skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> That's a backwards way of assigning moral responsibility.

"Moral responsibility" is a non-sequitur. The discussion is whether UNRWA perpetuates the problem it purports to solve. Several of us have demonstrated that they do this.

You seem each time to reject the evidence because you find the premise itself incredible. It is indeed a bitter pill to swallow, that one of the bulwarks of civilization such as the Union of Nations would be so corrupt, but the evidence is clear.

> ecause without it one side might "drop the idea" of making war -- or, more sinisterly, "drop the idea" of defending themselves.

Well, see, you are taking sides in this conflict. Historically, Israel only attacks when it is attacked. In other words, Israel would like to be left alone. No one argued against Palestinians defending themselves, but there is no legitimate reason to attack Israel, and particularly not Israeli citizens. As we've demonstrated repeatedly in this thread, UNWRA has enabled Palestinians to maintain a perpetual war against Israel for 75 years. If UNWRA had not been doing this, it's at least arguable that Palestinians would have devoted their energies to making a legitimate state that took care of its citizens rather than the situation as it is today: Gaza ruled by a well-funded terrorist organization that literally has "destroy Israel" and "never compromise with Israel" in its charter, while legitimate government operations are left to UNRWA. Even if you believe the Palestinians have some kind of right to "resist" the "occupation" of "their land" (which is taking a side) and so commit acts of terror, it should not be the UN that funds it.
"Who says that? Anything can be a useful utility in the right time and in the right hands for a specific purpose. Maybe one tool is useless to you, while useful to another.
Some people might use it to store hundreds of keyfobs, so instead of carrying all the hardware for each, they can use one device instead. Others might use it to control their home devices, either the IR remotes, or other smart devices, and instead of having 15 remotes (I personally do), they can use one device. Some other person might use it to monitor their TPMS in the tires, others to monitor a serial GPIO port, and so on. All these are not only legal, but you can perform all the individual tasks with a “collection” of tools, like reading the serial GPIO, you can buy a dongle for $10, IR remote? You can use some android devices, etc. However, with flipper zero, it’s all-in-one."

Sure, you can make that point, but No Reasonable Person would accept it, which is where I draw the line.
I would guess the highest leverage thing you could do is open source some of your work on Github as samples to show potential employers. If you are just getting by your top priority should probably be to find better employment ASAP. Making money off little utilities like this is almost certainly going to be tough going.

Have you gotten any feedback from people on these projects? If you get feedback from people that might give you a hit as to whether they might be willing to pay money for such things.

When you put a lot of time into something and are understandably pleased with the result it can be hard to look at it objectively and you are likely to overvalue your work relative to someone who isn't invested in it. Maybe just look at them as a stepping stone learning experiences to bigger and better things.
Hacker news traffic lasts just 2 days.
Well reasoned post. I tend to use Deno when I want to test code that should run in the browser but want to have Typescript support. I was initially really excited by the differences compared to Node but the gap is closing.

I also don't like the subtle differences that Deno has from tsc.

So for a Typescript project that I want to run in the browser I usually just use `npx typescript -p tsc` and import the build dir as modules in the app.

So while I was initially really excited about Deno, I just haven't really needed it for anything special lately.

When I want to write a quick script I usually just use Python because the std lib is so rich.
On Learning to Code
Treaty of Versailles turned out to be a real menace to civilization, BTW.
> Chinese seafood

After reading The Outlaw Ocean[0] by the article’s author, it’s clear to me there is no ethical seafood. The overwhelming majority of it comes from natural reserves where fishing is prohibited, depleting marine ecosystems, and fished by slaves who are prisoners on their fishing boats. One more reason (on top of heavy metal pollution, bottom trawling, human rights issues, bycatch, marine ecosystems destruction) for me to not eat seafood. Yes there is a microscopic chance you know of an edge case where the seafood is catches using traditional methods in sustainable quantities by a business that is virtuous… that’s not the seafood you’ll get in most supermarkets or restaurants anywhere in the world.

[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Outlaw_Ocean
Except for Steve Jobs, himself, of course!
Physics is very broad and encompasses concepts at all scales (from subatomic to cosmological scales) and all levels of complexity——“Complex systems” is a branch of physics. Economics is a form of applied philosophy that is not yet mature enough when compared to most branches of physics and is significantly smaller in total volume of published literature when compared with all branches of physics put together. Economics does however affect policy and politics directly in the last hundred years or so, whereas physics ends up guiding the technology, which eventually feeds back to society in multiple indirect ways. Physics did have a lot of early bloomers in its young branches eg, quantum mechanics, semiconductors, lasers, computational physics, but it also tends to split up and create a new branch whenever there is a new part of the world that needs some explaining. I’d expect that with economics increasingly becoming a data-driven science, including what used to be macro economics, there will be new crowds of young people blooming until the computational simulation models become much better and practical compared to any simplified high level models we’ve had in the past. A similar transformation is already well underway in physics, where computational physics and simulation have altered the course of the study of complex systems in all branches of physics from condensed to soft matter, astronomy to particle physics, polymer, and biophysics.
Maybe I’m old and out of date - but don’t you learn cursive as a child at school and then use it for the rest of your life?
There is, but the key sizes are just different enough that I can't swap the caps.
Since we're in the realm of fiction, Harold is a Helion employee and has first dibs on their container-sized fusion reactor.
What's your best-case scenario these days?

Top of the leaderboard?

Recognizable blogging name?

Building yourself a niche of tech, tech adjacent work, tech leadership/marketing work?
A child is the greatest gift we can give to ourselves to help us be the ‘best’ versions of ourselves.
Good luck on the 2nd part of life.
I am now realizing an app I was working on had some "vulgar" function names in tests. they've been changed, but they're still there in version control. I just hope no one looks at the history of tests...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19800726
Generalized anxiety disorder here. It stresses me out to be so square about breathing, as if I'm not allowed to do it when I feel the need to do it. Almost feeling like I'm strangling myself if I keep it up for more than a cycle or two.

Funny how humans work that this can be experienced so differently I guess!
"Clearfix" - when this article was in the bookmarks bar: https://css-tricks.com/snippets/css/clear-fix/
Same as in 2004. It's so political powerful, you can even start a war against it.
Fair enough. What I meant by that is that you don't really expect discounts to come quickly, but yes Apple does do EPPs, and modest bulk programs, they also do student discounts.

What I meant is that they very rarely if ever run general-public sales for up-to-date products.
There’s a big difference between quitting a side project and giving up on a startup. With the startup, you have other people depending on you.

IMO, this is the real power you can leverage with a side project, the power to change your mind and bounce between completely different ideas. Those famous side projects that become companies? I’d bet that a lot of them were not the first or even third iteration.
Not sure who needs to hear this, but you can buy a nearly new car used and save 1/3 to 1/2 of the cost. One big benefit is you let somebody else find out if new models are lemons. Another benefit is you don't need to haggle, as there will be many different options at different prices and you can quickly find out if the price is reasonable by checking KBB.
Smarter Every Day filmed a series on the same topic, strongly recommended: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLjHf9jaFs8XWoGULb2HQR...
Might be true for jackets, but my anecdata hiking with friends in the Scandinavian mountains where it rains constantly and there are lots of rivers to ford is that wax is not good enough for boots. Time and time again the waxers hit leaks in my groups, and the GoreTexers stay bone dry.

GoreTex of course isn’t a perfect material for boots. I think the main downside I see with the GoreTex is that it’s stiffer, harder to break in, and subsequently produces more blisters. That is fine for me though. I can control how many blister pads I apply and when, and ultimately whether the blister comes. I can’t control water ingress when fording a stream.

For jackets, rather than invest in super pricey thousand dollar jackets, I usually bring two sets of Frogg Toggs and don’t expect them to survive the trek.

It feels like the pick two for jackets is “cheap”, “light”, and “durable”. Maybe add “breathable” in there as well. Frogg Toggs definitely checks all the boxes except for durable, they will disintegrate if you simply fart the wrong ways. For an intermediate adventurer like myself who only treks once or twice a year for not longer than 10 days at a time that is totally fine
There’s an opportunity here to transmit wisdom from now (age 36) to when I was 20-something (you). Normally I don’t explicitly mention age; I hated when people did that to me when I was younger, and maybe it’s a rite of passage that you only "get it" when you’re older.

Here’s the recipe for success, as far as I can tell: 1. You’re not going to make any money from your side projects. Internalize that, and believe it. 2. Do everything in your power to try to make money from your side projects.

Both parts are important. Step one means that you won’t take it personally if you fail. You won’t be disappointed because you weren’t hoping for anything to begin with. Step two means you’ll actually put in effort where it counts, by analyzing the situation dispassionately. Do those things that people say are important. Market your work. The best marketing I’ve found is to make entertaining HN and Twitter posts (seriously; 100% of whatever small amount of notoriety I have stems from these two sources). More importantly, design your apps to be gathering money. That means doing something that most people would call "a dick move". Perfect example: I just tried a 3d scanner app called prodAR. There was no tutorial, some of the interface was broken, it didn’t support screen rotation, and it demanded $30/yr before it allowed me to save my scan. I paid the $30. Why? Because it yields the best scans of any app I tried. It delivers quality where it counts, and wastes zero time anywhere else. This is the essence of being effective.

Personally, I’m terrible at step two. I can’t bring myself mentally to be ok with shipping a 3d scanner that doesn’t e.g. support screen rotation. That’s also why I haven’t shipped anything that generates passive income, and why I’m trying to steer you the other direction. It’s really ok to ship crap, as long as it’s crap in areas that aren’t the core value proposition of your product. It’s arguably necessary to ship crap if you ever intend to make money. Even pg would admit his initial v0 of startup news was (very) slightly crappy in areas that didn’t get in the way of the essence of what became Hacker News.

That’s the best I’ve got. Good luck, and I hope you make a nice passive income stream for yourself. Don’t underestimate the effects of growth; even $30/mo should impress you, not disappoint you, as long as you focus on exactly one thing: make that number go up over time, superlinearly. https://paulgraham.com/superlinear.html
I was really excited about deno and gave it a fair shake. I was certain I needed what it promised, and I was determined to make it work for me.

Since trying and running up against the friction and barriers, I’ve realized I don’t care much anymore about sharing code from front to back.

It feels weird to reflect on how badly I wanted it and how little I care about it now. I suppose I feel like it’s trying to optimize for the wrong thing.

Part of my reluctance to share code from front to back is that I have Go for the backend now, and using Typescript on the backend feels like a serious disservice to my productivity and happiness. Rust is also compelling in some cases. It’s rare that I actually want to be writing Typescript on the server.

On the frontend I find myself wanting the thinnest wrappers on my backends possible. Not like obtuse UIs that don’t hide anything for my unfortunate users, but I mean in the underlying logic, I have no desire to do anything clever or abstracted in the client.

I have one side project I built with Deno and it’s the one I’m the most reluctant to return to. The only motivation I get to work on it, frankly, is to migrate it off to something else.

I do wish it worked out. But that, and a lot of what this article mentions, has kind of ruined the whole idea for me.

Maybe we will get there one day, but I think we’re much further than many would think. The current options seem like massive compromises only to gain code you can share easily. Which, as mentioned, is quite easy to do with WASM now too. If you don’t need rapid throughput, WASM is great. If you do, it’s often still acceptable. The interface isn’t ideal, but for my purposes it has been better than adopting Deno or Bun.

Having said that… I think these are awesome projects nonetheless. They’re trying to accomplish something worth accomplishing. It’s an envelope we should keep pushing. Me though… I’m too boring for this stuff.
Sometimes they can. Your provider probably sources power from multiple generators. Some consumers can get power from brokers who sell closer to market rate, rather than a levelized one. Customers usually save money, but pay newspaper-headline-catching premiums when energy is scarce.

To your point, I don't think making physical electrical conductors communal property would be anything less than a disaster. That conductors are most valuable when you have a grid makes the monopoly problem structural in my opinion.

I suspect from the indifference to the details and heavy-handed tone of the article that there is some particular agenda. Saying utilities are just greedy is not very compelling when the legal conditions on their operations are much more complex than most compabies to say the least.
It’s been happening for years, but does seem to be speeding up a bit recently.
By the way, I was always pretty good about step one. The reason I’m decent at raising money for various causes is because I never have my hopes up to begin with. It always astonishes me that people are willing to, and I end up feeling grateful and take the responsibility seriously. This turns out to have protected me from the worst effects of seeking money: when people end up feeling entitled because you worked so hard and therefore you deserve it. I’ve seen this firsthand in various people in my life (especially one particular extended family member) and they ended up feeling crushed when their hopes didn’t work out. Don’t do that either.
I'll admit I've had a few times where a work crunch forced me to put down a few side-projects, and I've never had the motivation to pick them back up again. I still stash them on GH for memory's sake.
That’s hilarious :) The first time I worked on a project that used git, I got called out by a coworker for naming my branches after characters from Avatar, the Last Airbender.
Concentrate on getting the better job. Mention your projects to potential employers - open-source the code on GitHub or GitLab.

It's great that you have written the projects, but: realize that there are dozens, hundreds, maybe thousands of similar apps out there. Unless you actively enjoy marketing, don't try to sell your apps.
Discussions on similar submissions:

Life Aboard a Nuclear Submarine as the US Responds to Threats Around the Globe https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39400834 (February 16, 2024 — 4 points, 12 comments)
> Let's keep this factual.

I will give you benefit of the doubt that you personally never had them, but both are factual based on my experience.

If you are interested you should be able find previous HN threads with same exact symptoms from other people.
That's called "a good problem to have". Seek monetization, funding, scale - popularity is a difficult thing to achieve in a world of infinite choice.
I developed a custom (open-source, under AGPLv3) solution at my first job for a centralized software distribution system.

The entire thing was written in C# with ASP.NET Core for the server, and (sorry) WinForms for the Admin Panel and the launcher. And it integrated quite nicely with the authentication for the web application that was being developed. At one point I was thinking of LDAP support, but I left that job before I could implement it. It has a fully functional license key system (no DRM, gotta implement that yourself), branching, and an announcement system.

As far as I know, it's still running and fully functional after leaving a year ago, with the actual ASP.NET Core server having about a year of uptime.

I have been considering making some QoL changes and creating my own open-source launcher, but I haven't had the time or the mental capacity to do that.

https://github.com/ktwrd/OpenSoftwareLauncher
Probably not so much "higher" as "onerous"
Let's do the same to twitter links and get rid of them too, please. Without nitter links, twitter links are completely useless to those of us who would rather not have a Xitty account.
Also you put yourself after the first leg of the defect curve. Buying used is a stressful experience with no guaranteed outcomes, but I'd never buy new
If you want to sell software, essentially you did it backwards: you made some stuff for yourself that solves a problem you have or completes a task. Now you hope to sell some of the better stuff for a few bucks.

But to sell software to someone else, you need to know that the benefit you’re offering to potential customers is something that they actually want or need.

For example, the tool to learn keyboard shortcuts. How many customers want that? How many customers have a pain point with being unable to learn keyboard shortcuts? Of those people, how much are they willing to pay for the solution? How will you find those prospects and convert them into paying customers?

Your ideas haven’t really been validated by anyone (unless they actually have users and you haven’t mentioned it)

The other part of this equation is that having a business with customers is way often far more work than the time spent building the technical solution.

You say that these solutions are basically done but that’s the easy part. If the goal was to make these projects into a business you might as well have pitched the ideas before you even built them…because if prospective customers showed you their disinterest you could have spared yourself the time and effort actually building them in the first place.

If you have a thousand people who gave you their email for a waiting list for beta access to a product you haven’t even started building that’s way better than having a finished product with no interested parties.

All of that said, my advice would be to put those projects in your portfolio for your resume for your industry job. They can be the projects you talk about when interviewers ask you about your experience (but you also need to convince employers that you can work well on a team team others).

If you want a job in the industry you need to focus more on the quality of your resume and your job application process than any of your actual coding work. The task of getting a tech job is almost entirely detached from everything you’ve done to this point. You are working a numbers game where less than 10% interview rate is normal and expected, so your job now is to be as efficient and effective as possible, putting on the best show for prospective employers.

I would get more eyes on my resume to hone it and make sure it is one that will get you a high interview percentage. I wouldn’t waste my time on the side project stuff unless one or more of them was something I was confident in enough to dedicate a significant effort into making selling and supporting that product.
What really worked or me is combination of both Short and Long term solution.

Stress Management (Short term) - Ashvagandha medicinal tablet, jogging, breathing exercise like Anulom Vilom

Stress Relief (Long term) -

1. Vegeterian diet, small amount of green tea over coffee or any other stimulants

2.taking regularly couple of days off every month from your mobile, family and friends and do what he hell you want to do, not suppressing your irritation and depression with alcohol or marijuana but gradually helping them find outer expression in terms of any outdoor non-competitive sports activity which you actually like and not what people around you suggests

3.Understanding source of stress by giving equal (VIA POSITIVA, path of faith) or zero (VIA NEGATIVA, path of sceptic) priority to everything and everyone around you to clearly see who is supporting you to live a life you may or may not like but find it worth, this requires great courage as it may have to look beyond and grow out of your current relationship with life partner, business parter, country etc.
The main issue is the ones having a problem with the improved state of affairs reliably call on the use of other systems that have always worsened the affairs of countries that adopt them.
So he's playing both sides, like a true philosopher. The simple fact is, work for survival sake is often mind-numbing and soul destroying. Finding work you have a passion for that creates a positive impact in the world is something everyone should strive for, even the wealthy trust fund kids that don't need to lift a finger.
What Is Deep Learning? A Tutorial for Beginners
American Football today is almost as dangerous as the sport in Rollerball (1975). This is probably a better comparison to Roman circuses than Kill Bill.
> if it actually had good documentation

Great trolling. Emacs has remarkably good documentation. You can look up the documentation of any function and command. You are not even allowed to ship an extension (package) for Emacs to any major package repository without properly linting and ensuring that every single publicly used function has a proper docstring, where each argument is documented, and each docstring is properly formatted and punctuation is in place.

> I give up every time because it is just too frustrating

It's quite alright. I gave up multiple times before finally moving over. The biggest revelation I had is that instead of trying to "understand the features" of the editor, I needed to start learning Emacs Lisp and how to properly write it. How standard hooks work, how to use --debug-init to analyze what's being loaded; how edebug and built-in profiler work, how to investigate exactly what happens when I press a key, etc. Just be patient, Emacs is a beast, nobody ever tamed it in one day. It takes time and patience.