skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: I've realized I'm a bad software engineer and I'm over 30, what's next?
Hi folks, I've been working as a software engineer for about 10 years but always in small companies with few or none programmers or as a freelancer. I've been able to always have work on my desk because I'm always moving and talking with people in the industry but some months ago I decided to go to work on a proper medium software company.

I'd been assigned a medium complexity task and I've failed to accomplish it, the code was all filled with hardcoded values, wrong structure, difficult to debug bugs and similar things.

I've realized I'm not a senior software engineer as I thought and now I don't know what to do next. If you read my resume it'll seem I am a senior but I don't really know where to place me in the "experience" spectrum. I've always managed to solve the problems in front of me but in a "hacky way" and now the issue was totally revealed to me.

I'm thinking about looking for semi senior roles but I'm afraid it'll look weird for the company interviewing me to hire a semi senior with +10 years of experience.

I've also thought about transitioning to a PM role but I'm not sure if I can be a PM if I'm not able to code things the right way myself.

A third option would be to take a break from work and try to learn to write good code but I'm not sure it's possible without working on a company with other people.

As you very probably see, I'm quite lost right now so I'd be very grateful if you can advise me what I could do next with my career.
Hypothesis Testing
I am validating a hypothesis for my project and I want to ask you for help. A bit of context. We consume a lot of information from social media every day (quora, reddit, twitter, hacker news, and so on). People use feeds for articles, subscribe via mail, monitor in their spare time, use Evernote to save the desired article, or in a business approach to monitor mentions, they use YouScan. We work out a hypothesis: we indicate topics, keywords by interest, select sources that are relevant to you, save and filter information for you, thereby reducing a large flow of unnecessary information. What is the profit? You do not need to spend an infinitely long time searching for information, it will find you by itself, since it will be stored in one place and everything is always at hand. You can easily find the answer to your question or topic of interest using tags. How do you consume information from social media and how much would such a decision make your life easier?
In Europe, the common man accepts more social control over his life than the American common man, likely due to the feudal history of the Old World. Looking at median purchasing power and social mobility in France / Germany / Italy, I would argue they are still serfs, modified only by a lack of knowledge of their own slavery.
> burning over $150,000 per month ... Flow did about $3MM of ARR

How did they run out of money? Something doesn't add up.
I've never used any vpn myself, but whenever I come across the topic in tech circles people seems to recommend mullvad. Can't vouch for them or anything, but might be worth looking into.
The number of reference pixels reported to JS changes but so does window.devicePixelRatio. In JS this info is given for you to do your own logic with, in CSS it is not. As such it's not "scaled up at the last step" any more than at 100% zoom when CSS finds out that means foo inches at bar zoom is foobar physical px on a certain monitor. This is opposed to MacOS/iOS or Gnome where things are calculated against a reference scale and then that reference is scaled an integer amount and then that rendered bitmap is scaled by the dpi factor to be displayed - in CSS layout dimensions are always just passed to be directly rendered to the display and part of that direct pass is it always has to figure out how many device px the reference px is.

Not to preserve user choice in itself no but em isn't preserving user choice in the end either so it's not an argument to convince either side.

It's a problem in the same way your original example was a problem i.e. there is no way to reconcile all of these with good answers consistently so that a certain layout methodology doesn't is proof of nothing. And all options being imperfect leads to the simpler dimension based layout being popular. Of course that means a relative dimension based layout is no more inherently "wrong" just most find it harder to work with and get nothing new they couldn't have accomplished with any other dimension type + the describing CSS syntax.

Percentage/viewport based layouts independently may be an actual "wrong" choice depending what kind of content the page contains. The CSS spec actually reflects that percentage based layout is a unique design choice - em and px are both a "dimension" type and you can make either do the same thing with CSS if you wanted (that doesn't mean just replace em with px and call it a day but it's always doable) whereas percentage and viewport are their own special "percentage" type and you can't make them always behave like another unit type because they actually represent a unique concept.
Seems primarily like Cardi B's writer started it and Cardi B modified it.
I'm not sure how that's true in this case.

I personally need the features of chrony, so despite running debian stable / systemd everywhere, I just turn systemd-timesyncd off.

Tight coupling would be "you can't boot your system unless you use this time sync daemon implementation".
Land is not always at a premium. It is in the Netherlands (508 people/km2), but not elsewhere. If most of the Moroccan countryside (83 people/km2) was filled with solar panels, I don't think it would affect many people. It would work out pretty well for Morocco to become a major energy supplier in a world moving away from oil. And you can keep your pristine countryside and high standards of living thanks to cheap, clean energy from Morocco.
How to build a successful application security program
Come on, Dang. We were getting along so well :(

Some people deserve the full force of the boot.

But I'll respect your opinion on my behaviour.

Best,
You know what he's about. He's just a boring old culture warrior who has to inject his personal politics into every situation while simultaneously decrying how everything is now political.
Crowdfunding a Direct Ballot Initiative for Right to Repair
What about tunnelling into a trusted network?

That's what a VPN is really for. The other uses are more side effects exploiting the encryption and tunnelling properties of VPN rather than the original intended purpose of a VPN.
We looked into the protocol, but unfortunately it made a number of poor architectural choices that leads to many language servers not implementing the protocol properly. This effectively requires custom integrations for most language servers. That wouldn't make sense to do in the core of the editor, since we'll never be primary users on the vast majority of servers.

The open source model makes sense since it will need to have tweaks and fixes to support various language servers. That combined with a very small development team (six engineers across our two products), would probably lead to slower development, and it would be tied to the release cadence of the main product.
The grand parent was talking about a faraday cage build into the house. That only stops wireless communication so I'm guessing he's talking about devices that use the mobile network to phone home.

So no, it's not possible to let some things through. Not even your phone will get a connection. (Besides the ones that originate inside the house, like wlan)
If it were a truly free market the entire music business would have to collapse or adapt as copyright wouldn't be a thing.

I personally just try to exit the whole system. I love https://freemusicarchive.org/.

I would love it if culture wasn't driven by pure profit and homogenized into bland predictability.

FMA also provides a way to donate directly to artists.
No clear evidence, sorry, you're right. It's only a rumor that is circulating everywhere, I should have made this clear but only realized this now. Another poster above/below noted that it might have been a misunderstanding of the law by Samsung, according to Yandex CEO. Which is also possible of course. (nonetheless, they still shipped unremovable software in a firmware update)
Should have the year in the title, post was from 2009. Still relevant and a good read, though, and a reminder to CHECK YOUR BACKUPS.
Yes, that's a nice moderation approach - allowing OP to be curator. It also allows OP the opportunity to comment before the thread starts to become public - giving a chance for a response to clarify, rebut, or other.
Why do you not think pop songs are artistically interesting?
What anti-trust measures made Blackberry give up and switch to Android? Was it Apple's doing that Microsoft bought Nokia and Nokia imploded with Symbian and Maemo and inability to compete with iOS? Was it Apple's doing that Microsoft went from Windows CE to Windows Mobile to Windows Phone 7 to Windows Phone 8, each incompatible with the previous, and they couldn't attract developers because they couldn't keep a stable API and didn't embrace the web? Was it Apple's doing that all the featurephone providers from Motorola to Sony, and all the PDA providers like Psion and Palm and Dell, and all the computer companies like IBM and Intel, all completely failed to release a credible competitor device?

Apple have 27% of the mobile OS market.

Simple as what? What do you expect, what do you want, anti-trust laws being applied to do? Magically conjour up a competitor from nowhere? Or just smash iOS in resentment for its success so you can have avoid having to suffer Android?
> I'm not guessing that it's easy to misunderstand things one has not experienced - that's axiomatic.

I’ll say it again:

You’re assuming I’m ignorant about or haven’t experienced what you’re talking about.

This comment, like the one before, isn’t made in good faith.
> I would expect a CPM around 1 cent. Still, times 50 million, it isn't nothing.

CPM is cost per mille, AKA cost per thousand impressions. Revenue from 50,000,000 impressions would be CPM * 50,000.
The fact the BBC calls it a criminal enterprise [1] is bullshit, it is not criminal.

If it's tied directly to professional sport fraud or copyright infringement or anything criminal then the BBC needs to show proof. Or if they want to be hipster and refer to local laws then make sure they refer to sodomy as criminal enterprise when talking about Saudi Arabia.

Video here - http://www.chinanews.com/chinanews/content.jsp?id=9441884&cl...

It seems it was for -

"At present, He Moumou, Wang Moumou and others are suspected of providing intrusion and illegal control of computer information system programs and tools."

[1] "What used to be a cottage industry of hackers exposing glitches in the code of games has now become a massive criminal enterprise."
>You cannot chose to not pay your taxes.

But you can move to another state/country. They aren't claiming it is apples to apples but claiming apples to oranges is disingenuous at best.
> putting their names as writers for songs of poor black artists, so they (the producers) can get royalties

Why do you need to be a writer to get royalties. Would the producers not be able to ask for a royalty regardless?
"Letters to the Editor" used to (and I suppose still does) function as a method of replying to serious think pieces. Of course the newspaper/magazine curated (and edited) which replies were printed and just as importantly there's a built in speed limit to that kind of exchange. Both these things help (although you do still see incredibly stupid things in letters to the editor).
“After 18 years with the Free Software Foundation, I've decided to resign”
You don't want to be doing font-related things in px units. For instance, you don't want, say "margin-bottom: 10px" under a text element. The margin will stay the same if the font size is increased or decreased.
I keep hearing the argument that the plugin community appears to be dead, but I've never had any issues. It pretty quickly got support for LSP and that covered most languages I use. The JS plugins for specific libraries like react/JSX/Sass are great. There is some configuration you have to do for some plugins but that's the case with any editor.

I actually really like the development cycle, if it allows the devs to keep the same payment model, I'm all for it. Also sublime merge is just awesome, I will pay for and support whatever they build cause they seem to really understand what users want and put out really good quality software.
SpaceShipOne was designed around winning the X-Prize and it was never meant to go beyond a simple suborbital flight that just barely reaches the edge of space. It's a capable spacecraft for that specific mission but the design is quite limited. It requires a carrier aircraft and it also utilizes a very complicated descent mechanism (flairing wings rather than parachutes). SpaceX started with orbital launch capability and then designed a manned vehicle afterwards. This was the critical difference.
- Consistently coming up with good melodies/hooks along with lyrics is fairly difficult to do time and time again.

- Without writers/composers the artists would have nothing to perform. It goes both ways.

- They’re not asking for all the revenue. They’re asking to be fairly paid for their portion of the writing. The artists still get their portion, as does the label, etc. They’re also asking artists to not take credit for writing that they did not do.
The music business has been massively "democratized" last few decades.

Now anyone can record high quality music at home. Anyone can self publish their music for the world to enjoy. Both were unthinkable a few decades ago.

But there are still a few gatekeepers, and gatekeepers will usually charge for opening their gate. Why wouldn't they?

A megastar can choose to record any of dozens of equally good songs. Whoever they choose will sell 100x more. So in one sense it's fair they get a share of the money they create by adding their fame and talent to the song.
Nearly. Not "really." The tragedy of the commons is not solvable. I accept that, and slashdot made it trivial to read without seeing those shit posts. It was probably just filling up their database with racist and faciast novels.
You're gonna want to sit down when you hear about the container shipping industry then.
I keep Sublime around for opening giant files, which it is the best by far, but like many, switched to VS Code for development.
We have the land, no problem, infrastructure and batteries maybe a bit more challenging.

https://www.freeingenergy.com/how-much-solar-would-it-take-t...
I've been trying out Doom Emacs recently. I'll admit that I have used Vim and Emacs for reasonable periods of time previously so I am somewhat used to their way of doing things but Doom is nicely prescriptive and gives a great vim first experience. There is a bit of getting used to it but it might be something interesting for you.
Would you be willing to qualify your statements wrt Engenius? I've had good experience with them in the past, has something changed?
Thanks, looks great
"Is the cup half empty or half full?"

"Be happy you have a cup!"
I was in such a situation twice. My ex-girlfriend threatened she would kill herself if I leave. Another woman said if I don't stay with her she will likely get very ill. It never ever crossed my mind to inform their employers these women were harassing me. Even if I did (why?!) I don't think it would be fair to fire these women.
Are you concerned about being locked into Dart as a developer?
Again, em's don't solve the problem of having to guess and check across the results of every rendering system. There are plenty of cases where I want text to be written between two vertical lines without overlapping either of them.
Neither would I, but it seems like a thing for some masks to include charcoal so maybe people are thinking it's that and some just leaked out?
> As far as I know, in a lot of country (like France) it is a legal obligation to keep logs and be able to identify one of your customer if the police demands it.

Not for all types of services. ISPs are sometimes under obligation to log, but VPN services don't belong in that category.

I can't speak for others but we have contacts with legal experts (in a few jurisdictions) that alert us to changing laws. Ultimately if a country required us to start logging we would just cancel all of our machines there and leave.

On the topic of trustworthiness, you are completely right of course that VPN users put a lot of trust in their VPN provider. There is also the lemon market aspect - the information and competence asymmetry between user and operator. That begs the question of how to ascertain trustworthiness.

We think things like this help:

https://mullvad.net/blog/2018/10/17/signals-trustworthy-vpns...

https://mullvad.net/blog/2019/6/3/system-transparency-future...
Check out any privacy policy that says they will never share or sell your data; the two boilerplate exceptions are law enforcement and transfering ownership of the parent entity. Two pretty big loopholes.
Mullvad is probably the best choice for most. It's the company Mozilla is relying on for their VPN service as well.
> From anecdotal observation, any big company mentioned on HN will have critics, apologists, critics of the apologists.

"fanboyism" isn't a boolean value as you imply. Every company has it but where it sits between 0.0 and 1.0 varies wildly between companies.

Your parent's argument is that when it comes to Apple on HN, their "fanboy rating" sits well beyond the bell curve peak.
Switch to Docecot which has full text search and seive.

Sadly there aren’t any good seive clients, though logging in and using Emacs is not much of a burden.
> The problem is that your signature is associated to the commit so it does make you vouch for history, and it lives on after your PR is merged.

That's exactly what I want though. I want anyone looking through history to be able to see that I signed that specific diff in that context (something weaker than the whole state of the tree at that point in time - but something stronger than the textual diff with no other context). The fact that rewriting history will break the signature is a feature not a bug, but I'd like the patch to carry my signature even after it's merged.
> Doom is a configuration framework for GNU Emacs tailored for Emacs bankruptcy veterans who want less framework in their frameworks, a modicum of stability (and reproducibility) from their package manager, and the performance of a hand rolled config (or better).

This looks pretty neat.
OP is primarily about money, not credit.

The songwriting is extremely valuable, otherwise just write your own damn songs.

If it's so valuable, how can these companies find "hit" writers for £100 a piece? While it is entirely possible for something of immense artistic or technical value to not be priced commensurately on the market, I've heard these songs, this is not the case here.
If you don't have autocompletion and suggestions working with LSP and Go it's almost certainly not setup correctly. I use it every day and it's great, the goto method def and preview popups are super slick too.
Yes please. I've often thought the same.

Mentioned this comment here: https://blog.williammanley.net/2021/03/31/seen-on-hn-invert-...

You’d need to implement a new protocol between terminal and shell. Maybe the shell would be in charge - allocating PTYs and multiplexing the output back to the terminal. Or maybe the terminal would be in charge where it would allocate PTYs for children and send them to the shell using FD passing. There are advantages both ways.

Integral to its success though would be getting the support for this new protocol upstream in bash. Bash is the most widely deployed shell and the only way to get to the point where you can log in to a new machine (or over SSH) and expect this to “just work”. Without that it would remain a niche and could join the graveyard of other improved shells/terminals that approximately no-one uses.

As such the protocol would have to be minimal and easily implementable in C. Systemd’s protocols could be an inspiration. I’ve implemented both sides of sd_notify and LISTEN_FDS before, in more than one programming language and it was very straightforward.
Only authoritarians don't support free speech. Name one time in history the people banning information and censoring were the good guys?
I want to see all info and research it myself in a scientific manner.
Or it’s a joke
Cheap on a per click basis. When you take into account the typically high click-through rate, Google is making more on a CPM basis(per 1000 pageviews). Google is making a much higher rate than even $5 non-branded clicks-- and this is for traffic that otherwise would be "free" with organic.
Looks good, and useful!

Two notes:

- The list of systems is kind of limited, for example I was looking for Fate.

- When looking for an in-person group, it should be possible to leave the system dropdown blank (or have an 'Any' option). I'm not sure if that would also be useful for remote games.

There are a bunch of other constraints I have encountered over the years for f2f games (mostly health-related), but those can probably wait, since remote will likely be the main use for a while.
> I'm still a novice, but will all X programs need to be converted?

No. Because Wayland is fundamentally different from X the following won't ever work:

* Window managers

* Programs that need to know their absolute window coordinates

* Windows that want to draw to the root window

* Programs that want to capture the screen via XGetImage()
A six step guide to customer journey mapping
As a leader you indeed need to protect people, and when someone is accused of "assault", I think it's OK to put things in perspective. He gave a clear objective description of the situation, and nobody can claim his observations were wrong. Remember that the accusation was "assault", and I agree with Stallman that this was too harsh given the circumstances.

I want my leaders to stand up for reality. If you prefer your leaders to be "think about the children", then that's up to you.
What should they have tested for besides graphene? Is there some list of contaminants which you feel would be a minimum requirement for their testing, which includes graphene?

Moreover do you know what kinds of tests they actually did perform? Without knowing that, how can you judge whether the level of testing was adequate or not? Have you looked into the rate of contaminants being found on their competitors products? Etc.
Nvidia has said that Arm's IP will remain registered in the UK. But as an American company, I doubt that would put it out of the reach of US export controls.
It's tough as an individual that's just dipping their toes into the water, but if you have some experience, then you typically have an optimized setup with partners in place, etc.
This is very good. Not only because it illustrates the maturity of wayland, this is been done using pipewire. The last remaining pieces of the puzzle are finally being placed. A modern linux distro will give you on the desktop a good oomd, good video drivers, pipewire, wayland, GTK 4, GNOME 40, a modern kernel, compiler, dev-tools... and modern cross distro software through flatpak/snap/appimage. There are still things to improve and fix, but the desktop has never been so promising.

The sad thing: I've been hearing/saying basically this for decades.
> Couldn't they just [...]

:D
I never thought of it that way. Thanks for sharing!
Many things are harmful and non ethical but we still do it for the sake of profit:

- using pesticides and herbicides

- using fossil fuels

- waging wars for the sake of profit

- over fishing

- deforestation

- spying on people to make profit from advertisement and to influence their political views ...

- ...

And if I continue list can get very, very long ... :/