skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Two anecdotes about similar issues.

There's an old (10 years?) case about smart traffic lights that included SIM cards for connectivity - which were taken out of the traffic lights and abused. See https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-12135841

Another case (for which I don't have a link) some years ago was that ornithologists were doing tracking of large migratory birds using ankle bracelets w. embedded radios - until people "underneath" the birds found out that they contain a SIM provisioned for international roaming, which resulted in birds with such bracelets being shot down to obtain these SIMs as they could be used to extract and sell a few thousand dollars in comms services to locals.
It's probably just politics, I think the US might find it more difficult to threaten to sanction South Korea. Or it might not. But definitely SK has a bigger position of strength relative to the US than Taiwan or even the Netherlands.
Just realizing this and being able to verbalize this makes you way better than 90% of people in IT.

Most senior consultants in Accenture are big dummies that know tech buzzwords. Most of them have never used an IDE.

So I would say your doing good. Don't worry you are good software engineer.
I can cast my desktop. Latency is abysmal though so no gaming.
It is quite simple... XD

Programmer Bob who outsourced his job was a model modern employee

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/jan/17/sacked...
It feels like in order to have this conversation intelligently, we all need to me on the same page about how royalties work, and the difference in royalty types (at least mechanical vs performance royalties).
Just read this yesterday from Fred Wilson talking about Tumblr founder resisting the idea of comments. Only thumbs up and reposts were allowed. The founder said it was a wasteland for negativity.

https://avc.com/2019/08/tumblr-2/
Disappointed in you for making such a comment.
I the only one who feels worse than before, it like all shit, sometimes life is shit. I'm not Cristian but I feel this frace encapusale my feelings
Mark 9:24"I do believe; help my unbelief!"
Not quite April 1, but good stuff nevertheless.
The only way to get better is to practice. I didnt code for about 15 years while I ran my own company and only started coding again about 3 years ago. My brain feels like mush sometimes.

Start by modifying other people's code - fixing bugs. When you have to write new code model it after other peoples' structures. Write comments for how the logic should work before you write the actual code.

You can get it working in one big method using hardcoded values, then slowly break it apart. It might be you just stopped your code at the first draft.

Alternately you can do product management. Being technical and doing product management means you can actually understand what is going on under the hood.
Probably worth a bug report!
Suggestion: I've found that doing a graduate CS degree really helps me build a theoretical foundation which has made me much better at my work.
Example: a much deeper understanding of the HTTP protocol and the client-server model, and how it relates to the world of networking and computing overall.
Incompressibility Method
We do not have the same resources and the same patience as Mother Nature.

Exactly!

Overall, Mother Nature is actually pretty resource efficient.
>but some months ago I decided to go to work on a proper medium software company.

I'm barely sure what that actually means in practice, day-to-day. If that's really what it is, they should know how to help you get up to speed and understand your situation.

Your core feelings here (not to be dismissive) seem to be about them "finding out" and suddenly firing you. It's remotely possible they do that, but unlikely. Even if they do, it was just a company you don't qualify for. It doesn't diminish the previous work you've done.

There's a lot of advice here already about what to do within this company, so consider the worst case: you fail 2-3 more times and they ultimately fire you. You still have something to fall back on by going back to your previous work.
1. Don't compete with deep pocketed VCs.

2. Keep costs minimal, offshore if required.
You make a good point! Being grateful for things that, as you put it, hold little connection to us surely helps because it makes us better people. Thanks for sharing!
Apple backs startup aiming to disrupt music labels
The US government sends people to prison for owning the wrong plant or the wrong type of lobster. It assassinates political opponents - definitely foreign, likely domestic. It snoops on, disrupts and if necessary curtails any serious efforts at political organizing (they actually called Zuckerberg in front of Congress because Facebook was not censoring enough people! Facebook! That was freaking mind-blowing.)

Yep, the difference is amazing.
A PhD advisor is the academic who guides your PhD work. Sergey Brin is a co-founder of Google. They're pointing out how connected many people in computer science.
> I found this exchange very fun

This guy is such a good sport. Unsolicited and impolite random critics of your tech stack on Twitter: fun.
> One day I'll actually set aside a few hours to go through a list of all tech companies that IPO'd in the last 5 years, and see which ones have actually made a profit. Gut feeling is that the "flashy" ones are still burning through cash reserves (Asana/Slack/Uber), but the more boring ones (Rackspace/Pivotal/etc) are probably sitting pretty.

You might find site helpful.
https://postipononprofits.com/

This is outdated a bit in terms of numbers (doesn’t include recent years and excludes many companies), but the broad point remains. You are right, there are ton of companies built around the idea of dumping it on someone else before turning a profit. This has become the ‘formula’ for building companies, unfortunately.
It is fascinating how our online behavior deviates from our physical world behavior.

This whole thread is about how asking for donations is a big fail online.

Yet, there's no lack of street performers in most major metros. Whether that is people in superhero costumes on Hollywood Blvd, or street dancers in times square, they all seem to be doing fine off donations.

There is something about the online "free duplicate copy" concept that just makes value dissappear
I don't know, I always feel like there has to be some reward to incentivize people, even if it's dead simple.

Like, you can choose to have your name publicly displayed on a thank you page (this would work well with BMAC, since donations can be both anonymous and not), or have your username be of different colour or have some badge next to it.

But then again, I don't know how I would fit that into this meme page, and I'm definitely not an expert having earned a total of two euros of donations (yet to implement some reward system).
Are you saying that one is free to commit any crime as long as one day they stop and no longer commit crimes?
And no punishment or retribution is required?
>Pre-iPhone phones were a completely different category of phone. They ran limited, special-purpose operating systems.

That doesn't resemble anything like my memory of the time. I had multiple general purpose windows mobile phones before iPhones existed. It wasn't limited and it could install apps. Neither Microsoft not the carrier took 30%.
There's a line of thinking, popularized by DHH of BaseCamp, that skewers Google for allowing competitors to place ads on a brand's keywords. I can totally see how this would be infuriating. You have to pay money to just "protect" your own brand's name.

But I don't think we should ban this sort of thing, though it's a bit of a toss-up when it comes to how it may promote competition. It allows new competitors to come in and compete with established brands. But, it also allows deep-pocketed incumbents take customers away from smaller companies.

It's similar to the argument that political ads should be allowed on Facebook because it is an effective way for fresh candidates to challenge incumbents. It can also be a way for incumbents to drown out challengers with their warchest.
I understand, the goal isn’t to compare yourself with others but to encourage each other. Thanks for sharing!
A lot of people seem to be taking a legalistic or moralistic view on this. Along the lines of "copyright works like this" or "people should get credit for what they do".

The economic view would be something like:

- There's a pie to be split, often beforehand. Some players are in better negotiating positions than others. Sadly, if you don't know a lot of performers, you'll have a hard time getting a bigger slice from the one that shows up.

- It's not actually relevant who is on the document as a "writer". This is simply a thing to be negotiated over so that the performer is incentivized to do the recording. It's the same thing as putting up sales tax on a purchaser of goods, legally the buyer is paying x% extra, but economically the buyer and the seller actually split the bill according to negotiating power.

- What will happen if it's enshrined that only the person who actually wrote the piece gets his name on it? Well there will be other things to bargain over. For instance, maybe you get your name exclusively on the song, but you put it in a company and the performer gets a piece of the company.
Most places I've worked say - do not read other people's patents.
VPNPro doesn't list ExpressVPN as having Chinese ownership. Wikipedia[1] claims it operates in the British Virgin Islands, and Quora claims the same. That written, a comment on Quora claims that it's owned by the CIA. Ha ha!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ExpressVPN
[2] https://www.quora.com/Who-owns-Express-VPN
An excellent point. My solution to this would be (ironically) to add one feature to Sublime: Grouped Packages.

Simply put, the idea would be to define a set of plugins needed (or recommended) for certain types of development. So you'd install Sublime, and then have a handy popup asking if you want to install any of the suggested Grouped Packages. There might be a dozen or so that are commonly useful for a Rails developer, another group that's useful for C, or for Wordpress, or whatever.

That would allow for a minimal text editor, the infinite possibilities of plugins, and also easy onboarding for new users. It would also be useful for advanced users who are getting started in a new field.
In this sense, I see Nextjs more like a Swiss Army knife than a hammer. And the author (and the Vercel CEO tweets) explained that he used the exact right tools of it.

In the end, it was a static page that handled an incredible amount of traffic.
Why do you have to come at me like this? This is a feeling I go through all the time. It's partly imposter syndrome, but partly that you're probably holding yourself to a higher standard than others.

> I'd been assigned a medium complexity task

Who decided that it was medium? A manger? Some lead? You? You can't really compare what is easy and what is hard when it comes to software. I worked on a project that timelines started to slide when I came on board. Not because I didn't know what I was doing, I had just moved from one project to another. It was because the manager didn't account for the time it would take for me to learn the code base. He assumed that developers were cogs in a machine that can be replaced with no downtime. That doesn't work.

> I've realized I'm not a senior software engineer as I thought and now I don't know what to do next.

There are two pieces of advice I can give you here;

1. Nobody else knows what they're doing either. We're all making it up.

2. You're going to fail at something, a lot, before you get good at it. Go dunk a basketball and get back to me if you think you should just coach(manage) because you couldn't dunk

>A third option would be to take a break from work and try to learn to write good code

You're already at a place paying you to write code. Why take a break to do it for free?
Well, it might be a mistake, but I find that the best communities I'm a part of are echo chambers.

I like urbanism Facebook groups where we can discuss how to improve a specific intersection, for example. Where we are like-minded people and we try to find the best solution.

When we have the same discussion in the neighborhood group, the thread becomes a shouting match with drivers requesting to be able to run through the intersection at full speed with no inconvenience and to get cyclists and pedestrians out of the way. With the usual "they don't pay taxes". So it is less interesting.
That was their point, the value isn't better at all. Their product costs the same too. plus you can't get the Play Store out of the box.
From what i've seen most ppl in your situation try to go into engineering management.

My advice would be try to get into managment positions where you don't have to code.
Or even a bit more sneaky , sorry but web requests from Flock-3453 is going to be served at a higher priority than flock-2234.

your youtube is slow ? , oh honey
Just click on these few websites to change your flock id to one of a more advertisement friendly one.

Looks like they found one the most computationally cheapest way to discriminate against users on the internet.

One identifier to discriminate them all :)
Formula to a great cold outreach email for Founders
Please, elaborate. What do all of those actually mean?
Isn't the point of ML exactly that you don't know the underlying distribution? How is this ever assumed in any way? ML is not parametric statistics.
> doctors would be given a financial incentive to see patients within forty-eight hours.

Not measuring that from the first contact that the patient made is simply dishonest.

"Call back in three days to make the appointment, so I can claim you were seen within 48 hours, and therefore collect a bonus" amounts to fraud because the transaction for obtaining that appointment has already been initiated.

I mean, they could as well just give the person the appointment in a secret, private appointment registry, and then copy the appointments from that registry into the public one in such a way that it appears most of the appointments are being made within the 48 hour window. Nothing changes, other than that bonuses are being fraudulently collected, but at least the doctor's office isn't being a dick to the patients.
Yes, that's the ideal, the practical issue in the fight is still the "gatekeeping" behind "plug and charge" and who can do that, instead of just being "anyone with a valid credit card".
you're probably fine
Cheating Controversy Results in Most-Watched Chess Stream in History
We had similar drama with masks distributed in Belgium. They contain nanoparticles of silver. The government gave an official recommendation to stop wearing them.

Original report: https://www.brusselstimes.com/news/belgium-all-news/156628/c...

Follow-up recommendation: https://www.brusselstimes.com/news/belgium-all-news/156876/b...

I'm still wearing mine because I don't go out often enough for it to matter (and when I do, I'm usually on a bicycle where it's not required to wear one). But what a fucked up story. I really thought this would be the end of it: anti-maskers "won", are set for life with an argument on a silver platter now. With actual silver.

Surprisingly, though, that didn't happen. People have been pretty chill about it.
> it becomes painfully obvious what these angry arguments are really about: highly-activated tribal emotion

I agree in about 95% of cases. There are certainly lots of threads on HN lately that descend into nothing but unhelpful, petty emotional arguments. I try (with mixed success) to avoid most of those myself.

But with respect, this is not one of them. This isn't about iOS vs Android, or FP vs OOP, or regulation vs the free market. This is a cut-and-dry moral travesty, and I think the allegation in the GP (which of course we can't know for sure with our limited window into the HN metrics) was that the "flame war" in this case may only exist as a result of artificial and coordinated action by a third party. This type of thing is well-documented on other social sites; it's not hard to imagine it happening here.

If that didn't happen, I don't think anybody would continue to ask for intervention.
Well, there is another reason for optimism: Wayland is supported in ChromeOS and WSL2, and it seems to be the base for any modern integration with other operational systems (macOS ARM maybe?).

> The sad thing: I've been hearing/saying basically this for decades.

I don't think Linux distros will ever be popular compared to the commercial OSes, since for one thing to be popular nowadays you need to invest money in many things like branding and marketing so something is mainstream.

But looking in another way, in the past I would say that desktop Linux was dying, and nowadays it is more live than ever, so this is something.
Like you I’ve been developing for over a decade. I work with a lot of similar people. I still encounter people who hardcode this or repeat that or whatever. Never run the linter or used git poorly. I don’t mind at all. The value good developers bring to the table is the ability to learn, solve problems, and collaborate with me.

You can get better at writing code, but many people can’t figure out the other things. That’s when it’ll never work.

You recognize your shortcomings so you can work on them. Most people don’t, in my experience, and developing software with them is a struggle at best and a dead end at the worst. You’re probably better off than you realize.

I’ve also felt like you do at times. It’s normal to feel down on yourself, especially if you’re exposed to very talented or skilled people. But it’s all fine. You can catch up, and you probably bring something to the team that’s still very valuable.
It’s all aesthetics to be sure but a lot of pop music doesn’t take risks. Song structures are formulaic as are chord progressions and the notes used for melodies.

How many hit songs use the same I-V-vi-IV progression? It works is why but it isn’t interesting to a discerning listener.

It seems like a lot of pop music is more like fashion than music. Image leads and after removing the stylistic facade you see the same underlying infrastructure. There are exceptions to the rule of course.

Nirvana was an interesting pop music band because many of their songs used weird progressions. “Smells Like Teen Spirit” shouldn’t work according to therory, but it obviously does.

And then of course how pop music is mixed and mastered today. Almost no dynamic range because of the “loudness wars”.
> You know there are issues, so that is a good thing.

That was my thought too. Programming is kind of like American Idol--a lot of programmers don't know how bad they are. The submitter said they failed to accomplish a medium complexity task, but it's not clear what this means: got stuck and gave up; missed a deadline; finished, but with poor quality?

From one of the submitter's thirty previous Ask HN submissions, I see experience working with a variety of tools, including machine learning. With batteries-included languages and powerful libraries, you can get pretty far in Tinkertoy mode, assembling the pieces of a solution. When you're faced with a task that demands more programming skill, it can be an adjustment.

If you have a passion for software development, self awareness, and a desire to improve, I think you'll be okay.
> People who are unstable enough to threaten suicide because of romantic rejection are a danger to others, not just themselves.
For the first, the context (situational, non-verbal, etc.) matters, as it's explained in a number of articles about the subject.

I asked a few (non-representative anecdotal sample) womans (programmers, managers, etc.) around, they all considered it safe unless the person crosses the line and starts stalking or exibit any other kind of oppressive behaviour (coming/staying too close, "accidentally" touching, stealing your belongings, starts looking for a ways to be alone with you).

Everyone of course is different and the same situation could be interpreted differently by different people. Some could even overreact a single glance or intonation therefore we need to draw a line between harrasment and being a weirdo and don't jump to conclusions too early.

From what I currently see (I haven't been there and can judge only by media), the situation has been pushed from personal issue to a political leverage. And this is unacceptable. What could have been done instead? I don't know, may be an open letter from a few persons to ask him to be more polite and/or ask to seek consultation with a psychotherapist? But cancelling is not the way.
> Oh come on, this entire article is obviously about Latin typography. Other scripts are simply out of scope.

The author proposes reworking either the way operating systems and browsers handle font rendering and scaling, or the way fonts are designed. Other scripts are very much in scope.
As the founder of Toodledo this really resonated with me. When I launched my todo site it was just me and Remember the Milk. I had one of the first iOS todo apps in the store and I rode that wave. Grew to 7 employees. Then came Reminders and Flow and Asana and Wonderlist and Things and Todoist and ...
Now there's actually hope for you ;-)

> Do you see a man wise in his own eyes?
There is more hope for a fool than for him.

Copied from https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Proverbs+26%3A1...

Really "seing oneself" is incredibly valuable. If one gets a glimpse one should think more than once about it and use it to take action to become better.

Just forget where this is from if it makes you feel better, in this context it is just the oldest written source of this saying that I am aware of :-) :
Depends on the path right? If its backend/systems related yes it may require you to write actual code and the person may still feel out of his depth. But there are areas in front-end for example where writing testcafe/cypress stuff is more like "go here, click on the thing, then click here", which doesn't need much more than basic coding ability.
Also, according to the article, "some daycare educators had been suspicious of these grey and blue masks for a while because they felt like they were swallowing cat hair while wearing them."

People must have been ordered to wear them; who would wear these by choice?
Having the power to bully does not justify bullying. They could negotiate the contract differently. Taking credit for something they didn't do is fraud, no matter how the market tolerates it.
This is the copy/paste response whenever solar gets mentioned on HN. It is non-responsive to the thread, or the story.

Why bother? We all know where solar is imperfect. We all know where nuclear is imperfect. Coal, NatGas, hydro, stored mass, geothermal, wave action, donkey trains. We get it.

And clearly, if solar would not fit the application, another choice will be made. But also clearly, solar fits a lot of applications.
> Nobody is making a career out of being a warehouse associate.

Right, and people argue that "no one is driving for Uber full time it's a side hustle" except a lot of people do. Not by choice, but by necessity.
Mozilla: a corporation funded by a spying company with a recent shady record of injecting stuff into products secretely (hello Mr robot). What could go wrong in this thought crime?
What "tanked their reputation"? I've been using them for years.
Sure, but coding a human-equivalent response to such events is trivial (because no one and nothing responds well to such events).
I can't remember how often I've referred people to this site: http://taobackup.com/ It exists for at least 10 years. And it is still spot on.
It's a hard problem to solve. Wouldn't you agree?
Ah no you are still senior don't worry. Whether problems are solved in hacky ways or not is up to process not you.
Optical Mouse Inventor Hunts for a Covid Cure–and May Have Found One