skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's funny because occasionally my wife will tell me to take a certain route to a destination because that is what her traffic app told her was the fastest route. I'll disagree on the basis of this experiment; that the "fastest route" has too many left turns and that my route is better because it has fewer. Needless to say, she is never amused. Maybe after this news I'll be vindicated!
It's been a few years like that, most likely a combination between someone getting fired and starting a fork (OPNSense) which risks fragmentation (and maybe a bit more competition), and the company behind pfSense needing a bit more return on their investment.

In the long run, it doesn't matter all that much, pfSense is still 'free' as in beer, and you can still get to the sources, and forking is still possible. Only protection of the name 'pfSense' as a brand has gotten somewhat more intense.

On top of that, they are powered by their hardware sales and service subscriptions, of which the former is probably a more important source of income. It seems they either 'are' netgate, or are a subsidiary, and also partner with ADI engineering. Some hardware seems almost purpose built for pfSense, like that tiny uFW micro firewall, or the modified Turbot board (Intel) with two Gigabit Ethernet NIC's. There also seems to be a uBMC in the works, a somewhat 'universal' BMC with IPMI etc. running BSD as well, most likely pfSense-based. I suppose those would be commercially interesting but not that much consumer-oriented but more the bigger ODM's and OEM's since it requires a bit more integration. So those hardware things are a lot more 'commercial' than the software project ever was. I suppose that naturally overflows into pfSense itself.

Currently, pfSense seems to have been 'branded' as a 'community edition'. There doesn't seem to be a 'commercial edition' anywhere yet, but I can imagine a model similar to GitLab where you have a common core and a paid version with enterprise extras. It also seems to be showing the serial number or platform UUID in the web interface, I guess that's somehow going to be tied into the non-community version of pfSense to use with an activation system for the 'more-than-community' version.

I do believe that there is already at least a special version for VMWare on their 'market' or whatever it's called, and a possibly modified version that runs on the pfSense or netgate branded hardware since it needs special software support to function due to it not being simply a 'standard x86 PC'. The uFW is ARM, so a working ARM version of pfSense is out there too!

Notice: a lot of this is just observation and speculation on my part, but it might help you dig for clues on the interwibble.
More notable to me, last I checked Python was still using Mercurial. Are they also switching to git today or did I miss that migration?
Not every job requires passion. I would venture to say that most jobs don't. Is it a desirable trait? Sure. Is it the only trait that matters? Most certainly not.

The idea that all programmers are super-passionate about the craft and never have any other interests can lead people to assume that if you don't have that single-minded focus that you aren't a real programmer. This is an industry where many people deal with imposter syndrome already; they really don't need any additional help with questioning whether or not they have what it takes to succeed.

It's a common human tendency to assume that others in your group are exactly like you. The programmers with passion for the craft assume that everyone else who is a developer must share that passion. This is pretty short-sighted and exclusionary. Not every developer codes in their spare time. Not every developer learns new programming languages for fun.

I agree with the author that you need some level of enjoyment from the process of programming in order to succeed in it as a career, but I doubt that's specific to programming, either.
This is about implementation strategies, which I think are a lower-level idea than paradigms. Datalog is a logic language that can be implemented without using backtracking/"search", for example.
A medical degree costs a lot more than the degree necessary to work in IT. I don't have the report off the top of my head, but doctors don't reach salary parity with their peers who got bachelors degrees until their mid-40s.

Edit: I'm talking about lifetime earnings parity, not yearly parity. If you are marking $85k in IT as a 27 year old, you are way ahead of someone who starts making $175k at the age of 35 and has $250k in debt.
12 Influencer Marketing Examples That Prove Influencer Marketing Works
It is progressing quite nicely. We still don't know yet when it is ready to graduate from Canary/Dev though. Lot's of stuff to do!
I have been doing tech support for nearly two years now. I've gotten plenty of certs, am mostly through college, and always ask to do more. It doesn't seem to matter in this area.
The 10-20-30 Year Rule of Computing
For those interested I read many of these in 2016 and I've put some comments on my retrospective post

https://tselai.com/the-books-i-read-and-the-world-i-lived-in...
I'm not advocating that exclusion is the main solution (see my last paragraph), but it boils down to: do you think these events are a bad thing? Do they have a net-negative effect when it comes to balancing the gender inequality in our profession? I don't think so. Just because exclusive events exist temporarily while the imbalance is so great, doesn't mean inclusive events can't continue to thrive.

Taking a principled stand against them means you don't support them and think they detract rather than contribute. If that's honestly your stance, I guess we just disagree on that. I will happily send my daughter to one of these events when she is old enough, but I hope they aren't necessary anymore by that time.
As an H1B visa holder, I think the issue of abuse at its core has to do with two things(at least):

1. Too many tech firms require/opt for low cost workers to subsidize their payroll bill. If you raise H1B salaries, firms that have thin margins might automate and outsource. I think to scrap the lottery, and add the market based approach to H1Bs like in the House Bill that was proposed in Jan is a better alternative, it would force firms to be more productive and boost payroll more organically.

2. The program is underfunded, its entirely fees driven and the fees is clearly not enough to prevent abuse we keep hearing about so much.

Remember top end silicon valley's don't really need to care about the salary issue as long as the reform does not dry the talent from coming to the US completely.
> What if the H1B program was taking in a huge amount of new grads right now and not as many senior positions?

Then the program in turn wouldn't be abiding by the idea of the H1B program in the first place, which is to bring in people who have skills that can't be found in the US. You can hire new grads from the US just as easily as abroad, just maybe not at the artificially low prices that you want to pay them.
Congratulations. You're not the average.
Pom-pom crabs fight over tiny anemones, which they hold like boxing gloves
This is why I love data science
A description/demo might help sell this better than a static image.

I love markdown but I'm not sure I understand what a "markdown tree" is supposed to be?
Capitalism will eat you alive if you don't stand up for your wages and standard of living. I used to be a naive young graduate grateful for a job with the delusion that I would commit everything to my employer and get treated fairly in return. If your employer is cash rich, you should be reaping the rewards as well, not just quietly taking a pay cheque to enrich the shareholders at disproportionate rate.

This is further compounded by the fact that, as developers, we are terrible at recognising our worth and speaking up. Doesn't help that you are conditioned into an inferiority complex constantly reinforced by a ridiculous interview process.
I want to make sure I understand you.

You are working in a team of, say, six. You are working alongside some business folks and helping them make money and support their family. Your boss, let's say, is a nice guy but an old mainframe IT guy who doesn't really grok what kind of things the team is doing.

There is not enough money for all six to work next year, but the company thinks they can pay for four.

You'd rather have a manager make the call, a guy who doesn't know really what the team does or the individual contributions of each member -- than the team? The team, who if push came to shove could probably agree on the four most qualified people to help everybody else in the coming year keep their jobs.

I don't follow this. I think the team is the most qualified, and I think if you care about the value you are creating then the team is also on the hook to make the tough decision. Now how it's made and such? I have no idea. I just know if you care about the work you're doing, the people closest to the work are going to be the most qualified to make businesses/management decisions like that. But maybe I missed it?
So isn't the obvious solution to move the allocation strategy from lottery to "auction" (highest payed employees get their visas first)?
Which Chilean wine was it?
Whether or not they contact AWS support, AWS knew about this issue and it should have been RED, not green with a 'note'.

I've had about 4 or 5 serious AWS issues in the last 4 years (an issue which impacts multiple instances or services), and literally never had anything other than a green tick. Usually they don't even bother with the note.

AWS service status page is completely worthless
If they're running a status page, you shouldn't have to contact support to get the status. It's pretty well known among heavy aws users that their status page is bullshit.
That information would have to come from a Nordstrom insider for it to be "insider trading". Neither Trump or Sean are Nordstrom insiders.

It's also extremely important to note that the SEC and the courts have very different definitions of "insider trading".
I think point (1) is there not because it matters but because Barney Frank wants you to be registered to vote. Having made a _bunch_ of calls over the past few weeks, and having made some first- and second- hand contacts with staffers: I don't believe they really check anything at all, at least not on issues that lots of people are calling them about.

The impression I have is that on big-ticket issues, they're just taking a yes/no tally of calls and letters, and that's it.
What is monkey testing?
This map is interesting too: https://www.us.ntt.net/about/network-map.cfm

It shows some overland links as well but it doesn't show intermediate hops. For example, you can see from other maps that most Pacific cables stop off in Hawaii.

You can match the nodes to entries in a trace root log. I did this for a chapter (on network latency and performance) in my last book.
MITM Part 1 – Never Trust the Network
Smile, you're on camera, and it knows who you are
Machine Learning Driven Web Application Firewall
How to explain Open Source to your grandma
What is passion anyway? It would suffice to say, that a person should like some parts of developing software in a way that creates a recognizable tingle of pleasure. Because that's what you will do. And sit in meetings. And if there is no tingle of pleasure from either of these, a career in programming will make your life less than it could have been.

The term "passion" makes me think I'm required to passionately make love to a superclass while domain requirements strap me to a table of molasses and legacy code, crying "Yes! You filthy amalgamation of mixed paradigms, take me any which way you like! Procedural! Functional! I want it all! I want you to be my precious Ruby! My cup of hot Java! My serrated blade of C! A twisting tangle of Python! A furious steed of Fortran and assembly!"
My understanding, from a couple of different D staffers, one of which is "firsthand" (if Facebook threads count), is that email does not count even a little bit. I also don't believe voicemail counts, or if it does, it doesn't count consistently. The basic atom of political influence seems to be the live human phone call; anything less obnoxious is ignored.
I too like learning other programming languages but I use programming praxis problems for that. I have some projects in my bitbucket: https://bitbucket.org/amatheus_personal/
This actually pairs nicely with the "How Do You Know a Developer Is Doing a Good Job" article on the front page right now.

Truly raising the standard of the development profession doesn't mean keeping out people who are less skilled, passionate or competent. There's a lot of room at all levels. What's most critical is that the people who form teams of developers, coordinate their work, judge their value and reward them are good at what they do.
Is this 'pf' like the BSD firewall? Anyone more familiar with the space want to provide some detail?

Edit: yeah it is:

> The pfSense project is a free network firewall distribution, based on the FreeBSD operating system with a custom kernel and including third party free software packages for additional functionality.

From https://pfsense.org/getting-started/ see also https://doc.pfsense.org/index.php/Installing_pfSense
Along with pensions the other big non-cash compensation cost is healthcare. Teachers, and public sector workers in general, tend to have health insurance plans of a type that have all but disappeared in the private sector. Low or no employee contributions, low cost sharing at the point of service, broad networks and formularies, no gatekeeper, and even some out of network coverage.
> ...indicative of deeper issues. Does your job not give you enough time to finish projects? Does your job not give you enough time to stay up to date in your field? Do you constantly feel like an impostor?

You are confusing 3 completely different issues and not accounting the enjoyment of learning new things.
Aws is massively incentivized to lie on the status pages until the outages become egregious. It's literally a page for marketing to point to when describing how reliable the service is.
Interesting to compare both the different approaches taken in sharing details by GitLab vs. Instapaper, and the long-term reaction to it here.

The backlash against GitLab was obvious; I'll be watching the next Instapaper disucssion with interest.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13608267 etc.
Well - this is not off topic - this is exactly what the US government is not doing
Linux Internals – The Art of Symbol Resolution
No-Code/Low-Code
What about https://svelte.technology/ ?
#5 is great and should be amended to include understanding what interests the representative has in taking a particular stand.

Barney Frank is the same guy who was actively fighting (1) against George W. Bush's initiative to tighten up lending requirements ahead of the Great Recession; Barney Frank was against it due in part to then boyfriend, who he helped get a job, being on the executive committee (2). Getting him to change his opinion would have been night impossible.

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iW5qKYfqALE

2. http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2011/05/26/rep-frank-admits-... I know it is Fox News, but only quick-link I can find to support my claims.
Yep, basically a really nice web interface and management system for configuring a pf-driven firewall.

You can click your way to high availability with sub 5-second failovers (even including NAT state synchronization) in a morning starting from no pfsense or bsd knowledge.
You should use Samsung internet. Much faster and smoother than chrome. Also supports ad blockers and has a nifty reading mode.
Ask HN: How to run test in Django with remote PostgreSQL DB?
I have remote DB which works perfectly fine with the app. But when I run tests I have these two errors:

RuntimeWarning: Normally Django will use a connection to the 'postgres' database to avoid running initialization queries against the production database when it's not needed (for example, when running tests). Django was unable to create a connection to the 'postgres' database and will use the default database instead.
RuntimeWarning

and

psycopg2.OperationalError: cannot drop the currently open database

I have postgres database on remote posgres and user of the production database also have these roles on postgres db: Superuser, Create role, Create DB. Also I added line to pg_hba.conf to allow remote connection for this user.

I saw this repo here which indicates that I am not lonely in this issue: https://github.com/cnk/d110example

Also there are couple of stackoverflow questions raised, but non of the suggested solutions helped me.

Any ideas?
I can't state how stupid this is. As if that person's bullshit's power of nuisance wasn't large enough, let's add automated echo chambers with a direct effect on the economy!

Don't be surprised if this crazy economic system can collapse any seconds with ideas like this.
When you made your phone calls, did you call from a phone in the area code they represented? Did they ask for your zip code?
> But git itself is decentralized.

To me that sort of makes things worse. I have nothing against using GitHub as such, but I also think it's important that projects like this should lead by example. If you centralize things that are inherently decentralized it's hard to make a case that decentralization is important.

> many people (including myself) prefer the command line where possible, which is essentially universal and not hard to pick up at all.

As someone who, at least thinks they, understands how DVCS works I find the git command line quite unintuitive. It's a mix between more low level commands and added shortcuts. The solution becomes "just run these three commands you know and use Github".

> In a worst case scenario the entire project could be preserved with history and exported.

That's not really realistic, unless something really drastic happens. People often use Github for more than git itself, it becomes an integral part of the workflow. If it's was easy to switch people would run something else in parallel (which some projects do).

All in all I think the pragmatic solution is to have your own system and then interface Github as one channel. If you can't set up your own system that is competitive as a completment to Github, well then you are effectively dependent on Github.
Don't get me wrong, I know that some people have major success and I'm glad that they do (I don't think 'white privilege' has anything to do with it as you contend below, as I have as much anti-anecdata as yours which also involves white people).

The data is all out there with regards to the level of unemployment and underemployment amongst STEM and IT grads, the number of people who have to seek employment in alternative industries, and the level of stagnation of wages in the industry. It's not at a level which indicates systemic failures, but it's significant enough to raise questions.
meraki started with wifi-mesh and nowadays it is shifting towards wired network and security mostly.
A constant theme for support of H-1B's is that they supply the US with an irreplaceable resource for starting new technical companies.

Despite this I have not heard reference of any individual who came to this country on a H-1B visa to work for an Indian outsourcing company who later participated in a significant successful startup. Honest question, does anyone know an example of this having occurred?
I use this service all the time when I need to transfer cash,. It's simpler than using a bank, often faster, and almost universally cheaper. The idea is old as dirt, but execution is everything, and boy do they execute well.
How Systems Engineering Can Help Fix Health Care
This gets to the crux of the issue with the H1B system as it relates to age discrimination. Why are we hiring fresh grads on a "best and brightest" visa? If the college degree from a US institution made them the best and brightest, why wasn't a citizen in that classroom seat? If they are truly geniuses why are they paid at entry level wages?
Facebook Agrees to Audit of Its Metrics Following Data Controversy
As http://www.cnn.com/2014/02/12/us/winter-storm-power-lines/ explains:

"underground power lines cost five to 10 times more than overhead wires, don't last as long and cost more to replace..."

and

".... underground lines "are not without their disadvantages,... While more reliable 'under normal weather conditions', they take almost 60% longer to fix when something does happen to them."
There underlying git is decentralized. I have a cronjob set up to keep a local copy of all of my repositories. If github were to disappear tomorrow, I would still have the code.

Granted, I wish that the issues were stored within a branch, so that they would be copied along with the repository.
What if the lesson is not that Nadella is a great CEO, but that Ballmer was actually terrible?
Does typical navigation software assign the same cost to a left turn as a right turn?
Or choose one of the many open source blog engines out there and maybe contribute to it.

It was, of course, a retorical question. We all know the answer.

People publish on Medium because we messed up. RSS died/was killed and we turned to these centralized solutions, instead. Even its name "Medium" is telling.
Yup. I've said it before[1][2] and people just kept replying "Oh but we hire them for their talent, therefore everyone does."

I work at a run of the mill SaaS company. We have 60% H-1Bs devs here as contractors from a certain contracting company (more in QA). They live paycheck to paycheck. I get paid, literally, twice as much (I've seen the H-1B Labor Condition Applications for ones we hire directly--The contracting companies pay likely about as much but take some 20% of their salary).

We don't hire them because they are particularly talented. I've been on interview calls with ones from the contracting companies, all their resumes are the same [3]. They are just code monkeys. Our company does it to save costs, period. Upper management knows nothing of the mythical man-month.

The system is being rampantly abused.

[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13521791

[2] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13525766

[3] - http://www.vocativ.com/money/business/theyll-sponsor-america...
> Lots of doctors and automotive engineers just do their job and then come home, in fact most employees don't come home and continue to work on semi work related things on their spare time.

And perhaps they chose the wrong profession. Perhaps they come home and think to themselves "gee, I wonder how my life would have been if I chose art school like I wished instead of engineering like my parents encouraged me.". Ideally people should work on jobs they (at least tangentially) enjoy.

> But what even is passion?

Enjoying what you do. A constant eagerness to experiment, learn, and build something. Passionate people will always be ahead of their peers. Because learning or practicing that activity makes them happy they are more inclined to spend their time honing their skills. And they spend their time practicing that activity not because of some "existential dread related to one's job or position", but precisely the opposite: they enjoy doing it.

I believe encouraging people to pursue carriers in domains they enjoy is a general good advice. The article touches on programming specifically because there is a current trend / hype to push people toward programming.
So was Microsoft Office when they were trying to put Lotus, Wordperfect, and every other word processor and spreadsheet out of business. And they succeeded. Follow the pied piper boys and girls...
Started my own company through the side projects.

Would I go back to be employed, I'd go after a product role.
This rings true. There are those who tackle the low level plumbing, core problems and take them on with the rest of the team. Then there are those who take on surface-deep issues. Intentions and subject matters.