skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Companies aren't making these complicated and overwrought things because nobody knows this stuff anymore. The ones actually doing the making generally know all the tried and tested ways to do what they want, because they used them to scale. Then they eventually outgrow the existing solutions and created these complicated systems to account for whatever specific technical or business issues that necessitated hopping from existing solutions to creating a solution.

The problem tends to come along with the visibility that comes when one of these get released publicly. People use these things without doing the same level of due diligence to see if something less complicated fits their needs. Either deliberately (resume driven development) or simply because it doesn't occur to them to do so and "if it's good enough for this unicorn it's good enough for me". Or in some cases they do due diligence, but incorrectly evaluate their needs and rule out simpler solutions.

But the most common reason I've ran into is simply that it's more fun to play with these projects than it is to use crufty old stuff, no matter how tried and tested and potentially appropriate it is.

At a previous company, I had a python script running on a cron job every 5 minutes to do some data processing needs. Once or twice a month, the batch would be so large that it took 6-7 minutes to complete and the cron job would trigger the script again before it finished, causing the second instance of the script to see the lock file, log an error, and exit. It didn't cause any problem for these periodically skipped runs, because the business need only required data to be processed within 24 hours of coming in. The 5 minute cron job was just to even out resource usage throughout the day instead of doing a larger nightly batch job. A piece of data not getting processed for 8 minutes instead of 5 did not make any material impact.

Another team had noticed the errors popping up in the log and were in the process of testing out a whole bunch of real time data pipelines like Kafka, leveraging my error messages to justify the need for a "real time" system without ever even asking me about the errors. After I found out other people were noticing those superfluous errors, I moved the cron job to a 30 minute window to stop them from happening anymore. Turns out they didn't have any other justification for their data pipeline greenfield project and weren't happy to go back to their normal day to day work. I offered to let them maintain and expand my python scripts if they were interested in data processing work, but for some reason they never took me up on that offer. :(
Evidence suggests no, so I've banned the account.

When people mess with HN like this we eventually ban their main account as well.
Scala does have wildcard types.

List<? super T> is List[_ >: T]

List<? extends T> is List[_ <: T]

Scala leave a feature out? Psht...always room for one more.
I'd suggest this should be a past-tense statement....

It's clear people's ignorance and desires will be taken advantage of on the internet, so what controls need to be in place to set it the 'right way' again?

Is it a failure of regulation? A failure of economics? A failure of education?

And to that, who do we give the power to 'fix' it, if it is supposed to be completely open?
I have rewritten incredibly overarchitected stuff, Cassandra, Hadoop, Kafka, Node, Mongo etc with a plethora of the ‘the latest cool programming languages’ running on big clusters of Amazon and Google to simple, but not sexy, c# and mysql or pgsql. Despite people commenting on the inefficiency of ORMs and unscalable nature of the solution I picked, it easily outperformes in every way for the real worldcases these systems were used for. Meaning; far easier achitecture, easier to read and far better peformance in both latency and throughput for workloads that will probably never happen. Also; one language, less engineers needed, less maintenance and easily swappable databases. I understand that all that other tech is in fact ‘learning new stuff’ for RDD, but it was costing these companies a lot of money with very little benefit. If I need something for very high traffic and huge data, I still do not know if I would opt for Cassandra or Hadoop; even with proper setup, sure they scale but at what cost? I had far better results with kdb+, which requires very little setup and very minimal overhead if you do it correctly. Then again, we will never have to mine petabytes, so maybe the use case works there: would love to hear from people who tried different solutions objectively.
For me it was riding a motorcycle again: pressing the clutch over and over again healed it, although I don’t recommend it because I almost fell a couple times.
This will be the death of general telephony.

There's no highly-evident replacement, but I suspect that what does supplant it 1. will emerge from a socioeconomic elite (as telephony, email, and mobile did, or letter-writing in an earlier era), 2. will have very cheap unwanted-contact rejection, from a cognitive-load standpoint (by the time my phone's rung or a voicemail's been left, it's too late), and 3. will probably intrinsically include multimedia -- text, likely image & video.

I'd like to see robust crypto in authentication, identity, integrity, and encryption of both data and metadata. Multople independeent peersistent, though at least partially repudiable, identities would be very nice-to-have. I have at best modest hopes.

Both elements may be undermined by an ease-of-use dynamic, though that's short-term gain for long-term cost.

In the near term, expect to see a proliferation of conflicting standards and systems.
> When I traced my lineage back to Charlemagne

Can you expand on how you were able to do this? I'm really interested in genealogy and I'd love to learn more about my own history. I figured AncestryDNA would be a good place to start, but how do you figure that out (assuming Ancestry doesn't help)?
It's international scammers that are the problem, not internal corporations. An internal registry hurts more than it helps because it provides a list of callable numbers, and chasing down scammers is way, way, way too expensive to enforce by any practical measure. Australia doesn't have this problem for the same reason OSX didn't have viruses in the early naughts. Not a big enough target.
> Why is nearing completion so demotivating?

Because the bulk of the interesting work has been done, and now all that's remaining is the finicky, nitpicking tasks that you've been putting off doing for the whole project.

> though I would be happy with 1500 bucks a month

I wish you the best of success, but please be prepared that you will not likely reach this goal for some time, if ever (although I hope I'm wrong).

Everything else you are worried about (surpassing parents, more people becoming involved, losing creative direction etc) is putting the cart before the horse. It's far more likely that the project will fail to meet your expectations. Especially if you've been working on it for 2 years and haven't had any customers validating your work in that time.

I don't mean to be a downer, but that's the reality of most projects.
I'm pretty sure they're referring to Lenny the telemarketer bot. https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=lenny+telemarke...
rather than complain I'm curious what a solution would be. It seems pretty clear we need to get rid of the current phone system to fix this.
Where there's demand, there shall be supply. Wouldn't be surprised if there's already a black market for stolen identities on their version of the "dark web".
So far I haven't found one, nor have I seen any of the downsides that other parents talk about. Maybe it's because we enforce technology breaks on her every once in a while -- when she is poorly behaved she doesn't get electronics the next day or two as a consequence. And sometimes we just keep her otherwise occupied and she doesn't even ask.

But I guess we'll see. Every kid is different, so YMMV.
I actually find Civ great to play on a long flight (as long as I have access to a power outlet, it chews through my laptop battery). Makes a 6-7 hour flight, er, fly by. But I never finish a game, I just get to somewhere around the Classic era and have to shut my laptop off. And the next flight I take I'm never in the mood to resume a game, so I just start again.

Lots of fun, though.
If it's that much crazier, why is it whenever I visited China it didn't seem crazy at all? Are they that good at hiding things from foreigners?

I should add that I don't stick to the expat bubble and I can understand Mandarin.

Reading China Daily and the Global Times, you also get stories about all the good things that happen in China. So it definitely seems more well balanced. Whereas the Western press seems to only focus on the negative and sensationalist pieces.
What part is a joke VW market cap is 85 billion. Apple cash reserves were like 280 they authorized 100 billion share repurchase so prob less now still def. enough to buy it out.
They are VOIP calls. And many are outside the US. And it's not just the robocalls- but I can't tell you how many calls I get a week about extending the maintenance plan on my car.

And frankly, someone is buying this shit. Else they wouldn't call. I mean if 1 sale is made for every 5,000 calls they've made their money. Same with scammers. Who the hell is going to fall for a robocall from the IRS? A call that's barely in English, and comes from a local number? Obviously, somebody does.
Hackers infect 500,000 consumer routers with malware
We never had those time-saving benefits before. Why do we now need them to recover levels of service that were previously achieved without them?
The EU limited fees to .3% on credit and .2% on debit cards, and made charging the consumer card fees illegal everywhere though. That's a big improvement on what was otherwise ~3%
Yeah we have two Mini’s at home that came for free with different purchases. Same thing with a friend of mine. I would think that accounts for a good portion of them.
Zinc. Sufficient intake daily.

Don't helicopter kids. Let them free to do things that aren't too clean like exploring creeks or rummaging in the dirt, or forgetting to wash food, or even eating food off the floor, or not washing their hands after touching animals. They also need to eat things like nuts, or other strange or unusual things from an early age.
If anybody wants to build it into a library I threw together an index file and included the rollup run to allow you to import everything as one library or as separate modules:

https://gist.github.com/robertfairley/11ba23640578650671dbde...
Well, presumably the phone companies make money from each call so I would assume they like these spam calls as it makes them money.
All of the major Bitcoin miners are very pro Bitcoin cash. They basically created Bitcoin cash. They would be more likely to attack Bitcoin Core, if anything.

I would also point out that Bitcoin cash is the 4th largest crypto currency in the world, by market cap. If IT is in danger.... Well I fear for everyone else even more.
Being Feynman's Curious Sister – Joan Feynman – 5/11/2018
That is what the data suggests to me. The very rural farming community I grew up in, for instance, that is well outside of any city, several hours away from a major city, has seen 17% population growth (the country grew by 5%). Along with that growth, the value of the average home has increased by 50% in the last two years. This region has the lowest unemployment rate in the province, and the median individual income is now $10,000 more per year than in Toronto.

And anecdotally, it feels like it is booming. New businesses are popping up left and right. The main street is packed full of people, something that you wouldn't have seen a decade ago. It's a complete turnaround to what I grew up with. Thriving leaves room for subjectivity, but it certainly is in my opinion. From population growth to relatively higher incomes, it all seems quite favourable by the data, and the visit leaves the same impression. I am starting to look to moving back there myself!

The people leaving Toronto are going somewhere, and everything points to this being one of those places. According to Statistics Canada, communities of 1,000 to 29,999 people were the fastest growing community type from 2011 to 2016. Communities with 100,000 people or more have started to lose share of the population.

I do not think anyone should see this as people reconnecting with nature. They are almost certainly following the money.
> what is the point of this whole business?

what a great question. 9 years later we're still trying to figure out what the point is.
Thanks for this, just set this up.
EOS has begin trading without any of that. Now it's a ERC20 token, I guess, but still there is no code, no network, no nothing -- and in fact their creators have declared they won't be starting the network or whatever, they're just selling "the idea". The tokens themselves have no value at all, they only _hope_ that whenever someone starts the network they will give some privileges to the current token holders.
Ask HN: What music helps you code better?
Techno? House? Classical Piano? Pop? No music? What helps you code better?
I think that learning to study stuff - especially when it's not obviously relevant or interesting at first - is incredibly relevant to later in life.

I also don't think we'd be great at predicting the 10% that's "most relevant" for any given person. It's like the "reinventing Excel" problem - everyone only uses 10%, but everyone uses a different 10%.

I think we should try to shorten the school curriculum - give some more purpose to people's ages 15-20 years, instead of filling it up with busywork while they're at their most restless and energetic - but not reduce it's breadth at all. Cramming extracurriculurs into every hour of the day to fill up time to tick boxes for a college application is a much bigger problem than foreign language classes, in my mind.
> what in the world do they know about building a mobile operating system?

They don't. Android was an acquisition and so was Waymo.
This is extremely important. A qualified trainer (I'm one, but hate the work, too many people watched a program on a body builder and know all about it) will assess your strength and fitness, determine your goals, and then create a program to help you achieve them, as well as teach you to lift properly and safely.

Poor form can cause long term injuries, soft tissue damage, or even arthritis.
Top line grew by 70% YOY so the reduction in losses cannot be attributed just to Uber exiting markets (which would correspond to reduced growth). 70% increase in bookings with 55% reduction in losses is pretty remarkable.
It worked! Thanks.

So, I've commented:
shared stdout = &_iob[1];
and added:
enum stdout = &_iob[1];

Now, I have 5 executables HTODn.exe, msgsx.exe, optabgen.exe, SCPPn.exe, SPPn.exe.
I'm unsure how it doesn't fix the speed advantage. Anyone can get in front by bidding a millionth cent more. You can keep doing that until the price starts mattering, right?

I'm not against HFT at all. But having such granular pricing doesn't do anyone favours. More decimals would reduce spreads as well as silencing HFT critics and maybe make trading a bit more accessible without as much high end systems. But the spread reduction is valuable alone.
The Cuban government negotiated the embargo relief with the USA, not the Cuban people. Regardless, this is a silly theory, because Cuba already has a robust tourist economy from every country that's not the USA. Not to mention its robust exports of rum and cigars.

In regards to if it was American equipment, why did it not happen in Germany? Well, the US embassy in Cuba is a brand new embassy, so it makes sense that they'd have brand new equipment.

And of course the Cuban and American consulates in Guangzhou are close to each other. Consulates and embassies tend to be clustered near each other.

The Belgian embassy in Cuba is just around the corner from the American embassy, and the Belgian consulate general in Guangzhou is just around the corner from the American one. So it could just as well be the Belgians attacking American diplomatic missions.
Despite popular myth, US households are in good condition when it comes to debt.

The US household debt to income ratio is far lower than in nations such as Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Netherlands, Switzerland, Ireland, Australia, South Korea, Britain and Canada (see: [1] [2]).

US household debt service payments as a share of disposable income, are near a 40 year low. [3]

[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-canada-economy-debt/canad...

[1a] https://i.imgur.com/XRJIDbi.jpg

[2] https://data.oecd.org/hha/household-debt.htm

[3] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/TDSP
I grew up poor in PA. People who have never been poor are not prepared to hear about it. My wife doesn’t even want to hear about it. She’ll roll her eyes when I talk about it. The fact is that people can’t relate to an empty refrigerator or to not having money to buy a gallon of milk.

Poverty is soul crushing.

I have had a very successful and influential engineering career but I can look back at single decisions I made that could have sent me the other direction. It’s easy for people to say that the decision I made was obvious but it absolutely wasn’t at the time. I took huge risk being the first in my family to go to a prestigious University and double major in physics and mathematics in the early 90s(I was no prodigy); let alone go to graduate school.

One decision different and I’d be driving trucks in West Virginia.
"...The $10,000 cap was imposed as a way to offset some of the cost of other individual and business tax cuts.

The Treasury Department and the I.R.S. are worried that the workarounds could further balloon the cost of the tax cuts, which are projected to add more than $1 trillion to the national debt over a decade."

Describing this as likely to 'further balloon' the cost of tax cuts seems inaccurate and misleading - the cost remains precisely the same, it's an attempt by certain high-tax states to avoid a tax increase designed to partially offset the static cost.
I’ll go read the article then :)

But again the fact that a blog post says X isn’t enoguh and while I have no doubt that eventually sense will prevail it still doesn’t fix the current problem and that is that the lack of prescriptive guidance from the 28 DPAs is problematic because it’s not a small risk.

What people don’t seem to understand is that most people who have problems with the GDPR don’t have problems with its principles but rather with the fact that it has been rolled out without almost any clear guidelines and rulings. If you can’t be 100% sure that your business model is compliant with the GDPR it can be a pretty big risk to take on and this ambiguity is much more disruptive than the requirements themselves.

BTW the machine learning problem isn’t unique to GDPR, HIPAA also has this problem most companies elected to classify their trained models as patient data to be on the safe side unless they were only trained with public information.
> The thing the government cannot do is simultaneously use the publishing platform's comment system and block certain people, based on the content or viewpoint of their comments, from using that system.

Is that an opinion of fairness? Or an opinion of law? Or the opinion of a single judge? Or just your open musings?
Show IH: A 7 day livestream on Twitch of me building a startup, fully open
Hey folks!

Long time listener, first-time caller.

For the last month or so I've been meaning to start yet another project of building a scrappy startup and seeing where it takes me.

About two weeks ago, I came across Pieter Level's concept of 'open' metrics and got inspired.

Yesterday, I went live for Day 1 with a Twitch & YouTube stream to share every step of my journey over the next 7 days of building and launching my project, an eCommerce service business for providing professional & short 'store reviews'.

In fact, I'll be live when this post goes up > https://www.twitch.tv/thecoppinger/

Thanks to feedback from folks on Reddit and Indie Hackers, I've created a 'Day 1' recap video which can be viewed here (I'll be doing one each morning): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gpOT1B6rpXc&t

The highlight of today's stream has been the incredible Julian Shapiro stopping by (I'm a major fan-boy, I got a lil flustered)!

I'll be sharing absolutely everything, live, via screen capture, including (but not limited to):

- Developing the marketing strategy

- Designing the landing pages, the copy, branding etc.

- Setting everything up and building it all

The Goal: Hit $2,000 of revenue within the next 3 weeks.

* By sharing this journey, I hope to achieve the following:

* To make the process a little less lonely

* To help keep me focussed and on-track

* To get feedback from smart folks as I go

* To help others learn from what I know

* To help newcomers realise they can do it, too!

You can find out more info on the website I put together on Monday, and follow the links below to see the stream, live in action!

Feel free to pop by and say hello :)

P.S. this isn't part of some big plan to sell a course or eBook at the end, just a chance for me to share with others and learn from others. I'm hoping this post doesn't come across as too 'self-promotion-y'!

Website with more info: http://charlie-starts-up.webflow.io/
Nothing wrong with sacrificing short term profit to meet a longer term objective.

So yes, it doesn't hurt. In fact, it quite clearly helps a ton.

Does that make them pound for pound competitive with one another? No of course not. But consumers are not necessarily buying one or the other on a price basis. Alexa got there earlier. Google has to do something to overcome that hurdle.. being practically free or getting stuffed into something else for free is a successful way to overcome.
I think it's a cool idea.

Here are a few thoughts:

I think it might work better in urban areas if you stuck to food/wine/microbrewery and art/museum/theater and city park type experiences. If you're going to do sports events, go as a spectator.

I think you limit your audience if you focus too much on the outdoorsy/physical stuff.

I think (at least initially) you should keep it to one adventure, as opposed to a choice of two and I think you might want to consider limiting it to twice a month until you have enough people attending to justify more than that.

I think you should try to offer a similar experience in each of your locations and a way for those who attended to share their experiences online so can learn about those other locations. A FB page could be used for that.

I think you should offer an option to pay per adventure.
Yes I have. Here you go https://github.com/h43z/rssify
Nice/interesting comment although “death of a friend” seems a bit harsh. (Although in some cases it may be worse than the death of a friend!)

Not sure if this is what OP is experiencing or just some 90/10 etc rule about the last parts being the hardest parts. Starting a greenfield project you can make massive progress quickly. Polishing it is slow.
I found the comment!

https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/esfrv/im_an_ornitholo...

The comment wasn't exactly as I remembered it, but it says more or less the same thing.
I don't think this is specific to programming, but generalizes to any kind of problem solving (as you write in your second sentence).

I was once taking a shower when I cried out in joy as I had just figured out how to shave off an extra fraction of a micron from the side of a large state machine (we had a last minute change order and it hogged a bunch of area on the chip). I grabbed some clothes and jumped into my car (didn't think to rinse the shampoo out of my hair) and floored it down the freeway to the office (VPN? hah!)
Show HN: DoublePong – Pong, completely reimagined
They already overcome the limited supply of coins by forking Bitcoin.