skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I interviewed A LOT over the past year. Most of the time senior meant some kind of framework tool monkey. When the interviewer started asking senior level questions it was clear my definition and their definition of senior were very different. Most of time is was clear they were looking for anybody would could put text on the screen with confidence, which feels extremely junior to me.

The interesting moments were when somebody with less than 3 years professional experience were elevated to management because it’s a startup. They were so lost trying to interview somebody with 20 years experience and prior experience as a corporate director level. I completely stopped talking to start ups.

Eventually I got very lucky and found a company that is awesome with incredible leadership. They were actually looking for a senior to come in and fix some architectural things and in return they would teach me areas of programming I had never done before.

Here are the common danger patterns I observed over and over:

* Most importantly look for strong leadership in the employer first. If it just isn’t there stop talking to them. They are more than happy to waste your time in repeated interviews.

* Determine the level of honesty present in the work culture. Look for brutal honesty up front and don’t be shy about it. If they are timid about honesty in an interview you will spend your employment walking on egg shells and playing politics, the kind of place where shitty brown-nosing people get promoted over you.

* Next evaluate for the quality of work. Do this by asking about writing original code. If they are timid about original code or are horrified at the thought of stepping outside the yellow brick road to produce a superior product I don’t want to work there. There are many people thrilled to work at someplace average building a shitty product so they should hire one of those other people.

* Finally evaluate for retention. Does that employer work extra hard to retain people? If not you need to drill into this immediately.

Don’t be shy about asking tough questions. You will be devoting a block of your life to these people.
A few of us remembers the time Slashdots 24-bit comment table ID keys overflowed, was a fun couple of days.
Why not count by English-speaking people? Of whom almost half are North American (US+Canada) and would call it "Soccer", and then so do the Australians, Irish, and several others.

https://www.businessinsider.com/football-vs-soccer-map-2013-...
> The cloud/SaaS approach

You dont have to push constant updates for a cloud / SaaS product - many chose to - but ultimately you dont have to.

A year of 'no new features' should be something customers and vendor alike benefit from.
Let's drop Steve Jobs as some sort of magic visionary.

If you really want to talk about a true tech visionary, use:

Douglas Engelbart: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Engelbart

Mother of All Demos: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos

> The 90-minute presentation demonstrated for the first time many of the fundamental elements of modern personal computing: windows, hypertext, graphics, efficient navigation and command input, video conferencing, the computer mouse, word processing, dynamic file linking, revision control, and a collaborative real-time editor.

> December 9, <<<1968>>>

1968, not 1991.
What's a “total language”?
Yes that's the approximate amount they have to pay due to the way he's done the financing of the deal. Keep in mind that the current interest is at a similar amount to there revenues from last year.

That's the reason to deeply cut expenses and to try and make more money. He could probably have serviced that debt if everything just kept going as normal (no big ad spend cut) and he had fired everyone but that's an impossible scenario.
Slightly better for orange and secondary. Though, it’s only an issue on one of my 2 monitors.
> Don't make assumptions; I'm well aware. I was deployed to an RAF station there for a number of months, my fathers side of the family are all passionate Catholic Irish republicans, and my mother all served in NI during the Troubles in the British Army. I know the history intimately through them, and years of studying the conflict within officer branch of the RAF.

Wow, in that case you probably have a more in-depth awareness than me. It's just that lots of people with no context have been pushing a United Ireland post Brexit, and it's really frustrating to try to explain that it's not quite that easy. My apologies for lumping you in with those people.

> I do truly believe that Brexit has fundamentally and permanently shifted the balance in the region in favor of the republicans. Public support for independence is the strongest it's been in decades, particularly within the younger demographics. There's no sign of that sentiment slowing. On the other side of the fence, Parliament's desire to govern NI has lessened significantly, something that would have been considered sacrilege just 10 years ago.

I think that you're probably right, but I would prefer this to happen really slowly with a well thought out plan. I think sometime by the late 2030's/early 40s would probably make sense. I'm just very conscious of how Brexit was managed, and I dearly want to avoid a situation like that.

More generally, the population of the Republic will most likely need to make a whole bunch of compromises to get unity (change the anthem/flag/maybe rejoin the Commonwealth etc) and it's gonna take a while to get people in the South to shift on that.

> I can't picture a situation where it won't eventually go to a vote, just like the Scottish referendum. I also can't imagine it being a particularly peaceful transition whatever the result of the vote.

That's why I want to wait a while, as right now definitely seems like the wrong time (sadly). If Brexit hadn't happened then we'd have had a much easier time of this, but such is life.
Ask HN: What's the future for Windows server? How does compete against free?
I had an idea for an application that would have required Windows server.

When I saw what it cost I abandoned that idea.

Then I wondered - how does Windows Server continue to charge hundreds of dollars per instance when Linux and BSD are free?
It’s no use trying to reclaim the term “troll” for the legends of Usenet: the word is now a synonym for a griefer, the contemptibles, FBI swatters, and so on.

Defending the word can be misconstrued as defending the act. It’s not a fight worth having.
This is one of those "well, of course!" pieces.

But I've bookmarked it, in case I run into someone who thinks they disagree, in which case I can offload the explanation.

I had a similar incident with colleagues who had discovered the "Default" trait and starting adding defaults to everything, including things that didn't have good defaults, and things where they didn't mean default but actually something quite specific such as "empty". The canonical "don't do that!" blog post didn't exist, so I had to create one.
What seems interesting to me about many of these (all the HVAC, home automation stuff) is that a device with a voice interface sort of seems like a local maximum in terms of usability. You're spending lots of time getting info from Alexa and then telling her what to change to keep the environment ambient.

I would expect that in the future, home automation does all the regulation for you without any interaction. You set up a bunch of configuration in advance, and maybe train the device a little bit initially on things like your temperature preferences (because we think we want a certain temp, but actually usually find it slightly too warm or whatever). Then you almost never have to make changes, let alone expend your executive function on deciding what instructions to give the devices.
The fact that you use the NFT ecosystem as proof of anything is baffling.

NFT doesn't even store its data.

It's not even a true protocol that mandates things ensuring stability.

You're buying thin air.
Just curious, among the critical stuff just holding on, was there also a whole pile of departments and teams doing work that could cease tomorrow and the company would blink and move on?

My experience is both exist at the same time because the leadership teams don't actually know what core business is or are busy building empires and resumes.
"Effective therapy" for which illness? Is there a bank robber virus I'm unaware of?
Many places in Asia have justice systems that make the US one look decidedly tame by comparison. The Japanese death row system is one of the most clear in its overt sadism. Prisoners are almost never allowed out of their cells, granted minimal resources to occupy their time, and never informed of the date of their execution until one day the steps coming down that hall aren't there to bring you food, but to (literally) put a rope around your neck.

Imagine just sitting there thinking each time you hear those footsteps. In the regular prison system at large Amnesty International has repeatedly singled out Japan for various abuses that verge on torture. A quick search for "keiheikin" can send you on a web crawl about such. Yet of course the criminality rate in Japan (and many places in Asia for that matter) is near zero, in spite of a vigorously punishment/revenge based system.

The point I make with this is that different places have different populations with different proclivities. It's not like if the Norwegian system was adopted in America we ought expect to suddenly see a relatively crimeless population with negligible recidivism rates, anymore than if Norway adopted the American system would they suddenly expect to see sharp increases in violent crime and skyrocketing recidivism rates.
Absolutely. I remember we build a unimaginably brittle application many years ago, I think it was running on Windows XP and glued together a complex system with COM calls into this single page webapp even before react was a thing. It was build on a very small budget, serving the core business of a very tiny company.

Like maybe 8 years later I found out it was still humming along happily, without really even a sysadmin attending to it, on a single workstation using consumer hardware, servicing the company that had grown tenfold in size.

It blew my mind it still just worked all these years.
>Taste is almost definitionally subjective and culturally mediated.

Yup.

"De gustibus non est disputandum"

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_gustibus_non_est_disputan...

But it's fun to dispute about, anyway :)
This paper describes an interesting approach to fixing that failure:

https://users.ece.utexas.edu/~gligoric/papers/NieETAL19TrigI...

Occasionally I have had luck by embedding assertions in C code that fail when the trigger conditions are met… but mostly that’s not practical. I’ve never had any luck with the dependent ticket approach, those tickets always end up lost forever.
> So how to we handle neurodiverse people has a modern society, it is an important question that bears asking.

We handle them so they can't have the possibility to hurt others again until we can be confident enough that they understand what they did and/or won't do it again. IMO protection of society is more important than punishments.

At the very least that person's internet usage should be restricted and monitored for a while.

Judging and handling are two different things.

FWIW, I have been victim of a mentally unstable person years ago, with employment consequences I still suffer from. Basically that guy's medication were not adequate anymore and he went to the police to report me and others for computer related crimes (things like hacking his family's emails). Me and others still have that info somewhere in my country's police system. I wish he went to the police with his usual bullshit of Noriega still being alive and manipulating him through the electrical outlets or that South Africans replaced his heart with a bomb while he was sleeping or threats of crashing our skulls through brick walls instead of the mild fantasy he had that day.

I don't think he should be punished. But he's still at large and that's not okay. Hope his prescriptions are better handled now, for others first and then for himself.
It's a good question what exactly they meant by 'at cost', but it's at least going to be the plain hardware cost (plus maybe shipping), I suppose. And the point of the parent and GP was that the overheads shouldn't be that significant either, so it is still a bit of a mystery where exactly they spent that much money.
This dude was hijacking buses and trains. He was absolutely a danger to society.
It would require same amount of scrolling, you can't have lines that long to keep it easily readable anyway.

What I don't like it's alighned to right, I prefer to read centered text, but it's their website, so whatever, if I don't like it I can just close it (or could try to block picture element through UBO).

edit: tried to block all elements on the left including header, but it's still aligned to right just leaving big dark left column
How does this work faced with legal systems, which <<mandate>> permissions?
At this scale, having someone take care of deleting double/expired accounts is just good hygiene and I would not consider that useless. Forgotten accounts are a security risk.
Arthur Hayes makes a valid point.
OSS Insight is also great and shows relative growth: https://ossinsight.io/collections/monitoring-tool/
as someone who worked at an SSP, that is nowhere near what is needed for an established platform. There were a handful of engineers(10 if we are being generous including data science) keeping the lights on. The rest of the time was spent trying to prevent "senior" engineers from pushing code attempting to execute a sql query per each of the billions and billions of daily api calls.
Just don't even think about using a decent wine for this. Just the cheapest you can find in the supermarket.
BTW, we call it "kalimotxo".
Music Studio: Windows-based C64 SID music creator software
Great throw back to old school interactive story gaming.

Wish more of the legends would open source their games (Kings quest?)
> Philosophers have been talking about justice and morality for æons, something so small isn’t going to turn our thoughts on justice on their head.

Theologists have been talking for æons about the essence of God and what the role of Jesus in the holy trinity is. Try to convince atheists that this æons-talking should turn their thoughts on religion on their head.
It was by all means intentional. He packed as much hurt as he could into his short messages and expertly targeted the people those words would hurt the most.
> Perhaps the better conclusion is that "free will" is merely our ability to alter our own biochemical state

But isn't our ability to alter our own biochemical state dependent on our current biochemical state?
Alexa's value is not in the device itself, but the fact that said product (Alexa, and Alexa-powered, et. al.) is in over 100 million homes. The value is in mining that data at some point in the future.

Amazon is familiar with employing that strategy, and it hopes to make it pay off again.
> But his understanding of the context and emotional impact is nothing compared to us on the outside.

Well, similar defense could be used for psychopaths as well, they too have a condition that prevents them from seeing or understanding the context and the emotional impact of their actions - but some lines have to be drawn somewhere. Society has to protect itself and innocent people who get hurt by these antisocial actions.

In case of Brandon here no one got physically hurt, and the court should certainly see his condition as a mitigating factor - but you can't just completely dismiss the damage that was done and seriousness of his actions. Emotional traumas are serious deal too, and he, knowingly or not, psychologically tortured those families, causing them a great deal of pain. And he probably got some pleasure from it too, whether from the feeling of power or from the peer support and cheering, as he wouldn't be inclined to repeat it so many times otherwise...
Mortgage loans are non-recourse in several states. A lot of people can and should just walk away from their mortgage.
advertisers wont care in a couple months. the situation has lots of public attention now, which is what the advertisers are actually afraid of. They don't want their brand associated with the craziness. They don't actually care one way or the other about any choice musk makes. They're not going to just walk away from a 300+ million person audience permanently just due to principles
The transition to contract management software is a worthy transition that today's business and industry leaders are making.
> It's possible to make things which last.

Things last when you take good care of them.
As someone who says "football" - by now, nobody's going to be persuaded to change how they currently refer to the sport. It's called "football", but it's also called "soccer" - that's fine.
There are tens of thousands of engineers maintaining and supporting postgres and clickhouse in all the organizations where they are used, the vast majority of which are not on Twitter's scale.
"Additionally it seems a lot of advertisers have cautioned their ad departments to halt spending"

What percentage? Big difference between 0.03 and 0.3.
The old space jam site worked for ages, and would still work if they hadn’t taken it down. The web is pretty good about keeping backwards compatibility.
See also "Ask HN: Best Engineering Blog Posts?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29758396
"Every politician that got money from SBF or FTX ought to cut a check and give it all back to the penny. It wasn’t SBFs to give. He stole it from his customers."

This, right here. If someone sells you a stolen car, that car is not yours as it was not the thief's to sell. The police will eventually come take it away and they will be right in doing so.
Right? I remember a guy who posted here that received over 2M Stellar XLM crypto by using the Mechanical Turk to pay people to sign up under their personal accounts to receive the 6K freebies per person and transfer their loot to him. At the time, XLM was worth virtually nothing, so getting a buck or two was a decent exchange for some. I think at its height, though, it was worth about 90 cents a token.
The Postgres engineers are not responsible for running their code on a shared platform supporting a billion users.
There is a lot of tooling around Office that would require a Windows server. Some games require it as well for hosting. Also many corporate networks use MSSQL server, Active Directory domain controllers, etc....

Wouldn't choose it as a server if my applications doesn't require it, but I guess there are still a lot of cases.
See "Good CI/CD and SRE Blogs" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32864909
> Intuitively this shouldn't be possible as it's acting against the company's own self-interest despite being in the interest of the shareholders (and the buyer), but I think "the company's interest" in practice is defined by "the owners' interest" (and the owners in this case are the shareholders, who sell the company). I guess corporations aren't people after all.

Or maybe they are too much like people. Right now there's a bunch of things that I should be doing, that would be in my best interest - continue with my TODO list, or do some exercises. Instead, I'm browsing HN. This shouldn't be possible, but it is, because I'm a human - what I want to do, what's in my best interest, and what I actually do are three different things, and rarely aligned.

(Ironically, in humans this is usually called an issue with executive functioning, whereas in companies, it's the reverse.)
If i use Visual Studio but with vim keybindings, am i faking it? ;-)
It's funny how the last section with the screenshots mentions "preserving accessibility". "Fixing the lightness and only modifying hue and chroma" is not a recipe for good accessibility and the screenshots demonstrate it.

I'm severely green-blind and in the earlier screenshots of the Solarized palette I already hat issues telling red and orange, and blue and violet apart. But with the new palette I now struggle with red, orange AND green, and magenta and cyan also have become less distinct from each other.

Solarized wasn't very accessible to begin with (few syntax highlighting color palettes are) but this is just worse. If you learn about color theory as a hobby, please also take the time to learn about color vision and before making claims about accessibility also learn about how color vision deficiencies affect perception.

It's nice that the author admits they had to learn about color theory in order to approach this, i.e. they didn't know much about color before, but please don't claim this is an "improvement" if you really only tried to increase the light-dark contrast of the text against the background. Solarized is a fairly low-contrast theme to begin with and increasing its contrast while maintaining its general aesthetic would have been an interest goal but this article doesn't seem to actually be interested in doing that.
Wild African dogs are being hurt by climate change
That's tiny bit of an exaggeration, maaaybe. Maybe completely prophetic, though!

That said, Instagram was run by just a dozen people back then, while it had hundreds of millions of users, right? So it's not a new data point.

Storing, retrieving, indexing, managing 280 char blobs (with links, threads, embeds) is not exactly the most hardcore of a problem domains.

Microblogs are the typical tutorial topic, and twitter's only "innovation" was to increase the text limit.
> fkey meThis report

What’s going on there? Some kind of typo? Slang I never heard? SS in case only I see this: https://i.imgur.com/FP7oO8E.png
very cool, brings back memories from 90s when we played it with friends and made our own insane tracks
> People with autism are not psychopath

And psychopaths are not autistic.

Yet it does not make the two things mutually exclusive. They can be both present and exhibit in individuals at the same time.
What would you say is a fair amount to tax the rich?

Say the top 10% have 50% of the income. How much of a percent of the total tax burden should they be responsible for?

50%?

60%?

70%?
Link to a 34min video about the 1985 diethylene glycol wine scandal [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1985_diethylene_glycol_wine_sc...
We're heavy Alexa users.
Since we are a family, the #1 use case is of course farting noises, but other than that, we use it to:
- Set ourselves reminders
- Manage the family calendar (reading out of reminders, reading the calendar, scheduling and rescheduling events)
- Manage the family todo list
- Manage the shopping list
- Read out weather information including rain, to help us decide on what to wear outside
- Some of my kids can't read yet, for them it's easy to use Alexa to start their own favorite audiobooks
- Games
- Answering trivia and animal noises
- Manage the temperature in all the rooms of our house

I also heavily use a routine that reads out the weather forecast, upcoming appointments and the latest news.
You were not around during the period of highly leveraged take overs starting in the 80s, were you? That is classical hedge fund behavior, if done right. The fact that Musk lending banks only get around 60 cents on the dollar on the market for the loans they gave Musk shows that it might not have been done "right" when it comes to Twitter.
>Historically the top destinations have been Australia, UK, US, and New Zealand - in that order

Sorry, I meant "usual gateway for South African emigrants who can't get into Australia directly". I am aware that Australia is the #1 destination.
Some more little language not listed by the article: Elm (browser apps w/o runtime errors).

The creator (BDFL?) of Elm, Evan, specifically avoids making it general purpose.
Thanks, now I realize how exceptional QuickJS is, a ES6 compatible JS runtime and maintained by a single person. We are bundling it into our web app to run sandboxed code.