skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have a general question about database reliability that perhaps someone could help me look into.

I love these Jepsen posts, and Kyle Kingsbury's work is amazing.

It all shows that distributed systems are really complicated and difficult to get right. These posts on the open source ones are really great. But how do you go about evaluating a proprietary one?

Let's say my company is looking for a columnar store. We look at the evaluation of Cassandra and think, "Nope."

But then someone says, "Hey! Let's go with Redshift!" How do you know that's any better?

We all know that DB makers claim certain things. Why would Amazon be better at this tricky subject than the people behind ElasticSearch?

My question is that I would really like to know what people think about this?

Is the decision that it's better to go with the unreliable demon that you know? Or is it better to pass the responsibility off to a company like Amazon, hope for the best, and lawyer up if unexpected things happen?
Gah! I didn't even notice that. Sincere apologies to any Urbit staff for posting this. Sorry.
Black Flag’s Psychic Imprint
This might sound nuts, but if you're using LabVIEW to control National Instruments hardware, and you don't write bad code, you've got a surprisingly fast and powerful system available at your hands. You can measure, drive, control, whatever verb for whatever piece of equipment you're using, with surprising speed, accuracy, and reliability.

It's a pretty expensive stack for doing some pretty particular weird stuff but I kind of love using it. I would at least say that the prices for the hardware aren't too much higher than the competition, and the software side is way way better than the competition. I have never met a person not employed by NI who liked NI software AND equipment as much as I do. Honestly, I don't think I've ever talked to someone who used it the way I do, though...

Swear I wasn't paid to write this. Figured people might have written this stuff off a long time ago and I wanted to toss some respect its way.
Did anybody else read this? It's poorly written and repetitive, but it's a gripping tale... You gotta put up with non-professional writing when you want to hear real-life stories!

The ending was a major WTF moment for me. WTseriousF, really, after a DECADE of battle with the other company, the story ends like THAT and the author is pleased?

No way, I want to hear the other guy's side.
+1 for Alfred. Must have. A few workflows i use:

- FastDiff (quickly diff selected finder files)
- Hash - https://github.com/BigLuck/alfred2-hash
- Menu Bar Search - https://github.com/ctwise/alfred-workflows/tree/master/menu-...
- Recent Items - http://www.alfredforum.com/topic/713-recent-items-42-for-alf...
- Strip clipboard text formatting - https://github.com/notDavid/alfred-workflow-stripClipboardFo...
- Transmit - https://github.com/ramiroaraujo/alfred-transmit-workflow
- Tunnelblick
- Synonyms - https://github.com/notDavid/alfred-workflow-synonyms
Just like with your hypothetical political policy, sure, that hypothetical X,Y,Z situation could make sense somewhere. Except that the facts are different with this political issue and what is known about those who voted for it.

Russia Today is quoting an FT article that's behind a paywall saying the same thing, if you're still uncertain.
Would be interesting to hear from netflix employees on whether this hypothesis rings true
If the title hasn't been edited by the HN crew you can still delete the story.
That means an acceptance about the Python-3-not-been-adopted problem?
Ask HN: ML internships for undergrads in the valley?
I'm at Stanford, currently working toward a BS in CS. I'm just wondering if there are any places that are willing to give undergraduates internships in machine learning?
I try and find engineers whose job is to run that distributed datastore in production with a scale similar to my case. Chances are really high that even in a related IRC one can find someone for any database. And just ask for their experiences.
Does this mean states can refuse to accept federal laws?
WinPcap vs. NDIS 6.0 vs. WFP vs. Native
Good UX for power-user tools is different from good UX for casual-user tools.

Vim is highly usable as a power-user tool.
Its logical and has a few primitives that can easily be chained and built-up into larger features.
For OS X (or should i say macOS...), this is a nice list of apps: https://github.com/iCHAIT/awesome-osx
8 Hot Mess Habits That Are Totally Acceptable in Summer
What makes you think that disabling infrastructural targets will result in fewer casualties?

Power for heating, cooling and hospitals. Transit systems for food distribution. Computers for synchronising all of the above.

How many casualties do you think would result from shutting down infrastructure in NYC in mid winter?

Even evacuation causes casualties. I was reading an assessment of the Fukushima evacuation that suggested fewer casualties would have resulted from just staying there.
Yes, until it takes an attached image and replaces it with an image from a previous email....
This wants me to login with twitter. facebook or google.

I'm not sure if this is intended to be the point or not.

Particularly given the article the web link finds:
http://www.sanspoint.com/archives/2016/06/23/the-unbearable-...

If it was intended, perhaps some reference to what is going on would be appropriate?
Get a load of this fraud.
The 14" Thinkpads (T41?) sound like a fit, as well as the 15" MacBook Pros (though those may be too expensive). Also, you could look into the Dell XPS 15, or the Asus Zenbook UX501.
Here’s What Happens When You Wear a Low-Cut Top in Your Job Application Photo
One of our goals is to be able to provide flat, predictable pricing to developers so it's extremely easy for them to integrate.

For now, the $.50 flat pricing has been working well, because most phone calls are pretty limited in length/scope. If we notice a larger variance in the time of our phone calls, though, we might slightly change the pricing scheme.
The problem is that the other things shouldn't be measured as a percentage. If someone makes 150k and spends 70k of that on housing, they still have 80k left for other expenses. If someone is making 30k and puts 15k towards housing they only have 15k left for other expenses. So the person making 150k has 5 times as much left for other expenses.
It may be worth reading "The Chief", a bio of William Randolph Hearst then. Follow that with outright political slander in newspapers in the 19th Century.

Even Walter Cronkite might oughta not said what he did w.r.t. Vietnam. More time to pull out would have saved lives, and many, many people have felt very badly about that. That one is complicated.

No doubt that the sheer quantity of "news" has dragged more muck off the bottom of the barrel, but the good old days weren't so good.
Indeed. There are other challenges as well. I think Caltrain electrification will happen, but the 2020 timeline is optimistic.
Convictions won't solve the problems that generics could...
Most likely; she also likely made a plausible argument for her position too, even though she knew said argument was flawed.
No delete link, unfortunately.
This seems overly pedantic. In my mind "incompressible" does not mean "there are absolutely zero situations in which the output could be shorter than the input." There will always be (compression scheme, input) combinations that produce smaller outputs. The qualifying criteria is "does expected input data typically compress?"

For a reasonable definition of incompressible, properly encrypted data is it.
Ask HN: Where to find great name for my app? (willing to pay)
I need a good name for an app I'm working on but so far I couldn't come up with any good names myself.

I'm thinking of paying somebody to come up with a list of names that I can pick from.

Any suggestions of services that would offer something like this? I was thinking of 99 designs, not sure if they have that offering.
Duplicate: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11997773
I was a Brief (by Underware) user and back in 93 when I started using Windows for Workgroups I found Slickedit which has a Brief emulation mode. I'm still using it and still using all the brief key bindings

(can't say it's totally stable though)
> Why would humans, the top group-oriented predator, run from a lion?

I'd sure run from a lion if it was coming at me.
"Everything" really is that simple. Point it at some folders and go.
All right, I'm showing my age here, I guess, but when did job application photo become a thing?
Latin: "Mens sana in corpore sano" (healthy mind in a healthy body).
VLC. There have been so many times I thought "man it would be great if there were this crazy hypothetical feature in my media player" only to find out it's like a stable long-established feature that's a keypress away from activation after a quick google search or glance at a dropdown menu.
Disagree. Transistor, car, heck even the iPhone (and I say this as a massive hater against apple) are not describable by this. Neither is anything which 1) actually solves a problem 2) in a legal way (Airbnb is pushing legislation, Uber is breaking it, and it appears lending club simply commited fraud)
Ansible baby steps
>> The fighter jet AI technique is hard-coded to a very specific problem domain

So are machine learning models, ultimately. Although the algorithms that build the models have more general application, once you train a model on a certain set of data, that model can only ever be used in the domain circumscribed by the data. They're one-trick ponies, yes?

>> we can eventually build generically trainable machines that can learn to do a variety of tasks, without having to code them from scratch every time.

We would however have to train them from scratch every time, for each separate task, and each time we'd need terabytes of data and megawatts of power.
I've interviewed at Netflix twice now and have been turned down both times. Both times, not for technical reasons, for cultural reasons.

The first time they told me a vague I didn't fit their "culture deck" and the second time they said I was a "brilliant jerk", despite being recruited to join by an old co-worker that liked working with me. The kinds of cultures are just excuses at the end of the day when someone on the team doesn't like you.

Both times, I wasn't impressed with their products and the teams building them or what they had been able to accomplish. I don't buy the fact they hire top of market, they just pay well. The reality is you get the people who are available, at the time you want to hire. Just because you pay a bunch of mediocre people well doesn't mean you're going to get a great product.

And it shows. Netflix hasn't been innovating recently. They are HBO, delivered over the Internet.
The original popcorntime.io client was incredible. I've never seen design like that. It worked so unbelievably well, it made me want to watch things just to use it.

It has since degraded since other developers took over with various forks.
these monthly box things are great for xmas gifts, but get old fast
TurboTax. The fact that I actually look forward to doing my taxes is just....hard to believe.
> I can't control when or where they transmit.

You can't actually control which frequencies your neighbors transmit on either. The best you can do is observe which frequencies are the most crowded, and avoid them.

But essentially this is what happens in the time dimension as well. Wi-Fi devices share a the channel across time using a technique called Carrier Sense Multiple Access (CSMA). When a device has something to send, it observes the channel to see if anybody else is transmitting, and if not, it waits a short random back-off time and then transmits. All devices are doing this, and since the back-off time is randomized, it's more or less fair.
We tested this in science class -- a balloon sized quantity of hydrogen makes a very forceful explosion. Safe enough to be used in the middle of a classroom but not something you'd want small children carrying around.
Glad to see someone else who hates smoothscroll. I absolutely despise smooth scroll - especially since it is a browser option FFS. If I wanted it, I'd enable the option. I don't want it - which is why I disabled the option.

As a developer, a sincere "Fuck you" to every developer who adds this to their sites. I shouldn't need to add this to my 3rd party filters:

!Disable Smoothscroll
*/smoothscroll.js

ps: I find the above rule blocks maybe 80% of all smoothscrolling on websites, thankfully.

E:

Unfortunately not this site as it uses a Jquery plugin called niceScroll() which is anything but...Running this in the console will remove it.

jQuery('html').getNiceScroll().remove()
There are plenty of free hotspots in my city that are 20+ Mbps. It probably has more to do with the cost of Internet access in your area than the Wi-Fi connections themselves.
In most states the agreement must be reasonable, and there is a lot of variation in how that is interpreted.
Am I the only one skeptical in thinking that they didn't really sell 200 stars worth 200 USD each and they are making this up?
Or bands of 250 if you classify things a different way. It offers both options.
Seconding Moom.
+1

I use CTRL CTRL, and I have my command and control keys switched, so it's really CMD CMD on the left corner of my keyboard, which is very convenient, but caps lock is a great idea also.
I think it's more that - for obscure internal and path-dependent reasons - people divide into cohorts who are lukewarm about static typing and cohorts who are quite for it.

His bit about it is purest hyperbole - "those who oppose static typing are like unto AGW deniers." As they say in Haskell circles - it's all fun and games until you invoke the I/O monad...
Sorry, something went wrong within Manage Queue Jobs in Project Server 2016
> Maybe this really can be the year of the 3rd party.

Regardless of whether you support Hillary or not (or for that matter Trump or not), it will never be the year of the 3rd party due to the US (and UK's) use of First-past-the-post electoral system [1]. The Spoiler Vote [2] is a real thing.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plurality_voting_system
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoiler_effect
If you're a felon, then you're essentially prevented from earning a living.
So, you spent 200 USD or something you don't understand? What's the gigantic return here?
By no means. But then, I was just out for a stroll.
You can email hn@ycombinator.com, then. Speaking from my experience, dang does a great job responding to user email.

Edit: It looks like the story has been [flagged].
What is your basis for believing that federal courts would agree?
But didn't this experiment already happen during Netflix's self inflicted "death spiral", ala Qwikster? Did all of the top employees leave at that point?

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/27/business/netflix-looks-bac...
Or for folks like me: I just want to play my video files no fuss, no muss. Something other major media players seem to have more trouble with than they should. But not VLC! 100% of the time it works every time!
It's nice for some anonymous internet person to say "Non compete clause? just don't sign them" but if you are ever lucky enough to get high up in a company this often just sometimes isn't an option.

So if you do have to sign one then the below is the advice I've been given by the employment lawyer's I've spoken to over the years.

1) make sure it says you are compensated for the time you can't work. ie if it says you cant' work for a competitor for a year then you should be getting a salary for the same duration. Some companies will try to give you a signing bonus and include language that the signing bonus is consideration for you waiving this compensation. I mean it's nice to get $50,000 in stock vested over 3 years just for signing, but it won't feel that way if your former employer also views this as compensation for you not working for a year.

I've had 3 or 4 employment lawyers go over this with me, both as an employee and as an employer and they've all repeated this, if the company doesn't' pay your salary during the non compete period then you just cant' sign it. Now they also stressed that this means the non compete is probably not enforceable but that won't be much consolation if they drag you to court.

2) Be very clear as to what "salary" means. So if you are a Google engineer and you have a salary of say $125,000 and then a bonus of say $100,000 worth of restricted shares vesting over 3 years and maybe a signing bonus of $50,000 worth of shares vesting over 3 years, you might brag that you just got paid $275,000, but the company will probably argue that they only need to pay you the pro rated amount of your salary over the waiting period.

Finance especially gets burned by this, as small salary and huge bonuses are how many hedge funds compensate their key employees, also known as the "you eat what you kill" compensation package.

3) Be very wary of telling your former employer of where you are going to work. There just is no real upside to it.

I've also been told not to hire former employee's in the first year you leave for a competitor. It's one thing for a company to loose you, but if you leave and take an entire team with you then even though you've probably done nothing wrong, it own't be very comforting when you are out of pocket $10,000's of dollars in lawyer fees and stress.

As always, IANAL, I've just happen to work in the most incestuous industry around, finance, and I've seen and heard too many horror stories of people leaving for another firm and bringing their team with them and then being in court for years.
I think he traditionally did OSS datastores because he didn't want to buy licenses for a side-project, but Jepsen uses a black box method--it creates special clients and introduces network partitions. So for a proprietary database that you host, you could try to figure out how to write Jepsen tests. That won't help for services, though.
You're absolutely not the only one.

And, now the number sold is up to 340...

Edit: Make that 361 (2 min later).

Edit: Make that 421 (9 min later).

Edit: Make that 471 (11 min later)
Perhaps the main thing such a society could do is maintain a website with data about employers that have non-compete clauses in their employment contracts, and the extent to which they try to enforce them (like Chilling Effects, but for employers).

If prospective hires for such companies knew that they would be seen as damaged goods on the employment market as a result of working for a certain company, it would influence their choice of employers, especially in the common scenario of having a few offers to choose between and not having much else to separate them with.
I wish iOS autolayout wasn't n^2. You have to realize these algorithms have very small time budgets and you can start seeing stutters when you use them in things like UICollectionViews and UITableViews and other scrolling / gesture contexts. Performance is still a very real thing for these things.

Devices you support will also last 5+ years and I don't think we will see the same power/performance ratio gains in mobile in the next 5 years like we have in the last 5 years. I bought an iPad Mini 4 recently and I see general stuttering in the OS programs alone and it's the most recent iPad Mini you can buy!

You can have something pretty close to constraint based layouts in procedural layouts in something like "snap view 1 bottom to view 2 top", etc.
The main page for this project is at http://stupidmessy.net/
"Datalife streams", Stars and planets...
This sounds more like Scientology than a product...
I really don't understand all these things about "building a new internet", especially when they are building it on top of the existing one.
If the existing internet is so broken what the hell would Urbit do to fix it?
Most of the innovation there was in the cell phone[1]. You've been able to order a car by phone in major metros for longer than those have been around. In fact, Uber started off as an app for using those very services.

Props to Uber for execution, but all the pieces were there.

[1]-edit: some in the smartphone, but most in the old "makes calls" cell phones
Also look at Clojure's protocols: http://clojure.org/reference/protocols

The "objects" you pass around are just data structures (maps) and protocols only purpose is enforce you call legal functions on those, but without mixing the two concepts (like Python/Ruby, where each instance is a data structure that contains both private properties and pointers to method objects, and can even modify those on-the-fly). If you want to extend at 3rd party interface at runtime you still can, but it's at the protocol level rather than instance level - better than monkeypatching.

Also, works better to implement the Component-Entity-System pattern on dynamic languages, because your objects are simpler data structures, without all the memory overhead.

I believe this (defining interfaces and passing data structures around) is "OO done right" - OO is a powerful idea but it seems we're only now figuring out how to implement it.
Difference between wanting to and needing to.
Coding Is Not a Life Skill
Maybe Typescript? (On Node.js obviously for server side).
>> Comparing comments here to the comments on, say, first Alpha Go post, reveals the amazing amount of AI bias on this website.

I think it's because only recently has AI been in the news again and it's been the news thanks to machine learning and neural networks in particular (and more specifically, deep learning). The last time there was a big todo about AI was in the '90s and most people writing here were probably not old enough to figure out what the hell was up back then.

Er, I'm not dating myself here. I know about those things out of happy accident (maybe a story for another time). Most people who graduated from CS in the last five or six years will not have heard anything about expert systems and GOFAI, except that it failed etc, if that.

Then along comes Google and promises it can make your phone talk to you. People are intrigued.

But of course, those who don't know their history are doomed to repeat it.
In IPv4 terms, imagine owning a class B block of addresses.
> Specifically, I suppose, the two versions work the same when one is concerned with only the most fundamental essence of the natural numbers, as captured by the Peano axioms.

I find this statement interesting and plausible, but difficult to formalise. The Peano axioms explicitly name the least element of the natural numbers, so in some sense they foreground, rather than effacing, the issue of whether it is 0 or 1; but, on the other hand, I suppose that one could argue that an argument using "only the most fundamental essence of the natural numbers" is one that, as it were, is allowed only to use a constant naming the least element, without pre-supposing any idea of what that name 'means' in any external axiomatic or intuitive sense.
I think hills are well covered - if you have to move the same amount of mass up either way, it doesn't much matter where said mass is on the bike.

Accelerating, as the article mentions, is the one place that their theory holds. My question was why that's considered more important than holding speed (which heavier wheels makes easier) or the extra bearing friction.
Doesn't matter what filetype it is...it just runs them all, instantly, like magic. I have never missed Windows Media Player for even a moment.
I highlighted several months that their behavior strongly signaled cooked books but I didn't think it would reveal this fast!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11660112
The philosopher, Bertrand Russel was also known to work like this. He would produce a perfectly structured, completed work on the first draft.
*** MASSACHUSETTS TECHIES: THIS IS ABOUT YOU ***

* Read the article
* Contact your State Representative [1] and urge
them to support the bill [2]

[1] https://malegislature.gov/People/Search
[2] I think this is the bill text: https://malegislature.gov/Bills/189/House/H4434