skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
20+ years ago, a sizable chunk of the software workforce was dedicated to converting legacy systems from 2 digit year codes into 4 digits.

The notion that all the interesting work was done in yesteryear is just looking at the past through rose-colored glasses. At any time in history most software work was glue code. Because the low-hanging fruit is always going to be taking existing systems and applying small tweaks to extend their functionality to a slightly different domain.

Truly innovative software has always been done by the tip of the spear. Building something new and valuable is risky and difficult. 95% of the time the end product is worthless. And that's assuming that everyone on the team is highly competent. You either have to be willing to take a lot of personal risk, or have a good enough reputation that someone's willing to pay you to take crazy risks. In other words, work that never has and never will be done by the median engineer.

But this is pretty much true of any job in the knowledge economy. The average lawyer is just writing templated boilerplate contracts, not arguing Constitutional law before the Supreme Court. The average accountant is just filing personal and small business taxes, not uncovering high-level corporate fraud. The average doctor does the same simple procedure all day long, not working on a cure for cancer. The average academic does by-the-number meaningless research to get his publication count up, not research deep breakthroughs in his field.
I can't relate to any of the "software sucks now" comments. I started off writing code the "old school" way. C or C++ using vanilla vim. I spent so much time wrestling with compile errors, pointer logic, memory management, looking up documentation to figure out what methods were available in a class, and using grep to figure out where/how methods were calling one another. It was a colossal mess. I had almost no interest in programming because I spent the vast majority of my time yak shaving, not coding.

Then ten years later, I discovered IDEs with inline compile warnings, autocompletions, method suggestions. I discovered stack overflow, and languages with automated garbage collection. My productivity skyrocketed. I started liking coding again, for the same reason I initially liked math and logic puzzles. I could spend more time problem solving and less time document chasing.

To anyone who thinks things have actually gotten worse, I would suggest building a toy project using a 90s tech stack, and comparing that to a modern tech stack. The kind of things I was able to build in the last few years in my free time, I can't even imagine building in the 90s. If things seem increasingly complex today, it's only because the bar has been raised so much higher.
Half of those are unique entities which arent "quintessentially American, they just are American.
He should had went with a 'hexavigesimal chipset'. A base 26 system could be capable of rendering reality with the right enhancements.

https://www.quora.com/Could-you-make-a-CPU-that-processes-on...
I probably average to about $50/hour programming. Last time I hired someone to fix something in my house I ended up paying about $350 for 1.5 hours of work. Physical materials was just a low voltage cable.

I had a plumber quote me $1300 to replace a $250 part that just screws on/off. I did it myself in a few hours.

Since I work on salary, one of the best ways for me to get more money is to save mine by not paying overpriced contractors to fix things around my house.
At this rate Mozilla is killing projects faster than Google. That's quite an achievement.
Not the OP. But as I understand you would be able to see all the outgoing requests. And thus how much your device phones home.

Considering it's an adblocker app, I'd imagine you'd specifically see all the times it tries to ping back to ad companies.
Not my experience.

I used to buy the new Thomas Guide (the 1 inch thick paper map book to find my way around Los Angeles). Having Google Maps on my phone has massively changed that. In the middle we had Nav systems but even then I now live somewhere where public transportation is the norm and being able to ask Google Maps how to get somewhere as been a life changing experience. As one concrete example, from 2000-2010 I pretty much never took the bus except for the one that went by my house. Now, since Google Maps will tell me which bus to take it's so trivial just to take whatever it tells me.

As for VR in arcades in the 80s they were remotely as good as 4 yr old VR today. not even in the same league. That's like comparing a 1970s calculator to a smartphone.
That's stating a chain of ownership, not why it's ironic..
Show HN: Unify-flowret – yet another Java orchestration engine
The year is 2040.

Gigaconglomerates Tencent, Activision Blizzard Ubisoft (ABU), Microsoft and Apple gatekeep the entire gaming industry.

Rebel guerilla groups of small publishers and indie developers rise up to take control of their encampments.
I do agree that "complex systems stir up the same emotions", but I was more referring to the simpler systems. I enjoy putting the dishes back into the cupboard a lot more than I enjoy moving icons on a desktop.
I watched a youtube video on the subject, and I was easily left with the impression that it's a very shady company. And I am not an investor in startups in any stretch of imagination.

Yet, people still invest millions, if not billions of dollars into this company.
There are ever-shrinking spaces where a developer gets to build something novel

I think it might be possible to say that relative to the entire industry the space for novel or interesting work is shrinking – possibly. But I don't think that actually means there's less interesting stuff to work on. If anything, the spaces for that are growing – maybe more routine work is growing faster, but I can't really say. I'd wager that the majority of software for its entire history has been pretty boring.
Carmack is the only reason why OpenGL is at all relevant in PC gaming as it was miniGL that made it popular in first place, against Glide.

Later on he changed his mind regarding OpenGL vs DirectX, but there are legions of wannabe game developers that worshiped his opinions regarding OpenGL.

See my sibling post regarding his change of opinion.
Load Shedding in Clojure
> Critically acclaimed creators of The Elder Scrolls, Fallout, Wolfenstein, DOOM, Dishonored, Quake, Starfield and more join Team Xbox

What? All good games published by Bethesda were MADE by other studios. Only the Elder Scrolls were made by them that holds critical acclaim despite/because of bag of various funny bugs.

DOOM, Fallout NewVegas, Wolfenstein, Dishonored etc were good probably because Bethesda had no or limited input (latest Wolfenstein was quite bad and that might be due to Bethesda pushing some trends to be in the game).

I hope this doesn't mean exclusive xbox titles (of course it means that... but one can hope).
Our business has a dash/hyphen in the name.

I say "dash" and I honestly rarely have issues getting folks to our page. The worse part is getting people to understand the letters over the phone (half my customers don't understand what a phonetic alphabet is so I can't just use that every time... "How do you spell Sierra?").

My boss, on the other hand, seems to have the worst time telling people about the dash. He tends to fall back on our second domain (which just redirects to the main one), and even then still has issues (I think he just talks too fast).
After having read the article Built to Last[1] from the latest issue of Logic Magazine over my morning coffee, and spending breakfast pondering my coming day of figuring out if we can disentangle some stuff I'm working on from the increasingly complex and inscrutable Big Data ecosystem, and if it's even going to be possible to get management to approve it when the requests to stick RSS feeds into DBMSes are forever piling up, and generally thinking about my own mid-career situation, and, this comment really hit me like a punch in the gut.

This quote from Built to Last is going to stick with me for a while: "... many people don’t even see the preference for complex languages for what it is: an attempt to protect one’s status by favoring tools that gate-keep rather than those that assist newcomers."

I'm not leaving the industry any time soon. At least in the abstract, I do like what I do for a living, and believe that there are still some habitable spaces left in the field of informatics. But there's a part of me that is beginning to wonder if the best and most comprehensive literary (sort of) analogy for modern software engineering culture isn't the Orks from Warhammer 40,000.

[1]:https://logicmag.io/care/built-to-last/
I think the average American doesn't understand averages.
Safetrading
If you look at the games shown for the next gen, it's MS is not far away. They have acquired some serious studios and reviving Fable, Halo Infinite hopefully lands, Hellblade 2 looks truly next gen and there's Obsidian, The Initiative and rumoured unannounced "AAAA" game
>Do you do manual labor

Yes my apprenticeship was (4y) +3 years after that.

Again different tastes.
Dear lord.

Zero articles in the past two weeks. If you've been following the case at all, there's been a Hell of a lot to report, from Amnesty and EU ministers despairing at having their monitor access revoked at the last minute, to Khaled El Masri's absolutely jaw-dropping testimony [1].

They have a front page post right now about "concern" over a "fan invasion" of the pitch in a GAA game (Gaelic Athletics Association). And another about some celeb confirmed to be on the next "Dancing with the Stars".

If anyone reading this is the type to blame people for being uninformed, please take this into account.

[1] https://shadowproof.com/2020/09/18/khaled-el-masri-stands-up...
(The weird tablet in question probably being the ReMarkable, considering other comments)
The biggest problem with Assagne is the fact that the US managed to assasinate his character with the swedish rape accusations dropped last year (after 10 years). They managed to make him untouchable, as journalists would have had to argue to show support for a "supposed rapist".

There is an excellent interview in german with the United Nations' Special Rapporteur on Torture about him that was very revealing: https://www.republik.ch/2020/01/31/nils-melzer-spricht-ueber...
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Install the app. Then close all apps and don't browse any sites for 1 hour.

Then open the app and check the logs. Just see if it phones home to Facebook, Taboola, Google, Adjust and some other 200 or so companies.
It won't take off until it gets a glyph that looks more th and less y or pb.
That would make it possible to record the stream. The UK legal system is very apprehensive of allowing any recording of what takes place in a courtroom that isn't filtered through a human observer's memory.
Is revenue model more important than culture?
I mean, the joke is funny but realistically it's clear that Valve is getting back in the game, so to speak, and we're probably going to see some VR followup to Alyx in the next year or two.
One suggestion: You could have used

https://github.com/librespeed/speedtest-cli

It is command line client of https://librespeed.org/ . Librespeed by default is privacy respecting and hence maybe safer than ookla . Also, it lets you to host backend servers if you want to (By default, it has number of servers available)
Is there any chance future Fallout/Elder Scrolls game become XBox exclusives that do not get ported to PC?
Almost always pollock in the US, but yeah.

https://www.google.com/search?q=imitation+crab&tbm=shop
I gave the total compensation ~average for FANGs / large US tech companies as a mid-senior role, which I assumed is what the OP was going for from the tone of their comment.

If you're in a position in life where you need a stable salary (family, children, etc.), you'll do the same amount of prep for a FANG as for a start-up emulating a FANG. Why in the world would I put in effort prepping and take 1/3rd the total compensation is my perspective (yes, I understand the start-up lottery, and disregard it here).
> opposed to code that hacks together some junk to try and make it work with other junk.

I think you work for a better company than me :)
Once decentralization becomes more widespread, it can impact politics too. Look at "liquid democracy" initiatives in South America for example.
Nice. I still can't believe there's anyone that thinks there's anything serious behind this company. People want a crazy volatile play stock, goes up fun, goes down fun, etc. I get it, fun game. But actual products etc? Who believes that?
Sure thing. But this also changes the reference point. If the entire video game industry is THAT predatory by 2022, it's hard to single out Microsoft for that and hold me responsible for my optimism today. ;)
From another HN thread last week:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Will-o%27-the-wisp#Natural_exp...

( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24493306 )
Note the scale here:

Conspirators paid $100k in bribes. "Products and merchants earned in excess of $100 million in sales revenue."

I haven't heard the job titles of the amazon employees yet, but presumably these are not very senior people. In terms of corruption dynamics, Amazon is now like a planning authority where a friendly official can rubber stamp a large fortune into a real estate developer's pocket.

Also note that, like with government corruption a lot of corruption stays just to the left of criminal red lines. Many former employees of large marketplaces (amazon, FB ads, adwords) move into the more lucrative seller side, either as employees or consultants. They are expected to bring inside knowledge and contacts to the table.

There have already been serious antitrust cases (eg the EU adwords case) concerning these marketplaces. More are coming. Meaningful fines or enforcement is yet to be seen.

Now, $100m corruption incidents.

I'm putting my money on the table now. Tech monopolies are the major political-economic issue of the 2020s.
I suppose your argument is that most applications could and should be handled in a monolith.

But I think it would be a terrible idea to be reliant on just one server because downtown, latency are real-troubling issues.
For me its always a sign of that they have precarious finances or are posh enough to leverage that into high end clients.
I've never heard anyone complain about how irrelevent their ads were. Only complaints about the rampant amount of ads.
> To be fair we could do nearly all of that before without much of an issue.

Only if you were born fairly recently.
> I see, so you use uninstall just because it's a more convenient Log out UX, than the actua Log Off function, because of auth

Yes, precisely. It saves me the hassle of reentering my password every morning.
We Built a CockroachDB Dialect for Hibernate
This specific case revolves around user’s routes being visible for anyone they physically cross on their way. They don’t need this information in the app because they’ve met them personally.
Besides real names and probably profile images being visible in the app, making it easy to guess the gender.
Also iD, and Arkane?
Are you considering this a correction and we are going lower? It's definitely a strong market right now. There is nothing bad happening except weak hands folding.

Timing the market > Time in the market is my motto so your previous comment has me intrigued.
Well speaking of trucks and not understanding technology, that is pretty much on the level of:
“The internet is not a big truck. It’s a series of tubes...”
I know this may be painful to hear since the new commercial sponsor is you but having an early stage startup which is entering the fairly crowded digital signage space be the commercial sponsor is not something which is going to raise anyone's confidence level that WebThings has a long term future.
Infinitely more than you can do without that knowledge
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This made me sad... Software is a job, so on one hand we shouldn't expect it to be all roses. And software is difficult: it's nontrivial, complex work.

On the other hand, it's sad how many people resonate with this. I'm all for following your passions and doing what you love. But it would be nice if more people were able to maintain their love for programming.

I've been writing code since I was 14, so I'm going on close to 30 years, and I still love it: the challenge, the creative outlet, the feeling when a bug is identified and a elegant fix is applied.

My question is: how do we change things? How do we keep people of all ages loving it (if that's what they're called to?)
Weird. I guess the article didn't say it explicitly, but that's how i interpreted this passage:

> And, of course, there's the headphone jack. Unless you're using the Mac Mini or an iMac, if you wanna connect something that isn't USB-C or Lightning, you're out of luck. Enter the dongle.

> In 2018, the best-selling Apple products at Best Buy were AirPods and the Lightning-to-3.5 mm dongle. Both of these products exist because Apple got rid of the headphone jack.

I guess you can/need to use a lightning-to-3.5mm dongle on an iPhone too, and that's all they meant, not macbooks? The "unless you are using the mac mini or an imac" surrounded on both sides by discussion of headphone jacks is kinda misleading.
The Playbook for Interviewing About and Designing Technology Product Metrics
According to Switch data, Unity powers about 50% of its games.

It is also the tier1 engine sponsored by Google and Microsoft for their 3D offerings, Godot needs to grow a bit more to reach that level of relevance for game studios, AR/VR companies and Hollywood now looking at Unity.
FWIW Ubisoft is very hostile to being acquired.

I worked there for 6-7 years and the CEO fought off vivendis acquisition. Which was not the first.

He has even gone so far as to decentralise the Canadian studios so that if the company was somehow acquired the aquirer could not close down studios without heavy fines from the Canadian government.
And fill it with giant gators..

Gators with fusion reaction chambers in their tummies

Tell 'em, "if it moves, it's food"

Tell who..

What a mess
Hi HN. I would like to show unify-flowret – yet another Java orchestration engine!

You may wonder – why another orchestration engine when there are already so many. We have off the shelf commercial “heavyweights”, the open source frameworks like AWS step functions / Uber Cadence / Netflix Conductor and a host of others. They why another one?

Simple, simplicity! Most of the orchestration engines I worked with or evaluated were too heavy weight or too cumbersome or too complex. Some you could build your entire careers on and some required complex DSLs, some required hacks to do parallel processing, many required their own separate server setup etc. I wanted something really simple which had all the features to create a complex workflow and yet was simple and no more. So I present unify-flowret.

Unify-flowret is a lightweight Java orchestration engine which gives you all features to implement your workflow. It is a small JAR file which can be embedded in your applications. Below is a feature summary:

1. True technical parallel processing

2. “Resume from where you left off” functionality

3. Support for any data store / database

4. Can be run and tested stand alone on a laptop without the steps being implemented (mocked)

5. Allows steps to specify “execute next on resume” or “execute self on resume” in case of non-error pends

6. Special persist step to tell the application to persist data (if not persisting at each step)

7. Comprehensive audit logging

8. Crash proof – resumes from where the information was last recorded without any manual intervention

9. Ticket management – a “go to” feature for a process

10. Support for process variables – available to each step and route to reference and update

11. Support for handling in flight applications by locking the process definition to a process instance

12. Application call back events for house keeping

13. SLA milestone framework and work basket management

At American Express, we use it to power many of our workflows and it has been able to meet all complex requirements thrown up till date. I hope this work will help many who have experienced working with orchestration engines difficult in the first place. I look forward to comments and feedback from the community. Thanks to American Express for open sourcing this piece of work which i truly think has the potential to help a lot of people in the wider Java development community.

Read more about it on https://github.com/americanexpress/unify-flowret.

Disclaimer -> #ViewsMyOwn.
Wow, nice stuff. This resonates because I'm pondering the same move, have a small shop, and have started with small traditional projects. I even live 20 minutes from Wharton Sherick but have never been, thanks for the links!
This is not something you can order:

> I can land in a completely foreign city and get step by step directions to wherever I need to go.
Not at all. It's called being an Indie Hacker: https://indiehackers.com
> Also this allows them to bring the ID tech engine under their stewardship.

It doesn't have to be id tech, but can they make Todd Howard use some other engine than whatever Gamebryo monstrosity Bethesda Softworks been using for 20 years?
Replace sleep with a countdown logger.
And yet you'll find that twitter only marks Russian and Chinese accounts as "state media".
Visiting that site without JS enabled just triggers a constant refresh loop!
I don't think their plan is to make them exclusives. MS makes lots of money from PS (i.e. Minecraft). What I can see is Fallout New Vegas 2, TES6 or any other big game, being free with Game Pass and 70€ for PS5. And you can already see this with The Outer Worlds & Minecraft Dungeons.

That's a power move that wouldn't make half of the consumer base annoyed at you and make everyone want to buy an XSX with the 35€ payment plan. I also hope this pushes Sony to be more competitive with their "exclusive" titles.
That’s why your next business have to be focused on Developers
Every company is a technology company, no matter what product or service it provides. The companies that embrace this fact are the ones that shape our world.
What I find truly odd is that, at least in the upper midwest of the US, carp is almost universally considered a trash fish. Sure, it is a bit of a pain to clean and fillet, but it tastes great.

Also, wouldn't Sweden and Finland also count as European countries that consume a lot of fish? I've never been, but I grew up around a lot of Swedish immigrants, and fish seemed to be a large part of their traditional diet.
In programming, it's move fast and break things. In aerospace, it's move slow and be methodical and never break things. I work in certification, and something as simple as re-painting interior sidewall panels requires something called an STC (supplemental type certificate) which requires updating manuals, burn testing representative samples of the painted panels, and design reports with constant communication with the local transport authority. I think the process is adequate, since we're dealing with machines in the sky, but it's the complete opposite of innovation.
This is so petty and undermines the British legal system.
"Your Honor, I was taking bribes merely out of customer obsession!"
I'd advise your clients to avoid your advise if I could.
FYI, Minecraft is the best selling game of all time and has probably sold more copies than every game Bethesda has ever made combined.
Microsoft now own Doom, Quake, Wolf, etc IP. They own id software.

2020, I'm done.