skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I mostly agree with everything you're saying. And share your goals. I also absolutely don't think my place in the totem pole is special, I worked hard to get here, but I'm absolutely replaceable.

I'm more pessimistic though on outcomes. I don't think UBI solves anything, just kicks the can down the road a little bit longer.

Money exists because of scarcity, there isn't enough for everyone. Money helps us decide who gets what, prices are relative and fluctuate as supply and demand change, that's a very good thing. If I think I can get a better deal elsewhere, I'll take my ball and go home. If I want it bad enough, I'll work harder (or sacrifice elsewhere) so I can afford to get it.

Baristas aren't paid well because anyone can grind and brew their own coffee. Or just buy a Keurig which costs less overall. Contrast that to say, a surgeon who is paid well precisely because most people don't want to operate on themselves.

The issue I have with UBI is that you still have the same number of people chasing the same number of scarce resources/houses/products. So prices will rise accordingly. Pretty soon it becomes "UBI doesn't let me be a musician and live the lifestyle I want/deserve". Complaints that UBI doesn't pay well enough, big business, etc.

I'm 100% for a better social net to catch those who have stumbled/fallen. But the arguments elsewhere in this thread conflate that with being able to pursue the life of your dreams free of consequence. That's the heart of the distinction I'm making here.

To me, you can't chase your dream without asking yourself "How hard am I willing to work to get what I really want?" Achievement is more satisfying when it's earned then when it's handed to you. A well lived life is about playing the hand you were dealt well, rather than complaining that you weren't dealt a better hand. I think that's the difference between having the "right to pursue happiness" versus the "right to happiness".
Could you fix the CSS to center the content? My screen looks like this currently: https://i.imgur.com/pEgskrn.png
> That rigamarole could have been easily avoid by converting the crypto to cash, which is trivial to prove is yours.

In US law this is a taxable event.
If it's within 30 days in the US, there will still be an issue with provenance of funds.
> pproaching a tough retirement watching people get rich or "earning" 15% APR and start to panic that they are missing a once in a life time opportunity and jump in. Its sad.

New clothes on an age old story.
In the US, capital losses can offset capital gains to arbitrarily large numbers, but only $3,000 of capital losses can offset ordinary income.

So if you lose $3M in one year and happen to have $3M in other capital gains then hooray - they offset and you pay no taxes on them. But if you lose $3M in one year and made $300k in income, you are still paying income tax on everything minus $3,000.

You get to keep carrying it over so you can apply $3,000 every year - but if you've got losses in the millions they'll never be exhausted in this manner.
Ask HN: Companies sponsoring visas/relocation 2023?
Company name:
webpage:
That's a similar view I have when it comes to voting. I work with tech, and I'd not trust any tech-only system of voting because theres so many areas it can go wrong or be exploited.

I'd accept electronic voting only if they print a paper ballot after and a spot check system is in place to confirm the counts.

I have more faith in cars and planes, as at least those have more public failures.
I don't know, this sounds an awful lot like the justification for harsh punishment for crimes the benefit of which is controversial as well. Just because you throw people in jail doesn't make the problem go away either, sure they're off the street for a while but the "cost" to society is still huge.
Never, ever host your service with a potential competitor.
It's missing the connection to climate change.
You seem to be against this idea of 'copycating' but our society has put a lot of thought into what's Trademark-able and what's not.

In particular, his name is incredibly descriptive - it's just a plain description of what the thing is: primitive technology. We specifically disallow that when it comes to trademarking because it would basically give you an extremely wide monopoly right away.

Consider that "Corn Flakes" is not trademarked because it's just a literal description of what the food is. It would be dumb if people couldn't call their product "corn flakes". Compare that to say a product called "Cheerios" which is just a made up term, and it would be very unjustifiable for people to copy this.

> SOE

Do you mean "seo"?
Too expensive. When my current car breaks down I will probably get the cheapest 5 - 10 y old second hand car I can find which is likely to have an ICE. The car after that is probably electric (so maybe a decade or so).
FreeCol 1.0.0 released after 20 years – FOSS Colonization clone
‘Invasion of the Body Snatchers’ Ending Still Haunts Director
I believe the parent was talking about the abstraction provided by the ISA, not whether it was a good way to program. None of this experiment cares about the execution speed at all, it merely concerns itself with the technical feasibility of the technique in the ISA. This would not be possible at all in a load store oriented ISA, because you can’t ever do an alu instruction without first loading into a register.
> This is a common sentiment in my community

I think you are in a bubble.
Even in NYC where cops are quite hated, I never hear the ACAB/abolish sentiment.
> I wish there were a better alternative, but I really am at a loss to think what that could be.

Figure out what it costs to have whoever is looking at the HN issues look at them and just charge that much for a executive VIP support request.

Like, if I’ve got $400k locked up and CS stuck in a loop I’d happily drop $200 to have someone that actually has the power to talk to people and get the ball rolling on fixing stuff look at my request.

I hate the idea that if or when I fall into one of those cracks that I may not have curated a large enough social media presence to actually have it resolved. I’d love if I could just, y’know, pay for services instead.

Being willing to put some money down on it should help filter only for people that are serious and expect a ROI from the support ticket (e.g., people knowing they're committing fraud likely won't) and even if it doesn't it directly funds the support so if people want to pay you to waste your time and tell them no... well, no real loss.
If a tree falls in the forest but the only witness is one million ants, does it make more or less of a noise than if the witness is one human?
That’s what you get for hating on PayPal, with them you get a dedicated manager once you reach a certain volume and you can resolve any question without any issues or delays.
Yes, and the world consists only of responsible sovereign individuals, who need no guidance at all.

I refer to the 18th century gin craze, here's an impressive print: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d0/William_...
In Beaver’s time, the best paying jobs were not available to the global majority.
I wanted an electric car. I did not want to be an early adopter of any brand. I value reliability over style and coolness, so ended up with a Nissan leaf. I'm very happy with it for my daily driving. It's a little boring, but very functional, reliable and a great value. The leaf and other ~$35k electric cars actually save me money over gas cars. Any electric that costs more than about $40k would be more expensive to own than a gas car.

The leaf will go to my teenager in a few years, and then I'll probably buy a mid size hybrid crossover. The electric car is good for daily driving near home, but not great for road trips in the rural mountain west.
Part 1: I prefer the utility of gasoline. Visiting a fueling station for a few minutes every 300-700 miles (depends on vehicle) is less hassle than plugging in. I have gasoline fueled lawn equipment, so I have range extenstion available if I needed to travel longer distances between fueling stations, or if I want to fuel a vehicle at home (two 5 gallon cans go a long way). I get the argument that charging at home/work can be convenient, but gasoline is currently more convenient to me. My PHEV has a two year service interval, which is not onerous, my gas only vehicles have a one year service interval, which is ok too.

Part 2: Tesla is a non-traditional car company, and while that can be good, it has many negatives:

a) there is not a good service/warranty network. Dealership service is mediocre, but widely available.

b) there is not good parts availability

c) I've heard there are many production changes within a model year, making it harder to match parts.

d) OTA upgrades are IMHO a net negative for a car; reducing incentives to get software right the first time

e) I've not seen any other car company try to convince the general public that the cause of an owner's death was the owner's negligence. Other car companies have the decency to not comment on pending investigations and not cast public aspersions upon the deceased. Other car companies do cast aspersions at review organizations and sometimes news organizations, but generally not regular people.

f) selling FSD is clearly fraud, and why would I buy from a fraud, unless the fraud gets me more power, smoother idle, better fuel efficiency, and an above market buy-back? (Thanks VW)

g) I need useful headlight controls and wiper controls. I have one vehicle where it's difficult to turn off headlights, and that's enough. Like a phone without a headphone jack, a car where you can't easily turn off the headlights when you need to is something you can work with, but it's very annoying. I'm not spending Tesla car money to be annoyed unnecessarily.

h) fit and finish don't seem to match expectations based on price
Exactly. This is an entire paper around whether someone wants to be 'right or effective.' I may know the right answer and how to move forward, but if I'm an asshole about it (aggressive, manipulative and selfish), then I'm less likely to effect change.
Building an Embeddable Web App with LiveState, Elixir, and Lit
I doubt it would mean much, you don't even need to self-host git just use gitlab, bitbucket, etc. Hobbyists and small projects would be the most affected but VPN's are a trivial solution for this demographic.
Entirely serious. It’s short to keep it to a point and so some nuance is missing, but there you have it.

I don’t mind the flagging - I don’t expect anything more from people unwilling to take a look at things objectively.
By "to work" you mean work while losing $50 million, like the stolen money mentioned in the article?
Solenoids could definitely work. They might also be cheaper if I wind them myself. I might do that for a future version. Downside is that's more work to wind custom solenoids, which of course I could automate, but then that's more work to build the automation. Easier to start with small off-the-shelf DC gearmotors for now. Off-the-shelf solenoids are a bit too bulky from what I've found. (Although I don't have perfect knowledge of everything that's out there.)

Linear actuators with DC gearmotors have more fine-grained positional control vs plain solenoids. But that could be fixed if I use a tubular linear actuator design that looks like a solenoid. [1]

But at this point it's more important to get something/anything to a V1 and start getting real world feedback.

[1]: https://youtu.be/3PLWTF_6odc
Ah yes the personal anecdotes and edge cases. Eh, I saw this coming.

The reality is that this is not an appropriate job for people with severe visual impairment that doesn't allow them to look at a screen, in very few exceptions is it the later, companies are not designed to handle this and realistically cannot.
Except they say, Python versions are a risk, all non Java projects are forbidden.
We're more than 20 years into marijuana being legal with no reefer madness.
Plug-and-play C/C++ DOS development in Visual Studio Code
As a kid I was always fascinated with sci-fi and futuristic TV shows like Time Tunnel, Lost In Space, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, Star Trek. I read books like Danny Dunn and the Homework Machine in elementary school. I was always taking stuff apart as a kid, usually breaking it! I got a record player for Christmas one year and 3 months later was using it as a suitcase because I had taken it apart.

So when our high school offered a computer science class, I took it on a whim and was completely hooked. Have loved it ever since and for the most part, feel like I've never truly "worked" a day in my life, even though I've spent most of my working life on a computer. My personality type is INTP (Introverted, Intuitive, Thinking, Prospecting) which probably has a lot to do with it.
1. Once a Volvo owner (first in the early 90s - changed four since), always a Volvo fan.
2. If not Volvo, then Audi, BMW, Mercedes, in that order
3. If none of the above available within a desirable price range, then Japanese, S.Korean, or French
4. If none of the above, then Mustang (Ford)
5. If none of the above, then maybe a Tesla, once the present executive leadership departs, and environment for engineering quality prevails
All ev psych, even the most accurate stuff, runs the risk of being a backronym sooner or later because it attempts to canalize future possibility based on biological history. It tends to contain some teleology in the implicit assumption that humans today are peak human and that all evolution is biological.

However, that said, it is very difficult in my experience to make correct decisions for a large organization if you prioritize personal relationships. Often, we define that behavior as corruption.
It might be too late now, IDK, but perhaps she could lie and tell the attempted extorer that she already pays another extorter and can't afford to pay two extorters at once, and if they keep taking down their store, she'll tell the extorter that she can no longer pay them because of them and do they want another criminal coming after them?
I've seen the blazing fast robotic cash counting machines, but when I was a kid in Nigeria in the 80s and 90s, it was mesmerizing to watch bankers hold the bills in such a way that they could count way faster than I'd ever imagine being able to! Due to the exchange rate, you'd literally show up with large sums of cash for significant purchases (literally multiple bags of money for a purchase as large as a car).
On the subject of modules, I often recommend “Composite / Structured Design” and/or “Reliable Software Through Composite Design” by Glenford Myers.

It’s old. The examples are in PL/I. But his framework for identifying “Functional Strength” and Data Coupling is something every developer should have. Keep in mind this is before functional programming and OOP.

I personally think it could be updated around his concepts of data homogeneity. Interfaces and first class functions are structures he didn't have available to him, but don’t require any new categories on his end, which is to say his critique still seems solid.

Overall, most Best Practices stuff all seem either derivative of or superfluous to this guy just actually classifying modules by their boundaries and data.

I should note, I haven't audited his design methodologies, which I'm sure are quite dated. His taxonomy concerning modules was enough for me.

"The Art of Software Testing" is another of his. I picked up his whole corpus concerning software on thriftbooks for like $20.
It's pretty much always the vested interests. Paige Saunders made a decent series on the problem with a Canadian slant (since he lives in Montreal, which is usually in Canada, depending on who you ask and in what language).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6OZJClSdZ28&list=PLTNrJFli7o...
Frontline support is oftentimes outsourced to firms like Arise Virtual Solutions [1] and workers typically have very little authority to escalate or fix more complex issues. Social media people usually have channels to marketing and other teams and are explicitly instructed to escalate the "trending" cases

[1] https://www.propublica.org/article/meet-the-customer-service...
It’s not appropriate or kind to expect people to read your mind on an online forum.
I did mention that it's only ACT blocking it so far.

> one ISP proactively blocking the domain without it being formally asked to do so

Very unlikely. Court orders are not ISP specific, but ISPs are not time-bound to apply them. It's all very secretive, so there's really no way for us to find out. It's better to assume the worst (ACT is blocking it on a court-order, and more ISPs might follow).

Other ISPs are known to do blocks without court orders (mainly Jio and BSNL) but ACT - not so much. It has been blocked for almost a week, with small media coverage, little outrage, and no response.
I'm chronically ill with an idiopathic incurable condition. I started coding out of necessity - my first program was a script that crawled Pubmed and analyzed what drugs were most frequently mentioned, what countries were doing the research, etc.
Ask HN: Launching niche service soon, looking for advice
Hello All,
Looking for some advice one launching a very niche product soon.

I already know it will save my clients time. Currently they manually import information from a spreadsheet into accounting software. This can take some of my clients a day to do as it is extremely tedious.

The best part is, once all the bugs and flow is worked out it can all be completely automated. Client would only need to set it up properly and then verify in their accounting software.

My current list of items to complete before launch:
1. Create videos on how to use it.
2. Documentation with links to the videos for each key step.
3. Maybe ask questions after first use to find out pricing before making it public.
... looking for more here.

What are some key steps I should take before launching to all my customers and market to outside my customer base.

I'm also struggling on how to price this value added service.
It can make a days worth of work into minutes.

Not sure if I should price it based on actions, customers, or just general tiered pricing.

The service will launch with no pay window. You will use it once and after that it will ask you to pay before using it again.

Should I create a questionnaire for the beta users to find out a good base price?

Thank you
The stuff on screen would be still (rich) text, of course. Only that it would be a rendering of the actually underlying data structure.

Linters and auto-formatters didn't solve anything. They are just a constant PITA, and a source of arguments.

And to quibble a little bit: I said "faster". I did not say how much… Just parsing is indeed very cheep by now.

But a major performance issue was unmentioned: Type checking. In languages with advanced type systems that's the most costly part. Putting all that information into a database and carry it along "the code" would make things significantly faster. It would be like there would be only incremental compilation of the few line you're just editing.
I don't need or want to own any car. Cars are destroying our society. Electric cars are not that much better than fossil fuel cars.

Even if I was going to buy a car, I wouldn't buy a Tesla. Everything I've seen suggests they are awful overpriced cars. Plus, I'm not giving any money to Melon Husk.
Yes and yes. While agree with the general points, note that they didn't say "unit that git stores", but "unit git can report on". Git can totally report on lines as a unit of change.
One the whole, the arguments I'm reading here against the author's points and for twitter and other social are no more than rehashed versions of why the profit-oriented social media CEOs say social media is good. Audience. Engagement. View counts. Feedback. Analytics.

Ask yourself, though. Who benefits most from maximizing those indicators, the content author, or the service which provides the author the free platform? Is it any coincidence that the metrics promoted and provided by the platforms are the same ones that they use to maximize their ad revenue?

We know the platforms use a variety of means to influence audiences to keep coming back, why don't we examine how much the platforms use those same means to influence the creators to come back? Doesn't that little dopamine hit from having your tweet retweeted or "liked" influence the author? And if those hits are parceled out stochastically like Skinner box rewards, who is dependent on who?
The "1024" scale is the weird one, even in computing, it only makes sense in a limited number of cases, and with modern computers, it is becoming more and more arbitrary.

Generally, that scale is only used for storage. A Gigabit network is 1000Mbps, a gigahertz processor is 1000 MHz, a megapixel camera has a million pixels, etc... Even for storage, tapes for instance have no real reason to use powers of two, the tape can be of any arbitrary length, same for disks. Blocks of data can use powers of two, but what is a block? It make be 4096 bytes for the OS, but more than that for the medium because of error correction, and less for the application because of headers.

Really, powers of two only make sense for randomly accessible storage, and that's probably why they tend to be only used for RAM and block sizes these days.
I always love that circular logic.

"Hey our developers can't make modules correctly! Let's make the API boundaries using HTTP calls instead, then they'll suddenly know what to do!"

And that unsupervised junior? At one place I joined, that unsupervised junior just started passing data he "needed" via query string params in ginormous arrays from microservice to microservice.

And it wasn't a quick fix because instead of using the lovely type system that TELLS you where the stupid method has been used, you've got to go hunting for http calls scattered over multiple projects.

All you've done is make everything even more complicated, if you can't supervise your juniors, your code's going to go sideways whatever.

Microservices don't solve that at all and it's pure circular logic to claim otherwise. If your team can't make good classes, they can't make good APIs either. And worse still, suddenly everything's locked in because changing APIs is much harder than changing classes.
A Prison Soy Saga
I'm quite new to HN so haven't heard about that till today
I don't think I'd take one even if it was free. The logistics of charging are challenging but not insurmountable, I manage to charge my Prius just fine. My primary concern is the ever-changing interface inside the vehicle. I'm aware other brands have hopped on the glass cockpit trend but Tesla's over-the-air updates make the problem of developing some kind of consistent muscle memory much, much worse, let alone how much of the vehicle's functions run through that panel. Related, the technical leadership of the company is... erratic. I quite like human-in-the-loop automation when safety outcomes are improved -- think radar based cruise control -- but Tesla vehicles's automation is not, well, not safety focused but 'feature' focused. They chose a flawed sight method for the vehicles and then way over-promised what was possible with that flawed method. Why would I trust they could get the fundamentals right too?

There's a strain of naive utopianism that runs through Silicon Valley culture, the sense that if we could just rub enough computer on a thing it will become better necessarily, decades of industrial practice and safety research be damned. Teslas are the ultimate consequence of that mindset.
Can this idea be turned on its head to engineer adversarial legal language that sounds reasonable but actually has terrible implications for the signee?