skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It can also be encouraging.

It's important to think about the things you have done and accomplished in life (happiness is more meaningful if you focus on celebrating what you have rather than chasing= what you don't have), and if you use this as an exercise to remind yourself of what you have accomplished/done, it might be helpful.

It could also be motivating. Perhaps you see all the things you've done and you're proud of and it encourages you to set out and do more things. Or the things you haven't done enough of, but are within your control to do more of in the future.

I quite like this kind of view on my past.
I think you're mean 'not committing...'? The US immigration system is almost uniquely hostile, by design.
It sounds like microbial anaerobic respiration heated things up and then conditions were right for a smoldering burn to propagate. It's a shame all that detailed historical cultural information will be lost to future landfill researchers. On the upside, the high temperatures and anaerobic conditions might reduce metals to their base forms as sperules which would make future mining for material re-use a lot easier.
Because /bin, /sbin, /usr/local/bin, and /usr/local/sbin all also exist?

(And bevcause GNU autotools uses the variable $PREFIX to abstract away the differences between these — you can `./configure --prefix=/usr` or `./configure --prefix=$HOME/.local` if you like.)
Maps Show We're Wrong About Direction and Location of Many Countries
"wichser" is like "wanker." Someone who engages in, shall we say, self-Stimulation. I don't think it's nearly as offensive as other words.
OP needs to learn about window.setTimeout(), or whatever the fancy wrapper function is in their framework of choice.
Anecdotally relevant to employees too: sometimes companies (and even public organizations like universities) let you keep the hardware they buy for you after it meets the 3 years depreciation rule.
Re: your experience teaching synths in university, do you feel there is certain knowledge/concepts that are difficult for those self-teaching sound design?

I do the same "no presets rule", with most being the result of random experimentation and fiddling of parameters. This does a good job at "creating never before heard, totally out there sounds", but I imagine it's trickier the more specific your end goal is.
I created demonstrations with interactive diagrams.

http://cleonis.nl/physics/phys256/calculus_variations.php
The following case is used as motivation for developing Calculus of Variations: the shape of a soap film stretching between two coaxial rings. (The name of the solution is 'catenoid'; a surface of revolution.) Then the discussion moves to the Catenary problem: to calculate the shape of a hanging chain. The two problems have the same solution; the curve is the hyperbolic cosine.

Demonstration of Hamilton's stationary action: http://cleonis.nl/physics/phys256/energy_position_equation.p...

The diagrams have sliders. Moving the sliders sweeps out variation of a trial trajectory. The diagram shows how the kinetic energy and the potential energy respond to sweeping out variation.
Twitter had such a strong and recognizable brand too. Working in payments under the X name or something like that might have made sense, but what a god awful idea to kill core app branding.
Yep. This is why I think super large Reddit communities, and also the federation part of Mastodon, are all a mistake that failed IMO. Sure, those tools need those things to grow, but the end result is as bad as social networking.

"Less is more" has never been apt. I don't want to be able to connect to a billion people :/
Yup. Also, the entire industry pretty much actively supports and accommodates ageism. It's not like a few "rogue actors." Everyone is in on it, and it starts from the top.

Also, I found out that some younger folks really hate us. A number of folks used the interview process to try humiliating me, and taking out their personal animus.

After a few of these, I decided "Bugger this for a lark," and just accepted that I shouldn't bother looking, anymore.

But I think people are being hoist by their own petard. I'm seeing folks in their forties, that never had any issue, finding work, hitting the wall. These were people that did it to others, when they were working.

We can't become other races, and we [usually] can't become other genders, but we all become old, so each of us will have a turn at the wheel.
I think that's a symptom of buying off-the-shelf NFC hardware. They all lock you out after some small number of incorrect attempts to guess the password, because some security researcher noticed how easy it was to try every password and people stopped buying their stuff if they didn't have this feature.

This equipment is not necessary for a toothbrush "minutes used" counter, but unfortunately, there is no off-the-shelf alternative.
Yeah, nothing can protect your heart from the inevitable 1-star review that makes you want to punch that human through your screen.

Thankfully, my best selling apps are published on my website, where I don’t have reviews. I have a contact form which can lead to the same disappointing messages, but at least they’re not public and don’t stay there forever.

But yes I understand you, I had many periods when I contemplated going back to a “normal” job.
There's a 4-example definition of the article, which aligns with the context it's used in on HN often: VC-funded SAAS or web-service-hosting. I thought about this one and did a dive a few weeks ago when someone I met at a coffee shop asked me if I work in tech.
Walmart has 1400 job openings with the word “software” in the title https://careers.walmart.com/results?q=software&page=1&sort=r...
During the 2009 bankruptcy government bailout the politicians involved forced GM to trim their portfolio to 4 brands worldwide. They had to pick between Pontiac and Buick. Since Buick had a strong reputation in the rapidly growing Chinese market it was an easy decision to save it and kill Pontiac. At that time the EV market barely existed.
"English no distinction is made between the second and third person 'you'."

Duh! I ought to read what I write before posing. Obviously what I said is garbage, what I meant was '...in modern English no distinction is made between the second person singular and plural forms in that both use the pronoun'you.'
right. "First Language" is a moving target and it is not something a language wants to have because you get a bunch of really crappy code in that language and it ruins the language's reputation.

After the rise of the web in the early 2000s it moved around a bit. Java, PHP, Ruby, Javascript, even Flash sometimes, but now it's generally Python and it's so far bucked the trend and managed to remain respectable. Pascal and BASIC had a grip on that slot probably since the late 1970s through maybe early 2000s. Before that it was Fortran.

I did y2k stuff 25 years ago, there's a lot of shit fortran out there.
With the exception of what left the earth and made it into space, everything we made will be recycled sooner or later, by nature or by humans.
You might find it interesting to track what happens to the people who do your coding exercises.
For the ones you hire, how do they do in the company?
If you can see happens to those you reject, via whatever online profile they have, you'll get a good sense of when you missed a good hire.
That only moves the question back a step. Why have a bin user that owns all the userland binaries and keeps them directly under its own home directory? What does that accomplish? Something to do with per-user quotas? Or making `ln /usr/bob/a.out /usr/bin/newcmd` cheap?

I note that there's also a bin group. Was /usr/bin mode 1775, and anyone who should be allowed to install binaries (and update/remove their own installed binaries) was made a member of the bin group?

Also, I note that there's no sbin user. (There is, however, a sys user. But only on Linux, not on BSD...)
It is called the Nix store, it is not a database as much as a special type of file hierarchy.
It is not horrible, but it breaks tradition for sure. The benefits are best understood when evaluating NixOS as a whole, of which the file hierarchy is just a part.
Make sense. Maybe I am just not very familiar with their lines of products. Let me come up with a more niche example.
> I understand the historical reasoning for the / vs /usr vs /usr/local split —

That was retconned, actually. My understanding is that the original "/usr" was a second RK05 disk pack added to an early system at Bell Labs for storing stuff owned/created/managed by "users" instead of the system folks. Space was precious in those days and RAID was still a decade in the future. You got your 2MB and had to decide where to mount it and what to put there.

Early Unix filesystems were an ad-hoc wreck, basically. Sun cleaned this up a lot as they moved (or tried to move) to NFS as the primary filesystem for workgroup installations, which is where we get the modern ideas from that you are tagging "historical". I believe (but am not sure) that "sbin" hails from this era.

Then Red Hat came by another decade later and further symmetrized the rules, but in the process essentially obsoleted the distinction between "/" and "/usr", etc...
I agree with pretty much everything you said; I don't argue too much on HN but I do occasionally.

My life improved substantially after I dropped Facebook, but the frustrating part now is that LinkedIn (more or less a necessity to find a job in 2023) has started to attract the same morons posting their conspiracy theories, and now I feel like somewhat of a hostage audience. At that point I'm in this kind of uncomfortable position of "do I let these potentially harmful posts go completely unchecked, or do I risk future employers knowing my political beliefs?"

Mostly I've opted for the former, but as you said, the issue is that I am still exposed to these arguments. The second that I find a job that I am confident I won't be laid off from, I'm never logging into LinkedIn again.
Counterfeit Warning: December, 2015 — buyers have reported poor quality copies (confirmed as counterfeit) being sold online at prices too low to be creditable. ...
Damn, my memory of the video is totally wrong...
That would mean that any clickbait title that has detail added is somehow wrong and bad by your definition.
After all the layoffs we still have an unemployment rate of of 3.4% (as of Nov). In Seattle it is 3.6% (as of Oct). Also the fact the population is increasing probably reflects job hires. It's expensive here. Who else would move here? Maybe AI startups...
What's wrong with the Turing test? Has any AI passed it?

Note, the Turing test is not giving people 5 minutes to exchange, what, maybe 2 or 3 messages with an AI and then guess.

The Turing test is putting 2 people in a chat, and the 3rd participant is an AI. Give all three an hour or more to chat and offer a reward if they guess correctly to ensure incentives are aligned.

I ask again. Has any AI passed the Turing test?
It’s so smart to not have an opinion.
ALTSpace in Seattle is still breaking even after twelve years, with no such endowments or grants. As you say, the membership has completely cycled through several times since the start, and there was a major spinoff several years in where several members pulled out to form their own, more private workspace. You have to expect all that and plan for it; you'll need a new generation of leadership every few years, and recruiting new members needs to be an ongoing process.
I get a 403
-Who would pay more for what?-

Re-read.

That isn't why in the slightest. It isn't about the number of alternatives, it's entirely to do with the cost of producing electricity for the different alternatives.

When there's plenty of wind, then wind power is obviously cheap. Sometimes running into the negative, as in: we get paid to use it.

This causes _everyone_ to lose money.

When there's no wind in large areas, industry power draw (which is most of it by a wide margin), means that something else has to produce the missing energy. If too little electrical energy is produced, the entire grid breaks down, so there's a scuttle to either disconnect sub-nets or add more production.

The production that is added is more expensive. This sets the market price.
So which companies manage to fulfill Moore's law?
> The disadvantage of using a Merchant of Record like Paddle is that I don't get to reclaim the VAT at the end of the year.
> That's because it's some kind of B2B relation:
> I sell them my app in gross with 0% VAT, and then they resell it and collect taxes themselves.

thats confused and wrong. it doesn't matter one bit if the merchant-of-record collects and remits VAT or if you do it yourself. the money ain't yours either way.

what does matter in a big way for small business is VAT liability in the first place. merchants-of-records like Paddle and the various AppStores are basically liable for VAT in every country around the world.

however a small business (like in this example with 100k revenue) is not VAT liable everywhere because VAT thresholds are often much higher.
if you sell directly (e.g. via Stripe), you don't have to collect the VAT when selling in most jurisdictions except Europe. so you can either offer the product for 20 percent less and have a more competitive price or increase the price by the VAT and pocket it yourself instead of having to give it to the government of the customer.

if believe this makes a huge difference for small companies but is rarely mentioned.
I think you can learn a basic LAMP/LEMP stack in a few hours or days. You can spin one up on bare metal or a VM using XAMPP or similar, then connect it to various other layers like a DNS provider, Varnish or redis, a commercial CDN, etc. That shows you the basic functionality of each part of the system and how they connect, without the overlying complexity of containers and such.

You can replace each part of it as you need to (like using postgres instead of MySQL or Ruby or Python instead of PHP).

This definitely can't hyperscale, but it's how small and medium websites all used to be made. Good way to learn by doing if that works for you.
The History of Xenix
The competition was very aggressive, escalating into several Anglo-Dutch wars. The VOC absolutely outcompeted the EIC most of the time. How do you explain the staying power of English given that “imperialism” is the more appropriate context, not “British Imperialism”?
Nationalize it
I spent about 15 years doing SaaS and tech startups, then switched to working for a scientific non-profit. The first difference I noticed on my first week here was that, while they do produce software (thus me being employed) they do not have anything like a delivery process in place. There aren't product managers, nor really project managers as I recognize them either. Consequently, things which would have taken a month at the YC startup I came here from take six months to a year instead—no exaggeration. This has both pluses and minuses, as it can be frustrating just not making progress due to completely preventable holdups, but on the other hand I now have one of those jobs people talk about where they can work for an hour a day and still make all the deadlines with time to spare. I'm certainly not complaining, I've done years of crunch and I prefer this to the marginal salary I gave up.

The second difference I noticed is that people actually understand what my company does, because I can say "we research [disease X]" rather than "we're building a best-in-class, b2b SaaS product/platform ecosystem that augments existing teams, but to be honest, we're just trying to demonstrate product-market fit for investors so we can get our second round, and ultimately get acquired by one of the big players".
>>> Whiteboard tests are not a good way to evaluate people

>> How do you make sure you don't hire these people?

> I simple whiteboard test such as reversing a list will do the trick!

Agreed. I did a lot of hiring interviews of experienced embedded C programmers. A few of the applicants could not read two bytes from memory and combine them into a 16-bit integer, no matter how much handholding they got.

But they had good resumes and interviewed well other than that.

So some kind of check of their actual technical skills is valuable.

We spent a much larger portion of the interview having them explain things like "how would you implement a firmware upgrade architecture where the power can be lost at any time during the upgrade?"
I think it always varied a bit and only in the average approached anything like 12 months. otherwise it died every time it "took" 11 months and 29days or 12 months and 1 day :P
One of the smart things with zsh is that the hooks¹ like precmd can be replaced with arrays of functions, so that you can cleanly have multiple hooks per hook point. It even provides a nice tool to work with the the arrays too², which makes editing/enabling/disabling far easier.

It makes life far easier when you see people post useful snippets(like wolfgang42's), but don't want to have to mangle them in to your already messy monolithic function.

¹ https://zsh.sourceforge.io/Doc/Release/Functions.html#Hook-F...

² https://zsh.sourceforge.io/Doc/Release/User-Contributions.ht...
Which is odd, really; you’d think that X11 would have appealed to his terrible names fetish.

Oh. Though, actually this was probably the ActiveX era (DirectX is largely the only remaining evidence of it today, but MS went though an irritating “everything should end in X” phase in the late 90s).
The Helium used for cooling expands a lot going from liquid to gas during a quench (iirc by a factor of ~1800). The pressure built-up from the phase change has to be relieved *quickly* before the machine turns into a crude pipe bomb. Oh and you can't get enough Oxygen from the air if most of it has been replaced with leaked Helium.
The waste/recycling service where I live advises that we can put old batteries in a ziploc baggie on top of our recycling bin, which is picked up weekly. The three bins we have (landfill, organics/compost, and recycling) are picked up via a truck with a grabber arm, so that the driver never has to leave the driver's seat.

The last time I left some out, I could swear I saw the driver just pick up the recycle bin with the baggie of batteries on top and dump it in with all the rest of the recycling (so why put the baggie on top?). For the 2-3 times a year I do this, it would only take about 30 seconds to hop out and grab the baggie by hand to store it separately. Maybe they sort it out at the recycling facility, but I've also been told that almost all our recycling ends up in the landfill anyway.
This is the new definition of "tech," which basically means storefronts and social media.
Think instead of how many Christmases you have left, how many summers, how many new houses and cars and how many Olympics and World Cups and GTA sequels. Then, maybe divide by half.
It's an understanderable deference when stumbling through a huge new field and its freshly minted jargon when tidying up and tying the new jargon to long standing terms in older fields.

"As near as I can tell when the new guard says X they're pretty much talking about what we called Y"

Does 'attention' in the AI bleeding edge really correspond to kernal smoothing | mapping attenuation | damping ?

This is (one of) the elephants in a darkened room that Cosma is groping around and showing his thoughts as he goes.

> I hope this doesn’t discourage him to keep publishing his notes

Doubtful, aside from the inevitable attenuation with age, he's been airing his thoughts for at least two decades, eg: his wonderful little:

A Rare Blend of Monster Raving Egomania and Utter Batshit Insanity (2002)

http://bactra.org/reviews/wolfram/
Unless these medical students have some immersion exposure into the physically-challenged (including Deaf) or mentally-challenged communities, this trend of ignorance shall continue.
My pre-startup career was in advertising (before the dominance of social networks) where salaries were quite competitive and the creative atmosphere made you forget the ad biz was still corporate America. Another huge benefit was complete technical autonomy: so long as you met deadlines, they didn’t micromanage (because they lacked the domain expertise). I imagine corporate lawyers outside of law firms have a similar experience. All in all, trading the prestige for autonomy, greater work/life balance, and slightly less pay was well worth it.

Update: two more advantages…

1. Technical interviews are far less grueling. Fewer applications mean a more personal and realistic interview process.

2. More stability through the business cycle. A small engineering department in a medium to large company is more likely to weather layoffs than a Big Tech firm looking to cut costs.
Obviously not. But my point was that contact between America and Asia, in significant volume, happened significantly later than contact with Europe (and, by extension, North Africa, as there was always tons of contact between Europe and North Africa).

And yes, places that have been truly isolated from the Americas until relatively recently are also are places where novel invasive species and pathogens come from (e.g. HIV, Ebola).
> Wouldn't it just be simpler to educate our citizens to identify propaganda

That US ruling class would not last long (much like the Chinese and the Russian, etc). The US has been in near continuous war or financing continuous wars for over 70 years. You don’t have to look far to find a citizen who’s lost something dear. And somehow the pattern continues.

Watching some of the WW2 propaganda videos put out by the allies is very eye opening. Our elites have gotten very good at convincing us to fight to further their goals (which only loosely align with the commoners).
Lark is a modern parsing library for Python. Can parse any context-free grammar
Originally it was doubling every year. It was already revised down to two years. By your strict interpretation, it’s been dead since the 70s.
Intel isn't even one of the top 3 semiconductor companies anymore. You've got Nvidia, Apple, AMD, Broadcom all ahead of them. Intel can whine about Moore's law, but AMD not only has many chiplets in one processor, but has different dies stacked on top of each other with TSV. And thanks to ChatGPT, there's demand not only for bigger computing hardware than ever before, but even for new architectures. Semiconductor companies are doing amazing, it's Intel that's the problem.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=k1BneeJTDcU
It should be noted that for Europeans other alternatives exist, as you can freely shop any EU country to incorporate a business. Many of my tech friends have set a company in Estonia for tax planning once they have hit a certain revenue (and 0% corporate income tax).
Yeah I’m currently doing data work at a retail company. It’s not bad at all. They’ve thrown money at seemingly every product that can be purchased with a support contract: Databricks, snowflake, Kafka, presto, rstudio, tableau, tibco, informatica, and so on lol.

It’s not “prestigious” but my resume has certainly accreted some fairly lucrative buzzwords.
sometimes it feels like medical school doesn’t even prepare students to talk to people
Is it so quick? He talks about getting divorced in 2017/8, now in 2023 he's 'recently remarried'. Staying out of relationships for a year or two after a divorce seems wise, to deal with difficult emotions and get a fresh perspective. But life goes on.
I dont know but numerous articles point out that gpt4 has passed turing test. Are you refuting their claim entirely?
We literally do not know what we lost.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Putumayo_genocide

When rubber industrialists wiped out the people living in the area, those that remained lost generational knowledge. Ethnobotanists like Shultes explored the Amazon afterwards.

There's even a movie made on the subject of exploring the Amazon for medicines with Sean Connery, Medicine Man. Also, the more recent Embrace of the Serpent.