skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hundreds of thousands, probably, and my work on that textbook feature brought in millions in revenue. Another aspect of the project is that I wrote a custom XML content storage and retrieval database, and spending a couple of months proving that my solution was far more scalable and performant than either the Oracle-based solution or commercial XML database solution that the director of development and CTO preferred. So I saved the company a 6-7 figure annual licensing cost as well.

My reward was short-lived immunity to the corrosive political environment that the CTO and director of development had created. The director came from a competitor we had acquired for their customers (not their tech), and right from the start he was open about wanting to eliminate our development team so that his old team could be in charge. They failed due to incompetence, and he and his entire team were let go some years later. The CTO lasted longer, eventually firing my manager without cause, and I quit a few months later. The overall product we were responsible for (which the textbooks were a part of) is still running, and it is still their flagship. But very little has been done to it in the past seven years since I left. The CTO was let go a year or two after I left.

Handsomely rewarded? Hardly. That's not how it goes in big corps. Presiding over the hand-off from the team that was let go was satisfying, and knowing that my software is still running strong after many years of neglect because everyone who was capable of maintaining it quit is also somewhat rewarding.
Update: AWS dashboard has been fixed and is now showing outages https://status.aws.amazon.com/
Due to HN's flaky Cloudflare 503 Bad Gateway error, I noticed that Cloudflare is also being affected by S3 being down in a similar but subtle way. See their status page's broken logo on the upper left hand corner.[1] It was actually directly linking to a S3 URL: https://s3.amazonaws.com/statuspage-production/pages-transac...

[1]: https://www.cloudflarestatus.com/
> But will I someday be prosecuted for the news articles I read or the songs I listen to or my amazon purchases or my google searches?

In case you've missed it, there have been a lot of articles on HN recently about US immigration going through people's phones and social media accounts looking for things they can use against them. e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13702981

Totalitarianism doesn't turn up all at once. It starts against those people, one person and marginalised group at a time.
1. Most of it is unhelpful middle management and non-productive people providing themselves with job security. There are a million and one incentives for this kind of behaviour in the private sector. Nobody ever got fired for failing to point out that their job is pointless.

2. Government can be punished at the ballot box, I don't have a choice in where my grocer sources its produce from, whether or not property developers in the area will choose to build small, affordable homes or McMansions, or which ISP will take my money, but not provide stable internet (Because all we have here is Comcast.)

I mean, technically I suppose I could overpay crazy amounts of money to get my food, my housing, and my connectivity sourced from somewhere else, but at that point, the ~25% of my income that goes into taxes will seem like a drop in the bucket.
> If you're talking about the Firefox Sync password, it's being derived and what Mozilla gets is not your password.

Derived by JavaScript served by … Mozilla. They can, at any time, serve JavaScript which submits your unhashed passphrase straight to them.

> If you can't trust an open-source application managed by a reputable non-profit, then you definitely can't trust your operating system either, in which case it is better to not have a smartphone at all.

There's a difference between trust once and trust always. An OS is downloaded once; an application is downloaded once; JavaScript is downloaded every time you need it (modulo caching, of course): Mozilla can be compelled to suborn that JavaScript at any time in order to target someone.
This is an API for very small datasets (daily time series data). The goal should be accessibility and readability over saving a few bytes.

I'm not saying it's ideal, I just think the snark is unwarranted considering how common it is. I just checked InfluxDB and they follow a similar model (even more verbose).
https://docs.influxdata.com/influxdb/v1.2/guides/querying_da...

Checked a few more and I believe they're the same - Microsoft IoT, Predix (GE), etc.
Raspberry Pi PiZeroW first impressions, pictures and review
Simple console snippet for fixing the AWS status page
Excactly. Or they could just buy Disqus and in an instant be the webs primary commenting platform
For purposes of pretty-printing and studying, the WASM MVP is effectively a binary encoding of asm.js. Imports and exports have names and are statically defined, while the degree to which unexported symbols are mangled is determined by your compiler settings.

Debugging tools will need to improve, and you'll need to learn WASM's (limited) vocabulary, but if you're happy enough with asm.js, then I think you'll be ultimately be happier in the future. I, for one, would much rather see actual type signatures like: "param $x i32" than asm.js's cryptic annotations "x = x|0".
More likely SE devop folks trying to snipe Azure/OVH PC/B2/GCP jobs ;)
Google DNS 8.8.8.8 was (for the first time that I've noticed) spotty about 30 minutes ago. Something big is happening: http://map.norsecorp.com/#/
I ran wallabag with nginx, fastcgi and sqlite on servers shittier than cheapest DO instances and haven't had any problems. Sure it may be slightly heavier than scp'ing and running a single go binary but compared to the likes of rails or java apps this setup as light as it gets.
This. There are plenty of games based on Dwarf Fortress and indirectness, though many of them seem to suffer from lack of depth.

DF is nearly endless in terms of new content and events; once you figure out a pattern for setting up your fortress and finally feel like you're winning, something new comes along that you didn't expect. Once that feeling of "anything could happen" is lost in a game, it's tough to continue.

Factorio is a good example of this. It satisfies the desire for challenge and survival like DF, but the challenge drops off drastically once you have a good setup.

It's tough to match the content of Dwarf Fortress for a game that hasn't been around for 15 years though.
The difference there is you can potentially do something about it, vs having to wait on an upstream provider to fix an issue for everybody.
> We have now repaired the ability to update the service health dashboard.

It seems their status page is hosted ... as a S3 static website.
That's a good article -- but I will say that (for now at least) facebook is a level-playing field and anyone and everyone can equally leverage its targeting abilities.

Sure its more refined than older ad technology, but picking the tv or radio shows during which one runs ads, or picking the magazines and newspapers in which one runs ads is not that different from targeting facebook ads. The first politicians 100 years ago to target ads on the radio probably gained the same advantages that Trump did in 2016 with facebook.
Gaming: Thimbleweed Park: Release date announced
Take a page from mobile gaming and let people buy extra characters.

The act of whittling down a tweet to fit inside the (increasingly ridiculous) 140-character limit is the exact kind of tedious, repetitive thing a game designer would instantly recognize as a "grind":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grinding_(video_gaming)

And free-to-play mobile games have demonstrated that lots of people, when presented with a grind, are very willing to pay real money to skip past it. So: give Twitter users the option to buy extra characters, usable whenever they're needed, at some price point low enough to be attractive as an impulse buy. A penny per character, say, or 40 characters for a quarter, or 120 for 99 cents. The marginal cost to Twitter of shipping 141 characters over the wire instead of 140 is essentially nothing, so whatever you charge would be almost 100% pure profit.

A user with a bag of such extra characters in hand would now have the ability, if they wanted to, to skip editing down every tweet and just post on the fly. Which could be a real time-saver, if you're one of the media-type power users who spend all day on Twitter! And how much it costs you depends entirely on how often you want the luxury of not having to edit yourself. If you only need it occasionally, it's cheap; if you're compulsively logorrheic, well... consider it a tax on the burden you're placing on your followers' attention.

But wouldn't it ruin Twitter, you ask, if people weren't forced to be terse? I don't see how. When people use the extra space wisely, it makes their life easier, costs you nothing and generates revenue that can subsidize freeloaders like you. When people abuse the extra space, you can always unfollow them -- and when the abusers notice their follower counts crashing, they'll be encouraged to rein themselves in. Nobody logs on to Twitter in the morning with the objective of losing followers. The system would correct itself.

So: Twitter makes money, power users enjoy using it more, regular users get their freight paid for by the whales, everyone has access to longer-form expression with a mechanism already in place to still encourage brevity. It's a win all around.
How hard DF is compared to Nethack? I've ascended on Nethack and it is always a very tricky business... this game seems on a whole new level.
That makes me sad. I would not order food if I do not eat it. Many places often burgers without bun – and you can always ask.

(No, children are not starving because of you, no worries!)
>the disc is little more than a key to get to the current version of the game that just gets downloaded.

Hoo boy this burned me bad when I bought Half Life 2. It was 2004 and I had a dial-up connection, so I bought the DVD from the store instead of purchasing it from Steam. No way I could download that big of a game in any reasonable time. Well, it turns out the DVD I bought from the store was just an installer for Steam and a CD key, the game didn't actually come on the disc. So Christmas day, I'm attempting to download 5GB on 56k along with everyone else who just got the game that day.
It's winter - hit the slopes!
I think that in Les Miserables, the main characters are driven by their consciences, and unfailingly make their decisions based on what they feel is right. Sometimes that has ugly or unforeseen consequences, or is even fatal. Many of the characters are plunged into poverty or despondency because they chose to act according to their conscience. Meanwhile people making choices out of expedience or because of external forces they obey (Javert, Thenardier) prosper at least temporarily.

But ultimately the story and characters who do what they think is right end up on top. Now this is also in a way the case in many a moralistic book (the patient Christian triumphs over the predatory thief or what have you) but in Les Miserables I think it is deeper than that, an indication that it is the strong and principled that buoy those around them and feed the matrix of society, even at times with their own lives.

Naturally it's all a bit artificial but I liked it immensely nevertheless.
2 processes = 2 GIL

There is no avoiding the GIL within a single Python process (even with asyncio IIRC, though I've been using JS lately). Multiprocessing is usually the most efficient way to execute I/O intensive, independent parallel operations. Of course you can also run threads within each process.

I do wonder where the 300mb memory is coming from. Surely it can't all be python interpreter? It doesn't look like he's importing 300mb of modules, unless MongoClient really is that big. In that case he could create a separate worker process for persisting data, and only that worker process needs to load the MongoClient module.

One explanation for the memory overhead might be conntrack tables within the network namespace of the container. However I would expect that conntrack table to be on the host, where SNAT is performed. As an aside, the default Docker networking configuration is really not well suited to concurrent network requests, whether inbound or outbound. If you can avoid NAT (and therefore a conntrack table), that is preferable.

This stack could also benefit from tuning some kernel parameters, both within the containers and on the host. Great blog post with details: https://blog.packagecloud.io/eng/2017/02/06/monitoring-tunin...
Market rate is set by wages less other essentials. As is buying rate. Credit issuance against land consumes all surplus value. Hence why not work 4 days en mass.
Huh, Tesla and Bolt owners report a 20% reduction in range in cold weather.
Why is always the manager that is the bad guy in these scenarios? Haven't we grown up yet?
Not at all at all, I understand your confusion. Mine is definitely a niche case, perhaps straying a bit into the eclectic.

I have put together a virtual file system for a programming environment for kids that is built atop the local storage/userdata API's.

I support legacy IE back to IE6 as well as modern browsers, and I wanted to maximize my very limited allowed storage space on legacy IE.

Also, I needed to have some certainty around how much free space is remaining in the file system. My design was to organize the underlying storage into 4K blocks that were pre-allocated when the system first starts; whatever the host system could give me in terms of space I would take.

JSON is nice for the general case, but the way it escapes some characters makes computing the free space I have remaining unpredictable as new files get written.

Of course, I can do my own encoding of bytes into unicode char codes and write those as raw strings using store.js. JavaScript strings are saved as 16-bit unsigned arrays if you unfocus your eyes and stare at the screen for awhile, and I use as many bits as I am able in my scheme.

So, I rigged up a byte-to-string encoder/decoder that was universally accepted on IE and modern browsers, and calling through to my getRawString/setRawString API, I just about doubled my storage over the default JSON.stringify/parse!

Suprisingly, performance isn't bad with my encoded strings either. That said, my compy has a retro flair, and I don't think my users will mind much that they have to wait a second or two to load their games from disk. Perhaps even adds a bit of authenticity. :)
Did you open up https://sublevel.net lately? It has all of those things.
It's where they store the error icon.
Trump Concedes Health Law Overhaul Is ‘Unbelievably Complex’
Yup, it is indeed hosted with Amazon.
"We have now repaired the ability to update the service health dashboard. " - full of yellow red icons now indeed https://status.aws.amazon.com/
Empire Earth 3 tried that(grand strategy-like overworld, rts-like combat), but poorly executed.

The total war series is a better example, but the games range in quality
maybe just the image icon? idk...
What web page or application would need smooth scrolling? What can't work with whatever scrolling is normal for the browser/OS/hardware?

Looking cool at the request of some manager does not constitute a need.
How to Navigate the Jupyter Ecosystem
A Brief History of Existential Terror
I don't recall which page, but I read the same thing on their website a couple weeks ago.
What do you mean? There are tons of rPi alternatives.

https://www.board-db.org/
> insane work hours which suits men better than women

My girlfriend earned 23 hours of overtime this week. I am on HN naked in bed at noon on a Tuesday.
And heres another good one:
https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~dawnsong/papers/sec14-pape...

"The Emperor’s New Password Manager: Security
Analysis of Web-based Password Managers"
How Playboy Explains Vietnam
> AMZN stock down

YES! Buy on rumor, sell on fact as the saying goes.
I mean, you say they are not idiots, but also that they are knowingly destroying the ecosystem on which supports all life on their planet. Which is kinda like knowing the brakes on your car are not working but being smart enough to cheat an inspection. Is that actually smart?
I'm aware that there are places like North Korea where this is a problem -- but what the article was advocating, private servers, encrypted messaging. Do you think if only the Chinese had thought of that, they'd be fine and free on the internet??

My main point is that an oppressive government is a huge problem, and it really doesn't matter whether you use aws or roll your own server, because either way you're screwed if you've let it get to that point.
I'm missing Dungeon Keeper 1&2 on that list :)

The attempt to manage a dungeon and direct all your minions at a certain goal, compined with the idea to automate your defence (through traps and alarms) somehow evoked a similar joy to programming for me. It's especally ironic on how many misbehaviors of the creature agents I tried by locking (ha!) doors in front of them.

Also, the general game style (aesthetics, soundtrack and the narrator) remains unmatched to this day.
EDIT: Misread parent.
Depends on what content you're looking for, but off the top of my head, here's a variety of type of EM-related people/accounts. The first two are teaching resources. The rest are active (both clinically and on Twitter) clinicians or EM-focused students.

@emcrit

@epmonthly

@MDaware

@precordialthump

@seth_kelly

@mcsassymd

anything tagged #FOAMed (Free Open Access Medical education – often has an EM focus)
Cut back all monetization projects that don't produce a ROI already, hire out the technical talent as a consultancy specializing on Twitter-scale scalability problems and keep the pipes running as the mother of all reference projects. It would be like hiring Noah to design your yacht.
Will do soon. Thank you Marcus!
Ditch micro services for your next startup
1. Looking at their financials, they could become profitable by just removing half of their staff. I would start there before anything else.

2. Fix the mess of UI. I still don't understand how to engage in conversations to this day. Convoluted modal boxes, overlaying other screens, that then expand out to more replies, and so on and so forth. It's WAY too confusing.
Please be reasonable.
Having NSA and several US agencies as customers doesn't mean you are a tentacle of the NSA.

Even in the case of companies owned in part by In-Q-Tel I guess the point is to make their technology available to the US goverment. Maybe 20 years ago the goverment would fund that with DARPA or something similar, but now there is an open technology market and I guess they should be investing to get their opinion heard on the direction they need the technologies to evolve.
I love it, like that fixes the problem!
..now fix the REAL problem
It's fixed... I mean the status page
https://status.aws.amazon.com/
Plus the AI in Banished liked to screw you over, and not because it was trying to help. When one villager is dying from cold and just needs a single piece of firewood, another villager will take the last 10 from the stockpile and hide it in their house.

Never trust your neighbors.
This should be the official anti-pattern when designing a status page.
If that is the political situation then I do not think it matters whether I use my own server, or encrypt all my messages.

If anything we would need less privacy and more transparency!
Australian citizen given computer science test during US immigration interview
Until we get seeded AGI's, that is.
I have seen WhatsApp being use that way in India. Closed doctor groups where lot of info (photos/info etc) gets shared/commented on.

Twitter's open communication channel might not be suited for such infoshare. Telegram/Whatsapp has potential in that area.
Because people are cheap and stupid. Doing artificial gravity like the space station in 2001: A Space Odyssey requires building a really big space station (because of the large diameter needed to get 1g or close to it, and avoid problems with the force felt at your head being noticeably different than at your feet), which is expensive. It would cost tens of billions of dollars at least. We'd rather spend that money on building more nuclear weapons and on tax cuts for and giveaways to incumbent corporations.
I like this idea. If I could subscribe through Twitter for the magazines/papers I'm reading I'd be much more likely to take on multiple subscriptions or try new sources out than I am now.

Basically turn it into an online Newspaper stand where I can read gated content without having to give out my personal info. or remember a username/password (to anything but Twitter.)
Is Twitter involved at all in the annotation web standard [1]? There was a post and some discussion on HN a few days ago about it [2]. Seems like Twitter would be a natural fit to become a major player or popularizer of annotations and annotation infrastructure. Notwithstanding the decentralized nature of the standard, it would probably evolve to have a few major structural providers. If it takes off, one could imagine a future with billions of tweets and tweet threads anchored to source material of every kind -- adding optional value to the material, and driving traffic and value to and through Twitter.

[1] https://www.w3.org/blog/news/archives/6156
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13729525
For this kind of page it might be best for them to use a data URI image to remove as many external resources as possible.
Because your status page shouldn't depend on your own infrastructure. Literally the problem Amazon is having right now.
Snap's Investors Could Disappear After the IPO
Worth a look tbh.
Since when was the alternative to piano lessons and dance class leaving your kids unsupervised?

If you need bare bones supervision for your school age children you can get that at the Boys and Girls club and similar programs. Their summer program was around $1 a day per kid when I went.
It baffles me that AWS, a leader in cloud computing can make such a rudimentary mistake. Seriously, I interviewed there and they asked me to write a b+ tree and I failed. And then you see fundamental errors like this which possibly cannot be made by people who had the smarts to write b+ trees in 15 minutes...

I want to take this opportunity to complain about the interview system. Hire people who care about the product and company. Such mistakes cannot be made by people who care.
Call for compiler hackers
I've created some compiler related tasks on RosettaCode. The goal is to create a simple compiler in small pieces: Scanner, Parser, Code Generator, and Virtual Machine Interpreter tasks have been created.

Scanner
http://rosettacode.org/wiki/Compiler/lexical_analyzer
Parser
http://rosettacode.org/wiki/Compiler/syntax_analyzer
Code Generator
http://rosettacode.org/wiki/Compiler/code_generator
Virtual Machine Interpreter
http://rosettacode.org/wiki/Compiler/virtual_machine_interpreter

In order to keep the actual solutions smallish, the language is necessarily very simple - a Tiny (mostly) subset of C, with only integer variables.

/*
Simple prime number generator
*/
count = 1;
n = 1;
limit = 100;
while (n < limit) {
k=3;
p=1;
n=n+2;
while ((k*k<=n) && (p)) {
p=n/k*k!=n;
k=k+2;
}
if (p) {
print(n, " is prime\n");
count = count + 1;
}
}
print("Total primes found: ", count, "\n");

There are currently implementations of all the main tasks in Algol W, AWK, C, Phix, Python and Scheme.

I'm especially interested in seeing implementations in other languages, including Java, C++, C#, Haskell, OCaml, Clojure, Racket, Erlang, Pascal, Nim, PHP, Javascript, Julia, F# and any others you can think of.
I use a master and four mirror slaves. Then use round robin for reads. I used to have three slaves, but when two of them was down at the same time I got nervous and set up one more.