skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
One of the things not mentioned here is that doctors are genuine professionals.

Software developers, on the other hand, are in this weird limbo where some consider themselves as professionals and others do not. I am using the term "professional" in the wikipedia sense https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professional.

Similarly, some organizations treat software engineers as professionals, and other consider them closer to manual labor.

The result is there is no shared understanding what it means to be a software engineer. Therefore it's quite hard to discuss software engineers as a single body of professionals, as the loose definition of the field means there won't be a single definition everyone could fall into.

What I read from the article is that the author defines his "professionalism" as "inhabiting the monastery". That is fair and good, but there is no reason this definition and feeling should be shared with anyone else in the field. This lack of shared definition probably drives a lot of disillusionment.

Someone thinks they are entering a monastery, but the next guy is there just to sweep the floors for a living.

In monasteries most people are there to search for the higher purpose. But in software industry, "sweeping floors" is the most plausible job description, where no holy insight is expected to be gained.

The described disillusionment might not be because the business is pathological (which it may very well) but because the practitioner entered the field with false expectations, imagining perhaps grand technological projects to move humanity forward, but founding themselves in the "sweeping factory".

Another thing that comes to my mind - generally once you've been in the industry for a decade or so you are middle aged, and probably entering your middle age crisis where steretypically people re-evaluate their priorities and life goals. Which, given generally sofware people are not the dumbest people around, means there are lot of displeased people trying to search more meaningful careers, and given their general aptitude in complex tasks, can find lot of other fields (that don't need years of complex studioes) where they are quite good as well.
> 3.) Accept the governor's revisions and move the bill forward

Nice write up, but leaves me wondering how this works formally.

My main guesses:

1.) There will be a vote to formally accept the new changes, but it’s treated as a done deal.

2.) The governor can formally edit the text to say anything she wants, and it’s up to the legislature to protest afterwards.
JPMorgan to spend $1B on rental homes in the US to become a megalandlord
Isn't searching the right way round extremely important? If you get the ordering right, a search to depth N takes time O(2^N), if you get it in reverse, O(2^2N). Perhaps if there were no time constraints, doing something slightly different was enough to beat the other competitors who cancelled each other out.
Not exactly "canaries", in that you won't know if they're dead. If you were to use this device/service, you'd want to test some/all of them every now and then to know if they still did what you want. Or just cross your fingers and consider them bonus security.
I have several books on Prolog that I still need to get through, but the one I have read (and need to finish) is Thinking as Computation. It’s a great book.
> Why? Is there something inherently bad about free domains?

Not the person you've asked but I've seen many legitimate websites using free eu.org[1] (sub)domains but I believe I've never seen a legit use of tk/ml/ga/gq TLDs. I may have seen the cf one used for some configuration tools though.

[1] https://nic.eu.org/
Computers clearly existed before the 1970’s even though nobody was buying personal computers back then. We are at the earliest version of self driving where it’s not affordable for individuals and the use cases are very limited, but that’s not nothing.

The self driving car you want to buy doesn’t exist, but they are already providing a valuable service. Saying well VC’s want to replace all Taxi drivers and all Long haul truckers and all … just means that development will continue but that’s true of most products. We hardly say the CPU doesn’t exist because Intel and AMD are still spending billions on R&D. All existing self driving car investments are really just peanuts compared to what companies will spend as the market matures and profits roll in.
In fairness to SBF (who I have no sympathy for and think should rot in prison), this could very easily just be set up to look like it's him.

If I was someone else with access to that wallet, I could easily see waiting until SBF is out on bail and then moving funds to make everyone think it's him.

On the flip side, if it was SBF, he maybe could have done it before. Martin Shrekli has stated how he did blockchain operations from a contraband cellphone while in jail.
> And stuff like pushing for EVs before infrastructure is there, all while planes are fine and dandy to run on fucking leaded fuel...

To be clear, normal planes don't run on leaded fuel. Avgas, which is often leaded, is used in small propellor planes.

Also, these seem, er, totally unrelated? The EU could ban leaded fuel tomorrow, and arguably should; this would lead to the grounding of a small number of small planes. But it doesn't have a lot to do with cars.
could you point the books u reading on (3)?
Can you please elaborate? What do you mean by the war to liberate ideas?
>Yet I haven't heard of a single doctor who quit his practice and moved to Colorado to run a ski lodge. When I ask why, they all give the same response: the patients. Every day they see patients brought back to health, the bullshit recedes into the background, and they're reminded why they got into medicine.

>The default in engineering is different. We don't have a daily ritual built into our jobs that reminds us why we got into the field.

This is just https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx%27s_theory_of_alienation

The difference between doctors and software engineers is just that it's easier for us to be alienated due to the nature of our work.
> What kind of world do you live in where you can get lunch for two for 10 dollars.

Many places in the world would allow you to have lunch for two for ~10 USD.

> It's more like 40 dollars, and that's assuming it's a very cheap place.

You have to realize that's not representative of every place in the world or even every place within the US, right? Prices around the world are vastly different.
Pattern matching remains and is my favourite feature.
I think software like alpha zero are an example of that —- tree search with policy learning which governs what gets searched.
They are valid patterns in MS Word and Notepad++ search and replace, though. (Word uses parentheses to create the group then \1 to reuse it in the replacement string, while Notepad uses $1).

That's what I meant about every system using a different syntax for what's basically the same functionality.
Kindle is switching away from MOBI and to EPUB. You already can't use "Send to Kindle" with MOBI according to the news articles I found.
False. People can desire things that are non material eg beauty. That’s always been there - what new is the constant feed of information to us that we process and conclude as being inferior.
Deceiving Windows Defender: The Big Stack Bypass
To me there are three reasons that reading on a phone is a nonstarter:

1. Screen is too small. And for everything except reading books "a large phone" is a bad. I've tried big phones. I don't like them. Other use cases either are best served with a phone-sized screen or a laptop.

2. E-ink. I could not imagine reading on non-e-ink. I'd rather buy the physical book, then, and that's a big ask. I'd really have to want to read this particular book.

3. No distractions. Notifications. "Just check my email real quick".
Reminds me of the old Bill Hicks bit "I took mushrooms and went to Astroworld and had a really bad time."

Personally I always felt like van life was super posh camping, as opposed to only mostly posh camping, which is camping with a tent instead of just a tarp.

People who take their creature comforts completely for granted are an amusing sort.
They also all use addition, which was invented so long ago, we don't know when it was.
But at least their clients aren't awful, might actually be useful if it can talk matrix
> How many people vote in Alameda county?

It's the seventh largest county in California (out of 58), with 1.6M residents. Hand-counting votes is out of the question.
Whenever I read about NY mayors or governors, it's like they are trying to be Gotham.
There are a couple of people interejecting with answers to questions, or asking questions. I'm afraid I don't have a better estiamte than that. But in this case, I think lumping the students together as one speaker and the teacher as another would be fine.
That affirmative action means worse hires.
Indeed. I feel like so many of these arguments that “airlines are making up fake safety or weather cancellation reasons; when’s the last time an airline crashed from a safety or weather reason; they’re over-stating the risks just to get out of paying penalties!” seemingly without reflecting on why the second clause is the case.
> Prolog is becoming more interesting now that several conforming and free implementations with comprehensive features arise

What's wrong with SWI-Prolog?
If I absolutely had to choose a vice here, I’d choose smoking for 20 years over living in social media.
Do you know is Java's built-in regex engine builds a DFA? This is all news to me. I built that optimizer because we were doing something pretty naive at work I suppose: we were doing the string concatenation joining with | for a relatively large set of strings and got a notably large speedup so I'm going to assume Java doesn't. It was a very fun project none-the-less :)
_What Should I Do With My Life_ by Po Bronson

There are a lot of stories of people who hate their jobs and make a switch.

One was a lawyer who became a truck driver.
A doctor who became a programmer (iirc ... I do remember she was in tears because she didn't want to disappoint their family not sure if she wanted to be a programmer or not).

This book gave me the courage to leave engineering field and become a firefighter paramedic. 1st best career decision I made at the time
I mean, he's just been arrested for, er, very much not white collar crime. He's just been detained for a further 30 days at the request of Romania's anti-organised crime prosecution unit. It would be, well, not unknown for people in that position to flee by means other than the official border crossing points.
I think food is really expensive in Seattle (where I live) but $40 USD for lunch seems very steep to me. Unless you're ordering room service or eating at a pretty upscale place lunch shouod be less than $25.

Perhaps in Hong Kong dollars you'd spend $40 for lunch. I know some places use a dollar with much less purchasing power.
Is it really not? Do you have a reference for that? I can’t find anything that says C isn’t Turing complete.
> It’s also quite affordable. The x5000 model (which is the power system) retails at around €1650,

I think there's the problem right there. 1650EUR seems like a lot of dough to me to tinker around with a toy system, basically. Show me it running on a Raspberry Pi or something like that, then we're talking.

It's a shame that Pi is not used more for Operating System experimentation. We should see an abundance of toy OSs for Pi, but we never do.

We are entering an interesting phase wrt to microcontrollers and RISC-V systems in general. Maybe one day someone will put together a cheap system that is readily accessible that people can pick up and say "hey, I can build my own system with this." It doesn't even need to be a particularly powerful system.

I did try out Aros (a free AmigaOS clone) earlier this year on an x86, but installing it was rather ponderous. That in itself is a barrier to entry.

What I find impressive is that Aminet is receives new packages on a daily basis. So clearly the spirit of the Amiga lives on.
I love the idea and I'll try it out, but a heads up in case the author is around: the name sd clashes with another tool [0], which works as an alternative to sed.

I use that one pretty often, so maybe my first managed script will be one which symlinks binaries :)

[0] https://github.com/chmln/sd
Could someone explain what exactly the attack vectors would be here? I always assumed the hashes were there just for collision resistance. It would seem that any attacks involving an attacker introducing malicious code through a collision would require a level of system access that would enable more dangerous attacks with less effort and/or less detectability. Curious to learn.
Seeing as you've adopted TS, have you had the chance to look into Sorbet? The Ruby type-checker?
Friday Facts #372 – 2022 recap
Oh is it time for another gaslighting piece about how service hasn’t got worse, it’s just people are angrier and not following #BeKind
Paper notebook usage – how do I use and choose a paper notebook?
Is it known that B/C voters strategically voted to knock out A?
That impostor syndrome is often a way to humble-brag. I'm so good at what I do yet so insecure, give me attention.
As of version 7, SWI-Prolog is consciously no longer conforming to the Prolog ISO standard in critical aspects, so it is not usable in organizations where standards are of great importance for procurement, warranty and interoperability reasons, and where long-term maintenance and guarantees are required:

https://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/ulrich/iso-prolog/SWI7_and...
Worth noting that (at least for national elections) your first preference also affects which political parties receive funding, so there’s an advantage to preferencing a party first even if they won’t be elected.
> i read on twitter that they released him.

One reads all sorts of things on twitter, and very occasionally they're true. Not in this case, tho.

Detained for another 30 days: https://www.rte.ie/news/world/2022/1230/1344154-andrew-tate/
Less wasted time (primarily reducing gaming time)
Less/no alcohol.
Find another job.
-- here in Korea - usually travel to a mountain or beach watch the sun the fist sunrise of the year - so go to bed early --
Oh getting a CPAP was a breeze here in France and I didn't/don't have to pay a cent, neither for diagnosis nor for renting the machine nor the quite serious tech support and follow-up. So, while the rest of the French health system seems to be collapsing, this still works.

And it's (IMO) clever, since it's such a game changer for most of the people I met who use it, many costly ailments disappear. It's probably a winner for overall productivity and a great reducer of sick days and late-life healthcare.
You need a good staircase between your bed and your desk. It allows you to have that commute experience. In my split level, if my wife comes home as I'm getting out of work, I even get the experience of "traffic" on my "commute" back up the stairs.

Doing something between waking up and going right to work helps too -- I used to walk 3 miles to work, and would all but snarl at my wife who occasionally would suggest that she drive me in and rob me of that transitional time. Kettlebell swings and a shower can work wonders at going from bed mode to desk mode.
That what appears to what happened with GDPR, it is much more sensible and covers the common "workarounds" of making the reject harder or blocking the site content if you reject
The world is going to hell in a handbasket, and it seems like we can't improve a thing in our society without breaking two.
I'm not prominent at all (which I think is a fact about me that I like so have no desire to change), and this is not specifically a new year based resolution (it is a decision I came to a while ago), but I'm actively trying to stop trying (well, planning) to do so much.

The reason: I find myself getting frustrated at the ever elongating list of things I might like to do/develop/improve in all my walks of life, and the fact that I try to do so many of the things on that list means I never seent to do (or even properly start) any one thing particularly well.

I miss the focus I had at certain points earlier in life when time seemed less at a premium and I would just spend a complete weekend tinkering on a personal project and on feel guilty about missing anything else. I miss the focus I had ahead of my first marathon, that allowed me to find the many blocks of time needed to more-or-less follow a decent training plan, particularly now as I want to return to my pre-covid-and-long-recovery levels of "fitness & not being overweight".

Of course I'm bending the resolution right now as part of it is to spend less time commenting in discussion threads and more time concentrating on my own stuff (little tech projects, fixing my home up a bit, getting out for runs and bits of cross-training, wasting time with friends instead of online, etc.).

--

Of course there might be many who embark on a resolution to write less, who you don't see talking about it because not posting about it is one of the first steps to achieving it!
I've found the script runner "just" to be worth using. https://github.com/casey/just

just (at a glance) is like a Makefile, but with some nice UX improvements that make it worth using. e.g. with `just --choose`, it runs fzf against the targets.
> Inspired by Office Space film, software engineer steals over $300K

"Damn, it feels good to be a gangster."

Maybe if his name would have been Michael Bolton, he would have had a chance.
I know you mean well - there are people who do believe that and they would take offence to being called “British”. They need to learn to handle it though. As a Scot who would describe themselves as “Scottish” when asked my nationality and who probably has similar feelings about Scottish independence as those people - I feel like this kind of nitpicking is unhelpful and allows opposition to dismiss us as naive, petty and tribal. People getting all puffed up needlessly is embarrassing and you’d think by now they’d be used to whatever triggers this response, roll their eyes instead and generally take the high road.

Yes I’m Scottish, my passport says “British” and I share a lot of things culturally with our friends south of the border to the point that I would weigh in on any topic about “British” issues as one of them. Whether I like it or not, I’m as British as any English or Welsh person.
Calibre can handle KFX conversion, though it requires a plugin and Kindle Previewer from Amazon (https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/help/topic/G202131170).

At least then it doesn't require uploading to Amazon's servers.
I agree with you that taxes are a necessary and in one way a good thing as well.

Just a note, though, that there was taxation even before we had social contracts that funneled taxes to public interest projects.
> I started my career just a couple years ago. In my first company, they used 10+ year old tooling and imo it was terrible. A very old legacy mess monolith that made adding features pure torture. Trunk-based development with a "who needs tests" mindset, resulting in horrendously buggy code, 50:50 chance pulling newest version would break something.

Monkey paw curls.

My story is complete opposite. Three years ago joined a startup.
We use relatively new Java, branches everywhere, microservice architecture, +85% branch coverage, integration tests, end-to-end, performance, you name it.
CI/CD integrated and self hosted. Heaven, right?

It was an absolute shit show. Because of microservice architecture you had no way of running +50 necessary microservice on your machine.

Tests are mandated but brittle. Mocking libraries break whenever you refactor a method. Integration tests are flaky and inconsistent (behaves differently on local vs remote).
End to end test takes hours to complete. There are 20 different environments, each with different configuration, each divided into dev/qa/prod.

In how long I was on we didn't have two successful deploys on main branch. But you have to keep adding features because one customer said it might.
Oh security found that library is 20ms too old. Have to replace it asap, despite the convoluted nest of dependencies between microservices.

It had good pay though.
Taught me to really hate mocks and that tests need to be applied at right level.
We often have to vote for the lesser of two evils.
That's not stopping you from selling the cucumbers, just normalizes "quality classes" so customers know what they get. EU does stuff like that for many regional product, you can make cheese, you just can't name it say "Parmigiano Reggiano".

It's not the same as banning
> can you tell me in what way a cucumber is dangerous to consumers, if its shape is bend a little bit more or less

I can't tell why a bent cucumber is dangerous, but I can tell tell why specifications for cucumbers are sometimes needed. When someone in the food industry needs cucumbers, he can't use any kind of cucumber, because it will go through machines with a calibre expectation. The industry that builds the machines also need specifications for their inputs.

Many regulations on fruits and vegetable are meant to help the food processing, since nowadays most of the raw food is processed by the food industry, not by consumers in their kitchens.

Oh, and you can still sell vegetable that are out of spec. AFAIK that's still legal in Europe, but since they can't have the right label, wholesale buyers may be hard to find at the same price.
I recommend choosing yearly themes instead of resolutions! Themes are a little more flexible :)

For example, next year will continue to be my Year of Trailblazing!

In 2022, I tackled fatherhood and sobriety; in 2023, I'm starting a company and doing a 550-mile bicycle ride.

---

[1] https://taylor.town/yearly-themes

[2] https://www.aidslifecycle.org
A lot of people buy cars on finance deals in Europe.

More than 90% of new car buyers pay on finance in the U.K. https://uk.motor1.com/news/353737/91-percent-cars-financed-y...

Personally I think it’s absurd to get into debt to buy a depreciating asset, where you end up paying more than the value of the car. But seems I’m one of the dying generation of “save up and buy it outright” types.
> Most programming language are Turing complete and if so they're also general purpose by definition. You can use them to build anything.

How long do you think it would take to write a web server in Rule 110?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_110

Turing completeness is an interesting theoretical concept, but it is wholly unsuitable and largely irrelevant when discussing the usefulness of programming languages.
Why would you expect a cs degree to improve your business or communication skills? I assume it covered aspects of software design and development and possibly aspects of the hardware as well. Might have had a math or logic background. All useful in designing and creating a product.

If you wanted to know soft skills and business savvy I would think a business degree of some sort was a better choice. Nothing you describe involves making the product. Determining the product to make and how to fund it, yeah, but you had two biz grads for that. Maybe they saw you as the tech lead? It looked like a good combination of talent assuming you wanted to be the tech lead.

If it was biz heavy, perhaps you’d be writing about how you’re unable to follow technical discussions or be taken seriously as a developer? Different skill sets and approaches.
Just is good stuff for project directories, never tried to use it like the author describes `sd`
A submission like this should link to the actual study. I don't trust a cable news video to represent the findings accurately and it's hard to have a meaningful or interesting discussion about the methodology without it.