skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Do you think humor and intrigue was invented in 2023? The lighthouse is irrelevant. The message in the bottle is relevant. "The world they live in" assuredly had creativity, humor, that could be tapped.

"Nevertheless..." so you basically agree its extremely unexciting? That's the point.

Would you click this post if it said "list creators of lighthouse found on piece of paper inside lighthouse"?

The point of a message in the bottle is that it's to make something legitimately interesting for the person reading (assuming it's not attempting to save a persons life stranded on an island)... Presumably the people doing this entire exercise were aware of that. When you take part in some activity, there is an expected amount of context which you are expected to have awareness of, similar to how when you make a movie, while you CAN kill off the main character in a cliffhanger unsatisfying way, you also have to expect people are going to hate your movie.

The fact that a bunch of engineers thought this was "most interesting" is, in itself not surprising I guess. But people lamenting that they could have done a lot better, is 100% valid.

> You want their world to conform to your idea of what it must feel like to be on a lighthouse for other "lighthouse people"

False. I literally want to read something interesting if I'm pulling a piece of paper out of a 100 year old bottle. There is an entire universe of topics besides a laundry list of names that could be done. They didn't because they thought this was what people 100 years in the future should see. Therefore, the entire experiment of "message in a bottle" is about as boring as it could possibly be. You literally couldn't make it more boring if you tried. Maybe a blank sheet of paper? The fact these names were meaningful to them, and the fact that this is an extremely boring outcome and leave people wanting more, can exist simultaneously.

I will mention the one saving grace is that it was left in the lighthouse

As an analogy, if I found 100 year old bottle in the floorboards of my house, a list of names could be made more interesting with... a photo, what their occupations are... what their favorite hobby or cherished item is, what used to be on the land before our house, what crops used to grow there, how the land was found, what kind of deed purchase it was, where they immigrated from. Literally 1000s of ideas to add detail.
And also I want to acknowledge everything that ends our career is not in our control .. like the dual forces of global offshoring / outsourcing and relentless automation (including AI driven) will continue to put downward pressure in the career curves of tech workers for next few years/decades.
Oh that's interesting.

Is that a thing? I've never known of anyone whose legal name used two alphabets that didn't have any overlap in letters at all -- two completely different scripts.

Would a birth certificate allow that? Wouldn't you be expected to transliterate one of them?
No, I know the basics of how the telephony network works and how wireless phones calls are made. I don't know specific technologies like what makes 5G different from 4G, but I don't need to.

I know that radio waves are sent by towers to me phone and back to create a connection. That's why I can't use my phone in an underground parking garage.

I know what a phone number is and why we need them. I know why international calls are more expensive.

That's basic knowledge about the tool that I have, and which I will utilize in my day to day life.

When I say "you need to have knowledge of computers", I don't mean "write an algorithm an operating system might use for scheduling running processes", okay? I mean, do you know what the internet is? Do you know what an email is? Do you know what shutdown/reboot means? Do you know what a program is? Do you know how to see what is running on your computer?

I don't understand why everyone is fighting me on this. To me this is pretty simple. If you're using a thing and that thing is integral to your job, you should have a high-level idea of how to fucking use it. Why am I blowing up people's minds with this?
Maybe I am a pessimist but I really don't believe you can plan for 20y in the future especially in the tech sector. People fail to realize that we live in a world that changes not in a linear fashion but rather exponential. For all we know in 10y we will only need 1/5 of the coders we have and IC won't be viable, who knows.
He recently did a mea culpa about the tipping point stuff. Glad he did.

I really, really disliked Gladwell. And yet Pushkin (his podcast network) carries some of the best stuff ever (Jill Lepore). And I found I was agreeing with a lot of Gladwell's (and Michael Lewis') overall "punching up" worldview. So I was having trouble reconciliing my two views of him.

As we've seen with Lewis' recent hagiography for that crypto freak: people are just people, they make mistakes, everyone's got blind spots, we don't have to agree on everything to learn from each other.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bendix_G-15 is the computer that has been restored.
Nestle is well known in the United States for claiming unlimited fresh water rights in small towns with historic springs, bottling and selling it, and leaving local sources dry.
Neat! I'll have to poke at it and see if I can come up with a usefully broader-but-not-too-noisy search - my personal "obsessively search 'ice cream in $town' for each town" collection has about twice that many individually reviewed locations and I'm nowhere near done collecting. (My "bracketing shot" for this is that mailing list vendors claim they can sell me a list of 700ish ice cream related business addresses - no idea how precise they are! but it suggests my current 370-item list is "getting there".)
1xx - this is the websocket connection if you want to watch what it's doing
Ask HN: Worst CSS/JS bug ever. Need cash?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-uREVVI3y4A

Clues:
- We haven't pushed lately this code was * working
- The styles.css file has a redirect which is suspicious.
418 I'm a teapot seemed pretty novel the first few times.
Oh, this is very sad. I was really inspired by his essays and stories when I was 17.

I wonder what was happening with him.
> Most managers are terrible.

A sweeping statement indeed, but it does reflect my experience too.

Perhaps it's my ingrained deference to authority - when I start a new position I tend to believe that my manager has my best interests at heart. This is a mistake and I now believe it's better to maintain a kind of defensive attitude and to always be assertive in establishing, and if necessary negotiating, the responsibilities and expectations of your role and your relationship with the manager.

This may not necessarily be a personal failing on their part, this may just be a consequence of the operational management system you both work within.
I don’t understand why this is being downvoted but this is very true, and it’s the literal case that the fisheries around the entirety of the Bornholm region of Denmark have been completely shut down because the farming industry runoff destroyed it. Had it not been for subsidies the farming industry wouldn’t have done this. We literally paid people to deliberately destroy our environment. Is insane and everyone’s just looking to the sky like “what are we supposed to do? We’ve tried nothing at all even though there has been consistent warnings for two decades and it still happened!?”
> I find it hard to believe humans were building houses, painting pictures, making rope, and sailing for tens of thousands of years without inventing writing.

Why?
"What do you want to be?" is a question we have all constantly been asked since middle school by parents, teachers, career counsellors, professors, recruiters, mentors, managers, HR and lots of other well meaning souls. My answer is the same at 40 as it was at 14 – I don't know. And you know what? I've been fine.

I have worked at some great companies, and some not so great ones. A couple FAANGs as well as a 20-person startup and everything in between. I have been part of some fantastic product teams and a fair number of disasters. I have been a code monkey, an architect, a tech lead, a staff engineer, a manager, a director...and now know that none of these fancy titles really mean anything. And throughout all this I have managed to put a decent chunk of money in the bank.

Most would consider my career to be pretty successful. I like to say that I don't really have a career but simply jump from one project to the next and one opportunity to the next depending on how the wind is blowing. Never once have I had any semblance of a "plan" or a "goal". And despite what all the authority figures in your life will tell you, that is a perfectly fine way to live and be happy.
Quality has to do with production and checking. Mercedes uses much the same methods and tools as everybody else. And in terms of interior quality, are you gone tell me they spend billion on research on how to make the interior nice? That literally makes no sense.

More different vehicles doesn't really make sense either. If you go watch some teardowns on YT, you will see that most vehicles are on the same platform, and use very similar methods. More vehicles increases your cost, but not that much in R&D.

What does cost if they are pushing, ICE, PHEV, EV and HEV at the same time.
Here's a fun one that just happened recently. A doctor I know works for a giant conglomerate as a general practitioner. Recently the business development team realized that insurance will pay them to take pee samples for diabetes tests for every patient. Now every single time someone comes in the medical assistants are made to get a piss sample for a test that is totally worthless for most of these people as they have little risk of diabetes(far high chance of false positive than true positive). When the doctor told the medical assistants to stop he received an angry email from an MBA which became a huge pain in the ass. At the end of the day we have to remember that the only goal of a business is to make money and even if everyone inside that business is trying to do good the banality of evil tends to rear its ugly face. The MBA actually believed the policy was helping people here believe it or not.
Cultivation began around 20kya.
I was taught https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%27Nealian

The uppercase t and h are the two main differences, but I guess I adopted the spencerian or copperplate version at some point.

Lampblack ink or india ink was in use as well and spots with lots of pigment can have it move when wet.

Edit: it would seem synthetic aniline based black inks were in use for personal writing by that time. Aniline black isn't even close to waterfast, so that might very well be it.
What if it’s an article for self-determined people ?

Or meant to plant a seed of thought in someone’s mind ?

> I can’t lose ten extra hours every week away from seeing my family

I hope you find the time to make it work for you.

And , I don’t want to assume but so have found “I can’t” attitudes don’t work for effecting change in life.

Maybe work on that aspect of your personality.
Plans are worthless, but planning is everything.

It's not entirely clear that much of this field will look the same in five years, but still, I think doing the thinking and the planning for the sake of mapping out the route is important.

If only to inform you that no, you don't want any of those routes.

(I did this planning and ended up in academia/microbiology, as a product designer, for better or worse but it's been fun)
That's just admitting that it is just justification.
There is a legitimate concern that if the smarter programmer quits the job, the remaining average programmers will not be able to maintain the code.

I think a smart solution would be to teach the average programmers the new concepts. Many of them would probably be happy to learn, and the company would benefit from having everyone know a bit more and use better solutions. But for some reason, this usually doesn't happen.
Dwarf planet might have its own ice volcano
If you can't handle volatile prices and know your demand in advance then simply by PPAs or energy futures?

You know, the standard method all markets use to handle volatility. But apparently electricity is different and we need enormous subsidies instead.
Here's the thing about the average career in big tech: five years after you leave, almost no one will remember you were there. Most of your old team mates will leave for other other jobs. Your code will get refactored or rewritten. Docs will be superseded, then lost in some CMS migration. Before long, it will be as if you have never worked there.

I know it sounds preposterous, but ask anyone over the age of 55 or 60: except for folks who built their own companies or made truly exceptional contributions to their field, most will say that hobbies, friends, and family mattered a lot more.

So, there is this fundamental contradiction in this article: you can engineer a very neat career, but for most techies, the most useful goal is to make money fast in a way that doesn't drain your life energy. And most of the time, this means responding to opportunities, not sticking to your guns. For example, a lifetime IC job may be ultimately worth less than a management job that gets you to VP level in a decade. You don't need to dream about being a manager; you just need to be reasonably good at it.
Should also be be /usr/local/bin.
The most recent instance, a few days ago, my feedback to the CTO was that, while the org restructuring he proposed was a good idea in principle, the way he did it was terrible, and that he ignored and disrespected his highest performers. I said he hogs all the growth for himself and doesn't let any of his reports grow into more responsibilities, and he's showing that he doesn't respect the people who are integral in the company's functioning. I also told him that there are people who do a ton of work to correct others' mistakes and don't get any credit or recognition for it, and he failed to recognize those.

It kind of made him sad, which wasn't great because he's a nice guy and a competent CTO, but his latest move was catastrophic and he needed to hear it.

> No need for the advice of the featured article for that, right?

I mostly agree with the other commenters here, giving feedback upwards is easier and you don't need to sugarcoat it as much, because you can't fire the person above so they aren't going to be insecure about your feedback. Then again, they are people, and giving constructive feedback gently is better than giving it harshly, so I can't say the article is entirely unnecessary. Maybe partly.
> This means that any similarities and relationships between symbols that you might find are probably intended

Specifically, the symbols reflect phonological features like place-of-articulation.

In general, such a writing system is called featural:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Featural_writing_system
Majority of this world is still not literate, just be happy to be there
I came here to make the same comment.

I immediately closed the tab.
> Liberalism doesn’t try, and shouldn’t, because it takes the position that human beings should be free to seek their own goals rather than have them imposed.

Ok, but then you're stuck with today's clusterfuck where nobody's goals can be realized because people refuse to work together and openly exploit each other. That sucks ass. We've got to be capable of more and can't realize that without imagining a society where we're capable of doing more than giving up.
Can you say what you’d prefer and why? I often use very large fonts, well large compared to my peers, when coding and really prefer tabs as I can define their width myself.
As a person whose done it all, independent stuff, senior ic stuff, management stuff, the main thing that makes management terrible is simply that most companies have no support for middle managers.

You are a good IC? Sure let's promote you to management, but in 95% of cases, we're not even going to pair you with anyone or have a senior manager help you understand, build and grow - we're going to throw you in the deep end and have you sink or swim.

This often ends up with stressed out people used to doing well now approaching an entirely new problem with slow feedback loops and entirely different protocols than before, and the amount of burned out shitty middle managers I see is off the charts.
For this to work they must have already done facial recognition on everyone’s ID photos, so I fail to see what opting out even does for me from a privacy perspective. Seems like shutting the barn door after the horse is already out.
This is so far from my experience. For me, R codes do tend to skimp on polish so it takes longer to get to the initial figure, but that is made up for by enabling me to see the data from a much richer perspective (to some extent because I had to think harder about what the output meant) such that I can find all the bugs in the data and in the underlying experimental plan: the stuff which makes it clear all the commercial reports are mostly useless anyway because Garbage in -> Garbage out
Making it a requirement sounds like some project manager has a KPI to hit to justify the expense of the hardware rollout. Maybe a stretch since I doubt most people opted out anyway.

Either that or they took a page out of the big tech playbook where the plan was to boil the frog all along.
> management without technical excellence track is just misguided

It's different technical excellence.

What's not given proper weight is that it's different technical excellence. Roles seen as "more management" demand system-level understanding and technical knowledge. And a technical knowledge that includes what many see as not technical such as awareness of people or finance dynamics. They can, should be seen as technical aspects. A more senior, "more management" role has different levers to use to make projects come through. And these are different higher level projects. A more senior role is also free to juggle reports who specialize in this or that. If you hate or you are bad at task scheduling, have someone do that for you. If you are not great at writing speeches, etc, etc.

Among the ways you can prepare for that: (1) find at least one mentor (someone at least two steps more senior who can guide you on what to think about and on how things work. If the people two steps up in your company are bros... your mentors don't have to be in your same company.) (2) Consider what's missing to your skillset - and that's not planning software but maybe it is.
The only weird thing here is your “my enemies have no culture” theory, which could not be a more transparent case of bubble blindness.
I don't see how spyware is going to replace my laptop.
People just want to get through an incredibly annoying experience as fast as possible, and they know the people behind them want this too. Doesn’t excuse the bullshit, but it’s much less of a dramatic “sheep bowing to authority” than made out to be here.
I personally think they are incredibly dangerous to motorcyclists and cyclists. When a car with spinner hubcaps pulls up to an intersection it takes much longer for other vehicles to tell that it has actually stopped (because one of the main visual cues normally is to look at whether the wheels are moving) so a couple of times I have found myself on the verge of taking emergency evasive manoeuvres thinking the car is pulling straight out on me (cars pull out on bikers all the time). I've seen cyclists swerve dangerously also thinking their lives were in danger from a car with spinny hubcaps.
I never intended to have a career as a programmer. I planned to work for two years, save a bit of money, and get a PhD in Chemistry. Forty years later I retired as a programmer. Every step was something new, I had 15 different employers (plus myself for 9 years starting two little companies). There was never a plan beyond finding a better/different/less irritating job, and constantly improving what I could do. I never gave any thought to what I wanted to end my career on. It actually ended entirely as my decision, I still was at the top of my ability, and my employer was happy to pay me, but I was tired of working.

While planning might work for some people, having a more short term view can work for others. The only thing I could ever control was what I was able to do, and when I was ready to move on. There are many optimizations available to succeed in life; not all are obvious.
The French did not achieve exonomies of scale when they built out nuclear. And that was in a much friendlier regulatory environment than today.

Power is a massive component of the cost of AI. They might pay extra for 99.9% reliability, but are not going to pay significantly more for more 9's IMO.
You must hate lisp/scheme then too, which has similar semantics as R. In that case books such as SICP would be lost on you.
I'm sure the American Sewing Guild is fantastic, but how do they help here?
Oh, no Phishing is getting too real, let's drop encryption. Said no one ever
unironically https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Bankman-Fried. He gave hundreds of millions to charity-start ups, even if you disagree with his definition of "help humanity" he certainly put some money behind it.
The only thing you know is you are aware. Rest everything mere appearances in the awareness. And that includes all the what ifs, the idea that you have evidence and you are sure.
NASA awards $11.5M to help design the aircraft of tomorrow
I'm really not going to bother replying any further because I don't think it's worth it. You're fighting and uphill battle here - virtually every country has agreed that having the government control education is a good thing and has been successful.

Conservatives, in the past few years, have fallen into a new sphere of lunacy. Anti-vaccine, anti-education, anti-workplace safety, anti-everything.

I don't have the patience to stamp out every single opposition people come up with.

To me, the "problem" that you, and others, have with education is that the government is involved. Sorry, that is not an argument. Just as blindly supporting something makes one a sheep, blindly opposing something also makes someone a sheep.

Our education is as successful as it is due to our government, and that is not up for debate. I've already explained the problem with free markets and why some services, such as healthcare and education, do not apply to a market and literally cannot.

As a thought experiment, consider what makes a free market a free market. Now consider the feasibility of implementing that into healthcare and education (hint: impossible). Now, assume it is possible, and consider the consequences of it. How many millions of people would need to die before you start caring?
Eat. Vertical Agents. World
Yes! I remember downloading this for working in an offline setup 20+ years ago.

Still, maybe getting rid of the mirrors program 5 years ago had its downsides:

https://derickrethans.nl/php-mirrors.html
I prefer I'm a coffeepot, but for some reason, there was a 404.
Now compare cloud bills.
The cover up is usually worse than the crime.
Did you even read the article?

And the senators’ letter quotes a talk given by TSA Administrator David Pekoske in 2023 in which he said “we will get to the point where we require biometrics across the board.”
Marshall was one of my closest Mentors through college. Truly heartbreaking to hear of his passing. I wish his family; wife and kids, the best through this tragic period.

He inspired me daily with his dedication to his students, incredible work-ethic and love for entrepreneurial engineering. My life is forever changed for having met and been mentored by Marshall, I cannot express enough gratitude for the time I got to spend with him.

Rest in Peace Marshall Brain, a real-life legend.