skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you're a middle class European working in oil and you're a bit naive and insulated from that sort of news and current events then it's easy to miss. Dubai marketed itself well enough that many people just see one side of things, so they might believe it's a wealthy, paradise of capitalism where there are some poor foreign labourers but they don't fully appreciate the scale of the abuse.

A few of my school friends moved out there (and Abu Dhabi), they see it as a sort of dream land where they can live a luxurious life they believe they thoroughly deserve and earned. They're a mixture of disbelieving there's some gross stuff going on and dismissive of its severity. An argument I've seen by one was that there are no countries that can escape criticism, which is true in a way but it just feels a bit more cruel and deliberate in the Gulf.

So that explains a little bit of the indifference to the defacto slavery, however these sort of stories where the person suffering is white may give them pause for thought...
Something something blissful ignorance...
ProTip: "Cornelius undoubtedly committed fraud", according to the article. Never commit fraud in the UAE.
I've been to Dubai, and other parts of the UAE, a few times. It can be enjoyable for short durations, but I am not sure I'd want to live there long term.

I am not saying the things you mentioned do not happen, but they're not as overly apparent as they are in some other parts of the Middle East, or China.

The heat though, yeah, that's a thing. When you have air conditioned bus stops, it's a different level.
While I'm sure we all understand your sentiment, I think you're missing the point.
This isn't the future we /users/ want. It's the future that corporations, silly commities and greed-/arrogance-/bling-motivated decision makers are dictating to the rest of the world.

What we're witnessing in these Thinkpad, right-to-repair, yEaR oF tEh nix dEsKtop conversations, is people taking back control of the devices we own. At the cost of compromises the same decision makers are not willing to allow you to make.

It's easy to look at these case studys as outliers or edge cases as someone who probably lives in the first world, adding to the pile of e-waste by perpetuating and encouraging the behaviour supporting companies like Apple.

What I see as an IT engineer at mid-size MSP is the SMB/SME market and their staff struggle with adapting to the ever-changing technologies. I feel their pain, because I'm the one that has to make old work with new. Privateers and coders get to choose their environment for the most part. Businesses have baggage, standard operating procedures and a mix of requirements. And then you get people like Apple thinking we can all live wirelessly or with exorbitantly priced adapters and less choice as consumers of their products... it's arrogant and user-hostile.
Covid testing policies influenced by.. covid testing companies. 'Covid experts' working for companies with similar interests?
I like these threads because I enjoy reading other people's experiences. The article in question is a fairly weak take down of pair programming, for many of the reasons others have stated. It just sounds like the writer doesn't really understand the point of it and enjoys working alone.

Pair programming definitely has pros and cons. The teams I've been on in my company have been very deliberate about when and how we pair program. Most of my experiences have been positive, especially in person pair programming. Pair programming over video calls is much harder for me.
I’d like advice on how to tackle this as well.
They address this in the article by saying it is "relevant" experience. They've given themselves some wiggle room there and I'm assuming they will trust their hiring practices to make sure they don't hire someone with 10 1 year experiences.
> In the article there is a quote, “There is no personal data more sensitive than our DNA.“

> This seems a bogus assertion to me. I can imagine many diagnostic health test results that would be more sensitive to leak than DNA (e.g., STD and drug tests).

> DNA sequencing is eventually going to be so cheap and ubiquitous that it will happen to everyone anyway.

> Having published my own results (https://enki.org/2017/10/17/publishing-my-genome/), I really don’t buy into the idea that DNA is the most personal data that can be leaked.

> (Nevertheless, there should be more obvious warnings to customers about how their data will be monetized.)

> In the article there is a quote, “There is no personal data more sensitive than our DNA.“

> This seems a bogus assertion to me. I can imagine many diagnostic health test results that would be more sensitive to leak than DNA (e.g., STD and drug tests).

It's still PHI, and in this case subject to at least the Data Protection Act. The walk-in centers at Gatwick and Heathrow may have tested non-UK citizens. If so, they may run into compliance issues with GDPR or other privacy regs. Not sure how that plays out.

Guess I'll have to wait for the investigation results....

> Having published my own results (https://enki.org/2017/10/17/publishing-my-genome/), I really don’t buy into the idea that DNA is the most personal data that can be leaked.

Being as (at least in the US) DNA is used as evidence to conclusively identify (or exclude) those accused of crime (i.e. rape kits, etc) I'd say that a court of law would consider it to be essentially personal info.
To be honest, I found this to be a painful read, as I often find when I think the author is woefully lacking in self awareness:

> “Look Cesar, the truth is that, if you are a mediocre researcher, but your department wants to keep you, they’ll find a way to keep you. And if you are a strong researcher, and your department wants to get rid of you, they’ll find a way to get rid of you.”

> I finally got “an answer.” The president of MIT told me that tenure was not about research, productivity, or merit. It was about office politics & being liked by your department.

The first paragraph basically defines every group of humans in the history of humanity. If you are trying to join a group (and, mind you, under rules that can make it extremely difficult if not impossible to ever kick you out of that group), if people plain old just don't like you, they will try very hard not to let you in the group. You can complain about this being "office politics", but that's just plain old human nature.

And the fact that the author thinks the second paragraph, a conclusion that "The president of MIT told me that tenure was not about research, productivity, or merit", follows from the first, just shows a woeful lack of understanding around how human groups organize.

I'm certainly not denying some places have worse office politics than others, and academia is famous for "the emotions are so high because the stakes are so low"- type of drama, but when I see missives like this, where the author just seems so clueless as to how corporations functions, I feel a ton of pity for him, but also can't help but think I probably wouldn't want to work with him either.
And there's no specification on how that wear-leveling works (or doesn't work).
Yeah, that sums it up pretty nicely. It's like tap water, I'm used to it being there and I use it without thinking about it. But there's no problem just going on a weekend (or week long) trip without any internet connectivity (unless you depend on your phone for navigation, but you get what I mean).
I’ll extend you the benefit of the doubt and assume your intention is to be helpful.

Can you be a little more specific and thus potentially actionable?
If the reward function is sufficiently dense, then likely yes. RL uses function approximators to solve problems, so in theory the perturbations of the chaotic system shouldn't matter as much.
Saudi Arabia is considerably worse on every aspect, it just gets even less press.
YOE has little correlation with performance.
I don't think it will be lucrative for fb because Microsoft is already working in that problem space, and has been for a while. They were working on it via Xbox Kinect back during the Xbox 360 days, and merged that into HoloLens suite 5-ish years ago I think. That's a big lead time, no matter how much money you throw at the problem.

Additionally, Microsoft actually is able to engage with the big corporate clients that want or have a need for data visualization, the US government chief among them. The "VR workroom" or conference call is a neat gimmick - the VR or AR security briefing or military planning session is a massive leap forward in capability, and there's a lot of money there.
Also, sure, one can debate whether the masses were right to execute the aristocracy… but surely we can all agree that the aristocracy were lethally wrong that the masses didn’t matter.

I hope for their sake that the capitalists realize this before it’s too late for everyone.
They make the assumption that someone will disrupt it or spoof it. Same for Galileo and GPS. Might be them, might be someone else, but they're so easy and effective to spoof/disrupt that it'd be stupid to assume they could rely on any such system.

They also suspect that other people might make use of it, and that denying its use to those others would be a good idea.
Color me skeptical. In order to burn 1000 kcal in 60 minutes a cyclist would have to sustain a power output of about 280 W. Do you have a calibrated power meter, or are you going by the "vanity" calories displayed by most stationary bikes?

There are certainly plenty of trained cyclists who can maintain that power output, but I've never seen anyone reach that level after only 3 months. If you really did that then you're an extreme genetic outlier with an unusually fast training response.
don't hold your breath. ex-doctor the OG antivax Wakefield committed malpractice by not getting informed consent to do all kinds of tests on autistic children, and he's free as ever. :/
question is too open, it depends on the issue.
even plastic surgeries for aesthetics alone range from few thousands to hundreds thousands.
hospital bills can inflate to millions and more.
> COVID/WFH only turbocharges this: tall white guys have way less edge over Zoom.

Being tall probably matters less, sure.

I do find that ability to communicate in writing with English-speaking audiences is much more important than it used to be. Technical communication and persuasion that used to happen in hallways and on whiteboards is now happening in discussion threads, written code reviews, design papers, etc. In some cases, I expect people that some people that used to struggle now benefit from the ability to communicate more deliberately or without a verbal accent.

I don't know that white versus non-white maps to excellent writing skills as such. Partly because I'm never sure what folks mean by "white" in these contexts.
so windows 11 slowly reduces itself to be chrome os?
Whoa! So weird to see pg and sama usernames as green!
Of course it’s enjoyable for brief tourist/business visits, you’ve got literal slaves attending to you.
I discovered HN around 2012, been visiting this site the first thing every morning for a decade now.

Happy birthday HN :)
Boring Company has submitted a proposal for 6.2-mile underground system in Miami
People do care about privacy. But, they don't have any power. Many people have to go to work, and they don't have time to fiddle in rioting etc. And, there is high chance that these people will be called terrorist for rioting such things. In fact some will even claim they are destroying property, and they should be incarcerated. And, there can be cases like rats in the group are taking advantage of protest. We can see this with BLM where few people deceived entire world by committing shenanigans in name of doing deeds.

Also, if people riot, there is no way to be sure that a positive thing will happen. We can clearly see this from Arab Spring. Many people thought there would be liberation, but what we got in return? Dictators got removed, just to be replaced by another dictator. In fact, it backfired and now autocrats have more power than past. Those days are gone where we ended horrific things like slavery and liberated the world with democracy. We have become too greedy with the capitalist society, as indicated by covid scenario. Sorry, for digressing.
If you’re talking about Telegram Desktop it’s written in C++ with Qt for the UI, I don’t think it’s even really comparable to Discord in that regard
Probably because they were told they'll lose their jobs if they don't comply. (Hey, they were given a choice! They chose this voluntarily!) /s /s /s
Depends on the company, but 40 hours a week minimum is pretty common where you're actually working the majority of it. Lots of meetings too that you might not feel are actual work as coordination is challenging regardless of WFH. Some weeks I work a lot more than 40 hours (especially closing out a big project), so maybe 70+. I wouldn't work for any company where that is the norm though as they've done plenty of studies to show humans aren't meant to work at that level for long. The diminishing returns are huge. As far as vacation, I think to get what you have, you'd need like 15+ years of experience at most companies. Generally an entry level employee in tech would be lucky to get 2 weeks of vacation plus maybe a week of sick time and a few holidays. I would not recommend working on a team with on-call responsibilities. I did that for 8 years and any weekend I was on-call, would be called frequently to fix obscure problems. Between the frequency of the calls and the difficulties in finding an answer to the hours of the calls (middle of the night), to even the existential dread of getting yet another call, I just wouldn't do it. They say pay is factored into that role, but it never is in my opinion.

$100k relative to what? Most traditional engineers with engineering degrees start at like $75k to $80k, and will reach $100k with at least 5 years of experience, but can decrease that by job hopping. I think that the majority of IT jobs (especially without a STEM background) are similar, but start a bit lower. $100k is extremely good money in plenty of places in the US as you can still get a starter house for $150k in plenty of places in the American South if you're in a suburb. $100k is less awesome in some place like New York city or silicon valley. I don't think too many tech workers start at $100k in the US. That is the cream of the crop that graduate from ivy league computer science programs and go straight to work at one of the FAANG companies. I think that is the exception rather than the norm.
I almost do nothing on my phone. When I go outside, it's natural for me to daydream when I'm sitting down on a bench or whatever. I think it's partly because of how shitty the web browsing experience on a phone is (I don't have any social media apps installed).
Ubuntu has been my daily driver for well over a decade now. As a developer I always wanted to give Fedora a try. Every two years or so I give it a chance and... Not even once did I succed in installing it.

Just Google "fedora won't install" and you'll see what I mean. From my perspective fedora is a meme distro.

Yes, I'm a power user. I just don't want to spend a whole day on something that's expected to work out of the box.
The last two places I've worked paired fairly heavily, perhaps 50% of the time, and on some squads mobbing has been popular as well.

As an introvert, I prefer to go solo unless I'm working on something I know would benefit from additional knowledge or brainpower, but I've found pairing to be the single most powerful tool I know for training junior devs and for bringing people up to speed on code bases, languages, techniques, or business domains -- which is often quite important.

There is undoubtedly a velocity cost in the short term, since ideally the junior person ("junior" here might be a senior person who is new to the code or the business) will "drive" (type) more, and some time is spent in the teaching. But the investment in higher overall knowledge of the team, and in catching bugs/avoiding dead ends early, tends to pay off.

One subtle thing that takes time and practice is deciding when to stop pairing, because one or both of you needs a break, or time to think about the problem at one's own speed.

I also think one can become over-reliant on pairing for learning. Personally I love reading (even printed books!) for learning languages, and writing for shaping thinking and capturing knowledge for future people. Not everyone loves these activities equally, but they are important skills for engineers to develop, and pairing is not a replacement for them.

Finally, sometimes it's good to just go off and think for awhile.[1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f84n5oFoZBc
You can just try it out here from the browser if you like:

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/cognitive-service...
> All driven by useful idiots that chanted "it's just two weeks" and "if it only saves one life".

Nope, just the "useful idiots".
Interesting! I didn't know this phenomenon had a name. I've seen the "dead sea effect" at a well known SV bigtech co as well. And this company has biannual performance review rituals.
Not seeing how that is similar at all.
I disagree, new Reddit is fundamentally flawed, and worse than old Reddit in almost every way. I will stop using Reddit the day old.reddit.com stops working.
I agree it is "personal data". I disagree that it is "more sensitive" than other data.
> They are “de-identified” from the lab info, but dna can’t be truly deidentified because it’s dna.

DNA is not just random numbers. You can reconstruct the whole family tree from just DNA samples. With DNA samples of the whole population we could reconstruct the family tree of the whole nation alive and even some generations back. Add in some DNA samples associated with medical records and you can use this to predict the probability genetic disorders. The more data points you can connect to this structure the less anonymous it becomes.

The key is to get DNA from a majority of the population to close the gaps in your relationship network.
Kubernetes is hardly ‘container tech’, but a cluster management and scheduling tool for large volumes of containers or VMs. FreeBSD has its own “container”-like feature called Jails, which was written by phk long before Docker / lxc / namespaces were a thing. For the ease of Docker’s CLI and config, use iocage; for cluster management like k8s, look at Nomad. It might not be as flashy and enterprisey as the Linux equivalent, but FreeBSD can easily compete with Linux in containers.
Btw, combined with ZFS, Jails are just beautiful. iocage integrates directly with ZFS and creates snapshots before upgrades, data sets per container, shared data sets for base system etc. It’s really really nice.
Do we have any modern day equivalents to this I would like to see a standalone system that has no ability to connect to anything except an audio jack that you could hook to your existing cell phone to get secure coms out.
I think there's a mix of reasons.

One is that they see it as a kind of failure -- like, for them to pursue a job in industry is to admit that they just weren't good enough for academia. This is part of the "cult" aspect I was talking about.

Another is the unknown -- they feel like they have a reasonable amount of freedom to choose what to do when they're in academia, and fear that when moving to industry they'll just have to do whatever they're told; not knowing that at their level, they'd have more freedom in industry (and they have more restrictions in academia) than they realize.

Another I think is the "almost there" aspect: a combination of the sunk costs fallacy and optimism. If you'd told my friend at the age of 30 that he'd still be on 2-year contracts at the age of 50, he probably would have chosen a different career path. But at each stage, it always seems like getting something permanent might be 3-5 years away.

Related to this is the known: one friend genuinely likes and respects his PE, and feels a loyalty to him. How can I tell him that in my opinion, if his PE actually cared about him, he would be shoving him out the door and telling him to go into industry, rather than making noises about possibly finding money for him to keep working for him for another 2-3 years (at which point he'll again have the prospect of losing his job)? I mean, I'm sure his PE actually is a good person and just hasn't thought seriously about the situation; but that doesn't really excuse him.

I do try to hint at these things, but how do you tell someone that you think this thing that they are passionate about and in love with -- something they've invested decades of their life in -- is actually toxic and abusive?
I mean, I’m a little edgy about a fairly recent bereavement, but if that’s filtering into my opinions about comp structure then I’m probably pretty bad at my job, and therefore my opinions will trend towards utter irrelevance.
Always wondered why anyone would use desktop on BSD.

Use stuff where it fits well for its purpose.

I use Windows only for gaming, Mac for development and Linux for servers where they excel at what they do.

Also I really don't get why BSD developers care to develop desktop environment with their limited resource but they should just concentrate on server offerings if they want to stay relevant besides having a more free license than Linux.
Ask HN: Is there VC appetite for defense related startups?
I was wondering if there is VC appetite for defense based tech companies.

We are in advanced talks (hence the throw away) with M&A teams of various of the top defense contractors for our startup, but me as CTO can't help but wonder if a VC model for us going forward wouldn't also be a good fit. Traditionally VC's shied away from hardware and defense startups but with the funding round of Anduril perhaps this is changing.

Katherine Boyle of A16Z also had something to say about how VC investment and Defense in the past didn't make sense, but that things could be changing [1].

The second problem with VC's is it is notoriously difficult to get in contact with the correct person, thus the proposal below. Dang let me know if this is not allowed please.

If there are any VC's perhaps interested you can contact me here

throwawaydefence at gmail dot com

and I can send you our prospectus / NDA agreement.

[1] - https://www.defensenews.com/smr/cultural-clash/2020/01/30/the-math-doesnt-make-sense-why-venture-capital-firms-are-wary-of-defense-focused-investments/

Edit - To address some of the comments below, this is a well established team (~50), with a proven track record, many years in the industry and a well developed sales pipeline, relationships and technology base.

So not just an idea or proposal thing, startup was maybe the wrong characterization but since this is HN...

The deal is (I believe) well above the typical SBIR grants threshold.
It’s not a lack of resources it’s a lack of will. You can’t force parents to use the food programs. Hell around where I live you can’t stop the parents from stealing from their kids to buy drugs. Send a coat home with a kid on Friday, Monday they show up with no coat.
All three systems are incredibly easy to jam. The signals from the satellites are very low power by the time the reach Earth, and in fact are below the noise floor. Recievers use processing gain tricks in order to see them at all.

I don't remember the RF energy decay rate but there is a X^2 term in there, which means the energy decays exponentially with distance. So a jammer 10 miles away doesn't have to try very hard to drown out a satellite 13000 miles away.
That’s fascinating to me. I’d love to chat more deeply about that, but I can’t see a way to get at the essence of the difference in an HN thread.
This is legit also because it’s already happening in the sea/boats, but it’s the same for every other position system, maybe they put less trust in Glonass? In this case every states/military should use a hidden/unknown position system because the “official ones” could be hacked.