skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm reminded of the story of Windows NT and how David Cutler commented at one point after the release that divorces and nervous breakdowns were tracked in the program metrics. I expect that's hyperbole, but there is a real cost to these death marches.

I couldn't find that specific quote, though, and being 25 years back it could be a false memory of who said it (I did read it somewhere, if you were on the team at the time, please speak up!). Here are a couple of illustrations[0][1].

[0] http://read.pudn.com/downloads196/ebook/923902/ShowStopper!-...

[1] http://www.proudlyserving.com/archives/2007/09/dave_cutler_w...
I agree that it's unfortunate that security and bureaucracy go hand-in-hand. As security becomes more a priority, the annoying overhead grows with it.
However, I think this is just the nature of security. It's a cumbersome task. Think of any organization that security is very important to, especially where it is life and death. Military, government, criminal gangs, VIPs/executives. All have large bureaucracies to maintain and enforce security. I think the adversaries any of these groups face are so persistent and capable that the only answer is bureaucracy. Training the person can only go so far. Individuals alone are too susceptible to minor slips in operational security.
If a small company that isn't targeted by advanced persistent threats has such a bureaucracy, it's overkill.
Not all companies have age discrimination not every developer job is in SV or even a “tech company”.

Also why don’t you move to management? I’m soon to be 35 and I’m taking a director role now primarily because it’s somewhat the natural progression path.

A lot of the experience you gain isn’t purely tech focused and it’s a shame to let that experience go to waste.
I disagree. Having a pool of sysadmins / developers who know how to manage CentOS makes RHEL a more appealing alternative than Debian for many companies. The three companies I've worked at have primary used CentOS for development boxes. Shifting to an alternative will change who is familiar with CentOS / RHEL significantly for the worse.
Yes and no. You need the right marketing to attract the right users to your product.
If I could read a book of these stories I'd stop everything and read it now. Absolutely incredible. I love stories like these, but I also understand these hells are probably reserved for the special world of startups. The interesting takeaway from this for me is the question "Was the rewrite successful?".

As an engineer, I understand I'm a vehicle for success at a startup. Even if I ultimately get burnt out and quit. If I make important changes, that maybe only I could have thought of before I quit, it probably becomes a good investment to hire me.

Uber managed to hire enough of the "right" vehicles for success to get to the point where they shipped a platform rewrite at massive scale. By all high level objective metrics, this is probably success story.

The one metric I think could derail the projects success isn't really documented--what was the human cost to this effort? I bet you looking at a graph of turnover at Uber you could probably identify exactly when this project happened. I'm curious if the engineering turnover from such a massive effort was enough to offset the benefit.
For their users.
Docker Desktop Community 3.0.0
Indeed you probably clicked on it because it seemed unbelievable
> If they don’t there’s no issue.

This doesn’t seem right, like saying if you shoplift and nobody comes after you, then there’s no issue.
You have years of google under your belt. Thats your ticket anywhere. Find a nice regional job at a mid to small company and your golden.
I know PostHog is only lightly mentioned in the article, but I would highly recommend checking them out! [0] (They're also open-source and provide a self-hosted solution. [1])

[0] https://posthog.com/

[1] https://github.com/posthog/posthog
I was a Java programmer

Most Java programmers get enlightened and feel relieved as you did when they switched to language X from Java. Is a recurring theme, not specific to Clojure.
what got me to switch was being able to run terminal commands in a buffer...

https://neovim.io/doc/user/nvim_terminal_emulator.html
> You have to touch two config files.

Not if you just want automatic security updates? The package is part of the server task, and defaults to installing security updates. It does not install other updates, and does not automatically reboot.

> Auto-updating security updates should be the default if you run servers in the wild.

It pretty much is (for Ubuntu server)?
OP said:

> Give Linux users option to play the game, without the anti cheat and only match with similar Linux users.
Interesting read, but what the heck happened to blogs?
> you wouldn't be able to easily move to the UK if it was not for the freedom of movement

Neither you nor I can know this at this point, since I'm already here.

> The only reason you were able to _easily_ immigrate to the UK is because of freedom of movement

This is factually wrong and is at most your personal opinion. There are many reasons why someone can immigrate _easily_. For example the UK is currently recruiting many doctors and nurses and people of those professions will have it significantly _easier_ to move to the UK than others.

> I have numerous friends and people I studied and worked with over the last 12 years in the UK that couldn't stay.

I also have numerous friends and people who I worked with and they could stay. So could my family members who also moved to the UK from a non EU country.

> Every time I discussed with them their visa situation and attempts to stay in the country, I thanked god that where I emigrated from, we've joined the European Union and I don't have to deal with these issues.

This is partly the fault of having no control over EU immigration, forcing richer EU countries to have harsher restriction on non EU countries (this is even more true for other EU countries, the UK is already much friendlier in its immigration laws in comparison to the others in the EU).

> You, as a EU national, can look for a job and work here without a permit, you can reside here without a permit, you can stay here after studies or employment, and from legal point of view, you enjoy equal, non-discriminatory treatment with same rights and access to employment, working conditions, social & health security and tax advantages as UK citizens

Yes, so my EU passport elevates me above other nationalities. Not exactly something to be proud of in my honest opinion. I rather compete on an even playing field, but maybe that's just me.

> No, you cannot have the same and "move to any other country in the world which isn't part of the EU as well, so clearly my freedom has nothing to do with the current 4 "freedoms"."

That's just your personal opinion and if I had a desire to move to another non EU country I'd probably prove you wrong. Where there is a will there is a way. I'm certain that I could find a job, get a work permit and build a life elsewhere and eventually naturalise there if I decide to call it my home.
Less a engineering disaster and more a human one.
Totally infiltrated by the alphabet agencies
If you wrote a browser client in Javascript / Typescript, then it makes sense to write a backend in it as well since it's easy to share code and data between them.

Now you can also write CLI tools that are trivial to deploy and can also share code with everything else.

This is the same motivation behind other languages that do the reverse; compile to JS / WASM.
> And beyond that, the career trajectory for a mediocre IC with no degree is looking... bleak.

I know a number of software developers who are sustaining. They aren't going up the ranks or down the tubes. They are happily sustaining. They do good work and are content.

As we are sold that we always need an upward trajectory... it doesn't work out that way. As you get older you find there is no more up. The purpose of always going up runs out of steam.

> It seems like you either hit the startup equity lotto, or burn out by 40.

Is this a SV or startup mentality?

Most successful startups have an average founders age at founding of like 45. It's not the young in age who are more likely to found successful startups.

If you burn out by 40 it may mean you have an unsustainable lifestyle.
Standard Notes: https://standardnotes.org/
There's certainly a regional crisis that will only probably get worse as climate change reduces snowpack in the Himalayas, the source of most water in India, China, and SEA. The problem with moving is threefold; moving to countries without water scarcity legally is not a realistic option for most Indians, cities are highly sticky, and new cities are incredibly hard to set up and set up well.

In fact, China is already considered to be suffering from water availability issues, and while this still happened with a one-child policy it almost certainly would be worse had Chinese population growth had the same trajectory as India's. (This is not an argument for the general good of one-child policy, and I do not endorse such a thing.)
> What exactly is there to keep salaries from a race to the bottom at this point?

I see so many takes like this, but I'm not yet convinced that this is gonna doom salaries long term. I haven't noticed a difference in the recruiting communication I receive in terms of salary, and my current salary is above average. Companies would be insane to ask current employees to take a pay cut to go remote unless they want people to leave.

As long as companies are focused on hiring the best people they can find, they're going to be motivated to continue supporting market rates.
>For the record I would subscribe to the liberal education viewpoint of college but question why that can't be had for free with the resources of the internet at this point.

How well is remote schooling working during the pandemic? Now imagine that, but with no teachers at all. Teachers are an important part of the education process.
Ehh, no matter how much I dislike Apple and hate everything they stand for, I must stand with them in this particular case (with the information the article gave).

They are suing Apple, yet the only thing Apple did in regards to them was make jailbreaking more difficult?

I don't see a real case here... If anyone has more insight, please do share.
PWAs to finally fulfill the promise of the iPhone for Web Developers?
China's 'vaccine diplomacy': A global charm offensive
There are many reports of households where the first person is infected outside the household, but only in passing, gets a low initial exposure, and develops a mild case. But then the subsequent infected people in the household develop much more severe cases because of higher initial exposure in the household.
I quit programming once. I was 18; lots of distractions. The situation didn't last very long, and had hasn't happened since.

Boilerplate code is conquered through, in the order of least desirable to better:

- manual external code generation

- automated external code generation that repeats itself in each build

- automated internal code generation: macros

You don't want to be manually creating repetitive content with small variations; that's what computers are for.

You can regard boilerplate as challenge: how small can I get the specification of this? And then work on the generator from that specification to the boilerplate. The boilerplate is still boring, but the generator can have fun bits in it.
You probably meant "Debian* comes in two flavors", but as you explained yourself, there are actually three:
* stable (non-rolling)
* testing (rolling)
* unstable (rolling)

What's interesting is that close to a freeze, "testing" is quite stable already, so pinning to its name (so bullseye as of now) allows you to keep this rolling state until it converges to the next stable.
Russians use “yous” or “вы” which is both gender-neutral and a polite pronoun.
At the company I work for we've found it hard to find Clojure devs. Not sure if this applies everywhere else, but it's definitely seen as a disadvantage of the language here.
> > Saying everything is so integrated that it can't possibly be decentralized is basically proof of monopoly.

> This doesn't matter from the standard of antitrust law. What most fail to grasp is that being a monopoly is not illegal. It's only illegal to use monopoly power to harm consumer welfare.

Citation needed? I thought, in the US at least, that the government will go after you if you use your monopoly powers to enter into other markets. For instance Google surfacing its own, other products as the top results in search.
This is a great time to check out Michael Lewis's The Fifth Risk (https://www.amazon.com/Fifth-Risk-Michael-Lewis/dp/132400264...), which does a deep dive into NOAA, the weather service, and the wretched attempts to strangle the usefulness of this public service while keeping it alive enough to act as a massive subsidy to accuweather and related bottom feeders. It should disgust both libertarians and proponents of active government, and really anyone paying attention. Accuweather wants NWS to do all the forecasting work but then funnel all the data through Accu and a few other private hands, who of course want to profit from this data but not pay for it.
> No, because Shopify doesn't compete against its own sellers. The antitrust concern arises solely because Amazon is both the platform and a competitor and it uses its access as the platform provider to acquire data to compete.

One can always make the argument then, that just use Shopify and don't come to Amazon. Amazon can even make the case for Google and FB having sufficiently big audience size for customer acquisition.

Unlike an app which needs to go through AppStore to end up on an iPhone, a product being sold on Amazon doesn't need to go through them for customers to purchase it.

> Yes, they are. They use this data to determine what products (specifically, what SKUs) to re-order from their suppliers.

So does Amazon, but both don't limit themselves to just this use case.
The reality is that some people can just do more per day than others. It's very common in academia that many professors spend their entire lifetime in 60-80hr work weeks their entire life.

I remember going to conferences,especially the really small ones, the professors and students would spend all day listening to extremely draining lectures; this one particular conference started at 8.30 am, went till 1 pm, you get a few hours break, and then it goes till 9 pm.

I'd go back to my room in the noon time to take a nap, and in the evening maybe go to the bar for a small bit to get a drink and go back to the room to get ready for the next day, but the majority of professors would spend most of the midday break meeting each other, and also continue socializing in the bar fairly late into night, and they'll still come back the next day as if this is a regular day.

I had a talk with my professor on how they're doing it and his response was just "you just have to train yourself to do it and get used to it." Probably one of the main reasons why I chose not to continue down that path!
Ask HN: Obsessing over Side Project Metrics
For the past year I've been pushing my side projects harder to make something more formidable out of them in the hopes of someday achieving either financial freedom or freedom to completely rely on them for income.

But for a couple weeks now, I've started feeling down when I'm staring at all the metrics related to my projects. I'd obsessively look at my downloads, conversions, page views and what have you.

Earlier this week I had a revelation. What I was doing was in no way helping my work or the users - it was just bringing me down because I was comparing with all the people who had "made it" already. And feeling anxious about not getting overnight success.

Couple days I decided to stop that. For all those moments I'd rather read a book or play with the kids or listen to the wife. Feeling a bit better already to be honest, and interestingly somehow more... free.

I guess you can set out to find freedom but get trapped in pursuing it.
> Unfortunately, there’s a catch. Ullisch’s solution ... can’t tell you, in a practical sense, how long to make the goat’s leash. Approximations are still required...

Ok, then in what sense is this an exact solution?
If they had stuck with the Swift ban they would certainly be facing a hiring problem today.
Oh you get to control your IOT smart lamps with a command line tool and not a proprietary iOS app with a login gate? Fancy.
Does it have instances of fsck running, or maybe launching daemons? Can't show this stuff to the kiddies.
>instead of focusing on the things that you can realistically learn on your own, focusing on the things that you're probably not going to come across on your own

This is an excellent point. Almost nobody has an idea of the true depth and breadth of most subjects or how to sequence that learning.
As a Software Developer, after working with CEO/CFO/Accountants on Managerial (Cost) Accounting Projects, I started appreciating it as one of the most important areas in the business. Started casually studying it so I can easier understand it in software requirements. If Costing Analysis and especially Overhead are important in your business, classic textbooks by Horngren and/or Garrison are great and also there is an excellent series on Managerial Accounting by prof. Mark Meldrum on youtube
The drivers from Windows Update are absurdly out of date. If you play recent games you'll have serious bugs and performance regressions.
Switched to? I guess I really am old. This is how almost all jobs were labelled before 10 or so years ago. Somehow "Software Engineer" became standard, probably under the influence of the FAANGs, in the last decade.

It's worth pointing out that here in Google Canada we were recently instructed to start referring to ourselves as Software Developers again, as "Engineer" is at least partially a protected term.
This is an extremely delicate issue in any large organization. Skipping one level basically means: "Let's see what important things my report is not telling me". If you are asked for such a meeting, anything you say could be used against your direct manager. You need to know the office politics well before speaking anything that could have even small impact on anything. I saw people freaking out for mentioning minute stuff "behind their backs."

With a small team, it's very different - but usually the hierarchical structure is much more horizontally aligned so this is not much of a problem.
For us, when hiring, we explicitly look for candidates without degrees, or degrees in unrelated fields.. they honestly tend to be better hires. They might not know some formal definitions or some algos off the top of their heads, but we've found they're generally more resourceful, better at thinking outside the box, and better at solving complex problems without being handheld. Not to mention that what someone learned in uni a decade ago is probably not applicable anymore whatsoever (in tech). Experience/projects are a way, way better indicator of a potential hire's quality than their formal education.
Apple was at its nadir at that point so the "How doea an apple engineer change the lightbulb" was "He sticks the bulb in the socket and waits for the world to revolve around him"
They don't span the size of the United States in terms of population spaced out across the country.

Also, while there is "free speech" to a degree, you do not have the freedom in China to criticize the government in the same way you do in the western world. So most non-state media won't say anything bad in regards to how the government has handled the situation for fear of reprisal.
Amazing! Xeno if you are reading this, would happily contribute a small amount of cash monthly for this :)
I'm not sure if that's really yak shaving. Usually it means having to fix thing A to fix thing B.

But in Hals case he simply discovers other problems and gets distracted, e.g. He could still change the bulb before he fixes the shelf.
It says she was employed by the DNC.
If you try to "gaslight" in court you will be subject to penalties.
> The converse of this is that good, wise developers are going to (ultimately) _demand_ Clojure.

HN seems to blindly accept the idea that developers using niche languages are good but I certainly haven't seen any proof of that and I haven't seen anything to even remotely suggest that good developers gravitate towards Clojure.

Great developers have to be working on hard problems and almost all of the hard problems in our industry, outside of language/chip design and correctness proofs, are being worked on in relatively boring languages (C, C++, Java etc.). Most of the niche language users I've met are working on basic CRUD web applications.
> Yesterday we launched Typefully, a write-only interface for Twitter, after weeks of work and refinement. I told the whole story on Twitter @frankdilo.

The idea of a write-only interface is interesting in itself. I was expecting to see something about it on the Typefully page but didn't.
I don’t understand what democrat is being claimed to be compromised, nor the proposed mechanism with which they are being compromised. So far I read: “there was a spy from China who volunteered on some campaigns. The fbi caught on and the politicians cut her off, she moved back to China.”
The people disputing the facts are doing it in bad faith because they want to steal the election. There is not a genuine argument to be made for widespread voter fraud.
In anti-racist circles you'd meet other PoCs who acknowledge the same.
The fact that you need to spend time on “boilerplate crap” just means you’re not good enough to be able to quickly build that boilerplate crap.

This is also a sign of depression. Boilerplate crap is supposed to be easy - what makes you so negative about it?