skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Iota is unusable from (almost) the very first day it got out, they are just scheduling and rescheduling the removal of central coordinators, making that in no way different from a central authority authorizing payment, they cashed and they disappeared basically

Stellar is trying to achieve a completely different goal than exchanging stellars coins.

Almost no one of those crypto could achieve even half of the current daily transaction processed by CC, and the proof they are using is in no way as safe as proof of work, even if more efficient. Why would people adopt them? There's no advantages, fees would be similar probably
I think I prefer the RESTful API idea more than anything because it could keep the architecture decoupled. The only thing that worries me is having issues installing this to client desktops. A lot of our clients are banks and insurance companies so I wouldn't want to create issues with our installation and get things blocked by client IT.
I think the issue was more that the plaintiff claimed a copyright on each page but the defendant had copied the photographs and descriptions. Having only read this one decision it sounds like the Judge had dismissed the case once without prejudice to allow the plaintiff to restate their claim to include copyright violations for the specific material that was copied (the photographs and descriptions) but the plaintiff failed to do so. The opinion then says that a photograph merely appearing on a site doesn't mean the website claims ownership of the photo. Since the plaintiff made no claims of ownership over the copied material they can't sustain a claim of copyright infringement.
The "Weissman score" is an actual metric for compression algorithms that was invented for the show: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weissman_score
The reason it is a nonconstructive attitude is that saying "4 hours" or "2 weeks" is not a direct and honest expression of what you'd mean by saying it. The honest and communicative thing to say is something like:

"""
I do not know how to develop a meaningfully accurate number of days or hours that this will take. The software industry as a whole has not developed reliable best practices for estimating software tasks or for teaching those practices to other software engineers. As such, it would be deceptive and unprofessional for me to give you a number.
"""

To really communicate this effectively, you have to say it with confidence: standing up straight, shoulders back, making eye contact. It is uncomfortable and the sort of thing that makes me feel a bit nauseous to say, but as a professional, it is important to be honest even in the face of discomfort. To this opener, I would personally add to this statement either

"However, if you are looking to get a rough assessment of the size or complexity involved, this is the sort of task that I can take 2 hours and produce a breakdown of the components of this."

or

"I sense that what you'd really like is a judgement of how large or complex this task is. However, at this stage, the task is not well-scoped enough for me to do that. I would need to invest effort into fleshing that out. If you'd like I can timebox one (or two) days to investigate and report back with what I discover are the major components to this and whether there are likely to be more unknown components."

or

"In particular, this is the sort of task where the work to discover the problem and the correct approach to solve it is 90% of the battle. There unfortunately isn't a way to break that down ahead of time."

Depending on whether it seemed like a task similar to one that I'd done before or not--or whether it was a bug-hunt.
For example, the phrase "Don't Mess with Texas" originated from a 1985 anti-littering marketing campaign:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_Mess_with_Texas

> In 1985 the Texas Department of Transportation asked Mike Blair and Tim McClure of GSD&M to create a slogan for an anti-littering campaign. McClure said that "bubbas in pickup trucks" who regularly littered beer cans and other items out of vehicle windows and ordinary Texans who believed that littering was a "God-given right" were targets of the advertising campaign. ... McClure recalled that "The crowd was sprinkled with 'Keep America Beautiful' and 'Keep Texas Beautiful' folks, and our audience is 18-to-24 young males." McClure added that "The 'Keep Texas Beautiful' lady said, 'Can we at least say please?' I said, 'No ma'am, you cannot use the line if you put please in front of it.'
Thanks, that was a dumb mistake on my part... And a mistake I wouldn’t make if I could rely on a third party to build and run a datacenter for me. I’m not interested in building a datacenter.
A collection of command line tools is something we tried years ago and didnt work very well unfortunatelly. Tempted to go down the REST server route.
> It's fundamentally _odd_ to me that people are looking at rental costs.

The median housing price in SF is $1.6M. There is no choice but to rent, or perhaps suffer an absolutely terrible commute.

(And since someone inevitably quips that the entire Bay Area makes $300k+: the $125k in the article is a bit low; the median tech salary is ~$135k. Some lucky souls pulling down massive stock benefits at a FAANG might be making enough total, but those of us not at a FAANG are not so lucky.)
I translated some well-regarded public domain works into English. I make around 2-3k a month from the ebook sales. If you find niche areas of interest or research it can be quite lucrative. Of course you invest the time to translate but I find it rewarding and less like actual "work"
> Somebody gets an idea almost right, but not quite, and their business fails; then someone else does it just a little bit better and they are viewed as a genius for the rest of their life.

I'm still thinking about this comment about Fieldbook shutting down [1], and the "What Happened at Fieldbook" [2] article:

> In contrast, our closest competitor, Airtable, seems to be getting more traction.

Was really sad to read that.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18461395

[2] https://medium.com/the-fieldbook-blog/what-happened-at-field...
Only voice works just fine and has worked for me for 8 years now.
Revisiting the West's view of China internet censorship
I don't think that it's sitting that kills. I think it's more the fact that you are less active. You can have the same problem standing all day without moving around.
Did somebody barf brain damage on a screen and hit 'publish!' ?
It's startWith not startsWith. I read it wrong myself too.
I'm consistently amazed at how doctors aren't required - at least in Australia - to talk about side effects or withdrawal symptoms when prescribing medication. I'm capable of googling things, but it shocks me how none of this has ever been discussed with me when getting medication. Pharmacists will ask you questions to determine any contraindications, but I've never been spoken to about withdrawal or side effects. Half the time people find out about them by experiencing them.
Unibone – Unibus Emulation on a Beagle Bone Black
Here it is:

http://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/energy/environment/a-blas...
I do not see why it has to ever be an all or nothing when it comes to desks. At work, we have adjustable desks, which can electronically be adjusted to sitting or standing positions.

I alternate between sitting and standing every hour or so, combined with small walks around office between shifting positions (say to the cafeteria or washroom or the game room). When I get off my desk, I make it a point to focus on some point far away to ensure my eyes get a break from simply staring at a screen 2 feet away from me.

Combining this along with ensuring I consume enough water through the course of the day (in AC environments, a very common cause of headaches/neckaches is simply dehydration) means I can ensure that I get to operate productively through the day.

Don't see why people get so paranoid about having to be in a single position for 8 hours a day. The human body simply ain't made for that!
Problems with these assumptions:

- QUIC. Yes, it's UDP, so its connections don't behave the way TCP ones do, but it's still based on IP and UDP connections, so it still breaks down under a number of circumstances (rotating backends, mobile clients changing connection types, firewalls/proxies, etc)

- HTTP-based. If you use HTTP, you must accept its warts, like being stateless. Even considering a transport protocol that can multiplex connections, you still need to track all these individual stateless calls. Perhaps a protocol that took care of state might give you some benefits (such as workflowing?)

- Workflow orchestration is just distributed centralized state machines. It shouldn't have much to do with a replacement for REST, because the API isn't necessarily controlling a state machine, and the API (in this case HTTP) isn't stateful anyway...

Why don't we evolve APIs into a sort of language? Why make 4 separate requests (PUT this, GET that, munge it, POST a result, GET to confirm) when you know exactly what you want to do? We can instead build a language or spec where we can shove a variety of instructions (even a "workflow") into a request, let the backend handle the method of accomplishing it for us, and retrieve the result. This can be extended throughout microservice architectures.

The transport protocol is a separate issue. So you want lower latency, and you want less round trips, and you want to survive network interrupt. Design a transport protocol for that (QUIC is a good base). If you want it to survive even more interruption and allow clients to split networks, start looking at intelligent tunnels with advanced routing mechanisms and spread them along the path. But that's a lot more funky than simply replacing TCP.
We discovered my child's peanut allergy at around 8-9 months old, when she had barely-noticeable redness around her mouth the first time we gave peanut butter to her, followed by full-on hives the second time. She's been tested by an allergist a couple times since then, and still has a strong reaction.

Our home was not nut-free prior to that point, and obviously she did not attend school. Had we exposed her directly to peanuts earlier, would it have made a difference? Right now, no one knows because the underlying cause of these allergies is unknown. I have no allergies at all, and my wife has only seasonal allergies (ragweed for sure, maybe pollen).

So who'd have thought exposure to an allergen would help? Well when she was born the prevailing advice was explicit to avoid exposure in the first few months. That advice has reversed recently (and after my child was born), based on a study in 2015 [1]. There are still babies that get peanut allergies even when they're exposed at only a few months old, so it's not like this is fool-proof.

Maybe in a few years/decades the underlying cause of food allergies will be well understood, and we'll look back on this time in the same way we currently look back on the attitudes of smoking in the early 20th century.

[1] https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/new-guidelines-preventin...
I remember this site from Indiehackers, glad to see you're getting some traction!
This is a fun project that continues to amaze me. If you're a fan of old computers and only have some of the parts to make a working one, these guys have you covered.
There was also Cook - https://getcook.org/
The rapid growth of jobs in renewable energy is a temporary excursion, mostly an artifact of current rapid expansion. At steady-state it will take fewer people to supply electricity from a renewable-heavy electricity system than a coal-heavy system. That's one reason that I am bullish on the long term price-competitiveness of renewable electricity but skeptical that there will be enough steady "green jobs" to offset jobs shed from legacy energy technologies.

For example, the old coal plant in Nucla, Colorado is going to close by the end of 2022.

http://www.cortezjournal.com/article/20161001/News05/1610099...

...

the local job options could be pretty limited in far-western Montrose County once two of its major employers close their doors, eliminating what are currently 55 jobs at the plant and 28 at the mine.

...

According to the EIA, the Nucla plant generated 416,150 MWh in 2015 for an average annual power of 47.5 megawatts: http://www.eia.gov/electricity/data/browser/#/plant/527 That's an abysmal productivity per employee (or a fabulous job source, depending on your perspective): 0.86 real annualized megawatts per employee at the plant ; 0.57 megawatts per employee if you include the mining jobs.

(Since this article was published, the mine shut down. The coal plant still operates for a few more years. The MWh generated at the Nucla plant also declined sharply in 2016 and 2017.)

A well-sited utility scale solar farm like Desert Sunlight can produce an average annualized power of 147 megawatts with just 15 full time employees, for a ratio of 9.8 megawatts per plant employee.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desert_Sunlight_Solar_Farm

https://www.doi.gov/sites/doi.gov/files/migrated/news/pressr... ("Expected to create up to... 15 permanent jobs")

If you amortize the labor for construction over the lifetime of a solar farm, it takes up the lion's share of labor-years associated with a given facility. It's still lower per MWh than for legacy coal plants. It's also concentrated up-front. It looks like solar produces a lot of jobs if you measure while new American solar projects are booming and new American coal projects are nowhere to be seen.

I don't intend any of these observations as a defense of coal or an attack on renewable energy. I am thrilled whenever low-emissions sources displace dirty fossils. But I keep writing comments like this on energy-and-jobs stories because few writers have thought much about the composition of the numbers. The gleeful articles about how many jobs we can create with renewable energy are at least missing some important caveats. The occasional conservative attack on how labor-inefficient renewables are, like https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2016/06/01/jobs-are..., likewise misunderstand the long term labor implications of more renewables than fossils.
> Where DevOps once was focused on monitoring dashboards and reacting to problems as they emerged, with automation, IT can focus on more innovative activity that impacts the overall business.

This is hardly how I experience IT Operations to be. DevOps and otherwise.
> I also wonder whether the talk of coal being dirty and dangerous actually boosts its appeal to some voters.

For example, see the attitudes around "Rollin' Coal". Practitioners cite "American freedom" and a stand against "rampant environmentalism" as reasons for coal rolling (aka "Prius repellent"). I'm not sure what argument one could make to change a coal roller's mind.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolling_coal
CS usually includes classes on compilers, at least that's where I learnt some assembly
Please do not downvote this comment. mikro2nd is expressing something that I've also felt and I have heard from multiple other engineers in the hallway track at conferences and in 1-on-1s. As such, even if you disagree with the opinion, it is still an important contribution to the discussion.

If you believe that there is a reliable method for producing time-measured estimates which a software engineer can learn -- a method which is not magic but is merely work -- it would be highly valuable for you to lay that out here.
You didn't create a house boat. Somebody modeled a house boat, gave it two parameters to slightly tweak it. An ML system was trained to classify scribbles as (among others) a house boat.

You scribbled something that the ML system classified as a house boat. None of the characteristics in your drawing moved over to the model. The only creative part (your scribble) was destroyed.

You could've just typed "house boat" and picked the model from a list. The result would be the same.
I'm a fan of form follows function. So every project is different, and every set of coworkers are different. For the type of work I do, with high autonomy groups, I wouldn't make the same choices as you.
> Sure, but it's still not like a resource

It is exactly a resource.

> and you still have to write code to implement it.

Well, someone, somewhere has to, just like any other resource.

> You could never have a user-agent construct a transaction because the construction is completely ad-hoc and will differ by application.

This is not true in any sense where the same is not true of lots of resources.

> It's just not generic.

While REST may favor using suitable generic representations where available, being generic isn't a requirement of REST.

REST is DRY, not “Don’t write code for anything.”
HBO's Silicon Valley isn't a comdedy, it's a documentary.
I've met archetype on that show, and have been a couple of them myself.
NASA chooses the landing site for its Mars 2020 rover mission
I wrote an addendum https://www.codeotaku.com/journal/2018-11/fibers-are-the-rig...

With C++/assembly, you can context about 100 million times per CPU core in a tight loop.
I guess the world is "full".
Thanks, I was really baffled to see that comment.
So first, the author Jigar Shah is a heavy-hitter in the energy industry and knows what he's talking about. He founded SunEdison in the early 2000's and popularized solar-as-a-service PPA's (SunEdison pays the upfront capital costs to install solar on your roof and you pay it back by paying them for the electricity you consume at lower prices than the utility but still high enough to pay back with margins). Today he runs a big cleantech investment firm.

But this article is also two years old. When it was written, coal-vs-cleantech was a big campaign issue for example.

A different rebranding angle that people are talking about now is just pure cost. Most of the new energy generation capacity added in 2018 has been renewable: https://www.forbes.com/sites/rrapier/2018/05/06/renewable-so...

This isn't because of "clean jobs" or a nationwide coordinated renewable push (there isn't one, and Trump has done his best to cut whatever marginal subsidies exist). It's because renewable is now the cheapest form of new energy. The beancounters love it. Conservative Texas is the largest windfarm state in the country.

This shouldn't be surprising -- renewables are largely manufacturing-based industries where the more we build, the better we get at building it and the cheaper it becomes. Compare that to fracking where the half-life of a fracking well is 2-4 years -- after 2-4 years, the well contains half as much oil as it did, and what's left becomes harder and more expensive to extract (compare that to a saudi oil well that has half-life measured in decades and that should tell you something about the "fracking revolution" vs "fracking boom", but I digress...)

Point is, we're now at the turning point where the economics of renewable just make sense. The rebranding as An American Thing was a good talking point two years ago (and still room for it, tbh), but costs are now the more interesting story.
Intelligence community can’t keep up with FOIA requests: IG report
To anyone who is on the fence about putting FoundationDB into production (or at least evaluating it for their use cases), what is the number one thing you think is missing or you're worried about?

i.e.

- a SQL interface,

- pre-packaged data structure libraries,

- monitoring,

- limitations of FoundationDB itself,

- etc.

I'm working on a talk for the upcoming FoundationDB Summit and I'd love to address some real-world questions or issues people have.
I use this simple litmus test: if it has a laugh-track, then it's for dumb people.
NPR is a national news source. Thr LA times is just a local paper, one of about a half dozen the Tribune owns. I do not think they ever aspired to have a global prescence, much less actively serve the EU market.

Whats wrong with a local press deciding to stay local, and only comply with local laws?
Wow this is hilarious, but are the KK crew actually dumb? I don't think so. Where do you think Silicon Valley sits on this graph? Is Silicon Valley is a show for smart people about smart and dumb people?
MinHashing – clustering with a key value store in a few lines of code
Non paywall version here [0], I have to think some Western governments are looking again at China's internet policies for inspiration. Tim Cook, for one, seems [1] to be encouraging it.

[0]: https://outline.com/8LNkuq
[1]: https://www.siliconrepublic.com/companies/apple-tim-cook-tec...
You know, I was fine with them making fun of the geeks (essentially me) when it was funny. When it stopped to be funny - which is by now years ago - it just became a silly pointless caricature.
its a hard problem
Fixed! Thank you
That didn't really come up. We were doing institutional research for a university to support senior leaders. Most of our work entailed working with transactional HR data, educational outcomes data, other information collected at the university to provide policy analysis and strategic recommendations.

The stats and econ phd came from the same school, so they had more shared vocabulary, but definitely thought about problems differently. The physics colleague came from Europe and also thought about problems at a much different scale. So a lot of the initial time was spent deriving proofs so that everyone felt comfortable with different statistical methods used for analysis. The data we worked with was often small scale, sparse, and not really IID. The proofs all essentially converged, but it was interesting because different language and assumptions were made depending on their distinct disciplinary backgrounds.

Sorry for the vague speak. A lot of the work we did was confidential, so can't really talk specifics.
Was curious about your situation so looked at your profile.

> I run a high-grade 2-person consultancy that works with both established companies and passionate entrepreneurs to help them polish their ideas, turn them into state-of-the-art working products, and bring those products into the market.

Sounds like you own a successful business. Congratulations, that is very impressive.

Keep in mind though that entrepreneurship is far riskier than employment, and this discussion is around being an employee. So it’s not an apples to apples comparison.
That hasn't stopped people from trying to make PiedPiper a viable startup though: https://www.wsj.com/articles/actual-silicon-valley-startup-g...
> I have worked on high volume Ruby applications where the problem with using async I/O combined with poor raw execution of Ruby code resulted in excess garbage to be collected.

What async I/O approach did you use and where did the garbage come from? I/O buffers?
The Office deliberately has a mockumentary style with the characters breaking the "4th wall" in a very believable way. SV doesn't have that and you don't really know the "real" motivation and feelings of a character till the plot unravels. They couldn't be further apart in structure.
> - monitoring,

What is the state of production monitoring of FoundationDB?
Just like all of mike judges work. A genius
Thanks for the links!

I'll definitely share the experience in the future. At the moment I'm still doing a tone of learning and trying to reproduce the basics of what I saw in the past years. There's so many things to do just to get through the winter and be ready for the next growing season.
Someone who is building a new kitchen has likely built many before and there are a bounded number of things that can go wrong in the schedule of that. Even so, the Scott brothers still sometimes have cost overruns.

A better parallel would be building a tunnel or railway line -- something bespoke and which has to deal with lots of stakeholders and dependencies. A Londoner or a Bostonian can tell you that the schedules for those are not that reliable either.

-------

But that is kinda beside the point. The ability of someone else in another profession to produce estimates doesn't actually provide any indication about the path a software engineer can walk to learn to produce estimates.