skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
- Why did you get into the field? What did you focus on at first?

I've always been fascinated with technology and trying to figure out how things work. I got my first computer at age 8, it had QBasic. I programmed a small number of games on it.
I spent a lot of time dis- and reassembling this computer, reinstalling DOS, Windows. We didn't have internet or manuals, nor did I speak English.
Later on played with Linux which really helped me understand how all of this works under the hood.
Actually programming came much later.

- What are you doing at your job? Is it everything you dreamed of and more?

I've been in the field for 11 years now, currently in an SRE role. SRE seems to be a different thing wherever you go. Not really my dream role in its current form right now.

- How did you break that first-job barrier?

QA internship in the gaming industry. Turned into full-time position, later on QA Engineering and then Software Engineering. I jumped on opportunities when they cropped up.
I made myself useful in QA rather quickly as I have a low tolerance for doing repetitive tasks manually, which got me into automation and tools programming.

- What were you doing before this?

I tried my luck studying computer science for about 2 years but that didn't really work for me. That opportunity for an internship came at the right moment and I took it.

- Any tips for the rest of us?

Find yourself a mentor. In my first role in QA there was one person in particular who was very open to all my question and taught me how to approach complex problems in legacy code bases. It really helped me gain a lot of knowledge and also confidence in my craft.
I should reach out to my first mentor and thank him, I am not sure he's aware of the impact he's had.
> IE was what happened when Microsoft conquered the browser space (where there really was only one other serious player), without any clear sustainable vision of what was "next"

I was under the impression that HTAs were what they viewed as "next", letting developers host and dynamically generate applications that would run over the network on Windows (or otherwise IE-equipped, hence IE for Solaris, et al) clients: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML_Application

It even has that whole super-granular "Zones" security system to e.g. trust an intranet-hosted HTA more than a publicly-hosted one. Am I off-base here on my historic Microsoft speculation? :)
The argument is that a photograph is a creative work (there are lots of decisions that go into it) whereas a scan is a mechanical reproduction, and therefore isn't creative, and so can't be copyrighted at all.

I don't know what the state of the law on this is.

https://boingboing.net/2016/06/01/why-3d-scans-arent-copyrig...
Clancy Imislund, a Towering Figure of L.A.’S Recovery Movement, Has Died at 93
DrPeering is good material: http://drpeering.net/tools/HTML_IPP/ipptoc.html

Geoff Huston paper "Interconnection, Peering, and Settlements" is older, but still interesting and several ways relevant.

I suggest "Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins Of The Internet" - generic and talks about Internet history, but mentions several common misconseptions.
The existing regulatory structure was designed specifically to stop nuclear power plants from doing things like running all the sets of redundant control and monitoring wiring through a single narrow space, filling that wiring space with flammable foam, and then testing the foam for air leaks with a candle when the plant was in operation. (This is not a hypothetical example - it actually happened in the US during the golden era of nuclear power, indeed I think it may have even been standard practice across multiple plants, and it very nearly caused a serious accident when the inevitable happened.)

I know the Trump administration has tinkered with adding more flexibility to the regulations covering fire protection and safety in nuclear plants in order to try and encourage more economical new nuclear power plants with modernized designs, but it hasn't really helped because the tradeoff for being able to deviate from the rigid rules is that the companies building them have to do a bunch of work to show that their new designs achieve the same safety goals.
> The economic value of a well targeted ad is probably 10x otherwise.

> Ergo - unless you are willing to pay for apps - you might now see 10x more ads appearing on pages than otherwise.

I'm afraid that this is nonsense. If the economic value of selling bread went down by 10x, do you think people would start offering you 10x as much bread?
I played around with programming as a kid, programming things like Mandelbrot sets on my TI calculator. In college I didn't take a single CS class, other than a EE signals class using Matlab. I graduated with a degree in Physics. After college I ended up in a training program at a big tech company, spending 9 months learning to be a test developer. After a couple years, I took some time off, studied the CLRS book and the first Coursera course on databases, and found a job as a developer in a "big data machine learning" company. Over the next couple years, I completed a self-taught CS degree through textbooks, video lectures from big CS schools, and a couple MOOCs.

My tips would be to take self-education slow and steady. There's an infinite amount of stuff to learn out there, and I found one "course/textbook/lecture series" per quarter to be sustainable for me.

I also recommend alternating theory and practice; studying to pass the interviews until you have a job, then emphasizing the theory that is semi-relevant to whatever job you get; and accepting that a lot of what you learn may not seem very useful/relevant until it suddenly is - six months after reading a couple books on Mapreduce program design, I was able to use that knowledge to ace an interview at a company that used that technology.
Oh jeezs, let's bury our heads in sand and never get out of our houses. How safe is air travel? Taking a car? Fact is, we take calculated risks every day - some smaller, some larger.

Unless you build the plant next to an ocean with on-going seismic activity, you should be pretty safe unless an asteroid hits straight to the vicinity of the plant. Counting out the crazy scientists who decide to do experiments in the middle of the night of course. I think we are past that stage.

And I'm tired of anti-nuclear arguments pretending that wind, solar and hydro energy will miraculously satisfy all our energy needs in the near future. If we phase out fossil fuels and switch to using electric cars and such, we need a lot more energy. Using uranium, otherwise quite useless mineral, we can produce some portion of that energy (as proven). Especially because it doesn't depend on natural conditions so it produces stable output all year around.

I would too prefer having all-green energy sources, but I'm pragmatist and in general not afraid of taking calculated risks in life. Maybe I'm too trusting of my nuclear engineers but then again, I still take planes and ride cars.
Germany imports much of its electricity, which often isn’t generated from renewable resources.
Tips for New Developers [audio]
Well when the run off area is a brick wall you have to expect some carnage.
Hyper-Stratification and Cybernetic Capital (2019)
I don't really think people are criticizing google for not wanting browsers to be capable when they say that chrome is the new IE
Okay, so for single source content I can either derive or assert an origin. Composition, not so much...
> it makes absolutely no economic, environmental or political sense

Environmental? As far as I understand, the much lower emissions (not zero because of construction, people driving to the plant, etc.) compared to our current main power sources is a huge benefit for the environment (and thus for us: even if you are right that it's more costly per kWh today, it might save the next generation many trillions). Given the phrasing "absolutely no [environmental] sense", it sounds like you're very sure it must be negative for the environment but I don't understand why.

I am generally supportive of nuclear but only because from what I read, it seems to be a big help in reaching environmental needs. I get the economics part: nuclear isn't super cheap and gets easily outcompeted by renewables on sunny or windy days. I also expect we'll start abolishing nuclear fission in favor of fully renewable sources as soon as we finished turning off carbon-based power plants (and, in a perfectly rational world, no sooner). If there is more to the story like some environmental effect that I'm not aware of then I'd like to hear it (note that I did read up on nuclear energy so you can assume I know the basics; I pose the comment somewhat questioningly not because I haven't done any research but because I think this is a constructive way to learn).
There’s people paying upwards of a thousand dollars on Intel i9s or Threadrippers when all they do is game.

What I’m saying is that there’s fanatics on everything, not just Apple. You were just exposed to Apple fanatics. There’s also Windows fanatics (not as common, but they exist). And, of course, there’s Linux fanatics.

There’s also fanatics in regards to hate. A big one we see here is Microsoft. Some here seem to think that the Microsoft of today is exactly the same one as the 90s. Never mind the fact that practically nobody from then is still there. But, “It’s their corporate DNA,” is something I’ve seen quite a bit here.
Microsoft Flight Simulator has had the entire world since at least version 5 (1993). But if you mean that it's the first time it has real satellite data for the whole world then yeah, it's a huge leap in out-of-the-box quality and it's nice that for once, you don't necessarily need to download scenery mods.
> Creating a function that accepts a `ctx context.Context` and then making a blocking call that doesn't respect your context will still block for the entirety unless you instrument it yourself.

A Golang service my work team owns has this problem. Virtually every single endpoint the service has contains a context as the first parameter... but the service never actually uses the context in the myriad of endpoints the service has.
Google Earth VR is truly one of the most awe inspiring uses of the medium.
Well if Google is already hosting all the content in their walled garden (see AMP), this would still be able to crawl the content, and even be able to be the exclusive platform that could crawl that content (in theory)
I completely agree with this statement and made a similar realization as well. Basically, modern devops and application development boils down to writing Lisp in YAML.

Config languages for Ansible, K8S, etc.are just basically a bad implementation of a Lisp-ish language.
Per the article, the issue is less the stock performance, and more of a contract issue regarding when the stock was issued.
I would classify those threats as different. Microsoft as one of dominant neglect and Google and one of dominance.
The unfortunate fact is that if you’re a restaurant owner (putting aside ultra high-end for the moment) if you want to increase revenue, you can either turn tables faster or increase the check size, if you raise prices people either want higher quality or better value - quality tends to be lower margin, so restaurants usually opt for value (bigger portions)...which is not the best for our waistlines
As someone self taught, let me cut to the chase and say your number one problem is proving yourself in the professional world the first time. My advise assumes you have a different degree and you have some CS skills. Assuming this, you have to knock on ~100+ doors until one opens. I’m not joking about ~100+ doors. You will be ignored, rejected and laughed at - repeatedly. You need to search exclusively in your local market with a local address on your resume. Don’t use the major bot controlled job sites - check prospective employer sites directly. Check for entry level positions - or even internships - that’s your best path. Manual QA tester. Project analyst. End user phone support. Third shift operations. I’m not joking: you have to prove it. Once a door opens, it may not be the title you want, it may not be the technology you want, it may not be the boss you want, it may not be the benefits you want, and it definitely won’t be the pay you want. It may be unpaid. Don’t negotiate. Your one and only criteria should be: will this role allow me to prove myself. Will this opportunity grant access to greater challenges, future roles, broader networks. If so, take it! Then work twice as hard as the next person and prove it!

My advice surely sounds cynical but remember the hiring pipeline is populated 98% by non-technical folks whose assessment of your skills relies exclusively on a degree. That’s the system.

tl;dr if you are self-taught, learning CS is actually the easy part. Getting your foot in the door is the hardest.
It gets even worse when you consider that you can encode visually identical characters with different combinations of unicode codepoints.

But that being said, are many nontechnical users typing filenames anyways?
That's why there are no plugins on mobile Chrome?
Article is hard to read since someone butchered it for ideological reasons:

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wigner%27s_friend...
Kind of depends how you define self-taught to be honest. Though I went through university, I do consider myself more self-taught more than anything: I got into programming when I was 10. By the time I got to university, I already knew 4 or 5 programming languages and even after that I kept learning more. And at this point I'm using technologies which were far from conception during my years in university, so again - largely self taught. With that in mind:

> Why did you get into the field? What did you focus on at first?

As I said, I was 10. At the time Windows was the only choice on our family computer so I started with a few batch scripts. At the time someone started publishing a small local magazine called "hacker" which iirc, was coming out once every two weeks and cost what would be the equivalent of 50 cents. And in it there were a lot of mentions of C++. So when my dumb 10-year-old ass saw a C++ book on the window of a book store right after the holidays, with some granny-cash in my pocket, I picked it up. As for the dumb 10-year-old ass - everything was going smooth as hell until I got to the section where namespaces were explored in more detail - I was completely unprepared for that. At the time I had this really cool ICT teacher at school who was aware I was ahead of most of my classmates so he let me do whatever I wanted, installed a C++ compiler when he saw the book on the computer I was using and it was game on from that point on.

> What are you doing at your job? Is it everything you dreamed of and more?

Lead developer, playing devil's advocate to be honest. Up until very recently (think 1-2 months ago) it was - awesome team, decent work-life balance, decent paycheck. But lately politics are catching up so I'm looking out the door at this point.

> How did you break that first-job barrier?

Pure coincidence. A neighbor at the time who had a real estate agency and infrastructure from hell learned about what I was into and studying so she offered me a job.

> What were you doing before this?

Not too much, I had a few small jobs to earn some pocket money, from driving laundry to copying pirated cd's (we are talking about the dial-up era where 1.38kbps was the speed of light).

> Any tips for the rest of us?

Don't sweat it. Pay close attention to what is happening and what people are developing and dig into it. Sooner or later a point comes where your experience will have immensely more weight than your education. I've interviewed dozens of people and when I look at their CV, I'm 1000000 times more interested in what they've been working on. Triple that if they have a public github account, even if there's one or two tiny projects in them. I'll spend hours digging through the code and commits just to get an idea of how this person ticks.
Yes, and if they don't, introduce them to a 5-year-old.

That doesn't mean they won't still have trouble working with filenames that differ only by case, and it can still be pretty hard to explain why two characters that are visually similar are distinct to the computer.

But the idea that letters that look different are different is not a hard one to understand. It's the default, and one that people have to actively unlearn.
It is in the oath that every service member, enlisted or officer, swears upon entering service.
I agree, and that's why I think it's not the new IE.

Like I said, it is very fair to criticize google and fear the monopoly of Chrome, but it won't be like the monopoly of IE.
> fields like these have a looser correlation to raw technical ability

Citation needed.
It's not even just the amount of tracking that Facebook et al do but the pervasive scope of it all. It's also a serious abuse of language.

Facebook and others use the word "ad" hoping people assume the definition is the old school television or print ad; "here's our thing buy it and it'll make you happier". Beyond whatever massage it had that advertisement only affected you if you turned to that page or watched it during your show. The content creator got paid to use some of their space/time to let an advertiser reach their audience.

For Facebook (and Google and others) and "ad" means a content creator is not just selling their own space or time but they're selling their audience. To them an "ad" is a means to hoover up a vast amount of data on people. Because of their reach and the fact they run a social network the data amounts to tons of PII. There's little regulatory control over the collection, storage, or dissemination of this data. The person being surveilled has no meaningful way to control what data is collected or what's done with it. Even opt-ins don't provide meaningful data to someone to make an informed choice about "ads".

Apple making some of the scope of their tracking clear is a step in the right direction for users. People shouldn't have to participate in a dystopian panopticon just to use an app or a website. If the apps or website somehow can't survive without surveillance that would give Stasi agents a boner they can fuck right off alongside Facebook.
It's because humans are rationale that they don't do this. There's very real advantages to operating the system and not being beholden to what a committee of nations wants, especially if you're a large economy that would be contributing vastly more than the smaller nations anyway.
Don’t have to convince me — I see photos as art too. I thought paintings with these because of the abstract shapes. So, not really photo-realism, but interesting compositions to lay down paint within.
Also, what's the point of SENTRI if not to obtain a more reliable and detailed database entry? Shouldn't that information somehow take precedence over a too-broad query of some other database?

Even if the official explanation is true as far as it goes, something is seriously broken here.
Yikes, when you put it that way... No thanks!
Mozilla was there.
Self trained SWE here. AP CS in HS, 1 CS class in college. Two degrees in archaeology which I studied and worked in on three continents (and an island).

- Why did you get into the field? What did you focus on at first?

It was kind of an accident. Archaeology is inherently destructive, so data management is pretty important. I'd always been on the data and mapping side. I wound up in a data production/management role at a government agency. We had a web mapping product delivered that didn't do what we needed, and it landed on my desk to figure out if we could use it to improve our internal workflows... and so I fiddled and read, and fiddled and watched Doug Crockford's videos, and fiddled and went to see John Resig speak at a meetup... and along the way released multiple little (and eventually big) tools to help my colleagues get stuff done. 3 years later I was speaking at conferences about the technical side of what we were doing, not the archaeological side. Asking some good questions to a co-panelist in the municipal SaaS space led to more discussions and a job offer.

- What are you doing at your job? Is it everything you dreamed of and more?

I'm an engineering team lead at a company that handles a lot of traffic, doing everything from new product development, bug fixes, R&D, and more. It's fun and interesting. Is it what I dreamed of? Not at all. I didn't set out seeking this, just followed the opportunities as they happened. I do miss working outside and digging in the dirt though, but definitely enjoy the stability, lack of poison ivy, salary and benefits.

- How did you break that first-job barrier?

There were two barriers, neither of which I set out to break.... the first barrier was "how did I get the Archaeology job to let me spend time learning and fiddling", while the second barrier was "how did I get that first job where they actually hired me to do software developent". To the first barrier, I built tools. Tools beget more tools, beget absurd amounts of time saved, which led to bosses willing to let me say "I have an idea, I know its possible, I'm sure I can build a "good enough" version, I just need time to figure it out."

To the second barrier, I asked questions, I answered questions, I went to lectures and was lucky.

- What were you doing before this?

Archaeology. Shovel Bum. GIS.

- Any tips for the rest of us?

The things I'm most proud of that I've built over the last 15 years are tools that let other people do more, be more productive, answer questions, see data, better help their citizens, etc. If you're in any sort of knowledge/data intensive/adjacent role, almost certainly there are data systems that could be improved, optimized, etc. Routine tasks that could be partially automated. Listen to the workflows, learn the pain points, and find a way to improve them.
Exactly. There is an opportunity for a volume discount for larger players but the 30% fee is pretty much in the sweet spot. Epic games has reduced their fees to 12% but it also has resulted in scenarios where it is possible to pay transaction fees and thereby pay more for the same game than on competing stores.

No sane developer is going to reduce the pricing on their $0.99 app to $0.82 just because Apple has reduced their fees but the lower fees mean that you have to pay extra for low cost apps. $0.82 may become $1.12 after adding credit card fees but if the price stays the same you may even have to pay $1.29.
I kind of like seeing articles like this, where you get to see the mental gymnastics (sometimes a simple somersault, sometimes a double twisting triple backflip) that employees use to justify to themselves "why I am not as evil as those people in that other company."

Sure, I don't believe Chrome has the same problems that IE did either, but I definitely do believe Chrome uses its dominant position primarily in service to extending Google's desires for the web. E.g. signed HTTP exchanges are more AMP shit that nobody asked for.