skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
LightStep | Software Engineer
Location: San Francisco, REMOTE

https://lightstep.com/careers

LightStep makes complex software systems understandable, giving our customers confidence at scale. We collect, store, and query complex performance data so our customers can get insight from it. We're a 60-person company, growing quickly, and looking for hungry & humble engineers to build great software.
Geez, that poem really hits me in the gut.
I speculate you could specialize in "heirloom" grains and charge a premium... maybe that's one way around it?
Will anything be done about this problem? https://github.com/mpv-player/mpv/commit/1e70e82baa9193f6f02...
“News” doesn’t derive from the compass directions; that’s a folk etymology. It’s literally just from a weird pluralization of “new”.

Anytime you hear that a word is derived from an unusual contraction or acronym, please check it against a real etymology source.
Personally, I'd much rather see a "pay what you want" (even with a minimum of a couple bucks) type of system rather than compulsory email newsletters [0].

You can still have the newsletter of course (and even give away copies for signing up). Just please don't have it as the ONLY way to get the full book :)

[0]: Of course I'm aware of mailinator, but why waste both our time, in that case?
Call me cynical but most of the populous has an amazing ability to turn a blind eye when they’re benefiting from it in some way.
Ok, so that's tighter than what I said, but my point still stands.
From your experiences is there any downside or drawbacks with switching? I've been considering it, particularly as Lastpass's Firefox app has been flakey and unreliable.

In general Lastpass has become less reliable since the LogMeIn take-over, and they've now added ads to the vault which bug me from a security perspective (even if I happily pay $2/month, it is the principle of putting profits over security).
Once upon a time newspapers were trying to sell you more newspapers by being a good source of news and journalism, generally.

TV news used to be a loss leader until the past 20 years or so. You could see essentially the same news regardless of what channel you preferred. Now the world looks completely different depending on what source you consume.

It's a relatively recent phenomenon that news has been corrupted by advertising, clickbait and catering to specific audiences as they fight for smaller and smaller pieces of the pie.
That is a good point, the commonality I was going for was authoritarian leadership. Between Hitler and Mussolini who were fascists, and Mao and Stalin were communists you do cover the political spectrum from one end to the other.
They probably don't want to because then they'd have to specify how they would interact with the setjmp/longjmp functions (which are, in fact, specified as part of the ISO C standard, section 7.13 in C11).
Why do people tweet for free? One reason is, because people love sharing their opinions with other people. A survey is one way of sharing our opinions.
That is completely the opposite of what happened with taxes. The complexity was such a problem that the law was changed so that as many people as possible would take the standard deduction, i.e. the tax law basically exempted small players from the complex rules.

And even then the tax complexity still disadvantages small players because their larger competitors have the resources to use the complexity to their advantage and end up paying less tax.
Its interesting that many people here don't seem to know that in most of the world WhatsApp is already the go-to business messaging platform and a large portion of its user base subscribes to business services via WhatsApp. Organic promotion groups, local business contacts, and messaging lists have existed in India and other regions for a long time now. Its interesting to me that it seems that in the EU/US users generally so shocked by this.
The tools team is still working on go/packages. It is bound to get better.

Given that modules support is still officially experimental, there are bound to be rough edges. But by 1.12, I think we will have a solid modules story.
Unfortunately 'lot' does not have any definitive size. I'd imagine just considering how people think here, that there would not be more than 2-3% people who'd pay 25% more for a gadget because of ethical concerns.
Behind a paywall so I didn't get details, but shouldn't this be an automated system of getting data from AirBnb and sending out fines if total rented out period exceeds a predefined limit? What did the raid achieve?
> At what point do you consider a chip a 'computer'?

IANACS, but I'd say the point at which it becomes capable of running Turing-complete languages. This probably covers anything that has a firmware, save maybe if there exist firmwares programmed in limited languages that can't execute arbitrary computation.
For what its worth, while emotionally charged, I have found this conversation to be pretty helpful, both in organizing my thoughts on the topics and understanding how people hear those thoughts.
I think scientists know too little about the gut microbiota. There could be a million things disturbing it.

I heard the main difficulty is being able to do experiments, and it might be too difficult to reproduce the conditions to observe it.
And Hollywood as well.
Well, when I was in college, I did a few internships and stuff, probably drank some of the kool-aid dished out at the time and genuinely swallowed some of the "we care for you, and really want you to excel here and make a difference in the world" type of stuff. I really did care for the companies I initially worked at and believed in the work I did.

A few years down the line and a few job changes later, I've come to the realization that broadly they are similar in what they do, the way they treat people. It's just different shades of politics, infighting, employee indifference, and perks and benefits. I don't expect anyone from corporate to have my back no matter how good the work is and how much effort I put in.

Maybe it's just my jaded inner self-talking. Christ, I am not that old, only just mid-30s and the way I am writing makes me sound like a grizzly 60 yr old! Now, get off my keyboard!
It’s a great story. Congrats to Qualtrics!
Estigator
There is an issue of semantics and nomenclature here. Essentially, the basic point is:

Journalism and advertising are both products (distinct as they are) being sold thru the same media, e.g. a newspaper or a 30-minute cable TV timeslot.
To be heard.
In my experience, many high-scale MySQL configurations use a global max_connections in the single-digit thousands (4000-5000 is common at social networks doing high-volume OLTP), and an aggressive wait_timeout (~10 seconds) to kill idle conns from misbehaving/stalled clients.

I've never seen a max_connections configured anywhere near 100k. That would be an extreme edge-case, and is generally unwise unless there's some very specific unusual reason that you need that. My assumption would be something is very wrong at the application architecture level if this is needed.

What "scan of all connected sessions" are you referring to? I've never heard anything about this, and never seen general performance issues purely related to high idle connection count, but I've also never configured max_connections to such an insanely high value.

As for other databases, I don't see how Postgres would be able to handle 100k connections (without a proxy) either, given that means 100k OS processes in Postgres.

> always make a new session for each transaction, which will lead to huge other set of performance issues because establishing new sessions is pretty expensive

Fire-and-forget (connection per web request) is somewhat common in MySQL, especially with languages like PHP. Establishing a connection is relatively low overhead on the server side in MySQL, since it just involves spawning a thread. Usually the bigger issue is network latency, especially if cross-region SSL connections are involved. In this case, a client-side connection pool or proxy certainly makes sense, and that is true regardless of what DB technology is used.

It sounds like you have a lot of application servers maintaining connection pools to a single database. In this case it is generally beneficial to tune the connection pools to aggressively prune idle connections, or use proxies that multiplex connections (ProxySQL is great), and then set max_connections to a more sane value as a circuit-breaker.
The problem is not that we're not willing to tolerate latency. The problem is that the model of how neural networks are trained is completely different from how humans learn to see. When a neural net is trained, it is shown a static image, weights are tweaked until the output is correct, and then it is shown a completely different static image and the process is repeated. Neural net learning is iterative, discrete, and supervised. Human visual learning, by contrast, is continuous and largely unsupervised. We don't see snapshots, we see continuously varying images. Furthermore, we actively interact with the world by manipulating objects and shifting our gaze, and that information is also incorporated into our visual learning. Finally, humans have very advanced feature detectors built in to our brains by evolution. We don't learn to see cats, we have cat-detectors built in to our brains by our DNA, which learned to detect cats because that was a useful skill in our ancestral environment, when cats were a lot bigger and could eat us. We do learn that the thing that our cat-detectors detect is called a "cat", but we don't "learn" what a cat (or a human) looks like. That's built in to our brain wiring. (There are some things that we do learn what they look like, like cars, which obviously didn't exist in the ancestral environment. That's why all humans can tell the difference between a cat and a dog, but not everyone can identify whether something is a Honda or a Toyota.)

The point is: the process that humans go through when they learn is completely different than the process that contemporary neural nets go through. No one has yet come up with a theory that combines all of the features of human learning into an implementable algorithm. It will surely happen eventually, but there are at least a few more conceptual breakthroughs that will need to happen. Minor tweaks to back-propagation won't do it.
Thank you, I'm not at risk but maybe others are.
> Once we find ways to travel to other stars, we'll need these men to explore once again.

You'd want an entirely different sort of person if the idea is to travel interstellar distances inside an asteroid, like	slfnflctd suggested below.
Would the Foxconn worker fare better in this scenario? How?
Can't speak for the downvoters, but the omission of Eich is kind of a trivial point to nitpick on. At this point I've probably read the 'Brendan Eich created Javascript in 10 days' story 50 times—and even heard it once from the man himself. I would be perfectly fine if Javascript books from here on out saved a few pages worth of dead trees and simply said "For more info on Javascript's creation, visit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JavaScript"
This reads like a problem with the POSIX libraries and not with the C language itself, so it‘s probably not up to the language to fix it.

C actually comes pre-equipped in a pretty nice position with its default 8 bit char data type (which is perfect for UTF-8).

The POSIX standard however, I agree is in serious need of an overhaul for locale features and you‘re probably better off ignoring it completely and just going ICU these days anyways - though then you have to go the extra length to still use the OS provided means (LC_* env under Unix) to get to the user‘s preferred locale.

But once you have that, yeah, ICU is probably the way to go for actual string formatting.
Maybe slave labor was hyperbole, I meant the dreadful conditions allowed to fester due to the lack of the concept of human rights in China.
No, Soviet Moon project had a list of successes and firsts and I would estimate was about 80% complete when it was closed. You don't launch a 100+ meter high rocket four times in 1970s, with the fourth time up until to thrust terminating sequence of the first stage, and call it a few spectacular explosions. The list of spinoffs is too numerous to list - Block D derivatives still fly, NK-33s still fly, Proton... Soyuz spacecraft... and it would be hard for one person with level of distrust which Germans had in post-war USSR to affect such a program to a scale of singular importance. Von Ardenne left USSR for East Germany in 1954 when works on - hugely successful - R-7 didn't even start, and Soviet Moon project was closed in 1974 - there definitely was some time to move development ahead.
I wonder how many subsistence farmers committed suicide.
Yes I agree, the big tech companies in the West are entirely complicit.
Took a few Google search iterations but I found this: https://hg.mozilla.org/users/tmielczarek_mozilla.com/gecko-i...

That's neat. Looks like the last commit was in 2015.

Is there any backstory to this project? Was it just research? Is it abandoned?
Doesn't signal require Google play services to work? That's a deal breaker for me.
Finland's GPS disrupted during NATO war games; Russia suspected
I use Keepass2, with my password database stored on a cloud server, accessible by SFTP - both the Windows client (with an extension) and Keepass2android support SFTP. Keepass2android syncs automatically when you start it, and it's just 2 clicks from the Windows client.

I've been using this setup for years, and it works well for me. Now I think about it, the only minor pain point is not syncing over some kind of HTTPS mechanism (for getting through corporate proxies).
That’s only because they’re not considered to be a real lie detector in that context.
amasad, I enjoyed the perspective of your article. I agree an engineer with many years of experience is going to have different expectations to someone who is entering the profession today. I think it's similar to my perspective on the iPad – I find it interesting but limited because my experience and mental model of computing is very different to someone who is growing up with an iPad in hand.

I work on the Web IDE at GitLab (among other things) which we built after we noticed that there were a few situations in our day to day work on GitLab where we didn't need a full local development environment, like updating documentation or addressing simple review comments. It doesn't replace a local IDE from me yet, but it is helpful and we hope we can make it more useful in more situations where local IDEs have shortcomings. I think the effort and maintenance of a local development environment is also a cost that is frequently overlooked – reinstalling dependencies is a headache that disappears in an automated ephemeral environment like repl.it or where we're heading at GitLab.

But that seems like it's just an iteration on the status quo rather than leap frogging to a post-IDE world. I think the idea of online interactive development can go so much further. Maybe we can integrate interactive editors/terminals/previews with our planning and code review tools so that experimentation and exploration are easier and happen in line in the discussions we have planning the next feature to build. I put a few dot points down on this line of thinking last week https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/epics/533 but I'd be interested to hear some of your more concrete ideas of what a post-IDE world might look like.
Presumably just the distinction between the rest of your body being upright and still, but your hands moving very quickly (like something flying) as you solder or screw or assemble.

It occurs to me that there's another sense in which the movement is like an animal in flight, in that pausing the movement to take a break is often not an option.
I'm building something similar but for litter collection.

In order to make the system mobile I'm making a sort of tiny tractor that relocates the bases of the support struts (I use a tripod.) You can have separate symbiotic fleets of static "heads" (tripod+wirebot) that are moved by mobile "rovers".

This lets you optimize the system a little better, since most of the time the head units will be working and largely stationary, so a small fleet of rovers could be enough to handle a large fleet of processors.

For ricefields I think you might sink stepping stones in a triangle "grid", maybe concrete cones about a meter long and 10cm at the base, inverted and stuck in the mud. The distance between them would be fixed by the span of the suspended robot.

You would also want "vascular" conduits to transport material to and from the working heads. These aren't necessarily physical tubes or conveyor belts, they could be made of simple cargo drones like streams of ants.

You could make bridge or rail units that fit between the stepping stones for temporary reconfigurable transport networks. (If your cargo drones are sure-footed and reliable these could be simple planks.)

Also, have you heard of Hangprinter? https://vitana.se/opr3d/tbear/ (I have no affiliation w/ it.) It's a "RepRap hanging from the ceiling"
Vast majority of projects will not reach two billion row tables(ID>0), but it should be something considered when planning, and regularly revisited in the future. BIGINT from the start uses twice as much space, if it's not needed, it's just a waste. You have to think about memory, indexing, scans in the future. Hundreds of millions of rows x 4 more bytes, is A LOT.
Even the very best reproductions are not at all the same as seeing the actual work. Having high quality reproductions means I can see a decent approximation of something it would be difficult/expensive for me to go see, but doesn't replicate the experience.

I suspect the role of galleries remains largely unchanged - curation and context will always be relevant. I do think you are on to something with the issue of smaller markets: how do you convince people to come in person, and can you do it at a price point that will attract them?

I recently compared (Canadian, as it happens) ticket and membership costs for galleries in a an approximately 500k market and a > 5million market. Although the individual costs were about the same, the entire physical size of the small market one was far less that one tenth the larger one. Regardless of the collection size, this is pretty limiting. Some of the fixed costs don't scale well, and I do think this makes things more difficult in smaller markets, particularly if you are trying to draw people from outside your core market.

As more and more high quality reproductions from big markets become available, has your board discussed the possibility of curated display/discussion of collections of these? Particularly if you could have the use of a first rate projection system?
I second questions about whether you were looking for another job. Judging by your blog, you're a pretty smart person, and you seem to have enough knowledge to at least land an entry-level programming job. Have you tried? If not, what prevents you?
> Wasn't Horn's trip last year the first unsupported crossing of Antarctica?

It may depend on the specific definitions ("unsupported" vs "solo unsupported"), but the first unsupported crossing I'm aware of was that by Ranulph Fiennes and Mike Stroud in the Antarctic summer of 1992/1993. It was documented in two books, "Mind Over Matter"[0] by Finnes and "Shadows on the the Wasteland"[1] by Stroud. Both were very entertaining and interesting reads.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Mind-over-Matter-Ranulph-Fiennes/dp/0...

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Shadows-Wasteland-Crossing-Antarctica...
Why, do you work on TMW?

Like I said, it was years ago. If I still have the patch, it's got to be on one of these spinning rust disks sitting in my closet. I'm on a trip so I really can't look for it now.

Assuming the client is still buggy (things like SDL2 have happened so who knows?), I'd probably look here first:

https://gitlab.com/manaplus/manaplus/blob/485e9bb12bf5dda318...

The logic won't run right if the timer is implemented with a sleep that ends up sleeping much longer than intended. If it works like it did back then (sleep is virtually always 20ms), simply incrementing the tick count by two every time should be enough to make it smooth on OpenBSD. Of course the correct fix is to keep track of actual time spent and adjust ticks accordingly. Or use a timer mechanism that has higher precision. IIRC setitimer[1] can get you a regular 100Hz alarm on OpenBSD.

http://man.openbsd.org/setitimer.2

If I'm not entirely mistaken, the old userspace implementation of pthreads worked with a 100Hz timer using this mechanism.
China is definitely extreme but you don't have to go too far to see overworked people, it's much more common in the US than people realize. Everyone is overworked. I think that Starbucks got popular partially due to this.
FYI to the author, Privacy Badger hides the signup elements on the page because it’s served from a third party marketing CDN.
Related question: do you charge by the hour? If so, what's your hourly rate and what software do you use to track your time?
why would you want to democratise a process that benefits highly from expert knowledge? The last thing the world needs is Jake Paul directing archaeologists to dig in the middle of a desert that was never inhabited.
duplicate (this article even links to that discussion): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18425643
I used derivatives in the regex implementation in TXR. The derivative back-end is only used for regexes that contain the "exotic" intersection and complement operators. (Or the non-greedy repetition which transforms to intersection and complement at the AST level).

http://www.kylheku.com/cgit/txr/tree/regex.c

The derivatives implementation starts with the appearance of the function reg_expand_nongreedy.

Wow, I see that in reg_derivative where it handles compound forms, I'm testing for some vanishingly improbable internal-error cases upfront: presence of uncompiled character classes. Fixed that.
A Raspberry Pi Zero is $5, runs ARM, has tonnes of community support, and is available to ship outside of china. If you look at taobao/aliexpress/ebay, there are also hundreds of RPI clones and ARM development boards and even FPGA boards < $10. What makes this interesting?
This is a very difficult topic to address well, in a way that's not so soaked in zeitgeist that it would be nonsensical if read in 30 years.

I think a big part of the problem is the key terms. Democracy, liberty, equality. These are undefined.

They may sound simple and self evident, but the way we use them is as rich and subtle abstractions, bundles of associations with all sort of philosophical positions and institutions.

Remember that the liberals who invented the term as we now use it... some of them were slavers. How is this consistent with liberty? Somehow it was, to them.

Anyway... I think Harari is mostly addressing what he sees as the employment consequences of current technology. He buys the techno-unemployment argument, and the argument goes from here.

I don't think it's fair to accuse Harari of lacking historical perspective. He's a great teacher of historical perspective. He's responsible for a lot of my historical perspective, personally.

I disagree with a lot of this essay. The point about propoganda posters is a solid one though.
I take your point, but a higher standard of living that has increased suicide rates? If we think about the results of those products, as the consumer isn't going to be buying directly from Foxconn but integrated into something from Apple or the like, then is that a 'fair' distribution of wealth made from the final product. It's a tricky one, for sure
Kill Your Personas
Lie Detector Brain Scans Could Be the Future of Murder Trials
Most are lying if they say they care about the location of the slave. Saudi Arabia recently eliminated slavery in 1965. Now they contract and imprison Indians, and packis to build their glass towers in Dubai and Abu Dhabi.

Few care about anything other than having what they want now and looking good for other people.

...PATHETIC