skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Choosing Back end Language
I've been a front-end dev for a couple years now, but I know I need to learn back-end programming to build the startup I want to build

there's 2 things I know I will need to do at my startup which are

1. lots of DB access (read/write) that will serve data as formated json to my front end

2. lots of functions that will be run at set intervals on the database

what would HN suggest as a language that is good at dealing with this (I know I could probably do it with anything) but because I will probably be scaling and be doing it as a one person time for a while what is suggested?

thank you
I see this from another point of view.

Suppose a female new grad goes to Electronconf and sees all male speakers. Suppose she goes to other conferences and it's the same story.

She feels there's no way she'll be able to break ground and be recognized as successful. She slowly drops out and leaves the industry and goes somewhere where she can make friends like her.

Now suppose she sees plenty of female speakers and she thinks to herself "wow this is awesome, I wanna be like her, she was like me 5 years ago". She stays in industry, and possibly becomes a speaker on future.

Once the cycle of people being motivated and seeing others like you starts, you see a diverse set of candidates joining the industry.
> Today I use auth0 configured as a passwordless solution, i.e. email code + login, or use Google OAuth, etc.

This. Not necessarily auth0, but passwordless auth.

Humans forget passwords routinely. It's at odds with realistic expectations of the human brain.

If email is compromised, so is the password reset mechanism.

Tacking on FIDO U2F and one can have reasonable expectations of identity.

No password DB exposure, no password guessing exposure, no remembering passwords so better experience and less support costs.
Maths but Not as You Know It
UK Prime Minister calls for internet regulations following London attacks
There is no extra danger climbing Olympus Mons involved, it's actually very flat: "...an observer near the summit would be unaware of standing on a very high mountain, as the slope of the volcano would extend far beyond the horizon, a mere 3 kilometers away."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olympus_Mons#Description
About to Be Canceled After Sexual Thing They Aired on TV About Trump and Melania
Hello! Just the other day I argued that the EU's new antitrust case against Google isn't economic nationalism, so allow me to even the score :)

VW's conduct both in implementing these cheats, as well as resisting the investigations into them (to this day!) was obviously, morally indefensible, and totally stupid. Health statistics put the most likely number of premature deaths caused by it somewhere in the 4-digits, in the US alone.

The absolute amount of the fine must have punitive component large enough to make it obvious that such crimes don't pay. At the same time, it wold have been unconscientious to level a fine that would bankrupt VW. I believe the US did a pretty good job.

It also shows a deep misunderstanding of the processes by which the Federal Government works. These fines are not determined by some Trump-like egomaniac impulsively acting on his emotions. Nor is the EPA known to be a fan club of US car manufacturers.

Why only VW? It's quite easy: these manipulations are really only relevant to Diesel engines, which for some reason became a fetish for manufacturers in Germany only. VW sells more Diesel cars in the US than all other companies together.
As someone who has been playing these kinds of games for 25+ years I have to disagree.

Complex games always existed. They're just becoming more mainstream. This is understandable. Boardgamers tend to fall into one of three camps:

1. The "let's see what happens" crowd. This group tends like to like games with a significant luck element. It includes coop type games that I tend to describe as "group vs deck" games.

2. The "social gamer". There is a strong social aspect in any boardgaming but for some it's clearly a priority. This group will favour lighter games and may not tend to play optimally or think too deeply about strategy.

3. The "board gamers". While this can still be social, this group tends to be more focused on the play and will try and optimize strategy.

So what's really happened in the last 20+ years is that group (3) has grown quite a lot. So-called "gateway games" 9eg Catan) were probably a huge factor in this. A natural consequence for this is that people develop an appetite for complexity. It starts to become much easier to absorb the complexity of these games.

For example, I've played probably half the games on this list and I would say that none of them are "heavy". There are a couple of "medium-to-heavy" but it can get much heavier than this.

As an aside, of the group Great Western Trail is my current favourite. Mombasa (by the same designer) never really grabbed me. It just seems a bit too abstract (eg by playing bananas you may get to move armies around. Or not).

To your last comment, I've played games that have a typical playing time of 4+ hours. 90 minutes is definitely in the medium (and maybe medium to heavy) camp.
"One would fork Linux on GitHub, name it something other than Linux, and just have the existing branches track Linux"

That's already hard given how many commits go into Linux. One must always remember it's not just some volunteer project: most of the commits are by paid programmers working at companies. That's where the labor comes from. You'd need a lot of volunteers to keep up with the paid programmers. Even Linux itself couldn't achieve that. Hence, all the paid programmers working on it.

"might be to take the lessons learned to create a conservative set of Rust inspired extensions to C without all the hoariness of C++."

Now you're thinking on the right track. That sort of thing has been done multiple times at the compiler level where they automagically make C safe with a performance hit. Several teams did it at CPU level. These projects have been used on FreeBSD mostly but also Linux. The strongest one so far is CheriBSD on CHERI processor.

Alternatively, for a safer C that you're manually using, what you describe has already been designed and actually inspired Rust's safety model:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyclone_(programming_language)

It could be revived and improved if people wanted. It got nowhere with C programmers, though, in the past.
That's a nice application for brushless motors with variable-frequency AC drive. The motor is so simple - it's just windings and the propeller ring. No seals, no gears, and no bearings that carry heavy loads. All of those things give trouble underwater. The drive electronics is more complex, but drives for variable-frequency AC motors are well-debugged now. Every drone has several of them, and electric cars have big ones.

Some pictures of existing units: [1] They're mostly used as steerable thrusters for boats that need to be highly maneuverable, such as ferries. They're becoming very popular for ROVs, because they're much lower maintenance than existing thrusters used at depth.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Te_xejpriFM
Just a few days ago I received an email from Coinbase asking to switch from Authy to Google Authenticator. The reasoning was:

> Authy and SMS are vulnerable to phone porting attacks. Device based Authenticator apps like Google Authenticator mitigate this by being linked to your device, not your phone number.
Let's not forget that Daedelus, with careful engineering and aeronautical prudence, successfully designed and constructed a set of personal wings and flew them 70 miles to safety and freedom. I think that's really the larger story.

The true moral is "do not exceed the design flight envelope on the maiden flight of experimental aircraft". Pretty sensible advice.
EGCG Para Que Serve, Benefícios E Significado
They are real faces that are morphed along one of the 50 axes they came up with. They look less real because it's standard practice to exclude hair and shoulders and backgrounds from face databases (even if this is totally unrealistic it helps isolated the system under study)
London attack: PM's condemnation of tech firms criticised
If you want them enabled by your os just install this on your server

http://byobu.co
You seem to ignore all the failures and security breaches caused by null pointers and null terminators missing
Sort-of: https://cmusatyalab.github.io/openface/#overview
On the other hand, the system described in the book is not shaft-less, so it still doesn't correspond to this new Chinese technology!

> "They called it a tunnel drive. You know how out West they have lots of hydroelectric power plants? Mostly dams. The water spills onto wheels that turn generators. Now there's a few new ones that kind of turn that around. They tap into underground rivers, and the water turns impellers, and they turn the generators instead of a modified mill wheel. An impeller is like a propeller, except the water drives it instead of the other way around. There's some minor technical differences, too, but nothing major. Okay so far? "With this design, you turn that around. You suck water in the bow and your impellers eject it out the stern, and that moves the ship." Tyler paused, frowning. "As I recall you have to have more than one per tunnel. They looked at this back in the early sixties and got to the model stage before dropping it. One of the things they discovered is that one impeller doesn't work as well as several. Some sort of back pressure thing. It was a new principle, something unexpected that cropped up. They ended up using four, I think, and it was supposed to look something like the compressor sets in a jet engine."
China figured this out decades ago. Hence the one-child policy. Now that China's population is leveling off, they can lighten up on that.

India, though...
As per another comment I made here, people develop a tolerance or even appetite for complexity. I've actually played some games hundreds of times and still found nuances in the strategies. Simpler games tend to be "solved" much more quickly.

What's more, absorbing and internalizing new games is a skill and you tend to start recognizing game mechanics from other games.

Lastly, I wouldn't put any of the games on this list in the "heavy" category.
I think I remember reading at one point that a bunch of the original Strongtalk tech was recycled by Sun Microsystems for the first JVM. A quick DuckDuckGo-ing yields some plausible confirmatory links such as https://github.com/jirkadanek/Strongtalk
This is precisely why I removed my phone as a 2fa option. I scan the authenticator on two devices (one primary, one backup) and simply use the google push app for all logins.
It's pretty circular to give group-level reasons for why individuals should "identify globally."
For me the problem with Lisp is that it's just ugly to look at. Compare some Lisp code to an equivalent in Python, just in terms of the raw visual appeal of the text. The parentheses and indentations obscure the logical meaning of the code.
Texas governor signs bill bringing Uber, Lyft back to Austin
Or even better, the clang/GCC vector extensions often let you write reasonably good fixed length SIMD code that’s largely portable between SSE, Neon, AltiVec, etc.
Compile time is a huge factor in maintainability!
The development is moving along at a good rate [1] so if you haven't tried it lately, give 0.16 or even 0.17-dev a shot if you're brave enough to try compiling [2][3][4], there have been 4500+ commits since 0.16 with a lot of improvements.

[1] https://github.com/FreeCAD/FreeCAD/graphs/contributors

[2] https://freecadweb.org/wiki/CompileOnWindows

[3] https://freecadweb.org/wiki/CompileOnUnix

[4] https://freecadweb.org/wiki/CompileOnMac
I believe it is the case that deep NNs at the highest/deepest levels have interpretable feature-specific cells as well. Not sure what they think the difference is.
Slightly harder but may generate some good ideas/discussion:

A two-part password (no, not two factor) where

part 1 is stored by the browser and recommended to be written down or otherwise recoverable

part 2 is remembered by the user from day to day.

Now if the user types the password into the wrong field or the keyboard is bugged they should still be fairly safe as long as part 1 is a good password on its own.
How does meson help make builds faster? C++ makes compilation slow, a build system will only help so much.
For the readers here, your comment added no value to the article in question. Your comment was all about your suspicion of being hacked that read pretty tinfoil hat - "my screen blinks so I think someone hacked my computer and router but I cannot find any hard evidence that that is the case."

Fred Wilson's post discussed how he was hacked, how he knew he was hacked, and what actions should be taken to avoid being hacked.

FWIW, not a downvoter.
Why is equality of outcome terrible, per se?
I agree. I'm still reading, but apparently to arrive at the repugnant conclusion, you need to argue semantics such as in the following:

> (2) A woman suffers from an illness which means that, if she gets pregnant now, her child will suffer from a permanent handicap. If she postpones her pregnancy a few months until she has recovered, her child will be perfectly normal.

[...]

[It's problematic to recommend postponing to the mother because] if the woman postpones her pregnancy, then the child that is brought into existence will not be identical to the child she would have had, had she decided to become pregnant while she was ill (it will not be the same ovum and sperm that meet). Hence, the alternative for the child brought into existence during the mother’s illness is non-existence, and to claim that it would have been better for this child if the mother had postponed pregnancy is tantamount to claiming that non-existence would have been better for her.

... which makes me not take it very serious.
Show HN: Startcrowd – Collaborate on ambitious AI products
> Now that China's population is leveling off, they can lighten up on that.

They already have, but people are now accustomed to the new status quo and changing their behaviour is proving difficult.
People have genes for all sorts of things, from over-eating to cheating on their spouse.
I recall reading something (I honestly don't recall where, so it's possible it was fiction) that discussed how Ohio class SSBNs are so quiet that theoretically, at least, they can be tracked by following the void that they leave in the natural background noise. Of course, the problem is that even if you can track it, you have to find it first. It's a big ocean.
Thank you, you said it much better than I could've.
Have you seen quiet.js?

https://github.com/quiet/quiet-js
Thanks! As a parent working in the US, the FMLA is a fact of life, but that isn't true for everyone on HN
Sounds like you've got a great thing going there!

Maybe we're more picky, but my game group typically does a new game every month. We find that a lot just aren't fun to play (in spite of reviews, etc.)

We do go back and play old ones, and reading through the rules again goes faster the second, and so on, times.

But, yeah, there are definitely too many games out there... which is a nice problem, in a way :-)
Her work on the History of Programming Languages conference is enlightening. Good reading if you can get a hold of it.

http://research.ihost.com/hopl/HOPL-I.html
Global Positioning System History [video]
Too bad their metal detector won't be able to detect the gold.
I agree with the last point: asking questions on tex.stackexchange is a GREAT way to get help. Sometimes you run into an "impossible" problem and some wizard will show up and fix it in minutes.
Typical politician: never waste a crisis.

Oh, was there an attack? Okay, let's cram through some wholly-unrelated policy change that we couldn't normally get away with. Simultaneously, let's completely ignore anything related to the actual attackers.
Here's the tease:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zMfdef-nYGY
Ah, so it's like sharing one password for everything?

Edit: Yeah, with the crucical difference that you don't need to worry about the server's user database getting leaked along with your password.
This was a great link, thanks for sharing. One of the better links I've seen on here in a while for understanding what's been going on.

Out of curiosity, could you explain more on how you found that one graph misleading? I didn't see it that way - but didn't follow your reasoning.
If I understand this correctly it would be better for GS to lower it employees wages 3% yoy so the profits will go up. What about lowering the bonuses will that help with the profits too?
Sorry, but I think some comments below contain incorrect or partial info.

Authy can be used just as a SMS-based 2fa, and this is as insecure as Google SMS. Note that this is still more secure than you (or me) implementing you own code via sms, because they do intelligence on the phone numbers, especially on critical operations like changing phone/merging accounts.

Then there's Authy app with the TOTP code, similar to Google Authenticator. From a security perspective it is true that having Authy on multiple devices slightly decreases your security, as an attacker could steal any device and bypass your 2fa.

I'm not convinced when people say that they can turn off Authy with just a phone verification (i.e. stealing the phone number), vs you can't on Google Authenticator. The fact that you have Google Authenticator, maybe even as a default, doesn't mean you don't have SMS too as an option, so the same attack can happen on Google.

Also, note that for many critical operations, in Authy and Google, you receive a notification. In particular, if you have many devices connected, you'll receive multiple notifications with an higher probability of catching the issue on time.

It would be nice to see explicit examples of the attacks mentioned. If you have someone's password and phone number [], you have a lot, and you can probably fool Google, Facebook, or any big as you can fool Authy.

let's also remember that 2fa is the 2nd factor. Your first factor, the password, should be strong as well.
Off topic but curious, who makes good metal detectors today? I haven't used one since I was a small kid. But I might look at one. I just don't even know who makes good ones these days.
It's a perfectly cromulent word, and embiggens every sentence and phrase that includes it.
The difference between 2 minutes and 2 seconds is the difference between me alt-tabbing and reading HN (and potentially getting distracted for much longer than the compile actually takes), and just staring at the IDE while the compile runs.
This doesn't address the argument that sacrificing other factors of maintainability for faster compile times can hurt you in the long run
I don't know how accurate they are, but a lot of the military analyst/journalist blogosphere (i.e. Tyler Rogoway, War is Boring, etc) have been pointing out that that US Navy, with its nuclear blinders on, risks having its sub and carrier fleets badly disrupted by a swarm of newer, cheaper AIPs. While there are limitations in range and payload etc etc etc, the swedes were able to inflict disproportionate damage in war-games in their AIP sub.

There are other thoughts on the current administration and their ability to see their way out of a Thucydides trap with a rising nation who also happens to be our largest trading partner...and the ability of the Pentagon to maintain primacy with the destruction of American STEM advantages...
Interoperating with code and data files that were made for/by MySQL.
Key sentence - "the correct choice of face space axes is critical for achieving a simple explanation of face cells’ responses."

They did PCA over two sets of metrics, taking the top 25 components from each set and then combined that into a 50d space. Using these dimensions and measured responses to fit a model resulted in explaining 57% of variance in real cell firing rates. (Much better than other models including a 5 layer CNN).

This is pretty cool. I'd like to see a follow-up where the chosen dimensions were further refined using something a bit more iterative that an arbitrary PCA cutoff.

Also I really want to know what eye motion was present during each trial. This paper presents a very "instantaneous" recognition perspective and doesn't talk about integration over time or the impact of sequential perception of face components on recognition. (Eg an upside-down face is hard to recognize because your gaze has to move up from the eyes to see the mouth which is a sequence rarely encountered in the real world)
Amazing results, it is incredible to see that our brains do the same process as CNNs, encoding information using multiple layers of neurons to extract features. This makes me think that consciousness could be just an extreme high-level temporal representation of our own senses.
No GC, optional runtime (no_std), etc.

Yep, still use C and C++.
You can even enable the mouse to resize splits and switch between tabs in tmux/byobu:

https://gfycat.com/SmallComplexGreatargus
That doesn't answer the question. To me as a common reader, the typesetting of a novel requires in no particular order

- nice block text adjustment, line-breaks and hyphenation, line/paragraph,chapter spacing

- margins and padding, page numbers, and chapter headings

- font selection, supporting ligatures and kerning if you are fancy

I'm sure the devil is in the details, but how much detail can there be in basic running text? I'm fine reading novels rendered by basic html engines without css, even in monospaced font. The most important consideration for a text layout engine seems to be the font data format and corresponding font engine, which I don't know much about, because I don't really care.
The US is currently deep in a dark age. With a country this big, it may not be obvious as everything is mostly operating as it was in the past, only slowly failing over time. If you look closely, however, you can see that we have pretty much given up on education, science, and the pursuit of truth. Actually, you don't have to look very close anymore at all; it's beyond obvious. We make a big deal out of people graduating high school, a feat that I have no doubt certain non-human primates are qualified for at this point given how much we've dumbed down our education. We have no problem churning out uneducated fools, so why would we expect these fools to be knowledgable when softer topics like "diversity" are so much easier to tweet about? I'm not saying diversity is not a worthy pursuit, far from it, but the way these people are pursing it is indeed foolish and dumb. It's a step above anti-vaxers and climate change deniers, but now we're just splitting hairs on what constitutes stupid.
She seems to very much believe that backdoors can be installed which only the "good" guys can use
It uses ninja as a backend which has a no-op build time of < 1 second. This means that incremental builds, especially in large codebases are much faster than make. It will also use ccache automatically if its available. It does some neat tricks like only re-linking shared libraries if one or more symbols has changed, etc... In my experience, converting to Meson has always led to a substantial reduction in build time, both incremental and full.
Code I can understand, data a bit less. I'm just thinking that no MySQL program which has already been written is going to have any reliance on the performance characteristics of this flash-based database system, since it wasn't a thing when they were written.

If you could change the shape of your tables to suit this approach, then surely you could adopt Postgres.
I believe he was often very silent about political or ethical matters of the "The Gadget". In contrast to other physicists at the time, like Oppenheimer and Szilard.