skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I spent 40 years as a programmer, but I always looked for ways to use creativity and imagination and never be a rote coder. Despite having success in my last job leading a small team building a strategically important piece of code (if it didn't work all the time, there would be 100,000 angry people every day, not to mention a whole cast of angry executives), I finally got tired of working so hard and decided to retire. You must find a new way or place to be a programmer if your job is not motivating (like starting your own company or trying something new) or finding another line of work. Reinventing yourself isn't easy and is much harder today, but you can do it if you want it enough.
The way I read that is that only 10% of the work is writing out the actual implementation that you're sticking with. How you get there isn't as important. Ie someone might want to take notes on paper and draw graphs while others might want to type things out. That's all still planning.
How is people living under bridges and living off begging and collecting bottles "solved homelessness"?
In professional settings the right people are usually the hardest to come by, and the most expensive part of the business. Recruiting is very resource intensive, some of your most expensive employees spend a lot of time figuring out ways to lure candidates in, discarding applications, running interviews and so on.

In software development it can take up to a year until someone has turned out to not be a good fit, because the systems are quite large and the first few months will in most cases be spent introducing the basics of them. That's a rather hefty investment for most companies, except the very large ones.

So as a manager, why would you bet on Racket? Unless you understand the peculiarities and power in macros (and eager to teach it over and over again) you won't, because the board will roast you over bringing in the risk that you can't find replacements when core developers inevitably move on.

If there was something unique you could only use if you had Racket developers it would pull in broader industry usage, but as far as I know no such thing exists.

As a single or few developer consulting business/dev boutique things change, you'd only have to convince customers and they like shiny things that solve their problems or make money, and if you and your comrades know Racket well you could very well create such shiny problem-solvers relatively fast. Then you'd only have to resist the attraction of better pay and someone else closing the sales once the business is up and running.
The problem is that regulation is popular. And the same people who want to regulate everything also complain about the price of everything going up. It's fair to say that the majority of people cannot/do not assess the consequences of what they are voting for, and this manifests in many ways, for example with misguided green regulation like EV subsidies, or the looming pension/healthcare crises. Politicians use their tools to redirect the externalities/damage back to the population, so politicians are not to be expected to solve the problems that they helped create. We need some kind of institutional 'politician watch' to save our democracies from self-sabotage
I don't know, the fact that a cow can play doesn't mean we shouldn't breed them for meat.
You are potentially talking about this one from March this year.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07126-4
> Foreign money is far more of a problem than foreign people.

Maybe in the UK, but in Canada we have the same problems (larger by the looks of it) and our government blocked foreign money with zero noticeable impact.

I think foreigners are a scapegoat for the cumulative impact of decades of bad government policy at all levels of government, including bad monetary policy.
So basically comes from a purveyor of state sponsored Urban trash?
My impression too is the housing crisis is only really in high demand places. Not only London either - nice villages can be equally expensive. However, there’s still plenty of safe places with jobs near by where houses are more affordable prices
Datacenters I've been in that were built with "no raised floors" and flooding in mind do have a "raised floor", but it just happens to be solid concrete. This is very much the same as a warehouse or factory floor. It's built several feet higher than the surrounding parking lot, so that everything is level with loading docks.

If you're talking in-building flooding, not much going on there other than the racks themselves keep the equipment off the floor. All power is ran from overhead. A lot of modern "rack groups" (OCS, TSCIF, etc) have water limited water protection in mind.
Some consolation if it can be done:

Rewrite the flagship app from the ground-up in a new framework. It's a little easier if most functionality is behind APIs. The requirements are already concrete: make it look and function the same.

Express the common business flows with a novel algebra (types). Make logic errors be type errors [1].

These pull requests may never get merged; the feature branch may age for years; at least you gave it an honest go.

[1] When people say, "but most business logic bugs aren't type errors," I just want to show them how to make bugs into type errors. -- Matt Parson, from Thinking in Types (2018) by Sandy Maguire.
This is part of the programming industry, but it's not the whole thing. I'm reminded of the story of a bunch of blind people all describing different parts of an elephant. You move your hand around a bit and it sort of all feels the same, but that doesn't mean you've touched the whole elephant! Elephants are big.

This part in particular stood out:

> thousands of lines of unmaintainable spaghetti code engineers were bullied into writing in weeks instead of months using arbitrary trendy technologies.

This is not my experience at all.

I have 2 part-time jobs writing Perl code, and at both of those jobs the people I encounter are thoughtful and intelligent and want to do a good job (including managers).

Nobody is bullied into anything. Nobody wants thousands of lines of new code. We have enough thousands of lines of old code that nobody understands :).

Your experience of the programming industry very much depends on what part of it you work in, and specifically who you work with. But I think if you want to "quit the rat race", Perl is a good choice, because everyone who wants to rush around chasing fashion trends left Perl behind a long time ago. Also, I'm told Perl developers are getting harder to find so salaries are going up.
Startup time! Has its own tradeoffs but you get to go compete with the system that is maddening. Imagine them trying to run a race against people who are actually trying? That's why startups are able to win against huge companies with seemingly unlimited resources. They use those resources to fight internally over who controls the resources.

Startups have their own perils of course. But you get to do work. Real actual work.
Is Mountain Duck (https://mountainduck.io) still viable for this sort of thing?

I use Dropbox, iCloud and GDrive but, it's inconsistent and a bit fractured. I've never looked into consolidation seriously.
From the website:

> JS Naked Day started because we were jealous of CSS Naked Day.[0]

[0]: https://css-naked-day.github.io/
Per the article, CSS naked day was the inspiration.

https://css-naked-day.github.io/
I would bet he meant this:

https://www.techtarget.com/whatis/definition/VIPER
> The web should work without JavaScript.

Says who? Perhaps popular platforms like twitter or instagram should support UX based on texting instead of requiring apps. Perhaps emails should be readable plaintext and without images. I could go on.

I love all of these ideas in theory; but in practice the ship seems to have sailed - and in a different direction.

I guess it's a mixture of primordial enshittification and old people reminiscing about good old days.
> if you aren’t moving the needle economically for the company, you’re a liability.

I would add, moving the needle in the short term. A business taking a long term view would care more about quality (reliability, security maintainability).
The software industry rapidly convergng on 3 languages: Go, Rust, and JavaScript
LLMs can be useful when used as a glorified version of printf and scanf.

I agree that classifying their mistakes as "hallucinations" is marketing masterstroke, but then again, marketing masterstrokes are hallucinations too.

In fact all human perception is merely glorified hallucination. Your brain is cleaning up the fuzzy upside-down noise your eyes are delivering to it, so much that that you can actually hallucinate "words" with meaning on the screen that you see, or that a flower or a person or a painting is "beautiful".

We have an extremely long way to go until LLM hallucinations are better than human hallucinations, and it's disingenuous to treat LLM hallucinations as a bug that can be fixed, instead of a fundamental core feature that's going to take a long time to improve to the human level, and then also admit that humans have a long way to go in evolutionary scales before our own perception isn't as hallucinatory and inaccurate as it is now.

It was only extremely recently in evolutionary scales that we invented science as a way to do that, and despite its problems and limitations and corruptions and detractors, it's worked out so well that it enabled us to invent LLMs, so at least we're moving in the right direction.

At least it's easier and faster for LLMs to evolve than humans, so they have a much better chance of hallucinating less a lot sooner than humans.
They clearly chose to not take advantage, that's the information I have to work off of in this

So is homelessness the problem, or the most visible symptom? My 'answer' is one final question: how is this not a mental health problem, among probably others? (Clerical, procedural, etc)

I'm rambling now, but we can throw stones at people or try to help. Perfect, better, enemies

Politics and such turn everything into an xy problem. The homeless that remain aren't the ones we'd see if nothing happens.

Hell, maybe they don't see a problem. That's not really even our place to say. Nobody wins in a society. That's the idea, in a way.

Edit: the simplest answer is that every system has bad-faith participation. The ones who want a home can get one, it's 'solved', except the fringe remains... the holdouts

There's a lot of room for study here. It isn't logical, and yet. Perhaps we're "solving" the wrong thing.
What do you think of these solutions;

1 - Create a independent body for housing growth "The house bank of England" and thier responsibility is to ensure 0% YOY house price growth by increasing supply to the point prices no longer rise, but no further. No negative equity created but also no above inflation price rises for a decade or two. This is not particularly different than when they do QE (for the middle class/wealthy who are often savers).

2 - growth areas: I'm thinking south London, Cambridge, Oxford, Leeds, maybe Manchester. Government builds houses and commits to buy any house for the value of it on $scheme_announcement_date for houses brought before that date. Scheme will last 25 years. Increasing the density of a city should actually draw house prices up in the long run as it will bring better transport links, more economic activity with greater productivity/efficiency.
A part of the problem is, no user ever look at codebases. Unlike you da a PCB, make an electrical machine, build a bridge, people see the result. In software people see the UI. Also because copying is free, in PCB for ex. every jumper wire cost you, in software they are for free. So why fixing things truely.
Agreed. I get that there has to be a trade off between size and coverage, but if it's a map it should really have the option - at least - for the person implement it to choose density. Personally, I'd want every island to be at least shown as a blob.
I made an open source Windows app to rewind and search everything on screen
The label is a blob.
And this is general approach, nothing malevolent against IT geeks like some less experienced try to project themselves. They want plumbers also just to keep things running and implement requirements, not have academic discussions about fine art of optimized water flow.

Companies are there to make money for the owners and thats it, not on some altruistic missions.

I think OP could be better served in academia as long as he keeps greed for money at bay, which some manage better than others over time.
This feels like the author simply went for the entirely wrong jobs. It sounds like what he wants is to make decisions, and those you can only make in small teams, small companies, and in lead positions. Going for any sort of FAANG or corporate job is the opposite of this - and that is not specific to programming jobs in any way. Nobody is 'free to just improve the world' in a large group.
Yeah, maybe they don't care about abstraction and beautiful code, but they suddenly start caring when technical debt caused by absence of these things starts to hit, but they are too often unable to see that the two are related.

In my personal project I spend a huge amount of time tidying things up, abstracting, cleaning, commenting and that has really started to pay off as the project grew. 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.

> if you aren’t moving the needle economically for the company, you’re a liability

yup
Its worse than that. I've seen some people conflating the term "AI" with "LLM".
ethicalads.io seems totally fine to me. I think there was another one similar to it. Those are unblocked for me.
It's entirely possible that certain groups benefitted from a policy that was awful for society at large. If it benefitted absolutely no one, it wouldn't have existed in the first place.
SEALOOK EP. 102 [video]
I do the same, iterate. When I am happy with the code I imagine I've probably rewritten it roughly three times.

Now I could have spent that time "whiteboarding" and it's possible I would have come close to the same solution. But whiteboarding in my mind is still guessing, anticipating - coding is of course real.

I think that as you gain experience as a programmer you are able to intuit the right way to begin to code a problem, the iterating is still there but more incremental.
I rember many years ago trying to run netcat [1] on Windows for some tests. AV: Blocked as "hacking tool".

I asked a friend who happened to have Visual Studio installed to build it for me from source. AV: No problemo!

[1] https://nmap.org/ncat/
> Removing right to buy, and laws on landlords tax benefits that have changed IMO have already changed the idea that being a landlord provides good ROI, in the main. I had a second property (my previous home) and having to pay 42% income tax on the rent, maintenance, any rent issues and then any potential capital gains certainly doesn't sound appetising vs selling and having cash.

It should have an effect, but has not had that much yet. There is a lag so maybe we will see it some time soon. However, we have also had rent increases and falls in house prices in real terms so that might offset it.
Also happens in a lot of seemingly-boring midsize companies (not just startups)
You realise you actually sound like a cultist with that first line? Like you're accusing me of being a heathen based on some insane subjective interpretation of what I think. I said the wrong words in your mind and now I'm basically a satanist. You literally sound like that. Notice how I just spoke about facts and you have decided to make this about your assumptions about my character.

I have absolutely no problems with white people. I'm literally half white. All my favourite family members who are literally my flesh and blood are white. Most of my friends are white. I grew up in a 99% white community. I do not think white people are the enemy and I do not think the majority of them hold any racist views. I do not hold white people collectively accountable for things their ancestors did centuries ago or assume anything bad about them based on this. I stated facts about history I was not blaming any race in modern times for the existence of these facts. They are just true, but they are of the past. I think white and black people should work together as the one and only race - the human race - to make the world better.

What is your argument against me now? Can you make one without resorting to gross assumptions of me being an evil white-people-hating black power SJW demonrat?

I made it very clear that I do not believe that race is real. So why would I view white people as some sort of inherently morally tarred enemy?

Again, I'm literally more ethnically white more than I am anything else.
I like having sex but don't like being a prostitute. Whatever you do if you don't do on your own terms, you can be miserable.
> I have looked into Syncthing and I found that their E2E setup is too daunting.

Are you referring to untrusted devices? That is different than e2e encryption. Synching is e2e encrypted by default. Synching relays are only used when a direct connection with a peer is not possible. When a relay is used the data is encrypted. The relay cannot read it.

https://docs.syncthing.net/users/relaying.html#security
OS/2 ran circles around Windows NT. It's API was one of the best defined that I had worked with. Certainly better than anything for Windows. I worked for an IBM subsidiary in the early 90s. IBM was just never sufficiently committed to OS/2 IMO. Hence it ultimately went away. But programming on Warp was a great experience. And for a while at least, OS/2 was very well established in the banking industry.
perhaps you could open source the test suite as a standalone thing so that other s3 compatible apis can prove they match the supabase standard
So funny!! Hahaha! :)
I did read the actual letter. Idk if you read my actual comment.

Him stating "Blacks are more stupid than whites", and following it up with "I like that sentence and I think it is true", feels unnecessarily offensive, and he doesn't really address that in his apology at all.

Saying hurtful things and then trying to intellectualise why they were hurtful, with an apology letter clearly aimed at your academic peers rather than those who your words would have hurt, is not about censorship. It's about not being a dick.
Fear not, no penguins were harmed in the making of this film.
For those who might be worried to click: the penguin chicks are fledging and going off to swim for the first time; they are not jumping to their doom.
There's a video on YouTube of the Smithsons - a couple who built some landmark Brutalist projects in the UK.

They're clearly either mentally unstable, or on drugs, or both.

They made a name for themselves by designing a modernist not-quite-brutalist-yet school - plenty of concrete, glass and rectangles, which turned it into a greenhouse in summer, a fridge in winter, and an echo chamber for shrieking kids all year round.

Some architects are very strange people, far more interested in building huge sculptures that happen to have rooms in them than creating inspiring usable spaces.
Manhattan might have more mentally ill homeless people than before but as someone who grew up in Brooklyn and Queens things are way safer than they used to be, mostly thanks to gentrification (mostly due to Bloomberg rezoning the Brooklyn / Queens waterfronts) and not any of the recent mayors.
Don't use it if you don't want it. Your body your choice. Just don't choose for me.

This goes for all the other drugs to.
The order goes from simpler to more complex data flow analysis frameworks. These frameworks allow you to encode dataflow problems and solve them.

* Kam, John B., and Jeffrey D. Ullman. "Monotone data flow analysis frameworks." Acta informatica 7.3 (1977): 305-317.
* Reps, Thomas, Susan Horwitz, and Mooly Sagiv. "Precise interprocedural dataflow analysis via graph reachability." Proceedings of the 22nd ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT symposium on Principles of programming languages. 1995.
* Sagiv, Mooly, Thomas Reps, and Susan Horwitz. "Precise interprocedural dataflow analysis with applications to constant propagation." TAPSOFT'95: Theory and Practice of Software Development: 6th International Joint Conference CAAP/FASE Aarhus, Denmark, May 22–26, 1995 Proceedings 20. Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 1995.
* Reps, Thomas, et al. "Weighted pushdown systems and their application to interprocedural dataflow analysis." Science of Computer Programming 58.1-2 (2005): 206-263.
* Späth, Johannes, Karim Ali, and Eric Bodden. "Context-, flow-, and field-sensitive data-flow analysis using synchronized pushdown systems." Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages 3.POPL (2019): 1-29.

Other areas that may be interesting to look at:

* Points-to Analysis
* Abstract Interpretation
* On demand dataflow analyses
Except 100% Free Markets lead to Monopolies. Then the argument is, those big companies are 'Free' to crush all competition and innovation.

But to prevent monopolies, you would need regulation, something to prevent them from forming, and then that is then 'Not-Free'. How dare you prevent me from having a monopoly.

It's a conundrum, if there is no oversight, regulation, then you are totally free to prevent other from having freedoms. It's just who do you want in control.
How did you do this transition? How did you feel about your decision before your game was featured? I've been thinking about this path, but I feel too hesitant to jump.
> 90% of the time when I read descriptions it is excruciatingly obvious to me that whatever code the chosen candidates will end up writing at this job will be completely removed from any important problem not only humanity, but even any individual human has ever had

> ...

> So far I haven’t had the chance to actually meet someone who would share these values in any significant sense and would want to do this kind of engineering work

There are countless such places!

There are NGOs that desperately need good engineers to build software that's essential to helping people. There are labs that do research on various disorders, or on hard engineering problems that need desperately software engineers.

You're totally looking in the wrong places.
Ostensibly that's true, but in the long term we're all dead anyway.

So the company's shareholders might only want the term to be just long enough to cash out.
I've been using sed, awk, and friends for I find myself reaching for 30+ years, refer to jq documentation 90% of the time I use it (vs. <<10% when using traditional UNIX tools), and still appreciate JSON output as an option.

Incidentally, PowerShell has nice built-in facilities for working with JSON:

/Users/jtm> (
>> diskutil list -plist `
>> | plutil -convert json -o - - `
>> | ConvertFrom-Json
>> ).AllDisksAndPartitions.APFSVolumes `
>> | where MountPoint `
>> | select `
>> VolumeName,`
>> @{L='Size';E={$_.Size/1GB}},`
>> @{L='Free';E={($_.Size - $_.CapacityInUse)/1GB}} `
>> | where {
>> $_.Free / $_.Size -lt 0.10
>> } `
>> | sort VolumeName `
>> | ConvertTo-Json
[
{
"VolumeName": "Gríðarvölr",
"Size": 1862.8213348388672,
"Free": 150.1973648071289
},
{
"VolumeName": "Mjölnir",
"Size": 1862.6963348388672,
"Free": 92.34595108032227
}
]
>corporate world

That was my take, and an unwillingness to compromise on their principles.

Sometimes the compromise may be less money but a more fulfilling role.
Can you make me some paperclips?
Yeah that's why today Cyberpunk is a very different game.
Weren't the castles on sale at a bargain price? It seems like that was one of those inflammatory stories 'look they are buying castles', but then you look closer and they were cheaper than office space would be.
The difference between hipsters and hobos is that a hobo spends two hours of pushing broom for their four-bit room.