skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have a question, hopefully it doesn't sound too stupid.

Basically my question is: do you have any recommendations for reading about "concurrency" but at a higher level than "concurrent programming" and less formal than "distributed systems" algorithms? Here's an attempt at explaining what I mean:

Suppose I worked for a company which mostly writes web apps in python. They don't write much multi-threaded code. They don't write native desktop graphical apps or do "systems programming". So books about "concurrent programming" with threads, or in go/scala/clojure/erlang etc seem, superficially, slightly irrelevant. Also, books about formal distributed systems algorithms seem, superficially, slightly irrelevant. But "concurrency" is still highly relevant! It's just at a higher level than is meant by "concurrency" in a programming language and it's not as formal or regular as is usually meant by "distributed systems".

What I mean is: the company handles concurrent HTTP requests resulting in concurrent database transactions; celery tasks might also be running at the same time; message-queue type problems come up frequently; they are increasingly tending towards a "service-oriented" architecture which is inherently concurrent; and, at the end of the day, all the higher-level "business logic" is some sort of emergent property of a complex, and concurrent, underlying system of apps communicating via HTTP, with asynchronous background tasks, etc. Wise senior programmers say: "Oh, you're going to need to apply some row-locking there.". Wide-eyed junior programmers say: "Oh yes, of course" and wonder, "What should I be reading to know this?".

What should they be reading?

Also, how the hell do people diagram this stuff in order to talk about it? Google searches tend to end up either in UML languages that seem to be unfashionable (but might in fact be just the right thing?) or in academic CS papers that seem to be uninfluential. But there must be something better than those pessimistic paragraphs from No Silver Bullet:

> Software is invisible and unvisualizable... The reality of software is not inherently embedded in space... As soon as we attempt to diagram software structure, we find it to constitute not one, but several, general directed graphs superimposed one upon another. The several graphs may represent the flow of control, the flow of data, patterns of dependency, time sequence, name-space relationships... In spite of progress in restricting and simplifying the structures of software, they remain inherently unvisualizable, and thus do not permit the mind to use some of its most powerful conceptual tools. This lack not only impedes the process of design within one mind, it severely hinders communication among minds.
As this title demonstrates, NoSQL is no longer a useful term. (It was useful for a period of time when SQL-based RDBMs systems were quite predominant, so it could be used as a gross differentiator).

Now the best way to think about it is that there are database platforms with varying features, one of which is support for SQL. When you evaluate which platform to use, you should have a list of business-derived criteria, such as SQL support, support for various relational integrity constructs (i.e. foreign keys), latency for typical queries (e.g. Hive), fault tolerance, ACID compliance, partitioning schemes, read or write optimization, etc. and act accordingly.

"NoSQL" used to be shorthand for a vague subset of database features that usually involved relaxing data protection in favor of multi-server scalability, but now it just muddies the waters, especially as many NoSQL platforms now support SQL or a subset thereof.
By the way, HN is open source, save for the anti-spam/anti-voting-ring stuff for the same reason.
Yes, but it's saying we are all rubes.
Or by the time this actually is possible, the patents will have expired.
Can someone explain this to those of use who have no clue what these calculations are good for? If this machine is faster to do something, what would you use that something for?
I don't get it .The "ugly " picture at the beginning is what you get in the end . No matter how many design steps you have.
It was as if Detroit was hit by a perfect storm of boom-town, bust-town with all the sexy variables thrown in.

What you described is a big part of it. And being mostly a one-industry town was another part, in an age of rapid globalization, and with strong unions making Detroit the more expensive place to produce.

Moreover, the core of Detroit was sliced up by an extremely extensive network of freeways, and in patterns where you get a fairly intense breakup of neighborhoods when you compare to other northern cities of the time who were building expressways through theirs. Detroit's postwar suburbs came calling for all of those automobile-owning middle-classers back in the D.

Also, most Detroit housing was quickly-built wooden construction, which are a lot more vulnerable to breaks in maintenance. While brick buildings can wait "on inventory" much longer, much of Detroit's wooden stock was expensive to maintain, and didn't last long waiting "on inventory" to be put into re-use. Michigan suffers dramatic freeze-thaw cycles, rain/snow/ice, and loose ground that can bust-up under-maintained buildings in no time.

Another, a perhaps seminal event, at least for people living in city, were the 1967 riots (which you could connect to all that redlining that went on). All through the central city. That was the "last straw" for most everyone who could leave and wanted to leave. Many people I know personally remember as a kid moving out not long after '67. And the race riots seemed to have made race relations worse in the region, in my unsubstantiated opinion.
For them individually, sure, being farther above the median is better.

Beyond that, I don't see how it's better in some general sense.
I think I would mistake it for a modded nerf gun on first sight. That gun looks almost dangerously close to a Nerf Maverick.
A lot of work is being put into such guns, but the technology applies to everything. I wonder what happens when functional designs for many things are available online, and anyone with a decent printer can make one for themselves. It doesn't need to be great, just useful enough.

A gun is a fairly complex device to make. If one can make that, most other basic devices become practical. A vacuum cleaner with hundreds of people contributing patches to the design, or forking it . . . How long before the design can compete with the better commercial designs. The gun crowd is doing it first, but hardly last.
When the company that bundles the Golf channel with the police drama controls the pipe that provides YouTube and Twitch they can punish you with data caps similar to what most cell providers do. Along with price increases, and then offer streaming services that do not count towards your data cap.
Webtesting.io: Smart Label Case StudyTest Automation 2
I propose a new category for HN --> "HN Onion: ". this one is the honorary founder and proof that art can only imitate life.
> But in 1984, something changed. The number of women in computer science flattened, and then plunged.

So did the number of men. Bachelor's degrees in CS peaked in the US with 27k men, 15k women in 1985-86. Then they dropped by 1993-94 to 17.5k men, 7k women, and then started going back up. By 2002-04, they both had reached new peaks of 44.5k men, 15.5k women.

There's something going on here that is more complicated than what is captured in that sex ratio graph.

Data from here: http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d12/tables/dt12_349.asp
Yep, imagine a phone UI you don't have to hold in front of you as you walk across the street, and never have to pull out of your pocket.

Then imagine it putting annotations into the real world - review scores of wines floating next to the bottles as you browse the wine aisle, or yelp stars floating next to the restaurants, GPS arrows floating in space, etc. etc.

All assuming they solve the ridiculously hard power, miniaturization, object recognition, latency, etc problems. Even if you have to be tethered to a PC, though, it has a lot of potentially revolutionary uses.
Flare pots used to light Pangnirtung, Nunavut runway after electrical outage
"There should always be something higher than your ideals and goals" is a contradiction; if there were something higher, it'd become your ideal or goal.

It's only a contradiction if you're aware of what that higher something is. Part of humility is realizing there are things you don't know. Your ideals and goals are imperfect, and will change over your lifetime. Why didn't you choose the "highest" ideals to begin with?
It used to be used only be those not in tech, but considering many major universities now have "cyber-security" degrees, I think it's mainstream now, for better or worse.
And yet it's not an official announcement, hasn't been discussed on any systemd related mailing lists, has no documentation and merely exists as a git repository.

It's almost as if the programmers were experimenting with ideas that are alternatives to kdbus.

I'm appalled. What were they thinking?
Honestly the EFF should pivot their marketing directly to this, rather than staying abstract and getting lost in the noise - "FBI Director James Comey wants to help authoritarian regimes spy on Americans simply to make his agency's job easier"
There you go: speech recognition solved
Cassandra actually has a strongly typed table schema for the most part if you are predominately using CQL. Also Hive requires a schema for querying data off HDFS.

There really isn't any such thing as SQL/NoSQL any more.
Quantum Computers Explained – Limits of Human Technology
I object to your dismissal of my industry as "configuring firewalls and installing AV". Certainly the security industry is not for everyone, but it does have a wide variety of interesting challenges ranging from highly theoretical to highly applied. My friends and coworkers in the security community do everything from mathematics to public policy, with no small amount of software engineering and systems design in between. Many governments and members of private industry also face a significant labor shortage in security right now, which provides a certain motivation for this agency to suggest it to people.

A lot of people in the security industry would not even consider "configuring firewalls and installing AV" to be security work, in most organizations that rests with the sysadmins and network engineers, who also have a varied and challenging field.
Fundamental quantum physics problem has been proved unsolvable
I agree with that is more or less what it is, but I'm not sure if I have a problem with it since it delivers the features people expect from a desktop OS. If you stop and think about the UNIX model, it really does not deliver everything that a desktop OS needs.

At the same time, there is plenty of room for traditional sysv or bsd style Linux distributions, particularly in the cloud/container space. It boggles the mind that Ubuntu is the most popular distribution in that area, considering how many of its features are utterly unused and unnecessary on a container.
Why as a response to this? As far as I can understand they're actually finally addressing some things that people have complained about. kdbus is removed from rawhide, bus1 is not under systemd umbrella as far as I can tell, it's not just a move of existing huge spec into kernelspace, and as the article says "BUS1 is being designed to be a low-level IPC technology that will also provide a high-level interface for applications."

Linux could definitely use some real, simple bus interface, so why would this be bad? (assuming it won't be merged into systemd in the future)
To me it's a simpler, binary question: You're either rely on your own labor for a living (in other words, you're N missed paychecks away from zero), or you don't rely on your own labor. Some people think if their number "N" is high enough they can call themselves "middle class" to distinguish themselves from poorer people, but it's a small distinction. At the end of the day, you either have to work for a living or you don't.

If you have to work for a living, your life is similar to everyone else who has to work for a living. Sure you may have more toys than others, but the things you think/worry about from day to day are similar.

If you are in the class that relies on their assets for a living, you think about entirely different things, and your world view and lifestyle are entirely different. If you ever get a chance to hang around people like this or talk with them, do it--it's eye opening. It's like having an alien encounter.
Why doesn't that scale? You might be underestimating Google's resources.
What about ease of setup? I'd take the NoSql setup any day. If in need of a super light, super quick db that is for a "non-enterprise" application, it's tough to beat NoSql...
Does anyone think Google will buy Magic Leap?
Clinton is supported by about 50% of Democrats. Trump is supported by about 25% of Republicans. That doesn't add up to anywhere close to "most Americans."
"Cyber" is used heavily in the industry, much to my chagrin. I wage a minor war of replacing "Cybersecurity" with "Information Security" anywhere I can.

I once kept a list of every cyber-* I heard at an industry conference with the idea of making Conference Cyberbingo. Notable entries included "cybertactics," "cyberstrategy," "cyberthreat".
Earthquake detection through computationally efficient similarity search [pdf]
There is actually one application that will delay, if not stop, the extinction of the PCs in the enterprise world: Excel.

Excel is by far the world's most popular business intelligence tool. Also, it is probably the world's most popular project management tool. In Japan (where I've done some business in), it also serves as everything from billing software to a mockup tool for digital products.

You might say that Macs have Excel too, but any business analyst types worth their salt know that the two Excels are vastly different.

Case in point: the very graph that shows the rise of Macs (quoted in the article and credited to IDC) seems to have been produced in Excel on Windows =)
Gun Deaths Map: How Many People Have Been Shot Near You?
This could also represent a compression of income-earning years. For instance, if more people spend their twenties earning little, but then their income jumps up a lot by the time they are 40, they may look middle-income for only a few years.

I'm not saying this is what's happening, but based on the numbers and definitions, it's possible.

In general, this kind of snapshot definition trying to capture the middle class is misleading. You should follow individuals over their life to see whether they are thriving or struggling.

This is not even a class mobility issue. It's more of a life cycle issue.
Or proof that classical computers and algorithms have decades of optimizations behind them and quantum computers and algorithms only have years.
There should be a national "voting day" holiday. Not having one is the equivalent of a poll tax for hourly wage workers.
Conversely, nobody would come to YouTube if it weren't for all the content on offer there. We all know about the costs, nobody is suggesting YouTube should hand over all revenue to the content provider.
Marissa Mayer Has a Year to Fulfill Yahoo’s Potential
> Everything they publish is for that purpose whether it exposes someone or not.

Obviously. It's okay to make money off of things that are helpful or at least harmless. Not okay to make money off of hurting innocent people.

> At least this is actual news if it's true and not mindless reprints of known information.

So what? Facts are not inherently virtuous. If I published a report on your intimate personal habits, would you feel better if everything in the report was true?
What Is the Secret to a Happy Collaboration?
Thanks, but what I had in mind was a chess game played on the internet, using for example, http://chessboardjs.com/. Can a recorded game communicate a message?
But at least he was asking for it this time, unlike Dorian Nakamato.
I'd bet Perl6 ecosystem will evolve very fast, I don't think you will need to wait several years
How to build your culture when employees work remotely
Now it would not surprise me much even if they go public (IPO), before releasing the actual product to the market. That would be a nice precedent for the tech startup industry.
How does a person become great at doing something difficult? (Brain surgery)
Have a look at systemd.conf presentations (and videos https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCvq_RgZp3kljp9X8Io9Z1DA). There are various goals there.

My interpretation would be: universal, global interfaces for all system things. Which is not a bad goal in itself.
I think you misunderstood what "more expressive" meant. It doesn't mean "more concise", though Perl can excel at that too. It means that expressions can be stated in more meaningful ways.

do_the_thing() if $is_ok;

warn_the_user() unless $is_ok;

The if/unless pair, along with the ability to put conditionals either before or after the statement to execute, is just one example of Perl's ability to be very readable.
Also in this article:

- 2 remotely-exploitable bugs in an unsafe-language implementation.
- 2 probably-inexploitable bugs in a JS-based server.

How many times will we have to repeat this exercise before people realize that, maybe, it's worth even a 50% performance hit if you can avoid exposing binaries like that to the internet?
The question you need to ask and I'll state it more clearly: do YOU need more?

Those companies probably aren't you, and can afford to experiment with commercial and open source options that may or may not fit their scale.

People who reject PostgreSQL based on scaling are 99.9% of the time wrong about how much they will end up scaling.
I agree, I would have never guess English wasn't your first language if you didn't mention it.
Why not go full infinite monkey and do:

cat /dev/random > /dev/eth0

Now you've simultaneously copyright infringed all the worlds works by sharing them on the internet, AND generated all other works, making it impossible for anyone else to ever not infringe on your work.

Isn't the world a wonderfully messy place?

</hyperbole>
Just in time! This will be nice reference. I recently started working on a new Scala driver that uses the v0_4 asynchronous protocol, built on top of Akka's IO module and Play's JSON module. I think I have the performance where I want it, but now I need to flesh out the DSL for proper ReQL support.
Settlement Reached in Happy Birthday Copyright Case – Likely to Be Public Domain
Because you get the benefits of those who do hack, simply by installing a recent stable version of OpenWRT. It's no harder than upgrading and configuring the vendor's firmware. If you tie yourself to vendor firmware, you're tying yourself to 5+ year old kernels and all the associated security and performance and stability problems and a much more restricted feature set.

The commercial vendors do an absolutely horrible job of supporting or maintaining their products and they tend to get a lot wrong with the initial software release. The OpenWRT community does a great job of putting out a solid product that works and has sensible defaults, but you can only get the full benefit of their work if you buy hardware that is open to their hacking.
That isn't a fair equivalence. A core costs about $100, while a D-Wave machine costs about $20 million.
2/3 and 2x actually
per-unit = per-film in this case.

You make a new film (which includes the entire range of things from Hollywood films, to pro-Youtubers to films you share with a couple of people).

For music you can

1) Get custom music written specifically for your film. This is usually expensive (unless you do it yourself, or know someone to do it for you) but has the advantage (if done well) of matching exactly what you want for your film

2) Find an existing piece of music and license it. This has variable costs (or maybe free), but won't be written specifically for your film and possibly will also be used elsewhere.

3) Use "template" music included in whatever software tool you are using.

AI-generated music has the advantage of (1) but the cost structure of (3).

It'll be a long time before it is useful for Hollywood films. But for Youtubers it is a completely different story.
I think Microsoft is at it's best when it thinks it's in second place.
Which is not a bad goal in itself.

It's worse than a bad goal. "Universal, global interfaces for all system things" is a goal that is cognitively meaningless.
Mostly-polite interaction on the content of ideas rather than personal attacks.

High signal-to-noise ratio.

A fair number of thought-provoking posts from a lot of different angles.
Maybe that's just me, but latest hiccups sometimes look suspiciously like an attempt to turn this trend around.

Nice nickname btw. Is it from Captain Grant's Children?
But is it inequality from one person to another, or just unequal life stages for the same individual?

You could imagine a college student from a middle-class background earning very little from 20-30, then being middle-income from 30-40, then upper-income from 40-65, then retired until 85.

Their independent life (20+) is 65 years, of which 30 are low-income, 10 middle-income, and 25 high income.
You won't get to make any reforms if you can't get anyone to invest you with the appropriate authority, though. I don't expect the agenda that politicians aim to implement to line up perfectly with the one they present to garner the votes of the public. Of course this means that I'm fundamentally accepting the idea that politicians are somewhat dishonest by not fully articulating their aims, but since there's a lot of empirical evidence that this is what actually happens I figure it's more effective to exploit rather than bemoan the fact.

I don't recall where I read it, but some years ago I came across the good advice that designing for the future is most easily done from being about 20 minutes ahead of the general public - less and your proposals don't look interesting enough, more and they're too hard for people to understand and you won't be able to get a job.
> So, before capitalism, people didn't build widgets?

Sure they did, at sustenance level. Or do you think that the noncapitalist economy of preindustrial Europe could produce enough widgets to sustain the modern standard of living?

>My point is that labour does not need capital to produce value (Although access to capital can increase the amount of value labour can produce.) Capital without labour is, quite obviously a lame duck.

This is looking more and more false by the day, to be honest. At this point, companies that employ hundreds of thousands of assembly line workers that produce "actual value" are less profitable than companies that automate that same assembly line using capital. On the flip side, the return to human capital in the form of educated workers has certainly increased.But I challenge you to build Google or Facebook without the venture CAPITALists who provided the money to purchase the infrastructure and hire the labour. The knowledge economy is great, but at some point the software still has to run on hardware purchased with, you guessed it, capital.

The point being that capital and labour are both necessary for a functioning economy, and concluding that labour is the only thing that matters and that anyone rich must be a rent-seeker leads you to becoming Venezuela or Argentina.
There is some precedent at Apple: WebKit is also developed in the open.
If we're honest with ourselves these discussions are never really about anything more than taste and have almost no technical foundation, but with that said I don't think the trailing conditional is more readable. In the rest of Perl the order in the text of an action normally indicates the sequence of the side effects, but here the first thing to be executed is after the first thing in the text.