skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hey friends! Author here.

If you're looking for a tl;dr you can find one on Twitter (with pictures!) [0]

This research was a blast to do, and I learned a ton. Happy to answer questions!

[0] https://twitter.com/jw_sec/status/1326908628411047937
State of the Art of Microservices in 2020
Some delivery seems to work given sufficient density and/or volume, e.g. NYC Chinese food or Dominos. Of course, the delivery drivers/bikers still make very little.

But the evidence suggests that given US labor costs and relative equality for much of the population, it's generally hard for middle-class or even upper-middle class to justify paying people to run errands for them generally. I'm not sure the economics of fast delivery are all that different from when kozmo.com was around.
SpaceX was well underway, but they would have gone bankrupt without investment from NASA.
Well, under pure capitalism, intellectual property wouldn't exist and these sort of efforts would be pointless.
I've been super self isolated. I live lone. I've seen 6 people since march 15th and those were just 2hr walks outdoors with masks on. That's it.

But, it's reasonable question to ask, what's the acceptable number of casualties. The answer is not zero. We have plenty of other diseases that kill lots of people. COVID is more but we still have to pick a number.

Is 1 in 100 ok? 1 in 500? 1 in 1000? 1 in 5k? (the car rate), 1 in 10k? (the flu rate).

I heard about this thinking on the Sam Harris podcast. He mentioned some people claiming if we lifted all restrictions by their estimates deaths would be 1 in 300. He and his interviewee dismissed out of hand without giving it any thought which was very disappointing. Whether or not it actually would be 1 in 300 we still have to pick a number below which we'd accept the losses. Is there a reasonable way to decide that number? Flu is around 1 in 10k (or at least my 30 seconds of searching seem to put it in the same order of magnitude) so apparently that's an acceptable number and we don't apparently get upset as a society that people go around spreading the flu. (though I get super upset personally)
Wow, thanks for this post, it seems obvious now, but it really gives me some closure on a startup role I burned out on after a year. I totally had foundersyndrome, and it was extremely stressful because there was a total mismatch between my emotional investment in the company, my equity share, and my power to enact change.

I only had 0.5% equity yet was completely invested in the company at the detriment of my wellbeing. And it wasn't really discouraged, some of the other employees regularly worked weekends, and I was dumb enough to do it too when my work was particularly interesting.

I LOVED the work, but ultimately it just ran me into the ground, and when I didn't have the power to push initiatives through that were important to me it was extremely frustrating. That combined with being the first engineer and basically building the engineering team and V1 of the product, but then not being promoted to director of SW basically sealed the deal for me, and I was like fuck it I'm out of here.

Thanks for your comment, I've doubted myself many times for leaving that role, but now it's crystal clear that there needs to be a good match between emotional investment and ownership, and mine was completely out of balance, so it really was never going to work out.
Square's Cash App
Prop 22 allows for treating drivers differently based on how many hours per week they drive. Previously a gig economy company needed to decide how to classify their entire workforce (a single driver treated as an employee meant all need to be). It seems reasonable to be able to treat full time drivers like full time drivers and part time drivers like part time drivers. That's why CA voted for prop 22.
Yeah, to hell with you, Greenpeace, for trying to do good. Serves you right, you little goody two-shoes, for not having all the relevant data to make an informed decision, losers.

Then again...

Maybe we should rather look at Exxon, BP et al. that already in the 70ies knew perfectly well about the possibility of antropogenic climate change and the danger that this might pose. They could have told Greenpeace. Instead they buried the research and chose to do everything to torpedo any political action.

But yeah, let's blame Greenpeace.
I never tried e-ink for prolonged times, but I always found the contrast to be a bit lacking, which is something that contributes to eye fatigue. Last I used such devices was over 5 years ago though, so maybe technology has improved now.
I've never worried about the state of software because I've never believed it will solve all of our problems, and I've developed hobbies and an identity outside of my career. If software causes you existential angst, it's a sign that you're putting too many eggs in one basket.

Software isn't perfect, there are perverse incentives, and everything gets messed up -- because it's a human endeavor, just like everything else.

But I enjoy it and it pays well. I try to point the ship in the right direction when I can.
I believe that computers today can do way more than they ever occurred back in the 1970s.

But yes, things do you not speak well to each other still.

I think the single most important distinction from back then too right now, is that back down programs was written to serve the user.

These days people no longer use programs, they use online services, and they are designed to make money.

That’s a small detail which makes a world of difference.
So true. I wouldn't even try to sell an enterprise to-do app for less than 2000/month. The headaches of selling are baked in no matter what you are building.
There's pessimism and there's realism.

Look at the sources below to see what we are doing to the things we need for survival.

We need IMMEDIATE action to stop extinction crisis, David Attenborough - BBC [0]

How long do most species last before going extinct? [1]

Accelerated modern human–induced species losses: Entering the sixth mass extinction (2015)[2]

Biological annihilation via the ongoing sixth mass extinction signaled by vertebrate population losses and declines (2017) [3]. Follow up study of [2]

UN report: Humans accelerating extinction of other species [4]

Barring a massive change in how we fish, there won’t be any sushi left by 2048 [5]. The source of that article [6] and the related study [7] (only abstract, but you can use another source to get DOI: 10.1126/science.1132294 )

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dbCR0KSU52g

[1]: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/how-long-do-most-s...

[2]: https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/1/5/e1400253

[3]: https://www.pnas.org/content/114/30/E6089

[4]: https://apnews.com/article/aaf1091c5aae40b0a110daaf04950672

[5]: https://qz.com/856652/barring-a-massive-change-in-how-we-fis...

[6]: https://web.archive.org/web/20100505032504/https://wwf.panda...

[7]: https://web.archive.org/web/20090311004650/http://www.scienc...
I've been in touch with folks from the Open Source Security Foundation [0] who is interested in making this a centralized service.

I'm a big believer that functions like this should be centralized under a foundation like that, and have really close connections to package manager maintainers so that we can work together towards solving the problem.

[0] https://openssf.org/
Both WeWork and DoorDash proved their markets which is what is meant here. They found demand for something to fill a need irrespective of the services they offered to try and fill it.
You are putting words in my mouth. I was responding to an accusation that we didn't act strictly enough back in March.

I agree we know much more about the virus now and should be tailoring our mitigation efforts accordingly.

I would say that in general we are failing on that front however.
No. The ugliest person in the world also belongs to the bottom 10, percent or otherwise.
The day after I tweeted about the ongoing attempts to block sales of my book, Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters

Here I stopped reading and went looking for the activists. Maybe they have a donation link.
>but they are far from being a majority. I'm confident we will be able to eradicate this virus with vaccines, like we have (mostly) done so in the past with diseases such as polio or tetanus.

No of course they're not a majority, but there are enough out there that it reduces herd immunity; I'm not epidemiologist so I can't really make an argument as to how much, but it will be > 0.

Yeah polio is unfortunately a perfect example of how one community for whatever reason choosing not to vaccinate leaves a reservoir for the disease and prevents total eradication. I'd be delighted if I'm proven wrong and we manage to eradicate Covid-19. I'm just personally skeptical compliance will be high enough to do it considering the anecdotal data just watching people wear masks now, which is frankly a much lower bar.
> As the election started to come to a crescendo in mid-October, and possibly as a result of the Trump campaign falling behind the Biden campaign in fundraising in early October, the Trump campaign began ramping up the cadence of contact to individuals, peaking at 26 mails per day. That’s not a typo: the Trump campaign on the eve of the election was mailing their respondents an average of 26 times per day.
d) are drunk
Another hack for those of us on underpowered macbooks with retina screens is set a non-retina resolution with RDM:

https://github.com/avibrazil/RDM
Let's put it this way.

I went to lunch with a girl who worked at a Bestbuy. She spent the entire time trying out figure out how the a group of current BestBuy employees nearby at the restaurant could afford the food (overpriced $20 meal) for such a causal meal.

My former landlord financed everything she ever did, including her damn electronics she would throw away or break in a year. She was a widow, on social security and was cheated out of a pension. I have no idea how her monthly payments weren't thousands per month.

Americans fucking suck at financial literacy and trap themselves in debt pits. Alternatively, people spend themselves silly without stepping back and realizing their savings is staying at $0 by living larger than they should if they want savings to go up.
There's a lot of false premises and a lot of things that don't follow in this.

> Maybe the most marvellous, utopian idea for software was Unix program design, in the mid-1970s. This is the idea that programs will all talk together via unstructured streams of text.

It was a great idea in the 1970's. But we had OLE and COM and CORBA and GNOME and KDE and now PowerShell where you can load .NET assemblies and pass around structured objects in the same process. We've had Cocoa which exposed Smalltalk style control of objects in applications since the 1980's.

This isn't a problem of technology. It's a problem of incentives. It's the same incentives that drive programs to try to look different from each other instead of fitting smoothly into a set of user interface guidelines. It requires a producer of software to find it beneficial to them to fit into the ecosystem around them.

> The promise of a computer is to reveal truth, through a seamless flow of information.

Seamless flow of information requires connecting the underlying semantic domains. Semantic domains rarely exactly match. Humans use enormous amounts of context and negotiation to construct language games in these situations.

> music was around forever but in the 16th century, if you made music, you made it for god, or the king.

This is empirically false. We have records of dance music, of broadside ballads that were sung in the streets, of the music people played at home. And there were lots of student drinking songs about being young and free.

I think the real solution to the author's angst is to go study the field more broadly and get out of whatever ghetto they are living in.
Unfortunately legal concerns about data privacy are pushing enterprises towards MORE of this stuff, not less.
> I think it's safe to fear unchecked power and those who are loyal to people instead of loyal to ideas

For all its many failings, I think this is one of the benefits that religion (an particularly the form of religion popular in Europe during the the last 2000 years) can provide. By having a notion of some god, and a cannon, you can have a list of ideas that everyone considers good, and it makes such demagoguery a little more difficult.

The US Constitution is a similar sort of cannon, but the ideas it proscribes are much more limited.
I’m not talking about the federal government. Most major cities and states have already passed temporary mandates and orders that are not being enforced.
> I love that there are so few limits in "software world." No pesky laws of physics.

Actually...

Laws of physics are very important to software engineering. Stuff like speed of light and ability to disperse heat have a tremendous influence on how computation can and is done, and how we design software systems.

Then there are laws entropy and complexity, math laws & cryptography, social laws (how do people cooperate), game theory, economic laws and legal laws. And bunch of other stuff that I forgot about now. All greatly limiting / shaping the way we can create software at scale.

Software engineering is one of the most (if not the most) complex forms of engineering out there. A lot of people don't realize it, since they routinely work with tiny parts of the whole picture. Writing a typical REST API backend, or making a RPi blink an LED is like civic engineer building a popsicle stick bridge. Sure it's fun, but that's not "the whole field".
Which west? Which norms?
A large proportion, if not the majority of my doordash orders include some sort of promotion. They're everywhere and at this point I almost have an expectation that doordash will always have a promotion that lets me order at a discount.

I think that these effective consumer subsidies are included in their "sales and marketing" budget.
That's interesting, but have you got evidence for your belief? Are you sure the wish is not father to the thought here?
Facebook changed that in 2014 because it didn't work.
Yeah, I've done enough fine dining in my professional career to know that "schedule a ..." means a low value product pumped up by dedicated sales.

Even if an actual product value exists after accounting for spin, the gated access means high training cost which in turn means vendor lock-in.

"Schedule a ..." ticks all the wrong boxes. Except for dinner, dinner is often quite good. In fact maybe they would get more traction with "schedule dinner."
I moved everything over to Amazon Prime which is now the unlimited free storage choice for photos. When they bring the hammer down, I'll move it to the next website of the day.
> Creating a culture of home-cooked software must happen in the margins, without capital, because capital by nature goes to restaurants.

I honestly think this is the root of the problem, and that there is "too much software" is merely a symptom caused by this.

As someone who didn't eat out often before quarantines, and is only a fair-to-middling cook, I can say that restaurants have crippled us in many respects. The overall cost is more than cooking at home, it's less healthy for you to eat at restaurants, fast food in particular has a bigger environmental impact, and to top it all off, these corporations are warping the political landscape with lobbying, never mind what other concerns there might be (much like the oil lobbies).

I find it funny that you claim that "we didn't have millennia of home-cooked tradition built up before the restaurants arrived" as I'm pretty sure the exact opposite is true. So it would appear that as with all victors, restaurants are re-writing history, too.

Take all of these observations and apply them to software, and it fits, perfectly. What's the commonality? It has to do with certain unchecked forms of certain economic engines . . .
The "non-N95 masks don't protect yourself" was what we thought in March; it's no longer what we think after the Starbucks contact tracing and other studies.

Regular masks absolutely provide substantial - admittedly, not perfect, but substantial - personal protection.
That's lazy thinking. There are a whole host of things a care facility can do to mitigate risk with various cost/benefits, but the difference is there is an acute risk at the facility while a distributed risk for anyone outside. It obviously makes sense to implement more protections at the vulnerable location than blanket policies across the board.
SpaceX's Starship SN8 prototype fires engines for 3rd time, encounters problem
Amazing that calling it resilient chicken farming instead of sustainable chicken farming can suddenly make it sound smart and cool while not actually changing anything about the process. People, myself included, are truly idiots, and I mean that in the most loving way.
It's a constant minor annoyance weighed against a fairly rare, hypothetical risk.

People ride motorcycles despite vastly higher death and injury rates than cars, cause it's fun. (I did for awhile and might start doing so again one day.)

I'm not disagreeing with you I don't think? I agree that it's a really stupid thing to not wear a seatbelt. I just think it's important to consider how to solve these problems without throwing up our hands and saying "people are irredeemably stupid" because that doesn't really do much good for anyone.
Part of it is security, part of it is lock-in. Either way, it’s excessive. It contributes to entropy more than security.
Sometimes, the high pay is to offset the terrible nature of the work, not to attract better developers, e.g. having to work on the terrible ad-hoc, micro-managed code of many previous devs.
I find it helpful when writing apology posts to start it by writing down the timeline of events. Don’t insert any commentary attempting to justify anything in this part, it just comes off as defensive. Instead just outline what happened though you can include the immediate cause of decisions you made.

“Because I was worried about how people would react to X I decided to do Y”

Then after that you can write all the stuff that they list in this post.

I think it helps a lot to get the audience into the same situation you where in in their minds before understanding the context of how you actually screwed up.
Yeah, thank god.

Otherwise we'd could have accidentally done something (not much, but something!) to save humanity.

Puh, dodged that bullet!
You've made me wonder if there's some way to arbitrage the billing itself so that neither party needs to pay anything.
I like that.

I'm quite good at apologizing, because I need to do it so often. I get lots of practice.

The American abhorrence for admitting fault and/or apologizing is quite mystifying to me. It's really corrosive.

I've spent 40 years, promptly admitting mistakes, and repairing, where possible.

WFM. YMMV.
The anti Women's right to vote movement, anti Civil Rights movement, anti Gay marriage movement, etc. A vocal minority was stoking fears of the implications of recognizing the rights of the disenfranchised as the imminent breakdown of society, family and law and order. Turns out they were just bigoted.
This seemed counter-intuitive to me, and in particular I recalled a scene in the documentary Food Inc where an organic poultry farmer extolled how much cleaner it was to be processing meat in the open air rather than in an environment mediated by chemical sterilization.

However, it does seem like this is a thing, in particular there was a Swedish study in 2009 that was referenced several times in media coverage and I can find no follow-up or rebuttal to:

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/01/090114200003.h...

And then in 2014, an industry-focused article on how to mitigate some of these effects, in particular rodents:

https://www.thepoultrysite.com/articles/range-management-for...
Same here, I love my bathtub turbine!
I don't think this is evidence for or against that, though.

The wedding attendees used their "personal choice" to attend the wedding and get sick. But we don't know how they transmitted it to people once they left. Were the people they infected taking precautions? Or were they also using "personal choice" not to?
It depends how you want it to be compared. But in the context of leading edge Fab ( as in the Node that is being used by Mobile SoC ) TSMC is ahead in every category, from Capacity, Yield, Resource Planning, And Technical Superiority.

But Samsung wins with pricing, mostly because they have DRAM and NAND as cash flow.
You can find people of any background who will spout contradictory rhetoric. I don't think you're making this argument in good faith. 2016 was a whole lot closer than 2020, and Clinton conceded and there was no serious calculated attempt to overturn the election results by either the public at large, or people who had any power to do so.

Equating that with what's going on now does not seem like an argument made in good faith.
And of course no one bothers to ask what precipitate(d/s) the first steps, what gets the ball rolling down the slippery slope in the first place, because it's unacceptable to ask such questions.

We had better start asking those questions soon if we want to avoid the most tragic trajectories ahead but sadly I don't see that happening anytime soon.
What did the leaders say to their engineers, did they mislead them?
Is there an appetite for something like an instagram/snap, but closed/paid/private? I'm working on something _similar_ for the education, but I also use it for my extended family. Wouldn't be hard to spin up a group if you're interested (unrulr.com). I'm will@ if you want to chat.
Because.... reasons?
I really wish there wasn't this big distinction between using a computer and programming a computer.
To elaborate on aazaa's comment: think of the labels "patriot" and "terrorist" and think of how frequently they correlate with "winner" and "loser".

The Founding Fathers were patriots, because America is now the dominant world superpower. But there are a number of groups that attempted to do to America exactly what America did to the British. Daniel Shay, Tecumseh, Sitting Bull, the entire Confederacy, the Anarchist movement of the early 1900s, the Business Plot of 1933, McCarthy, Vietnamese nationalism, Osama bin Laden. How does history remember them now?
“I weep for how spoiled and entitled our society is, living in the lap of luxury but still complaining,” they say while working from home and admitting that they have not left their house at all for the past half year, not even to feed themselves because a benevolent underclass of coronavirus immune elves delivers paychecks to their bank account and food directly to their door.
I’m not sure why you’re ignoring BLM. They’re the biggest terrorist organization of the last year, organizing riots and orchestrating widespread looting. How can you call the left peaceable after that?
Of course, nothing of value could be in a book with that type of cover! Activists must be right!
There may be a genetic component to Type 2 diabetes but _most_ people who are diagnosed with it are indeed quite overweight and have decades of poor lifestyle choices behind them. If we can help those people understand that diabetes is not always inevitable, even if it's not helpful for a small percentage, then that sounds like a net win for me.
Have you considered using Signal instead of WhatsApp for secure messaging?
I think more remarkably though is that readers kept up the 10% reading rate, in contrast to Biden's 20%, so the total emails read ended up being much higher on Trump's part.