skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Another fairly happy GCP user. They have their issues (everyone does), but GKE is pretty amazing if you don’t have the resources for an in house k8s on AWS team.

I am however fairly pessimistic about their chances. Especially considering the person at the helm is ex-Oracle VP.

I also don’t understand their alternatives... do they want AWS to own the cloud market? They’ve operated Android as the bulwark against Apple, why not view GCP in a similar light?
I don't have any good resources on the data modeling side, but on the SQL side the PostgreSQL manual[0] is really good. Even when I'm working with an Oracle database, I often find myself looking at the PostgreSQL documentation.

[0] https://www.postgresql.org/docs/12/index.html
I’ve had 10 jobs over the past 30 years, and I’d say I probably interviewed at four places that rejected me for every one of the 10 that accepted me. My hit rate is a little higher than his, but not really that much - I think the main difference is the prestige of the places he’s interviewing.
I agree with the last two paragraphs of your post viz. humility and reform.

> the disconnect between "most scientists agree there is a reproducibility crisis" and "most scientists believe most of the papers they read are basically true and reproducible"

Could it be that many scientists think: "there is a crisis, but not in my field!"? To be honest, I personally think this quite often (and then realize I am being naive).
> Now it's super easy until impossible/difficult.

That's interesting, I've never thought of it this way. I'm bored out of my mind at work more often than not due to not having full access to a monolith where it's actually possible to understand/work on the whole thing. Instead, I have to work until I hit a black box/3rd party and I have to either work around it or knock on the black box and ask the proprietors for help. I know that's a generalization, but it's a real cost of componentization of everything into services and the like, at least in the web world. It's _super_ fucking easy to get like 95% to a solution to almost anything on the web, but that last 5% where you spend the most time is like a constant root-canal.
How is this different from any build engineer? For some reason we generally accept that client development isn’t trivial except when it’s a web client, then it somehow must always be trivial despite it being the platform that must deal with things like application payload optimizations and work on every device. Meanwhile look how busy the rabbit hole of Xcode config on a complex app can keep an engineer for a single iOS app, and we seem to just accept it because it’s not web, and web = bad.

So, we make fun of a company that is serious enough about their web client to have a fulltime build engineer while we lament how little thought and care seems to be put into so many web clients in the wild. Maybe it turns out
that clients aren’t always trivial and some specialization / division of labor is what it takes to make a good product.

It wasn’t long ago that you could see HNers snicker about fulltime “front-end developers”. I mean, isn’t it just HTML and CSS? How hard could it be? Isn’t the server API the only hard part of building a rich client??
Have you tried textmate? I used that for a lot of years and it was 100% cocoa focused.
I don't know that we can reform - if you spend too much time trying, the system will automatically cull you. Personally, I'm lucky enough to be at least slightly insulated from the true scale of the problem by working in theoretical/computational soft matter physics, where the costs/grants/impact factors are comparatively on the small end of things. Medicine and biology seem to be affected the most, for good reason - this is where the messiest problems intersect with the most interest from society at large, so you get the most acutely misaligned incentives.

That being said, communicating limits of applicability and degrees of certainty to a popular audience is hellishly difficult even if you're trying to be perfectly honest. Even in a hypothetical world where we've somehow fixed academia, this will always be a hard problem most scientists are ill equipped to tackle.
> But what really gets me is the disconnect between "most scientists agree there is a reproducibility crisis" and "most scientists believe most of the papers they read are basically true and reproducible".

It sounds very much like an academic equivalent of Gell-Mann Amnesia - the phenomenon in which you notice that every news article on a topic in your field is complete garbage, people you know in other professions report the same situation with articles on topics in their fields, and yet when you turn the page and see an article on something outside your field, you forget about the whole thing and treat it as a gospel.
> Seems like it would be risky for companies to switch to Google Cloud because it might end up in the graveyard

It's sort of a Catch-22 for them. They are this far behind in part because people fear they might not be around long term, and they might not be, because people don't want to sign up, because they fear it might not be. :)
‘In March 1983 Compaq introduced an "IBM PC compatible" called the "Compaq Portable"’ .. but Columbia Data Products got there first in June 1982.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbia_Data_Products
Typically, a forum has a listing of posts. What function enumerates the listing?

If we sort by newest, then those who can post most frequently will dominate. If we sort by most comments, we'll get emotionbait; by deepest comment trees, most nuanced and controversial topics. Sorting by oldest prioritizes those who most frequently venture out to find new forums, which leads to domination by a network of well-connected people who discover new forums by systematically maintaining information asymmetry over forum creators.

IRL example: Stock exchanges. Listings are sorted by freshness and causality, so being close to the exchange ends up dominating almost all other factors.

More generally, this is the Reputation Problem: How can we possibly grant any sort of social credit to anonymous passerby without creating side incentives which will be immediately and horribly abused?
Outside of academia, the patent situation looks much like this. In theory, patents have two parts -- the claims (what specific attributes of your invention are getting patent protection) and the teaching (the bulk of the text/diagrams, which are supposed to teach one of "ordinary skill in the art" what would be needed to duplicate the invention).

Turns out that you want claims as broad as possible and teachings as useless as possible -- so that nobody can read your patent and then patent other surrounding things.

It's gotten so bad that most companies now instruct their employees never to read any patents -- the potential liability increase because they "knew" that something potentially-patented was out there so fantastically dwarfs what you could learn by reading the "teachings"

It's all about incentives, as you say. And science today has more or less just as perverse incentives as the IP marketplace.
> blocking super-outdated browsers like Konqueror that basically lack all modern security mitigations is a reasonable thing to do

Except they still allow browsers far more insecure, like IE. And they could do feature detection to see if the security features are implemented or not.

Blocking user-agents does nothing good for anyone.
Start with "How to fail...", then "Win Bigly", then "Loserthink". "How to fail..." is the most important IMHO.

Also, read up on this: https://www.ribbonfarm.com/the-gervais-principle/
they're 'dead' in the sense that they have a lifecycle that is predictable and eventually peters out into meaningless consumerism; they still arise but they aren't seen as a potentially liberating or revolutionary social mode in the way that they might have been in eg the 80s, because we see them follow the same course every time.
Which country and domain are you in?
It’s funny how HN is all capitalists when it comes to startups, but once you mention land or housing they suddenly all become communists.
Same reason they mostly require college degrees even though most of the work we do isn’t anything we learned in college - it’s a check to see if you’re motivated enough to stick with something difficult.
So they made some gates out of fungus?

> Thus, it would take about half an hour for a signal in the fungal computer to propagate 1 m. The low speed of signal propagation is not a critical disadvantage of potential fungal computers, because they never meant to compete with conventional silicon devices.

> Likely application domains of fungal devices could be large-scale networks of mycelium which collect and analyse information about environment of soil and, possibly, air and execute some decision-making procedures.

Pretty neat. There's a computer growing in the corner of my room.
Doesn't FastMail serve Google Ads?

From Wiki:

"In newer versions, the user was allowed a choice of generic graphical banners or text-based targeted advertisements provided by Google based upon the page being viewed. "
Why would I care what replies random Twitter users made? If you want to highlight a particular conversation thread, by all means, link to that (probably via one of the many Twitter thread collation apps).
Definitely not. You're degrees, publications, and jobs but not personal anecdotes. Except for goals and research or teaching philosophy.
Anti-patterns and malpractices in modern software development (2015)
Although notice here that it's the cloud companies making hundreds of billions off of free labour, not the "mops".

If your take away from that is "we need to charge people money for open source" instead of "use less business friendly licenses like the AGPL" you should really ask yourself why you're doing open source in the first place.

We don't really need more SaaS freemium open source stuff.
They're far from over. I tried out CLion because I just didn't have the time and patience to set up my environment for effective C++ development. No matter how well vim and emacs can support it, there's still a lot of scripting and configuration to get it to behave how you like.

Meanwhile, my shiny new C++ specific IDE (that isn't Visual Studio) knows everything about Cmake, and code completion, and linting, etc. Not all of it is correct, and the IDE isn't my favourite thing to use, but it helped me focus on the code and not my setup.

Even moreso when it comes to debugging.
There may be some tiny influence that the HN crowd can have through the impact of hiring influences in industry on respective incentives in academia, but overall, I agree completely. Solutions are easy to state but as always the difficulty is finding a lever and a place to stand to put them in practice.
From /r/datahoarder: magnet:?xt=urn:btih:3D8FF2A3B20CEF8C3EA966F0657F1E4235141090
(To continue your journalist analogy)

So what happens to "the journalist" when something speculative is reported in a newspaper piece that is written by 7 people five years ago? In addition, five of the seven writers are now working different jobs in the private sector, no longer writing in any newspaper.
They try to do the same things in different implementations. They conflict with each other and you shouldn't install both. Tlp seems to be the modern default replacing laptop-mode, but I don't have details around why.
>not being reproducible is not necessarily a failure and does not necessarily indicate a bad actor

I disagree with the first part and agree with the second. I would argue that failure to reproduce is perhaps the worst kind of scientific failure, because the activity cannot be called science anymore. And no, I don't mean anything personal when I say 'failure', you don't have to be malicious to do bad science -- after all 'doing bad science' is the default human condition.

An analogy with classical music: A musician that fails to reproduce the score with his violin consistently, will lose his job quickly. It doesn't mean he's a bad person, but it does mean he's not good enough for the orchestra. The metaphor for the "reproducibility crisis" in an orchestra is what happens if they let bad players stay, the orchestra sounds worse and worse, and finally the audience stops coming. In the apocalyptic scenario, cultural forces cause ALL orchestras to stop honestly evaluating the skill of their players, and all orchestras simultaneously lose their ability to accurately play any but the simplest music.

Standards are painful for those that can't meet them, but they make the world better, overall.
“But it's easy as hell to tax land and impossible to avoid the tax (just show up with cops, what the hell are they going to do, move the land?“

The revenue man wanted granddaddy bad, headed up the holler with everything he had, ‘fore my time but I’ve been told, he never came back from Copperhead Road...
You’re in a rut. Take a long vacation aka sabbatical. Don’t fill your day with activities, let your mind wander. Climb mountains, go skydiving perhaps.

At some point what you want should come into focus. Don’t be too quick to quit the job, save up first and buy some income investments.
If you’re not collaborating with others who won’t change their habits and your needs aren’t very complex, then LibreOffice is a relatively good enough alternative to MS Office.

It’s difficult to recommend anything without knowing why you prefer MS Exchange, but there should be options depending on your needs.
> there's no reason why a given person should have the right to profit from it to the exclusion of others.

The social value of private ownership isn't in permitting owners to profit, it's in aligning incentives so that a resource is put to the most productive use. Very often those willing to pay the most money are the ones with the most productive use, and so long as there's a private owner his interests are usually to sell to the highest bidder. More importantly, a private owner can't be corrupted into selling to lower bidders, whereas bureaucratic owners (public or private) can be.[1]

I [very briefly] researched Georgist taxation systems in the U.S. when taking a seminar on land use regulation. My tentative conclusion was that they weren't very effective because the bureaucratic systems for appraisal were very quickly corrupted--not to benefit individual politicians, but to satisfy the electorate, who often find such taxation schemes unfair.

[1] A private owner with multiple interests might be willing to sell one interest to a lower bidder in exchange for a higher bid for some other interest, though.
Can't this be summed up with making it super attractive for sellers (or the content creators) early on, grow really fast and then completely screw your content creators after you're somewhat established?

This is what it seems like for just about every marketplace. Marketplaces seem like one of the most corrupt / shady / backstabby lines of businesses I've ever been a part of. This is coming at it from a content creator on some video course platforms in the past.
Getting an offer from every interview is impressive, good for you (you don't cite how many but I'm assuming you've done a good number in different contexts). Even the smartest people I've known have had mixed luck with interviews, due to some combination of randomness, poor interview design, or just poor fit for that company. As for administrating 100 interviews, you'd prob rack those up in a 2 year stint at a FAANG (usually they'd start you around 6 months in or earlier and you'd do 1-2 per week thereafter).

Anyway, yes, interviews are prone to bias. So are work samples (in different ways). Pair programming can be better but logistically harder (i don't know any companies that have been able to do them at FAANG scale), but even then, like you said, you'd need a lot of it to really judge.

At the end of the day, the entire hiring process needs to work "well enough" and with reasonable cost to both company and candidates. For many FAANGs, these interviews (plus hiring committees, bar raisers, or something else) meet that criteria... Though honestly, they often fall short on diversity but that's a whole other topic.
You don't think that sociopaths have been using the 4chan subculture to their own ends? Have you noticed the things that 4chan is known for these days? It was even a significant actor in the last Presidential campaign!
Yeah, actually I did, and it was pretty decent; I really considered it seriously back then.
I think I found the completion a bit limiting; I would like LSP running with it's context-based completion. It's non-cocoa based tabs were also not my preference; though that wasn't a dealbreaker for TextMate though.
Its no worse than it was 6 years ago. Under Obama, I had family who were here legally and were not sure if they should leave because there was no guidance on whether or not they could return. I've had foreign friends here who held legal visas who left the country only to be stuck unable to return because of unclear guidance. But just like now, if you stayed illegally or entered the country illegally and didn't commit any crimes then everyone would just turn a blind eye.

It's not a lot worse. It's just differently worse. If you follow the law you're still F'd.
'Land ownership' actually means 'rights for exclusive use of land'. Government owns the land but gives out rights to use to people. If oil deposit or gold mine is found on it, the right is often revoked after compensating the rights holder.

The prices for rights of use are determined by market, but usually bundled together with prices of buildings on it.

One way to look at Georgist critique of current land system is that the rights of use are sold once but held infinitely long. If you got lucky and bought a piece of land in downtown Manhattan 200 years ago for 20 bucks, now you wouldn't need to pay anyone for granting you that ownership right. Basically land (and natural resources) are owned by people who got lucky, not by people who actually use it (such as a restaurant which has to rent it from that lucky holder). If the ownership rights were not given for infinite amount of time but reentered into an auction every, say 7 years, the allocation of land would then go to people who actually need it. It is the same economical problem as Domain Name allocation on web.

People 'own' land on paper only. The government actually owns it no matter if you are in China, Europe or United States.
I think this highlights the fundamental problem with hiring at many large companies. They think they are getting the best, but are they? They sure are overpaying for their employees.

I think if OP isn't motivated enough to learn, excel, and build cool things on the side while he has a catered life at google, I don't think she/he will put in much effort elsewhere? That intrinsic motivation isn't there. And it honestly doesn't make sense to leave, take a pay cut, and hope that you will be given responsibilities to do new things that require learning. If you haven't been learning new things on the fly, you missed years of practice trying new things, and they won't give those responsibilities to you.
Companies with a higher hiring bar than Google? You mean the CIA, NSA or what?
> we all know that most if not all politicians are corrupt,

We do? Seems unnecessarily cynical. If that were true than by corollary most if not all people are corrupt, and that does not match my experience by far.
Post your real name here and then email this posts link to your PM.

Then, once you lose your job, you will no longer be slacking at Google. This will definitely push you a bit.
At least favoritism has some variability in it. The problem with metrics, besides being gamed, is that they are so uniform.
Most tech workers in the US aren't at Google or making Silicon Valley wages.

HN's description of what it's like to work in tech sounds likes a fantasy world to me.

Yes I make more than a European at $100k living in the US midwest... but I have to work hard every single day, in an open office, with my boss sitting in a desk right behind me. Most jobs are still a grind. This guy is probably a high-performer who wonders why everyone else is so incompetent because he doesn't try and still looks good. That's more winning the talent lottery than anything else.
There are many tools easing the process: ctorrent, buildtorrent and others allow torrent creation in a single command line, and qBbittorrent contains a gui panel for creating them as well.
Well in 19th century Russia 99% of economy was farming :)
Translation: I like to crap on other peoples accomplishments. I don't realize that adders are simple logic gates for the people who were actually there when 7400 TTL was a new thing and building ALUs out of adders is one of the oldest ways of building them (unlike "cheating" using a 74181, for example). Or that using PROMs to replace logic is just as old. I propose my "better" way of doing things that unlike the OP I'll never actually do, but I get to crap on him. I'm so disconnected from reality (or went to such a low grade school) I don't know that people actually learn how to build CPUs in school, as opposed to this knowledge being imparted from mystical higher beings directly into CPU architects skulls, or some such.

But mostly, I like to crap on other peoples accomplishments.
Nah, Qt isn't; It's much better than electron (where nothing is consistent) but it's still distinguishable with it's non cocoa-text fields. I remember being annoyed that my custom keybindings in textfields don't work for some Qt based app.
This seems both overly-cynical and a case of whataboutism - "most if not all politicians are corrupt" [citation needed]. There's also a difference between "bombshells" which usually relate to moral lapses and regrettable life choices, and actual corruption which is a crime typically investigated by the FBI.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_federal_political_scan... is an illuminating read. Some of the older entries seem quite quaint now the bar is a lot lower:

"John C. Doerfer (R), the appointed Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission by President Eisenhower, spent a week-long Florida vacation in 1960 on the yacht owned by his friend George B. Storer, president of Storer Broadcasting; as a result, he was accused of conflict of interest and forced to resign."
> "most scientists agree there is a reproducibility crisis" and "most scientists believe most of the papers they read are basically true and reproducible". [...] I do not know how you square that circle.

I don't understand why these seem contradictory? To me the obvious (maybe naive?) reading is that scientist believe reproducibility is essential to the advancement of their fields, but also believe that being unable to reproduce a result can often be explained by their lack of sufficient information (or resources) to reproduce said results, rather than always assuming the other person must be lying (or just pretty darn lucky). I'm guessing this must've happened because they have actually come across such situations and observed many results that are indeed correct, but just difficult to reproduce. Why can't this explanation square that circle?
Using market share along isn't a very good measure, because it hides that fact that they entire market is growing significantly, far outpacing the market share loss.

It's not that Microsoft is stealing customers from Amazon. It's that both companies are brining in lots of new to the cloud customers, and Microsoft is just doing it faster.

But both businesses are growing at enviable rates.
You won't get much more focus on politically (in the context of the academia) popular topics, the existing system already imposes that particular bias exceedingly well (how do you think you get citations?). But yes, you'll get more everyday human issues along with the judgment. In my view, that's far preferable to the existing situation, if only for the simple reason that the human problems will vary from place to place, whereas the existing system distorts virtually the entirety of academic research in roughly the same ways everywhere, to the uniform detriment of all.