skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: I'm 38 and I have just left my last startup. What should I do next?
I'm 38 and I have just left my last startup. What should I do next?

My experience is as follows:

- 3 years in my startup as founder/CTO. We were a team of 4 developers + sales. We delivered enterprise-grade SaaS for a few listed companies.

- 3 years as Staff+ Data Scientist in a large, very well funded proptech startup. I was the first data scientist, I built the team from scratch, and wrote the initial versions of real state valuation models, price indices, time-in-market models and also a natural language search engine for real state listings and broker visit routing.

- 3 years as data scientist and software developer at a software consultancy. I worked on a variety of projects, from C/Lua projects to introducing Elixir and SPA frameworks to clients. I also analyzed tons of cryptocurrency ICOs for an investor.

Prior to that, I was at the business side, and I worked for 2 years in management consultancy, 1 year in equity research and 3 years in venture capital.

I have a strong network and it’s easy to get interviews.

I can code in Python, Haskell, Elixir, Lua, Javascript, etc, I hold a MSc in Computer Science (formal methods) and a BSc in Economics (econometrics).
> you just need someone to talk to AI might be good. There are a lot of lonely people out there that need someone to talk to and don't know how to do it.

Facebook is about the last company on earth I'd trust to identify, let alone be responsible for facilitating, social behavior.
> That is just as good as any new laptop made today.

How’s the battery life? Going days without thinking about where my charger is can be really nice.

What resolution does the screen run?
> During May 2022, Western Australia experienced sharply rising cases amongst the highest per capita cases seen anywhere in the world throughout the pandemic.

Just delaying it to 2022 according to those same articles, as it had already exited the evolutionary fit population’s memory everywhere else in the world
Well said.

> "Constraints" are key to finding purpose and direction.

I would modify this as "externally imposed constraints w.r.t. socially validated goals". I had come to this conclusion long ago based on my study of philosophy and my own life situation. I had to give up a software career to become a caregiver; my needs and wants being few and frugal with no dependents i found myself in a situation where i had a place stay, clothes to wear and enough food to eat and no "goal" in life i.e. freedom. That was when i realized that every goal had been imposed from outside and i had simply followed a socially validated path taking it as my own. Breaking out of this cycle means you are suddenly in a situation where you have to define your own goal from a large options menu with no constraints pushing you one way or another. This is when a feeling of "emptiness" dawns on you i.e. everything feels unnecessary/empty/worthless without social validation. Note that it has nothing to do with the amount of wealth you have but having enough for oneself based on how you choose to live.

The Financial Independence, Retire Early (FIRE) movement is very relevant here - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FIRE_movement
This comment could have easily been written either by someone who thinks the response went too far or by someone who thinks it didn't go far enough.
Android 15 sideloading restrictions are a raw deal for users
All the legitimate studies that did not find masks to be effective had glaring omissions, such as adherence to guidelines. Would you wear the mask properly or let it droop?

E.g. from https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8499874/

Results: When the adherence to mask usage guidelines is taken into account, the empirical evidence indicates that masks prevent disease transmission: all studies we analysed that did not find surgical masks to be effective were under-powered to such an extent that even if masks were 100% effective, the studies in question would still have been unlikely to find a statistically significant effect.
Do we need them now? Probably not. But if we get another pandemic? Definitely.
H-Matched Tracker: Now with MathVista, PubMedQA, and Interactive Charts
learn to love your insignificant self
It's easy: masks helps to avoid infection or/and buys more time for body to fight a virus. Looking at graphs of mortality rate between countries with good mask culture and bad mask culture, it looks like masks reduced Covid19 mortality by 2x at least.

Country # of cases # of deaths
USA 111,820,082 1,219,487
UK 24,910,387 232,112
Japan 33,803,572 74,694
S. Korea 34,571,873 35,934
> You cannot (re)use any GPL code unless you agree to license your own code under the GPL.

and you can't burn tyres in the park.
it's so easy to point fingers. why don't you do what you're telling him to do instead?
There is some truth to this. A friend of mine is a recruiting manager at one of the big tech companies here in the valley. They use a scoring system for candidates that ranges from (iirc) 1.0 (don't hire) to 5.0 (should hire).

If you're female, you earn a point. If you're a minority, you get another point. So, before considering all the other skills and qualifications, you already have a few points ahead of the typical white male applicant.
Fully agree. Clients like this are why I left firm life and went in-house doing corporate tax work.
Wearing a mask, even poorly will reduce the chances of spreading a respiratory virus. Is that reduction meaningful? That's a really hard question to answer in any sort of binary way. Combined with how bad humans are at processing/understanding probabilities, you will never have wide consensus.

As for the specialists, antidotally, I've never heard a medical doctor claim anything other than a mask is helpful and they all seemed to wear theirs quite happily.
Where are you getting your numbers? Social security is well known as one of the most efficient government agencies.

https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/admin.html

A 10% increase in administration efficiency would shave of $700 million.
> our bodies need to learn again to fight against viruses

This is unequivocally false. There is zero benefit to exposure to almost all viruses that infect humans. At best you would get sick and then have limited immunity to that single strain for a period of time, but getting sick is always worse than not getting it. You're not going to get immunity to the flu by "exercising" your immune system with colds or vice versa.

The only exception I'm aware of is chicken pox, where getting it young had better outcomes than getting it in adulthood so it made sense to seek exposure, but we have a vaccine for that now which is significantly better than ever getting it.

That doesn't necessarily mean we should all go around wearing masks always. There are certainly tradeoffs associated with that.
It’s a support role for a researchers: the institute makes probably zero profit.

A six figure salary seems generous, ask how much the postdocs are getting paid there. Their skills are more rare than rust for sure.
> "a carefully socially and civically managed resource available to all but notionally protected from abuse".

no it seems that you've just been triggered - I did mean it in the above sense. that's why it's offensive when somebody takes gpl code and puts it in proprietary code that they distribute.

public domain means do as you want, even burn tyres in the park.
That was still better, because you could track down errors. Other people used the same code. Chatgpt will just make up functions and methods. When you try to troubleshoot no one of course has ever had a problem with this completely fake function. And when you tell chatgpt it's not real it says "You're right, str_sanitize_base64 isn't a function" and then just makes up something else new.
This is the only reason I use iTerm2. I can view the terminal full screen while also instantly switching to the browser or other windows, without the animation.
It reminds me of how subscribing on YouTube and other platforms turned from "inform me when new videos come out" into "I like this channel".
That feels like a non-segueter given the comment I was responding to
That's of course wayyy oversimplified. There are many more differences between those places than just masking culture. You can't come to a conclusion without evaluating all the other factors.

This is exactly the kind of pseudoscience argument people pull in that muddies the water (on both sides of the debate)
Doesn't it depend on the medical center these days? In Poland everybody was so crazy about it that even police used to go on public transport (trams, buses) to check if everyone have their masks on, but now some doctors ask you to wear a mask (then they provide it as well), some not. Same thing in hospital.
Cool but this will grow unworkable as the number of entries increases and will require some sort of filtering / searching.

Even pure signal can be overwhelming these days when so much good stuff exists.

Which brings us to the (as far as I know unsolved) question of supporting large scale discovery of the web without drifting into enshittification.

Some sort of decentralized index that will be distributed in a torrent-like manner might work but that requires curation too: Who and with what criteria can add an entry etc.

Bottom line is that the walled gardens did not exist, they evolved because the original web was missing critical components of usability. They exploited a vacuum.

To fill the vacuum with something more benevolent we need to go back and solve these problems. The rest will be history.
> when you build this kind of software you have a certain responsibility to be thoughtful and cautious and not indirectly cause harm to others

I think the only responsibility maintainers of an open source project have is to not intentionally cause harm, and even that might not be absolute (e.g. would it really be that wrong for maintainer(s) to remove a package/source code, if they so decide, like with the left-pad debacle).

> Is every commit/PR being reviewed by someone other than the author? By multiple someones, ideally?

There is a good chance that they would welcome additional maintainers, so you can try volunteering to do that.
Properly done with what the consensus opinion was at the time the decisions were made, or properly done in hindsight and colored with political bias?

It's weird to me how quickly folks forgot the depth of our ignorance during the beginning of covid. Do you remember when we all started washing our groceries when we got home because we weren't even sure if covid survived on surfaces? Remember when we were desperate to slow the curve because medical staff were overwhelmed and people were dying from lack of services?

Sure, in hindsight we really screwed kids up with lockdowns. We probably kept it all going too far for too long. There was probably politics on both sides and lack of purely rational decisions on both sides.
> We were talking about criminal penalties.

No. We were talking about regulation.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42572449
It massively inflates asset prices which disproportionately benefit those who are already wealthy (they also have easier access to capital).
There’s an extremely wide range of viral expulsion rates, both from person to person, and from day to day for a single person. You really have to think about things logarithmically. There’s some viral concentration that is enough to infect you 50% of the time, but most of the time, the actual concentration is either way higher than necessary or way lower than necessary.

The types of masks most people use and the way they wear them maybe filter 70-80%. That’s about 0.5 on a log 10 scale. That will make a difference sometimes, but not that often if the experienced variation in concentration is maybe 4-5 orders of magnitude for a positive person.

If you’ve got someone sick in your house and you don’t want to get covid, you need to do high quality masks on everyone, fans blowing out windows, air filters, intelligent HVAC operation, etc. If you do all of that you can probably get 3 orders of magnitude reduction and likely keep it from getting everyone in the house.
It made me wonder how old the Horizons system is... I couldn't find any information. I would've guessed it dates back to the age of UNIX workstations and NSFNET, given the "e-mail" [sic] interface that produces either pure ASCII or PostScript.
> Would love to start a tech-interactive-art museum

Check out "TeamLab Planets TOKYO DMM.com". Ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TeamLab_Planets_TOKYO_DMM.com
Yes, but rarely
Copy on select is the feature I used to over the years (on BSD/Linux) and stock Terminal lacks it.
I find this to be an impossible problem because everything that any consumer could possibly want already exists. In fact, there are too many things and wealthy people are literally going insane trying to absorb the enormous supply and range of goods and services that are available to them. Sales is basically a zero-sum game of one useless product or service stealing market share from another useless product or service.

The only real problem which exists in society is the problem that the system itself prevents us from solving. The problem of allowing people to obtain money to buy the damn stuff that is being produced and whose production could be easily scaled up at will and there is nothing save climate change and other doom narratives getting in the way of massively scaling up production and automating everything. Letting the pie grow as big as is required to satisfy everyone. Ask just about anyone on the street what they need and if they're honest, 99% of them will tell you that they need more money to buy the stuff that already exists. The government could essentially give free land and free money (UBI) to everyone, new cities would be built and the system would expand and decentralize outward, creating an abundance of opportunities.

How do you solve the problem of helping people to get more money when the entire monetary system is designed to concentrate wealth, to take away opportunities and wealth from the masses. The only solutions to the most important problem in society are political. There are no business solutions for this problem within the current political framework.

There is no incentive to actually automate anything (beyond the point when it satisfies only the elite) when the masses are systematically broke and desperate for money. People will always be as cheap as machines. Slavery exists on the periphery and will grow in the current system. It will come down to the cost of food for a slave or electricity for a machine... However, the slave can produce their own food in the same way that an intelligent machine could produce its own electricity. The net cost is 0 in both cases. Slavery is more achievable, even today.

Now if you're interested in ways to make money without solving the only problem that matters, then you need to basically come up with a solution to make the problem worse; which helps concentrate the money faster, more surveillance, more control, more plausible deniability, more dulling of the senses, more inequality, more suffering... Basically anything that helps to prevent political change. Nothing else pays in the current political framework besides protecting the current political framework.
Which response? Every country responded differently, every state in every country responded differently. Cities implemented the state and national guidelines differently and then rural and urban populations reacted to the responses differently.

Imo, your question is a question with 10,000 answers. But also imo the biggest issue with most places responses was that it asked people to behave collectively in a society that rewards only individual action. Asking people to stay home when they’re sick for the good of their neighbours only works if people are supported when they stay home, or they have the means and desire to do it out of the goodness of their heart
An entire thread of neovim users generally saying that the performance is acceptable: https://www.reddit.com/r/neovim/s/JOQL9e76fp

Just because something else is faster doesn’t mean that iTerm is slow. It’s all relative.
Really good advice there. Thank you for writing this.

I've written several in-house tutorials to our internal product, and I've come to internalize your advice somehow.

IMO it's mostly about empathy. I remember myself as a newbie perplexed by this product and try to write to my younger self. I also make a point to always spend a lot of time with new hires and get their feedback and their viewpoint.
Mars Exploration: How the CIA's Project Stargate Went to Mars [pdf]
And it seems to US/European companies will ever be able to compete in China again. So what’s left?
Focusing the wrong problem. You'll also need to own everything that being a part of a nation state provides you, including markets and defense. If you can't do that, you can't live truly rent-free.
We absolutely did know this in the first place; China published detailed mortality data by age group in Wuhan. The media just refused to publish it, fearmongering to the benefit of its aging, at-risk owners.
It goes further than that. The form gets passed the model and it's name and based on that also drivers the URL and http action to take.

IMO this is good coupling since it's very loose, trivially changed and eliminated boilerplate code that's just noise. Of course, as always, it depends on a number of circumstances what trade-off is best for you, your team, the specific problem, etc
Science isn’t a proper noun unless you’re talking about the journal.
That is certainly a hard problem, but how do you know such a system is better than simpler command based ones? Systems like you describe have a much higher chance of taking the wrong action. Even humans do, when given ambiguous instructions. I know everyone loves to hate on Siri because it doesn’t do a good job of understanding anything complex, but I have always found it to be very reliable when you find the right command. As a result I use it much more often than google assistant (was team android/ pixel until 2020). I especially use it for timers, reminders, and navigation, and if my hands are not free, texts. Taking the wrong action breeds distrust, which I also think is not user friendly.
split the current star function into a "star rating" and a "save bookmark" function

let both users and repos opt out of / hide star ratings if they don't care about this popularity contest

let bookmarks be always private to users -- so users can peacefully organize their bookmarks for what they are
Fair point - I will add a note to the top that if you don't want to contribute via GitHub, you can send me a note to hi@den.dev. I will make the change myself.
Hmm so you have to jerk the model off a bit.
Utter origins propaganda from Jon Cohen, demonstrating his usual biased set of interviewees (only Bloom serves as the fig-leaf exception).

To get a quote from Baric unrelated to origins, when that fellow is at the absolute epicenter of FOIA litigation (led by USRighttoKnow) on the topic, is simple journalistic malpractice.
Pliant / Backend Engineer / Remote within EU / Full-time

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Tech stack: Java/Kotlin, Spring Boot 3, Postgres, Kafka, AWS, Terraform.

Getting shit done attitude, no bullshit environment, empowered product teams with competent PMs.

Drop me (CTO) a message alex.korotkikh@getpliant.com or apply right away https://www.getpliant.com/en/careers/
Yeah here in Spain nobody does masks anymore either. Except some tourists.

I'm glad, I always found it a super heavy burden, for me even worse than the lockdowns. But this is due to prior respiratory issues and PTSD related to that. For other people it will be a lot easier.

For me I'll just take the risk as it comes, I'm sure it's a bit higher without them but there's many things that can kill you in this life. For me being overweight is probably a lot more likely to do so.
For context: this is a transcript from a remote viewing session, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stargate_Project
There's a neat little thing some discords I've seen use, where they honeypot spam bots into a channel-- if someone posts into it, their messages in the last 5 minutes get deleted and their account gets kicked.

Is there a meaningful way to make it so a website shares a resource that automatically updates their blacklist to block the IP address? Knowing that you will lose X but hopefully you'll retain everyone who can read?
Hi! Quick update to H-Matched, the website tracking AI's progress toward human-level performance. Since last post, I've added 6 new benchmarks (now 20 total) and made the visualization interactive! The site shows how AI's 'catch-up time' has dramatically shrunk - from 6+ years with ImageNet to just months now. Explore the timeline with release dates, solve dates, and links to papers. Would love to hear your thoughts and if there are any benchmarks I've missed!
I found that it supercharged parts of my thinking — particularly critical thinking. I just had to read, review and critique so much. And, I had to write very clearly my intent.

But I no longer do manual brainstorming as much. And I am generally overwhelmed by what I might do, I’m more concerned about my time use.
Hey there, I'm a full-stack dev looking for full time employment, or part time if it's the right fit.

Location: Seattle, WA

Remote: open to remote, or in the office / hybrid Seattle or Eastside

Willing to relocate: to NYC, I guess

Technologies: React (JS/TS), Node, Python, Ruby on Rails, Postgres / SQL, HTML & CSS, Docker, AWS, Git, Vercel

Résumé/CV: https://drive.google.com/file/d/15Sap_FmWRWhhOFCAhlbg4V4gcwr...

Email: masonlynass@gmail.com

https://www.masonlynass.com :)
The steam deck only has flash storage tho....

Until I see actual benchmarks I remain sceptical.
Seems very useful. This stuff can’t be done already with pg replication?
> I think your points are mainly issues with determining that an experimental treatment actually has a significant effect.

Yes, this is the place where the placebo (and nocebo) effect was observed and where it has an impact.

> But noise in how the disease naturally progresses is also split amongst control and experimental groups, and so the important test is the control group compared to people with no treatment at all, or even unwitting of their observation.

It's basically never possible to do a study comparing a new medication to no treatment, mostly on ethical grounds (beyond the complicated logistics of studying people outside of clinical settings). There are very few diseases for which we have no treatment whatsoever, so it's very rarely ethically acceptable to compare between offering a medication vs no treatment.