skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My first jobs were retail. Everyone had weekend off except me. I hated it. Ten years in retail, and I dreamed of the day I would have a "career" and good pay and weekends off to enjoy it all.

Then I got a career. Now everywhere I go is packed with people and lines.

A trip to the grocery used to be on Wednesday around 2pm. I could fill a cart with anything I needed and get in and out in minutes. Now I go after work and wait in the "express" lane with my under 20 items for upwards of half an hour.

I used to go out on a Tuesday night, because that was my weekend. Two for Tuesday everywhere! Happy hour, all the time. Fast service. Hot food. Now, I have to make reservations in advance to wait 20 minutes for a waiter, because the restaurant is short staffed. God help you if you forget the reservations, or the place doesn't take them. You'll easily wait an hour for a table on a Friday night.

I take a weekend trip to a theme park and I have to park a mile away from the tram which is a mile or more away from the gates, where there are lines to get tickets and more lines to ride the rides. Just getting to the parking spot requires slow traffic. Lines of cars all doing the same thing.

I've considered asking if I could work weekends at my career job. It would be quiet on Saturday and Sunday. I could get a lot of work done without tickets and support calls coming in all day long. But then, who would handle the tickets and support calls if I'm not there?

What a pipe dream... To have a middle of the week "weekend" again would be so grand!
I really dont understand. Im deploy rails webapps all the time with pretty large postgres backends.

You could totally spin up multiple digital ocean instances to get a much cheaper infrastructure. I usually use one for load balancing, 2+ for running the app, and usually one for the backend postgres. You could also get away with using something other than digital ocean for the postgres.

But for 6000 users, depending on the app. I can probably get away with like $30 a month with this setup. Including the database.

Total setup time might be a day the first time. But it scales pretty well, costs significantly less.
What you're saying goes against a lot of research into how humans pick partners. [0][1] It's very complex and little of it is conscious.

[0]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_selection_in_humans

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assortative_mating#Assortative...
Humans in advanced production lines are "actuators". They are not there to think, but to replace an hypothetical machine that it's not possible to build yet. We have those magical machines in software, we call them compilers, interpreters, operative systems, file systems, etc.

I still have memories of my pass by Uni and how a Software Engineering professor constantly refered to programmers/developers as "coders" or "monkeys". He never stopped of repeating to us, day after day, that we shouldn't program ever. Our job as engineers was to plan, design, assess and manage those "monkeys".

More than 15 years of professional career later, my initial suspicion have been confirmed one time after another: those professors from Uni need a good deal of fresh air and to get in touch with the reality, instead of spend the day pontificating like celibate catholic priests about what you can and cannot do in your bedroom.

I know that many people here love Dijkstra and people like him, and even enjoy to feel their intellectual whipe in their mind, reading their essays and feeling bad about themselves as the essays repeat constantly how that everything is wrong and broken in the software profession.

For those people, I suggest to read "To Engineer is Human" by Petrosky and learn about how real engineers really work.
[Cloudless developer here]

Our backgrounds are more in machine learning and computer science than metereorology, so that aspect was new to us. As you mention we were mostly approaching the problem from having more data and tools like neural networks to throw at the problem.

Best,
Brad Neuberg
This is more about production lines vs one offs than engineering vs hacking.

Civil engineering is real engineering but jobs are usually unique. Problems in civil engineering projects are usually 'debugged' and 'patched' on site without going all the way back and revisiting the original design.
From the heroku costs, it looks like you are using one web dyno and 2 workers dyno. The database is on standard.0, which is the first base tier production level database they offer. There's no reason you couldn't host all these on one server on digital ocean. I don't really know what load your server is getting, but seeing as you only need one dyno, it's probably not much so one server should suffice.

---

# Pros of setting up your own host.

- Huge cost savings.

# Cons

- Heroku is way easier to scale, just drag the slider. Upgrading databases / redis is still a pain. I recommend going with RedisCloud instead of Heroku Redis. With database you have to do a migration and copy the data over.

- Having to deal with securing your own server and maintenance.

- High upfront cost due to setup

At the end of the day, it's about what your time is worth :). There's no right answer. I go with Heroku myself. The instant gratification is hard to beat.
How is that appeal to sovereignty not a charge you could level at any treaty? Isn't that more or less the definition of a treaty?
Still using MD5 summed SSL certificates?

What security issues does the latest version of Chrome have, incidentally?
Robots trained to cook using YouTube videos
Hierarchy != graph (although it can)

There are always better tools but that doesn't mean that it is "wrong". For example, S3 is generally a better tool than Postgres for storing files but there are several legitimate use cases where storing the files in the DB is better than S3.
[Cloudless developer here]

I believe the Landsat cover percent field is generated by humans and historical information, but I'm not completely sure.
I'm not disagreeing that in some cases it's true. But as someone who provides infrastructure for a great many businesses including startups, most everyone changes their tune when their server goes down.
Does anyone have solid figures regarding automobile lifespan and what variables affect it. I've always been told that mileage--not time--is the main variable.

I wonder if driver-less automobiles will really reduce the need for cars. Sure, you can have a car run 3 different commutes a day instead of 1 typically done now. But that will produce 3X the wear and tear on the car.

In New York, taxis are used for 3-5 years.

Plus, with driveless cars we may end up driving much more and further. Instead of a bus, I may just have a car drive me to work. In fact, Uber already lets me commute by car instead of public transit 4/5 days a week.

Uber has already caused me to drive more, not less. I wonder what the end result is.

But they are right to be worried. Any major change in technology brings in winners and losers.
Killbits is the one I've heard most commonly - as the talk says, most modern processors have a bunch because it's impossible to test every possible edge case a priori.

(Good recent examples include the AMD lockup bug that Matt Dillon found, and the nasty counter-example of the Intel Quark segfault bug, which can't be worked around so easily because the Quark doesn't have killbits. "Oops.")
Well yes, but of course "hotel close to a premier convention center, where most hotel bills are going to be paid by corporate, not individual" are going to be noticeably higher.
While I understand that it's mostly a question of aesthetics, I don't like this also because it might break the expected semantics of continue/break in such a loop. When I iterate over things more complex than a single variable where the conditions in a for() would become ugly, I tend to put the domain-specific "increment" into a small static function:

static int
next_pixel(*x, *y, width, height) {
(*x)++;
...
if (last pixel...)
return 0;
return 1;
}

/* later on... */

do {
/* do something with coordinates x, y */
} while (next_pixel(&x, &y, WIDTH, HEIGHT));

This is, of course, not only restricted to 2D arrays, but could cover walking of a tree or a filesystem...
Show HN: Giki, the __simple__ wiki
No, it just makes you a bit dumber so that you stop noticing the discomfort.

* Edit: that is not necessarily a bad thing.
Linknob Beta Test
Linknob is a social link sharing service built in Python. It started a few months ago as an experiment but now has grown to what it is today. Linknob needs beta testers and you can request an invite on the bottom of the main page. https://www.linknob.com
You mean "Native advertising": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_advertising

Do you really want to read half of an article just to find out you wasted your time because it turns into an sponsored article (advertisement of a product)? People hate blog spam here on HN. And often as well other forms of "native advertising" like the slightly yellow colored sponsored search results on Google or your example of sponsored feed posts on Facebook and Twitter. What you probably mean with "experience is the ad" is more what is called product placement in movies, games and theme park rides.
For many ingredients, you have the option of selecting raw or cooked. For popular items like potatoes there are dozens of options including fried, baked, salted, etc.

Try entering "potato fried" in the search box.
Your country happily joined ours to invade Iraq, which resulted in hundreds of thousands of civilian fatalities, but it's "Hollywood lobbying" that's the last straw for you?

Had the UK not signed on to the Bush administration's war, 2003 might have gone differently; Blair's alliance with Bush was a key "legitimizing" force.

My point, relevant to this thread, is that I don't think the UK is somehow coerced by US market power. The UK sees its best interests as mostly aligned with those of the US, which is not surprising when you compare the structure of our respective economies (for instance: London is the other Wall Street).

There are countries in the world with a reasonable claim against market-driven hegemony. The United Kingdom isn't one of them.
You can get free SSL from CloudFlare and connect it with the free SSL option at https://yourApp.herokuapp.com. (That's what I use at https://www.learneroo.com)
Canada and Denmark fight over uninhabited island by leaving bottles of alcohol
Deciding not to AB test because of this article would be a huge mistake.

Learning from mistakes made by others, and avoiding them is what I would suggest as the take away.

I work for a successful ($50M+ revenue) bootstrapped startup. And one of the reasons for the success is that AB testing became part of the company's culture, as soon as there was enough data coming in for the tests to become useful.

AB testing is so important that we have built our own in-house framework that automatically gives results for our company specific KPIs.
If you can sell it as faster than the alternatives, it makes sense to optimize.

But in the web-focused marketplace, adding 6 months to your launch calendar to get something fast to market may mean someone else's good-enough solution becomes the entrenched, de-facto standard that you are now fighting to prove you're superior enough to that it justifies people's time cost to move their data to your solution.

That's the risk tradeoff.
I said it on my comment already, OS and console vendors SDKs.

Contrary to common belief among current generation of young developers, C compilers did not always generated good code.

In the 8 and 16 bit days, proper games were done in Assembly. Any language you can think of, were the managed languages of the day.

At the end of the 16bit days, C had widespread enough outside UNIX, that OS vendors started adopting it. So SDKs were then in C.

So many were forced to use C, even if their code was mainly composed of C functions wrapping inline Assembly.

Similarly, around the PS3 time, SDKs started to move to C++. So many didn't had other options than moving along to C++ compilers. But, just like the Assembly generation, many still use mainly C code compiled by a C++ compiler.

So when an OS or console vendor says the language X is the platform's language, they either adopt it, even if only partially, or ignore the platform until they cannot avoid it anymore.
The API looks a lot like Netty
I don't understand this concern.

I walk into a jeweler's with a bit of 3 year old plastic and walk out with a six figure watch.

Is it really wise to trust this bit of plastic with the ability to authorize transactions in the tens of thousands of dollars?

Why is adding my fingerprint to the transaction worse?
Hey, author here. I'm surprised this got posted to HN. Anecdotally, when I first looked into ways to handle this, we tested recursive CTEs, and they didn't perform as well for our workload.

The indexed arrays work well for doing lots of queries of descendants, though are harder to manage.

One nice thing is that this approach worked well with ActiveRecord, while at the time CTE support was a bit awkward.

I'd love to see some people benchmark other approaches.
[Cloudless developer here]

It can certainly be done with hand rolled heuristics pipelines. However, one of the trends in machine learning is what is known as end to end learning - having your machine learning model automatically discover what these heuristics are going from raw input to final output. This approach now dominates in computer vision and speech understanding, replacing previously complicated hand rolled feature pipelines. It's worth attempting it on satelittle imagery as it seems the same approach should be valid there too.

Best,
Brad Neuberg
> Humans in advanced production lines are "actuators". They are not there to think, but to replace an hypothetical machine that it's not possible to build yet. We have those magical machines in software, we call them compilers, interpreters, operative systems, file systems, etc.

Unfortunately this view of people that work in manufacturing is pervasive, but it is also incredibly naive. That view is essentially the reason why American car companies (along with many other industries) got their clocks cleaned by the Japanese car companies over the last 3 decades. I've been involved in a lot of companies where we worked really hard to correct that mentality and the results were always obviously positive, but incredibly difficult to achieve. Engineers just love to look down their noses at everyone else.

There is nothing worse than some new kid that just graduated with a BS in engineering pretending like he's smarter than a guy that has been building the product we're designing for 30 years. Unfortunately some people never grow beyond the 'new kid' stage.
Engauge – convert plot images to numeric data
I think you're overstating it on mentioning alternatives. There's certainly factors that go into picking a particular provider that may justify the price or negate an alternative mentioned. So, I'm also against anyone mentioning them as a critique without context.

However, the flip side is that many services have alternatives that do about what they do. They might do so with a lower price or more capabilities. People mentioning those in comments of articles like this facilitates the discovery of those products for people not aware of them.

An example for me was arguing that much of what "cloud" stuff does can be done with dedicated hosting if it was setup correctly. That we just need a combo of the two to satisfy certain markets focused on security and dependability where sharing hardware isn't permitted but they want flexibility & low costs. Thanks to a commenter, I found out I had re-invented the concept of "bare metal hosting" and SoftLayer provided exactly what I was thinking about. I wouldn't have discovered that if everyone and I were just giving props to the OP or further elaborating their own use case.

So, I think exploring the reasons behind the choices of company in question and bringing up alternatives are beneficial. One facilitates understanding. One discovery.
Why There Are No Skyscrapers in the Middle of Manhattan (2012)
Some of the complaints seem reasonable. But how did he make the jump from the web-faxmachine to unix? did i miss something?

Web pages being saved as blobs and not providing raw data is not a problem technologists can fix unfortunately.
JavaScript is a brutally poor target for that application space though. It'd be better to target Unity and their web plugin; that's designed to be a game engine.
> If we can determine the outcome, why is it not a successful betting strategy?

Because the bet is for what happens today but what the bet changes is what happens the next year or the next generation. It's giving someone a car loan when you know they're likely to default and then pay pennies on the dollar in collections. They will then have paid half the market price for their car and you will have paid the other half. That is clearly not profitable for you so doing it on purpose is charity.

> For something to be charity, you need to determine that the receiver does not rightfully deserve it, and the giver does.

Gibberish. Charity means giving to the less fortunate. The robber barons were terrible but you can't arbitrarily redefine words in order to claim they didn't give to charity.

And you're missing the point. I don't care what you call it, if your goal is to have the government take from the rich and give to the poor then just do that. Collect simple taxes and then give the money away. Don't come up with weird complicated economically distorting contortions with large and hard to predict negative externalities.

> As what we do or don't do determine the outcome, any decision is a political choice. Saying that we're specifically trying to change something is no different from saying that we're specifically trying to keep something the same.

Of course it's a political choice, but that doesn't tell you anything about what should be done or not done. And saying you're specifically trying to change something tells people what you're specifically trying to change.

> Therefore, if we look at the racial or sexual makeup of a certain source of social power and we find a gross disparity, we want to balance it.

But your categories are arbitrary. Race is a thing idiots made up. It isn't a real thing, it's a social construct. What justifies groups to be defined as they are? Why don't we also care about the economic disparities (which actually exist) between Irish Americans and English Americans? Or short and tall? Ugly and pretty? Consider whether the reason is because those lines don't map with existing political coalitions.

Everyone who is not born rich is so because of some historical misfortune not shared by their rich-born contemporaries. That's the line that sums up all the other lines. If you want to help the poor, help the poor. If you find a specific instance of racial discrimination (as in causation not correlation) then stamp it out. But Mercedes is not doing something wrong or obligated to do something different just because there is a racial disparity in who can afford their cars.
It's different when you're used to it - a large amount of people here in London are from other countries/areas where this isn't prevalent and haven't worked out (or not really considered) the difference between the two.
Doesn't work when the person in question is a partner.
I started to read said article, and then realized that I normally am not inebriated as the article only tests for. I am not a binary sober/inebriated.

Again, it's "Alcohol(in some form) is Good" and then "Alcohol(in general) is bad." Just like Eggs. And just like Butter. All these scientists can test for is gross amounts, and not the small.
> "It's indeed a much more complex idea than most people shouting "meritocracy" around entertain, but it's a meaningless idea."

I agree, it's meaningless to follow a meritocracy if we can't explain what we mean by merit (even if it's different in every case, we should still be able to define it in a specific case).
TI stoped doing the processors used by some Nexus.

Google apparently didn't had any contract in place for forcing TI to keep doing the updates in case of such situation would occur.

Neither they thought it was worth to spend some Google resources doing the updates themselves.

So they went to third option, letting their Nexus customers that they aren't any special and better buy a new Nexus.
Spool – Spark creative videos among friends
Are you suggesting that "rolling with the punches" on a civil engineering project is happening without going through some sort of an engineering change order process?
Maybe if you hire them from Silicon Valley. There's plenty of skilled people in areas with low cost of living that can handle the job without 10x the pay of whoever. There should be at least one such person on the team anyway if the business is a web application. Plus, aren't there alternatives to services like Heroku these days that come as appliances or VM's with simple deployment? I'm seriously asking because I don't work on that stuff but swore such products pop up all the time.
Amazon has no idea how to run an app store
Yes, if the "driver" unware of sounds and lights, the driver should not be driving.
A song for those who have lost someone
I wasn't remotely surprised when the NSA's numerous electronic surveillance programs were made public. Doesn't mean I approve.
California's rules, regulations, tone and general outlook on most things irk me, and even more so SF as the epicenter of such things in California. So, no, I don't think one could pay me to live in San Francisco.

It doesn't need to be said here but I'll go ahead and say it anyway - Texas has no state income tax. Sure, they have no mass transit to speak of, but then again, in truth, they don't need it. (Outside of the philosophical view that all metropoli need mass transit, which I agree with.)

Edit: the fact that SF, a city with arguably a third the population of NYC has rents more than NYC is exactly the kind of "thing" that irks me about SF. It's the kind of social dysfunction that's intolerable - for me.

Another is the Bay Bridge. When standing in Marin north of the Golden Gate, there are a number of plaques describing the building of the GGB. A picturesque view with the BB in the background. Guess what? It turns out the GGB was built ahead of schedule and under budget - with no computers! I don't even need to go into the failings of the BB. You get my point.
Formal proof in software engineering has been a thing for a very long time, no need for cryptocurrency for that. Control systems for rockets, autonomous subways [1], and many life critical devices are built using such methodologies.

In a startup environment you are first and foremost trying to figure out what your customers want. Formal proof is not going to help solve this problem. I'm sure McLaren is also not spending days trying to understand why a panel is off by a few millimeters when they assemble a prototype.

[1] Paris subway (line 14) is controlled by a software written using a formal proof method called the B-Method: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B-Method
It is an amazing feat, but given the calibre of the avionics expertise that Lockheed had then, I would expect nothing less.