skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Most blithely, no, software "engineers" are making out like bandits.

Recently, one of Alan Kay's talking points has been that "software engineering is an oxymoron", and I couldn't agree more. What he means by this is that, instead of the principled approach to design and development characteristic of other engineering disciplines, software people do little more than what amounts to tinkering. Partly this blame lies in the shift to agile methodologies, adapted whole heartedly with little understanding of what the old style process was doing. Projects, moving incrementally, are stuck in local maxima in the name of "product-market fit".

That's the demand side of things; you've described the supply side pretty well. Developers like dealing with problems, so they naturally and unconsciously seek out more complexity. If you look at how even mediocre developers can make >200K easily now, it's not hard to see how that's a massive problem for everyone. All this complexity, especially from getting the various separately developed components to work together, gatekeeps the profession and business of making software. I'm at one of the companies that doesn't spend the most to hire, or have the shiniest perks, and let me tell you, we're desperate to get anyone we can get. This is unsustainable, and I worry we need to solve it before AI takes the means of programming out of our hands.

So, what is to be done? There are plenty of examples of software that gave the non-programming masses a means to build. Spreadsheets like Excel are by far the most popular, and have driven corporate computer adoption since VisiCalc came out in 1979. When they were simple, scripting languages like PHP and Perl could be handled by a non-engineer, as long as the admin side was handled. But I think the most interesting cases are those of full, contained programming and authoring environments, like SmallTalk and HyperCard. By being the entire system, they could cut out all the accidental complexity brought on by these interfacing components, and instead let users focus on building software. Importantly, they don't deal with the concept of files for code - instead it lives alongside whatever object it's relevant to. For better or for worse, object-oriented code is easier to reason about and empathize with. The more imperative code gets, the more the programmer is forced to play computer, which I think is the determining factor in gatekeeping programming today. The way forward is having the computer explain itself, be visible, and unsurprising, which modern stacks seem to be moving away from.
Unneeded complexity is the greatest enemy of the software engineer.

Unnecessarily complicated is the default. Choose the elegant thing wherever possible (its not always possible, but often is).

Actively avoid complexity, or it will shackle you.
I think getting hired for a junior position will be more difficult, not less. There will certainly be more explaining to do. Keep targeting mid-level positions.
Do it

Sit down with your manager, tell them they have 2 months or you quit, then be prepared to quit.
> In traditional music notation notes an octave apart do not resemble each other.

This is what I'd emphasize. To sight read, the mapping from sign to note has to be so automatic it's unconscious. In standard notation this mapping looks different at every one of the middle four octaves, which nearly quadruples the size of the "multiplication table" you're installing in memory. Since your exposure in practice to the further ends of that range is less frequent, you're still slowed down by some notes even once the middle ones are automatic to you. (And there's probably some "cross talk" for a long time -- at least, that's how it felt to me.)

It's strange to me when people are like "eh, what's the big deal" about a UX failure that seems this big.
I’m betting 2025-2030 as well.

We have quantum AI math developed and photonic accelerators are currently in development. The moment those work reliably, machine learning will hit an exponential curve — particularly since those photonic circuits are already partially designed by AI.

The feedback loop of quantum-accelerated AI refining its own hardware is one breakthrough away.
Some of my friends used it to play older lan games
Stanford gets $1.1B for new climate school from John Doerr
I see it as a tech debt bubble cycle and almost inevitable in any industry/field. It will always ebb and flow.

On one hand it make work unnecessarily complicated and in some cases creates political problems because the more complicated a solution is the more governance, and the more governance, the more politics. A lot of these solutions get put in place because the people promoting them are incentivized to be the one who found the "solution".

On the other hand it creates new opportunities for those who have the courage to not accept other people's assumptions about what "good" is and to find out for themselves and separate the wheat from the chaff. If you can adeptly use Occam's razor to decide for yourself what works and what doesn't you'll be ahead of the curve. Just keep calm and code on.
Synapse (Matrix homeserver), mautrix-telegram (bridge for Telegram to Matrix), Element Web (Matrix client)
Mastodon (federated, activitypub Twitter-like)
SyncThing (P2P Dropbox) - fantastic for syncing my purchased music & ebooks between devices and sharing with my wife.

These are all on my small NixOS VPS (or individual devices for SyncThing) - I've been meaning to setup an old laptop as a server at home for home automation and media.
The crypto part is fine, not that I can claim to understand it.

The trustless model where the paper insists that irreversible transactions are the only acceptable form of financial settlement is hubris and ignorance.
Where are you seeing these for those prices? ebay? It'd be interesting to see what could be done with boards like this
How so? I'm sure you take my point: that by indulging selfish wants, we can harm others. Private situations, do what you like; shared or social contexts, not so much.
A person who's job it is to do research on security of software
Not sure what it's like now, but over a decade ago I made "online friends" on online games. Those were great times... Legend of Mir 2, Phantasy Star Online, Gunbound, even WoW!
What I like about Dodeka is not their notation, but the Dodeka keyboard.

I'm learning to play the piano now and the amount of stupid unnecessary complexity stemming from the fact that we've designed the keyboard to make playing in a single specific key easier and fuck everything else, is hurting my programmer brain.

That, and the fact that small-handed male players like me (and like 80 % of women) are gate-kept forever from a significant portion of music, just because.

It's a shame that our most versatile instrument is actually not that versatile. We could do better as a humanity.
Does Nebula have anything like Tailscale's rules engine? I am absolutely in love with being able to configure all my connections by just specifying a JSON file somewhere. No need to have firewalls, the configuration specifies which service or user can talk to which.

That having been said, I also am wary of using Tailscale for the same reasons as above, I have to trust Tailscale and Github? I can maybe justify trusting Tailscale, but trusting GH/Microsoft/other SSO provider is a bridge too far.
Datasette Lite: a server-side Python web application running in a browser
Thanks for the writeup!

I've tried running Synapse (and was partially successful) a little while ago but didn't try to federate as I never took the basic hosting of it anywhere.

I will try again when I have my new home infra set up.
Single player RPGs are just constrained writing exercises, the same way single player DMimg is just writing a book. I actively play in my campaign as a player, but spend a lot of spare time writing campaign settings I never intend to play. It's a blend of creativity and fun which most good hobbies have.
My experience actually living in suburbs is that when you’re not in your house, you’re driving: either on a highway or a stroad. Now I will admit that driving on a highway with pristine nature on both sides is pretty nice (love 280) but most of the time when you go places you’re in 4-6 lane road strip mall land, which is a much worse environment than either a proper urban neighborhood or proper nature.

If I could have a house truly situated in nature, I might like that, but that’s not what happens. You get a house situated in a suburban sprawl, and that sprawl is the day to day environment, and it is mostly artificial but in the worst ways: all the human art and ingenuity is directed towards the best interests of the cars instead of the people.
I have a decent amount of Tommy John's stuff. I personally think it's substantially higher quality than any of the Fruit of the Loom stuff that I've been able to find. Maybe it is 10x the price, but it's still cheap enough at the quantity I'm buying that I don't really notice.

Is there some other brand or big brand variant out there of similar quality that's like 2x or 5x the price instead? Not sure, I haven't been able to find any. I could research harder to try and find such a thing, but is that work on my part worth the potential price differential? I highly doubt it.

And why do we need this cheapest price obsession anyways? We're wearing this stuff on our most sensitive bits for most of our waking life, why is it necessary to get the cheapest thing we can possibly find? This 10x price is still a meaninglessly small fraction of total income, at least for me. I bet it's more in line with the historical price for what ordinary people wore than the cheapo stuff.

Maybe this alternate mode of product distribution feels weird. But I think the question we ought to be asking instead is why has there been such a race to the bottom in mainstream goods obtained via mainstream distribution routes? Your mainstream producers and store shelves mostly only have the lowest quality stuff that won't fall apart immediately. If we want something a little better, we need to invent a whole new mode of distribution. Maybe we should ask ourselves what's wrong with our current mainstream where you have to go outside them to get something that isn't junk.
Its really worth a watch for the narrative that it spins, and gives a really critical eye to mass media and the intellectual underpinnings of manufacturing of consent.

That said its hard to agree with the through-line of a sort of malevolence, drawing almost a direct line between Goebbels and Tide ads. Still, anything that makes one think critically about the impact of advertising and propaganda has some value
I got an ecc-ready used workstation on Ebay. After adding a smallish SSD for the system drive and upgrading the memory to 16GB I think my total cost was in the neighborhood of $200. Cost about as much as two top-end fully-equipped (case, heat sinks, disk) Pi4s, but is much more powerful, and, conveniently, includes space & ports for my SATA spinning-rust bulk storage disks.

It is a (fairly small) desktop tower, so it takes up quite a bit more space than a couple of Pis, though, again, it also encloses some internal hard drives, which is nice. I'm not sure about power use but I'd just gut-instinct guess it's equivalent to four or five Raspberries Pi, even if you take out the power to run the hard drives, so it is (probably) worse on that front.
Summit Interconnect Acquires Royal Circuit Solutions
I have a similar take. What startup can succeed selling $1.25 socks? None. Walmart and their suppliers have worked for decades at massive scale to trim every possible cost and make money on slim margins. For most startups selling physical goods, the only way to make money is to charge a premium. This is exactly how Tesla grew their business.
Another similar project: https://www.backchannel.co/old-home
Do note that Authentik, being a Python project, still uses a decent amount of RAM IMO.

I think Keycloak 18 should use less memory? Might be worth a try.
For my company I needed something with CUDA cores, got a 3070 Ti for $100 over MSRP. I could live with that.

Coming down, yes. Back to normal? Not until 2024 I bet.
Paxos is not byzantine fault tolerant
> Bitcoin is deflationary

This is a claim made repeatedly by Bitcoin proponents and opponents, based on various ideological differences.

But the statement is nonsensical. The statement "Bitcoin is deflationary" is exactly equivalent to the statement "Bitcoin will always increase in value".
Good socks are exceedingly difficult to find. I'm particular in what I want, something like diabetes socks that breathe and doesn't restrict blood-flow while looking fine to wear with dress shoes. I'd totally pay 3x and buy in bulk.
You skipped the "if".

In general you don't have to do that. That's obvious. But inside this theoretical scenario you made up, if you don't make a drastic change like that then your scenario is a dumb strawman argument that proves nothing.

The contractors aren't asking for anything the other video game workers don't get. If you don't preserve that aspect, your metaphor is useless.
Yes. This sh*t is unmanageable.
Intervals are ambiguous on the staff in the traditional system. They're disambiguated by reference to the clef and key signature. The whole point of this new system is to remove that ambiguity so you don't constantly have to keep the clef and key signature in mind when analyzing intervals.
The author writes database engines.
Ruby is a fantastic scripting language and I generally use it instead of Perl but for the ugliest corner cases, character encoding gotchas, *nix system oddities, etc I frequently find someone from the Perl community has had my problem and solved it with a regex.

I think it's the sysadmin culture. If your scripts are used by thousands of different servers hosting custom web apps and strange databases you'll run into every possible bug fast.
I believe this issue was discussed about 7 years ago. I believe this article still holds true.

https://pingineering.tumblr.com/post/116038532184/learn-to-s...

(let me know if someone has a better link.)
Do you think India has historically been better off than it is now?

Do you believe more than 10% of countries (20 in about 200) are worse off in 2020 than 1920?

To me, this does seem like unprecedented prosperity — on a global scale.
Plus, the little boy on the dock fishing at the start of (I think) one of the films.
Well put, there is no moat. Corporate customers really don’t want yet another network infra if they have Cloudflare + ZTN offerings.

Cloudflare, please make a box I can buy and stick it in the closet with a WAN connection. Routers suck, it’s time to reinvent them. Also please don’t make them look like goddamn spaceships.
This is something I can't fully understand. Why didn't Salvador choose Bitcoin instead of one of proof-of-stake currencies? Choosing BTC is one of the worst if not the worst choice: (1) enormous transaction fees make it completely useless for everyday payments, (2) proof-of-work has a negative influence on our environment that we can no longer ignore- you'd think that a state player would know that and chose to be a bit more responsible.
It's a way of sending commands to safely power down a linux (maybe *nix?) system even when it is in an otherwise unresponsive state -- I'm pretty sure not a kernel panic, but if it's otherwise frozen, these [0] may work.

The current usual advice
for a safe shutdown is REISUB, with the mnemonic 'Reboot Even If System Utterly Broken', but the old mnemonic a lot of folks will still know is 'Raising Skinny Elephants Is Utterly Boring'. It seems to have been replaced because it flushes data to disk earlier in the sequence than killing off processes, potentially leaving data from running processes un-flushed.

0 - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_SysRq_key
I've noticed there's been a lot of shoe startups in recent years. This is of interest to me because several years ago I broke my foot (Jones Fracture) thanks to poor advice from a shoe salesman for an expensive stability shoe of a major brand. The shoes were fine, but my orthopedic surgeon informed me I should avoid stability shoes if I want to avoid another 5th metatarsal break.

Based on my experience with looking for shoes (communications with the companies, etc), and trying one of the startup brands (the only one I could find with wide sizes), I've sworn off these startups. These days I just look at their products to see how absurd the price is. $100+ hoodies? Come on.
The price of those other currencies seems to somehow always be directly related to Bitcoin, so you are right GPUs aren’t used, but the claim still stands.
> I get it, maybe Tommy John is better than Fruit of the Loom. Or maybe not! I don’t know, Fruit of the Loom has been making underwear for a long time. They’re probably pretty good at it.

He’s stating that everything is a fungible commodity in his view and then gripes about the costs being different. Everything is not an interchangeable commodity and to view it that way creates a toxic race to the bottom.

The part that kills me is this is posted on a site called “machine learning everything” and yet the post shows a lack of basic understanding of basic data stuff, and zero desire or motivation to look into the actual data. Vastly different things are grouped and it goes well beyond just ignoring signs that they are actually different. In fact, in the face of such indicators he decides the best course is to actively refute them without looking into it to understand what’s going on.

And being a longtime producer of something absolutely does not have bearing on quality. There is a common brand arc where in the latter stages they cut costs and quality to capitalize on built up reputation.

Anyway I’d be curious on his opinion of cheap 40oz bottles of malt liquor vs normal beer.
I don’t understand why these mesh VPN companies don’t take themselves out of the trust loop? For example, by supporting Wireguard preshared keys (if that makes sense).

In light of the recent incidence at Okta, the risk of the VPN company or the identity provider getting compromised, or provided with a gag order by the government, should be accounted for.
Bitcoin is an energy-wasting competition masquerading as wealth. Bitcoin values are literally scores of proof for how much energy has been wasted "finding" and then trading it around, which wastes more energy.

But then people will also waste energy and throw real money into NFTs, hats, cosmetics, virtual spaceships... Bitcoin is just more of the same. An exploitation of some primitive human brain fart for percieved status in a rigged game.

Bitcoin's killer feature is speculation for the stupidity of people. What small cryptographic utility it might ever have is eclipsed by the illusion of currency and investment. It is a marketable enigma.
Thank-you, very informative.
> Our nation is currently on the downward slope of the bell-curve for civilizations.

A "civilisation" is more than the modern notion of a nation-state. Ancient Egypt lasted ~3000 years. Ancient Sumeria/Babylon (the Akkadians were the inheritors of that culture) lasted ~4000 years. Sumeria itself ~2000 years. Greece lasted ~3000 years (I'm counting from the Myceneans to fall of Constantinople). China is still going (~5000 years). And so on.

Recognisable "European" civilisation is only around ~1500 years old. If you go by history, we've got at least another 1500 years.
That’s exactly why many of the best engineers move to Silicon Valley and start their own startup, or work at an engineer-founded one.
Definitely not immune but far from perfect. I was talking to folks at PyCon about this problem. There’s definitely “framework fatigue” in data engineering.

Luigi, Airflow, Argo, Prefect, Dagster, bash + cron, MLFlow. Pandas, Dask, Spark, Fugue, etc.
I feel a bit silly, but I didn’t realize at the beginning that each art piece is a video to be played. (My bad for skimming the text probably, but the UI is a bit unusual as well.) Anyway, once I realized that, I understood much better why the author loves these. Each one has a lot of “character.” Thank you for sharing!
Your personal dislike of cloud SSO is not the same as "their attitude towards privacy". Before you do anything "permanently" you should read their reasoning behind that decision:

https://tailscale.com/kb/1013/sso-providers/

> Tailscale works on top of the SSO/IDP/IAM identity provider you or your company already use.

> We don’t support sign-up with email addresses. By design, Tailscale is not an identity provider: there are no Tailscale passwords.

> Using an identity provider is not only more secure than email and password, but it allow us to automatically rotate connection encryption keys, follow security policies set by your team (e.g., 2FA), and more.

You can BYO SAML provider if you like, you'll just have to pay for it: https://tailscale.com/kb/1119/sso-saml-oidc
> In high school and later on in rock/metal bands, I never actually used it. It was far more common to use guitar tablature

I know you know this, but I'd like to point out for others that Tab is specific to the guitar family (basses, ukulele, etc) it does not work for any other kind of instrument.
Adguard - PiHole alternative

Plex - media panacea

Transmission

Valheim - currently disabled, waiting for more content
We went from soap to nswag generated openapi clients. Full circle.
Thanks, I didn't know it started on Shark Tank. Ya one of the main issues is that the tests can show an immune response, but not the specific foods that triggered it. So they might report too strongly on foods in your system and miss foods that you haven't been eating lately.

I want to emphasize though that this is a situation where leads are more important than evidence. For example, my sensitivity to wheat was shown as normal but I have since discovered that it causes instant inflammation in my gut and I gain 5 pounds the next day, then go into a slow decline if I keep eating it. And it showed normal sensitivity to beans because I've been avoiding them, but I still can't eat most types except maybe garbanzos and lentils sparingly.

Also wanted to mention that I forgot introvert/extravert in my comment about TikTok and one's reaction to it. I was thinking more about how skepticism affects it, but our tastes are more complex than 1 scale, or even 4 bits for the 16 personalities of Myers-Briggs. Even 20-30 bits might not be able to predict them, since every personality is unique.

Edit: "stars in the sky" is what I meant in my previous comment (of course we can see the sky). I'm a bit OCD but with diverging thoughts so brevity is a real challenge for me.
It does! In fact replacing AWS security groups and making them cross region and cross platform was probably the first goal of the project. My coauthor, Nate, wrote Nebula's internal firewall code before we wrote a single line of the actual protocol, because he wanted to ensure it was performant enough for massive scale.
"Bitcoin has died 447 times" [0]

It's not an easy thing to kill.

[0] https://99bitcoins.com/bitcoin-obituaries/
The post made me irritated because of the smug sneer that seemed to be behind the words. It was as if this "phenomenon" is built solely on the ignorance of consumers who buy anything other than that cheapest option. No open-mindedness at all, and certainly no curiosity.
Your comment seems to imply that computer programming == web development. Would you say your comments also apply to embedded, mobile, games, data science/ML and scientific computing?
When I was younger I was aware of the idea of perverse and misaligned incentives, but I never would have expected the extent to which they pervade practically every human institution.
> attend offline events! Be adventerous Meeting in-person is harder but increases the intimacy and richness of communication. Combine an offline meetup with a walk through a park or a museum for maximum serendipity.

Clearly you missed this part of post.