skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> It's great that $50-80,000 salary jobs can exist for people who have a modicum of software development talent. I'm very happy for these people.

My impression was that these jobs have always existed but are disappearing, we used to call them support developers but that is a job title that seems to have disappeared lately, the jobs themselves seem to be disappearing in our rush to make everyone "full stack" interchangeable parts. Management sees the skill overlap and seem to think their roles can be replaced by real developers, which is a terrible term but I can't think of a better one, this may even be part of the problem.

The even bigger loss is that they could be great entry level roles for bringing less experienced people into the industry.
Why Veritasium's video went viral
>Here is another vector: compared to the software you could buy back then, the things you could do in your spare time programming were more oftne than not cooler or at least comparably cool. To make a better version of any on single app that comes preinstalled with your Mac is not something you just do.

IMO this is definitely the issue, rather than availability. If someone is too lazy to download some programming software then they're almost certainly too lazy to learn to program.
We don't have the tools. If FB won't moderate the content they publish, then the government will have to. Putting the burden on users is how you 4chan/gab
Two stories spring to mind.

The first is I worked at Google when the whole "real names" saga of Google Plus was going on. The worst part about that was if some algorithm decided your name wasn't real, it could block your entire Google account. You'd lose access to GMail, Drive, everything. I don't know what bright spark PMs, lawyers and executives signed off on that one but it was insanity. As a result I would strongly recommend against any family or friends use any G+ features in case the Real Names bot zapped their accounts. This was ultimately fixed but it should never have shipped that way. Ever.

The fact that disputing a charge with you credit card provider like this could result in you losing your GMail, Drive, Android developer account, etc means you should absolutely under no circumstances use that service, ever, period, no exceptions.

Don't get me wrong: I like GMail and Drive. I use them all the time. Thing is, I want to keep using them so they get firewalled from every other service that I use.

The second is something Eric Schmidt said a lot. He didn't say it first but he's well known for saying it, and that is that more revenue is the solution to every problem.

That's both true and not true. It's true in a high margin business (like search). If you look at Google financials 10+ years ago there was a point where the profit per employee was nearly $1m. It's less now but it's still pretty significant. Low margin businesses are not in its DNA.

Let me repeat that and make it clear: Google simply cannot compete in a low margin business.

Personally I learned this the hard way as I worked on Google Fiber until that was quietly shelved (by "advancing our amazing bet" no less). Fiber services are capital intensive. They require strict financial discipline and planning. There are far more moving parts to this kind of business than many people realize. Comcast, Verizon and AT&T have gotten very good at this sort of business. Google didn't (and IMHO never will).

I put Google Fi firmly in this camp. I also put making hardware at scale in this camp (compared to, say, Apple who is second to none when it comes to logistics, procurement, financing and supply chain management).

Google's DNA is hard technical problems at scale with no UI like an almost blank page with a text box and a search button. The infrastructure behind that is unbelievably good.

But telecommunications? Tied to my Google account? Sorry but that's a hard pass for me.
Enterprise is 80% busywork. It’s really easy to hit 10 hours a day.
Python has an optional type checker these days so you can write fairly statically typed Python if you want.
Indeed.

A friend of mine wanted to give back and started teaching programming to disadvantaged kids.

He was shocked to ultimately discover that for most of his students, they simply didn't seem to be fundamentally capable of the abstract thought required, and it didn't matter how much time he spent with them. He came away from the experience fairly disillusioned, and I also never expected the difference in ability to be so extreme.

I personally really wonder -- is this something "genetic", like an athletic ability? Is it something learned, but somehow acquired at a young age? Is it a mindset, that we just haven't figured out how to communicate? Or a question of motivation, if it seems "hard" to think that way?
Agreed 100%, I worked with legacy code at different stages: 1 to 2 years: very little of structure but still velocity matters a lot, complexity is not very high; 2 to 5 years: first customers. copy/paste designs and complexity arise; 5 to 10 years: I observed 2 different trends, software where refactoring happened, product is still not in a very good shape but it is still ok and the others, the garbage product with millions of lines: global variables, If/then/else copy/paste design, doesn't scale, broken everytime for no obvious reasons. It's going to take years to stabilise without too much churn. So everytime I'm working on a project, I pledge managers, devs to allocate time to refactor and follow those patterns, implement unit tests etc... everytime at whatever stage, after sometime the team realizes the benefit. So yes, without a doubt, good design patterns are keys to make our dev lifes as easy as possible. And the SOLID ones are definitely my favourites.
> Why, because Microsoft moved their German headquarters Munich - not for any business reasons - but for secret nefarious reasons.

Here is where you are misinterpreting all of the above. I did not say there were any "secret nefarious reasons". All involved parties made the decision that would be most beneficial to them ("business reasons" in the case of Microsoft), which influenced Munich's reversal.

Munich's switch to LiMux was an embarrassment to Microsoft, and one of the reasons for their move to Munich was to gain political clout by becoming a more important stakeholder to Munich. Generally speaking, companies have more influence on a city's decisions when they are actually located in the city, because they pay taxes to the city and have more employees living there. This isn't a "conspiracy theory", it's common sense.

In summary:

You: Munich switched back to Windows solely because there were issues with the LiMux deployment, and Windows software is superior to Linux software.

Me: Munich switched back to Windows because there were issues with the LiMux deployment, and because Microsoft made itself more important to Munich by moving its headquarters to the city.

We can agree to disagree.
Just contact HN support about the downvote.

I kid.
This outstanding film documents nearly every aspect of life in and around Chernobyl both before, during, and after the disaster. It contains many facts and viewpoints I had never seen elsewhere, both negative and positive. The story of the "replacement town" is particularly interesting and probably not widely known outside Ukraine.

Worth a view!
I'm not sure what you mean by this - it is possible to write any subquery as a CTE
Priority Queues for JavaScript/TypeScript
It'd be nice if we at least got the easy connectivity promised and just had to work out a few security kinks.

https://xkcd.com/2055/

I have a few Bluetooth speakers. If I accidentally close the app but forget to disconnect from settings too, then no one else can pair with them until I return. This seems like standard behavior, and makes me worry that if I lose my phone at the wrong moment, I might brick a few devices.

I really like common standards, but if the consortium can't fix either security or usability, we might be better off with a clean slate.
> Do you suggest limiting loans to only dudes that aren't "off the boat"?

I suggest that with a revenue + collateral based loan, you should write loans that the borrowers can understand and pay back. The off the boat folks don’t have the financial awareness or education to understand what’s happening. Their willingness to work as hard as necessary is exploited.

Read the article. It’s absolutely in the interest of the lender to write a non-performing loan, because they make money off of the fees or can sell the obligation to some other entity or seize the medallion.
I'm a co-author of a paper where we use program synthesis to optimize big-data (i.e., slow-running) SQL queries. The synthesis engine we use encodes its search problems into SAT.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/...
Khao Soi is northern Thai dish. Originated in Chiang Mai or surroundings aka Lanna.

It is very difficult to find it in Thailand outside of Chiang Mai not to mention outside of Thailand.

The few times I’ve had it outside Chiang Mai it was very different. Too sweet, and crispy noodle was always a round, factory type.

But for sure it’s top 5 noodle dishes for me.

Other notable favourites:

- Taiwanese beef noodle

- Boat noodle with wonton
I had similar issues too. Awful customer service, more than a month shipping delay for the Pixel 3, "Google Fi VPN" does not work in China, only the mobile data, is better to buy a SIM over there, Wifi calling didn't work either. Now here in the US, the signal is pretty bad too, sometimes while talking to someone the call just goes silent and the other person can't hear you. My pixel 3 makes a weird noise ( like an insect trapped inside your phone) from time to time. and more... I switched to Verizon a month ago.
I agree to some extent. I think in general they're good principles, but I think people tend to take them as gospel and forget about code readability and complexity in order to adhere to them. It's important to understand the trade-offs involved, and to understand that different problems will require different solutions.
How come? As it stands, anyone can be a bad actor but their impact is limited, and it requires a pretty big sacrifice (their health). For example, nothing is stopping someone from driving the wrong way on the highway other than a couple of Do Not Enter signs, but by crashing their car into oncoming traffic they risk losing just as much as the people they crash into.
FWIW, the built-in VPN isn't actually what matters for why the internet is unblocked in China when on a foreign SIM. Instead, the way cellular data networks works is such that your traffic is tunneled back to the provider first.
> The typical tech job is more like someone getting paid 30k a year to delete porn from Facebook or draw boxes around pictures of stop signs.

No it's not.

There are approximately ~1.3 million people in the US doing software development at extremely high income levels for the top 3/4. Median pay $107,000.

840,000 computer support specialists ('tech support') earning a median of $54,000.

600,000 computer systems analysts earning a median of $90,000.

300,000 computer programmers, earning a median of $84,000.

170,000 Web developers with a median pay of $70,000 per year.

165,000 computer network architects earning a median of $110,000.

120,000 database admins earning a median of $90,000.

100,000 information security analysts earning a median of $100,000.

28,000 Computer and Information Researchers, earning a median of $120,000.
> I'm not sure it's any better than CSV or PSV (pipe), and it also doesn't interoperate with existing tools.

I think the point is that it's largely a formalization of what unixy tools already do.
I don't think they will actually...

A credit card chargeback bans you from Google Pay/Wallet/Android Pay/Google merchant services/google shopping basket/gBilling/whatever it's called now and all services requiring payment. I think you can still use gmail/youtube/whatever.
I think he points it out in the article how it is mainly foreigners that are both leading the work, and are interested in Egyptology.

I don't know if you have read Edward Said work, Orientalism, but this explains the article. What interests the readers of HN, and the Guardian is the romanticized past rather than the reality of now. But Peter Hessler in a way brings this up.

Is Orientalism that bad ? If it gets people interested in a geographic region. We have many more conflicts which are just ignored like West Papa, or even Sudan now.
The author's experience mirrors my experience with Google Fi so much! Started with Project Fi, upgraded to a Pixel 3 recently. Putting up with poor service for a year and a half. They pretend to provide service and I pay the $35 every month. I receive all my calls at home using my computer.

I called up customer service to complain about poor service twice. Nothing happened. I just don't have the patience or time to follow up. Kudos to Jason for bringing up this issue. Also, here is a conversation between me and a friend in Mountain View who works for a large company there :D.

Me: I have Project Fi. Let me call you back using WhatsApp.
Him: Oh I have Project Fi too and was going to tell you the same thing!

The call quality is absolutely terrible when both ends are using Project Fi!
Refusing delivery means they never had possession of the second phone, FedEx kept possession of it the whole time.
There is only one customer at Google, and it is the people buying ads.

Astonishingly enough, even at moderate ad volumes there's still no customer service. You have to start spending truly astronomical amounts of money before an actual rep will attempt to help you with essentially any problem.

So to Google, "actual customer" means "someone spending six figures per month on advertising on our platform". As far as I am aware, even similar spending on other areas (GCP) doesn't warrant "actual customer" status.
or base-64
Very much appreciated, sir :-)
Meanwhile I’ve worked at places with poor management that treats question marks like that as a one off problem. Teams scramble to fix that instance of the problem then return back to the way things were done before.
What do you do about the traffic?
Correct, for data that isn't backed up, you would need to have root access to the user's device.
> I'm saying that OP could do this without crapping all over React's contribution

What are some specific quotes from the article that you feel are "crapping all over React's contribution"? Genuinely curious, because I don't take the tone of the article that way at all.
You're lucky... Some collections agencies are far more rigorous... They'll come to your house every day at awkward times. They'll ring your grandma and try to tell all your friends you're in debt, etc.

If they finally get paid, it won't be $600 - it'll be $600 + $1500 of interest at 55% APR and $1200 of fees for letters, visits, phone calls etc.
Considering the average person drives 10,000 miles per year, that means the average person could live to 10,000 and not have a single crash.

> Humans are incompetent drivers

No, not really. Humans are actually such good drivers that computers have absolutely no chance of even coming close. Computer can't even stay running without crashing that long, never mind actually driving a car.
A look at tea accounts and social media influencers
What do you find most surprising about life in Mexico City vs. wherever you were living before?
So basically never get into a business relationship with Google because if they screw you over you have absolutely no recourse, unless you've managed to steer clear of using Gmail, etc.
Billionaire Robert F. Smith pledges to pay Morehouse 2019 grads’ student loans
As a European founder (small app company) it will definitely add another dimension to how I think about our strategic roadmap. You can be certain that large non-US corporates will be far more aggressive in their approach to this problem.
We have a justice system that would prevent this. Same reason why I don't worry that a gunman is going to kill me every time I go out into public.
Is this not a perfect case to dispute the charge with your credit card company? You paid and never received the promised product. It's fraud, plain and simple. Why go through such an ordeal? And finally OP still bought from Google! Amazing!
Amazon generally has always treated sellers/vendors like shit, but has always been good with consumers once you escalate it appropriately. I’ve had a lot of weird cross border Amazon problems and mail to Jeff resolved.
> legally, Youtube has no obligation to host these videos, and can take them down on a whim

Well, maybe law has to change.

For example, in my country if you offer a service to the public you cannot refuse a customer for no reason. It's intended as an anti-discrimination law, but also as a way to protect customers from abuse.
What is specific about a circular drain opening for this to work?
Eric,
Congrats man! What unbelievably good news for the planet. I have been telling anyone who would listen for the past year that the LTSE simply HAS TO HAPPEN!!! You have the solution to the currently flawed version of shareholder focused capitalism. Now, all stakeholders can enjoy the ride. When you get a chance check out: TorreyProject.org to see how we are going to use LTSE to change the world.
Etruscan art is much livelier and more graceful than Roman art. Well worth a quick search, or much better, a museum visit.
It's times like this that I'm really jealous of the foresight of the likes of Norway.

Norway as we know has massive oil reserves. Most other countries (I come from Australia where digging stuff up from the ground and selling it Asia is in our DNA apparently) would for a small cut make some small number of companies and the individuals who control them mind-bogglingly wealthy. Norway, on the other hand, created a state majority owned company and taxed it highly, largely for the benefit of its citizens.

In this case, NYC created the taxi medallion system ~80 years ago to limit the number of cabs on the road. This made sense at the time but why sell off the right to drive that taxi essentially in perpetuity? It makes no sense.

Why not instead have an annual auction based on how many taxis you want on the road where whoever pays you the most gets allotted a license? The city would get income in perpetuity and financial fuckery like from this post just couldn't really happen. Hell you could even have a spot market for your license (for the remainder of the year) to allow people to get out from under it.

But no, instead we have human vultures preying on the uninformed and desperate. Another win for capitalism.
It sounds like great advice, I just wish I had some properly hard things I needed to apply it to, rather than the multitude of what ought to be simple things of which a few unexpectedly and inexplicably turn out to be grossly disproportionately difficult to do for no very good reason.
They have an almost-negligible performance decrease in my experience.

I worked with a client who was transitioning from their MySQL DB to a (mysql-flavored) AWS Aurora DB, as they required high concurrency. In order to handle the throughput their requirement was for the queries to run in under 1 second. After getting down to ~1.1-1.3s on average, I had to figure out how to squeeze the last bits of optimization I could get. One thing I did was rewrite all the CTEs to subqueries, and if I recall correctly, it shaved something like a few percent off the query time (~.01-.05s).

I'd call it negligible as the speed increase certainly isn't worth the decrease in readability and maintainability of the query.
Nobody hires another in order to "organize society".
That's most definitely is true if it's about one of their free services (gmail, youtube, etc), but I'm not sure why people expect free services to have the same quality of support as Amazon Prime where you're paying monthly fees + more for the products.

Become an actual paying Google customer[0] and you'll get a real person. Of course, the issue here is slightly different. The author clearly did get to talk to many real people (being a Fi customer), but they got stuck on some other problem.

[0] https://one.google.com
Sorry, America doesn’t want to take care of its own. There’s more than enough money around, more than enough space, more than enough resources. There’s no will. Not collectively, anyways. That’s got nothing to do with immigrants.

Me first, mine second, community last, “the other” coming to treat America as an all you can eat buffet of social services is the enemy. Which is crazy because America doesn’t really, uh, have social services. Which I think was the point of your post.
As an observer, not any kind of authority:

The release methodology of OpenJDK from Oracle is obscure at best, and it is hard to imagine how package managers are supposed to cope. I notice both of these examples come with Debian version strings attached, and they likely build from tags in the version control repository. As example, in these two links:

https://hg.openjdk.java.net/jdk8u/jdk8u/tags

https://hg.openjdk.java.net/jdk-updates/jdk11u/tags

The "-ga" tags do pretty clearly delineate official releases, but they also get pushed to the public repository well (often weeks) after Oracle posts official binaries for these releases. It is confusing and makes it not all that mysterious that distribution packaging will take the best that they can see for doing a clean build, as they like to do.

It would help quite a lot if the +1/+2/+3/etc releases were instead delineated with "-alpha1", "-beta1", "-rc1" tags. Much clearer that they aren't meant to be production.
>>>make a decision that will take weeks or longer to play out

This is a hardware engineers on going struggle.
Google Fi on iPhone is pretty meh (if you travel a lot internationally), but there is one reasonable advantage of google fi over a lot of other operators: reasonably secure against malicious number porting. There are better options to protect a number, but nothing as accessible.
which requires some understanding of how websites work, web servers, PHP, JavaScript, CSS, a plugin ecosystem, backups, etc. It is quite simple for a software pro, but light years beyond what someone untrained could do.

Most WordPress sites I’ve seen for small businesses are using some type of managed services where the person isn’t dealing with the server.
"comfy" varies so much between people that the question cannot be answered.

I lived in a tiny unit on a beach in Oaxaca for $60/mo. And I consider walking out the front door of an apartment onto a beach more comfy than anywhere I have lived so far in the States for $1000+/mo.

Meanwhile, I know people who aren't willing to give up even the smallest trappings of familiarity, and they can only endure in a Hilton in a tourist city that doesn't even seem like Mexico.
It doesn't because this shows that things can change on a whim. No one is going to commit billions of dollars to anything in such a precarious environment.
To be fair, I think this is essentially just a case, motherboard, and power supply and not an entire computer. Still an amazing deal!
HK China Mobile is cheap and also tunnels around GF.
I'm sure the costs (both direct costs and the opportunity cost) of a career change is orders of magnitude higher than the $70 he is going to get back through the chargeback.
Why does that matter? The issue is that they claim to be recycling and then just dump it in the ocean instead.
The writer has more patience than I would, today. Halfway through, I would've switched to talking with communications/utility and consumer regulatory authorities, state attorney general's office, credit card company, etc.
Reverse Shell Cheat Sheet
Mobile Has Replaced Desktop, and That’s Scary