skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Uh... I don't think you understand the problem. A company going though your private social media is a big no-no. It's as if they'd call your friends and family and ask them "Has OP ever said or done anything offensive?".

It's none of their concern and the fact that they even try this shit is a massive red flag. If they don't respect your privacy before they hire you, they won't magically start respecting it afterwards.

Even setting that aside, a company policing what employees say in private, regardless of whether or not they find out about it actively or passively, is absurd. An employer does not get to decide what you say, do or think in your free time.

-----

EDIT: As a small extra, here in Germany something like this would be very much illegal, as you're not allowed to discriminate against job applicants based on their political opinion.
Is the quarantine when you get there? Doesn’t that put at risk:

- everyone working at the airport and on the flight

- everyone else on the flight over

- people in the hospital if you get sick while quarantining

And that’s even if people are obeying the quarantine. Which they often don’t.

All that for a social visit? Why?
This could just be an outgrowth of complexity. As the number of pieces increases by O(n), the number of relationships between pieces goes as O(n^2). As a result, any endeavor is going to tend towards the majority of people working on connecting pieces.

This is true in plenty of occupations. I've seen it in mechanical and electrical design, for instance. With that said, I know a lot of good people who actually enjoy the work of piecing things together, so I wouldn't disparage it. Something for everybody.

A pleasure of working on something for fun at home, or maybe in an R&D setting, is that it can start out a lot simpler.
I made this decision as well. https://gavinhoward.com/2020/08/the-software-industry-is-bro...
Yeah, it pretty reliably turns up interesting articles from the long tail (are the cool kids even still using that phrase?).
Oh it's so awful; but I recently was exposed to a project where some of the leads were trying to defend it as a reasonable tech choice. It really isn't. Not in this era. Most people never even used it correctly in the first place.
> autotools-based C project

It wasn't autotools per se that was horrible. It was the the fact that you had to pollute your system with random libraries, often no longer available from the operating system vendor repositories. Docker has been a lifesaver with these older projects.
Primary school a little of pottery and woodworking. Secondary school sewing and cooking. High school nothing.
I wonder but if you have access to the actual file system, why put the S3 layer unless the app is already built to use S3 in mind?
They make it cheaper at scale. Most of us don't need that scale, so for us it's expensive.
Games, embedded, desktop apps, "infrastructure" software (OSes, networking, orchestration, developer tooling), mobile apps (depending on how picky you are about using APIs being "web"), ...
If I complain about poorly targeted ads, it's because I am shocked that the targeting can be so useless even with the disgusting level of surveillance.

It is not an invitation for even more intrusive spying. It is an invitation to give up and leave me alone.
Sorry, got that from related surfing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Junaid_Hussain

(Compared to sweden[1], the PLO[2], or even a japanese 財閥[3], either ISIS took a cavalier approach to hooking up their "Cyber Caliphate" or he was not as important as the article, and british tabs, made out.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Bernadotte#History_of...

"On 21 August 1810, the Riksdag elected Jean Baptiste Jules Bernadotte, a Marshal of France, as heir presumptive to the Swedish throne."

[2] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2001/12/all-you...

[3] https://www.kalzumeus.com/2014/11/07/doing-business-in-japan...
I'm about 40 yrs old, started in software almost 25 years ago. I still really enjoy it. I stay away from web development because it's a big mess of sloppy languages and tools.
What would be indications of "targeted" ssh attacks, and what can you do in response?
Your Cabinet on Stand [1] is gorgeous.

1. https://www.flickr.com/photos/fuller_craft/49837847346/in/al...
What current outbreak are you referring to? E.g. there is no outbreak in that sense e.g. in Western Australia (Perth).
> Most of the available programming work is really just writing glue code to make big software systems work as intended, to the point where it can feel more like writing configuration files than actual programming. Put simply, 98% of programming these days is scripting.

It's that the entire purpose of programming, though? To abstract away the repetitive stuff? I personally see this as a good thing.

Even with all the configuration and scripting, there are still plenty of lower-level programming tasks involved in piecing together systems.

I'd rather save the difficult programming for the actual difficult tasks instead of re-implementing the already solved problems like CRUD.
Do you see how the complexity of the attack increased though? Now the attacker has to buy multiple hosts to stage their attack from. Like anything in life, when things get hard, a percentage of people give up.
I find many folks who dislike Mac's window management paradigm are unaware that there is a keystroke for cycling through app windows: Cmd-~ (tilde).

This may help you, or others.
This discussion tends towards tediousness because people never define the security goals they're trying to achieve with their pet definitions.

Yes: moving your ssh daemon to run on a different port is "futile" if your goal is to prevent a competent attacker that is single-mindedly focused on attacking a specific host and willing to continue investing time and effort until they succeed.

Yes: having a port-knocking sequence is "futile" if your goal is to prevent an attacker that has the ability to perform full packet capture on all your traffic and is prepared to wait and observe an incoming ssh connection.

But, on the other hand:

Yes: having ssh at all is "futile" if your goal is to prevent an attacker that has the ability to identify your authorized users and then compromise them by kidnapping their families and threatening to murder them.
Anonymity so your opinions don't get you fired isn't new to the internet. "On the internet, nobody knows you're a dog" is an old saying indicating how divorcing people's online persona from their real life persona was supposed to create an opportunity for meritocracy to grow.

It didn't really work out in practice precisely, but it was a good idea.
I'm 56 and STILL love building software ... I started coding as a hobby when I was in 6th grade, built my first computer (a COSMAC Elf) when I was in 10th grade and spent 20 years doing a combination of electronics and software engineering. For the last (almost) 20 years, I've been only doing software development with a small amount of consulting on hardware design and hobbyist projects. (And the weirdly political intersection with these disciplines while working on a committee that wrote part of the DOCSIS cable modem spec). I have no intention of throwing in the towel and am really enjoying the Go language (and happy to see that Java is taking steps to reduce the complexity of the JakartaEE framework).

But ...

I used to code for fun in my spare time and more recently I'm finding myself working on "shop" projects. I sold my pocket-cruiser (a small yacht) and I'm building a couple of small wooden boats. I have a '71 Saab Sonnett III I'm in the process of restoring and a '71 VW Karman Ghia that's next on the list. I thoroughly endorse the idea of doing something with your hands - it's so much more satisfying than sitting in front of the TV.
I guess it depends on what you build. At the scale of GitHub and Twitter or Shopify there are probably significant challenges caused by said bloat.
I believe the main thing that changed is that 10 years ago, "building software" meant you would work with (presumably reasonable) engineers. Nowadays, it means you do web busywork for some newly rich kid chasing a startup lifestyle, who may or may not have any idea about what's easy/difficult possible/impossible.

Also, the whole industry has been strongly commercialized. Before, people would share source code on the internet just for the fun of it. Nowadays, that is a surefire way for someone else to take your source code and sell it as theirs. I mean that's basically what Cloud providers do. They rent out access to open source software.

The insane pressure of money also makes sure that most software nowadays is not build to any reasonable engineering standard, even when it really should be (like Boeing MCAS). Instead, every piece of software nowadays is optimized for the sweet spot between sucking so bad that nobody buys it and not spending a penny more than what is necessary.

The goal of software development has changed, and I think $1 phone apps nicely illustrate the new commercial landscape. It's the bare minimum quality at the bare minimum price.

BTW, on a related note, most bicycles made in 2000 still had a much more stable frame than the 2020 models. The marked switched from costly steel to cheaper aluminum so that you can make $300 supermarket bikes. And obviously, the quality has suffered.

It appears that in general, there's always a race to the lowest possible quality in the hopes of reducing costs, thereby increasing profits. Does anyone have any suggestion how we could reverse this trend in general?
So let me get this straight.

If an application were, positively and indisputably, spying on the conversations and data which takes place in the households of people with the highest security clearances, again if this were proven to be true, then a judge in San Francisco can stay an emergency (or other) executive order from the POTUS to ban the application because it is a national security threat.

I am just trying to understand exactly what power this judge has. It's really incredible. Is she determining as a matter of fact the application is not as POTUS asserts? Is she claiming that such a spy-ap, if in any way engaging with civilians and their communication, cannot be banned by the US government?

Last I knew, the tech companies are claiming that their conduct is their private conduct and anything they do to their users does not intersect with any 1st Amendment rights of their users.

So this is a private company and POTUS's order is about this company and therefore not infringing on anyone's 1st Amendment rights by banning it.

This positions the maker of any communcation-related app beyond the power of POTUS and his national security team and even Congress itself, unless the Constitution is suspended, as in time of war.

Wow. Just. Wow.
Grass is always greener on the other side.

Programming can be great, fun, challenging and profitable, but it can also be tedious, boring, demoralizing and hours can be miserable. It all depends on the company and the project you're working on.

I agree with most of the haters in this thread yet I wouldn't trade it for another kind of job :-)

> I just find aerospace boring, unimaginative, stressful and low paying,

Could you expand on that a bit? To an outsider aerospace sounds much cooler than making web widgets with questionable purpose...
... and if stick a lambda in there the whole thing becomes on object :)
Your first paragraph nails it completely. The entire software ecosystem is like having infinite layers of train crashes to fight through every day.

The purpose of a lot of software is to make software, not to solve problems.
As bad as our ISP situation is in Canada, there are a few smaller ones like teksavvy which will make your ipv6 assignment static of you call in and request it.
Honestly, that's a terrible idea. You want society to have the resources to pull up Nazis by the grassroots. Otherwise, they can readily leverage personal power into political power.
Do people even read the logs? What value does it add compared to just monitoring successful logins?
I think it is funny you mention 10 years because I would agree with you, in the last 10 years we corrected a lot of the sins that we did in early web dev, but I think the lament reaches further back. Move back 25 years ago and it was much easier. A kid in his room could singlehandedly write the next big thing. Things in a lot of ways where much simpler then, it's hard to not look back on that period without a lot of nostalgia.
I think they think about this like we think about making an error which will delete whole database of our client. It happens to us, but there are some safety nets everywhere. Several families in the world may be so unlucky as to get killed, but it's not day to day worry for everyone.
Page and Brin didn't do anything academically. They took a standard technique and deployed it industrially "X but on the Internet" as we describe software patents today, and scaled it up.

Academy is where they made the social connections (each other and VC) needed to launch a business, before they hired DEC people to build the tech.
I think so. That's why eventually you shatter your monolith into micro-services and then have 1000+ people work on coordinating how these services deal with each other.
Being old does not make you close minded. People who assume old people are close minded are ironically close minded themselves.
Dropped onto a project this year that was put together by 15 or so juniors over 18 months. They're all gone, and there's now just 3 seniors (new team) trying to make sense of things and save it.

If the project had been tempered with some seniors, it could have been done in 6-9 months with 3 - 5 people. It's pretty straight forward work.

Having to excavate and rehabilitate all of the poor decisions and practices due to inexperience has taken time. It's nothing I haven't seen before, though.
I can order a comfy car anywhere I am with the tap of a button.

I can order food from hundreds of restaurants and have it delivered in less than 30 mins with the tap of a button.

I can book flights and hotels with the tap of a button.

I can play with friends in virtual reality and actually sweat.

I can watch a live stream of SpaceX launching reusable rockets in space.

I could buy a car that is almost fully "self driving".

I can exchange value with anyone in the world anonymously and with no delays or censorship thanks to cryptocurrencies.

I can land in a completely foreign city and get step by step directions to wherever I need to go.

I can translate almost any language in real time, be it in writing, spoken or taken from an image.

And so on...You can (and most of the time do) get paid to build interesting things. It's just that most of us are unable to look at the big picture and not realize that the combined effort of a team is more valuable than the sum of the individual efforts. And if you do actually work on stuff you don't find interesting there is enough demand that switching is not that hard.

And if you want to solve puzzles for the sake of solving puzzles then there are plenty of resources for that.

Plenty of choice in my honest opinion.
Shop was heavily discouraged for college-track students when I went through high school, both by the administration in terms of guidance counseling and timing of the classes, as well as through heavy social reinforcement by peers.
I can't speak for GP, but I do behind-the-scenes networking stuff for an enterprise ISP.

My team's responsibilities include configuration management, fault management, and certain KPI monitoring. We don't need to write webapps for that (though we do integrate with them) :)
Business/System analyst is a very different role than a UX researcher.

In the agile world, the analysts were basically replaced by product owners, but I assume there are still places where they exist. I've done it for a while, it's quite cushy job if you're good at talking, writing, presenting (same as product owner but without the "ownership" part, so much less stress).
You're right about your points. Yes, there is current quarantine for arrivals in Australia when you get there. Masking removes some of that risk.

This could be solveable with a negative test and few days of quarantine pre-travel. Some countries are indeed looking at that.

> All that for a social visit? Why?

How long would you want to _not_ visit your immediate family members? What's your personal threshold?
Completely dry them first, cut them, then let them soak in water overnight. Can't guarantee they'll taste 100% the same, but you get around buying dedicated hot-dog cutting hardware.
I don't apologize for it, but I don't think yours is the only argument that can be made.

What if a security hole is discovered in OpenSSL and overnight all those bots smashing port 22 are tweaked to take advantage of it? Let's assume a vulnerability that doesn't care about password auth being disabled. Sure, they might discover my sshd on port 17263 or whatever eventually but I am surely going to get a significant head start on all of the people having their boxes hacked left right and center.

Sure, it's still security by obscurity, but it's nothing like the napkin example. It's more like hiding your phone under a table that has 20 other phones on top of it. When I hear about phones getting stolen, I've got a while to get mine back.
As a statistician now working as a machine learning engineer, my response is “definitely not”. It’s all the frustrations of software development, but on top of that you are now frequently dealing with clients/colleagues whose requests are now not simply impractical, but usually defy the laws of mathematics and probability, and an ever present pressure to put out work that amounts to fraud. Analytics have a lot of value to provide many organizations, but it requires planning, foresight, and a willingness to sacrifice a little now for the sake of a payoff in insights later, which very few organizations have, in my experience. So it essentially becomes a buzzword and people throw worthless data at you to wave a magic wand over so you can tell them what they want to hear. Doing so would essentially require lying, so instead, we would perform the awful, worthless analysis, it usually didn’t provide much insight, and we would include a litany of disclaimers about why the little insight it did provide wasn’t al that trustworthy, which would just disappoint and infuriate the people we were working with. We would also provide detailed guidance on how to execute moving forward to make the process much more valuable the next time around, which without fail went in one ear and out the other.

So essentially we became figureheads. Our work rarely was used in any significant way or provided much value, but we were kept around because the company wanted to be able to tout its “data driven” culture.

It was so bad that at one company I worked for, they had the data science/analytics department start putting on a yearly intracompany conference on analytics that became a huge deal. One year they got Stephen Levy, the author of Freakonomics, to be the keynote speaker. At one point he shared a story about how he was consulting with a company on their marketing, and they found that they had accidentally not been running ads in a particular metro area, and were able to leverage this to act as a control to assess the materials effectiveness. But when asked to intentionally do something similar moving forward, the company balked. It was so close to home that my colleagues and I wondered if the head of our department had fed him the need to talk about it. And yet, not a single thing changed at the company during my time there.

I currently work in a role much closer to software engineering, and I have all of the same problems described by the person in the original post and that many are describing here. But I consider it a strict upgrade over my time working as a statistician.
And I've literally never seen that as an argument, outside of chuckles from friends who have their advertising personalization turned off.

Complaints about ads, as I can tell it, are: they're everywhere all the time on everything and in the way of content a lot of the time.
>I think the dongle situation is fairly overblown

It really is. I was salty about how early they went all-in on USB-C, but it turned out not to be much of a problem. Now it's pretty clear the whole Apple ecosystem is shifting there -- the Pro iPads were already there; now the new iPads introduced last week use it, too. I fully expect the new iPhones will be there, too -- and if not this year, then next.

(Now, when they do that, the same people will scream about Apple "changing ports AGAIN," because for some people Apple cannot do anything right.)

>Get a USB-C hub and plug everything into the hub.

Exactly.
I believe that's working is intended. Reddit doesn't particularly want controversial opinions, at least, not controversial enough for most people to signal they hate them. Because that generates a clear signal to Reddit that most people hate that content, and people who hate the content don't come back.

As with face-to-face human interaction, the trick is to start by reading the room.
> https://ourworldindata.org/suicide

This is not a credible source for suicide data.

> I doubt suicide is underreported. There are certainly cases misattributed, cases of attempts are excluded perhaps, but concluding something on that assumption seems premature.

There are lots of complicated reasons why suicide may be under-reported.

In the US the work to get standard definitions, in the NVDRS, to be used across the country is relatively recent. This document is from 2011.

https://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/pdf/Self-Directed-Vio...

> Despite the large volume of data on certain types of SDV, the utility and reproducibility of the resulting information is sometimes questionable. Mortality data are problematic for several reasons: geographical differences in the definition of suicide and how equivocal cases are classified; jurisdictional differences in the requirements for the office of coroner or medical examiner affecting the standard of proof required to classify a death as a suicide; and differences in terms of the extent to which potential suicides are investigated to accurately determine cause of death.18 The quality of the data on nonfatal suicidal behavior is even more problematic than that of suicides. The concerns about discrepancies in nomenclature19-23 and accurate reporting11,24 apply here even more than with suicides. Also, except for rare exceptions there is neither systematic nor mandatory reporting of nonfatal suicidal behavior in the United States at the state or local level, nor is there routine systematic collection of non-suicidal intentional self harm data.

> These “system” problems with data collection have been discussed for more than a generation. Over 35 years ago, the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) convened a conference on suicide prevention at which a committee was charged with recommending a system for defining and communicating about suicidal behaviors.25 More recently, two scientific reviews that addressed the state of suicide-related research also remarked on the need for consistent definitions. The Institute of Medicine issued a report entitled Reducing Suicide: A National Imperative.4 This report states ”Research on suicide is plagued by many methodological problems... definitions lack uniformity,...reporting of suicide is inaccurate.” “There is a need for researchers and clinicians in suicidology to use a common language or set of terms in describing suicidal phenomena.” The World Health Organization issued the World Report on Violence and Health.2 In the chapter addressing self-directed violence the authors note “Data on suicide and attempted suicide should be valid and up to date. There should be a set of uniform criteria and definitions and – once established – these should be consistently applied and continually reviewed.”
Whoopse, didn't mean this as a global comment.