skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> But if you train twice as many electricians, its not like there will be twice as many electrician jobs created. So learning a craft or trade is a great personal strategy, but it not a solution we can universally apply.

I don't know that I agree with that, right now at least on the data I have available and the anecdata I have observed there is a serious shortage of skilled blue color work, plumber, carpenter, electrician, etc. so there is definitely a shift that would be beneficial for society at large and individuals.

But let's explore this idea a little bit more, right now we are used to the idea that there are X jobs for Y persons, especially in white color work. This seems to derive largely from the fact that white color work is focused not on production of goods and services but in the production of information (and to some extant bullsh*). For example there are only so many marketing jobs out there because there are only so much marketing a company needs done. Sure adding your first 3 marketers may increase your revenue by 50% but adding your 300th marketer probably isn't going to increase your income at all, in fact it's likely it might actually be a negative investment. The problem is the marketer doesn't actually add a resources to the world, they aren't producing marketing widgets, they merely identify and optimize existing distribution channels, and help others become aware of your company, and there is only so much you can do in that area, there is only so much inefficiency that can be optimized away.

Contrast this instead with a plumber. You hire your first plumber he can do say 5 jobs a day, if you hire 3 more plumbers you can do 20 jobs a day now. Well let's suppose later on you hire another plumber he still adds the value to do 5 more jobs a day. Now you may say that there are only so many plumbing jobs out there, only so many people have their 3 year old push a bouncy ball down the toilet, but the plumber is also working on new housing and new business, the plumber isn't just optimizing the existing pie they are causing the overall size of the pie itself to increase. Now there does of course exist some sort of maximum to this, but after reading World War Z that explores this concept in quite a bit of depth (and has no similarity to the movie at all) I've realized that if society did collapse I as a software engineer have absolutely no real or applicable skills, whereas an electrician or a carpenter, they will be able to keep on doing their job as they were now, because they are creating actual wealth, not just optimizing existing wealth generation activities.

My point being a society with an overabundance of electricians, carpenters and plumbers is probably better off than a society with an overabundance of project managers, paralegals, and risk analysts.
Yes, and some places world cup viewership can take down the grid!
> The idea that an 18 year old would start their own household is an artifact from a small period in our history when 18 year olds could easily get an unskilled job that would afford a decent modest lifestyle.

I think this is the root of a lot of people's frustrations around housing, and adulthood. For most our history it was expected that you would have multiple generations sharing a household. The idea that you move out of your family's house the second you turn 18 or finish college is a relatively new idea. As parent commenter points out, this was really only the norm for two generations, suggesting that that, and not our current situation, is the historical outlier.

Living with your family for a while allows you to save money and help your parents out after they spent the better part of two decades raising you.
/*
* Samma på svenska..
*/
12 year old me would have greatly appreciated it. Instead I had to wait until college to get exposed to actual programming lessons and assignments.
I knew you would reply :)
> Outliers in what way?

I've never met one in real life. Anyway you want to look at it, such levels of muscle development is highly unusual. I doubt it's healthy either.

> I would suggest that while the lens of evaluating physical attractiveness in most of the western world currently largely aligns with physical fitness, this is a relatively recent development and far from universal.

I don't believe that. I don't really have a choice as to what I find attractive. I don't believe you do, either.

For example, I am never going to find "heroin chic" attractive, no matter how much the fashion industry pushes it. Some women like bald men, some don't, and there's nothing anyone can do to change that.
> Is there any evidence of this systematic underfeeding?

I provided evidence that our cultural ideas of what careers are and aren't masculine impacts women's interests in terms of career path. You provided no evidence that interests are a product of sexed brain chemistry. Your height analogy makes no sense and doesn't match up to our discussion.

> There just is no evidence that we are not educating girls fairly in science or any other domain.

I never argued that schools discriminate against women by offering them a worse education in those areas. I argued that our culture encourages certain interests above others in boys and girls by gendering those interests. Consider the example I linked, where the number of women pursuing careers in computer science fell precipitously after messing with computers became coded as a "boy hobby."

> You ignore giant influences like the education system which does a better job educating young girls in science and math than boys.

Girls get higher marks than boys in every subject, and the discrepancy is actually less pronounced in STEM fields [1]. But this is really irrelevant to our discussion.

[1]: https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/girls-get-better-...
See the text of the comment: "12/12/91". The `git blame` is likely due to not having imported the previous history as commits when the original import to the git repo happened. I worked at a company that moved from VSS to TFS for a ~10 year code base. It took months for the consultants to get the import to preserve the history. Too bad this didn't happen in this repo.

edit: Found this [0]

Initial git repository build. I'm not bothering with the full history, even though we have it. We can create a separate "historical" git archive of that later if we want to, and in the meantime it's about 3.2GB when imported into git - space that would just make the early git days unnecessarily complicated, when we don't have a lot of good infrastructure for it.

Let it rip!

0: https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/1da177e4c3f41524e88...
The degree is irrelevant. I don't doubt that men have privilege — but the "but women have it worse!" comment often shows up on articles like these, and since it's just whataboutism, it feels like it's suggesting that we shouldn't care about these issues.

Shouldn't we care about how society is treating people, no matter who they are, instead of getting into a pissing contest about who society is _really_ screwing over the most?

Not to mention, frankly, it's ridiculous to imply that a 35-year old male software engineer's experience is at all representative of that of the average male (who is far, far worse off).
It wouldn't solve all the world's problems, but it certainly wouldn't hurt.
any idea what liquidmetal is used for?
> probably

Your whole argument hinges on this word, you are not arguing in good faith, but rather, building a strawman. I'm not going to engage with this style. Thanks.

> I have no papers to show but I have been watching the debate from the sidelines:
I don’t believe much about situations I know only what media has enabled me to know.

If I were to assume anything, I’d first guess that a healthy marriage could endure a questionable relationship. If it did in fact end over that, it could have been due to underlying issues rather than something more scandalous.

I’d also guess that Epstein also did legitimate business, and with many people we don’t point fingers at.

Given that with the limited information available, I can’t draw a conclusion.
I don't understand why every distributed project has gravitated to write-optimized data structures; like, if you look at all of the decentralized SQL offerings, they are now all built around LSN trees... does no one have extremely large transactional (so not like, bulk data analysis OLAP but standard OLTP work) datasets that are more read than write (ones where raw replication to balance the I/O or CPU load of queries due to the space exploitation, so you want the kind of autosharding these solutions offer)? I guess I am just confused as I would have expected write-oriented workloads to be more rare and specialized, mostly operating in the regime of transient shopping carts (Amazon's original use case for Dynamo) or click logs or whatever, as I would have thought most projects (maybe a social network or a chat client) would have numerous reads (maybe even tens of thousands) for every write.
but why a mind map instead of a simple outline?
> Shopping for uphostered furniture based on fabric type seems more like a rich/poor divide than male/female, to me. Like, it doesn't even get interesting until you're way out of most people's price range, does it?

That doesn't stop car people who can only own a single, entry-level car from caring about all sorts of dimensions that don't meaningfully affect the boring commuter experience. And each of those dimensions has vocabulary words associated with it, which adds to the fun. If you feel a connection with a domain, be it furniture or computer hardware, you learn all the words and form lots of impractical opinions (again, because fun). It's not exclusive to rich people.

All the fabric, fashion, and color stuff probably has all sorts of cultural implications. "Seersucker" just "screams" "summer", or something. Stuff like that. It's fun. But you only have space for so much of it in your head, so with all the other categories of things, you just go based on surface-level experience. Maybe there's a correlation between wealth and the number of topics you have lots of highly-specific opinions about? But my guess based on experience is that it's a personality trait independent of wealth.
That's going to be severely problematic for those in the bottom 15% of the intelligence distribution when there comes a point that there is nothing in society they could do that wouldn't be actively counter productive.

Modern society and its trajectory seems a fundamentally unsustainable enterprise.
Lithium I picked as it's a heavy metal that wouldn't break down per se, though maybe the form it would exist in post-compost would be plenty benign. The sewage sludge issue I'm unfortunately aware of and have been following due to this case:

https://www.mainepublic.org/environment-and-outdoors/2022-02...

In my area the majority of contamination is from firefighting foams, and I think in the Bay area there's also a lot in groundwater from semiconductor manufacturing. My understanding is the known way to remove PFCs from soil involves baking at very high temperatures (like 500C) which is impractical at any scale.
For the visualizations - Milkdrop is alive and well as projectM (which sometimes comes bundled with VLC, sometimes not?): https://github.com/projectM-visualizer/projectm

Which has a ridiculous level of cross-platform compatibility. I can throw up 3 copies of projectM-pulseaudio on my big 3-monitor work machine and have it listen to any audio sink, I've got it installed on my Android TV and it happily responds to whatever audio's being played, so works with streaming apps and whatnot.

There's also thousands and thousands of presets you can add which the community has been adding to since way back when it was still milkdrop, and people have made curated lists like this person's NestDrop:
https://thefulldomeblog.com/2020/02/21/nestdrop-presets-coll...
Being able to sideload is a double edged sword. Yes, it would be a barrier for Apple to go to far overboard on monetizing the ecosystem. It would also give companies like Microsoft a means of ONLY distributing their applications via their own app store forcing you to side load this app store with less oversight. Maybe they add a forced installer to push their apps ? It's not that I trust Apple that much. It's that I trust other companies like Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Amazon less.
>That is not to say C students cannot be successful, but as discussed in the article Normies, Status, and Substack, if they are wildly successful financially and or in terms of social status, it’s due to a combination of luck (like inheriting a family business), timing (being early), or connections (such as knowing the right agent who can land you a highly sought after acting role), not due to raw intellectual horsepower or merit like in STEM or finance.

Isn't this just a lie? I didn't know anyone, didn't inherit anything from my lower class family and wasn't early. I was a D/F student, now I manage engineers. I've had reports with PhDs while I barely passed high school.

This post smacks of smug elitism and worship of academia, which is a failing institution with questionable value to society.
>Apple didn’t have an SDK ready, and tried to sell the shit sandwich of Web Apps as a stopgap.

And how exactly do you know that it always was their intent to make an SDK for third party developers?

From
https://9to5mac.com/2011/10/21/jobs-original-vision-for-the-...

"The App Store came later and apparently as a reaction to jailbreakers and developer backlash."
Git was released 7 April 2005, I imagine it existed and was used before v1.0 release, so 17 years checks out. It is git's age, not the code.
For anyone wanting to dip back into the nostalgia of Winamp and Milkdrop without installing any software, I made https://webamp.org for that exact purpose.

It can render real Milkdrop presets and real classic winamp skins directly in the browser.

Also, it’s open source: https://github.com/captbaritone/webamp
> First, folks with ADHD tend to lack empathy. It's ironic because we also tend to be very sensitive to others' emotions, leading us to think that we are feeling empathy. It's not.

This is a misconception. It's much like the misconception autistic people lack empathy. Some people without the condition lack the empathy to imagine any other explanation.

People with ADHD miss non verbal signals more often. They're more prone to difficulty putting their feelings and thoughts into words. They're more forgetful on average. Those things strain a relationship for sure. They aren't lack of empathy though.

> We often cover up for ourselves with pointless, white lies.

This isn't inherent to ADHD. Many people without ADHD do it. Many people with ADHD don't.
Nit: THE top HN contributor
That particular lousy "leader" bought your company and thought that the performance of your contract engineer all alone in his company could carry on at the level possible with your company's obviously highly effective employees and engineering engagement environmental support systems.

At least that explains him being isolated..

.. which actually foreshadows the conclusion of this story and even begs for more...

the engineer was employed with expectations of being able to perform like a entire department

obviously the CEO didn't grok his valuation mistake

and that's why after being a unacceptable ahold for a very actionable sounding amount of really lousy leadership level loosing litigation liability lingering low blows, the CEO was prepared to re-hire at double rate

the CEO clearly still believes that the whole department performance deal is possible and merely adjusted his salary and expenses expectations by the minimum I expect he was prepared to pay.

I don't think that the fundamental performance potential for this person and that position is actually unfortunately possible.

only positive possibility I can think of is using the CEOs presumption to hire a sufficient staff to do the work and end up VP/SVP report to the board up from contract engineer in one job half life. I've seen the similar kind of thing done. I presume your former colleague can hire your company back to buy some thinking time as well. If this is a current situation I hope this is some food for thought.
> 20 trillion in debt for illegal and stupid wars

That's really the elephant in the living room. Perhaps as a society we are poorer because we set fire to trillions in the deserts of Iraq and Afghanistan.

For the HN crowd here's a metric: the average seed round is like $2M these days, so Iraq at roughly $3 trillion would be enough to fund 1.5 million startup companies.
i see your point, but hans and runeard were not the primary _antagonist_ in each of those movies, and te ka was actually a good being who acted negatively because of maui's actions.

hand and runeard were essentially "living" props and if anyone one moana was a villain, it was maui. again, i see your point, but i think the point of the article and how i parsed it was that the pure good v evil villain motif has gotten significantly more nuanced recently.
I thought this was interesting point, way near the end:

"Even if Apple allowed sideloading, I don’t trust Apple to come up with an elegant solution, though. They will put every warning they can to discourage users from sideloading applications. It could make the user experience miserable, worse than it is on macOS. Why? Money is at stake here. A lot of money, actually. Because Apple seems to be run by lawyers and greedy people, we can expect everything."
In a modern codebase, would there be tests for code like this? Is it too late for a plucky contributor to start adding them?
That's market shifting though.

Apple does have a monopoly on the markets running on all their devices, from apps to media, for ~900 million phones. When Apple doesn't completely own the only available market service to it's hardware (that it exclusively gives itself), it still charges a 30% fee to it's competitors for access to it's markets while actively blocking everyone else.
Yes, but some of the history has been omitted. [1] Line 1035 includes the signoff "-TYT, 12/1291"

1. https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/1da177e4c3f41524e88...
History likes to repeat itself:

https://github.com/rootless-containers/slirp4netns
110v can easily kill you. It's a little harder to get a good solid connection through your body and into the ground than 220v. But it certainly can and does happen.
The use of goto out (or similar) is idiomatic in a lot of kernel code. Since C has no notion of defer (like Go) or a finally block (like languages with exceptions), you place the code you want to always execute at the end, and then goto out instead of returning earlier.

The other option, in functions like this, is to have duplicated "deferred" execution scattered throughout the function at each return point. This is a maintenance nightmare as it can be hard to discern which code is actually part of the "deferred" block (and needs to be copied) and which isn't, at least at a glance. So differences in two return points are clues that something may be wrong, but requires further investigation to determine if they should or should not be the same. As a function grows in size, this becomes increasingly problematic.

It's actually a good demonstration of DRY.
Really? There's no indication breakoutlist does that on their site? Or they just don't disclose if companies paid
Well hang on there! When the Camaro v5 first came out (2009) there was a pretty decent online community and what we discovered was dealers were completely unready to handle software updating and versioning. At the time, iPod/ iPhone/ general mp3 player software kept having breaking updates, so being able to obtain car stereo updates was important but impossible for large portions of the user base.

Which is how I wound up downloading 2 files from a person who apparently wrote the C# code for the radios and was saddened by the situation. The weirdest part was doing the upgrade: stick the files on two usb keys, turn the car on, stick the first key in the one port, remove it, open the driver side door as an indicator and then finish with the second key.

I've thought about that level of ... security every time I read about some malicious car hack.
The test aircraft was designed to see whether the coanda effect would produce the lift and controllability they desired. The rotor for that aircraft would be fixed. They didn't intend for VTOL with the model that had fixed wings, they would fly it like a regular airplane and see how she handled.
I like to ask what version of software they're running, and why. You might catch some change-adverse or bleeding-edge jockeys that way.
> Sibling comment to yours is writing about men who want women chained to the kitchen.

I said:

> There are examples of men who want women to be chained to the kitchen; we should consider the reasonable views though,

and

> Ignore the fringe elements

Emphasis added on the important parts. I was arguing there are always fringe elments, and to ignore those, not that the men who are shitheads are important to focus on. You're really twisting things around and I won't comment further on these bad-faith arguments, have a nice day.
> Am I allowed to have side projects that I own?
> Does your insurance cover my preferred doctors? (obviously more of an email question)

Your contract specifies that and other answers to other questions. Don't ask your interviewer this question, the only thing he/she can do is rely to HR. Best ask HR directly.

> Why did the person before me leave?

It is unlikely you are ever going to get answer to that and even if you get it, it will have low value.

First, there does not necessarily exist a link between your position and the person before you. If you are a developer then it is more like a pool with new developers replenishing losses over time.

Second, a lot of people do not really know why they leave.

Third, even if they do know, they do not give truthful answer. They might be saying something like "I needed a change", or they might be rationalising it in some way, where in fact they just got a better offer from FB.

Fourth, as an interviewer you might not be privvy to that information officially.

Fifth, even if, by accident you got to know this information privately, I still don't feel ok passing private information especially one that can be basically gossip.
I haven't seen startup data on levels.fyi
>It's not like they pulled the rug out from under you

Situations and therefore opinions are allowed to change over time. I could argue they pulled the rug out from under me when they removed Fortnite from the store, or started blocking apps I want such as Stadia. It's not like it's advertised on the phone "Hey we'll remove any app from the store that we don't like".
Ah, I have fond memories of hacking on that architecture for DEF CON. We wrote a lot of tools for it: by the end (less than 3 days after getting the spec), we had disassemblers, debuggers, binary rewriters, and even rudimentary decompilation support. It was quite a fun journey :)
Techniques for recovering certain biometric data from accelerometers, microphones, etc. is well-established.

Obviously the behavioral profiles are unaffected by this, considering it focuses primarily on browsing habits.
There are good reasons in response to: "Why we all think it's a great idea to leave our families at 18 and pay high rents so that we can live with strangers we found on the internet is beyond me," though personally I also don't believe that multigenerational housing is a symbol of failure, and often lets a person save a lot of money.

It's more difficult to maintain a romantic relationship when living with family (especially if both partners live with family), and it can also delay life skills (e.g. learning how to cook at home, clean, and generally learn to live more independently; though it's possible to deliberately learn this while living with family, it becomes a necessity to learn after moving out).
A New Method for Quantum Computing in Trapped Ions
Really excellent and in depth breakdown!