skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
SEEKING WORK | Philadelphia, PA | Remote or Local

Technologies: a lot, but mostly Python, Django, PostgreSQL, AWS, GCP

Résumé: https://www.amecy.com/work/Plick_resume_web_2023-10.pdf

Email: tomplick AT gmail.com

For the most part, my résumé only has my professional experience on it. To see more of what I've done, please visit my work summary at https://www.amecy.com/work/ . In particular, if you play chess, check out my chess training site at https://www.checkmatechamp.net/ . That site runs on the Google Cloud Platform and uses Python on the backend. The frontend is a mix of vanilla JS and OCaml (using js_of_ocaml).

My experience at startups has helped me learn how to build systems, and how to keep them running, simply and with minimal resources. For example, as of this writing, Checkmate Champ has been running for 816 days without my intervention.
It was interesting for me going from interacting with wealthy, educated developers, to working in a very physical, low-paying blue-collar job. It seemed like living in two different worlds almost.

> working class communities are more accepting of male-female dynamics

I'm curious to what you mean by this
> I just bought a gas lens set for my welder and it included cups called the BBW and the FUPA. When I was taking MIG classes, they had a jar of anti-spatter gel called cooter snot tip dip. Can’t imagine why women are so rare in the profession…

Makes sense. I suppose if women had invented these things, they would have been able to name them something nicer.
Did you read the papers? That is literally not what they are saying.

If I have one twinkie, that isn’t a problem - because I have other ‘real food’ to compensate. Same with someone doing zoom periodically.

If all I have is twinkies, that is a real problem, because I don’t have enough real food to compensate. I’m missing some essential vitamins, minerals, and macros that will eventually hurt me a lot. Plus a lot of sugar that causes a lot of load in my body we really don’t handle well.

‘Zoom fatigue’ is exactly because people aren’t having enough real in-person interactions anymore and it’s causing numerous real psychological issues in people because of it.

Because there are actual necessary things in real in person interactions that are not present in video conferencing. And real effects of doing video conferencing our minds don’t handle well.

The insistence on ‘but it’s not impossible!’ is tangential to the fact that it isn’t a good idea to do long term or exclusively.

And depending on the individuals environment or makeup, it could be an immediate major problem, or it could be a slow burn. Everyone will have a different tipping point.

I’m sure there are some 1-in-a-million outliers out there that could stay pretty functional literally eating just twinkies for a decade (somehow).

But either way, having the social interaction equivalent of an all-Twinkie diet is a bad idea.

Near as we can tell.

But ‘this is America!’, with an ongoing obesity crisis, so not like I expect people to just listen.
Phone companies were for years considered the dictionary example of a “natural monopoly” because of the network effect. I’m actually old enough to remember when you could call people in AT&T and Verizon network respectively, cheaply, or use phone cards LOL. But call outside the network? You pay.

Yes, I agree the government did ONE thing that helped some people and that is pass a law mandating that you could port your phone number between carriers.

But no, splitting up Ma Bell into a cartel of phone companies did little to lower the price of phone calls. Technology like Voice Over IP did that overnight.

The Web disrupted walled gardens like AOL overnight. Trillions of dollars in value was unlocked with business models like SaaS and e-commerce. Splitting AOL into 5 AOLs wouldn’t do that.

The reason Google, Facebook, Amazon and all thr Big Tech companies even were able to get their start (and funding) is because they built on top of the open and permissionless Web!

Do you really think AOL or MSN would have allowed a search engine, a social network and a massive global store to grow within their walled garden and not pay then any rent? And they wouldn’t cannibalize them like Twitter did with Periscope and so many other platforms did with their startups? Come on :)
Graph Neural Networks for Predicting Material Properties
I sure hope they shut down industryinfo, that hive of scum and villany.
It isn’t just housing actually - costs of education and healthcare have similarly skyrocketed out of control.

These are all areas with similar levels of ‘desirable is constrained’. Or perhaps worded better as ‘people want the top x percent, not just the same thing in bulk’.

Most of the other things you’re talking about, it’s easier to scale up production without hurting desirability.

For instance, if commute/neighborhoods/climate literally didn’t matter, everyone complaining about housing costs would just move to Rural Kansas or North Dakota and problem solved for dirt cheap.

Instead everyone is complaining about how nice new housing in city-of-choice-close-to-work is unaffordable.

Well of course it is - people are restricting building to keep it nice (by their standards), which is why folks want to move there, which is restricting supply - and with easier money (historically) that is causing increased bidding and increased costs.
Yes, which is also the conclusion that I cited from the paper. My issue is with the other benchmarks described in the paper.
A Rust Take on Bsdiff
MOATs Aren't Useful
I think you're misinformed on how Larry handles his investments.

He uses a Blind Trust.

Due to how many investments he has that could create SEC insider trading issues, Larry has a Blind Trust that sells his stock as they see best fit without his influence.

So this wasn't Larry selling $322M in stock. It was his Blind Trust that did.

Also, he's not hurting for cash. He gets an annual dividend of ~$1.6B from Oracle due to him owning 42% of he company.
Not sure how long it will hold with the AI hype cycle. Not long ago Microsoft was 1st due to its association with OpenAI, now all AI stocks are spiking, some beyond fundamentals (AMD, Palantir). It is what the market is marketing or trying to predict, whatever the crowd wants to believe in, regardless how connected it is from the truth, only time will tell…
I went the other way (grew up working class) and I still, decades later, find middle class folk (in the UK) to be uptight and terribly afraid of causing/receiving offence.

I can't pinpoint exactly "what I mean" but basically traditional values. More willing to accept the fact that men and women are going to find each other attractive, that you probably don't want your wife or husband to have a "platonic" friend of the opposite sex that they meet up with one on one, etc etc.

Whereas the highbrow view is more like - okay but if we accept those things then women can't work on nuclear submarines alongside the blokes. We want women to be able to work on nuclear submarines alongside the blokes, anything else is unacceptable, so we should sanitise all of the interactions and punish everyone for being human and then we might be able to make it work, sort of kind of but not really, everyone will be miserable but we pretend.
I think we just need to give up on this. What’s the harm? It’s not like some ground truth is fabricated.

I’m far, far more concerned about photo, video, and audio verification. We need a camera that can guarantee a recording is real.
You can route DDR in KiCad and there are some online reports of people doing that. KiCad is not as nice as the paid software and there are shortcomings but I think 'pretty useable' covers its status accurately.
I was referencing exclusivity clauses rather than noncompetes, and the vastly different nature of employment law from other contractual arrangements.
They are Grumpy because now they are doing Sysadmin stuff
It can be used wrong!
It's not perfect!
It could be better!
> find middle class folk (in the UK) to be uptight and terribly afraid of causing/receiving offence

This isn't just a UK thing. Seems fairly universal at least across the western world.
Not the original parent, so unsure of their use-case. But I've seen the approach where some/basic development can be done on duckdb, before making its way to dev/qa/prd.

Something like your project might enable grabbing data (subsets of data) from a dev enviroment (seed) for offline, cheap (no SF warehouse cost) development/unit-testing, etc.
I think NYPD labor actions is something I feel strongly against.

- underpaid

- they fight tooth and nail for lack of accountability

- they get lots of fun benefits for overtime, so they make sure to arrest people so they can get overtime

I can't say one positive thing about the NYPD union, it is the "anti-accountability" union.
I am just using duckdb on a 3TB dataset in a beefy ec2, and am pleasantly surprised at its performance on such a large table. I had to do some sharding to be sure but am able to match performance of snowflake or other cluster based systems using this single machine instance.

To clarify Clickhouse will likely match this performance as well, but doing things on a single machines look sexier to me than it ever did in decades.
Yeah, but can they run any modern OS well? The last N intel laptops and desktops I’ve used were incapable of stably running Windows, MacOS or Linux. (As in the windows and apple ones couldn’t run their preloaded operating systems well, and loading Linux didn’t fix it.)
Yeah I refuse to give Oracle a dime, so I'll keep that in mind.

I only run the tiny models for fun (the CPU inference is enough) and any complex coding tasks go through GPT or Claude. Mainly just using the one instance as another backup server, run scrapers, host a bunch of containers, and experiment with networking services. I don't see a reason to split up my one instance, but maybe in the future.
Histneur-L the History of Neuroscience Internet Forum
Right. In Britain at least at some point this flips and if you're proper old money you go back to not giving a shit again. Classic example is Prince Philip.
I thought that was only true in languages with lazy evaluation? Otherwise how do you implement short-circuiting operators?
If you think that something comparable to a modern phone operating system and hardware will “just spring up” you’re delusional. If somebody was capable of producing more powerful phones than the iPhone, they’d be doing it already.
Ask HN: Teaching the "magic" of software development to 3rd graders?
Next week I'm going into my daughter's classroom to teach about software engineering. I want to teach them about the magic of it.

What do I mean by magic?

Well, Steve Jobs said all great technology is indistinguishable from magic.

I want to show them how math can be magic.

I want to show them how code can be magic.

But, these are third graders. And I'm not sure I can use a computer.

Any suggestions on magic tricks? I have 15 minutes.

This is really about teaching them about different careers. This is a very poor school where most of these kids probably don't have a parent or friend in this industry. So instead of getting technical I want to show them the joy I get out of this work.
Show HN: I made a site to generate consistent text every time with AI
Hi everyone! I'm Sas, the founder of Sloap.

A little backstory on why I built this tool: I used to be an Etsy seller, and one challenge I kept running into was using ChatGPT to generate product titles, descriptions, and tags for Etsy product listings. At first, it worked well enough, but after a while, I found myself having to repeat the same instructions over and over. It became time-consuming and, honestly, a bit messy.

That’s when I started thinking, "What if there was a tool where I could set all my preferences once and get consistent, accurate content every time?" I had this idea floating around for a few months, but then something unexpected happened—I got banned from Etsy. That was the push I needed to bring Sloap to life.

Sloap isn’t just for Etsy or e-commerce sellers; it’s designed for anyone who wants consistent content generation without the hassle of repeating instructions. Whether you’re managing social media content, writing blog posts, creating product descriptions for a Shopify store, or generating text for newsletters, Sloap has you covered. It lets you set predefined rules for each project, ensuring your content is always on brand, no matter the platform.

After months of trial and error, learning, and lots of coffee, I’ve finally built something I’m genuinely proud of. It might not be perfect (yet), but Sloap is already so much more than I originally imagined. I’ll keep improving it, adding features, and making it even better with your feedback. Thanks for checking it out, and I’d love to hear what you think!
The study does not control for distance traveled.

This is all hand-waving, to try and bolster the case for safer infrastructure for bicyclists (electric and not) which I of course also support.
Nice benchmarks. Hopefully some benevolent soul with more spare time than I can pitch in on threadsafe CFFI
I'm in Switzerland, so maybe I am biased, I have 10Gbit/s dedicated on a 100Gbit/s link for about 600$/month. In practice I have 25Gbit/s with most datacenters in europe, 100Gbit/s with some that are close (OVH, Hetzner), and 10Gbit/s with the rest of the world.
Lots of little locks littered all over the place.
In 1996 we set up a rack (department store surplus) of Cyrix 586 (running on 486 socket C motherboards) running at 75mhz with 16mb of RAM and could serve 100 concurrent users with CGI scripts and image maps doing web serving and VOIP with over 1 million requests a month on a single T1 line.

Good luck doing that on a load balanced rack of 96 core AMD servers today.
See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42056666
weird - everything claimed as wrong or bad is, IMO, utterly sensible and robust in the real, mean old world. by the author's logic, TCP's entire logic of congestion control is terrible because it's not eg, a deterministic credit-based mechanism that depends on everyone implementing it perfectly.
Indonesia banned iPhone 16 and Google Pixel smartphones for breaking govt rules
Except in all those wars of theirs which, like the current one, were essentially optional for them. In which, after taking a sufficiently harsh beating for the sake of basically nothing, they threw in the towel, and went home.

Like all the other colonial powers.
> isn't Gmail still Beta?

If only they knew...
>The elites choose that trade policy because it is efficient (specialisation)

Idealist nonsense, offshoring of manufacturing capacity from highly developed countries with large union penetration to countries with lower labor costs and more lax worker protections has literally nothing to do with comparative advantage and everything to do with enabling ever more brutal exploitation of labor and higher profit margins
Yeah the main reason that I’m interested in using OCI is because it’s free and it actively takes money away from them by me doing this. So I will happily continue to take advantage of Larry, I know he would do the exact same to me but many times worse. So it’s a great solution as long as it lasts. I get to make Larry inconsequentially poorer every second my stuff runs, plus I get some free cloud compute. Win win
Yea and that's a violation of professional ethics. Being corrupt or working for a corrupt organization in no way justifies it. Professionals are trusted by society to act responsibly even when it's against the interests of their clients or employers.
Not to be the nitpick guy, but you meant 50% tax is double the price. 100% tax is simply taking ALL YOUR MONEY lol
It's when a website automatically detects the user's preferred color scheme and adjusts the color scheme, accordingly.
I see. I went from interacting constantly online and being surrounded by people in post-secondary and higher-level academics to working alongside immigrants in a tough and (frankly) undignified job. This coincided with some other major changes in life and it definitely changed my view of what's "normal". I had to think about my previous life and where I actually derived happiness and value.

I got the impression that the highly educated types are wrong in a lot of ways, and the blue collar labourers are wrong in completely different ways, so I took the intersection of their worldviews and now ...well I'm probably wrong in every way ;) We can but try.
Where does your data reside, is it on an attached EBS volume, or in S3, or somewhere else?

I had some spare time and tinkered with duckdb with a 70GB dataset, but just getting the 70GB on to the EC2 took hours. Would be pretty rocking if duckdb team could somehow set up a ~1TB sized demo that anyone can setup and try for themselves in, say, under an hour.
A lot of people confuse the free trial account that lets you use free tier resources with a pay-as-you-go account that only uses free tier resources. The former WILL eventually be terminated without notice, the latter usually does not unless you are doing something they see as suspicious.

At any rate, I've had mine since the start of Covid Times and never had problems provisioning an instance.
I have access to all of the beer that is currently in my pocket. Sadly, there is none.
> I got the impression that the highly educated types are wrong in a lot of ways, and the blue collar labourers are wrong in completely different ways

Couldn't agree more!
> working class communities are more accepting of male-female dynamics

I agree. Gender differences seem to be exaggerated, while in upper classes women and men converge to androgyny. One contributing factor is that surviving on low incomes requires more differentiated roles (care taker vs manual laborer).
Every time that somebody calls me a software engineer I correct them that I'm a software developer. The word engineer has specific meaning and unless an accredited university gave you that title you should not be using it.

I realize that HN has many actual software engineers, but it seems like every frontend dev today calls himself an engineer. Even on the Laravel website, the default job title for new members is software engineer.
OK fair enough.
Huge fan of Clickhouse, but the minute you have to deal with somebody else's CSV is when Duck wins over Clickhouse.
No one gets reelected for avoiding a crisis.

For example, Trump’s running on blaming the next guy for problems that he created as president.

Similarly, when Arnold was governor he bought a fleet of mobile hospitals that could have been used for covid.

They were scrapped by the democrats the second he was voted out, and that mistake has had zero political repercussions.
I would gladly pay $2-$5 a month without thinking for ff/tb if they committed to open accounting with user voting and a ruling council headed by devs and technical thought leaders. I think at least 1-10 million other people would too!

The empowered userbase would then direct Mozilla to make other solutions for their most pressing needs (maybe search or email or anti tracking) instead of the lame ideas they have wasted resources on
> Bayesian (ex Salute)

Changing the name of a vessel is bad luck. That's all I need to know.
I think there's some truth to that, but I don't think that's the only factor in everything the article described, and it's not specific to blue collar work.

There's a lot of actual prejudices (not just banter) among, say, "educated" tech industry workers, too.

Including sexism, racism, ageism, and classism.

Most people will at least superficially hide it in modern workplaces, but it's still there, and having effects.

You've probably seen evidence of this places you've worked, and you can also see it often in pseudonymous HN comments.
Oracle and hobbyist are two words combined that can't make sense
Sales tax is added to the price. 50% means to add 50 cents for every dollar you pay. 100% is double price.
It creates a paper trail that transfers liability from the individual to their employer, which then incentivizes them to make it safe somehow, even if that means shutting down and demolishing the whole thing. Better that than somebody getting killed.
"not perfect so it's worthless!"
I've been thinking about this for a while. Digital signatures can guarantee that a piece of data is authentic, if the author wishes to sign it.
> working class communities are more accepting of male-female dynamics

I’ve also seen this. There’s more of an acknowledgment: that people will be attracted to each other (or not),the status/dating games people play will be out and open. It will be acceptable to talk about physical/sexual qualities of your coworkers, etc. That when you are in physically close proximity you might see each others sexual parts and comment on them. It will be understood that after a breakup people will be less amicable.

You can also see this in literature: look at Les Miserables. In the factory they talk about sexual fantasies of the foreman. Whereas in the context of the upper classes it’s talked about in context of love/romanticism.

Contrary to popular believe, I find this much healthier. Emotions expressed can be dealt with and moved on. Emotions suppressed grow and fester. If it’s normal to talk about who’s is attracted to who, then everyone is aware of the sexual exploits of the general manager. Therefore people know where to set boundaries. If it’s hush hush kept quiet then the exploits of the Gm can grow.
Does that have to be same-node VRAM? Or can you fit 52B each on several nodes, and only copy the transient state around?
And macros! Which you can overload too

https://duckdb.org/docs/sql/statements/create_macro#overload...
The limit for syscalls in early Unix seems to be five though. I forget why.

Hence, famously, "creat" instead of "create"
And if the blue bubble matters to one's "friends" in the US...then one needs better friends.
If you want to look at hidden GDP women and access to power tools is probably a big one.

Lighter batteries and brushless and mass production allowing for a quick jump in and companies like Ryobi's making tools look good (but not cliched pink) and how-to's on TikTok have changed the landscape.

We have gone from upkeep at home to asset building.

Some of this will go to careers, but it's not that simple.

HN isn't mature enough to discuss this but men die in dirty jobs, no one really cares. For every one who dies many are hurt and for the many injuries there are many many near misses.

A near miss is often about reaction times and strength. These 1% issues are the problem. You are 3 hours from anywhere and stuck in mud by yourself and the tool kit is missing. So you can get the 5.3% up, but it can't be 50%
Where do you derive your happiness now?

What is wrong from the view of each? (As someone who interacts both with phds and high school graduates on a daily/weekly basis I find the differences interesting).

Biggest surprise for me was the sense of community that seemed present in the lower earners.
https://crittergoo.com/collections/goo
Everything is worse now.
It is mostly that way for the GOP since the Newt Gingrich era.

Not that the Dems don't undo things... But they add to policy as well.

GOP does culture war, tear stuff down mostly.
You're not alone, and this is why plan9 has only 51 syscalls instead of the hundreds for Linux/BSD/... and thousands for Windows.
I think the competition for the future is between DuckDB and Polars. Will we stick with the DataFrame model, made feasible by Polars's lazy execution, or will we go with in-process SQL a la DuckDB? Personally I've been using DuckDB because I already know SQL (and DuckDB provides persistence if I need it) and don't want to learn a new DataFrame DSL but I'd love to hear other the experience of other people.
That's Coca-Cola GmbH, a German company that was owned by a US company. When the US and Germany were at war the US Coca-Cola lost control of Coca-Cola GmbH. It wasn't until after the war that the US company got control back.