skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think it depends... Who are we talking about here? Juniors, even intermediates, in my experience, haven't had enough time on the job to have learned enough to be writing raw SQL statements or query objects unless they're actively punching up on a daily basis. I am unfortunately talking from experience here.

What I am saying is, I really do not want a situation on my hands where the juniors that I work with, or most of the intermediates, and even a few of the seniors and leads, are writing raw SQL or query objects. Most of these folks have n years of experience in web and desktop application development and couldn't give you a passable answer to simple questions like, "What's a database index?" I know this isn't isolated to my current employer, or former employers, and I've seen it in other organizations where I've done some consulting on the side, and all of these folks I'm talking about here have largely worked else where in the past, too. And this in itself leads to other third-order effects, like the "SQL wizards" who get asked all of the "tough" SQL / database questions.

I want to stress that I understand the point that you're making, and I do agree with it, and of course, so do many (all?) ORM authors themselves, but I think the advice is wrong and is prone to take you to a much worse situation. I think we have an obligation as people who do grok SQL and databases to gently introduce our less experienced co-workers to the idea that ORMs are not a panacea to all database interactions, but until the companies we work have enough of an incentive to give us that sort of time and empowerment then I, for one, am going to recommend ORMs for everyone for everything unless they really, absolutely, demonstrably know what they're doing.
One of the most interesting proposals to me was the concept of an information fiduciary:

SCHATZ: In the time I have left, I want to — I want to propose something to you and take it for the record. I read an interesting article this week by Professor Jack Balkin at Yale that proposes a concept of an information fiduciary.

People think of fiduciaries as responsible primarily in the economic sense, but this is really about a trust relationship like doctors and lawyers, tech companies should hold in trust our personal data.

Are you open to the idea of an information fiduciary and shrine and statute?

ZUCKERBERG: Senator, I think it's certainly an interesting idea, and Jack is very thoughtful in this space, so I do think it deserves consideration.

So I went and dug up the paper they're talking about. [1] It's really interesting and I think probably does a better job than most of the other proposed regulations. Typical regulation is to set forth processes that companies must follow. If instead we just tell companies that 'you're responsible for not misusing this' we don't get all the bloat that can shut out small businesses, it avoids first amendment issues and instead of being antagonistic or alternative to anti trust action, it complements it.

[1] https://lawreview.law.ucdavis.edu/issues/49/4/Lecture/49-4_B...
Those things don't generally influence how you structure the query, though - you can choose to structure your query to fit the underlying structure better, or you can modify the underlying structure to better fit your data and the manipulations you are trying to preform.

Yes, most of us will have to do both at some point, but they can be thought of as discrete skills.
As someone with a degree in chemistry and now attempting to self-learn CS, I have found working through detailed books and problems the best way to learn.

If only I would have known this simple fact in my chemistry lectures instead of trying to look through the book for what the teacher would test on. Yes I tested well but my understanding of the full concepts is not as expected.
Recommend testing the site on mobile. I stared confused at a black screen for a while before realizing that it had a massive fixed width and I had to pan right to see anything.
Ah, thank you for confirming that, I didn't think about looking at Blockstack's FAQ itself. But then I reiterate my question: what does the blockchain enable here exactly? TFA says that it's "exciting for crypto[currencies]" but it just seems like a cloud computing framework that happens to use ethereum for purchases.

Just to be clear I'm not saying it's useless, actually being able to host your own data anywhere you want and having "end-to-end" encryption sounds great, I just don't see the "blockchain is going to revolutionize the world" angle.
If you can move, consider amsterdam. Great city, great salaries for devs(75k€+).
(Interview) How Forbes Keeps Shaping the Future–“Creative Destruction”
They aren't idiots. That's a big generalization to make. There are idiots on both sides as well as very smart people. Bad guys and good guys.
I appreciate that it might sound like that to someone who hasn't used MySQL in production for 10+ years.

To start with, this is still true today: https://vimeo.com/43536445 Despite being 6 years old, strict mode is still required.

Anything prior to MySQL 5.7 will accept "0000-00-00 00:00:00" as a valid date, 5.7 will not (which is sane) however this means migrating from 5.6 -> 5.7 just got a little harder.

In fact it wouldn't validate /any/ date so it would assume every year was a leap year and febuary always had 29 days.

Regarding the query planner: https://bugs.mysql.com/bug.php?id=74602
This affected my prod mysql/zabbix installation https://support.zabbix.com/browse/ZBX-10652

Regarding performance:
This is what I found from my own experience: I was given the task of testing the limits of MySQL, MySQL was the chosen technology and I was no involved in making that decision so- whatever.
We were given 10 servers, with 40 cores (2014-2015~) 128G of DDR3/ECC and 8 SATA SSDs in RAID-0 with 1G of RAID cache for write-back.
We managed to get MySQL to bottleneck pretty quickly, our queries involved a lot of binary data so we should have been raw IOPS bound, but we weren't we were memory bound. So we replaced the memory allocator with a faster one (jemalloc) and we get a 30% performance improvement. We suspected that the kernel sockets implementation was slowing us down so we compiled a custom "fastsockets" linux kernel. The improvement was around 4%, but we were bottlenecked on memory. After doing a full trace of what MySQL was doing we saw that InnoDB was spinning on a lock quite a lot.
I asked if we could try other SQL solutions (MSSQL/PostgreSQL) Postgresql was first chosen because we could just install it, no license and no OS change... it was twice as fast as the optimised MySQL installation out of the box with a stock CentOS6 kernel.

We never even bothered testing MSSQL because PostgreSQL met our performance targets, we were now IOPS bound.

--
More anecdatum:

Regarding data consistency we (tried) to migrate to postgresql for performance reasons in 2014 (my previous company), and failed because MySQL had been corrupting our data very slowly and silently for many years (corrupting meaning not honouring NOT NULL, not honouring type safety, allowing invalid dates, inserting data on error) So far in that actually reimporting the output of `mysqldump` would not work.
Could you tell us more about how your book is relevant to the topic at hand? I've tried to read up on information operations, albeit in a different context.
Some comments here mentioned that it's more like $180k base salary plus around $130k in options. Depending on where you're living, you'd still need to pay for living expenses (rent, insurance, food, etc.) before amassing a good chunk of change for retirement. So, it's possible that those making that amount of money are putting a good amount away while they work to live that life of luxury where the dollar goes further.

It's also very likely that people pulling $300k/year really like the work.
From the first one:

> To mitigate these issues, external contacts may typically include a corrosion-resistant coating to the exposed exterior surface… Although temporarily effective, such coatings are subject to frictional wear and may become less effective over the life of a device.

Frictional wear is not a huge problem in practice.

There’re billions of devices with built-in batteries in the world. I’ve been carrying a cell phone, and later sometimes other electronics, since 1999. Never encounter such issues.

Most manufacturers use gold plating, and they advertise reliability for 10000 mating cycles:

https://gct.co/usb-connector
https://www.gradconn.com/Products/MicroUSB
https://www.molex.com/molex/products/datasheet.jsp?part=acti...
I disagree. I believe that the code I write for my employer is valuable and I recognize that having no copyright on it would reduce my compensation as an employee. You're right that developing a consensus on this is ngih impossible.
Not that I doubt you, but by what metrics?
Unless you bought a long time ago, I'm going to take a guess you're not in London. You could expect to pay £900 for a room (maybe including, maybe excluding bills) in a flatshare in a decent(ish)/popular location.
If they called Python 3 e.g. Cobra or Boa Constrictor or even Turbo/rapid/mega Python or similar nonsense, nobody would likely complain as it would clearly distinguish itself from existing ecosystem and all the enthusiasts could jump on the wave, boasting how much better it is, that it comes from the original authors of Python and then go through usual Darwinian selection to see if they prevailed. But breaking compatibility in a major way doesn't make a lot of people happy, when the gains are small, as with v3.
Every documentation system I've ever seen at any company -- large or small -- is almost always undermined by the inclination to: 1) not look things up, and 2) ask someone before looking things up.

The information is almost always 3 clicks away, but people just want to ask another person, or behave in a paralyzed manner as if the information couldn't possibly be found.

And if you work in a "lotta meetings" company culture, even moreso.
> it's like how in the US, it is illegal to pay taxes on illegally gotten gains,

Actually, the rule in the US is:

it is illegal to /not/ pay taxes on illegally gotten gains

Failing to declare and pay income tax on income (no matter the source of the income) is what is illegal. And many a criminal (as another poster mentioned in regards to Al Capone) has been ensnared in a "failed to pay income tax" /gotcha/ even though they could not be convicted of the illegal activity itself.
I think the situation with managers and engineers is likely only marginally better, but you're probably right.
> Yes, technically. But practically, every single story showed how some robot was able to reason his way into violating the spirit of the laws.

Huh? There is literally one story (Little Lost Robot) where there is a "loophole" in the laws (and only because the First Law is modified to drop the "or through inaction allow a human to come to harm" bit).

EDIT: in thinking about it further, I guess I'd add That Thou Are Mindful Of Him to the list of "loophole" stories. Still, two examples out of dozens of stories is very much the exception, not the rule.
I would think that, depending on the dapp, it would be inaccurate to call the UI centralized, if you were able to run it yourself. In a way a wallet is a UI for a currency dapp, and you could either use a centralized UI or your own instance.
Yes, 100% this. It doesn't matter how good the tool is (and so many knowledge-management tools are not good), you need the processes and organizational habits in place to make knowledge management a success.

Effective knowledge management practices are something we think about a lot at Spoke (https://www.askspoke.com). We've studied other companies' practices and have come up with some organizing practices/principles:

1. Adopt the right tools:
- Adopt cloud-based knowledge management tools that are simple to use. If new tools are overly complex, no one will use them.
- Find solutions integrate with the applications employees are already using. (Be where employees already are, like Slack.)
- A central source of information is best. If knowledge is spread across multiple tools, it will still be difficult for people to find.

2. Take advantage of new technologies:
- Adopt tools and technologies that use AI to process and catalog resources. Ideal solutions may automate the processes of updating knowledge and/or automatically categorize and tag new content to make it easier to find.
- Look for tools that use machine learning to improve as data is collected. Machine-learning technologies learn how people search for certain types of information, getting better over time at helping users find the exact information they’re looking for.

3. Document important processes:
- Set aside time once a month for employees to create documentation on the tasks they’re responsible for.
- Save all documentation on the cloud or some other shared server so everyone has access to it and to prevent document loss.

4. Find creative ways for employees to share tacit knowledge:
- Establish a mentor program that pairs new hires with long-time employees.
- Make sure managers know how to perform the most critical tasks that their teams are responsible for.
- Set aside time for employees in related roles to cross-train. This will expand institutional knowledge, provide a source of backup when employees take time off, and reduce the likelihood of total knowledge loss caused by unexpected turnover.
Why does advanced mean theoretically better? From what I've seen from industry discussions, other companies seem to believe that Musk is automating processes at such a high cost that it would be more cost effective to actually employ humans to do those steps.
That's not an investment, that's giving your money away. Would you spend $X0,000 on something that can walk out the door at any moment?
On the largest repos I've worked with `git blame` takes a second or two: long enough to be annoying and make me wish it was a bit faster, but still fast enough for interactive use and well short of the threshold where I would be tempted to context switch after invoking the command. On most repos it's perceptively instant.

I suspect on a HDD `git blame` would be unbearably slow on anything but the smallest of repositories, but it has been many years since I last worked with source code stored on a HDD.
FTC Warns It Is Illegal to Condition Warranty on Use of Specified Parts/Services
The "doubling every year" part takes care of that pretty effectively IMO.
I think a default of --ff-only would be fine for pull. This is great for when I'm merely a consumer of a project, and will never silently perform a merge or rebase.
Sure. Given a choice between a CSV parser that supported multiple character delimiters and one that didn't, sure you'd choose the one with better support for your use case.

But given the choice between a CSV parser that gives you an invalid parse and a CSV parser that completely falls over when thrown a curveball (like a multi character delimiter), which would you pick? ;-)
If it costs development time because they need to be extra careful about not sending queries that ERROR and 'wipe' data.

If it silently corrupts data over years and gets discovered much later. (As was the case with my previous company, an e-commerce retailer that lost large chunks of order history)
While I totally agree with the things you said and that talent does play a factor, but I feel like playing devil's advocate here a little bit and point how that you can replace every instance of "talented" with "dedicated" and what you said still works.
Artificial Intelligence, Fair Use, and Using AI to Create New Works
They're definitely learnable skills. The thing I find with engineering is that most skills remain untrained with experience.

If years of experience meant you'd be better at a skill, then older would be able to reverse park very quickly. But without deliberate training, most skills don't improve.
Why GPL though? Why not MIT or Apache? Those are better IMO.
Ask HN: Need help in gathering human-generated data for research
I am working on a Natural Language Processing project as part of my final thesis. We need help in gathering human-generated data to train an ML model that could generate follow-up questions during an interview set-up.

We have built a tool that takes 5-minutes of your time to submit your entries that are totally anonymous!

We are also planning to make the dataset public once gathered.

Your contributions are highly appreciated!

https://poorao.github.io/followML/

Our previous work can be found here -
https://dl.acm.org/authorize?N49928
Hex Dumping with Elixir
This kind of thing really needs to be normalised by house prices. Even a dumb metric like "salary * (number of bedrooms+1) / (house value)" would give decent results; I'm paid about one bedroom per year.

When I moved away from London I was moving away from all the really highly paid opportunities but my salary in bedrooms/year went up considerably.
> But Voss wants to amplify its worst features by asserting that press publishers will receive—whether they like it or not—an “inalienable right to obtain an [sic] fair and proportionate remuneration for such uses.” This means that publishers will be required to demand payment from news aggregators.

Does "inalienable" mean something different in European law than it does in US law?

In the US, having an inalienable right doesn't mean that you are required to exercise that right. It just limits what others can do to stop you from exercising it. For example, we have an inalienable right to travel. That doesn't mean we have to travel. It just means that government is limited when it comes to things that impact our exercising that right.

I could contractually agree to limit my exercise of that right, and that would be fine. Such a contract could be enforceable.
In git you can use merge commits as your "summary" and `--first-parent` or other DAG depth flags to `git log` (et al) to see only summaries first. From the command line you can easily add that to key aliases and not worry about. I think that if GitHub had a better way to surface that in their UI (ie, default to `--first-parent` and have accordions or something to dive deeper), there would be a lot less squashing in git life. (Certainly, I don't believe in branch squashing.)

The DAG is already powerful enough to handle both the complicated details and the top-level summaries, it's just dumb that the UIs don't default to smarter displays.

(I find git stash essential given that `git add --interactive` is a painful UX compared to darcs and git doesn't have anything near darcs' smarts for merges when pulling/merging branches. Obviously, your mileage will vary.)
The Zuckerberg Files – A digital archive of Mark Zuckerberg's public utterances
It probably is, but so what? The Economist has made it clear they don't want me reading their material. So I'm obliging.
Being remote complicates things indeed. If your teams have daily stand-ups make sure to join and pay extra attention to language used. Complaints, sighs and tasks taking longer than initially estimated are indications they need help. Pay attention to code reviews if you have them and see if they are in line with your vision of the architecture if you are a software architect. If you have webcams watch for body expressions.

That are some things that readily come to mind. Probably you can find more if you think about it a bit longer.
Agreed. I have no problem paying for subscriptions when warranted (content such as Netflix, utilities, etc...)

The issue I have is when this model is applied to certain software that doesn't directly provide added value over time (like Office 365 or Photoshop).

When I purchase software, I want the ability to clearly compare the available features (value) vs the cost at that specific time. This is why Sendy (https://sendy.co) received my business over MailChimp (https://mailchimp.com). The software I sell is also a pay-once model and I feel much happier knowing my customers are getting good value for their money.
How is suggesting your kid might get into programming by modding a game a romanticized notion? That's one of the most common "how I got into programming" stories. It's completely non-controversial.
The list seems like decent thoughts if you are going to work extensively with CSVs, but the title is clickbait and honestly incorrect, I haven't worked much with CSVs but I'd make very few actual assumptions about them, although in reality we would all ignore 99% of his list because it wouldn't be practical to deal with any of it.

He also almost seems to be blaming the receiving programmer for not being able to deal with a given CSV in an insane format.
The fact that there's no worthy competitor to FB shows the power of the network. Zuckerberg has been really smart to acquire instagram and WhatsApp to avoid the possibility of irrelevance.

If not for the acquisitions, I think FB with this kind of heat would have started being irrelevant to some of the users and many of the advertisers. The govt should have had been keeping a tab about these things in the first place. It's little too late for regulations.

Even breaking up them would not help. How do regulators would make sure that the systems from different apps under FB umbrella are not sharing data with each other?
How do you determine the unit of work though? Every C file counts as an independent work? Or a module? Or a system?
The good news is there's going to be at least some echo effect here. I work for a US based company, although the vast majority of our users are in Asia. We're implementing GDPR for everyone. It won't affect the companies that exist solely to spam you much, but for most companies the technical issues of ONLY implementing this in the EU are simply too great.

So everyone will get at least some benefit. But ya, it'd be great if other governments took this as seriously.
An example: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-goldman-sachs-aleynikov/e...
>A fundamental principle of Asimov's writing about robots was that the Three Laws were inviolate.

In universe, maybe. But the actual purpose of the Three Laws as a plot device was for them to be violated, and provide the crux of the story that followed.
That's outside of an employee's ability to decide to be. The business has deadlines and needs, and writes the checks, so it's up to them to decide how long it takes for an employee to become a net asset for the company.
The science really is accurate with regards to the lecture being outdated and not effective. However, problems abound with regards to implementing different methods in higher ed.

For example, I was previously a Financial Economics Professor and "flipped" the classroom for my introductory corporate finance class. This means that the students watched prerecorded video lectures at home and then worked out their "homework" in class. So basically, the students had someone (me) to ask questions of when they hit stumbling blocks. Pedagogically, this has shown improvements in learning achievements.

HOWEVER, the problem I ran into is pretty similar to what I have heard from every other faculty member (across disciplines and universities) who has attempted to do this. The problem is that we repeatedly hear from students that "he didn't even teach us anything, he just made us watch videos." This wasn't just one or two students, this was an overwhelming majority. The other problem I ran into was that students thought there was no benefit to coming to class (even when you include attendance as part of their grades). The number of students dropping the course at the last 'W' deadline skyrocketed.

For me, it became a challenge to continue to do it this way, even though I spent 3+ months full time over a summer producing videos of my lectures, and eventually went back to the "chalk and talk". My student opinion polls went back up.

I'm not entirely sure of what the solution to the problem is, but project based learning does greatly enhance learning. That needs to be baked into the institution.
Is Ornamenting Solar Panels a Crime?
A game prototype for understanding the safety issues of a lifeboat launch