skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You’re HN famous, Will!

But I disagree with this:

> Companies like Dropbox were able to build surprisingly large and scalable systems on just Python.

Many of Dropbox’s services are written in Go, and Magic Pocket is written (partly, at least) in Rust. Earlier in their development, Dropbox relied on S3, which is obviously not in Python.

Fundamentally, I think the important part of the “production” aspect of “systems programming” is that it’ll be used a lot. That’s what drives the requirement for efficiency: if you’re 10-100x less efficient, someone else will be more cost effective / solve bigger problems.

As an additional example, GitHub was written in Ruby, but that’s fine because the underlying Git and filesystem manipulation is all in C. The same thing is sort of true of Facebook’s world of PHP: PHP is mostly a wrapper around C libraries. Until it got complex enough that they rewrote the language.

tl;dr: I don’t think systems programming needs to be “low level”, but production systems do need to be efficient. More powerful computing just moves that further to the right!
I'd do anything to leave tech, but I didn't even go to high school, I don't have any real options. None that pay a six figure salary, or even 1/2 that.

Every time I sell a company, or get fired, I tend to take 2-4 months off to backpack around the world, or find a new hobby / learn a new interest.. Then the reality that living in hostels doesn't pay the bills sets in and I have to go back to the real world.
The Facebook effect coming to OSS. Lots of activity and noise, little to negavitve value.
That doesn't make it the "right thing".

That makes it a "best for me" thing.
statecraft is a job. It's a popular fiction that historical monarchs spent all their time indulging their hedonistic impulses, but it is fictional.
So none of it has any GUI?
> you leave the password in the clipboard, and another website copies it (used to be a thing, I think it's patched now)

Even if it were not patched, how a site disabling "paste from clipboard" remove my password that I have already copied to clipboard.

Note that I would copy the password first and then I would realise that the site is not allowing me to paste it.
Ask HN: 37 year old freelance UI designer, am I doomed?
Hey,

I just wondered what your thoughts were about hiring a designer that's the wrong end of 30?

A little about me. I start learning design at 33, previously I'd been importing items from China and selling them on eBay. That never went particularly well and I keep going with it longer than I should have which was over a decade. In mid-2013 and I decided to enrol at an online university and study computer science. I found it incredibly boring so started learning to code. I actually enjoyed the visual aspect of building sites so doubled down on learning design for the next few months.

Fast forward to now in mid-2018 and I've been a UI designer for around 3.5 years and I love what I do. I've been 100% remote since I started and had to rely on my own non-existent marketing skills to find new projects. It's been pretty hard to say the least and a constant struggle to find projects.

I've got to the point where I think a full-time role will do a ton of good and would tick a lot of wants/needs in my life. I'm based in England but the dream would be to land a role in a nice city somewhere other than England. Europe would be cool but somewhere in North America would be the most exciting.

At my age is it likely any companies would take a chance on me?

Thanks for reading,

Marcus

http://designbymarcus.com

http://dribbble.com/designbymarcus
Thank you ETFs. On the other hand, in finance and investing, what is old is new. I don't doubt that hedge funds will have a resurgence or that active money management will find footholds in different vehicles. For example actively managed ETFs.
Would be nice if it motivated Amazon in the states. I have Prime, and I get 2-day delivery times at best. Sometimes longer. I will not be renewing when it expires at the end of the year.
Got to ask, what makes you use this workflow? What is it about your work that makes it more productive than more standard ones?

I get it to some extent; I'm a heavy Emacs user myself. But for instance, why C-z / fg1 between shell and Emacs, instead of using compilation mode[0], or having your shell in an Emacs buffer, via M-x shell, M-x ansi-term or M-x eshell? It works well with non-GUI Emacs; in fact, that's how I do most of my work when traveling (terminal Emacs via SSH to home desktop).

--

[0] - https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Co...
Not sure what the definition of "next-day" shipping is. Most electronic stores will send you something so it is in your hand next day if you order before something like 16:00. If you live in the nearby the warehouse ordering in the morning (before noon?) and you will likely receive it the same day.

I've always been flabbergasted every time I've been forced to use amazon. It feels like a site from the 90s, and not in the fast and to the point good way. But in the messy, why on earth do anyone use this site kind of way. How on earth do you find stuff on that site anyway.

Amazon has been talking about opening shop here for at least a decade, I think they've realized that they just won't be able to compete.
Cerner President Zane Burke to Step Down
Is that so? Even when ground fine and with enough oxygen? For local heating, I heard good things about the efficiency and cleanliness of wood pellet heaters.
Inequality – how wealth becomes power
How does a site disabling "paste from clipboard" protect my password that I have already copied to clipboard?

Note that I would copy the password first and then I would realise that the site is not allowing me to paste it.
And every manager (but for a few well informed) will scream every time that gold standard has to be adjusted for new zero-days and completely new vectors etc etc, forcing rewrites over and over.

Never underestimate the power of inertia.
Rust is nice but I wouldn't call it full stack because I don't think you should choose it in situations where you can afford a garbage collector. In those cases there are much more ergonomic options available.
Thanks a ton.

Why the hell don't they put an example on their page??
A 1 hectare (10k m^2) poplar plantation yields 30 tons of wet biomass per year; average carbon content of wet wood is 15-20%; that would translate into 4.5 tons of co2 sequestered per year (assuming that all the carbon comes from the atmosphere).

To offset 5GT of carbon dioxide emissions per year, you'd need 110 million hectares, or 1.1 million square km, that is 13 times the surface of Kansas. Then of course every year you'd have to cut down something like 1/7th of the trees, throw them in a big hole, and replant them. Just about doable, I'd say. :)
I imagine the reason is side effects, like additional long-term pain for the patient, compared to having to just a stump. As far as I know, those things are hard to predict (and mitigate if present).

But I'm by no means an expert, that's just a semi-educated guess.
Isn't 10,000's of records a bit to low for a database ?
Crap DNS not supporting CAAA records can be an issue too
Welcome to uriparser
I think amazon is winning solely based on their physical infrastructure which they keep investing in, and hence the share growth. It has nothing to do with how good their website or customer support is, or how many ads they show or not show. All are this ideas they just trying without anything to loose.
I did therapy / group therapy for about 9 years, but decided that it would be healthiest to leave San Francisco / America, and where I live now they don't really have therapists (and I've yet to grasp the language).

I reached out on HN mostly because I'm hoping to find some other crazy old men, as I've known quite a few people in my direct career field who I could be describing in this way (washed up young, formerly successful, diagnosed bi-polar or schizophrenic (I'm thankful I'm not schizophrenic. I've been to a few funerals for them. Most people my age from the bay would remember a sysadmin named SLF when I say this). )

My kid I don't interact with much, I decided a long time ago it was better to keep them shielded from my craziness. Now it's just text messages & international adventures once a year.
Babel, the defacto JSX (and ES2015+ syntax) "compiler" has basically become a general purpose AST manipulation engine.

Pretty much everything it actually "does" for your code is implemented as a plugin, and writing new plugins is relatively trivial if you're familiar with the AST objects and concepts.

Call it macro or AST manipulation, the effect is the same; the language becomes practically infinitely malleable. The only real limits to what JS+Babel can express are those imposed by the host environment (aka DOM APIs, no manual memory mangement, etc.).

To specifically address your last question regarding JSX:
Code such as `<MyComponent attribute={value}>Child Contents</MyComponent` becomes something like `createElement(MyComponent, { attribute: value}, ["Child Contents"])` (sorry, I'm going off of memory here).

The transformation is applied by Babel, so it's parsed from the file as a string, transformed into an AST (with the help of the JSX plugin), and re-written back out as vanilla JavaScript to be executed by your browser / server process.
To be fair, the gold standard is "move a dense, liquid mass uphill" so doing it with solids is kind of a novel approach.
What sucks is that for every breach you hear about, odds are somebody “on the inside” has tried to raise the alarm and been ignored, or marginalized, for it. Then after the breach they often take it very hard.

To the extreme, a former employer suffered a major breach (after I was gone) and from what I heard a really great dev was distraught to the point I worried he might be suicidal.

All made worse because the organization as a whole didn’t learn, there were no obvious consequences for the management at fault, so he took it even more personally, when it truly wasn’t his fault a breach happened.

We need a way to give these people a voice before bad things happen, not just therapy after something they saw coming goes bad.
That's in dry conditions though, it'd probably be gone by now if there wasn't a roof.
What about a modest job in a completely different line of work.

Meet a new kind of people, adjust to being outside & the physical work, get rid of all the office jerks, re-find your love for a local club and kick all medical drug dependencies.
I said nothing about the 1950s. Please revisit my first comment where I spoke of my personal struggles to make sense of my life and find a path forward for me personally.

If you would like to back way, way off of your outright dismissive position, we can try to bridge the communication gap here. But if not, I don't see any point in continuing the discussion.
> What happens in another 10 years when Troy's current advice is outdated? More pitchforks?

YES! All companies storing data should continually stay up to date with best practice.
Why NASA’s next rockets might say Budweiser on the side
Is there an addon of some kind that exists to make those ads more obvious (some kind of highlights) without outright removing them?
Their website is garbage for how popular it is. It’s really hard to navigate the sections for controlling your kindle, digital purchases, or settings.
TypeScript it is, then.
It might take a moment to familiarize oneself with macros or a DSL, but does that not almost precisely define react component definitions?

Surprisingly, the answer seems to be no.

Experienced react devs rely heavily on metacomponents: components that take other components as input, and return a combined component as output. It's like oldschool template metaprogramming in C++, but you end up merely wanting to stab yourself in the eye with a fork rather than hurl yourself out the nearest office window.

A proper macro system would make this pattern unnecessary, because you would rely on macros to generate the specialized components. It would spit out react code that you'd otherwise have to write -- or that you'd have to write a metacomponent for.

Note that a metacomponent is not the same as a macro. It's similar, but it still operates at runtime.

Here's a rule of thumb. Can your macro system embed the contents of your /etc/passwd file as a string literal into your codebase? If the answer is no, then you're missing out on significant power.
What if you don’t want to “learn to think,” whatever that means, but instead want to learn how to do a well in a low cost of living area?
Ideally when there is a sufficiently large disaster an inquiry is held which suggests measures to prevent the disaster, and these measures are implemented and enforced. Air safety is closest to the ideal on this. Politics and political economy is often very far from it, especially when it's possible to profit from a disaster.

Part of the explicit aim of the bailout was to preserve the finance industry status quo, one of very unequal incomes and widespread effects on people by forces outside their control. In the long run this has turned into a sort of formless populist anger that's been successfully transmuted into racial hatred, but there is a real and persistent sense of injustice that needs to be addressed.

Turning this into specific plans is too big a question for me. All that has really been done to prevent it happening again has been a raising of European regulatory capital requirements.
See OP, they had oven immediately proceeding the word you solely focused on.
People can abuse and mistreat themselves as much as they can be abused and mistreated by others. Negative self-talk, for example, can cause real issues. So can suppressing emotions.
Q:+Gedachtenlezer+en+een+oog+uitsteken+(spreekwoord)
Right? This seems a little obnoxious. I could totally see doing all of the things he talked about with C macros.

But whatever.
The implication being that academic politics arises out of basically non-issues? I should be able to infer Sayre never worked in academia; there are situations where a lot of money for research is at stake.
> native application

My issue with those is, they are less sandboxed than JS is. Why would I want to put one-off things all over my disk and system? While I'm willing to install native applications from the package manager for big things I really need, I do not want to do so for simple one-off interactive things, so I really like that I can just do such things in the browser without installing them. Things like simple games, mathematical demonstrations, ...

I think the value of sandboxed self contained interactive apps that can do graphics, input, sound, that run from a link, is tremendous to humanity.

Of course on the opposite side, one problem is the usage of so much JS for simple articles of text and photos. Those would be more pleasant to read if they were just text and photos and nothing more.
Yep, if you can support some (relatively basic) queries, and CRUD operations, you can plug in essentially any database, and bridge on any platform. Think Electron, SQLite on native macOS, heck, you could use Realm as the underlying database if you so preferred...
I think that is a mistake, because data is universal but types and methods are not. Consider a value {"a": [42, 43]} - it could be mutable, immutable, persistent, optimized for ordered traversal, optimized for random access lookups, optimized for insertions.
> Ideally, solving your problem would be a one-liner in an already existing DSL created for your specific problem

I like thinking about the practice of programming as creating a DSL in a language to solve your specific problem.
That's true. I still can't quite believe that although family sharing is a thing, and collections are a thing, I can't share a collection. I want to add books to a "Kids" collection and have that collection shared with them in Kindle for Kids. Can't be done. Need to share each book with each kid, one click at a time.
Wow, that's quite the vulnerability.

Several years ago, the FBI used JS-based identification scripts on an entire hidden-service hosting service to identify visitors.

https://www.wired.com/2013/09/freedom-hosting-fbi/

I wonder if it's already being used in the wild by governmental agencies.
A mobile app database. It can probably scale to hundreds of thousands too, but very few apps and very few users of such apps would actually have THAT much data.

The point is that most current solutions for React Native apps start being super slow when you get to 1000s, or have other issues (like using SQLite directly doesn't give you observability)
It's not hard to imagine that Amazon has created a situation where groups within the company are incented to drive up this high-margin ad income (no annoying logistics! no inventory!), divorced from the "external" fallout of ever-so-slowly turning the site into garbage.

eBay, have you anything to say about this? Or how about you, Hewlett Packard?
It's not omitted, it's just proven to be terribly inefficient. Hydroelectric pumping is being used in practice, being relatively cheap and you can store a huge amount with little materials - millions of tons if need be. Imagine having to lift up blocks of concrete millions of tons heavy and the machinery it would require.

A previous discussion mentioned a heavy train being hoisted up and down a slope for the same effect - same problem. In addition to the weight you can shift being a fraction of a hydroelectric dam, you also have to deal with material maintenance and wear and tear, security, etc.
Programming workout – The way to become a better programmer through exercises
There is no consensus that a light bulb has absolutely no negative influence on human health. You receive much more radiation from these devices than cellphones.

Radio is much lower frequency than light, once you get below the UV spectrum the only known effect that light and radio have is thermal, that is heating flesh, ie heat lamps, microwave ovens.

Yet everyone walks around outside under orders of magnitude higher intensity radiation that has full scientific consensus to cause cancer without giving it much thought.

I for one am not worried about my cellphone that has the power output of a led penlight.
Former hedge fund manager here. It's a good summary, but there's a big piece missing. Setup costs are higher now, a lot of it due to regulatory changes. One of my contacts (and former customers) told me with recent European changes coming in, you need a good few hundred million bucks AUM to make it worthwhile.

A fair few potential founders would be able to find a few tens of millions from friends and family, but a lot fewer can find a hundred bucks. If you're backed by a big name this isn't a problem, hence you still get the occasional massive launch.

The part about the fees is also pretty important. 2/20 is from tales of yore. Any significant ticket will ask for a discount as well.

So it's just that much less attractive to launch.
Just fuzz every parser you write. And the problem is solved.
Exploring TimescaleDB as a replacement for Graphite
Rare text-classification open datasets
Totally! You just described my life.
Find an employer that invests in training.

And ask about benefits. If they skip on benefits they probably skip on other things as well(like raises).
Also nuclear, unless you're counting that as renewable.

In any case, this process also produces concrete, and regular concrete production accounts for 5% of our CO2 emissions. So this reduces our emissions on top of absorbing ambient CO2.
It's easy to be cynical on HN, but to the best of my knowledge, no other solution for React Native checks all the boxes we need.

And it's not like reinventing the wheel (it still uses SQLite), more like inventing better suspenders for the whole undercarriage ;)
I work somewhat similarish to you (or at least, closer to you than the environment suggested in the OP), but I really don't understand why you're so disturbed. Don't use tools you don't want to use.
Artificial intelligence helps track down mysterious radio bursts
You'd be better to submit this as a Show HN.

This style of post don't usually do so well here, I guess because asking for upvotes on another site doesn't quite qualify as "gratifying curiosity", which is what HN is meant to be for.

But interesting projects submitted as Show HN often do really well, when they're things people can learn from or use.

And once your project is doing well as a Show HN, it's not a big deal to mention that product is on PH :)
Cross-platform GUI toolkits were a thing before the HTML-everything craze.
The energy density really is abysmal, which is why the "lifting heavy things up" techinique of energy storage is essentially never discussed outside of pumped-storage.

The problem is the linear relationship between the mass, the height, and the stored energy: energy = mass * height * gravitational-acceleration.

gravitational-acceleration is fixed at the earth's surface to ~10m/s2

So taking an example of 1,000,000 tons lifted up 100 meters:

energy = 1,000,000,000 (mass) * 100 (height) * 10 (gravity) = 1,000,000,000,000 Joules

This looks like a lot, but really isn't. It's equal to ~278 MWh (megawatt hours), which means it can supply 278 MWs for one hour. 278 MWs is equivalent to one small power station.

Note that the largest pumped-storage power station in the UK, which is of course constrained by exactly the same E = mgh formula, Dinorwig (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinorwig_Power_Station) stores ~9,000 MWh.

Another way to consider this is to calculate how much mass needs lifting 100m to supply the whole of a country for a day.

As a very crude estimate the UK requires an average of about 30,000MW of electrical energy. Over a day this equals 30,000,000,000 * 24 3,600,000 Joules = 2.510^18 Joules per day.

The mass required to be lifted up 100m to store this is 2.510^18 / (100 10) = 2.510^15 Kg = 2.510^12 tons = 2,500,000,000,000 tons.

Which is many times more than the current global annual concrete production of 10,000,000,000 tons (ref: http://www.columbia.edu/cu/civileng/meyer/publications/publi...)
I always felt the same about PHP.

It gets a lot of shit because some of the oldest parts have some weird function names or parameter order, but outside of that it's a fantastic language, especially if you stick with php ~5.5 and newer. It's fast, it has a nice package system, and the pepole behind the language are making it better, faster, and more feature complete every day, with standards bodies which includes the biggest players in the space.

IMO languages like Go could learn a thing or 2 from PHP about how to stop worrying about the "best possible choice" and just start giving the language the tools that developers can use to solve real problems.
I Keep the fingers crossed, that's for sure! Let's see how the Bavarian state elections go down in November. I kind of hope that the CSU's drift top the right will not be appreciated by voters.
This is one of the reasons I've let my Prime subscription lapse and started doing more shopping at Target. In addition to fewer (or no) ads, I can often pick an item up in an hour instead of waiting two days, and the prices are better.
To your point, it seems like AWS ECS really is the best of both. You get the no-infrastructure benefits of Lambda with the flexibility/control of a docker container.

You keep the ability to exercise a fair amount of control, easily, and clearly.
And you don't sit inside really opaque execution environment.

Sure, the scaling and provisioning of those Docker containers is opaque, but I'm much more willing to deal with it at that level.
Have you ever experienced one of these?
While I've never worked in academia, I've been in the room while professors argued vehemently - as if their very livelihoods depended on it - about who was sitting in what chair around the conference table, and who was sitting in the chairs up against the wall.