skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Author here. Not a lot of material out there on how engineering organizations evolve as they scale, hope you find this interesting.
Ask HN: How can I become a better software engineer?
Every day I come across posts about people doing incredible things: entrepreneurs creating awesome startups, programmers doing great software and people organizing events like meetups.

I would like to do something I'm proud of. As an entrepreneur, I suck at sales and networking (which are the most important things probably) and I am struggling to find a co-founder that complements me. As a programmer, I work as a web developer in a small startup. I like to read a lot and I try to keep learning new things every day, but I cannot find a place to put in practice everything I know. I would love to work on more challenging projects but sadly I live in Argentina where tech companies are practically non-existent.

It makes me a little sad to know that in spite of everything I know I'm not doing anything that makes me proud.

So, what can I do to improve my self?
I don't think we will converge that much. Most gene differences are insignificant. Is it better to have black, or white skin (or any other skin color)? There is a lot of baggage associated with that question, and some people will make a choice - but not everyone will make the same choice (in a culture I would expect everyone to make the same choice, but other cultures will choose differently), and many people won't care.

There are some genes that I expect to be edited out. I'd give a lot to have the gene causing my high cholesterol edited out, as would my insurance company - the drugs I'm taking are not cheap. There are a number of other conditions that are genetic (and still more that science believes are genetic even though the genes haven't been found). This convergence is good though as these are genes that if you have are known bad - just not bad enough to prevent reproduction.
I wonder how does his security detail look like.
All those other cases of escaped prisoners of war?
It's possible. I still use web apps (e.g., Slack client on macOS). But I dislike them compared to good native apps, mostly due to their lack of consistency with the platform and general sluggishness.

If I'm using a web app and not realising it, then I would happily keep using that app. I do not think I am, though.

Also, there are plenty of native apps which are terrible and not consistent with the platform. I do not like to use those either.
"The linked posts dismiss this early because of the possibility to cause DDOS, but really, you can already do that from a hacked desktop "Quake", so there is no harm in being able to do it from a browser-based "Quake"."

No same-origin-policy would be lovely combined with XSS vulnerabilities.

Suddenly all the visitors of that website would be doing DDOS on a random host.
Sounds like they are changing their target companies to send their students to from startups to existing incumbents. I'm sure all those old 1990's software companies would love to recruit junior programmers but otherwise find it difficult. And it's probably not a bad way for non-programmers to get a decent first programming job.
> causes people to pay less attention to their feed and as a result less attention to ads

I suspect a higher-than-average proportion of twitter users have simply blocked all the ads.

Personally I'd favour a payment model a bit like the "reddit gold" one, where users can pay for other users to have better features. It's a network effect. I want the people I like following to have a better time on the service so they keep using it.
I guess I don't have a formal proof for you, but in general the more characters/words a response contains the more significant, relevant, important, consequential, telling or material it is. Of course you can find counter examples, but considering the New York times still publishes articles and hasn't moved fully to Tweeting (yet anyway) I would say more often than not it's difficult to convey or articulate things correctly in 140 characters.

If a communication method is "low-stakes,informal and brief" how often do you expect to be meaningful? To me those things are diametrically opposed to me.
Tell him to watch a f'in sunset.
Or the eclipse on Aug 21, which will happen exactly to the second predicted by astronomers.
Or look through binoculars at a ship sailing away over the ocean.
Or look at the stars rotating around the north/south pole at night.
Or fly to Australia and measure the mileage between any two cities and ask him which map is more accurate. Make sure to have a return flight through South America and ask him how long the flight took.
Or ask him why low tide is always when the moon is at the horizon.
Or ask him what causes phases of the moon.
Or ask him why the azimuth of Polaris is always equal to the observer's latitude on Earth.
Or ask him where satellites are.

Or ask him not be a dumbass.
I was one of the guys writing M$ and annoyed by the shady business practices of Gates.

Today he has my utter respect on how he tranformed and how he spent his money.
There's a preference to disable this, though. Don't get me wrong - it's awful and I hate it. But I'm sure there are valid use-cases for people who use e.g. webmail.
I laughed out loud at this.

There's two types of these guys:

1 the ones who don't know what they did was awful and are thinking about how great they are

2 The ones who know what they did was terrible and are imagining how their shit tastes in our collective mouths

Alas, both types are happily retired from book sales and conference speaking fees, so...
you have two options: PyObject and Py<PyList>. Both has Send + Sync and all pyo3 types defines `std::convert::From<T>` for both.
On the other hand, I'd say RoR optimizes productivity for Day 1 at the expense of Day 60+. I abandoned RoR because I didn't like that deal.
We're having issues with some of the Amazon APIs and the Console (500, 502 errors) right now in us-east-1 as well.

AWS Status Page: All green.

EDIT: SQS as well, no EC2 issues for us as it seems constrained to us-east-1a
Tutorial for reflex-dom, a Haskell FRP library
Why on earth do you need loading screens, push notifications, home screen icons, etc for any of that?

I booked the holiday I'm currently on to China almost entirely on an iPad, I could easily have done all of it that way, with none of these features.
AWS is having widespread issues
The will be auctioned since they were forfeiture by Feds, like this:

http://thehill.com/policy/technology/290745-feds-to-auction-...
>There are many, many GUIs implementing git and not all of them do it right or even well.

Speaking of that, which git GUI is good, in your opinion? I tend to use Git from the command line, but had tried out a few GUIs for a project earlier, but not enough to decide. GitEye was one, another might have been SourceTree (IIRC it is from Atlassian).
Wells Fargo apologizes for spilling trove of data on wealthy clients
I like the approach, and I like Peter Turchin's books as well. It would be nice, however, to have access to the code used for the simulation.
I confirm I am getting sporadic HTTP 503 responses for about 30 minutes.

Edit: it seems it's fixed.
>Software exists for whatever reason we want it to exist.

Yes, the author stated this from a very narrow point of view. Software exists for whatever reason we want it to, but business pays people to build it to solve their problems.

>almost always look at automating existing workflows.

I've always justified it in my mind as making existing workers more productive. As long as the company I was working for was constantly hiring, growing and in a competitive market, it was ok.

The paragraph about no one cares what language you use, etc is obviously false. Write a PHP app in a C# shop is an easy way to disprove that theory.

Also, what the author fails to take into account is scalability. As the business grows, the software needs to grow with it, or all those marketing dollars they threw in to grow the company will be wasted and growth will be halted. That's where the business would need to defer technical decisions to technical people.

An acquaintance of mine currently works for a company who is about to hit a hard wall where they will no longer be able to take any more orders due to scalability of the software they chose. They aren't doing much about it, not realizing that by the time this happens, it will be too late. The CEO probably read an article just like this.

But I will agree with the author that JS, and web front end in general, is way more complicated than it needs to be.
I would consider JavaScript my primary language, and you're right - Node is usually my go-to choice for a web backend. Express is pretty easy to grasp and be productive with.

But when I need more (auth, orm, logging, etc.), I feel like I'm spending more time searching for and curating packages and then trying to get them integrated than I am actually building an application.

Rails (especially its API flag) has caught my attention recently because this becomes a non-issue - you pretty much just use what Rails has included.
Fast and pleasant are useful tools to Apple's goal of making a lot of money, which is not bad per se.

The author got it right:

> Apple treats web apps like second class citizens because they don’t generate money like native apps in the app store.

There won't be good support for web apps unless they find a way to make money out of them. If the day comes that native apps don't make money anymore, maybe because everybody gives them for free as front end to services paid outside the Apple Store (think Slack), then Apple could improve Safari and live only with revenues from the hardware.

It's going to be a hard fight because the goals of Apple and the goals of developers (and maybe also the goal of their customers) are not aligned and they own the platform.
There is a wax brand on Amazon that has 5,237 5 star reviews all posted within the last week. He should try that one.
> The only issue that irks me is that I can't resize a pool after it was created, can't add new disks, can't remove one (without risking parity).

Not sure why ZFS would not auto resize for you. It's the reason I have been using it for several years as my home NAS under a linux server. In my case I just replace all the disk on a RAIDZ with bigger ones and automatically resizes up.
I think that's a community of ex-retailers.
He might have spent the money in ways that later benefited him - even if he bought a house that was 13$ more expensive, given the housing boom during his lifetime in many locations he would have made more than a 6% return. You're never going to be able to really figure that what-if game anyhow... I think interest is an appropriate simplification (certainly more appropriate than inflation).
Likely so, but there's two facts to consider:

I offered to pay 3x the average rate to account for some of that. I think that moves me into covering the average spread across the US and Western Europe (about a third of their active users). Now, I'm still probably one of the more valuable people, but it would be the average cost if all the revenue was spread across people who could afford that cost.

Facebook already claims they don't use a profile to market to me. (It took some digging, but you can delete your tracking profile conclusions and turn off a lot of things.) Which means (assuming they're honest), I'm probably not a high value user because they can't target me for high value ads. This would just be giving them an alternative revenue stream to compensate for that. (So a strict improvement for Facebook.)
I really miss Metrotwit. I used it in 2013 back when I was very active on Twitter.
Are you kidding? (..not being sarcastic). Drug lords don't strike me as having quite the wealth that Gates has. Hell, I'd even assume drug lords pale in comparison to some oil Princes, but at least that's a more even comparison perhaps. Gates just has so much money that it's nearly beyond comprehension.

But, I don't know any of this, just speculating. Do you know more?
The "walled garden" is what prevents the horrendous disjointed mess that is the Android phone market. Sure, for a guy who likes hacking around stuff, it's fun for you. But for everyone else, there is a thousand different phones, with a thousand different interfaces, all running different versions of the Android OS, that will never be updated by the phone manufacturer.

I understand where you're coming from, I do. But when it comes to a phone, I greatly prefer the standardized hardware/interface/OS over the free for all. I hate to use the "it just works" nonsense, but that is exactly what it does.

Working in the Enterprise, the iPhone is infinitely easier for us to troubleshoot, and manage. Because everyone is running the same thing.
I'm the same - I've generally taking to avoiding native apps wherever it's possible. So I don't have the Twitter app anymore as Twitter is now a PWA: https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/topics/open-sourc...

Similarly Facebook is just fine without the app and I'm happy with it. It has notifications etc. I'd like it if it was offline first but I'm more than happy with it as is.
http://yarchive.net/comp/linux/gpl_modules.html

----8<----

But one gray area in particular is something like a driver that was
originally written for another operating system (ie clearly not a derived
work of Linux in origin). At exactly what point does it become a derived
work of the kernel (and thus fall under the GPL)?

THAT is a gray area, and _that_ is the area where I personally believe
that some modules may be considered to not be derived works simply because
they weren't designed for Linux and don't depend on any special Linux
behaviour.

Basically:

- anything that was written with Linux in mind (whether it then _also_ works on other operating systems or not) is clearly partially a derived work.

- anything that has knowledge of and plays with fundamental internal Linux behaviour is clearly a derived work. If you need to muck around with core code, you're derived, no question about it.

Historically, there's been things like the original Andrew filesystem
module: a standard filesystem that really wasn't written for Linux in the
first place, and just implements a UNIX filesystem. Is that derived just
because it got ported to Linux that had a reasonably similar VFS interface
to what other UNIXes did? Personally, I didn't feel that I could make that
judgment call. Maybe it was, maybe it wasn't, but it clearly is a gray
area.

Personally, I think that case wasn't a derived work, and I was willing to
tell the AFS guys so.

Does that mean that any kernel module is automatically not a derived work?
HELL NO! It has nothing to do with modules per se, except that non-modules
clearly are derived works (if they are so central to the kernel that you
can't load them as a module, they are clearly derived works just by virtue
of being very intimate - and because the GPL expressly mentions linking).

So being a module is not a sign of not being a derived work. It's just
one sign that _maybe_ it might have other arguments for why it isn't
derived.

Linus

----8<----

The real issue is if anyone who can claim copyright to Linux kernel will sue Canonical. I don't think so.
This would imply that you had to choose a specialization when the "designed" human could just be best suited for all of those things. Physical and mental perfection.
A quick search on amazon for "birkenstock", all departments, I get 1023 results. I wonder if Birkenstock is facing a giant game of whack-a-mole here.
Every time I try to get into it, usually as the result of a particularly entertaining comedian or insightful scientist, I'm driven away by all of the things you're describing. I tolerate the bad parts of Reddit, I used to do the same for Usenet and Irc, but Twitter is too much.

Facebook is similar, except without any of the temptation to actually join in the first place.
It can be misleading too. Desktop frameworks date from a time when there was no distinction between backend and frontend developers. There were just software developers, and they were expected to be able to write algorithms and UI and whatever else was necessary to ship the app.

This led to a lot of ugly UI, but also pretty tight low latency UI (compared to the web).

It also impacted job descriptions and the way people think about hiring.

I am the lead developer at a firm with about 25 software developers, we do JavaFX GUIs when we can. We do not mention this in job specs. We do not hire for "frontend" guys specifically. Writing JavaFX code (or WPF or Qt) is just too easy to bother doing a specific candidate search for them - any competent dev can learn these frameworks quickly (and they do). The primary reason to search for UI specific skills in the desktop world is to find people who truly understand usability and graphics design, which is a separate skillset to what the modern kids call "frontend development". There are lots of web UIs out there that look superficially attractive as they just imported a stock CSS theme but which are actually confusing, nonsensical or simply can't scale to the addition of more features. UX design is as much about figuring out your user stories and workflows as it is making nice graphics.

In the case where developers need to do their own UI design, I prefer to just train them and push them to consider appearances when doing the work. It's easier to train someone how to make an attractive-enough UI than to train them in great software engineering. So ideally you'd have two specialists tag-teaming but when that isn't possible, desktop UI + some training is the way to go.
My point was just that TradeHill, being the US entity, is the one in the US jurisdiction and that a criminal doing business with them doesn’t magically fall under US jurisdiction. I’ve no problem with BTC-e or whoever getting arrested, since they were clearly criminals, but I am concerned about US laws becoming a thing that applies to non-US citizens outside of the US (the implication in the comment I replied to being (as I read it) that BTC-e falls under US jurisdiction because they were doing business with a US company, which in my opinion is overreach)
I have no problem controlling noise but Twitter seems incapable of delivering the signal. It seems impossible to have it show all the content from people I follow; instead it delivers some seemingly random subset.
Ok technically you're right, but the free tier (which only predates Slack by a couple of months) was limited to 5 users, so it cost money for most use cases.
Because it's not just about issues - I don't exclusively want someone to interact with me in a setting that's centered around the content. I would preferably like the experience to be more free form and open to a wider audience. Incidentally, I don't think the 140 character limit has ever really bothered me. Most of the time I text shorter strings than that - if I want to have a longer conversation I'll either send multiple tweets, or move to DM/chat.
Yes, #mtbos - The Math Twitter Blogosphere

Tremendous community of math educators from pre-k through professors. Education has horrible silos, especially up and down the stack. Twitter gave this community an opportunity to break those silos down and connect across vast geographies. The community is doing so well it's even hosting it's second annual IRL conference this week: Twitter Math Camp #tmc17

While the #mtbos connects through Twitter, it seems a world away from the use case you described, which does not seem like a good time.
Amazon has a secret health care team called 1492 focused on medical records
Over the years I have seen astronomy become more like biology - diverse both in the kinds of objects it describes and their behavior.
You just need to be brutal about pruning. Someone retweets politics twice in a row? Mute retweets from them. Someone posts more politics than things you want to read? Unfollow.

My timeline is maybe 5% US politics. That's still 5% too much, but no more than in any other media. That's 117 people followed, and is about the maximum message volume I want to deal with in any case.
So how do you do playlists when you just drag files to folders? What if you wanted the same song in multiple playlists? How do you do smart playlist? All of this is not as popular now as it was during the iPods heyday but it was popular then.
> Selling slack to the enterprise probably is something missing.

You know that there are enterprises with 5000+ members on a paid slack, right?
What I don't understand is how can they burn so much money to still not be profitable despite millions of users.

Their platform is already built and they've got a way to monetise it (promoted tweets). Why don't they just cut their costs down to actually make enough profit from those promoted tweets to become sustainable, instead of burning through even more money endlessly with their useless "experiments"?
Interesting. Anything you could share with us?
That's technically true yet also irrelevant. Amazon fully controls all aspects of sale.

With other categories that Amazon decided to care about, like toys during Christmas, they put controls on who can sell them and has qualifications to make it harder for a bad seller to just reappear.

In a major category like headphones and power supplies, the company takes a Casablanca style "we're shocked that there is counterfeiting going on here!", although it's not credible that genuine product could be sold at the price points they are selling for.
>but in general the more characters/words a response contains the more significant, relevant, important, consequential, telling or material it is

Yep because the longest books are the most important...lol fuck outta here

There are NYT articles that are just tweet embeds with some of their language around it to make it seem like the journos did work. Hell half of their articles about the Trump white house are tweets for pols.

And again, the 140 character limit is for public tweets only. DMs can be very long and involved.

>If a communication method is "low-stakes,informal and brief" how often do you expect to be meaningful?

Lol dude you must be the worst to work with. So you can't derive any meaning unless it's high stakes, formal, and involved?

Meaningful can be "Derived value" from - so if you tweet at a dev "hey is it possible to do X in your library" and they just reply "No, you can't sorry"...was that not meaningful? Did they not just save you a few hours of digging through code with a short reply?
Bloomberg tries to track that.

They're currently pegging Gates at sitting on $43 billion in cash out of his $90.8 billion total fortune. His investment vehicle, Cascade, is well known; I assume that's one way Bloomberg is attempting to keep tabs on the cash level. I've occasionally checked Bill's numbers on the Bloomberg Billionaire's list, I don't recall his cash level ever being so high. You can essentially guarantee that if the $43b is even remotely accurate, nobody else on earth is topping that (save for an extraordinarily rich leader / royalty, but even then $43b is immense).

Most of the richest billionaires have their wealth heavily tied up in one or a few businesses. Gates, among the hyper billionaires, is rare in the sense that he's basically sitting on a giant investment portfolio at this point, meaning he can turn most of it to cash dramatically easier than his peers.
Huh? Have you thought about all the dreams he destroyed? This is not even Robinhood style where he made money off evil people.
I seem to remember reading that Gates is still earning more than he is "giving away".
Maybe he is one of the reasons 2mm users left the platform... Not the only one, but one factor.
Where's the open source macOS kernel replacement? That's what I'm after. "macOSS" (macOS SECURE)