skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Or how about tarot cards for interviews? After I conduct an interview I read the tarot cards to figure out how to judge the candidate.

I wonder how many tech employers know for sure that their in-person interview process has a higher accuracy than this one. If you've passed a resume filter / internal referral and can demonstrate that you're not simply lying about being able to code (or whatever the job is) does the rest of the in-person interview reliably, provably add signal?

That's sort of the implied argument of the article - that we deal with complex systems so complex that systematic and rational debugging isn't obviously higher-signal than picking things at random.
I enhance pull request quality on GitHub and Azure DevOps
Sqlite-utils 2.0: real upserts
Why Koreans Have Blue Sponges on Their Cars
Kudos to the author for sticking with it, and making a contribution to the field. His persistence will serve him well in his Ph.D. (provided he gets in this round).

He's also right that AI/ML is particularly competitive for PhD admissions. I'd venture to say that a CS PhD in AI is probably the most sought after credential in the world right now (compared to a MBA or MD), and one that each university can only absorb a few new students per year.

I'm chairing phd admissions at Brown CS, and see more than a third of all PhD applications being AI related. So our AI-related faculty are able to be very very selective.
Why would you care if you're not from the US? Get the healthcare and go back to whatever awesome place you come from with proper health care and be grateful you don't live here. US debt collectors cannot follow you outside the country.
> Sure, and then you end up with linux.

You mean the most successful software project in the history of mankind?
fair points- clearly my use cases are less demanding
Launchbadge/Sqlx: 🧰 The Rust SQL Toolkit
And even if they aren't supported by default in your IDE/editor, they're perfect hooks for recursive grep. A simple

grep -rn TODO *

and you see a nice list of all of them, with files and lines.
From this thread, I feel a lot of people misunderstand what a scaleable system means for a scale-up startup or BigTechCo. It doesn’t mean cost-efficiency. It means the ability to solve scalability issues at 10x, 100x, 1000x load by throwing money at it (aka buying more instances/machines).

Yes, John Carmack is right that a bunch of scaleable systems that see reasonable load, with well-understood traffic requirements could be rewritten more efficient ways. But how long would it take? How much would the extra work cost? And what would happen if traffic goes up, to another 10x, 100x? Can you throw still throw money at that problem, with this new and efficient system already in-place?

One of my memorable stories comes from an engineer I worked with when we rewrote our payments system[1]. He told me how at a previous payments company, they had a system that was written in this kind of efficient way, and needed to run on one machine. As the scale went up, the company kept buying bigger hardware, at one point buying the largest commercially available mainframe (we’re talking the cost being in the multi-millions for the hardware). But the growth was faster and they couldn’t keep up. Downtime after downtime followed at peak times, making hundreds of thousands of losses per downtime.

They split into two teams. Team #1 kept making performance tweaks on the existing hardware to try to get performance wins, and increase reliability during peak load. Team #2 rewrote their system in a vertically scaleable way. Team #1 struggled and the outages kept getting worse. Team #2 delivered a new system quickly and the company transitioned their system over.

What they gained was not cost savings: it was the ability to (finally!) throw money at their growth problems. Now, when traffic went up, they could commission new machines and scale with traffic. And they could eventually throw away their mainframe.

Years later, they started to optimise the performance of the system, making millions of $ in savings. The new system - like the old one - cost millions to run. But that was besides the point. Finally, they stopped bleeding tens of millions in lost revenue per year due to their inability to handle sudden, high load.

It’s all about trade-offs. Is cost your #1 priority and are you okay spending a lot of development time on optimising your system? Go with C++, Erlang or some other, similarly efficient language. Is product-market fit more important, with the ability to have high uptime, that you can buy? Use the classic, horizontally scaleable distributed systems stack, and worry about optimising later, when you have stable traffic and optimisation is more profitable over product development.

[1] https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/distributed-architecture-...
Thanks a lot for that blog post (and the update)! That was super insightful and interesting to me.

Setting up a screen reader and actually experiencing the way a blind person views the web has been on my list of things to do for the longest time, but ditched time and again in favor of the latest hotness in our industry.

Reading bits like “crime against humanity” in relation to improperly used form elements are a good reminder of the responsibility we have when it comes to the semantic output of our work, which makes me wonder:

How usable are interface-heavy reactive UIs to you? How - if at all - are screen readers picking up on changing parts of an interface?

Which brings me back to setting up a screen reader myself... Is there a guide you know of to set up a VM to experience the web like a blind person does, or is installing a screen reader in combination with a regularly set up browser fine for accessibility testing?

Cheers and... I wish you all the best for your dev-career! I am super impressed.
Tesla delivers its first 'Made in China' cars
Something I've seen Jonathan Blow do that I like is tag things // @Speed when doing a quick to type but slow to run kind of first pass.

It seems nice to have tags for places to jump where the improvements are obvious, rather than hoping to just remember/spot them later.
One day I will be a CEO
A shill scientist was paid to promote high sugar, low fat diet a few decades ago by the sugar lobby.

Just like every other food paper quoted in the press.
It should be fairly easy to put together a Raspberry Pi as a stingray detector?
It was for me as well. I'd love for them to thruline with southwest, but it wouldn't make sense.
But at least I have more control over what my computer does when it connects to the internet than I do over what my phone does.
If there aren't enough homes and too much demand then there will always be people priced out, the remaining question is who. The same is true for all the finite capacity of regional services. Given that everyone wants a musical chair, we can rest assured that for whatever capacity it shall be filled.
> When the file is next edited by the next individual.

That usually means you add a separate goal and focus to your ticket to be committed inan unrelated issue, which in some projects is frowned upon as it avoids tracking, context, or auditing.
Because it's trivial to add special highlighting to such notes in most editors and IDEs. Hell, a lot of them come with a configurable list of these comment keywords already built in.
(u meant they rewrote in a horizontal scaling way... Add more machines to a pool to scale)
> I'd be interested how this relates to melancholy

Melancholy pertains to one’s internal state. It is a state of being, and one that accepts the circumstances as they are. (It also contains notes of inevitability.)

Wehmut is more active. The outcome is evitable. One accepts them, and the pain they will cause, but perseveres, usually towards a brighter outcome. At worst, it’s Sisyphean with an unknown ending.
Wouldn't this translate quite well as stoicism?

"the endurance of pain or hardship without the display of feelings and without complaint."
Apologies for the rant, but boy do I hate 1:1s -- maybe even more than daily stand-ups. It's the epitome of cargo-cult corporate Kool-aid†. If this article doesn't convince you that one-on-ones are nonsense, I don't know what will. Let's see what the author, a proponent of 1:1s, uses them on:

1) Personal habits and self-improvements

Personal habits and self-improvement are (at best) tangentially related to your professional life. Are you seriously saying I should be talking to my manager about my struggles trying to go to the gym more often? About my passion for painting? Or that side-project I'm trying to get off the ground? More often than not, this seems like professional suicide. Your manager is not your friend.

2) Project management

Unfortunately, this is basically status quo. Yes, most one-on-ones will devolve into PM discussions -- what's getting done, when's it getting done, what's the progress of X or Y, etc. Why one-on-ones aren't really the place to talk about these things is because I already have weekly status meetings with my team, daily stand-ups, and monthly roadmap check-ins, also with my team. So if you talk about project management in a 1:1, it's a complete waste of time.

3) Communication

Author writes: "In addition to improving the form of my communication, I also learned a lot about how to improve my communication habits..."

Most people learn this by high school. I mean, if you're a functioning adult at a grown-up job, some decorum, emotional intelligence, and context come with the territory. But then again, point taken: most of us do work in tech. I don't know about you, but I don't need a weekly 30-minute lesson in communication. My parents already did a pretty good job: I'm polite, responsive, and professional.

4) Alignment

I'm not sure how conflict resolution does anyone any good unless all conflicting parties are present. If I've got a disagreement with X, it seems we should probably hash it out in a meeting with X (sure, maybe with a manager present), but what do I know. And wait.. you need a regular one-on-one meeting on the books for this? How often do you get in conflicts at work?

5) Uncertainties

Author writes: "for instance, occasionally I’d get worried about some strategically important project elsewhere in the company because they’d forgotten to announce progress reports on it..."

Why? Why are you worried about things you can't control in a company you don't own? Besides, I'm not sure how your manager -- who also might have no idea -- could ease your worries. Either way, this also seems like a waste of time for one-on-ones (and, to be frank, a non-issue altogether).

†The fact that the author believes corporate-style one-on-ones are part of the key to a healthy relationship is, in my opinion, doubly offensive. A relationship is about empathy, love, care, and longevity. Besides, a one-on-one is defined by being run by your supervisor. What he was doing with his girlfriend wasn't even technically a one-on-one: there's no power asymmetry there.
My whole country has been blanketed in public WiFi access points as they were included in all but the most high end tiers of consumer broadband installations by all ISP's. Any device with WiFi can already get to the Internet regardless of your own network firewall settings using these.
Yes - thank you! Corrected.
> Wouldn't this translate quite well as stoicism?

Stoicism accepts discomfort for its own sake, and the futility in fighting it. Wehmut is less fatalistic. It is about experiencing unavoidable pain in pursuit of a worthy goal.
While that’s true, this is the same issue I have with Hadoop clusters which can easily be replaced by a single server and some grepping (well almost;))

Most companies or startups or even bigtech are not big enough for these problems.

All these complexities are horrible, but good for the AMZN stock price, as devs keep spooning up a ton of VMs
What: A terminal tool to check what is taking up your bandwidth
> “this is a thing which is okay during development but absolutely must be changed/fixed before shipping this product”.

These should not reach the master codebase and should thus be fixed before you merge your code into it.
Does creating weapons of mass destruction count for profit, political gain, both or something else?
Hasn’t Alzheimer’s been referred to as diabetes type III? It’s inflammation of the brain, and eating a low inflammation diet (low carb, no sugar, fasting) is the best thing one can do to drastically reduce getting it.
SO is really not a great example of a high traffic site. 5500 req/sec of mostly read only traffic is not that crazy at all, and their hardware footprint is incredibly over-provisioned for the workload. I don't really think their example stands well here.

For example, at work, our entire analytics ingest workload (HTTP) for a few hundred million users runs on 8 core VMs on GCP, written in Rust/Go, each node doing ~40k events/second.

Our RTC infra sustains >1m PPS per node on 4 core 3.9ghz 2014-2017 xeons.
We used to do static asserts with a preprocessor macro that typedefed an array with size expressed as: (your condition) ? 1 : -1. Point being, static asserts have the use case you want them to have; I see no reason to not have a TODO macro that expands to static_assert(false, "...").
Let’s not forget schadenfreude!
> Against foreign militaries

I'm not sure why you started with this. Your odds are way better if it's against your own military, especially in the West. There's going to be a ton of defectors. Have you met anyone from the South? Those same people who are extremely anti government are usually vets. This isn't just speculation either, there's very clear examples.

But something people constantly forget is that you can't rule the dead. People are a resource. You need them to produce your economy, make your food, tax, etc. But there's also an argument here on the converse side, to make your people rich to make your ruling class even richer. But short term thinking...
Exifcleaner: Cross-platform desktop app to clean image metadata
I'm not even German, but I know this...

Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell

Awesome YouTube channel, BTW. ;)
Insofe: A Right Mix of Industry-Academia Collaboration
As a native German speaker, I wouldn't translate "mut" in Wehmut as courage. Here it rather is the same as "mood" (and the English word has the same roots). Like in "Anmut", "Dehmut", "Unmut" etc.

So Wehmut literally would be something like "woeful mood" and you could use it more or less synonymous with melancholia (or nostalgia for example).
I prefer to minimize tribal knowledge of all forms. This does incentivize deletion over "it might be somewhere/in someone's mind", but it also incentivizes moving the knowledge out of the jungle and into something longer lived and searchable in a broader context. How much I prefer the minimization depends on the size/stage of the company, though... At early startups for instance, most tribal knowledge will take care of itself by being forgotten -- and no harm either since the subject matter it applied to is no longer relevant, that was x months ago and nearly everything has changed.

For larger companies, though, it's really nice to be able to pull up documentation (glorious if you can even use a public Google search instead of some intranet lookup or README) about something, instead of having to go on a safari to try and find someone who knows someone who might remember why X, find out they don't remember (or don't remember enough/don't have time for you until Later), and having to figure it out from scratch yourself like you hoped to avoid. Not having to do that for everything is such a nice experience that I'd like to encourage more of it where I can.

Coming to the specifics you highlighted, "there's probably a better way to do this", "maybe look at this edge case", to me those are topics for the code review. They can be rephrased as questions for the reviewer(s): "Do you think this could be done in a better way?", "Should we try and test this edge case or does it matter?" The answers are in the review, and possibly in follow up work items tracked by something.

Code reviews can contain a lot of useful knowledge. If your commits aren't trivially linked to a review, it's worthwhile to spend the extra 10 seconds and manually link them at the end for posterity. If you aren't doing reviews, or the reviews are crap, oh well, you asked and no one answered/cared and that's now visible. Don't leave the question in the code.
Literally: briefly said
>I have no trouble getting started, I have trouble stopping.

I can relate. It has its pros and cons. There are definitely days I wish I could turn the ambition off or at least down, but it's stuck on high. The upside is life's never boring. The downside is it's always non-stop.
Really? I found quite the opposite to be true. Once we had drinks with our manager discussing our lives in general and it gave him a much better understanding of how we approach things generally in life and he was able to get so much more out of us , not my manipulating, but rather by being straight forward about the way we think and how we can open our minds to various opinions.
Of course he did'nt have to do it, and of course the wrong person could have taken advantage (like by manipulating) but being a great manager as he is, it definitely boosted the team productivity and cohesion
I've been struggling to find an equivalent for 'overengineered' in German - there's verschlimmbessern, a portmanteu verb of 'verbessern' (improve) and 'schlimm' (bad), it's what you use when you want to improve something but the end-product is worse.

However, German tech (to me!) has a overengineering problem, not a verschlimmbessern problem, there's nothing being improved. Just look at modern German cars, impossible to fix yourself, very expensive to have serviced, for no real gain, pure overengineering. Is there a word?

(edit: there's an opposite for OP's 'Lebensmut' -
'Lebensmüdigkeit', literally 'tired of being alive', i.e. suicidal)
https://semiengineering.com/interdependencies-complicate-pow...
Read this: https://thebigfatsurprise.com/

The website initially may look like yet another diet approach, but this is actually a serious publication. And a good read.
I think it's a mistranslation, though. The "mut" in "wehmut" does not mean courage. Looking up the etymology, the word "wehmut" seems to come from "wehmütig", which literally means something like being in a painful state of mind.
Sounds implausible to me. In their useful (active) mode these things emit. The FCC (not to mention the other TLAs) can easily track this shit down and shut it down. Except of course if those are NSA/FBI/CIA stingrays.
This is not how Wehmut is used in German, sorry. As nice as it sounds. ;)
Both, probably.
I don’t really think it is 100% synonymous with melancholia, but that’s probably (sadly?) the way it used today. Wehmut is a little bit of a rare and oldfashioned word which got fashionable in the romantic era through (among others) works of Goethe and got modern reuse in the fantastic Donald Duck translations of Erika Fuchs.
Show HN: Refer friends to startups. Get paid when they get hired
Ask HN: Any books like Liars Poker about working in tech / SV?
I really enjoyed Michael Lewis’ The Big Short and was googling around to see if there are any similar books written about working at FAANG or similar company, minus the economic collapse of course. Haven’t found anything promising yet... any tips?

I am planning to read Skunk Works but that’s not exactly what I’m looking for.
I usually say überkompliziert.
What if the intruder isn't perpetrating this "most likely" case of theft? The other possibilities aren't exactly great alternatives for the occupant. That seems like a very risky gamble to me.
I guess it depends on your personality. Fear-based tactics don't usually work well on me, they just make me anxious about what I am supposedly going to lose. Once I realize that there is in fact nothing to lose, I can relax and handle things effortlessly.
I actually would not read too much into these. The German language builds heavily composed words. To me intuitively they mean mostly just the translation presented in the post and I would rarely reflect about the origin. There might be slight changes in connotation from the English, but I doubt it says all too much about the German using them (at least I can tell that about me when using the word wehmut). Particularly the stem "mut" is much to ubiquitous and mostly meaningless to the speaker these days.

Sure it is interesting but one can also dig into the etymology of any other language...
I had a vague idea that perhaps there is a difference between a Toyota truck and a Stinger Anti-aircraft missile.

But yes, I see we can't possible make that distinction.
Tech is enabling dictators, genocides, election tampering, massive theft, massive surveillance, addiction, etc. It's hardly doing well. Unless your definition of doing well is a few people profiting from the suffering of the masses. In that case, you're right tech is doing wonderful and we don't need government intervention. We could regulate tech to get this under control. Or we can deregulate medicine and forget about sanitizing surgical tools or sterilizing this and that. I'm sure the healthcare providers will do it themselves without being forced to. What could possibly go wrong with expecting healthcare providers to pay for necessary things they do not deem necessary for budget purposes? The plan is genius.
The problem is if you become so sick that you cannot leave the US. That can be a tragic situation.

That kind of situation can be avoided with International SOS insurance, on top of travel insurance.

Basically, it is medevac (helicopter or small aircraft) insurance that repatriates you back to your home country.
Yes, you are right. That said, the COST paper's presumption is that not every "big data" problem is big (petabyte size), that most probably fit in a single system's disk & memory.
Ask HN: Recommend a fun memoir about working in tech?
I really enjoyed Michael Lewis’ The Big Short and was googling around to see if there are any similar books written about working at FAANG or similar company, minus the economic collapse of course. Haven’t found anything promising yet... any tips?

I am planning to read Skunk Works but that’s not exactly what I’m looking for.
According to Wikipedia, melancholy included the present in it's reflection.
I.e. you remember how great that house you grew up in was, and how your current apartment is terrible in comparison

Wehmut on the other hand doesn't need a current reflection... Which is much harder to find an example for, which is probably also why it's basically never used irl

While the memory is kinda painful, your personal mood doesn't necessarily have to become negative from wehmut either, while it's easy to write like that... Good luck finding a situation in which this applies.

I know the definition but really struggled to find an applicable example. Maybe if you're recalling a broken leg some time ago and how hard life was with it? It still feels like we compared it to the present, honestly. We just didn't spell it out.
You totally can. Many people do. The people that do aren't the target audience of these kind of articles. It's simply not relevant to them. And that's OK.
From the point of view of being in the middle of working with some piece of code, it's the issue tracker that's out-of-band! Also, a lot of those TODO entries tend to not be good entries into issue tracker (do you want to track "add extra error checks foobar at line 213 in quux.c"), and they tend to be very localized to the area of code they're left in - which means that, unless your issue tracker supports some way of encoding coordinates in files that survives changes to those files, future people modifying a piece of code are very unlikely to see those notes if they're not left in the code itself.