skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Here are the best books I've read over the last few months:

- Lost and Founder - the founder of Moz shares his advice and experience from building a 40M/year company. I found the things he says about building a startup extremely insightful and practically useful. Reading it feels like having a dinner with a friend who shares with you the things he has learned in a very honest, down to earth way. Highly recommend it.

- Rationality from AI to Zombies - probably the most influential book I've read in my life, profoundly changed the way I think. It's a collection of LessWrong essays on science and rationality. (recently they've released an an audio version by the way).

- "A Short History of Nearly Everything" and "Our Mathematical Universe" - two general popular science books I'm enjoying a lot. Haven't finished reading them yet, but so far they're brilliant(and very easy to understand, authors do an amazing job explaining complicated things in a simple, accessible way).

- Hacking Growth - an AMAZING book on "growth hacking". It provides a framework for marketing a startup, gives a ton of practical advice and specific tactics. It breaks down step by step how startups and big tech companies grow their products. Most of the books I've read on the subject were bullshit, but this one is absolutely fantastic, can't recommend it enough.

Other great books I should mention: This Idea is Brilliant, Actionable Gamification, The Design of Everyday Things, The Master Algorithm (great overview of machine learning techniqes), Springfield Confidential (fun behind the scenes from one of the writers on Simpsons), Homo Deus(from the author of Sapiens).
VR therapist helps patients overcome fear of heights in Oxford study
Sometimes I wonder about an operator-type job like that, or security, or stuff like that - you know, sit around all day / night, browse the interwebs, play farmville or what have you, or do remote contract work to maintain skills and make a lot of money on the side. I had a neighbour who worked as a roadworks driver (like, the car that puts down cones and such), his job involved a lot of night shifts (good money) and then waiting for hours, occasionally moving - that gave him a lot of time to study.
Machine Learning professor on Google Brain and other commercial ML research labs
Management forced it on us, so we use it (as little as we can get away with, but that's mostly because nobody here seems much point in either Teams, or Slack, or something like that).

As much as we do use it, though, it seems to work quite well. Video conferencing actually seems more reliable than Skype for Business / Lync / whatever it is today.
How to Avoid the “Not Secure” Warning in Chrome Browser
To be fair in some situations where it is not internal political pressure that caused the vote in the first place, large majorities can occur; see the falkland islands referendum on joining argentina
Don’t Give the DHS Free Rein to Shoot Down Private Drones
If you like James Michener, then The Covenant is a great read about South Africa

If you're looking for a somewhat bleak overview of corruption and despots since independence, then try Martin Meredith
The State of Africa: A History of the Continent Since Independence

One of my favourites is Blood River: A Journey to Africa's Broken Heart

Disgrace, by JM Coetzee. Outstanding book, emotionally difficult to read. Made into a not-too-bad movie with John Malkovich, but the book is infinitely better.
Should I Run Postgres on Kubernetes? Part II
I assume this relates mostly to economics or the humanities (social science, if you insist) in general. These apply to sciences too, but are less debilitating in the long run.

Fifth, most researchers’ priors are heavily influenced by some extremely suspicious factors.

Academics in the humanities identify themselves "I am an X." X can be post structuralist, rational materialist, classical liberal or some other broad, hairy, intellectual identity. This is bad news for objectivity. Everyone has a dog in the fight.
I'm understand why the page is so obsessed with DaVinci Resolve, but does anyone have any insight on how this would work with After Effects or Premier Pro?
Show HN: URL shortener using easy to remember, rhyming words
Likely bad synchronisation primitive is used, such as sleep instead of optimistic spinning or even locking. Probably not atomic variables where they can be used instead of mutexes.

Alternatively croup confinement causes threads to be migrated at random and some flat overhead.
> And then the client is saying : "how can it takes so long ? I am only asking for this feature from Dropbox, that one from Google, a Facebook like feed and some Whatsapp notifications, all synchronised with these existing applications ! NOTHING HARD to do here !"

People use these fancy features for free by companies having billions of budget and income... then they want the same features from you, also for free:)
The Tyranny of the Clock
As someone with mild social anxiety, I, for one, welcome our new robot overlords.

I hate having to talk with a stranger just in order not to starve to death.
Costs which negatively affect revenue!

Costs do not affect revenue. Perhaps you mean profit?
Visual Studio Code’s terminal is GPU-accelerated [0], a work in progress.

[0] https://code.visualstudio.com/blogs/2017/10/03/terminal-rend...
> Of course if your data is not relational, you can't do SQL.

The relational model is, as I understand it, fully general, so this literally cannot be the case. There is a problem of “if you do not know the shape of the data in advance” and “if the RDBMSs available to you do not efficiently handle data of the particular shape and access pattern you are using”, but “relational” isn't an inherent property of data, it's a property of a data model, and any data that can be modelled can be modelled relationally. That doesn't mean it is efficiently handled by every, or any, existing RDBMS, though.
I think NoSql, especially things like Mongo, got popular because it is super easy to program with javascript. While scaling is one of the advantages, I'd be super surprised if many people actually need scaling capabilities ( other than because their design is super inefficient ).

Recently I've been inspired to play around with kicking out as many layers between a relational db and a REST Api, largely because I've been watching https://www.twitch.tv/nybblesio ( who I first came across here on HN on a thread about live coding via twitch streaming ). One of his projects he works on is a SASS product which is largely done in postgresql leveraging https://github.com/PostgREST/postgrest . Seems pretty good, going to be interesting to see how it turns out ( though I haven't seen him work on it lately )

I tend to like SQL Server, ASP.NET Core and found https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/sqlserverstorageengine/2018... and I've been playing around with this kind of idea and using a lightweight mapper when needed ( https://github.com/StackExchange/Dapper which the stackoverflow people created )

I gotta say, I kind of like it

One of the problems of many stacks is that the frameworks wrap general purpose languages over SQL, which, is not really a good idea, SQL is a vastly more capable language for dealing with relational data and layers built over the top often dumb down the database.

The REAL problem SQL wrappers need to solve is that most languages don't have a good interface with SQL. So most often SQL is handled in strings and manipulated with string manipulation and there is no type safe way transitioning data from the DB to a general purpose language.

Microsoft at one stage had Linq to SQL which was quite good..... but they killed it :)
The same answer applies to your product.
Russia Adopts Draft to Prohibit 'Piracy-Enabling' Software
Webapp to order lego bricks for tech logos
So the developers at Google (BigTable), Facebook (Cassandra), Yahoo (HBase), Apple (FoundationDB), Redis etc are "lazy" and have drunk "too much Kool-aid".

Because these technologies every day power the most demanding applications on the planet.
> Not everyone does the same job you do, even if they might share the same job title.

That's true about any title across the entire computer industry (and maybe all technology), but it doesn't say anything about the categories those jobs fall into and skills/experience associated with those categories.

> my actual sysadmin duties required little more than being able to do 'while true; do x; done'

If you mean that was the level of the complexity of the scripting/automation required, there's nothing wrong with that. Consider, however, trying to do even that, without any scripting at all.

Presumably something like 'do x', up-arrow, return, up-arrow, return, ad infinitum. Apparently, that's the kind of person that's moved into "IT" that was being described to me, though this was pure hearsay.

> That's very much not been the case over the past half decade, but there were times in the 2000s where nothing was necessary beyond some basic bash scripts. No writing, modifying, or debugging of anything I would actually call code was needed.

That would be comfortably (up to a decade) past the dark ages to which I referred. Please don't misinterpret my mentioning having had to work with C as being in contrast to basic bash scripts.

My point was actually quite the opposite, that it's all code, but that it's a form of working with code that is (at least subjectively) different from software development.
> I'm not sure anyone is philosophically attached to "all balances are visible".

I don't know either about others, but to me it looks like hiding balances is a regression. Why would you hide your balance, unless you want to lie about it?

I can't think of a reason hiding balances would be better, but I don't have a degree about economy so I'm open to explanation.

Same argument than personal privacy I guess, but here we are talking about currency, not personal political opinions or personal identifyable information.
Time-Lapse Cryptography (2006) [pdf]
How does a chemical environment replicate and mutate?
Apple disabled eGPU support for Thunderbolt 1 and 2 with macOS 10.13.4 [0]. Of course someone wrote a nifty script to unblock it and enable support for Nvidia GPU's while at it [1], but it's too bad a great upgrade path from slightly older MBP's (up to 2015) is not officially supported.

[0]: https://egpu.io/external-gpu-macos-10-13-4-update/

[1]: https://egpu.io/forums/mac-setup/script-enable-egpu-on-tb1-2...
You are correct, the text is wrong. It should be 128KB, not 64KB. A word is two bytes (on a 16-bit architecture) so we can address 64K words which is 128KB. (I think you mixed up byte and word in your comment, but I understand what you meant.)

The explanatory text for the level does not really define neither "byte" or "word", so beside fixing the error it also need more details. (But I want to avoid going down the rabbit hole of explaining that bytes can have different sizes than 8 and so on)
Every time Apple releases a new product, these comments are the same. "blah blah, apple sucks, I am totally thinking about switching to the Microsoft <insert latest failed product here> and let me tell you all about it". This year it is the "WSL totally makes development easy on windows now" garbage.

The fact is that the competitors are garbage. Dell makes crappy, low quality computers, windows has the design of a sleezy casino, and programming on windows is still a massive compromise. The same with Android. Samsung s9+, note 8, etc are not even remotely competitive with the iPhone. Android and Windows serve different markets and every attempt to break in the high-end market since the history of time have failed.

Personally, I think that macbook's are kind of old fashioned. When I went into the Apple store a few months ago, the iPad Pro seemed like a much better mobile computer. The fact is that you don't spend all day on a laptop. If you do, then you need to go see a physiotherapist and start your treatment now. Whether the keyboard is perfect or not really isn't that important. Nothing about a laptop is anywhere near perfect. The processor is lower powered, the screen is smaller, the ergonomics are terrible, etc.

It makes much more sense for a lot of these tech companies to start issuing iMacs and macbooks or iMacs and ipad pros. That is what Apple themselves seem to do, and the majority of the people I know who work from home do. You can't even buy a screen as good as the one in the iMac 5k for the same price separately. Text looks much better on a retina screen, you get much more power, more storage, etc.

People say "well you have to sync between work and home". These people must be an extreme minority because how many people work at home one day, work at work the next and keep rotating like that so that syncing becomes an actual problem? Further, you can just ssh into your own machine.

Anyway, that is what I think. Everyone seems to be moving to iMacs instead of laptop + external screen. You get more power, no need to charge as much, a retina screen, and it is all at a very very competitive price.
Where is the 2016 from? This looks like it’s from 2003, when RAID levels were something you had to think hard about. I agree RAID5 is unsuitable for most database uses... but I also haven’t had to think much about it in years. RAID5 was all about maximizing drive space while maintaining some level of reliability. It came at the cost of write speed but for many use cases was the ideal mix. For write intensive applications, RAID10 or equivalent across several pairs of disks is a no brainer. But these days in the cloud the physical disk arrangement is not something I spend much time worrying about.
What you linked to is a type of CT scan (CT uses X-rays).
The point is that is not a convenient business model to just sell support, I can definitely understand why they are trying to sell features.
This is indeed a great book. Definitely worth a read.

Van Reybrouck describes the history of Congo starting pre-colonial, the colonization by Belgium and the entire aftermath. The books gives you a good understanding on the impact and the how of colonization and the history of Congo.
And still no ports, so you get to buy apple approved hub.
> everyone wants a short term solution with no long term planning or costs.

Except for a few, who are treated like fools or motors.

> Everyone is a disposable cog in a machine that doesn't care about them.

The same as above. However, the cogs work more than motors, where it should have been the opposite.
This is a very blunt statement and overvalues hstore.
Keys AND values in hstore are and can only be text strings.
I think people are dumb, and I'm not being derogatory about 'the 'masses' or any such crap. I'm unbelievably dumb. It often takes me a ridiculously long time to come to a solution to a problem, where the answer seems like it should be obvious. Instead my slow, feeble mammal brain takes forever to grope blindly around the issue before getting any traction.

Lets say there is a scale of sentience that goes from 1, which is the lowest level of sentience necessary to develop a technological civilization, up to who knows how high. Where are we on that scale? Well, given that we literally, in evolutionary terms, only just barely got our civilization off the ground we're pretty clearly very close to 1. I discussed this with my brother and he pointed out most of us are below that, because we get taken along for the ride by people who are at 1.0 or higher. They're the geniuses that truly drive innovation forward.

So we are literally at the dumbest, most intellectually feeble level of sentience required to get where we are, otherwise we'd have done it sooner.
I work in patient safety in English MH settings. The culture you describe is toxic, and I would have reported all of those HCPs to their trust (using the trust complaints process), to the CQC, and possibly to their professional registration bodies.

> is part of psycho-hygiene that allows the people to be able to continue to work and keep a certain distance.

It's also a culture of de-humanisation that allows abuse to continue unchecked. You find this culture in every patient safety scandal: winterborne view, mid-staffs, morcambe bay, cornwall, etc etc.
Seth, thanks for taking the feedback directly here, but...

Shouldn't we be able to make these requests given the built in feedback tools in the documentation, and actually expect some result? It's great that you're willing to address this specific issue, but it's frustrating to basically see plain text validation that the feedback forms are not attended to, and developers should be emailing individual team members problematic documentation pages if we're in the cohort exposed to your contact information.
You also need to have http://ohshitgit.com handy
Good one! That said I don't know any place that I don't find horrible when that topic is on. Except places where everybody agrees of course.
Just thought I'd mention. The game in the "gaming" picture looks like The Last of Us - a PS3/PS4 exclusive. Not sure how they're playing that on a mac lol.
I think this depends how you value your time, and how you feel about reading. I personally feel that the point of reading is not simply about understanding the fundamental ideas those books are about. More important is to do something you enjoy, and if you don't enjoy reading that much, going with the more efficient way is most likely the better way to go.
4-day work weeks? Who's got the data
Flask API Decorators and Helpers
Mysterious malware campaign targets just 13 iPhones in India
Not sure what you are talking about here.

There have been scalable and strongly consistent databases since the invention of the concept of NoSQL i.e. HBase and Cassandra (CL=ALL).

And the idea that "learning and optimize SQL" would instantly change people's rationale for using these databases shows you don't understand them much at all. There are many factors that come into play. For example you can't use SQL databases for large scale feature engineering.
Mac MenuBar App to show current desktop/space
I searched and at some point even tried to create my own Mac App with my limited Swift skills. I failed.

Am I the only one that wants a simple title in the menu bar that is relative to the current active desktop space? Persistent would be nice but I can live with renaming it after a restart.

My use case is that I work in different environments and want each environment have a simple handle for me to recognise each environment.

I use stickies now but after a restart they end up all in one desktop. Anyone have any suggestions how they manage multiple desktop spaces in Mac?
Maybe then you'd be interested in having a look at Talkyard, which is new forum software (I'm developing it). It has HackerNews type discussions, with improvements:

https://www.talkyard.io/-32/how-hacker-news-can-be-improved-...

and looks & works a bit like Discourse, + also Slack chat features (no mobile app though) and StackOverflow style question-answers. Open source.
The opposing view is also true: You cannot ignore everything.
I have to disagree here. From personal experience I can say: you need exactly one person willing to read, try and properly observe the installation and population of a kubernetes cluster with applications and tools.

The actual cluster deployment is not mess at all. Even if done with a mere Bash script, it can be done in like 20 lines of code.

I can only recommend to actually try using Kubernetes because what you wrote reads more like you are actually still in the state of "wtf is this and why should I touch this crap?" but have not yet tried it.
Entry level Xeons E announced
There's a lot of benefits to having the same people doing a lot of stuff (see also full-stack devs). It means that someone has an overview of things and have situational awareness.

Without generalists with overview and situational awareness, you're going to need a lot of documentation, paperwork and meetings to preempt communication problems.
Other than she was her famous son's mother and the bare fact that she invented the stuff, did you know anything about her remarkable story? I didn't.

The NYT's mission here is to correct what it sees as its own previous omissions. Whether many other outlets wrote obituaries at the time is hardly the issue.
How do you measure "difficulty" of the world?
Thanks, it is a very cool idea. I wanted to make the game really simple and accessible, but there seem to be interest in optimization challenges like finding the smallest/cheapest/fastest possible solution.
Ask HN: Equal treatment or robbing of feminity?
A sincere question to female engineers and not only.

I'm having issues finding a comfortable spot in communicating with my female colleague. I sense that she is a bit unhappy that we are robbing her off her feminity with our "equal" treatment. But she is a bit (IMO, of course) of an insecure person and hence I may be just misreading something.

Since this keeps bothering me, I'd like to hear opinions from female engineers and others who found/observed that balance. Where is the line? I don't want to have cold professional relationship, I want to actually connect with everyone on the team.

To avoid any sort of flame here, I beg you to avoid any frustration venting here. Just advice.

Edit: of course, if you have good reads to point to, please share.

Edit2: I'm based in Northern Europe, but the environment is very international.
Yeah, I've been in environments where they completely locked down internet access, and we had to "fight tooth and nail" to get an exemption for a handful of sites like StackOverflow. I agree it can be a huge productivity problem.

Again, my experience is very limited compared to many, but the best mix I've seen is programmers had basically wide open internet access BUT everything was still logged. And they must have had some type of automated review. A coworker was planning her wedding, and while sitting on conference calls, browsed around a bunch of wedding sites. She got an email from IT asking about that. (It wasn't a big deal, just embarrassing.) Also, certain categories of data could not be copied to a local computer; they had to be manipulated on a server. Technically you could transfer data from the server (again logged), but it was a firing offense if you were found with sensitive data from on your laptop.
Doesn't select have a maximum of 1024 file descriptors it can handle at any one time? Or some such?
Looks like Tomb Raider to me
Making a Solar Dehydrator
That’s why in my post I qualified that with “depending on your jurisdiction”.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duty_to_rescue

Read the last part about the elderly man who died in a bank and no one offered assistance.
I highly recommend the recently published book Radical Markets[1] which I read after listening to an interview with one of the authors on Econtalk[2]. From that summary:

> Weyl urges a radical transformation of land and housing markets using a new federal real estate tax based on self-assessment. Owners would be required to sell their houses at the self-assessed price.

That's just the first part of the book, it has similar suggestions for election law, how monopolies fueled by index funds can be addressed etc.

I don't know how workable all these ideas are in practice, but I found it to be a fresh look at some societal issues.

1. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36515770-radical-markets

2. http://www.econtalk.org/glen-weyl-on-radical-markets/
With arrays and composite type the potential for semi-structured schema was there for decades. The concept just got more mainstream with NoSQL, more easy to maintain and more efficient with indexables type such as JSONB.
I think the two month phase is pretty accurate. Deployment itself is not that time intense and changing your applications to be container friendly is not either.

The time intensive phase during the first Kubernetes deployment is changing the mindset of the engineering team and everyone involved in IT.

Kubernetes IMHO is pretty much like moving from college into work life and adapting to the fact that requirements for a decent adult life are very much different from a college life.