skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Several of the PMs and UX people at the digital services agency where I work have compsci degrees or some experience as developers. Transitioning into developer-adjacent roles is a kind of graceful exit from development where your experience is viewed as a positive. A PM who actually understands development and developers is much more effective than one who doesn't. A UX architect who knows what's possible, what's easy, and what's hard has a big advantage too. Overall, you mesh better with the development team on a project than someone without your experience.

On my side, I like working with these people because I can communicate much more easily with them on technical issues.

As a bonus, you would be entry level, but it's not a weird issue to be experienced and entry level moving to a different field, and another bonus you have is that, having 10 years of practical employment experience means someone looking at hiring you can reasonably assume you've already learned to be a good employee and won't need to be handheld through basics like "don't be late" and "communicate appropriately in a work environment".
How are you getting job data?
i think this actually gets at what makes applied ML distinct from statistics as a practice, even though there is a ton of overlap.

statisticians make assumptions 1 and 2, and think of themselves as trying to find the "correct" parameters of their model.

people doing applied ML typically assume they don't know 1 (although they might implicitly make some weak assumptions like sub-gaussian to avoid fat tails, etc.) and also typically don't care about being able to do 2. and they don't care about their parameters; in a sense to an ML practitioner, every parameter is a nuisance parameter.

instead you assume you have some reliable way of evaluating performance on the task you care about -- usually measuring performance on an unseen test set. as long as this is actually reliable, then things are fine.

but you are right that in the face of a shifting distribution or an adversary crafting bad inputs, ML models can break down -- but there is actually a lot of research on ways to deal with this, which will hopefully reach industry sooner rather than later.
> Instead of ads, I thought I would try and sell an NFT of the page [...] In the end it was successful, selling for just over $200

... It was at this point in the read that I got very excited and broke away from the article to research "NFTs"[1] - because I've been known to create digital art[2] and I've even written a JS library to help people create digital art[3] (kinda). Luckily I got interrupted during my research and, once the interruption completed, I returned to the article rather than my research tabs - which were closed pretty quickly after the read completed.

> Most of the things I’ve posted [to Twitter] are liked exclusively by my colleagues, my Mum and my ex-flatmate. It’s screaming into the void.

My Mother doesn't do social media. I doubt she'd approve of the words I choose to scream.

[1] https://www.creativebloq.com/features/what-are-nfts - "NFTs use a monster amount of energy in their creation. So much so that many protesters are worried about the very real impact the craze could have on the environment" ... this is seriously scary; it puts me off the whole idea of trying to monetise my creative work in this way.

[2] https://codepen.io/collection/DmgxKv - my collection of generative art on CodePen

[3] https://scrawl-v8.rikweb.org.uk/
So "civilian" now means "amature", or at least "non-professional"?
Those were my thoughts too, recognizing bad code is a quality of good programmers.

The big question I would have for OP is 'do you want to do this anymore?'. I personally don't, I've loved development for 20 years but it's just not for me anymore, at least not for a day job. In that respect I'm in the same boat as OP, "What do I do now ?"
id argue acquiring the skills and experience to be a good pm is on par with doing the same to become a better engineer. good pms have very different skills to software engineers - communication, communication, more communication. obviously software experience lends itself to managing software projects well so youre half way there, but i wouldnt underestimate it. it sounds to me, that if you recognize and have identified your weaknesses as an engjneer, youre also half way there to learning from them and getting better at it. the question is what do you enjoy and what will you be motivated to work at? do that.
> There are good mechanics, cars are getting safer, cops do fight crime, soldiers do fight wars and so on, social workers so do their jobs, teachers usually teach and so on.

But there also exist many mechanics who try to get you to pay for unnecessary services, which mechanics are incentivized for.

Cars are getting safer for their human passengers by increasing the energy absorbed by the car body, which coincidentally increases the odds of a car being totaled in an accident, which increases demand for cars, which is what car manufacturers are incentivized for.

Cops are incentivized to make lots of arrests - which means they mostly fight crime which doesn't require extensive investigation nor poses high risk, ie lots of low level non-violent crimes.

Soldiers are not incentivized to prolong wars (they get paid in peace time, which also has much lower risks of death and disability). Major defense contractors and some politicians though do have an incentive to prolong wars, and coincidentally the US has been continuously at war for nearly 20 years.

How many major cities have had a serious social problem eliminated by the efforts of social workers? That's not their job, which is why it doesn't get done.

Teachers have no perverse incentive not to teach, they don't get paid more if their students don't pass. In fact it's a real problem where schools that have poor performance for unrelated reasons get punished with reduced funding, leading to a downward spiral that has destroyed lots of inner city schools. Even if the government doesn't formally have such punitive measures in place, the fact is wealthy families move away from mediocre school districts, which reduces the funding available for them, which quickly leads to the school district becoming even worse.

Perverse incentives don't mean you're incentivized to do your job poorly, it means the job you're incentivized to do well isn't necessarily the one people would want you to do.
Linus faced the fallout of his communication style recently.

Musk is far from universally admired, many-many people think he is a piece of shit for how he handles his employees, how he overworked the Tesla factory staff to meet idiotic production quotas, how he throw a hissy fit when CA mandated closing non-essential workplaces (so Tesla factories) due to COVID, etc., etc.

RMS consistently pushed himself on vulnerable women on campus.

Are these comparable? Sure, on some level.

Is the FSF better off without him? Well, who knows, but many people seem to think that the answer is a clear yes.
I started programming at gymnasium and through uni. Throughout uni I did a lot of Competitive Programming. Most programs in CP are written and discarded within hours of each other. You also pretty much only use the standard library and no third-party tools. You never interact with the hardware of the system that the program runs on. Maybe reading files from the filesystem (depending on judge software) but definitely no networking. No threading or parallelism. No CI/CD. No Docker, K8s. No build systems. No project management & other "soft knowledge". No "Does it work on IE8?"-stuff.

Essentially you become an expert in writing 100-200 lines of code that reads data from standard input and prints data to standard output. Useful for CP, not so much in the real world. After doing CP as a hobby for a few years at uni I realized this and instantly looked to my peers. What were they doing? One guy was building something similar to IFTTT in golang. Another one was building his own window manager for Linux. Some were really good with constructing websites. But what except solve toy computer science questions could I do?

I don't come with any specific advice, but the way you described being down in the dumps felt very similar to my experience. I think that kind of experience is quite common and normal... Maybe more people have had such a moment than not? I hope you manage to find a way were you get to do what you love.
What language would have been appropriate in 2013?
Show HN: Draw Our Homepage
I am a software engineer for a small startup called Monet. Drawing is a core focus of our product so we wanted it to feel more than superfluous on our website. We came up with a way to use Google QuickDraw as an API to classify a site visitor’s doodle as they draw. If their doodle gets classified as, say, a bird or a camera, their drawing suddenly gets lifted off the page and becomes a working link for our Twitter or Instagram pages respectively. I’m still a very junior dev (still in college) and would love to see what you all think. Cheers.
Broken Windows theory. People tend to do what they consider normal in an environment. Change the environment and the people change. Either because they, in this case the cheaters, change their behavior or go to another environment.
Great question. I chose to focus on tabletop RPGs because I wanted to focus on a niche I was personally familiar with. I'm bullish on the future of the space and would love to build tooling for game masters if the site catches on. That said, if those games are something you're interested in using Roleplayful for, I would be happy to add them.
Agreed with everyone else here that it's great that you've recognized areas of improvement for yourself. That's an important step, and in your position I would validate by chatting with your coworkers about it. Every time a colleague has asked me for my opinion on what they can improve upon or work on, I've always tried to give a straightforward critique; see if your colleagues independently bring up the same issues you think you have.

More generally, without having worked at a company that size yet, you can't be expected to come in with all the domain knowledge that dev team veterans have. Forget about titles like "senior" and what that means. Doing mostly-solo dev work for a long time is just a very different kind of work than writing code in a shared codebase with a team of coworkers of varying experience and skill levels. There will be aspects of maintainability and clarity which simply aren't a big concern in your solo projects but make a big difference when you have dozens or more developers working on the same code. Communication with coworkers becomes an important skill, collaborative project management etc. These are things which you can't just study and learn on your own, you ramp up on them over the course of working in that kind of environment. So yes, you might be pretty "junior" at some of these medium-sized-company aspects of software development, but that's fine and only to be expected at this stage. Keep at it, gain experience, level up by doing.
Even more, this is all slightly different (or completely different) based on region, country etc.
Opened Sublime text – no updates since Oct 2019. Went to the website – everything about ST3 from Oct 20190. Went to Download – Build 3211 from Oct 2019. "For _bleeding edge_ releases, see the dev builds" – last build September 2019, older than the stable one.

I'm all for using "bleeding edge" (although I don't with VSCode because I don't need to in order to have a working dev environment), but I've had a really good look in all the places I'd expect to see this and am thoroughly convinced that I'm using the very latest version of ST and that it is therefore out of development.

I understand that this thread saying something different, but if I've had a good look _knowing there is a later version_ and can't find it, then how would a customer know? A sufficiently hidden development process is indistinguishable from a project being dead.

Edit: really keen to use a later version if one is available, can anyone point me towards a download link? I own a licence for ST3.
Understanding the Law of Vibration to Create Your Reality
Cool, this is the first time I've seen "Calligraphy for Computers". I hadn't realised Hershey was doing phototypesetting from the beginning, so my comment about a physical pen was a bit inaccurate.

However, the "Dot Size" section on p.9 suggests that the fonts were meant to be rendered with relatively high strokewidths:
"...the effective diameter of the plotting dot is 2.9 raster units for the S-C 4010 printer. A diameter of 2.3 raster units has been reported for the S-C 4020 printer."
Yes, they're valuable because they capture many listeners and generate revenue. It doesn't need to interesting for it to be valuable.

Plenty of interesting music flies under the radar. Even without the massive marketing push some artists get, the same artists would still rise to the top producing familiar song structures the average listener can recognize.
Software Supply Chain Security
Mullvad is the bees knees. The cats meow.
I wonder how well this transfers. Instead of cheaters, bullies? Liars? General opportunists?

My gut is it transfers easily. Not clear on what to do about it.
Technically you wouldn't even have to do that. Just change a few codons to alternative codons, it wouldn't even change the amino acids being produced.
To change the society, change incentives.

“Never, ever, think about something else when you should be thinking about the power of incentives.” — Charlie Munger,

https://fs.blog/2017/10/bias-incentives-reinforcement/

The Psychology of Human Misjudgment
https://fs.blog/great-talks/psychology-human-misjudgment/
Ask HN: What do you think about the book ReWork?
You could argue that plumber only needs adjustable spanner, otherwise he is a bad plumber. Sure, technically it would be possible to do most of the job. But it's stupid and ineffective.
] The western countries are accusing China of fake genocide here, such as suppressing the Uyghur culture, their language, their food, their clothing, even their haircuts

First of all, that's not a fake genocide. Forced cultural assimilation is still considered genocide.

Second, the accusations are far more serious - concentration camps with various human rights abuses. That's in classic genocide territory, going as far as the Herrero and Namaqua one.

> The funny thing also, is that one of the most famous Chinese actresses right now, is Dilraba Dilmurat, of the Uyghur ethnicity. And she is rising in stardom in the Chinese entertainment world.

> So if the Chinese are really trying to genocide the Uyghurs, then I highly doubt they’d let a Uyghur girl rise up too far in their entertainment culture.

> Can you imagine the Nazis promoting Jews in their films? That is the analogy here

The comparison isn't apt, because the Chinese don't claim Uyghurs are enemies of the people or w/e, just that their culture is terrorist. They're doing cultural assimilation, not mass extermination ( mostly). So a culturally assimilated actress is a perfect tool - see, they're not all bad, it's not in their blood/race!
It’s fairly clear to me that the problem isn’t that Systemd is leaning towards everything should be solved the SystemdD way.

The real problem is that almost no one has been able to create alternatives to SystemD’s solutions to the vast majority of problems it chooses to tackle that are as well developed or effective as the SystemD solution.
Standard French pronunciation of "Strasbourg" has an /r/ but no /g/. Of course it's a German name, really, but the Germans spell it a bit differently, and neither French nor Germans pronounce the second vowel in the way it is normally, I think, pronounced in English.

Good point about regional languages in Italy.

"Cologne" is a good example, though some people, including me, usually say "Köln" in English, though I wouldn't say "München", except in the name of the football team "Bayern München", which for some reason is usually called thus in English.
No warrant canary, from what I can see.
Backward Compatibility Reaches the Clouds for Xbox Game Pass Ultimate Members
So people with no programming experience are confused with Java. That doesn't sound like an issue at all.

I don't think the solution should be to bend Java backwards so that it's easy for people with no progrmming experience to work with.
Only spent 4k? Add in your time at your typical hourly rate and despair. 4k is basically nothing in game development.
Cheers for unregulated money
There's plenty of information in all those types of commits even if you personally don't find that information "useful". I've had to do the sort of archeology digs to figure out "what syntax errors did a build tool miss", "why is this type of file often missed to be added, and how often do we miss it", "what was still TODO in this feature effort that got removed at the last minute", etc. All of which needs information from those sorts of "low level" commits.
I think you'd find that a slight shift in perspective on this will do wonders. Try imagining that the person posting is your best friend on a good day. Or your mom. Or your dog. Or anyone/thing else you unconditionally hope receives good things in life. That might turn some of them into boosts to your happiness (I want good things for person x: imagine good things happening to person x = good thing for me).
Highly relevant in the context of open source project infiltration.
Considering the alternative is not having the feature... I'd say this is very good.

Of course, we have to consider that wayland is basically a re-thought for a substitute of a system that exists and evolves since early 80's... It is acceptable that it takes long. If such wait is needed to get something better than what we had and fix antique design limitations, I have no problem waiting for it.
While I agree with you I also think that Google and Apple have some responsibility here. They advertise their platforms are safe and secure but you have a lot of applications blatantly impersonating legitimate companies and it can take quite some time for stores to remove them.

It's a very common issues for the Cardano blockchain, their official wallet "Daedalus" is desktop-only but almost every week you have a new "Daedalus mobile" fake app (i.e it will steal your coins) made available on the App Store and Play Store from a fake company (with a name close to IOHK, the developer of Cardano) and it takes literally days for stores to react.
Is this because of memory bugs\vulnerabilities that target the stack or just because it was too old and junky?
For the next reason Alan Smithee exists, possibly:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Smithee
Yeah I believe Rust is also much less forgiving to mistakes than C is, which makes it a bit less beginner friendly, but do we really want to allow badly written things to run?

Also, are you sure it is a race condition? Some other errors can also appear as races. What service are you trying to create?
Hoare's thoughts on the 40th anniversary: https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2009/10/42360-retrospective-a...

Discussed (barely) at the time:

Retrospective: An Axiomatic Basis for Computer Programming - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=905176 - Oct 2009 (1 comment)
I was under the impression that the Raptor was running a full-flow staged combustion, which by definition is neither Fuel-rich nor oxygen-rich.
Pairing, pairing, pairing, and more pairing.
(Some) ML is non-parametric, but there are always some questions you need to be able to answer about your data. At bare minimum, is the generating process ergodic, what is the error of your measurement procedure, how representative of the true underlying distribution is your sampling procedure? All use of data should start with some exploratory analysis before you ever get to the modeling stage.

Once you have a model, at minimum understand how to tune for the tradeoffs of different types of error and don't naively optimize for pure accuracy. At the obvious extremes, if you're trying to prevent nuclear attack, false negatives are much more costly than false positives, if you're trying to figure out whether to execute someone for murder, false positives are much more costly than false negatives. Understand the relative costs of different types of error for whatever you're trying to predict and proceed accordingly.
We had a similiar issues where a senior employee came and interviewed great. She ended up becoming a pm.

At another place something similiar happened and she ended up as a pm / developer.

I think pm move is a great idea for someone who can sell but maybe isn't as strong.

Perhaps moving to pm is a good answer for thread poster.
Not sure if the article mentions them, but a couple environments I regards as "cheating-enabled":

* Almost any social media platform

* Online product reviews
The study is a bit more interesting than this title suggests.

>An intervention aimed to discourage participants from choosing the cheating-enabling environment based on social norm information did not have the expected effect; on the contrary, it backfired. In summary, the results suggest that people low in moral character are likely to eventually dominate cheating-enabling environments, where they then cheat extensively.

In other words: we tried to tell the cheaters "you wanna cheat? fine, you can only play with the other cheating pieces of crap." The intent was for this to be a punishment, but it turns out they like it. The strategy backfired.

Don't dismiss this as a "well duh" thing, there's cool stuff in here!
Biden plans to connect every American to broadband in new infrastructure package
Yeah - sorry I wasn't clearer - I found Mobikwiks denial of a breach hard to believe at the time and this seems to confirm that they (Mobikwik) were full of it regarding their nope, didn't happen press release
Ask HN: Would you go for a Covid shot not recommended in U.S. & your country?
Instead of just reading about I'm currently actually facing this choice and would like to get some unbiased advice. I was following the conversation too much and got too emotionally involved but now need a sober decision.

I live in Berlin and have just received an invitation to do a shot. According to the local rules, you can choose the brand of vaccine, but in reality it means doing AstraZeneca in a week or BioNTech in two months.

I would prefer to do BN 'cause it seems more advance, safe and too support local science, but remember a lot of public medical advice to vaccinate as soon as possible to help the population. Due that I was ready to do AZ, however, our local medical regulator (The Standing Committee on Vaccination) has just prohibited the use of AZ for anyone younger than 60.

The third option - that I would rather avoid - is going to Moscow to do the Russian shot. While I'm against it in general (due to logistic reasons and lack of proper early stage testing), I'm not sure if I'm just rationalising my preconceptions.

If AZ is still available, what would you do?
I'm assuming this was the Ullman book you took a look at - https://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Automata-Languages-Compu...

If not, it's good but pretty dense. If you didn't like that, then I would recommend this one - https://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Theory-Computation-Micha...

Sipser has a lot less notation and more english explanations of the concepts. I picked it up and read most of it after graduating - it's pretty easy to follow (though if I recall, I think some of the terminology around Turing complete languages differed slightly from the Ullman text).
Almost all Chinese companies are integrated with the Chinese government to that degree.
Optical Mouse Inventor Hunts for a Covid Cure