jkeisling/hacker-news-corpus-2007-2022 huggingface dataset:
Much has been written and disseminated about their culture, benefits and compensation practices. They are one of the largest software companies in the world with a publicly recognized name. Their product offerings span just about everything you would want to do with a computer. They have (historically) been a very stable source of employment, with a good compensation and benefit package, along with a full career path for developers (a rarity in most companies it seems).

Unfortunately, their business practices have also left some developers with a bad taste in their mouth (whether through their previously predatory nature, or their current lack of a cohesive approach to the web). Given that Microsoft is a well-known entity in the developer world (and frankly the larger US-culture), I will assume that you fall into on of those categories, in which case Microsoft will need much more than perks and salary (of which they apparently have many - I am not affiliated nor have I ever been affiliated with them) to sway you.

On the other hand, there are plenty of folks out there who may not have the same negative experiences with MS and, based on everything I said above, would consider the company an excellent place to work.
We've wanted to go to Bali for a while, so we're really excited!
Punishable by what? The slow dissemination of information resulting in markets driving down the viability of a company that produced a faulty product? How many injuries are necessary before that information hits a critical mass?

Let's take one specific example, though the principle can be applied to most industries: child car seats. Presently, govt regulations require very specific quality and manufacturing standards and thorough testing before a child safety seat can be sold on the market. Without those regulations in place, how man children need to die before third party organizations can disseminate product failure information wide enough that the responsible company suffers the consequences?
As pointed out by others here already, SQL may not be the optimal fit for every scenario at large scales but it will nearly always work at smaller scales, and I can't imagine that you're already trying to write the next amazon.com. So in other words, start with SQL.

There are three main free software SQL databases: MySQL, PostgreSQL, and SQLite. Don't use MySQL, it'll get you into a great deal of bad habits, is missing an ass-ton of useful features (the default engine doesn't even support transactions), and likes to corrupt data. It also has questionable licensing and is owned by Oracle (a commercial database vendor) which as you can imagine doesn't have a lot of incentive to improve it.

SQLite is a very robust database that is great for read-mostly sites (like blogs) and for embedding into applications (Firefox for example). Its primary limitation is that there can only be one writer at a time. It is very easy to pick up and get going with since there's no persistent daemon, you just point it at a file and start writing. I'd recommend starting here.

PostgreSQL is the more featureful database and supports hundreds of concurrent connections, locking, access control, etc. This is the real "workhorse" database you're likely to find in production at large sites that do make use of free-software RDBMS. Eventually you will need to use something more powerful than SQLite, and this is probably it.
A Malaysian coworker of mine told me about this sort of phenomenon years ago. (Something like 2002?) He was working for Compaq in the Asia-Pacific region, and noted that his group would often send in someone with asian features someplace with a proposal, which would get rejected. They'd later send a white American to give the same presentation, and it would win.
> Taken one step further, since Tesla is constantly transmitting telemetry to home base, Tesla HQ likely knows the average battery consumption of all other drivers who have ever driven that route. This would allow non-topographical variables (traffic lights, potholes, road conditions) to be factored into the range calculation as well.

This is super powerful. This in combination with a service like Waze in cars would produce some of the most accurate traffic and estimation data for travelling. I'd be interested to see Tesla incoroporating all these factors into their in-car estimation for ETA.
> I do have a huge problem with the content of criminal records, because I have a huge problem with what we consider criminal--drug offenses mostly.

In the US you also have lots of really bad laws about sexual offenses (which aren't real offenses by any sane standard; like teenagers sending each other nude pictures).
Whenever I've tripped (over 50 times in the past 8 years, though not for a while as I moved away from that scene) there was a 3-4 hour period where I would just not talk. At all.
I'm a little confused. If I understood the article correctly the argument is that the rate of expansion isn't increasing but staying constant while the rate time passes is slowing.

Given that the rate of expansion is a measure of distance over time wouldn't the net effect be identical?

I guess the argument is that dark energy is in fact a manifestation of the physical rules of our universe, but in the end doesn't that violate the laws of energy conservation? Effectively if we observe acceleration of distant parts of the galaxy due to present time traveling slower relative to historic, where does the energy that causes the acceleration come from?

This is reminiscent of Feynman's explanation about magnetism [1] in that it leads back to the original question.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MO0r930Sn_8
Actually they have found some references to something... not sure if it's related to tomorrow though. Time will tell!

http://erictric.com/2010/11/15/itunes-live-stream-reference-...
Where I work, if one doesn't want to be a manager, he can go up by being Architect and then Senior architect. Those roles doesn't require leadership experience...simply, the best engineers who doesn't want to manage people will become architects.
"Eight years after 9/11, why are we still so reactive, so un-Israelified?"

Because L-3 / Lockheed Martin / Haliburton / etc. don't sell training in behavior tracking / FACS? Isn't it all just a money-grab by the usual suspects?
s/engineer/researcher/
You need to show your management that you can handle architecting a design from scratch or take a leadership role. Nobody will ever see your potential and offer you the role. You have to take the initiative and express your attitude on this. If they don't listen then you can switch your job to one where you have more control (i.e. a startup) or start a startup yourself.
Consider how many bottles of liquid the TSA confiscates in a day because they might be explosives. Now imagine actually treating each of those as if the agent really believed it was a threat in the style described in the article.

Does this still make sense?
Thanks to Dropbox my photo sharing site has the world's best uploader. (1) Since it's an ordinary folder, all photo management software (iPhoto, Aperture, Lightroom, etc.) can export to it without installing a plugin. (2) People can queue up photos to upload while traveling even if they're currently without Internet access. (3) Mobile clients are already built, and people can use the same client either to upload to my site or to send to their desktop for post-processing.

If you're running a site that people upload files to, I highly recommend integrating with Dropbox. They have an API, but I just did it by letting people share a new folder with box@ourdoings.com and pulling photos from that folder.
I would like to try it, but I have no idea what you are going to post to twitter. Could you explain somewhere exactly what gets posted and when. Also, can I control what is private and public? I get that a totally public to-do list might make people do them better, but I just need to understand exactly how public it is before I type my to-dos into it.
...or perhaps they daren't ask again ;)
This is proving to be an interesting read, but I have much different design goals in mind than the author. I'm interested in simulation, and this sort of RNG is useless for that purpose. I would go as far to say this approach is useless for any scientific purpose. With great state comes great reproducibility. (I couldn't resist!)

In the abstract the author suggests that PRNGs rely on "on unprovable assumptions about “one-way functions”" Any PRNG worth using should have solid number theoretic footing. For example, Multiply with Carry generators are based on the decimal sequence produced by dividing integer by a very large prime.
A vivid demonstration:
http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&cd=5&v...
Not enough, and worse, auditing is never a guarantee.

None the less, at least the perceived risks of audited code seem to be less than unaudited code, and there is at least some data to support the assertion. It's not a guarantee of perfection, but it does seem better than the alternative.
Police unions are much worse than other public unions. If other public unions take illegal action, the police can arrest them. When the police union does something illegal, no one is going to do anything about it.
I find it almost impossible to make time for reading these days. My saviour is audiobooks. I get a LOT of "reading" done while driving and commuting.

One unexpected consequences of COVID has actually been that the number of books I read has decreased drastically due to less time spend commuting.
The purpose of qualified immunity is to permit officials to carry out their discretionary duties without fear of personal liability or harassing litigation.

It applies to all parts of government. Didn't get the building permit for your kids horse barn? Sue the planning commission members individually. Animal control writes you a citation for Puddles not being on a leash? Unleash the lawyers. Health department gave your wine bar a bad rating? Sue the inspector personally.

The way to fix policing isn't by making the rest of government worse. Reform unions for employees of the people. Create independent civilian oversight boards with the teeth to suspend and terminate. Invest more in mental health and drug rehabilitation services. Invest in educational resources to teach communities how to deal with law enforcement.

Edit to add: People are confusing civil liability with criminal liability. If you are found guilty of a crime, then you can be sued.
Things aren't as black and white. Unions, like every other manmade institution, seems to be rot when its getting big, old and fat.

German labour is heavily unionized, a lot of the workers are lazy and incompetent. A lot of the union leadership is well paid and almost never works. It heavily opposes remote work(for good reason, but with a slightly wrong conclusion).

Their salary negotiations have been a clusterf* in recent years. And in fact I tried them, and contributed. But attempts at protecting employee rights were not only shut down by leadership but also fellow union leadership. They were too busy cozying up to leadership instead of protecting and informing other employees of employee rights. When it comes to employer abuse they will be too "busy" to help you, so realistically you will still need your own private law insurance.

I'm not opposed to unions and I do agree that workers need better protection especially in the US. But we also ought to be able to talk about how these big institutions may no longer protect the interest of those people and at some point exist to feed their own mouths more than the workers they were intended to protect.

Is it better than nothing? Yes, absolutely. But why do man-made structure always end up like that?
Cargo bikes for the 2 adults. It's the norm here in Stockholm. Well, 4 kids is not the norm. But 2 kids in a cargo bike is the norm.
I have an anecdote about this.

In my somehow big city (1m habitants in France), they wanted to create a train line between my city and another one. As every infrastructure projects in France, the project eventually had years of delay (maybe 3 or 4).

So at the due date, no train line. But the trains (about 20 of them, IIRC) were acquired and stored somewhere.

So we had those trains without rails. Somehow, local politics decided to let them roll temporary on an existing national train line.

Nobody anticipated it, but all cities with a train station on this old line started to gain a ton of attractiveness. The real estate prices and population on those cities raised by 30-40% in 2 to 3 years.

People were just happy to live countryside while being able to move to work without cars. And that’s totally reasonable since with this high numbers of trains, this line is now able to have a 20min frequency.

Eventually, local politics decided to let the trains indefinitely and just buy 20 more for the new line. Which of course, added delay :D

——

I have a great car. But I think any mean of transport is really more pleasant than car. The only problem is they are not always all as optimal as a car. But it’s an infrastructure problem. Public transports without rails is as optimal as your car without a road.
As a resident of SF, you have to wonder how much of this kind of crap happens behind closed doors - elected representatives spending time on crap that doesn’t matter.

Then suddenly you understand why SF has one of the highest city+county budgets per capita yet horrible services, decaying infrastructure and rampant corruption.
Assuming nothing's changed since I left, the front-end is taken from the old COBOL compiler, and is written in PL/X. It emits WCode for the backend, which is written in C++.

XL C is a separate codebase, with very little shared code IIRC.
If you're under some sort of child support and/or alimony, courts will often interpret losing a job as an attempt to dodge payment, and will not reduce payment to match the new circumstances.
i did, but now i'm depressed and burned out
I'm not going to dox myself, but if you want to learn more about it, here are a few pointers:

https://www2.deloitte.com/us/en/pages/operations/articles/bl...

https://hbr.org/2020/05/building-a-transparent-supply-chain

https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/blockchain-suppl...
Looking at you AWS cloud.
For remote interrogation of meters?
I'm really hoping they bring GPG to the Solokey V1, but I'm starting to lose confidence
Anything similar to https://github.com/drduh/YubiKey-Guide for what you have just described?

I am willing to use what I can understand, backup and operate, and yubikey+gpg seems to be it because of this guide.

Anything practical for what you've mentioned?

Edit: for ssh and encryption.
Creating your logo yourself will protect against copyright claims, but it won't protect against trademark violations.

Apple sued Prepear because Prepear's logo looked too much like the Apple logo [1]. Prepear spent lots of money to defend themselves and finally made a small change to the logo to make Apple happy.

I think the lesson is to be prepared to change icons and logos swiftly when another legal entity sues for copyright or trademark violation.

[1] https://9to5mac.com/2021/02/09/apple-and-prepear-reach-an-ag...
In my mind, Paradise Lost and Gustave Doré's illustrations are inseparable, similar to Alice in Wonderland with John Tenniel's. It's because I experienced these books with the words and images together, as an integrated multimedia work.

So, to me, illustrations for these works by other artists almost always feel derivative and "off", rarely reaching the perfection of the original experience.

But then, John Martin's illustrations for Paradise Lost are from 1824, before Doré in 1866, so they're definitely not derivative. If anything, Doré was probably influenced by them.

John Martin brings a unique worldview and aesthetics, and it's quite striking to experience scenes from the poem in a (for me) new way. I especially like how he depicts the struggle of light and dark, and the grand panoramic scenery with scale and depth.
Fame is wealth. You're talking about money.
I'm not sure that insists on credit being given on, say, the credits page of your website, it refers to the source release.

If you don't mention that you are using X on the site then there is no requirement (as I interpret it) to say "X is made by". (Most people do link the X's website though, which I would call courteous attribution).
Until I read this comment, I didn't realize it was a Zed Shaw post. I must have skimmed right past the byline. I read the whole article without even knowing it was written by a famous programmer.
There will be. At the moment though, linux support is very basic. There's no automatic packaging. When it comes to packaging and distribution, the mac version is more developed.
> Your scenario assumes that (1) he could rent the same or an equivalent property for much less of cash outflow than buying

Of course he could. If your rent is paying your landlord's mortgage, you're overpaying.

> and (2) he could have invested the difference in some other asset that had a much higher return than appreciation of the condo.

Finding an asset with a better than 1% return is not difficult.

> If the amount the rental amount is about the same amount as the mortage payments then you are almost certainly going to be worse off renting than buying under average market conditions.

If you're wasting your money by paying your landlord's mortgage, you're going to be worse off than if you refuse to waste money and pay a reasonable rent. Renting is cheaper than home ownership; if it's not, you're doing it wrong.
I've heard this 256MB limit that you see on all the smartphones now is because the ARM A8 architecture they are based on only has 256MB of RAM on the die. I think this is the biggest limitation that these devices have right now. I love my iPad, but it kills me to have the occasional "crash to desktop" just because Safari ran out of memory.

My prediction - next year we'll see A9 based smartphones/tablets with 512MB-1GB of RAM and these memory starvation issues will be a thing of the past. It certainly doesn't bode well in the short term for early adopters though.

The post PC era is upon us - too bad the hardware (and software) is still in it's infancy.
Well, in Australia we've had video chat over 3G for about 6 years now. Everyone has a 3G phone (it's standard) and everyone can use video chat. The thing is, people don't. I've never once received a video call apart from when we all first got them and there was novelty in calling a guy who was sitting 2 metres away from you.

Video chat is awkward because it means your contact is on speakerphone so everyone can hear you, and I don't really need to see who I'm talking to anyway.
"Famous" is also relative. I'm a programmer, and I'd never heard of him or any of the projects he mentioned.

If you go down any particular niche, I guess everyone's famous to somebody.
What I think K8S (EKS, GKE, DO hosted environments at least) provide is a nice way to integrate things like Gitlab. This gives you a really easy to use CI/CD pipeline for very little work and configuration. This allows you to deploy production from your main branch and spin up feature branches that can be tested by the people that requested the feature very easily. This does not require an additional effort once the system is setup.

Also you can get red/green deployments and rolling deployments with little to no effort, which can be very nice, nice to have.
Fun story, if you have a Gmail account and share it with many people. Gmail won't like it people logging in from a lot of different places... except when in incognito mode, then you can login without issue.
Example with COVID was to illustrate how fast humans can develop a change, compared to nature which for evolution of something practically from scratch takes longer. Another example is Apollo project, where mammals successfully traveled to Moon and back, something which nature isn't known to be capable of without humans.
The Google Play Store solved this problem with dynamic feature modules. Either at install time or later on, you can let users download only certain parts of the app. All with a single app store entry and app bundle.

We use this for devices which don't have NFC. If the device doesn't support it, then there is no reason to download the module for identification via passport NFC scans.
Really? Tokyo isn't super-expensive for an American compared to NYC or SF but it isn't especially cheap in my experience. The same could be said of at least most of Europe. There are cheap countries where maybe 10x is a reasonable figure for living like a local in a developing country vs. living like most Americans in the US.

Median household income in Japan is about 30K USD, which is lower than the US but a lot more than $12K.
Dare I say that given the choice of stretching the truth or admitting failure, startups will always choose stretching the truth. Often the truth is just seen as yet-to-be-realised potential. This is the nature of startups, which have limited runway and thus have to make the most out of their opportunities.

By not doing everything you can to get more funds, land a client, or hire that candidate, a startup increases the probability of failure. When a startup fails it's not only the founders that are affected but the whole organisation. How can you make a questionable ethical choice that guarantees the moral outcome is people lose jobs and lives you interact with daily are negatively impacted?

The challenge here though is that the consequences of questionable choices add up. If all choices turn out to be wrong, you end up with hires question why they were hired in the first place, partners that realise they joined on a hope and a prayer, and investors that realised they backed a dud. However, if all choices turn out to be right, then you become a visionary that saved the company multiple times. Perhaps even mythologising your bluff.

Theses risks and stakes contribute to why we lionise successful startups and founders, and why key decision makers generally will take their chances; if they wanted safety they would've taken a corporate job instead of founding or joining a startup.
So far all that has worked is Socialism with Capitalist ideologies. Is there some example of Socialism and Anti-Capitalist ideologies that has worked?
upvotes can be undone with the unvote button.
Did you know that many (most?) key open source contributors are employed by companies specifically to keep working on their open source projects? This is true of kernel developers, language maintainers, and many more.
Have you tried Hoovers?
And these caused a lot of disagreement in the core team. Many thought that they were introducing too much churn.

Coupled with the fact that they get paid for the alleged churn and others have to catch up on unpaid time, this can ruin a project.

The Python dev community has certainly gotten far less vibrant (and productive) in the last decade due to stifling corporate influence.
Could we have an option of not storing biological materials after processing?

Assuming you don't store (notable) digital host data, it seems much safer, in case policy / ownership were to change, a breach happened and/or someone was compelled to produce samples/data.
The future of Bitcoin is still up in the air. In 10 years, maybe it goes to $0 or maybe it goes to $100k.

People who say things like this assume that Bitcoin is going to $0 at some point.
Were you under a rock for the whole Parler thing?
One of SOE's achievements around D-Day was introducing abrasive materials into the axle bearings of the trank transporters for the SS Das Reich division - they were stationed in the south of France and had to try to make their own way there rather than using transporters - which fortunately didn't go well.

An entire division of experienced and well equipped troops pretty much neutralised with some gritty powder in the right places....