skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm also 31, been in the industry for 10 years, and can agree on most, if not all, points, that you've made.

I totally understand, that since the 80s and early 90s IT has transformed from a craft into a full-fledged industry with a lot of money to be made, so the dilution of the original spirit and an influx of all kinds of people was to be expected.

Sadly, with all the money and hype and cultivation of the "nerd" culture among the masses, the IT has become "mainstream". By this I mean the very same process that happened in other niches, originally populated mostly by enthusiasts, that at some point showed the potential to bring huge profits. Like rock music or skateboarding, you get the idea. Basically, anything, that a person chooses as a way to express themselves, to oppose themselves to the rest of the world, both in healthy and not so healthy ways. To rebel, even.

I feel like in the past there were more people in this field, who were genuinely punk and misfits and revolutionaries (and I understand, how this may sound ridiculous, if taken at face value, but I'm speaking about the human spirit and attitude, not the intentions). These guys (overwhelmingly male, by the way) did not give a flying fuck about becoming celebrities and earning tons of money, or about saving the world and solving contemporary problems, or about outlook and diversity and inclusion and bringing everybody, including neighbour Joe and his wife and their dog onto the ship. They were happy just by doing the stuff they liked and sharing their happiness with a very limited circle of people, who really digged it.

Fast forward 30 years, now being an IT worker is completely normal, it's just an occupation, a job, where people earn money to spend them on other things, that they really like. Of course, there are many really smart and bright and devoted people as well, probably many more than ever before, but I feel like they are not of the same kind as 30 years before. They are nerds, not punks, and it makes all the difference in the world.

And with these structural changes comes the almost suffocating blandness (despite the outer gloss) and conformity, that you just can't relate to.

Just my 2 cents.
One of the neoliberal illusions many believe in, is that their opponents are leftists.
كوبون اناس
Docker Swarm doesn't support multiple users and there is no remote-accessible API. Nomad doesn't implement network policy (Nomad Connect sidecars may be an option but sidecars bring new problems). Just learn K8S, Helm, Terraform & Terragrunt properly. Use proper tools (k9s, Loki, wrapper scripts around kubectl). Stop finding excuses for not using K8S. Stop putting proxies everywhere (that Istio/servicemesh bull*hit) and use Cilium CNI instead.
It's more that in linear algebra, we have "the nicest theorems we can hope for", so there's no "nasty surprises" lurking around. This is qualitatively different from pretty much all other algebraic structures one studies, where there is some amount of nastiness which we attempt to control.
EATS and Wavenet are from the same research group. EATS and Tacotron have almost the same score for the human sample. None of the papers said that they used Mechanical Turk. Google has it's own internal MT-like service which is probably more consistent.
I for one love pieces like this :-)
I'm not sure why this comment identically copies the GP with the exception of the last line, but it doesn't appear to be a spam account.
I took a look at it about 1,5 years ago while having worked with very early versions (2, 3 or 4?) as a teen. It was the first language I put some effort in to learn more about. Not that I remember too much, but it is a complete different language by now.

I would have thought only dinosaurs like Algol or Fortran can be that old.
I think aesthetics are an important aspect of GUI design, since it has such a big impact on the emotional state of the user. But if it starts to interfere with readability then no amount of visual craftmanship can make up for it.

I really think contemporary design is driven by a fear of being uglier than the next guy, to an extent where a lot of proven ideas have been thrown out with the bath water instead of being iteratively improved upon.
The type inference mystery novel – part 1
Its all semantics. If there's no free will, then we have no choice over assigning moral blame either. It is what it is.

Arguments also become irrelevant, since we're destined to play out the drama exactly as we have. Like some static 4D statuary in a forgotten temple. There's no point in trying to convince anyone, as they have 'already' been sculpted as they are. So argument can't be said to have any real effect, as its just more posed stone.
Hmm I tried that, but you have to sign up to SlideShare. So I tried, and it wants me to sign up to LinkedIn. No thanks.
That's fair. Do you think I am causing one with this comment?
9/11 resulted in a 20 year war. That's a big deal.
9/11 resulted in a generation of soldiers returning into civic life with serious physical and mental scars from that 20 years.
Equality is worse, two nations have been destroyed. There are multiple failed states all over the middle east and north Africa.
9/11 was a really big deal. Everything did change that day.
No, the parent poster does not have Vietnam, nor North Korea, nor even communism in mind.

You know this, and we know you know this.
I remember disillusionment in my 30's. I think this comes about when you have enough experience to realize there are a lot of people out there that have no clue what they are doing, people just going thru the motions.

You mentioned truly revolutionary things in computers that maybe a handful of people worked on. There were hundreds, maybe thousands of developers working on COBOL business systems dealing with PM's and MBA types in the 80's and 90's too.

Take some chances and bootstrap something into a business now.
I love how quickly you can generate a large GraphViz diagram! In a past job we had the "network drive of shame" (actually all 4 of my internships had that). So many Excel files which had dependencies which weren't documented at all.

I once made a script which would go through each subdirectory, open every Excel file, and document all dependencies, and output to a GraphViz diagram. This enabled me to move a file and know which files would break, absolutely vital for making changes in that environment.

It wasn't beautiful - VBA checking properties of tables, pivot tables, examining embedded VBA code searching for the network share URI - but it did work.

For safety, I copied 200 GB from the network drive locally. 6 months later the guy in IT was curious why imaging my replacement machine took so long.

--

Last week I documented how money moves around my various bank accounts. I needed to make sure all the bills get paid even though I'm switching banks. A quick GraphViz diagram is proving to be really handy.
Well, one can certainly debate that. There are discussions among historians about "the long 19th century" (1789-1914) [1] and the "short 20th century" (1914-1991) [2]. Maybe in the far future, people will talk about our times as part of a "short" or a "long" century as well.

Does it really matter in the end though? I would just take these statements with a grain of salt. It's symbolism to create a feeling of urgency, a common spirit to take action or just a way to form identity.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_nineteenth_century
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short_twentieth_century
Local history will save your butt. Right click in a file and see the local VCS. Survives all sorts of external events or losses.
Ask HN: What’s your mobile app infrastructure look like?
I’m in a new position where I’m leading a mobile (iOS/Android) team and I’m looking to learn more on common and best practices when structuring the data pipeline for our apps.

For example, our applications have a high majority of their data coming from a single API. It has GraphQL support so we can wrangle connected data with minimal requests and we even built some previous data bundling tools.

But this team consistently has had problems with the lack of an intermediary system to manage data we may want to pre-process further, state for push notifications, and similar.

Is it common to have infra specifically designed to support the data coming to and out of your mobile apps?

I’ve begun my reading and exploring, speaking to the team, but I always find HN valuable in this cases.

Thanks!
I started with PHP 15 years ago, but after 5 years I just moved to Java.

The worst thing with PHP was people and standards, everything was a mess, there was no right way to do stuff and larger projects had like 100 different implementations for the same thing. PHP was really challenging to work with as coming to a shared agreement for how one should implement stuff was a recipe for personal conflicts.

So after a few years, I just started to code web applications with Java. A completely different, but much more enjoyable environment and much more friendly people.

I guess PHP is much more fun today, it was really fun to code in PHP as it was really simple and you feel productive and powerful. But in the old days, bad defaults often caused issues in production. And some of the documentation/knowledge sharing was dangerous(tutorials lacked warnings and information about preventing SQL injections).
Dumb Reasons to Hate PHP
Companies can spend unlimited on advertising, marketting (including social media manipulation), regulatory compliance and lobbying.

These areas have grown hugely, eating up all the gains, and will continue to eat all the gains so that the number of work hours needed is constant.
Too bad he wasn't a frontend developer would love to see his take on the changes
> Sussman is not just "a professor at MIT."

You're the only person who said 'just'! You're arguing against something you said.
For trace: there is a perspective that a trace is a generalized dimension counting operator. If we have a projection matrix (a matrix such that AA = A), then the trace of this matrix gives us the number of dimensions it projects onto. Indeed, requiring this property and linearity uniquely* defines trace. So, trace is the linear-algebraization of dimension counting.
Reading this comment it seems JS is the new PHP, culturewise.
> i'm talking about netscape and jamie zawinski, xerox and alan kay, l0pht and mudge, valve and gabe newell. legends.

And you're surprised that not everybody is a legend?

You made up you opinion based on a very small and very unrepresentative sample.

> entering the industry in the early to mid 2010's i found a landscape filled with self serving product managers, conmen (i think they call them executives and MBAs), and a populous of engineers that cared nothing for the tech or the work, and didn't need to as there were no real challenges to tackle.

My experience is different, much better. However, we're not playing with Legos, we have to make money.

Different companies make money in different ways. Some do it by tackling exceptionally difficult problems. Some do it by providing value. Some lie that they're providing value, or provide it to some people at the cost of others.

Always look at the company's business model. For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.
I have a personal license, you can absolutely subscribe without a company.
It is not obvious that a two level model is a cleaner way to think about todays memory access, which has 4-5 levels of caches before you even hit possibly NUMA RAM, then an SSD, then a HDD and then maybe big datasets that can only be accessed over the network.

But then, I am a physicist, not an engineer, so to me starting from empirical observations is actually a very good way to construct a model.
Useful article, but I tend to think that the split between external/internal factors is misguided.

It's seeking to explain away decisions based on personality as if a personality based decision is any less prone to being temporary, erroneous, or that it's somehow a decision of the human (and so can just be discounted).

In reality, the human brain is not a perfect machine. We have a sense of what is 'neurotypical', sort of, but realistically everyone exhibits symptoms of some disorder at some point whether they're diagnosed or not.

A disorder also implies some sort of inability to function. Way below that are variations in mental state that still allow people to get by in a world formed for 'neurotypicals' (read: set up for less than 50% of the population, so realistically the 'typical' word there is kind of misleading).

We don't all see the world in the same way. We might see the same colours or the same patterns or whatever, but the extents of our emotions and our reactions to them (trained over decades) differ a lot.
"I'd have spent that time working on some of the ideas I had for software projects instead." Then this takes off, makes you money, and you are higher class than those who keep their skills "for fun"

EDIT: Not sure if this was understood, this was meant on a commentary on how capitalism and class can find its why back into such a system
If some of the faculty researched the relevance of FLOSS to university missions, and then made a good argument for it, do you think the university would change this IT policy?
Experimenting with QuicTransport
The sense in which this is true is similar to what they mean when they say that a car engine mechanic “knows everything there is to know about car engines.” Sure, conceivably you could do with a car engine something that it is not designed for and which would be beyond what the mechanic would know or expect, or you could (unlikely) invent a new material (a “number” system for matrix elements) which would lead to results that are hard to predict in advance, but the “engine science” itself would hardly benefit from such things...
Talking about a handful of people - in the 80's we created the CTOS operating system and desktop computers (pre-dated the IBM PC). The whole OS, through the entirety of its existence, was worked on by 12 people.

The entire support organization was much larger. In Japan for instance, it was sold and supported through an organization of 1200 people. I always marveled at that - there were 100+ support people just for the work I did.
I kind of missed on what was solved when he switched to a text description.
Just couple days ago I had to help someone to find up-to-date webbrowser for WinXP https://feodor2.github.io/Mypal/ to use on internal network, they had no option to upgrade. Legacy apps are here with us forever.
>The only solution to making me happy again would seem to download Ubuntu, mount it to a USB thumb drive, and get it installed. Had I known that Windows 10 doesn’t utilize BIOS, but has replaced it with UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface), which is a secure boot option that validates programs before giving them permission to run, I wouldn’t have wasted two more days of my life trying to install my favorite operating system.

I don't understand what he's saying here. I dual boot Ubuntu on my Windows 10 PC all the time (as well as using Virtualbox).

Otherwise, I'd say his accounting of the changes shows although he may be an outsider simply by virtue of time away, he's still more savvy than the majority of the population.
During the pandemic, food delivery solved unemployment issue
basically means working as a contractor in the US
Say what now?

[Digging]

https://github.com/littlekernel/lk/wiki/Introduction:

> LK is the Android bootloader and is also used in Android Trusted Execution Environment - "Trusty TEE" Operating System.

> Newer Android phones have some chance of LK running all the time alongside Linux.

TIL!
You only have to make a living where you are, doing what you. Release the idea that you're part of some industry, and are instead a boutique craftsperson.

Do you have contacts in the 'industry'? Will they contract out subprojects to you? Start there.
Fair enough, so not capitalism, not communism.

What political system might be capable of meeting these requirements? Is it the political equivalent of unobtanium or vaporware?

Im not trying to be a smartass; I want to know what the answer might look like. It doesn’t have to be a treatise. Just something consistent with a chance at succeeding with non-ideal people.
You looked at the wrong side of Google Search, which is why you didn't understand it. Searchers are the product being sold, Google Search's business is ads, and it's customers are advertisers.

Due to their monopoly, businesses can't switch: You might hate Google. Google might be your direct competitor. No matter what, you have to give Google money, and Google gets to make all of your web design decisions, because if Google doesn't approve of you, you don't exist.

Google isn't good at this, it's just that you really can't leave. They have too much search data solely based on the fact everyone already uses them. Why does everyone already use them? They're the default. Through investing in web browsers and mobile OSes, Google is the default everywhere already. And the majority don't ever change the default. So no matter how bad they are at search, they remain in top.
I wrote a lot of PHP from 1999-2008. First as a hobby, then professionally. From 20 LOC guestbooks to payment gateways used to process millions in payments. It wasn't until recently that I was sure I'd written more code in any other language than PHP. These days I'll occasionally poke around with it or patch a bug, but that's about it.

Is it a perfect language? No. But which language is? (I can hear the Lisp crowd grumbling.) It's fast. The only ceremony you need to write executable code is the <?php tag. It has a very rich standard library -- even if some of the function names make me want to stab people.

My only real gripe with PHP is the annotation syntax. Yikes. Stuff that's in comments SHOULD NOT AFFECT RUNNING CODE. Who came up with that?

PHP has taken a lot of flack over the years. Mostly from people who never really worked with it. A lot of the criticism really should have been aimed at certain PHP developers, rather than the language or the community at large. PHP's low entry barrier is a blessing, it's how a lot of developers were introduced to programming. It's also a curse, because a lot of very inexperienced programmers managed to become prolific at getting code out there, code which was ugly, bug infested and a security nightmare. But it's not fair to attack a language over its inexperienced users.
Strategic Synergy secret method to burn up to 25 pound of fat within one month
Fat has a specific gravity < 1.0, floating in water.

Bone + Muscle have specific gravities > 1.0.

Generally, the more fat on a person, the greater that person's buoyancy.
I switch PHP to C to show OP in a mirror how ridiculous his statement is.
Since yours is software its much easier to give away freebies. Discount codes, special features, early access features, etc are much easier to do than a physical product. Also its a great way to get feedback and generate buzz on the project.

Echoing the other comment, I would agree to avoid giving out equity. The customer is far less vested in your company's success than you are.
What about service discovery? What if you need to put power your node down for maintenance? What if your app goes crazy and consumes so much memory it OOMs some other services? Reliable, multi-service deployments ARE HARD and always be regardless what tech you use to achive it. Of course you can use Ansible and do it old-school way and wast lots of underutilised VMs and custom idempotent scripts. But K8S solves many of challenges in a standardised, data-driven way. It has steep learning curve but once learned, all resources/limits are properly set, logging in place, etc, it works nicely.
SecureBoot.
Organizations Cannot Afford to Stay Silent on Racial Injustice
Ask HN: Have you made any use of IndexedDB?
I’m talking about the browser-based database API that is more robust purportedly than localStorage.

Looking for interesting use-cases.
> However, the compatibilist notion of "free will" is in fact incompatible with what most people mean (or think they mean) when they say they "have free will".

I disagree, and the data seems to disagree as well: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/274892120_Why_Compa...
I am in the same position except 7 years earlier and on my first bootstrapped startup. Any general advice to your younger self?

Funnily enough there's another thread on HN for someone about to embark on this journey:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23475890
Thank You. I will need this in my project.
I'm probably the opposite but it's not really surprising that there's a divergence between the two. The box office makes it pretty clear that big budget popcorn movies/summer blockbusters/etc. are very popular with mainstream audiences. Whereas people who feel a calling to be film critics (or any sort of culture) tend to be a bit dismissive of at least cookie-cutter flavors of blockbusters (e.g. Transformers, most modern superhero movies, etc.) and more appreciative of indie and other smaller releases even if they aren't full-on fans of European and Asian art house fare.

Even Ebert, who was a relatively "everyman" sort of critic, definitely had a serious film critic persona if you've ever listened to any of his DVD commentaries.
Ah, just saw that Jeff Geerling (the author of the linked article in this HN post) also has an article about booting the Raspberry Pi 4 from an SSD located here¹ (HN thread here²).

――――――

¹ — https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2020/im-booting-my-raspber...

² — https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23471729
Gosh, I felt that way about Windows 3.1. It got so bad around Windows 95 that that was when I switched to Linux. I've never used Windows since, so when people ask if I can help them "sort out their PC" the answer is... :)
Hi, I'm a woman. We still exist in tech spaces. Please use "they" when you don't know somebody's gender, or "she" for me now that you know. Thanks
Facebook’s TransCoder AI converts code from one Programming language to other
The point of calling a "fractal" and talking about the "design" is that while you can only look at the surface in an article of reasonable length, it points toward strutural and systemic failings within the language itself.

The problem is that PHP is built on bad foundations and while many of the superficial problems can be mitigated, the underlying foundations can't be fixed without breaking changes. (Or, as Python proved, even if you make breaking changes, you may still not fix many core issues.)

All languages get this way over time, usually as decisions that made sense early on become baggage. But when a language makes poor decisions early on, it accelerates that timeline.
'This page is best viewed in landscape mode'

I don't think I'm going to rotate my desktop monitor just for your website :)
Space has micrometeoroids, and that might even be more monsterish!
> My only real gripe with PHP is the annotation syntax. Yikes. Stuff that's in comments SHOULD NOT AFFECT RUNNING CODE. Who came up with that?

It's a workaround to copy Java's annotations which IIRC also came from javadoc. PHP-8 is adding proper annotations as well. In general being able to add parseable meta information to your code can be quite useful.
Muscle is denser than fat per volume.
Afaik after the whole PHPixie scandal, they got backlash but the PSR standards they adopted are still in use.

PHPixie thread:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/php-fig/cjLBp2weYaA
Indeed, “linear” and “nice” are almost synonymous in mathematics and, especially, in its applications. (For example, the entire differential calculus is based on the idea of approximating arbitrary “nice” functions with linear maps.)
Sure, but I doubt they gave firm timelines. Future projections are always murky, but it seems pretty clear that the tech is in a much better spot and the incentives are now stronger than ever. Human workers get sick and can't work? Automate them away!