skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes. If you're a senior IC and tend to do several days work on your good days but get little done on your bad days, depending on the boss you have this can cause a lot of friction (even if overall you're producing a lot).

There's a strong tendency to "watermark" your productivity, and ignore circumstances around it.

Today is a perfect example, I got to look at code only for the first hour before I got a pinged about an issue somebody thought was related to code pushed out last week. It turned out the issue had nothing to do with it, but I had to investigate that. Then I got pulled into a conversation about why a certain number was up and how we might ameliorate that; came up with a pretty simple solution someone else is implementing... but then I got asked if I still was working on some low priority ticket so I had to figure out what that was, and then my boss wanted more details in our weekly status update so I had to search up some docs and tickets and stick them in there. Right now I have 15 minutes between lunch and a meeting with HR, and no, I'm not using it productively - because how far can I really get in such a small time window?

I budget for this reality in my estimates, but often get pushback. "Is this really going to take a week?" Well, no, it's not. If all this crap was pushed out of the way it could get done in a couple days, like project X did. But the reality is I'm halfway through my workday and had at best an hour to code uninterrupted - much of which I spent checking my email and doing code reviews because I often get tagged for not doing those things often enough

There are quiet days when I can just code, and there are days like this. And even in the former category, not everything is perfect; sometimes I didn't sleep well or have other personal stuff. But the days everything went well sets the expectations, while the reality is much less predictable.
This makes me want to ditch gmail to prevent accidentally getting my account closed, say for using Youtube while I have Adblock installed in my browser. I do have personal email on a domain I own, but it will be a lot of work to update my e-mail address with each service.
Each RF hop is going to have more latency than fiber for RF physical layer processing. Forward error correction intentionally uses large frames to spread out burst errors.
It reads to me as an attempt from Google to further shame people into following better practices, like when they started factoring HTTPS into search rankings.

I think the principle is a fine one (though it is a bit odd considering the web's main source of slowness is ads/tracking tech, and... that's Google's main business). But in practice I'd bet that - like most of Google's broad-strokes efforts - there will be many edge cases/outliers where people get penalized unjustly, and there won't be an appeals process.
Soon (a decade or two) every major corporation and organization will have a manned station of their own.
Walled gardens and proprietary software can allow for fantastic user experiences in a way that open platforms often cannot match. However, I feel focusing on the user experience misses the main point - the web is an open platform, and this is an example of Google exerting an authority that many may not feel comfortable with.
that person doesn't sound brilliant at all. What earned him the badge "brilliant"?
Brazilian Jiu Jitsu is also very niche, very little money in competing, yet there are hundreds of professionals who build their schools (with paying students) based on their competition record. There is no way to compete at the top (and even sub top) without juicing, because the top guys are extremely technical and very strong (and they can train 6 days a week, 2 times a day, plus s&c, which no normal human can sustain for months or years).
>Should I be allowed to host a video openly slandering and lying about someone simply because I don't have enough people who follow me or because I'm not directly saying "attack this person"?

"Slander" is a legal term, and if someone feels like they were slandered through a youtube video, they are welcome to go through that legal channel, just like if they were slandered by someone on the street or through phone or elsewhere. That's the kind of matter that courts were designed for, so it would make sense to keep that issue there. We don't need bajillion private "courts" to dish out their own "totally not self-serving" flavors of justice, we should be using the one we pay taxes for and that has grounds in the federal judicial system.

This should increase the friction to the point where we don't have as many takedowns of videos that are not doing anything wrong, while still allowing for offenders like Alex Jones to get the justice they deserve and get their videos removed.
> Patrolling the border and ensuring territorial sovereignty is well within the purview of the US Military

I still think it is against the very spirit of the US Constitution and in this particular case I don't see against whom are these soldiers "ensuring territorial sovereignty"? There is no enemy military force on the opposing side of the border.

I actually grew up in a Eastern-European dictatorship but even they didn't use the Military to "protect" the country's borders, the dedicated border patrol forces were doing just a fine of a job of making sure nobody was escaping the country (because that was their job). The last time when we actually had soldiers "protecting" our borders was in the late '40s-early '50s on the Yugoslav border, when there were exchanges of live ammunition between Romanian and Yugoslav soldiers each stationed on their side of the border [1]. I can't see why the already de-facto militarized Homeland Security people aren't allowed to handle this, after all this is their main job.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tito%E2%80%93Stalin_split
Sure, but most engineers are working for a business and most businesses don't have perfect processes.

I think we can say (1) engineering productivity is severely impeded by interruptions and (2) it doesn't hurt to work on skills to help yourself get less impacted by disruptions.

You're right there's no secret technique, but documenting your work and thoughts, keeping TODO lists, breaking down large work items into small chunks can all help distractions not ruin your day.

But, these are effectively "hacks" and the only way to ensure highest possible productivity is to have processes which prevent engineers from being interrupted
Yeah I agree. Sometimes I'm too rushed to be nice! I've pitched HN a lot on perhaps creating a more restrictive grammar to help keep conversations constructive. I saw that Grammarly actually rolled out something new that shows a simple smiley/frown based upon the town of the content in your textarea.

IRL I'm not an argumentative person, but I consider coding/posting on forums to be my equivalent of the gridiron, and I hope people don't take offense when I fight hard on the field. I'm just hoping we can all get to the correct answers the quickest, and so if people think I'm wrong, please provide data or detailed explanations as to why, or else be prepared to take some heat.
Is the "Father" works too?
I was going to comment the same thing. Even if you never plan on writing a database, the lectures are a great overview of what goes into building reliable distributed systems.
Launch of the Branson Centre of Entrepreneurship for Southern Africa
When you're into extreme stuff you should take extreme precautions. The chances of me ending up unconscious in a ditch in the wilderness are nil. This wasn't always the case and I'd make sure to plot my route and have check-in points set up in advance which is the way to do that. Your fall into the ditch may destroy your fancy gear and then what? But that stuff certainly won't hurt to bring along on a risky trek (and on plenty that don't look all that risky, the weather can really get you).
It's almost like your news sources are biased against one of their major competitors.
>Parts of a jawbone and spine of a camel, and the tooth of a horse were also found at the site. Both species later became extinct in the Americas.

I didn't know that.
Although it's more complicated than that, because IC engines are only have about 15% efficiency, whereas electric motors are up at about 80%.
In practice, the only thing that really matters here is the phrase "his work was falling behind". And "he was missing deadlines".

It doesn't matter if a worker is secretly pulling 80 hours or 10 hours a week instead of the 40 (apart from legal/contract issues). If he's doing less than agreed between the parties, that's a problem. If management bought his excuses, then there's a problem with management.
In a state like that it is about as plausible as a US general starting a war with Russia on their own. Anyway, I don't suspect we'll ever have a fair trial where these details will come out. Just more murders to cover up for the previous ones, possibly in the guise of executions by the judicial system or what goes for that in that country.
Once went to a new Walmart after it opened before they had the sound system set up and boy was it eerie.
Do those people use a credit card or cell phone? I think many people care, but not enough to stop participating in society, or even enough to stop posting on their favorite web forums. Modernity demands compromise; we abide.
ZeroCater (YC W11) Is Hiring a Full-Stack Engineer in SF
WeWork in Talks to Hire T-Mobile’s John Legere
I think they were referring to reverting the work of the employee that left that put the organization in a bind, not someone still on the team.

I had the same thought—revert the changes to get the rest of the team back on track. The problem could be that the changes could be over the course of many commits, so rolling back is complicated and almost as difficult as moving forward.
Building a Galery with Gatsby, Google Sheets and Netlify
I hope they won't whitelist their own pages from this. Maybe then they'll notice Google's own products have a performance problem.
Of note - I think the Porsche factory built on Japanese (Toyota) innovations on manufacturing. I recall reading something about in the '90's, Porsche and VW were in a bit of a crisis in terms of manufacturing, cost of manufacturing, tolerances of manufacturing, etc. Turns out a lot of steps relied on a person hand fitting something or reaching into a bin of parts, etc. They hired Toyota to consult and rejigger everything. This was also when they came up w/ the Boxster, and then their SUV's to save the company as the 911 was definitely not paying the bills...
I'm an American and used to only buy american cars (until I finished college) because my father was a GM factory worker and that was the expectation (right or wrong, GM paid the bills for my upbringing.)

I've driven GM, VWs, Hondas, Toyotas and currently drive a Ford F150.

I've had the fortune of rarely having serious problems with any of them, but we haven't kept most of the vehicles for more than 4-5 years for a variety of reasons (VW Golfs are fine when you're single, but not when you have a couple of kids (at least not in America...we're spoiled.)

Hats off to Toyota though. My parents have been driving my wife's old 2003 Camry for the past 3-4 years. It still runs great and up until this past weekend had zero issues. The master power window switch failed and now the rear driver side window fails to come up. Amazon is delivering the replacement part today for a whopping $23.50.
What developer out there reads "The spin bit is an OPTIONAL feature of QUIC", then sees "Implementations MUST allow administrators of clients and servers to disable the spin bit either globally or on a per-connection basis" and thinks "Yes, this is definitely something I will implement and test out all the edge cases." Especially stuff like "The random selection process SHOULD be designed such that on average the spin bit is disabled for at least one eighth of network paths."

This whole thing is going to be a congestion control arms race. With TCP out the window this is going to be an epic battle of network operators trying to heuristically classify important vs. bulk traffic any way they can, content servers trying every trick in the book to get their traffic prioritized ahead of competitors, and savvy users running tweaked router firmware to jump the Fair Share queue.
Echo Auto – Add Alexa to Your Car
The slowness described in the article isn't jank, but time-to-initial-load. Conceivably the initial client-side render could take a nontrivial amount of time, but in the vast majority of cases - just like for server-side rendering - it isn't a deciding factor.

The real deciding factor is the amount of dependencies that have to be loaded. This includes JS, but usually the JS for ads/tracking is far larger than the JS for the actual UI, even on fully client-side-rendered sites.
Don't biofuels take up way too much land to be economical? A large portion of US crop area is for corn and soybeans for ethanol and biodiesel. I can see the reasoning behind biofuels for aircraft, but I don't think biofuels are sustainable if people continue driving as much as they do now.
"Don't take advice from the successful; they might just be lucky."

-- anon
Really? I'd expect the water in the Arctic to still over around 32F and for the phytoplankton to be blooming.
That’s an absurd claim. “Niceness of place” is far from the only criterion people use to choose where to live. It’s probably not even in the top 5 actually.

Proximity to jobs, proximity to family, cost of living, whether you can legally work there, and safety all trump “niceness of place” for a majority of buyers/renters.
So this is an interesting idea. And I do tend to write that way. Especially if I'm not sure what to say, or how to say it.

But I'm not sure what the point is. I mean, searching yields "We couldn’t find any repositories matching 'rolandasb'". And I'm certainly not going to write anything substantive on this site. So how would I do this locally?
>There is no "I" in "team".

But there is a "me".
Biofuels always sounded wasteful to me. But this post makes a lot of good points on its merits that I hadn’t considered.

How efficient is producing biofuels using renewable energy as a way of storing power long term?
Many "imported" cars are made in the U.S.

According to Wikipedia [1]:

> Toyota has a large presence in the United States with six major assembly plants in Huntsville, Alabama, Georgetown, Kentucky, Princeton, Indiana, San Antonio, Texas, Buffalo, West Virginia, and Blue Springs, Mississippi.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota#North_America
I would replace cookies with a browser controlled session id, 128 random bits encoded as hex.
This is one of my favorite aspects of the writing in Outer Worlds: that no one who works for a corporation is ever, ever allowed to speak ill of it, of it's products, or anything even tangentially related to the corporation.

It's hilarious the mental gymnastics these fictional people will leap through to avoid earning the ire of their employer, and it's absolutely shocking how true-to-life it often is.
Flatpak unfortunately has other issues inherited from a repo-based approach. Like, it can't be installed to a separate disk than the rest of the system and you can't use anything not in your repo, forcing you to setup pretty much 1 repo/application, which is ridiculous.
I have tinnitus because I've spent the last two decades playing music through headphones to block out conversations and often music at work and in my commute. I'm still equally distracted/disturbed by other people's noise as day one.
Starlink apparently won't be a fixed concept. 5 year sat lifecycle means its likely we'll see rapid year-over-year turnover and hence macro-level iteration on the specs and design.
You cannot look at the energy density of the fuel by itself.

Electric motors are lighter than ICE engines per HP and torque unit.

Emrax 268 (electric engine designed for aircraft) - 6.12 HP/lb

GE 90-115B (jet engine used in 777) - 6.10 HP/lb

Junkers Jumo 205A (diesel engine used in Ju 86C-1) - 0.66 HP/lb

Electric also scale down better so for light weight UAV a higher energy density battery will open up a bunch of use cases.
IRS Says ‘Dozens’ of New Crypto, Cybercriminals Are Identified
The advice we got from our professors when writing theses was: crack open a bottle of fine whisk{e}y [0], get a couple glasses in, write (while keeping your drink topped of course) until writing is a serious challenge, edit the next morning in the harsh and sober light of day [1].

Works a treat, even if you liver may not fully appreciate it.

[0] Whiskey may be substituted for your preferred liquor, but it is a solid traditional writers' choice

[1] TL;DR 'Write drunk, edit sober'
Does a good system have the potential to be good for patients? Sure. Will Google do that? Probably not. There's no incentive for them to improve health care for the patients; there's no profit. There is, however, profit in ads, and in increasing insurance margins for insurers and those funding insurance.

I'd like to think that Google is concerned about more than just profit, but they prove again (censored search for China) and again (YouTube policy changes) and again that they are not. Profit rules Google's decisions.

And that is why there's such backlash against Google getting this data. Because the chances of anything good for us as patients is slim to non-existent.
That is objectively false. Since I doubt anyone from my neighborhood taco stand or hot dog carts is on HN, I'm offended on their behalf
Ouch. I used to work with a guy like this.

Generally speaking, this is an occurrance that is exceedingly common and extremely under-recognized in our industry.

Instead, he used the odd hours to force us to give him only
work that could be accomplished alone. We were lulled into
letting him make key architecture decisions in isolation

Our guy accomplished this via different means but the end result was the same: because of various factors, he became "architect" and essentially was able to make decisions alone. Then we had to live with them.

Eventually he became the architect by virtue of operating in
isolation, where we couldn't discuss his decisions. Everyone
else was forced to work around his code.

Yyyyeeeeeeep.

Our guy was genuinely, I think, the best engineer on a team of pretty good engineers. But in terms of sheer talent he was not a "10x" coder in terms of raw talent. Call him perhaps a "1.2x" or "1.5x" in terms of raw talent.

However, he was essentially able to operate as something like a "10x" talent because he got to do a lot of greenfield work, make sweeping architecture changes and decisions, and so forth. Meanwhile we were all left to deal with his fallout.

Whether or not you believe there are legitimate "10x" engineers (we'll set that debate aside for a moment) I think it is very, very obvious that we have misidentified the talent level of many engineers. Your actual output level as an engineer, be it 1x or 100x, is always a product of many factors and your actual talent level is only one of those factors.

Worse yet, having someone like that on the team drives away other great employees.

Yes. Two big reasons.

1. It's not a good way to make software, obviously. Great employees want to make great software and will be frustrated.

2. It's career fucking suicide to work under somebody like that. It's impossible to shine when working under somebody like that. You can't clean up a mess as quickly as other people can create a mess. You just can't. With very rare exceptions you simply cannot mop a floor well enough to be seen as something other than a janitor.
I am in this situation pretty frequently. Are you just a solid communicator? I know I tend to get roped into meetings because I'm good at leading meetings, while other engineers are frankly terrible at it.
I hate how patient consent is typically implemented. I've seen two ER's firsthand who have someone come in with a computer, ask some questions about insurance and all, then say "please sign for the HIPPA privacy form, and again to release the information to your insurance provider".

For all you know, you're signing away for an assisted suicide and authorizing your organs to be transplanted. I refuse to sign on the pad, I'm the patient who asks for it to be printed out on paper, signs it, and gets a copy too.
The worst I've run into is back when I was still doing a lot of Cisco networking, and Apple came out with IOS, which was the same name as Cisco's IOS operating system. As I remember, Apple ended up having to license the name.

Seemed like overnight it became nearly impossible to search for Cisco IOS (since many relevant posts didn't call out Cisco by name, since why would you, IOS is obviously Cisco IOS)
Being a modern American who lacks important critical thinking skills, I would like to ask you how it is that I am to discern obviously fake information from real information? Or perhaps a better question: what is true?
All I can say is, I am old enough that I remember when writing rough drafts, by hand, on paper, was how you did writing. If you changed your mind right after you wrote something, it was awful because you had to squeeze it in between the lines or in the margins or draw circles and arrows and such.

I hated writing then. It was just painful. I procrastinated any writing assignment till 2am the night before it was due.

Now I love writing. Writing is often something I do when I'm procrastinating something else. (ummm, that would include right now I guess)

I'm not a linear thinker and forcing myself to do it that way would just be a way to make me hate writing again.
And that's one of the reasons those positions are often salaried.
> Don't biofuels take up way too much land to be economical?

Can we turn solar energy into hydrocarbons? (Water and CO2 are total feedstocks.)
Engineers are generally salaried for this reason. Although, personally, I very much do count thinking about work problems as work hours no matter what time of the day it happens.
I was curious if this was possible, and I did some quick research. From what I gathered, it's just not practical. There are a multitude of mutually interfering sources and reflective surfaces in a noisy real world environment. You just can't plop a mic down - or an array of mics - and cancel the audio it receives. You have to put the mic and the cancelling audio as close to the ear as possible, and isolate the listener as much as you can. Which we already have, in noise cancelling headphones.
In what way is "indicate that this website is slow" a walled garden or contrary to openness?
I completely agree that open offices designs are completely terrible and make work very stressful. I don't see agile and slack as equivalents though as how they get implemented completely dictates how this plays out. My current work is agile and we use slack and I have 0 problems with being interrupted. We also don't have the issue with open offices as well, given that we are 100% remote.

Personally I think the fully remote fixes half the problems in this area as it makes meetings harder and emphasizes communications like slack as being real channels (with processes and conventions), vs. a side channel that people feel easier to bug you personally on.
Since this was posted in 2015, the title should be changed to one of:

- The Next 50 Years of Databases (2015)

- The Next 46 Years of Databases

:-)
The Digital Human – Terry A. Davis and Temple OS