skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
First off, sorry for your pain, and if you stay it will be a rough ride.

Initially I would say make sure you are paid for overtime, as when this thing breaks they will expect you to stay until it is done.

Other option is to get your resume together and plan for a new job.

Second make sure YOU have a backup copy of the code. Yeah yeah they make backups... no you need a separate one. Okay maybe you will not, but the smart money is saying you will. Let us just hope you never need your personal backup. Do it now, when you find out you needed it, it is too late.

Third make sure your boss realizes what a S** sandwich this is that you are being left with. The 'other' developer is clearly not a professional. Your boss needs to realize that this other guy has left you with a HUGE technical debt. If your boss actually needs this software, then he is going to have to spend a ton of resources fixing it.

Next start documenting what is there. Sit the guy down and start having them explain the 1) Requirements including the goes into and goes out of. Be leery of the would be nice if it does this. 2) Now start going over the design. What are the 2/3 or 4 MAJOR components. What does each do. How do you build / compose them. How do you test them. Make sure all of this is written. Test what you have written. 3) Understand the entry point of each system, and how to debug it. 4) for each major system ... what are the 2/3/ or 4 major components. What does each ... <yes recursive>

Although I agree you are over your head, it is also a great opportunity, if they pay overtime and respect the herculean effort they are asking you. Sadly most places I have worked at did not understand how bad it is.

Rewrite would take a LOT of effort. As it stands you can blame the previous person and their management for everything that goes wrong. Once you rewrite you own it.

While rewriting you have to have the old stuff running. If you break it down into parts, you can slowly replace a part at a time. Same architecture, just better coding.

I wish you the best of luck. I have been in similar shoes all too often.

First time, after documenting the code enough to make it understandable, started the rewrite. Person I replaced was around for 3 months.

Second time, redid just the variable names, no variable name was less than 50 character, variable names included project name and company. Other person was around, he resented my changing the variable names.

Third time, was laidoffed after 9 months as the project had not progressed enough. Entire team doing the development left a month before I arrived. They only had pretty pictures.

Fourth time, I started a week before the developer left. He had his working project and a 'new and improved' that was almost done. The week of overlap was spent with him showing me things. I was busy trying to absorb what he was saying, and did not realize he had not documented a thing. Documented his stuff as best I could and kept the ship afloat, until I could get someone else to create a replacement.
Design decisions I do not regret
> Your voice is needed.

I see that "anyone" to you is "any leftist". The internet has sent a very clear and unmistakable signal this past week that the voices of anyone else are not welcome.
Biden and Harris are trendsetting experts in the field of mass incarceration.
The logic gate was my only familiarity with the term.
And also on Peertube :
https://sepiasearch.org/search?search=the%20internet%20own%2...
If you move away from coastal areas... It's pretty easy to have enough space for this to work.

Have you seen how cheap houses are in Houston, TX or Bentonville, Arkansas?
> He was offered a 6 month sentence in a low security prison. He could have served that sentence

Prison rape is part of the sentence, in that godforsaken country.

This is how aspies fare in the US prison system: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_DeFriest
> That’s why we have judges and give them latitude.

See "Mandatory sentencing" aka "Mandatory Minimums"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandatory_sentencing#United_St...
I feel like a tinier, more constrained version of this would have worked better. E.g.,

* normalized 128 byte message content size

* defaults to sending all messages during a one-hour window each day

* no acks until next one-hour sending window

That's quite ascetic. But I think you get certain privacy properties that way which aren't otherwise possible. It would interesting to see if there are practical uses for those properties.

Edit: Oops, forgot:

* when the client is opened, fill a 128-byte buffer with random garbage. When the one-hour send window arrives, if no message has been set in the UI then send the garbage (and reset the buffer to new garbage).

Again, super crude but this PIR is a kind of brute-force approach anyway.
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Free speech has always had limits...
Hmm, I guess it's my damn fault for staying too much on the tourist route and assuming things from appearances !

Charging phones from car batteries, damn !
One of my theories based on life experience is that many fields do not attract the brightest people to begin with, and consequently many of the ideas from these fields are not pressure-tested enough.

In todays academia, it is basically impossible to fail getting a PhD in many fields provided you are ok being miserable for years at a time. At the same time academia is filled with a ton of bs like publicly funded research being released behind paywalls, professors receiving grants for projects that are already completed, students being denied graduation util their project can be submitted to the highest impact journal possible etc, having to do a long postdoc to get a tenure track position etc...

For smart people that value financial freedom, academia is a terrible option at this point in time.

The current coronavirus fiasco has laid bare the lack of critical thinking in the life-sciences fields.
You're probably right, I can't check the TB spec but from what I see in shops I'm gonna say those "passive 1m 40G" cables are manufacturers breaking the spec. I'm also seeing "20G" cables that claim to only do 5G USB3, which is concerning & confusing me quite a bit...

FWIW my confidence level on "would an active TB3 cable work for USB3 if it had the proper bits set" is somewhere along 66% to 75%; this is based on the SERDES in some (most?) TB3 host silicon being able to switch to USB3 to "downgrade" a port... meaning the electrical level can't be all that different... but I haven't dug into this.
Demand supply matching, reducing solar curtailment by innovative use cases will lead to thousands of business ideas. Although most still make sense at large scale and difficult to bypass the grid or apply anything in terms of storage at small scale like an individual house.
> It's a bit frustrating since the Community Market/Trading is likely only used by a minority of users, but seemingly a ton of login limitations are imposed because of it.

It's probably because it moves a significant amount of money, between trading cards, CSGO knives, TF2 hats, etc. Of course, nothing comparable to banking systems and general-purpose marketplaces, but I personally think those protections only add to the product.
When one says “big tech” I think it’s usually used to represent Twitter, Amazon, Google, Apple, etc “big SV FAANG’y tech”. This seems like controlling content the same way large media outlets always have (ie newspapers, magazines, etc), they have no obligation to amplify your message. You can still take your message to a smaller player if they’ll have you (ie a smaller newspaper) or if your message isn’t wanted by others at all you still have your own machine in a closet (ie a printing press and pamphlets).
Even if you wanted to, Facebook can't be de-platformed. They are entrenched in the internet and own their own data centres, are also themselves domain registrars and members part of the ICANN.
> Now there are two partitions on the drive, Macintosh HD, as before, and Data, and it’s not clear if you need to wipe out just one or both.

Isn't this a feature of Catalina, not M1 Macs? At any rate, the author is acting purposely obtuse (not unusual for Thurrott). The process takes a few steps, sure, but it's not like you can't just google "prepare mac for resale" and it lands you here: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201065
Type systems are really good for detecting contradictions; they're much less good at figuring out which piece should be different. For any given type error, there may be half a dozen different changes to the code that would resolve it in different ways. Type systems often have no real way of guessing the user-intent there. There are loose heuristics, like... an explicit return type is more likely to be intentional (and therefore correct) than the type of the local value that's being returned. But I'm not aware of any formalism around this "ranking" of which types are most likely to be unintentional. Maybe we need one.

The only immediate solution I can see is to keep types simple enough that the user can fit the entire relevant type-space in their head (and in the IDE dialog!), so that they themselves can determine which part is actually "wrong" (as opposed to just contradictory).
They don't need IDs. They need to positively identify account owners with the IDs. @JohnSmith is not a lot to go on if you want to send the FBI after them. @JohnSmith of 123 2nd Amendment Street, Jackson County Kentucky is a lot more useful.
This seems to be highly variable depending on the locality that holds the records. It does not seem to be standardized in my experience.

Even after expungement where possible, there can be problems with records being inappropriately cached by background check services, and a background check after expungement may still show the conviction. Yes, this can be appealed, but still puts an undue burden on the applicant and may ultimately be a deciding factor between similar candidates even though it should not be used
I like that prediction, but git is actually a bit of a step back from older more traditional source control systems. Rewriting history is far more common with git to the point where teams have to make explicit policies on when that is allowed.

Even if git becomes common in science outside of code, I don't think it would overcome the social pressure to appear infallible.
The popular way of quizing developers during the interview has more about throwaway leetcode than experience.

What you're digging for is about their experience. To me, what you're finding comes at no shock. The industry has been punishing people with experience and willing to show it for years.
It is a tough nut to crack. Social media as we know it today brings some benefits. I thank some aspects of "woke" twitter for making me realize the reality of several societal ills, pulling me out of the "theory only" political alignment that is Libertarianism (IMO). Letting everyday people, including the poor, minorities, and targeted groups, have a direct platform to share their story with the world, is a positive thing. In other words, good-faith usage of the platform.

Clearly, there is flipside. Private Facebook groups to share hate speech or otherwise echo awful thoughts. Legions of bots controlled by political organizations or nation-states trying to divide and conquer a population. It is a losing battle to moderate these platforms.

Facebook has no inherent right to exist as it does, or rather, make a profit as it does - and I wonder if extreme measures, such as a partial repeal of section 230, should be considered. Like all laws, small-p-progressive measures should be taken. Small and medium websites should not necessarily be held liable for content posted by others. But as a network grows to have hundreds of millions of users, perhaps they should?

I'm not sure either.
You could look for you own graphs? I don't think it's in dispute that the power output of wind and solar varies, and that its output is somewhat stochastic. And that there's a market for extremely intermittent capacity.

https://www.current-news.co.uk/news/balancing-mechanism-pric... : UK is currently paying quite a lot ot the few marginal producers ("peaker plants").

Peaker plants are a big business: https://www.energyassets.co.uk/about-us/news/article/peaking...

Yes, as you overbuild renewable capacity the number of such occasions goes down. This is why is said that it's hard to reach 100%, but it's not impossible.
Of course it had a role in his suicide, but no person who was not already very mentally ill would have ended their life in that situation. The narrative that prosecutors wanted to effectively ruin his life for his criminal offenses is just wrong.
Simple, yet powerful Customer Success technology (Fiji 2021)
feels like yesterday! :'(
"Thanks Obama!"

This was unfortunately one of the many casualties in the war the Obama DoJ raged on the country. It's unconscionable.
Duverger's Law (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverger%27s_law) provides insight as to why this is unlikely to happen.
What businesses will–and won't–give their work from home employees in 2021
The distinction is that Facebook are failing in their moderation efforts while Parler prohibits themselves from even trying. There's also the face that Facebook has such an enormous footprint of positive or neutral content. It would be like shutting down air travel because some planes crash.
In what way does the government pay you to use oil?
Above all, it's about consistency. Make a schedule and KEEP TO IT. No exceptions. You can build rest days into your schedule, but if today is leg day, don't skip it for anything except illness or injury.

I personally run at least 15 minutes per day every day, averaging a 5K per day. I do this first thing in the morning. I wake up, I put on my running stuff, then I walk out the door. I find that the hardest part of exercising is getting out the door, and the hardest part of getting out the door is putting on my running gear, so if I make that literally the first thing I do, then I might as well walk out that door, too. I used to hate running in the morning, but I discovered that it had always been just an excuse. Don't let it be an excuse.

I cross train on alternate days, changing it up between core, chest/arms, and cycling. I take my dog on 20 minute walks twice a day.

I also don't own a car (technically, my wife has a car, but she commutes to work which leaves me at home with no ride), so if I leave the house, I'm walking.

I recognize it's not always possible in suburban/exurban areas, but if there is anything walkable to you, like your local Starbucks or your local drugstore or lunch places, I would really consider walking. I would consider anything less than 1.5mi/2.5km walkable, which should take you about 20-25 minutes each way. I used to live in suburban Atlanta and commute an hour each way, and then I moved to the middle of a city, and within 6 months of just walking to work every day, I had lost 30 pounds. No other physical activity or diet changes at all. Don't underestimate just walking. (Note: if you don't walk much, one mile will hurt your feet -- but within a week or two, your legs will be much stronger, and before you know it, walking 3 miles is nothing at all.)

Hope that helps.
This is a fantastic comment, and spot on I think. I concur with everything you've said.
I'd argue the only meaningful online social network is git, and maybe soundcloud/bittorrent, the rest is just somebody elses variable source of narcissistic supply.

You could use one of those p2p-blockchain messengers to talk to other people who use p2p-blockchain messengers, but then you are talking to people who use p2p-blockchain messengers.

It's really a question of how much breadth you want/need.
The internet itself reduces to a politically atomized individual sitting alone at a keyboard, struggling to connect, while being neutralized from all sides by random noise to stimulate both outrage and helplessness. It really is the totalitarian dream. You'd have to leave The Internet proper as we know it now, and create the next one, just as AOL/Compuserve were walled gardens that the internet grew outside of, a new network that resembled the 90's era internet could emerge in as little as a few years.

Think about what Linux was: a new kernel for bare metal that broke out of the constraints of an OS landscape that looked a lot like today's internet giants. At the time, global communication was novel, today, privacy and regional networks are novel. Most linux users had a bsd/solaris/windows machine to connect to the legacy world, so you don't have to design the whole thing at once.

A p2p-reddit that used a blockchain that operated with a kind of old fidonet/UUCP/nntp over bittorrent as transport could be a source of new community. A bare metal blockchain client kernel for open RISC and ARM processors that uses a wireless mesh, and includes a kind of regional pub/sub pattern would do it.

The tech is there.
Doubtful, all the links were publicly accessible. I believe the researcher just crawled the "video.parler.com" domain after finding out they used sequential IDs.

Allegedly Parler didn't scrub exif data from any media, including all of their "verification" materials including Drivers Licenses and Passports.
One of the tenets of this site is that we ask everyone to assume best intentions from everyone else.
Is it because demand greatly outstrips supply at this point and will remain so for a few more years at least till new production capacity catches up ? Or is there any other reason that makes it trickier ? Would appreciate any links if you have some.
Move the discussion offline. The state can still get to you but at least you will mostly be out of big tech's reach.
> Now that this is public, they're going to burn everything connected to it and it may ruin ongoing investigations.

There is no way a non-tech savvy person can foil the federal government agency in this way - an agency which will likely have all the logs from Amazon (in addition to the data dump from this particular hack, and cached data from Parler follower's devices which will be duly imaged). In reality, any such amateur cleanup activity will be brought forward as further evidence of guilt (or as an additional charge).

I am tech savvy, and I am not foolish enough to think can possibly hide information from a nation-state, should one choose to turn it's Sauron's-eye-like gaze on me. Hell, I don't even stand a chance against a VC-funded security firm with <10 people that's worth its salt.
Deep Dive into Dowsing
> The sad fact is your comment exposes how difficult it is for anyone in the tech industry to hold a sincere conviction that free speech is a good thing

Twitter occasionally labels disputed/debunked political claims as such (but still lets them be published) and, after literally years of doing little more than that, finally took actions to ban a half-dozen high-profile accounts that kept pushing such claims after they arguably literally lead to an armed insurrection. Parler was literally designed with suppression of political viewpoints they disagree with in mind from the start. It should be crystal clear which of those networks "values free speech" to a higher degree.

So, no, your implicit claim that it's sad that top talent wouldn't work for Parler because that would demonstrate their commitment to free speech is silly at best and disingenuous at worst. Parler has demonstrably less commitment to free speech than Twitter does.

I'll be blunt: my sincere conviction is that "if you moderate anything it means you are not for free speech" is not a viable operational principle. It's a rhetorical device. Trolls -- alt-right or otherwise -- have always claimed that moderation suppresses their free speech. If you listen to them, you are running a forum for trolls, whether or not that is your intent. It is not Parler's publicly claimed intent to be doing so, but -- even based on the content on their site, let alone their ideologically-driven moderation which, again, goes far beyond anything Twitter, Facebook, et. al, have actually done -- it is painfully obvious it is their actual intent.
This and similar stories should really be interpreted more as british intelligence being brilliant than the germans being dumb. It's almost scary how many times the allies produced paradigm-shifting hacks in record time throughout the war.
Agreed. I think there needs to be a better term for the reality of the situation, something like "negligent obsolescence". There's no technological limitation preventing Samsung from updating those for a decade or more, they just don't care. A battery degrading over time isn't planned obsolescence, and while not being able to easily replace the battery might be, more likely it's that they just don't bother to put in the slightly extra effort to make the batteries easier to replace. Right to Repair mandates would be a good start in ensuring manufacturers are properly motivated.
Except the over 70,000 documents and leaks about the Russian government on Wikileaks right now. This argument is absolute nonsense given that fact.
Yes, that's the tradeoff he chose.

Neither Twitter the company nor society at large is obligated to play into the game where a candidate figures pit how to make a non-traditional platform work for him and then expects help from others when it no longer works for him.

You can't live by the sword and then passionately advocate pacifism when a sword is raised against you.
I'm troubled as well. Here's how I see things that played out:

Twitter and Facebook banning Trump? Not surprised, they censor conservatives all the time and have been doing so since even before Trump. Also remember: it wasn't just Trump this time, many others have been banned from Twitter and Facebook, and many groups have been shut down.

Apple banning Parler? I was surprised by this. Apple is supposedly about privacy; clearly, they are not. Changes my view on their value proposition moving forward.

AWS dropping Parler? Again, this is surprising. Head scratching even. Going to make a lot of people think twice about AWS.

I'm also kinda surprised at the HN response to all this, perhaps its because many of the posters here work at one of these Orwellian companies and don't see the issue. I see complaints here about payments companies blocking criminal activity, yet very little relative objections to simply cancelling people the CEOs disagree with.
Parkerizing
A single, fatal shot was fired for precisely that reason. And even then, I don't think it was anywhere near "executing the VP" but more like getting too close to the area where the politicians were being kept safe.
Here's something even simpler: Trump supporters might try to do the same to you if they get power again.

These are Nazi tactics being used by the Left.
Not exactly the same, as I believe there were more than drugs involved, but several years ago, I met someone who had been through the system in his youth. I didn’t really like the guy at first, as he was rather volatile and could suddenly turn aggressive (diagnosed bipolar, don’t know if he was actively treated at the time), but as time went on we were mostly cool. Eventually he would tell me about his life, how he had gone to school for three years, but had to drop out for a variety of reasons. He would talk about his time spent homeless and the things he would do to get by or protect his stuff. It was pretty clear he wasn’t ok mentally. He couldn’t find good work, due to his record, and felt condemned to working a near minimum wage job to support him and his wife in the run down town we lived in. Eventually, he started getting erratic, confronting his managers about issues with his paycheck among other things. One morning, we heard he had crashed his car into a ditch and I didn’t hear anything from or about him for several months until a mutual acquaintance had informed me he had committed suicide at 27.
Anything can be de-platformed.