skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I had a meeting with a customer today.

During the previous meeting one of their highest priority feedbacks was "X doesn't look anything like we want it, we want it to look like A,B,C,D...."

In the meantime I put it on the back burner to work on some other customer's requests.

Before today's follow up meeting I realized I hadn't made any changes to X, first thing they said "X looks great, don't change a thing."

I had done nothing, I double checked and nothing had changed in any way.

I suspect they just needed time to use it a bit and then they realized that it was in fact what they had asked for months earlier. Fortunately we were moving that customer into exactly the phase of "no changes, you use it for 6 weeks then tell us what you think".
Your choices are “it will happen again”, or “it’s different this time”. Choose wisely!
Indeed, under those circumstances, yeah formal and semi-formal methods get used.

But since these circumstance aren't common [goto: very eloquent GP].
Even aircraft software doesn't require formal methods. I have a copy of the DO-178C on my laptop. It's mentioned once in the glossary, once in the appendix A, and once in appendix B.

Formal methods would be great, but most people don't have extremely complex state machines where lives depend on it being right.
Interesting, thanks for that insightful comment!

Can you give any examples of larger companies that are hungry for senior devs?

Cheers.
Stupid wsj links
Flask app with programmatically generated mock data with variations. nginx to connect the whole thing.
It's a cost benefit analysis, if the failure costs you more than verifying it then you will verify it. Since cost of verification is currently high, if you are not losing millions due to failure it doesn't make sense to verify your code.

Look at fuzzing. No one did fuzzing a decade ago. Since fuzzing became cheap (i.e. due to cheap compute and somewhat due to cloud computing) everyone does fuzzing on pieces of code which remotely appear to be critical.

Even testing. When cost of running a program was high people didn't write test cases. They hand checked programs for bugs.
For some of these concepts - take a look at what Envoy + Istio , linkerd (and other service meshes) are trying to solve and conceptualize: load balancing, auth(n/z), monitoring, logging, etc.
Next you’ll tell me email isn’t encrypted.
My two cents:

(Full disclosure. Not an economist)

The great depression seemed to have ~5-8 primary causes to it. These causes came from many different directions and converged on a single year (or handful of years) in time. Since then, the recessions we've had have seemed to have occured due to a single or unitary primary cause. That is, they did not seem like the convergence of a multitude of quite distinct causes. A problem here is how fine a line you draw between separate causes. On one interpretation, there was a convergence of a multitude of causes leading up to 2008. The only thing I will say here is that the multitude of causes for 2008 seem much fewer in number and distinctness than 1929, and our present situation feels more similar - in that way - to 1929 than 2008.
It's time to switch to Linux :)
It won’t, permanently, and who thinks that about anything? But it would be a good change to try and have human ethics reflected on a societal level. I do have faith with enough failed attempts at capitalism we’ll learn, and at some point in the future capitalism will have the big failure, the one that makes it obvious how unsustainable it is. I’d like to avoid that one in my lifetime. One way that could happen is our AUTOMATED nuclear system built to protect capitalism fails and accidentally destroys civilization. This could happen at literally any time.
The funding for NPR says a lot. I suspect if you asked them in confidence, the staff would be fairly liberal, but the GOP hasn't defunded them because they realize the threat of defunding is more valuable than actual defunding.
Which programming languages use indentation?
Google hit with largest GDPR fine to date
Free open-source Video cloud service with docker image
I’ve been converting as much as I can from Chocolatey to scoop, mostly because the install experience (no admin/uac).

I had a great experience, especially after adding the “extras” bucket. The last time I tried (a year or more ago) I found a lot of apps missing. Seems that has improved quite a bit.
Well sure, but we are nowhere near there. The 2018 deficit was less than 4% of gdp.
https://www.usgovernmentdebt.us/federal_deficit_percent_gdp

The Laffer curve is not interesting when you are way on the left side of it.
This article is not about low level optimization.
He does acknowledge it, but it is in the screencast. The screencast is worth watching. It isn’t too long and is well done.
It is a rule for German passports. US passports don't have characters. AFAIK there is no general rule for passports.

Also, some passport numbers stay with you for life (China), other change with every passport.
The thing about software, indeed, most of it isn't space shuttles or life support systems. But it can go from paper airplanes to model airplanes to real airplanes more quickly than you'd think. Your hobby website could take-off to be an income and then a company and have leftover code all around.
> All companies that develop MIDI products are encouraged to join the MMA to participate in the future development of the specification

The good news: a new enhanced MIDI spec is in the works!

The bad news: you're gonna have to fight for it.
The comparison is between senior (5-10 years of experience) positions at FAANG, not all software companies, and doctors over all hospitals. How much do doctors make at the top 5 hospitals after 5 years ? How about top lawyers ?

In terms of job difficulty, I see no argument there: I can't imagine the stress a surgeon has during an operation; especially compared to a computer scientist such as myself.
What the earliest fragments of English language reveal
Disappointing that the 100 studies neglected long term success so much that the author didn't have much to say about it after reading them all
If you are worried about it go with something else, maybe .app.

maybe hang on to the .ly and use it to redirect to your main domain.
I'm not a climate change denier, but the New York times has become a pretty trashy magazine. They're like the MSNBC of print.
We're currently well on our way to the first alternative, and I don't know if we can find a way out of it without the second

"Climate change" is a red herring; we can "fix" the increasing temperature problem and yet deforestation, pollution, and overpopulation will still destroy every natural ecosystem on the planet.
It's Novo Nordisk, not Walmart. Walmart just charges a low, no nonsense, cash price for it.

Know how pharmacies work and you can get it for about the same price elsewhere:

https://www.goodrx.com/novolin-n
And they call it "Quantitative Easing" wtf. Time to look past Capitalism and our Modern Feudal Lords.
That quote reminds me of something Huey Long said not much after that (1935) after people were accusing his "Share our Wealth" program of being communist despite it having explicit protections for private property.

> "Communism? Hell no! ... This plan is the only defense this country's got against communism."

His was less of a "using poor people is helpful to the rich" argument than an "abusing the poor is going to create violent revolution", but both arguments stem from the same source. The cynic in me says that lines like these were easier to sell back when the idea of automating most of workforce wasn't quite so real. If the rich people of the future can get everything they need and want by owning technology - through patents, tech investments and physical technology for self-defense, why would they care if the rest of the country can play the poker game with them? If they have enough chips, why not just trade them among themselves forever? There will be nothing left to gain from letting other people buy-in significantly and there is no significant risk from refusing them.
Interview with Japanese demoscener 0x4015 (2017)
Show HN: Self Driving Anki Vector
Accidental faraday cage? :)
In modern houses the solution to this is a “whole house air exchanger” which acts to cycle on low power the airflow in/out of house. You can also get these for single rooms and equipped with a heat recovery component.
Hello, Matt from Gallantway here. In some ways, I agree. In fact, Your comment reminds me of the video 'everything is remix'... What do you think we missed? Perhaps a better baseline for comparison would be digging into strategy & tactics from the perspective of PUBG vs Fornite?
This is a rare case where the title is underselling the drama of the article as we’ve likely already passed a tipping point.
Don't zoom into the Boston Teapot!
>So, err on the generous side with your scoring, and down-select with interviews. Iterate until your interviews almost feel pointless. We got there!

I'm having hard time parsing this. First sentence suggests that I should be permissive in the scoring part, and rely on the interview to weed out candidates if we had too many. So interview becomes important. The second sentence says that interviews will stop being important. Can you clarify?
"Leveraged loan", defined:

https://www.nasdaq.com/investing/glossary/l/leveraged-loan

FT offers a more technical view of the phenomenon. Yesterday:

https://www.ft.com/content/64c9665e-1814-11e9-9e64-d150b3105...
When I've done gamedev stuff in the past I have used the "single big function, collapsible scoped blocks rather than calling separate functions" pattern a fair bit. I do find it makes the code clearer, especially in the root level game loop or world state setup stuff where the code reads (or at least should read imo) a lot like a flat script.
I think we could hazard a guess and say 'serious' money, is a 'serious' understatement. I'd say we could do an entire piece on this alone with indie, EPIC and EA!
Cool, so I can't choose not to read the NY Post now?
Most programmers are not that well compensated. I never made more than 120k a year tops, I'm almost 50 years old. Not everyone is young and pretty and attractive to the Googles. The number of employers who compensate like this are tiny you can count them on one or two hands. 98% of programmers never make more than 100k. With nearly 30 years experience I build things that would bill out to $160,000 a month for an outside team to produce, but I live in an 80 square foot roach infested apartment and can't afford a car.
Exactly this. New York City is the very definition of a "walkable" city because you walk to the subway, stand on the subway, walk to work.

Not because you live within walking distance of work, which almost nobody does. That definition of "walkable" would be so tiny to render it almost meaningless.
The question begged on formal methods is, who is the customer of the design? To accept a formal design, you must also be bound by the constraints and timelines it specifies, which reduces your flexibility.

The perception the OP or someone here might correct is, formal methods frustrate corner cutting and other product level optimizations that return margins, optionality, performance bonuses, positioning and leverage, "moving the needle," and other higher order fudges that are realities of human organization.

One example is how producing a security design to provide assurances to exogenous stakeholders becomes a forcing function on feature commitments. e.g. "if you do this feature, you need these controls, which means if you don't have those controls, you aren't delivering the feature by date X, and now there is a paper trail that you know that. have fun at the customer meeting!" This is a crude example, but makes the point.

From a product and exec perspective, that forcing function knocks the ball out of the air / collapses the wave function in regard to "who knew what when," as it relates to making feature commitments to customers, sales people, and channel partners, etc. These are all people whose interests are not necessarily aligned. Much of enterprise tech business is keeping that equilibrium unstable in a kind of strategic fog while you build a coalition of stakeholders that gets your company paid. A methodology that forces decisions in those relationships will get mutinied by sales pretty fast.

(It's often hard to tell whether people are solving these higher order alignment problems or just being dishonest, and many of them don't even know for themselves.)

In this sense, formal methods solve engineers problems but not necessarily business problems. Playing the cynical customer, I don't care how much marginal residual risk there is, I only care who holds it. Above a certain level, detail just means "caveat emptor."

It's a critical view of org behavior, but finding a customer for the models themselves (other than compliance) would go a long way to getting them adopted.
I had a section on "high-availability software" that I cut due to not being able to research it thoroughly. For the most part cars and medical devices and stuff don't use FM because there's pretty much no oversight. Aircraft, though, are a super interesting case here. I'll be honest, I'd probably trust code that's gone through DO-178C more than I would trust code that's been formally verified.

I _believe_ there's been a push to add formal methods to avionics, mostly because it'd potentially save money. But any FM stuff has to go through DO-330 and DO-333, which are just as rigorous and intense as DO-178C. The only stuff that has so far is, unsurprisingly, very expensive and very proprietary.
Lessons from the Startup Culture – Leadership
Bwaaaahahahaha! I've only just now realized that's an intended feature, not a bug. I'd been wondering for close to a year now why they'd not fixed it yet, since it happened so often for me.

I think that's the nail in the coffin for me; the screens are just too damn big.
True, though without greater specificity I, at least, interpreted the original comment to mean that the scientist believed the phrase "tipping point" was overly alarmist.
Reading the headline made of think of installing Windows via the command-line (say via imagex). Which is actually very useful in certain tricky situations when you mess up an install.

Once I didn't have enough space on a flash drive to install Windows via an ISO...but I did have a liveboot ubuntu system and 2 spare drives. Interestingly enough imagex and WIM tools were ported to linux, and it was a surprisingly easy experience.
well it would have helped if they explained it or knew why. they just “felt” those things. if I knew it’s because co2 was building up and it can make you dizzy, i’d open the window
Oddly enough, I think learning to program is easy, but only for a few people. And those are the people who are motivated to learn it as an end unto itself.

I was motivated because my older brother, and my mom, had already learned how to program, and they were quite excited about it. After getting past a few familiar conceptual hurdles, it became very easy for me to learn programming myself.

People who are only motivated by the money, or under pressure from others, have a harder time, because their curiosity and drive aren't activated. There's some sort of valve that lets the knowledge into your brain, that has to be opened.

For the most part, the people I know who seem to be motivated by money itself are not so desirous of getting rich per se (many are already rich), but are actually interested and curious about money in the way that I was curious about programming.

I don't program for a living today, but my ability to program is definitely a force multiplier for my work. It has either improved my earnings, or improved the continuity and longevity of my career.
Describing market moves in "standard-deviation events" does not really make sense. It is something for normal distributions and "random walks".

It has been known for a long time that his is not the case:
https://www.amazon.com/Fractals-Scaling-Finance-1st-First/dp...

The conclusion is: due to faulty mathematics, far out of the money options are underpriced. Or, who Mandelbrot concluded, "investing on the stock market may be riskier than you think".
Screen exposure before bedtime can also drastically affect sleep. Different color temperature and intensity and all, but on top of that is also the barrage of information that the screens deliver, which keeps our minds on alert. I find that I'm sleeping much better now that I turn off all screens at least half an hour before I start getting ready to go to sleep.
Whoever is determining credit worthiness needs to have skin in the game. This is what Dodd-Frank did. It required security bankers retain 5% of the overall risk of the security. Known as the Volcker Rule, it is now being rolled back: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/trump-signs-...
As STEM Majors Soar at UW, Interest in Humanities Shrinks
Watching the YouTube video (mentioned further down) which covers in-development concrete alternatives (https://youtu.be/wOE4UegzJ_M?t=190), apparently this forms FeCO3 + H2.

The C in that would be the carbon sequestration. :)
My comment was about how it is being sold. Even the title of the submission had "Magic" in it.

It may actually be a system of protocols, but you don't get that from the PR pushes.
With this spec, my LFO can be on a separate device and spit MIDI to modulate sample-accurate playback of an entire season of a TV show (assuming that it can be loaded into memory) recorded at 96000k.

Talk about future proofing. No complaints here.
> "Small cabals of capitalists" didn't murder a hundred million of their own customers in the last century alone. It took governments to do that. (Or, I suppose, tobacco conglomerates.)

lol I appreciate you offering an excellent counter-example to your own point within the sentence.
It gets even more complicated because your server is often a client, too.

Modern backend code will usually connect to databases and call REST APIs. The databases themselves might be part of a cluster. Moreover, the backend code is rarely exposed directly to the public; there's usually a proper http server sitting in front of it, and there might be another load balancer or CDN between the user and your http server. Every connection has a client and a server, and sometimes the same component plays both roles. Remembering which role(s) each component is playing in any given context is very important for security, not to mention debugging.
I'm a backend engineer with 10 years experience, and now a team lead. Everything I learned is through experience and piecing stuff together... This looks to be the book I'm missing! Thanks.
Echo this. We have collateral, revenue, decent profit margins, and significant YOY growth (over 500%) and it's been difficult to get a loan or LOC due to how young we are. We finally got one for a small $10k LOC which is funny because our company credit card is many times larger than that. Gotta start somewhere though...
With my 10 year old, he’ll need to watch some minimum amount of educational content online to
balance out the other stuff.

Generally he does this (or plays math/word/science games). And if he doesn’t, strangely our internet connection gets slow on his devices. Shucks, I guess it’s time to read a book.
Formal Methods are 30+ years old.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formal_methods
I didn't include it in the article because I wasn't 100% confident in saying so, but I'm reasonably sure that medical devices don't use FM. There's not a whole lot of oversight in that area, and most of the standards are (to my knowledge) about software process versus software methods.

Aviation also doesn't really use FM, but that's because they follow DO-178C, and that is a scary scary standard.
15 - 20% of subprime borrowers defaulted on their mortgages. That's a lot of people! Imagine, 1 in 5 of your neighbors defaulted and were foreclosed upon. This is not suppose to happen.

https://www.chicagofed.org/publications/profitwise-news-and-...
> Not in the sense of worst-case time complexity.

Fair enough.
Reviving the Handwritten Thank-You Note: Tips, Tools, and a 4-Sentence Template
Formal methods don't make a lot of sense when the product changes from week to week, or month to month, or even year to year.

It seems like the advocates of formal methods assume a waterfall method of software development wherein you develop a spec, formalize it, prove that it works, and then deliver it. That's just not how software works in industry. A lot of it never had formal specs and never will, and whatever specs exist change frequently. By the time a spec is perfected it is out of date and we are already moving on to the next thing.

Agile development killed waterfall development and formal methods have not adapted to the agile methodology.
I think that mean that if daytime temperature in a place is 1 degree celsius, no ice will remain in the long run.

This is true if there are no seasons, but of course more ice will form in the winter. But it's still worth thinking about over the long run. You don't need 30 degrees celsius to melt ice - 1 degree will do. It will just be slower.
That's still Rust code.

(And speaking as an outsider, arguments about purity seem like the last thing Rust needs.)
Neither loop unrolling nor avoidance of call overhead have anything to do with this article, with the exception of a small segment actually arguing against manual loop unrolls/structure unpacking. The article is about code structure for clarity, defect reduction, and predictability.
Many companies are laying off right now...
Having worked on aircraft software, including some very safety critical stuff, I wouldn't necessarily trust code that went through DO-178(A|B|C).

There's an unfortunate tendency (just like CMMI and other certifications needed/desired in that industry) to achieve the certification on paper by backfilling. DO-178 requires a formal spec document (NB: Not the same as formal methods) with traceability to the design and test procedures. Oops, we let it get stale (Read: Didn't keep up to date). I've seen people turn that into 5k pages with a good enough looking RTM that no one was ever going to read, and it got certified.

A system I recently worked on (left the project, it was toxic, or maybe it was me) had a "design" document that consisted of running the code through doxygen. While that did produce documentation, the code was reasonably completely annotated, it did not produce a design document (which should include rationales and things like, I don't know, state transition diagrams or similar to illustrate the design, not just the structure). And that system is flying today (has been for a while).

These things turn into games by the developers and managers, like hitting 100% code coverage in testing (which doesn't mean you've actually verified/validated anything).
wasn't theranos fraud committed for much longer than a couple years?
This is a an exceptional claim. Not saying that I don't believe you, but do you have any evidence that might help us verify this suggestion?
A 3D Animated Roller Coaster Model in Excel
Standard deviation only has meaning for a normal distribution.
I think the social aspect will be extremely dependent on how much the parents put into that part. The majority of home-schooled kids (now adults) I know, were socially stunted because of it, but I don't believe this is as much a fault of homeschooling as it is a symptom of those particular families not putting enough effort into integrating social environments into part of the routine. That part comes for "free" in classroom-based education, but it doesn't meant they have a monopoly on it.