skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I was pretty ready to upvote this, but then I scored 9/10, (the one I got wrong had Chinese/Mandarin writing on - another I got right kind of looked like a school but said HMP, I'm British, I know that's Her Majesty's Prison, so 'swings and roundabouts').
It's a good bit of rhetorical slight of hand. Anything that existed in any form prior to the date isn't new (even if it was only in an experimental, near-unusable form). Anything that exists today but hasn't yet had much impact on the world is a toy.

The only things that remain are those few which appeared seemingly out of nowhere and rose to prominence over a short period of time.
I bought them yesterday and today after reading the headline I check and yes indeed there some moisture when I remove the earcups. But far fewer drops than on the photo, my room is at 19-20° and I haven’t used them outside at all.
So there might be some cases where the moisture accumulate more with humidity ...
I have no idea, but the top tier companies pay more than FAANG where I am now.
They should get absolutely nothing at all until after payment, what the fuck.

eBay practically permanently bans everyone involved if you dare take conversation offsite on normal items.
This is precisely why I do not use these services.

When I go get the food, I know what happened from pickup to plate. Given how health care works right now, I definitely want to know about all that.

This is going to happen too. Someone will push it, mistake made, lax process, something.
This test biased toward the western building culture of school and prison. As a Japanese, I'm clueless on most buildings save for one image that was of Japanese high school and it literally says high school in Japanese.
> 6. Whether it’s OK to go to that thing or not

This part really resonated. What a weird year it's been. Finding the right balance between having a social life and being safe + conscientious has proven to be exhausting and depressing.

My wife and I have chosen to be super safe and turn down almost all social engagements, even ones with close family who promised to wear masks and social distance. If it wasn't a life or death thing, we felt the "right" thing to do was to host the even on Zoom, or not at all.

That decision never came lightly though and missing events with friends and family always weighed on us heavily. We'd never know if we were doing the right thing or if we were being too cautious. Especially when, on Facebook or Instagram, we would see close friends without masks hanging out and partying, while we sequestered ourselves from the rest of the world.

It's hard not to have emotions in a situation like that. At times I have felt frustrated, angry, tired, etc. Everyone has a different perspective on this whole thing, a different feeling of risk, and a difference decision about how to behave during it all. I long for the day when we can be human again without having to pass every social decision through some matrix of risk calculation.
I like her. Last time I taught HS I told my students that I would never deny them the right to go to the bathroom, but that if they went more than three times in a week (or something) I would send a note to the nurse so she could discuss a possible health issue with them and their parents.
This could be called the activist’s syllogism too.

I’m tired of how folks take “I don’t think X will actually help fix Y” as “I don’t think Y needs fixing.” This is a thing, so we must do it. If you disagree, you’re immoral.
Interesting. I've thought about why journalism in general today never links to anything, sources or even mentions any competing media of any kind.

Often you think why don't they just mention the book, the theory, the article.

A pretty sad state of affairs and against everything that makes the "web" great.
How do you feel about NetSurf? I still prefer Dillo, but NetSurf looks promising.
At the least, one can work the problem to a resturaunt. Not always possible, due to how these things can go, but more possible than when other parties are involved.
Ada is an example of this that everyone likes to ignore.
I completely disagree.

Disclaimer: I work at a megacorp, but as someone with 25 years in companies of a variety of sizes, I think I have some perspective.

Early in my career I worked as an IC at a non-profit, a small tech company, a startup (that went from 15 to 200 to 75), and some other medium/large tech companies. I'm currently a senior engineering director at a FAANG.

If I had a time machine and could do it all over again, I'd absolutely start by joining a FAANG. I'm actually a bit jealous when I compare the T3/T4 experience to what was available to me. They're able to learn from & work with some of the best in the industry. Their ability to advance is based largely only on themselves. Sure, I had a lot of autonomy but it's also a lot like learning the piano without a teacher. You make so many mistakes that you don't know you're making.

Likewise the tech-stack is pretty good. Not perfect (by any measure) but heads & shoulders better than what you'll find at most places.

And the variety of problems is hard to beat. Work at a company that does X, your only choice are going to be problems relating to X. Get tired of working on something at megatech? Transfer. If you're good, teams will be thrilled to have you. A lot of your knowledge will carry over, and so too, your reputation.

Now do megacorps care about you? Well, as much as any company will. To be honest, I don't think any company really will "care" about you (at least in how I care about family) and I think it's disingenuous for the author to pretend otherwise.

Both megacorps & smaller companies do care about you in a sense of wanting you to do well. But if push comes to shove, both will lay you off if financially they're forced to. I learned the hard way at the startup. Not because I was laid off, but because I had to make the list of people to layoff in my group. It really, really sucked as we felt like a family. I really admire that the CTO saw I was struggling and talked with me at length about it. I learned as a manager at any company you have to be willing to do these things for the good of everyone overall, and the best you can do is be fair about the decisions and be humane to those let go. Is that caring? My family would never do that. And if that's caring, that's exactly the same mindset I see in megacorps.

Obviously megacorps aren't perfect, but if you apply the same standard to them & whatever other option, I think they stack up pretty well.
Look at the Stellar Lumens Cryptocurrency.
I haven't been in this kind of situation, but I'm curious if the HR's goal is to help the company, not individuals, how is protecting abusers and ignoring negative workplace dynamics helping the company?
>> If an engineer in 1996 fell into a coma and woke up today, they'd be greeted with an entirely different world.

i was little and didn't know shit, but i was already learning to program, and i think about this all the time. like mind blown, every day. 8 threads and 2GB of ram in my cheap ass phone? crazy! and we got so good at writing compilers they give them away for free!

JS was way slow because MSIE wasn't supposed to compete with desktop apps :p also, transpilation, JIT, virtualization and containers seem like a pretty big deal to me -- virtualization was academic in the 90's.

also, a lot of that "old" stuff like python and ruby and even C++ really weren't as mature and feature-full. memory safety/auto-management and concurrency language features are prevalent now, and i think people don't always appreciate (or remember?) when your computer couldn't walk and chew gum at the same time.

it seems to me like our tools have clearly improved -- i think a more useful conversation could investigate how to apply what we now have to improving productivity, safety and security.
In 1917 they were in ruins.

in 1940 they went toe to toe with the worlds greatest industrial super power (or second greatest - depending how you count) in war and won.

The economic development achieved by the Soviet Union in the first half of its reign was incredible.

They made the best rockets, fighter planes, super computers.... But they never made a TV with a remote control.
And the signal drop issues with the iPhone 12
There's a button you can press that recenters it. Down on DPad maybe? It's been a while since I played.
Don’t even get me started on conferences, there are a centerpiece of the controversy. I never got into the conference groove because I always had to pay my own way and never wanted to turn down an opportunity to bill some hours.
The leaders of the free world sat around a secret table...

https://youtu.be/azEvfD4C6ow

(I know this comment is not exactly in the mood of HN, but this is the one thing I never fail to think of when someone mentions the Bagger family of murderous machines!)
That's an understandable reaction if you just look at the raw USD value, but that's very far from the full picture. They are not pitiful when you start adding the costs for housing, healthcare, transportation and the rest of the things that you need to live. Compared to the huge wage increase, the increase in living standard is very minor (and in some regards worse, e.g. the amount of time you lose daily to the car centric infrastructure).

The number and quality of available jobs in the SV region was a much bigger factor to everyone I've spoken to that moved from the EU.
The idea that homeschooling is devoid of social contact is a bit naive I think. Of course different parents have different styles - it is entirely possible to close off your child from social contact. But most homeschoolers I know have their kids doing all kinds of things throughout the day. Sports, group lessons in topics where the parent's knowledge is lacking, and overall more free time to visit friends' houses and do things that are actually interesting. The real trade off of homeschooling is with respect to the effort required by the parents.
Yes, meal times for kids in school are also poorly structured, often dictated by over-crowded facilities that can't hold enough people to let everyone eat at a normal lunch time. My kids' school starts at 8:50 am, but one of them has lunch 11:00 a.m. with 4 hours afterwards during which they can't eat. We let him bring a snack and tell him to let his teacher know his parents gave him permission to eat, and they should contact us if there's a problem. Though last year he also had a teacher who recognized the problem and had an unofficial "snack time". Plenty of teachers are not arbitrary & capricious in their rule making.
You might be interested in this early work to build a Sinatra echo server [0] with Artichoke (called ferrocarril back then). `hubris` used a custom Rack-compatible web server called `nemesis` [1] based on Rocket [2], a Rust Flask-like web framework.

[0]: https://github.com/artichoke/artichoke/tree/97ba69d31154be45...

[1]: https://github.com/artichoke/artichoke/tree/97ba69d31154be45...

[2]: https://rocket.rs/
I mean, if you'd like to put it in perspective, try developing for IE6. You don't even have a dev console.

I had a recent revelation when watching a video someone posted of a Symbolics Lisp machine, and its legendary dev environment. That being - it's basically just a modern browser devtools, but for the whole OS. Turtles all the way down.

But somehow, despite having the bird in our hand, we as an industry lost them, and regressed to having vastly-inferior tools to those Symbolics devtools, and only gradually rebuilt them over the course of multiple decades.

-------

As a harsh rebuttal to the OP article; I think the number one thing that's "whooshing" over that guy's head is that if someone develops a proof-of-concept for something, it doesn't invalidate the far-more-significant trick of making it widespread. Often it's the latter that's far more difficult, because it requires eliminating compromises that weren't acceptable to people before.

The strange thing about the software industry these days is that quite a few "truisms" about software development have been completely invalidated. Ironclad laws of how the world works have slowly been rendered completely false, and it's happened not through some sudden eureka development but through some slow, sneaky, iterative improvement. The same sort of thing i.e. that made solar cheaper than coal, or made SSDs cheaper than HDDs (I don't know if we've actually crossed that line yet, but it seems pretty inevitable that once the investment impetus behind HDDs collapses, we'll eventually get there). Flatscreens versus CRTs was another great example.
Floor tiling

Did it in during the lockdown. Self-thought, tutorials on the web and some tips from people. Got stressed for a moment, but then it gets quite easy. Would not do it myself if it wasn't for the lockdown.
Not sure how far off this is, practically speaking, but "true parallelism with no GIL" would be a pretty damn significant perf achievement.
I basically mirror Thomson's opinion but there is are other frames on the thinking. Eg, as paying someone to demonstrate a deep understanding of a topic and articulate the uncertainties. That is different from traditional research because they aren't being asked to do anything exactly new. But in practice that is what I think the better researchers actually do.

Maybe there is a clue in the name "re-search". Epistemologically I don't think it is possible to set out to discover something that isn't already known to exist, so the justification for paying people would best be for evidence that they were searching rather than if they find something.
If you pick 1994/1995 as the cutoff, you then have Java, JavaScript and Ruby in the latter group. So I'm calling bullshit on an argument framed around one the biggest years in software language advancement.

Not to mention ignoring PHP, C# and the the whole .Net framework.
In the UK in sixth form (the two years prior to university) - speaking from my own experience only of course - we would generally come and go as at university, the only difference being that the teacher might question it, (in contrast to lecturers never caring, at least not in a disciplinary or educational sense) in which case 'just going to the loo/getting a coffee miss' was fine. That's about as in between as I can imagine.
Personally, I don't really choose to spend my time going over checklists to look for reasons why I don't deserve any of the success that I have. Although, I definately emphasize with the plight of obese feministas who cannot find clothes as easily as non-obese people... Or those who are fat because they cannot afford a gym membership... actually wait a second, no I don't.
You deserve a lot of praise for your engine! And the reverse engineering leading to full patch compatibility is one of the real gems about Dexed. And therefore it becoming arguably the unofficial official editor and librarian software for the DX7.

I hope you got some satisfaction out of the fact that 2020 seemed to be a real renaissance year for Dexed. It’s been at or near the top of every list of free plugins I’ve seen or watched, so your work from a long time ago keeps bearing lots of musical fruit!

Thanks for making it and giving it to the world!
Why does that matter? You said the employer shouldn’t care what the employee does with their money. In that case, so too the employee shouldn’t care what the employer does with its money. Under that logic all that matters is the market clearing rate—-not savings or extra costs for either the employee or employer.
Dang was super cool and explained this to me as well when I emailed about this post being flagged.

It sort of supports my core concern when I see the use of flagging to suppress discussion, even when the subject is clearly on topic and doesn't violate any guidelines.

As evidenced by the fairly vibrant discussion here, it seems like far from a resolved issue.

Suppressing the post and removing other people's ability to contribute ideas, especially new users, seems like an abuse of the flagging system.

Many worthy discussions have been "rehashed" since the beginning of time. Does this mean we should suppress these conversations? Because we may be bored with it?
Show HN: Build your own programming language
Corruption charges is how you take down dissidents in China
Looks great. That being said, a lot of the open-source Flash runtimes I've seen have been left to rot. I'm hoping this doesn't go down the same path, because it's a very good idea.
The experience can vary wildly at those companies, sometimes while still holding the same role. I’ve seen people shifted from amazing transformative mentoring managers to gaslighting managers that counted lines of code as a key metric in performance reviews right before directly claiming they didn’t in team meetings.
Like many virtuous science applications, curing disease, fighting child abuse, feeding the hungry, unless we start seeing either profitable business models around it or charitably funded research organizations that actually pay competitive salaries to attract and retain talent, this is all just aggrandizing. It’s usually pet projects of certain gurus or career researchers with extreme personalities and penchant for drumming up funding hype.

When the science is real and we’re talking about professional, legitimate deployment of a medically revolutionary technology, it won’t show up as fractious riff-raff biotech startups built on the back of post-docs and super cheap labor hoodwinked by idealism. Rather it will be companies or non-profits that actually pay high compensation to get results.
Not a lot of support for his sentiments here it seems, but to understand where he's coming from you probably need to see the research he has been doing, largely aimed at entirely different modes of programming -- visualizing boolean logic trees and all kinds of other stuff, aimed at making programming more accessible and concrete to regular people.

You know in the movies where they have the futuristic user interfaces? Well we've been able to put graphics on the screen for decades, but "real" enterprise programming is still mostly pounding keys into text files and fussing over semicolons and curly braces. Visual interfaces are considered toys that "real" programmers don't need.

And yet there's a chasm of capability between programmers and users, and it's actually true that what programmers do isn't something most "normal people" will ever be capable of. But is that because programmers have some wildly special form of intelligence that most people don't have, or is it because our tools suck?

The divide between users and developers is as accepted and entrenched as it is archaic, not to mention a huge innovation and creativity bottleneck for the species, and by my estimation an embarrassing failure to innovate for our industry. Jonathan has been pushing back for decades. He's not grumpy or cynical, he's a relic from a time when the future of programming and "what programming even looks like" was still a wildly open question.

I wish more people thought like him.
No -- common law ascribes different responsibilities to a school during the school day, in comparison to before arriving or after leaving for the day.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_loco_parentis

The logic isn't "kids might die in a crash", it is that "schools are responsible for what happens to kids during the school day". The school administration isn't trying to be altruistic, they're trying to avoid liability for a death.
The article does seem to take a rather narrow viewpoint. I'd love to see a year in review from D&Q [1] or another independent publisher.

[1] https://drawnandquarterly.com
Raiders of the Lost Steel
Why would you do that? That doesn't seem very trusting of your students. People need to go to the bathroom several times a day, there's no reason to think that needing to go to the bathroom in your class is an indication of a health issue.
I don't know about how things usually are because my kids aren't in HS yet, but I do know that their school district, during distance learning, has a blanket policy that parents are not allowed to record the teaching sessions. So I wouldn't be too surprised if voice recorders aren't allowed in many schools as well.
I agree, but i also find it quite weird that the "seasonal angle" has been almost non existent, so why are people surprised?

Most regions of the world have been following the regular flu intensity almost to a T. Especially in northern Europe after a summer with almost open societies and no grave surges.

With this in mind we will peak when regular flu used to peak, ie. we are only now at the very start of some very bad months (for the latitudes with winter now).

Also while this new variant may be the culprit, the regular flu probably also mutates in a similar pattern - though it could be that this variant is a heavy factor, but for me we are still pretty much following the seasons.
That's surprisingly reasonable. Thanks for the thoughtful answer.
Maybe it's just a poor turn of phrase, but when someone talks about "shouting" across the table to get some minor issue fixed, that isn't the kind of place where good coding happens.

With regards to your previous comment, I already said above

> "The only sort of issues where it's appropriate to drop what you are doing and immediately fix it are the most severe issues which need to be fixed right now...."

—and—

> "In general, if documenting an issue (of any sort) is more work than resolving the issue, you shouldn't bother documenting it."

If you are a developer and your workplace is filled with interruptions because people lack credentials or things are poorly documented, then your productivity is going to be terrible.
Ask HN: How to Transition from PhD to Industry?
I'm a PhD student working in a machine learning related field (not doing ML research, but using ML to do research). My research topic is interesting and I have a good advisor, but I have conerns about transitioning away from academia once I finish (I don't want to continue doing academic research).

My current plan is to either apply for software jobs once I graduate, or start a company related to my thesis. My main concern is that be spending too much time outside industry I'll lose the skills necessary to be competitive, or be viewed as such, and only be a good fit for research lab jobs.

If you have made this transition what was your experience? Either going to a job in industry or starting a company. Looking back would you have done anything differently?
Like, why is there an entire section about why not being fat is a privilege while being fat is inherently a 1st world problem
In the US, jury duty can have issues with bathroom rights also. In many places everything must stop when any juror is out of the room.
Thank you very much for writing this extremely insightful post.
I think it is totally reasonable to not be cool calm and collected during a pandemic. It was an incredibly stressfull experience which means it is excusable to be not collected anyway. I would argue that it is also okay to not be happy during the pandemic because your emotions are a useful barometer for the state of your world. If your world is dangerous, then it is reasonable to be stressed and under a higher alert status than normal. It seems unreasonable to maintain coolness and calm when the situation calls for further action.