skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What are some of the shenanigans to juice ARR?

I can think of a few; 1) make 2 year contracts cost the same as 1 year contracts (so you're lowering the price by 50% but get the number you want for your report today); 2) give incentives equal to the value of the contract (our software costs $30k but we'll give you $30k of AWS credits).

Anything else to watch out for?
df = pd.DataFrame( universe )

Warning: Specify dtype option on import or set low_memory=False.
> B player wants to hire C players so the B player can more effectively beat their rivals in the company

I’m sure this is the case at some companies. But in my experience, it’s because the B player is as bad at hiring as they are at their job. This repels A players, who can smell bullshit, leaving a pool of Bs and Cs and guess of which there are more.
That comic just made my mind bend.
My father passed away in 2020. As he was a mariner, we wanted to give him a proper send off. We had him cremated and built a little wooden boat. We put his cremains in the boat and set it adrift and afire just offshore of Florida’s Treasure Coast.

We put concrete blocks into the boat to ensure that it would sink.

I asked USCG for permission beforehand and they had only reasonable restrictions such as my assurance that we would not leave anything floating afterward.

I should write up a blog post. We had a few lessons learned that I should share. Don’t use a flare gun.
Even in a private monorepo, Google has tools like Copybara that make it somewhat easy to 'open source' small pieces of it and sync them in and out of a 'public' repo. The benefits of a monorepo and just having to 'git checkout' and your entire environment 'just works' (I'm looking at you, scripting languages and build systems) is not to be taken lightly.
At a former company, we needed to connect to customer's databases from our service. Many were understandably cagey about opening a public hole in their firewall to their DB, even if it's just for our single egress IP.

Our solution was to run a public host (the Reverse Bastion) that would, upon user request, generate a shell-less linux account for the user and install their public key. The user was then given an SSH command to run from inside their corp network that would connect to Reverse Bastion and establish a reverse tunnel pointing at their database. That way we could "connect" to that user's dedicated port on the Reverse Bastion and our traffic would traverse the tunnel and pop out inside their network, bound for their database. Since it's all TCP tunneling, JDBC drivers had no idea they were hopscotching around networks and did DB queries like usual. As long as you have the user accounts totally locked down and people's port assignments locked to their users via iptables, it was a walled (tunneled?) garden.
I want an encyclopedia set, and there is the World Book Encyclopedia that still updates and publishes a physical book set every year, the question then for myself is, which year should I get? Isn't one always tempted to wait for the following year's?

https://www.worldbook.com
Can we please have this argument withoutboats?
Custom LOCAL XMPP servers could do the same. Whatsapp has had connection issues globally.
> Nobody cares what your architecture looks like.

This isn't an absolute. Yes, people using your thing don't care about the architecture. But developers sure do. If your system is built in COBOL, you will have a smaller pool of developers who will have an interest in working on it.
I hope they will have good anti-submarine defences. And one more strategic dependency on another country.
If you are making $300K to $400K at least for four years, you are not a bad engineer.
Only 5 states let you compost your body.
> Why is Joe’s closet computer a bad choice? Because it’s a single point of failure and we won’t be able to ship fast if it breaks, which it will.

It's kinda a shame they reduced it to this. A single machine in a colo center is going to be far more reliable than single availability zone in AWS, which is all many people resort to. And maybe we've just gotten lucky, but in general our very simple 20 machine colo center setup has been more reliable than our single region AWS setup.

But yeah, if you literally put Joe's computer in a closet it isn't gonna be too reliable for all sorts of reasons completely unrelated to the reliability of modern computer hardware.
I was thinking of ancient Arabic and Chinese texts that are obscure enough that no one's bothered to translate them yet.
As a big fan of the monorepo approach personally, I would say the biggest benefit is being able to always know exactly what state the system was in when a problem occurred.

I've worked in large polyrepo environments. By the time you get big enough that you have internal libraries that depend on other internal libraries, debugging becomes too much like solving a murder mystery. In particular, on more than one occasion I had a stacktrace that was impossible with the code that should have been running. A properly-configured monorepo basically makes that problem disappear.

This is more of a problem the bigger you are, however.
In my experience, this is actually the typical opinion of people on HN, and I agree and see nothing weird with it.
You know you can just say "I don't care about inequality and people who are doing worse than me deserve it" or even just "I got mine who cares about the rest." It's not illegal. Some people might not respect you much but we don't respect whatever this is either.
There are very real public health consequences for bedroom activities too.
The "Open" in "OpenAI" turned into pure marketing/branding long ago.
Forgive me if I'm wrong about this, but it would seem to me that the FAA NOTAM system had orders of magnitude more uptime than literally any product produced by so called "professional" "engineers" at big software companies.
> Runtime-safety "panics" in Go, like concurrently modifying and iterating a map that can lead to other memory being corrupted, tend to abort the whole process immediately and not be suppress-able panics.

https://go.dev/doc/effective_go#panic

> The usual way to report an error to a caller is to return an error as an extra return value. . . . But what if the error is unrecoverable? Sometimes the program simply cannot continue. For this purpose, there is a built-in function panic that in effect creates a run-time error that will stop the program

Panics express unrecoverable failures. This is plainly stated in the language documentation. There are exceptions to this rule, but they are exceptional.
The process that caused the light we see as the CMB happened everywhere in the universe roughly all at once. At the time, from any given point, you'd just have seen blinding light but as things cooled, you'd see a sphere expanding around you where this light was dimming, as less and less, and finally none was being emitted around you, but due to the finite speed of light, light from outside that sphere would still continue arriving in your eyeballs. That's the situation we're in today; that sphere's just really big now.

During recombination epoch ~400,000 years after the Big Bang, this light would have been visible. Due to expansion, over time that light has stretched to longer and longer wavelengths, and we currently see it as microwaves.

Note: It's been ~30 years since I was actually studying physics & astronomy; others may be able to offer better explanations or correct me.
Brings back good memories of playing Arma 3
Phone call or some kind of document verification.

Phone call just involves typing a verbal authentication code. Very simple.
I my experience, normal users don’t read the permission prompts. They immediate click Allow or Accept and then wonder later why they’re getting popup notifications in Windows pretending to be an anti-virus or think their entire computer has been hacked because “something is wrong.”
We keep hearing all these critical stories about Jeffrey Epstein, which is inconsistent with the fact that he was quite popular in the financial sector...
Ok. How will we not end up with echo chambers where there are one or two people collecting all the vote-rights for that particular chamber?
10 years isn't far enough back. I would like to go further back, to highschool. I'd do more homework/studies and I would exercise more.
https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/e5/03/de/0743b47...
> but we have neither the ambition nor the bandwidth to support every build/bundling platform out there, especially ones none of us otherwise use.

For what it's worth (though it seems like the decisions is done), there's no need to support every build/bundling platform - the NPM registry is rather 'tooling agnostic' and publishing there would make it available to a lot more people with a lot less effort.
Thank you. I didn’t even think of something as simple as cookie stealing.

Here’s what he wrote to me (and his talk of manners would be fair if it were justified - he went on the attack as soon as I said there was XSS in his plugin).

-

“ok

Thank for the advice i will try to follow it.

well there is noting about haking your site with some text well that is a joke i will suggest you to change your university and most importantly learn some manners for talking with unknowns, seniors and any one in this world

Education doesn't teach us to earn from it.
it teaches us how to behave and live a life without hurting anyone.

I'm a developer and having years of experience but you are a student and it's your learning stage, not for coding or anything like it but most importantly manners

coming back to your words. no one in this world can hack your site through the order notes nor any one wants
today you are saying me joke of coding without knowing anything tomorrow you will be the joker of coding even the joker of computer science

i have developed you what you wanted and at that time you were agreed on it and now after month you learn something new and come back to me to misbehave with me and i think after 10 years you will again come and say to me somethink new that will be more interesting ”
Hinton's networks become the neuron of novel networks. It is important to know that these types of weights don't learn features, they map a compressed representation of the learned info, which is the input. Classification through error correction. That is actually what labels do for supervised learning (IOW they learn many ways to represent the label, and that is what the weights are).
Modern AI do that plus learn features, but the weights are nevertheless a representation of what was learned, plus a fancy way to encode and decode into that domain.

What Hinton and Deepmind will do is use neural-network learned-data, or perhaps the weights, as input to this kind of network. In other words, the output of another NN is labeled a priori, ergo you can use it "unsupervised" networks, which this research expounds. This will allow them to cook the input network into a specific dish, by labels even. Now give me my phd.

edit: edit
Liquid democracy, direct democracies and all these shenanigans sound good on paper but they are incredibly easy to manipulate by the government.

Only paper ballots, with humans counting them, and humans observing them, can properly be "Proof of human": proof that there's an actual human being behind the vote. The fundamental problem in "Proof of human" is that fake identities are easily fabricated, dead humans can keep on voting if the government "forgets" about them, and finally, backdoors can be inserted into software systems creating a single point of failure, and the incentives of the government funding these systems is to get re-elected. Mail ballots, voting machines, and early voting where there are months of voting and volunteers don't have time to oversee months of voting, it's all problematic.

The fundamental measure in "Proof of human" is how many humans you need to trust to have confidence in the results. Do you need million election workers to go rogue? 100,000? 100? or maybe only 20 election workers in the right position can completely change the result? That's what makes the difference between fraud being a conspiracy and plausible: the number of people who need to be part of the conspiracy.

Getting a cryptographic backdoor in electronic voting systems is not even in conspiracy land, it requires only handful of people to be a part of it, and it can even happen remotely by an adversary country (such as Russia).
A lot of startups jobs are well-defined and have a pre-existing business strategy. In fact, in my experience, startups can even be much less fluid in this sense than big companies, because startups are funded for a much narrower mission based on a very specific vision, whereas big company often has a huge scope within which there's tons of ambiguity as to what to pursue.

A lot of these types of statements generally are made by founders whose relative role at the startup (C-level) is much senior than their past or would-be role at larger companies (entry-level or close). Or early employees who got to be much more senior within a startup than they had been at a larger company. This just isn't an accurate statement for the rank & file or when you compare people at similar levels across companies.
Yes, unless you get lucky.

They find spots on the pancreas by accident all the time. It is incredibly common. I know, I have one: I got an abdominal CT scan while getting something unrelated checked. Some of these go on to be cancer, and sometimes they know it is precancerous. The cyst I have wasn't immediately precancerous. Now I get regular MRIs to check on it. Since I have no symptoms, there is really nothing else to do.

That lack of symptoms, though, is a real issue. If you have a little bit of cancer and no symptoms and you don't find it accidentally, it is going to be much, much harder to detect early.
I think the point still stands but in a different way. The architecture was designed to be quite reliable.
Bill Gates' stake in Microsoft is on the order of 1%. Therefore, even when Microsoft buys a 100% stake in something, it does not mean that it is "in Bill Gates' hands".
Space and time are intertwined interstingly that way. If time somehow loops back or reverses (circular time) the it is not unreasonable to suggest space also loops back. Is it possible that at a certain boundary of space and point in time you loop back and start over at 0:0:0/0:0:0 space/time coordinates. At least in this current realm of reality, is it like one big space-time movie on a loop?
> even at 100%

Can you give more background or references for this? It hasn’t been my experience, at least on desktop.
Elon Musk Drives Even Some Twitter Founders to Mastodon
Not sure exactly what is meant, but if this includes Certificates of Deposit, CD laddering was a frequent thing when interest rates were high enough to be worthwhile, where you'd want long-term CDs for the highest interest rates, but wan t to get the point of having some fraction of your CDs expire every month so you have liquidity, so you might have 60 5-yr CDs for instance, and somewhat less while you're working your way up to that
I've thought for a while that the world needs a new simplified web, based on something like markdown but properly standardised. I'm stoked to discover that something similar actually exists!
Just as rick rolling many years ago it was also fun to have people react to "Bagger 288" on Youtube, it is a weird video.

On a more serious note: open pit mining is one of the most in your face destructive things that humankind can do to the planet. And the Hambach open pit is not in the middle of nowhere but right in the middle of a reasonably densely populated area in Germany.

Short term gains, ie getting coal locally instead of depending on foreign gas, is of-course a strategic advantage. But for the longer term my opinion is that this sort of mining is not sustainable.
Appreciated, I'll check it out.
What I'm going to ask you is completely dumb, but keep in mind I don't know much of physics.

If my understanding is correct, when mass gets dense enough inside, a star you have a black hole, that would be like a hole in the fabric of space time. Ok, we have black holes in the contemporary universe. So how was the primordial universe a ball of dense, extremely hot, opaque plasma without becoming a huge black hole?
Which state disallows that specifically?
A good retroencabulator helps a lot here.
We regret to inform you that 'woke' does indeed simply mean 'observes objective reality' to a lot of right wingers these days.
The CMB happened everywhere in the universe at the same time[0], so what we're seeing is the light which took 13-point-whatever billion years to get here[1] from some part of the universe in that direction at that younger age.

> My understanding is that the early galaxies still produced light after recombination.

I'm not sure what you're imagining about recombination, because I've not heard any suggestion of any galaxies existing before it, so they only produced light after recombination.

[0] for some definition of the concept, even though relativity is formulated with the assumption that there isn't any good concept of simultaneousness.

[1] from our point of view. From light's point of view, time isn't defined.
The same reason when every year a new iPad comes out, you have a thread on Hacker News with engineers complaining they can’t run Kubernetes cluster on it even though it has the technical capability to do it.

Engineers don’t understand iPad’s product positioning, that it’s not built for them and they’re not the target market.

Want to get a portable Docker developer machine?

MacBook Air is cheaper and lighter than a 12.9 iPad + keyboard.

However, given the chance they’d be happy to ram the iPad with never ending list of features.

Companies did that before the iPad and failed, because they couldn’t say no to ideas that sound great and focus on what’s really important.

More often than not, engineers lack the people skills and business experience to know what questions to ask and how to dissect the answers they receive.

The “Mom Test” is a great example of that.
This. I've had micromanager PMs that made my life hell and I've had PMs that advocate for me to others. It's all about hiring the right people and healthy company culture.
Silicon Valley's crisis of conscience
AWS uptime is pretty insane
Runtime assertions without defensive checks are programmer errors that are not difficult to spot in code review and should not be expected to make it to deployed code.

// RED FLAG
x := y.(type)

// good
x, ok := y.(type)
if !ok { return an error }
> "Surely HVDC links between Scotland and England could be built?"

Absolutely. One HVDC link between Scotland and England (actually, Wales) has already been built:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_HVDC_Link

And more are planned:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_HVDC
https://archive.is/TWCWE
I have to say I agree very much with his point, though not really the way he communicates it:

> Let’s riff. I’ve had my “macho engineer” days, I’ve built that stuff. Take me deep, I’m ready.

or

> No; customers are not paying for, nor give a shit about, these things. Sorry.

Just feels to me a bit condescending for no reason
I feel for the Weather pattern folk. All of the one I have spoken to over the years are pretty cool. They are trying to model an insanely complex system - oh but thanks to global warming they are struggling to make models that work for longer than a few years because it all keeps changing!
Yes, absolutely. Nonetheless, I think the author may be right, except that by "Google" they mean "large." This is a fundamental misunderstanding of just how large Google and its peers are. I think it's more interesting to consider three sizes.

If you're small, everything will fit nicely in a monorepo.

If you're large, you'll want lots of repos. There aren't really any off the shelf monorepo options that scale super well, so using a bunch of small repos is a great way to deal with the problem. Plus, you probably don't have a full time staff babysitting the source repos, so you want some isolation. If someone in another org is breaking stuff left and right, you don't want the other orgs to be affected.

If you're GIGANTIC, monorepos are a pretty great option again. You'll probably have to build your own and then have a full time group of people maintain it, but that's not a huge problem for you because you're a gigantic tech company. You can set up an elaborate build system that takes advantage of the fact that the entire system is versioned together, which can let you almost completely eliminate version dependency hell. You can customize all of your tools to understand the rules for your new system. It's a huge undertaking, but it pays off because you've got a hundred thousand software engineers.
I think it's a cool way to show off some info, like foundation you support or certain non-mainstream tech you use. It's great to use such things as conversation starter.
I had a few on my previous laptop. No regrets!
We need a TAOCP volume on dithering.
Right, the "elements of x" made me think values, but those elements really are other types.

Crazy where operator overloading will get you. If there are postmodern math papers I feel like this is one of them
So there could've been civilizations that are literally BILLIONS of years ahead of us? Imagine what these people know about the universe!

This reminds me of the Star Wars lead-in: "A long long time ago in a galaxy far far away." It really could've happened you know!
> - your product is slow, so they assume it's crap and leave your site

I don't think there any tech stack that will have any significant (or even just measurable) impact the speed of the product, for 99% of the startups.

> - your product breaks, no one notices or fixes it

This has nothing to do with the tech stack. You can setup monitoring, alarms and metrics for any tech stack.

> - your product is bad, because your wrote it in a boring technology like cobol and therefore couldn't access the best developers.

99% of startups won't be able to afford the best developers anyway. 99% of startups don't need the best developers. Average developers can make great products.

---

You are taking "your tech stack does not matter" and twist it into "You will have problems if you have the worst tech stack and the worst developers!". Cool, but that's not what the article is about.
Most states disallow traps - they're indiscriminate devices that could harm people with legitimate reasons to go on your property, e.g. emergency workers.
Using Ruby primarily is my best guess.
I think you’re getting bad answers here. It’s not just about talking to customers and understanding what they want, it’s about taking that and matching it against bigger business goals, budgets, and priorities plus making sure you’re not duplicating or messing up things other teams are planning plus prioritizing within all the features all the customers want. If you have time to do all that then why is the company paying you an engineering salary to write code?
Avionics, sadly is not like this anymore. When I started in avionics (late 70s, when this instrument was state of the art) I was fixing some radios that still had tubes, a mechanical crystal carriers that got moved to change frequency. In 10 years it’s was all chips. In a few more years it was glass cockpits. I saw the future and moved into programming. But for a while at least I programmed flight simulators to use my avionics knowledge. But now MSFS is as good as the software in any of those sims. Of course, being in a cockpit built with actual aircraft hardware with a full motion base and a visual system focused at infinity is an experience I’m glad I had. And I repaired a lot of instruments like the OP has for the sim.
Scientists Have Reached a Key Milestone in Learning How to Reverse Aging
Notfound.org – Make better use of your 404 page
Google used Perforce for many years until they outgrew it. What size org outgrows Perforce but can't develop and maintain their own thing?