skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think that in the short-term there will definitely be a shock to the system and there may be less lucrative and easy jobs, but long-term software is going nowhere and the fundamental value proposition of software engineers hasn't changed.

The only thing that changed is that due to increasing rates companies are tightening their CapEx and focusing on profit over growth.
> unlike being a lawyer or a doctor, the difficulty of programming is not "front loaded" and lies beneath the surface, not easily visible to the average person.

I think this is very much like those professions, especially law. Lots of people think they can be their own medical professional or lawyer, to inconsistent (at best) results.
This is quite basic 101 for ad/media. It'll be surprising if no one ever texted Elon Musk about it since May.
> "overrides any custom DNS server and enforces the ones the user set - or are set by default"

If Portmaster "enforces DNS servers with the ones that are set", after installing Portmaster and without the user changing anything, i'd say that's a decrease of privacy;

Your VPN provider can see your traffic in any case (even when you're not using their DNS server.) So, if Portmaster would change this to whatever your default is (Cloudflare, Google, etc.), people are then suddenly sharing their DNS requests with yet another 3th party.
I say this as someone who has cultivated a very low cost of living (very nearly 0.)

For every 100k I have been paid by organizations to create & program out marketing automation code I have made those organizations 1mil in recurring revenue.

It's no mystery. Code is compounding. Why do authors and musicians with a proven financial impact get huge advances? Until any one company has a monopoly on a given business niche/vertical/whathaveyou you code has compounding value.

If anything engineers need to band together as small groups and start cloning out business models for any company with a relatively traditional business model that tries to have a time wasting faang level interviewing process. The moment the salaries drop there will be an army of software devs moving back in with family and cloning any business they can aquire basic knowledge of...
Have you been to SF? I spent a bunch of time there for five years between 2013 and 2018 and the homeless problem got worse every time I visited. It's really bad, and I live in a place that has lots of homeless people.
Consistent Raft clusters from multiple Redis instances
These were on the front page I believe:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33398134

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33371121

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33140237

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33106196

This last one was also about Jadi.
> What makes me nervous, though, is that we don't really understand why programmers are paid this well, and especially why this has persisted.

Isn't part of this just how valuable software work is? Unlike almost every other industry, there is very little marginal costs to growth and a huge demand for new software based products. This means a large chunk of the value created is captured by the developers, since they are the limiting factor.

Even with that large chunk of value going towards developers, they still only get a small fraction of the total value created by the software industry. It is simply such a valuable industry with such small marginal costs, that developers are still able to be so valuable in the market.
$500 seems cheap to hire someone to impersonate a police officer. Isn't that go to jail for a long time territory?
12bit instructions would be easier (I think?) If you're inplementing it in software.

If you're doing hardware then you're either making the 256b memory 50% bigger or adding logic. Plus you need extra transistors to decode the longer instruction but you don't need to deal with the context switch of switching between instructions and data.
Grafana Phlare – aggregating continuous profiling data
Yes, I know that already. And good luck with dealing all the linker/ABI issues from changing that setting.
The video is interesting, seems like the vision system is detecting it but too late and then not actually disengaging.

I'd be interested to see if this can be replicated, as this research group seems more like an anti-tesla marketing company: https://dawnproject.com/contest/
I can't find a Git or GitHub account for him. Any ideas?
Hahaha no. I get sick when the motion I see doesn't match the gyros in my ears. I felt horribly sick from vr once with the gyros switched off.
Yes. See also:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
Any chance you could provide a link to an example product? Air purifiers seem pretty expensive, but I expect that might be due to my location
It makes the most sense to me as multiple distinct labor markets. It’s easy to find skilled programmers in the Silicon Valley labor market, so that’s where a lot of hiring happens even if the prices are higher. Equally talented programmers can be found in other markets, but it’s more difficult to locate them.

Part of why it persists is because the gravitational pull of Silicon Valley became self sustaining. Programmers move to that market because that is where the hiring happens. The hiring happens there because all the programmers move there.

I don’t live there, but that’s how I make sense of it all. It’s the same reason I shop at Target instead of Amazon despite higher prices.
> we don't understand why programmers are paid so well

Then proceeds to explain exactly why programmers are paid so well.
> Firing even 100% of your employees, just because you “don’t like their vibe”, is not illegal.

In some (many?) countries it is in fact illegal.
Surely you know the answer, if you're analyzing at this level of detail?

It's because spending 1 millisecond per X operations doing vector moves is preferable to spending 20 milliseconds per X operations stalling on list links.

If you set a good vector size from the start, the moves will be rare to nonexistent. Or you could reserve some address space and never have to move the data.
That's all fine and groovy - as long as your work doesn't involve any text or anything requiring high resolution/fine details.

Then unless you spend $$$ for very high end hardware with high resolution (4k on a headset != 4k on a monitor!) you will not be able to work efficiently.

There are also many problems with the applications and usability of the entire stack when it comes to doing actually productive work.
ShareNote – A Notebook for the Retail Investor
Built by a couple of software engineers who also invest and got tired of using tools like Evernote, Notion and Excel to undertake DD and keep track of their stock portfolios. Beta now live for the curious.
Visual Studio: Of course I can autocomplete! Hold my beer while I bring your machine with 16 cores and 64GB of RAM to its knees for multiple minutes ;)
It’s obviously wrong. Is a restaurant a software business? Ridiculous. Software is great but there are other businesses.

I could be convinced that all companies are energy companies, though.
I've worked at places that had to implement policies limiting features for a while because scammers would use credit cards that would turn out to be fraudulent. I don't know the details of how they worked it out, but they could sign up, send SPAM via us, and then the account would get shut down a week later (and we'd get a huge hit to our deliverability because of their SPAM).
>I think given what I know now, I might trade with my good friend who makes 8 figures per year doing "boring" (reliable, methodical, and predictable) contract law.

Considering the percentile of people who earn 8 figures, what makes you think you would have been capable of being in that percentile had you done law?

If your 8 figure lawyer friend was friends with a tech company founder, would they also say “given what I know now, I might trade with my software developer friend who makes 8 figures per year just from investment returns after going public”?
> A proprietary ball-return system can be programmed to pass him the ball anywhere on the court, including alternating shooting locations, allowing Looney to simulate in-game movement.
It's true that we measure the speed and precision of analog "computers" differently from how we measure them for digital computers, but it does not therefore follow that analog "computers" are all infinitely fast and perfectly precise. Any analog system has a finite bandwidth; signals above some cutoff frequency are strongly attenuated and before long are indistinguishable from noise. And analog systems also introduce error, which digital computation often does not. When digital computation does introduce error, you can decrease the size of the error exponentially just by computing with more digits, and there is no equivalent approach in the analog world.

For mechanical naval fire control computers the cutoff frequency is on the order of 100 Hz and the error is on the order of 1%. You won't learn anything interesting by sampling them every microsecond that you wouldn't learn by sampling them every millisecond.
I do this, and more people should. People on huge multi-user instances are completely missing the point of federation.

The downsides are the usual sysadmin stuff that comes with running servers for anything. People also get excited about the instance-local timelines on multi-user instances, but again, that's completely missing the point.
Sure they can and probably should, as an alternative. My point is that I sometimes prefer to take advantage of the more advanced capabilities of specialized recommendation systems.
Right, and that's why I said at the end of my post, it may just be that length is a bad metric in both cases.

However, I'd posit that if you went into a forum of professional writers and asked how they felt about word count measurements, they'd be a lot more divided than we are regarding lines of code. Or, to pick another example, NaNoWriMo seems to be pretty popular among aspiring authors, and that's all about the wordcount. Maybe it shouldn't be—or maybe there's something we're missing.

For example: it may be the case that lines of code is a useful goal during certain phases of a project—maybe while prototyping, for example. Just like how a target word count is useful when writing a rough draft, but obviously stupid while revising a draft.

Although, an author might set a goal to get below a certain word count during the revision phase—and that again might be a useful target for programmers refactoring code.
The numbers don't check out. It looks like he is using a weird definition of recycle the CO2 produced by an adult human.

A normal person need about 2000 kcalories per day. That's approximately 500g (1/2 kg) (1 pound) of sugar. Eating only sugar is bad, but most carbohydrates and proteins have a similar kcalories to weight ratio.

If the plant absorbs all the CO2 produced by the person, it must rebuild all that sugar back (and store it as cellulose, or starch or even proteins, but again all have a very similar similar kcalories to weight ratio.) So the plant must grow approximately 500g (1/2 kg) (1 pound) per day.

That is like 15kg (30 pounds) per month, that is a weigh of a small child. Or like 150kg (300 pounds) per year that is the weight of one or two adults. Plant's don't grow so much.
(Note that you can reduce the weight to one half is the plant only makes oil instead of as cellulose, or starch or even proteins, but it still too high.)

Edit: Self nitpicking: About the reduction of weigh using oil, I used calories per gram instead of carbon per gram.

Oversimplifiying: In sugar the simplified unit is COH2, that has one carbon per 12+16+2=30 atomic units. In oil, the simplified unit is CH2 that has one carbon every 12+2=14 atomic units. So the ratio is aproximately 30/14=2.14 instead of the calories ratio that is 9/4=2.5. Both are very similar, so the end remark is still correct. I'm not sure if it's a coincidence or if I think hard enough about energy per atomic bound it get obvious.

Proteins are harder, because amino acids are more diverse. I left the exact calculation for someone else, but as a rough simplification let's use achain of valine. The building block is C5ONH9 that is a carbon for every (12*5+16+14+9)/5=19.8 atomic units, so it's something in between. Anyway, don't expect your plant to make too much proteins. Even soy overdosed with fertilizer has only like a 15% of proteins.
*Until the party was co-opted by authoritarian plutocrats. and still said all the same things without tangibly moving towards those goals.
I think you've inadvertently stumbled on another great example, distinct types for TranslatedMessage, LocalizedNumber, etc. from ordinary string has been a cornerstone of localization enforcement on at least two large applications I've worked on.
I would rather become a brick mason or plumber before I have to work with a VR headset on.

Zero doubts.

If this becomes any kind of norm for tech work I'm throwing my computer out the window.
This seems like saying that because all modern businesses depend on electricity, working in the utilities sector will always be lucrative. It's true that developers are necessary, but it doesn't mean they are important, or that they will always be in high demand.
Curious about your cost of living statement being zero. How did you do that? What kind of life style is that?
Yeah I checked to see if it was posted on his newsletter (they give you a free issue preview on substack) before I posted the above, and it's not there... yet. I think the main thing that motivates Twitter behavior is that it's easy to quickly post stuff including pictures and gut reactions without having to compose a more well-thought out article. As such, Twitter unfortunately still fills that gap of short-posts that are aimed to get high attention. This area is need of (decentralized) innovation.
Ah yes, I'm going to make software for trillion dollar corporations with record profits and record salaries for CEOs and fat cats and take a pay cut because ,,I'' am being over paid.

5 of the top 10 companies with highest profits are tech, most of the others are banks (which highly rely on tech). What a joke. This feels like propaganda to make me happy to just get paid while fat cats still get fat.
Every modern company is dependent on a lot of things due to interconnections in the economy, that is nearly irrelevant.

Pay is about supply and demand in the labor force. Necessity will help hold up one side of the equation, but not the other.
The problem with relative numbers is that they provide a mechanism to increase absolute numbers without impact to the percentage. Thus, “fewer ads” today could be more tomorrow if we consider that we don’t know the absolute number
Has absolutely nothing whatever to do with OOP.

OOP, where it means anything at all, involves runtime selection of operations according to types organized in hierarchies.

TFA is about compile-time type compatibility enforcement.
Which doesn't go with the idea of a public square free speech platform. Real public squares don't require you to pay to enter. And actual free speech should be influenced by those who are willing and/or able to pay for the privilege

https://twitter.com/somebadideas/status/1588876465915166721?...
Right now? In the context of me saying it's a substitute for a fresh graduate?

> Who tells GPT what to write? Who verifies what is written?

Are the people who would previously be doing the same to the fresh graduate.

How far we are from a project manager being able to do the same to a whole team, or a CEO being able to do away with a PM, I don't know, but I did explicitly suggest it may still be the last thing to ever get automated.
For what claims? Patrimony, alimony, residency, or taxes? Probably not. Maybe a passport?
What is the value proposition for this subscription, should include boring flamethrower or some internet connection from space.
If you can do more with one programmer, then you need less programmers, and demand for programmers goes down.
The article didn't explicitly talk about near future, even from his advice (that you should save several years worth of your expenses) you can see that it's something for the long-term.

Ironically, reading what you just wrote ("Since 2019 my pay has gone up by triple digit %") and considering that it's the same case for me - we should probably ask ourselves - is that kind of growth healthy, and can it be sustained? While I obviously do enjoy the benefits of it, I have to say that I'm afraid the answer to both of these questions is "no". The only question that remains is when it will stop and collapse.
Are all companies energy companies?

While that statement broadly applies to white-collar and services, what percentage of COGS is software in manufacturing?

Is it 90%? 50%? or maybe only 5%?

Software is useful. That doesn't make it important enough to command high pay in a shrinking economy.
…in mice! Oh wait nevermind.
Thanks, I largely agree with all of this except for concerns about me being banned or whatever. I'm not worried about that at all. Reddit banning Reveddit would probably shoot it to the moon because there's absolutely a story there. The thing about censorship is it actually helps the message of whoever's being censored if you know that focusing on the censorship is what wins people over. People naturally want to hear both sides of the argument, and if they're not allowed to hear one, they want to hear that side even more [1].

It's a little sad to hear that that blog post foretold this situation. I knew of the post but didn't realize it predicted the result. If so I wonder why not build something like Reveddit sooner? Oh well.

About contact, there's an email in my HN profile. I have to sign off now, but would be happy to chat further there.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E0T9XSG73kY&t=4889s
And the only actual useful tests are functional (depending on how you write them) and above.

If those fail, it means that neither your design nor your code works.

The absolute vast majority of unit tests are meaningless because you just repeat them again in the higher level tests.
> I like Twitter enough to pay a few bucks to do my part to help keep the servers running

The only part anyone would be playing is digging Musk out of the financial hole he created for himself.

"Give me money to rescue me from my bad business decisions!" is not much of a sales pitch.
> What makes me nervous, though, is that we don't really understand why programmers are paid this well

It's very easy. Look at any tech company's stock price and you have a very good proxy for programmer compensation.

When government and central banks worked together to create a bubble in the monetary base, valuations went nuts and so did job creation. Many of these jobs are useless or unnecessary. Many of them are completely discretionary. Many of them have a negative effect on the bottom line. Many of them employ people who we would normally consider unemployable. Many of them offer the employer atrocious returns.

In classic government fashion, they realized they made a mess, so now they are doing their best to correct this by pulling on every lever they have:

* Wage suppression through record immigration

* Under-representing inflation so that CPI-driven wage adjustments do not rise enough to sustain demand

* Outright job destruction by trying to destroy certain key industries (e.g. oil and gas)

* Making money very much not free, so companies suddenly have to think about costs.

Unfortunately this trend has only begun and technology has been generally fast to act, but mass layoffs are coming to almost every industry, especially if you were not characterized as "essential" during the pandemic.

Inflation isn't just fought through interest rate increases and quantitive tightening, it's fought by ensuring you can no longer afford your current quality of life.
Given that software engineers tend to be paid more than hardware engineers, things being dependent on software isn't a very good argument.
12 to 17" 4k monitor is completely pointless.

At those sizes a normal FullHD or 1920x1200 panel will do you the same service - and cost much less and require much less powerful GPU to drive (battery of your laptop will thank you!)
def job_saver(): while (true) { add_code; sleep; delete_code; sleep; }
> mangling of signals

As I recall, there was a 1990s Macintosh where the serial port used a proprietary connector (of course) with fewer pins, so Apple decided to double up and use one pin for both Data Terminal Ready (DTR) and Clear to Send (CTS). (Or we had cables that connected two pins?)

Many modems would hang up if you dropped DTR. Enabling this is a good practice to prevent the modem from accidentally staying connected after you're done.

Enabling hardware flow control is also a good practice. If the Mac can tell the sender to wait for a moment, that's better than dropping data.

Perhaps you can see where this is going. If you enable both of these, everything appears to work fine for a while. That is, until the Mac falls behind (scrolling a lot in a terminal window, for example) and needs to actually use hardware flow control. Then, rather than pausing the flow of data, it hangs up the modem.

And your first thought when a modem hangs up out of nowhere is that it's a modem issue: noise on the phone line, a bad modem implementation, an incompatibility between two different modems, etc. So you waste time looking at those as causes.

The solution was to either disable hardware flow control or to configure the modem to ignore DTR and use +++ ATH to hang up instead. Disabling hardware flow control makes PPP (etc.) perform horribly because packets get corrupted and re-sent. And this is another deceptive problem because the modem speed appears to have plummeted but actually the modem is working fine.
Wonder if that includes any users from the EU? Twitter Blue isn’t even available there
Importance does not command high pay, supply and demand does. The point of “every business is a software business” is to imply that demand for software developers will stay abreast with supply of software developers.

Edit: also, obviously, the buyer needs to be able to pay, which is sort of related to software being able to be used to advance a business’s competitiveness in the market such that the business is able and willing to invest in software development
> Specifically, I'd recommend living on a small portion of your income and saving a multiple of your living expenses.

General life advice? This implies everybody should save at least 66.6% of their post-tax salary.
If it is confirmed that energy production relieves Yellowstone Caldera pressure, should we build geothermal energy plants there?

For the greater good, despite conservation efforts.
Can you recommend one of these great products that won’t transmit my activity and usage off my device? Fortunately monitor manufacturers haven’t figured out that trick yet and I don’t want a privacy regression from my non-virtual monitor setup.

Everything I have found in VR land assumes internet connectivity, demands a login/PII, and transmits data back to the mothership against my will.
Plant subscription boxes are a thing, so we're not _that_ far off.
Newton Minow discusses broadcasting (1964) [audio]
Interview of Newton Minnow, former FCC chair, by Studs Terkel.

Audio runs 46 minutes, transcript available at link.

Discussion includes advertising, business performance metrics (ratings), programming quality (Minnow's most famous phrase is "the Great Wasteland"), and educational television, amongst others.

This is part of the excellent Studs Terkel archive at WFMT which spans seven decades.
TIL that punycode breaks email.split('@') to get the domain:

Apparently John@Gıthub.com normalizes to xn--john@gthub-2ub.com but Gıthub.com normalizes to xn--gthub-n4a.com.

For now I will go back to forgetting that emails not covered by /[A-Za-z0-9.-+_]+@[A-Za-z0-9.-_](.[A-Za-z0-9.-_])*/ exist to preserve my sanity but this does confuse me.