skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Real engineering" does not mean building things. Real engineering means knowing how to model processes - so that when you actually do build something, your model gives you a strong signal ahead of time that it's going to do what you want.

Engineering is not libraries or cook books: engineering is math.

Civil engineers model buildings and other structures. Electronic engineers model circuit behaviours. Aerospace engineers model aerodynamics and materials. Traffic engineers model traffic flows.

Stuff only gets built after a model appears to work. This is a good thing, because otherwise we'd be build bridges with rule of thumb and trial and error, and they'd fall down a lot, and kill people.

Knowing the math makes it as easier to model a business case, complete with deadlines, as a process.

Why isn't software engineering like this? It's not impossible to model software. It's just conceptually demanding, and very expensive.

Professional software engineering doesn't look much like vanilla coding. The percentage of developers who can hack it - or could ever hack it - is not large.

So we muddle along as a trade, not an engineering profession, hammering and gluing libraries together.

The pay is still good, hardly anyone gets asked if they know what the ACM is in job interviews, and a lot of customers don't mind that much if a site only works in Safari and not in Chrome. (NB: actual experience I had with my online banking account last week.)

It's true that being asked to estimate how long something will take may be met with a sharp intake of breath. But the reality is that very similar projects have usually been completed many times in other companies already, and the amount of truly unique and original R&D needed for most work need is miniscule.
The first one isn't a product that can be sold but rather a systemic failure.

The rest of them didn't kill anyone.

iOS 6 Maps was definitely a pretty big mistake, but Google Maps was available the majority of the time it was broken. I guess I can let you have that one, since it was pretty appallingly bad and because not everyone knew you could download the actually good Maps app.

The next two examples were unfortunate mistakes where a tiny bug caused a massive failure, and these things happen sometimes. They didn't ship a broken product, just a product with a worse-than-expected bug. I feel like that's understandable when your target platform is a damned jet airplane or ship, and your underlying platform is some complicated 35 "Intel i960" mess running Ada[1] or 27 Pentium Pro computers all running Windows NT 4.0.[2] I'm not sure what you expected.

And yes, the loss of the Mars Orbiter was awful, and yes the error was noticed by two different people who said something about it.[3] I think this might be the most applicable scenario to your point, where a broken product was shipped broken on purpose because of stupid time pressure.

Two of five isn't too bad, but it hardly shows a pattern of shipping broken stuff for profit. Sometimes people want profit, but many times people make mistakes.

1: http://www.militaryaerospace.com/articles/print/volume-12/is..., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_i960

2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Yorktown_(CG-48)#Smart_shi...

3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Climate_Orbiter#Cause_of_...
Vice News 'State of Surveillance' with Edward Snowden
And Snowden has what exactly to do with Wikileaks? (apart from criticizing their means of releasing documents: not a thing)

As for your statement that Snowden fled to Russia: false! Snowden was on his way to latin america and the State Dept froze his passport en route, stranding him in Moscow when his plane landed for a connection. This misinformation will never die.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Snowden#Russia
Those are just flags, the message contains much more than the flag. Therefore it is wrong to say that they just send the flags and that the flags are equivalent to SYN and ACK.
There is no evidence of sexual assault in the tape the author links.

The quotes from Trump state outright that he engages in sexual conduct with women, without obtaining consent from them to do so. Engaging in sexual conduct with someone without their consent is sexual assault.
I would be incredibly interested in data for all tech salaries.
I am very aware about statistical methods originating in mathematics - I did statistics every semester as part of my biology degree. Indeed, half the reason why the mathematics department existed at my university was to support the biological sciences.

You may be interested to know that my point is that you don't need mathematical proofs to have a pragmatic, beneficial effect - and while the OP is sitting there feeling smug, the others at that dinner table are actually out there reducing pain and disorder in the people around them. Some medical tools are completely impossible without maths - MRIs are the poster child for this - but feeling superior because "my field uses proofs and yours doesn't" is just obnoxious. This vid link is about teachers rather than medicos, but it's the same sitation; a response to the smug one denigrating the others at the dinner table, because those others don't match up to a very narrow standard: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RxsOVK4syxU

Besides, as the saying goes: "In theory, there is no difference between practice and theory. In practice, there is".
Most of the books on the first list represent those I would only read once, and never again (or never at all, like "Head First [Anything]"). The C Programming Language and Refactoring are the exceptions. K&R was one of the textbooks in my first CS class, and the first CS book I read which was still useful to me 10 years later.

The books on the second list which I have read (at least partially) are books I have had reason to go back to at some point in my career, and any of them which I no longer have, I will likely purchase again.
Sigh. I didn't want to respond, but someone pointed out to me that you work at Amazon (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12181599). I think it's fair to say that in a thread asking about alternatives to AWS, I was both factual and disclosed my non-trivial source of potential bias (so my statements didn't constitute spam).

Again, I don't mean this to be an ad hominem response, but I take the disclosure "expectation" seriously, and it's frustrating to see folks (competitor or not) try to squelch discussion.

Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud.
Well, on the subject of Russia and WL, today there was the allegation that RT (that's Russia Today, guess where they're based) had information about WL's latest "leaks" before WL had announced them. Some kind of information channel must exist there.
Which of the following seems more likely?

A person fails to read a question verbatim.

A person who has been the "smartest person in the room" for decades has an inflated view of his fluency on a topic and makes mistakes in his favor when he tries to reconstruct the questions from memory.
"Yeah, that’s her. With the gold. I better use some Tic Tacs just in case I start kissing her. You know, I’m automatically attracted to beautiful — I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything."

"Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything."
This tired argument is neither logical nor relevant. The reality is that in a pre-Wikileaks world, leaks also existed.

The new reality is not "evil persona holds dagger to your throat", rather that motivated persons are empowered to securely spill secrets the world over. By turning around the fallacious "nothing to hide" argument, Assange is making some secretive groups quite literally pay and squirm against the possibility of unknown assailants and the 'threat' of real transparency. Good job.
I reckon Ive done just enough to waste their time including me in their letter :)

Playing with honeypots much safer and more fun than active hacking.
developing on top of managed services will allow you to do more with less people over time. And adopt best practices by integration.
Global deal reached to limit HFC gases
Obama's all-time favorite sci-fi movies
Not so pointless. Think that one of the NPC in a computer game gets intelligent. It could learn how to trigger bugs or cheats in the game or features thought only for the player. Examples: crash the game, which hopefully restarts from the last save. Get where no NPC was supposed to be, only players, and get teleported somewhere else. Trigger a stack overflow and perform actions in the host, maybe changing the programming of the game or the data in the save files.

In our case it could be the way to FTL. Did any Sci-fi author considered that yet?
A lot of her professors in Stanford told her that her vision is not possible. Of course she didn't listen to them.
I am a chronically ill homeless woman who was molested and raped as a child. I find your comment rather offensive for a great many reasons. Children drowning at sea is not relevant to the topic and most people I talk to online do not genuinely care about my suffering. So this appeal strikes me as a rather nasty means to be dismissive of me. I was not suggesting anyone else was obligated to have compassion for her and I am quite confident your supposed compassion for real suffering will fail to in any way benefit me.
Exploring ASP.NET Core with Docker in Both Linux and Windows Containers
That'd explain why the military is funding it - patents don't apply to them!
As I understand it, it's actually worse: the thing you swear under penalty of perjury is not "this content infringes a copyright", but rather "I am the copyright holder or authorized to act on the copyright holder's behalf". So even if you know beyond doubt something doesn't infringe, you're not committing perjury unless you misrepresent yourself as a copyright holder or authorized agent of a copyright holder.
"People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public."

- Adam Smith
> You continue to be extremely insulting and making significant assumptions about my experience. What shibboleth do I have to provide to prove that I know what I'm doing? This inherent assumption that other people don't know anything is incredibly damaging to the industry: I don't assume a SRE is an incompetent programmer, so you shouldn't assume I am barely competent at ops.

My mistake for projecting, the comment you posted about sysadmin age being dead gave me the opinion that you think infrastructure is just something you can deploy and forget, again my mistake.

I also spoke in my original message that some 10x engineers can do both, but they are not the majority.

I guess you're a 10x full stack engineer then.

> Like I said in my original comment, I have been the primary on call engineer for multiple projects with millions of users.

That's great, so you're a developer, and operations engineer then (devops)?

Do you think that developers should be expected to do both? Genuinely curious
You're missing the point. He isn't saying the books are crap, not even TAOCP. He is saying lots of programmers suggest they have read them when really they haven't.

You see some of these books suggested to novices. Is TAOCP really the best book for someone just getting started on their first program?
Car in your bag
He's literally bragging about sexual assault. Facts are facts. That's true whether or not there is evidence of his words being true.
It's because certain things stay the same between elections that the forecast, while based on the past, has some validity. And it is because every historical situation is different that we can have lively speculation about whether the election is historically unprecedented in some way that invalidates the forecast.
Same re: the Linux version, though I believe it's still up in the air whether it'll even be released.
US MSM and HRC talk about Russia being responsible for cyber attacks. Yet, not a shred of proof is presented to the US and world public.

In 2003 US has started another war based on a lie. The "enemy" was weak and had inferior military, yet the war caused deaths of US soldiers and Iraqis, destruction of Iraq and we now have IS(IS).

And again we, it seems, have a lie. But now the "enemy" isn't inferior. The chaos US has caused in Iraq will look like a three-year-old-birthday-party compared with the war with Russia.

Are we willing to go that far? Have we learned anything from the recent past? Do we really want to destroy the World based on a lie?
I said no such thing.
I am sorry, but I fail to see how offering https support as a premium feature could be considered "shady".
I follow the war closely, 30 US/French soldiers were not killed nor were any Russians outside of their pilot killed while ejecting. Do you mean the the rebels or government soldiers they are backing got killed?
> Or try to negotiate with the estimate. Which means they aren't estimates any more.

Oh yes this annoys me. I've been asked to break it into sub tasks then justify those. So best case estimates based on some predicted sub tasks ... before any design has been done! Then the surprise when it takes longer
I agree. Quality is improved as developers start to understand, get involved in, and own the operation side of running their system. Ops ought to be an enabling force.

But, I do wish that anytime anyone writes about ops or infrastructure, they put a big headline:

There's a 99% chance you just just Scale Up and use Bash.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/keyboardio/the-model-01...
Great, I'll tell my Peul friend that he's a genetic bottleneck for wanting to marry a Peul girl
David Gelernter is a professor of computer science at Yale.
Why not ask the archive.org guys to publish it somewhere? The research already relies on their data and they seem to be pretty good at defusing shady legal requests.
I ran magereport.com on some of these and it's scary that they have multiple serious vulnerabilities still not patched.
Well engineered? How so when the "engineering" to make this work does not exist. That some team might find solutions to this problems is pure gamble....

If you are talking about Elon Musk, he might have other incentives to put forward something like this. Note that we are living in an age when anything can be made popular or credible despite its worth....
Actually a good comment :)
Yes it's no good producing a turd, even though it's an on budget and on time turd.
Most of the information that makes some of those books worth reading is only easily accessible on the web in the sense that it's pretty easy to find ebooks of many of those books on the web.

Many people learn a lot of their development knowledge from the web (and I certainly do as well), but the majority of the web sources for material beyond basic language reference simply extract the easiest to digest parts of the major texts. This is why so much of what many people know about patterns, algorithms, data structures, and even OOP, TDD, Agile, Scrum, etc. is fragmented or even wrong.
> My mistake for projecting, the comment you posted about sysadmin age being dead gave me the opinion that you think infrastructure is just something you can deploy and forget, again my mistake.

I didn't mean to imply that. The "who is not also a strong programmer" part of my comment is important. Of course infrastructure breaks, but in the modern era we have the tooling that your next step should be figuring out how to automate things so that never happens again.

> Also looking at your linkedin on your profile led me to believe that you worked with small niche infrastructure setups that don't need to scale.

I'm not sure where you got that from. As much as people on HN hate Business Insider, it's hardly a "niche" site. And for the record it's not even the biggest site I've worked on.

> I also spoke in my original message that some 10x engineers can do both, but they are not the majority.

I agree that the majority of engineers can't do both, but I also don't think it's only small minority who can. Infrastructure is just another skill-set that some engineers can/do build.

> That's great, so you're a developer, and operations engineer then (devops)?

I wouldn't call myself an "operations engineer" but I've done quite a bit of devops work.

> Do you think that developers should be expected to do both? Genuinely curious

I don't think every engineer should be expected to do both, but I do think at least one developer on every team should have DevOps experience and be capable of coaching the rest of the team.

The role of ops teams (if they still exist) should be primarily in building tools/frameworks for the embedded DevOps engineers to use. From that perspective it's much closer to a traditional internal tools team than a traditional ops team.
What is the problem to publish on your own site?
>Should America also have upgraded the mail system before telegraph lines were deployed?

It is a bit different, you know. Investing in proven tech vs investing in vapourware..
Yes they did. And they succeeded. Perhaps part of the reason is that they are male and they got more of the right kind of feedback because of it.
In small setup yes the developer knowing this will help,but in large companies I would assume this is what solution architect and CTO's do. If we do 80/20 heck even 20/80 with Infra experts and app architect and decide on day one the characteristics and limitations of the software to be developed then you don't need every dev to know the infra and every infra guy to know code. In my experience seeign other super support professional it is that knowledge of how app and tech works make it easy to support. But yeah i training people with this kind of knowledge. I would say 1 in 5 is capable but only 1 in 10 or 20 only make it due to time it requires to know all and able to do ad-hoc work. May people hate ad-hoc challenges everyday . But there some some who take it as day to day.
Take HN as an example. This can't be done as a static site.

Or a simple guestbook or hit counter.

Where the lines may blur is JS front end talking to a BaaS... This may make it possible to glue up impressive sites using just HTML and JS with no custom backend requirement.
Except that passing the information back never actually happened in The Intercept article.
Blogspot/Blogger?
Beat me to it. Using "head" is a good scalable title. It works for both large and small sized organizations and for people who care about titles, it looks good on paper as well.
Of course C is facing the internet. The entire Linux networking stack is written in C. Damn near every request on the internet touches that code.
Perhaps distributing this list is a use case for IPFS?

https://ipfs.io/docs/getting-started/
The White House Open Sources President Obama’s Facebook Messenger Bot
Create Opportunity and Ask for Help
why? and what is "time?"
It would probably get DDOS'ed just as quickly.
When do they learn this stuff? More weekend reading and side projects? Aka free overtime.
It says that you have not exhausted the wonders of this world, and that good times are ahead of you.
One of the solutions is to move to a model where all data that companies like google have in their servers is encrypted by a key that only the user has in his device.

The side effects are:

-No server side analysis/logging/sharing/selling to advertisers of the user's data

-All decryption takes place at the client side

-Targeting ads/content becomes impossible

-gag orders are rendered useless to seek user data from service providers

-Privacy
PayPal Mafia is looking more like scam mafia every day. Thiel sues people, Musk consolidates failing businesses, Levchin not sure what he does besides get press. Including PayPal at the time these guys exited, seems like alotta hype around not a lot of results.
Oh no! I didn't realize it wasn't released on OSX on the release date. UGH. Do you know when? Time to change my calendar entry :(

Really looking forward to this edition. This game was my intro to video games back on the first release. Such a well thought out game.
Actually, I'd say that these days that crown has been taken from PHP by Node.JS. It may not be as popular but it is definitely easier to work with than PHP, if only becausee it's 1. JavaScript and 2. Doesn't have most (all?) of the warts of PHP.

Of course it introduces a few of its own but on the whole I'd say Node is definitely easier to work with for a newcomer.
You have a valid point. I felt that my love for math and algorithmic thinking (although not part of a formal curriculum) have been very helpful. Medicine is more like engineering than most people think.
Keep in mind though that everything looks like a nail to a hammer. The same way they lacked in some way, you lack too. Unless you expand your knowledge base in the end you will be limited in analyzing similarly generated data with slightly better ways, as is so often seen in the literature. At the same time researchers who possess the knowledge to work "under the hood" are designing novel ways to obtain data, ask new questions and design the accompanying pipelines in the process. Where you put mathematics major feel free to insert molecular biologist/ nuclear physicist/ organic chemist/ or whatever else you like.
I feel that if you really want to be spectacular and at the interface of many sciences you have to master one and have a good understanding of the others. And as a doctor you will always have it easier to lead a team for human disease research, the prestige of the degree by itself and the fact that you have actually seen what is being studied will always give you some respect if you are not a complete jerk.
The bar can only be set higher and higher...
Fair enough. I was generalising from the example of myself. (Although I am surprised you didn't know what a homomorphism was. Presumably, therefore, you didn't know what a group was at that time?)
I don't know who writes/says dumb things like "ops is dead" but ideally we wouldn't waste time arguing against such reductive statements. Whatever the zeitgeist, there will always be homogeneous groups (all developers know/do roughly the same things), structurally heterogenous groups, and organically heterogenous groups.
GitLab and GitHub are both pretty active on HN. I look forward to their response - where is it already?!

I'm especially disappointed by GL. GH is already too big to care about such things.
And there is strong evidence that Kratom curtails alcohol addiction. Kratom is amazing. It has anti-depressive effects that once fully understand I believe will usher in a new and vastly superior wave of anti-depressants. To schedule 1 this plant is beyond insane. Banning it is the bunny brained idea of a lunatic. The DEA is completely out of touch with reality or some special interest is pulling their strings.
I think he/she is just being playful and humorous. But since I'm studying math along side EE, I feel like I should comment about the role (or lack thereof) of proof in practical applications.

MRIs fall into the field of electrical engineering, and EEs generally don't understand the math they use. e.g. when working with medical imaging the radon transform is used, which would require a post graduate mathematical education to understand.

That's why it annoys me when the math/physics types think that if they don't make it in academia they can "fall back on engineering", even though they're studying something completely different.

By the time you get to 4th year math, you will be able to prove things about the existence and uniqueness of the Fourier transform. That's one way to understand it. On the other hand, you use Fourier transform (more specifically, the frequency domain), from first year EE - you can see the frequency spectrum on an oscilloscope. That's another way of understanding the Fourier transform.