skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I am not “self taught” in the sense that I taught myself to code when I was young, and got a CS degree, and continue to learn new technology on my own , but I feel that the feeling you have is not related to being self taught or not.

When I turned 30-ish and had a kid and a wife and a mortgage… I lost a metric ton of interest in computers and computing. It happens. The truth is that software is a terrible time-sink and life is much cooler. To that end, a job is a job, and if your job is to pet puppies: after 40 years of work, you’re going to hate puppies.

Try to think about what you’re doing as providing for the people you love. Don’t think that the grass is greener on some other project. Try to become a true master of your craft. Stay up to date on your skills, without chasing the new-and-shiney framework or language.
If you are still interested in professional growth: become a mentor, get into project management, start a side project.

For me, I doubled down on “just” being a C++ developer. I just don’t want to climb the corporate ladder. And, should my skills ever find a dead end, so be it. But, I doubt it. I just churn the tasks at the best pace I can maintain and do my best to focus my energy towards things that actually matter.
So basically don’t do micro services unless there is a real need :-). I am on board with that but I am old and don’t understand how modern software gets done.
Read the article linked by the post, it discusses it as well
I always considered it an issue with the usually longer sentence in the US (compared to where I'm from in France), particularly when taking into account the stacking of sentences (where we instead have "the longest one apply and trump others). Each year, well each day really, passed behind bars makes rehabilitation harder and it feels a bit counter productive to put people for (often several) decades behind bars, at this point they have a very very small chance to be able to reintegrate properly.

Not that I consider my country a paragon of virtue on that front mind you, since we're still struggling with the concept of rehabilitation instead of punishment.
In Italy the limit used to be as low as 1000€

https://www.axerve.com/approfondimenti/insight/limite-pagame...
> This is targeted at law abiding smallholding farmers where roadside transactions are often done in cash.

Most EU nations are setting up instant payment systems for these and other "informal" use cases. In Sweden you can buy strawberries at a sidewalk stall and pay through Swish [0]. I should also stress that, no matter how bad Swedish inflation is at the moment, it's very unlikely that you will ever spend >3k EUR (about 35k SEK) on strawberries :)

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swish_(payment)
> fudge rounds

It's a typical conservative talking point, because it's true.

https://www.ebtcardbalance.com/georgia-ebt-food-list-ef9

> From the USDA guidelines above, you can purchase the following items using your EBT card.

> Soft drinks

> Candy

> Cookies

> Snack crackers

> Ice cream

> Seafood such as lobster and shellfish

> Steaks

> Bakery cakes

I followed a woman in Publix the other day who used a SNAP card to purchase crab legs. A very take-a-deep-breath-and-count-to-ten moment.
The icon thing is so they can sell the same appliance everywhere without localizing it. (Of course, they still have to localize the manual but their inventory management is simplified.) That doesn't help you though.
I'm not sure it's proper to conflate flyover vs. coastal states with rural vs. urban. Even the middle-most states of the continent are majority urban dwellers. Most people in Kansas live in either KC or Wichita. The only state that is really majority rural is Vermont.
I HATE ellipses and I really don't even understand the purpose. What are they supposed to signify? I know two people that use them constantly and it makes me feel like I said something dumb; like there is some response that is so obvious that I shouldn't have needed to say what I said. I know that isn't their intention, but that's just what my brain makes of the those three trailing periods...

> Single period is normal, surely.

This I understand. Ending a text with a period does make it seem more "serious". I would interpret "yup." to have an almost annoyed tone, and I think that's pretty common. I think it just comes from not needing to punctuate statements given that most texts are single sentences anyway. The end of the text implies the period, adding it implies more.
Both of the above are little quips from the author in his own short introduction to the book - his main point is that nobody should confuse the book with any work on Zen Buddhism. I just remembered these lines from the book's intro reading it many years ago, The line about motorcycles is him just being modest - he knows how to fix his bike, this does feature in the book.

It is a philosophy and adventure book, not about Zen, but filled with many of the author's own unique ideas. He studied Eastern religions and they do inform some of his ideas, which he combines with Western thought in an interesting way. It's off-beat, but I personally found it to be pretty inspiring and would definitely recommend reading it for anyone interested in philosophy.
Some countries limit the time you can spend in prison for this very reason, no matter what you did. For instance, Brazil sets it to 40 years total even if you killed 100 people.
Be the 3x personable engineer not the 10x a**hole
> My advice to you is to use anger as a signal. If you use anger as fuel, you can end up burning yourself.
It says there is a bill in the works. Nothing definite yet. If it does pass, that seems very odd to me, especially coming from the US. I noticed the policy on €10K or more is already similar to what we have here for dollars. Anything $10K in cash or more gets flagged, and you have to fill out a form.
What do you mean they do nothing? They have a redundant microphone array that can track sound with high precision and a camera that can be used to automatically issue fines. Just point the hardware at the people walking about or congregating and see who is saying things The Cabinet doesn't like to hear. Or maybe even who isn't saying enough of what the Cabinet wants to hear. Why get rid of a perfectly functioning and deployed surveillance apparatus?
My inmediate reaction is:
"This is how we start. Watch it go down with time." and someone will say "there's already X amount".

But 3000 is pretty trivial and inflation makes it worse as well.

The end result seems to be the absolute desire of corporations and governments to have us control no actual money so they track everything while being absolutely non transparent themselves and can switch it off at their whim or, simply due to "system error", good luck going through the buteocratic process to get it back.

When it stops being about convenience and becomes forced, it's always a danger.
I picked that example because Apple has already lost in that scenario before. :D https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Apple_Inc.

There is also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L..., so Apple hasn't exactly been free of antitrust legislation in the past...
Unregistered migrants cannot buy a car at all, because they can’t register it and get a plate (details differ between countries, but legal residence is a requirement everywhere in the EU). Registered migrants can get a bank account.
At the risk of being slightly off-topic, what are good sources to find out wether and in which conditions building your own house is financially advantageous vs buying an existing (new or old) house.
The point isn't that nothing costs €3k, but that regular working people rarely have €3k physical cash on hand. Money goes into their bank accounts via direct deposit and they spend it digitally.
Or for free. One of the reasons Venmo and similar do well in the US but have almost no equivalent (and certainly not at scale) in the UK, for example, is that free, near instant transfer of cash from retail (i.e. ordinary people) bank accounts has been free for years. If I need to pay someone, I need their bank account number and their bank identifying number, and that's it; the money will be in their bank within sixty seconds, with no fee. I've told people mine so often to get paid that I've accidentally memorised it.

Even some people who historically took cash (such as household tradesmen) now often simply have the money transferred instantly on the doorstep, rather than have to carry cash around in their pockets all day. I imagine a similar story in much of the rest of Europe.
Syncing Notes with Obsidian
I wish that reputable reporting on this kind of topic would start putting accuracy next to what it can reportedly do. I remember visiting a machine learning poster session where many of the posters reported results with accuracy as low as 30%.

If a program is able to predict this once or twice it's not a miracle. If it's able to do so with 60% I'd raise some eyebrows. But I'd say it's only a turning point when it's able to beat false positive rates of human doctors. Without an accuracy score, this news is absolutely meaningless.
Another part of the problem (for me) is I would get something like an LTS setup the way I want (a CentOS or an Ubuntu LTS, but I honestly can't recall exactly what I was running on my desktop at the time) and it would be rock solid for years - until it finally was old enough (or out of support) and I wanted to install something new and I had to upgrade - and which point I get five years of changes right to the face, and spend a week or more tinkering everything to how I wanted it.
In general house is a big investment. If someone is already familiar with construction then DIY is probably fine. But if not … I would like to know the rationale for not hiring an architect. I’m sure there are many who will draw a bog-standard gabled house in no time? Plus, if they are familiar with the region they should be aware any gotchas in building codes and permits.
>> That's a separate problem that allowing overeager regulation of currency utilization enables.

> Now it seems like you are resorting to the libertarian fantasizing that used to be so common on news-for-nerds sites.

As I see no reason it is a fantasy, I'll continue "resorting" to the reality that, frankly, the entity able to put me to death legally probably doesn't need to know my reasons and justifications for every action I take, respectfully. If that makes me a left-libertarian, then so be it. Respectfully, sounds like you might have some hangups with discussing points that have overlap in classical liberal philosophies, throwing out legitimate discussion with the baby and bathwater.

>> Note, I said hush money, not extortion.

> Threatening to go public with a story when the other party might feel compelled to pay hush money, is already viewed as extortion.

Payment for private services, like sexual services, are common in Europe and likely preferred to be kept private. I believe you would view this as legalized extortion.Yet, the desire for discretion exists even when the "threat" of information being public isn't necessarily blackmail.

> The general public who can be sure that taxes are being paid fairly and they are receiving the services they should. Again, not all countries are as culturally forgiving of tax evasion as Americans, let alone those places with even less controls over the flow of cash than the USA.

That's a weird way to spell "banks and financial institutions." There are plenty on controls already on the impoverished and middle class. A blunt hammer like this gums up transaction processing and allows for additional regulatory capture by banks and financial institutions.
Have you ever been to the Netherlands? Many people don't even carry cash, never mind people buying goods from farmers. Card payments are so prevalent that some sellers at markets don't even accept cash.
When I was 20, my bank has a daily limit on what I can spend out of my own account electronically because of reasons that I was told were related to account protection. I do not trust cash transfer apps at all and will never link them to my identity. I like to keep a small target surface.

Why should I not be able to spend my own money how I feel? It's mine.
Of course we should? I'm surprised you think otherwise. It's like arguing that we shouldn't have explored the Americas because the Earth was not unexplored.

The Lunar poles have lots of scientific value, particularly for long term habitation, as you can have both permanently shadowed craters with water ice in them and permanently lit areas providing a reliable source of power.
I guess the point is that only conservatives care that public funds are contributing to obesity.
A visit to the one-man computer factory
Motorcycles vibrate. A lot. I’m guessing you’ve never been on one? Having ridden both extensively, comparing their vibration to that a bicycle is almost comical.
And this is the essence of the issue: complexity in one place often makes simplicity elsewhere.

Did it make sense for Microsoft Word back in the day to have a Fax option? Of course not. Unless you had a fax machine and needed to do a lot of faxing, then it was super convenient that your word processor knew exactly how to do that.
I think that's more to do with you being a freshman and being more easily impressed. Others can say the same thing about 1997, or 2017, from a freshman's point of view. Much of the tech stuff released in 2007 was hype, much as it is today, but you don't usually know what's hype vs what is substantive until years year.
Sorry, I don't understand the link between my comment and yours?
I’m pretty sure the 3000 limit is not at all a huge issue in any of those cases pretty much anywhere in Europe and bank transfers are also cheap and instant.

Not that I agree with this ban. I really don’t but focusing on farmers specifically is very strange when farming is so heavily commercialized, especially in the Netherlands.
I’m not looking and worked at FAANG and some recognizable companies in my resume.

I would say recruiting has dropped off 80%. In the boom times I’d get like 5-10 emails from recruiters a week, and even a couple phone calls. Now it’s down to 1-2 a week. Still not like before, but has noticeably picked up from earlier this year.
Obesity is bad.
Alternatively, you can also buy your drives a few months apart to get different batches, most likely.
I don't know much about landing extraterrestrial missions, but I would imagine that the moment of touchdown is exactly the moment everyone in the control room should be keenly paying attention to their assignment instead of jumping up to celebrate (or at least try not to distract those that are). Because if that thing sunk into a pool of moon water or landed on top of another lunar lander, it would be 15 minutes before anyone realized. Just a minor layman observation.

Anyhow congratulations to this team and to the people of this great nation.
> Option 1 can be done by one sensible person with intermediate PHP/Python knowledge, and maintained fairly easily and cheaply forever.

This a vast underestimate of the amount of knowledge it takes to do 1. well, for a project of any complexity. Doing the simple thing well is hard. Indeed, one of the reasons that option 2 has skyrocketed in popularity is because a larger number of mediocre devs can "get the job done" using that method.

> They're different jobs. You can take the interview for that option 2

What you are saying is that there is a lot of non-technical pressure to do option 2. I couldn't agree more. It doesn't make it any less absurd.
No, it really means that the US political compass is very right-wing. Also that there is a semantic difference between being left wing in the US and left wing in most of the world.

Historically, those supporting the king were on his right, and those opposing him on his left. Really basically, during the restoration, the far-right was composed of anti-Republicans (old nobles mostly), the right wanted to increase the cens, the left wanted to expand the right to vote by lowering the cens (tax to be allowed a vote in the congress), and the far-left, 'radicaux' as they called themselves, wanted a 'radical' republic, without a king.

With time this shifted, and the 'radicaux' are now center, center-right, but the idea of left-wing/right-wing is the same. Right-wing is in large part the party of old money (and to be fair small business owners who value stability, which is really fair from tel, even if it means power calcification).

I met really left-wing people in the Appalachians, fighting against a pipeline and for owners/managers of a company that caused a huge spill to be prosecuted (from what I understand, the company polluted 3 towns that had to rely on bottled water for weeks, then the company was dissolved and a new one with the same mission and same executive was created after a few months. Gotta love LLCs man.) but those weren't democrats.

Some voted Democrat by default, most didn't care and were realist and knew no place exist for left-wing discourse in the US outside of internet forums. One of them told my brother how he tried to unionize when working for a coal mine company. In France, owners and managers trying to pull the same shite would have been put in jail. But well, it's cultural, what can you do. I respect that.
Ask HN: I'm trapped in a golden prison, any advice?
This is going to sound very braggy, I hope I won't get shut down for this.

I feel like I'm trapped in a golden prison, unhappy but comfortable.

I'm a self taught programmer, 32 yo, with an engineering background and masters.
Co-founded 2 companies, failed, worked in california and singapore, now based in Europe.
I think I'm an ok dev, quite good with people.

I've mostly been working as a freelancer all my life, started billing 33€/day in 2012 for a few days at a time, now around 924€/day, 220 days/year.

Always worked at fast paced / high stakes startups except for my current job. Worked 60 to 70 hours a week, ~50 weeks per year for many years until 2020.

In 2021 I was completely burned out after 7.5 years of grinding.

Took a cozy freelance job as a fullstack senior engineer in a ~100ppl company, coming into the office 2days/week.

I'm working about 1 to 2 hours a day max, the expectations are so low compared to what I'm used to.
The rest of the time I'm just answering a couple of emails, helping some junior devs, sitting into meetings. It doesn't feel like work but it's a bit mentally draining.

I'm getting along with everyone, I'm liked and praised.

I've recovered from my burnout about 6 months in.
Since then I ran a saas for a year, did some consulting on the side, got certified as a product owner...

But most of my days are just about dicking around, working on unimportant things.

I've been wanting to move to another company for the past year or so but the tech world basically crumbled at the same time, no offer has come close to what I'm earning right now and no company seems appealing.

- I don't want to do yet another bootstrapped-side-saas-business, done maybe 20 in the past 10 years, earned like 100k€ all combined, I suck at this.

- It makes me anxious just thinking about going back to the startup grind, hearing founders bragging about their tech stack, promising a 100x exit. If I had a penny for everytime I took stock-options as compensation, it would be worth more than all these stock-options combined.

- I'm scared about leaving my current job and finding out I'm unhappy elsewhere and it was never about the job

- I fear I've become a lazy, gloomy and negative person regarding tech as a whole. I hide this feeling and never discuss it in public because it would hurt my freelancing career but holy shit tech companies suck, crypto sucks (worked in crypto for 4 years, I know how the sausage is made), I can't stand the VC & founder crowd anymore...

So I'm staying here, stagnant, sprint after sprint.

I'm thinking about studying and trying out FAANG, feel like I could stay a long time there and move around between projects, never getting bored, earning good money, but maybe I'm idealising these companies...

People who have been in this situation before, what did you do ?
The first world war was almost a half century after the end of the first industrial revolution and the usual marker of the end of the second. Neither revolution’s work pattern changes were driven primarily by military logistics. (OTOH, changes in the patterns of warfare were driven by the same forces as the work pattern changes.)

So, no, your comment about 90% of workers being independent before “world war industrialization” is way off base.
One thing to realize about these photos - they're still a vast improvement over a child literally rolling around on the floor (where they could get entangled with the pedals or who knows what else).
very opinionated article
You're arguing that it should be illegal for him just because you don't personally want to do it? We wouldn't be allowed to do very many things if "I don't personally want to do that today" was a good reason to outlaw something.
I took the Ng course when it first came out, but I hope it's been updated since - it was taught in a language I've literally never even heard of outside the course (GNU octave).

That said, if you want to understand ML stuff I learned waaaay more from Andrej Karpathy's famous video series. But I still found the old Ng course useful in a "ah, so this is what they teach in a college intro to ML course..." way.
in rural Ohio a hundred years ago, I read that a man built his house, worked as the manager of a bowling alley in town, and raised a family of four with that income alone.

The modern condition is not like that. Is it government taxation, money lending, fines and fees, whatever else? Or is it more like a system of middle-men who expand theirs at the expense of yours, at every turn of the game?

A vague complaint of "moochers" lacks context. There are those that are less able, those that have less to look for, and those that give in to lazy and selfish ways.. all of that, but in different social niches? There is no simple answer, but if you outlaw the path for the ordinary person to have rights, something is lost forever.
Shane Mac interviewed on Hashing it Out and discussed network effects, infrastructure of decentralized messaging, and developer tools
“enthusiastic presenters narrating it.”

I seriously hate their narrators and all the cheering.
This is not a valid Show HN. Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html.
It's a medium of exchange, it doesn't need intrinsic value to add value.
Caloric restrictions was my first thought as well.

Also, the fact that we’re talking about this person means he’s an extreme outlier. I’d expect reaching 98 is much more common outside of prison.
I am European and the feeling "that's none of your business" is shared by many people.

An anecdote: The 500 euro bank note was originally created because Germans had the habit of paying in cash, even for large purchases like cars, and they had a DM1,000 bank note (which is about EUR500).