skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Frcntl – community for fractional developers and designers
Hey HN! In 2017, I launched Moonlight to help engineers find part-time, remote jobs. Combining part-time with remote work was a big leap then, so we quickly narrowed our focus to just remote work.

Lately, I've seen many talented friends and colleagues moving into part-time fractional roles. They're carving out more personal time while maintaining the same income. Personally, fractional work has empowered me to pursue my entrepreneurial goals without worrying about runway or funding. It's no surprise that hiring managers are gravitating towards this, especially as companies are emphasizing efficiency instead of all-out growth.

From our experience with Moonlight, we found that most engineering managers prefer hiring for ongoing, direct work relationships rather than transient, fixed-scope projects. These enduring relationships proved to be mutually beneficial, providing stability for companies and workers in a working style legible to both.

Today I'm launching FRCTNL - a community of fractional developers, designers, and marketers. Distinct from traditional marketplaces focused on top-down projects, FRCTNL focuses on often-overlooked bottoms-up, relationship-centric "staff augmentation" roles. Hiring managers seek quality candidates referred by their existing team, and direct relationships with talent — this is the niche FRCTNL aims to serve.

FRCTNL operates on a referral model, where members help swap and share opportunities with each other. The underlying hypothesis is that there is latent demand for fractional talent, and that connecting with existing fractional workers is the best way to find those open roles. I'm convinced that our fractional worker network will streamline hiring for companies and further mainstream part-time roles.

Take a look, and let me know if you have any questions or feedback!
Just a few months ago on HN there was a thread discussing the upcoming summer.

Was surprised just how many 'free-market' advocates came out to say how great things were, how the market has created additional supply, and all this was just lib panic.

They are paying 'crypto-miners' to temporarily stop running? That is absurd. So I could make money just by moving a mining operation to Texas, and wait for a shutdown.

How much failure does it take to realize some regulation is good. It benefits everyone.
Ironically, Cantor's argument falls apart in constructivism.
> I'm not from Texas so genuinely asking, is there hard proof that anyone specifically invested in power infrastructure because of bitcoin mines in a way they wouldn't have otherwise?

In theory supply and demand still exists in Texas, and Bitcoin miners do demand a lot of energy. Assuming that energy companies are including Bitcoin miners in their demand projections (I don't see why they wouldn't?) then the default assumption is that just based on the market forces at play, capacity should have been built with Bitcoin miner demand included.
>rather than something that actually makes writing terminal-based programs easier

Are there alternate options you'd recommend? I've used Textual to create a few interactive apps and found it a pleasing experience. In my case, I didn't need it to be a TUI, but it was much easier to reason about compared to tkinter.
This is politics in a nutshell. People keep voting for the same politicians so they keep the same problems. Power infrastructure is poor? Keep voting for the same people that made it that way. Lots of violent crime in your city? Keep voting for the people that release criminals back into society immediately.

Politics is so binary and broken in this country that we are just making fixable issues into permanent hardships.

This is a Dem and Rep problem and more importantly the end result of a 2 party system.

That and corruption all the way down.
Unfortunately not how it works. The reason that Texas is paying miners to load shed is because they are being paid to supply a constant load to the grid. They shut down in order to dump capacity into the grid because that is less expensive than attempting to bring new capacity online to meet demand and then later bring that capacity back down when it is no longer needed. Because of the way miners can ramp up and down their loads systems can be set up to smooth out extreme spikes in electrical demand.

These miners have no choice but to shut down because ERCOT can also remotely kill their ability to consume the load. Part of the payments they get are because of the service being provided to the grid and also to encourage miners to continue operating in good faith by volunteering to load shed and work with grid operators.

The story is even more complex when you throw in things like land being bought to the sum of 240 million for these miners to operate on and locals in areas like this seem excited for the job opportunity so I have to believe good portions of that 34 million are making its way right back into the local economy of central Texas.

The reason Bitcoin mining works and not your space heater is because of the incentive structures built into the proof of work system within Bitcoin.

I think this is worth digging into deeper and figuring out how we can objectively measure if this is successful or not. I think there is a legitimate counter argument to make that without mining actually, Texas would have had a full grid blackout this summer.
So that, as I said in my neighbouring comment, "you could pay twice". Why make a piece of furniture that in the end will cost you, the manufacturer, the same but will decrease your sales by about three times because the end product would last three times as long? To recoup the losses, you'd have to charge to the point that you move into the high-end part of the market but at that point you could just as well use solid wood (in fact, you're expected to by the customers).
https://twitch.tv/agentultra

and Youtube where I archive my streams:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCg4RIhvLDjiAzMmWgdcMG1g
It already has...
> There are many people who code and use this technology who are pro-military

But are they pro-US military or they might be pro-other countries military?
I'm in the firstname.lastname@gmail.com club too (common first name and very common surname) and I receive so many mistaken emails that I like to collate them to guess which homonyms are the same person.

I often see repeated attempts to create accounts without reconsidering the email address, and sometimes they succeed (I received repeated invoices for Sky and for an insurance, not to mention occasional ones).
> Bizarrely, this happens even when the question is completely unrelated to China: you get the same error message when you ask, “Why is Hawaii a part of the US?”

Not bizarre at all, reveals they probably fine-tuned / RLHF'd on not answering a bunch of things that look similar, like, a bunch of variations of the question about Taiwan.
This is exactly why I switched some months back to lsd after years of using exa.

The muscle memory of `ls -alt` and `ls -alrt` was too powerful for me to switch to `-snew`, even after literal years.
You could use this for hotloading: send every (relevant) process a message with a new closure to run, and they begin running it when they process that message, but BEAM provides other infrastructure for hotloading.

For modules, BEAM can have two versions loaded: the current version, and an old version. When you make a fully qualified function call module:function(...), it will call the current version, but calls within the module stay within the same version.

So if you load a module's new beam file, all processes that make fully qualified calls into that module get the new version. In case you're wondering, if you load a third version, any processes that still running in the first version get killed (you can check before you load a third version if you don't want that).

It's idiomatic to write receive loops as

loop(State) ->
NewState = receive ...
end,
?MODULE:loop(NewState).

so that if a new version of the module is loaded, processes will update after they next receive a message. Then you might add a timeout or a heartbeat message to ensure the processes update in a reasonable timeframe. Or use gen_server which has the loop and calls your module so processes only linger in your old module while working on a request.
The way pensions are currently implemented in the state is "don't invest, just transfer tax revenue to pensioners" social security style. The issue is todays tax payers did not agree to those pensions. The people who voted for the pensions are mostly no longer working, they foisted all the costs onto their children and grand children.
Oxidised Moss
There's a huge difference between a company with a business model capable of taking over the world getting some investment, and one with a business model that is necessarily niche.

What kind of market does Arduino expect to get into with that money? I can't see any.
I think the basic problem with EVs right now is that western manufacturers are completely uninterested in making vehicles that ordinary people can afford.

There are two scenarios for this: (1) new technology starts off expensive and becomes cheaper, and (2) the thesis associated by Clayton Christensen that high business margins are addictive and can make it impossible for a potentially strong competitor to move downmarket.

In the US electrification is a major conflict between carmakers and the UAW in that it is expected that electrics will take less labor to build, so long as it is high-margin electric Cadillacs there will be huge surpluses to go along but when it is mainly sub-$30,000 electric Chevys it will be different. Soon we’ll see protectionism as being the main foe of climate adaptation in both the US and Europe if we aren’t already (that is, it is China that has invested in capacity to make very cheap solar panels)
> an icon in the dock, system notifications, matching light/dark theme, etc

Textual apps will eventually support this and other OS integrations exposed by the browser. It's never going to look native, given the terminal origins. But it will be possible for them to play better with the OS. And when we add PWA support, they will have a more desktop look and feel.

SSH is an advantage when running in the terminal. In the browser the advantage is that you can deploy them where you couldn't run a web server. Think IOT, routers, lab equipment. Or just cloud servers, where you want a backend to work with the local file system.

Another advantage is development speed. Textual has a learning curve which is far less steep that a regular web stack. It allows non-web developers to build bespoke apps.

I also think that TUIs can be more attractive than GUIs in some scenarios. Not because they look better, but you can build UIs that are snappy and keyboard driven. TUIs are a more natural fit for that kind of interface.
What does completely mean here?
Uh, that doesn't make sense to me. Could you provide some details? The point of SIM card is that there is no user-controlled software in the path between SIM card and antenna. So if the pipe from SIM to antenna was secure before custom ROM, it's still secure after it.
On the other hand, while in all the previous years there has been a delay of around one year between the appearance in laptops of some Ryzen model and its appearance in small NUC-like computers, this year a large number of companies have introduced small computers with AMD Phoenix (Ryzen ? 7?40) immediately after its launch.

I am happy about this, because instead of carrying a big laptop, I prefer to carry a NUC-like computer, a 17" portable monitor and a compact keyboard, which all together are both lighter and much cheaper than a mobile workstation laptop, while being faster and more comfortable for working and also having more peripheral interfaces.
Can you give an example of the full picture to someone who doesnt know haskell? The only functional language I'm familiar with is elixir.

I tried learning about them for fun but couldn't see many examples unless I know all of the weird haskell syntax.

The core basis that I gathered of functors is that they're like anything which is "mappable", the key part being it can be any type, and not something like a list or array. So maybe you have an object data type, and you create a custom function which makes it mappable.

The basis of monads was a functor that returns another functor, and the example I saw was a "stream". Elixir does have streams, and this "makes sense" but I wasn't super satisfied with that answer as I highly doubt all this talk of making it hard to understand is about streams.

Is there an actual example that exists where you can present the different ways to solve it? Ie... you have X data structure, and you want to get Y parts out of it while transforming Z at the same time. Method 1: no monads, Method 2: monads, or something like that?
Well, considering that many HN users seem to be under the impression that this is a loan ("$54 m of debt to service" etc.) I don't think there's much point in assigning any importance to the opinions.
Hey, that's an awesome playground! Thank you for this!
I believe you’re mudding the argument with unrelated statements I didn’t make: brain surgeons working on a farm.

It’s simply: a worker who participates in the productive chain with labor can’t benefit from the value added by said labor. If thousands of iPhone are assembled by the worker, but said worker can’t afford even ONE iPhone, implicitly this means we value the worker 1/100000 of an iPhone.

If you think this is fair and proportional compensation, ok, but that’s an opinion. It’s not a natural law. I don’t think wage stagnation and pornographic profit margins are fair.
"Property wealth inequality" is not something to measure and try to fix, since it is heavily affected by the decisions of households about whether to rent or buy. A couple that rents owns zero property, but upon buying a home they do own property. Merely buying the home does not substantially change their net worth.
Nvidia upgrades Omniverse for OpenUSD framework and generative AI
The payment was to not mine coins and thus conserve electricity to more important consumers during times of shortages
Are any words the same in all languages?
> I would tend to trust an Arduino more than an ESP in critical infrastructure.

Arduino has always come across to me as being for hobbyist/beginner/learning, and critical infra would use things more like, for example, STMicro or Texas Instruments microcontrollers
This entire IPO is fascinating to me. Firstly, Softbank do seem to be somewhat of a forced seller, that should be really bad for the price. Secondly, ARM just don't seem to be in the dominant position they were when Softbank took them private in the first place.

But the really interesting element is that there are a handful of giants who might choose to come in and buy a stake just for strategic reasons - as listed in the article. But why? It's become very clear that there's no one who can buy arm due to anti-trust, the dream of Windows ARM has kind of died. Google is producing TPUs (not through ARM), Apple has moved a lot of it's silicon in house, MobilEye have done a great job on the self-driving side which ARM has arguably failed to get into. And if it is seriously true that these companies are going to take big stakes for strategic reasons, then why is Softbank even IPOing? They're only selling ~10%, at that scale you could easily see one or two of those tech giants taking the entire thing as a strategic move.

Plus it's a catch-22, if those companies do decide to take a strategic stake, there's almost no liquidity left for the real IPO, if they don't then buying at the IPO will be like trying catch a falling knife surely?

I know Softbank say they love ARM and they want to keep a big stake because they think it's really valuable. But really, it looks to me more like they over-valued it repeatedly. They paid over the odds to take it private at $32Bn in 2016 at a time where they were just spewing money. 4 years later they think they can offload it to Nvidia for $40Bn. Which is weird right? That's not a fantastic return at all. Then here we are in 2023, Softbank acquires the vision fund's stake of 25% valuing it at $64Bn which just seems absolutely crazy, so they bought 25% for $64Bn this year and now they want to sell 10% at somewhere close to $54Bn? Doesn't that seem pretty shady? Just one more example of Softbank getting into weird situations when matching their investments up against reality. My guess is they float a tiny amount because they're worried about downward pressure on the price, but they need to sell so they'll proceed to dump much more over time causing massive headwinds for the stock for the next few years.
Had a boss that would swoop into “suspicious” meetings.

“There’s 10 people here whose time I bill out at $250/hr each, spending an hour discussing whether to buy a $1,000 software license? Why?”
>The PR firm, named Bunker 15, is said to pay as much as $50.00 for a single Rotten Tomatoes review.

The article makes it sound like this is how much the firm is paying members of the official critics pool for reviews, not ordinary users. If $50 is the upper bound for how much they can get paid then journalism must be an even more terrible career than I already thought.
I'll admit that when I get the "turn your AC off from noon to 3 pm" email at 8 AM, I go turn it down so that I can turn it off at noon.

I don't know if this thermal battery helps much.
There was recently a flareup on HN about PlatformIO trying to make money by charging a fee to vendors to be supported (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36090536). Maybe Arduino wants in on that.

I honestly don't see how such strategies work long-term though. As a former embedded SW engineer, the Arduino IDE seems very toy-like - which is excellent for people just starting out, but not something a company developing an embedded product is likely to use. I think PlatformIO is similar but I have only tried that once.

If these companies try to get vendors to pay them to support their boards, or try to start charging users directly, I really think that the hobby community will move on and someone will fork or create their own solution, and the whole cycle will start again.
Apple's own apps used to be prominently featured at the top, alongside Mac, iPhone etc.
Paywalled: http://archive.today/ximl
Note: This link is a low-effort "hot take" on this more substantial source: https://www.vulture.com/article/rotten-tomatoes-movie-rating...
This is how energy contracts work. If a utility opts to break a contract made prior to ensure grid stability and to mitigate risk to more residential customers terms sometimes dictate that the settlement will be made in dollars or energy credits...

I'm not a fan of bitcoin mining but this is just business. No reason to trounce maniacally on Texas...
That is a pretty misleading presentation, because of the cherry-picked dates and conflating (apparently) capacity-related outages with public safety shutoffs, and for not weighting by population impact.

California has not had any capacity-related problems in the past 2 years, mostly due to the fact that they now have 5.5GW of battery backup capacity that covers the critical period at dusk, when solar generation is headed for zero, during late summer where the days are getting shorter but it is still hot.
Guns don't kill people, ERCOT kills people.
When is the Emacs clone coming?
The law is full of gray areas. If we couldn't have any laws that weren't ambiguous, we just wouldn't have laws.
Experts call for 'post-growth' climate policies in high income countries
I think the first questions to ask would be, which ones would it steal and why?
I Used a Game Boy Camera for FaceTime Video Calls in iPadOS 17, It Was Glorious
Retool AI
Move unwanted meters into abandoned parking lots. Maybe there's an old run-down airport somewhere? Put parking spots on the tarmac.
They don't just send emails, they also send texts. Given that this is the 7th time they've done this in the past ~2 weeks, if anything I would expect people to be more likely to ignore the messages now, since (from the perspective of residents) nothing obviously bad happened the other 6 times.

The difference is that this was the first time that they followed up the first message with a second one when reserves became critically low and the frequency started dropping. But by the time I saw the second message, it was obvious from their dashboards that the situation was well on its way to being resolved, so I'm doubtful the second message had much affect either way.
It's possible, but as others are saying, there are guarantees in the contract. All things being equal, this makes it more likely that Chicago will do what it can to motivate people to park cars next to meters for 75 years to come.
The simplest explanation is politicians excluded taxpayer funded defined benefit pensions from any regulations ensuring their solvency, such as ERISA 1974 and PPA 2006. Why? Because future taxpayers can always make up for underfunding.

Voters today want lower taxes today. Politicians today want votes today. Government employee union members want maximum compensation, and union leadership is composed of older employees who will collect benefits in the short term.

So, how do you deliver both lower taxes (than a competing politician) and market pay? By using benefits where you can fudge the numbers with plausible deniability.

For example, the federal government requires non taxpayer funded pension plans to calculate the present value of the benefit using corporate bond yield curves, which were ~4% and below for the last 10+ years.

https://www.irs.gov/retirement-plans/pension-plan-funding-se...

In the meantime, most taxpayer funded pensions were using 7%+, some even 8.5% return on investment assumptions to calculate present value of the benefit.

The higher the discount rate (or ROI) assumption, the cheaper the benefit is today (since you are expecting the investment to pay the benefit to grow quicker). And as a rough estimate, the sensitivity of the discount rate is 15%, meaning a 1% difference in the discount rate assumption will change the present value (or liability) by 15%.

Which means when a government uses a discount rate 2% and 3% above what non governments have to use, that means your government is understating liabilities by 30%+, which means either they have to make up for it by investing in riskier investments, and most likely hosing down future taxpayers to make up for the underfunding.

These reports show a ranking of the levels of deferred compensation funding throughout the US. Note the relatively bad position of Chicago and Illinois, hence why this thread exists.

https://www.truthinaccounting.org/resources/page/state-repor...

https://www.truthinaccounting.org/resources/page/city-report...
Maybe then tweet something to the effect of “we are extremely sorry, and we would love to continue having Anduril as sponsor and part of the community, but because of a screw up on our part, we didn’t realize we need to comply with venue requirements, so we need to drop Anduril just this single time”. Should be easy, no? That is, unless the TU Dresden policies is only a pretextual reason for this.
I treat giving out my email as giving out the social security number. I wish HideMyEmail feature from iOS came in 15 years ago.
You didn't "question the premise", you disregarded the content of the article and why it was written. Doing this opens yourself up to criticism.
TUIs being constrained to just text means that they are most likely 100% usable with a keyboard.

Text editors are a great example: I tried using VSCode with the vim extension, but every once in a (short) while some GUI panel "steals" the focus and I had to click somewhere to get back to where I was.

Apart from vim, I also use some chat TUI, and tig for browsing git, for the same reason.

It's like back in the days, common users of software could get really good and fly through with keyboard shortcuts. Nowadays I'm saddened when I have to watch a cashier CLICK through some shitty GUI at snail's speed.