skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Technology is only neutral in the sense that guns, nuclear weapons, and neurotoxins are neutral. No, not all technology is the same, and much of it is evil. This loosely falls into the same fallacy of "it can either work or fail, so there's a 50% chance" - you are wildly misrepresenting the space in order to project a stance of neutrality.

I really think what you're saying is just something engineers tell themselves to feel better about what they do. I hear it more often from people at FAANG, defense contractors, and other morally ambiguous places than anywhere else.

Also, if you're the guy building a tool that's oppressing someone, you are the guy building the means to oppress someone. There's nothing neutral about that.
The bulls**t Canonical wants you to jump through before they will give
What are the top 3 things you learned that every company should be aware of? Could be interesting to have an experienced view on this :)
Infusion of spinal fluid from young mice reversed the memory loss
Imagine what the lifelong prospects for the Flint kids are going to be.
Baltimore, Chicago, Detroit, Milwaukee, Newark, New York, Pittsburgh, Washington, D.C all have high lead levels in their drinking water. These cities are often associated with minority violence but what if its all a direct result of high lead levels and the cities / states failing the vulnerable people that live there.
NFLX may be slowing down hiring, but they also laid off 150 full-time employees, in addition to part timers and contractors: https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/netflix-announces-more-layof...
That was actually addressed in the article with a parent noting that a hike the kid went on didn't show up in the app.
The entire android ecosystem. F-droid is free and works. You're way less free using iOS which you have 0 control over vs. Android which things can be rebuilt on. iOS could disappear tomorrow forever and there's not a single thing you could do about it.
What is a hyper local online service, like services for someone you closely relate to geographically or socially?

Could you give an example?
OKRs are a joke made up by MBA product focused types to try and remain relevant
A Chinese spy in New York posed as a dissident for years, befriended activists
Livestream Shopping Is Coming to Youtube
Ahah so sorry. Hope this is because of the substance, not about the form ;)
200x more expensive and a single point of failure? I can't see why they would pick that.
Memphis website: https://memphis.dev
Memphis documentation: https://docs.memphis.dev
That's how a search engine should work: it returns only what you asks of it, knows how many results there are, can be forced to use your query verbatim.
In what sense does it contribute? Yes, putting any amount of lead into the atmosphere is bad, but it isn't so bad if it is so dilute that it is basically background levels. I'd imagine low quality lead pipes, and fruit juice, are a much bigger cause of high lead levels than small plane engines.
Yep, it’s by no means the most common stack but it does power a few critical services. We’re actually hiring for an elixir role right now (non-senior/mid-career, prior elixir not required).
I think there is a switch somewhere which changes the mail store from monolithic to one file per mail. Or is it the database which is so large?
I was going to write that this was demonstrably untrue, but then I saw the muted-microphone shot of an interviewee laughing without context before cutting to a straight-faced interview segment that appeared more natural (at time = 80 s), which was quite possibly recorded after the straight-faced segment to make the video's happy tone consistent: https://youtu.be/N0ng8R0_Tis?t=80
Love my Konftel Ego portable bluetooth speakerphone. It stays plugged into USB power 99% of the time on my desk but the audio quality for myself as well as how others hear me is leaps and bounds better than any other solution I have found, including headsets.

Obviously if there are others in the room/house then a speakerphone may not be the best solution; but if you aren't going to annoy others I find a speaker phone far less fatiguing than dealing with headsets all day.
I think a lot of what you said emphasizes my view on non technical people making decisions and/or being the public face of a very technical product. I don't mean everyone in this regard.

But I imagine many of us have been on the side of being told that marketing/user retention wants a dark pattern introduced. "User Research" wants all kinds of tracking introduced. Finance wants ads. Management wants something quicker so we cut corners (or worse they tell us to release something even though we say its not ready and very buggy but marketing was making a big deal about it... which I have personally been involved in. Will give one guess how that one went and then who was blamed). Or any other decision made by someone non technical that is a bad decision and is another controversy waiting to happen.

I still see technology as a great force. I still believe in it. I am lucky that my current job, I don't have to deal with any of these things. But we are not a consumer facing operation. But when I look to the future, I find myself asking myself. Where is the industry going and it feels like it's just constantly getting worse. I worry about being in a position of needing to be involved in that again.
> many of those apps were hot garbage that generated a huge account takeover problem

Are there any publicly known examples of this? I'm not doubting that it's happened, I've just never actually heard about any cases of this with respect to the Gmail OAuth API specifically.
Has anyone attempted to get an id.me verification for DL/passport recently?

They require you to do a smartphone face scanning-fingerprint to get your id.me... (fuck this company BTW)

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and they make you do a facial recog sig for mundane bullshit such that they can build their faceDB.

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Yeah, I wouldn't say everyone becomes gym rats, but I think that a lot of users have some power user functionality they use.

In the same sense gyms do not only contain machines being used by everyone, there are overlapping subsets people use.

The feature equivalent of Pareto's principle or something.
> handful of rice

Maybe 20 years ago.
Deno 1.22
There is also this https://worldvectorlogo.com/
Fusion can and hopefully will be competitive in the near future, but gravity based storage is just not possible to scale unless we're talking about massive hydroelectric dams. I didn't know about energy vault and yeah the investment amount they managed to get is insane. Centrifugal energy storage can be used as a short term buffer somewhat economically for variations in demand, but not actual storage. Thankfully natural gas and other fossil fuels store just fine as they are, and peaker plants are very cheap as they're usually just the old low efficiency plants, available at essentially zero capital cost.
Same, I get all my work done in 4 hours a week. The rest is "me" time and chores
Good luck getting anyone at a publicly listed company to sign off on a video promoting a $xxx million project with candid unrehearsed interviews.
Do you have references to these claims? I'm not saying it's impossible but this shocking and much higher / more prevalent than I would've thought
The law doesn't use the term "platform" so your point is moot.
> It could, but detecting whether it has to “drop out” has a performance impact.

I would be ok with a flag that raised an exception/halted if the restricted dynamicism was encountered, if it meant appreciable performance gains.

For every project I've worked on, and every project I've really become familiar with, the "magic" that requires these crazy levels of dynamicism can relatively easily be avoided, with more "standard" interfaces, and possibly a very slight increase in complexity presented to the library user.

I used to play with python magic frequently, but eventually realized my motivation was just some meta code-flex game I was playing, and it's almost certainly never worth it, if other developers are involved.
I have problems being associated with the rest of humanity, considering all the awful shit they get up to.

I don't see a reason to call out tech as being worse than other industries I could name. It is uniquely awful in a number of ways, but so are others.
Who decided that oil should be accounted for when it's burned and not when it's extracted? That is a choice, and it is a choice that benefit some people over others, and it's not a choice that most people would agree with.
Yeah exactly, if I `require important.rb` in this file, and `important.rb` wasn't committed how did that project even build and get deployed. Any sane build system will instantly fail for this situations. Looks like an issue with dev ops/engineering culture rather than .gitignore
"Each generation thinks it invented sex." -Robert Heinlein
Looks interesting. Reminds me of the web-based desktops that started popping up in the early 2000s.
da da dummmm....
Couldn't agree more on this. Even if finance, sales, marketing or other deps are involved, billing is an engineering thing! Back in 2016, while building the billing system for qonto.com (european fintech unicorn), we were surrounded by people willing to add complexity to a thing they don't understand.
A team of 2 engineers building it ended up in a whole squad called "Pricing Cross Functional Team"... even the name of this team was complex :)
Have you not looked at Stripe? Their product is fairly straight forward to set up
I like the annual prize anthologies (for short fiction, that would be Best American Short Stories, the O. Henry Prize Stories and the Pushcart Prize Anthology (the last includes poetry and essays, and genre identifications are sometimes incorrect). I also get recommendations from writers that I follow on Twitter. My incubating project has my own recommendations showing up little by little at https://litjunction.com (anyone who wants an invite can email me at don.hosek@gmail.com and I'll throw one out—right now I’m focusing on making sure that as much of the lobste.rs excess as possible is pulled out of the site but I can handle a small influx of new contributors/commenters etc.)
> Want to buy a car? The best review of what car to buy is probably happening in a car enthusiast discord or slack maybe an e-mail newsletter.

I thought about this and I disagree. Indexing discord/slack (even if would be possible) would probably just add a lot more noise. Yes there might be an occasional gem in a discord channel discussion, but vast majority of time it would be low quality content/chatter. There is another problem - how do you rank it? If someone says on Discord that earth is flat how do you know they are right or wrong? What signal can you use - emoji like count? How do you rank this result vs a wikipedia result?

It is still more likely that the best review of a car will come from a specialized car review site (that is not ad-ridden).
Uhm. Explain to me the method for which one may opt out of biometrics.

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I assure you, you may all provide a singular response.
HUD[1][2] is the source for the 35% of households figure.

1. https://www.gao.gov/blog/2018/06/20/lead-paint-in-housing

2. Here's a better source actually: https://www.hud.gov/sites/documents/AHHS_REPORT.PDF
Ask HN: Annoyed by opening too many browser tabs?
- very easily, often got too many browser tabs (window) opened...

- tried this chrome extension for several days, seems it helps :-) share here...
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tab-limiter/pbpfchnddjilendkobiabenojlniemoh

other better solutions?
> For what it's worth, Firefox lets you edit them

Would it work with a... opionated website with a hundreds of !important all over the CSS?
I mean, building tensorflow is generally an awful experience.
Might want to just try a high quality conference speakerphone. They have advanced audio processing, directional microphones, noise cancellation, etc. built in - since they are designed for this kind of audio from the ground up.

You can find the Konftel Ego for $80 at Provantage.com (around $120 everywhere else). Konftel makes amazing speakerphones that rival polycomm, for a lot less. Indeed, I actually prefer their sound to polycomm.

The Ego will be a dramatic upgrade from whatever is built into your other gear. If you still aren't happy with it, then you can start going down the USB/XLR microphone rathole if you still prefer. But it's probably unnecessary.
https://archive.ph/CCylQ
> There is evidence that Tether is making moves to improve.

Such as? There is concrete evidence that Tether has repeatedly defrauded the field.
Richard Steenbergen has regularly given the presentation "Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Optical" at NANOG over the years; October 2019:

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nKeZaNwPKPo

APNIC/NZNOG had a good presentation focusing on sub-sea optical stuff (January 2020)):

* https://blog.apnic.net/2020/02/12/at-the-bottom-of-the-sea-a...

For longer distances (>100km), you want to do a search for "coherent optics".
To me the cool thing is working through a PyTorch-based course like FastAI on a local Mac may now be above the tolerably fast threshold.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27440675#27448881

> https://itwire.com/business-it-news/security/infosec-researc... (2019)

> https://itwire.com/business-it-news/security/krebs-accused-o... (2020)

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=krebs%20doxx&sort=byDate&type=...
It definitely is an edge case.

But I'd push back on the 1 subscription per customer idea. Consider any physical fulfillment business, where you have an optional annual membership (amazon prime, costco, whatever) and N subscriptions of varying frequencies for physical products.

It doesn't make sense to roll these into a single subscription on the backend (unless the periodicity happens to line up perfectly, and even then there's a heated debate, since you still probably want them to be separate charges).

You can go down the route of creating N "virtual" customers for each "real" customer, but it doesn't really solve the problems, because these N customers have a complex relationship with each other that you need to encode and manage.

Hence, the name of this post :). It's definitely not easy!
Your career is what I aspired to when I started in this industry over a decade ago. But what ended up happening was that I (a) worked full-time while dabbling on nights and weekends, (b) spent several years trying to decide which project I wanted to really pursue in earnest, and then (c) after picking the project, obsessing over it so much that I never felt it was ready to release. So it's...not going well so far lol.

Can you recall any specific thing you did that brought you success?
According to the article this seems allowed:

> [...] This restriction does not apply to code that runs in a virtual machine or an interpreter where either provides indirect access to Android APIs (such as JavaScript in a webview or browser).

Also blocking Firefox to install an APK would be anti-competitive, because Google's own Chrome also allows APK installations.
The reason billing systems are hard is because they tend to just accumulate features/behaviours/requirements. Forever. Although billing is not my specialty I have had to involve myself in it as product owner and business unit manager. Try and imagine the amount of logic, complexity, rules, and exceptions involved in a system that has accumulated perhaps 30-40 years of customer sign-ups. Umpteen contracts, umpteen iterations of each contract, and perhaps 50 or 100 products, each sold in 10 or 100 countries. I now know more about the tax system in South America than I ever wanted to.
I have no idea what you are talking about. Every Google service (not just GMail), and every major service provider on the internet, uses OAuth 2 as the standard for authorizing API access.
I was paid $165k a year by a neobank startup to.....build their bank. It's now responsible for over $200mm a year in revenue. I was the sole engineer on the project.

Good engineers are worth their weight in gold.
Just went over the comments and am once again amazed that none of the comments goes into the referenced message; most people discuss something else, or ask questions that are answered in the referenced message; but hardly anyone seems to care that the most important technical head of the company is leaving, or why just now (that he is leaving at this time seems rather coincidental according to the text, and why leaving a well paid, secure position for a startup, at his age?).
'c' is dependent on the medium. The value of c as it is commonly known, 300 million meters per second, is in vacuum. Light traveling through other media is affected by its index of refraction, in the case of silica fiber, that is approximately 1.5 so radiation propagates much slower through silica than it does a vacuum. Since gases have low refractive indicies already, within a hundred ppm or so of a vacuum, you could essentially round air to 1.
If you need multiple letter variable names, your function may be too long, or you are using a language that does not let you express yourself.
Couldn't agree more!
I do think the best way to do it is to log ingested events in a db, and decide which way you want to aggregate a billable feature at a defined billable period. This way lets you (i) keep track of everything, (ii) invoice complex behaviors and (iii) provide great granularity to your customers inside a final invoice.
if a human participates in interactive gamified social media, and this participation begins to change, shape, reinforce or otherwise mutate their beliefs, for the purposes of the test are they still actually a human? could the entire social media mechanism (from the builders to the participants) be considered a form of a sort of singleton autonomous intelligence in and of itself?
Light only travels at C in a vacuum (so it doesn't actually travel at C in a standard fiber optic cable, it's actually much slower).
I don't believe that there is a lot of confidence in Europe now. In fact shortly after the war I have been advised to sell all European stocks because European company will be impacted by an energy shortage. At the same time I was advised against purchasing USA stocks since they were over evaluated but now instead the Down Jones ( but not the Nasdaq ) has changed evaluation to interesting. And yes Canada is interesting as well.
update: AT&T won't let the Pixel 4a on either! Time to switch networks.
A presentation at a conference like NANOG, APNIC, IETF, etc. See my other comment:

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31426614
I work on a project that is 20 million lines of code - while large someone reading this is working on a project much larger. There is no way any human working alone can prove the whole thing. I have no idea how to even get started. Even if I did, until I can prove theorem proving is useful in the real world I'm stuck doing it as a side project: my boss will encourage it, but if I spend no more than a couple hours a week one it

Now in my company we are worried about bugs and reliability. If I can show via example that theorem proving catches bugs they will train all developers on it and demand all code be proved. However proving quality needs to be something that is worth the effort, if it slightly increases quality but at the expense of making projects take 10 times as long it is probably not worth it except for specific areas of concern.
This feels like a good moment to mention my most embarrassing bug which was, of course, in a billing system. I had written code to handle the overdue billing of customers' usage on an internet telephony service. The code seemed to work great in QA so we went ahead and pushed it to production.

A couple days later we got an angry call from a customer whose card we'd maxed out. The final stage of the process was to adjust their bill by the amount that they paid, but there was a sign error in that adjustment so instead of lowering their balance by the amount paid, we increased it. As a consequence, for a user with, say, a $50 balance, we kept doubling the amount that we charged them each day.

Exponential growth is a powerful thing.
To be honest, my question would be why this wouldn't have happened. Their cheapest plan was more than Fastmail Professional - while delivering less product than Fastmail Basic and not having anything approaching the Fastmail brand. I have a hard time understanding why anyone would have used their service.
It was pointed out to me, a millenial, that Social Security was created and administered in the Depression era before computers even existed. To think that they somehow created a working system without the tech that we throw at it today is interesting.
I use this: https://www.monoprice.com/product?p_id=602507

Changed out the mount to work with my USB webcam and it works a treat. Obviously it won't work with a heavy mirrorless camera - but there are tons of mini tripods out there - the Joby Gorillapod's and their numerous clones are among my favorites due to their flexibility.
Yep, and folks will keep complaining until it’s just a fork of Chrome.
Why can't I just enter my own Google client ID/secret on the app and auth against that? There's no approval from Google needed in that case, since I'm not publishing it anywhere.
Thank you @iamaaditya and @eklitzke . Very informative
Anyone else curious about whether their spouse might have been exposed to lead?
> We're democracies, we vote.

You vote what you're told to vote by the media that the state and capital dominate entirely (Think about it: how would enough people even hear about an alternative idea or candidate that they don't deem in their interest?) If you're American you get to choose between two millionaires (or sometimes billionaires) with virtually identical economic politics chosen in advanced for you who can safely ignore you once they get elected. "Democracy."

> Oh also it's land, labour, capital and entrepreneurship in classical economics.

First, no you're wrong, there are only three factors of production in classical economics which you would know if you read any of those authors or at least bothered to check Wikipedia[1]. Second, the state is not a factor of production, so you got the wrong list anyway. "Entrepreneurship" which isn't an institution, was made up by noeclassical economics to justify profit in the 30's, over 250 years later. It wasn't even popular until much later.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factors_of_production#A_fourth...?
> What worked for printed text has no bearing for what works on an illuminated screen.

This alone almost made me stop reading the answer.

This people is talking about accessibility. So, the more contrast, the better. You want to "highlight" something? Bold uses thicker fonts, underline adds also more pixels. You can add a carefully selected background, like a medium gray or other light color.

But black on white it not to highlight. Is to make it readable. To anyone.
Do theses apps automatically update in the background without you having to do anything?
"c" is the speed of light in a vacuum. Traditional fiber optic cables are very much not a vacuum, with an index of refraction of ~1.5, so light travels through them at ~2/3c. In contrast, light actually travels at nearly c through hollow core cables.
> If you do lose your job then don't just accept anything (remember, you have savings + unemployment + severance to live on for awhile) and use this time to sharpen skills and learn new things.

This is terrible advice. An employment gap will make you radioactive to hiring managers during a recession. Even a terrible job will keep you in better standing for negotiation.
I'm not sure this comment is exactly in good faith though-- OP does make a billing product but as a result is also uniquely qualified to provide insights into what can make it hard.

This isn't OP trying to claim it's the most difficult problem to solve from an engineering standpoint. Merely why it's hard.

Of course engineers solve problems, hard or not. That's not really being debated here is it?