skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Are my expectations on code quality and professionalism too high?
I have lost perspective on what is reasonable to expect, and need a reality check from HN.

Some time ago, I left a large-ish company with what I perceived as overall quite good engineering to join a smaller company. When I say "quite good", I don't mean perfect, but what I consider the basics were there

- Code review, where we would consider architectural concerns, failure cases, etc. ensuring maintainability. Shortcuts were taken intentionally with a plan to address them

- Test coverage was good enough that you could generally rely on the CI to release to production

- Normal development workflow would be to have tests running while developing, adding tests as you introduce functionality. For some projects that didn't have adequate test coverage, developing might involve running the service locally and connecting to staging instances of dependencies

- Deployments were automated and infrastructure was managed in code

Those are what I consider the basics. Other things I don't expect from every company and am fine setting up myself as needed.

In $current_company, I was surprised that none of the basics were there. All agree to do these things, but with the slightest bit of pressure those principles are gone and people go back to pushing directly to prod, connecting to prod DBs during development, breaking tests, writing spaghetti code with no review, leaving us worse off than we were before. This is frustrating since I see how slow dev is, and I know how fast it is to develop when people write good code with discipline. Most devs in the company don't have experience with other kind of environments (even "senior" ones), I think they just can't imagine another way. My disappointment isn't with the current state, but that people of all levels are making it worse instead of better.

These setbacks are demoralizing, but I'm wondering if my standards are unreasonable. That this is what mid-sized companies are and I just have to endure and keep pushing
Political and ideological planning.. indeed what a wonderful idea as many others that the world has had seen... except, as dictated by physics the reality is not going to cooperate. Wrong economic signal crating overcapacity where not needed and deficiency where needed. The goals under which this folly is enforced will not be meet. And, the car industry, which will abuse the "game" (as they should) will to push for further and prolonged subsidizing.
Verifiably Random Ethereum Lottery
At least they're pretty honest about it though;

> The idea that some recordings were important to keep for longer term re-use or historical reasons developed gradually and inconsistently across the BBC.

> A key recommendation was that a requirement to keep archives was included in the BBC Charter and this was done for the first time in 1981. Although collections of recordings had built up by this time, before this there was no regulatory or legal requirement to keep archives in the BBC.

> In a large and complex organisation like the BBC, the processes for making and managing recordings after broadcast were not always well defined, resourced or secure. This sometimes led to programmes not being received, or technical faults not spotted at an early stage. In some cases – Local Radio is one example - central departments had no remit to manage the archive, and with scant resources to spare in production teams, selecting output for archiving could be limited and rely on the personal interest of staff leading to some great collections, but patchy coverage in the archive.
Again a decentralized ID is all well and good. An extension of PGP/GPG which as before, works great for this person signed this video.

The problem of deep fakes still exists. Deep fake isn't just about altering, it's also about creating whole new videos that didn't happen using the likeness of a person like in OP's link.

If I upload that, sign it with my decentralized ID, CNN and Fox picks it up and co-sign it with their decentralized ID. Great! My deep fake is in the wild picked up by millions all while being completely verified.

But that won't happen because no one would believe you irjustin. Right, isn't that the crux? Who do we trust?

(if you're thinking i can't just sign any random video, it's gotta be signed with my phone - don't worry let's go back to direct feed into the camera)

I'm not sure what else to say to help you understand that if you're not willing to take a hard look at your own solution then there's nothing I can do to convince you the block chain is really good at doing some things and preventing deep fakes is not one of them.
>working for social and environmental justice

In my experience focusing on political causes of any kind is not a great path to happiness, as it almost inevitably results in anger, frustration or sadness at the state of the world.
Military deals with violence issues. It's just not happening at home and most of it isn't even recorded.
Actually IIRC, that was our inspiration for it. ;)
So you're saying optional things should be forced on everything, because the rare optional case needs it anyway?

Look up what the Export-Csv, ConvertTo-Json, and Export-CliXml, Invoke-Command -ComputerName 'someserver', or Import-Sql commands do in PowerShell.

Actually, never mind, the clear and consistent naming convention already told you exactly what they do: they serialise the structured pipeline objects into a variety of formats of your choosing. They can do this with files, in-memory, to and from the network, or even involving databases.

This is the right way to do things. This is the UNIX philosophy. It's just that traditional shells typically used on UNIX do a bad job at implementing the philosophy.
Landslide in Alta, Norway
France is #1 in the EU for public spending [1]. Deficit is within average and constrained by Eurozone rules (excluding the current mess). Money does not magically appear.

As I said, taxes are many, complicated, and often useless. This of course overlaps with the issue of red tape but is an issue in itself.
There is a reason why so many rich French people live in Belgium or London. There is a reason why when Peugeot merges with Fiat-Chrysler the new company is headquartered in Amsterdam.

Just another example I've recently found (this is supposed to be abrogated this year): If you're a company and your turnover is greater than EUR760k annually then there is a special, additional tax on your advertising spending. There are plenty of things like that. This is bonkers.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/263220/public-spending-r...
No, this approach doesn’t. Complex working systems are built on a core of simpler working systems. Picking winners works incredibly rarely. Industrial policy and the infant industry argument barely ever works. You’re far more likely to get the Argentine or Indian car industry[1] or the Irish steel industry than the Korean ship building industry.

Airbus did not arise from the government putting out a tender for an airline company to be delivered in working order. There were many smaller, working, profitable aviation companies first.

[1] They all disappeared absent subsidies/tariffs.
I think that you will find that directly helping those around you who are in need is a lot more beneficial to your well-being than you might believe otherwise.
I'd really wish there was a standard for large-size battery packs an a simple, open protocol for the battery to advertise charge/load limits as well as charging method.

This would totally change the dynamic of EVs.

Go to a station, just hot-swap the batteries and be gone. Charging time becomes irrelevant: the stations can be as small as they're now (parking wire), they just need storage for hot batteries and chargers. Because that's how you use anything _serious_ which is electric right now such as power tools and drones: you don't wait for charging.

The idea of "waiting for charging" is something which is fine at home, or to charge the secondary battery pack.

Batteries in modern e-bikes are almost that already. The battery itself includes a controller which advertises what the batter can do often regulates both charge and discharge. This allows the battery to be changed and upgraded in the future.

The limiting factor is that currently every company that does this (f you bosch) wants to keep this as closed as possible, meaning that we essentially can't escape the vendor lock-in or even fix your own battery pack.

This needs to die. If I know I can get a charged battery at every station and be paying for delivered power I wouldn't care less about having my own. This would also put more incentives in keeping those packs as efficient as possible, which in turns is incredibly good for the environment.
The goal is not happiness; the goal is liberation.
It is owned by Xavier Niel, so yes, they are.
There's actually an implementation of the same HAMT data structure that Clojure uses available in QuickLisp and on GitHub: https://github.com/danshapero/cl-hamt/

Technically, since the hash-table implementation isn't specified in the CL standard an implementation could use a HAMT for the built-in hash tables, but I don't think any do.
It always surprises me how little value is given to positive human relationships and community when considering mental well-being.
It's in my opinion the second most important thing after sleep.
IMHO the broader issue is that there isn’t a european culture or market. Instead you have a fragmented set of markets, each with their own expectations and regulations. That makes it incredibly hard to create a product that serves Europe as a whole instead of just Germany, or France, or something else.

Even just the basics are way harder than they should be, for example the lack of a common language is already a pain to deal with.
I doubt CloudFlare Registrar would be better in terms of customer support—unless said customer has an Enterprise plan—as their prices are just the registry + ICANN fee, no surcharge for them to make money.

Doesn't seem conducive to great customer support, but maybe I'm wrong cause I've never had to contact them.
The Cell paper [1] begins with a three bullet Highlights section:

- Sleep deprivation leads to ROS accumulation in the fly and mouse gut

- Gut-accumulated ROS trigger oxidative stress in this organ

- Preventing ROS accumulation in the gut allows survival without sleep in flies

[1] https://www.cell.com/cell/pdf/S0092-8674(20)30555-9.pdf?_ret...
The crazy bit of this is that this is where the tunnels will be built: https://www.hs2.org.uk/where/route-map/#12/51.6609/-0.5849

"from just inside the M25 to South Heath in Buckinghamshire"

South Heath is here https://www.google.com/maps/place/South+Heath/@51.7054459,-0...

We are going to tunnel through open country due to the politics and objections from land owners.

It is no surprise that the costs have risen.
This sounds like LINQ would definitely qualify? https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/system.linq.expr...

I think your best insight here is the importance of the "lid off" intermediate representation; plenty of languages have an eval function of some sort, but it does both READ and EVAL in your terms with no intermediate access to the parsed representation.
I read the javascript part as specifically referring to JSON, not to all javascript code.
Could you please give some examples of the changes you have made?
It’s pretty common to have these machines buried in the tunnel after they done the digging.

These are usually custom made one off machines that don’t have much of a life span beyond each project.

That was on some level the whole point of the boring company Elon said it was crazy that these machines were discarded or sold for scrap.

That said since recovering them would be much easier than landing a rocket I don’t know if there is actually financial motivation to recover them.

When they are sold they are usually sold for their effective scrap weight (metal worth minus the cost of getting them offsite and breaking them down).
I sincerely hope that you do not ever put that to the test and I think you should stay miles away from advising people on legal matters. To put it bluntly: you are clueless about this stuff.
The goal the article is referring to is improving mental health. Is a consistently unhappy person considered mentally healthy?
They can be used as a gender neutral singular pronoun: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they
> * A good, free education system * Social security * Good healthcare system * Proper democracy * Politicians who aren't clowns * A total of 500 police killings ... in total since 1950

None of these things (for good or bad) have anything to do with making good tech products.
Super cool story Don!
If you have network or persistent storage, those parse and serialise steps are better served by a consistent, typed, and common serialize and parse step instead of a different ad-hoc step for each part of the chain (especially if there are then parts of the chain which are just munging the output of one serialisation step so it can work with the parse stage of another).
No, I don't develop another JavaScript framework
Ladies, gentlemen, all and none of the above:

Amazon is one of the worst forces in our world, and if you care about the sorts of things that it would appear that this submitter cares about, I encourage you not to donate free labor to large military defence contractors such as Amazon or Microsoft, who actively assist in the US’ imperialistic war effort, even if it is just documentation edits.

There are better ways to spend your time than enriching the violent and violence-adjacent.
> Namely those who hold stock options

Oh sure those too. But small businesses benefit from it immensely, e.g using fb live and fb groups to connect with their customers for example.

> Let's. The "constructive conversation" has been going on already. This doesn't move the needle on that conversation, it's not one with a lot of grey area where the world is on the fence. This is great - for him. But not much else.

If that's the case, what do you think he should have done, or we should have done?
The Apple II Launched – Event – Computing History
Telegram by far has the best user experience, yes.
Well this is random to see on the front page of HN.

A pull request to change a string from "she or he" to "they"

It's more concise English.

And hey, it's no skin off anyone's back to be accommodating.
The poster I was replying to used the phrase "working for social and environmental justice". My understanding of that phrase is that it refers to trying to bring about political change, which can be a stressful experience.
If anyone wants to play around with this in a hosted gpu supported jupyter notebook, check out:

https://colab.research.google.com/github/AliaksandrSiarohin/...

I think this is just a wrapper of that script
Tinygo – Go compiler for tiny places
Honestly there are very capable and smart engineers in France, and I don't blame the country ambition to develop its own solutions, but the SSII mafia (or how are they called now?) is killing innovation.

It's a very top to bottom decision process (starting from the Government/MP), with big bucks involved, and very little understanding of how to drive these tech projects, all the way to the bottom.

What I don't understand is the status-quo after years and years of failed projects. What a waste of tax payer money.
The implication is these factors will suffice in attracting and retaining talent, instead of simply paying them more.

Completely delusional in the face of the past thirty years or so, but it remains a worryingly common talking point in WE “tech adjacent” circles.
I convert emails to JSON, and then import them into Meilisearch, which handles the indexing. Search is instantaneous (CLI/browser). Run the app locally using docker, or deploy it on a cloud service like DigitalOcean (Meilisearch droplet). I don't know if the solution appeals to you, but for me it's very useful
At about £106bn for 531km, that's £200m a km. If the line were built out of a stack of twenty pound notes, it would come to about £100bn. So HS2 costs about the same as a 500km stack of twenties.

Only a million people live in Birmingham. That's £100k each.
That seems to me to be more like multithreaded linear than non-linear per se.

There are multiple linear components, and it's not obvious how they emergently interact — but they don't quite have the interconnectedness and non-directedness properties.

(I think that it's impossible for anything that's time-embedded to really be non-linear, short of time travel, since time is so fundamentally a directed linear vector.)

It's certainly a related concept, and these are aspects of non-linearity, but to my view it lacks some essential Buddha-nature of the full thing.
Still wondering whether it was unsuccessful as a product or as a concept.
I mean, I don't get why it has to get any more complicated than "I have friends that use it". That's the main reason for having any messaging app.
Developing a tool to be used by 80 million people to help fight a global pandemic under big time pressure is not a huge contract?
It's just a fact that Telegram has more features. Every few weeks I get a notification with a long list of features, it's a more rich experience. My main favourite thing is just that gifs show up bigger.

Muted chat, chat groups, draw on photos, stickers on photos, quiz / polls, dice rolls.

Signal does cover the basics well through (GIFs, voice messages, video, photo, replies) and it has a clean interface.
Haha, don't know yet. It seems that could be quite beneficial if I will add forecasting as a paid feature. But until then it would be as public tool.
> Biological weapons are more restricted by the fact that they're impossible to control, and so using an effective one is a suicide mission.

It isn't a suicide mission if your side is immune to it. For example, biological warfare against the natives were instrumental in the conquest of the americas. Not only did it quickly thin down and weaken the native population, it also left the infrastructure intact.
D'aww. /blush
Seems cheap, but I guess the transportation costs are eye-watering.

I think I remember reading back in the day that they buried/parked the machines near the center of the Channel where the French side and the English side met at the middle.

EDIT: Dogma replied on this as I was typing
In the media, there's been a focus on HS2's ever-growing budget, bulldozing land, and massive delays. These are significant, if not more so than what I'm about to talk about, but it's worth focusing on an aspect frequently not considered: the positive externality of improving human skills.

With Crossrail (now Elizabeth Line) nearly finished under London, the Channel Tunnel, and now HS2 tunnels, the UK is exposing some of its workforce to some great tunnelling projects. The skill these workers must have aquired working on these large-scale tunnelling projects is impressive. The UK could even be developing a comparative advantage in tunnelling.

It doesn't solve the factors outlined at the start, but it's a side affect few discuss in public discourse when deciding to fund an infrastructure project like HS2. The positive externalities of SpaceX's work or of NASA's work are not limited to the end goal (the fact we fly something to space), it's also that now we have more people with better skills. This is something that the media doesn't focus on when big breakthroughs happen, whether privately- or publicly-funded, and I think that's a shame.
Some users will be irrational
>And if you get it replaced they replace it with the exact same one...

Not to mention the free replacement is only valid for three times.

Would also like to add the thin cable that makes Screen stop working, Thunderbolt charging that fries the CPU etc etc.

And yes all of these are 2016 - 2019 MacBook. Apart from Staingate, 2015 MacBook Pro is pretty damn good.

Apple could have hide all of these "flaws" with a free repair given out to customers, making them feel better without actually acknowledging it. Instead they actively tries to price gouge customers with ridiculously expensive repairs.

I still remember you could get a brand new Keyboard on MacBook Pro if you ask for a battery replacement which is much cheaper than keyboard repair.
It's about time we just did a big nationwide vote for big infrastructure projects.

Voters can decide if they want to pay an extra few billion pounds or to keep a little farm village.
Go scheduler is sophisticated and it indeed intercepts all blocking system calls.

Essentially Go runtime will run a different goroutine, if current goroutine is blocked on: blocking syscall (for example opening a file), network input, channel operations, primitives in the sync package.

http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~aho/cs6998/reports/12-12-11_Desh...

I would always prefer the runtime to do this job instead of having to scan code under a microscope across functions, libraries and module boundaries to see what blocks and what doesn't.

http://danboykis.com/posts/things-i-wish-i-knew-about-core-a...

If I wanted complete control, I would use C++
That has nothing to do with it. Your mobile phone voice comms are encrypted. Push to talk over cellular is another solution which British police use.

Police are increasingly militarised, pretty much any military uses encrypted radios. It's a cheap technology now.

https://www.harris.com/solution-grouping/tactical-multiband-...
When the cost of machinery is a rounding error in the cost of the entire project...

Yeah, I don't like that thinking.
Telegram is a great alternative also, offers encrypted chat's also.
In some cultures, it's even considered rude for a table to be bare, without some sort of food on it, during daylight hours.
The why, how, and when of representations for complex systems
It seems to me that there are was to do social changes that aren't necessarily stressful, like helping to provide or deliver food to the homeless.
Oh I’m sure that would happen - and it would probably be the same 10% of people who leave 90% of the stuff behind.
I'm at around 1000 and have it. I suspect it might be a little above 500?

EDIT: dang answers directly (500 or 501): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8381148 (2014)

I try to save downvotes for posts that are actively abusive or hurt the discussion (by being abusive). Not just for stuff I don't like or I find 'low effort' (although I understand why others might have different standards). I also try to be generous with upvotes for everyone who participates with me in good faith.
Do you work at Wework ?
> they're not going to use awk

Or `dir`. https://thedailywtf.com/articles/The-Indexer
Honestly even if the UX is still behind WhatsApp, I have seen it improve continuously since I've started using it. Images (with annotations), videos (with some controls like trimming), gifs, sound recordings, stickers, emojis... it's great and honestly good enough for most imo. Especially compared to WhatsApp which isn't really on the bleeding edge of social features either.
Presumably cost analysis has been done and the cost of buying land through compulsory purchase is far higher than tunnelling. Crazy, but true.

HS1 only has 4 significant tunnels, St Pancras to Rainham, the Thames Tunnel, Bluebell Hill, and the approach into Ashford International. Some of the major costs was moving some houses out of the way (by using pistons), and moving and removing bridges.

HS1 followed the Regents Canal out of London, the A2, and then M20 motorway through Kent.

Looks like HS2 isn't following any significant roads.
Not encrypted by default afaik.
Fanfiction Journalism.

If you want to tell a story please just write a book, I don't need your clickbait wrapped up in a quaint little story.
This is unenforceable and what it does is alienate the open source community built around Lattice, that, I may say, has only helped their sales. Very short sighted move of them.