skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> or at least, they trust their knowledge of infrastructure solutions better than their coding abilities

Or we trust our knowledge of such solutions more than even your (anyone's) coding abilities :)

I realize, of course, that you're using "trust" as a metaphor for expertise, as well as that we all have a tendency to be biased in favor of solutions that favor that expertise/familiarity.

The trouble is, programmers outnumber ops people by a vast, vast margin, especially here on HN.

> often, an ops person can take your developed software as a black box, and solve its scaling problems without touching the box.

Not often enough, not any more. It seems that this skillset has been sufficiently devalued in the industry that, however rare it was originally, it hasn't spread, which means there may well be a significant plurality of coders out there who have never worked with such an ops person.

> And this is often the optimal way to solve these problems: you probably can't write a caching layer for your web app, inside your web-app's process, that will work half as well as Memcached

This goes back to my original, partly facetious, comment about trusting anyone's coding. My real point is that I don't need any kind of faith in something like memcache, since I've seen it work many times before, whereas someone's coding ability (even my own) does require a leap of faith, since it's totally unknown how effective the effort will be or on what time scale.

> And, since these scaling problems can be solved without ever touching your code, it's especially silly to try to anticipate scaling problems you might have and solve them in your code

That's a message that's difficult to hear for management that's made up entirely of programmers (such as at many software startups, even grown to a larger size). Witness the willingness to pay huge premiums for cloud ("infrastructure as code"!) solutions, that eliminates huge low-level scaling opportunities.
You're right, my mistake; economies of scale would keep the trend, and diminishing returns dissolves it
Seems to be a misreport, the guy wasn’t a mechanic he was a baggage handler.
I understand the first thing emergency people do in the hospital is to give us a saline (salt) solution. If salt is so bad for us, why are we given a bag of salt water?
It's true that economic conditions change with technological advances, and that the general trend is that fewer and fewer people are required to meet the demand for any particular product. It does not follow that we as a society should adopt a policy that those who manage to capture markets are entitled to a proportionate (note that I deliberately did NOT say DISproportionate) share of society's wealth. Most of our social mores were designed under the assumption that production, not consumption, was the limiting factor in our economies. But that is starting to change. If we don't change the rules to accord with this new reality it will cause serious problems. If only 1% of the world's population is required to meet 110% of the world's demand for everything (and that could very well happen within our lifetimes), what are we going to do with the remaining 99%?
I don't get the USA's obsession with banning dogs from anywhere that serves food. In Europe, this is typically standard practise as long as the dog is well behaved. It's not as if food safety is more of an issue anywhere in Europe than in the USA in recent times. Something similar seems to also be the case when it comes to babies.

Just let the dogs in if they're well behaved. No big deal...
QEMU as a snap package with GTK, SDL2 and Virgil 3D enabled
The article states that Tobacco have to be treated differently because it’s addictive, why sugar is different ? It’s addictive too.
I would think that could help EVs, as it would be cheaper (in weight and dollars) to add a gas powered range extender to EVs with smaller batteries. I'd rather have an 80 mile EV with a range extender than a very expensive heavy 400 mile EV.
Well essentially they are going at night, bringing their own night with them
>It sounded like you made an argument that at least 30% of people shouldn't be allowed to drive, and then leaping to that leading to some sort of societal bifurcation?

Aha, a tangible argument. You don't see the possibility of social bifurcation from 30% of the population not being allowed to drive?

Most tradie jobs require a car. It's very hard to be an electrician, plumber, chippie etc. that services homes as if you don't have a car. It might be possible to do commercial work in those fields without a car but every apprentice I've ever known has needed one to carry around the huge pile of tools they're expected to bring on site themselves.

There are also a lot of entry level unskilled jobs that require a drivers licence (assuming you consider a drivers licence "unskilled", which it sort of is but wouldn't be of 30% of current drivers had their licence revoked overnight), like delivering pizza or doing private courier work.

So yeah, changing driving laws to make it a requirement that drivers be consistently safe, courteous and predictable and refusing to give licences to people who can't meet that criteria would definitely be a social bifurcation because it would all but eliminate whole categories of otherwise relatively accessible industrial for the people that cannot get the licence, and in so doing widen the already increasingly wide (lower/middle)/high income divides that most western nations are seeing.

However, that was not my point. My point was that the argument "we shouldn't let people do this because it has costs to society" doesn't really go anywhere as an argument. That's true for pretty much everything we do in society, it's a nothing argument.
"Salt has effect X" is not what's in the article, is not the recommendation widely circulated ("reduce our salt consumption to near zero", "salt is bad for health and should be avoided as much as possible" etc.) and thus not what I wrote about. You're building a straw-man. As straw-men go, you're technically correct in what you write, but miss that I didn't argue against the facts you laid out.
High carb or low carb high protein diets which any low fat diet would turn into is a terrible idea in the both short and long term as they are glucose focused you want to avoid high blood sugar and high insulin levels since insulin causes your body to store fat.

Fats are not inherently bad for you, doesn’t matter if they are plant based or not.
There is some stuff on the sidewalk, so anything goes now?
Honestly, in Manhattan, trash is a bigger issue for smell because it is just everywhere on trash days. We need to adopt the Barcelona dumpsters-in-parking spots method.
Nutrition Science is a huge mess even though it is a core part of human health. As in, it is a total disaster. Here's something depressing to think about: if the Keto people are correct, mainstream nutrition science was a key contributor to American obesity crisis and resulted in countless premature deaths and major suffering over the last few decades.

Anyway, recently I wanted to look into whether or not eggs are good for you because those same Keto supporters make noise about how eggs no longer affect (bad?) cholesterol levels and therefore won't contribute to heart disease. You'd think it would be clear. Nope. It's about 50-50 split judging by various links (from seemingly reputable doctors and nutritionists). Even those docs that pay lip service to the changing attitudes towards eggs, don't know what a safe amount is and caution about eating more than X per day or week ... though not because of any specific studies, but just as a precaution. A simple question like "Can I eat 3 eggs for breakfast everyday" has no consensus answer. What the fuck.
I read that as tangents, not opposites
No difference, it's KDE + android. Not only it has bidirectional clipboard syncing (so copy a 2FA token from the mobile to the PC) but also other nice features. Like if your phone is ringing, your PC will pause automatically YouTube or play music / spotify tabs on chrome. You can control PC media (e.g. again play music on chrome) from your phone, sync notifications uni or bidirectional, share/browse files, use the phone as a trackpad or keyboard for the PC, answer messages from the PC, etc.
I wouldn’t necessarily say you’re wrong, but (at least in the US) we have a long history of taxpayer-subsidized bailouts for the very wealthy who take gambles and lose (e.g., 80s S&L crisis, but there are countless others). It’s an interesting and unfortunate cultural aspect of America that we really, really hate the poor, and seek to hold them accountable for their actions to a degree that we simply don’t do for the well-off.
>If there's indeed no benefit, then the message is actively harmful, because it causes people who follow it to suffer (from bad-tasting food, in this case).

Well, the food doesn't end up tasting bad because they replace salt with sugar...
Thanks, changed from https://www.bloomberg.com/amp/news/articles/2018-08-09/crypt....
Sugar is currently very bad for you. It's really bad for your liver though I can remember a time when it was thought that fatty food was hard on the liver and that sugar wasn't.
You talk about those things you listed as an irrevocable part of maturity, but back in the day, wealthy people did not have to do them. They had servants who cooked for them, did their laundry, cleaned their homes, bought their groceries, etc. And that's still true today, and even more so in certain places.

And frankly, if you have a high enough salary to pay someone else to take of the mundane parts of your life, I don't see why you shouldn't.
I was going to post that but you beat me to it.
While I agree the patent is garbage, it's also covers a highly specific configuration. The operative part of the patent is not: "Methods and systems are provided for connecting an electronic device to a network."

It's the claims, and to infringe you have to meet every limitation of the claim:

> A computer-implemented method for testing network connectivity for a network device, comprising:
connecting to a network provider;
pinging a first server with the aid of the network provider by directing a data packet to a static interne protocol (IP) address of said first server;
pinging a second server with the aid of the network provider by directing a data packet to a dedicated uniform resource locator (URL) of said second server; and
determining whether to maintain connectivity to said network provider based on whether a response was received by said network device from said first server and/or whether a response was received by said network device from said second server; and
connecting to another network provider based on at least one criterion selected from the group consisting of: bandwidth of the another network provider, cost to maintain connectivity to the another network provider, cost to transmit information with the aid of the another network provider, a download rate of the another network provider, and an upload rate of the another network provider.
Employees of companies are instructed specifically to avoid reading patents, to avoid the chance of hitting the triple damages from "wilful patent infringement". (I suppose they could read expired patent definitions, but at least in tech, those are likely much less relevant.) I imagine this also has the effect that they have no idea what technologies could theoretically be licensed from the patent owners, so, even if both parties would be willing and could agree on mutually beneficial terms, the transaction isn't initiated in the first place. (In cases where technology is licensed, I suspect the discovery mechanism involves the patent owner advertising and promoting their thing, rather than people looking at the patent stream.)

The "archive that people maybe start looking at 20 years later" might be worth something. I wonder, though, if similar or greater benefits might be gotten by encouraging companies to dump their secrets (or parts thereof) into some archive where they will remain heavily encrypted and guarded for a few decades.
Yep, KDE Connect is fantastic. I was really thrilled when after installing the mpris extension for Mopidy, I was able to see the current track playing, including album art, and pause/play with zero latency. That's just the icing on the cake of notification and clipboard mirroring.
> It's not even clear if this is a problem: "very little is known about whether lasers can harm the animals' retinas."

It's not clear it's not a problem, either. As you cite, we don't know either way yet.

"Let's be careful mucking with an ecosystem" isn't negative, and there's a lot of historical evidence such caution is necessary.
Thanks, changed from https://articles.mlive.com/news/index.ssf/2018/08/rockets_on....
We had a situation a few months ago where some manager found out a small group in the company were doing a side hustle in design consulting. One morning IT showed up and confiscated all of their laptops and searched them + did some searching through their network history to see if they were using company resources for it. Turns out they weren’t. But it was a big deal for a few days.
i use python on windows(sorry not a linux/unix guy here) and it works fine. i disagree with the atricle in question.
Good to hear. Keep in mind, this part is true for literally everyone:

> Overall, I'm not exactly where I want to be
No, no I agree completely that things should be taxed to cover externalities. My point was merely that those externalities aren’t inherent to the products but vary between societies due to - for example - what laws, taxes, social safety nets etc exist. Smoking has enormous externalities together with tax funded healthcare. The same can argusbly be said for other things too (e.g sugar).

Universal healthcare itself is a huge discussion but seems off topic here.
Maybe so, but the risk of retinal damage is arguably preferable to death from raptors, shotguns or poison.
I think software patents can be useful, but it should be very, very "non-obvious".

The bar should be very high to get a patent and it should only cover the most novel and unique algorithms out there.

Idiotic stuff like a "one click purchase" button or "do it on a computer" should be thrown in the trash immediately.

Pretty much all of our patent problems could be solved in all industries by simply raising the bar for what is considered non-obvious to those familiar with the craft and substantially different to what is already out there.
CloudFormation isn't really good enough because it's AWS specific and doesn't track changes to the state. Plus it just uses data serialisation formats as well so doesn't even address the core problems I raised with HCL. What I really want is Puppet for Infrastructure; the closest I've used to that is Terraform but the syntax isn't quite there...yet.

Plus the pace of development in nodejs worries me. All too often I've ran into issues where modules have changed and broken things downstream. When you're running infrastructure as code you really want to be damn sure your tooling is going to be consistent for years to come and I really don't have that faith in nodejs. Sure, if your a JavaScript developer you can manage it easily enough, but if you're DevOps who rarely touches JS then you really want your tools to be low maintenance. So to that end I wouldn't consider any nodejs projects for any serious production work given the kind of customers I work for (high availability stuff for some major brands). I might be fine but it's just not worth the risk.
To Identify a Hacker, Treat Them Like a Burglar
This might be an unpopular opinion, but I'm convinced we should get rid of all patents and copyrights.

I genuinely can't see anything good with artificial scarcity.
Hey I miss plastic.com too
Congratulations! I'm looking forward to trying it out tomorrow
To answer some of your questions (I use vertx and mainly focus on the JVM world) - reactive is actually a widely used term in the java world to mean "event loop with async programming.

Origin of the term here:
https://www.reactivemanifesto.org/

Graal is an R&D effort by a few folks in the java community driven by oracle right now to allow AOT compilation among other things for the JVM:
http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/jvmls2015-wimmer-2637...

Java is generally not for apps that require fast VM spin up times. That being said, for what the JVM ecosystem can do it isn't bad in practice for heavy server applications.

I know gravitational mainly works in the go ecosystem which has its own trade offs there, but considering what else java already has a mature ecosystem for (big data, well understood native internals, other language built on top of it) the startup times and weaknesses while not ideal haven't been a show stopper.

GraalVM is an attempt to address a wide variety of problems you get with JVM startup time, GC etc.

At most it's simplistic right now and will be for a while. The fact they are working on it is really cool though!

Hope that helps!
Butter from grass-fed cows contains CLA/Tonalin, an extremely beneficial type of fat. Remove butter at your own risk...
Butter is not bad it came from the time where liver function and metabolism was not as well understood, the worst thing you can have is insulin resistance which both high carb and high protein diets can cause as they both revolve around glucose.

I would highly recommend to avoid any diet which is less than 30-40% in calories from fat.

That said the worst thing you can have is high fat and high carb since the insulin would cause your body to store all the fat and turn the extra sugar into more fat.
From the same people: http://rosettaproject.org/disk/concept/

It doesn't really scale, but then neither does the Clock.
I live in an economy with a significant ongoing trade and migratory relationship with China, and chinese of all ages (students, on the path to acquiring Australian permanent residency, Chinese women over 55 with significant retirement benefits from a lifetime of forced savings and work in the public and corporate sector in a buoyant economy)

I don't think its true to say Chinese social media is useless outside the economy: Many of these people continue to maintain links in qq.com much as the mobile west uses facebook for family reunion.

I think its more true to say that the direction of the 'gaze' in these chinese systems is quintessentially inward, and designed that way.

They're not offline: They're online in a different space.
Please don't pull uncivil tricks like that here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
There are two important facts for Modi's demonetization action.

Fact 1 : 86% cash of the currency in circulation was made invalid

Fact 2 : Unaccounted income in cash is approx. 3%

Once you combine Fact 1 and 2, you'd know where this goes. Anyways, NPR has two podcasts on this [0,1].

[0] https://text.npr.org/s.php?sId=527803742

[1] https://text.npr.org/s.php?sId=528181998
"To use a specific example, here’s a problem worth solving with decentralized social networking-style technology that occurred to me last night. It is a real problem with real time savings and other important benefits attached. (Note: you could actually get people to pay for social networking! What an idea!)

Imagine you are the “resposible adult” who takes care of an elderly relative, or a child, with a complex, chronic disease. You are probably middle-aged, female, family-minded, and have your hands full. Other than juggling your family and your job, you also need to find the right specialists for young Bob, organize rides to and from treatment, get second options, research conditions, get prescriptions filled, supervise that Bob actually takes them on time, keep all the other relatives updated, draft them for particular task (“can you take him to the physical therapist on Tuesday”), listen in to some on-line self-help groups, being a Mom of course etc. etc."

I was just in this situation taking care of my mom after her stroke and I don't think this kind of service is very compelling. Most of mom's friends don't know much about computers in general. Some don't even own a computer. taking some time to make phone calls, text messages, email, and letters is well worth it. It absolutely has to be done personally (well I think so at least).
You can apply this kind of cause-and-effect relationship to literally everything. Overeating is bad. Lack of self-control is bad when it leads to overeating. But "Tasty food is a factor in overeating" does not make tasty food, salted or not, bad. Otherwise, everything is bad, even the oxygen you're breathing. You also completely remove personal responsibility and trivialize the nature of the brain's reward system by putting blame on an inanimate molecule.
This doesn't "examine gender norms" it just creates a lot of non-sense per book like "She had to go to war like most women and like many ended up amputated and homeless"
> Most tradie jobs require a car. It's very hard to be an electrician, plumber, chippie etc. that services homes as if you don't have a car.

Then how do people do those jobs in countries that do meaningfully select for good drivers, instead of dispensing licenses to all comers? Last I checked, continental Europe hasn't entirely descended into disrepair, because not everyone can drive.

If your position is that overnight switching to a tough drivers licensure regime would be disruptive, I can only say, "Of course it would". Literally no-one is advocating that, either in this thread, or in The Fine Article, however, so I'm vague on its relevance.

> My point was that the argument "we shouldn't let people do this because it has costs to society" doesn't really go anywhere as an argument.

Which would be an interesting discussion if that was the argument being made. Sin taxes aren't "We shouldn't let people do this", and it's a fundamental mischaracterization of them to say they are. They discourage it, sure. They can also be used to mitigate the cost of the "sin" in question.

But it is fundamentally incompatible with most of the goals of a sin tax, to be used to outright prevent the thing being taxed.
Furby 1998 source code
This has been another episode of “the effect of sodium chloride on human health.” See you yet again next decade!
I have actually worked with some code that took in account all those aspects. The code was written in 2005.

While not a lot video games are open source. A lot of games do things like. Particularly FPS shooters do very similar things to select servers or game hosts. Mainly in trying to find the lowest ping to ensure responsive game-play.

Let's break the claims down.
* "computer-implemented method for testing network connectivity for a network device, comprising: connecting to a network provider;"

This is any computer connected to a network that tests connectivity.

* "pinging a first server with the aid of the network provider by directing a data packet to a static interne protocol (IP) address of said first server;"

This is any application testing ping time/rate.

* "pinging a second server with the aid of the network provider by directing a data packet to a dedicated uniform resource locator (URL) of said second server;"

Any application that makes a HTTP request to check that a URL is online.

* "determining whether to maintain connectivity to said network provider based on whether a response was received by said network device from said first server and/or whether a response was received by said network device from said second server;"

If the tests failed or are high latency try a different connection or probably choose a closer device.

* "and connecting to another network provider based on at least one criterion selected from the group consisting of: bandwidth of the another network provider, cost to maintain connectivity to the another network provider, cost to transmit information with the aid of the another network provider, a download rate of the another network provider, and an upload rate of the another network provider."

Choose the best connection from a list of connections/devices based off your tests and any prior knowledge like geography.
Hyperbolic Discounting: Why You Make Terrible Life Choices