skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Should I continue working as a software engineer?
Hello everyone,

It's been almost a year since I left my job. It wasn't a rash decision, but it was one that has made things difficult for me since then, and I accept that. I am someone who loves logic, the 'magical' aspect of coding, and finding and implementing solutions to help others achieve their goals. However, finding a new job has been a real challenge for me, even though I believe I am capable of meeting the demands of the companies I apply to.

I think there are two reasons why I haven't succeeded: First, the intense competition from other candidates. Second, I haven't truly put in the effort during interviews. I hate the feeling of being interviewed, and as a result, I sometimes respond poorly, even to questions on topics I've thoroughly studied. I wish there were a company that would give me the opportunity to prove my abilities during a probation period, but of course, no company operates that way.

I'm starting to think that my career as a software engineer might be coming to an end. If you have any advice for me, I would greatly appreciate it.
Low-cost 16 EEG channels cap (hat) for PiEEG
Other than the airport, there doesn’t seem to be any benefit. If I still need to carry my ID card this is not really more convenient.
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// you're blaming the company //

Hmmm....trying to figure out why you think I'm blaming the company. I'm not really--the company is not your friend, and it's not your family, nor should it be.

// I really don't know what more you're asking for? //

I'm asking you and everybody who is reading this not to confuse the company with your family and friends. No matter how much time you take away from your friends and family and give to the company, the company will--and should!--fire you as soon as they can find a cheaper way to do your job. It absolutely does not care if you die at your desk and alone. Nor should it.
>Engineers have a low opinion of advertising—and of people whose job it is to create advertising

Yep. I have a low opinion of anyone who tries to manipulate others using deceit and trickery. Marketers just happen to have made a career out of it.

The irony here is that this 'article' is just an ad for this guy's consulting services.
Let me disclaim that this is a work in progress and that I am not a doctor.

Part of it was that I had a breakdown. That was unpleasant. But ultimately it was part of the process. (Not to say this is necessarily true of everyone!) This forced me to quit my job. I have a one track mind, so I couldn't really do the work on myself I needed while I was working. I hope this isn't necessary for you or anyone else though.

When I was breaking down, I lashed out at the people in my life. I made things very hard for them. But they forgave me and supported me. Sometimes I have a mad instinct to smash everything and start over. But they didn't let me push them away.

Reading the Zhuangzi helped me to conceptualize why I allowed myself to be burned out and didn't do anything about it until I was a wreck. In particular, there's a refrain about people who are useful being ground down by being put to use. I realized that I invested my identity in being useful to others, and my team especially, because I didn't respect myself enough to be useless. I didn't value myself outside of being valuable to others. That attitude will inevitably burn you out.

Studying Zen and Taoism and meditating has helped a lot. Partly it's just a very different perspective from what I'm normally exposed to, so it broadens my horizons and helps me take things less seriously. The Zen notion of "practicing" with a problem is a perspective I find really valuable.

I started therapy and I started taking an antidepressant. This was a mixed bag, my therapist ended up moving away and I think I need to change my medication, but I think it was an important step. Something I struggled with was that I didn't understand the mechanism of action behind therapy and I didn't really see any benefit in any particular session. But I've also had to accept that I just don't understand what I need in my life, I think I do but I'm constantly proven wrong, so not being able to see why something is helping doesn't actually mean it isn't.

Similarly, my medication doesn't seem to do anything. But there have been a few times I've had a really hard day, and then when I'm taking my meds in the evening, I realize I had forgotten yesterday. I also think the lows haven't been as low.

About a year and a half after my breakdown, I had a profound spiritual experience I'm not entirely comfortable discussing, you might call it a breakthrough. None of these things caused it. But I think they were all preconditions. I'm not "fixed," and in the intervening time I've had depressive episodes and panic attacks on occasion. But I was "fixed" for ten glorious days, and it proved to me that, regardless of whether such a thing can be permanent, it is possible.
If Twitter doesn't want to follow the laws of Brazil, then they need to stop providing access to Brazil.

Merely having no office in some country not sufficient, for the same reason it wasn't sufficient for preventing New Zealand based Kim Dotcom to be prosecuted (and his Hong Kong-based Mega Upload domain to be seized) by the USA.

Or how X sued Media Matters in Texas before X moved there and despite Media Matters not being based there: https://www.threads.net/@sherrilynifill/post/Cz5Im7VONzd

Or all the defamation suits against US citizens filed in the UK on the grounds that being published on the internet counted as if it was published in the UK, forcing the US (Federal and State) to pass laws preventing payment of penalties in such cases: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libel_tourism

Edit:

Just found an interesting claim, thought I cannot verify it myself:

"Notably, Brazilian law necessitates all internet businesses to have a legal representative in the country who is authorised to receive judicial orders and respond legally." - https://www.opindia.com/2024/08/moraes-is-the-dictator-of-br...

and

"Under Brazilian law, social networks must have a representative to receive and consider government takedown notices about political misinformation. X has no such person after closing down its Brazil office. Moraes gave the X platform 24 hours to name a new legal representative or face a nationwide suspension." - https://www.siliconrepublic.com/business/x-brazil-suspension...
Since Chrome dominates the browser market, they just pay lip service to the web standards process.

They will have this as proposal, its status will be "not on any standards track", it will be shipped in Chrome, and enabled by default.
I don't mean TSA or CBP literally. I am aware of the programs you are talking about. I'm talking about unofficial/soft-power policy that adds additional barriers pre-boarding for flights that fly into the US. You won't see this in the west/EU. I suspect it's more widespread in the rest of the world.
I guess the way I'm using my computer is also wrong now...

$ lsof / | wc -l
8533
Rust does reserve the exact `macro` keyword for the eventual replacement of `macro_rules!` [1] [2]. But it is unlikely to be used in the invocation syntax because that will be too verbose.

[1] https://doc.rust-lang.org/reference/keywords.html

[2] https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/39412
So abstraction is still a point, but Rust cares about memory layout as well.
Well she likely doesn't know that.

However, you can be severely harmed by it. So I'd suspect that's a major concern.
Ah didn't realise my 'Demoscene Forever' playlist is public[0]! Apologies it's only semi-ordered and all about my own interests of course but maybe fun to follow if you like the flavour? :)

[0] https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLlerVIXy18-dSHxk4Gr_NeeWy...
> And the clumsy Arc<Mutex<Something<TheOtherThing>>> makes users feel bad about using runtime cost paid types

Yeah, this would look worse than any of the "complicated syntax" examples in the blog post.

A language should be designed so that the typical case is the easiest to read and write. Syntax for the most common abstractions. Rust forces you to be explicit if you want to do an Arc<Mutex<Box>>>, but lets you inherit lifetimes almost seamlessly. That means it's not idiomatic to do the first, and it is to do the second.

Languages with a lot of historical baggage don't follow this pattern: if you want to write idiomatic modern C++ it's going to be uglier and more verbose than you see in K&R. But in Rust's case it's clear what the designers encourage you to do.
As an engineer thinking about products that really got me. This seems a little bit outdated, but it is largely correct. If you sell a thing that I know (e.g. let's say a new Operational Amplifier or transistor) just give me the specs. A fluffy "ten times less noise" sentence is cool and all, but which firstborn was sacrificed to get there? Maybe the THD is really bad now. If you really managed to cover new ground just show all the graphs and how it is better than previous generations of parts.

With other more subjective devices show me why I would want it. And that isn't flashy looks. My equipment could look like a people from the Back to the Future franchise, if it has the right specs, the ergonomics are right and it covers the features I want covered I am all ears. Also: your Smart CloudBased thing is considered an anti-feature unless you open sourced your backend and I can self-host it.
I use kagi for everything
why?

It makes type information unnecessarily longer without adding information, and feels like writing "end_stm" instead of ";" after every line
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This reminded me of Archer Scavenger Hunt[0]

From Wikipedia:
Shortly after episode 2 aired, a viewer noticed that a serial number featured on the computer screen in the episode was actually hexadecimal ASCII code for a website URL. This URL was the first step in an extensive interactive online "scavenger hunt" which animator Mark Paterson had devised as a side project to the season, which was awarded the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Interactive Program for 2015.

[0] https://figgis.agency/walkthrough
> but Will Power is not just enough!

This should be something to work on, no? Strengthen your mind to the point your will is strong that it is sufficient.
In TFA they are quoting a whopping 3W on idle for the RPi5 (just search for "idle power"). I have a Celeron system that idles _measured at the wall_ at 1.8W, including 8GB of LPDDR3 and a 4TB SATA SSD. Since I measure at the wall, I'm including transformer losses, which is not usually the case if you just measure current at the USB level as you seem to be doing.

They are also saying that the RPi5 in the default power off state (which is not even a real power off) it stays at 2W.

This matches my own results from the RPi4, where I had difficulty getting it to idle at less than 3W at the wall. While my x86 result is _out of the box_ with an standard openSUSE install.

The (desktop) RPi devices are just TERRIBLE. Cheap, small, have multiple GPIOs, but terrible power-wise. The µc RPis are another story.
Bay Watch: Northern California is an energy catastrophe waiting to happen
Due to firewall logs showing DNS amplification attack attempts
Appstun Account Termination
Why not to train your body between the sessions? What you want is effectively some proper studies about men doing wrong things for the sake of learning exactly how much wrongly is this or that behavior. You must to be an expert in these questions tbh if you used to have enough vim to escalate your pain issue into surgery field but amusingly you haven't even consider you have any experience about these kind of issues.

I recommend you to read about healthy men, healthy exercises to your wrists like stretching, music playing and physical exercises. And if you are really young you should try Dvorak, because do not forget since we are living in idiocracy all the good things must be researched by you, not provided to you by default.
It's not the same. Will power is a muscle that can be strengthened. Being able to overcome depression is not a great analogy. It's an entirely different category.
Also, they didn't have a lot of 64-bit stuff in PowerPC land during the transition, software- and hardware-wise.
>> The use of ' as a symbol that has any meaning on it's own has got to be one of the most stupid choices I've seen in a language.

' has a long history of use for various purposes in programming language syntax not derived from C.

In Ada, attributes are a single quote followed by the attribute name.

If I have an enum called Fruit then Fruit'First would give the first value in the Fruit enum definition.

http://www.ada-auth.org/standards/22rm/html/RM-4-1-4.html

Attributes provide meta information about types and are very useful when working with custom integer types and ranges:

https://learn.adacore.com/courses/advanced-ada/parts/data_ty...

Using ' for Rust lifetimes or Ada attributes is just a sigil https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sigil_(computer_programming)

It is not too different from:

& for addresses / references in C, C++, and Rust,

* for dereferencing in C, C++, and Rust

$ for value substitution in shells and scripting languages

: to mark keywords in Clojure and some Lisps
Giving out speeding tickets
Correct. And also the non-solar panel material. For example the aluminium support they use between the roof and the solar panels costs the same or more than the actual solar panels. When I asked for an offer two years ago the price of the solar panels was about 25% of the total cost.

The aluminium frame was 25%, labor 30% and putting up the scaffold 20%.

I hope thin film solar panels integrated in the actual roof material will become more common going forward as it removes the need for an aluminium frame, you get a new fresh roof, it's lighter, no holes are drilled in the roof etc.
But he is working as a mafia leader. I don't think that is the kind of chief executive a democratic country needs.
He said "not more clear" and yet you're responding as if he'd said "not less clear" or "exactly as clear"? This seems strange?
I had the same problem until I realized this: for generics and traits T: A means T implements A and it's actually the same with lifetimes: 'a: 'b means lifetime 'a implements lifetime 'b, which naturally translates to objects with lifetime 'a lives at least as long as 'b.
Tell me more about this Blorp protocol...
I think it is a good font color. Nice contrast.

Also if you're the sort that cares enough about such things to make a post complaining you should have tools to change them or override per your preferences (e.g. reader mode).
I have a feeling that most of the clarity you find in your example comes from better use of whitespace. Consider:

pub fn read<P>(path: P) -> io::Result<Vec<u8>>
where
P: AsRef<Path>,
{
fn inner(path: &Path) -> io::Result<Vec<u8>> {
let mut bytes = Vec::new();

let mut file = File::open(path)?;
file.read_to_end(&mut bytes)?;

Ok(bytes)
}

inner(path.as_ref())
}

Plus, your example does not have the same semantics as the Rust code. You omitted generics entirely, so it would be ambiguous if you want monomorphization or dynamic dispatch. Your `bytes` and `file` variables aren't declared mutable. The `try` operator is suddenly a statement, which precludes things like `foo()?.bar()?.baz()?` (somewhat normal with `Option`/`Error`). And you weirdly turned a perfectly clear `&mut` into a cryptic `&!`.

Please don't assume that the syntax of Rust has been given no thought.
Actually it’s called Google Search.
I guess you are talking about the web interface. I don't think it is a fair way to measure the usefulness of the models because they are clearly instructed to be overly "safe". I think ChatGPT currently has nearly 2000 tokens worth of trash polluting the system prompt where as claude.ai is way too obsessed about things like copyright.

The APIs of all of the models are more permissive and refusals to answer are much more rare.
If you talk about learning to play doom, I would say it is unrealistic at this point and still a topic of research, the purpose of the neuroplatform is precisely to find reliable ways to train neurons to perform a specific task.
Wait. Are you a Cobol programamer? Your argument has nothing to do with ' per se; it's completely generic for every "symbol" in a language.

https://www.mainframestechhelp.com/tutorials/cobol/arithmetic-statements.htm

"Confusing" is mostly a question of familiarity; "ugly" one of taste. When you're designing a language's syntax, there is a tension between making the language feel recognizable to beginners/non-users and communicating important information saliently to experts. The former errs on the side of least-common-denominator symbols and explicit constructions, while the latter errs on the side of expression density and implicit understanding.

Language features that appeal to beginners and outsiders naturally aid in language adoption, even if they actively work against expert practitioners. So, funnily enough, we should a priori expect the zeitgeist opinion to favor lowest-common-denominator languages features and shun high-utility but "complex" ones.

That is a real shame, however. As a business or whatever, instead of maximizing for ease of onboarding, I want to maximize for facility in exploring the end-goal problem domain, i.e. expert work. Instead of picking a "readable" language, I want to pick one that increases our ability to find simple solutions to complex-seeming problems, conventionally readable or not.

IMHO, baseline languages like Python are great for writing down what you already think but terrible for iterating on your understanding, and 95% of our work as engineers is (should be?) changing our understanding of the problem to fit reality as it bumps us in the face.
I think this applies more to firewalls used for simple internet connections than switches/routers.
Well, we already have systems with 32 electrodes, and we are looking at alternative to increase this by several orders of magnitude. I hope we have something next year.
Sophos does that in fact. I did a double take when I noticed my domains weren't signed by let's encrypt on my work machine.
I wouldn't make that assumption; adding TLS or HTTP on top adds more work and processing power, and if good-enough encryption was promised by the use of GSM/GPRS, why would they add it on top? That's like adding custom encryption on top of HTTPS... which isn't unheard of actually, I knew someone who built that for a banking app, and an ethical hacker got through the HTTPS layer pretty fast.
Not your core point, but it is fun to remember that NAT wasn't always a thing, and many networks just PCs with public internet addresses and no firewalls. Even NetBIOS worked over the plain Internet back then. You could just \\x.x.x.x\c$ and it would work a decent percentage of the time.
This is a beautiful explanation, it's tempting to add up another take here: these companies exploring AI safety are really just selling their anthropomorphised machines and making good money. The intelligence they sell is so intellectual it needs a word-blacklist in order to look safe for legislation.
> I think companies will simply quit doing business in California

Sure they will. Just like how the auto manufacturers stopped trying to sell in CA after stricter emissions regulations and just like how companies stopped trying to serve European visitors after GDPR came into force. California is a $4T GDP, placing it just behind Japan and ahead of India in global rankings. I am sure they are happy to tell non-complaint companies to piss off and not let the door hit them on the way out. This is the canary in the coal mine for cowboy AI companies, once EU regulators get into the game their days of playing fast and loose with this tech will be over.
yes, but not impossible and it comes with other problems
Sales people like to talk and hate to write.

I got regular calls from my cellphone provider about offers until one day I had enough and told them if they call me once more I will cancel my contract with them and go out of my way not to do any business with them again. If they want to show me an offer they can just send me an email. They didn't.

Generally my advice is to never agree to anything via phone. Tell them to send you the details. They always try to use the heat of the moment to make you do things that might not be in your interest. If it is really a good offer it will still be good hours later when you read the actual details.
Are you saying you cannot be rejected in any following interview if you do a 8 hour unpaid take home?
> 5. Engineers are not turned off by jargon—in fact, they like it.

I think the point is right, but the reasoning is off. Jargon (at least in engineering) isn't a secret language for the benefit of confusing outsiders, but more words that have more specific meaning than more common words. Eg, "Use our API to run your container images" tells me a lot more than "Use our product to run your software". Software could've been compiled binaries, virtual machine images, raw code, excel macros, whatever. This ties into other points about how engineers evaluate products.
Not just cabin crew, a lot of the time anyone flying standby is offered the jumpseat if there are no other seats available out of courtesy. Especially if they are an airline employee, but often non-employees too.
Content should span the entire width of the viewport, because guess what?

Users can just resize the window to suit their reading preference.

I know, it's mind boggling that windows don't need to be fullscreen.

Pardon the sarcasm, but authority for user preferences should be left to the user instead of assumed/forced by the designer.
If Firefox changes it UA for these sites, their operators will see even less needs to support the open standards it champions.
Not to minimize the very real pain from RSI, but I don't think "most" programmers develop RSI. I have over 40 years at the keyboard, and then using a mouse, trackball, and now trackpad. I have worked at quite a few places with programmers younger and older. In my experience most groups that I worked with had one or two people -- often the younger people -- who had symptoms of RSI, sometimes severe. But not most of the people I worked with, many of whom had the same number of years, or more, typing and dragging a mouse around as I do.

The only time I ever experienced pain in my wrists came from gaming. When I had young kids they liked to play console games with me. A few hours of that and I'd notice pain in my wrist, probably from gripping the controller too hard (Mortal Kombat and Mario Kart can get intense with a teenage opponent). I suspect heavy gaming does more damage than typing and mousing, unless you have terrible posture, can't touch-type, or grip the mouse/trackball too hard. That might explain why many of the work colleagues who had RSI got it fairly young -- gaming seems more a thing with younger people, and they start gaming as kids whereas I didn't see a video game controller until I got well into my 20s.

My oldest daughter works on a computer all day (mainly Excel) and she developed RSI. Her therapist gave her gloves that keep her wrists straight and told her to pay attention to stress and excessive force in her hands. I guess a light touch helps.

I don't have any actual medical evidence or expertise regarding RSI, just my anecdotal experience.
Sorry, but the proposal for the included shading language looks pretty braindead to me.

See for yourself: https://github.com/libsdl-org/SDL_shader_tools/blob/main/doc...

Deviations from C-language families, such as "Flow control statements don't need parentheses." are completely unnecessary, I think. Same goes for "Flow control statements must use braces."
People re leaving chrome more and more. Let's hope the trend continues