skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My partner is an academic in a humanities department at a top UK uni, and I work in STEM in the private sector.

Universities in the UK are a mess, everything is rated on the salary within a couple of years of those leaving uni. But few people are asking if people are happy once they leave Uni, if they want to chase money, if the abundance of Uni places and associated debt make sense to everyone, and even whether society is better for so many people going to Uni. In the UK we've obliterated all vocational and manufacturing polytechnics, replacing them with STEM and business focused universities.

From my perspective, the pendulum has swung too far in this direction (towards everything being quantified with money and money and employment being the sole value of a uni and the courses it offers) and it needs to start swinging back the other direction.

A very simple phrase I recently heard and am paraphrasing: Developing the vaccine was the STEM problem; distribution & getting shots in arms was the Social Science problem; getting people to trust it & combatting misinformation was the Humanities problem -- which did we fail?

Most of STEM can be quantified, it's a lot harder to quantify the value of the Humanities and Social Sciences... maybe we should stop trying to make that the primary way to measure it.

Universities (in the UK at least) seem to be suffering from the metric becoming the measure.
I appreciate your followup but this ideology isn't random alignment. it's just a kinder, softer version of the dominant ideology. how do you think the 0.1% of a given "good" country gets all that money to tax? from resource and wealth extraction from the "poor" countries! Even presuming we should have a 0.1% to tax (instead of treating them like the french aristocracy, for example) is an ideological position. It's capitalism.

Fwiw, these were my biases too and then I think I just got jaded that you can't stay here. Ignoring the first world / western chauvinism at play, we could get there but i think even these "nice" countries are all going to backslide if, idk, we run out of computer chips, the global extraction economy fully shifts to China, or the IMF decides to punish them like they did Greece.
Probably a reference to the "Traitorous Eight". You can Google more about them.
Nothing is going to.
I wonder: are virtual thread at the JVM level? If so, would Kotlin (and other JVM languages) be able to leverage virtual threads to improve (e.g. produce more optimal JVM bytecode) for their async functionality?
"let it end half of humanity"

You do realize that would be mostly the half whose nations had nothing to with this mess in the first place, right? The rich well of nations of northern hemisphere will not suffer dramatic population falls (just the slow, endemic kind from low birth rate).
> How often do you order on Amazon? How often do you dine out?

You took the bait. Swallowed it hook, line and sinker.

I bought shrimp the other day, they were farmed locally, transported to Malaysia, peeled there and transported back. I bought canned pears, they traveleled the world too.

So while you are arguing and pointing fingers at other consumers over irrelevant cocempts like eating out, industry continues its destructing practices that are actually responsible for majority of emissions
That must be why Italian cuisine is so dramatically unpopular. Oh wait...
You still need to practice, you won't be getting easy questions like that all the time. There are tricks you need to know to solve many others.
To be fair, all other carbon capture technologies are still net-positive emissions-wise, after accounting for (what's typically dismissed as mere) externalities. The fact that trees, ie forests, are net-negative and also have other benefits (QoL for lots of organisms, increased biodiversity leading to resilience, etc.) puts them at the top of the list in this category for me.
because fixing stuff is hard, it can even seem harder than building from the ground up.

But it would clearly be better if we could solve our differences like "adults" :p
I think you're glossing over how much people in other office jobs get gaslighted (gaslit?) into showing up at odd times too. To finish a report. To coordinate with an offshore accounting team in a foreign time zone (not unique to Engineering). To be always reading their email. Not for nothing are some states and countries writing rules against being "always on" into their laws, recently. So, sure, a small contingent of Engineering folks might be on-call, but you should be able to make good working agreements about that, put boundaries around it, and keep your sanity. If not, you're maybe being gaslighted like any other old regular office worker.
I'm Antipodean and grew up on metric but can do all the imperial measurements. Both the US and UK like to not use metric (or some hybrid).

Kilograms are pretty easy. 1 L of water is 1 kg. 1 pound is 0.4536 kg but it's usually easiest to just use 0.5kg for a rough estimate and that makes it 2 pound to 1 kg. If more precision is needed then a calculator is never far away.

For temperature:

-20° is dead (it's not really, but Australians tend to feel this way), I believe this temperature can be dangerous without adequate protection
-10° is Australia also doesn't really get this temperature
0° is jacket temperature, and freezing water, although the freezer is usually at -3-5° (I think)
2-3° is the fridge temperature
10° is jumper temperature
20° is roughly t-shirt temperature
22-23° is a nice comfortable temperature
25° start of a heatwave in the UK and NZ, still cool for Australia.
30° is not nice temperature unless you have a pool or aircon handy.
40° is "what are you doing moving around" temperature. Find aircon or swimming pool urgently.
45-47° is "you shouldn't have gone out to the desert" temperature.

Like imperial to metric this definitely also comes out with currency conversion. Having travelled a lot, the first few weeks are definitely the hardest, then it starts to become intuitive.

The GBP to AUD is fairly easy because it's roughly 2 AUD to 1 GBP. Things like Norway/Sweden/Denmark are harder because it's 6.90, 7.50, 4.50, these tend to just be rounded to 5 and 10, which is generally close enough to not make stupid mistakes. Things like Hungarian Forint are a bit harder again 1.00 Australian Dollar = 231.49064 Hungarian Forints, But again it's just rounding to 200 and then establishing thresholds. 10 is 2000, 50 is 10000, 100 is 20000, 1000 is 200000.

And I went down a rabbithole :)
never ever save recovery keys to any effin online service, use something like eg keepass to save them there, accessible anytime
Do you have link to any specific article of his (on virtual threads vs async)?
Hmm, seems plain Cheerios are indeed not available in the UK; [1] shows only flavored versions...

[1] https://www.nestle-cereals.com/uk/brands/cheerios
DevOps Concepts #6: Jump Hosts
You know what also didn't work out? F/OSS where eventually every choice/"market" ends in the hands of very few entities, or a single one (eg RedHat/IBM, gh/MS, Goog).
Internal here means I don’t need the certificates trusted by a third party.

Having built many Enterprise PKI systems — including Smart Card auth — I do know the complexity involved. I can prattle on for hours about how the Key Recovery Agents should be distributed and stored, and how “offline” means no network cables at all you dimwit.

I also know that there is virtually no difference between a root CA certificate and a signed leaf certificate.

They’re both just files.

The difference is the amount of ceremony.

DigiCert’s Root CA certificate files had a lot of ceremony — with good reason.

But the CA for “I need five devs in India to get VPN certs with a common root” is practically zero.

No, it does not take a “a lot of infrastructure” to host a 1kb file. It really doesn’t, and your persistent confusion is my point: you are simply unable to let go of your preconceptions.

Just last week I needed a pair of certs with a common root for a load balancer’s back end. Not for transmitting NSA secrets over intercontinental backhaul.

I already have access to a bone-fide HSM! For pennies!

Why can’t I be allowed to use that pre-engineered secure certificate storage system for its intended purpose!?
> People conflate the two and then try to charge $50 for the $0.0000001 use-case

Then… don’t buy certificates? Use letsencrypt or run your own CA? There are tons of options out there.
John Deere X9 Combine how it works animation
Actually the anti-masturbation lobby, but yeah.

https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/32042/corn-flakes-were-i...
Well kinda, there’re indeed some services can cost more hosting than cloud hosting especially when it comes to geo-location, auto scaling, preventing dead servers but there’re are companies that maintain data centers, etc it depends
As an illustration, I wrote a Sokoban game in that style (no mutation, no side effects, partial application everywhere). See https://github.com/Michael-Zinn/fpsokobanjs/blob/master/game...
>the Austrian military intelligence has some agreements of cooperation with the NSA

Same with Australia, whose people are also unable to gain oversight over their militarys' activities.

The more the "mah' Russia!" crowd bleat, the more it looks like we've actually manifested the very apparatus the Soviets' would have implemented, too, were they still around ..
I misread that at first too, but animal agriculture. i.e. stuff grown for fodder. It's more efficient to fuel a human on food grown in the ground than on an animal fed on food grown in the ground.

(I'm not vegan or otherwise promoting absolutes, it's just easier to explain/understand in the extreme I think.)
It's a great thing the "little people" don't give up on their freon. Forcing anyone to give it up - either by direct prohibition or taxation - its a totalitarian move.

Honestly though, limiting harmful things and/or pushing people towards the better solution is one of the roles of government. This is how we beat the prisoner paradoxes of modern life. For example I don't believe we should ban cars (nobody does), but I welcome good, affordable and available public transport. People living in places with good public transport don't have to depend so heavily on their car, and everyone is happier.
???

perhaps it's some kind of ESL issue, but here are some similar articles I'm talking about:

https://medium.com/fearless-she-wrote/shut-that-b-up-why-spe...

https://janicetomich.com/women-speaking-while-female/

I don't see how my makes me prejudiced? Society wants women to be quiet and primes them (i.e., [1]), which is one of the main ways male power dominates. How does that make me bigoted?

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/mar/08/silenc...

Edit: I think I see the misunderstanding; I meant 'primed by society starting from birth', you seem to have read 'primed by nature'
I don’t understand why people still put up with Apple’s autocorrect instead of just turning it off. It’s so wrong so often as to be utterly useless.
I don’t think the argument being made is that the cost should be proportionate to wealth, but proportionate to impact or alternatives.

If flying private incurs 10x or 100x the externality costs of flying coach, it should be priced (taxed really) to reflect that a significant portion of those externality costs are an unnecessary luxury benefit.
It's pretty standard mixing advice to mix on monitors that are as flat as possible (add no color of their own) but to test the final mix on car radios, headphones etc to make some adjustments.

Back in the day I checked out my nephew's Beats headphones and quite honestly thought they were broken because the bass on them was pumped up so much that it was a muddy mess. The mixer's job is getting harder and harder with the tradeoffs they have to make between phone speakers with no bass and vanity headphones with nothing but bass.
No matter how often I read these kinds of posts, I never get it. I just don't. Especially now that we have components and native elements that describe what a thing is, it's so much easier to be semantic. Personally I love BEM (Block, Element, Modifier). I wonder if this is due to 'traditional' CSS adopting a more OOP like inheritance model, and the trend has been moving to functional. In the end though, most important is to use what works for you.
You know there is more cereal than cinnamon toast crunch right
Its probably distracting them from rapidly
developing features. In stable projects its a much more
better incentive to get programmers focus via
some gamification techniques like bounties/prizes/competitions.
Open source projects usually stagnate without
some "competitive" incentives, because its feels like working for free.
Can you give me a link or reference to this incredible $3600/year for $0 deductables insurance?

That's cheaper than I pay with my employer covering most of my healthcare. That could be literally lifesaving for friends of mine who currently have to choose between paying about $800/month for insurance with deductables or going without.
Gas, petrol for cars, or gas, for heating and cooking?

It seems the Americans in this thread might be a bit confused about that.
But lodash has a curry wrapper? So I'm still not understanding what functional wrappers the author is talking about that are so problematic.
> I've often said that the most reliable way to get "rich rich" is to watch where money is flowing from point A to point B, stand in the middle and stick your hand out.

Oh come on. If it were this simple, everyone would be doing it. Why aren't you "watching where the money is flowing and sticking your hand out"?

> Elon has certainly mastered that, but I don't have to ascribe "genius" to it.

Musk is vastly overhyped by some, but that's really selling him short. SpaceX and Tesla have real products providing real value, they aren't just leeching off money flows.
It doesn't always make sense to allow extending -- String is `final` for a reason (and one might even argue that final should be the default, and one should explicitly mark with `open` classes that can be subclassed).

The stereotypical FP example for sum types are a List -- there you only have an Element<T>(T head, List<T> tail) and a Nil(). There is no point extending it, it would, in fact, result in incorrect code in conjunction with all the functions that operate on Lists.

Also, the Visitor pattern, which is analogous to pattern matching is very verbose and depends on a hack with the usual method dispatch semantics of Java. I do think that pattern matching is several times more readable here.
This is the comment I wanted to make :)
Cystic fibrosis clogs the pancreatic ducts, which eventually causes irreversible damage to that organ. Because of that, many CF patients also develop diabetes. Sounds like a terrible way to downregulate the pancreas.
"Based on the damage he is doing" is not " based on the money he has"
Noone needs the internet, yet here you are posting on HN.

Western/industrial human civilisation has long since surpassed most human needs and moved on to human wants.

And that’s a good thing.
I’d agree with you if someone somehow managed to memorize all the problems line by line, but that isn’t the case.

You’ve memorized how to build an array in your language of choice. You’ve memorized the patterns that require an array. You might’ve also picked up some techniques for splicing it.

When I see a master working, be it in woodworking, art, or engineering, everything is second nature. Years of seeing what worked and what doesn’t and they make it look effortlessly — almost like they memorized it all.

By all means, if the problem can be easily solved by DFS, but you want to be creative, try something else. If it was really creative, the interviewers will be sure to talk you up and you’ll beat out the “code monkey” that used DFS. If you invented some new type of search, I’ll look out for your paper on it. If you found a new way to hire and cut candidates only leaving the creative geniuses, I’m all ears.
I don't know where you all work, but it all sounds very toxic. Genuine question, I'm European, is this a US culture thing or have I just been very lucky with my jobs?
That doesn't really narrow it down very much. How many different entities, how complex are the filters, how frequent are the reads and writes?

When I was around 14 or something I started teaching myself relational databases with something called Paradox for DOS. For at least 15 years I went along with the assumption that real programmers use a relational database for just about everything.

When the NoSQL trend appeared and became wildly popular, it made me reconsider.

These days, if I can get away with using JSON files, then I just do that.

As far as the stack I usually use Node.js and JavaScript just because I have been doing it that way for so long. Recently some people specifically ask for Python.

Obviously, whether that will work depends on the project.

You often don't have a choice because the database is already built.

For many projects, there are multiple different approaches that would work fine.

I think for the future you will start to see languages that target web assembly becoming more and more popular for portability. Such as Rust and maybe some Rust competitor that has yet to become popular.

There will probably be some kind of popular web assembly runtime soon bundled with Postgres or something.

Or maybe someone will just build a Postgres extension that serves web pages running web assembly that can query Postgres.
If you want to show a trend, give us a diagram that shows a trend. A scatter plot with a trend line would be a start, maybe.

One can equally interpret the diagram from the article as showing a fairly constant level - somewhat varying within a limited range - with 2023 being an outlier. All it tells about is the variance and without at least more year labels there is no way to read anything about the trend from it.

[I'm not saying the article is wrong or right, just that it does a very bad job supporting its thesis.]
Agree completely.

Just a note that monoculture plantations don't function the same way as vast, diverse, multi-level primeval forests, with regards to a water cycle and biodiversity.
> one entity cant take all blame

It depends, in some (rare?) cases, they can.

Could depend on, for example, who knew about it but ignored it, who did it intentionally, who didn't know about it.
Geforce Now is 20$ a month for a 4080.
It seems it needs a rotating connector, but I don’t think in needs to be under the water. I would place that thing above water, inside the turbine.
It's potentially about centralised power literally taxing people to death (unaffordable housing/energy/transport) in a probably-futile attempt to modify the climate.

Yes, climate change is very real. But my current opinion is that 'solutions' are not. Especially while we're still fighting/escalating/anticipating wars between nations.

Solutions would take a truly global effort, but people generally don't want to sacrifice their democracies and have a 'new world order/world government' imposed upon them, let alone have their elected leaders puppeteered by shadowy forces 'above' them.
"associated with income flows"

Yeah so the editorialized title is ignorant at best and deliberately misleading at worst. I've flagged it.
> Cars, meat, heating and AC are not rights

We have no right to prerequisites for being a productive worker (safe shelter, food, the ability to travel to a workplace)

But we have to maintain the right for people to breed a dozen kids if they feel like it, despite population being the multiplier that scales every single problem the world faces.
None of those are a necessity, and they can be easily implemented in an additional layer (e.g. annotation processor if you really wanted to).
Further Analysis of North Korea's New Missile Submarines
CVE database.
There are lots. Usually these days, also comparing with TruffleRuby, which also runs on the JVM.

This one is a couple years old now but you get the idea:

https://eregon.me/blog/2022/01/06/benchmarking-cruby-mjit-yj...

I don't know where to find more up to date benchmarks.
Good point, but I don't think it changes the validity of encouraging participation in democratic process where possible. Perfect is the enemy of good.
There is only one central difference of "Silicon Valley" type companies with "the Rest of the World". It is the recognition (or not) that we are in an accelerated information processing age where the wiring of information flows in society is upgraded dramatically. While this realization is not new (from Negroponte's Being Digital [1] to the perennial VC cry "software will eat the world") the disruption story is for at least two decades broadcast to deafening volumes. But it is by no means universally adopted.

For most organizations "IT" is just a utility. While information flow and processing is vital for most businesses, the control of these particular "means of production" is not deemed central to the business model. Like the provision of electricity, water etc, it is a stylized something that happens in the basement or outsourced. The C-Suite is clueless of digital tech and will at best include some tech consultant types rotating in and out.

In fact the very strange period of tech we are going through is a testament to how the alien forces of this new landscape have turned everything upside down. Google, Amazon, Meta are not "tech" companies. They are advertisers, retailers, publishers that have made information flow and processing central to their business model (and for now at least, have cornered the market).

What is mildly interesting though is that there are many major sectors where information processing is 100% what they do (finance and insurance the easiest example). A universe where the information market is cornered by, e.g. banks is actually less absurd than one cornered by advertisers.

With the above framing, the role of developers in decision making etc. is in reality just an epiphenomenon and circumstantial. Form follows function and it is the functional difference (what the company does) that is the driving force in organizational matters, remuneration etc. This also gives you some hints as to when things might change: When senior industry personalities are equally comfortable both in digital technology and the details of the particular sector they are in.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Being_Digital
> I don't think I've ever seen a Java codebase that doesn't experience NPEs in prod

Frankly, the last NPE I saw in production was many many years ago.
I think the point of the article was that to be valuable as an engineer you have to do things like "making tough decisions, dealing with stakeholders, incomplete and poorly conceived requirements". My problem is that a lot of people have your attitude and pretend that they are doing me a favour by having this being written down all the while limiting the actual design space for a problem, and in the same breath patronise me on what teamwork is really like.
Likewise Windows is not to blame for stupid users running as root.
> 2. We don't really understand how to theoretically model emergent systems. Emergent properties are high level, the stuff we can measure is low level. Connecting them in a principled fashion is hard.

I feel like this is just outright wrong because we have a history of being able to model it. Saying we don't understand it is to deny years of good theoretical modelling with real results.
Is it, though? For a start nobody wants to spend hours preparing breakfast. Second, I don't think anyone is ready for a rich, heavy meal in the morning. Third, it's ok for culture to be "just because". Culture and tradition is nice. That's why humans always develop it. If it ain't broke, don't fix it (doesn't apply to junk food for breakfast, which is broke, but porridge or muesli etc, go for it).
Thank you pigs for being so similar to us surface monkeys.