skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm a bit of a centrist here:

I think of software lies somewhere nebulously between craftsmanship and engineering.

There's a flavor of pure craftsman/artisan that can make an excellent product with overall little "technical" knowledge. A traditional potter works much on instinct, texture, feel. He might know how to select a clay by color, not knowing or even thinking about the constituent minerals. Water is added in eye-measured doses.

Then, there's a flavor of pure engineer that executes most of his tasks in structured, industry-prescribed, formally-verified, deterministic ways. Particle aerospace engineers are the extreme in this category--they're a slave to the formal methods that rule their design, build, and test processes.

But we software "engineers" float back and forth between the two--and all the time. One minute, we might hacking together a throwaway script that checks if Amazon has toilet paper. The next: writing a test for a rules engine that tests every corner case in a truth table. Or proving that some algo runs in O(log n) time.

Most craftsmen/artisans lie somewhere on this spectrum, but I feel we software "engineers" wobble around a large swath.

So, call us software engineers, call us software craftsmen--they both apply.
Yes, I agree. Iran's supreme leader is still on twitter. But a counterpoint is that that ISIS was driven out of twitter and FB systematically. Correct me but you're implying in your statement is they "eliminated the one they didn't like [because of political views]" but that's not necessarily the only reason

EDIT: Given your other responses, we're at an impasse. Bowing out.
> so does not require impartiality, only adherence to reality.

Adherence to reality is the better part of impartiality.
It’s still plain ole libel or defamation. Musk was sued for defamation on Twitter not too long ago.
> There are clear reasons why individual US states haven't been able to provide universal health care. It's not because the idea is unworkable at a national level; it's because you can't do it state-by-state.

How do you figure? This is exactly how Canada's single payer system came about: province-by-province. Saskatchewan was the first Province to offer single payer in 1947, followed by Alberta in 1951, etc. By 1961, all Provinces had some form of a single payer healthcare system. To this day, Canada's single-payer system is Provincial, not Federal.
I think the discussion shouldn't be about what should be censorship but rather who decides it. So if you put, lets say illegal pornography, on your page, then there is a law that forbids it. Especially in a good system the person who posted it gets prosecuted. On the other hand if companies act like judge and low, it can lead to bad things I think.
Agreed, as an example this could have been exploited by leak sites to get unlisted videos prior to public announcements/launches.
If the goal of a blog is to get people to know you better, not just share knowledge, then gist isn’t a great platform for that. People would rather have a blog with clearer branding and personality, that promises more polish, and an offers to give you many ways to get to know the blogger.

I use gist for informal things I don’t have time to turn into a great blog article yet. Or half constructed notes that can live in a pastebin.

I guess I’m curious why medium is the only alternate you list to gist as opposed to creating your own blog outside of medium?
What I find noticeable is how it misses automotive infrastructure entirely, and instead focuses on aeroplanes. Some cars are depicted, but roads in the rural depictions are still dirt roads, not anticipating they would be paved. Paved roads did exist before the 1890s, as they were generally used for cyclists.

With the Panhard brothers arranging the Paris to Lyon race in the 1890s, you'd think the artist would have heard of this, and anticipated more cars. Notice the background of the cities, there are almost no cars on the streets.
it's pretty a well known saying that the last 10% of any project takes 90% of the time.
Ohio has about the same overall population density as Spain.
$40k is a lot to put in a business you have no idea if it can make money or whether it is needed.

It's a definite that people have to eat. I would assume most failures in restaurants and convenience stores are operations, not a critically flawed business model.

---

But yes, I guess $40k is less than $2M, but it also takes $40k away from another venture and possibly having to go back to a day job to take another run at something.

All because you didn't validate the problem before cutting off your income source.
I love it. This is an excellent product.
Environment variables, config, secrets, and globals
Because that's how its expressed. Like other criticism in this now fashionable genre, it accuses technology of being the problem. Of course this is a complete red herring, but it bites, because commenting on the actual source of the problem will make you sound like you're just rehashing Marxist tropes, which everyone has heard already and thus they don't drive engagement.
I'm mostly a vegetarian except that I do take molecularly distilled fish oil. Very simple way to get some of the health benefits of seafood consumption but take no risk.

However, I actually feel mercury isn't nearly the bugaboo that vegan proponents often make it out to be. High ocean mercury levels have been a thing for over 100 years. Yet a great many studies have found seafood to be beneficial to longevity and overall health.

All of your points sound like vegan talking points, but to each their own.
The author might not like Pinker's writing, but this hardly speaks against Pinker's advice. I have a feeling he read the first chapter of The Sense of Style and decided the whole thing is bullshit because it's about style and not substance.

But the author clearly accepts the need for some level of style. The blog theme they use has a readable column-width, a table of contents, etc. And the advice they give fits with Pinker's. For example, "Rich outlines" is relevant to chapter 5 of Pinker, "Arcs of Coherence."

> I want to get some information from them and I want to get examples and counterexamples for the points they make. I want them to get to the point.

Pinker's book is fairly dense on the advice front, and chock full of examples. Including ones about academic writing that involve shorter sentences and more clarity, like rewording "Participants read assertions whose veracity was either affirmed or denied by the subsequent presentation of an assessment word" into "We presented participants with a sentence, followed by the word 'true' or 'false'."

> The first advice you need to give to an academic writer is not to read a book on stylish writing but rather to read how people in their field are writing. Because those are their potential readers....

Sure, but they don't have to be the only readers, and jargon and bad style make a community insular. And beside, even for those readers, the point (particularly beyond chapter 1) is that conveying meaning efficiently requires sound structure.

One gets the feeling that the author likes jargon and density for its own sake, or because it makes the author feel like a member of the community. They seem to assume that better-styled writing will necessarily be less scrupulous:

> clear explicit structure and moderately shorter sentences. No stories, no metaphors, no flourishes. No avoidance of passives or reduction of adverbs. No worries about technical language. Just these two. They will not only make the academic writing easier to read, they will also make it more scrupulous.

Okay, maybe stories aren't appropriate in academic papers, nor inexact metaphors, but so what? That's not a matter of style.

And why just these two? Would the author's thesis be better stated as "worry about structure and concision first"? Because I don't think Pinker's book would disagree with that.
I was playing the role of many possible counter-arguments to the parent comment. None of the views I expressed were actually representative of me. I was saying 'if I believed...' because I think many people on the other side actually believe what I put out there and if parent wants to make change, he/she'll have to acknowledge it.

I personally don't actually believe that the country is irreparably divided and I try to bridge divides when I see it.

But I'm sure millions of americans are jaded beyond that point and take the positions I offered in my original comment.
>All of these seem like very reasonable justifications to rethink the way we build software, to change what's standard practice or to invent new tools that solve old problems in a modern context. To some degree the clock on when our industry starts accumulating stable knowledge won't start ticking until these kinds of changes stop happening.

But we already have stable knowledge that's simply not considered valuable. Your list of changes over the decades is of course a change but I don't understand why the attitude is "unless things stay stable over the next 30 years, there's no point in trying".

All those SOLID, agile, TDD, DDD, micro-services memes that are being implemented so superficially and cargo-cultishly are actually grounded in a real understanding that has a context, constraints, and trade-offs. The issue is that superficial and cargo-cult application. "Software engineers" that decide they're going to do micro-services without understanding what it solves, how it solves it and what they're trading off. And a business that doesn't care or know enough to ask for better. Maybe they don't need better! Maybe it's ok to slap together and the product will be equally mediocre whether the devs use cargo-cult pattern X or not. Maybe the quality doesn't matter that much to the business. In which case the devs being hired also don't need to actually know that much software engineering. In which case maybe the idea of electrical engineer vs electrician makes sense here too.
Always question everything you are told, especially by central authorities, mainstream popular media, etc.

Seek out information from variety of sources and discern the truth from fiction.

What you may think is evidence may be completely opposite of what it actually is.

Especially any narratives that are pushed to convince people to voluntarily give up privacy and freedoms.

Just look at all the regular people going around screaming at other people to put on masks. What happened to make these people go screaming at other people?

If you're on this board and worked on tech projects, you should be able to spot propaganda in process.

Good luck.
I'm sure that happens occasionally as well.

I get it, sales people can be annoying but it really only hurts your business (in this hypothetical case) if you have a user retention problems and are actively fighting against people trying to help you solve that problem with a mutually beneficial business agreement.

They will call the next person on their list, I'm sure it won't matter much.
No platform recourse and they didnt even ban the material, even today. You could say the capital protestors were “mostly peaceful” as well as the vast majority did not storm the building. Even those on the capital steps were a tiny minority of who showed up. Im really not here to argue case by case and combat mental gymnastics for why one sides extremism is ok but the others is not. Im simply pointing out that all platforms have extremism and calls for violence but only one was banned swiftly.
You can open an article for no paywall on Medium, but they purposely make it difficult by requiring you to sign up for their partner program (and provide all your taxpayer / payment information) to do so.

So I think it's a split between people who want to try and generate some revenue, and those that don't want to sign up for that program and are too used to Medium to switch away.
Yes, because doing something and being accused of something don't meet the same bar of evidence.

Meanwhile, the Trump and children have been a Masterclass of nepotism and corruption. Let me know when one of Biden's children become an Aide to the President or put in charge of pandemic response, middle east peace, federal government reform, or the dozen other things Javanka was put in charge of despite being absolutely ignorant and unqualified in those topics.
> _9MOTHER9HORSE9EYES9, sometimes abbreviated to 9M9H9E9 or MHE, is the screen name of an anonymous writer of creepypasta speculative fiction on the social news website Reddit. [1]

This looks like a fun read. This style of fiction and writing is really interesting. I’m a huge fan of scp foundation [2] and their universe. Any other similar suggestions would be welcome.

1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/9MOTHER9HORSE9EYES9

2. http://www.scpwiki.com
Which "lifestyle diseases" are you thinking of? Both obesity and diabetes are markedly more common in rural America compared to urban America, but there is a confounding factor of poverty.
See my parent comment:

The problem is even if Newsom/Getty does get replaced there are few credible politicians on the horizon who can handle the massive debt load, complex layers of bureaucracy, alarming levels of graft and extreme levels of economic hardship.
I was ready to agree with you because question in the OP wasn't so bad, but "So you have perfect user retention then?" -- seriously? Yeah, that's being demeaning. Maybe being demeaning is a good sales technique, I dunno, but that's definitely being a jerk.

But "Are you sure increasing your user retention isn't worth something to you?" or something like that maybe.
We're also at the point now where you have to ask which cloud is deplatforming a site. (edit, and their state alignment)

Case in point, Russia is now routing Parler traffic.

https://twitter.com/VickerySec/status/1351227537985318929?s=...

https://twitter.com/dtemkin/status/1351240721261584385?s=20 (edit)
> it's probably less well known and less widely taught than it should be

This seems an important mechanism for science education content and instruction remaining wretched.

Consider "a 5-year old asks 'the Sun is a ball?! What color is the ball?!". Certainly some instructors teach it correctly. But the top 10-ish most used introductory astronomy textbooks have it wrong. And thus so do most first-tier astronomy graduate students. And this state has been stable for decades.

> the explanation is not novel to this article

Science education research is distinct from the underlying science research. If those colleagues didn't write it up and publish it, perhaps because they didn't see chemistry education research as their field... oh well.

The paper's existence makes it ever so slightly more likely some future content author gets it right, or is ever so slightly more embarrassed at having it wrong, and thus to revise it. Which over decades can sometimes move the needle. And being part of a research literature permits incremental collaborative correction, refinement, reference, and citation.

> It's counterintuitive to many people that the formation of strong bonds results in the production of heat!

A similar case. Some instructors do mention that attraction in bonds is almost all classical electrostatic attraction. Which makes this an intuitive extension of gravitational and electrostatic potential. But most instructors and textbooks don't. And so people struggle. Maybe a science education research paper or three might help. Or an interactive electron density model web app? (Something on my infinite todo list, using precomputed densities from GPAW:)
I have no doubt in my mind that the violence would have been much worse had Trump won, and while I am happy we bid the bullet, I can’t help wondering how tech and media would have responded.
> How “old” is a single-celled organism?

Good question, I looked around a bit for this, it seems the life of a single celled organism is taken to be from division to the next division, but really this is a bit odd, because nothing died there. Clearly age for such organisms is not a well defined concept.
Cringely's first prediction for 2021 is about Trump prospering on the web
"Following the U.S. Capitol riot of January 6th, President Trump was bumped from nearly all social media, even YouTube, with many of those changes subsequently made permanent...Even Trump, the technical luddite, will figure it out and roar back shortly with or without those accounts..."
I'm interested in the following example (3x speedup), and is it possible to read more details about their project?

(From the hpcwire article) "During his talk, Edelman presented an example in which a group of researchers decided to scrap their legacy climate code in Fortran and write it from scratch in Julia. There was some discussion around performance tradeoffs they might encounter in the move to a high level programming language. The group was willing to accept a 3x slowdown for the flexibility of the language. Instead, said Edelman, the switch produced 3x speedup."
> That's what they want you to think. In practice it never really happens. Too expensive. Hence the spam.

It happened to me. A very nice man knocked on the door and delivered a speech about the licence fee. I told him we just use the TV to watch Netflix and Amazon Prime. He filled in a form and we haven't had one of those annoying letters since.
You can name anything you want, the career is not a protected name. Software directors? Code artists? Byte doctors? Anything’s possible, nobody cares
Thank you for your feedback! We have thought about it on higher resolutions. Not sure yet if and when we will implement but noted.

PS. You can use a shortcut to open the last component category (press C on your keyboard)
Is this similar to Investor's Exchange? https://iextrading.com/

Similar principle... IIRC it delays execution to try and prevent HFT. A big part of Flash Boys by Michael Lewis was chronicling the history of what led to this exchange being created.
SMS Productivity App.

You text it, and we keep you on track in achieving your goals and maintaining high output and productivity. I was tired of wasting my time on what doesn't matter most. The goal of this app is to make me hyper-focused and empowered to focus on what matters most! Less stress, more time on things I want to do!
Too late to edit: I meant to qualify the last sentence that Vitamin D supplements are probably more beneficial in winter, for people not exposing their skin to sun or those with high levels of melanin.

For context, related HN submission on this issue – Lack of Vitamin D is associated with SARS-CoV-2 infection and mortality: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25618273
I think the explanation was made in another comment where they say "don't forget to estimate time for research & design", which explains why the *3 multiplier works for me. And yes, I feel that most of the work is redundant, there's always like network services of some sort or web pages, databases, linux servers, a humain interface, other services depending on the project like a message queue or a caching server or both, background workers and scheduled code execution... things I had been doing for ~10 years back in 2012. Data structures, workflows, they change between gigs, and each gig has its own particularity, but 90% is the redundant from a gig to another: HTML/CSS/JS/Python/SQL/Networking/Storage/Linux stuff
Nothing will pour more gas on that fire than censorship.

I basically agree with your analysis on that point, and I'm resentful of Trump for helping to create that problem. But I consider big tech censorship to be the first step to an inevitable end of democracy, "destroying it in order to save it".
Good luck getting the government to honor that. I can't even get a local court and state trooper to follow their own rules of procedures defined in code or basic civil rights.
Additionally, the process of doing the physical engineering has changed drastically -- computational tools, design space exploration, optimization methods. (recognizing that the grandparent comment stuck specifically to screw-tech, but it's interesting to think about physical-engineering-innovation in broad terms)

Then there are innovations in manufacturing enabling new designs. 3D printing is coming along. Not everybody has to pull from a catalog of shapes, thicknesses, etc, for structural design.
I do this as well.

I realized I needed one for my car-keys.
Bought more and put them into the "battery storage" area. Turns out I'd stored the exact same battery there previously (so I used that one instead).
Is the speech really the problem, or the echo chambers within which it is spoken?

The marketplace of ideas can't really function if people are only ever presented with a carefully tailored safe/comfortable subset of ideas.
Haven’t read this yet but: someday I’m going to write an article like this and the body will be: “because they’re paying me more and the work is more interesting“ and that’s it.

Any CEO who tells you “compensation shouldn’t be the reason you work here” is full of shit and gaslighting you.
China has acted suspiciously since the beginning and provides every reason to believe they're hiding evidence of wrong-doing or simple incompetence.
The strongest indication programming is not engineering is forgetting and reinventing the past

If it was engineering, or even a “profession”, experience would be prized, instead ageism is rampant.
I would think that context is also important.

Tweeting "burn the whole thing down" to a generally liberal crowd is a figure of speech which implies, by and large, the need for complete reform.

To far-right "conservatives", white supremacists, violent insurrectionists, and paranoid militias, it implies something completely different.

In other words, someone tweeting "burn the whole thing down" to a liberal following in regards to a judicial appointment is a very different thing from Trump or other far-right "influencers" tweeting "burn the whole thing down" to a large and frequently violent crowd in regards to their false claims of stolen elections, because it's reasonable to assume that people upset about the replacement of RBG aren't going to literally burn down the capitol, whereas it's clear that a (small but sufficiently significant) subset of Trump followers were not only willing to, but able to and intent on, burning down the Capitol in response to the false stolen election claims.
I don't accept the premise that you must choose between stylish and informative writing, but the argument fails at the outset. Complaining that Pinker (one assumes especially in his A Sense of Style, which I recommend without reservation) writes poorly for academics by focusing on his writing for a non-academic audience. If you desire a more "academic" style, Pinker is quite capable of providing it, if you look at his journal articles (the abstract to his Formal Models of Abstract Learning at https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/001002... should provide sufficient evidence of his familiarity with the norms). One important aspect of a writer's style is how it is directed toward the audience, and Pinker is frequently (and Gladwell is always) not writing for an academic audience. This post also has a fundamental begging-the-question problem: the academic writing it describes is not notable for an absence of style, but for a very specific terse style that is difficult to do well.
It’s true. Petty prosecutorial corruption is far too common everywhere for it to be labeled as “something you’d expect to see in Russia/China/etc” given the far worse things that go on in those places. But, please, let’s stop pretending this is something other than petty, obvious political corruption of prosecutorial power. We get it, she probably did something that is a crime by the letter of the law. What’s important—and I think you know this—is whether the decision to go after her so aggressively was the result of her going public about the covid data. For me, the suggestion that that isn’t the case here is comically naive or obtuse.