skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Now, it’s immediately clear that component_a and component_b are packages, and services is just a directory. It also makes clear that “scripts” isn’t a package at all, and my_script.py isn’t something you should be importing. __init__.py files help developers understand the structure of your codebase.

The problem with this theory is that the presence of an __init__.py in a new project I've never seen before doesn't necessarily mean anything—it could just have been sprinkled superstitiously because no one really understands what exactly these files are for.

Then later—once I'm familiar enough with the project to know that the developers are using the marker file strictly to indicate modules—I'm already familiar with the directory structure and the marker files aren't doing anything for me.

I'd rather see people in the situation above make the module structure clear in the actual folder hierarchy and naming decisions than have them sprinkle __init__.py and count on readers to understand they were being intentional and not superstitious.
Credentialism is good. It provides both a trustworthy reference point and a method for punishment.

If I want someone to do work, I want them to be licensed/certified. If they are flagrantly unsafe, I want a licensing board or similar to be able to strip that person of their ability to practice that profession. This raises public perception of the profession as a while, avoids a market for lemons, and gives some baseline.

There are too many decisions in life to be able to spend an hour (or more) researching every option. Credentials allow a framework of trust - I don't have to decide if I trust every single engineer; if they have passed their PE exam and not had their certification taken away that is a starting point.
Oh, everyone has a number....
Here's my "pro-stagnation" argument: stagnation and stability are pretty much the same thing. There's a lot of infrastructure that we take for granted because it always works (water purification and distribution, bridges and roads, electrical generation and transmission, automobile engines, the quality of gasoline, the safety of food, etc). You trust that these things will work the way you expect, because they don't change very quickly. Is that stagnation or stability?
I agree. That's also why I just don't believe at all when people say we have a shortage of talent (as in we need stuff like H1B) there is a ton of talent wasted. Everyone know that smart person who is working a menial job.
> those were dismissed on the grounds that animals can't have language by definition.

What modern person said that? I've read a bit about it and didn't encounter that.

> The ethics of enslaving and torturing animals is definitely part of the motivation for the dogma.

What does that have to do with language?
Let's start by fixing the language. It's not stagnation, it's predictability.

Civil and mechanical engineering are not static fields. They come up with new materials, new methods, new ideas. They have tooling to understand the impact of a proposed change and standard ways to test and validate things. It is much easier to predict how long it will take to both design and build things. These are all good things.

We would all benefit from fewer cryptoAI startups and frameworks of the week and more robust toolchains tested and evolved over decades.
> If the intern "had no experience with the AI lab", is it the right thing to do to fire them, instead of admitting that there is a security/access fault internally?

This wasn’t an accident, though. The intern had malicious intent and was intentionally trying to undermine other people’s work.

This isn’t a case where blameless post-mortems apply. When someone is deliberately sabotaging other people’s work, they must be evicted from the company.
That's probably an argument in favour of having it a fee instead of buried in taxes, so people raise hell if they suggest adverts.

Meanwhile the Canadian CBC is buried in taxes and has as many ads as any other station.
AI and the SEC Whistleblower Program
> "maybe we shouldn't have this all-or-nothing view of language"

That idea seems like a strawperson, not something anyone seriously thinking about it would say. Everyone sees animals communicate.
Yes, any folder that contains files that are expected to be imported (or other folders that have the same)
Very cool! We’re excited about this use case and building an MVP for our accelerator. Look forward to trying it out.
Standardized tests are tool for systems to be able to compare and work toward a uniformity of outcome. Expecting it to help anything beyond that is a foolish errand. Public schools need to educate million of people each years with differing deposition and life circumstances and do so with relative competency.

Excellence requires individual attention and cannot be so readily mass produced.
The story going around is that the sabotage was to make their own AI projects look better than their peers.

This wasn’t an anti-AI crusader. It was petty office politics.
It is good to expose them. But that doesn't mean the previous point is backwards.
I use syncthing to back up my entire Android phone.

At least the parts it can access, anyway: /storage/emulated/0
Man I REALLY hope we solve Dark Energy/Matter in my lifetime. That'd be so cool. I put it up there with long term habitation on another world (moon or mars is fine to me!).
> you can just let go of the controls and most aircraft will be stable

This is not rule.

Some planes named "friendly to novice pilot", and are stable, others are not, and this is somewhere predictable when design.

I even hear, Lindsberg, when was preparing for his flight, asked designer to make his plane unstable, because typical stable flight is very boring and he scared to fall asleep.

In other cases, modern planes like 737s and larger scale, usually considered to have zero stabilization in design and if need, stabilization created by electronics (navigation system is usually made as very high precision inertial platform, so could in most cases know, how should fly to looking stable). This is because design stabilization costs additional resistance, less payload and more fuel consumption - for 737 scale it is about 1-3 additional passengers and few percents of range.
Military planes and some aerobatics now are designed unstable for better maneuverability.

I don't say, this new trends are good, just notice.
Fwiw, I never use them in Python if I don't need to put anything inside them. They're optional for a reason.
It depends what you call Life.

If it is a machine that can reproduce itself, growth, collect energy, use energy, do actions based on events, etc, then animals match this profile (perhaps even plants), and also, at some point computer will probably reach that goal.

Despite that, computers won't have a "soul", so where this soul comes from is a big mystery.

I'm not even sure that two humans can prove with certainty that the other ones has a soul, this is still an unsolved problem.
Is there? Planck length isn't a pixel.[0]

[0] https://www.physicsforums.com/insights/hand-wavy-discussion-...
"Better" depends on what you are after. In my world better means not being tied to using proprietary communication protocols over compromised networks with hardware I don't really own/can't control.

The makerphone was a learning tool and built to that spec. It wouldn't survive being carried around in your pocket, for example, but it was fine for teaching you how to program and how a phone works.
> JavaScript tooling requires index files for everything

This just isn't true. I've never encountered tooling that forces you to have these by default. If it's enforced, it's rules defined in your project or some unusual tools
It's a common practice/trick in Discord communities (particularly gaming) to pin some status, but yeah, I always find it neat.
No there’s not. This is what narcissistic assholes tell themselves when someone calls them out for being a narcissistic asshole.
There's a lot of people making AI companies outside LLM model development
(Also it's lcamtuf, who was smashing stacks a quarter-century ago.)
I'm aware we never "ban" any specific substance, as we say the dose makes the poison. And any substance that has any effect is also a potential cure for the disease that has the opposite effect.

I should have been clear I saw it in the "make people smart" light, as doping an already acceptable situation, instead of correcting something perceived as a pathology.

Meth was widely available over the counter at some point, and we made it legally disappear outside of strict medical settings.
I think it should say runtime errors "are usually easy to fix" because they are usually a result of simple logical errors or technical issues. But you're right, it does not account for all possibilities.
After around 7yrs of company life it's about 90%

Doesnt mean they won't make money in the prior years then still shutdown by the 7th year because markets change or competitors beat you
Maybe Pythons import/module system makes sense to someone but its caused me a lot of trouble. I'm not even sure exactly why but I run into weird issues often.

Like the fact that the imports are tied to the working directory things are expected to be run from is just very weird. There should just be one project root and all imports can then import via full paths from the root or paths relative to the file's location. Tying it to working directory is incredibly confusing. The same imports can work when run from one directory and fail from another..

In a project I have I need to run it like `python3 -m part2.week2` instead of `python3 part2/week2.py` or the imports will fail. I'll probably never understand this system :)

Part of it might just be some implicit complexity in module systems as a whole that I don't get, not just python. Rust has some confusing situations too, although Java and Go seem to have more straightforward systems.
I am guessing that you didn't get value out of it probably because you didn't work in avionics, medicine, defense, etc? Those industries where a software fault is unacceptable and has to work for decades.

In some industries like avionics and medical instruments, the programmer might be personally held responsible for any loss of life/injury if it could be proven.

Having read Software Engineering and Formal Methods 25 years ago, I could say that IEEE leans heavily towards SE like it is a profession.

It is not going to be appealing to the crowd of Enterprise developers who use Python, Javascript, Web development etc.
I've noticed that a lot of engineering books cover concepts which are useful in the hands of senior developers but are harmful in the hands of junior developers because they misunderstand the nuance due to lack of experience.

It reminds me of the phrase "If all you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.." But in the case of a thick design patterns book, it amounts to giving the junior dev a whole toolbox... The junior dev tends to assume that every problem they'll ever face requires them to use one of the tools from that toolbox... But reality isn't so neat; you rarely use a specific tool in its native form as it's described. They are conceptual tools which need to be adapted to various situations and they are only really useful in highly complex scenarios which can often be avoided entirely.

The one piece of advice which is closest to 'universal' which I can give about software development is this:

"You should be able to walk through and describe any feature provided by your code using plain English, in such a way that a non-technical listener would gain a complete understanding of what the code is doing but without having to dive into functions whose implementation details would exceed the listener's mental capabilities."

When someone talks me through some feature they developed and they start jumping around 10 different files 80% of which have technical names which they invented and they keep having to define new concepts just to explain what the code is doing at a high level; this is a red flag. It shows that their code is over-engineered and that they haven't fully made sense of what they're doing in their own mind.

My philosophy is basically a variant of "Rubber duck debugging" as proposed in the book "The Pragmatic Programmer" by Andrew Hunt and David Thomas... But you imagine the duck to have the intellect and knowledge of a non-technical middle-manager, and you use the approach during design and development; not just debugging.
Thr post is overrated. The files are optional. I use them only if I need to put something inside them. As for imports, they work fine. And as for static analyzers, they work for me, as in I don't work for them.
Before Excel there was VisiCalc [video]
So… most likely it is a “typo” or edit-mistake or similar. If you understand what they meant then all is good, no?
Credentialism creates a false basis of trust and an arbitrary reference point.

You're just arguing that you want to outsource your own decision making. You actually should interview your candidates before hiring them, whatever credential they have, because it actually is your job to ensure you work with high quality individuals.

Credentialism basically allows the sort of low effort that you're describing and causes many places to rely solely on the credentials, which are obviously never sufficient to find high quality individuals.

What are the jobs you're day dreaming about that require PE exams? I'd bet that requirement is much less common than you think.
I don't know, Stroker does some interesting stuff in Dracula, essentially it's this Victorian hysterical story about extramarital or premarital sex "ruining" women (in this cases, essentially turning them into undead monsters as an extended metaphor for a woman's reputation being ruined in victorian society) as the cuckolded Victorian gentleman look in horror until they figure out the source of the trouble-- a no good foreigner.

There's also a sub-theme of the too secular modern men who don't believe in superstition (Jonathan Harker doesn't believe in vampires in the beginning) needing to get in better touch with Christianity to defeat Dracula- and features a rejection of secular psychiatry to defeat what turns out to not be "mental illness" way before The Exorcist did it.
But if you notice the people who are in administrative positions are the people who are “well rounded” not those who are good at one thing.

Even within academic stem fields you have people who know how to promote and speak and they have the most influence.

I guess what I’m trying to say is the system is mostly selecting for what it wants.
Fun to imagine someone or something out there mapping us as well. What a cool video. I think one of the best things about space travel will be the loss of ego we go through when we really understand how vast the world is.
Are there any freely available books you would recommend for 2024 security in software engineering?

(Freely available in the same sense that the SWEBOK is I mean; you can read it free of charge without DRM and without having to resort to piracy. Doesn't have to be a fully free book that goes as far as to allow modification and redistribution although that is an extra nice bonus if any of your suggested books are like that.)
When you enabled the browser plugin, it would completely cover the input box, preventing you from using basic browser functionality meant to prevent you from using an alternative while it's enabled.
I’m still loooking for intelligent life on this planet!
> but I think your "_really_" is actually just "_pretty_" and you're trying to include more than the 1 in 100 million.

I don't quite understand your point. Pretty good still puts you far ahead of the average. I could easily handle second year college maths and computer science while in high school. And I couldn't hold a candle to Ramanujan.

I still needed to do well in my other courses in order to be able to get into my chosen college.
It's a corporate jet from Starbucks, he pays nothing for it, and actual can use it for personal travel up to $250,000 per year.

> You will be eligible to use the Company aircraft for (i) business-related travel in accordance with the Company’s travel policy, (ii) travel between your city of residence and the Company’s headquarters in Seattle, Washington and (iii) your personal travel in accordance with the Company’s policies, up to a maximum amount of $250,000 per year, which amount will be based on the aggregate incremental cost to the Company.

His offer letter [1] is available on edgar

[1] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/829224/0001193125242...
1 sweaty rustlol or xlol zealot out there that wants to play. this will be my last post here, its getting boring, so make it count.
> Part of that is showing that you can learn about and deliver results on things you're not necessarily excited about.

Why is that useful besides for the employer trying to impose Framework v3.0 onto their subjects?

To me at least, learning things one is not excited about is only useful to capitalist society that views human beings as replaceable resources.
So I don't know about you, but I live in America where roads, electrical generation and transmission, water purification, and bridges are all in subpar shape.

That's super broad and I think there are complex reasons why each of these has failed, but it's pretty clear that stagnation hasn't helped and has probably actively caused harm by letting incompetence become too common in these areas.
I don’t see a path for Waymo either. With crime as high as it has gotten in the likes of SF, LA, Portland, Seattle, NYC, without a dude inside these cars will have a fairly short lifetime. Ads, idk, I haven’t seen them in the last 15 years, and their decision to disable ad blocking in Chrome sounds like desperation to me. Search engine duties are better handled by some company which does not insist on filtering search results for political reasons. What else do they do? Android/App Sore? Ok, I think that has staying power. Google Workspace (or whatever it’s called)? That’s rolled up into Cloud, thanks to it it makes a small profit. So no, I’m not bullish on Google at all. I have sold my entire position.
High school has been dumbed down and is mostly a waste of time.
My experience is the opposite.

Try asking an elderly user of an Android phone where the attachments from gmail they have tried to save are stored in.

I think they'd cope a lot better with a standard folder/file hierarchy as opposed to saving into a folder/file hierarchy but never at any point telling the user where in the hierarchy they saved to!

And every app saves to a different location. I've been using computers my entire life and I generally have to resort to a file manager to find what I'm looking for.
> How? There is no way to associate hostnames with addresses in IPv6 that works unversally.

It looks like SLAAC and RDNSS is supported by most modern OSes, including android.

It’s definitely much more painful currently, but no reason you couldn’t have your router broadcast RDNSS. Then in your routers local DNS registry associate IP camera at ::aac::eda3::1 to ‘ip-camera-1.internal’. In theory about as easy as configuring device at Mac ‘de:fe:34:21:00’ is set to IP 10.0.0.5 and host name.

In practice granted it looks like a PITA right now. Searching google hardly yields helpful or easy tutorials on this stuff. Many home WiFi routers are pretty behind too. Though pi hole looks to have some support for this stuff.

I wish DNS options were easier or better for configuring for small networks.

IMHO IPv6 can be pretty nice but really needs saner defaults and better software support. No wonder IPv6 has taken so long.
Matt -finally- listens to the lawyers beseeching hom to STFU. With one final batshit crazy rant.

I look forward to Matt running his defence along the lines of "My right to blackmail and extortion is absolutely guaranteed as a fundamental right under the First Amendment!!!"
Education is optimized for average citizen who must work through boring tasks every day. I feel like geniuses probably more like survive in school rather than being supported.
Oh! Lobsters is neat!
Early in my career, one of the senior engineers in my group had a T-shirt that read:

Old Age and Treachery Beats Youth and Enthusiasm, Every Time.

Looks like this guy tried the “treachery” part, before he had the “old age” part down.
Finland requires a radio license fee for taxis, or at least did 21 years ago:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2002/dec/07/andrewosborn

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/2542291.stm
Why do you think such wrong things about civil and mechanical engineering.

Tell me about all the on time and under budget civil/mechanical engineering projects that are happening.

Do you think that just because they have physics to lean on that they can just like press solve and have accurate estimates spit out?

Edit: I totally agree that more long-lived battle tested software toolchains and libraries would be great though
One key to acquiring thinking skill (a skill like any other) is to learn how to decode the world using your own abilities and resources.

Start by asking about a new idea, "How would I prove this idea false?" This is the key to scientific thinking -- scientists first ask themselves, "What would falsify this idea?"

When you acquire an idea, you're borrowing someone else's thought. But to simultaneously learn how to think and make an idea your own, before taking the idea seriously, assume it's false and test it for validity, using your personal knowledge base.

Here's a classic example -- a friend says, "All swans are white." To make this idea yours, don't confirm it by locating ten more white swans. Instead, try to find a black swan. Even if you fail, your personal version of the idea will be, "It appears that most swans are white."

As it happens, this skeptical outlook is the key to the so-called "Enlightenment," an historical change that dethroned blind acceptance of ideas. This paradigm was best expressed in the Royal Society's (https://royalsociety.org/about-us/who-we-are/history/) motto "Nullius in verba" or "Take no one's word for it." Written in 1660, this motto expresses the essence of scientific, skeptical thinking, just as true today -- indeed, more true now than ever.

Being doubtful and skeptical of received ideas, scientifically testing new ideas, makes you intellectually stronger, and strengthens the surviving ideas as well.

With proper training, your immune system can protect you from germs. In the same way, with proper training, your brain can protect you from bogus ideas. Train your brain.
It was not a terrible approach, the use of "poison gas" is a bit of a misnomer. They weren't dousing the theatre with chlorine and melting everyone's lungs for example. It was not deadly poison gas, it was "get high" poison gas. That unintentionally made some people get so high that they died in a state of euphoric bliss.

The gas, high speculated but nobody 100% sure, is thought to be basically super-fentanyl. Fentanyl itself is like hyper powerful heroin, and this stuff was hyper powerful fentanyl. But not fatal per se, certainly intended not.

So all this hubbub about the theatre gas isn't so bad. Per capita if you just walk down the sidewalk in San Francisco's Tenderloin district, you would be exposed to more fentanyl fumes than you would have in that theatre. In the tenderloin residents talk wistfully of the the theatre gassing with superfentanyl, wishing they could have partaken in that bliss. If they had taken a good dozen people off the tenderloin and sent them to the theatre they easily would have smoked it up with between 100 and 1000x times the concentration of opioid fumes.
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