skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It sounds like most of your disillusionment is with the profit seeking. Now, sure there are still some caveats here, but have you considered working in defence? While private defence contractor companies still make tons of money, there is not the noticeable profit incentive floating around since government contracts are taken for granted, very lucrative, and last a long time.

The pace is slower, but I've found managers on the whole to be more hands off, you get to be an individual contributor more easily, and there isn't the constant product hype.

Yes, iteration is slower. Yes, the documentation can be monotonous. No, you won't be writing code as often. But if you get the right job, you'll get to design some interesting stuff. You'll certainly learn a lot.

You can learn the next JavaScript framework through Google in a couple weeks. You aren't going to learn about how the software of a combat management system on a submarine works through Google. So much military hardware is "fly by wire" now, so there is software galore.

It's not for everybody, but with only 7 years into a career you should give it a shot. And then, worst case you decide it isn't for you, but maybe you get a great idea for a defence company along the way and you leave and win a government contract and get on the gravy train. Seriously, I'd say winning a Gov contract is easier than being bought by Google for $$$. Less competition, and you won't be selling based on growth potential, but on the quality of your product.
The other major difference is the Pi 4 has USB 3.0 and the network interface is not on the same bus. So, while the 3/3+ also benefit from USB boot, the 4 can benefit quite a bit further!
Without having read the linked post yet (saved for later) I do believe that the headline is right. We are the boss and the computer is our worker. We can have as many as we need (AWS, DigitalOcean, etc.). We just need to give these workers a task that will pay the rent. (And unfortunately the money still comes from people, unless it's about automated stock/crypto market trading bots.)
I don't believe TikZ does any kind of automatic layout - that's what most people use Graphviz for I believe.
This hits home. I was in a startup together with very smart people, way smarter than me. We tried to pull off the impossible and were succeeding quite well in that. Unfortunately nobody pays you for solving problems that no customer has. So the company ran out of money.

Now I am in a big global company and my life sucks in a way it never has sucked before. I do not know how I will proceed from here, maybe I should leave software development completly and try something else.

But if you haven't done it, try working at a startup. May days there were nearly 100% coding. No pointless meetings, no useless managers, no corporate bullshit. Come in in the morning, fire up the IDE and do the things that need to be done. Fun three years.
How often did features come from engineering, from an insight into what the technology could do?
Tasks makes up Jobs.

Certain tasks that form a particular job are being automated more now than ever before.

This is more true of knowledge workers where they are operating and working in a digital environment already (e.g. traders, accountants, lawyers, marketing, admin...)

This is less true of manual labour - like cleaners and gardeners - why? Well look at robotics, its good but nowhere good enough to replace these dexterity required which a human can provide.

For knowledge workers it is very hard to automate all the tasks that make up a job. Hence why automation has not resulted in mass unemployment (excluding all other factors).
Mines gotten a fair bit better. I'm spending a lot more quality time with my s/o, and work has gotten a lot less stressful. I'd love it if my city stayed this quiet.
A timely article, considering that there are currently hackers attacking Honda, various law enforcement agencies, etc.

What seems poltically urgent to you today will pale in comparison to losing 10 years of your life if you're caught.
> my choices are either to open a company of my own, making what i believe in

What do you believe in? Have you thought much on this? If you haven’t I’d recommend it. Introspection and mindfulness can really help you suss our what _you want_ from your career and life in general.

I’m with you on general disillusionment with the tech “industry” as you’ve posed it, but really that’s only part of the picture. There are still people on the fringes doing some pretty cutting edge work. It’s not where the big money is, but is much more engineering focused.

Regardless it’s worth double checking your assumption that you should completely strike out on your own. Chances are if you think about what you believe in, you’ll arrive at what you want, and from there you’ll find people with similar goals working on interesting projects.

Feel free to email me if you’d like to discuss. I’ve gone through a very similar “crisis” recently.
We had astronauts who had to interrupt an EVA because they had a water leak in their suit and it was pooling in their helmet. That thought absolutely terrifies me. You have plenty of air, it's just that there is a silly blob of few centiliters of water around your nose, and you can't wave it away because your helmet is in the way.
All that has faded into the background for Tim O'Reilly, I guess.
No, it's not true. If you followed closely their APM was hamstringed to the point of being lower than players in many cases. In many of the playbacks I've seen it is the strategy that helped them win. Though when they lose against grandmasters it is often obviously poor decisions caused by a rabbit hole of thinking.
How London Transport Is Preparing for Life After Lockdown
I use graphviz a lot; here I generate a 'call graph' of the codebase of simavr[0] as a pdf for example [1]. But I also use it for introspection for complex data structure.

[0]: http://github.com/buserror/simavr
[1]: https://github.com/buserror/simavr/blob/master/doc/simavr_ca...
I'd be careful, are the credits even legally transferrable?
just want to clarify that the program-under-test in cram can be written in anything, as long as it's executable and produces some outputs (stdout, stderr (or any other file descriptor, really), files, exit code). right now i'm using cram to test a program written in F#.

it's true that cram shines in tests for programs written in sh/bash/zsh, where you can output the command lines your PUT consists of (while | instead of) running them and then have cram verify that your program composes expected commands.

git-pimp.zsh is an example of an early approach: it runs its commands through a helper which uses $GIT_PIMP_CHATTY and $GIT_PIMP_DRYRUN to optionally output the given command line and whether to actually perform it, respectively. the helper is a function called "o" ([o-impl]) which makes the code look a little like a bullet list ([o use]).

[0120-output.t] sets git-pimp to skip execution of `git mailz` and `review-files` invocations, and echo any `git format-patch`, `git mantle`, ... invocations (regardless of whether they're dryrun or actually executed).

[0120-output.t] https://github.com/roman-neuhauser/git-pimp/blob/master/t/01...
[o-impl] https://github.com/roman-neuhauser/git-pimp/blob/master/s/gi...
[o-use] https://github.com/roman-neuhauser/git-pimp/blob/master/s/gi...

`o` was a stepping stone and inspiration to [fake]. this is an external command (as opposed to a shell function), so it cannot stub out shell functions, but it provides greater control over the behavior of mocked command lines. eg. one can mock out `rm -rf --no-preserve-root /` but leave all other uses of `rm` to the actual command, define any combination of exit codes and outputs of particular invocations or prefixes, or provide custom implementations for same. if you ever scripted any destructive, hardware- or network-dependent code (ip(8), fdisk(8), ssh(1)), [fake] can help write sort-of unit tests that do not require expensive setup. as always, mocks and stubs are dangerous, and i'm not claiming this is bullet proof, but it's still very useful.

[fake] https://github.com/roman-neuhauser/fake
As I read the article I couldn't not help but feel a certain similarity in his words and Neuromancer.
Proprietary sw: once discontinued for one reason or another, you're pretty much fucked up

OSS: You can still manage to sorta make it work

I guess my point is, if the software GP talked about was proprietary, he wouldn't have known what was wrong in the first place.
Surely there is. It just seems overly complicated to me.
Java 6 was released in 2006. The first dual-core Opterons and Xeons came out in 2005. The licensing for Java 6 was written in a reality where multi-core wasn't really a thing yet.

By the time Java 7 came out, you could easily use a single-socket multi-core processor for workloads where you'd have used a dual or quad socket before. It makes sense that the pricing was adjusted to match the new reality.
Interesting. I didn't know that they were even more expensive than normal nuclear plants. Do you have sources, so that I don't have to cite you comment the next time I talk about breeder reactors?
It's interesting that your feeling that "academia is dying, and dare i say irrelevant", to me, is exactly what brought us here and to the status quo you're complaining about. Maybe return to academia and improve things there?
The utopian dreams of the 80s and 90s haven't really gone anywhere (in both senses).

What has happened is that the internet as a tool has largely been colonised by corporate interests.

If you’re looking for a business adventure, Don’t look to retread the imagined glories of the past. Look to the future instead and apply the founder effect to some new technological frontier. Good luck!
Unearned income is unfulfilling in the context of a default assumption that the ability to earn an income is a valid measure of worth. There are other, better, measures.
Ask HN: How do I get started for UX Design work in the sustainable space
I run a two-people UX boutique agency offering design, copywriting and content strategy services. We want to use our skills for social impact. Anyone here working in the sustainability sector like ecofriendly startup, green tech, clean tech etc? How do we get started? We are already working on a pro-bono consulting work for a metasearch engine for tiny house parking and communities in the US.
The first introductory lecture on politics starts with "laws are written by current political elite to enforce their interests". There are many social norms many people don't share like smoking, snobism, virtue signaling, fake smiles, it's even difficult to share the norms, because they don't make any coherent system.
My team probably did 10-12 tickets per sprint and at least one of those were always technical debt related in some way.
Sussman is not just "a professor at MIT." He's one of the inventors of Scheme and one of the authors of SICP. And perhaps most apropos for this article, one of the founders of the FSF, along with of course RMS.
Why do I hate the mainstream media?

You only have to look at a famous photo to see. It's the one of Anderson Cooper standing in a flooded ditch, water up to his chest, while a cameraman stands feet away on flooded level ground-- with water up to his ankles.

That sums it up. And it's not just on one side or the other.
You can put the group of nodes in a subgraph and apply the uniform style to the subgraph. In https://gitlab.com/kragen/bubbleos/-/tree/master/yeso#callin... I did that for example as follows in https://gitlab.com/kragen/bubbleos/-/blob/master/yeso/api-ty...:

subgraph types {
node [shape=square];
subgraph ints {
node [label=int];
int bool fd u32in die stride;
}
long int s32 u8 u32 -> ypix ywin;
...

Its expressivity is limited, since it depends on a hierarchical classification of your nodes and arcs that doesn't always eliminate all duplication, but it's usually enough to manually style the nodes the way I want without too much hassle. Because "types" and "ints" aren't "clusters", they don't affect the layout. (If you do want to use clusters, that can make this approach more difficult.)dnl

I haven't ever been quite desperate enough to use m4 to generate Graphviz files, although clearly it is a good fit. My experiences with m4 are more in the nature of getting way too much rope to hang myself with and then having a terrible time debugging. I wrote an HTML-generating macro language in m4 in 1994 and have never stopped regretting it.dnl

I do agree about the Makefile. In Dumpulse I used the following Makefile rule:

%.png: %.dot
dot -Tpng < $< > $@

That way I can rebuild the README diagrams (if outdated) just by listing "diagram.png heartbeat.png health-report.png" as dependencies of the "all" target. https://github.com/kragen/dumpulse/blob/master/Makefile
Get involved in the decentralization space (and not just cryptocurrencies). The hacker ethos is still alive and well there. Plenty of smart people trying to change the world like the hackers of the 80's and 90's and it's all fresh and new. Decentralized services (like IPFS, Sia, Ethereum, Scuttlebutt, Matrix, etc) are the new frontier for development and there's so much cool stuff being created.
At the company I work at, Triply, I also have this experience.

One of the companies I had as a client, Healthy Workers, I had the same experience.

So I wouldn’t say kt is that uncommon in my experience.

Both companies are Dutch. I wonder if it is a culture thing too.
If we had chosen not to financialize a large % our economy, the fastest route to paying off school loans wouldn't be wasted talent in finance.

We will pay for the poor choices we made in the 70s-80s until the process of dedollarization is complete.
Academia isn't dying and you can definitely build a lot of things that are much more advanced than what most companies are doing.

Now if you want these things to be used right now, yes academia isn't the environment you are looking for.
We should start something. Any ideas of things that we can hack on?
Strange title for a story that's a mix of 'how the sausage is made' and an editor's observations of 'what people want' based on the letters of criticism he received. I thought this was going to talk about the 24h cable news industry--that's a dumpster fire.

This a good piece. I worked in graphic design, for years, and it's clear from the story he's paper news. But let's get to the point of the title, which may not be delivered by this piece. Who doesn't know there is limited real estate 'above the fold'? Who doesn't know ...

- not everything is going to fit.

- there's only so many hours in the day

- news stories involve reporters gathering the news.

- news is funded by advertising more than subscribers

We're all consumers. We're all consumers. Today's news is more exciting than it was yesterday. Tomorrow's news is going to be even better.

Author Andrew Potter is just having a down day.
Unless you don't know how to fix something and the only people that do are goodwilling 3rd parties
"It made available licenses for various nonfree programs, but I objected to them on grounds of principle.".

Which is to say Sussman could effectively, for the purposes of this course, get _any_ license for free-as-in-beer.

So the actual decision would purely be on some other grounds. Since Sussman is a world renowned CS teacher, I choose to believe he made his choice based solely on whether it was most suitable to teaching CS.

(This is not an unreasonable belief: The concept of "Free Software" guarantees that the student is able to take the software apart to see what makes it tick. That is obviously a very valuable property when learning how things work!)
> 5.1 / 5.3 -- "don't see any unique selling point" -- "there are a couple of forks"

Doesn't that show that the actual users of Lua and the authors have drifted apart, and the former are not willing to commit to a hard fork or taking over development? Or both sides could come together to form a much-beloved committee. The curse of "good enough".

> quirks / fastest

I think you misunderstood: Yes, it is fast even without LuaJIT, and super easy to embed and integrate - which is why this slow fading away into the embedded only realm would be quite a shame.

But it is also "quirky", and adding some (optional, possibly slower) syntax sugar over it could make it more appealing. Sure, Lua-fans will argue that tables are better than anything, but for those who just want to transfer existing language knowledge are hard to convince, and setmetatable makes everything even weirder.
VWO and Optimizely are still incredibly expensive for basic A/B testing. I feel like this could disrupted pretty easily with a $29/mo offer. If you know any service like this, feel free to reach out to me. I'd love to connect you with many startups.
Nowhere in the comment to which you're replying was Sussman called just a professor.
What's your feeling on the status of elasticlunr as a project? I've been eying the the functionality for a project, but it hasn't received updates in quite a few years.
I teach at a world ranking university in the UK which has decided that in order to have a 'standardised student experience' teachers are prohibited from running their own FLOSS setup when there are proprietary contracts in place. Sorry but MS Teams is not designed with teaching in mind. I've been advocating for Big Blue Button and Jitsi but effectively told to shut up. It's infuriating.
Chrome T-Rex with TensorFlow Posenet
Not to deny the obvious frustration of the poster, but it's sad to see such wise and calm advice currently being downvoted.
I've also a feeling there were two things they changed but I don't recall what the first one was. And I don't think there's been any more improvements since November so I think this article includes everything so far.

When the pi 4 first came out, mine throttled when driving two screens and that was depressing. I've not tried that setup again since but I really should.
It has been argued that the 20th century ended with the fall of the Soviet Union, and that the 19th century before it ended with WWI. The 20th century was a "short" century.

9/11 was a spectacular event but did not change anything fundamental and was neither the first nor the last Islamic terrorist attack in the West or on the West/US. In fact, the lid had been removed on Islamic extremism in the 90s, following the collapse of the Soviet Union, even if it had been brewing for quite some time before that: Soviet withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989 (leading to the Talibans seizing power), Algerian Civil War started in 1991, highjacking of Air France flight by Algerian terrorists in 1994 (said to be the blueprint for 9/11), attack on US Embassy in Nairobi in 1998, attack on USS Cole in 2000, etc. I think what 9/11 did is to make the American public catch up with the world they were living in because many of them had not realised yet.

I'm not sure whether Covid-19 will change anything in the long term. It's too early to say. At the moment the main effect seems to be a significant economic downturn, which could have long term consequences, or not.
I own one. To some extent you're right. My pi runs mpd and pi-hole at all times and under that relatively low load, the case is constantly warm to the touch. But it has enough surface area that I've never been worried about overheating. Refer to TFA -- a tiny little heat sink on the cpu was all that was need to keep from throttling.

I don't have the hardware to give a proper surface temp reading. I can measure the pi's reported temperature / test for throttling under extended load later, but for now: I stuck an "instant"-read thermometer intended for cooking into one of the usb ports, which was the hottest place I could find on the case. It measures 36.1°, compared to an ambient temp of 23.4°.
I think you want to seek out companies where the main business risk is technology risk still. That would be database companies, developer tools, artificial intelligence startups, operating systems, ...

Probably drones and sensor-companies also qualify but don't really know much about that industry.

SpaceX's reusable rocket is a great example of technology risk and so is Tesla's affordable electric car.

Most startups today don't take these types of risks, SaaS is well-understood. The risks these companies take (in the eyes of investors) are in matching product features to the market and profitable go-to-market.

If you want all management to defer to engineers and their needs then you need to seek out a company where the success of those engineers will make or break the company.

That said, I think product and businesspeople are often not aware that having really solid tech yields dividends for years to come and will help them outcompete any peer as well increase the acquisition likelihood. Saas-companies should have a strong engineering culture, but unfortunately it's not a requirement to be a successful company in this category.
>If your ongoing work is not worth anything, why should you be paid extra for work you did in the past?

If you write a piece of software that took you a year to write but buyers are only willing to pay $500 for then do (A) live on $500 or (b) try to sell to many buyers including some in the future?
You seem to be saying (b) is out of the question but if it is who will write the software these people wish to buy?
There are still FLOSS projects that still have that hacker culture you mention. You can still build things and feel good, though you probably won't get paid. Check their mailing lists, Github issues, IRC chats, Slack or whatever channel these projects use for communication, there are big discussions in what technical decisions to take. These projects always need help and also have different problems to be solved.

It might fill that gap you have (at least it did for me).

In the end you will see your job just as an income source but most of your passion will be in contributing to FLOSS projects, if you get paid for contributing to FLOSS even better.

You mention those 80s 90s hacker ethos, be like that, be curious, try checking someone's else code, play it with, read what things need to be improved, hack it and show it.
In the old days people who thought they had a business idea would get a bank loan. You don't need VC money if you believe in your idea and think it can be successful.
Humans observe an object once, such as a cup for drinking water, and we immediately grasp its "cupness". We can identify infinite varieties of cups despite variations in morphology, design, utility and context. Simply based on a single learning instance. This absence of any neural theory of inference is at the crux of the problem ;)

Shortcut Learning in Deep Neural Networks

https://arxiv.org/abs/2004.07780
About IoT and Smart Watch
>and not crypto currencies

>Ethereum

I understand that Eth is more than a cryptocurrency, but as your comment demonstrates, dividing those worlds isn't always quite so simple.
What a paradox!
Bell's Theorem basically says that there isn't a deterministic system underlying quantum mechanics. Therefore the universe is fundamentally unpredictable. You could take that to mean everything is random, or that everything has "free will" (constrained by the need to coexist with everything else).

Personally, I find the idea that the universe is a living thing that can feel and act all scales of complexity to be delightful, and it certainly has massive ethical ramifications.
haha, that is awesome. "show don't tell", "the medium is the message"... and wow, what a great use case! This tree UI for rendering multi-threaded conversations would be a great feature in slack or twitter. Bravo -- and thanks for sharing! :)
Can't find a Windows binary to download.
Very interesting info. Never thought it has so much use outside science at CERN.
Tech ultimately doesn't matter. It's all about solving problems you (and by association the business) run into.

The hacker ethos never really existed.

My suggestions is to try and get into management because they need more people like you who can advocate for tech properly.