skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Literally everything you do with memory and disks can also be reduced to CRUD, but that is an extreme example to show my point: a DB does a lot more. A well written DB, in this case a good RDBMS, gives you stronger guarantees that data is saved and accessed in certain ways. That by itself is worth using a better one that gives you better guarantees.

But they also provide stronger typing and checking of the data. They provide a programming language neutral way to access the data quickly and efficiently. They index data to make queries on it faster. They do much of this automatically so you think it's all simple CRUD operations, but they also provide ways to explain what they're doing if it isn't working as expected. I can count the number of programs (not DBs) on my hand that I know of that can explain themselves accurately without needing a debugger.

Edit: I don't mean to be annoying. Most people on HN knew this and I'm not assuming you didn't, but while most people just use RDBMS for simple CRUD operations they're losing out on the power that these databases have been designed with.
I think that in the world of B2B, the website isn't meant to sell product; it's meant to start a conversation/look legitimate. Sounding like your competitors == legitimacy.

All of the real sales and marketing is done offline
Are you really suggesting that Eric Schmidt personally calling their CEO and expressing his "displeasure" isn't pressure? I suppose when a mob boss says it'd be "unfortunate if something happened to someone", you'd characterize that as just an expression of a personal view, too. Perhaps someone "sleeping with the fishes" really is just a leisurely dip in the Chicago river.

It's also worth noting that there are a significant number of examples where your employer has invested specifically in people writing about antitrust law, and specifically, claiming that Google doesn't violate it (see Joshua Wright, etc.). Suggesting their financial investment is limited to net neutrality discussions is... pretty misleading.
Lean meats are also preferable to fatty, and animals that grow fast are preferable those that grow slowly.

Pigs and chickens are fairly safe, and perfectly ethical if you source responsibly.
Likewise chicken is often not considered 'meat' despite clearly being the flesh of an animal. It's kind of weird, but not as weird as the people who think "a little bit of ham" in a salad doesn't count as meat.
Sailor 1911 standard: greatest fountain pen ever.
Where did I say anything about loans?

You do realize renewable energy is subsidized by RECs, who wouldn't want to add capacity when the government will pay the shortfall! They aren't profitable on their own, and barely turn a profit when you look at the full life cycle of these businesses due to the maintenance/depreciation costs which are hidden when you look at pure operating profit.

Invenergy has huge natural gas generation and seems to want to sell every wind farm they build. I don't know why you think they're an example of a profitable wind farm operator, there isn't any evidence that they make money off it. Alstom makes nothing off it's wind either.
> scaling on SMP machines and not crashing while doing it

Yep - Only ever had one time when it hosed on us (100 people team, many running JVM based applications and some doing load tests on it - IIRC it was 2.6 days.) And there wasn't a challenger in sight as far as SMP goes(h/w and s/w both).
It all depends on what kind of business you are running. Your 2k design package might be great for someone on a budget but a large number of businesses want value and don't focus on price. Ironically you are attracting a certain kind of client yourself. You post about attracting 300 clients but do you talk about the quality of life of your employees? Do hey work minimum wage? Outsourced to India? I have no idea what kind of quality of life you create for your employees at your rates. Not to mention you are selling a commodity not a specialized service so to say that people are blissfully unaware of affordable companies like yours might be better achieved on junk showcase sites like dribbble - spew out a bunch of garbage and see what sticks.
I'm not quite sure about the national transportation being 100% green, or at least I misunderstood what you are saying.

As a Dane I can promise you that our governmental public transport is not 100% green, our main long-distance trains (IC3) currently operate on diesel. Neither is the private transport 100% green, since people can buy traditional combustion engine based cars.
Not at all. RDBMS features were critical in getting performance and scale once upon a time. Sharding, access control, authentication, indexed views, fk relationships and other constraint enforcement, cascading updates and deletes, efficient data management with stored procs, caching, etc etc.

My first job was even writing dynamic web apps entirely in Informix.
Ironically enough, fungi and animals separated later in the tree of life than plants. So, while certainly not correct, there is a kernel of truth there.
Ask HN: Truly “open source” create-react-app?
Since facebook isn't going to change licence anytime soon, how long before JS community comes up with a truly "open source" create-react-app?
They sell turbines, they don't run wind farms. Selling the equipment is very profitable because every purchase is hugely subsidized by the government.

Their profit is tied to the volume of wind farms deployed, not the profit generated per MW of wind.
Because they are paying me and therefore it's not my decision. I give advice but if the client insists on something that's what they get.
I think this post is aimed more generally than just at programmers. In my experience, I've found more perfectionism everywhere else in the business. Bias: I'm a programmer and I believe I take the time to do the job the best I can; most of my time is spent re-doing features that users have never used.
Yep. I play with deep learning pretty much every day and I'm way more scared that we don't invent AI. In medicine alone, there is just an incredible opportunity to improve the human condition.

A consequence of humanity establishing itself as the apex predator on this planet is that other humans are the real threat to our world. If there is one thing humanity has demonstrated throughout history, it's an incredible penchant for destroying itself. The difference this time is it might be possible to wipe out the species.

This is why the U.S. govt and world in general are probably not concerned enough about protecting the lives of Ivanka, Donald Jr, Eric, Tiffany, Barron, etc. Because if a foreign power killed them, or a terrorist pretending to be a foreign power, that would probably be enough to get Trump to show the world what a big man he is and unleash a nuke that could kill tens of millions. Ironically, Trump would probably be pleased if he read this. That doesn't make it any less true.
Reminds me of "I am Pied Piper": http://siliconcali.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/I_AM_PIED_...
If everything is always changing, then the perfect happens only one moment in time and the next moment the perfect is gone. Secondly, you can only influence things to perfection and when they hit perfect, you got lucky. You cannot make it happen.
With design, there must be some way to be objective to evaluate a design. If there is no objective, then how can you establish, know and recognize what is perfect?

A witty saying proves nothing -- Voltaire.
A hilarious, and well written story.

I fondly remember my camel riding experiences along Cable Beach in Broome many years ago. So much more peaceful and sedate than a horse ride.

A good addendum to this story (if I can find it) will be one that I've heard here a couple of times, of a young lad who decided to walk across the Kimberley desert with a camel pack, and it turns out one of the camels was pregnant and gave birth during the trek, and he ended up carrying the baby camel on his back a lot of the way. A similar story of courage, strength and hilarity...
Not technical, but Money/Finance http://www.npr.org/podcasts/510289/planet-money
Can anyone offer any advice for software engineers/product managers with a web app background, interested in moving into the renewables world? Open either to using existing experience or learning something new.
Still much more a fan of sbt (and sbt-web for bundling just about anything on the web side).

Smaller, type-checked build files, even has a native packager plugin for building RPMs... really very nice.
Kite power is one of my pet hopes. I keep hoping it will gain some significant traction. Looks like there may be a a test power installation going up in Scotland https://www.independent.co.uk/environment/kite-power-station...
Per capita fish consumption is not radically different between East Asian and Europe/USA [0], while sperm count is.

https://www.st.nmfs.noaa.gov/st1/fus/fus99/per_capita99.pdf
You might be asking two different things.

Minimalist: Steve Reich, Henryk Gorecki, John Adams...

But it sounds more like you're asking for classical music that isn't overwhelming. In that case, go for chamber music - this is for any small ensemble. You might particularly like things like Mozart wind ensembles (quartets, quintets), Faure or Ravel trios or quartets (sometimes with piano), etc. There are a lot of Mozart cds "for children" that are good here too, since young children like smaller ensembles better than big orchestras.
And clearly you don't know what you're talking about and are just making slanderous speculation. Engineers at Google have better things to do with their time than sit around trying to dream up ways to screw up the health of their code base for harassment purposes.

Is that what people do at your company? Sabotage code for political purposes? Maybe it's time to change jobs.
I could've sworn you guys were joking but you're all serious. This is utter madness!
[Original question altered to break apart "why?" and "it shouldn't be".]

Q: Is fatality rate the only legitimate metric on which to judge prison sentences?

No. Fatality rate is not the sole legitimate metric.

Q: Then why is fatality rate relevant? People are put in prison for all sorts of lesser offences all the time.

It's a "hot-button" metric. Its use inflames emotion and skews human behavior away from rational.

When drawing an analogy between two things, introducing "fatality rate" when not already present muddies the waters of conversation. If done accidentally, this can lead to serious "foot in mouth" scenarios. If done intentionally, it's typically used to encourage fearful decisions instead of careful decisions.
Add this to yesterday's Paris Hilton news and I'm pretty sure we've just spotted the top of the bubble.
Generally, you would expect lenses with a higher refractive index to be thinner.

However, due to the selling point of Trivex being "shatter proof" it has a greater centre thickness (to pass safety lens regulations), and thus the edge thickness is also comparable to CR-39.
philosophers are used word salesmen, you aren't missing much.
Mysterious fossil footprints may cast doubt on human evolution timeline
Stop Designing Languages. Write Libraries Instead
You need to accept that something as big as a Facebook or Google is pure poison, inimical to anything like the freedom you're describing. You don't create a hammer, you just break everything and leave it in pieces, because at least when it's in pieces you can find something that roughly suits you and none of the pieces will crush any of the others. Of course over time some pieces will naturally band together, and eventually you'll be right back where you started, but that's just human nature and another reason why they call it "revolution" after all. As far as anyone can tell there is nothing static in nature, and nothing in human history indicates the ability for us to avoid constant change or the need for constant change, and get our history is essentially a story of trying to resist change.

As a result we get frontiers like the Internet, but those frontiers always close if they turn out to be valuable. You can either except that, you can try and open and exploit new frontiers, try to change the way we operate as a species, or just give up.
There are a number of reasons some websites do not list prices:

1. Pricing sets the wrong expectation for the true price you may actually pay once you get all the features you need and may not be aware of thus making the sale more difficult.

2. Pricing sets a transactional tone vs a mutually beneficial relationship

3. Pricing anchors your mind set to how much something costs vs how much value / ROI you get out of that product or service.

All of these do disservice to seeker and provider.
It doesn't shut the machine down though, right? Just kills all the processes? I remember reading somewhere that solaris-killall was only a part of the shutdown process.

I remember having a related problem with an ubuntu cloud server a while back. I'd called 'halt' instead of 'shutdown' - they're not the same, and on this machine 'halt' didn't actually send the 'okay, now power off' bit.
and IoT.
Never listened to him talk but he's surprisingly down to earth, interesting, and levelheaded.
I run a/b tests and this is the furthest from the truth. A good tester works with professional copywriters who create clarity not add to confusion.
Love Will Tear Us Apart received significant airplay in the US, at least where I grew up in the 80s. Even if you’ve never heard of the band, you might know that one song: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=zuuObGsB0No
Let's not forget the time they refused to make a YouTube app for Windows Phone and when Microsoft made one, Google forced them to remove it. And then seemingly in retribution for making the app, Google blocked Windows Phone from being able to access Google Maps even though the browser was technically capable of using it. Google's reasoning was (similarly to another comment here) "it's too hard to check functionality in so many browsers" like they're not literally the most powerful Internet company in the world engaging in petty nonsense with a basically non-existing competitor.

Remember when Microsoft did the stuff Google does now and the government actually cared enough to do something about it?
Just curious which membership tier you're using?
> Though this same argument is dismissed by those who support the idea that we're changing the weather by CO2 emissions.

Our direct effect is minuscule, it just so happens that our efforts magnify the not so minuscule effect the sun has.
some goodwill. Microsoft earned a lot of with all of the open sourcing they've been doing in the last few years.
Ask HN: How do you pivot your career when jobs want years of exp in a stack
Learning frameworks and platforms through udemy and pluralsight.
Side projects on github.
What did you do to get a response back from jobs you've submitted an application to?
Did you apply to junior roles when you were a senior in the other stack?
Thank you.
> By some magic voodoo witchcraft, x86 remains consistently capable of producing a single kernel that can run on anything from Intel or AMD.

It went the other direction: anything new from Intel or AMD had to run the same proprietary, binary-only kernels and applications (since MS-DOS was more of a loader, applications could and did access the hardware directly).

Later, Microsoft started specifying exactly what would be required so that their proprietary, binary-only kernel would run (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC_System_Design_Guide). It was not the vendors upstreaming their platform support; it was Microsoft dictating what the platform support would be. Even today, Linux's ACPI support mimics Windows', since that's what vendors test against.

ARM systems never had a dominant vendor which could dictate its terms, and new systems were not expected to be backwards-compatible with older kernels.
Is that really an AI though or just a bunch of if-elsif-else loops? Is a true artificial intelligence really required?!
I don't have anything I can point to.

I also struggled to give up caffeine on my first couple tries. On my last attempt, I noticed that I stopped getting migraines, which gave me all the motivation I needed to stick with it.

I only have a sample size of myself, so my advice may not be worth much, and it's definitely a cliche. What seems to work for me is to set a modest goal and don't get discouraged when I don't meet that goal the first time. Once I hit that goal, I stretch to something more ambitious. Sometimes you'll find you have goals that you don't really care about as much as you think. It's okay to set them aside and pursue the things that matter to you. Okay that's it for unwanted-advice time. :) Good luck with your goals!
The other rule that helps with this is to train employees to always put the conclusion at the top of the email. And it should fit in a short sentence. Give me the bottom line first and I can get through a lot of emails.

I very rarely need all the details someone thinks are important in order to make a decision.
Remote-first is the way to go, I think. That's how my current employer functions and I think it works pretty well. You definitely don't want to be the one guy who's remote and left out of lots of stuff. I also think it's much more likely to work at a smaller org than a large one.

Of course, even in remote-first occasional face time is important. So some traveling is involved.
Multiple points to make: 1) AGI is closer than you think 2), long-term perspective, 3) they are not just classifying it as a threat and most do not want to halt AI research.

1. Many people who _are_ in the AI field have stated that most if not all of the pieces for AGI are probably there. We cannot say for sure that this will happen in the next X years, but there is enough evidence that it is a possibility in X years. I believe that x is less than 5 years. I think the likely way we will get there is by creating artificial virtual animals that have high bandwidth sensory and motor outputs, advanced neural networks, and develop diverse skills gradually in varied environments like young animals. Obviously until we actually see those types of systems performing generally, that is speculation. One of the common beliefs of myself and other 'AGI-believers' is in exponential growth of technology. That means that even though it may seem far away now, it could still be completed in a few years since exponential growth is much faster than linear.

2. Looking at the evolution of life, we have a progression of things like single celled-animals, multi-celled, reptiles, mammals, apes, humans. This occurred over millions of years. On that type of time scale, whether you believe we will achieve some type of general intelligence in 5 years or even 500, it is a relatively short time. Even in terms of just human history, those with my type of worldview believe this will develop relatively soon. This will be a new type of life (or tool). A higher and much more capable paradigm. Whether they care enough to have disputes with us or not, humans will only be relevant in the larger scheme so far as they can interface with these things.

3. What most of these people are saying is not "Oh no, AI is dangerous, better stop". Generally people who understand this well enough realize this is sort of a force of nature or evolution that cannot be stopped. What we can try to do, however, is try to guide the development to be more beneficial for us (at least at the beginning stages). We have to take it seriously because there are enough signs that we have the components to build it that we don't _know_ that it won't happen soon, and the consequences of an unfriendly or out-of-control AI are too serious.

So the idea is, try to come up with some rules to handle this, and that is what governments are supposed to do. And also try to actively pursue friendly practical AI before someone who is less aware comes up with something we can't control.
Your pupillary distance won't change depending on the frames you buy (it is a body measurement after all).

However, where the optical centre of a lens is placed within a frame can vary from the PD a fair bit, depending on how the frames sit on your face, as the contact point of the frames do not always line up perfectly with the top of the nose bridge.

Also, an oft looked over measurement is the distance from the bottom of the frame to the centre of the lens, which is important with complex prescriptions and cannot be measured without looking at the frame on your face.

Having said this, with most low prescriptions the human tolerance is so high that it does not matter.
Florida Gov Declares State of Emergency for Incoming Hurricane
Both were directly related both to anticommunism and to extractive, commercial colonialism, so, no, I don't think that's a solid rebuttal.
That kind of pricing is bad in the long run, though, because that customer who paid $50k is eventually going to learn that their competitor only paid you $20k and then they're going to be pissed at you about it forever and ever.
It would be great if Google changes their policies and acts responsibly from here on out, but whether they do or not, I think we would all be better off in the long run if there were more competing services.

Maybe it's time for a new search engine? (Or a new video sharing site, or a new email service, or a new online ad delivery system, or a new news aggregator, or a new cell phone operating system vendor, or a new Internet business model that isn't dependent on advertising revenue...)

Google started at a time when most people didn't think we need a new search engine, and it seems to have worked well for them. Maybe it's that time again. I'm not sure when exactly the PageRank patent expires (people seem to be saying 2017 or 2018), but it will be soon and that should open up some interesting possibilities.
Right: Guacamole doesn't do anything for Wayland. It just lets you create a parallel solution.
I can't even tell if this is "real" or just fantastic performance art... Or even if there's a difference any more...
Most ICOs actually trade Etherum, Bitcoin plays a role but it's usually secondary.
They seriously did that as you said? What a bunch of self important twats.
Someone who can afford a $2.5 million house can easily afford a financial advisor.
It's completely possible for someone to have immense market power and not use it for evil.

I mean Apple is the richest company in the world but they choose to compete in very niche markets, and hasn't actually completely dominated a market since the iPod even though they easily could with their massive stockpiles of money.

Instead of trying to bend the Internet to the point of breaking, Google could just... not do that. They could focus on putting the industry best ads in the industry best search results, running the largest video streaming service, sell a wildly successful mobile OS, and have the best online office suite without all of the other terrible things they do as a corporation.

They're already the best at basically everything, so they got bored and now need to burn their reputation like it's kindling. It's pointless.
Hardware support is by far the stupidest complaint that prevails when people talk about operating systems. Choose your hardware for your software, not the other way around. There are so many better things operating system authors have to do than to implement thousands of competing proprietary hardware interfaces. Mature support for even 50% of consumer hardware would take a massive team of full time engineers years to pull off, and would be wasted when that team could have been making huge strides and innovations in the parts of the OS that actually matter.

If your hardware isn't supported and you don't like it, get your ass into the code and build support for it.
I treat the "we want people who know stack X" kind of thing as a "Here's what stack we are using" and nothing more. I don't lie and say that I know the stack, but I don't want to work for a company that doesn't understand that a good programmer can switch to a new stack in a very short time frame. On the other hand, you need the ability to pick up a new stack easily.