skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Change Professional Direction or Not?
Hi, I'm 25 years old and I've been working with Android for about 5 years. I noticed that in the last year I completely lost interest in all this Android stuff. It doesn't seem funny anymore to program for Android. I don't learn new technologies, frameworks, libraries, and all these fancy things. I have no interest and inspiration for that.

The reason why I chose Android is in childhood I liked playing with mobile phones, in that time they weren't so smart and there were a lot of ways to hack them, to patch the firmware(especially I liked Sony Ericsson phones), etc. On earlier versions of Android, it all was as well, it was funny to install custom Android builds, play with them, but now it doesn't make sense. Android has everything that regular users need. Community doesn't interested in it anymore. R.I.P. CyanogenMod... :'(

Also, I like the balance in mobile development between UI and some kind of business logic. You can see the result of the written code immediately and can write complex business logic, it looked appealing to me when I started...

Nowadays. In the Android world, everyday appears "fancy" article on Medium, someone creates a new "amazing" library/framework. To be in trend you should read all this stuff because if you don't, you aren't demanded employee, colleagues look weird at you. Regular android applications don't seem challengeable anymore, it has a standard UI, functionality, requirements. The code from project to project looks similar, because of community use one architecture, one approach, the same libraries, etc. In truth, modern android development reminds me of FrontEnd development, especially with Google's JetPack Compose and the last improvements from Google (because before it was awful)...

The full post here: https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestionsEU/comments/hmbuvb/change_professional_direction_or_not/
It's probably closer to how an electron microscope works.
If you're a shy person who would like to do better in social situations - learn to dance.

Becoming a dancer opened up all sorts of doors for me. It made me comfortable in social situations from small-talk in intimate groups to public speaking in front of large ones.

I even ended up married and living in a foreign country. Currently I'm learning the language and making some progress. All of which I can trace fairly directly to learning to dance.

Caveats:

You need to like the music! So pick a form that's compatible with that (if there is one).

Don't go into this looking for a hook-up. Those people are greatly disliked by most of the people in the scene.

Obviously this is open to confident people too, but shy people will likely get more out of it because the structured nature of dance classes compensates for lack of confidence.

(Also, for all the "two left feet" people - if you can clap a rhythm to a song, you can learn to dance just fine)
Yes, but the government doesn't want to spend too much tax money on it, so it operates semi-commercially. I'd rather they cut commercials, cut one of the three channels, and focus on content that the commercial channels can't or won't broadcast with the same level of quality.
One benefit of testing I haven't seen much discussed yet is that testing can make fixing bugs easier. Many times in my career, there was a bug reported in a function I am not familiar with, based on a very particular set of conditions. There is a lot of work required to simply recreate the conditions that will allow me to debug. If I have written a test, where I have created appropriate fixtures and isolated the logic, I can easily recreate the failure condition and find where my logic is broken.
You have no idea what you're talking about. Monitoring and logging is just as important with a monolith, how else are you gonna notice when something is going wrong? In fact it is much more likely that your monolith will go down and lead to a significant outage because the monolith is bigger and thus has more failure points. Furthermore, a monolith that crashes will take _everything_ else with it whereas a microservice that is unavailable only impacts a part of your business. You can do some disaster recovery in your monolith to a certain degree but you will only be reimplementing things that K8S can already do.

> You will probably have one or two services that when they go down, your entire company is down

If you have microservices like that then your macro architecture is bad because one of the key points of an SOA is to limit the impact of failures. Probably you are using a lot of synchronous communication like REST because it was "easier" and now you have to pay the price. You chose consistency (which can be a valid choice) and now you complain about lack of availability when any undergrad knows you can not possibly have both (at a scale that requires partitioning). Using synchronous communication everywhere between microservices leads to a "distributed monolith" where you have to pay most of the costs of a SOA but get few of the benefits.

The one correct thing you said is that a microservice architecture is indeed a huge investment that requires sophisticated devops processes in order not to drown in operational tasks. Microservices are a good choice when you need to scale either in amount of users or developers beyond the capabilities of a monolith (i.e. you need an application that is partition tolerant). At that point you can chose between consistency + easier development or availability. No matter what choice you make, it will be painful but it can't be avoided.
Facts is a loaded term here. Facts cannot rely on trust, those are called authoritative opinions, not facts. And opinions about vaccination are still just opinions, not facts. If you say, for example, that it's hazardous not to vaccinate, like the article does, it's not a fact, it's a judgement and advertising judgements is the essence of propaganda, it's basically the opposite of a fact, dystopian use of the word fact. But actual decent factual picture about vaccines is complicated, it's about balancing many big and small risks: catching the virus while you live your life, catching something at the clinic while getting vaccinated, having complications from vaccination, being subjected to unnecessary treatments and drugs because doctors want to profit from you that may also cause complications, or just being able to afford it vaccination, and so on. Not to mention all the unknown unknowns and not knowing how to evaluate the risks involved. And poor but still factual picture would at least not advertise any judgement and would present the reasoning for everyone to make their own conclusions.
https://postimg.cc/4Y2Jh6pz
Depends is it better for NAG to do that research or for us to do it?

Our funding was to do xxx research and not go off and build a better Fourier transform in this case.

Though I do regret that we couldn't get funding to do Vision /ML on one project in the 80's truly cutting edge stuff
While the creator of Buttondown [0] and Spoonbill [1] wasn't trying to get a job, I really like the philosophy he talks about in this post about side projects [2]:

> If you are going to find a project, I encourage you to find something particularly small and particularly durable (which is to say, does not require constant or near-constant attention), so that you give yourself the ability to take a break from the project for weeks or months while it accumulates interest.

*edited for formatting

[0]: https://buttondown.email/

[1]: https://spoonbill.io/

[2]: https://jmduke.com/2020/06/26/atypical-success
People do run experiments in social science too. There's just as much, if not more, tacit knowledge required to reproduce those experiments correctly (even after accounting for differential participant populations).
A super duper universal binary? Oh you mean a .jar file
From my observations, the experiment is failing.
Pure Python Configuration Management with PyInfra
'Unpaid home hobbyist writers' don't have more credibility than newsrooms, with budgets, copy editors, massive networks of sources, researchers, professional staff support - which costs money.
I started my blog in 1999, so it was a different world. I guess it's a story of right place, right time more than anything else. At that time it took some REAL effort and at least a little bit of skill to get a blog going. But I'm here because I started that silly little blog. I got my first real programming job because I was able to show that I could do real programming from having that blog. My second job, more or less the same thing. That blog led to me starting my own tiny little hosting company. And because I had some decent tech cred on my resume, I got yet another job. Then, finally, that got me here. That didn't happen over night, it took from 1999 until 2013. I couldn't be happier with my current position and hope to never change jobs again.

Almost every professional job I've had since the 1990s was because I liked Slashdot in 1999 and wanted a site just like that. So, thanks CmndrTaco!
Starting your implementation with a test that's setting up, what the expected result is, and then implementing the controllers/whatever against that test is pretty satisfying.

In web development it also makes back-end development faster. Switching to a browser, reloading the page and inspecting the console/properties/page, is so slow.

I wasn't really into testing until a certain point, but having the confidence that your business logic still works after doing change requests is a bliss.

No testing it in the browser, no testing it with postman, no checking if mails are send in your dummy smtp server interface etc.

When you don't write software that changes very often or has many use cases, go ahead and leave them out, but the more you take on your shoulders, the better automating the tedious work.
Balena is pretty great. I use its balenaetcher often. It's a great isofile to usb tool! Which also happens to be another free or from the balena company.
Those two are linked fundamentally - even medieval and ancient rulers hardly what we would call enlightened knew that making unenforcible laws only breed contempt.

When they can set up anywhere and access everywhere it is asking to be flouted. Geolocated financial intergration is about the only area they can start to touch with enforcement. Without that they have about as much sway as a backwater dictatorship writing hate mail threatening arrest to every first world newspaper which refers to him as a dictator. Right or wrong morally they just look stupid and delusional.
DataOps for Streaming Systems with Lenses.io – Episode 140
No new Coldfire processors made in years, unfortunately. Freescale/NXP seems to be just leaving it.
Typo: Kenia -> Kenya
nice, they should ban google too

hypocrisy of this unviverse, when will we finally be nuked, we deserve it asap, and twice
You cannot possibly avoid testing software, unless the software is literally useless.

So testing will definitely happen _at some point_. The debate is about where it happens: on the developer's computer, on a tester's computer, on a CI agent, or on the user's computer.

I like to cover as much code as possible before the software reaches the user, but that's just me.
I'm not just talking about the borrow checker though - Rust has a much more strict type system in general. It's really explicit about everything, for example you can't just `println!("{}", some_path)` because `Path` might contain invalid UTF-8 that can't be converted to a string.
Picking Favorites: How Unconscious Recruitment Bias Undermines Potential Talent
Some of the new HK laws are worse then the counterpart in China. (Through practically in long term it might not matter that much as law enforcement/interpretation are another matter altogether).
> Why oh why is the embedded industry so easily forgotten? It's not all cloud, food apps, SaaS and Electron, ya know?

Because the other industry is inherently linked to the internet. It's like the media telling you that the media is very important, or your brain telling you that it's the most interesting organ in your body (I forget which comedian I stole that from).
Ask HN: Turing Test for Online Communities?
Yesterday, I was considering the idea of building a social network just for bots, then seeding their interactions with some random content and seeing how they’d interact thereafter. I was inspired by the idea of anthropologists studying human interactions/communities. That got me wondering about how one might distinguish a social network comprised of sufficiently advanced bots from one made up of actual humans.

I’ve been extending the idea a bit, and had this notion of establishing a kind of Turing Test for online communities as a whole, rather than individual AI agents. Do you HNers know of any previous work in this area? I imagine this is closely related to the idea of measuring the health of online communities, which is an area in which I’m also not knowledgeable of the prior art.
This view is an improvement over the status quo view held by most technologist.
In retrospect I weirdly wish I was actually held back a grade or two. I feel like I would've benefited socially by being the oldest kid in a classroom.

Simultaneously I would've wanted some enrichment or flexibility on learning pace..
You are looking at x86 from an AMD's perspective which really is just catching up to Intel in many aspects and enjoying the advantage of TSMC and Chiplets.

The Zen3 rumoured impressive IPC improvement will still be below Willow Cove or Tiger Lake. An uArch that was supposed to be out in 2018. Intel's 7nm ( In between TSMC 5nm and 3nm Node ) Golden Cove was supposed to be launch this year in Intel's original roadmap.

From roughly 2.5 years ahead of the industry to now lagging behind 1.5 years. That is 4 years of difference.

That is why The Intel world has stagnated in recent years. 4 years is very long in tech industry.
Why Go's Error Handling Is Awesome
They definitely design the CPU but I wonder if they licence any IP for things like USB controllers or such? That would mean using ARM standard interfaces inside the chip and I can see upsides and downsides.
There are other very good but smaller schools on the west coast like Pomona, Harvey Mudd, Reed etc.
Brought to you by:

Organization:Extinction Rebellion Organizing Committee Inc.

Don't know why I had to do a WHOIS to find that out.
Made a (very) brief scan of the filing. The notable personal information mentioned: phone/social network contacts, MAC, IMEI, IMSI, device serial #, browsing history, cookies, "metadata", location. Pretty par for the course. (I'm not sure "browsing history" and "cookies" is correct, at least on Android versions after KitKat.) I believe you'd need to give permission for most (all?) of these before you download the app, or when you run it the first time.

The filing also makes these claims regarding video uploads:

>Once TikTok users click the “next” button, but before they click either the “save” or “post” buttons, their videos are transferred from their devices to the following domain owned and controlled by Defendants: [...]

Not very damning.

---

In the end, the concern is solely that the Chinese government may have access to the data, or may be able to upload exploits to users. This may be a reasonable fear. But people need to stop pretending TikTok's data collection is somehow worse than that of any other data-hoarding apps (Snapchat, Facebook, etc).
If a U.S. site blocks you from accessing it, it's the fault of the U.S. site, nobody else.

HackerNews is a U.S. site, and it works fine in Europe
Tesla providing equipment for energy plant in Holes Bay, Poole
Opportunity cost, though.

Experienced teams who have designed high performance microarchitectures aren't common, because there just isn't that much of that work done.

And when you're eventually going to spend $$$$ on the entire process, even a 1% optimization on the front end (or more importantly, a reduction of failure risk from experience!) is invaluable.
Fundamentally, the browser is the user's agent. Storing cookies, running tracking scripts, etc. should be controlled by the browser. Some browsers may take a strict "block everything" approach, some may be relaxed, and some may harass the user with prompts. Users are free to choose the appropriate browser.

Depending on websites to limit tracking by on their own is very difficult, since it is inherently against many websites' business model. They will keep trying to bypass the rules.
From an interview quoted here:

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/thomas-edisons-mom-lied-ab...

> One day I overheard the teacher tell the inspector that I was “addled” and it would not be worthwhile keeping me in school any longer. I was so hurt by this last straw that I burst out crying and went home and told my mother about it. Then I found out what a good thing a good mother is. She came out as my strong defender. Mother love was aroused, mother pride wounded to the quick. She brought me back to the school and angrily told the teacher that he didn’t know what he was talking about, that I had more brains than he himself, and a lot more talk like that. In fact, she was the most enthusiastic champion a boy ever had, and I determined right then that I would be worthy of her and show her that her confidence was not misplaced.

According to the snopes page, he was taught by his mother until age 16
> I might be a bit cynical / neckbeard, but the tech industry tends to go in circles with good engineering principles sold as the newest fads / hype.

Not cynical at all — this is well observed and I wish more people saw it. I think software engineering is more susceptible (permissive cause) to fads because so much of the work is more craft than science and the actual catalyst (proximate cause) for the faddishness is the economic incentives driving the posturing for "thought leadership".

Consultancies need to compensate for generally not having a long-term stake in the projects they work on in order to overcome skepticism from clients so they have to invest in content marketing via thought leadership. The principles of marketing don't change -- convince people they have a problem, sell them the solution.

In a similar fashion every developer has various incentives to either consume and propagate or create this kind of content as well.

The only check on faddishness is well-grounded technical leadership.
I remember seeing this role (maybe it was https://workaline.com/listing/38e26af8) listed at Balena last year.

What a fantastic job. Free hardware and freedom to build super interesting projects as long as you can fit Balena in somehow. It's also a much better alternative to facebook ads or similar for a company's marketing spend...
I enjoy the GDPR if only because it forces websites, even big ones like Google or Reddit, to show me that they value tracking me over everything else, even if it means ruining the user experience and using every dark pattern in the book.

Those websites that are usually all about streamlining and reducing friction to a maximum suddenly don't hesitate to trick me into a maze of slow-loading menus with weird conventions and a purposefully broken and confusing UI in an obvious attempt to trick me into opting in by mistake, even though the mere fact that I clicked the "more options" button means that I'm almost certainly looking to opt out.

These are tactics that I expect to encounter on shady websites, not some of the biggest websites in the world.

Advertising is a cancer that offers next to no added value in our hyper-connected society. Tricking people into seeing ads to trick them into buying stuff they don't need has become the foundation of the web economy. An utter travesty that puts our industry to shame.
To me the box itself is the dark pattern. That what GDPR actually changed about the world was making modals showing up in front of content completely ubiquitous is hysterical in a very dark comedy sort of way. The WWW part of the internet is nearing uselessness to me lately. :(
I consider myself pretty fortunate to have both:

1) Been accelerated after I had formed a pretty tight friend group with my same-aged peers (jumped 2 years of math in 7th-8th grade)

2) Been born in a time where the internet was modern enough that we could all hang out and game online

I entered University at 16 (the PSEO program in MN that pays for tuition and books your junior and senior year of high school), but was able to keep in touch with my high-school friend group with multiplayer video games.

Even today, a decade later, I'm still able to keep in touch with them almost daily even though I'm living in Taiwan (started the digital nomad thing soon after graduating University at 20).

Academically I did _really_ well in a large University environment with a lot more autonomy, freedom, and responsibility (it's insane to me that we have 18 year olds still needing to ask permission to go to the bathroom during class).

Socially, I'll admit that I struggled to make any college-aged friends, but I think that was more due to still living at home than anything else. Instead of being able to take people up on offers to hang out at night, I had to make the last bus out of Minneapolis to my small town by 6:30pm.
Though most overlook it and/or consider it a toy language, Logo is a good educational language while remaining powerful. See for example [1]. It is also used beyond learning with some implementations specialized in agent-based modeling.

[1]: https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~bh/logo-sample.html
That's really awesome. If that gives us widely available open source hardware, our computing freedom will always be safeguarded. We'll always be able to run any software we want even if the hardware is not as good as proprietary designs.
Yeap, that too, had forgotten about his atrocities.
The distinction is easy. A unit test test whether a single unit works as expected. Generally, a failed unit test comes with a good pointer to what is wrong, and failed unit tests are rare.

Meanwhile integration tests test whether multiple units are integrated properly to produce expected results. When an integration test fails, you don't really know what is wrong. Instead you look at or write unit tests for the smaller units to see whether they fail, or whether the way you tied them together has a flaw.
Ask HN: Efficacy of homemade masks in reducing transmission?
What is the current best research we have on the efficacy of homemade cloth masks against reducing the community transmission of COVID-19?
It’s intended for transactional, but could potentially be used otherwise- hence the unsubscribe option is required for GDPR
Technically if they do that, they are illegal.
What was it like to run a Perfect Dark fan site in 1999?
An Open Source Software Un-Maintenance
I think these kinds of constants are very normal (and very cool) in these kinds of problems. "e" shows up a lot. For example, the probability that a given bin is empty is the probability that every ball misses it, or (1 - 1/n)^n --> 1/e.
Old man programmer here. I also think it is trivially implemented. What is hard is having the world agree to and craft such a standard.
Yeah, I understand that. But the fact is 250,000 is still a tiny number compared to the scale of these operations. As a concrete example, "Also key to the overall total was the money brought in by the state's sportsbooks, which collected an all-time high $329.1 million in revenue during 2019, up 9.5% over the previous year." https://www.pokernews.com/news/2020/01/inside-gaming-record-...
Google wants to create an open, innovative ecosystem for silicon so it will be easier for them to build accelerators for their workloads to meet the growing demand for compute. TPU is only one example of the kind of accelerators they want to build. Tim directly addresses this in the talk: https://youtu.be/EczW2IWdnOM?t=407.
With JS enabled, there's a banner at the top of the page that links to https://www.xrebellion.nyc/news/we-stand-in-solidarity , so I don't think they're trying to hide their identity.
For me it was a talking point in my interview. Helps to break the ice to talk about the architecture I used.