skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It has null to do with "The Valley". A young startup should probably take velocity and "just ship" over any other consideration. But new startups are not a very big or important part of the IT industry.
There has always been a bottom-tier category of software development, which is programming at the level of "tweaking wordpress websites". Not that all jobs at this level are doing this, but the technical skill is what it takes to setup, configure, operate, and tweak a wordpress website, 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.

Also, this can be extremely high-impact to a business. Consultancies exist at this technical difficulty making lots of money but also delivering lots of value. Go into a non-tech business, notice how 1000 man hours per month are essentially updating Excel files, automate most of it with a Python or VB script, and save the company hundreds of thousands of dollars.

You don't need to feel attacked or nervous that these jobs exist. "Software [Developer|Engineer|Architect]" has no legal definition and the title is meaningless, which is why hiring developers has overhead where you need to check far beyond what the resume says to assess a candidate's true skill.

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.
I assume filing for bankruptcy means the lender gets to claim the medallion and sell it?
That means losing potentially hundreds of thousands in payments already made, as well as the loss of any source of income. I think renting a medallion is possible at that point, but many of these medallion owners seem to have invested their life savings and could be nearing retirement.
Most governments in history were authoritarian and many were stable for hundreds of years. With modern technology, I don’t see why authoritarian governments are necessarily more vulnerable than democratic ones.
Last year I watched a short tv reportage on Gela, Sicily. The small town was next to a major industrial area of the island. 50 years of omertà, bribes and illegal dumping from the petrochemical factory caused the town's death toll to skyrocket: +50% birth defects, +7% mortality for men and +15% for women compared to the rest of Sicily. Tumors left and right. (data source: http://www.rainews.it/dl/rainews/TGR/media/sic-gela-inquinam...)

Now the former blue collar workers (the ones who haven't died yet) are coming forward: "I buried Eni's toxic waste. They (He talks about the higher ups) used to say that everyone (the town) was going to die of tumor in the future." The processing waste, "from amianto to the reactor's ceramic rings", were allegedly buried in 500m²*15m tanks near the factory.

I imagine this happens all the time, all over the world. Cutting corners – at the expense of the labor force – is the norm, not the exception. Even worse, imagine how difficult is to clean up the area. Even if you magically erase the waste now, that district will still be a death show for decades to come.
I think you mean “6502 gave us desktop (micro)computers.”

Most 8080 and then Z80 systems of the mid-1970s used S-100 and were oriented around a separation of CPU and I/O, i.e. “Just plug a surplus terminal or teletype into a serial port to use the computer!”

It was really the 6502 and its use by the original “self-contained” Apple I that made desktop microcomputers a real product. Yes, buying an Apple I just you just got a board, but it was it intended to be put in a desktop case (and advertised that way) with a surplus keyboard and plugged into a TV, and could use audiocassette for storage. That made it way more approachable.
50% of US inmates (prison slave labor participants) are African American, sounds pretty concentrated here as well.

I don't believe the whole continent of Africa has 1.5 million Africans in jail, this is a uniquely American outcome.
Just like manufacturing jobs, some software work could be completed by uneducated felons, and some work could only be done by PhD specialists. In fact I work at such a place that has an extremely wide gamut of both software engineers and production staff.
> Sure, the professional developers are paid well. However the more Jira and agile ideas takes over, you become more replaceable. Why? You're just a card-filling machine dealing with feature requests or problem reports.

Agile do not make developer replaceable. If anything it empower developers to become on equal footing with everyone else.

> And sure, the next developer may fill less cards, but they will improve with time.

I saw projects outsourced to huge teams in India failing to deliver. Reality of software development is that unless you have right mix of experience, skill and people you might never deliver.

Programming require both engineering and creative skills. Some class of problems cannot be brute forced by large number of young bodies.
>Krafcik went on to say that the auto industry might never produce a car capable of driving at any time of year, in any weather, under any conditions. “Autonomy will always have some constraints,” he added.

This is an out-of-context quote. Right before that, the linked CNET article said "John Krafcik, head of the self-driving car unit of Google parent company Alphabet, said that though driverless cars are "truly here," they aren't ubiquitous yet. ".

There is a big jump between L4 & L5 autonomy which is what Krafcik was discussing. But even achieving L4 (which is what Waymo has in its Phoenix tests) at mass scale will revolutionize the industry since it means cheap robocabs for large portions of the US for much of the year.

The other companies are still struggling with L2 & L3, but Waymo's lead appears to be getting larger based on the public results they are showing. Tesla is the only one that's close since it has a public L2 system.
In the "remote only or not at all" argument, I think it's really up to the leadership to set the example. You can have an office, but if the leaders of the company stress how important it is to work remotely, this will be ok. The employees just need to understand how all remote workers feel; when they have to go through the same patterns as remote workers do, then these habits get adopted well into the culture.
> Software development (I hate the term "coding") is not a manufacturing job

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.
I was just reiterating the comment, it was hidden. Also kinda silly for you to say so definitively that being owned by what is effectively a state venture of the PRC doesn't have an effect on their reporting. I wouldn't say that about basically any news outlet, because they all at least have a headquarters somewhere.

And given the PRC's enormous, well-documented investments into perverting the truth and framing the narrative worldwide, more developed than most; even an arm's length relationship is too close for me to put that sort of trust into a a venture like this.
And that’s why European consumer rights are cool.
The NYT has written about taxi medallions for many years. The contrast in their writing on them is pretty striking:

https://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/10/20/2-taxi-medalli...

I had more boosterism bookmarked back in the day but lost it.

This is a special case of Michael Crighton’s amnesia, where even the NYT forgets how incompetent the NYT was at getting this story right.
While I agree with you, it's also true that the majority of software in the world is held together with bubble gum and duck tape. That doesn't mean it should not have been written - it solved some problem for someone.

We should not build complex systems that way, but plenty of systems are not very complex.
The thing with Google is that things work well 99% of the time for 99% of the people, but if you hit that 1% of 1%, your life will become an absolute nightmare filled with support site loops, chatbots, automated email replies, and months of suffering. If you're lucky, your story will make it to the front page of HN and somehow get resolved immediately.
Whenever you have situations defined by some financial fuckery (or “innovation”), you end up with “unanticipated consequences” that your grandma could anticipate.

Anything can be collateralized, including things that don’t have stable value. In our quest to provide stimulus, fiscal policy has made capital so cheap that all sorts of dumb things are possible.

There’s no scenario where some dude off the boat from Pakistan or Haiti without assets should be able to borrow $1M for the right to drive a single cab. This story makes the exploitive and scummy Uber/Lyft business model seem ok in comparison.
To what does the harmonic series converge? (2013) [pdf]
From the article:

> The medallion bubble burst in late 2014. Uber and Lyft may have hastened the crisis, but virtually all of the hundreds of industry veterans interviewed for this article, including many lenders, said inflated prices and risky lending practices would have caused a collapse even if ride-hailing had never been invented.
As usual, the BBC don't research their articles properly.

The reality is that GWR are removing "full-set diagram" HST's (or Class 43's) with 8/9 carriages, from their long distance operations, e.g. Paddington to Penzance, Wales etc). These long distance routes are being replaced with Class 80X's made by Hitachi. You'll still see "HST"'s on GWR operated local routes but as "Castle Sets" running with four carriages and replacing older DMU's. Fifty six of GWR's Class 43's are being redeployed to ScotRail as part of their "Inter7City" programme and are being refurbished by Wabtec to have automatic doors and modern human waste disposal tanks, and other upgrades (better WiFi, USB power etc). On ScotRail they'll run as 4/5 carriage diagrams when fully deployed.

But that said, it's a wee bit of a sad day for Class 43 fans whence once across Paddington's platforms was lined up with Kenneth Grange's design icon ready to depart to the west country.
Google Fi support went down the drain when they expanded. I had a recent experience with my mother's phone being stolen while she was at a hospital, here's the summary after it was confirmed missing and police contacted, with a lot of redundant messages removed.

1st chat with agent

Me Hi, my mother's phone was stolen, I'm tracking it on find my phone.

Them: Sorry to hear that, we can black list the phone but you must message us from the member's account

(I am the sole payer on the group plan, paid for the phone, etc.)

Me: Okay, fine, I will contact you from chat on her google account

2nd chat with agent:

Me: Hi, this is [mom]'s son, I am helping her report her phone stolen to blacklist it.

Them: Sorry, we cannot blacklist a phone on a group plan if you are not the primary account holder, please contact us on the primary account.

3rd chat with agent:

Me: Hi, I'm trying to blacklist a stolen phone, please see [case numbers]

Them: The phone is registered under another Google account

Me: No, see these case numbers, I refuse to end this support until this is dealt with, I am the primary account holder. Let's blacklist this phone so that it cannot be used by another carrier.

Them: Our specialist says the phone must be active on Google Fi to blacklist it.

(The phone's battery has died at this point, 90 miles away from where it was last)

Me: Does that mean it has already been transferred to a different carrier, or is it offline?

Them: The specialist says that the phone must be active on Google Fi

Me: What does that mean? Can you ask the specialist if the battery is dead that means it's not active?

Them: I cannot say.

Me: What is even the point of blacklisting a phone if it doesn't work the moment someone pops the SIM card out or turns the phone off? Nevermind. I would like to escalate to a supervisor.

Them: Okay

Escalation??

Still haven't gotten anywhere since this Thursday, no one has reached out to me.
>Constantly updating HD maps is expensive.

Do any of the players in this space use HD maps?
"Creators should enjoy the ownership of the products of their labor."

The basic issue some are concerned with is that "ownership" of intellectual property gives people or entities rights that infringe on regular property rights. There's an inherent conflict, so you can't just maximize both at once.
That's no different anywhere else in the world.
Riposte?

https://docs.racket-lang.org/riposte/
> The US perceives the economic relationship with China to be one way.

This is ridiculous. No one thinks it is one way. The spanish sending south american gold back to spain was one way.

What is actually happening, is some people think it is unfairly biased towards China.
It's weird -- I use Google Fi and loved it, and I got great customer service, up until the point I ordered a Pixel 3 through them back in November. I had to contact them so many times to find out why they hadn't shipped yet, and the regular customer support people had no idea what was going on, and when it got escalated to shipping, they also seemed to have no idea but were much less apologetic about it. After a few weeks of not having my phone shipped, I ordered it through the Google Store (with 0% interest financing instead of paying it off through my bill, oh well) and I got it within a week. It's ridiculous. I'd been a loyal customer of Fi for over two years, but that ordeal almost made me want to quit. If I had to go through what this author went through, I would have done the same.
"Today, Mr. Davis, 27, is a cybersecurity specialist working on an incident response team at the company. He earns above $40,000, more than twice his salary in retail."

Isn't that like what people at Costco make for running a cash register and being friendly?

And who do you think has more job security?

edit: To be less coy about it, if you are any good at this stuff and are only making "above $40k", you are getting f-ed.
Updating strings in database/code is line work. Update images on website is line work. Debugging basic issues is line work. I've gotten these tasks as discreet Jira issues, so someone thought it was important enough.

It's fine if line work + hardcore CS positions exist simultaneously. This fighting over the boundaries of where the profession starts and ends is tiring and we should just accept there's a stratification of developer skill levels and start adjusting our attitudes and training accordingly. Development is all of these things because development is a huge job market.

You can't abstract your way out of doing the line work and only have hardcore CS positions in the job market.
About to leave for Paris on google fi for the first time from the US and praying that it works well. Supposedly I don’t have to notify them and it should be the same price for data and just a little more for old-fashioned sms and phone calls.
> What should be talked about is what's actually the point of jobs.

I fully agree, FWIW. Perhaps it's where my interests have typically lain, but as a developer whose primary job has been to automate other tech people--sysadmins mostly, but developers as well--this has been on my mind for about a decade now.

I don't know what the solution is.
I take it you're not familiar with Peter Hessler's other work? He's an incredible writer who learned Arabic for the gig, and some of his pieces in the New Yorker go way beyond pyramids:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/10/13/tales-trash

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/08/10/learning-to-sp...

His work about China is also great, particularly Country Driving:

https://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/24/books/24book.html
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> Development is not line work, and doing it like line work creates unmaintainable, expensive crap.

Huh, it is already happening. I see everyday so many web services are created via auto generating scaffolding tools like Spring boot etc. One just fill in environment details, bits of JSON parsing and service is ready to be deployed.

Good for you that where you work people are intelligent enough to read Fred Brooks. Most places, including the ones with fancy gleaming buildings, open office floors, lounges with couches and organic smoothie bars are just making CRUD services with some cloud backed data storage. More so terminology I see at work is more inspired by factory floor not some intellectual venture.
Do you know what the disadvantages of your vehicles? they don't take riders to their house. They don't allow riders to bring along any oddity of luggage. They aren't available at the moment notice. They aren't personal escape room when one is needed. I'm sure you know what kind of vehicles providing such comfort.

So take the high moral ground all you want, be snarky all you want, but the real world is a strange and messy place. Car has it place, along with bike, scooter, planes, trains. Until teleporter arrives.
how expensive would it be creating areas of road that only allows autonoums vehicles, something like carpool lanes we have now.

Wouldn't that cut problem size massively.
If it is ASRock (an Intel shop for decades) makes bet on AMD, Intel should begin to scratch their head at least.

The bet to prioritise server chips over consumer ones in fab priority may seem like a win from money side, but loss of clients will be much more impactful on them long term.
I can definitely relate to the struggle of debugging slow SQL queries. I've been optimizing Postgres for the last three years for my day job. There's nothing like spending hours trying to determine why a query is slow, only to discover some bizarre incantation makes the problem go away.

I had one case where adding OFFSET 0 to a query, which did not change the semantics of the query, made the query ~10x faster. It turned out that due to a reference to a large column being inlined in a dozen different places, Postgres was detoasting[0] that column a dozen times more than it needed to. Adding the OFFSET 0 prevented the subquery from being inlined and made it so Postgres only detoasted the column once.

In general, I think optimizing a database is way harder than it needs to be. A lot of it is black magic and it requires a ton of expertise that many teams don't have. Even though I've been doing it for years, I still struggle with figuring out what indexes I should create to make a query fast.

I recently started a startup in an attempt to make optimizing databases easier. I built a Postgres extension that records information about queries as they run. It's basically the same information you would get for EXPLAIN ANALYZE, but you get it for every query at query time. Then, using this information, I'm able to make specific recommendations about how you should optimize your database. I can give advice on how you should structure your schema and what indexes you should create in order to maximize the performance of your queries. This way, even teams that don't have much in-house Postgres experience won't have to spend hours or even days trying to figure out how to make their queries faster.

If this sounds interesting to you, I would be happy to chat. You can reach out to me at michael@perfalytics.com. It's my goal to use the expertise I've built up over the last couple of years to make scaling Postgres a truly painless experience.

[0] https://malisper.me/postgres-toast/
My first thought is that by 4/22, I would have been issuing a chargeback with my CC company and getting them to handle it
To be fair, Apple has been fighting tooth and nail against the FBI decrypting their phones.

Huawei, ZTE and consorts are literally owned by PRC cadre and are actively involved in infrastructure to spy on and terrorize minority groups in China, as well as getting caught spying and stealing IP abroad.

I think there is no need to answer each post with Whataboutism, especially when the comparision is to tilted against Chinese companies.
Yes this is what I meant. Slavery is a convenient example where exploitation is obviously occurring but could still encounter the same loss as the parent had claimed was proof of no exploitation.
Ok, yes, that is true. But the USA commits war crimes and doesn't want to be brought before court over them. So I should stop using US goods if I gave a shit about human rights, right?
I worked teaching factory workers how to use a software, and can say that no matter how much education and training the majority of these people receive they are not going to become software developers, and it isn't just the older generation. It takes a certain level of abstract thought to be a software developer. The kind of software development jobs that a typical factory worker is capable of are quickly disappearing if they aren't already gone.
I’ve been on T-Mobile for years when many friends went with Google Fi. Service on T-Mobile is spottier in CONUS, but internationally my experience has been far superior to that of my friends. Good choice.
Ask HN: What Are Hard Things?
There’s a post at the op of the first page called “How to do hard things.” It made me wonder, “What do HN folks consider hard?” Any answers are viable based on your fame of reference in the space-time continuum.
I have this case in a 4-drive size in which I had a 4-drive 2TB raid 5 for some time - I had a couple of those disks go bad over time, and I was always nervous rebuilding the raid that another disk would die, so I eventually just replaced it with a raid-0 mirror with two 6TB disks which, for some reason makes me sleep easier.

And I recently put the most valuable 500GB or so into aws glacier deep archive for a couple bucks a month - this all seems to work pretty well