skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
50+ no beard, starting to gray, here.

Been coding professionally since the mid-80's. I still sit in front of 3 computers (win10, mac, linux) every day writing code for various projects. Mostly embedded on NXP/Renesas for ODMs (lots of security and ML these days), but also device drivers on Linux/Windows, native windows tools, and as a bonus SPA dashboards for IoT/cloud (Vue/Node). I use python+excel extensively for behind the scenes analysis.

To stay current, I read multiple newsletters because HN tends to skew to the web and misses large parts of the industry. It is rather myopic that way.

People talk about tech leaving grayhairs in the dust, but that discussion always seems to be related to web front-end, which is like a fraction of the industry. Sure there will always be a need for a fast flashy website that scales to billions of users, but optimizing C in embedded space, or debugging a Windows bulk USB endpoint, or customizing UDP for multicast, etc. will always be necessary, too.

Realize as you older that you are going to be charging a premium for experience, so you have to build breadth while you are young to compete when you are old. If you just stick with one tech your whole life you won't be able to leave it.

And you can only get that kind of breadth from decades of experience.

There's literally no short-cut to age.
It's kind of odd that people are this shocked about this. Google and FB have frozen various roles for various periods of time over the last 2-3 years. I'm guessing they have on and off for most of their existence. I just want clued into their hiring process then.

The freezes almost always are for lower level roles only (l3 or l4) and dont REALLY impact anything since these companies are pretty slow to begin with. The people impacted by this are early career folks who are likely interviewing for general swe roles at these companies and a slew of others.

FB and Alphabet will almost always still be moving folks with specialized skills sets through their pipeline and even if "no offers are going out" a L7 machine learning engineer or security engineer or android engineer who is already matched with a team is still getting an offer.
Book publishers could get more money if libraries didn't exist. Are libraries unethical too?
You aware of the AnandTech channel and their podcast?

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC6Qjj9Jpww3iQarwt8HOcDw

I could give you a list of channels that do similar content to TechTechPotato.
Several points:

- The price for on-prem conveniently omits costs for power, cooling, networking, insurance and building space, it's only the purchase price.

- The price for the cloud server includes (your share of) the costs of replacing a broken power supply or hard drive, which is not included in the list price for on-prem. You will have to make sure enough of your devs know how to do that or else hire a few sysadmin types.

- As the article already mentions, the cloud has to provision for peak usage instead of average usage. If you buy an on-prem server you always have the same amount of computing power available and can't scale up quickly if you need 5x the capacity because of a big event. That kind of flexibility costs money.
And on the other side of the ring, we have the anti-crypto absolutists who will do anything to: 'ban all crypto, 100%', 'destroy all of it', 'let it all die in a fire', which I'm afraid is as equally delusional as the crypto utopians who believing that Bitcoin will be the world reserve currency.

The truth of the matter is, both of these extreme camps are going to be very disappointed in the future.
Not to mention the overwhelming feeling of failure when you have to tell your kids they are moving away from their friends and everything they know because you lost your job.
> I have been doing this for two decades. Let me tell you about bare metal.

> Back in the day we had 1,000 physical servers to run a large scale web app. 90% of that capacity was used only for two months. So we had to buy 900 servers just to make most of our money over two events in two seasons.

> We also had to have 900 servers because even one beefy machine has bandwidth and latency limits. Your network switch simply can't pump more than a set amount of traffic through its backplane or your NICs, and the OS may have piss-poor packet performance too. Lots of smaller machines allow easier scaling of network load.

I started working with real (bare metal) servers on real internet loads in 2004 and retired in 2019. While there's truth here, there's also missing information. In 2004, all my servers had 100M ethernet, but in 2019, all my new servers had 4x10G ethernet (2x public, 2x private), actually some of them had 6x, but with 2x unconnected, I dunno why. In the meantime, cpu, nics, and operating systems have improved such that if you're not getting line rate for full mtu packets, it's probably becsause your application uses a lot of cpu, or you've hit a pathological case in the OS (which happens, but if you're running 1000 servers, you've probably got someone to debug that).

If you still need 1000 beefy 10G servers, you've got a pretty formidable load, but splitting it up into many more smaller servers is asking for problems of different kinds. Otoh, if your load really scales to 10x for a month, and you're at that scale, cloud economics are going to work for you.

My seasonal loads were maybe 50% more than normal, but usage trends (and development trends) meant that the seasonal peak would become the new normal soon enough; cloud managing the peaks would help a bit, but buying for the peak and keeping it running for the growth was fine. Daily peaks were maybe 2-3x the off-peak usage, 5 or 6 days a week; a tightly managed cloud provisioning could reduce costs here, but probably not enough to compete with having bare metal for the full day.
Why is there a autoplaying unrelated blade runner video in the middle of article? What is the point?
After completing ~9 interviews (2 video interviews, 5 on-site interviews, and then was asked to complete 2 additional video interviews after mediocre on-site results), I passed Google's "hiring committee" and then was put in their team match process. Over the next 4 months I had ~4 calls with hiring managers, none of them fruitful (and not for lack of my own enthusiasm or willingness to leave my comfort zone). After this the recruiter basically said they'd be in touch if any other opportunities came up.

The process is absolutely insane and an obvious symptom of Google knowing people really, really want to work there. They do not respect the candidate at all, and then will cold email you again a year later as if you've forgotten how painful it was the first time. I'll probably end up interviewing again.
And also, climate change is not even really the issue. It's environmental and ecosystem change that is the real disaster looming. Wildlife, especially pollinators, and native plants, which affects wildlife, are in serious danger. Their eradication has little to do with climate change and more to do with people replacing habitat with lawn wastelands that never get used.

It's gonna be real hard to grow crops without pollinators and the ecosystems they're a part of.
If your app calls the tool yq, is it written for yq v3, or v4? v4 has breaking changes in its interface. Just statically linking your app won't deal with that, but a container with both your app and yq v3 will. What containers don't deal with is the interfaces between containers.
What matters in (clean) utility power generation is cost. Period.

Unless this magickal energy density results in lower-cost electrical output, in quantity, it is just a load of guff.

What we know is that every use of uranium for civil power generation, ever, delivered only extremely expensive power. There has never been a single reactor, worldwide, that was not heavily subsidized by taxpayers, coerced above-market rates, or both. Nukes get even less competitive with each passing year, as the cost for renewables continues plummeting with no bottom in sight.

So, the compelling evidence is that energy density is of extremely limited value for civil power generation. If it has any practical value at all, its copious orders of magnitude are yet insufficient to overcome its extremely poor cost effectiveness.

And, places in the US where uranium was mined are marked by poisoned groundwater and early death. Those poisoned are not impressed with its magick. Nor am I.
It would be illegal in France to do it without declaring yourself as an employee, and therefore paying contributions . “Illegal” as in if you get caught you’ll get a fin and back-taxes, not jail or anything
I just don’t get how this is possible. Every single company I’ve ever worked at (large and small) has had at least 10x more work in the backlog than could possibly be done with the staff they have. Everyone’s JIRA queue is stuffed full, and since there is so much work, things have to be brutally prioritized and even high-value stuff has to be cut, since there are just not enough people-hours to get it all done.

Where are these companies/teams who have nothing to do, or so little to do they have time for side projects??
I think you have some misunderstanding, because it takes approximately one month to start vesting at Google (and Facebook) and at Google your equity is frontloaded.

I'll happily tell you what the approximate compensation is by Google in Atlanta or NYC, because there's really no reason not to discuss those things.
Sorry but "any other key:document store" seems to imply that you're not aware of the value of consistent secondary indexes: a lot of people are not aware and conflate K/V stores which are fundamentally inflexible with more general purpose alternatives like Postgres and MongoDB: frankly these two are both able to express a wide variety of modern needs and whether you prefer one versus the other is a question of tradeoffs. The world is no as reductive as you imply
team matching has been removed. Now you get interviewed for a specific role, which streamlines the process quite a bit and saves time for everyone.
Increase usable cloud GPU memory by up to 6.6% through disabling ECC
Not included in the break even calculation was the cost of colocation, or the cost of hiring someone to make sure the computer is in working order, or the less hassle upon hardware failures.

Also, as the author even mention in an article, a modern server basically obsoletes a 10 year old server. So you're going to have to replace your server at least every 10 years. So the break even in the case of renting makes sense when you consider that the server depreciates really quickly.
Just FYI, you can have one big database, without running it on one big server. As an example, databases like Cassandra are designed to be scaled horizontally (i.e. scale out, instead of scale up).

https://cassandra.apache.org/_/cassandra-basics.html
Yeah I'm looking forward to being free (fire). Right now it's like "ugh gotta get through my 9-5 before I can do what I want to do".

Still I'm fortunate/could be worse.
What a dumb retort

If you got burned by mortgage backed derivatives and lost your life savings, it's ultimately because you were (knowingly or not) speculating on the value of real estate assets and making an assumption about future values of said assets.

In the case of Nomad, it's that you put yourself at risk by using their service you could've lost everything you put in.
Yeah this strikes me as odd too. My bank will instantly deposit transfers while the (free) ACH process takes time to clear. I can transfer up to something like $99,999 a day which is fine for my needs. At worst case a $15 fee to wire funds which I could probably get waived if I asked customer support nicely. There is also plenty of recourse in the unlikely event something goes wrong.
And therein do you see the almost inevitable doom of the dream of decentralised cryptocurrency, because it’s never going to be able to stand up against the power of governments once they decide they don’t like it and have no vested interest in it surviving. All of this stuff, even up to Bitcoin, is only still around at the sufferance of governments that have not yet decided to clearly make it illegal. Most are currently preferring to regulate it (which does tend to undermine the principles of full decentralisation, as you rightly observe), but a few decide to cut it out like a gangrenous parasite that’s enjoying mixing metaphors too much, and others may at almost any time. Already cryptocurrencies flout things like copyright and privacy law, for they have made it fundamentally impossible to comply with various plausible court orders. And “we have designed it so that it is not possible for us to comply” does not impress courts.

And in your musings about which countries’ laws—therein also do you see the perennial mutterings of discontent at international policy, and globalisation shambling towards collapse. It may be averted. It may not.
The OSDev wiki is nice.

https://wiki.osdev.org/
It's not racist as it does not support the idea that one race is superior or inferior to another.

A "racist" idea would be that one race deserves more than another because of some inherent flaw or virtue.

The idea of affirmative action is the objective fact that racist policies have already been created, and to decide to "go colorblind" would be de facto support for those racist policies that are already in place.

The position you quoted is explicitly antiracist, because it suggests the racial groups are equals in all their apparent differences.
“We were on AWS Managed Airflow, but to stay on it and have a solid platform, I would have been writing Github Actions for CI/CD, standing up ECR and IAM roles with Terraform, setting up EKS to run Kubernetes jobs, managing infra monitoring with Datadog, etc., etc.”

DAGs can be published to S3 for cutting down on like half of these dependencies. And the nice thing about MWAA is log & stats publishing over cloudwatch, which should flow into any existing amazon integrated tooling.

For our team setting up terraform for iam & mwaa, some deploy pipelines to s3, and connecting some config bits to wire up splunk logs / monitoring pieces was not that much work. Initiating a separated vendor relationship & pricing out data ingress/egress costs would blow that work out of the water but maybe it’s a difference in company size/placement.
For the same reason that it's impossible to solve a housing shortage in this town. It's not a technical problem, it's a collective action problem. [1]

[1] Which are hard enough to solve without malicious actors actively undermining us.
> Getting laid off is a traumatic event.

I agree that it is for many, but in my case it wasn't.

> It is not a hero's journey except in so far as a hero's journey is exciting because it talks about a path through dangerous times where a person can fail.

Difficult events are often found at the beginning on the hero's journey... like getting laid off.

> The average person with a family who gets laid off will not sense adventure - they will have despair. Utter despair and worthlessness and the hope they can get things back together before their family suffers.

I totally agree with this. I originally wrote more about this but I reduced it to: "Most, unfortunately, will never hear it over their newborn’s cries or the deafening financial storms that suffocate them." This will be terrible for many people, and I have endless sympathy for them. But there will be others who gain from this.
Getting laid off was the "cold water shock" I needed to rewrite what had been drilled into me since grade school: if you work hard and do your job, you'll always have one and your hard work will eventually result in promotions.

I took that experience and changed what kind of jobs I looked for, and found one I'm much happier with.
A few of thoughts on writing small tools in Rust
I just thought your list of fiscal conservatives to be quite odd. And isolationist would be more fiscally conservative when compared to the expense of running a world empire.

I'm not here defending Republicans, I consider both parties to be controlled by big businesses.

My point is the electorate isn't going to vote for proper fiscal conservatives so it's a bit ridiculous to expect politicians to be fiscal conservatives. Maybe if the US dollar loses the reserve status and the connection between policy and consequence tightens then maybe after an economic disaster the public may want fiscal conservatism.
It works, but I've had to discard photos that looked fine in the view finder. It's hard to see all the details. Particularly evaluating focus issues is hard this way.
The recent ruling itself is a facade. All of these Federalist Society pranksters pretend to care about abortion, but of the six FS justices only Barrett has an ideological commitment. The actual ideological commitment they all share is Borkism. Since 1977 the judiciary has steadily chipped away at antitrust law, and they've done so largely by pretending to care about dead babies. Republicans nominate lots of judges, and these Borkists have always said the right things (at lower court levels, they don't even have to make many anti-abortion rulings, and at all levels there are vastly more cases about commerce than about abortion) to be on the list. Soon enough, additional attacks on abortion rights will no longer be as politically useful, and the masks will come off.
Looking at it another way: Q1 GDP contracted by 1.6%, Q2 by 0.9%. If Q3 contracts by 0.2%, should we call it a recession?
indeed.com isn't what you should be looking at. levels.fyi
I don't know if you are being sarcastic or naive here... Why would Hillary use her own email server for critical government correspondence? I don't know! Reasons I guess. People on all levels tend do stupid stuff every once in a while
yeah it's getting a bit tough
The teleco I used to work for gave people 2 weeks pay for every year a person was with the company when they had post merger layoffs. I don’t know if there’s a standard but that seems to line up pretty close.
Not experienced here but as a genuine interest can you tell what problems airflow solves that can't be handled by celery and rabbitmq?
The 1) part is true for most of the developed countries (except the US, apparently), and even for many underdeveloped countries: IIRC in some African countries people transfer funds between cell phone accounts.
This is one of those problems that basically no one has. RTT from Japan to Washington D.C. is 160ms. There's very few applications where that amount of additional latency matters.
A few years ago a new guy at our DWH team tried to sell Airflow to the rest of the team. They invited me to listen to his talk as well, and I was baffled why something so trivial as Airflow was being sold as a critically important piece of infrastructure.

Why would I need a glorified server-side crontab if something like MS DTS from 1998 could do the same, but better? Sure, Python is probably better than whatever DTS generated, but the ops don't care either way, since Airflow doesn't care what it's running.

Something as simple as "job A must run after job B and job C, but if it doesn't start by 2am, wake up team X. If it doesn't finish by 4am, wake up team Y" isn't Airflow's problem, it's your problem.

"What's the overall trend for job D's finish time, what is the main reason for that?" isn't Airflow's problem, it's your problem. "What jobs are on the critical path for job E?" isn't Airflow's problem, it's your problem.

"Job F failed for date T and then recursively restart everything that uses its results for date T" isn't Airflow's problem, it's your problem.
Just in case anyone is wondering - this is a local privilege escalation issue, not a remotely exploitable wifi vulnerability.

https://access.redhat.com/security/cve/cve-2022-1679
> If you don't want to learn new things, buy one big server. I just pray it doesn't go down for you

There's intermediate ground here. Rent one big server, reserved instance. Cloudy in the sense that you get the benefits of the cloud provider's infrastructure skills and experience, and uptime, plus easy backup provisioning; non-cloudy in that you can just treat that one server instance like your own hardware, running (more or less) your own preferred OS/distro, with "traditional" services running on it (e.g. in our case: nginx, gitea, discourse, mantis, ssh)
Our industry is big enough that there are plenty of people not aping Google, and conducting different kinds of interviews. As someone who has been doing this for a while, I'm pretty appreciative of people who 'think differently'.
> but I didn't know that there were people actually making money off other people wanting to get into a FAANG company

I've made xxk of side income every year over the last few years working for companies that help people land at faang companies. It's a huge business.

If you're an average swe making 100K-150K and you could spend 6 months and xk-xxk to be making 200K+ for the rest of your career, its a pretty easy decision.
What is ADM?
I think they’re probably asking about US markets. Afaik those do close at business hours and I’m not sure how after hours trading happens but it might not be available to most people.

I think the one of the main reasons is government concerns about shenanigans happen overnight without oversight / flash crash. That being said I presume all the breakers that would halt trading activity are probably automatic but potentially not all of them (I think the US did things like that during the housing collapse).
Sure, but those short-term active strategies have little impact next to what big paper will lift in major macro markets.
Of course it would be possible. The problem isn't technological, it's political.
it's a little disingenuous not to put remittance on this list as it's one of the few legitimate and not morally dubious ones. I have gotten screwed on exchange fees and wire fees remitting and using crypto is much easier.
The parent refers to an issue from 2016 when 30000 (!) dbs on the internet got deleted/ransomed. The fact they blame the customers for this and totally confuse this with data loss is kinda telling huh? Sounds like data integrity wasn’t a big thing internally at mongo after all
Parliament are the people who live in the Parliament House and make HP Sauce.
+1 to this!

Support your local tool maker building on text!

My thoughts: https://braintool.org/2022/04/29/Tools4Thought-should-use-Or...
FWIW, there's also "simple.wikipedia.org", which has plain-English definitions for many of the most popular entries in regular Wikipedia. Here[1] is the entry for "House of Representatives".

> Didn't want to bother with it.

I suspect this is the root cause of the problem. I could see why you'd post such a question here if you had tried Googling, found no relevant results, and ran out of options for doing the work yourself. But that doesn't sound like what happened. Instead, it sounds like you had the ability to continue Googling, but decided to let others do your research for you. That's like saying your time is more valuable than other people's time. Do you see the problem there?

1. https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Representatives
My theory is that the likelihood someone understands the use cases is inversely correlated to their trust in government.

For example: https://www.bbc.com/news/business-60912789

These articles all follow a common pattern.

1. The trigger – Inflation/distrust in government/bank withdrawal restrictions/paypal freezes your funds/country is at war/etc

2. The response – People gravitate towards a system that is resilient to whatever failure mode they experienced

Those who haven't personally experienced #1 (such as world superpowers, the wealthy/"elite") seem not to be able to grasp the benefits. Meanwhile in places that are smaller/less stable/not economically self-sufficient/on the fringe, people are increasingly turning to it as the best alternative.
Well said. I don't understand why there's always so much hand-wringing and pearl-clutching over crypto.