skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In 2020 I managed to leave my megacorp job for a smaller situation (new and fun subsidiary of a megacorp that feels really small). My experiences agreed with most/all of the article. Pros and cons of the new situation:

Pros: I feel much less like a cog in a big machine at the smaller organization. My pay went up significantly because they actually wanted some of my unique skill set, and just before the end of the year I got a project of importance from the R&D director, with the VP of product development explaining the longer term importance of the project. My manager is pretty hands off, so I can totally get away with building my skills when he thinks I'm working on short term projects -WFH helps too ;)

Cons: more variation in people. The megacorp had more standard cooperative folks, but I think some people I work with now are trying to protect their fiefs at the expense of my work. I'm slowly learning to do their jobs though hehehe...

At the megacorp (a big name you've heard of), I was in a huge side office. They made some nice sounding efforts to train me, but my time was billed by the hour (standard in the industry), so every hour learning something was an hour i had to make up later. I was moved between random projects with vacancies, so when I did learn something I'd have to shelve it for months or years until the funding situation or other variables aligned. My own ideas: there was a way to get funding, but it wasn't much and nobody above the director level cared if my idea worked, even if it impressed the company's anointed experts. I was an experienced engineering hire, was there for a few years.

I'm pretty happy with my new job! The industry is renewable energy, which makes me feel better than my old corporate jobs on the oil/defense side of the moral spectrum. I got lucky! We'll see how this goes. At the old job people came and went a lot, so I have reason to believe I can go back if the new thing flames out.

My two cents.
Can't find the thread, but there was a big thread about being a poor developer where one commenter had claimed they left software for networking because "it involved more systems-thinking than logic-thinking" and that that made it better suited to him. It put in words and helped me describe the same about myself as well helped me understand why I wasn't good at certain things. I'm just not willing to take the pay / potential pay-cut like they did.
Also occasionally used in optometry (applied directly to the eyeball!) as either an anesthetic or diagnostic tool.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/3885453/
But often there's too few bathrooms for too many children, so they can't go in those five minutes when they're supposed to. That was my experience at least.
This doesn't really work for natural monopolies, a small phone operator doesn't connect you to many people, a small steel mill doesn't have the economy of scale as a large mill, small oil operators couldn't build their own oil distribution.
> The OP mentions software, not technology in general.

Hardware and software are closely intertwined. We couldn't design, develop, build, and run modern hardware without modern software packages. You're just not seeing the advances in software if you're only looking at famous web services technologies.

The whole article is extremely myopic, limited only to the author's narrow domain of web services and coding in text editors.
Exactly. The most common ways to interact with a game world are the simplest and most visual: push button = physically do something, and the target physically reacts also. Subtlety and abstraction is harder to pull off, and hence, riskier for the company to attempt. The ones that succeeded did great though
Agreed, and this reminds me of friend who started to carry foldable chairs and table in their car during lockdown. They would, sometimes, set those up in the parking lot of the restaurant and eat there.

However, perhaps a solution might be a labeler that prints a label with consume by time and attach the label to carryout container. Or some other kind of disclaimer on the containers. Yes, this adds burden on the restaurants but hopefully, reduces negative reviews.
Further, most serious diseases like cancer and heart disease that are major issues in developed nations are highly age related. Progress on one front will likely lead to improvements on others.
I remember reading Fireplace Delusion by Sam Harris [1] (it's about religion, but uses the fireplace as an analogy of harmful thing that people in some sense know that is harmful but still keep enjoying and using) a long time ago and have been thinking the harmfulness of burning wood ever since. It's weird how hard it is to take news like this in even though it's backed by actual science. I just like the smell and the type of the warmness that a wood stove (or a fireplace) creates and would use them instead of electric stove or heaters when given a chance.

I'm pretty sure people can't be cured of brain bugs like this after some age or some degree of conditioning (in the sense of "it's always been like this and I don't want to change"). Hopefully the next generation is raised better based on new data and will be smarter than us. (Or at least me.)

1: https://samharris.org/the-fireplace-delusion/
There are probably a lot of benefits to be gained from Rails on Wasm. For example, Shopify recently posted an article about how they use Wasm outside of the browser to execute untrusted code (user scripts) [0]. It is also worth mentioning that although Artichoke supports WebAssembly as a build target, compiling to Wasm is not the only way to execute an Artichoke program.

0: https://shopify.engineering/shopify-webassembly
After a torrid start to the year, by the end of March the pandemic will be mostly over for nearly all western nations. Whilst vaccination and some social distancing will continue to the end of the year, most people will be back to work from April in office, pubs and cafes will open.

International travel will not be back to normal until 2022, however.

The vaccines will not be as effective as anticipated, but a combination of multiple vaccines, community spread, and large vaccination programmes later in the year will be sufficient to mostly eliminate fatalities.

This good news will be tempered by the realisation of the full economic consequences of covid. Many people will lose their jobs. The liquidation of assets will result in downturns in many markets, and probably a stock market crash. Inflation will take off. Governments will struggle with keeping down borrowing and investing to keep the economy going. It will be a great year for those supplying infrastructure.

At the same time, a desire to “roar” will lead to a boost in spending by those who can afford it, and we will see a “mini roaring 20s” in some ways, but more affordable ones. Lots of booze, drugs, divorces, and unplanned pregnancies. People will travel as much as they can, but a lot of it will have to be within country.

Scotland will elect a landslide of the SNP and an independence referendum will be scheduled for 2022.

It will become clear that Northern Ireland has essentially left the U.K. and this will lead to some discontent but the troubles will not return.

Belligerent behaviour by the U.K. will lead to an economic and legal confrontation with the EU. This will be drawn out and run into 2022.

American - U.K. trade talks will stall, ultimately resulting in the resignation of Boris Johnson, made somewhat inevitable by his previous behaviour towards the US.

The EU will have a year of huge decisions, but ultimately will come out stronger than ever.

It’ll be a surprisingly bad year for China, as they struggle with balancing authoritarianism with entrepreneurship, whilst also faced with strategic diversification by other nations acting in concert.

Twitter will finally be bought, probably in Q1 as Jack et al. realise it has peaked.

We’ll see about a 10% increase in home working but, apart from that, the predictions of the demise of the office will be mistaken. However, that swing will be enough to cause major problems for holders of commercial real estate, and major changes in the composition of rural areas as the rich displace locals, most notably in major beauty spots.

Biden will become president, but many of his left leaning supporters will be very disappointed with the compromises he makes and the distraction of the economic crises thrown at him, as well as further very serious problems with China’s foreign policy. Twitter will turn on him but support his Vice President. There will be some discontent within the democrat party on these accounts, but people will hunker down to wait it out.

It will be an amazing year for the fight against climate change, as Biden re enters the Paris Accord and vast amounts of money are pushed into green industries.
It's so weird because we go from being treated like children one year, to being treated like adults the next. There's no in-between.
>FWIW I'm from the UK so things might be very different here.

Yeah, it's different. One obvious difference is that you don't have the threat of preventable death or debilitating injury bankrupting you overnight.

>So your argument is about intent, rather than just the final effect? So what do you think about the tech workers who believe their job puts out more good than evil into the world?

No, it's not about intent, it's about accountability. You can only address the problems that you are aware of. If you're talking about unreasonable standards then it is unreasonable to hold someone accountable for problems that they're not aware of.

And if you believe your job to do more good than evil, and I disagree, then that reflects poorly on my opinion of you. I do not hold the ignorant accountable, but I do hold the irrational accountable.
> Internet Explorer 7 was audited by Microsoft to ensure that it contained no Mosaic code,[39] and thus no longer credits Spyglass or Mosaic.

oh wow, thanks for the correction, cant beleive i missed that
This is just the normal course of technology. The jet engine hasn't fundamentally changed since the 50s or so, but we're still making incremental improvements to it (single crystal casting, various high temperature alloys, probably ceramic turbine blades in the future), and those changes add up to substantial improvements over time. Software is the same.

Edit: Just compare how much easier it is to make something substantial today than it would've been 15 years ago. You could make a fairly sophisticated SaaS today from scratch using Django, Postgres, Redis, Stripe, Mailgun, and AWS in about a month. That's progress, even if it is boring and obvious.
Your advice pretty much equates to "just bend over and take it", which is a horrible thing to tell people.
If the judges hadn’t blocked Trump’s attempt at banning TikTok and WeChat (he had made clear intentions that he would go after more Chinese apps/companies as well) then Apple could’ve been in a position where they were forced to block Chinese apps worldwide, which would almost certainly guarantee that China wouldn’t be able to build popular apps that could be used to spread CCP propaganda and censorship, and influence elections.

Apple’s lack of side loading not only protect the users from malware, but it could also serve as the perfect weapon for the US government to make it near impossible for a company/nation to compete in the mobile app sector. That’s likely why 40%-Tencent owned Epic engaged in a desperate PR lawsuit to try to make it possible to side-load apps.
Since 1996 we've gotten deep learning, the iPhone, Google (search, maps, translate, youtube), bitcoin, landing rockets for re-use, social networks, and the ability for the whole world to switch to remote work without advance notice (and yes those are all software innovations).
Mostly disagree. Background: >7 years at a FAANG.
In the "corners of the company" I saw (multiple teams) they do care for people. They invest in us via courses (with transferrable skills, not only internal technologies), by letting us pick projects that are good for advancing our career and learning something else, even when the product would benefit from the n-th quick delivery of results on an already familiar topic.
They invest in us by considering us as humans and whenever someone had personal issues, there was some solution offered.
I saw a low-performer turned into a consistently high-performer by a manager who cared and carved out the time to help the person.
I saw the effort spent on collecting facts for fair performance reviews - for both ends of the spectrum.
I saw people having trouble with their direct manager getting moved to other teams, where they ultimately thrived.

What is the biggest perk, to complement the big salary? My colleagues. I worked with really amazing people, and learnt a lot from them.

Did I end up in the only few good spots at the company and spoke mostly with people in the remaining good ones? Statistically unlikely. I'm aware there are rotten parts, but I don't think it's the majority.
Roaming is a concept in the mobile networks, that isnt really part of the problem here, that is robocalls. As LinuxBender says, the decision is to block the ingress link containing the robocalls. These calls generally dont come from mobile devices roaming abroad, but from voip switches that have access to the landline network and configure their own a-party afaik.
Robin Williams suffered with undiagnosed Lewy body dementia before suicide
First arrest back in April:
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/coronavirus-mari...

150 people arrested in London protest: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-55116470

...including Jeremy Corbyn's brother, who was fined thousands of pounds:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-52693383

People are being arrested just for filming empty hospitals: https://twitter.com/Jen70717630/status/1344332042188845056

Hundreds of people fined yesterday: https://news.sky.com/story/covid-19-hundreds-fined-over-new-...

This is clearly enough to create a chilling effect on socialisation.
Not Playing Around: Board Games and Intellectual Property Law
Google is not alone when it comes to poor exception handling. The case you cite (a corporate merger) is something they should absolutely support.

I recently had a problem with Dell/VMWare when we wanted to change the domain name associated with a VxRail cluster. After working with their support teams for months, they eventually threw up their arms and said; "It cannot be done unless you reset and do a fresh install."
In Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn notes that denying prisoners the right to go to the bathroom during lengthy interrogations was a standard tactic, and a surprisingly effective one. The shame of soiling ourselves is so deeply ingrained in us that many people will confess to things they didn't do just to avoid it, even when they know the consequence is years in the Gulag.
I'm not sure if those two fields are comparable. In software engineering, at least there's usually a dollar value impact for the code you write. In research, the impact isn't as tangible and probably won't be known for years.
As someone that's had a bullshit job[0] where I might as well have been paid to stare at a wall, it's really not what it's cracked up to be. Considering you're spending 40 hours a week (1/3 of all your weekday hours, and half your weekday waking hours) at your job, the creeping realization that you're wasting your life and labor gets unbearable after a short while. It's even more miserable when you have to pretend to your boss and coworkers that your job is Making A Real Difference (tm).

I think it's best to just settle for a healthy medium between the outlooks of "who cares as long as I'm paid" vs. "my job is my life and identity".

[0] Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber is a great book on the topic.
This article sets up a very narrow view of "software" and then criticizes the state of "software" as if all that existed was what the author though of as "software"
"Corporation" is not a unit of measure. A "unicorp" does not have a market cap of $1. "Megacorp" does not use an SI prefix - it just refers to exceptionally large companies. This is the understanding my word choice is based on.
What's the point of this? Schools and prisons are both buildings.
Oh perfect; higher barriers of entry and further entrench existing monopolies!
Wouldn’t you also hope that we determine with complete certainty that plants don’t suffer? That plants have no experience of being harmed?
> Computer science is much broader than internet advertising companies.

Nobody would doubt that. But as a computer scientist I would have hoped that our discipline could have paved the way for something better to mankind than the current reality.
iOS and Android seem like huge omissions from that list.
Cool! TIL.
Yup! just a laundry list of software.
Not just real work but also education, for me a good interface can help build intuition about a task rapidly.
Haha Connor (although one of the main participants) definitely isn't a BDFL - we don't have any BDFLs :)

We don't really have much of a hierarchy at all - it's mostly just a collection of researchers of widely varying backgrounds all interested in ML research.
This has nothing to do with school; you can barely find any low-level windows without bar in most of cities in China.
Even if that's all true, it doesn't mean that microtubules are the only way to generate strong AI.

Consciousness isn't even particularly well defined, let alone proven to be a requirement for strong AI.
This is why the tech industry needs unions.
> The picture the author included has enough information...

I'll refrain from the sarcasm. Although...it's very appealing.

Is exApple-anon (OG comment that I responded to protect the obvious attack vector) the same as limono (HN submission)?

Do you have evidence of this? I hope you certainly don't believe that they are the same person in a 100,000 person organization. This would be terribly assumptive.

I don't believe limono's questions were malicious but I wanted to make it clear why the questions were inappropriate.
The author is a researcher with experience in programming languages, but curiously omits LLVM from his list of post-1996 advancements.

LLVM alone is responsible for a Copernican revolution in compilers and program analysis; just the last decade has seen a proliferation of novel PL and analysis research as a direct knock-on effect of LLVM’s success.
Rust and GPU programming are notably missing.
I'm not sure what a BDFL figure is, but Google does not give us millions of dollars. We are a part of TFRC, a program where researchers and non-profits can borrow TPUs when they're not being used. You could say that we are indirectly funded as a result, but it's nowhere near millions of dollars and it doesn't reflect any kind of special relationship with Google.
It is a matter of dealing with the lowest common denominator I guess.
Regarding Japan, their https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitsubishi_F-2 had the first https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_electronically_scanned_... with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J/APG-1 which is the key part for a modern fighter. Developed by themselves. The rest is more or less exchangable. Could have used some Mirage/Rafale/Gripen/Mig/Sukhoi too.
What's Next for JavaScript?
> Not sure what a potential solution would look like.

Make all salaries public by law - you could even anonymize people, although there would be lots of issues with that caveat. I'm not saying this is a good solution (most people don't want to talk about their salaries), but it would solve the problem.

It's already the case for government employees.
> Software 2.0 is happening right now. GTP-3 and Tesla FSD are examples of this.

I agree with this. As an anecdote, I've spent the past decade explaining to clients that things like natural language question answering and abstractive summarization are impossible, and now we have OpenAI and others dropping pretrained models like https://github.com/openai/summarize-from-feedback that turn all those assumptions on their head. There are caveats, of course, but I've gone from a deep learning skeptic (I started my career with "traditional" ML and NLP) to believing that these sorts of techniques are truly revolutionary and we are only yet scratching the surface of what's possible with them.
I will sometimes still announce "I'm going to the bathroom" at work. Not because anyone needs to know, but because it has been so wholly ingrained. I'm just glad I don't impulsively ask for permission.
Agreed but it should be paid.
TFRC, a program that lets you borrow Google's TPUs when they're not being used. You can apply here: https://www.tensorflow.org/tfrc
I'm the opposite. Security researchers have struggled for decades to get people to fix their stuff after discovering something is broken. When a vuln has a human-readable name that sounds vaguely scary, even nontechnical decision makers can ask good questions like "are we vulnerable to this 'heartbleed' thing?". Anecdotal, but I've definitely noticed people talking about them; I've seen articles in mainstream press referencing some of these named vulns and have even had friends who are otherwise uninterested in computers ask me about them!

Certainly there's a self-serving glamorous aspect to it on the part of security researchers, but fun names and logos brings attention to issues that otherwise result in eyes glazing over. As much as this stuff makes me cringe to read, I'm willing to bet the branding for this issue will result in more eyes on it and probably will result in a fix. That's ultimately what vuln disclosure is about, after all.
Depends. For a quick prototype or small project? Seems fine. For a project with changing requirements and planned long term use (read: most software), it's probably best to not mix all your technologies in a single layer.
Apparently it's an 'Enterprise' edition available only for the Chinese government - https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_10...

It's funny that the Chinese, who have created a vast network of online and offline spywares, gets to have a Windows stripped of all spyware! Shows how much Microsofts cares about us ordinary users.
I’m not going to point to any age “generation” or make big broad generalizations, but from my time at Amazon I saw people who disagree I would have fired in a hot second, and who also from their point of view may have written the exact same thing as the article.

I have no real judgment on this guy. But I’ve seen plenty of people straight up not prepared for the real world get hit hard and it’s never ever their fault.

I find the lack of admitting any fault anywhere to be suspicious, esp when we know there are always two sides.
As a parent of a walking 18mo, a) it depends, sometimes it takes closer to age two, and b) they're absolutely too young to learn any social protocol at this age.
No mention of distributed version control. That seems to me a more important development than most of the post-1996 list.
also the idea / protocol of bittorrent
EleutherAI has a very flat hierarchy; we do not have any BDFL-like figure.
It is.

I had a friend whose father was a chemical engineer back in the 1980s who did a study on it. The cost per cubic yard to recycle styrofoam was insanely cheap. It was just that it required a specialized process that nobody implemented because creating more was also cheap. So it wasn't recycled, but it could have been.
>> Is there anything wrong with this?

No. Building something useful is good. It's just not an example of technological progress. That's what they meant by a victim of it's own success. When something advances enough to be useful it's natural for a bunch of people to just make use of it as-is.
I'm still amazed how many people(myself included) accept the Apple's censorship and planned obsolence/drm policies.