skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
By default, MongoDB doesn't listen on the public interface so it won't be exposed to the Internet - it only listens to localhost. Old versions of MongoDB had bad defaults but that hasn't been the case in years:

https://blog.shodan.io/its-still-the-data-stupid/
The article does not use the phrase "record breaking drought".

The phrases are: 1) "They are known as the "hunger stones," and they were chosen in the past to record low water levels", 2) "As Europe wilts in the sweltering, record-breaking harshness of summer 2018", 3) "with water levels hitting record lows in Europe".

The last two provide links where I think it's clear that they refer to modern record keeping, eg, daily measurements of temperature, rainfall, water depth, etc.
The US government doesn't issue birth certificates (aside from births under Federal jurisdiction, like military).
Software Freedom Ensures the True Software Commons
We have a Numatic Henry and it runs circles around the most expensive Dyson. While the Dyson seems more powerful on paper, in reality the Henry sucks up more dust, grime and pet hair. Our Henry is 18 years old, survived falling down the stairs, a complete house remodel and basic family life with kids.

The bags only need to be changed a few times per year, and changing is a breeze. Compare that to the Dyson where you have to empty the bin every other time you use it. Oh, and the Henry doesn't seem to lose power as the bag gets fuller since the motor is placed on top of the cleaner.

Every part can be replaced (and are still available, for a 18 year old vacuum cleaner!) but as I said, they're nearly indestructible. And cheaper than a Dyson.

There's a reason why professional cleaners use them, I guess.
I live in a city like that. The month of August would pay my mortgage for a year, and pay for a holiday if I Airbnb'ed my home for the month. One of the issues is that everyone else goes away during august, so the prices are hyperinflated. You have to go somewhere (as your home is occupied) so where do you go? You also have restrictions (most likely) on annual leave - is paying my mortgage and a holiday worth having 0 time off for the rest of the year?
Just get a subscription to them on amazon and you never have to think about it outside the 4 minutes it takes you to change the bag
By the way, I think this is why communism failed. I don't think their error was for companies to be state-owned. The problem was that, in the pursuit of efficiency, they merged all companies in a sector into one combine, thus making it impossible to replace (today we would say "too big to fail").

Maybe the communist/socialist bloc would've been more successful if they had retained multiple state-owned corporations in each sector and allowed for competition between them.

Disclaimer: I was born in 1989, so everything I know about communist/socialist economy, I know from books or from talking to my parents.
But will it be skookum?
Well, not everyone needs a meaningful job, like all the time.
Why I built yet ANOTHER remote job board, despite being told not to
But what was there to do with this free time?
> DMA to/from stack

wait what oh my god
Some people believe that it is possible to derive values.
But even if you don't, it is still very possible that the way most things are done is inconsistent with most peoples values. Simply because using rationality to go from values to policies is computationally hard and can give counter-intuitive results.
It's about time. As HSTS is becoming more prevalent, these "legitimate" MITM techniques don't work nearly as well.
A common vector for identity fraud has been to request a copy of a legitimate birth certificate of a person who died later in another state.
It goes the other way as well.

Managers offering to get their team trimmed because of lack of stuff to do is seen as a failure.

On one side the manager will be blamed for not being attached enough to its team, not being 'greedy' enough in general. On the other side the whole team will be blamed for not having come up with novel ideas and new expansion paths.

And as you say, even if the Level N manager is fine with that, it will look bad on the N+1 manager to not have a growing trend, and so-on.
I have many code snippets, whih I keep either on Box Sync or Drive depending on platform. Would be happy to share them! Would you be interested?

I'd definitely be interested in peeking at/copying other snippets too.
"we do not claim to support decentralisation"

What a strange statement to make. I feel like such an apparent preference should be accompanied by a very clear explanation of the disadvantages of decentralisation (other than "it's hard and we don't know how to do it").

Ideally, a page discussing the relative merits of centralisation and decentralisation would start with a threat model too, so the reader knows what problems are attempting to be solved, and which are out of scope.
Well, universities in the US do make a shit ton of money per students they have
In-memory data grids vs. in-memory databases
If stealing office furniture is an actual concern and ongoing problem that company has some incredibly fundamental problems. Personally i would just bring the damn chair in and play dumb.
That works, with a few caveats.

1. It takes time.

2. The places need to be intrinsically nice, not "generically pleasing to tourists at this moment" - those wear out quickly.

3. Popularity breeds popularity, so the tried-and-true sites stay popular.
Yes, the name of this effect is called Software Engineering.
Powertrains? IIRC Tesla already made the patents for their powertrains public. Dyson only has experience making very small motors; for their larger vacuums for example they already use a 3rd party motor (panasonic?, there's an AvE video out there somewhere).
Most of the available land that is capable of the agriculture needed to support the current populations are in use though.
I am intrigued by your question. Namely with 20 years experience and living in SV, why would you want to do "remote consulting" ? In my experience consultants with face-time are preferred and earn more.

Microservices is just another architectural approach. As far as a consulting business goes it is much the same as any other consulting business - discover problems - deliver solutions - bill.

Ok, tangentially attempting to answer your other questions:

Are you sure you are offering consulting services and not "contracting" services? My reading of your questions suggests that you really mean the latter.

You say "you can specialize ..." - does that mean that you currently don't have hit the deck running skills? In which case, what exactly are your 20+ year's skills and how could you leverage from those to microservices? In my mind this is very critical because if you just hang out your shingle as microservices consultant, then you are not differentiating yourself from some script kiddie who as read a couple of blogs.

Before you go any further, read Steve Blank's "customer discovery processes" and apply the principle of getting out of the office and validating your business model. This is why using your current experiences and contacts and being in SV is so critical.

As to how to bill: charge as much as possible. You want to avoid the bottom-feeders (both prospective clients as well as competing consultants). Personally I prefer to bill on the basis of specific deliverables instead of hourly rates. In a nutshell my process is: meet with client; understand their requirements; propose a specific deliverable and price; get agreement; do the work; deliver; collect money; repeat for next deliverable ...
It's a bit awkward to use (I was expecting a direct link) but for anyone else wondering:

1. Enable the Tudor layer using the Layers menu in the left-hand sidebar

2. Apparently, only the City of London (not Greater London) is covered, so make sure to pan/zoom over there!

Generally, a nice little tool — it's a shame the satellite imagery is so low-res.
Brexit means more expensive cars from abroad. The guy wants to make a UK car for the UK market, I guess... We'll know when they don't make a version with the steering wheel on the left :)
Counterpoint: Las Vegas is in the middle of a desert - yet immensely popular.
Ask HN: Should big companies be commercializing open source?
Big companies aren’t just using open source software, they’re turning it into revenue generating services.

The authors of the OSS aren’t making money but Google, Amazon and Microsoft are.

What do you think about this?
Probably because fuel is so much more expensive than electricity.

You avoid having to climb all the way up just so you're using up less of this very expensive fuel, which especially on short haul flights is a huge % of the whole flight.

Not actually economical in terms of energy used per distance covered, but more practical and likely to be appreciated by passengers? Less stress on the airframe too, probably.
Isn't this what happens at a cellular level all the time?
Judging by the nicely spaced points in the first animation on your web page, probably pretty good.
The Scheduler Saga
There's the old saying "I know half of my advertising budget is wasted, I just don't know which half".

But in practice, the reality is probably far more that most of the jobs do add value to the company, it's just relatively difficult to quantify (the related "as we're not an IT company, we should just outsource this department" mentality has never worked out very well...). Or taking the ludicrous Graeber definition of a "bullshit job", just because the employees would rather be poet musicians than credit controllers doesn't necessarily mean the world actually needs more street poetry of dubious merit and less timely payments.

And the given example of advising someone they can't bring their own furniture in without a good reason is a "bullshit task" which takes far less time than the alternative "bullshit task" of evaluating whether doing so might cause conflict, clutter or insurance liability issues, and auditing who owns which piece of furniture.
Supposed to? I dunno, 6% is respectable and if I were an investor, it sounds like a safe bet. Unlike 30-70%, that just tells me they've been dedicating resources on growth, probably using backhanded techniques, instead of their product and profitability.

Plus as another commenter pointed out, it's not a startup, it's nearly two decades old now. What were their growth rates 20 years ago?
In some times in history, folks worked more. In other times, less. Some folks still work a lot, even though they'd rather just work 35-40 hours a week.

Sometimes folks had more holidays and vacation time in the past as well. Not everywhere has a culture of paid vacation time (or medical leave at all).

Sure, there are interesting jobs, but only a small portion of folks have those sorts of jobs. Lots of folks work in retail, though. Many more jobs are much more interesting from the outside, but at the end of the day, they are still a job. Even when you like what you do.

Lots of folks have to do what pleases their parents. This varies by country: In the US, a parent can refuse to offer up their tax information to a child getting ready to graduate high school, basically keeping them from going to college until 24 or something. They get the chance to revoke it once a year. Some folks pull their children out of school in 8th grade. School schedules sometimes need parental permission.

There are lots of areas in the world where women can't really do the same stuff as men.

I do think the world is better overall than it was in the past, but glossing over these things isn't helpful at all because then folks more easily ignore these things.
They did have jobs. What happened? Undo that.

It should be even easier now, given that a little remote office can be easily connected to the rest of the world.
Remind me of f.lux on MacOS and iOS
Define successful. I know of one German software company that's raking in money and large contracts, despite being staffed with underpaid junior developers and overpaid clueless managers. I had this eye-opening moment, after which I asked my boss, how is it possible that we have the expertise and yet they have the money...
They do not - you're not supposed to keep them in enclosed spaces because of this exact issue.
>The above represents my expression of what I know Google engineers would be capable of. They're smart enough. I believe in them. They can do it!

I believe you're thinking of Google engineers circa ~2001

I doubt the current crop of engineers working on things like GMail refresh are anywhere near having that kind of skills.
Where Ad Verification Vendors Fail
Understanding Drone Regulations in India
Rest. Socialize. Make babies. Goof off, make others laugh. I'm gonna guess that some folks had games, and children likely invented them.
I don't understand. Who owns the shares now if they were bought with the company's own money?
What does the GDPR actually mean for startups?
I don't know about Facebook and Instagram being the main "culprits", but rather the fact that it's so much easier to travel today, than it was before. And I'm talking about everything from price to accessibility. You just grab your phone, order a ticket, book a room somewhere, pay up and wait for the departure date to come. Sure, social media helps promoting places and creates an urge to show that you also travel to these ultra amazing locations. But if it was more difficult to travel, people wouldn't be touristing as much either. As I see it, it's a two way relationship where both ends fuel the other.
The problem with Zig is that they changed almost everything. I think there's a high risk they introduced new design problems that we won't know about fully until Zig has been used in anger for 10 years.

I've always felt that C is near the sweet spot. I'd rather see a minimal change to C that broke backwards compatibility (because it has to) and fixed the top ten simple problems.
In a world with 80% service jobs, social skills are practical skills.
That would be a first for Dyson.
Having gone to the Internet for advice (and I don't mean just Googling symptoms and taking a guess, I mean those actual pay for medical advice sites), I have a handle on what your GP is for - they provide some sort of accountability and responsibility.

Once, at my wits end with a problem with my child I went to one such site even though I knew it was a bad idea - it's basically a stackoverflow but staffed by real doctors (apparently) and you pay per answer. It's not terribly expensive, but literally any advice you have will be totally vague and contain the instruction to "see your GP". No reputable professional would put their nuts on the line for a remote diagnosis.
To be entirely fair, this is an accurate alt text for the picture, as it is very much full of cyber.
Mind you, you couldn't have expected to have the Forum to yourself for millenia now. Rome seems to have plenty of experience with barbarian hordes (/joke) - or more seriously, how to mix the locals with tourists while remaining a city, not a preserved relic to be gawked at.
Regarding the doctor's note thing, isn't it just to present a hurdle that the majority of people wouldn't jump over unless they actually needed to? So as to prevent people arbitrarily demanding an unlimited variety of conveniences that they don't really need?
I know some Eastern Europeans that told me they were treated like garbage in Germany, but as rockstars in the US. YMMV
Maybe the distribution is much narrower, but it also seems that software salaries are on the lower end, which is the most surprising part to me. Or, as a German colleague of mine put it, "my no-good brother who takes construction jobs every now and then earns more than me in this software job", followed by revealing that apparently his wife still has to work for them to have the ends meet, because programmer's salary is not enough.
Ansible and Docker should not be mutually exclusive|Example configuring keycloak
An angle that appears to be underexplored, is what happens if you let males compete for sustainability. We might be underestimating the effect of classical (or perhaps even biological) provider roles of males, i.e. the amassment of resources to attract a mate. If we could transform this in competition in sustainability, then it might make a huge difference. Current approaches to sustainability might exactly fail because they do not take such possibly hardwired mechanisms account. E.g. a male who foregoes meat and excessive life style appears to have it harder [0], not easier in his romantic life.

[0]: http://psycnet.apa.org/record/2017-26154-001
Not sure this means what you think it means.

My unit in the university has:

Academic staff: 10

Administrative staff: 70

Students: 0

Because we do research, which requires a lot of staff who aren't academics.
PolyMatter did a nice video on why "Apple Glasses Are Coming."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1SrckSJvGc8
Even then, it's a form, such as an "FS-240." My sister was born in a U.S. Air Force hospital, which issued a "Certificate of Birth" and it was useless. For passport or any other time the government asked for a "birth certificate," the FS-240 was what they wanted. (It's a form with information on both parents.)
I usually have a month off every year in the summer, but whether that means you run out of holiday days that's problematic. Perhaps a compromise would be having a 2-3w holiday in August and keeping the rest of the time off for other parts of the year.
Having synchronized weekends is quite sufficient - doesn't really make much of a difference whether the traffic is 10x or 20x ;)
What do the doctors hate about EHRs
I know if you have worked only in software companies where everyone is paid six figure salaries then you will think that stealing stores and company property must be incredibly rare and deviant behaviour, but at most companies this is a very real concern of management and something that happens regularly.
I posited recently that news in areas we're not expert in are basically processed as entertainment, which is why we don't give a damn about its accuracy whereas we're comparatively so enraged about gross mistakes in areas we're well-versed in.
> It can take a long time to accurately determine if an activity is essential in complex organizations.

Seems this time you mentioned is N * management-turnover-period. It could be N==1 if the company is run by lucid people, or longer.

IMO, business directors who made their way from the ground up, mostly have a very good and constant feeling for what is essential, even in ever-evolving situations.

The manager running our business group resisted till the end to the attempts to get us CMM-certified, pushed from the top of the group. (Our business was nothing close to medical/military/aerospace.) Eventually he has got replaced, and we did it all -- hired consultants, moved people to newly created jobs, etc. %d years in, and guess what, the fashion for CMM turned over.

Ultimately, the activity was sold and demolished, I suspect this story contributed.
thanks! There's some really cool examples in that subreddit.
Getting started with Cloudflare and Terraform (part 2)
Tachyum claims its Prodigy CPU will run AI jobs as well as traditional apps
It's not that these jobs are bullshit jobs, it's that commonly they are wrapped up in bullshit procedures.

These procedures typically appear when there's an initiative to reduce costs. The easiest and cheapest way to employ an unskilled person to do a skilled job is to hand them a book of 'procedures' on their first day and say "Everything you need to do and know is in this Book". No time consuming cross-training required, no hiring of expensive people who already know the skill. As the Book of Procedures enables you to rinse and repeat the process with every new hire, you are no longer invested in keeping 'talent' within the organisation; good people leave once they realise that the job is 70% procedure vs. 30% actual work... No matter, there's always The Book, let's hire another grunt from the employment queue.

However, because you are filling up your organisation with unskilled workers, errors become more common place. To reduce the error rate, you introduce some extra checks and balances to ensure that the job is being done correctly. These extra procedures go in to The Book. The ratio is now 90% procedure vs. 10% actual work.

People who actually know how to do their job, having learned it well, or had previous skills, get frustrated that most of their workload is 'make-work' following all the extra procedures, and the people who have no skill, just follow the The Book, because they know no different, and it keeps them out of trouble.

Meanwhile, somewhere upstairs in the boardroom, people in grey suits are patting themselves on the back as operating costs have fallen, profits are up, and incidents are down. Creating The Book of Procedures is now considered a valuable skill in it's own right, so the people who care about climbing the managerial pole devote large chunks of their time adding yet more processes to the The Book, and thus the cycle continues, until several roles in the company are nothing but endless procedure creating/tracking without any actual product output.

There's still the problem of a high attrition rate amongst the middle tier staff, but hey, there's always more fish in the sea right?
Wrong! 3000 amps are different than 5 amps. Vacuum batteries are a a toy compared to liquid cooled 300 kg battery pack. There is already one electric car manufacturer that had (has?) problems with manufacturing. Vacuum and an electric car are very different domains.
Very neat. Thanks for sharing - also agree with your sentiment that it feels like content is locked up in Medium, even more so with the subscription plans.
> If you've got a 5% monthly churn rate then at 1000 customers you'll lose 50 customers/month. At 2000 customers you'll be losing 100 customers/month - and all of a sudden your 100 new customers a month will net out to zero. After that point you'll start losing customers.

Actually, in this scenario the number of users will asymptotically grow towards growth/churn = 100/0.05 = 2000 in perpetuity. So it's not a "death sentence" but will lead to growth stagnation.
‘Familial Searches’ with DNA Raise Privacy Concerns
Ottoman
Any extension that Interacts with pages. I have so many of them. Vimium injects itself onto every page.
> As technology progresses, and all things being equal, the situation will only become more extreme and ridiculous.

It's actually the opposite that is the case. As technology progresses you will see more and more and more speculative waste because the entire market becomes more efficient at producing speculative waste.

Another name for "speculative waste" by the way is "Capitalism." Before you worry about "bullshit job" you might want to consider the thousands of businesses that fail everyday, the books and movies and cartoons and the mountains of media that is produced that will never be read or consumed, the endless containers of products -- everything from Squirrel Girl teeshirts to satellite networks to cryptocurrencies -- that get made and then quickly discarded.

All of it is speculative waste and all of it is absolutely necessary for a free market to function.

The concept of "bullshit jobs" is stupid but it's the "common sense" stupidity that is really just a lack of imagination. In a global economy filled with billions of independent actors the vast majority of economic activity will be variously inefficient, useless and often down right harmful. This speculative waste will expand to consume all of the speculative capital available. The vast majority of this economic activity will only be minimally profitable and much of it will generate no returns whatsoever. But every once in a while you get a "10 bagger", an investment that yields order of magnitude returns, and this changes everything.

The author should be concerned not that most people are engaged in ultimately pointless economic activity but that, perhaps like himself, so many in the West are profoundly underemployed.
The answer is literally the part after the comma you left out. Entropy maximization.