skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>It always strikes me as odd that someone can go through a 4 week bootcamp and call themselves a software engineer

Why? If four weeks is enough for somebody to learn enough that they can build Joe the Plumber a slightly nicer-looking website that he's happy with, what's wrong with that? A lot of excellent software engineers have zero days of formal software education. Even Donald Knuth doesn't have a software engineering degree; he has physics and maths degrees. Should Donald Knuth be forbidden from developing software because he doesn't have a piece of paper saying "software engineering degree"?
Brigading ?
Doesn't he mean for MBAs?
> Also without strong social incentives to believe, it becomes too hard to believe based only on the likelihood that it's actually true.

Can you clarify what you're trying to assert here please?

> The idea of divine, absolute laws of conduct and an un-gameable entity that enforces these laws sounds fantastical but it's very effective at getting people to cooperate once they've bought in ...

Would you be able to cite some examples of where this has happened in the past few millennia?
The US was also prepared for a global pandemic, or at least had a plan.. just a certain person in power decided it was unnecessary.
That’s a clever idea!

I’m not sure how practical it is, however. The first problem that popped into my mind was that the stove would often be unattended while I ran downstairs to grab something I forgot from the fridge.
On this historic day (exactly 75 years to the day since the August 9 1945 atomic bombing of Nagasaki) we should take a moment to understand more about our shared history.

> But he was also behind the internment of more than 100,000 Japanese Americans because, as Mr Stimson put it, "their racial characteristics are such that we cannot understand or trust even the citizen Japanese".

The internment of Japanese-Americans is a blight on United States history [1], as is the gold rush era Chinese Exclusion Act [2] ("the first law implemented to prevent all members of a specific ethnic or national group from immigrating" to the United States), as was the 1950s "Red Scare" [3] (where accusations of being Communist spies were made without evidence.)

As the United States enters into a (likely multi-decade long) second Cold War and potential painful economic decoupling, it's worth knowing this history so that the real problems the United States has identified with the Chinese Communist Party can be addressed in accordance to the values the United States exposes.

Especially with the presumption of innocence (innocent until proven guilty) when it comes to individual people's lives, and the principle that everybody is created equal.

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo's recent "Distrust and Verify" [4] reformulation (of a famous Russian proverb) should definitely be applied widely to counter the Chinese Communist Party threat, but great care must be taken to ensure America's core values are always respected. Cold Wars are very dangerous and vastly increase the risk of nuclear escalation, so it's vital we all understand what's at stake.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment_of_Japanese_America...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Exclusion_Act

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Scare

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trust,_but_verify
I don't really want to enter this discussion, since it usually quickly devolves to less than stellar levels. However, on the topic of the 1989 protests, I feel like Westerners often have a very superficial understanding of what happened back then, and in turn cannot understand chinese civil society and government today.

There's one documentary on the topic that I can wholeheartedly recommend, the Gate of Heavenly Peace.[1] It is quite long, but goes into incredible detail and also interviews a lot of organizers and politicians first hand.

The Tiananmen Square massacre was a turning point in chinese politics, ending a decade of increased freedom and open calls for reform. In civil society, people kept their heads down and went to work. In politics, almost all the reformers and politicians sympathetic to the students were isolated, demoted or even imprisoned. Still the last 30 years have been the best China has had in hundreds of years, and it is always much harder to argue with success. A lot of chinese people know what happened back then, and a lot of those accept it as something shitty that happened, but ultimately the country and people were still able to progress. Chinese people, by and large are not against their own government, even if they don't always agree with everything that happens.

[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Gtt2JxmQtg
Certainly we can be very happy that it is so.
At this point, i would consider any engineer who even considers a nuclear power plant within 200km of an inhabited area to be highly irresponsible.

As a species, we have not demonstrated the ability to create engineering organizations that put safety first in design and operations of Nuclear power plants - even the Japanese with their renowned safety culture couldn't do manage it.

Maybe if and when we get intrinsically safe nuclear power plants that demonstrably cannot irridate their surroundings if things go boom, then I'd reconsider but i don't believe there are any of those operational anywhere currently.
We need a "I'm going to shut the fuck up" oath for dudes like this.
I dont know exactly why but the almost poetic style of this piece resonated with me.

Im curious about the militarisation of China in recent times. Given the example that China has largely been "at peace" (not warring) as compared with the US, is this actually true? Are they largely defensive/Peaceful? What about the recent stuff with India and Japan over borders?

Also, whats next for the US then? After Trump, Corona...are the Americans waking up to something?
> These people are Belarusians

Sure. Belarussians can be spurred into action just like anybody else. A few provocations is all it takes.

> Most of my friends are against

No doubt. Shit I (and most of my friends) were "against" Putin in Russia. I always vote for whatever is the least embarrassing clown that he allows to run against himself. Note also that I think Putin is the best Russian leader in almost a hundred years - that's how low the bar has been before him. Be that as it may, I think he's corrupt as fuck, and I don't think he's the best Russia has to offer. _Most_ of the people in Russia, however, vote for him. Even if he didn't rig the elections, he'd win, just not with such an overwhelming margin.

I very strongly suspect the same is the case in Belarus - cities vote only mostly for Lukashenko, rural areas vote _overwhelmingly_ for Lukashenko, poor people vote as they're told by (government controlled) mass media.

Having 10-15% of people who don't like him doesn't matter a whole lot as long as he keeps control of the national security apparatus, and as long as Putin doesn't want him gone. If Putin wants him gone, though, shit could turn real ugly real quick, and you wouldn't even know why.

Don't get me wrong, I did not say it was "true". I merely said that this is what Lukashenko thinks. I also think it's somewhat plausible that Putin would use COVID19 crisis for geopolitical maneuvers.
The show wasn't censored in the traditional way. The show was basically reframed as an action monster-of-the-week targeting a much more male audience than the original anime. They basically edited the shit out of it and turned it into a different show.

edit: for the record I would not recommend the US "dub", since it's terrible (I don't even think they did the whole series). The original, however, is wonderful.
I agree, the article feels cherry picked. Look at the entire picture not just what's going well.

The S&P 500 is performing well, because it's being driven by big tech stocks that were largely unaffected by the pandemic.

There is a flood of retail investors enabled by mobile apps, many of them are inexperienced. There is stock mania, trading without looking at fundamentals.
I think making a statement as an industry helps avoid some of this stuff even being asked. With research you can easily find doctors who are brought in to assist with torture or other heinous crimes, but in general I would expect it to be harder to find a doctor to help with my project of creating a more addictive cigarette versus finding a web developer to help me market them.

There's some (not a lot, but some) power in a profession just claiming to have ethics, even if there is no enforcement and change in the hearts of practitioners.

Plus, at some point, we all just have to own what we do with our lives. It's great to advocate for systemic change but doing your own small part is at least as important.
I say no. My boss says "well, then no more salary for you". I say yes. My boss smiles. I feel dirty but my kids are not hungry.
I don't see how you think this intelligently contributes to the conversation.
People have woken up to that misery, it's why cutting your commute time by 60 minutes will cost you ~$300-500,000 in the price of your home.
great story, thanks for finding this!
I'm guessing because the unique outlier is about the fashion. Lots of other articles on HN about investment/financing
There are two "WWII - HD in Color" documentaries on Netflix right now. I recommend them if you find this subject interesting.

The old one is more comprehensive, but a bit numbing in that it just hits you with fact after fact after fact.

The newer one is a bit shorter, and breaks up the action with recent interviews with historians, who delve deeper on the "why" of what happened.

The second one skips a few important things, so I recommend the older to fill in a few gaps even if you don't watch both.
Providing a list of problems that Singapore has with ethnic discrimination – and I don't deny all those problems you've listed are real – doesn't actually answer the comparative question of how Malaysia and Singapore compare in this area.

I think the difference is between a country whose official written policies claim to treat minorities fairly and equally, but which often in practice fails to fully live up to those claims (and Singapore is far from being the only country for which that's true); and a country whose official legislated government policy is to discriminate against ethnic minorities. Can you see how the later is worse than former?
You have no clue what you're talking about.
Get into an industry, make a shitload of money, then add regulation and qualifications to make it harder for the next generation.

A tale as old as time itself.
How about a compromise then? Software engineers are responsible for the negative consequences of the software. Any and all responsibility they take is then also shared with every person that is above them in the hierarchy.

Eg a developer does something and society finds this unethical and punishes them. The developer's boss, the boss's boss, the boss's boss's boss etc up to the CEO all get punished in the same way. Furthermore, to avoid companies trying to shield themselves from this by putting their developers into a different company, it will apply to software that you get from someone else too.

Suddenly this doesn't sound very appealing anymore, does it?
The reporters strength is not tech it seems, it is indeed a 512 GB hard drive that is part of the system.

Additionally it has a range of detectors, even a Gunshot detector.

Source
http://www.smartercity.tech/smart-pole-node/
Doctors don't typically have bosses directing how they treat patients; Doctors have full agency, front line grunt workers do not.
> That’s a clever idea!

> I’m not sure how practical it is, however. The first problem that popped into my mind was that the stove would often be unattended while I ran downstairs to grab something I forgot from the fridge.

I often leave the stove unattended whilst I check the grill outside. So long as it's less than a few minutes (and you have a fire extinguisher on hand in the kitchen—as one always should), there shouldn't be a problem in most circumstances.
You get custom made clothing cheaper than store clothing? That doesn't seem to be the norm pricing wise.
Back when I was a teenager, I had a slide rule. I can guarantee that a slide rule is still valid, so long as you're not interested in more than two or three significant digits, and you don't want to add or subtract.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Ring
I wouldnt call one comment "discussion"
The problem is that the perception is relative, not absolute. As soon as more than a few people on the fringe start chasing it, the average will move up, causing a Red Queen scenario. Victorian court dress is a ready example of what happens when economics and social norms fail to restrain appearance arms races.
> Why are we trying to shift focus from the wrongs large multi-nationals do to individual software engineers?

Because software engineers are the ones doing the actual work. By imposing an ethical standard on the people doing the real work the multinational executives then either accept that limitation or knowingly accept risks from intentionally violating the spirit of that limitation.
Not sure hou understand how software is made. A programmer doesn't decide what to write, when to write it and they are lucky to be included in how it's made.

Programmers get specs and write programs to match those.

At no point is it the programmers responsibility to talk about the moral compass of the project and where it fits into society.

An oath to do no harm? You first need to give programmers the power to decide the fate of projects on their own the way only a doctor can decide medicine or treatment.
At the two ceremonies I have attended, the new MDs took this oath: https://www.hospicepatients.org/modern-physicians-oath-louis...

While it is often referred to as "The Modern Hippocratic Oath", I would argue the Lasagna oath contains significant differences from the original Hippocratic oath, and it is worth treating them as separate things.

P..S. I remember because I was like "Mmmm, Lasagna...." both times.
>Seems like ice is a better choice? The phase transition requires a huge amount of energy.

Why are you excluding the phase transition energy of the brine? Presumably you can calibrate the salinity so it freezes at around say... -15C, and set your freezer to -18C. That way it's absorbing heat more heat when it's colder, which is helpful if you want to keep your food frozen. The latent heat of water isn't of use to you if all your meat is already thawed.
Yesterday, there were 9 deaths in NY from COVID-19, compared to 77 in Florida and 103 in Texas. Positive % for tests is way down too.

Something like 50,000 people have died nationally since NY got things under control in early June.

That didn't have to happen. It wouldn't have happened if, say, Cuomo was running the country. Because whatever mistakes were made in NY, it was turned around starting in early April. At that point, the national death toll was about 150,000 less than now.
I'm pretty sure your (1) is correct. I think your (2) should be giving you results they think you should want, as in you shouldn't want to search for a conspiracy theory (even if your goal is to see what the other side is thinking).
Ethics are subjective. Plenty of people working at facebook will tell you their work is ethical.
the background daemons are mostly memory-limited, not processor-limited.
depending on the electrical wiring, latencies may not be that bad.

Ethernet is usually <1ms.... powerline adapter i use is about 2ms.... wifi to the same router, is 40ms. 2ms is much more manageable for me than 40ms
> Fast fashion and the fashion industry as a whole seems incredibly wasteful to me. Buying new clothing because of yearly trends is way to damaging to the enviroment for what it's worth.

I don't disagree per se, but I think you could say this about just about any hobby/habit/interest. Is it really necessary? Probably not, but it makes some people happy for whatever reason.

How do you draw the line?

Some people complain that travel is too hard on the environment..but I love travel and will continue to do so (post-covid)
Es interesante saber como los proyectos pasan por diferentes procesos antes de liberar su verdadero potencial.
On #3, it would not have been the same deaths. Russia hated Japan and would have genocided the Japanese by the millions, torturing, starving, brutalizing, slaughtering them. Russia would have conquered and enslaved Japan for the next half century.

Instead the US occupied Japan and forced cultural changes upon them, which resulted in Japan becoming a democratic, peaceful economic power and tremendous contributor to the global economy and both global and regional stability.
One would actually have to make a change to their global git config to set the pretty setting to display oneline or add a bash alias to run git log --oneline.

By default, it shows the entire message, and, in my experience, most people aren't going to change the default behavior in one specific case.
Build it into the corporate charter.
And yet they provide services to ICE
Not so. The support for unemployed workers has been extraordinarily generous - $600 a week. Household income has not fallen because of the unprecedented state UI support.
I think it possibly did a few years ago. There's a lot of 'tribal knowledge' stuff, and none of these practices were explained when my team (another... 8ish people) were added to the current team months ago.

I think it could be done a lot differently, and better, but any change requires huge amount of political changes. There's probably ... 2 or 3 teams that would need to approve of any process change, and no one wants to be the one to push changes like this ahead. It's "good enough", even though... we often collectively lose a non-trivial amount of time every week or two or three. We log that "wasted time" in a spreadsheet to make a point of it, but... no one is motivated enough the shepherd the required change process. The devops team would have to change a bunch of their scripts, and the process would need to be coordinated among multiple teams of varying sizes and skills. It is kinda disorganized and nightmarish with... I'm trying to count - there's maybe 20+ devs touching this. I suspect this was 'fine' 10 years ago with, say, 5-6 devs who would have dealt with it.
Reminds me of a story I once read about feeding to an optimizing compiler a program to print out the digits of pi.
Why should software developers take the oath? Half of us are already working for morally bankrupt companies. The companies should take those oaths and stop building products that ultimately produce negative externality.
You would lose the ability to practise medicine as a license is required.

Do you want to license software developers?
thats not a quote...
"Just doing my job"
I have used this, in a more dangerous fashion, to recarbonate flat soda.
I had a 600E! It was my very first laptop, and I learned Flash 4 (of Macromedia era) on it. It stood out so much against its contemporaries and made me a ThinkPad fan to this day.
Too bad there isn't something like Linksys with open drivers that also has SFP.
"Sure, some manufacturing is being done in China now, but the total amount of manufacturing has expanded." -Some soon to be unemployed factory worker in what is now known as the rust belt, circa 1988.
I thought it was settled now that the entry of the Soviet Union in the Pacific theatre ended the war, not the two (!) atomic bombs - it's a sad fact that Nagasaki is so often forgotten.

The US had already destroyed mostly all Japanese cities. There was no large difference between a firestorm bombing and the bombs to Japanese cities. In Tokyo more than 700.000 buildings were destroyed and in one night more than 100.000 people killed by fire bombing.

The only difference was one of efficiency. It took 280 B-29 to kill 100k people in one night in Tokyo while it took 1 B-29 to kill 100k people in Hiroshima.
The consequences of the decisions made by Microsoft Presidents and their ilk, since they are the ones who actually decide what software will look like.
But still it would be good when MS gets found to do unethical things that a programmer could be scapegoated instead of their president, at least from the presidents perspective.
Personal anecdote; we didn’t have to pay for after school care or kids summer activities for many months now, allowing us to pay down credit cards.
My first blog, give it a read
There is one.

https://www.acm.org/code-of-ethics
> Any and all responsibility they take is then also shared with every person that is above them in the hierarchy.

Currently, if I write software that performs illegal actions -- let's say software that allows me to use unlicensed Adobe products -- at the request of my boss and their boss, all three of us would be legally liable.
Always Home Run Bat
This absolutely reeks of the corporate effort to undermine action of climate change or environmental policy in general: advertising campaigns being run with a focus on individual responsibility to consume less, save water etc. as a way to divert attention from systemic action which would have an impact by controlling the biggest contributors.
Depends how you define evil. Is advertising evil? Then Facebook and Google engineers are committing evil. Is working with repressive governments evil? Then Apple and Microsoft engineers are committing evil. That's a sizeable chunk of engineers right there.
That's why you leave it in your motto, where it is _not_ legally binding, as a reminder to try to do whatever you think the right thing is...

Unless you don't.
You lost me when you went on a diatribe about socialism, as if the modern democratic socialist movement in the US, for e.g., has a lot in common with Stalin's USSR, which was a totalitarian, authoritarian state.
I looked at the product page for the wireless sensor and I saw this:

>No subscription fee of any kind for life; no monthly or annual fee to use cloud service and no cloud storage fee for data collected by sensor tags.

>High anonymity: only your account email address and tag manager IP address is collected

That sounds... slightly disturbing. It suggests the tags sends all the data to the manufacturer's server. That's bad from a privacy and reliability (eg. company goes bust in a few years) perspective.
The Hippocratic Oath is mostly irrelevant, so, no, we don't need it.

If he means we need a professional code of ethics, and the organized professional discipline that makes such a code meaningful, sure, maybe.

But it's odd for a software executive to make that case, since the only reason such a code would be necessary in software would be to provide a countervailing force so that developers resist unethical demands from their employers. IOW, if it weren't for the lack of ethics by Smith’s peer group, their subordinates wouldn’t need new constraints.
> My understanding is that if we could turn off all the coal plants tomorrow we could actually significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

yes. in 2018 40% of all CO2 emissions were from coal:
https://ourworldindata.org/co2-and-other-greenhouse-gas-emis...

that graph is the simplest possible way to think about "dealing with climate change". Its a checklist: #1 coal. #2 oil. #3 gas.

Gas has been a "transitional" fuel in the sense that its made the last decade less bad than it would have been, but given the timeline left* its already too late to build new gas infrastructure, assuming you intend to finance it with 30 year bonds.

* per the ipcc in order to stay under 2C emissions need to hit zero somewhere between 2040 for rich/western countries and 2055 for the whole planet, and then be followed by negative emissions for the rest of the century