skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> To start with, it’s not as though client de­vel­op­ers can com­pose ar­bi­trary queries, lim­it­ed on­ly by the se­man­tics of GraphQL, and ex­pect to get uni­form­ly de­cent per­for­mance. (To be fair, the same is true of SQL.)

Maybe I'm missing something, but isn't that exactly what you can expect from a GraphQL API as a sweet spot between SQL and REST? Semantics of GraphQL enable a schema-dependent set of queries, not arbitrary queries.

> Any­how, I see GraphQL as a con­ve­nience fea­ture de­signed to make syn­chronous APIs run more ef­fi­cient­ly.

For asynchronicity, GraphQL has subscriptions.

That being said, I agree GraphQL (of today at least) won't be a solution to every problem and I bet transports such as HTTP/2 and HTTP/3 will cause new things to be built which don't look like just a faster REST, GraphQL or MQTT. I would mention event sourcing and persistent logs in addition to just stream/queue processing.

Tooling (like API management gateways and API consoles) is not still all there for GraphQL and MQTT either.
The it crowd is one of my absolute favorite shows. Maybe it will work better without a laugh track but there are a lot of British shows id rather have with a track than without the show in my life.
More like 12-18% with booking.com.
How do you manage time to work on side projects?
How do someone manage time to work on your side projects with a full time job and family?
>Forget ever using electrical element heating, which is 100% efficient from a thermodynamics perspective, but uses a ridiculous amount of kWh per heating unit.

Insulate to passive house standard and old lightbulbs throw enough heat - https://www.nypassivehouse.org/how-three-light-bulbs-help-ke...
Appeal to masculinity. "Real men" maximize horsepower, and coal rolling reduces horsepower.
Olive trees are planted decoratively and for crops here, but they're messy trees to have in city neighborhoods.
Partly true: Seinfeld used a laugh track, and also a real audience for stuff like scenes in Jerry's apartment.

https://www.quora.com/Did-Seinfeld-use-a-laugh-track-a-live-...
You are getting a barrage of comments telling you that you are the problem, so let me just say I completely agree with you.

I have multiple colleagues who just casually disappear from the office (sorry, "work from home") for days to weeks and it's beyond irritating and disruptive to the rest of us.
2018.47 Piensa en Perl 6 – Weekly changes in and around Perl 6
Thanks but contracting / doing projects with a friend is hardly "owning a successful business".

You wouldn't call $5/hour folks on upwork "business owners". We're basically doing the same thing, selling our time for money.
Wow, this is the 2nd time in two weeks that something has appeared on my probability homework and then made the front page of HN almost immediately.

Coincidence?

Who else is taking Stat 110?
?????????

You took a drug. Changed your mind. Stop taking it. Had adverse effects. And continued to not take it for 2 weeks of hell.

?????

Did you not talk to your doctor? Did you not consider tapering off slower? What the fuck were you thinking???

I know first hand that SSRI withdraw is hard. I tapered off of 150mg effexor. At times, I had to go down to 1/2 mg per day reduction to not get night terrors. That is taking out the little xr balls
in the capsule and cutting them apart.
Jonathan McIntosh sums it up as complicit geek masculinity and adorkable misogyny:

http://popculturedetective.agency/2017/complicit-geek-mascul...
http://popculturedetective.agency/2017/the-adorkable-misogyn...
having money (as you note, the family wealth came from kris jenner's husband) makes it easier to make more money, with no implications about the intelligence of the wealth holder.

take trump for example. nytimes detailed about $600+ million in wealth transfer to him from his dad. while we don't have tax returns or financial statements to confirm this, he's probably worth about a billion dollars now. that rate of return is (roughly) less than 2% yearly. he would have been way better off putting that money in an index fund--he'd be worth about $3 billion if he had.
+1 for a SQL layer/interface. Would massively increase utility of FDB.
>140k max with +10 years of C++ experience

Ouch, that feels very low to me. Granted, I'm in Boston, but you can get that at nearly any startup around here (I've both held those jobs and hired people for them). The bigger companies can then throw some real equity on top of that.
Obviously, the ones at the top have contributed a lot of appreciated content here.

Or maybe they just wrote a bot to submit articles 10 years ago and left it running.
We Will Make Christmas Great Again Trump
> And nobody internally enjoys doing a lot of coding interviews

That's true, I recently had an interview and the interviewer was on the phone all the time totally uninterested, barring the first 5 minutes. How do you account for that?

Everybody knows (and as stated in the article) the system can be gamed (by memorizing Leetcode solutions) and I choose not to. If you don't believe me have a look here:

https://www.1point3acres.com/bbs/thread-191077-1-1.html (translate it to English)

(there are a ton of interview experiences and detailed questions and strategies on this site)

There are people who are freaking memorizing behavioral questions!!
Surely, the FAANG companies are aware of this?

This what I see happening these days:
1. You have an interview candidate solving questions without memorization

2. You have an interview candidate solving questions with memorization

How are you distinguishing between the two and how do you prevent bias? Bias in all forms, not just the stereotype: white guy hiring another white guy.
Great way to summarize this experience - way too close to real in my experience. I finally got over this and just enjoyed the humorous aspects of the show. RIGBY...
I absolutely should be tested on when to use a dictionary vs an array vs a tree. But if finding the "acceptable" solution to a problem relies on remembering one particular algorithm from college that I've not had to use in a dozen years, as some LC problems do, then that's reducing a senior level dev interview down to a junior level dev interview. As it stands, all senior level devs have to do a month of Leet Code just to be competitive. The people down voting me can't honestly say they remember every single one of the algorithms that are popular on LC without studying. That's just not being honest.
I started using it around v0.3 and quite a bit has happened with aws-amplify since then. After migrating an IoT cloud from a competitor to AWS IoT, our team decided to leverage AWS Cognito (user identities) and Amplify really saved some time for us in this regard. User identities, JWTs and signing requests to lambda endpoint worked, for the most part. There are some struggles with ill-documented issues or just flat-out wrong Typescript definitions, but for the most part, I probably would have made the same decision again being that our platform is "all in" on AWS. I doubt I would use it if AWS Cognito was not in the mix.
Wired has a fun series where a professional watches scenes from a genre about their industry, then reviews their accuracy.

https://youtu.be/vGOL7ZvuGMc
Both those things may be regarded by many people as putting them out in front.
I am not outraged, I only know that people were sent to the tribunal for less. He did nothing when his superdeluxe algorithms helped genocide in Myanmar.
Show HN: Small Java String validation library
I've been working for a bit of time with both SparkJava and some custom command-line tools, and I wanted to have a simple but efficient validation library, so I decided to make one myself.

I just released the v0.2.0, with a concrete documentation, API documentation (Javadoc), and automated CI for tests.

Here's the link: https://gitlab.com/Artemix/validator

I'm open to any suggestion/recommendation that may help me develop this library even further.
I agree with a lot of what this guy says, but this bit rankled my nerves:

> In short, it doesn’t feel American. […] American is can-do, right-now, yes ma’am…

No dude, that is exactly the kind of polarizing attitude that you are accusing the folks on the other… "side of the fence" (or whatever you want to call that).

"American" is lots of things to lots of different people.
Potentially cool if you want to generate regular expressions dynamically at runtime
That wouldn't scale because of the range and topology of BLE. Solar-powered micropower 900 MHz modules with built-in microcontrollers would be a basis for a viable solution. 900 MHz carries much further for a given power and isn't as susceptible to attenuation due to foilage.

Source: did industrial 900 MHz and 2.4 GHz module testing, once upon a time.
Generally I always use Function() instead of eval, because Function doesn't capture the current scope (and also it won't interfere with JIT optimisation, and avoids possible memory bloat of variables in closure if you keep references to the functions).
One useful reason to use it over a terminal is portability. If you're happy mostly working in the terminal then tmux will be the same on every OS your work on even if your favourite terminal isn't available.
Yeah I don't understand what value this library provides. It's just additional indirection, not a proper abstraction any different than the regex APIs it's calling under the hood.
TBBT is not a "parody". It is your standard-issue broadcast network sitcom about 3 males, 3 females and their friendships as they date and break up with each other, marry each other and have kids. This is a successful premise that has stood for decades in American TV. Friends and How I Met Your Mother followed the same principles almost to a tee. That's how you get a show that runs for 10 seasons in this day and age.

Pointing out that TBBT's parody is poor is like saying Will & Grace did not portray a representative picture of gay urbanites.
If I had to guess, it's the "I'll figure it out" mentality. The problem here is, with C++, you probably will NOT figure it out!

I did the bare minimum C++ in my classes. I can write trivial little "code challenge" type things with it. (mostly imperative style, very basic OO) But, ask me anything about Templates, etc, and I'll quickly admit you've gone beyond my knowledge. I'm intrigued at the answer to this question though....
You're allowed to have human interaction outside your company, ya know? :/
OK, we've gone with “tissue implants” instead of “implanted organs”.
The linked article makes no claims about health outcomes - instead, the participants in that study reported feeling better, which contributes to the reported improvement in health-adjusted life years.

In fact, there was no difference in BMI reported between the standard condition and the intervention designed to decrease sitting time.

I don't know this literature much, but a separate analysis of the same study may show improved cardiometabolic risk profiles in workers who are encouraged to stand more often[1].

1. https://insights.ovid.com/crossref?an=00005768-201803000-000...
Reminds me of Steven Tyler reacting to Spinal Tap:

Tyler expounded on his reaction in a rare Library of Congress interview made public back in 2012. "That movie bummed me out," he said, "because I thought, 'How dare they? That's all real, and they're mocking it.'"

To be fair, Silicon Valley (the show) never interested me... kinda found it to be boring. But it _is_ hilarious when you run into these art imitates life imitates art things.
Wombat poop: Scientists have finally discovered why it's cubed
So, string concatination?
If you have a single CS bone in your body, you should be able to grok at least the basics of regex.

If you don't, then go back to designing* I guess, and ask for a programmers' help

* I only say this because I recently saw a tweet from a frontend designer person who said she thought regex was the worst technology ever invented and she absolutely hated it.

Disclaimer: For whatever reason, I'm a big fan. Concisely describe patterns in text and match on them? Plus the puzzle-fun of figuring out how to match on what you're looking for? Yes, please. (And yet, on certain programmer teams, I've had to scale back my regex usage because of you folks who refuse to just learn it, sigh)
Seems like a bad version check. I'm running latest Beta (Version 71.0.3578.53 (Official Build) beta (64-bit)) on macOS and seeing the same thing.
No need to adopt such a rude tone; be civil!
He is a Steve Ballmer sendup, but Gates and Ballmer worked closely for many years at Microsoft and had many fundamental disagreements about the direction the company should take. Ballmer refocused Microsoft from software to hardware when he became CEO (hence "The Box" joke on the show).

Ballmer himself probably doesn't like the caricature (he's a bit of an internet darling, isn't he? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I14b-C67EXY), but would someone who worked with Ballmer find it accurate? Likely.

Not to mention, Gates wrote the article about Silicon Valley linked in this thread.
That's a really excellent point. If there's any risk that an employee would leave to run after a cheap perk like a standing desk or a good chair, it's just bad management to not spend that money.
When I said "Bush-era", I was talking more of the national zeitgeist during Bush's presidency and not so much about how Bush himself was perceived.

The Bush era—or rather the core of the era, from about 2002 to 2007 (i.e. after the dust from 9/11 settled and before the housing crisis), was a boom time, and much of the future situation feels like it comes from "what if this boom lasts forever?" (i.e. society becomes wealthy enough to automate everything, so people just sit around and watch Ow My Balls and drink Brawndo every day instead of having to work). Something made nowadays would probably start with a premise that comes from "Millenials can't afford anything".

Mainstream culture during the Bush era was also before the sudden explosion in nerd culture. Superheroes hadn't eaten the entertainment industry yet, nostalgia wasn't yet a driving force in pop culture, and it was still uncool to admit that you enjoy RPGs or reading comic books or doing whatever else nerds do. A parody of modern cultural memes would resemble Ready Player One more than Idiocracy, and Ready Player One wasn't even intended as parody. Instead, Idiocracy spends a lot of time lampooning shock reality TV (e.g. Ow My Balls), which was a huge thing in the mid-00s with shows like Jackass and Fear Factor but isn't big anymore. And the general culture is different. Like, you had people saying things like "you talk faggy", which sadly was common in real life during the mid-00s, and as such it was a ripe target for parody, but would be completely taboo now. Even in bro-culture you wouldn't see that in 2018 (I mean, there's still a lot of homophobia around, but you don't see those slurs dropped casually anymore), and so a parody of modern bro-culture probably wouldn't even mention it. TBH, a parody of modern bro-culture would probably involve MRAs and redpillers and pseudo-intellectuals who worship Jordan Peterson.

Like, the _idea_ of a movie about the future being full of stupid people would still be relevant in 2018 (and you can thank Trump for that), but it wouldn't be Idiocracy because Idiocracy was more about parodying mid-00s pop culture than anything else. I'd imagine a late-10s Idiocracy would involve some combination of nerd culture turned mainstream eating the world, '90s nostalgia (with "only '90s kids remember" somehow being reiterated over and over 500 years in the future), avocado toast, and nobody being able to afford a house.
Did you watch the new season (2011)? It was pretty good.
FYI, TLA is a TLA for "Three Letter Acronym"
I remember this being talked about since before the fist FDB release. I think the only reason we don't have one yet is because SQL is not nearly as cool as everything else in Foundation. ;)
Ask HN: Doing remote work for a business in the UAE
I would appreciate any information one may have about financial trip-wires (taxes, tariffs, etc.)

Background: I've been developing a relationship with a company that is incorporated in the United Arab Emirates. The work will be technical writing for a short term contract, but my goal is to grow them into a regular client. They have an established history of working with companies in the UK and US, so I'm not too concerned about getting paid. I'm primarily concerned about the cost of doing business with the company.

I've researched tariffs and taxes, and so far have only found information about trading goods, not services.

I recently read a post here where someone was surprised by a tax situation after doing business in a state, and I'd like to avoid any surprises if possible.
Aside from the completely overused line "Hello IT, have you tried turning it off and turning it back on again?", the show has almost nothing to do with IT. Apart from a couple of IT-related plotlines, most of the episodes take place outside their office.
I have been frustrated by the lack of resources on how to estimate software tasks for the past 8 years and had essentially come to agree with micro2nd that estimation was impossible. I was, however, searching for some method which would turn it from [impossible task that I had no idea how to do or how to learn how to do or how to ask how to do] into merely difficult work.

However, this past summer, I got a new manager who has had a goal of introducing estimation into the team and I've been working with him. The biggest thing I've learned so far is that if you're estimating by asking "how long will this take?" then you're asking the wrong question. To estimate, ask instead "What are the mile-markers?"

The work of answering this is to go through the research process of determining what the task involves. This takes significant time and so it is still important to stand firm and resist the urge to give a number when someone asks you during a meeting if you haven't prepared. It also is still fallible and I'm honestly not all that practiced at it yet. However, at the end of it, you'll have mile-markers which provide the three pieces of real value from estimates:

1) A rough intuition for the level of complexity of the task.

2) An opportunity to notice when you can cut down the scope of something or when you should prepare for something by doing a small refactor.

3) A way to judge your velocity as you are doing the task.

The third one is particularly important and can make guessing a number an actually-somewhat-useful activity. Why? You can guess numbers for the individual mile-markers and then, if after a while of working notice you are falling behind or moving faster, you can communicate with stakeholders.

----

When I've asked for advice on estimation, I've often been told "just gut-check yourself and multiply by 3. The important thing is to communicate when you think you might not hit the estimate." But if right after producing a single number and saying it, the alarm starts blaring in your head saying "I'm not going to be able to make that estimate." well... you'd feel silly "It will take two weeks. Oh I think its going to take longer than two weeks." and so you never have a point where it makes sense to raise a flag. But if you have mile-markers and a regular habit of checking yourself against them, then there is a defined point where you can raise an alarm.
They did do an episode on the monocultural aspect in the latest season. Richard unintentionally "outs" a guy as being Christian and some of the programmers feel uncomfortable working with a Christian.

The guy later pulls Richard aside saying that he wasn't "openly Christian". The whole episode was hilarious.
Deep learning pioneer Yoshua Bengio is worried about AI’s future
A Guide to Statistics on Historical Trends in Income Inequality
That's the problem. What point is the author trying to make? It even says in the article that sitting all day is bad, and that standing desks can help people with neck and lower back problems. That's exactly the point why I have a standing desk. My back hurts from sitting at my computer all day, so alternating back and forth helps. Not being in pain is a significant health benefit to me. People who don't have pain, are proactively preventing back pain problems by using a standing desk.

The only point that I could get out of it, is that standing is not exercise. I don't know anybody who bought a standing desk thinking they are getting exercise...
It’s a step up from the No Planet scheme we had before.
I don't think anyone thinks the Kardashians are genuinely being themselves at this point.

I mean, the show is painfully obvious in being scripted. It's like the Truman Show sans Truman.
Yup, 2 WrestleMania events.
This type of concatenation I first saw in Alex Graves' work on "Generating Sequences With Recurrent Neural Networks", including his unpublished TTS demo [1]. Biasing with part of another sentence (as in handwriting) can possibly improve style in TTS as well.

We followed this approach in char2wav [2], but "voice cloning" has come much farther in my opinion [3][4][5]. There's a lot of relevant research on techniques for this beyond concatenating indicators or embeddings, if people are interested in the research side of this technology.

[0] https://arxiv.org/abs/1308.0850

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-yX1SYeDHbg&t=38m30s

[2] http://josesotelo.com/speechsynthesis/

[3] https://twitter.com/Jeanne_Heo/status/972089715225542657 (lyrebird.ai)

[4] https://google.github.io/tacotron/publications/gmvae_control...

[5] https://google.github.io/tacotron/publications/speaker_adapt...
Standing desks can be amazing for those of us who tend to sit like we're misbehaving second-graders. When I sit down, I rarely have 2 feet on the floor, I slouch not just forward but left or right, I spin in my chair... if there were a nun standing behind me, she'd whack me with a yardstick.

That makes sitting all day unhealthy for me. And I know a lot of people who fidget like this! When I stand, I actually have to align my body correctly so that I can, you know, stand up. My core does work, my legs do work, I'm not standing on one foot or slouching because that's harder when you're standing.

I could learn to have perfect posture, but I'm 43, it's not cheap to teach an old dog new tricks. A standing desk is a great investment for me.

On the other hand, my co-worker both has perfect posture at their desk and also has bad knees. A standing desk would be more problematic for them. A quality, expensive chair (almost as expensive as my standing desk!) is a great investment there.

As you say, why are we always looking for the one way to do things? Even if things are factual, there's no reason that the same experience is factually best for all people. Factually, a standing desk is great for me. Factually, it's not great for my co-worker.
I think in this case it was probably more about funding opportunities.
> It's about the interests of this or that group (e.g. given population vs people coming from outside). Arguments can be made for either, but if a given population is not protected, then those coming from outside wont be protected (from people coming from outside later on) either.

> People build cities to be protected and prosper long time in them, not to give opportunities to third parties to come and displace them from the places they've built and helped grow.

Well you're basically repeating Donald Trump's words when he explains why he wants to build a wall, and last time I have checked nobody calls him progressive.

Just do s/cities/countries/ and you're all set.
My favorite Silicon Valley anecdote:

"During the review process once the footage [of Techcrunch Disrupt] was woven in, another editor criticized the crowd shots for not featuring any women and blamed Berg for the oversight.

'...Those were real shots of the real place, and we didn't frame women out.The world we're depicting is f---ed up.' said Berg"

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.businessinsider.com/hbos-si...

Sorry for the amp link, the main page was broken.