skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: What is a good crusing altitude for a “Head of IT”
Hi HN,

I work in a very fast growing SaaS company.

When the company was less then 10 programmers a few years ago, we ran very tightly managed systems. The test coverage was enormous and gave us great confidence. The feature selection was done carefully. Big tasks, very little frustration.

Ever since the company started growing faster, everything we have achieved just seems to be turning into this huge mess. The number of systems goes through the roof. The overall management of these systems became very poor.

Passwords are found in source repositories, servers and processes appear to be not monitored in production, the feature selection became a democratic vote between business people, writing tests is skipped way too often, code is not cleaned up before committing, merge requests are incomplete and what not. The data science team even refuses to even talk about their practices. They just SSH/RDP into their servers, install dozens random products, hack away some Python or R or whatnot, take a database dump here and there. No GIT, no docs, no tickets, no nothing.

In short: Many new hires in a short time frame brought a huge lack in good practice and craftsmanship into the company.

Should the "Head of IT" of roughly 50 people even bother with the all the many little details of the work produced? Do they usually work at higher levels of abstraction and simply hold the teams accountable if things to south? How might an IT supervisor actively prevent things from going south in the first place?

What are some traits of good IT/tech-leads, that you worked with?

I would live to hear your wisdom and stories on this.
If it’s novel enough, or it won’t attract enough down or up votes regardless, then I don’t really see the issue with this.

Nobody cares enough about Assange, but a Trump post would be a bloodbath.
>In the long run it's harder to say.

The easiest solution if the software industry wants to preserve the status quo is to just lobby Congress to amend the laws to explicitly distinguish interfaces from implementations.
That's actually what I'm doing for my day job and part of why I originally built this. I built the 2D map for Calla because I was still in the middle of converting all my VR work from Unity to WebXR. But pretty soon, VR will be possible.

Technically, Calla is just the library for driving Jitsi and adding spatialization. You can do whatever graphics you want with it. The graphical elements and the interactions are all up to you to build, separately from the teleconferencing.
This is a horseshit article. To connect the murder of Lübcke to hate speech...

> For decades now, incitement to hatred against national, religious, ethnic or racial groups has been illegal in Germany

This also applies if to you if you call someone a fascist, which can have legal consequences. Just to your information.

> Forged in the late 1950s, Germany’s robust hate speech laws were a direct response to the country’s experience with Nazism

Legislation crafted from a national trauma might not be the best template. It had reason though. Reasons that aren't applicable to the current situation.

> authoritarianism was partly made possible by the fact that it was legal to use incendiary propaganda

That was countered by schooling critical thinking, which does indeed paste a large warning sign on this novel. It also was meant to shield people with differing opinions. Most internet moderators would not be able to adhere to such rules. Not even judges can do that if we are honest.

> Renate Künast, a former national minister and one of the country’s most prominent politicians, has gone on a crusade to expose the failings of current legislation, after she became the target of online hate.

Public figures need to be able to deal with it and that does mean rising above it. She means well, but has the wrong approach. Many targets wouldn't even want the state involved because of negative secondary effects.

> One of the key obstacles holding victims back from retaliating is that they have to advance the costs of legal proceedings

Great analysis, it is a problem with judicative in nearly every country. Completely unjust. I would think that would apply to important rights violations instead of being called names on the internet.

> A blueprint for authoritarian regimes?

Yes, authoritarian regimes have an even larger problem with freedom of speech compared to German politicians, even if it doesn't feel that way.

> It took less than two weeks after Berlin passed NetzDG back in 2017 for Russia to follow suit and approve its own hate speech bill.

... not only Russia. And yes, that is on western 'leaders' intimidated by Twatter. It was so predictable that a believe in any excuse is difficult.

> The signal Germany sent with NetzDG was that cracking down hard on illegal online content was the right approach

I am so proud of my country that it inspired dictorships everywhere. The Nazis weren't even enough for one century and they still make the exact same mistakes again. Insanity...

> how to police online hate speech

Teach people how to disengage. If it is personal, the solution would not be found online. Some people might find themselves encouraged because of the necessary resistance to these policy ideas.

> All are paying close attention to how Berlin is handling the delicate balancing act

Then everyone is making a huge mistake. Especially with its history Germany cannot act differently with international observers. It takes some critical thinking to understand why that is. Would make for an interesting article, politico.

In the end it won't even work but you still get the negative effects. It should be obvious by now.
FreeCodeCamp – Complete Guide to Open Source
What are you talking about? The Daily Caller is one of Facebook’s official fact checker partners: https://www.mediamatters.org/tucker-carlson/facebooks-fact-c...

And the top performing content on Facebook is dominated by right wing media figures: https://mobile.twitter.com/FacebooksTop10
I use adblock plus (imo interchangeable with ublock origin), noScript, facebook container, and HTTPS everywhere.

No script is a pain to begin with, but you come to find out that google and facebook are everywhere constantly watching. It's incredibly unsettling.
They're already increasing some taxes from 2022 for EVs.

Basically, EVs has to pay an insurance equivalent to what motorcycles pay. Which per now is 2135 NOK or USD 230.

Governments writeup: https://www.regjeringen.no/no/aktuelt/pa-veg-mot-ei-framtid-...
Here is an example of how to do XMPP over a Tor hidden service for Conversations on Android:

* https://creep.im/xmpp_tor/
Qualifying people for highly paid info security positions is shockingly broken right now. No one who knows what they are doing cares about credentials you can get from a training program or school, but they also complain constantly about how hard it is to find and hire qualified people. The result is: there is a lot of salary out there for people who can figure out how to get it.

Developing exploits that are acknowledged by major targets--even if done freelance or as a hobby--is one of the few ways to gain lines on your resume that everyone in the security field will pay attention to.
I would also expect somebody to not march alongside neo-marxists and self-professed communists (antifa) with a history of violent extremism (according to the FBI director Wray) but there you go.

> Support for the Lee statue has never been seriously about history

This is irrelevant to the question of whether there were non-white supremacists in attendance. What matters as to people's motives is whether people think that it's about history, which many ordinary people do.
It's not just prop13 and it's not just in California. The Federal reserve has been buying mortgage backed securities to keep the market from correcting (similar to ~2008.) Because of this you can finance the construction and sale of small amounts of luxery space without having to worry nearly as much about being able to rent it for a profit.

Essentially we have insane inflation but it's been carefully architected to only really affect real estate.
Try posting that maybe, just maybe, Assange is a rapist and needs to at least go before the courts to test the allegations and see what happens.
Yeah, the union agreement gives the union money whether or not you're a member.

This was recently ruled illegal in the public sector (Janus v. AFSCME), because of first amendment concerns (the state is forcing you to pay money for union lobbying).

This hasn't resulted in a drop in membership, in no small part due to many unions adopting freakishly Byzantine opt-out measures, e.g. the ones where there's a certain window of 10 days a year that you can leave (computed relative to when you signed your union card, never advertised by the union — and if the employer even mentions these rights the union might attempt legal action under California law which forbids their employer from doing anything to "deter or discourage public employees from becoming or remaining members").
This is quite unfortunate news but not surprising. This effectively turns Privacy Badger for the majority of users into another block list.

Fingerprinting vs ad tracking protection has been an ongoing war. The natural escalation to tracking protection is to fingerprint even harder. I'd expect most power users who like to configure their extensions and blocking lists to be suprised how much information thst provides to differentiate them. Even without that browsers by default share a lot of information with every website (https://panopticlick.eff.org/).

I don't see a good ending to this war. Solutions like Firefox containers requires you to be extremely thoughtful in your site usage and don't protect from more advanced fingerprinting techniques (that for example cloudflare employs). The web is fundimentally a little broken here.
It doesn't. I'm not looking to make a living off of Calla. I have a day job that I really love. Calla is a component of it.
There is so much excess natural gas in the US that they are building a plastics manufacturing plants to convert ethane to plastic.

https://www.npr.org/2019/11/15/778665357/the-u-s-natural-gas...

The plastic industry is just an extension of the petrochemical industry. As oil and gas consumption for fuel drops, they are finding other outlets for production.
> Wait, are you in good faith comparing H1B workers to slavery?

Yes. Now I will pre-emptively call out that there is a wide step function gap between slavery and indentured servitude, and indentured servitude and H1B workers. H1B workers can always leave and return back to their country of origin. In this sense they are neither slaves nor bonded serfs. You are well within your rights to question the comparison.

But the question is if we have a binary classification, should it be between slave and non-slave, or should be between free and not free? The historical context of this country post abolitionism implies through the civil rights movement that it should be the latter. And that is why I made the comparison, clumsily hyperbolic or not. When some residents are not free, there is a chilling effect for citizens nationwide. Wages are depressed for all workers. The space is made for a culture of "I'd rather hire an H1B than not because they'll be more loyal because they have no choice." This culture corrodes national freedom.

> So, if a FAANG hires the same Indian kid, at 120K/yr and have him/her do the same shitty job that the consulting company does, there's nothing here that stops it (please correct me if I am mistaken)

The difference is the incentive structure. The consulting company is based on essentially ripping off the customer by selling a high interest loan to them. It runs on services with razor thin margins which are predominantly returned to the owners rather than reinvested in the firm. Fundamentally, the firm owns no proprietary IP, and is not structured to accrete nor reward the long-term strategic thinking that FAANGs do.

The FAANG may pay that same kid 120k a year but that share grant could easily result in 300k a year with appreciation over the long-term. Because they are giving the employee long term incentivization, they are going to want to see long term results or else that employee will get PIPped. Beyond that, if that employee can hack it at 1 FAANG and is underpaid, they'll just go to another one which pays them market. But the gulf between WITCH body shops and FAANG is wide because the employee gains the skills which give them mobility at the latter and not the former.

All of which is a long way to say that body shops dilute the labor pool by exploiting an externality and creating a market for lemons by flooding it with low quality product. I think they create a situation where no one wins but the proprietors of the body shop, at the expense of the rest of society.
Yes, but it does not look easy to obtain: https://www.cambridge.org/highereducation/books/mathematics-...
Is Distributed Tech Important in a World with More Nationalism?
There are several digital newspapers that you can view with and without ad blocking.

Here are some Austrian examples
https://kurier.at/
https://www.diepresse.com/
How to Protect Your Body and Mind in Changing Seasons
With fall upon us and winter just around the corner, it’s important to look for ways you can boost your health and take care of your body and mind.
Can someone please provide the link to Roger Penrose’s ground breaking article about black hole.
As someone who's used argparse recently, this would have been helpful. argparse is great, but it's (personally) rather cryptic especially if you're not intimately familiar with it.
The problem with normal is that it involves complicity with social norms which to many of us are horrible.
It's total rubbish.

He says that because that's the kind of weird koolaid that 'inspires people' and investors apparently.

It also takes the edge off of 'this is for rich people' and makes it more about the plebes.

It's pure communications koolaid, Valley Style.
Why not both so as to protect your assets.
You can build whatever interaction system you want on top of the thing. Calla is a wrapper around Jitsi to add the spatialization and communicate user state between users.

https://github.com/capnmidnight/Calla/blob/master/Calla/doc/...

As for the server costs, I'm not going to use anything other than Azure. Most of the cost is bandwidth, but it's worth more to me to keep everything in one place and not have to worry about learning another PaaS system. From the other offerings I've seen, Azure is usually only more expensive at the most lowest of tiers. Once you start scaling up, the other vendors get just as expensive. So I'm fine with shelling out a few more bucks here and there to avoid having to use something else.
(Side) effects are the reason you write code in the first place.

So I'd agree that focusing on the reason you are writing the code makes everyone more productive, though not just in the short term. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Now how you organize your code so that you don't mix things up willy-nilly is a different, more nuanced and, I think, more interesting question.

I am a big fan of hexagonal architecture, where you have a very localized and super-testable core with, ideally, all the complex functionality, surrounded by adapters that are as trivial as possible and communicate with the outside world, be that the user, persistence, network etc.

FP is one way of achieving this, but certainly not the only one.
I meant it more like "am I at fault/in the wrong here?". It doesn't literally have to be assholeish behaviour.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) ethics: 5 questions CIOs should ask
There needs to be an Industry-wide game production union, with all the developers and artists together as a single global political force. That would RADICALLY change crunch abuses.
No, your just wrong here.

Courts at every level consider the constitution. Lower level courts routinely rule on constitutional grounds.

The legislature routinely passes unconstitutional laws that purport to punish constitutionally protected speech, and those laws are routinely not enforced against that speech. (Often these laws have other constitutionally valid purposes and are still enforced for those purposes, more rarely their main purpose is to forbid protected speech and they are thrown out entirely).

It is simply not the case in the us that the legislature passing a law against speech means that the speech is unprotected and illegal.
I'm sorry, Mr Firstname Lastname, you can only have two names and you cannot have spaces in your names.
The Importance of Post-Merger Integration: Achieving the End State
Hundreds of animals dead as a result of ecological disaster at Kamchatka
Validation, as with the normal html request/response cycle, is done on the server side. Here is an example:

https://htmx.org/examples/inline-validation/

It's the normal web 1.0 thing: validate your data server side and render an error message/flagged input which is returned as html.

The latest dev version plugs into the HTML5 validation API so that client side validations are respected, but that doesn't require any scripting.

Htmx does fire a lot of events that you can hook into if you wish, and hyperscript is an experimental mechanism for doing so, but neither are the focus or a requirement for using htmx.

From experience, yes, it is much simpler than the javascript-framework based approach, at least for many use cases.
To Californians..
Well, if the GP used ripgrep, they wouldn't have needed to install WSL or even cygwin first. ripgrep is a native Windows program.
I agree. That's likely why philosophy is often so semantics heavy. Your example is apt.

OTOH, I do think that there are different levels of "bogged down in semantics."

Semantics can sometimes interesting in their own right. That's rarely a help though. The semantics are generally not interesting as used to try and win a debate.

Getting back to the original point, I think the semantic arguments are usually the shallower ones. That's not bad in itself, but being a bog, moving past semantics is a rarity once in. That tends to get annoying and boring faster than rehashing a repetitive but substantive discussion.

Say we're discussing the existence of god. "What if I consider god to be the universe itself?" might be interesting on first pass, but it's kind of boring by the third time. Environmental sustainability. It might be interesting to reflect on the etymology or politics of the term "sustainable" in the context it's used today. It rarely gets us to a more nuanced view though. Usually, it just keeps the debate in shallow water. what does the word "really" mean. What words should we use.

As I said, I think it's important to keep in mind that there is no escape. Professional philosophers get stuck in semantics regularly. OTOH, a forum is probably somewhat susceptible to shallowness (semantics are just one type) regardless. After all, it's a casual medium.
Can DuckDuckGo Privacy Essentials be an alternative to Privacy Badger? Once I replaced Privace Badger by it, because Privacy Badger had conflicts with some sites I read often. But I'm not sure if its's an optimal alternative.
If you're already doing C#, then it's easy to start using F#. You probably are using VS Studio/Code, you already know the standard .NET libraries. etc.. F# is a little weird because there are accommodations to ensure it will interop with C#. But it is fun.
The Supreme Court hears Oracle vs. Google tomorrow–here’s what’s at stake
i had expected that Appple might have paid a million to him.
Slashdot. I dare you to wade into a political discussion there. It’s all name calling and vitriol. So toxic.
> pressure Wave in front of the moving plane moves away at the speed of sound, so it just stacks up

This is a description of trans-sonic flight.
Honestly the ideal contraption would be something that can harness the solar on the sea directly. That would be something especially if it is in the form of fishing nets at surface.
OLTP performance since PostgreSQL 8.3
Using Laravel and TS? A package that generates all types for your models
Don't mistake "downvoted for complaining about downvotes in advance" for harassment.

That said, I do think Facebook PR deliberately played up the CA story as a way of masking the fact that any Facebook app at the time had access to this data, and many thousands were certainly siphoning it off in the same way.

It was very successful.
> That is helpful, but even with a clean needle they will administer something possibly contaminated anyway

In general, the main drug-related vector for disease is needle sharing. Most pathogens wouldn't survive long in the actual heroin, and it's not clear how they'd get there in the first place.
I think the statements: "CA were ineffective charlatans" and "Carole Cadwalladr is misinformed" and "the methods by which CA attempted to influence the election were wrong" can all be simultaneously true.
If you wanted to get hired as a bank robber, how would you do it? Gotta rob a few banks first.
I don't think that's a fair comparison. The Julian Assange saga is about hacking, privacy, three-letter-agency overreach in the tech sphere, etc. I think it's the "hacker" half of the "hacker-politics" that makes it on topic here. The story is developing over time; sure some non-newsworthy Assange articles get posted here sometimes but in general I don't think it's incongruous with HN.
Emacs might not be doomed after all
It's the whole "you need to volunteer for a year before we'll hire you" hiring method typically seen in low paid positions in the arts, but this time for high paid infosec positions...
Unions are not only about salaries. The company I worked at was unionized and the union made yearly salary adjustments happen.

But to answer your question: In Germany, what the company actually ends up paying is about 20% higher than what you have in your contract. The company pays part of your unemployment insurance, healthcare insurance and some other contributions/taxes employees don't get to see. Your own contributions are usually around 40%.
If a company pays 100k in total you end up with ~50k in your pocket after taxes/contributions.

I also feel that tech salaries in some regions of the US are a bit disconnected from what is happening in the rest of the world.
In the US, there are state by state rules now. It is complicated.
Fake reviews are certainly a big challenge. I introduced a credibility system for every user, similar to Reddit's karma so people can see how trustworthy the user is in the Buy For Life community. As mentioned by others, people trust reviews on Reddit, I try to achieve the same.

I could also imagine picking reviewers by interviewing them initially - someone who owns and uses the product for a while.
I'm sure you see the damage very well, you just don't care or even welcome it. So drop the demagoguery.
Do you automatically presume any conservative group is white supremacists by default?
"As of now, October 4th, we have received four payments totaling $51,500"

What a joke. That's an hourly rate of $20 (assuming 5 researchers working for 3 months). Just enough to buy a MacBook to do the research in the first place.
Using tools and resources rendered by Datamart, businesses can build an
I'm not opposed to the idea, but I wonder how small the pieces can get before they're not practical to run as a company anymore.

Obviously, things like Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp could be competing with their counterparts. As I've never really used Facebook, I don't know what the core app does and how it could be split up.

Do you have any insight there?
Singapore launches cyber security label for smart home devices
I believe Firefox's market share is now less than 4%, so I'm not really keen on wasting time supporting it.