skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Isn't this a truism with all technology? One could say the same about, for example, human language itself or any domain-specific professional vocabulary. As programmers we are relatively unique in that we are encouraged to analyze, create and maintain the behavior of complex systems across disparate domains, which demands developing a certain comfort with new vocabularies and an independent capacity for identifying behavioral and structural similarities across systems and domains. Some ~relevant quotes:

Tesler's Law of Conservation of Complexity: Every application has an inherent amount of irreducible complexity. The only question is who will have to deal with it - the user, the application developer, or the platform developer? - Larry Tesler (ca. 1984)

With a good programming language and interface, one - even children - can create from scratch important simulations of complex non-linear systems that can help one's thinking about them. - Alan Kay (2016)

An evolving system increases its complexity unless work is done to reduce it. - Meir Lehman

Any sufficiently complex system acts as a black box when it becomes easier to experiment with than to understand. Hence, black-box optimization has become increasingly important as systems become more complex. - Google Vizier: a service for black-box optimization Golovin et al., KDD'17

We're more aware of simple processes that don't work well than of complex ones that work flawlessly. - Marvin Minsky, MIT AI lab co-founder

Tainter's Law of Problem Solving: As easier solutions are exhausted, problem solving moves inexorably to greater complexity, higher costs, and diminishing returns.

The endogenous nature of [the] buildup of complexity eventually makes the system fundamentally illegible to the human operator - a phenomenon that is ironic given that the fundamental aim of the control revolution is to increase legibility. - Ashwin Parameswaran (2012)

It is time to unmask the computing community as a Secret Society for the Creation and Preservation of Artificial Complexity. - Edsger Dijkstra

You're not going to find the best algorithm in terms of computational complexity by coding. - Leslie Lamport

I have struggled with complexity my entire career. One of our key approaches for managing complexity is to 'walk away' and start fresh. Often new tools or languages force us to start from scratch which means that developers end up conflating the benefits of the tool with the benefits of the clean start. The clean start is what is fundamental. The simplest way of controlling complexity growth is to build a smaller system with fewer developers. - Terry Crowley

Successful programming is all about managing complexity. Managing complexity has many aspects. You can eliminate, avoid, simplify, hide or automate complexity, and so on. - Keith Bentley

The most robust programs isolate complexity in a way that lets significant parts of the system appear simple and straightforward and interact in simple ways with other components in the system. - Terry Crowley

... from https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup
Show HN: Convert to Bitcoin Using This Simple Node.js Module
Yeah, but the problems is that I (and I'm sure many other people) just can't pay enough attention to every detail DURING the code review. Yet after the review, when you start using the code, issues just reveal themselves without any extra effort. I'm just looking for ways to prevent them from reproducing I think.
I imagine that routine use of antibiotics after surgery is covering up for a lot of this and is also contributing to antibiotic resistant bacteria showing up in hospitals with greater and greater frequency.
Cloudflare’s DNS has a command line client. It’s called curl.
Pretty much this. Those who are irreplaceable (if you think they're not then it's not you) can get away with anything. But they are a minute percentage of people in the workplace. Those who are jerks to others will be gone as you say simply because they're toxic.
Yup. Tell me what problem you solve for me, and then show me how you do that.
Sacklers could hold on to personal fortune in proposed Purdue opioid settlement
I mean, you're not wrong. That's the whole point behind a specialized workforce. The whole point to modern society is individuals focus on something and do it, really, really well. We then suffer doing other stuff competently. Other than the occasional hobby gardener, how many tech engineers know how to maintain a vegetable garden? I've asked this to a few people before. They just imagine it's as simple as throwing seeds in the ground, making sure there's water and waiting. Growing food on a decent scale, like feeding just yourself, takes a lot more. Knowing how and when to fertilize soil. How much sunlight. How much water. Seasonal timing for maximum yield. Recognizing disease and ailments. And it goes on. But we're a society where not everyone has to farm. That's both good and bad. Same goes with building homes, bridges, maintaining a water supply, electricity, preserving food, curing disease, etc.

But the drawback to that system, it's easier to wipe out a small population and start to handicap that society. Thus, you do have a "type of army" of structural engineers that build and help maintain bridges. If they're gone, there are problems.

I do have one... discussion point(?) I'd like to bring up. I constantly see and hear that liberal arts and what not is supposed to teach critical thinking. How does it do so more than engineering? Engineering especially forces you not to just think of the immediate solution, but long term both in terms of wear/tear, environment factors, attack vectors and future proofing against obsolescence. Yet, I'm told, rather often by other people that a liberal arts major can do this better than an engineer. Look, I'm a sub-par engineer and programmer. I say this often and will never hide it. But I've yet to meet someone with a liberal arts or literary degree that can do analysis and solution strategies on complex, real world problems anywhere close to me. Sure, I get hung up on theoretical problems. Really badly too. But when it comes to the real world, I've never met a non-engineer who can step forward on a, again, real world problem.
They're not mutually exclusive; I'm starting to think that the market for coders is basically a market for lemons.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons

So we end up with employers who don't want to pay top dollar in case they get a lemon, and competent developers who are either happy where they are or unwilling to work for lemon rates.

And have you interviewed candidates for development positions recently? It is depressing, and I say that as someone who catches flak about being too generous and letting too many "poor-quality" candidates through screens.
> Grab opened an R&D lab in Seattle and hire Google folks. That's breaking the wallet big time in terms of employee compensation.

Sure they will open in Seattle as it's 30% or more cheaper than Singapore. Grab's largest R&D team is in Singapore. They did bring in talent from around the world here. But as the cost in Singapore is very high, to get an expat is very expensive. [1]

So it does make sense to open in cheaper location an R&D, it also shows they have engineering talent from around the globe.

[1] https://www.businessinsider.sg/most-expensive-cities-in-the-...
There is not a shortage of "STEM" workers- but there are a number of more specific industries that have a shortage of workers, and these industries fall under "STEM".
I find Kubernetes a funny tech experiment. It does not present any new innovation. We first had Docker. It's too hard to use. Let's abstract Docker with an orchestration layer. We have Kubernetes. It's now too abstract and hard to use. Let's create kops to tame it.

I guess this whole experiment is backed by a deep pocket tech giant trying to chip away market share from the other two giants.

If Kubernetes can make us less dependent on AWS, that's a good thing. Until then, I just sit and learn about this silly tech battle. I'm not keen to move production stuff into Kubernetes.
> I don't like this, I think it will have a chilling effect on free speech, but if you're posting in public I think you have to expect folks may pull up your posts.

It's not just your posts that can get you in trouble at the border. They also check the posts of people you follow, and those too can get you in trouble.

There was just such a case in the news this week [1]. A 17 year old Palestinian arriving to start his freshman year at Harvard had his visa cancelled when he arrived and was sent home because they found that some of his social media friends posted political views that opposed US positions.

[1] https://thehill.com/policy/national-security/department-of-h...
Uber and Lyft are both in the "extractive" business.

Uber and Lyft are a scam to drain both investors and drivers of money which is skimmed off and goes into the pockets of the CEOs, and other business managers.

There is no true profit generated by either the company itself or by the drivers. All business is being permitted by using the investors' money to undercut taxi companies' prices by subsidising customers.

Once the investors finally wise up, both Uber and Lyft will disappear like they never existed.
I made a print version if you're into that sorta thing: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/g46fo30rnwt6lah/AABTQAlrXXoCvR-8a...
Welcome to kubernetes new configuration language!
It's unsettling to learn that a life-saving surgery can compromised by a tech who didn't spend a few extra minutes cleaning the tools properly.

I had read that surgeons were moving into using disposable instruments because of the possibility of prion contamination (prions can't be destroyed by an autoclave). But maybe that was only for neurosurgery?
According to Googlers, much of the battle tested tech Google's critical systems run on is not maintained by a staffed team. Stuff that works well enough to not scare a VP and isn't a
10x moonshot doesn't get funding.
Any recommendations of commercial products that worked for you?
It is also interesting that Intel (after buying the Strong ARM line from DEC) were the manufacturers of some of the fastest ARM-based mobile chips in the late 90s and early 00s but sold the line to Marvell in 2006 right before the mobile explosion.
I am ready to bet the number of users who need these features dwarf the number of users of Cortana and Paint 3D together!
> I cannot read without a pencil

If I had to choose one recommendation to give others, this would be it. You don't read with your eyes, you read with your pen.

Read fewer (better) books and really internalize them. This 99% of the time requires you to take notes that you revisit throughout and after your read.
Just because you don't like doesn't mean it's not built and supported by a large team following some VP or PM vision. Boondoggles cost a lot of resources.
BitTorrent uses SHA1 only? That seems deeply flawed.

Edit:
https://www.quora.com/Does-bittorrent-support-SHA-2-256-512-...
That is very interesting! What benefits do you see from using UiPath over testing frameworks?
No, it’s just a failure of reading comprehension on your part.
Pattern’s Guide to Daily Enjoyment
تحميل سناب بلس عثمان للايفون Scothmanar سناب عثمان بدون جلبريك
No one owns file extensions. Magic numbers and shebang lines declare a file's language.
I don't think giving antibiotics after surgery as a rule is a modern invention.
> as long as you work at a company that isn't afraid of firing/laying off, hiring isn't fully broken.

Yes, it is--it is just broken in a way that privileges the company over its employees. Firing somebody (absent flagrant abuse and the like) is a failure of management and leadership.
In order of importance to me:

- Spotify
- Cloud VMs for hobby projects
- Fastmail
- KGS Go Client for Android
- JetBrains IDEs
- Windows 10 (bundled with Surface Go)
- Desktop productivity utilities from time to time
- Games that I support but hardly ever play
- Netflix (I think about cancelling all the time)

Edit: I forgot about how I get one (Gran Turismo) or two (usually DLC) games for each PlayStation but then don't buy any more games.
New standards:
https://xkcd.com/927/
I ran into this same issue with python/SQLAlchemy. It's a connection pool thing
We Shouldn’t Want Equality for Everyone and Everything
Better Metal. How to make steel without coal. [video]
Trump and Boris: The Blind Leading the Blind
New York City’s First Skateboarding Superstar
Just yesterday one of my tier 1 chat agents received a death threat from a long time problem customer. I don’t tolerate threats from customers on my team, so we immediately terminated their service and contacted law enforcement.
It cuts both ways though. You only have so much time you’ll spend socializing. In a lifetime you’ll meet maybe 0.001% of the people you possibly could have. If you aren’t discerning with who you give your time to, you’ll miss out on more and more of what could have been better relationships.

It’s easiest demonstrated at large events or parties: there might be 200 people you could meet, and you have 3 hours there. If you weren’t discerning, you’ll spend 80% of your time just with whoever happened to be loudest and you’ll not meet lots of the more compatible people there. In reality, you can make snap decisions about whether a relationship is worth pursuing with > 50% chance. “This person is whining about how awful their spouse is”: probably not someone you’ll be able to mutually respect. “This person refuses to make eye contact with me”: probably not someone you’ll have any real intimacy with. And so on. These might be wrong 20% of the time you apply them, but even so you’ve boosted your chance of meeting someone compatible at this 3 hour party. These aren’t questions like “I like to play Super Mario Bros”, these are trying to gauge real deep-seated, fundamental personality traits like “I’m driven by a curiosity of the world around me”, or “I tend to the people in my life”. These are things that really do matter in relationships. I know I want my friends or spouse to tend to the people in their life. I know that without curious people around me I lose my motivation. Take that 0.001% of the world you’ll ever meet and be more discerning about which 0.001% that is. There’s nothing wrong with being selective about who you let into your life.
ok so... why is writing an AST more ergonomic than having some syntax?
Hospitals are extraordinary profit centers for their owners - vast amounts of money go through them. If they can't clean their surgical instruments, the situation is morally and, uh, literally, criminal. Whoever is ultimately responsible for such situations - managers, not underlings - should be in jail.
It's not Google branded and who has blue eyes?
What a strange comment. Extensions aren't the property of anyone.
whats the key piece missing for you then? because my friend was definitely very keen on the "no syntax" bit
> Math/Physics majors end up switching to CS and do mundane software engineering work

My degree is in mechanical engineering, and I have had a nice career doing mundane compilers. A big motivator to switching to software is I could start a business with nearly zero investment.
Afaik, for nonimmigrant visas they don't care about skills, but they do care about any ideological background (preventing terrorism) and they care a lot about the probability of overstaying the visa: they want to see evdence of connections and plans to return from the US.
Considering the amount of antibiotics used, doctors could probably use tools fished out a dumpster.
Note that this is more unique since it acts as a schema and a data language. And it has common programming constructs.
Disclaimer: RSI can have many different causes and what works for any one person may not work for someone (or anyone) else. But here is what worked for me:

I had completely debilitating RSI in both arms for years, eventually getting to the point where I was using Dragon Naturally speech recognition for any computer interaction, and a hamfisted stylus for using my phone since actually using fingers with any dexterity hurt too much.

On my better days typing for short periods was ok, but any interaction with a mouse was immediately painful. Once I discovered I could use a trackball mouse on the floor with my feet I was able to get back to a point where I could work professionally again. But if I ever went too far I would be out for at least the next few days without being able to do much.

A year or two after I realized that the pain was generally worse when my arms were cold. After some experimentation I found that almost all of the active-use pain went away when I kept my arms warm.

Since then I've been able to get back into the full swing of things. I'm consigned to always be wearing sweaters, jackets, and hoodies while working, but that has been a small price to pay for being productive again.

Any time I forget and use a computer bare-armed it comes right back again, but so far keeping them warm has been the silver bullet for me. If you're at the end of your rope give it a try!
Yeah, a book is researched, thoughtful and laying a long, and complicated argument. Just the act of reading the long forms of ideas will make you better at thinking.

Reading a Wikipedia page or watching a video, almost always dismisses the ideas that lead to a conclusion, which is what you need if you want to THINK, not walk around with containerized ideas that other people came up with.
It's true that non-CS STEM degrees are very fungible. CS degrees, however, are not.
I've probably over-exaggerated a bit how "terrible" our merged code is but anyway, my point is that at the "review" phase the code is still "imaginary". We think that it'll work, but it hasn't been integrated with anything yet, it hasn't been battle-tested or, often, even used. Obviously, we find a lot of issues after the merge and filing tickets allows us only "not to forget to fix them". I feel like there should be a standard practice aimed at preventing those issues from RE-occurring.
It makes me cry how much time has been invested in formats like CSV's, TSV's, etc. ASCII (and UTF-8) has characters reserved for column, row, and even group separation. Just use them and save a lot of pain.
What is 5G? The definitive guide to next-generation wireless technology
80 years ago, German battleships open on Polish positions
I don't think I'd try such a position. I don't even much like working at companies without a technical CTO/CEO. You'd think any CTO should be technical as it's the second letter, but not so.
Here's how these inflated numbers come about:

Companies notice that they're getting less applicants with higher salary expectations.

When those companies are surveyed by the government, they cry wolf: "There's a shortage of workers!" they exclaim, when really it's just a "shortage" in the number of applicants with the same salary expectations as before - a trend that has to be nipped in the bud.

The goal then is to have policy bring labor supply back in favor of the companies, by dumping money into education and liberalizing immigration. Essentially, it's another bit of corporate welfare that can be marketed as philantropy.

The joke's on them though, because unlike most other professions, software developers have the ability to create more work than there would have been, had they never been hired in the first place.
Yes you are, but if you pay in full every month then you don't incur any interest charges. It's a free loan from the credit card company to you.

In the past, people who paid in full every month were called "deadbeats" by the card issuers because they were far less profitable than those who carried a balance.
Operation Sandblast
Hi all, Primary tsv-utils author here. Thanks for checking out the tools! I hope some of you find them beneficial.
Their unique pricing structure is that listeners pay 0.002 for the 1st play of a song, 0.004 for the 2nd, and it keeps doubling until you reach the 9th play where you will have paid around a dollar to finally own it.

This is just my limited understanding of the rather inconsistent marketing copy. There is also a section about using a blockchain for DJs which I will not even try to comprehend on a weekend.
Most corporations aren't big and don't have a lot of power -- laundromats, machine tool manufacturers, and so many other businesses are formed as corporations (and not as sole proprietorships). How fictive is the invisible hand on that scale?

Lots of money confers lots of power, sure, though this is not anything peculiar to corporations. Corporations are a strange kind of ownership -- since shareholders "own" the corporation but have almost no control of it or any direct access to its assets -- but what is the "strange and powerful" place that corporations are granted?
Yep. And $25,000 for 1 hour of a surgery room. And $20,000 for 1 hour of a recovery room. Practically poverty levels.
Eating glass.
There is a great video serie by infinite series[1] that goes into detail how the neural network of a brain processes information. The way I understand it is that the more abstract thoughts can are represented as higher dimensional structures of a directed graph.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=akgU8nRNIp0
> it seems a little grotesque to be focusing on creating people trained in STEM solely for the purpose of keeping an "economic edge", as if they were troops that we need to keep us safe

But the reality of the situation is that economic "troops" are required to maintain our current standard of living. It seems to me even more grotesque to ignore the immediate needs of society because it feels wrong from some ivory tower philosophical perspective.
Mysql certainly has some syntactic warts, but you picked what I consider rather odd complaints.

> The ordering is not always name of table and then names of columns

I would point out that only SELECT (not INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE) can be run without providing a table reference. Also, the select doesn't take a simple list of column names, but is a more complicated tool for organizing and formatting data. (This section would not by syntactically or semantically similar to anything in the INSERT or UPDATE that is not itself part of a SELECT statement)

> For UPDATE, the column names are adjacent to the value with the '=' equals sign. However the INSERT statement splits column names away from the values; all column names as one delimited list in parentheses and then all the values are another delimited list:

UPDATE and INSERT both support the "assignment_list" syntax. So they are perfectly consistent. UPDATE also supports other formats (such as VALUES or SELECT).

The real inconsistency I would have called our here is that while INSERT can be used with subqueries (via VALUES or with a SELECT clause), UPDATE must use joins to achieve a similar functionality.

> For syntax consistency, the UPDATE would also have had a preposition such as "UPDATE TO t", or "UPDATE ON t", or "UPDATE ONTO t" ... or ... the other 3 commands would have removed the need for "FROM/INTO". Either way, all 4 SUDI commands could have looked more alike.

Well "INTO" is an odd case, it is completely optional and serves no syntactic purpose. The FROM portion of SELECT statements does serve a syntactic purp0se but isn't actually required if it is not needed (E.G `SELECT "hello world"`). The inconsistent thing here is that the FROM portion of the DELETE syntax (which serves no syntactic purpose) is mandatory and not optional.

> Maybe we should be grateful that SELECT/UPDATE/DELETE at least all happen to share the same "WHERE" clause. It seems like SQL's inconsistent syntax design should have tortured us with memorizing "WHERE" for one command and totally different synonyms such as "FILTER" and "CONDITION" for the others!

If you look at the spec, SQL is pretty good at reusing syntactic units. You can see this in the documentation for both MySQL and Postgres.

The worst thing in terms of SQL consistency is the syntactic and semantic differences between different flavors of SQL. This greatly reduces the value that SQL could have as a plug and play query format.