skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I get the premise of the article is to show that software developers aren't all that special, and shouldn't call them engineers.

But what's frustrating to me is the blatant comparison of structural engineering with computer security. The comparison stops at the point that they're both in place to make sure nothing bad happens. Imagine building a bridge and having to fend off hundreds of adversaries continuously getting more advanced in finding ways to destroy your bridge.
> Its just the costs, they're high and increasing.

This is only because of economies of scale (China is building many nuclear reactors and they seem to be fine).

Also no one ever factors storage / higher grid costs / backup generation into costs of renewables. When people use such double standard no wonder nuclear seems uneconomic!

> I seem to be taking a longer view than you, maybe in the 20 - 30 year time frame you're right. But in that sort of time frame is it even worth trying to start building a new nuclear power station?

EDIT: I misread your point, but I will leave this here as it seems to me important point anyway

In this time frame there is not even a _talk_ about having renewables backed by storage / carbon neutral backup generation (because that would be lol expensive with current tech). So you're proposing majority generation being fossils fuels? I thought climate change was important or something.

We _might_ get there with battery tech, but

1) nuclear will benefit from load balancing grid scale storage as well

2) in the meantime we will burn fossil fuels, alright?
The outcome :

"The court dismissed Zak’s novel wiretap and eavesdropping claims, writing that the complaint failed to adequately allege that Bose is not a party to communication, as is necessary for violations of these statutes. “ … [T]he relevant inquiry,” the court wrote, “is whether the defendant is a participant in the conversation, as opposed to a nonparticipant that uses other means to gain access to – i.e., intercept – the communication.” Bose wasn’t an intruding third party, so this line of attack was shut down.

Nonetheless, the unjust enrichment and Illinois state consumer fraud charges survived. And, to make things a little more interesting for the defendant, the court left the door open for Zak to file again under the Wiretap Act if he could prove “that Bose is in fact not a party to the communication or that Bose, while a party, nevertheless intercepted a communication with the purpose of committing a crime or tort independent from the alleged interception.”"

https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=5499bec3-8a87...
>leads me to be more outgoing and not staying at home.

Leads me to be more impact & big picture driven, less ego zero sum bullshit.
You can get addicted to propofol, and some people who self harm frequently and severely report the propofol as one factor for their continued self harm. (although it's often only one of many factors).
Not high priority but maybe you could explain the different blocking methods on the settings page ?
"The carbon footprint of the latest Impossible Burger recipe is 89% smaller than a burger made from real beef, according to a science-based life cycle assessment released by the company this week."

https://www.fooddive.com/news/impossible-burger-boasts-much-...
> Currently the project is in beta so it's free. But we are planning to take payments ($1 per month, $10 per year). This will be more than enough to cover all the expenses (hosting, domains, etc).

More likely is that it will stay around for a few months / maybe a year and then die off because it's not worth the time to maintain. Not trying to be negative, but it's what I have seen from similar projects.
Holy cow, I like this old BYTE more. Like Computer Chronicles. I like how direct and no-bullshit the layout and all the graphics are. Ads are creative and fun, and the content is rich in ideas. Modern magazines often lack substance and soul, including graphics design. What modern computing magazine can compare, is there a single example?

Looking at this BYTE mag pretty much confirms to me the old adage that the Earth's population is increasing but the IQ levels are staying the same.
I think they felt more strongly about being forced to accept opium on penalty of being bombed.

The thing is that they remember all those things while people in the West are oblivious to them.
Maybe I should have formulated myself better. Like you say, it's self-imposed/self-enforced.

The danger is definitely real. If you don't know where you're going you might get lost and people get lost for good from time to time. In the more visited parts someone might find you, but if you take a wrong turn and fall in bad luck it's no good.

I don't want a random tourist go unprepared after reading this and have an accident or require medical assistance when it could have been avoided. Just like if you go hiking a mountain or spelunking.
I've got an aerospace engineering degree and have worked across a number of industries, from satellites to robotics. These days my job is about 50% software.

Software development feels the same as other engineering design. You generate requirements, prototype, test and iterate.

To argue that it's not engineering because it's not regulated is stupid, partly because most engineering fields outside of buildings aren't particularly regulated anyway, and partly because there's loads of regulations which are just as relevant to software engineering.

Generally safety standards apply to the whole system - not just the electronic design, but the software and hardware interaction. The complexity of software means you have to take a slightly different approach to actually quantify risk of failure, but it's still very much engineering.
‘The title “engineer” is cheapened by the tech industry.’? That’s a little over the top ain’t it?

There are a lot of degrees combining electrical & computer engineering. My diploma was in such a degree and my PhD was in informational technology and electrical engineering. I think the lines between the two fields are blurred and by no means do I believe that one title/specialisation is better or harder.

I started working as an EE and later on moved to coding and both fields have their own challenges and hurdles. I never felt that a person that didn’t get a degree explicitly in engineering doesn’t get to call themselves an engineer.
Actually there are different things for which people study:

a) computer science

b) computer engineering

c) business and management

One who is an engineer (b) by training can spend most of his life implementing the wishes of the (c) people, basing his work on some results obtained by the (a) people, and the product can still be against the "public interest" as in the implementation of the MCAS for Boeing 737 MAX (where it can be said that the software was actually produced "according to the specifications" but that the "specifications" were faulty). But that doesn't mean he isn't an engineer, only that he works in an
environment that is driven by the goals which aren't of "public interest."

There are even more extreme "non-public interest" stories to be told, but that just means that on many levels there should be more done to move the society to do what the "public interests" are. Which as we know is not easy at all, and surely not decided by the practitioners of of some engineering discipline themselves.

(and moderators, please add 2015 in the title).
Of course you’re right; perfect privacy is impossible.

But at least we can pick the low hanging fruit and not give our own info to Google voluntarily.
At very least those that haven't taken an Informatics Engineering degree, with professional title should stop calling themselves engineers.

There is a certain level of expectation beyond such title.
Yes, this happens a lot on HN. It's pretty common to present a firsthand perspective only to be downvoted without anyone commenting on why they downvoted.

I think that largely, this has to do with the fact that a lot of the site users are heavily invested in their lives (identities?) and aren't looking to be told otherwise.

“Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.”
― Carl Gustav Jung
We use Jenkins [1] for CI. Every team runs its own Jenkins instance and has an individually configured CI pipeline. The more we grow, the higher raises the wish to unify the Jenkins CI/CD flow.

[1] https://jenkins.io/
> the "chai" form comes from Persia.

Well this all comes from the Chinese pronunciation.

Persia had old links with China through the silk road. That's how tea, silk etc. got there while Islam reached China very early.
I've always called them backslash and forward slash. I had thought everyone did!
Fae - A purely functional smart contract system built in Haskell.
In a somewhat similar vein, I've always found it odd that engineering students commonly refer to themselves as engineers. I agree with much of the linked article and believe the title of engineer implies that one has already gone through a rigorous testing and certification process and that you conform with continual professional development and regulation. So it irks me slightly to hear a first year student call themselves an engineer. It feels like a medical student calling themselves a doctor.

In other fields where the title most designates that you regularly do an activity and does not imply certification and strict regulation I think it's fine to call yourself by that title even if you are a student. Many CS students are programmers, or PhD candidates in mathematics are mathematicians.
Macbook buyer's guide: Louis Rossmann's recommendation list
Get rid of retched compulsory nullability and offer optionally optional types. Could be via ADT style Maybe a = Just a | Nothing, or just a language feature eg Mytype vs Mytype?
In a way I understand these comments, but I think they are drawing a very black white line in a grey area.

I trained as an electrical engineer (but I'm now %100 software), yes there was a lot about responsibility, safety etc, but to me the core of engineering and in being an engineer is to be able to apply theoretical math and physics concepts to real world problems.

That is why I did what I did, I didn't want to be an engineer to be an on time, on budget, project manager. I did it to combine design, maths and physics to build real world solutions to problems.

And this is why I would 100% consider myself a software engineer.

The accreditation and certification is missing (so far) because we are still figuring out the best ways to apply engineering to building abstractions (which is what I believe our field is). To me this doesn't make us any less engineers.
that's interesting to know.

Correct me if I'm mistaken since the motivation of the project isn't that clear on the home page: the main thing that makes lit-html special is the fact that it's just standard javascript.

This won't appear to typescript developers because they have jsx already built into the compiler. They can use lit-html and have their template type-checked too but it requires extra setup. What's the benefit here? That they can use class= and for=?
I bought the QC35 just before the new edition came out. I never downloaded the app because "yeah fuck that..." and all I wanted was some nose-cancelling headphones. I'm still very much in the fence about voice recognition.
It is a hard sell. If we ask the weapon industry to stop selling weapons some other country in the world would get the money.

Here in Sweden it is a very hard sell. About 1/3 of the yearly government revenue from state own companies come from selling weapon. About 85% is sold directly to countries with ongoing wars, mostly in the middle east. If they didn't buy ours they would just go elsewhere.

If we must present it as an all of nothing, then yes. Making it slightly harder is a goal worth while. If we can get nuanced about it then a priority goal is to reduce the risk of bad actors getting their hands on weapon we produce. This can be achieved by stricter regulation, which for computer-based signals intelligence means greater funding to protect the existing weapons and using them less as each use involve risk. This would go against the cost of fewer and more costly computer-based signals intelligence operations.

Since we keep hearing about US developed exploits being used by bad actors it means that the US is not spending enough funding on protecting their weapons or use them so regularly that they end up in the wrong hands anyway. A small price to pay is to adjust those numbers, and having a political discussion about what those numbers should look like.
Not just that, Wikipedia specifically prohibits original research [1] because it doesn't (while not in the practice, at least rightly) want to be the source of the truth [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_original_research

[2] Can be inferred from, for example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Fringe_theories
COBOL is specialized for business applications by supporting records (i.e. punch cards) and decimal numbers (as opposed to the binary floating point of FORTRAN).

Visual Basic is specialized for using COM (with a high-level interface to its features), I suppose - otherwise it's definitely general-purpose.
Interesting that they would allow press on such a clandestine outfit. However, I suppose perhaps in part — at least — its goal would be deterrence.
Correct crypto is not anonymous, but it’s more anonymous and there are mixers.
This number has 2x495 pages! Is it just me or did this really seem normal for its time?
Drawmote – use your phone to draw on your desktop browser
Thing is, it is regulated, sadly not enough world wide.

Back in Portugal no one can call themselves Engineers if their degree wasn't done at an university validated by the Order.

And even then, you are only allowed to sign certain kinds of projects after getting the professional title.

Naturally coders, with roles similar to construction workers, can be anything.
Pedantically, isn’t the “it” part of “do it” the plot?
This is a very poor definition. Probably the poorest.

I wonder what your definition of a doctor is then.

Being a guilded engineer myself but now called a software engineer, I can tell you with absolute certainty that software engineers as defined by industry today do not make the cut.

They are the equivalent of witchdoctors to doctors. Make of that what you may and then tell me again what an engineer is and what software engineer is
Recommended models:

Mid-2013/Early 2014 13" MacBook Air [1]

Late 2013 13" MacBook Pro Retina [2]

Late 2013 15" MacBook Pro Retina with dedicated GPU [3]

Mid-2014 13" MacBook Pro Retina [4]

Mid-2014 15" MacBook Pro Retina with dedicated GPU [5]

Lenovo ThinkPad P52 [6]

[1] https://everymac.com/ultimate-mac-lookup/?search_keywords=26...

[2] https://everymac.com/ultimate-mac-lookup/?search_keywords=26...

[3] https://everymac.com/ultimate-mac-lookup/?search_keywords=27...

[4] https://everymac.com/ultimate-mac-lookup/?search_keywords=28...

[5] https://everymac.com/ultimate-mac-lookup/?search_keywords=28...

[6] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=ThinkPad+P52
For languages that read left to right:

Downslash \

Upslash /
The underlying legal problem is the fact that in many jurisdictions it is forbidden to advertise to children of a certain age, sometimes with restriction on the time of day and / or the products advertised.

Toy companies and other producers of children aimed products do what they can to stay on the right side of the legal line while at the same time maximizing exposure.
It looks as if there are quite a few Bose-made apps available for download in in the EU. Feels like a clears GDPR violation without active consent
Exactly! This is what we want to do with nuclear. Pro-nuclear isn't anti-renewable (we want diversified energy portfolios, not a single source. That'd be ridiculous). It is about load balancing. If we can load balance with renewables and cheaper than nuclear options, then let's do it. Let's just not load balance with fossil fuels.
While a random js dev should not be called an engineer, the complexity and societal impact of modern software stacks far surpass most "true" engineering projects.

If Linux, Google, networking, etc.. were to stop working what would be the global economic cost?

If your work requires using formal methods, maths and extensive testing to ensure the reliability of the most complex systems known to man, than your an engineer not just a programmer.
Pm2 NPM library breaks thousands of builds bc analytics endpoint was down
For remote teams I have used Podio. Really good for my team over past 5 years.
> Consumers are human, and businesses are made up of humans, so what exactly is this saying?

True, corporations are made of humans, and therefore corporate goals are axiomatically aligned with human goals right? Like when nestle started indirectly increasing child mortality in Africa to peddle baby formula, that must have been because they put humans first right?

It’s not as difficult to understand as you try to make it sound. The principle is simple: In cases where there is a disconnect between what is good for humans vs what is good for corporations, side with the humans.
Something that happens in daily life can invoke emotions but it doesn’t mean one has to react with an immediate emotional response. Instead accept the input for what it is and choose how to act on it.

It’s rational versus emotional
I don't see any difference between a mailfunctioning piece of software creating serious harm to that of a crashing bridge. They can both kill, create huge social disturbance and leave people ruined. The problem is that the field still largely just thinks of them as bugs when it comes to software. That we have an abundance of programmers not taking software engineering as serious as the mechanical engineer is a huge problem today. When someone gets hurt from a bug, the software engineer mostly gets away with it (or get a reprimand from the boss) and doesn't get his/her licence to write professional code away. To be honest, what we would need is a professional certification where the software engineer should at random be required by law to be audited about his/her code and potentially be forbidden to work with some type of projects if it doesn't pass. I have seen way too many nasty outcomes and suffering during my career in the industry to hold any other opinion. We have real software engineers out there who write clean, rigid & maintainable code - but the industry is flushed with hobby tinkerers allowed to work on projects that can result in serious harm. Calling oneself a software engineer should be regulated, audited like any other engineering field. That we don't require it, leaves us with the nasty results that is an ongoing disaster. Anyone can write a piece of software, the way anyone can build a bridge. Ensuring neither of them come crashing down and adhering to principles and practices that doesn't make it come crashing down with high certainty is what's makes engineers different. If you have read the book "structures - or why things didn't fall down", you know that those other engineers from other fields also fail on and off. The difference is that in software we just keep building the next bridge go come falling down when the previous broke.
I switched from a Bose QC35 to a Sony WH-1000XM3 about half a year ago, and the Sony app on iOS was egregiously requesting permission for location access, even while the app is in background. The cited reason for location access sounded rather flimsy and suspicious. Luckily, everything that can be done with the app can also be done with the physical buttons on the headphones. I guess their design philosophy is that if you want the convenience of using an app with the product that you’ve already paid a lot of money for, you’ll need to pay for it with your location info.
I think a public GitHub in markdown format is a wise choice. Firstly markdown can look nice but will always be readable using cat (not what cats for but leaving that to one side...), so there is the longevity factor. Using github means you’ll probably have a local copy, and you can subject the repo to your normal backup procedures. But you also have another backup in Github itself. Finally making it public will encourage you to curate it and keep it up to date and not blasé delete old stuff (and git protects you from that too because a force push is required to really delete something). Most importantly it’s easy - open any editor and start writing, then commit ‘n’ push when done.
This is a very common misnomer. Mainly because weapons require so much more enriched uranium. Enrichment plants have to be much bigger. A size difference you can usually tell just from satellite imagery.
> A standard pair of enclosing characters would have eliminated a lot of unnecessary and unreliable escape character logic

Windows allows you to enclose paths in double quotes, which deals with the space problem.

Off the top of my head, I don't recall if Linux has the same behaviour?
Complaining about strawmen is pretty rich coming from someone who said that the person you're arguing with had the attitude that "the only people who can take credit for any kind of accomplishment are those born in awful circumstances", considering that was never said. You just came up with it, and now you're all huffy about someone doing the same thing to you
I agree. However, people like Steve Jobs literally did their best after the above-mentioned 35 years of age. Apple basically introduced so many "new" technologies which "broke the wheel" under Jobs' leadership, and he was way passed 35.

Although there are always exceptions like SJ, I agree with the general notion you quoted.
Nope. Chai is just tea. Spices may be added for regional defaults, but you can also get normal milky tea.
> that requires other people to have gotten it

Did you miss the last part where I said multiple machines are hosting it?
A normal "Chai" in my home is just 1:1 Milk and Water with a teaspoon of tea, a little sugar and maybe some cardomom.

A "Masala Chai" is milk, water, green tea leaves, tea, cardomom, cloves, grated ginger, a leaf of tulsi and a bunch of other stuff according to taste.
> A self-host solution by its nature requires some investment in the techniques and would take greater effort (that's how most open source projects make money).

That sounds like a pretty good reason not to run your own solution then, so I guess we can meet there.

> Look, I'm not trying to sell my solution here.

Yes, you are.
Haha nice that came to my mind, first :-D
Scripting Languages for Interactive Fiction
Slideshow from the talk:

https://fosdem.org/2019/schedule/event/templatinglanguagesin...
It wouldn't be 2x the work if this was standard design since common problems/hurdles and their solutions would then had already been mapped out. It pays off to use the least powerful language needed to accomplish a goal.
Weekly Robotics #40
> totally different tools and languages

do they, though? What's distinguishing JavaScript from, say, a poorly implemented lisp? What's the main difference between typescript and a poorly implemented ML? Syntax? Come on! There are maybe a handful of really different programming languages designs. And only three of them are really widespread.

> There's almost no cross-over in skills now, especially with Elm-derived front-end frameworks taking over.

If you are talking about Elm the language then it is very clearly influenced by Haskell. It is literally rooted in FRP. So to understand elm you need to know something about functional programming and type systems. Then you read the docs and you are in the game after a few days.
Yeah, nuclear can be expensive when you're building only couple of them per decade & continent. Look at China.

On the other hand, what is the actual cost of renewable energy with storage / backup / grid upgrades accounted for?

Nobody ever brings up _those_ numbers when claiming how nuclear is uneconomical. Maybe because those would be sky high today, and only might become manageable in the future. But hey, nuclear reactors are expensive!