skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>> Solution: Use a NullObject or Optional type instead of ever passing a null. An empty collection is a great alternative.

That doesn't work if you are building a library, or working with other software developers. The alternative is to have a strictly typed language that forces the user to pick the type of the variable.

It doesn't also fix the problem of whether you function is returning a functioning result or an error.

That's one of the thing that I like about idiomatic Rust. The Result/Option types are implemented as standard language features. You get to use them from the get-go and they reduce lots of if/then/null friction.
You left out those that might say that buying Bitcoin at any price is idiotic.
> In the modern era, you should expect that the privacy policy contains the details of everything that's logged.

Perhaps corporations with a history of abusive tactics and legal shenanigans, would prefer to follow a different path?
RFC 3271 – The Internet is for Everyone (2002)
> The same thing confuses me with smartphones.

I like how John Siracusa explains the concept of "naked robotic core"

To paraphrase, the phone is the computing unit, and the user customizes it to fit it's usage.

People that never dropped a phone in their life can use it as is. People who work in construction can put hardcore shells that survive multiple floor drops. Those who like furry cases can go wild and those who want to build accessories around the phone have a smaller target to do so.

Seeing it this way, having the phone thin enough than you can put the case you want without the whole package being bulky is a feature.

To touch on the laptops, a few grams shoved off won't matter and don't justify a huge sacrifice. But the size and weight drop we had from the 15" Lombard laptops to today's 15" don't all happen in dramatically, and keeping a goal of having the next machine thinner than the previous one can help achieve huge progress in the long term.

I am not a fan of the current keyboards, but I can't throw them the stone for trying to make things thinner and lighter. I was super happy to see the lighter 2013~2015 models, and I don't want them to just settle and say "we're good enough for the next 20 years, we don't care anymore".
It's not perfect but doing it in a pre-push hook can be useful. Unfortunately there's no post-receive hook on client-side, which could have been useful in this situation...
Yes that was hugely important. You had a machine that was entirely safe to use - no risk of exposure to questionable content or malicious code, no risk of breaking it because the OS and BASIC were in ROM - and fully documented down to the purpose of every byte in memory. Literally the only limit was your own imagination and ingenuity. That kind of experience doesn't really exist anymore, even the RPi doesn't come close.
I lived in the Bay Area for almost a decade until around 2005, the Presidio in San Francisco was my last address. I had a choice to stay - but I decided to go back to Germany. Wonderful city (for the most part), wonderful landscape, great climate, and I'll forever miss it - but different people have different priorities. I (still) don't really care where I live, but Europe (most of it) is hard to beat as an overall package deal. When you are young you don't care about much that you do care about in your forties or later.

About high incomes: What's the point of high income when you have to use it to buy things you otherwise get as part of the package anyway - or, more frequently, that no money can buy because the society as a whole has to provide it (includes the soft stuff like political climate and how much some arts of the population think they have to protect themselves from other parts)? I understand and accept when different people choose differently, but if there is only a single argument, a single data point "my income" then I see a lack of vision (almost literally).
Yes, i know.

I really don't want to say "MacOS > Unix" because of any reasons i mentioned. I also had ArchLinux as main OS on my Desktop, and also tried a new KDE Flavor.

But for me personally it was never as good as MacOS. Maybe i wasn't trying hard enough, or don't want to loose any spent $ on MacOS only software. Dunno. Anyway i just hope for myself that i can get a great MacBook again ;)

(What i missed the most on MacOS was always a fast and keyboard focused window manager like 2bwm. In the end i was able to recreate this behavior with hammerspoon and some custom lua scripts in combination with alfred. MacOS just looks sometimes a bit bloated with all these rounded egdes, drop shadows etc.)
In the anaerobic environment of a landfill paper takes an extremely long time to break down. There have been excavations of landfills where they found 60 year old newspapers that were still readable. There was so little oxygen in the pile, the process of breaking down the starches, cellulose and ink was taking place with inefficient anaerobic processes rather than much more efficient aerobic processes.

Long story short, a landfill is not the same as a compost heap. Compost heaps are routinely turned over and disturbed to ensure that oxygen permeates through to the core of the heap. A landfill, on the other hand, is explicitly designed not to do that, in order to contain potentially hazardous materials that may leach out of the waste contained therein.
While I agree that a proof of the Riemann hypothesis is unlikely to matter for cryptographical purposes, neither does the AKS primality test. As with many asymptotically efficient algorithms, the constants are simply too large for it to be practical.
Stupid Apple - I blame Schiller.

They won’t support 32Gb ram because it might decrease battery life and requires them to reengineer the logic board but they’re totally cool with a fragile ass keyboard GLUED to a battery! Really there’s no way to call this anything other than insanity.

I remember the media used to talk about the ‘halo effect’ - well I’m someone who has Almost every MBP between 2002-2012 and every iPhone until the 7 plus.... right now I doubt they’ll make a real pro laptop and so I’m likely gonna switch to a Dell XPS. /end frustration
There are all sorts of aspects to this. In terms of the bigger, longer term trends, I think the dynamic described by Thomas Picketty is the most important aspect. Long term trends towards increased wealth disparity.

On the other hand, at the micro level people actually experience, I think the cultural dynamic is more important. It determines how people feel about the economy.

The people she talks to believed their educations and backgrounds (most of them grew up in middle-class homes) would guarantee some financial stability

Upward mobility is ideologically important to any major, modern political camp. Few deal with downward mobility in any way. Individuals will have a much tougher time politically tolerating being poorer than their parents (or their cohort) than just being poor. Losing is more emotional than winning and the grudge lasts longer than the opposite.

Ideologically, I think most of us would say that social class should not be inherited. Emotionally, few of us can live with downward moves in the economic hierarchy. It creates an unmistakable feeling of having been robbed of one's birthright.
You're overcomplicating it, use pytest :P

def test_some():
assert False is True

(no need for imports, classes and special assertion methods if you're just writing a simple test)
I'd like a laptop with cherry mx keys, also in future a screen won't be needed if we use VR so some kind of dock for motion controllers could be a thing.
This is the usual excuse to justify questionable design decisions. It ignores which information customers use to make their decisions and how we have whole business sectors that do nothing else than control and shape this information. (PR, marketing and advertising)

By the same logic, if a crappy movie (by reviews) nevertheless earns a good profit on the first weekends due to an intense marketing campaign and flashy, misleading trailers, that would magically make it a good movie, because obviously "customers wanted that".
Yeah, quiet but goes to 100C constantly.
Once I get the razer I'll check what's the temps/loudness there.
But with the MBP, I turn the fans up all the time, to avoid burning my fingers when I type :/
I apologise, it was 1am and I miscommunicated, I listed a subset with a very front-end heavy bias. I transitioned from back-end roles to front-end in the second half of my career. I also do (have done):

* Recommendation engines (less relevant now a lot of it is easily achievable with tools like Spark)

* Data processing pipelines

* Search indexing, optimisation, and relevancy tuning for millions of products

* Actual database model definition and business logic (possibly where the confusion was, i kinda meant to say everything between database and request/response layer, when all I really said was data modelling).

* Weird stuff like integrate Django’s model layer seamlessly with RPC frameworks. Essentially you could define “foreign keys” that worked across service boundaries and they’d work transparently and decently optimised.

* Systems architecture. Defining service and communication boundaries, message queues, pub/sub etc.

There’s probably a bit more I’ve forgotten about. Does this address the imbalance a bit?

My point is that if you define full-stack as merely having the skillset to do these things at an intermediate/senior level, then there are plenty of people who fit the bill. The issue is time management, I don’t think it should be someone’s job to do all these things, quality will suffer regardless of ability.
FWIW, my Macbook (not my primary machine) cost me 400€ second hand and I spent another 100€ upgrading to 8GB Ram and an SSD drive. It's a ten year old machine which runs like a dream.

I challenge anyone to find a better computing solution for 500€.

You could install Linux on a 500€ laptop but you wouldn't have the keyboard or screen quality of the Macbook, nor would have access to the Apple ecosystem. A lot of programs for Mac are just really well made and nice to use.
I guess most people, even in HN circles, agree that Microsoft as well as other PC manufacturers like Dell (XPS) or Lenovo (Thinkpad) can built beautiful, high quality hardware, but as you already state in your last sentence, that's not the problem at all. Windows is. Or the lack of macOS, for those of us that can't use Linux fulltime.
Except you can’t add so many features because you have sucked up all resources already ^^
I have borrowed one from a colleague, because I like to swap keyboards every now and then for variation and the old Apple Wireless Keyboards were ok. I also had wrist pain within hours with the Magic Keyboard. This is a huge difference compared to the unassuming Microsoft Sculp Ergonomic Keyboard, which is not only cheaper but really feels nice in comparison. It also has genuinely useful features such as reverse tilt, a magnetic battery door, a split, and wide spacebars. Plus it has full-size arrow keys (though I don't use them much, because vim/evil).
> The Nokia Lumias a couple years back (e.g. the Lumia 800[0]) were good-looking and super robust.

Yes, I have a Lumia 640 here and I really like it from a hardware point of view. It's a shame that it only runs Windows Mobile, I wish so much that I was able to just install Android on it.
I looked at the P series, nice machines will probably look at one of those next but I think I'll get some life out the T470P yet.
Try the game-based talent platform Owiwi to assess the soft skills of applicants
This is awesome. I was seriously considering not carrying a cell phone over this.
BTW, you can achieve this permanently with deep spiritual work and most importantly, meditation.

Shinzen Young talks about the different experiments they are now starting to perform with deep practitioners of Zen Buddhism (but other schools can likely achieve the same effect). In one of them they are measuring a certain specific response in the brain, which for a normal person happens when they hear a new unexpected stimuli, like a sudden loud bird chirp outside. For a normal person, if this same stimuli is repeated, the "novelty" response in the brain dampens after 2-3 repetitions, and each subsequent chirp is not registering in their brain in the same way. For them it becomes something old. But when they measure a meditating practitioner in the same way - they exhibit the novelty response unlimited number of times, each time a chirp is played. It is like each time it happens - for them it's like a completely new experience.
And a battery glued to the keyboard.

That is just insane. We just can't trust apple et al to do good designs. It saddens me that common sense and goodwill isn't valued to the point that they are actively working against it.
The New Deal was just a head fake while they dealt with the real enemy - communism. I do have to give the owners credit (or more accurately their advisers) for how they played the long game - a work of genius that has totally won.
The article is lost from it's first sentence. "with a senior level of expertise" No a full stack does not need to be senior in all, if you want a Senior Full Stack engineer maybe.

The fullstack engineer or T engineer is someone who shows versatility when it comes to the tasks given, he has an issue on the FE that is related to BE. He doesnt need to solve it but if the understands and then can point to the person who can fix it quickly thats key.
Yes - I built a pair of machines - one mini ITX B350 motherboard with a 2400G CPU/GPU & the second an X370 board with a Ryzen 2600 that used a GPU I already owned.[1]

The first came with an updated BIOS & the 2400G worked out of the box. The second came with it's original BIOS. Both were ordered from Amazon. If you order from a smaller outfit they’ll hopefully be able to tell you whether the motherboard box has the sticker on it that says that its BIOS has been updated to cope with Ryzen CPUs.

[1] Still hoping for the great crypto-currency crash in the sky to bring down GPU prices. In the meantime the 2400G is adequate for console grade gaming on the TV.
I ran it for a few years but they do have breaking changes sometimes. It's a great system if you want the latest versions but that daily update can sometimes make you spend hours troubleshooting, and that's not great for a work environment where everything needs to just work.
Excellent point about job stability. Its possible to get into a field that looks promising at the moment but then quickly have it become irrelevant. Alternatively, you could get into a field too early and then discover that theres no demand for it. Its a delicate balancing act.
Works on an iPad, with occasional crackles.
The Microsoft Sculpt Ergonomic Keyboard does not have loud switches, but feels much better than the Magic Keyboard. Only the function keys are not great.
> Earth has changed drastically with all the humans on it.

do you have earth scale measures for this? what is your threshold for drastic?

on most measures I can think of, earth is pretty much the same as it was 100k years ago. maybe you are suggesting humans have a drastic impact on other species on earth?
I bet there's a whole bunch of caveats attached. How old is not "real-time" data? Can I buy where your phone was yesterday?
> It was as if Alexander Fleming had discovered penicillin but kept the details hidden in order to make more money. It just seemed wrong.

Because your right to make money is equivalent to other people's right to remain alive.
When you were larger, you state:

"At this point, I believe technical co-founders have a binary choice: Stay on the technical track and hire a professional manager (usually given the VP of Engineering title), or give up coding and focus on the management aspects yourself. It really isn’t possible to do both."

Since you chose the management track, what did you do/who did you hire (in what levels) to take care of engineering at the level you were previously doing? Or were you effectively functioning as a standard IC so any developer could take your role?
Heavy technical background. Not Microsoft.
I had both. At work VS/9 on a series 90 or a 4381 with a large number of people hanging off the back, at home a BBC Micro with two floppies (once I could afford them) and a 128K Solidisk.

Between those three I couldn't wait to get home to get something done.

The edit-compile-test cycle on those mainframes was so ridiculously long it would be a good day if you got three turnarounds, on a bad day you got none. Compared to seconds for my home stuff. Shortly after that I got an Atari 68K machine and that felt like unlocking God mode.

Mainframes are powerful in the same way that tractors are powerful: you can do an awful lot of work if you have an awful lot of work.

If you are just programming or learning then something smaller is far more effective, on top of that the lack of resources will teach you all you need to know about efficiency.
Did you read the rest of the article? It's very well explained, and makes some really good points. Of course they're biased towards one factor above all else: repairability. It's right there in the name of the company! But calling this a troll post isn't justified.
> We also know that [...] first impressions are a much bigger influence on the final decision to purchase than later analysis and consideration

But this is the whole point of the GP's criticism: The whole design of the device is driven by optimizing purchase, not actually by making it usable, useful or durable.
Geologically it is the same, a stone is a stone, true that. The creatures on it, both plants as well as animals, changed drastically by human intervention.

Example: https://mic.com/articles/84681/this-is-exactly-how-much-weig... (it's for this xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1338/)

Then there's the pollution, for example plastics (tiny particles) everywhere, example: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/sep/06/plastic-...

We change(d) the atmosphere, from pollutants to CO2 levels.

Land for agriculture: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/AG.LND.AGRI.ZS -- much of it is to support livestock

https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/08/human-footprint-...
Yes, but online reports suggest the round trip time is a couple of weeks. I ended up ordering the cheapest possible AM4 CPU from Amazon Warehouse & returning it after updating the BIOS instead.
As much as I like Fowler, he's missing an important option in his description: don't try to do object relational mapping generically. Consider that you have business model objects. In the UI, you create a "view" of that data. Of course the UI view is not related in structure to the business model object. That would be absurd. We need to use collections of model objects and present the data in a flexible. Just as absurd would be to build a framework for automatically mapping the data in the model layer to the UI view.

Now consider that your DB is just like your UI. It's a view of your model objects. Just in the same way, there is no reason why your model objects should be related structurally to your DB representation of the data. And in exactly the same way there is no particular reason why you should have a way to automatically map to and from your DB layer to your model objects.

In many cases, it will be less complex to build a bespoke OR mapping rather than try to find a system that will do it generically.
I paid everyone back who was financially out by working and saving for many years.
Winepak – Flatpak-Ing Microsoft Windows Applications with Wine
> it still has them, because the underlying hardware and ABI provides them,

when you program in C you program against the C abstract machine, not against a particular hardware.
Also sorry did anyone see the bio of this guy? he is not even related to engineering unless he lies in his bio:

"I’m Robin, a web designer, writer and typographer living in San Francisco."
Riot Games breach of GDPR by repeatedly sending wrong persons data
You can get close to that though using the RPi + a read-only mounted SD. It's still not going to be 'instant on' but it can be reasonably quick.
It would be really awkward if this was in your pocket and you decided to plop onto a couch
I wouldn't, so long as it sticks to facts. No need to be unreasonably negative.

"Honestly, he only worked here for two weeks, and then quit without notice. I didn't even know he'd use me as a reference."

"Honestly, I don't know how much help I'll be. He worked here for two weeks, and then turned in his resignation stating he wasn't comfortable discussing his work with others. I didn't realize I'd be a reference before you called".

These are facts, the first two easily verifiable in court - who would likely have no trouble believing the third.
Unless Locationsmart (and the other shady data brokers like "zumigo") goes under then it's pretty clear that there's some serious caveats in this alleged stopping of sharing location data.
they are already invested in the current chassis, and it's not changing for at least two next generations
She could have saved her changes somewhere, reverted to the non-developer mode, update and re-apply the changes but no, she decided to abuse the first-line staff in an unnecessarily aggressive and extremely rude way. Then, she tried to hurt Squarespace by posting this entry on her blog.

I wouldn't work with this woman for all the money in the world.
I don't believe in Specialized front/backend development when it relates to web development.

Web development is and should always be a full-stack affair.
Otherwise your frontend developers would request apis in a way that destroy performance and create a database model or logic that is unmaintainable on the server-side.
Your backend developers would make apis that make the requested front-end design make a hundred api calls or api calls in the wrong places (like during a transition/animation).

It's not just about communication either, though that's also important - it's exceedingly hard for specialized developers to understand the reasons for another's requests, being full-stack means you can see the full-picture.

It's about owning the feature/product from beginning to end. It's about knowing what tradeoffs to make in the serverside, clientside, database or ops, which you can only do effectively if you are familiar with each.
It's about never being stuck waiting for your backend to fix an api that isn't right, for your dba to build that query so it won't take a year to run.

That isn't to say that you can't specialize while being Full-stack or that specialized roles outside of web development shouldn't exist (for example game development, big data, machine learning).
People should have learned the lesson from federated email VS Gmail: federation works only when people don't have a compelling reason to stick to one service provider.
Spiral: Self-tuning services via real-time machine learning