skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sure, but I think it would be foolish to do otherwise. I was new once too, and even after I'd done my first job people were hesitant to call me back with no relevant degree and my only experience being in a small shop mostly working alone (for significantly less than the market rate, I should add). Now I managed to make my way past that gauntlet and I'm enjoying the fruits of my labors as
a "senior" developer. I don't think I'm doing anything other than responding to the incentives created by the system.
I found the article a bit light on details, so I checked the linked report at https://www.kaspersky.com/about/press-releases/2018_hackers-...

> Attackers used a hidden Unicode character in the file name that reversed the order of the characters, thus renaming the file itself. As a result, users downloaded hidden malware which was then installed on their computers.

> Secondly, upon successful exploitation of the vulnerability, a backdoor that used the Telegram API as a command and control protocol was installed, resulting in the hackers gaining remote access to the victim’s computer.
Devil's advocate: there's more to keeping email safe than just not allowing JavaScript. Most browsers let you have up to 255 drop shadows on a single element, which can really heat up your laptop. CSS animations can also cause havoc. Imagine loading a GIF from a server that just streams frames forever. You also don't want to immediately load images (for privacy reasons), and you probably also want to ban audio and video while you're at it. In a web email client, you don't want the styles of the email to affect the chrome of the app. <iframe>, <object>, and <embed> lead to a world of bad ideas. <base> and <dialog> could potentially cause unusual issues. I can't think of anything off the top of my head, but I'm sure data URIs could be abused somehow (data URI-encoded SVGs something something loading content dynamically?).

CSS can cause problems, too. @import could cause privacy issues, as could @font-face. If images are not pre-downloaded, @media and @page could reveal when you print a message and @supports could leak details about your mail client. `position: fixed` would need to be banned outright I'd think, if the message isn't sandboxed in an iframe.

HTML5 as a whole is designed for building applications, not for making pretty messages. You want to have a subset of HTML5, but not too strict of a subset. Some APIs (e.g., @font-face) probably can't be used as-is and need a replacement. And of course, it all needs to be somehow backwards-compatible.
I'm already scared of Boston Dynamics. Once their bots start to look like cockroaches, I'll never sleep the same.
> what that data is

Can I find out what data Google has on me?
It often works to implement well to implement your code in C++ and have a C interface (using extern "C") wrapped around it to be consumed be interfaced with by other languages.
I don't live and breathe programming either. But when I am at work I care about the technology and like to learn new stuff whereas a lot of people I see just do what they are told to do and take their paycheck home. Nothing wrong with that but I find it more fun to work with people who care.
So if a users presses a button that says "Do X":

Then the app sends a request to a server to do X and based on the response looks up the text that shipped with the app saying "X completed successfully" which it displays using the system font, that is fine.

Then the app sends a request to a server to do X and the server sends back the text "X completed successfully <smiley-face-character>" and the app displays it using the system font, that is fine.

Then the app sends a request to a server to do X and based on the response looks up the text that shipped with the app saying "X completed successfully <smiley-face-character>" which it displays using the system font, that is against the rules.

That seems incredibly arbitrary and nonsensical if that is an accurate description of the rule.
Right, I suppose what I mean to say is, if you were "just" learning how to program, it probably wouldn't be worth it, because you could learn just as well on your own for practically nothing (order some books on Abebooks and watch some videos on Coursera and you've got a decent curriculum). But if you do that you haven't made any contacts and don't have anyone to vouch for your skills.
Discussion of the original Wired article that this is based on:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16358148

HN Guidelines: "Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> The short-termism that's infested our culture--it seems like all Western culture--is truly sickening. It feels like "Well, I got mine, screw the next generation." This goes way beyond just junior developers.

It's a bit of a leap to conclude that on the basis that you weren't asked by management to mentor junior devs. In fact, it's possible management assumed you would do mentoring and didn't need to be told.
What happens when you search for Walmart (or some product where Walmart is the organic top result) and Target gets the ad spot above the organic result? Should Walmart let that go without bidding?
Suggestion: allow the buyer to specify some piece of information that will be used as the seed for any needed noise in the generator. That way you can market it as a personalized thing. "Put your name in, or some important date, and it's uniquely encoded in your print!"
Happiness = reality - expectations

Remember that formula and you will be fine.

It's not a case for lowering your expectations, but it does set a framework for approaching different endeavours. It forces you to ask the question, if this goes amazingly well, how good is that really? Furthermore, it forces you to ask whether you are putting too much energy into your expectations. Finally, it's why slot machines (based on unexpected and uneven payouts) work so well. :)
Do you have any more info on this? I have unilateral deafness and am constantly increasing the pressure of my good ear throughout the day by popping it. (The way I do this is sort by blowing a quick burst of air out my nose and clicking my ear at the same time.) I have long worried it may not be healthy but I have been doing it for years and have no recorded hearing loss from it, I continue to do it because the added volume it gives me is sometimes the difference between having to ask "what?" a third time in a row.
Emacs, several reasons.

I learned to use it circa 2000 (after vim) while in university for my CS degree. It took some getting used to, but it stuck.

It's incredibly versatile once you get to know it. It's wonderful having a properly extendible tool. I wish every program I used was as easy to extend as emacs. This is the same thing that drew me to Common Lisp (running programs can be connected to and extended/debugged without having to stop them).

Lisp, I took to it very quickly. Not sure why but everything about it just clicked in my head after a brief learning period.

It's default installed on everything I use except Windows. The Windows port works well.

With emacs lisp, I have written up a number of (simple) modes to support various esoteric languages I've run across in my career that no editor supports (openly available but uncommon, or internally produced).

I don't have to use a mouse. Everything is available via the keyboard. Being able to type about 100 wpm these days, that means I can instruct it as fast as I can think of what I want it to do.
It's gotten significantly better over time. I can't remember the last time it crashed, sync between clients of the chat log is kinda wonky sometimes but that's just Skype in general. Not positive on feature parity, I've been on the UWP version for quite a while and couldn't tell you what's different anymore.
I wished I could take credit:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog#As_metaphor
OK, fair enough. I agree with you; I also like to challenge myself with new things. But I like to go home at the end of the day too, you know? Sometimes I think programmer culture gets too self-flagellating.
Your anecdotal opinion is worth less than decades to centuries of empirical evidence.
Definitely agree with this. It's not that the junior developer position doesn't exist anymore, it's that there's an overwhelming supply of strong candidates with the CS pedigree, multiple internships, side projects, and well balanced technical/soft skills.

For juniors to be cost effective/neutral, you can only really have 1-2 per mid/senior engineer. Most companies don't have that many mid/senior engineers to begin with, much less ones that are willing to take on a junior to mentor for a year or two.

It takes a better part of a decade to transition a junior into an independent, mentoring capable senior. The current software boom only started in 2009ish. That means there's only a few cohorts of seniors created in this cycle, and I would guess not very many of them given the job market in 09. Give it time, years of experience don't just happen overnight.
If the fact that a name gets attached to the prize is the only thing stopping them, then they could easily make up a name and photoshop a picture. This feels like it's getting into conspiracy theory territory.
Again, I'm failing to see why you're advocating for a business to make all the money it can, but why you decry the same for employees. Double standard much?
The word ’Junior’ killed the Junior Developer. Nobody wanted to have that title and it was also an easy target for recruiters to hire them away promising software developer roles.
You know you are living interesting times when companies bust on purpose !!!
tests do cost time, but an investment in an automated test can save orders of magnitude greater time than it takes to write them... in the end, automated tests save a lot of time, as long as they (A) cost relatively little to maintain and (B) provide a reasonably useful guarantee of quality
if you don't step on a snake by mistake, you have very little chance to get bit... it's not like they go out and hunt humans... I've seen rattle snakes (2) and a coral snake in the wild and I had to be very careful not to scare them away just to take a picture.
You are a bargain hunter. The majority of the consumer spending is not. And your store brand is made by the same company that buys ad for their product and creates demand for the flavor of toothpaste you like.
> The other problem is most Sr.s don't want a Jr. coming in and making negative contributions. Sr.s are frequently the ones doing the interviews. They see most Jr.s as "What's a computer?" level talent that will start fires in production systems.

I think this is pertinent, when you're already too busy doing things and keeping stuff running, who has the time to handle a run-of-the-mill junior?

The most successful launches I've seen is where a junior comes in and can already contribute _at some level_, this is always due to the extra curricular work they've done outside of their education (if indeed they had any higher level education at all).

The spectrum of jobs out there allows a creative (or lucky, in my case) junior to springboard. Think of 'started out modifying and configuring wordpress themes, ended up writing some custom code and extensions, ended up learning laravel and databases' type of progression. You won't be working in bleeding edge AI or at Google on their self driving cars, but you'll be solving problems for people, and that's a career.
Until people can verify that the adverts I expose my computer to do not contain cryptocoin miners, crapware, or outright malware, and until adverts become less intrusive generally and much faster at loading, I will continue to use an ad-blocker. The advertising industry created this problem, it has the choice of fixing it as well. Through regulation, whitelists, blacklists, etc.

I value the security of my computer and the amount of mental space I have been gifted with too much to clutter them with bit-crap and visual-crap. Besides, advertising has become an adversarial and manipulative industry. The more unwanted influence I can cut out the better.
Influencers like SmarterEveryday or SameerReviewsRunningShoes
I hate the whole side-project-after-work thing. Unless you have a real business idea to pursue I think 40 hours per week of focused work is plenty. There are a lot of other cool things in life.
It's still pure fantasy.
semanticscholar link: https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/99f8/063247da7d87de2b9d61c6...
Those towns exist all over, but I agree suburbia for our generation is not as attractive for other reasons.

Personally, I want to raise our son in a suburb and my wife doesn't. I do because my childhood was great in suburbia but there are major family and career trade-offs to do so.
Oh yeah watch out for bootcamps that juice their placement stats by hiring their own grads a lot. It's normal to hire a few grads for teaching assistants but if you see more than that be weary.
Other restaurants have food-borne illness problems occasionally too, but when you have thousands of locations it makes national news.
Another replacement of a founder with a body from the random CEO pool. Knowledge between companies is almost 0% transferrable.
Part of the problem with that is finding the right mix of free content to attract users and still get them to trust that it's worth it.

It's also a challenge because with all of these modular services, it's hard not to start feeling like your bank account is getting the death by a thousand cuts routine.

Sure, it's annoying when I can't read a NYT article because I ran out of my 5 free articles. But is it enough for me to actually pay? No, I'd rather just read the HN comments as those are free and usually better than the actual content in the article.
I'm not actually against AMP being put in emails, but adding unnecessary functionality to emails under the banner of "AMP for email" definitely seems like a step too far.
I think he is referring to people entering the field now. If they don't have internships then it will be hard for them to compete with others vying for Junior Dev positions that have done internships.
i wish i can upvote this more, bless this comment to the top
Nice to see San Diego up there. Thinking of moving there after 10 years here in the bay.
Scalable and Performant ASP.NET Core Web APIs: SQL Server Isolation Level
I have been to Taco Bell only twice and I found the "food" they are selling basically inedible. Definitely wouldn't hire that CEO.
On the contrary, it costs almost nil to handle traffic with an HTML/CSS static site, maybe 3x - 10x that with personalization, transactions, social, etc. Most info sites don’t need those.

Define popular? How about a billion hits?

Figure four servers for static HTML/CSS, maybe add CloudFront or similar if heavy on images or progressive download video, and 10 servers for dynamic personalization/transactions, for a billion personalized/e-commerce hits a month.

A billion hits averages to under 400 reqs/second, which you could handle on a single Pentium running Apache on BSD in late 90’s. Make it a bell curve, account for surges, 4 modern boxes is still comfy headroom for static stuff.

If hosting content is prohibitively expensive you could be doing it wrong. Try not firing up script interpreters and ‘frameworks’ per hit, use a static site gen CMS. If dynamic, spend time nailing caching.
Just because he believes it doesn't make it so.
Meth, the Forgotten Killer, Is Back. And It’s Everywhere
Ads are not the only method for monetizing content, they are merely the laziest.

Content makers have been using the web for over two decades, and figuring out how to do it profitably as well. There are innumerable models for doing it, but it requires putting in the leg work to actually care about how your work is supported. Sure it's seductive to think that someone working in some "noble" pursuit should be able to avoid having to do that, but that's not really true of anyone anywhere, why should it be true of content makers?
PDF to Word Document Conversion Further Enhanced in Aspose.Words for Cloud 18.1
If you're going to use a VPN, please read about its policies and try to understand them. I was horrified to learn about this VPN service from Facebook that is now being promoted in its iOS app (I don't use the app, but anything to do with Facebook generally worries me). The Onavo VPN service from Facebook is disguised as a protection mechanism but tracks the user for the benefit of Facebook.

Quoting from this recent news: [1]

"But Facebook didn’t buy Onavo for its security protections.

Instead, Onavo’s VPN allow Facebook to monitor user activity across apps, giving Facebook a big advantage in terms of spotting new trends across the larger mobile ecosystem. For example, Facebook gets an early heads up about apps that are becoming breakout hits; it can tell which are seeing slowing user growth; it sees which apps’ new features appear to be resonating with their users, and much more.

This data has already helped Facebook in a number of ways, most notably in its battle with Snapchat. At The WSJ reported last August, Facebook could tell that Instagram’s launch of Stories – a Snapchat-like feature – was working to slow Snapchat’s user growth, before the company itself even publicly disclosed this fact."

[1]: https://techcrunch.com/2018/02/12/facebook-starts-pushing-it...
I don't get it! Why do websites think they have a right to use my CPU and bandwidth? This is like saying people locking their doors is preventing thieves from stealing their stuff. Yes, that's the intention.
Yeah, it was fuzzy to me too. Found this in the article though:

> First, a description of how SBCL’s generational GC works:

> ...

> Being conservative with regards to the stack. That creates a major clash with LLVM which expects a stack map. A stack map declares which data type can be found where on the stack for a function (as in every invocation of that function needs to comply to it), whereas SBCL’s compiler can and does generate code that just places anything anywhere. This makes the stack a lot more compact in some call patterns.

So those were intended as corrections.
I fear it will take longer than anticipated and may not end up being a full sized hat that he eats.
If you sell 40k a year contracts, can't you just have a sales assistant maintain the custom terms&conditions&discounts and draft personalized invoices manually until you have many such contracts and automation starts to make sense?
Do people actually find these languages interesting? I mean, what's the point of them?
>app is without peer

It's usually good though last time I tried using it the app insisted on moving the pickup point from where I'd put the marker (by the road) to the middle of the pedestrianised complex. I thought ok whatever, called the Uber and then it headed to the wrong side of the complex with no road access and I had to cancel and run for a regular cab to not miss my flight. They didn't use to do that - I guess moving the pickup to some other location is a new 'improvement'.
+1. This is what I was thinking but I'm not a a MechE. Would it work?
Absolutely. It seems they only blocked a few specific large providers and service types. I often route my netflix traffic through a smaller provider and I never got any service interruption.
> AWS would lose lots of business if their complicity became public.

So would any VPN provider. The incentives are no different, and neither are the opportunities, so recommending one over the other is a bit suspect.
When I was a kid mowing the lawn, which was adjacent to a thinly-forested area, I ran over rattlesnakes at least half a dozen times... in those cases, if I hadn't been mowing, I definitely would have just stepped on it. I don't think it's too unlikely that people could stumble over a snake in grass while just playing around outside.
I like the premise of the article. I think bean counting, short sighted companies killed the junior dev....and that role died a long time ago in many places (even farther back than 2010).

I also think the article needs some copy editing. A few paragraphs were rough to get through.
The problem is that the "bad culture" wastes more time and mental strain on addressing the consequences of the lack of tests than it would spend maintaining a proper test suite.

This waste exhausts morale.
Efects of Death and Post-Morten Ischemia on Human Tissue Transcriptomes
The genesis for The Mythical Man Month:

"In particular, I wanted to explain the quite different management experiences encountered in System/360 hardware development and OS/360 software development. This book is a belated answer to Tom Watson's probing questions as to why programming is hard to manage."
Well, where are you based at?
I couldn't agree more. I've worked at places where some of the engineers were conscientious about writing tests and having excellent test coverage. Guess what? Our services were still unreliable because the engineers who didn't write tests brought poor quality into the codebase, so we had constant problems.

Even a few engineers on the team who don't write tests can make the product as unreliable, from the customer's point of view, as it would be if none of the engineers wrote tests.

At my current company, test coverage is taken seriously as a job requirement, and it is considered during performance reviews. Consequently, the test coverage is pretty darn good.
Yeah, that's exactly what I'm getting at.
Let’s see what he can do with a $10 lunch business model.
Seeing this on Hacker News again, this time from Bloomberg, is so mind numbingly frustrating. I already contested this story when it first showed up on HN 14 hours ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16366754. But time is a flat circle.

Sigh.

1. This is not a vulnerability in Telegram. This is vulnerability in the way Windows processes malicious RLO characters in downloaded files. See: https://cdn.securelist.com/files/2018/02/180212-telegram-vul.... The users must click past the security warning (unless they have manually disabled it in system settings), download the file to their machine, and run it.

2. This vulnerability is a phishing vector, not a "0-day" (which these days, is a marketing term). It allows you to send a user a file to compromise their machine, not the Telegram desktop application. Telegram is therefore the channel which can be used to execute a phishing attack. An email client would also be a channel.

Kaspersky is trying to get eyeballs by checking off a bunch of boxes in the tech zeitgeist: Telegram, controversy over Telegram's security, cybercrime, cryptocurrencies and mining. They've baked a narrative that is specifically designed to market Kaspersky's services to its readers by dropping a bunch of keywords - the scenarios presented are so far removed from the standalone technicalities of the vulnerability that it's no longer even honest.

Exploitive security marketing and the uninformed journalism that follows it around is going to give me an ulcer.
(1) NYC has rent controls but not property value controls, so that does throw things off.

(2) Perhaps I should have done the numbers with 4x. The idea is the same.
There is a small chance that we will see something like Star Trek food replicators in our lifetime.
A good analogy is a bootcamp is like a personal trainer. Sure you could do jumping jacks yourself but when someone yells at you to get them done, you do it more often and faster. Some people need that extra push through.

But yes some people have plenty of self motivation and can do it themselves. The career networking is really all they need then.
>Turn Chipotle into an upscale version of Taco Bell

Taco Bell tried this in the 90s near where I lived at the time (it was called Border Bell) and it never really caught on and closed not too long after it opened.
That needs to be the new mantra for the Daily Mail.