skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Career advice for underperforming developer?
Hello, HN! I write this in despair, as I can't see a way through. I'm 31 and hail from a small Latin American country. I entered a CS major program in 2006, then switched to a Math major in 2009 until 2014. I began working full time as a UNIX/Linux sysadmin (was part-time sysadmin in college). I'm again in a CS program at another college.

However, I still don't have any degree, as I dropped courses whenever I entered in conflict with myself. I consider myself far slower in coding and problem solving than I can accept. Thus, I make very little progress in comparison to what I expect from myself and never get anything complex done.

I've been diagnosed with depression and Asperger's and attempted suicide in 2005. Several psychiatrists and psychologists have treated me, but there has been no progress in the treatments.

Jobs for backend developers (I'm not into frontend/mobile) in my country are scarce. I've applied without success to dozens of them for years. Thus, a startup around a developer-friendly PaaS kind of makes sense.

Nevertheless, whenever I try developing an interesting idea that might be profitable (e.g., a serverless compiler and runtime environment), a part of me thinks it's not worth it. That part of me points out that some Google team probably has a working implementation of a much better idea (backed by PhD research and good engineering) for internal use. That part of me also points out at the utterly hostile business environments out there, and how my half-baked idea won't sell when competing against much better battle-tested products and established development teams.

What advice can you provide? Thanks for your time.
Who hasn't jaywalked, gone over the speed limit, killed a neighbor's pet, done remodeling without permits, etc.?

One of those things is not like the other...
It appears that azlo is just a front-end reseller of banking services provided by "BBVA Compass."

They probably make a lot of money on transaction fees (charging merchants when you use your debit card) and loaning your money to other customers at interest.
Thanks for crafting and sharing 8chen, Daniel - very easy to read, parse, and share.

Would it be possible to add an option to disable the animations?
Indeed, my street when I was growing up was like the parent's: Kids running around, on our bikes, or playing street hockey.

My parents still live in the same house, and so I get to see my old streets today. They are completely parked up on both sides, not just with cars, but the typical car is a full sized pickup truck, SUV, etc.
The percona toolkit is critical for any MySQL DBA. So flexible and invaluable for many aspects of running a production fleet.

edit: I'm getting nostalgia of doing things with the toolkit like running a 24 hour lagged slave because one Developer kept dropping tables from the live primary database he'd decided were "obsolete" (when they weren't). Sadly we could never remove his root access.

Also of particular value: pt-online-schema-change, pt-table-checksum and pt-query-digest. The latter you can do some neat stuff, like tcpdump live traffic and pump it in to find out interesting stuff about live performance.
Is there a reason to worry about it dying?
IIRC the golang GC has a similar behavior, because it is a non-moving GC, so it is very fast and C-friendly.

IIRC Java and C# have a moving GC, so the GC may decide to move the object and will update all the references to make the change automatic. This is slower and you can't pass the pointers to an external function that is not aware of the GC. But the memory is compacted and it avoids the #3 type of leaks, and also allocating new memory is faster because the allocator has a big block of free memory instead of having to lookup a good place in the fragmented free memory.
Good to see Percona get some love on HN. They put out really solid work, and have great blog posts!
Creating a bunch of UML diagrams up front is usually the sign of a broken software development process. However, there's a lot of great work that went into the various diagramming grammars that turn out to be really useful in different cases. I've found that spinning up UML-like diagrams for certain subsystems on a whiteboard, or quickly in yEd or similar tool helps immensely with:

a) creating a "thing" to facilitate communication and understanding

b) capturing a design after it's done as part of a deployment/hand-over package

c) a useful toolkit for reverse engineering a system that you had dumped on you

etc.

basically, any sort of ad-hoc communication need or information capture process.

Software Engineering coursework will warp your brain into thinking that you need to spend a few years in a spaceship in orbit around Saturn dreaming up millions of UML diagrams that when done, will magically barf out all of the code that makes up some enormous over-engineered enterprise fizzbuzz system.

It takes a long time to overcome that nonsense without throwing away the goodness that exists here -- there's some excellent diagramming techniques that really help with coming up with a common understanding of how a system should work for a team and product owners and used well can bridge huge communication gaps. Many of the diagrams more or less show the same information, but with a slightly different angle that can help communication.

The diagram grammars themselves can get really fussy and particular, but I think when they're used best only certain components of the grammars are used to fill very specific communication needs, the rest is more or less sketched in, and the remaining grammar can be pretty comfortably be left out.

Many times, you can just invent a diagramming grammar that you can the other parties agree to and just "be inspired" by ideas from UML and get most of what you need done. There's also grammars that are not part of UML that would make sense for people to get familiar with. ArchiMate comes to mind as a particularly great example. I don't use it explicitly (the software tooling support for it is garbage, but you can fake it with yED pretty well), but I've used systems inspired by it numerous times to succinctly capture incredibly complex enterprise systems and data flow and tie those things to business processes and needs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ArchiMate
Crypto: Generate your own collector scripts for master nodes
Not really. The typical $250k house here in JOCO would be $2M in the Bay Area.
Sleep Engineering Can Improve Brain Function and Memory
I dunno why you're marked as dead (FYI: your posts haven't been showing up for over a year at this point), this isn't a particularly bad comment.
> No conclusion has been reached that it is "wrongfully illegal,"

The same could be said about being black, or gay, or whatever.

I mean, if alcohol is a legal and regulated drug there is absolutely no reason marijuana shouldn't be too. This should be obvious to anyone who's drank till they passed out and also smoked weed till they passed out.
> Creating a bunch of UML diagrams up front is usually the sign of a broken software development process.

Wait, what? Why?

Assuming I'm doing them because they help me flesh out an idea, it should be fine, right? You're talking more about being forced to express a concept in UML when it's already adequately described in a non-UML format, right?
you are at once arguing "we can't criminalise making mistakes" and "you face the consequences of your actions when the legal system catches up to you"

The first you apply to the elites, and the second to everyone else.

Only in the case of the elites are we talking about serious, intentional, and known in advance to be illegitimate, irreparable harm to millions of people's lives.

But its just a "mistake", but you demand those who perpetuated victimless crimes continue to suffer.
Md. officials: Letting ‘free range’ kids walk or play alone is not neglect(2015)
The only Facebook ads that really upset me is when it says my FB friend "liked" something. Facebook should not use a "like" as an endorsement like that. Apart from the fact that it could be an accidental click, liking a particular post or event or thing is completely different from endorsing the company in general for all time.
The more general principle is that investors put their money where it generates the highest return.

Since the United States taxes land rents much less than it taxes labor and capital, investment leaves agricultural areas where farming is heavily dependent upon labor and capital, and moves to coastal cities where land values are highest. It moves out of rural areas and into urban areas at an accelerating rate because that's where our broken tax system tells it to move.

This market distortion could be permanently corrected by replacing taxes on labor with taxes on land values.
Not really: people have reacted to more capacity being available by getting in more channels. You can control a 1980s 20 channel ultrasound using even an atom cpu, not a problem (though will still get close to max cpu capacity). So what did we do ? Well we made chips, I believe the best one now has 4000 channels and there's test models of 8000 channels. A quad xeon can't process that. But it gets worse.

Because information is encoded both in the direct signal and in the interference patterns between different probes you'd want to evaluate both of those (if nothing else it gets you a wider field of view, but really it gets you more than that, for instance you can get full 3d from a cross-shaped array). Unfortunately that scales with the square of the number of channels. This doesn't even work on FPGAs at the moment, so they basically limit interference processing to only 100 or so of the 1000-2000 probes they have these days.

This is a problem that keeps coming back. CPUs can do nearly everything in processing, but with one exception they suck at it.

That means that when doing these things, you can use CPUs, and people are always pushing that, if you accept to be 2-5 years behind the state of the art for advanced applications, or you accept that you have to spend 50$ per piece where others can get more processing done for 1$, or "much less but still enough" processing done for 0.1$ (FPGA, DSP, microcontrollers, ...).

Good luck in the marketplace if you go CPU.

CPUs work where your complexity is above a quite high lower bound, and they stop working once you hit a certain level of data processing. Below that lower bound, they are absurdly expensive. Above the data speed limit they just can't keep up.

Now there's niches where the strengths of CPUs outcompete other approaches. For instance, you want to create stuff to interface with ancient equipment. Lots of that is necessary, and lots of it is custom. For telecom companies, banks, factories, ... here CPUs and the fact that you can do one at a time are tough to beat. Sure FPGAs can do it better, but that's not the point here. They're much harder to design, so a one-off (or couple-dozen-off) designs use CPUs, plus they're very unlikely to hit the data rate limits.

Even there CPUs tend to have a disadvantage. Lots of environments where these things have to operate aren't exactly pristinely clean, cooled and free of static and interference. CPUs don't deal with it half as well as especially FPGAs do. You want a closed box that has to operate at 70 degrees without cooking itself with constant electrical arcing around it ? Don't go for a cpu on a large mainboard. You can't cool because any cooler will get clogged and destroyed in a matter of weeks at the most.
The interactions are complicated. Government subsidies on many agricultural commodities guarantee a price floor, but that's little comfort to farmers whose livelihoods depend on being able to sell at prices considerably higher. As with many things among actual people, the comparative differences are significant: if you can sell more for more money and have spent less money, you win much more so than your neighbors who've overspent and ended up with less profit.

Conversely, a massive, diversified corporation can better weather local circumstances than a farmer running a smaller operation. This favors further consolidation, as individuals get ruined and or want to exit the space, or they move towards higher-margin products. Current purchasing tastes favor high-end produce to be close to its consumption, so pivoting to Organic in Kansas may not pay off nearly as much as in New York, Illinois, or California.
Every time I visit my mother's home town (800 people in KS) and see main street basically boarded up I think about how interesting it would be to move there and try and build some type of ag or rural tourism business to get some partial revitalization. AirBnB for disconnecting techies in KC or maybe a small coffee house and Inn on main street. It's honest to god beautiful place.
"you cannot get on a bus or a subway train with a bicycle."

Most European cities allow that. There may be some restrictions. I.e. Limited to certain cars, or banned during rush hours and, dependent on the city, you may have to buy a ticket for your bike.

But seeing bikes in buses, subways, or trams is perfectly normal in most European cities.
> if you derive city, region or country from that it becomes personal data

I don't think city itself is a personal data. You could use user's IP address to get the city and then discard it and this way you know user's city but don't have to keep their IP address.

Google Analytics can be a problem; Google or someone else should make the analytics that doesn't store IP addresses.

And I think ISPs should randomly rotate IP addresses of their customers so they cannot be used for identification.
>How do we separate business logic in a self-contained way that can be independent of hardware and (from a certain level) software?

Come up with programming languages with limited domain specific functionality that don't allow you to do funny machine specific things. (or even ordinary things like pointers)

Use the restricted languages for business logic and have a second language to do the plumbing.

Or just target a generic x86_64 virtual machine.
Because you're creating a waterfall that you can only slide down and the development process becomes an exercise in alignment to "the plan".
Yeah just like rich people are forbidden to sleep under bridges and eat from the garbage, absolutely consistent.
Many reports.
I was wondering the same as it’s a common use-case for the project I run (browserless.io). Seems to be a big demand for sane PDF rendering and generation.

Been pretty interesting seeing webtech handle these kinds of problems
Minimal HttpKit web server compiled into a 10 MB binary using GraalVM
I read a lot of books on many subjects. Seriously I have at least 500 books.

While I enjoy reading them I find that I must "practice what the book preaches" in-order for the book to have been useful. From Buddhism to math. Even something like the Jobs book... I could have read it and forgot it..but I took notes and reviewed them and therefore have a more permanent and deeper understanding. You can do this with any book on any topic.
Small tribute to Jan: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14249880
I don't have gripes with this marketing approach and I read it more as "expect to be surprised by what is possible" rather than harp on what isn't .. at least not yet. For a comparison, it is like apple branding their display tech as "retina display" to communicate the intention (you can't tell pixels apart), possibilities (you can now use any font) and quality rather than any claims about mimicking the eye.
LLVM Weekly – #226, Apr 30th 2018
I sort of consider these different things. Key/value store versus typical row store.
Any identifier can be a "personal data" only if it allows to link it to some real person. If you don't store IP address, email, real name, ID card number, SSN, bank card number, phone number, then user id is just a number.

Quote [1]:

> ‘personal data’ means any information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person (‘data subject’);

[1] https://gdpr-info.eu/art-4-gdpr/
You imply a tale of woe by saying "few years", when it was really closer to 2 decades. He was on food stamps as a child, he'd worked at Yahoo for a decade and started working on Whatsapp with hundreds of thousands of dollars in savings, and at the time of the acquisition their finances were extremely healthy.
Those of us who can’t afford city-center/transit-connected apartments are also people.
I still have to pick up and read The Blind Spot but I semi-agree with this.

I think Wittgenstein and Nietzsche are two thinkers whose aphorisms are positioned in a near perfect space such that anyone can read them and walk away feeling he's gained a powerful insight without knowing precisely what the hell the philosopher actually meant. You could read either of them for a lifetime and ceaselessly uncover further nuances in their bodies of work.
Company-wide outages and the tendency to spam “ME TOO”
One doesn’t need to be wedded to diagrams one works out up front. Doing a bit of design upfront can be useful in fleshing out ideas. Whether that’s in UML, sequence diagrams, stories, or just some sketches on a whiteboard, or some notes on paper, what one does with them is up to the team. It need not determine everything that follows. You point out all of this yourself upthread.
For the specific use case in question, what I've been doing for years is not just hashing the data, but hashing an internal secret AND the data. The secret isn't stored in the database anywhere (usually an env var but could be a secret in vault or other outside config), so our hashes are deterministic (and don't need a seperate salt for each one), but our hashes will never cooincide with another system's hashes. I didn't see this mentioned in article but didn't read thoroughly, I thought this was a pretty good compromise but curious for other perspectives/forget if I read this technique somewhere or just made it up as a reasonably good safeguard.
Differential privacy is basically a buzzword. Don't believe the hype.
I think this also happens in the human brain quite a bit. There’s a lot of times where you see something out of the corner of your eye that isn’t there, or you duck because you think something was coming towards you, or you wave because you think you recognize someone.

I bet at a lower level, various systems in the mind fail constantly but we have enough redundant error correction to filter it out.
The issue is waiting for threads at runtime, at fixed boundary points, not statically determining if they halt or not.

The halting problem is irrelevant to this discussion.

Well.. whatever. You can provably determine whatever irrelevant point you want I guess.

If a naively spawned task or routine can be artificially restricted at a boundary point, that's enough for me.

You could without question implement this by binding child tasks to the threadlocal context on spawn and wait all on a dispose block in c#; certainly if you explicitly went out of your way to swap to a different sync context it would break but so what?

You can always unsafe your way into a hole in any language.
OP Here.

With my understanding of bcrypt, it's an algorithm that's designed to be slow (and the implementation providing guarantee's to resist attempts to significantly speed it up), and the slowness is tuneable through a work factor. So usually you would target something like 200-500ms. Long enough to be slow if you have to make billions of guesses, but still fast enough that when someone enters their correct password they're not sitting around waiting for you're login to complete.

If my database is something like:

salt1 + alex = aaaaaaa
salt2 + ben = bbbbbbbb
salt3 + kevin = ccccccc

* with 100,000 entries

This means if I want to find user = kevin in this database, I take the salt + username, and test if it produces a match in the database. Once I get to salt3 + kevin, and produce cccccc, and see that cccccc is in the database, I've now unmasked that user.

At 500ms, a single CPU can test 172,800 entries per day, which could easily scan the database. If it's millions, or tens of millions of users, you do need more resources, and if you want to unmask every user it will take some time, but it becomes plausible for a moderately sophisticated adversary with moderate resources.

The algorithms like bcrypt, scrypt etc are great for passwords, where depending on the password used, you need to make billions of guesses. However, if you reduce the problem space down to millions or thousands of guesses, because you already know the username, the email address, or the date of birth because this is not secret information but public information, these algorithms being slow helps significantly, but not enough to work alone.
Do you pay for cellular data or home internet? You are paying for messaging.
I don’t think the article is about bikes piling up the in the street. It’s more about oversupply and the distorted operating cost of bike sharing in China.

From a friend of mine working in this space: it’s cheaper for these companies to keep dumping new bikes onto the street rather than finding and repairing the misplaced and broken ones.

So imagine you live in a dorm with someone who never washes his mugs and leaves them everywhere because he gets free mugs from some mug oversupply place.
Hi @rolleiflex, this is not exactly correct. You do not need a passport to sign up for Azlo. It certainly is accepted as a form of identification, but not the only one. Also, we will be accepting both resident aliens and non-resident aliens this month!
It's funny, just came back from a trip into the American South West. Stayed at a cabin in the middle of nowhere on a 500 acre ranch surrounded by only the wilderness and other giant ranches...on a new moon.

I've never seen so many stars in my life, even in places I thought of as raw wilderness and I've spent quite a bit of time camping in national parks and so on.

Those places seemed like light filled cities in comparison. It was about a 4 hour drive from the nearest major population center.

I suspect there's plenty of these places still left even in relatively developed areas.
The blog post wasnt about

> pseudonimization strategy in context of GDPR guidelines.

i.e. Doing the minimal work to meet the guidelines. Effectiveness is incidental to that goal. Maybe I misunderstood the GP tho.
This is great. I have been tinkering with the idea of building something that helps people learn something in the most efficient way possible. I have been pretty frustrated with most learning materials for almost anything, especially when you have limited time and a lot of interests. Keep up what you are doing and hopefully I will be able to share something after a couple of months.
IP Targeting – Match IP Addresses to Physical Mailing Addresses
Add Postal Addresses to Your Customer and Marketing List
Yes exactly. Pointing a development effort towards a goal or in some direction is a very different thing from an Enterprise Architect dropping a bible of UML on a team.
Not that i have not done many questionable things like this when i was a kid, but at what point is it an admission of fraud that can get one in trouble?
He doesn't like cocaine, he just really likes the way it smells.
I meant that separately. As in, we should encourage more people to become scientists and increase science funding. But for any given amount of funding we still have to pick how to allocate the money, which seems like a very important problem to solve to me.
One thing I found very strange when looking at Apple laptops was that they only really had 2. They had 3 main models to pick from, but the air hadn't been updated in so long that it was no longer the lightest option. The air.