skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Not belonging? Not at all. When I read that article, I see a kindred spirit who belongs doing either systems programming or maintenance programming. In the right place at the right time, that very mindset is worth a lot of money. I for one have made a career out of fixing awful code and awful systems.

Publicly, we praise companies and programmers that get a lot done very quickly. Do what doesn't scale. Move fast and break things. Those are great ideas for a while. But eventually, following that alone harms a company, and might even kill it. The quest for speed needs a whole set of people that are capable of keeping bad systems running and improve their stability and scalability while they keep going.

For instance, I currently work at Stripe, making a core piece of infrastructure that doesn't scale anywhere near as well as we need, and has been plagued with downtime issues. There's been plenty of attempts to rebuild and replace, which never had any success, but this year, we've had tremendous improvements, which are seen by our users every day. This improvements aren't really about someone getting lucky and rebuilding from scratch again. Instead, we spent time adding observability features, and understanding how the system works in practice: Pain points, causes for errors and all that. Only after we had a good understanding of the major problems we started making architectural changes to improve the system: Build better interfaces across components, then replacing the components that needed the most help. After enough time, Theseus's ship might still have the same name, but it is a far better ship than it ever was. Then other systems will need more help, and I'll move on to work on another fire.

There are companies out there that don't value this kind of skillset, and that's fine: They are either too small to need it, or they will be unable to keep building new things and fail. Instead, look for growing companies that realize that they can't just hire commandos, and need people to focus on lowering risks and maintenance costs.

You don't just belong in tech: You are a key part of tech, you just have to realize what your spot is.
Cubans are poor, and even those who are better off (within Cuban legal bounds) still live miserable lives compared to an average UK poor.

Unlike the USA, the UK has efficient universal healthcare and access to quality education, plus working safety net for the citizens. It might not be easy to rise from the poverty, but it is possible and indeed, most Britons are doing OK.

As to your small personal dab, I grew up in a Communist country and am familiar with the package, don't need no lectures from guys in Che t-shirts.
Haxe compiles to many other languages / platforms; so 'compiling' for .NET would actually give you a lot of C# files which you are not to touch, which are then compiled to a binary. Same for the other platforms.
There is also the Unix Humble bundle available at https://www.humblebundle.com/books/unix-book-bundle

Does anyone have recommendations for any O'Reilly books that are especially good?
I hope nobody quits tech, and certainly not because they are frustrated that the tech industry chronically celebrates solving problems we don't understand.
If you are working alone, do not get headphones. Use decent speakers and a condenser microphone [1] on a boom [2] mounted to your desk.

You can lean in to the mic when you need to be heard better, and it keeps your hands free.

Plus on video conferences it makes you look like a cool radio DJ.

[1] Blue Microphones Snowball (White)- Shockmount an Popfilter Bundle https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00P0PP1XG/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_ClDo...

[2] GVDV Microphone Stand Adjustable Professional Desk Recording Microphone Suspension Boom Scissor Arm Stand With Phone Holder, Pop Filter And Replaceable Shock Mount Suitable For Most Microphones https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01FLQP7BE/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_2oDo...
This sounds very handy and I definitely need to learn more about LMS and Compiler Plugins. I wonder then what are the limitations on the values you can pass automatically across phases, since there must be (you cannot transfer e.g. a file handle from compile-time to run-time).
I don't think the median software is used for months. I don't think that's true at all. That really needs some evidence behind it.

I reckon in most companies, software is written and maintained until the whole system it's a part of becomes obsolete. That typically takes years, sometimes decades if the system is really useful.

It's really risky to rewrite software, so it typically isn't done; it's similar with deletion of code. Most people shy away from it because they're making local changes and don't have enough global knowledge to be brave. So the code lives on.

Personally, in my professional career, nothing I've written has yet been retired or end of lifed, and I've been doing it for 15 years. Some things were experimental and never got released; some things were maintenance for a subsystem that got buried away; but no whole feature nor whole product has been discarded other than by gradual overwriting through maintenance.
I am usually reading 3-5 books at a time but I only read computer/math books now a days.

I wonder if the benefits that the author and other people mention apply to technical books. Maybe I should pick up a fiction book or finally start reading "Gödel, Escher, Bach" again (which has been sitting on my shelf for too long).
This is the big problem that has accumulated after generations of government-intervention and fiddling with the market.

The price of labour is now artificially cheap because the price of food is not taken into account due to subsidies and foodstamp programs, as well as the huge labor/population supply that such policies have created. There is no way the market could peacefully absorb such a massive distortion and so if we were to ever attempt it, no doubt there would be countless individuals chanting "see, we told you the market isn't the solution". These things need to be phased out over generations so as to avoid massive starvation and riots by the poor.
I'm adding this for balance: lots of people on the announcement of Castro's death said he was a monster. It is worth knowing that this was an American narrative and a product of the cold war,and that life is more complicated than simple good and evil, in almost all cases.

Cuba under Castro aided decolonising countries in Africa towards their independence. In the case of places like Rhodesia, which had legally enshrined racism that carried on after it declared independence from the UK, white minority rule might have continued had it not been for Cuba's policy of intervention. The aid of communists in Africa helped deliver equality, where the capitalists of Britain wore badges saying "hang Mandela" well into the 90s, and Americans were conspicuously quiet.

This is worth remembering at a time in history where the way we see the world is being distorted by echo chambers and demagogues the world over.
A long time ago I was interested in finding out what the intersection of all languages sounds would be, would it be an empty set or was there enough overlap that someone designing the next esperanto could build it using universal sounds thus allowing any human speaker to pronunciate it without difficulty. Turns out there is a good degree of overlap if you allow for a very small bit of fuzzyness. For instance, 'a','m', and 'p' are some of the most common sounds across all languages, which is also interesting when you realize "mama" and "papa" - with slight variations - display high universality in their pronunciation across all languages.

for more info see: https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-most-common-phonemes-amon...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mama_and_papa
In their own words...
"Cards Against Humanity is known for our charitable fundraising - since 2012 we've raised nearly $4 million for organizations we love like Worldbuilders, the Sunlight Foundation, the EFF, DonorsChoose.org, the Wikimedia Foundation, and the Chicago Design Museum. We even started a $500,000 full-ride scholarship for women getting degrees in science."
https://cardsagainsthumanity.com/blackfriday/

They don't have a history of burning money. It's inconsistent with past behavior as well as their own description of themselves.
Interestingly, the same might be true with languages.

Quechua (from the Andean Mountains) only has three vowels (a, i, u). I can't find a reference, but AFAIK the main hypothesis was that a 3-vowel system made it easier to communicate across longer distances (i.e. across a canyon or valley in the Andes).
Algol (1960s) had no garbage collection (that I know of), so any "closure-like" data captured by a function/procedure reference had to still be on the call stack.

Otherwise, you certainly had first class functions, just not always with any external state captured.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_or_boy_test

I suspect TurboPascal was in the "boy" camp, in that a reference to a function (or procedure) would not have any external state bound to it.
“Graphical Models 1” talk by Christopher Bishop at MLSS 2013 Tübingen [video]
The time added per donated donated dollar is decreasing towards a limit. The subreddit seems to think that it is designed to max out at 48 hours total.
If you have the opinion of "This wasn’t going to work. Coding wasn’t going to work. I didn’t belong" before you even start learning a new skill, of course you're going to go through your career with that new skill believing you don't belong.

It honestly sounds like the poster really needs to invest in some self improvement before diving back into a career. If you want to succeed, go in with the expectation that you will succeed. Do whatever it takes to succeed. Don't start with an expectation of failure and expect everyone around you to change your mind.
And what's the definition of "work" here? Sorry, we seem to have missed that.
Oh, yes. But US liability law is a funny thing and its reach is vast. That's why US swimming pools tend to be surrounded with serious fencing with locked gates: to avoid liability for the kids and drunks and $OUT_GROUP members who would otherwise wander in and drown.
They could borrow in the US (and they do to finance share buybacks and dividends), while they wait for the next tax holiday [1] to repatriate that overseas money at a low tax rate. The next tax holiday will probably next year.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repatriation_tax_holiday
Pretending omission in order to emphasize something is a core element of classical rhetoric dating back as far as ancient Athens. It is a parlor trick that has been taught to children for two millennia, and an inherently flawed line of argument.

If you punched someone in the face, and then specifically asked her not to pay attention to it, would you be shocked if she failed to carry on as if nothing had happened?

When someone falsely deems you, your family, and your children bigots by mere virtue of the color of their skin and the shape of their genitals, that is not any less radically offensive due to the author's own race and gender. This type of casual discrimination cheapens the experience of racism, engrains the very cultural atrocities it claims to combat, and alienates the very people who's minds we need to change.

To raise racial specters for personal gain and social gratification is extremely troubling, and I will not hesitate to speak out against it.
In every colonial system, the resources were owned by the foreign power, but the management of these resources were made by a privileged class of locals which constituted a local elite. This elite lives a very comfortable life, gives a "local face" to the regime for the population, but ultimately answers to the foreign power who retains the bulk of the profits sent overseas.

It's important to note that even if this elite is the "1%" of the country, this 1% amounts to a significant number of people.
You have to love the first comment is 'it's so easy to pirate so why is anyone buying?'

O'Reilly is the perfect example of make it easy to get and people will buy over pirate.
You can apply this analysis to anything. The US bills itself as the 'land of the free' while imprisoning more people than any other country, frequently in deplorable conditions by the standards of what we know about human psychology, penal theory and so on. How exactly are you weighting the good and bad factors here? How do you criticize the economic policies that led to doctors being desperately short of supplies without mentioning the bizarre asymmetry of US sanctions on a tiny island with few economic resources of its own? I was not a fan of Castro but to be honest I don't think that Americans have much standing to criticize him given the frequently atrocious nature of their own country.

I have to agree with the poster above in observing that much of the criticism here is nothing more than the regurgitation of propaganda that people have been fed since birth, and I question the ability of many posters here to distinguish between derived and received opinions on this topic.

This is why I ask how you're weighting the good and bad factors. No doubt your feelings are sincerely held, but since we're not privy to your personal moral calculus, how else can we evaluate it, or make meaningful comparisons with prior alternatives? This might seem academic, but it matters. I would likely have done quite badly as an individual in Castro's Cuba and would probably have been in a hurry to leave; on the other hand I can't but be aware of the dreadful conditions there that led to the overthrow of the Batista government in the first place, nor of the US' intransigence in refusing to tolerate a neighboring country following a path of political self-determination on purely ideological grounds, and putting it under extreme economic pressure for doing so. To use a Christian metaphor, don't be in such a hurry to point out the mote in your neighbor's eye that you miss the beam in your own.
But most of the time it's not black-and-white and people are really good at rationalizing. If you work at a hedge fund chances are a good chunk of the assets come from pension funds, foundations, and university endowments. You can feel good about that! Alternatively, if you work at Apple improving iOS for blind users you still have to deal with the fact that the phones are made by mistreated, underpaid workers in China.

I had kind of the opposite experience as you. I worked at a company that I felt good about, but over time they took on projects I was less on-board with for various reasons (money, political capital). Eventually it got to the point where it was no longer worth the lower paycheck.
"Just trying to "quick fix" apparent bugs, without having understood the complex problem in its entirety beforehand, is a pretty bad approach in quite some areas of the tech world."

And a million sysadmins across the world cried aloud in agreement and despair.

The point is that I think there are business side problems more than there are tech problems in this industry as a whole. I think the phrase "the perfect is the enemy of the good" is a dangerous one for so many managers to latch onto. More on point to the article though, we need more magnum opuses, more results of this kind of long term thinking, put into action. Not more band-aids on problems.

I do think though, that big picture thinkers of this ilk do find themselves trapped into a twist on the Bertrand Russell saying, "The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt."

What we need then, are some of the intelligent to gain a bit of the cocksuredness, and the stupid to gain a bit of doubt.
Also "Sometimes he says wrong things, and then I have to explain why those things are wrong.."

Sounds more like she just lectures him rather than having actual conversations.
Worries About Health Insurance Cross Political Boundaries
Don't tell that to the GCC Objective C runtime.

With the NeXT/Apple runtime,

[object selector: arguments...]

is syntactic sugar for

objc_msgSend(object, @selector(selector:), arguments)

With the GCC runtime, that's syntactic sugar for:

IMP tmp = objc_msg_lookup(object, @selector(selector:));
tmp(object, @selector(selector:), arguments...)

No assembly necessary. I believe there are also compiler flags to assume the function won't be replaced behind your back so objc_msg_lookup can be hoisted out of a loop, etc.
The AMP result worked for me.
The US had had ballistic missiles (Redstone) in European airbases since 1958 -- Kennedy simply continued the existing policy of the US. Kennedy's poor judgment, arguably, consisted in aggressively defending the "rule" that it is acceptable for the US to have nuclear missiles near the Soviet border, but it is not acceptable for the USSR to have nuclear missiles near the US border.
While JFK was driven by the need to appear tough, one has to give him credit for not following the advice of the "hawks" (Curtis LeMay) who advocated a preemptive invasion of Cuba, a move that would have almost certainly led to a nuclear exchange, given that the USSR had already placed (unbeknownst to the US intelligence) tactical nuclear weapons in Cuba.
> the casualties were mostly American

It isn't really clear if this is true, there is a clear bias of studies to focus on the effect on American veterans, but there are 1-4 million Vietnamese affected depending on what non-American source you believe.
>taxed at least once as income or capital gains

for some one who is now dead and thus very very unlikely to give a shit.
From your description, it actually sounds like the US and its tariffs were responsible for the collapse of the Cuban economy. That happened decades before Castro came into power.
This post is not about perfection, but rather about a deep, legitimate frustration that the tech community spends so little time really understanding the problems it sets out to solve.

Here's a key paragraph:

> I am not solution-oriented. I don’t see a problem and get giddy at the idea of solving it, patching it up and sending it on its merry way. I want to poke it and ask it questions. Where did it come from, what is it doing, what’s its story? I want to take it to tea and hear about its life and understand it to its core. And if, at that point, I’ve come to a wholistic understanding and am able to solve the problem, by all means, let the problem-solving commence! But my instinct is never to solve, but to understand.

This is not a statement of perfectionism, but rather a deep yearning for like-minded people who believe in trying to understand the problems they're trying to solve.

The RFC process, which has gained more prominence through projects like Ember, Rust, Swift, and Yarn, operate on the same principle: that we should try to make sure we understand, not just rush in with the first solution that comes to mind.

Iteration and contact with reality are important. A desire to understand is not in conflict with a desire to iterate and work with communities. But too often, the tech community makes a virtue out of moving fast, breaking things, and never coming to a deep understanding even in many of the most successful cases.

I think we owe it to ourselves and our community to get past a knee-jerk reaction to this post.
There are certainly some design choices here. I want to emphasize that in the few projects where I've used macros (e.g. https://github.com/OlivierNicole/macros-examples), I found that these translating functions were scarcely needed and I never had to pass a non-standard type between phases.

You may want to read this comment which I find relevant: https://www.reddit.com/r/ocaml/comments/5e8slg/bringing_type...
I hope you use f.lux or something similar if you're in front of a screen before going to bed. Otherwise the blue light from the monitor is likely doing your sleep more harm than watching the documentary.
That may actually be a reason for preferential release to Google.

In general, I think we are in interesting times. Still a guess but I think the crowd close to their forties (I'll be 40 in 4 years) will see a significant shift within a decade.

My kids are an age where they don't really care what is in their game console, TV box or their parents' phones.

I guess I (as a working adult) would really stop caring about what is powering the cloud as long as I keep getting access to the service level I (or my employer) is paying for.

With Google trying non-Intel option, there may be a copy-cat effect for other cloud providers to do the same to remain competitive, possibly diminishing Intel's importance in the server market.

And with "kids" mostly using non-Intel(or x86 in general) platforms (phones, TVs, snapchat-shades, phones etc) where Intel already has very little presence.

Not trying to sound a doomsday prophecy for Intel but... times they are a changing ?
You know what? The hole just got 10 feet deeper.
> From reading autobiographies, books, and blogs, I've gathered that creating an amazing company culture is much more of an art than a science.

Nope it's science. Just do everything right as suggested by "Peopleware" and "The mythical man month".

Growth and new people cause the culture to shift. That's the biggest threat to the current culture of growing companies.
Yes, but 'attractive nuisance' laws are there to stop you escaping liability this way. If you make a super-dangerous thing, which is likely to attract idiots or small children, and then kill them, you can't just say 'it was their own fault, your honour, they shouldn't ought to have been there on my land...', rather you must erect a fence and post warnings. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attractive_nuisance_doctrine
The need for government or direction is seen not so much in the pencil's ancestors or antecedents, as in all its offspring, which curiously go totally unmentioned. The pencil's family tree might have a lot of roots but it has a lot of branches too.

Example from Ceylon: toxic mine tailings, leading to soil pollution, leading to either poisonings/cancers/deaths when attempting to grow food locally, or to having to import it from afar, or move away. Broken homes/families. Strains on the social safety net if there is one.

Example from Oregon: clearcuts, leading to soil instability, leading to landslides, leading to deaths and destruction of property, and also to the silting/sedimentation of streams & rivers, destroying salmon spawning habitat, leading to decline of the fishery, unemployed fishermen, broken families/alcoholism/crime/strains on society.

Technology metes out equal parts punishment and convenience; this site's audience should know that better than anyone, or they'll learn it soon.
'I'm not a white male!'

Seriously? This felt incredibly out of place in the article, it seems like its just pandering for clicks (lets talk about how women, minorities, and 'non-tech' people don't have a place in tech for the millionth time!). Not to mention the quote could have worked similarly with 'asian male' and 'indian male'. Why are you erasing the identities of other overrepresented people in tech?
Think we can all agree that the people you are describing are trash. My point is that they are a fortunately very small non-statistically significant group and their beliefs do not represent the beliefs of most Americans (yes, including Trump voters.)
Self-help books is philosophy for the feeble minded.
So what? There's plenty of code that doesn't need a rockstar to write.
Sure it seems a little unfair that women get an advantage, but they are only a small percentage of the workforce.

So if everyone was equal your chances wouldn't be twice as good - only about 5% better. That's a more reasonable view.
You just said the US caused the sugar trade to collapse and then said Castro destroyed trade himself. Are you referring to trade besides sugar? Why WOULDNT Cuba decide (realize) that they need to protect themselves from the US?