skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I live in a 3rd world country, worked the last 20 years as systems administrator. Recently lost my job and while looking for a new remote job I have been touched by the hard reality: The world changed and I was full of self leniency, years using the same bash scripts, the same tricks day to day. Did lot of things maintenance, networking, security,databases, mail servers, anti spam. I consider myself capable of put a SMB connected and working. My job didn’t demanded me new skills an I was self indulgent, happy to have enough money for the day.
Some recent job interviews showed me a depressing reality : I did the least, I know the minimum, never upgrade my knowledge, just relied on Google search. I didn’t know about CI, CD, containerization, DevOps in general. I have a B.S in Systems Engineering (Some sort of CS , without the ‘science’ part) enjoyed math and code in college, done tens of websites in WordPress, Joomla and some Drupal, I’m capable of code in Php, some bash, some ruby, some python.
I’m in my mid forties a kid 4 years old and cannot afford to stay worried, I have to do something to land a remote job, I want to thrive and motivated enough to learn, but time is ticking would like to hear some advice.
Alice and Bob are dating and plan to get married. They play a game in which they receive rewards for having the same answer to questions about their relationship.

They are asked: "Would it be preferable to serve ice-cream cake, or traditional cake at your wedding?"

Alice writes "ice-cream cake" secretly on her answer card, but Bob is still thinking.

After some thought, Bob writes "traditional cake" secretly on his answer card.

Both answer cards are revealed. The answer do not match, so the couple does not win a prize.

Alice criticizes Bob, "you should have known this, we love ice-cream, we had ice-cream on our first date!"

Bob believes he is not at fault. They argue. At one point Alice says "stop tying your identity to that question, just admit you made a mistake".

Bob still believes he is not at fault, and that he made no mistake, because it was never within his power to be certain what Alice had written on her card.

---

And now I ask: Is it within your power to be certain how the hardware and software of a modern computer will act?

My point is I will never be able to be certain that my code is bug free. That will never be within my power. I can only ensure that I follow a process that gives a good-enough probability that my code works correctly. What that process is, and what "good-enough" means, is largely determined by my company and team. I do follow that process, I do what is within my power. Should I apologize for not doing what was never within my power? Should Bob apologize for not doing what was never within his power?

I do accept the responsibility of ensuring "my code" (however the company wants to define it) is working well with the rest of the system now and in the future. Apologizing is completely orthogonal to accepting responsibility. Apologizing alone is not enough to "accept responsibility", and one can accept responsibility without apologizing.

PS - Alice and Bob eventually learned to avoid making moral judgments immediately in every situation.
> functions and variables live in different namespaces, so you could assign 4 to foo and then call it.

The two namespace approach makes it harder to assign 4 to foo and then call it, so I don't understand this comment.

You can assign 4 to foo and try to call it in a language that has one namespace.

;; Scheme, one namespace:
(let ((foo 4))
(foo) ;; oops

;; Common Lisp, two spaces:

(let ((foo 4))
(foo) ;; still calls the foo function,
;; not related to or shadowed by the above variable.
(funcall foo)) ;; oops

The usual valid complaint about two namespaces is that funcall is required all over the place in code that works with higher-order functions, which uglifies the code, and that an operator like (function foo) or its abbreviation #'foo is required to lift references to functions as values instead of just writing foo, which likewise uglifies code.
If you make $40k for a family of 4, your ACA premiums will be much lower than that.
I dumped it years ago when my container work kicked off and they started paywalling everything behind vcenter.

If web works with base ESXi great! If not then I'm not interested.

I just don't work on a lot of companies in the position of needing VMWare anymore. Either they're all in on AWS or they're too small to justify the expense.
Differences in the Life of a Software Engineer vs. a Civil Engineer
Having been through "agile conversion therapy" at two different companies and then having seen what the companies actually did several months later, I think most of the value of 'agile' has been realized. To get much more out of it, you need some combination of a more capable culture and better disciplined people.

And I'm not talking about just engineering - I'm mainly talking about customers and management.

Most of the gains come from tighter feedback loops between engineers and other stakeholders than tend to happen without an intentional effort. This works because it is simple - tell teams to talk amongst themselves every day, get feedback from customers more incrementally than you otherwise would, etc.

Most of the rest of the promised gains need better disciplined customers and managers - ill-defined specs, dropping projects to pick something else up, only to switch back a couple months later, managers who don't pay enough attention to what's being done until it is too late, etc.

Perhaps the problem is that it is a management fad aimed at engineers. It needs a v2 aimed at nontechnical people, "become competent at asking for what you need".
This seems like as good an excuse as any to share a link to "Modern Agile" again:

http://modernagile.org/

I think it's probably a good reinterpretation of the original manifesto that is a bit more fundamental and a bit more direct. I like the concepts a lot.
dd vs. cat – is dd still relevant these days?
Nobody can. But anybody can ask "What is the next task that needs to be done?"
> He also won, with fewer votes than his competition, while only half of eligible voters cast ballots.

I don’t think that’s right. The presidential vote count in the 2016 election was 304 Trump to 227 Clinton [0]. And all 50 states voted. What system are you going by?

> You're allowed to view this person as illegitimate

Yes, you are. The constitution grants all sorts of protections from the government for ideas right or wrong. However... If you are using said constitution’s rules for how STATES vote for president, not people vote for president...

[0] https://www.archives.gov/electoral-college/2016

Edit: I’m confused by reaction, where is the incorrect part here?

Edit2: Oh, the reaction is emotional. I see
Most process pathologies are the result of common sense. Waterfall is a description of the usual reaction to undesirable results on the first project—add more planning steps and make people sign off on phases before moving to the next, more expensive phase.
Yes, of course. To elaborate, most people (outside the HN bubble) have these priorities, they are good priorities to have, and these people work in tech. Therefore, advice starting with "move to SV" applies only to an extremely small subset of programmers worldwide, and as such, is not very helpful.

If the career advice is "ditch everything in your life, become magically younger, live in a country you don't like, ditch friends and family, and generally live for work, and then you'll maybe succeed at having a tech job", that's... less than useful. Maybe if you're young and starting.
I've come to best appreciate agile by calling "agile" whatever practices work best for my team.

Sometimes we move things in and out of a sprint mid-sprint because new information came up and it's high priority? It's not ideal (and we'll discuss it in retro) but that's agile.

We've sat a fat 5-point ticket in our backlog for 3 sprints straight because it needs a decent sum of meeting time and dedicated attention from multiple engineers who keep facing higher priority work and not quite having time for it? That's fine, we're being agile.

Our backlog grooming meeting ended after 8 minutes because we had nothing to discuss and we're all focused on delivering? Very agile.
I appreciate the thorough exploration and resulting detail in this article. Still, I find it a little sad that either the state of our toolchains or the perception thereof prevent it from being self-evident that basic strength reduction will always happen, and developers need not worry about the cost of expressing simple arithmetic operations in the clearest way.
This style of design, prioritising aerodynamics highly, hasn’t been popular in cars for a long time, but it is popular in one niche type of vehicle: velomobiles, which are recumbent tricycles with a full fairing (shell). When you’re doing all the pedalling, there’s a little more incentive to optimise its aerodynamics than when you’re merely paying for the fuel.

I’ve had an unfaired recumbent tricycle (a Greenspeed GT3) for over five years and they’re great, especially for long-distance travel and touring (I’ve gone on solo multi-week trips a few times, e.g. St Louis to Philadelphia in America and through parts of Victoria and South Australia in Australia). I’m currently planning and intend soon to start designing a velomobile and trailer that I’d like to build from scratch next year. (These plans are subject to complete change, of course.) It’s an interesting domain where a casual person with no particularly relevant training can actually get going and produce quite decent results at comparatively low cost. (I mean less than a few thousand dollars.) There’s lots of interesting and useful information on the internet, though most of it is from 2005–2012, which is a common era for interesting things happening on the internet, and you’ll find lots of broken links, and it’ll probably help a bit if you’re Dutch.
Agree 100%: agile practices can be great.

Hiring a consultant to teach 'Agile' is easy: the change of practices from something completely top-down to something that empowers the people at the bottom is the hard part and some orgs aren't capable of changing. Too many orgs are built around micromanagement, they don't know any other way.
With these things the reality of agile is within corporate constraints. The Big managers will want to steer the company and dictate deadlines or goals. While the pure form of agile might work the reality of agile causes a lot of friction.

Keep in mind though problems also show up with waterfall or young small startups. Its just which flavor of friction/pain project issue you are willing to deal with
This thought experiment is flawed. It assumes the only variable worth considering are the actions of the individual. The reality is that we apologize all the time for doing something that, done one day previously or to a different person, would not have been a problem at all.

We're typically not apologizing for the act itself, we're apologizing for the effect it had. We don't mean "sorry for writing code with bugs in it", for example. We mean "sorry the bugs in the code caused you problems."
Try working in military applications, aerospace, tax software, medical devices, banking. Making one mistakes can affect the fates of hundreds if not millions. It's way more responsibility and risk than the job you quote.

By the way. A dentist gets to try on fake tooth before drilling a real tooth. They actually don't have a choice, that's part of the mandatory training. Doctors gets to train on real people too, medicine schools go to great length to procure bodies for training purpose.

In programming, one would be lucky to get any sort of test environment.
He asked a question about an unsubstantiated theory that nobody was talking about in the medical field.

Even if he was "normal" politician, we shouldn't be listening to politicians about medical advice, and they shouldn't be pushing pseudoscience contrary to what medical professionals and virologists are saying.

Asking loaded questions about pseudoscience, that implies that there is some sort of promise in it, absolutely counts as peddling it.
They do have a cost, and every person would prioritize those gardens over other needs.
> The company is not your family.

Yes, and it's also not your friend. That's an easy mistake to make. You owe your company nothing more than work and loyalty.
By the same argument, we also don't know the long term effects of drugs and vaccines that haven't been in use for a very long time
Fair point, I'd still argue it's better to send money back home, if one comes from a 3rd world country.
I think what he meant that the increase has platued, meaning a linear growth in infected, as opposed to exponential.

Other than that the numbers of people in intensive care and the deaths per day has been decreasing during last week, something that in my eyes are even more positive.

(data according to FOHM, Swedish CDC kinda)
Yup.. though it's unclear how much we'll clear the test sensitivity hurdle by.
So IF I read this correctly, cloth masks still do a pretty good job? The post ends with...

"I have reanalysed the Korean data using the suggested replacement value of half the LOD and the results don’t change very much, suggesting a reduction of 70% of virus particles when using cloth masks."

And it starts with...

"His key claim is that “cotton masks reduce virus emitted duringcoughing by 96%”, citing a recent South Korean study."

So 70% isn't as good as 96%, but it seems like that's still a decent number. Or am I reading this wrong?
Oh wow, now I see what you mean. Thank you! That’s work great. I wasn’t aware of ‘entr’ either, that’s exactly what I had in mind!

I’ll have a look at pgTAP too. Naturally we want to test in CI, I can see this working really well. I did look at myTAP too, since we have a few MySQL instances.
"Am I understanding correctly that you're saying that because you can't get a perfectly random sample you shouldn't try to minimize selection bias?"

No, you're not. I was explaining why your argument is a truism in disguise.

"OK, this is the second time you've implied that I'm uninformed, or am acting in bad faith or with bad motives (or whatever "lowbrow reasons" means). None of these are true. I've ignored the personal nature of your vague dismissals up to now in the interest of conversation, but I'm done doing so."

I don't know if you're doing it in bad faith or not, but you're definitely making a highbrow lowbrow dismissal. You've set up an argument that can never be refuted, for reasons I've explained.
Occam's Razor: people are just found this curious at this point in time.

no need for conspiracy theory that a cabal of trump supporters are jumping on to find a theory backing his absurd clamis.
Fedora has been the only distro that seems to work with my ThinkPad Yoga immediately after install. I battled against Ubuntu and other distros for ages trying to get the screen rotation to work and eventually just made scripts to convert between portrait and landsacpe and even with that the touch controls failed to work properly.
That sure sounds like a crummy situation and I'm sorry you have to put up with it.

I don't buy new computers very often (except Rasberry Pi, I buy a fuck-ton of those), but when I do, I always do an inordinate amount of research beforehand to make sure there are no major issues with the laptop running Linux.

The two most important pieces of hardware I look at when buying a laptop are: 1) Does it have _only_ Intel video? 2) Does it have Intel wifi? If both of those are true, then there's a strong chance most everything will work out of the box. I'm no Intel fan boy, but they are very good at maintaining their hardware in the kernel.

This also means staying away from the latest-and-greatest. I don't know how new the X1 Carbon 7th gen is, but I would never buy a machine that has been out for less than 6 months. A year would be just about the right time frame, that's more than enough time to let the early adopters work out the bugs and write blog posts about it.
My guess would be that many of the references you call do in fact work for companies with a no-reference policy. This has at least been the case at all of my employers (large and small places alike, some household names), save a 5 person startup.

In my experience, although near-ubiquitous a no-reference policy mostly seems to mean "if anyone calls the company line or shows up on prem, we redirect them to HR who then tells them nothing". It doesn't mean they go out of their way to stop individual employees from giving positive references on their own time (to wit I've never seen any employer actually make any effort whatsoever to disseminate their no-reference policy to employees, it's just a CYA measure they adopt if communication happens through channels they're directly accountable for)
There've been lots of detailed reports about rebuilds not succeeding. For example: https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/issues/10214
Radiation also causes cancer, yet we have radiotherapy. I mean this is really basic, think-a-tiny-bit-below-the-surface stuff that anyone not afflicted by TDS seems capable of.
I get the importance of following science in weird times like these.

But, if the author of articles agrees people should still wear masks, what is the end game of this article?

The people who want to open back up economies using masks instead of appropriate other precautions, will not read this. The people who will read this and understand it will not change their views. The people who will read this and misunderstand it will just add to the negativity and confusion by claiming that no one should wear masks.

Maybe I'm just going into a depression spiral, but what's the point?
In the public discourse (or at least in American public discourse), any comparison between the coronavirus and the flu has come to be seen as a signal for a package of controversial ideas. The coronavirus isn't that bad, lockdowns were designed by fear-mongering globalists, etc.
Of course it is.
Devs, sysadmins, etc using Linux and such don't like it when they have to fiddle around because they need to fiddle to get bluetooth working because some producer was an ass or whatnot.
These are also the people that get turned to when the uncle or friend needs a recomendation for a new laptop, etc.
It's uncommon enough among major vendors that it's good publicity (and it's uncommon because of shady anticompetitive Microsoft deals)
Barrel shifters are still frequently omitted from microcontrollers. Primarily because of their size.
They even used for the attacks there own servers in the us!

“NSO says “our clients do the hacking, not us”.

almost like

“Kim Dotcom says “our clients do share movies, not me”.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22955612
>ecause if it's the first (as a comment downthread implies) then I must've missed a big story

Yeah but it was more like a slow news day than a big story. Yesterday President Trump said this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHkzqejFKbM

And the media reacted as expected.
Which language? With Javascript or PHP you can show them how to make a small projects and host them in the web.
It is not that the processor that contains an optimization per se. The thing to understand is that shift is fundamentally a simpler operation than multiply... a shift can be implemented with a few transistors per bit and done in a single cycle trivially. A multiply unit takes tons of transistors, and often takes multiple cycles (this is a trade off you make when you design a multiply unit, you can save space by making it work on smaller integers and reusing it multiple times over several cycles to do multiplies of larger integers, just you like you iteratively multiply digits one you do it on paper by hand). Even on processors that have single cycle multipliers it takes a lot more power to do a multiply than a shift because of all the extra hardware you need to engage.

Since shifts are fundamentally simpler than multiplies it always makes sense to do this transform. This is one of a number of transforms that are generally called "strength reductions" <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strength_reduction>, converting for a more general expensive operation into a more constrained cheaper operation. In this case it is the equivalent to knowing that if you want to multiply a number by 10 you can just add a 0 at the beginning instead of having to write all the work by hand.

The only reason not to do this transform would be if you had a CPU that literally does not have a shift operation, but I cannot think of any such part. Even if you did have such a part, the odds are you could emulate a shift using other other instructions and still outperform the multiply.

This has been a standard optimization for half a century. The original C compiler for the PDP-11 did these transforms even when you turned off optimizations <http://c-faq.com/misc/shifts.html>.
As a longtime Fedora user, I agree that upgrading every six months is more painful than it needs to be. It's generally a LOT of packages — in the thousands — and takes a VERY long time.

The option to upgrade once a year makes this more palatable, to be sure.

I haven't tried Silverblue yet, but that might make the upgrades faster and less painful.
There are always people from the Union of Bought and Paid-for Scientists that will gladly give up on science for a well-paid gig at some bullshit think tank. Somewhere around 3% if we use climate-change numbers.
I disagree that voluntariness and lack of real-world relevance are very central for games.

I often find that a task that I put off for a while turns out to be fun and gamelike once I get into flow and find that the problem has interesting structure to learn.

In general, finding an appropriate level of challenge is usually the limiting factor in making a good game. Our brains love learning new patterns and making new discoveries. But most tasks are either too mundane to provide any challenge, or too difficult that we can't make progress. Even games that start out as very fun generally become boring once we master the easily learned patterns and our skill plateaus.

This is where most attempts at gamification fall flat. The problem is not that the goals are meaningful to our lives, the problem is that there's just not any interesting structure to learn, so the game feels hollow.
Look at median household income to get a better picture of the market for high-end laptops; what your customers have to spend is a better way to figure out how big your market is than raw bodies or statistics that can be heavily-influenced by single entities. Buying a laptop that's 3% of your household's yearly income is a ridiculous financial decision, and given that most of Lenovo's business laptops start at near that range for your average person in significant amounts of countries in the EU, I'd wager that the market is smaller.

You make a good point though in that my mention of GDP elsewhere in this thread was mostly irrelevant, though; thanks for helping me refine this argument.
To dismiss as dangerous is silly. Here are the 12 rules.

Rule 1: Stand up straight with your shoulders back

Rule 2: Treat yourself like you would someone you are responsible for helping

Rule 3: Make friends with people who want the best for you

Rule 4: Compare yourself with who you were yesterday, not with who someone else is today

Rule 5: Do not let your children do anything that makes you dislike them

Rule 6: Set your house in perfect order before you criticise the world

Rule 7: Pursue what is meaningful (not what is expedient)

Rule 8: Tell the truth – or, at least, don’t lie

Rule 9: Assume that the person you are listening to might know something you don’t

Rule 10: Be precise in your speech

Rule 11: Do not bother children when they are skate-boarding

Rule 12: Pet a cat when you encounter one on the street

https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2018/01/jo...