skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As a Phd student me and a couple of office mates did this at work one day. The fish, the white crispy bread (whatever it's called in English?), potatoes etc. for a proper "klämma" sandwich. Once you get over the smell, it's quite good actually.

Oh, the smell. We did chase everybody else out of the coffee room when I opened it (using the bucket trick, yes). A bit later the lab engineer called me:

- I got some complaint about the toilet drain malfunctioning, and that you might have something to do with it?

- Uh oh...

Sometime later one of my co-conspirators moved on to do a post-doc in another country, where he eventually repeated our stunt. Except he forgot the bucket thing, and sprayed the foul smelling bile on some poor bystander.
I had no idea it ended this bad:

http://www.juicero.com/
The Anatomy of a Killer Job Description
Yes, "curry" is a British meal invented by British people (British-Asian) in Britain.

I read a funny article a few years ago about British Indian people going to India for the first time to visit relatives and really looking forward to the amazing currys they would be able to get out there (surely better than the knockoffs we get here??).

They were very disappointed to discover what British people call "an Indian" is nothing like the food Indian people eat.
That seems like a low estimate of the cost of a senior SWE at Google. They probably earn at least 400k in cash + bonus + stock, and there are employer costs beyond that (office space, benefits, payroll taxes).
I remember hating the whitespace thing so much when I started with Python circa 2.4, but have really come to love the language in a lot of domains since then.

A huge, huge "thank you" to Mr. van Rossum for creating this quirky language that I've become so fond of and for the countless hours of his life he's given to the project.
True, but for me that python was my 4th CL (after fortran, c, c++), there were lots of gotchas, specially with implicit type conversions, mutable classes, and passing by value / reference which all seemed quite arbitrary in my first steps.

Maybe for a complete beginner these are no-issues.
I am interested also.
Viruses themselves don't actually multiply. They just force the host (in this case the bacteria) to produce more copies of the virus. Is there some kind of rule that a drug can't force the bacteria to produce more of the drug?
The Reber Plan called for filling in San Francisco Bay, and it was seriously considered. In retrospect it was obviously a terrible idea.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reber_Plan
You do realize that whether long or short doesn't matter as to whether a cable is an adapter, right?

And that what people don't like is "dongle" and "multi-port" style adapters, not mere adapter cables that go from one form to another.
Microsoft stock rises on upbeat Q4 earnings
I couldn't find a straight answer to this the last time I looked, but it sounds to me like this is more of a matter of cost then the actual hard need for pre-WWII steel.

We could mine ore that hasn't been exposed to the atmosphere since then, and use air (either purified or found in some air pockets underground) for the furnace behind an airlock.

This would be much more expensive than just finding some pre-WWII steel, there's a lot of that around, but I don't think it's the case that if we somehow didn't have it we'd be screwed.

Am I wrong?
It's incredible how they are down to such racketeering practices. Their journals should be stripped of rank, where's the prestige to publishing with them?
Uhhhh no..
Can you explain implicit type conversions problems in python?
Is there a better way of assigning/determining value? Make everything equal? Randomly pick one? The first one to market wins (essentially what we have right now)?
The way it works in Brazil – maybe in other similar countries as well – is that insurance only covers specific doctors which have partnerships with the insurer. A common question when you're talking about a doctor or call his office is "which insurance plans does she accept?". Usually it's 2 or 3 plans, and thus you end up maintaining in your life a network of doctors that work with your specific insurance – so that whenever you have a problem you know where you can get treatment without spending extra.

This creates a relationship where doctors get paid much less than they would normally charge (e.g. $20 for an insurance-paid appointment vs. $100 for a customer-paid appointment). But this way they end up receiving a steady number of clients from the insurer. And in most cases doctors have to accept this deal because they don't have enough demand on their own.

Naturally, that's not the case for top neurosurgeons. They have way too much demand and can make only a few surgeries per week. So virtually none of the top ones agree to being "accredited". They make an order of magnitude more money by charging the customer directly.

If you decide to use a "non-accredited" doctor you have to pay out of your own pocket. Typical insurers won't reimburse you in this case, and even the high end ones will give you back only up to 10 or 15%. They do cover for hospital expenses (room, nurses, meals, etc.), but these are a small fraction of the cost of brain surgery.

There are some different insurance plans that will reimburse your customer-paid appointments/procedures, but – since the cost for these visits is way higher – these are plans that only multi-millionaires can afford.
Microsoft Azure Notebooks
Unlimited vacation is in vogue because it allows a company to avoid accruing a liability for unused leave.
Totally agree. I hate having to force the fans higher when in clamshell mode. Ideally they could have a settings page to choose between quiet or cool.
Salary is usually only 2/3 of the cost of an employee. Benefits and overhead are a big part.
HTTP was intended to support web browsers, so there may be value in keeping compatibility. Application development, debugging, and scripting can all potentially be well served by having standard HTTP interfaces for interactions because this enables application operations to be performed or spoofed using web browsers.
Thanks for reporting this bug! Yup, Instabug has bugs too.
Here is a great podcast about the nuclear-powered cruise missile (the one that spews radiation as its exhaust, is >180dB loud from the ground, and has unlimited range) - and a public analysis of its testing in the arctic.
https://www.armscontrolwonk.com/archive/1205364/russias-cras...

It comes with some strong shout-outs to Planet (satellite startup), and goes into some technical detail about how they've gone about geo-locating where the tests occurred.

Very scary/crazy weapons here...
Interesting to know, thank you.
If you don't have an unsynchronized RNG, then any unsynchronized content can't use an RNG, and unsynchronized content is important for improving a game's experience by using local resources for things that don't really need to be shared or sent over a network.

For example, maybe in a FPS, part of the non-gameplay-critical graphics use particle generators for a cool effect that not all players see (because it's behind a building for some of them and thus doesn't even need to be rendered); if these generators used a synchronized RNG, then all players would have to do computations for every particle effect happening anywhere, just so that the combat and more game-important RNG values would be in synch when they really need to be.
Culturally interestingly though, he mentions needing a new dryer right now, when you can just air-dry them.
When I lived in a dorm in Uppsala there was a girl there, an exchange student from China, and she purchased surströmming for cooking, thinking it was regular fish. So she opens up the can and, boom, smell. Still thinking it is fish (”Sweden is a strange place, maybe they don’t get the fresh stuff here?”), she proceeds to rinse it it under the faucet and then makes a chinese dish with surströmming as the fish ingredient.

Surströmming is great - in small amount together with fresh potatoes and melted butter, on thin crispy bread.
I can't say this trend surprises me. Years back I was an IETF meeting when people were already mentioning that the old saying "IP over everything, everything over IP" was slowly being phase out for "HTTP over everything, everything over HTTP".

The thing to realize here is how much middleboxes sit between a client and a server, boxes which are aware of higher layers than just IP. It's impossible today to deploy an Internet-wide layer-4 protocol other than TCP or UDP, and increasingly it will be harder and harder to deploy a truly universal L7 protocol but HTTP. That's my limited view of this issue, how things like IPv6 might affect it I have no idea.
The great advantage of Python is the vast amount of libraries out there for pretty much anything you can think of. As a C# developer that's the one thing, and probably the only, that I envy from Python.
> I didn’t like to eat food prepared by other people—I was afraid I would taste their emotions.

> I feared I would taste the sweat and tears of a cousin or the impatient plucking of a woman who wanted to get home to watch soap operas.
A less radical, and probably more tolerable, version would allow the owner to retain the property by increasing the declared value to the offer and paying back taxes with some formula (say, presuming linear increase from the last repricing, with some added interest payments for the delay if the back taxes for a given year are above a specified fraction of the original amount.)

This would prevent both sniping in response to changing market conditions and exploitation of people who just failed to reevaluate value.

OTOH, it's still an annoying system and politically impossible: look at the national blowup a few years ago about one town exercising eminent domain for private development. Thid essentially is delegating the power of eminent domain to be exercised arbitrarily by every individual and business.
This is often called the NASA approach since they've hired multiple companies to provide the same component many times. Then they use the best one.
A good write up, thanks.

I remember a configuration change being rolled out by an automated system caused a problem on GCP a few years ago, it's an interesting area that's probably quite hard to fix
Yeah, a similar observation is that there are more atoms in a glass of water than glasses of water in all the oceans. So, dumping a glass of (somehow trackable) water into the ocean would eventually cause every glass of water to contain atoms from that glass. See also: http://samkean.com/books/caesars-last-breath/
Impressive results. Solid growth from Cloud and also from LinkedIn.
Sometimes bugs are triggered by very specific data or queries (aka "queries of death"). GFEs have many tests, so I'd go for the subtle bug.
from __future__ import braces

I hated the white-space thing until I discovered that. For whatever reason this made me get over myself and learn to love the tab/space argument that is somewhat akin to the vi/emacs argument.
There are many ways to define APIs, we don't need to struggle ourselves only to C.

Metal uses Objective-C/Swift, with shaders in C++14. The Objective-C runtime can be used as FFI.

DirectX, uses COM with HLSL (a C++ subset). Likewise any COM or .NET (via RCW) aware language can talk to it.

One of the reasons OpenCL lost to CUDA was being stuck with C, while CUDA offered C, C++, Fortran and any additional language that could target PTX.

Which was what eventually made them come up with SPIR and later SPIR-V.

NVN and LibCGNM are also based on C++ and C++ inspired shader languages.

All modern OO, with nice SDKs that handle font, texture, materials, maths, GPGPU debugging.
With all due respect, it's not a postmortem, it's an advert. It doesn't really say anything other than "We had a problem, we fixed it.". There are virtually no technical details in there other than "something would restart spontaneously, which shifted the load somewhere else". Maybe i'm a bit jaded by cloudflare and aws writeups, but this really isn't anything special or worthwhile reading.
> unless you’re operating at a huge scale and with Google’s culture.

I'm not sure one has to go to the extreme of huge scale, anywhere near where Google is now, (not that that's what you said), nor all the aspects of their culture, but I agree that key fundamental aspects are often missed.

My favorite example is to point out that Google does not run Hadoop on expensive, virtualized AWS instances (or even brand-name servers with useless-for-purpose features[1] that creep up the cost). Rather, one of their competitive advantages, from the very start, has been to optimize hardware that they purchase, customize, and operate for cost (and performance).

The other is, as you mention, culture, which involves a remarkable amount of specialization, with groups dedicated to hardware, networking, internal tooling (i.e. building and maintaining the Hadoop-euquivalent), and, of course, SRE, who couldn't even begin to do their jobs without all those other groups' support.

Of course, there's an argument to be made that things like k8s and PaaS/IaaS can take the place of all those supporting groups at Google, but my counterargument is that they both fail to impart any benefit of customization (or, conversely cultural benefit of the mindset of doing everything that way across the entire company) and carry a tremendous cost (in money and complexity).

[1] redundant power supplies, high-density chasses, onboard hardware RAID
This sounds awesome but it only works for time-insensitive service provision. Where there's a relatively fixed amount of work to do, but you don't have to constantly be in contact with your customer.

I'm a contractor. I have to pick up the phone any time of day or night or I lose a client. Most of my friends and family work at varying levels of healthcare provision. They can't just send everybody home on Friday. They can't even do that at the weekend. And retail faces similar issues. Plus they're still fighting online sales.

Estate planners are basically the slowest possible service. They could probably work a two day week and let the answerphone and inboxes pick up the grunt work. It's neat that this works for them, but —and this isn't just jealousy— I don't expect this to become widespread any time soon.
This is a well written summary.

From the article, the European Commission requires Google to respond to these three accusations:

> 1. Tying Google’s search and browser apps to the Google Play Store.

From the user's perspective, this is not even true. For example, Samsung devices ship with their own browser on the home screen [a]. The user has to seek out the Chrome app (that is pre-installed) in order to use it. Besides, Play, Chrome and Search are Google's products and they should be allowed to bundle them as they wish. Technically, they could be one app.

> 2. Paying OEMs to exclusively pre-install Google Search on every Android device they made.

This point is moot. Google no longer does that. In fact, unbundling the Play store from search will force a bidding war for the default search engine, which will end up with Google paying to add Search on a product they are giving away for free.

> 3. Barring OEMs that installed Google’s apps from selling any device that ran an Android fork.

This feels absurd to me. Google is under no obligation to offer an open-source version of Android in the first place. If they decide to retract the OSS version, which is well within their right, how exactly are OEMs restricted ? How is EU better off in that case ? Is EU going to _force_ Google to give away Android for free ?

[a] ..except in the US.
3 Week Diet Promote Fast Weight Loss Successfully
For a functional employer, the definition of "a good engineer" is "someone who produces valuable engineering solutions for me".

An engineer who isn't doing that is either mismanaged, misplaced, or is no good. In the first two cases, I can possibly make use of them. But if the engineer is a diva who would only work on some made-up fancy project, then he is not a good engineer for me.

Maybe he will be able to do good work elsewhere, but that's not really relevant for me, my business, or my shareholders. Not anymore than the fact he may be a great painter or musician. Good for him, but sadly irrelevant for my business.
But a high price leads to higher taxes. In this way I am taxed for my sentimental attachments, which seems wrong. An old man with 5 years left may have a very high sentimental attachment as he wishes to die in his 'forever home.' Should he be taxed more for that? What about a young couple who just had their first kid? Providing a sense of stability and staying in their current home has a lot of meaning to that family, should they be charged for it? A family in 2008/2009 who is making payments but barely and struggling may place huge value on being able to maintain their position as homeowners. You're going to force them to choose between much higher taxes or selling to a PE firm?

We already have a system where you can offer any property owner any amount to sell, the idea that the government should come in and shape the market in such a way that people are charged for emotional attachments and compelled to sell at a specific price is ugly. It seems wrong to shape human behavior in that way (especially for a spurious benefit) and it seems like it mistakes efficiency towards a goal for the goal itself.
Dark matter is a supersolid that fills 'empty' space, strongly interacts with visible matter and is displaced by visible matter. What is referred to geometrically as curved spacetime physically exists in nature as the state of displacement of the supersolid dark matter. The state of displacement of the supersolid dark matter is gravity.

There is evidence of the supersolid dark matter every time a double-slit experiment is performed, as it is the supersolid dark matter that waves.

Supersolid dark matter ripples when galaxy clusters collide and waves in a double-slit experiment, relating general relativity and quantum mechanics.﻿
I really dislike converting Python to a different language. What type is this? Go 5 libraries down to find out ;)
How AI and Machine Learning Change CMS
Are we sure they're the ones who released them? It could be them, I don't see why it wouldn't, could be anybody. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Light raises $121M led by SoftBank
I love the puzzled looks of clerks when they ask for my phone number or address and I decline. I've only once had to resort to "I can make up a phone number if you really want one".
He doesn't have to be doing anything wrong: We can be wrong for letting him accumulate so much wealth and influence.
Test Drive of the Tesla Model 3 Performance
Who Gets Left Out of the Urban Tech Boom?
EDIT: Actually, more useful than me suggesting a scattershot bunch of things, it'd probably be more efficient to ask what bits gave you pause, which bits look too complicated or difficult to use.

---

Yeah, I agree. The lowest-hanging fruit is probably around the formula box at the moment -- it's easy to type a syntactically incorrect formula, it's unforgiving with typos, and there's a lack of discoverability. I think some "programming editor features" like tab-completion, syntax highlighting and automatic insertion of closing quotes/parens will be a good first step there. Clicking on sheet elements to insert terms in formulas will probably help a little too.

With regard to complexity, though, I'm not too sure there's much to be done. I imagine most uses will look a bit simpler than the demo video because a greater fraction of the time will be spent working on the data, but wrt logic I think the complexity may be irreducible. Maybe better support for foreign keys instead of using lookup expressions? If the user can "relate" tables by columns (and an "arity" -- "one to many" etc) then we might be able to make some formulas simpler with some ORM-esque magic. Then in the example we could write

trips.from_airport

rather than

airports[name: trips.from]

though I'm not sure it's a big win.

Maybe we really do need Clippy... Or some kind of formula-writing wizard. Pivot tables...

Gotta find a designer (and/or some users) to keep me honest, I guess.
If you're writing a lot of command line scripts and want some of the safety offered by types, but still want the flexibilty of python (+ more flexibility), you should check out perl6.

Gradual typing: https://perl6.party/post/Perl-6-Types--Made-for-Humans
Command line arguments: https://perl6advent.wordpress.com/2010/12/02/day-2-interacti...

And at the end of the day it's perl, so it's the king of command line scripts.
I have seen SaaS products provide incident reports to customers but that were products with SLAs.

It depends on Amazon Retail Site in this case, Netflix has published postmortems in the past but then again Netflix is very good at blogging(also, open sourcing) their engineering efforts.

https://medium.com/netflix-techblog/a-closer-look-at-the-chr...
Why? As long as python.exe runs code, people will use it. And there's too much money invested in it for people that have done so to let it just die.
Stupid people block stuff. That's why (somewhat less stupid) people try to tunnel everything via HTTP.
I keep looking for this analysis from someone serious and not finding it, but... frankly Putin is starting to look a little desperate. He's invading neighbors for fundamentally stupid reasons, he's directly intervening in the internal politics of basically every nation with white people in it. He's straight up engaging in assassinations on foreign soil (another nerve agent death just two weeks ago in the UK).

Things just don't seem to be going his way, and he's taking risks that seem geopolitically absurd (and very much not in keeping with Putin's MO for the rest of his career). Even the guy he wanted for POTUS turns out to be a bumbling idiot who "says" the things Putin wants but doesn't seem to be able to effect much policy (though Trump did "ignorify" the most recent sanctions bill).

Maybe the Magnitsky act and related actions really are having an effect, and this is Putin trying desperately to hold onto power locally in Russia?

Not qualified to judge. But it feels right to me...
I know that now. 2.4 was a long time ago... there is some serious wisdom behind that decision/PEP-8/"import this" that took me a while to appreciate. Humans beings are the weak link in developing software, and language decisions that nudge towards highly readable code are productivity decisions.
I don't think there's an obligation for any company to publish a post mortem. But if a company does, it shows that they're a company that's accountable and shows that they care about their customers.
Described by one former employee as “glorified A/B testing” — a common method of running experiments by changing one variable — TLA involved developing “many ad combinations” using different “messaging,” “creative,” “format,” and “delivery,” according to a late-2017 internal Facebook presentation. A client would then test each combination “against the smallest possible audience” on Facebook, with the one generating the most engagement being scaled to a full audience.

Misleading title, but this is interesting. Basically digital ad platforms are also a great interface for algorithmic propaganda.
If a serious percentage of companies started giving people Friday off (or maybe Monday, which is worse?) at some point everyone would do it since people wouldn't be able to get work done on that day. It could happen.
> I think it's different when it's a platform/service provider but the prime day outage only hurt Amazon.

Have you not used Amazon? It's where half the country does their shopping. Many businesses live and die on Amazon as just much as they do on AWS.
Enjoy your ignorance:

https://ratical.org/radiation/CNR/CHfIP1975.pdf