skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Overall, I think this article is good.

I've been in the game a long time and there is not much here I would disagree with.

"Working in software engineering often means long working hours. Most of the time, you are glued to a computer screen, with little work-life balance."

For sure this is true. The younger you are, the easier it is to deal with and be amazingly productive.
As you get older, life creeps back in and you get a bit of balance.

When you get to my age it becomes less about screentime and more about problem solving. Something I am very happy about.

As a career, it's 8 out of 10.
3D map plots human brain-cell 'antennae' in exquisite detail
This is an exciting proposal. We have delimited continuations in Guile Hoot, a Scheme to WASM compiler, but because there's no stack switching there's more overhead than there should be.
> College will not prepare you for the job

I'm on the fence. Not initially, sure. But there are embedded lessons that click later.

I was ten years into my career before I needed to write a b-tree or a double ended linked list, but when the need arose I was very grateful for having the ability to recognize it, and the familiarity to act on it.

Some things I learned such as the wonderful value of pure functions just didn't click for about as long. I'd done a ton of Scheme in College and at the time it was nothing but a frustration "Just let me mutate state, this is dumb" it wasn't until I had years of tracking down what the heck was mutating state in a giant old code base that I learned to appreciate functional programming.
You do not create clean code for others, you create it for your future self. And he/she will appreciate it.
Without knowing the exact expectations of the people the author spoke to, I'd imagine lots of the misconceptions are on-point.

One personal exception for me was how university (not college) prepared me for my future in software engineering. The courses I took quite often involved group projects of 2-3 people completing work cooperatively. Undoubtedly this was - by far - one of the best and closest to real-work experiences I had during my earlier education.

Compromise, discussion, division of labor, and a healthy bit of experience with individuals who'd prefer to be part of the project credits but ideally do as little of the work as possible.
> You can spot someone who just read How To Make Friends or whatever else a mile away - why? Because they seem to be nervously following some invisible rule and it ends up making them seem like a kid from the school paper conducting their first interview

I had dinner once with an acquaintance in the industry who did this. Every interaction we had with someone else (hostess, waiter, etc) he made it a point to stop them and ask their name. It was incredibly awkward because there was no point in knowing everyone’s name.
actual medical bills before insurance.
After being a software engineer for over 30 year, I agree with all the points. I have come to the conclusion that being a software engineer is one of the hardest jobs. Also because your often confronted with your weaknesses. But that also gives you room to grow. I also have come to realize that being a software engineer, changes how you view the world, because it forces you to think deeper about problems. The problems behind the problems. In sense that alienates you from all those people who do not have to deal with hard problems, are not used to think deeply about problems. And there are a lot of those kind of people in the world, at least a lot that use their voice.

But in the end, I never regret becoming a software engineer, and I also realized that it has profoundly shaped who I have become.
I think the question assumed that you can run go in a script-language mode. Because you do want the source of shell-scripts on the local machine.

So it is easy to make changes by system admins/non-developers.
Scripting is for glue functionality after all…
Possible 3k-Year-Old Meeting Hall Uncovered in Germany
Thanks. Your attitude sounds reasonable. Being honest though, one problem is that I do not consider it a personal preference: I basically think that functions longer than 100 lines are completely, and objectively, unacceptable (I wouldn't normally write a function longer than, say 30 lines). They are just woefully failing to take advantage of modularity, and modularity is the entire basis of the software revolution in the last 60 years. I recognize that I should try not to have overly strong feelings about a subject that some consider a matter of taste, but I don't think I'm alone here.
> GNP counts income only owned by residents of the US that happened in the US.

Also income of US residents that happened outside the US, no?

IIUC, "domestic" is location-based while "national" is residency-based.
If you compare running a monolith on a singel server then you
might be better off diagnosing problems in .Net.
Though I think that is uncertain.

If you are writing a distributed system with plenty of microservices
BEAM will be magnitudes easier to debug if you write the same system
in BEAM native
This actually describes the job pretty well in my opinion, as someone who has been in this field for over a decade now. Not everybody is cut out to be a software engineer, and the "day in the life of" youtube videos where they never do any work and just eat all day of free food and socialize just paint an inaccurate picture of reality, making the job seem a lot more glamorous and easy than it is.
Apparently the demand is large, as Microsoft is not a small customer by any measure.

The actual cause here is something else: NVIDIA have been allocating GPUs according to long term corporate priorities rather than just auctioning them off and letting price signals do the work. The reason is twofold:

1. They want a diversity of customers for GPUs, not just one or two LLM mega-players that everyone else invokes via high level cloud APIs. That would put NVIDIA in a bad negotiating position.

2. They don't want GPU supply to be dominated by companies that are simultaneously designing their own silicon. Microsoft is. [1]

Oracle has been getting large allocations because they aren't designing their own AI hardware (or at least, if they are, this isn't public), and because they are in the business of selling CUDA and not hardware abstracted model access.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2023/4/18/23687912/microsoft-athena...
Switching Xilinx / AMD Kria K24 and K26 SoMs [video]
I agree but I found people bounce with big intros, so it's a bad attempt at "show don't tell."

The cells were written by AI, but the metadata data that generated the cell is mixed in (thats the {...} && bit).

So now the full chat context can be derived from the notebook. Because the notebook is editable, you can fully edit the chat context in an ergonomic way. Both the prompt, the AI code output. So when the AI makes a mistake (it often does), you can correct it. Your ability to detect mistakes is accelerated by the fact it's a computation based conversation. Because the chat context is derived from the editable state, your corrections are internalised into the chat conversation. It continues as if it answered that for real.

So in the notebook you see that the AI is rapidly become an Observable notebook expert, because I have manually coarse corrected its chain-of-thought. An out-of-the box chatGPT session cannot do what is in that notebook. My expertise have been transferred. Once it knows how to solve something in the chat context, its very easy for it to repeat the pattern for new situations. Having it as a standalone forkable self-enclosed notebook artifact is useful. The existing notebook infra allows you to copy and paste cells across notebook too. So I am thinking we can curate stand alone skill memes. The examples are all over the shop just to see what kinda of things I could get it to solve, I imagine a real use would concentrate on upskilling just enough to solve a specific class of problem.
LICENSE Apache 2

https://github.com/qdrant/qdrant/blob/master/LICENSE
Show HN:AI Chats Tailored for You
Parody chats with some of our fav characters across fantasy,movies,TV,books etc(adding tons soon)
Method for producing diesel oil from coal tar [patent]
My biggest frustration is the people who refuse to get involved with any of the process of defining requirements, but then when the requirements arrive moan about how they're stupid requirements and won't get the job done. You can't have it both ways.
I generally find I write perfect clean code in my own personal projects, however at work my colleagues keep complaining about it ;)
it's actually very easy to measure. the audience here is close to the 1%, so your usecase is already discarded in the grand scheme with a 2% error margin when measuring behavior for the large population.
It won't be available in the US so they're not needed.
If it's not on a remote server, then how would you know when people leave/arrive at their homes? You'd miss out on so much sweet, monetizable personal information. Won't anyone think of corporate profits???
"The discount is bigger if you don't buy it." -- delete those Apps, so you don't pay them with your data or your $10/month.

Instead, call your parents, the people you care about, and get them to spend time with you. Send them postcards, and make them know you genuinely care.

Meta even lets you download Messenger without Facebook. The same is true for Whatsapp. Just use them for communication if you must. There's no reason why anybody needs social media on their phone or in their life.
Cool. I encourage you to post a show hn!
Let’s start here to support what I said the UK already DID: https://www.wired.com/story/the-uks-controversial-online-saf...

And here is the rest of the world and the laws they are passing: https://community.qbix.com/t/the-coming-war-on-end-to-end-en...
Does anyone remember the "reset" button? I assume it still exists, but to be honest I have never found the need for it. But I do remember it being on many forms that you would encounter pre-2000.
You will almost certainly experience a layoff in your first few years of post-college work. You may or may not be affected directly by the layoff, but either way your first layoff experience makes an impact on you. You will watch others around you who may have even been great at their jobs lose their jobs for no fault of their own. It sucks.

When a layoff happens to/around you, TALK ABOUT IT WITH YOUR PEERS! Every one of your peers will be having feelings. Engineers are not good at talking about feelings. But OMFG seriously, when that first layoff happens just drop everything you're doing, grab a pile of people you work with and go out for a long lunch right away and then talk about wtf just happened. It makes the situation less bad and will help you get back to being productive much quicker. Your boss won't mind, and if they do, they're a horrible person.
Have you been to Asia and seen the state that most of those dogs are in ? You aren't doing them any favors by letting them reproduce.

Dogs won't go off in to the wild by themselves, they are social animals and like being around people. Not in the least because they receive left over food and get more out of the trash. But they receive very little health care.

Not many people are bothered by them. This is all for the benefit of the animal, not us humans. IMHO.
A side note:

There are a lot of new languages coming out these days,
which I find interesting and positive.
It gives hope for evolution and better solutions to come along.

A problem is that on the surface they have similar syntax and
keywords.

I can get confused as to what language I am programming in since
some syntax nearly transfers between more than one programming language.

There are of course differences, and those differences can be
profound which is what gives us a richer eco system but my brain
gets confused by it.
This sounds a lot like CAA records! https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc6844
No updates on GitHub since Aug 2022. Isn't it abandoned?

Supported and battle-tested OCaml or StandardML for BEAM would be great, of course. I'm waiting for something like this for years.
I think that automation is great, but we will definitely need some enlightened form of socialism to run along with it if we want a minimally decent society.
> Legacy codebases can be fun.

"Legacy codebases" and "fun" should not appear in the same sentence.
Eh that's one of the least universal ones in there. I've worked in tech for a decade now across 6 positions in 4 companies and I have never had any complaints about WLB. If anything, I frequently feel like I'm getting away with something when it comes to how little I can actually get by with doing if I want to.
8GB RAM on M3 MacBook Pro 'Analogous to 16GB' on PCs, Claims Apple
I mean, given that both of those produced nice-sounding but wrong translations, that doesn’t count for much, does it? To borrow a saying, the correct tool to translate things into Russian is a Russian speaker (native or otherwise).

But I didn’t actually mean to criticise, really. It’s just funny. (Not nearly as hilarious, say, the Russian passport in The Bourne Identity, but still pretty funny.)
I think the difference between a long function and many short functions that are not reusable is not big. A long function can be cluttered if it is really too long, and also many small helper functions can bring confusion to the code. The advantage of short functions can be their testing, or the division of work in the team. Anyway, if too long functions or too many one-call functions start to appear in the code, the code architecture should be reconsidered.
> Performing math how you suggest is little more than memorization except you've just memorized a different chain in the process.

It's synthesis of memory perhaps, but it's not memorizing specific answers; which is different yet from executing steps of an algorithm you have memorized.

> This isn't going to become true no matter how much you repeat it. You've consistently made assertions that are trivially proven false.

Then agree to disagree because I think you're full of shit. actually, not even that, I think you just don't even understand what I'm saying. which is agreeing with you 90% of the way. This article is nice. But Memorization -> Generalization -> Cleaning up Noise -> Stability is STILL NOT THE ALGORITHM. It will never be the algorithm. It's always just "generalization-ish". Which is again, a modality that human brains can use to process problems and works pretty well, and can presumably work very well, but is ultimately inferior to established, perfected algorithms.

but nah. you chose petty arrogance so yay, we get get to be dicks. fuck off.
I think the point with regards to clean code is somewhat changing. As companies and their clients adopt process certifications such as ISAE, static code analysis reporting is slowly becoming a requirement for the release process, driving measured code quality improvement and directly tying it to business outcomes. I feel like some other points are also less severe in technology oriented companies focused on cloud native, continuous delivery and that manage based on the DORA metrics.
I'm at student at UPC (next to this). I did some workshops at BSC while I was in HS and got to visit the room for Mare Nostrum 4 and all the cooling facilities that power it. Pretty cool to see it featured here!
can we just make non-sens like that illegal

no one has time for it

you bought the device you should own it

it's not even anything fancy where you could argue that continuous software updated need to be done or similar

also pass a law that all smart home devices had to go through a hub, no direct internet connection allowed, uh put it under "reducing DDOS potential due to long term issues with internet connected smart home device security"
Natural is just that, natural. I have never met a human being alive that has never had a natural conversation and yes that includes people with strong social anxiety, autism, you name it. Maybe that’s when you talk to your mother, or when you’re drunk, or when you’re talking to your best friend, or you live in a basement and it’s some guy over voice chat in a game or whatever but I guarantee you have had at least one.

Pretty sure everyone knows what “relax” means.

I never said you should talk ONLY about yourself. I just said that a realistic conversation can be all over the place and the exact split doesn’t matter.
And then you switch to security from being a developer and the imposter syndrome hits you in the face like a truck and you'll realize how easy it was being a developer.
When you both follow this advice, it leads to both talking for 30%, leading to awkward silences for about 40%.

Just kidding, but it’s generally true: two introverts have not much to talk about. I certainly always enjoy talking to extraverts because they fill up the silent space.
Imagine how much worse the code would have been without all those rules.

If people don’t have taste, no rules will get you to good code. Only a bit less worse / better predictable behavior.
irregulars have a tendency to become regular if they fall out of frequent use
It is extremely easy to disconnect from work. Turn off your laptop and live your life.

I find that those who are chronic workers have very little going for them in their personal lives.

I challenge everyone who feels overworked to work 1 hour less this week, then an extra 1 hour next week. See how far you can go before anyone even notices or cares. It’s farther than you think.
It's also very valuable to have a shared frame of reference with colleagues so you can communicate more efficiently. Saying things like "this is like backpressure" instead of having to explain the entire concept is very valuable.
Once a coworker spent 4 weeks arguing with me that his code was fine because "the test was green" before I touched it.

The test contained a "return true" before the actual test.

After writing countless emails to convince him to fix his code, and wondering why they wouldn't just fire him and save everyone else some time, the CTO announced that the guy was now promoted to team lead. :)

His code is not elegant, it barely works, requires constant full rewrites, is an endless source of segmentation faults, deadlocks, sleep() in the main thread and whatnot.

The only skill you need to get promoted is to laugh at the jokes of your boss and schedule meetings to demo your n-th rewrite of the same thing.

Estimates are important.

I've overheard a team lead claiming they are completely impossible.

How long does it take you to go to the store? Yes you might die in the process and take ∞ time, but one normally considers common inconveniences in this. A senior who can't estimate isn't a senior.

Of course at work I've heard a team lead say "I did my part, I have no idea when they will implement it" (not the same team lead I mentioned before).

> It will be almost impossible to disconnect from your job

I learnt that very early on. In my first full time job, my boss got mad at me for arriving at the office at 9:05, unacceptably late.

So precisely when my hours were done I'd stand up and leave.

> talk directly to them, be professional but not mean, and tell them what and how they can improve

And then get reported to HR… my advice is to be the 1st one to do the backstabbing and complain that it is impossible to work with them.

> Get used to being in meetings for hours

Working from home helps… one can cook and build lego during meetings.
There's no need. All of our biological waste (e.g. wood) will provide reliable carbon dates within the range of ~50k years. Radioisotope ratios in our metals and construction materials can be used to date our inorganic ruins on geologic time scales.

Radioisotope dating doesn't work for stone structures like the one described in this article, because it would date the age of the stone, not the structure. But concrete is poured, and steel forged or reforged at or close to its actual use date. So radioisotope ratios in these materials ought to give a reliable dating mechanism on very long timescales.
it's also humorous how often AI systems are some complicated form of mechanical turk.
I've always liked working in legacy code bases. It's like doing archeology. Seemingly bad code maybe didn't start out as bad code, but was made bad over time because of historical reasons (last minute product changes, time pressure, local changes without understanding the bigger picture). It can be very rewarding to make sense of it. And it makes you realize that any code you write yourself will be legacy code soon too, and someone else will need to be able to make sense of it again.
Thanks for that.

Interesting serendipity: Samuel Goudsmit, a co-proposer of the idea of electron spin, was scientific leader of Operation Epsilon, which captured the Farm Hall detainees.
Banning E2EE is stupid
Let's take a small creature, say a fruit fly or a jumping spider. We can probably agree that they have tiny brains (if in the shape of some centralized brain, that is).

a) Would you say it shows any kind of intelligent behavior? For a flexible definition of "intelligent", along the lines of "problem-solving ability".

b) Would you say such behavior is pure instinct, 'pre-programmed', incapable of learning / evolving / adjusting to a changing environment?

c) Would you say that (given time) science is incapable of figuring out how such tiny brain works? Or produce a model that shows similar behavior?

Now take it up a few notches. Say the brain of a mouse. Then onto brains of bigger mammals & humans.

I think you can see where this is going...

Granted, "global collapse" scenario does have a non-0 probability.
Discovering how a large system works can be fun. Even if a codebase is old, but the design is good, it can be gratifying.
Related https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38163412 is worth reading alongside this (it's not exactly a dupe, but it's pretty meta).
The add-free version will be soon be available for 9.99€ per Month.
Concise and well argued paper, best read listening to Gloria Gaynor's I will survive
From company statement:

> Our customers rely on us to make access simple without sacrificing quality and reliability. Unauthorized app integrations, stemming from only 0.2% of myQ users, previously accounted for more than half of the traffic to and from the myQ system, and at times constituted a substantial DDOS event that consumed high quantities of resources.

Yeah, that sounds plausible, because:

- Home Assistant users are power users, thus more likely to actually use the devices in question;

- Official IoT software and integrations are uniformly shit, designed to discourage effective use (while maximizing data collection).

Thus, I read this statement as: "We're not happy that some of our customers decided to actually use the 'smart'/'connected' aspects of our product; our service-providing part was not ready to provide the service, and unlike the data collection part, it was never intended to."
>Now we're back to mutually incompatible cable standards.

Not exactly, we have a single standard with different tier cables for power and speed.

If you buy a USB-C cable with high power delivery, it will work for lower powered devices as well (but the inverse will not). If you buy a USB-C with high speed, it will work for devices will very low throughput rates too.

So buy the most expensive highest power+speed USB-C version, and you don't have to worry, it would support all (or close) lower-level uses.
> I find that those who are chronic workers have very little going for them in their personal lives.

Yeah having kids fixed that for me
Isn't this a self-fulfilling prophecy? Giving up can't end in success.