skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Another side comment:

> This is further clarified in the rest of the comment, but I wanted to call attention to this. Be really careful with this line of thinking. It's not an apples-to-apples comparison, especially given higher costs and potential downtime between contracts. I recommend billing about 30% more than you'd expect out of a salaried position.

I agree with most of that. 130% of base salary is a good guideline. Employers use the same napkin math to factor in payroll taxes and benefits. As a self-employed contractor you have to pay for all of your taxes (you will get some more deductions) and your health insurance (which you can usually deduct, though that particular deduction is a political hot potato). But yes, you need to consider the additional costs of freelancing when determining your rate.

As for downtime between contracts, I think it's obvious that's the freelancer's problem. You can't overcharge your customers to make up for downtime. If you establish trust and long-term relationships and get referrals you won't have a lot of downtime between projects unless you want to take time off. I had full-time hours as a freelancer just a few months after I started, entirely due to building some good relationships and getting referrals from satisfied customers.

If you intend to scour the freelancer marketplaces like Upwork, you will have both downtime and significant non-billable time spent on getting projects, negotiating and going through that process. Rather than thinking about finding the next project all the time, I looked for customers that needed steady work, either system admin or programming, or both, because they couldn't afford a f/t person or couldn't find/attract/hire. Lots of smaller businesses don't have resources in-house and couldn't find and keep a competent person even if they could pay a f/t salary. You only need a few customers like that. Leave the big green-fields fixed-fee projects to the larger outsourcing firms. I found cleaning up the mess they left was itself a lucrative niche.

To make a living freelancing you have to both eliminate unwanted downtime and reduce non-billable time, which mainly goes into finding the next project. I know some freelancers have effective "sales funnels" so they always have new work coming in. That can work. My approach was less sales and more building relationships that led to more work with a small number of steady customers, and solid referrals that I didn't need to find or sell myself to or bid on against other freelancers.

I have written before that you know you're succeeding as a freelancer when the customer didn't consider anyone else for the job. Winning 10% of the jobs you bid on means you wasted a lot of time on jobs you didn't get.
Since you didn’t answer my question we can assume that the answer is “yes they do meaningfully compete” which is good because that’s obviously the case.

There are on the order of 10 video game companies with over a billion usd in revenue. There are 3 distinct console manufacturers (4 if you count the steam deck, 5 if you include PCs). Then there’s the mobile gaming market, which has all the big players plus a bunch of others.

Duopoly’s and small markets goodness or badness is irrelevant in this situation.
Doesn't this pretty much fulfill the requirement for counting as racketeering?

EDIT: Realized racketering isn't the right term here I think but I don't remember the right term and need to go do bed.
I find only ".com" names cool.

All other are cheap, junk or designed to extort.
Yeah, why not go with at least a soft deletion first? Allow people to transfer to a paid Dyno for up to a month after the change happens or something.
I wouldn't consider it a failure, I earned a couple meals running that and resource editing aim to have Internet Explorer in the window title; I might have edited mirc as well, but I quit IRC during that time period. Didn't have to fake anything else.
I haven’t but don’t go to a lot of them. Too much vandalism here, but could see it in a safer place.
The _author_ should certainly feel threatened by ChatGPT - that article reads like generated output.
So, all traits are at least partially heritable.
If you want to play with a little demo I made for talking about laser cooling physics go to:

https://zerok.com/demo/

Admittedly it will be a bit hard to follow without the accoupling lecture, but if you zoom in and press the buttons (cool, compress, etc...) it looks cool at least!

(it only performs well in chrome-derived browsers)
Certain factors determined by Google running your domain name through a RealPage algorithm.
Before that we didn't have anyone to contact, and the Chrome extensions team definitely did not react to feedback in any meaningful way.
Prices are fixed at the registrar level. I own a .dev domain and it's $200/yr even if I transfer it to Namecheap.
Yes, someone has to run the official registry, so there's a choke point, unless there are rules in place to prevent abuse. For Verisign's management of .com there's a contract that limits their power. For the new vanity domains there often isn't, so I'm afraid that we will see a lot of this: a cheap price to register a domain, and then a whopping price increase to keep it.
This has been exactly my strategy. My first setup had two leafs of 8 panels each, tracking both azimuth and elevation. It was fragile, finicky, required a lot of active components and ultimately cost more per Watt that it put out than if I had simply laid the panels flat. Which is exactly what I did with my current installation (16x265 and 26x365). Another advantage of panels that are flat is that they are much less prone to being lifted up by the wind, you can mount them flush and the wind barely has any grip on them. They also do not shade each other at all, no matter what the angle of the sun.

Double axis tracking systems when they work are very pretty and technically satisfying, but ultimately those are not the right criteria by which to evaluate a system that has to be reliable, storm proof and that has to last a decade or more after installation, preferably without any service.

The weak point in the current installation is the cables and the connectors, that is something you can't really get away from. After dismantling a few older setups and having a good look at what remains there are two things that stand out for me: Make sure all cable joints are made in the shadow of a panel and tie down your cables on the underside of the support structure so they don't flap about in the wind and are not exposed to direct sunlight. Over time they'll get killed and especially with series connected panels (the bulk of them) this can lead to spectacular results (of the wrong kind).
I suspect the real answer is not commodity hardware, but commodity software. As in, it wasn't the PC that "won", it was MS-DOS on PC-compatible hardware.

You can't clone a Mac without their ROMs, and a clean-room implementation would fall quickly behind without a sustained effort. But Microsoft can sell anyone the disks, and your clone can respond to the right interrupt calls, and IBM can't do a thing to stop either of you.
You're saying that .party domain owners on Namecheap have seen the renewal price for their own domain shoot up compared to prior renewal prices?
Not one? That seems highly suspect.
How would Netflix know that you want to continue watching something vs. finding something new?

Do you feel similarly about retail stores putting staple items in the back rather near checkout?
Twitter refuses to pay for former CMO’s private jet flights
Well dismissing someone because they use a phrase that's associated with people you don't like is not a very constructive way to have a discussion. (note: I am not a right winger, just think its absurd to dismiss a statement like that)

Do you really believe that every time someone has been cancelled that they were screaming the N word at Arby's? There's a massive list of people who have been cancelled for doing something far less egregious than screaming slurs in Arby's, making a bad joke, phrasing something incorrectly, phrases taken out of context are all examples of things that have happened to people who were cancelled. Most of the time these people who are cancelled very obviously do NOT have malicious intent.

There's an episode of Family Guy where Brian the dog gets cancelled for making a bad joke on Twitter, it very neatly demonstrates what people mean when they say "cancel culture". The death threats, calls for him to kill himself, "bigot", "fascist", harassment at home/work, though an exaggeration in the show, are all examples of things that happen in real life to people who have made mistakes I'm talking about.

I would be happy to list people who have been cancelled for saying the wrong thing, even when they obviously did not have malicious intent, though I think it's very easy to find using Google.

If you honestly believe that only hateful Nazis get cancelled please to tell me and I will respond with a follow up message listing people who are obviously NOT Nazis that have been cancelled.
The price of ‘sugar free’: are sweeteners as harmless as we thought?
We were an industrial customer; comparatively small volumes (~100/quarter) but scaling up. The shortage has meant we've pivoted to something more guaranteed, so no more raspberry pi for us. Which is a shame as it's a nice platform and community.
Lol, it’s hilarious how decent programmers can very feasibly make 300k+ a year, but somehow, a course that’s selling point is to make you more decent is too expensive at $30 a month. That’s literally skipping a single night of eating out.

If you’re point is that you can’t trust the program to deliver, that’s valid, but make sure to make the judgement call AFTER you check out their free content first.

Honestly? I’d argue that they should be charging more. The people who are truly interested in investing in long term learning generally have a higher willingness to pay, while everyone else will balk at anything that isn’t free.
One of the rules on HN I vehemently disagree with. These tangential annoyances often coincide with genuine accessibility issues, and should be called out when seen.
Built a qr code generator website 15 years ago and it paid me $750 a month in AdWords revenue. Gold.
Gladwell is a story-teller first and foremost and a good one at that. The problem everyone, including myself, have is that he won't let the truth get in the way of good story. He'll bend the facts in to the narrative arc. He should be writing fiction.
This is one of those business ideas that I must have had around the same time, but never pursued because I was studying; figured engineering would make me more more than selling mushroom growing kits and spores ever would.

I had a large setup in my shed for a few years. Lots of labor getting the substrate boiled and bagged, but once that was done it was easy. Figured that surely there was legs to selling the means of production directly to consumers instead. Who could have guessed it would take off like it has. Now you can even find the grow kits in TK Max and the like as Christmas presents. The market seems pretty saturated now so I'm sure the boat has long sail for me. I'm glad it's worked out for you, if not a little envious.
Someone tell that to Adobe and Autodesk.
Yes, high-efficiency cells have been around for a long time for cost-no-object applications, mainly space.

What's changing is commercialization. Two or three of the big Chinese manufacturers have pilot projects going for two-layer cells. Of the order of 10 MWe, that sort of size. (I can't remember which companies, sorry; it was a few weeks ago I read about this. Probably at least one of Jinko, JA Solar, or LONGi is in there, as well as one or two of the second tier.) Also in the West there are a few startups working on two-layer cells, either perovskite on silicon or perovskite on perovskite.

(Perovskites are more easily "tunable" in terms of which frequencies of light they absorb, apparently--that's one of their attractions.)
James Webb Space Telescope 'fingerprints' earliest galaxies
This is true, but even then the area required is much larger than if you were to simply stack them side-by-side. It helps if the whole surface is inclined as well, ideally on the Northern hemisphere a South facing roof.
Just found an interesting example explaining how that works, I wasn't aware of it either (this site also has nice 'yield from' explainer):

https://lerner.co.il/2020/05/08/making-sense-of-generators-c...

> "The above code looks a bit weird, in that “yield’ is on the right side of an assignment statement. This means that “yield” must be providing a value to the generator. Where is it getting that value from?

Answer: From the “send” method, which can be invoked in place of the “next” function. The “send” method works just like “next”, except that you can pass any Python data structure you want into the generator. And whatever you send to the generator is then assigned to “x”."
Wouldn’t that be a privacy nightmare?
Never heard of that tld, but "thats.sexy" is available for the bargain price of $250,000! What a world.
He worked on the technical support for targeted surveillance of serious organised crime and terror threats. So if you look at this realistically, no, his kit wouldn't have been used to spy on people who weren't at least suspected of being dodgy.
He's a basic switch and gauge cluster:

https://weaverauctions.com/assets/auction/105/34610-9.jpg
I agree that the custom TLDs should be used with care (a lot are owned by single registrars, such as name.com owning a TON of them) but some ccTLDs can also be trusted, as well as .eu . I'd say .org is technically the most trustworthy until isoc try to pull that shit where they try to sell it to a private equity firm again.
Anvil still seems to be kicking along too...
I mean, if the .com registry said to Google “renewals are $10B for Google.com or we let someone else have the domain”, that would border on extortion. People build brands on these, and it’s odd that you can’t permanently buy one or at least have a predictable cap on price increases.
Learning and Practicing Abstraction
I don't want to get rich quick - I just want a simple, easy, low-effort, scalable and actionable method of generating wealth each month without working. ;-)
They are ridiculously strong. I've had a set of 8 on a tracker be blown over by the wind (in spite of ample foundation according to the people that sold me the gear), land on the edge and not get damaged at all. That was a pretty heavy impact too, the whole thing was 30 cm into the ground.
when is the agreement up? We really ought to tell ICANN to not do that. There should be domains that can owned for every as long as we pay the fee.
The scale difference between text and pixels is relevant. If you asked for a novel (less information content than a 512x512 image) from ChatGPT and judged it by how it held together at a high conceptual level relative to output from a stable diffusion image I don't think it would seem that different.
We need to consider the variation in the problem spaces of top 10%, top 25%, and the long tail of software engineers. Engineers doing nothing more vanilla starter NextJS projects might be at the highest risk for their skillset eroding to technical advancement.

I remain unconvinced that people working on systems that evolved over a decade or more, with microservice spaghetti, can truly leverage things like ChatGPT. If I'm on a greenfield project or want to generate something new, sure.

Until I can say "migrate this AWS account to GCP and/or Azure, and update all of the deployment tooling for the hundreds of repos supporting it, and update the DNS records too" -- something that might take teams of engineers within large organizations a quarter or more to figure out, no, I don't feel at risk. The degree of ambiguity in the spaces we operate in (eg: the top 25% of software engineers) are far too great for this sort of technology.
I have a defunct NY LLC - PM if you would like to buy it vs paying the fees.
that's cute, not like they cant hit you with extra "unforeseen" charge and hold domain for ransom until you pay up, or just drop you as a customer based on some arbitrary reason, refunding full 10 years and putting domain for an auction

you have just as much real control over domain as you have over entire DNS — zilch and a half — it all holds on trust and good faith, until greed comes into play
I regret to inform you that this argument is not mine; it's Marx's. You're more than welcome to direct your complaints to him, but he may take a while to respond.

Be assured though, if you take the time to read Capital, your criticisms are addressed. I'd encourage you to read it. It's a much better way to understand the argument than a HN comment section. Good luck!
I really like how wise.com made themselves #2 in that chart instead of #1. Very clever.
The big change in recent years is the explosion of perovskite-family cell materials. There's a huge variety of perovskite materials offering tunable band gaps and they can be processed at low temperature, so they can be used as top cells over silicon. That promises a big cost reduction from conventional multijunction cells built with III-V compound semiconductors on germanium [1].

There are a few problems so far:

- The perovskite materials containing organic moieties tend to be sensitive to degradation by moisture and/or oxygen. They need to demonstrate 20+ years of service life to match silicon.

- The purely inorganic materials like cesium lead iodide are more stable but have yet to attain high cell efficiency.

- There is no proven high-volume way to deposit the thin films of perovskite materials, which have different handling characteristics than anything previously used in solar manufacturing.

I would say there's a good chance of silicon/perovskite tandem cells taking off this decade but it's not yet a sure thing.

[1] https://eom.umicore.com/en/germanium-solutions/markets/multi...
I have a similar setup and rain takes care of the dust. A bigger problem is the leaves and bird droppings that get stuck, even that gets dealt with by the rain (eventually) but it has to be a pretty good downpour for that to wash off. Fortunately here in NL we have no shortage of those.
Prices didn't fall that quickly. 386s were premium until the 486 came along and $3500 is still a drop from the introductory pricing where they went for $5000. The 386 was an export controlled supercomputer and the market reflected that early on. 286's were the mid grade with 8086 still available for budget PCs.
We have a clear and clean description of the apparent bottom layer of the universe, but we also have clear evidence that it's incomplete, that there's something else going on. So, physicists are spending billions of dollars trying to look one layer deeper and find "new physics." To no avail, yet...
Some clients do understand estimates and the nature of software development. A tech firm or a software outsourcing firm, for example, will have more experience and understanding. Other customers not in the software business probably won't understand that, and they expect binding estimates because that's what they get from their other vendors. I tend to work with companies that make money, depend on technology, but aren't in the tech/software sector. A trucking company or a law office, a medical school, for example. Their idea of how binding an estimate is will differ from how a web marketing agency interprets an estimate.

Sure, don't do that. And yes, stay in constant communication with the customer. If you can estimate at all then you can break the tasks down to make the estimates even more realistic and achievable.
name.info/.dev and the like are pretty cool for personal pages though. People always design them really well because it's about them personally.
https://sedo.com/us/ is the largest listing site I know of, if you want to sell at a fixed price.

https://uk.auctions.godaddy.com/ is the largest auction site. If you're looking for a quick sell, this is the place.
It’s a shame :/

I am a big fan of WebRTC. The conflation of WebRTC and Google’s implementation hurts a lot.

Really excited to see how much webrtc-rs has progressed. The next 3 years are gonna be really interesting
I've trained models using Jupyter and Livebook (though only smaller toy models [1]) so I can deposit my 2 cents here. Small disclaimer that I started with Jupyter, so in some sense my mental model was biased towards Jupyter.

I think the biggest difference that'll trip you up coming from Jupyter is that Livebook enforces linear execution. You can't arbitrarily run cells in any order like you can in Jupyter - if you change an earlier cell all the subsequent cells have to be run in order. The only deviation from this is branches which allow you to capture the state at a certain point and create a new flow from there on. There's a section in [1] that explains how branching works and how you can use it when training models.

The other difference is that if you do something that crashes in a cell, you'll lose the state of the entire branch and have to rerun from the beginning of the branch. Iirc if you stop a long running cell, that forces a rerun as well. That can also be painful when running training loops that run for a while, but there are some pretty neat workarounds you can do using Kino. Using those workarounds does break the reproducibility guarantees though.

Personally while building NN models I find that I prefer the Jupyter execution model because for NNs, rerunning cells can be really time-consuming. Being able to quickly change some variables and run a cell out of order helps while I'm exploring/experimenting.

Two things I love about Livebook though are 1) the file format makes version control super easy and 2) Kino allows for real interactivity in the notebook in a way that's much harder to do in Jupyter. So in Livebook you can easily create live updating charts, images etc that show training progress or have other kinds of interactivity.

If you're interested to see what my model training workflow looks like with Livebook (and I have no idea if it's the best workflow!), check out the examples below [1][2]. Overall I'd say it definitely works well, you just have to shift your mental model a bit if you're coming from Jupyter. If I were doing something where rerunning cells wasn't expensive I would probably prefer the Livebook model.

[1] https://github.com/elixir-nx/axon/blob/main/notebooks/genera...
[2] https://github.com/elixir-nx/axon/blob/main/notebooks/genera...
>How SMoL Becomes Large

30 seconds into opening the textbook and I already like it.
Can you point out where? This looks pretty circular to me: https://www.tesla.com/semi
To be honest I see this new trend of squishing down longform information (such as books, courses etc) into short tidbits with the promise of «infusing you with information» a detriment to learning. There is a huge difference between being told something by e.g reading a sentence summarizing a point, in comparison to reading the longer form. This is because a big part of what is learning, or grokking rather, is that you ponder and think about the information you just received in context with something else. You need to simulate and build a mental model using the information as a jumping off point. Thats where longer form of content such as a «slow» book is beneficial. It might be slow and repeating itself, but in doing so it gives you the chance to actually understand what is being presented to you. These short summaries are giving you non of that, unless you actually stop and ponder every single sentence, and at that point you might as well be consuming the longer form since it will help you in that aspect.

I honestly believe we’re currently being too focused on productivity hacks, so we’re not seeing the forest for the trees. You reading and remembering a line from a book is not the same as you understanding that line, and in this example where they state they are giving you a 60 minute lesson in 5 minutes - how much understanding are you actually left with at the end?
See Ursula K. Le Guin's "Always Coming Home": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Always_Coming_Home