skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I grew up dirt poor. Filthy home, no family car, head lice, "food or electricity this week?" poor.

Poverty was a series of choices, not something forced upon my family. Of course you eventually get to a point where you can't "better choice" your way out of it, but I think the truth needs to be said, as that reality isn't very PC it seems.

Every time my family had any money, they bought stuff. Not stuff we needed, but stupid crap. Definitely not calculated decisions to make progress to getting out of poverty.

As a technology professional, I make good money, and my income has about quadrupled since I started in 1999. I still struggle with that same poor mentality even so.

At best, it's a spray-and-pray approach. Many will fail. Maybe the few that use the money to improve will make it all worth, kind of like the "Just Say No" campaign. The real question is what level of efficiency do we demand?
It was the first thing I thought of as well. I feel like there are ulterior motives behind the grant award. Will be watching closely.
> I have to admit them a certain respect for executing their strategy so successfully.

But be certain not to conflate your respect as a business strategist with your judgment as a mindful developer. To speak clearly: By systematically playing a weak spot of ours [1] they have used countless of small teams as a stepping stone to sell their business contracts to large players, while hurting a lot of these small teams with an (at the time) inappropriate product for their needs. And through these huge costs they still made a product that is inferior to one that was designed properly.

As a community (both as a startup, as well as a developer community) we should resent these tactics and try to find ways to protect us against players that abuse the common good of mindshare. And lest you say, that is the price you have to pay to at all get a product like MongoDB in harsh business environments: We could also lobby for open source funds that are organized like research funds, producing fundamental technology that benefit everyone. Not every technology fits the model of for-profit startup innovation.

[1] Our community has very little defenses against marketing that comes from our midst, aiming to produce the (false) impression that a disproportionate amount of our fellows have evaluated the product and found it to be excellent. See https://www.nemil.com/mongo/3.html for a discussion about MongoDb specifically (HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15124306 )
I think the claim is that this is true in practice (among the surveyed options) not that it is true in principle.
Tesla’s China Dream Threatened by Standoff Over Shanghai Factory
In cities, I routinely get pings of about 40-50ms on LTE. I think it's well past the point of matching fixed broadband in that regard.
I never said the word 'ignorant' nor did I say anyone was a fool. I said 'not understanding'. If someone doesn't understand chess, I don't call them a fool, I just point out they are not trained in chess. Also to your point about grains of rice, I think the world would probably benefit from everyone purchasing the optimal number of grains of rice, and eating that number of grains of rice. Food waste is a problem, as is the belief that 2 dollars here and there doesn't add up.
> In fact, it is somewhat friendlier (some studies say a lot friendlier) to women than it is to men?

That's one of the problems. Nobody wants to be the special kid. The one you invite to all the meetings to be a token. The one who can't even be certain if their achievements are worthwhile or simply artificially inflated.

Being insincerely friendlier to women in a professional environment is, in fact, sexism. It is a form of gender prejudice and gender bias.
The analogies damage this article because they feel wrong. For example the "never synchronous" example is more like this:

You order a burger at the cashier window, then go to the pickup window. If the burger is already made, it's already at the pickup window when you get there.

The author wants a special case where if the burger is already made, they hand it to you immediately at the cashier window. This might seem more efficient, but both in the restaurant and in code it makes logic way more complex.
Accelerating I/O bound deep learning with a simple trick (4x speed-up)
Create VR on the Web Using Unity3D
On this point, the datastores that have insisted on using a query language that isn't SQL have always seemed to just be attempts at setting up walled gardens. Plenty of people have extended SQL when their needs required it (MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, TSQL/MSSQL) but intentionally rejecting the basic format of SQL queries just seems like an attempt to setup a barrier to ever move off your DBMS.

Speaking as someone who ported an application from MySQL to MSSQL there is still a lot of work required to remove those custom extensions, but the core of what you're doing can remain the same.
From the previous discussion [1] on HN:

I use ropes in xi editor. I did not find the argument against ropes convincing. Yes, they're not trivial to implement, but in a proper programming language you're not dealing with the data structure directly, you're always going through the interface, so you get the logic right once in the rope library implementation and then forget about it.

In a low-level design, your editing operations would be poking at the data structure directly. There, the simplicity of a gap buffer is a pretty big win. I agree in this environment ropes are too complicated. However, I don't see any good reason to architect a text editor in this way. Use abstractions.

The linked article contains a factual error, the referenced Crowley paper does not consider ropes. Thus it cannot be used in support of the argument that piece tables outperform ropes.

There's one other important concern with piece tables I didn't see addressed. It depends on the file contents on disk not changing. If your file system supported locking or the ability to get a read-only snapshot, this would be fine, but in practice most don't. It's very common, say, to checkout a different git branch while the file is open in the editor. Thus, the editor must store its own copy to avoid corruption. In the long term, I would like to see this solved by offering read-only access to files, but that's a deeper change that can be made piecewise.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15383193
Are you intended to read this XMLs? Having strongly typed protocol is a very cool thing in large multi-entity frameworks. Have you seen any successful JSON schema? I have not.
I code on all three platforms but whatever I do I keep ending up in Linux just because it’s so more powerful and useful (but hard). Second best is macOS even though lately it’s been a suck fest. I have coded in Windows for Windows but it’s clunky, awkward and riddled with bad APIs. If you don’t want to know what a machine does or appropriate problems, chose Windows. Also it doesn’t give you the mechanical sympathy which Linux breathes. Linux is better if you want to run something with raw technologies. Sure it’s harder to learn, so macOS is a better starting point, if you can afford it.
Also I think Linux is a lot less opinionated than the others which means it’s easier to come up with your own ideas.
I'd agree that a paradigm shift is definitely needed to address the problem. Banks need to see that constant investment not "put it in and let it run for 10-15 years" is what's needed.

And yes the point about risk of new projects... who wants to lead a project to replace a mainframe system that's been running successfully for the last 30-40 years and if it goes wrong you're guaranteed to be on the front page of the papers...

I wonder if a pattern will emerge where big banks let the challengers develop the tech, then they buy them and move across to it, once the kinks are all ironed out.
FreeBSD Code of Conduct
> otherwise there's no well defined place in your program for the exception to go.

I don't see the problem with that. Unhandled exceptions can occur at any place of your program.

I also don't see why the unhandled exception from the background thread cannot terminate main thread. Why not? That is how unhandled exceptions are supposed to work. Terminating the program is the optimal default behaviour for any error in my opinion. This way you won't miss them.
That is true in life in general, not just work place.

Nobody cares about people who are healthy all their life. But someone who suddenly realizes they need to eat better and exercise, and they do, they are applauded. They are defended too, if they go back to old ways. And so on...
Forget Boston Dynamics’ Robot Dogs: Purdue’s Microbots Are the Real Nightmare
I think all the console makers learned a lesson from the Red Ring Of Death. No one wants to be having a massive portion of their systems become useless hunks of scrap because of poor thermal design not dissipating enough heat and causing the solder to crack.
Ask HN: Do you incorporate before or after validating the project?
Hi great community.
I have this question for a long time...
Do you incorporate before you validate or after?
In fact the question would be... how can you start getting clients to pay you without incorporating? Do they pay on your name? And you inc. after that?
How do you get this working and pay your share if taxes?
I am from EU, if that makes any difference

Thank you very much
"The database was straightforward to create. The team set up a task on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk crowdsourcing service that asked people to describe three happy moments in the previous 24 hours or the previous three months."

I don't know about studies like these. Isn't this a huge selection-bias, sourcing from Amazon MT?
A database which utterly fails the Jepsen test should not be considered for production. It might be good enough for a cache, but trusting it with real data is reckless.
Ask HN: Experience with New California Salary Law?
What have your experiences been with the new salary history law in California [1]? Are recruiters providing salary ranges for openings when asked, and are employers asking about salary history?

I was recently asked about my current salary in the later stages of an interview for a company based in San Francisco, which to my knowledge is a violation of the new law.

[1] https://work.qz.com/1105643/silicon-valley-employers-cant-ask-your-salary-history-thanks-to-a-new-state-law/
100% Agree. It’s like saying Coca-Cola is not a marketing company, they sell beverages. Or Apple is not a “design” company, they sell hardware. sigh
I see the small community in illumos as a benefit, more or less. I'm not trying to denigrate it for its size. The issue is the attrition, the apparently-negative momentum, and the loss of prominent proponents and distributors, including Brendan, OmniTI, etc. That's bad when something is already small. It makes people wonder why others are fleeing.

My concern, as it relates to this thread, is around the spectacular loss of faith that Brendan has exhibited. You don't go from being a world-recognized authority on DTrace like Brendan to a Linux refugee overnight, especially not 3 years ago when you have to lay out all the plumbing for eBPF yourself.

So something happened. That's clear. I want to know what it is, at least proximally / vaguely, because if it can drive Brendan away from illumos, I assume it can also drive away those of us who are less involved.

If it was simply a personal dispute and had nothing to do with technical direction, that, of course, is one thing that doesn't reflect badly on illumos at all. People burn out sometimes, they want a change of scenery, whatever. But Brendan appears to stringently believe that illumos is now a bad choice in virtually all circumstances. It feels like there's something substantial at play. I don't think he's petty enough to bash the illumos kernel just because he had a spat or wanted to mix things up, especially considering it contains a not-insignificant portion of his own work.

I don't necessarily expect either of you to reveal details, and obviously, I respect that you have both moral and legal obligations as it relates to confidentiality surrounding personnel matters. I'm just talking about my read on the situation, and why I'm skittish, despite what I feel are some strong positives in SmartOS's favor. A world where Bryan Cantrill is the lone SmartOS holdout, after his compatriots have declared it a lost cause, is just nerve-wracking. I'm sure you can understand an outsider's perspective on that.

It'd be cool if you could discuss some of the performance ground that illumos has covered since 2014, as Brendan gave a pretty thorough list of ground that Linux has covered. His tone always seems to be "Solaris is a sad situation, but look guys, there's light at the end of the tunnel." He gives absolutely no intimation that illumos is a viable alternative, though he will entertain FreeBSD. Always phrases it like everyone knows Solaris and its derivatives are fully dead, and he alternates between appearing relieved about it and appearing disappointed about it (I'm sure it's both).

I just want to know why he rules it out so strictly. It's weird, it doesn't add up. Missing variables. I don't think this attitude is sufficiently justified by "Linux caught up, that's all". When stuff is weird, I approach it cautiously, especially since my goal with SmartOS is something simple, stable, and powerful, no fuss. Weird things are fuss.
The average consumer definitely does not need a mobile connection of very high speed. 24mbits is well enough. Netflix can stream w/o issue on 5mbits.

Tell me - which site are you going to stream from at full 5G speeds? None.
The consistency is really nice too. I've always hated the fact that column declarations are the first portion of a query and wanted them at the end but... I'd rather be slightly disappointed all the time than occasionally need to rewrite huge swathes of queries if we're changing DBMSs
Oh now that's an idea!

Somehow I expect that GMail's search box will get a "usesAMP:yes" or "content:AMP" filter or something. It has a lot of filter keywords like this[0], undoubtedly they'll add it.

You can easily add a filter rule to automatically mark all messages matching a filter as "spam".

If enough people do that, they might get the message. (and probably just remove the search filter option, sigh)

[0] come to think of it, GMail's search is a delight exactly because almost still kind of works like how Google Web Search used to work back when it was still good, a mere decade ago ...
I worked for a bank in the UK that's a US bank that has no retail presence in the UK (that probably narrows it down a lot) but much of the IT operations were being run and managed from the UK. The headcount in the global IT organisation was about the same as the headcount of Apple at the time. I've always known banks has been relying on computers for decades and probably longer than most industries and from my experience this bank was particularly progressive when it comes to technology and happy to innovate and experiment. When working in other parts of the financial industry in the UK it wasn't quite the same as this. I think there's certainly a stronger engineering culture in the US and the benefits of technology delivering productivity at scale is appreciated. The UK also has a legacy of a lot of well paying functions in the financial industry that wasn't relying on technology with people who don't have an aptitude for technology.
Yup, this is definitely a big part of it. I won't pretend like it's "the whole answer", but "poverty-induced executive dysfunction" is a real contributor to poor people staying poor.
On average, the program cost $13,459 per family, 48 percent of which was paid directly to families as cash rewards.

So the best we can do is 48% efficiency?
If you want to have a specific point to catch an exception, you could write something like this:

def start_task():
thread = Thread(do_task)
thread.set_error_handler(SpecificErrorType, handler)
thread.start()
Can I grow "herb" with one of these? Asking for a friend, of course.
I think it's dangerous to take your situation and apply it to everyone in poverty. Most people are there because they don't have a way out even if in your specific circumstance that wasn't the case.
> ITER is not a power station it is a research project.

That it is not, and that there is no such thing yet, is itself testimony to the difficulties of fusion. I wish it were otherwise, but these are the facts.

On the other hand, the author is being misleading when he considers ITER as if it were a power plant, except where he can show that its problems are inescapable problems of any plausible fusion-power scheme.

If / when it becomes possible to build fusion power plants, these problems should be weighed against the alternatives, such as the undeniable (though often denied) problems of climate change.

I notice that the author became convinced of the futility of fusion research only after his income became in no way dependent on society's hopes and expectations for it.
Have you checked out the Draggin' Jeans liners? They're basically full-coverage aramid long johns, much better coverage than their (and most other American) kevlar-lined jeans.

I wear them under regular jeans for casual riding (I always wear an armored jacket so no need to wear the upper liner) and would trust them in a low-to-freeway speed getoff about as much as any other mesh gear. You can stuff d3o armor into them pretty easily too.

It's not precisely what you're trying to achieve, but it's more versatile and generally looks better than full-coverage (Hood, etc.) riding jeans.
OK, we can't do threaded imperative programming because threads are expensive and people botch the locking. So we have callbacks where completion of some external event calls you back. Then you need closures so the callback has some state so it knows what to do when called back. Now you have a control structure problem, and need a state machine to decide what to do next. But most of the time you just want to do the next thing, so there's syntax such as ".then()" so you can write imperative programs again.
From what I'm reading they were trying to do things with Mongo that it wasn't designed to do around transactions. If you have a schema that is well defined and doesn't change frequently, why use a nosql database?

I chose Mongo for a relatively large project that I was responsible for because I knew the schema would change frequently, we didn't have a need for transactions and honestly we hardly ever update documents. We insert and replace.

I also had enough sense to set my Write concerns appropriately.

My choice was also informed by a preexisting project that the company was using that had close to 150K new documents a day with basically the same semantics as the one we started.
Bootloop is down to hardware ageing, specifically solder, as I understand it. System resets etc. don't fix it. I've had two phones die from it. The cure for the brave involves reflowing the solder in an oven.
Facebook ads 90% of traffic is coming from bots and fake visit
Isn't that exactly how this program was operating? Short-term reward payoff: monthly cash; long-term reward: children graduate from school.
If the licenses are what is worth the money, not the discs, and the licenses are still tied to the PCs that the restore discs are being provided with, I don't see the significant problem here other than the infringement of using MS/Dell logos on the discs themselves.

Really seems like a reach by Microsoft to claim lost sales. Already had a negative view of Microsoft, especially from their past, but this is ridiculous.
Uber reached 150,000 registered drivers in Egypt during 2017
One excuse is lazy teachers. If you force everyone to buy the latest yearly edition, every year, chances are most students won't have access to the teacher's edition solutions guide yet.
> In fact he tried 1000 micrograms of it, one of the biggest doses I’ve ever heard of someone taking.

If this is at the threshold of your knowledge in this area, there's a heck of a lot more to learn. This whole article, with some interesting facts about a few cherry-picked researchers, emanates naivete.
As an aside, fixing that problem should be feasible. Linux (or rather libgcc or whatever the case may be) uses an open source floating point implementation (and not virial like the GPL): https://github.com/gcc-mirror/gcc/tree/master/libgcc/soft-fp

With enough finageling you could utilize the libgcc floating point implementation on Windows and make it consistent everywhere. Or you could take the wiser approach of avoiding floats outside of graphics code and using fixed point instead.
Extensive non-advertising product offerings that somehow don't translate into extensive non-advertising revenue...
That's good in theory, but what currently happens is a professor takes a fully paid sabbatical and writes the book for a publishing company. That company sells the book to students for $300 a copy and pays the professor $50 a copy (with a possible sizable amount up front). The professor and friends of the professor requires it for their classes.

The friction that prevents your plan from happening is that the professors won't do it for so cheap. There is a ton of money they can make under the current system.
> Many people look at what Thiel did as a public service.

How they feel about that is going to closely track partisan allegiance.

And what constitutes "justice", in the context of a sex tape or other journalistic malpractice? Tens of millions of dollars? Uncountable millions? Any number of millions so long as it's enough to put the company out of business?

I don't agree that shutting down Gawker was the appropriate remedy. Damages yes, annihilation no.
I'm one of those people who come in and comment about MongoDB, positively. My first "stack" was LAMP, in 2012 when I learnt how to use it, it was:

- a JSON store that works well with NodeJS
- a geospatial database (yea, it has what I need) that was "easier" to work with
- a database that made it easier for me to change my schema (if you just throw data at it, garbage in, garbage out).

Over the years, I've followed development, and adopted new features to make my life easier.

- I was one of the people who were excited about full GeoJSON support in the 2.* days, because that's something I depended on.
- I've tailed the oplog for as long as I remember (never needed Redis), and have been learning about change streams (announced in 3.6) with the hope of submitting a PR to Apache Beam to support them.
- I adopted a lot of the aggregation framework (Asya Kamsky from MongoDB personally helped me a lot)
- The last time I migrated data from MongoDB was when I turned on WiredTiger in 3.0.*

My little replica has been up for as long as I remember, the only time I have downtime is when restarting my server.

When I start a new project these days, I still go to Mongo, because what held true in its early days still holds. It's quick to get something started. Yeah, there's $lookups, transactions in future; I've just leveraged features as they become available. I have Postgres in my stack, which runs TimescaleDB and is a backing store for my Gitlab instance.

Would I use MongoDB professionally? It depends on the use-case. Over the past 2 years I've worked with Oracle, SAP HANA, Teradata, Hive+Impala, etc. From OLTP to OLAP, but once in a while when I find it quick to, I still use MongoDB, and when I have it my way, I don't later migrate elsewhere.
Those "other revenues" only account for about 13% of Google's revenue. So its a fair comparison. Google is almost 90% an advertising company.

https://abc.xyz/investor/pdf/2017Q4_alphabet_earnings_releas...