skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The main problem with the Agile industry is that the certificate mills give people the idea that they have to know nothing about software to work on/in software.

Also Scrum as outlined by people like Jim Coplien would probably be kind of fine for certain set ups, but only a few agile coaches, POs or SMs know Scrum that well, instead it's a weird mix of apocryphal, illogical practices and superficial knowledge that, coupled with an inexperienced dev team, is similar to a giant Molotow cocktail that will sooner or later explode.
I'm convinced history ended in 2020 and that we're just stuck in an unending loop of purgatory at this point, where everything blends together and nothing is real and nothing matters anymore. Money is fake, prices are fake, people are fake, nations and borders are fake. It's all just coasting on inertia into oblivion.
I'm looking at it from the perspective of my parents.

For them it is a major feature of the iPhone that you can download any app with complete impunity. No need for $150/year antivirus (for those big scary viruses windows used to get absolutely riddled with). No need to worry it's going to change your default search engine or start mining bitcoin. You know when you download something from the App Store it has been through some level of vetting. I'm not sure why so many people here are wilfully blind to this use case.

Also, the reason I specifically bring up WhatsApp is that we know Facebook will take ridiculous liberties given the chance - remember Onavo?
whats weird about it?
Dude, if people fix RFI problems by shielding speaker wires and putting ferrites close to the amplifier on speaker wires, clearly speaker wires are antennas for RFI that can affect amplifier performance.

Asking me to figure out what you're arguing based on a 17 minute video is not reasonable. I skimmed the video and took my best guess of what you're advocating. (It's not a representative or useful test; yes, it's harder to measure RF on a cable when it's plugged into an amplifier, but that doesn't tell you that RF on cables can't be rectified and amplified by the amplifier). You can use your words yourself.

In any case, the people who have asserted that RFI can get into ampifiers from speaker wires and cause problems are correct.

Your assertion "this is not an issue for anyone" contradicts the direct experience of lots and lots of people who have lived close to large RF sources and had RFI problems in audio fixed by adjusting speaker wires, such that it's the first step for engineers and radio amateurs working with angry neighbors.
This is Scrum, not agile.
> "people had fewer than 3-4 hours per day to actually work" had the same experience.

Same. Even worse, spread out in between meetings. Some days I'd have barely started understanding the work to be done and it was time for the next meeting. Rinse and repeat for each "non-meeting" slot throughout the day and the whole day is a write-off.
How to Plan as an Engineering Executive
Why not just define a lisp for databases?
That was my experience pre-2023, now it's 100 applications and maybe one response, except there aren't 100 positions, all of them are the highest possible level of seniority and require 10 y.o.e plus a masters degree, and nobody responds to messages.
Exclusivity/elitism.

The same mindset that appreciates the "simplicity" of removing all the connection ports from a device.
Guess I have to find a way to prank these two guys in reverse.
Please convince me that lack of native support for division by 3 is a feature.
By "doing something for 10 years", I think the implication is you're actively working on that subject area, regularly, for 10 years. Not per se occasionally working on something every now and then. You can become a really good Chess player if you consistently play for 10 years--you figure out all the strategies and shortcuts, and it would be unusual if you weren't really good compared to someone playing for a year (assuming they're not some exceptional learner). But if your metric is just "I've played it occasionally since 10 years ago" then indeed, you probably didn't develop much breadth or scope as you were constantly forgetting and relearning as opposed to compounding your knowledge.

As for programming, I don't think programming is all that hopelessly complex and broad as field, but it can seem that way to a beginner. Most computer science concepts translate very well to other parts of the field, and the core programming constructs and libraries don't change much at all. How many ways can you configure a website, a mobile app or a database? Your instinct might be to think about all the different libs you can pull in, all the different programming languages, etc. But they all do roughly the same thing, they all compile down to the same stuff. You just have to develop the skill of understanding the fundamentals as opposed to getting lost in a sea of high level abstractions.
>Meanwhile Israel has recently expressed a desire to occupy their neighbors as well as fully settling Gaza and West Bank after they are ethically cleansed.

I have not seen anyone say this before. That's a pretty extreme position that doesn't quite jive logically with the facts I know.

Israel quite obviously is a technological level above Palestine, they could have done this many times before. In fact, every rocket attack for years prior that was thwarted by iron dome could have been justification; but they decided on peace and deescalation.

>They also want to create the Ben Gurion strait to compete with the suez.

I havent heard that one is a very long time. That stuff hasn't be a thing since before I was born. And im not a spring chicken. I bet the Saudis would LOVE for this to happen though with Neom. Egypt will never consider

>Look up “Greater Israel”.

I am familiar. As a Canadian, I know various, mostly orthodox jews who oppose israel because biblically israel must be freely given. Which would be greater israel.

That isn't what's happening here though quite obviously and israel hasnt expanded their borders to any significance.

>It would seem Israel is the root of Egypt’s source of problems.

I totally disagree. Egypt warned Israel of the impending attack, though israel says they werent warned.

Egypt and Israel are probably the most friendly they have ever been today. Dare I even say Israel and Egypt are on the same side in this grander conflict which is obviously orchestrated by Iran.

Egypt rushed to build a rather respectable wall between them and Palestine and will be taking 0 refugees.

Hamas spit in Egypt's face. Egypt is quite respectably working toward peace and may actually be the best chance of peace for Palestine.

Pretty standard war at this point. Palestine will have to come to Israel with some major concessions.
It's webscale.
I'm going to (at least I should) design my application logic very differently if I know in advance the call might take a while or timeout completely. If I'm not offered that info during development time it's just going to turn into terrible mess in production. Ain't nothing any framework can do about it if the language itself lacks the semantics to express developer's constraints.
A place with daily standups?

Their "sound biting" of a complex issue resonates. It can be difficult to even explain what I'm doing to several people in the bandwidth of 2 minutes sometimes.

Most charitably, it's just a quick, lossy status report and forced request for help with blockers.

I feel like something is wrong if you feel like you need to cut corners to perform a "good-looking" report in standup. You shouldn't feel/cave to such a pressure.
To be fair, most of us tend to be dehydrated, so some beneficial effect is expected
Take the scholarship. It's a much higher probability outcome.

You will have more control over your destiny. EG if you work hard in your studies and pursue side projects you will prosper.

In contrast, you can do everything "right" at the startup and still end up unemployed due to forces outside your control. In a foreign country with no qualifications.
Beeper Mini users find Macs banned from iMessage network
It worked for me on the mobile app.

This Tweet has some sample code at the bottom: https://twitter.com/rez0__/status/1745545813512663203?t=icds...

If I've understood correctly, GPT-4 interprets the code points from the Unicode tag block as corresponding to letters. If so, I'm curious to know whether this is something it learned or whether it was hard-coded.
Nice one.

Homeopathic snake oils are diluted so many times they pretty much guarantee there are no traces of original substance left (they believe the more times it is diluted, the more potent healing powers it gets). I think default is 30 times dilution, each time with ratio 1:100, so you're left with 1e-60 of original, so if you'd put all atoms from milky way (1e68) and start homeopathic them, you'd be left with number of atoms that make ie. a virus (influenza has roughly 1e8 atoms).
Are you thinking of cilantro? Never heard anyone say that of celery, only cilantro.
I love driving past this base to see them...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assault_Craft_Unit_5
Their ancestors were smart enough to stay out of that particular thicket, afterward.

Typically they have dug up and eaten the tasty-smelling tuber. The most daring cow chowed it while the others goggled, and remembered the smell forever after.
Often the people at the top understand. However what most developers fail to understand is the guy at the top really needs accurate estimates. the more accurate the estimate the better he can do their job. Thus they are constantly loohing for a magic bullet that gives them that. it doesm't need to be perfect, but the closer the better.
Yeah really. It’s not a story about waste heat at all, it’s a story about revision 1.0 not being tested in all weather conditions.
Imitate, Then Innovate (2022)
If an app has sufficient popularity to force people off of App Store, it probably isn't buggy/low quality.
The whole point of the game is to do it within a bounded set of moves.
Interesting to know - thanks for the info. Strange to think that something designed for 'known, understandable, repeatable work' got adopted by software development.
I've used Nix with Nix-Darwin on my macOS machines for a couple years now. The primary benefit is that when I get a new macOS machine, it's only three steps to having ALL my apps, configurations, etc. exactly as they were before:

1. Download Nix installer (I prefer the one by Determinate Systems)

2. Clone my Nix configs (public, so I don't even need secrets like keys yet)

3. Run `make`

I then wait around 15 minutes or so (mostly network time) and I'm good to go.

ONE BIG RECOMMENDATION: I don't like using nix-darwin to manage graphical apps directly. It's a bit awkward. But, you can use nix-darwin to declaratively manage `homebrew`, so I still get my graphical apps from Homebrew. The linked article seems to suggest ditching homebrew entirely but I found its best as a mix of both worlds with Nix being the source of truth to manage everything else, including brew.

You can find my configurations on GitHub but note that if you're new to Nix you would do better finding a simpler starting point: https://github.com/mitchellh/nixos-config (these are shared Nix configurations between macOS, Linux, and WSL on Windows).
Evolution has amazing power to change behaviors in inexplicable ways. Sudden reliable death at small doses is a fairly powerful evolutionary pressure.
It amuses me, personally, seeing the "antivax" crowd quickly being equalized to all the other various "bad" people - 20 years ago, there was a strong but quiet "antivax" crowd and it was definitely not made up of Trump or even R-leaning people. It was quite the "hippy liberal progressive" if you had to qualify it.

But then again, twenty years ago you had all sorts of political positions you could take, now everything is simply binary. You have no agency.
Personally, interacting with users can be a source of great joy (it can also be a source of great consternation).

I've typically found it much better to interact with the person you're making the dog food for so that you can get their rapid feedback and know where you either talked past each other, the user realized something new, etc.

Because that's what we do. We solve problems for users. Ideally we solve more problems than we create (jury is still out of that though).

My favorite anecdote was one day walking through the plant and we walked by a lady who was cutting up one of the reports we generate, reordering the lines, gluing them to a piece of paper so that she could photocopy it.

"Did you know that we can do that for you?" we asked. "Really!?"

Half hour later she had her report, sorted properly -- forever.

This was the transition from the Mainframe culture to our more responsive "Mini" culture. She had learned over the years to be content with what she got and make it work.

Interacting with users, AND (big AND) having the power to respond to them can be very fulfilling.
This is one of the things I've added to me repertoire when I interview with teams: I always ask how often they meet and how they structure their meetings.

I once mysteriously turned into "not a culture fit" after several rounds of interviews with excellent feedback up to that point and I'm fairly sure asking a couple of similar routine questions about their dev process was what got me tagged with that label. I do consider that one a bullet dodged - if your process is so bad that you're worried about a candidate asking about it or you think they're being awkward for doing so then that says everything really - and I still ask similar questions of anyone I might work directly with/for today. But if there's a place you really want to work it's worth keeping in mind that some people apparently get rubbed the wrong way by this kind of question.
> Extreme case: google, does not use aws for its main load; this upper threshold I wager is couple of orders of magnitude smaller

Not a good example in my opinion, as Google is also a major provider of cloud services. AWS isn't the only game in town.

I think Disney+ is a more interesting case. A quick google search turns up some articles saying their video streaming is powered by external CDNs. As I understand it, Netflix take the opposite approach and deliver all video data from their own Open Connect CDN, although they use AWS for other workloads (presumably including things like authentication, their recommendation engine, etc).
That’s fine but it isn’t much of an argument.
may you and the people relying on you never have to rely on the maintainers taking things more seriously than they've shown themselves to in their public positioning
Apple to Remove Blood Oxygen Sensor from Watch to Avoid U.S. Ban, Rival Says
I can’t imagine it was intentionally added as a feature. It doesn’t work in GPT-3.5 — it seems GPT-4 is unexpectedly smart enough to parse the invisible portion (and confuse it for user instruction) whereas in any other context it’s just steganography that would need to be decoded explicitly.
>> It'd be like being a carpenter or mechanic but spending the majority of your time debugging, fixing, and communication with manufacturer's of broken or poorly working tools.

What do you think a mechanic does ALL DAY? Very few carpenters start with a raw blank of nice wood and craft something amazing. It's all interpreting plans (poor spec), framing (boiler plate), figuring out an addition (bolting on features to a shaky platform), correcting things that have failed (maintenance), addressing things that were built wrong (bug fixes) or fixing shoddy renovations (tech debt). Sounds EXACTLY like the majority of software development.
With less money to poison themselves with, then. Among those who don't know any better than to buy from homeopaths, that may make the difference.
They are always deadlines as long as the cycle is official. An informal status update can be done with the project management tool, a 1:1 meeting or a quick team meeting (in this order)
24 hours? Oceans of time! I had "Teach Yourself C++ in 10 minutes".

I had done some MSX-BASIC, but after we got a "real" PC I wanted to learn a "real" and modern language. This is what they had at the local bookshop.

The "10 minutes" is done by explaining what C++ is and then it declares "there, in the last 10 minutes I explained things and you now know what C++ is". Ehh...

I didn't understand a lot of it. Chapter 5 or so is templates. It's pretty thin, and just rushes past things and never takes the time to really explain anything. It may be somewhat suitable if you're experienced in other languages, but it's absolutely not suitable for beginners. Visual Studio also didn't help (at the time I thought you needed VS to program on Windows – it was 1999, we didn't have internet, and I was 14, so what did I know?)

Aside from being a border-line scam, these books are worse than useless and actively harmful. As a result of this book I gave up programming for years, thinking I just didn't have what it takes. Wasn't until years later that I discovered this "Linux" and then "FreeBSD" thing that I discovered you can "just" write programs with "just" a text editor, and that things like Perl and Python and C exist.

If you see one of these things at the bookshop you should steal it and throw it out. Haha, only serious.
Australia faces controversy: feral horse culling from 22,500 to 3,000 by 2027
awful to maintain and make changes

Paying people do maintain and change the codebase is the simplest thing that might work.

Charging customers enough to cover those expenses is probably a good idea.

Good luck.
My synopsis:

1. The Apple Podcast app has been updated to longer automatically download episodes of a show if the listener has stopped listening to the show.

2. This has resulted in the "download count" metric crashing for several high profile podcasts the publish frequently -- The Daily from NYTimes is mentioned.

3. This lowers advertising rates and is basically bad for the publishers of those podcasts -- the "download count" for some shows has fallen by 40%.

---

Now to me this seems like an obviously good move because podcast episodes can be long and can eat up a lot of space on a device -- especially if they are never played, meaning that they never have the "delete after being played" opportunity.

Also, advertisers obviously care about how many people hear their advertisements, not how many people download the podcast episode, so the fact that advertisers even have to consider the "download count" metric at all means they are operating with inferior information.

Even when I do play a podcast that I have downloaded, I often skip the advertisements because it is so easy to hit the fast-forward-30-seconds button a few times.

But I have been assuming that podcast apps collect information about whether or not a podcast episode is ever played, and also on what parts of the episode the user rewinds or skips, and so forth.

For instance, it would be valuable information to know that of the listeners who actually download and start playing and listening to a certain 2-hour-long podcast episode, 99.4% quit listening within the first ten minutes.
Learning to Use Appreciative Inquiry
What is Appreciative Inquiry? How does one shift from research that focuses on problems and negative details to the strengths-based approach of Appreciative Inquiry? What are the benefits and requirements of such an approach? And what is it about Appreciative Inquiry that fosters change?
Australia has entered the chat with the Gympie Gympie:

https://www.newsweek.com/world-most-dangerous-shrub-suicide-...
Naveen Singh is leading Fossify and these projects. If you admire open source and volunteer projects, and if you're able to donate or sponsor, here's a way: https://github.com/naveensingh
why is this even a story?
> I don't absolutely, fully buy into OpenBSD is "very secure". Some of its mitigations are good but many do feel a bit arbitrary.

Can you explain how "some mitigations feel arbitrary"? A specific example for us to ponder on?
Verizon to keep charging controversial fee despite $100M settlement
The note seems to have more than two lines? Have they decoded the other ones as well.
When you're in the aviation industry, you're not allowed to "minimize pilot training" and "make it cheaper" if it interferes with the safety of the airplane.
There are these things called Loras (Low Ranked adaptions) which do exactly this.

"A language model with billions of parameters may be LoRA fine-tuned with only several millions of parameters." -- Wikipedia
https://archive.ph/x5S7s
From the original forum post [0] announcing this improvement:

> But if you modify your application to start storing JSONB instead of text JSON, you might see a 3-times performance improvement, at least for the JSON-intensive operations. JSONB is also slightly smaller than text JSON in most cases (about 5% or 10% smaller) so you might also see a modest reduction in your database size if you use a lot of JSON.

I for one am excited about these improvements (specifically the disk use reduction) since we store a lot of JSON here at Notion Labs, and we’re increasing our use of SQLite.

[0]: https://sqlite.org/forum/forumpost/fa6f64e3dc1a5d97
This is precisely part of the job. Somehow your expectations are very different than mine.
Damn. I recognized your domain name... I absolutely love your games, and got so much playtime out of them. I wish I could help, but I'm in a similar boat today.
>rediscovered a decade's worth of collective knowledge

Unless one can guarantee this knowledge wasn't in the training data, it's not rediscovered, it's regurgitated.

Good example of the bias that exist with AI: when the output/performance can be interpreted in two different manners, I consistently find people unconsciously choosing the option painting the AI in a better light.

I don't think AI / deep learning is useless, but I do think it's overrated at the moment.
>Basically you are lying to yourself if you think you can run a datacenter cheaper and better than Amazon or Microsoft

what magical things do they have? that every single reasonably sized enterprise doesn't have? it should be extremly easy for a small enterprise to beat any of the main clouds* - they make crap ton of profit from you

*making an assumption that your needs are reasonably static and not MASSIVELY busting up and down your infrastructure
First they ignore you, then they make fun of you, then they fight you, then you can't match performance speeds on modern architectures and just troll people about fonts.
I mean, I just stopped using Facebook instead, I was an admin for my employer at the times Facebook app (used for login) so I did not want to risk it. It's Facebooks loss.
This submission of the GitHub repo got more popular, in case you want to follow the discussion there: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39003292
iirc, you can have a different base path, but you have to recompile every package locally to have the correct patched paths. I forget where I read about this.

Seems like an unavoidable consequence of how modern software is built
Ask HN: Is there anything like Mario Teaches Typing?
I've looked around a bit, there's lots of typing websites and a few typing games. But I can't find anything that feels appropriate for a total beginner, say 7 years old, and also fun.

There's basically two requirements here:

1) It doesn't assume you already know some typing

2) It looks like a game

I can find some things that satisfy one or the other but not both.

Epistory looks closest to me in terms of being a fun game. But I think it's too hard for someone that doesn't already know how to type a little, even on the easiest mode.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/398850/Epistory__Typing_Chronicles/

Most websites feel like they're for competitive typing or just getting faster a typing. TypingClub is the only one I've found that looks good for a total beginner, but it looks mostly very sterile, with games interspersed but not the main focus.

https://www.typingclub.com

I've got the kid playing Mario Teaches Typing in DOSBox, which is working out fine. It's just surprising I couldn't find anything modern that works better.