skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Oh sure, you can solve the endless little meaningless problems that plague the day-to-day life of programmers everywhere, but the source of these problems — defects at the engineering level — are effectively untouchable. Also untouchable are the systemic issues that cause each of these should-be-trivial-to-fix problems into 5–8 hour tasks.

That part of #4 is so true it hurts. Most of the software I use is full of brokenness and "WTF"s.

About a year ago: AWS Lamba supports Java. Sweet, should be easy. Oh but the command line tools are broken in several ways you won't discover until you try, find they're broken, google around for a while trying to figure out what's wrong, then realize it's not your fault when you find the relevant unfixed issues.

About three years ago: Well I'm writing an Android app so this Google Maps feature should be a piece of cake, I mean, Google makes the OS so surely Maps is amazing on here. Except. Wait. No. That cannot be right. It can't. The Android maps SDK is missing features that the Javascript version has? No. That doesn't make any sense. Oh. Here's a GH repo someone already made to provide a convenient interface from Android Java to the Javascript maps SDK for this exact reason. I mean I guess I don't have to write it myself now but seriously, this was a fucking waste of half my day for no good reason.

A few days ago: Debian installer is flat-out incapable of writing Grub correctly. Several tries, every reasonable combo possible, boot fails with missing OS every time. This ain't my first damn rodeo—something's wrong. Think it's maybe a UEFI issue. Force UEFI. Now my video card doesn't work. Because it's not UEFI compatible? Why dafuq is that even a thing? Open case, reset bios so I have a display again, install again just to be safe, boot to installer's recovery mode, mount, chroot, install grub manually and in precisely the way I'd told the installer to do it the first time, and without changing a damn thing about the config the installer had just written, and it's fine.

This is basically how everything goes every time I try to do anything with software at all. Which is my job. So this is my life.

Software is terrible.

[EDIT] in fact I can think of one area where my tools are consistently as shitty, broken, and unsuitable for their intended purpose as software usually is: it's when I cheap out on power or (especially) hand tools to try to save a buck.
I'm happy to have read this article as it has a different perspective on R than I am used to. My general take is that Python really is a better suited language for production workflows, while R is superb at interactive workflows. I love R, but chiefly for RMarkdown, Shiny, ggplot and obscure stats packages rather than large machine learning codebases. Here's why:

> Native data science structures.

DataFrames are often easier to use than Pandas. However, in production workflows we're often using more datatypes than DataFrames, and R is weaker there. For example:

* Lists must be accessed with `[[ ]]`, instead of `[ ]`. I've seen many silent bugs slip through due to this.
* There are 3 competing implementation of classes. This results in classes being mystical and rarely understood.
* R is a Lisp 2. Variables and functions may share the same name. This leads to confusing errors.
* Catching specific types of errors can be awkward.
* Adding elements to a list iteratively is slow [1]

> Non-Standard Evaluation

This can be handy while quickly working in RStudio, but it's not easy to maintain. I've seen code that failed because it specified `f(!!variable)` instead of `f(!!!variable)`. I like R's formula notation, but I'm happy enough with sklearn's API that I don't miss it.

> The glory of CRAN

CRAN is not set up for production. It makes pinning versions very difficult [2]. Many people resort to using MRAN, which is a Microsoft supported snapshot of CRAN at a specific time, so a dev can just pretend they are installing software as if it were 6 months ago. I have seen MRAN go down multiple times [3]. Not to mention, the owner of CRAN is notoriously prickly [4] and packages will not be accepted to CRAN unless the maintainer ensures their software runs on Solaris [5]. Hadley Wickham has done so much for the community with `devtools` and his books. He gets a lot of praise, but it's not misplaced.

> Functional programming

Okay, this is actually pretty great. Hooray functional programming! Not totally related, but R has a great polymorphic dispatch of functions, which really can't be undersold (the way automatic documentation generates for this is kisses fingers)

Ultimately, R is a cool language. In interactive settings, I would rather work in RStudio than Jupyter any day. I like RMarkdown better than Notebooks for sharing analysis, too. If there is a specific Bayesian model necessary only available in R, that's fine, wrap it in a container. But the rest of the ETL and pipeline code feels easier to write and maintain in Python.

[1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/17046336/here-we-go-agai...
[2] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/17082341/installing-olde...
[3] https://github.com/Microsoft/microsoft-r-open/issues/51
[4] https://www.reddit.com/r/rstats/comments/2t5oqp/dont_use_the...
[5] http://www.deanbodenham.com/learn/r-package-submission-to-cr...
Now I want to see a port to the Low Level Virtual Machine
Personal attacks will get you banned here, regardless of how wrong another commenter is or you feel they are. Please review the site guidelines and stick to the rules when posting.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
That is true, but the trick is how to separate the hype from the gold, which is almost as much superstition as science. I would disagree that Python didn't have a hype phase; there were comics like this[1] after all.

[1] https://xkcd.com/353/
I believe that blue menu is doshell
> guys who would be considered attractive and desirable in most other locations

Your conception of what women are looking for in a man might not hew as closely to reality as you think.
Intel's crappy caching software is locked to only work with certain CPUs, and/or requires certain things from the fake RAID controller.

NVMe Optane as a product just shows up as a small, fast drive. StoreMI works with it, even faster than Intel's stuff in some cases.
Maybe it's a stupid solution, but it'd be fun as hell to make.
The article failed to mention operators, which is the most interesting part of Kubernetes and where I see most of its future growth.

I hope to see the operator ecosystem grow to support more than just the management of existing open-source tools.
It's really more like a puzzle than something to be good or bad at.
My sister dragged me, kicking and screaming, to one of those new Walmart Neighborhood Markets. I was shocked to learn that it didn't suck. They definitely invested in their self checkout things (unlike Kroger). I even found some foods which didn't contain HFCS. I've been back a few times.
The book discussed in general at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=583164
I totally agree with this. I had a dream job vanish after just 3 months after two bad people came in. If that happens, just quit FAST if you can.
Sun is not Oracle. Oracle acquired Sun. 2006 is not now and the page you point to shows that Oracle do not always assert all things all the same all the time. I don't like API licence or copyright, so I am certainly not here to defend Oracle's case. The underlying point remains: if they claim they have an IPR right over the API, then their acceptance inward of use of Apache licensed API is not material to their IPR/Copyright claim.

Hypocracy does not negate legal rights (unfortunately)

What Sun did, does not alter what Oracle Claim. It might alter what binds them. I'm not a lawyer. If I was a lawyer, I would still be saying (sorry to be so repetitive) that the underlying story here, about the Apache API licence by Amazon, has virtually no material applicability to their case in law, even if it appears inconsistent.

The nearest I've seen anyone show me why its relevant, is the above comment about how Oracle seek an extension of their API rights, which would be in conflict with what the Apache licence inward for Amazon grants them. I absolutely concede that might play in their case, against what they seek. I just don't think its the giant "Ah-HA!" moment. Because. .. Hypocracy is not actually illegal per se.

I may demand you don't kill me, while (stupidly) denying I commit an offence killing you because they aren't the same. I may be held guilty of killing you but it wouldn't therefore make you innocent of trying to kill me, because the one does not negate the other.

Oracle may indeed wind up in breach of the Apache licence over the Amazon S3. Or.. they might cross licence it from Amazon in return for a RAND licence over their claims for the Java API, or hold-harmless or some payment in cash or kind.. Anything is possible. If Bezos hated Google enough, he might even come in on Oracles side.
Absolutely love Next.js (and Nuxt for Vue which was inspired by it), just for the routing alone which makes React routing feel so clunky.
as usual media only shows the opposing protests and completely blacked out the support rallies.

btw a couple of satire tweets and some specific situational tweets with a well known back story (like that tweet of the south indian actress Gayatri Raghuram confrontation with cadres of a rival political party etc) are used to concote some kind of false campaign. this accusation is not just untrue but plain stupid. as always I'm not surprised.
The Digital Antiquarian had a good article on this game in 2018: https://www.filfre.net/2018/06/another-world/
Reproducibility is referred to as a "crisis," but I'd like to know if it's really a new thing. What if we tried to replicate the studies that surrounded great developments such as electromagnetism or thermodynamics. Did those advances emerge from an unbroken series of reproducible studies, or from a tangle of good and bad results?

Before looking for root causes that invariably turn a cynical eye towards the motivations of scientists, let's make sure the effects don't precede the causes.
The Perfect Crime – Scientific Fraud in America
> someone put a website to advocate something like this to replace semver, forgot the url though

It's probably CalVer: https://calver.org/

As other commenters have said though, manufacturers probably don't want consumers to have a good idea of just how obsolete their equipment is. The current a|c|b|g|n alphabet soup is working out just fine for selling lots of equipment.

Also, there are likely to be actual manufacturing and engineering reasons why Wifi 2021 will only become widely available during 2024, and those are hard to get across to consumers too.
I personally switched over to Keypass a year ago when 1password switched over to their cloud solution. I just don't like the idea of my entire vault of passwords being stored on the cloud.

However, my dad needed a password manager recently and the cloud solution works well for him. I also don't have to worry about him not backing up his passwords/losing it all if he gets malware.
How can story points be used for that? To me that's only relevant in the short term. Can management be made to understand that velocity can be too high?

Edit: Expanding with my previous thoughts on this - as a software architect I've explained my role to management by saying it's like I work in an agile team, but the waterfall is in my head - someone needs to keep the architecture together and drive it towards green pastures where it keeps great flexibility for developing future anticipated features without giving up stability.
Just out of curiosity, why do you say "Assuming Trump is re-elected, my portfolio should hit the $1,000,000 mark within two years."?

Do you believe the stock market will get bad if he doesn't win the election? or is it the other way, i.e. if the does get re-elected, the market will be better so it will take you less than 2 years to reach your goal?

I've never heard this take before so I'm genuinely curious.
The GPL was created partly in reaction to copyright protection being extended to source code. Copyleft licenses subvert copyright by forcing all involved to do the opposite of what they'd normally do with a copyrighted work.

The real victory for humanity would be the end of copyright itself. Too much time is wasted on trying to understand and work around this fundamentally broken system.
> head hunter compensation report

You should ask for a refund. Senior engineers at FANG in the Bay Area will typically make over $100k/year in stock. Total compensation of $300k-$400k is pretty normal, and includes salary, stock, and bonus. Netflix is an exception; compensation is mostly or all in cash.

The flip side is that, even with $350k/year income, you probably still can't comfortably afford a nice 3-bedroom house in a good neighborhood to raise a family (unless you've already been working in the Bay for a while and saved up a big nest egg, or your spouse makes a similar amount and continues to work full time while you raise a family).

Since I moved to the Bay Area, I've realized the high salaries aren't worth it to me. If I were still in my twenties, I could make it work, but as it is, I'd end up paying a truly absurd amount of money for a small, over-priced house, and my entire paycheck would go towards paying the mortgage for the foreseeable future. So I'm looking to transfer to a non-Bay Area office ASAP, even if it means a pay cut.
At the risk of sounding pedantic, “former Egyptian engineer” sounds like he stopped being Egyptian at some point. Shouldn’t it be Egyptian former engineer?
Except it won't, dead plants decompose and release their carbon back in to the atmosphere whether you burn it or not. Coal comes from an age where atmospheric carbon was much higher and nothing had evolved to decompose wood, digging it up and burning it means a net increase, growing something and burning it is net neutral.
With the ability to reach Java, JavaScript, .Net, and Erlang runtimes, plus interop with many other languages via GraalVM, Clojure has incredible reach across runtimes, perhaps more than any other modern programming language, certainly among Lisps. That said, its pretty gnarly to try to navigate all of the implementation differences among platforms. I wonder if there is a subset of Clojure that is 'safe' to run on any of its supported environments.

This list is pretty long:
https://clojerl.github.io/differences-with-clojure/

For now, the JVM is the only way to get the full Clojure experience.
>Completely changed my relationship to my kid.

Had the same experience when I figured out to make offerings as A/B choices (and non-choices).

Instead of "Do you want broccoli?" It's: "Would you rather broccoli or cauliflower?"

Or the non-choice: "Do you want to eat your broccoli at the kitchen table or on the porch?"
I don't think Costa Rica is in SE Asia though..
Does America really give green cards for people to become “agile/scrum masters”
See for yourself: https://imgur.com/a/WvbZj9W

Search for "agile" or "scrum" in job title and "PERM" in case type:
https://icert.doleta.gov/index.cfm?event=ehLCJRExternal.dspLCRLanding
You want to see it? Spend some days watching https://reddit.com/r/learnprogramming/new until you've seen enough to recognise the common patterns, recommendations, requests, and reasons.
Please make your substantive points without personal swipes like "Get a grip". Those aren't allowed here, because of the degree to which they poison discussion. Your comment would be fine without that bit.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Based on your requirements, I think you would be able to withdraw the cash from the bank, put it into a briefcase and sink it to the bottom of the ocean in some "accident" :) You are right it's technically illegal to willingly deface currency, like melting pennies for copper.

Another idea is to find someone who will sell you something at face value, that they also acquired for face value, such as silver bars or copper bars or something of that nature.

In that scenario, the person who originally sold the metal to the guy who sells it to you will have made a profit, but not a very big one after accounting for the expense they went through to obtain it. This is one way I can think of that avoids the technical illegality of defacing currency.

But I would definitely put the cash in a shredder or burn it. It will be quite difficult to prove what you did with the cash-- you can just say you spent it on consumable goods like food, drinks, vacations, blah blah :)
"But at what rate do gasoline customers enter the store now? I suspect that rate is far lower than 5%."

Everywhere I've been from LA to halfway to Vegas usually has a fairly-crowded gas station. WAY more than 50% of people arriving go inside.
Study shows, cute puppies and fun GIFs promote positive emotions at work
Please don't take HN threads on generic flamewar tangents or into partisan battles. These are off topic on HN because they are predictable and tedious.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Do you mind talking specifics? So 50k/year to 150k? Or 120k to 360k/year?
I was still in school during the big crash, so you’re right, my experience may be colored by that. But I keep a pad that essentially allows me to be completely without income for at least 6 months without withdrawing from any accounts which incur penalties or are tied to stock market performance. I’ve done freelancing and could spin that back up. It would be harder to land contracts during a rough economy but often people who just fired their staff need short term contracts to keep the lights on and so there’s usually opportunities for something...

You’re right. I don’t know what it’s like to cobble together work during a downturn like that if I were to lose my primary job and be unable to find another. I would likely take the most fulfilling work I could find. Then when times were good I’d resume more fulfilling work. Just like I’ve done through out the time I’ve been in the field so far.

Given that we have been in a 12 year period of one of the largest tech expansions in the history of our industry, I don’t see why it makes any sense to argue that people shouldn’t be seeking fulfilling work now.
Wayback Machine Chrome extension now available (2017)
For starters, the GOP could instead try and figure out why black Americans vote overwhelmingly in favor of Democrat and update their policy stances to reflect that. Instead, they're deciding to draw districts to lump them together so they can disenfranchise them and make their vote worth less.

So you're right there are racial implications, and it's certainly on the side of the GOP.
We also give green cards to those who are willing to run Dunkin Donuts and Subways and Days Inns.

There's nothing wrong with immigration. My best friends are immigrants. They work hard and pay their dues.
It's an attempt to rebrand because "native" = good. There are certainly Electron apps that you can't really tell are not "native". They work fine.

People who are passionate about something, be it computers or cars or food, tend to obsess over what their passion is built from and not purely on the end result. To laypeople, the end result is all that really matters. I've never once asked to tour a kitchen. But to the nerds, it's really important what their apps are made of, even if the end result is the same. So "native" becomes a contentious word. An insult, even, when the contrary is argued.
That website design is quite irritating. Reminds me of 1990s web pages, only in monochrome.
Almost certainly IBM was a major contributor to the SQL standard. Since the entire point of a "standard" is to encourage third-party adoption, so it would rather difficult to sue anyone, imo.

Sun set up a certification process for Java, but specifically had different rules for mobile applications, because that's where they were trying to make money. Not that I agree with Oracle's argument, but it was very willful on Google's part to avoid licensing.

tldr; SQL is not analogous to Android.
> Poland, Czech, Slovakia, Hungary

The salaries that are considered "acceptable" in those countries would result in a _negative_ effective tax rate in the US. Tax rate alone is not everything. It's a combination of pretax pay and the effective tax rate that you need to be considering.
Azure doesn't run O365, Exchange, Bing, or Xbox Live. Please stop spreading misinformation. (I work at MS.)
One thing that's helped me is learning to enjoy my own company.

This is a life-long endeavor which is helped by my natural curiosity. I love going to unfamiliar sections of the library and learning about subjects I didn't already know.

From this can come hobbies like painting, making music, and writing that don't require anyone but yourself to do or enjoy.

Reading itself is a marvelous solitary activity which can let me live entire lives and in different time periods and places from the perspective of different people, and finding writers who are on the same wavelength as me and who "get it" is a real treat. Then I feel I'm really communing with thinkers who've trod the road before and have a lot to teach me, even if we never meet in person.

The toughest situations are on holidays or weekends when I'm walking by restaurants, bars, or houses with private parties full of couples or people who are friends with one another and having a great time. If I'm not focused on listening to a podcast or music or thinking about something else, and if I'm in a sad mood, that can sometimes be hard to take.

Fortunately, such situations are relatively rare, and most of the time I enjoy reading, watching movies, pursuing my hobbies, and learning new things by myself.
You started by saying that if a service required a specific type of hardware to use it then we should boycott it, but now you're saying it happens all the time and you're fine with it.

I accept your point about the protocol being irrelevant, however. One could even say that, if services are going to require specific pieces of hardware, it makes sense that the requirements are communicated and enforced using an open standard protocol, as that does allow a certain degree of interoperability and Free Software implementation.

The counter-argument, though, is that currently there are barriers to sites implementing such policies (due to the cost of issuing these devices and linking them to a specific account/address). If we set the precedent that every site should be using this technology, and reduce the cost of doing so, we bring about a set of dynamics where individual sites can start to introduce incompatibilities, whether with good intentions, or for anti-competitive reasons, or by accident.

Maybe this won't lead to people needing to carry around five dongles and two phones with them, but it could easily lead to having a lot of power concentrated into the hands of a small number of entities, or even just a single one, like the bad old days of "This site works best in Internet Explorer". Moreover, this is not just a theoretical concern, as it has already started to happen, as the link above explained:

"FIDO does not dismiss these worries and their answer, for the moment, is the metadata service (MDS). Essentially this is a unified root store that all sites checking attestation are supposed to use and update from."
Show HN: WeTube. Sync YouTube player across multiple devices