skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It would be far, far better if every able-bodied person performed basic fire prevention mitigation on their property. It would be far better for those replacing their roofs to use fire-rate shingles, or for county/city codes to mandate improvements. The well-off can pay someone to do that, and can afford to live in environments where the new normal is >75 mph winds.

I doubt any amount of public investment can make it safe for the masses, short of long-term acceptance of blackouts being the new normal.
I'm not sure if you're actually disagreeing with me. Of course a team needs a technical lead who is likely a senior engineer. I think that much is obvious. However, that person is predominantly concerned with their own team's technology.

As an engineering director, I have an entire organization of teams I'm personally accountable for, and I have to make sure the work that's being planned out meshes well with what all the other teams are also planning. I cannot constantly be pulling in a dozen senior developers into every meeting every day to help me figure things out. I also have my own technical objectives I want to achieve for the company that cut across multiple teams or the entire engineering organization. Most of these considerations are technical in nature, and while a senior IC on one team can help they frankly don't have time to be involved in the whole process -- that would prevent them from succeeding as a senior engineer in their current role.

Under discussion is not the role of a senior engineer, but rather the technical track beyond that point -- roles commonly termed staff, senior staff, distinguished, principal, fellow, or even senior fellow. My core claim is there's more in common between engineering management and these roles than many folks tend to believe and/or realize.

Often an engineering manager is just someone at this level of seniority who also has rock-solid people skills and has been empowered in the organization to actually get bigger things done that cut across teams, though they may not themselves write code anymore.

Certainly I agree with you that not every manager needs to be deeply technical, but I think that for someone who is deeply technical, engineering management can actually be a much more powerful and interesting choice vs. trying to expand your impact without taking on formal leadership responsibility on an IC track.
That’s open for debate. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labyrinth:

”Although early Cretan coins occasionally exhibit branching (multicursal) patterns

[…]

both logic and literary descriptions make it clear that the Minotaur was trapped in a complex branching maze

[…]

In English, the term labyrinth is generally synonymous with maze. As a result of the long history of unicursal representation of the mythological Labyrinth, however, many contemporary scholars and enthusiasts observe a distinction between the two.”
The borrowing of fakir into English is largely the result of British colonialism in India. While Persian (and the heavily Persianified variety Urdu) was an important court language in NW India, and the word would have been spelled with ق in the native script, the word had passed from Persian via Urdu to Hindustani in general, which lacks a phoneme /q/, and so its unvoiced velar stop is reflected as k in English spelling regardless.
I think the GP was more getting at "you can like the fluff" or you can "like the game".

My ex could never understand why I would play wacky strategies when we'd play board games. It's because I wasn't "playing the game" I was trying to "break the game" by better understanding the meta.

At high levels of strategy, you aren't even "playing the game" anymore.
Sounds pretty good :)

Curious: any issues with using more than one of these kinds of platforms, or do you guys have exclusivity arrangements? How does it work if I've already applied for a role at a company that I then connect with on your platform?
I can't wait for my Pebble 2 I paid for via crowdfunding (shhh I know I got refunded) to get manufactured and shipped before the company decided to go out of business, not delivering the product they hyped, and sell themselves to FitBit.
This is likely a New York specific thing, where Hertz is incredibly expensive in the city proper unless you go to the airport.
Ask HN: Why are there no peer to peer data warehouse solutions?
I am wondering why there are no solutions to data warehousing that work in a p2p manner rather than relying on centralised servers. The obvious upside to have a cloud-hosted/on-premise DW is that you have a single source of truth from which all further analysis is derived. On top, there is also a dedicated team that does query optimization, data integration and so on.

But especially for heavily regulated or understaffed companies, where development cycles are long, this seems to be an alternative since it would give control over data to the users and would enable them to work with their data in a more structured way.

This would be helpful for multiple reasons:
1) You would not loose insights from users, since they would be kept in a somewhat ordered fashion
2) Although probably a nightmare for any DBA, I could imagine it is still way better than spreadsheets, since
you can at least enforce some bounds (like MS Access for example)
3) Users could query it and use any frontend they want with a simple SQL connection (no fiddling with proprietary connectors etc.)

What are drawbacks of this? Has this already been done/tried outside of academia?
This is pretty revisionist. My own experience lurking in crypto communities (and reading the replies to @Bitfinixed), was to insist that everything was fine and furiously deny that Tether was a scam, and accuse me of being a dirty fiat shill for pointing out that Tether was a scam, right up until Tether starting admitting under oath in court that they were never backed by reserves, at which point the conversation switched to "we knew it was shady all along".

This sort of thing is pretty common in Bitcoin land. Mt. Gox was also totally fine, nothing wrong, how dare you accuse them of wrongdoing, right up until they declared bankruptcy and then suddenly everyone had known all along they were insolvent and only a fool would've put their money there.
there's plenty more from construction to factory workers to professional drivers to nurse and doctors but the literature is far from recent and the findings have been stable enough so it's not being discussed that much.

some concerns are specific of our industry, like efficiency from high level languages. some are more cross cutting, like communication efficacy. some are more universal, like optimal working hours per week.

if you pick some common metric like that last one you'll see all fields share a great deal of the same issue and same research
The problem is we don't really know. Drugs that are almost out will probably still come out. However we are most likely to lose ones that are in the here are 100 things we could try at high cost - we know from experience than 1 in 1000 of these ideas is useful. If the cost recovery is high enough you try all 100 ideas to see if they lead anywhere, and then find another list of 100... If cost recovery isn't high enough you don't try any, and we don't really know what we lost because we don't know which of the ideas before actually will turn out to work.
Apple iPhone 11 Pro vs. Google Pixel 4 camera shootout: Apple wins
Show HN: Commandeer 0.3.2 Release – SQSLambdaTester, S3 Drag/Drop, Dynamo Search
I read very little in that article that's operationally in any way different from what happens daily in bank to bank back-office plumbing.

The only difference here is that it's a lot more visible to the general public because it's A) crypto B) new rather established means of transferring value between financial institutions.
Can you make this into a movie please? I will fund the kickstarter campaign.
"In many ways Tcl is more powerful than most implementations of Lisp."

Could you elaborate on this? In what ways is it more powerful?

Also, I don't get what connection TCL has with Forth. They seem uttery different from each other to me.
He bamboozled the Saudis sure, but it’s not as if he actually managed to rip off retail investors, as was his intent.
Fitbit is damaged goods. Just read https://community.fitbit.com/t5/Ionic/Would-you-buy-Fitbit-I... - I own one of these along with many unsatisfied customers. Google is buying technical debt.
Yeah, it's short for PROfit. ;)
The pro line is just the high-end line-up from Apple. The 'regular' (non-pro) line is for consumers with average spending, and the pro line is for those who are willing to spend more for a more polished experience.

Maybe except for the upcoming Mac pro, the pro line products don't offer particular features for professional use over the regular line. It's not like you can't do professional work on a non-pro Apple product.

It's just a really well chosen marketing name, which is now being diluted due because every* Apple product now has a pro version.

* except the Watch I believe?
From what I've heard all other fully-wireless earbuds are a terrible user experience WRT connection quality/disconnects, battery life, etc. Of course noise-cancelling doesn't require connection to a phone, but for this price range I want both parts of the experience to be excellent
The last few years have actually been uncharacteristically wet by historical standards.

That's actually why this fire season is so bad.

The problem isn't that too many people moved to California, the problem is that California has been aggressively blocking anything that might be construed as development, meaning that conditions just keep worsening everywhere.
Effective Python › the Book: Second Edition
This paper by John Ousterhout (creator of Tcl) is a good read if you think Tcl is a weird language plagued by bad design decisions. If that describes you, it's probably the case that you don't understand the problem Tcl was designed to solve.

https://web.stanford.edu/~ouster/cgi-bin/papers/tcl-usenix.p...
Nasty PHP7 remote code execution bug exploited in the wild
I found it awful. I'm running on a very beefy development machine in the latest version of Firefox and it was kinda sluggish and very hard to read all of the information (felt like I had to scroll forever just to see a few sentences and pictures). It's also very inaccessible.
I was at a place that had been around for 20+ years, but needed to grow fairly quickly. So they systematized their hiring process. The focus was on generalists both because a lot of their technology was written in-house (it predated the commodity, off the shelf, solutions). It used the theory of the off the shelf solutions, but often had a different name or a slight difference. But the major reason they wanted generalists, like you say, was so they could move people around as-needed.

Much of the industry was either specialists in their studies, or specialists in that they knew a specific software package. It was interesting to interview people who had very in-depth knowledge of one thing, but completely oblivious to even the basics of other areas.
Notes on the new edition from the author - https://www.onebigfluke.com/2019/10/i-wrote-a-new-edition-of...
Swedish post-term pregnancy research study stopped after six babies die
I had the exact opposite reaction. I wanted to see how much the headphones cost. It took me what felt like 100 space bar presses to get to the purchase link, almost like the page didn't really want me to order and was stalling for time.
There is not much "feature" in a Fitbit. You can't even correct simple numeric values of an exercise, such as the ran distance or the bodyfat percentage of the scale reading.
Given Android, I'm not. hopeful that my Fitbit will continue to work with my iPhone, long term.

Edit: I guess Android Wear does work with iOS, so maybe I'm being overly concerned about this aspect.
Stupid question: Everytime I'm given the option to work with v4 or v6 (which, granted, is not often) I do v4 for one silly, stupid reason: I can remember a v4 address for, like the 10 minutes while configuring that I might at any moment have to record/enter it somewhere. (So: Not just once, but being able to have it as needed in a small time window)

What do people do with v6? Have better memories than me? cut-and-paste repeatedly as needed?

While I do less-and-less sysadmin work over time, even on my home network, there are opportunities to get more comfortable with v6 that I've skipped because of this, yet I never see anyone talking about it.
They already have that from your phone.

If you have an android device, no explanation needed.
If you use an iPhone, unless you abstain from Google products completely, they have it from maps, wifi AP MACs, etc.
Ubuntu's ppa domain - ppa.launchpad.net - and the domain their normal repos are hosted on - archive.ubuntu.com and security.ubuntu.com support IPv6. You can test it with this tool: https://ipv6-test.com/validate.php

It's common for hosting providers to modify system images to point at a nearer mirror or even a local one they own. Perhaps it wasn't working on your system because of some change you or the host made.
Yes, I have native IPv4 too, with the usual NAT. I think the default router that Comcast will rent to you actually is dualstack in this way too -- IPv4 NAT, and IPv6 prefix advertised for devices that want it.

I actually played with NAT64 for a bit (IPv6-only internally, all IPv4 space is mapped to a special /96 in IPv6-space and NAT'd at the router, and local DNS server on the router returns translated AAAA records for IPv4-only hosts), but dropped that when I simplified my router config. It works, it just takes a bit of config :-)
The point is that Google is currently actively working towards reducing lock-in. Storage is one area where I've seen some good movement. Microsoft is also contributing a lot of good stuff to make Kubernetes migration easier.

We'll never get to zero, and I'm sure that Google & Microsoft will eventually put more emphasis on complementary products that increase lock-in. But right now it's trending in the right direction.
"The most important aspect of an interview process is that it is easy to teach."

That basically begs the question of what I'm saying though; why should we expect that there is an "easy to teach" process that "works", for some useful definition of "works"?

Our desire for something to exist does not mean it does exist. I think a lot of the rhetoric around "fixing" interviews is making this fundamental mistake, where what is desirable is laid out, and then some process that will putatively lead to this is hypothesized, but there isn't a check done at this phase to be sure the desired characteristics can even exist.

It may be that evaluating human beings and whether they can fit into technical roles is just fundamentally hard. (I mean, when I put it that way, doesn't it sound almost impossible that it's untrue?) While acknowledging fundamental difficulty is not itself a solution, it does tend to lead one to different solutions than when the assumption is made that there must be some easy, repeatable solution.

I can sit here and wish there was some easy way to communicate how to be a full-stack engineer in 2019, but that doesn't mean that such a thing exists, and anyone trying to operate on the presumption there is is headed for the shoals at full speed. People who know such easy things don't exist may still wreck themselves but at least they aren't guaranteed headed towards the shoals.

(Or, to put in another really technical way, the machine-learning-type bias that somewhere in the representable set of interview processes there must in fact be a good solution is not necessarily true, and think there's good reason to believe it's false.)
You cannot hire by not discriminating. It's by default a task that discriminates.
> other retailers pushing down to their SaaS partners a hard message to get off of AWS.

Is this true? That gives me a warm feeling of hope.
I love my Fitbit Versa, every product has unsatisfied customers.

Anyhow, I was actually hoping Microsoft would buy them, and make an assistant agnostic device that could run Google, Alexa or Cortana.
On our landing page in the box where you enter your dates and times, it says "Rent a car in San Francisco," but we'll add a banner to the top of the page as well just to ensure people know we're only in SF for the time being!
If you're really concerned about noise reduction, I personally recommend headphones that block noise, not counter it. An example would be the Shure IEM line, which acts like an earplug, and which provide a flat 25db attenuation of sound. So, your 85db environment becomes a 60 db environment, and your music can be 65 db.

Boise 2 headphones with ANR, in comparison, reduce about 13db of noise at 85db.

http://www.hearingreview.com/2008/06/attenuation-values-of-a...
Not so much "crazy" because it was in multiple places in my suburban location at that time. The 'Claire' character of "The Breakfast Club" movie of 1985, brought sushi in (what I remember to be) a bento box with her and I only read her as spoiled, not crazy.
Startup Job Fair Online: Showcase Your Startup
And Perl has PDL.
Not aware of anything for Tcl beyond math::statistics, but I think it waned in popularity way before the ML bubble started inflating.

But in my experience, the strategy for Tcl is the inverse of Python when it comes to domming/subbing with your "partner language". You _extend_ python, you _embed_ Tcl.

At least in the areas where Tcl still survives. It lost long ago against the P-languages, but still faces Lua rather bravely in the enterprise/engineering sector.
Sounds like Skurt re-born.
I agree, but if the split is 90% well functioning, and 10% people with the manners of RMS/Torvalds, well, people are going to notice those 10%. Stereotypes obviously don't need to be real to shape things. My concern more is that our industry needs to stick up for itself and act like professionals, instead of intentionally marginalizing itself and then acting indignant about it.

I don't even think that 10% really needs to change. We need the RMS' and Torvalds of the world. But we also need to, individually, act better than they do and advocate for ourselves as adults.

I constantly see coders deriding any decision that places the business over their own individual interests, and then we get indignant that the decision makers don't listen to us. But if we don't care about their interests, and the collective best interest of the company, why should they care about our interests?
Sometimes I don't know whether to be proud of or disappointed in our species.
And here I am smack in the middle. I can run in them, I might even try jumping jacks. But bicycle helmet straps knock them out, and when I tap them I often have to readjust them. So I have "AirPods with earhooks" called PowerBeats Pros. The innards of AirPods in a different, better-fitting (for me) package. (And the PowerBeats are water-resistant, but I guess the AirPod Pros are, too.)
The $1.4B Sabre does in airline bookings revenue isn't insignificant but don't underestimate the difficulty of reinventing Sabre with a better suite of APIs from both a technical and commercial standpoint though.
Great question. This is just conjecture on my end, but I imagine it has to do with software engineering and tech in general having become one of the largest new destinations for a rewarding, stimulating, high compensation career. From what I can recall, I believe seeing the same amount of analysis applied to medicine, law, management consulting and banking.

To answer the latter half of your question, it is strange to not see that much analysis of science lab workers, truck drivers, restaurant workers, nurses or social workers, but I imagine that without the profit incentive there, the demand for research dries up. I wouldn't say that's a good thing, and it does indeed feel strange.
They were able to clone it because copying is easier than having the idea and building something for the first time and verifying that anyone wants it. Hosting is analogous to the sales data, it helps prioritize who you should clone first.

Cloning is just practice for many developers.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
> if the author of a website does not want you to copy out the text, they will use all existing means to prevent it.

The author of the website should not want to prevent copying in the first place. It's the 21st century, copying is trivial.

> Ok, so Firefox will prevent websites from modifying a clipboard. Then, such websites will show you the text in PNG images. What is next?

What happens next is those sites will immediately lose a ton of users due to their poor usability. Site translation services will be completely broken. Search engines will fail to index the text contained in the images. People will still be able to save, copy, screenshot, crop, edit and share the image itself; the authors just made their own content look worse on purpose by making it impossible to scale the text properly. If developers care enough about the content, they will eventually create and use an optical character recognition browser extension that extracts the text and overlays it on top of the original image.

The only thing that isn't going to happen next is users going "aw shucks the author's will is absolute so I guess I can't copy the text".
Yeah, it's true.

This cycle, investors realized that OK, maybe we have to see revenues to believe it's a real business.

But, if you look at things like WeWork, sure, there's revenue, but there's never even been the hope of eventual profit. The business model fundamentally destroys value.
> Also surprised by the lack of mention of reformulating existing drugs to extend their patents.

Reformulation does not extend patents, it creates a new patent on the new substance. The substance in the existing patent can be manufactured as a generic after the existing patent expires.

The wrinkle is that the new and existing substances are not equivalent, and thus cannot be substituted for one another. Thus, if a doctor prescribes the new one, that is what needs to be dispensed.
Apple Releases iOS, iPadOS 13.2
Credit card form with smooth and sweet micro-interactions
> Xiaomi, Huawei, and Huami have really taken the wearables market by storm

You link to a press release. Are there actual sales numbers to back that claim up? Because all I see out in the real world are Apple watches and Fit Bits.

> I hope the rumoured Pixel Wearable isn't comically expensive like its Phone counterparts.

The Apple Watch Series 3 is available on apple.com for $199.
Really surprising. Even if they self-host everything, you can still design a cloud based emergency spin up configuration.
That's assuming the alternative thing actually benefits from the money. You mention education, but we've already seen that education spending has a threshold past which spending more money no longer improves outcomes (it just inflates prices), and we're already above that level of education spending.

And even if we weren't, it doesn't follow that moving resources from one place to the other is the right choice. When you have two things that both produce benefits exceeding their costs, you're better off to do both of them.
I'm using the Digital Ocean $5/month on a site, running Nginx & NodeJS, admittedly low load but boy the uptime has been great and $5/m. Just create an ubuntu droplet, couple of apt-get commands and you are up and running with a server :-).
Most Bluetooth headphones work this way. Jaybirds also have seamless syncing, and the X4 has full multi-device coverage like you describe of your Bose.
Also great for automated tests of interactive functionality in your own projects.