skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I guess it's a matter of degree.

Literally! But, jokes aside, how is that amount measured? Software development (which I also had a job doing during my time in high school) seemed quite approachable. I've certainly become a better developer over time (along with everything I've continued with), but I'm still proud of what I accomplished back then. I don't feel that it was out of my depth. I was able to deliver real business value and the employer was happy.

Honestly, I find software development has been one of the easier jobs (in terms of knowledge and ability required) that I have had. Granted, I haven't had jobs in every industry out there. I expect there are easier jobs. But software development does not strike me as one that meets the necessary degree here. If someone in high school can walk into the job and deliver real business value, it does not feel like a "degree required" job to me.

In my opinion, the defining factor here seems to be how desperate employers are. On the farm, we are often quite desperate for help. Timing is critical. Leave the crop out for an extra week and you won't have a crop at all. As such, farm work is considered low-skilled work since employers have no room to be choosy. You take what you can get and deal with what comes from it. It is still better than losing the crop.

Contrast that with software developers, where there is no real pressure to hire people. Who really cares if a feature sits in the backlog for a year? It will still be there next year. That allows employers to be more picky. Don't like your current applicants? Just wait longer. As such, this industry is labeled high-skilled work. If there is any pressure to get the job done, it comes from the competition trying to do the same as you, and they are just as likely to have hiring problems in those circumstances. In reality, the amount of actual skill necessary between these two examples is probably quite comparable.
> Compared to having your own car, even the absolutely best, world class, mass transit service is just terrible.

Downtown London is a tremendous counterexample. The Tube is generally faster, sometimes dramatically so.
Pinker also looks at relative numbers a lot, to me this seems disingenuous given for example that every day an equivalent number of people as a fully loaded 747 die to car accidents alone. We have been on the brink of complete nuclear annihilation at least once, to say we're very far from another such incident would be almost mad. Pinker avoids the giant elephants in the room so sure, the fast that we're still here makes his arguments look good, but they could be very shortsighted specially if there is no one to talk about them.
Since the article hammers on about Cyc -- I architected Cyc at MCC, rebuilding the project from the bottom up, developing a layered architecture (that others then took in directions I hadn't imagined) which really emphasizes the reusability and component architecture that was possible with the lispm (I used the predecessors of them as well when I was at MIT and at other research labs). I agree with the 100K LoC in a year, in order of magnitude at least. It was definitely the most productive I have been in my life, but then again it was a research project not an end-user package.

I had two machines in my office at MCC, one with a color monitor (in addition to the stock B&W), both with maxed-out RAM (8 MW, each word I believe was 40 bits (36 bits of machine word + 4 of ECC?). I can't imagine how much it cost -- probably enough to buy a small house in Austin.

I never used the "complete" key or several of those far away ones as they were too distant from the home row. Tab completed as it had in Emacs for years (I started using Emacs in 1977 and still use it as my development environment). I still use the same "dynamic window" typing approach described in the article, but with a C++ app passing JSON data to a web app. You'll notice the article references Gene Ciccarelli -- Emacs began as his TECO init file around 1976 or so.

(I also used D-machines at PARC before moving to Cyc -- a very different experience).
> It's also common in the industry to even sign a NDA to not disclose what company you're working for.

What industry are you referring to? Because it's definitely not the software industry.
Gallery La La
If you have played a video game with a voice acting not from a famous performer/actor, those are typically done by professionals who specialize in voiceover roles, almost all these will be credited in the video game listing on imdb.com and the performer's contact or agency info is linked from there.
Of all privacy preserving approaches, I believe Differential Privacy has the strongest chance of meeting GDPR standards.
I’m not convinced Brooks actually read Pinker, as Pinker addressed at length many of the things that Brooks mentions.
I suspect your dystopias have in common that they all had utopian visions. Instead of focusing on real problems and making gradual progress they kept talking about building heaven on earth. Apparently they just needed to tear down existing institutions and kill a few people first...
Yes, it's cheaper but that's because Dropbox needs lots and lots of infrastructure and they can hire people to run it. At some point, if you have the capacity, it cheaper to build than to outsource. Dropbox found that point.

Smaller companies don't have the option to hire a whole IT team.
As someone else commented, the spec doesn't just omit running scripts via img tags, it explicitly excludes it, both the general idea of img being scriptable or interactive, and scripted SVG specifically (in the Note: part): https://dev.w3.org/html5/spec-preview/the-img-element.html#a...

I think the spec authors and browser vendors are more than savvy enough to know that "img tags don't run scripts" is a security-relevant promise that authors will rely on; I'm not so convinced it's uniquely unreliable compared to the many other security-relevant corner cases out there.

There are other reasons to treat user-provided content specially, whatever format, so maybe you end up in a similar place no matter what. I just don't want folks to be left thinking that the behavior here is unspecified or such.
You can also use a different browser.
"The American midwest is quickly becoming the next Mumbai." What you're seeing is SV outsourcing to America.
> cheaply, quickly, and effectively done in software

Hardly.

Power usage in SW(or FPGA) vs ASIC is easily an order of magnitude difference. For most battery based solutions software based signal processing is right out.

Latency is another, your CPU is going to introduce both jitter and long latency compared to a discrete software solution.

Software also can't handle raw speeds involved in a lot of things. There's not a single CPU out there that can natively handle 5GHz wifi off of the wire. That's why even direction conversion SDRs use a frequency mixer to lower the data rate down to something a DSP can handle.
On a related note, I just quit one of my contracts, but in this case a fellow developer was asked to become a SCRUM master a few months ago. The word "master" must have gotten to her head because that's what she thought she was. It turned into a micromanaging nightmare and she started trying to track my whereabouts and hours, even going so far as to tell me who I can and cannot talk to, as if she were a manager (but not even our CEO would treat me like that). I finally had to tell her she wasn't my manager and that we're equals. Well she didn't like that and told me "I'm the SCRUM master!" and that I don't understand the agile process. I had even talked to my actual manager about this the week before, who confirmed that yes, a SCRUM master is nobody's manager and cannot tell anyone one what to do. Things came to a head and now I'm outta there and all their objectives will now go red, all because someone who had some perceived power thought that they could skip years of training, experience, and wisdom, and go straight to "manager" (and a bad one at that).
I’m sorry for your girlfriend’s experience. If it makes you feel any better, it cuts both ways.

For example, I was in an Uber Pool yesterday in SF. My driver picks up the next passengers (two women), and they refuse to get in after asking what my name is. (Who even asks that?!)

They cancel, and we pick up another passenger who’s also female. Keep in mind that my driver and I are both of Indian descent. She instantaneously showed signs of fear and pretended to be asleep while throwing herself on me. I felt a mixture of pity and anger. Mostly anger though, why would you assume that two brown guys are going to rape you? Not to trivialize what happens to women, but it’s certainly an odd reaction to have.

In short, I’m glad I don’t live in SF anymore. I thought things were bad in 2015-2016, but what happens there now is much, much worse.
How does something like SVG even end up in HTML spec? It seems like there could be millions of such technologies but we end up with things like JS, SVG, XSLT.
Google Australia engineering head leaves to start ocean nonprofit
Is there a framework that could communicate the most appropriate role of a given hospital for those trying to evaluate their care options? For example, "given the individual's parameters X and Y and Z, the hospital in question is in quadrant N of the individual's sphere of care options. This implies a role of [e.g. emergency use only, etc]."

It just seems like we need a more objective idea of _what a given hospital really is and can be_ for a given individual. Such a model would naturally expose economic opportunities for providers who have the resources to open small competitor clinics, while conserving resources like money, energy, etc. for care seekers who can only be excused for thinking "sick = hospital".

If we can't get needed anti-monopoly regulators to do their job, we can at least start to find points of leverage with which to educate the public on the cost-benefit and alternatives in a more straightforward way.
i never claimed he wasn't entitled. i have simply stated i am tired of his complaints and rants. and my point is that the world he has helped nurture is not without its travesties, so maybe he should concentrate on that rather than constantly bitching about what other people have built.

it would be nice if you stopped twisting my comments to say what you think they say. and i don’t even understand your retort anyway.
Perfectly valid, but it won't evaluate as a full SVG document, just as the initial document snapshot. Kind of like loading a webpage with scripts disabled, you'll see "something", but that might not actually be what the document was designed to look like at all (so if you're using SVG as <img> source, only static SVG documents will look the way they're supposed to).
> You'd end up going to a local convenience store and paying 2x the price for the item because you need it now. Your grocery budget becomes hugely inflated, and you still end up buying the same necessities.

I see this at a lot at my local 7-11, many poorer people do a lot of their grocery shopping there even though an aldi is 5 minutes walk away (so it's actually closer for some of them, literally across the road) and three other supermarkets are under 15 minutes walk. I suspect there is some sort of psychological effect (possibly from advertising) that is compelling them to go to 7-11 instead of somewhere cheaper and that they aren't making a conscious financial decision.
A very good read. An interesting point from the article: ">>Also, using an embedded key value store alongside an embedded indexing engine like Blevesearch in a compiled language like Golang, means you can truly deploy single binaries with no external dependencies and no need for post deployment setups".

I think that most small, medium or even large companies which operate in b2b or even in niche b2c markets who would never reach the massive scale of Google/FB/LinkedIns don't need complex architectures involving large scale databases or micro services. Yet they spent large amount of money for building datacenters, hiring large team for maintaining the architecture including system admins, database admins, developers etc.

P.S The author seems to be a developer from Nigeria. It's not very often you get interesting articles from outside Asia or Western countries.
just limited by local availability, cost, coverage restrictions, preexisting conditions,etc. Simple, right?
Sometimes the access codes do provide e-text, which in this case would then be providing access to someone else (the buyer) other than who originally paid for the hard text (the seller, who is taking a "profit" of sorts). Publishers do typically restrict the access to only the semester the student (the seller) is in that class, however, so it's just temporary access for the buyer.
Ghost Dancers Past and Present
Gramclick – Reach your social network followers faster
For me it is hand wavy doomsday scenarios that makes me skeptical, along with hand wavy predictions that don't come true. My thought is that if it truly was as serious as people say, the evidence and argument would feel a lot more solid and there would be less fearmongering.
I live in SF. My wife has started taking uber pool because she can no longer deal with the verbal and physical harassment on muni buses and trains by homeless and/or mentally unstable people (both men and women). I've had on multiple occasions had guys with no pants on smelling of feces sit next to me. I don't want to deal with that so I pay two to four bucks more and take an Uber Pool.
I remembering reading this a while ago. EFI just tries to do too much and thus is too complicated.

Let alone the concerns that secure boot and other OSes.
Unfortunately taking risks to better yourself and having it work out are the exception not the rule. And I have to assume that a non-socialist society supports this better in almost every way, based on historical evidence in my own head. (flawed as that may be)
I thought much the same but quadcopters are too slow for an effective solution.
Oh so it’s a conspiracy
False equivalence.

The US has no regulation that requires the installation of spyware or face a fine or jail. China does (https://www.deepdotweb.com/2017/08/12/chinese-government-req...).

The US has no laws requiring firewalls to block or censor content from foreign countries. The US doesn't block VPNs and there is no law against them.

Yes, they try to snoop on communications, but in US domestic citizens and companies can resist with encryption and in the courts, and in general, a warrant is required for legal access. Having the NSA snoop on your conversations or use 0-days to hack isn't the same as being told to put security backdoors by the government and go to jail if you don't.

And "aggressive filtering" is your euphemism for the Great Firewall? I'd call sending to to jail for selling a VPN a little more than "aggressive filtering"

I've lived in China and to call it "aggressive filtering" is a pretty nice way of putting it.
I'm the "target audience" but the use of English made me flinch.
Just asked my fiance who works at a after school program for K-5th graders. She says that although she's not sure if these kids use more technology, the only correlation she notices is that kids who can hold a pencil/pen properly will write more then kids who just grip the pencil/pen (implying that their holding it incorrectly).
Agreed.

The issue is not debt here, it's not showing up for a court date. The exact same thing would happen if you got a ticket and had to appear before a judge and didn't show. Or if you had a child custody trial and just blew off the date.
Is there anything for supervised document classification? Like raw plain text -> features?
1. Garmin is in Olathe, not KC.

2. Fair on the Cerner and DST point, although I'd argue that they aren't particularly good opportunities to work for.

3. Three (or four, if you want to include Garmin) medium sized companies in a city aren't particularly great if you're trying to represent success.
Web Development Trends for 2018 That Will Be Ruling This Year
Has anyone done a serious analysis of the scalability of air taxis

You mean... helicopters? Because they already exist and have limited use cases.
Yes. When forced to, due to bad traffic, people will use other forms of transport. Fast, enclosed, point-to-point, on-demand personal transport (cars and trucks) seem to be better than other modes. Why don't we fix the problems with personal transport instead making that mode so broken that people are forced to use other methods. Go Boring Company.
The blog posts are how I originally discovered Candy Japan (which is a great service by the way. I definitely recommend). But we are a weird demographic. I doubt the majority of his customers are HN readers.
It is interesting the other comments in this area are vague and emotional, whereas the only thought out comment is downvoted because it is critical of global warming. This constant dynamic is what makes me skeptical of the whole global warming thing.
Ah, right.

I suppose it could also be argued that the kernel is also unnecessarily complex as well?
Ah. I understand. For the projects I ever did on consultancy basis, I've setup a replica db for database stuff. And backups every 3-24 hours to s3 using glacier or infrequent access class depending on the nature of data. I keep a limited number of db snapshots usually. Some people want everything. For cases like that it's always glacier. I should learn how to store just the incremental changes but again, I've never worked on data more than a few gigs.

For standard data like images or files uploaded by users, I pray that s3 doesn't ever crap out on me and lose my data. Given AWS's guarantees, Ive always felt comfortable with that. Never worked on anything so critical that 1 file lost out of a hundred billion would be an issue.
Reading about the interglacials makes me worry about what happens when the interglacial ends and we lose half of our farmland.
What percentage of the greenhouse effect do these industries contribute? Everyone focusses on CO2, but its greenhouse effect is minimal.
The median home price in Seattle proper passes $1million. SF median home price passes $2million. Microsoft/google busses start to get rocks thrown at them, hire private security escorts.
google docs and confluence.
Interesting. So communist countries must be carbon neutral.
The Birth of Calculus (1986)
What's your method of assessing whether the bad choices come from being cognitively tired or cognitively lazy? What's the marker you look for?
Good to see that China is taking a step against plastics and is becoming more green
Those who find global warming convincing should buy up all the soon to be beach front property while it is still cheap.
Shouldn't there be some sort of law that says you can't be fired over a court date?
In my view, full-stack is principally a business term, meant to communicate how many people you have to hire, or whether you can skimp on hiring.
Just to be clear, I'm not suggesting that our society doesn't need skeptical journalism - if anything we need more of it. As you point out, we have been failed many times by the media in the past. I've read plenty of articles from The Intercept over the years that have been informative and thought provoking.

The bias I was referring to was not so much one of pro Russia but more one related to the particular focus that Greenwald/The Intercept seems to have on American policy. If you read their "About Us" page (https://theintercept.com/about/) it mentions that their mission is to "expose corruption and injustice __wherever__ they find it and hold the powerful accountable.". Personally I find it very interesting that they rarely seem to find examples of this in other contexts - the reporting is predominantly about American/western issues. I don't think I'm stretching to suggest that Greenwald/The Intercept wear their disdain for western foreign policy/hegemony openly.

This doesn't negate their reporting or perspective but it does make me question what impact this has on the conclusions they draw about the Russia issue, particularly when the public record shows questions about the role of Russia in relation to organizations such as Wikileaks. As you said - "There is a reason for the Russian fear mongering and not Chinese fear mongering, Saudi Arabian fear mongering". Personally I believe being skeptical also includes being open to the idea that extraordinary events can occur and the growing body of public evidence seems to suggest that the Russian influence was far greater than previous efforts.
That doesn't mean the Tube is good - it means the roads are bad.

Fix the roads (probably impossible in London), and no one would think the Tube is that great.

But newer cities have that chance, they can build good road networks, with the houses far enough apart to avoid congestion.

I hate close, dense, cities. I like space. I like to have a my own yard, and my own private space.

Not everyone shares this Politically Correct dream, of dense cities with lots of buses and subways. It's hard to argue against, just like every in-vogue politically correct thing is hard to argue against.

So you won't hear a lot of public disagreement.

But privately? Things are quite different, people are just not interested. Well some people. I would never imagine everyone is. Different people like different things.

Dense cities need Mass Transit. It's terrible, but it's the only practical option. So if you chose to live in a dense city, you have to accept that.

But less dense cities? No only do they not need Mass Transit, they can't do it anyway (there's not enough demand to make it work). And there are people who prefer it.

And then you have cities in between...... With either the best of both worlds, or the worst, depending on the city.
I am a pretty happy Windows user and developer since Windows 3.1.

My main reason to use Linux distributions was to be able to do university work at home.

After all I wouldn't be able to buy an Aix or DG/UX license, the UNIXes we had on campus before computing department started to deploy Linux based PCs.

I always dual booted and tried a few times to just use it as desktop, but eventually gave up on it.

My travel netbook and mobile devices are the only gear still running some form of Linux.
Are we going to start talking about broken arms in HNs, too?
Fragile X syndrome neurons restored using CRISPR/Cas9-guided activation strategy
> cold hard facts about the arctic.

Forgive the reddit-esque comment, but...Nice.
So if the earth heats up, and more water evaporates, and more clouds form to block the sun, will this lead to a global cooling effect? My understanding is this was the old worry, that all our pollutants were going to block out the sun and lead to a new ice age, or at least the Matrix.
How does lonliness change your mindset? Saddness? Depression?
Yeah, but that's still not what critical thinking means.
And yet they don't use that power to threat OEMs to lose contracts if they don't behave nicely regarding updates.
Breaking the chain, I was amazed at King's Quest V and Conquests of the Longbow when I was 8 or 9 and sent a letter out asking how they made it and how I could learn to make something like that, never got a response.
A lead developer is certainly not a manager and is in no position to rethink someone's employment. A lead developer can lead and guide, and generally make technical decisions, but must do so with humility and respect. I've been a lead developer and have never used my "authority" to dictate what people do, but that's just my style.
That's creative thinking, but not critical thinking.
Hard work is one of those things that's necessary, but not sufficient, so it all but begs for survivor bias. It may well have been the case in the past, when the economy was less abstract, that hard work could translate directly into material necessities (provided you were privileged to own land!) As far as I can tell, that's simply not the case in a society like this one.