skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Just wanted to add my experience as someone in the UK that graduated at a UK university.

The various software engineering modules I had were pretty lacking and flawed in their teaching and I could tell that at the time and even now with several years on industry experience I still believe they are lacking foundational areas especially the ones you identified.

For example:

- Databases were barely taught or even used. We had some fairly poorly put together “web” module that covered PHP, a tiny bit of SQL, no HTML, CSS, JS.

- Networking module was “here is a Cisco CLI, setup RIP following these instructions, congratulations you are now network experts”. I think we covered NAT in one module.

It seems to be a deeper issue too. I remember that the vast majority of people in the software engineering modules couldn’t not just write code - they’d never even so much as attempted it.

This was in other modules too - a majority didn’t know what operating systems were beyond “what, there’s things other than windows?” all the way to being for all intents and purposes tech illiterate.

To the point I remember a second year teaching another second year what copy and pasting is.

This was around 2012-2015.

So I don’t know where the blame likes really, I think it’s all an amalgamation of:

- Clear lack of interest or passion about anything in their degree of study (why the hell sign up for it then, with so many people doing that?)

- Completely failed tech or STEM education

- Total failure to vet applications to the university

- Whatever STEM GCSE or A levels they had gained clearly not being up to scratch

- Some modules being so dumbed down as to be meaningless or something you couldn’t gain equivalent learning from googling for a few days
Really interesting. However, the Black Forest is not in the Bavarian Alps.
I guess the "I don't know"'s are usually silent.
Favourites are public but upvotes are private, which might be a reason to use the latter.
what have you created in the last 25 years?
This was a while ago now, but my undergrad requirements consisted of: (1) data structures and algorithms, (2) computer architecture, (3) advanced algorithms, (4) computational theory, (5) programming languages, and (6) a few electives (discrete math was also a requirement). To complete my electives I took a couple classes in AI/ML and a class in compilers. I went to a small liberal arts school for undergrad, so there was no database class offered, and I don't remember a class specifically in networking (although a little bit of networking was covered in an OS elective that was offered). I did get all 3 areas you mentioned in grad school though.

This all is to say: as a matter of curriculum design maybe we can train future software engineers better, but when presented with an individual candidate consider not only what the candidate knows now but also that person's ability to learn.
How to Convert Kubernetes YAML to Helm
that's pretty inspiring! Any drawbacks? What is the time delay (which I realize are dependent on a lot of factors) between input prompts -> result of what you have tested?
This still seems firmly based on the idea that it is possible to plan a project completely from the outset correctly. I don't think that is possible, you only see all the problems when you try to do something and incremental progress has a lot less inaccuracy all be it with very poor future prediction. We put far too much emphasis on projects up front when we understand the least. Such budgets and project plans are useful for choosing between projects maybe but they don't stand contact with the problem.

This advice really misses the fundamental reason why projects fail and advocates for more of the things that are impossible and cause the failures!
> Formalising 3rd normal form and giving it a rigorous definition so that we can test if data is properly normalised is a big deal.

It isn't. Half the world already relies on ORM frameworks that barely require any input from the developer to setup relational databases, let alone knowledge on how to normalize them.

On the rare occurrences a project feels that specialization on relational database design is relevant, more often than not it's far more useful to require expertise on specific RDBMS than trivia tricks.

> If those things aren't math to you (...)

You're missing the whole point. No one is arguing that you have math formalisms. The whole point is that those formalisms do not add any value at all. Don't you understand that?

I mean, I can whip out a web app with multiple services running in the backend and with datastore using both DynamoDB and S3, and build a business around it. We can do this without ever knowing who Jack or Joe or Jim or Jose Cobb was, let alone what he wrote. What does it tell you?
Isn’t that why some other languages explicitly draw a distinction between a function and a procedure? I think ‘void’ was introduced in C to do the same thing, implicitly (because omitting the return type does not achieve that).
>but to me this sounds like a distopian place where anyone that does not align with the "correct worldview" is made to disappear and never be heard of again.

You misunderstand. Being banned from a Mastodon instance doesn't mean you disappear never to be heard from again. No one is going to try to murder you. You're still allowed to participate in society and communicate. Also, the "correct worldview" in this context means not being a racist, bigoted, anti-Semitic asshole. If you find that too much of a straitjacket on your personal liberties or radically free-thinking beliefs, there are Mastodon instances that will happily accept you.

Of course, not everyone, everywhere is compelled to accept you and your speech with open arms, nor should they be. Freedom of speech and freedom of association are equal and opposite.
Mastodon instances report their user user stats via the API. I have a bot the polls about 9000 server federated with my own and just adds them all up. It’s always incomplete, however, because non-Mastodon Fediverse applications like Pleroma and Misskey don’t report user stats.
Cargo-limit: Cargo with less noise: warnings are skipped until errors are fixed
Source code at https://github.com/GerevAI/gerev
Technical note on bug fixes in ESPHome fw for ESP32 GPIO and ISR settings modes
In my org we'd call what you do a coordinator. Handles prioritization but is not above the team in hierarchy.
TBF, it was always easier to look busy in an office, with everyone around you. Plenty of ways to procrastinate work with "work".

When you work remote the only thing you have to show is your output.
Not sure if the blacklist has to do with keeping community nice - I believe the point of the blacklist virtue signaling to a) get around oppressive App Store behavior around Gab, and b) avoid dealing with European laws.

Both causes are entirely external to the Fediverse, and I haven't seen groups of "bad people" having to be cut off by blacklisting, so I'm not sure if I'm convinced that the list is necessary or effective.
Global distribution and load balancing exist yet we still need DownDetector. One of the reasons data centers go down is because of weather. Picture Cascadia devastating the west coast while a category 5 hurricane pummels the east coast.

Renewables aren't the panacea so many people want them to be.

I can't imagine that near future because despite the feasibility, the companies that manufacture smart home products want people in their thrall. Why go for a one-and-done purchase when that ubiquitous Internet can be used to hold basic functionality hostage for a recurring fee?
>Automation and AI will make most basic programming jobs redundant

You are probably not an engineer, since you should understand GPT makes programming harder, not easier. You won't necessarily make something easier by making it more high-level. Following your logic, you could conclude introduction of C made Assembler engineers redundant or that introducing Python left C engineers without a job. This is not true, using GPT to code is leveraging a natural highest-level language for the job, which is certainly leading to trouble, because it's not the best tool for the job – people specifically invented new languages so it's easier to express the business algorithm, all the attempts to make coding look easier by making it more as natural language failed, and the thought of GPT would suddenly change something? It is naive and ignorant, doing code is a pure thought process and fingers have long learned to tap it out by heart with the usual syntax without falling for the trap of ambiguities and inconsistencies in natural language. You just can't build reliable things with the prose, you do it with stricter rules of expression in mind
Gpt is not a calculator. I suspect that it could solve calculator problems if it was given a calculator though.
The most surprising part is ML being an elective course in 2016. ML is mandatory in my university, but DL is elective
Or maybe your org has too many layers. Teams of smart people should be able to mostly self-direct.
> The US Navy made a nuclear reactor

Still wrong, made != owned
I had a similar issue here in europa, where a travel agency used my photos from flickr in their catalogues.

Killed my desire to take pictures for a while and also to post them.

I got my desire to take pictures slowly back, but I still don't post anything worth while online or even share it with friends or family if I can avoid it, in fears that it somehow gets put on facebook or similiar and from there used for someone else to make money off.
This is the same kind of error people make when they assume an introvert must have poor social skills, even though that's often not the case.

There's a meme/comic that goes like this:

Panel 1, "Nothing really matters": a little creature in a void, sad. "What people think nihilism is."

Panel 2, "Nothing really matters": the same creature surrounded by rainbows and puppies, happy. "What nihilism really is."

In the same way that recognizing nothing really matters in our march toward entropy means we can get on with choosing our own path in life, recognizing the pitfalls of a potential path means we can walk it in confidence.

I know there be dragons, and I'm going to date them all.
Switch interview roles, and the recent graduates would say the same about your
"foundational knowledge."
Hypothetical history books could one day read "and in 2023 the Russians nuked New York". Probably in some African script since they'd be talking about the end of civilisation in the northern hemisphere.

While I don't want to try and defend every right wing policy, the crowd who think global warming is the biggest challenge we face have been outplayed by the very real disasters and escalations we've been facing since 2020. The well resourced anti-US axis that is developing between Russia and China is a much bigger threat than difficulties adjusting to climate change. Which have generally been fairly minor challenges in the official reporting.

All the evidence I see is I'm more likely to die in a fire caused by soldiers than power plants.
That bot is notorious for spurious spikes, often making the graphs unreadable. It’s open source, but it’s using an API, not doing its own polling, so it’s hard to dig into what’s going on.
From what I heard, from older women (American public school) teachers I knew ~10 years ago (pre-COVID, pre-MAGA) - going into teaching was not something that they would do again.
No, I certainly do wish harm and loss of respect and livelihood upon most "artists". They have not been a force for anything but intellectual onanism and self-aggrandizement for some time now, if ever. They do not (quoting linked book blurb) "sustain our souls and societies".
> For example, 15-20 years ago we had conservatives yelling video games are the devil and they need to be censored and some topics not even touched.

My memory of the 2003 to 2008 time frame is different.

I recall mainstream complaints about GTA 3, released 2001. Famously, Senator Clinton asked the FTC to investigate GTA 3 over the "hot coffee" mod in 2005.

There was also the 2005 California Law [0] that banned the sale of violent video games to minors.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_v._Entertainment_Merchan...
Steve Jobs was 21 years old when he co-founded Apple Computers.
Bill Gates was 19 years old when he co-founded Microsoft, as was Mark Zuckerberg when he founded Facebook.
> I keep losing the stuff I want to watch

Why not use the "Watch later" feature to add it to your queue? I use that feature all the time.
Custom ML made easy with AutoML
Artifical Intelligence and Climate Change
> The right are very interested in solving problems; but they are defined by identifying the plans of the left as the biggest problem.

That's not so much problem solving as just obstructionism. Surely there are things to be done that don't depend at all on what the competition is doing.

> Otherwise the right generally favours non-government approaches to problem solving (partially in an attempt to stop empowering leftists who tend to infest bureaucracies).

No, the right favors non-government approaches because they want to pick and choose. They for instance heavily endorse personal charity because you get to pick who you help.

I on the other hand think there should be a floor in society below which nobody is allowed to fall, and that it ideally should be implemented in a fully blind and dispassionate manner, eg, UBI. Everyone gets it automatically no questions asked, without needing to be liked by the local community.
The name is fine. I always think of the heavy metal band.
Opening code in an IDE is likely compiling the code, not merely reading it. I would not expect opening a file read only in a text editor to be certain to not execute anything. That's the reason many complex editors (including vscode) these days will ask you if you trust the contents. It's likely possible to merely "open" the code "as a text editor" would, but I'm not sure if that's what happens if you answer no.
> the moon has no atmosphere to get in the way of it.

The lunar night is 14 days long
Kind of makes you think that the subject at hand is quite complex in its nature, thus untrained people might do best to steer away until properly trained.
This is a narrow view on types; for example, types also help the compiler to produce optimized code. In general, they assist reasoning about and understanding the program.
> for millions of impoverished children worldwide.

Did you read I wrote "modern diet". Those are not the typical HN reading crowd.

Also: you could give them leafy greens can lentils to achieve the same.
Ml.net An open source and cross-platform machine learning framework
Log into an instance you have an account on through brutaldon, then paste the URL in the search box. It's not a no-login-url-passthrough like Nitter.
Show HN: A Ruby Gem for encrypting personal notes
Do you think it's an improvement over the old one? Why?
What is wrong with laypeople learning the words "phylogenetic" and "anthropoid"?

I am not a biologist, and my knowledge in the field is limited to what I learned in high school plus afterwards self study out of curiosity. I did know what "phylogenetic" refers to but I do not remember ever encountering the word "anthropoid". Yet I was perfectly able to infer what it means based on the meaning of the base and suffix.

If I don't know a word I look it up. Have people stopped doing this?
Honestly, I do believe that at least some of the people would be able to rewrite what they use curl for in the mentioned weekend. In this sense I think they are mostly right from their perspective.

Of course, curl contains a lot more functionality, but the people who are very aware of it and actually use this functionality actively would not do such claims, because for their use cases, curl cannot be rewritten in a long weekend.
Even giving instructions to a human programmer, a few iterations will be needed to refine the requirements, clarify ambiguities, and get the desired system.
None of that is relevant to CS. All of that is stuff to learn on the job, if at all. It's a very 1990s list of topics that are barely relevant now.
> I'd love to see the look on some of these people's faces when they find out that tool/software/whatever they use is actually using libcurl under the hood.

Python dependencies (does not include curl)

https://devguide.python.org/getting-started/setup-building/i...

The "requests" module in Python (does not use curl)

https://github.com/psf/requests
Those impoverished kids you talk about are often lactose intolerant.

Sure the benefits of the dairy nutrition may outweigh the problems of the intolerance.
I mean, I really really do enjoy coding.

It's just so fun to do something where knowing stuff actually changes people's lives every day.

I'll be happy along the way regardless I'd say.
As a side note, I found the concept of BIOS/UEFI/Firmware virus fascinating. It might be useful to read a few analysis about them. Of course I understand little about the topic as I don't work in low level.
Those sound like missing features in the importer rather than an actual gap in the spec. Transforms and different color spaces could be baked into the data at import time.
> Per-capita and the whole social justice thinking that comes from is the worst thing to happen to environmentalism

I strongly disagree on this. I believe instead that per-capita arguments are helpful because they make environmental hypocrisy painfully obvious.

> The perverse incentives it creates for regimes to increase population and reduce living standards are ridiculous.

My current belief is that this is a complete non-issue, for two reasons:

1) Meaningful population control is hard, expensive, unpopular and comes with a myriad of (problematic) side effects

2) Nations care *very little* about per-capita pollution in the first place

The very idea that e.g. EU/US would ever even entertain the notion of boosting their population for the purpose of improving per-capita CO2 emission numbers seems absolutely ridiculous to me.
Is a common industrial chemical fueling the spread of Parkinson's disease?
Yes it contains (natural) growth hormones. And we (milk binging nations) wonder how we got so fat?!
Oh! Oh! (Raises hand…)

A programming language!
As They Swim, Fly, and Crawl In, China Wakes Up to Invasive Threat
What would you estimate as the industry-wide productivity increase for programmers from this tool? I've seen estimates anywhere from 1.5x to 10x from friends, which astounds me because in any other context whatsoever a 50% productivity increase is absolute gold, let alone the wild and frankly unbelievable higher numbers.

Something I'm really interested in, after we've gotten the full 32k context and multi-modal capabilities of GPT-4 and done all the Langchain/ReAct shenaniganery we can, is GPT-5, or 6. These things are coming so fast and delivering step changes in productivity, it really does feel like something new.
> Except hammers already do not work as expected 100% of the time, as evident by them painfully hitting the hands of the workers in mishaps. Yet we still use them.

The hammer did work 100% as expected. It's the human, who is fallible, that hit their hand with the hammer. My analogy stands. We make mistakes, we want tools that do not. LLMs should not be compared to humans, they should be compared to other tools.
When you phrase it more simoly as "Why don't my interns know all the real-business things they are supposed to learn during internships?"

The answer is obvious.
> I’m using “third world country” as a generic reference to low standard of living.

Um, ok, here's a tip: if you want to be understood, maybe try using words like everyone else uses them, instead of repurposing existing words with your own private definitions?

> That makes it impossible to develop government and rule of law. [You seem to have deleted this sentence in editing.]

In other words, we're doing a lot right, otherwise we wouldn't attract so many immigrants, and thus our culture isn't as bad as it's portrayed by, ironically, immigrants.

> That individualist streak has always been latent in American culture, but it’s most apparent in Appalachia.

I... am speechless. I don't know how to respond to this, at least without saying something that will get me downvoted or flagged. So I guess our conversation may be over.

> For example, even 100 years ago Appalachians had higher rates of multiple marriages than the rest of the country

From your own linked article: "Whether this was due to divorce or higher mortality, I can’t say".

Also: "Even with these higher divorce rates, the share of Appalachian women currently married is nonetheless higher than women in the rest of the US."

Your article doesn't even show what you seem to want it to show.

> There were lots of German immigrants in Appalachia, but they didn’t build the place the way they did the Midwest.

I'm a lifelong Midwesterner. There's a very strong, deep rooted progressive streak in the Midwest, for example in Wisconsin and Minnesota, notably, which both have large populations of German ancestry. Frankly, your comments seem to be imbued with with overgeneralization and stereotypes.

A major reason why divorce rates have increased in the past 50+ years is that over this time period, women have achieved a great deal of financial independence from men. They don't have to be married anymore. They have more choices, can be more selective. This is, I would say, good. I don't want to go back to a past where women were subservient.
The irony is, even if you have those things you can talk to someone else who says "why do so many cs grads not have a background in unix tools, compilers, and reading ASM". Knowing everything about "foundational knowledge" in CD is a somewhat tall order, especially if you don't use some of it for 5years after learning it.
> Moderators blocking other servers is an essential part of the federated ecosystem in my opinion. When another account (or, with many accounts, another server) is causing tons of moderation reports, blocking that server is essential. Allowing the content to appear anyway will cause boosts, reactions, and then more moderation reports. Moderators are the ones who have to deal with all of the crap being flung into the ether so it makes sense to give them the power to choose what servers they want to bother moderating for.

I meant it in "moderators control what shows to people but if you subscribe to someone on the other server you still get their updates" way. Then for the rest it could be AND kind of deal, if the server-blocked user you're answering is blocked they don't see it unless they also subscribed to them.
I wonder if where OP is from, engineering and physics only exist as minors available to mathematics majors?

With the rising popularity of tangential fields, we've taken to calling it 'computation science' to help delineate from disciplines that rely on the application of technologies built using CS that run on "computers".
It's a good thing we have well-defined fonts.

Just imagine the wide world of lines people would have to complain about if everything were still manuscripts!

Thank you, Johannes Gutenberg, for saving us all from having to stumble across those rants on HN in 2023.
> We're starting to add new members in timezones that are 5+ hours

I am all for remote work, but large time zone differences is a massive hurdle to proper remote collaboration.

The only way to smooth it out in my experience is with a decent documentation culture (not only one that gives incentives for documentation to exist, but also for it to be kept up-to-date).

On places with only tacit knowledge that spreads around through communication (and those can very well happen through slack, screen shares and so on), it becomes hard for the people that are seldom working at the same time as the "main team".
The developers who don't understand the relationship between relational algebra and SQL are the ones who end up confused why their query browned out prod.

It's not exactly the same thing, but the underlying lessons and mental model matter.

Of course, the move back towards nonrelational data stores these days may make the point moot.