skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
While you do interface with it all the time, it's not something you'll be thinking all the time, at some point it will be completely invisible even though it's there (unless you're that bored). What will really be a big part of the experience is what offers actual resistance to solving your problem and actively waste brain power and not muscle memory, be it the fact that language semantics forces you to write the same thing all the time when a particular feature (like macros) could handle it trivially, the lack of some particular type safety makes it so you keep losing time debugging the same error, the interactive tools being lacking forcing you to waste time debugging with prints, you have a workflow where the JIT lag keeps breaking your pace, the community doesn't have a culture of documentation making it so you'll lose time trying to decode the source, etc...
(Interview I Did) Lessons Learned from Code.org Founder and CEO Hadi Partovi
All of buganizer, monorail, launchpad have a way to indicate that a bug affects you too. Launchpad literally has a button that says "this bug affects me".

People simply act obnoxious and entitled for its own sake.
Would you please stop breaking the site guidelines? You've been doing it repeatedly (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25819408). That's not cool.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I have seen that a lot of people that now have "software engineering" titles that are not doing "engineering of software". They're doing network/platform management or some other task that doesn't involve the actual design and architecture of software systems. ie. it's more of a payscale for HR than an actual discipline

Engineers should be able to understand design principles and be able to architect a new system from those principles. In today's world i think we are moving further away from this than closer. We spend much of our time learning trivia such as how to fiddle with a particular software platform to get it to work.

Additionally with all the various abstractions that we have built (lock-in cloud services, high level languages, proprietary platforms, etc) many people are no longer capable of discussing with you what is happening on the CPU or how data should flow through a system or the disadvantages of a distributed architecture, etc.

I think that software engineering is still in it's infancy in someways and hasn't yet matured enough to be an engineering discipline. That being said there is an egalitarian quality about being a "software engineer". We're all software engineers.
That doesn't imply anything about estimates.

Do they tell you at the beginning of that cycle what features to expect? Or do they constantly work on features, and then at presentation time do a freeze?
It would be interesting to see this compared as a 1:1 overlap with BLM land in the western states.
No, that’s not the most likely explanation - it’s actually very unlikely.

Medallion is not unique, there are other firms with comparable win record (Virtu, a Czech one, an Israeli one and a couple of British ones at the very least) but only 5-10% of the size; of all these, only Virtu is public and verifiable, the others aren’t but you can find people who will confirm it off the record.

People were begging Simons to take money. He wouldn’t let them into medallion (why should he share?) but he did start a higher-risk, lower-reward business and let’s people into that.

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.

What’s Virtu’s or RenTexh’s/Medallion edge? I don’t know. In the past, they seemed to like people with speech/hmm background. But that was before the DNN / differential computing revolution. I have no idea where there edge is now (and actually whether hmm was their edge in the past - but it did seem to be quite common background among their recruits)

That said, they may or may not be tax frauds as well - I have no idea. But I don’t see any reason to suspect they are doing retroactive allocation of successful trades.
> It is my understanding that it is the states' responsibility to handle situations like this.

Its only the state's responsibility now because the federal government fumbled hard initially and had to pass blame because it was an election year. When is the last time states had to handle disaster relief on this scale with little to no assistance from the Federal government? A strong central force is crucial to handling crises like this, ours just blew it.

You can have input from local officials on setting up locations and timelines for clinics, but the 12 people making 20$/hr working in my local health department shouldnt have to deal with some of the most complex logistics the country has ever seen.

This is absolutely the best time to mobilize the massive military logistics chain in order to distribute and use vaccines as fast as possible.

If states are truly doing a great job (not many are), they can always decline assistance, but it isnt even being offered in the first place at this point.

> At some point politicians need to be held accountable. Passing the buck for everything is not a great answer.

Are you not just passing the blame onto local politicians and off of the federal level ones that hold most of the power?
> ...nobody cares!
> Nobody learns.
> It's insane.

Estimation is really hard, especially if you're dealing with new challenges, new people, and new expectations. Throwing moving targets (unplanned changes) into the mix, as you noticed, makes estimation even more difficult.

The thing is, it very rarely is the case that a wrong estimate will sink a project. Things get delivered late all the time. No one dies. Most stakeholders aren't like two year olds throwing a tantrum because an unforeseen problem delays a deliverable by a few days (admittedly some are close).

The actual definition of failure also needs to be considered. Is it considered a failure because a project manager ended a colored gantt bar at a particular date and the actual time was longer? Or is it a failure because the customer cancelled the contract because a deliverable was not available on the agreed-upon date? Or is it something far more nebulous, like a slow death march towards a misguided goal that burns everyone out and compels them to sip artisanal coffee and daydream about leaving instead of grinding onwards and hitting targets?

Ultimately, people "don't care" because accurate estimates are not the most critical problem on their mind. Most of the time an accurate answer to "When will it [the deliverable] be done?" has about as much gravitas as guessing the number of jellybeans in a jar at a kid's birthday party.

Doing a retrospective and analyzing what went wrong when a project delivery slipped expectations is certainly reasonable but it so easily slips into a blame storm and/or people making commitments that aren't realistic. Getting straight answers from folks for this kind of analysis requires a level of psychological safety that just isn't present in most workplaces.
"If your main concern is old computers the solution is to use a proxy that strips the encryption."

Why not also use the proxy to add encryption when it is missing. Then "HTTPS-only" is not necessary. The decision of which scheme to use, http:// or https://, rests with the user, not the server.
Agreed, before GDPR the largest internet companies were essentially just data collection firms.
Such a great timepiece
This looks great. Looking forward to firefox support.
To paraphrase someone paraphrasing someone in another thread:

"They're a private country they can do what they like. If Google and Facebook don't like it they can make their own Australia"
I wish as much attention was paid to perform post mortems regularly then to only do estimation. You know, actually look at "hey, this is what we guessed and this is what actually happened".

I've had to fight to actually hold post mortems, and every time I've done this, the manager ends up asking, "hey, can I share this?"

So clearly, there's value, at least when we've done them.

I'm amazed at how few places even perform a complete feedback loop. It's just, "when can you get this done?" and, "is it done yet?".
Yes, along with everyone else, the NSA exists.
For a time I had a slightly different perspective.

I did my utmost to actually use Google services for everything I could, on the assumption that as there will almost certainly be tracking going on at least that way only one company had my data. By de-Googling I would be spreading my information across a wider catchment and hence increasing my exposure, whereas by being all-in on Google I kept tighter control.

As Google has become more and more untenable (as well as falling behind on their offerings) I've been de-Googling for a while. All my email is now custom-domain Fastmail, for Drive I use PCloud, for search it's DuckDuckGo, for browser it's Brave or Safari, and I've stopped all 3rd party analytics on principle.

The hold-out, and I think it is probably acceptable, is Go :) - next stop is to de-Amazon.
> the few kids who do need real homes

You have to be kidding me. Do you know how many kids are literal orphans in sub-saharan Africa?
> police guns being pointed at [...] her children.

I've seen body camera footage from this search warrant raid and never saw any guns pointed at her kids. Do you have a video that shows what you claim? I think this claim is misinformation.
It's not obvious how prefetching the next address would make things run that much faster - you don't know a given address until you execute the load. That said, there is definitely an extra cycle in your dependency chain to do the XOR, which you might well notice if your linked list is in cache (that extra cycle will show up).

We had a discussion on Twitter about some sort of superfast magic prefetcher that may well have been on the M1 which arguably could shave some cycles off list traversal, and there was a theory that an XOR-list would have been a good negative benchmark to prove/disprove this, but nothing came of it.

The limitation is worse than you say; you can't even navigate from an item just by knowing its address (not just remove/erase something). So any given iterator into this list has to have 2 pointers (say, the item and its predecessor).

It's a weird structure. There's probably almost certainly some peculiar use case for it somewhere, but I've never encountered such a case.
Incidentally, over the weekend I listened to a two-hour-long presentation[1] by the cognitive scientist, Mark Turner[2]. The talk's main goal was to explore the question "Does cognitive linguistics offer a way forward for second-language teaching?"

During the Q&A, Turner explicitly mentions GPT-3 (that's when I first heard of it) as a "futuristic (but possible) language-learning environment" that is likely to be a great boon for second-language learners. One of the appealing points seems to be "conversation [with GPT-3] is not scripted; it keeps going on any subject you like". Thus allowing you to simulate some bits of the gold standard (immersive language learning in the real world).

As an advanced Dutch learner (as my fourth language), I'm curios of these approaches. And glad to see this open source model. (It is beyond ironic that the so-called "Open AI" turned out to have dubious ethics.)

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A4Q977p8PfQ

[2] Check out the excellent book he co-authored, "Clear and simple as the truth"—it has valuable insights on improving writing based on some robust research.
Yes, I expect practitioners to care about something useful, assuming the result has been properly written up and explained in a way they can understand. Scientists want good results and will adopt new tools if you can make a case that they will help them publish impactful papers.

Again, it's pretty telling specific applications aren't mentioned, and instead there's just vague gesturing. How can we expect scientists to "do the field work" necessary to bring the applications to fruition if we can't even tell them what those applications are?

Also, regarding your first sentence, the vast majority of influential mathematics was indeed "immediately acknowledged," because it made progress on some important problem. Perfectoid spaces are a recent example.
But that's the point. Months ago, they had "caught something". And that something was her using some sort of system to send an org wide email to people after she had been fired. Now it's a whole new "something" and everyone is supposed to go along with it.
GraphQL is one.

Here's an article making the argument for it
https://blog.spaceuptech.com/posts/why-we-moved-from-grpc-to...
Sure. A lawyer may have a pretty good idea of how a particular task or case is likely to play out but there's a lot that isn't under their control. I imagine something like drafting a will is relatively straightforward but I also imagine a criminal case has a huge number of variables.
Maybe not what you're looking for, but in the same ballpark:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_(TV_series)

https://www.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults?sts=t&cm_sp=S...

https://www.amazon.com/s?k=burke+connections&tag=duckduckgo-...
> Nah, not in the mood for a voluntary paycut and demotion.

No worries, It's understandable to not be in the mood to take a role where 10 to 20 million+ concurrent users already scares you to not bother applying anyway, despite your 'experience'.

> But even if I was, I'm not the one running around telling extremely experienced devs that they should rewrite their apps in a different language because of a "web scale" cargo cult.

So even when Signal is actually seeking those who have 'Deep knowledge of Erlang experience' in their server-side roles, In your view, they and I are 'cargo-culting'? Come on now.

> I have nothing to prove to them, unlike you.

Says the person who just yelled 'I have first hand experience' and then immediately bails out when challenged to apply said experience after 'daring' someone to create another competing open source messaging app using Erlang for free. Ha.

Sounds like it would have just been better to not even mention you have said 'experience' after all.
This comment breaks two of the most important site guidelines:

"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."

"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."

Please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here. We're trying to avoid shallow, repetitive discussion, because it's boring [1], and because it has a tendency to get nastier as it goes along [2].

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
Where do our minds wander? Brain waves can point the way
We should be extremely critical of the sweetheart corporate giveaways and if the Amazon project had gone forward I'm sure it would have had more then it's share of reality not living up to promises.

It's easy for politicians and companies to make nice PR statements about theoretical jobs that will be created but reality frequently doesn't live up to it

These sort of subsidizes should be banned. Cities should complete on infrastructure and we'll educated work force not giveaways
Thank you. I'm happy that we speak the same language!

Getting out the big guns in solo freelance is like going to the hardware store and buying the most complex and expensive drill possible. Only to arrive home full of sweat to drill a 5mm hole.

(FYI: I love expensive drills, but I don't own one)
The underlying layer is problem solving: digging deeper until you find the problems to solve. Then there's product and management. Then there is writing software and the skills inherent to it. Then there are the methodologies. Then there are the tools.

It is a combination of all these and more. You take one out, and you're developing for the wrong problem or one that does not exist. You take the other, and you take too long or do it. You take yet another, and you're making cool technology for its own sake. You take the other, and you're solving problems in the wrong order. You take another, and people are making different things than the one you're thinking about.

Depending on what you are trying to accomplish, you stress on one more than the others. It is a balancing act in which the weights and priorities change, assumptions change, landscape changes.

You can follow agile all you want, if you're in a brainstorming meeting where you haven't clearly defined the problem, the job to be done, and are instead talking about buttons and interfaces, the project will fail and not all the great code will save you. It is tricky especially if you are with a client and they're very into it and you have to focus everyone on problems.

You can have SWEBOK in your head, if you are too dogmatic about it you risk of missing the bigger picture, or a market.

You can wield GitHub, GitLab, and editors all you want, if it is your main concern you risk of spending way more time on their interfaces than thinking.

You can know all these, if you don't get out of your metaphorical room to confirm the problem exists, or lack interviewing skills to extract a problem, then the software will be a thought experiment with no usage.

What are you up to? Working on an idea?
I believe the cheapest energy sources are used. You can't compete on the mining market with the coal power in my region, for example.

The cheapest electricity in the world tends to be hydro or subsidized.

I assume countries that heavily subsidize power will crack down on mining.
Yes, the opposition to prudent measures that would have saved lives and helped the economy is mind boggling and frustrating.

And you don't need to impose something from above to lead.
There is something special about software engineering that deserves a bit of thought - the discipline is all of 70-80* years old. There are people on HN who are older than software engineering.

Engineering is very much about the accumulation of experience - the reason all the planning is up front isn't because the Secret Society of Engineers said so, but because they are practicing something that has between hundreds (electrical, maybe ~200 years) and thousands (mining, dates back to the stone age) of years experience.

In 100 years, software engineers will have an enormous advantage over almost all non-engineers at designing and running software projects. There'll be a few amateur prodigies that nobody trusts, and putting an engineer in charge of software projects will mysteriously trigger a lack of things going wrong.

Software isn't unpredictable. Nearly nothing is unpredictable. The process of figuring out which bits are predictable isn't finished because the hardware keeps changing and forcing the tech stack to change. When the S-curve of hardware progress flattens, software engineering will gain in importance.

* Changed from 20-30 because that was wrong. Changes none of the arguments.
> "Special pleading that our industry is somehow the only one that faces uncertainty and novelty doesn't really hold water."

I'm sure you're right. I don't think we should abandon all hope. I just think we should be more honest. I also think that software has fewer constraints than other industries, which is a blessing and a curse for estimation
> they pressured her to make the numbers look better

I'm surprised more people don't know how common this is in other states. I have a bunch of anecdotal evidence and articles on both sides of the aisle contending either the numbers are too high or too low - depending on your political affiliation.

This whole COVID affair has been politicized from the outset, which is sad. It feels like the scientific data is being manipulated on both sides to create a political narrative in order to benefit one party or the other.

It looks like politics has overrun the scientific community.
Haha!

Thank you for such a kind feedback!

Paul
I have read that in the 1930s, the city of Rome, Texas, sent a letter to the New York Times to protest that it was not the Rome that had just invaded Ethiopia. I guess this could be an apocryphal story.
I think this question always poses something about status insecurity as the old discussion of what makes a "true" software developer.
Engineering and Software Development share a key characteristic which is about inventing and implementing things.
The key difference is that engineering is fundamentally based on applied physics and math where software development doesn't care about physics because it's an already solved abstraction in this discipline.
The judicial system as a whole may be apolitical but there are large pockets of corruption in the south. Pat my back kind of corruption. DeSantis is just following what Rick Scott and Marco Rubio have been doing for over a decade. Appoint someone to a position of power and blackmail them into doing what you want them to, threatening removal of the very position they were just appointed to.
Honestly, many of these images aren't that far off.

Replace the mechanisms with today's robots or the rural postman with a digital worker (email).

Flying cars may still be a ways off, but flying busses (airplanes) are certainly quite commonplace and have transformed the world.
Adopting baby is significantly easier then older kids, because older kids are affected by their previous experiences, abandonment, massively dysfunctional familly, death of parents and so on.
My problem with this is all estimation is hard. Period. Quantitative discussions of something that has been done? Fairly easy, if still not accurate.

Discussing something that hasn't been rehearsed before? You can really only discuss how long you are willing to work on it. Not how long it will take to get done.

Fun examples. How long would it take you to clean out your fridge? How long would it take you to learn to play a song on piano?
I’m thinking about scrum product master certificate (it’s not free), it might be more recognized profesionally (next to neverending courses and content you can get your hands on)
It helps clarify to what standards software is supposed to adhere. As the author points out, the key feature of engineering is building to specification. Engineers have formal processes, standards, fault tolerances and expectations.

The people who write software for a space-shuttle do engineering work, your average app store app is likely not 'engineered'.

I think it matters because it says a lot about how seriously the software industry as a whole takes the quality of its products and to what standards we hold software and with what goals in mind we make software. If we treated software like engineers treat aircrafts we'd likely have a lot less of it, but what we had would probably not crash that often.

The debate is tied to the debate about why so much software today feels so terrible and bloated and that makes it relatively important in my opinion.
Yup, the R-FAQ specifically calls out Dylan and CL as influences.
Based on that, would you also say that American's don't have a love affair with firearms?
Yeah in retrospect it was a really awful job, I can leave whenever I need now.
That is the degenerate scenario, but it’s not always true.

Often I see this haggling down of estimates and then microagression if estimates are not met but no need to work for free to make up for it.

And I’ve also seen wise use of estimation but that is rarer!