skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: How to grow as a developer in the federal government?
I've been working for the last three years out of school as a software developer for a federal agency. Actual software development is only about 30% of my job (Rails/JS) and the rest of my job tends to be configuring and troubleshooting Redhat servers we've deployed, the old legacy networks we often use, and any hardware that we have to interact with. There's plenty of breadth, not so much depth, but I enjoy it. I love the people I work with, the compensation is only slightly below market in a HCOL area, our product is useful (if not cutting edge), we have a lot of freedom in terms of what tools we use, and work-life balance is wonderful.

While I like my job a lot, I need some guidance as to how to grow in my career and skills. I feel like I could stagnate a lot in this job and just become one of those "retired-in-place" civil servants if I just stop challenging myself and no one would bat an eye. What sorts of skills or goals should I be pursuing that would be useful for my own personal/career growth? There's so much to learn and everything interests me. How do you narrow down what to focus on?
You're right.

The good news is that it's true regardless.

The repetition just makes it more likely to get into the skulls of people who have a hard time grasping the concept.
Fees are higher for those cards than cards without rewards.
I think it is hard to make that into a constructive argument.

Either you care and the 'allocation' is unfair.

Or you don't care, which means that the market doesn't work since you caring is what is supposed to allocate resources fairly, and it is still unfair.
What is it with this attitude that somehow learning new things is only honorable when those things are useless in the job market? Do you really think that anybody is taking up 4 years of their life and 200 thousand of their (probably borrowed) dollars just for the purpose of "expanding their horizons"?
Really, UC tuition was essentially free before 1990? I had no idea. Is that true?
If we get babelfish from Facebook, was it worth it?
"Facebook is the worst thing that's ever happened to the internet" -Twitter
Also some companies, to allow IDS to inspect traffic without having to extract keys from clients.
You can get a pretty good idea today of how close a specific text is to that ideal by pasting it into Google translate, translating it to a few different languages, then translating it back and comparing the results to your intended meaning.
Which apparently does nothing.
Just out of curiosity, what capabilities do you think are extremely valuable? This isn't an attack or anything, I ask with sincerity.
Imagine the guy that sat next to you in freshmen algebra class. Now imagine still having him on your 'friends list' 20 years later...

People are being hyper-socialized. Its not normal and no doubt causes people increased mental stress.
That seems rather low, if it is to be functional.

The funny thing is that it a "fitted kitchen" yet there's a large gap between the sink and the rest of the kitchen. It seems like it could fit better.
> I wonder if the verified compiler could be altered in the same way?

How do you know it hasn't already been compromised =)
This is such a beautiful example. We all want change, but giving up modern conveniences is so hard. We might mock the people and their private planes but I don’t doubt someone would mock me for my cars, central air conditioning, etc.
Credit repair
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that's not what you accused him of saying, and you've appeared to have gone back and edited your previous posts after I responded

I'm done here
I suspect this will be a take that someone is going to have a problem with, or maybe many do-but this is kind of the editor's job. Editorials while probably not the express opinion of the publication you're writing for does need to at least carry enough of an opinion of theme to stay consistent with readers expectations when they pick up $Publication_Weekly$.

Would it be nice to see if a publication just decided to run editorials contrary to or perhaps ones that eviscerated a viewpoint or position said publication has been known to hold-and entertain plurality for plurality's sake?

Probably. If that's what the readers have come to expect, probably.

But as a default condition of running a newspaper? I think senior editors like keeping their jobs too much for that.
CRT Displays: These Are Not Pixels
> I was no slouch, but many of them were getting better grades than me.

ADHD doesn't mean stupid. Many people who suffer under ADHD are really bright, they just have problems with focusing in school.

And AFAIK Ritalin doesn't increase intelligence, the best explanation I've come across is it just lowers the threshold for "interesting" in the ADHD brain until things like driving according to speed limits and listening to teachers isn't mind numbingly boring anymore.
I think you are talking about CuriousMarc's Xerox Alto restoration: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YupOC_6bfMI&list=PL-_93BVApb...
The method is to treat the protocol as structured data instead of a bunch of concatenated text. I.e. use a library that processes each piece of data, escaping any invalid characters, before putting the pieces together.

Strong typing isn't relevant here, this is applicable in any language. But the lib needs to know when you're putting text in a header name and when in the value.
Good website development services?
what best Web Design Companies did you work with?
By and large, GlassDoor ratings are no longer a good measure of how well a company treats employees; they now measure, mainly, whether a company has the ability to engineer and maintain artificially good GlassDoor ratings.

GlassDoor, in short, has become a textbook example of Goodhart's Law:

"When a measure becomes a target,
it ceases to be a good measure."[a]

The same phenomenon is known in some contexts as Campbell's Law:

"The more any quantitative social indicator is
used for social decision-making, the more subject
it will be to corruption pressures and the more
apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social
processes it is intended to monitor."[b]

[a] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

[b] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campbell%27s_law
One year after my first self-published book: 11,000 copies sold – $3,000 profit
I remember reading about dyslexics liking Comic Sans because the letters have distinct shapes even after transformation. This then inspired the creation of specialist fonts that are supposedly better, but since I last read about it there's been some research suggesting it doesn't actually help, so I retract my previous post.

"Dyslexie font does not benefit reading in children with or without dyslexia":

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs11881-017-0154-...
> In Unix you have to cut, awk and do all sorts of parsing to get some field out of `ls`.

I'm guessing you've mentioned using `ls` as a simple, first-thing-that-comes-to-mind example, which is cool. I just wanted to point out that if a person is piping ls's output, there are probably other, far better alternatives, such as (per the link below) `find` and globs:

https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/247973

That has been my experience, at least.
Tech Arms Race with China Blurs 'Physical, Digital, Biological Lines': WEF
The competition in the current market is not done at that level but at the insurance level.

Its just that insurances are picked by employer, so again, no way to compete.

The economics of the system are complex, but healthcare is far from being a "free market" as it is right now.
Bold text stands out when visually scanning the page, italics don't.
But this is about Pharo, which is a Smalltalk environment, which is different from how most programing languages are used. So starting from those kinds of questions is missing the point, when the focus should first be on seeing what makes a Smalltalk environment different.
When you're an employee, you're paid for the time you spend at work. The productivity is not part of the equation in the contract.
It’s not just hard, it’s also pointless unless we all do it together. If these people had refrained from making the trip, it would have no real impact on climate change. It’s a collective action problem.
> It's remarkable how often companies expect their employees to be completely loyal and do a bunch of work for free, while also treating their employees like free labor and cutting them loose at the smallest disagreement.

There's lots of other imbalances as well like how you have to tolerate being mistreated so you can get a good reference, and you have to actively avoid mentioning negative reasons you left a company in job interviews to avoid being labelled a trouble maker.

Glassdoor was suppose to help with the above I guess.
Create Your First Mobile App with React Native Framework (Free Tutorial)
Is there an issue for that? On the current version of GitLab https://gitlab.com/dashboard/merge_requests?assignee_usernam... loads in half a second https://www.dropbox.com/s/rfj1svopkexl6vb/Screenshot%202019-... and I have 1700 merge requests.

Maybe it was a regression in an old version?
This was the path all viable social networks were heading, than Facebook bought those willing to sell, Instagram & WhatsApp. So no, the problem is Facebook, in particular Facebook method of operation. Things would have been better if Instagram & WhatsApp did not sell to them or it was blocked by regulators. These companies would be serious competitors that operated differently.
Walking, public transport and biking are orders of magnitude more inefficient if you have kids or have to transport anything bigger than a backpack.
People are naturally political, that's precisely why professionalism was invented, and a key function of a manager is to shield their people from the politics higher up.
GitLab product manager for Verify (CI) here.

Thanks for bringing this up I hadn't seen your contribution! I think this is a great idea. I know the technical team has been overwhelmed with community contributions as of late - which is a good problem to have but one that we're still solving. I'm going to try and shepherd this one along myself. If you want you can reach out to me on Twitter @olearycrew or my email is boleary [at] gitlab.
Yep! I worked at CodeWeavers during Proton development and we were basically contracted by Valve to build the whole thing for them. Although if projects like that interest you, the work on supporting Wine on MacOS after they drop 32 bit application support is amazing!
Facebook and Google got rich. Users paid the price
That's defeatist. Small changes are not the only things that matter but saying "everything or nothing" is not helpful. The collective change that's needed to effect change begins with individual steps, like not taking a private plane when commercial will do.
What substance?

That comment reads like someone fed a thesaurus of non-words and a copy of the Communist Manifesto into a Markov chain.
>Colleges shouldn't be in the business of training people for jobs - that is what tech schools are for.

Whatever it "should" be for doesn't really matter. The majority of people (in America) operate under the assumption that going to College helps you get a job.
The comment about "blogging for the sake of blogging" (it would've provided better context if you'd replied to that, btw) made the comment that what we have now is mostly content marketing and self promotion. I don't see how pointing at social media refutes that.
The most important sentence is the last sentence:

There’s still a considerable gap between real intelligence and so-called artificial intelligence

My Tl;Dr on the article is that it's a lot of maybe, we don't know, we don't know why, we are not sure, maybe.

But I certainly agree with the final sentence.
I think the general feedback in these post are that people were using numerous tools in the decades before Facebook and they worked pretty well. I, myself, can concur what everyone's saying. I didn't have to set up a forum to chat with people who liked Tori Amos .... atforumz existed[1].

At that time I don't recall the social networks being about your local community, friends and family like Facebook is today. It was about people you would never have met - because that's what made the Internet magical at the time. It could easily have morphed into forums of friends and family - not that it would have rivaled Facebook but it could have met the need.

Socially speaking, I think the Internet is much less interesting now than it was 20 years ago.

[1] http://toriforum.proboards.com/thread/1138
AWS nerd here, I recently googled you guys and found out you have 1/4 bandwith cost already. See you soon for my upcoming project.
This sounds like a system that is no longer valuable for it's original intended use case.

I am just thinking out loud, but maybe one feasible response would be for people to create their own anonymous blogs about their experience at a company. I consider that a more distributed approach that may be more difficult for companies to game. If I were to create such a blog, I might use a disposable email address and create a blog on something like neocities [1] and other free static web site providers. Perhaps some of these sites would even allow access via Tor or other proxies.

Can you think of any other mediums that may be useful for this purpose?

[1] - https://neocities.org/
But were the developed with the GUI and then deployed as a headless app?
Sadly I constantly hear people say that you should get an Nvidia card for both Linux and FreeBSD, because the drivers are better. While I'm sure that Nvidias driver a good, it's kinda sad that the attitude is that AMD is a better friend of the open source community, but yeah, we're going with Nvidia.

I get why, you have stuff to do and Nvidia performs better, but still it a little annoying.

OpenBSD seems to be the only open source operating system that suggests that you get an AMD card (or use Intel integrated graphics).
wait.. You have several Symbolics lisp machines? which ones?
You must be joking.

Those product are the best products out there. They could be overpriced, yes. But other products "many times better", no way!!

Other products could be cheaper, but better, no they are not.

You can't compare an aluminum laptop with a plastic one, filled with spyware(from vendors and Windows today is spyware too), a screen that is sh*t and a battery that last nothing because the manufacturer has not optimized it like Apple has. Not to talk about the chipset electronics, Apple has a volume that gives them the Upper hand choosing the best components.
Building a Firebase Powered React.js Social Network
It’s not 1024 cells. The size of the hidden vector is 1024. Which is roughly an order of megabyte per cell (1024x1024 matrix). Here they have a cell per word, which is reasonable.
I never understood why people are so casual about inequality. To put it bluntly a lot of people will eventually, if not already, be working something like three quarters of their lives for society, a company and a land owner. And only one quarter for themselves.
Europe wants to mine the moon by 2025
well put

it also helps us to conveniently ignore economic sovereignty when contemplating 'success' or 'prosperity'

which of course is a useful frame given the bulk of the post war american middle class was created by essentially trading economic sovereignty in the form of small farms for corporatism

not sure how it could have developed otherwise given the rise of factory farms, etc, but this direction was certainly influenced by large players as well..
yeah, came here to reply "... said unironically via twitter"
Right. Your credential only has value because other people don't have it. Increase the supply of degree holders and the value of the degree drops. If I made this statement about any other economic commodity it would be called obvious, but for some reason people don't get it with education.
I wonder if they have states failure rate based on a drive's manufacturing or installation date? It looks like there's a bit of a bathtub curve, and it would be interesting to see if that's attributed to individual drives having a tendency to fail quickly (if they're going to), or if drives are less likely to crap out once their model has been manufactured for a few years
An ancillary lighted display that distracts you with bright colored buttons when you're trying to watch Netflix.
> I really don't understand Apple's obsessions with thinness. Do they really think that a few millimetres off the depth of a laptop is worth sacrificing reliability like this?

My favorite is when they wanted thinness so badly, they sacrificed the "bulky" hermetically sealed crystals in favor of super thin non-sealed oscillators of some type. As a result, iPhones would stop working in the presence of helium atoms (such as at hospitals where liquid helium sometimes escapes)[1], but not Android phones (which used the "bulky" hermetically sealed crystal oscillators)

[1] https://ifixit.org/blog/11986/iphones-are-allergic-to-helium...
> If you just want to get a job, go to a tech school, don't go to college. College is (or should be) about expanding your mind, your horizons

This is patently false. Colleges compete and advertise based on their job placement rankings. Just a few years ago, law schools were sued for misrepresenting their employment statistics.

Whatever ideal, romanticized version of university and college experiences are touted, the reality is that they are marketed to parents and kids as the way to a better lifestyle.

Sure, "Liberal Arts" are largely about enriching the mind, but that doesn't change the fact that very, very few people can afford the luxury of going to get a 4 year degree just to "expand your horizons".
Danny, boy, the pipes are calling!

(I love pipes too btw)
I worked in an area where the nearest competition was hundreds of miles away. When the engineering staff would question upper management and HR during annual meetings about competitive wages they would always state that we were extremely competitive for our location. After working there for nearly a decade and a half I moved to another state, about 300 miles away and my pay nearly doubled.

Doing my exit interview I stated that the reason I was leaving was because management had this goofy view of the world and it was the reason why we struggled finding talent. They felt that because there was no physical competition in the area they could pay a fraction of what their competitors in the field pay and still retain talent. They also felt that it was appropriate to create a convoluted scheme where you could never really get a promotion, just be given more responsibility w/ almost no increase in pay. (You can only move up a level if you have 1 or fewer "needs improvements" while the managers were told that all employees should have no less than 2 "needs improvements" as they should have things to work on over the coming year).

Most people I talked to about that whole situation would offer the "well why didn't you just move" advice not understanding that the pay was just enough to pay for room and board, college loans, and then choose to put the last few dollars into a 401k or into savings to escape that job. I opted for the former hoping I would work my way up to not have this problem. I made the wrong choice.
Air conditioning, at least, is a natural to pair with large grid connected photovoltaic setups. The times of the day when you'll have the heaviest AC compressor motor/fan motor load in watts is also when the sun is up.

Look an hourly demand curve chart for a central air conditioned house in Sacramento in mid summer, vs watt-hours produced during the same hours of the same day by a rooftop 10kW size pv system.
OKAY GOOD POINT I'LL EDIT THESE HEADLINES SO THEY DON'T USE THE ORIGINAL ALL CAPS!
While I've heard lots of great things about the Backblaze reports, I've noticed in comments on NewEgg, Amazon, etc that the SKUs mentioned in the report frequently aren't available anymore. I've never had problems with WD Red drives though I don't purchase them all from the same vendor at the same time to make sure I get drives from different lots in case of a lot defect.
For those who are really unable to work, we already have a safety net.
Web Apps Can Turn Browser Extensions into Backdoors
Are we to understand that:

— nobody hit the Enter key?

— the program does nothing?

— the program does something but there was no output?

— there was output but not to stdout?

etc etc
> Before Facebook, if I lost someone's contact information, and drifted outside of their social circle for a long enough time, chances were I would never ever see or speak to that person again.

Not really. Chances are, I knew someone who knew that person and could ask them for the contact information. Before Facebook, how do you think people coordinated class reunions decades after graduation, decades after having spoken with most of the people in their class? Sure, it's easier now, but it wasn't as difficult as you make it out to be.

> Before Facebook, if people wanted to organize conversation and cooperation on an information technology platform, the options were to pay $X00-$X000 for a proprietary system, get lucky enough to know about mailing lists, have someone who knew sysadmin do it basically for free, or have everyone learn how to use something like IRC.

Again, it really wasn't that hard. You found where the groups you wanted to hang out with were online. It wasn't restricted to mailing lists or IRC. There were forums, etc... And no, you never needed to know a sysadmin to do any of that. That's just silly.

> Social networking was an enormous pain in the ass.

No it wasn't. You talked to people through the channels you had available to you or, even better, in person!

All Facebook, and social media in general, has done is centralize all of that. I'd argue we're now seeing that such centralization isn't a good thing.

You're right that the problem isn't necessarily Facebook's fault, it's how people are using it and we're just not good at using it. However, I counter that Facebook knows this and is taking full advantage of it for their own benefit. They're purposely showing things to people that they know will get them riled up so they will comment and spend more time on the site. That's just unethical.

It will not get better as long as current management and thinking is leading Facebook.