skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think this article actually makes quite a fresh and interesting point, after the first few paragraphs that sound like stock self-driving skepticism. The author is pointing out that imagining self-driving cars of the same form-factor and niche as the human-driven cars today is a fallacy on par with a 1990s futurist imagining the internet as simply a way to send letters faster. The point is that changes to the technological landscape as momentous as self-driving rarely are as simple as 1:1 replacement of the technology that existed before: the self-driving car is not unattainable, but it is a red herring.

Given this, I don't really know why he mentions the challenges involved in self-driving and his skepticism thereof -- it seems to me that his autonomous "rovers" and "software trains" face basically all of the same challenges as a self-driving sedan would.

Overall I applaud the imagination that the author applies, bringing together the threads of autonomous vehicles, micromobility, and lingering anxieties from COVID into a set of bold claims about the future of urban transit.

What I am curious about is whether the future he paints ("micro-sprawl"; "walking is passé") is one people find compelling and desirable. I think he's basically right that the underlying market forces will lead us there in the next couple of decades absent strong action from municipal governments, but is this the right way to model cities of the future, or are we sleepwalking into another Robert Moses style disastrous reimagining of the urban fabric? Personally I'm undecided.
To the collective maybe. Not to the individual.
Hope it gets better for you soon. I'm a systems engineer who dabbles in coding and have been overwhelmed by all the frameworks and whatnot. Wish there were companies looking for just competent engineers to fill probably-mundane-day-to-day-but-mostly-reasonable-otherwise roles.
> But I'm assuming that the functions aren't mucking about with global state or something equally distasteful.

There's not much else for them to do, since they don't take arguments, but to muck about with global state and/or have side effects.
I think we should separate ideas/proof of concepts that were in the field and presented as having potential, and implementations that are largely adopted and reliable.

There will always be a lag between the two, and it won’t just be ‘reinventing the wheel’.

I had a look at CORBA and it was horrible in many ways. Interestingly it’s something that works and is proven at large scale but nobody would want to have it for small/middle scale non enterprisy applications, and it might not even be a good idea at large scale depending on what properties are valued. In no way I’d see kubernetes with services as a worse version of it, we didn’t choose it just by ignorance or hype.

Same with “dark mode“ on win 95. Most programs couldn’t even properly handle text sizes, it was a i18n nightmare that was just brushed under the carpet. Changing text and background colors was the same, with some apps somewhat working because they Mostly relied on default widgets, and a mess of unusable apps on the side that just had text colors baked. You had a better chance to have it work by plain inverting all colors through the accessibility settings.

To be fair it’s still partly a mess now, but we are in a way better situation that in Win95 , it is understood at an application level, it actually makes sense now.
In a major city like SF? Will never happen. That's the price for a 2-bed in a mid-west city with excess supply, super cheap labor and materials costs, limited permitting, etc.

I could never see a $1200 2-bed in SF ever coving the costs of construction.
Yes, but... sometimes you have data about data (aka metadata) or about a thing, in which case "...Info" is the best thing I know of. Say FileInfo or ProgramInfo (e.g. a CNC machine program).
It may have been language-agnostic, but it was never going to be OS-agnostic. Like everything Microsoft it only worked with Microsoft implementations on both ends.

> saner (i.e. binary) protocols

.. which only had one canonical implementation on each end.

If I remember rightly, the protocol for accessing Exchange from Outlook was MAPI over either DCOM or DCE/RPC. Despite some reverse engineering efforts, this is why there were no Open Source drop-in replacements for Exchange, and clients accessing Exchange always did so over IMAP, thereby losing features.

Similarly SAMBA is DCE/RPC. https://wiki.samba.org/index.php/DCERPC
https://youtube.com/watch?v=77pnVFLkUjM&t=39s
> Webflow (the modern equivalent of Frontpage/dreamweaver) produces portable, semantic HTML and sane CSS.

That’s assuming you already know how to use HTML and CSS. The tool does not help you learn that. I worked on a project in Webflow with talented designers who didn't know diddly squat about HTML and CSS, and it was a mess. I agree that it’s amazing that the tool allowed them to do anything at all, but the output was a big ball of tech debt.
Right. We’d probably be better as a society if we were interested and willing to do some infrastructure projects to alleviate the burden of driving cars. I really wish Elon’s boring company were further along and getting much more headwind for this reason.
Depends on what u want to do with it,
I had the same config for a dedicated server at hetzner(nixos) , desktop, laptop with just a flag depending on the features I needed (server with xrdp, laptop with i3, desktop with KDE)

U can replicate the system to anything, even build new config in a vm in seconds, or turn it to a USB stick, or iso, but u need to manually copy the home folder ofc

It rather sounds as if u only read about Nix and not Nixos and the integrated ecosystem
I repeat: I am not talking about changing the domain that the user typed. Only that I’m happy with things showing www.example.com as example.com.
Dutch flying car gets permission to drive on European roads
Are we talking past one another?

I'll repeat. I am not saying that the idea would be to have a company where everyone had to have strong personal relationships. My idea was to think of a company that is no bigger than the "number of people that the human mind can keep track of in terms of their identity and relationship to you" (your words) as way to have a company where everyone can at least make a distinction between the individual and the corporation (in my words, "care" about the people).

You are right that we should not expect "strong personal relationships" with more than a handful of people. But using Dunbar's number was just a way to get an first approximate sense of dimension of a company size that is not so big to the point where individuals become faceless.

It's more or less like life in a megalopolis vs a small town. Living in a small town does not have a personal connection with everyone, but there is a sense of a "everybody knows each other" even if the town has more than 150 people. less The question would then be: how big can a village or a town be until it loses the "everyone knows each other" feeling?
The title doesn't make sense.

As far as those who enjoy the current relative scarcity (developers, schools) are concerned, there are already enough devs (not enough is good).

If you are end user who pays pay for dev services you'd want as many as it takes to have their pay hit minimum wage.
+1 totally agree. Support for schema.org, WikiData, etc. is useful, a rising tide that floats all boats.
Probably in the same way as people specifically mean 'you're' when they write 'your' ;)
In most population dense parts of the country where traffic is a problem, there is no “side of the road” to dig a ditch into. It’s all built up.
You could have "dark mode" in Windows 3.0. Provided programs used the standard widgets and the correct "named" colours, everything would pick up the colour changes from the operating system.
This is great— thanks for sharing
Shakespeare the software architect: "First kill all the Managers".
That's my thought too. What all tests are they running on all covid patients ?
Nice looking board, but I agree, you should charge more. One market to consider is automotive scopes- since it already can interface with a phone, putting different connectors on there and with a case would suffice for most uses. Compare to a Pico scope for the market leader in this segment. It definitely doesn't need to be a 100% finished consumer product (that's already covered), you wouldn't be selling to hackers but the mechanics who use a scope are by and large the technically sophisticated ones. Just a thought, it looks like a great product, I'm buying one just to hack into a portable scope so I don't have to deal with getting out my rigol for basic auto work.

Edit: it certainly doesn't need to be battery powered either, conveniently cars have 12v battery power avaliable (although it is quite dirty, so input protection is required). I'm on my phone RN, otherwise I'd pull up the schematics, it might already have adequate input protection.
The practice is often very different from the principle. I’ve had a set top box that in the “off” state used 29 watts, 24 hours per day. In the “on” state it used 30 watts. In principle, it didn’t have to be so but it was.
> Whatever you do, don't seek to join a management track because you think it's the "next logical step" or some reward for being good at coding. It's not that. It's a different job.

It is certainly a different job, but the reality of today's corporations is that outside of a few niches, it certainly is the the next logical step. It is also easier to move down to IC than the opposite (by changing jobs), and getting back in management if you have a good resume.

Yes, some companies have technical tracks where you can grow your career well, but the reality is those are few, and moreover, even when you have them, growing in technical track is actually much harder than the management track. And technical track involves a lot of meetings/discussions as well. E.g. there was recently a post on HN about principal engineer, and their job overlaps with what I do as EM quite a bit.

I have met many engineers who are around 50 years old, did not want to go into management, and they are fairly miserable. If you're a kernel hacker, sure, you will likely be able to get paid working on enjoying it until you retire. But otherwise... It ends up being consulting, 'architects', and other jobs that are not that much more challenging technically speaking than engineering management. They get paid much less, and have fewer opportunities.

Also, honestly, the whole thing about "management is a role, not a rank/title" feels like another trick by companies to low ball salaries.
Thanks, but that is a form of speech, doesn't mean necessarily a numeric value. :)

https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/hundred

> If you refer to hundreds of things or people, you are emphasizing that there are very many of them.
You're right about tcl, a comment can mess stuff up as the comment is a command that says do nothing. It's a terrible language, and that may be it's worst flaw, but it's still in every EDA tool. It's kind of like how C is still around despite its foot shooting ability costing billions every year due to security and bugs due to buffer overflows, etc. If an EDA tool wanted to break the mold and use say python for scripting they would still likely need to offer a tcl option. It's very ingrained in industry.

As for SV - a lot of your gripes are Verilog issues, and SV has tried to fix some of them. I agree the blocking / nonblocking is a mess but most folks just learn the rules to avoid issues, but delta cycles can be a pain. The syntax limitations/quirks you point out are intersting, though not enough to say the language is terrible, it's extremely powerful with very good composability of types, constrained random is very powerful, the coverage is extensive, assertions again are very powerful. In a way its line a few seperate languages bolted together so sure there is some duplication, but it works surprisingly well in the whole.
Not the point.

What is the point is that Sketch didn't have the functionality they needed at the time they needed it, so they migrated to Figma.
I've been saying this for a while. People think these huge moderated platforms are somehow better than other parts of the internet but they're really not.

Lots of pedophiles and abusers seem to just use Facebook and a decent number get away with it.
Is there a comprehensive comparison between Hoppscotch and Postman?
You know that album you really like? Yeah it's gone now. The estate of $ARTIST doesn't want it available on $SERVICE_A now that $SERVICE_B is offering a better deal. Oh, and $SERVICE_B isn't available in $COUNTRY of course, but someone could buy the rights for it there and publish the music, someday, or never, we don't care.

I don't get it either, and yet these services are massively popular to the point of alternatives going away. Meanwhile I have tons of music on my laptop, desktop, and HTPC, and can play it as long as there isn't a power outage.

Streaming is great for things I know I want to watch once (e.g. TV series) and don't care if I can't rewatch it tomorrow. For music? Nope.
Depends, check the recent stories about X.org being abandonware, yet it is open source.
It's all fun and games until we laugh our way into something from The Outer Worlds.
Is there a catchy expression for the fact that in the future all data that we believe private will probably be public? Give it a few more security breaches..
What I don't understand is how someone can keep such poor proof of authenticity when hocking questionable products on Amazon? To pretend that illegible evidence of authenticity is okay is disingenuous. Everyone knows that Amazon is full of fakes. You would think scammers would try to have reasonable proof of authenticity so that when the banhammer comes swinging down, they'd have a saving grace.

Plus, the article is clickbait. I don't see how the man is homeless. He's not a rough sleeper. He's staying with family. To call him homeless is absurd, it cheapens the word and erodes our communal empathy.
I am extremely skeptical of the boring project. The claimed money saving (a 10x improvement vs. every single tunnel digger in the world without any evidence to back it up?) the safety issues of a car breaking down in a tunnel or being brought up and down, the enormous cost with digging deeper tunnels, etc. etc.

Road tunnels exist and have been built all around the world, these kinds of ideas have been tried and ultimately general underground road tunnels are just not economical or particularly safe.

Thunderf00t has done a series of videos debunking these claims [0,1,2]. Unfortunately Elon has a habit of frankly lying which I think does serious harm to public perception of these things.

These kind of infrastructure problems are just hard and have a ton of trade offs, there is no silver bullet.

[0]:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HBtL3qDvdZc
[1]:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ezF7NmwQZs
[2]:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hyy-19qyNWE
I see.

Genuine question:

Do you happen to be able to estimate how many people and of which qualifications you require in a team for how long to go trough all the available research, and make some useful and fairly certain prescriptions in a complex topic like this?

Is it even realistic for an average joe to look into it in their free time, and come to a useful conslusion in a realistic timeframe, or is everything so complicated nowadays that it's not worth it?
Counterpoint: Hayflick limit [1]. Of course, the humble lobster, jellyfish and hydra [2] (along with other animals) don't seem to undergo senescence but IMO the jury is still out on whether hominids are biologically amenable to such feats of genetic engineering.

The other question besides whether such a thing is possible is whether it is desirable. Depending on one's viewpoint, one could look at immortal humans as a cosmic cancer. At least the cycle of death and birth limits the harm a bad actor can do. What would you do if your least favorite fascist were also immortal and invulnerable? And I do mean that somewhat rhetorically. It's a messy ethical subject to think about, personally. I kinda prefer life and death.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hayflick_limit

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_immortality#Organis...
Therapy notes should require both therapist and patient to enter a secret passcode to unlock. 2 person consent.
I didn't say "was not available at the time", I said "was not common at the time".
Oh it will happen, temporary.

Until some really big accident happens in a situation where even a drunk driver wouldn't have messed up that way.

After that self driving will be limited to situations like while you are in a traffic jam or limited to 30km/h and having it's own track or similar.
I have good luck with DuckDuckGo for technical searches. It's local searches and searches about relatively current events it seems to have trouble with.
You should have bought a Wico Command Control.
IMO this is terrible advice. What happens after a decade when some or all of the desktops are way out of date? Are the doctors diligent about patching them? All of the doctors?

Likely the situation they’ll end up in is a bunch of old computers running outdated software that all ends up being a massive security threat. Let’s say in 2005 one of the doctors wanted to video chat with their kid, and the kid tells them to download teamviewer. Chances are, 15 years later in 2020, that 2005 version of teamviewer is still going to be on that computer. I know this because I work in a psychiatric research institute (though not in IT) and this kind of stuff happens all the time. It’s not everyone, but in this case the weakest link breaks the chain.
Ah yes, the notorious bitcoin that stole this data and extorted people. Curse this troublesome software that has gained sentience wreaks havoc on the world.
Are We Designing for Children?
Kudos, guys!

Time to wait three months for all the kinks to be worked out, though.
Does the rocket design really reuse these? I keep on hearing they are designed for reuse but even though SpaceX is landing lots of boosters I've yet to see another company landed and reuse an orbital booster. Will they be landing be-4 in 2020 or later?
The RIAA’s fraudulent attack on youtube-dl is not a DMCA §512 infringement/safe-harbour claim

https://joindiaspora.com/posts/808cf690f8e801381778002590d8e...
The same exact reasons exist for rural communities.
E.g. I don't see how the text tool would work. Where's the transient state stored while the text is being entered, but not yet finalized? Similarly, how would drawing a line work? That is, drawing a long squiggle, that is continuously updated while drawing, but will still be undone/redone with a single Undo/Redo operation.

I simply don't see how this fits the functional core + imperative shell pattern.
It is usually easier to become a manager within your existing company, compared to starting with an EM role.

If that has not happened to you even after being clear, it can mean different things. It could be that you are within a group that has little growth, and does not need a new EM. Some political reasons. Maybe your manager is terrible and does not seek opportunities for you. etc...

In this case, my advice would be to join a mid size company which has growth, and you join as a senior engineer. Startups can be another way (that's how I did it), but that's more difficult to plan. I certainly did not plan it this way myself.
Faceted Search for Ecommerce: Best Practices
I am not sure if you are sarcastic.
> safely from another country

Again, there's a reason ransomware doesn't ask for cash. It simply doesn't work for ransomware style attacks; you need an immediate, irreversible payment method that doesn't put the ransomer at significant risk.
Developers that keep pushing for Chrome are the ones to blame to start with.

Happy Firefox user here since Netscape Navigator days.
Ohhhh right that makes sense.
RTX 3090 SLI to the rescue
The way I read the article, I believe his main point was to make reasoning about state easier, even at a small cost to performance, making code easier to test and debug.
> So in effect, we were also throttling them, which is similar to what wireless carriers do today I think...

No. Dropping a dial-up connection when all lines are busy is not the same kind of artificial limitation as throttling/de-prioritizing someone's traffic after X GB even if the network is uncongested, or unconditionally throttling specific types of traffic (eg. all video traffic, to prevent HD streaming).
Why tunnels instead of the Japanese/German solution of ramps/viaducts?

In the same vein, why underground instead of light rail?

See, open air systems like those are much easier to service. Removing a crashed car from that requires just a big crane.
The market for people who actually want to own it is vanishingly small. I for instance literally do not care if I own it or not. All I really want is to be able to listen to it when I want to and I have that. I don't see a realistic future where I won't be able to listen to it.

All in all I'm with tptacek here. For all but the most niche consumer this is unambiguously better than we had before.
Cars will never be safe. At any point if you are moving 50 miles an hour and an animal runs out in front of an oncoming car they may swerve and hit you head on. Or if your tire pops you may swerve into a tree. When cars have accidents 10x less frequently than humans it will be stupid not to switch over.
Bad guys will always exist and will always take advantage of whatever vulnerablities we create.
Ironic workaround. :)
This is good advice and a good writeup, but I take exception to one (boldface!) line:

Coupling kills software

I hear this a lot but I think it’s highly overstated.

The “clear” final version is still strongly coupled -- you can’t call find_definition without it directly calling the build_url helper! The key aspect isn’t the coupling, it’s that the high-level imperative function is calling a simple, low-level, testable helper.

Coupling can be bad, sure, but not if it’s kept under control. And excessive decoupling can make programs much harder to understand and debug! Have you ever worked on an app where every reference to another object is injected via a DI framework, and where all the significant calls that actually do stuff are farmed out to asynchronous messages and callbacks, all in the name of decoupling and testability? That can make it really hard to debug problems. A good balance is what’s needed, not decoupling over all other concerns.
It's the other way around.

By "not allowed to exist" I don't mean literally executed in a mass genocide of half the voting population. Using such an interpretation is very bad faith, assuming that's what you're getting at.

I mean not allowed to be visible, to play any part in the public sphere, not allowed to "exist" in the sense of mattering to the structures of power in a country. Being forced to be invisible, forgotten, erased from the written and spoken record. And with that far more rational interpretation you can hopefully see that your views definitely qualify.
So what if we eliminate some of the hard problems, like steering, traffic, pedestrians, and setup guided routes specifically for automated vehicles? All you would need to control is signaling and the throttle/brakes. You could even couple multiple vehicles together for more capacity! Seems like an idea ripe for implementation. /s