skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's really not impossible. The main difference is in LC practice and system design experience. The latter of which is likely covered by any reasonably scaled startup.

The barrier to the former is practice and knowledge of fundamental algorithms. There are a lot of algorithms that come up in practice, and it can be intimidating to learn the first time.

As the parent mentioned part of the problem is that engineering productivity as measured by dollars/engineer is proportional to the profitability of the firm more so than the skills of the engineer. High end engineering firms are highly profitable and select the best engineers. There are diminishing returns to hiring more engineers so companies prefer to hire the number they need at the maximum competency they can pay for.

IIRC 2 decades ago engineering was more evenly distributed in salary expectations as there weren't as many mega cap companies, and the ones that did exist had the philosophy that they should hire more engineers rather than better engineers.
Just read a good non-fiction book about con men, one of them pulls this exact ruse:

https://www.amazon.com/Cleantech-Artists-True-Vegas-Caper-eb...
The city builder has its origins far back in the 1990s in the combination of the strategy genre and the management genre, leading to games such as Sim City (1989), Caesar (1992) and Age of Empires (1997).

Utopia for Intellivision/Aquarius came out in 1982. It was one of my favorite games growing up. I highly recommend it if you're into these kinds of games, or retro gaming. I guess I was retro gaming when I played it in the late 80s/early 90s, but we didn't call it that then. Some caveats, It's a 2 player game, you need to read the instructions, and it's annoying without the overlays.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utopia_(video_game)

edit: When Sim City, and Populous made their way to Super Nintendo, I remember explaining to my older cousin that they were kind of like Utopia.
Ohh, one of the hard questions :-)

Personally, I think the cache oblivious thing was oversold, all the algorithms I have seen are horribly complex and thus only an improvement if your N is so big as to overshadow the constant terms in O(...) we usually ignore. Patenting and expecting to become stinking filthy rich on the licensing fees, was another good way to prevent them from being used.

I think the best we can do is probably still making sure we know what we are trying to do, and what we are not going to do, and then architect accordingly.

That is of course really just a fancy way of saying "it depends", but I'm OK with that: Magic silver bullets are not a thing.
An extreme instance of grafting, 40 kinds of fruit from a single tree: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_of_40_Fruit
Could someone explain to me why, after seeing how many exaggerated claims the author has made, they have invested their time into building up a community around it?

I'd be straight up terrified to trust anything serious with this guy's work.

In this instance, the demo won't even load for me and the documentation page can't be bothered to put the most basic of padding in it. Why even release publicly?

Promises, promises.
Now almost 80% of 16 to 24 year olds in England have Covid antibodies
Nice, also build a management interface so they can see the workers brick per hour stats.

Add in GPS, keep all the data and later sell the database to insurance companies so they can charge higher rates for construction that happened too fast.
Project wifibox: Use Linux guest to drive a wireless network card on FreeBSD
People are always talking about the 10x engineer. Nobody imagined that someone would invent the 10x programming language.
Wow, I had heard that Firebase was powerful but this almost fully featured program is just one html file, the leaflet js library, and is fully powered by Firebase on the backend.

I got it running locally on my machine without any trouble, this is super neat!
Infra: Halt security bugs impact critical industrial control devices
https://www.paced.email is a service I built to buffer users from email. It aggregates multiple inbound emails into single messages based on a desired cadence. There's a dashboard, but after signing up, there's no real need to sign in as I designed the system to generate aliases on the fly using an easy to remember format.

E.g.

- johndoe@daily.paced.email

- johndoe.hackernews@weekly.paced.email

- johndoe.github@monthly.paced.email

- Or xyz@example.com if you bring your own domain.

The UI came about after being requested so much, but the original interface still stands.
Smalltalk too.
This is now a classic reading:
(tldr: it is faster to call PHP process from C++ code and do regex in PHP than to use std::regex, and slow std::regex will never change because the Comittee doesn’t want to break ABI in favor of speed):

https://cor3ntin.github.io/posts/abi/
GP is the friend who, when the gang all goes to Vegas, stands stoically behind everyone else playing for s__ts and giggles.
They are looking out for the collective us not for any subgroup. If you think about it, there’s lots of ways to make subgroups wealthier at the expense of America herself.

Subsidies are one such tool. Tariffs are another. He was right, you know, and fortunately the H1B helped with the growth of the American tech economy - which benefited all Americans far more than if it had been delayed (or worse, taken from us by others).

There is a ride in the affairs of men, and they managed to take it at its flood.
And occasional loot crates containing optimizations?
expected to see FromSoftware Inc (the peeps that made Dark Souls)
My company is currently porting a critical app to React, yet I feel similar to you on most of your points. The app in question is currently using Angular 9, so a fairly similar beast. But React, by comparison, is worse in most ways IMO. The ugly syntax forced by JSX, the combination of template and logic together in 1 file, the odd forcing of certain unintuitive abstraction patterns while also claiming to be "not opinionated" about other crucial aspects of how an app works, and I certainly agree it is not special.

However, your argument starts to erode for me when you claim you'd rather spend a few months to build your own moat. You're not just choosing to incur that cost once when you build it. You're incurring a multi-month charge of developer cost that doesn't result in anything being produced for every dev you add to the team, as they have to learn the ins and outs of your proprietary abstraction without the aid of any documentation (assuming) or community to help when they get stuck. This also means a large part of your time is now spent reactively answering pings for special case questions and "what does this opaque error mean" and "how come this thing doesn't work when I do that thing"? And good luck hiring devs who are excited to work on your special creation, not to mention how you have to adapt your hiring process to determine who will be likely to succeed in such an environment. That sounds like a lot of stress to place on a fledgling company trying to grow at a crucial stage and could certainly be a contributing factor in your post-mortem when things don't work out.

By contrast, by advertising for React vs Angular devs we can expand our candidate pool 5-10x and anticipate reduced ramp up time and increased velocity out of the gate. And since hiring and growing my team is one of the most expensive and difficult things I'm grappling with, that's what I'm optimizing for. In the battle between pragmatism and idealism, pragmatism wins the day once again.
The Nonmachinables
If there are two humans left in the economy would one end the other's life to get that final doubling?
Unit tests cannot check this exhaustively unlike type checkers.

Right, which is actually an argument against the claim that you have to write more tests with dynamic typing.
Well, first, two of the people these are based on aren't doctors at all; they're biomedical researchers with no background as practicing doctors.

However, the random careers website you cite may be giving you a slightly confused idea about actual doctors, too. Many doctors do research, and a lot of medical research gets done by practicing doctors. That website isn't intended as an exhaustive guide to everything that doctors do.
I'm a big fan of GitBucket - It's like GitHub-in-a-WARfile
https://gitbucket.github.io/
Most people have the idea that the job of a government is to make conditions better for its citizens.
Tools You Need to Automate Your Lead Generation Agency
Hey - creator of BudgetSheet here (https://www.budgetsheet.net/ ).

These formulas are great! I am currently working on adding more charts, graphs, and formulas to my product. These formulas and handy to know about for a net worth sheet. Thanks for sharing!
This entire discussion seems to be very US-centric. In the Netherlands, the situation is exactly like you describe how it'd look like if the proposition in the title were correct.

Possibly because Dutch companies simply refuse to increase salaries, and 60k per year is still somehow considered good.
Does your inclination to recommend the legal field and law school stand if the person would have to finance the entire law degree, and couldn't get in to a T14 school? I assume $120k all-in, having been a party to shopping for law schools—albeit several years ago, so I hope it hasn't gone up much.
> Yes, it seems like a credit card in that it's predatory and should be illegal.

Saying that credit cards should be illegal is laughable. Whether they're predatory could be debated, but there is zero downside to using credit cards if you pay off the monthly balance.

> Where is the business model if not to charge users

Well, the article says "the companies more often make their money from retailer commissions, not missed payments", so let's say that the business model is there.
When I say he's a Tesla shill, it's specifically because of the positive things he says about Tesla.

Right. Checks out. There's certainly solid engineering logic and reasoning there!

So, if that's your best example, are you tacitly admitting you can't think of any mechanical engineering examples?
People who study STEM know a bunch of stuff about science and technology. There may be science and tech firms out there that feel that's what they need, but what they actually need is people who can learn how to do the work in their businesses.

The connection is that the kid who takes his time to learn how transistors work is more likely than most candidates to be able to figure out how your swaption contracts work. He's more likely to be interested, and he's more likely to be motivated than say the kid who studied French poetry. Or so we think, naturally there are type-O people who just love learning all sorts of things. But neither of those kids knows enough to actually do the job out of college. There's a small head start if you've studied CS and you want to be a coder, or if you studied finance and you want to be a swap trader. But it's actually quite small, and more of an indication of interest than actual competence.

The problem is we're now creating a narrative that STEM degrees cause competence in technical fields. It's not true, it's a correlation caused by people who like taking shit apart going to take-shit-apart classes so that they can indulge their curiosity for a bit. That metaskill is then used to get into whatever comes next. Software, solar cell manufacturing, whatever.

Look back at your degree. How much if it was actually useful, directly? How much was just exam cramming wastage (formulas, derivations)? I think the only time anything ever happened that I found useful, it was implementing a Bessel function in an option pricing library. So basically a few minutes saved, because everything else in that project (compiling the C lib, studying the option theory, calculating the model params) was of the "I'm gonna learn that now" type.

The danger here is we tell a generation of kids that if you study organic chemistry or quantum physics, you'll find a job. What they really need is that get-to-the-bottom attitude that will lead them to more satisfaction both intellectually and professionally. And just so we don't forget, that attitude is just as useful in non-STEM fields. Being able to thoroughly learn something is a universal skill.
> You have fears about getting a vaccine, moreso than for coronavirus. If this is you, do you prefer a mask mandate?

As someone who is vaccinated, I'm frankly tired of wearing masks, and I don't feel I should have to wear one to protect someone else who is refusing a vaccine.
The $1B pricetag came from the linked article. The thing about the main unsolved question is simply false - the process by which classical mechanics emerges from quantum mechanics is already well-understood and partly taught in undergraduate courses.
In additional to what others have mentioned (OCaml has OOP), Kotlin is very good. It's not as expressive as ML-family languages, but sealed classes + null safety + type inference makes for a very fluid, almost dynamic programming experience that still has strong guarantees.
Kubectl plugin for blue/green deployment strategy
STEM is in crisis because we need more blacks and browns in order to do good science.
A company is not out there comparing salaries with salaries at other companies (not all, anyway). That would be too much pressure on a company to determine what compensation should be for that specific person. Not everyone can get into the top companies, so it's up to the employees themselves to determine what it means to be underpaid.
Yup, Apple fanboiz always be deflecting. No wonder Apple doesn't need a marketing/PR dept - the fanboiz will happily come to Apple's rescue for free!
Those same people probably disagree about an army captain being middle class. Some would say that any public employee short of a presidential appointment is per se something below middle class. The average congressman or senator, the people on TV making all the decisions, are paid 175k/year. The president is paid 400k. Such people normally have other private income streams but that is the base pay. So anyone talking about "low six figures" as "middle class" really needs to take their head out of the sand.
Maybe to also break reader or rss views, but I feel like we’re a pretty low percentage of the hits.
Those that lie often either don't respect other people or they don't have the ability to know when they are lying. Which is scarier?

Go, Nim, and Zig have similar focuses and their devs have put in years of public, good work.

Some of the take downs at the time he was making his initial claims are absolutely brutal and make it clear that he not only couldn't back up his crazy claims, he wasn't getting the small stuff right.

https://christine.website/blog/v-vaporware-2019-06-23

He still hasn't learned.
Building architectures that can handle the world's data
I understand, but consider how different your situation might be if those corrections had occurred at the end of your career rather than the beginning.
> Among the 469 cases in Massachusetts residents, 346 (74%) occurred in persons who were fully vaccinated

> Among five COVID-19 patients who were hospitalized, four were fully vaccinated

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7031e2.htm
Its not a gamble. It's a sure thing that only people with the right mix of technical knowledge and Austrian economics can see
That'd be a great addition. I plan to update this with historical charting and tracking of position values over time. I'll see if I can find a way to add risk parity. Makes a lot of sense.
Good observation. It seems most economic policy these days is made from the perspective of the investment class.
Here are some good answers about it [1], but it's current leakage from the mains voltage making its way onto your chassis.

You end up with upwards of 60V sine wave on your MacBook case, compared to the relatively grounded you (capacitively to your surroundings). This voltage creates some electrostatic force to attract your finger to the surface enough that you can feel a change in friction. The Disney Research Lab made a neat touch display surface that used the same effect (and higher voltage) to modify the friction and "texture" feeling for a haptic touchscreen [2].

1. https://la.disneyresearch.com/publication/teslatouch-electro...

2. https://la.disneyresearch.com/publication/teslatouch-electro...
In the case of Gitea, an argument could be made that it's actually `gi•tea`, not `git•ea` :)
I didn't know about this until working in the US. Yeah, engineers here are royalty. They are better paid than doctors and lawyers. In other countries, a programmer is like a plumber.
> Why would a company pay more than they need to?

There is the prestige factor. And of course pressure from the employees. If you are making $600K per employee and it's public, they'll demand more.

> I would pay 4x the price for grapes if required. I don't as I would prefer to spend less on grapes.

But you do. That's the point. If you make $600K and another person makes $100K, you are far more likely to buy grapes whenever you want/need rather than waiting for the grapes to be on sale.

> Unless there is something that prevents from from becoming mid-level engineers. Like companies that don't hire junior level engineers at all and have mid-level be the entry level.

But the tech industry favor junior/younger employees. Ageism is a thing in the tech industry.
Pggen: A Golang ORM Alternative
Seems like Dijkstra was seeking popularity too.
> Optional requires generic types (kind-1 types) to be usable

My gut tells me that's not quite right (for some reasonable definition of 'usable'), since we can always build elimination forms into the language (after all, 'null' must be built in, and few take objection to building in elimination forms like if/then/else).

> it also requires some kind of pattern matching or monad comprehensions - otherwise, code using Optional is neither type safe nor readable.

I really like comprehensions in Python, but hardly ever use them elsewhere. In fact, when I do use them in Haskell and Scala, I usually find myself having to refactor them into calls to `map`/`join`/etc. soon after, to have more fine-grained scoping or somesuch.

> trying to offer a generic SQL library that presents an AST as the API for even the most popular RDBMSs quickly gets complex

That's orthogonal to anything I said. Represent SQL using arrays of bytes in memory if you like; offer a string-like interface for constructing and manipulating them if you like; just make sure to distinguish them from other string-like types, in a way that's statically enforceable, and where the only API to convert a 'String' to an 'SQL' is the escaping function.

Note that I don't particularly care if an SQL value is valid; it would be nice to statically enforce that, but you're right that (vendor-supplied) SQL is pretty complex in its own right. What's much more important to get right is that SQL is not user-generated.
> What is bad is that I capital can just work and earn money, those not lucky need to be creative and actually use and sell their abilities.

Yeah, inequality is a bummer, but it's a small price to pay to lift billions out of abject poverty. Further, we can do more to calibrate our capitalist systems to be more efficient which is to say we can reduce the amount of inequality and lift more people further out of poverty. That said, capitalism has allowed many of us have been able to lift ourselves out of the labor class and to begin to earn passive income even if it hasn't allowed all of society to do so in perfect lock-step. It's a centuries-long process (7+ billion people distributed through a lot of different cultures and political systems with varying degrees of corruption especially among the non-capitalist systems), but we can get there.

> Also bad: while there is competition, there is just a huge amount of excess and waste work because everybody is determined to out-compete the others

Far less than any other system known to man.

> In the end, a capitalist company aims for perpetual growth and monopoly, because that's where you can set your price and maximize your profit.

Our system largely marshals this corporate greed to the benefit of all of society. Many of us believe it can be marshaled more efficiently (i.e., less inequality and less poverty, probably by steeper taxes on the rich), but we're talking about calibrating the existing system--not changing to a fundamentally different one. Indeed, we haven't found an alternative to capitalism that isn't utterly catastrophic, so complaining about capitalism seems horribly destructive (by all means, complain about the degree to which our system could be made more efficient, but complaining that capitalism is responsible for the constraints imposed by nature is ultimately counterproductive).
I personally like to put it in the negative.

Let's set aside for a moment FAA, FCC, IATA, etc.

The airline has a several million dollars/euro worth aircraft to lose in case of a crash.

The insurance has many more millions to pay.

If I were them and if I suspected that having phones or smartphones switched on and/or used during flight might in 0.00001% of cases cause a crash, my policy would be to frisk all passengers and take all their electronic devices in custody before boarding.

Since this is not done, they (airline and insurance) must be pretty sure that the devices (and their use) are not dangerous for flight safety.
The difference is that type check shows a property is universally ∀ true across all of the code, while a run time test shows a property is ∃ true in this one part of the code.
Passing grueling multi-round leetcode endurance + memorization tests. That's the distinction.

So, yes, it's kinda dependent on employers.

There's another level of people who are the sort with a reputation that means the leetcode-hazing employers wouldn't dare force them through the usual gauntlet (as they'd refuse), but that's a vanishingly small set of folks. And anyway, I think a lot of them (but not all!) end up doing more "soft" work than banging out code, by the time they're in that phase of their career.
Looking at gitly repository it almost has no features, only a fraction of the basic git features are present, and they are barely working.
Why is it being advertised here on HN as a fast alternative of github/gitlab?

P.S.: Probably the website crashed, it's giving me 502 bad gateway from cloudflare
ABET accreditation (not as important in CS as engineering, but still very common) requires a CS program to teach software development and strong programming skills.

Training for professional roles (like engineering) is essentially vocational training. There is an industry need that drives the curriculum requirements.
Yea, I think developers need to make a better conscience decision to not work on those things. I can't ever imagine taking a job doing those. It would be far to soul crushing. There are plenty of exciting and fun challenges left in tech development, you just might have to sift through all that crap to find them.
But were they well-compensated in the beginning and middle days, too? It seems unlikely that sports and games are only popular during the end days. (Unless you're just saying that their compensation should decrease.)
> There's large swaths of Republicans that think public teachers are overpaid...it's mind-boggling.

About that. Some of the best funded school systems and best paid teachers are in wealthy (republican) areas. Why? Wealth drives tax revenue, quality of teachers drives quality of school system, and quality of school ultimately causes that suburban McMansion to go up in value faster. In wealthy areas in my state (Indiana), charter and private schools flourish in impoverished, urban areas and public schools are extremely good in wealthy area.
The overwhelming view on HN is that labor shortages cannot exist but chip shortages can. The only difference between the two is whether HN users are buying or selling.