skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> But I assumed that was dependent on the query planner;

Problems that can be “fixed” with DISTINCT but really shouldn't, an accidental cross-join being one I've seen many times, be are common to many (all?) SQL implementations and I don't think they are treat much better by any of them (they are generally mistakes, so prioritising optimising for them is not a good use of the query planner engineering team's time).

> Oracle SQL, as I recall, has/had specific constructs for giving hints to the query planner.

SQL Server has index hints much like Oracles, along with locking hints (which I think Oracle has similarly), and so forth, which can tweak the query planners behaviour. They are best avoided if other options are available because:

• they often only work well for a given data pattern, so you are just pushing the problem into the future when your data size has grown noticeably (in this context they are valuable as a temporary workaround, just make sure you treat them as such and work to remove the need)

• they potentially block optimisations that future versions of the query planner/engine can perform by forcing it a different way around

• sometimes they make explicit reference to objects (indexes usually), tightly coupling their names to things that others may not expect making accidental breaking changes more likely

Postgres doesn't have the same sort of index hints IIRC, but does have options that constrain the query planner in similarly to try make it prefer a particular path and/or avoid another.
They can't "take" it without compensating you. And very few people created their land from their inner mind or something anyway, it is being taken from everyone else for you to have possession of it, in exchange for hopefully you (or as it is set up, someone who willed it to you) having contributed to society as imperfectedly reflected in the markets.
Except a sale is a sale; did they buy it or did they not? There's additional nuance for whether they'll buy again or what support they need going forward, but a sale is still a sale.

A program is not just a program. A bug fix is not just a bug fix. They are not fungible, while sales, definitionally due to the exchange of money, are fungible.
It’s my job to have a job not that job. My “stability” comes from always preparing for my job to be snatched from under me.

By preparation I mean always be networking, keep my reputation spotless, keep my resume updated, keep my skills current with the market and keep my “career document” updated.

My wife has seen how efficient I am with getting a job six times over the 12 years we have been married.

We were both laid off from the job we worked at when the company folded when we were still dating. I had a contract lined up the following Monday. When that contract was unexpectedly terminated, I had an offer four days later.

This time I had a contract lined up a week before my last day and a full time job three weeks later. The only thing special about me is my network
Great explanation. Another example in a very similar vein - Akira. Watched it for the first time ever around 7 years ago, and while I loved it, it was very clear that it was pretty much the origin of a massive number of modern tropes and cliches in anime.
I don't know how this is relevant. Are you trying to hypothesize that Texas' "keep business open" response to COVID helped business medium-term confidence?

I will point out that Texas has one of the country's HIGHEST unemployment rates:

https://www.bls.gov/web/laus/laumstrk.htm

Only 5 states have higher unemployment.

It's 2023, I don't think COVID is relevant to any business decision anymore.

If we are going to make up hypotheses on what drives employers to relocate to Texas, I will submit the idea that Texas' poor workers' rights are attractive to business owners: https://www.keranews.org/news/2022-09-13/texas-is-one-of-the...
It’s also business climate (regulation) and crime. While SF I’d not Cal it’s a bell weather and businesses are rethinking NY State and Cal. Of course for many it’s still viable to stay but some have moved and some more are considering it.

I don’t mean it’ll become Detroit —a one trick pony, and collapse but it could mimic 1980s NYC when biz moved across the river.
It might be, if it’s directionless pushback instead of genuine curiosity to understand the need of the internal customer.

From my personal experience, people are often positively delighted when you make an effort to try to understand them and their needs.

Not shooting down your experience, but from my perspective it could be seen as a straw man argument in favour of never trying in the first place.
Eh, be smart and give up when the time is right.
> but there is some sort of global system understanding that you get from college (in my case computer+software+network engineering) where you can quickly narrow down potential sources of a problem, all the way down to say, the TCP/IP stack, CPU architecture, memory management, how some code might be optimized incorrectly by the compiler.

That's one potential place to get that kind of understanding. It's not the only one though. I've been fascinated by computers since I was a kid and I've put together a pretty good understanding of this stack.

Don't get me wrong, college isn't a bad place to get that understanding, I'm going back myself (mostly because my employer is paying for it), but it's definitely not the only place.
Eventually, we're going to have to come to terms with the fact that captchas take effort for humans to solve, but no effort for robots to solve. These systems are better at keeping humans out than bots now.
The goal is to leave the company before this becomes your problem. ;)

I say this as the person who gets hired to fix things after they left.
There are guardrails around access to the clipboard (and the post talks about the circumstances around it) but this exploit takes advantage of the fact that simply selecting text on X11 puts it in the primary selection buffer. The code just tells Firefox to select the text.
x86 and ARM are well maintained because they're 30-40 years old, but Power (it's not an acronym anymore) is not because it's 35 years old?

I also suspect you're making the typical mistake of confusing PowerPC with modern Power ISA. They overlap strongly and PowerPC was virtually designed to be 64-bit ready from the very beginning, but chips based on the modern ISA are much more sophisticated.

As someone who actually works on ppc64, the biggest two things that bother me about the ISA are the weirdness with r0 and the large number of instructions that must be implemented to be practical on a new design. Those are comparable to the quirks of any other "successful" ISA by your standards. They hardly make it junk.
Older workers are supposed to pass along this knowledge to younger workers in an expedited fashion. Acquisition of the understanding of increasingly complex systems must be optimized to operational needs. One of the many, many gripes Millennials have with Baby Boomers and Gen-Xers is that they jealously guard institutional knowledge in the name of job security, for years, and then just... retire. If you're lucky, your company will shell out massive consultation fees to have them come back and drip-feed what they know to younger personnel.

It's not just the natural order of things that such knowledge passes out of this world. It's one of many collective and affirmative decisions by people born before 1980 to take as much with them as possible when they go. I would be skeptical if it were just one thing, but after affordable college, affordable housing, affordable healthcare, affordable retirement, and a viable biosphere, it's become a pattern. That you seem to understand this on some level and don't care to try to mke a difference is even worse.
Companies that hire remote software engineers
Data including salary ranges, funding stats, employee ratings and tech stacks of tech (and tech-adjacent) companies that offer remote work.
Starship has still not successfully flown once - if you disregard those testing flight to some 10 km height a few years ago - and yet the matter of the problem and the pace of the company still makes it quite comfortable to talk about multiple launches per day.

More so, not talking about several launches per day is becoming more and more naive. Do you remember the Lockheed's ad where the page was vertically split, and on one side there was a rocket and on another - similarly scaled image of microphone, with wording like "while classical rocket companies launch, Elon Musk talks"? People rarely remember that ad, Lockheed is quite small in launch business these days in comparison to SpaceX. So, when - and if, if you want - those 10 launches per day will be achieved, will you get caught empty-handed? Or do you start preparing for that "pure fiction" right now, even just in case, so you'd have a viable business plan, a product riding on the possibility of massive and frequent launches, or will you retire at that time, as somebody who's left behind by the pace of the progress, with stories for grandchildren about how you programmed equivalent of COBOL on equivalent of DEC?

Our days pure fiction has a habit of becoming reality unexpectedly fast. Better be prepared.
We add links to real gifts. Asking ChatGPT only gives you suggestions, but doesn't show real examples.
We’re going to be so fucked when the people who develop things like the linux kernel die. There are no upcoming people with that level of knowledge.
Right. I want to know if Google News is going the route of Google Reader.
Authorities Seize Control of RagnarLocker Ransomware Dark Web Site
Texas has a pretty strong and diversified economy. Lots of oil both in midland/Odessa and in the gulf. Energy sector is big in Houston. Decent tech presence in Austin although lots of focus on lower level jobs (phone/support/etc). Dallas has lots of finance. Manufacturing is big there too, and transportation.

One of the things I worried about when I moved out of Texas was leaving such a strong and diversified economy… but after Covid and the normalization of remote work, this is thankfully less of an issue now. I hope remote work is here to stay. It helps prevent the centralization of labor around existing cities and lets the wealth of society spread more uniformly throughout the country.
One way I've seen this enforced is this: Have your "best" devs, the people who put out 2x the amount of solid, testable, well documented code as anyone else, you know those that carry the sprint, spend half their time reviewing. Your overall sprint velocity may go down a bit, but your code quality will go up.

There's a magic to slowing things down, too - require reviews on every change, require tests to run and pass, run UI tests on each PR. Let people discuss good and bad code they see. Turn every little thing people mention, (like "man, this view is difficult to reason about", "the entire xyz class is a mess", "does anyone know why we do X here?") into a Refactor issue, discuss it, plan it, do it. You can do this during a big feature sprint, you dont need to wait until your product is done (then its too late).

Refactor, let people say "yes this issue isnt high prio, but its important to me". Embrace when people want to make code better.
Same thing in the retrocomputing community. The video series Usagi Electric did with the Centurion minicomputer is a good example. The degree to which data about even off the shelf parts have been lost to time is frightening, let alone software.
Yes, in the past they would find positions internally.
Attempting to future proof your code so you never have to refactor: the most expensive choice of them all.
Agree that devs not needing to know this is how things should be, and that CTO/tech management however is not acting this way.

It is basically idiotic to me, as a highly paid senior application dev.. that they basically want me to spend any cycles on stuff that would ordinarily be done by someone making 1/5th my TC.

If I can do it more than 5x as fast/efficiently, sure, but I don't. IaC is something I worry about at the start of a project, as hamfistedly as possible, probably over-provisioning so I don't have to go back to it anytime soon. All so I can move onto what I am paid to do - delivering functionality to stakeholders. Someone who deals with IaC as part of their full-time job will be the expert who can move more quickly & correctly through it.

Sometimes this is just galaxy brain budget arb, where the infra org gets to show a cost save, to the detriment of the appdev org.
Boy-howdy — Vietnam left a mark.
It's also sometimes "when to refactor", because eventually you either have to refactor or rewrite (or retire).
> I don't think it translated Alhamdulillah wrong.

Correct, they provided a transliterated version.
You'd just better not travel to that country then. At least Turkey [1] and Saudi-Arabia [2] have arrested people for internet postings that were done outside of their territory.

With China it's even worse - they've been caught operating secret police stations worldwide, who then targeted and threatened dissidents [3]. Can't find the article again, but I remember that there were also cases of Chinese dissidents being threatened with harm to their family that was still in China. Hard to get more insidious than that.

[1] https://www.dw.com/en/german-lawmaker-briefly-detained-on-tr...

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/oct/18/saudi-arabia-u...

[3] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/what-are-chinas-allege...
> The developers knew how to put together a website and an API using a "modern framework", but did not understand much of the coding of the framework itself

This example sounds like a bad choice of framework, or insufficiently skilled devs.

I don't think the problem is that we have too many abstractions. Abstractions are useful, they allow people to focus on where they are different, avoid wasteful duplication of effort (when done right), and compensate for the non omniscence of everyone. They come with a cost, you need to know it.

There's a clear tendency to just buy into new trends, anf that's always been the case. Maybe the smaller scale of the industry back then made trends smaller and the choice more limited.

I think there's clearly an issue with the lack of interest to understand what's under the abstractions. Is it training, habit, culture, a change of who is a developer today? Don't know.

It was also much harder to be a dev 15 or 20y ago without having to know at least some C and some system. Stuff seemed more brittle as well so you had to fiddle. Deployment was mostly manual and artisanal so you had to copy files over manually, run commands, shit like that. Honestly the piece of mind and safety that frequent deliveries and "devops" brought is so good that I'd find it comical if anyone would suggest to me to go back.

So I don't think there's really too many abstractions. I think that sometimes they're the wrong choices, and sometimes people don't care enough about what's under their immediate interface
I'm not sure I understand the question. I didn't live in California then or since.
The Great American Mall Game
There were a lot of things in the write up that in hindsight were verifiably false I could have possibly fought against.

I honestly didn’t read the write up or the parts I needed to improve to stay until after I had another job. I didn’t even realize it was part of the documentation.

I skipped right down to the amount of severance, went online to sign the paperwork and started looking for a job the same day.

Fighting to keep a job that doesn’t want you is like fighting to keep a girlfriend.
Climate activists should make a special effort to get the science right
I'm happy to stick with "challenge". It means I can lament how "morally challenged" Apple is :)
I feel the sales analogy is quite general (hit a quarterly/annual quota) but the engineering example is talking about a specific piece of functionality.

If you asked the sales team about a specific deal and they said "We estimate a 70% chance of closing the deal. It'll bring in about $5m in ARR."

If management responded "Could you make that 80% and $7m ARR?" I think that would be a closer analogy.

Sure it might be possible to improve the odds of closing and jack the price up at the same time - just like it might be possible to complete that feature in half the time - but somebody will have to make some major changes or concessions somewhere to make it happen.
What are you using server side?

I've been looking outside the JS world for an alternative for doing full stack dev and Laravel Livewire seems like an amazing alternative for like 80-90% of use cases. Something like Alpine, vanilla, or even Lit for the more sophisticated interactions.
We're dealing with accumulated tech debt burying us right now.

For years the team was told to deliver features, that the upgrades to node dependencies weren't of a high enough priority. Now some of the dependencies are so old they're complicating upgrading past node 12.

Yet the cybersecurity people are demanding that vulnerabilities be fixed.

Thankfully we have a stronger product owner now, and spent most of the last 6 months getting things updated. Yet there are still those in senior leadership who openly question why our team hasn't delivered the features they want.

We're working on educating them. And something pithy and catchy is useful, so I'm definitely going to mention this in future: "fixing tech debt has a price, not fixing it has a cost."

It's the kind of thing that if you can get a "cool" or influential senior leader to repeat, the rest will fall in line.
>being ignorant of the larger world is a totally reasonable and healthy position to take.

Reasonable yes, healthy I'd debate. More importantly, if you prefer to have something of focus it would local politics, your mayor and representatives. It is often said that what happens here is more impactful on your life than what happens in national or international news. You can participate whether a new library or infrastructure is built, zoning laws, etc.

You won't see this anyway on your newsfeed so it might suit you.
I swear I hate this estimates thing so hard.

For many reasons:

1) Estimations should be useful so business can adapt. In reality there's no adaptation of any sort, your PM will get the stick from its own boss that stuff needs to be ready by this or that more-or-less vague deadline. Thus, what am I estimating for if you don't care about my estimation anyway?

2) There are no incentives for teams ultimately to estimate anything realistically. What do you get for being accurate? A medal? In fact, all incentives go towards inflating the amount of work through estimates.

3) Ultimately all this dancing of estimates and rituals is nothing else but stuff that management embraces to appear more effectful and impactful than it really is.
An important thing to remember is that not only did you get to watch the layers be added, you also have decades of experience. In today's field, where we double in number every N years, that's enough time to accumulate enough knowledge to feel like a demigod—to have more than 20 years of experience is extremely rare in the industry right now. That won't always be the case: eventually we'll stop growing exponentially and we'll find an equilibrium, and eventually the people with 30 years of experience will stop being a vanishingly small minority. While that may not give us the kind of breadth that your generation has, I would expect many of them to be able to master the specific slice of the tech tree that they actually build on top of.

30 years is plenty of time to learn the everything from the browser down to the CPU, or the HTTP framework down, or the database down, and probably enough to learn two such slices. Part of why it seems impossible now is just because most developers not only don't have the historical context, they haven't yet had any time.
But then you lose 1/2 the severance amount
That is the issue. It is very hard to write tests that ensure correct parallel code as it can easily work 99.9% of the time. This is not the case with typical functional requirements.
> and just as in the audiophile world where there's a huge amount of money and energy spent to try to convince people that pricey bits are somehow better than cheap bits

I always assumed this came down to the analog part (usually some sort of speaker) being better, and all the extras on the cords were really just there because a cheap looking cord would ruin the aesthetic they're going for.
Dear Elon, Remote Work Boosts Productivity and Fertility Rates
Is it really crime? San Antonio, Dallas, and Houston all have higher burglary rates than Oakland, CA and San Francisco. New York City has the lowest burglary rate on the entire top 100 list.

Dallas and Houston have higher total violent crime rates than Los Angeles.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...

Speaking of regulation, could it be that businesses prefer Texas due to poor workers' rights? https://www.keranews.org/news/2022-09-13/texas-is-one-of-the...

I'm also unsure what California business climate is stifling businesses there, considering it is the #1 GDP economy in the country, 5th highest state in GDP per capita, and only 5 or 6 entire countries in the world have larger economies. Is there a specific regulation that is stopping your business idea from working in California?
Oracle Releases October 2023 Critical Patch Update Advisory
I expect Jon Stewart would rise to the opportunity to complain about content partnerships with China among other things. The question long term is if someone takes money from big tech to fund a content studio will there be long term bad consequences or will the audience rebel to the content creators side.
great analogy but why doesn’t anyone pay me more for crunching out more tickets?
It's not a big deal because there is no need to retry 20 times. The probability of getting a deleted article several times in a row is very low, so you could limit to e.g. 5 tries, and if all are deleted fall back to the next non-deleted article (or even a hard-coded article). The bias would be negligible assuming the proportion of deleted articles is low; to guarantee that it is low, one can periodically renumber to eliminated deleted articles (this can be done efficiently using the trick suggested by @munificent; but the naive O(n) approach would probably be good enough).
You have to join the actors union to be in the vast majority of movies and tv shows
lets say I opened account on hentzner, rented server, they sent me email with password, I SSH-ed to it and connection got wire tapped. What way you think could help me to detect this?
Thanks, super helpful comment & blog posts.
Oracle has released its Critical Patch Update Advisory for October 2023 to address 387 vulnerabilities across multiple products. A cyber threat actor could exploit some of these vulnerabilities to take control of an affected system.

I'm curious, are a lot of people here still using Oracle?
Saw this on reddit, and liked someone pointed out Elon isn't practicing what he preached (again)

https://www.reddit.com/r/EnoughMuskSpam/comments/17cln5t/dea...
I have no idea why Apple even is in the content business at all, it's a low-margin business at best that requires continuous investment or the viewers will go somewhere else. It doesn't even help retain people in their ecosystem as they make apps for other platforms.
Sorry to be a stickler but this is a heavy editorialization of the title.

The original title is "Someone saying 'No, it's less effort than that!'?".

The current HN title isn't even a proper quote of the article, the quote is

> Pushing for a lower estimate is like negotiating better weather with the meteorologist!