skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's absolutely the promise of high-paying tech jobs.

People see salaries of FAANG engineers and think that those companies pay well in gneeral, and furthermore that the tech industry pays well in general.

I've seen this first-hand: people were super excited about an Amazon distribution center being built in a town I used to live in. The thought process goes something like: "Amazon says they'll be hiring hundreds of people and that they will train people on the job. Also, Amazon engineers make 100k. Therefore Amazon will hire me, train me, and I'll be making 100k!"

I think the ship has now sailed on Amazon; people today realize that an HQ full of engineers is different in kind from a distribution center.

But the cycle continues with other low-skill and medium-skill "tech" jobs. For a particularly striking example, see some of the rhetoric around the Foxconn plant in Wisconsin...
TBH I've never been too proud of code I've typed quickly; the best stuff has always had about 10 or 12 revisions after I've made it, with lots of thinking about it in between.

Unless y'all are a bunch of Excel sorcerers, slow touch-typing should be all that's necessary.
> Good cooking doesn't care where you're from.

Except when it does. Attention to detail and skills matter. Clientele demographic and competitive pressure matter too.

In most survivalist/subsistence businesses, the owner typically optimizes for volume and profit rather than quality. He/she will typically do just enough to appeal to a broad clientele and keep costs low. There is no culture of craftsmanship or perfectionism -- it's just business. The owner is merely trying to feed his/her family... there is a nobility in this, but it doesn't always make for good food.

Many suburban sushi joints in the U.S. run by non-Japanese people fall into this category. Good enough to satisfy an American clientele, but not really done to the level of a craft (e.g. the rice in the nigiri falls apart as soon as you pick it up, the vinegar is left out altogether, etc.) Sushi is a craft that takes years to perfect and commands a premium.

Truly good places are run by people who know the essence of the cuisine they are serving, and make an effort to be true to it. They don't necessarily have to belong to the culture of origin, but they have to be serious about getting the details right. Such places are typically not run as survivalist businesses.
I have a "friends only" facility that renders a map perhaps once a week. That's now failing, so I'm looking at using a GeoCoding service instead. The pricing model that Google has is a reasonable price in terms of actual money, but the hassles I'd need to go through for such a small thing are just too much.

So I'm going elsewhere. It's not a big deal, it's not a mapocalypse, but it's anecdata.
What you call “over-engineering”, the developers of Snap/Flatpak call “security.”

Portable app bundles are not the goal here. The goal is portable app bundles that the user can install from arbitrary sources on a whim without putting their OS at risk of malware or their data at risk of exfiltration.

Y’know, like on phones.

But also, since these designs aren’t for consumer electronics appliances with a central vendor, but rather are following the FOSS philosophy, you can’t just use a weak sandbox powered by nominal capability manifests signed by a central code-signer, where the app could do arbitrary things outside of its capabilities and the sandboxing wouldn’t catch it (i.e. the macOS approach.) Instead, you have to have a strong sandbox that will actually enforce the capability manifest to restrict what the app can do.

Oh, and the bundles can update by self-modifying their contents, creating new executable binaries in the process, so your sandbox can’t be based on signing the initial contents of the sandbox, but rather has to sandbox whatever is attempting to run in there right now.

If you can come up with a design that fits those criteria and is simpler than Snap or Flatpak, by all means, share.
Is Amazon breaking a law?
Read – Between the Lines (Android) to practice reading faster using peripherals
I think one of few good outcomes of monopolistic tech companies, like Amazon, is the degree to which they expose the lie that is American free market Capitalist ideology. There’s never been anything other than highly-subsidized State Capitalism and it’s outcome is massive, private command economies in the form of corporate dictatorships. These dictatorships then seek to assume the power of the state so as to achieve a monopoly on subsidization, while at the same starving the ability of the state to subsidize others and provide a challenge to their control.
An Interactive Exploration of Dead End Careers
Oh god. HPSM. I totally forgot about that. One large company I worked for used that to file routine IT tickets when it seems like it was a ticketing application for the telecom industry. They must have had some of the best salespeople of all time.
Apologies, you're quite right, they're using "transcranial alternating current stimulation" a.k.a. tACS during sleep. Now I'm at my desktop I can read the paper, and see that they applied direct current during task training (discovery of "hidden targets in static images") using the "StarStim R32 simultaneous EEG/Stimulation device", and their own tACS system during sleep.
It worked for Tether. /s
Are you suggesting that by winning in ecommerce and cloud computing they're gaining a monopoloy on jobs? Seems like a stretch.

There have always been and probably always will be unpleasant jobs. I watched 6 guys replace the roof of my neightbor's house yesterday in Houston. It was 100 degrees on the ground so I'd imagine it was intensely unpleasant working 8 hours on the ashphalt shingle roof. Does that make the roofing business exploitive? Should we all abandon our roofs?
If Apple had never gotten out of the embarrassment that was the Performa Era with a multitude of largely similar but wildly different priced computers, Apple would have gone the way of HP and divested itself of different business units until nothing of value was left.

Instead Apple focused, got its shit together, and did something important. HP could have done the same, knuckled down and fixed the fundamental problems with their company, but instead they decided to throw away all their babies and drink the bathwater.

The problem is not that Gassee sees everything through the Apple lens, but that very few companies have been like Apple and maintained focus. Tech companies, ironically, often fail from their wild success: MySpace and Yahoo! being two notable examples.

Once they have all this money they start to do lots of stupid shit and ultimately lose their way.

Microsoft was on track to do this, but they seem to have sobered up. Facebook, on the other hand, will probably fail if they can't regroup and rethink their purpose. One day some telecom will buy Facebook with pocket change and we'll all go "Yeah, well, saw that coming."
The airport's whiteboard backup plan is interesting but my first thought was also that all of this info is available online or through the airline apps.

In my experience, changes often show up in Kayak ahead of the airport dashboards. I check apps or notifications before the official dashboards now.
Projects like these should be sponsored by private firms. Let them put up ads/billboards on the sponsored highway. This can provide fund to finish the project.
When I first heard it, I considered both interpretations, and left it ambiguous in my mind. Ambiguity is actually a selling point, in my observation: people shape it in their head to mean whatever they want it to mean. It's just like (alleged) news: if they tell you what you want to hear, you are more likely to tune in again: Confirmation Bias. It's partly why media choice has made the nation more divided.
In the license file provided in the .tgz microcode file, under 3. Licensing Restictions section:

> All right, title and interest in and to the Software

> and associated documentation are and will remain the exclusive property of

> Intel and its licensors or suppliers. Unless expressly permitted under the

> Agreement, You will not, and will not allow any third party to

> (v) publish or provide

> any Software benchmark or comparison test results.
I have spent my entire life in Michigan. What is sad is that this story has repeated itself again and again over my lifetime. Each time my friends in the auto business have said we're not going to get caught again, yet it happens again.

I've heard dozens of stories from young engineers who are early to some trend only to be frozen out by their bosses. A lot of them get bitter and switch fields, so in effect the auto companies chase away their own future.

We had the governor of Michigan say we don't need to spend money on a test village for self driving cars. He said this technology is twenty years away. Six months, six months later he reversed himself because the Big 3 decided this tech was indeed much closer.
I would love some more references please.
Not just tax dollars but investment dollars as well. Amazon is the big winner for almost every web based startup, whether they succeed or fail, because Amazon still gets paid.

It’s pretty hard to have a business of any size and not touch Amazon in anyway. Amazon, in many ways, has becoming embedded the as GE once was.
I'm 40, started programming at age 7 on the Commodore 64.

Recently I have been exploring and implementing my own ideas with child-like purity. Programming has always been a hobby and a passion but once I started working professionally it kind of went on the backburner.

In the past I would learn new frameworks and hop on the bandwagon of whatever the newest technology was. It is getting to the point now that I'm really sick of how bad things have become. Programming in assembly required 1 op code to set a variable. Now in Redux I need 20+ SLOC across 4 files to do the same? Functions are now API calls, modules are now containers.

The tools I use are designed for specialized (division of labor) roles and favor simplicity and verbosity over power. So many barriers are erected with all the technical bureaucracy we have now.

The tools out there are built under the paradigm of a large team. There's nothing out there that is a tool for experienced programmers writing an entire app themselves.

I've set about building what I wish I could be using and am ignoring what the industry considers best practices, commonplace, etc. It's a pure creativity mode and feels more like play than work. I'm going with my gut, intuition, and experience without a concern about how it will interop with existing paradigms and what other developers are used to. I'm building short explorations to test out a concept and trying to figure out how to use these new concepts.

I'm exploring new programming paradigms: applications as a graph. How to compile said graph into an AST. How to manipulate the graph using tools appropriate for that section of the graph (lots of different structured editors / modes for each task). I think the paradigm of manipulating all aspects of an application using the same 2D grid of characters we call source code is an outdated concept.

I also enjoy mentoring interns and junior developers. It's amazing seeing them learn and using the insights that took me ages to learn.

In short, I'm concentrating on being true to myself and what I want to build rather than just programming for a paycheck.

I've found that it is very easy to get a new job, but it's much harder to find a company I like. In the past I would switch jobs chasing a hirer paycheck but now fit is much more important. Find a company where you feel like you are appreciated, can contribute meaningful work, and that gives you the freedom to do so.
> But averaged over the long term they are very accurate.

That doesn't make sense. Sure investors can be accurate in the long run, but the market itself just reflects the price today.
The Internet is comprised of physical servers, owned by humans. Those servers are accessed by other humans, who are perfectly capable of predicting how the human owners of the servers would want those servers to be used. The protocol isn’t what defines those human interactions and expectations.
It's not really whatboutism. The point to be made is this is not an Amazon problem, it's a systemic problem. Amazon seems to be getting more attention in recent years because of their size, but to me that just feels like picking on them because they play the game better than everyone else.
There are hundreds of details that are checked for. If any is not in good conditions, it's written down. If it's any important, you have to fix it and come back for a counter visit.

Cracks would most certainly be part of it.

You can choose where you do the inspection. There are a lot of choices, it's like repair shops, but specialized into inspection. It's done by a real mechanics and it's certified.
Regarding 2° being a catastrophe — that’s how James Hanson described it. The Paris Agreement picked 2° as some kind of politically attainable goal. It’s not a safe limit for human civilization as we know it.

There’s also this recent paper which got a lot of press http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2018/07/31/1810141115

> No it doesn't. We can convert 100% of our energy usage to renewable energies

I said that it currently requires fossil fuels. In order to build “renewable energy” systems, you need to bootstrap it by expending fossil fuels today. Even if you could somehow mine iron ore with electric bulldozers, that’s not currently how iron is mined (and transported, refined, etc). So, you have to convert every link in the supply chain. Some people have already calculated that, in order to completely convert our electricity system to 100% renewable, we’d have to burn more fossil fuels today than would be allowable under the carbon budget outlined in the Paris agreement. Others have calculated that the transition will simply take too long (and the rate it has to happen increases all the time).

Can you outline how it’s possible to convert our industrial system to 100% renewable energy, using real numbers and timelines? Does your model also include economic growth (and therefore growth in energy consumption)?
High rises can actually extend green areas, presuming the city planning isn't completely dumb or bought out.

Unfortunately developers is live to fill every space in with small flats to sell more of them and with high rises likewise. As long as pricing holds up.

The thing that cannot be provided with single homes is services availability, since they cannot be built close at all.
This necessitates big road infrastructure and pedestrian hostile design.
I'm empathetic to those impacted by preferential and redacted rate negotiations, but not to my fellow Virginian complaining about rate hikes.

The community wanted it buried at a higher cost? Well, Dominion has a right as a regulated utility to negotiate rates for the following year to match infrastructure and other costs. This is so they can recoup / respond to storms and other issues. It's a part of utilities regulation.

Now, if they get a sweetheart deal on top that's certainly a different story, but the infrastructure cost passed on to the consumer thing has been part of the deal for a long time. It would likely only be higher for that following year, and then rates would return higher but closer to normal as the buried pipe went into O&M mode.
My experience is that stereotypes exist because most humans are lazy and prefer to see patterns where there aren't any (or are weakly there) than critically examining the world around them, including assuming stereotypes are true instead of getting to know actual people.

I know few people who truly fit any stereotypes.
> Amazon seems to be getting more attention in recent years because of their size, but to me that just feels like picking on them because they play the game better than everyone else.

Yes, they're getting picked on because they are the most exploitive (extreme tax avoidance, worker abuse, etc). It seems that would be the first org you would pick on: the one causing the most damage. Why would we pursue or focus on the orgs doing the least amount of damage first?
The proposal doesn't provide a motivation other than Objective-C has them. Is there any API design that is improved by optional protocol members? It seems to me that if you're adding optional members to implement, your protocol or interface is too large and should be broken up.
The subhead is less sensationally figurative, but still has factual problems: this "one customer's discounts necessarily push rates up for others" is not strongly supported by the article, or by economic reasoning. (Often scale can drive everyone's rates down: that's the whole mechanism of utility monopolies!) And it's certainly not supported in the inflammatory "everyone else" formulation.

And even in the particular leading anecdote of the article, it's not so much Amazon's rates that have caused a regulator to approve a new assessment on other customers - it's neighbors' demands for more-expensive underground transmission lines. Even if Amazon received no discounts, the lines would still be needed, and the regulator would allow this sort of capital outlay to be passed-through to ratepayers.
While I agree that it's odd that there was no fallback, the whiteboards do immediately convey 'stuff is broken, you should check this board' pretty decently, as they would stand out like a sore thumb in the airport normally.

If there was a digital fallback, it would absolutely have to have something to tell commuters that the information might be stale (as someone frantically types up flight updates in a back room somewhere)
It wasn't just individual or commercial mobility, but also internal lines of communication for national defense, that motivated the Eisenhower interstate highway system. The official name of the interstate system is the "Dwight D. Eisenhower National System of Interstate and Defense Highways." By that measure, what's important is whether you can get an APC from Pennsylvania to D.C. quickly, not whether you can get to your office in a timely fashion.

Edit: presidential spelling
Labor prices must be set in USD. So during a strong dollar, the cost of labor relative becomes the dominant factor in the price of new houses, since material goods can be imported. This makes it difficult/impossible to reduce the cost of a new house by just building smaller houses, since the marginal cost in terms of labor is lower, i.e., installing 30 outlets in a house costs much less than twice the cost of installing 15; only the material costs are doubled.

This is ignoring the fact that a strong dollar makes real estate in the US a much, much more attractive investment. Not only do you get a decent appreciation in real value if you own in a desirable areas, but you also enjoy the relative appreciation in value relative to the currency you buy goods in. Chinese investors holding real estate in the coastal USA have done quite well in the past decade.
When I worked at Amazon we had to run around the warehouse, bc
if our pick rate fell below a certain number we stopped getting
paid. There were bottles & bins full of piss at odd points, bc
you were penalised for toilet breaks. A co-worker attempted
suicide on-site bc of the stress

Source: https://twitter.com/OwennnThomas/status/1007957414577090560

If this isn't exploitation, I'm not sure what it would be.
> I do agree macros could reduce boilerplate though, but add the extra complexity that someone has to understand AST transformations instead of just regular old Python type dynamic code.

Not only do you have to understand AST transformations, but you also have mysterious stack traces pointing to non-existent code.

The amount of tooling to make it debuggable and understandable is significant; the Javascript folks have done that lift but that's a large community that was heavily dependent on it.

All that said, I think AST transforms have their uses. I wrote a library[1] for pyrsistent to allow normal mutable usage of pyrsistent's immutable data structures. But I think that works because the interface it presents and the behavior it's modeling is ordinary python.

[1]: https://pypi.org/project/pyrsistent-mutable/
I still haven't seen anything as fluid to use on mobile as webOS. Android Pie gestures still don't do it justice. I thin in 2018 we finally have the hardware to see the true potential of webOS but it's too late.
You read Cory Doctorow talking about vulnerability research and you get the impression that there's a war out there on security researchers. But of course, everything else in Doctorow's article aside, there isn't: the field of vulnerability research has never been healthier, and there have never been more companies explicitly authorizing testing of their servers than there are now.

There isn't an epidemic of prosecutions of vulnerability researchers --- in fact, there are virtually no such prosecutions, despite 8-10 conferences worth of well-publicized independent security teardowns of everything from payroll systems to automotive ECUs. There are so many random real-world things getting torn down by researchers that Black Hat USA (the industry's biggest vuln research conference) had to make a whole separate track to capture all the stunt hacking. I can't remember the last time someone was even C&D'd off of giving a talk.

I'm a vulnerability researcher (I've been doing that work professionally since the mid-1990s) I've been threatened legally several times, but all of them occurred more than 8 years ago. It has never been better or easier to be a vulnerability researcher.

Telling the truth about defects in technology isn't illegal.

Doctorow has no actual connection to the field, just a sort of EFF-style rooting interest in it. I'm glad he approves of the work I do, but he's not someone who I'd look to for information about what's threatening us. I'm trying think of something that might be a threat... credentialism, maybe? That's the best I can come up with. Everything is easier today, more tools are available, things are cheaper, more technical knowledge is public; there are challenges in other parts of the tech industry, but vuln research, not so much.
I knew I'd see something about Breezewood in here. For those who've never had the pleasure, just before you hit the PA Turnpike, there's a 500m gap in I-70 where you are forced to exit and reenter all while dodging a minefeild of gas stations, red lights and fast food. Those 500m can add 30 mins to your trip. It exists as a political aberration. In the 60's, the feds and state couldn't agree who should pay for an interchange connecting the two roads, so no one did. Like a stubborn wart on the highway system, Breezewood remains.
Chavez/Maduro style democratic populism was based on expensive social welfare programmes targeted at the poor, funded by oil revenues.

Some would call this well-intentioned socialism, others clientist bribery. But it doesn't really matter. What matters is that these programmes were affordable only when the price of oil was sky-high. When the price of oil collapsed a few years ago, they became unaffordable.

At this point, the government needed to make substantial cuts to the size of the state and its welfare programmes to stabilise its finances. However, such cuts are just not really possible for this kind of government: The entire basis of its power is a huge web of political patronage and self-enrichment, sitting on top of a mass of impoverished supporters. Money is the only thing that makes the system work.

Thus, the government attempted to maintain its spending through borrowing and enlargement of the money supply. Their hope was that, eventually, oil prices would rebound enough to restore the lost revenue and stabilise the economy. As they waited, their domestic and foreign opponents saw an opportunity to make the situation worse for them through measures like sanctions. However, the debt and printing of money would have lead to financial crisis sooner or later.
Microsoft’s Glasses Monitor Blood Pressure