skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There's actually a potentially good article in here, about how the software development community is failing to uphold its obligations to the public interest.

Unfortunately it's struggling to escape from yet another entry in the tedious genre of "software engineer (sorry, programmer) who has never worked in, or even read a book about, any other engineering discipline assuming that he knows everything about how they work".

It's ironic that he cites the failure of the NATO "Software Engineering" conferences as evidence that software development is not engineering, when the idea of those conferences was that "programmers" would be the assembly-line workers in a software manufacturing process.

Software development is a design process, not a manufacturing process. That's why we call its practitioners software engineers:

http://www.zerobanana.com/essays/reclaiming-software-enginee...
Walter, what is your personal net worth? How are your investments, assets, and other capital allocated?
truth is that most people simply don't care and are entirely clueless on the impact of the continued centralization and surveillance of the Internet on their lives

That's a common assumption, but I wonder how true it really is. I've certainly talked with friends in their 20s and maybe early 30s -- people who have grown up with the Internet and ubiquitous mobile devices -- and had them express a sentiment that was more frustration than ambivalence. Sometimes they did find it creepy that they'd be tracked around with ads, or that their phone was doing things based on where they were or what they had planned to do later. However, they've never known technology to work any other way and assume there's nothing they can do about it, and they value the social aspects of sharing stuff online so they keep using these services.

I very much like the idea of creating a "home internet box" which is a self-contained fanless machine connected to an UPS -- and it contains router, firewall, own website, own mailserver, own private Dropbox, a universal P2P node (BitTorrent / IPFS) etc., but as others have pointed out, our current stack of network technologies is way too bloated and full of incomplete standards

It used to be common that your ISP would provide you with an email address, web hosting, and so on as part of your package. Everyone could set up a basic web site by just FTPing an HTML file up to their ISP's server, and then yourname.yourisp.com would show it to everyone, or you could get your own domain name and use that instead. Likewise for sending and receiving mail. Many countries set up their legal/regulatory frameworks to foster competition between ISPs, and so in practice we had a relatively decentralised Internet. You obviously still had the equivalent of today's lock-in problem if you relied on the email or web address your ISP gave you rather than your own domain, but you didn't have to.

It doesn't really take having some magic box in everyone's home to provide this sort of flexibility, though such a box would be no bad thing IMHO. We just have to stop doing so much through a tiny number of centralised service providers and social networks, and develop standards for interoperability and federation. The whole Internet was built on those principles, so I'm pretty sure we could do it for sharing data like mail and photos, and there are many interesting possibilities in terms of searching for data as well.

One of the other provisions in the new EU rules that come into effect in 2018 is effectively a right to export data from one controller so it can be processed by another, so people could potentially migrate all the data they've given to sites like Facebook or Instagram or Twitter or GitHub to some other competing service (assuming such a service exists). It will be interesting to see how that one plays out and whether it is effective in breaking the lock-in effects that have allowed so few companies to become so dominant in recent years.
You can neither remember nor forget what you do not understand
Stupid snobbery. Reminds me of the hall monitors on stack overflow who flag useful posts as off topic.
Can pretty much do all that in a Java applet, and have been able to for a long time.
Software Engineering is recognized as Engineering both by IEEE and by Professional Engineers of Ontario (or other provinces) who are members of Engineers Canada.

Certification does exist....it's not widely used or accepted because in most cases, companies want developers not engineers.

To add to it, the only thing stopping Software Engineers from becoming members of the above mentioned organizations is a code of ethics (and experience) - not knowledge or know-how.
Lazy loading with Webpack
Ask HN: What is your favorite HN post?
This has been asked in the past, but I'm curious about recent answers.
Writing Music in Plain Text
What is sidechain compression?
Have you considered not psychopathy, which is not a clinical term but a criminology term, but something like a dissociative disorder or schizoid disorder? Note that the closest thing to psychopathy is antisocial personality disorder, which is more than a lack of empathy and guilt but also a streak of constant aggresssion and an incapability to learn from the consequences of ones own actions.

Not having empathy with others can be a variety of illnesses, one of which I'm suggesting to look into is schizoid personality disorder. Schizoid personality disorder is an illness in which a person doesn't feel empathy or emotions, has restricted affect. Schizoids can often function as you described above (merely responding based on how they understand other humans to be emotionally like a robot) and often don't feel the need to seek treatment due to their capability to function in this way.

Note: I have schizotypal, a related illness to schizoid (has more delusions etc) and many of your descriptions that you ascribe to psychopathy also describe how I function in reality. Would you be interested in having a conversation about yourself and the limits of your self?
From what I can tell, the main difference in the US is that most states have a so called "industrial exemption" which waives the license requirement for engineers who work for employers under certain conditions. Depending on one's field, (e.g., electrical and mechanical), most engineers are unlicensed.

Also, the law in my state is less concerned with the specific title, than about what people actually do. In general, professions that could affect public safety are regulated. That includes haircutting, K-12 teaching, and engineering.

Still, similar to what people do in Germany, my friends who have their own businesses, but are unlicensed, choose vague business names that avoid the words "engineering" or "design." My LLC is "technology."
Thanks, I saw the video, she makes some references to the spanish word olé! as an evolution of the word Allah!
expressing there is god in that performance.
There is another spanish expression "tener duende" literal translation "to have a fairy-goblin-like-magic-creature", mostly used in flamenco.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duende_(art)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duende_(mythology)
Markets hate complex news headlines
America's First Solar Roadway Is a Total Disaster
People never learn. News at eleven.

Just the other day was reading N. Wirth objecting on using a resource lavishly just because it was cheap.
And just now, in the same front page of HN, some guy wants programmers to stop calling themselves engineers because they aren't.

Well, let's build a bridge using all the iron we can get our hands on (iron is very cheap you know); or even better, let's use all the RAM in the computer with this program of ours.
>I think the common understanding of the word is irrespective of position in space time.

Logic, science and philosophy (and Leibniz did all three) doesn't concern itself with the "common understandings of the world".

In the Leibniz's example, he wanted to set first principles -- that go deeper than the "common understanding".
RED Helium 8K DxOMark Score: 108 – A new all-time-high score
I believe the term you're looking for is "middle ground".
You don't get it. The government limits the amount of residency spots. They fund the residency spots. And most students do not pay upfront, they go into debt to fund their education. Having students pay more or go more into debt will do nothing. The amount of residency spots is ultimately determined by the US govt
One of Go's design principles is that "we're full of untalented junior programmers who wouldn't know what to do with fancy techniques anyways."

Sort of like Python's multi-decade insistence that Lambdas confuse people despite the fact that it's standard after massive popular demand even in Java.

It's quite insulting, if you ask me. Sort of like an elder telling a teen the power tools are off limits because they are "only 16 and not coordinated enough yet to use the table saw without losing a finger."
TcpCrypt – Encrypting the Internet
Dropmix:+Place+cards+and+mix+music+at+the+same+time
The real test of whether one supports free speech is whether they still support it when voices they don't like get heard.

Kind of like the way to judge a person is how they treat those who are less fortunate, not how they treat their peers.
Or more precisely, 90% of everything.
Pointing out failures in engineering isn't a productive exercise.

The difference is that engineers have both professional ethical obligations that they can fall back on and accountability. It is possible that the guy who stamped the sinking skyscraper will lose his license, for example.

In technology, the lack of a real engineering culture is a profoundly negative thing in many ways. When your boss demands that you do something clearly unethical, you have no backdrop as a professional to say "I cannot do this". Engineers, attorneys and CPAs have that.
"They're the tip of a spear with a rotting shaft"

The west also doesn't have immense societal problems?

Probably not a great idea to disregard the strength of a countries military/intelligence services because it has social issues. Unless the social issues are serious enough they are going to collapse the underlying support for the entire military/intelligence infrastructure. Which I don't see being the case in Russia any more than in the west.

My "uninformed" opinion is that the CIA is largely succumbing to bureaucratic rot. Which eventually happens to most large organizations. Particularly those who have managed to remove themselves from effective oversight because "top secret".
It all is. The person contributing to gcc needs to make money somehow.

Well, at least it could be considered tainted by self-interest if you're paranoid. My point was that commercial interest does not prevent quality/security.
I would truly love a new "web" which is effectively style-free ... a parallel information-dense system that uses ultra light weight browsers that work on every device and platform, accessing machine-readable data

That sounds a lot like the Semantic Web, another thing that Berners-Lee has promoted over the years but that has gained limited traction so far.
When I worked in healthcare, every piece of software that interacted with a human in a healthcare related situation was extensively regulated. There was an enormous amount of documentation, change control, effort to change things (for example, updating the firmware was considered a major change to the system and had to be documented in detail).

Are you talking about research, rather than healthcare?
> So OOP might only be useful in a limited number of cases. I find it comfortable for categorizing functions: "Here's all the stuff you can do with a String" or "All windows behave like this..."

That's a module. This scope creep is part of the problem with OOP, as it slowly encompasses features that are orthogonal to their main purpose.

OOP is mainly about procedural abstraction: any type implementing a protocol (set of methods) should be indistinguishable from any other type that implements that same protocol. This enables the open extension that characterizes OOP.

So amending your statement to make it truly about objects, "here's all the stuff you can do with String-like values".
Its not just regulation. We're not getting rid of Eulers critical column load equation because of neophilia whereas in software if its over two years old it must be scrapped as obsolete and no longer trendy.

Engineering is very predictable because of the enormous amount of procedure. It takes precisely X labor hours for an engineer to analyze a house roof blueprint and specify a scalable system of installing anything from 1 panel to covering the entire roof with solar panels that will survive local wind and snow loads with essentially 100% survivability yet also being minimal cost. Its just incredibly predictive.

On the other hand a lot of software development is throw something brand new at the wall see if it sticks, if it does, great, scale till it doesn't, if it does not then its not your fault because its new and nobody can predict nothing in software development. Will it take 3 months or 4 months to write that app, who knows, unpredictable.

No large body of "human life trustworthy" predictable process has developed... yet... for software except in the simplest cases.

It doesn't help that due to moore's transistor law times were changing fast such that what would have required a miracle and some scientific breakthrus in the 70s is now the structural engineering equivalent of some carpenter building a doghouse, its so small that overbuilding doesn't matter and theres no human lives at stake so hiring a structural engineer for hours to calculate the rafter geometry and size for a doghouse is a waste of time and money, leading ignorant people to think solid engineering principles are in opposition to profit for ALL software development, which is a bit of a mistake.

And leading to a desire for software engineering to exist, although there is no academic teachable scalable hyper-predictable mathematically provable process for software development like there is for circuit analysis or structural beam design or chemical process kinetics for scaling so desiring "truely engineering like software dev" is like wishing for magic to be true, sure would be convenient if it existed, but since it doesn't, the people who claim to be engineers are kinda like people who claim to be alchemists, best hold on to your hat.

With a side dish of "engineer" being a modern term of nobility only granted by certain authorities and extremely jealously legally guarded.

And a side dish of hiring people who know nothing about computers or engineering think engineer sounds impressive, so its required on resumes, just like "rock star" or "guru" or "ninja".
Shoot you an email where exactly?

You should check your HN profile visibility from a browser where you're not logged in. You don't have email in your profile.
Feature wise, I always think there isn't much between the big brand browsers without extensions. They could do so much more. They may be better at CSS, JS and have some good debug tools in them these days, but as actual web browsing tools, there's plenty of ground to cover. Bookmarking, History, Link management and even Meta inspections/overviews could be much more user friendly and useful. Example: Chrome is a tabbed browser, and as such titles are lost until you focus on tabs or select a tab. And that bit of meta information is really important. Publish dates, shouldn't necessarily be embeded in HTML body, when a browser could extract that information from a header or a head. Navigation could be more fluent and the browser could aid in that. So usability wise, I'd say they are pretty feature lacking.
> We're involved in a new "fight of the systems" [...] Democracy vs Authoritarianism

The United States has been authoritarian for at least a half-century.
There is a constant: people using memory-unsafe languages, and then collective shrugging after the same things have happened over and over. Cloudbleed? Old news by now...
A guide to becoming a productive programmer quickly
New ways to foot the hefty bill for making old ships less polluting
Go channels are slower than go mutexes for the same task set.
See: http://www.jtolds.com/writing/2016/03/go-channels-are-bad-an...
I have the impression it has been folded into FVWM proper, and the latter is still being maintained.
There's Enough Time to Change Everything
Typically do these gigs require one to be physically present onsite ? I ask because I too am on the fence to try AWS consulting, but don't want to on-site type consulting [i.e you need to be at their site from start-to-finish]
you put a compressor on the background music with the sidechain input set to the channel your microphone is on, so when you speak the music is automatically pushed to the background and you can actually hear the mic.
Speaking from experience, it's easier to get non-routine procedures done in France than in the USA. This is because the provider is less concerned with profitability of the technique.

So no. It's especially great when you need something that isn't routine.
Margaret Hamilton was a software engineer. Read up on the processes she and her team used to build the Apollo computer software and you'll realize, there really is a higher standard that software engineers could be held to.
Interesting source...
In this case, it's basically where when the presenter is speaking, the music quiets at the exact moment, so you can hear more clearly but still have the music.
And I would be happy to write it if I felt confident about some method of measuring memory use. I could use something like Process Explorer, but a dedicated utility would be handy, if you can think of one.
A bigger issue indeed, and one I've also seen in fully OOP code bases. Entire parallel bits of functionality as developer A has no idea that developer B already made the thing they want
The problem with all of these arguments is that everyone is right.

You can absolutely treat software development as a manufacturing process. It is sure as hell not appropriate for many situations, but is possible.
From your example what I could understand is that browsers are not doing what you prefer, so you call them "feature lacking".

For the specific case of your example I prefer the current browser behavior. So what?
Rather than having voice over and background music clashing at the same volume levels, the music level would decrease whenever the voice over signal is active.
Thank you. Thats amazing. People here talk about disruption and changing the world with some silly SaaS. You are the one actually doing it. Im glad you are.
I don't see any other example.

I see technologies being replaced by something totally new from time to time.

What would be an example of this?
Well, one-time 250.000 USD donation for a company like Intel, is quite small, in my opinion, considering most FreeBSD servers are running Intel CPUs.
The Ultimate Choi Soon-Sil-gate Explainer (Part 2) (2016)
I loved Google Reader. When it died, I tried several replacements. Feedly was the one I ended up using. I'm not as fond of it as I was of Reader, but in my opinion it's the best of the ones I tried.
> Certification does exist....it's not widely used or accepted

That's an understatement. Was speaking to a fellow engineer recently, and he claimed that there are really only two licensed software engineers in all of Toronto. We probably have tens of thousands of software developers.
Inheritance is arguably one of those things. It certainly goes against Kay's original scheme, which was more like actors.

To me OOP winds up looking a lot better without the inheritance
WebVR with A-Frame and Angular
We cannot retrofit these qualifications onto what have always been arbitrary titles, just because it sounds plausible. Imagine you are reading a candidate's resume. At one past job they were called "Software Engineer" and at another they were called "Software Developer". Nobody would presume to say to the candidate, "So, I see you did rigorous development with proper quality controls and metrics at Company A, but you did move-fast-break-things development at Company B?" You can't infer that from the job title, because the title is just whatever each company feels like calling programmers.
The email address field in your profile is only shown to mods so they can contact you if there's a problem.

HN users who want to be contacted should put their email address in the "about" box.
After I read this article I was quite upset, but really I wasn't angry as I was as much hurt. I actually don't like to call myself an engineer. I don't like the title, because I don't think it represents how I work and what I do. I don't follow a strict rigorous process, my job allows me to be free and agile (no pun intended) which is quite different from building engineers, mechanical engineers etc.

Where I live developers, programmers, etc. have never had the prestige that other science like professions have had. Most of the time when you talk about what you do, it's often a look of either confusion, or ambivalence because "Excel is on a computer, so programming can't be much different." A lot of companies belittle programmers, because "everyone can learn to program." Programming is hard, and this isn't to insult other professions. A lot of them are hard too. It's just that a lot of developers want to be respected for what they do just like everyone else and that's normally missing. This article, although in my opinion correct about not calling developers engineers, seems to ignore that what developers do is highly technical and quite complicated. Developers saying they're engineers puts that force of science and process behind it, and it's a defense from someone equating their basic class in HTML to mentally tracing how a request is going to trace through 100 servers in different regions.

Personally, I don't want to be restricted to being an engineer. I love the freedom to rapidly alter how I work, and most of what I work on will not cause harm to others. I am sure I speak for all developers, and what everyone really wants is to be counted among the other people who have challenging professions and respected for what is accomplished.
Apart from the political rant that's exactly what I said, isn't it?

Or do you meant to say Google, Apple and Mozilla are working to increase the features of their browser in the last years with the objective of controlling the Internet in their minds?
The web UI objects, with their collection of global namespaces for IDs, Classes, JavaScript functions, etc., are aggressively resistant to compontentization.

You can see the disastrous implications of this feature with the ID mangling needed for Asp.net webforms, and the utterly miserable workflow that creates.
Java applets are not supported anymore anywhere, I think.
I did not downvote coldtea, and I would have preferred those who did so to explain their reasoning instead, but I have offered up an argument that works equally well against your first paragraph: the existence of bosons.

Eliezer Yudkowsky has made an argument against doing epistemology by intuition [1]. Famously, Henri Bergson tried to use his intuition about time to dismiss special relativity, and while he may have swayed the Nobel prize committee [2], his ideas were swept away by history.

Turning now to your last paragraph, it is like saying Bernie Madoff's clients were wealthy because the arithmetic in their statements was correct. Also, one cannot validly argue against the rejection of a self-serving axiom on the grounds that doing so leaves problems unsolved.

[1] http://lesswrong.com/lw/q1/bells_theorem_no_epr_reality/

[2] http://nautil.us/issue/35/boundaries/this-philosopher-helped...