skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Launch date: 23 January 1970

Phew, 23 days earlier your father would have had to code all timestamps in negative.

Joke apart, which OS did such satellites run? Unix? Probably not, since timestamps only started in 1970. Just "C"? Even today, how do you register time on satellites? With Unix timestamps (a long since 1970-01-01)? Can they synchronize based on objective points (stars or Earth position to the sun) or are satellites always resynchronized from Earth signals?
This is why we use Blazor now. Our domain model has over 50 different types, some with well over 300 unique properties per. In a complex use case for our application, there can be tens of thousands of total business facts to deal with at the same time. If we were still trying to define JSON API contracts and mappers to pass this amount of domain knowledge around, we would have closed up shop a few years ago.

We now have 1 strongly-typed domain model that is used directly throughout the entire application. If you want to talk about productivity, cutting out entire layers of unnecessary mapping is key to getting leverage. Our custom javascript interop amounts to approximately 150 lines of code. Needless to say, we don't worry about javascript too much. Any interaction requiring js is quickly abstracted away under some razor component, never to be worried about again.
>the discipline is all of 20-30 years old.

How do you define software engineering such that it's 20-30 years old? Why isn't it 50 years old? I ask because I've heard the argument that software engineering is a young discipline but it feels like you're really stretching it with those 20-30 years.

>When the S-curve of hardware progress flattens, software engineering will gain in importance.

But a lot of software engineering issues are entirely divorced from the underlying hardware. So I'm not sure how the shape of hardware has any significant bearing to our current situation.

>Engineering is very much about the accumulation of experience

I would argue that we actually know a ton about how to build software. It's just that it's not really being taught or valued or applied. I would argue that's an important distinction because it strengthens the analogy of electrical engineer vs electrician. So it's more about just an accumulation of experience.
From 2019: https://heartbeat.fritz.ai/deep-learning-has-a-size-problem-...

> Earlier this year, researchers at NVIDIA announced MegatronLM, a massive transformer model with 8.3 billion parameters (24 times larger than BERT)

> The parameters alone weigh in at just over 33 GB on disk. Training the final model took 512 V100 GPUs running continuously for 9.2 days.

Running this model on a "regular" machine at some useful rate is probably not possible at this time.
The implementation of functional programming languages
Executive Communication – Barbara Minto's SCQA
But that’s my point: it is like gamergate.

And I didn’t use that term.
What a fantastic gesture. Great timing as well.
Cap'n'proto?

https://capnproto.org/
> It's a cliche but if we spent 10% of of what we spend on Nukes or drug enforcement on this it would be a game changer.

> > I think people that say things like this overestimate how much we spend on things like this and underestimate social spending.

These caught my attention because they both made claims for which the quantitative basis can somewhat easily be established, partly because the parent was making a relatively specific claim as these things go.

Here's what I was able to find with ~20min of searching for federal spending in these three categories:

Foster care: $22 billion (2017) [1]

Drug control: $25 billion (2015) [2]

Nuclear arms: $35 billion (2019) [3]

I was surprised that these three areas received roughly equivalent amounts of money - support for your statement that people tend to underestimate social spending.

As to the parent comment: while it does seem likely that taking 10% of the budget from nuclear arms or drug enforcement would indeed make a qualitative difference to foster service provision, my hunch is that the 10-20% increase that implies wouldn't be a "game changer" as the parent asserted even if the claims in [1] that the program needs to be entirely reconfigured are warranted.

EDIT: The parent comment also asserts that a better-funded foster care system would be "cheaper than prison" - another question which could probably be answered with some quantitative basis. Anyone else want to take a shot at it?

[1] https://abcnews.go.com/Primetime/FosterCare/story?id=2017991...

[2] https://drugpolicy.org/sites/default/files/DPA_Fact_sheet_Dr...

[3] https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/14/us/nuclear-weapons-spending-t...
It was Whitney Cummings, and Andrew Schultz [0] who I recently found out has a podcast that often delves into hacking things like Netflix's algo that's put his special in the top 10 since its been out, or the social media loop cycle it has with the MSM that creates headlines and an odd form of enhanced self-promotion with things like SEO so he understands these Social engineering topics rather well and happens to make them funny. Sorry no time stamp, but it was a funny podcast so worth a watch.

0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JwdkeIhKHNM
It works fine. That was a bad-faith comment from someone that browses with JS disabled. Frankly, I think that comment was uncalled for.

I also make the choice to disable JS by default, but I just enabled it to see your site.

I think this is an awesome project and I freaking love your attitude, too. Thanks for sharing and keep up the good work.
Hi, I am really interested in reading this conversation, as I have keratoconus and had CXL surgery about ten years ago, and am very happy with it. The CXL stopped the keratoconus progressing and I only need to wear glasses instead of the more invasive things other patients mention (contact lenses, corneal grafts and transplants, etc).

It would be good if this intervention to convince patients to cease eye rubbing was more common in keratoconus patients. There is often a delay of several months between when keratoconus is suspected or diagnosed and CXL is carried out (in my case I had to wait 6 months in one eye and 9 months in the other, during which time it got a bit worse).

About eye rubbing, yes there should be more awareness of it! In practical terms, I would recommend that everyone tries wearing an eye-mask when they’re asleep (I recently bought this one, and I'm happy with it https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B07DW32QYJ ). This is because it's more difficult to notice and prevent yourself from rubbing your eyes when you're half-asleep.

There are several reasons why I like wearing an eye mask while in bed, and some even apply to people who don’t have keratoconus:
1. It stops me rubbing my eyes when I'm in bed.
1. It might stop allergens getting into my eyes when I'm asleep, for example I notice much less rheum on my eyes when I wake up in the morning. When I’m in bed is when I notice that my allergies are worst.
3. It helps me sleep better, it's like having blackout curtains in my room.
4. If I want to get up in the middle of the night, I will be able to see better in the dark.
It's core concept cake (like a "concrete turing machine model" counterpart to lisp 1.5's half page of lambda calculus definition) combined with the mutable braid of mutable PLs icing.[0]

[0] https://gist.github.com/raiph/849a4a9d8875542fb86df2b2eda892...
In practice, I don't care, and I lol-ed at the religion comment below.

And I know tabs are seeing a comeback lately, but they are basically the only ASCII character that does not have a predefined width.

And the reason I dislike that is because they don't have clear semantics even in the pure text-only world: eg. writing out a table in ASCII is not possible with these "tabulating" characters, because if the column data is wider than (tab-width – 1), well, there goes your alignment. And when something is so badly defined not to serve the purpose it's named after, I can't like it. :)

If it was called the "indent" character which was ignored anywhere but at the start of the line, it would at least be sane and consistent.

Incidentally, Emacs can do the right thing in most modes by turning tab key into the (re)indent command.
Homebrew is also spyware.

They transmit your unique identifier to Google every time you run brew, which effectively provides Google with your coarse location tracklog via client IP geolocation.

Data collection like this that is done without the consent of the user is extremely unethical, rude, and in some jurisdictions actually illegal. The fact that the data they steal is useful to them is not relevant and your bringing it up is telling.

It actually has nothing to do with whether or not I agree with it, and everything to do with whether or not they obtain consent to exfiltrate this information. Neither Homebrew nor Gatsby obtain the consent of the user to transmit their spying data.
Thank you. I will look through both.
Justice systems are complicated. From what I've read, it's true that the japanese court system indeed gives prosecutors more leeway and the trial is more of a formality. The conviction rate of 99% (vs 70-95% in the us, depending how you count) speaks to this.

However, that's not all there is to it. You're still innocent until proven guilty in Japan.

There's also probably more in common with the japanese justice system and the US system than different. In practice, the majority of cases in both don't go to trial. In japan, the prosecution will just not prosecute any case they don't think they'll win (and have broad leeway to do so). This results in a 99% conviction rate because, well, there's no reason they can't just drop any case without rock solid evidence. Even in cases where they're confident the suspect is guilty, but they don't think they have enough evidence, they may opt to just drop the case.

In the US, similarly, most cases don't go to trial. The vast majority are also ended under prosecutor discretion, via plea bargains. Both in the US and Japan, most cases skip the proper court system due to the prosecution having power to do so. It's just in Japan, the prosecution also has power to drop the case, while in the US the prosecution can only skip the courts if they get a plea deal, but not if the suspect keeps pleading not-guilty.

Japan has laws requiring evidence in addition to a confession due to understanding that police sometimes force confessions (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criminal_justice_system_of_Jap...)

In america it's routine for people to be convicted on nothing other than a suspect agreeing to a plea deal even though they didn't do it. "You can get 1 year in jail and get back to your family if you take the plea, or you can risk 30 years in jail if you keep saying not-guilty" isn't at all unusual in the US system, especially since a cop's word is often enough for a guilty sentence.

I'd be happy to be wrong on any of he above details if anyone has separate experience, understanding, or sources.

All that being said, I'd much much rather be arrested in Japan than in the US.
Is there a source on this? I thought this was for specifically for "Professional Engineer" status. If not, myself (3 year college program grad) and many, many others are not what our current titles are as given by multiple employers.

I've asked many times even on these forums and have yet to get a credible source on this. I've been officially "called" sw engineer as per job title for roughly over a decade with 4 different large employers. I've never given this premise much credibility because of that, and perceive it to be wishful gatekeeping. I am hoping for some kind of clarification however.

I'd like to retire one day being able to say I've built a 40-50 year career while being a living, breathing lie. That makes me chuckle. =)
Yes, for sure! A lot of people have been asking for Postgres and I want to get that in this year. For now some customers are using the "Other" DB option, which gives you a REST API where you can connect to your DB of choice.
Please stop posting flamewar comments to HN. What you've been doing on this site is over-the-top excessive and it's time to stop.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Tech workers can't leave SF fast enough
Pocket does Text to Speech, IIRC. I think I tried it on reddit at some point. It turns out the ability to just skip comments and not read through all the threads in their entirety is pretty important.
I tend to think of engineers as people who apply scientific and mathematical techniques to solve real world problems. Clearly some programmers do these things, but equally clearly some programmers do not! Why would you expect a yes or no answer?
This is one meta-study, it's not exactly proof.
Ask HN: Why are people publishing FAQs/articles on Medium instead of Gist?
I've noticed a trend in technical material being authored on Medium behind a registration wall. Are people really generating enough revenue to warrant publishing tech articles on Medium to offset the greater good of making the material broadly available?

Gist offers public visibility and commenting without the requisite barrier to entry.

Thoughts?
I've lived in the US, and now live in Canada.

Despite right-wing propaganda that we're all flocking to the states for care (never met a single person who has even considered that), or that we're all dying on years long wait lists (there is an element of truth to that, but it's a triage system. So cancer patients get priority for surgery before the skier who blew his ACL).

I still have yet to meet a single person who doesn't think the US system is batshit crazy.

Canadians recognize that their system has problems, and can be improved (which is true of ANY complex system). But they also don't think that the US system is functional or desirable.

I know that the nearest border crossing to me regularly has ambulances waiting for people that preferred to travel sick or injured than seek healthcare in the US. In other words, people literally flee the country to avoid being treated in the US.
At least for me (or is it the onions we have?), peeling the onion is the tricky part and takes as much time or more as chopping the onion, and cutting off the root helps with that.
Two kids found a screensaver bypass in Linux MintSecurity Affairs
I thought of the analogy that mixing a safer random generator to your existing one makes the result unsafer, not safer. Kinda surprising for non-tech folks.
Company should be blackballed from producing US goods. Took the money and ran in Wisconsin. Zero benefits to US citizens.
I was thinking of doing a Deskreen for mobile and tablets to do exact same thing, but technology is not there yet for React Native.

Things may change in future
Yeah and I think it is on a negative feedback loop. Look at Cuomo and his complete flip flop except for the punitive and controlling attitude.
Yeah. Basically Signal protocol over XMPP. It uses the XMPP server for the stored/delayed cryptographic state which is why you need a server that can do PEP (Personal Eventing Protocol) if you want to do OMEMO.

OMEMO has pretty much replaced OTR in the clients so if you want simple/stateless you are left with one of the two PGP flavours.
scrcpy - https://github.com/Genymobile/scrcpy
Also notable: "Is soup a drink?"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IDNuz_VFJtU
Please don't perpetuate flamewars on HN, regardless of how wrong someone else is or you feel they are. It's not what this site is for and the guidelines ask everyone not to do it:

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Arrogant cowboys are a good deal better than the truth.
I'm on the same trajectory but audio and also video are slow compared to text, even if you listen and watch at faster than real time speed. You can read this message almost at a glance, you would have to listen to all of it and maybe again.
I've always felt that sustaining oneself with the life another animal or plant or whatever is the ultimate sign of respect and should be considered an almost sacred act.
I did not know that the word helicopter was in use back then, nor that the first helicopter was built in 1901, before some of these postcards!
Thank you for your feedback! It really means a lot to me :)
That's a definition of engineering.

How isn't that like claiming you're a chef because you have a catering company where you serve microwaved foods, and claim it's silly to try to distinguish degrees of cooking skills.
And why would you go fishing for sea gulls?
The same people demanding a Patriot Act 2.0 are now apparently chastising Parler for treating US IT as a potential point-of-failure? Maybe this is the market reaction to deplatformning? Russia-as-a-data-haven. Tell me how thats worse than US-based infra, where your business can be turned off on the whims of new grads on a company internal mailing list.
Tawk – Awk but in Tcl
As far as I can tell, the commonality among those always-winning firms is high frequency low latency algorithmic trading. These days it takes millions of dollars per month just to pay for the infrastructure you need to be able to be competitive - and then you also have to have some nontrivial edge, without which there isn’t all that much profit in having low latency.

And that is why I like the idea of a "trade arbitrarily slowly with limited price change" market versus the current approach of "trade fast with an arbitrary price change" market.

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24760841 for an explanation of how the trade arbitrarily slowly market could work. Under normal conditions, it would look a lot like the current market does. Except that you're paying less to the HFT folks.

What I didn't describe there is that you could even have a chain of slower and slower markets. With a maximum rate of price change varying from 1% per day to 1% per minute. With the idea that ordinary folks would trade on the 1% per minute market while large institutional orders would be likely to go in the 1% per day market. (And when the price of two markets cross, open orders on the one can match as open orders on the other.)
I use Ting and I've been very happy with them. I switched because they have really good policies working against SIM swap attacks: https://help.ting.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/360030105653-...
Awesome Hackernews
Here's the paper: https://nutrition.bmj.com/content/bmjnph/early/2021/01/07/bm...

Essentially, they appear to have used stratification on genetic factors to reduce potential confounders and improve their ability to get a less biased estimate.

This seems reasonably solid to me, from a brief overview of the methods section (I'm not an expert though, so there may be flaws I missed).

Definitely some countervailing evidence against Vit-D being directly related. There's almost certainly some third factor between Vit-D and health, but we don't yet have a good sense for what that might be.

Note that the study is only analysing data for White British individuals, so if you are of a different ethnicity there may still be hope for you ;)
This makes total sense. 10% of your users are superfans they read / understand everything you publish. They are so into it they give support (word of mouth, helping onboard others, bug patches, they will test alpha builds and give money/time where possible).

90% of users don't understand your product as well. They haven't totally bought in. They will need more support/handholding in order to convert. People are trying to get your product to work for their situation and if they can't 90% will go away and 10% will ask (usually dumb questions).

Your unhappy with the 10% who can't get it working but want your product to work enough to bother to ask?

I guess you can feel that way. Those 10% do represent an opportunity to get a group of people who want to use your product to onboard. The ones who tried and failed and never asked a question will probably never come back. If you ultimately want more support you are going to need to convert this group (or invest more time in advertising hoping to get more superusers/fanboys)
Depending on how technical you are / your audience is: Vysor or scrcpy. Vysor used to be a free chrome extension, but alas, no longer. https://fossbytes.com/android-screen-mirroring-apps-pc/
Brexiters are waking up to the damage they've done
You were probably not contagious during those first days (at least for everyone except your partner).The threshold for the rapid test is higher than what the PCR detects. The antigen test is highly reliable for catching contagiousness, not just any viral load. Michael Mina (Harvard Biologist) presents the data in a great way if you want to check.
Proxmox VE Lenovo Nano Cluster
Handling disasters has always been the states' responsibility. They are the ones with the power to address this. That part of the constitution is still intact. This is why Biden can suggest wearing masks, but is powerless to mandate them, amongst other things.

I think that it is wishful thinking to believe the military could be re-purposed to make a significant difference. Their job is to blow things up and kill people. It seems the field hospitals deployed were a drop in the bucket, and I assume that all doctors and nurses are already busy. What else would you expect from them, or the rest of the federal government? I'd be afraid of a single bad solution being forced on everyone. The feds have a pretty bad record of moving fast.

Perhaps this is just a difficult situation and is not going to go as smooth as you'd wish? There's no magic bullet here. It's a pandemic. Covid has killed as many people per-capita as the low end of the estimated 1-4 million deaths from the 1968 Hong Kong flu. These things happen.

Also there is no widespread disagreement on what the response should be. i.e. Would our national response follow the NY model or the Florida model?

Yes, I would blame states for local problems. If your state setup a system leaving twelve local $20/hr employees in a bad situation I would say that is your state's fault. What makes you think the feds could do a more effective job?

Not all states are doing a bad job.
Amusingly enough, saprotrophic fungi come the closest to putting this idea into practice. Their enzymes externally digest decaying matter, I.e. the disorganized jumble of proteins and nutrients “left over” from dead organisms.
My sympathies are with Kashmiris but you have to admit Mirwaiz who sees a Qadiani behind every corner and Syed Ali Shah Geelani are not good PR for you.
> In the context of software development?

While your examples I'm not sure are super relevant from a software development context. I think you're pointing out that the estimate would help you decide when you need to start so you are done before the "real life events that needs the thing".

Is that correct?

Like for example I'm not sure it's useful to learn that no, you will not be ready for the Christmas event. Or no the cruise ship will not be ready in time. But it might be useful to know: "If I want to be ready for the Christmas event when should I get started and how many developers do I need?"

That's a good example I guess, though I haven't seen this issue arise very often in software. I could imagine someone needing to know when to start feature freeze and prep work for scaling up leading up to a big sale event if you run an online store for example.

My take on this is that asking devs to guess that time would obviously not work. And if you did this type of forecasting for any other discipline, you'd instead gather historical data about how much time things took in the past and plot that to forecast how much you'd think it takes in the future. Which is a process that can be done without needing to ask a dev for their personal not data based guesstimate.