skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't like the headline. But the article does explain why he feels it's the wrong career choice for himself. I can understand many of the reasons he cited, but many can be refuted. For example he can double or triple his salary by moving to the USA and working for a FAANG company. He can also choose to work at companies that view programmers as a valuable resource than a cost center.
The Java community has some great developers, but also a lot of Serious Software Engineers who will sabotage everything with extra complexity, and then everyone who learned Java in school and never felt like looking at another language (not even Kotlin).

Java is definitely "boring technology", but hiring random Java developers will probably sink a company faster than doing the same for Go.
thechao is probably referring to the 2011 outage - dunno if that was multi-day though
It sounds like you are already confident in programming and maybe just have a few gaps in your knowledge. You can fill those with online classes or just as you read and learn things over time. In my opinion, going back to formal school for years would probably be a waste of time when there are so many programming jobs that don’t care about a degree.

Doesn’t the public sector contract out a huge amount of their technology anyway? There are tech companies that do things like help cities optimize bus routes, or sell Saas or data products that governments use (e.g. palantir).

Surely you can find a private sector programming job where you’ll have a much bigger impact on solving public sector problems than working for the public sector. Maybe even start your own company down the road.

And I have to think that since you do have a college degree just not in CS, once you get a few years programming experience under your belt you could even get hired for a public sector programming job, although I don’t have any experience with that and don’t know for sure.
Yes, Apple fans seem to be forgetting that the ones in power at Apple are business people, who care as much about customers as any other company. And being business people they don't have sympathy for developers either and in fact would rather see their power reduced. In their best scenario, all developers become low-wage employees but without the benefit of employees. A bit like Uber drivers.
Yes. It’s estimated that modern electronics have a lifespan of about 5 years. And they don’t always fail in obvious (or obviously bad) fashion.

Here’s a fun report from NASA that I love to cite (it is also the citation for my lifespan claim).

https://c3.nasa.gov/dashlink/static/media/other/ObservedFail...
> That whole choice process is carried out by physical reactions in our mind.

That is a common assumption, but I am not aware of any evidence that it is the case. If someone knows of any, then please share.
>>Running an alternative OS "natively" on a Mac doesn't seem very appealing to me. It's almost guaranteed you will never fully get (...) working flawlessly

This statement is rather miopic. I still recall when this very same argument was made regarding the idea of wanting to install Linux in computers which were bundled with Windows. I can tell you it made absolutely no difference to me a couple of decades ago when I installed Mandrake Linux on a Windows laptop, and it made no difference to me that I couldn't get hardware acceleration or the webcam to work, and that wifi only worked with ndiswrapper. I was able to run the software I wanted to use in the hardware I bought, and that's what matters.

M1 Mac minis are on the market for around 800$, which is an affordable price point, and their form factor and looks make them an interesting choice for a home server or workstation. It would be incomprehensible if we couldn't take advantage of that hardware by running our choice of software.
The guy who is complaining about having to learn new technology is complaining about not making enough money?

I would never hire him.
Don't get me wrong, I do plenty of exciting stuff on my side projects (involving linear algebra, some AI, etc.)

I completely agree with your last paragraph. I am a backend engineer, a job that at its core involves creating and fixing CRUD apps, and writing relatively simple business code. No matter how exciting people try to make it seem.
>It's almost guaranteed you will never fully get Wi-Fi, audio, graphics acceleration, the trackpad, etc. working flawlessly

And yet people have done it with Linux just fine... Linus himself run a G5 as his desktop (circa 2003-2005) and later a Macbook Air as his daily driver laptop (circa 2011-2013...)
Reminds me of the intro to Bioshock
> I think we should have more gratitude for our privilege.

The company hired you because you make them money. As soon as the company feels you are a bad deal they will fire you. Why shouldn't you do the same to them? Feeling gratitude about a shitty job will just make shitty jobs more common, that isn't good for anyone.
"What I mean is that private schools quickly understand just how much damage a student can do and the teacher board / politicians really don’t, they think everything is sunshine and unicorns and put systems in place that are extremely naive."

The politician Really understand the problem that is the reason their kids are on the private school or them likely live in the ""same district"" then.
I'm doing the opposite. I'm an American now living in Russia and will apply for long term residency then may apply for citizenship at some point once my language skills are better. I joke with my wife that in return for the green card I helped her earn, she helps me get a red card.

Russia has very low taxes for contractors, so that combined with the American foreign earned income tax credit results in tremendous tax savings. Also, I'm on the Black Sea so the weather is better than the rest of Russia. Downside is the political situation, obviously.
I remember all the news stories when the Fearless Girl statue [0] was erected to oppose Charging Bull [1]. So I looked into the back story of each statue.

Charging Bull: The sculpture was created by Italian artist Arturo Di Modica in the wake of the 1987 Black Monday stock market crash. On December 14, 1989, Di Modica arrived on Wall Street with Charging Bull on the back of a truck and illegally dropped the sculpture outside of the New York Stock Exchange Building.

Di Modica had arrived in New York from Italy in 1970 penniless and risen up to success.

Fearless Girl: A bronze sculpture by Kristen Visbal, commissioned by State Street Global Advisors (SSGA), a large asset management company. It was a campaign developed by advertising agency McCann New York.

I found it ironic the Charging Bull was basically a Banksy style illegal art project while Fearless Girl was corporate art commissioned by an asset manager controlling $3.5 trillion of assets. Reminds me that things aren't always what they seem at first glance

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fearless_Girl

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charging_Bull
Interesting, this was posted as I was just now reading a different article with (basically) the same title.

Why Are India’s Farmers Protesting? (from Fair Observer) https://www.fairobserver.com/region/central_south_asia/atul-...

Curious to see how they might differ in their presentation.
Personally, I've already spent months doing unpaid work on testing sites, and yet I'm still stuck in the same place.

Have others encountered this? I have not but I do wonder if the hiring process is becoming more demanding / time consuming.

Maybe the author needs a coach or needs to network more.
Government work is the worst example for quality.
A monopoly without accountability having terrible practices doesn't surprise me.

In all the private companies I worked either software was maintained or the feature wasn't in use anymore or the entire engineering team was about to be fired or the company itself had 2 months of life.

I agree on your point regarding security, closing every vulnerability is impossible or not economically sound for many realities.
Israel publishes real-world data of Pfizer vaccine, prevents 98.9% of deaths
Ya. Adjacently: pre-DAT, my musician, audiophile, hacker friend would use higher end VCR gear and tapes for audio production. Some kind of DIY homemade multitrack (8?) setup. Back when professional recording studios had 16+ track gear and very expensive tapes.
This is just par for the course on closed down hardware. The manufacturer decides how you use it, that's how it has always been. I'm actually happy about this news, I hope it raises awareness for the need of open hardware, it's not like I'd ever buy one of these cards when competitors at least have open source drivers. Lack of hardware freedom generating electronic waste isn't unheard of either.
The product is named Nurofen and its generic name is ibuprofen .

If you want to talk about acetaminophen/paracetamol than brand names would be Efferalgan or Tylenol
Yep, it is what I did (from the Netherlands) and it works well. I moved to South eu: quality of life, IMHO, is far higher even while it is cheap to live here, especially if you do not want to be in a popular city (which I never wanted). I moved when I was little over 30.
you always hear this about the UK.

It seems like generally speaking, science and engineering lacks prestige over there compared to being a lawyer or banker?

Possibly due to the “two cultures” problem combined with the English class system.

I have no idea if this is accurate or not, and the English class system is pretty opaque to me.
I don’t know anybody who will willingly buy a second hand video card used for mining cryptocurrency. They’ve been pushed so hard, for so long, that their useful lifespan is pretty much used up. It’s a big part of the reason they’re being sold and not continued to be used.
I agree with the article's author. He should definitely go to another field, programming is not for everybody. You need passion in the first place and then you need the will to see through with the passion. From his rant he seems to lack both.
Not only that, there is also diffusion caused by difference of concentration, which is increased by heat. And you have that concentration difference at the p-n boundaries/junctions in an IC.

Though I'm not sure how much actual damage you'd see in practice, whether the ICs tend to die with intense use before e.g. the capacitors mentioned above.
there is also another externality, due to perception (regardless of whether it is true) that it affects non rich people more means that it build distrust. trust (and in particular systemic trust, e.g. rule of law) reduces transaction costs; i.e. you can rely on others to do their job properly without having to continually monitor them and build in unnecessary contingencies.
Which plastics are you refering to? In a PLA plastic for example (which is derived from lactic acid, derived from startch) there is no distinction between "binder" and "plastic", and there is no starch left in the resulting production.

Granted the biodegradability of many formulations is still far too long and requires unrealistic circumstances to happen in the wild (hot composting for example).
A lot of people are missing a nuance. Should employees take satisfaction in what they creating, what the business is selling to customers, and how they're advancing in their careers/learning? Of course.

Does that mean that the business should allow developers to indulge in whatever resume-driven development decisions they feel like lest they burst into tears? No. There are various comments in the thread about people who get bored after a few months because they have to do code maintenance.
A Picture of Graham's Number
I listen to a lot of podcasts, but this may be the one I get most excited about when a new episode comes out.
Hashmasks: Ethereum’s Greatest Art Sale
Napster’s war with Metallica comes hilariously full circle
This example makes no sense to me.

I would have had Sony and friends not create a closed ecosystem in the first place.

You're replying in a thread about (compared to consoles) general purpose computers, which developers depend on gamers actually playing their games on, being effectively DRMed.

I don't particularly care about shareholder obligations in this case. I'm glad this incentive structure exists, and it doesn't necessarily inform my ethos.

This is being received well by people who are practically triggered by the notion of cryptocurrency operations.
Thanks for summarizing the talk so concisely.

Maybe read it before commenting next time.

I wish HN had a feature where it could detect that you clicked the link and disallowed commenting before that. At the very least you’d have to click the link, even if you just immediately click back without reading, and you’d know what you were doing was circumventing the spirit of the place.
They are obligated to shareholders. But i am not a shareholder. I am a gamer who wants to buy a new graphics card. So i am going to scream, boycot and lobby government against them until the needs of thier shareholders bend a little closer to those of thier consumers. Free speech is a necessary part of a free market.

Maybe nvidia should be held responsible for thier products. Anyone else up to support a law imposing disposal obligations on single-use products designed to kill secondary markets? When the boom slows, the miners can give these cards back to nvidia for environmentally friendly recycling.
Yes, take their lessons with a grain of salt, but they have a ton of experience, and shouldn't be dismissed out of hand either.
eat arbys
Take a look at https://web.eecs.utk.edu/~azh/blog/challengingprojects.html and https://web.eecs.utk.edu/~azh/blog/morechallengingprojects.h... for some good summaries.

For me, I started building programming languages (and standard libraries) years ago as personal challenge and to learn more about how various languages work. Later on that branched into emulation (x86/amd64, armv8/aarch64) and more recently databases. (You can find these kinds of projects on my github).

Before that when I was more focused on web tech, I'd build clones of React or Bootstrap or Flask to increase my understanding there.

It helped being surrounded by people with a lot more experience than I so I'd keep being in a situation where I knew nothing about some field and wanted to not be embarrassingly naïve :D so I'd try to build something from scratch to learn it.

It doesn't always work out! An example of a topic I haven't yet been able to get into is the TCP/IP stack. I got somewhere into the IP layer on top of userland raw sockets but TCP complexity and may poor C skills failed me as the algorithms needed for tracking state came up.
I can certainly sympathyse with those vibes, when I was just starting I was really happy to spend extra time outside work, was happy to see all the new frameworks,etc.

Now its all starting to rub me the wrong way, I thibk the culture we have around it is unhealthy
Building a Modern React App from Scratch in 2021
Of course. It just makes it quite a bit more difficult to read; I need to spend some effort trying to figure out the exact nuance the author was trying to convey.
I’ll point out that it’s already 50 degrees in Austin today with a projected high of 70. Plus it’s a Sunday, so many businesses are closed. Plus we just had a freak storm that required a lot of 24/7 industrial operations to shut down, and they likely haven’t powered back up yet since the roads were still icy as recently as yesterday.

TLDR; demand is now very low, and since the electrical supply has to be matched very closely to demand, this is how ERCOT tells plants that can shut off easily to shut off.
I went to a "blue ribbon" school that was attached to a continuation school. It was a great school. Kids behaved well, very upper middle class.
However, if you were doing at all not great for any reason -- C average, struggling with depression or learning, anything -- they would pressure you into the continuation school right next door. So you have one school operating as two schools so that they can pretend to be the top school in the state by moving the bottom set next door.
I'm not really sure why you think these articles are not contributing to sensible discussion. Both articles provide arguments for their case, neither seem dogmatic about it.

In contrast, your comment offers no arguments, you merely dismiss the debate as uninteresting, while simultaneously misunderstanding what these authors are talking about: you claim one should simply "choose the right tech for the job", as if there is always an obvious right choice. But it seems pretty clear to me that both authors agree that this is in fact often a hard choice.

And both articles are about such situations: what to do if the choice between multiple technologies is hard. In reality, you can almost never really evaluate all the alternatives, so you need some sort of "reasoned bias", a heuristic that helps you decide between candidates. "Choose boring technology" and "choose exciting technology" are both suggestions for such heuristics.
I initially thought this article was satire - poking fun at how easy programmers really have it on balance. But no, it’s just a contentless, envy fuelled moan from a position of privilege.

Take a step out of the FAANG-SV-HN salary distortion field for a moment, and the London financial one too for the matter, you will clearly see that 55k is a great salary in the UK. Far more than the average.

If you picked a career that you don’t innately enjoy because you thought it would make you rich, and it’s not, then that’s on you.
J6 floated an idea like that above, but a less drastic outcome where the earth takes on some very small fraction of one percent of additional mass, and the shape of its orbit merely changes a tiny bit, is also a possibility.
Yes. And then the incentive will be to buy up all available capacity and create artifical scarcity.
If you believe that we are dealing with profit maximizing actors then this is the likely outcome in the absence of any price control.
Lets say you believe that a competitor may come up to provide the service as soon as the price becomes attractive. Power generation is not something that can be stood up (at least not yet) at the drop of a hat.
There are far better solutions to this problem and they all involve more and not less regulation.
It's a sad story.
The action of the student is difficult to understand in my opinion, and may have been the consequence of some other underlying issue. However, even if he suffered from of mental issues, the fact that he didn't get support speaks very badly for the university and the supervisor.

The lack of reaction from the university is also hard to justify. Even if one doesn't want to jump to conclusions about the professor, some temporary measure should have been taken, at least to reassure the family that due investigations were being done.
How quickly does the mind go from "my career is stagnating and finding better jobs can be hard" to "this is the worst choice of career". One of them is a valid concern, the other is a gross exaggeration that people who actually have bad jobs would laugh at.
"moving to the US" is a very generic statement. For starters, one can't simply move but needs to fulfill the immigration requirements, one of which is employment which one has to first find.

So no, it's not as easy as you may make it sound like.
Media Immediately Stops Covering Ted Cruz Story After He Puts on Cuomo Mask
I worked in finance for 5 years, passed all 3 CFA exams, and was ready to start studying for the GMAT to get in a top MBA school. Decided to take a hard right and learn programming instead.

I loved studying finance, but didn't like working finance jobs. Finance is getting more automated anyways, here's an excerpt from the front office salary link that's in the OP's article:

> As banks try to automate as much as they can, and as trading takes place electronically using computer algorithms, human beings are becoming far less plentiful in the front office. Goldman Sachs, for example, famously replaced the 600 equities traders it had in the year 2000 with electronic trading systems. Now, Goldman says it only has two actual human traders left.

I love working with code. Finance spreadsheets were a bore for me. Complex Scala codebases are a delight.

Programming has been an awesome career for me and the flexibility has enabled me to live a completely different life.
Same here. Primitive security rules? I guess they just chose to ban all non-US IP addresses.
Your personal value for reliability isn’t relevant. The electric grid is providing power for hospitals with back up generators and office building which don’t. The value of each of those 9’s to society and the overall economy is what matters and business being forced to shut down lose vastly more money than it would cost to prevent this issue.

The market based solution is to add a very large fine for blackouts on a per customer bases. Grid operators can still select how many actual 9’s they want, but the externalities for doing so are priced in.
High Profile Developmental Biologist Lewis Wolpert Dies at 91
1. What makes you think that they need it?

2. FWIW Texas is kind of an island. There are very few significant population centers near the TX border. Oklahoma City is the closest city, followed by New Orleans and Albuquerque. Plus Texas only has one major city near its own borders (El Paso). There aren’t that many neighbors nearby.
You have some points here, but the Bash part is _not_ the problem. Bash is everywhere and the true fix to that bit is to learn Bash: It's not hard and I benefit from my Bash skills everyday, it's one of the best things to invest even a bit in. Just don't write "actual software" in Bash.
A lot of happiness thinking centers around focusing on achieving something, having the right job, “I’ll be happy when...”

But like that doesn’t work because we keep moving the goal post on ourselves. There will always be “one more thing” until I’m happy. Happiness is found in the journey to achieve these things.
I love Standardbooks. It is such a good idea.
Nvidia will make sure that no one can use "mining" cards like this.
Fully agree with the author.

Even if he might have over-simplified things, the bottom line is true.
How about hooking up that excess energy to a federal grid and make that growth both permanent and sustainable? What will happen when BTC goes back into the dumpster for a couple years (if not forever)?

All those tons of Carbon that could have been turned off had that hydro replaced Coal should be laid at the feet of crypto and fundie “anti-state” nutjobs
People, when picking a career in college, still seem to believe that you can have a 9-5 job for life. I know quite a few university bank employees (ubs, Barclay's, etc) before and/or now still in London who are not programmers; sure they make more, faster after uni, but they work stupid hours. And get kicked fast if they kick up a fuss.

The expectation that things are like what you were told by parents or grandparents maybe needs adjusting. You are not hireable with this attitude, it is not a programmer-only problem.
> The parent comment's tone was as if a business needs to beg for workers, and to make sure that programmers are kept happy with fancy and trendy technology. This is what's toxic and infantilizing.

That was just your interpretation. The parent commenter said that some engineers are motivated by money and some by new tech. Either way you need to keep workers happy or they will leave, that is just common sense. So if you choose boring technology you will get people motivated by money and not the "infant" engineers who "need toys" as you say. But really they don't "need" the toys, they just prefer it and will therefore leave if someone else gives them that when you don't.