skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Why do giant companies do so many hilariously dumb things?

As organizational complexity increases, design debt and responsibility becomes diffused among larger and larger groups of people. Leading to the bizarre situation where no individual has power or responsibility over anything specifically.

Any individual interface element might have taken input from as many as 100+ different people over many years, each with competing interests and goals (no, I'm not joking). Combine this with the precedents and decisions made on projects in the past (design debt), and you end up with stupid outcomes like this.

As a multiple FAANG alumni, I've seen this firsthand hundreds of times.

I think it's cute that people think IC designers or engineers have the power to make any real decisions inside large organizations.

What's more likely, is these stupid icons were part of some design system somebody created 7 years ago (have to stay consistent of course!). The circular floating buttons were a precedent somebody set 5 years ago on a completely different product (god forbid it feels "off-brand"). The colors were set 6 years ago on some project where this kind of application was never thought of.

And finally, the order & placement of the icons was changed 15 times by some PM, then the PM's boss, then the accessibility guys, then the brand team, the brand team's boss, then the director of marketing, etc. etc. The tie breaking vote going to whoever is perceived as having more soft power inside the org at the time.

Hence, the inevitable outcome of big company stupidity.
Surely more like making a show of not being compliant.
Obviously the world and the economy are big enough for both but at least in terms of programming, I've observed the following:

The more senior programmer I become (both in age and skills), the less I can actually focus on a single programming task. I am expected to know a metric ton of tooling for 2000 separate purposes. So I learned to quickly master tools just good enough. Same goes for frameworks (which has been to the detriment of the projects sometimes, sadly; there are things you cannot afford to half-ass).

Basically, as a tech generalist and a polyglot, my job is to assemble bricks into walls into houses. Rarely do I get to write the perfect brick or glue. I am much more a plumber and architectural worker than anything else.

So IMO if you are not in a single company for most of your career and want to be competitive, you have to be a generalist.
I have problems with many programs like this. For example thunderbird where the buttons don't stay in place. So when I want to archive some emails to clean up the inbox I keep clicking on Archive. But if I click on a message marked as junk, the Junk button disappears and all buttons shift right so instead of clicking Archive it's now suddenly Forward.

In my new car, the phone menu lists all recent phone calls without grouping them by contact, so if I want to use the fancy controls on my steering to call someone I have to scroll and scroll.

Another example from the physical world. Recently I found the buttons for all 15 floors selected (probably a kid thought it was funny) and I had to wait on every damn floor. No way to cancel them. And it's such an easy thing to predict, there can nr max 5-6 people in the elevator at any time, so why should you be able to select more than 5-6 floors at a time? And no way to cancel of course.

And almost every software or device has those issues, and like the author I sometimes have to ask myself, am I the crazy one here, how can everyone else live with this? I believe most ordinary folk will believe it's there fault when things don't work as expected and their lack of expertise or handiness instead of blaming the interface. Or by learning the nuances and quirks of a system they consider themselves as skilled and knowledgeable.
No reason we couldn't peg those to the price of gold, a basket of commodities, or of consumer goods.
For every user you'd have to know all usernames which could be brute forced guessed or gathered with some sort of crawler.

It's definitely a great point you bring up I think with web analytics an attacker has a natural advantage since captchas would obviously not be feasable. But it is worth to but effort in not making it too easy.

> Happy lunch!

Thanks :-) gonna start with my normal job now^^
Indeed... we're going camping near there in a few weeks!
What Authenticator App to Choose?
As our lives and day-to-day functions move increasingly online, keeping our personal information secure is more important than ever. Passwords can be forgotten or compromised and multi-factor authentication (MFA) or two-factor authentication 2FA helps to prevent private data from getting into the wrong hands. In this post, I will try to analyze the 2 Authenticator apps, Google & 2Stable.

What is multi-factor authentication (MFA)?
There are numerous factors of multi-factor authentication:

What the user knows: This includes security questions or PINs, wherein the user is the only one who knows the answer.
What the user has: This includes mobile phones where it can give codes or a one-time password or even smart cards.
What the user is: This includes a part of the human body such as fingerprints or facial recognition.
The combination of two or all these types creates the multi-factor authentication method, and this is where the authenticator app comes into play.

What are the differences between Authenticator by 2Stable and Google Authenticator?

* 2Stable Authenticator can synchronize all your accounts on multiple devices, while Google Authenticator only supports 1 device.
* 2Stable offers a backup feature essential when the device is lost or stolen, while Google Authenticator doesn't.
* Google Authenticator is free of charge, while 2Stable Authenticator costs 4,99$/year to unlock all features.
* 2Stable supports custom icons that make it easier to locate each account and code, which Google doesn’t have.
* Google Authenticator is available on Android & iOS, while 2Stable Authenticator only for Apple devices.
* 2Stable Authenticator supports Mac and Apple Watch, while Google Authenticator doesn't.

No matter what app you will choose, it is vital to enable two-step verification for your online accounts, until is not too late.
WorldNews Network | 100% Remote (near GMT) | Full time / flexible hours

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We're looking for a full stack developer/devops to join us to to build even more value into these large numbers of domains. We also develop internal tools to automate and support business processes.

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If you strive to build simple, elegant, readable, maintainable, secure, testable and well tested code resulting in excellent user experiences, we'd like to work with you.

Feel free to contact me here on HN or check more details at
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I think it'll be facisnating to see how long America can hold the pretence of its Mars colony being "American" before history repeats itself.
Thankfully, I will be among the large subset of the population which will be immune, as, per deep learning tradition, the data set the GAN will be trained on inevitably won't include any fats, blacks, or non-binaries.
> The second is a gross demonstration of "anecdotes are not data."

The second one doesn't even support the premise. Video games aren't more "technical" than Facebook.
Well, the founders of Sibelius created another music notation software called Dorico[1].

Is Dorico's UI more consistent? Does it address many of the issues of this video's criticism?

Or put another way, does being a green-field software project allow the freedom to create a sane UI? Or did it have to deliberately copy may of Sibelius' faults so migrating users can quickly get up to speed with Dorico? (Analogous to MS Excel copying Lotus 123 buggy leap year of 1900 to be more compatible.)

EDIT -- just noticed same uploader also made a 1 hour video about Dorico[2] but not sure if answers my questions.

[1] https://new.steinberg.net/dorico/

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-3wEC6Fj_8
From what I hear and read there is a bit of ageism there. Good to hear it is possible there too.
I started with gitbook for deploymentfromscratch.com but run into various issues and now adopted a similar approach to OP by using Pandoc with Markdown and some Latex here and there (like some custom boxes). I really wish there is something more streamlined :(
Superset and Redash worth a look. I'd go superset if you are comfortable with python but want some of the prebuilt stuff that Tableau gives you.
That case has no bearing on this because they aren't deciding if "interfaces can be copyrighted"
Control web applications with two-clicks in Cloudflare Gateway
Is it also a crime to create and sell software, even if that's the only path available to you that will result in the product you see a need for?
I am beginning to think that hiring for enthusiastic programmers might be a mistake. Get on old cynical bastard like me. I just want to make my own life easy, and that means writing the easiest to maintain code that I can. Not trying out some new tech that has promised to solve all my problems.
> In all of Google, I'm certain that there are at least thirty (1 in ~3500) mentally ill employees

Just curious about this statistics. Is 1 in ~3500 the prevalence of mental illnesses in the general population? If so, why would you assume that this frequency would remain the same in a leading tech company which selects its employees through a rigorous (one would hope) interview process, which might significantly skew the sample? It may be much lower than in the general population. Or, alternatively, much higher.
3 years is a long time for another piece of paper!

In my country (Ireland), we have courses called 'conversions courses'. These are year-long courses designed to 'convert' your career path into a new industry. The year-long course is about equivalent to a BSc (minus a couple of credits).

I took a conversion course in computer programming and secured a job ~6 months after graduating. I've been in the industry since and have recommended it to a couple of friends who have done the same.

I recommend checking out postgrad courses in your country. I would be very surprised if there was not something similar. There should be no need to spend another 3 years in university just to go into the software industry!
Shops return to rural Sweden but are now staff-free
My biggest problem with the design of Google Meet is that the buttons are horribly inconsistent.

The big fat red phone button means "click this button to achieve the state that is depicted on the button (hung up)".

Okay, so good so far, by clicking a button, you get whatever is pictured on it. Makes sense.

One would thus think that similarly, a picture of a muted microphone on a button means "click to mute" and a picture of an unmuted microphone on a button means "click to talk" and this is backwards from what they actually mean.
The first question I’d ask is what we’re the results of the interviews? Are you applying for experienced jobs, internships, or entry level (0-1 year experience) positions?

Also, you enjoy this as a hobby, but how do you know you’d enjoy it as work? I enjoy writing code but find it difficult at times to do it as an employee, especially when I’m unmotivated by a very boring task. I still get it done and to the same standards, but it’s a lot less easier than more interesting tasks.

The master’s degree in general can help, but I’d evaluate why you didn’t get the jobs you interviewed for and think about how those jobs may aid your goals or hobbies.

The other thing I’d say is that in my experience, boot camps are great - but you described that they are geared toward web development and that being an issue. Many jobs are going to be in web and app development (if you’re lucky) or gigantic corporate enterprise boring work. Thats the reality of the vast majority of software engineering roles (oh and also backend, distributed systems, databases, etc.).

If you’re applying for level virtual reality jobs - my guess is the hiring bar for those is both more difficult and more idiosyncratic than other jobs given the youth of the industry. You’d really have to wow someone with 0-1 years of resume experience.

Also, if it makes you feel any better this is a struggle for many people, myself included. I’ve been trying to find a job in product or program management for years and for the life of me just can’t do it, especially where I live (open to remote which expands the pool somewhat). I’ve interviewed at companies ranging from Google down to startups and just can’t make it happen, and that’s if I’m lucky enough to get the interview... so know you’re not alone in this endeavor and keep trying and working toward your goals!
Because he didn't intentionally deceive anyone as part of his "pump and dump". At least not in any manner where it can be proven that the deception was intentional.

In Musk's case, the "pump" was simply the very public announcement that he had made a large purchase --- which as far as we know was 100% accurate.

This is all it took for coinheads to start buying like crazy and "pump" the price. Whether Musk took advantage and made the "dump" is unknown.

Deception for personal gain is called "fraud" and is illegal. But there was no known fraud in what Musk said. Being truthful for personal gain is legal.
Scribal traditions of “ancient” Hebrew scrolls (2014)
I've been a generalist all my life, I don't think I could be otherwise because I love to learn above all things.

That's a curse and a blessing at my forties.

And I don't know who is more successful, but certainly I can tell that my main disadvantage is the constant, crippling imposter syndrome. Because I know some things about many things, but above all, I know how much I don't know yet.
Wahou; this is terrific work! It would have saved me hours of work if I had known that before!
Thanks for sharing!
I think both approaches are interesting and valuable. Yes ripgrep is great for interactive usage, but in scripts I'll still be using grep for the foreseeable future.

I think the situation with GNU coreutils on Solaris/BSDs is a bit different: a lot of the time the BSD/Solaris tools on one hand and the GNU tools on the other were incompatible in some ways. Some flags would be different (GNU ls vs. FreeBSD ls for instance have pretty significant flag differences) and then you have things like Make who have pretty profound syntax differences between flavours.

As a result if you needed to write portable scripts you either had to go through a painful amount of testing and special casing for the various dialects, or you'd just mandate that people installed the GNU version of the tools on the system and use that. That's why you can pretty much assume that any BSD system in the wild these days has at the very least gmake and bash installed, just because it's used by third party packages.

So IMO people used GNU on non-GNU systems mainly for portability or because they came from GNU-world and they were used to them.

I know that there's a common idea that GNU tools were more fully featured or ergonomic than BSD equivalents, but I'm not entirely sold on that. I think it's mostly because people these days learn the GNU tools first, and they're likely to notice when a BSD equivalent doesn't support a particular feature while they're unlikely to notice the opposite because they simply won't use BSD-isms.

For instance for a long time I was frustrated with GNU tar because it wouldn't automatically figure out when a compression algorithm was used (bz, gz or xz in general) and automatically Do The Right Thing. FreeBSD tar however did it just fine.

Similarly I can get FreeBSD ls to do pretty much everything GNU ls can do, but you have to use different flags sometimes. If you don't take the time to learn the BSDisms you'll just think that the program is more limited or doesn't support all the features of the GNU version.

An other example out of the top of my head is "fstat" which I find massively more usable than lsof, which is a lot more clunky with worse defaults IMO. It's mainly that lsof mixes disk and network resources by default, while fstat is dedicated to local resources and you use other programs like netstat to monitor network resources. Since I rarely want to monitor both at the same time when I'm debugging something, I find that it makes more sense to split those apart.
Tips for Surviving and Thriving in Developer Relations
Mosaics
Want to advertise your services for free?
This guy also made a similarly acerbic video about MuseScore, a good open source scorewriter [1]. They actually took his criticisms and started making changes. The two ended up working together and I think he is now the design lead for MuseScore.

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4hZxo96x48A
Because you can't just rebuild the financial system from scratch in a single day, and most of that complexity comes from new rules or exceptions to patch a loophole or an unintended consequence

It's basically a legacy software that is kept alive with patches upon patches until it collapses.
Learning to paint has been my greatest satisfaction in a tough year 2020. Never managed to be satisfied with my drawings for my whole life, I'm quite proud!

https://www.instagram.com/adriengonin/
https://www.deviantart.com/saivia01
Does turning your monitor / browser into negative mode help?
Never heard of dorico because this isn't my space, but that bit is mentioned in the video and it looks as if being greenfield with the original team has its advantages.
Scott Cunningham is an old internet pal of mine, before he was famous!
I think the short answer is that the performance penalty is so significant that it doesn't make sense to use WASM unless you're running untrusted code.
You can't have a "computer that you own" because a computer is no longer an independent device. It's an access point - what used to be called a terminal - into a complex information ecosystem.

You won't get what you want with different hardware and an open OS unless you also fix the ecosystem.

And that means fixing ad tech, cloud services, DNS, open packet inspection, location tracking, security at multiple levels, and any number of other technologies, only the last of which is the local OS.

Worrying about the item in your hand or on your desk is almost literally looking through the wrong end of the telescope.
This video is only a few years old but should already be considered a classic. Not long after, the video's creator was hired to lead design of MuseScore (another sheet music desktop app).

I find the world of music notation software to be fascinating in its diversity of design philosophies. Something about music notation — its complexity, plus its worldwide ubiquity, plus the business reality that there's (relatively) not a ton of money to be made in its software industry — creates a situation where many interesting ideas bloom and there is not one clear monopoly.

Yes, Sibelius and Finale are the longtime popular applications, but Dorico recently came on the scene with a genuinely new philosophy, and there are lots of less popular apps, mostly one-person-show kinds of things, with different approaches to how editing music should work.

My own attempt is with Soundslice (https://www.soundslice.com/notation-editor/), which has an entirely web-based sheet-music editor and lots of tools for music learning/practice.
Imagine actually using free and open-source apps from free and open source app stores&operating systems instead of buying an overpriced rehash of open source software.
I'm not going to wait for them to fix that and I'll just switch to Element.
You've been able to share Excel Sheets online for a while now...
The problem is not the $70 price tag. It's the way publishers cripple the game design in favor of extracting even more money from the players via ingame gambling systems.

We don't have distinct Free2Play and paid games in the AAA market anymore, we now have a mix that combines the worst of both worlds.

Another thing to consider is that in many countries the price is significantly higher - when I look up prices of PS5 games here they cost between 65 and almost 90 Euros, roughly $77-105. Would I pay that much for a game? Sure, but not for any of the titles currently on the market. For that price you better give me a Star Citizen or equivalent, including free updates over the entire lifecycle.
The Two Fundamental Types of Architecture Diagrams
The best answer is probably to watch this video by Joel Spolsky (founder of StackOverflow, among other things): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nbkaYsR94c&ab_channel=JoelS...

It's a kind of tongue-in-cheek video explaining why "You Suck at Excel", but what it's mostly doing is going through a ton of really awesome Excel features, many of them things you can't do in Sheets, and explaining them to a technical audience.

Highly, highly recommended - most of the stuff in that lecture I use every single day.
1Password has built in authenticator which is obviously backed up to their cloud.
They did Lampshade[1] the supposed scripting in an episode of Grand Tour[2]. They've got a huge crew and lots of stuff, so going over borders is a huge hassle without extensive preparation. Basically it needs to be scripted to some point to work at all.

[1] https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/LampshadeHanging
[2] S2E4, Unscripted: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6068870/
As everybody knows who have looked at traffic accidents on Youtube this has been misused in Russia. You want a new car for free? Stop then reverse into the car behind you. And that's why dash cams became ubiquitous in Russia and other countries.
Dr. Seuss as a policy issue: Oh, the intellectual property rights you'll extend
I’ve had the experience that often weird bugs pop up when signing; often it isn’t that simple unfortunately.
Metrics that will make you a top product analyst
Workflow Optimization Tools
Have you ever wondered how much time you spend re-reading all the correspondence in the Slack workspace and how much of this information you really need and relate to your work? I am increasingly faced with the fact that from public channels I really only need 20 percent of all messages, so I spend a lot of time a week to read them, distracted from my main work. In my company, all employees experience similar inconveniences and we decided that we need to optimize our work processes with the help of tools that will really help in this and not take a lot of time. Please tell me if you are experiencing similar problems with corporate messengers and how do you deal with it now?
That's only a problem with one of the arguments, and is exactly why there are two approaches. Some errors are hard to detect by reading or working on the code, but easier to detect from behavior. Some are the other way around.

In this case, I do not agree that this could have gone unnoticed for a long time, even only looking at the behavior of the running system. When multiplied by the number of installations and how much filesystems are used, it is run a lot. It's also the kind of thing people investigate when it happens in certain settings - we lost a block and our whole filesystem was corrupted. And the kind of thing people test for.
Thanks for sharing. I feel like I'm not going to relax until we face the music and there's a real discussion about this.

I'm just hoping that Western governments are looking into this in private and there's a conscious effort to withhold the discussion until the virus is controlled. It's unconscionable that this would be allowed to simply pass by.

Related article and discussion from yesterday. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26389690
Ah. I like it when the things I pay for belong to me.
Keep in mind that Perl regexen can not be recognized in linear time.
In automotive mechanics this is paraphrased as such:

"Every 20 minute job is one broken bolt away from being a 3 day ordeal."