skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Agreed ‘years of experience’ is a crap measure. I’ve interviewed people that put 20+ years Linux experience on their C.V. yet knew nothing about grub or systemd (as examples).

When pressed just a little bit turns out they installed Debian or such back in 2001 then used Linux on and off/now and then over the years. Often not even going beyond the live install environment.

Same thing with programming languages. 20+ years of C++ experience doesn’t mean anything by itself. I’ve worked people with one year experience that are far more experienced in actually using the language and delivering high quality code.

It’s just bullshit gatekeeping and laziness mostly by HR or non-technical managers.
> Denver and the surrounding suburbs...

I live in a developing "15 minute city" that encompasses a border with Denver and one of its neighboring cities. Development has been... okay I guess. We have a light rail stop that goes downtown to Union Station and to all the main stadiums, and bike trail that runs alongside it.

That's pretty much it. The area has been zoned for everything a 15 minute city might need, but developers have been reluctant to build anything beyond 5+1 apartment buildings and small townhome developments. It's hardly a 15 minute city and both municipalities (Denver and the other) that have a stake in the development don't seem to care much about the area.

We are still fully car dependent for basic errands, and now that they are enforcing parking laws for blocking hydrants, alleys, etc, people are up in arms.
Good read, and it hints at just how absolutely nuts the situation is be today with almost everyone in the world having cellphones, tablets, laptops and what else running predominantly American-designed software and hardware.

Nothing is private or secure.
In the linked transcript Doctorow suggests that Uber's profits come from selling off divisions. "I’m finally curing my starvation by eating my own arms" is the rather colourful metaphor he uses. Does that line up with the 2021Q3 profit you mention, or maybe he's talking about something that happened earlier?
Wow, people on the internet really will argue about anything.

@kqr, thank you for your insights. While it's not exactly relevant to my problem domain (self-driving cars - lots of essential complexity there!), it's still generally useful advice.

Software is expensive to write, but it's even more expensive to maintain. That's why my favorite projects are those that delete large amounts of now-useless code. Not writing it in the first place is an even better alternative.
This has been a thing since day 1 of Overwatch at the very least. Most aimbots being used didn't touch the executable or memory at all, they were called 'color bots' because all they had to do was match pixel color values. They were basic enough a concept you could build them in AutoIT macro software along with ramp up and down features so you weren't just instantly spamming headshots, but instead incrememently your aim would get better. They became so sophisticated that you could be sat behind someone physically using one and not be sure they were cheating or not.
>I never ever had any such issue with an Apple laptop.

There is just such an issue right now with macOS 12.2:
https://www.macworld.com/article/610175/macos-monterey-12-2-...

I currently have to shut down my Mac mini every night instead of putting it to sleep because it routinely crashes and reboots in the middle of the night, lighting up the room
Legos are like coding. The simplicity of Lego yesteryear was like some of the simpler programming languages out there. Approachable and rewarding, but limited. Over the years, the language of Lego has added new programming constructs and is inherently more complex, more capable, and harder to approach.

The evolutions the article describes may be deplorable to some, but it was adapt or die. Anyone playing with Tinker Toys, Lincoln Logs, or Erector Sets anymore?

I am 51 and still collect Lego. I realized some years ago, that my own four kids were not getting the same enjoyment out of them that I had. Chagrineldy I realized that in my attempt to help them love them, I had over glutted them. Two large bins (the kind you put in the back of pickup trucks), an explosion of piece types, and an explosion of color, made it too difficult to find the piece you wanted.

So I sorted them. Today, I have more than 200 clear Sterilite storage containers with the whole collection sorted by basic shapes or types. Some are very specific (2x4 bricks), some more of a category (all technic gears). I had tried sorting them by color in the past, but all that led to was very mono color creations.

When I build something, I use the whole set. But when grandkids and nephew/nieces come, I just get a few of them out. With about 20 boxes, it returns to that simple approachable phase and they do the coolest things. You can get a lot of mileage out of just the plates and bricks, plus one or two of the “specialty” boxes thrown in for grins (e.g. two of my nephews just love the big box of wheels).

The most popular boxes are still the minifig boxes: heads, hats, vests, torsos, legs, tools, animals, foods, weapons. They’ll “play dolls” with those all day. They generally push the few Friends pieces out of the way. When the kids were younger, we used to do a monthly bricklink order as a group. My 3 girls always opted for more female hair pieces.
I don't see why either of those things is contradictory to a good user experience, ngl
I'm fine with people praising Valve for utilising linux to advance their commercial interests. It's an example of a "win win" situation.

However I notice on these forums in particular when other tech companies do similar it isn't seen so charitably.

I speak with a slightly cynical tone because I've seen this story before - the catalyst to the changing public opinion has been less about what the companies actually do and more about when competitors emerge and engage PR campaigns to recast the incumbent as evil and the newcomer as a saviour.

One should keep their eyes open to see if the same happens to Valve.
For me, I prefer to keep my screen brightness at 50% or so. In that case a glossy screen is just a distracting mass of reflections, where a matte display is pleasantly usable. Color accuracy isn't an issue for anything I deal with, so the more comfortable appearance of the matte display is a clear winner.

For my digital-artist friends, they do prefer the over-bright glossy displays since it's actually a critical need for their process.
https://imgur.com/gallery/xQMlVcZ
I remember stumbling upon /r/antiwork a few years ago and being so happy I'd stumbled upon a thriving movement that so effectively criticized one of the core principles of society that everyone takes for granted - that everyone must effectively sell their labor to someone else (unless they're rich enough to opt out, or clever enough to create some business or invest their way out).

To me anti-work is the recognition that forced wage labor is not acceptable, and that technological advancement and automation should enable greater freedom for individuals to spend their time how they choose. We could already have this reality today if we just implemented a universal basic income, but until the boomers retire from office that's just not happening.

I haven't browsed the subreddit in forever but just took a look, and it's sad to see it's just a bunch of stupid memes now. Every decent subreddit eventually devolved into a bunch of stupid memes. Travel and digital nomad subreddits are just people posting Instagram style pictures of themselves or asking the same dumb questions over and over again. Crypto subreddits seem to consist primarily of 14 year olds asking "when moon".

Reddit in 2008 was amazing - similar to Hacker News in comment quality (which has also lowered significantly). I watched the site devolve - with the advent of memes, pun threads (thankfully that's gone now), hivemind, and quality discourse being replaced by sarcastic low-effort one-liners and downvote sabotaging of any contrarian viewpoints regardless of the substance of one's post.

We need better alternatives to Reddit, or Reddit needs to fix the mess because the post/comment quality there is straight trash there. All the default homepage subreddits are trash. I don't know how any co-founder of Reddit could look at Reddit today and be proud of what they've created knowing the forum of intelligent and productive discourse it could've been.
First management theorists or first recorded management theorists? I feel like there are similarly (or nearly as) advanced cultures in this approximate era for whom we unfortunately have significantly less recorded material - and often what we do have was created by other civilizations (such as Rome itself or Greek city-states) who interacted with said people. These persons surely had theories of management for their assets, which undoubtedly would include slaves and indentured servants.
100k each? Wow thats the highest bug bounty payout ive ever seen
A ~550-piece set from my childhood (90s): 10 minifigs and accessories, end result will fill about a 1-foot cube. Plenty of room for small hands to get in and actually play with it. Construction simple enough you can easily put it back together if it's messed up during play, without resorting to the directions. Exposed studs everywhere for easy adding-on.

A modern ~550-piece set, also from a line aimed at kids, not one of the adult-aimed models: 3 minifigs, fills 1/3 cubic foot at best because 450 of the pieces are little 1x1 and 1x2 plates or similar. Finished set's too small for even kid hands to get in and play. If it gets messed up more than a very tiny bit, you'll probably have to re-build from scratch, because the construction is... very CAD, I guess. All surfaces clad in smooth bricks if at all possible, making adding on awkward.

The modern ones do have more cool mechanisms and gadgets, though. Also they include extra pieces for the small ones now, and more sets come with a brick tool. Those are all nice changes. But the sets themselves seem to be tuned for inflating part counts and looking nice on a box, not for play.
At face value, many police departments do seem overfunded. In many small towns you'll see too many patrol cars for the area, new patrol cars too often, unnecessary improvements to the department, etc. while other areas of the budget languish because it's politically unpopular to go against the police department and people fear retaliation for advocating against them.
> we've had decades of hyperbole where relatively small cuts to defense funding are referred to by opponents as "defunding" US troops

making defense and police funding continue to increase but at a slightly slower rate is referred to by opponents as "defunding"
Not if you pay in cash. The problem with many of these proposals are that the backers also want to start limiting the use of cash.
As a React developer who can also sling Rails + ERB, they're very different skillsets, even though they're both broadly "frontend".

I can see why someone who's trying to make a career as a React developer would see a primiarily-ERB role as a detour. And maybe in their next round of interviews, people would question how good they are at React if they spent the last X years doing mainly ERB/HTML with only sprinkles of React. "I see you don't have a lot of recent React experience..."

And yeah, I agree - a person can get rusty with some tools and pick them up again just fine. The trouble isn't whether you (the interviewee) believes that, it's more about convincing the person on the other side of the table. The perception in JS-land is that things change Very Fast™ and that skills quickly go obsolete. (Disregarding that if you zoom out, React hasn't changed majorly in 4 years and it's been the dominant choice for 6+ – the perception of fast-paced change is definitely a thing)
>likewise, "no one wants to mine coal" me, I do, I wanna do that, I wanna work out the refining process, I want to lathe 1000 of the same thing. Not every personality is what the author can come up with in his head, other kinds of people exist too

You may want to, but the kind of people who talk in online discussions about "What will your job be after the revolution" overwhelmingly do not.
I envision a third option: Apple successfully appeals the regulator decision in Netherlands. It's not far fetched: Apple successfully appealed EC fine on Irish tax break (pending new appeal from the regulator), Intel successfully appealed older fine for anticompetitive behaviour. It seems to me that many laws in the EU are built on shaky legal grounds.
Why would it be strange to want the freedom to choose again when Apple is expanding the set of things that are covered by a 30% commission?[0]

Are you suggesting I should have illegally acquired information about Apple’s future business plans so that I could make informed choices as a consumer?

I certainly never agreed to their expansion of the commission, but what power does a consumer have over that now? That’s what monopoly power feels like, even if it may not meet the legal definition of “monopoly” that was set many decades ago before a smartphone was even imaginable.

Apple seems intent to expand their 30% commission to cover all aspects of daily life nowadays. I certainly didn’t know this years ago, and years ago when many consumers bought into iOS, the 30% commission was really just a commission on Angry Birds and similarly casual apps. It wasn’t impacting more serious parts of life, but now the smartphone is the place where the average person does some of the most important transactions in life. It’s a completely different situation from when the App Store first launched, and it should be treated as such. Do you recognize the validity of any of that?

[0]: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/28/technology/apple-app-stor...
If you haven't already, checkout Keith Seddon's translation with commentary: Epictetus' Handbook and the Tablet of Cebes: Guides to Stoic Living.
> In the second case, I got the sense that leadership didn't really grasp how costly the context switching was for us due to not having much collective experience working in mobile (not to mention the rude awakening of having to deal with iOS dev dependencies).

Interestingly I see this is a few ways:

* Every small 15-30 minute call knocks me out for hours. I really need at least one full day a week with minimal meetings and that includes the daily stand-up. I honestly think the daily stand-up costs companies millions per year in productivity cost

* Moving from project feature to feature is costly. So if you're working on feature X this sprint and then the PO moves to feature Y in the next sprint due to priorities it'll slow down dev. Doing this often (say every sprint) will kill velocity

* Moving from project A to project B is also a big killer for productivity

* Moving around tech stacks as you've said it happens occasionally in my experience but when it happens you're often flustered
I had this almost exact same experience last year. I left the company only after six months. I definitely saw my front end skills take a big hit in those six months. I think the author here definitely made the right move. No shame in quitting, if it's not a good fit move on to the next thing.
> In contrast, the picture you linked looks frankly horrid for cyclists, by Dutch standards.

Yes, I did in fact explicitly called the Netherlands out as an extreme example.

Cycling in London is more catered for than in the US and harder than in the Netherlands.
Pretending to like? It's not like these were shallow conversations at a party... He lived with them and dated them for years while acting as an agent of the state. That is pretty unfathomable violation...
>Make American Great Again

I think this is a really good example of an effective slogan, both in Reagan's initial use and later Trump's. It has some really critical properties: it's easy to comprehend, while also nimble enough to fit anyone's notions, and you can't argue against it directly.

If you have to direct people to "Google it," then your slogan is a non-starter. I'm not a marketing expert (hence the rather dry alternatives), but I am aware of how wildly effective conservative-leaning messaging is compared to the often off-putting (even if well-intentioned) liberal-messaging on the other side. So then, why not use the same tactics? Government accountability is a good thing, and you really can't argue against it. If it makes sense to demand a lot of accountability at a high standard from teachers (and teacher unions), then the very same demands should be put on police (and police unions). Use the same exact messaging.
One additional thing…

Reason 9 from the articles is exactly why no on plays with my Lego except in bare feet. Little shod feet break Lego. Little bare feet learn not to step on Lego.
It's an old idiom that people started saying wrong a long time ago, its correct, original form is "Eat your cake and have it too".
It seems pretty clear that those in the upper 10% (to pick a random number) of broad intellectual curiosity, motivation, home environment, etc. would likely be much better off with more self-directed learning than a rigid program--with some exceptions like probably languages.
> So, I have a friend. He owns a farm. I want to go and visit him on his farm.

The state built a road to their farm (and presumably that road goes past the farm as well). What would stop them from also running a (rare, definitely) bus line around there?

> Last month my local train services were cut from every 15 minutes to every 30 "Cus COVID".

Sure, global pandemics are one weak point of public services of every kind, unfortunately.
I realise that we must have been raised very differently indeed. Perhaps you could volunteer to mansplain it to the spy cops inquiry?
> My current team has a senior that has been at the company for 20 years as an Analyst, she can't write a line of code without assistance. [..] And we've got a few juniors/midlevels that could out code almost anyone of the team.

I mean, there's much more to Analyst and Engineering jobs than coding, especially as you advance up the levels.
I feel like contrarian techniques adopted by sane mind at cooperatively manageable scale (of zero) is great, but IMO users of reactive contrarianism that eventually emerges just deserve downvotes as external means of value judgement. However that leads to communal polarization, and to solve that, regular exposure events would be necessary ... I admire Reddit, at least for its architecture.
He meant on your own shores where critical supplies are not at the mercy of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan.
I think it was always pretty clear that the movement as a whole advocated redistribution of resources toward less violent and more efficient alternatives to police, like better social programs and mental health resources.

Relying on the police to prevent crime is like relying on firefighters to prevent fires or paramedics to prevent injuries. Sure they have a role to play, but logically they should only be the last resort in case everything else goes wrong.
I think Eve Online uses python.
KDE has been the best desktop experience since 3.0 in 2002.

There's no comparison if you value your time and mental state.
We are currently implementing Tornado on a Clojure + Graal install. Even with our partial, non-optimised version, we are seeing a speed-up greater than an order of magnitude. I presently estimate an infrastructure savings of nearly 70% versus our current Azure spend. I will post a postmortem once completed if it would be of interest.
> Even my preferred IDE, the Jetbrains suite which I love, are resource hogs

Ok, so you're saying that because a large, complex desktop application uses a lot of memory and is also written in Java that therefore the JVM is a memory hog?

Well then, given how much of a memory hog Chrome is, I guess we can all shitcan C/C++ as well.

Look, in any reasonable apples-to-apples comparison the JVM blows anything PHP has out of the water, including haxe, hiphop, etc.

And even if you write a PHP-to-bytecode compiler (e.g. https://github.com/jphp-group/jphp) then there are certain limitations to how fast and efficient any dynamically typed language can be. Look at all the shit V8 has to go through to do field lookups: https://v8.dev/blog/fast-properties

And then there's so much useless request-level overhead to PHP, even with pre-cached bytecode, you're never going to get even close in terms of latency to a well tuned JVM running something like spring boot.

And if you really hate Java as a language, you can always use something like Kotlin.
> Is this really that unusual?

Extremely.

Lets obviously ignore the large percentage of the workforce that are waiting tables, stacking shelves, have to use a punchcard and have their hours tracked to the nearest minute etc. for whom stepping out for an hour to run an errand probably means they get paid a couple of hours less at best or fired if its done without the permission of their supervisor ...

Professional 'knowledge' workers - there are workplaces where its ok, there are workplaces where you would put your career into reverse at 100mph by not being present from 7am to 8pm for your 9am-5pm job.
Cool how many brushes has it got? Does it have an undo function or some sort of cloud backup option?
This is really interesting. I didn't know that the Linux kernel provided documentation like this. I thought my only recourse for learning about the internals of Linux were man pages, 3rd party tutorials, or reading the kernel source.

This sort of documentation, that doesn't assume prior knowledge, while still being technical, is really hard to get right.
> including Google where we've heard horror stories of getting locked out with no one to even contact
---
[raises hand] Been there, done that.
It's not Reddit specifically but those different subreddits growing to the point where the most "engaging" stuff wins and that always becomes the low-effort memes and stuff. Hacker News has had a slower decline in quality because it's like one specific subreddit in size and has pretty aggressive moderation of content in comparison. Your comment and the phenomenom it describes has been given the name "Eternal September" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
I read your comment before the article, went in ready to shake my fist at the clouds and exclaim "kids these days!", but....it's not? He was hired into a role ostensibly to do front-end, which he wanted to do, but he was coding mainly in Ruby instead.

Now, I love Ruby, and I got excited seeing his code "time spent" metric that Ruby was at the top, but I can understand why he would want to focus on his area of comfort. I also have mistakenly hired and dealt with many whiny, entitled, head-in-the-clouds/reddit-roleplay programmers who certainly need a good kick in the pants and a right sacking, but if I had hired someone to do X and instead deployed them to do Y, I can't be surprised if they want to leave to actually do X somewhere else.

He probably could have definitely "learned something" as you say, but he himself admits he doesn't care about e-commerce, so in this case nothing was really lost. Yes, "safely scaling" is a silly comment to make, but otherwise it comes across as fairly positive towards Shopify.
The .3x versions were the last ones before they put in abstraction layers for video and sound, which had a lot of benefits, but adversely impacted performance on low-end hardware of the time. On modern hardware I don't think it is really an issue, particularly for games from the 80s and prior. Raspberry Pi 4 works just fine.
Thanks for asking! I use an API by GCP and don't train(transfer) on my own.
Do you train your own model?
That was the purpose of the parent article's assertion, to illustrate that same point.