skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't claim that Kafka randomly deletes things. Just that it automatically does so.

The danger is not that Kafka will choose not to respect the configuration value. It is that the default setting will find a way to creep back in without the admin noticing it, and then a quick reboot, maybe even an unplanned one caused by a power trip or a kernel crash, will be sayonara to the system of record. Sure, there are backups, but who needs that aggravation? (p.s.: there probably aren't actually any workable backups)

In the RDBMS world, MySQL's automatic and silent truncation of VARCHARs down to the character limit of the column was seen as a sign of its badness. That demonstrates the difference in paradigm.

Anyway, the argument doesn't really hinge on whether or not there's an automatic eviction model in the software. It's just a clear, loud signal that the software is not really intended for long-term storage, and that you are, at best, entrusting decades of mission-critical data to a less-tested configuration on a young, maturing product. This should not be appealing by itself, and that's a very optimistic perspective on the choice to forgo the data integrity features provided by a traditional RDBMS.

Developers just cannot seem to grok that just because something appears to store data across server restarts does not mean it is necessarily a safe permanent parking spot. I'm not a DBA, and I've had my share of serious squabbles with them, but when this is what happens with unsupervised developers at the helm, it's hard not to be sympathetic to their aggressive, almost hostile, feelings around developer input into the data model.
Hey I'm Lee, the author of this article. I think there are a lot of fair callouts about controlling for major, sample size, selection bias, and others, so I collected my response to those concerns here: https://blog.ledwards.com/methods-for-determining-startup-de... and linked to this follow-up article at the top of the original. Really appreciate the comments and feedback, and happy to hear more.

I'm sure this won't satisfy everyone, but I wanted to do this analysis now instead of in 40 years, so I had to work with the data I do have. I think this is enough to show at least directionally that Olin is doing a reasonably good job at producing startup founders, though as I raise myself at the end of this article, we won't know for sure until we have some exits and long-term value creation in the future.
(this comment is a dup of one that i submitted elsewhere in this thread)

As a tutorial for those of us like me who sometimes stumble in situations like this, could someone who found the OP's responses to the recruiter unprofessional please post example phrasing of what the OP should have said? Let's assume the constraint that the OP will refuse to lie (so they won't just change their resume to 'Unix' instead of 'Unix-like').

This is a genuine question; I often can't think of how to phrase things and I think an example would be educational.
unsurprising
Lasker Prizes Go to Planned Parenthood and Developers of HPV Vaccine
This is correct. The APIs have extended to include calendar and contacts in addition to the original email API, and that's where we've chosen to focus going forward.
What do you mean by "expose UTF-8"? Because nothing about UTF-8 requires that you give byte access to the string.

As for indexing, strings shouldn't require indexing period. That's the ASCII way of thinking, especially fixed width columns and such. You should be thinking relatively. For example, find me the first space then using that point in the string the next character needs to be letter. When you build you're code that way you don't fall for the trap of byte indexing or the performance hit of codepoint indexing (UTF-8) or grapheme indexing (all encodings).
42 is a private, nonprofit and tuition-free computer programming school
It's not you, it's the author. That's a horrible way to describe it.

It's partitioned: Cassandra is a clustered database that will automatically route data to the right nodes. It does this by partitioning a token ring among members of the cluster. If you need more capacity, you add nodes and they claim more of the "token ring".

The row store: Cassandra groups data within partitions (see above) which determines which hosts get the data. Within each partition, Cassandra sorts the CQL rows based on your schema. If you had a table of "employees", you could have them partitioned by last initial, and then clustered by last name - all of the employees with last name starting with "J" would be on the same machines, and then they'd be sorted on disk "Ja...", "Je...", etc
Their problems will be ours in 30 years' time. All industrialized nations will face declining populations and automation --given their demographics, I say they are doing a pretty good job. I don't think there are many economies which faced with Japan's demographics (together with their lack of natural resources, arable land, etc) would do as well as they are doing in their circumstances.

Now, work culture, that's a different topic. They definitely could improve their work/life balance and their gender disparity, etc.
In Georgia, warmer winters means peaches crops are dying
It’s not always that bad. I have had pretty pleasant experiences with Google, Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, and Apple (my current employer). I have also had negative experiences with Google and Amazon as well (the Amazon one puts them squarely in the I-don’t-want-to-ever-interview-with-them-again bucket).

On a more relevant comment, I think the student could have been a little smarter in realizing that the recruiter didn’t seem like he/she understood what was really being asked in the position he/she was recruiting for, but I think a lot of respondents on HN forget that people are sometimes held to account for items put in the resume. I remember when I interviewed at Apple in my last interview search, all 3 of the teams I had onsites with held me to account for items I had put on my resume.
Well, I'm not shocked. You came across as intentionally obtuse. You don't waste a recruiter's time -- they're higher status than you and working for a living. This reflects that. Glad you realized that your condescension and lack of communication skills escalated the situation.

The biggest setback that every IT candidate that I meet is "I'm great, I know X, Y, Z." when the reality is that a great attitude, nice smile and a hard focus on soft skills including selling yourself, building rapport and interpersonal intelligence (aka EQ) will take you much further.
If you're on the 2 lines for $100 promo, you don't qualify.

If you move to the 2 lines for $120 plan, you're okay. What does a Netflix subscription cost again?
Hi, I think you could have massaged the snark in the sentence that says "Beyond software developers who have programmed in the 1970s, most people do not have experience with a true UNIX OS" but other than that I think you should walk away thinking that your communication was clear, straight-forward and respectful.

Here's what happened - the recruiter had a list of keywords, received a large volume of inbound resumes and filtered for == 'UNIX' and dumped everything else.

They (and the company they represent) could have done a better job if they'd taken the information given, created an actual human mental model and filtered accordingly but chose to behave like a computer program instead. Their loss - move on and don't feel bad about this.

But I want to point out that like the recruiter you too got stuck in the literal filter. You assumed, I'm guessing correctly, that the hiring team is probably looking for someone with experience working on UNIX-like operating systems.

A bit of advice: When you encounter imperfect systems like this in the future a good practice is to ask yourself if you know what the actual desired outcome is, and give the lossy filter the input it needs to get you to the next round.

Here it would have been simply updating your resume to list UNIX instead offering an explainer. This would get you through the recruiter filter, and during your actual phone screen with someone on the hiring team, you could discuss your UNIX-like experience if asked. If they did want literal UNIX experience, you could apologize for misinterpreting the requirement and move on. No harm done.
This technology didn't work out for me. After spending time and effort in providing what it needs, the results I got back in return, were terrible for the time invested. In any case, good to see such attempt at evolving what is potentially possible in the future.
Lack of sleep could contribute to mental health problems, researchers reveal
I've taken to your advice. Thanks!
I think that if this is true, it'll ultimately be a good thing for Bitcoin -- increase awareness, incentive more miners around the world, etc. The crash would hurt, but it would be temporary -- digital scarcity is here to stay, and network effects matter. This isn't my ideal scenario for spreading awareness, I hate to see anyone lose money, but it's better than central banks continuing to dominate the worlds' monetary systems for the rest of eternity (which isn't going to happen!)
Datastax academy is probably the best free source

Searching YouTube for Cassandra summit talks is probably second

There was a push to do some better docs on the ASF website but it's just manpower that is currently spending time writing code instead - we have no real full time doc writers that focus on the open source product. Maybe some day someone will volunteer (and if you want to volunteer, I'll commit the docs for you - the site has a how to contribute guide, but honestly I'll take GitHub PRs if they're nontrivial even though it's an annoying workflow for our non-GitHub master).
SpaceX: Orbital Test Vehicle Mission 5 [pdf]
Wind turbine manufacturers are dipping toes into energy storage projects
Well, then you'll end up being that one lack-of-social-skills dev in the basement at many places. Or in your Mom's basement because you can't hold a job. Social skills, interpersonal intelligence (EQ) and the ability to be patient and communicate are higher up the list than your portfolio of coding majesty or IQ.
I'm old, and I'm still at "don't care". Except when it matters, of course. But I have noticed that old age helps with blending in, and attracting less scrutiny. Also, one gets some deference. So hey.
It looks like Mailspring is still going to be an Electron app, but with Mailcore2 [0] for the email behaviour rather than Nylas' sync engine (per the repo's readme [1]).

[0]: https://github.com/MailCore/mailcore2

[1]: https://github.com/Foundry376/Mailspring#high-level-goals
The graph coloring problem for chordal graphs is tractable, true.

But register allocation involves a lot more than just graph coloring. For example where and how you insert spill code makes a huge difference.

Also, for SSA, you can split some variables to have smaller live ranges which are more likely to get registers. The moment you do that, the theoretical advantages of having a chordal graph goes out of the window.
My concern is that you ignore the effects of deflation in your argument altogether, which you simply cannot do.

You are also effectively demoting the US dollar to the current inferior currency of the two to support your little adage, which I find a bit strange.

I believe your intention was just to write a little thought experiment, which is cool. I'm just a little baffled the way some people follow along for the ride without question.

Perhaps obvious, but I hold no cryptocurrency. I'm not saying I never would, but the sheer amount of dreamy speculation like this is exactly what keeps me away from the market.
Sounds like cognitive dissonance. I learned a lot about it by reading the Dilbert blog over the last couple of years. Here's an earlier example: http://blog.dilbert.com/post/102627908761/job-satisfaction
Using Cassandra as a key value store is ok, but ignores one is it's legit strengths.
Mexico signs e-commerce deal with China's Alibaba Group
Please, can we stop using the word "modulo" in non-mathematical contexts?
> This only works if every library that you use agrees with you on this, and treats all strings you pass to it as UTF-8 whenever encoding matters.

Not exactly. The library just has to treat it as a string and not worry about the encoding (i.e. not try to encode it to/from the unicode type).

Only ran into this issue once and the library had an option to return everything as string so not a problem.

> At least in Python 3, with bytes, if a library does try to use it as a string, you'll get an error, rather than silent wrong output.

Bytes in Python 3 don't support string operators.
AI researcher Lotfi Aliasker Zadeh, Fuzzy logic founder, has passed away
A very good question, but I'm not sure if it would be useful.

I don't know if this is true or not ("I think I'm right but don't quote me"), but I think that UNIX certification applies to the effective equivalent of "that bunch of files over there". Change the checksum and the certification doesn't apply anymore. Yay.

But it's not the end of the world. The people that want to buy UNIX licenses - Solaris, HP/UX, AIX, z/OS guys, etc - are those steeped in vendor lockin from legacy systems. The number of people still part of that tradition is decreasing; most new tech stacks are built on Linux, and its new mindset.

So, a UNIX cert for Linux would ultimately be 95% geek cred, 4.9% "oh hey, let's go this way" for those from the aforementioned groups who want familiarity, and 0.1% practical in terms of ROI.

Once the personal status quo of each individual in those groups shifts so that UNIX won't pay their bills anymore, those who wants to keep their jobs will switch.

NB. I know this comment is mildly flat in terms of only looking at this from one angle. I don't have any experience or knowledge to comment on the many other interpretations of the issues I've mentioned, replies are welcome to do so.
Brian Goetz the Java Language Architect addressed the very points you raised in a talk called "Stewardship: the Sobering Parts" [1]

I highly recommend anyone with these very valid concerns to view it once.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2y5Pv4yN0b0
So I won't be able to use Mailspring unless I use you as my email provider?
The stereo plug thing was a joke, but thanks for educating me on the Calutron. Very cool.
Show HN: Page.REST – An API to fetch details from a web page as JSON
Not familiar with the source from the parent, but the "point" to anything depends on a form of consciousness assigning that definition. There is no point to a water logged ball of rock, orbiting a giant ball of hot gas unless there is someone on that rock to say "the point of this rock is so I may exist.". Ignoring some cosmic creators with some purpose for us to exist (which would just be another form of consciousness), the whole point is decided by us. So without us, there would be no point.
Ugh, what's with these obnoxious buttons? https://sr.ht/S3w1.png

I'm so tired of endless barages of SUB TO OUR NEWSLETTER and LIKE US ON FB and TWEET THE SHIT OUT OF THIS PLEASE on every goddamn website.
I still don't understand the hatred around XML. Is it slightly verbose? Yes. Does it support lots of neat functionality that make it great for interoperating between systems, like validations and transformations? Yep. Sure, it's possible to go full architecture astronaut with it, but you can do that with pretty much any programming language.

Meanwhile, I'm just sitting over here wondering whether my YAML file is supposed to have certain indents here or not, "-" or not, and trying to go figure out which magic incantation I need to get it to handle a multi-line string the way I'm expecting.
IBM commits $240M to fund an MIT A.I. lab
Take this as a lesson in people handling. As a rule when dealing with business situations:

- Keep messages simple. Less information to process is better.

- If the response seems strange, start by assuming miscommunication and misunderstanding. Do not respond with more complicated information.

- When in doubt, say what they are expecting to hear and sort it out later when you talk voice or in person.

A more fruitful exchange would be:

Recruiter: We require having UNIX experience. If you have it could you update your resume and resend?

Candidate: Resending with UNIX experience written in.

Recruiter: Thanks! We'll be contacting you shortly.
I think it's more of a legal/licensing move than a technical challenge. You write and compile Java but then it's translated to bytecode for a different VM (Dalvik, I presume this is still the case though I hear there's additional native compilation that occurs now). Net result, developers get to write Java but Google doesn't have to pay royalties for a proper VM on every device.
I'm not sure, I haven't managed to write an app that large yet. I'm also not sure how you can outgrow Django, since you can always split off parts of your codebase, or not use the parts of Django you don't need.

I've recently written a flask application too, and I found myself having to reinvent the wheel at every step, and I cursed a lot. Django's ecosystem, both in libraries and in sheer community documentation, is hard to replicate.
I'd like to believe you about Pt and Ir catalysts, but I just had a chemistry PhD student complaining to me that some paper's processes were too uneconomical because of needing too many platinum atoms in the catalyst. The point was about new processes being viable, not existing techniques.
This sounds so much like those ads that look for "8 years of Swift development experience" despite the fact that Swift only came out 3 or 4 years ago. The fact that a recruiter can 'recruit' for a company like Facebook without having enough knowledge in the area that they're recruiting for is not only embarassing for FB but for the recruiting profession in general.
thanks for your contentful comment. I'm pretty sure everyone in HN will appreciate this.

"modulo" in this sense does make sense, because it's abstracting that part out and mapping it to a equivalence relation.
Do remember that we are talking about internships here.

If I have a task for an intern that requires some shell-scripting, and the intern already understands what it means to pipe commands, I put my hands together in silent thanks.
We originally piloted using Nylas's APIs in our product about a year and a half ago. In that timespan, their pricing has changed significantly about 4 times and they do not seem like they have a particularly good grasp on their business model. They also, despite advertising 10 free test accounts, arbitrarily delete said accounts and then when you ask to get them reactivated you get connected with a sales rep.

Their API sync-engine [0] either hasn't been updated since March, or hasn't been kept open source--neither of which is a great sign. We're currently using the open source Nylas sync engine in production as we were uncomfortable trusting an important feature of our product in a company that doesn't seem to have a firm idea of what they want to do. But with the seemingly abandoned open source project, we are now working on building out our own syncing applications to ditch it altogether.

I would strongly caution anyone considering using the sync APIs to think about what they are getting into and the switching costs.

[0] https://github.com/nylas/sync-engine
Turning? Wasn't it true already with cases like Flint?
There is some reason to believe that even a small percentage of "good" drivers can reduce traffic problems such as standing waves on highways:

http://trafficwaves.org/trafexp.html
Because of the monopolies that have been allowed to exist, getting black listed by FB is akin to chopping off a large portion of the quality tech jobs out there.

Its not that he was factually wrong (or even wrong in etiquette) , but as my mom said you can be right and dead right, which is why he recognizes he needed a better approach to leave the most opportunities for his career going forward
Awesome (I see it's in your profile, reachable by clicking your username).

Good luck; here's hoping you get some emails!
I don't think I'll be able to convince you otherwise, but this would read to most people as two assholes arguing with each other. Also OPs explanation of why UNIX == POSIX was pretty confusing, and I had to look up more information.

Plus, recruiters are incredibly busy this time of year. I don't blame him for choosing not to engage with candidates who reply with a wall of text when given a simple request.
Apparently it's already unsafe to drink the tap water in parts of the country. No turning needed.

Sometimes bureaucracies need a cleanout. They can then be rebuilt more effectively later.
great, I'm looking forward to the next Love Canal.
> Since the high-level API is supposed to let you treat a string as a sequence of code points,

I disagree with that premise. It should operate on grapheme clusters. Operating on code points falls into the same trap as operating on bytes.

> a correct implementation (which Python didn't have until 3.3!) would've imposed the overhead of conversion to something resembling a fixed-width encoding whenever a programmer invoked certain operations.

Those operations should have been removed. Indexing is the big one that needs fixed width internal representation for speed. Code could have been rewritten to not require indexing. But mechanical translation from Python 2 to 3 was a goal and because of that they couldn't radically change the unicode API for the better.

> And the vast majority of strings in real-world Python contain only code points also present in latin-1, which means they can be stored in one byte per code point with this approach. And for strings which can't be stored in one byte per code point, you were similarly going to pay the price sooner or later.

You're going to pay the price for 4 byte per codepoint strings quite often. A single emoji will blow up a latin-1 string to 4 times the size.
You right! Good feedback and thank you.
Resonates with me. Either we aren't ready for society in our 20s or society isn't ready for us. Either way, I think there's a missed opportunity there for a better use of that decade.
It wasn't that large a database if I remember -- maybe 1TB? The sstable sizes seemed reasonable at the time, I think it was just explosion due to json.

Anywhoo, one huge file is fine, what's not fine is having one huge json object -- streaming parsers might be ubiquitous in the XML world, but definitely not in json land. Something simple like small json documents separated by newlines would work.
All Python 3 did was put a hard barrier between bytes and strings. That's it.

Mising is all the grapheme handling that languages that do Unicode strings right have.
Good question. The 0th-step answer is that the people using `dd` are generally going to be using all OS defaults, including for the filesystem.

For what it's worth, I know that dd'ing /dev/zero makes df show a smaller value. AFAIK, df (for ext4 in my case) isn't reading a logical abstraction of capacity as arbitrarily decided upon by a bunch of layers, but is straightforwardly reporting the free blocks on disk.
> ask yourself what your end-goal with being elitist like that is really trying to serve. In engineering situations usually the purpose is some form of disguised signaling.

Facebook markets itself as hiring the best people. Therefore, when applying to Facebook, you want to market yourself as being among the best. When a recruiter first tells you that Linux isn't Unix, you assume that the elite recruiter looking for elite people is looking for an elite response which explains the difference.

OP's point is that image of Facebook elitism is just smoke and mirrors.
Duplicates https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15182386
But about half of the necessary safety margin comes from reaction times. Computers tend to be much better than humans, so that autocars can get closer without compromising safety.