skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As a software developer who has worked within the university world for about 15 years, this seems very common to me. In my experience, most developers don't actually DO very much. They do some small thing here and there, but they mostly just coast their way through the weeks.

That seems to be about 80% of all developers & syadmins. Then you have the other 20% which are actually really hard working & productive and are basically carrying the rest on their shoulders.

It used to upset me, but now I think it just is what it is. Call me jaded I guess.

It's often not people among those productive 20% that gets promoted either, that seems to depend mostly on other factors, so OP's story does not surprise me.
AppleScript is sort of an attempt at that isn't it?

I got there by thinking 'probably not that far off python, but even more pseudocodey, a load of redundant keywords like `for every item in` instead of `for v in`' -- and such constructs probably wouldn't bind variables, you'd repeat yourself referring to `the item` or something.

I also think there'd probably be a lot of focus on (high school) mathematical functions (since that would be the expectation of what computers must be like) and graphics (because that's what computers look like). So everything would be about identifying pixels on the screen and colouring them, locating the cursor by position, that sort of thing.
If you're managing a team, they like you, and you're being productive then I wouldn't consider it a parasite. A good manager who helps when needed and stays out of the way when I'm working is amazing.
They are addictive. Purdue knew they were addictive.

2007

>ABINGDON, Va., May 10 — The company that makes the narcotic painkiller OxyContin and three current and former executives pleaded guilty today in federal court here to criminal charges that they misled regulators, doctors and patients about the drug’s risk of addiction and its potential to be abused.

Also, in a rare move, three executives of Purdue Pharma, including its president and its top lawyer, pleaded guilty today as individuals to misbranding, a criminal violation. They agreed to pay a total of $34.5 million in fines.

https://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/10/business/11drug-web.html

2020

>Purdue admits it illegally and misleadingly marketed its opioids, including “to more than 100 health care providers whom the company had good reason to believe were diverting opioids” for misuse; illegally paid doctors to prescribe more opioids; and took part in other fraudulent and illegal practices. Purdue says it did all of this between 2007 and at least 2017 — after a separate guilty plea in 2007 forced the company to pay more than $600 million in fines.

https://www.vox.com/2020/10/21/21526868/purdue-pharma-oxycon...
I'm not worried about my survival, I'm worried about my theoretical children's survival
Stupid and industrious is exactly the crypto/NFT population. They are smart in code, but zeros in financial literacy, and zeros in complex social dynamics - the perfect rubes to promote hazy, social frauds.
EULA is between the user and the vendor of the software, it isn't a agreement between the user and the users employer. Capturing traffic like that runs afoul of hacking laws.
Yeah, seems plausible - after all, as I recently learned from another HN post, it is customary for trucks not to have side mirrors in India, whereas this is much rarer in the US and virtually unheard of in (western) Europe...
Let's look at the latest UK data, https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...

> To the end of week 43 in 2021 (to 31 October 2021) 72,264 possible reinfections have been identified, of which 441 have been confirmed by identification of genetically distinct specimens.

That is from a total of 7.9 million positive cases, i.e. reinfection rate is ~0.01% to 1%. That means at least 99% of Covid-recovered people in the UK were not reinfected. Some textbooks from recent decades may call that "sterilizing immunity". Note that some words have been redefined by government agencies since 2020, including the term "vaccine" (definition updated by the CDC as recently as Sept. 2021). At this point, usage of some evolving and contested terms should be accompanied by a version number, date and changeset hash.

Regardless of terminology, the UK numbers show a 1% chance of reinfection upon exposure. If someone takes precautions to reduce their exposure to infected people (e.g. people with symptoms / positive test, or a crowded indoor space with poor ventilation), then the risk of reinfection will be a small number X 1%.
The bound editions are nice as well.

https://www.amazon.com/Simon-Travaglia/e/B00JCJDZCU
> Fun fact: Amazon is so big and the churn so high, that hiring talent has become the bottleneck.

This is only true because Amazon refuses to pay market rates for talent. E.g. for the folks who write their technical documentation, they require that they have the technical skills of senior engineers, but pay them closer to what you would pay a recent college grad to churn out SEO blogspam. If they actually payed their technical writers the same amount (or more) as their engineers, their documentation would be great. They have the money to do so, they just refuse to actually do it, because they're big enough that they can externalize the costs of bad documentation onto their customers.
> The poster says "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". Do you have any evidence for this??

I read their Privacy Policy. They are quite explicit about what they plan to do to you. I raised the issue with them in an email (among 5 other issues). Their reply is in the header. Another issue I raised is that they expect me to accept undisclosed terms and conditions.

That said. I have worked with computer security at an advanced level, including consulting, training, penetration testing, design/implementation of x-platform server agents for monitoring and alerting, design/implementation of firewall. Once I designed an implemented a system to deal with NATO secrets (not very sensitive secrets, but still secrets) for a military subcontractor in EU. My computer is relatively secure. I follow best practices - and more. A hostile agent would decrease the security on my network. That was my first thought when I got that awful email.

Also, I don't get it why that need such a thing on my PC. I don't have credentials to production systems or production data. I am a software developer. I work with code and documentation. That's it. Anything I produce is reviewed by other developers and then tested independently by QA.

I am careful to be a freelancer, and not an employee, for several reasons. It means that legally I'm my own boss. That feels good (I have a great boss!) It also make it unproblematic to work on open source projects, without getting into discussions about who owns the intellectual rights to that work.
Needs a smartphone, that’s what I was pointing out.
Could you please share a couple of scams/knock-offs from Amazon? I would like to know what to avoid, otherwise your below quote is rather incendiary.

> Amazon is what Canal Street was in the 90s - somewhere to buy fakes, stolen goods, and electronics that might catch fire.
> That seems to be about 80% of all developers & syadmins. Then you have the other 20% which are actually really hard working & productive and are basically carrying the rest on their shoulders.

Honestly, this is true for the whole of society.
Code reviews by more senior peers is mentorship if they do them properly. You don't need more mentorship than that unless you want to go for management.
> I find these two positions very hard to re-conciliate.

Why do you need to reconcile them? "HN" is not a person and does not need to have consistent beliefs. "HN" is a loose association of independent people who believe different things and choose to comment on different matters. If you think some individual is being hypocritical, take it up with them.
> 20-30 year olds hanging out are not the ones causing the spread or hospitalizations.

They're not? Logic would dictate that the cohort which is most sociable and least likely to be symptomatic, would be the most likely to cause spread.
In windows 11, clicking the wifi icon shows a list of available networks to connect to. I can’t seem to remember that clicking on the Bluetooth icon doesn’t give a list of devices but simply switches Bluetooth off.
The printed FreeBSD Handbook with the 2.5 CD-ROM was amazing at the time. An open source OS with a book that was better than some of the commercial OS offerings. We setup the colleges first mail server with that combo.
> If the decision maker cared about developer experience why do they keep choosing AWS?

If you have to go to the cloud what else is better. Google, MS? If you press hard enough the same amount of shit drops on your feets.
IMO these two positions are no hard to re-conciliate. The thing about "drugs should be legal and available" is that it should go hand-in-hand with honest information about those drugs. What evil pharma companies do is lie and misrepresent information about those drugs. The amount of incorrect marketing done about OxyContin is just insane.
I remember greatly enjoying BOFH when I was young, in the same way it’s fun to watch a movie with a deeply flawed character behaving poorly.

Then I worked at a company where the IT person modeled their personality on BOFH and it was, unsurprisingly, a miserable experience for everyone. Strangely, they got a free pass for the gruff behavior because there was this idea that “that’s just how IT people are”. Fortunately, that’s not the norm or even acceptable at any sane workplace and I went on to work with a lot of great and professional IT people since then.

But I’ve often wondered how much the BOFH fictions influenced some people who missed the point.
I think that’s a riff in Steinmetz’s bill[1] to the Ford Motor company for fixing a generator.

“ According to Scott, Steinmetz listened to the generator and scribbled computations on the notepad … Then he told Ford’s skeptical engineers to remove a plate at the mark and replace sixteen windings from the field coil. They did, and the generator performed to perfection.

Henry Ford was thrilled until he got an invoice from General Electric in the amount of $10,000. Ford acknowledged Steinmetz’s success but balked at the figure. He asked for an itemized bill.

Steinmetz, Scott wrote, responded personally to Ford’s request with the following:

Making chalk mark on generator $1.

Knowing where to make mark $9,999.

Ford paid the bill.”

[1] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/charles-proteus-stein...
I don't think the conditions are close to a large scale revolution in the U.S., especially if you mean a violent revolution. First, there is not a high level of discord in society. Upheavals in the 70s were much more significant than those now. Second, most people blame one or the other political party for our problems, rather than the established order generally, making it more likely people will fight within the bounds of the existing political system.
To be fair, it could two (mostly) disjoint groups voicing those two conflicting opinions.
These agents are not really meant to check if you are doing any work or not. They are there to find out if you are leaking company data out.

I have worked with some DLP such as digitalguardian.com that does indeed report the time you spent focusing on each app, for instance, which is a big no-no for me too, but most of the time the company is just interested if you haven't been copying data between your computer and some thumb drive, or copying it between you corporate and personal cloud drives, or syncing your corporate e-mail to an external account, that kind of stuff.
> On another hand, HN demands extreme punishment against a pharma company which produced opioids.

They didn't just produce opioids. They fraudulently claimed that the opioids they produced were non-addictive.

>Purdue admits it illegally and misleadingly marketed its opioids, including “to more than 100 health care providers whom the company had good reason to believe were diverting opioids” for misuse; illegally paid doctors to prescribe more opioids; and took part in other fraudulent and illegal practices. Purdue says it did all of this between 2007 and at least 2017 — after a separate guilty plea in 2007 forced the company to pay more than $600 million in fines.

https://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/10/business/11drug-web.html

https://www.vox.com/2020/10/21/21526868/purdue-pharma-oxycon...
Regexplainer is a website where you can try to obtain an explanation of a regex (Python’s re package style). The success rate of a good explanation is fairly high for complex regex.

I made this project to try Codex explanation capabilities. And also to have something to show during hiring interviews. Regex are really interesting because they are complex enough for non tech people that being able to generate an explanation for them is a real world problem. Moreover for the same reason they are suited to try generating precise mid-level of abstraction explanations instead of vague high level ones which is important for many real use cases.

I am actually impressed by the ability of codex to generate good enough explanations with a decent rate. If OpenAI would extend fine tuning to codex models I bet the resulting model could be really impressive on this particular task.
These don't conflict, the only similarity is the presence of a drug.

Purdue Pharma was using legal drugs already with high purity and free of contamination, so this case already satisfies the desired goal that is hoping to be extended to other substances.

Nobody (in your first audience) wants opiates to be illegal. People want the pharma company to not undermine doctor advice to patients with kickbacks, especially after patient consequences.

https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/opioid-manufacturer-purdue-ph...

The violated the FDA, which is a much better framework than the DEA. This is consumer protection in play. In all vice topics: Criminalization doesn't have consumer protection, decriminalization doesn't have consumer protection, only legalization has consumer protection.
What added value does it have over Kotlin?
This is a good objection. The system might be so complicated that people don't understand how to correctly express their preferences.
Can you give a few examples of said absurdities?

People giving too much weight to the actions of Twitter (as a company) seems to be a serious problem. Twitter (as the company and its users as a whole) does not control whether the vaccine is good/bad.

The formula used to be simple. I want to travel to this or that foreign country I need this or that vaccine. Kids at age this and that get this and that vaccine.

Simple Bayesianism puts a limit on the chance that there's a large but extremely competent group conspiring to hide unfathomably huge problems with vaccines. The chance was never 0, which was fueling the slow burn of the antivaxx movement.

But now with this pandemic those voices suddenly reached a much larger audience, and those who have certain biases are much more susceptible to this, and hence the bomb explosion. (In particular people whose mind sufficiently discounts the very real risk of getting sick compared to the astronomically slim risk of getting an 5G chip in their arm.)
You can't really ad-block from astroturfed ads, for example a 'viral' video of Amazon delivery driver dancing on a Amazon Ring doorbell get to the top of a video subreddit. That can't be blocked against.

I run agressive ad blocks and I'll still get pictures on r/aww/ of a kitten next to a freshely delivery KFC - with a title like "Kittens first every KFC delivery to investigate".

What I'd like to know is how Reddit monetizes those ads that make it through to everyone.
But from that link, this is considered an advantage "by advocates of approval voting, as it chooses centrist candidates with broad appeal rather than polarizing candidates who appeal only to the majority."
We had a power strip catch fire. I left a review with a photo of the scorched strip and started getting bombarded with off-Amazon contact requests to "make it right" if I'd take the photo down.
they're not even conflicting opinions. demanding consumer protection and the consequence for undermining it only exists in legalization frameworks.
But you’re the one describing a piece of software they are asking you to install as a condition of employment as a ‘hostile agent’.

Feels like the layer of cynicism is already there.
Floating point behaviors are well understood. This type of problem shouldn’t happen if your developers are qualified.
The real story is far less sensationalist than the title on HN, "Indian online merchants cannot store credit card information from 2022".

Reading through the actual notification titled "Tokenisation – Card Transactions: Permitting Card-on-File Tokenisation (CoFT) Services", it is clear that the directive is a well deserved push away from Card on File (CoF) where the actual card details are stored by merchants, towards CoFT which is a lot less vulnerable. In fact this is exactly what Apple Pay, Google Pay, and several others are already doing worldwide.
I found going through the AssemblyScript setup and tutorials really helped me understand WASM without first having to wrap my head around C++ or Rust toolchains. AssemblyScript is a TypeScript dialect that compiles to WASM instead of JavaScript: https://www.assemblyscript.org/

What I find really interesting about AssemblyScript is the potential for homographic code between JS and WASM. I'd prefer to see languages like AssemblyScript that are designed for WASM first, rather than shoe-horning existing languages like C++--and thus, their existing library ecosystems--into WASM. Yes, there is a lot of extant code that people are interested in porting, but that's not the end of the world and I'm not too keen on the bloat it creates or having to debug the teetering tower of tools that it represents if some impedence mismatch causes problems along the way.

With homographic AssemblyScript and TypeScript, I start to imagine a time when you can run an app on your phone, serialize the whole state of it, push it off to another user or your PC or something, and pick up where you left off. Maybe you'd do it for more compute power. Maybe you'd do it to share state on a collaboration. I don't know. But it's a fascinating idea that I'd really like to see one day.
SSDs don't need to get defragged, but it needs occasional trimming, and that can be done either continuously, or batched. Sadly, there's no fancy graphical application to show you what was trimmed in the batched version.

If you use a filesystem with checksums, you can also scrub it. The stakes are there: is my data bit rotted? Will the errors resist recovery? It also takes about the same time as the defrag, but again I don't know of any graphical tools.
Speaking of logos, the Gradio logo looks very much like that of DataBricks
Wondering, are there examples of similar atrocities in earlier Russian military history, or are these uniquely Soviet ?
JavaScript’s DOMString is basically defined as UTF-16.
The original and the best. After moving to The Reg it stretched from grmpy sysadmin deciding to delete peoples files to a machivellian character who murders people on a regular basis
> One would have to seek out someone with a nearly programming language formality in their logical thinking, such as a mathematician, or linguist

I’ll give you some examples of people who possess the kind of logical mind you describe here yet lack programming ability:

- lawyers work with legal code trying to figure out ways to hack it to help their clients. Say what you will about lawyers, but they are good at finding and exploiting holes in logic.

- doctors debug and apply patches to complex, opaque, nonlinear systems. As a programmer, I can relate.

- teachers break down complex subjects into small digestible chunks that when consumed, produce a desired result. You have to be very literal and precise when giving children instructions; they tend to do what you say, not what you mean.

These three professions are removed from coding but it’s not hard to find analogues to programming in what they do. I think with the right language these people could integrate coding into their work the same way they do writing. And in many cases, with Excel they are. Show me a teacher who doesn’t use a spreadsheet or similar tool to manage their class. You can’t!
I’m not talking about just Asia, I’m talking about anywhere from the world no matter what system is in place. That’s why crypto is valuable. It doesn’t matter what banking or remittance services are available, crypto not just works, but works in a way that lets you send more money, cheaper, with zero paperwork’s or middlemen. Really frictionless. Like handing cash to someone in real life (which I guess in your world wouldn’t be allowed because you might not get it back)
OxyContin is not significantly more (or less) addictive or dangerous than other opiates. The problem with it is that it has been marketed by Purdue as 'safe', and that it is over-prescribed. I recommend the book Pharma by Gerald Posner, which goes into this in excruciating detail - but well worth a read.
Authorisation vs. Consent
For one of the two countries the answer is yes...
I'm doing AI/ML type of work (computer vision). I think most of it boils down to efficient trial and error, and a good way of approaching the problem. A correct way is at least 10x more productive than an incorrect way for this job.
I'm so glad someone else is noticing this.

I am noticing it everywhere: clothing, furniture, cooking equipment, dishes & cutlery, even houseplant pots.

I wonder if this is a phenomenon similar to "shrinkflation", or if it's just the long-term corporate master plan.
Because it's not a black & white subject, and with the polarization of the extremes in today's discourse you can't bring some points to the discussion, or you'll be shoved to one extreme.

We forget that ultimate freedom is ultimate responsibility, and the truth is that some people just aren't able to be responsible for themselves, some for brief periods of time, others for life.

For some people things like drugs or even money is the worst thing we can give to them because it will only fuel bad habits like addictions and gambling. Some people will for sure become addicts and gamblers if the conditions are right.

Now: are we okay with these behaviors that are frown upon? Or are these actual destructive behaviors that shouldn't be left loose?

Even if these are extreme behaviors that only apply to a small fraction of the population, it's millions of people we're talking about.

Now in this case, some people were probably not properly informed about the side effects and addiction. They were lured into their addiction. Or they just thought chemical addiction wouldn't through to them.
Agreed, dplyr is great.

I built my own data frame implementation on top of NumPy specifically trying to accomplish a better API, similar to dplyr. It's not exactly the same naming or operations, but should feel familiar and much simpler and consistent than Pandas. And no indexes or axes.

Having done this, a couple notes on what will unavoidably differ in Python

* It probably makes more sense in Python to use classes, so method chaining instead of function piping. I wish one could syntactically skip enclosing parantheses in Python though, method chains look a bit verbose.

* Python doesn't have R's "non-standard evaluation", so you end up needing lambda functions for arguments in method chains and group-wise aggregation etc. I'd be interested if someone has a better solution.

* NumPy (and Pandas) is still missing a proper missing value (NA). It's a big pain to try to work around that.

https://github.com/otsaloma/dataiter
> Would folks be interested in a more detailed write up ?

Yes please.