skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> As I said in my comments above, it's a question of who owns the data. In general, other than things like financial information and HR records, IT does not own the data in our company. They provide lots of services (version control, Jira boards, etc). They often are responsible for backing them up at a specified interval (daily, etc). And they are responsible for configuring them to be secure (which may involve shutting off APIs). But they don't own whether someone can write a script to automate clicking on fields, etc.

I don't understand what that means. With noted exceptions, nobody owns specific data in any of the many companies where I've worked or consulted. You own data stores, get restricted access to other data stores... that's services, even if it's SOA/P. Standard for many many years.

> If IT was responsible for every database, Jira board, etc in the company beyond their regular backup, little work would be done. It's a huge company, and we cannot have one org be a bottleneck.

Not sure what this has to do with the situation at hand, where a user who was a part of a human data entry team dealing with metrics around oil rigs and live oil pipeline data decided to automate their data entry dayjob. No data stores or backups were touched beyond their contribution.

> No one has answered my question that I brought up several times: If I can write my own program to do it, should they ban compilers as well? I'm sorry but whatever damage a VB script can do can also be done by C#. Should we ban Visual Studio?

I don't understand your insistence that a language is meaningful. Why would the IT guy sign off on a haskell program, or a java program, or a python or awk or bash pipeline? He doesn't have the expertise to verify that it does what your job is to do. He doesn't know the guy's job, doesn't see testing, can't verify if it's right or not. With no verification of correctness, he's completely right to block it, no? I almost feel like I'm missing something here.

Sure, my employer allows me to run whatever I want on my laptop. They don't let me pump piles of data into prod environments from that laptop even if it's done in AHK, F#, ... whatever. Why would they? That's a crazy requirement to have.

If you have over 50k employees and each person is allowed to script prod data, let me know the name and some prod endpoints for your company. I'll give you a hundred bucks on the spot :)
The tech has always been around - but the politics of it stinks. So does the element of human greed.
The ones I've seen are a right-place-right-time kind of things. One company I saw scanned and collected auto parts instructions to be searchable via a web UI. I'm not going to come up with that out of the blue. These people are close to a problem and figured out an automation step that adds a lot of value.
What's your take on the way Web Assembly approaches trust of dependencies?

https://hacks.mozilla.org/2019/11/announcing-the-bytecode-al...
$60 in cash typically last me atleast a month. Making special trips to the bank to get out cash is the last thing I want to do during all of this.
wow. does it come with a kindle?
Sure, but lots of people don’t interact with it and would not know about it. The fact a company uses it doesn’t mean most engineers would know about it.
The irony is that golang was created to replace C++ at Google, yet it didn't even make a dent in its usage for serious products. C++ and Java remain the heavy lifters there, as well as at other major establishments, precisely because of reasons like performance and (on the JVM) monitoring. golang ended up being more of a Python replacement.
Ask HN: I found out a hacker's phone number. Now what?
Hi guys,

I run a SaaS business in Canada, and I had an individual attempting to gain access to one of our customer's account illegally via social engineering (pretending that she's an employee of the customer)
I asked for her phone number as a part of verification process (completely made up), and I was able to speak with her briefly. During our phone call, she blatantly lied about being my customer's wife when I know for fact that he's single.

I checked out the government's website about reporting a cybercrime, but it seems to have very little resources available. Their office's closed right now, so I'll give them a call tomorrow.

Has anyone experienced a situation like this?
Protocol mandates use of nothing less than TLS v1.2 so one could skip/remove all support for lesser versions.
A long uppercase trash is hardly considered a recognizable identifier. Remember, it needs to be identifiable. IMHO UUID's are more identifiable with its 4 words.

Uniqueness is usually guaranteed by a symbol table, and the op is gensym().
I work for a large healthcare company. My point is not whether we use it (as another poster pointed out we apparently use a product that was acquired by SAP), it’s that lots of people might not know all of the business software that is used for various reasons.
> “Wait until you find out about the $100 million company that chops all the pre-cut fruit you buy in supermarkets,” he said.

Imagine you harvest 1 fruit, chop it and package it, and then duplicate the result millions of times. Then each time you sell your chopped fruit, it's somehow teletransported directly to the customer.

That's software.
I reckon subreddits are a good start, even though their lists are always domain-specific too:

Biology: https://www.reddit.com/r/biology/comments/6jfscw/what_are_so...

Law enforcement: https://www.reddit.com/r/ProtectAndServe/comments/gc13w5/mus...

Midwives: https://www.reddit.com/r/Midwives/comments/32fw16/book_recom...

Any of the Ask* subreddits usually have practitioners answer: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskAnthropology/comments/bl759q/ant...
I could have sworn foxnews.com domain was shadow banned on HN?

All you need to know about voting / shadow banning / right vs left / etc on HN is the following, which I stole from somewhere and am too lazy to track down for attribution:

HN is open minded about intellectual inquiry as long as that inquiry doesn't challenge anything an average Californian already believes
Without widespread U2F support, the list of individual MFA secrets I would have to maintain would be unmanageable. It's not yet reasonable to expect users to have MFA on all of their accounts; only their most important ones.
TCP and IP are not exactly trivial, though certainly much simpler than TLS. There's no shame in using a library for TLS, either.
I use one site that completely unreasonably blocks paste with Ctrl+V. The Paste context menu item works, though, so I use `Menu P` instead of Ctrl+V.
The employees are in a different negotiating position. Google pays them as little as they can get away with.
This isn't exclusive to couples though, is it?

We see this in situations involving co-workers and neighbors, friends and even strangers. There's the point-source stimulus and its first order effects we react to but it's mediated by the reactions we observe from those around us participating in the same experience resulting in second-order (and more) effects.

Isn't this effectively the psychology of crowds writ small?
Surfers can't use traditional life jackets. Partly because of the bulkiness. But also because surfers typically need to be able to go under the water. The surface of the water when a wave breaks is very turbulent and powerful, and the white water is similar to the foam in this story -- too much air to float, too much water to breath. Surfers duck dive (or bail their boards) to get under the white water.

The same is true in a big barrels. If a surfer knows they won't make it, they will pin drop and try to get as deep into the water as possible. If they fall and stay on the surface of the water in a big barrel they will probably be swept over the falls and be driven down with crazy force.

The buoyancy of a traditional life jackets wouldn't be good for surfers.

What big wave surfers use is inflatable vests with CO2 cartridges[1][2]. They pull a tab to inflate, and another one to deflate. They have multiple CO2 cartridges, sometimes surfers will have to inflate to get to the surface, take a breath, deflate and dive back under water for the next wave, then inflate again, until a jet ski can rescue them.

But inflatable vests aren't a thing normal surfers need, they are only for big waves in deep water (Mavericks, Jaws, etc.).

There are also impact vests and wetsuits[3][4] that provide a more passive form of flotation, enough to raise an unconscious surfer to the surface. These are used in big waves, including ones in shallow water (Teahupoo, Pipeline).

[1] https://www.quiksilver.com/highline-pro-airlift-vest/

[2] https://www.patagonia.com/psi-vest-purchasing/

[3] https://www.patagonia.com/product/mens-yulex-impact-wetsuit-...

[4] https://buellsurf.com/collections/job-collection/products/rb...
See, this time it only took 6 hours for the goalpost to change. I'm sure in a month, when we start getting comfortably above 500k, people will show up to tell me that it was obvious we'd need 2 million.
Cost of living looks higher in Vancouver than Seattle while salaries look higher in Seattle that Vancouver...

High pay requires a competitive job market (employer can't find anyone else to do it to the same standard for less) in a profit making industry (it's worth staying in a line of business even with higher wage costs.)

Honestly I'm quite surprised how little salaries at big tech companies vary by location within the same country. The bigger difference seems to be in opportunities for career advancement with more post-senior roles available at head offices.
These bills dont exist, they are an oasis. I dont believe in the idea that easy millions is just laying around
Yes please. You should write a book on such things!
If you want a bit of a political counterbalance to Sowell, try Chang's Economics: The User's Guide
Also, I wonder about availability of off the shelf hardware for non HD alternatives?

It's reasonably well understood how to plug 45 harddrives into a server, I wonder if you can buy hardware to drive 45m.2 2280 SSDs into one server/motherboard as easily?
Same that would happen with the manual typing process. The workflow either includes a process for auditing data quality or it doesn't, regardless of how it was entered in.
You're between a rock and a hard place.

The rock are the incentives, how your performance is measured, and the short duration you will have teaching these students.

The hard place is students who have likely spent 13 years in K-12 learning without understanding and are now being asked to do engage in practices they have little to no experience with.* They also have incentives to get good grades and a good GPA, which can be at odds with actual learning.

*To get more concrete, the practices have a name--Standards for Mathematical Practice (SMPs). The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics developed them and considers them the "heart and soul" of the Common Core Mathematics Standards. Not only are these practices absent from most classrooms, all too many teachers are not even aware of them! (see my Notch Generation reply to Sriram to understand why)

https://www.teacherstep.com/breaking-down-the-common-cores-8...
I haven't used them myself, but these boards look awesome, and they are supported by an end-to-end open source toolchain:

1. https://www.crowdsupply.com/1bitsquared/icebreaker-fpga
2. https://www.crowdsupply.com/radiona/ulx3s
3. https://groupgets.com/campaigns/710-orangecrab
Aren't there patents protecting it? I remember reading something about the fast interprocess call mechanism... Microkernels are prone to high overhead because everything requires context switching. Maybe this isn't true anymore.
"Hype is the plague on the house of software" as Robert Glass put it in "Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering". A very good citation, the rest is not worth reading.

Hype driven development is for long a big thorn in my eyes. Esp. with rust and raku/perl6.
Sciter – Multiplatform HTML/CSS UI Engine for Desktop and Mobile Applications
V1 skimped on many of the things we might consider requirements such as preventing SQL injection. For a long time the username and password for this service consisted of hard coded if statements for each client. Plenty of plaintext passwords. Default admin logins. Even seen a frontend password checker with jQuery.

So it isn't software we would consider production acceptable. The code quality is atrocious. None of these people I know who do this would ever get hired as a software engineer by any company that does a coding interview.

But you pair their can-do attitude with a willingness to sell and tell them to use Django so they can get away with not knowing a lot about key software concepts, and you can make a living off selling niche atrocious software.

Plus, 90% of what most small businesses need could be replicated in Wordpress with plugins.Plenty of money there too.
Philanthropy serves many purposes but it certainly paid to wash his image. He was publicly hated, notoriously ruthless.
Doesn't seem that much for Gitlab's size. And they are doing an effort to document it all and write it down instead of having it lie distributed in the minds of employees managing those services.
No they're saying for a Gitlab employee moving to a higher COL area is essentially getting gitlab to pay for the mortgage (assuming the higher wage actually covers the increased mortgage of course).

Adjusting by CoL is only good for the employer, if a worker is worth X working remote in SF they're worth the same amount in the middle of nowhere.
Good luck! You're time to market and the sunk cost fallacy are overwhelmingly against you.
A Religion of Isolation
Who said anything about Marin? Oh right, it's just you cherry picking the least dense Bay Area county.

Here are the 2010 commute flows between the counties from the state of CA metropolitan transport commission itself.

http://www.vitalsigns.mtc.ca.gov/commute-patterns

Alameda county sees the greatest flow of commuters in the Bay Area. San Joaquin counties commuters are a fraction of those in and out of Alameda county. They are dwarfed by the flow from to/from SF, Contra Costa, and Santa Clara counties. If you have an issue with that study, take it up with the state MTA. I'm sure they'd love to hear your criticisms.

> Your argument is repeatedly repudiated by the facts, your logic is weak, you try to score points on irrelevancies, and yet you continue to try to argue. e.g. You know nothing, Jon Snow.

Right back at ya boss...
Just because a visa isn't dual intent doesn't mean you can't apply for a Green Card. TN, E-3 etc can all lead to a Green Card but you have to time it right.
> I like the sound of it, but it seems like it might descend into something like checked exception hell where a given package D works fine as a dependency of package A but not of package B (because package B drops some privileges that D expects to have).

That sounds like it would be working. If you declare that your package doesn't need network, and it fails because it used the network, that sounds like a bug was caught.
For software people, the missing link is knowledge of a domain. Not domain expertise, the rare part is merely knowing that domains even exist to be searched for $20 bills.

The article mentions actuarial software for funeral homes. In retrospect, of course that's a thing, but asked to name low-hanging domains for lifestyle software businesses, few of us would ever arrive at that answer, let alone in the first 500 guesses. And is it sexy enough that we'd stake our livelihood on it?

I'm reminded of this XKCD comic: https://xkcd.com/1425/

People in these small niches can't easily tell the difference between things that are too hard to be worth the money vs things that are solved by a for loop in an afternoon, and they don't talk about their work in a way that makes it obvious that there's gold in the hills.

This is one reason that user research is an entire field that gets paid almost like engineering: framing the problem can be just as hard as the problem itself.
Rescuers pinpoint location of injured walker on Flinders Island using what3words
And on Windows you can use WinCompose to get all the normal compose key sequences and more, plus you can add your own in with ~/.XCompose.

I love my Compose key. When I looked into purchasing a Surface Book (and switching to Windows) some four years ago based purely on its specs, the two critical factors were WSL and WinCompose—without either one of those two, I couldn’t have, wouldn’t have switched.

(I also use an AutoHotkey script for a few other things like remapping Win+F to maximise/restore, and disabling the horrifically slow Win+Tab which was too easily triggered by accident.)
I have that extension, too!
A lot of it is developers not understanding, being aware of (or simply being uninterested in) the problems other businesses face.

And businesses not knowing what _can_ be done with software to commission developers to solve it for them (or if they do, the lack of empathy from the developer ends up with them building a half-assed solution).
The metal economy is huge. Almost every product requires metal. But metallurgists don't take home a big fraction of it.

What's special about the software economy is that people who write the software take home a large fraction of it. Maybe more than half, depending how you count. Which is unprecedented.

It's not just because software can be zero marginal cost. Musicians don't take home half of music revenue. In most creative industries, the creatives take home less than 1/10th.

Enjoy it while it lasts.
I have to think there are lots and lots of industries ripe for disruption or even for their first taste of software, and it's just that they're outside the radar of the vast majority of engineers. Industries you never ever hear about unless you're an insider. Maybe we need some mechanism for cross-pollinating people from "deep industry" with entrepreneurs. Many of the "visible" ones have already been saturated to death with startups, and it's just because those are what software people happen to be aware of.
Killer vaporware, classic Microsoft FUD modus operandi. Mac is “coming soon.”
MS Teams has more paying users than Slack because for every CIO in America there is probably a Microsoft employee who goes to strip clubs with him.
"I am no expert on memory, but from what I have read on the topic, our long-term memory is virtually unlimited, the main constraint being inability to recall rather than the memory content being erased. If you have once learned a topic well but haven't visited in a long time, you may not be able to recall it very easily, but you will be able to recognize or relearn it better than someone who doesn't have any exposure to the topic. "

I agree with your this part and personally my memory behaves the same way, but I am not sure if it should be like this, because then for example if I am having a conversation with someone about a topic I studied long back but did not recall recently then I am unable to contribute anything to the conversation although back in my mind I know that I studied or read about this but because of this poor memory thing I have to remain silent.
The irony of all this is that one time in the 00s, I signed up for a website and copied and pasted my email to the verify field and it was wrong!
Was a typo I meant `proponents`, fixed.

The core library deps isn't relevant, it's how many deps the smallest starting Create React App has that matters [1]. As mentioned by OP react-native is far worse.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19195148
Location referred to in the story was https://what3words.com/murky.founding.spoonfuls
IMO the industry has made this into a false dichotomy. I want both security and hackability, and I don’t believe for a second that wanting better security means we should have to give up control of our devices.
We have very obviously worked on different types of end-user SQL. One that springs to mind had 30 or 40 tables, evolved over the years as “special cases” popped up, and by time I was asked to look at it, it was maybe too far gone. I tried. Maybe if the schema had been tended like a garden, the queries wouldn’t have been so crazy, but...

Mind, though, that this system had made a ton of money for 15 years, so in a way it was a huge win for them! They just eventually painted themselves into a corner and performance started to get worse faster than Moore’s law could save them. Last I heard, the great untangling is still in progress, and I stepped away from that project a few years ago.

They likely have still come out on top when you take the sum of revenue they made from the system, but they incurred a huge unanticipated cost and got backed into a pretty bad corner. Sales people were still selling features that didn’t exist, and the team was desperately trying to build new things while also fixing the ever degrading performance.
Okay maybe our economic system sucks?
El pasado de Angela Merkel
That is exactly what is happening in this case; the author is a lecturer at a South Australian educational institution, and the book is a textbook for one of the courses there. I'm looking into studying Australian Aboriginal / Indigenous history, and thought I'd better get acquainted with some of the source material.
Queues don't fix overload (2014)
You know the ends of shoeleaces, those little plastic bits? Roughly a 800,000,000/year industry

Cardboard box industry in USA is bigger than the NFL, NHL, NBA, and the other major sports leagues combined
This is because of a few factors, mostly availability bias. We find it easy to think of high-profile examples of tech companies, so we assume they are the industry.

Previous comment with fancier wording: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17994976
Jesus Christ, it's almost like the US economy is mostly ran by small businesses, what the fuck.
React Native and React are two different things, no? JavaScript is not Java, Programming Pearls by John Bentley is not about Perl, C# is not C, etc.
Am I the only one who just spent 5 minutes chasing moving nodes round in that graph looking for leftpad.js?
the fact that organizations don't want software "they need" shows that those industry's companies are not competing against each other. If they were and the software really did make a big difference in their bottom line, then the ones that used the software would be stealing market share from those that don't use it. unfortunately, with a burgeoning govt and ever more companies that have monopolies, there's getting to be less and less competition and efficiency in the world
Because developer efficiency reduces the cost of the app, or in many cases causes the app to exist where it otherwise would not.
What in particular do you disagree with about the idea of the noble yeoman?

I'm not saying I think every rural person fits this image, but there's some percent that do, at least as I think about it.
Yeah, but if you are using their native extensions and they deprecate your version, their repo will become unavailable and your app will fail to start.
My main PoV for this is it doesn't particularly matter to the business where the employee is if they're working 100% remote, they're getting the same value out of the same employee regardless of where they happen to live. Trying to judge how much a salary is worth to the person just lets businesses justify getting similar value for lower cost when they're already coming out way ahead.
Fast window switching: pin Firefox in the task bar in the first position (so that it’s always the same number), and Win+1 will do roughly what your RAlt+1 hotkey does out of the box in Windows 10.
> Tesla is ahead where it counts, sales

Why is this where it counts? And if it were, wouldn't this mean that Ford/GM are way ahead of Tesla?
Thanks for mentioning ConvertKit! We're happily building our niche product for creators and growing quickly.

Just a couple corrections, at the end of 2019 we were just under $20M ARR (Not $24M). Today we are at $22M ARR and 30,000 customers.

You can see all our numbers (updated in realtime) here on Baremetrics: http://convertkit.baremetrics.com

I'm happy to answer any questions.