to-be-true, also consider Carlos Castañeda.
> I had serious side effects, I was basically not feeling well for a week

Would you care to elaborate? I had really bad brain fog.
i’m with you

folks want someone to be their oracle

scott galloway is another one whose in the business of writing credible narratives that might as well be fiction

the only thing i read now are facts and even those i stick to top line numbers like revenue

ultimately if i’m not investing no way i can know what’s going on and even if i have the facts there’s no chance i can predict

it follows that i don’t really believe anyone else can either

all we can do is focus on the problems in front of us, talk is cheap.

so just do something. build, organize, lead all else is for the feel gooders not the doers

be somebody do something
People are liable to drop dead the same day they drink water! They must be connected!