skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Long-time non-profit guy here. Totally get where the author is coming from and I'm in a very similar position in terms of where my role relates to my organisation, but I still love my job despite having exactly the same issues. Why?

Non-profits are a funny old space. In theory, they're not out there to make money, so people gravitate towards them seeking "purpose". Everything is fine once you realise that you're not going to get that, or at least in the way people come to it for.

Non-profits have ridiculous, completely unachievable goals, particularly when you put their budgets in context. Some provide truly excellent services and products (e.g., reports), most don't.

So what's so great about a non-profit tech job? I've got an interesting problem space, I love trying to work out how to measure things that are inherently difficult to measure. I have a hell of a lot of autonomy, freedom of tooling, people listen to me on tech issues -- even when they probably shouldn't.

I bust my arse because I'm interested in what I'm doing, but I could easily coast if I wanted to. The pay is enough for me, and my colleagues are for the most part super nice and interesting. If I want to learn something, I can make an excuse to play with it at work and run with it.

Seeking to have "impact" through a data job at an average non-profit is naive, but a lot of these jobs have stuff to recommend them beyond that.

----

Edit: slight addition to my list of joys of non-profit nerding
Care to elaborate where the value created for millions of people is in an industry that pivoted years ago to focus on ad revenue and psychological tricks to extract money from 'whales'?
This program helped me to do 2hr half-marathon: https://www.halhigdon.com/training-programs/half-marathon-tr...
Idk why this is getting downvoted.

There's a book called 'Breath' by james nestor where he devotes a lot of time to this theory.

The book itself is mixed in terms of scientific quality but I found the stuff about diet influencing face shape to be very convincing.

If your mouth doesnt grow properly then your airways will also be too narrow and you will have obstructed breathing.
>> You may be mistaking reasoning ability with sheer volume of more patterns to match on. You can only reason when you have awareness within which to reason, which these systems do not.

What exactly is "reasoning"? Seem, like the ability to consider options and choose one that fits the situation best. One might even call it "prediction". I generally argue that these big brains of ours (and science too) are intended to predict the future of various hypotheticals in order to choose the path forward with the best outcome.

Another frightening thing about chatGPT is that it has no "motivation". A lot of people think that AI will need some kind of motivation in order to be useful. How much of what we do as humans is actually done on autopilot? And then there's the NPC meme. I'm not sure these concepts (reason, thought, motivation) are so well defined that we will be certain when AI attains them or not.
Many languages have enum types and algebraic data types (Java has both now). TypeScript is a little unique in that its core type system is much more structural than nominal (even more so than Haskell) -- and that's because of its JS heritage and interop -- but structural types have significant disadvantages as well advantages. The main advantage is succinctness as well as very powerful inference. The main downside is inscrutable type errors (if two types having the same structure are considered to be the same type, the compiler has little choice but to refer only to the structure in error messages rather than the type name).
> neovaginas

There is no way to create a vagina, which self cleans.

Claiming your opponents get their information is like people claiming you get your information from Tumblr. Which... well, 'neovaginas' - maybe you do.
Hentai is popular pron subgenre and obviously not realistic. The author is probably correct in that AI pron which attempts exactitude would not be particularly compelling but it would be a different matter if producers embraced the falsity of it and radically experimented. After all, this is basically what the original Hentai artists did
I am surprised there are no private equity like entities that are driven by a single thesis which is to buy non-tech public corporations (or as far away from tech as possible: like commodities and real estate) then cancelling all 'digital transformation' or 'data engineering' contracts with consultancies like McKinsey, replicate the important 10% part of the contract in-house by recruiting a solid small tech team.

Then take the company public later at 10x the valuation, having slashed the cost by 10x without impacting operations or growth.
You could say a lot of the work is speculative because you might be wrong about how much value it ends up producing. But if you say that 1 project in 10 pays off you just take the cost of the other 9 as the cost of the 10th.
Holistic visual testing of frontend apps
I’m on the other side. Almost bought a PS5. Or to be more accurate, wanted to buy a PS5, but they were insanely behind with shipping and the little stocks there were got bought up by resellers. Then once Sony managed to get stocks up somewhat, they jacked up the prices (something I don’t recall any other console manufacturer ever doing).

I bought a steam deck instead and I’ve been playing basically all I would’ve been playing on the PS5 I wanted to get, plus it’s a nice emulation machine and I’m also catching up on my PC backlog.

Compatibility is great in my experience, sleep mode is incredibly convenient, and the only real complaint I have is battery life is basically awful for modern games. You’ll be recharging after any modest length session.
The velocity of an average air molecule at normal atmospheric pressure is about 1000 mph, so yes - brisk indeed. Of course the mean free path is only a few dozen nanometers, so it'll take about 10^10 collisions before a molecule reaches that far - but they started with "a drop", or something like 10^21 molecules, so statistically there's plenty of opportunity for a few "lucky" molecules to make it - and it's so stinky that we can detect it even in those absurdly low concentrations.
Yes, it can be wielded as a tool, but it isn’t just a tool - the brush was not trained on the work of masters, but the model is.

It used to require that the human had practiced in using the brush. Now, a human without art training can talk to a machine that has far more than the equivalent.

Working with a model is closer to commissioning a piece than authoring a piece. The twist is that prompt engineering can take effort, and that hasn’t been reconciled with the decrease in required effort that the model allows.

There’s also the whole “you can commission the model to make you a picture so that you don’t have to commission the artist.” That’s an unresolved mess that neither side seems to want to approach honestly.
To give quality examples for this sort of thing can be difficult - because things that are obscure enough to be nigh-unreadable won't be recognisable to most readers.

After all, if I said "try opening a Generations Family Tree .cht file and you'll know what I mean" - would you know what I mean?

Perhaps the most famous example is the BBC Domesday Project [1] which paid homage to a 900-year-old book in the form of... a LaserDisc. The data isn't entirely lost - but only thanks to the effort of computer history museums.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Domesday_Project
Your example chain of events would be called "lab leak".
Requires signup to even look at the content. That's a pass for me...
I did purchase one. Full access to my complete steam library on a device that can be carried around. Plays well. A little heavy at first compared to a switch, but I quickly got used to it. Gyroscopic aiming makes shooters playable. It has the flat mouse trackpad things from the steam controller that make using a mouse with games very nice. Valve will only continue improving wine over time, and if the steam deck is popular enough, you'll see titles account for it as well.
>That humans can't manually evaluate a computer program, because they are not themselves computers.

Well, yes, that’s why they were designed in the first place: to carry at scale those repetitive dull tasks that aggregates to an amount which exceeds human abilities and patience.

No, our submarines doesn’t have what it takes to swim, but really there is no drama here: there are still useful amazing peace of engineering.
>This seems like a viciously difficult problem to solve to me. How do you hire someone for a city's transport agency who has the ability to manage a multi-billion dollar construction project? Anyone with those skills will surely be able to earn 10x more in the private sector.

You pay them 5x as much as they would get in the private sector. In all my hiring trouble never have I been in a position where spending what I was told was unreasonable money on staff did not result in a better outcome.

My only explanation why no one else does this is that CEO will never let anyone else in the company earn more than them.
Well we recently got the Logitech G-Cloud and the Razer Edge. Although both are Android devices. There's plenty of Asian companies like Aya, GPD and Onexplayer putting out handheld gaming PCs.
Having way too many bullshit jobs backfires , and we are not prepared for that
Twitter is truly dead in some niches. Mac dev is one.
There are many incredible foods that we cannot imagine putting in our mouth as children, but usually we grow up and discover how wonderful they are.
Couchbase withdraws non-profit event sponshorship 4 days before
What you’ve posted here and what I’ve said are mutually exclusive. It’s entirely coherent for white supremacists to believe that it’s only okay to be white, and for them to troll people with the phrase “it’s okay to be white”. That’s what makes it a troll. They get people who aren’t savvy to spread their message, while making people who are savvy sound unreasonable. Then they sit back and watch how many people defend them (you) and how many people get angry (me) and feel like they’ve won either way.

But to be clear, the only way to win against a white supremacist is to push back. Scott Adams isn’t winning today. Watching the general response in news and media, it seems most people see right through this little troll stunt, because most people know it’s okay to be white, so the nature of the question is just a huge red flag. Except Scott Adams and the credulous posters here.

In the end though, you’re the one downplaying white supremacists as mere trolls, while casting me as looking like a racist for calling them out on their shit. So really I’m wondering why you’re trying very hard to convince hard that white supremacists are just trolls and don’t actually believe the white race is supreme over all others.
SymPy definitely makes things easier.
As a non trivial example I attempted to solve a recent (2022) IIT advanced maths paper with SymPy. This exam is usually considered to be hard, and is definitely non trivial. But with SymPy it was a cakewalk: https://youtu.be/O6UFVSm625k .
Watching growing startups hire a junior data scientist to analyse their new mountain of data is very entertaining. One of their first findings is their revenue/growth seems to be dropping… “we need someone to focus on growth/revenue ASAP”. They hatch a plan, build a team and magically their growth starts to recover.

The issue was spotted in April/May, the building happens during the summer and is launched In September… I’ve watch this cycle happen so many times, I’ve given up trying to point out that the issue is just seasonality.
>Your sentiment is simply absurd, let's be honest.

It's a personal opinion, I think they're sellouts and traitors. You can consider it absurd if you like, but that's just your opinion.
Yup the tool chain was a more than a wee bit painful. There was a lot of interest at that time in graphics applications of transputers - I remember seeing code for a parallel ray tracer (MAGG?) and there was Division Ltd - a spin off by folks from Inmos and Perehelion( makers of Helios OS used in the Atari transputer product), Ian Barron was chairman. Division built a very early VR system called ProVision[1] using transputers and later built general VR development software until their acquisition by PTC where they build digital mockup visualization tools. In many respects, at least for me, exposure to transputers and those companies gave a glimpse into what the GPU market would become.

https://www.cs.ru.ac.za/research/groups/vrsig/pastprojects/0...
> You chat with people online because you think, you know, that people exist on the other side.

A fairly large portion of social networking isn’t so much “chatting with people” as “Finding an Us so that we can get together and yell at Them”, and in those cases the dehumanisation is a feature more than a bug...
Of all these almost-perfect-looking mockups, the "ZIP drive" (which unfortunately has a very prominent position in the article) stands out because it 's just a 2D image of a zipper slapped on a 3D ZIP drive. But hey, everybody is allowed to be lazy once in a while ;) Or maybe there was some deeper reason for doing it this way that eludes me?
Prostitution is high risk and expensive. Porn is zero risk and basically free because we all have Internet access already. Porn is not the problem but it is a serious crutch for those unwilling to address the actual problem, which is generations of teaching men and boys that intimacy isn't important.

I have male friends I hug and cry with. I have deep feelings of loss for my pet pig, who challenged my world view on "love animals" and made me rethink how and what I eat. I have a successful marriage with a wonderful, intelligent, beautiful women because I'm not afraid of emotional and psychological intimacy.

What sex toys exist for men that aren't just gross receptacles for semen? (I'm not into butt stuff, personally.)
does it run stock Android and get all the latest updates?
Most of jobs in academia are like that. Everyone knows it, some few admit it, most do not want to rock the boat.
> But it may be totally correct for a website about kookaburras.

It isn't; "to maintain afloat" is not grammatical.

You could replace that with "stay afloat" and it would fix the grammatical error without introducing an E.

There's a similar unforced error in referring to a "group" of kookaburras rather than a "flock".

"Individuals distinguish from distinct sorts" is gibberish. I cannot tell what it's supposed to mean.

"All flap wings as a way to [stay] afloat" is, at best, very awkward; fluent English would require "flap their wings", but that would introduce an E.

"Flapping about a body of liquid" is a very odd thing to say unless the body of liquid happens to be suspended in midair, since midair is the only location where you can find birds flapping.
James Bond books to be rewritten to remove “offensive” references
Goebbels is an unreliable narrator who had strong incentive to promote the idea that freedom of speech makes a nation weak.

The problem is not that the Nazis were allowed to speak (in fact, hate speech against Jews was often punishable under German law and Goebbels was imprisoned twice for it), but that they were allowed to be violent with no real consequences. Hitler only served eight months for his violent coup attempt in 1923.
That why this kind of department for sure was called R&D... His organization just didn't reached the "D"...
At some point the image size does start to matter. Both for local convenience and for the time of deployment.

Also serving only the current version's assets will cause failures during a restart. If you have more than one container, there's a chance the page request will hit the new one, but the resource request will hit the old version - without the needed asset.

And once you hash your assets, you normally only deploy a couple of extra files, not the whole 1gb. I don't get why people would want to keep them embedded (apart from convenience for a third party who will run it)
>> capable of

Not necessarily actively engaged in.
I hear this sentiment from management but never from an actual worker.

Unfirable people don’t complain about being unfirable. You don’t say!
Is it also unlocked and LineageOS-friendly?
I'll be the minority here and say for me it is the current ultimate gaming machine. I love that it runs Linux. It's convenient, runs my already purchased library of games and is consumer friendly for modding. On the other hand my PS5 is gathering dust.
The next required reading on the topic of clipping is the indispensable Jack Orman's amzfx:

http://www.muzique.com/lab/sat.htm

http://www.muzique.com/lab/sat2.htm

http://www.muzique.com/lab/warp.htm

PS: What I don't see on these pages is the variation of one or many diode pairs to ground ending with a variable resistor as a "softness" control. Can't recall the source of this idea, but it's probably R.G. Keen.
> it takes like 20 seconds to update the nameservers

Users are being denied your site without your knowledge. People using nonstandard browsers (such as for accessibility or security reasons), Tor/I2P for privacy, scrapers, hobbyists and so on. Maybe the content is replaced in certain cases (like governments targeting certain individuals).

> I'm not being held hostage, promise!

If you can easily turn off the CDN and still serve your traffic with reasonable performance, then you are not. Otherwise, you are.
> Most children happily run around all day and rarely develop any issues

I am an adult and I definitely have kept issues from things that I did as a child.

Now, seriously, isn't the body weight to joint surface ratio completely different for children and adults?
In what sense does the company have more information? They have more information about the details of the job, sure, but the applicant has more details about themselves. Which is “more valuable” depends on the market I guess. But why do you say one party has strictly more information?

(This question is asked in good faith).
It's a small and very responsive company, maybe shoot them an email?
In neutron stars, astrophysicists see a form of matter like none other
15k Inserts with Rust and SQLite
I found it resonated (although agree the title is click-baity, they just talk about their own experiences in multiple orgs).

It is hard to do good data work. Offhand it takes some combination of:

- business understanding and goals (that don't themselves come directly from data)

- using data to effectively orient those goals to the best opportunities

- using data to measure whether you are successful or not

Part of that can involve meta goals -- our data is not sufficient now to meet bullet 2, so we need to start doing something different to measure it.

I find many people in these roles act like they are just human machines producing reports. You really need to take agency in many situations IMO, and direct higher ups to look at data in the right way. If you just wait to be told what report to produce, it will not go well.
I disagree, the author has touched on something widespread and hard to articulate that I suspect a large part of the HN readers have had experience with.
I think they should fix missing hands, legs, fingers etc first
I have heard this but as I’ve only worked at startups I’ve never seen it play out in real life. How common is it that it happens “all the time”? Only at bigcorps?
This confusion is part of the problem. I've been watching this space a bit, and it tends to be that all types of energy from waste schemes are sometimes advertised as "bioenergy" or "like bioenergy" or "renewable".

To actually evaluate these, one relevant factor is what waste we are talking about. If the source is plastics then of course the more accurate term would be "fossil fuels", because that's what plastics is usually made from.
I'm going to take an educated guess that you've just turned 30 or are about to turn 30?

I had this exact same problem where I became entirely disillusioned with the output of my work after having become reasonably senior and realising that the majority of my time and effort ammounted to projects which either failed or treaded water. The unfortunate reality in business is that the projects that truly change the world are 1 in 100. They don't look or feel much different from any other at the begining but when traction really does start to take off you know you have something right. I think from your description, you need to work at a startup where you have genuine impact. This is the only way you truly "feel" meaning. You might still build something that's reasonably worthless to humanity, but you will do it your way and take your own risks.
For me, S-expressions remove a whole layer of stuff to think about and remember. It normalizes everything.

And you get the bonus of being able to construct or parse code from within code, since the structure is so uniform and flat.
Every time this gets brought up, people forget that the patch had been sent to the openssl mailing list and someone said that it looked fine.

But here we have all the proponents of "distributions should never do any patch (and thus leave all the security issues open)". But they live in a fantasy world where all upstream authors reply within 3 minutes, fix issues within 30 minutes and of course backport the fix.
How do I know for sure they are free in the sense that I can use them in a book cover, broadcast television, print magazines? My advice is, always modify the icons a little yourself.
Does chatGPT have goals? WHY does it produce the output that it does? ;-)
> Not sure why this is being downvoted

Because it's comparing the wrong numbers. The article specifies what the 2 million refers to:

"Here's a 18 minute video of I talk I gave at XOXO in 2015 that'll teach you more than enough Arabic to not embarrass yourself in front of everyone who can read the Arabic alphabet to some degree. That's about 2 billion people, or 28% of the human population, and they will absolutely notice that you don't know what you're doing and laugh at you in languages you cannot even read."
Iron shortage threatens microbes key to food chain in Southern Ocean
Sure, advertising is collectively a multi-trillion dollar industry propelled largely by computer/data science, but it is still only a fraction of overall economic activity driven by advancements in data analysis.

The past couple decades have seen huge advancements in safety, reduced workplace injuries, auto injuries, etc. all driven in some part by analytics.

This sentiment that “all data analysis = advertising = evil” seems very reductive. It reminds me of all the comments I see from my technical peers about how “useless” other departments are such as HR and Sales, when they’re fundamental to a healthy business which pays the salaries of programmers.
For every octopus that reaches adulthood there are probably hundreds who get eaten or starve to death...