skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> If I'd let it deteriorate into a random bowl of software stew, I have come to a dead end by now, eternally firefighting instead of progressing.

It's real. It's what I'm doing at work now.

Every few months we start a new big project. Sometimes they're business-driven (end users can now have many X instead of one X), sometimes they're compliance-driven (we now need to block users who associate with users in blocked countries), sometimes they're tech-debt-driven (migrate from self-managed VMs into a dedicated provider).

We keep finding missing parts we overlooked. Sometimes it's from us having rushed it, other times it's from consultants getting fired while they're working on it, and others struggling to continue the vision in the right direction. Sometimes it's bad tooling - our new managed Kafka host has a mirror-maker tool that doesn't quite mirror properly, or intellij/gradle will flag that a class is missing, but not why (i.e. which dependency is missing!).
It depends on how much you need to love or are shaped by a job. 'Live to work' or 'work to live'.
Well how would they filter out emojis? My assumption is, that they're doing it by exluding Unicode code points for all emojis.
ISWYM. I operate 95% - 98% without so, close. Am very happy with it.
Startup offers toilets and coffee for delivery workers in exchange for data
interesting thanks!

Thats cool!

I haven't even heard of The playdate before.
Once as a kid I caught a fly by its leg, it panicked.
Welcomments.io: Git-based static comments for static websites
> DEADBEEF and B00B

0xDEADBEEF is even more evocative. OxB00B is, well, problematic.
Welcome to post-capitalism. We’re no longer in the realm of free markets for goods and services. We now make up new markets and deal in abstract commodities such as attention and relationships. The need we are building things for is capital: profits over people.

It’s not all bad though. “The industry,” is a big place. There are companies out there that might share a good number of your values.

Unless you’re in a certain privileged position in this world you may have to compromise on a few principles here and there on your journey.
Yep, with seniority programming gradually goes from problem solving to product communication and solution proposition
Wouldn’t you think this would mean government-made code would be of higher quality (in theory, and ignoring when govt code is made by private contractors)? It seems to be the opposite
Yeah. It's extremely rare to be able to do exactly and only what you want to do and be able to make money from it. Even the big YouTube celebrities face pressure to make the videos their audience wants to watch. When they go off the rails the views take a nosedive.
I’ve had the opportunity to work with lots of mechanical engineering corps to date, and I can confidently tell you: Even if they had some platonic ideal, they would never be able to follow through. The mediocrity of their software development practices is… profound. On all levels of the hierarchy. Sure they care about the ideal of sustainable software development, but they just can’t do it.

On the other hand, my employer advertises clean code as a service, and this attracts the kind of developers you describe.
Off topic, but Douglas Self is also the author of several remarkably good audio electronics books. For example, http://www.douglas-self.com/ampins/books/ssad3.htm .
Huh, my company pushed the Agile/scrum/retrospective thing at the same time as talking about "fit for purpose" teams that would be formed based on need/skills, not the old structure (this team works on this only). Since specific teams were now gone, less need for managers.

The idea was agile/scrum/retros was a way to manage the "fluidity".
> first try to make it work to spec

In my professional experience, the only spec you get is a wishlist, never quantified, always vague. Half the work is figuring out what the customer wants.

The only metric that anyone cares about is speed. You need to go fast, but to where? There is no consensus.
It's not just the corporate world, it's capitalism in general.

I could point out a million people who have made rhyming criticisms of this type before programming even existed. Until those criticisms are met with widespread solid agreement instead of outright hostility or even a resigned "well, it's better than all the alternatives" then nothing will change.

Ive lost count of the number of times Ive seen programmers complain bitterly about e.g. alienation, forever oblivious to the fact that they are rehashing Marx. This post is no exception. When push comes to shove though, 0 of these people would actually dare to call themselves a Marxist.
The problem is that we can't just wave a magic wand and increase supply instantly, or even with a year, or perhaps 5 years (lack of trades, materials, and so on), but we could, at the stroke of a pen, flatten demand right now.

The fact is that the UK is creaking at the seams and the elephant in the room is too many people. Yet, for the NHS it's 'Tory underinvestment' (despite never having more money, and the highest ever staffing levels), and for all the potholes it is again... Tory underinvestment, despite vastly more traffic and no new roads. Similarly with pretty much everything else. Demand is people using the NHS. Demand is people using the roads. And yet somehow we've not raised silly amounts of extra tax from the extra people to pay for any of the extra stuff.

But it's always fashionable to blame the Tories (as they're mostly in power), rather than apply a bit more critical thought to the problem. Next 5 years at least, will be Labour, but it will still be the Tories' fault. And I'll place a small wager than net immigration to the UK will still be 200k per annum, so another 1mm people, but that will be ignored in favour of 'Tory underinvestment'. Every government casts a shadow on the next one, some shadows are longer than others. This one started in 1990, and got worse in 1997.

> honestly considers all the different factors that contribute to the housing crisis

It's not really a 'crisis', it's just, well, business as usual. I remember the same topic covered in the late 80s and early 90s. 'We're not building enough', 'there's a housing crisis'.

Sadly the UK housing market is so entwined in the economy, it will be decades for a correction to happen. Homeowners won't sell below purchase price. House builders won't sell without making a profit. Lack of house sales paralyses the economy. No labour mobility, loss of stamp duty and so on.

We cannot force prices down without causing problems in the economy - tradesmen, solicitors, estate agents, investors, and so on. There needs to be a multi-decade plan from 'the Government' to somehow reduce house prices. But that seems to be well above the level of ability of our politicians and political system.
I feel this sort of mentality is exactly how you turn into Boeing.

Wings staying attached to the plane in air isn't pumping up the KPIs, fire everyone who wastes time on such irrelevant concerns!
This post and the Hydra paper reminds me a lot of Ruler and Enumo.

* Nandi, Chandrakana, et al. "Rewrite rule inference using equality saturation." Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages 5.OOPSLA (2021): 1-28.
* Pal, Anjali, et al. "Equality Saturation Theory Exploration à la Carte." Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages 7.OOPSLA2 (2023): 1034-1062.

I will need to read more about both of these techniques along with Synthesizing Abstract Transformers.

Thanks for sharing! Really exciting stuff!
This tug of war between individual satisfaction and monetization exists in all industries and not just SW engineering. There are very few areas where there is an overlap between solving problems benefits all of humanity while being able to monetize it for a sustainable business(finding a cure for cancer for ex). It's not the fault of any industry or economy etc, it's just a mismatch of expectations vs reality.
From what they wrote, "small startups" are part of that "corporate world."

From my experience, the cultural differences between large corporations, and smaller startups, is night and day.

Often, neither one is functional; but they are dysfunctional, in different ways.

For myself, I was never happy until I was able to helm my own ship. A lot of folks think that this means "hobby programmer," but I don't actually fit that template.
Why? in the short term they will say "expensive", "low ROI", without analysing the long term gains when the bridge does not collapse, and those happy customers attract new customers to our company, to run away from those companies that have done such kind of ROI analysis in an attempt to justify their lack of common sense.
Total rubbish, building regs are if anything not strict enough (see flammable cladding, new build house quality)

The restriction is planning permission e.g where are developers allowed to build housing. To a lesser extent the large house builder oligopoly is not great either but fixing the former will probably sort that out.
Check out Datasette by Simon Willison:
https://docs.datasette.io/en/stable/index.html
Shameless plug, but I just recently built my own little simple MTA app because I wanted to play around with Live Activities in Swift [0] to be able to display the next upcoming train on the lock screen of my phone: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/mta-tracker/id6477849271?platf...

(There are some annoying technical kinks with this that I'm still trying to iron out, but maybe someone will find it useful in the meantime!)

[0] https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline...
> Apparently folks in the USSR once wanted to find aliens because they assumed that, as aliens must be very smart, they’d be communists.

On the other hand, the conceit of Pandora's Planet (1973) was that the aliens were technologically advanced, but somewhat earnest and honest and dim*, so they encounter earth and get steamrollered by our advertising, conmen, and fads.

Fast forwarding half a century, I wonder if a Federation of Planets counterpart would have the memetic antibodies to resist assimilation via gamification dark patterns?

* this now seems less plausible to me than it did at the time; I'm guessing a large driver for developing (energy-intensive!) intelligence is spending much of your time around species that indicate one action but intend a different one.
There are simply opinions that are not worth the time to summarize or compare. I am not going to give my attention to a journalist who takes a serious look at holocaust denial conspiracies and tries to write about "both sides" of the equation in a neutral way.
"remember that historically the most groundbreaking achievements in early computing have happened in the service of the greater good. This is what I really want to do: I want every how - from the programming language and paradigm, architecture, down to every line of code and piece of syntax - to be informed by the why of the system that is being built. And I want that why to be a reflection of a genuine existing need, not some bullshit business metric which pretty much exists for its own sake."

That's a pretty achievable goal, work in the defense industry and the public sector. Programmers are in high demand, the economic incentives align with building things correctly and don't consist of shipping AI powered coffee machines in the next four weeks and the technical work is usually complex and interesting.
If quick and dirty gets you 10 shots, while slow and beautiful gets you 1, I’d choose quick & dirty any day.
I don't think it's "corporate world", but just capitalism. Non-corporate companies often have thinner margins than corporations and thus skimp on "extras" such as quality, craftsmanship etc. even more.
Corporate? I think ultimately we’re talking about any business here. And a business doesn’t exist to facilitate engineers to go back and forth on a PR for a week, or to fantasise about abstractions all day.

The entire problem is the vast majority of engineers have an inability to recognise the business function of their output. They live in their own worlds with tunnel vision on minutia. I can’t pin point when this happened but engineering is a complete circus in most companies.

The horrifying thing is there is buy in at senior management, like the engineers have convinced everyone that it should take weeks to deliver some trivial feature, because God forbid they don’t deliver it by using every dogmatic and koolaid driven process they’ve picked up from others over the years.

You work for a business that’s trying to make money, not a software engineering sandbox charity. Of course there needs to be some balance, but boy is it skewed one way for most right now.
> This is what I really want to do ...

This is an incredibly selfish and childish demand. Except of doing the really hard work of finding and CREATING meaning in your everyday life by understanding the problems of other people you want to re-enact with the benefit of hindsight the people that did this successfully in the past. Most people in your corporate job actually are making the same mistake as you, maybe it is time you wise up and call them out on it. Before you can do this at least admit to yourself that you don’t know what to do next either.
Privacy and lack of digitization is big in Germany. There no central vaccination database or similar. You can have an "Impfpass" (vaccination pass) which is a piece of paper with stamps and signatures for your vaccinations. But no one would bat an eye if you "lost" it.
3DO History: Trip Hawkins' Big Bet on the Model
Basically, lockdown project.

I made the decision in early 2020, shortly the first C-19 lockdown happened in the United Kingdom. I had extra time every day given that my usual routines, childcare, etc were disrupted. And I had a Playdate developer preview unit. I switched from web and app development to purely games. I'd previously made games but only occasionally, as a hobby. Though I do live and breathe classic video games.

During lockdown I created many prototypes and a couple of them showed enough promise to become full games. That was the point I went all-in and I haven't looked back. It took time for the device to launch, but again largely coinciding with C-19 restrictions. Through itch and Playdate's Catalog store I make enough money for my modest way of life, so I'm happy. Life gets in the way occasionally, but I keep pushing forward.

The accolade was a complete surprise and very encouraging.

I wrote a bit about my past year https://blog.gingerbeardman.com/2024/03/07/a-year-in-the-lif...
Before Free Solo (Full Episode) – Edge of the Unknown with Jimmy Chin [video]
Counterpoint: The MVP is usually what ends up in production. If your code is a heap of garbage but chocolate-coated on the outside, you're gonna impress management and they'll want to push it live asap. Then the issues start exploding.
Brutalism is the new gothic.
Do you ask that question to bash me for having an old, unsupported OSes open to the world?

Then address this to the owners of those machines. And get a load of cash ready to give it to them, so they could migrate to somehitng newer.
This might be conceptually easy to grasp, but it does sound hard to implement.
How would you crawl the web in the first place if there was no way to recognize a link in the HTML?
We were for a time a small company, and we broke off to become an even smaller company. I had a pretty big (perhaps oversized) say in the way things worked, UI, UX, architecture, and had the power to affect and stop decisions I thought would be bad for the users, etc. Working with our designer was a collaborative process.

We got bought out by a much bigger company a number of years ago. The pay is better, but the amount of say I have has slipped away basically to almost nothing.

We just get told what to build and how it should work and look by people with no actual connection to the product. People who frankly have barely used it and just got assigned to design a new feature, and have very little idea how it fits into the bigger picture.

I feel like now I'm only here for my ability to code and not my mind more generally and it's frankly kind of soul crushing.

I've considered leaving, but I'm getting old and a well paying job is a trap, doubly so when you now have kids.
In the US housing supply did keep pace with demand until about 2006. Witness the reversion of prices to historical norms (briefly) after the housing crash. So the response of home builders to interest rates is mixed.

The problem here at least is that many homebuilders went bankrupt after the housing crash and the supply of skills and willingness to build homes decreased for a generation.
Indeed. That's before you've even gotten to places like Manchester, Edinburgh and the like.

Instinctively it feels like about 2/3rds of people live in "unaffordable to buy" areas. Worse it's probably the best paid 2/3rds of the country.
> He was really pissed that our company does not give out admin access to developers

I’d be annoyed too (I often work on Windows and services); fortunately it is possible to grant people local admin access scope to their own machines and treat their OS install as fungible cattle (e.g. Boot-from-VHD derived from a common image with preinstalled software, so if anything goes wrong they can be back-to-normal in under 60 seconds; and give people (non-admin) access to VDI for reliable access to Office/Email/SharePoint, especially if devs use Linux as a daily-driver but the rest of your org runs Windows).

At the very least, people can just install a VM with admin rights in there - and what’s the difference between that and a physical machine?
> The investigators found that pairs of twins who had parents with higher levels of education and higher family incomes have similar results to each other, regardless of whether they were identical or fraternal. These observations suggested that familial environment was more likely to influence metacognitive abilities than genetics.

Do they? Couldn't this alternatively show that metacognitive abilities are more broadly heritable? I would've thought that a twin study where identical twins were raised in different environments would be far more instructive?

What am I missing here?
Not all developers are equal. Government work pays a third or less what private industry pays. You’re never going to get extreme competence from a government software employee.
Look into online snail mail services - you can write mail on a web UI and they'll print and post it for you. This is a good solution to deal with bureaucracy with less effort while maintaining a proper paper trail.

You can even couple it with an LLM to parse & write the bullshit on your behalf.

A good UK one is https://www.pc2paper.co.uk/.
Given this video is taken by a drone, and drones are very noisy, are the splashing sounds and sounds of penguins chirping added later?
What’s there to get? There are no alleys in NYC for garbage trucks to use. There is no underground garbage collection system. There is too much trash to install permanent garbage bins on the sidewalk because these bins would be a huge permanent eye sore. You could potentially have each building use large plastic garbage bins, but then you will need a lot of bins for the same amount of trash, which would be an eye sore and a barrier to walking.
Right, I always thought this is what TDD is used for, very often I design my code in tests and let it kind of guide my implementation.

I kind of imagine what the end result should be in my head (given value A and B, these rows should be X and Y), then write the tests in what I _think_ would be a good api for my system and go from there.

The end result is that my code is testable by default and I get to go through multiple cycles on Red -> Green -> Refactor until I end up being happy with.

Does anyone else work like this?
Actually there is special admin account, but you have to enter credentials manually after you click "use admin access" or whatever it is called in windows.

He wanted 100% admin account all the time.

If you complain 100 ppl meeting that it is annoying to install Spotify and you fail most obvious phishing test then I would not give him that local admin access.
There are many reasons. First a manager is not a peer but brings in a sense of authority into the mix so the discussions will not be honest. Manager's inputs have a sense of finality and people will hesitate to comment or override them even when they are questionable.

There are human elements too. Even if someone has honest inputs, any (monetary or otherwise) rewards or lack of them will be attributed to those inputs (or lack of them).
Overall, it just encourages bad behaviours among the team and invites trouble.

These should not happen in an ideal world but as we are dealing with people things will be far from ideal.
Actually, yes. I recall that the high school textbook and lecture did talk about mitochondria having its own DNA and that mitochondria traced the maternal tree. Although those are somewhat interesting, its origin as a separate lifeform is WAY more interesting.
Thanks yes, your maths is better, 20% on top.

Having to save for 5 years doesn't seem unrealistic for people who don't have the bank of mum and dad. Totally doable - though below average house price in any area, preferably somewhere more affordable.

There are a lot of tax instruments available today that never existed a generation ago.
Given the cumulative energy cost to make and run you, AGI chatbot, and the importance of diversity of life on earth for healthy human existence, will you justify your existence, please?
I built something similar last year if you're interested! https://www.bktransit.com/
> add a blank overlay until JS and/or cookies are enabled

On many sites Firefox "Reader mode" can work around this.
Perhaps indeed we are missing a lot of more complex communications. We will maybe learn more with LLMs, we'll see.

Related to deception or intent - those are still at best second order reactions to internal/external stimuli. The fact remains that dogs or even chimps don't, for example, tell stories to their friends about what a fun ball they saw yesterday or how sad they've been last week.
It's not necessarily leading to the overgrowth. Nitrogen fixation is a really expensive process. It means you will need to spend a lot of energy on this process. The nature is a self balanced eco system. Species need to have certain amount of growth speed to keep itself competitive. A species that growth much slower but not require extra supplement is not necessary going to win the original one if it just get wipe out of the ecosystem.
Great product. Would be awesome if you could generate a smaller version depending on which part of the world you are biased towards.
Its a simple answer I give professional drivers in the diesel engine shop I work at.

Youre going too fast.

Mashing different departments together to do things quicker, faster turnarounds at the gates, playing with flight times to game service hours...it all comes back to you in the worst way.

I wouldn't be surprised in the least if Reagans sacking the air controllers union isnt still haunting this country to this day. Those were professionals, and you decided the rates interfered with profits, so now you get a lot more near misses from a much more exhausted crew.
> the bottom line is if you aren’t moving the needle economically for the company, you’re a liability.

That's fine. The issue comes when you fail to explain how stuff like keeping recent versions of your software or taking some time to fix (at least some of) the bugs moves the needle to people that would never fly a plane that doesn't receive maintenance.

The issue, in economic terms, is that a significant share of our industry's sponsors are the kind of clients that make a market for lemons.