skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
not all "technical debt" is wanting chess when we built checkers.

it can just be building a minimal chess quickly using methods/frameworks that are not easily extensible to future requirements related to chess.

the vast majority of software projects will have features/requirements that evolve after the initial design, it is a rabbit hole to try and guess all of those, but some things are just common sense but would add a little time to the first milestone. then you are in the position of tacking on things indefinitely making it a horrible tangled mess.
When I was a kind, I liked the Pyro! fish screensaver more than the After Dark one.

Sure, it was in B&W instead of color, but when a bigger fish collided with a smaller fish, he'd eat it!

Edit: here's a video where someone (who was probably -20 years old when it came out) demos it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YyLtenNh7Sc
We want to level the playing field!! Similar to your experience, we've seen too many examples of homeowners receiving different prices or treatment based on gender, socioeconomic status, or other factors that have nothing to do with the underlying service. HomeBreeze eliminates this for our customers.
>The least charge you can give it is a black signal

The point is that you could not give it no signal without it being off. LEDs can do this. The closest to black from a CRT I saw was from Sony's Professional Studio reference monitors that were $32K for a 32" screen. When Sony brought out their OLED reference monitors, they did a side-by-side comparisson of their best CRT, an LCD and the new OLED. All 3 were receiving the same signal, and when the demo started black, the CRT was clearly "on" but the OLED looked "off" with the LCD in between. Just about the time I'm thinking to myself that the CRT brightness was turned up, they switched to reference bars and all were calibrated correctly.

Arguing that CRTs could display true black is arguing against history.
I don't think they're mutually exclusive for most people. Take transgender people for example. On one hand acceptance has gone up but it's also caused a minefield for scientific researchers and medical professionals.

I honestly don't think most people are capable of the nuance you describe.
He’s providing the unavoidable answer that the author feels is unfair - your reputation doesn’t belong to you, it belongs to everyone else.

She believes it’s unfair because powerful people are able shape hers. I suppose the alternative is to have our reputation determined by unbiased Facebook factcheckers.
edit: typo, changed $700,000 to $70,000. Also note that isn't income, but revenue.

> For a certain size of customer this problem does go away

> We have an account manager, have received lots of support from Google in setting up, have been able to trial products in closed alpha before release, and haven't been hit by any meaningful deprecations

Too bad that level of customer service doesn't extend across their offerings and to smaller customers. A conservative estimate puts my wife's losses at just over $70,000 for the time her accounts were disabled. That doesn't include potential referrals from customers she would have gained during that time.

I've been an Amazon customer for years, for several of their products, and I have yet to experience an issue that wasn't handled promptly and to my satisfaction.

Several companies I've worked for have used AWS, and we experienced that same commitment to customer service. My network from those companies use AWS for their side projects and startups.

> we are not a Google competitor, and one of our major partners considered it a significant benefit of using us that we did not host on Amazon services.

Some companies don't use or have moved off of GCP for similar reasons.
I prefer to think of it as, the more there is the more there is to fail. I apply that to the entirety of the application not just the tiny part I write.
I really _really_ hope that HP continues making Itanium based servers available for 30 more years, even if they are not selling a single unit, just to spite Oracle, for the comedic value only.

In all seriousness, HP can do that to get some out of court settlement money from Oracle, as Oracle clearly does not want to continue supporting the platform.
Not sure why this is downmodded - fbi.gov stats report that an in an interaction with police, a white person is more likely to be killed than a black American person.
Show HN: Make Sound – Music Player for Mac
This is true in my experience at various large corps I've worked for. The legal department has a rather small headcount but a massive consulting budget. They hire other lawyers with local jurisdiction experience, subject matter expertise, courtroom experience, etc. Their day-to-day hands on work is 1) managing all of the outsourcing 2) mundane corporate contract stuff which is more frequent/consistent in volume.
I thought most people just get fast internet and let "the cloud" handle it now days ?

Seems like a lot of work to ultimately not do things not as well as army of engineers focused on this problem full time.
> I may be splitting hairs here but I want to make the distinction that at no point was an engineer making poor choices.

Financial debt can be both good and bad. Good financial debt lets you take advantage of opportunities now that you wouldn't otherwise be able to afford, and you end up better off in the end. Bad financial debt leaves you worse off in the end. Taking on financial debt absolutely can be a poor choice.

I don't see why these same qualities can't show up in technical debt as well. So sometimes engineers might be making poor choices, the point is to evaluate whether the debt is taken on to exploit an opportunity, evaluate whether you'll be better off for taking on that debt, and to ensure you pay it back in a timely manner.
Maybe for people who have never had the misfortune of using a MS product.
> I couldn't put on my laundry and hang it up while I listen to other folks on the daily stand up.

Yeah, there's a secret value in low level distractions: they prevent higher level distractions. When you go into a deep focus environment for that daily, chances are your mind will focus deeply on something entirely unrelated.
It's a step in that direction, which is more than we had previously. It doesn't establish a cutoff threshold, but it does allow a doctor to say whether somebody's antibody level is closer to the group that got infected or the group that didn't. They could warn that person to be extra cautious and theoretically save lives based on this study alone. I find that newsworthy.
I agree that we need negative feedback in our voting systems. But it doesn't have to be downvotes. You can use the number of views as a negative force. I created some simulations and plots: https://github.com/fdietze/downvote-scoring
"But be aware that there is no free lunch, and reducing risk right now will most probably reduce your opportunities in the long term."

I would buy this t-shirt. This is so true. At certain points in your life you can take wild risks - eg. work for a company that has 4 months of runway and live on the co founders couch. This type of opportunity can teach you more in 4 months than 4 years at other positions. Small companies having difficulties can be a fun place to lead, fix and build. You will have plenty of years to do: 2 hour code reviews, long sprint planning sessions and write endless unit tests.
We're all speculating without hard data, but just for fun, another pet theory explaining something like this could be as simple as: neurotypical programmers tend to enjoy socializing more than neuroatypical programmers, so they generally spend less time on the computer, and are less proficient at programming, on average, simply because they have less practice. That doesn't preclude someone who is neurotypical from enjoying computers and programming and bucking the trend.
This is one of those cases where the news cycle and court of public opinion spiraled out of control, never to be corrected. Imagine how surreal and frustrating that must be? And she makes a good point about how these things get named:

Who had the power in the relationship between Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky? The president or the intern? It matters what you call a thing. Calling that event the “Lewinsky Scandal” fails to acknowledge the vast power differential, and I’m glad that more people are now referring to it as “the Clinton Affair” which names it after the person with the most agency in that series of events.
Yea, the great thing about the organization-wide decision was that everybody in the company knew it, so nobody expected quick responses.
CDC – Coronavirus, Improving Communications
I’m not sure if a “normal” legal dept does cases like this but besides that, they have other things to do. That means that the day-to-day business would be postponed or the legal team expanded.
Thanks for explaining! So in other words these cannot be compared with unrelated studies or test results.
If Apple advertised as little as Creative Labs did, it probably would not have done much better than the Nomad. iPods were far from perfect products, and non-iPod players were not all clunky ripoffs.
I love the function call timing story:

> The iAPX 432 failure could best be summed up by a meeting of Intel marketroids and Tandem engineers who wanted to use the chip in their next generation machine, after the slides, the senior engineer asked: “How long does it take to execute a procedure call?”

> The presenter looked it up. “Two hundred and fifty microseconds.”

> Tom immediately walked out, followed by the majority of the Tandem software department. The presenter was poleaxed. “What did I say?”

Found in comments to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FvmTSpJU-Xc , but I saw it somewhere else, too, I just don't recall where. Doesn't anyone know?
Your causality doesn't seem to line up. As you tell it, the workstation CPUs were already peaking in terms of complexity and cost, when Intel and HP announce a huge investment in the next generation of this class of CPU.

This doesn't signal that the segment is economically unviable, and if you're an existing player with an existing strong design, it signals an opportunity to invest in your own next generation and meet Intel/HP head-on with a superior brand (for this segment) and a more plausible next-gen design.

Intel and HP show up promising a clean sheet design in a decade doesn't seem like a time to roll up your market leading offering and go home.
So are you against all defamation lawsuits? This is more or less just an extension of that train of thought: people deserve to not have their reputation ruined unfairly by powerful structures. There's a big difference between gossip of people you know and a Hollywood movie.
> I swear the big benefit of cloud deployments is the teams ability to say “we tried throwing $$ at the problem, if we don’t want to spend $$$ we’ll need to do some work”. And have this convo play out over a day rather than months.

My current job is on the tail end of hypergrowth and we are just starting to get our arms around the years of hacks and inefficiencies that made it possible to succeed. We've had a dozen conversations where we've decided

* to throw $10^2/day at a problem for two weeks so the engineers are free to deliver the features required to land $10^5/year in ARR, then work on perf

* to analyze the system, identify the one or two features that cost the most, and tackle those while leaving the rest alone

* and yes, to translate inefficiencies to real dollars and use that to force prioritization (we do that a lot ;-))

A team that understands cloud computing and can do some cost forecasting makes some amazing things possible.
A platform that enables creators to be paid by their fans
That is quite interesting, and makes sense! The spread-spectrum signal is a psuedo-random, but same sequence for all receivers, while the noise varies and should cancel out.

Though, if I am not mistaken, the laws of super-sampling hold in this case, and SNR is only improved by O(sqrt(N)) for N samples, so this approach will have practical limits as one has to place a very large number of receivers in range of the emitter (or do auto-correlations over a very long time window), with enough separation to make sure the noise isn't correlated anymore, if looking for a signal deep below the noise floor.
That would quickly be abused to silence critics as well. Imagine if Brock Turner trademarked his name, and went after anyone discussing his story.

Not to mention, your name is not unique. I know of at least 2 other people in the US with the same first and last name as me.
render.com for $7 a month.

Digitalocean is $5 but you need to handle all the management that comes with it.

with render you just point it to a github repo and you're done.
'Technical Debt' in contemporary terms has certainly become a container holding far more than originally intended by Cunningham.

The fundamental debt metaphor was about the need for ongoing re-factoring of past code and systems to match today's understanding, and the accumulating cost of failing to have the discipline and taking the time to do so.

Cunningham's specific quotes from the video [0] linked in the article: "...accumulate the learnings we did about the application over time by modifying the program to look as though we knew what we were doing all along, and to look as if it had been easy to do", and "If we fail to make our program align with what we then understood to be the proper way to think about our financial objects then we were going to continually stumble over that disagreement, and that would slow us down".

This problem is fundamental to software systems and how they change over time, and is not about making poor choices, tradeoffs, or generally poor engineering to ship code faster.

A system or feature is initially built based on the requirements that were known at that point in time. Requirements are frequently not static though: that original set of requirements may continue to evolve over time, either as we better understand them after implementation, or when requirements are added, refined, or removed by the stakeholders or organization.

Additionally, we can't view each feature or requirement in isolation over time: only when we see the overall set of features in a system will the important patterns start to emerge that inform how refactoring should occur. We can't know this early on, only over time as the system evolves.

I have witnessed this many times on software projects, both small and large. Requirements and features evolve over time, but the code base was never refactored to take into account the overall understanding as of each point in time. Rather, the changes are applied in isolation ('bolted on?') incrementally. Over time these numerous incremental changes result in a system that is fragile, increasingly difficult to understand and maintain, and generally veers toward spaghetti. It becomes harder and harder to make changes. That is the debt that was never repaid.

[0] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqeJFYwnkjE
Answer is IA-64 was good enough and industry did not have a good incentive to rewrite working software for another architecture.
I see. My blog is not meant to bait attacks. If it was, it would be anonymous.

Could you tell me why you think it is baiting attacks so I can fix it, if possible?

Edit: to be clear, I think you are making excuses, but I could be wrong, so I am giving you a chance to prove that I am wrong.
That not really how, at least some, European countries work. Laws are written and companies are generally expected to follow them. We’re try to catch up, going from an society where rules are followed, without the need for actual enforcement, to one where companies don’t follow the law unless the court makes it unprofitable.
Interesting take. I never bought into the argument that social media companies were publishers in general, but I do agree that their algorithms used to promote and suggest content can be seen as actively publishing selected information.
DALL·E mini – Generate images from a text prompt
DALL·E mini is an AI model that generates images from any prompt you give!
Pretty sure autism reduces reproductive fitness. Though, assortative mating could mean that the autistic minority develops ever-stronger autism.
Additionally, trademarked names are made up by the trademark owner (or by people they pay). Your name is made up by your parents/guardians, and you generally have no say in it.
Indeed. I would suggest replacing the link with https://9to5mac.com/2021/07/30/m1-macbook-screen-cracks/ which has much more neutral tone despite being published on an unapologetically fanboyish website.
I think you are taking it personally, tech debt usually isn't the fault of individual engineers. It is leadership who chooses to value initial short term speed over extensibility, maintainability, etc.

sometimes it is obvious to the engineer that this will cause problems in a few months, but the first deadline is in a few days, and that's all leadership cares about.
The appeal is heavily tilted towards the Teenage Engineering branding and design.
I didn't get the impression the film used her name
I entered the tech world as a junior system admin and can attest to the fact that they could be unappreciated. Back then, I was working within the network operations department, and the company managed all of its own servers. Later on, colocation became a more of a thing and there was a round of layoffs where our department got totally slashed.

Overall being a sysadmin was a lot of fun, although there were definitely some awkward moments. Like fixing an executive's malware infested laptop and finding a huge stash of porn. Or crawling under a woman's desk to test an ethernet port while she was shouting at me and frantically working on a presentation only to find out I was being used as an excuse for why she couldn't upload her late report.

But it seems like sysadmins have become even more invisible, largely outsourced and consolidated into cloud providers.
Well, this is true, but to me this provides a set of good defaults instead of starting from scratch. I see this very useful for example for side projects, where I don't want to start from scratch on every experiment I do.

For a work project, I'd use just tailwind for the reasons you mention.
Or maybe people who are neurotypical rise to management faster (because they have better interpersonal skills) and so spend less of their career programming.
> everyone who wants one has got one

If too many don't want to, this unfortunately isn't enough. Unvaccinated are a danger to others who can't be vaccinated (children under current rules, people with weak immune system) and where it for whatever reason failed (happend with other vaccines, not sure how likely with mRNA) Thus "vaccine sceptics" don't impact only themselves but can cause effects on others (and yeah, "children aren't hospitLized" but suffer from LongCovid ...)
You seem to be changing the subject. In your post here you seem to be arguing that the fines should somehow be related to profits:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28007958

Frankly that argument doesn’t really make sense. If I ran a car stealing gang and didn’t turn a profit (say due to costs related to my underlines), then my punishment wouldn’t just go away because I made no profits. The punishment would be related to the total value of the cars that were stolen.

A similar line of reasoning here would show that Amazons profits are irrelevant. It does’t matter if they have zero profits today due to magic accounting or due to future strategy or due to monopoly building or anything else because the profits don’t matter at all.

Of course you’re correct that if there’s not damage caused by Amazon (equivalently that Amazon did nothing illegal), then they wouldn’t have to pay any fines, but in that case you’re changing the subject and arguing something than than your original point. The EU however seems to believe the actions to have been illegal which makes profit irrelevant to the discussion.
This would be the only reason I'd need to pay for a safe deposit box. It might be worth it, just for that, but I haven't made that leap yet.
Also-- is the implication that it's not a design flaw if the screen can be cracked by a corn chip crumb?
> {Free, True}NAS are dead easy to use as long as you stay inside the confines of the GUI, and hugely reliable.

I’ve used FreeNAS (now TrueNAS). Great at first but eventually I started hit snags and bugs. I still use TrueNAS but I wouldn’t say it’s 100% reliable, especially across upgrades.

> Anything else is no man's land. Running ZoL and you did a routine kernel update? Enjoy your new read-only ZFS pool!

FWIW, I have a separate ZoL server that has been bulletproof, even with frequent upgrades. I did, however, run into a kernel issue with TrueNAS after an upgrade that caused some hardware issues about once a week. My options were either to downgrade to an older TrueNAS until they fixed it (still not fixed) or buy new hardware.
There were no Oracle databases in the Snowden revelations, all MySQL iirc.
Craig Murray is a gem! I knew him for his reporting on the Assange trial [0]. The fact that they convicted him is absolute lunacy. I happen to agree with his interpretation of the conviction, because I don't see how anyone could reasonably convict him. Godspeed Mr. Murray.

[0] https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2020/02/your-man-in-...
> The shit you have to go through to make basic stuff work is insane.

Isn't that always the case when you are jumping on a new area?
> We are here on Earth to fart around, and don't let anybody tell you any different.

I need this on a shirt. And in a plaque on my desk at the office. And framed at home.
It hasn’t been accused of the wrongful collection of data either. Not that hard to follow for sure…
> It's my last day at my current job. Thank you for inspiring me to set up a 1 minute BSOD screensaver for the next person who uses my current workstation.

What company won't wipe and reimage it before redeployment?

Hell, I usually wipe my own work PCs before surrendering them after an upgrade, to make sure it's done properly.
eh, tips scales towards balance and onwards we go.
We call STEM hard since most people fail to learn it to a passable level even when enticed with tons of money.

You can try to explain away their failures to learn in many ways, but the fact is that most people fail to learn STEM well enough to get a job doing it and instead they go to other fields considered less hard. You could say "They just didn't try hard enough" or "they just went into it with the wrong mindset" or "they just need to spend more time doing it" etc, but all of those things are signs that the field is hard.
No. See:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_persons_fictitious_discl...
Is the direct connection actually explicit in the film somehow? (e.g. "based on the Amanda Knox saga") My impression, not having seen the film, is not.

Usually, when there's a fictionalized novel/film based on a real world person (well, outside of someone really famous like JFK), it's usually obvious to everyone and all the reviews will mention it but the work will often explicitly disclaim any connection to actual people and events. Not much anyone can or should be able to do about that.
Absolutely disgusting. Murray did nothing wrong.
I think "1 container = 1 process" is a common misconception. There should be a separation of concerns, but there's no reason to go to extremes where it doesn't make sense.

S6-overlay people lay it out pretty neat https://github.com/just-containers/s6-overlay#the-docker-way
So this is more of a “is ice wet” study?
Thanks for the clarification. This makes a lot of sense.
For the past few years, I've created a photo book of the best family pictures from the past year. I store these photobooks in a fireproof safe. I think that's the easiest way to pass down pictures since it's paper doesn't require decryption or passwords.
Los Angeles Covid Surge Being Driven by White, Affluent Neighborhoods