skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>Am I wrong? Is software really not that hard, and able to be learned later in life?

You are wrong. Software is a passion of yours and had been all of your life, but that's not the case for many or even most of the many millions of developers out there.

For them, it's just a job and it can be learned just like you learn any other job.

I studied history at university, did a lot of traveling after graduating, working casual jobs for years. I was 28 when I started work as a junior developer after spending a few months doing an evening course in the UK. (1998)

I chose programming as a profession not because of any passion for the subject (I had none), or experience working with computers as a teenager (I never had one). I chose it because even back then, in 1998, it was a lucrative profession, and one that I could learn 'on the job'.

Things were a lot different back then. On the job training was more of a thing and CS courses were not always packed to the gills at university.

You can be a great doctor without immersing yourself in medicine from a young age. You can learn to be a great vet, lawyer, school teacher, even writer. Writing code, building software - it's no different.

>What do you say to someone who wants to get into software development?

Tell them you need to put in the work, but the rewards are worth it. Tell them it's a varied field, as varied as medicine (where there are nurses, GPs, plastic surgeons and heart transplant surgeons). Tell them that even though they might make lots of money, that money alone won't make them happy and that the office politics is no better or worse than any other profession.
As with many issues, people on the right in the U.S. balk at the idea of their tax money being used to pay for someone else's problems. At its root I think it's a basic lack of empathy.
Can someone explain what Stanislaw ment?
Please don't take HN threads further into flamewar, regardless of how wrong someone is or you feel they are. You broke the site guidelines badly here.

"Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead."

a.k.a. please don't feed the trolls

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Its not racism, I'm an Indian and I agree, you just get what you pay for. If you pay like that of a starbucks barista, that is the quality of devs that you'll get.
We only don’t have enough doctors and nurses because many have simply left healthcare entirely due to the low pay, impossible conditions and how the administrative tasks of the hospital were being placed on doctors and nurses in addition to their existing jobs with no additional pay. This is all while hospital systems were doing large dividends and share buybacks to extract capital and return it to shareholders.

That’s a perfectly fine business model for a manufacturing plant, but we have to ask if that for-profit model makes sense for health care. With a public system, you can just decide to pay doctors and nurses more until you actually have enough of them to run the system. You can make cost / service level trade-offs intentionally rather than “how much capital can we extract before the whole thing collapses”?
have a burning goal in mind that programming solves as a means to that end.
Please continue with the worst interpretation possible.

It makes it easy for moderators to cue on those that are not adhering to HN rules.
Even the customers on the darkweb have to encrypt all of their orders with PGP or they won't be accepted. Encryption is definitely used by smaller-time black market operations.
> Ultimate Kronos Group

The very name of the company sounds like a scam. Why would you entrust your payroll to people who chose a name like this?
From the first article:

> Here's my challenge. If you can't wake up every day and, using your 100% original equipment God-given organic brain, come up with the three most important things you need to do that day – then you should seriously work on fixing that. I don't mean install another app, or read more productivity blogs and books. You have to figure out what's important to you and what motivates you; ask yourself why that stuff isn't gnawing at you enough to make you get it done. Fix that.

I think most people don't have the money to go on a years-long soul searching trip while getting nothing done in the meantime. I dislike that trend of saying "you aren't a perfectly functionning human? Time to go on therapy and focus on self-improvement for a few years". I work with half-broken systems all the time, I'm one of those. And it works! I'm able to do stuff, be kinda productive at work, spend good time with family and friends, and even find a bit of time to work on myself to get better.
I can’t find anything in normal EU companies that would be over €80k for IC positions. Where do you find these magic opportunities?
Fair enough, though the reason I posted was because the GP did get cheddar misclassified as comte so it evidently can propose both comte and gruyere as labels. Maybe the taxonomy could be revised to make it respond gruyere/compte if they are really indistinguishable.

Where I am, comte is usually wider than gruyere. If this generally holds, that could be what it uses to distinguish them, and actually I showed it a cut piece so maybe that's why it thought gruyere.

With more time / motivation, it would be interesting to do a study looking at whether size and orientation can change the predicted label. Like if I cut cheddar into a wedge would it think its brie?
I have never heard of Galesburg but I found this analysis riveting. Somehow it was more informative to me than the Strong Towns posts.

I suspect you can extend this analysis to the country at large. The national budget suffers from the same imbalance.
Well, we're also at a position where "You won't be fired for using Amazon". Suggesting colo at all gets you the same looks and derision suggesting PostgreSQL used to.
I told someone to go to a coding bootcamp (they were from an Arts degree). They went to one in Brooklyn, worked for a couple of startups as a junior, got terrible pay for a couple years. Now she makes like $100k+ only a couple of years after taking the bootcamp.

I'd say do it.

---

On the other hand, if someone likes the idea of writing code itself, I'd say don't go to a bootcamp — learn python from FreeCodeCamp — there's a whole world out there that you can do if you learn how to manipulate computers and data
Start for the real basics and learn CS from first principles !

https://github.com/geohot/fromthetransistor
How have you found the article to be more interesting when doing this substitution? Did you find it more accurate as well, and if so how?
They should charge. And I would pay.
> You are at more risk unvaccinated in your 40s than boosted in your 80s.

At more risk from Covid19 during first eight weeks after the booster, yes.

But you're at more risk from other shit. And maybe even from Covid19 after eight weeks.
I don't see how that is relevant? He just made an analysis of how low their costs could run with that many employees. If their developers aren't stationed in India and paid the lowest going rate for developers there then the discrepancy in costs between these two companies would be even larger.

If you know where their developers are stationed then you could add that information and we could estimate a better number for what their running costs are.
Defer is used to automatically release resources on function exit, I'm not sure how result types will help here. Can you give an example?
> I remember one called SkyOS as well - it was really far along, probably killed by the lack of driver support. Unfortunately it's site seems to no longer exist.

Here is the LinkedIn page of the main developer (Robert Szeleney) of SkyOS: https://www.linkedin.com/in/robert-szeleney-26902738/

In 2009, he founded Djinnworks: https://djinnworks.at/

You can find Robert Szeleney's email address on https://djinnworks.at/team

Considering the fact that according to the German wikipedia page (https://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=SkyOS&oldid=21527...), the last version of SkyOS is from 2008, I don't believe that SkyOS was killed because of a lack of driver support, but rather because the main developer simply had to make money. But feel free to ask him directly, you now know how you can.
> Previous upgrades have gone live within a year of the launch of their public test nets.

I didn't know that, but it helps with my hope that PoS will become the default. People bringing up how long they've been trying to switch had been hurting my confidence.
Why couldn't it be shipped in the opposite direction?
Funny enough, I just posted a comment about this the other day, how basically every SF/NYC company that has gone full remote could cut their employee costs by nearly 2-3X by switching their dev team to a European time zone. And this is including all the extra taxes involved with having employees there.

And I'm not talking about having to hire in Romania or something (where you could save 4-8X or more). You could hire the top 5% of talent in expensive cities like London and still cut your payroll costs by 2-3X
I like this version (whose source seems to be unknown, I googled it and found https://quoteinvestigator.com/2015/06/04/race-swift/ ):

The race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, but that is the way to bet.
My advice: Take everything people say here with a grain of salt. There are lots of cultures and subcultures around IM, and they do conflict. It also varies with age/generation. You will not get much that is universal.

As an example, I can already see the common advice on not writing "Hi" IMs. Plenty of people at my company complain when people jump right in without these perfunctory messages. Plenty of other people at the same company complain when people do write these messages.

Whatever consensus that forms will be outdated in a few years anyway. The ground constantly shifts.

And don't even get me started on whether to end a sentence with a period!
The potential for good actors isn’t really as noteworthy as a system that enables bad ones.
Please refrain from ascribing a negative motive, or "casual racism", to someone with whom you disagree, and violating HN rules in the process.

You are digging yourself a deep hole.
How frequently does that kind of explosive eruption happen? This one sent a pressure wave around the planet. See https://twitter.com/burgwx/status/1482447133529686019
Again, you were in a very unusual group. I agree you have peers that do care a lot, my statement was hyperbole, I didn't literally mean that no-one cares. One must also weigh the caring by those with the ability to effect change. Microsoft is still a very top down org so you have to look a Julia Liuson and Scott Guthrie to get an idea of what will happen. AFAIK both of them respect Don Syme enough to provide political coverage for you and your colleagues so that you all could focus more on your jobs instead of office politics. But I feel that neither will fund F# enough to unleash it's potential. Visual Studio has stupid F# bugs and AFAIK they won't get fixed. And really, leaning on the constantly breaking 3rd party open source plugin Ionide for F# VS Code support. I know people on the F# team (again an unusual team) care about it but Microsoft as an org doesn't care enough. And not to mention the dogs breakfast that is Win11.
Maybe I just talk with a weird subset of cryptography engineers, but I'd have trouble finding any that think JOSE (or "COSE") is a good message signing format. The argument that people should use JOSE or COSE simply because they're standards is, of course, risible; the track record on IETF cryptography standards is miserable. I'm not sure why this person's random mailing list comment merits this kind of attention, but if you need to hear another person's response to it, sure, here it is: "no".
I hope it's not mandatory. I'd much prefer static analysis to tell me of use-before-acquire errors: I have a number of hot-inner-loops where initialization nukes performance.
Lately I was tryong to understand the exact reason "why". Why are modern browsers so ridiculously complicated? Rendering a (albeit confusing) content is a PDF-like kind of job (or am I wrong?) What is the exact complexity here (except for JS compiler, which is again just a compiler)?
I found it hard as well.
No worries, it's a provocative project.

Thanks for your suggestions!
Forgot about terraforming Mars; we need to terraform Illinois. The weather makes it a great place to be from. The scenery is also seriously lacking, except maybe on the western borders and the southern part, where hardly anyone lives.

Aside from that, you have the permanently toxic politics.

Don't come at me; I used to live there.
Bayesian A/B Testing Considered Harmful
How could a patriarchal society that explicitly reserved power and property for men contain misogyny? Historians are baffled.
>you're going to run into bugs all the time

yet it doesn't reflect reality
Mountains are one example. There are still people living there, but not nearly as much as in the densely populated parts. That's how it looks in Slovakia: https://govisity.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Jahnaci_stit...

North of UK is almost empty. North-Eastern Germany has population density similar to USA which is pretty low compared to the rest of the country. France and Spain especially are sparsely populated outside of the big metro areas.
That's because it detects only French cheese. It's not trained on British/Swiss/Italian/Dutch cheeses.
This is the same guy who cribbed MessagePack for his CBOR standard, and now it looks like he wants to jam it onto JOSE. The likely thought process here is "CBOR is MessagePack, MessagePack is binary JSON, the J in JOSE is JSON..... profit."

Disclaimer: I wrote and maintain a MessagePack implementation.
But they deliberately chose to point out "Indians" and "Westerners", using a subpar adjective for the former. What gives? Sounds like casual racism to me.
I share your disappointment but am happy to see the top upvoted reply calling it out.
Small loop antennas can work well, especially when used with efficient modes like ft8 [0].

You can also get out of the house and get some fresh air using Summits on the Air [1] and Parks on the Air [2].

To learn code, try the Ham Morse app.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/WSJT_(amateur_radio_software...

[1] https://www.sota.org.uk/

[2] https://parksontheair.com/
yes, let's route billions of people through Tor when we are already scraping by on bandwidth because exit nodes get shut down left and right. and no, the companies themselves shouldn't set up exit nodes to expand the network because then they would still know everyone's IP address and could give that info to the police. either the Tor network gets reinforced on a completely independent basis or nothing
Maxis’ former “serious games” division (2020)
> It really felt downright hostile, with advertisements in the start menu, popups prodding me to make a microsoft account, and I only used the damn thing for like 2 hours.

I really wish tech companies would look at users as customers who are willing to spend more for better and more useful software, instead of looking at users as commodities ripe for monetization.

When I use Windows I feel like I'm living in a refugee campl and I've entered a digital flea market where the PA announces every 10 minutes you have to get your parking ticket stamped, and you can get a no-admission charge get pass for $10 per month. The market has everything... there are some deals to be had, but you have to lookout for pickpockets and scammers at every turn. The camp? Well, I have to pay for protection (hi antivirus and antimalware industry) and I have to teach my family how to stay safe. It also feels like the host-state for the camp can change the rules at any moment.

When I use a Mac, I feel like I'm living in an apartment and I've walked into the company-run Super Target. The apartment is really nice, but there are lots of little rules. The store? it's a clean, modern place. The prices are higher than down the street, and the products on the shelf are a little different. It certainly feels a lot safer than the flea market. As long as I like the inventory and can afford the extra cost, the experience is great. The painful part is the apartment rules. Sometimes I want to do things Apple doesn't want me to, and well, the apartment isn't mine.

When I use Linux, I feel like I'm in my own home. It's safe. I own it. No one tells me what I'm allowed to do.
Does the course require prior statistical knowledge? Couldn't quite figure that out. It looks interesting, and there are python versions of the examples as well..
I don't think HackerNews is the correct venue for your ideological posting style.

The rules here, https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html , are designed with a purpose. Suggest you reread them.
https://www.precisesecurity.com/articles/top-10-countries-by...

Holy crap, the US has more cameras per capita than China, according to this.
The UK is a somewhat distant third.

Though I think a distinction should be drawn between government-operated and commercial surveillance.
Just take a walk down any British town street. If you can't physically do it there's always Google Street View
A lot of them (Discord, Slack, etc) will also let you use shift-enter as a way to go down a line without sending.
How consulting can be good for your career
I want a Zero Blaster gun, that shoots fog rings! How does that work?! Doesn't mention what kind of power supply it uses. "Additional fluid is available if your a maniac and need to shoot the gun more than 25,000 times."

https://unitednuclear.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&c...
LibreSSL Update
The IETF is mostly run on mailing lists, and those mailing lists are public, so it's tough to attribute a bad take on one to the whole "organization".
It’s for the same reason I build games for a day job and then turn around and build more games as a side project at night. It’s too damned fun making fun, and when you make something intentionally not for profit that multiplies the effect.
I think you are likely making up the exposure risk based on "conventional" wisdom. I imagine the actual efficacy gain of a simple cloth mask has nothing to do with "trapping" virus particles. My guess for where the actual efficacy comes from is

1) not being able to touch your mucus membranes with your hands anymore

2) limiting the amount of air circulating near your face by limiting induced currents due to your inhale/exhale cycle

If I'm right, your conclusions about gaining the effectiveness of a simple cloth mask are completely off base.

Definitely curious if you happen to know of a study that looks at the mechanisms of protection for a non filtering mask!
The cheaper model sold out in the past 13 hours
Windows has somewhat stripped down versions of the same kind of commandline process management:

tasklist | findstr chrome.exe

taskkill /IM chrome.exe /F

taskkill /PID <pid> /F
I think you miss the point of the waiter. Their job is to upsell and that’s where they provide more than their 5$ an hour of value that the restaurant pays them. They push wine, chef specials, food that’s going bad or overstocked, or meals made out of leftovers that people wouldn’t normally choose. If you replace them with QR codes it’s gonna cost you a lot of money in unrealized profit and wasted ingredient
Linux maker board market survives chip shortage, adds 29 new SBCs in 2021
I might add to that. While you're learning, it absolutely helps to have lots of little project ideas. And then later it's nice to have a hammer in a world where everything is nail-shaped.
There have been a few interesting cases of "custom" encrypted solutions being sold to crime groups then compromised by law enforcement.

The thing is, most "normal" crime doesn't rely on comms at all - street and domestic violence, burglary, car theft, etc. Fencing stolen items probably could make use of it. It's only really organized crime. And the UK has an increasing problem with organized crime .. from the top, like the unlawful "fast lane" procurement scheme. And the recent business with MI5 identifying an (extremely overt) Chinese agent.

And a surprising amount of terrorist recruitment gets done in the open. As long as you're not planning specific acts it looks like "free speech".
I agree a reboot would likely be disappointing. I wouldn't mind a continuation of the movie version though. I was excited a few years ago when they announced they were going to make two sequels to the movie, which would ignore the show. I think would be the right move. Even though I thoroughly enjoy the show, the movie is definitely telling a slightly different story. Unfortunately, it looks like the momentum on the sequels has died.
Are there any Linux desktops that don't require you to sign up for an account to submit a crash report, and keep crash report details private until triage? That has kept me from reporting reproducible bugs in KDE apps before.
> If they do have this capability it is only every going to be used for large scale organised crime, terrorism and state security.

Don’t forget political opposition / dissidents, and analysis to see what they can get away with in terms of public opinion.
This paper doesn't mention her economic writings, but Jacobs thought they would end up being her most enduring legacy [0]. AFAIK they've had a much more limited impact on economics, except for a burst of interest in some circles around the 1990s (endogenous growth theory and urban econ).

For those interested in her economic ideas, I recommend reading _The Economy of Cities_ (1969) followed by _Cities and the Wealth of Nations_ (1984). For a quicker overview, here's a past submission/discussion on the topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10834435

[0] https://reason.com/2001/06/01/city-views-2/ (search the page for "remembered")
> DS9 was the darkest

While this is true in many of the plots and themes explored on the show, especially the Dominion War, it by no means meant the show always took itself super seriously. In fact there is much more humor and general levity on DS9 than TNG which felt more stuffy and righteous.

It wasn't outright comedy besides a few episodes (Little Green Men, Our Man Bashir, Take Me Out to the Holosuite, Ferengi episodes), it was natural banter between character pairs (Odo and Quark, Bashir and Garak, Bashir and O'Brien, Worf/Martok/Sisko, Jake and Nog, the entire extended Ferengi family, etc.). Often episodes would be structured with a "serious" A-plot and a more soapy B-plot where most of the shenanigans would take place.

It's part of the reason DS9 felt, to me at least, more real and lived-in than TNG. TNG was promoting an ideology, a religion of sorts. Very aristocratic, many sacred cows. You would not expect humor to show up much for such people. DS9 on the other hand showed people living in a less than ideal situation, dealing with a galactic shitstorm that washed up on their shores. One of the ways real people deal with such situations is humor.

Granted this was the 90s, since 9/11 TV shows, including Star Trek, became more dark for the sake of being dark. Seemed like Archer was torturing people every other episode at times, and I'm not sure he knew how to smile. And for the epitome of "dark and super srs", look no further than nuBSG, where characters could not even take a dump without Irish bagpipe music being played over it.

Yes I miss the 90s. A lot of what I said about DS9 applies to Babylon 5 as well.
That's not true. The queen does have final say over laws.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/feb/08/queen-...