skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> We will realise that describing data and calculations using the Given-When-Then format leads to tragedy, and will create and popularise tools and approaches using Excel to document examples.

Given all the examples given, it sounds more like Cucumber is the problem. Having specifications/tests written in the form of given-when-then isn't shown to have any issues. Rather, taking those specs/requirements and disconnecting them from the people who need them is the issue.
It's not that straightforward; there was concrete on top of the soil, it had functioned as designed for many years.

There are problems with infrastructure maintenance at a national level, and lots of deferred maintenance/upgrades. Given that, there's no reason to suspect that upgrading the spillway prior to failure would have seemed like a higher priority than many other remediation projects. There was not an a priori way of knowing it was going to fail, instead of a bridge abutment or whatever else was presumably repaired first, and would have had to wait if the spillway work had happened first instead.
One of my major hangups on that puzzle was that it required you to think of your character's clothing as inventory items, whereas in previous games, clothing was just part of your character's description.

It was also the first game I ever saw that had multiple possible solutions to a puzzle. If you can figure out the thing your aunt gave you, you can skip over a significant chunk of the game.
Where did you infer I had the opinion that communism is pro-worker? This is irrelevant. China isn't communist because their economic system is exactly capitalism, not because they're pro or con worker.
A very thorough review of the game on the Digital Antiquarian, including photos of the packaging:

https://www.filfre.net/2013/11/hitchhiking-the-galaxy-infoco...

On the same site, an exquisitely detailed account of how the Hitchhiker's game came to be:

https://www.filfre.net/2013/11/the-computerized-hitchhikers/
> An example would be how there is a financial incentive to not work employees over so many hours since that can decrease their efficiency.

So then you get a new employee.

> Another would be how if you have at least two firms, all other things being equal, the worker will choose to go the the one with more favorable work conditions.

Both are toxic work environments, literally, but the stuff you inhale in the latter place is slightly less likely to give you cancer.
How is the 737 obsolete?
Indeed. And one of my favorite Infocom games was A Mind Forever Voyaging which was arguably more tilted towards the literary and less towards hard puzzles than most. Which probably is one reason it's not as well known.

I'm sympathetic to arguments that you should be able to--at least in principle--be able to work your way through IF without having to rely on trial and error. Which wasn't the case with a lot of Infocom games.
Anything tooling you try and add is just going to be putting band-aids over the real problem, the fact your designer just isn't up to scratch.

They should be designing for the target of the product and if they don't have a good enough understanding of what that entails then they need to tighten their laces or you need to find a designer who will.
> Sure we might spend a fraction of a percentage of global wealth dealing with the trade-offs of spewing plastic everywhere but we'll be fine in the long run.

If you look at each large scale environmental issue in isolation, sure, there's a chance that it will be mitigated down the line.

But at what cost in the mean time?

Because this stuff is hitting vital and fragile ecosystems now at scales unprecedented.

Might I remind you that we are well into a mass extinction that shows no signs of slowing down?

With regard to microplastics, it's only a matter of time before we microbes learn to digest them. Those little guys are gonna be everybodies' best friends.

Because of the likelihood that microbes will be learning to eat plastic pretty soon, I don't see microplastics as being quite as daunting of a problem, in isolation.

But I take issue with your casual attitude and prioritization of humanity over the larger ecologies that humanity evolved in and depends on.

We absolutely need to be alert about this and other ecologically issues collectively.
There's probably some truth to it, but there is probably some confirmation bias to his story. I have no love for big companies with horrible corporate culture. But this is like a Yelp review from an unsatisfied customer, might be true, but should be taken with a grain of salt.
This might be the best comment I’ve ever seen on HN
HiveMQ is OSS now
Some builds in this project are out-of-tree (the best practices cmake way with a separate build directory). Some are built in-tree (with json files, libraries, object files, LLVM ir files, and more scattered in the same directories as source code). I can't be bothered to spend the time to learn, write, debug, and maintain the correct grep invocation to do this. rg has saved me the 10 minutes it would take to do this, and 28 seconds * ~1000 grep invocations. I'm a very happy customer.

The project is a fork of LLVM. We're implementing compiler support for a new design for threading on x86.
It doesn't seem there really are any rules or limits at Facebook.
A graphical introduction to dynamic programming
> You can't blame Facebook for the rise of right wing leaders

Facebook absolutely bears some culpability in this, but they're not the only reason that this is happening. Facebook cannot successfully control the hateful toxicity of their platform, which is now global.

All along the way, Facebook has lied, concealed, and deflected as much blame and responsibility as they could. This is unacceptable.

Facebook launched internet.org to get the 3rd world online (and more specifically, facebook), and wound up cancelling the project after the UN blamed Facebook for failing to control toxic speech against the Rohingya, who were mass murdered and displaced as a result[0].

[0]: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/meghara/facebook-myanma...
I don't live in a city with a smog problem, and this is not my area of expertise. I was just clarifying what I thought @dsfyu404ed was saying, since it seemed to me that @lm28469 had taken it out of context and jumped to a nasty reply that wasn't really pertinent to what was being claimed.
and ran in < 40 kilobytes of RAM on the Apple ][, less on TRS-80 and Commodore if I recall correctly. The game ran in a virtual machine built for various architectures so that the game could be built once and run anywhere. (Write once, run anywhere -- an idea that would later catch on with a certain programming language that is now displaying this text on your browser screen.)

Those games felt miraculous back in the day. I still recall the amazement I felt playing the detective game Deadline (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deadline_(video_game) ) and the way the simulation moved on in real time -- people wandering through a house, or suspects fidgeting nervously or offering additional info while I questioned them -- even if I didn't enter a command and merely waited.

Appreciating the severe limitations it operated within makes it all the more amazing. Another fine example of "scarcity drives innovation."

40,000 bytes for all code and data. Wow.
Since when is https mandatory? And which kind of power we give to cert auth (except money if you are not using letsencrypt)?
Here's the breakdown: https://seekingalpha.com/article/4243459-evolution-teslas-re...

It's only a small portion of their revenue overall and they operate on razor thin margins so it just might be keeping them afloat.
Going through this now and boy is this true. Nothing like rewriting a 1k+ lib the day before a feature is supposed to be ready and then praying you didn't blow up some other lesser documented part of the code.
What dress codes mean for cabin crew
I loved it, too - really enjoyed the puzzles, and had gotten through most of the game as a kid. I never quite finished it, and found out later that there was a timing component whereby you had to make the tea and get to the exit while Marvin was in the right place, (or something like that), and if you missed the chance, it never told you the game was in an unwinnable state, so you could play forever.

Nevertheless, I fondly recall solving the babel fish puzzle, just one step at a time, reading a clue, trying something new, getting one step further. Thinking it was almost solved, then having to go back and get some missing item from the first room of the game, etc. I find strong parallels to that puzzle and debugging code, and never did quite enjoy any other Infocom game quite as much. (Although Lurking Horror came close.)
If they are the same thing, why prefer Einstein to Chopra? Why quote Einstein's fluff, rather than his science? Why shouldn't we give samstave a Nobel Prize for his poem?
They didn't mention it in that article but they do this for a part of the year: https://m.signalvnoise.com/why-we-only-work-4-days-a-week-du...
The thing that amazes me about Notre Dame, and several other structures of that era, is that it took 200 years to build. The reason this is so amazing is that the architects and planners knew it would not be completed in their lifetime, and yet they progressed for a greater cause.

We don't really have projects like that anymore. Contemporary structures and infrastructure are designed to be completed within the lifetime of the creator.

We might be able to attribute that to advances in technology allowing for faster development times. But sometimes it seems we've lost sight of the grandeur that existed at those times, and perhaps we are not challenging ourselves enough.
Is there any information on the tech behind this? As a software developer this is horrifying and fascinating
This sort of personal vitriol will get you banned on HN regardless of whom you're attacking. Please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html, follow the rules, and make your points without stooping to that, regardless of how right you are or feel.

You may not owe better to Zuckerberg or Facebook, but you owe much better to this community if you want to keep posting here.
The notation for player death appears to be "JIGS-UP". Glad to see the classic Infocom sense of humor is present in the codebase too.
> There is a reason why most of the prominent jewish scientists are from germany, britain and US. You need wealth, infrastructure and research instutions.
Jews in the middle east, china, africa, etc haven't as much due to instability, lack of wealth, infrastructure, etc.

Thanks for mentioning not all Jews are European. Most Jews in Israel, for example, are not European. Nearly the entire ancient communities of Iraqi, Yemeni and Persian Jews are almost in Israel. If not for modes of dress (and even then), the casual foreign observer would often not easily tell apart Jew from Arab in Israel. At least, I often cannot.
I recently had a percussionist in a band I was in assert that "women don't have the brains to be mechanical engineers", and he honestly seemed to be serious. These people still exist

edit: I realise the post I'm responding to is sarcastic, but not everyone who thinks women are intellectually inferior to men is a troll
Do they not teach cursive anymore in schools?

That’s a new one for me.
I have heard the NIMBY argument many times before but I just don't buy it. It's too easy of a target. Plus there is so much land. Ok fine, won't build in your backyard, I'll build in the next yard over. We have this exact situation in a town called Davidson, NC where I am from. Builders can't build there. So they built in the hundreds of thousands of acres immediately right next to it. Problem solved.

Plus people exercising their right to let things happen or not happen on land and electing to do what is in their own best interest sounds fine to me and nothing to be vilifying. It sounds like to me the "NIMBY" finger pointers are just upset that low cost housing isn't built in neighborhoods they want to live in -- that is, it is being portrayed as some altruistic goal but really has self interest in mind.

Even if I conceded your point about NIMBYism, it may explain a very small part of the problem, but it absolutely does not explain why builders are not flocking to a state with a 117k/yr housing shortfall to figure it out.
For stealing/running the service, sure. But they find an exploit
> drawing the simplest hypotheses based on patterns

So, you're saying that it is generating conspiracy theories?
Yep, basically. We had a few chatbot products for some pretty popular media brands, they noted little to no engagement. Alexa, on the other hand, seems to get engaged a lot, even though in theory it suffers from the same problem.
I worked at a similar large aerospace contractor just in the past couple years. I can attest 100% to what you've said.

They estimated they would need to replace 40% of their workforce within the next 10 years just to stay afloat. Recently at my old site they hired 1000 people. Within a year, 800 had quit. These are software engineers, mechanical engineers, etc. I watched people just play on their phones, keep their feet up, basically do nothing at all.

One guy showed up to work on the first day and was told by his manager : "I don't have an office, so you'll have to sit here for now". The manager then flew back to another state, and the guy did not see him ever again. For a year this guy played Candy Crush on an iPad and did nothing because no one else knew who he was or who he worked for. Eventually he got a new manager and his job was then unboxing computers...for a year...When I started working with him, he would go into a large empty lab and just lay down behind some boxes and nap for 2hrs a day.

He was hired to be some sort of cost accountant.

This was not uncommon, it was rampant. I still cannot believe workplaces like that exist.
Politeness restricts the issue to one lane without making it worse for everyone else. You and all of your lane mates suffer, but everyone gets to get to their destination at a normal time.
That's a bingo! It's never No! It's "Sure, this is what it entails and this is how much it costs". Especially if you're a contractor. If their willing to pay the price, why not take the money and do the work?
I have the same problem, so I spent a month of my free time writing a reporting tool that does this for me. It sorts my activities into tasks and updates, and I can generate reports based on dates/tasks/etc. It's been a life saver for those stupid reports.
Why would moving a table from The Place All The Other Requirements Are Kept to an Excel file stored elsewhere do anything other than obscure requirements?
Whereas:

> The reduction of the tester to an expert translator/typist is a tragedy

> The Given-When-Then detracts from understanding and readability but provides the much prized automation through tools like Cucumber

> Instead of abstract domain models in Rational Rose

Now I see how we got into this situation. All this misery comes from the people who understand the code and the people who understand the business being different, non-intersecting groups of people.

Since the BAs can't read the code, there is a desire to construct a technical representation that they can read, representing a some kind of formal specification, and then derive as much as possible the program from that. This was the promise of Rational Rose and the whole UML project. Had it been successful, it would have reduced programmers to stenographers, "coders" in a very limited sense. As it is, in a "Rational" system of this kind, coders end up producing increasingly elaborate polyfills between the machine-generated parts of the system and the rest.

The target of this is always the "5GL" dream:

- specify program in English
- ???
- automated tools transform to code

.. without programmers involved. Unfortunately we've not managed to reduce the irreducible complexity of the step in the middle.

GWT does this de-skilling to testers instead; it's effectively TDD with tests in this quasi-human-readable format that gets unimaginatively translated into programs by the testers.

The proposed solution is to do more communication through spreadsheet-prototypes. Since these are effectively programs in Excel, with all the real programming capabilities thereof, you get a real working model of the system that actually behaves like a program.

Many businesses simplify this process by then just deploying the spreadsheet to production.

(I'm not familiar with Cucumber, but it looks like a thing for constructing toy "human readable" DSLs for tests? I wonder if we could get BAs to learn INFORM?)
The game randomly picks tools you don't have in order to force you to solve the puzzle that tells you which tool will be selected before you are actually asked for it.

If I recall correctly, you can't even carry all 10 tools into the room where the random tool is needed (unless you figure out the aunt thing).
Back in the days when Kings reigned for tens of years, whereas now we have 4 year politician cycles...
Debugging Teams – Book Review
I don't. The most accurate navigation system that doesn't require an off-platform signal is inertial (INS). INS units drift badly (relatively speaking), with errors measured in tens or hundreds of meters after only an hour. I have personally seen data from a unit that was off by kilometers after a couple days without GPS correction.
Microsoft is rapidly approaching "When the going gets tough, quit" territory. Windows Mobile was a vastly superior operating system, but it was dropped because it was only in third place. Android is still catching up to it's feature set. They've just more or less abandoned Cortana, relegating it to Office and an integration for other voice assistants. Edge, which while buggy beat Chrome on power consumption and performance more often than not, has been dropped for a reskin of Chrome.

Which is to say, Microsoft no longer appears to want to compete with anyone in any market where there is a leading competitor that isn't them.
"If you define winning solely as “who has the greater growth”, you’ve already lost. If you dismiss the standard of living enjoyed in Europe – one without medical bankruptcies, crushing college debts, or falling life expectancies – as a “retirement society”, you’re the one who deserves to be dismissed."

I agree with DHH's overall viewpoint. And Jason's portrayal of this issue as a "us Vs them" is idiotic.

But it is hard to overlook one point - if you were to choose to incorporate in one country today, the de facto choice is the US. When was the last time you heard someone who wasn't born in those countries say "Yeah! Lets incorporate in Denmark (where DHH was born) or Spain (where he currently resides, according to Wikipedia)"? And Basecamp itself is apparently incorporated in the US. There is probably a reason why Stripe Atlas doesn't take your money and decide they will open up an office for you in Switzerland.

Europe does seem to enjoy an excellent standard of living - good for them. But no one wants to immigrate to European countries because they think it is a "land of opportunity", at least not in the sense they do (or used to before Trump) when they immigrate to the US. The CEOs of some of the tech giants are first generation immigrants from developing countries. I don't see that happening in any European country in the near future. The success of these CEOs, by many accounts, is also directly related to their workaholic tendencies. And I am not sure if they are really exceptions (in the sense that other migrants who became CEOs at a much smaller scale can just afford to be bumming around). The success of these CEOs are signs of the same ambition and growth too.

Besides, there are some who think the issues pointed out by DHH as America's failing is actually because America wants to have its cake (high living standards) and eat it too (high growth powered by capitalist ventures) and turned into a confused mess. Well, clearly that doesn't seem possible in today's world for whatever reasons, but it isn't as if any country in Europe has managed to pull off both either.
fit where?
I think a lot of it is down to people overinflating the importance of their work, or the qualifications of their team. You could have a legitimately talented team and have delivered successful projects for big-name companies, but I'd be willing to bet that there are half a dozen other companies within the same city with similar size clients, a similarly-skilled team, and equivalent work.

It's all marketing. A company might sell the fact that you're doing large-scale work for global clients, when in reality you're building shitty CRUD apps for big-name companies that have farmed out the work because it's short-term work for a single department.

The panel interview is always a weird one. I've known a few places do it, and it's usually because the company is flat enough that certain individuals want to assert control over certain groups of people. My old place did panel interviews, with leads from design, tech, and PM's sitting in to ensure they have influence on that team.
Happens to me often on cold dewy mornings. Plenty of moisture from the overnight air, and it takes a while for the defogger to heat up, during which time it sometimes feels as if it’s actively refogging my windshield.
Its not only FAQ based bots that we intend to remove. It won't serve many purposes. Customers call banks to know about their balances. Or retail Customer care to know the status of order.
Once I saw a chatbot use case where chatbot recommended dresses if we talk to it in a natural way. For example: "I have to go to a Christmas party today " and it handled this...

We are only limited by our thinking on how to create them.
Sagrada Família in Barcelona[0] was started in 1882 and is scheduled to be completed by 2030.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagrada_Fam%C3%ADlia
Benchmark Time Series Database with IoTDB-Benchmark for IoT Scenarios
Here I thought I was hip using ag, the announcement blog post linked in this thread is fascinating and thorough, looks like it's time for me to try out rg.
You might want to revoke that token...
Here's to us.
Is the complaint literally just about aligning the text in tables of a Cucumber file because business analysts are more comfortable in Excel? Or just managing the text of your test suite across a whole project? I am struggling to parse out the underlying point of the article.
Let's assume that the goal is to rebuild Notre Dame as authentically as possible, except for whatever changes are absolutely necessary for modern safety standards (fire control; toxicity of paints; etc.) And that includes using the same kinds/maturities of wood, same kinds of marble, same wood varnish, etc.

And let's assume that we're okay with modern building methods (such as cranes) as long as the results are the same.

Do we still have access to all of the specialized knowledge that went into that building? E.g., stone masonry, wood carving, preparation of varnishes, etc.? And is there enough supply of the required building/decorating materials?

Does the world currently have enough qualified artisans to allow construction at some "acceptable" pace? Heck, do modern governments and Parisians even have the patience for a multi-decade construction project to succeed?
Why? It's basically soliciting vendors but with a broader scope. If you're redoing your kitchen you might actually want to buy a home magazine full of ads. It's Pinterest, which is hugely popular and I use all the time, but for print. Once I find roughly what I want I still have go through the vetting process to make sure it's not trash but it kinda solves the unknown unknown problem.

However, ads when I'm not looking for them can just fuck right off.
Ask HN: When was the last time you made a big mistake?
Source Code to the Original Decwar
Using managed machine learning services as your baseline