skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Microservices, test driven development, Agile, 4GL and so on. It's all the same thing: a technique that is applicable some of the time but not all of the time that ends up getting a bad rap because the people promoting them tend to come from the theoretical side of the street, and they see the subject matter as their new revenue stream. They will then promote it to be used even when it isn't applicable.

A web based service can be as messy or as clean as you want no matter whether the underlying architecture is a monolith or a bunch of microservices. I don't like the 'micro' in microservices to begin with, to break up a large and complex problem into multiple smaller problems that are each simple to solve is a core principle of programming. If you take that to an extreme you end up with services that do almost nothing and then you have a communications problem (or at least, you will have one in most environments you are likely to encounter). If you glue everything together in on giant hairball you don't have the comms overhead but you have a cognitive overhead in trying to understand it all.

Like with everything else: there is a happy medium: services that are easy to understand because they do not have horizontal ties to other parts of larger whole, enough isolation to help you with debugging, not so much isolation that you end up doing remote requests for data that should have been nearby.

Everything in moderation.

As an illustration of 'microservices' done well: I worked - the last time I had an honest job+ - as a programmer on a message switch for KVSA, a company that brokers shipping capacity. Super interesting job, even more interesting architecture. Right from day one (contrary to the article title!) it was decided the system was too complex to tackle as a monolith. The reliability demands and the latency requirements led to the base system being built on top of QnX, a soft real time Unix like operating system with a micro kernel. Since in a microkernel environment message passing and service oriented architectures go hand-in-hand the technique percolated through to the application level, which ended up being a series of queues and 'admins' (QnX parlance for a daemon or a service) handling the inputs from these queues and effecting transformations on those inputs resulting in new outputs or side effects (such as a fax or a telex being sent). The system worked flawlessly, had a very high degree of redundancy built in and it most likely would have never made it to production if it weren't designed like this from day #1. For that particular use case it was ideal.

+ in 1993, if you're wondering whether microservices are something new you have your answer.
If your bosses are generally aware and happy with the state of affairs twiddle your thumbs, look at your phone, zone out and get paid for every minute of it.

Some companies are more efficient than others.

Trust me it's not a battle worth fighting.
"The conflict is that the bigger the company, the higher the bar for entry." is that true? I would think that the bar to get in is lowered as you need more and more people. Of course, some institutions like Google manage to make a good branding effort and attract talent, but becoming an early engineer in a successful small startup requires you to be extremely smart too.
Nah, your job is to lead the team in the most effective direction in order to fulfil business objectives, not build resumes.
As it currently stands, the trajectory of our carbon footprint will take years off people’s lives- in one clear-cut chunk.

Besides which, cars aren’t faster than trains.
Disclaimer I used to work for the Ministry of Justice (UK) as a software developer.

There are two aspects I feel worth mentioning:

1. GOV.UK is not one single unit but rather quite distributed. these styles and standards are created by a central organisation called Government Digital Service, and all the the government departments follow and feedback. There is a design community and one of the ways of collaboration is to use a Wiki https://paper.dropbox.com/doc/GOV.UK-Design-Patterns-Wiki-hk...

2. UK government is a big open source software contributor. Software projects by default are open source on github. It felt really good getting paid for writing open source code when I worked there :)
https://www.gov.uk/guidance/be-open-and-use-open-source
> They are following the rules, just maybe a bit more aggressively and in ways that the regulators had not expected.

Also judges who interpret the laws ultimately decide what the laws means - possibility even for future similar cases in countries where judges are bound by precedent.
PostgreSQL locking; Row locks
Seems like we went everywhere from age 8 via bicycle. No supervision, just be back for dinner. Worked out fine and there were no designated bicycle lanes.
I agree that the government shouldn't be meddling with this, I just don't agree that the prospect of ever switching to an electric car is "unimaginable".
Smart tips for writing the perfect blog post
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanty_town
This is a very philosophical / meta-physical discussion of quantum mechanics, and not in line with our modern understanding of the measurement process. For example, there really is no sudden wave function collapse in quantum mechanics, as every measurement process can be described as a purely quantum-mechanical process that produces an apparent "collapse" of a wave function through entanglement and decoherence. There's nothing magical or abrupt about it, today we can even perform quantum measurements that precisely control the amount of decoherence that is introduced to a system (see e.g. some of Irfan Siddiqi's seminal quantum feedback experements like https://www.nature.com/articles/nature11505, or the earlier work done in Serge Haroche's group). Taking aside the philosophical problems that people have with "pure" quantum mechanics (i.e. an interpretation that does away with the second postulate of wave function collapse) it perfectly describes our experimental results.

The largest problem with wave function collapse (which the author only briefly skims) is that you need a way to explain how it works: Basically when the wavefunction collapses we go from a fully reversible, deterministic quantum system to an irreversible, stochastic system. At which scale is this supposed to happen? Let's say one day we can build huge quantum computers (think billions or trillions of qubits) that we can perfectly control. We could then prepare a single qubit in a superposition state. We can entangle this qubit with the other qubits (the measurement system) and manipulate the state of the measurement system using a deterministic but highly chaotic control program. If we'd then measure the state of the single qubit (e.g. by preparing many identical systems and performing quantum state tomography) we'd find that the wave function has collapsed, i.e. there is no more coherence between the two qubit states. Now, after entangling the qubit and evolving the large system we could just reverse its deterministic evolution (as we have perfect control over it) and bring it back to the state it was in directly after entangling it with the qubit. If we then perform quantum state tomography of the qubit we should see that the coherence is back. Now, if we believe that wave function collapse is a phenomenon that occurs independently and not as an effect of the evolution of the large quantum system, we would expect to observe a loss of coherence in the qubit even after perfectly reversing the state of the large quantum system. The question is then of course: At which scale does this happen, and what is the physical theory that governs this behavior? Are one billion qubits enough to produce it? One quadrillion? To my knowledge, no one came up with even an idea of how to describe this. If someone finds a good theory for describing wave function collapse I'll consider it as valid theory, until then I'll stick with the "many worlds" interpretation, though I'd really prefer calling it "plain" quantum mechanics instead.
> Also why would people outside the US trust the legal protections afforded to a US company to protect US citizens?

Oh, hello there. The short answer is, of course we don't.

It's a very obvious attack surface that Signal and Whatsapp could avoid if they wanted to. For Whatsapp, being tied to Facebook, I kind of get why they don't (it's mainly that I don't expect them to be better).

But for Signal there aren't any good reasons. I've read various threads (on github and HN?) with Moxie being asked questions about this and I've not heard reasons that satisfied me. On occasion he was even evasive. Now, when the reasons given aren't good enough to explain why to take such a major security affecting decision when there is an obvious better alternative, and Signal seems to be very meticulous about doing the right thing in almost every other area of the protocol and systems around it, then there MUST be another motivation behind the decision that is not stated openly. Maybe it's just something benign left unsaid, who knows?

But even then, the only reasons I can imagine for choosing becoming this huge target, are reasons that are just good for Signal/Whispersystems but meaningless risk to its users.
The Haunting of Hill House – Tepedeki Ev 1. Sezon Izle Full HD (2018)
This can sometimes be worthwhile in a corporate environment even if technically it makes things harder, because it solves a major political / communication problem.

However, for the expense of dealing with the complications of an additional network boundary to worthwhile, some of the following must hold:

* You need architect who has an overview of the whole system creates abstractions that make sense and puts the API boundaries in the correct place, avoiding the "tightly coupled microservices" antipattern.

* You need good devops people who can track problems that span service boundaries. This is the one area where the company can't skimp (i.e. no outsourcing of this position). Without these people you get an epic political clusterfuck where everybody ends up blaming "the other" team for their problems.

* The two services need to be built by two teams which, for whatever reason, cannot be relied upon to communicate or work effectively with one
another (different orgs, different country, different company maybe).

* The two teams possibly use different programming languages.

I believe these reasons are probably the reason why it worked wonders for Martin Fowler. Then startups read his blog and decided that every team needed to build 15 microservices and the whole world went crazy (thanks Martin).
As far as I know (and I don't know much because I'm not a compiler guy) LLVM (and most compilers) doesn't keep everything in SSA form. Any value whole address has escaped (most of the things not in the C stack and evem some local variables as well) must treated as memory. I think that not automatic, not recently used variables would also be the values that would benefit the most from deferred loads. So IIRC Mill has hardware to help with aliasing but it wouldn't in fact plug out of the box in LLVM.

Do the Mill guys even have an LLVM backend yet? Or even any compiler at all?
I'm more measured on this.

The "plain English campaign" often boils down to dumbing down copy and removing all words that a 12 year old might not know.

There are many terms, especially legal terms, which have a precise meaning and which are used for a reason.

Teach vocabulary and good English in schools!
It's incorrect to imply that HPC filesystems generally can't specify data distribution or that it matters greatly on HPC network fabrics; there are publications demonstrating better performance on Hadoop benchamrks over them than HDFS. Also HPC filesystem installations routinely have millions and millions of files.
Having worked in a payments company, where SLAs can be very demanding,

We broke our monolith server into microservices, and realized that we broke in to too many pieces as our SLAs broke. (every microservice you add to your usecase adds a small but fixed cost)

and finally decided to convert some microservices into libraries to save milliseconds and bring down our 95th percentile, I completely agree with the premise of the article.

never start with microservice, start with monolith with enough flexibility and inbuilt abstractions which can allow you to replace an abstraction with a monolith.
It is easy for this problem: In doubt, the pedestrian wins.
Man, some reactions here...

I wouldn't recommend starting with VFIO by running macOS, there are enough hurdles without it. Start with Linux or Windows. And this guide is a bit outdated now anyway.
It looks like there is a hinged floor that folds down and is covered by a tarp. That should get to about 80"
Speaking about linguistic minorities, here in Southern Italy there are some small towns speaking ancient Albanian called "Arbëreshë" [1], they have even orthodox churches

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arb%C3%ABresh%C3%AB_people
Marimekko Chart
Indeed, and (as notacoward will know) the HPC filesystems OrangeFS/PVFS2, Lustre, BeeGFS, and GPFS all have -- or can have -- distributed metadata, and POSIX semantics (or POSIX modulo locking).
tbh if he had a viewpoint, good or bad, but wasn't significantly influential with it, does it matter?
Yes but can you do that from Julia without writing CUDA/OpenCL code?

I'm happy that Julia supports GPU programming for simple code, but I don't see how you can run algorithms with inter-thread communication.
TLDR: muh socialism
Questions from Gwern (in Response to Patrick Collison)
It occurred to me a couple years ago when designing my deployment architecture that the majority of the complexity was just this. Instead of letting linkers/module systems do the work, I was doing all that stuff first by hand and then basically writing my own form of linking logic to solve a problem we created ourselves. Reminded me of when I read about the old ways people used to link code by hand...

And yes we were definitely cargo-culting...microservices were totally unnecessary for us. The only positive result is that it forced clean boundaries, but those could just as well have been forced by thoughtful architectural design anyway.
My nephew was at one stage really into "The minions" movie. To be honest, I can quite enjoy movies like that myself (same for the other disney / pixar bunch).

The only downside was that he for some reason really liked it if I sat next to him watching it, but I don't have the ability to rewatch them countless times :P

Still, kids definitely get hooked on stuff and stick with it through countless repititions.
But isn't that what "introduce" is for?
But this merely a product of the choice of representation.

Here is a fully expanded representation: 1.

Of course my choice of base is a bit exotic, but the point is that no matter what, we're working on symbols. We're just used to seeing some as more direct analogues of numbers than others.
people jump into this because of shit processes like agile which push for incremental and iterative development processes instead of thinking things through properly. usully just to be able to have easy deliverables and easy reporting to upper management about the epic progress that is made. all the while product quality usually is degraded to a point where customers will start to feel it badly.
always the same dumb excuse is used that tech is changing so fast. but really, it's only changing so fast because people invent retarded processes which move too fast. you don't need to keep up with every innovation if you have a good quality product. you only need to keep up with this if you require all the latest buzzwords in your product because without them you are unable to sell your piece of junk. /endrant
Seems very similar to Scott Adams' Whenhub Interface.

http://blog.dilbert.com/2018/03/26/say-hello-to-the-whenhub-...
Self-awareness leading to cognitive dissonance
Not really. I'm as "off" as an INTP is off in the world at large. I was generally seen as nice. Though some would say/imply I wasn't, it was consistently shown to be done as part of an attempt to use/screw me. Maybe my tendency toward being introverted/quiet bothered some people (in the world at large).

My use of the term Targeted Individual was more literal (another reason most would say Paranoid Schizophrenia): https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=targeted%20i....
Don't get me wrong; this man's a U.S. national treasure. But when I come to Hacker News, I expect to see hacker news. The mods really need to start clamping down on this stuff. I can go to reddit or nearly any other site on the internet to have learned about this. What does this even have to do with startups?
3factor apps: a pattern for fast iteration, resilience and high scalability
Actually with the physical objects you could use one to occlude the other and test for light passage
IMHO, the monoliths vs microservices debate is akin to monorepos vs multi-repos: they are both strategies used to share work when your organization grows. Both can work well, depending on your tooling and organization.

But do not forget that those abstractions layers you add, while very useful (say, for release velocity), might also be a direct application of Conway's Law:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law

Which means that refactoring some code, might sometime require refactoring your organization, so if you lack the ability to do that incrementally, you might converge to an ossified system that stops evolving.
Thanks for mentioning it here. I would have wasted a lot of time wondering why these designs didnt work as expected.
Data flow. Closely related to functional programming, and also relational algebra. Different variants, whether reactive, push vs pull, streaming vs batch, restartable, etc.
Try making a paper airplane with Galactica’s octagonal sheets of paper!
Psst...put it in your password manager.
These MPs have made their proposal for a way to improve and optimize: use zero-emissions cars instead of petrol/diesel.

CalRobert has made their proposal: the same, but also reduce the number of car trips by improving cycling infrastructure.

Neither proposal is absolute, though they exist: ban all [private] cars [from cities].

What's yours?
As always, kudos to Canonical to deliver one of the most mature distribution.

But. 2018. And still no fractional scaling. This drives me mad. (changing the text scaling is not a solution).

Ok, there was Mir, Wayland is late (again)... how can this problem not be solved in 10 years? (genuine question)
Ask HN: How to report Google Local Guide who is randomly down rating for points?
This guy: https://www.google.com/maps/contrib/107035689799550788450/reviews/@26.9872123,70.0936697,6z/data=!4m3!8m2!3m1!1e1?fbclid=IwAR1v2yP8K1SWShFu2oYjCw5Dxd3ZTeD5LnLacoUY9Zc0QL_eD2wQA9i9qmk
Just randomly rating hell no of places to gain points.

I couldn't find any proper way to report his profile.

You can see he has rated so many places in few mins.

One place is almost too far from other. So chances are high he hasn't visited any. Still, Google is accepting this reviews.

He has even rated my business. We are a development company and never served anyone named "Rashmin". It doesn't affect as much but just curious how to report such spammers?
I'm amazed at Canonical policy of releasing new versions with these kind of bugs open https://wiki.ubuntu.com/CosmicCuttlefish/ReleaseNotes#Known_...

Anyone care to recommend a distro which has better policy on quality? (for desktop usage)
> a large part of the CL community treats the spec a bit like a sacred text

That's not my experience. I'd say that people know what the CL spec currently is, love its stability, and might fear what it could become after an "upgrade".

Anybody can write something like CL21, for example, with one's own style and notations. That's why it is frowned upon to do so and to claim that "this" library is how "the" new Lisp should be. Part of growing in Lisp (and programming) is to learn how to work with a language, not against it, and avoid fixing what is not broken.

However, I trust Common Lisp compiler developers and vendors to know how to make backward-compatible, useful changes: current common lisp environments have way more facilities and building blocks than the bare minimum required.
They also know the pain points that currently exist in the standard in a way that goes beyond aesthetic things.
Sleep over and party with the other tourists at the Fisherman's Wharf hostel; Wake up to the a calm, detached serenity within the city that gives the Marina district's urbsn calm refuge a run for it's money. Meet a stunning New Yorker. Sweep her off her feet, literally, and swaddle her to place of, more, our own. Watch her later disappear, her a sugar cube, into your teacup; meet another from Texas whose taken to your dumb, musical pining, there in the dining hall. Carry her too. Scale an apartment building to watch the stars and muse on how, maybe she should switch majors to math, maybe. These stars, never a spectacle for a Texan, but here lending to me a perfectly stunning, halcyon glow over the whole situation, after all this time royally without romance, a cliffside's breeze before a warm washing Pacific sunset. All at the Fisherman's Wharf hostel...
If it takes you 30 minutes to answer, of course I'll do something else. Which is good, because I don't want you to rush the answer and you don't want me to waste 30 minutes while you think of a good answer.

You probably talk a lot, I write a lot. So we are good at different things.

Talking / writing has nothing to do with anonymity, you can talk for two hours and I would still don't know who you are.
>It’s a mistake, and will set you back to think of politics as a zero-sum game.

It's a mistake to think that it's not a zero sum game.

If there are 5 people and one available spot for promotion, you can get selected by bolstering your appearance or by tearing the other 4 down. Either one works.

And yeah, the best tactic is usually "make my boss look good".
Not really, the machine can be built to exclude all sorts of probabilistic results to any given redundancy level. Probabilistic algorithms still work on Turing machines.

What a standard Turing machine cannot do is entangle and superpose states. (It can only simulate it at high and variable cost.)

Remember that a Turing machine is an abstract thing. Building an ideal one is not possible. You can try though.
Nix does everything I want, but I find it hard to convince friends and coworkers to try out Nix. I think this is partly due to Nix itself not belonging to the Python's ecosystem, so the barrier is higher than say, "Yeah, Pipenv is just Virtualenv+Pip"
> Other direct matches and similarities: Fazer - To do (Portuguese), lavorare - to work (Italian), djente - people (Brazilian Portuguese pronunciation of gente), pássaro - bird (Portuguese). Even the z in roza, for rose, is typical of Portuguese pronunciation.

More italian matches:

* fazer -> fare (which is irregular and declined like the verb was "facere")
* roza -> rosa (with a [z] sounding s)
* djente -> gente (with both dj and g sounding [dʒ])
It’s fair to point out that I was being hyperbolic.

Depending on exactly where we fall in the range of bad to catastrophic possible futures ahead of us, it may be hard to find too many people who would be more affected by giving up cars than climate change.

I am clearly not wishing a peasant lifestyle on the poor, that is a straw man. I am wishing working public transport on everyone.

Your final paragraph I absolutely agree with. I over-egged my comment for effect. The general lack of alarm and urgency surrounding climate change is frustrating.
Living in a town or city takes years of people's lives, both gradually as an effect of air pollution, or suddenly through a collision.

Public transport causes far less of both problems, and where problems remain (e.g. a town with old buses) they are much more easily solved (buy 200 electric buses).