skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Very good question. It'd be better if they'd just written a tl;dr version of the article and put it at the top.
Aaargh20318 et al are making the claim that it is always inescapably like this and there's nothing you can do about it, because every day of programming is always fundamentally unlike anything you have ever done before. All I am suggesting is that this is an exaggeration.

Doing something about it takes some commitment, however. Nobody estimates well without having practiced it, and been honest with themselves about where it went wrong.
I had a job once where we used Lotus Notes. I'll take extensibility over integration any day.
I use (for example) 50 libraries, and want to submit bug reports and pull requests to all of them over the course of 5 years...

and your attitude is "well.. if you don't make 50 accounts you don't deserve it!". Really? And also that's why we have package repositories... npm, nuget, PECL, composer, should i also register on 500 websites just so i can build a website or two?

Also, github is free for open-source projects, but it's paid for teams and enterprises. it's a win-win situation where they do social good and get paid for private service.

Alternatives & competition is good, but too much competition is not that great either in this case.
Well if Threadripper 2 can do 32 cores at ~4GHz@250W is there a good reason we cant have an Epyc SKU that does the same? (So that we can take two of these and put them in a machine).
After 10 years of adjusting the measurement method, the number is finally going down.
I usually say this to my direct reports- "we have to do the review, but I promise there won't be any surprises!" And then I focus the review on how I value their contribution, how they positively influence their coworkers and clients. And if we are in-progress on improving something, we set those things as written goals for the next year.
There is a lot of anti-union propaganda going on in this thread. I call it propaganda because most of it has no root in reality.

Having an organized workforce should be the cost of doing business. If you can only survive as a corporation that does the bare minimum to take care of employees you have no right to be an employer in the free market. Most corporations _can_ function with organized labor, but would rather not because it cuts into profits.
I did a holiday stent with them while I was in university.

I was a package runner, so I would take the packages from the truck to the house, while the driver could organize everything and get things ready for the next few houses.

The worst part was the super short breaks. We would stop for maybe 5-8 minutes, piss, and grab food to go.

There were a few things from my experience there that stick out in my mind:

- There was this weird implied situation with running. It was iterated to me multiple times that UPS does not encourage me to run, but I needed to do everything I could to efficiently get the package to the house and back. So they were basically telling us to run, even though they couldn't specifically say it.

- On my route one day, there was a van following us and stealing packages that we were dropping off. We had no idea until they scared the shit out of some poor lady, who ended up calling customer support. Apparently, she saw me, and even motioned for me to leave the package... but I never saw her- I just dropped it off. When she went to the door to get it, the thieves were taking it off her porch. I'm glad she said she motioned me to leave it, because if not, UPS wanted to hold me personally responsible for the loss.

- We had to pick up packages from a handful of UPS stores in the area. We even had a bigger truck that day to hold the capacity. There was zero organization to it, it was just throw everything that could fit on the truck. We had it filled to the TOP, but we still had to do some deliveries. I had no idea where to find the packages, because they got all mixed up... So we ended up crushing some packages because we had to climb the mountain of boxes to find them. I always felt bad about that day because I stepped on a styrofoam box of omaha steaks and completely destroyed it, but we delivered it anyways.
Aaaah, the infamous "10 minutes" sale pitch.

I think it's getting 10 minutes years old to this day.
This is a cartoonishly naive idea of the operations of a union.

1) Unions set wage minimums and working conditions. You're free to negotiate for more. Underachieving workers receive more, and overachieving workers also receive more because the floor for their negotiations are raised.

2) Employees who do not like the operations of their union have a democratic stake in changing it, or can run for leadership positions themselves. Without a union, their only option for a grievance is to work elsewhere, which is not always feasible (location, family, accrued benefits).

3) Workers have skin in the game and union dues to pay. It's not unheard of for workers to threaten union leadership with non-payment to force a radical leadership change, and there's always the more measured approach of union elections.

4) This is a critical mass problem. There was no decrease in productivity when unionized workplaces were the standard. Without unions you have skyrocketing productivity but wage stagnation. Eventually the wage stagnation turns into a drag on productivity, but in the meantime the company gets rich. It depends on what you prioritize.

EDIT: patmcc has a much better response than my own.
Kontena Pharos 1.1.0 Released – now with even better customisation capabilities
The availability zones in us-east-1 have unique legacy problems related to companies that would select one AZ and deploy all their huge amount of infrastructure to it. IIRC, Netflix did this, for one example.

Every company that did this was picking us-east-1a specifically, because it was the first AZ in the list. It added up, and now the us-east-1a datacenter can't add capacity fast enough to support the growth of all the companies "stuck" on it (because their existing infra is already deployed there, and they still need to grow.) Effectively, us-east-1a is "full."

Which means, of course, that companies would find out from friends or from AWS errors that us-east-1a is full, and so choose us-east-1b...

AWS fixed this a few years in by making the AZs in a region randomized respective to an AWS root account (so my AWS account's us-east-1a is your AWS account's us-east-1{b,c,d}.) So new companies were better "load balanced" onto the AZs of a region.

But, because those companies still exist and are still growing on the specific DC that was us-east-1a (and to a lesser extent us-east-1b), those DCs are still full. So, for any given AWS account, one-and-a-half of the AZs in us-east-1 will be hard to deploy anything to.

Suggestions:

• for greenfield projects, just use us-east-2.

• for projects that need low-latency links to things that are already deployed within us-east-1, run some reservation actions to see how much capacity you can grab within each us-east-1 AZ, which will let you determine which of your AZs map to the DCs previously known as us-east-1a and us-east-1b. Then, use the other ones. (Or, if you're paying for business-level support, just ask AWS staff which AZs those are for your account; they'll probably be happy to tell you.)
This is an unpopular opinion here, but the facts stand.

Mozilla makes money disappear. Their 2016 revenues were in excess of $520M, and their claimed output was the Quantum browser.

The two largest R&D verticals seem to be their browser and the codecs group. That still doesn't account for expenses of $520M in 2016, and much much more in 2017.

Where is all the money going, Mozilla?
As Peter Thiel pointed out in Zero to One, in an idealized free market, profit is impossible. Pure competition drives profit margins to zero. This can be easily observed in highly competitive industries, like groceries or gas stations. They operate on razor-thin margins. The only way to make big money in competitive markets is huge scale, which explains consolidation and the drive of money to the top. All substantial profitability comes from friction or monopoly (including localized monopoly, like not having a full range of choices for your employee-based insurance).

But I digress.

At any rate, the Japanese system clearly works, while the American system is clearly broken. One is selling the same product for half the price of the other. Assuming I'm right about the key differentiator being the Japanese price controls (I could be wrong), then it really makes me wonder why we aren't trying that. Seems like a great way to get costs under control (even shrinking), while preserving much of the complex market and avoiding radical change to almost 20% of the economy.

I think "critical utility services" touches on the importance, but doesn't go far enough. I believe a health care system that denies care purely out of poverty is immoral. A health care system that is the primary cause of bankruptcy for the middle class is immoral. A system that traps employees in jobs they hate, for fear of losing (or even changing) their insurance is both immoral and un-American - what's more American than quitting your job to get a better one, or start your own business? So our system is not just an economic failure, it's a moral failure. It's a stain on our honor and an insult to our values.

In conclusion, I do not give a fuck about "free market" here. I am not putting economic ideology ahead of moral imperatives, and I'm not choosing ideology over observable facts. If I wanted to choose ideology over economic reality, I'd be a communist.
This is a quite embarrassing bug because it affects probably the most used class in Java.
However I think using += for the Strings is not that popular among experienced developers because they want to be sure that no unnecessary Strings are created in the pool.
I assume the execution times would be similar with the optimizations you mentioned, but according to Effective Java(3rd edition, published this year) using += for Strings in the loop is still 6,5 times slower than using StringBuilder. I need to check it myself.
> It works both ways. If you're too lazy to learn a service I chose to host my code, you don't deserve my code.

Not really, you just get less people using, contributing, and testing your project - software should try and stay in the known, not scattered around sourceforge, google code ... etc
How come Facebook sees 50% where Google sees 35% in the U.S.?

https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html#tab=per-...

Maybe the Facebook app is more aggressive in steering towards IPv6 than browsers.
More like the Fall and Rise
>I could buy a bitcoin from someone else who has one with local currency, I lower my risk of ruin from currency inflation by paying a price that I deem reasonable

You could just use dollars, euros, or yuan instead. Which is what people currently do in that situation.

Or, be like the mobsters and take payment in goods like olive oil, stolen art, or drugs.
At least with Objective-C it's pretty trivial to just use C or C++ or whatever in most places and Objective-C minimally. Swift is a little more of a headache in that regard.
I thought that was just because the UK had a different culture or historical tradition on free speech.
Reminds me a lot of the show Silicon Valley, where one of the characters has something like a Phd in artificial intelligence but ends up writing code for an app which dynamically turns your face into a smiley face (i.e. snapchat)..
UX Challenges for the Next 25 Years [video]
> If anything in your performance review is a surprise, then I have failed as a manager.

I hear that a lot and tend to agree with the statement. I even used to say it in the opposite "If I get a bad review, that's a signal that I need a new job, because I think I'm doing well and I must have a terrible manager if he'd wait a whole year to tell me otherwise".

And though I'm going to counter it, it's not inaccurate -- an employee shouldn't land in a review expecting that they've been doing wonderfully only to find out that they've been stinking up the place (or vice-versa), but the best manager that I have ever had, Lou, did surprise me at my first review. I wrote about it in another comment on this post so I won't rehash it, but I came to understand this as one of the benefits of performance review time.

Managers are rarely thinking about ways that a top-performing employee can improve, but everyone has something they can improve and a good manager will provide feedback to a staff member if there are areas that they, and others are noticing, that the employee may not be seeing. Because "top performers" don't require the attention that other staff might, a formal review may be the only time that a manager really takes the time to think about them in the context of "improvement". In addition, it's easier to bring up areas of improvement during this time, because it is set aside as one of the purposes of a formal review. In the couple of decades that I've been working, I've had two managers offer me anything in the way of "areas for improvement" -- both times were at reviews -- outside of a review it has never come up.

So yes, it is obscene for a manager to wait until review time to bring up a year's worth of failures, but being surprised by a bit of negative feedback -- provided it's not "Fix this or your getting a pink-slip" kind of feedback, isn't necessarily a management failure. It was quite helpful to me and I count Lou among about 3 people who I feel honored to have known[0] because their impact, caring and advice was life-changing for me.

[0] The other two were my HS programming teacher (who's class I enjoyed in Junior High), the late, great, Mr. Dzwonkiewicz who made me love writing software at a young age, and the woman who cured my social anxiety and made me enjoy public speaking -- the director of To Kill a Mockingbird that I performed in as a young teenager. Her name, though, escapes me. :)
Should also mention that it's common for a strike to last many days.
And for the users. Given that it's fairly technical software, it's reasonable to expect that folks would search the issue queue before submitting an issue. If the issue queue was split across multiple sources, issues would exist in one system and not the other.

Sorry if you disagree, but giving clear instructions about how to report issues and limiting vectors is fair, logical, and incredibly common and a best practice.
Another important caveat to snprintf: because glibc's snprintf might use dynamic memory allocation it's not async-signal-safe. OpenBSD notably rewrote their snprintf implementation to be async-signal-safe (with the exception of floating-point formatting). They did this so extension functions like dprintf(), commonly used in signal handlers for debugging or logging, would be easier to implement, and also because a lot of software assumes that (or doesn't even consider whether) snprintf is async-signal-safe.

I wonder whether glibc's dprintf() is async-signal-safe....
Swift needs its version of Django/Ruby-on-rails...
I don't want to detract from the message of the article, but:

> For example, an eater might search for udon, but end up ordering soba. In this case, the eater may have been looking for something similar to udon, such as soba and ramen, instead of only being interested in udon. As humans, it might seem obvious; Udon and soba are somewhat similar, Chinese and Japanese are both Asian cuisines.

Aren't udon and soba both Japanese?
In the last century there were also practical concerns like making sure soldiers could understand each others' accents.
Appreciate all the hard work! TShock is great :)
> I feel it's important to really stress this on a site like Hacker News whose readership prides itself on being informed and rising above propaganda.

It's hard to take this last comment seriously when all that's been provided is 15 year old anecdotal evidence about wage rates and an article about income equality which itself poses a different explanation for its cause.
Angel Vision Investors – submit your pitchdeck to investors
and paid well "enough"
If clusters of these tanks are eventually deployed, it could have some surprising effects on local marine life and might be a good way to jumpstart a marine preserve. [0]
[0]https://www.abcactionnews.com/news/local-news/clusters-of-ma...
Is the difference of physical cores vs modern SMT that big for gaming?

I'd assume given asset size they're already dealing with a large amount of cache misses, and if you're stalling for a memory read anyway then it seems less impactful than on a high-thoroughput tuned scientific workload.
People keep implying that Microsoft is somehow going to break git and somehow use it to destroy people who want to give away their code.

You can just change your remotes and push to a different server. The protocol was designed to be distributed and prevent a single point of failure.

Also, Microsoft and people who develop on Microsoft tools realise that there are network effects of being able to share code. This was just a side benefit and not altruism. What they were after was Electron, since that's a very popular way of writing desktop applications currently.
>Meh. The biggest data center (ChinaTel's Inner Mongolia Information Park) consumes about 150MWe, assuming all of it becomes waste heat it's basically nothing: a nuclear reactor (each plant has 2~8) releases 2Wt for each We it produces, and they're usually sized between 800 and 1300MWe.

Seems a shame to let all that heat go to waste. Surely we put that waste heat to use and a distillery or desalinization plant or something.
No kidding huh. He's doubling down on "criteria" though. Gets all butthurt when somebody politely tries to point it out. Cites "common usage," which is for commoners, chortle chortle, and doesn't make it right.
And fedex will gladly go on a hiring spree to meet the new demand! Its not like they have dormant capacity to just swallow a permanent 10% bump in packages.
> If you're a VP and suddenly someone asks, "Hey, can you promote or fire Person X?"

Why would anyone suggest such a thing?

Absent new information shouldn't the default action be to humanely leave person X alone so they can keep doing work and paying their bills without costing the company more?

I must be very naive in the ways of management...

EDIT: This is a real question; what's with the down votes? Should I expect to be treated like this at work?
I'm not sure if you've ever done physical labour, but you need to keep yourself hydrated over an 8 hour shift. Especially if you're working in 90 degree weather.
Why aren't issues, etc., part of the repo and so pulled (optionally) to duplicate repos. Shouldn't web front ends be views of federated content -- having issues in one git web front-end not get propagated to others for the same project is surely a major flaw.
https://stats.foldingathome.org/teams

Folding@Home already has team stats with points.
If you read his Letters, you will understand that you are absolutely not correct. Tolkien's views are bound up entirely with his stories. He explains precisely how and provides interpretations on many occasions. You are seriously misrepresenting his fantasy works, not just his personal views. To all appearances, you are speaking whereof you know close to nothing. I apologize if this comes across as adversarial, but this is a serious mis-reading of a man who felt very deeply about the subject.

> more consideration and without requiring the use of "evil,"

Unfortunately, whether you like or or not, there is a such thing as evil for most people. You appear to like "nuance", which appears to be code for some sliding relativistic scale. Yes, dehumanization is bad, but that's not what Tolkien is doing when he talks about evil, whether you think so or not. That's why, for example, torturing information out of Orcs is unjustifiable in-story regardless of circumstance - because to engage in such an act is to be an Orc, which is a mode of being (alluded to in the Letter I quoted)- or why taking up the Ring causes good to be perverted into evil.
Was your route in the last case optimized? Or did you have to figure out the delivery sequence on your own?
If you are the only one giving a damn about getting things done then it means you are in the wrong team. All teams have their rock stars and their slower devs but if they are to be called a "team" then they should all care even if they can't contribute the same amount of quality or quantity of work.
I would not say that GH offers the best service. There are lots of features that they are lacking compared to BitBucket and GitLab. I think it is about the interface and that we are just too used to it and lazy to retrain around brains... again
Parent was referring to latency optimization, I believe.

But I'd assume most of those folks have ML / other slower models constantly churning away in the background, even if their HFT reactions are highly tuned and simpler.
I like go as a language, but its lack of package management is the single reason I no longer use it.
As if public transit in America is any better: in SF BART and Caltrain trains are late on a regular basis already without the need for strikes...
JEP 335: Deprecate the Nashorn JavaScript Engine
I didnt think HN needed a downvote button until this thread.

Quick Union story- Was an engineer at a factory. Foam pieces were blocking my path to the process room. Like, there was a tiny pathway, probably not shoulder length wide that I'd turn and squeeze in, and that was the path to my room.

The floor was a wreck, something bad happened with the temperatures + wax or something. The floor was a mess, foam everywhere. This was my job and I was failing tonight. Messing with temps and wax constantly, checking if chemicals were weird. Pretty much grasping at straws to fix this issue.

Well back to the blockage. I couldnt get to my room without either clearing the foam or walking around the factory.

So I took the piece of foam and tossed it into the garbage bin behind me.

Oh what a mistake. The next morning my boss was swamped with last night's mess and citation/form/write up that I was doing Union Jobs.

I was punished by having to take 2 days off unpaid. They paid a worker an entire day's salary, and I got some sort of negative mark on my record. My boss wasnt happy about this despite him being understanding of the silliness.

This was one of many many things that got to the point of hating unions. 95% of people just wanted to work. Then you had people that abused the system to the point that it didnt work.
There is Vapor. But unlike Rails, the timing for something like this is way gone.
maybe most facebook visits are from mobile and that mobile providers are more likely to have IP scracity issues (my speculation based on the fact that mobile providers tend to do CGNAT more than residential providers).
(How many servers they use it on * 1000)

If that is 1000 servers, then it's a million in savings. Also think about it in the way of all the servers they have now + all the servers they'll use it on in the future.
You must be browsing a different HN than I am. On my HN, there's a lot of support for unions, including voices advocating for software developers to unionize while we're still in position of power over employers.
It can be much, much worse. I would offer in reply:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoils_system

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tammany_Hall
> No clue why people don't just do that though

Most somewhat larger C shops will have their own internal utility library or they'll use one of the more popular batteries included packages which typically takes care of memory allocation, string handling, lists and a bunch of other useful stuff.
But if specialist work is a commodity in china, wouldnt that make it no longer 'specialist'?
Populism is 'supporting the concerns of ordinary people', demagoguery is 'apealing to popular desires and prejudices at the expense of rational argument'. Distrust of populism itself is misplaced distrust, since while these two concepts do appear at the same time on occasion, I'm not sure of a causal or even correlated relationship.