skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> many people sheepishly admitted that the best managers they had ever had knew absolutely nothing about technology

This is an interesting line, does anybody share this opinion? My experience are exactly opposite. The managers with whom I enjoyed working always had an engineering background or at least they were very keen to learn and were asking tons of technical questions after being assigned to the team.

I think it's important for both parties (manager and their subordinates) to understand each other. To achieve that I think you need some common knowledge, common point of reference to start from. So either management needs some technical knowledge, or technical people some knowledge of management (at least some theory of it).
That’s a disingenuous argument. Nobody is objecting to trying to reduce mass shootings. They are objecting to trying to reduce mass shootings by curtailing constitutional rights of millions of law-abiding gun owners. Even leaving aside the constitutional issue, that’s why the cost benefit analysis is important. It’s justified to try and address a low-probability issue if the solution is commensurately cost free. Gun control is not a cost free solution. It’s an enormously costly one.
This is so sick. Wonder what was done for Halo
A breakthrough in Quantum Teleportation as the first Qutrit is teleported
I’m going to relate an experience rather than answer your question. I don’t think the question is in its best form because it can be time consuming to write proper documentation. The existence of the “fairy godmother” takes time out of the equation which is an important variable.

I used to work at Microsoft on a team with poor documentation. By my reckoning developers writing code would have preferred better documentation while developer managers couldn’t justify the time to write it. Both preferences were sensible.

From the implementer perspective you could get caught up on a problem for several hours before having a conversation with another developer who could unblock you instantly. If the content of that conversation had existed in some document it could have been searched and several hours could have been saved.

From the managers perspective, product requirements and features changed so rapidly that a few days spent writing documentation could easily create a document that no one would use. Indeed, this was the case in a few experiments.

I lead a team for awhile and we hit the first problem a lot. However, I noticed that most of the conversations which unblocked my team had happened over email (I was CC’d). The tone of emails did not make for perfect documentation but they were helping my team so they were better than nothing. I decided to start taking some of the emails and pasting them into a OneNote document. After a few months the result was a large collection of imperfect documentation created very economically.

The OneNote document was wildly successful:

* Because the notes were from emails which had at least unblocked one member of my team, they had proven value.

* Because developers were already writing emails there was low cost to pasting them in OneNote.

* Developers could also correct the OneNotes and everyone would get the changes unlike an email thread which was only accessible to people on the to and cc field.

I also believe that the imperfections and limited editing features of email made it easier for people to write these documents: they didn’t feel like the documents needed to be well-formatted or perfectly written, if someone had something to say they had unlimited license to paste it in the document.

So thats been my experience and I will bet on it again in the future. The only caveat is that I worked on games which is the cause of the rapidly changing requirements. “Unfun” features could entirely be cut and we essentially rebuilt the product every few years to release a new game obsoleting much of the documentation. This sort of thing may not work for a public facing API for example.
I want to know why ECC RAM isn't more common. With the amount of RAM going into today's computers, it's insane not to protect it.
What is it what makes these sequence diagrams especially important in your experience?
Ask HN: Did we get bait and switched by YouTube?
Overnight, Youtube app on Roku doubled the number of ads it shows per video.

Is this the digital equivalent of dumping? Where offering the service with no ads, then a few ads, locked us all in and killed any competition until their moat was insurmountable. And now that there is no viable competition they're free to ramp up revenue to where they can make a profit?

Should it be regulated as such? I realize this business model is certainly not unique to Youtube, but should offering a service unprofitably be treated any differently than say selling steel below cost until all the other producers are forced to close?
you don't need wealth to be messed up.
I contend that flagging the comment proves its point.
How do platform coops differ from traditional member-owned coops? Or is it just a specialized type of member-owned coop?
I think people really underestimate the engineering and manufacturing that goes into an electric car. Tesla got the jump, and now they're ahead of the competition.

For example, the gigfactory is the world largest car battery manufacturer by a factor of 2. That's a massive and slow investment any competitor needs to make to sell EVs in volume.

And making an EV is not trivial. Let's compare the Tesla model 3 and Nissan leaf 2, which are in the same price range:

- Tesla has better range.

- Tesla is the faster car.

- Tesla has much faster charging.

None of these things are revolutionary, but taken together it's clear to the consumer that Tesla is further ahead than the competition. I'm not going to buy a slower, less efficient car for the same amount of money.

Edit: formatting
In 1993, one of my first tasks in a new job as a sysadmin was to install 256MB of RAM into a DEC Alpha 3000/500. I remember the RAM cost on the order of $20k... I don't remember the exact price, but I remember thinking that the RAM was worth more than I was, and I'd better not screw it up.
I am there with you. Part of me worries about overreactions, but the other part is glad this is happening, because, at one point, people have to figure out that those narcissistic douche bag are the bane of humanity, and that we should avoid them and socially isolate them, and that there are consequences to enabling them.
I think that there is real value in thinking more broadly about the cooperative model when building any new business! As a way to align incentives it makes a lot of sense.

I am part of a growing tech worker cooperative called Tribe Works (https://www.tribeworks.io). We are a platform cooperative that helps tech workers connect with businesses looking for contractors or direct hires. We were set up as an alternative to "gig platforms" (upwork, etc) and staffing firms, and quickly realized that the real value in our model was in longer engagements. We usually target roles that last at least 3 months so that our members can access healthcare through the cooperative if they are working full time and allow workers to buy in. The platform ties together the functionality of an applicant tracking software (ie jobvite.com) and professional employer organization (ie justwork.com) and we add recruitment process outsourcing as a service on top. We have only just launched our beta platform right now but hoping to fully launch when we reach 301 members (we are about 1/4 of the way there). We have community calls every other week as well for people interested in learning about the co-op.

We are also part of a larger cooperative called the Staffing Cooperative (https://www.staffing.coop) which is a holding company owned by every worker. Here is a webinar we were recently on describing the holding company structure: (http://transformfinance.org/investor-resources)
Can you expand on a few of your comments. I have an older Leaf in Japan and I've never seen a Model 3 before, so I'm curious about the difference.

- "the driving experience is in a different league". In what way? I was surprised at how much I enjoy driving the leaf (except for very poor turning radius, which I can't quite understand). What's better in the Model 3?

- "doesn't require fifteen minutes of fiddling every time". What does that mean? I don't have trouble charging my Leaf. Is that something specific about the supercharger network (which isn't in Japan), or are you referring to something else?
> I work in the public sector where we both develop and buy software ... Agile dies the moment contract negotiations begin

There's a pretty famous public sector counter example: the initial ObamaCare website. The initial site was contracted out using traditional waterfall development methodology and was a complete disaster. The rebuild was done with a far smaller team, at a far lower budget using agile methodologies.

Things move pretty slowly in government, and I entirely understand that the existing government processes with big lump sum payments and rigorous accountability are not very conducive to agile development. However, it's not impossible (as with ObamaCare, it has been done before). The next time you have control over these negotiations, maybe push a bit harder for a more agile approach and see if it works.
it lacks some nice features like built-in structural subtyping (which is basically the default in TypeScript) - see my other post. A few things are a little clunkier because they're being added to an existing language rather than the language, and having to import things just to get Optional and generics is kind of ugly. But functionally, it's pretty much all there.
The corporate capture of our government is a crime
in case you don't have $18,000 to buy those fancy brand new DDR4 RAM -

second hand 64GB DDR3 ECC REG RAM is about $100 each, a dual socket c602 motherboard such as my Z9PE-D16 has 16 memory slots, having 16 x 64GB = 1TB RAM in such a workstation costs you $1,600.

bargain!
"We could do it in a easy two liners that make sense, but, and hear me out here, what if we instead built an entire 10k LOC system that would barely work half of the time, using dozens of man hours for it ? And then never re-use it nor train anyone about it so that it becomes a mythical black box after your contract expires ?"

"Well, I gave you my recommendation but hey at the end of the day you're the customer and I'm paid by the hour, so whatever you say boss"

I now consider myself very lucky to be successful enough to not have to deal with projects like that, but back when I wasn't I paid quite a few things I wanted with those sort of stupid decisions.
> A compiler would catch the problem at build time

And a nice IDE/code editor would catch the problem as you're typing it
To me, the direction of the causal arrow is unclear. Was he able to throw money at MIT (and fulfill his fantasy of scientific/academic relevance) because he was a pimp, or did his involvement with these universities allow him to get closer to powerful people whom he'd manipulate with the offer of sex from young women? I agree that it's hard to definitely say because we're still unsure how exactly Epstein made his money.
Being green used to be purely virtue signaling. The idea 'be the change you want to see' combined with (a few years ago) the higher costs of green products have lead to 'look what I am willing to sacrifice for the environment'. Once going green is no longer a sacrifice, it loses its value as virtue signaling.
Moreover, as it used to be the case that green was more expensive, much of the marketing really focused on this virtue signaling. Because being green needed to be a unique selling point to make it worth it.

It seems like this perception of green hasn't caught up with reality yet. This also explains the (worry about) accusations of green-washing. If a company announces some green improvement in their products, people read that as virtue signaling. Then, when it comes out the company has not made green sacrifices elsewhere, that is seen as not virtuous. Problem is, their announcement was not 'we are making sacrifices to be green' but 'we made improvements that are green'. But that is not how people read such announcements.
If you could do this with a proper regex: they’re easy to parse and don’t have a lot of structure, so you can do neat things like produce generators from them. Now, you can get your regex for regexes to produce new regexes! This can be useful if you want to do generative testing.
In the same comment you say you're bearish and yet admit they have a massive EV tech lead over BMW and the ICE feet draggers. The reality is those companies make money off fossil fuel drivetrains, and Tesla makes money off battery drivetrains, so even if FSD doesn't deliver Tesla simply continues to make way more efficient cars with a much better charging network.
Not to be cynical about Tesla or the EV market as a whole but I don't get why Norway has become so important as an indicator for the car market while it hasn't mattered for the last 100 years.

The number of cars per capita in Norway is below the average in Europe. If you considering the countries GDP their number of cars per capita is even smaller. If anything, Norway due to it's high taxes and high government subsidies as well as abundant amount of green energy, should be highlighted as a "freak" economy rather than an indicator or even role-model for the rest of the world.

!!! DISCLAIMER !!! Before HN nukes this post into downvote oblivion please consider that I am neither a Tesla short-seller nor sponsored by the Big-Oil lobby. I am just a bit critical with what I read.
They explain the dynamics of a system, how the parts fit together and show the responsibility of each component in the context of the action (use case)
PHP Creator Rasmus Lerdorf Shares Lessons Learned from the Last 25 Years
That's fine, the problem is what to do with the tax money.

Ideally you want to return the collected tax money back into the economy through a general tax cut/subsidy. This way you incentivize good behaviour (carbon emission minimization) but limit impact on the economy. Most economists favour this approach.

The problem is environmentalist and progressives will not support this scheme because they would rather take the collected tax money and redirect it to their pet causes. This is what happend with Washington's Initiative 732 [1] - and why ENVIRONMENTAL groups brought it down (because fuck helping the environment if socialism doesn't come along for the ride)

There is insanity going on in progressive circles that is completely detrimental to fighting climate change that dwarfs conservative denialism.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Initiative_732
In fairness, the list comprehension syntax in python was taken directly from Haskell: https://wiki.python.org/moin/PythonVsHaskell
I once had a car where I wanted to upgrade the stereo. Never did it, because the station buttons on the replacements were all too small.
It depends what you mean by "validating email addresses".

A regex that tests if a string looks like a valid email address is simple. Forget the ancient RFCs, a real world email address is in the form of `mailbox@domainname`. Which is not so difficult to test for with a bit of care.

However, testing if the email address is a valid mailbox is harder and indeed impossible using regex alone. The domain name can be validated using standard domain tools but in practice the mailbox can be anything that the server will route to a valid mailbox. The only way to validate it is to send an email.
> ... but encryption is useless unless you know who you are talking to.

False. Opportunistic encryption is useful even if you don't know the other person's identity. This is because it helps prevent wholesale surveillance and "tapping glass":

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_(surveillance_program)

For the majority of the website I go to on a casual basis, I don't really care who is behind running them. Certainly I want that for my banks and webmail, but not so much for some random weblog that has an article comparing Rust and C.

I'm all for Let's Encrypt, and pushed for it to be introduced at work (both for internal and external sites), but we could have gotten encryption in more places, a lot sooner if connections over plaint-HTTP (tcp/80) could have been upgraded automatically to encryption:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP/1.1_Upgrade_header

There would have been no lock icon in web browsers, but it would have scrambled a lot of bits. Yes, MITM would still have been possible, but MITM is a targeted attack that takes way more resources than simply vacuuming up everything that goes across the wire.

The insistence of providing identity, IMHO, delayed the securing (or at least 'confidentializing') of communications by many years. LE/ACME is getting us there, but we could have had a lot more encrypted traffic already but for the desire for the little lock icon.
If you don't mind, here is my personal angle:

"In reality, great products do a whole lot, while providing a helpful, intuitive and somewhat shy interface. In this way, they allow to achieve solid results for complex problems in no time.

Customers who are lucky enough to interact with such product at least once in their life often describe it as being simple and even magical.

But do not let this fool you. Simplicity and magic do not equal to the lack of functions or settings.

Great products get the job done. They do it in timely fashion. They do not brag. They do not ask you to sign in. The do not put you through myriads of advertising. They do not overcast nor crash customers' lives by their own egos. They just work."
Platform cooperatives in my opinion are just another name for a cooperative who conducts the bulk of their business online. this can be a worker cooperative (https://www.upandgo.coop/), a multi-stakeholder cooperative (https://www.savvy.coop/) or even a producers cooperative (stocksy.com). I think the term is actually a bit arbitrary. The more important thing to think about is a) who owns the equity, b) how does the business make money c) how do the members participate.
Well it's a pop-sci book that reads as such. I don't take it to be rigorous, I take it with a "I guess I could see how those dots might connect" food for thought type way.
You’re correct, I was looking at a chart that stopped at 2016. Nonetheless, the peak west Nile deaths were 280+, and the average is over 100, compared to under 100 for mass shooting deaths.

West Nile seems like a pretty unpredictable and scary cause of death. The media covers mass shootings more because reporters are overwhelmingly members of one party and gun control is a critical wedge issue in the culture war. West Nile isn’t.
This doesn't seem correct. The author specifically says that Haskell is important because it is used in industry.

There's a lot to be said for a language that is a) important as an idea and b) gets used enough to test out those ideas in practice.

I'd agree with the author that Haskell occupies something of a sweet spot in that regard.
use the tax to pay off government debt?
I think one problem they have had is not enough advertisers. So you see the same ad over and over and over again...

That for one thing limits how many ads you can see. Once they scale that side up they can show more ads.
If you were looking for the reason why a regex cannot parse HTML, it is because HTML has matching nested tags and regex parsers are finite state machines (FSM).

What this means is that a regex parser is like a goldfish. It only knows about the state it is currently in (what it just read) and which possible states it may transition to (what is legally allowed to come next). The fish never remembers where it was before; there is no option to have the legality of a transition depend on what it read _before_ the current state. But this memory function is a requirement to recursively match opening tags to their closing tags - you need to keep a stack of opening stacks somewhere in order to then cross off their closing tags in reverse order. So regex cannot parse HTML.
It is a very different kind of complexity. Games are super complex in a very limited set of boundaries (the entirely virtual world of that single game) and have very rigid timing requirements, but usually the requirements to a "released" game don't change that much anymore. Enterprise apps usually implement stuff that seems simple (buy some item in a web shop), but gets complex due to a nearly boundless world which makes it necessary for them to interact with nearly every other system out there (which also changes all the time after release, just like the requirements to our app do). Thus the complexity of enterprise apps usually can be found in their interfaces to other systems (including humans) and in the way in which the app handles requirement changes over time, while the complexity of games is found in the simulation of their specific game world (including graphical representation of that world). It's like games are introverts while enterprise apps are extroverts.

If you want to explode the complexity of each of these "classes" of applications, just add the thing that makes the other class difficult to the requirement:

- A game that allows players in its world to interact tightly with an entirely different game world (like "really different", with entirely different rules and game play) which also evolves independently over time and on an uncontrollable schedule

- An Enterprise app that implements super complex processes with thousands of different moving parts, modeled out into extreme detail and without the possibility to resort to "this is handled organizationally"
So about 14 trees per person. There’s about 3 trillion trees currently, so 33% more.

And this assumes we’ve cut back on emissions.
How High Tech Is Transforming One of the Oldest Jobs: Farming
I have an even broader question: why do articles talking about some subject, have a random image representing the subject attached? For example, if an article talks about coffee, there will be a picture of a random cup of coffee or a random coffee tree field. I have never understood the point of it, but this has always existed in all forms of journalism.
You don't go lisping to make your CV look pretty. That doesn't help at all. On the contrary, it might be even damaging, as some discussions here on HN have shown in the past.

If you're "looking for tools better able to solve specific problems", your best bet right now might be Python. It ain't pretty, but the momentum behind it is tremendous. Tons of libraries, books, how-to's and developers out there willing to help. From a practical point of view, you couldn't ask for more.
Would be interested in hearing more - I think IR35 changes in April are going to make co ops an interesting option.
My Junk Cleaner Project Python
Heat. Electricity. You know, all those modern comforts that the developed world is getting by building coals plants, that they didn't have and CAN'T GET with solar panels and wind farms.
On point 3: Norway isn't in the EU.

On point 4: what does the population have to do with it? If they had a population of 50 million, would that negate points 1-3 in some way? Another way of describing their population might be, "roughly the same size as the average US state".
Yeah, I'm sure Dropbox's founders remember and regret that fateful day when they said to each other, let's write 4 million lines of Python to get this fledgling business idea off the ground!
The one context I've seen ML show up as such is when referring to the family as a whole, rather than a specific dialect.

I must admit I had the same reaction to this post, and thought that calling it Julia Academy was odd if they were going to teach other languages.
Tell that to Excel.
Not in a dynamic language. Finding all possible inputs to your method that’s calling float() on its Arguments in a dynamic language is akin to solving the halting problem.

Also, error messages in an IDE can be ignored. Compiler errors can’t.