skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It isn’t about your skills now, but if you are improving. If you look back back in code you created 6 months ago and thinks it is a disgrace, then you are very well becoming a good developer.
Curious, why "super healthy"? Not that I doubt the statement, but I think it's interesting that something that I view as nutritionally insignificant is viewed that way by someone else. Then again I'm not a nutritionist or even a particularly healthy eater, more just a nutritionally curious person.
I'm not a fusion scientist so I can't really judge, but in general I'm not sure it makes sense to say "it turns out" unless you know that experiments have proven it correct. From some quick googling it appears that TAE people responded to the critique and other people thought they made some valid points; see page 4 in this paper:

http://w3fusion.ph.utexas.edu/ifs/ifsreports/919_wong.pdf

Things seem to be going pretty well for TAE, at least as far as plasma confinement goes. Whether they can get net power from boron is another question, of course. I definitely see them as a dark horse compared to the tokamak companies.
Really? That seems like a good idea?
It has a reason this not popular.
Obligatory link to the digital dark ages wikipedia. Not that I actually do this much, but having a physical record of things I care about is something that does rattle around in the back of my mind. My dad has a letter written from his great great grandmother writing to her mother about the confederate soldiers stationed near the property. She describes them as heathens, living in an awful tent city, with very poor manners.

It's just remarks of the day to day, but idk it's always stuck with me as the kind of artifact that they won't be able to just find in their grandparents house when they pass away because it's all digital now. Hard drives and usb keys, sure maybe there's good stuff on there. Maybe having a lasting record of me being on earth doesn't really honestly matter. But man, I sure would like to know that one of my distant descendants enjoys something of my legacy. Even if it's just a single letter. It'll probably be a youtube video instead though.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_dark_age
"Am I an affective programmer?"

Does my code make people feel good?
Does it automate some user task?
Does it make some user task easier?
Does it amplify users' powers?
Does it create value, by my definition of "valuable"?

Of course, these are outcomes/benefits, not the technical role of programming within an organization. But apt if you see yourself, fellow programmers and company members as "users" also.

> I read a study that measured the efficiency of locomotion for various species on the planet. The condor used the least energy to move a kilometer. And, humans came in with a rather unimpressive showing, about a third of the way down the list. It was not too proud a showing for the crown of creation. So, that didn’t look so good. But, then somebody at Scientific American had the insight to test the efficiency of locomotion for a man on a bicycle. And, a man on a bicycle, a human on a bicycle, blew the condor away, completely off the top of the charts.
https://www.brainpickings.org/2011/12/21/steve-jobs-bicycle-... https://youtube.com/watch?v=0lvMgMrNDlg

> ... There need be no real danger of it ever becoming a drudge, for any processes that are quite mechanical may be turned over to the machine itself. https://wikiquote.org/wiki/Alan_Turing
My general rule is that if I look at code from 1 year ago and I'm not disappointed with year-ago-me, I'm not growing as a programmer.
Prathi Udayam Nee Pilupe
This article seems poorly written, consider getting someone to edit it.
It's a question I've asked myself too. I've also wondered how often others are being aggressively pursued by former colleagues to join them at another company. I've seen team strongly believe they hire strong candidates only, but rarely seem to pursue these same people after moving to a new company.
It is Econ 101. Governments can do and pay whatever they want but the parent comment will still be correct.
Just because Google doesn't have a use for PHP doesn't mean it has no use or that it's dated or having "a hard time keeping up." Why would Google want to use PHP when it doesn't have a core competency that uses it?

On the other hand Microsoft does use PHP in some cases, where it makes sense, like company blogs. What's wrong with that? Nothing. The right tool for the right job. People that hate on PHP are usually people that over engineer things. Why build something like Wordpress in .NET or Node.js...when you don't need that, because you already have Wordpress and it works fine for a small site or blog? People will spent 10x the amount of time trying to -not- use PHP on a simple project than to use that time doing something else.

It's like this new "let's containerize everything" movement. Ok, you just spent an hour setting up something that would normally take 5 minutes, and you now have access to a bunch of features your little app will never ever use. Congrats.

No one is saying use PHP to build a super complex webapp, (though you could do that if you wanted!) But for small project PHP is very hard to beat when it comes to time/benefit. Right tool, right job. Simple. Biggest complaint I have against modern developers is the tendency to make a simple thing complex because it's en vogue to use X, vs Y. Gotta build this small web app with 50 users and no need to scale, better build in Node and Kubernetes. So laughable.
That might mean you are a good negotiator and salesman.
Drug testing is always experimentation on humans. Drugs have to have human trials for safety before we are certain they are safe. Testing on animals reduces the risk but does not eliminate it.

And if the treatment is only effective on infants or children then there's no way to get informed consent. Your options are to experiment the best you can and accept the risk or forgo the opportunity (or more likely let China do it and accept both the risks and the rewards, as they seem willing to do).
Watch next year at WWDC they integrate a feature into HealthKit that uses the FaceID sensors to tell if you have cavities.....
I agree, this is the situation in which OP has considered.

However, depending on the stage of the project, getting asked for help may be a red flag for me.

If it occurs too often, it can mean the following:
- incompetent co-workers
- someone did a terrible job documenting
- modules, packages, functions, etc. do not provide a good abstraction layer for the task(s) they perform
The blog ends with the best and most insightful comment:

And no human’s life is measurably better since Apple had the “courage” to remove the 3.5 mm jack. But a lot of our lives are just a little worse.

The author also points towards active de-standardisation between Android and iOS:

"if only there was one universal audio port they both could use"

Apple gets an advantage from this with their iron-grip on compatible peripherals, but I don't know why any of the Android manufacturers would follow suit. The ugliness of the impracticality of fashion.
My story about NET Core environment tags
>Creating a new project with one of the current popular frameowrks will bring in hundreds or thousands of dependencies. Who can possibly vet that?

People who care if their software works correctly. Everyone else relies only on herd immunity. If you have dependencies, you either belong to the first group or the second, and you make that choice. Neither choice is wrong, but it is still a choice you have to make and account for.
As an atheist, I do envy the religious people their weekly meetups!
that's pretty amazing... I've been trying to do IF but got off it for a few weeks... I also do keto on top of that though... I've lost 65 pounds since September, but that puts me at 450, my goal is 50 more by the end of January when my 2nd child is born and to be under 400.... (first time since before I was 15 - I'm 39 now).

My highest weight was 690, I had VSG surgery, so it's a little easier once I get into keto to keep going, as long as I don't stray into sugar land I don't usually have desire for food... I can easily eat 500 calories/day when intermittent fasting and feel like that's plenty... I've also been doing Crossfit 3-4 times per week.

I like IF because I only have to prepare one meal, and forget about food the rest of the day and just worry about my workout, and my day job.
Paying for Popularity Can Be Fraud
I don’t disagree with you, not entirely. When I was younger, it was all about sprinting full out as long as possible and that is a company that is either going straight to the moon of more often bursting in to flames. I’m quite a bit older and more senior now too and I think there are two slices of startup time, you put in your 45hours doing whatever it is the company needs, often running like hell. Then there is the 5-15 extra hours a week a startup can take and I absolutely think those need to be spent on dividend earning things, logging, ci, documentation, better testing, tooling, etc.

Thing is, it can go to the moon or it can flame out but there is this giant middle part of the spectrum where there are good exits and those exits often involve supporting your product and having well documented and tested technology is a positive. Trust me on this, it really sucks to get bought and then explain that it’s going to be a year and a rewrite to do the 10 things the buyer wanted yesterday.
I am also heartened that the #1 and #2 comments on here retain the voice of sanity.

I think this piece and the pitch it references are borderline abuse of the history and context of subscription businesses.

I see the current trend in subscriptions as largely a revolution in pure technology service businesses, where subscriptions are a rational way to pay for them (dropbox, github), along with software producers and their customers maturing to the point that they can mutually acknowledge the need for up-to-date and evolving core capabilities, such as Windows and Office, which can reasonably be seen to require recurring support which has value. (But you can still get a lot done with non subscription versions of Word 2003 etc).

Newspapers, telephones and cable TV have long been subscription based. Subscriptions alone obviously were not able to save newspapers from crushing deflation in their ancillary revenue models of classified ads, which they lost to craigslist and others. Cable TV to date has been much more successful in evolving and preventing disruption in those ancillary lines (pay per view etc) and has maintained a subscription model.

As an aside - everyone thinks Netflix is so wise with their current subscription strategy, I am a paying streaming customer myself, but the number of times of late that Netflix does not have the movie I actually want to watch, but Amazon's pay-per-view model does, makes me realize there are limits to the subscription approach as well. Netflix's model of creating content to justify their subscription is going to stop working eventually, content is a "long tail" type problem and their strategy of self-funding content is going to be increasingly unworkable within a few years.
And only if their users receive a copy of the software in the process of using it. Source: Myself, who slings lots of technically-GPLed proprietary code in the form of network-accessible software like websites so never sees the light of day outside the customer's private repos.
> I get about 2 wrong every time on purpose.

I do the same, but actually get google to accept bad data as good. The trick is to get the system to trust you (e.g. by supplying one honest answer), then selecting answers that the system is likely to be unsure about. If done correctly, you can get them to accept a lot of bad input this way.

Like you, I am under no illusion that this will have some sort of effect on the correctness of the resulting ML models, but I like to think that I am at least delaying or otherwise decreasing the training rate.

Have google adopted stackoverflow's model of making the result of our unpayed work available to us, I would have answered these challenges honestly.
Yes, and I think they meant to. Node isn't one of those.

Edit: partially because of design decisions around package permissions.
Facebook was here already when Instagram, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat became popular
Angelina Jolie Natal Chart Reading – Astroligion.com
Just from pure introspection, you might be able to glean an answer by thinking about these questions:

— Are you capable of distinguishing opinion from fact? Are you capable of distinguishing _your own_ opinion from fact?

— Any project will have easy bits and hard bits. How accurate are your predictions of which bits are easy and which bits are hard, for projects within your domain of expertise?

— When you think about your software, how good an idea do you have of what's "cheap" to achieve, and what's "expensive" (e.g. which endpoints or queries are fast and which are slow)? What's easy, what's hard? Do you understand how the people who consume your software use it? Do you know whether common operations for them are cheap and/or easy? Do you understand why (or why not)?

— Turn the previous question around — do you understand the design behind the software that you consume? Are your own common operations things that are cheap and/or easy to achieve using that software? Do you know why (not)?

— When you think of technical choices, do you tend to think in terms of absolute right and wrong, or do you prefer thinking in terms of tradeoffs? If the latter, how capable are you of articulating why a given tradeoff makes sense in one situation but not another? Are the tradeoffs you consider limited to technical matters, or do you consider "softer" aspects in your analysis (such as recruiting costs, time to market)?

— How well do you know your tech stack of choice? How well do you understand your own limitations within that stack? How does your stack of choice measure up against the alternatives? Where is it better, where is it worse?

— And, finally — why does any of this matter? Do you genuinely want to work on the sort of project that _actually_ requires so-called "rockstar" engineers, or are you happy working on projects where good enough really is good enough? How much effort would it take to actually become a rockstar? What would it cost you? (you might want to go over the bit on tradeoffs above again)
It's not that the people who run the companies are better or worse. It's the customers. Is the company staying in business because once every two years a majority of the country pulls a lever for a group of people who then decide to vote to keep a company in business by sending money their way or is it staying in business because people spend money.

I have a lot more faith in decisions that get made because people put money down then because people put votes down. What's the line? A bet is a tax on bullshit. People say they like lots of things. They'll pay money they had to work to earn for a lot fewer - and they'll think about those a lot harder.
I'm positive if I died no one would notice for at least 2-3 months, maybe more

I live abroad. I have no truly close friends. The closest friend has 2 kids so I see him maybe once every 2 months. My family is 7000+ miles away. I talk to them about once every 3-8 months. The biggest issue is the time difference. Those times when I think "I feel like calling" it's always the wrong time so it's usually only when I'm up at 3am and instead of going to sleep I tell myself "Ok, I guess I should stay up another hour to call".

I'm self employed. 80% of my expenses are automated. (should be 100% really)

So, if I died a couple of friends might think I was rude for not answering their messages on slack or fb messenger but it would be quite a while before someone came and checked. Unless there was a smell or something coming from the apartment there really is no one I can think of that would check up on me.

Yes, I want to fix this situation. Stupidly I don't know how. I'm > 50yrs old. When I go out most people are < 40yrs old. Of course we get along but being in different places in your life can make it hard to relate the same way that people in the same place in life relate. I go to meetups and know a few people's names but haven't made any "friends".
Awesome post. Definitely good timing as I was about to start an Ask HN around this as I go through the process.

I've also asked about early exercise (83(b)) and term sheets, if there are bad terms i.e. liquidation pref, anti-dilution etc but not all companies are willing to share this info.

Also, I am curious about why companies don't just have a black box formula output generator, with your equity offer value, saying this is our projection and based on our current termsheet if the company exits at this value your options are worth X, with the option of dilution built in.
A simple front-end framework based on react and redux
Unfortunately I’ve met some people that take that mentality to a macho extreme in the form of “if you want to be STARTUP, you should actively avoid doing anything that resembles forethought.”
That's not entirely the case - there's definitely research / work being done in this area.

https://blog.mozilla.org/javascript/2017/10/20/holyjit-a-new...

https://github.com/nbp/holyjit
I'm not claiming they're the only ones (I called out github's offering explicitly). I'm just explaining why this exists because a lot of people in this thread seem to think it's a github replacement.
I think it’s important to note that in many situations, money > equity.

90% of startups fail.

If you have two options, one being getting payed your preferred rate, and another being taking a huge pay cut for equity.. experience tells me to take the money every time and you’ll have made the right choice 90% of the time.

For most people money on hand today is way more important than future money that may never even materialize. And if you’re not most people, there will be future opportunities to buy into the company one way or another if you want to be an investor. You don’t even need to invest in the company you work for, there might be better investments that your real money that you get from the job can afford.
Why do exams test un-taught material?
I'm taking an online mooc for a comp science class. I feel that I've grasped the material in the lectures and have passed all the quizzes and problem sets without issue, however the midterm exam introduced many obscure twists to the topic that were never covered in the lectures. I recall this happening a lot when I was in college, and there must be a reason why. Isn't the goal of an exam to test one's understanding of topics covered in class? To all educators out there, why introduce new stuff in exams?
This is very interesting.
In larger organizations it can be very difficult for team managers to measure business outcomes of their work directly. Talking to customers is a difficult process, if at all allowed. Information from customers percolates through many layers of support and sales staff, product managers, business stakeholders, project managers etc. By the time the information gets to you it is tainted by bias and politics. Not that it would have helped you much since your objectives are already set by your hierarchy, and again are focused on your ability to execute, not business outcomes.

That may not sound like a very productive environment, but that is the environmental in which most of the world’s software is written. For those engineering managers that have to operate in it, measuring your ability to execute is the best you can do. You might as well do it correctly (which is hard).

And if you’re one of the lucky few working in a less dystopian environment, don’t be too quick to gloat. Enjoy it while it lasts, you’re just one acquisition or reorganization away from joining the rest of us in corporate mediocrity.
I never actually did it, but I was around the same age when I read about this on TOTSE (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TOTSE) back in 2000-2001.
Should Heroin Be Prescribed?
This ignores the "disruptive technology" aspect. Consider that most of the largest corporations are very young. Even Apple is only half a century old. 2 decades ago, they were doing completely new things that no one had ever done before. No one "understood" mobile computing before it took off.

Companies get a quarter trillion in cash by doing something really well that others aren't doing. Nuclear fusion powered perpetual motion machines certainly fit the bill...
Right, but consider if OP's other option was a Google/Amazon/Apple with total compensation at $250k a year.

They could have worked in a stable environment with guaranteed $1M in compensation after 4 years, vs unstable and very demanding job with a low likelyhood of $1M total compensation over the same time horizon.
Think of it like having a lot more cops on BART, only with accountability for shooting the wrong guy.
>Whether access to an rng is a prerequisite for consciousness is another question...

Wouldn't free will necessarily require "true" random number generation? If there existed any equation such that it could always perfectly predict what something would choose, then it seems no choice is really being made. Assuming that's true, and assuming free will is a necessary component of consciousness, then it follows that probabilistic phenomena is a requirement for conscious behavior. This begs the question, "Do people have free will?", which isn't any easier to answer. But hey, if it doesn't exist, then you really can't blame me for thinking it does.
My guess: To test whether you understood the teachings enough to apply them properly to a new situation vs. simply memorizing the correct answers to the lecture problems.
All of those did something different to facebook. None of them attempt to replace it. Googles problem is not that they can't move fast, they already move too fast. Every year they totally rebuild an IM platform and create a new music streaming service.
It's not uncommon to refine things as a project evolves. I've had a few cases where I ended up replacing some huge messy code with a simpler and better performing alternative, however in my case I was also often the one to have written the original. Not that I consider this a bad thing, since it highlights the experience increase and skill progression that took place in-between.

I can't say I agree with your rule of thumb. How'd you reach that number? In my experience the number fluctuates wildly depending on what tasks you're working on. Your output will usually shoot up while a project is young or you're working on a new well-defined feature, and it'll go down as you focus on fixing bugs or improving performance. The best days are when you write negative lines of code.

Lines of code is usually not a good signal for code quality. If I pull in a huge new dependency in order to quickly solve a problem then it might seem like my project is maintaining high code quality, but that doesn't paints a complete picture. For each included dependency you should probably have at least one person in your team responsible for maintenance, which includes stuff like: keeping it updated, tracking security issues, checking releases for breaking changes or bugs, updating your code to handle changes or notifying others if the scope is too large, etc. Ideally, they should also be sufficiently familiarized with the code-base to fix bugs or other serious issues which affect you. These points are only meant to serve as a rough example of some of the responsibilities one might be expected to shoulder, but it should be understood that requirements vary based on a large number of factors.