skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> the best parts of woodworking aren't actually that different from software engineering

What parts of woodworking actually aren't that different from <your favorite profession, probably your own as of the time you are reading this>?

Which professions could I NOT relate these items to? Full honesty, looking for professions where these generics do not apply. And this is from the perspective from the actual practitioners in that profession, not outsiders looking in. I.E I don't really want a SWE thinking of using the example of a mechanic, financial advisor, nurse, land surveyor, etc.

Woodworking is an old profession turned into very niche hobby for bored people, is that not enough? What is the point to likening X to Y? I would even bet the overlap of woodworkers to the general population is equivalent if not smaller than the overlap for woodworkers to SWEs.
just like it isn't always easy to see sarcasm in text (unless /s is added)
I see your point. There are more factors than talent being different in the Bay Area I think. I work for a Bay Area start-up in the Netherlands. They opened their office here for a specific talent. This talent can be found in the Bay Area too, and they can pay the salaries there too but the employees in the Bay Area don't stay that long compared to here. For the company this is a big issue because you keep bleeding out know how. So the reason they came here was a combination of the talent, affordabile salaries (100-150k for staff level), and employee loyalty. We had only 1 person left from a team of 25 people in 6 years while half of the people in the Bay Area office is left. Give us 40 holiday days, 40 hour work week and a decent salary we will stay.
I left my dream job at Apple to pursue woodworking. If anyone is interested in dipping their toe in, I help out at a 2.5 day weekend workshop on the central coast of California where you come and make a piece a furniture with a master woodworker. We get a lot of software engineers from both the bay area and Seattle.
Kapitan founder here! Please reach out on the kapitan channel of the kubernetes slack, or connect with me on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/alledm

I have been working on a couple of video tutorials that could be helpful to get started
- Postgres and Kafka
- Airflow and Flink
- Kudu+Impala or Clickhouse
- Iceberg/Parquet or Delta
- Ozone(HDFS) or Ceph
- Spark Rapids and/or Ray+Metaflow
- Open Metadata or Atlas+Ranger
I do baking and make confectionary, and I think it is for much the same reason that programmers also like woodworking - the fact that it is something physical that you can touch and feel (and taste, in the case of baking). Then there's the smell as well, which may be relevant for woodworking too.
* Digital SLRs are already on the way out in favor of mirrorless designs.

* HDMI will be replaced by USB-C or some other multi-purpose standard.

* USB/Audio ports on handheld devices like smartphones.

* General purpose personal computing won't be obsolete, but it will become increasingly obscure.

* Screens will still be around, but I predict a some kind of push for augmented reality devices to take place of screens if devices like the Vision Pro take off.
Kapitan founder here! Thank you for the promotion

Happy to help if you need anything

https://www.linkedin.com/in/alledm
Say you're running a SQL transaction and queue a message in SQS. The problem is, this message isn't part of your SQL transaction. So if your transaction fails, the SQS message won't roll back with it, potentially leading to inconsistencies. That's why sometimes it's better to use a queue inside an SQL database, to ensure both your transactions and queue messages are always in sync, and as a bonus, it simplifies the overall architecture and you will have fewer potential points of failure.
> The final product probably doesn't use it.

I disagree here, usually projects that are not keen on relying on ROS end up re-implementing a lot of the groundwork (shared memory, message distribution, parameter server, logging, etc.), usually they are older products (10 or 15+ years old), where ROS wasn't really a thing and migrating to ROS after implementing their own tailored stack is not worth it.
LA's Totally Awesome carpet cleaner from the dollar tree. I was holding a bottle trying to get a stain out of my daughter's bedding and saw one. I was so mad by then I sprayed at the sucker and it instantly keeled over. No clue what's in the stuff but it saved my sanity.
The constitution also says “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated”
Doing a Master's and/or PhD in bioinformatics is probably the easiest way. It's a pretty specialized field, and the first couple of years are usually spent learning the basics. You are unlikely to find anyone willing to hire you to a real job to do that.
That wasn't Brackett's fault, Chandler famously said he didn't know who killed the chauffeur. Like many of his novels The Big Sleep was made by combining two or more of his short stories, and sometimes things didn't make sense.
I made a smart pinewood derby track. Used a reed switch to start a timer on release of the cars and ultrasonic distance sensor to stop the timer when the first car crossed the finish line. Displayed the data on a TV mounted above the finish line. That was a fun project.
Most people can live in a rent-capped MRG apartment for two years and then immediately qualify for social housing and stay there until the day they drop dead - seems like a very affordable system to me, nonetheless.

The salaries are comparably horrible and that probably plays its part too in the equation, for sure, but on the other hand the salaries would also have to be higher if the state government didn't do such an excellent job at housing people for reasonable cost.
YES! That's the one :-)
Thanks for identifying it. And it was in that anthology "Nanotech" having editors Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois. I found this interesting article about the story, with links to other similar stories:

https://kasmana.people.cofc.edu/MATHFICT/mfview.php?callnumb...

And this quote:

"Marsden's data stores contain a fragmented catalogue of mathematical variants. All founded on the postulates of arithmetic, but differing in their resolution of undecidable hypothesis."
"Undecidability. You're talking about the incompleteness theorems,"
"Right. No logical system rich enough to contain the axioms of simple arithmetic can ever be made complete. It is always possible to construct statements that can be neither disproved nor proved by deduction from the axioms; instead the logical system must be enriched by incorporating the truth or falsehood of such statements as additional axioms..."
The Continuum Hypothesis was an example.
There were several orders of infinity. There were 'more' real numbers, scattered like dust in the interval between zero and one, that there were integers. Was there an order of infinity between the reals and the integers. This was undecidable, within logically simpler systems like set theory; additional assumptions had to be made.
"So one can generate many versions of mathematics, by adding these true-false axioms."
"And then searching on, seeking out statements which are undecidable in the new system. Yes. Because of incompleteness, there is an infinite number of such mathematical variants, spreading like the branches of a tree...."
No it doesn't work differently and the framing of all of this in the media is terrible. No one goes into making a movie planning on writing it off. They made a movie and decided that it was actually not going to be something worth releasing / unable to recoup the expenses, so they're not releasing it. This happens all the time with movies at all sorts of various stages of production. It just so happened this movie was "finished" before the decision was made. If they'd done this 6 months earlier than they did before it was "finished" no one would care.
> to replace me and the manager by bringing in politics, social dilemma and putting layers of management between everyone.

sorry, this seems ... too vague for me to understand what's going on, and how it connects to their greed.

are they trying to 'scale up' this project? why aren't they keeping you? replace you how? in what capacity? are you currently wearing too many hats according to them? can you please give some details?
>I just sped-run tweaking different values +/- 1 until I got the expected result

we call this "ML" now, and it pays extra
Your argument seems to be that these "fiefdoms" aren't providing you anything and just taking a portion of your generated value. The obvious follow up is then: why don't you quit and go solo then? Clearly if they're entirely parasitic leaving is strictly beneficial to you.
Well, yes. But the important part of a creative process is there are usually a few drafts before the final work is done. There aren't many (any?) people who can just create a masterpiece from scratch to finish first attempt with no wasted effort.

There isn't a problem with writing a bad script with a few good ideas in it. The process of filming is supposed to take that and iterate on it until it is good.
> Unfortunately, that's how the competitive market works.

That's how some people think the competitive market works. It's not universal.

Which is why I just contradicted that, and called to not encourage those beliefs.

Put loosely, half the job of an engineer is to tell the truth.

What I think you're characterizing is a corporate bullshit shoveler who just wants to go through the bullshit motions to get a paycheck.

I really don't want some impressionable junior engineers to see multiple people on HN encouraging lying.

I do not want to wade through that, to separate the merely misled junior engineers, from the hopeless anti-engineers.

> You are more than capable of withdrawing your candidacy.

And I do. But I'd prefer that the situation improve.
I couldn't speak to careers, but my curiosity was enough for me to ask a biochemist to join his bioinformatics class despite lacking a great many prerequisites.

I was quite helpful to him and the other students (who mostly struggled with packaging: conda, pip, apt, etc). In turn, they were quite patient with my lack of biochemistry background. It was nice to get a taste without having to take what would've been 2.5 years worth of prerequisites.
X is like Y since you work with tools, have to learn things, have to plan things and people have opinions about the results.
And if you think that's a big deal to introduce a change like that, let's not forget that Lucas' first draft for A New Hope had Luke Skywalker as an elderly general, "Annikin Starkiller" as the protagonist, Chewbacca as a leader of a tribe of Wookies behaving very much like the Ewoks in Return of the Jedi (and a presumably-unrelated human pilot called Chewie!) and Han Solo as a giant green alien...
Thank your for sharing, it's great to hear different perspectives on the topic.

Non-transferable skills is actually one of my biggest concerns about working at the same company long term. These tools are often so far from the industry standard that it can hurt your employability long term as you mention.

It's no secret that devs often interview with companies they don't intend to join just as a warm up exercise. I confess I've been guilty of this.

The boomerang is quite interesting. Up until very recently this was a very well known career move. People would leave the company for one year just to come back at a higher level and higher salary. As a "loyal" employee I find this furious, but alas I guess it's my fault for working for such a lousy company and not pulling the same move. If it is any consolation, at least our company change the rules so that it's harder to pull this off, so you should see this much less often these days.

Regarding your last comment I'm not particular about leaving FAANG, as I aren't about working for FAANG. Considering my priorities it's very likely I'd only take a competing offer from another top tech company. For now I'm comfortable enough staying in my current company and passively looking for a better opportunity. At the same time I want to avoid becoming too complacent, and I'm aware the rug might get pulled from under my feet at any moment (hello layoffs?).
Also grad student. I use Voice Dream reader on my devices and it's helped a lot with reading dense texts

https://www.voicedream.com/
TLDR the Parks Service wanted to stop dredging that river, despite having done it for years, because they wanted to shift the focus to summertime visitors on foot and keeping the dunes more natural.

That disappointed some fishermen who used to be able to navigate into the bay with a boat. Tired of having to push their boats over the last bit, they dug a channel themselves instead.

The NY Times article has more info: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/09/us/michigan-river-nationa...

"Park officials decided to restore the river to its natural state in 2016 after an environmental assessment found that the sand and gravel dredged from the river mouth interfered with dune vegetation and the enjoyment of beachgoers.

According to the assessment, dredging benefited “a small, short-term user group compared to the deleterious effects for the larger recreational groups during the full summer.”

It was a controversial decision, prosecutors said in court papers, because in the Platte River’s natural, non-dredged state, the river mouth became too shallow for boats to pass.

“If you had a boat, it sucked,” said Brian Seiferlein, a chartered fishing boat guide. “You would need two, three guys to push your boat about three-fourths of a mile in ankle-deep water.""

The environmental review is here: https://parkplanning.nps.gov/showFile.cfm?projectID=60589&MI...
You raise good points, and it echoes advice I have given many times — follow the funding path that makes sense for you and your business.

That being said, I do think times are changing. I don't think Obsidian could have been bootstrapped as easily 5 to 10 years ago. The leverage we get from cross-platform frameworks, scalable server architecture, etc, make it possible to stay small. LLMs will even further enhance that leverage for entrepreneurs.
> He benchmarks against the rust implementation.

No he doesn't.

The post is Mojo for Bioinformatics.

They ran a completely different library, in a different language, on their machine.

They did not run anything in Mojo.

You are asserting one data point of a Rust bioinformatics library on a random machine contributes information about Mojo, and berating me about reading comprehension to cling to that.

> If this is...

"If this is your take-home from my post, it's pretty clear you didn't read it, or your reading comprehension needs some work. That sentence was obviously facetious, poking a little fun at the author of the original piece."

^ seriously, right back at you. With a wink, and hopeful understanding I'm saying subtly "relax partner." Your first reaction should be curiosity when you're confused, not name-calling.
Highly recommend the Sold a Story podcast (mentioned elsewhere) for a synopsis accessible to laypeople.

A big part was guilt by association with a behaviorist view of education. Phonics is very rote and mechanical, which clashes with notions of whole, meaningful problem solving. By analogy, think reps on Spanish flash cards vs speaking Spanish to solve a mystery or order lunch. At first blush mechanical drills feel divorced from an authentic lifelike context, which can lead to poor engagement and generalization.

Then there’s the affective layer—how you feel about the subject and your ability in it. If all you do is drill Spanish flash cards, you might worry that a lot of kids will hate Spanish instruction. Alternative reading methodologies put a lot of emphasis on kids falling in love with reading.

But it turns out that in all the well-intentioned holistic thinking they basically they forgot/missed that decoding phonetic information is just super important as a discrete outcome, and you can’t skip addressing it directly or many kids will fail to infer it on their own.

And turns out it’s not so boring for little kids, because it’s new to them, and decoding skills give them much-needed momentum to read literally any text they encounter in their daily lives.
yes,actually! I am cringing right now remembering it. Nightmare of my life, we unwittingly moved into an infested house.
Also a post from Paul Normans, mentioned in the parent post, covers some options. https://www.paulnorman.ca/blog/2022/10/tilekiln-storage/
They might not still have the game source and/or knowledge on how to recompile the game. There are lots of technical reasons that it might be entirely unworkable to do that even if they wanted to.

(disclosure: work in video games at a big studio where I know for certain there are things we couldn't build again at this point without a ton of work)
Really, the marketers seem to call it "AI".
I can't stress enough how much I admire that it is true 256 bytes, instead of usual 1k game jams, where submissions are presented as zipped, gzipped, and postfixed, and not including assets to fit the criteria.

Hats off.
I've used MessagePack[1] and MemoryPack[2] for some internal binary serialization. It'd be nice to have a (safe) BCL option.

[1] https://github.com/MessagePack-CSharp/MessagePack-CSharp
[2] https://github.com/Cysharp/MemoryPack
I don't want to get into a political argument, man. I think most anarchists can't really agree on what a definition is. It's unfalsifiable.
must be blind but I don't see it in the image of all characters
Well, this is a decent example. I didn’t say you were hostile, just defensive.

As an ML researcher, infrastructure libraries need to show how to train a production grade model, or else they’re useless for research. This is why research is hard. You keep handwaving this in various ways, but if you want ML researchers to take this seriously, you need a serious example.

"Production grade" doesn’t mean that it needs to have a deployable API. It memes the model needs to not suck. And until your training code can train a model that doesn’t suck, every ML researcher will view this and think "this code is guaranteed to produce a model that sucks," since there’s no evidence to the contrary. It’s incredibly hard to get the details right, and I can’t count the number of times I’ve had to track down some obscure bug buried deep within abstraction layers.

I’m trying to help you here. Ask yourself: who are my users? Are your users ML researchers? I already explained the problems we have, and why your library doesn’t meet those needs. Are your users ML hobbyists? You’ve already said no to this, and I think that’s a mistake. Most ML researchers behave as hobbyists, in the sense that they’re always looking for simple, understandable examples. Your library gives that, but without any of the rigor necessary to show that it can be trusted. Are your users ML devops, since it’s infrastructure? No, because it’s training models.

So you’re excluding every possible user, whether you realize it or not. But we’ll see; in a few months, if your library has significant traction, I’m empirically wrong. But I’m trying to help you avoid the default outcome of nobody uses your code because you’re not designing it for any particular user.
16TB is a single hard drive these days. It's easier to grab everything at that point instead of picking through, and having everything gives you a nice easy claim you can make.
> What would HN commenters define as a truly modern data stack right now?

Just don’t spend too much time debating what it is, or the analysts who need numbers yesterday will develop their own solutions before you’ve even published your A3 architecture diagram.

A bird in the hand, as they say.
I've often told people that programming is like woodworking:

- jigs are like functions
- stops are like constants
- experience teaches you the order of operations, how things fit together
- woodworkers build a lot of their own tools
- custom tools are usually made by same stuff the products are
- both spend time optimizing their workflow
- wood is quite soft, like software!
Covered in sawdust right now from building a pull-out drawer for a kitchen cabinet. It came out square and the joints were tight enough to hold it together for the dry fit. Very satisfying. I am still mostly terrible at this.

> It's tangible.

This is the best part for me. Programming often reminds me of the "I sell air"[1] scene from City Slickers. The down side of this is that there's no undo. You have 300 operations to step through and if you mess one up you probably need to start over.

> The techniques are hundreds/thousands of years old.

Watching Clickspring recreate the Antikythera mechanism[2] has made it obvious to me that loads of secret knowledge was trapped in guilds and missing from the historical record as a result. You can do so much with basic hand tools. The down side is that there's so much temptation to buy expensive shit. Or worse, think you can't build anything because you don't have $15,000 worth of pro tools. I really needed a thickness planer on this project.

> Every project has a definite end.

So much. Fuck maintenance. No down side

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=77xaqFyFET0

2. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZioPDnFPNsHnyxfygxA0...
The way to get rich if you’re VC-funded is also to make things people want by getting more paying users. You don’t become Dropbox or Stripe by having a terrible product.

The fools optimizing for “growth” without anything sustainable aren’t going to get rich (on average), and are focused on the wrong customer - the VC.

VCs don’t force you to do bad things. Bad founders do bad things, and they sometimes raise money. That’s all.
RSS is great and I can't imagine what my life would've been if I were to scan the news feeds on each individual site that I have included in my RSS feed. However, the text rendering feature is rather useless for the resources that are greedy for views, clicks and other analytics, as they simply truncate the body of the article, leaving you no choice but to open the original url to read the rest of it. For my use case in particular, a full title is enough, but I was rather bummed initially that the promised "read all articles rendered in the same style with no distractions that existed on the original website" never worked out.
/This is a reply to a reply (which I thought was thought-provoking) but commenter deleted it. I'm posting regardless to flesh out my thoughts.

>...that still doesn't mean they will do what you want them to do.

I get the generalization/perspective, but I reject the premise that you can't influence or manage subordinates to "do what you want." While you can't avoid your subordinate (a) daytrading their job or (b) empirebuilding for the sake of empirebuilding, you can for sure mitigate with monitoring, prioritization, and termination.

> <anecdote about Larry Page getting frustrated about PMs not doing what he wants in early Google>

I don't know the context of the Larry Page story, but the qualifier of "early Google" makes my point that they were still figuring out their leadership presence as rising managers/leaders. Jobs was also a known micro-manager. The answer, I assume, is that they began to realize how to manage results and I bet they could get a random employee to "do what they wanted," but prefer a different approach.

> learning to be hyper-aware of how your employees' agendas/motives can subvert your goals

I don't disagree, but there are checks and balances you can incorporate as a principal. The Gervais Principle takes it one step further by incorporating how these "subverters" can be useful to take risks that if things work out (and nobody gets caught), you get a pat on the back and the bonus. But, if you get caught (for doing something illegal but highly profitable), well we have to fire you. Either way, the principal is getting subverted, but it's not always against the principal's wishes.