skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I hosted a server, in my bedroom back in the late 90s. By server, I mean a desktop running Slack, connected to the internet and allowing me to SSH into it. It could recover just fine from a power outage, but unfortunately due to a RAM issue it would just randomly die - and RAM just wasn't something the local computer store was ready to bring in.

Enter my Lego Mindstorm. I effectively built a box, on wheels with a big thick stick pointing out I loaded that guy up with NQC - built a small application for my Palm Pilot. The modem on the palm pilot would pick up, accept a certain DTMF code, and fire via the infrared port a signal to the Mindstorm. The Mindstorm rolled forward X revolutions of the wheels so that the long arm hit the reboot button, rolled back.

Yes, eventually I bought RAM, but that eliminated all the fun.
Is there any evidence that would convince you that you are wrong? Was your prediction last week that this would happen - or did you predict he wouldnt be charged?

I personally do not think the Dems care about a broke crypto dude who can contribute nothing to them and didnt exist 3 years ago.
I agree with most of the stuff in the article. Seems like they have a good engineering culture at gitlab.

Which is a pity because their business sense is awful. The first major issue was the whole deleting inactive repositories debacle. They never officially announced it, but they never denied it, and were commenting on the outrage as if they were planning to go ahead with it. The whole way they handled that left a sour taste in my mouth.

So I casually started looking for somewhere else to host my code. And during this time, I suddenly realized something else: if you are not logged in, the "explore page" or whatever you want to call it has disappeared. I have no idea when this happened, but it shocked me.

It still exists (https://gitlab.com/explore) but there is no link to it anywhere. On github, they don't make it easy to find, but at least it is still there.

As a place that is pro open source, why would you go out of your way to hide all the open source code on your platform?

This utter disconnect between their values and their actions is very off putting.

I've moved all my stuff to codeberg.org and have been very happy since. At least they give a crap about open source software AND do something about it.
The expected return in a negative sum game is negative. We can call such schemes investments but then we're going to have to call PowerBall tickets and roulette wheels investments too.
> I think the more credible critique of anarchy is that it is too hopelessly idealistic to occur any time soon.

Certainly this is beyond the foreseeable future, but I don't think this is actually a good way to critique a vision for society. I believe it is important for us to pursue bold utopian visions, even though they are not achievable in our lifetime. Just because we do not reach it does not mean the exercise isn't valuable; it provides a guidestar to help us to see how society can be improved today.

There is also the concept in anarchism of prefiguration [1], in which you build your ideal society in miniature from within the context of the society you exist in. So for example, we're currently discussing capitalism; we probably won't live to see the end of capitalism, but we can create a microcosm of a better world in the form of a worker's cooperative. This is much more achievable and it allows for us to put our ideas to practice in a sort of "societal laboratory".

Tangentially, I personally have a hypothesis that tech companies are stifled by hierarchical decision making that stops different parts of the organization (eg sales and engineering, or different teams within those departments) from properly collaborating, and creates maladaptive behaviors. For instance, I've seen situations where different parts of the same company feel that need to lie to each other in order to get their needs met, because the systems of prioritizing work weren't functioning properly, but the politics of the company made it impossible to call out these issues.

My hypothesis is that horizontally oriented tech companies, like worker's cooperatives, would outcompete hierarchically oriented companies, all else being equal (eg, if they had equal access to investment [which they don't]). I would like to test this hypothesis by creating such a company.

If anyone is interested in this topic and would care to correspond with me about this hypothesis, including/especially people who are critical of this idea, I'd love to hear from you. Email is in my profile.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prefigurative_politics
Ie you are treating RAID as a backup.
US suburban sprawl, enormous parking lots, and generally inefficient land use is what puts everything 10 to 15 to 25 miles away from home. It didn't have to be like this.

Check out Not Just Bikes on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC0intLFzLaudFG-xAvUEO-A/vid...
> Most institutions provide very little signaling value.

I don't think this is true.

Most universities' signaling value is from the fact that they are accredited universities. They draw their signaling power for the institution of the university, maintained in part by the department of education.

While I haven't checked recently if this survived, in the 2010s several universities offered their courses online and offered certificate of completion for $50-$300 per course. These kinds of programs fizzled because even if students did learn the material the certificates did not sufficiently signal to employers that the student had learned it. A friend of mine from one of these universities did an internal study showing that of those students who completed the equivalent of a bachelor's degree almost none found employment in their field. This result should be surprising if we think low tier universities have no signaling power.

On a more conciliatory note; I generally agree VC ed-tech has been a boondoggle for similar reasons - a combination of misunderstanding education and realizing that no other part of education is monetizable enough to produce the kind of returns VCs want (barring certain extra-ordinary tech innovations that have not been forthcoming e.g. strong AI)
If they traded in dollars it's probably already enough.
The existence of the XFL is evidence that NFL doesn't own the sport of football.
Haha indeed.
The difference between men and boys is not just the price of their toys anymore it seems: it's also got to shoot real bullets and kill animals.
Aren't humans cute?
> A Pull Request is basically the same as an Opportunity in your JIRA/SFDC

What?

For an Opportunity, it's usually pretty clear and very very easy to measure, how much the company gains from that and when.

How do you measure the gains from a PR? If you can't than literally everything else is completely meaningless. Don't forget that PRs can also be net negative to the company.
I think you misunderstood...

The way I understood the article, the mentioned calendar software `Makes scheduling collaborative instead of a nuisance.` by having strong opinions about how a calendar should work, and building those into the product. The quote "Makes scheduling collaborative instead of a nuisance." is not supposed to be an example of an opinion.
Oh boy, I remember using it back when ActiveState was the go to shop for good developer experiences on Windows for Tcl, Python and Perl, exactly 20 years ago.
Can't edit after like 10 minutes, unfortunately.
I thought I would let you know that you misspell "inertial" on your website as "innertial". Normally I don't point out spelling mistakes, but I think it may be more noticeable when pitching a nuclear fusion reactor.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inertial_confinement_fusion
The average game is closer to 12 minutes.
It sounds like you're hypothesizing a long chain of bad decisions, and then ridiculing btrfs for taking the choice that means your next bad decision only culminates in (predictable, preventable) downtime rather than data loss.
I can relate to this. Spending the better half of the meeting catching people up to you can be exhausting sometimes.
With D-He3 process, most energy generates as neutrons (about two magnitudes more than in fission reactors) and as break x-ray.

Each will be converted to heat in walls and in shielding blanket, which cooled by water.
I've been using SkyPilot for 3 months within an ML platform project and it is exactly as awesome as it sounds. The overall experience for launching and managing compute is thoughtful and ergonomic in a way that we've been conditioned not to expect from cloud compute (let alone GPU compute). It was a real shock to start using it, and now every time I need to jump back into the weeds of a cloud provider's APIs I'm reminded of how nice I have in SkyPilot land.

I think you'd have a hard time finding a better cloud launcher anywhere. I couldn't.
This is great! If you are interested in running ML workloads across clouds, Netflix's Metaflow will officially announce support for all clouds tomorrow: https://outerbounds.com/blog/metaflow-on-all-major-clouds/

Quite a coincidence :)
> Don was a brass tacks semiconductor sales guy who founded Sequoia Capital in 1972 with the novel idea of investing in markets, not founders. He could care less about the number of founders in a startup. Half the time, he’d replace them.

Thought this was a weird characterization. If he’s willing to go so far to put specific people in charge of companies, seems like the leaders of the business are very important to him indeed.
> It probably reflects the inherent risk-aversion that comes with a gov lawyer job.

there are long term benefits to encouraging conspirators to defect early and often, even if you don't strictly require them in a given case.
Big tech.. You just need to know someone there to get your stuff fixed.. Only really a problem for the other 99.999999% of the people on the planet :)
But these people aren't excluded from numbers in these articles. 95% of people stream to 0 viewers, but do they even care?
I regularly complain about how thin and light (and thus noisy, slow, and lacking ports) laptops are. I drag my laptop to the office around once per year, I don't really care whether it weighs 3x as much but if it was silent that would be terrific.
Money is literally just a number, a fiction. What we must mourn is the expenditure of time of brilliant engineers and people, that wasted their productive years on this foray. However, humans waste tons of time... even the most intelligent among us. I would not say this is a tragedy of great sorts, and for a guy who was working at Jane Street, I don't think SBF would see this as an opportunity cost... it's more like he played the game and lost. Lost badly.
Cockney
It is anarchist literature, that’s why it presupposes anarchist values

You can find introductory materials elsewhere on the site
I agree. All I'm saying is that it's a lot harder to prove
I'm not for the US.

Does being from MIT actually mean anything?

In my country we don't really have a university that people would great about or that would how any special status, at least not that I would know of.
> Anytime I have to open an account, add a joint account holder, change my address or, less commonly, my cell number there is a request to send clear text sensitive documents over email to establish identity

This is not true. Any of those operations require that you are ALREADY logged in to your account using a username/password that you set up previously. If you do not have access to the online account, then your only way to transact is to actually visit a branch of the bank with your proof of identity (such as a passport or aadhaar card).
In 1997, I had to convert a legacy unix (SCO System V?) application's comms from X.25 to tcp/ip. Had the source code, but it was a weird case of the system you built it on didn't have a networking stack (or was somehow massively different that it was a pain to build and now unsupported) and while I'd written some basic networking bits (some telnet utils etc) in C on windows, but felt like this was a bit of a stretch of my skills/abilities.

Anyway, after playing around with different flavours of linux, I ended up with a rather simple solution that ended up being easy to install. Essentially it was a two line script that piped the serial port to the destination server IP address, and inbound tcp/ip piped to the serial port.

So just plugging this little (old school) 486 box in-between the serial port on the legacy system and an RJ-45 connector which plugged into the 'corporate' network and we not only had an upgraded comms layer, but we now had remote system management, which we never had before.

Think it saved $250k+ minimum replacement at next to no cost. Just me barrelling up and down the country installing the new hardware. Was a fun project in the end and started me down the linux appreciation route.
This is the same thing that happens in Scheme/Lisp when you note that the tiny thing you're working on doesn't handle dotted pairs so you dig in and ...

The next thing you know your tiny code has tripled in size and now spews so much gark that you have to go optimize your garbage collector and ...
I was pretty proud of some software hacks I did in the early years of my career, but later came to the conclusion that it's always better to avoid using such tricks.

I'd still use them if there just was no other way - or if I needed a time-critical band-aid that stops the bleeding for now, while I work on a proper fix. But these days I feel more ashamed rather than proud afterwards...
Personally my money is on SPARC as a demo plant and its planned successor ARC as a commercial power plant prototype. Unlike ITER these systems use high field strength superconducting magnets, which directly translates to a much smaller machine for the same energy gain. Because of the smaller machine size, it can be built much faster than ITER. The company building SPARC plans to achieve first fusion around the same time as ITER, and since their machines are smaller, they should be able to move faster. That said ITER will be fantastically useful for proving a lot of science, and I am happy we have so many viable fusion projects in the works.

https://cfs.energy/news-and-media/new-scientific-papers-pred...
Yes, I believe Meta is and they rebranded it to VR.
Where do the customers leave to?

We are currently giving up our self hosted Redmine instance as nobody is willing to take ownership on maintenance.

We switch to Jira cloud.
It's a highly respected engineering and science university, one of the top handful in the country, and world.
You know, that's surprisingly an elegant hack. I'm sure it's obvious to some folks, but for some reason I never came up with it during my old C programming days.
Google will send you codes to devices that don’t even have the app installed. Ask me how I know.
My coworkers were talking about this at lunch the other day. An experienced tech guy asked all the employees there what they thought about whether a 4-year degree should be a requirement for tech jobs. All the new grads of course shit on their educations. A couple more senior people were of course more hesitant.

But college education does have value for most people beyond signalling. Whether it's worth $80K-$100K (depending on your state) I think is a harder question, but I definitely think it's >>$0.

I think the reason for this is hindsight bias, we don't realize how dumb we were before college vs. after college. Maybe going to an expensive day care where you are spoonfed super basic math and sociology or whatever is not valuable. But what I do think was valuable for me when I graduated 5-6 years ago from a state U.S. school was

(1) learning to talk with other people in a professional way,

(2) dedicating yourself for 4 years to studying one thing and becoming generally knowledgeable
and mature about that subject, so that very little can surprise you, and

(3) learning self control and independence, and also how to drink/use drugs without embarrassing yourself. Valuable professional skill especially in tech.

I don't think (2) can be accomplished unless you take the initiative to go beyond the basic requirements for the undergrad curriculum. At least in math/CS, which is what I studied. But in industry, that maturity comes in handy especially as you're given loosely scoped tasks and you have to determine what's possible or impossible and then convince various manager types from foreign countries who are pushing back and sometimes threatening you. And as your peers whine and are weeded out, you see more and more how valuable that maturity is.
I suspect it’s a breadth-first search, which is substantially easier to code. .front looks like the queue of nodes to visit.
Berkeley CS (and in particular the systems research labs like AmpLAB, RISE lab, etc.) gets enough funding from AWS, GCE, Azure, etc for it to be uneconomical to have a data center administered by the campus.

That being said, there are HPC facilities shared with LBNL, as well as smaller clusters operated by the department.
Not “software engineer”, though. Anyone can be one of those. Maybe because it’s an English term?
Perhaps its my disdain for metrics and "efficiency process" in general, but skimming through these slides made me want to run for the hills. A high functioning team, in my experience, is one that has clear direction, autonomy, communicates well, and has enough trust to operate as efficiently as possible to meet the company's needs.
As we are talking anecdotes. Universities I’ve been at that researched sensitive data like human genetics and some commercially sensitive data have been excellent at data security, and provided a centralised HPC cluster at a marginal cost than it would have been at AWS..
Example: limited number of donor kidneys. What will you dismantle to solve this? Not everything can be solved by dismantling something. Some resources are truly limited.
> and studying computer science doesn't grant you the title of "Ingenieur" anyway

If your university offers computer science as a bachelor of engineering, it actually does grant you the title.
So I stopped gaming soon after the original Xbox came out. Rocket League is about the only game I understand now. I have the new Xbox now and started playing it and find it extremely difficult. I improved a lot with some practice and even studied some other players. Until then, the whole concept of Twitch didn’t really make sense to me. Anyways the point I wanted to make is Rocket League has some mass appeal as a game to watch tournaments. However, it kind of falls a part because of how the pros play. It just looks like the game is glitching out. A layperson is just watching some weird physics without the context of how difficult some of those moves are to perform.

I think for esports to be as huge as a traditional athletic sport, you need mass appeal. Most sport fans don’t play those sports they watch. But they can appreciate the difficulty and it’s not easy to appreciate the difficulty of a video game you’ve never played.
Another may be volunteering company time to contribute to open source (outside critical path requirements). What would be tech worker analogs?
I saw this too...i wondered how could a single bank have so many VP's
Agreed. I've worked on two multiple year projects with hundreds to thousands of engineers working on each, only to have them thrown in the garbage. It's highly depressing how many person hours of some of the highest educated and valuable skillsets we have are just thrown away.
Looking at the current trend of completely unacceptably shitty work in new construction, if you do quality work on time and on budget you'll have infinite amounts of work just by word of mouth advertising.

The old adage over here goes "If you find a reliable electrician/plumber/handyman, hold on to them and take care of them. You can always find a new partner, but a reliable construction person is a rare find."
When I was 18 I found an offshore online casino that had a video poker game that paid out slightly over 100% if played perfectly. I don’t remember exactly why I couldn’t just reverse engineer the API so I wrote a program that would scrape the screen for the cards, determine which cards to hold, and physically move the mouse and click the correct buttons. I had the program running on a laptop in my mom’s kitchen all day and night, it drove her crazy (I liked having the sound effects on so I knew it was running 24/7). Made the house sound like a casino, lol. I was skeptical that it would actually work, I figured this random offshore casino probably rigs the RNG anyway, but it actually did pay out as expected. I logged every hand and it was pretty amazing seeing the royal flushes actually come up once every ~40,000 hands - needed those to make the whole thing work, obviously.

They eventually caught on after around 10 million hands I think, banned me, stopped me from cashing the remaining funds out (wasn’t that much since I withdrew frequently), and changed the odds of the game.
On the contrary; that's a component of my entire argument.

The US and the concept of a developed economy both started at Square 1 around the same time. That's a huge structural advantage. Developing or selling some new technology? No laws. Let's write one; with the input of the businesses doing the development. Other companies had to update their infrastructure over time; we green-fielded it. Much cheaper. Opening a factory? Take a thousand acres of land in the west, no one is using it, take it. Raw materials? An entire content worth of them, virtually untouched by the natives.

Those are all structural advantages which helped fuel the hyper-accelerated growth the US experienced throughout the past two centuries.

And the broader point is, every day that goes by everyone gets older; including the US itself. New businesses contend with more laws and regulations. Infrastructure was built without a plan for how to pay for its maintenance. The land is claimed, and the new owners want a million bucks for it.

That's the reversion to the global mean; that now, we're dealing with a lot of the same shit everyone else is and has been for centuries.
Outside US and a few other countries with private universities, they actually are mostly state sponsored and everyone that meets the grades gets in (of course as per seat availability per year), instead of having to mortage the house.

In some countries private universities even get a bad reputation, with exception of a few renowed ones, as their graduates are seen by the employers as having bought their degree, even if they battled throught it as everyone else, e.g. in Portugal.
I hacked a running magazine’s online poll for “best high school runner of all time in $homeState” to have my friend (who was extremely talented and went on to run at Stanford) as #1. I don’t remember exactly what I did but there was a nonce related to epoch time and I had to rate limit it. Everyone’s friends and family were obviously voting multiple times but I was the only one to automate it
Article behind paywall :/
Verse is really a disciplined cue-lang on steroid. https://cuelang.org/
'Tag soup' might not be perfect, but then neither are widely-used languages that - if they spot a single misplaced period or missing comma or a couple of extra characters after a right-curly-bracket - just QUIT. Why that sort of fragility is tolerated, even lauded is beyond me. That HTML just ignores any tag it can't recognize, without stomping a foot, means all the others are available for other uses. Great!