skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My own personal views (electrical engineer who deals a lot with software and who codes a lot) are that you can find people that can do engineering work without an engineering degree today. A lot of that stems from powerful software that abstracts away much of the math. So you can load a model into a vendor's product and run transmission load flows without much formal training. However, if you haven't taken any circuit classes, complex power, calculus...etc, you're never going to truly understand the results of what you're doing and the end results will suffer in quality. That's why engineers are generally hired (assuming a PE license isn't required) instead of anyone with a 4 year degree. Before computers, a lot of that would be done by hand (at least the calculations that were feasible at that time) and you would pretty much have to have gone through an engineering, physics, or math program to have those kinds of chops.

Software is different in a lot of ways. Especially at the high level, you are solving a puzzle. Let's say you need to generate a report. You've got all the tools in your language and several libraries. You know you'll have to talk to a database, pull down data into some kind of data structure, open a file handle, write the data, close the file, and save the results somewhere and then send an email. Is it technical? Yes. Challenging, well...maybe not this example, but software can be very challenging yes. But is it engineering? I wouldn't call it that. And no, I'm not sneering at it, or calling engineering superior. I just see the two as very different.

The stuff you do in engineering school (calculus, differential equations, statistics, linear algebra, circuit analysis, signal processing, Fourier transforms, control theory...etc as tools to solve problems with radio, industrial machines, turbines..etc) has pretty much zero to do with web design, standard business apps, databases, compilers...etc. If you use engineering as a general term to mean "make technical stuff" than you could apply it to either field equally, but engineering has already had a definition for many years and software is it's own thing. So use the term "coder", "developer", "programmer", "hacker", "complexity guru", or even "software engineer" as they all make sense. But the general term "engineer" would apply to mechanical, electrical, chemical, industrial, civil, biomedical...etc. All of those fields have the same core math classes and they then usually share an intermediate set of classes (thermodynamics, dynamics, statics, circuits...etc) before the advanced classes which specifically apply to your field. I don't think a very high percentage of coders (amazing, technical, often better paid, and very valuable as they are) have an overlapping lineage and language with what you would think of as traditional engineering. Believe me when I say I'm not gatekeeping the term either. I just honestly feel like there these things are taxonomically different. Maybe a new single word term should exist to convey what software developer does with two words.
It is sometimes effective. It is sometimes a harmful delusion.
In the US on self-referral plans (60% of health plans) you can get an appointment without any acute symptoms and with no delay versus a referral. I'd say that's a fairly large difference in ease of access without probably any impact on patient outcomes.
We’ve had a lot more success with avoiding no-shows by giving things away and selling things on Nextdoor.
It is if you're following agile principles. By the time you've completed a few stories you should be delivering every feature at production quality with all the automation pipeline and deployments ready. The question from that point is always did we build enough features for a launch.
The first Ace Attorney game must have been incredible value for Capcom's investment. The spartan, comic-like sprites and straightforward visual novel gameplay likely fit into a smaller ROM size. Given the charming narrative, I bet they made their ROI pretty quickly in the first print run.
Yes, in practice this interview style now achieves exactly the opposite goal that it was created for. That is, originally people wanted to base hiring on general problem solving skill, mapping out a problem domain with relevant questions, proposing solutions, identifying tradeoffs, reacting to a change in problem statement, etc. based on a pure computer science foundation, independent of ever changing software frameworks, libraries, APIs etc. Precisely because memorizing the specific steps of creating a CRUD mobile app in today's workflow is not useful later on. The problem is, Goodhart's law kicked in and performance in such puzzles became the target to optimize for, so it stopped being a good measure, because now people have to explicitly study for it from books and online courses and practice sites and so now it measures more of the effort you're willing to put in to jump hoops instead of actual problem solving aptitude.

An alternative could be to ask about a recent real-world project of the applicant, but that's also easier to rehearse.
I do a fair bit of writing at work of various different types of things.

For stuff that I'm doing on my own? I can estimate pretty well. I know more or less how long the writing will take based on length. I'll allocate more time for research if I need to do more than a base amount. And then I add some slack in case I'm struggling with something, priority interrupts happen, or I'm just not into it on some given day. (Underpromise. Overdeliver.) It only gets harder with bigger projects. It helps that I'm quite fast compared to most people so even with significantly underpromising people are usually very happy with the estimate.

But where it's really hard is work that involves getting buy-in and input from a lot of different people. Those always take forever. (And at this point I pretty much know they'll take forever, a lot of which is just latency rather than actual active work.)
This can also be seen as roots of matrices and is not exclusive to XOR, it can be done with addition and subtraction. I tried explaining it in [1].

[1]https://paureahack.blogspot.com/2016/04/swap-without-tempora...
The original american revolution was almost entirely propaganda driven by the elite and succeeded in convincing the population to move on.
Not only do we not know how to predict how long a software project will take, we don't even know how to predict what the end product will look like.

So who are we kidding?

Another way to look at it: take a small one-person project and assign it to three different developers. You may get wildly different results. How could you have predicted those differences in advance? Let alone apply that type of prediction across a large team.

About a dozen years ago I gave a presentation to the Silicon Valley Software Process Improvement Network (does it still exist?) My presentation: "Unsolved Problems of Software Maintenance." You think predicting greenfield development is difficult? Try predicting maintenance work, where figuring out what to do can be more than half the work.
I mean kudos, you have optimized as you should, for you. As a freelancer you have other concerns, but people that will maintain it will curse you (but that's what they're paid for). You have some very cool projects.
> published a message on the work network

I don't think the state found any evidence, after seizing her equipment, that this was her. Exfiltrating data is the sole charge sustained.
I think a better title would have been "most effort estimation literature relies on small datasets". The use of "fake" can be read as insinuating deliberate malpractice.
Any company with the trademark. And if they throw enough money at it, it won't matter who had it first (see: Amazon, Apple, /.+book/, etc).
My experience is that most customers are unwilling to wait for and pay for quality, especially if someone in the market sells a competing product (which itself is of low quality)
Assuming it's not locking an issue, I really like stalebots for internal projects. There are lots of things that just become moot after a while because things change so rapidly. If you run into the problem again, it's always easy to reopen the issue or refer to the old one, usually with more up to date context.

It also means if you sort issues by oldest and is:open, you get longstanding problems rather than "things we were worried about 2 years ago, but were never important enough to fix or close".
Were there any states that did real lockdowns or contact tracing? If not, then perhaps the political will did not exist to do so. There certainly is disagreement on such things. If peoples of so many states could not agree on more drastic measures, it would not have been right to impose them from above. Also the constitution limits what the federal government can do in this regard.
They should at least push it to both (maybe blocking issues/comments/etc on one of them).
But a language's syntax is something you interface with literally every single time you're using it.

Why would (even simple) aesthetic choices in syntax not matter, if they're such a big part of the experience?
Redirect loop on TFA?

Update: working now.
I have less then an year as software tester and I have a startup in web. I am wining around 300 EUR a month but the level of knowledge that I won is amazing. Even a freelancer business is trying to sign contract with me to establish them self as authority in the startup world. Don't worry just try
> "...with an open, freewheeling atmosphere more like a university department than a company." This gave me a pause. Which university department has "open, freewheeling atmosphere"?
Unfortunately in many ways it is still a dream.
The Supermassive Black Holes in the Galactic Cores May Be Wormholes
This is brilliantly put. That's pretty much what engineering is – constraints and tradeoffs – giving software project planning/execution a healthy vocabulary to talk about makes it so much better. Much of the crappy feeling that developers go through by putting themselves into a corner can be avoided if everyone had better mental/language models to think/talk about it.
Preferring text-only content is one of the reasons i come to HN a lot but as i get older my eyesight is getting worse. Maybe one day TTS will be good enough to be a pleasure to listen to but I think audio-only forum software could lead to interesting results.
Related:

The Risk Makers. The nuclear, auto, and food industries

https://onezero.medium.com/the-risk-makers-720093d41f01

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25824670
Unless you're sitting closer than two screen diagonals to your TV, it's a scientific fact that even with 20/20 vision you can't tell the difference between SD and HD.

Please reference the NHK's book on their analogue HD technology, Hi-Vision Technology, where they go into the psychovisual research extensively.
Chinese researchers unveiled the prototype for their new maglev train
Mercades cars do often have more features, but I also am skeptical of claims that they are of higher quality.
The enduring popularity of this question baffles me. I get it: other people like other things. But is it an idle enjoyment or is it something that helps conclude other things?
If what you're saying is true (and I maintain that it's not), then what happens to our claims of judicial impartiality in evaluating election fraud claims?

Nothing, you just have to use the right arguments.

You don't need to argue that judges are unbiased. You need to argue that judges have uniformly concluded that there is no merit to Trump's arguments, EVEN WHEN those judges should be expected to have a Republican bias.

That said, what do I believe to be true?

Judges, being human, cannot avoid having biases. But historically both parties have believed in selecting judges who do their best to be objectively neutral while having beliefs about the law that slant their decisions towards the party. The result has been fairly neutral and fair.

However our growing polarization has lead to an acceptance of picking more openly biased judges. This is leading to an increased strain on our justice system. Particularly with recent appointees in lower level courts, you cannot expect the judge to be fair. This is much less of an issue with more senior judges because they were first appointed a long time ago when norms about objectivity were stronger.

And yes, I worry about the future implied by our continuing increase in bias. Right now a significant fraction of the country believes lies about a stolen election. They will someday come back into political power. When they do, armed with the belief that elections are stolen, they will more openly try to steal them back.

Over history, a number of countries created constitutions modeled on ours. The usual end for those countries was increased polarization leading to a breakdown in government, and eventually a declaration of martial law by the President, transforming it into a dictatorship. Nothing prevents what has happened elsewhere, happening here. Our democracy held together this time, but it is eroding. We should be very concerned with the current trend.
Why 1.3? Most sites today are using TLSv1.2 at best, not 1.3.

One argument it is/was "security theater"[1] is that there were/are numerous programs that "added support for SSL/TLS" under pressure to conform but did not bother to add authenticaton measures such as hostname checking and validation, which was not even a function of the OpenSSL library until 2015.

1. Adopting SSL/TLS for accessibility reasons instead of security reasons.
You are exactly correct.

That is why Honda is a bigger company than Mercedes. They do decent quality (Hondas cost more than Kias), but at scale.

I worked for a "Mercedes-level" photographic equipment company for years. People were often quite surprised, when I told them the size of the company. It was like Roadhouse "I thought you'd be bigger."

Our prototypes were incredibly expensive. A $2,000 (retail) body prototype would be insured at half a million bucks.

I just find, in my experience, managers expect Mercedes-level quality, for Kia (not even Honda) prices, and (if you are lucky) mature Honda assembly line development speed.

That can lead to real Jurassic-scale disasters. If you want that level of quality, you need to plan for it.

I'm working on the app that I'm doing, because I was helping a friend of mine evaluate contractors for his dream.

The promises they made were absurd. After a couple of these, I just said "Screw it. I'll do it for you."

He'll be getting Mercedes quality, but he'll need to wait a bit longer for it. I am pretty good at doing damn good; damn fast.

But he also won't be paying a dime for it, so I think he's good with that.
1. and 2. nice reasoning. I have been considering adding Typescript recently. Mainly as I sometimes encounter bugs on e.g. an options object where a property is named incorrectly. That tends to lead to hours of debugging, so it'd be reasonable to start using it.

Re: third party code: I'm not against third-party libs. But what I tend to prefer is having control over my code. This makes me faster in building and maintaining. I'm a solo freelancer. I can't afford to wait three days for a PR upstream to be merged.

Also, I like to create my own little dependency. That way I have a way to create separate and loosely coupled APIs (shareable) and control.
A New Resource for AI, Litigation and Human Rights
Behaving morally and doing useful work aren't the same thing. Imagining Jesus is behind my shoulder might make me question my need for masturbation, but it sure won't help focusing on code.
UK system after war was heavily reliant on nuns and monks for running orphanages and work schools and such.

It was horrible match and there was huge amount of abuse going on.
The homicide rate in Bangladesh is half of what it is in the US, and not far off from wealthy countries with gun control, like Canada or Belgium. Yes, there are a lot of bad things that happen in Bangladesh--it's a very poor country, with limited law and order, political unrest, and significant problems with organized crime and gangs. One wonders what things would be like if--on top of all of that--more than a quarter of kids were growing up fatherless like in the US.
I think it could be a good critique. It's a good point in general (just think about Grunt, Gulp, Broccoli, webpack and the like), but I don't see TypeScript as the "new and shiny" anymore.

Although there are alternatives (Flow, for example), to me it seems like the community has picked TS as the way forward, so in my opinion TS is a very low risk technology with real benefits, so I wouldn't hesitate adding it to a project's tech stack.

It's here to stay and a big chunk of JavaScript developers enjoy using TypeScript.
Credibility is in the eyes of the viewer: what you view as credible may not be what I view as credible.

And, to that end, whether you would agree with the criticism or not, there is none anyway. No questioning or investigation by media of any sort around COVID science. That was my point.

Even if a hillbilly right-wing conspiracy theorist came onto CNN to talk about aliens or lizard-people that would at least be something but there is nothing but acceptance that what the government says is the ONLY answer.
gRPC has a pleasant developer experience? This is news to me.
> It seems COVID is the great excuse to let all the Orwellian bs loose.

Any new excuse is good to tighten up the grip.
He probably read Goldratt's follow-on to The Goal, Critical Chain. Critical Chain Project Management is the specific term. Goldratt tried to sell software to companies that would help them make schedules like that, but a large component (often ignored) was collecting historic data, and running models. Most companies might do one of those, but rarely both, and of course models with only speculative numbers are absolute garbage. In my experience, places that tried to apply CCPM never actually grokked it, and it was some manager's obsession because they were buzzword crazed (like many big-A Agile offices).
I don't see the argument that it's weakening the JavaScript ecosystem. If anything it enriches it as you have (generally) safer more robust code to work with.
I multiply by 4. Specifically, giving estimates on when features will be deployed/usable by end users.
Afaik USB3 latency is same as USB2, uSOFs every 125us, lowest round trip 2*125us
I had a conversation about estimates during a recent interview. I asked about how the company deals with those, and the interviewer said they don't do estimates because there's never been a time where something productive came out of one, and I think it makes sense.

In my experience, when an estimate is spot on the world goes on as if nothing happened. When it's incorrect, all hell breaks loose and it's every man for himself. And at the end of the day, all of the blame ends up on the person who guessed wrong. I'm glad I don't have to deal with that anymore.
Never Been Seen: Objects from the Science Museum Group Collection
Show HN: TheLibraryMap – 100k Books in a Picture
On one hand, winner takes all helps the winner get amazingly good at what they do to further humanity’s technological progress.

On the other hand, everyone starts to feel less in control of their destiny when even the largest corporations are powerless against supply fluctuations.

I believe it is a good thing though in the long run. A world power that knows it needs the entire world to continue prosperity is one that is less likely to blow up the world...
On android device, both portrait and landscape mode, the right side of the text is cutoff. Desktop view mode fixes it.
Slightly misleading title change here - the article was "How I Build JavaScript Apps In 2021" but here it appears as "How I Build Web Apps As A Freelancer"

Web apps and JavaScript apps are not the same thing.
Looks like the author updated the article to address that:

>Update: On a more detailed examination of those two states, I’m convinced the contrast here is due to differences in the sizes of the blocks. North Dakota’s blocks are more consistently small (StDev of 3.3) while South Dakota’s are more varied in area (StDev of 9.28). West of the Missouri River, South Dakota’s blocks are substantially larger than those in ND, so a single inhabitant can appear to take up more space. Between the states, this provides a good lesson in how changing the size and shape of a geographic unit can alter perceptions of the landscape.
The author noted in the post that:

> I’m convinced the contrast here is due to differences in the sizes of the blocks. North Dakota’s blocks are more consistently small (StDev of 3.3) while South Dakota’s are more varied in area (StDev of 9.28).
It might be because the country is run by a dictator who is intent on crippling the US’s diplomatic and economic power.
Reading about this study and the experiences described in other comments, it seems the experiment is a bit limited in its scope.

The effect of music depends on the person, the type of music (lyrics or instrumental - even if there is applause or not), how well the person knows the music and, of course, the task itself and its complexity.

Until there's a way to test all of those permutations, I think the best we are going to do is rely on all our anecdotal evidence, as it affects ourselves.
What would you say the codebase size threshold is for when types become needed? I mostly work on medium projects I think, and never found typescript to be of any use...
> It's engineering Numberwang.

Can I just say that is the greatest description of software estimation I have ever read? I am 100% stealing that.
Have you noticed their declining OS release quality in recent years? I have, and I now wait 6 months to upgrade.

The triangle is real[1]. Something's gotta give when a deadline can't move, and as we know from Brooks, software development speed doesn't increase linearly with more people. So it's primarily quality or scope that must suffer to hit a software deadline.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_management_triangle
I discovered a few books that I loved on Twitter a few months ago by pure luck, and I find it weird that in 2020 we didn't have more than mouth to mouth, bestseller lists, and "you may also like" to come upon some of these gems.

The site is quite self-explanatory, a large interactive map with more than 100,000 books placed and colored by their similarity. Right now, it's completely based on an algorithm, and things like being written by the same author do not directly affect position or color.

Probably the most interesting feature, apart from the map, is that when clicking on a book similar books will be highlighted based on that. However, there are other features like the ability to create your own lists.

Any feedback will be appreciated. Thank you!
I think you forgot to add Krita.
> The most likely explanation for the success

Mostly likely based on what grounds? Rentech was very profitable for decades before they ever started their public funds.

> Nobody knows how Rentech makes money

There's nothing extraordinarily special about Rentech's returns, they just employ short-term stat arb type strategies that require relatively little capital to execute, so if you express their returns as a percentage of invested capital you get an eye-popping number. But it's not comparable to the returns that a traditional buy-and-hold fund makes (in particular because those returns don't compound). There are plenty of other quant shops and prop trading firms that would make huge (>Rentech) annual returns if they attempted to phrase their earnings in those terms, but they typically don't, because if you don't need a lot of capital then you don't need to raise money from the clients and outside investors (can just trade the partners' money) and you don't need to brag about your returns in public.