skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I started to write a whole big thing here because I found this whole thing pretty disgusting but it's not worth it.

> I had privately had the “we need to stop” conversation with my
director. He told me that if this project fails he might as well pack
his bags. The same was true for his boss all the way up to the VP. There
was no way out.

> With only a week left we decided eat the 8 figures and drop support for iOS 8.

I'll say this: If I were an Uber investor I would be pretty angry. And the story
just gets worse from there.

This is a story of gross incompetence. It's not an engineering disaster,
it's a management disaster. This is classic "inmates running the
asylum". ( https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/44098.The_Inmates_Are_Ru... )

This is the story of some hackers who got in good at a big company with
lots of money and sturm und drang so they had no adult supervision
while they partied while pretending to be actual engineers. (That they
were pretending to themselves too doesn't make it any better.)

The writing was on the wall, but rather than own up and take
responsibility they double down and keep messing things up for months
and years.

> This is when the real brilliant engineers started to shine.

This is when they get pulled from other tasks to clean up your mess!
(cf. Broken window fallacy.) Those real brilliant engineers should be
doing other better things than dark rituals to appease the Swift compiler
gods.

Look, we all make mistakes. There's a blog post from an engineer at a
company I used to work for complaining about the pointless middleware I
wrote years earlier. (I feel ya bro, I told them at the time that it was
pointless.) Here's the thing: I got out of that place when I realized
that the folks running it weren't really competent. (And, sure enough,
they got pushed out by the investors and now the company is a "Wallstreet
darling". So... Yay?)

I've burned enough investor money in my career that I don't think it's
funny anymore. (I never really did think it was funny, I don't like
waste, but I was young. REDACTED was only my second official job, and in
hindsight it was really crazy. I mean, they built a skating half-pipe in
the office! At the time, everybody thought that was real cool.)
CentOS Stream is effectively a rolling beta of minor releases of RHEL.

So, not a beta for RHEL 8->9->etc, but a beta for 8.1->8.2->8.3.
The difference is that Apple, and Microsoft for that matter, don't give a shit about knowing who I am. They may want data here and there (moreso microsoft), but if you want to give them a fake email address and a fake name, you can march ahead with your device just fine.

Facebook wants to stick it's eyeball tendrils up my butt before they deign to allow me to use hardware I purchased from them.
Indeed! We like to think of light as photons, traveling in rays in straight lines. That's geometric optics and works great for most purposes in photography.

Physical optics takes into account the wave nature of light. This becomes important when the size of the lens becomes small (eg pinholes) ... there's diffraction around edges and pixels receive contributions from many points in space.

Geometric optics lets you model using ray-tracing, reflections, and Snell's law refraction.

Physical optics uses tools such as Fourier transforms, convolutions, and sinc functions.

Understanding a simple lens system? Geometric optics is your friend. Building an astronomical telescope? Check into physical optics.
The biggest disaster about this story is having to read it 2 lines at a time.

Too broken up, didn't read.
I think that used to be the case, but I recently got an Android TV (I know it's not _exactly_ the same thing) and had no option but to log in.

Of course, creating a new account for just one device was a pain too, as Google required some verification steps which included an SMS message.
This is a good point, but it's important to be clear about it. There is no universally superior language. There are a number of competing factors which means that optimizing for one sacrifices others. So instead of a single point in space that maximizes all of them, there is instead a volume bounded by a curve and going farther in one direction requires lower values on other axes.

But, there is a lot of space nowhere near that trade-off optimizing boundary. You can absolutely make languages worse in ways that are strictly negative for all users. For historical reasons, all languages contain some amount of that dead weight. So the absense of a perfect language does not imply that all existing languages are right at the edge of the optimizing boundary.
RHN is dead as a doornail, for the record. Replaced by RH Subscription Manager
Opportunity for Cloudflare or some other CDN?
> The converse of this is that good, wise developers are going to (ultimately) _demand_ Clojure.

Maybe the really wise developer is aware that not everyone thinks the same, even themselves now vs six months from now, and is very wary of dynamic behavior and cleverness...

I don't want Java or Clojure in a team environment, now that I've got Kotlin.

Or maybe I'm just not wise enough. ;)
That site breaks the "back" button for me pretty badly. Small complaint, though - I really love the new UI.
Well yes but you're still going to need a sensor as large as the aperture of the lens you want to simulate, which makes it a non-starter for phones.
In Brazil this is a GREAT reason to NOT use it.

In fact phone operators for a while tried to ban whatsapp here, SMS prices in Brazil are just nuts (it is normal for an SMS cost fifty cents or so, sometimes even more, a full SMS conversation can cost you several days worth of food).

Everyone here just uses whatsapp, because of how ridiculous SMS prices are.
Compassion is the reverse of what you're thinking. If you make bombs in modern day you're a murderer. We have no active world war, no real threat to our borders, and any basic level of research shows those bombs are used for proxy wars over resources and land in foreign continents. If youre in a position to design bombs you're in a position to work anywhere else too. No excuses for behavior.
No, historically OS's haven't been linked to hardware like iOS is. Imagine if every time you got a new webcam, you had to buy a new version of Windows. XP was supported for 12 years, iOS 12 was officially discontinued after 1 year. You're talking about orders of magnitude difference in time.
I doubt they'll manage to win, but the fact that Cydia predates the official App Store looks pretty core to the complaint.
No, you can't (in that timeframe).
Rel8 Design
The site is really nice - Would be great if you could get rid of that horizontal scrollbar
Working for Google and Facebook is often a choice, with a highly desirable outcome. People rarely become engineers at Facebook because they just couldn't find a job at a different company.

Those engineers could decide to build similar tools at a company that does not aid, you know, genocide. Those engineers could also decide to not continue working for a company that normalizes mass surveillance.

When you decide to work on your awesome things at companies like Facebook and Google, you are propping up megacorps that harm society, and that's your choice.

Regarding compassion, I'm looking forward to the next mass walkout of Facebook engineers, condemning the spread of hate and violence that their employee enables.
Talk to your manager about that meta problem. It may be awkward but you should push them to become a more effective manager, which they can do by pushing on their manager and skips.
Product tying was one of the reasons for the Microsoft anti-trust trial in the 90’s.

Iirc you can obtain a monopoly in one product legally by out-competing your competition, but you can’t obtain another monopoly in another product by tying the second product to the legal monopoly product.

MS built Internet Explorer into Windows to remove users’ need for a third-party browser like Netscape. And they did some contractual tying of Office to Windows too iirc.

https://www.justice.gov/atr/us-v-microsoft-courts-findings-f...

So it should be no surprise that DoJ may have problems with attempts to tie Occulus to Facebook’s legal monopoly product.
PyTorch 1.7.1 Release: binaries for Python 3.9 and cuDNN 8.0.5
First it’s 50% of cellphones not computers, but secondly as an iPhone customer I have never paid Apple for any app, but I have still paid for apps so that’s clearly false.

Apple forces companies to give them a cut of in App purchases, but Kindle and Netflix show you can sell to iPhone customers without that.
I'll share something with you.

The level of consideration you have for people who are no more than 1% of the population is admirable. Very admirable, in comparison with the actual large problems that I'm sure you pay 0% attention to each day, and do make assumptions about. So very admirable that you go out of your way to bring this to the level of everyone having to select a pronoun in their dropdown menu because you feel morally superior for doing this.

Extremely useful. I'm sure you live among people who are 50% transgendered and cannot tell the difference between an man and woman with every person you come across.

Is it any wonder that most of the country feels you and such people are out of touch with the needs of the world, and vote in a backlash against you?
Apps are the worst. Not everything should be an app.

There's no reason web couldn't continue to be a powerful app platform with full device API access. Rust+WASM+device APIs and you could have Google Maps and Netflix be "native" web apps.

Apps were just an excuse for Jobs to own the iPhone platform. It's why they killed Flash - they didn't want a cross-platform way to develop apps and marginalize their plans.
There's a set of 3 free courses on secure software development fundamentals developed by the Linux Foundation Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF). Just go here:
https://www.edx.org/professional-certificate/linuxfoundation...

For a fee you can also take tests to earn certificates.

Full disclosure: I developed these courses (with lots of gratefully-accepted feedback). But I hope you'll like them anyway :-).
More like

Fedora -----------------------------------------------------> CentOS Stream --> RHEL

CentOS Stream is at most a couple of months ahead of RHEL, not true for Fedora.
The UK was very for Turkey joining the EU and a major backer of that, but now Erdoganisation has put that beyond the pale. Similarly so for eastern europe it has been pushed about as far as it can go, so I think you're right. Unless neighbouring countries (Ukraine, Turkey etc) really massively up their game the EU is not expanding again for a while. The most likely new member state would be if Scotland became independent!
Deliveroo Down Internationally
Just as one example, Nubank did not hire 600 Clojure developers. They hired 600 developers who learned Clojure.
You're mudding the waters and missing the point.

If you're on Hacker News, I assume you work in IT. Of course you can find a job in any part of the world. You have one of the most desired and in demand professions in the world. No one argues about that.

But being in privileged position like yours and saying 4 freedoms don't benefit _regular people_?!

No one cares if you personally are proud or not that EU nationals have equal rights, but these equal rights exist, regardless of what you think or feel, because it's a fact and a law which along with other 3 freedoms have been playing huge role in shaping the European Union. And it benefits everyone of almost 500 million EU nationals today, including whoever you mean by _regular people_.

This discussion is about you saying "None of the 4 freedoms of the EU is actually beneficial to regular people".

Saying that, you either:

1) Don't know what you're talking about

2) Or you're delusional

I will assume you're not delusional, but a logical person, since you're on Hacker News and you can understand rational argument.

So please, research what free movement of goods, capital, services and labour actually means and has done for everyone in Europe, including _regular people_. Saying they're not beneficial is nonsense, and means you haven't done your homework.
> What exactly is there to keep salaries from a race to the bottom at this point?

Nothing. Based on numbers I've seen, there are probably a lot of companies out there where I'd take 75% of what their devs are making today if it means I can be permanently remote. Probably 50% if I could move freely internationally. Now multiply that by how many people are eligible once you expand your hiring range from driving distance to national/international.
Combinators – Inverting Top-Down Transforms
This is not an easy thing to shake off.

You may find that something simple and really only for yourself -- something where the comparison to others comes up, but doesn't matter so much -- could really help. I've found a surprising amount of amusement in adding Velcro patches to my backpacks, making watchbands with Hypalon and stuff like that.
Possibly because of some commercial proprietary software support. Typically they support RH, now sometimes Ubuntu LTS (trending up). Vary rarely Debian, unfortunately.
Books on Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency in for Beginners, Enthusiasts and Developers
>> It is with great sadness and regret that we announce that our beloved asciiart post processing shader has been removed from Dolphin.

I didn't know the dolphin project had this sense of humor. Here is a sample of what this silly feature enabled you to do: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eCXRQ1WwHlc
"Not sure why Axios feels the need to try and pin the whole thing on the Midwest."

How are they doing that exactly?
Finding Critical Open Source Projects
Show HN: Simple way to access various statistics in Git repository
Uber also has a habit of solving problems by hiring a manager externally and building a brand new team of all new hires for them.

There's some upsides to that, but basically even though you're a W-2 employee, you're effectively a consultant in that arrangement. Your job is not secure.
China national here.

BioNTech's vaccine is already bought and to be manufactured in China [0]. Implying it's China behind this incident is a little too late, don't you think?

[0]: https://www.fiercebiotech.com/biotech/fosun-follows-biontech...
I'd like to see an ms graph api version of this. A proper rest json api for mail, contacts and calendar is long overdue.

JMAP never took off. Maybe, if projects would copy the odata based graph api that ms documented we could collectively move there...
I think the real underlying principle behind the United States is that the US says one thing and does another. Believing that the US has principles, etc. instead of just realpolitik in 2020 is naive. You have access to the all the information in the world.
What a hypocrite -- feel free to let people be who they are, as long as I can force you to call them a word I want.
I’m always suspicious of articles like these that keep bringing up one company that fits their criteria. That tells me the criteria was constructed around a specific offering, not the other way around.
It's not about the money, it's about not being able to leave an IMAP connection open on IDLE or change the push server for your IRC app or run guile/gcc/vim/git locally at a usable speed.
The set of people who make decisions like this has no intersection with the set of people who hang out on IRC.
Is this where RIBs came from? My company adopted that and ran into smaller versions of all the same problems. We moved on to something leaner after a couple of months. Lots of interesting ideas in RIBs though.
The DigitalOcean App Platform Hackathon on Dev
Please don't be a jerk on HN, especially in response to someone else's misfortune, even if they brought it on themselves. Maybe you don't need to treat these people better (though why not?) but you owe the community better if you're posting here. If you wouldn't mind reviewing the site guidelines and taking the intended spirit to heart, we'd be grateful. Note these ones: "Be kind" and "Please don't sneer"

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

p.s. I skimmed through your recent commenting history and it looks great—just the kind of thing we want here. Sharing some of what you know is exactly what we want users to do. But please don't be supercilious about it, as in this comment and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25372847. Ignorance doesn't deserve humiliation, and that ingredient poisons the ecosystem (and eventually starts a degrading spiral, e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25373520). The rest is good.
Life imitates code
On my bucket list is using the "Referer" header to aggressively redirect traffic from hug-of-death websites toward cached pages.

It's been a long time since I've worked somewhere that would benefit from that trick, so I haven't had a chance to use it.
Up and coming :D
Reporting back: It was fine, no better or worse than ordering from anywhere downtown but probably 20% more expensive.
Federal Legislation to prohibit paying ransom for crypto-ransomware attacks?
Crypto Ransomware seems to be a growing problem. I believe it should be a federal crime with a fine of $1 Million USD (or equivalent) for paying the criminals. I think there should be a court to make exceptions.

What are your thoughts?
"I can't be banned by my power company or my water company"

Los Angeles is breaking new boundaries in this arena!
That's awesome. I applaud anyone who sticks with a project for that long.

I've got a similar side project that makes some money, but isn't profitable yet. I'm in the "almost given up" point, considering shutting it down, but would be letting people down and frankly, letting myself down.

Props to you for sticking with it and it sounds like it's been worth it!
It was a hilarious episode.

I think a difference might be that these are super rural and uneducated communities as opposed to global capitals of business and technology
I am sick and tired of everyone saying African countries are resisting better on paper because they can't test.

During the Ebola, AIDS, Yellow Fever crises/épidémies we did not have the means either... But we could count the bodies.

Eg: Gabon is a small country with a pop just under 2M. The capital is 60%+ of that. There are 2 morgues there. All are seeing a bump in deaths, but no unprecedented activity.

Something is really happening. There must be a reason why sub-Saharan countries are relatively ok, but everyone is only saying: it's because of poor data.

(rant)
HN feels like the_donald sometimes. Incredible that such a high number of interesting & intelligent people can stop thinking altogether.
(/rant)
Outside of the US, many (perhaps most) educated and politically-aware Westerners do look down on people involved in the Military-Industrial Complex.

Nobody civilized wants to "go after" them of course, but make no mistake - it's not something you'd want to brag about while overseas if you're trying to make friends.

This is true even in friendly places like Europe, Canada or Japan. Make of that what you will.
lol, nice
> First it’s cellphone not computer

Then I'll kindly ask you stop using it for GPS navigation, email, browsing the web, banking, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, dating, calculating, and ordering food. :)

And if you write any code at all that you run on it, just get outta here. :P

> I have never paid for any app

All your money goes to Apple and you leave everyone else out high and dry? I'm not judging you, but you have to see how that's not good for non-Apple employees.
And the same could be said for the electrical grid, the post services, roads, etc. I agree that infrastructure and monopoly are two very distict concepts.
FDA Finally Approves an Over-the-Counter Covid-19 Test Kit
My guess is that "sufficiently standardized" has to come from browser-makers. If what my browser reveals (at the default settings) is that I'm using Safari 13, and little more, then it could actually be low-information.
A few things:

* Non intrusive: meaning one can snoop info of application without changing application code.

* Deep visibility: function level and syscall/kernel functions reveal more context and are more accurate in a lot of cases.

* Low overhead: everything runs inside kernel space, no context switching compared to other kernel based/aided tracing.

* Expressiveness: eBPF is fairly expressive, can do many things that usually are exclusive to high level programming languages.
interesting. Is that browser-specific maybe? (something to do with how the html is parsed)
> There’s a video somewhere in one of our talks of an Uber engineer typing a single line statement in Xcode and then waiting 45 seconds for the letter to appear in the editor slowly, one-by-one.

I'm not sure if you are familiar with Xcode, but this indicates an off-the-charts LOC count. Something isn't adding up -- the user-visible features and screens in the app don't necessitate a codebase this large.

My guess would be the intersection of several compounding factors:

- a product team endlessly pushing special-case features which aren't core to the user experience (the twitter thread talks about the rate of new code being added as if it were a foregone conclusion the app would continue to grow without bound),

- an A/B testing framework which leads to the deployed codesize being much larger than what the typical user actually interacts with (worse if they are lax about culling the vestigial A's and B's),

- and reaching a "thermal runaway" point of too many devs x too many lines of code, where code reuse stops happening. Once you reach the point where it takes less time for a dev to write a given feature in a from-scratch fashion rather than doing some codebase archaeology to find existing code structures which can be reused, you've reached thermal runaway. The Facebook iOS app revelation of "18,000 classes" indicates they were likely suffering from this as well https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10066338

Was Swift up to the task? Perhaps not. But does a ride-hailing app really necessitate this level of codebase complexity? Uber's iOS app is now over 300MB...
I found the best way to learn Clojure was to play around with Clojurescript. I have an allergy against javascript, so being able to write front end code in Clojurescript was a dream. There are a few differences, mostly due to the fact that your code is single threaded, but otherwise, what you learn will be applicable to later using with Clojure. I have to say I envy you, already knowing Java, as the hardest part of learning Clojure(script) has been interopt with the host language.
Given how quickly the virus spreads, given that China stopped all of its lockdowns in May, and given the nature of exponential growth, if China were lying about its numbers, by this point, they would have tens or hundreds of millions of cases.

If that were the case, your Chinese coworker with family back home would have known about their entire extended family getting sick.

... Yet, their extended family is not sick, and life in China goes on as normal.

What is the most plausible explanation for this?

PS. China's self-reported IFR was ~6%. If they are making up all the numbers, do you think they might have fabricated a lower number?
Amazon and Netflix are getting my money without that Apple tax. It’s already a completely viable option for both specific purchases and ongoing subscriptions.
anyone else think it's ridiculous that this is in a giant tweet thread? :\
It's the developer equivalent of "support the troops or get out of the way!"

Don't ask why, just do or die.

But yeah, I would have been pissed off if I was put in this situation by myopic upper management.
I don't know. It's a good question. But the quantity-over-quality thing that's here now is problematic.
tipping is an archaic practice and should be outlawed. Even in california where servers receive minimum wage, we're still tipping to have someone bring me my food. I can't wait until robots take over.