skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: What is key to good technical documentation?
Imagine you are a junior software developer who is entering a relatively large and complex project with 150,000 lines of code. It is not some web software, but something way more complex, say an embedded system, or a navigation system, or a digital camera, or maybe a complex device for medical imaging. It is a lot of code in different languages. What you know is that the major aspects are working but there still might be some problems.

And of course, management is eager for you to get stuff up and running, as the project is already severely delayed, needs to be shipped as soon as possible, and the customers and investors are getting impatient.

There is only one problem - all the three senior engineers which were working on the codebase have left suddenly, only their manager is still there, and you have to start with reading and understanding the code, and what needs to be done. It is somewhat commented, but, of course, it is not easy to understand. And as it looks, the previous developers did not had any time to leave you proper technical documentation! What are you going to tell the manager?

But then, suddenly, a fairy godmother appears, which has a magic wand in her hand. It is a kind and witty documentation fairy, and she says: "I will fulfil you a single wish. By my magical powers, I will give you exactly the documentation which you think is most important. It can be anything you want. Anything! The only condition is, it must not be more than a good software developer can produce in a month."

What do you wish for?
Well that’s good that they’re racing petrol cars and I applaud them for doing it. They’re wealthy enough to be able to afford it. It’s what’s necessary to move away from carbon.
Is there any credence to this, or is it just in your head? There is a lot that goes into earning the organic label from regulators, and it‘s highly correlated with doing things slowly, the old-fashioned way. So the only way you can beat non-organic produce is with quality.
The argument would probably be that putting failable electronics in the pipeline of saving your life from a violent person/animal is too risky.
The cost of their degree is an order of magnitude greater, though.
What is the ecological impact of hydro there? In the US PNW we seem to be taking out hydro due to fish rather than putting in new dams, although I haven't followed it closely
Sorry about that. I've let the team know and they'll be taking a look shortly once folks are awake. Not sure what happened here, the site was up fine until now.
Yeah if you choose for a locked platform, you're out of luck if you get locked out.
Maybe it's just that bad?
Negative externalities should be taxed, so companies optimize for "green" by default.
> True, software development has faster hype cycles than other professions such as medical or legal professions.

Medical and legal are not having hype cycles that need to be kept up with in this way. They each have processes to test if a change is positive and then implement the change. For legal it is initially jurisdictional and not going with the change in the jurisdiction it happened is malpractice, yet not knowing the basics of New Orleans law in New York is normal.

> Keeping your head down and ignoring new developments is simply malpractice.

My general doctor knows nothing that is happening in the field of foot surgery (unless he injured his own foot.) Many of the complaints I see about people not keeping up is about people who are well aware of more alternatives and more details in the alternatives than the person complaining.

I was quite shocked at the seeming ignorance when my company selected new window environments or revision control a number of years back. But they all knew more about more than one via previous choices the company had used in the decades before than I knew about subversion and git or gnome and kde. Many of the details I assumed would be relevant to transitioning were never particularly relevant to them. Any of them learning too much about the choice not chosen was pretty irrelevant and could become negative if it developed into pointless complaining once the consensus occurred.
I have a self hosted bitwarden instance. I feel very comfortable using it and encourage my friends and family to use it as well.
Was there ever a sting theory that looked plausible to explain gravity say? As far as I can tell it started off as a simple model of how the nucleus held together - to stop the protons flying apart lets model stings holding them together. And then after that it's been let's play with the maths and the aggressive self-promotion thing mostly.
> I think the key phrase in the parents comment is "agile manifesto". ... One of the most important skills of a senior dev is a well developed bullshit detector

It seems that your gripe is mostly targeting "agile" and the related jargon. I remember clearly when the agile hype started and I was pretty disgusted by it ... just a bunch middle managers getting expensive certifications and inserting "process" that was getting in the way of productivity.

But I've come around. Developers have always been "agile" (although they didn't call it that), it's just that engineering management was not. Before, managers liked to create giant specs dictating everything and flow charts with unrealistic timelines. "Agile" really changed that. Now the more modern trend is small iterative improvements, and more direct contact between developers and customers.

If you view the agile hype as directed to engineers, it fails. But if you see it as enlightening engineering management, it far more palatable. Sure, engineers see "agile" as new words to describe the same thing they were already doing, but for many managers, it was something pretty new. Agile encouraged managers to get out of the way, and to allow developers to operate in the way they were most comfortable.

Maybe agile is over-hyped, but it's still a big and impressive development.

But even if you don't buy that, guess what, every engineer has an engineering manager managing them. If your manager is learning a bunch of new lingo and processes, it definitely behooves you to learn what they're learning before they do, to get in front of it.

My point is only to keep learning and staying abreast of industry developments. Even if they seem like BS to you, they may not to the people around you.
I'm actually thinking the opposite.

Tesla strategy was to put the first desirable electrical car on the market, which they succeed at doing.

The strategy of most traditional manufacturers is very different. They want to make the most profitable car. And it seems like no EV will be as profitable as ICE vehicles until batteries will be more or less price competitive with ICE.

I'm pretty sure that their target is to release an EV when batteries will be so cheap that it wouldn't make sense to buy an ICE car anymore. And this is not yet the case, as it will most probably happen in the early 2020s. Before that time, any manufactured EV has a pretty high opportunity cost compared to an ICE car. e.g. BMW still makes a such high margin (almost 10%) on ICE cars that selling unprofitable EV just does not make sense from a business standpoint.
How can we expect the republic to survive if some of the most capable people try so actively to not pay attention to what's going on outside their bubble?
It wouldn’t, because, I would argue, a modern phone serves as an API to apps, and all of its “features” are a necessity to facilitate its main feature, the apps it serves up.

Some must be integrated to provide those APIs effectively (eg store, file storage), but the rest that are provided by default I would consider separate products, given that they are discrete, often easy to remove, and easily replaced by 3rd party apps.
Sounds easy but its really hard to do, and yes I agree with the concept
The established car manufacturers are too highly optimized for their specific suppliers. Over many decades an internal culture appears within these companies that immunizes against heavy risks. This is done by (unconsciously) selecting for certain personality traits in upper management and by forming certain specific ties to the first and secondary surroundings of the company.

In short: companies petrify around local optima given time.
For Windows there is Gpg4win, which includes a port of Kleopatra.
“Why Haskell is important” according to a Haskell consulting company. So taking this article with a big grain of salt.

Haskell might be a great language but barely anyone (besides CS academics) uses it.

We use java and python in production because (among many other things) they’re very popular.

Popular languages have large archives of open source packages and easy to find communities that save enormous amounts of headaches and time. The opposite is true of Haskell, at least for now.
> That's one of the great things about electric cars in Norway - you're actually going to get electricity from renewable sources.

This is true in a way, but only part of the picture. While virtually all the electricity that is produced in Norway does come from renewable sources, Norwegian energy producers sell a lot of their “guarantees of origin”[1] to energy companies in other European countries, who are then in turn allowed to market their energy as renewable. You can think of these as a kind of “virtual export”: Norway sells its energy to the rest of the continent and receives the “European Attribute Mix” in return. Since it would be pointless and inefficient to physically transfer this energy, virtual certificates are traded instead.

Because of this, the Norwegian Water Resources and Energy Directorate declares the energy consumed in Norway as being 58% fossil, 33% nuclear, and only 9% renewable[2], but Norwegian politicians and energy companies tend to forget this and prefer to emphasise the point that 98% of all energy produced in the country is renewable. Both claims are true, but somewhere someone is getting screwed over.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guarantee_of_origin
[2] https://www.nve.no/energiforsyning/varedeklarasjon/nasjonal-... (in Norwegian)
And it is a different 10 for each person.

And those 10 apps change over time. Heck I only use trip planning apps a couple times a year, but I wouldn't buy a phone that didn't allow me to use one at all.
The US authorities have created an artificial brain and named it ‘Sentient’
It makes cars less affordable for everybody. Not everyone lives in an area with good (or any) public transport.

This is effectively a very heavy tax to "save the planet", which won't have much of an effect (Norway is too small to have any impact on global CO2 emissions), except for Norwegians having to work more in order to pay off this tax.
Marvin Minsky was directly named by one of the victims in documents that were published a couple of days before Epatein’s convenient death, and those documents were mentioning that Minsky had directly sexually profited from an under-age woman. In other words he was a paedophile.

I submitted an article detailing all this stuff on the day of Epstein’s death, it had reached the top links of HN in less than an hour but then it was ominously flagged. I lost a great deal of let’s call it respect for the people that keep this website up, apparently letting other people know that a now dead AI luminary was a paedophile is considered tabu.
Addressing specifically your two points:

-fingerprints: because if the system fails, you have no gun. Internal malfunction? Greasy finger(s)? Gloves? Dirt? Dust? People whose fingerprints are really hard to print?

- determjne how often/when they are taken out of the house: talking specifically about the USA, that is a gross over-reach of the government (local + federal) via registration. A central database with who has what gun at what time? I'm against it.

I hope I can inspire you to look-up some additional information. Responsible gun owners are not a problem. The FBI has statistics on "defensive gun use", reporting that it happens over 250,000 times per year. Compared to what number? 35-40,000 deaths per year involving guns? And of those, 20-30,000 are suicides.

Please look up hard-data. Trying to take away guns will not solve the issues society faces. Then why do it?
This is like a piece of JavaScript parsing User-Agent and looking for "Chrome 72.4" to decide whether it wants to work or not, instead of of detecting features.
Didn't the Japanese basically win the U.S. market by making cars that lasted?
It inspires many Indians to become science literate and pursue it as a field
I tried to use BATS (Bash Automated Testing System) with Expect and Tcl to test a series of interactive scripts. It turned out to be something of a rabbit-hole. I didn't spend long enough on the task to get really good at it, and the result was tests that were hard to read (i.e. not what you want).
Perhaps there was a 'wrong tool for the job' factor at play.
My experience living in CA had taught me that NIMBYs are at the root of many problems there.
"quite rightly", "sticking some batteries"... Its fascinating that you do realize that the people who disagree with you have been right, and yet you're not updating your model. Look up Sandy Munro, a car guy's car guy, talking about his teardown of the model 3[1], or even just focus on his comment about the superbottle, and perhaps you'll get a better sense of why nobody has matched the 2012 Model S yet, nevermind the 2019 one.

[1]: https://cleantechnica.com/2019/04/06/auto-industry-expert-in...
Name the last school shooting that took place at a school without surveillance cameras. Can you? I doubt it. School shootings predominantly occur at the most locked-down and oppressive schools in the country. The solution to some adolescents being driven into such intense desperation that they are willing to annihilate themselves just to do some damage and escape is not to squeeze them tighter.
Because such 'intelligence' comes with new thingies in the gun (or attached to it) adding weight and volume to it (that's bad), and often reducing its reliability (that's very bad).
Nordics is actually too general. Denmark and Norway do this, Sweden does not.

(Guess which one has a car industry)
The article contains an image of a (relatively basic) calculator, asking the question: "How many of these buttons will you really push?"

Well… all of them. I may not need tan every day, but when I do, I need it to be there.
Software projects are usually 90% done in 1% of total time taken. And if you just solve the problem with duct tape eg. a shell script, like piping stdin to a file, or contenteditable=true in HTML, you would have a very basic word program, and if you take that route you will probably have the essential features done over a weekend. But going from that to a full Office clone would take years. The real challenge in development though is to solve real problems, eg not make solutions looking for a problem, and not implement new features ( implementing only features that solve real problems).
My experience is that who you're selling to matters a lot. In case of B2B, enterprises usually have tons of requirements and the approach of "less features but better" will not work: there's too much enterprise "cruft" that need to be implemented (e.g. SSO, audit logs, RBAC, etc) before they will even start considering you.
A Nobel Laureate Goes to Burning Man
How exactly is a fingerprint sensor going to keep the legitimate owner of a gun from shooting a school up?
> They talk about measuring the photon at the slit, collapsing the wave function... but it's never demonstrated!

I believe they have done real experiments, Feynman mentions doing it with electrons going through the slit and a light source to make a flash by the slit when the electron passes. If you use short enough wavelength light to tell which slit then the interference goes. But true it was done in a lab sometime, not as a popular demonstration.
Is is though? I am not familiar enough with US degrees but I don't think that a master or PhD in medicine is significantly more expensive than in another discipline (computer science, engineering, electronics, maths and statistics if we're talking about the HN and GAFA population).
I can only underline that, before joining our current startup I was always of the impression that quality always trumps quantity, but the past four years really have shown me that in some markets it's really just about checkboxes and shipping mvps of features instead of actually pushing for the best possible ux, especially in a low price sector (5-30€/month).
WLTP range is different measurment that Tesla's EPA range. Conversion rate is approximately 1.12:1 ([1]), so ID.3 EPA range would be 491 km.

[1] https://insideevs.com/features/343231/heres-how-to-calculate...
My though entirely. People grow but fundamentally, they don't change.

For instance, someone who is lazy won't become hard working. He can however, grow up by becoming more efficient and doing more with less work. Someone judgmental won't become tolerant, but his judgment will become more and more valuable.

IMHO, trying to change people is a lost cause. Take them for what they are and take advantage of their personality traits or let them go. And don't forget that diversity is not just about race and gender.
I am not sure I see your point. You choose what apps you install, and you can uninstall bad ones.
True, also there is no VAT (which is 25%) on EV cars, and it used to be free to drive on toll roads (this year we have to pay, but much less than the petrol cars). Also, we can drive in the bus/taxi lanes.
No more room for Belgium’s nuclear waste
> Why fraud? Organic is certifying different, but clearly defined production and husbandry standards.

Those production and husbandry standards aren't always quite what we expect them to be. You should see how "free range" chickens are raised. Australian farmers who actually care about the welfare of the chickens and the quality of the end product have been trying to create a new brand "pasture raised" or "pastured eggs" (in the case of eggs) because lobbying by the major producers watered down the standards to the point it's disgusting to see chicken feedlots where chooks are free to range at 10,000 hens per hectare.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=can8xFpZKRs
This is a very good point. Does it help that one can export his/her tree to a very readable JSON file? From that perspective, the data is not locked to jumproot.
I've been using Apple's iCloud Keychain since it was first released 6 years ago. It's well-integrated so I don't need to think about it. I'm already trusting their OS, and if it gets compromised, at least I won't be alone.
I’m 38 and afaik nobody has ever sent me underage women for me to have sex with them, that way I could have boasted to an external third party that “I refused”. When you’re 88 years old (so when biologically sex is one of the last things you should be thinking about) and when one of your close friends “sends” you an under-age woman that only means that that close friend of yours knew what you liked and what you were into. And make no mistake, Epstein was a friend of Minsky.

And I don’t buy this “it could happen to you, too”, because, again, afaik not me not anyone of my close friends has been sent “underage girls” as “gifts” (for one reason because we don’t befriend paedophile pseudo-billionaires).
The tipping point for Indian fintech
Indeed. Many companies are affected by the environment, so this tax would serve to directly ensure a long-term cost is also a short-term cost, such that the market does not ignore it.
Fingerprints: even if the system doesn't fail it means that during an emergency you cannot immediately give the gun to a friend who wasn't previously registered.
> but glibc shouldn't be accepting code that unnecessarily favours one CPU vendor.

why ? AMD just has to do the same. I want to be able to use the CPU I buy to its maximum capability.
LA doesn't have water problem but a governance problem that is causing them to not address their water supply issues by e.g. making obvious investments to produce all the water they could ever need using a combination of desalination, recycling, and less waste.

Desalination plants have been in use across the world for decades and would be an obvious solution for LA as well. Cost for desalinated water is in the order of a couple of dollars for a thousand gallons.
i like travel writing/travelogues , but the results of using awards to select books havent been great frankly ,and goodreads isnt much better
Never heard that one before, but I love it.
And you could do the same thing with lambda/DynamoDB/API Gateway just as easily by using one of the wizards.

What you can do as a hobby project is much different than the parent poster who was trying to deploy an enterprise grade setup with an existing legacy infrastructure. How would you know if GCP is easy based on your limited experience? Not trying to sound harsh, as well as I know AWS, I would be completely loss trying to manage any non AWS infrastructure. Just like I said about the front end in my original response, if I were responsible for setting up a complicated on prem or colo infrastructure from scratch, I would hire someone.

“It’s a poor craftsmen who blames his tools”.

A guy that works with us was also an inexperienced back end developer except with PHP. He was able to easily figure out how to host his front end code with S3 and create lambdas in Node after I sent him a link to a $12 Udemy course. I only had to explain to him how to configure the security groups to connect to our Aurora/MySQL instance.
Google Search is a good example of this. But this isn't always true. WeChat and Facebook can be considered as counter examples.
considering that I'm typing this message from a train with a very spotty connection, I'd consider that a huge downside.
Nice! Now have it installed on my phone...
The model 3 is estimated to have a 30% gross margin [1]. So it seems incorrect to say that the traditional manufacturers are waiting for battery prices to fall, as it’s clearly possible to build a high margin EV today.

[1] https://jalopnik.com/engineering-firm-that-said-tesla-model-...
right

i mean ,did they develop some kind of protective mechanism to deal with exposure (not only radiation but UV and all the other stuff thats up there)
I still feel that only EV is not the answer. You have also get the electricity somewhere so some investment in modern nucler power plants and fusion would be even better then just blindly pushing EVs.
The donations to the Media Lab under Ito, which are the issue here, were obviously post-criminal-conviction since Ito took over in 2011.
This looks like a build of total surveillance system like in China. Except the excuse is different.
Dude, I'm pro gun but to deny that taking away guns wouldn't fix it is dumb. All the other countries that don't have lots of guns have way less gun deaths. Period. People here may not consider taking away all the guns possible or preferable, but it would work if implemented.
> ... that only means that that close friend of yours knew what you liked and what you were into

That's the only possible explanation?

Perhaps Epstein wanted to ensnare Minsky in a situation that could be used to coerce him. That's consistent with Minsky turning her down, unlike your version.
They're both interesting, but the aqueous approach has some advantages. Keeping materials working at extreme temperature is difficult: basically anything above 1000C gets very hard. And a low temperature approach has the potential very big advantage of being highly dispatchable, since it would not have to be kept running to keep from freezing up. Dispatchable electrochemistry is like half a battery, just great for dealing with intermittent power sources like renewables.