skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I guess just because it seemed fairly niche, seemingly targeted mainly towards people making 2D games for cross platform use, around the same time things like Unity & UE became the hot new thing to be using for that type of game dev. People also seemed to look down on it's AS3 like syntax and there was a limited pool of people willing to commit large numbers of hours to working on it as part of their career path when Apple were bringing out new frameworks every year for doing things like AR, 3D, SceneKit, IAP, etc. It never seemed it could fully embrace the newer native abilities that everybody wanted to be working with while maintaining its ability to cross compile. I guess browser based gaming (Flash, Facebook games, etc.) kind of died at the same time as well.

We used to do lots of Flex development back then for various commercial projects, then Flash/AS3/Flex got all but abandoned overnight, becoming almost hated. We managed a large cross compiled (iOS/Android/Windows/OS X) AS3/Flex project with native hooks for various platforms up until mid last year, parts of the codebase were nearly 10 years old, when we finally managed to convince the client it would cheaper to re-write in a mix of HTML/JS/Electon/JS bridges than continue to battle the existing codebase. We rewrote it all in around two weeks, improved the UI and fixed long term numerous issues that had plagued us for at least a couple of years, mainly due to being reliant on closed source 3rd party Windows/Mac integrations/hooks that had been abandoned by the original developers and Adobe also largely abandoning the AS3 iOS/Android compiler.

Also, it didn't really seem to have a huge community and everything seemed to be in a transitory phase with things like Flash being pushed out by iOS native development, the huge improvements in HTML/JS/CSS, etc. Then tech like Swift, React, etc. came along it just seemed to get forgotten as a tool in our arsenal.

We certainly started focusing more on other new stacks/approaches around the same time.
Rewatching one of my favorite shows (Arrested Development) was rough. They made "Retard" and "Tranny" jokes left and right.
Turtle visual cortex is non-retinotopic
I just learned about Takeout today. The question I still have though is, how do you import those exports back into some usable state/service?
That then means you can't communicate with others running the normal Signal client. Signal is not a federated protocol.
Based on what I have heard, FB is a very demanding workplace. Lots of smart people trying to get ahead and with that comes a cutthroat culture and poor work-life balance. As an engineer you will have access to smart peers, which can make a big difference to your technical skills. Pay is very good, as is the name-recognition, which can both make up for FB's negatives. If you are planning to start a family, look for a less demanding workplace; otherwise, you can't lose much by doing a 2-year stint there.
I moved my mail away from Google last year, and can no longer accept people's calendar invites. It seems that the "Yes"/"No"/"Maybe" links in the email body of a calendar invite cause Google's (or whoever's) servers to spoof an email in my name, which predictably fails if my SPF is set strictly. I have not been able to find a good workaround for this.
How would you feel if you knew your work started being used by authoritarian regimes to oppress their citizens speech and ability to organize?

I may be speaking out of ignorance, but do you have an example of this occurring or are you speaking purely hypothetically?
Yes partially for medicine/device development and something like new services but it's not enough to think same as computer.
Except that if you added a new file then "git commit -a" will miss it out.

Git's UI is full of little sharp edges like that. You get used to them, but it's just needlessly fiddly to start with.
My concern with Python’s feature bloat is the opposite. That there aren’t parts you’re not supposed to use - developers are expected to know all of it.

Three string formatting approaches are all in wide use. There are now two different ways to do something as fundamental as assignment. Some classes use explicit methods like __eq__, others hide them by using @dataclass. Async-await adds coloured functions [0], along with “red” versions of numerous language constructs.

That’s not to mention type annotations, which I won’t deny are popular but are incredibly complex.

[0] http://journal.stuffwithstuff.com/2015/02/01/what-color-is-y...
Balancing Flexibility and Productivity in Your CMS
Products vs. Protocols: What Signal got right
Really? Copyright law is the real problem and not the extrajudicial murder of citizens by police? Must be nice to be insulated from worrying about that.
> it's a fallacy to say the entire field of software development didn't move forward until it existed

I mean, like, it kinda did in some ways? I feel like GitHub's semi-centralized web UI and pull requests empowered a lot of people to engage in software development online that wouldn't otherwise. I think if it didn't, we wouldn't see value in GitLab and Gittea providing GitHub's accessibility in a more decentralized way.
> it's a fallacy to say the entire field of software development didn't move forward until it existed

A lot of software development got a lot better. Yes, software development was possible before GitHub, but it lowered the barrier to entry a lot.
I've been doing a lot of reading & thinking on this lately as I just finished building https://carbon.fyi

Your take is 100% correct, but we still opted to use Ethereum Gas units as our "emissions factor" because it represents useage of and relative benefit from the Ethereum network.

We are interested in raising money for carbon offsets, so if we ask the question of "who pays?" it wouldn't be fair to place the burden on miners when all users benefit from the security and stability that comes from mining.

I'd eventually like to develop a model that allocates emissions based on "unit of time held" which is a more accurate allegory for 'benefit' for speculative assets like Bitcoin (if we are honest about Bitcoin's purpose), and because of the macroeconomic reasons you mentioned.

It's an interesting problem and discussion because unlike driving a car or eating meat, simply reducing consumption won't fix the problem, and yet we would all agree heavy users or benefactors of the network should bear more of the burden.
This is not an accurate description of a constitutional monarch’s role, either de jure or de facto.
It's easy to do that when you work from home and never leave the basement
There's already a "under penalty of perjury" in the DMCA for rightsholders. Though it's arguable whether it has been ineffective; most settle out of court before it gets that far.

YouTube and their partners intentionally sidestep the DMCA takedown rules in favor of their own system which doesn't have these rules. The point of Content ID is to remove the barriers the law and the DMCA have, in favor of an arbitration system which (mostly) sides with big rightsholders.
https://www.levels.fyi/

click E5 under fb
Just to clarify - Orion is a partially reusable spaceship, developed by NASA with Lockheed Martin as the prime contractor, while SLS is a non-reusable launch vehicle, developed by NASA with Boeing as the largest contractor. SLS has been a poster child for cost overruns and delays - but so far is still intended to launch the crewed missions to Gateway, while it was never intended to launch the non-crewed Gateway launches.
[0]: https://archlinux.org/packages/community/x86_64/haxe/
> this is a post from 16 years ago

Sure, but the only opportunity to change this was along with the other breaking changes in Python 3.0, which is now 12 years old.
Most enterprise software is written in Java or C# / .NET and more recently Golang and Rust.

Lua might do just as well, but it did not get marketed to businesses the way that Java and C# were in the early 2000s.
I left FB about 9 months ago and still talk to my friends there daily. Many of them are down in the infrastructure layers, which is 1) where the interesting stuff is, since the top is just a sleazy web app with advertising, and 2) very insulated from most of the political stuff.

It's not a bad idea to join FB as an engineer. Just make sure you end up working on something that you wouldn't get to elsewhere, keep in mind that, like all organizations, it has its own unique pathologies, and set yourself up so you can walk away if you need to.
I don't work for Facebook and have no inside information whatsoever and let me tell you that I would not hesitate go join Facebook if the position was attractive (good salary, good benefits, great professional challenges).

See, there will ALWAYS be controversy in large companies. There was back then in IBM, there was in Oracle, there was in Microsoft, there was in Google and there is on Facebook. If you are trying to find a COMPANY that is a "innocent dove", you will have a hard time finding one that is not an NGO or Non For Profit. Or maybe go into one that is not VC funded and not publicly traded.
That’s actually hilarious.

Repelling livestreamers with licensed music, like they are vampires and it works!

Cops are about to start wearing JBL Clip 3’s on their utility belt.
Lambda: The Excel worksheet function (Microsoft Research)
> Coronavirus has been a pretty good litmus test for which countries have good governments, and which countries do not... I think it shows the fundamental defectiveness of the system itself

Authoritarian states have been able to manage the pandemic because their residents must do as they're told or suffer. Many others do well because they have cultural cohesion and people are willing to band together for the greater good. That is to say, people must either be willing to act for the greater good or be forced to do so.

Failure to manage the pandemic is more a sign of a liberal government (unable to force) and cultural breakdown (individuals unwilling to act), outside of countries that are actually just not capable.

The UK and US aren't willing to enact forceful measures, which actually think makes them quite good governments, in contrast to China, for instance. The US, at least, has been in a cultural death spiral since the late 60s and completely lacks cohesion. I suspect the UK has similar issues, but I know little about it. That is our actual weakness that has lead us to be unable to manage this crisis. Our government being unwilling to force us is one of our primary strength.
> Doing almost anything yourself feels impractical these days.

I would argue this is only the case because we've created an intentional social and skill gap in the industry between server administration and operations work and software development. My experiences, especially more recently, have been shocking in how little the average software developer knows about /very basic/ server administration. I don't have a full picture of why this is, but my gut is that part of the reason is that this type of work has become socially considered to be beneath software developers. They see it as the type of thing you're supposed to outsource, scut work for digital janitors, so they never bother learning it. There's definitely a growing sheen of disrespect in the industry towards those very valuable skills.

The outcome is, yes, it may feel impractical to do things yourself. The reality is, it's probably never been easier to do things yourself. Everything from the widespread availability of low cost enterprise-grade hardware to the plethora of virtualization technologies and associated low-cost hosting platforms means that doing things yourself has never been easier than it is today. Yet it feels so far away because software developers in our current time are no longer the tinkerers they once were, preferring to focus on abstractions over dig down into the dirt of reality.

I think the best way to resolve this challenge is for individual developers to come down from their horses and learn the basics of system administration and actually try this stuff out. You can learn nearly 80% of what there is to know about systems administration and operations with an Ubiquiti router, two Raspberry Pis, and Google given enough time. But so many devs would rather use dubious SaaS tools rather than learn how to host their own Gitlab instance or run their own CI pipeline in their closet.
There is nothing bad with them having to work hard to make money.
The offer for music is incredibly high and most people would prefer playing music over doing their job. The market is oversaturated and it gets worse and worse the more time passes (assuming a portion of people will be content with music from the past). It's normal that making music pays penny.

Redistributing money would be terrible: the government would have another token to use to raise taxes (on which they can surely pocket a % for managing the work - free of market interference, so with zero competition or attention to waste) and the artist would have less of an incentive to make truly great pieces.

That said, we don't need copyright laws or any other law which facilitate rich producers to get money or censor people.
If we didn't have an expensive government upholding copyright laws, producers could just sell music with a non-redistribute contract.
If someone breaks that contract they can go to a court and get a monetary compensation.
If they're selling so many copies that they can't keep track of all the people sharing their music, consider it a market fee on excessive profits.

The problem in our society is that rich producers can corrupt the government (and media / education: how many people consider copyright to be fair?) and get them to pass laws which give them extra power.
I find it much more fun to speculate about and imagine things that potentially really exist. Aliens in other galaxies exist with 99.99% plus probability. Angels don't exist and are of no interest to me.
Would you work at a Big Tobacco company post ~1990s? Because that’s how a large portion of the population now sees Facebook.
Generally speaking, the less complicated something is, the less weird combinations of states one can find themselves in.

Now you probably shouldn‘t code golf either, but KISS works as an operating principle for a reason.
Datapoint:

I joined facebook as my first job out of college. I didn't really have a plan and they offered the most money.

The good:
There is a huge breadth of stuff to work on and good internal mobility. Whatever WLB, "impact," etc that you want, you can probably find it at fb. Getting tired of working on groups? You can work on some VR project. The tooling is really good so you can spin up whatever you want without having to think about infrastructure too much. They treat engineers well.

The bad:
Morality for sure. Nobody's perfect, but facebook felt especially evil sometimes. Lying to regulators etc is seen as strategic. Not wanting to be outed as an fb employee is definitely true.

Might not be a bad move, think about where the equity will go in the next few years, etc. If you want to start a family and high compensation, it's certainly not a bad move. If you think about the larger picture of what you're doing, I'd think it over very carefully.
Funny reply to the tweet:

> Somewhere on MSFT campus a poor PR person is having this stuff explained to them very slowly in very simple words. They will nod and pretend they understand it, go back to their office and wonder if there's an opening in the Xbox team. I know - I was the PR guy for Excel 2003

It sounds like the functions are only available per-workbook though, not system-wide so to speak:

https://twitter.com/msexcel/status/1359268944125820934
Parts of it might be cutthroat. Others certainly aren't. Work-life balance isn't really a problem. I certainly never worked evenings and weekends outside of oncall shifts, and my kids loved coming to the office for lunch and that kind of thing.
The problem is not higher power usage but lower perf/watt. Both can adjust TDP to maximize performance but setting higher TDP generally worse for perf/watt.
Former FB infra SWE here. Like any big company, it depends a lot on exactly where in FB you'd be. Contrary to what already seems to be a popular belief in this thread, not every developer there is directly involved in implementing any of the "dark patterns" or whatever that the company is known for. Damn few, in fact. A tiny percentage. My impression is that on the front end most people are solving pretty generic problems with platforms, frameworks, and interfacing to some very complex back ends. On the infra side it's even less related to the nature of the business. It's generic database stuff, or generic OS stuff, or generic storage stuff, or whatever, only at very high scale.

The social/moral issues do take their toll, both as pangs of conscience and the general unpleasantness of people acting like everything Facebook ever did was 100% predictably bad and you're personally responsible. There are also certain pathologies in how planning and evaluations and promotions work. On the other hand, the work is generally very interesting and the opportunities for learning/advancement are huge (though I'd caution that some of what you might learn is very FB-specific). Also, one on one, people at FB are generally very smart and quite nice. The managers in particular really Get It when it comes to supporting engineers. So a lot depends on how well you can "build that wall" between the work and the company as perceived from outside, or whether you even want to do that.

P.S. Don't read anything into the fact that I'm "ex" because 90% of the reasons were specific to my own circumstances.
Hopefully Charles (heir apparent), who's a lot more polarising, abdicates when Elizabeth II passes.
Not necessarily solved, and I assume you know about it, but for anyone reading this, elm-ui is definitely worth checking out for at least an exploration of an alternative to CSS.

For a talk about this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ie-gqwSHQr0
Honestly, as a hiring manager, at this point I'd say it's a negative on your resume. I'm sure I'll get downvoted for saying that, and not everyone would agree, but I think it's headed into "Big Tobacco" territory, being a job that pays well but carries a lot of stigma.
And that’s how country X ended up having every successful entrepreneur emigrate or set up their business affairs so as to have assets held offshore.
Death by a Thousand Meeting Cuts
This is neat, but search seems to be broken. I loaded one of my repositories and ran global searches for strings I know exist and they came up with no results. After I opened the file in the web editor, the results would appear in subsequent searches.
Could you specifically point those outdated books?
Perhaps the "Dragon Book" is among them?
> One of the most important things I learned about SPF records was that the entire record had to be under 256 bytes.

It sounds like this is a case of buggy implementations. You can have TXT and even SPF records longer than 255 bytes. The fundamental issue is that TXT records are composed of segments of up to 255 bytes each, where each segment has an 8-bit length header. As Resource Records (RR) individually, as well as DNS packets as a whole, have a maximum length of 65535 (because of 16-bit length headers), DNS supports TXT RRs of approx. 256 segments, 255 bytes each.

Both RFC 4408 (https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4408#section-3.1.3) and it's successor, RFC 7208 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7208#section-3.3, require SPF implementations to concatenate the segments and process them as a single string. This means you should be able to publish a single SPF record of approx. 65025 bytes (256 x 255).

It's not too surprising implementations might be buggy in this respect. It's a rather esoteric aspect of the TXT RR specification. (If only because few people, including developers of DNS-related tools, bother actually reading the specification!) And unfortunately neither the popular rfc4408-tests.yml nor rfc7208-tests.yml test suites seem to have a test case for long TXT records. Even if a test had been included it likely wouldn't have caught many violators as it's actually a matter of the low-level DNS library providing the proper interface(s), many DNS libraries are deficient in how well they expose DNS record parsing or packet injection interfaces, and most SPF libraries would have likely integrated the test suite at a higher level that didn't involve actually making queries using a low-level DNS library, which can be difficult to do.

That said, RFC 4408 says that,

> SPF implementations MUST limit the number of mechanisms and modifiers that do DNS lookups to at most 10 per SPF check, including any lookups caused by the use of the "include" mechanism or the "redirect" modifier.

IME experience this limit is rather low and many, many SPF policies require more than 10 queries. (And if you need SPF policies larger than 255 bytes, you're probably skirting this or other similar limits.) When I was writing and deploying my own implementation I very quickly realized I needed to increase the minimum maximums, but choosing that value is a total crap shoot.
A lot of the British constitution is specified in the legislature. It isn’t precedent that determines who the next monarch is, or how frequently there are elections. Though there are indeed conventions like the way the House of Lords must treat budget bills.
Another Monte Carlo angle:

import random
n=1000000
print(4.*sum(random.random()**2 + random.random()**2 < 1 for i in range(n))/n)

Both this version and the Buffon's Needle version are a lot less efficient than the version in this article, because the article's version is making educated guesses about where the boundary is, while the randomized versions are making uneducated guesses. :-)
I've been writing publicly on the Internet for >15y, under my real name (www.jefftk.com), and no one has given me a hard time for old posts. Quite the contrary: people have often written to say they found my old posts useful or otherwise interesting.

I do think it might be different if my entire online presence consisted of a handful of posts written a long time ago, but anyone trying to get a sense of me from my writing can tell very quickly that I have a lot of views about a lot of different things.
Of course, such facts get downvoted as per usual.
For single people, pandemic isolation has presented a unique type of loneliness
yes. unless you're ok with the morality of actively promoting violence, racism, sexism, etc.

They're a big company that doubtless works on many interesting problems, which puts it down to whether you agree with their operating philosophies.

All evidence to date says that they're 100% on board with promoting horrific content if it makes them more money.
Unfortunately for WHO many other scientists probing the origin without Chinese propaganda and bribes have announced the origin of covid19 is likely from a lab . . .
> Facebook E5 total estimate $380,320

> Uber 5A total estimate $385,469

I'm sure I must be missing something. (Disclaimer: I definitely do not do 50hr/wk at Uber)
> You'll be tasked with implementing dark patterns

Facebook is a large company, and there are other ways to make a difference or learn skills you can take elsewhere. For example, their teams in DC are working on the problems that people often criticize them about. Things like misinformation, foreign interference, security, public safety, etc.
(A cop)