skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> As in, if everyone gets higher wages, bigger bonuses, and more money is being poured into 401ks, inflation gets even worse?

This is the thinking companies would like you to have. Meanwhile, profits have been massive for many companies in spite of inflation. The in site of part is somewhat sarcastic, because a lot of it is driven purely by corporate greed next to macro economic factors.

Companies that move part of their profits into wages don't have to increase prices if... They accept a decrease in profits.

To me, this seems like one of the only ways to avert a real crisis right now. We're moving money toward the rich at a crazy rate, causing regular people to be able to afford less and less. Rich people tent to not spend their money in the real world. A rich person doesn't buy 10 iPhones or 10 F150s, they buy one yacht. The middle class is who cause economic growth and stripping them from purchasing power will slow everything down.

In the end, the rich will also feel this, when their assets implode. But they'll only feel it in the value of these assets. They won't feel it in their daily lives. Only the normals actually feel pain from all this.
This has not been my experience. I have seen plenty of people with generic backend/full-stack keep their jobs, while my Linkedin is full of impacted infrastructure, security and data engineering specialists. Although I do agree that the developer world is becoming increasingly commoditized, I do not think that specialization is really the way to escape it.
Sway Sessions à La Tmux3
> Chat (whatever it's being called that month) is always changing, and not for any benefit that I can see.

I'll actually vouch for the current state of Chat. The Google Chat and Spaces functionality included in the office suite is a great addition. It still has a ways to go to be anywhere close to the level of Slack, but what they have so far is extremely useful for customers that don't want to deal with an outside service. It's improved a lot in a short period of time.

I've seen 2 companies I consult with adopt it and it's currently "good enough" to bypass a need for Slack without all of the pain points of equivalent MS Teams.
> So clearly a legally defined minimum wage doesn’t really matter in terms of average salary.

That single examples at most shows that other factors also matter and in sufficient combination can dominate, not that minimum wage doesn’t really matter.
I worked in food service for like 10 years, followed by 7 years as a licensed massage therapist. During my time as an MT, I broke a metatarsal, and while I was able to work through the recovery, it wasn't lost on me that working with your body (vs your brain) has some downsides. A slightly different injury would have meant months of not working. I knew I needed to get into a field where I could work through a more serious injury.

The nature of the work meant that I often had 1-2 hours breaks in my schedule. Sometimes a slot wouldn't get booked, or someone would cancel. So I started learning to code, first Ruby on Rails then JavaScript. I took a couple of freelance clients, but didn't really start looking for work until I was 35. By then I'd been hacking on my own for almost 4 years.

Now I'm 40 and my title is Principal JavaScript Engineer. It's only really been like 5.5 years of working full-time in tech, but I love what I do and I'm damned good at it. I'm so grateful this worked out, because I _did_ end up having that hypothetical worse injury in 2021. Between that and the COVID pandemic, if I had stayed in massage or (worse) food service, I would have been seriously screwed.

> Is there any hope for someone like me?

Yes

> Is there any reasonable path to starting over?

Yes

> Where do I even begin

Pick a starting point. I can only speak for the software world, but the fundamental principals are generally the same regardless of your domain or tech choices. Pick a popular language and just start learning to build. Keep building and keep learning until you are able to recognize that you've reached a level of basic competency.

> Will tech co’s ever consider hiring someone like me?

I mistakenly assumed that being self-taught would make it harder to sell myself, but the opposite has been true. I'm not saying getting that first job wasn't challenging, but in general, I think my story makes me an attractive hire. Software development typically involves a lot of autodidactic learning, so someone who taught themselves is doubly prepared.

The first job is hard to get, but if you aren't picky and you try hard, you'll get it eventually. It's worth it. Once you're in, you're in.
In terms of search the biggest problem is less Google itself and more the web. It’s now just a low quality generated content minefield of affiliate links and other hot garbage. I bet they could do a better job of punishing those sites, but it’s a race to the bottom with that stuff. It’ll only become worse as LLMs advance.
I'm personally happy to accept this volatility in return for higher comp and the opportunity to be part of a leaner, higher performing team. I don't want to work with people who are here to coast.
> Or do wages become a rounding error when you add in stuff like real-estate and loans?

In the US - debt is >30% of the economy (government deficit, new corporate debt, new mortgages, and personal auto & student loans). But non-debt still makes up the majority - so I don't think everything becomes a rounding error compared to debt.

The interest rate has to be the single most important variable - but wages aren't a rounding error.
You could be working and just decide you want to save the money. In that case people might complain that you are taking free food from someone else or depriving the supermarket from profits.

It is amazing how many people don't get public services because of feelings of shame. All the people I know who've gotten on disability in the US come from upper-class families, the poor people I know who struggle with severe mental illness (e.g. so disorganized that they struggle to get up in the morning and smoke a cigarette) are often too proud to claim benefits and would be dissuaded by the adversarial process they have to go through to get them.

I volunteered at a soup kitchen a while ago and I saw some counterexamples to "food in the food pantry is the same quality as food in the supermarket". (e.g. we got food from many sources, including the food pantry) Particularly I would see different brands of food from the usual that had unusual ingredients.

For instance I saw peanut butter with peanuts grown in India and that was also cut with large amounts of seed oils that I don't usually see on the label of commercial peanut butter. I don't know anything about the quality of Indian peanuts but that is the only time I've seen them in peanut butter in the US.
> Pretty much any effort to constantly monitor everyone's behavior at all times is dystopian, yeah.

You say "at all times" but like I said, this surveillance is limited to the times when you are operating your privately owned heavy machinery on public roads (which have posted signs regarding aircraft).

> The income from fines is the real reason it's done.

The article even explicitly says that the economics of aircraft doesn't work out for tickets. It's not about revenue, nor evil gov't surveillance. It's about public safety.
What's fascinating is how long it took for this generation of giants for people to realise it's just the same big enterprise world again, just more shiny. Maybe it's because they revolutionised corporate marketing: Google was a symbol for my generation, a fun tech oriented company completely in rupture with what was before (i.e. wear a suit in a cubicle). The cycle is also complete with "modern" tech stacks starting to feel like enterprise framework at the time like JBoss/Hibernate/...
If you look at this moment 10 years from now, you'd be surprised how early it is for you.

Eric Yuan founded Zoom at the age of 41.

David Baszucki was 41 years old when he created Roblox with cofounder Erik Cassel, who was 36 at the time.

Stan Lee created his first hit comic, "The Fantastic Four," just shy of his 39th birthday, in 1961.

Samuel L. Jackson has been a Hollywood staple for years now, but he'd had only bit parts before landing an award-winning role at age 43 in Spike Lee's film "Jungle Fever" in 1991.

I don't know how many of these examples you need, but all I can say is you can ignore the past. Do what you need to do, have some faith and just look forward.
I agree that such restriction would make it worse.
UUID does not protect your records, that is, it is not a security measure against what you describe.
Was a promise to never have paid dlc actually a draw? Pretty dumb love to promise supporting a game forever on a fixed fee
From https://twitter.com/en/tos:

By submitting, posting or displaying Content on or through the Services, you grant us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, reproduce, process, adapt, modify, publish, transmit, display and distribute such Content in any and all media or distribution methods now known or later developed (for clarity, these rights include, for example, curating, transforming, and translating).
Cameras are much cheaper than drones.

That being said, local law enforcement agencies absolutely use drones. Perhaps not for traffic enforcement, but for general surveillance, especially during events with large crowds.
the contractor is the next level up, almost the same thing.
> fast moving fields like front-end development where you have lunatics running the asylum and standards and practices change every three weeks.

Hate to break it to everyone but its really not like this, unless you're stuck in a loop of a bunch of resume driven engineers there's alot of stability in frontend development, especially since the advent of meta frameworks (Next.js, Nuxt, Modern Angular etc) and stability in tooling (rollup v2+, webpack 5+, and especially esbuild / vite)

If you want to be even more stable here, you can forgo a lot of headache with web components, which will always have some backward compatibility built in thanks to it being build on standards.

It isn't 2016 anymore. New frameworks aren't just popping up left right and center and expecting adoption. There's a lot of stability out there and there will be for the foreseeable future.

Much like any engineering endeavor there are, yes, people pushing the frontier, but all communities have this.
I find the parents of my kid's friends are pretty cool usually and since I have a long commute my coworkers don't live near me - we end up spending decent time with them.

As to alcohol - I try to limit aggressively. It ruins my sleep these days. I prefer edibles anyway (if that's legal where you live).
Mozilla created SweetJS over a decade ago[0]. It added hygenic macros to JS and I'm sure everyone on the TC39 committee is familiar with it.

There's a lot to like about it, but macros in such a complicated language as JS are hard to get right. They'd also potentially lead to huge fracturing in the JS ecosystem with different factions writing their own, incompatible macro-based languages.

Look at JSX for an example. It's actually a subset of a real standard (E4X -- actually implemented in Firefox for a long time), but just one relatively small syntax addition has added complexity elsewhere.

For example, `const foo = <T>(x:T) => x` is valid Typescript for a generic arrow function, but is an error if your file is using JSX.

I like the idea of macros, but I suspect they made the right call here.

[0] https://www.sweetjs.org/
For me offsetting is the opposite of the Zeno's Paradox. I will emit today an amount X of carbon, so I will pay this company some amount of money so they over some time (years, decades?) will capture that amount of carbon back. The speed of emission is far faster than the one of capturing back, even if we assume that all emitters somewhat offsetting them (that is not true, specially for the worst offenders).

And if we had millions of years left that wouldn't be so severe, but we don't. Already a lot of positive feedback loops are triggered so the natural world is having its own share of emissions, and they don't buy carbon credits.

The other reason offsetting is wrong (at least for most used capture methods) is that they aren't taking out carbon from the carbon cycle. If you plant a tree, it still is in the carbon cycle, while the carbon that I'm emitting have high odds of coming from carbon that wasn't in the cycle (buried oil, coal or natural gas that were out for millions of years).
Oh my god, that's hilarious but I'm so sorry for scaring you! (OK a creepier part of me is satisfied that I went full poltergeist in someone's house, but I promise to do these sorts of things sparingly.)
This makes it sort of trivially true, though. Our scale of what skill looks like is naturally normalized to typical human capabilities, and “much” is a a point on that continuum.

If we’re going to talk about talent on a scale that is normalized to typical human abilities, IMO it would be better to assume talent distributed on a Gaussian and talk about n-sigma talents. We’ll end up sounding like Jack Donaghy though I think.
Labor is a very small part of steel making. What maters most is the availability of needed resources, specifically energy and iron/coal. Then comes distance to markets and environmental regulations. Doubling/tripling/halving the cost of people is a secondary consideration.
I'm sorry I'm not familiar with ETH Zurich, is that a Switzerland thing? I reside in the US.
Correct. But other more mature languages, like C or Bash or whatever, have devs that don't immediately use bleeding edge features. Bash gets forwards incompatible features all the time but it's devs actually write for pretty much any OS from 2000 to now. Because it's mature. C11 wasn't required for a significant amount of C projects until close to 2020.

As Rust grows and it's demographic changes from bleeding edge types to a more general purpose userbase hopefully their use of the latest forwards incompatible features stop and distro rustc compilers become useful for more than half a year.

And you know this is true. Otherwise all the docs wouldn't be advocating for dangerous curl | sh rustc (into rustup) installs. You absolutely do not get this kind of community behavior in C where your system compiler is good for at least a decade.
Because in that industry, you need a lot of capital, which usually means you need to convince people to lend you theirs. If you’re in an industry that doesn’t, and labor is the limiting factor (tech is more in this vein), then labor tends to get its way. This has been a bit mixed up by super loose monetary policy, but that’s not historically the norm.
TikTok and Tinder bringing about World Peace
It's the opposite of taking responsibility though, they're not displaying any actions that can be quantified as them actually being responsible. If a company is doing mass layoffs it's because the executives fucked up, not the employees. The lack of corporate/executive responsibility is off the charts. They make big mistakes and everyone except them pays. I wouldn't be surprised if the executive team have to vacation after this on the company dime and receive an extra bonus since they took "responsibility".

Someone is going to say, but but but the economy, inflation. You would think people that command billions of dollars and tens of thousands of really smart employees coupled with AI, they would have went with a risk averse model. Nope, we're Google, we don't like human interaction at all. Sad...
I think the problem is that most students think a PhD is just like studying a bit more, but that's not what it's meant to be. It's largely a multi-year solo project with some support, and it should set you up to become an independent researcher.

Part of the problem is that most "university" studies, especially US colleges, are too similar to high school with rigid schedules and teachers closely leading classes throughout the semester. Other models where students are more responsible for organizing and completing their studies foster building independence at an earlier stage already.
How do you "peer pressure" another driver?
Servers ought to realize that no one is forcing their restaurants to only pay them the minimum wage (~$2 plus tips). That's a choice their bosses' make. They could pay $15 and still let the servers take tips. They could pay $30 per hour, and mandate no tipping or less tipping.

All of these options are fine. It doesn't even have to be done on the federal level, state and local governments can increase the minimum wage.

The failure to pay employees isn't a failure from the customers.
It that really the going rate for an auto worker in the US these days? I knew people making $100k+ per year at those jobs 30 years ago. They worked as much overtime as they could get but some of them saved a ton. Others bought boats and second homes.
Glad you got out of that situation.

Burnout & depression suck. They're cycles that area easy to get stuck in and hard to get out of. When it comes to avoiding such situations in the future, therapy and personal boundaries are the tools I personally reach for, but recovery is a long journey. Don't let them drain you of the energy you need to make life worth living.

As a mentor told me, "Illegitimi non carborundum".
Hey!
My name is Jason, I'm the developer of Fasten Health - which seems to be a similar open-source project.

https://github.com/fastenhealth/fasten-onprem

If you're interested, I'd love to chat.
Thanks for your vulnerability and sharing your story. Good for you for moving forward and moving on, glad it's working out for you. I've been in several bad situations, maybe not quite as bad as yours, and every time I get out I have nearly the same realization as you did - it just wasn't worth it. Whatever valid reasons I thought I had for staying were almost never worth the anguish and pain of sticking it out. I resent those people and situations too, and I try to fight it by remembering that resentment is like swallowing poison and hoping the other person dies.
I know 10x programmers exist cause I am one. I guess you'll have to take my word for it.

For years I worked as a contract consultant. I'd usually only get called in when projects were in crisis. I'd get into town, solve the problem, explain the problem and get out of town. I've worked in more than 20 workplaces so far in this way.

But... It requires incredible focus and being constantly in crisis mode led me to burn out more than once.

So now I work as a 1 or 2x and just take it easier and no one complains. You could say that I'm retired from my 10x life.

I do sometimes fall back into the 10x mode, cos honestly the rush was exciting and it fed my ego, but I'm trying to no let my ego lead me down the path to burnout anymore.
Hypothesis also has two different ways to generate data:

- One is to write things like in the article: accept data via arguments, and specify a strategy for each up-front.

- Another is to be more ad-hoc: use the 'data' strategy to get a data generator which can be called on-the-fly at the point it's needed inside our test. This is useful if our test is complicated, e.g. with a bunch of conditional logic where each branch needs something different; or the data generation depends on some run-time values (e.g. the number of results we got from the database); etc. Hypothesis will still keep track of the random seeds, perform shrinking, etc. as usual.

The latter approach is described at https://hypothesis.readthedocs.io/en/latest/data.html#drawin...
It's the next day and I'm still positive, above 0 ;-)
Use ChatGPT to solve the blank page problem.
The medical software company in Madison WI I think
A generation of immunocompromised guys with AIDS built the entire electronic music and rave scene in the 80s and 90s, the fashion business, and most of the culture you consume today. It's not condescending if your issues are in fact discretionary.

I travel with someone who will die within an hour of exposure to peanuts, regularly spend time with people in their 80's and 90s who have been on deaths door for years, ride motorcycles with guys in their 70s and if they have a random spill, they're guaranteed dead. I see women in their 70's thrown from the backs of horses, often twice in the same ride. I drink with guys between chemo appointments, smoke cigars with guys who have colostomy bags, and saw a friend perform a spectacular monologue when he knew it was the last time in his life that he would give it.

These vulnerabilities are not lifestyle choices, and yet they manage. The difference between "I will actually die," and "I could die" is a matter of perception, and the world doesn't stop for any of us. Actual lifestyle choices which are a selective constraint as a substitute for achievement are uniquely prevalent today, and I think, socially suffocating.
My wife did. She was a doctor and burned out during the pandemic. She misses it, but not the baggage that came with it.

Now she's a software engineer at a large non profit. Only had minimal experience writing code with me on hobby projects before that, but she learned quickly.
Far and away, the most used OS for personal usage in the world is Android.

If you squint, you can call that Linux.
Only if the competent let them.

You could argue that the whole point of something like Y Combinator is to back hungry competent founders over stagnant incompetent people working at behemoth companies.
It is a reflection on how google views popularity over usefulness.
Right, I've never heard somebody quote it and declare that we're currently in the hard times. Its only purpose is to let other people know that you consider them unwise and soon they'll be sorry.
I switched to home gymming, so fortunately, this is no longer an issue for me.
I've been using Rewind for about a month now. This is something that feels so obvious in hindsight—it's not just search for all your files, but search for everything you've and done. The only reason why I don't use it more is jsut remembering to do Shift-Command-Space instead of Command-Space for searches...

I'm increasingly convinced that, if Apple had just continued developing Time Machine and Spotlight, this would have been the natural progression. Instead, These features haven't gotten significant product love and attention for several updates, and they've redesigned the soul out of Time Machine to just be, well, bland. (Apple, maybe M&A Rewind and build it into a Time Machine 2?)
I actually see no problem with that. If the employees have a mechanism to keep management in check, there should be a way of management keeping employees in check. As long as there's a way to make sure everyone is on the same page, and there's harmony on and also between every level of the company, that's fine in my book.
Since Google is no longer restricted by "don't be evil", overhiring to keep the best employees is a valid business plan. It is easier to overhire than to attract , interview and offer to better candidates and most companies are doing it. Quantity leads to quality, eventually.
This profile in the times caught my interest

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/23/business/dealbook/a-new-b...
Video Game-Playing Fish Commit Credit Card Fraud in the Ultimate Phishing Scam
How to Apply a Hugging Face Machine Learning Model via SparkSql UDFs and MLflow
At this point, I much prefer the results of bing. For the top few results, I don't have to guess what will be on the page, based solely on the pages title. Compare:

"how do mems absolute air pressure sensor work"

bing: https://www.bing.com/search?q=how+do+mems+absolute+air+press...

google: https://www.google.com/search?q=how+do+mems+pressure+sensors...

I've also seen many cases of "unfavorable" news articles being deranked, in google search results, while can be easily found on Bing. The best examples being during the pandemic, where there appeared to be a massive amount of curation.
This is pretty interesting too:
https://www.carsized.com/en/cars/compare/bmw-3-1997-sedan-vs...

Same car has grown by 5% over 15 years.