skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This article is a good reminder. When I started out my programming career many years ago, these things were fundamental in the way I created software, however things seem to have gone downhill in recent years.

The reason? The pressure in the past from co-founders or stakeholders to 'get things out the door quickly' and to get a quick and dirty MVP out there. This often meant lack of time to consider these small details (or even to backload them into the system later for v1.0).

Also ironically, we've had professional UX and CX designers work on my software creations who have cut a lot of these things off the interface and functionality as 'unnecessary cruft'.

I would also add to the list under Colours/Formatting, that a lot of 'dark mode' designs out there that are considered fashionable just have too low a colour contrast or too small a font to make it readable my someone like me with degrading eyesight.
Can you expand on what you mean by "unreality"?
Refrigerated cargo has a not insignificant carbon foot print. If self driving trucks can deliver it sooner/faster, then it’s a good thing.
Some of the address space is reserved for particular purposes: 127.0.0.0/8 is for loopback, 10.0.0.0/8, 172.16.0.0/12 and 192.168.0.0/16 for private addresses, 224.0.0.0/4 is for multicast, and 240.0.0.0/4 is class E and unallocatable for anything.
No, the corporation retires the shares after the buyback. Total outstanding shares decrease. All remaining shareholders get a larger percent ownership of the corporation
Interesting thing is that their Silicon Valley office is next to a strip mall and is more of an office space than an industrial one. I live near there and so far haven't seen any of their branded trucks or anything of their brand really relative to other self driving startups like Apple roaming around with their mattress-like hardware system.

So I'm guessing most development work is happening in China, just like several other Chinese based self-driving companies.
Ah, I misunderstood. I thought the layer stack was immutable.
That’s still a hell of a savings.
If it's one safety driver monitoring 4 vehicles it's still a win.
"What's broke?" Is said multiple times throughout this article. For those who don't know, "what's _broken_" is the grammatically correct way to say this.

Yes, I'm being a grammar Nazi. And no, that's not a bad thing.
We speak English, and while a lot of it's rules are archaic and silly, this instance is not one of those silly rules. It's basic English.
Handling that 10% is going to be tricky, though. Can an unpiloted truck be trusted to know its limitations perfectly, shutdown and park when it hits borderline road conditions?

Edit: Okay, remote driver access might solve this.
Are you a trucker?

Once upon a time, horse drawn carriages transported people and there were stables and groomsmen and carriage drivers and those who provided food and board for the horses. That entire industry and those jobs disappeared when the motor cars came along. They found other jobs. We moved on.
My answer is no.

I have a deep lack of respect and huge hatred for these types of ass holes. If I became this type of person I would hate myself.

However, you are right in the fact that many people are like this exist and life is not fair. My hatred is just a personal preference. I can see a lot of people answering your question with a yes... which says a lot about people in general. Most people are ass holes and that's life.
In the USA, that is the general perception, as that's how it's also stated on the little envelopes we get in the pew and the blurb pastors put in their bulletins.
How does a self-driving truck refill its gas tank without human intervention?
I mean, consider the alternative of being unemployed. How many people out of work would be infinitely better off with a do nothing job while they search.

It's possible to sell yourself when you've been unemployed, so surely it's got to be easier when you have a job no matter how meaningless.
Isn't that what pay is for? If you care about something but your programmer doesn't, then you pay them to start caring about it?
90% less human mistakes.
It's like tragedy of commons for management. The manager gets nothing by enforcing corporate rules on his team. But not enforcing them usually doesn't cost them anything while improving team morale, good will and in most cases retention, productivity.

I see many managers strictly follow up on logging leaves or restricting work from homes or enforcing release deadlines as if it personally costs them something while usually enforcement is just discretionary. The managers who have figured this out usually have happier teams.
Arthur Koestler’s life embodied the existential dilemmas of our age (2007)
> Also ironically, we've had professional UX and CX designers work on my software creations who have cut a lot of these things off the interface and functionality as 'unnecessary cruft'.

As a UX designer, that pains me. The only "unnecessary cruft" I've ever removed was stuff the CEO asked for but tested abysmally with users. We launched it, then quietly removed it a month or two later after they were able to show it off to whomever they were trying to impress.
Only if your win is continuing devolution of the middle class.
I'm sure someone's working on telepresence which kicks in when the AI's getting confused.
Their webpage shows 15 engineering job openings in Silicon Valley: https://plus.ai/join/
I work in the public sector (higer ed) as a SysAdmin but I'm very young w/o my own family or anything tieing me down but I can relate to the sentiment.

> are there any companies out here on HN [...]

I think it really comes down to what your credentials and experience are; the private sector is much more competative (I'm shocked how many non-technical or only semi-technical people work in IT in the public sector) and you're kind of asking for the holy grail of jobs - remote, good compensation, and engaging.

Personally, I feel this is the biggest risk/negative to public sector jobs. They typically aren't breaking new ground so gaining the experience that the private sectors values is difficult. This compounds the longer you work in the public sector.

If I was in your position this is how I would approach it.

1. Update your resume and try to see how competative you can make it; you can pick & choose the projects and skills from those 12 years that you think companies would value.
2. Identify gaps in your resume, most likely these gaps are the very thing you believe you are missing out on such as large/interesting software development projects, modern development & team paradigms (DevOps, newer languages, etc.)
3. Find open source projects that match these gaps and spend ~1 year learning the ropes and contributing. This will show that you're serious about your goals and have the talent to achieve them. And, most importantly, it sepertes you from the majority of people wearing your shoes.
4. Along this time and after, reach out to any place that is looking to grow. It may even still be public sector but not all public sector is equal just like a lot of private sector IT isn't going anywhere if it's not their core business.

Even though this may sound long winded and pessimistic, I think that experience + catching on on some modern technologies is enough to be competative for junior dev. position that recent, but highly talented college grads are able to obtain.
What would you recommend then?

Dockerfiles are super useful in a source code repository and has saved me a ton of time.
yep, should include a hotel room
Spokane vs. the Border Patrol
That would be quite the feat given that I70 goes to neither of those states.

I80 goes SF to NJ, but no single interstate will take you from SF to NYC proper.
It's not a very big deal.

It's a little bit bigger of a deal because this was their second going around due to being misconfigured for landing.
> URL was deprecated in favor of URI before some of you were born.

It hasn't been deprecated, it's still in use in the standard library[1][2][3] and they don't offer additional classes that accept URIs.

> Easy to be a harsh judge now but back when java was first developed...

They've made no effort over 11 major versions to diminish its use beyond a brief note that encoding is easier with URIs. There's not even a warning on the equals or hashCode method, let alone the class documentation, it just quietly mentions that it's resolving a name. There's no way people are finding out that you should avoid URL except through lore.

[1]: https://docs.oracle.com/en/java/javase/12/docs/api/java.base...

[2]: https://docs.oracle.com/en/java/javase/12/docs/api/java.base...

[3]: https://docs.oracle.com/en/java/javase/12/docs/api/java.base...
I just sold my google home mini for $10...never trusting these devices inside my home anymore
Maybe my British English is hindering communication of my point here, because by "private car" I meant "car for private personal i.e. non-commercial use"

as I've noted elsewhere, in many areas there is no way around use of private cars due to the lack of population density.
Dec - 7xxx
Jan - 9xxx
Feb - 8xxx
Ask HN: Does anybody still earning from their blog(s)?
I propose required anonymous 3 month evaluations from all team members to be evaluated by a department that is unbiased.

Maybe even a computing system that raises alarms when a score falls too low to prevent corruption.

You gotta balance this right with more checks and balances though as you don't want employees overpowering management either. It's a complicated thing.

Some managers have
No, but that's because I saw this thread first. There was no point. And it would have been immediately deleted as soon as it asked for info had I downloaded it.
The tech giants that paid no Australian tax last year
I'm hoping that you're actually an attorney now!
If we are to get technical, Silicon Valley is not listening to your secret, workers in the rest of the country are.
A bar friend of mine is currently a truck driver. He's going to school to learn to be a network engineer.

Retraining is a really important part of our modern reality. The idea that we can simply turn off the tap of advancing technology so that the hardest working, lowest paid workers can continue to toil for peanuts is super shitty. There are some incredibly intelligent people who stumbled in their development who really deserve a second chance at jobs that aren't ass.
I’d rather invest in just that company, one that can continue reinvesting profits in itself at attractive returns year in and out. I can sit back and let compounding work it’s magic ( although at some point in my life I will switch from a net producer to a net consumer and opt for cash ). In cases where a company does not need all the cash it generates to continue its growth or does not have growth prospects ( not necessarily a bad thing), then I’d rather have cash to invest more productively elsewhere.
“in the absence of a tight coupling between profit and payouts (either buybacks or dividends) the value of a stock becomes detached from the value of the company, and approaches pure opinion.”

I think I can agree with that. Whenever I hear someone say that a stock is overvalued because it’s market cap is 15 or 20 times sales, I always ask so what? Who says 15 to 20 is too high. Why not 100 or some arbitrary number? I mean, the stock has no dividend and they never have done buybacks and you aren’t going to get a piece of their sales in the form of a paycheck! Why should you care what multiple the market cap is over sales??!!

It’s all opinion. You are just valuing it based on what other analysts think is the “right” multiple.

Sometimes I wish the stock market worked like a blind bidding auction. You can’t see the current price nor the other bids. And nobody is allowed to publish any articles expressing their opinions on any stock.
Do you do anything with Microsoft Office, including Outlook? Virtually any routine task with it can be automated without additional software.
In theory, but it turns out that most software products are most significantly just systems of social control. The economics of it don't work out; I can't pay the military industrial complex to value my life. I don't have that kind of money.
imo the open req for an auto tech is a tell that they either have a low key shop or are building a shop out in sv
Preppr – Scheduler for instagram, Facebook and Twitter
Sorry, but I absolutely hate this. Especially considering we're talking about businesses. It's crazy that in this thread the consensus is that you have to manage people and relationships at the expense of being pragmatic and exposing the truth.

Sometimes, especially in the startup world, decisions need to be made because it's make or break. And if your boss is wholly incompetent and they're the ones calling the shots, they will take the entire company down with them. Or worse: you get blamed for their failures and then you get sacked.

I've seen it happen multiple times in my career and I'll gladly speak the truth and get fired or forced to leave than sit around and watch an incompetent leader run the entire company to the ground while I stand idly by, doing grunt work and fighting all of the fires they create.
But that isn't what the article talked about either (A European company did do a run like that a while though).

It did talk about "level 4 autonomy" based on a single drive with no disengagements (they mentioned they'd made a lot of drives but didn't mention their disengagement rate overall), doesn't sound like "achieving level 4" autonomy either-either.
@poniko How did you convert typescript into some hex strings js file?
Not really. Labor is a constraint that has kept truly dominant players from taking over the industry.

Without that, trucks are no different than cable companies, airlines, or other capital intensive businesses. They’ll consolidate over time into oligopoly. Whatever efficiency gains appear will be eaten up by the lack of market forces.
Early Windows (probably up to and including XP) did a lot of these things right. But now Microsoft is starting to go against their own recommendations.
Amazing. Which font is used in the logo?
Honestly this article misses my main request as a user:

1. Software should be free of bugs. At the very least, updates should not introduce new bugs.

2. Software shouldn't phone home. Ever. If I want to submit a bug report I will submit one through the usual OS channels, and I will give my feedback through your feedback button.

3. If you are a web service don't ever popup banners/tips/chat windows/whatever. Put links to them and I will click on them if I want. If you pop up a modal asking for my e-mail address I am leaving immediately.

4. Assuming you are doing well on #1, you shouldn't need to release updates on an hourly cadence. If there is a security vulnerability release a fix ASAP, but for new features bundle them together and release annually for mature software or quarterly/semiannually for software that is still being finished.

I mean having a color scheme that is pleasant to look at is nice, but I would rather you just use my system settings in the first place. What I care about is stability and that the software puts my interests, as a user, first.
David Gerard presents himself differently in his book than how he acts in real life. In the words of Brendan Eich, David is a "real piece of work".

For the record, we are taking about the guy who created the Bitcoin article on RationalWiki back in 2011.

PROOF: https://rationalwiki.org/w/index.php?title=Bitcoin&oldid=819...

He's also an admin on Wikipedia and claims to be a "subject matter expert" on cryptocurrency which he uses to get around his obvious conflict of interest.

Here's what he had to say about Ethereum:

>I believe Ethereum's codebase is based on the Bitcoin codebase (though I don't have a cite), so it's a fork of that (as most altcoins are). Hypothetically you could do blockchain software that wasn't, but that's not relevant here. The actual blockchain generated from this is separate - David Gerard (talk) 12:10, 19 March 2016 (UTC)

Yeah, a real subject matter expert who can't be bothered to do two minutes of research.

Stay away from this clown.
My Vanguard account is showing 11.2% yearly return over the past 10 years. You need to take some risk.
I'm no expert, but it seems likely to me that there should be an infinite amount of mathematically consistent "theories" to describe a given system. Iff the "theories" have no more predictive power than the rules of the system itself ( they may make predictions but unless they are testable they could describe non existent things and you wouldn't know).
You're a bitter guy or what? I'm sorry you were treated that way, but you know there are good people out there.
> Now I'm just imagining some sort of steampunk wood-burning airplane.

Almost there https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wood_gas

"Flight attendants will resume service in just a moment, after they throw another tree trunk into the wood gas generator"
^ this is a great comment, and speaks to the reality. as cars came to prominence a whole host of supporting industry developed, creating jobs. it seems like some of those jobs required more technical training than the jobs they replaced.
Is that MVVM or like Razor in asp.net core?
For better or worse, millions of truck drivers are going to be displaced. Just like the way robots replaced manufacturing jobs.

The best plan is to prepare, like Yang and others are saying: https://www.yang2020.com/policies/trucking-czar/

So we can soften the blow.
Yeah that doesn't make much sense to me. Local brands of butter made with local dairy are popular in Pennsylvania. It's alarming to think how environmentally inefficient shipping butter two thousand miles must be.
This was the hardest lesson for me to learn. I succeed at solving problems by being stubborn, but stubbornness is the problem.

Get out. Get out fast and clean, if you can, fast, if you can't. Clean is secondary.

There is a whole world of projects that value competence. They deserve it far more than these bozos.
Yes. You are right R&D offices are in China. US HQ in Cupertino. It only started in 2016...so I guess most of the AI R&D already developed in China prior.
Why does it need to be without human intervention? A gas station attendant on major trucking routes is a pretty easy solution until some autonomous docking standard is developed.
No doubt. Robin Williams, undoubtedly one of the great masters of our times, killed himself.
My dad got a regular PSA test from his old doctor. But that doctor retired, he got a new doctor, moved, got a new doctor again, and the guidance changed, recommending against annual PSA tests. Then my dad developed some back pain. Took it easy, went to the doc, did physical therapy, etc., but it just got worse. Turns out, he had (has) stage IV prostate cancer, with several tumors along his spine and was on the precipice of MSSC before he received a correct diagnosis at age 66. His PSA was north of 80.

The good news is that treatment has shrunk the tumors dramatically and he's mostly back to normal. The bad news is that he still has stage IV prostate cancer. It'd have been great to have had it caught earlier.
>> If you need a safety driver 100% of the time, the net gain in efficiency is 0%.

If this trial period helps us improve the technology and eventually remove the safety driver after 1, 2, or 10yrs, that is a huge gain. What is the rush? -- every technology takes time to perfect. Lets judge the technology once it has had time to mature.
A Theory of Pervasive Error
It's a good argument for a carbon tax.
Dang. I asked my job for a PluralSight account or if they have one and they said they'll "look into it."
My example was pretty contrived– I would also expect some sort of flag representing the state of the job in that case.

My point was just that the absence of a value is distinct from an empty value. And that intentionally modeling those 2 cases separately can remove a lot of ambiguity.
Possibly the most thoughtful comment I've ever read on this site :)
I'm having this problem too. It's hard for me to stay silent. I tell my friends about the things I do or say and they tell me that I'm just giving away all my intentions and political moves.

I don't manipulate people and I'm told I'm extremely straightforward. I'm not a hero though but when politics affects me like it always inevitably does, I don't play the game, I'm emotionally unable to.
Watch out, especially, for Death March assignments. A Death March is an unmistakeable, clear message: move on. Move now.
If the truck still requires a human for some tasks (intra-city, fuelling, etc.) but can be rated to legally drive itself for most of the trip, then the human could sleep / eat / etc. during those times they're not required. This would presumably let them avoid minimum stationary rest times etc. since they could get a full rest of sleep while the truck drives itself (on sufficiently long journeys).

For owner-operators who live out of their vehicle anyway and are more concerned about getting work than sleeping in a hotel somewhere this could dramatically increase the volume of work they can take on (at least until fully autonomous trucks become widely available and humans are completely deprecated as truck drivers).

From that perspective it would be more efficient, not 90% but there would be significant gains.
If the fuel is synthetic anyway, uh can be made better than kerosene.

Also, we have a huge amount of free nuclear energy, daily delivered from Sun, about 1 kW / m². It is nit stable enough for electric baseload, but, depending on the process, may be adequate for fuel synthesis.

North of Sahara may become a primary source of jet fuel, given its vast amounts of insolation, cheapness of the land, and access to seawater. Not exactly tomorrow, though.
> Under the direction of Treasurer Josh Frydenberg, the unit's first priority will be inquiring into the tech companies' advertising technology and algorithms.

This seems like a weird thing to focus on. What exactly are they looking to find out? It's not like it's the advertising algorithms that are at fault, its the content of the ads that's the problem as we've seen by the content of the Conservative party's ads in the UK election (who use the same PR company as the current Australia government)

Anyone know how any of this is actually enforceable?
Sorry, I didn't mean it as a general swipe at all designers, and I am sure you are great at what you do. Specifically I am talking about the advice such as "Tell me what this does before I click on it" in the article.

I tend to always put a description in small print under a button or option (or use a hover tooltip) to explain what a certain button will do when clicked (e.g. a button labelled "Assign Checklist", then underneath "Clicking this will assign a brand new checklist to the employee(s) you nominate". Or perhaps under an entry field for a mobile phone number, I specify in small print that the number should include the international dialling code etc.).

These are examples of things that two different designers said to remove completely so the interface could be 'cool and clean' with minimal distractions. We did see an uptick in support queries about a few things after users inadvertently selected something at the wrong time or entered things incorrectly and wondered why they couldn't send text messages etc.

On the flipside, there were a few screens with 4 or 5 lines of explanatory lines at the top or bottom that we removed and had nearly nil impact, or that users preferred. So I can see the necessity of lessening the things that users will read, but sometimes, I wish designers would go a little deeper and see when something that doesn't look as 'pretty' is still useful to keep.