skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I worked at IBM as a student intern in the mid 80s and at the Royal bank of Scotland.

Process at these companies was slow and waterfall. Once worked with a group porting mainframe office type software to a minicomputer sold to banks; they had been cranking out C code for years and scheduled to finish in a few more years, and the developers were generally convinced that nothing would ever be releasable.

The people were smart and interesting - there was no notion of doing software to become rich, pre-SGI and pre Netscape, and they all were people who shared a love of solving puzzles and a wonder that one could earn a living solving puzzles.

IBM had a globe spanning but internal message board sort of thing that was amazing, conversations on neurology and AI and all kinds of stuff with experts all over the world.

I also worked at the Duke CS lab around 1990, but it was hard to compare to companies because academia is generally different. People did the hard and complex stuff that they were capable of, and the grad students operated under the thumb of their advisor.

Wages were higher than for example secretarial jobs, but not life altering for anyone, but people didn’t care so much.
I can go back 26 years. Sorry.

It was a mixture of VGA CRTs and VT220's. I just missed token ring,

New graduate, started in Australia at $35k. That's about $65k in current dollars. No stock, maybe a bonus.

Manuals were binders or printed books. Builds were managed by the "Configuration Manager", and coordinated nightly. The languages were C, Ada, Assembly.

The network was BNC cables.

Design reviews were a thing, code walk throughs were a thing. People were trying to work out how to apply UML.

Printers will still a mix of dot matrix and lasers.

Design patterns I think, had just become a thing.

Work life balance was okay. Everything was waterfall, so you ended up in death marches semi-regularly.

Linux was just ascending, but big-iron Unixen ruled the dev environment. Microsoft was just trying to work out itself (Microsoft Mail, Lotus 123, Domino)
This [1] is something people should be more aware of. Those are our declassified nuclear targets from the Cold War. The Soviet Union's (and now Russia's) are almost certainly of a similar theme. While military targets did play a significant role, major targets included population, economic, industrial, and even medical infrastructure.

What military targets there were would be significantly reduced today. We were targeting military targets, not to target their military - but to try to destroy their means of nuclear delivery (bombers). Today in the ICBM era, that means of delivery is largely nuclear fortified silos spread far out and in the middle of nowhere. Poor targets.

Nuclear war isn't about defeating the enemy, it's about destroying them. If Russia nuked 100 military targets today, then tomorrow there'd be 20 million Americans looking to enlist, and every single aspect of manufacturing we have domestically or can influence abroad would be directed towards rebuilding at an unprecedented rate.

The way you overcome this is by focusing on that rebuilding: population, industry, economy, and even medical. You probably have a much better chance of surviving a nuclear war if you live out in the middle of nowhere, even beside a nuclear silo, than you do living in a common population center. Though with the goal of destruction, even that may be insufficient since there's no reason to expect things like salted bombs [2] or other doomsday type weaponry would not come into play.

[1] - https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/nukevault/ebb538-Cold-War-Nuclear...

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobalt_bomb
If you are truthful with your psychiatrist about recreational drug use, they may be required or decide to withhold an amphetamine prescription that ironically reduces your recreational drug use.
MJB did a video on this yesterday.

Basically these people (Meta execs) truly believe that VR/AR will be the near universal way to do things at some point in the future so they can't lose by being a first mover.

I believe that to be so wrong it's hilarious and shows the depths of self delusion at play. And I say that as a share holder since IPO.

Main fb platform has stagnated to irrelevance and I have real concerns about the long term viability of the advertising income streams in light of potential regulation.
Communication is key. In my opinion, half of technical debt is made before a line of code gets written by the rank-and-file.
Apple sold hardware. Twitter sells what, attention? And it sells it indirectly - to "advertisers". Which I guess can include traditional advertisers, political campaigns and people distributed about the political and ethical spectrum. I doubt the last group is willing to pay all that much, so losing the first group will hurt.
It's difficult to be productive when you're waiting on a shipment of parts, for one thing. We've been working for decades to make industries work with more advanced logistics and less stock on hand. Now there are supply chain issues, and you can't assemble and sell something if you don't have the parts whether it's a car, a computer, or a rose hip half skim gigante honey latte.

Real wages are up a bit, but revenues are way up despite the supply chain issues. People are being forced back into offices who don't need to be there. Maybe morale is low. I know of concrete instances of low morale, and I'm sure there are others.

People's life changing because of RTO requires attention.

People are often looking to move or to change jobs recently, which requires attention.

Millions of people have been ill with a respiratory/vascular virus which sometimes causes long term damage. More than a million in the US have died from it. Survivors often have pulmonary issues and long-term mental fog which may be permanent or take years to recover. They have less energy and stamina. It's harder for many of them to concentrate. Some of those who died were in the workforce, and whatever knowledge they had about their job died with them. Other deaths were people's family and friends. Funerals, cleaning out houses, donating their belongings, and the grief itself aren't exactly good for worker productivity but they are things humans need to do.

Lots of micromanagers exist. For people who haven't returned to office with no open floor plan to walk around, many of them use a messaging app like Slack to micromanage. Water cooler conversation is in Slack channels. Meetings are in Slack, Teams, or Zoom or something else, and everyone's supposed to be engaged rather than working on their laptop until it's their turn to speak. There are often more officially designated meetings because people can't drop by one another's offices. Lots of work is concentration-based work, or "flow" work. Constant interruptions are bad for anyway, but when it takes 20 or 30 minutes to get all the context in your head to solve a problem and a three-minute interruption to lose all of that, more interruptions can be catastrophic for productivity.

Some types of business have minimum staffing requirements. You can cut staff and try to "right size", but you need enough staff to keep the place open if that's your goal. If orders are down enough, your staff will sometimes have less to do. If because of the shortages mentioned before your ability to fill orders is down, the same thing applies. You have a choice of eating some less profitable quarters until the supply chain levels out or just closing shop. You can't lay off 100% of your trained staff and count on rehiring them later.
> Employers should be able to be unreasonable and shoot their business in the foot, no?

No.

Not when they hold an employees ability to meet basic human needs and their access to Healthcare over their employee's heads.

At-will employment is ideologically built on the equal splitting of the power between an employer and employee. The reality is as far from equal as can be.
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/hpc/in-the-search-for-performan...
No, my point was that the fleet itself adds entropy to the system because it creates a lot of noise for engineers to track down edge cases and other weird things that happen when you're collecting data from a lot of "sensors", i.e. cars, at once. The exact same argument Karpathy made about why they dumped ultrasonics and radar.

The problem is that so far, Tesla has yet to demonstrate that the fleet _is_ sufficient. IMO, if the fleet was enough to get to L5 autonomous driving, then they would already be there.
Iranians trying to get cash so they can buy groceries are not the problem. North Korea using ransomware to get lots of cryptocurrency they can use to fund their nuclear weapons program is the problem.
Totally, not just Twitter, I've seen that behavior outside of Twitter employees plenty. I am just as not in favor of it, regardless of the company.
As a 48 year old who's feeling quite burnt out, I'm curious to learn more about this sideways move... I'm feeling a bit trapped right now. :(

EDIT: Ah, checked your profile and history and it seems like you've become a writer? Hmm... maybe I could do that...

(BTW, the SSL cert for your website has expired!)

EDIT2: Thanks for the advice on writing, all! Honestly, I was thinking of taking the technical writer route. I've always been pretty good at authoring things like technical specs, so it seemed like a potential "lateral move," albeit one that probably pays a hell of a lot less than software development. I'm suspect that technical writing has some of the same soul-crushing aspects of software development, so perhaps it wouldn't even be worth it.
Have you stepped through protobuf processing code? There's a lot of special cases, ifs, branches here and there. Protobufs within protobufs. Its not like its a size, then 100 floats packed together, theres more overhead than youd think. (Not to mention the client side allocations etc etc)
I use protoc compiled to wasm for protobufs and it is fast, but theres a lot of wasm overhead to execute that code.

Json parsing is also a lot of special cases, error testing, but the v8 team has spent a huge amount of time optimising json parsing (theres a few blog posts on it).
Im not assuming either way, but it's definitely as cut and dry as one would assume.
Were you in the process of closing? I can’t imagine a scenario where a $5 dispute would cause problems with an established loan.
Tried it, seems to me a bit dull.

Check https://www.nordtheme.com/ports/visual-studio-code for an example.

BTW I really like https://github.com/enkia/tokyo-night-vscode-theme from the other thread.
You also have to multiply time savings by the number of users. If some optimization will cost a developer an hour and that will result in only one minute savings for a single user, then that might seem like a loss; but only if you have less than 60 users. Once your software has a million daily users, every second you save results in a cumulative savings of 1 million seconds (over 11 days).
yeah, at first glance I was wondering "did they seriously make a website for a colour palette?"
Many things operate this way - you want to charge people who can pay but offer the service for free to those who actually cannot pay (either because of sanctions or lack of funds, etc). The tricky part is avoiding abuse; but "country claiming it is sanctioned when it is not" is pretty unlikely.
Sometimes people have their own motives and don't always tell you the truth or at least omit to tell you their plans. As a co-worker once told me, welcome to the mud pit along with everyone else you'll be a competitor with while trying to build a career and hopefully a decent product.
To your first point, assuming alien life is not ubiquitous would be an equally thought provoking claim. The Fermi paradox asks “are we alone?” while yours claims “we are alone.”
I did this once, bought an older MacBook Pro to make sure my app was still 'usable' on an older machine. After about a year the machine didn't get any OS updates, and then a year after that it just died. Wasted my $300.

I have a 2006 Intel MacBook that still works but I've also had 3 year old Macs just quit working.
I work on an application with some serious performance issues. Nearly all of them involve some combination of:

- inefficient design around data dependencies and their identification

- redundant work performed around said dependencies

- excessive reliance on APIs for uses they’re not intended, which frequently causes…

- …excessive VM deoptimizations and excessive GC

Granted this is one application and I certainly don’t think it’s representative of anything. But it’s definitely a counterpoint to inefficient concurrency (where this app generally performs quite well).
I think the point still stands though, right? The moon is only 1% the mass of the Earth so if we had all that extra crust it wouldn't make our crust to core ratio so off that we couldn't have an atmosphere.
> Reports that he gave a team until Nov 7th to roll out a paid subscription

> None of these things are particularly unreasonable

Six business days to come up with a system to process $6m per month of income.

Nothing unreasonable indeed...
Choosing a technology because you're betting it will become popular and therefore better than it is now is a bad move (except for hobby projects). You should only choose to use a new tech if you will derive enough in its current form to justify the cost. Otherwise you may well end up stuck with technology that you were never happy with and that never hit the popularity thresholds you hoped for.
> If an autocratic country isn't doing well, how would you know? Who would loudly say anything?

Protests and rebellions happen all the time, no matter how heavily autocratic a country is. You see this everywhere in the world, look at Iran where protesters are shot but keep protesting. Hell, just look at history, look at how much lives have been sacrificed on the altar of revolution.

I don't believe that any autocracy could suppress discontent enough for the rest of the world to not know, if widely spread.
I would accept that another person has chosen not to do business with me and take my money to a vendor who would choose to do business with me. Or host my own source control. Anyone is free to choose not to take my money because they disagree with the business I choose to conduct.
Alternatively, given that the majority of the planet is water and we kind of can't really imagine a biology without it, the universe could be full of fish planets.
I am sorry but i am over the "people familiar" .. " condition of anonymity" crap in news

Either put a name to it, or dont report on it
> Illegal Tampering by Diesel Pickup Owners Is Worsening Pollution

The solution to this is not to make tampering hard or illegal, but instead to simply have random spot checks and hefty fines for those caught doing it.

It would work like this:

* The truck detects tampering has occurred, and pops up a warning (repeated once a month) saying "Warning: Your emissions system may have a fault, and should be checked by a professional. Driving a vehicle that does not meet emissions laws could incur a fine of $10k."

* Each state trains a few police officers on use of a rolling road and emissions checking equipment. They pull vehicles over at random and test them. They issue large fines to those who don't pass the test (with a big discount for those where the emissions failure appears to be due to neglect rather than deliberate tampering).

* Publish in local media stories of those caught, include figures of how many people air pollution has killed in the state. Make sure you get some quotes from the mother of a trucker who has died from lung cancer, etc.

Soon far fewer people will be modding their trucks...
* No. People who visit and donate, only wants it to go to the site they are using and for its development.*

Not if it was clear the money was going to other avenues of increased knowledge.

Then the donator knows what they’re getting into and can choose accordingly. Nothing wrong with that.
Exactly. Use simple language. State what you like / dislike about something and provide a compelling argument. Don't try to add false legitimacy with a "considered harmful" title. If your argument has a broad consensus, then state exactly which groups have come to that conclusion.
In my experience, most developers hate interacting with stakeholders. They start complaining about having too many meetings, etc. Also I think it's difficult to handle both roles simultaneously. There's a lot of context-switching involved. Hence the existence of scrum masters.

Perhaps it's different when you have the resources to attract top-tier talent.
It's definitely one of the best-looking color scheme I've ever seen, but I've tried it and it's unfortunately not usable for me.

My vision is really bad and the contrast is way too low for a long coding session. YMMV.
> We still don't understand what causes many diseases, or how to heal many wounds.

Right, but we still know the diseases and wounds exist.
I think much of that really depends on what kind of company/department you worked for, like I'd guess it does now.

Apart from that, there were more constraints from limited hardware that forced you to get creative and come up with clever solutions for things that you can now afford to do in a more straightforward (or "naive") manner. It helped that you could (and usually did) pretty much understand most if not all of the libraries you were using. Chances are you had a hand in developing at least some of them in the first place. Fewer frameworks I'd say and fewer layers between your own code and the underlying hardware. Directly hacking the hardware even, like programming graphics card registers to use non-standard display modes. And I'd guess the chance that your colleagues were in it for the magic (i.e. being nerds with a genuine passion for the field) more than for the money were probably better than now, but I wouldn't want to guess by how much.

Oh, and the whole books vs internet thing of course.
I don't follow the logic that RIPE has to acknowledge Russia's claim on Crimea as legit to do this.

As far as I can tell, the following statements are true independent of who you think rightly owns Crimea:

1. RIPE is the ultimate authority over IP address assignments in Europe as recognized by the relevant governments here

2. The Crimea region became served by different ISPs than before (for whatever reason)

3. RIPE exercised its authority to transfer Crimea's IP address assignments to the company(s) currently serving the region
>>Perl's syntax is a bit off-putting.

Not sure which parts of Perl syntax you find off putting, but I could guess.

1. Sigils: Why is this bad? Perl has symbols do represent lists(@), associative arrays(%), scalars($). This is actually more readable than Python's approach where there is no symbol to indicate things. The only place where symbol pollution gets out of hand is where you need nested structures. But even there having explicit indication of what's what is better than leaving programmer guessing. Note how this is a program design problem, than a problem with the language itself. To me the only time I deal with this when I'm parsing XMLs and JSONs. Nothing much can be done there because XMLs and JSONs themselves are nested structures.

2. Regular expressions: How else would you represent regular expressions? Do you want Java style

string.matchAtStart('x')
.matchAtEnd('.')
.dontMatchImmediatelyStart(...)
.noAlphaNumericChars(...)
.exceptChars(...)
...
...

See how verbose this gets and very hard to read, it's really the equivalent attempting to do math in words than symbols.

3. References: There are places where you are better of passing a reference to some data, than passing the data itself, for obvious performance and efficiency reasons.

4. Quote words, expressions: Very useful for rapid scripting, and adding data without having it to massage it to a program's syntax.

5. Text utilities: Like chomp, tr, grep. Make it very easy for Unixy work. Why are these even issues?

Perl also contains your regular list manipulation utilities, and OO features. Overall very useful. Not sure where this 'hard to read syntax' thing comes from.

>>However, learning simpler Unix tools - i.e. grep, sed and awk - is worth the trouble, as those are very useful tools for command line tasks, and work with pipes.

There are lots of limitation with those tools, you can't do work with several files. You don't get error handling. You are stuck with a paradigm of working on line/block at a time. You can't do other stuff like make Rest API calls. You can't do XML/JSON stuff, the list goes endless because they are not by definition regular programming languages. In fact Perl exists to address these limitations.

>>However, using Python's re module for regular expression matching results in far more readable code than any of the predecessors, particularly as expressions get more complex.

No Python got famous, because its users never worked with messy early internet work. Like having to deal with multiple data formats, log files, API responses, database work with no standard data exchange formats. Perl lost a lot of its utility when JSON and XMLs became ubiquitous.

And yeah Python was never big in Unix world either. Its main use was for developing web apps(Django, Twisted Matrix etc).

For that even today Python is bad at anything which has non trivial data work.
Agreed. I find this visibly worse than many IDE presets.
Not always. 90% of criticism is crap too, and that is what I'm referring to.
Massive Pandemic relief fraud has Congress eyeing digital IDs
This only makes sense if you have a server that someone else put together that for some reason only speaks protobuf. I'm not aware of any language ecosystem that has protocol buffers but no json support, so if you're building a server from scratch this isn't a good reason to use protobufs.

And if you are faced with a server that only speaks protobuf, the same question applies to the original devs: why did they make that decision?
I've personally settled on Dracula, came from Solarized and Nord, stayed with Dracula for the longest time now.
About 30 years ago, Java hadn't even shipped version 1 yet.

Windows 3.11 was all the range.

Mobile development wasn't a thing.

Networking personal computers was a big deal. There were several architectures up for grabs, and several major players (including Netware) in the mix. It wasn't clear which path developers should follow.

The internet (on personal computers anyway) wasn't really a thing yet.

On Windows, the Component Object Model had just been shipped, and it was all the rage with Windows developers.

Keeping source code in version control was a novel idea. (Mercurial and git were 10+ years away)

Many things haven't changed though. It was important to be current on technology then as it is now.

It continues to be important to be able to communicate well. Software is a domain of the mind because we take ideas in our head and translate them to bits. You need to be able to have a mental model of the problem space and communicate it clearly with peers and clients.
Here's the thing though, if you're Karpathy and you are 100% confident that Tesla's approach is on the cusp of delivering full L5 autonomous driving, then why leave? Surely, Tesla would become the most valuable company overnight if they could actually do it. He would be showered with accolades when they finally finish it. To leave, _before_ any of that happens, says it all.
"Lots of stuff is bad and so all of it must be bad" is a weak argument. Look at email: 85% of mail is spam and scam.

If you read beyond the hype the use cases are very clear, even if they are very narrow: disintermediation, decentralization, and making permissionless payments and contracts.

Blockchains like Monero and zcash are pretty good ways to handle anonymous payments across the world, compared to sending cash in an envelope or trusting a third-party with your privacy. If Tor would be allowed on SourceHut even with its negatives, so should Monero and zcash. Monero and zcash were not built with the explicit goal to scam people, and they do provide features that were not easily achievable prior to this technology.