jkeisling/hacker-news-corpus-2007-2022 huggingface dataset:
Disclaimer: Work for AWS Support. Good and bad things about my employer. Opinions my own.

One of the biggest questions here is what are customers asking for? And the necessary follow-up question: Do customers want to actually bear responsibility for their choices?

Recently, I had a customer lodge a support case because their programmatic access keys were leaked. A malicious actor was then able to use those credentials to exfiltrate their S3 data, and delete it. Now the S3 data is being ransomed.

The customer opened a case asking if there was any way to get the data back. If we had to go the 'extra mile', the customer demanded we do that.

The answer is simply: No. We can't get that data back.

Customers demand that they own the data they upload into S3. They don't want AWS to be able to read the data, nor do they want us to store the data internally as a backup. That's what customers demand, and what AWS gives them.

Now something regrettable happened (a customer got pwned) and now a customer wants AWS to bear the responsibility for backing up the data. I bet a week ago they would've demanded that they have absolute sovereignty over their data. Shit changes when shit hits the fan.

---

Hard caps are doable, but the question is: Do customers want responsibility for this feature?

I read a comment wherein someone's startup was killed due to $30k of bandwidth costs because of misconfigurations that led to users abusing their platform. That sucks. It's not in AWS's interest to put their customers out of business.

But let's look at the flip side. What if someone in the finance department puts a hard cap on an account. But then a tweet goes viral, and business is pouring in. Everyone, in their rush to keep everything scaling appropriately, forgets there's a hard cap. They hit the business and now there's a hard outage in the middle of the biggest business event they've ever had.

Who's the customer going to hold responsible for the outage? As someone who deals with customer misconfigurations on AWS for a living, I assure you the customer won't be calling themselves demanding an explanation.

What happens if the person in charge of budgets doesn't lift the cap before the Christmas holidays? Again, hard down. Again, customer won't be mad at themselves.

---

It's better to let AWS run as the customer configures it to run than bring everything to an abrupt stop. Billing alerts exist, and you can use Lambda to turn off resources that are above their billing threshold.

But doing a hard cap on an account? Something a subsection of customers might want, but something not many customers will want to take responsibility for when something goes sideways.
> I understand that I'm a higher earner, and therefore naturally am going to be paying high taxes, but paying over 50% just seem wrong.

I have to agree with you. A huge number of regular (albeit comfortable) people, also pay > 50% in income tax. When they complain about "the 1%", it's because they see people like you having the means to get out of this system. They're angry you're not suffering alongside them.
So you have to be explicit in what to "preload"?

How does that differ from specifying an includes on associations for eager loading?

It's not saving you any mental energy; you still have to discern what should and shouldn't be loaded up front.
I don't know about the Mac hardware specifically, but SSDs can be hotplugged in linux boxes. If your sata controller doesn't support hotplugging, you will have to reboot for the block device to be accessible but that does not seem like an insurmountable problem in this case. Hotplugging is also a pretty basic feature for such an expensive computer.
You could've phrased your question in a way that's not like dissing someone's fashion sense.

That aside, I think Lisp is genuinely at a sweet spot for the product of nice-to-program-with and simple-to-implement. It's historically important besides, and there's lots of code worth reading in it (SICP and PAIP just to start).
Any platform that 'recommends' content on the basis of user behaviour is going to incentivize spam. Clubhouse is new so maybe that's not there yet. The spammers will only open the floodgates once the audience is big enough.
"As a new digital currency bitcoin has had the fairest distribution,"

Not sure I agree with this, but I guess it depends what your definition of fair is. I think something like 2%-5% of BTC wallets control like 90% of BTC.
Everyone experiences this in Haskell, where you make some statement online and then someone tells you some way in which it’s incorrect.

I’m sure most real-world Haskell programs are “incorrect” in some way.
Yes the "point where you passed far enough" is another way of saying there is contention, I'm not sure what your point is. If it was a zero or one state, there is no contention over it.
>That said, they may (probably?) screwed up containing the crowd contained in the first place.

Certainly with the benefit of hindsight, there should have been a much stronger show of force/barricades/etc. Should that have been obvious even without hindsight? Don't know.

That said, once the Capitol Police were outnumbered and things were getting out of hand, I'm pretty sure the best outcome if they had used deadly force to stop a rush would have been headlines like "Dozens of Trump supporters dead after police open fire on crowd." Worse scenarios include the police getting overwhelmed anyway and many of them killed also leading to a firefight within the capitol.
They should consider ANY hardware in the Capitol Building during the insurrection to be compromised.
make sure to post the article here when you finish writing it or a video.
More virtue signaling for the incoming administration.

Reddit, Facebook, and most of all Twitter need to take a hard look at themselves and role they played in all of this.

Waiting until after an armed insurrection occurs is not good enough.
But thing is,

While the article plausibly argues that the cost of the iPhone should not be credited entirely to China, it still shows the iPhone as adding to the deficit - the cost should just be creditted to Japan, S. Korea, German and "others" instead of China.

Which isn't an indication that the US trade deficit is an illusion or anything...
No, but it has a right-click. Use it.
There was an HN post addressing your question not so long ago:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2016334
That's considerably less in-depth than the criticism itself. The post you linked is mainly complaining about how mean some people were to Schildt and brushes aside the criticism on the basis that Schildt had good intentions. You'll notice that he tries to link the widespread criticism of Schildt's books (I mean, it's in the "learn C" newsgroup FAQ) with some anonymous trolls' death threats against blogger Kathy Sierra. It's basically the "LEAVE BRITNEY ALONE!" of the programming world.

I also think that post's phrasing has confused you. When he says "teaching C in practice," he doesn't mean teaching C-isms in a C++ book — he means C as it is (incorrectly) used in practice, such as teaching implementation-dependent assumptions and pretending that they're part of the standard, as well as simply wrong code that might appear to work right "in practice" in certain situations. For example, his "Annotated ANSI C Standard" stated that void main(void) was a valid main function and that padding only appears at the end of structs.
Just noticed I am now only a couple of weeks over my first year here on HN. Its been fantastic, regardless of anyone who says the site is going downhill, its as good now as it was 381 days ago.

Happy Christmas All!
I wish. I's mostly interpreted languages nowadays for me. But thanks anyway! :)
Well, Babbage never wanted to build the Analytical Engine, he said so explicitly. He just wanted to design it, and let someone else build it. The reason was his experience with the Difference Engine. Because the D.E. would be useful for accurate, error-free charts for the British Navy, he felt that the Government should pay for it. And he did get an agreement with the Gov, but getting the money out of them was like getting water out of a stone. He was so disgusted by the whole process, that he resolved neither to finish the D.E. nor to even start the A.E. Other than that, I think there is no question that the Analytical Engine could have been built in the 19th century.
> FoundationDB was single process. They had no per-node writer concurrency.

Interesting - I didn't know that. Even so, it depends on what kind of writer concurrency we're talking about, I guess - I presume that ActorDB is limited not just by having to run requests one at a time per-process (which is a legitimate tactic to avoid latching overheads and so on), but by also not being able to run any new transactions against an actor that's received a write until that write commits?

> The reason why I said sqlite concurrency support is irrelevant is because ActorDB serializes requests anyway. It must do so for safe replication.

Do you mean by this that the entire cluster can only perform one request at a time? Or am I misreading you?
>point to a case where genetic information passed laterally between species

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizontal_gene_transfer
no, it doesn't. Having multiple independent implementations is a PITA, but that's why you have testing & validation labs along with standards. Take windows graphics driver labs... They test for pixel perfect compliance of output across hundreds of vendor implementations. Contrast that to the web where it took a separate group outside the w3c to embarrass browsers with the ACID2&3 tests. Now separate browsers look a lot closer in output.

Devs are trying to fix these ecosystems: why does react use a virtual dom? Why do we need css resets? Why do we need js shims and polyfills? Because its the only way to come close to normalizing the platform.

But have you ever wondered why you expect no two browsers display the same image? Postscript met that bar and is just as old as the web. Why didn't the w3c base the web on device independent coordinates instead of this confusing and unpredicatble layering of partial scalars and "angle subtended by a pixel on a 96dpi surface at a nominal arms length from the surface" crap? No one could have made a reference implementation off those requirements, much less a consistent verification & validation suite.

And no offense to TBL, but HTTP didn't even survive first contact with netscape's vision of shopping carts. Cookies? An elegant solution? Or simple a new hell of tunneling client/server state over a supposedly stateless protocol. HTTPS everywhere requires long lived sessions as the basis?!? No wonder people are heading towards web sockets, etc. webapps are client/server apps -- HTTP was always grossly misapplied to them.

Webdev is hard, not because I'm building beatiful bridges in the sky that are "good enough" poetic balances of constraints while coming in on time and on budget... Webdev is hard because of all the underlying assumptions I constantly have to check and recheck because I can't rely on them as an ME would (or hell, even as a backend J2EE engineer would). This is why some of us lament that people don't know the stack all the way down, because we have to in order to solve real problems. Every abstraction leaks, but hell, web abstractions are flipping sieves!

No, the thing that "works incredibly well" is not the web, but whats under it that lets us make so very many mistakes and yet keep on trucking.
This answer is too good to merely upvote - it is not only informative and factual, but also very well written. Thank you for taking the time to add it!!
I think one of the reasons is that Yahoo announced that program to recirculate mail ids, and people have been visiting their long forgotten mailboxes to make sure they don't get closed.
> It either did or did not happen for the causes described.

Well, whatever the actual reason for the surrender, any claims about it one way or the other are totally unfalsifiable. But, thanks for the historical analysis here nonetheless.
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Thanks for linking the most condescending site ever. Please also tell me how vaccines don't actually cause autism.
Unfortunately I think people who take the type of care you outline above are in the minority of recruiters/hiring managers. I don't know what the solution is, having been on both sides a number of times.

What I worry about most isn't that the contemporary coding interview creates false negatives. What I worry about is I suspect that it unevenly creates false negatives.
From my point of view, Windows desktop software is a niche. It's a good, big and profitable one, but one I do not take part in. I agree Visual C++ is a great compiler for that specific target.

Still, there is a lot more to programming than desktop applications that run on x86 processors under Windows. And embedded ARM processors outnumber desktop x86s by a large margin. I carry at least three of them with me at all times.
Since this cures you for life, comparing it with the annual mortality rate doesn't seem appropriate. Better to compare the average life expectancy with and without the procedure.
I suspect a couple of issues:

1 - There are karma/score based systems in both sites that highly reward "first to post" interesting articles.

2 - There is no penalty here for bad initial posts, so there is no real penalty for not "posting news related to hackers."

3 - Both have a karma/score based system for rewarding interesting comments.

You will find similar situations on the stackoverflow sorts of sites, although one of the rewarding moves available at stackoverflow is unavailable here - which is to make a fast quick post and continue to edit it and add more details from other answers.

Any system with a score or badge as a sort of "reward" will get gamed. I'm sorry if you are offended by it, but that is the way things are.
Hopefully VirtualBox support will be added at some point. It's amazing what Amazon is doing with AWS.
I had almost the opposite reaction. It was too long, but I didn't have any trouble figuring out what was going on (and guessing the ending). I was wondering what the purpose of the article was, given that it's perfectly obvious to me that modern life is too loud, corporations are usually to blame, and tend to refuse to clean up their act. Just listen! How can you not hear it?

This is a difficult topic to report on, because some people will not understand at all, and some people will not understand how others cannot understand. There doesn't seem to be any middle ground on this issue.

The real mystery is why they didn't use multimedia, which would be the perfect vehicle for this. Instead of (or in addition to) writing some poetry about noise, play some noise! Instead of describing the mathematical foundation of white noise, when you're at that part of the article, play some white noise! Alternate with sections of silence, which everyone will then be able to appreciate.

When you care about communicating a message, you've got to match the medium to the message. Otherwise you're not a reporter with an exposé. You're just a writer who wants to show off your clever writing.
This article vastly overstates the role of closures. The connection isn't that deep - it is a simple consequence of life being a super-complex software executed in a biochemical machinery. Thus, you can find any programming construct the process of life, and argue that life wouldn't work without that.

There are lots of much more important things than closures. One example is the ability be self-referential on all levels (not to be confused with plain recursion). This blurs not only the line between code and data, but also between software and hardware. And this happens in a much deeper way than we're able to do now with things like FPGA/CPLD or hardware virtualization.

If you are really interested in that topic, I recommend the book "Gödel, Escher, Bach" by Douglas Hofstadter. It is written very well and should be especially easy to understand by programmers:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del,_Escher,_Bach
>D&D
>mature

much lulz were had
Actually that's (and typing other frequent programming related stuff like the semicolon, or the brackets) one of the reasons I switched to us keyboard layout.
He has a gallery in Manhattan: http://www.etmodern.com/ET/NOW_OPEN.html

His own artwork is on display. (And for sale?)
ohm-ing is very helpful

three part ohm a-o-m (aaaaaahhhhhhhh ooooooooooooooooooooooo mmmmmmm)

as low pitched as possible
Don't block stackoverflow. The economy will crash.
> when enough members of the military decide to do what's better for the country against the lawful orders of the elected government that they serve, we call it a coup.

No, we call it a mutiny.

A coup is specifically when the action they take involves displacing the lawful government, not merely disobeying its orders.

There's a pretty giant difference.
If your programmers are having to work under pressure then you're doing it wrong. It is the job of the manager to create an environment where people are as effective as they can be, and creating artificial space for developers is part of that. (Read Peopleware for more on this.)

If you're only willing to consider people who can somewhat function under artificial pressure, then you're passing up a lot of top-notch candidates for very bad reason.
Too bad someone crafty enough to modify a cassette player to recharge a phone ends up in jail.
Why are nuclear facilities frequently built near oceans and rivers? Is it due to the easy-access to water for cooling purposes? I've seen it in many places, and it just seems short-sighted in light of the potential to spread contamination when something goes wrong.
Government should not invent laws out of some theoretical concepts. Laws work only when they formalize, cement and enforce the established practice and traditions. In this case, we can unfortunately only tell that the anti-gay law is good. The vast majority of Russian people, and other peoples populating Russia, are strictly against any diversity in this field. It is not mr. Putin or the government, it is the Russian people that is the problem, and the free world should better learn it and take into account than try to fix.
Maybe he expected that post-admission operations would be cleaner.
I feel that freedom of expression is given to people who stand up for what they say and not hiding behind anonymity.

Because freedom of expression works so well when you make reprisals easier?
But the "recovery interval" is not defined, leaving the device to decide what its "recovery interval" is and guaranteeing that software will not expect it to be less than 10ms.
c is a conversion factor between space and time coordinates when we project them into a space that we can intuitively grasp.

the obsession with the 'speed of light' always seems a bit senseless in this context - its taking a concept which is known to break down in some limit and then applying it right at that limit. this is bound to be confusing.

really the speed of light is like infinity in the geometry of our universe... it just happens unfortunately that the geometry is not as simple as an infinite euclidean space with an independent time coordinate so we end up attributing a bad interpretation to the 'speed' of light.
Think what s/he's saying is that it helps that they use their own tools for UI dev versus those who hammer on the browser and made comparable tools, not that Firebug has a better UI.
I don't know why Japan can get away with this for so long. I remember when the Chernobyl disaster happened, Soviet Union was shamed to death by all western media for years. I had high respect for the Russians for their great efforts to contain the damage. A great many of red army soldiers died when building a concrete substrate underneath the ruined reactor, which prevented the underground water from being contaminated by radioactive pollution. In contrast, the Japan government hasn't been capable to do this for the past two years, which is apparently irresponsible and shockingly incompetent.
> $120k base plus an equity grant with expected value in the $X0k range.

Or not even $120k. You'd be surprised at what some SV companies get away with. Take a look at angel list and you'll commonly see wages lower than $100k for experienced developers.

I'd say the only epidemic that exists in the US's technology field is a lack of adequate compensation, not a lack of talent.
Most of the "main goals" are supported by ... Eclipse!
I posted a comment to that effect a few minutes ago :-)
We don't require surgeons or airline pilots or bridge-designing civil engineers to be rock stars. Exactly why do people think you need a rock star programmer to build, I dunno, eBay for cats or whatever is the latest stupid VC fashion?
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I am all for letting talented people in. Clearly, everybody would benefit if the really talented programmers from all over the world could work where the eco-system is set up for them. However, tech companies generally complain about a general shortage of programmers. And I don't buy it because a shortage would manifest itself through large real wage increases and we don't see those. I also suspect talented programmers overseas are already working for us - remotely.
In a CAS role the F-35 would use JDAMs rather than guns. The A-10 is the only US fixed wing aircraft still using guns in CAS.
Well Zuckerberg’s major was psych so you might be onto something there ...
I'll sell you my Toshiba Libretto for cheap.
Coup d'état
I was part of the team that really pushed the kernel team to add support for a monotonic clock that counts while sleeping (this had been a persistent ask before just not prioritized). We got it in for iOS 8 or 9. The dance you otherwise have to do is not only complicated in userspace on MacOS, it's expensive & full of footguns due to race conditions (& requires changing the clock basis for your entire app if I recall correctly).
We need telecommunication laws like we had in the old days. No messing with our data. And the ability to migrate to a different network.