skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Have there been movements to “keep the code” after layoffs?
I was recently laid off from a startup where I think we were writing some pretty awesome code.

I think many other people have felt similar things recently when, because of a layoff, they've been severed from a great codebase they were learning from.

Have there been efforts or movements to encourage employers to make their codebase available to employees they let go?
It's crazy to me that somehow "Alley 19 Bowling" has been lingering around in my brain for 20+ years. All of a sudden I feel like I played it yesterday.
This is somewhat inaccurate. The government pays for half the cost of a degree for Australian citizens. Then you pay back the other half in tax, interest free but with inflation but only when you earn over a certain amount of money.

The cost isn't doubling. The government isn't covering half the cost of the degree.
Yes. I worked at Quora and we had a "practical interview" that was exactly this (it wasn't take-home though).

https://www.quora.com/What-is-it-like-having-a-practical-int...
Maybe there are more reliable ways to achieve the benefit for a greater number of people. Science offers an approach to discovering this, and the "why" - the theory - is what drives science.
I’ve found box breathing to be useless at best. There are better alternatives in Nestor’s book
If the only option are paying X for something that will easily pay it off and set you up for life, and paying 2X for something that won’t, it will make it more attractive. Or people will opt out of college entirely, which is also sometimes better than getting a useless expensive degree.
One of the most telling questions I ask when interviewing is “what was your favorite or most complicated project you’ve worked on and how did you solve the problems you encountered?” I don’t need the interviewee to show me a perfect implementation of a red/black tree. Hell, I don’t remember it. But I want to know what they found challenging and how they went about solving it. Often times they will give me all the technical details I would have asked for, but in context. I don’t care that you know the exact name of that one function in PHP but if you mention it off hand in relevant context, I will place that much more trust in the fact that you actually used it instead of memorizing it.

Other questions I ask are things like do you work on your own projects and tell me a bit about the tech behind them, what’s your favorite pieces of open source or free software (I work with almost exclusively FOSS stuff though my own work is not FOSS), what do you do for fun, and if we were talking on the phone and I had never made tea, walk me through the process (this is a fun one). Then take them out to lunch if possible and watch how they treat service workers. I think this has so far worked well for everyone involved. At least as far as I know nobody I says yay to has been a bad hire.
this looks very cool. but my experience with photogrammetry is pretty poor. The reconstruction seems to be noisy.
Yeah, as an immigrant in the US, I still can't wrap my head around it. I originate from a country with rampant corruption amongst beauracrats and politician. The most common, that's always in the news, is one where the wealthy pay off political leaders to influence policies. But in the US, it's just legal!
Absolutely. I often feel bored, depressed, and anxious being a corporate software developer. It crushes my soul that we coddle junior developers so extensively instead of mentor them and that coddling defines everything from product quality to what code we are allowed to write and how fast we are allowed to ship it.

I was recently mobilized in the Army reserves to a deployment in Kuwait where I am a junior director in charge of help desk operations for a large military command. I am a late arrival to the unit. When I got here morale was low, productivity was low, things were falling through the cracks. Now things are really turning around. I am working 70-80 hours per week and it’s great. I building new software products that auto prioritize the work. The team sees the progress they are making in terms of numbers from day to day. Productivity is up and working harder with necessary direction has caused morale to jump up.

The military thing is less pay for longer hours but it’s so much more fulfilling to know we can set our own short term goals and crush them. I get to use my software skills to produce products that influence my leadership style and advertise team success in raw numbers. There is nobody complaining about how hard life is to slow me down. Since I am allowed to produce products at my own speed and since software product creation is generally foreign to the military my team is able to influence and empower its own success in a way others cannot and seeing that success in real time has been awesome.

Deployments are temporary though and I know I have to go back to dicking around with slow application code and large incompetent frameworks in the corporate world. About the last month of a deployment gets super depressing.
How about basic feature parity with GitLab?

GitHub - if you're listening, _PLEASE_ implement protected tags :)

https://github.community/t/feature-request-protected-tags/17...
Australian tax payers subsidize tuition costs. It’s not interesting to them to produce degrees that will not contribute to that same tax revenue for the next generation.
IMO the problem is that the government meddles with the market to begin with. I know I'm in the minority, but I believe a clean separation of government and market would remove the incentive for regulatory capture without damaging free speech rights.
Thanks for the info! Yes, a writeup, and open-sourcing the Python driver you wrote would be excellent. We've got tons of tapes still unconverted, and as another commenter mentioned, it's better to do it sooner than later.

On an MBP 2012 as well, and also have a powerful Linux desktop for ML work, so definitely sympathise with the divide in hardware. Interesting that you're using Quicktime - is ffmpeg not suitable because you need a GUI for the trimming/splitting?
Consume a k8s course, not the marketing, and set up a test server. For me the downside is there is a lot of new stuff to learn. Information overload!

(are we calling it K8 these days?)
It’s hard to explain the excitement that those CDs packed to newer generations. The internet was 14.4 or 33.6kbps. My HD had 250MB.

That meant that 650MB was just colossal. Thousands of exquisite icons, games, productivity, utilities, etc. It was vast.

Besides, the drivers were 2X or 4X, so it really took you a while to browse the whole thing.
Every reading noise would correspond to another portion of the screen being partially painted, something to look forward to.
But even if you think you’re right you may be wrong. All current understanding is bound to change when better understanding is achieved. Sometimes things that are scientifically thought to work in a certain way take turns, sometimes going into opposite directions. So even if you think you understand something, it’s healthy to keep a bit of skepticism and a bit of open mind.
I really enjoyed the first bit about his background. I don't see it as "victimhood" as much as showing where he came from - inspirational, even.
>Knowing how to naturally be curious and solve problems is a far more difficult skill to learn and demonstrate, but it is easy to evaluate indirectly.

That's what leetcode used to test and then people optimized for it and now it tests memorization. At scale things work differently than in isolated cases. I've also found that most problem solving interviews really test how well I've seen the problem before and how well I can lie about seeing it before. Interview enough candidates and the good problem solvers will look dumb compared to the ones who simply saw it before and can act like they didn't.
Let's not forget that Bezos left behind several teenage children to shack up with this helicopter pilot . . . even Elon Musk has like 8 kids from a former marriage he probably rarely sees . . and now a new boy with his current "Baby Mama".

Yet still the media dares not talk about these facts.
I’ve gotten to the point where it’s simpler than this. Firms get 16 hours to evaluate me. If the take home isn’t a huge component of that I know they’ve cargo-culted it. I won’t do it if they can’t promise that isn’t the case.

I say this as someone who was an extremely early adopter of take home tests and think they are the highest signal filter you can reasonably have in the US.

So many places have added take homes in the worst possible way without removing all the other nonsense. It’s as if orchestras started demanding high pressure auditions and then threw out the results if the person talked a good game in an interview.
They might use user-agent sniffing and decide not to redirect ie that old to https?
about:preferences#search

aka Menu > Options | Search | Search Suggestions > Provide Search Suggestions
Prediction: Spinning beach ball (92% confidence)
Economics Is a Disgrace
Some of that bloat is legitimate, or at least dictated by consumer expectations.

Consider graphics resources: modern screens typically 9 to 16 times as many pixels per square inch. Even though Macintosh computers have always been known for their graphical interfaces and use in publishing, user interface elements did not always exploit increased colour depth in the early 1990's. A graphics resource in a modern application can use an additional 4 to 32 times more memory just for colour. Software also tends to incorporate more graphical elements these days, thus adding more bulk. We shouldn't be surprised by Photoshop being 310 times larger. Since people tend to notice the visual quality of software, whether it enhances the software or is pure cosmetics, it is not necessarily a bad thing.

Other aspects of software will also influence its growth. Modern software tends to support more languages and regional variations in how data (numbers, time, etc.) are represented. This virtually always produces a noticeably larger program. More features means more code and associated data, while optimization tends to focus upon speed at the expense of size. Again, programs will be larger. When it improves accessibility and functionality, this "bloat" is a good thing.

I am not saying that bloat is always a good thing and I appreciate how much developers of the past could do so much with so little. My favourite example are early versions of Clarisworks, where a stripped down installation could fit on a single floppy disk while offering a word processor, spreadsheet, database, paint program, vector illustration, and telecommunications software. It also addressed the needs of most home and home office users, even considered in the current context. That being said, most people would consider the presentation stark by modern standards and anyone who takes the time to actually learn how to use their software would find the features skimpy.
I call it "performative productivity" since it's actually a performance.
The "13 years" of compulsory education are foundational, but cannot adequately address topics in any depth, at all. A student who has taken "13 years" of math might be able to solve for x and y in a system of equations and calculate compound interest. Two additional years would grant them an understanding of set theory, Bayesian statistics, or calculus.
Nearly no ethics or civics is taught during the compulsory period. No philosophy, very little critical reasoning. What we could do with just a little bit there.
OpenVMS Community License Program Is Live
That is great in areas where the correct knowledge or pedagogy is not known. Then you can have different opportunities for success. This is horrible where a teaching or pedagogy is known to be better. As an example from a few days ago on Hacker News, suppose a teacher wanted to teach Roman numerals as the primary method of representing numbers.
Demo CD's would often feature shareware versions of software.
The introductory paragraphs and the proposed Alternative are completely disjointed.

The stated problems are caused by breaking API changes. The author says it clearly: don't break your API.

Now, how does a different version naming convention change anything? You still have breaking changes, just with a different name. And I'm not sure at all that dates make it any easier to spot breaking changes.

There's this very illustrative talk explaining why breaking API changes are such a bad thing. https://github.com/matthiasn/talk-transcripts/blob/master/Hi...
Lays on the schmaltz pretty thick in the beginning. In fact I couldn't even get past all the schmaltz. Then I remembered he has warehouses where underpaid workers pass out from exhaustion and I stopped reading.
> many STEM degrees require TWO YEARS of "liberal arts rounding" classes.

Is that true in Australia? I assumed universities in Australia would be similar to the UK, where all classes are in the chosen subject only?
The Lisp Academy
Windows updates can be installed remotely/using only command line tools with Powershell, though I forget if it requires admin.
Unfortunately someone at Twitter read my comment... The Bhutan trending section exists now. :-(
Netflix is literally on the list
Wow. You think that the Gates Foundation has complications and conflicts of interest, and you think that a mega-science project would be free of those?

I mean, first of all, mega-science is just as prone to grift and mismanagement as any other type of mega-project, and far more so than vaccine programs or malaria treatment. And just imagine, what would the absurd conspiracy theory nuts say about a supercollider?

Of course, hey, wait a second, Gates and/or the Gates Foundation already do this (e.g. TeraPower, e.g. CFS), so your whole line of reasoning that it'd have considerable PR benefit is proven false. Fortunately the Gates Foundation isn't very motivated by PR.
> Yeah, I live with a cat, they're extremely clean creatures in that sense.

My two cats lick their own anuses multiple times per day.

Not. Clean.
Wrong about what exactly?

If someone observes measurable benefits after (e.g.) breathing through one nostril for a while, I'd consider it important to know exactly why. Maybe there are important things about the mechanics of respiration that we haven't understood yet. Dismissing such phenomena with "If it feels good, who cares why?" seems counterproductive in the long run.

OTOH, if no one sees measurable benefits, then the various anecdotes from practitioners really are just bias in action, and (IMO) are not worth expending further thought on.
The absurd number of footnotes and their careful detail make me happy. I wish all articles were this well documented.
They are from a demo CD, their whole point was to encourage distribution
Far as I can tell, the government has several levers that they are pulling/not pulling here (somebody correct me if I'm wrong, I'm just getting this out of news articles, not primary sources):

- they are partially directly subsidizing the cost of degrees for domestic students. The extent of subsidy has not changed in the new policy. (questions: is the direct subsidy the same for all degrees? do arts currently get more or less than STEM?)

- they set the fees that universities are allowed to charge students. In the new policy, the allowed fees for humanities have doubled, the allowed fees for STEM has decreased.

- also, there is HECS/HELP, which is a scheme where all domestic students (not PR/exchange) are allowed an interest-free, CPI-indexed loan that is only paid back slowly when the student's wages go beyond a certain threshold. This is for the full cost of the entire degree, and is a big part of why students tend to be price-insensitive.

- fees for international students are roughly 5x domestic students, and they don't get HECS/HELP. They are basically subsidizing the entire system. The covid situation has dried up this revenue stream and now the unis (who have not been financially prudent during the fat years) are deep in the red, with rumors of bankruptcy starting to circulate.

editorializing:

1. Arts and humanities are bad choices if you're already poor. If you're from a rich family it's actually pretty great - light course load, personal growth, better male/female ratio, etc. If you're poor and you do arts, you will have trouble getting a job. People should be allowed to choose whatever degree they want, but the government shouldn't subsidize bad choices.

2. The government seems to be implementing this in a suboptimal way. It seems that there is a fee increase but no decrease in subsidy (or there's a mismatch). I would just lower the subsidy for arts/humanities and allow a fee increase that matches exactly.

3. I doubt this will produce worse engineers. The engineering degrees in good unis are heavily sought-after and difficult to get in, and this just increases the number of applicants, while the number of available places won't change much. I think the largest effect is unis will spend more on marketing their arts degrees, since these will be more profitable going forward.

If it leads to the arts departments upping their game to attract students, it's probably a net plus.
what?

Google has been running on 100% renewable electricity since 2017. Microsoft has reached that milestone as well, but I can not find a date for when they achieved it.

AWS aspires to eventually reach that goal by 2025. One of the clouds is dirtier than the others.
Because if they admit there are good and bad ways to teach, we might start evaluating whether the public school teachers are good at their job and fire them when they are not.
The board game of the alpha nerds (2014)
Sadly no one has made this easy and possible.
I'm learning Chinese and I think you've avoided the question. The crux of the matter is how to learn the thousands of character-to-pinyin/meanings mappings. It doesn't fit at all into the phonics description given in this article because you can't sound out a character. And the way I'm learning is straight memorization which this article makes sounds bad, but what's the alternative in Chinese?

And this article says that a second grade reader can learn a new word after being exposed to it just a couple of times, but I'm not having that level of success to new characters I read in my passages.
My city considers 1099s as businesses due to some shady contractors in the past. So my local government would try to collect a chunk of any contractor earnings (with that chunk getting huge if you didn't register with them first).
I thought it never took off as a mass produced material because mass production was rather difficult (read: expensive)

That said, apparently it's been going down in price quite rapidly by order of magnitude: https://www.graphenea.com/pages/graphene-price#.XyDfAGkpCNw
I have no hard data to give you, only anecdote. But ever since I've consciously tried to reduce the quantity and frequency of my meals, I feel like my 'stomach has shrunk'. It's most likely something like what you're describing, as I don't literally believe my stomach has shrank, but there may be something to that folk phrase.
You're kidding right? When is it ever okay to broadcast blatantly false information that obviously violates longitudes worth of pharmaceutical regulations set in place by the FDA, that's a rhetorical question by the way.

There's a reason that regulations for pharmaceutical companies exist, to prevent harm to consumers that don't have the aptitude to adequately evaluate the products that they're using themselves.
Modern windows has no expectations of consistency, but Windows in the 9x era would have a pretty consistent feel. Sure, there were two file pickers, and yes some people made their own, but other than media players and games meant for full screen, almost everything used system widgets and kept system colors etc.
The annoying part is that most of the politicians have humanities degrees and are of an age where their degree was probably free in Australia. $40K is a lot for an arts degree.

Surely a better solution is to provide lots of incentives to get a STEM degree - more carrot less stick.

I suspect their motivations if their stated goal is to get more STEM graduates, then this is not the best solution.
Your ad hominem concedes the argument.
Everything you said is true, and at the same time misses an important nuance. Yes, your obligation is to maximize shareholder value, but there are an infinite number of ways to do that. Treating your employees like crap and paying them the minimum you can may temporarily maximize your returns for a quarter, but your hiring and training costs will rose as employee turnover goes up. “We treat our employees well because we believe that that maximizes our organization’s long term productivity and profitability“ is a perfectly reasonable approach to addressing your fiduciary duty to your shareholders.
It seems that you and a lot of people look at hiring as a zero sum game, because there can only be one standard. If it doesn't include someone, but changing it to include them would exclude you, then tough cookies. That's a very depressing outlook.
Don’t forget how he treats employees. If just 1/3 of what was written in The Everything Store is true, it paints a damning portrait of its ceo.
You’re giving 18 year olds too much credit. Ask the average college student what job they’re planning on getting with their degree and how much it pays and they won’t be able to tell you.
Wow! I've been trying to figure out for a year why my financial institution hasn't been able to deliver me electronic statements. Every month or so it's been auto-switching back to snail mail. I even switched email services and did extensive tweaks to my spam blockers to try to figure out what was happening. Them looking at the email image-loads never occurred to me... thanks for sharing that!
Sometimes the jokes just don't crystalize into something funny.
Only thing my team uses is recorded demos.
Thanks - I think that's fair, but it doesn't necessarily get out of the way without casualties.

I'm bothered when something that is still uncertain is put forward as true, I think people are generally over confident where they should be less certain. Even this can be harmful in ways people don't expect [0].

It becomes really harmful though when stuff known to be false is pushed as true (conspiracy theories like not getting cancer treatment). This leads people to not pursue treatment they desperately need. In their case they won't have the opportunity to become more skeptical afterwards.

There's also the risk of political influence pushing certain things as true that aren't and real knowledge can be lost (though I think that's less likely to happen today).

In this specific breathing case, it's benefit being real or not is probably not that big of a deal - but the underlying value of wanting to understand why something is really true or not I think is important.

[0]: https://guzey.com/books/why-we-sleep/#the-potential-harm-don...
Large tech companies will have system design and project oriented behavioral interview which will somewhat cover actual dev work. Other than that it pays to build up your network during your career. You can basically bypass interviews at smaller companies with the right referral.
Yes, that's why it said "very likely"
Supply and demand. Demand for certain fields is high, so governments are willing to put more money into them because they're more likely to pay off in the future. Meanwhile, certain art majors are in very low demand and supply is high, so governments aren't willing to pay.

Not saying what they're doing is right. Just saying that from a purely economic perspective, it makes sense. I don't think university should be purely economically driven, though.