skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> In my humble opinion, burning fossil fuels to create electricity to “mine” this “currency” is unethical because it literally has no net gain to society, not even entertainment.

A true peer-to-peer digital currency enabling you to make payments globally without a third party being able to censor has very real benefits.

For example:

* Donations to wikileaks or similar organizations
* Payments in gray areas, for example porn
* Transfers to and from inaccessible areas, for example war zones or dictatorships

It might be inefficient but the concept isn't completely useless. So far alternatives without mining are being researched but are lacking in various ways.
Major cryptocurrency deanonymization event is imminent
SpaceX Plan for Broadband via Satellite Backed by FCC Chairman
I didn't go to university thus I do not have a CS degree. This book was incredibly helpful in teaching me the basics of algorithms. I found it approachable but technical enough.
not to mention they need to be maintained...
Time tracking for developers, wow
Thank you. We took an exploratory road trip to check out Corvallis and Eugene two years ago, and we stopped in Ashland and did have a very nice time at a park there. We hadn't actually considered the town, I'd assumed it was very conservative for some reason.
I don't see this as a purely financial decision. A coffee shop here in Austin recent re-introduced Wifi after years of famously not having it. Presumably, this was because they were lacking the business from the laptop crowd.

Obviously, use common sense and courtesy. Don't take up a large table. Don't teleconference. Buy a something regularly if you plan to stay a while. Don't bring outside food in.

Having said that, I welcome coffee shops that choose not to have wifi. But frankly, I'm less likely to go to them.
Based on my experience (primarily enterprise level data development) Agile can work if the product is ideally suited to it. By that I mean a reasonable number of stakeholders, and documentation and the product are in a state that can support rapid iteration. When management complexity and product complexity increase I begin to lust for the dreaded waterfall, because it can become onerous just defining requirements in an environment that is particularly chaotic or troublesome.
It's really unfortunate this didn't have its day in the sun... It's an excellent piece.
One of my favorite technical books. The sections on dynamic programming and heuristics were a revelation for me working on some of my first non trivial algorithms.
> The short-termism that's infested our culture--it seems like all Western culture--is truly sickening. It feels like "Well, I got mine, screw the next generation." This goes way beyond just junior developers.

This is a byproduct of the erosion of loyalty that's pervasive in business these days. Businesses use to be loyal to their employees and in return their employees were loyal to them. That's no longer the case because over the last 30-40 years businesses have shown they aren't loyal to their employees.

Pensions are gone in favor of the 401k scam with many employers no longer even matching contributions. Medical Benefits get worse every year while the cost to the employee rises. Merit increases are virtually nonexistent and in many cases you're lucky to get a cost of living increase.

Why would an employee have any loyalty to a company that treats them like a commodity? It's gotten to the point that many functions are just outsourced to another company (e.g. HR, Maintenance & Facilities, Administration, IT). The staff are employed by the contracting firm and thus they are a fixed unit cost commodity and there's no long term obligation to them.
One simple suggestion for one platform: https://github.com/weinberger/nosql-tests/issues/22

The more common pgtune CLI is not up to date for PostgreSQL 10+ at this time.

Also there are some old, open issues that indicate the benchmarks have problems:

- https://github.com/weinberger/nosql-tests/issues/16
- https://github.com/weinberger/nosql-tests/issues/13
You're absolutely correct on this point. My first job after obtaining my CS degree was "Senior Developer" even though I had never developed software professionally before. I got the Senior title because the company had their pay buckets tied to titles so in order for the company to bring me on at the rate I requested, they gave me the Senior title. Titles apparently are nonsense, at least from what I've seen.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16369977
Woow !!! Journey of 20 years. I get bored maintaining 1 year of code. Hats off to you Sir !!!
> ... but it would still be annoying to actually use ZFS in Linux for the same reason it is annoying to use it now.

For those of us who are ignorant of what is annoying to use now (I raise my hand) can you elaborate? I'm fooling around with it on Debian Stretch and Ubuntu 16.04 LTS and haven't yet found it annoying (except for the challenge of finding where the various command line switches are documented...)

I was particularly surprised to find it was an 'apt get' away on Debian, but I do have non-free repos enabled.
> If I buy exactly 100 bitcoin style coins on a block chain I can't turn around and sell exactly 100 coins because of in network transaction costs. Making it literally negative sum.

No, because the aggregate value of the market is increasing. And what you’re describing is a liquidity cost, not a value cost - those coins still exist and their value has not changed, your ability to capture their utility has. The conventional markets are very similar in this regard with respect to derivatives and trading fees.

> More abstractly miners must be paid to do work.

Yes, and at the same level or abstraction: if the activity was not positive, it would (by definition) not be sustainable, given that we are measuring interactions between miners (and their aggregate costs) and the market (and its aggregate costs). Which brings me to...

> Billions of hours worth of compute time has direct material and energy costs.

Yes, and the same principle - the compute time and energy costs have quantifiable costs, and those costs are under the potential profit of mining.

Note that I’m not saying growth is sustainable in perpetuity (that’s thermodynamically impossible). I’m saying that the game, with the interactions and constituents you’ve described so far, is positive sum, and therefore sustainable with growth for the foreseeable future.
Sure. That place is called "corporations".

They might say otherwise and of course they can't really say: "If you're average at anything come join us." but not only is it very unlikely that the majority in a 10,000+ employee company is above average, big corporations - traditionally at least - optimise for mediocrity and consistency rather than excellence and creativity.
Your argument boil some down to ‘its Google's platform, they can do with the want with it’.

Which is true. It's equally true that people can point out if changes Google make are problematic for users.

No hypocrisy required.
Where did you move from? I used to live in Toronto but don't currently - starting a business is probably a good idea there, employment opportunities are not as great as big cities in the US / Europe IMO.
"the City": London's financial services sector.
> How is that the "bad idea" passed over so many people at a company that praises itself of hiring some of the most smartest people in the field?

That formulation is disingenuous at best, and your follow-up describing it as a "question" is just as bad.

How is it that you think your comment was acceptable when so many people disagree at a website that praises itself for having some of the smartest commenters on the web?

I hope that helps demonstrate the dishonesty of a question of that format. No need to answer.
Don’t do “projects” at all.

Instead, Everything is either an “enhancement” or a “defect” broken down into the smallest deployable chunk. These can have themes (epics), labels, and dependencies.

Prioritize in consultation with the business, but don’t plan more than a few months ahead.

This actually seems to be working for us in SaaS product management, infrastructure management, even managing packaged internal-facing “crapplications” like financials.

The budgeting, funding, and measurement practices surrounding “projects” is so broken in most orgs that you almost have to do this.
There was also the internet. Consider this article from Tom's Hardware circa 1998 http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/nvidia,87-8.html
> "Weird how HN is ..."

Please just leave generalizations like this out of conversation. HN is more than just the comments that catch your eye or those who choose to comment on a particular submission. You yourself choose to be a part of HN. Would you ascribe these same attributes to yourself? Or those that other commenters mention when they make similar generalizations? There are plenty of comments in the threads for this submission which indicate that there is no consensus around the topic.
Actual gold has physical storage costs aka a bank vault etc, those costs must be paid making gold negative sum.

Say I buy 1,000,000$ worth of gold and agree the vault owner can sell gold to cover the costs for the next 100 years. Alternatively, I can spend 1,000,000$ but get less than 1,000,000$ worth of gold to pay for the vault. In either case in 100 years someone needs to keep paying for the vault. Any finite amount of gold is not enough to pay for it's storage costs forever.

PS: You can spend less on security but you risk having nothing of it's stolen. Given enough time and it will be.
Rainbow Deployments with Kubernetes
I absolutely agree with this. I think that this "all screen time is unproductive" mindset can actually deny some kids the opportunity to develop technical skills and interests that could significantly benefit them later on.

I'll use myself as an example:

I grew up with parents who restricted my time spent on video games and internet use (I just spent more time playing video games at friends' houses). They did however allow me to have computers in my room that weren't connected to the internet.

I spent a lot of my early teens tinkering with my computers and learning to code. When I was around 15, I finally saved up enough money from my summer jobs to buy an iMac (and a wifi router that I convinced my parents to let me replace theirs with). I then had unlimited internet access and continued to learn IT and programming.

A few months after graduating high school, I moved cities and applied for a dev internship at a local ad agency. I had started at a community college but dropped out to accept a full-time position. Now four years later, I've held 2 lead positions at two companies and am earning a senior-level salary.

Without a doubt, I wouldn't have had that level of opportunity if I wasn't allowed to have computers growing up. I think parents are doing their kids a potential disservice by placing all forms of 'screen time' in the same category. Restricting (leisure) internet use and video games is very understandable, but I think there is real value in allowing kids 'screen time' if they have any level of interest in technology.
Calculus Learning Guide – Better Explained
I liked your review of Servierless architectures (http://bit.ly/2Es31X9). Have you been working with many projects involving AWS lately?
Because it's a standard that allows an effective way to curate and browse lists of articles without having to fully commit to a single walled garden service. My primary method of browsing HN, for example, is via the RSS feed.
What would be the advantage of adding tighter voice/video support to XMPP, vs just using links to sip: URIs? A major point of open standards is that you can use use them together with other open standards.
Agile and Scrum (big A/S) have faded into agile and scrum (little a/s). The 'One True and Holy Process' has faded into a set of processes that organization iterates on. The process should be fit to the team/organization. The team/organization should not be fit to the process. Personally, I have had good luck with a mix of kanban, with multipart estimation and Monte-Carlo simulations for projecting completion dates. So far its worked well and managing change while being able to predict completion times.
I'm also reminded of C.S. Lewis here:

“Suppose one reads a story of filthy atrocities in the paper. Then suppose that something turns up suggesting that the story might not be quite true, or not quite so bad as it was made out.

Is one's first feeling, 'Thank God, even they aren't quite so bad as that,' or is it a feeling of disappointment, and even a determination to cling to the first story for the sheer pleasure of thinking your enemies are as bad as possible?

If it is the second then it is, I am afraid, the first step in a process which, if followed to the end, will make us into devils. You see, one is beginning to wish that black was a little blacker. If we give that wish its head, later on we shall wish to see grey as black, and then to see white itself as black. Finally we shall insist on seeing everything -- God and our friends and ourselves included -- as bad, and not be able to stop doing it: we shall be fixed for ever in a universe of pure hatred.”
Find an employer that values career programmers? We have a "Technical Fellow" career path for devs/engineers/architects who want to remain in a technical role beyond the typical "tech lead" or "principle whatever" roles.
Arbitrary code execution from removable volume label in KDE Plasma desktop
I love this comment
it's called market signaling. I just read it from a previous HN post/commentary. Example: Once they use VB as their adviser everyone just thinks the coin will go to the moon. 99% of these ICOs really don't need a blockchain and are just selling a prepaid discounted giftcard where the discount is not determined until a maturity date and you don't even know if the company is there for you to redeem your giftcard.
MIT AGI: Ray Kurzweil
Kodak literally invented the digital camera, and were significant in both consumer and professional digital photography in the early 00s.

They missed by not innovating fast enough compared to the competition, not by ignoring the market.

Unimaginative management was very definitely a problem - although to be fair, it's easy with hindsight to say they should have started developing digital much earlier, when in reality consumer digital photography only started to make commercial sense when computers and public networking became powerful enough to support it.

That didn't happen until the later 90s. Until then, most computers lacked the photo quality displays we take for granted now.
> This "over-engineering" is happening all over Google products

This is absolutely a thing at Google IMHO. Remember the last major version of Google Maps, ran silky smooth on low end hardware, searches went where you expected, in and out no problem.

Then someone decided to try for glory and improve on perfection by re-engineering the entire thing. Now it sets the fans off in my macbook within a few seconds of appearing and they run for the duration, searches zoom out and show results 5 miles away on the other side of the major city I live in when I just want to see restaurants or coffee shops near me, constant back and forth jank from result lists to items.

Went from an app that was a complete joy to use to something I dread to interact with.
What do you mean by "chaotic" and "troublesome" environment. Also I would be interested in how waterfall is helpful in those cases.
I see, that does change things. Thanks for explaining that -- it is quite different than in North America, where municipal taxes are generally added on top of provincial or federal taxes. For example, many wealthy NYC residents go to great extremes to avoid the municipal tax, which they can do by spending enough time out of the city [0].

I guess to the point of Berlin, do municipal taxes work the Estonian way or the North American way in Germany?

[0] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/03/19/tax-me-if-you-...
> All the examples are Java 9, Scala, Groovy, or Clojure

Some of those languages are more functional than others. I'd put them on a scale from least functional to most like so:

Java 8 (least functional)
Apache Groovy
Java 9
Scala
Clojure (most functional)
Also note that in both cases (Venezuela and Brazil) there was no external force (war or commercial ban) that artificially reduced supply.
At the time Brazil started experiencing hyper-inflation, it was already one of the world's top beef producers, still beef was up 5000% a year.
Venezuela was selling it's oil at peak prices to the US when their hyper-inflation started. For a while gas was the only affordable product in the country, because the production kept pace with the money printing.
There's just no explanation for inflation in Latin American countries that haven't seen a war or major natural disaster in 100 years, other than bad spending policies.
The government themselves admitted that in most cases, and were able to get inflation back in track with massive cuts in spending.
The Verge is really pimping Magic Leap hard these last few days. Not going to help now that “photonic chip” is clearly just a diffractive waveguide, and the rest was marketing spin and lies.

http://www.kguttag.com/2018/01/17/magic-leap-how-rigged-was-...

http://www.kguttag.com/2018/02/14/magic-leap-one-video-diffr...
Kanban.

Done correctly, it allows the product owner or manager, to rearrange priorities dynamically as long as they aren't in progress, it surfaces where resource or process issues are causing a bottleneck and there isn't as much ceremony.
How the Dinosaurs Went Extinct
From what you asked, I can deduce you work in an environment where performance is important.

For my startup (and I'd say at least a non-negligible number of companies), half of what you ask is just not important.

Background to read what follows: small 5-year old startup with 2 developers, which don't do anything "complicated" like ML, computation or things like (mostly apps, with a CRUD back-end).

I'll try to rephrase as what I'd expect instead:

* Big-O is not important there. What you need to know is to have some knowledge to how to leverage your DB to do things instead of looping yourself over data just queried from your DB. And that's not number one.

* Edge cases is actually a valid concern for every programmer, no matter the field

* it might be useful to have a rough idea of what you expect to offer a proper solution, but it's generally pretty obvious

* justifying a solution is also a valid concern for every programmer, no matter the field

* manually doing operations already handled by your framework/library is a red herring, barring very specific situations that require an explanation. Be it sorting, filtering or whatever.

Bonus point

* bringing manual parallel processing reeks of premature optimization (as an environment where performance isn't generally a problem, remember). It has to have a real explanation, and other obvious optimizations have to be done already. So far, I've never reached that point in my professional career (but tools I use DO use parallel processing, I just don't roll it out myself, that would be NIH syndrome)

* don't forget caching! If the cache performs badly, it's time to start investigating why, but you don't need to worry about cache performance if you don't do crazy things, for the most part.

* Testing is also important wherever you go, but I also let this one slide because entry-level candidate aren't teached that in school, unfortunately.
With regards to tracing eBPF has actually moved at a fairly brisk pace the last year or two and it will probably take a while for the documentation and knowledge to permeate.

The usability side you mention is what Brendan's suggesting is worth porting from DTrace, just the front-end that the users sees. That would just back onto eBPF and the user would know little different.
> If you go for a few days with no interaction/seeing other human beings you'll go crazy.

I've done solo backpacking trips for more than 'a few days', and I did not go crazy. I think there's a difference between choosing isolation and being forced into it (the later probably contributes to insanity, not the former)
Do I have to be on a keto diet for this?
Our new email is workwithus@signal.org
Show HN: PeopleMaven
Interesting concept. But what if you start building from scratch?
You are either young or have lived your life in a dystopian movie. :)

Friends and Frazier are accurate portrayals of how cafe culture used to be. People used to go to coffee shops for hours, drink coffee and other stuff and just shoot the breeze. It was pretty great, and in a lot of ways better than a bar. The one by me growing up had a big leather couch in front of a fireplace that we liked to sit at, and it was pretty great in the Ohio winters.

In the DC area we have a big Ethiopian community. Ethiopians are big into coffee and coffee shops. If you go to a Ethiopian coffee shop, it's still like that. Some of the higher-end coffee shops that have sprung up in the area are also like that. We live by one that we often go to as a family every Saturday morning and get coffee and breakfast and just chat.

I have found the chain coffee shops have been taken over more and more by people camping out on laptops. It probably also depends on how much your area has actually coworking spaces.

I have also found that if a place offers more of a true cafe menu, you'll find more people talking. If a place can be something where you would realistically get lunch and coffee, it's much more likely to be lively. And for me, I'd rather be in a lively place regardless if I were there for lunch or if I wanted to work on my laptop a bit.
I love it since it has actual C code for implementing the ideas. You get the intuition for the algorithms, how that intuition translates into pseudocode, and how that pseudocode becomes real C code.

Another lesson that it uniquely provides is that in day to day life you don't use these algorithms. You create new algorithms using the ideas behind the famous ones as a guide. An algorithms book or class that doesn't teach you that problem-solving mindset is basically useless.
SHAP: A unified approach to explain the output of any machine learning model
I don't have a CS or any other degree either.

But I guess I'm just grumpy, because the book came with high praise.

To be more constructive:

Sedgewick's Algorithms is good for implementations in imperative languages. Okasaki's Purely Functional Data Structures is a nice introduction to some algorithms and data structures suitable in a purely functional setting. He also addresses laziness.

And finally for the theory, Schrijver's "Combinatorial Optimization: Polyhedra and Efficiency" tells you more about P and the boundary to NP than you ever wanted to know.

Those are just a few that I enjoyed, and I can't claim they are the best.

For example Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs is definitely worth a read, but it won't help you with algorithms directly.
Sure. I don’t think that captures all the economic nuance (you’re just reducing it to a Keynesian beauty contest), but yes.
The original agile manifesto is still the best thing to go by, IMO
I’ve been impressed (read: found few/no obvious factual errors, which puts it in a minority of one among non-industry-specific news services I read) by Bloomberg’s technology reporting lately.
Why is that bad? Jobs should be filled based on skill/knowledge. (The ability to learn is a skill too, one that means what you know currently matters less). I take slight offence to your statement. Why is being a woman relevant to anything, unless your company is going for 50/50 male female. But in my opinion that is wrong, and amounts to sex discrimination against men, because if 50% of roles are filled by men, even if there is a better male candidate, then the female will get the role. (And vice versa, but that is generally not the case in my experience). This is wrong. It's about what the person can do, not evening numbers. Sex discrimination gone mad!