skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The problem I find with static typing is that it so easily leads you over-specifying the requirements / constraints. In fact, it makes such a virtue out of that over-specification that many people would consider it a best practice to do so.

For example, perhaps my `calculate_price` function only depends on 2 attributes of the order which has 65 attributes. Am I creating a 2-element data type for that function to process? no! I'm specifying that it processes an Order data type, with all its 65 elements. But implicitly then I'm saying the function has 65 input parameters of all these specific types and nobody can call it now without providing them all. What a pain! Huge amount of extra code, refactoring, unit testing, because of this.

So either you end up with a cambrian explosion of micro-types or you have these way overspecified interfaces everywhere.

Compare with dynamic languages (or structural typing, Go etc) that only care that things "quack like a duck". The calculate_price function doesn't care what object you give it, as long as it has the two attributes it needs. Now I can unit test `calculate_price` with a 2-element object rather than needlessly creating the 23 irrelevant required elements of a valid Order.

I think a lot could be solved with culture shift. Where data types are really known and locked in, use the crap out of them. As soon as things get ambiguous or flexible, go right ahead and specify that your function takes a Map<String,Object>. If a useful concrete interface emerges at some point factor it out then. The problem is that this is really frowned upon in a lot of places.
- Should I tell my boss and/or team?

This depends on how your relationship with your boss is and how they are. I once encountered the start of burn out and told my boss, and he said to go do something fun. So I played video games while he covered for me and let me know if I was needed for a meeting. It was great and I skirted burn out.

- Should I take time off? How much? Or should I try to work reduced hours?

I have taken up backpacking and have loved taking a day off or two to go out into the woods. I really love just disconnecting from the world.

- If I continue working, is there something in my working environment I should try to change?

Maybe try different text editors? I don't know if doing that would bring more stress as you have to learn new stuff. But, maybe you want to learn it, its up to you.

- Is there anything specific to working in tech and burning out that I should know about?

Burnout as I have been told and experienced is normal, but its usually a sign that something is off like a lot more work has been thrown at you or your team, or you feel like your contributions are not getting the attention you want. Or, you just want to not work because your brain is tired of always working.

As for boredom and not liking it, I have found that it pays to do nothing some times and just daydream at home, doing absolutely nothing. It helps my brain rest and clear out all its stressors.

Also keep in mind this advice is what works for me, but it may work for you. Take it with a grain of salt.
If you're serious, send me an email at alexmiller@spacefiller.space! I would honestly love to hire someone to do a bit of grunt work.
a similar situation happened at my company where management was informed of severe burnout. we didn't have a policy/SOP on it but created one where we gave our valued employee 2 weeks forced PTO and actually suspended their gsuite so they couldn't access work.

so far so good. employee came back after being able to finally catch up on life, we hit reset as a team and we're off and away.

this doesn't help prevent future burnout specifically but it was an initial step that showcased that we cared more about our employees' health than the company.
Yes, we’re all engineers. Some better than others.

A piece of paper changes nothing, only in the legal system in which you operate.
Does Fastmail do mailing lists? That's the one thing I use in GSuite other than the basic email.
That's when you start charging for email / workspace :-)
>In-person voter fraud

Aside from the fact we are moving away from in-person voting, and mailin voting is far less secure to the point where many other nations do not do it.

The claim the there is no fraud is has many many problems and based on a huge amount of assumption. There is very little actual transparency, there is the appearance of transparency, but any time anyone asks any questions is a response of "HOW DARE YOU QUESTION THE ELECTION", the election is secure because we said it was secure is not a valid position. nor is the position of "well show me the fraud" because the average person lacks the legal standing to actually investigate anything. Instead we have a system of "we investigated ourselves and found we did nothing wrong"

The same people that accept this from the election boards, do not accept this from the police... which is another example of political hypocrisy
I disagree because you loose press freedom, fairness and actual good reporting in favor of profits.

Sure maybe in the US federal funding mean spreading government garbage but in other countries federally funded systems are vital to keep the balance and keep the corruption and cooperate greed at bay.
It's scalability with regard to parallelism if work streams and business units. One module can respond to market faster if all the other business units and teams don't have to weigh in
I have done the full theme park ride on monolith->microservices->monolith. Both have ups and downs.

The most important thing I learned is that "microservices" in absolutely no way necessitates "bullshit spread across multiple cloud vendors and other scenarios involving more than 1 computer". What part of microservices says things must be separated by way of an arbitrary wire protocol?

We now have a "monolith" (process) that is comprised of many "microservices" (class files), each of which is responsible for its own database, business logic, types, etc. These services are able to communicate amongst themselves using the simple path of direct method invocation.

If you are looking to scale up your capacity or even make things more resilient, microservices vs monolith is really not the conversation you need to be having. If you are trying to better organize your codebase, you might be in the right place but you also need to be super careful with how you proceed.

We wasted a solid 3 years trying to make microservices solve all of our problems. Looking back, we spent more time worrying about trying to put Humpty Dumpty back together again with JSON APIs and other technological duct tape than what our customers were complaining about.
If you're in a large organization, you're expecting other engineers to make sense of the work you're submitting. Anything that helps them here is a good thing (although it's always a tradeoff.)

The advice I try to live by, is that however messy my work was leading up to a PR, I make sure the end result is something somebody can review without additional context. Commits should have lengthy descriptions of changes that describe the "why" and "how" of a particular change, in a way that makes it easy to digest for a reviewer. Sometimes multiple commits make sense (like if you're renaming a module/class, put that in a single commit, then put the actual code change in the next one), sometimes they're not necessary. But it's worth it to put in the effort here if it means it helps a reviewer, IMO.
Wish you all the best, hope and sure others with knowledge and advice can help you. Your for sure not alone.
> Should I tell my boss and/or team? Should I tell them right away, or wait until I know what other steps I want to take? What should I expect their reactions to be?

No there're not your family. You need to talk with a professional and take decision together.

> Should I take time off? How much? Or should I try to work reduced hours?

It's impossible to say. Everyone is different. Some need to work part time, others a month off and others 2y. When I did my burn out at first it's 4 months, after 6 and at the end it's a year. Again decision with a professional. Evaluation every month at first.

Depend also your country/insurance. For me it's easy because I live in EU, so my salary was paid at 80% while i was taking care of myself for a 1y.

> If I continue working, is there something in my working environment I should try to change? Think of senior engineer in a typical DevOps-y SaaS startup.

Again need a professional and long conversations. May be it's the environement or the job itself.

> Is there anything specific to working in tech and burning out that I should know about? I feel like this isn't exactly rare.

Because it's always the same. Managers think when we add or remove features, it's just lego. You re-assign 1 ticket 3 others come.
Like most drugs, it gives you a perspective. It's perfectly fine if that's not your cup of tea. Most people, especially rusty cans, should stay away from stuff like this. It is well known that different perspectives are not only stupid, but also very dangerous. Can't have that
I dont agree with vaccine passports at all. But, if vaccine passports are required, minorities having a lower vaccination rate by choice does not make vaccine passports racist. Enough with the disparate impact BS when the policy is the same for all people across the board.

The only thing that vaccine passport requirements are discriminating against are unvaccinated people. Skin color has nothing to do with it.
Also there are people without any degrees that do far more engineering than many developers who hold software engineering degrees.
Sometimes when I read these the discussions I get the impression that software engineers think "real" engineering is about making life or death decisions all the time, but a lot of the work is so systematized it can turn into enormous amounts of paperwork. Especially as the things you work on become more deadly.

Before I went into web development I worked briefly as a mechanical engineer on nuclear power plants, and I feel like I more critical thinking when I'm pushing code to prod than I ever did reviewing load calculations on coolant pipes (despite how important a functioning cooling system might actually be)

Also want to point out that most aerospace engineers have no certification outside of a college degree, at least in the US.
Something I just discovered is that Office 365 Family only lets you use custom domains if they are hosted by GoDaddy. If you want to use another domain registrar you have to get Microsoft 365 Business, which has a similar price as Google Workspace :(

There's no way I'm moving my domain to GoDaddy.
I said that Boeing defined engineers as having a degree in engineering. That is clearly not my definition.

I've known engineers that were no better than mechanics. And a couple (very rare) mechanics who could do engineer work, and would be engineers in my estimation.
I know. It's strange how they have such great coverage for kids, but decide that it's not worth it for adults with adult money.
they're all missing out on a huge market

That doesn't sound like a huge market. Very few people have an assistant these days. That sounds like a few tens of thousands of potential customers, although admittedly ones able to afford a high premium.
When OP says “robot/android” voice I don’t think he means literal robot sounds like Kraftwerk, but instead that artificially flawless, ultra-precise, sterile “ISO-standard male(or female) vocalist” sound that seems to show up on many modern pop songs. You can’t tell the difference between modern singers today since they’ve all been produced into this single bland homogenized voice-like sound.
It gets better!

> and bestselling author

> Click here to download a free copy of his eBook
Was it? When was that?
Cute idea! The checks seem to be running entirely on the client side, so for instance the following will pass all test cases

function isEvenNumber(num) {
return challenge.testcase[1];
}

or even

this[challenge.fnName] = _ => challenge.testcase[1];

Depending on the use case, though, you could just say that anyone who can use the debugger to figure out how to hack around the captcha passes the test :)

Edit: oh, I see, it submits the code to be evaluated on the server after it passes on your browser (but the above causes the server to 500 at you, so it just says "Passed! Submitting..." and gets stuck in that state). Seems a bit dangerous to trust the client to control what code runs on your server, but I suppose platforms like leetcode manage it so in principle it should be possible to do safely.
naice! curious about the customers/target audience though?
Archaeologists Find 4k-Year-Old Board Game in Oman
> If software engineers were engineers, testing would be a higher priority

testing is not that important for a hacker but important for an engineer (although hackers do penetration testing).
Increasing expressiveness of a language necessarily increases its complexity. Comprehension is important but it's a function of "the whole stack" -- language and program both.

> engineering is applied science.

Absolutely. But the metrics are different.
Was going to say the same. The article doesn't back that statement up with anything.

Many of us don't have engineer in our job title, and I've never heard of anyone being upset at it not being there.
I never really considered myself a 'true' zen practitioner, but years ago I did regular zen retreats. It included sitting meditation, walking meditation, a mindful lunch with other practitioners, and... chores. (Maybe they used a different word - I don't recall.) One time I spent our ~hour washing dishes. Another time, sweeping the zendo.

The point of it, beyond contributing to the greater community, was to do these chores mindfully. There was no higher spirituality to it; just be present. When washing dishes, I was only focusing on washing, rinsing, drying, and putting them away. When sweeping, I was only sweeping the floor to collect dirt. When I collected the dirt, I was only collecting it. And so on. It sounds a bit silly, but it was a tremendous practice to force yourself to only do one thing and to think about that thing while you're doing it.
https://web.archive.org/web/20220119164824/https://www.al.co...
You are weeding out all candidates who understand Unicode. This is exactly the sort of problem that a good engineer would keep an eye out for because it's almost certainly going to explode with edge conditions if you try to do it the "obvious" way.

Unless you're giving that problem and then hitting the input with a string that includes directional formatting characters. Because that's exactly what is going to happen in real life.

The only good thing about that question is at least you didn't ask them to casefold the string.
This is pretty interesting to me.

I think most software developers think of engineering as making sure the software will perform under stress. But this requirement is (usually) meaningless from a customer safety standpoint. Sure it sucks if the system breaks, but unless your business model is also safety critical, that failure isn't a safety problem.

But leaking customer data is a safety problem. So for most people, software engineering should as much (or more) about security as things like time complexity tradeoffs.
you're not servicing anyone, you're not a business
> it's a process of optimization within a solution space bounded by constraints

That just describes problem solving.
There are a lot of towns like this in America. Towns where the sole source of income is traffic tickets, and often that revenue stream comes from a disproportionately black and/or poor population (this was the case with Ferguson MO. The justice report after Michael Brown was murdered pointed to this as one of the factors that led to so much contact between the minority population and police)
https://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/opa/press-releas...

----
> Ferguson has allowed its focus on revenue generation to fundamentally compromise the
role of Ferguson’s municipal court. The municipal court does not act as a neutral arbiter of the
law or a check on unlawful police conduct. Instead, the court primarily uses its judicial authority
as the means to compel the payment of fines and fees that advance the City’s financial interests.
This has led to court practices that violate the Fourteenth Amendment’s due process and equal
protection requirements. The court’s practices also impose unnecessary harm, overwhelmingly
on African-American individuals, and run counter to public safety.
Most strikingly, the court issues municipal arrest warrants not on the basis of public
safety needs, but rather as a routine response to missed court appearances and required fine
payments. In 2013 alone, the court issued over 9,000 warrants on cases stemming in large part
from minor violations such as parking infractions, traffic tickets, or housing code violations. Jail
time would be considered far too harsh a penalty for the great majority of these code violations,
yet Ferguson’s municipal court routinely issues warrants for people to be arrested and
incarcerated for failing to timely pay related fines and fees. Under state law, a failure to appear
in municipal court on a traffic charge involving a moving violation also results in a license
suspension. Ferguson has made this penalty even more onerous by only allowing the suspension
to be lifted after payment of an owed fine is made in full. Further, until recently, Ferguson also
added charges, fines, and fees for each missed appearance and payment. Many pending cases
still include such charges that were imposed before the court recently eliminated them, making it
as difficult as before for people to resolve these cases.
---

The full report is with reading.

Also add asset forfeiture to the equation (usually targeted at poor and minority populations who cannot find it) and you have a toxic cycle of racism that feeds into more traffic stops of certain populations which then feeds into stats about that same population, rinse and repeat.

But asset forfeiture can cast an even wider death. The murder of millionaire Donald Scott by LA county police was motivated by the fact that they hoped to seize his ranch through asset forfeiture if they found any wrongdoing/illegal activities there (there were none)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Donald_Scott
I know why I'm burning out, but I don't know what to do with the realisation. The fear of being fired, then broke, and then not being able to survive is real-ish. Advice?
I think Hillel is a pretty interesting guy. But I think that he's a bit missing the mark here.

It feels like his view of engineers is that they are people who can put together a solution and then use a lot of fancy numbers and established facts to support their solution. In his oil drilling example.. he's not going into the same issues that we face. (Is that drilling analyze for failure worth the money in investigation, etc)

With software engineering you're putting together instructions to fit within a computer's hardware capacity to solve your problem in the context that you need to operate it. There are a lot of ways about it .. however we have a lot of issues in our field surrounding the technical aspect on this:

1. Academics is dead focused on the hard part of language schemas, grammars, correctness-proofs, etc.
2. The research that we have about design patterns and their usages are nothing more than surveys and try to debunk a negative. (This goes back to the whole "academics proved unit tests don't provide value") [The results are never influential and they completely ignore the quality of the data]

Additionally:

I want to say that as engineers .. at companies, we're put into aggressive processes and methodologies that prevent us from operating a very high quality output. As a software engineer, you should have verification to prove your program works as intended, you should have monitoring to validate that constantly in production, you should have experience+data that supports the design decisions.

There are metrics there to quantify our solutions.. but being business and shipping led.. that's forced to the wayside.

---

Slight addition here: We're in a phase in the industry where experience is completely ignored and we're forgoing technical "merit"(By that I mean experience, strong practices, discipline.. not the business says I'm good) in favor of blasting people into the door.

We're not getting a lot of people that are willing to learn from the methods of old and make constructive commentary, we're getting people that are not willing to be disciplined, and we're getting people who forgo good practices because "they dont' wanna". (You see this all the time with lazy arguments about people hating to do unit tests, bad tooling, etc)

TL;DR to my argument, are we engineers right now.. some have the privilege to be.. but most are punished for doing so because it may annoy the PO. We totally can be engineers, no one really rewards you for this.
Cryptocurrency Titans Newly Obsessed with Artificial Wombs
Outside of Starlink, and late-start wanna-be competitors to Starlink, how does the total market demand for launch services compare to the supply which all these eager new wanna-be launch companies plan to build? Given that there are a number of national space programs - which may be able to tolerate large financial losses "forever", for political reasons...
I'm one of the people affected. Over the years I've created multiple accounts most with multiple aliases on top of that. I would have a separate account for recruiters and job hunting, separate one for logging into sensitive accounts, separate one for each of the countries in which I've spend more time, etc, etc

Now I would need to start spending ~$90 + VAT (?) per month to keep this setup going. Anyone with a similar situation? Any services you could recommend to migrate to?
As someone who does a fair amount of SELinux professionally, I’d mostly agree with this: getting started can be daunting, so one could likely get far more value from a short time focusing on systemd security.

But if one can spare the time, SELinux can secure everything, not just systemd services.

It all depends on the threat vectors one faces.
Criticism of religion as derivative is generally reserved for the abrahamic faiths you don't generally see it done to say Bhuddism. A sort of early modern bias creeps in, the idea that a religion is invalidated by showing that it arose among men at a certain time. of course, that this is exactly what religions generally claim. I'm struggling to think of any sects for whom this is actually a deal breaker... maybe some American fundamentalists?

it's common to interpret the structure of genesis as being a riff off of earlier myths, in a critical way. The structure is often parallel, but also often different as though to draw a comparison to the mind of the reader. We see a harmonious creation account rather than a violent one, and a creator God who is master over both earth and water.

Anyone who studied religion at an undergraduate level (or at a good highschool) knows this. The specific narrative you're weaving is , however, highly speculative.

It should not surprise Christians or jews that the ancient Israelites recognized other gods, this is covered extensively in the Bible. There are frequent references to the 'God's of the nations' in the old testament, particularly evident in the greek.

The existnece of miltiple lower case G 'gods' - is still held in even the New Testament 'principalities and powers' are 'gods over the nations'. I think, it is fair to say that modern jews and Christians alike still hold this to be true.
Yes! Exploratory scripting is a categorically different thing than programming, though, I think.
I'm using Cloudflare Web Analytics. It's free, offers you far less information but in exchange you offer your users much more privacy.

It's still a front-end analytics system which means you'll still lose information from users with tracker blockers, just like with GA.

https://developers.cloudflare.com/analytics/web-analytics