skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Software does not have to be wildly unpredictable if you do good estimation work up front. Being good at this is very important if you work for clients that have a specific budget or are doing fixed bids for software. The main thing is that you have to take estimation very seriously. You have to put experienced people on the estimation task, and you have to spend a lot of time on it to get it right, but doing it right can pay huge dividends. A few strategies that have worked very well for me:

1. When doing estimates, estimate hierarchically and break down every task until the leaf nodes are 4 hours or less. If the leaf nodes are a week of effort, that means that you don't yet understand fully what the task entails. If you don't know what the task entails, it is very difficult to get an accurate estimate.

2. Maintain a database of various projects and features, and use them for comparison purposes. If you know how long something actually took in the past, you can much more accurately how long it will take to do something similar again.

3. Include specific time for various types of "overhead": meetings, code review, writing tests, debugging, making presentations, etc.

4. Derisk ahead of time things that are truly unpredictable. Doing something in a brand new programing language or framework, training an ML model on a new type of data, working on datasets of unknown quality, etc. For those you need to estimate out a project to determine feasibility and generate an estimate.

The main thing is that this is clearly not impossible. Years ago I got really interested in the Apollo program as an example of bringing in perhaps the most complex and risk-laden project ever attempted, on time. One of the things that clearly stands out about that project was that there was huge derisking happening first. At one level you had the Mercury and Gemini programs that were figuring out human spaceflight generally, and docking with Gemini, and also things like the first stage engines of the Saturn V were already in development in the mid fifties.
Spoiler: PFAS usually (but not exclusively) around large population clusters.

The Pacific Northwest of the US, aside from Portland, is looking pretty good, though.
> There’s no metric of success for non-commercial ones. They simply exist as long as at least two users are using them to communicate.

Trying to get social media users out of "big number go up" mindset is really, really hard. Twitter has something like 450 million active users, and a lot of them are miserable with it, especially the heavier users. But if you try to suggest maybe just not using it, it seems like it is a "foregone conclusion" that it is the only way to go, as if there's no possible way to just do something else. Why go somewhere where you can get 100 meaningless "like" button clicks when you can go on twitter and get tens of thousands of meaningless "like" button clicks?

The worse part is that this mindset is a self-fulfilling prophecy, because users that think this way don't think it's worth bothering with anything that has less than a hundred million users. Naturally, this helps ensure that most of the growth will continue to go to just a handful of highly popular networks, since they're the only ones worth bothering with. While counts of users are meaningless, there are some knock-on effects to having most people believe alternatives are worthless. For people who produce art or videos or other forms of content, it means that you pretty much have to use the mainstream platforms, because a large amount of people are unwilling to use anything else even to follow people they're interested in, which also depresses your ability to grow and succeed. While monetary success and internet fame should absolutely never be the goal of social media or the internet, the fact remains that if you are an artist on the Internet, you are not going to get as many commissions or as much business opportunity if you're not on huge platforms like Twitter, and that means that the financial sustainability of a lot of internet creative works depends on a few tech companies.

But that's kind of the thing. That's basically WHY federated networks are good and we should want them to succeed. Indeed, it is true that there is no meaningful success metric for a social network. However, the "success" of the Fediverse is a bit different: I think it "succeeds" when it becomes viable to publish on ActivityPub as a complete alternative to needing to use Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. But of course, that's not a constant value. It's not some constant amount of users. It depends on many factors. However, it will be pretty obvious when you see it, because it will come in the form of seeing people do healthy business over just ActivityPub.

I empathize if this sounds arbitrary or pointless, but I think a lot of people don't grasp the impact of this. For all of its flaws, this would effectively mean that you could go back to running your own damn sites, because they can participate in ActivityPub just the same as anyone else.

ActivityPub could fill the void left by the downturn in popularity of RSS, and then some.
https://jay.jvf.cc
> Some communities will find a new home on Mastodon or on Lemmy. Some will go elsewhere

I wish protocols like mastodon or nostr would allow to federate all of these.

I am not part of any "social network community" that I know of (apart from maybe HN) but I still occasionally use twitter, mainly as a substitute for blogs of the people I'd like to hear from, and get some comedy. They are from diverse communities and I certainly won't join everything and check everything.
If it doesn't do anything - if it doesn't matter, then why care?

I mean this quite literally. Is it worth expending any time or energy on changing habits and tooling when it doesn't matter, and will probably never matter?
Have you ever played video games once?
> I could’ve also generated as many valid government approved drivers licenses as I wanted to for anyone of my choosing.

This is a good example of how identity verification is mostly useless in existing systems like code signing. What value is being added if there’s no guarantee the signer’s identity isn’t fake? We might as well be self-signing at that point and I would argue that signing with a domain based identity (@example.com) is better than identity verification.

For example, I want code signed by @example.com, with the GitHub repo at github.com/@example.com, and the website at example.com. It’s time to get rid of all the ambiguity and (matching) handle chasing we have to endure to (try to) mitigate that ambiguity. Domain verified identities would be a huge step forward for good actors that want to (optionally) consolidate all their web assets and accounts under a single, matching, verified namespace.
> Post-war Europe is a result of the Marshall Plan. In today’s dollars, the Plan invested close to $130 billion in Europe to help rebuild infrastructure, restore production, and generally support economic development.

To "rebuild", is not the right word, the intention was to build the EU and open up the market and borders for US goods, including military bases to further push away the Soviets

There was a lot of US propaganda during that time

Some interesting links:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2004/sep/25/usa.secondworl...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eYVhn5_ADUA

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Coal_and_Steel_Commun...
Bottled water is typically tap water filled with microplastics, so that’d be worse for you.
Wow! This is exactly what I was talking about. Didn't know it had a name!
Fading? Vs. Linux, maybe. Mac OS is still a bad platform for games.
At the end of the day I do not believe this is a national matter in the first place, No where in the Constitution does congress have the authority to regulate drinking water in the first place, outside the bastardization of the commerce clause

So it should be left up to state regulators to set what they feel are the best for their states.

EPA could play a role in ensuring One state does not pollute another state, but there are and should be limits on what is a "federal issue" even if people today seem to think everything should be under the umbrella of the federal government.
Honestly I can't remember the last time I had an issue with SELinux on any of my desktop systems. I've had to work past some issues with systems I manage for work, but those weren't too bad to deal with.
Quit academia and go work in the industry? $190k/year is not remarkable there.
This is obviously a personal preference thing, but I just want to mention a counterexample that I find the Python docs incredibly frustrating, and the worst of any language I've used. Going by the 4docs methodology, I am usually looking for reference docs, and Python seems to only have tutorials, even when they call them references.

The most common reasons I check the docs are because I want to know all the functions available for an object, or what type of parameters a function expects, or what a function returns. None of these are straightforward in the Python docs, and you often have to read several paragraphs of text that may or may not have the answer.

Here's one example: https://docs.python.org/3/library/urllib.request.html#module...

What type is cafile supposed to be? You have to ctrl-f or read a bunch to find out that it doesn't even say. I guess you're supposed to assume it's a string from the context (or is it some kind of File object?). If you work primarily in Python and you're familiar with the conventions this might be obvious, but if you're not a frequent Python user and don't immediately remember if there's a special Path type or not, this is annoying.

What does that function return? There are three paragraphs describing the potential return types in the middle of a very long docstring, they aren't highlighted in any way even though this is pretty fundamental information, and they aren't comprehensive. I might need to click a couple links to figure out what exactly this function is giving me.

Here's another example: https://docs.python.org/3/library/datetime.html#datetime.dat...

Is timestamp a string or a number? Again you're just supposed to already know the Python conventions, or go do trial-and-error in the REPL.

These issues are pervasive for me on docs.python.org - it always feels way too verbose while lacking basic details. Every time I visit a page I wish there were a simple quick reference table at the top listing all the functions and their types before it dives into the minutiae.
The way you get around this type of crap is by diving deep, and when you think you've gotten deep enough, go further. Academia, for all it's faults, is a fantastic way around the bullshit you get with industry hype, by mere virtue of open peer scrutiny. You want to understand whether the current "AI" hype will last? Research and understand the theory and academics behind it - therein lies your truth, and if it doesn't align with what you see in industry, you know it's grift. Hint: it's usually grift.
https://whoisnnamdi.com/

About 50 longer-form essays over the last ~5 years, mostly about venture capital, software, and developer productivity.

Some interesting Hacker News discussions on a few:
Remote Software Developers Earn 22% More Than Non-Remote Developers (377 points) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22935476

Why We Will Never Have Enough Software Developers (366 points) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31724942
Recurrent networks are exponential. They also blow up and decay exponentially. So this is not necessarily worse than rnns
Author here. That's a good point. I'll add output examples.
I would like a more strict version of this article, "Stop trying to make social networks".
Disclaimer: I'm not a climate change denier, I think we should stop burning fossil fuels ASAP.

Though I'm one to question a lot of things and this is my 2 cents. How the hell we know this current changes are completely abnormal? I read about some weird climate anomalies centuries ago and of course there's a lot of evidence that current events are completely abnormal but one question always come to my mind.

What if we're wrong? What if we're being too cooky thinking that by having looked into some evidence that made sense, we're not completely wrong here and current events are just part of a cycle in the planet weather?

Again, I'm questioning but I don't need you guys to present me the proof, I'm aware of it. Just questioning if we're not wrong all along and are here destroying our mental health for nothing. Seems like even by the 1940s standards our generation is being constantly swarmed with problems which we can't fix, which are causing all sort of mental issues due to the complete stress we live in.

This being said, the switch from fossil fuels should be done ASAP, even if we're wrong and it's not causing issues in the environment, they are for sure causing health issues.
Linking to it works better than linking to Twitter, in fact, as of this week (Twitter no longer shows replies unless you're logged in...)
I don't see how this is dissonant to you? I will occasionally eat beef, I'll never eat octopus.

I helped my farm friends raise calves for 4H in junior high. They're dumb as bricks, don't think they knew they were food even on the way to slaughter. So on the whole, as long as you take care of them, they enjoy life and you enjoy a burger, minimal suffering.

If something is intelligent and understands it's going to be food, and that causes it to suffer for its entire life, it tips the scales quite significantly. You already live by this assumption if you are vegan; you choose to eat things with no brain over things with a brain. Being an asshole over people drawing the same line as you but in a slightly different spot just makes you sound like the fool.
It's hard to overlook the role of institutional capital in shaping the landscape of nearly everything.

As a teen I grinded for a few months building a b2b SaaS. A competitor launched a better version for free. The founder had a Harvard MBA and used VC funds to build this marketing tool.

Growing a product organically puts you at a disadvantage to companies that can ignore market fundamentals for years at a time. And if you do manage to grow, acquisitions that amount to life changing generational wealth is hard to ignore - and it's not like the future of your product is guaranteed.

Wall street needs returns. Tech is just the first to adapt to the loot-box economy but it'll spread. Anything that can be turned into a subscription model will be. Air-bags to air conditioning. We will own nothing and like it.
This'll come out in discovery, but I didn't see anything particularly crazy in the complaint.

I didn't see any examples of economic posts at issue, despite it being in the summary.

And the parody accounts seemed to be focused either on (1) non-public figures, like Biden's granddaughter or (2) have resulted in sincere confusion, such as when Twitter actually asked the CDC if a 'parody' account was Fauci's real handle.
My biggest issue with Threads is that search only searches profiles.

What was Twitter’s “magic” to me was that search was for tweets.

So you could hear about a live event happening and in near-time find information about it and people who were there or knowledgeable about the event.

My first exposure to this was the Atlanta Gas Shortages in 2008 and it was when the hashtag really came into its prime as a way to quickly find relevant content.

Threads has none of that. Try searching for the “Tour De France”. This morning when I did that I only got two profiles. This kills discoverability and the ability to follow the zeitgeist.

If Threads changes search to index content then it could work. But until then it’s just bland with its attempt at using an algorithm to spoon feed you content without your ability to control what you want to see.

Shameless link to the thread where I first put these thoughts down: https://www.threads.net/t/CuW77iEuquK/?igshid=MzRlODBiNWFlZA...
Can you share with me if you have found any really good ones?
There’s also the time when the surface was molten. The day the moon was created was probably a scorcher :)

That day might be the candidate for the first day earth existed given it gained quite a bit of mass. (Given the theory the earth-moon system was created by the collision of a couple of planetary bodies)
This sounds about right to my dilletante's cognition.
That style has a name, and you’re not alone in disliking it:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_Memphis
Yes that's what I was intending to say. So I agree with you, that the idea that a user who prefers mobile first being niche is highly specific to the West.
The ridiculously cheap one Technology Connections just covered now sells for $500.

Welcome to inflation.
Mixture-of-Experts with Instruction Tuning Wins for Large Language Models
But they can't find a stolen bicycle with a gps tracker as the gps information 'may not be accurate'.
Similar for phones.
/(am in europe)
My bias is Anti-government. The best government is the smallest government, and I believe in strict interpretation of Article 1 Sec 8 powers.

That said, where am I wrong, for the last several decades all the Democrats do is talk about how the Rich do not pay their "fair share" never defining what a fair share is.. and how we always need to tax them more...

I have also seen it Move from "millionaires and billionaires" to just billionaires as many of the Democrats in congress entered the millionaire club
If you accept running Java, the Apache Tika is extremely good at parsing content (https://tika.apache.org/)
Most of HN would always assume you have to compete and capture the market, no matter what you're talking about.
Study shows smartwatches could detect Parkinson's early
If those filters are to be subsidized, we're back at the impasse of "how is this funded?". If the filters are not subsidized, whoever approves the campaign will get kicked out for making the disadvantaged drink dirty water and serving the rich who own the filter manufacturers.

/s, I think, but I'm not sure.
There are some Christians who don't recognize Mormonism or some other groups that call themselves Christian as Christians due to theological differences, mainly about the Trinity IIRC.

As for Abrahamic faiths, the obvious criteria to decide if it is Abrahamic or not is to see if they claim to worship the God of Abraham, which a quick Wikipedia check indicates they all do. What criteria do you believe correct and includes Judaism and Christianity but not any other?
> The only change that I've disliked has been requiring being logged in to read tweets.

Yeah, fair, I agree that this is not good. It makes the prospect of posting news/updates on twitter worse because you can't link it externally, it reduces your reach.

> One complaint I've seen from a lot of people is that they dislike the tweets they see in replies now because of the blue check prioritization but I'd imagine this really depends on the type of content you follow on twitter

This is also fair but it doesn't bother because I think it will be the direction all social media sites must go. I think the amount of bots on the internet will grow beyond all reason and we'll need some sort of filter to be sure that we're actually interacting with humans. Maybe there's another solution than a paywall, but I can't think of one.
My "basis" is that reporting on the labor market in it's current form is flawed as the Fed themselves have stated that it's a lagging indicator on numerous occasions.

So is the fed wrong, or is this another sensationalized article in an attempt to garner clicks?
I signed up out of curiosity, but just like my instagram/tiktok/Mastadon/whetever accounts, they are just... there.

People like me count as a signup, but active users after the hype dies down will matter more.

I stick to youtube even for shorts, because its content/recommendations are much better than tiktok/instagram reels (I could spend time time curating it, but why other when Youtube has already done it for me?)

Same for twitter, already curated with multiple lists setup for me to browse depending on topic, I am not going to do the same on threads/bluesky/mastadon, ain't nobody got time for that.

Something drastic will have to happen for me to switch, but it's unlikely.

Then again I am in the wrong demographic. I guess its the age group thing, I am in my mid-30's, a Gen-whatever we are called.

New kids probably who are hyped on instagram and tiktok are probably already telling us OK boomer and making leet memes on threads, and we will just look on in confusion.

I will believe Threads is real when people start to ratio each other on it.

____

Prophecy: usage will split and depending on the social/cultural/commercial sphere, people will start posting on the relevant platform. If you regularly post on instagram, you will append threads into your workflow.

News twitter will NOT be following to threads. Food twitter will, and stuff like that.
Surely you've met people who were genuinely intelligent and accomplished who still held on to dumb beliefs?
Also curious what this refers to. Anyone find a crbug?
> They want thousands of strangers to praise them.

And the irony is that the people who think this way tend to be less likely to have anything worthwhile to offer.
The second fridge listed on Home Depot is $1499
1. I have to keep notifications disabled on twitter now, because they keep suggesting truth-social type content. Regardless of your politics, regardless of who you follow.

2. It’s a social network, and other people leaving changes it. I followed a handful of interesting people to mastadon, but it’s not everyone and now my follow list is fractured. Neither thread nor mastadon solve this, but it’s something new caused by Elon.

3. You can not give blue check marks any deference but the platform does. Now more than ever.

4. All these crazy shenanigans are tiring. The 600 tweet a day limit, Disabling moderation, banning mastadon links, etc. they make twitter unstable.
The real story is that the only way Rockstar could combat their cheat-broken economy was by reducing the purchasing power of the money that had been generated effortlessly by cheat-engine and 'menu' users since the first day of release.

I never understood the idea of selling in-game currency in a game with such terribly weak book-keeping. It happens in MMO style games because someone is keeping their finger on the economy. Rockstar never once treated GTA Online that way.

There was a time (maybe still, I don't play the game) where cheats would cycle through every existing lobby and spawn millions of dollars into the inventory (or on top of physically) every character in the lobby.

Now I see that Rockstar is slowly pivoting from the cash sales into car sales -- gee, wonder why. Spawning cars is less common but still fairly easy; one imagines this is coordinate with work that would make spawning cars less easy -- but maybe that's too charitable here.

Sucks for the players that haven't cheated their way into owning EVERYTHING (which has been trivial for years and years just by being the random recipient of hacker money), and yet another boon for the cheaters who now find themselves with even more exclusive treasure.