skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've adopted the following strategy for Ugh work. I would love to hear other people's suggestions, because while I have found that the below algorithm works, any improvement would be greatly helpful.

1 - Is the Ugh work so small, that if I just power through it, it can be done in ~15 minutes? If so, give yourself an hour break or so, then just slam your head into that wall. 15 minutes is hardly any time at all.

Otherwise, follow the general below pattern:

2 - Document out the task. Figure out exactly that needs to be done. Most procrastination research I've seen, and personal experience validates, that just documenting out the task moves it from the theoretical (and easier to procrastinate) to something more tangible (and therefore less likely to be avoided / less scary).

3 - Break the task out into small, concrete components. The smaller the components, the better. (procrastination research also strongly suggests this, as small concrete tasks are easier to visualize just doing and getting done, and feel less scary than big unknown problems).

4 - Out of all of those tasks you just broke out, can we throw any in the trash and ignore them? Once this became an "ugh" task, we stopped trying to solve this task perfectly. At this point, we just want completion, because this is holding up something more important (otherwise, why are we doing it at all?).

5 - Out of all those tasks you just broke out, are all of them ugh tasks? Or are some of them neutral / easy? Often, just breaking things out into small tasks gets rid of the ugh factor, because now you can handle it in pieces. Its the combination of trying to do all the pieces at once that gives it an "ugh" factor (for example, doing all of the chores on a Sunday can be an Ugh. But having a list of chores I need to do in the next few days, and just do one or two now? Not bad at all, provided I never have to look at the entire list and get overwhelmed again, and can just pluck one from the top and feel good about my progress). Either way, do the easy / neutral ones left.

6 - At this point, hopefully, the Ugh task is now just a fraction of the size it once was. If we're under 15 minutes, just brute force it, and have some ice cream / whiskey / outdoor time as a reward.

7 - If the remaining ugh task still exists, or is atomic, estimate the amount of time it is going to take you. 10X that estimate. That is now the amount of time you must dedicate to that task, in order to get through it sanely and happily.

It was going to take you ~1-2 hours to look up that financial data that you really hate standardizing in excel? Great, that's what YOUR ENTIRE SATURDAY is now dedicated to. Take breaks, play video games, do other things. Because in reality, you're going to work for 15 minutes, then take a break for an hour, then work for 30 minutes, then go to the store for 2 hours, then work for 20 minutes, then cook dinner, etc, etc, etc.

An Ugh task with an estimate of 1 hour is usually an annoying task with an estimate of 10 hours (9 of which are positive, happy activities).
> Rust imposes one of the possible disciplines for memory-object management

Could you give some examples of other possible disciplines?
How to prepare for a video interview – One Temp Agency
thats why i pin my deps to the exact versions in production apps :)
I enjoyed reading your background and methodology before you subtly pitched your solution.
Apple's guidelines are usually written in soft language to give it wiggle room in case an unexpected scenario arises.

Practically-speaking, if Apple decides an app has violated this provision, the app is toast. No app company on the planet has enough lawyers to challenge Apple on such nit-pickery.
Why not just block SSH access from the public internet and use a VPN? Trivially easy to setup and more secure than knocking.

All it takes is me somehow being able to listen in on your traffic - not even decrypt it - and now I know the knock sequence. I know that you have SSH listening on that server. I know you are actively doing something on it.

vs. a VPN where... all I know is you are communicating over a VPN. With DPI I might be able to determine what type of traffic you're sending, but not where it is ultimately going.
I pretty much agree. Anthropic reasoning is very strong in some circumstances. If we can directly observe some planet, and see that there's no life on it, then it's pretty easy to answer the question "why are we on this world instead of that world?"

The difficult case is the one where direct observation isn't possible. The neutron star example is good: they exist in our universe, but who has strong evidence or argument that there's no exotic life in/on the crust?
Are you under the impression computer systems survive unmaintained indefinitely?
I own a small app and iOS's free organic app search results drive 98% of my user base right now. I could see it being much more challenging to build an app if you have to develop alternative marketing channels.

Personally, alternative marketing channels have yet to work for me.
Order Isopoda [1] on Wikipedia if anyone else is interested.

Edit: Corrected Family -> Order - oops! Thank you pvaldes.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isopoda
> People quickly forget what a tremendous liberation the App Store created for developers.

People quickly forget that software was distributed on the web long before the App Store existed.

>That's what has caused this flood of software purchases from consumers.

No, that was caused by a billion people buying shiny new mobile computers. They would have bought a lot of software in any case, even without an App Store. New platform, new software.
I find that policy entirely acceptable, for the same reasons I think shrink-wrap EULAs should be illegal.

This makes me curious about Apple and iOS / OS X. Does Apple try to require that the user accepts an EULA for the OS after buying Apple hardware?
This video is pretty lengthy but well worth a watch; the oral history of Alan Cooper, the 'father of Visual Basic'

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-wtGFgaKYI0

EDIT: One highlight is where Alan Cooper gets a cease-and-desist letter from Microsoft for calling himself 'The Father of Visual Basic'...

https://youtu.be/-wtGFgaKYI0?t=9666
The alliteration in the sub-heading is choice.
Container waste needs to be considered with its inversely correlated counterpart, content waste and contamination damage. A single food poisoning case has far more impact than just tossing a non-biodegradable container in a landfill. Especially if they die - every investment in them from vaccinations to education becomes for naught in the future.
If a single company was putting up toll booths on every intersection AFTER selling those roads to the public, then yea, call me a communist but I don’t think that’s good for the economy.

And I don’t care if that company single-handedly invented roads - there should a limit to how far you can milk the society you operate in.
Such things are never going to come to Android are they? Every preinstalled app abuses every permission possible
It's a reference to the legendary comment under Dropbox's announcement that asked, what's special about Dropbox when it can be implemented using a {finicky, arcane and difficult to use} software.

My comment was to highlight that there's the ease-of-use and quality-of-life aspect as well that needs to be taken into account.
You're skimping on some of the complexity by equating a definition with a particular way of computing it, but that's completely inadequate for mathematics, as there are many things we can't compute (either in theory or in practice).

In particular, you definition of integral assumes that integrable functions always have an antiderivative, which is wrong.
I'm just about 100% sure Apple uses "should" and "should not" in the absolute sense, not the way RFC's define it.
Security by obscurity is dangerous. You can eliminate any obscurity with reverse engineering, spying, etc. Obscurity makes your system prone to catastrophic collapse and loss of security. Security by open design is necessary but even insufficient.
I am not blind. Neither am I a mathematician. I'm a sighted biomedical engineer.

I have heard blind mathematician colleagues very loudly espouse using LaTeX for everything they do. I'm inclined to believe them!
I think it is the opposite -- systems with rigourous security tend to be more open, because the designers are confident they understand their system. In contrast, systems that practice security through obscurity are often owned/managed by people afraid of what will go wrong.

We should distinguish obscurity from intentionally hiding the configuration, which makes attackers undertake discovery, and hence can lead to detection. But your internal red team / security review should have all the details available. If loss of obscurity leads directly to compromise then you don't have security. Cf insider threat.
Thats a good thing. Can Apple guarantee that they themselves are not tracking their users' app preferences/behaviour either?
Not sure what you specialize in, but going deep into a specific subject/framework might help. Maybe work on a project that incorporates things that you feel you are weak on. Perhaps you can create something that incorporates OOP will force you to put things in context and understand how to use it. I find it easier for me to understand things when I build useful stuff. For me I find that projects force me to move past my previous comfort zone. Also you can read other's code, and then pull it apart and understand it. I'm always amazed by my peers coding styles and choices that they make. I try to understand why people make certain choices and that usually opens me out to deeper understanding of a particular language. Finally, I found everytime I learn something new from another language it offers me insight into choices/styles that I make with my current language. Computer science/coding in general is a deep subject, give yourself time as there is a lot to know, or a lot you may never know.
Worked for a major bank (think top 10). We had port knocking on several publicly accessible infrastructure pieces (LBs, some VMs, etc.)

Decades of running without a single intrusion. We moved to SPA port knocking and now we rely less on the VPN for certain assets.
> Hey look, you don't need the dummy variable explicitly any more. It's almost like it's a relic from a time before people understood what function application actually was.

If you actually perform definite integration, as a limit of Riemann (or Lebesgue, if you like) sums, or even try to approximate it numerically, you're going to have some dummy variable cropping back up again. As your comment indicates, when Risch's theorem proves that there is no elementary anti-derivative, you're going to be out of luck.
>What's your alternative? Using return values? But then you are doing the bubbling, manually.

Huh? The alternative is unchecked exceptions, which are already present in Java and therefore have to be accounted for anyway.

Removing checked exceptions from Java would greatly simplify the APIs that use them, with absolutely zero cost.
SOV is the first sovereign currency issued solely in digital format
I think that game should end at the question of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_there_is_anything_at_all.

I don't actually think the anthropic principle is capable of tackling that one.
And there are roughly 1267650600228229401496703205376 port 22's in the IPv6 space - I've substracted a few for reserved and unassigned spaces, but at this scale a few orders of magnitude hardly matter.

Here, for comparison:

281474976710656 - total ports in IPv4 space
18446744073709551616 - 4 port combinations
1267650600228229401496703205376 - my estimation for 22 in IPv6

And if you don't block the knocking when receiving traffic on another port, brute forcing gets quite a bit easier. I mean, it's still unreasonable. But my point is, when we accept 0,001% chance as possible, I don't think we can say that 0,000001% is impossible - just a lot less possible ;)
This is me too.

I have learned, slowly and painfully, that I need to wait 24 hours before saying yes to any optional assignment. I'm too optimistic about my available time and wired to be a people pleaser. When I'm asked to help and I recognize a gap I can fill, I tend to volunteer, even if I'm not the right person for the job. Days or weeks later, I realize it was the wrong decision then the Ugh feelings start up in earnest.

It's important for me to realistically assess whether I have the knowledge, desire, and time to do the task. I'm learning to say no more often than I would like, and to be less afraid of the consequences of saying no. Promising to do something I can't or won't do is bad for everyone.

Better to think on the decision and politely say no up front if I don't have the time or interest or enthusiasm required to get the job done.
> Conversely the photographer has no first amendment right to take a picture save freedom of the press.

Why do you say this?

> If the picture isn't being captured for the purpose of informing their fellow citizenry they have no first amendment rights at all to protect in this scenario.

Even if free press is the only basis for protection of the practice of photography under the constitution, there is no requirement that press activities be exclusively for the purpose of "information their fellow citizenry", and no requirement that the person in question be part of the "citizenry" in the first place.

Someone taking photographs in public is not required to disclose all photographs in order for this activity to be protected. Press generally covers not only publication, but documentation, research, and other press activities. If I take a photo in public, the subsequent activities of performing research and analysis of that photo are also protected activities.
Very cool post. I like this point particularly:

> In this case we can’t assume, in general, that the thread scheduler will assign each thread processor time with uniform probability. That assumption makes even less sense in a fully distributed system with processes running on separate computers connected by a network.

I would love to see tools in this space mature some more. TLA+ has had a huge influence on how I approach distributed and concurrency problems, and a large influence on the industry in general. Modelling non-determinism (beyond the 'try all paths' approach), and assigning probabilities to outcomes, seems like the large missing piece needed to model real-world systems and protocols.

In systems with limited redundancy, for example, there's always a "transition to a failure state" path which tends to get ignored in modelling with tools like TLA+. That's because these tools can tell you that the whole thing might fail (which is useful), but not the probability that the whole thing would fail (which is significantly more useful).
Snowflake and the Data Blizzard
Breaking down $SNOW and how they maintain their position v. Redshift, GCP, etc.
How many positions have you applied to, what salary level did you tell the companies you want, what companies did you look for, did you look for remote jobs or for relocation (judging by Australia, it had to be one of those)?

Last time I looked for a job as a senior backend developer (having made the transition from gamedev in the last few years), I've had very easy time interviewing and a lot of offers. I don't live in a first world country and my salary here is probably much more humble than what you're aiming at, but the whole job market here still looks very good, and there's plenty of remote opportunities from all over the world as well.
European years typically have on the order of 1e2 days.
Years ago, I think when I was still using a Commodore Amiga system, I went into a computer shop in St. Louis to see if they had any SCSI drives.

The clerk at the store went off on this surprisingly lengthy and heated diatribe about how SCSI was mediocre technology, and how nobody in their right mind should ever want anything SCSI ever again.

I kind of miss that sort of passion in computer store clerks.
Why? There are 3rd party resources available for ue4.
I spent 20+ years as a professional software developer, yet there were always days where I felt like I didn't know anything. That's part of the business - there's always something to learn and someone with more experience in some niche.

Separate from that - it sounds like you need to decide whether this is really something you want to do professionally. Technology is a vast field, so even if you decide you don't feel good about being a software developer / programmer, that's not to say there isn't a place for you.

Finally, I'm reading between the lines that you are primarily self-taught. Perhaps what's really needed for you to reach a level of comfort is simply more education?
Twitter and VMware cut pay for remote workers
You are not forced per se, and can have the same level of obsfucation. It's pretty common to find code ignoring exceptions or wrapping them in RuntimeExceptions, like:

try {} catch (Exception e) {
throw new RuntimeException(e);
}

Also not doing nothing, or the famous catch and log
> Epic games exclusives are not the kind of competing I want

EGS represents the choice in the market, and the market can act on that. Developers have the choice to go on the store, and they have the choice to take exclusivity agreements, or they can choose to go on steam or to offer direct downloads. Customers and chose whether they want to purchase a game from EGS, or go elsewhere.

"a product exists that I don't like" is not "bad competition". If you don't like Epic Game Store, then continue to not use it and go to a competing service/game.
> In particular, you definition of integral assumes that integrable functions always have an antiderivative, which is wrong.

I was objecting at the same time as you were, but I don't think this is the right objection. It's true that not every integrable function has an elementary anti-derivative, but every integrable function f does have an anti-derivative F, at least in the sense that F is almost everywhere differentiable, and the derivative is almost everywhere equal to f. (And, of course, if f is continuous, then F is everywhere differentiable, and its derivative everywhere equals f.)
> If a single company was putting up toll booths on every intersection

Again, Apple is not the only company in this space and iOS is not the only intersection/road/whatever analogy you want.

There are alternatives and companies like Epic are absolutely free to start their own platform.

Honestly, all of this becomes much less complicated if you think of the iPhone as an Xbox, PlayStation or Switch. iPhone is not the entire mobile industry, it is one phone among hundreds.

Will you move for a forced break up of their exclusive stores too if MS/Sony/Nintendo started allowing general-purpose apps on those consoles? (They already have YouTube, Netflix, etc.)

iPads on the other hand may be a different story, given how Apple likes to market them as general purpose computers, and the reason why they forked iOS into iPadOS I think.
Just respond "don't knock it 'til you try it... or rather, don't try it 'til you knock it!"
Not sure if Rust counts as mainstream by your metric, but it does have compiler enforced error handling in the form of the Result sum type.
I would thing that blocking IP's of insessant knockers would be easy to implement.
> are all silly ideas.

Changing the port is not silly, it increases the SNR in logs, that's already a worthy goal.
so sweet ! love it !
Why would anybody ever use ACA with either BOT (that doesn't support it) or UAS?

It's basically a solution in search of a problem, since it is needed when commands are delivered asynchronously with respect to responses but you don't have autosense. BOT only has a single command in flight so it didn't need ACA, but UAS has autosense so it doesn't need it either...
Not that I need a drone.. but I've thought about one in the past.. and having to not only use their app but have it connected to the internet has been a big deterrent and thus far have not used one.
Because we're accustomed to American companies such as Google and every bank trampling on out privacy.
accessibility, which its own author says not to use any more (or at least not until foundational problems are fixed), is mentioned in the article.
You seem to be getting stuck on the word "retail" referring to point-of-sale-to-end-user, where other people are using it to refer to the cost of the entire retail model, which is the comparable thing in this discussion.
Pre-installed apps where you can't disable them or revoke their permissions are a cancer on the Android ecosystem. Especially fun when they have permissions like "access the filesystem" or "obtain device location" or "send notifications".
I agree that it's important to have stable responsible male role models. I object to the state preventing abandoned parents from getting divorced, and treating them with them various other forms of animus -- something that is advocated for by conservative think tanks like the one that payed for this article, and had negative consequences for people I care about.
One of the interesting things about Raft that doesn't get focused on much is that strictly speaking Raft does not require that all nodes be able to see each other, just that some nodes can see all of the other nodes.

One of the reasons we use consensus protocols is because with enough hardware involved, the machines cannot even agree about which machines are up and responding to traffic.

In Raft, a leader has to be able to communicate with more than half of the cluster. But the followers don't strictly have to be able to see each other (and if I understand the election protocol correctly, not even during election). The leader is the hub of a wheel, not a member of a star-connected graph, and as long as the 'spokes' are all working, there is no partition. Even if individual links keep disappearing.

Is that true of the snowflake protocols mentioned here? Or do they require a star topology to mostly be intact?
Everybody complains about the walled garden, but damn I love to see things like this.
This sounds.. great!
I think one thing that's missing from this article is what engineers at higher levels of IC status (up to VP) do. When a Sr. Engineer is choosing between a Manager and a "Principal Engineer" type role, I have to remind them that PEs also don't do much depth coding. They write proposals, discuss architecture, sit in meetings. Ultimately, the same mechanisms that Managers use.

There's certainly SOME PEs that go deep in some areas but the majority I've worked with are broad owners of technology in large organizations. The difference between the two roles often has to do with what balance of time you want to spend influencing others for broad goals vs. building up jr. folks to accomplish your team's goal.

In either case your authority is derived from whether people "under" you want to work with you. People who can't get a set of people to go a certain direction won't last long in either role.
You can also make an alternative registry and add dependencies from that registry.

That said, an alternative registry that enforces namespacing would not work, just because of cargo's limitations on package names that prevent characters like /

It could be done by making every "namespace" a different registry, and for those registries to allow packages with dependencies from other registries (something that crates.io doesn't allow, for a reasonably good reason). Would be quite verbose for the user though.
Should not vs may not. Any difference?
Right, but stores buy from distributors who take 50%+ of the amount they make. So the developer is still getting less than the App Store.
Doesn't youtube, with its ads, violate this policy?
Of course they can’t guarantee it. The best they could do is give users the ability to block all internet access in an app. Currently you can only block an app from using cellular data.