skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: My client want an agent on my laptop. Is this the new normal?
I work from home in the EU as a freelancer for a US startup.

A few days ago, an email came out of the blue, demanding that I install an "agent" from a company named "Drata"* on my laptop. The motivation is that my client badly want a SOC 2 certification.

I have worked as a developer for more than 30 years. Tiny shops. Startups. Major league. I have never even heard about someone putting agents on developers laptops.

I'm pretty pissed off. So are the teams I work with.

Is this the new normal now?

Just for the record: I don't have credentials to production systems, and I don't work with production data. I just figure out how to transform dreams into code, I write parts of that code, and then I fix it as needed.

* Drata (https://drata.com/about) is on a "Mission to Help Build Trust Across the Internet". Their business model (in my case) seems to be to take money from companies to spy on their employees/contractors, and then they sell the employees/contractors private information to "targeted advertising". When I confronted them about this, they replied: "Feel free to reach out to your Drata administrator internally with concerns. Do note, that when your company contracted with Drata, any edits or redlines they provided will prevail for all employees of your company." - basically to just bend over and smile.
Transferring money is faster if you pay a fee.

You’re paying fees to transfer crypto.

That said, it’s free and instant with services like Zelle.
> Transferring money was in seconds, compared to Fidelity/Venmo which took 3 days!!!

This is a problem that can be solved sans web3.
Please don't post unsubstantive comments or fulminate, regardless of wrong something is or you feel it is. Maybe you don't owe nosy employers better, but you owe this community better if you're participating in it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
My HD runs incessantly on Win10, it's SATA, not SSD. Win 10 already pushed out an upgrade ad on my desktop today to my dismay, just installed win10 2 weeks ago, because I no longer had a choice.

Most of the time the HD grind is caused by Chrome scanning my files, but still, I wonder if all the verbose logging and tracking that Win 10+ does now is what made them recommend upgrading to SSDs for the OS'es.

I'm also pretty sure that Win11 has a lot of structural changes made to eventually inject ads into everything as a back-up MS-Revenue Stream plan, so I'll wait for the usual mandatory to update anyway, after there is no longer a choice.
DataFramesMeta is great!

But I always get confused by the name. Since DataFrames.jl is lower level shouldn't that be DataFramesBase.jl and the meta package be DataFrames.jl?
> you will have times where a week goes by and you haven't written a single line of code, and that is exactly what the job requires.

OP is not saying that sometimes he's idle. Of course there are times when things move slowly.

OP is saying that in his entire software development career, he works 0.5-1.0 days a week, and never more.
You’re leaving out the part where those who come to control the union also import their personal politics/agendas, bully others into silence, and abuse their position far more than company management. Look at any major union like the NEA - the leaders and their acolytes are weaponizing the power intended for collective bargaining to push ideological agendas and propagandize children at schools. Meanwhile they barely do their actual job and resist all accountability. So why is the authoritarian control of unions preferable to that of company management that just advances the company’s financials and leaves the rest out of it?

Regarding developers - you seem to be ignoring that most software developers outside of FAANG are just not very good at their job. They have to put up with conditions in part because of their low value and replaceability, but certainly no one is forcing them into one industry over another. Therefore they must see the compensation as a fair trade if they are choosing to remain in the industry. Given the lower quality of work, I also wonder why you think they’re doing the “actual work” and not their management or other job functions at the company.
The Canas (Cheap Ass Network Attached Storage)
Polars would be 10-100x faster, but so would DuckDB!
50% of the value of everything on earth. The other half is the stuff. The paintings from 400 years ago, the mansions, apartments, houses and buildings, all the stonks of equity representing human enterprise, the options and futures on those stonks, the commodities, like the wheat and gold and cows and iron. the energy sources and generators, the oil, the gas, uranium, the solar rays and the wind that blows. the heat from the earth. the promises, the debts, cryptotokens -- all the way to the 4th and 5th level+ derivative liquidity reward pool stake locked ponzischemes. the dollars and euros and yuan in the pockets and databases around the world.

Effectively, infinity / 21 million.
$100k? $1M? $10M? $100M? Infinity Dollars. Infinity Euros. Infinity Yuan.

or not :-)
This is a nice example of the tech consensus anti-web3 perspective.

Of course, it openly claims everyone promoting web3 technologies are scam artists, that it is a ponzi scheme, and that nobody in the space has considered "DNS and AWS are cheap, the EVM is way slow and expensive."

I guess we'll just have to wait and see which it is: the above claim, or that the authors writing these pieces are missing something. I'll admit I do respect the bravery to post something like this, lacking all humility, and fairly falsifiable, that will result in embarrassment if left up and disproven.

One thing that is interesting about these critiques is they mirror identically the early critiques of Bitcoin. And now, ironically, they take it as a given that cryptocurrencies are here to stay and are no longer going to eventually crash to zero, which was the claim made in these kinds of posts 5-10 years ago.
> We are all unappreciated beta testers.

I've been trying to popularize "gamma testers" for years without much success.
The thing with tor is that it is only 1-2 orders of magnitude worse than the “normal” approach in terms of performance and so forth. Enough to be annoying, but still totally workable for a lot of applications
Thanks again for your thoughtful response.

I have more questions about whether ReactQuery can help me out when working with a bad legacy API, but I don’t know how to ask them clearly. It would be unfair to ask you to understand the system I’m working with, especially when you’ve already written an article that clearly describes the idea and have been so generous with your responses. I will be looking at this more deeply for sure.

This kind of thing is why I come to HN.
One man's "venture capital" is another man's "actual websites and functionality." I would appreciate less subjective criticism of web3.
>Frontera led a study that found that more than 13% of hospitalized COVID-19 patients had developed a new neurological disorder soon after being infected. A follow-up study found that six months later, about half of the patients in that group who survived were still experiencing cognitive problems.

The infection hospitalization rate for the Alpha variant was about 7% [0] so 50% of 13% of 7% means... 0.46% of patients may experience a new serious neurological complication that persists past 6 months.

Where "patients" is those aged 55-77 (with lower body mass indices, more past history of dementia, stroke and seizure, worse SOFA scores during hospitalization and higher rates of acute renal failure) [1], and...

>though we identified high rates of disability among both neurological COVID-19 patients and controls, this study was not designed to determine whether the deficits measured by these metrics are static or represent ongoing injury as suggested by some “long-hauler” and post-COVID literature. Since cognitive impairment and mood abnormalities occur in over 50% of ARDS survivors, it is possible that the level of disability we are documenting is not specific to SARS-CoV-2, but rather a result of factors related to critical viral illness.

[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7895685/

[1] https://www.jns-journal.com/article/S0022-510X(21)00180-5/fu...
> A prospective cohort study including 1,139 community-dwelling older adults (mean age 75 years, 56% women) living in Tuscany, Italy, followed for 20 years

Doesn’t seem like the type in d population that would have a usual vegetarian
My previous job used MS Teams with that "productivity dashboard" built in to it. I reported to multiple people within the organization. One of those people was adamant about the team being signed in and available at precisely 9AM PST and he loved his dashboard metrics. And whilst I spoke with this particular manager about this issue, he wouldn't budge on the subject and unfortunately wielded a bit too much political power to be routed around.

To sign in to MS Teams at the company you needed to run a 2FA app from your phone to get the code that would let you log in. I wrote a Python script that ran on a Raspberry Pi, that would pull the 2FA code from an Android emulator running on another machine running the 2FA app, and then the script would paste the 2FA code in to MS Teams running on the corporate laptop using a USB keyboard/mouse h/w emulator. Every morning my machine dutifully booted up, logged in, signed in at precisely 9AM and made sure it showed I was available and active throughout the day until it was "time to go home."

The company overall was pretty decent, but unfortunately there are toxic managers and little Napoleons everywhere.
Right. In addition to the issue you cite, folks seem to have confused things like immutability and things like compatibility.
Immutability generally guarantees something like integrity.
It does not, ever, guarantee compatibility.
Often the opposite.

IE things end up immutable and incompatible, immutable and broken, etc.
Or even worse "immutable and vulnerable".
(IE can interact enough to still kinda work, but often do things it should not).

If you truly want to jump down the rabbit hole, it's true that immutability of this kind can provide great integrity.
But you can get pretty darn good without it.
That's a bizarre comparison considering the prevalence of Object Oriented programming languages and the ubiquity of that style of programming.
For Safari users seeing persistently confusing or inconsistent results: it’s also worth noting that Safari aggressively caches and ignores cache-invalidating HTTP headers quite a lot. So you might just be seeing what’s in memory, over and over.
Fair enough, will do. Thanks!
> You can change your server code at any time and your users would be none the wiser.

I'm my only user, that's why I'm discussing self-hosted apps here...
Refugees lack Covid shots because drugmakers fear lawsuits, documents show
Potential consequences are what?
And, Stripe now exists, so the problem is mostly solved on "web2", no? What does Stripe (and similar products) not offer that $USDC could?
> Dapps running on the blockchain are immutable and highly resistant to being shutdown.

is that good? seems flaws then are perpetual?
Before covid I would count all of my 8 hours/day as work hours whereas now with work from home my actual coding+meetings work is around 14 hours/week but my productivity has improved significantly. And that is because now I code when I'm in zone which produces at 5x more output than when I worked at office.
The population used for this study doesn’t seem ideal for studying the impact of being vegetarian

> A prospective cohort study including 1,139 community-dwelling older adults (mean age 75 years, 56% women) living in Tuscany, Italy, followed for 20 years
no it is is not. there are $470 billion of eth out there. some if locked up, but a lot of it held by people and exchanges. hence efforts to steal it. The market for eth is huge and very liquids and deems it worth $3970. Whether or not the value is subjective is irreverent to the fact that there is a huge market.
If you wouldn't mind, please update DuckDB as well!
native game is the way to drive adoption up

i applaud this move!

more effort should be put into cross compilation toolchains, including abstracted graphics API

more widely accessible, crossplatform libraries and APIs is the way to go!

targeting linux with godot/unity is a matter of a click

it should be way more encouraged!

valve, next step is a xplatform, ondemand build farm! with a lot of different GPUs and OS, so people can submit and test their game with ease!

if want to keep 30% then invest!
A typical web3 site consists of two parts: The first is the smart contract code that lives on the blockchain, which handles the tasks that a typical server backend would handle (keeping and changing state, producing outputs given certain inputs, etc).

The second is a web frontend typically deployed to a decentralized service like IPFS to provide interactions with the backend contract, however this isn't the only way a web3 site can be made. You can also have the front end as something the user runs locally, or you can eschew the front end entirely, as it's also possible to programmatically interact with smart contracts directly (analogous to the command line in a way).

An example of such a site would be the decentralized trading exchange Uniswap located at https://app.uniswap.org/. Rather than calling a centralized API endpoint to populate the front end, all the data is being pulled through interactions with contracts on the blockchain. Smart contracts can provide read-only data fee free, and you only have to pay to interact with the site when you're doing something that would change state.
The problem is that all the protection mechanisms that have been put in place for officers help the bad ones the most, and don’t do much for the good ones.

So things like qualified immunity need to go away.
If they’re putting in 2 hrs/day on a remote job and not making the cut it’s not worth my effort to try to coach them out of that.

Right, but it's your job to treat them like adults, not babies.

And the first rule of dealing with adults is: how they spend their time is up to them. Granted, if they were working onsite ... you could at least require that they be on site during certain times. And then there would be the implicit surveillance that comes from just being the same room with other people and all that. But sorry, the situation has changed and that luxury is no longer available to you.

Accordingly, your recourse should be: tell them what deliverables you expect, and by when. If they don't meet these goals -- sure you can offer coaching -- but it's not up to you to "diagnose" them (never mind whether this involves invasive techniques or not). Just tell them what you want, and leave it up to them to manage their own time and resources to deliver.

If you can't that -- that is, articulate your expectations, offer support and treat them like adults -- then as a manger, you're the one not "making the cut".
Why didn't you rewrite it in Crystal instead of Rust?
Crystal preserves a lot of "look-and-feel" from ruby.

Yep, Crystal is not as mature as Rust even these days, but it is cute and useful.
Okay, can you give me an example of some staple Web3 sites that exist today?
the reason people put money into crypto is to get rich quick. Imagine you put $1000 and got 1000 BTC as an early adopter. Now, you are a multimillionaire many times over. Most refuse to acknowledge the truth and it is almost a meme now about being there for "the tech"
That scaled to about 100k active users from a highly-gated potential community of about 1 million and was replaced by ... centralised systems.

Usenet itself was more centralised in most regards than Reddit is today. And even then it proved nonviable.
I think the most valuable articles I’ve written were in the beginning of my development career. I struggled to do so many things and was able to document them with a beginner’s mind. Most of those things are so easy now they don’t even make it to the “prerequisites” of an article I write. What I write now reaches a smaller, more focused and advanced audience.
I mean, this is true, but it feels like there is a more basic issue of product/market fit here.

Even given the comments here about what this stuff is supposed to provide, it's really unclear anyone did even basic diligence.
Something as simple as "we went around to different focus groups of developers and said "what are your biggest problems and pain points".

Things like "immutability" and "not being shut down" would not be the top 2 for most groups of developers, and i'd bet not in the top 10, either.

As a result, every time i hear about "web3" i can't stop hearing the simpsons clip where Stephen Hawking says "i wanted to see your utopia, but now i see it is more of a fruitopia"

Don't get me wrong, there are certainly types of apps, etc out there where they are going to say "being shut down" is their biggest problem, but that seems like a really small portion of the total addressable market.
> Some of it does, most doesn't

I don't know of anything in crypto which actually works (read: does something better/cheaper than pre-existing technologies). The single value of it is speculation.
A fragmented hard drive was so much faster than a defragmented floppy disk that I was happy either way.
It'd be great if USENIX as an organization had a Fediverse presence, thereby showing their commitment to an open web.

by the way, shameless plug for /r/Web3Skepticism, where we take a long hard look at this "ecosystem", question its benefits and examine its failings.
Nothing creates affordable housing like violence and bad schools.
Lines of code is not a good metric, but log lines of code is probably useful. The most product team ever recorded in a study was the Borland Quadro Pro team. They averaged 1000 lines of code per developer per week. To put that into context, the industry average rate is about 1000 lines of code production code by a developer in an entire year at a large company.

5-10 hours a work per week? That sounds average to me. That sounds like an average developer at a large company.
As a 14 year old programmer and tinkerer in 2004, I had no problem buying a Helium-Neon laser for an experiment and paying via PayPal.

As an 18 year old tinkerer and hacker in 2008, I had no problem signing up to take payments via PayPal and running a little side thing selling home-assembled widgets out of my bedroom.

And as horrible as PayPal is, cryptocurrencies have even more friction and risk.
Looks like the daily "hate on web3" article has arrived. Yes, there are problems that need solving in blockchain / crypto / web3. We're doing something that has never been done before, i.e. building censorship resistant trustless systems. It's come a long way but it also has a long way to go before its potential is fulfilled. I don't know that a daily thread of people complaining about well known issues in the space is useful.
It's Safari (WkWebView) dressed up as Firefox. That's all Apple lets them do.
> China on a gdp per capita basis is still in the middle income trap.

That's according to the CCP stats, which are rosy.

The reality is horrific - 1/3 of the adult population earns less than $140/month, and half of those zero. China is currently importing half of its energy and food, a situation that can go pear-shaped in only a few months of famine (or mining its harbors, etc.)

Every time you see a major flood ruining crops across a province, that's a million starving peasants who won't make it to the next harvest.

China is a train wreck in slow motion.
Would it still be a superior system if you had to pay some amount to every person you download from for the bandwidth you're using? That seems to be the case with web3, unless I'm completely misunderstanding how it works.
Well, you don't have to like the criminals of today, but lets also not forget that good people are deemed criminals under repressive regimes, for crimes such as "watching K-Pop."

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/15/world/asia/north-korea-kp...
In Sweden we have "BankID" that could be card based, but almost everyone has it in their phone. It is issued by the banks (hence the name?) since they already has vetted your identity. BankID is used almost everywhere, from online banking to sign your employment contract or collect benefits when you're home to care for your sick child.

The post office used to issue normal identity cards, but today I only think it's the DMV equivalent and the police that does that.
This must be it and ditto for me on Rust. It feels like they made the language just for me.
What for? I know nothing about it but why not Python?
Still haven't heard of anyone using it where I live.
No, there are $470 billion if you make the huge mistake of assuming you can sell each one at the same price.

This is an issue for stocks also. If 100% of Amazon share holders tried to sell simultaneously the price would fall precipitously. But, Amazon is at least backed by assets, dividend potential, and IP.
My apologies for talking past each other.
Seriously fuck the whole scientific and medical community for absolutely bungling the communication on this the whole time till this very day.

Fumbled the ball over some pedantic irrelevant semantical bullshit that means nothing to the general public the one time the general public needs to hear from them.

In addition to how “no evidence” is used around reporters, stupidly

“Young” doesn't mean 55 years old anywhere, except in ICUs.

And half the messaging seemd like its worrying about fat shaming, we all noticed who actually young gets affected and we all notice who is staying home whether the government is involved in that decision or not

Fumbled, bungled, tumbled
Is the immense cost cited in the article not a barrier to entry?
Towards the end he talks about some general rules he has found for a happy life.

What Worked Well for Me [1] by David Patterson

• Maximize Personal Happiness vs. Personal Wealth
• Family First!
• Passion & Courage
- Swing for the fences vs. Bunt for singles
• Friends may come and go, but enemies accumulate
• Winning as Team vs. Winning as Individual
- "No losers on a winning team, no winners on a losing team"
• Seek Out Honest Feedback & Learn From It
- Guaranteed Danger Sign: "I'm smartest person in the room"
• One (Big) Thing at a Time
- "It's not how many projects you start Its how many you finish"

• Natural Born Optimist

[1] Full video: see "Closing Remarks", www2.eecs.berkeley.edu/patterson2016
I have no inside knowledge, but I expect there are a great many significant and very successful Clojure apps…that are single-purpose within single companies, never discussed publicly. Clojure conference videos seem to support this notion.
Appreciated! (and I'm glad I gave you the benefit of the doubt...)
Ask HN: Paper Books for Children to Learn to Code
I have a 12 year old niece who is interested in learning to code and would like a print book to help her learn. Has anyone got any suggestions please?
I once had a lot of excitement about it, but the closer I looked at and used "web3" tech the more I came to the conclusion this is all a big pump and dump scheme.

What's crypto been good for in its 10+ year span? Financing terrorism and ransomware, selling meaningless jpeg certificates of ownership, ICO scams, totally empty and greedy "number go up" speculation consuming the money and attention of potentially creative and productive fellow human beings, and Cryptokitties.

Meanwhile it's already irrevocably wasted, and continues wasting daily, tragic amounts of our world's resources and electricity.

Crypto is a cancer - it thrives because the earlier Ponzi participants are working overtime to hype it to the later ones, with mainly emotional and ideological appeals, plus plenty of technical handwaving. If you get deep enough down the rabbit hole technically and structurally, you discover basically what this article is saying.
Are you equating following safety measures with docility?