skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The article makes a good point that if you want ordering by a computed 'ranking' to be performant, your database will need to store and index that value.

But then it takes another leap and says that this means your database should actually compute that value. I don't see why that's necessary, and it would bring with it all sorts of issues that other people have mentioned (maintainability, scaling, testing, coupling).

It seems you could equally solve the problem by adding an additional indexed 'ranking' column, and computing and storing the value at the same time you insert the row [1]. It seems that's essentially what Postgres would do anyway.

Also, I'd note that the algorithm here is very simplistic, and even so, the author had to make a functional change in order to get it to be performant in Postgres. You can't just substitute an ID for a timestamp, just because both are monotonically increasing. The initial Ruby version of this algorithm treats a given 'popularity' as a fixed jump in some amount of time (e.g. 3 hours). The Postgres version treats it as a fixed jump in ranking (e.g. 3 ranks). Those are not equivalent.

[1] This does assume that you can control all the database manipulation from a centralized place.
What you say sounds intriguing. Do you have any examples of the wide gap between high-value content vs. low-value mentioned in 3? Any pointers to high-value content since you mention there is much?
There's a bit of a difference between discriminating against a human on the basis of a immutable aspect of their person and one media business refusing to associate with another media business on the basis of their content.

I'll admit, your solution sounds nice, but how do you account for regions where the market supports discriminatory businesses and ostracizes marginal groups?
> the Washington Post's article on PropOrNot didn't seem very rigorous

The article was based on many sources, despite the Intercept's characterization of it. PropOrNot is just one of many:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13045686
If you subscribe to the notion that a gift should be something that will bring the recipient joy, but that the recipient wouldn't buy for themselves, I'd say VR headsets, drones, and 3D printers.

If it's an Apple household with a pair of speakers somewhere, an Airplay target (Raspberry Pi or otherwise) is also pretty nice.
Set up the POS machines to refuse to process purchases using certain credit card numbers, or based on the name associated with the card, I'm guessing.
They don't have to see their vein. Sometimes they feel it or they already know what spot to go for.
Except of course that Clinton Foundation is highly rated by charity monitors and Trump ADMITED on his tax return that Trump Foundation violated federal law. So which reality are you in?
Curious as to how much faster this makes standard workflows where you are re-compiling only a few files and the linker is typically the bottleneck.
I use incredibuild in my day-job it's a great help when doing full re-compiles or changing a pervasive header but offers no help on smaller builds where it doesn't parallelize the link. Zappcc doesn't look to do anything with the linker either.
I am the original author, and I assure you I know the difference between Ruby and Rails. This was written over 3 years ago, and while I don't remember all of the details, I don't believe conflating Ruby level code with Rails specific code corrupts the article.
That's exactly what we did. We return an anonymous table of records in Postgres that are then passed to ruby to render an excel file. The SQL query takes 27s on average. The ruby view generation is fast as well but I haven't profiled that part of the report.
Postcards. That describes what you mean.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13037448 and marked it off-topic.
This reminds me of the irony of people who discredit bitcoin because "it's digital fairy money" when only 8% of the world's currency is physical.

The entire concept of fiat currency is abstraction. It requires layers of illusion to maintain its integrity. At it's core, those in charge of the ledger can change where money goes and who has it.
This is at least complicated somewhat by PCI compliance. Are you allowed to store irrecoverable hashes of card numbers?
The new MacBook Pro is kind of great for hackers
This article from The Intercept is even more misleading than the article it criticizes. The Intercept has been pretty lax editorially in the short time it has been running. https://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/feb/02/the-intercept-...
The lament that software engineering is not real engineering because we eschew formal methods is one I've heard a lot (not from you), but in those fields testing and failure are very, very expensive.

In places where failures are expensive, such as high volume websites, we use techniques such as A/B testing to limit the scope of expense of failures and detect them earlier.

In cases where failure is truly unacceptable we take more drastic measures such as formal verification, restricting programmer freedom through coding standards, etc.

Even he dramatic story about having a wrong number read out on NPR you'll notice she is the one punishing herself; no-one really admonishes her, there are no negative repercussions. As economic pressures have increased in journalism, this attitude that everything must be fact checked has fallen by the wayside since it is not economically viable any more. This economic pressure coincides with mass adoption of the internet though, and the real cause may not just be their declining ad revenue, but the increased competition between news outlets to be first, since that's what drives clicks.

The saying that the perfect is the enemy of the good exists for a reason.
I had to work on/with a rather large backend which used this approach. Most of the logic was in stored procedures, with python/sqlalchemy used as a glue and to process requests.

It was absolutely horrible to develop and a nightmare to test.

For one, there's nothing approaching ActiveRecord migrations in stability and ease of use, so schema changes on dev/test/deploy were a huge pain. Then, you can't really work in normal "auto-run tests on save" mode as you would with saner frameworks, syncing source from git to postgres is needed (the principal dev altogether preferred to edit directly in pgadmin and then sync). Then, SQL tends to be a lot harder to read than python/ruby, especially so if not well documented and with many join tables. And finally, you can't scale out the heavy stuff, you are limited by your master instance basically. 2/5, would not recommend.
Kola Superdeep Borehole – Wikipedia
If your using Java, there's a popular apache http framework[0] that automatically retries a failed request unless you specifically instruct it not to.

That bit us in the A$$ with double payments a few times.

0- https://hc.apache.org/httpcomponents-client-ga/httpclient/ap...
It's bizarre, but it's also typical for press releases from large organizations.
Probably don't want a job that objects to unit tests, if you can avoid it.
For many of them it's due to direct experience with the arbitrary and capricious nature of the Castro regime:

"... all three of us — papi, mami and me — got visas to leave. It took five years to get those visas and my folks were immediately fired from their jobs when they applied.

"On that July 1967 day when we were scheduled to go, the three of us made it to the boarding ladder of the Eastern Airlines Freedom Flight bound for America. But a Castro soldier stopped us before we boarded and demanded to see the family’s papers. I remember this as if it was yesterday. That bearded guerrilla in green and carrying a rifle confirmed all three of us were cleared to leave Cuba.

"But, he added, that only two of us could leave because that’s what he personally was deciding. He then told my father to pick who goes and who stays. What ensued next is hazy to me. I know there were tears. I know there was drama. But suffice to say only my mother and I got on that plane.

"My dad stayed behind, and for three years he was unable to reunite with us. Other family members never were able to reunite with us."

Armando Salguero, Miami Herald sportswriter, in:
http://www.miamiherald.com/sports/spt-columns-blogs/armando-...
Most of the articles I've read about this refer to a "tipping point": that we're crossing some line where the behavior of the system will change dramatically. But what are the actual consequences of this? Can anyone on HN explain the real-world effects that this might have, apart from slightly higher sea levels?

I tried searching, but the fluff to substance ratio is so high out there.
That's pretty slick! I still haven't found an SR tool that I can stand to work with, but that's clean enough it might do the trick.
Google is active with ARM and (Open)POWER. ARM remains a threat to the lower end, POWER challenges fat Xeons. Potentially AMD, depending on how their current development efforts are going.

Buying Intel is easier, so Intel gets to guess how far they can go before one of their large customers decides that the risk of going with one of those alternatives is worth it (demonstrating to the world that Intel isn't the only viable option in the process, which might at the end be the bigger damage for Intel)
Start with Security: Lessons Learned from FTC Cases [pdf]
Yes, and if your environment can be configured with two or three monitors, a portrait orientation can be great. With just a single monitor, 1440x2560 would probably seem too narrow. Obviously individual tastes will vary.

If your environment is limited to a single monitor, 3:2 is very nice and 16:10 is also quite good.
> I guess the people massacred at that MSF hospital were terrorists, too.

That wasn't a drone strike. That was an accidental attack by an AC-130 gunship.

I'm sure folks in Yemen or Afghanistan are a political threat to Obama. Right.
I recently got a Benq bl3201pt (32" 4K IPS) and I've been very happy with it. It's great for having a browser w/dev tools open on half the screen and Atom on the other half. The MiniDP, DP, and multiple HDMI connections work well between my desktop and MBP. It works like a professional monitor should, with no fuss. I particularly like the detachable hockey puck remote.

At work I have 2 Asus PA328Qs. It's hit-and-miss plugging them in over MiniDP into my rMBP. They are slow to power up, and I once set the DisplayPort version to 1.1 instead of 1.2 via the menus. The buttons on the back aren't super responsive, and the OSD software seems very undercooked. It took me a good 10 minutes to get the DisplayPort version back to 1.2 because it kept saying "no input" and would turn off. There's a tiny joystick to navigate the menus and the way to toggle between menus isn't obvious (click the joystick to the right when it looks like you can only move up and down, which completely changes the menu options). Overall this monitor is incredibly frustrating for me, and when I get home and plug into the Benq, I'm saddened that $WORK spent a similar amount on the inferior Asus. It's actually massively lowered my opinion of Asus in general, and raised my opinion of Benq, which I had previously thought of as a kind of budget brand, comparable to maybe AOC. I'm now looking for a gaming monitor, and while Asus has some compelling g-sync options, Benq is used in actual e-sports competitions and gets great reviews for that use-case.

TL;DR try a monitor in a store first and try to make sure it doesn't annoy you before making a significant investment in one. I also looked at OLED laptops (mostly the Alienware 13 r3) and ended up getting a used XPS 15 9550 with a maxed out CPU and the 4K IGZO display.

Edit: make sure you understand the issues with OLED burn-in and fading before buying. Especially a laptop. That's why I didn't ultimately get one.
I've always thought that if you learn one programming language, you can probably pick up any other language quite easily, except for APL/J/K.
> report

Always pure SQL, at least as you're using a DBMS. Never anything else.

SQL can stretch to full Turing completeness, so it'll always be good enough for that. And between JSON support and PLPGSQL most everything can be done in Postgres.
I'm building a robot. Since I've never actually done any hardware work, I'm finding it a mind-expanding experience.
Again, Castro went about killing or jailing all those who opposed him. My original statement was that no US president has done so.
> This allows for version control to track the changes of the sql function.

You... realize you could just put the SQL itself in git, right? Not saying there aren't potential benefits, but "it can go in version control" isn't one of them.
And if we're talking about the other version of the acronym, then Perl is ideal for webservices and related technologies. Listing rubbish is what a lot of the modern web seems all about.
Surely if it's Rails then it must also, by definition, be Ruby?
Hacker News is not the place for fighting political battles, which this account has been doing much of. We have to ban accounts that post primarily this way, so please stop.
With the correct abstractions, you can definitely run tests on save.

SQL is rather readable these days. It's obviously not as easy to read as ruby or python and is slightly more verbose, but it is certainly readable.

Mileage will vary of course. There are cost/benefit trade offs with every architectural decision made.
>Treating Amazon like a mail-in library for books, tools, and other products is the easiest way.

Isn't that part of their business? I order stuff to try it out and if it turns out it sucks, I send it back. Isn't that the point of the online store to trump the disadvantage that I cannot try things out without buying them first?

EDIT: It turns out you have to do quite some abuse there and they even send you warning emails. So it won't just happen out of the blue.

EDIT2: What's with the downvotes? Here I was thinking this community is better than Reddit for certain things, but I guess I was wrong.
Basic project template for compiling SDL2 projects with related libraries and Lua in C++ on Windows: https://bitbucket.org/kennethrapp/sdl_mingw32

It's a batch file that creates project directories, calls a makefile that builds the thing, and then copies the dlls to the build path. Ugly, and probably wrong in any number of ways I'm unaware of, but it works. Once i'm happy with this, I'm planning to get some basic games cloned in C++ and Unity, using it to generate projects.

Also cloning HN in Hack, but don't expect to see that anytime soon, since I can't find anywhere to host it.
Interesting. Is it international or US only?

Would it be easier to have this as a chart on the wall?
Really? There have been free and fair elections in Cuba, where anyone can start up a political party, campaign for their positions without any fear whatsoever of government retaliation, and successfully get elected to office, even if they have anti-Communist views? Wow, I hadn't heard about this. You seem to be pretty confident about stating it, though, so perhaps you can go into some detail about these elections.

I'm also wondering why so many people were so desperate to leave Cuba in rickety rafts even though they could have just voted out the Castros instead in one of these elections you mention, but I'm sure you can explain that too.
A Lua based Digital Signage tool (written in C/Lua) for the Raspberry Pi. And a complete SaaS platform (mostly written in Python) around that tool, so you don't have to understand neither of them and can get everything up and running in 5 minutes. It's commercially used and growing. And a lot of fun. https://info-beamer.com/pi (the tool/standalone program) and https://info-beamer.com/hosted (the SaaS). Feedback welcome!
I believe the tipping point usually refers to the release of Methane trapped in permafrost? Meaning the permafrost melts, releasing methane, and thus triggering a runaway greenhouse effect. Something like Venus.
I worked on software like this. You wouldn't believe how many variations of a typo can escape parsing.
Two games that would delight any programmer from Zachtronics:

TIS-100 http://store.steampowered.com/app/370360/
SHENZHEN I/O http://store.steampowered.com/app/504210/

TIS-100 is not very long, but then it's not very expensive.
We detached this flagged subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13042522.
Do you happen to remember in what time frame the hundreds of orders happened?
Greenwald's reporting has always been incredibly inept (to this day, he won't admit how wrong he was about PRISM). The culture of making wild accusations and not interviewing subjects of a story to verify the facts continues to pervade the organization.
its often much easier to scale via app "farms" then to scale the db backend. Sometimes db procedures can lower the total db load, but be careful letting the db do too much work.
Absolutely! We use rails. I just mentioned doing it in that method as opposed to throwing it in a migration. That migration shouldn't change in version control. We wanted a history of the changes and an easy way to access it in migrations.

Sorry for not explaining that fully.
> The entire concept of fiat currency is abstraction

Then why does the US still maintain over 8000 tons of gold at Fort Knox and elsewhere, 45 years after closing the gold window?

Of course even before 1971 paper currency was an abstraction as well - it was a piece of paper to get a commodity, not the commodity itself.
Oh, well that's not really what "Doctor of Philosophy" means. It comes from the same Greek word, which means "love of wisdom", but it's unrelated the field of philosophy.

I also think the philosophy of computer science is very interesting, though. I just saw that Oxford offers a course that combines computer science and philosophy: https://www.ox.ac.uk/admissions/undergraduate/courses-listin...
It's going to be yuge.
>> * Reduced sex drive * Life just seems more "flat" I don't laugh as much, get as giddy. My partner described me as seeming "disconnected".

Propranolol - like other drugs - changes your personality and makes an other person out of you. Replacing you through "Propranolol you" is not a real solution.
re: media keys not working, do you have Karabiner/Karabiner-Elements running? if so you'll need to disable it for the Touch Bar device in the settings
Hmm, I'm banned from PreCheck for 24 more months. Maybe I could help get her some Amazon items and she could help me with my TSA status?
I take issue with the standard of repeating Russian funded organizations talking points as being labeled as propaganda. If that's the case, then aren't American news outlets that push US government talking points also propaganda? Why only blacklist one?
Well, there you go. New IE, same as the old IE. Glad I don't have any of that anymore - reading the article, I felt the dread of "but this browser has a special relationship with the OS" wash over me again. I prefer my applications isolated, thank you very much.

(Yes, I know it's not-IE-anymore-nooosir. What's in a name?)
Everyone's a critic, don't let it get to you.
> But comparing the US and USSR isn’t nearly as easy. Both were (and are) horrible to non-citizen.

Go ahead and compare how the United States treated the citizens of, say, France, with how the USSR treated the citizens of, oh, say, Czechoslovakia. We'll wait.

> And while the US was mostly okay to the white citizen, minorities had to suffer for quite a while.

It's telling that you are attempting to draw an equality between segregation -- which was legally ended in 1957 as part of an open and democratic process -- with the USSR's extensive gulag system, intricate controls on freedom of expression and freedom of thought, and general lack of civil rights for everyone, which lasted right up until the day it disintegrated.

> In Germany we’re having a huge group of people who lived under communism – and want it back.

If Communism was so great, why did you have to build a wall to keep people from running away from it? That's the unanswerable point here.
So, did something change over the last 3 years? Is it still unknown if Telegram protocol is ok?
I'd be happy if Siri were finally able to understand a proper sentence at least most of the time. That would be helpful.
Is there a system where trust is not necessary, but can still get things done?

Yes. Check out cjdns (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cjdns) and Hyperboria (https://hyperboria.net)

An entirely encrypted network of relays where ip addresses themselves are encrypted so no one can snoop traffic.
I can't help but notice that you skipped over the little details about a lack of democracy, a lack of free access to information, and how dissidents are punished.

> On the other side, western propaganda blanks out a lot of facts about Cuba. Among those is the fact that a significant percentage of Cubans approve their government.

I can't help but notice that you skipped over the little details about a lack of democracy, a lack of free access to information, and how dissidents are punished.

> On the other side, western propaganda blanks out a lot of facts about Cuba. Among those is the fact that a significant percentage of Cubans approve their government.

Weird. Then why the resistance to holding elections?
The flagged sibling comment demonstrates how emotionally invested people can be in their technology choices. Similarly worded comments about other subjects would not have been flagged to death.

If anything, I think this demonstrates how talented Apple's marketing team can be, as well as how meticulous their UI team can be. I myself am a huge fan of attention to detail, and we need more of it. I've used Skylight before, and if I'm working on another project that could benefit from it I'd recommend it again, so thanks for paying attention to all the little things.
You've got a type error going on here with money. Money is just how we keep score for "getting the things we want". Is this something that we want? Apparently, digging a pointless hole, streaming it, and asking for donations is terrifically entertaining, so yes. All things considered, the holiday hole is probably the best use of those resources. Like, construction equipment usually isn't used as postmodern art, but postmodern art is something we want, so yeah.

I guess my real point is something like "why aren't you asking this question about theater or television or live music"
The article only mentions it once, but this is "binding arbitration." "Binding" as in both parties are bound by the decision and neither has any further recourse.
I read entire non-fiction books precisely because they revolve around a few central ideas. My retention and ability to apply the concepts is significantly better if I expose myself to the same ideas day after day. A well-written book that takes weeks to go through can leave it's mark far more effectively than a quick summary I'd forget after a few months.

That said, I prefer to read a summary of the book before the book itself so I can focus on the details instead of exhausting mental energy figuring out what is going on.
If you’re stuck because of “best practices” throw them away
"And so, in 2016, the World news war 1 began, my grandchildren"
It was probably native dirt, so you may have a point.
> There are similar things out there. One is Pyspread (which is referenced) that allows the functions to be written in Python (vs Basic). One of the engineers used this to do some pretty amazing analysis that would have well exceeded the capabilities.

A little known feature of LibreOffice is that the whole suite, including Calc, is scriptable with Python. It is not super convenient or user-friendly now, but with some love from developers it could become quite powerful tool.
Up until some amount. Once it becomes clear that you're more trouble than profit, they'll cut you off (and if they are unlucky, your neighbors as well). Amazon seems to bit all over the place with that, if media reports are to be believed.