skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
These kinds of write-ups offer valuable insight into a popular project's requirements and decision-making, and are some of the most instructive resources one can find: these show not only the kinds of challenges one has to face at scale, but also how architectural choices are made.

It's far more valuable to understand why Discord uses Cassandra than to merely be aware they do.

Out of curiosity, did you consider HBase and Riak? Did you entertain going fully hosted with Bigtable? If so, what criteria resulted in Cassandra winning out?
What are the competitors to this language? Can someone provide a list. I'd like to start learning a provable language, not sure if Dafny is the one I should start with though.
I see you've already asked, as well pvg. Thanks.
This is a bit more limited than that, one really specific part of the banking system. Right now, Euro-denominated transactions can be cleared in many locations, of which London is one, with a large share of the total volume. Some Eurozone countries would like to require that this take place only in Eurozone countries, and unsuccessfully pushed for that previously. Some of them think the UK leaving the EU presents a good opportunity for a renewed push in that direction (since it weakens the UK's role in internal EU politics). The people quoted in this article think that's unlikely to happen.

This is all pretty deep in the weeds for a nonspecialist audience though, I think.
"Despite French and German threats to claw away clearing in euro-denominated derivatives, Britain will probably continue to house trillions of euros of swaps trades because limiting where the operations can take place could backfire, said the executives from several global firms"

"Bankers have not been unanimous in their views, however. Executives at four of the biggest global investment banks in London in September said they expect France and Germany will prevail in the clearing tussle."

Some bank execs think that it will stay, other bank execs think that it will leave.

The title should have been "Clearing in dispute as Brexit moves on". But that probably is not what the flavor of the news source wanted people to reflect on.
This standardization makes it clearer that there's a button that blasts you into the air.
The Hidden Costs of the Nintendo Switch, Is It Worth to Buy
I know several friends in San Francisco that got rid of their cars for Uber. They spend about $500/month on Uber. Owning a car in SF is more expensive than that: monthly parking, insurance, parking where your destination is, gas, etc.
You're assuming they make money on ticket sales. Maybe all that money goes to the theater? If so, the ads are completely rational.
One of my lobby conversations at a SEM conference dealt with those quick survey popups. The guy I was talking to swore that by putting one on their landing pages conversion increased by like 30%. His theory was that it helps to refocus users who are about to bounce. Give them a second to digest the page and right before they click the back button bring SOMETHING up to grab their attention. They'll just click the survey away and will come back to the page fresh again.

I've never tested it, so I have no idea if it works. It's an interesting hypothesis at least.
You're naive if you don't think Uber already has audited financials. Investors wouldn't dump billions in if they didn't.
SpaceX caught a dramatic photo of this weekend’s rocket landing
The damage is so obvious that you can't cite a concrete example? Do you think other nations were actually unaware that we hack into computer systems and tap phone lines?

The idea that Snowden should have stayed in the US strikes me as petty and naive. If he's a coward for fleeing instead of spending life in prison then I suspect the vast, vast majority of the population are also cowards.
They probably think they have to give their email to see the site.

We are power users, a lot of people have no idea what they're doing on the web.
If you reform patents in that way, you get cheaper EpiPens, it's true. But if you reformed it that way a while ago, you would have no EpiPens, because the maker wouldn't have gone to the expense of developing and testing them without the protection of patents (and the hope of profit they bring). Without patents, you only make thin margins; that's not enough to pay for developing something like the EpiPen.

Banning patents sounds good; it sounds like freeing technology from greedy capitalists. But in practice, it means freezing (or at least dramatically slowing) the development of new medical technology.
I noted the same pattern in myself and the affects it had on my ability to concentrate and my desire to work for long periods of time to achieve a goal. However I still play games, just specifically games that are slower paced, more story focussed normally puzzle based. Think Myst, Obduction, Deponia, things of that nature.

I found after so long playing quick reward cycle action packed shooters that I couldn't enjoy games like that anymore, and I really wanted to be able to. So it was a conscious decision to try and extend my focus and reward cycle so that I could again. It helped immensely with other things as well. Spending an hour or more to work on my car no longer gets passed over in favour of a few rounds of counter strike for but one example.

Overall I agree with your findings and found just being aware of them has helped me get more out of my brain.
Ironically I discovered it yesterday when using it to trigger outbound Twilio voice calls from a Windows desktop (for testing the local Lync client). The Windows binary has the logo.

(Off-topic, gotta change from ' to " for the example code to work on Windows. I should mention that to Twilio...)
- E2E/OTR encryption is something some of us are interested in, but due to the nature of our platform probably isn't going to happen anytime soon (we'd want to do it right, which requires time and effort).

- Some libraries support connecting through user accounts, and there are various third-party tools for "linking" chat rooms, incl. some client plugins for irssi and such. We don't officially support it, but it's definitely possible.

- Search is currently live on our alpha-testing client, and should be rolling out globally soon. It's also possible to save or log channels through the API fairly easily.
> but we're about so much more than that

And to fix that, you've made your name ungoogleable. Good job!
Ask HN: Do you feel as disorganized as me?
I’m not nearly as productive as I’d like to be, and it’s because I’m constantly overwhelmed by information.

I have an email sitting in my inbox, unanswered, because I first saw it a few hours ago when I was busy - I’ll probably never respond. I have work that I really should be doing, but here I am reading more news. When I am actually doing work, I waste so much time looking for things. I end up walking into meetings less prepared than I should be because I don’t have the context I need. Between conversations I’ve had, and all the places I store stuff, I lose minutes everyday looking for stuff, rather than actually working.

Is it just me? Do you feel similarly? Could you write a quick paragraph on what a recent day looked like for you, and when you felt most overwhelmed?
Yes. Once declared, function pointers are similar to regular functions. They both point to a value that cannot be changed. That value is a block of code.
The reason for this behavior is that Google is systematically destroying the SEO traffic of these sites

Another reason is that with apps, they have the opportunity to harvest the phone owners private data directly (contacts, messages, seeing what competing apps are installed, etc.)

Most people don't pay attention to the overbroad spectrum of access many apps demand.

Specific example: Samsung changed the Gallery app (default on my GS7 to display photos from within the Camera app) to demand access to my Calendar. If I hit Deny, it aborts. My Calendar? Really?
I read this, and about ideas like the Von Neumann probe[0] all the time, and it really fills my head with concrete to try and reconcile those ideas with the fact that we haven't found any signs of extraterrestrial life yet. If it's so feasible in a "short" time relative to the age of the universe, where are all the probes?

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-replicating_spacecraft#Vo...
Speaking as a business person: often the biggest challenge is to make ANY decision and actually DO something. The perfect is the enemy of the good. So to continue the cliches the business critique of your objections would be "analysis paralysis."

I tell you this just to help you understand what you describe. But in my observations of failure modes in business, it is rarely because one follows the wrong analysis, but more because most are unwilling to make any changes unless confronted with overwhelming evidence. (And that hurdle always gets higher no matter how much evidence you give.)
Let me take a stab at that.

Riak is not a good model since its more a blob store and we wanted to simply range scan through messages rather than sharding blobs (Cassandra is REALLY good at this).

HBase would have been fine for this model, but the open source version of HBase has much lower adoption than Cassandra so that was a big factor. We also don't care about consistency and HBase is a CP database, we prefer AP for this use case. As far as using GCP's BigTable (HBase compat), we made this decision before we moved to GCP, but we are also not fans of using platform lock-in. While BigTable has the same API as HBase we would hate to go to an less widely adopted version where we have a hard time getting community support if we decided to leave GCP.

Hope that helps.
What's the female form of phallic? Yonic? Phannic? Flappish?
The speed disparity can be a huge issue. Drive over the Donner Pass sometime or any major Western highway with lots of trucks and mountainous spots (i.e. most Western highways at some points) and the different speed combinations can be pretty nerve wracking to navigate.
They registered it. That doesn't mean other browsers will implement it. In fact, if I were on Chrome or IE, I'd make sure "moz://a" either redirects to my own feature-page or leave it as it is (i.e. google search leading to shady SEO business moz.com).
Jerks drive Mercs
I find it interesting that he would even consider the job.
This is how it works, a unit works because you know with as much certainty as one can have how some one would act and react to every situation.

Soldiers have to be predictable and interchangeable otherwise the entire structure falls apart, this isn't some hollywood action movie.

Yes (predictive) initiative is encouraged and rewarded but what Manning did according to the article and the behaviour shown during boot camp was not intuitive for the lack of a better word manning acted like a brat.

Now this isn't a personal attack, not everyone can fit into the military, not everyone can be made to fit through boot camp, but honestly if the first thing you do is effectively stomp your feet on the ground and say nope (the bag thing during initial induction) doesn't really bode well.

People like manning used to get a "blanket part", not the prison one where you actually get covered by a blanket and beaten half to death but things like shoe polish in your boots and other stuff was pretty common hazing for anyone who thought they were a special snowflake.

Most militaries work on unit cohesion which means if 1 fails everyone fails, sometimes a single infraction is enough for the entire unit, squad or troop to get punished (e.g. mess duty, extra PT, weekend passes revoked etc.).

Additionally when a unit is assigned tasks the task is assigned with mind that everyone is not only going to give 100% but effectively 110%, anyone who doesn't effectively makes everyone else work harder to pick up the slack for them because they don't want to get punished for someone else's mistakes.

Yes it may suck, but there is no way around it, acting like a brat doesn't work in the military and don't expect your fellow soldiers not to show their "dissatisfaction" in various ways with your behaviour.

I think the best question is why wasn't manning booted out in the first place.
A conjecture is someone, usually a well known expert in the field, saying, "I think this is true but have not been able to prove it." It's not considered a theorem until someone proves it. A famous example is the Goldbach conjecture. No proof has been found but people have been searching for a proof for a long time but so far no one has proven it.
SporeStack: Disposable, Anonymous Servers, via Bitcoin and Python
Modals don't usually open by themselves.
> This isn't a logo, it's a stylised name

Pretty much all the material about the redesign says this is, in fact, a logo.

I agree that the whole process was a complete clusterfuck. They picked the less atrocious suggestion. It's still terrible.
"It works for me, therefore it can possibly be broken for any other user, despite them potentially using a different OS/revision/etc" /sarcasm
The answer to your question: Absolutely nothing.
An interesting bit is that this is coauthored by Kristen Stewart. But it talks about a lot of interesting things on how to tweak and evaluate Neural Style in a production environment where the results need to serve the story (rather than a loss function).
interesting. during the coup that removed the president that was trying to hold that capital and other resources inside the country economy, the US press was doing nothing but printing doomsday scenarios.

now that Brazil has the most pro-usa politicians in power, but much worse prognosis, we get this. the timing doesn't even make sense since they just crushed most of the programs that were working since they were from the previous administration. the article has to try to push a dictatorship-era incentive from the 80s which is the only one still standing after the current administration ripped off everything that had any social spending from the budget.

shame on you TC. publishing articles signed by a PR...
Write coalescing doesn't work with our security model, so we don't. The client has to replay all the writes in disk cache when it comes online. The writes are pipelined fairly efficiently, but I acknowledge that for some workloads it might not be ideal. But most apps do not do require rapid streams of writes while offline.
> And lua is miles faster than Python when you're outside the tensor domain, ie while you're sourcing and wrangling your data.

Is that true even if the Python used is PyPy rather than CPython?
Ask HN: Has anyone ACTUALLY landed freelance work via a “trusted” marketplace?
Something like https://www.toptal.com/ or https://crew.co/ or even https://hired.com/ for example.

I've been freelancing for a while, mostly referrals but you know it's nice to get something else to fill the project pipeline with. I'll bookmark sites like these and when I get some free time, fill out the 20-page application with my portfolio. It inevitably takes at least an hour...

One place took a few days to tell me that even though they advertised remote, they weren't hiring people "in my region" (aka not SF/NYC).

Another place did a Skype call with a "recruiter" who couldn't tell me anything about project sizes, timelines, or availability for my skillset. They wouldn't share the blanket legal agreements they described for me to review before continuing the "application" process. And they wanted me to do 90 minutes of silly coding challenges before even confirming they had work.

And the other place just sent me a generic rejection letter ("not the best fit for our community at this time") that must have taken 5 minutes to write. I have no idea if I'm too expensive for their projects, the wrong skillset, or just too senior.

The sad thing is, I have no problem being too senior. I don't want to be on every platform if I'm getting junior level work. But when you're asking for people to jump through all these hoops, claiming that your platform is where it's at... It's just getting ridiculous!
J20 Art Strike: an invitation to cultural institutions
>3 dimensional space/visual imaginiation

These do not even require puzzle/building games, most video games that require the player to move trough a 3D virtual environment train the players ability to "mentally rotate objects" and for "visual imagination" (gotta build a map in your head of that virtual place), in this case the games world.

Many people who regularly play games don't realize this, but keeping oriented in a virtual space is not something many people are good with by nature. It only feels natural to many gamers because they are used to it.

And I'd say anything that involves some kind of "multiplayer" can add emotional play, even more so in games that require coordination between several players on a bigger scale, like MMORPGs. The social drama I've witnessed in games like WoW is some of the worst drama I've ever seen ;)
Good for you.
Sorry, but in the long run I manning didn't play an important role in history, besides a few activists and now the media no one really remembers him or the leaks.

One can even say that Snowden is irrelevant in the long run, he only pops up once in a while.

There was not major political or social fallout following manning.
Same goes for Snowden, the NSA is still there with more power than ever, more and more countries developing similar capabilities and no one seem to really care.
The opposite might well be true: people believing seo is a real thing tend to be the unsavvy ones.

Moz.com should throw a party.
Saying it would cause a crisis is unlikely, at least long-term, since anything to would cause spending to recover and the cause of the "crisis" would be known and accounted for.

To put this in perspective, America alone lost tens of trillions of dollars in from the peak to the trough of the whole 2008 crisis:

http://money.cnn.com/2011/06/09/news/economy/household_wealt...
This might be a controversial thing to say, but Ruby would be a pretty obscure language today if it wasn't for Rails.

If you want Elixir to remain obscure as well, keep hoping that it doesn't get picked up by web developers and Rubyists.

I for one want the language to eventually overtake Ruby in popularity (hopefully with Phoenix overtaking Rails). So yeah, the more individuals and communities that adopt it, the better.
Chaitin's Omega: An Infinitely Long and Incalculable Number
PIX – A performance tuning and debugging tool for game developers
> The whole process of constructing life narratives is biased in ways that almost guarantee that people won’t recognize the role of chance events adequately.

This is also a cultural thing. Here in Sweden it is easier that people dismisses their achievements to not look like they are bragging and to accept that chance is part of life. I do that myself. And I feel better and less stressed recognizing that luck is part of why I have what I have.

So I work not too hard - that can be bad for my health and a bad long term investment - not too little - work is needed to achieve anything and you have to do your part to not let other down. So you work lagom.
He did not get surgery and if someone needs to transition go ahead.

Overall there is no harm done here by my questioning things and making you either reject it fully or think as with all the fake news that this was orchestrated for the better of Manning.

Obviously everyone disagrees with my viewpoint and that's fine. I've been right about these things before and wrong too!

Overall there needs to be a startup or something that instantly shows what's fake and what's not.

Will Manning still be a woman ten years from now maybe .. maybe not.

But we as techies may want to question a lot of what we see and hear.. especially on the Internet. I.e. Pizzagate
You will fail at your New Year’s resolution – but you don’t have to
Even in commutative algebra, there is a fair amount of guesswork. If I tell you that 2+3=4 in an abelian group with {2,3,4}, then ask you what is 2+4, you will immediately guess 2+4=2. Its just what the millennials term "stupid obvious". Yeah you can do a lengthy proof on why 2+4=2. Proof: Its 2 because 4 must be the additive identity, and 4 is the additive identity because 2 & 3 are not, and they aren't because if 2 was then 2+3=3, and if 3 was then 2+3=2, but because I've told you 2+3=4, by closure 4 must be identity, which implies 2+4=2. That's the whole story. Literally no mathematician I know will sit down & write that lengthy proof I wrote. They'll just tell you 2+4=2, and if you pester them with "But why?" they'll say "Because" and excuse themselves :)
True, but I think that'll have an asymmetric effect. Generally when people adopt a product it's because they have some sort of burning desire, it's faster, it let's me do stuff I couldn't before, it allows me to avoid spending lots of money, etc. Then, once they want to switch they consider the switching costs to see how feasible it is. Switching off of Oracle would presumably save many companies lots of money, the fact that they don't can only mean that switching is too tough.

This means that even with a low switching cost they still haven't created that burning desire for people to adopt the product and that's generally the harder part of the equation. I do think Cockroach is creating that in other ways with their Geo replication and sharding capabilities to name a few. But no one is switching to Cockroach because it's SQL so why not. However we know they're creating a burning desire for people to switch off their product by charging them money since people would always rather not spend money. The switching cost has to act as the counterbalance to that desire. The lower the switching cost the less you'll be able to charge people. This can be a very hard thing to solve after the fact and companies resort to all sorts of contrived things to try to get people locked in to products that don't inherently have strong lock-in.
I don't think that's really comparable. No one's going to arrive at a store and decide not to buy the milk that they came for because the walk to the back of the store is too much hassle.

More comparable would be like someone standing in front of the checkout and insisting you take a survey before you can pay. In that scenario I can very much imagine someone getting pissed off and leaving.
The first domino when programming is your 'Hello World' program.
Great direction, I think they it on the head. If I would have to give suggestions they would be:

1. CockroachDB Community License (CCL) might sound like a Community Edition, and that normally refers to the open source version instead of the proprietary one.

2. It is hard to quantify the difference between a startup and an established company. We put the difference for GitLab at 100 people that can potentially use our software.

3. I see the CTO commenting here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13438863 that they will never move features from open source to the CCL Maybe they can consider publishing a set of promises to the community. We did that at about.gitlab.com/about/#stewardship
And it seems he is posting only a single response when he isn't ignoring important questions altogether.
Any Bayesian analysis should still be valid, despite stopping conditions. You can still draw conclusions from an aborted test. You just have to use valid formulas, and not formulas that assume incorrect counterfactual scenarios. I think it's dogmatic to say stopping is bad and you can't do analysis. In my mind, you totally can. It just needs to be the appropriate analysis.

Anyway, I don't even think false positives are the right way to think about this. The framing should be continuous, not binary. The goal is to maximize success, not maximize the odds of picking the better of A or B.
> they're either on the Mozilla website or a webpage

or they've seen a sticker on a laptop. Or they've seen a t-shirt, or skimmed a magazine article. And they're now googling it, and ending up on moz.com.

It feels just like a scene from Silicon Valley.