skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Have you tried the product he worked on?

Oculus has done extremely impressive hardware and software for VR and created the only viable mass market headset in the world and most importantly managed to ship consistently.

If he wanted to work on that there isn't really another company that he could have worked at. Valve doesn't take it seriously enough, and personally I believe they would have actually abandoned it already if Oculus hadn't been competing with them, they just lack the ambition and making hardware successful is infinitely more work than just running a videogame store.
> Lawyers Don't, Doctors Don't.

And both deliver abysmal cost-benefit and have obfuscated competence to the point that it is nearly impossible to discern good ones from bad ones, as long as the bad ones meet the minimum standards of the license. In fact, both doctors and lawyers have fought hard to prevent any sort of evidence of their relative competence and performance from being accessible to their customers.

> Pretty much any Degree based industry doesn't.

Only non-degreed people should be accountable?

> Yet Devs are somehow supposed to know to a dollar how much the unknown will cost?

"To a dollar"? Straw man.
As someone who has argued against a rewrite, lost the argument, and then proceeded to do the rewrite, I would push back strongly on the notion that we have a perfect specification, which is just "do what the old thing did".
This specification is woefully incomplete, of course, just as a vague requirements document for a brand new service or product is incomplete.

When someone proposes a rewrite for software, I ask him or her to think critically along the following questions:

1) What is the purpose of the rewrite? What do you hope to accomplish by it? What business objectives are furthered by the rewrite?

2) Explain in detail what is wrong the the existing code base, and why it is untenable to fix those problems piecemeal.

3) Explain in detail how the rewrite will avoid, overcome, or improve significantly on all the problems mentioned in 2).

In my most recent, case, and as I expect in many others, I couldn't convince anyone to engage on any of these questions.

For 1), we were told that the org planned to build significant new features on the product and the rewrite will help. However, the company's priorities changed significantly even as the rewrite was just getting started. By the time I left the company, I was not aware of any short or long-term plans to continue adding functionality to the now-rewritten product.

For 2), the level of detail was along the lines of "the code base is awful. I hate it!" And, that's about it. Question 3) is, of course, impossible to answer if you failed to answer 2).

Failure to be able to answer these types of questions is also in my eyes a strong indicator that you don't understand the existing product very well. And why would we? The existing team that built the thing had all left by that point, which is, in my experience, the norm, not the outlier. It's normal for devs to build something for a few years and then peace out, either via an internal transfer to another team or a new job opportunity.

I believe that much of software is knowledge acquisition, and much of the cost of software maintenance is in dealing with the failure to transfer and maintain acquired knowledge over time. Rewrites can be spurred by ignorance, and that same ignorance can lead to the rewrite taking much longer than expected.
Then it's not a democracy, because the excluded are denied their self-determination.
Because a derivative work must "as a whole, represent an original work of authorship".

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/101

(Not a lawyer...)
I feel like this is a lesson that basically any college dropout learns fairly quickly: the job requirements simply aren't. If you have the ability to do the job, and pass the interview, it's not too hard to get companies to overlook your lack of formal education.

Until very recently, I was a college dropout who managed to finagle my way into senior-level positions at big companies, and I think it's mostly because I almost never bother even reading the "requirements" section of a job posting, instead applying to anything that seems interesting.
Except that women and minorities tend to be easily discouraged, not "ambitious" and confident.

As someone from a rural background where the best case was usually HVAC repair and the not-too-uncommon case was addiction and stagnation, and who came into tech from far outside the normal path, this is the problem to fix, and tech company job requirements are way too late in the pipeline to exert much leverage there. This needs to be solved culturally, across years and generations.
IANAL, but I wouldn't read that as granting GitHub the right to do anything like this. There's definitely a reasonable argument to be had here, but I think limiting the grant of rights to incidental copies should trump "[...] or otherwise analyze it on our servers" and what they're allowed to do with the results of that analysis.

On the extreme end, "analysis" is so broad that it could arguably cover breaking down a file of code into its constituent methods and just saving the ASTs of those methods verbatim for Copilot to regurgitate. That's obviously not an acceptable outcome of these terms per se, but arguably isn't any different in principle from what they're already doing.

Ultimately, as I understand, courts tend to prefer a common sense outcome based on a reasonable human understanding of the law, rather than an outcome that may be defensible through some arcane technical logic but is absurd on its face and counter to the intent of the law. If a party were harmed by an instance of Copilot-generated copyright infringement, I don't see a court siding with this tenuous interpretation of the ToS over the explicit terms of the source code license. On the other hand, it would probably also be impossible to prove damages without something like a case of verbatim reproduction, similarly to how having a developer move from working on proprietary code for one company to another isn't automatically copyright infringement.

I doubt that GitHub is doing anything as blatantly malicious as copying snippets of (GPL or proprietary) code to explicitly reuse verbatim, but if they're learning from license-restricted code at all then I don't see how they wouldn't be subjecting themselves and/or consumers of Copilot to the same risk.
> These types of contracts are actually quite common, for example an employment contract will almost certainly include an IP grant clause.

In the US, maybe. In most of the rest of the world, these sorts of overreaching "we own everything you do anywhere" clauses are decidedly illegal.
Android App Bundles are replacing APKs
TheMakersClub: A club of ideas, feedbacks and resources
I think i’ve got a slightly different take - i’m not saying my take is any better though.

If we’re talking engineering principles, not team dynamics, then it’s:

1. Use immutability by default, even in languages that make that harder than it should be
2. Understand how liberating idempotency is
3. Divide and conquer, use abstraction to make hard problems manageable
4. Delete code, delete tests, re-write stuff, re-write it again. Painful? Keep doing this till you get to the other side and feel liberation and empowerment, took me years to get past wincing at the idea of re-writing that thing AGAIN
5. Pay attention to your build tooling - to do any given task, it should always take exactly 1 command. How do i run the tests? Run the test command. How do i deploy to non-prod? Run the deploy command. Etc

If we’re talking softer stuff:

1. Don’t block collaboration - e.g. if there are 5 people don’t work on 5 tasks concurrently. Work on 1, maybe 2 in some cases
2. Accomodate 2 types of work: work that needs collaboration & synchronisation (brain storming, planning, why are we even doing this, that kinda thing) work that needs focus time - sometimes that’s focus as an individual, sometimes that’s a mob focussed on one task and saying no to every other distraction in the world no matter how “urgent”
3. Change what you’re doing throughout the day, don’t try to code all day, you’ll get in a rut, you won’t write your best code after a while. You can optimise this step, e.g. if the team is low energy after lunchtime, use that to your advantage and schedule the easy boring work then, don’t be afraid to use humour or burn low energy time just getting to know each other better
4. Make sure people are being heard in the team. Hardest point to get right.
> I think degrees are remaining a requirement because a hiring manager and recruiter at a large company are risk averse.

My take is more judgmental:

Our current hazing rituals persist because people can't imagine how it could be otherwise.
Apple still planning return to in-person work despite complaints
Here are modems for Timex 2068, https://www.timexsinclair.com/products/hardware/rs232-serial...
I work for a large corp. We used to get resumes from HR (not sure what filtering they did) and follow up with a phone screening. If that went well there was an hour interview and a panel interview. I don't think our process was the best.

Recently, hiring was overhauled. Every office that needs engineers submits a list of requirements. All interviewing is handled by a hiring panel that consists of HR and engineers with relevant experience, but who do not work on the team or with the project. The hiring panel hires people without any interaction between the team and the candidate and without any input from the team.

Basically, we sent in a posting and they send us an engineer. I'm curious to see how this plays out, though I'm not very hopeful. I think someone looked at how much money was being spent on staffing at the lower level and decided to consolidate it.

Anyone have similar experience?
Yale has 12000 students, 7000 are grad students, many of which have tuition waiver. Even if every one of these 12000 paid $40,000 tuition receipts would only be half a billion which is a third of what their endowment makes a year. I'd be very surprised if the actual tuition receipts are even a third of that with all the scholarships and phd waivers they give out.

Still, why throw away 100+ million a year if you don't have to?
Rwazi
There is no means of collecting and analyzing on-ground data from developing countries, particularly African countries.
On one hand, organizations need near real-time, on-ground data to make effective decisions on activities such as expansion, investments, distribution, new product/service offerings, and reaching target beneficiaries.
On the other hand, millions of young people in Africa need income-generating activities. They are educated, use smartphones, have daily access to the internet, and are the target consumers or beneficiaries.
Rwazi is a data services company that provides organizations with fresh, on-ground data on products, services, and activities, among others, from Africa
Sometimes when a job listing shows impossible requirements, it's because they already know who they want to hire for it and they are just going through the motions. For example, if a US company wants to hire a specific person on an H1B visa, they have to show that they couldn't hire a US citizen or permanent resident for the job. And if the person they hire doesn't fit the requirements either, they don't worry about that because it's very unlikely that anyone would ever check each individual hire.
I've seen several job postings requiring 10 years' experience with the cloud platform I work with. It released in 2015.

I always go by the "75% rule" - if I meet 75% of requirements they ask for, I apply. You never know who actually wrote and contributed to the posting. The requirements can be far removed from what the hiring manager actually cares about.

https://www.manager-tools.com/2010/06/career-tools-rule-job-...
Sorry about your situation. I would suggest doing two things.
1. Build a github profile. Do some interesting side projects that shows you can code. They don't have to super complex, small scripts that are useful or a CRUD web app is fine.
2. Make a linkedin account, add a bunch of recruiters, people from FAANG and start ups, start sharing your side projects on linkedin.

Do cold reach outs to recruiters on LinkedIn. This is all a lot of work obviously, but it will work. Don't worry about college degrees, no one really cares tbh. Good Luck!
> . Speculation doesn't add to the conversation. In the absence of evidence

This is an interesting claim. Do you have evidence for it?
Complexity exists in interaction between parts - not necessarily the parts themselves. Breaking down a project do not take those interactions into account.

Even if we were to try considering interactions we would fail. Like the weather, and other topics in the complex systems domain, software is sensitive to initial conditions. A small change in input (change in data or code) creates a large change in output.

We generally accept the upper bound on weather forecast to be 7 days and even then we might bring an umbrella just in case. Forecasting software many months into the future is futile - if taken at face value. Used as a general guideline it is usually ok.

A paradigm shift is needed. Both inside and outside the industry. Software is not industrial construction, hence the same logic (project management) do not apply.

Software is creation, conduction and orchestration. Not production or manufacturing. We are not teams of architect, builders and operators. We are musicians in a orchestra.

How long does it take to write a symphony?
Great project, I hope that you'll be successful. I'm pleased to see an european startup in the field. Do you happen by any chance to accept cryptocurrencies for the upfront payment?
My high school had the attendance computer in main office and it could be found on the network from any other machine. Everyone knew the password to it since was used and shared for all other admin and IT tasks.
Is your primary goal to find a more enjoyable day-to-day existence? Or is your primary goal to become very successful?

If coding is what you enjoy and nothing else matters, taking a junior developer job and just enjoying it despite the hit to your financials is a fine choice. You need to be sure that you actually enjoy programming more than managing, though, because it will quickly become an unhappy experience if you discover you can't take orders from a manager and you spend your days trying to backseat drive the project or usurp your manager's authority.

If your goal is career success and accumulating notable achievements, starting over as an engineer at 40 isn't optimal. It's possible to go all-in and accumulate achievements over the next decade, but it's not the most likely outcome. Even if you spend the next 10 years working hard, you'd still only catch up to a 31 year old who has been all-in on software development since graduating college. That's not a bad place to be, but it could be disappointing if your real goal is to achieve notable career success above all else.
Repo: https://github.com/bobsgame/bobsgame/ (deleted, see edit below)

I looked at it a few weeks back and it's really strange. It has really weird restrictions that don't make any sense regarding the license - I'm not even sure if they even are legal. The author claims he is sharing the source but that nobody else can fork it, unless they fork it on GitHub?!

Anyhow, within a few seconds of reading the source you'll find that the first thing the binary does is call home to download and extract a newer .zip file from the bobsgame.com website.

It does this over HTTP and without any kind of signature/signing of the binary.

Before it actually downloads the .zip file it actually tries to grab a version number from a PHP script on the website that doesn't exist. The website instead renders some HTML. The C++ casts this HTML to a number and gets 0, so it always assumes that the website does not have a newer version of the game to download.

This means if someone on the local network can DNS spoof the website it will dutifully talk over unauthenticated HTTP, the attacker can actually provide a PHP script that responds with a high version number and then deliver the payload over a .zip file.

It's a fascinating tale!

EDIT: It does appear the author has been removing things =( His GitHub has been wiped clean https://github.com/robertpelloni

If anyone is curious here is a fork of the repository I was trying to link: https://github.com/mpavlinsky/bobsgame
It's odd to me that you're telling me what I am feeling. Regardless, does everything have to be some hyperefficient activity for you?
Mozilla serves as an interesting example here. They are very much a Silicon Valley company and have a ton of that same energy. Even before the pandemic they had a globally distributed workforce and so had to develop processes that brought people together. Twice a year, for example, they had a company all-hands event to bring everyone to the same place. Usually somewhere fun. Now they aren't a large company by any means but if the 'culture' you're worried about preserving is a group of fun-loving, hard-working, highly talented and motivated engineers committed to a goal that's ultimately beneficial for the world then Mozilla is a pretty damn good example that distributed can work.

Now, due to both economics and the pandemic Moz had shut offices and even more people are fully remote. We'll have to see if that crosses some previously hidden tipping point where the culture is eroded because the MV office doesn't exist, but I suspect not. It's the mission, people, and processes which make it a great place to work.*

* My knowledge is second hand, I don't work for Mozilla or speak for them.
Author here. At it's core most static site generators are just fancy "string concatenation" tools.

In my experience playing with several generators before building Elder.js it isn't so much about the output that matters it is about how the static site generator lets you do non-trivial customization. Things that would be hard without a larger framework.

More importantly, when building a major project on a static site generator, it is important to have an upgrade path beyond a static site generator should you require it. Elder.js was built with that use case in mind though I didn't cover that in the article.

Being able to move to SSR should the project require it is a huge plus in my book.
Just tell them your phone is not working, and ask for a menu.
Your point in the floating-point discussion is true, but you’re wrong about this one- linguistics is a descriptive field, not a prescriptive one.
> If it doesn't make any difference

Can you support that? History is filled with protests leading to change. Just looking at 100 years off the top of my head: Women's vote, Gandhi, civil rights, S. Korea, the fall of the Soviet Block, the Arab Spring ...
Reminds me of Research in Motion.
My uncle’s neighbor retired from a New York bank last year, after ~20 years as the Head of VMS system administration. He managed a team of three whose sole job was to keep a small VAX cluster 100% available during business hours. I don’t recall the specifics but he said the ancient machine processed Billions of dollars per day of transactions via FTP files to some other institution. It was fascinating to know technology and teams like that still exist.
Alternatively, wait for co-pilot to add support for C++, then start writing an operating system with Win32-compatible API using co-pilot.

There is plenty of leaked Windows source code on Github, so chances are that co-pilot would give quite good suggestions for implementing a Win32-compatible kernel. Then watch and see if Microsoft will try to argue that you are violating their copyright using code generated by their AI.
> 50 GOP Senators vote no, and 1 Dem Senator votes no, it’s still squarely the GOP’s fault

Even worse, you can have 59 Dem & GOP Senators, but if a single GOP Senator objects, the bill is dead.
This is one of the hardest things for me to grapple with in my career. I hate that there is realistically a hard ceiling to how successful I can be because I don't have strong network effects working for me.

I'm from a pretty small town, low income family. Edit/ I also did my Computer Science degree at a small university that was a community college when I started my degree. /Edit. Making my way in the world often feels like being a small fish in a vast ocean. People from wealthier families, or who have built-in connections from growing up in the big cities or going to prestigious universities don't really understand what an advantage their networks are.
Head of Inclusive Product at Pinterest gives a glimpse into how they work
There's a joke out there that big universities are just hedge funds that do a little work giving out degrees as a marketing expense.
> Rewrites per definition already has a perfect specification in the old code

If the old code is a perfect specification, there is no need to rewrite it, because you already have a code base that performs to specifications.

Less glib, random code is a terrible format for specifications, because it contains lots of things that aren't actually requirements of the specification, but implemenntation details. And a specification that contains lots of specific things that aren't actually part of the specification is not a good one.
2008? Walk through the floors of Fortune 100 investment banks (or other Fortune 100 companies) and you will see systems running REXX jobs on z/OS systems. If you're lucky, the systems will be running AIX. I work at a Fortune 100 company and our migration from on-site IBM to the cloud happened just last year.

Just take a look at the job ads out there for investment banks -

https://www.ziprecruiter.com/c/JPMorgan-Chase-&-Co/Job/Mainf...

https://www.careerbuilder.com/job/J3N14P5YQRLKW5Q1HBB
Hey, author here. I banged this out quickly and didn't update the template to include the date as an oversight. It was written in Nov 2020 as shown on the homepage.
What I understand is that Musk is very skilled at taking highly technical decisions, that have huge risks and financial implications.

Take the example of the decision to re use rocket engines. Its a highly technical decision that has huge financial repurcussions and essentially the whole basis for the low cost business model of SpaceX.
Invest in undervalued people – A Cloud Guru
The world records for efficiency are here:

https://www.fai.org/records?f%5B0%5D=field_type_of_record%3A...

The world record for the 1000-1750kg weight class is about 16 miles per gallon. That is burning jet fuel rather than ordinary gasoline. 1000 kg is light for a modern car.

There are no aircraft that can compete with a Prius for transporting small numbers of people. There are few that can compete with a Hummer.

(Note that I'm not sure how the records are calculated. There are a lot of relevant variables, most importantly how fast the plane is flying. And I'm not an aeronautical engineer, just a hobbyist.)

EDIT: More information on that record can be found here:
https://lift.erau.edu/for-the-record/

I get a slightly different figure of 17-ish mpg. Still pretty bad.
Most loans are secured with collateral. 'Right to seize land' sounds pretty alarmist. Any one of Russia, the EU or NATO would have stepped in to to broker a deal without China, if the alternative was a CCP bank scooping up swathes of territory just outside their borders.
Something like http://www.eeemo.net/
"Put another way, it’s ironic that an industry that tends to want to build everything instead of buying it chooses to buy the absolute most expensive thing on the market: talent." -- Joe Emison will give you something to think about during the weekend.
HR at a previous employer would write the job descriptions in partnership with the hiring manager. Unfortunately, the descriptions had to apply to everyone in the position because they were also used for compensation research.

It took one manager months to get “Windows NT” removed from the description for a network position.