j4pe

I am a simple man I see -2k lines of code, I upvote

I've told this story to every client who tried schemes to benchmark productivity by some single-axis metric. The fact that it was Atkinson demonstrates that real productivity is only benchmarkable by utility, and if you can get a truly accurate quantification for that then you're on the shortlist for a Nobel in economics.

Yeah we're opening an engineering office in NYC, TBD whether it's Manhattan or across the river, likely depends on the location of the next few hires.

GovPilot | Senior + Staff Software Engineer | Python NYC Onsite | C# NYC + remote

I'm CTO of a bootstrapped civic tech provider powering hundreds of local and county governments across 40+ states and 3 countries. We provide 150+ services from marriage licenses to construction projects to tax assessments.

Now we're building out AI concierges to make citizens' interactions with their governments fast and easy, and to make accessing government data and building workflows on it as simple as asking a question.

We're growing fast, our market is incredibly behind the times (we've upgraded customers from a paper map and hand compass onto GIS), and we generate unique first-party data that's priceless in many other markets. Come help us help citizens and build something that matters.

Send me an email - jpbonner # govpilot.com

Or apply at

https://govpilot.bamboohr.com/careers/46 | https://govpilot.bamboohr.com/careers/37

This was my first thought as well. I wonder if he hired someone to build it and is paying some kind of monthly maintenance fee. Anyone here could contact this guy and offer to put the page behind a (probably ~free) CDN.

GovPilot | Senior + Staff Software Engineer | NYC Onsite | C# Python Elixir

I'm CTO of a bootstrapped civic tech provider powering hundreds of local and county governments across the country and federal governments abroad. We provide 150+ services from marriage licenses to construction projects to tax assessments.

Now we're building out AI concierges to make citizens' interactions with their governments fast and easy, and to make accessing and building workflows on government data as simple as asking a question.

We're growing fast, our market is incredibly behind the times (we've upgraded customers from a paper map and hand compass onto GIS), and we generate unique first-party data that's priceless in many other markets. Come help us help citizens and build something that matters.

Send me an email - jpbonner # govpilot.com

Or apply at

https://govpilot.bamboohr.com/careers/40 https://govpilot.bamboohr.com/careers/39

Joe Eskenazi, the author of this piece, is a solid journalist who helps run the tiny donation-funded Mission Local. They've done incredible reporting on corruption in the SF city government and punch way above their weight in the stories they break. I have respect for how Joe refused to join in reporting this murder as evidence of a violent crime epidemic, while still reporting on homelessness and property crime.

I actually registered a bet regarding his eventual conviction: https://longbets.org/922/

I was bothered by the level of rhetoric from high-profile people in technology predicting that the US justice system would never pursue SBF, because these claims seem to smuggle in the conspiracy that the US government is controlled by some cabal or hidden element. While of course the US government has many problems, these insinuations don't represent a serious take on the issue, and this FTX debacle seems to be simply a convenient opportunity for "network state" or techno-libertarian proponents to promulgate some more damaging untruths into an already poisoned information environment.

Nobody has yet taken me up on the bet.

It's charmingly on-theme for the title of this HN post to be a Youtube-style clickbait, but we should probably edit it to something more informative.

You may enjoy HN darling(?) Pinboard's 2013 talk on Thoreau and his phoniness: (https://idlewords.com/talks/thoreau_2.0.htm)

It's an incredible essay for anyone who feels stifled by the society they're living in, the organizations they're a part of; anyone who wants to create and to do something original; anyone who wants to understand their compulsion to carve their own niche in the world and perhaps feel less alone in harboring that compulsion. Because, of course, Emerson thinks we're all this way inside.

Transcendentalism is the MMA of philosophy, or maybe the Jeet Kun Do. It finds its influences everywhere, and it's interested in being applicable to real life. You read this essay and you'll see its influence everywhere from hustle culture to the Unabomber.

You want philosophical underpinnings? It's got the Stoics' and Buddhists' serene indifference to circumstance - "No man can come near me but through my act .. nothing is at last sacred but your own mind .. Nothing can bring you peace but yourself."

It's got premodern traditions' reverence of nature, colored by the semi-recent invention of science - "The civilized man has built a coach, but has lost the use of his feet." (With, yes, charming old-timey digressions into how aboriginals are immune to e.g. axe blows.)

It's got Leibniz' and Nietzsche's perspectivism, this idea that while theology can no longer claim your cells and atoms are somehow sacred, it's more interesting to consider the uniqueness of your mind as the holy thing you bring to the world.

You want applicability? Entrepreneurship? Failing fast? "If the young merchant fails, men say he is ruined .. A sturdy lad from New Hampshire or Vermont, who in turn tries all the professions .. does not postpone his life, but lives already. He has not one chance, but a hundred chances."

Instagram? "I do not wish to expiate, but to live. My life is for itself and not for a spectacle."

Mob politics, as employed by people like Jackson: "When the unintelligent brute force that lies at the bottom of society is made to growl and mow, it needs the habit of magnanimity and religion to treat it godlike as a trifle of no concernment."

The tendency for good progressive causes to be co-opted by jerks: "If an angry bigot assumes this bountiful cause of Abolition .. why should I not say to him .. never varnish your hard, uncharitable ambition with this incredible tenderness for black folk a thousand miles off. Thy love afar is spite at home." (Emerson was a famous Abolitionist.)

"I must be myself. I cannot break myself any longer for you, or you. If you can love me for what I am, we shall be the happier. If you cannot, I will still seek to deserve that you should. I will not hide my tastes or aversions." What would the guy who wrote that say about gay or trans people?

Emerson and his pals might have loved Sapiens and evolutionary psychology and Tumblr, and hated Instagram and Doordash and Communism. But their Puritan minds would have been blown by the idea that people could be better. They thought the best you could do was to live according to your nature, because your nature is divine: "I suppose no man can violate his nature .. if I am the Devil's child, I will live then from the Devil."

And here in this corner of the world, one of the most powerful popular philosophical undercurrents is that idea of self-improvement taken far past "rationalism" and self-optimization to the final degrees of utopian transhumanism. Our most successful entrepreneurs, the most wealthy people in our society, are all tinkering in some form of bringing about a future where people are freed from work, from the natural world, and from their bodies as imagined by Iain M Banks and Charlie Stross [1]. Hardly living according to your nature.

But Emerson and his contemporaries were writing these things in response to the creation of industrial society. Their philosophy was tailored to a time where people, in their view didn't sufficiently respect their own nature. Seeing the subsequent century of industrialized war and the postindustrial society, how would they apply the idea of "affront[ing] and reprimand[ing] the smooth mediocrity and squalid contentment of the times" to a world of indulging your nature, pressing buttons and looking at screens and, probably, trying to get rich? Who is thinking about this today? Honestly, I'm asking.

[1] Though in Crimes against Transhumanity Stross argues they're missing the point (https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2022/07/crimes-...)

Congrats on the launch, Stefan. That is a heck of a nice wrap on that tractor. Best of luck!

As a longtime freelancer and agency founder: misaligned incentives are not the same thing as dishonesty. Honestly pursuing your own incentives, and being open about what those incentives are, is really the only honest way to do business.

Broadly speaking, it's not economically feasible for an agency to take contracts that pay $7k (or even $25k, for that matter - I've written about this here https://bonner.jp/posts/the-co-op-consultancy/). So if they can do you a favor, in their minds, by fixing your whole website instead of just three pages - and if you're willing to pay for it - then everybody wins. Right?

That's the difference between a business relationship and being a friend: you may keep your mouth shut when a friend is being imposing, taking too much for granted, because you value the relationship. You would never remain silent in a business context when somebody is spending your money. It's business. They understand.

On my jobs, I'm explicit about what I'm going to do and what I'm not going to do. If my client needs to scale, I'm going to talk them through options for caching and horizontal & vertical scaling. But if my client seems to be dragging their feet on customer development and making poor business decisions about which features to prioritize, well, that's not my role in this relationship.

That said, I would never lead a client into a project backwards the way this agency did. Because I do value the relationship! In that I want you to come back, and pay me more money later. Not because we're friends. That's business honesty.

This situation is definitely your fault - but only because you and your agency had different assumptions about the rules or norms of your relationship. Your agency poorly communicated their intentions, and you allowed that to happen out of a misplaced sense of friendly obligation.

But hey, the new site does look great.

Has anyone compared memory usage of these launchers? I can report albert consumes a constant ~600MiB on my machine, which seems high for a list of filenames and application names.

Parag apparently lost his patience with superficial and misleading claims about Twitter spam (like this analysis) and posted about it today.

You can see it here (https://twitter.com/paraga/status/1526237578843672576).

Noteworthy highlights:

* Twitter estimates its <5% number from human analysis of multi-thousand user random samplings of mDAU

* Twitter allows that number to remain so high to avoid introducing friction like captcha into real users' experiences

* Twitter uses all sorts of internal private data in its analysis

* Parag says you cannot get a reliable indication of bot/not bot without this internal private data

Having just finished building a Twitter analysis tool, I agree with Parag that the Twitter API doesn't provide sufficient clarity to make decisions about spam. This article's analysis doesn't hold up - just because you can name several features you're going to use to generate a spam confidence score about an account does not mean that spam confidence score will have any precision.

It's worth appreciating how fluent all of these people are with their craft to create something of this quality on that timeline.

The director got the script on Wednesday! Look at the set layouts, the lighting plans, and the lens choices that were made on the fly. Not to mention somebody had to actually make those costumes and build those sets in a day - and modify them on demand to make the kitchen 8' longer. They were still editing it while the show was being broadcast!

You don't generally see "improv" in a field with a lot of preparation like filmmaking, or like software. It's cool to witness somebody who is so comfortable with their tools that they can e.g. live-code a hack-the-box solution or build some new web service on a stage and make it look effortless, and it's equally cool to see this kind of fluency in film.

Is it a bit of extra complexity? Yes.

Does it cause friction for new devs? No - I can't think of any mainstream Elixir use cases that require Erlang libraries, with the exception of math operators like `:math.sqrt/1`. Chris' comment here is the golden example of this.

And anyway, what does the user get in exchange for that extra layer of complexity? A unique high-concurrency VM with easy-to-use primitives that would require huge gobs of code and lots of added dependencies in other languages.

It's a small tradeoff. My own experience is that the benefits far outweigh the complexity cost.

It sounds like OP mostly objects to the oldschool textfile documentation aesthetic of a lot of Erlang core and libraries, which is fine, but the overwhelming majority of new Elixir devs doing web applications and data processing will never encounter this.

The incident this piece revolves around seems strange. I can't find the avalanche report to confirm this, since only fatal accidents seem to be publicly available [1] (all reported US avalanches are cataloged publicly [2]).

First, it seems like the burial victim was on the surface for 30 minutes and wasn't found by his companions - who also had avalanche beacons. It's very common for people to panic after an avalanche burial - the comments of any youtube footage of avalanche rescues will be full of people screaming "you idiot, why did you take off your gloves/not spread out/forget to set your transponder to search". Because these are simple things that people forget. But I've never heard of rescuers, for a full half hour, failing to notice a fluorescent float bag on the surface of the avalanche field. Is it possible this was uncovered by rotor wash?

Then, the professional rescuer is described as asking on-site amateurs - twice! - to remove his shovel from his pack. This should never be necessary. All alpine packs are designed to hold avalanche gear - shovel and probe - in an isolated compartment for rapid ease of access. It's just an odd note that makes the reader wonder what inaccuracies have crept into the story, or, if it actually happened as described, makes the reader wish the author had the expertise to notice and explore these anomalies in the incident.

1. https://www.slf.ch/en/avalanches/destructive-avalanches-and-...

2. https://www.avalanche.state.co.us/caic/acc/acc_report.php?ac...

Wait, why and how? Did I miss this?

Another example, similar to the open source world, of a volunteer's passion project becoming a critical infrastructure component that people rely on.

Sixty years on, the most interesting thing about the case is enthusiasts' refusal to consider the most plausible explanation because it doesn't deliver the same satisfaction as less likely theories like government conspiracy. Granted, the incident took place in a society where the government frequently covered up fatal accidents, but that environment doesn't make the wind slab explanation any less likely.

There was a discussion a while back on "trapped priors" in Bayesian reasoning, where you might "correctly" update your beliefs in the wrong direction based on your subjective experience of evidence that should contradict your prior beliefs (1). It seems like you see this behavior everywhere, these days, especially when it comes to conspiracy thinking: any data can be taken as evidence to support the conspiracy theory, whether it's "Q" or a sixty-year-old backcountry disaster.

--

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26447924

I've been watching Urbit for a while, the grand vision is just so cool. But it never seemed to have any immediate utility, even for the most DIY hacker type. They're combining the hard things about technology (let's rebuild the user layer of the internet!) with the hard things about social networks (nobody has any reason to adopt this). So I've still never bothered spinning up a node.

But I can remember having had the same feeling about Bitcoin! And the interface is so nice. So perhaps this time I'll finally find a reason to get started.

And in particular, the protagonist of that short story who is so happy he lives in his grim and grotty but real cyberpunk future, instead of the sterile, facile utopia imagined by the retro-futurism aesthetic.

It's an interesting idea! You can learn a lot about a decade by studying what they thought their future would look like. And in the 90s we were definitely thinking it would involve neon translucency.

Why don't gig workers just work for themselves? Gig apps are basically trivial to engineer in 2020 until they get scaling problems, largely due to the contributions of the open source community. It would be nice if there were also open source tools for people's gig businesses, so they didn't have to sell their labor through a company extracting such a heavy rent.

I've always admired your work, and read your source code to learn how to structure a great project.

Looking forward to reading whatever you do next!

Chromium has very little to do with whether a browser shares user data - it's just an open-source package for making browsers.

I also primarily use Firefox, but Brave is definitely a more serious effort at a privacy-focused browser.

Previous discussion: (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4333578)

Yanis Varoufakis, who wrote the post during his tenure as "Chief Economist" at Valve, went on to serve as the finance minister of Greece during its financial crisis and negotiations with the EU.

Relevant today in light of the many attempts being made at creating tech coops (https://github.com/hng/tech-coops), and decentralizing organizations with blockchain systems.

Nice! I also ran a company as a worker coop - but I structured it as an LLC, just because it was far easier. Coop practices like revenue sharing were defined through company bylaws, not its legal ownership structure.

Lots of people have done coops in tech. One decent list: https://github.com/hng/tech-coops

Yanis Varoufakis, before he was the finance minister of Greece(!), worked at Valve and wrote about the economic theory of why corporations are structured as centrally controlled fiefdoms instead of democracies, and why Valve was apparently more democratic (http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/economics/why-valve-or-what-d...). Great read.

Instacart | Sr Full-stack Engineer, Sr Data Engineer, Data Scientist, Machine Learning Engineer, Sr iOS/Android Engineer | onsite in San Francisco | onsite in Toronto | https://instacart.com

I'm a dev at Instacart, where we're building the world's largest market for groceries. Lots of novel problems, lots of room for experienced people to have big impact.

Hiring Process depends on the position, but will generally follow this flow: Phone screen + simple challenge / Take-home challenge / On-site. We're pretty flexible and can work with you on this.

We care that you can ship product and enjoy taking ownership over what you're working on. We don't really care where you went to school or what companies you've worked for.

Tech:

  • Ruby (on Rails)
  • ES6+
  • React / Redux
  • PostgreSQL
  • Elasticsearch
  • Memcached / Redis

Learn more and apply directly at:

  • https://careers.instacart.com/
  • http://tech.instacart.com
  • http://stackshare.io/posts/the-tech-behind-instacarts-grocery-delivery-service

Instacart | San Francisco, Toronto, Remote | Senior engineering roles

I'm a dev at Instacart, where we're building the world's largest market for groceries.

Lots of interesting problems for senior people in various technologies, frontend and backend engineers, iOS/Android, infra/devops specialists, security, etc. It's wild to deal with the scale we're reaching these days, and online grocery is still a tiny market in 2019 compared to what it will be.

We were also frontpaging HN a lot last week for some appearances in the news, which wasn't fun. It was pretty excellent to see how company leadership listened and changed policy within a few days. That doesn't happen everywhere.

If you're interested, reach out to me - email in my profile. Full job listings at https://boards.greenhouse.io/instacart

Part of the excellence of interviewcake is that it feels like it was made by a person. When you're reading passages on the site, you can tell that the same person wrote them all. When you have an issue or a suggestion, you email it in, and the founder emails you back immediately.

It doesn't feel like a venture-backed company that provides an anemic free trial, but designs the entire product to upsell you to the subscription. Nope. It costs a few hundred bucks. Take it or leave it. If it doesn't work, you can get a refund.

This probably isn't a scalable way to do business, but isn't it nice that ignoring the growth impulse can actually make your product better?