skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Computer Operator

We had a couple computer operators (one per shift, not sure if there were just two shifts or an overnight shift too) at my first job (school district), they didn't program the mainframe, they ran and supervised jobs; for us, most of the effort was around running the print jobs for things like report cards and what not. Grab the paper from the warehouse, load the paper, collate if needed etc. Run the backups, change the tapes, etc. Yell at the student interns when they run ping of death and it borks the mainframe. etc

> Computer Operations Supervisor

Supervises the computer operators, basically the manager. Handle shifts when a Computer Operator is out sick, presumably. Not sure we had a dedicated computer operations supervisor because we didn't have that many operators.

> Tape Librarian

Organizes the tapes (reel is a lot harder than the little cartridges we had). Physically deliver tapes to computer operators, or maybe load them, based on requests, etc.

> Data Control Supervisor

Supervising the Data Control people --- you didn't list them, so I don't have to guess what they did. :) My guess is running reports, checking consistency, that kind of thing.
HN is as much of an echo chamber as any other internet forum. 90% of the time you can predict in advance what the top-voted comment is going to be. Most of the time it will be some pointless quibbling about how the subject line technically isn't correct somehow. The rest of the time it'll be about one of the three or four hobby horses of HN. "I don't use social media", "WFH has no flaws", "whiteboard interviews are worse than waterboarding", etc.
Increasingly, they don't.

I don't think a Linux monoculture is good, but from the perspective of an individual or organisation choosing which OS to use, there's less and less reason to choose a BSD.
> This lets it greatly outperform the JVM, at the expense of some rarely used functionality.

Outperform in what metric? Startup time? Granted. Anything else? Not so much.

>Basically, it’s like switching from the JIT to a C compiler’s -O3.

Yeah and that would be pretty bad (it's not a good analogy to begin with). "-O3" doesn't have anything that a JIT couldn't have. The only advantage is again, startup time. JIT compilation has otherwise only advantages over static compilcation, especially in highly polymorphic code, such as java. Static compilation for polymorphic code is a joke in terms of performance... And every C++ programmer should know that.

I didn't look at the spec, but I would assume that AOT is only the bootup and then the JIT will take over anyway. This means, they'd do some basic precompilation for fat bootup and then use JIT again to optimize the code further based on runtime analysis. Everything else would be a ridicolous step backwards in time and make AOT completely useless, except for some niche scenarios.
So? The goal is to eliminate improper behavior not cry about it and point fingers.
That is a fair point. It just felt too simple for a large transaction. I guess I should be happy at how easy it was.
> By far the loudest of these overtones is the 2nd harmonic...

Not true in general. There is no reason to expect the 2nd harmonic to be louder than the others. Some instruments produce mostly odd-numbered harmonics, such as the clarinet.

> This is not some artificial construct but a fundamental part of how things vibrate.

That's only true in a one-dimensional world. Instruments in the three-dimensional world are either mode-locked (not freely vibrating) or have some amount of inharmonicity. This is why the octaves on a piano are not tuned to 2:1 ratios, as I mentioned.
Some among the US founding fathers argued that such was inevitable. The only plausible solution, they posited, was to encourage even more lobbying. The only thing that could protect the democracy from special interests was, well, special interests. Competing special interests. The only hope was to set them against each other.
> Most software engineers are not like doctors. We have little autonomy over what is created. Our responsibility is primarily the how. And with devops sometimes the actual deployment and maintenance itself.

If you're an actual engineer of any kind, you always have some choice on this. You make architectural decisions every day, and you generally work for places that do, in fact, take your input into consideration. If you don't work for any of those kinds of places, then you are still responsible because you wrote the code to enable it. You can always say "no". There are consequences for that, for sure. You can always quit as well. And it may still get made. But it won't be by you.

And sometimes, that's still better than the alternative.
Invoking dystopian fantasies to rally cry for war? Seriously?
I read the statement and think Google used and then and abused their service, but at the same time, publishing a database of people's net worth strikes me as being pretty unethical. Would they have been able to handle a GDPR request? Why didn't they put their own and their families info up there first?
> R.I.P Westphalian sovereignty

The russian who ran an african "security" company, just before Erik Prince started his post-Blackwater african project, was arrested in thailand and sent to the US.

(This is probably a good place to remind any HK'ers with piles of the ready, who have not already invested in Vancouver, that Subic Bay is no longer a US naval base, but instead offers condos and a yacht harbour, all within cruising distance of HK.)

Before handover, HK police would come in pairs, with at least one english and one cantonese speaker. My (very pale and blonde) friend's hobby was to approach the cantonese speaking cop, who would gesticulate wildly pointing at their partner ... and ask a question in decent cantonese.
You’re describing Latin America and for that sole reason that you don’t see the irony of your argument, I think, what you described, will happen.
"It should be noted that no ethically-trained software engineer would ever consent to write a DestroyBaghdad procedure. Basic professional ethics would instead require him to write a DestroyCity procedure, to which Baghdad could be given as a parameter."

- Borenstein
I'm not sure you understand how bad the coronavirus situation is here. People's kids aren't going to be able to go to school in person this fall. Short of the outbreak of WW3 I can't imagine the pandemic not being the top issue.
Nope. So my current apartment is on the 28th floor. It's common to have gates/grills on the windows here in Singapore. But this apartment, AFAIK the family didn't have kids so they never got it done.

So I messaged my agent and said "i love the apartment but the windows don't have any gates or safety catches, my understanding is gates are pretty expensive, would it be possible to atleast get safety catches on the windows?"

Never googled or anything like that. For the next couple of months I had constant adverts for windows gates in Facebook.
The thing is one does not know if they'll come or not. That is not the point. There is a general fear amongst the people that they'll be targeted for speaking out. Effectively blocking freedom of speech.
using a "real" Turing complete language for configuration is overkill.

But there are two promising projects that could finally make a difference (at least one of them).

https://cuelang.org

https://dhall-lang.org
I hope you realize that according to your description, there are very few of those "most efficient" dairies. For best milk production, the cows need to be kept happy and healthy. That means letting them have a place to go out of their barn, walk around, lay in the sun, etc. Also pumping them full of hormones is a thing of the past. Source: lived on a dairy farm all my life
This is fascinating not only because of the datacenter

I wish we had the 60s fashion back
> If your complaint is that the title doesn't match the article very well...those complaints have become frankly tiresome. Does every single post ever need to remind people that the editor picks the title not the author?

1. I was responding directly to a comment on this site, not to the article as a whole.

2. Read my commentary again, I refer to the author of the piece and what they wrote and the Atlantic itself separately.
It appears the free trial is completely useless. It gives me no idea what to expect from search.
I don't think that's what the original article is getting at though. It talks about user privacy rights for instance, and it would be harmful to certain companies to not spy on their users, even if it's the right thing to do for society at large.
Engineers at the beam companies just certify that the beam meets its specs.

I'm not sure why software would be any different. Bridges are complicated and made up of versatile submodules, just like software. Some other software engineer eventually designs the "bridge" and selects "beams" for the structure. If those beams fail to meet their specs, then the engineers who stood by them are at fault. If the bridge fails because the beams weren't used in accordance with their spec, or didn't have a spec at all, then the engineers who approved their use in the bridge is at fault.
No most people destroying democracy are the people with nothing and want things with no effort. IMO
Covid-19, the impact of university return
I would say that some big core router manufacturers have built equally cool looking designs, for things like the Juniper T640, Cisco CRS1 and similar. Also the big Infinera DWDM platforms. The aesthetic is best when people who really care about good quality singlemode do careful cable management on the front line card side.

My least favorite old telecom equipment is probably the Nortel DS3 microwave radio systems, full rack sized, which were the most ugly shade of dark brown.
In the 1920s, I don’t think any person could have imagined the progress in Civil Rights that would occur in America.

And yet it happened. From racist Jim Crow laws to Gay Rights, the progress made in 100 years is astonishing.

Give the PRC 100 years and who knows how it might change.
This comes up all the time and I never understand this attitude.

Yes: dependencies are bad. Not having dependencies and writing everything yourself: also bad.

Honestly, you have to rely on heuristics in your deps. How active is the project? How simple is the thing it's doing (simple enough to probably not have major bugs, but not so simple it's faster to code it yourself) etc.

You get so much velocity from depending on external libs, it's straightforwardly bad not to take advantage of it. Are the junior devs at your company really going to write a better config handling library than the random one from github? Probably not. Maybe they'll both be bad code but the open source one has a better shot of someone else noticing it.
If anyone has the source from freeopinion reply please add it. That actually a really interesting concept.
Ironically the "don't seduce people" bit that got axed is actually still enforced and is one of the most common reasons doctors get their licensed revoked. (More specifically sexual misconduct).
That’s the Sgian-dubh. If you wondered what it was called

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sgian-dubh
http://www.larryluckham.com/1969%20&%2070%20-%20Bell%20Labs/...

Here is the original images.

Also that thring they call a computer terminal, I'm pretty sure is either an TSPS, OSPS or TOPS console, basically used for telephone operators.
And yet I constantly get CAPTCHA's just from blocking tracking cookies.

The biggest scraper of them all goes to incredible lengths to prevent scraping. How ironic.

I hope the US govt demolishes these monopolies. It's not just in web either, the closest historical precedent I can think of is the Robber Barons of the 30's
No it would not, but you could use decimals in xml.

Edit: looks like there is no float in xml.
How to Plan the Perfect Employee Retreat This Summer
Two things stand out to me, other than the clothing/fashion...

So much raised floor

So many tapes.
> To say it’s on the engineer to do no harm puts them in the tenuous position of doing the job or being replaced by someone who will. That isn’t setting us up for success.

This is where a strict licensing requirement, like Canada's P. Eng, can empower the engineer. If you think what you're being asked to do would violate your professional ethics, not only can you decline to do it, but you have a system to ensure that you won't just get replaced by someone who will do it.
Even if we’re to take this arbitrary definition from this small private organization, the article of this thread states that GDI is the highest and debt is the lowest since 2014. While GDP is 1% from the highest.

Record job numbers were posted in May.

There’s absolutely no evidence that any sector other than the social entertainment sector has been negatively impacted. Even REITs are doing well. Traversing economic damage across sectors is a key ontological definition which the NBER and monetarists agree on. Which is what I mean by systemic.

Most major central banks, including the Fed hold the monetarist parallax of where a recession is endogenous as the other commenter notes—-where all recessions are caused by monetary policy failures.

Indeed the surprising facts of this article are instead predicted by the monetarist, perhaps it’s only the NBER acolytes and Keynesians who are left confused with their certain ontological stubbornness.
Interesting. China was just doing its own thing in the mid-1900's. Sure it was no paradise to live in, but they were pretty much irrelevant on the world stage. Then all these multinational corporations come along, pump steroids into the Chinese economy (and by extension, the CCP) while fattening their own pockets, and after a few decades, play dumb and whine about how China hasn't been playing fair. Am I wrong on any of this or am I going to get a bunch of anonymous downvotes?

Now some basement-dwelling armchair generals want to go to war with the consequences of our own making. If humanity ends in a cloud of fallout, it'll be hard to say we didn't deserve it.
Just like Pepsi vs Coca-Cola was a referendum on what liquids would exist so now the earth is 70% covered in Coke? This isn't that timeline, friend.
The modern commercial Internet and non-monopoly/non-government ISPs would not have become possible without the 1984 breakup. Companies like Sprint and MCI benefited greatly from it.

All of the early core ISPs like UUNet and its competitors, in the pre 1997 period.
Beter title, other one underpins how serious this is.

"Owner of NewsPaper arrested under HK NSL"
Nonsense.

It can't be lawful to initiate violence or excessively respond to violence initiated by others. Not many people rush to immigrate to Russia, China, North Korea and few other nice places. Take a hint.
Makes it even sadder that Google now scrapes all of it and provides the information themselves
I do a lot of Mac/iOS UI development and use ImageMagick to make before and after GIFs from screenshots. It's incredibly useful. This is my one-line makegif bash script that I use by dragging images from the desktop to Terminal after the command:

convert -delay 80 -loop 0 +dither "$1" "$2" ~/Desktop/"`date +"%b %d, %Y, %H.%M.%S %p"`.gif"
From what i'v read, freezers are designed to be placed in ambient temperature greater than +10C.

There are specificially designed freezers that can withstand up to -15C ambient temp: https://home.liebherr.com/en/lva/products/household-applianc...

A guy on the phone that sells used freezers told me that compressor has some liquid that gets thicker when temperature drops below X and compressor has to work harder.

The other reason i'v read somewhere is related to compressor not maintaining stable temperature, won't turn on when needed etc.

These may be false statements and I ask for some guidance from professionals - is that the case? I understand when temp may fall below 0, you need some special freezer. Liebherr guy assured me any of their freezers will work OK as long as it is > 0C. But he couldn't tell about other manufacturer freezers.

As i'm in the process of buying a freezer that has to work in basement, could someone chime in please? Is Liebherr my only option?
Just flag the article and be done with it. My tolerance for clickbait headlines has gone to zero during this pandemic.
Your landlord might have immediately googled them and viewed some sites about them.

And do you and your landlord have the same internet connection?

How did you know gates are expensive?
Imperial Japan during WWII deserved getting atomic bomb drop on them. Those nuke doesn't even come close to what they have done to the Chinese, Korean, Taiwanese and every Asian countries they have invaded. Imperial Japan should get 10 atomic bomb drop on them for Nanjing Massacre.

Imperial Japan use Chinese as test subject for bio and chemical weapon. They have committed far greater crime against humanity than Nazi.
For the moment you have to build it yourself if you want one. I know that Esden on 1Bitsquared is working on productivizing it, but it's still a work in progress.

I actually bought all the stuff I need to build one, but I just didn't get the time to assemble it. And I'm a bit scared of the BGA package that is used o the Lattice FPGA.
Ask HN: Why are my Echo Dots uploading 300MB of data in 3 days?
I have several Echo Dots scattered throughout the house as well as Google Mini's. Finally trace mac's to their data usage and found two of my 2 Dots that are most heavily used (heavily I mean may be 5 commands total throughout the day to do simple things like lights and outlets, nothing at all complicated like read me news, stories etc.)

In 3 days, each of the 2 Dots uploaded over 500MB of data I don't know what. WTF?

Has anyone scoped it out and see what kind of data is sent? I haven't wiresharked it or anything outside of finally now realizing the data usage.

As a comparison, I use my Google Min for about the same amount of commands of similar types; lights/plugs on|off and also exclusively talk to my harmony remote. Actually G's Mini gets about 3x more commands but in the same period of 3 days, it only uploaded 24MB.

I realize voice files can get large, depending on sampling but damn.. 500MB in 3 days??! That's 500MB each!
I do pretty much need to interface a 68000 bus.

D lines and some signals need to be bidirectional. And I might even need to do bus mastering, so most signals would have to be.
Because he's not just randomly throwing money around and has a well earned reputation for getting a decent return on his investments: he tends to spend money on things that work. So given that he's actively spending money and getting results, his perspective on what things need to be invested in and why is very interesting.

There are plenty of rich philanthropists but very few with Gates's level of understanding and ability to make good policy choices.
I think the way Uncle Bob said it was reasonable. We have a choice: either we commit to doing good ourselves, and get out of licensing. Or we fuck up repeatedly, and eventually someone else will force a licensing process upon us. And it will not be a pretty one, because it's unlikely the person designing it will know the first thing about how we work.
a licensing system is just a form of regulation as alluded to in the comment you're replying to.

And in the end, if software engineers are to conduct themselves in moral and ethical ways, they must be empowered to do so without having to sacrifice their personal wellbeing or livelihood. Regulation, it seems, is the only way to achieve that end.
I have been thinking a lot lately about a possible solution for a small portion of this problem: Microdependencies. I'll explain in more detail in the context of JS, but it applies to other languages as well.

Currently package repositories like NPM host 2 types of dependencies: big community packages (frameworks, database drivers, validation libraries, query builders,...) and smaller function-scoped utility packages (left-pad, is-even, math functions,...)

My proposal is to create a new package manager for the latter (or adapt existing ones) which handles micro-packages, typically scoped to 1 function, 1 file or a small set of files. The big difference with regular NPM is that these micropackages do not get downloaded into node_modules, but are downloaded inside the src directory and committed to source control. This means that when you add a micropackage to your project, its source code is pulled into the regular src folder and is subject to the same code review as the other code your team writes. When the micropackage is updated the changes are visible during code review as well (instead of just being an opaque version bump in package.json)

This process makes small dependencies more visible and has review builtin. It also solves the problem of having to rewrite the same logic in every project in a slightly different way.

Edit: I'm not currently working on this due to time constraints but if anyone wants to talk about this, hit me up.
How about a Hippocratic Oath for business leaders? This is shifting the responsibility from management towards the engineers. It's not the engineers who pulled the trigger at Facebook - or Microsoft. They build the weapons. Management fires them.

This is a hypocritic ode. If somebody is acting unethically at MS then it is management. All the innovation that is not happening because MS is abusing their position. Two times they have killed a universal software platform to preserve theirs: Java and websites. Ironically they are pushing websites now that the platform has shifted to mobile with objective c and Google's variation of Java.

>According to Brad Smith, just like it is the Pope’s job to bring religion closer to today’s technology, it is the software developer’s job to bring technology closer to the humanities.

The Pope is to religion as is the President of the biggest software company to software development. It is his responsibility, not theirs. Or does he see himself as that software developer? I guess it is more a Balmer developer and he means software engineers.

He could start by handing out software licenses / EULAS that take full responsibility for any damage the software does cause, like any other sold product has to do. Then, by business processes, management will take care of the ethical issues to minimize risks.
You write like there are dangers that the US might forget or lose their values, like innocent until proven guilty or that everybody is created equal.

The US has never lived up to those. Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp (I hope no one forgot about that one) or all the tragic events that ignited the BLM movement are just current examples.
Yeah, the Japanese interment sucks, but I wonder what would have happened if there was no internment. Could US wartime industry on the West coast have operated successfully under constant sabotage? Would it be better for America to lose the war to Japan (or at least reach a deal and let Japan keep all of the Pacific islands and Chinese land holdings) if it meant that the internment didn't happen?

It's impossible to figure out what percentage of Japanese people in the US would have sided with Japan over America. But it might be telling that during the Niihau incident, literally every Japanese person the pilot ran across decided to help him, in contrast to helping the native Hawaiians they had been living with for decades. I wonder at what point the internment becomes acceptable. If 99% of the Japanese people in America would have supported Japan in the war, would the internment have been okay?
From what I’ve read, the Han are also affected by this if they violate the new 2 child policy.

Back when it was the 1 child policy, only the Han had to follow it. The Uighurs and other minorities did not.

Now, everyone has to follow the 2 child policy.
Those of us with professional Engineering titles already have to do a kind of engineering oath anyway.

The problem is the lack of value of the word "engineering" in several countries, where everyone fells like calling themselves engineer after a six weeks bootcamp without suffering any issue with it.