skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You're right that few companies advertise their actual needs. Employers, recruiters, online job boards, and the mass of job seekers have all created and participated in a system that uses proxies (degrees and other credentials) and checklists of "skills" that actually refer to tools. To make it worse, candidate screening got outsourced to HR and then to algorithms and so-called AI.

To get around those problems you have to get creative, stop playing the same game everyone else plays, find the alternate routes and back doors. Traditionally that meant finding openings and getting in the door through contacts -- family, friends, former colleagues, friends of friends, etc. And I think that remains the best way to shortcut the job application process. Another route is to pitch yourself like a freelancer -- identify a problem (or find out about it from contacts) and offer a solution to the business problem.

Poring over job listings and submitting applications is probably the least efficient and effective process, for both parties. No one likes it.

Two really old books describe some alternative job hunting strategies that have worked for a lot of people. Who's Hiring Who by Richard Lathrop, and What Color Is Your Parachute by Richard Nelson Bolles. Both of those pre-date algorithms and AI scanning your resume, but they do give good advice on how not to get stuck in that process in the first place.

I suggest ignoring the idea of a "job market," which is more of a statistical artifact than a real free exchange of labor for money driven by supply and demand. And branch out from applying at the same handful of cool tech giants and startups, look at the small/medium size businesses that make money and struggle to hire talent because they aren't big names in sexy niches. If you don't have a large professional network, get busy making friends and connections (I don't mean clicking to add people on LinkedIn -- get out and actually meet people). Clicking submit on hundreds of online application forms is just lazy if you really want to find a job. You will have to do the research and legwork and try alternate paths. Complaining online about job hunting failures or "the market" or dumb interviews won't fix anything, and it won't help you get a paycheck.

I intended my previous comment to get programmers to stop thinking of themselves in limited terms -- "React developer," "Python engineer," etc. Those aren't skills, nor do they solve business problems. Too many programmers fall into the trap of confusing their toolbox and experience with marketable skills. If we describe ourselves in narrow and over-specific terms, can we feel surprised when employers and recruiters do the same thing? Spend some time building up core skills, the fundamentals, the things you find across businesses -- relational databases, domain expertise, Unix servers -- and less time honing a couple of specific skills that will very likely fall out of fashion in a few years.
Speaking from personal experience when I was in school, there were a a decent amount of relationships between students in the same year(often sharing some sort of classes).

> Apologies, but I was reading that you are claiming that dating at 14 years old damages your future prospects. Perhaps I couldn't parse.

To avoid any confusion, my stance is: Regular pornography viewing (as a 14 year old or as an adult) hurts your perception of what normal relationships/sex are and will hurt your relationships, in the future or in the current. Additionally it creates complacency as it's easier to put on a website and rub one out than it is to improve yourself to be a good candidate, and go out and meet women. Additionally the porn industry is very harmful towards women (sex trafficking, and incentivizing 18 year old women to perform, when your prefrontal cortex isn't fully developed yet).

> I'm just at loss why you don't list the negatives of NOT watching pornography

I don't believe there's any beside quick release.

> such as feeling lonely, worthless and desperate, not having any meaning to your life, and not having any way to divert these thoughts

I disagree that pornography viewing actually helps combat any of those. I would say it actually helps those grow. Feeling of loneliness is at it's highest, and so is pornography viewing (but, correlation does not mean causation). I don't think you can replace real human interactions with pornography (or parasocial relationships, for that matter).

I'm curious, do you think AI boyfriend/girlfriend/friend is/will be a plus or a negative on society?

I do agree on what you said about dysfunction/pre-mature ejaculation, but I don't think it's the only factor. I think that porn can also contribute. Either through "death-grip", unrealistic expectation of sex/beauty, or requiring more "hardcore"/"extreme" content to become aroused.
[dupe]

Some more discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40565087
A rare disadvantage of having learned to navigate by the sun.

I generally have no idea which way is east or west unless the sun is quite low in the sky, or I already know the area and just know the layout.
Yeah, I suspect that OP speaks Brazilian Portuguese but I didn't want to assume.

I should have specified in my original post, but I only meant that Portugal Portuguese (and at least a few of the African varieties that are still very close to Portugal's) are mutually intelligible with Spanish. Which actually just further illustrates the complexity of categorizing speech into discrete languages...
Probably update link to the announcement blog post: https://modretro.com/blogs/blog/the-future-is-retro
Not a practitioner, just a startup cofounder affected by these changes.. not legal or tax advice. You can read the applicable text here:

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/26/174

Section 174(c)(3)

```
(3) Software development

For purposes of this section, any amount paid or incurred in connection with the development of any software shall be treated as a research or experimental expenditure.

```

That being said... it's complicated: https://www.thomsonreuters.com/en-us/posts/tax-and-accountin...

We've heard a mix of advice from various tax professionals on what should be classified as R&D or not. The messaging gets expecially mixed since the R&D tax credit is often handled by a 3rd party that specializes in it. The company specializing in the tax credit may be incentivized to classify as much of your activity as R&D as they can, since they are usually paid a percentage of the total credits they are able to claim for your company.

It certainly complicates running a software company. My cofounder and I need to look at the amortization schedule before making any engineering hire as we basically need to consider their salary nearly 100% R&D. I imagine it's even more complicated for founders with overseas teams.

It would certainly be easier for us to do business if Section 174 was revised :)
It absolutely is intellectual laziness. There is zero attempt by hiring management to improve their own quality.

They use bottom of the barrel practices for hiring (such as leetcode), practices for collaboration (stack ranking), for distribution of rewards (skimping on existing employees in favor of hiring more headcount), and generally incapable of creating and sharing solid visions and giving people the resources to get them to fruition (Sitting back after OKRs are decided out of thin air, never truly explaining why something is important and never really supporting their reports to achieve those goals).
I too was/am concerned by the name. Tacked onto the end of the article is an announcement, which suggests the blog is intended to be commentary on what they're terming that:

> Effective immediately, this newsletter is now called The Nerd Reich. It will still focus on the weird tech authoritarian politics emanating from California these days. [...] I did not come up with this wonderful name. After my recent stories, someone on Twitter informed me that some people had been referring to the tech authoritarians as “the Nerd Reich” for several years. And, of course, it’s just too perfect to pass up… [...] There was a podcast called the Nerd Reich, but it’s been dormant for many years.

I'm not comfortable with referencing such evil historic events in a way that seems a bit edgy-cavalier, and possibly someday hearing wordplay on it tossed around routinely and casually. Some related terms have already been diluted.
Oh man, I am not looking to switch companies right now, but this sounds amazing. I'll be following you guys.

Also: I could swear I saw you comment on something Mathematica related a long time ago. Is there a Wolfram connection here?
Promises from the Ground Up
I'd recommend Henri Bergson's Time and Free Will for mind opening view of time. Imo it elaborates on the distinction between space time and our temporal experience.
RCTs are fine but the obsession with them is overwrought and counterproductive. My own drum to beat on this is regarding clinical trials for fatal diagnoses like cancer: https://jakeseliger.com/2024/01/29/the-dead-and-dying-at-the.... We have Kaplan-Meier curves for fatal diagnoses. We know what happens (the tumors grow and metastasize. One doesn't need elaborate phase 3 RCTs to figure out if there's a good shot that a treatment is working; one can see it in tumor response and comparison to known KMCs. The existing system raises costs and causes people to die while waiting a decade or more for exciting treatments: https://atelfo.github.io/2023/12/23/biopharma-from-janssen-t...

Moderna's mRNA-4157 is a current example of this: https://jakeseliger.com/2024/04/12/moderna-mrna-4157-v90-new..., although it may be held up by lack of manufacturing capacity as well.
Excellent article!

(It's interesting how gas-filled tube devices could be used as rectifiers (aka "diodes"), amplifiers, and some could even be used as switches (aka "transistors")...)
Is the number of natural disasters increasing?
It's actually not "anthropomorphizing the model".

I passed it input in the serialized form known as "English text". I expected a response also in serialized English that I can then decode in my brain to something that comports with reality. If I requested from a web server some JSON giving me my bank balance, and the balance it gave me is not accurately reflecting reality, it's not anthropomorphizing anything to say that it's incorrect, any more than pinging Nginx is.

And to be clear, we can wax philosophical all you want about "correctness", but that's really sidestepping the point: I don't care why it's giving me wrong information.

In my bank example, does it really matter, for the end user, if it's because of some integer overflow error or if it's a null pointer there's just a special `if` statement saying that antonvs account should always print out a different number for your balance.

I think nearly everyone would say that that's incorrect, and it actually wouldn't be clever or insightful for someone to say "no that's just a result of how the computer was programmed! You're imposing a human understanding of correctness on your bank balance!"
> TLDR, it was cannons. Improvements in cannons so they wouldn't explode on you led to advanced metallurgy required for things like engines.

The improvements in cannons was about precision, accuracy, and speed of making the bore. There is a chapter on this in The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World by Simon Winchester:

* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35068671-the-perfectioni...

Newcomen got an early idea going, and everyone knows that James Watt improved its efficiency, but even Watt's engine wasn't very good in absolute terms. This is because his tolerances were huge and lots of steam leaked out. It was John Wilkinson's expertise that solved that issue:

> James Watt had tried unsuccessfully for several years to obtain accurately bored cylinders for his steam engines, and was forced to use hammered iron, which was out of round and caused leakage past the piston. In 1774 John Wilkinson invented a boring machine in which the shaft that held the cutting tool extended through the cylinder and was supported on both ends, unlike the cantilevered borers then in use. With this machine he was able to bore the cylinder for Boulton & Watt's first commercial engine, and was given an exclusive contract for the provision of cylinders owing to the lower tolerance between the piston and cylinder and the resulting improvement in efficiency by lowering steam losses through the gap.[9][10] Until this era, advancements in drilling and boring practice had lain only within the application field of gun barrels for firearms and cannon; Wilkinson's achievement was a milestone in the gradual development of boring technology, as its fields of application broadened into engines, pumps, and other industrial uses.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Wilkinson_(industrialist)...

See Winchester's for more details.
> One doesn't use Kanji anymore, and no one seems to struggle to read it?

Chinese/Japanese has a level of written mutual intelligibility. Korean lost it.

> Japanese on the other hand I have seen even natives struggle to read.

It's like a native English speaker encountering new vocabulary. Happens quite often.

> Heck even the existence of furigana in novels is an admission of this.

I'd agree that manga use of furigana helps (perhaps school-aged readers) reading, but furigana in novels are standard tools in the language that authors can use to achieve some effects that is hard to describe to non-speakers.
Thanks for sharing, I had difficulty empathising with the OP but this puts it in perspective.

I’m curious, did these ideas come from your upbringing?
This is super cool. Custom FPGA based camera with this magnificent machined case is something I can only wish I could build.

I kind of wonder, is it going to hurt aesthetics too much to replace the lens mount with a transparent window, with the lens mounted to the board and PIR sensor off a short cable, so the front face would require less machining and that the board can be secured to the bottom plate? That would save machining time and also might allow use of customizing options on existing enclosures, if it would make sense to do so.
Filling the form wasn't too hard. It's probably the kind of thing every founder should know and be able to answer. It's easier than most job applications. Definitely easier than college applications... if you wanted to compare it to college, getting financial aid has a tiny acceptance rate as well. YC is bundling the education and the financial aid.

Rejection isn't hard either. If you're a founder, you'll be rejected by VCs all the time, and many early stage investors offer far lower amounts and far worse advice. You'll be rejected by your product - MVPs often have to be reworked and pivoted. And then you'll face some more rejection when doing sales and product interviews.

I think it's important to be transparent about the rate though, but also important to make it clear that the low rate doesn't mean they're trying to push people away.
Previously on HN [0] (44 points, 9 days ago, 45 comments)

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40480159
I'm failing to see how this is novel. It looks like they're doing diffusion on a representation system for 2D graphics, which is very different than an actual program (they do address this limitation to be fair)
How does one discover that tab opens the skip to main link?
The article posits that pumping water out of mines was the only impetus. I can think of others:

1. pumping water for irrigation

2. driving a hammer forge and a forcing air into a smelter

Neither requires smooth rotation.
Honestly was a typo, I was actually aware of the type of reactor. People make simple mistakes sometimes, especially while typing fast. Fixed in post.
Maybe I'm miscommunicating, I know that the question about whether or not humans are intelligent is rhetorical. What I'm trying to say is that "humans make mistakes and are obviously intelligent, so a probabilistic syllable generator can be considered intelligent despite making mistakes" does not necessarily follow because at best they're different kinds of intelligences.

In my rush to be a smartass, I did miss that you also asked what definition of intelligence they were working with though, so I suppose I didn't really add anything besides unnecessary snark (-‿-")
Show HN: Insta-infra – Spin up any tool in your local laptop with one command
Hey HN.

After getting frustrated with many tools/services for not having a simple quickstart, I decided to make something where it would be just a single command. So you can run something like this:

./run.sh airflow

Behind the script, it is using docker-compose (the only dependency) to help spin up the required services to run the tool you specified.
After starting up a tool, it will also tell you how to connect to it, which has confused me many times while using Docker.

It has helped me with:

- integration testing on my local laptop

- getting hands-on experience with different tools

- assessing the developer experience

I've recently added all the major job orchestrator tools (Airflow, Mage-ai, Dagster and Prefect).
That is great!

I kind of assumed as much, but unfortunately that also most likely means that it'll lose Manifest V2 support at some point (not that upstream Chrome will keep it).

That seems to be the concern of some people commenting here, and I wanted to highlight that the two are largely orthogonal as far as I can tell.
Part of ADA compliance comes with applying for a Certificate of Occupancy for your space. If things do not meet minimum satisfaction, they will not issue the CO. If your space is part of a larger building, it'll probably be something to work out with the building itself if there are issues. So comparing it to ramps/rails/parking spaces for ADA is harder as most construction has had that built into it for a long time now, and existing spaces have most likely been retrofitted.

Websites just don't have that level of red tape to launch. People do not need a government issued certificate of minimum level of compliance to launch. There are way too many sites for pretty much any government to monitor for ADA compliance. There's probably a way to report issues, but who has the time to look up where to do that? Some part of my foggy memory also thinks there's a caveat for the size of the company running a website about how strict compliance needs to be, but that might getting confused with cookie banners???
I'm wanting to transition to an engineering role, but I believe I am missing some of the skills needed for it. I am currently a Senior Windows Systems Administrator. My interests with work are currently around device management and automation, but would love to work in just about any field. I love to learn and am quick to pick up new skills.

Location: New York City
Remote: Yes
Willing to relocate: Maybe
Technologies: Python, PowerShell, Docker, Linux, Git, OSQuery, Kaseya, Jamf, Jumpcloud
Résumé/CV: LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/jacob-nichols
Hobbies: Writing, 3D Printing, Electronics
Email: j4ke@omg.lol
Which is why my foss metaverse is gonna rock!!
There's a whole bunch of US government sites on the list (notable inclusions: fda.gov, nasa.gov, whitehouse.gov) for some reason, as well as quite a few non-corporate web properties:

* Stack Exchange, but only one of their sites: superuser.com

* Wikimedia: wikimedia.org, wikidata.org, and wiktionary.org (but not wikipedia.org)

* Image hosting: imgur.com, giphy.com, tenor.com, deviantart.com, artstation.com

* Audio and video hosting: soundcloud.com, vimeo.com, dailymotion.com

* Blogging and web hosting: livejournal.com, squarespace.com, substack.com, typepad.com

* Fan fiction: tvtropes.org, archiveofourown.org, fanfiction.net

* Miscellaneous indie web properties: bogleheads.org, craigslist.org, ifixit.com, instructables.com, knowyourmeme.com, mozilla.org

Overall this is a very strange list.
Right. it's easy to see the upside and think you missed out, but you also gotta realize you could've been the counterparty to the action going on.

never invest from a place of fomo.
Prehistoric 'giant goose' skull found in Australia
I have to say, it’s a pretty convincing illusion…
Ted Nelson was talking about this decades ago. Prophetic.
Common knowledge that hasn't passed scientific rigor is not actually knowledge. There's value in testing things other people haven't bothered to test, because if you get a weird result that often leads to new science.
I've idly thought now and then what would I do if I was magically transported back into Roman times? Printing press and paper. Both can be constructed from what Romans had readily available.
Rare and Amusing Insults, Volume 2
Georgia Prosecutors Stoke Fears over Use of Encrypted Messengers and Tor
Here’s us at Medium Spicy (news.ycombinator.com):

> Sure, here’s a roast for Hacker News: “Oh, look! It’s where hipster tech enthusiasts gather to pretend that reading obscure academic papers and debating blockchain moralities will somehow save the world. Users here must believe that they are singlehandedly revolutionizing the internet by sharing the latest in cutting-edge spreadsheet theory. Between the 90s design and the endless sea of ‘expert’ opinions, I’m surprised this site isn’t still run on a dial-up modem.”

Ouch!
Romans had slaves, so labour was cheap. Industrialization requires expensive labour as demand driver. Wasn't there just an article on HN about that?

Edit: Found it: https://rootsofprogress.org/robert-allen-british-industrial-...
Radial Menus in Video Games (2022)
Key thesis:

> Now we can’t cover the entire industrial revolution with all of its complex moving parts but we can briefly go over the core of it to get a sense of the key ingredients. Fundamentally this is a story about coal, steam engines, textile manufacture and above all the harnessing of a new source of energy in the economy. That’s not the whole story, by any means, but it is one of the most important through-lines and will serve to demonstrate the point.

> The specificity matters here because each innovation in the chain required not merely the discovery of the principle, but also the design and an economically viable use-case to all line up in order to have impact. […]

Interesting thought experiment at the end:

> Much of history ends up this way. As much as we might want to imagine that the greater currents push historical events largely on a predetermined path with but minor variations from what must always have been, in practice events are tremendously contingent on unpredictable variables. If Spain or Portugal, for instance, rather than Britain, had ended up controlling India, would the flow of cotton have been diverted to places where coal usage was not common, cheap and abundant, thereby separating the early steam-powered mine pumps both from the industry they could first revolutionize and also from the vast wealth necessary to support that process (much less if no European power had ever come to dominate the Indian subcontinent)? This question, like so many counter-factuals, is fundamentally unanswerable but useful for illustrating the deeply contingent nature of historical events in a way that data (like the charts of global GDP over centuries) can sometimes fail to capture.
Couch openings from the Simpsons
> Wasn't expecting my question to hit top of HN.

Thanks for asking it. Thanks too to the person that provided the thorough answer.

After reading that answer - seeing all the math equations and physics that cover several disciplines - I wonder how some people can just hand-wave "science" away as a conspiracy to fool the masses. They clearly have little idea the amount of knowledge that works together to get answers questions like this.