skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
System admins who might change e.g. Postgres config files absolutely should be proficient in looking at documentation or the source code to understand the meaning, and then create separate documentation about their own customized config files (not making others or their future self actually have to read that file to understand why a value was chosen).

But more generally, it’s bad that a lot of applications don’t offer documented ways to modify config through ENV variables.

A config file should always be code reviewed, versioned and checked into SCM. One side effect is that end users, sys admins, etc., should never be given the chance to inject their customizations through locally modifying the base config file. That should be straight disallowed, so that distributing config files (such as the default, or bundles of other settings commonly used in unison) is part of packaging and deployment, and end users use other mechanisms that allow overriding defaults in a case by case manner.

Then you are talking about perhaps a shell script that sets dozens of ENV vars to override what comes from a (never modifiable) config file, and sure you might document the why of your choices in that shell script with comments, and at no point would anyone need or want comments in the actual config file(s).
Under Personal Exceptionalism, it says “not to be confused with arrogance or high self-esteem”; but how are they different?
Swapping on SSDs is not ideal though, because of limited number of writes. Is it still relevant with SSDs produced now by the way?
It’s not about malicious intent on Google’s part- the borders between countries are literally the most contentious lines ever drawn, people die every single day over them. Google shouldn’t be an authority on border disputes in any capacity.
I dropped a few bucks on Quiver for a more developer friendly Evernote, and I've been relatively happy with it.
Today's equivalent of meaningless clipart? But a whole order of magnitude more annoying.
One is outward one is inward.
In response to a “guarantee”, that’s a lot.

“I guarantee this plane won’t crash” = 23.5% chance of dying?
“you must have the correct tool” vs “if you have to, you can open this with a butter knife from the kitchen drawer”.

They’ve both got their place IMHO and vive-la-difference :)
>Chrome is even worse than before with this change.

That's disingenuous.

Chrome is 1) more secure, but 2) less accessible.

These are separate metrics and you can't really roll them into one.
This was discussed 8 months ago (221 comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15516526
Strange how many people believe this is a self-description until they see it in somebody else. Most people, despite their self-delusions, are not this and are actually deeply offended when they do see it or blindly follow it, such as the worship around Steve Jobs.
I'm not sure I agree. The most important thing about designing large scale systems is dividing the total work flow into self contained pieces with easily inspected separation points.

In the grand scheme of things this doesn't have to mean microservices across a million hosts, only that you've decomposed the problem into it's elemental parts. Those parts can now be considered separately as their own elements rather than having to contend with the entire architecture in your head when a problem arises.
I pause longer for colons than for periods. Colons are less common and often join what are really two sentences, meaning something like "read this sentence in the context of what was said in the first."
I consider this an important perspective, because it illustrates something I have heard criticized (and which I criticize in its narrow form, as well): overspecialization/overfocus.

> I've been doing Ops for 20 years and even back in the 90's I barely had to understand what a Make file was doing. I've certainly never had to do much actual dev work.

Although I ended up being pretty comfortable with Make, I wouldn't characterize what I did with it as actual dev work, either. The vast majority was tweaks of existing makefiles to get them to work on new platforms.

I'm not sure even the devs I worked with back then had as much exposure to Make as did the release engineers (part of QA).

> My main worry is that specialization won't return soon and my Ops skills won't be enough to keep me employed.

The latter part may end up being true regardless, in which case Ops skills will eventually be lost, to the detriment of the industry.

I doubt it, however, because even in the vast majority of Devops-as-a-title job postings, no matter how much emphasis is placed on automation, building internal tools, CI/CD, "dev", or "infrastructure as code", Ops skills (some of which those arguably were or overlap with) are still key. Otherwise, they'd just be hiring developers and having them perform these functions [1].

All that said, I don't know what the right answer is for staying employable.

I know it's not merely waiting for (a subset of) skills from the 90s to become valuable enough again. That would be doubling-down on what might be too narrow a specialization. However, even making sure one has at least some expertise in as broad range of Ops skills as possible, including networking, databases, and especially enough coding to enable routine (if basic) automation, may not be enough.

Maybe the answer is acquire just enough dev skills to get hired into those hybrid roles and then either wait until the Ops part becomes important enough to be full time or deliver so much more value with Ops than dev that the latter responsibilities get transferred to someone else. I have, so far, not done this, both because it feels slightly dishonest and because, like in the footnoted situation, I fear it leads to lower productivity/quality on the Ops side.

[1] Judging by some comments I've seen here, this also happens but has not yielded a large set of examples of successful outcomes (including keeping those developers happy and productively developing)
>That, or we move ad blocking out of the browser and into the OS where sites have absolutely no access whatsoever.

Interesting concept. Asking as a layman: is this possible? Is the browser sandboxed enough away from the OS that this is a difficult problem? Is that why we haven’t seen solutions that implement this approach?
Yes, this is absolutely the reason. Open-source software maintainance burns out people daily, and most can only tolerate <4 years. 20+ years is godlike, and can only be achieved if you have the world's longest patience, or correctly direct your madness on exactly the people who caused it. It's the only way. All maintainers do it to some extent, depending on how far separated they are with their contributers. Linus works very closely with them, which is why he experiences so much BS firsthand.
And presumably they took the larger sum the 5k came from and spent it on something even less authorized!
Than what, an entry in some table in the kernel that you can use to read bytes from the thing it represents and/or write bytes to it? That's what a "file" is in *nix.

The on-disk notion of a file sits atop layers of that abstraction. It doesn't, for example, go away when you `rm` it. An entry in a table does, but if some other process had that (disk) file open at the time, its data is still there, readable — and recoverable — through the former file's entry under that pid's /proc/$pid/fd/.
Ask HN: What are your predictions on the server CPU market for 2019?
Will EPYC be able to compete with Xeon in TCO? Will Intel need to crash their prices to fight off AMD?

What will happen when AMD hits 10nm in its servers, is it game over for Intel?
USB sticks are rife. I had an AV project this past week; needed 40+ media players for TVs around a convention space that needed a USB stick to hold a small MP4 file.

Ordered several sets of '5-Pack' PNY USB sticks over several days, first sets the write time was 1 minute, but the second/third orders the write times were abysmal taking 5-7 minutes.
Yes, I think there are at least five. So this is a list of at least five, but not the five I think.

Several of them feel like variations of the same theme: I know I'm right, so I can disregard evidence|opinion|counter-argument because .. an axiom of the system is I know I'm right.

If I had a sixth, it would be the tendency to latch onto a mantra. "think different" doesn't really mean very much, but boy, successful people who get stuff done like to say it.

(I'm not a person who gets stuff done btw. the mantra my get-stuff-done colleagues say which feels apposite is: "do the shit work first" which kind of makes sense: they don't procrastinate about things they'd rather not do)

Another one: seventh might be they believe implicitly they are the smartest person in the room
I went the other way, I was a PC gamer and 'only true programming PC consumes 700W and acts as a space heater' type for nearly two decades and then somewhere along the line laptops got fast.

My T470P with an i7-7700HQ/32GB RAM/nvme m.2 handles all the programming I realistically need to do (I realised this when I had W10 running in a VM (8Gb/2 CPU), 3 vagrant instances and intellij open and still had 12GB of RAM free.

When I bought the laptop the plan was to build a Ryzen desktop pretty much immediately afterwards but here I am a year later deferring that till next year and the Zen2 architecture and my incentive to build a desktop has gone out the window, the Thinkpad runs a 27" 4K display just fine and for programming thats all I need it to do when I don't feel like working on the sofa.

So yes I can see ML and Gaming been a driver but since I don't do the former and rarely have the time for the latter I'm in the strange position of having a laptop be my primary computer for the first time since I started using PC's in 1987.

Hell the only game I play anymore on PC is Chess everything else the Xbox One is just fine.
Is that a problem though?

It also means that POSIX doesn't constrict you -- it gives you the tools to build rocksdb, sqlite, etc and have them be performant.
I can't really say since I don't use google maps so much but I expect search to be better than in osmand (while online).
Top UFO encounters of all time – This list is scary
If I am not mistaken, this is not unlike how all game graphics were done in the 80s... directly writing to some frame buffer...
Also, occasionally some malicious Javascript gets ran.

But ad networks and the sites that host ads won't jump to compensate you for that.
It's not even close to socially acceptable to tell someone on the phone that they "sound like a man," or "sound like a woman." If they didn't believe you, you'd never find out.
At https://officesnapshots.com we’ve sold and hosted our own ads for the last 5 years. It seems to work well for all involved (us, readers, advertisers).
There is no need to use a semi-colon: "Roses are red, violets are blue, I drink coffee, my wife drinks tea."

I think that ; is only really handy for delimiting lists: Firstly, I would like to thank the Queen <for>; Secondly, I would like to thank the President <for>; etc.

I think that the name is a bit of a pain: a colon is used for <statement>: <and here is why>. A semi colon is used for lists. However, the name seems to imply some sort of half interval and so people use them as an intermediary between , and .
People don’t look to social media for content that changes their opinion. They look to it to confirm their already held opinions. It’s an echo chamber. Nobody is changing their opinion based on a random ad they see on Facebook.

The genesis of these articles - the media’s quest to explain how it failed to manipulate our Presiential election in favor of their chosen candidate - is also based on a false premise. Russian Facebook ads didn’t get Trump elected. The choice by Democrats to run a candidate against him that much of the country disliked did.
I really enjoyed the second season but yes the first season was better bordering on sublime.

Much better than the BBC version (and very different).

When I heard they where doing an american version I didn't expect much wondering how it would translate...it turns out, very well.
> [SIOCSIFADDR] is a thing, although it targets a socket on the interface, not the interface itself.

If we're cheating by using file descriptors instead of files, then you
could go all the way and used AF_NETLINK sockets, they allow you even to set
routing or firewall. That's kind of not the point.
Cleaning Toilets, Following Rules: A Migrant Child’s Days in Detention
Not sure how the article makes the mental leap from "google is limiting free usage to a few thousand views per day" for a system that costs a lot to operate, to "google may hide stuff or change country borders at will". If that's the main argument for switching to openstreetmaps, it's not very compelling.
OSM is supreme when it comes to paths, trails and other such details (like wind shelters). Google Maps seems to be devoid of these.
Indeed, if the forest had not been tamed, not had some part of it claimed from the wild, it would be neigh-impossible to run in it.
I'm a technical co founder. I'm CTO and the other co founder is CEO. We've been working together for 6 years now. Before that we were aquaintaces at our last job, where we met. I'd never get into the situation I'm in now with someone I didn't know. I also wouldn't do it with my best friend. I dont have any advice to be found, except to meet people and discuss ideas and get a feel for how people are and work.

Non technical co founders, when working properly, have an enormous amount of work to do, often much harder than a technical person, even though it may never involve anything more complex than excel or a web browser.

You need to find someone who you can work with, work through problems with and trust. No small task! I suspect most people find each other by pure luck.
Are we reading the same comment section? Because I do not see "mostly supporting it", but lots of people arguing on both sides.

Just as I can find both people supporting it and people thinking its stupid on Twitter when randomly looking around. The "real world" doesn't appear to have a consistent opinion on this, which isn't surprising at all.
The meditation is very helpful. The 10 day vipassana course was very insightful. Even if I can just manage 30 minutes a day, I feel better, more calm.
That's usually what people seem to think of when they consider 3D printers, because that's what 3D printers tend to do.

Otherwise to "3D print" a tomato slice you would spray tomato slurry layer by layer into the shape of a tomato slice, which would just be silly and far less efficient (and probably more expensive) than having a person slice a tomato.
Typically, I've found, the common operation is not so much the file/HANDLE itself, as that the file/HANDLE can generate operations that you need to wait on. But select() set the stage by waiting on the file descriptor, and poll/epoll mostly follow suit. You register interest in events on an FD. (Instead of, say, starting an operation and saying "tell me when this operation finishes"; e.g., "futures" as exposed by a number of languages.

Aside from waiting, I'd say passing/referring to the objects being operated on is also a commonality. Passing a FD to a child process, for example, or giving it (the object, be that a file/pipe/socket/timer/process/etc.) a name in the FS s.t. other things can refer to them by name. (I personally wish though that fork()/exec() had forced you to specify exactly the set of objects (files/etc.) for the child to avoid the entire multithreading/close-on-exec/atomic flag setting hell that exists today.)

I don't know that read/write are actually abstract at the level of a "file descriptor" though. Eventfds and timerfds both support them, but it feels forced. Pipes are one-way, so one of read/write don't make sense, and seek on pipe doesn't either. I think some file descriptors (child classes of a generic "object"/FD/HANDLE, such as files) support read/write, but not necessarily all FDs support read/write/seek.
Jonathan Blow talks about his new language JAI
For RPG goodness, Divinity: Original Sin is one of the best isometric view point games I’ve ever played. Skyrim for first person goodness.

For tactical squad based games, I am still playing X-Com. After this play through, I am finally firing up X-Com 2. If you are a tabletop miniatures gamer who can’t get out of the house enough to get your fix, this series is a great substitute for 40k/Infinity/Imperial Assault.
> Trust me, if it's culture you're interested in, Europe has more established cultural differences between white peoples from completely different language groups within small European countries than between African Americans and non-African Americans, and we didn't even have to impose Jim Crow laws to achieve this.

The category "white people in America" has that level of cultural diversity inside of it. It includes millions of first generation immigrants from all of those places. Plus millions of people descended from those cultures who over the past centuries have developed them into something uniquely American, melding them in a thousand cities with the cultures of all the other immigrant populations that have come here since then.

And we can't pretend that no country in Europe has ever sinned. Or any country anywhere for that matter.
How We Pay People at Basecamp - It's Just Better Business To Pay People Fairly
How does this compare to Lobe?
Personal exceptionalism is when everybody tells you how and wrong and stupid you are and regardless you produce a superior product or convention. It wouldn't happen if you actually listened to the idiots around you.

Arrogance is telling the people around you how they are idiots instead of producing a superior product or convention.

Think about it in terms of your performance (output) instead of your opinions (what you say).
Hard to believe a billion people use this nearly an hour a day....don't people have lives anymore? Sad, is what this really is. While there have been times I've used sites like reddit that much, it is a helluva lot different being involved in a dozen ongoing conversations about deep subjects than looking at pictures and saying the equivalent "ooh, nice picture! your cat is so cute." or "that latte art is so super keen" 100 times a day.

Get a life, world.
It may be trivial, but I have actually never found a way to mark them and assure myself the download was complete and the maps are available before a trip.
Now that we have established our bona fides, let's get back to kadenshep's comment. You originally wrote:

> People who weren't online in an earlier time should probably refrain from making statements about how it was different, just as people who weren't actually at a company, in a battle, etc. should refrain from making statements about how it was for the participants.

To whom was your comment directed? To the author of the article? But the author clearly states "I was there in 1993, too, equal parts young, naïve, and shy, but so damn excited about the idea of suddenly communicating with people around the world."

The author also brings up the concept of 'gatekeeper behavior', saying:

> ... his esteem rests on the fact that he knows certain things that others do not. Like all gatekeeper behavior, it was ostensibly a check on the credibility of the target. Also like all gatekeeper behavior, it wasn’t really about whether or not someone passes the test, but rather the gatekeeper feeling like they can control what is true and not true about the subject. Alas for him, I was there in 1993, too, equal parts young, naïve, and shy, but so damn excited about the idea of suddenly communicating with people around the world.

I read kadenshep's comment "I think your view point is directly addressed in the article." in that context. That is, it's easy to interpret what you wrote as gatekeeper behavior.

This of course can also be poisoning-the-well sort of argument, as it is hard to address by simply saying "From my own experience". Which is all that you did.

You still have not pointed out some of those facile generalizations about the past that kadenshep made.
I'm currently evaluating several different options, and I'm beginning to lean towards "One tool is probably not enough". Bigger tools such as Notion.so or a personal wiki are great as a repository of knowledge, you can easily browse and organize information. But writing a one-off quick note is not their forte. Lighter tools like markdown files in a text editor or a pure note app all handle the jot-down-a-note aspect very well, but they lack in organization and structure.

I prefer not having to use a bunch of tools for the same task, but here it seems like that's probably the best idea. Use a light note-taking app (or a physical notebook) to scribble things down, then enter it into a more repository-like software when I'm back at my computer.
I see it as consumers telling the companies that they went too far. They let the ads take over too much of every page, let them be way too much in your face and let Spyware and other shit in. You simply used up your good-will and need to build it up again if you want to use this as an business model.

The only place I've ever seen ads actually work and not be too annoying is in podcasts. They are more personal there and still isn't too much in the way. I've genuinely followed up on some companies podcasts I trust has had ads for. I have no idea how to make that work on the internet though.
I found the slide for "Cognitive behaviour model of depression" very interesting, it's probably the best visualisation of depression taking over someones mind leading to a paralysis where simple tasks become something else and chaos emerges.

Ego does, sometimes, gets in the way of getting things done but without it we wouldn't care to launch anything new/groundbreaking. Without our Ego as creator, we would have no soul in my opinion.

Anyone who freelances, creates something alone, goes solo as a startup founder etc. needs these "cognitive distortions"/"mental disorders", I see them as necessary beliefs. The opposite would be someone who just blends into and becomes yet another functional toothed wheel without any manifestation of desires. A good portion of our society is like these, some people don't want more and are happy/contented.

We need these self beliefs/"lies" to wake up on the next day and keep moving forward. I guess this is a form of inner power/motivation without relying on our environment and/or friends. As a solo freelancer, I do "suffer" from some of these because at the end of day: this is what drives me forward.
Factorio. (Warning: for a lot of the readers here, massive potential of getting sucked in for dozens to hundreds of hours)

Opus Magnum.

Fallout 4 right now.
> "...it would be the tendency to latch onto a mantra. "think different" doesn't really mean very much, but boy, successful people who get stuff done like to say it."

True. But reading you say it now makes it sound less like GTD and more like they do the right (different) things. Things that yield results; which makes the lead up look important. Kinda the tasks are a symptom more than a means, if that makes sense.
Bear if in the Apple ecosystem.
By what measure do the people studied ‘get stuff done’? By virtue of being a founder? Is this an attempt to shed light on productivity or a backhanded way to compliment the Silicon Valley crowd? Generally you get things done by being dedicated and having the ability to deliver, rather than having a distorted vision of reality.
I thought that the issue with /dev/urandom was that it wouldn't block when read shortly after startup (when the entropy pool wasn't yet initialized).
Thanks. How does that apply to high self esteem? Someone who talks a lot about how great they are projects high self esteem outward, while someone with an internal attitude of personal exceptionalism just gets stuff done and doesn’t brag about it? This is very interesting and subtle.
Women who now finally have freedom due to the financial security afforded to them by being able to work certainly "won".