skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> There's a growing rift in software between employers saying "there's a talent shortage" and a rapidly growing population of devs who feel like they're locked out due to the technical interview process.

I think there are ways for both of those things to be happening simultaneously. (Well, sort of- employers claim a talent shortage, but really it's a shortage of talent at prices they wish to pay.) The fundamental problems are that it's not possible to measure a broad swath of candidates' abilities, and that hiring an engineer is very expensive.

I interview people all the time who have job in "top" companies, who then proceed to do a pretty poorly in the interview. Now that could be the interview's fault, or my fault, bad luck/nerves, or at the very least you can say the interview may not provide an accurate depiction of the candidate's abilities. And I am sympathetic to that, I've been on the other side of that and I know what that's like. But the two fundamental problems remain.
Journalists do in-depth investigative reporting, they submit FOIA requests, they cultivate connections with other institutions in order to get stories of public interest to the public. I have never seen a "Github" non-professional style of journalism approach doing the same thing.

> they just spend all day dueling on Twitter and writing about whatever unsourced hot take is found there.

This is the hubris. Thinking that everyone else's job is way easier than what an engineer does - and journalists just spend all day on twitter without doing anything else.

> Questioning the status quo is how many revolutionary things got started

You can question the status quo and it's not hubris. You can also have instances where you question the status quo and it is hubris. I would say this is an instance of the latter.
The coronavirus may not have originated in China, says Oxford professor
If that was it, they could just copy their acceptance letters and start applying for jobs.
Those things have looked the same for at least 15 years.

I remember checking out new laptops from Japan and being amazed at how small they are... With zero change, they now look antiquated :D
It's true, but it gets fuzzier when the tool is a service. If Autodesk has a cloud component, it's up to them whether they vend that component to fossil fuel prospectors or miners.
Let people have their fun. Not everything in life needs to be optimized to death. My hobbies are completely unrelated to my job but they make me a much fuller and happier person. As a side-effect, everything else is improved.

If you're worried about this person's impact, think about how many people saw this and were impressed and possibly inspired? I was.

We have a much different effect on the world than we realize. The things we think are important may not be and the kind word or small bit of advice we gave without a second thought may have changed someone else's life. The human experience is too complex to be measured in spreadsheets.
Many products in the Japanese market are well designed, durable, functional and cost-efficient, this is not something specific to cars.

When it comes to computer products, I am a fan of REALFORCE keyboards, which are manufactured in Japan. They have really made a difference in my day to day work.
You are probably missing the fact that PS4 became obsolete the same year it was launched and it couldn’t be otherwise.

They can’t change the console capabilities, because games would not take advantage of it, as a ps4 game need to run in all ps4 versions.

If you want to upgrade the hardware, you have to launch a new product, as they are doing with ps5.

It’s all about having a stable ecosystem which allows developers to spend hundred of millions and be sure to reach all ps4 users. And milk that cow for years.

The same will happen with ps5: incredible machine at launch, obsolete within 1 or 2 years, but will remain in the market as is for 7-8 years while development houses (and users) reap the benefits of the ecosystem.
Because the case rates are almost entirely worthless. They're combining PCR AND antibody tests into the case rates!

A lot of people who are finally able to get elective procedures (some which are critical health procedures) are getting tests because everyone is required to now when you go into some hospitals. If they test positive for antibodies, they're counted AS A NEW CASE!

That's insane! They may have had it at one time and never even realized it. Even now, the fatality rate is 0.001% for all Americans and it's much lower if you're under 40.

This is absolutely, 100%, mass-hysteria.

Let us look at the numbers and decide our own risks!

Go to the beaches of Indiana or Florida or Texas. 1000s of people have been out there every week for over a month, and there are no massive increases in fatalities. The Texas numbers are skewed because people are coming in for normal accidents, happen to be CoV2 positive, and then suddenly someone in a car wreck in an ICU is now a Covid19 case as part of the "Second wave" bullshit.
In general, I find it difficult to accept criticism from anyone taking over public property, whether it be the Bundies or CHOP. That's not calling for reform, that's terrorizing people. I read their list of demands, including abolishing prisons, hiring doctors based on race, and the abolition of the court system. I then decided that abolishing the courts, police, and racial hiring preferences are so far removed from the American ideals, that these are not 'reforms'. This is a radical departure from anything considered American. This is extremism, not reform.

If you're so confident in their demands, why don't you post them? Here's where I got mine from: https://www.dailydot.com/debug/seattle-capitol-hill-autonomo... . If you don't actually think this is what they want you need to (1) establish why the article I linked is incorrect and (2) establish why whatever list of demands you produced is the 'official' one. According to wikipedia, the demands in the daily dot article were posted on Medium by organizers of the protest.

Here is the authoritative list: https://medium.com/@seattleblmanon3/the-demands-of-the-colle...

Anyone who thinks this is 'reform' and not a radical undoing of everything the US stands for is not seeing what I'm seeing.
Reminds me of when my past employer sent me to Japan to debug a firmware issue for a potential customer. Every day for a week I had to spend two hours talking to their engineers talking about my debug decision tree for debug work for the rest of the day. And that was with an English/Japanese translator to help communicate. Most people adapt their debug strategy as they collect more data but they wanted it all planned out ahead. A very different way of doing it.

The bug was very specific to their use case and they wouldn't help us replicate it in our labs so I never figured it out until a year later helping another customer. It was a bug in counter wraparound handling.
> one that was reporting some degree of success in determining whether someone was homosexual via ML

Yes, which was also phrenological in nature.

> one that was reporting some degree of success in determining whether someone was homosexual via ML

I've yet to see any "uncomfortable truth" from psychometric research that wasn't relatively easily explained as culturally tied.

> but as long as they continue to maintain a relatively consistent relationship to observable reality

The point is that neither this study nor the homosexuality study have a relatively consistent relationship to observable reality. Your priors on us being able to predict, independent of social conditioning, some arbitrary social attribute based on someone's face should be very, very low.

And "predicting" some arbitrary social attribute based on social conditioning is just encoding social bias into the model, which is bad.

> and that if we had continually given higher credence to feelings the Enlightenment and most scientific progress we've had would have been far slower if it had happened at all.

You mean like all the scientific progress that came out of phrenological research?
>>The media isn't inclined to pitch it this way ("DOOM! GLOOM! FIRE IN THE SKY! News at 11!"), but technically, the ideal outcome is essentially everybody has already had it and deaths (and serious hospitalizations) are at zero.

That's literally the worst case endgame, where everyone vulnerable has received the full brunt of the disease lessened only by medical care.

The ideal outcome is that the spread is minimized by a mix of general and targeted social distancing and containment measures until a vaccine, effective treatment, or both are deployed widely enough to eradicate the disease.
It's unfortunate that "essential" became the label for shelter-in-place-exempt jobs, because it implies that non-exempt jobs are frivolous. That implication has become a meme - you even hear the usually-well-reasoned Jon Stewart barking about how the pandemic has uncovered who's actually essential and how poorly they're paid.

I'm glad that the coffee shop can stay open for the sake of everyone involved, but I think we can all agree the world would be worse off if Google didn't exist. The ability to build a search engine (or any other piece of the Internet) from home doesn't preclude its ability to be fundamental infrastructure for our lives.

I know your point is more nuanced than that, and I know it's true: some jobs aren't very productive. But it also points to this false dichotomy of essential vs frivolous jobs that seems to be shortcutting a lot of people's ability to reason about the economy right now, so I thought it was worth tagging-on to your comment to point that out.
I believed you were writing about analysis linked in parent article (you know, the article we're all discussing), where he compares USB3.0 throughput to SD on the Raspberry Pi 4, and finds speed differences of 3-16x+:

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

Now I see that someone linked another article inbetween, which you beat up for being on 3B+, but the conclusions remain largely the same when tested on the 4. And note that these tests were without UASP on the USB drive, so USB was handicapped.
> I always wonder how do the scammers justify this to themselves

Scammers rarely work alone.

For most, it's just a job. One that pays decently well. In most cases the companies(yes, companies) involved maintain the appearances of a normal call center, with sales targets and everything.

One such scam company was even providing Japanese language training, so they could target a market that's less disputed.
They used the logo and font as well. My very first impression was actually that this is an Autodesk site.
Tiny anecdote:

I run a prototyping lab. I have one office-type employee, two assembly/mechanical peeps, and myself (electrical engineer and, well, it's my shop so I'll do what I need to do).

Due to COVID, I sent everyone home, and had to let go one of the assembly peeps, she found a new job so I'm not worried about her.

So it's just me in the shop right now.

The coding person is really happy about not having to commute and gets more done.

The remaining assembly person was given a nice solderng station, drill press etc. by me, and passes by whenever when t's time to drop off finished units and pick up parts. This person now tells me that they are working mostly at night, because they want to since they're nocturnal by inclination.

I am not looking at hiring someone else right now BECAUSE we are getting more done this way than how we used to!
I may exaggerate for effect, but 150LOC developed over two weeks is still vastly more surface area than a localized 5LOC change developed over the course of a few hours.

Of course circumstances vary and it depends on verbosity and idioms of your preferred language, framework and codebase. Maybe 150LOC is the minimum it takes to express a logical change unit.

My point is not about specific “maximum line count in a commit” but about a commit expressing a single logical change concept, and not a whole chapter of a book.

> making better individual commits is not going to help with understanding those … "jumbo" PRs of 1K-2K LOC.

This is where we disagree, it seems. You appear very categorical here, could you clarify why you think this is the case?
You can use Google. It's not hard to find. As for true studies, there probably aren't any. We're talking about a virus that has only been known about for less than a year.

The horrific death totals early on have completely skewed people's opinions of the severity of this disease. It's not a binary live/die, there are all kinds of other complications associated with it and too many people seem to think that spending 3 weeks in the ICU is no big deal because "hey, you survived".
The comments from the robber barons (I mean god's special children "the entrepreneurs") are just embarrassing for them. In their own words, they hang themselves. Then compound it by complaining on twitter about it. You can't make this stuff up. It's like Bonfire of the Vanities, 21 century edition.
Why are they emphasizing the optical disc drive so much?
A love letter to my favourite open source project
most of that drone related survey work is actually for things like gravel, or earth-moving processes for construction. It is also not particularly difficult or novel, and solved well by several different packages. For construction, it is often used to estimate the amount of soil fill / drainage rock, etc that is used or needed or removed during site modifications.

An example would be that if you need to haul away a lot of dirt, you pay per truck. Better estimating the amount of dirt means you don't accidentally book too few or too many trucks, this saves cost both in timing - avoiding delays, and in budgeting.
Best to buy gold plated wire off the shelf for your design. Solders nicely as well!

I played with gold electroplating pens but they are nasty.
Tbf when you are sending a Western Union transfer, the form that you fill out has a very specific warning, in bold, saying that WU is commonly used for scams and to never ever send any money to someone you don't know. I imagine the effectiveness of these warnings is near zero.
I've always disliked how widely accepted this argument is. I agree, if you have a family or really value time outside of work for some reason, money has a serious diminishing effect. However, even if I'm totally satisfied with my wage, having more of it means I HAVE to work for less years in my life. Giving me 500k/year versus 100k/year means I have to work roughly 4 less years per year I work now. That is EXTREMELY valuable.

I don't exclusively value money, and there are trade offs that I won't make, but lets not pretend like making more money isn't very impactful for nearly everyone.
Using Babel transforms to inject analytics code at build time
You could buy a standalone GPS device, I know Garmin make ones for hiking, I'm sure there are other probably cheaper options out there.
A companies purpose is to make money for its shareholders. If the companies goal becomes anything else, decisions become extremely arbitrary.

Perhaps Autodesk should stop supporting car manufacturers who produce internal combustion engines. Perhaps Autodesk should stop support modeling single-use products. Perhaps Autodesk should only support its products being used in countries with "democracy". Perhaps Autodesk should open source all of their software, otherwise Autodesk could be a front for the NSA.

/s

If people want actual change in the world, the correct solution is to try to shame large companies, smaller companies will just take their place. Instead work on technologies that make "unethical" practices obsolete.
I think it's pretty transparent that it's just because they need the Freshman class to pay that first year tuition so they're hooked.

After their first semester on campus they're much more likely to deal with remote learning for the remainder.
Essential workers are not scarce. You need someone to do the job, but there is no shortage of qualified candidates. Hiring and training them is not a huge investment, and they are somewhat fungible. A department store could replace its entire staff within a week or two with no dip in productivity.

On the other hand, a few disgruntled knowledge workers can send a company into a death spiral if enough of them quit at once.

I guess companies don't care so much about their labourers, because there's an unlimited supply of them. Their skilled workers are perceived as an investment, because they're expensive to replace and shape the direction a company takes.
Advanced SQL for Data Analysts, Scientists and Engineers
I've told my parents and in-laws (mid 70s) two things (they're cognitively with-it as far as mid-70s people go, I don't know what advice would work for people who are losing their mental faculties). The things I told them are:

1) Gift card = scam. Always, 100% of the time. No government agency and no legitimate company will ask for payment via gift cards, ever. My in-laws nearly got scammed by "Apple support" calling to say their router had been hacked and was being used for illegal activity and that they needed to pay using iTunes gift cards to have "Apple support" "clean out their router".

2) Nothing is immediately urgent. Unless someone is dying in front of you, the problem can be solved later. Banks, government bureaucracies, lawsuits, etc all work via snail mail and lawyers and paperwork, not by calling you up and telling you you're going to jail and are going to lose all your money unless you do something immediately.
True, but vimdiff is a wrapper around vim, that starts the editor with pre-arranged windows. I would like to have a non-interactive stand-alone tool, that prints the syntax highlighted side-by-side to the terminal then exits and does not require you to learn vim. Maybe such a thing does not exist yet and I have to wait for delta issue #86 to happen.
At some point you will have to come to terms with the fact that things in the world will get shaken up by climate change. We've ridden comfortably through our grace period by matters of decades. Time to tear the bandaid off, some companies will adapt and some will fail. If you're right about AutoDesks' role in creating green energy products, then hopefully AutoDesks' success is tied to the green industry's own success.
One elephant in the room that wasn't mentioned:

Samsung is years ahead of anybody with self emissive quantum dots, and new types of TFT matrices.

Samsung can commercialise cheap self emissive qdots within 2-3 years if they want, and then microleds will be automatically obsolete, probably with exception of displays for VR goggles.

Samsung has another ace in the sleeve they don't get public about: they know a trick how to grow GaN leds on amorphous substrates. Their papers from 2012 showed them being in a quite advanced stage already.

If they can get advanced with the later, they can not only bust the display market, but pretty much everything LED.

If LEDs can be grown on a much cheaper, and less finicky substrate than sapphire, we can talk about them getting n-times cheaper.
Here we go...

paper link here https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.06.13.20129627v...
The "job" has somehow been elevated to a divine entity in American politics. Just "job". No regards for the quality of labor or product or compensation.

One cynical suggestion is that the economy is set up to keep people stressed with busywork and that it's not by accident.
My boss tasked me with hiring my assistant. HR filtered most of them and I was left with three applicants. So I ran it the way I'd like to be hired which was skip the useless small talk and other painful BS and just bring the applicants around the shop and show them what I did.

The first applicant seemed like his mother dressed him and reminded him to breath that morning. The second guy was pretty sharp but disinterested during the walk and talk. The third applicant immediatly stood out. He was excited and fascinated by our systems and kept asking technical questions - winner. Excellent co-worker until he moved on to greener pastures.

All that wear your best suit and where do you see yourself in 5 years (best answer: prison) nonsense sounds like it was lifted from one of those cheesy 1950's self help shorts the MST3K crew routinely riffed.
I don’t disagree that the original Away article showed bad behavior.

Both things can be true though, the slack messages/toxic environment from Korey in that first article can be bad and it can be wrong for Taylor to mean tweet without addressing the content of any of Korey’s points about the media (which are valid), and everything Lorenz did to escalate and mislead from there can be wrong too.

For clarity the media comments Korey wrote that kicked this recent thing off are separate from that original article.

I have even less confidence that the original Away article is entirely true now given the journalist behavior around this second issue.
Find them through word-of-mouth.
Yeah I can see that. Health insurance in this country is really expensive compared to what you actually get. If I had a whole family on my insurance then the out-of-pocket maximum would just barely not bankrupt me.
I don't know why you would assume that Microsoft uses their ill-gotten user information to make their UX better and Google to make theirs worse. Is it just because Microsoft's products' UX cannot be made any worse?
Right, so you agree that comparing a Celeron to an R2/R3 is apples to oranges.

The devices are wildly different, with the amount of RAM available being far less important than the fact that your GF's laptop, with a vastly more complex motherboard, actually lets the OS efficiently use a swapfile. 2GB on a laptop goes a lot farther than 2GB on an Raspberry Pi.
Very insightful. I too see it as today's vcs/robber barons self-justifying blabbering about their greatness, and how no one should be allowed to question them.
>There is a culture of overwork that begets a culture of inefficiency that boggles the mind. Few people know that Japan has a labor productivity lower than Italy, for example.

If you spent so much time at the workplace like the Japanese you end up with a low producivity on paper pretty much by definition, because it's simply output divided by amount of time worked.

But I wouldn't overestimate the importance of computerization on productivity which is actually extremely low. Here in Germany we have a similar paper culture (although not quite as extreme) but very high labour productivity. The Japanese could simply go home or work a day less and their productivity would go up, it's not really comparable to much of Italy. (except the north of italy which is actually also extremely productive).

In fact Microsoft in Japan actually did just that and introduced a 4 day week a while ago, and productivity went up 40% (https://www.npr.org/2019/11/04/776163853/microsoft-japan-say...)
Maybe you're one of the few lucky programmers who actually build something useful.

But I think a lot of developers actually build software that is used by the same people mentioned in the book/article to be more productive at doing their bullshit jobs. And they're happy about it because it feels like they're providing real value to real people.

Also, most of the "enterprise" code I've seen written in the past couple of years was written to justify some big budgets and salaries, while the actual value provided by the related projects was questionable at best.

It's just that when you're a developer focusing on solving a problem you've been assigned, you're just to happy playing with your new toy to even ask yourself if you're actually solving a real problem or that shiny new feature is just something added by someone in a backlog to justify his salary.
This is absolutely beautiful!!

It speaks for his mindset as I would not have the patience to finish something like this. Besides skill, there's a high amount of perseverance and focus needed that most people don't have. Wow!