skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's not surprising to me that it's variable. The school administration, culture, and individual teachers matter a lot.

For example, a Colorado teacher physically assaulted a student for not saying it: https://kdvr.com/2018/08/31/teacher-accused-of-assaulting-st...

Another teacher just tried the guilt trip approach: https://fox2now.com/2018/11/16/teacher-banned-after-students...
>a large portion of Americans still believe in guns.

It would be the exact same situation if American students in Australia or England were trying to shut down a rally against gun ownership.

I personally believe in the right to own a gun in written into the constitution of the united states...as is the right to burn a flag..I don't own a gun and would not burn a flag...and if I was in Australia, I would definitely not try to stop people from burning an American flag..
Ask HN: How do you validate your alerts still work?
HN folk, how do you ensure the continual integrity of your individual alerts? Like a DB backup is only valid if you verify you can restore, an alert is only valid if it will actually alert. I'm thinking regular integration testing that ensures alerts still work are in order, but not sure if anyone does this.

This came front of mind because we recently had a bad deploy where some stuff stopped working right. The correct error logs were generated, but a formerly working alert that checks for those error logs had been poorly modified and as a result no longer worked. Had this alert been in an automated test suite or similar, we would have known ahead of time that the alert had been borked.

HN, how do you handle this kind of situation?
Thanks!
This isn't like restaurant tipping where bad service gets 10% and good service gets 25%+ It's mostly bi-modal, drivers frequently don't get tipped at all. In this scenario reducing variance makes sense because (as many other commenters here note) unless the experience is overwhelmingly bad the tip generally has more to do with the receiver of the order rather than the driver.
I too hate long-form writing, I cannot bear to read it ever ever ever. If you need to flex your imagery chops on the reader that badly then write fiction, otherwise get to the damn point!
not buying chinese made products is the only thing that will work. look at it as voting.
I started working as a programmer, and for all practical purposes started programming, at age 37. I'm over 50 now. The vast majority of my professional career has been spent in violation of this article's thesis.
https://www.rosshartshorn.net/RossHartshornResume.pdf
A better take on it would be, "don't expect to be able to avoid learning new stuff every few years, just like younger devs".
Code review is one of those things where the culture around reviewing and the experience of the reviewers makes all the difference.

A code review where the boss reviews code is pathological. When experienced peers do the review it can be brilliant.

In fact I would only trust a team of very competent seniors not to need code review. Even then, getting another opinion on your code can be worth it.
> FIXME: Do not rely on glibc internals.

Seems that's less of a glibc breaking compatibility, and more developers relying on something outside of the guaranteed API.
Barker – a decentralized/distributed open-source Twitter clone
Here is an entertaining take on some related questions, going into the history of how our modern ground systems evolved:

http://amasci.com/amateur/whygnd.html

I would be interested in your comments about that article, thanks!
What would it be for one of the gas giants?
As were the 8" hard sectored diskettes. Don't forget the write-protect notch.
That is the basis of the assumption of 40 as a boundary as well, isn't it? I don't think most people really believe there is some biological limit of 40 for programming, but more an apparent shelf-life for your run of the mill programming career. This all strikes me as a specific case of the more general character of any ~20 year or "generational" endeavor.

You experience phases of intellectual and social stimulation, and your response is probably somewhat stereotyped as a normally functioning human. I think it is a bit more acute if you are also doing this in a cohort with many of your peers in the same phase at the same time. Things like the "hype cycle" are observations about these effects in a population or market as a whole, but are rooted in the similar experience of the individual participant.

So, I might rephrase it as: you should give some thought to subsequent phases of your life, and not expect this one to go on indefinitely. There will be changes. The only choice is whether you attempt to steer the changes and/or mitigate the challenges that might be beyond your control...
If you do not properly bond the ceiling fan (that is, connect the "ground" wire) then the circuit breaker will not trip if there is a fault to ground on the fan.

That is, if the hot wire touches a metal part of the fan which is not supposed to be energized (say the metal housing), and the fan is not properly bonded, then there will be no ground-fault path back to the source to cause the breaker to trip. This could mean that the housing of your fan would be energized with (in a home in the US) 120V, and would shock anyone who touches it.
(19) LinkedIn
Not every year. Given the article's assertion of the 103 tons per acre per year, your Alaska of Empress trees would do it until they all die and presumably those forests will be maintained into perpetuity.
That's exactly correct. You would get shocked if you touched the fan.
And in use until recently! https://www.cnbc.com/2016/05/25/us-military-uses-8-inch-flop...
I think it was both more pervasive and subtle than that. This (by no means the only research on the topic) gives a bit of the flavour:

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/pgp53z/how-the-cia-infilt...
Carbon and CO2 "emissions" numbers are different

"Carbon" is 10B
"CO2" is 40B

This article says Carbon in the headline but CO2 in the body

From the body of the article:

> While each acre of most tree species can capture and store 1.1 to 9.5 metric tons of carbon dioxide a year, an acre of empress trees can absorb 103.

40 billion / 103 = 388 Million acres of Empress Trees

China is around 2 billion acres in size
22% of China is covered by forests

22% of 2 billion is 440M

In theory China alone can solve this problem by replacing the indigenous trees with these trees. Bad idea though for obvious reasons.

In practice if every compatible country just got rid of some sub-optimal tree and replaced it with this tree, it could probably work.

If we gathered up the annual amount of money spent on "solving" Climate Change - one example that comes to mind is the recent Google summit where all the B-tier Celebrities went to in Yachts and Private Jets. What if we took all the money that these kinds of events cost and devote it to this single exercise. I'm pretty sure it could be done. All it would take is some governments to say OK. They can get paid for it by the other countries too as a one-off payment.
I love your comment and can back you on your last point. I know plenty of people who are very successful because they took the time to become experts on some industry that also aligns well with programming. Compare:

Person A has become one of the world's ten foremost experts on the GPS system and other industry-critical location/positioning technologies. She is also a good, above-average programmer but nothing special.

Person B is an academic, a master of C++ who can recite chapter and verse from the language standards and writes bug-free code. He can point out undefined behavior, implementation-defined behavior, and memory leaks with ease in code reviews. He builds entire systems using template metaprogramming and is already an expert on C++28.

Person C is a highly productive generalist. His career jumped from a bank to an enterprise company to an operating system vendor to an online store. Always working on API-to-API middleware, expertly pushing Protobufs and JSON around and designing vast systems, but never gaining any expertise in an actual application topic.

Person A is going to be much more marketable later on in life, assuming she placed her bet on the right industry vertical. Person B and C may have good, successful early careers, but are often at risk of being replaced by Yet-Another-Protobuf-Slinger fresh out of college. Be as good a programmer as you can, but also build up knowledge of the business or detailed knowledge of a specific technology application that you know is not going away.
Except that they will be brainwashed by the AI, in whatever direction the authorities dictate.
First rule: Don't call yourself a "programmer".

https://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/10/28/dont-call-yourself-a-pr...

I read this post a few years after it was published. I was lucky to read it early enough in my career. It was eye opening.
Presumably you don’t have to harvest and replant them every year though. I’m guessing it takes them several years to get to the point that they’re full grown.
Interesting, I was curious. Personally, I feel like the nationalism has gotten a lot worse / uncomfortable in Guangdong in recent years. I don't feel like it used to be this way in anything-goes Southern China.
Did Linux ever support 8" disks?
It's great that these are in a consistent formatting style. When trying to extract some contents programmatically from some Gutenberg texts, I kept running into different formatting styles. That combined with being able to check out the entire repository makes it much simpler to do data processing on the works.

And, of course, fixing more errors is of course a noble goal. Are these corrections going to make it upstream to Gutenberg?
I don't want to dismiss what sandstorm is doing. They've been around for a while and they've shown some incredible persistence in pursuit of their vision. I'm also a little out of date since I last checked up on it.

IIRC, one example of the SSO thing I mentioned is exemplified in sandstorm. They either (I can't recall specifics) wrap or fork the relevant projects to make them "fit" within the sandstorm ecosystem. SSO, ACL, and overall storage / permissions are handled by sandstorm, which is why there's a list of supported apps - other apps that haven't been "wrapped" don't integrate with sandstorm APIs so they can't be used directly (I may be wrong now its 2019)

That's...kinda my point. There's OIDC, OAuth, Unhosted, IndieWeb, microformats (repeat ad nauseum) and yet there's still somehow a need to create the XKCD #927 situation (yet another standard). There's already schema.org (OK, Google influence :shrug:), the ActivityPub vocab (still new-ish), RDF / Linked Data etc.

It's not a slight against any of these projects, particularly sandstorm. IMHO the effort and onus should be placed on the component projects to play well with others. GitLab and Nextcloud deserve shout outs for exploring or working on federation strategies that should remove the need for things like sandstorm, but we should keep fighting for and implementing similar things for other projects.

(This discussion is now convincing me to open a second pull request to Wallabag implementing OIDC login)
tl/dr - Barker is a twitter clone that runs its backend across 25 global data centers. The post explains the motivations and challenges that inspired the developer to build barker and how he leveraged Macrometa - a geo distributed platform's document database, graph database and streams to build the app. Source code provided.

Macrometa offers a free developer platform for building apps and APIs like barker at www.macrometa.co
Wrong again, that was Herb Sandler. Today is the first day that I read any of these emails, and I already know more than you about them. Why am I here pointing out your misunderstandings of the facts? Shouldn't you have become a steward of the facts before unraveling your thoughts in this thread?
Only if you harvest them without releasing CO2 - no firewood for instance
> why would a job need a credit check?

So they can weed applicants out. This is very common in the fire service. Applications can be 40 pages long and they want you to list each financial account, balances, limits, etc. It's ridiculous. But I know just why they're doing it. I also think such requirements are weeding out minority applicants.
> They can get low interest loans using the shares as collateral. This deferring taxes indefinitely

And in case a superinflation strikes, all those loans are effectively wiped out while they keep the assets (the corporate off-shore hoard might suffer as well though, but it might be sufficiently mobile and well-managed to avoid the worst). If capitalism was a video game, it would get terrible ratings due to utterly botched difficulty scaling.
I recently found a really old floppy in a box.

It contained the first client work I ever did for someone, around 1990 or so.

It was an implementation of an algorithm for computing the inbreeding coefficient of a population.

The program read the population data from a database and then wrote the resulting coefficient back into a new column.

I pleasantly surprised at how good my code was.
Breaking Down the Chrome Web Store: An Exploratory Analysis of Extensions
Sure, but there's also got to be some sort of diminishing return.
More coming next week. We believe we got to the bottom of this last night.
Because it's so blatant it'll be a 'front door.'
Location: Dresden, Germany
Remote: Yes
Willing to relocate: For the right job within Germany, yes
Technologies: Linux, FreeRTOS, C, C++, Assembly, Arm, Xtensa, currently tinkering with Elm to broaden my view
Résumé/CV: https://cv.philipp-trommler.me
Email: cv [at] philipp-trommler [dot] me

Hi, I'm a mid-level embedded and low-level GNU/Linux software engineer with three years experience in building GNU/Linux distributions from the ground up as well as system services for RT and non-RT operating systems. Generally things that can't be seen but have to work.

I'm looking for a new opportunity within a company that does not just use but also contributes back to Open Source. I'd really like to work as a full-time contributor in the open, including code, docs and community work.

If you need someone who knows how to code but also has the soft skills to interact with your community, reach out to me!
It's one of those statements that doesn't actually have to be said since everyone implicitly understands (because it's not unique to programming), but that someone feels the need to say because it makes them feel insightful. related: bikeshedding.
A picture of my old Tektronix 2225's warning tag:

https://i.imgur.com/jYNCC4d.jpg
Regrettably, that didn't stop us here in the US.
Haven't you ever played a game, won, and felt good about winning? If not, try it sometime. You may find that winning is fun. It's even more fun when the other players like you enough to play with you again. What sucks is winning when the losers starve to death.
> Standard Ebooks puts significant work into designing, formatting, marking up, and hosting our ebooks. While some think we could, or even should, release our work with some kind of copyright notice, instead Standard Ebooks dedicates the entirety of each of our ebook files, including markup, cover art, and everything in between, to the public domain.

https://standardebooks.org/about/
Government agencies require developers, and it’s full of older coders at least in my country (Sweden). Lots of benefits such as long vacations. Only problem is they move slow as all hell and they have decades of legacy, which drives the younger developers away because they want to move fast and break things.
Though it's been years since I used one, I'd still put floppy drive support in the "obvious" category. I suppose it's noteworthy that it no longer had a maintainer.
This is the bottom section of TFA:

> You’ve got a cash cow, milk that sucker!

> I know you love programming because you like technology, so this may go against your very nature, but no one says you’ve got to jump every time some snot-nosed kid invents a new way to run byte-code. You have invested a lot of time and energy mastering the technology you use, and your experience differentiates you. Money follows scarcity, and snow-birding on an older technology, if you can stomach it, may just be the way to protect your earning potential. The industry turns on a dime, but is slow to retire proven technology. It is highly likely that you will still be able to earn some decent coin in the technology you know and love even after a few decades.
Hi, Katia here. Thanks for your question!

Right now we’re available to participants in OECD countries and it’s probably going to be another while before we can expand globally. Within the 36 countries that we’re in, we’re currently trying to work out what incentives might work best: How can we encourage the average citizen to sign up and take part in online research? What about very hard-to-reach demographics like professionals?

We feel that cash generally works well as an incentive, but it’s not everything. A lot of the time people want to contribute to projects they personally care about. So on Prolific’s end, it will come down to matching projects with the right participants. Another type of incentive could be to offer to participants that Prolific donates their earnings to charities on their behalf, and perhaps Prolific could match their donation?

We’ve recently launched quota-based representative samples for the US and UK [1], where we stratify based on sex, ethnicity, and age. A by-product of this feature is that it specifically invites niche demographics to participate, helping fill gaps. We hope that having more surveys available for demographics that are in the minority (e.g. certain ethnicities and age groups) will improve our ability to recruit these participants (although there’s a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem here).

Another thing we’d like to do is launch a mobile app for participants, so anyone can take a quick survey on the go (while waiting in line, chilling at home, commuting). Making our surveys more accessible to participants through different channels should help represent more people in society.

And then there’s user experience. We’re working on making our site as self-explanatory as possible, so anybody can sign up and start participating, even if you’re someone who doesn’t spend much time on the internet.

What do you think––what might be other ways to diversify our participant pool? Very curious

[1] https://researcher-help.prolific.co/hc/en-gb/articles/360019...
Agree about that. And I'm not wild about the idea of having to do a special incantation before using the package system anyway, myself.
Mark43 | Various engineering roles | New York, NY / Toronto | ONSITE https://www.mark43.com/careers/

Fight crime with code

We build software that literally helps save lives. Our clients are police departments, firefighters and EMTs.

Be a part of an awesome team in a fast-growing startup (featured on multiple “next startups to break out” lists). Learn more here: https://www.mark43.com/careers/

Back-end: Java ElasticSearch Kafka

Front-end: React Redux JavaScript

Hiring:

[Sr|Mid-level] Deployments/Solutions Engineer
[Sr|Mid-level] Front End Engineer
[Sr|Mid-level] Back End Engineer
[Sr|Mid-level] Data Engineer
You'll never do that update right? The more you wait, the more that developer will get annoyed when you interrupt them with it. :)

In this case actually I would have taken the half an hour and sat with them to explain what I think should be done differently and why, prioritized by importance.

Reviews done through tools work if there aren't many comments and if the basic design is ok.

I've seen reviews where someone's not skilled enough and they have to be taught idioms in dozens of comments in 10-20 patch sets. It's pretty horrible, but the positive side is that at least they're not merging crap.
Rackspace Welcomes TaskUs, First Neighbors to “Castle” HQ
The Path to Hell: React’s Context API
> what is your balance of private and university clients as of today?

Our clients are about 80-90% academic, and we find that there’s a strong move within academia towards fair payments. In the long term we think that this will show in the data quality and reliability of samples such that paying fairly will result in the best value. Regarding cost, we're about $2 total for a 15min survey right now.

> How large is your pool?

Lack of transparency about pool size is one of the most frustrating things about online panels. This is one of the reasons why we don’t report our total pool size, but only our ‘active and accessible’ pool (participants who have been active within the past 90days). As a result, you can expect > 50% of the numbers of eligible participants we report to actually take part in the next 24/48hours. We have ~70,000 active participants (20,000+ in the US). I expect we would be able to get a sample of 5,000 people in <48hours, but would only be about to repeat this for about 10weeks with unique participants. Our ‘pool’, as measured by traditional panel providers is approaching 500,000, but we don’t think this is a useful metric as the majority no longer respond to invites.

> a) how you recruit high income people into your pool;

To be honest, we haven’t cracked this nut yet and we expect our pool to be unrepresentative for high income people also right now. Ideas we have to help address this problem are to 1) introduce charitable donations for those who aren’t motivated by cash incentives 2) improve non-financial incentives (e.g. feedback on the impact your data is having) and 3) have highly targeted invites, we hypothesize high earners would be willing to help out if we need someone of their demographics in particular, and if this was communicated well. If you have suggestions, we’re all ears!

> and b) what percentage of your pool would be high income (say HHI > $125k a year or so).

According to self report we have ~2,000 participants from a HHI (>$100k/year on our screener), though it’s possible this suffers from slight inflation and we don’t (yet) have a way to verify income levels.

> Finally, what is your pool attrition rate?

Our annual retention rate is ~40% or so (e.g. if a participant takes part in a study, they’re about ~40% likely to do so again 12months later). There’s a balance between ‘refreshing’ our pool and keeping high engagement, and we’re working on keeping “naivety” high while allowing for studies over a long period!
I've always preferred to think of it as pumping water from the bottom of a (practically infinite) reservoir and dumping it at the top of a mountain then doing some work as it flows downhill, back to the reservoir.

It provides a nice visual for why current always makes it back to ground, just like water always flow downhill. It also removes the tendency to anthropomorphize electrical current and say things like it "seeks out" ground. When something falls from the sky we don't say it's trying to find the ground!
This isn't completely correct. A few years ago JetBrains changed the license.

You get the version available when you pay, and then you get a year of updates, which you can only continue using if you renew the license.

So you can only use the version available as of the moment you pay for a license.
The article is a bit ironic. It apparently talks about people who don't learn and don't change but suggests to them to just go and "find a new profession"...

A new grad, compared to a 10 year veteran :D. Yes sure, it levels the playing field, totally. As if language and frameworks would mean anything. I don't even want to know what kind of "veterans" would compare to a new grad. If you are worth anything at what you are doing, you would kick any smaller team of new grads out of the park, even when working alone, in a language you don't know and with a framework you don't know. New grads essentially know nothing about software engineering, nada...

It's baffling to me how any company would think otherwise. Perhaps they should review their hiring policies then.