skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It’s bad policy to spend scarce resources (in this case road space) on something few people use.

You mean like self-driving cars? How about we spend "scarce resources" on things people actually do use right now, like bicycles, scooters, electric skateboards, whatever.

You're also arguing, "let's not spend anything on infrastructure for $ACTIVITY, then when no one does $ACTIVITY, we can say, 'yeah, but nobody does that'."
Ah, well, you just described the relative value of math in much the way I'd describe the relative value of... well, just about any intellectual pursuit. Same in philosophy. Or in law. Or in physics.

A lot of people with particular interest in one area -- say, mathematics -- don't realize that much of what is important is much more generally applicable.

It's not that these things are distinctly important for math. It's that they are important for thinking.
> However, lately the tension between those two is so high that any small decision towards living the life you want to live may very well end in financial misery for the rest of your life.

This is definitely an uncomfortable truth that isn't talked about very often, and the information age seems to exacerbate it.
Lived in Austria for a couple years... it was hard to say though. I didn't speak the language there, so people were friendly, but obviously it kind of limited my interactions to anglophones or locals with the desire to have English speaking friends.
Oftentimes people make the mistake, of jumping directly to the formulas when reading mathematical texts.
You will not have enough context to parse them!

Instead, think of a formula like a very dense sentence in a novel.

The protagonists are usually introduced in the paragraph before. You are assumed to know their names to make sense of the formula.
A single anecdote doesn't disprove his hypothesis - in this case a more effective engineer might have sent it back saying "can't repro, needs more info".

They also might have looked at the code and said "oh hey, that won't work with multiple windows, I'll just change that".
> How do you compensate the people making internal tooling for example?

You need to place them in your business model.

What are the tools used for? What would happen if the tooling didn’t get built and your colleagues used off the shelf tools?

That will tell you how much your team is worth.

Most people seem to throw up their hands at this point and say “it’s hard, and imperfect” and they stop working on the business model.

But any model is imperfect. Even the sales person you mentioned, who earns a flat commission on sales... they could be costing the company more than they’re bringing in, if their sales are forcing developers into crunch, or if their customers churn, etc. The point of the model is not to mirror reality perfectly, it’s to give you numbers that can guide your negotiations, as I said.

Just because it’s unusual to think about how developers fit into your business model doesn’t mean it’s impossible or it shouldn’t be done.
I am staying subscribed; I don't have the spare time to watch all of their shows; so getting bored of it; is not a problem; I like that they don't have adverts; and you can just play what you choose when you do have the time.

This morning I got a letter from the BBC thanking me for paying my mandatory license fee; for owning a `colour television`.

Netflix is good value; because I actually watch it; and the fact that people can legally cancel the subscription should keep them on their toes.

Not that long ago there were only one or two channels of government propaganda to watch; that displayed a commercial test card transmission through most of the day.
Life is good.
UK MPs call for suspension of facial recognition trials
Uh, they don’t. They also don’t turn on their computer faster than you. But a 10x programmer, while fixing that bug, might eliminate 3x as many bugs in 1/3 the time (so maybe they’re a 9x programmer).
What about double hashing? Once on the client and once more on the server? Then, the server never sees the password, but prevents using a leaked password hash from the DB
Why on earth is the text of Home/Explore/Notifications etc on the left bold and twice as big as the content aka the tweets?

You see the navigation every day. You know where it is. Its not that you have to read through it. So if anything, shouldn't it be smaller?
Side note, but sharing salaries with colleagues is actually a good idea, due to the unfairness that can arise from salaries being kept secret.

Example article:
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/31/smarter-living/pay-secrec...
It's very easy to terraform 1000 nano machines on ec2, as he said it wouldn't be expensive at all. In fact, he estimates $150, but for 1000 nano machines for 10 minutes i believe it's under a dollar. Possibly nano machines aren't powerful enough to spam the verify endpoint enough
Is letting the client know the salt a problem?
Yes, this is what I meant. It wasn't clear, thanks. Generally squashing all the feature commits in a branch into 1 atomic commit in master.
Okay, but one of these is a massively distributed team and organizational sport, and one of these is an individual sport. One is highly based on hyper-focused physical dexterity and the other is an interdisciplinary form of cooperative knowledge labor to achieve business goals. There's some overlap in so far as technique exists in both, but there exist such vast differences between the failure, passing, and mastery criterion, the process of learning and teaching, and even the actual act of execution that the analogy doesn't really work effectively as a vehicle of language.

This isn't to say I fully disagree with your point, by the way. I'd rather use the analogy of a TV producer, or a movie production, or a band. It's creative output, there's tons of variation in the level of natural and practiced talent, it's highly team based, and the work product is very much a knowledge product. But, even there, differences remain between something you have to use and something you can consume for pleasure.

How about industrial design firms and elite designers? Well, now we're cooking with gas -- when it comes down to it, engineers are still ultimately designing systems that either are dependencies of other systems that people directly use, or are those systems themselves. What makes someone 10x more productive? Is it that they individually produce 10x more output, or that they understand the nuances of the constraints 10x better, or that they're able to make the engineering lifecycle 10x more effective, or some combination of all of the above? I'd say the latter. In that way, there are almost certainly outliers that are more productive than the mean.

And, in my experience, that comes from a combination of individual competence and team/organizational based leadership ability. It's a far cry from the savant 10x individual contributor that the 10x meme originally came from and which many folks across the industry now (rightfully, in my opinion) critique.

I've been a "10x engineer" and I'm not sorry. The difference is, it's not the 10x savant individual contributor. I've made entire organizations 10x more effective, but fundamentally, that was because I learned how to be a good multiplier: how to help people out, help them grow, unblock procedural bottlenecks in a lasting way, resolve misalignment between different divisions in an org, refine a product that was missing the forest for the trees, and so many other things. But that did not come from me being some kind of natural genius, or more "talented" -- it came from me being persistent, and never really being satisfied if I thought things could be improved. It came from me doing that over a long enough period of time that my cumulative output and multipliers ended up indeed 10x-ing things. This is the kind of "10x" engineer that I believe most engineers can become -- not easily, but doably. I've built teams and orgs consisting of these kinds of engineers. And, they'll eat your 10x savant contributors for breakfast.

How does the old saying go? Culture eats strategy for breakfast? It seems trite, but it's always rung true in my experience.
Thread from last year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17417545
You can find the code they wrote with that compiler (EPL) and more information about Multics here. It's browsable but not in any modern archive though (https://web.mit.edu/multics-history/). And here are some links to a simulator that allows you to boot Multics up (https://multicians.org/simulator.html). That web site also has a bunch of history about the system.
Will do that. Thanks.
Chinese manufacturing industry is already the most automated and robotised in the world.

Chinese factories did not stand still for the last 10 years when accommodating the rising wages was their biggest trouble.

This is very obvious to anybody working in the industry. The popular image of the industry being all about "sweatshops" is completely wrong.
if(foo = 5) {
...
}

You don't need the rust style expression/statement distinction to catch this. Many languages will catch this at compile time since "foo = 5" does not evaluate to a boolean.

I know that it's relatively easy to catch this error in Rust, and it is at most a minor annoyance, but it still feels like a clear step backwards after working with languages which don't require semicolons at all.
I had the luck of nopping out of the new version pretty quickly.
Indeed, and I'm glad I saw the discussion and switched to Imagus and then Hover Zoom+, but if I had missed discussion of Hover Zoom's spyware activity I would have kept using it. We need better mechanisms of keeping people constantly informed about bad extensions, and ideally, ways of shutting them down.
Math can be considered an art, though not a fine art. Programming by either extension is an art (though again, not a fine art).

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematics_and_art
Unleashing Predator: Precomputed Data Repositories
> If they don't see a referer, then they can assume that you typed in the URL or bookmarked the page.

... or followed a link from an IM or some other source outside of the browser. Too many possibilities to really assume anything and draw conclusions.
Are Cellphones a Flight Danger? They Are on These Boeing Jets
Some primates can use a few signs from deaf language already, and combine them to make almost a sentence. The foundation seems there already. We also have no idea how much the dolphin language can convey. Your conclusion seems very definitive for a question that I meant very hypothetical and so many missing variables.
Similarly, there was no point in Carmack's career where his work and his views were accepted totally uncritically.
I don't think that can explain everything. As far as I understand, cultures where family is highly valued (Latin America, some parts Asia) say they are happier despite being relatively less well off than richer countries.
> Why would anyone spend an hour or more playing games in the office rather than just getting their work done and leaving to spend time with family, friends, pets, or hobbies?

I worked for a SV company with a ping pong table, video games, board games etc.

If you don't participate you're seen as "not a team player"... It's the same with lunches etc. They want you at the office as much as they can get/keep you there, and now they're doing their best to create "inclusive social environments".

It creates an "in" and an "out" crowd, and if someone decides you haven't hit your monthly Go Karting/drinking event/fancy dinner quotas you're the office outcast. Managers love this because it's all under the guise of "family" or "team building" etc. and it gives them a totally arbitrary metric to nickle and dime someone on.
You have assumed the role of the loser, as per https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...

It feels nice down here, join us!
You just tell the other people on the line to be quiet for a moment while you spell it out.

Same for "press 1 for ..." type menus.

Sometimes the automated system says embarrassing things like "The balance of your account is..."
>For which are you advocating?

A single-payer system, as I said.

>Why could I not buy my own insurance? Or why can't I self-insure?

These are leading questions. There exists healthcare systems that are a hybrid of single-payer/private insurance.
>How would such a dramatically more effective programmer have been able to reproduce that bug more quickly?

I'm not quite sure I understand your point.

"Dramatically more effective" does not mean "dramatically more effective in every single scenario you can think of."
> They still made the contract - and it was even their lawyers who wrote the contract and spend hours poring over it. If I order truck loads of landscaping material to be delivered to my house and I later learn that it wasn't such a great price, you better believe I'm now stuck with that material and the bill.

At first, I thought you were talking about the general social or implied contract between a retailer and consumer, in the general sense. But if you're talking about the explicitly written contract that the lawyers wrote, which is the Conditions of Use, then the allowance for pricing mistakes is right there in the "Pricing" section of the contract, including a description of what happens in such events:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?ie=UTF8...

> With respect to items sold by Amazon, we cannot confirm the price of an item until you order. Despite our best efforts, a small number of the items in our catalog may be mispriced. If the correct price of an item sold by Amazon is higher than our stated price, we will, at our discretion, either contact you for instructions before shipping or cancel your order and notify you of such cancellation. Other merchants may follow different policies in the event of a mispriced item.
you should be aware that Authy can by default be taken over with just your sim card. I believe with the right settings you can disable this behaviour
I ain't an expert with the tool, but I use it a lot. There are plugins for those advanced document types for TW, but they aren't stellar unless you know exactly what you want. The nodejs option (especially TW5-Bob), however, seem very well-suited to quickly hacking together interfaces to your underlying OS and whatever can be accomplished on the CLI. It might do more now than it did for you a long time ago.

I think wikis are hypertext bombs, and TW a rapid prototyping tool. That's how I try to use my silly wiki (https://philosopher.life/).
> The Screen and the Job have displaced

The screen and the Job have no volition of their own. It's humans themselves that choose to spend more time with them instead of interacting with nearby humans. And this is happening despite the fact that we 're no longer in the industrial age, and people don't need to live near the factory where they work. The Job provides people with enough money to frequently escape from nearby people (travel, or "experiences"), money to move in upscale tiny apartments where they can be alone in a crowd, or to move in comfy suburbs where they can be alone physically. It seems highly-paid people choose those, and it is lower class people that keep socializing with their neighbours.

I presume many of those people do not idolize their relationships with other humans as the most precious thing in the world. They weigh them against the freedoms afforded by money and technology and act accordingly.
Singapore mostly uses concrete, and it will crumble without the requisite maintenance (much faster than a western wooden, brick, or steel building). Overbuilding using cheap unskilled labor makes the maintenance problem worse, but not insurmountable.
> There’s nothing intrinsic to rust that makes it better suited for “foundational components” over anywhere else in the stack.

Actually, there is, not having a GC means you can better reason about stack/heap memory usage. That matters for performance critical and things like embedded systems where you might not even use malloc() in c.
Chrome's API changes will hurt a substantial part of the extension ecosystem. Google could have dissected the webRequest API by introducing new granular APIs that together would have offered feature parity with the deprecated API functions. But they didn't because it would hurt their bottom line.

Granular APIs would have allowed developers to migrate their extensions in a meaningful way, while users would have been able to allow only the permissions they truly need. Reviewers could have scrutinized extensions which request unrelated permissions.

This is a feature reduction from Google's part with the aim to keep ad blockers in check, while the rest of the many extensions and future use cases that they'll make impossible are casualties that they are willing to accept to protect their profits.
My journey through infidelity and a broken company
I keep seeing "capitalism" leveled at Amazon as a pejorative when people seem to mean "consumerism."
This! Ten times this! Single dependencies like this are absolutely a risk management issue.

I say this as someone who's both been a single point of failure at times (and learned my lesson) and someone who's had to clean up after piles of "clever" code that someone left behind when they got hired out somewhere else.
Coons and Stivers Reintroduce Measure to Make the U.S. Patent System STRONGER
I think as with most things it's a little of both. HN as a whole is concerned about a lot of privacy stuff that just doesn't bother everyone. Also privacy is hard, even if you buy things in cash companies can still track you if they want, they use cookies and fingerprinting techniques that even most people in tech don't really understand. It's not really possible to counteract tracking if large companies and governments make an effort for it.
Are you saying there are no dramatically more effective programmers because you encountered a bug that would be difficult for everyone to reproduce? Even if task X takes the same time for 2 people, one is more effective in the end than the other if they can do task Y in less time/more efficiently/some other performance metric.
What open offices could really use is those kinds of spinners that they have at Brazilian steakhouses, where you could flip from green to red, depending on if people are open to being talked to.
I think this gets at the difference between knowledge and understanding. Simply knowing a fact (like the Earth is round) is different from understanding why we think that. Perhaps what's even more important than understanding is the ability to come up with experiments and arguments questioning our understanding.

Questions of understanding lead to scientific research and analytical thinking, and that's exactly what a large fraction of the human population lacks. I'd say that's the only goal of education: to create people who can think for themselves.
Switch Michael Phelps with Tom Brady.
Neanderthals not only developed along the same evolutionary path as us... they're full blown homo sapiens. There's a high likelihood you have Neanderthal DNA yourself. That's not an example of something else being able to develop like us independently in 5,000 years.

If all humans were wiped out today, _maybe_ over _100,000 years to 1,000,000 years_ the great apes would be able to evolve into creatures as intelligent as modern humans. But if all apes were wiped out today, it wouldn't be surprising if Earth never saw another species go to the moon. Don't forget lots of species thrived for hundred of millions of years without leaving any trace approaching even simple tool making.
Administrative costs are costs too.
Another prime example why UI redesigns are a waste of time - https://debugandrelease.blogspot.com/2019/03/ui-redesigns-ar...
What I'm discussing here is the general concept of modelling your program formally before writing it (as per the article). What I'm arguing is that this type of approach is only possible for a certain set of applications which take the form of y = f(x), where f(x) is some type of data transformation /computation operation (e.g. calculate the GCD of these ints, find the shortest path through a given graph, sort this set etc). There's another set of applications which I/O bound, are very important, and yet, the "computation" that they preform is limited to none. These applications are rooted in, and bounded by system parameters, like understanding how disks work, how network cards work, how CPUs work etc. This is an optimisation problem, but not one that can be modelled mathematically (in any reasonable way) because of the vast complexities of the system. Building a TLA+ "proof" of this system will reduce trivially to x = x, and yet, the system is still important, and difficult to write well.
I saw this a couple of days ago in the /new section. It seems some good modding is being done!

I take my hat of for you mister (or miss) mod :)
It's an odd choice to put the tweet button at the top of the dialog rather then the bottom where your eyes and mouse should be after finishing the tweet message.
True, but in civil law systems, with minor exceptions, only statutory law counts. Why should the US system dominate in space?

Another question is: why should the US decide what happens in space? That’s quite an imperialistic view on the world.
getting an auditing threat from a @v-microsoft.com accounts are pretty common
Lack of edits is an important anti-abuse feature. If you can edit a tweet, you can make a tweet saying one thing, and then edit it to say something entirely different after someone else retweets, links, or embeds it elsewhere..

(Though frankly, given how poorly they've handled other abuse-related issues, I doubt this is their reasoning)
> you have to be very careful about events

The only gotcha that can cause memory leaks in C# is a GC root, i.e. referencing something on a stack, that is static or that is pinned. Events/delegates are not special in any way, they are simply a reference footgun because it's non-obvious that they contain a reference to the object that contains the handler.
Do you make a distinction between stealing from a rich person versus a poor person?
I think many people value being disentangled from other peoples' problems. They move to the suburbs so that they don't have to have roommates or people in the next door apartment - so that they have some space. Then they find out that they have no community - they're isolated and lonely. As you say, we're doing it to ourselves.
My Changing Relationship with Books
Maybe the real secret to being a 10x programmer is being so charismatic that people attribute the work of 10 other programmers to you!
I thought it was satire for most of the thread. I can't imagine celebrating someone being a poor mentor and disagreeable.
This language should be called `Visual Difficult` since it seems to offload memory management to the human; while the compiler aggressively critiques them.
It is safe though; as in fool proof.
> This argument cuts both ways. If Amazon isn't a moral entity, then there's also no moral violation if they screw you over.

In that case, it's not a moral violation if they screw you over, but it's not a moral violation if you end them for screwing you over either. The mosquito isn't violating morals when it bites me, but I'd still have no problem eliminating them all from my backyard if i could do it in a reasonable manner. Not many people claim it is immoral for me to swat the mosquito.