piercebot

I actually think Linus has had some of his rough edges smoothed out over the years. This was not nearly as combative as it could have been or may have been in the past!

Finite Automata and the Theory of Computation.

Lots of Turing Machines and constructing proofs. I'm not sure I would have passed if it wasn't for my friend who worked with me on the homework.

My private hypothesis here is that we're doing a better job as a society of encouraging "disconnection" from being "always online," which is documented to aggravate mental health issues[0].

It stands to reason therefore that the people who remain online to comment may have lower levels of mental hygiene by virtue of their ongoing exposure to the internet and social media, thus resulting in a gradual decrease in sentiment over time.

[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7364393/#:~:tex...

I made a safe-to-wake light for my son out of a Raspberry Pi. It serves up a responsive website on the local network so you can manually change the lights or update the schedule.

Been running like a champ for over 3 years now, which has been the most pleasant surprise. I'm used to ecosystem entropy causing things to break.

I documented my adventures in a 6-part series: https://ajpierce.com/2020-01-04_safe-to-wake-pt1/

Sure!

For the first job, I bill hourly for the time I spend working. Here, I develop web applications to validate machine learning models for a company; I help organize results in a way that allows ML engineers to easily "spot check" the results of ML runs on data through a web interface.

The second job I have is in the "web3" space developing applications that run on a specific blockchain in which I've specialized. Compensation here is based on milestones and paid out in cryptocurrency.

In both cases, I am transparent about the progress I'm making and compensated accordingly. The hourly rate I charge as a contractor brings in an equivalent salary to what I had as a full-time employee in about 900 hours per year, which works out to be about 18/hours per week if you assume 2 weeks off.

I transitioned from full-time employment to contracting in April 2022. I am currently over-employed and working two gigs simultaneously.

All leads have come from my personal network or my reputation as a known entity in a relatively niche field.

Only trouble I've had is invoice approval and waiting for money to be moved, but it has always eventually come through.

Cashflow remains equivalent to when I was an FTE, but I'm working fewer hours per day and working on more interesting things. A lot of that has to do with transitioning out of management, I think. I don't miss it :)

It took learning another language (Japanese) for me to finally make sense of my native language (English)'s grammar.

I still remember the day I learned the difference between transitive and intransitive verbs in Japanese and had that "ooooHHHHHH" moment in my head where all verbs everywhere finally made sense.

What a luxury to work at a place where tickets are defined and work is scoped out for you :)

If you're chafing there due to the lack of autonomy, I promise there are places hiring people whose strong suit is tackling ambiguity in addition to software development.

Are there any copyright concerns around doing this kind of thing? Surely SEGA will come after him for providing this as a free download?

This is like saying "you can't really leverage Java well without knowing JVM bytecode." Which is to say: I also disagree with you :)

I think the real advantage is scripting with a REPL in your IDE. Whipping up a script becomes trivial because you can test every data transformation (heck, every expression!) with a keystroke. There's no great way to do this in a language without s-expressions.

I wonder how much of this changed due to public sentiment driven by pop culture? Movies like Fern Gully[0] and TV shows like Captain Planet[1] definitely had a hand in shaping my generation growing up.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FernGully:_The_Last_Rainforest

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captain_Planet_and_the_Planete...

What is it about America (or other countries) that makes you think this couldn't happen anywhere else?

Maybe not once you consider the R&D costs of figuring out how not to melt a solid gold Merlin engine ;)

BlackSky | Remote ;; Seattle, WA ;; Herndon, VA | Full Time | US Citizen

BlackSky is building the premier global intelligence platform. Our Platform delivers timely, relevant, and actionable information allowing our customers to make swift and informed decisions. In other words: we launch satellites and set up AI/ML pipelines on the torrent of data they send down. It's really cool.

You can see our business plans over at this SEC filing: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1753539/000119312521...

We're especially looking to staff up our Platform team, which is responsible for building the software that delivers the data and insights our customers need. We have open positions for front-end, back-end, and full-stack developers; our language stack includes Java / Python on the back-end, and JavaScript (React) on the front-end.

We're a fully distributed team; the company is just over 150 people now, and we've got teammates in over 20 states. 100% Remote is 100% OK. Due to ITAR requirements, we are only hiring US citizens at this time.

https://www.blacksky.com/careers/

Typically, there's a "cliff" after the first year, at which point it switches to quarterly.

So you get nothing the first three quarters, but after quarter 4 (your first year at the company), 25% of your 4-year grant is immediately vested. Every quarter after that is another 6.25% of your initial grant.

I believe the point they were trying to make in the article is that, instead of quarterly grants following the pattern of:

    [0%, 0%, 0%, 25%, 6.25%, 6.25%, ...]

    [6.25%, 6.25%, 6.25%, 6.25%, 6.25%, ...]

I'm not sure I would classify that as "talking plainly." Words like that would put anybody on the defensive, and being on the defensive does not make people receptive to positive change.

Blastomere links to Nick Szabo blog posts:

https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=blastomere

...links to:

http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2005/12/bit-gold.html

Thanks for pointing that out -- I've updated the title :)

Do you think it's worth editing the title? Will I step on any metaphorical landmines because the HN community (for example) prefers immutability?

This idea is explored in Walkaway: A Novel, by Corey Doctorow. If you enjoy reading fiction, I highly recommend it!

They linked a study from a medical journal. Are you asking for additional qualifications? Should there be restrictions on who is allowed to share scholarly articles?

How are things in PR these days? I can't imagine what it must be like to deal with a pandemic while simultaneously trying to rebuild basic infrastructure.

Have you been able to get back to some semblance of normalcy yet?

I believe this is less about hearing opinions and more about celebrating the next generation of hackers.

This is a fine example of a kid who has a strong opinion and, rather than shout it into their echo chamber on social media, they've taken the liberty of securing a domain name and creating a website capable of reaching a larger audience.

We here on Hacker News enjoy celebrating the initiative, the creative process, and the execution. Of course you'll find a wide range of opinions, but I think you'll find (and you imply as much by your question!) that most people on HN are happy to celebrate a the accomplishments of the next generation.

Thanks for taking the time to share, this feels like a good approach!

The author of this post appears to do an excellent job of projecting negative emotions onto the tweet that broke the camel's back, so to speak.

He makes it appear as though the entire software development industry, and especially how developers carry themselves within it, is not to his liking. I think he is calling for more humility, but I'm not sure, because this appears to be more of an attack on a vaguely-defined group of people rather than a call to action or a proposal for how software developers could present themselves more to his liking.

It is hard for me to read a text that is set only in hiragana (as in the Japanese version of Animal crossing on Switch for example, the characters only speaks in kana, with no spacing separating words...

I'm very curious as to why Nintendo made this choice!

Is it because the game is designed to be welcoming to children? In which case, why not use furigana and use it as an opportunity to learn Kanji though repetition?

Is it supposed to reflect the simplicity of a back-to-nature lifestyle and the characters therein?

I'm inclined to suspect is the latter of the two; especially if kana is only employed in character speech while other parts of the game use Kanji.

Has anybody played the Japanese version? Can you speak to the use of Kanji in the game?

I don't see why Bitcoin's technology stack is failing if it's what is enabling its current value.

Keep in mind as well that the protocol is mutable as long as people agree to change it.

Saying BTC is doomed to fail as it's living alongside a multitude of other cryptocurrencies that attempt to solve its shortcomings is also a dubious proposition to me. Take for example the Mina Protocol[0], which eschews proof of work, huge blockchains, and slow transaction speeds for solutions built on top of zk-SNARKs.

If BTC has value as a long-term store of wealth, and if other cryptocurrencies exist to transact at faster rates with more liquid capital, and if that capital can flow between systems freely (as fast at BTC will allow), then every system is working as designed, right?

0: https://minaprotocol.com/

People often bring up the Bitcoin algorithm to make arguments against it, but don't seem to acknowledge the fact that the protocol is mutable.

If the sha-256 algorithm was cracked such that BTC blocks could be solved instantly, the existing miners would have to choose between:

1. No more income, or

2. Adopt a quantum-resistant protocol.

Market economics being what they are, I think it's safe to assume that BTC would survive the "quantum apocalypse." There's too much money at stake for any other choice to be the logical outcome.

Thanks for the thoughtful reply; I'd never heard of Hammerstein-Equord before, so that was enlightening.

I think I've lived a charmed life in that, for the past 7 years, I've worked at a company without a bell curve distribution in terms of employees. We're extremely "top heavy" in terms of experience and ability, and there has been a distinct lack of ego as well. At previous companies I would agree with your assessments about types of people, but having seen what's possible when you hire only the best people through your professional networks who only want to work with other talented ego-less individuals, I may be guilty of holding myself to unrealistic expectations.

That said, we're becoming a victim of our own success now and we need to hire outside of our tapped-out professional networks. Perhaps as we achieve a more "normal" distribution, the more "normal" advice will start to apply. A good problem to have, but still a new problem where there wasn't one previously.