skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Do you regret being a generalist?

No. Not at all. I just know one programming language pretty well and I just do one kind specific that is weirdly broad. Full Stack web application with a scraping/automation backend. It is like Fullstack Web + Data Engineering (or, DE with a hat)

I call myself general-purpose Python developer. I can fit anywhere but I don't want to do programming full time at the moment.

I am working in a developer relations (DevRel) role for a Data As A Service company for the past couple of months, I have honestly never been happier. Being a generalist programmer helps, and being a generalist sideproject-hacker-type works even better for this role.

> Have you been one in the past and then changed?

Thinking through, I guess, I changed my position from being a generalist to a marketing role.

But I am happy. I want to be in this position indefinitely. Being a freelance generalist programmer for more than 5 years, I think being generalist doesn't hurt, but finding your place in a stable position is difficult. Everyone needs a freelance generalist not a in-house generalist.

> In that case what do you prefer?

Generalist Programming + Marketing. 50/50.

Communicating to people (both technical and non-technical) about a technical product seems to be my life's calling.

> Do you regret it?

Absolutely not. Best thing that is ever happened to me.
Most of the cell labels are self-explanatory, but some of them are a bit puzzling (as is the intended ordering) and a bit amusing: "hairy"? "no cow"?
There is nothing they can do, anything they can imagine to use as a signal for a bot user can be made to look legitimate. There is no way to win.

My college English professor was so obsessed with beating cliff notes that all of tests were hyper focused on the most obscure details he could dream up. It was just impossible to maintain a full course load and memorize what was the 1st, 3rd, 5th, 7th , last, etc word on every page and which character spoke it. Did the sentence contain any commas? How many times was the nurse mentioned in chapter X, etc.

Google can always follow his lead and make their data impossible to access, but impossible doesn’t increase ad views, so they will never do it. People using ytdlp is just the cost of doing business.
It takes a long time to get truly skilled in something. What we call an expert is really what a reasonably intelligent person can be expected to learn about a single topic within a lifetime. The gains in one area compound on themself. Given that these gains compound, you can't learn 2 things half as well. So the T-shape represents the constraint that you only have a shot at becoming an expert at 1 thing. Spend 80% of your time on that and 20% on the rest.

The Pareto principle (80/20 rule) also implies that you only need to read a handful of books on a single subject to know more about it than most people. The knowledge gains become marginal unless you focus most of your time on it. So the things that you find interesting that aren't your main thing, just "learn the ropes" and move on back to your area of expertise. That's the most efficient traversal of the Sum of Human Knowledge: Familiarize yourself with the lay of the land, then focus most of your energy on some place that hasn't been mapped yet.

This is a complex topic!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=baY3SaIhfl0
Thank you for the link and the correction!
You should be motivated by what you want to do, not by some sense that the industry opportunities lie this way or that.

Software development is so incredibly hard that you must be motivated in order to do it well.

The best way to be motivated is to be working on stuff you enjoy.
Having exposure to a wide variety of environments makes you far more valuable. Making gears gave me a whole new perspective on the world of manufacturing. If there's something new to learn, why not go for it?
> Thus everyone knows exactly what the dealer is paying for the car before walking in.

Myth, I think. That information (the real wholesale cost) is not public.
Economic impacts of overweight and obesity: future estimates for 161 countries
You can replace some parts of it, but the core message is timeless.
Wasn't China's unified standard from about 2007 much more influential?
If you’re writing resolvers manually for something like this, your stack sucks. Use federation.
I'll take Libraries over Frameworks every time.
> Just way better design and implementation

Sounds like “far fewer features” to me. Anything that has a lot of features, accumulates a lot if design and implementation compromises (“flaws”)
It's very simple to understand. You don't have to actually read the definition just know what "compose" does at a high level.
No, everyone on HN likes to think they're at least 1.5 std from the mean (when in reality they're below that). Very different from actually being 1.5 std from the mean. This is an even more dangerous place to be.
The best thing about becoming a parent is that the "why"-questions about your life becomes absolutly irrelevant. You look at your newborn child and you know why you're doing this.
It will unlock some power reserve in you you didn't know you have it.
By the way congratulations.
> Under the first amendment, the government cannot force a website to host content it doesn’t want to host.

Apparently shops, restaurants, hotels can be forced to have patrons they don't want. Even if those patrons are talking about things they don't like, whole on the premises!
There is a feature comparison link on the front page in the second paragraph.
Sounds like the typical "parking lot", where you just move long discussions to the end of the standup, and everyone who's not involved can leave.

If there are multiple parking lots, either you go through them quickly (if it's a series of questions affecting only a few team members), or you just break into breakout groups.
> Facebook, Google and the rest of the industry were so driven by profit at all cost, and at the expense of long term thinking, they shot themselves in the foot.

As far as I know, the technical term for that is greed.
US, Canadian warships sail through Taiwan Strait after Biden vows to defend TW
So if front-end devs get everything they need client side, what’s the point of having backend devs?

https://imgflip.com/i/6u4obk
I’m curious about this too but there’s really only a few options. Npm update, etc, is the riskiest thing I do at this point, I’m extremely fed up with the state of packages and cross-compatibility.

I merely cross my fingers, if something fails, force peer-legacy install and hope for the best etc.

The only other options are:

- Don’t update, and when you do, update to an already old version not the latest

- Carefully scrutinize released updates and evaluate potential for breakages

I say this because I don’t primarily see any other options but hope we can get some more insight in the comments!
Why not both? You've got a long career in front of you. I started out a straight software dev, stumbled into being a "DevOps" expert before the term existed, ran a team for while, and am now sliding into "architecture."

Being a "generalist" means that you are going to pick up a ton of varied skills. Eventually, you'll find out that one of them is something that no one else has and your current team/project is in desperate need of. Congratulations, you are now the "expert!" If it is something you like (or, in my case, was simply angry didn't exist), double down and keep pursuing it. Now you are the "specialist." If you get bored, step sideways into something else.

There are places where you really do need to stop and specialize- for example, there are parts of AI are in fact hard to get into without lots of specialized experience, but much of that seems to come from Academia which at least has a clear path to gaining the experience and credentials. Even then, there are ways to side-step into it- my current team is a data science team, where I am the voice of software and infrastructure engineering reason. There is a fairly clear path picking up more and more data science or AI tasks if I wanted to, eventually doing that full time instead of what I'm doing now.

I've found a lot of success and happiness by focusing on problems that I'm convinced need solving rather than technologies or categories. Sometimes that means I go months without coding (that does make me a little sad), but it is very fulfilling to see my positive change for the better come to light. It also has driven me to pick up all sorts of skills and technologies that 23-year-old me never would have thought I would, let alone enjoy!
Not sure the keyboard is as good and got any history; but similar idea without the trouble:

https://www.clockworkpi.com/product-page/devterm-kit-cm4-ser...
captchas are fine. recaptcha is not.

between 2015 and ~2020, my home ISP was blessed with every recaptcha being 3 rounds of slow fade-in bullshit. I have also seen infuriating gaslighting of "please try again" after certainly correct solutions, as well as 5+ rounds followed by a notification that my network is entirely blocked.

I've developed a reflex to Ctrl+W upon seeing it, unless that is absolutely vital for me to get past it - which is exceedingly rare.

if I had a genie lamp, I'd waste one of my 3 wishes to do terrible things to the people responsible for that shit.
This is because demanding that people spout what they did since yesterday is not how to manage humans. You need to engage with them. Call them up (voice ideally, but a slack DM thread is ok) and ask questions like they're another human being (not : what did you do since yesterday?).
Why not to explain to public why privacy matters and what real consequences are if you don't care and constantly doomscrooling?

I'm against any types of censorship. If you value freedom, you cannot implement practises of enemy.

To be clear... I'm not social media user, because of many ethical and technical issues that they have. And I know about them because I'm able to find that information or practically reproduce. With regulations, I wouldn't.
A proton is around 2000 times as heavy as an electron, so your energy numbers are actually semi equivalent. (At least that's how it seems to me - I don't know if this would even work on protons.)

I hear your point about efficiency though. Why do you need similar velocity for the particles? It seems to me you just need a LOT of particles, but beam quality doesn't matter much.

The cold electrons you mention are the ones bound to the Boron? Can we give the Boron a positive charge? All the charge will live on the surface, which is exactly where we want it.

Make the box metal to the height of the boron, then an insulator after that, and charge the box. Put the output of the accelerator directly above the boron (the output is facing downwards), and keep pumping out helium.

Cool the box from the outside to capture energy, and also capture electrical current from neutralizing the charged helium.

Am I missing something major?
It’s really not that much extra work to automatically rotate VPS IPs or VPN relays on an hourly or daily interval. Since most Invidious/Nitter guides don’t recommend doing this I guess it’s not very common.

Just remember that you’re still technically trackable via behavioral, configuration, or latency fingerprinting. Anonymity is a full-time academic endeavor, not a shell script one-liner.
And do we know if there has ever been a single exception to this rule in practice? The CoC as written is a religious covenant between all current developers and its users.

Again, if we explore the hypothetical of the same scenario but with another company, do you truly find no suspicion over the actual reality of religious inclusion if it appears there isn't a single exception to their unanimous religious pledge?

Maybe I'm just confused over the wording and there are current exceptions, and perhaps you might have some off the top of your head already.
FCC Expands Covered List to Include China Unicom and PacNet/ComNet
One reason search is hard is people are very motivated to game your system. That makes being transparent about how it works a fool's errand. It also isn't clear how the economic structure works: improving search relevance by x% is tremendously socially valuable, but probably makes Google's bottom line go up by a thousandth of x, and they have a very direct understanding of the connection. Without that money, how will this get the resources to succeed given the adversaries are learning from the people with a lot more?
I uninstalled after the acquisition as I wasn't keen to hear the Avast siren go off every time a cookie consent banner is detected.
I love this area. And unlike physics (Bell theorem aside), I hope p of maths would be useful. Or is it a distraction.

Just “calculate” is suffice as it is, well, maths?
I guess the author doesn’t use windows because otherwise they would’ve acknowledged iTunes during the application and user experience section. I tolerate it since I only use windows for gaming but if windows was my main OS the app experience would be enough to choose Spotify.
Taxes are taking from funds for personal projects, and universities already get a lot of funding in Europe to do research, maybe they should focus on creating a better environment for students to become researchers or entrepreneurs instead.

Overall I think there are better ways to improve search from an EU perspective by doing what they are supposed to be doing:

- create a fair environment for companies to compete in, e.g., take a look how Google, Apple or Meta's assets are set up to make it harder for competitors, break that up

- improve standards in eduction – it doesn't really make sense for all member countries to think of and maintain a good CS curriculum and they all seem to be pretty bad at it

- make it easier to build something and get funded, and reward creating prosperity, don't tax it to death

Just tested marginalia's random mode btw. Pretty cool, reminds me of the internet when I was a kid

(edit: formatting)
Well, I do radiosport contests, and most stations are sending around 30 WPM, the hot shots are faster of course. But anyway... I look at radiosport the same way that I look at sail boat racing. There is great fun in keeping the old skills alive, and nobody at your local yacht club thinks it is odd to learn a bunch of arcane knots and spend Saturday dashing around in circles. But nobody is suggesting that wooden ships powered by sail is a good way to bring container loads of merch from China. For me Morse contesting is the same — I would use FTP to fetch an ISO from Finland, but code is good humor on a random Saturday contest.
In the nineties, people were talking about n-tier architectures. This was of course before browsers were a common thing. But we did have networks already since the nineteen seventies. And actually, a lot of the architectural solutions people use today aren't that different from what people were doing a few decades ago. Things like resolving names, passing messages, figuring out security, etc. have been things that people have been figuring out for different systems. If you compare Kubernetes to CORBA for example, you'll see some common features between the two. Not surprising because they both provide a solution for allowing networked components to talk to each other.

Basically, the whole frontend/backend distinction is a simplification. There are more than two layers. And you can probably even identify layers in the frontend as well these days given that a typical SPA actually does a lot of stuff before it even talks to a server. Local browser storage for example is a storage layer. And you probably have some layer in between that and e.g. event handlers.

The reason the frontend/backend boundary is important is because they are physically separated by a network but also have relatively independent life cycles. You don't update them at the same time for example. You might have different versions of the frontend talking to the same backend. Or even multiple different frontend applications. And many companies have multiple backends as well. So, it's an ecosystem of frontends and backends talking to each other. Providing some kind of facade layer for that complexity is of course an obvious solution when you have a complicated backend with its complexity spilling over to frontend layers.
Same Day Pest Control offers emergency pest control services with inspection and extermination of pests in London with certified and experienced technicians.
> Highly correlated" would not be the choice of words I use to describe correlations between (0.23 - 0.5).

lol, this range is 0.5 to 0.7 variance explained (R squared) which is an insane value. in typical social studies a correlation of > 5% is considered a major improvement.
In finance a correlation or > 1% is considered amazing.

You are either a hyper-intelectual drinking Taleb's kool-aid or simply don't know what you are talking about :D
A tiny bit more complex: the German/European plug has the ground at the sides and so goes in both ways. The French/Belgian plug has instead a ground pin that goes from the socket into the plug (so the opposite of the other two). That means generally you'll be able to combine both and most products have a plug that allows to connect to both varieties. But there are some (especially Chinese and American) products which miss this diversity and either only fit in one of the two or produce local varieties for either one when it would well be feasible to produce a single version that fits both.
Not long ago golang switched from doing direct system calls to libc on *BSD systems. The explanation I believe was that the BSD systems fix a lot of kernel problems and compatibility issues in libc and it was just easier to use libc then try to rewrite all of that in the golang standard libraries. On Linux it uses direct system calls for everything.
> It's trivially easy to spoof email addresses. Someone could sign you up easily, for example.

Proper DMARC configuration is table stakes to send e-mail, which makes that anything but trivial.
That's one of the applications, yes, compact x-ray source with smaller source size.
Can I ask which company you work for? I want to be sure I never work for them.

When they say "people don't quit jobs, they quit managers"... pretty sure they mean you. God, that's toxic, and I'm so sad you're in our industry.
Advertisements are essentially artificial reminders of how unsatisfying and difficult life is without $PRODUCT.
I'm usually jealous of a specialist for about 6 months to a year. Eventually I learn enough about what they do to lose interest and become jealous of a new specialist.
> But utilizing these hardware capabilities with traditional blocking interfaces, like pread(), would involve many threads and, hence, some overhead here and there (like increased memory footprint or context switching). Moreover, QuestDB's threading model operates on a fixed-size thread pool and doesn't assume running more threads than the available CPU cores.

> Here we're using 8 threads to make blocking read calls to the same CSV file and observe 223MB/s read rate which is not bad at all.

Why is this? This is not an IO efficient usage of threads. And using io_uring to circumvent that bottleneck might be a solution, but just bumping the threadcount for IO seems a lot more straightforward. Using one thread per CPU core is a decent baseline if everything is async, but for blocking IO you would want a lot more threads.
The work tradeoff is usually framed as specialists are somewhat better paid, but it's harder to find jobs, and you're often restricted to fewer employers and specific locations. The other part is the specialty might find itself irrelevant, whereas if you can code your way out of a box in a top-5 language, lots of companies will be interested in you.
The users punish.

You need a trustworthy core by which you can judge the vote of new users. You can incorporate them until somebody complains about a result that is out of place.

This doesn't have to fully scale. There are many pages without monetary value that won't be manipulated. The tags are an additional signal that can be used where they work. If they don't work, they can be ignored.

But it will scale because there are far more consumers than producers.
Being banned from Mozilla is actually sort of endorsement for me :)

I was worried this project is just repacked Thunderbird, with malware. This makes it more legit.

Also some people do not like politics in Mozilla Corp. Firefox is supposed to be privacy focused, yet it uses Google for search, CEO salaries, scraping promising tech etc...

I use Brave browser, created by a guy who was also banned from Mozilla, it works great.
Wow. That brings back memories.
Did something like that happen with ffmpeg a few years back? A huge amount of the dev work was being done by one at-the-time abrasive guy. They booted him, he forked, the ffmpeg mainline went moribund while the fork line kept getting better. Apparently he is back with mainline now. I hope things are mended but I didn't pay attention.

As for Thunderbird: I use it, but it seems like its dev decisions are often wedged in rather basic ways. I have no idea how the decisions were made, but if you look at the support forum, there is a big disconnect between what the devs keep adding, and the existing pain points that users keep running into. I'd rather have a less featureful program where the dev effort went into eliminating user pain instead of adding more.
No, because the total accelerated charge is tiny as of now, so you don't get a lot of total thrust. You'd need to scale up which hasn't really been considered yet. I'm not sure if the plasma bubble will be stable if it is larger (which I think is one way to up the total charge).
> Just track me already!!!

Okay. Nice to meet you, throwaway787544. Please reply with your real name and address to proceed.
If you're not invading because you can't, you're not good: you're just useless.

You need to be able to invade and not do it to be good.
https://danluu.com/car-safety/
I don't regret it at all. I have a generic CS education and it allowed me to work on a very broad range of topics in every kind of company. I have an average level of knowledge in every OS, framework, and programming language and it helps a lot when it comes to getting hired everywhere, quickly get some knowledge in a new project, and helping my "specialized" coworkers when they are stuck.

But I'm also not stuck in this generic mindset. I'm good at C++ because I like it more, that's my freedom and my choice. And after one or two years in a company, I kind of become a specialist myself on what I'm working on.

The secret is to always learn new stuff. I have 20 years of experience and I'm still reading books to learn (C++20, Rust, etc.) I've seen way too many coworkers who were stuck for the past ten years in a boring job or a dead technology and could not get out of it, it's very sad. When we meet for lunch, I always have funny stories to tell about "my new company." Yes, my previous coworkers have stable jobs but the salary is not good, they have no raise, and if their company closes for good, they will have a very hard time adapting and finding a new job (because it's most likely they only worked for one company their whole life). They always come back to me for advice on what to learn, what to do, and how to find a new job. Last but not least, their knowledge is tied to their own company and is not transferable.

What seems to be fragile is actually a power: I can quickly learn AND adapt, and I can switch companies without being unemployed if the management becomes crazy or if a company is stalling and/or on the verge of closing due to lack of money.

For me, being a specialist is interesting because you know one subject deeply, but it can become soul crushing, you'll have a hard time switching jobs, and you seldom learn new stuff. The best example I've seen all these years is C++: when you work for a company, you use THE specific C++ of the company and most of the time the "tech leads" refuse to change and, again, you're stuck in that specific version which does not teach you anything.