skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thanks for writing this. It's tangential to my point (which is specifically about the large corporates which constitute "tech" in the colloquial sense), but I find it very interesting, and am keen to reduce my own ignorance.

> There are almost no physical assets there to justify calling the system 'capitalist.'

Why do there need to be physical assets? I know the classic Marx-ish "seize the means of production" stuff is written in this way, but it doesn't make much sense to me outside of the factory labor of the industrial revolution.

I use 'capital' to mean investable money, or assets that can be traded or exploited; e.g. accumulated wealth, as opposed to income. And I generally use 'capitalist' to mean someone who invests 'capital' seeking a return on investment, without producing much productive labor themselves. Often this means maintaining the capability to partially or fully control the product and the nature of production, in exchange for the investment. E.g. a venture capitalist.

> But it is hard to call someone who starts a firm for $1,000.00 in his garage and sells it for 10 figures, or someone controlling a similar firm who has already recovered his initial investment 100,000 times over...

These wouldn't really be 'capitalists' per my working definition above, just extraordinarily successful founders of bootstrapped-small-business. I think we're aligned, except on whether examples like these are in any way representative of anything that's likely to happen to anyone, or what's meant by "tech" in the article. Google raised 36MM pre-IPO, Facebook 2.3B pre-IPO. This money came from venture capitalists, who would have exchanged it for boards-seats, strong influence on executive appointments, and ultimately the direction of the company.

I can't tell if you're an accountant or a Marxist (or a Marxist accountant!), but I'm keen to know more about your perspective.
It can't have a similar metabolic effect to sugar. For one, it's a peptide, not a carbohydrate. Also, in the quantities it's consumed in, there are very few calories.

Now, for phenylketonurics it's problematic, but they have severe dietary restrictions anyway.

The only problem I'm aware of with aspartame is that consumption of any sweetener is associated with weight gain, possibly due to changes in the brain's association between taste and calorie intake.
Did you find the real Black Friday deal?
Wallabag – Save web articles. Read them later. Read them anywhere
You Aren't Gonna Need It.

That’s a popular claim. I wonder how many failed projects could have it as their epitaph.

Have you ever worked on a project where the requirements changed so fundamentally from one day to the next that you truly, honestly had no idea where you were going next?

I haven’t. I’m not aware that I’ve ever met anyone else who has, either.

The claim that requirements always, or even usually, change so dramatically within such short timescales that it isn’t worth laying any groundwork a little way ahead simply doesn’t stand up to scrutiny, in my experience. Any project that was so unclear about its direction from one day to the next would have far bigger problems than how the code was designed.

Otherwise, there is always a risk that by being too literal, by ignoring all of your expectations about future development regardless of your confidence in them, you climb the mountain by climbing to one small peak, then down again and up the next slightly higher peak, and so on. This could be incredibly wasteful.

Of course requirements often change on real world projects. Of course I’m not advocating coding against some vaguely defined and mostly hypothetical future requirement five years in advance. But often you will have some sense of which requirements are going to be stable enough over the next day or week or month to base assumptions on them, and insisting on ignoring that information for dogmatic reasons just seems like a drain on your whole development process.
Way back before they added visual basic into it Excel had what was called a Macro language that was also built in sheets - just slightly different appearance (very wide cells) and altered functionality (to prevent you from doing numerical operations to your macro code). I think this was around version 4?

Anyway, it basically worked like a stack, with the currently selected cell being the instruction pointer. So when debugging you could either look at your data and watch blocks of numbers flashing in and out of existence or changing state, or look at the macro sheet and watch the pointer bounce around as it went to different branches or sat in loops or whatever. There were commands to turn screen updates on and off (which sped things up considerably) so as you got more and more of it working it would go from looking like some confusing nightmare to a smooth list of progress bars and passed sanity checks.

They moved to VBS because programmers were finding the cell model too restrictive/weird, and for integration with Access, but doing it all in cells was remarkably and pleasantly like assembly-level debugging. You'd hack something up quickly, figure out your algorithm, then name the ranges and use and index value, and you could lock ranges and what-all else. It wasn't as easy to read as a page of code (eg no whitespace) but the crudity of it pushed you towards that sort of 1-operation-per-line discipline that assembler demands and really forced you to think about semantic efficiency. I had macros consisting of thousands of cells of code with every single operation commented. You could, in turn, name the ranges that had macro code in them and do code profiling to find out where your performance bottlenecks were, and so on.
> some random idiot on a blog post

So you're not ok with holding employees responsible for their work product failures, but you're ok with calling people with strong opinions about said failures "random idiots"? Hooray hypocrisy.

> That's why companies don't base their decisions on random posts or comments.

So companies shouldn't take customer feedback into account when making product decisions? That seem like a pretty bad plan.
I think the fight is mostly over the last mile, not the backbone that connects DCs to intercontinental cables.
You can get around that by cross-compiling. I think in this day pulling something like that off on a compiler as popular as Go would get noticed.

Anyway that issue is orthogonal to the language choice.
>Seattle

I'd rethink that. We're blessed with relatively low violet crime numbers, but property crime is pretty high. We take it as a given that our car will be broken into every once in awhile living here.
"Population health" at work!

That is terrible about your family member though. Its a horrible system
I was trying to express an inchoate thought the other day, something to the effect that, "total volume of code in the world should be shrinking about now". I think this article could be interpreted as pointing to that.

I imagine a Grand Refactoring... The "great compression" of '23, or something...
Setting Up Mailgun with Laravel 5
> For instance, why do doctors NEED to do a 4-year undergrad degree before medical school?

They don't. Medical schools can accept students straight out of high school, as long as they've completed the required pre-medical coursework. They don't, however, because those students drastically underperform their peers who received an undergraduate degree in a different field.

> Why do they NEED to go to a 2+ year residency after medical school?

Because without it, they literally have never been trained to practice medicine. Where do you get the idea that Europe is somehow different? Residency is required (and comparably long) in the UK, Germany, etc.
Hawaiis action to address predatory practices at EA [video]
Nice work! My first ever Vue.js project [0] had just basic functionality like this, but it was a great learning introduction to the framework.

The only thing I noticed was that the 'infinite scroll' seemed a little 'off'. Hard to describe, but the experience was a little jarring. I would scroll to the bottom and it looked like there were no more items, but then there was a short stutter, and more items were added. Perhaps a visual representation that this isn't the bottom of the list and that more items are below might make the UX experience better? Somthing like a faded out bottom of the last box on screen, or a simple '...' or down arrow below it if there are more?

[0] - http://tophn.info/
> When a CTO says "let's collect geolocations", the CEO should should have legal and business reasons to say "no way, it's not worth the financial risk of losing them; it could destroy our company."

Sounds like the EU Data Protection law, which says you need a legitimate reason to store & process personal data.
As I understand it, Wheeler was a cable lobbyist back when cable was the upstart against the broadcast incumbents. So it may have been easier for him to appreciate the upstart perspective as well as that of the incumbent.
Same can be said about most things but that doesn't/won't stop people from using things like this. The same goes for web Development I used to be a freelance web designer in 2000s-2009 which gave way to do it yourself 1 click websites, forums, and WordPress which people use blindly. I was recently looking at local businesses web presence and 3 I found were using WordPress to serve up mostly static pages all out of date 1 was hijacked and serving pornography TGP with a link on the main page to it. I contacted the owner who could seem to care more about being bothered than the fact his family friendly restaurant and website were serving up hardcore porn. took them 24 hours to fix something that should have took less than 5 minutes. and they only removed the link their website is still hijacked the script is still on their site and the exploiter could return at anytime and start serving up malware. I documented everything pretty well and am going to use it as a case example to these other local businesses to hopefully use some sense and not try and DIY and hire if not me, someone to maintain their websites. 1 last comical thing is another one of them was using their FTP credentials in css to link a picture
>I know about aerodynamics and fluid dynamics and how things move through the air, about the certain size of rocket nozzles, and thrust. But that's not science, that's just a formula

Wow, I don't even know what to say. Does he think these formulas magically appeared in text books one day?
unfortunately the subtle technical trade-offs that Bitcoin as, doesn't make it a suitable resource for daily use, from the poor unbanked that live on developing countries, that "use case" will need a new currency developed specifically with this objective.

Currently the best real life "use case" of Bitcoin is digital gold, a form of electronic store of value.
That's the point, I think. CDNs are all tier one, and tier one is where the bandwidth shaping will happen?
Not really. CORS headers are set by the destination of the XHR. In the case of XSS it would be an attacker controlled server used to exfiltrate user cookies, etc.
Was he ?
As a Lotus specialist I can see why you'd think Lotus 1-2-3 was the original killer app spreadsheet and as someone who worked retail at the time selling UNIX and Microsoft machines I'd have to say we sold a ton of Lotus 1-2-3.

But we have to give Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston their dues because Visicalc is the original killer app spreadsheet in the literal sense: people used to say they didn't know if Visicalc sold more Apples or if Apple sold more Visicalc. It truly was the program for which people bought the platform.
There's a lot of really weird vicarious worship of the wealthy around here. It's ironic that it's called Hacker News since traditionally hackers came from more of a "fight the man" zeitgeist. At times it borders on sycophancy, like when every single utterance of a VC no matter how banal is analyzed as if it's the words of some venerated guru.

The extreme of this would be the Silicon Valley right and its full and explicit embrace of feudalism and monarchy.

... and no, I'm not criticizing Thiel. The vicarious sycophancy of the HN community is a lot weirder and at times more troubling than the behavior of the actual SV rich.
I can store the tick data, although I'm not storing it at the moment (I disabled it for the launch and will test the load that enabling it represents).

I use Cassandra with just 1 node for the moment.

It's kind of that, although the client doesn't talk to the exchange directly, it only talks to the backend. The backend consumes events from the different exchanges, transforms it to a common format, stores it and serves it to the client (in brief terms).
I mean the price he sold at IPO was way higher then what he bought in at the seed round as one of the first investors, it is one of the best seed investments ever, given he was already one of the longest shareholders by the time of the IPO it made sense to sell
"viable" is a function of how interesting your production services are to a capable adversary.
Self-taught rocket scientist plans launch to test flat Earth theory
There's a plethora of E-numbers which are a safe alternative [1] (according to the EU). I could quote them, but you might as well just click on the link instead.

They're supposedly easy to recognize as they're in the E95? and E96? range. Unfortunately the fear for E-numbers has caused manufacturers to stop mentioning them and instead naming the ingredients again.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E_number#E900.E2.80.93E999_.28...
One could instead use fats for fuel by cycling in and out of ketosis. After the body adapts, sugar and carb cravings subside.
How a single PostgreSQL config change improved slow query performance by 50x
If (random made-up numbers here) 90% of bitcoin transactions are BTC being shuffled between exchanges and 'washed' through mixers, but 90% of wire transactions are people paying for rent, food, and hospital expenses, would you really say that the distinction isn't meaningful? The societal implications of those two groups of transactions are very, very different. I would argue that the latter group's importance is much higher than the former's.
You don’t. The majority of websites behave acceptably if you disable JavaScript entirely.
I think this is key. All the conversations we're hearing are about data breaches. In my opinion, that's merely a predictable and unavoidable symptom of data hoarding.

We need to move toward a recognition that collecting PII is inherently dangerous. Holding on to PII forever is inherently dangerous. And that's before the not insubstantial privacy risks these databases incur. I worry that any policy that solely concentrates on breaches is just going to lead companies to gamble that they won't be in the relatively small minority of companies that actually get hacked.

What can we do to incentivize a CTO not to have a customer database, or failing that to keep her company's database as minimalist as possible, even if she is 100% certain that database will never be stolen?
Why wouldn't market pressures force some ISPs to provide unfettered access to the internet? As a consumer, you might choose an ISP that prioritises say Netflix above everything else to guarantee a good experience. For someone who prefers diversity of content, might pick an ISP that does not prioritise in the same way.
How did they know they'd delete it?
Don’t try to reason with a man who is trying to use the scientific method (hypothesis and experiment) to disprove science. “You cannot reason a man out of a position he was not reasoned into.”
If you're interested in it, you should try it! I did it for about a year, and thoroughly enjoyed it.. though it's not without its negatives as you say. For me, the positives outweighed the negatives. Consider getting a mobile hotspot and set yourself a house rule of only using it in emergencies, or on the road.
I can't speak for Cortana on desktop Windows 10 as I don't use it there, but when I had a Windows phone it was by far the best of the big three for hands-free communication while driving. It understood every command, every word, and was able to flawlessly send texts by voice and read responses back.

I have an iPhone now, but Siri is so hit-or-miss that I rarely use it for sending, and it doesn't read me received messages at all. With Windows phone when I got a text in the car I immediately heard "You got a text from __________, would you like me to read it, or ignore it?" That's what a digital assistant is made for, and it was amazing. If only Windows Phone hadn't stagnated and died, I'd happily still be on it.
The FTC is taking over and will uphold net neutrality, the FCC is giving it to the FTC who can run it better for consumer protections. The rules for the last 2 years and the 300+ page document will go away under the FCC, but that doesnt mean the FTC will not do anything. This will change the classification from title-2 regulation to title-1 regulation, and enforce privacy protections and access/censorship restrictions.

The end of the world it is not, and the hyperbole is at an alltime absurd level.

As for access, 5 years, LTE 5, Viasat3/4 will provide coverage around the world. FCC guidelines for internet access at the pole will go into communities to allow the breaking up of limited choice ISP for some communities. Google fiber and Facebook internet already helped promote the change.
Highly recommended article about Jigsaw (Java 9)
The President Donald Trump Coloring Book
A super comprehensive article about MongoDB architecture
I find it's applicable to some software projects as well.
I do not have a smartphone. I have purchased things using bitcoin. Smartphones are not necessary for BC transactions.
Good point—I can see the point of having numerous repos if you have multiple unrelated clients’ code bases.
Probably an igod
> Social Media Addiction: You can passively use Twitter to follow "history in pictures" and "baby kitten of the day" photos. People choose to follow 500 politically charged accounts and then get surprised that the environment turns toxic.

The "evil" part of this is that they encourage you to do exactly this. They'll go out of their way to find entities for you to subscribe to, regardless of how tangential the relationship is. Unlike your bartender or waitress, they never cut you off when you're in too deep-- they just keep shoving more down your throat.

An alcoholic should be able to call it quits after just one drink, too. Like the rhythm method, not everybody has the willpower to just pull out once engaged. This mechanism capitalizes on human frailty to keep users engaged.

> Fake News: There used to be a publication called the Weekly World News at almost every check-out in the US that made claims that the Clintons were romantically involved with space aliens (http://www.motherjones.com/media/2015/04/weekly-world-news-c..., the Republic withstood this rash of Fake News. That some people can't work out that conspiracy theories promulgated by "EaglePatriotNewz.PL" or "GMOTruthNow.us" aren't likely to be accurate isn't the fault of Facebook. It's a problem to be sure, but not a tech problem.

Fantastic claims about lizards in politics are on the level with comic books-- recognizable as fiction without even needing to think about it, and diminished by the fact that nobody else but that single tabloid is making such claims. You can safely evaluate it based on number of claims alone. "If this were true, everybody would be reporting on it!"

Well, enter social media. Thanks to the algorithms and the circles you're part of, you're bombarded with variants of this story about lesbian leisure suit lizards from a virtually unlimited number of sources, legit or not. Suddenly, it looks like everybody is reporting on this lizard thing. "You should just know better" doesn't work when the more you're exposed to it, the more you're desensitized, and the more real it becomes. That is the corruptive influence of social media and fake news.

We've all had that one crazy relative who insists some crazy conspiracy is true, but these lies can only achieve this scale of influence because of tech.
Or imagine corporations using it.
And a reverse example is that for 40 years, people thought low-fat diets were heart-healthy, and that turned out to be bad science.
Systemd is one of these things that brings many improvements... and gets talked down.

If it was at least criticized constructively, but no, it is something else than the "traditional" init, so let's just berate it.

And then we wonder, why the Linux desktop is always out of reach, when we dismiss anything, that helps to drag Linux out of the maze of one-off bash and perl scripts.
You cant beat Roald Dahl - the dark humour and themes are brilliant. Im reading them to my son and its great to still enjoy stories as an adult, and see a different side to the story I would have missed as a child
It's actually both of these reasons, with reason (1) being the primary one.

PostgreSQL allows interactive transaction blocks (meaning you don't have to submit all commands within a transaction block upfront). Citus extends Postgres and needs to provide the same semantics.

That said, we regularly evaluate different techniques on distributed deadlock detection and avoidance. We have an FAQ that discusses deadlock avoidance methods in the context of Postgres. In the link below, the last question on "How can a distributed database prevent distributed deadlocks?" provides more detail:

https://www.citusdata.com/blog/2017/08/31/databases-and-dist...
> The key is that you have to not give a shit about anyone other than yourself

This is actually quite difficult. Despite its shortcomings (and perhaps ironically) religion can be effective at convincing people to put others first but I would say the default behavior in most people is "I only care about myself and family first". This default behavior is exacerbated when people follow the influence of greed, lust, etc.
Merica!
Your profile is emphasised to recruiters during searches, kind of like a premium profile in a dating site.
> I really do not want my family to be the brave eggs we had to crack to get to the omelet of a driverless future.

Good, then don't get a self-driving car, why do you need regulations for that?

> I now _like_ that someone somewhere has a book listing chemicals that aren't allowed to be shipped on an airplane

Wow, someone who actually believes in security theatre aka airport security. The litterature is so vast on the uselessness of the TSA and the water bottle ban and co that I shouldn't even bother posting it here but here you go https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/06/01/tsa-fails-95-perce...

> I used to view lawsuits as a menace to free enterprise, but I'm a tiny bit comforted by the fact that everyone working on car tech knows they're extremely exposed to litigation if they aren't diligent

Even in a world with no regulations there would still be private arbitrations and if a company is responsible for a death they would still get sued to hell.

> The idea of code from Apple or Google driving on my roads is switching me from classical liberalism to "help me, big government!"

Oh boy.
The world always keeps spinning. Just in one future you have Star Trek, and in the other, Blade Runner. Once dystopia becomes fait accompli, the beneficiaries of the status quo also benefit from the difficulty of arguing for counterfactual histories without access to a world with those histories.

But that doesn't mean nothing was lost, or that some huge chunk of human potential wasn't sacrificed. In that regard, for the people who see how things could have been, the predictions of doom were accurate.