skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It it still quite a lot of energy needed from batteries to maintain airspeed that produces sufficient lift.

For short flights, a crossover between an airship and airplane might be an interesting idea. Economic and technical arguments might shoot it down but I'm just contemplating here.

If there was a balloon attached to the body of the plane that would provide most of the lift the electric motor could just drive the propellers or motor fans for mostly forward propulsion. The overall speed could be slower because the wings wouldn't have to convert airspeed to so much lift, saving energy. On short haul flights the speed wouldn't be a big problem.

The plane wouldn't thus rise up directly like airships: the balloon would only give most of the lift required for flight. Large but light wings would provide the remaining bit of lift starting from slow speeds and the plane could thus basically behave more like a normal plane, taking off and landing as usual albeit at significantly slower speeds, figuratively as if the plane was swimming in low gravity or, alternatively, 10x denser air.

A balloon would obviously introduce a lot of aerodynamic drag but since the balloon would only help in lifting the plane it could be a bit smaller. We could also build it into an aerodynamic shape instead of a traditional balloon, and we could integrate parts of the helium filled balloon onto the plane itself. For example, we could give the small plane huge biplane wings made out of light-weight steel mesh with helium-filled pods inside.

Edit: Similar idea in https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=188&v=oxotOEZCh8... where 60% of the lift comes from the helium and 40% from aerodynamic forces.
That is insane. They deserve to go out of business.

I can't imagine that Lyft or Uber could have done something like this. But maybe I'm just too naive.
> C is actually great and is only really dangerous because it gives the programmer so much control.

This doesn't actually refute the assertion that C is dangerous :)

Control and increased safety are not mutually exclusive. I'll take safe-by-default, unsafe-when-asked any day. It's not 1972 anymore.
I would already be happy if all tenders paid for with public money would include a clause that forbids dependencies on proprietary software. There is no good reason to write new software that doesn't run on Linux.
I've always wondered if my various general practitioners had primarily bullshit jobs following the rise of the internet.
Thanks for clarifying that. While I still feel that the quote is totally wrong-headed, it sounds a good deal less stupid.
This is especially true for pain diagnosis which is inherently subjective and if possible relies on self evaluation (even though some methods exist to complement or replace self evaluation with external observation).
> Worth mentioning that github ended killing ZenHub, by introducing github projects

Sherlocking is a well-known risk every tenant application must consider if they want to make a business out of it.

I would hope and expect that the ZenHub folks always understood github could just integrate the features directly, and not necessarily by buying zenhub.
I use both Gitlab snippets and a repository with a mkdocs website.
True, but the presumption in the case of cancer is that:

a) The doctor in question is qualified to diagnose cancer.

b) The doctor has made that diagnosis, in the medical sense.

In this case, Scott is a psychiatrist, who is unqualified to diagnose back pain or recommend any course of treatment on the matter. He believes his client when they say that they are in pain, but that belief is a personal, not professional, opinion.
You're behind the game. Seriously, there was a major supreme court ruling in 2013 that allowed floating homes to be legally classified as homes instead of marine vessels which affords a whole slew of critical protections and distinctions. In everything from protection against seizure to the coast guard not being able to walk into your home to inspect for life jackets.

Kind of makes you wonder why we haven't already been doing this on areas just off the current coast. Guess that old saying really is accurate -- necessity is the mother invention. Dutch Docklands is one of the companies building these new facilities. Their mock ups [1] look amazing.

[1] - http://www.dutchdocklands.com/Development/United-States
Seehofer wants to create an entire agency. Makes sense given that this is national security matter, I can't believe he'll (be able to) outsource this.

And the other points are still valid even if outsourced, as the requirements will be part of the outsourcing contract.
Discussed on HN in 2013:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6236478
Simple does not imply easy.

Go forth into the world and find someone. Expect failure. She may find fault in you. You may find fault in her. Evaluate her as much as she evaluates you. Evaluate your approach, how you speak etc. You’ll need to improve and change.

Being afraid to approach means you equate failure with some kind of death. That by itself is a faulty belief you’ll need experience to get rid of.

If you want homework: approach 300 women and see how you go. Vary every approach, change the time, place, activity. Document each attempt: What worked, what didn’t.

Have fun.
I was thinking the same thing. There is also the interesting discussion about how to label nuclear waste disposal sites with signs that need to be understandable for ~10,000 years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-time_nuclear_waste_warnin...
I guess so. One of the LWN comments mentions a Microsoft function memcpy_s defined as:

memcpy_s (void *dest, size_t destSize, const void *src, size_t count);

which is effectively equivalent to your memcpy_oobp function.

However the Microsoft function also returns an error code which must be checked (because count might be larger than destSize), thus providing another way for the programmer to screw up. I'm not sure if this is better or worse than just copying the min() as in your second example. It probably depends on the situation.
Do you think that there's a substantial difference between "the public is tired of experts" and "the public is tired of experts from fancy organisations getting things wrong"? Sincerely asking - I think the context helps, but the short version doesn't seem like a misrepresentation of the main idea.
Everyone has goals
The passports are much, much older then WWI - however railroads in late XIX century made travel requirements more relaxed as the administration were not able to catch up with technology.

Also XIX c. passports were without biometry (ie without photography of the holder).

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passport
We use Discord.

While branded as a "chat for gamers", the screen sharing, sound, conference and channels quality and tooling is far more versatile and superior to Slack.
Tooling absolutely helps to reduce defects. That's why you use them.

That said, sometimes I'm shocked what kind of disasters get past the analyzers.

Stakes are higher than ever. It's not just about functional correctness and avoiding crashes anymore. Your code needs to be secure against outside world malicious actions. Getting rid of counterintuitive security vulnerabilities is very, very hard.
I think the spontaneous emergence of such procedures is straightforward:

1. Wu appears in work with a chair
2. Said chair creates mild inconvenience to X
3. X asks Wu to remove the chair
4. Wu replies his chair violates no company code
5. X launches the creation of a chair bringing policy, designed mainly to make Wu's chair a clear violation of it
They don't have to pay well compared to the US. They have to pay well compared to rest of Europe / Germany.
That's an amazing stat - do you have a source for that?
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Moving Home: To AWS with EC2, Lambda, API Gateway and Cloudflare for Free
Oh you can set up mandatory Slack channels too.
I am very satisfied with Mullvad,but they are maybe not as hip as the new kids on the block, but I have never really had a reason to switch. Reasonable speed (at most about 100kByte performance penalty for a 30mbit connection), and a very nice support with lots of knowhow.

I don't like their new application, but I do like that I can use them to play with wireguard.
yeah highlighting "Uncle" Bob as a "10" with respect to programmer cred was a weak point of the essay. He is basically a one trick (TDD) evangelist pony and I doubt he has any serious developer cred outside the agile methodologies circlejerk groups. Not like he is Linus or Carmack or Jeff Dean.

That said, the actual phenomenon that the author was trying to highlight with example is pretty valid imo.

"Companies like this don’t hire 10s because a single 10 will single-handedly raise their margin or even land them clients. They do it to grease the skids of recruitment. That hire is neither about clients nor about work product — it’s about recruiting."

Pure Gold.
Firefox on Android. Per my other comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17874566 it was a mirror site, though I didn't save the chat log so I can't remember which one.
I think the problem with EU standardization is that any viable standard has to be a superset of all member's wishes. Nobody wants to change anything about the way they work right now, so whatever the EU mandates must be 100% compatible with all the quirks of even the smallest municipality. So instead of a simplification that smoothes out the differences you get lovecraftian abominations that nobody can implement without draining their sanity.
ASP.NET Core 2.2.0-preview1: Endpoint Routing
Another Mattermost user here.

When Slack came up, some of our development teams picked up using it, because it was free and didn't have to be installed and because of "it was that hot new thing from Silicon Valley that all devs use now". Most people loved it. I've always been in the "we try to keep our other infrastructure mostly in-house for control/privacy/anti-lock-in reasons, so why add a dependency to an external service and push internal documents onto it while we don't even pay for that thing?" camp and therefore flat-out refused to use Slack until the issue of internal instant messaging got enough attention to be discussed on a company-wide level. It was agreed upon the need for such a service, but it was also recognized that the way in which Slack was used to serve that need was not sustainable and far from rational, so alternatives were discussed and we eventually settled on trying out Mattermost.

Within weeks, all teams using Slack had moved over to Mattermost, and even most of the people who never wanted to use Slack for various reasons, including me, were okay with giving Mattermost a try. Most kept using it, so it has become a widely accepted part of our internal infrastructure now.
> In an efficient market, why would profit-focused companies employ a bunch of people who by their own admission aren’t doing anything valuable?

There are lots of reasons for bullshit tasks, I found. And let's call it tasks, not jobs. Because a job is something regular that pays a monthly income, and there ARE certainly complete bullshit jobs!

One reason, as mentioned here, is process. Everything needs a process, so that it's clear (or rather that it's unclear, but more about that later) who's responsible, what needs to be done, and that there is an objective checklist to show that something is done when it's done. It sounds stupid but it makes complex things work. In a relatively big company for this chair topic a number of separate, independent units, who might not even know each others existence, need to cooperate on a task that is split in organisational, financial and temporal terms. That is hard. But with a process it's possible to get finished at some point.

The second thing is that each company that is still alive had a time of growth and a time when they where stuck. When you are stuck, you can't just fire everybody. And you can't allow people to just browse Facebook all day. So what do you do? You create bullshit tasks. That keeps the juice flowing. And if an interesting, profitable opportunitiy comes up you still have people, orgs, etc setup so you can start approaching it. It also makes sense, to some degree.

The third one I can immediately think about might come as shock to some people. We grow up with the believe that things are equal and supposed to be fair. Truth is, the world sucks and is an unfair place. Therefore power hierarchies really exist, even in the seemingly most open places. Even at the cool company you heard about and really want to work at. And what do people do who achieved some powers in these virtual pyramids? They create obstructions for the people below them so they can't follow them upstairs and maybe even take their seat. Bullshit processes, bullshit tasks, and bullshit jobs help greatly with that. This might look inefficient, but in fact might actually be the most efficient system in existence. Because it works. It worked in the stone age, in the medieval times, in modern dictatorships, and also (sadly) in modern democracies. Like the invisible hand that governs the resource allocation in free markets, power structures are always there and make things work. Maybe not like you want it, but you are also not at the top of the pyramid, right?

Alright, that's what I can think off. They do valuable things, just that the value is not obvious to you nor is the value shared with you. That's why it looks like bullshit.
If you are in a large company then it will accrete these rules until it is almost impossible to get anything done.
FYI the relevant flights are low-altitude flights anyway. https://www.flightradar24.com/data/flights/wf784#1daa9d35 is typical.
Jet enegines have a combustion efficiency of 100% at low altitude and 98% at cruising altitudes.
High bypass jet engines will operate 90%+ propulsive efficiency when you reach cruising speed and altitude.

This can include torbo props.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propulsive_efficiency

Fuel has also a very big advantage over batteries and that is that you shed off weight when you use it while an empty battery will weight as much as a full one so you’ll end up carrying much more dead weight for the entire flight.

Fuel cells might be a possibility but I don’t think airplanes with hydrogen tanks are a good idea.
Whilst it has its uses, I think we should encourage people to do things in a reproducible way
People fall into rituals and procedures for reasons that are not necessarily obvious to them. Why should we expect to be able to determine what is and isn't "bullshit"?

Wouldn't you need to know where the whole endeavour ends up, before you can pass such definitive judgement?

I'm not questioning any individuals feelings (your job may certainly feel like bullshit to you), but whether something is sustainable and makes sense on a larger, super-human scale (organization, society, species) is tough to determine by any single actor. It's typically left to be played out and then (hopefully) analyzed and learned from.

Ultimately patterns (atoms, cells, people, societies, whatever) organize by efficiency, by how well they reduce energy gradients across time, not by what the individual actors wishes or feels. If a drone-like society turns out to be the most efficient in this sense, full of silly rituals which nevertheless make it more cohesive / stable / whatever, then that's where we're headed. Even though it currently doesn't seem that way, with individualism, science and articulation scoring some spectacular victories.
I'm with you on that. Even if I'm typing a long response in a web form I often write it in Vim and paste it onto the form.

I created a documentation CMS that functions as a Git repository allowing you to make the choice. The web editor is quite nice but power users will always prefer a proper editor.

https://www.graphia.co.uk
Honestly in some regards step 5 might be much more successful than what most people do. Most people go to their manager and complain about Wu. Then the manager does nothing. Then they complain at the bar to their friends how their manager AND Wu suck.

(Wouldn't exclude myself from that loser group, although I don't like to go to bars.)
Not everyone wants to live in the US....
Did you know Spitalfields comes from Hospital fields? There used to be a hospital near the market. Every name has a story especially in London.
If you are on a Mac, you could try Quiver. It's a general purpose note taking app aimed at developers that handles code via Markdown. You can then tag and orgnaise everything. I use it along with Notability on iPad (for hand written stuff)
>I wonder what causes this anomaly?

Compared to the US, you will not find many rich people in Germany. At the same time you will also not find many poor people. Generally, people are quite equal in Germany.
What would their case be for not encrypting it?
It would in Europe under GDPR. If your subcontractor leaked your data, you are at fault as well, for improperly vetting your subcontractors.
> But having to explicitly specify both destination and source sizes might prevented a lot of buffer overwrite bugs.

A good way to prevent this is to have a buffer abstraction, where the size is a property of the type, e.g.,

typedef struct {
size_t bytes_used;
size_t capacity;
void *data;
} buf_t;

int buf_init(buf_t *buf);
void buf_cleanup(buf_t *buf);
void buf_copy(buf_t *dst, buf_t *src);
/* ... */

Of course, it doesn't prevent people from using memcpy directly.
High-locality of reference can be achieved in any language that supports unboxed types, it doesn't require C (even a very high-level language like Haskell has support for this). But this is a long way from having complete control how each memory heirarchy is used.

Likewise most static languages defer to the compiler for CPU-specific performance optimisations and will permit foreign native calls into C or ASM where necessary. So I don't see how this is an argument in C's favour.
University administrators.[1]

Stanford is busily building their new Redwood City "campus". It's all administrators. No students. No faculty. No research. 13 office buildings. 2700 staff.

Initially, the campus will be home to Stanford employees working in such critical areas as the School of Medicine administration; Stanford Libraries and University Archives; the major administrative units of Business Affairs; Land, Buildings and Real Estate; University Human Resources; Residential & Dining Enterprises; and the Office of Development. ... Three of the university's eight vice presidents will have their offices at Stanford Redwood City.[2]

[1] https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/02/06/higher-ed-administ...
[2] https://redwoodcity.stanford.edu/frequently-asked-questions
duplicate [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17874320]
I think you are undervaluing a lot the benefits of the European culture [1].

It's just not health care, it's also the safety of not being spontaneously fired, the work-life balance, the vacation time, the paternity leave, and so on.

[1] I know that the mileage can vary from country to country.
"You don't have to pass an IQ test to be in the Senate"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XTSCRoYyM-Y
Seriously, "Hitch"?

That blows my mind. I guess it's one way to get drivers for less money. But damn, what horrible selection.
I'm not sure I'd agree that. I felt it was more revealing about the author & their context than anything else.
Welcome in bureaucraty world! This patient needed a medical note so that his employer authorizes him to bring his own chair. This medical note is completely fancy and does not contain any assesment about health. For bureaucratic procedure, it is perfect.
Fair play to them. I'd take this any day over "This is an exciting move for customers as we limit what we give them for more money" or the other corporate bollocks that gets spewed on the regular.
They claim 35% speedup in "real world applications"!

https://github.com/aspnet/Routing/pull/730
You'd be surprised at how good people are instinctively at not bonking their head on stuff. In an ordinary bike accident -- e.g. swerving for something unexpected, and then falling -- you'll not hit your head on anything. Road rash is no fun either but you're not more likely to hit your head on a bicycle than you are when just walking around.
A test of a bullshit job (or procedure) is whether we could get rid of it. Could we get rid of the doctor's note requirement, or of the compliance officers in the company insisting on one?

In a start-up or small company, yes. Bring your own chair to work day! In a larger company where people don't know each other or there are many employees on low pay or short contracts, not so much. They'd be worried about people stealing the furniture, or bringing in furniture that was not fire safe and then getting sued.
I think the article is reading far too much into this whole "positions we don't hire into" thing. Usually, those are just roles invented to keep key people aboard who are refused the conventional hierarchical rise (and raise) due to Peter Principle awareness and/or not fitting in with the execs.

Walking repositories of the history of in-house technology, software archeologists who know where to dig because they've been there when it happened. It's impossible to hire that kind of knowledge. Usually, when a position invented to keep that kind of knowledge aboard gets vacated, the hat won't even be handed on in-house to the next best candidate, it will just get abandoned.

Unfortunately, the premise of the article comes off a bit like someone sitting on the fat spoils of strategic job hopping being unreasonably envious of the modest rewards of staying put, wishing to get them on top. I do like the humble use of "programmer cred" as a non-substitute of actual performance/ability.
No it’s true that anything can be poisoned even your beer leaving it on a table. Usally your supplier and the people in the culture will know what is good and where to get it... it’s only a concern I would have getting stuff from random people.
Playtika Is Trying to FUCK ME PLEASE HELP (Alibaba group)
Hello fellow Hackers,

I'm Mayhem.

I build the entire event-driven architecture of House of fun.

One of studios of Playtika.

They are earning a SHIT TON OF MONEY thanks to me.

Now, they fired me!

What to do?

My money is running out really fast :(

I'm so pissed off that I can't sleep!

Please, advice!
Those bullshit jobs which pull the great bulk of humanity together to pay the mortgage and buy groceries and degrees and Beanie Babies and cocaine... They are the substrate from which real progress grows.
A 6-char limit excludes "Smith", "Brown", and "Jones". Perhaps that coding decision should be revisited.
Front-end data validation begins with modeling
The TAO of Gordon Ramsay
Thanks for the details. I briefly looked at holographic storage when I did my undergrad thesis on holography.

Anyone care to comment as to whether this storage methodology could be moved forward?

(Apple acquisitions are always fascinating. I did a deck on PrimeSense for an old boss when we thought it was going into an Apple TV product rather than FaceID.)
I'm absolutely sure same skill level programmer will create less defects in Python, Erlang and Lua than in C. You really have to try to overwrite memory in those languages.

Of course you can shoot yourself into foot with stuff like metatables in Lua and Python metaclasses and whatnot. Then again you should see some C macro messes around...

Anyways I don't like when people defend C with that age old argument it requires a clever disciplined programmer that never makes mistakes. Because either such programmers don't exist or they're very rare.
Liquid oxygen and nitrogen both have some commercial value.

The tricky but is the liquidation process only liquifies some small fraction of the gas. The rest remains as a gas, so you now have "helium enriched" air, but it is still a very small percentage helium.
As a dutch person I'd most definitely make assumptions about an adult on an ordinary bike wearing a helmet. No one does that here except tourists sometimes or people who need a helmet all the time.