skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This comes up often enough here. The number of people who do argue that “software engineer” is a kind of engineer, alongside “mechanical”, “civil”, etc, is always dismaying to me. I’ve always maintained that it’s merely a common title within the software industry, based on a loose analogy. Similar to “software architect”, it’s evocative, not literal.
If something isn't obviously recyclable (like, pure aluminum, pure glass, or regular paper) I throw it into the trash. I'd rather it end up in a landfill here, where there is at least a pretense of environmental regulation, than have it shipped overseas after being rejected from a recycling process.

I also watched that video, it's just so depressing. The amount of externalized costs we incur is simply staggering.

When I see someone throw something away, or when I throw something away myself, I just think: "Everything you've ever thrown away is somewhere."
As a fan of Aella’s Twitter persona I wish I had known about the escorting before it stopped!
it helps workers as the low interest rate boosts employment due to lowering the risk of investments (which creates jobs at some point in the financial chain).
(I deleted this comment because I couldn't find sources, but I found a couple of relevant ones since, so I've re-posted)

American hourly pay rose by 4.6% in the year to September while consumer-price inflation of 5.4% is more than wiping out those gains.

I've heard that the 5.4% figure is based on an out-dated methodology[0] and that inflation, as it affects the reality of a majority of people, is a fair bit higher than 5.4%[1]. This would mean the wage increases are easily outrun by inflation / CPI.

The 2014 article[0] specifically mentions that CPI doesn't take into account the devaluing of the currency - which is a much bigger factor today than it was 7 years ago when that article was written. Various statistics about X% of all US dollars were printed in the last Y years[2][3] (maybe not the most trustworthy sources).

House prices seem to be outpacing the stated inflation figure, which continues to raise the bar of income required to even consider home ownership a possibility. Whilst interest rates are very low this removes some of the regular mortgage repayment pressure, but beware the future when tapering starts and interest rates rise again, how many will go underwater, and will that be big enough to create a cascading failure of GFC proportions?

And then there's Evergrande? How will China play it to their financial advantage?

Lastly, because it's maybe more controversial and divisive, is the ol' WTF Happened in 1971?[4]. The top graph of that site showing wages growth has flatlined between 1971 and 2017.

It feels like The Economist is acting as the mouthpiece for industry pushing the status quo, wanting to continue the rhetoric that sells out the workers for the owners; rates capital and investor returns well above the provision of labor.

[0]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/perianneboring/2014/02/03/if-yo...

[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/02/business/inflation-worse-...

[2]: https://techstartups.com/2021/05/22/40-us-dollars-existence-...

[3]: https://www.cityam.com/almost-a-fifth-of-all-us-dollars-were...

[4]: https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/
I remember a time when people didn't have to be coddled from opinions they don't like. He should have just said nothing.
I haven't tested my mettle on this one, but probably the tobacco industry. I can't imagine working for an industry that kills people like that. (Please no morality Olympics - this one feels unambiguously personally objectionable, which is why I picked it out of several examples)
Simple Linux kernel memory corruption bug can lead to complete system compromise
> What could we not know about water? It’s wet!

It’s not. Things that have water on them are wet, water is not.
Well many people spend $12,000 a year on a hobby like travel, skiing, whatever. One escort a month is similar. Very few consume it hourly at the same volume as say Netflix.
An Obvious Loophole Appeared in New World
Sounds like you're describing NAT-PT, originally proposed in RFC 2766 (published in 2000).

It suffers from a lot of practical problems, which are described at length in RFC 4966. For example, without careful special handling it breaks protocols like FTP/SNMP/H.323 that embed IP addresses in data packets; it breaks IPsec; it can't handle fragmentation; and it suffers from scalability issues.

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc2766

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc4966
I think a lot of it is to fit a bigger battery. No easy way to do it unless you want a 3 inch thick phone
This argument has been done to death. I personally find the conga line of analysts and hedge fund managers who appear on CNBC and talk up their book of shit picks a lot worse than the best short selling shops.

There are so many bad companies that are public today, they really need somebody nipping at their heels.
Yes, exactly. This is how companies react.
Thank you for this insightful post.

I can only imagine the courage it takes to write something like this (you briefly hinted at the end).

Really appreciate your efforts to bring light and improve safety in a difficult line of work.

I too hope it doesn't affect your work, although I suspect you would get some unwanted attention with this exposure.
In a world of COVID remote work I got tired of my i9 always running loud and hot, and replaced it with a Mac mini which runs at room temperature, is the same or more snappy, since I was almost always running it in clamshell mode hooked up to the two displays anyway. And unplugging and plugging it back in to the TB hub always caused weird states that required reboots maybe 30% of the time.

So now I've got a Mac mini hooked up permanently to those monitors and it just works.

Now I am very tempted to trade in both my Mac mini and i9 for a 16" M1 pro so I can once again return to one machine that isn't always out of sync.

But I'm going to wait to see how well it runs in clamshell mode hooked up to 2 4k displays.
I don't think he screwed up in defending the special.

I do however think he, and Netflix, have screwed up by hiring activist employees.

I believe there's a way to screen out these employees that wouldn't involve discrimination or lawsuits.
If your concern is that this is additional unneeded syntax that is just going to result in difficult to understand, overly terse code, my 2 cents is that a conversation among your team to discuss these cases and agree on some standards is a pretty straightforward solution. It's not like today's JS has the Python philosophy of "one obvious way to do it".

I'll throw my hat in with those on the sidelines excited for the language we're stuck writing more of than we may want to, getting another piece of syntax that improves the ergonomics in a lot of little cases. Much like destructuring, much like the optional chaining and null coalescing. It will be nice to avoid the occasional temp variable that isn't useful for readability, or to rearrange expressions that read better applied than composed... but mostly I'm looking forward to how much nicer a pipe operator makes iteratively doing something in the console.
> we can physically create ample prosperity for every human on Earth today

or you imagine it is possible, because you have it.

It is not likely that every human can live the wealthy life style of americans. Current day technology can barely withstand the lack of gas and fossil fuel for a few weeks.

Until the day star trek replicators exist, it won't be possible.
Has the value of your investments really increased that much, or are rising stock prices just reflective of the lowered value of the dollar?
I found Hillel Wayne's series on the topic interesting, where he interviewed people that had worked in both "traditional engineering" and software.

https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/are-we-really-engineers/ (first post, later ones linked from the top)
These sound a lot like room temperature optical qubits... I'm certain I am missing something but this sounds pretty neat.
This strikes me as a weird things to say tbh, but in the spirit of the article I decided to try to look at it a bit more rationally and not sure this is wrong to say, but I still don't like it and I'm not exactly sure why.
So you mean you, me, your grandmother, and everyone else with a 401k or pension?
Couldn't this perhaps be useful for specialized compute problems that can be represented as a combinatorial system of optical gates/switches? It would be something useful for a specialized subset of problems, sort of like quantum computing.

QC is also not going to replace general purpose electronic computers but augment them for certain classes of problems.
Your racism is stinky
I am quite sympathetic about too much administration; however, the difference is more fundamental.

America doesn't "track" students and teaches everybody. Other countries flush away the lower performing students to non-academic education as the years progress.

We see what this does even here in the US. Every charter school always manages to claim to be "cost effective"--except that they always manage to do this by effectively flushing the lower performing (read "expensive") students back to the public schools. When you force the charter schools to accept via lottery so they can't cherry pick only the decent students, their cost effectiveness vanishes.

And, by the way, the Gates Foundation actually had solid research about this from following several programs. For middle school age and below students, you need to spend roughly $15K per student (and that was 5+ years ago--so adjust upward), hold class sizes at about 15 students maximum, and have 2 adults in the room. This allows you to bring poorly performing students up to average over several years.

ALL of those programs were eventually cancelled for lack of money. Everybody wants "educational excellence" until somebody hands them the bill--then everybody pisses and moans about cost.

The only people who don't moan about cost are the upper class--they fund the hell out of the schools their kids go to. Funny that.
Even modern Chinese is ambiguous. Claiming to know the exact definitions of characters in Ancient Chinese is laughable.
>One is SIGNIFICANTLY (twice!) more likely to kill people in an accident. To say otherwise is just a lie.

Show me where I said that. You are saying it's ok to drive home exhausted in a car but not a truck because you're only half as likely to kill someone than a large truck. To say otherwise is just a lie! See I can put words in your mouth and use it as a red herring too.

The correct answer is it's not ok to drive home exhausted regardless of the vehicle you are in.
Drug/arms/human trafficking operations can have easier time cashing hundreds of millions via shady Tether than US-based audited and KYCed USDC.
Isn't this just a trade off? Is there never a scenario where you would trade transistor density for switching speed and lower power consumption?
Your chart shows that the student population increased 96%, teachers increased 252%, and non-teacher staff has increased by 700%. But what does that mean in terms of the typical school budget? Going from 1 to 7 non-teacher staff doesn't seem like that big of a deal. A baseline related to the school budget would make these stats more useful.

Also, the article clearly has a political axe to grind. For instance, they compare the Chicago BOE to the Japanese Ministry of Education. The Japanese Ministry of Education is actually called "The Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology." You can read their Wikipedia page, but they're not directly involved in providing education to the population, so it makes sense that they would have a small staff:

> The Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (文部科学省, Monbu-kagaku-shō), also known as MEXT or Monka-shō, is one of the eleven Ministries of Japan that composes part of the executive branch of the Government of Japan. Their goal is to improve the development of Japan in relation with the international community. They are responsible for funding research under their jurisdiction, some of which includes: children's health in relation to home environment, delta-sigma modulations utilizing graphs, gender equality in sciences, and other general research for the future

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ministry_of_Education,_Culture...
> Just like you can replace the engine of a classic car today if you are so inclined

How this works is usually you would replace/fix individual parts of the engine until it works again. When you buy one ready to swap in, it's because a third party has taken the time to fix up an old engine - usually with no help from the original manufacturer.

A lot of car parts you cannot buy new replacements for. Engine parts you usually can, as pretty much everything there is consumable, but I mean things like body panels or interior parts. However a lot of cars end up damaged beyond repair, which means there are usually enough parts in the surrogate market so old cars can be kept running.

In this case it's not reasonable to ask manufacturers to be selling new battery packs 10 years after discontinuing that model, but they should make sure it's possible for third parties to make/remake them and have them behave the same as an OEM battery pack.
I'm sure it must be so very hard to include a bundled and sandboxed JS FTP client implementation that doesn't need maintenance. /s
I can imagine working at a company that does things I consider wrong, and treating it in my head as a game of infiltration and reconnaissance. But there are things I find so personally repulsive that I could never, like ad tech or data brokering.
Surprised this is as illegal as it appears to be based on this result. I see very similar all over the place. Maybe I should be reporting this? lol
> One of the reasons why eating in cemeteries become a “fad,” as some reporters called it, was that epidemics were raging across the country: Yellow fever and cholera flourished, children passed away before turning 10, women died during childbirth. Death was a constant visitor for many families, and in cemeteries, people could “talk” and break bread with family and friends, both living and deceased.

It's fascinating that the article also notes that the older generation at the time (late 19th century) viewed the fad with disgust:

> But plenty of Americans believed that picnics in local cemeteries were a “gruesome festivity.” This critique, notably from older generations, didn’t stop young adults from meeting up in graveyards. Instead it led to debate over proper conduct.

This was a phenomenon driven by the times. Lots of deaths mean you spend a lot more time at the cemetery. Cemeteries started to lose their association with loss/decay and gained more of an association with remembrance.

There's quite a lot on this topic, like this article, which notes that another reason for the pull of cemeteries at that time was the Civil War:

> ... Beginning in the late 1800s, cemeteries were prime picnic spots. Remember, in the aftermath of the bloody Civil War and in an age of cholera and yellow fever, cities created large new cemeteries to accommodate the dead. Family farms or sacred churchyards were no longer the only spots for burial grounds. These new-age cemeteries looked and functioned more like public parks than stark, spooky graveyards. They featured professional landscaping, winding paths, ponds, and pavilions.

https://connectingdirectors.com/55122-cemetery-picnics
they aren't quantum
I have a (non-software) engineering degree but write software, do I get to be called a Software Engineer?
Depends if the startups were the ones complicit in establishing the fraud or victims of a kickback shakedown. I can see it both ways.
Same here. Still rocking my Pixel 3 even though the USB C port is hosed and I can only wirelessly charge. :/
"making an activity illegal reduces the incidence of that activity" is not a "counter-intuitive statement". The literature shows a slight skew in results that show negative effects from minimum wage (& related policies): https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/12/beware-the-man-of-one-...

Scott thinks that the shape of the distribution implies publication bias; as per the very first comment thread in response to that post, I disagree with that interpretation. Since 101 theory would in fact predict a negative effect you can go ahead and assert with weak confidence that a negative effect exists. (You can also trivially demonstrate that above a certain threshold, like, say, $100/hr, you would have a negative effect. Now you need to add epicycles to your theory to explain why the effect would flip from negative to positive as that number goes down, while the mechanisms by which the negative effects occur remain unchanged.)
Oops - thanks!
Yeah, I'd do it exactly like he described. Clean? No. Who cares? No one.
Java List Cheatsheet
As someone who originally would have strongly agreed with you, I think there is actually huge benefits to thinking in this "streaming" mindset.

That is, the first place I really encountered code like this was when Java introduced streams [1]. I wasn't used to programming like this when I first experienced this code, and at first I found it harder to read; it felt obfuscated.

As I got more used to it, though, I started to love it. There are tons of operations in programming like this, where you're really just performing a successive series of transformations on a set of data. Obviously functional programmers are familiar with this, but this is also the paradigm for shell programming, where you're just piping stdout to the next small little program in the chain.

The thing is, now I really feel a bit of a "switch" in my brain when I read code like this. That is, whenever I see this, I'm just like "OK, doing a whole bunch of data processing from some input set to a final output". Over time, when done correctly, I actually find this easier to read, with less verboseness, because my brain already has tons of context about what's going on.

1. Some Java streams examples, https://winterbe.com/posts/2014/07/31/java8-stream-tutorial-...
You are looking at it, or at least what could have been if he didn't back down. Not backing down creates a forcing function to where they leave and people like them won't come.
loved the book, thanks for writing it
California, the most populous state in the nation, removed the statewide mandate for these programs in 2014, so the timeline fits. That doesn't mean it's the predominant cause of the drop, or even a major contributing factor. But it sure doesn't help.

I've been shocked to see how little interest the public schools have in educating students who are more advanced. We live in Menlo Park, and it's like pulling teeth to get the school to allow our daughter to do advanced math. Many families are leaving the public schools because of this, and we're considering our options as well. This is a sharp contrast to my experience growing up and going to public schools in Sacramento, where there were (and still are) many good options.
Would be nice if all corporate exploitation was illegal.
Comcast still has a terrible reputation despite their best efforts to call themselves Xfinity wherever they legally can. Doubt it will work for Facebook, so long as they aren't allowed to continue buying up and coming competitors.
The Plain Person’s Guide to Plain Text Social Science (2019)
All of that sounds good except for the phone size.

I'd go for a Pixel 5, but... no 3.5mm jack is a dealbreaker.

So I guess the Pixel 4a is my only real choice.
I don't think that it's gonna be a straight rebrand. If it does happens, it will be more of a restructuring in line with Google, with a new parent company being created.

Facebook is way too large and does too many things today to be called just Facebook
> the thing is, that used to be the case a long time ago.

Yes, I am aware.

> But it's insufficient

Why? Let's listen to the argument..

> increasing complexity of the modern world demands more complex financial products.

It was Clinton's deregulation that allowed more complex financial products. Products that ended up hurting the real economy. Deregulation that was heavily lobbied for by the financial industry, not by the real economy, and that benefited FIRE, at the expense of the real economy.

But name one need in the real economy that requires complex financial products and we can have a discussion. Generic appeals to the zeitgeist of the "modern world" don't cut it.
"seems weird to this commentator..."

I see what you did there!
Bombers of Theseus? As the article says, "little is left of the original craft except for the airframe"
British copyright expires on 1 January 2027 (70 calendar years after Milne's death).
The difference between the community adopting a "standard", and something becoming the standard/being included into the langage by a direct decree is enormous. Especially with Python's philosophy.
> "React isn't a framework, it's just a library"

There may not be a clear line between framework and library, but as written in the homepage of reactjs.org, it claims itself: React - "A JavaScript library for building user interfaces"
Their reasoning is that you should stop buying luxury superyachts each year and focus on your health. Its about priorities!

On a related note, dentistry is another one that is usually not covered at all. Why even basic dental isn't covered by government healthcare as a prevention initiative still surprises me. Bad teeth can kill you / give you cancer / wreck chaos and damage organs in general etc and its all often detectable at early stages.
The S&P 500 is up 31% compared to a year ago, and the US Consumer Price Index has only increased 5.4% over the same time period.
It wasn't so clear but I was mostly thinking of the management when I wrote that comment. In this particular case I think people might get caught up on what an individual did but I think the management failing here is the far bigger deal.
"Maybe the name will have to do with Horizon" is the needle I had to dig through word vomit to find.
Totally agree. I commented elsewhere that I had someone of a similar reaction when Java introduced streams, in that the common paradigm is to just call successive operations on the stream you're processing.

It took a while for my brain to get used to it, but once it did I found it so much easier to read, and much more efficient to write.
A drone company is working to airlift dogs stranded by the volcano in La Palma
Yes, I wanted to do another bootcamp after the degree.

I wanted to take the Computer Vision Bootcamp because I talked to the CEO of a DOOH Ads company, and that company leverage Computer Vision to count how many car, motorcycle, people that see the ads. And they also have a Vending Machine business unit!

I will try to dig deeper where to start again after the end of my degree. Maybe what I need is to learn raspberry or Java ME or python that power those Digital Billboard and Vending Machine.
The really creepy thing for me is that I've never had a facebook account, but I do have a very early gmail address.

I started getting emails asking me why I hadn't been logging into facebook lately. I ignored them the way one ignores any such spam. Then over the years they got more specific. I got one of those do you know so-and-so emails for a person I'd only ever spent a single evening with. That creeped me out to the point that I password reset the account for my email that I never created and deleted it. Does that make me a hacker?
Anecdata from an east coast founder here. Since at least 2018 I and several of my colleagues flat out refuse to go to SF. For any reason, including raising VC.

No offense to those in SF.