skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: How to make coding great again?
Hi,

I've been working as a developer for ten years.

During the first couple years I was really in love about programming. I'd love to get to work every day, sit in front of my PC, put the headphones on and spend all the day coding and learning or looking for a way to do whatever I needed to get done.

With the years passing by I started to feel more and more far from coding.

During my previous job and the current one, for example, I've been facing a situation in which I feel more constrained every day due to meetings, some dosis of politics, and lack of clear direction by part of leadership which leads to constant team and priority changes.

It's been pretty hard to find any motivation to wake up and get to work every morning, knowing that probably the stuff I'll be working with will be thrown away within a couple weeks or months. I'm not being pessimistic, it's just a statement based on what has been happening during the last 4 or 5 years.

It seems that with all the VC money and the hypergrowth buzz some startups are hiring faster than they should/could absorb, which leads to chaos.

Most of the days are spent creating and moving tickets, writing doc pages that nobody reads or configuring boring boards on tools such as Asana/Jira/Confluence.

Recently I was in a kickoff meeting for a - surprise! - new team, and all devs present mentioned something along the lines of "I used to be a programmer" or "I program when I have some spare time" when introducing themselves.

Is there still companies in which the developers spend most of their time programming, or is that a distant and nostalgic past?

I know this sounds like a first world problem, though this is the reality I've been facing and would be great to read about some other people's experiences on this situation. I think I'm not the only one who used to love coding and now see everything around it as an almost unbearable burden.
This is one of the benefits of an agrarian economy. For example in the rural South during the great depression, virtually everyone was dirt poor, but almost nobody went hungry. Of course that meant eating squirrel, crow, possum, and such, plus garden vegetables.
I would pay top dollar for a 2011 era 17 inch macbook chassis, with 2019 era internals.
Wait until you discover that the story behind Thanksgiving is pretty much a proper alien invasion sci-fi, featuring technologically superior invaders landing in ships, and promptly unleashing biological weapons on the local population.
I actually have this problem with 2017 MBP. If I put lid down with anything less than 10% it will black screen and repaired a hard reboot upon opening the screen. Fortunately these days most apps have auto save.
>because in the land of Crypto anything bad that happens is your fault, not the insanely problematic technology

Cars are designed to travel at lethal speeds. If you were reckless and killed someone or yourself, do you also declare it to be an "insanely problematic technology"? The problem here is that people are not aware of the risks associated with cryptocurrencies and so are not taking the required precautions. After all, you can be pretty reckless with your credit card numbers or bank login and still be fine, because the finance system has an undo button for everything.

>This is the fundamental problem with crypto, it's irreversible and decentralized. These aren't features, they're bugs.

I wouldn't call them "bugs", just design decisions or trade offs. Bug implies it's somehow fixable, but if it's not. What if you want to make an irreversible payment, or want to be able to send money to whomever you want without the government stepping in the way, all while being trustless? Is there a way to achieve that, and still being able to hit undo when you make a mistake?
Burmese here, we don't have family names as well and run into this similar problem in all other countries.
Lobotomy and electroshock therapy have an undeserved reputation as being barbaric and futile. We've substantially refined both techniques and we still use them where other options of failed.

In the case of lobotomy, we now use stereotactic guided procedures to precisely ablate small parts of the brain, mainly for the treatment of severe OCD and treatment-resistant depression. In the case of ECT, we perform the procedure under full sedation and use EEG monitoring to deliver the minimum possible energy. Both treatments still carry a substantial burden of side-effects, but they work when nothing else does.

The uncomfortable reality is that a lot of people have debilitating, life-threatening mental health problems that don't always respond to medication or psychotherapy. Most of us don't want to think about what very severe mental illness really looks like - the person who is too depressed to sit up in bed, the person with OCD who picks at their wounds until they hit bone, the person with mania who is keen to test their belief that they're immortal. If you were treating a patient with that level of disability, what would you do?

The real disaster of psychiatry isn't the failed attempts, but all the stuff that we don't yet know how to treat or don't have the resources to treat. Mental illnesses are the single biggest cause of disability in the developed world. There's so much we could be doing, so much we should be doing, but we're not spending nearly enough on research or treatment. We're watching helplessly as people live short, miserable lives because of diseases that are treatable or potentially treatable.
Does anyone know how to turn off "Extract Canvas Data" by default?
EDGAR
> In particular, C is rather uniquely unsuited for segmented memory models

C was often used to program 16-bit x86 systems, and it handled that well enough.

A more relevant limitation of the 6502, however, is its stack. The 6502 stack is limited to a single page of 256 bytes, and there is no stack-relative addressing mode. This makes a C-style stack difficult to implement -- most C implementations for the 6502 implement a secondary data stack in main memory.
Age of colonization meets zero of the two axioms underpinning "dark forest" - there was a possibility of establishing trust, and there was no possibility of sudden and unexpected technological leaps of the weaker side.
It's quite a lot easier to just work in an all-male department. You don't have to tiptoe around, you can say what you think, criticism can be offered honestly. Considerably fewer grudges are held. Stuff just gets done.

My wife works as a PM for another software company with a much different gender ratio, and every day she comes home with stories about backbiting and jockeying for position and incredibly petty feuding that makes the sum of what I've seen in the entire eight years at my employer pale in comparison. Every single day it's more drama, and they drown in communication, with so much sound and fury, signifying nothing.
On the plus side, this means there's an opportunity for the US to commit some tit for tat industrial espionage to catch up.
And not available until September.
I have a quest. super hot vr is very smooth. love it and can’t wait for more games.
Doesn't GPS and the wireless antenna use a decent amount of power and thus cut battery life quiet a bit if they're being used constantly?
Pro mid 2012 user here ,oved to SSD couple of years earlier and added 4gigs of ram this year and happy customer ever.

Unfortunately I use external hard disk as boot , and in recent releases of MacOS I think apple started pushing towards fusion drive due to which had to buy a new ssd and move again ( any other alternatives?)
Not sure how the parent comment is hostile. They aren't critiquing the system itself, they are critiquing its method of distribution.

As such, this comment:

>But given all this hostility, have you downloaded it, and have you tried it? Or is all this just philosophical (i.e. the least interesting) criticism? There seems to be no experience backing your comments.

does not seem to apply
I have done a lot of Vive stuff. I have also been to a VR done and ran around shooting zombies. I never felt immersed. But I also never experienced nausea.

I’ll be honest, I just don’t get people who say VR is amazing. I enjoy it. I’m developing games for it because I think the control scheme is innovative. But I don’t think we are close to something I would call immersive.
You have to test the password against the real login feature, otherwise you wouldn’t know if you guessed it. The hashing function can be widely known and attackers using brute force guesses would still be blocked by a security feature that requires a second factor (e.g. email) after a certain number of failed attempts.

As an attacker you're not trying to guess the hashed password and even if you had it you still would not be able to use it to log in. Hashing functions that are fit for real-world use are pure functions and their input cannot be determined by looking at their output, which renders rainbow tables (a list of plain text input and their corresponding hashed output) useless to attackers.

So knowing the hash function is useless and even if you also manage to access the database and get the hashed password you still need to run through a brute force technique to find which input gets that output. If the original password is itself a long random set of characters stored with Keychain or Onepass you’re looking at potentially trillions of attempts before you get it right. Hashing functions are written to be slow and computationally expensive so you’re going to incur a lot of energy costs by the time you get it. Also, you’ll be dead by then. When brute force works it’s because the password has no failure restrictions and is something short and simple like a mother’s maiden name with a zip code at the end.
I used to spend a lot of time chasing a mower around the yard while trying to design a continuously variable transmission that used (for lack of the term of art) direct engagement (eg gears) rather than friction on bearing surfaces like belt-based cvt’s.

Came up with a few tantalizing geometries but would always find a problem after thinking it through.

Makes me wonder how many if these were deveoped under similarly mindless activities. Also makes me wonder what a genetic algorithm or ML-based optimization/search algorithm could find.
I really like how the fill pattern of the rope lets you see in the animation the decreasing velocity.
The 13" 2015 model had the same issue. They replaced my screen for free a few months ago.
One of the assumptions in designing cryptographic systems (Kerckhoff's Principle [1]) is that the attacker knows everything about the system and how it is implemented, except for the password itself. While you could hide the implementation details, that would mean that nobody could verify how strong your system is.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerckhoffs%27s_principle
There are millions of christians who disagree with you. But yeah sure, clearly you're the one person in the world who has it right!

You're right about my expectation of consistency for there to be social benefit. I just have an expectation of consistency from those claiming to have a monopoly on fundamental truth in the universe. My expectation has nothing to do with social good in that case.
> the electric car market

The size of the electric car market = the size of the car market now.
I think you mean... P = NP. Which is very unlikely as we could do away with mathematicians if that were true.
The fact that Tesla is hard to price IS information though, The wide range reflects that it's a high-risk bet.
Microsoft removes Huawei laptop from store, silent on potential Windows ban
And by that same reasoning, modern x86 computers are either 48-bit or 52-bit, depending on which limit you consider.
You measure productivity that way on the assembly line or other menial tasks where it's obvious how to do things and the work isn't very complicated. Trying to do this with creative professions is a disastrous mistake.

>> So much of development is bullshit posturing for developers to justify their existence

That applies to any profession. Developers aren't unique in this regard.
The last complaint seems feasible to address have you thought of adding an issue?
Does anyone have a good source for buying these types of odd parts?

Years ago there was a website called "smallparts.com" but this was bought out and no longer exists.
I think it was expected as they have more money
This is not a standard pully system.
I see that you have forgotten on whose watch the Great Recession started, and on whose it ended.

I see that you have forgotten who was responsible for the invasion of Iraq, which has now cost over 5 trillion dollars, and was justified with out-and-out fraud.

So, on both economic and defense grounds, you vote against your own interest.

Propaganda displaces truth.
A $30-$50 lower tier would be more than acceptable.
The "key" of a "key derivation function" typically stores all that information. For example, see the format for scrypt: https://github.com/Tarsnap/scrypt/blob/master/FORMAT
Yes, of course. Not all but a different subset of passwords.
Super Hot is a very well executed port, not VR first.
Is Google's password reset system a massive security risk? I set up a couple of recovery phone numbers without thinking about it too much, but after reading this it seems like I'm just a little bit of social engineering away from having my Gmail account taken over, along with anyone else who set up a recovery number. If someone took over my SIM and reset my password overnight, they would have 8 hours to do whatever they want with my Gmail account before I saw that my password had been reset.
Hope the Air Force has upgraded their radar systems. The one I worked on in Iceland was dismantled right after the Berlin wall fell:

https://www.radomes.org/museum/showsite.php?site=Rockville+A...

http://wikimapia.org/1006454/Former-Rockville-Air-Station-H-...
The author is evidently far from neurotypical. Generally I find these kinds of diverse viewpoints interesting, if not appealing.

Unfortunately his prose borders on unreadable. There may very well be excellent ideas here, but until he follows the commandment "omit needless words" nobody is going to wade through it.
The only feature in *sh, that is superior to PowerShell I know about is proliferation of parameter completion for tools.

Otherwise it's the same git, cmake, etc I use everywhere, just a different language.
Perhaps a better target might be the 68000, then? Still a relatively simple architecture, but one that more closely resembles a modern system -- multiple general-purpose registers, and ones which can be used as pointers without weird workarounds. (The 8-bit data / 16-bit address nature of the 6502 makes pointers complicated.)
"Female" sounds like something police, Ferengi and incels say, so "woman" just sounds more pleasant.
Dodo Bird Hypothesis is still in contention.
Although not animated, the book makes for delightful bathroom reading:

https://www.amazon.com/507-Mechanical-Movements-Mechanisms-D...
Awesome, cher bro.
And more than twice the price.
>Giving hormones to tweens for the sake of a rounding error of the population

There are any number of medical disorders that affect only "a rounding error of the population". Medically-assisted transition with hormone treatment for gender dysphoria is the treatment option best supported by the evidence, although the quality of evidence is currently less than ideal.

If you have found peer-reviewed research indicating that hormone treatment for GD does more harm than good, I'd be eager to see it.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4977075/
I agree; it seems that SOLID does a good job of marshalling the complexity out of individual elements into the system as a whole. This can be a good thing, if the system design itself was created with SOLID in mind, and is well implemented. However if the system design didn't account for this complexity shift, it will likely cause a lot of mayhem.
I don’t remember exactly what SmallParts carried, but their closest competitor might be McMaster-Carr?

https://www.mcmaster.com/

And SmallParts I think is now Amazon Supply or something, but dear god would I not trust Amazon for that sort of purchase. Especially PPE like allegedly 3M respirators. Who knows how much of this is counterfeit.
I don’t think it’s simply a matter of defining terms. The choice to call non-violent actions “violence” is a political one. It is certainly not made less so because certain people use it regularly when discussing these issues. Nor is your choice to use it any less political. You can’t wash your hands of it by pointing to others’ use.

What you are referring to here has been, in the past, considered a call to violence (or perhaps an implied call to violence). People, rightly or wrongly, object to the conflation of speech and violence.

I happen to think the normalization of speech as violence is dangerous doublespeak. What is gained by classifying speech as violence rather than simply vilifying the type of speech without the violence label? What is lost?
This could be useful for design problems if they were cataloged or tagged, e.g. identifying input as rotary or rectilinear, and type of output.
Procrastination is an addiction because it offers relief from anxiety and instant gratification. Also, being a chronic procrastinator and a skilled developer is a deadly combination. I've been praised for my excellent work and rewarded with raises and bonuses, even though I often procrastinate until the very last minute.

Tip: to make your git logs look socially acceptable to co-workers and management, don't commit at 3AM Monday morning, wait until 9AM.
The lever here is export control, e.g. "you can't export this tech to these people, countries, vendors" etc, rather than a request to perform some affirmative action at the behest of a government. ( a "writ", if you will; c.f. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_Writs_Act#Application_to_e... )

So the USG can tell a company "you cannot transfer this controlled material to these people, 'cause NatSec", but (probably) can't compel a company "build a tool for us that does X".
This is an idea that keeps coming back every 2 years or so. While it is enticing to think about, these ideas never manifest into anything. With most decentralized projects there usually hasn't been a big enough financial incentive to execute them.
Delete the

class="onp-sl-overlap-box onp-sl-transparence-mode onp-sl-great-attractor-theme"

element. Ta-dum!
TikTok Owner to Launch Music Service as Its Music Licenses Are About to Expire
I already have my degree (in CS).

btw shout out to Jessica Livingston! Amazing program.
The Definitive Guide to Integer Division – The Higher Math Way
Top Raspberry Pi Alternatives in 2019
Edit: I just got an appointment for tomorrow morning for a minor ear infection, through an iOS app.
True, but I think there’s more hope when you take superrationality[1] into account.

Multiple actors can independently arrive at compatible cooperative solutions to the survival-and-utility game (which is not zero-sum).

Wikipedia says it assumes all other players are also superrational, but I think in practice a successful variant of this strategy is to identify whether other players are superrational and avoid them if not.

There is sometimes the option of converting existing self-interested rational players into superrational ones, but that is another subject entirely.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superrationality
I see what you mean but questions like these are not what I was really referring to. I do get them from time to time on my repos and I point them to where they can get help which usually is some mailing list, docs or some other related project. Also, my quality of life as a maintainer has dramatically improved since I stopped caring about maintaining clean list of GH issues. I'm fine with people opening tons of them and a lot them being open for a long time. I'll get to them when I can as I don't feel obliged anymore to answer all those questions or implement new features.
Since you know your own password on the system you can use that to figure out the hashing mechanism. Also, the hashing strategy and salt is often part of the stored hash.
International trade gang violence – China vs. USA
Keyboard issues aside, these laptops are a thermal disaster. Mine heats up and gets loud fans if 20% or more CPU is used for more than a minute or two.

My non-Retina MBP would need to be at 100% for 10-15+ minutes for the fans to kick in at half the volume.
Sets are my #1 favourite Python built-in. I used to have these tedious imperative functions for doing change detection on collections. Then I learned sets and it turned into obvious code like:

added = b - a

removed = a - b

repeated = a & b

Etc.

Of course this is set theory and not Python specific. But still. Learn sets!
I'm interested in this because the Cato institute along with Koch, is one of the main reasons AGW is disputed outside of the competent scientists.

Having somebody from inside the tent walk out and say why they changed their mind is informative.

its as informative as (say) a Blockchain fanatic coming up for air and saying "nope. nothing there" or a ML person saying "nope"

I found this interesting.

Obviously, its charged. I wonder if they will flip back too, but I take it on advisement.

A public commitment/mea-culpa is actually interesting.
From what I’ve read it seems like they basically rebuilt the game from the ground up for VR.
It is also very interesting to have such a service provided by a Chinese developer (the author)
The future of technology hubs in Africa
This is awesome, and reminds me of Animagraffs [0], which has also come up on HN from time to time.

[0] https://animagraffs.com
Worth noting that the security team at Google that you are likely referring to (P0 I assume?) has nothing to do with G Suite. Google has many security teams, and I’ve seen no indication that the security team whose scope includes G Suite is particularly exceptional, if they even have one. Some teams at Google don’t work with any security team at all.
Bitcoin isn't the problem here. Coinbase is regulated as a "money transmitter". You can get into the same situation if you send money via Western Union, which is also regulated as a money transmitter, and tell them to "waive identification" at the receiving end.[1] That's used as a payment method by some scams.

Coinbase will pay out via PayPal, so someone with access to an account's credentials could pull of this scam without involving cryptocurrency at all.

Now if Coinbase was regulated by the SEC as a "broker/dealer", which is what they really are, they'd be subject to SEC regulations on fraud, and would have SIPC insurance to protect the customer up to $250K.[2]

Coinbase does, in fact, have a New York State "BitLicense", which makes them subject to various New York State regulations.
Among other things, transactions larger than US$10,000 have to be reported to the New York State Department of Financial Services within 24 hours, and Coinbase is subject to rules about cybersecurity, fraud, and its activity as a custodian of the funds of others. You can complain to the New York State Department of Financial Services.

DFS pulled Bittrx's license last month and gave them one day to get out of New York State.

[1] https://www.westernunion.com/us/en/fraudawareness/fraud-ques...

[2] https://www.sipc.org/for-investors/what-sipc-protects
They were a life saver when I was going to school for furniture. We would order everything from them. Screws, bits, inserts, random bits of metal.

Later I discovered that they provide CAD drawings for everything they carry. That was immensely helpful when designing things in say, Solidworks. If there were some screws that were called for it only took a visit to McMaster-Carr to get a 3D version of the real part.