skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Unhelpful customer support, making it impossible to troubleshoot problems anyway

Sadly this is by explicit intention. I used to work at HP and got involved with the printer group because of their policies - they were and probably still are mostly horrible, greedy people with small minds!

We were one of the other "B2B" organizations so we routinely talked to customers because 99% of our sales were direct face-to-face (and they still are today since the split). So we were happy to let customers contact us and our web site had that provision.

The printer group absolutely did NOT want to ever talk to customers. It was worse than customers being lepers in 1 AD!!

Some of the arguments given to us included:

* "That's why we have channels - so we don't have to talk to customers"

* "It costs us the margin of 14.3 DeskJets to even look at an e-mail from one customer. It's not worth it!" They never asked or cared about how many fewer customer issues might be addressed to avoid attempts to contact with some modest Pareto sorting

* They said it was "too hard" to sort and categorize messages that came in (this being the COMPUTER/Printer organizations) and we were only a measurement division.

I wrote a text scanning system in about a week to do exactly that (an early NN/ML system) and it would output: Organization, Product Number (most people were really good about including enough information to arrive at that), Product Line, Product Line Manager, Product Line Support Contact. So
I used it on our incoming messages and then on the poor souls who couldn't find contact info for printers who contacted us. And it worked just fine. I just got several corporate databases which would key off of product numbers. 99% accurate in summarizing and scanning to that.

So next meeting I brought up the issue of "printer customers contacting us", they repeated the same excuses, and handed out that months summary and detailed referable messages for their products. They didn't like that - definitely a f-ck you on my part. I then summarized what that report meant for this business (I don't suffer fools well) which included: CompuUSA failing to uphold their channel contract which required they deliver warrantee services, and a major design flaw in one of the DeskJets that was causing massive failures in the field. They had no clue about any of this! Because they didn't want to talk to customers. Nor even engage their channel partners regularly!

I also happened to sit next to the marketing guy in charge of that product: he actually knew before it shipped. His "plan" (because I overheard him brag about it) was to get as much revenue in to get promoted and then it would be his replacement's problem. The very antithesis of the HP Way - fuck him!

All of this is why, despite being a long-time customer of and ex-employee of HP, I'd NEVER buy HP printers or computers nor would I even accept them as gifts! Hell NO!

There are competing companies out there that actually care about quality and customer value. That is NOT HP Inc. nor HP Ent.
My employer is refusing to take a stance

Leaving up giving a yes/no on what WFH will look like contingent based on how the pandemic unfolds

The problem? People (myself included) have mentioned we're walking if office work becomes required

Why? We were already doing WFH before the pandemic; this isn't a chance to renegotiate that
I don't regard this as a "perverse" hack. If I ever do embedded memory mapped stuff in C11 this is way too tempting.
Given the subject matter, I'm going to hazard a guess they are somehow getting stuck on the Axiom of Choice.
Yes, jq is very powerful yet incredibly inefficient to work with when you don't master its arcanes.
> I was a pretty big emacs fan in undergrad about 15 years ago. Since then it seems like editors/ides have advanced and eaten emacs’s lunch, and I can barely understand my own .emacs anymore due to disuse.

If I'm writing Java I'll definitely use a JVM hosted IDE like Eclipse, but other than that I'm just not seeing this. For example, I recently decided to try VSCode for a popular scripting language and if anything configuring it to work properly was actually more difficult than getting lsp-mode and few helper packages working in GNU Emacs.

Spacemacs[1] is another popular "modern" Emacs distribution that you may be interested in.

[1] https://www.spacemacs.org/
So I guess keydb is pretty solid in production? I considered it when running into problems with redis, but opted against it since none of my co-workers had any experience with it
X1 Cross Helmet Flaunts 360 Degrees FOV, Siri and Google Assistant
If everyone started taking two years off to start a company the incentives offered by existing companies would rise until the tide was stemmed.
I've very much liked what my company/team/office is doing so far:

1. No hard rules on when to be in the office, simply that you must be close enough to make it into the office when you need to.

2. All meetings are remote first unless everyone is in the office (protects disadvantaging people who don't choose to come in)

3. A slack channel for people to coordinate when they will be in the office. This is big as it means that people can group together when they want to socialize easily, so it's 20 people in on one day vs 4 diff people in a day in a week. I've seen team coordinate this as well, often with social activities after.

4. Cross-team social events that encourage people to go into the office without having any professional consequences when you don't come in. In person hackathons, a many game long Catan tournament, etc.

I think there's much more to sort out, but generally this seems to have few complaints. Everyone gives up a little here, but it is very flexible. Some examples:

- The people who want to be in for social reasons can be

- Those who work better in an office / separation from home can come in whenever they want

- Have a new hire? Everyone can try to come in for the first week to help onboard and get to know people, then go back to mainly remote.

- The people who want full remote get most of what they want and don't get professionally disadvantaged by not being in the literal room. The only downside is having to be near an office, but they can easily do a few weeks working from completely remote location X still.

I think many full remote people who want to get out of major cities will have qualms with the last one, but I think those people are looking for fully remote companies without any hybrid model. I'm all for that existing and becoming more popular, but I think we have to realize that the hybrid model simply can't fully accommodate these people, and the answer is to split our models. One open question then is can you split that model at a team/org level, or does it have to be at the company level?
I just sent your article to a lot of different people trying to learn. You have a natural gift for teaching, I'd highly recommend you keep making posts.

I went down the rabbit hole learning a lot of this stuff about 1/2 a year ago and good information is quite challenging to find, it's all hyper dumbed down or hyper generalized and vague (investopedia).
Unexplained underachievement.
what was the software ?
Bad Windows font, probably. It's just using the default system fonts, which in case of Segoe UI doesn't employ caps for I. Ironically, Segoe (just Segoe, the reference font) do have caps on I.
Are your users compensating you well for this? Sounds like the impact you're having is making fintech serious money, so I hope you're getting some of that.
Outsourced operations like contractors are often neglected in the feedback loop. So are SRE’s and parts of the business that are less customer facing. This can lead to lack of purpose. Good companies make sure everyone knows their contribution to the whole.
There are more things that reasoning applies to than you can learn, so it’s not really helpful in deciding between all the things. Everything depends on your goals and there’s no one size fits all answer.
It's the size of the market. The startup cost of making a competitively cheap printer is much larger than the expected revenue. Would you pay $2000 for a whitebox printer? Would anyone? It'd be a cool passion project, but making a legitimate business out of it would be hard.

One big question I have: "is it legal to sell a printer that requires the use of someone else's toner?". If so, then the concern about sourcing toner after the whitebox company fails can be addressed in the design stage.

What I really want to know is why there is no BYOPK whitebox TPM product. That should be easy to make and could dominate the market.
Thinking about how this plays with Gurdjieff's[0] idea that I've been partial to lately that one is not born with, but instead must develop a soul through effort.

[0]https://www.wikiwand.com/en/George_Gurdjieff
Is eternity countable? I really want to know what I am in for, ya know. Plus, depending on the properties of the eternal manifold, maybe I can perform some useful closed timelike computation while there and use that to get rich when/if I return.
Except you don't need to know the git CLI except when you've screwed something up. Even the reflog is available via TortoiseHg. Bisect okay maybe you have to drop to the command line, but otherwise there's no reason to futz about it when you can checkout, merge, rebase, cherry-pick, create new tags, etc. using the GUI.

My experience is that knowing the DAG in GIT is equivalent to needing to know pointers to write effective C.

Knowing the internals is more like needing to know assembly in C. Yes, it can be really useful for debugging certain classes of problems, but not really necessary in day-to-day work.

I've used git professionally for 4 years now and haven't once run into a corrupted repo or a problem googling for help couldn't solve. Day to day driver is TortoiseGit, which is frankly just a shitty TortoiseSVN skin on top of git. But I like being able to visually see the graph since at the end of the day I'm doing graph operations when manipulating the repo.
Pars Pro Toto
> What you should not do, IMO, is to say "Oh, I have a CNC system, but I never interact with it directly, I let CNC-Foo on my computer control it whenever I need to do anything".

I have experience with CNC machines, and I would still not recommend that anyone try to control their CNC machine by typing in G-Code directly. Understanding G-code can be helpful, but you really need to learn to use the higher-level tools properly to get anything done.

HN is really strange on the topic of knowing the underlying details of complex systems:

- When the topic of CS interviews comes up, the comment section is irate that companies are testing for low-level knowledge that isn't used in day to day programming tasks. Asking someone to reverse a linked list is blasphemy because we have libraries for that.

- When the topic of Git comes up, the comment section is insistent that the only possible way to use tools is to have intimate working knowledge of the underlying low-level concepts. Insisting that people know the ins and outs of every git command instead of using a GUI is the only acceptable option.

I suspect there's a lot of overlap between the two positions, which boils down to: "I do things a certain way and I'm convinced my way is the correct and only way."
They could use a paraconsistent logician also
The point is that we care about the quality of the software at all times, not elegant graphs of its history.
> How do we make our execs feel more comfortable to let those who want to work home do so? How do we make it so easy that no exec has to worry about losing their job because they agreed to something that didn’t use to be normal?

Looks like you work for a relatively good company. Others have, for example, threatened with dropping health insurance unless the workers come back -- yes, in the middle of a pandemic. I am not sure those execs care about how you make them feel. Therefore, my answer to your question, is to organize and fight back. It's a class struggle, not a happy conversation.
I’d second Doom emacs, I consider it the best way to use Vim :D

However, I am using it less and less, and I find myself using VSCode more and more. I now very rarely find myself using Doom emacs or vim. I’d say for small changes I still use them, but any time I think I’m going to be doing a significant amount of work in a directory or file, I always open it in VSCode. Not sure when that change happened, honestly.
What's wrong with a color laser printer?
git bisect will optimize the number of tests you have to run, and will reduce the amount of code you have to look at it to the minimum (in general).
What would the right question be?
Hmm, maybe I should try increasing the voltage.
You can use inline namespaces for versioning symbols.

https://www.foonathan.net/2018/11/inline-namespaces/
Because HP or Lexmark or Epson or Xerox used to be great, I suppose.

They often are not any more, at least on the software side.

Also, of course, if you need to produce really great colors (think 6-color inkjets), or really large printouts (say 3' wide), your choice is narrower.
Bad fruit yields good alcohol, therefore JS brings the party.
The salary ranges seem very good to me, according to what's on Glassdoor.
But this isn’t a problem because the underlying data model is almost perfect for version control of text files. In some cases the data model is an implementation detail but in this case the porcelain is the fungible detail that can change depending on surface things like people's preferences.
I never trust impostors who say that they are the owners of some companies or creative associations. I am used to working only with those who have established themselves in the market and have some kind of fame. For example, https://www.fxcess.com/platforms/metatrader-4/. If you read more about it, then you will understand what I mean. In any case, it was much more useful for me here.
Might have something to do with the eviction moratorium which means there could literally be millions more homeless within a few months.
There are, but nothing really satisfactory to be honest. GUI testing is still an unsolved problem in my book.
Nice trick, ty
The goal of inline namespaces is exactly to allow for migrating libraries across versions.
>Instead of having a million developers adapt to git, git should adapt to the million developers and free up their time for doing something that actually matters to a user.

How should git adapt?
Can you get a simpler model than this?
Is really a basic structure like a tree so complicated millions of developers are having a hard time with it?

Nobody is advocating for "dont use new stuff, old is betteer". Nobody is advocating for people to hand-check compiler outputs (unless your analogy pertains to people who work in a GUI tool that shows them pretty pictures for opcodes and they check if the pictures match).

You've missed the point.

The point is "try to understand the basics of the tool you are using".

If me wanting people to learn and understand more makes me an asshole, so be it.

I'd rather be an asshole and help people learn more and understand more than coddle them in the safety of the pretty buttons and say "it's ok, you don't have to understand".

If we don't understand our tools and the problems they solve, how will we make progress?

How will we make better tools?

How will we make better software?

How do you learn and grow if not by understanding what you don't?
Newbie is a nicer word.
There seems to be at least one reason to have a non-GC option: You want to write code that integrates with an environment that already has its own GC and you want that to decide things. For example you want to integrate existing libraries in C/C++/D/Go/Rust/whatever with a Lisp process, since there's lots of those libraries and they do useful things, and you don't have a Lisp library for that (yet). In that case having one point of deciding when to deallocate things seems to be better than having two of them.
It would be perfectly reasonable for someone to just say "no, I'm not going to imagine my job designing software as analogous to cabinetry," because argument from analogy shifts some of the burden of proof to the analogy itself, and the analogy must be defensible. In this case, you're drawing an equivalence between OP's 100 complex things and 100 cabinet components that must be assembled, yet also drawing an equivalence between the 101st thing and a central tool of the cabinet maker's trade. This is an internal inconsistency. You must either acknowledge the 100 things as 100 tools of cabinetry, each more important than the 101st, or you must regard the 101st thing as yet another fixture to be added to the cabinet. A domain expert is telling you that version control is a peripheral concern in their trade, the 101st tool, and you're responding with an idealism of mastery that stems from notions of integrity and identity and establishes no reasonable boundaries. You're welcome to this ethic and idealism, it's not a bad thing to have, but you're second guessing someone else's mastery based on arbitrary reference to your own mastery. I might as well be chiding you for looking up man pages without understanding the command-line capabilities of `troff`.
I'm using anonymous nested structs extensively for grouping related items, but I consider the extra field name a feature, not something that should be hidden:

https://github.com/floooh/sokol-samples/blob/bfb30ea00b5948f...

(also note the 'inplace initialization' which follows the state struct definition using C99's designated initialization)
I'm really surprised to find this article pointing out that this spike "began during the COVID-19 pandemic" but then Ctrl-F for "Trump" and "elections" come up empty and there seems to be no further discussion of the matter. They could have just as well run with "began in the middle of a heated electoral cycle with an incumbent who clearly has little regard for the political culture or unity of the nation."

As a total outsider I'd have guessed that the (in retrospect justified) anticipation of large-scale civil unrest would be driving this...
I see you left mercurial out of the list.
>The data also showed that 39 percent of U.S. households now own guns, an increase from 32 percent in 2016.

I'd like to know the methodology that leads to that conclusion. Unless they are making some seriously handwavey assumptions in the absence of a 1:1 binding of individual/household to gun purchase which is technically illegal for the Government to maintain.

(Though not really because it's likely a third-party that is doing the aggregation that the government would never think of peeping a look at I'm sure.)

Although, I'd still like to know how "required FBI background check", which I bet all are tracked and cross-referencable with the requestor, thereby giving a synthetic key to "gun purchase" does not translate to database of potential gun owners.

Really wish these types of thoughts would stop occurring to me, I only have so much room for research projects in my head. >_<
> Turkey does not have the expertise nor money to build this.

Heck, its pretty much what the US didn't have the combination of expertise and money to carry out with the UCLASS project, whose requirements got signficantly relaxed into an unmanned tanker with minimal combat capability project (CBARS) and produced the Boeing MQ-25.
Excelize 2.4.1 Is Released – Go API for Spreadsheets
There are obviously good reasons why Turkey is being denied access to advanced anti aircraft systems from NATO, its current government is growing more and more aggressive with its neighbours even if they are also NATO members and at the same time they cosy up with Russia at times while turning from the most secular Muslim country into a theocracy.
That’s what I figured. Thanks!
How Google quietly funds Europe’s leading tech policy institutes
Well the first example in the article was about the author completing her PhD, and it mentioned productivity and making use of talents, and seemed to be talking about fear of success, so I read it as a (strange) extension of that.

If it was meant to be about more personal relationship type stuff the author could have discussed that explicitly. Maybe the piece needed an extra paragraph to explain better what the link was.
"All in all, the culture in here makes it very hard to improve anything as most people I work with have spent their entire professional life in a bubble where every problem is solve through shoehorning various products and framework made by oracle."

Government jobs tend to be very secure too. It's possible some people just see it as an easy paycheck and don't want to rock the boat.
Never use my real name anywhere online.
Startup for a quick online soul market?
I spent a few summers in the mid-90s card counting with a couple friends on summer vacation from college. Vegas was saturated so we focussed on Reno and Mississippi. I'm pretty sure we were about the only ones in Mississippi because the rules weren't always great (the basic rules are fixed of course but casinos can and do change the "edge cases" like the ability to double after splitting) and they played with big "shoes" of multiple decks, usually 8.

The thing is when you count you start at zero when the deck(s) are shuffled and then keep a running count. So it's just one number. Each card you see modifies the count up or down (we used the Omega II system where 10s were -2, aces and 8s were 0, 4/5/6 were +2, etc). Once you practice (a lot) it's not hard: I could count a double deck perfectly as fast as someone could push cards off the top.

The thing about playing games with a lot of decks is that they let players join at pretty much any point. In a single or double deck game you have to wait for the shuffle. So we could wander around the casino, wait for a (massive) shuffle and then start counting without playing. If the count got good, it could get really good, and once a bunch of "bad" cards were out it would stay good for a while. Long enough to jump in and play a few hands, until the count went bad and then you could pick up your winnings and move along.

Fun times. We made good money for college kids but never had enough starting cash to really make a splash and get caught.
I interpreted what GP said as " the version control system is the place I store my files, so it's not just a tool, but it's an essential and necessary environment, the space where I organize my stuff"
It's not like the options are EU membership or theocracy. Turkey was secular long before attempting EU membership
Just recently there was a case on the front page of HN where a white boy was groomed into the drug trade by the FBI since he was 14, and served more than 32 years in prison, "the longest sentence of any nonviolent minor in Michigan history" [1].

Moving away from anecdote, black males receive on average 19% longer sentences for similar crimes compared to white males [2]. 0% would be better, but 19% does not strike me as over-the-top racist as we are told the system is. For comparison:

Black female offenders and Other Race female offenders also received shorter sentences than White male offenders during the Post-Report period, at 29.7 percent and 35.4 percent shorter respectively - page 9 of the report.

That's considerably more than the black-white male disparity. But is this piece of data going to convince you the justice system's anti-male bias is a bigger problem than its anti-black bias? Is it going to affect you at all? The next time someone brings up how viciously racist the system is, will you correct them and say it's only 19% racist, compared to ~30% misandrist?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28020253

[2] https://www.ussc.gov/research/research-reports/demographic-d...
Imo the real fashion trendsetters don’t think about it in terms of what might become trending to surf it like q wave but are focussed on ideas&concepts which are relevant for society in that year/age.