skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"It's not a craft, in its purest form it's an engineering discipline with specific rules, procedures and standards."

Sorry, but I have to strongly disagree. In it's purest form the core of software engineering - i.e. programming is a craft. The other parts are mostly about creating processes so that craftsmen can create something together without stumbling into eachother.

The difference between a craft and engineering are numerous.

- engineers generally need a license

- engineering is about repeatability and creating dependable cost estimates

- engineers are required to study for years for a very good reason. You can be a rockstar programmer out of highschool.

Just having a bunch of cargo cult gibberish bound into a book does not make a craft into an engineering discipline.

It's harmfull to call programming engineering. Engineers have curriculums that can teach them pretty well what is expected of them once employed.

Not for programmers - or, well, software engineers. If there was even one curriculum that could churn out good programmers dependably, don't you think this model wouldn't be copied instantly elsewhere? If such a curruculum existed, do you think think software interviews would be filled with whiteboarding just to check out that the candidates understand even the basics?

I think this incapability to create a curriculum for actually creating good programmers is the best evidence that programming is a craft. It's such a complex topic that you can't create a mass curriculum that would serve all equally. Not with our current understanding, anyway. Maybe if we could teach everyone assembly, and Haskell , and have them implement compilers and languages as a standard things would be different.

The second best way to learn programming without being born a programmer savant is to learn from others while doing. Apprenticeship is the traditional way to train craftsmen.

Programming is so much more like a craft than engineering that it's best to call it a craft.

Craft is not a deragatory term. It just means we don't understand it theoretically well enough to teach it properly.
Tomatoes, parmesan cheese, escargot, sushi ... coding. True that.
Ask HN: Original implication of IPv6?
I apologize, as this is a fundamental question I got from a school kid (We correspond in a User Group) and it got me into a thought...

The early implication of IPv6 was that everyone/everything would get the power to host their own content and be identifiable over a network. It was touted as a boon to distributed internet people; But it didn't turn out as well. I think the main culprit behind this is the NAT, which kinda serves as a control mechanism. Can we get rid of the NAT??

I answered back by stating the usual "Security and Privacy Reasons", but I think there must be something more to it. Network is not one of my specializations.

What are your thoughts about it? Also Is there an initiative for a distributed Non-NAT network?
Societies have always competed in there own right. The state is a more effective way to organize groups of people than the chiefdom which is more effective than the tribe.
Google does some things that I think are very cool. Google does some things I don't think are so cool. None of the things that Google does, however, can in any way be compared to the things that a child rapist does. Making that comparison is wrong.
The problem is that there's no generic way to describe the universe without contextualizing the characteristic you're interested in. But as a layman (not an astronomer, not a physicist, not a topologist), I'd argue that it's fair to say that the universe is infinite. I say that not only because of where the evidence regarding expansion and geometry of the universe points, but because even in a discussion of the visible universe you have to address the fact that the visible universe is shrinking as objects at the edge disappear due to expansion. Those objects don't cease to exist (at least not unless you make some highly contentious metaphysical arguments), which means there's no avoiding the inference that there can be (and likely are) an infinite number of objects which exist but which are not visible.
Creativity is what you just described.
No one knows everything.

You should at least know the basics and be able to apply them. I'm rather shocked by the number of 3.75, 4.0 students from good schools who can spout 1st principles, then utterly fail at applying them.
Didn't like the sentence 'Poor mental health affects half of all employees', as if employers were responsible.
In fact, I’m doing that right now! Mostly because I want a blog with a graph structure for linking, and most assume you just want a tree of categories, with tags as a seperate set of trees, usually with a depth of one.

And it mostly just boils down to those 3 lines, with some additional support for the graph structure (and to force the urls to reflect the path taken, symlinks for all possible paths)
No, for international flights the airline additionally checks your passport at the gate (at least in the US).
Lol - no. My computer isn't that old. Chrome switches tabs instantly. Firefox doesn't. I'm not going to buy a new computer to find out if Firefox will then switch tabs faster. Also, I've read similar complaints from others. Maybe it's faster now - I dunno. When Firefox's tab switching is faster, I'll give switching another go.
> Can we really always pick such a prime? Yes. If N is divisible by every prime p < N, then N-1 must be prime, but then N-1 is a prime < N that does not divide N.

We don't actually need a prime. We just need something that divides N! but does not divide N. N-1 will do nicely.
The survey is done by a charity that accepts money from corporate sponsors. Dubious source at best, paid shills at worst.
Does anyone know a potential reason why .NET shows a clear trend of decreasing cold start time as memory size increases?
Counterpoint - could be evidence the security measures are working. More data needed.
Amazing quick weight loss tips
FWIW I've done some limited consulting work with senior citizens. Two observations: A) they like their systems the way they are, so changes of any kind (especially to the UI) are upsetting/unpleasant experiences, B) they are on fixed incomes so hardware/software upgrades that cost more than some de minimis amount are put off / ignored. My prediction - this cohort is going to get slammed at that EOL date.
The technology is really just being piloted here in a low-risk application.

Everyone commenting here is right that it really doesn’t save that much time when boarding a plane, but think of where else it could save time.

(I probably shouldn’t go into details even though I never signed an NDA, so I guess I technically could talk about it)
It is indeed intriguing to imagine music history if composers had followed Reicha's lead rather than Beethoven's. There would have been a lot more metrically interesting music earlier, that's for sure.

The experimentation Reicha loved so much became popular in post World War II Europe and America. Many would argue that this led composers into a modernist dead end. But I guess if Beethoven had never happened Schoenberg wouldn't have either. But then we forfeit Wagner too...

I've been pondering a related question which I've found difficult to answer: if Beethoven's music had been lost or misplaced, would we immediately recognize it as "genius" if someone made a first recording in 2018? I'm not so sure.
... more about giving user more control than any new algorithmic techniques. Was expecting e.g. GAN discriminators
> moving to a non-apple OS

Sadly, by all measures Android with Google Play Services is worse for privacy than iOS. Presumably, non-Googled Android (e.g. LineageOS w/o Google Play) is better than that, but that's not the majority use case of Android.
There is lots wrong with this article, including what you mention, but also, they fail to define what they mean by the terms they use such as: "experienced problems with stress, anxiety or low mood". That can pretty much cover a lot, if not well defined.
I think if would be nice to also show the performance after cold start so you can make a real-world comparison with all trade offs.
That's strange. We see on analytics that app works correctly. Is is mobile or desktop Chrome? What kind of error do you get?
The whole point of serverless functions is to do work that isn’t necessarily real-time, but of which this is a lot and each unit of work can be completed relatively quickly (say, periodic sync tasks and the like). I really think if the nitty-gritty of cold start behavior is foremost in your mind you’re likely Doing it Wrong(tm).
I do like to imagine a future where the modem/router becomes a place people can host their own data. A formally verified Deno-like web-server on seL4. The actual modem/router software running in a separate VM.
Despite the pain of Spectre, Torvalds says he still loves speculative execution
At least on AWS, increasing memory also comes along with more compute and more networking bandwidth. If there are a lot of packages to be imported and possibly decompressed that could have a large impact

"AWS Lambda allocates CPU power proportional to the memory by using the same ratio as a general purpose Amazon EC2 instance type, such as an M3 type. For example, if you allocate 256 MB memory, your Lambda function will receive twice the CPU share than if you allocated only 128 MB. "

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/lambda/latest/dg/resource-model....
Tangent, but I thought Dulles Airport's "moon buggies" felt super weird to have to go onto after a long international flight. It felt like I was loaded into an armored personnel carrier or something.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_lounge
The name is horrible. I had no idea that it would lookup trademarks. Once I saw what it did I came away impressed.
GCF support for Golang is coming as well: https://twitter.com/kelseyhightower/status/10352785867548139...
How is this a tired meme? Looks like 99 services were shut down since 2006.. You just proved their point. The consensus here is that you shouldn’t build anything critical with their APIs, and I agree
Given I’ve never had reason to use a y-combinator, mocking bird or eta or any of the other colourful terms from the article this post about GPS seems vaguely appropriate.

Which means that in around 14 days I’ll suddenly need to revisit this article and learn all about it because it’s suddenly useful.

Life is strange like that. I do like the term “why bird” though.
But limited-supply medallions isn't the obvious solution in any case.
Thanks for the summary. I'm aware of all of this; but from the server side, when clients mysteriously don't send packets of a certain size, it's hard to know why --- because I'm only on the server side, and I haven't had any luck getting knowledgeable people on the other end.

I can tell it's an MTU issue, because I get later packets, but I'm missing a block that happens to be an exact multiple of the MSS. It could be simple packet loss, except this pattern comes up too often, the client will sometimes send probing acks, but never the missing packets, and it never retries with smaller packets. This is especially bad when you're communicating with default Linux servers that always send syn+ack with their local MSS, because so many clients think they can send 1500 byte packets, but they can't. It's less bad when using most versions of FreeBSD [1] where it returns whichever is smaller of client side MSS or server MSS. There are a number of systems/networks that clamp outgoing SYNs but not incoming SYNs, so downloads mostly work, but uploads are broken. Mirroring the sent MSS isn't enough to make every connection work though, because of exciting things you mentioned -- somewhere in the middle, something is dropping large packets, and ICMPs aren't sent or otherwise don't make it to the client, so it just kind of sits around waiting forever.

Edit to add: I wish the codified behavior was simply to truncate IP packets to the size available, rather than either fragment or alert. TCP Peers would be able to notice that only shorter packets get acked, and adjust, and in the meantime, some data would have gotten through. Not terribly great for UDP, but I dunno.

[1] there's a change in -CURRENT to use the Linux behavior, unfortunately
Healthcare billing is too broken for me to endorse blindly paying things. Routine care, co-pays, planned procedures, sure, pay your goddamn bills. Get hit by a car, loaded into an ambulance, and stuck with a $15k bill that your insurance company refuses to pay because it's "out of network"? Tell them to pound sand, they have no right to extract your life savings in rents simply because they happened to be the hospital closest to the relevant ambulance.

Yes, it's technically "theft", but the property right being violated has no business being granted in the first place.
Enforce Open Source Licenses with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act
agreed. Just because they were acquired doesn’t mean that the acquisition customers didn’t feel the pain from being forced deprecated
That's a very negative and dangerous view to hold. You're blaming someone for being exploited because of their lack of knowledge. Not everyone can know everything and they shouldn't be expected to in order to participate in the global economy.

Robinhood markets themselves that they are taking from the rich and giving to the poor. Their behaviour is the exact opposite of that! They're actually more like loan sharks or payday loans.
This looks beautiful! Here's a related tool my friends made: http://partifi.org
Sure, give me a 9000 MTU on my home FTTP connection :)
> WhatsApp and other platforms can randomly spam their users with these lies and at the end of the message, write - its a joke, April fool or whatever.

I worry that would have the opposite effect - it would train people to look for that, then assume messages that _don't_ have it are real.
Atom has https://teletype.atom.io/ as well. I don't have any experience with either though.
You had me at the shared debug session. I am amazed at how VSCode has evolved in such a short span of time. Technically it's not an IDE but it has most of the required features of the IDE.

The liveshare feature does require you to be signed in to Github or Microsoft. So the sharing might not work with other proprietary SC or even Bitbucket or Gitlab.
Because they never explain or explore the particular qualitative definition of randomness that is difficult: unpredictability. Computers do indeed suck at this, which is why you need to attach specialized devices to feed it unpredictable bits.

Random is an overloaded term. You can algorithmically generate statistically random distributions which are nevertheless easy to predict given some previous state. That form of randomness is useful for many things, but lethal in cryptographic systems. Moreover, proving that some distribution is unpredictable--and that this unpredictability is preserved within the larger system--is really difficult.

To be even more technical, there are different ways to categorize unpredictability: quantum, thermodynamic, mechanical, computational, etc. The former relate more to how you physically generate unpredictable states from physical phenomena while the latter relate more to qualitative degrees of unpredictability. A thermodynamic generator may only be mechanically unpredictable (i.e. unpredictable because it's impractical or perhaps impossible to capture the necessary state needed to predict the next sequence), or it could be unpredictable in the quantum sense (there exists no state that you could ever capture sufficient to usefully predict the next element in the sequence), depending on how you model the fundamental physics. These distinctions matter when you want to analyze the consequences of, e.g., using a real-time video feed of a lavalamp to feed a CSPRNG.
If you are using serverless functions for something that a user sees, cold start time matters a lot more. Python's Zappa is made for taking Flask/WSGI apps to AWS lambda, and it actually has a configuration option to allow for automatic invocation of functions on a schedule to keep a pool of warm containers.

https://github.com/Miserlou/Zappa#keeping-the-server-warm
As Brazilian real continues fall, Decolar falls victim to emerging market plunge
I apologize if it appears I've stepped out of line, or if this thread has been difficult for you to moderate; that wasn't the intention.

If you go back to my first comment on this post, it seems reasonably clear that my message is not particularly contentious – I'm simply suggesting that people apply some amount of ethical rigor to their work. Sadly, that message was heavily twisted in all sorts of ways that somehow fit within this site's guidelines.

Ethics and politics are indivisible from the act of creating software. It clearly stands to reason that software is fractal of the beliefs of the people that create it. By placing intellectual curiosity on a pedestal above morals and ethics, HN has managed to drive away some of the most talented and credible people in the industry from this site – and to promulgate a culture of no accountability for what we do, or fail to do.

I've fought year-long battles that have come close to costing me my job, just so I could prevent inaccuracies in systems that likely process your credit score. I've consciously killed projects that would disadvantage entire groups of people, no matter how technically cool or interesting they were. In much the same way that I'm not willing to negligently let someone die, I'm also unwilling to be part of the next Manhattan project – but it's becoming clear to me that I'm in the minority of the Hacker News readership that feels that way, or has ever even considered the impact of their work.

Over the past ten years, the attitude of this community has single-handedly convinced me that the end of our world will be because somebody could, so they did. If we can create "deep fakes" on demand, we will. If we can patrol the border with some hastily slapped-together CV and ML, we will. If we can use deep learning to decide who will go to prison, we will. All under the guise of intellectual curiosity.

I honestly believed tech was a good thing at one point in my career – now I spend most of my time building systems to protect people from my peers.

I know I can't delete my account here yet – I've tried. But I've never felt more disconnected from a community I'm supposed to be a part of.
>If there was integration of Malays as equals...

They were responding to a commenter who introduced that dichotomy into the convo, fair or not.
Correct. And they're essentially acting as outward immigration, since the airline's passport records are used to mark the unwanted/foreigners (like me) as departed.

But the system is quite flaky, my arrival/departure record is missing a few departures - and I think that's where CBP want to improve things, possibly so they can more legitimately claim that someone overstayed when their records are incomplete. (And I guess also to spot passport swaps.)
Command Line Interface in Python
I think the battery/memory/computation issues work out fine. Remember, the normal alternative is heavy-duty crypto like AES or a public-private key pair. This is just XOR.

Write memory wearout is not an issue. You can do this with write-once memory, so you don't even need flash. Manufacture the device with FF bytes, load keys into it by clearing bits, and then dispose of keys by clearing the rest of the bits. The same could apply to the car, or that could be different. Billions of keys could fit on a key fob.

Wearing out the car door hinges will happen long before wearing out the key fob storage.

Timing... well I don't know, but common ethernet chips have registers that tell the OS how long the cable is. Cars also ship with radar that has much tighter time measurement requirements.
And people always criticize me for avoiding OpenVPN in AlgoVPN. Here's the entry from my FAQ:

OpenVPN does not have out-of-the-box client support on any major desktop or mobile operating system. This introduces user experience issues and requires the user to update and maintain the software themselves. OpenVPN depends on the security of TLS, both the protocol and its implementations, and we simply trust the server less due to past security incidents.

source: https://github.com/trailofbits/algo/blob/master/docs/faq.md#...

Stop using OpenVPN! Use whatever client ships with your operating system for IPSEC or use Wireguard.
Wasn't content-aware fill just some sort of cellular automaton instead of an “AI”? Granted, the results could look similar to what AI approaches to image editing sometimes also produce, but I don't think we have to label every algorithm with an unfitting buzzword. Unless I missed a major change to what CAF does in the past few years.
> No, we don't. We have a few failed states like Somalia today, but they are few; almost all societies on the planet today have governments.

You wouldn't call all the human societies that existed prior to the modern nation state version of this experiment If the colonies count we have enumerable examples and in all cases at a certain point of density people took it upon themselves to form governments and delegate punishment to an other power. All forms of the anarchist argument ignore the fact that governments grew out of necessity and need. weather for internal control or to protect against an external force. I view human nature as unchaining so I doubt that any theory can hold sway over it.

Pinker has this in his book but its good to reference. Also Fukiama https://www.amazon.com/Origins-Political-Order-Prehuman-Revo...

https://ourworldindata.org/ethnographic-and-archaeological-e...
So there are two alternatives:

1) Trade for free at Robinhood and get front-run by HFTs

2) Pay $10 to trade at E*Trade or some other garbage company and still get front-run by HFTs
Alpha, Bravo, Charlie: how Nato's phonetic alphabet was chosen
I commented on a thread a couple weeks ago about Cloud Functions on GCP here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17796893

Eager to test it out we ran thousands of tests attempts with different RAM sizes and I can corroborate this persons findings in regards to the reduction of cold start time from functions with larger RAM allocations and seeming unpredictability of cold start on GCP. I hope with time they will improve cold start times or increase the minimum time for making a function "cold".
> Counterpoint - could be evidence the security measures are working. More data needed.

The TSA itself has admitted that there is no evidence of a threat of terrorism against aviation in the US[0].

[0] https://professional-troublemaker.com/2013/10/17/tsa-admits-...
I suspect that this is why some of the people here were trying to argue that having 5G service on nearby telephone poles will negatively affect their property values. That way they can claim the problem is not "on the basis of the environmental effects of radio frequency emissions" but on other people's perception of those effects.
YC community at its best :)
Optimizing for Security
That last has to be it. Every flight I've ever boarded has been bottlenecked at the jetway by people getting themselves and their carryons loaded and situated, not the speed of scanning the boarding document.

At best, it means they boarded an A380 through multiple doors in parallel instead of all through a single scanning location. This only matters for planes big enough to have multiple entrances.
'Work culture' is an unnatural form of menticide that has increasingly encroached into our lives.

Many employers try to hold it back but the general trend has been to select for self sacrificing drones, despite the effects on mental health.

The labor strikes have been glossed over in history but they happened for very good reason. IMO they'll happen again.