skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Should you work for a non-tech com­pa­ny?"

Yes!

You get to solve all types of interesting problems developing for non-tech companies. You are able to help with real business problems. Think shipping and warehouse companies or companies that deal with a lot of products/inventory. So many things to automate in a business like that. You can have the opportunity to work on inventory management software, bar coding software, order entry software, call center software, etc. I worked at a company like this early in my career and it was really rewarding. Company consisted of a few hundred employees with less than 10 in IT.
My point is that what qualifies as incompetence is extremely subjective. Saying "this person's work is incompetent", I think, usually amounts to nothing more than "this person made mistakes in their work that turn out to be obvious to me because of the particulars of my circumstances."

Take me for example. I work as a software developer at a company that hires devs who studied computer science or math mostly from lower-ranked ivies and big state schools. I have an idea of what constitutes good code, and most of my coworkers, owing to our common background, either share this idea or soon find their views being molded by our code review process.

When I look at what my more talented classmates are doing who work at Google or an elite startup, I am humbled and a little embarrassed to show them my code. They would consider some of the code that is written in my workplace to be the product of incompetence. When I look at what my liberal arts friends who were hired as web developers are doing at their non-tech companies with only a few months of programming training, I remind myself that I have much more experience than they do and that my response should be to help them as I am able instead of to shame them and adjust the laurels that I rest on.

And there are people better than my talented classmates at Google and Airbnb who would call their code incompetent. And still others more talented than them. Etc. And there are people who write code that is even more poor than my liberal arts friends'. And still others, ... etc.

Not only is the label of incompetence highly subjective, it is also useless at best and injurious to everyone involved at worst. The less-skilled dev learns nothing by being called a name. Giving harsh criticism from an assumed position of superiority can be gratifying in the moment. I know, I am often tempted into it myself. But it is also a missed opportunity for cultivating empathy for your fellow-human, and a missed opportunity to help someone.
He wasn't exaggerating he was being sarcastic. He was in fact poking fun at the notion that defending a soda ban was compared to stalinism. Your outrage is misplaced.
you would use Java when you don't need explicit control of memory layout, and/or hard real time requirement. Java is much simpler to read and write, has many more libraries (which interoperate well together, unlike most C++ libs), and also many more developers to hire from. an all-around good choice.
I suggest you look into schema migration tools.

What I have done in the past is to prefer lazy migrations (migrate once you access an old record), rather than migrating everything in batch.

Also a good idea to archive data that hasn't been used, moving it outside your primary database.
I found myself a "pre-sales engineer" and it's a great combo of engineering and being a "people person" with other engineers who aren't "people persons". Pays like middle management with only half the bs.
I don't know which is worse, moral busy-bodying in the name of religion, or moral busy-bodying in the name of health, or public transport, or many of the pet causes here.
Ok, but a lot of companies are working on self driving cars.

If one company refuses to sell self driving cars to consumers/upstart ride sharing companies, then that means that ANOTHER self driving car company can makes 10s of billions of dollars by ignoring this rule.

Do you really think that not a single one of the multitude of self driving car companies would break the collusion agreement, if there is 10s of billions of dollars on the line?
Outside of truly unique skills, it's basically true - engineers are interchangeable with sufficient time to ramp up.

I learned this lesson pretty early in my career when most senior engineer on the team left. I and everyone else freaked out because he was the only one on the team who fully understood how everything works. But you know who was not freaked out? My manager. And he was right, we did not even miss deadlines. In two month everything was back to normal with other people filling his shoes.

Obviously you can't replace Principal engineer with fresh grad and expect success but most of the work done is not that unique or hard.
https://senzu.io - Learn how to manage your personal finances
I agree. Absolutely fantastic piece and a real encouragement to the rest of us who want to live that dream. I wish you guys the best for the future: you remind me a lot of a company I used to work for called Red Gate. Keep this up and I reckon there's a good chance you'll be making hundreds of thousands a month in five years' time.
Brother is currently in med school. I can confirm these things. It was mind blowing to learn of "the match" with the relative freedom we have in tech.
Asking why Twitter is so bloated gets 300 upvotes, but asking why Uber SRE is so bloated gets downvoted? My, what a fickle crowd HN is.

My assumption was that Uber SRE's played roles similar to Google SRE's. If that's not the case, someone can please say so instead of just downvoting? If you lump all ops people (DBA, sysadmin, network, storage) into the SRE term then 150 isn't huge. But if it's mainly sysadmin and devops, that's really high for a company that's mainly in the cloud.
> It's a little akin to saying that culture is the President's responsibility. No, it's everyone's responsibility, and if you want to change it, the influential people in your org (country) must lead and reinforce that change.

To a point, but when HR gets involved and does not help, that IMHO is often due to the upper leadership being a big part of the problem.
I've seen HR blow off inappropriate behavior when the CEO does or is okay with it.
I've been reviewing code for a long time, and I've had lots of my own code reviewed. You have to learn to accept code reviews as mentoring and learning and striving for consistency across the team. If you think of reviews as a contest of egos or a test to pass you aren't getting the most out of it. Most juniors now days don't get the opportunity to have a more experienced programmer review their code.

Main problems I see when reviewing code:

1. Doesn't meet requirements, or requirements not understood. If you aren't clear on what you're supposed to deliver before you start coding you need to ask questions. Make a plan, identify intermediate goals, have someone else validate your approach.

2. Over-engineering. Solve the problem assigned. Don't create more problems or try to plan for every eventuality. Prefer simple, understandable solutions.

3. Not tested. Test carefully. Then test again. I don't mean just making all the lights green in TDD. You should go test carefully and make sure you see expected behavior according to requirements. Think about edge cases. Build testability, logging, etc. in from the start.

4. Sloppy work. Read your code. This is called desk checking. Review your code before someone else does. It's surprising how many obvious errors you can find just reading through code.

5. Idiosyncratic style. If your team has written standards, follow them. If not propose that the team define and follow some standards. In lieu of that make your code look like what the senior devs produce. Lots of time is wasted resolving disagreements over things like indenting and variable naming.

If you have the luxury of code reviews keep notes about what your reviewer asked you to change. Determine if the issues are style, efficiency, lack of testing or sloppy work, or misunderstood requirements. Change your approach, and talk to the team if you think there's something everyone can do to address the issues.
Oh absolutely. My DJ friends love using vinyl it seems
I feel the same way. I jumped ship once but didn't have enough savings to ride it out. Getting independent work without a track record was extremely difficult.

Looking back, I think most people going solo start as contractors and also diligently save at least a half year living expenses before hand.

I've begun saving but it's slow going and I'm getting impatient. I greatly enjoy the feeling of making my own destiny and having employees to care for, the idea doesn't scare me as much as it seems to bother most people.

In a position of leadership it's possible to build your own little utopia. It was a great feeling to build a bubble in a world that's usually shit, where a lucky few actually enjoyed their work and each other's company. Alas that opportunity has passed and it's nigh impossible to go from the job title developer to manager without climbing a ladder for years and brown-nosing.

Anyways, how do you recommend getting started? Like most career devs my company has me locked down with contracts so the usual advice of starting a side business isn't possible.
You're missing a huge part of the problem here. People with power are the ones who need to be "taught" (punished).

This behavior can only occur repeatedly when someone can get away with it, because they have power. If they don't have power, they are punished (often harshly), and a rational person will not repeat that behavior.

Your blanket approach is completely ridiculous. You act like the problem is that men aren't being "taught" properly, when the real problem is that there is little or no accountability for people who have accumulated enough money and/or political power (whether it be on a social scale, or within an organization, as seen in the article).

It's also very wrong for you to assume that only men can abuse their power. Fowler's article even has an example of women abusing it (HR).
HR already investigated. Putting the Chief Human Resource Officer in charge implies what the investigation will conclude: rouge employees. Because if it was institutional, the CHRO would be responsible.

Then again, it isn't a commitment to cleaning out HR beyond anyone there who says, 'Oh I think it is ok.' And the whole 'thinking' thing is a way of backing off under the cover of 'We don't want to be thought police.'

There's no taking of responsibility for what happened on his watch. No personal commitment to action. No promise of full disclosure. This is damage control and the fact that HR is in charge of investigating allegations against it suggests that the plan is cover up. The CEO sets the culture.
Java is very good for enterprise development where the code has to be maintained. It's easier to read and contains less gotchas than C++. It is especially good when the team consists of people of varying coding competencies. Also nobody ever gets fired for choosing to develop using Java.
Vaguely? My first thought was, "No, because it's not a battle of wits, it's a war of attrition." Followed by waves of disgust.
Java was inspired by C++, wth three large additions, compile-once run anywhere (ergo JIT), GC, and memory safety. Throw the first two out the window and no wonder you aren't impressed.

I would add to that open source libraries which are (1) of high quality and (2) easy to pull in, e.g. Maven. The C++ ecosystem has no package manager, and people write header only libraries blowing up compilation times. With Maven, I can add Guava, Ehcahe, AWS SDK, etc. and their transitive department in about 60 seconds in a simple, consistent way.
When you write a blog post, it creates a text file (metadata & content) in the /content folder, not an HTML file.

Take a look at the Starter Kit (it's the best way to try Kirby): https://github.com/getkirby/starterkit

Look inside the /content and /site/templates folders.
But, if the inheritance had at one point been income for the deceased, it would have been taxed at the time they earned it and (again) at the time it transferred to their heirs (after the cap).

The opponents of the inheritance tax state that they were taxed when they earned it, so it shouldn't be taxed again at the transfer to their heirs. With stock, it is only taxed at the transfer.

You could argue that the person holding the stock never received benefit since it was illiquid, but it can still be leveraged.

Which is the other piece to this. The stock holder is able to leverage the asset to create cash that has an interest rate significantly lower than the tax rate. As long as the loaned capital also results in a return, the stock holder is able to "grow their pile" essentially tax free.
I wrote[0] about a method I've used with success in the past. Essentially you use the previous version's hash as the name for the next version. The benefit is that merging the work of multiple developers is easier. I ran the process manually when I did it and would love to hear if someone writes a script that makes the process easier.

[0]: https://medium.com/@clord/for-migration-of-schemas-use-versi...
No, they believe they can be a monopoly. There's no other way they can be profitable.
My biggest hardship with sed is having to figure out how to escape the operators within regular expressions on the command line. I think it's pretty reasonable to spend 15+ minutes on a complicated replacement regex.

Edit: It looks like I agree with you; `replace` only solves trivial problems that can easily be done with `sed`.
But making a saying doesn't take any source material. I'd imagine there's a lot of fun in giving this bot an image and seeing where it puts the faces and which "poses" it opts to use. Have a look at the examples where there are heads put in random places and some more obvious positions left out. The hilarity is in the imperfections.
This morbid fact is actually taught in law school. Something like 10% of attorneys abuse substances, multiple times over the national average. To demonstrate the scope of the problem: a phone number for an assistance hotline is placed in bold on all Texas state bar cards.
Did you not read the article? Literally has an example of everything you are referring to.
I'm not sure how I feel about installing something as big as mysql-server just to get one utility.

Unfortunately it seems to pull in some MySQL/MariaDB specific code - https://github.com/MariaDB/server/blob/bb2c1a52c61706dde8c52...
which php? looks interesting.
A spoon.

Too bad there is none.
I've recently had to reacquaint with Java after 15 years, and Spark was a godsend. It's basically Flask for Java.

From an ease-of-use perspective, the closest I've found for the Java7 hell I currently inhabit is Ninja (http://www.ninjaframework.org), but it packs a lot of stuff that I don't necessarily need - it's more of a Django, let's say.
You can find SourceKit crash logs in Console.app; can you file a bug and attach some of them?
You both should sit this one out. Talk to your women engineer friends to get a better understanding of the situation.
> My CS classmates - especially women - simply do not apply to Uber,

The sad thing is why do men want to apply there after what is know about it? I wouldn't want to be near any company that treats any of their employees like that.
I looked him up, his views seem like total nonsense without either evidence or tradition.

What about his diet makes you suggest/promote it?
So? The article mentions pipes as a distinctive feature of *nix systems. Neither it nor I claimed who had it first. The truth is piping from devices, programs and files is pretty much the same in Windows :)
Thanks for the thoughtful reply. I'm confident that well-organized engineers working together could very substantially grow the percentage of company revenues that go to engineers, which would benefit both upper and lower tier performers by growing the pie. As for the way workers might punitively divide up that larger pie, it sounds like knucklesandwhich is more knowledgeable than me about craft unions and the ways they try to mitigate against that. Presumably high-performing engineers would be a powerful bloc within such an organizing effort/union, and could advocate effectively for their interests.
Perhaps a smarter browser implementation could detect this sort of thing?
Check out the ThreeTen backport for a mostly API-compatible Java 6/7 version of the Java 8 date API: http://www.threeten.org/threetenbp/
Interesting take. The operative word for me is influencing. Thanks for pointing out in detail where you where getting your reading.
Rock stars don't need unions.
WOW I'm impressed.

I literally never open headlines with rhetorical questions because the rule of thumb for media headlines is that the answer is always 'no'
Great, less competition will make her cheaper.

In the world of grown-up business, as opposed to SV bro startups, that's just one new business opportunity arising to poach talent!
not always, these things are normally drawn out and end up in settlements because HR could have done just enough to stay within the bounds of what is legal. Technically they did not fire her, only made her life difficult and perhaps did not take disciplinary action towards her manager.

When she does sue, every employer she ever worked for will be subject to a subpeona, including her current employer, and it's really a drag for everyone involved, and emotionally taxing.

This blog post is actually a worst-case scenario for Uber, because the cost of the settlement is nothing compared to the negative publicity. If she wanted to hurt Uber, this was actually a great way to go about it, and she should be commended for putting her own future job prospects at risk by going public with her name. It might encourage other people to speak up and eventually lead to a bigger lawsuit that can lead to punitive damages, which is an order of magnitude more costly for Uber than a settlement had she simply filed a lawsuit by herself.
>sell cars only with an EULA that forbids ridesharing.

It'd probably be leases, rather than sales - selling property gives the buyer more rights, which would make that sort of EULA problematic. Might be able to side-step it by a combination of forbidding commercial ride-sharing in order to keep the self-driving system up to date along with requiring up-to-date self-driving software to be road-legal.
Continuous growth since the bottom, yes, but from a value that was asymptotically close to $0 in the prior decade:

http://diffuser.fm/files/2015/01/vinyl-chart.jpg
Do you have a publicly accessible project I could inspect how this all worked out for you?
Even though my development role means I do SAAS yes, yes I do miss owning software forever.
I hate that part... but I learned vim...
As a typical white male my life is surprisingly easy even when it is not easy. I've never been wronged the way Susan was so I've never had to think about suing anyone really.
It was FM and I have one so that I can listen to podcasts when I drive in foreign countries.

But it sure is a pain in the ass. :)
> Who decides what is fair? You? Tech workers? Speaking about fairness as though it's objective or straight-forward isn't doing anyone any favors.

The beauty of a union is there doesn't have to be an objective definition. A union gives you a democratic voice to advocate for what you think is fair. Without organized labor power, your voice is completely ignorable.

> Speaking generally, if employees aren't getting a fair deal, they should look for better jobs. If they can't find better jobs, they're getting a fair deal. There are certainly anti-competitive exceptions, but nothing posted so far suggests we're in such exceptional territory.

This is a completely naive understanding of what finding a job is like. Leaving a job can be a strike against a person in the hiring process, not to mention it consumes a lot of time, leaves someone uncompensated and without benefits during the process, etc. This also assumes engineer competency is something we can effectively gauge in the hiring process or otherwise (just search "hiring" on hacker news to get the general sentiment among engineers about how good we are at this).

Imagine if this was the suggestion given to factory workers and coal miners and the early 20th century (not that I think the worker conditions are comparable, but its illustrative of how naive it is to believe that market forces are sufficient for providing fair compensation). This is a marginalist's definition of "fair" that doesn't jive with any real human person's.

The real question is why you are so fervantly against having a democratic voice in the workplace.
The Kinesis Advantage contoured ergonomic keyboard. Once you've used it for a few weeks, regular keyboards feel awkward and uncomfortable. They are pricy and completely worth it.
Which puts the pressure on the victim. Very few prosecutors are willing or able to bring a case to trial without the support / testimony of the victim (who is often the only witness).
Are you kidding me? These plastic toys break like 4 months in. Would never buy another one. Luckily I bought it at Costco so I could return it.
> Are you a woman?

Yes.

> The problem is all the folks who don't pass out but all of a sudden think this is a good time to declare their love for a coworker's body.

The problem is if they say something like that, the target is clearly uncomfortable, and then nobody else cares. Banning alcohol isn't going to fix something like that.
I would, but it's definitely not a universally appealing film. It's very similar to something like the Weather Man[1] where there is a plot, but the real point of the film is to witness a character going through a particular point in their life.

---

[1] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0384680/?ref_=nv_sr_1
Combs! Best designed, as somebody said, haven't changed for centuries!
Humans Working Behind AI
I love that the parent comment currently has the most sub-comments on this story.

EDIT: By "this comment", I meant "the parent comment".
But you don't challenge the central point. Just because major media collusion with [DR]NC is normal doesn't make it any less galling. In fact the only reason there is any complaint this time around is precisely because Bernie's candidacy was so unexpectedly strong. When Howard Dean was demolished (DNC-orchestrated with the full participation of the press) there wasn't nearly the backlash as he was just getting started.

With that point standing, the statement is opinionated but hardly tinfoil-hat. Hillary and the DNC are definitely due for a great deal of blame for our current disaster -- if they had lifted a finger to accomodate the Bernie side -- make him VP maybe, or pick someone less nasty than freaking KAINE -- they might have been able to pick up on his momentum a little. Would Bernie have beat Trump, or even won without the DNC collusion? I don't know -- but you don't either.
You're talking about that 13k calories of sugar as if it exists in a vacuum. That extra sugar could have caused more of the other non-sugar food he was consuming to turn to fat.
PHP 7.1.2 released
I've also seen single-number versioning in production that goes '' -> 'v2' -> 'v3' :)
Our migrations have unique datetime stamps. Stamps and migration names go into a table.

We do have a hash of all of the contents of the table, but the schema "version" is just the list of migrations that have been run. We run many different instances of our applications on several different "versions" and from time to time pull individual migrations back into earlier releases for hotfixes etc. The overall version is the instance, environment, and this hash.

Practically speaking, when we're handling the files ourselves though, it's instance, environment and backup date.

There are edge cases and it's not perfect (around ordering mostly), but it's incredibly rare for us to run into issues with this schema / data migration approach. We've found that even with a bunch of environments and a couple thousand migrations, data versioning isn't that serious a problem for us.