skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's a completely different topic, separated by 7 years.

Back to what you said:

> those stories about him "being stranded" are bullshit

He really really was stranded. He had no passport, and the only place he could go without one would send him directly to prison without even a right to raise his defence of "public good" in his trial.

So unless you're saying "he wasn't stranded, he could choose to go to prison forever", that's not really true.

And as we later found out, the US would force even diplomatic planes to land and be searched for Snowden.

Sweden was playing US lapdog with Assange, so presumably would be the case for Finland too, even if not NATO at the time.
If AI destroys anyone it would be the artists, since labels with distribution networks could use it to create content without ever needing to pay anyone.

The Internet should have taught us that if there is a portal the owner of that portal and the network effect around it has all the power.

Look at Twitter. Half its users hate its new management and spend much of their time there complaining about it, but they are still using it. Why? Because people are still using it.
Even in lower-stakes communication it's a good practice, I figured this out early in my career when I was doing tech support.

In e-mails, I noticed a lot of customers didn't register much beyond the first couple sentences. Or they would react to some point of curiosity or contention about the explanation without taking the steps forward or providing the information we were asking for.

In real-time conversations it meant the machines were idle during the explanation of why we were going to do the next step, when often there would be plenty of time to explain why while we were in the process. (In the days of dial-up and RAM measured in megs instead of gigs, even "open a browser and go to our website" could take a minute)

It's a huge time-saver. You want that little excerpt in a pop-up mail notification to have the call to action displayed. Especially when you need them to take ten seconds to provide some information. Seeing the call to action immediately might bump you up in their multitasking queue whereas they're more likely to sit on it if they see the opening sentence of some exposition pop up.
The administrative bloat and incompetence is why they're in the position to cut academic programs in the first place. You seem to think the tail is wagging the dog.
Yes. I switched away from Cloudflare DNS and the reCaptcha issue went away.
More general hazard: Treating engineers as fungible resources
So does Twitter, are you gonna complain about every tweet link posted here?
> China is their own worst enemy

They truly are. They could make anything, yet they choose to make junk and attempt to scam everyone at any opportunity. It's a surprising immoral country for someone who view themselves as being on the moral high horse. And they know that they are a nation of scammers, because what do they buy when visiting Europe? Baby formula and designer brands, because they don't trust the stores in China. Seems like a weird way to run a country.

China continues to insist that the rest of the world respect it and its culture, while making zero effort into understanding or respecting any other culture. Why we keep listing to the CCP is beyond me, the west should have cut it's loses more than a decade ago.
Apparently they rank 139 in CS.

Barring significant open-source contributions or stellar leetcode skillz, the path to an entry-level tech job in the valley or NYC will be a challenge.

I went to a top-25 CS program in a flyover state without tech jobs, and only the top 5-10% of the graduating class made it to a major tech hub within 5 years. Granted, there a personal reasons to not leave, but still.
I don’t find mine useless, but I focus a lot on prioritizing and un-blocking people. The tasks we have are usually very different between engineers though so I can see why someone would find that useless time.
A new memory-safe SAT solver for package management in Rust (port of libsolv)
They hurt recently phased out the sulfur fuel, and it's a whole ironic thing, it's actually causing Temps to go up because the sulfur clouds were actually helping us.

https://youtu.be/dk8pwE3IByg

It's like that whole global dimming thing with con trails after 9/11 but with ship trails.
How about: every internet router should have 10TB of space for household member data and an API to request personal details like medical data.

May soon be commercially viable.
10000+

Everyday

Many times researching things I get hundred tabs open, and no time to collate the relevant results, I just bookmark everything into unsorted

Then on repeated visits I give them some tags

Also use extension to highlight bookmarks
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/bookmark-high...

Any kind of better bookmark management is definetly welcome
So what? It's not like you can realistically expect a public sitting surface to be clean anyway. So long as you don't leave a mess I don't care.
There is also a dynamic aspect to that: the original team who started the startup has battle scars, they used to take risk, but now they have a natural incentive to be more conservative, preserve the way things were done.

Rands has a great article on that topic well worth reading: https://randsinrepose.com/archives/stables-and-volatiles/

It matches my experience with startups experiencing challenges as they grow.
> The first of which is ridiculous beyond description

What about working to save the planet from the very much real, devastating effects of climate change do you find “ridiculous beyond description”?
Jack Ma said that China should "not worry about financial systemic risks" and warned about "Collateralization with a pawnshop mentality" https://interconnected.blog/jack-ma-bund-finance-summit-spee... because Ant Financial was making uncollateralized loans on a huge scale, something they were only able to do because they weren't subject to the same regulations as established financial institutions, and this was about to change.

With Ant Financial being just another regulated lender, there was no way to justify their inflated valuation and by proxy the valuation of parent company Alibaba. Hence the sharp decrease in stock price.

So I think you have your causality backwards: Alibaba didn't lose value because of Jack Ma's warning, rather the "problem" with China's regulatory system he was warning about was that it was going to make Alibaba lose value.

(And invoking his advice when another financial systemic risk is rearing its head might not be the most appropriate.)
I lived in a small Rust Belt city, dropped out of college, waited tables, built a restaurant management app, sold it, by the grace of God made it to a FAANG.

Everything I've learned and surprised me over 7 years there fits into exactly what you said, "[smart cloistered people without exposure to costs] often approach debate by assuming everyone else is braindead, rather than puzzling through conflicting information"

It costs so, so, much, especially when you throw in the rush everyone is in.
Yes, for example it costs billions to tool up an automated autotive plant
There are more important problems to solve when trying to boot up a self-sustaining startup or project than rewriting your app in a different technology for no apparent reason.
I'd love to hear more about what kinds of carrots you were fed coming in from a non-STEM background. For me, the one I can remember was a family friend recommending I stick to an engineering field (mechanical, electrical, civil, etc.) rather than CS because "there was much more money to be made in those fields". Thankfully I stuck to what I liked, which was coding.
Well, should be capped by life of the author.
Nevertheless, this doesn't sound sustainable for a university to fund programs for this limited purpose.
So? What’s your point?
I’ve always wondered if the idea that life originated on Earth might not be the last geocentrism.

Edit: I’ve always found this fascinating:

https://phys.org/news/2013-04-law-life-began-earth.html
You know it’s a good article about China when this starts appearing in the comment section.
So they reserve the TRANSFERABLE right to train AI on your content but promise thay THEY will not train AI on your data. That seems like a pretty empty promise to me.
its fundamentally wrong to treat your employees learning process as a long term investment that you maintain ownership of. paying someone for two months to come up to speed is an investment. if they become productive in your environment, that investment is very quickly paid off. if they don't, then your at-risk investment didn't pay off. the return is the work that you got from them afterwards. you don't get to claim ownership of what's in their head.

if someone gives you two years of good work and moves on because you aren't giving them what _they_ need, or because their father got ill, you still came out way ahead. you should be a human and accept that.
Europe tried this with Russia (fossil gas) and still ended up in a bad spot. Trade is important and can be beneficial, but one should still prepare for war if peace is desired. The mental models of some nation state leaders deviates from what one would consider logical. They won’t hesitate to burn what has been built for their goals.
Wikipedia defines panspermia as living organisms being spread throughout the universe. An unreviewed paper about carbonic acid in outer space does not directly have a connection to panspermia. The topic of panspermia is being pushed by the article.
The Science is settled. We ARE stardust! I’m going to grab my boyfriend and get down to the local craft brewery to celebrate!
> Talking to users is for PMs, silly!

I particularly don't understand why an organization would hire a PM for an internal infra team. It's like hiring a PM for Go to design the features of Go. Funny enough, executives from Google love to do this kind of things. I'd thought Google's infra engineers would be perfectly capable of driving the features of their infra services.
That's a great taxonomy of foot-guns! As to how they can be avoided, I can only describe some of what has worked for us so far, with the caveats that we are still small (~60 employees); that none of this is formulaic or perfect; and that there are many reasons why what we have done might not work for others -- or may not work for us as we get larger! That said, here is some of what has broadly worked for us:

1. Writing-intensive hiring process

This is controversial for some, but I have the personal advantage of having previously made The Worst Hire of All Time -- one that forced me to accept that using resume + interviews as the sole (or even primary) criteria left me extraordinarily vulnerable to Problem Engineers. We ask candidates not just for a portfolio of their work (and analysis samples and so on), but also ask them values-based questions[0] -- the answers to which are astonishingly revealing. Our review of candidate materials constitutes the bulk of our hiring process.

2. Transparent compensation

Another one that is surely controversial, but in my professional experience, an amazing number of anti-patterns arise from the scramble compensation -- and usually not for itself per se (that is, not for the marginal dollars), but rather for what it represents in terms of validation, power and so on. Making compensation transparent forces some measure of organizational health -- to say nothing for the bright light it shines on any institutionalized inequities.

3. Uniform compensation

One that even more people will find controversial. ;) When we wrote our blog piece on this 2+ years ago[1], we assumed that it wouldn't last as long as it has -- but it honestly is more important to us now than ever before. Especially as we go to expand the team with roles that are often less well compensated (e.g., customer-facing roles), the fact that we explicitly compensate them as well as everyone else allows us to attract extraordinary folks to the company. We still don't know if this is going to last forever, but we have seen so many incredibly benefits from it that we have stopped burdening it with asterisks.

4. Very, very careful hiring

We are deliberately lean. We add people to the company very carefully, and we have no one inside the company who is incentivized by the size of their team (see #3, above!). When we add people, we keep a sharp eye on versatility and intrinsic motivation. This allows us to do more with relatively fewer people -- helping us avoid the foot-guns you've outlined. That said, it is also not without side-effects: a consequence of this is that we are extraordinarily selective, which means we have many more people that want to work at Oxide than we can reasonably accommodate -- and it can be really, really hard to turn down someone who you think will likely be successful!

[0] https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Xtofg-fMQfZoq8Y3oSAKjEgD...

[1] https://oxide.computer/blog/compensation-as-a-reflection-of-...
Great question!

For me a large part of publishing is getting to hear the thoughts of the clever people in my readership.

If I'm obviously wrong, anyone can point that out to me, but if I'm only subtly wrong, it takes popularity to have the right person read the article and correct me.
> This is essentially written by bitter ex or current employees.

I imagine if you worked at a place for over a decade, then saw it being run into the ground at speed by people earning 5-10x your salary, some bitterness may emerge.
> Most people pirate to get stuff for free. If everything was cheaply, easily available, piracy would exist at similar numbers.

As the other poster mentioned, the music piracy scene today is a shadow of its old self. There has never again been a private tracker as vast and ambitious as what.cd. Seed numbers are down on lots of remaining trackers. I logged into Soulseek recently (which used to be the obsessive music anorak’s filesharing network) and I can’t find all kinds of things that were widely shared a decade ago.

A lot of this is due to the rise of Spotify as a more convenient means of listening. It is also due to so many young people today using their phone as their sole device, which is not very suitable for torrenting and other types of filesharing.
Startups lose their spark when they either:

1. Go from "more to gain" to "more to loose" thinking.

2. Growth slows and either ethics or vision are sacrificed.

Both of these are natural, and the people will have to change. In most companies, eventually growth stops (at least growth driven by the original vision). Eventually you really do have more to lose than gain. The signal these transitions are happening can be spotted by proliferation of guardrails and process controls, and a cultural change towards risk aversion. The drive is to make everything predictable, controlled and safe. The focus is no longer on acceleration, and is on momentum.
if that's truly the case then i imagine there might have been problems with how wvu has been operating, and this may be an overhaul to remove bloat.
They reserve the TRANSFERABLE right to train AI on your content but promise thay THEY will not train AI on your data. That seems like a pretty empty promise to me
# TODO remove this

is my all time favorite.
Are you being sarcastic? To grow to 50 people in 7 years is probably only for the top 5% successful startups.
> These can mostly be resolved by the tool having more awareness of the program structure, understanding the intention of the change, and knowing how to produce a valid result.

If you have a three-way merge tool which does all these things, you can use it with Git.

> Version control would be much more useful if the tools kept track of semantic changes in a project, instead of line-based differences without any awareness of the content.

So the good news for you is that Git doesn't track any differences at all. Every commit stores a set of files, the "index". There is no limitation on how smart your merge tooling can be, as long as it can work with three artifacts: the ancestor code, and the two parallel derivatives of it to be merged.

The idea that a version control must track detailed differences is false, and a bad requirement. Additionally, if the internal tracking representation has follow different syntaxes of umpteen languages, that's a hyperbad requirement.
This is a particular unique course offering introduction on ML compilation and deployment :)
That's an...optimistic point of view, especially given the departments being threatened are not the source of the university's financial troubles and this "transformation" process doesn't promise to address the things which are.
Looks like an amazing place for remote workers. Sadly, the internet connection is probably dogshit.
I would add:

4. We need plausible deniability in case something goes really wrong with the choices we've made so let's hire consultants to validate our decisions.
I'm curious about why an article from 2004, is being discussed by so many people at this current point in time?
What proportion of users had a primary telephone contact? I think you'd need to be skipping over a lot of users (those without a primary telephone contact) to hit the pathological case that's implied.
https://docs.microblog.pub/ is intended to be a single person instance/blog but the reality is that I am more interested in consuming posts than making them, so I just use the built in rss feeds to follow people I like https://mstdn.social/@feditips/108357998963885456
The incentive structures in science encourage publishing, not novelty, and the ones who are best at bringing fame to their institution (and thus grant money) are not the scientists early in their career.
I heard a story of high up executives stepping into an Uber, only to discover that the driver was actually an employee for their firm.
Well, this is unofficial "option" of older taxis. I've few times hear, that for some not too large amount of money, driver could allow couple to stay alone in taxi for few minutes.
Do your your kids watch Skibidi Toilet?
I really can't recommend Drew Neil's resources enough. The vimcasts¹ series are great if you're the sort of person who likes videos to learn with, and both his books are excellent²³. [The books may appear to be getting a little long in the tooth, but their contents are still very applicable to today's usage.]

My own "trick" for improving my vim usage was to start mapping things to <Nop> that have better replacements, it is a great way to shock yourself out of bad habits like hjkl movements or reliance on /. Then again, I think text-objects and the items below it in motion.txt are the main to use vim so YMMV.

¹ http://vimcasts.org/

² https://pragprog.com/titles/dnvim2/practical-vim-second-edit...

³ https://pragprog.com/titles/modvim/modern-vim/
There's no problem about it, a business does not necessarily need to have a bank account as long as it can send and receive payments and provide statements by request of a certified auditor when supplied with authorisation letter. My company actually uses Payoneer and does nothing dodgy or tax-avoiding, it's simply a lot more convenient that way (for example, most U.S. clients have a hard time sending SWIFT because all they used to is ACH, and Payoneer lets my company accept ACH - no EU bank would). My auditor is happy with this. I know vast majority of Payoneer uses are something crazy shady deals, but it doesn't disqualify legit users of it.
I assume the tight coupling would mean it can't be used for capacitor mobile apps?
> The IA is on a crash course to destroy the livlihood of artists, writers and other content creators

Every single artist mentioned by name here has long since passed away, and in some cases even their children have passed away.
No! The reality is that the vast majority of phone users don't want or need this and are better off with such abilities disabled. If you want to run your own low powered server use a raspberry pi. People have their banking credentials, most of their personal life, their most private images on these devices and most of the people using phones can barely handle the complexity they already involve. I'm all for allowing people to use their devices as they chose but there's a certain level of compromise that anyone should see is reasonable when it comes to phones.
>even though it’s inconvenient, it’s important to me to have control over my social media

The whole post is basically showing pretty much features lacking that are otherwise quintessential for social media. Can't see posts, can't see replies, can't see trends, can't search etc. I mean at this point why even use it? It's like having a Ford Mustang in your garage that doesn't have tires and steering wheel but hey that V8 engine is sure nice.
Are there other examples that you particularly like?
> Like, an order of magnitude cheaper.

Rooppur Nuclear Power Plant cost $6 per Watt of installed capacity over the projected 50 years of lifetime. Simple natural gas turbines (not combined cycle) cost around $2 per Watt over 50 years in just capital costs. This doesn't take into account the cost of the fuel, or the magic infrastructure to produce, store, and deliver hydrogen.

I'm taking Rooppur Nuclear Power Plant as the base for comparison because it's an example of what you can do, when you have a "mass produced" design that you can just quickly build.
By many measures, China looks and smells like it's already in the early stages of a major financial crisis and deep recession.[a] Publicly, the ruling party adamantly insists otherwise -- but that's always to be expected from politicians. We ought to consider only the data, not what they say. The data looks and smells really bad.

My biggest hope is that the economic pain will induce soul-searching and push China away from authoritarianism, leading to the country's gradual transition into a modern democracy -- to the detriment of party apparatchiks and their psychophants, whose power and importance depends on maintaining the status quo.

My biggest fear is that party apparatchiks start pushing for policies that can lead only to armed conflict in the hopes of holding on to their power and status -- e.g., they might push for annexing Taiwan by force in the short run, ensuring a confrontation with the West. Few things impede political change as well as armed conflict.

---

[a] See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37101496 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37101229 for background.
A lot of people ask about the bull. But if you take it as a metaphor for status update, it does translate well.

Whether he explains the situation about the bull or not, does not matter, the next action is to have someone pick him up. That's the only thing they can do. The bull story is just extra information.

In the status update, when my devs tell me the new api failed, my role is to check the results and figure out if we need an alternative. The product owner and scrum master do not need to know those results, in fact they can move on to the next status update. The person who can help is informed.

The challenges I face in a daily stand up are:

1. The developer trying to over explain their current situation.

2. The non devs asking questions trying to fully understand a situation that is irrelevant to them. i.e. why is the bull dead.

3. The dev keeping their mouth shut for fear of being interrogated.
Bram founded ICCF Holland https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICCF_Holland#:~:text=Vim%20i....
Developers have a finite useful lifespan and they need to pick their portfolio of techologies wisely if their journey is not going to be an anxious random walk chasing the latest fad.

You cant only pick "winners" but you almost need to develop a sixth sense for what will be a valuable and long term addition to your finite toolbox.

Looking at tech attributes is just the start. business and community context, complementarity with other pieces etc are all the subtle factors that may help avoid wasting energy in short lived pursuits.