skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Don't want to write CRUD apps for the rest of my career, what to do?
Quick background, no degree, been working in the field professionally for a few years now and I'm bored out of my mind.

I don't want be stuck writing code to automate business processes for the rest of my life, nor does developing b2b or b2c consumer apps sound very interesting to me. The typical stuff I hear recommended to people like myself is to go the PM route or do something like devops, neither of which sound interesting to me.

There are certainly fields / problems that interest me (low level embedded type stuff, low latency programming, etc.), but they tend to not be accessible to someone with my educational background (let alone professional). And while I've considered school, it's a financial impossibility. On top of that, I fear I'm not smart enough to do a lot of the stuff and feel like a proverbial "code monkey".

At this point I'm wondering if I should just leave tech, but the lost earning potential tells me that would be financial suicide (where else can you make that much money with nothing but a HS diploma),but I'm just not sure, and feel I may be overreacting or not seeing some option, I know other people have been in similar situations, and I'm curious if anyone could lend me some advice.
My startup is working on identifying and maximizing happiness for this reason [1]. Largely the reason we believe this is the case, is because people tend to stay where they are happy.

“Tribal knowledge” is the single most important thing an employee can bring to the table. It’s also only obtained through time at a given (or related company). At the same time, hiring and training a new employee is the single most expensive cost to a company. So identifying and keeping experienced employees really improves productivity and reduces costs. Which makes it much easier for a business to succeed.

[1] https://metacortex.me/
I wasn't referring to personal so much. More so the conversations they have that they are trying to keep a secret.
And this is one of the reasons why you see the revolving door between regulators and private companies. They are both competing for experts.

One can argue about the appearance of impropriety, but when people talk about stopping the revolving door, you’re talking about hurting both the gov’t and private companies because there are a limited number of experts.
The only downside to the filament LED bulbs is the flicker. Much like old fluorescent tubes they flicker at twice the supply frequency due to the very small driver circuitry.

That said I just saw a Big Clive video with a much better driver embedded in the bulb, so tech is getting there.
Absolutely! clang-tidy has a suite of modernisation tests and in many cases can apply fixes automatically.
> It seems quite odd that he lumps "Mens rights advocates" in there. Are they crazy?

Crazy or not, MRA invariably is grounded in a worldview as at odds with facts as climate denialism or anti-vaxx advocacy. (Honestly, I think TERFs and incels, who are not categorically factually delusional, are the ones that don't fit, though it's possible the use of “wrong” was meant to encompass not only factual delusion but also what the author sees as moral error.)
Several of my jobs in the past were programming proprietary languages and systems. No one outside the company had experience. Look for CS background, wide experience, quick learner, and team player attitude without arrogance. The differences in programming language details is trivial. What you will be using in the future is not what you are using now.
Of course they are. They're also an absurdly tracked and recorded generation, all of their cultural idols and most of their work supervisors are Gen X, and the people who own the companies that employ them and manufacture everything they buy are Boomers.

Their kids are also up to 20 years old, and are more polished online than they were; they were born being judged for what they posted, and knowing that everyone at school would see it.
Can you critique the article's points or the author's experiences specifically? Talking about Twitter tropes like ratios is not substantive.
It's a relay-based computer. Basically as long as relays continue to be made (which is probably close to forever), it can still be serviced. Somewhat newer but still old computers using custom ICs that stopped being made long ago would not have as good a chance of survival, and vacuum tubes are also relatively rare. But relays are still being made, and people still build relay computers for fun, as a quick search of the Internet will show; this is one of the more memorable ones: http://web.cecs.pdx.edu/~harry/Relay/

There's a similar analogy to this in the automotive world, where early cars were simple and one could easily service and maintain them, even fabricating new parts as necessary; at the same time, they're nowhere near as efficient as modern equivalents.
On a personal note the brand IIT has helped me in making me what I am (whatever that be). Even though I did not make it to IIT, the aspiration to get into IIT made me push myself to my limits. The preparation to get in helped me in getting top score in my state engineering exam allowing me to gain admission to the “best” engineering college of my state. That led to easy job placements, getting selected for lead role ( my manager actually said that he selected me just by the Engineering school I graduated from.. He was happy so I guess I didn’t do too bad on real life performance parameters) and getting accepted for research based masters by prof who knew about the college.

So coming back to the point, the IITs inspire you to dream and be ambitious and bold. I think for that matter alone, the premium value of the brand needs to be preserved. It has helped people from small towns like mine, where people don't know the difference between IIT and ITI, to aim high.
Empiricism and Dogma: Why Left and Right Can’t Agree on Climate Change
Some languages (I think Cobol) allowed the last 8 columns of punched cards to contain sequence numbers for physical sorting...
Logs can be treated as database rows regardless of source format (plaintext, csv, JSON, etc). The modern approach for dealing with large scale tables is column-oriented storage and databases which can easily handle billions of log lines without indexes by using ordering, partition maps, compression, etc.
Conventional wisdom? Or "common sense?" It's too common to be sauna talk.
Solving our housing supply issues in the US.

1. We need more small spaces

2. suitable to families of three or fewer people

3. that allow for a middle class lifestyle without owning a car because you can access jobs, shopping and entertainment via walking and public transit

4. that don't cost a fortune so people in the bottom half economically have some hope of living well.
Oh, interesting, but quite simplified and dogmatic principle. Anyways confusing labels for the groups. The group labels should rather be e.g. A,B and C since the labels don't really corresponds the their literal meaning.
There will always be other potential physical keys that aren't on your laptop keyboard. You could just as easily say that you shouldn't have to use modifier keys to trigger Page Down on a Macbook Pro keyboard. Where's my Print Screen SysRq key?
So true. And the United States has 2x the number of civil cases per capita than the next most litigious country, The United Kingdom. Tort reform just isn’t a sexy campaign promise either.
Overall, sure, but Project Zero follows responsible disclosure.
> That story was basically a plant from Amazon

Evidence?

> Quillette is absolutely not a high quality news source

Really? I find their articles to be written well. They are respectful and balanced in their tone, and provide a lot of evidence for their points.

Are you sure you don't just disagree with their centrist perspective? You've not actually offered any critique of this article.
Apple's AWDL protocol plagued by flaws that enable tracking and MitM attacks
Wow this is really cool. I honestly expected this to be just a program that would boot to some text output and maybe a very simple shell, but it looks like this more than that.
China’s AI Talent Base Is Growing, and Then Leaving
my single experience with Krita is trying to load hdr raw images in it where it failed with no major error
Boar wars: how wild hogs are trashing European cities
Are we really debating meaning of “forced” now?

What I meant is since Pivotal is known for uh voluntary-enforced? subscription to XP religious practices you can’t really expect it not to bleed into all aspects of dev process.

Btw I have nothing against pairing in general, just not the way Pivotal does this.
I don't think that paying a monthly subscription gets me news that is any less fake or higher-quality than what I can find from non-paywalled sources.

I guess I'm a "credulous moron".
CyberSaber..?

> By choosing a simple but strong cipher that is already widely published and agreeing on how to use it, anyone with elementary programming skills can write their own encryption program without relying on any products that can be banned.

http://ciphersaber.gurus.org/

And Pontifex, aka the Solitaire Encryption Algorithm (SPOILER ALERT):

> In Neal Stephenson's novel Cryptonomicon, the character Enoch Root describes a cryptosystem code-named "Pontifex" to another character named Randy Waterhouse, and later reveals that the steps of the algorithm are intended to be carried out using a deck of playing cards.

https://www.schneier.com/academic/solitaire/

Laws cannot stop encryption, they can stop law-abiding people from using it maybe but not criminals.
As Maciej Cegłowski pointed out some years ago, we already have a working micropayment system for content.[1] Unfortunately, the payments are going to carriers/service providers to pay for the page bloat that comes from not having another micropayment system.

[1] https://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm
An AI Weirdness Book
>it also seriously disadvantages kids with estranged parents.

I knew someone in this situation. It sucks, and the parent commenter is way too eager to attach labels.
Historically, intelligence services did routinely open and read physical letters sent through the mail, on bulk scales.
It could be argued that, while you're staring at a piece of paper covered with text printed with ink and categorized as 'fiction', you're enjoying that as a landscape peopled with imaginary characters. Some of which you might be drawn quite close to, say, Sherlock Holmes.

The same argument applies to orally-transmitted folklore (and notable story-tellers, before printing came along). Certainly the exercise of imagination enhances such widely-admired and long-remembered works.

The exercise of the powers of imagination is responsible for most of the great ideas of humanity.

Indeed without it, "We would own no more, know no more, and be no more than the first apelike hominids..." -- R.A.W.
Used Maya and cinema 4d for years.. just started switching to Blender because I heard the buzz around it.. and it is legitimately the biggest win for consumer open source software by a huge margin. Absolutely great product, I think I can get workflows as good or better than Maya out of this.. and Maya costs thousands of dollars a year.
This just in:

Dealing with the challenges faced by having a mere 97% conviction rate, federal prosecutors and law enforcement conspire with foreign powers to remove pesky civil liberties.
Don't know about Coverity, but a customer did a Fortify scan on our code last year (as a part of acceptance), and it didn't find any issues. Which I find really hard to believe that there aren't any issues, seeing that the codebase is 200KLOC of pretty gnarly C++ with probably another 500KLOC in source-level C++ deps (we compile from source where we can). Either the team was comprised entirely of gods of C++ programming, or it doesn't really "fortify" all that much. I'll let you decide which one is more probable.
And feminists in the US have managed to change the attitudes and laws that favor men while leaving the ones that favor women intact. That's not equality.

Many MRAs are men who were victims of domestic violence, or false allegations, or bias in the family courts or schools, who saw the system turn against them because of outdated assumptions that men are by default the guilty party.
What makes going to college a financial impossibility?
Did formation of European Union lessen severity of 2003 heatwave
Sure – think of it as implementation feedback rather than design feedback. You use Figma to collaborate on mocked up designs – what do you use to verify that the implementation matches the designed spec?
decrease in size because the game engine got deleted ?
> limit entrepreneurship with onerous licensing requirements

I work for a government agency that provides professional licensing in my state and was shocked the other day to learn that you need a license to operate as a "hair braider". This seemed a bit excessive to me
I'm wondering - is this a genuine request, or a snarky, implicit reference to an online resource for learning math somewhere?

I'd love to know about the existing resource, if it exists.
(The only thing that comes to mind is Wolfram Alpha, which didn't seem 'systematic' the last time I skimmed the main page)
A company press release definitely has no agenda though.
As another ooster has said. The law is pretty clear. Anyone selling is responsible.

What matters is the supplier agreement between retailers and suppliers. As another poster has said, that should heavily favor the retailers. Very interesting case because the fly by night operators that are amazon suppliers will be forced out, leaving a few that will de facto have to comply with US IP laws, even though de jure, they would be inmune
It’s getting old and lame . Sorry.
As crime dries up, Japan’s police hunt for things to do (2017)
Are we witnessing the birth of a new idea, something like "there is no right or wrong if it hurts people's feelings"? will "non binary truth" emerge as law?

You have the right to say anything that's wrong, and nobody can say it's wrong because that would be discriminatory, but if you say something that's right, nobody should say it's right because it would be binary thinking and discriminating? yet you can say it's wrong, because it's hurting your feelings.

Let's try to abolish logic! It will surely lead to immense happiness.

We're at the tipping point where Idiocracy becomes real (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/)
Most of the design geist for Forth applies pretty directly to Joy. E.g. you can read "Thinking Forth" and apply it to Joy.
You could always make it a labelled block statement !
Imaging of exotic quantum particles as building blocks for quantum computing
What about a flat rectangle that's automatically facing the user's face as if pinned to the inside of a sphere? Whatever window you're facing should have the right orientation.
Right now the killer online is:

"Buy from us, we dont sell cheap knockoffs"

However no one can bring amazon to task, since all the other ones (walmart target etc) are also moving in the same direction...hopelessly trying to catch up with amazon
>and every subsidy a university gives to a multimillionaire's offspring means less subsidy available for the genuinely poor.

Sure, let's deprive 100 people of their benefits so that 1 of them doesn't get that same benefit unjustly.
Oh wow I see, okay thanks.
Why I Banished My Ego from My Writing Process
That seems fairly obvious to me - SolarCity/Tesla have always talked about building a "virtual" utility via residential solar+battery, with the cars working as an (occasionally) mobile battery component.

But the OP's question was why don't Tesla install MegaPaks that they own themselves, into diverse energy markets around the world - and become a traditional utility.
I too have knowledge of these issues and they are devastating.

On top of dissimilar metal issues there are also different aluminum grades involved in the construction.
(meaning training+certs needed to work on these for most yards)

So on top of zero survivability in a hostile env they are not going to last 15 years.

Back when I was in, Ronnie wanted a 600 ship navy. Now we have <350 and that is counting these glorified ferrys.
Not the reason at all. Even if you left the charge of the word "race" behind, no one ever uses that word to describe such a distant variety of humans as the ones described in the article. I've read they compare to neanderthals and denisovans in their relationship with sapiens, and there's surely a reason why they were classed as Hominins (a two million year old tree) and not some narrower class. I'm still trying to get a better clarification, but the theorized extinct groups seem to require a far stronger word than race by any metric. Maybe subspecies would have preserved the idea of separateness while reconciling the interbreeding, but as you said, what you call this group of hominids is not that important anyways, but race gives the wrong idea in biological terms.

And I'm sad so many people just downvoted the comment without clarification. I thought too it was political correctness at first until I looked into the time-frame more closely. It merited a decent reply.
Do you mean inequality? Poverty has a specific meaning. We define poverty thresholds. Middle class is not in "relative poverty" compared to billioners.
It would still probably be used for inexpensive jewellery but maybe not things where showing investment was important. That said with engagement rings most of the cost is the diamond not the gold. Also it will remain in limited supply unless we start mining asteroids.
Why Florida Crocs Are Thriving Outside a Nuclear Power Plant
Huh, I have a different experience, I hit a paywall (or a free article limit like NYT or Bloomberg) on most news stories I follow
>> If you want to read about the actual tech they were harping as bringing MUH
SWINGULARITY, go read Norvig’s AIMA book.

This was still the main AI textbook in 2014 when I did my MSc in the subject.
It is what is rightly called a "seminal text" and there is not a single trace
of Singularitarianism in it. It's not just "Norvig's book". Its authors are
Peter Norvig and Stuart Russel. Is Stuart Russel ignored because he is not at
Google?

The article really needs to cool down on the hindsight triumphalism. A lot of
people were very optimistic about AI in the '80s (as earlier) because
significant and continued progress had been made. Scientific progress, the
continuation of the work of the Logicians in the '20s and Church and Turing's
work in the '30s. Sure, people in the industry just wanted to make a quick
buck, as they always do. But interesting science was being done and it is a
big loss that the AI winter disrupted its course. Not because it could have
led to autonomous vehicles and conversational agents. What we lost in the
winter was the opportunity to discover new knowledge. That is a tragedy.

So I really don't understand where all the schadenfreude comes from, in the
article. A big commercial project failed and took with it a whole branch of
computer science. Who, exactly, benefited from this?
In some places you need a license to wash hair.
my sentiments exactly. once you know how to solve a problem, you can Google newer UI equivalent of those tricks.
It’s a commoditized market and Apple’s success blueprint is out for everyone to see, yet no one else can adapt mid century design principles and “high fashion” style marketing to technology. This sounds like shilling (and I do own Apple stock) but I’m serious.

Compare the Apple remote (with the iOS “emulator”), Apple TV, and Airplay to Chromecast’s UX, for instance. Apple does have special sauce. They make tools that work together and are understood at a surface level. Everything, including the new keyboards, fits a hardware market driven agenda (quiet, “appy”, small like a phone). Google and Amazon work backwards from services, and Samsung and co just aren’t even playing the same ballgame. They are much more like traditional prebuilt computer companies. MS is kind of coming close with just computers but they are not nearly as sticky as an everything tech company.
About 1 ns per foot latency at speed of light. Having the CPU only six inches from the RAM is 1 ns round trip latency. Only way to lower that cost is physically moving the CPU closer.
What frequencies are these using? Also what is the speed? I assume its low frequency and pretty slow.
>by PHds who taught purely for enjoyment

Yeeeeeah, right.

Signed, PhD working in the industry.
Find a company that is growing, and grow with it. Try different programming paths. Go more devops, or more build pipeline, or core business for a tech first company.
They can still have the quarter-over-quarter growth in share price. That's why they're buying stock back.

With their last quarter's profits ($10bn) they could buy back about 50m of their 5bn outstanding shares ($208/share right now); that's 1% of the company.

It may be that the S-Curve is good enough. Make a huge profit and return it to shareholders through dividends and stock buybacks. Share price doesn't have to increase based only on hyped growth.
The threshold at which people use the term "poverty" is very different in different countries (including the official American definition, which changes), even after adjusting for PPP. So whether or not it's officially supposed to be an absolute measure, in practice it's relative.
The Eco-Programmer's Guide
I don't understand why you're going to so much effort to be wrong. The Lightyear One's drag coefficient is under 0.2, the Model S has a drag coefficient of 0.24. The Lightyear One is lower and narrower than the Model S. The Lightyear One is lighter than the Model S. The Lighyear One has in-wheel motors for greater efficiency, the Model S doesn't and neither did the EV1.

Again, reading.
Goes to show that every field has its own inferred "dark matter" of sorts.
How are these "events" different from sending this data to a metrics aggregator?
CASREP[0] in the ditch was pretty funny to me

[0]https://www.navytimes.com/news/your-navy/2016/11/22/destroye...
HN won't let you downvote comments on your own posts so I assure you, I didn't and do not think this comment was downvote-worthy. I might not agree, but it's a valid, if cynical point.

I just think that at a level where a peer review paper says "you did this" failure to respond is a fail in two dimensions: Its asocial and fundamentally stupid politically despite the "deny everything" posture every government takes, and its un-scientific: It makes it harder for other people to take your own science seriously, if you refuse to participate full-cycle in the process.
I think this point has a really deep meaning. Because of the child's mental development, there are many atavic characteristics within conceptions about the world.
It is better to post excessive disclaimers on the chance they're not necessary than to accidentally not post one where it's relevant.
Re: specialization. Most people aren't ambidextrous afaik and will have a hard time retraining to do things with another hand. So I think the metaphor still holds
Sounds like the same problem Germans had during WW2: weapons are too advanced and as a result very easy to fuck up when they see action, expensive to make, and impossible to repair. Same with planes: all that nice anti-radar coating loses effectiveness after a just few combat sorties.

Military gear needs to be simple as a shovel, and not require a PhD to operate and repair. It also needs to be cheap and easy to manufacture (for some definition of "cheap" and "easy", given that this is an aircraft carrier), so you could make more of it if needed, reasonably quickly. None of the stuff the US military industrial complex has been producing for the past several decades fits this description even remotely.

What was wrong with the older, tried and true systems? Sure, they were slower, but nobody else in the world has anything that comes close anyway, and won't have it in the foreseeable future.