skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> This is what happens when you hire the same kinds of people to write the software for your car that you've hired for 25 years to write the terrible internal applications inside the company that everyone hates, and in the same terrible way.

I work in "automotive," and my company created an internal textbook on waterfall development 25 years ago. I know, because I was part of an external consultancy to review it. And it was great! At waterfall! And they're still using it! Now we're getting into alternate power, and we've lifted the same software process we've been using since we had to break our firmware into 8 pieces BECAUSE THAT'S WHAT FIT ON A FLOPPY to send to the plant to upload into the ECM, and started using it with completely new build systems and processes. We've hobbled what could be a completely fresh start with 25-40 years of technical debt before even getting started. I would posit that heading off this train wreck was the place of the CIO or CTO, but they just made the CIO the CEO, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
Hah. There's actually an interesting UK-specific quirk that the comment you're replying to has missed: if a previous UK government had built more wind power in the 2000s using more subsidies that wouldn't actually save us money, because those subsidies weren't structured as CfDs. They were just outright direct subsidy payments on top of the market price of electricity which is set by the most expensive generator needed to fil demand (usually gas). So building more back then could actually have lead to higher power bills even though they should be cheaper.

Newer wind farms don't have this problem only because we ended up with a big-C Conservative government that restructured the subsidies for new projects sometime around the 2013-2016 period as CfDs at prices which are now substantially lower than the market cost of electricity. That government is generally portrayed as pretty much the archtypical example of pro-austerity, anti-green, anti-investment "fiscal conservatives" who let corporations benefit at our expense. From the news reporting you'd think that they were the ones which structured deals in ways that let energy producers get undeserved windfall profits. The media even let Ed Milliband, who was actually in charge of energy when the opposition Labour party were last in power, blame them for the fact that these windfall profits are happening without challenging him on his own role in those contracts.
So do you feel the same way about backend developers who use databases? Surely that's two roles: server developer and database developer?

Of course, they can't test their own code manually. That's two roles: developer and QA!

So a backend developer is at least 3 roles of work. Are you making 3x the salary you should be?
Every vegetarian should look up "Dairy is scary" on YouTube.

Wouldn't be one for much longer.
When we started with cars we had accidents all over the place. Not even close to this. It's so hard to know if this is worse than actual drivers or better without the full picture. For all I know this might actually be orders of magnitude better.
There's also several projects attacking web3 social and identity:

1. https://ens.domains/

2. https://nftychat.xyz/ [0]

3. https://www.farcaster.xyz/

4. https://tryshowtime.xyz/

[0] I'm the co-founder
Fair would be sanctions, restructuring, legal consequence for those responsible for inaction in dividing the constituents of the conglomerate. Think Ma Bell, Standard Oil. 4B likely wouldn't even cover the vig on all that profit.
Exterior heat pumps used in humid or below-freezing environments need some kind of defrost mechanism, just like a refrigerator. Otherwise your coils end up clogged with ice and the system stops working. The compression cycle is indeed symmetric, but the second order design constraints are quite different.
Is this ageism implied for SV and like companies, or all of them in general (implied US-based anyway)?

I can't speak in either instance at this time, but I'd like to think ageism isn't nearly as widespread as it seems when discussed on here when it comes to technology-based work. E.g., Small town in Nebraska with one or two software houses versus SF.
I believe the vegan comment was about the burgers, not the poster. But it's interesting to see your apparent anger towards vegans come roaring out.
General-purpose compression algorithms tend to be conceptually simple. They must be fast, so they can't try many different approaches to see what works best. And because they are general-purpose, they can't assume much about the data.

The typical data compression algorithm starts with a combinatorial transformation of the data. Then it creates a statistical model of the transformed data and encodes it according to the model. There are two successful families of combinatorial transformations: Lempel–Ziv and Burrows–Wheeler. Neither of them is superior to the other, but the compression performance depends on the properties of the data.

Lempel–Ziv parsing replaces copies of repeated substrings with references to an earlier copy. It works best when there are long repeated substrings in the data. The modeling/encoding parts of an LZ compressor are usually pretty simple.

Burrows-Wheeler transform reorders the symbols according to the context they occur in. It's often but not always followed by run-length encoding. Because the symbols are reordered by context, BWT-based compressors work best when there are many copies of each repeated substring.

Unlike the LZ, the BWT does not compress the data on its own. It relies entirely on statistical compression. Because the symbols are ordered by context, the BWT is an order-n model for every n simultaneously. Hence you get something similar to PPM by simply partitioning the BWT into blocks and encoding each block independently with an order-0 encoder.
I very much think this is limited to the startup / work fast and break things style of companies. Always work available for sr. people at large established companies, especially fortune 500. Specifically companies where tech is not the core business product, many of them are attempting to modernize their systems. They pay pretty well too; not Google / Amazon level but on a pure salary basis many probably pay comparable to Microsoft without the shares of course. They do have a good 401k match though. A good salary for 95% of tech people.

I am early 40's and have had no issue finding work and am currently interviewing others to come work with my group in a solution architect / tech lead style role and they are all my age. I have never interviewed for a job and not gotten an offer, regardless of age; with that said I'm not interviewing at startups or places I feel really wouldn't allow me a family life. I get the offers not because I'm incredible, I'm not, but because I know my lane and skill set and stick to it.
Incidentally, the flickr user koen_jacobs from the title photo is/was a huge spammer.

They had a script running that added new flickr users as contacts (who would then usually add them back), then he would remove them after a month or so.

This is why they have "138.2K Followers•385 Following"

That sort of behaviour really diminished the community on flickr. But at least Koen made it work for them.
Visual media is the problem, not phones themselves. Use your phone to listen to an audiobook, podcast, music, etc and leave the phone in your pocket. Problem solved.

> ears attuned to serendipity,

Ears attuned to.. the distant rumble of diesel engines. Maybe a few crows squawking. I don't think I'm missing out on much by tuning out city sounds.
I miss being able to long-press a link and clicking "send link to device."

Now it only lets you send the page you're currently on, which is annoying.

I send a lot of stuff to my desktop when I'm riding the bus.
What a Technologist Can Do About Climate Change (A Personal View)
Architectural Decision Records (ADRs)
They had until now no map with timezones?!
> You're supposed to be bootstrappy and a problem-solver, aren't you? Why did any of your industrious spirit vanished once it's your time to pay back to society what you owe it?

It's interesting that Peter Thiel's preferred mythology (bootstrappy problem-solver with an industrious spirit) has become canon even among skeptics.
I use Firefox for web development (I got used to using it in the Firebug days and never switched). On the occasion I’ve had to use the chrome developer tools I’ve had no problems since they are so similar.
Aging. At 40. lol!

My the youngins have some pride. Not sure how to break it to you but, the web, phones, etc was created mostly by people 10 years older than you.
Ah something like.

Plastic: Eating Mushrooms (a memoir)
I can't help but think that this whole "TikTok is a search engine" school of thought comes straight from Google, which is doing its best to convince regulators worldwide that it doesn't have monopoly power in search.

Even in this article, the only source of TT's amazing search engine prowess is....a Google exec. How would they even have enough TikTok data to make such an estimation? All activity happens inside the app, so it's not even like Google could ballpark it based off Chrome browser sessions or something.
We really don't know that, and there is a huge difference between eating canola or palm oil and eating beef fat (although we throw them all under a blanket "saturated" label). I would guess beyond is using a variety of seed, palm, and coconut oils to fatten the burgers. Everyone can have their own opinion on this but I believe animal fats are healthier than those seed oils.
> Yes, anyone who has been around for awhile should be able to recognize it as nothing more than a soy burger or veggie pattie.

Out of curiosity: Have you eaten one in a restaurant setting? They're credible ground beef analogs (and are judged harshly since the bar is higher), where soy/veggie patties don't even pretend to be beef.

In any case, it was all over once Big Beef's (JBS, Tyson, Cargill, Marfrig) P.R. machines established "fake meat" as the name for beef alternatives.
That's fine, give the extra money directly to the person consuming electricity, which allows them to choose whether to use that money to fund the energy use if they need to, while encouraging

My company has a lot of equipment it keeps on needless because it's cheaper than the manpower to turn it off and back on. If demand is lower at the weekend they could use the money to shift some of their electric use to a weekend and pay people more to use it then.

Instead we are encouraging people to use energy as before, which was slightly more profitable than another option, rather than taking the same money but putting the power into the hands of the people using it. It's a paternalistic socialist approach which disempowered the person buying on the market, it's the exact opposite of what the conservative party should be about.
Is it premium pricing on plant-based products or that animal-based products are subsidized?
Your comment will come off as elitist/condescending but you're 100% spot on.

People without actual engineering background (should) have no place in safety critical systems design.
If you did a blind taste test between Impossible and Beyond (or the McPlant), I suspect people would pick Impossible nine times out of ten. Writing off all plant-based meat at this point feels a bit like saying the Internet is a failure in 2002 because Yahoo is losing steam.
If the world starts coming after corporations for these kinds of very-real safety issues caused by software, they're going to "do a pro move," and come after the programming profession.
Why can't those same processes be used for open source code then? If we assume those processes can't(or don't) apply to open source software then am I to believe that OpenSSL has been running the internet without any scrutiny for the last decade?
Hello vegetarian, please see "Diary is scary" on YouTube, won't be one for much longer, hopefully.
I don’t like the push to define humanity as a thing somehow separate from the Earth and all that entails. Cows wouldn’t exist at all if humanity didn’t depend on them. The most pro-cow stance is to raise them with love and respect and use all they offer us without wasting.
my iPhone 13 pro is so big that its cumbersome to bring on walks with my dog (in running/workout shorts) - so I just leave it at home.

downside is no music... but I do find peace in being 100% disconnected.
Brine temperature varies over the heating season by up to 10 deg C.

I really tried to verify the horizontal coil length and installation depth recommended by installers from the first principles, but I had to give up, as there were just too many unknown inputs: the type of soil (thus, specific heat and heat conduction), water content (which varies over the year), received solar energy (shady/sunny).
There's nothing wrong with the meat quality per se, but if you're cooking a frozen premade patty you're not properly seasoning it and it's not going to have a good taste.

You could thaw it out, break it down, season it and re-form it. But who does that?
Seems rather to be a complaint about the ruining of people watching, now that everyone is looking at their phones.

My thought is that this is an interesting new human behavior to observe, probably won’t last forever if we consider past technology cycles. So this is particular to this point in history.
These numbers don't really translate to meaningful information.

Livestock eats bulk commodities like corn and grain, which modern mechanized farming has made incredibly efficient. Those staples are grown in regions that don't require irrigation (iowa, kansas, etc). Wheat and corn are already so cheap that they're almost free in the US. Humans get their fill.

It's not like little Johnny can't have broccoli this week because the fat cats are eating burgers.

Look at it from this perspective: Shipping corn and wheat is a relatively efficient way of moving "water" from places that rain a lot to places where it doesn't.
I had a Surface book die due to the battery swelling which warped the glued down display. This happened because stupid me left the machine on all the time because I got tired of all the windows updates. Little did I know that Windows had the habit of maxing out the CPU to 100% for some reason. The little fans in the Surface book couldn’t handle the heat. The only reason why people like the PC as far as I can tell is because of Steam.
This happens to me frequently too. Think of something obscure then it appears on HN. It is neither coincidence or surveillance. Reality is an information fractal.
Ask HN: What are you doing this weekend?
Hoping to find out about some of your new hobbies and projects. Thanks in advance.
I recently tried a vegetarian (I think vegan, even) burger at a German McDonalds and it tasted more like it contained meat than the meat based burgers they sell.

It wasn't even significantly more expensive, I think.

There's a good chance I'd choose it again when/if I go to McDonalds the next time.
What's faster, closing a cookie popup or watching a 7-10 second video that may or may not be related to your search query?
> And most of them intuitatively understand that making your own currency out of electrons probably won't work in the long run. Otherwise, work would become obsolete and the economy would grind to a halt.

This statement has validity but I don’t think it implies what you seem to think it does.

That the continual creation of new currencies is not a globally sustainable process does not mean we should not experiment with their creation. It also does not preclude a handful of them that support valid and important if not revolutionary use cases.

This is just an early phase.
In Europe. The question people were asking at the time is if the fine was great enough to cause google to abandon Europe. If they did, they might be able to abandon Mozilla with impunity since nobody else is likely to do anything about it.
When someone posts a beautifully composed picture standing in front of a waterfall and the sunlight just so with the caption “I love spending time in the woods” I generally assume that she does not love spending time in the woods. The evidence rather suggests that she loves posing for and sharing photographs.

Likewise when someone writes a lot of long essays about how much he loves spending time in the woods and he can’t understand why no one goes hiking in the woods anymore I draw my conclusions from his actions, not words.
Cruise is a mess internally. The product is unreliable garbage.

For more details, see this recent whisteleblower account of the situation: Cruise robotaxi service under review following anonymous letter (https://techcrunch.com/2022/07/14/cruise-robotaxi-under-revi...)

I work directly with the employee who submitted the complaint. He is understating the problem.

The letter also states that Cruise ... intentionally hides from the majority of employees the results of investigations into collisions involving Cruise vehicles and other sensitive, potentially damaging matters.

Cruise has been covering up safety incidents since before the GM acquisition, including an early incident where an engineer suffered a concussion due to violent cabin motion caused by bad motion control code.
Speaking of nostalgia… the _click_ of the relay when your 3 D card turned on.

(Although I think that was only with the original Voodoo and Voodoo2)
There's only a narrow band of land then where we would be able to live without expending large amounts of energy to stay warm or cool.

Colder places use just as much if not more energy in wintertime. They just don't often use it as kWh from their electricity provider so they don't normally compare it this way. Instead of electricity they burn natural gas or propane or fuel oil or even wood pellets to heat their homes. Many people in this chat which talk about having pretty low energy usage then acknowledge they heat with gas.

For many, changing to heat pumps would drastically increase their electric bills in the winter offsetting their gas bills. Just look at my comparison of energy usage of my heat pump cooling my home compared to the energy usage of other big usage areas. It's not even close.

Running a heat pump for 12 hours to keep the house warm would be a similar amount of energy usage. It's the same tech. Raising the inside temperature from 0F to 70F (70F degrees of difference) takes more energy than cooling from 100F to 70F (30F of difference). So a place that spends half the year around 100F but then is close to comfortable inside for the other half requires less energy than a place that gets down to 0F half the year and then is close to comfortable the other.
its like an youtube ad in the middle of a symphony
This question was downvoted but I think it's fair. There's a lot of evidence that Mozilla is pretty bloated as a company, and if they shed a lot of that bloat I see no reason to suppose they couldn't keep maintaining Firefox on a much smaller budget.
Not the first time, here is a story about seven stopped Cruise cars from last July just a few months ago.

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/07/01/self-driving-cars-from-gms-c...
I know it was just used as an example, but in reality when I see code like this I think "I really don't want to reinvent URL parsing for this, I'll import the library for that instead," resulting in much cleaner code.

But I do agree on keeping individual lines, if not entire statements, small and simple. The ruby chainsaw is a great tool for that. I find a chain of simple statements arranged in a flow to be more readable than using lots of intermediate variables.
But the problem with that approach is that people tend to revive zombie threads. I would estimate that <1% of threads actually have any useful discussion after 10 years, the rest is bumping zombie threads.
Delusions of reference should be statistically verifiable as delusions. Has anybody ever tried?

For starters how many thoughts does a typical human have in a day?
Everything you're describing would be ideal for management, but creating ideal outcomes and utility isn't the point of why we work in the US.
> potential for food production on solar farms ... is limited.

Food production in dual-use farms is really not limited in any way. Besides siting in existing pastureland, solar may easily be deployed in cropland in rows spaced to leave plenty of room between for farm equipment.

The key is that, with dual land use, there is no need for or value in cramming panels closely together. There is an absolute over-abundance of both pasture and cropland suitable for dual use, and panels work better when widely-spaced. Farmers welcome an extra revenue stream that costs them no yield or extra "inputs", delivers year-round, and cuts evaporative water loss.

The simplest way to deploy for dual use in farmland is to erect bifacial panels vertically in fence-rows running north-south, to pick up morning and afternoon sun.

Few crops can use more than a few hours' direct sunlight in a day, if that much. Most plants prepare overnight a stock of material to process in sunshine; once that stock is used up, any further sun exposure is only endured. Shade is a valuable and sometimes necessary commodity on a farm.

Some varieties of pepper yield 3x under partial shade. Most crops benefit less, but most over 1x. Even wheat delivers 0.9x, with the extra revenue and reduced water loss more than making up the difference. Some crops need physical protection, such as against hail and torrential rain, that solar panels can provide.

Most cropland yields revenue only in a pulse once or (sometimes) twice a year. A steady income year-round, even in fallow fields, makes management of the farm much easier.

A source of difficulty, in some places, is a mesh of land-use restrictions incompatible with installing solar. These restrictions are being eased in many places.
Do you mean an empty line? (since, as others have pointed out, every line ends in a newline character, for most text editors).

I like having the extra line, it is a very minimal difference, but this way it is possible to copy the last line by copying "down" rather than copying "out" to the end of the line.
I would say 5min. 10min is nothing on a road trip but a lot when you are running late for something. People who make less money tend to care more about this.
> downside is no music...

If this is a personal downside for you, the Apple Watch is a great solution for this, and there are many tiny MP3 players still being sold.
It wasn't the White House, it was DHS. If you meant "the executive branch" you should say that, calling it the WH makes it sound like this was an effort of the office of the President and not someone three tiers down. And it wasn't going to censor anything, as Homeland Security doesn't have any such authority, it was about counter-messaging. And no one but political enemies called it the "Ministry of Truth".

But indeed, the count-counter-messaging was too strong and it was shut down, because at the end of the day what amounts a PR organization isn't going to be very useful vs. the ammunition it can provide to people wanting to scream about censorship.

Hilariously that statement is a perfect example of the kind of disinformation and memery techniques that that (aborted) department was trying to refute.
The use of formal methods in safety critical code is already well-established. MBD is a very common method to write ECU software, for example. It's not universal though and proofs of the more complicated system requirements are challenging at best.
> pretty minor differences

There's a massive difference between a McDonald's burger and the kind of burger you'd make fresh (or order at a non-fast-food restaurant). It's not a subtle issue of taste. They're just completely different dishes.
My partner asks me where I am going when I head out on my motorcycle; I never have an answer for them beyond north, south, east or west. That might be for one hour or six, or longer.
The cure to burnout - give yourself ample time to play and be inspired.
Doesn't matter. Pick one. Enforce it with a linter. Move on with your life.