skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What puts me off the most is how corporations handled PR or in general the equality/equity topic. It is clear as day that they pretty quickly find a fall guy to promote someone whose qualification is gender or ethnicity or whatever. With the accompanying unofficial NDA that nobody is to criticise these moves. That is just not desirable basis for anyone.

> gain for one group must necessarily be a loss for another

Because that is the most realistic result. In the end it will be the people at the top deciding who gets the most cake and they are pressured by the sentiment of vocal minorities driven mostly by vanity, surprisingly often from the most privileged groups of all. Only solution here is to treat everyone equally and in the worst case, like the sentiment is now, it has to be enshrined in law.

Instead of policies for the "just" splitting of booty, increase access to opportunities and transience of mainly economic class in areas that are struggling.

And yes, generalizing white, black, latin or whatever people and trying to balance the scales always requires a racist approach. My opinion, perhaps wrong but I don't see evidence against it.

Now to my prejudice: Could it be that academics just don't understand that discriminating groups for a labor market inevitably makes them competitors in the labour market? The theories against the idea of a zero sum game cannot hold up, in fact you created it yourself by discriminating like you did. It is self-evidence by the metrics that are put up.

> people still found a way to believe they'll be harmed

Maybe it is you then?

> The change itself has to be the justification.

Ah, true believers, discussion pointless... typical for racists.
It also underhandedly increases forum switching costs and thus drives stickiness
Obviously, they don't prefer them in that sense.

But if the derailments are <X% of the trains, and the rest of the trains are more cost-effective enough to make up for those, especially if the costs of the derailment to the environment, communities, and employees and such are externalized away from the MBA making these decisions, then they may decide it is worthwhile.

This is one of the reasons so many people have varying levels of distaste aimed at "MBAs"... it's not that hard to train people to push numbers around in any number of industries. It's easy to equip somebody with an MBA capable of doing that. Heck, based on what I've seen of MBA training, it's trivial compared to an engineering degree, no offense particularly intended, but it really isn't that hard to tell whether this number is bigger than that number, even with some statistics thrown in. The problem is that there is no way to scale up understanding all the details that are not and perhaps even can not be in the numbers, and that's where the MBAs can go trampling over companies.

I'm sure the numbers on these jumbo trains look great, even accounting for the derailments. I'm sure of that because the fact they're running them is pretty much proof of that. If the numbers weren't good, they never would have become popular enough to be worth writing about in the first place. The question is, what about the things not in the numbers? That I can't speak to and must defer to people with experience in the industry. So must the MBAs, but they are trained, deliberately or otherwise, not to.
I don't see this as a Wall Street problem though; they should be able to optimize for their incentives within the rules structure. It's the regulators fault for allowing trains to be this long.
Can't you just use a credit card?

Every time any HN discussion veers toward alternative smartphone OSes, for instance, people come out of the woodwork to talk about how they just couldn't possibly access their bank without an Android or iOS device... what are you all doing with your bank so often? I log in a couple times a month, from my PC, to check balances and pay my car loan. I've certainly never needed a damn app.
Unionize, unionize, unionize.
I've worked in multiple fields, and I understand human nature. I would trust an org to have good intentions and generally put out good research, but I know that all humans and organizations are fallible, and including ACM. A bad study can get through any org. It doesn't have to be corruption either, just a miss. I never insisted that it must be corruption.
I can't help but wonder if this sort of stuff would already be banned in the USA had the Lac-Mégantic disaster happened 35km or so further south.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lac-M%C3%A9gantic_rail_disaste...

https://ici.radio-canada.ca/recit-numerique/891/bande-dessin...
Meant that they're only employing the exact number of doctors/nurses to meet their current capacity.

It's great for profitability, the tradeoff being when there's increased demand, it's inflexible.
Why do I get the feeling this happened:

- Sale went through

- Some internal bug occurred preventing money from being released

- Customer calls and asks about the money, support staff can't figure it out.

- Customer keeps calling because they want their money

- "Hey this customer that want's his money is getting annoying, can we please ban him?"
Longer trains derail much much easier. For example consider the "straight lining" phenomenon. Straight lining is a major cause for derailments. The straight lining forces are pretty much proportional to the weight of the cars behind the car that is subject to the straight lining forces.
Hyper efficiency isn't about you, it's for the corporation and, to no small degree, the insurance company.

I'd have to imagine that the amortized cost (millions?) for the MRI machine, it's operation and storage, and the trained personnel isn't free, but obviously much less than you and your insurance pay.
not really sure what you are referring to; ENS does not depend on IP addresses or have anything to do with internet protocol domain names.
Most people don't have internet connections fast enough to handle running their own website. Sure, you might handle a low-traffic page fine, but all it takes is hitting the second page of HN to bring it down.

Until about 2 years ago, I was on a 30 mbps connection. Gigabit wasn't even an available option.
From the essay:

"A final thought: the top judges in Britain are appointed for 18 years, which apparently is the length of time that Britain thinks offers the best balance of accountability and independence. So maybe our politicians should be elected for a single term of 18 years, with no chance of running for a second term? In such a case, they could spend 100% of their time focused on their legacy, without having to spend one minute thinking about re-election. If we outlaw a second term, but give them the equivalent of 4 terms, then they have the incentive and pressure to do some good in the limited time they have been granted."
Scripting COM components in Haskell (1998) [pdf]
My reading is that changing the word in the source code is really easy, but getting everyone's browsers to use the new version instead of their old cached one is difficult.
Which is beautiful, but is absolutely not something I would ever choose to pay for.
> With crypto you still need to trust someone:

Yes, but the people you need to trust are self-selected, anonymous, distributed, and unaccountable, which is, apparently, better somehow.
Day Trader Army Loses All the Money It Made in Meme-Stock Era
> Help me understand why Wall Street greed would prefer trains that derail to ones that don’t?

I don't know if it is true that they _prefer_ trains that derail vs ones that do not. I can try to understand their _incentives_ though.

I would assume that they are incentivized to make money _this quarter_ or _this year_. I would also assume that they aren't really _caring_ about consequences that are not _fiscal_.

Given these two incentives, if someone asked me "Should we ship this train that might derail?" I wouldn't say "no". I would ask "what are the fiscal consequences if it does?" and "How much does it cost to not?"

Famous Fight Club quote about recalls and such. Same thing with companies breaking the rules in exchange for some sort of fine. It's not that they _want to break the rules_ it's that it's they are _incentivized_ to make the choice that _increases their odds of fiscal growth_.
Wait, how so?

WASM isn't an interface or a wrapper, it's a language/format. Having trouble understanding what you mean by this, unless you're arguing that the WASM VM itself is the FFI?
The fact that it is multi-threaded (where .jpeg and .png are not) is also a huge deal.
It sounds like you’re talking about Buddhism. I’m talking about the recently popular mindfulness practice.
Because the feedback loops of Wall Street optimize short term gain over long term investment. They do so by actualizing risk.

A railroad engineer is going to value longevity/consistency, and lives to minimize (rather than capitalize) risk.

The two are not going to make good bed fellows.
I contacted my UK bank about this and they switched me to using an email confirmation where they send the OTP code to instead of via SMS. For my digital account, they previously sent me a card reader which the login process still accepts.
so they aborted the original solution???
We've got 7 horses all of which are used in lessons. We have a compact car.

Most of the people who run a riding barn probably do have a big-ass track to carry a horse trailer around but most of the people who start a riding barn lose money at it. (We've seen three individuals go out of business running a big horse barn down the road... It finally got somebody who is sensible.)

We started out really small (just two) so we never wound up with a large herd of unprofitable animals the way a lot of people do who feel pressured to get 10-15 horses right away.

The usual justification for that horse trailer is to go to and from horse shows which we don't do. When we get a new animal (maybe once every two years) we pay somebody with a truck to haul it for us.
>"It is 'stealing' from the content creators rather than youtube."

I'm not so sure, from what I understand these creators are typically paid upfront to embed the sponsorship in the video and they are given some promocode or url to present to watchers and that's how these sponsors track engagement. I don't think they check the watch time or the skip rate.
Been using Elixir since 2016 and I don't know anything about Erlang beyond "it uses BEAM". You don't need Erlang to use Elixir.
That'd be a reason to not mention the replacement word, but they could have mentioned the one they removed.
The thing is it’s not a choice between living on lentils and fancier food, it’s a choice between having a stable food source and having a food source that is dependent on huge amounts of your own manual labor which will still sometimes fail to feed you through no fault of your own, leaving you or your partner or children to go hungry and possibly starve to death. Ergo: nightmare.
I agree with the anti-pitch premise but am surprised by the backlash as it seems pretty common in my experience.
I think it's important to differentiate between groups, because it is definitely possible (and normal) in some situations not to ever need to understand Erlang or know anything about it.

If you are building a Phoenix web app, you can go many years and never run into non-trivial/non-obvious Erlang (excepting perhaps a small thing here or there, although many of those have Elixir wrappers now). I've also heard similar regarding Nerves apps.

On the other hand if you're writing a non-trivial CLI or app that doesn't use any sort of "framework" and you have to dig into OTP more than just the standard well-documented-in-elixir functions, then you will most likely run into the problem described in the question.

I don't think it's "an albatross" but it's certainly not ideal. Now that real apps/companies are using Elixir and it's not just the hobbiest/early adopters, it's an important question to ask and I'm glad to see it!

I wonder how much we can solve this by improving the Elixir docs. If we better document the areas where people end up digging into Erlang, it seems like it would help. I'm hesitant to accept the "to be a Sr Elixir dev you might just need to learn a little Erlang" but that's also worth considering.
As the creator of Phoenix, I've never written an Erlang program fwiw. That said, I frequent the Erlang docs and most seasoned Elixir developers will do the same because the standard library is a wealth of features, and the documentation while not 2022 polished, remains a remarkable resource.

> I don't know what a solution is, but perhaps a concerted effort to create a documentation and library ecosystem that never links back to Erlang would help. And where there are critical systems that use an Erlang library, perhaps rebuilding it in Elixir is in order?

This would not be helpful. Erlang has over three decades of features, heritage, and libraries. Elixir helped usher in first class documentation as a core language feature, but that doesn't make rock solid Erlang libraries somehow things that should be avoided. Rewriting for rewriting sake is also not a good idea. One of the benefits of bootstrapping off an already amazing platform is exactly because you don't have to invent the universe. See Clojure and Java.

In fact, Elixir has helped Erlang up its documentation game, and there is already work done to help the ecosystems share documentation tools. Both ecosystems work by rising together, not masking one or the other. We see this in tools like `telemetry`, documentation generators, and recently the Erlang Ecosystem Foundation:
https://erlef.org
I've heard it shrug.
My brother tried working for the railroads. He quit within a month.
It's lonely, it's dangerous, and you don't want to know how reckless the trains are being run in the US (around the midwest). There are train overpasses in my area which are cracked and falling apart (I can send you pictures).

The number of derailings, the amount of hazardous material (chlorine is a blip), and the skill drain has brought the rail industry to a crisis point. We're just waiting for its Hindenburg moment.
Given that Alphabet still refuses to release profit numbers for Youtube, right now, no one but Alphabet.

And given the context of this conversation is about ads, dark patterns, and more broadly, privacy, I think it's perfectly reasonable that we have that conversation.
I'm a bit rusty, but I think they are technically correctly placed— they separate many dependent clauses, interruptors and a time phrase from one independent clause at the beginning. The sentence is too structurally complex, though. My very strict undergraduate intro to expository writing class required using commas like this but it's definitely passé.
We are in an era of mythologizing that old white men are at the root of all problems, so thinkpieces like this have to mention old white men as a matter of course.

That said, however, the article is correct to assert that Agile, as implemented in real organizations, addresses the corporation's needs and only those needs. Otherwise, it wouldn't have been adopted at all, but dismissed as the snivelings of whiny insubordinate programmers who forgot just who signs the checks.
That's a pretty common scam in the US with FedEx as well... someone must have access to lots of tracking numbers, they sell stuff on ebay and provide a tracking that sort of matches your city and paypal won't do anything as long as tracking sort of matches the supposed destination.

I ordered a drone, but the package supposedly weighed 75lbs and consisted of 2 palets and went to my city but the wrong zip code according to tracking -- I documented everything and started a dispute but paypal did not care.

This works best with Fedex because they won't release full tracking details afaik unless you know the destination address, which you don't know, of course.
I agree with your facts. We differ on judgement and/or labelling.

Regulations made the sounds engineering solution very costly, in both time and money, so Boeing was forced to do a complex error prone hacky solution to stay within the regulatory constraints.

Don't really know what "reductive" means here, but it's probably not good :)
Erlang excels at the 'hard' parts of the problem space having to do with complex distributed ultra reliable systems, the 'number crunching' bits are offloaded to specialist languages because the underlying language model that Erlang uses does not lend itself for the kind of optimization that JS, Go, PHP etc have available to them simply because their runtime model is so completely different.

The biggest issue from what I know about how Erlang works internally is not so much the fact that Erlang could not in principle be made fast (and indeed, BeamASM will if it makes it to mainstream become a good step in the right direction), but that the whole way in which Erlang schedules its threads is super ineffecient in terms of cache use and besides the byte code interpreter relies on its ability to keep track of the number of reductions that it has done to determine when a thread has had enough cycles and we need to move on.

This means there will always be a fairly hard upper limit as to how far you can optimize Erlang byte code, it is at its core a cooperative multi tasking operating system inside a user process.

One of the more elegant ways to do such interop is to isolate your number crunching code to a separate process group working their way through a queue one unit of work at the time that way you can use all of the Erlang goodies and still get very good performance.
The phenomenon you're talking about, imo, doesn't have anything to do with Erlang or Elixir.

All languages have limits to what you can do natively. There will always be some tasks where you will cross a language barrier from "your" language to another. To me, the question is: "Is the area that Elixir covers big enough to recommend?" and I think the answer is yes.

I do not think most programmers need to learn Erlang to use Elixir - but I think programmers will often encounter Erlang and can decide to learn it (or look for a different library that's pure Elixir). I am sure that there are individual programmers who would learn pure Elixir, but get 'scared away' by Erlang...but I doubt they are hurting the language ecosystem in a meaningful way. Focusing on this would both be optimizing something that does not, in general, matter - and would be trying to achieve an impossible goal.
I'm a big fan of Virginia's governor system. The term is six years. You can be governor as many times as you like, but you cannot succeed yourself.

It's term limits without the limit and provides the elected official with enough time to get something meaningful done.

If you elect the wrong one, though, you're stuck with 'em for a while.
> You wouldn't ask a teacher or nurse to change careers because their employer or government is treating them poorly.

yes i am only talking about software developers.

> not everyone is able to just make a job change like you're suggesting.

why though? Those cushy jobs are dime a dozen everywhere. I don't see why someone is forced to work for a gaming company at low pay.
Waterfall (as a bad management practice, which sadly is still practiced) is bad when you're trying to run a large scale project and don't have feedback (because Waterfall does not include feedback). Waterfall-the-real-thing has no feedback loops built-in or severely delayed feedback (months of dev followed by months of testing, I'm watching my colleagues across the hall repeat this mistake right now, they "finished" dev last week but it won't be installed for the testers until the fall and they've started developing their next version of the system...morons). If you actually have biweekly feedback, you don't have Waterfall.

Planning and then executing on that plan in short increments is reasonable. Planning and executing on that plan over months or years, stupidity and insanity.
> nobody will pick up the required bill and infrastructure will just continue degrading to Third World status?

Laos, the poorest country in South East Asia which I guess would qualify as Third World, has a brand new Chinese-built high-speed railway. So I guess US railways are already worse than "Third World status".
If you could replace income tax with a national sales tax, I'd be all for it. The problem is, everyone knows any consumption based taxes will be in addition to the current taxes on productivity (e.g., income tax).

In any case, what the govt doesn't take in taxes, it can just take via inflation.

Wealth confiscation via inflation is great! it doesn't require politicians to justify higher taxes to their constituents (and thus face the wrath of their voters), and it can be implemented by unaccountable and unelected officials at the Fed.
Ask HN: How did you learn sales?
This question is for both sales people and technical people. Did you follow a course? Read some books? Got practical experience with a mentor?

Also, how would you recommend someone to start learning sales?
did you have an aha moment that finally made it all (genservers and entry points) make sense? if so, what was it?
the worst thing about ads in the middle of relaxing music is that they are typically loud and obnoxious, instantly destroying within milliseconds any mood/relaxation benefits accrued over the preceding few hours.

it's as if a frat party suddenly bombs your meditation group, trashes the place in 5 seconds, then leaves
As great an alternative as a car is to a unicycle
I follow industry news and talk to folks employed by Class I's, and this is not recent news. I would generally agree with the statement - if your job is to be aware of railroad industry issues, this will be at the top of your list or you'd simply be incompetent.

This article is strange in that it's focusing on a single issue of "PSR", but in general terms anyone casually following the industry even as a fan would be well aware of the labor vs. management conflict that has been brewing and escalating for decades. You can only squeeze so much efficiency out of systems before they break.
I apologize for the low effort gripe, but if their search is so great why do they feel the need to flood the entirety of google image search results?
Languages that compile to continuations often put the continuations on the heap. So think Standard ML and Scheme implementations, not all of them of course. SML/NJ is a specific example.

https://par.nsf.gov/servlets/purl/10201136
> I don't think it's "an albatross" but it's certainly not ideal.

I find the whole framing problematic. To call the foundation that you are building on and that you seek to displace an albatross is missing the option that it could easily be seen as being the other way around.
Ah well, who is John Galt?
From the essay, quoting Democracy For Realists:

----------------------

By Christopher H. Achen & Larry M. Bartels

Page 110-111

Canes-Wrone, Herron, and Shotts’s analysis identifies the circumstances under which an incumbent may be tempted to “pander” - implementing the policy preferred by the voters even though her private information suggests that it will not serve their interests. In their basic model, pandering occurs when the probability is not too high that the inferiority of the voters’ preferred policy will be revealed before the next election (and if the expected quality of a prospective challenger is strong enough that the incumbent has to worry about her public standing at election time).
Also Martin Luther King: "A society that has for 300 years done something special against the Negro must now do something special for the Negro."
It's even worse than that - a single person working you to death for his private island could be sated, could have a change of heart, could reduce the workload.

Everything is managed by managers for the same managers - there's literally nobody in charge; the bureaucracy perpetuates the bureaucracy for the sake of the bureaucracy.

http://johncbogle.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/n...
Yes, that's exactly why. And I assume they're pushing the app so hard because it's immune to ad blocking browsers and it can harvest more of your data.