skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"When you put a price on linking to certain information, you break the way search engines work," she said. "And you no longer have a free and open web." - Google

"Google and Facebook (along with Twitter and others), however, do not simply link. They frame the work in previews, with headlines, summaries and photos, and then curate and serve up the content while sprinkling in advertisements." - NYT

More than that. "Google News" (is it really? they produced none of it) is a series of redirects via cloaked URLs before the user ever sees the true media website URL.

That is not linking, that is a process for collecting data on users. With that process Google can collect more data than any single media website. That is not an even playing field on the web.

It is also a process for protecting others from using those links by scraping them from Google. As if to suggest it is OK for Google to scrape and to be an interstitial, but it is not OK for others to offer a competing service.

Of course Google can also show ads on those interstitial pages if it wanted to. They are the ultimate middleman.

What if I start a faster, more direct and more privacy respecting site to compete with "Google News". No redirects, no URL cloaking, no iframes, no ads, no tracking, no data collection.

It is better than Google News in every way. How much traffic will "Fast News" get.

Why is that. Perhaps the antitrust suits in the US will shed some light on the answer to that question. (Massive payola to be the "default" search, for starters.)

Google is not arguing in favour of "all" search engines, it is arguing in favour of itself only.

There are lists of URLs pointing to the media websites in every country. It is not as if no one will ever be able to find these websites again if Google does not feature them.

Quite the contrary. People will discover more news by going directly the sources.

I can write a few lines of shell script that scrape indexes of articles from media websites. I get an RSS feed of the news, from multiple sources.

I can also write scripts that automatocally search media websites using the media website themselves.

Finding and searching through news does not require Google.

Google may be the fastest, largest search but only because every single website allows one company to scrape full indexes to their content wth impunity and that one company pays every computer vendor to make it the "default search".

It is nice to have an "all-in-one" solution for searching the web. But this is not a fair situation.

It is Google's greed that has pushed things to this point. We cannot blame the media for trying to stand up to this nonsense.

Google can stop this law and whatever detrimental effects it may have on others by simply paying for what they are continually allowed to do. Google has mountains fo cash on hand.
Or even data from genetic testing, literally showing relationships.
Good. Wordpress is battle tested, open source and in the right hands, secure. Twitter recently tried to dunk on the last administration's use of Wordpress at the State Dept, claiming they were hacked to show Trump had resigned, but it was just a disgruntled employee and was it never hacked.
Housing is a debt market. Houses don't cost 10% more just because prices have increased 10%. Manipulatedd interest rates have made debt service 15% cheaper. It's not that simple. Sure, you need 10% more for the down payment - I'll give you that.
Wordpress also has a really rich ecosystem of mature and widely used plugins that are quite easy to install.

The podcast ones for instance, they'll allow you to schedule the publishing of a new episode, then upload the episode to all the major platforms, format the images, titles and descriptions automatically for the different platforms, cross post to the social media accounts announcing the new episode, allow you to put in show notes for the blog, and embed a way to listen to the show on the site, all built in, for free, using an interface that is clean and well documented.

Of course I could do that myself but come on now, that simplifies my life so much.

I'm ok with my government saving money and not hiring six figure tech workers to custom roll effectively a press release website. Honestly, they could redirect it to a medium blog and save on the hosting fees as well. The real infrastructure is going to be at the departments, NASA, Smithsonian, CDC etc...
Also, having consistent formatting makes it very easy to read through large amounts of code. If you know how the code is laid out, you don’t need to focus on everything and can “squint” through it to get a good idea of what’s going on.
When I moved to a smaller city for grad studies, I soon started missing the subway system. Crowded and dirty as it is, taking the subway was a constant reminder for me that there is life outside of my confined world and that alone contributed a lot to my sanity.

In the smaller city, I took buses or walked, but I noticed taking a bus still makes a difference, even though one might have to stand up a little. Just the idea of being surrounded by people, each with their own untold stories and problems, made me feel part of something bigger. I agree with the OP; commuting actually helped me feel like I belong to a community, even though I'm introverted and would never talk to any of the people that I would see.

Now with the pandemic on top of it, depression has kicked in. I sometimes play youtube videos with city/car/library... ambient sounds, just to get that feeling again. It does help a bit, but I can't wait for things to get back to "normal", whatever that means from now on.
I thought implicitly doing anything is against the whole bazel philosophy.
I think it lasts until a startup (not necessarily in tech) dethrones an incumbent because working in-person helped with vision, alignment, and performance. My hunch is that WFH projects are less ambitious and have less collaboration.
They mention that it's "useful for keeping an eye on the newbies", which indicts standups. That is a positively horrendous justification for standups. Your "newbies" should have assigned mentors and helping hands, and that shouldn't be something that drags down everyone.

Standups are a shitty, passive-aggressive way of managing. Managers who are too weak/incapable of simply monitoring progress, asking questions instead make this whole show under the assumption that everyone is checking on each other. 100% of the time this is the justification for standups. In many firms, "agile" is a failure mode for "waterfall".
You can do the bare minimum with a path to scale, though.

But it seems like when things 'scale' a lot of changes are required regardless, so I feel like it's a bit of a moot point.
Eh, the second one is probably the only point I was kind of meh on. You should almost always start with an RDBMS, and it will scale for most companies for a long long time, but for some workloads or levels of scale you're probably going to need to at least augment it with another storage system.
PfSense is Closed Source (2017)
I'm not sure about that. As an industry, we're just beginning to realize that object orientation is hurting far more than it's helping. As more people realize this, better tools and techniques will be devised to help developers think of their programs more like computers do: as data, and not as objects which only make sense to some humans.

As such, PURE OOP languages like Java are going to start to fall out of favor in the industry for all workloads. Academia won't let go of OOP until much later.
But is their business model targeting hundreds of DAUs, or is it targeting millions of DAUs? It doesn't make sense to architect for an amount of usage that is too small to sustain the business. If the business model requires millions of users to be successful, you should build for millions of users, even if you only have hundreds at the present moment.
I echo all of this post, especially the part about wrong mental model. Me too after reading listening to all success stories thought that it would be a fairly effortless, all I have to do is build a great product and users and investments will coming knocking to the door. And why not, that's what led to fairly great success in corporate world - focus on building great stuff, heads down do things that you are great at, and good things will follow.

I took couple of years off, built seemingly good product along with 3 others but it did not go anywhere.

Selling and hustling is hard.

I depleted and reset my savings and wealth by half a decade or so. Initially I found it tad difficult to get back to same or better position in corporate world; though eventually after couple of years it happened.

But inspite of all this I'm glad I did this as otherwise I would have always led a regretful life (what if).

As OP says next time I would be doing this with my eyes wide open and with a 'default dead' [1] mindset.

[1] Default Alive or Default Dead? http://www.paulgraham.com/aord.html#:~:text=If%20it's%20defa...
Doctors are not all seeing gods. They need input from their patients - if you told your doctor that you have been actually dieting and actually exercising but aren't losing weight and wonder if there is some other cause? And if he won't look into it get another doctor. It's not that hard.

> Again this is what I mean about being dismissive about other health issues when someone is obese.

Doctors see the excuses all the time - in most cases it's diet and exercise. You can be mad all you want that someone called you fat and a doctor misdiagnosed you but at the end of the day it's your body and your life, he won't be the one dying from complications due to obesity or your other health problems.
You should be using both.
These days I piled up on veggies (my system just couldn't tolerate most sugar/salt/fat heavy food in stores). That said I found that 80/20 green/carb is a sweet spot. I'd bet a few dollars that vegetables help your system process the carbs too so it's less an issue than normally (according to the 'too much carbs is bad' trend).

I too regret cheating most of the time.
Thanks for the examples!

There are some things that aren't as easy. And sometimes it's a better choice to drop into Java to provide a shim between the package you're interacting with and Clojure to make the interop easier, or when performance matters.

Regarding hinting for defrecord fields and deftype/reify, do you have references where this has been a problem for you? It's not something I've run into, but that's just my experience.

As for java.util.function interfaces, I just did this within the past couple of weeks, which worked for my use case:

defn ^java.util.function.Function as-function [f]
(reify java.util.function.Function
(apply [this arg] (f arg))))

For SAM conversions in general, there's https://github.com/ajoberstar/ike.cljj . I haven't used it myself, but perhaps the pattern used there would work in you.

It sounds like what you've worked on has been relatively performance sensitive, which can definitely a thing. So perhaps some of these interop suggestions won't work for you.

Again, thanks for taking the time to be more explicit about what you've found frustrating.
They don't seem that controversial? There has been endless religious wars about lots of them. To point:

> Typed languages are better when you're working on a team of people with various experience levels

This is the static vs dynamically typed controversy. And if you think the consensus is "types are good" today, that wasn't at all the case 10 years ago or so.

> Java isn't that terrible of a language.

That was (and probably still is) the knee jerk reaction of many younger devs (and some older ones)

> Designing scalable systems when you don't need to makes you a bad engineer.

Not controversial in itself, but tons of people do it all the time and think it doesn't apply to their case...

> DRY is about avoiding a specific problem, not an end goal unto itself.

Many people take it religiously...

> In general, RDBMS > NoSql

The NoSQL/RD religious wars were all the rage when Mongo and co first appeared (even earlier, with BS Java projects like Prevalayer).

> Functional programming is another tool, not a panacea.

You'd be surprised how many think the opposite...
We need to replace the "work as social outlet" with something else. It's not the office anyone wants, it's the connection, we're just lacking the connection part to make remote work... well... work.
Microsoft should bite the bullet and simply create another operating system, created from scratch. They have the experience and the know how to avoid all the mistakes. Offer them in parallel, keep a virtual machine (an Wine equivalent if you want) that would run Windows programs and overall simplify the API's while only the new one would receive new developing. And in 10 years Windows would be history. I know it won't happen but once can only dream though.
Mind the Pennies: Money and Its Use in Early Medieval Europe (2014)
I once lived and worked in the Midwest, in a medium sized city, and drove 30 minutes to work. Traffic was not bad. It gave me a chance to listen to audiobooks, podcasts, and sometimes just to think alone in silence. Now my subway commute from Brooklyn to the financial district on the other hand...
> You don't need a TPU cluster to train a working GPT-2 model [...] A free GPU on Colab gets you most of the way

I have a hard time believing you can really train it with 1 V-100, unless you are talking about an extremely scale down version of GPT-2 (large).

If you can train it at all it would be with a batch size so small (probably 1?) that it would hurt the performance and it would take months.

I am out of the loop somehow?

Edit: I was thinking about reproducing the training that OpenAI did in their paper, so redoing all the pre-training, but I realized you might have been talking about training on a smaller custom dataset.
I do remember that, and while I wouldn't say I'm having flashbacks per se, I do agree that there are some disappointing similarities between that event and what we see in 2021. Do we not learn from our mistakes?
In my experience, a PM handles a lot of the crap work that engineers shouldn't be working on. A PM keeps management apprised of progress. A PM handles the work involved in keeping Gantt charts up to date. A PM coordinates with dependents and dependencies to make sure resources and components are available when needed.

If you don't appreciate the value of that, you maybe have worked on smaller projects or not been in a large org that pushes those menial tasks onto engineers. PMs are there to facilitate engineers. They do not rule over them. They make targeted, efficient queries of engineers' status and then communicate and coordinate appropriately.

I would love to see PMs hired at my org. We're currently drowning in process-related tasks and it's mostly because we do not have PMs(the process is mostly necessary, but wastes engineer time). I'd also love to have some technical writers on staff. Having engineers write documentation, beyond, say, doxygen comments in header files, is just dumb. Right now our user facing docs have little consistency or defined scope. They don't target a well defined audience, and don't effectively communicate to our users.

Let engineers do what they do best, and enable them to be productive by hiring helpers as needed.
> People are not turned into property. This is coercion through debt.

It turns out there's a term for when people are coerced to work through debt: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debt_bondage

> Currently, debt bondage is the most common method of enslavement with an estimated 8.1 million people bonded to labour illegally as cited by the International Labour Organization in 2005. Debt bondage has been described by the United Nations as a form of "modern day slavery" and the Supplementary Convention on the Abolition of Slavery seeks to abolish the practice.
Have never agreed with a blog post more. Every single bullet point, 10/10.

Okay, okay, actually I have one qualm~

> Standups are actually useful for keeping an eye on the newbies.

Unfair. Standups are useful for communication between a team in general, if kept brief. If senior engineer X is working on Y and other engineer M has already dealt with Y (unbeknowst to X), it's a great chance for X to say "I'm currently looking for a solution to Y" and for M to say "Oh I had to solve that same problem last month!"

Seniority has nothing to do with this. Communication/coordination/knowledge-sharing matter at all levels.
Send invoices to identifiable users, which go to collections if unpaid.

Eat the cost for unidentifiable users. As long as you can fix any connection problem within a few days, the maximum value lost is limited by physics.

People used to pay for stuff with checks all the time. It's similar to that.
How else would you justify constantly raising new money at inflated valuations?
A lot of people refer to the common cold and flu interchangeably, but they're very different, and it's usually just a cold.
I wonder if there exists an oxygen "getter" suitable for this purpose. ("Getters" are reactive materials put into vacuum systems which react with specific types of expected contaminants, like oxygen, water, or carbon dioxide)
> just a single file zipped up or scp'd

And now your page displays a white page. Error in the log is an exception with no stacktrace/location. This was my experience in production a few times.

It's a fun system if it works, but without a testing pipeline and a staging environment it's a lottery with a possible mystery breakage on every update/change.
Printing dollars to buy treasuries won't work forever. China has already started tilting away from treasuries and holds almost a trillion dollars less than they did a few years ago.

Now there is talk of the Fed issuing notes with durations longer than 30 years...

There will be consequences eventually
Plus, 'scalable' can refer to the codes performance or the codes malleability, and the two are often conflated in blog posts :P
the two largest employers are both the number one players in their market, being the number 1 player in a market may require that you invest for "first mover advantage". This would lead to a lot of failed/re-tooled initiatives over time.

Being number 2 often just means copying the number 1 player in a more capital efficient manner, product descriptions become "X did it this way, customers want it this way". In a winner takes all market, being the first mover matters a lot.
I think that statement should be considered in the context that it's a blog from a company that specialises in and promotes Wordpress hosting.
Oh yeah. They're allowed to say pretty much anything they want.

One basic interrogation technique involves lying to you about what you're suspected of. The interrogator might accuse you of something they KNOW you didn't do. He then notes your reaction.... typically you will be outraged and confused.

Later when he accuses you of other crimes, he studies your reaction and compares it to the earlier reaction. He already knows what you look like when you truthfully deny a crime. Is your denial different this time? Yes? Then that gives him a hint that his current accusation might be accurate.
>Imagine thinking about colleagues as people with “frail little minds.” Yikes.

He's not thinking about ALL colleagues, but "TDD purists".

And even so, it's obviously a turn of phrase to dismiss the hardcore purism, not something the author generally feels about such people in their entirety.
How does this work for people on these lists? If Chicago PD thinks I'll be shot, do they warn me?
~10 years ago, Nintendo had only 3000 employees and was the most profitable public company per employee. They only have 6200 now.

Edit:

Source: https://www.ft.com/content/9d9624a4-8341-11dd-907e-000077b07...
Point (of the author) proven.
How many gypsies gets killed per year by police in Europe? Compare that to how many people police kills in USA? There is pretty hard data that European police is drastically less violent overall.

It is possible that European police is more racist than US police, yes, but that wasn't what we were talking about. I'm pretty sure that US police is more violent against white people than European police is against gypsies, meaning that even with the racism European police is still much better.
You can hedge by breaking up your codebase into logical services from the start which own their data sources and controllers. When the time comes to break up into microservices, you separate each service into its own application rather than grouping them in a monolith.
I went with the NVIDIA Ubuntu repos:

https://docs.nvidia.com/cuda/cuda-installation-guide-linux/i...

This is nice because staying updated can be done through the usual apt commands, and you can have multiple CUDA versions installed by installing cuda-11-0, cuda-11-1, etc. Switching between them seems to be as easy as just making sure the appropriate /usr/local/cuda-<version>/bin dir is first in your PATH.

In general the NVIDIA documentation is pretty good, and I try to follow their Ubuntu-specific instructions whenever possible.
Thank you.

Green Party taken over by Russian operatives: plausible. I gather they were quite helpful to Kanye West's campaign, too.
Not totally enthusiastic about this type of developer who disses other professions.
I love stand ups but agree they need to stay small. When the audience is too large it becomes an exercise in bragging and is not functional.
I think some people just have better or worse tolerances to these things than others.

If formatting in code is as I am used to it, I can skim it very quickly. If it is not, I have to focus much more, and that adds up over the course of a day.

My brain can just recognize what's happening in a small block of code if it has a particular shape and colors. I don't know how to explain it better than that.

This is one reason I REALLY want to see editors save files as tokens rather than plain text, and see compilers ingest code as pre-parsed tokens rather than plain text. (Or have editors save the tokenized file alongside a plain text file for the compiler.)

If that ever happens, I will be able to view the code exactly as I like it, and so will everyone else, even when we each want to view it differently.

Compilers and diffing tools will need to report a token number rather than a line number for errors and differences, and I don't see that as a big problem at all.
This is similar to how I feel about graph databases. Twitter (FlockDB) and Facebook (TAO) built scalable graph abstractions over SQL without a hitch.

Why would I want to use a graph DB directly then?
I didn't know this. Thanks!

It was lowered in July 1998 ("overweight" was reduced to 25 from men: 27 and women: 28)

https://www.nytimes.com/1998/06/04/us/us-to-widen-its-defini...

https://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/04/14/a-number-that-may-...
If you're hiring more people to deal with rote, managerial "process" you're already lost in a mire of inefficiency.
I am around 20 years into professional software dev and this list is great. Not sure what else I can add, just wanted to +1 the whole thing basically.
I think I love this person.