skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sometimes there is a real reason for someone to work a weekend or off hours. In every reasonable place I've worked, this has been offset with some other free time. Work Saturday, but take off on Tuesday to make up for it. Or work a late night maintenance window, but take a quiet no meetings day the next day.
Sybil Attacks, System's Thinking
The ‘effect’ was zero. This was a randomised double-blind controlled trial, by far the largest of its kind.

The story should end here.
They have recently threatened to murder all of western society with nuclear weapons should it choose to intercede to prevent the mass murder they are presently perpetrating upon the old folks women and children of one of their neighbors while discussing the possibility of perpetrating further mass murders against its other neighbors.

The only saving grace is that this is probably but not certainly a bluff.
ActivityPub is so poorly/vaguely specified that basically every real world implementation follows what Mastodon does, so good luck with trying to get what you're after without being at least indirectly dependent on the decisions of yet another Twitter clone.
Remember "Apple’s insider-trading policy enforcer accused of insider trading"?

He got inside information from being...chairman of the committee that managed disclosure of sensitive information.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/02/lawyer-who-wrote...
Director of engineering for CockroachDB SQL here.

One of the major pain points we have with Go is the lack of language support for monomorphization. We rely on a hand-built monomorphizing code generator [0] to compile CockroachDB's vectorized SQL engine [1]. Vectorized SQL is about producing efficient, type and operator specific code for each SQL operator. As such, we rely on true monomorphization to produce a performant SQL query engine.

I have a hope that, eventually, Go Generics will be performant enough to support this use case. As the author points out, there is nothing in the spec that prevents this potential future! That future is not yet here, but that's okay.

There are probably some less performance-sensitive use cases within CockroachDB's code base that could benefit from generics, but we haven't spend time looking into it yet.

[0]: https://github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach/blob/master/pkg/sql...

[1]: https://www.cockroachlabs.com/blog/how-we-built-a-vectorized...
Other effective early interventions work within this timeframe eg sotrovimab.
I'm so happy to be using f-droid, lineageOS and no google apps (including play store)....
Which brands if you don't mind sharing?
A fairer comparison with swiping a credit card would be if you used the wallet like a credit card: just give it to the cashier, let them take out what is required and give it back to you.
I expect we’re going to see most generic Go code happening at the lower levels of the stack. So cintainer libraries, utility/algo functions, and probably in some contexts around databases/ORMs. Outside of these contexts —- and because most usage will be able to simply leverage type deduction —- I’d guess most app code will look pretty similar to what we’ve seen before.
> The real world is messy, as much as programmers want to think it's not.

You hit the nail on the head with the whole comment and that line in particular.

I'll add that one of the most effective ways to deal with some of the messiness/complexity is simply to avoid it. Doing that is easier said than done these days because complexity is often introduced through a dependency. Or perhaps the benefits of adopting some popular architecture (eg: containerization) is hiding the complexity within.

> It's because system design is a lot less theoretically clean

Yea this is a major problem. It's sort of a dark art.
Wow. I recommend everyone read through that page. Some may love it. Obviously the bosses at SOCi do. For me it is a dystopian nightmare.

To summarize: there are three roles, Typist, Navigator, and Support.

The Typist is not allowed to think. They are explicitly described as a "smart input device". For the most part, only the Navigator is allowed to think. They tell the Typist exactly what to type, and the Typist must follow everything the Navigator speaks, to the letter.

The Support only looks over both their shoulders and sets a 10 minute timer after which the roles rotate. Yes, every 10 minutes everyone switches roles.

When working in person, one thing this selects for is people with perfect vision. Elderly programmers need not apply!

Why do I say that? Well, I have computer glasses that let me see my screen perfectly even at my age. This applies to anyone over 40-50: if you don't have them already, I strongly recommend getting a pair of single vision prescription lenses tuned for your normal distance from the screen. Since I use a laptop, these glasses are set for a 20" focus distance. I have two external monitors (one landscape above the laptop, the other in portrait mode to one side), and I keep those at the same 20" distance from my eyes. It is glorious! Everything is in focus, all the time.

If we're sitting around a desk, it's almost certain that I won't be able to read what's on your screen, for the simple reason that it won't be at a distance that brings it into focus (probably much too far away).

Oh, and you may like dark themes and tiny fonts like all the young people use these days. So even if it were at the right distance I wouldn't be able to read what's on the screen.

Mobbing on a Zoom call mitigates the focus distance, but the dark theme and tiny fonts would still mean I can't see your code.

And webcams are supposed to be on all the time so your fellow mobsters can see your face. A nice sentiment, but two problems:

1. I can't work sitting. If I do, I fall asleep after a while.

2. I can work standing, but not standing still! (I'm no John Carmack, who can give an hour long talk without moving a muscle.) I have to move around in order to think and stay alive. So I would constantly be walking in and out of camera range, or stretching, or wiggling around on my Fluidstance balance board, or just looking out the window for a vision break.

A more delicate problem: Sometimes older people need to take more frequent bathroom breaks, and the timing may be unpredictable, especially for someone like me who eats a lot of fiber for intestinal health. Sorry, I may not be able to just "hold it" until the next scheduled mob break. (Apologies for the TMI.)

This whole thing is an ADA compliance lawsuit just waiting to happen. (And no, I'm not going to be the test case; I have no interest in working for a company with these practices.)
This is a magnetic loop antenna; it works on a very different principle than a dipole antenna. The author of this piece is very misinformed.
More common than you think. I’ve seen it happen more often than not when a startup grows quickly and the original “CTO” doesn’t want to manage people, so they hire an outside manager.

CEO doesn’t want the original CTO to lose face, so there’s a bit of an awkward period while the new manager on boards. Not an ideal situation but life isn’t always ideal, definitely a surmountable situation though.
This is like fiver?
I have never seen that class SerializationUtils used in the wild. Now if it was in Jackson...
> I have medical issues with no meaningful diagnosis, despite seeing many doctors.

This isn't directly related to your point, but why is this even the norm? Why are you going from human to human seeking answers to some arcane mystery like you're on a Skyrim quest.

Imagine a system where you wouldn't need to see any doctors. You would type in all of your symptoms as accurately as you can with as much detail as you can, perhaps with a timeline, and as output you'd get the most likely causes (a diagnosis). Maybe that system would even have your medical history (and that of other people and related diagnoses) to better predictions.

It seems to me that a system like this would be significantly better than going to a couple of humans that are arbitrarily local to you and asking them to figure it out. It is slowly improving all the time just in the form of Google and WebMD. Even before 2010 I accurately diagnosed myself with Bell's palsy with the internet and the doctor begrudgingly asked how I had made that diagnosis. Confirmation from the human doctor was nice but redundant.
True. And I do think it taught me a valuable lesson that needed to be learned so I wouldn't say it was a bad thing all together staying longer, just expensive.
Wealthy Canadians tend to just come to the US in order to skip the waiting lines.
If CNN hangs on until the next election cycle, they'll be fine.

Enough Americans seem to be too politically brainwashed in election cycles and need emotional support when their side loses.

If some investors invest in both Fox and CNN, keep only a few key people permanently and hire others temporarily as they are needed (depending on which side the elections tip every 2 years), they will do much better.
Yes, there are visual indicators that the post has been edited, similar to how it is on GitHub.
> how will Facebook grow?

Probably by buying the next up and coming networks, just like they did with Instagram and Whatsapp.
And honestly if the whole company was like your manager an argument could be made you still made the right choice. Just wanted to share my experience :)
Airlines, Restaurant Chains Join the Subscription Bandwagon
Of course not. They probably just wanted to pay a laughably small amount to make a clone of Twitter. And whether the client asked for it to be done or not, the outsourced development group they hired copied the source code while removing the required attribution.
>Sudafed working the same way as Strattera

Well I have (currently) unmedicated ADHD and pseudoephedrine never did a thing for me besides clear my sinuses, so it's good to know beforehand that trying Strattera will be useless. My problem must be more dopamine and less so norepinepherine.
Bengaluru man hacks IndiGo's website to find his lost luggage
Declining fertility is probably one part bad health and one part inequality. It has zero parts to do with too many brown folks coming to live in our nation.

It is a logical absurdity to suppose that folks coming to America are a threat to the integrity of western civilization while those who descended from immigrants are part of it. We are all of us who grew up in the west and who have chosen to come live here a part of western civilization. There is no them we are all us.
And if the defroster fails, like many I've seen? Phone for help?
Why would you wear AirPods while doing anything remotely serious?

I don't even like doing watercooler talk with my AirPods in, let alone trying to close millions in funding...
I've found the opposite. An approximate quick and dirty visual representation can transport almost instantly the knowledge that writing back and forth for half an hour could never achieve.

When I learn about and talk about a system a visual representation of the flows of data and function calls is playing in my head. I get an overview of the system and what it does. Think "mental model". I "see" that this service calls that service to get that piece of data, which it gets from that database table and it all flows over there to do that and suddenly it all makes sense. I recall those high level flows for a very long time too and I have no idea how I do it. It just happens. I hope my mind keeps doing this for a very long time still.

I can talk about it and it makes perfect sense to me. There are other people at the company usually that share the same knowledge and understanding and if we speak a similar enough language we can communicate well. And then there are people that do not seem to get this level of understanding, even after prolonged periods of working on the same code base. Ever. When you ask them to explain to you how the systems and modules interact, they can't.

And then you draw some simple graphs of this service and that service, and this database here etc. and it finally clicks for them. They could not synthesize this from code or written text. They only ever saw the local view of the module they worked in. Overall, more abstract flow of information and modules was lost to them. You have to actually visualize it for them.

Note that I am not talking about "visual programming" as in drawing UML like diagrams and such to actually program. It's purely about showing data flow and call stack and such. Usually I don't need to draw this for myself as my head does it for me and it works really well with statically typed languages without any magic going on where I can just have the IDE navigate to exactly the right places, find all the code references quickly and accurately etc. One time (a looong time ago) I actually threw together a quick script to generate a graphviz file for the call graph of some system based on some proprietary database's stored procedures that I had to quickly come up to speed with and that nobody was there to explain to me. I think it printed out to like 15 pages that I taped up on the wall next to me just to make sense of it. No IDE support to click through from one procedure to the other.
> People on HN can't figure out cash?

> Whatever is going on, it's not about convenience.

I feel like using the phase "figure out" and then saying it's not about convenience is directly contradictory. I can't think of any way where handing someone my plastic index card, swiping it through a machine, and returning it is ever less convenient than shuffling through cash, counting it, handing It over, having the other person count it, calculate change, count change, and hand over various paper bills and coins that I don't want to be carrying.
The Taco Bell subscription ($10 for 30 days of daily free tacos) could be worthwhile if you (1) could buy two subscriptions and use them both in one visit, or (2) live within a block of a Taco Bell. Otherwise most people would end up buying other menu items with each visit, essentially negating the apparent savings.
Adoption of smartphones was also learning to adopt to a major technology change.

Adoption was also spread unevenly. Some parts of the country moved past flip phones long before others. There are still holdouts!

Cars will be an entirely different matter. People are trained to accept internet enabled devices and ridesharing already.

Once insurance rates for manual navigation clear those of an autonomous fleet vehicle, people won’t want the oil can Henry’s experience anymore.

You can already tell most people don’t want to drive anyway. They are looking at their smartphones as they idle down the street.
I mean, if you asked random passersby in Stanford (my alma mater) about Donald Knuth, 4 out of 5 wouldn’t have heard of him. Or 9 out of 10, more pessimistically. Approximately nowhere are academics hailed as local heroes.
Yes, these are social networks. Arguably even a vBulletin forum is a social network and I’ve met some of my best friends in life on those when I was a young lad.

If you can post somewhere as a person, build a reputation or identity there, interact with a community and build relationships: congrats, you have a social network. The mechanics of me replying to you on HN, sending an iMessage to a girl, sending a Slack message to my boss or posting to a group in Discord are nearly identical but the people and the intricacies of the software differ. This is one of the reasons I’ve never been a fan of the “Facebook is a social media monopoly” line of thinking, at least in America. Just doesn’t work if you sit down and think about it, it’s just another website that does a few things better than some others and they are massively successful because of what they’ve chosen to be good at.

HN is a lot like /., Digg or very early Reddit to me, and it makes sense because it was started with a lot of the same ideas towards the end of that era, but with a purpose to serve Y Combinator’s needs.
Get back to me when it can go into my kitchen for the first time and make me a cup of coffee.
For news stories, moderators can approve publishers (e.g. techcrunch.com) and then they don't need to review individual links anymore (though the ability to override this for individual links remains). Same for posts and authors.

If a post is edited to be something bad, there is still the fallback on reports and post-hoc moderation, making it not any more risky than having the local/federated timelines in the first place.

There's a finite number of publishers/authors that regularly create popular content, so the workload decreases after an initial burst.
Indeed! And even then drawing can help with the programming!

Discussing code for linked lists for example, having the box and pointer notation for what happens and scenarios very helpful!

[1]<->[2]<->[3] to [1]<->[3] means changing [1]'s and [3]'s pointers and freeing [2]
> If the model is trained on data from Colorado, it will underdiagnose Lyme disease in patients from New England (high false negative rate). The only way I know to overcome this problem is to create even larger data sets, but this just isn't possible with data privacy laws.

My understanding is that high dimensionality in the domain is exactly where ML excels (so add location as an input), and that is exactly what a medical diagnosis involves. Perhaps the legislation will get there one day.
Your telephone company doesn't choose to filter a selection of incoming callers including not only friends but friends of friends of friends in order to expose you to the folks who will keep you on the phone the longest which accidentally turns out to be the folks that play on your existing deep seated anxieties and deficiencies.
Sounds super cool. The downside of this wet lab computing is the feedback is so much longer and debugging is much more difficult.

Part of the joy of programming for many people is the instant feedback you get and the ability to go through the logic of the code line by line to debug and reason.

I feel a lot of that is lost once you start pipetting instead of typing.
None of what you said about companies is true in Germany. You're able to sign up for a company Steuernummer easier than in the US, in fact.
One of the hardest things for me is walking away from a solution I know is right. It's hard to realize that you will have to deal with a less than ideal solution because of internal politics but at the end of the day it's not worth it. Go home to your family and work on projects you enjoy and when work makes you write slop give it to em just as sloppy as they want it. Hopefully you work at a company where you don't know what in talking about but many of you in sure know exactly what solution you went to bat for and the various irrational reasons it never got built and to those of you out there I sympathize.
I disagree with this (sort of) for a couple of reasons:

1. For one, I think it's hard enough just to keep technical documentation up to date. Keeping separate business process docs up to date with code feels like it would be a collosal task.

2. That said, most software at least starts with some amount of requirements (whether that be a formal spec or a bunch of Jira epics). I have rarely seen any engineer start first by reading all of the old business requirements before trying to understand the code.

3. Even if the business requirements were documented perfectly, I rarely find that they are the major issue with understanding a code base.
What does it mean to contend with Tesla in this industry? They're aiming to become the 5th place self-driving car company?
Possibly, but you're equating "contractor" == "employee" when in reality you have more options.

1. No one said you _had_ to do that job for that client. You don't have that flexibility as an employee.

2. Don't feel like putting up with all the bullshit? Keep raising your rates until a) it's worth your while (I personally can put up with a lot of BS for $400/hour) or b) until they decide you're too expensive and let you go. This is not an option when dealing with your employer.

3. Having downtime as a consultant in between clients is seen as normal. Between employers, it can be a death knell.

Knowing, and willingly to execute, these options gives you a completely different perspective than being an employee. Which means you handle the situtations differently (better?).
> Delivering gasoline to gas stations for example requires hooking up hoses etc

However delivering electrons to a powerpoint doesn't :)

I get your point though. The last mile stuff is tricky and fiddly, and will be done manually long after the long haul stuff has been automated.
> I first discovered MUDs as a child while portscanning for open SMTP servers so I could send spoofed email to my friends

a growing set of Gen Alpha kids are doing the same in "metaverse"-branded online worlds, but earning a little crypto here and there from whatever they launch or interact with and use it to buy knockoff jpeg apes

maybe a lot of things make more sense with that knowledge, not a lot of people understand whats going on yet, but probably the same distribution of people that figured out children with computers were portscanning in whatever decade that was
His full-length online novel was the funnest thing I've read in the last decade: https://unsongbook.com/ (a little googling will also turn up Kindle/ePub versions)
“for a combined generating capacity of 429 megawatts” according to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windpark_Noordoostpolder. I read that sentence as “under optimal circumstances” the Windpark can deliver 430MW. Whereas the datacenter will have sustained need of Power 365x24. IMHO that it a completely different thing. Please someone explain how Facebook could manage it's datacenter on local Netherlands sustainable Energy sources?
How to Be a Better Innovator
tangential question: I'm 37 and think I have ADHD. My partner thinks I do, and when I read posts like this I deeply identify with them. What should I do? Get a diagnosis? My ignorance thinks the only course after that is drugs which doesn't sound that appealing..
Frameworks like Quarkus and Micronaut do this at compile time. They dynamically load things and record it, then insert the resulting bytecode statically in the build artifact. I believe the core motivator is performance, but it has the added benefit of eliminating most of the runtime magic that leads to vulnerabilities like this.
The light from this star that astronomers just spotted is 12.9B years old
I feel like it’s a little bit of a flag in the latter section that they’re taking it for granted that someone is “just underperforming” and that it’s obviously not some other issue.

Like idk, I do buy that managers might sometimes taper over what are “really” performance issues as if they’re relational, but I feel like you should spend some time addressing the seemingly obvious possibility of “are your managers right and this is a relationship issue”?
S3 Is Not a Backup
Web Developers Are Shopify Developers
Russian oil tankers are vanishing off the map
My wife makes us clean the house, run the laundry, and do any budgeting we need to do on a Saturday (the time depends on our plans). It takes an hour or two in total if you just focus on finishing quickly. Does it suck? Yes. Do I moan about it? Yes. Am I a big kid? Probably. But get it out the way as soon as possible and the rest of the weekend is yours to enjoy :)
So much of consulting is effectively digging in dysfunctional organizations and circumventing their people problems..

For example, coordinating between team A and team B, because they are unable to (or refuse to) communicate effectively; or submitting a convincing report to management with data/conclusions/proposal that some team in their company effectively had already a year ago, but were unable to get the management to implement the proposals because they cost a lot of money and they wouldn't believe their own people unless outside consultants said that this really needs to be done.

And of course there's sales. And pre-sales, and post-sales followup that's effectively sales for the next, much bigger projects... No, consulting is definitely not a way to escape politics.