skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
100%. Especially in a tough, competitive job market like today's, having a credible portfolio of work, published content, and external validation makes a huge difference. It can take a good candidate to the top of the list, and when that list is a few dozen great applications, that's critical.

As a hiring manager I weigh a candidate's public presence at 10~15% of my initial decision, even more if it's exceptionally impressive. And I hear from other hiring managers that they view this similarly.

If you have good academic qualifications and a great record of past work experience ... guess what, there are several other candidates with great academic qualifications and an impressive work experience. Having a strong portfolio of public work can be what distinguishes you and gets you the opportunity to be invited to interview.

One important note: just having publicly available content isn't enough. It also has to be credible and impressive. Original articles that demonstrate deep expertise and are valuable to others. Serious codebase you wrote yourself or made significant contributions to. Real achievements on things like Kaggle competitions. I sometimes see people including a link to a "business card" type website with their photo and links to their social media or a blurb about themselves. That doesn't impress and won't make a difference.
Okay I’m focused on it
Bronze, right?

Brass is copper and zink.
The function checks for a type with assert: (assert (stringp arg)). But that check is a documented behavior which generates a predictable exception that the caller can detect and so can tell when that is suddenly missing.

No matter what consequence you give to the failed check, something can break when the check is taken away.

We could have a True(r) Scotsman's checked precondition like this

(unless (stringp arg)
(abort)) ;; bail the entire process image with abnormal status

If we check it like that, nobody will try to depend on the behavior within an application, in the way that my test program did.

It can still be a breaking change if the function is written that way, and then changed so the abort is taken away. Because the application can do this:

(defun my-stupid-abort ()
(strlen nil)) ;; this calls abort!

So now if the program relies on (my-stupid-abort) to abort, that will break; suddenly that function call returns zero and the process keeps going.

You really need:

;; ... ffi definitions here ...
(unless (stringp arg)
(acpi-power-off))

But again, dumb program can depend on (strlen nil) to power of the machine, which could be part of some critical system that breaks as a result of it not powering off.

Only a compile time check can do it, by preventing the program from existing. A program that never compiled and therefore was never deployed to its installation will never break.
Do you have any study or something supporting your claim that this/such a zoo's benefits outweigh the cons?

I am well aware of its worth avoiding harming animals. This includes capturing them, holding them against their will, using them, forcibly breeding them and killing them for profit and food.

I have also been to many zoos in my life but I only got this perspective by watching educational documentaries, reading up on the topic and, most importantly, applying simple reasoning, like: "Would we do this to humans? Would I volunteer to be in their situation for the rest of my life?"
I have a similar situation lots of online presence showcasing what needs to be showcased and I find nobody cares to take the time to check it.
Maybe it's a sign the folks with HN demographics are not into discussions?
I've never heard that "10% were captured and tortured" number before.

When trying to learn more about it I found a Snopes article at https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/the-price-they-paid/ discussing a letter going around titled "The Price They Paid" making the claim "Five [of the 56] signers were captured by the British as traitors and tortured before they died."

Snopes comments that while five of the signers were indeed captured, four appear to have been treated as normal prisoners of war after being captured in battle ("they were not tortured, nor is there evidence that they were treated more harshly than other wartime prisoners who were not also signatories to the Declaration") and the fifth - singled out for signing - was sent to prison.

Wikipedia comments that the fifth, Richard Stockton, was "intentionally starved and subjected to freezing cold weather. After nearly five weeks of brutal treatment, Stockton was released on parole with his health ruined." quoting a 1823 biography.

But was that torture? Reading the biography, at https://archive.org/details/biographyofsign03sand/page/100/m... , the issue appears to be that rich Mr. Stockton, used to living the high life, has been placed in the commoner jail rather than the comfy jail for rich people:

> On his removal to New York, he was ignominiously consigned to the common prison, and without the least regard for his rank, age, and delicate health, for some time treated with unusual severity.

As Congress described it, "that he hath been ignominiously thrown into a common gaol, and there detained".

And the common jail had horrible conditions. Quoting https://www.americanwars.org/american-prisoners-revolution/p... :

> "The New Jail was made a Provost Prison, and here officers and men of note were confined. At one time they were so crowded into this building, that when they lay down upon the floor to sleep all in the row were obliged to turn over at the same time at the call, 'Turn over! Left! Right!'

> "The sufferings of these brave men were largely due to the criminal indifference of Loring, Sproat, Lennox, and other Commissaries of the prisoners.

> "Many of the captives were hanged in the gloom of night without trial and without a semblance of justice.

It doesn't seem like any of the founders were tortured during the war.
> It was the common way to sanitize water

That’s mostly a myth.

> as the river was the source of clean water

Also mostly a myth. e.g. they weren’t drinking water from the Thames in medieval London for instance but from the Tyburn river. The case in most cities was that you had stream and springs which were legally protected and you poured your waste downstream into some major river. Obviously shit happened and water sources got polluted from time to time with terrible consequences but they still drank water all the time.
Systemctl –Force –Force Reboot
Yesterday I learned that is a thing:

systemctl --force --force reboot
You seem like a super intelligent guy in regards to your profession, though (and perhaps it is my own bias) also super contrarian. I'd genuinely always pick the person who is easy to work with than someone who might cause conflict - even if the latter was way smarter. Collaboration is key in teams.
Dark matter almost certainly doesn’t exist.

This hunt for it is very parallel to the hunt for the “ether” that Einstein showed didn’t exist. Curiously, the big insight of relativity was getting rid of two bad assumptions: the concept of “simultaneity” and the idea that gravitational acceleration is locally different from other acceleration.

I think the resolution to whatever dark matter is will likely make other fundamental problems in physics simpler as well.
Here are some of the (nearly free) and free alternatives
umami.is (open source MIT)
ackee.electerious.com (opensource MIT)
pirsch.io (open source AGPL3)
plausible.io (open source AGPL3)
usefathom.com (lite is open source)
simpleanalytics.com
splitbee.io

i have developed one for myself as well.
The market asked for these developers, and it got them. Their inexperience is not a symptom of a decided ineptitude or nonchalance towards CS fundamentals. It’s a case of getting what’s required for a job (web apps and crud backends) and not much more.
I guess a couple questions, if you don't mind:

1. Can you say how you find things like this? Just bulk scanning packages doing pattern matching heuristics?

2. I know it gets talked about every time, but I'd be interested in your perspective on how we (as an industry) could stop this kind of thing from happening. Is it as easy as blocking hooks from executing, or is there a better way forward? EDIT: Oh, just now seeing https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36869587 - so I'm assuming your answer is better sandboxing:)
Chillwave like this [0] or the original Ghost in the Shell soundtrack.

Edit: Also great to block out the environment is this [1], I donated 50€ years ago and still get to listen to everything.

[0] https://hellometeor.bandcamp.com/
[1] https://mynoise.net/
Ageism, racism, or any other generalization about people based on attributes beyond their control is discrimination.
"Introduction to Operating System Abstractions using Plan 9 from Bell Labs" is the best operating system book I've seen - and it works through Plan9: https://archive.org/details/plan9designintro It isn't quite real world as Plan9 was never used for serious production, but it is mind opening and doesn't wallow in minutiae.
Hi - If possible can you send me the invite too? Would really appreciate it. Thanks!
The size 12 contacts can do 15-25A. There's e.g. the Amphenol size 25 / 24 connection version, with 12 high current contacts and 12 smaller contacts.

There's not too many that have a variety of pin sizes and that are military qualified, though. And it's not cheap stuff, for sure.
Is this your personal opinion or the sad acknowledgement of humanity's negative impact on all non-human animals on this planet?
I always do and will spend as much time and attention as necessary to really understand what I'm looking at. A lot more than I do reading a CV.
Letting an AI Junior Dev Run GitHub Actions
We gave our AI juinor dev access to Github Actions to run linters and tests, so it can fix syntax errors and avoid undefined variables.

Check out our work at http://sweep.dev/
I always linked my gitlab profile in all my applications. If I had any code on it which might be relevant to the position I also mentioned it in my cover letter. Barely anyone ever mentioned my gitlab projects or ask things about it. Just this one guy, he was confused that my master thesis was stating I handed it in in 2021 and asked why i didn't have a job yet. Thanks to this man I found out there is a typo on the cover of my thesis, because i handed it in 2022.

It was kinda embarrassing, but I also felt joy that there are actually people out there who look at my stuff. The job didn't fit, but it was still a good experience.

So yeah: Investing a few minutes in writing up a personal readme which gets shown on my gitlab was worth it. I can recommend!
"This geofenced Level 3 system works at up to 40 miles per hour on select highways"

It's just worse cruise control, can't even go at highway speeds, there's about 1% chance you could use it.

Meanwhile FSD Beta is driving around cities the same as Waymo/Cruise are, except every city in North America.

We know a few things about AI, it needs lots of data, and lots of CPU. Tesla has 2 million cars with 8 cameras gathering data, and a top 10 in the world supercomputer.
you can't . It does not give you accurate details anyway even GA used to have lot of false positives i.e. it would show traffic from amazon where really amazon was getting used as corp proxy.
Backfired?

> While recycling campaigns can help limit what heads to the landfill

Oh, backfired in the US. Gotcha. Right. And because it didn't work out in the US, there's absolutely no way that any other country could have this shit figured out, right?

Landfills. Jesus.
I assume we could make CPUs stupid fast if we didn't have to worry about heat as much, though I'm not sure how much is lost to resistance vs operating transistors.
There are absolutely no positive benefits for people and especially children to visit zoos. Quite the opposite is the case:

By visiting zoos, children get taught at a very early age that it is OK to capture animals and use them against their will for amusement purposes / profit. They get presented the animals in a completely unnatural habitat. Most of these animals have developed mental disorders due to their situation.

Please feel free to read some of the research on this - there is plenty more:

References:
- https://www.researchgate.net/publication/261254556_Evaluatin...
- https://www.researchgate.net/publication/338313609_Psycholog...
it is not seeing any development i feel umami/pirsch is better alternative. umami is mit licensed.
Being a great developer requires written communication skills as much as it requires software development skills.

It's not bias to hire non-one-dimensionally. People are not cogs.
Police block Elon Musk’s rebrand of Twitter’s headquarters
Actually, I think the opposite can also happen. I've heard point-blank during a programming interview: "why do you want to work here...you're too creative."
Your sarcasm detector is broken.
Transluna.net a JSON Translation Tool
Transluna is a website that allows users to translate JSON to any language. It is a free and open-source website that can be accessed from any device with an internet connection. Transluna uses the Google Translate API to translate JSON, and it supports over 100 languages. The website is easy to use, and it can be used to translate JSON files, strings, and objects. Transluna is a useful tool for developers who need to translate JSON data.
I'd say that's what the README page is for that you can create and gets shown at the top of your profile.
I summarized my most important projects, the languages I know and some other simple facts about me. Mainly because i have a lot of "trash" on my gitlab which is just for personal use (I am always unsure if i should keep that public anyways)
It could be when they see that
https://git.gavinhoward.com/gavin/petty-tyrant-businesses
Anecdotal, but I've changed jobs 3 times in the last 6 years (oof) and in two of the interview processes they dug deep enough into my github (linked from the CV) to be able to ask tricky questions and have discussions.

Heck, as part of the most recent interview process I was asked to provide a code walkthrough of a part of a personal project of mine for two developers from the company I was interviewing for. It was fun actually.
There are valid reasons not to post code or blog. True for some.
Posted code or a blog may demonstrate knowledge and capability in the subject area for the potential hire. Also true for some.

Demonstrating professional skills shouldn't be discounted just because someone else doesn't.

It absolutely should make a difference if it's relevant even other people have reasons for not doing the same.

Hiring is selecting the right person and not selecting the wrong person. It is not about sorting all people 100% correctly into hire/no-hire groups.

A blog with code can tell a lot about a person. Do they understand the material? Can they write coherently about it? Can they target an appropriate level of audience with that? Maybe these can't be answered just by reading the blog, but it gives a lot to discuss in the interview process.

Some people want to have the exact same interview process between all people. People are different, though. Locking the interview down to a single process doesn't allow for the variety of skills out there to shine individually. If that avenue is through a portfolio or blog, it's fair game.
The Role of Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) in Maintenance Management
Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) are systematic, documented processes or sets of steps that guide routine operations and tasks. In the realm of maintenance management, SOPs play a pivotal role in ensuring that maintenance tasks are performed consistently, efficiently, and safely. They provide a standardized approach to critical procedures, ensuring that all maintenance personnel have clear and concise instructions, reducing variability in task execution. This not only prolongs equipment life and ensures safety but also promotes a predictable and efficient maintenance workflow. SOPs also aid in training new personnel, ensuring that they can quickly adapt to established procedures. In essence, SOPs are fundamental to achieving operational reliability, safety, and efficiency in maintenance management.
Hi Nick, this post was forwarded to me.

Good post, I remember those days well and this exposure we had to all that tech absolutely had its influences for many of us.

The real-world demo of that sms-soda machine was at the Stockholm offices, and one of several why I eventually moved out this way and have stayed.

Though razorfish stuff is pretty spot on except I'm pretty sure Razorfish didnt BUY disinfo, but funded and supported it, IIRC Gary and Richard retained ownership, that was a content play for RSUB, which was a wholly owned subsidiary of Razorfish.

...and coincidentally Gary is selling all the brand and contents right now.

ckn (Former IT Director @razorfish 1996-1999, Current Security Champion for R&D @Ericsson)
Decades of public messages have crowded out sustainable ways to manage waste
Discussions went from helpful and a personals experiences, to insulting and criticizing people. Not friendly or fun.
'USA supplying arms for Putin's war machine' would be the accusation if legacy media standards were universally applied
People don't realise how easy it is to get to top 1% in most fields, if you are sufficiently intelligent (say 110-120). Most intelligent people don't get there because they are either not willing to do the work or don't know how honest work looks like or they put artificial barriers before themselves.

And even if you are less intelligent you still can get there, you will just have to put in more work.

I think of those, the ability to put in honest work is the biggest limitation of most people. I like to compare honest work to Allies fighting World War II -- doing whatever is necessary to win, wherever it leads you. No plan is stupid if it works, there is nothing shameful about trying and failing. There will be setbacks because life is not fair and on short time scales the rewards are never assured. But what makes winners different from losers is what they do in response. If they can persevere, through their setbacks, experience, hard work, the focus they put in they will gain the knowledge that lets them win on the long time scale. You lose only if you lose faith in yourself and quit.
You can head to Wikipedia to quickly check what happen to the company beside browser abandoning Presto and moving to Chromium: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opera_(company)

Personally, I consider this switch to Chromium solidified Chrome and derivatives dominance - with Presto-based Opera there was always a choice. It's also a shame they didn't released the code of this engine.
Looking at your blog, I think you're such a specialist that it's going to be hard to find a good fit. (For example, only being willing to write code in C.) Most people are more flexible.
Is incineration really that much better? You’re trading off one kind of pollution for another: toxic emissions and toxic byproducts that still have to be disposed of in some way…

One way or another, countries have to deal with non-recyclable, non-compostable waste, and all solutions to it are pretty nasty.
If boiling is enough what’s the point of “wasting” grain if your only goal is to make the water safe to drink?

Also medieval authorities to great effort to keep water sources unpolluted with outright draconian punishments for those who did that. Of course they didn’t always succeed.. but still.
Financial media doesn't write for us, it writes for Big Money. It helps keeping prices down just as much as it helps pumping.

When dumb money (that's an actual term used) starts to FOMO into cryptos, it's always because it got hyped by the media ... and when that happened, smart money cashes out, crashing the price. The FOMO is always caused by media and this must be true, because otherwise these people would have already known to invest.

One can not ever trust a source that doesn't actually write for its audience.

There are enough lemmings out there, who do as some perceived authority tells them to, that it's legitimate to say that mainstream financial media controls the flow of money of millions. This isn't even restricted to financial media. Regular newspapers have the same effect. Sometimes it just takes a simple oneliner:

"Bitcoin crushed its AllTimeHigh!"

Tangentially related: Jim Cramer, a Big Money shill.
What kind of tools do you build? I'd be interested in your opinion on what are the preconditions for tools to profitable.
> So, basically, people aren't satisfied when Mozilla is pure/idealist, and they aren't satisfied when it's compromising/pragmatic ("If they do that, I might as well keep using Chrome!").

I suspect those are mostly different groups. And my personal take is that Mozilla did indeed make that calculation... and proceeded to sacrifice the die-hard core userbase in order to get wider appeal, but they managed to not actually get the wider audience to buy in either, leaving them with nothing.
> That most European countries have a whitelist of names was one of the more shocking parts of moving here.

I believe this is very much wrong.
You need to distinguish between filtering and interviewing.

Most interviewers will not discuss your public work because they want to be unbiased and have the same discussion with multiple candidates without any other factors other than your performance in the interview itself influencing their assessment. They are doing the right thing.

Where a portfolio can help you is in getting you from application to being invited to interview, which can be a challenge when there are many applications for a role.

In some cases it might also influence a hiring manager's or hiring committee's decision as a tie-breaker between you and another candidate who did just as well as you did in interview, but I believe that's less common.
Before the Industrial Revolution they certainly weren't, as the weather wouldn't have permitted them, at least in Europe. Not that much work to be done outside the house during winter-time, outside bringing some wood from a forrest nearby and maybe a little hunting.

Once people began leaving the peasant life for the factory life (many of them because they were forced to) things changed for the worse in that respect.
Based on our experience with, well, everything, even if local build is currently possible, we KNOW it's going to be removed later on.
Any Marketplaces for Agents?
Curious if there are any marketplaces for agents? I would like to submit one I've written that performs well on PDFs (https://github.com/mr-gpt/PDFAgent) but struggling to find agent marketplaces to submit it to.
Wouldn't you just interrupt the fermentation process before it gets that high? Or add less nutrients for fermentation?
I would recommend not using it at first. If things start to get problematic you can start requiring a trusted environment for some things. For example you could save a user's highscore even if they are on an untrusted device, but it just won't show up on a global leaderboard.