skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Great article! I've been thinking about this problem since 2006, and there are probably a hundred reasons why things are as bad as they are. Many commenters here have hit upon some: misuse of abstractions (they should be used to save time, NOT save knowledge), insistence on code reuse, etc. To add a few more: treating programming like a form of manufacturing instead of an art, believing that the latest language/tool/process is a silver bullet (and even believing that it's new!), not realizing/accepting that constant refactoring is vital, worshiping teams at the cost of individuals, not letting teams form themselves, and a huge one is this: trying to eliminate problems and/or complexity instead of mitigating them with tools and skill-building. If you try to eliminate a problem or complexity, you will succeed, but at the cost of creating at least as many other different problems than you had before, and you'll just end up moving the complexity to another place. Later, when you realize you still have problems, you'll try the eliminate them too, and do the same thing all over again. Building layer after layer, always increasing your problems and complexity while attempting to reduce them. (This is exactly the same as government controls breading more controls, and it happens for the same reasons.)

When I first started out, if you were programming computers at all (microcomputers, anyway) you were someone who was naturally curious and probably had a high IQ. If you continued programming, it's because you really enjoyed the process and had a knack for it. You understood how the computer really worked, and that didn't scare you, it thrilled you. We didn't have "testers" and "UX Designers" and "QA people" back then, so if you produced a good program at all, it's because you had a high level of conscientiousness. Today, that description fits only a tiny minority of the programmers that I know, just like it fits only a tiny minority of the general population. Those programmers all have the same complaints that you do, and they all have side projects that they work on because the work in their day jobs is unfulfilling.

As someone here pointed out, this is a relatively new industry, and I think we're just seeing the same thing that plays out in any industry once "everybody" starts doing it. Just like vacuum cleaners, mattresses, doctors, or oil paintings, there are a handful of great ones, a whole bunch of mediocre ones, and some really awful ones. The bell curve has arrived and is here to stay!

My belief is that if you want to have great software, then make it yourself. Don't wait for the majority of others to produce it, because they never will.
The problem is that automation (like mechanization before it) is easiest to apply to simple repetitive jobs. The remaining jobs are 'knowledge jobs' like engineering, project management etc. which require a specialized understanding of the work (often on a project-by-project basis) in order to perform it. You need one individual (or a small group) who are responsible for 100% of a project, or the communication overheads become massive and the work becomes intractable.

Which is why we have what we have now - a few overworked people doing stupid hours trying to hold everything together, and a lot of underemployed / unemployed people who can't break in because they don't have the skills or proven track record required.
Africa suffers from more basic issues: lack of water, lack of electricity, very poor infrastructure, high crime and corruption levels, high levels of illiteracy, very low average IQ in certain in countries.

A huge percentage of the population is then propped up working for foreign NGOs, so wages are actually artificially inflated.

Controversial statement, but I think we need a Colonial renaissance for these basic issues to be resolved - for order, infrastructure and education to be re-established. It seems China is in the only position to do it, the West having lost its confidence.
Heartbeat paces learning
earlier: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honeywell_RQ-16_T-Hawk

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiller_VZ-1_Pawnee
Yes, certainly we should discuss them and there is definitely a difference morally. It’s clear extrajudicial killings of political opponents is wrong. Drone strikes are wrong because in a sense they are also extrajudicial. At least, the threshold for lethal force is too low, in my opinion
> The best realization of the American dream was on the decade after the end of WW2.

An essential caveat: That only would apply if you were a white male, a Christian to a significant extent, and possibly a Protestant. For women, African-Americans, and many other minorities, the American Dream was far out of reach. African-Americans were still being lynched.

> Incidentally, it was a period with comparatively high corporate taxes.

An excellent point, and don't forget much higher regulation.

> If you want a current example of reality vs "common wisdom" economics, compare California to Wisconsin, Kansas, or Texas.

Yes, I try to point out: Name one great American industry that came out of a 'red' state, other than extractive industries like oil. Does the whole country want an economy and human welfare like Alabama or like Massachusetts?
Managing Your Personal Configuration with Puppet
Social media does away with the good ole natural moderation that happens if someone belches out a self centered monologue in a public space and immediately receives glares and scoffs from strangers within earshot.
> Latency is high because the gateway is run by a nonprofit and they don't pay for ultrafast hardware for the public gateway.

Isn't ipfs.io run by Protocol Labs? And didn't they raise something like $250M from the Filecoin ICO? Surely they can afford some fast gateway servers.
Yeah, I think it should be more of a pay system than a use system. If after 10 years the work isn't worth a $100 or $1000 fee -- or there is no entity left to pay it -- then perhaps it should be public domain.
If you're writing async code with futures, you're probably writing a web service. Go is a better fit for that.
Google is making a smart move by showcasing Flutter's capability to make iOS apps. Cross-platform SDKs have a tendency of favoring one (iOS with React Native) or neither. By showing that devs can easily make quality apps on iOS, they show the promise of Flutter.
Not exactly, the call was to the Russian High Command in Syria (I stand corrected)on the "deconfliction line", but the attack was ordered from Washington, by Mattis.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5rgqSEVVIU
Certainly "king" isn't the correct title
That's fine, but we should then tax it same as all other property that is a significant investment - have the tax assessor evaluate the market value, and tax based on that.

Then we'll see how much Mickey Mouse copyrights etc are really worth to Disney.

Oh, and capping it on the bottom end - even symbolically, to something like a dollar a year, just so that there's the hassle of having to pay it - would also solve the abandonware problem.
Plasticity is enhanced but dysregulated in the aging brain
I maintain that automation means that we have to work more. Perhaps counterintuitively, automation creates more job demand.

And that's when the battle begins. If I work a little more with more work available to me, I have a little bit more to spend. And spend it I will... Probably on housing. Now you can't afford a place to live, so you have to start working a little more so that you can also afford a place to live. And so on.

It is not a coincidence that women started entering the workforce en-masse at the same time automation was coming into its own. Previously there wasn't enough work for women to do, but once automation created an abundance of jobs there were some who started to take jobs. Once they did, soon all households needed both a man and a woman (generalizing for simplicity's sake) to have jobs to be able to afford anything.

But now we don't have another gender to help fill the void. It has been fascinating (albeit unfortunate) to watch people start to flounder as this plays out, and it will be interesting to see what happens when it all comes to a head as there is only so much work one person can do.
Yup checked it out. i found one more great app at https://blokada.win/android/
A new way to capture the brain’s electrical symphony
> Sample bummer-based sentence: “Your identity is packified by bummer.” Sample marginalia, scrawled by this reviewer with sufficient desperate emphasis to literally tear the page: “Please stop saying bummer!”

That was a fun line to read in a serious article.
Is he also going to ban the internet do create millions of jobs by reopening the pony express?
Sexism in tech stories are always immediately flagged off the front page, sadly.
As I understand it, this is sort of the problem Filecoin is trying to solve, but that has its own issues (it's hard to see how paying people to host your stuff on their own machines can ever be cost-competitive with paying AWS to do it). http://newpipe.xyz
> I'm hopeful for a future with better jobs.

Most people on HN don't have real jobs. The entire premise of venture capital is gambling that you'll be able to fund the next Facebook or whatever.

The reason that jobs would go away is more automation, but more automation means markets are more winner-take-all. And if more markets are winner-take-all, then that which means higher expected returns to capital if you can back a winning startup.

I don't know to what extent they balance out, but it seems at least plausible that as technology centralizes the economy then most jobs could basically be in service of gambling with investor money.
People now say they’re “gender fluid”. So given this fluidity it might make sense to always use the nonspecific pronoun in order to prevent retrospective character assassination due to something said without the ability to predict the future.
It's not short sighted.

In finance it used to be the norm and is largely moving back that way.

Using it as a lever for employee performance is a secondary effect (that can be done just as effectively with salary). Primarily it allows the firm to manage comp costs to be in line with the firm's performance. During a downturn it allows you to cut comp by like 25% without reducing headcount. The possibility of employees leaving en masse is certainly considered but it's not very common.
I’m not independently wealthy. I saved a lot, and invested a bit. I’ll run out of money eventually unless I launch something (which I’m in the process of).
It could conceivably be done even below the schematic level, though I'm not sure how much room modern processes have for this sort of thing now that we're talking about how many atoms wide a transistor is. I've been told that there was a period of a few years in which a kind of "copy protection" proliferated in IC layouts. The layouts would be tweaked to exploit quirks of the originating company's fabrication process (e.g. a pattern might look like a diode but actually function as a resistor when fabricated), and this would sabotage attempts by other companies to clone the chip (at the time, Japanese and Soviet clones were major concerns).
The migration from Chrome to Firefox takes between 30 seconds and 30 minutes, depending on how much stuff you choose to move over, and has nothing to do with migrating code between two platforms. It's not a fair comparison unless you're talking about developing browser extensions, and even then the API is very close to being cross-platform[0].

I don't think most people are making a principled stand against the use of Google products, they're just instinctively performing a risk analysis.

[0] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Add-ons/Web...
> A tag created through the GitLab web GUI is directly connected to `git tag`

It appears you may be suffering from the same confusion (or perhaps you're not aware of the feature), I'm talking specifically about gitlab-ci tags
https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/yaml/#tags

That has nothing to do with git tags, but one could be forgiven for believing that's the case when the documentation exacerbates this confusion. From the docs you just linked

> only defines the names of branches and tags for which the job will run

"tags" in that sentence has nothing to do with git tags but is actually referencing a gitlab-specific job tagging feature. It's very confusing.

> I think you should refer to the manual.

I have. The tools provided are not sufficient to accomplish the examples I have described. I'm happy to be proven wrong because it'd actually be quite useful to me. Can you direct me to how I might trigger a job only on tagged commits pushed to the master branch?

As far as when/except/only etc, they are not able to introspect on variables or conditions within the context of the job runner, they can only react to gitlab-specific signals like the success or failure of other jobs, I can't do something like "build, run unit tests, run eslint, run flow type checker, deploy but only if nothing else failed, except eslint which is only a soft requirement but not a deployment blocker". Any failure in one job is a failure for all jobs unless you make it explicitly the inverse which still doesn't give you intelligent control over the jobs.
> If copyright protection was 10 years, one would be able to take any 10 year old code and close source it (and sell it) with no legal repercussions.

So? 10 years is eternity in the world of software. If some company wants to fork, say, gcc as it was 10 years ago, and try making money selling that... well, people have the right to ruin their business.
It's turning out that social media is like nuclear fission: it's not that it's inherently bad, and a smarter species than us probably could use it safely with no problems. But our stupid ape brains with their tribalist tendencies and short reward circuits weren't ready for it.
> The US drone program does not target US citizens who speak up, protest, or embarrass the president of the USA, at the behest of just the president.

How do you know that? Does the US publish its list? No, it doesn't, so you are making that statement on literally nothing but good faith.

While at the same time you use bad faith to frame the Russian version as something where Putin personally orders people killed for slighting him or some other mundane reason.

The reality is both are killing "enemies of the state", justified and regulated by their own, internal, rulesets and governmental institutions. They and others have been doing so openly, and covertly for decades. Heck, this kind of stuff even has been glorified as a pop-culture export from the UK as "the agent with a license to kill".

In that context, there's literally no difference if it's an Obama, Trump, Putin or their UK equivalent giving the final "okay" or if the target is a US/UK/Russian national who's a terrorist/pedophile/traitor/whatever.

It's about the lack of accountability, the lack of due process, the lack of recourse. All these issues exist regardless of the US, Russia or anybody else doing something like this.

In that context, the US drone war is pretty much the overt manifestation of a practice that used to be kept covertly due to its inherent controversy. But in the zeals of a war on terror, where even torture became openly condonable, too many people have lost their moral compass.
Public sector salaries are usually set through a very bureaucratic process, where the salary has everything to do with the position and little to do with subjective evaluations.

In the private sector, salaries have more to do with subjective criteria like "how much do I think this person is worth" or "will this person go looking for other jobs if I only pay x."

Envy is not as much of an issue when people in the same role all make the exact same amount. It is an issue when pay is set by the will of a manager/HR person whose perception of things differs wildly from the employee's perception (regardless of whose perception is more correct). That being said, paying people by perceived performance, for all its flaws, is still better than rigidly paying someone based on what the sign on their desk says, with no consideration of how well they actually do their job.
You're right, and productivity growth isn't particularly high at the moment (indicating a low rate of automation compared to past decades). I also think it must take a colossal lack of imagination - not to mention lack of awareness in the world around you - to think that we're going to run of of things to do anytime soon.

On the other hand, a lot of the work that needs to be done is stuff that needs to come from collective action (Replication crisis, aging infrastructure, global warming, cancer research, environmental destruction, food scarcity, etc.), which we don't seem to have much a a political/societal will for at the moment. And a lot of the work that people are currently doing seems rather pointless, or even having a net negative impact on society (soda, highly processed food, credit cards, car dealerships, arguably almost all advertising, etc.).

It's possible that we'll end up as a society where a larger and larger percentage of the population will end up working parasitic jobs meant to leech off of the smaller and smaller percentage of the population doing actual productive work. Again, this seems to stem from the lack of political and societal will to try to allocate resources more efficiently.
Clearing out old cells might help the brain
Ever been to a large meeting when there's a hot political issue? People can be nasty in person too, unless there is very good moderation, and sometimes even then.
" you know that you could leave at any time and you know that you will not."

I have no problem.

The press needs to take more responsibility for this as they are the primary enablers of Twitter.

Tweets are presented all the time in articles as expression of legitimate opinion, and often used as the basis for some kind of rally bad straw-man argument the author wants to make.

I think Twitter will wane but it won't go away as those who make their business making noise, either celebs or those who report on them, will just keep going with it.

It may become purely PR providence though - I can see regular people giving up the notion of actively tweeting entirely.
There's an easy way to charge market prices and have them be lower. You can raise supply by playing more shows. And if a band values its long term fans, they should have an interest in getting as many people into their shows as possible. Just stay an extra night or two and play another show.
Yep 11 days to get a janitor -- definitely a "Roswell" incident here ;)
Units of measurement (2004)
Thanks! As for the nature of our queries, almost all of our use cases are group-by with count(*) plus some constraints.

So we're interested, for example, in the number of views, grouped by a few dimensions, over a specific time interval (per month or quarter, typically), with some constraints, including time (last 12 months, often).

Usually the user selects a whole bunch of dimensions, and we display this in the UI as a table where we pivot or nest based on the dimensions. For example, if you group by month, by region and customer, then you might get the months as horizontal columns, the regions as the vertical column, with totals for each region, then the customer nested under the region, with totals for each customer within the region. (The underlying query gives us a flat table, which we convert to a kind of dimensional hypertable structure for display.)

Our application is schema-agnostic, which is why we use JSON. If we were to avoid JSON, the only realistic option would be for the app to use SQL to create tables, and handle schema migrations, and sort of control the schema. That would make it a somehwat different app.

Of course, for many time windows, we're talking about tens or hundreds of millions of events. Elasticsearch is very fast at aggregating data and lets us do queries that span a few months in just milliseconds, whereas grouping an entire dataset containing years of data typically takes maybe 4-5 seconds, still fast enough to be acceptable for a reporting UI. In my experience, Postgres isn't as fast at counting.
How do you account for wild differences between schools in the same school district? Despite sharing a tax base, you see a sharp increase of the median house sale price across school boundaries.

Aside from differences in capital investments, generally the operational funding is allocated on a per-pupil basis.
Alex Jones is on it!
The Potato Paradox
Getting 20 dollars extra a week doesn't feel worth it vs 1000 dollars at Christmas
That is the complete opposite of any of my experience.

CPAs are generally extremely conservative. And unless you are paying them immense amounts of money, they are almost always reticent to do anything even remotely risky.

After all, their license and this livelyhood is on the line.
Bitcoin on the macro consumes a lot of electricity which produces carbon.

On the micro level the issue often stems from municipal power contracts. Some towns pre purchse their expected power needs collectively to lower cumulative costs. Bitcoin miners can upset this balance and drive up costs per kWh across the whole town, making them unpopular locally.
Always. Be. Shipping. (2007)
I haven't tried Flutter yet, but I want to provide my experience of what non-native mobile development usually looks like comparing to native. Through my mobile development career I have tried C/C++ cross-platform development on mobile, JavaScript frameworks (e.g. PhoneGap), Xamarin and React Native.

Cross-platform frameworks always seem attractive because you can write code once and run it on both Android and iOS. When you start development it might also feel productive at first because you finish 80% of the project much faster than with using native platform frameworks. Problems begin when you need to interface with native code or if there are some small annoying issues. You get stuck for hours and days trying to solve something that would take much less if you dealt with native platform SDK. In the end you are not completely satisfied with your hacky solution and it took as much time as native app would take.

My opinion is that if you have a very simple app, it might be OK to write it in, for example, React Native of Flutter. But if you have a more complicated app and it's an important part of your business, you should go native.
Then help me understand what your point could be about this New Yorker piece?
Worse than checked exceptions (Java)? How about unchecked exceptions?
Angular 2 is just very different product, smooth migration (reliable auto translating sources from js to ts?) would require a lot of effort..
It’s going to be a great day to ingest all of PACER into the Internet Archive of this passes.
I first started developing with Flutter about a year ago.

One thing that has really impressed me is how responsive the Flutter team is to developers. Often when I posted a question on Stack Overflow it would be answered perfectly within 24 hours by a member of the Flutter team.

Contrast this with React Native where Facebook's attitude seems to be to develop what they need themselves then 'throw it over the wall' to for others to improve.

The Flutter team is like a dog that really wants you to be happy. The React Native team is like a cat that doesn't really care about you as long as she gets fed.
I mistyped. I meant targets a gender for employment.