skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I can't see why a company couldn't have one long-term customer.

Let's hope you won't find out why that's a very bad idea.

> Clearly having multiple customers isn't a reasonable requirement for a small company.

On the contrary, it's a must.

> Software engineering isn't like private residential plumbing - "sink drain unclogged, next please!" :)

That's a strawman.

Sorry, but if you have just one customer and you're developing software other than taxes and your rights you are less than an employee. Don't kid yourself, that tends to lead to rude awakenings. If at the end of the year you've only sent invoices to a single customer then you are simply at risk. You need multiple customers to be stable and secure. Two is better than one and three is really the minimum.

Loss of income insurance is to take care of mishaps, not to insure against market downturns or other normal risks that a business is exposed to.
Good idea thanks, let me figure out how to do that.
It's Azure's TTS API — I'm using four of their voices.
Ask HN: Water jug with 9-5 markings by HN user
I remember someone from HN once posting in one of those "what products / companies earn you side-income" posts, that they had a small company making high-quality water jugs with 9-to-5 markings on them, using high quality glass and materials.

I wanted to check it out again, but I can't find it now.

Does anyone know what I'm referring to to give me a link please?

(possibly the creator himself, even!)

Thanks
I want to love Zellij, but it eats up way too many keybindings. Yes, I know about mode lock, but then it's an extra two or four keypresses for everything I want to do.

I'd love Zellij with true tmux style keybindings - a single prefix key followed by a non-modified letter.

With zellij, you have to unlock, do your zellij command, then lock again.
Volume and lack of metadata is effective anonymity for most people in most circumstances if they've avoided doing anything that creates a public presence. But most people probably have photos at least on the web even if they didn't put them there.
My bad, so Corfu is in the category of Company mode.
I disagree with the premise that this even counts as automation. Automatic nagging doesn’t make the actual tasks any more automatic. Simply buying a Roomba would accomplish more than what they did.
More misdrilled holes on 737 MAX in latest setback
I tend to read books on mine in such situations. I can sit alone in the woods quietly without any issues, but reading something I brought seems preferable to flipping through the magazine stacks or staring a gray wall.
"rebuke" is a very strong word, given what actually happened.
I feel like charging these batteries in my apartment would be some kind of a safety hazard.
Show HN: Natural-SQL-7B, a strong text-to-SQL model
Would love thoughts!

Here is the HF page: https://huggingface.co/chatdb/natural-sql-7b
https://archive.today/MWMPG
That seems like a very ambitious rate of return, given that India seems to have ~4% inflation rate.
Huh, why would using uuidv4 be a problem? Collisions?
That’s an interesting change, from when I graduated two decades ago. I remember I did not want to work for defense contractor and wanted to work on worthwhile work like NASA or something. Course is early-Internet, and I had no idea how expensive life was going to be.

But a lot of people did not want to work for a big company, like Microsoft, and open source was a much more heralded movement.
TayTay makes her own money. She isn't on anyone's payroll as far as I know --- contrary to right wing propaganda. So no one is "counting on her" for anything.
Wondering if anyone can confirm this, but....

I saw somewhere that part of the problem at google is how their mono repo code base is so cumbersome that they are more likely and willing to kill services just because of the maintenance overhead of maintaining the code.

Any insight from Xooglers? I feel like I read this somewhere on here or reddit, but can't recall the specifics.
People don't want to pay for digital content, search, or social networking. Advertising, data harvesting, aka surveillance capitalism is the only remaining major business model for the web. This is like saying your neighborhood gas/petrol station is downsizing because of mismanagement, and you're cheering because you think that means the end of the fossil fuels industry is near. Whatever replaces Google, if it fails, will certainly be at least as invested in advertising as they are.
If the gov. sells some goods at a fixed price you can probably limit the inflation increase somewhat. I.e. like backing it with gold, but with foo.

You'd have to increase the fixed price to not have a too big disparity though.
what was it related to? I thought someone reported a suspicious bag in the venue.
> You could also just work less, or let yourself spend less time and energy on your kids.

When nearing end of life, many people, especially fathers, say they wish they'd dedicated more time to their children rather than work. While meaningful work can provide purpose, it doesn't compare to the happiness derived from building meaningful relationships with loved ones. Children offer a rare opportunity to enjoy one of the deepest forms of human connection available, and I think it's shortsighted to put career advancement over building a family. Balancing work and family life is challenging, but the payoff is well worth it.
Very nice. Thanks.

Typing and Text Editors? My favorite text editor is my most important application program, and nearly all of my work is typing into that editor. Soooo, I agree that typing and text editors are important tools, approaches.

And I'm a TeX user: For any important writing, in math or not, I use TeX. Never tried LaTeX.

The text editor I use is KEdit, and for it I have lots of macros and write more continually.

VIM looks more advanced than KEdit!

For drawing of simple figures, I use the old Microsoft PhotoDraw -- you seem to have something more recent and better. Good!

Thanks!
I do. But I’m on private trackers where almost all content is well-seeded and long-term seeding is rewarded, so download time is less of a concern.

Why? Because I want the highest-quality possible copy. Same reason I download lossless versions of albums. It’s less about being able to perceive the quality increase, and moreso about archival. Then my Plex server can transcode to appropriate streaming bitrates on the fly without having to re-encode an already heavily compressed video stream.
Is there a citation for 3?

Afaik, WASM is only used by Sheets [1].

[1]: https://2024.wasmio.tech/sessions/webassembly-at-google/
I'm not downvoting you if you show me a modern IDE that out-of-the-box(!) can do filename completion in the way Martin describes ("type 'articles emacs' to get a list of any file paths that contain 'articles' and 'emacs' in their file path").
12% is not conservative
Thanks for the example. It got me thinking.

It's true that a sale at $0.20 profit margin is still a profitable sale, so if the alternative is to not make a sale at all, then better make it.

And... in the case of expirable things like food, even a negative-margin sale is not something to back out of, if again the alternative is to not make the sale at all. That nearly-expired porkchop was already stocked, no way to get back the purchase cost, but you can get something.

But you should not give out negative-profit coupons to begin with for perfectly fine non-expired goods. I hear that.

I guess you would also worry if a customer's behavior forestalls other customers' spending. Like if you have 50% off on bacon but you forgot to set a maximum amount of units, then one customer comes along and buys up the entire supply.
I think it's kinda weird to expect a source any time someone online shares an anecdote. It was sunny in New York yesterday, do you need a source for that?

At any rate, a 5s Google of "patel hotel indian scam call site:www.reddit.com" reveals dozens of threads of people sharing essentially the same anecdote. Is that enough for you sir, or do you need something peer reviewed?
I don't think exciting is the right word here. What's being called for is careers that are deemed worthy/virtuous according to the OP.
That doesn’t address the tail risk concern, and a huge number of people are living far below a comfortable level. Just because it’s possible doesn’t mean it’s reasonable or desirable.
Sorry but that’s terrible advice. I’ve worked on projects that started with integer ids and it caused nothing but problems.
What about when those 6 bytes are randomly generated?

RFC 4122 does allow the MAC address in a version-1 (or 2) UUID to be replaced by a random 48-bit node ID, either because the node does not have a MAC address, or because it is not desirable to expose it.
I don't know. The leaking of information via time-based identifiers always strikes me as an annoying trade-off to work around an implementation detail in certain database engines. Sometimes you have to do it, but it shouldn't be a general rule.
Cable companies, automakers try to derail FTC, FCC quest to kill misleading fees
On the one hand, I'm happy to see people being responsible. So many people who shouldn't have had children don't change, and think they can "have it all". You can not. Your life as you know it is over, and if that only dawned on you after you already had a kid, then join the club, but don't delude yourself, and don't make your kid suffer the consequences of your delusion.

On the other hand; stop being a little wuss. The reasons I see being given by those fretting the responsibilities seem to be born from general anxiety and over-thinking. Nobody is ever ready to have a child, but we do it any learn along the way because we're arrogant enough in the beginning, and humble enough afterward the beginning.

What I see with this generation however, is never trying because on paper it's impossible. Yes, it's impossible, but that shouldn't stop you if it's what you really want.
You might want to skim through <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astrophysical_maser> which discusses among other things single-pass versus oscillator-based lasers, and whether the lack of oscillating cavity makes an astrophysical source something other than a "true" maser. One would want to apply the same thinking to astrophysical lasers and gravilasers.

There are very very large coherent sources in the sky <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megamaser>, and obviously these are not generated with oscillating cavities any more than is a terrestrial laboratory X-ray FEL <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-electron_laser#X-ray_FELs> (examples therein).

> how does one make ... a GW mirror

This is a genuinely super-interesting question!

In an anti-de Sitter universe (AdS), gravitational radiation eventually reflects off the "screen" and returns to the source, unlike in our universe which as far as we can tell lacks such a screen (and expands whereas AdS contracts). Among other interesting results, this means that in AdS a generic black hole that digests matter in blobs in its early history in AdS never fully evaporates, because the gravitational waves emitted from the blobby growth (as opposed to spherically symmetric infall) reflect back before final evaporation, followed in due course by early Hawking radiation.

In an open universe like ours, probably nothing can outright reflect gravitational radiation (seriously, though, it would be interesting area of research into mechanisms that could generate a "reflected GW" metric). However, if there is a high-amplitude plane-fronted wave with parallel propagation sweeping across the universe, it could conceivably sweep up incident gravitational radiation into the pp-wave and redeposit it onto the sources. Bondi & Pirani did a bunch of work in this area if you're curious about details; one might start with their "sandwich wave". (Nobody knows how to generate a sandwich wave; it would have to simply be a feature of the evolving universe, like the metric expansion of space).
Now that you understand the problem, you can address it :)
I bought a KaiOS device a few years ago and use it mostly on weekends. It supports basic messaging and internet browsing, so I won't get lost if something emergent happens.
No news, feeds, or any other unnecessary stuff.
Simply because using the same language for both Web and server is incredible.
but it does exist
Anecdotal, but developers from Poland (and Russia too) have been among the best contractors I've seen. Even the digital tracking / documents system from the government, which is usually a pile of crap in most countries, is pretty well done.

I've had terrible experiences with Hungary, Latvia, etc. and (judging from conversations to the owners of the outsourcing agencies) Hungary has very high taxes and not many smart ways of avoiding them.
My understanding is that they cause a lot of page fragmentation, which leads to excessive writes to the WAL
Reading books is somewhat different than scrolling through endless feeds and numbing yourself, though.

I also prefer to read books in these situations, or face with the thing which makes me uncomfortable. I don't like to have a puddle of thoughts which fester and attack at the most inconvenient times, making my life harder than it should be.
I believe the JetBrains tools can actually do this (ctrl-shift-N if I recall) and can do it for symbols, filenames, and classes, etc. Keyword match with some fuzzy logic.

Though actually I'm not sure if they'll do it on directory name components or just the filename itself.

They will, however, have 5x the memory and battery consumption and not be nearly as snappy in response time, nor nearly as customizable.
I was thinking about this when reading John Calhoun's post about Tom Dowdy, which has been doing the rounds recently (probably via Daring Fireball): https://www.engineersneedart.com/blog/dowdy/dowdy.html

This was the 2nd half of the 90's and Apple was at that point in its history when it was circlng the drain. It was another lesson that would be reinforced over and over in my three-decade career as a programmer: if you work very long in this field, know that everything will eventually change.

It was the supposed "dark times" to be at Apple: whole teams would be suddenly let go (the rest of us that lingered still might go through the abandoned offices of once co-workers looking to pull RAM out of their hardware for our own development machines). Some engineers like Tom, could see the writing on the wall early enough and knew when to switch teams. Tom ended up moving to the QuickTime team where he was able to continue to use his graphics talents. Later he worked on the iTunes visualizer if I recall correctly.

It's possible to join a company at a bad time and still have a good experience there.

(I don't know if everyone is aware how bad things got for Apple back then. IIRC they tried to sell the company to Sony, but Sony turned them down. They only survived due to investment from arch-nemesis Microsoft.)
> Question from someone knew very little in this domain: what stops mass adoption of WebAssembly?

I think it's the focus on native apps. There's isn't exactly a benefit of WASM when you have a native app.

I was kinda hoping all the complaints about app stores would push people back to web apps and then I think you'd see a surgence of WASM. I guess Apple/Google gives apps too much tracking ability on native apps compared to web apps to make it worth it to re-do the app thrice (Android/iOS/Web Desktop) instead of just twice (Mobile Web/ Desktop Web).
Very curious to hear your reasoning and what alternative you propose.
That is completely understood, but you also must realize (if you are being honest) that if you belong to a group that has developed a negative public reputation for itself because of some of its members negative behavior that the negative public reputation will bleed over to you by association.

Conversely you can be a truly awful person within a group with a good public reputation and that good group reputation will apply to you too, even if you don’t deserve it.
To your question on property:
The claim that the idea of private property ownership is universal is just incorrect.

Proudhon famously deconstructed the concept mathematically:
https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/economics/proudho...

(You can ignore the fact that it's on a Marxist site - Proudhon and Marx were not friends and had bitter disagreements - but unfortunately and unsurprisingly Marx's "Communism" got popular)

Plenty of groups through history and even today ban interest as usury - the early Islamists were known for this

On efficiency: Note your arguments. The conceit of a capitalist apologist are that the mechanisms of capitalism, (eg markets as a price clearing mechanism between free agents) according to the efficient market hypothesis should not require a central or other intermediary for allocation. Yet your entire claim is that the purpose of finance is to make that clearing happen efficiently, and to be significantly compensated for such.

How is that not centralized planning only by a different group, then a government? From an information and planning perspective it’s not, so any claims that you need a financial services market in order to make capitalism efficient, argues against the foundational argument of the efficiency of capitalism.

Syndicalism, however, does not require any intermediary, and in fact, any intermediary introduces net losses as I’ve already demonstrated, there is no value created by capital allocation, and therefore the only value if it is taken out of, it comes out of those the value that could be captured by the person creating it.

Finally I’d suggest you read my paper and see what you think:

https://kemendo.com/Myth-of-Scarcity.html

Thanks for the debate
I see people go all out in LV and drop a lot of money at restaurants. I guess it depends. Then again if you've already been in LV for a few days due to BH you might be over the bell curve on spending for the week. I guess it depends on when you get in. I tend to drop more money Wed-Thur.
They also own largest Taxi service in Russia (Yandex Taxi), largest food and home goods delivery service (Yandex Lavka), and largest car sharing service (Yandex Drive). Yandex Taxi has been testing self-driving cars in Moscow for years.

Interesting to note is that all of these lines of business were created as in-house startups, not through acquisitions. In the local business community they are famous for doing the internal sandboxing and investing just right.

However, Yandex has mixed results outside of the Russian market, as far as I'm aware. E.g. former two services are driven locally by extremely low wage workforce from ex-Soviet countries, I'd guess their business model has this ingrained, and just does not work the same in markets with more expensive labor.
I can only speak anecdotally on this, but I personally find the added cognitive load of advanced note taking solutions like this one were often distracting when I hit a tough thing to represent. I would be so focused on figuring out how to encode it that I would miss parts of what's being said.
~1% of your waking day
Public space programs in the US have always been a job creation program that gets chopped up and subcontracted across the country, so many senators can campaign on how they are bringing space jobs to their state. The cost is intentional. And this unnecessary cross country subcontracting was an organizational cause of the Challenger explosion.
For those wondering how to accomplish something similar with Emacs: https://karthinks.com/software/latex-input-for-impatient-sch...

It does not cover creating figures, though.
Would you explain why this makes you proud?

I assume as the kid is showing a good grasp on identifying his emotions.
It is in India.
Am Googler. I do a lot of work on google3 code health and maintenance.

I do not think that this is the primary cause of product turndowns. Messy product design, left-hand/right-hand problems, internal politics, unfunded regulatory mandates, and other organizational complexity seem like much more direct causes. People like to add promotion-focus to this list but I don't actually buy that since there are tons of Googlers who are happy at their current level and want to maintain stuff even we if take it as a given that maintenance can't get people promoted. VPs showing up and changing org priorities so that various products no longer match the priorities and then get their funding cut is way more common.

I do think that there is something to the fact that the monorepo and single-version rule means that sometimes a team says "we are changing how you do X with our system, everybody needs to update by Date Y" and then the bulk of teams upgrade but there's some project with a skeleton crew doing maintenance and it is not possible to fund the upgrade and so the entire project gets deleted instead.

However, I also think that the monorepo is a superpower. What I describe above is a problem but there are so many incredible benefits (under the assumption that you've got tooling as good as Google's) that I feel that the benefits dramatically outweigh the costs. Comparing the code quality of the stuff in google3 vs the stuff in various isolated git repos is night and day.
If you want Emacs to work as Martin describes out of the box, you can install Doom and enable Ivy completion from the config.

From then on, the experience feels pretty modern, while remaining infinitely customizeable in a structured way.
I'm "half-half" so to speak.

I work as a CTO in my day job (as an employee).

Also I'm self-employed (via a company structure) to build https://persumi.com - a blogging platform, and https://rizz.farm - a lead gen platform, as well as to work on client work.

https://persumi.com/u/fredwu/hire-fred :)
With the shift from blue collar to white collar employment in the developed world, I wonder if there hasn't been an overall decline in cognitive surplus in the past 50 years.

After 8 hours of coding, meetings, and emails, I am done. I'm up for physical activity. But no way am I contributing to open source or doing anything cognitively challenging.
How to Work Hard (2021)
To me, the name Yandex seemed familiar, but I did not know what it was until now.
> "From an H.R. standpoint, this is a nightmare... It completely reverses their image as a desirable employer."

Good. I mentor early career and nontraditional-background engineers, and among this set, Google has acquired a certain reputation. To paraphrase, if you can just pass the interview bar, you'll find yourself in an organization where the pay is amazing, the oversight is minimal, the visa/greencard policy is generous, and the HR processes rarely fire anyone. I routinely got to see people who I would never want to work with get hired there.

If Google becomes less of a target for barely-qualified people who want to rest and vest, I'm all for it.
Google News has been going bad for a long time. But that’s probably not entirely on Google. The news business has been going bad for a long time, and has gotten even worse in the past year as a lot of legacy news organizations completely fold, or operate on an absolute skeleton crew. The meaningful content is behind paywalls. (Yes, I know, that’s a broad generalization, but between the NYTimes, the Economist, WSJ…that’s a lot of paywalled content.)

Voice Assistant is a somewhat surprise flop. For a while there, voice assistants were The Big Thing that you had to have. Maybe they saw the metrics and realized everybody eventually gave up in frustration once you realized that outside of setting timers, the interaction model doesn’t scale well.
As a childless person I agree entirely. I fully acknowledge and embrace that I don't have kids because I'd rather not deal with the hassle of it.

Although I've not fully understood what makes that decision "selfish" in the sense that I'm not acting in a way that is a detriment to others.