skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What do you do?

The company I work for doesn't even have an ad platform, and its business model isn't designed around addicting people to anything. I don't go home with the thought in the back of my head that I'm just making a drug that much more attractive. We actually help people. I've heard customers talk about how we saved them from some big disaster before.

Companies that are designed to be exploitative and addictive are the minority, really. They just got really large because of how successful that business model can be and loom large in our minds. There are plenty of places to work based on creating win-win scenarios with customers. You may take a pay cut from Google. Then again, you may not even take that much. Can't hurt to look around.

I can't lay claim to "changing the world", but I do feel like my job is making it better. I'm a Chesterton's Fence kinda guy anyhow. It doesn't surprise me all that much that a lot of companies out to "change the world" do so only to discover that their change wasn't an improvement after all. Improving the world at all is a tall order; to do so in a revolutionary fashion, nearly impossible. (On the flip side, a lot of that "change the world" stuff is just rhetoric anyhow. "We're going to change the world by making it slightly easier to call taxis on your phone!" may be a great pep-talk, but it's kinda... silly.)
It's just kind of funny because every time there's an article about gender/race discrimination, you've get a bunch of people playing devil's advocate and explaining how it's not really so bad after all.

But then you see the age discrimination articles and the entire tone of the commentariat is "yes this is a real and serious problem! something must be done!"

I don't even disagree: age discrimination is awful. But nobody's out here with "Well maybe older workers are really worse at their jobs. Surely you don't want affirmative action for greybeards..." the way they are when women raise the issues they face in the tech industry.
When it's not possible to sit down and enjoy your meal outside of the car, which I understand happens, then bamboo cutlery may be offered.
>I took it the other way around: it's easy to memorize "went" because you use it all the time.

That still wouldn't explain the why of having it like "went" vs "goed".

Sure, it's easy to memorize because we use it all the time, but why have it to memorize it in the first place, versus something like "goed".

So, this theory (I tried to convey above) said that it being irregular placed ensured we don't slow down try to derive it from regular rules, but instead have fast access to a memorized form.

Couldn't we just memorize "goed"? If it's just "frequency of use" that mattered, "went" and "goed" would work just as well.

But the extra idea is that "goed", being regular, would be too easy for us to confuse with thousand of other regular verbs, and not use our "fast recall" mechanism, regardless of that verb being needed all the time.

Not sure if correct - read it years ago. This seems to be related to that:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regular_and_irregular_verbs#Li...
> And if you're on the go? Eating as a passenger in a car, etc.

Maybe eat food that does not require cutlery ?
It's just like how HFTs can make massive amounts of money just by making transactions milliseconds faster than the people next door.

Stuff is insane
> Anyone who asks you to be "dedicated" to their business or cause is looking to exploit you. When things get tough, they will not repay your dedication in-kind.

If you give your time for free to a company. The company will assume that your time is worth nothing. And once the expectation is created, there is no gratefulness for doing it. The only thing that you will get is a bad looks if you stop giving your time for free because now it is expected.
Most in-demand tech jobs in 2019
> break out of nested loops

-deeply- nested loops at that.

I once was on a thread in a forum discussing state machines, and somewhere in the convo the use of GOTO popped up. I wasn't for it, but somebody made mention of how it could be used to implement a state machine very compactly.

Then he showed his code - it was done in PBASIC. I saved a copy of that code, because it was very, very elegant. While I knew there were certain very niche cases for GOTO, I never thought that a state machine would qualify. For me, it does now.

I don't have the code handy, but it reminded me of Duff's device, if you know what that is - just done in BASIC - and not as a SWITCH-CASE of course...
Ah thank you! As I dig into the reference material, I’m sure I’ll gain this kind of nuance, but I appreciate you pointing this out! That indeed does also make it less dangerous.
This was submitted a while ago, but hasn't picked up much discussion in the past.

Resubmitting now in relation to the discussion on the 737-MAX8: Using software to stabilize hardware isn't easy. ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19509618 )

More Mickens:
https://mickens.seas.harvard.edu/wisdom-james-mickens
w3w has been around for a few years, and it hasn't caught on, so it's fair to say it's pretty much just a zombie of an idea now.
It doesn’t help much! Better do nothing!
MGRS and UTM are missing from these comparisons. They're commonly used systems in North America and exist for easier human reasoning and communication about coordinates, so they'd be good to include.
Like the bag ban in California this will probably just increase trash by causing people to use bulkier disposables. Restaurants and such will replace these with super-cheap glass or metal disposables that also consume more fuel when shipped because they weigh more. Cheap paper alternatives are often from pulp that is not sustainably sourced and in many cases they fall apart and so are rejected by customers. These measures might be well intentioned but they don't work and often backfire.

There is no way we're going to decrease oceanic plastic pollution without sanctioning or otherwise pressuring the nations and industries that are primarily responsible for it. For nations it's largely China, India, and a few others. For industries fishing fleets are a disproportionate source, and most of the culprits here are also not US or EU based.
Our team right now is about 3 developers (1 part time consultant). This is about a year into a recommendation by me to can the old team. The old team was about 9-12 developers located in Pakistan. The new team is pretty much Americans (all their lives). We are all remote.

The 3 of us have:

* Migrated significant portions of the PK team's Angular 1 app to React

* Introduced GraphQL

* Fixed migraine sized security holes (no priv. checks in about 30% of the app)

* Migrated from some system that was SUPPOSED to be docker swarm to kubernetes

* Introduced 4 major feature releases

* Building systems and configuration formats designed for code reuse rather than building brittle shit code

* Actually implemented elastic search in a useful way (the old team installed a shitty unreliable version and used it for a non-essential purpose)

* Migrated the 90% of the JS codebase fraught with patches to typescript.

I get that none of the above is stuff that can be "fully" grok'd from an outsider, but basically I'm saying the team is doing the code right (instead of poor, not up to spec) releasing features waay faster, fewer bugs, in less time with 1/3 the people. The price? It's actually cheaper by about 20% (maybe about 10k less per month).

I'm not a writer, and am definitely poor at story telling, but there's a major problem in my eyes when we say we have to hire people out of the country or are H1B holders first.
Back in university (~2005/06) I still remember the "concurrent and distributed programming" course, held by an extremely opinionated professor who was an Ada enthusiast and spent half of the lessons bashing Java and its lack of proper constructs for concurrent programming.
We all at the time commonly agreed to hate on Ada :) (it was not a popular professor)
What benefit do you have over Plus Codes (https://plus.codes/)? I only learned about them from this thread, but they seem to solve the problem quite well, and there's no premium component.
> Is it me, or is traditional news always attacking tech?

First of all, Amazon is not tech. It's retail. Walmart doesn't have the same growth. When Walmart was on the same wave, it was also 'attacked'.

Please stop the whataboutism, it deflects from the currently discussed issue.
Easier said than done when you're only other option is toiling in a field.
The end of open: BBC blocks its podcasts on Google [UPDATED]
If the point of NATO is to get money flowing into the U.S. from Europe, it's failing horribly.

EDIT - I mean via direct military purchases. Obviously the stability protected by NATO enables tremendous trade between Europe and the U.S.
> 3 weeks of vacation ... most US workers

Most US workers have no vacation...
We're using the ical standard to pull in events, though we've found so many instances of companies breaking RFC 5545, it's hard to call it a "standard". Happy to chat about how we built this feature, for those interested.

ical standard: https://icalendar.org/RFC-Specifications/iCalendar-RFC-5545/

// Joe (Eventbot co-founder)
It's not just Boeing, though. Formal training, at least in my limited perspective, is seen as a luxury now.

A related point is that training used to signify a ramp up time for an employee with an unfamiliar technology. Employees didn't go onto projects until they passed through a training course. Companies now expect zero ramp up time. Hence, they pass over highly qualified software engineers, who may not have a lot of experience in a particular technology, to get less experienced engineers who don't need training in the technology.
I think the idea that they work is more important than these systems actually working. The hope is that these systems scare students enough that they don’t try to plagerize in the first place.

I don’t think these systems are nearly as egregious as the 5 paragraph essay scoring system they used around 2010 when I was in 9th grade back in 2009. I thought it was fine back then, but now I wonder how that thing had even the appearance of working some of the time.
Does your local river actually have a plastic problem? I am not sure thats a problem in western countries with functioning waste management systems. I thought the water problems we had were generally from industrial or agriculture runoffs. Am I wrong?
If a given generation is doomed by plastic misuse, going through the big effort that would net in .5% total savings in western countries is hardly going to postpone the calamity to the following generation.
Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17906113
I think people on the west already know this. It seems like Chinese people have to learn it the hard way.
They make compostable plastic utensils now, along with wooden ones. We should use those instead if we really need something disposable.
Epsilon-delta is the formalization introduced by Cauchy, Bolzano and Weirstrass during the 19th Century.

It is not the way calculus was invented by Newton and Leibniz. They thought in terms of infinitesimals. However, this approach is relatively hard to formalize. It was only done by Robinson in the 1960s.

To see why Cauchy et al had to work on epsilon-delta, take a look at [1], an excellent book.

[1] https://www.macalester.edu/aratra/
What's hilarious is that the reason is Google is pushing back on sharing user analytics with BBC. For another company it'd be the pinnacle of respecting user but you just seem biased against Google so there's nothing they can do to please you it seems.

All other services (Spotify, SoundCloud, Apple, etc.) serve podcasts on their own properties but if Google does it it's monopolistic. To me such claims about Google have become too overused and have lost their meaning.

I don't blame BBC though for sticking to their guns because they really want user analytics and think have the weight to pull out. The justification they provided is just misleading.
There is nothing about a "Software Engineer" which precludes them from achieving a grasp of the finer points of physical engineering disciplines.

Finite element analysis, error propagation, systems analysis, statistical process control, mechanics of materials, and all the other equations we've come to rely upon are equally applicable by anyone with the wherewithal to learn to learn them, and are in fact, more likely to be picked up by someone who spends 80% of their time learning "the next tool".

In short, while I agree many software engineers may be in possession of an inflated sense of competence, there are many who are legitimate polymaths. This makes appeals of the sort you assert less than useful in the pursuit of substantive conversation.
Every single human on earth would agree that this is what should be done, but this is naive. Of course it should be done. How do we actually accomplish it?

good engineers will step out of their box

Good engineers are often prevented or discouraged from stepping out of their boxes by organizational structures.

Engineers also typically have intense workloads.

Getting a solid week's worth of engineering done is hard enough as it is.

Heroically crossing boundaries and leaping outside of organizational boxes to solve problems carries, at the very least, a high risk of falling behind on other work assigned to you.

In defense of organizations (and those who create them), coordinating hundreds or thousands of people is really hard. How do you create a strong enough structure to avoid chaos, while simultaneously allowing people to step outside/across that structure when the need arises? It ain't easy.

Also, and I don't know anything about how Boeing operates, but I suspect they already are successful at this to a large degree. Their record is not spotless, including some cover-ups they're guilty of, but it is very good. They would not be a world leader in aviation with highly competitive planes if they weren't pretty good at this stuff.
Hidden costs of Firebase Performance and how to avoid them
> On Windows Phone every reader app (not that there were many) had to have its own independent download because god forbid you have shared freaking storage.

That's not entirely accurate, even for Windows Phone at its most restrictive (7.x). The reader app would ask for storage apps and the storage apps would provide the files. It was quite common that the storage apps seemed like they would download multiple copies each file separately for each reader app, but that wasn't always the case. Unsurprisingly, some storage apps were just dumber than others.

Windows Phone 8.x and 10 opened up more direct file system access without going through an intermediary storage app, though of course possibly too late for the impression of stupid storage apps to linger.

ETA: Not that any of this currently matters given the current state of Windows on mobile devices. :(
Please tone down the language here. I'm not for hostility against people with disabilities.

However, keep in mind this is a small fraction of people and does not justify single-use plastics. There's more discussion of alternative materials in other branches of this post.
For Lego aficionados, that's about $499,207.34 worth of pieces.
Yes, I agree that the article spends waay too much print on the lack of openness, and too little on the fact that W3W is just a bad idea that solves nothing.

So, yes, if that was his only problem, he should definitely organize an open version. (it'd just be a bit less pointless)

BTW, did you see this? Somebody posted it above and it is hilarious - especially the Vision, Facts, etc pages...

http://www.what3fucks.com/
Not everyone involved in Rust needs to be intimately familiar with all the prior art. Further, I'd argue that many of the people involved in Rust know as much about prior art in programming languages than anyone who has been involved in Ada in the last 20 years.
I believe things might work pretty differently when it comes to China, which is the main demographic of this browser
Agreed, harmless pranks are what April Fools' is about. On my part I'm planning to prank my relatives on Plex with a fake Game of Thrones season 8 episode, with the intro followed by an hour of Rickrolling.
Creating a Starcraft AI – Part 22: Caveat Implementor
Build a Custom Minimal Linux Distribution from Source, Part II
I have seen bamboo plates and cutlery, though it isn't common.
Inmates in Finland are training AI as part of prison labor
Maybe we'll just bring or receive our fast-fired pottery plates, eat on them, smash them into the clay pile on the way out, and some companies collect and recycle it back into quick pottery the same way companies drop drums of water off at my house.

A lot of these comments just remind me of a roomie I had in uni would would come up with endless reasons why he never owned a single reusable piece of dishware. It's suddenly about hygiene and... do you even know how many people die in $country cuz they can't just throw their plates away?! And the time savings! He must save hours each day actually if you do the math. And are you sure using so much water to clean a plate is any eco-friendlier than the plastic he just tossed after eating that sandwich? Oh yeah, and disabled people! How would he clean a plate if he had no hands? Or if he was just a disembodied head whose only form of locomotion was to be tossed around like a volleyball. What then, huh??

But at this point you indulge him just to see if he'll even admit that he's just not willing to spend 5 seconds rinsing a plate after use. And any time he does use one of the communal reusable dishes, it'll collect mold in the sink until someone else washes it for him.
Why would they? It's not like Airbus planes haven't had their own fatal glitches. Heck, it hasn't even been all that long since they had their own version of an MCAS style failure which was only recoverable because it happened a lot farther from the ground.
They're probably going to settle. This is not new and there is already precedent[1] about these sort of postings. Even a halfwit counsel could have told them this wasn't allowed.

I've been seeing this go on for a while and I'm not surprised at all. I'm more surprised it took this long. As soon as they added rentals and properties to their marketplace they should have immediately tweaked their algorithms to not fall outside the law

[1] https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=554032...
"Being able to hire H1Bs helps hiring managers" for sure, but H1B need to be sponsored by the firm they're working for, with the implied threat of losing their residency right if they can't keep that job. It's blatantly exploitative and not a free market at all, so the "lump of labor argument" doesn't apply in this case. Basically, any support for the H1-B program in its current form means you're supporting a race to the bottom in workers' rights.
This is one of the best metaphors I have heared for a long time :)
I've had similar thoughts. The problem to me is that a huge portion of the people who say they want to "change the world" really mean they want to get rich quick with loose morals or they want to change the world in mostly trivial ways for young urban professionals. On the flip side, there are plenty of people and companies who legitimately are trying to change the world for the better for large segments of the population, but they're not paying FAANG salaries with cushy offices and benefits.

It comes down to your own priorities - if you want to actually help make the world a better place, you're probably going to have to suck it up and take a salary and career trajectory hit to work at a non-profit or a help-oriented company with low comp structure not based in a sexy city. If you're unwilling to give up some lifestyle points for that, you'll always be faced with companies that are really only paying lip service to positive change while actually being driven by profits.
I've envisioned an application like the following for construction sites and industrial installations:

There would be a "supervisor" app with a schematic 3D model of the site, with dots or tags indicating the location of smartphones of workers, who have installed a satellite app.

There would be messaging between the satellite apps and the supervisor app, and a worker with a satellite app could stream video or post pictures to their tag, which could then be accessed from the supervisor app.

There could also be a VR/AR version of this. No video stream would take over the POV of the VR/AR users. Rather, the streams would be available as pop-up "screens" from the location tags on the schematic model.

For bonus points, interface this with CAD/CAM, so that not only the schematic model can be imported, but the design details can be accessed and drilled-down, and relayed to the workers on-site.

The purpose would be to provide answers and clarifications to workers very quickly, as well as providing contextual information localized in the 3D space of the design to supervisors, architects, and engineers.

Is there already something like this?
Ah... the old debate about onshore vs offshore.

I tend to work for technology companies these days and give the ones with offshore dev teams a wide berth.

If your product is a technological product and you skimp on labour needed to produce it, sorry, you are doing it wrong.
Lucet: Native WebAssembly Compiler and Runtime
Random Processes for Engineers [pdf]
To be fair, I would fully expect American guerrillas to be able to maintain an insurgency just as effectively as the Afghans, particularly in the Rockies, Appalachians, Alaska, and Cascades. Texas is more flat and wide open, but if you managed to hold the local fuel infrastructure you can do a lot with guys in pickups.
> but an even bigger problem is rudeness, snark, or condescension that newcomers often see.

I remember one of my first interactions with other developers was the #php.dk channel on Quakenet in the start 00s, I had shared a PHP script with them that didn't work, and had included my development database settings, and back then NAT wasn't really a thing, so one of them figured out that he could login to my MySQL database and change the password!

And I didn't know how to reset it, so they made me beg to get the new password, so they showed me how to change it to something new and they showed me how to protect myself from such things in the future.

It was a nice life lessons, and I guess that IRC channels needed some strict moderation, but I'm not sure the shenanigans that went on back then (and likely still happens) is all that great for learners and newcomers.
Yes and no. No, if one is designing something that will be state of the art, it is not unreasonable to expect that the designer knows what the previous state of the art is.

But yes, it's weird. First, he's not a designer of the language. Second, there are too many languages for anyone to be intimately familiar with all of them.

And third, there's just this weird bunch of very negative comments. What's up with that? You don't like Rust? (Not you, lukebitts, but the original commenter.) Fine. Don't use it. You don't like the publicity it's getting? You think your language is better? Languages are tools; they're not rock bands. Feel free to like and use yours. Rust doesn't take anything away from that. You don't like Steve? You think he's getting too much attention? He's getting it for useful, informative contributions. You want that kind of attention? Go and do likewise, rather than whining and sniping because someone else is getting attention.
> I don't believe manufacturers should have to build things to be easy to take apart, to be replaceable or upgradeable, or anything else along those lines.

Why not?

> I'd rather see legislation that ensures when a piece of tech reaches the end of its useful lifetime it can be submitted back to the manufacturer and properly recycled at no cost to the user.

It is always and exclusively at the cost of the user?