skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My "ligue des pensées" (LDP), AKA "Gedankenbund", AKA "League of Thoughts" (LoT) is certainly based on storing analog signals on refreshing electrostatic drums and projecting the image (images!) on CRTs. There's a nice railway print of the futuristic main hub of the British part of the LoT at New Castle, exposing the stylized cylindrical shape of the storage drums in its main tower (nicely lit in electric blue by high the voltage discharge of the drums inside). A delicate chapter in the history of the LDP is the niche of the "valses roses", which inevitably evolved into a major business. In many countries some opposition of mostly moral objection arose, especially in Germany, where a rising NSDAP feared for the health of the populus and for the sanity of German men who were exposed to the finer details of the anatomy of foreign women, which in turn lead to its smashing defeat in the 1933 election… :-)

----

Edit, on the technology of the LoT: This was some of a joint European effort. A crucial part was the storage of the analogue image signal on a continuously refreshed electrostatic drum, invented by Dr Ludwig Chevenmüller in the early 1920s. A major breakthrough was then the contribution of a young Tommy Flowers, who came up with a way to combine discrete signals suitable for relay-based automatic dialling with the analog signals that provided the content. In a somewhat parallel strain Thierry du Pont du Lac invented his "lecteur discret", which did much the same for character based signals in Baudot code, which was eventually combined in the vertical blank of the analog image signal and stored on the terminal side on a second drum, to be superimposed by a tiny typesetting machine and an array of electrostatic lenses onto the analog Chevenmüller image. (Alternatively, the combined image could be redirected onto a third drum, from which it could be printed using a technique similar to stencils. Seasoned users of the LoT may remember the typical smell quite well.) But the LoT only really took of, when BASF came up with a way to compress the Chevenmüller signal into rapid bursts, which enabled the rather astounding speed of the network.
if this traffic were intercepted- you'd be able to see port numbers, right?

Sure but I hope the service you're opening up with the knock is actually secure like ssh.

The idea is just that you cant portscan to find something to attack. Its basically the same reasoning behind using non standard ports, but takes it a bit further.
The U.S. EEOC Confirms a Pattern of Age Discrimination at IBM
If you have any bit of real security, incompetent people wouldn't pose a risk.

So, what's the gain?
Why should laws to protect people be deleted and laws added to protect corporations?

You base laws that protect the well being of the citizenry into a tort reform call. Protecting corporations that abuse the public does not improve the lives of the public. It just improves the profit margin.

The basis of "tort reform" is a panic assessment that lawsuits run wild and the only solution is to indemnify the rich and powerful. This lets them abuse the public even more.

Your link implies this is for liability, but it could just as easily be a filtering step so that the bottles provided are up to a certain quality standard to be readily reused.

The root problem is the bottles are cheaper to make out of disposable material. The cost burden is shifted to The People over a longer term. This is the tragedy of the commons.
Paul Castellano agrees
Maybe not a try harder situation, but a "try smarter" one. Many people are quite bad at learning because the process is counterintuitive. People mistake the feeling of mastery for learning, and it's not at all a productive feeling (if you want to learn; it's great at building self-confidence). My advice:

1. Focus. Acknowledge that you have surface level familiarity in many things, but that nobody can or should go deep in everything. Pick a language you're using professionally, and focus on that. If you don't currently have a job, try to pick something with broad applicability like Python or Golang. Also eliminate distractions: email popups, SMS, facebook, HN/reddit, Slack, all must go while you focus.

2. Study. Now that you have a language you want to build expertise on, study it methodically. Start an Anki[1] deck for it (and run through reviews daily) -- this is your tool to "try smarter". Get a set of beginner books from the library/amazon. Run through a codecademy or similar online course series. Make new Anki cards as you go. When you've finished a book, start working on the easiest online problems you can find online. Sort Leetcode[2] by acceptance rate -- many make the mistake of trying them in order, or by difficulty tag, and get frustrated when they hit a stumbling block. Learn from their failures. Once you solve a problem, review how others solved it and try to understand their code: did they use arrays or objects? did they use recursion? obscure syntax you need to look up? Which code base is cleaner, and easier to read?

3. Pace yourself. This is a marathon not a sprint. Improvement will be slow, and it will not feel good. If you have a job, I'd limit myself to 1 hour a day on professional improvement. If you're searching for work, I'd still limit myself to 4h daily. I try to spend about 10 minutes a day on Anki, just to retain what I've learned. People spend 4 years of their life on this stuff, after all.

4. Advanced study. As you advance beyond the material in step 2, look for conference talks at your level. Read through the official documentation. Start browsing StackOverflow or similar for your language tag[3]. Keep making Anki cards and reviewing them. Maybe pick up a CS textbook to shore up theoretical shortcomings and study 10 pages a day (textbooks tend to be denser reads than other reading material, so again, pace yourself.). Start with freshman undergrad stuff like Data Structures -- nearly universal in application and immediately useful. Or since you feel anxious about it, a book on OOP.

[1]: https://ankiweb.net/about
[2]: https://leetcode.com
[3]: Little known secret: the most viewed questions aren't the ones with the most votes, they're the ones that novices google the most. Top viewed question is like 'how to quit vim,' but those people don't vote up the question or answer. Unfortunately, SO doesn't make it easy to find the most viewed questions, presumably because cream skimming their 100 most viewed pages is an existential threat.
A vector-based leadership philosophy
> "alternating with short bouts of motivation"

I think you might have pinned it here. It may be that you are just fine as a developer but that you have burn out or some other mental health issue honestly. I don't mean that as a negative. I was burned out very badly a few years back and I felt exactly like you describe. It led to anxiety, depression, a lack of motivation, pain... nearly a mental breakdown.

I had been on a bit of anxiety medication for a while. I had a near breakdown (some would say a total breakdown). My doctor literally said "You need to go see a therapist. I mean it. You can either go on your own or I am locking you into the trunk of my car and taking you and you won't be let out until you talk to someone." (So, my doctor threatened to kidnap me, and thank goodness!) So I went and talk to a therapist. And talked. And talked so more. For months, then years. It has changed my life for the better. I am a better developer. I work better. I am a better husband and father. I FEEL better.

I really can't recommend highly enough that you take a look into your mental health. It will help a lot. So what now? Talk to a professional.
Looks like that's in addition to federal income tax: https://www.canada.ca/en/revenue-agency/services/tax/individ...

So I think most of the time it's probably a lot worse than the long term gains tax in the US.
The impostors aren't (IMO) concerned with improving their skill level. They're normally just worried about what position they can hold on to, how much money they can make, or how to hide their incompetence.
To give you good advice, we'd need to know more about you. You haven't really said that much about why you think you're bad, or what you've tried to do to improve.

You say four things about why you're bad:

am not even really that great with the "practical" stuff despite having been at it for so long

I must stress the 'surface level' part

can recall my last interview tripping up on questions about very basic OOP

although my solution is more likely to be a complete mess

The first seems relevant, but too vague to get much of a grip on. The second seems of dubious relevance--it can be useful to know about a lot of technologies, but it's neither necessary or sufficient. The third is about interviews. That may hurt you in a practical way (and is something you can practice!), but doesn't actually bear on whether you're a good programmer. The fourth is relevant, and actionable. But why do you think your solutions are messes, and what have you done about it?

Supposing that you do really have a problem, you have to decide what your real issues are. Then you have to identify ways to work on them.

Ideally, you'd find someone you trust who can work with you, who knows something about coaching people, and can give you an accurate assessment.

P.S. All this assumes that you have a problem. I don't think we can assume that. It also assumes you want to stick with programming. But that's not a requirement. There are plenty of good comments about how you could switch fields and be happier. There's no shame in doing that, if you decide it's your best course of action.
That's right. HFT extracts value from the market without providing any of its own. It's purely rent-seeking.
I never considered myself a great developer.
I studied design at university because I wanted to broaden my horizons but I already knew that I eventually end up coding at some point (just because I enjoyed it so much). I guess it took me around 8 to 10 years to get confidence in my work. Now around 20 years after starting to learn how to code, I'm runing my own studio. managing some code projects for major cultural institutions, a AR project and the manufacturing a physical product. Still not a great coder, but probably a good generalist.

My advice is focus on the skills you're good at, the ones that bring you joy and the ones that other value. Make sure you keep challenging yourself and getting better at whatever it is that you do. Also keep yourself curious about the world and the people living in it.
Things will will eventually work out just fine.
You get more power as a manager because you have influence over engineers and their careers, even the ones that get paid more than you unless they have been with the company for a long time and have built relationships with the higher ups.
The way you described it, it seems like it could relay information:
If you see an odd value, meet me at Disney world.
If you see an even value, meet me at the grand canyon.
This way, our persuer won't know where we will meet.
The best thing I did for my mental health this last year was get the audio book of "The Untethered Soul." Interestingly enough, I found out about this book on HN last year. This is a fantastic book about spirituality that is really practical. I've listened to this book about 5 times all the way through and it never gets old.

The guy who wrote it is the real deal, not some random guru. The Surrender Experiment, his other book, is also good because it shows how he applied it all in his life to make him self a self-made tech multi-millionaire and to go through some pretty hard struggles and build a large spiritual community along the way.
Pinterest, more tales of workplace discrimination
Security by obscurity was the perfect way to send the largest diamond across the world:

"Due to its immense value, detectives were assigned to a steamboat that was rumoured to be carrying the stone, and a parcel was ceremoniously locked in the captain's safe and guarded on the entire journey. It was a diversionary tactic – the stone on that ship was fake, meant to attract those who would be interested in stealing it. Cullinan was sent to the United Kingdom in a plain box via registered post." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cullinan_Diamond
Apples trying to get 30% of in game purchases..

Microsoft should just strip it all out and send warnings through their regular channels, butt say nothing in the games to comply with these rules. Malicious compliance is the best compliance when faced with abusive and controlling partners.
Fixed! All good for tomorrow's newsletter!
Not necessarily stonks, it can also be commodities (oil/etc), or currencies, or anything else.

Latency arbitrage is old. Paul Julius Reuter (as in, Reuters) made his first fortune by using carrier pigeons to transmit trade data from Brussels to Aachen. Then he started a new agency and built telegraph lines.

Rice traders in Japan used boats/smoke-signals/runners to transmit information between rice markets in 1700s

https://digital.sandiego.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=111... pages 15-22 has more examples.
How to edit writing by a robot: a step-by-step guide
I thought the Romans were known to outright despise glass, although that was in architectural contexts. Flexible glass sounds very unlike them given references to pottery and wineskins instead.
> why namespaces are just -impossible-

As mentioned elsewhere in here, this is a misrepresentation of the issue. The problem is that crates.io is a free, volunteer-run project with zero full-time employees who could be tasked with the drudgery of intervening in naming disputes or managing an identity layer. This is unlike GitHub and unlike "Java" (by which you probably mean Maven Central, which is operated by Sonatype). Solve the funding issue first, and then you can start solving the rest.
The entire universe is always whatever the people looking at it know of but don't understand. It was a god, once, i.e. some guy. Then it was clockwork. Then it was a computer, then a quantum computer. Now, a neural network.

What will it be next week?
Agree. I haven't taken the time to figure out why, but the newsletters I'm subscribed to tend to get ignored or deleted whereas it's rare for me to skip over anything in my RSS reader.
One downside of security by obscurity is that it makes it harder for whitehat people to spot problems in your code. It is like asking everyone $1000 to look at your source code. It is relatively more likely to deter whitehats since their upside is lower.
Also don't forget that relative effort matters too. Consider "The Club" protection for cars - in a lot, the one with The Club is chosen last to break into just due to its relative difficulty. (Weighted against the potential upside, obviously.)

The port knocking itself may actually be the strongest link in the chain, despite it being one of obscurity, if the population of targets in your "value pool" is large enough so that you are always below a sufficient number of others without knocking enabled, since all attackers will bounce to those when they realize they are not knocked.
Security by obscurity is bad. Obscurity alone does not provide much security especially in a cryptographic setting. It can not be relied on as your sole protection.

Security and obscurity: if you make something secure and then obscure information about that system from an attacker that can increase the security. However obscurity is often organizationally expensive and very fragile. A key can be rotated, but changing how something functions is very hard to rotate.
Programming ability is based on far fewer immutable characteristics and the pool of programmers is far less exclusive than that of the NBA, though.

I think it's more common that someone is simply not confident in their programming prowess and without that confidence may never achieve their goals. Knowing this, knowing that neither you nor I likely have the credentials or ability to prejudge someone's ability, and barring some obviously shady/impostor behavior like having bummed most of an assignment off of someone else and then asking for my help laundering it... you will almost always find me encouraging people to not feel like impostors and instead feel like programmers that are just early on in their careers.

I think such a default makes sense, and not even because it is "nice". Even pragmatically, people can often improve.
How so?
Stack cookies and ASLR are a form of encryption, where an attacker had to guess a random number to succeed in an attack.

Obscurity really just boils down to a secret that doesn't have mathematical guarantees. It's doing something that you think the attacker won't guess, just like an encryption key, but without the mathematically certified threat model, so you just hole that the attacker is using a favorable probability distribuy for their guesses
Thanks for your honesty. Yes, I am going out on a limb creating a product that is based on non-standard methods, and there is some risk to people using it - we all have different and complex responses to events. I've given a lot of thought to the question what would happen if someone killed themselves because of the app? It still keeps me up at night. But I won't stop looking for better answers because the current state of the art in dealing with this isn't enough.

Having a clear goal helps with depression, but leaving my job and trying to start a business around it makes it worse. I'm pretty sure using the app is what's keeping me sane these days, while building it is trying to bury me.
I'd also add Quality Assurance to the list. The QA person on our team started out as an engineer and is much happier now (and damn good).
> ...when it comes to exclusives.

Since when are exclusives an issue outside of console gaming? Even in console gaming - nobody cares that much. And furthermore, console gaming is not even nearly as important a market or as ubiquitous or as useful to society as smartphones are. The fact that some things are wrong with the gaming market doesn't really say much.

Anyway, app publishers like Spotify and Netflix have already offered lower prices when you signup outside of Apple's app store.

Sorry, but you're wrong. Giving customers a choice between shopping at Walmart, Target or Best Buy will always benefit customers more than only giving them the choice of Walmart.

There is simply no way in hell that you're going to convince me that having less choice is good at any level.
> Again, seems more like a failure of imagination.

Sure, but on the designers' part or ours? I certainly would not be surprised if there were reasons why the Ritz approach wouldn't work.
I've never seen "team lead" as a management role. Team lead is more of technical tie-breaker role on technical decisions. It's not a management role if you can't fire someone.
Because the alternative is less likely/wrong - This is just the best you're going to get and you just have to accept it.

also TIL impostor and imposter are both correct spellings (even though I got dinged for the o spelling in middle school)
I enjoy HN as much as anyone, but I would exercise caution. The HN comments need to be read in conjunction with the linked article.

I've absorbed a lot of good information from HN comments, but I hate to say that the signal to noise ratio is not particularly high in 2020. Reading the comment section without a significant degree of skepticism could result in a lot of misinformation.

I didn't fully understand how off the mark the HN comment section could be until reading the comments for topics and companies I was closely familiar with. There are a lot of very confident posts here from people who don't really understand what they're talking about, mixed in with some great posts from people who know exactly what they're talking about. Take everything with a grain of salt.
Last I heard FAANG pay between 70 and 80 in London for mid-level, no? There is a big difference between US and UK salaries. (Big difference in cost of living and taxes)
I'm an Apple fan but the AirPods are a pretty decent counterpoint to Apple being 'green'.
This is a common experience with a lot of expats, diplomatic or not. Very similar experiences here and I hear the same from my expat friends. Forever ‘in transit’ and there’s no going home.
£200,000 is a really great salary in the UK.
I took years off from Linux and recently hopped back in. What a convoluted mess it’s all become! I’m currently using a “packaged” version of Arch (arcolinux) and the whole thing is just a hodgepodge of things that might work together but probably don’t. I like to tinker as much as the next person on HN, but editing configs all day truly takes away from doing “real” work.

However, the Mac problem is also annoying... not having $1200+ every two or three years to spend in new hardware is limiting. While it’s true that you can “code on anything”, resource overhead becomes a consideration at some point... which is why I switched back to Linux, but then I’m back at my first complaint.
Just got an e-mail now about an App Store guidelines update. There's more juicy stuff in there besides this.
I agree with the principle, but I disagree with the article's example of changing the SSH port as an example of obscurity. Lots of people set up SSH servers on multiple ports, especially in the case of relay servers that provide access to multiple machines through one IPv4 address.

A better example of security by obscurity would be to, for example:

* Flip all the SSH bits or XOR it with some long key.

* Encapsulate SSH inside another protocol, such as websockets over HTTP port 80, or embedded inside what look to an outsider as cat pictures being sent over HTTP.

* SSH over TCP over Skype video.

Incidentally, any of these methods work well for confusing China's firewall and keeping the SSH connection alive, and would probably confuse hackers as well for a little while. They could all be implemented in a router box that doesn't affect your actual deployment.
Holy crap, being compared to Mr. Watts is spiking up my imposter syndrom :) Thank you so much!
Should have added on the site, but here is the RSS → https://buttondown.email/producthacker/rss
> One-to-few and one-to-many realtime experiences must use in-app purchase.

WUT?! This is so arbitrary and petty. So we're supposed to feel thankful that the all mighty Apple is allowing 1 on 1 personal fitness trainers and tutors but not build something that is scalable?
btfsc ftw! ;-)
We are about 5 miles from an evacuation area, one of my wife's co-workers and several of her acquaintances have lost their homes. Fortunately the weather seems to have mellowed.

Frustrating that this seems off the national radar completely.
You're a couple years into developing and feel like an imposter? Welcome to the club!

Literally every programmer I know has been wracked by doubts and existential dread over their skills. I've mentored a lot of interns and I always stress how impostor syndrome is normal, everyone gets it, including everyone above them in their teams.

My history is more of the "programming wunderkid", been programming since I was 13 and (like many on this site) find reading HN and programming news relaxing and recreational. I say all of this to highlight the fact that I got impostor syndrome. It was particularly bad the first few years. Once you realize everyone feels this way it's liberating. In fact you can even use impostor syndrome for good; either by motivating your learning or by empathizing with others.

I'm constantly learning and growing, which means I still feel like an impostor in these new areas. I'm the Kubernetes expert for multiple startup and government projects, but I still feel like a beginner in out of his depth.

The way I see it, you have two options. You push your comfort zone, and get comfortable with being uncomfortable, or you stagnate. You either become a constant learner who always has a niggling impostor syndrome, or your knowledge becomes static.

Be like Socrates. "I know that I know nothing."
Also that they often lack the ability to do it, it's the legislative branch that makes the rules and budgets.