skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There seems to be a trend: As software increases in complexity, programming languages and frameworks become higher and higher level to combat these increases in complexity.

For example, think about how much more complex it is to develop an Android app versus a web app. All you need to write a web app is a text editor to create three files: an html file, a css file, and a js file. Android development on the other hand is so complicated that you need a fancy IDE to organize everything for you. My prediction for the future is that Android development (and mobile development in general) will eventually become this simple.
Ask HN: How do you use cloud only databases?
Recently for a new project I am working on, I wanted to use GCP's datastore. That got me on a quest to learn more about cloud only databases like Datastore (GCP), DocumentDB (Azure) and DynamoDB (AWS).

While they all seemed ok at first, I noticed that you could not have a backup of your data to protect yourself against accidental human data corruption (bad update got pushed to prod and now your data's corruped - assuming this issue was not caught in stg etc.).

So if you use such a database, how do you handle such cases? Also what are some gotchas of such databases (from experience)?
good question ...

another german hosting provider also required you to at least respond to dmca + three strikes
Haskell at Work: Writing a Specialized CLI Client for the Postmark API
I spent two or three years heavily using Scala. During that time, I more than once got to the point where I literally couldn't casually read code I'd written less than a week before.

This seems like yet another great way to make that worse.
Google Optimize (Analytics Content Experiments Are Being Deprecated)
I just had a hard time building a mental model of what the asyc function was doing, and the analogy I had heard before made it sound more like a multi-threaded process (something I also didn't fully grasp).

The analogy I had heard was that of a check-in window at a doctors office: the nurse would give you a form to fill out and when you were done, you could get back in line and hand the form back to the receptionist. I think the analogy was trying to show that there weren't multiple windows to check in at, nor did you have to stand at the window while you're filling out the form, preventing people behind you from getting the form. But the reason it's a bad analogy, and why I was confused, was that it made it appear that you (the patient) are the callback function, and you're doing some processor intensive work when you sit down to fill out the form. It would have been clearer had the analogy specified that you are actually a backend server/web-worker, but even that doesn't fit right.

So, I think it would be best to avoid using analogies. The event loop isn't that complicated: async functions just sit around waiting for a response, and they stick their callback on the event queue when they get that response. When the call the stack is cleared (from it's synchronous functions), the first callback in the event queue moves to the call stack (ie, it gets called), and that process repeats until the queue is cleared.
I tried to err on the side of understating things (I found higher figures for cost estimates as well knowing residencies/fellowships could go a lot longer... and that was ignoring continuting education/certification/training and costs of running a practice). I think that people see the dollar figures for some specialist and make two errors: extrapolate it to all doctors and ignore the huge investment/risk to get there.

Congratulations to your partner (and you)! I for one still think its a noble and altruistic calling.
Yes, it's just a twitter clone where people 'toot' instead of 'tweet'. It's fine work but they don't seem to have any idea how to make it desirable for people to use.
>Meanwhile, while the argument is being made for regulating Facebook as a natural monopoly, the next technology paradigm is being born somewhere to make them far less relevant. That process has been repeating itself for 60 years or so now, requiring very little actual regulation by the government.

^^ Just world fallacy

In reality, the DoJ deal with Microsoft is probably partly what led to the second internet startup renaissance. MS were still bullies and they still inhibited innovation by squashing smaller competitors but it would have been a whole lot worse if Microsoft were not defanged by that deal.

Unfortunately anti-trust enforcement seems to have gone out of vogue these days (starting with Bush, but Obama was worse than useless in that respect as well).
I tried testing the Bernstein Vazarani algorithm on a 5 qubit quantum computer that IBM let us use for an afternoon for one of my university classes last semester. It was unable to recover the hidden string, even though simulating the circuit classically recovered it. Anyone can launch a "quantum computer as a service" platform, but the service won't be valuable if the computer doesn't work. And so far no quantum computer has solved a problem faster than we can do classically
A simple use case is incrementing a >53-bit integer id.
Reminds me of the difference between JavaScript and CoffeeScript.

CoffeeScript attempts to become more concise by removing delimiters and making things more implicit. I don't think that actually adds much value.

In a sense, it was the equivalent of trying to simplify traffic by removing lane delimiters and street signaling. You could somehow imagine they're there, but it's better if you can see them.
A console app for soccer-loving hackers
Swiss voters give green light for renewables and nuclear phase out
PHP online quizzes
New Zealand Takes Aim at the Commercial Space Race
Ask HN: Do you believe medicines don't work beyond expiration date?
> Hetzner also owns few other brands like Serverloft.

"serverloft ist ein Produkt der Host Europe GmbH."

https://www.serverloft.de/unternehmen/agb/

doesnt say so on the english website thou
It was not my intention to complain, as I neither feel pain, dissatisfaction or resentment against those who downvote me. I wanted to point out that my comment asking if this is PR was downvoted to the bottom. I remember such a voting pattern from only one other thread on HN. I just looked for it and it was also on a thread about Microsoft [1]. I can not remember such voting patterns for any comment not about Microsoft.

I will probably not respond to further comments about those downvotes, as it seems off-topic; dang has already commented extensively regarding previous astroturfing accusations against Microsoft [2]:

> If MS "infiltrated" HN, it's news to me and I'd like to know about it. If anybody did anything to HN that could fairly be described as "infiltration", we'd be pissed. It's our job to protect the integrity of this place for the community and we take it seriously. When we see gaming and manipulation we crack down on it hard. But actually the BigCos aren't the ones who do such things, probably because they're (rightly) too risk-averse.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12319829

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11844253
Is this the TFS that Redox OS is building after falling short on their ZFS goal?
Example Web-App with Go, MongoDB, VueJS2
Consume less.

When you post on Facebook or Instagram you are just doing work so someone else can make money off that work. If you want to actually make something then do it for yourself.
I'm not talking about advanced features here, but stuff like that annoying zoom on hover and not remembering my sort preference and such. Just bad design!

The most annoying thing maybe is that I can't hide stuff from the lists. Like when I watch 2 minutes of something and decides that I will never ever watch that crap again - that piece of crap will forever haunt my interface.
You went straight from saying, “Don't assume I'm a running dog!” to literally proving that you are a running dog! So cool.
The double-spaced is because this is a draft/preprint and not the final version; it makes it easier to copyedit and modify before the final layout. You can of course read the final version instead with normal typesetting: http://journals.sagepub.com.sci-hub.bz/doi/pdf/10.1177/09567...
Nice, other than the necessity of dumping CO2 into the air. I wonder if he tried creating an electric field across the water as some folks have done for desalination[1]. Any pollutant with a net positive or negative charge would be suitably diverted in that way.

[1] https://cleantechnica.com/2013/06/30/desalination-with-small...
Why is there so much emphasis on the credibility of the threat? Why not just blanket remove all explicit threats? Establishing credibility is impossibly hard.
What's wrong with the submission, content-wise? Is everyone just mad that it was originally broadcast on the radio instead of published in a newspaper?
Basically a full-page content ad for Alphapages
R is hot
Their product marketing surely is in a quantum state.
Google is great when it comes to find out details about special corners of your current technology. And there is nothing bad about that - in fact this is the new standard when it comes to solve special problems. You use collective knowledge, you also contribute to the collective data bank by helping others. I love it!

When it comes to basics - those you pick up quickly and never google for them again.
You wouldn't need significant whitespace to do this; any block syntax would work. The following, for instance, would still drastically reduce the noise:

enum Tree[T] {
Branch(t: Tree[T])
Leaf(t: T)
}

The main benefit here involves using a block instead of "extends", and using "enum" instead of the odd use of a class hierarchy.
Good point %]
If you do 23n + x, you probably want it to raise an error if x isn't a bigint. Otherwise you end up with more situations similar to NaNs appearing in unexpected places.

It's arguable. There are at least two schools of thought, and both of them are valid. It just depends what you want to do. If you're using arbitrary precision, you're probably in a situation where it's better to be explicit than to have implicit coercion.

For example, what should happen if you do 23n + 0.5? You can't have 23.5n, since it's not an integer. You could convert it back to a Number, but you can't do that if it's 9007199254740992n + 0.5. It's logical to throw an error, if a bit counterintuitive.

Comparisons on the other hand probably shouldn't throw errors.
> Maintaining low effort, that narrows it down to Frama-C, Java/JML, and SPARK.

Not really. Frama-C aside, JML and SPARK simply cannot express those global correctness properties you naturally express in TLA+. Frama-C is really a set of ad-hoc tools.

> So, solution for this proposal is to try to encode correctness conditions from TLA+ or another analysis in SPARK.

But SPARK simply isn't rich enough to do that in general. You're right that if the TLA+ specification is at an abstraction level that's very close to the code, you can try to express some of those properties in SPARK, but I doubt even that is possible. Concurrent algorithms require liveness properties, and I'd be very surprised if SPARK could express them.

There is something interesting you could try, though: You could express global correctness properties in TLA+, and show (in TLA+) that they are preserved if some simple low-level properties are preserved, and then express and verify those in JML/SPARK. This is very interesting, and I'd love to hear about such an experience (or even try it myself), but my gut feeling is that that it would still be too costly. If someone does do that, however, that's something certainly publication-worthy.

> One can see that in ACL2, Isabelle/HOL and Coq ecosystems for projects that actually use what's already there. Or even in CompCert work where new CompSci just keeps adding new components to it to save time/effort.

But I still don't know of a single nontrivial real-world project that has been affordably verified, even with all that reuse.

> The other thing is that seL4 targeted C language. That language wasn't designed for verification...

Again, everything you say is true, but still there are no examples of affordably end-to-end-verified real-world projects.

> I imagine they'd need at least one specialist for that kind of verification.

Not if TLA+ is used. Amazon (and I, too) specify and verify such properties all the time and they (and I) are not verification experts.

> Also, recall the COGENT work where the key components of an ext2 filesystem was done with half the code in C without painful analysis of mutable state that seL4 had to do. Easier proofs with C code coming out that preserves those properties.

I know the person behind Cogent (he'd also worked on seL4), but he points out that the language targets a very narrow domain. Most programs you can think of cannot be written in Cogent.

> Really ad hoc, though.

That pretty much sums up all of formal methods at this stage, especially end-to-end ones. TLA+ is relatively rare in its universality and depth, but it intentionally gives up on end-to-end both because it is currently infeasible (in general) and because 99.99% of software simply doesn't require such strong guarantees.
Go to the source, it's called lapacklite and it's C code translated from Fortran

https://github.com/numpy/numpy/tree/master/numpy/linalg
There's lots of alternatives to Facebook. Facebook is for people who don't care about alternatives.
If You want to pursue Your creative efforts, then 20% time is not the solution, since technically that is owned by Google and Their creative endeavor
My 3 Win10 machines reboot maybe 1/month because of updates. This is doable for me.
ymmv.
That's to be expected. Transient SPICE analyses can become really slow for larger circuits (couple real-ps/CPU-s for analog circuits that work with a few dozen MHz).
> I understand this filesystem is still nascent, but shouldn't data integrity at least be one of the design goals?

What makes you think it isn't? It definitely is. In fact, it borrows several ideas from ZFS wrt/ integrity.

For example, it uses parent block checksums like ZFS.
You would, but more and more, CO2 is being regulated as a pollutant and there is going to have to be recovery from such waste gasses anyway.
just join kde, its a huge umbrella organisation. kmail and akonadi need some serious code love :)
Yes indeed. Perhaps you are not the target demographic, but there are a lot of algorithms which can be interactive and have a visualization for example

http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....
It's already been implemented, in fact, in the venerable Rhino JS engine.
I have to say I don't know of any other language where the maintainers have such a cavalier attitude towards making breaking changes. It makes the common analogy between Scala and C++ a bit ironic.

Not that that's necessarily a bad thing; it's good to have some popular languages that follow a less conservative approach, if only to get some real-world experience with different strategies for dealing with the tradeoffs between keeping a language modern and maintaining backwards compatibility with legacy code.
Author here. We were under the assumption that CPU was mostly being used for evaluating the partial index predicates. Under this assumption, we figured batching was unlikely to yield much of a benefit. It wasn't until we actually profiled Postgres did we realize batching would be worth a try.

As for the numbers, we specifically got a 10x improvement in ingestion throughput.
> It's considered retro and hip to just schedule social time and disconnect completely

2 years off Facebook here, and while I didn't do it to be hip or retro, once I quit I started to rediscover... snail mail. I've kept in touch with some of my Facebook friends who are far away via handwritten letters, and gifts. It's been awesome to get unexpected parcels in the mail full of random items & gifts, candy & CDs (!) from overseas etc, usually with stories behind why the items were chosen. We could have done that while still on Facebook too, of course, but there wasn't the impetus to do so.
What is an advanced life form?
Early versions of Google would be interesting to see (would be interesting to look at parts of a version of the engine that are still small enough to reason about).
Do you mind sharing realistic cost of living in bilbao specifically? i.e. rent, utilities, public transportation, food and whatnot
1. Do they claim that the backend is actually a quantum computer? Or are they just providing a quantum computing like interface, which is backed by a classical computer emulating a quantum computer?

2. Looking at their Terms Of Service (excerpt below) it's unclear whether you share rights any model that you try in their playground?

<i>"IBM does not want to receive confidential or proprietary information from you through our Web site. Please note that any information or material sent to IBM will be deemed NOT to be confidential. By sending IBM any information or material, you grant IBM an unrestricted, irrevocable license to copy, reproduce, publish, upload, post, transmit, distribute, publicly display, perform, modify, create derivative works from, and otherwise freely use, those materials or information. You also agree that IBM is free to use any ideas, concepts, know-how, or techniques that you send us for any purpose. However, we will not release your name or otherwise publicize the fact that you submitted materials or other information to us unless: [...]"</i>
Do I have to be mad to prefer text over audio when trying to get the news on a computer?
Indeed, someone spends what AFAICT is a very small amount of his time debunking every last claim that any given quantum computer does anything straightforward simulated annealing can't do.
Collection bag from Apollo 11 moon mission to be sold at auction
> The tension/problem as I see it is this: we need distributed networks, where people run their own services, and are servers as well as clients, but at the same time a large proportion of people do not or cannot run their own services.

cloudron.io is tackling this very problem. sandstorm was trying to solve this as well but the project is not active anymore.
TFS was created to speed up the development. The issue is that following the design specs makes it much slower to implement, and prevents a "natural" development (like, you cannot implement it like a tower, you need every component before completion). It was started[1] and got far enough to reading images, but implementing it took ages, so we decided to put it off for now.

It is very similar to ZFS.

[1] https://github.com/ticki/zfs
The explanation videos are very fluffy. Anyone find any technical overview articles?
I don't think that this helps really with the pollution issue, since the CO2 is in effect being used as a catalyst and will be emitted afterwards just as it was before. What the article is saying though, is that a large consumer of cement (a high CO2 producing process) is also likely to be a large consumer of clean water.. so that leaves the process of cleaning the water CO2 neutral except for the small amount of power consumed
Evaluating creative ideas is hard. That's the big problem. Generating creative ideas that are hard to test is a huge headache for organizations.
Amazing this has not been renamed to Watson.
Indeed, although it takes two to tango. Impossible to know the relationship between said person and their management. I take my inklings to start new things while employed as an indicator that I need to talk to my manager. Help doing more work should be a good request, and 'in a month' or so is an acceptable answer. If they don't help me out I start feeling restless and perhaps start that project on the weekend. If they don't respond to my progress then I start feeling unappreciated/underutilized, and express this. If it still goes nowhere, time to move on. Not moving on at this point is where the problems start, as you go into a reactionary mode and "aren't yourself" anymore.
Yup, 98 is trash for this use, This is why it makes is so exciting to try and run a "production service" on!
Ask HN: Curating the internet?
Would love to get your thoughts. What if there was a chrome extension that allowed you to upvote any link you run into over the internet. This way you have a meta layer of human curation over the internet, giving contextual clues as to whether something is really useful or not!
Inside Facebook's plan to eat another $350B IT market
Whqt are you talking about. If there is a more efficient allocation of energy to value, then it's progress.

Or are you saying you know which companies will grow and change the world?

AirBnb was for couch surfing... stupid and "useless" idea that allows my Mother to earn extra income from her suite in her older age.

Maybe Snapchat or Whatsapp are toys.... toys that let me keep in touch with family overseas more.
> the biggest benefit is the complete separation of logic from semantics.

Then maybe allow JSX? The way I write my React components, the view is what you find in the `render()` method, and there is little to no logic there. The big selling point for me with React is that I no longer have to learn yet another templating language. Which seems to be somewhat where you are leaning as well. But being able to read HTML as, well HTML (or something very close like JSX), has a lot of benefits. Just going between code and the browser debugger for example. The mental step of translating between what I see in the browser and what's in my code, is in fact a step.
IANACE, but there are good reasons to sequester carbon emissions, and this scrubbing can be achieved with renewables (eg. solar thermal) for processes that involve heating the flue gas.
The problem of course is that there isn't really an economic case for industry to do it, because the costs of implementing sequestration are quite capital intensive to polluters.
Agreed, I think humans planting "exotic" trees have a lot more to do with tree migration than just global warming alone.

Also, last year before we turned my childhood home into a rental I cleared out a large Coniferous tree I planted when I was a young sapling. It was much, much larger than 12 inches tall.
Looks like nice work. I think. I couldn't find the details and didn't want to spend the full 15 minutes reading.

This style of writing is very frustrating.

1. Introduction. We set up for something dramatic. In this case, a Parkinson's sufferer is about to see her life changed. In another recent story, a maternity nurse is about to birth her first child, and we were teased she would die after giving birth. Now we're at the moment of truth. All we have to do is...

2. CUT TO BACKSTORY. When X and Y first met in 1997, they were first drawn to each other by a shared love of whatever. Eventually, their travels led them to find out...

3. DEEP BACKSTORY. When X was 9 years old, she found a thing that immediately interested her. She kept at it because...

4. FAMILY BACKSTORY. Her grandfather fought in WWII/Korea/Vietnam for the US/British/Japanese/Australian army, and he tinkered on the side in whatever endeavor X would go on to work in...

5. MAIN TOPIC. And we get a paragraph or two of what we originally were interested in reading about, but not before...

6. CUT TO ORIGINAL BACKSTORY. Flesh it out a bit more. Finish it out. College, grad school, first job, moved across the country, landed current job. And now, finally...

7. NOT SO FAST. Let's finish out the grandfather's story, and his reaction when he learned what X was working on. Ok, now...

8. BACK TO THE ORIGINAL STORY ITSELF. And we get the five last paragraphs, which could just be joined with the first 3 paragraphs to tell the entire story. But then we woudn't hit our word count.

I just wanted to learn how this bracelet works. With that other article, I just wanted to know how the nurse died. Do I need to be teased for 27 paragraphs?
It's been a while, but I don't recall Chesterton mentioning "a crystal or jewel erected to contain an ancient being".
Physical servers, with an implication that it's litrally just the hardware and no service level on top. Similar to when people talk about bare metal servers.