skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
People are inherently selfish. Everyone is looking to better their own self-interests, seek validation, and seek attention in life. A community - any community - is made entirely of these people.

An effective leader is one who can play to the strength of this fact rather than fighting it. You have thousands of people willing to spend their time for you. How can you make their interests align with your own? How can you convince them that your self-interest is their self-interest?

Funny, but I don't think calling people entitled is the answer to this.
yes, it's at lmgtfy.com.

snark aside, yes this is common info.

Even as #8, for a fresh grad, 0.25 is probably quite high. Without looking at the standard breakout and also not knowing how strong a candidate the GP is, I'd guess more like 0.1.
Mellow.... it's so mellow.....
> But even for web requests it's terrible

Maybe you have specific needs? At Vimeo it runs reasonably well, with median response time around 30ms.

> Or at least, it was, last time I used it years ago

Ah, PHP 7 was released three years ago and made some massive improvements to performance.

> Couldn't really do any long-running tasks in response to an HTTP request

We add something to a queue, and handle those tasks offline. Pretty simple.

> or load a single data set into memory to share among all the HTTP requests over the lifetime of the server

apc_store does that: http://php.net/manual/en/function.apc-store.php (it's part of a very popular extension)

> I'm quite happy that I haven't touched PHP in years.

Cool, it's not for everyone and all use cases. But it's always there if you need it.
Why is this upvoted? It shows a severe lack of physics knowledge.

The whole goal of fusion is to get the energy amplification, Q, to be > 1, which requires the triple product n T t to be above some threshold. n is density, T is temperature, t is confinement duration. This is Lawson's criteria, you should look it up to educate yourself.

Your proposal doesn't help n, T, or t, hence doesn't help Q.

Also, there are economic and physical gains from concentrating your efforts into making your fusion reactor larger, rather than trying to make it 1/10 the size and have 10x of them.

The economies of scale will happen once fusion ignition (Q>1) is achieved and we start mass producing dozens of fusion plants around the world. But at this point we're likely 10+ years away from achieving ignition.
It is true that a lot of GCP services were once external, like Firebase and Stackdriver, and it is true that there are numerous different domains and UIs that you manage GCP products under, but I believe the future direction is definitely towards unifying things, and the split right now is probably mostly technical. This isn't an official statement by any means, though.
It's "very simple" that you will also "get absolutely no guarantee of security" unless you personally rewrite every line of code you use in a provable/verifiable language, design and manufacture your own hardware, hide in a cave to avoid all social engineering, and so on.

Hopefully you see why your advice is similarly impractical.
There are degrees here. Depends what kind of scotsman we are talking about. Having a general understanding of the uses of the tool, understanding what feasible in general, some best-practice rules of thumb and knowing how to google for details gets you most the way there. You could call that mastery. It certainly requires greater expertise than "I read a blog post and changed a few things until it seemed to work." But the bar is much lower than: is familiar with the source code; or even you can use the tool for common uses cases without recourse to the documentation.

I think you do need to invest in getting over that initial learning curve such that your tools aren't "magic." You have a conceptual mental model of what is going on. And I agree that takes much more than a token effort. Yet for me, that also stops short of mastery.
A Sub-$1000, Non-X86 Motherboard
In addition to this, some studies have shown intermittent fasting increases muscle mass (or in some cases, has less muscle loss than other diets), focusing on weight instead of BMI (or some other measure of body fat %) is a huuuge mistake. If a person gains 10 pounds of muscle but loses only 5 pounds of fat, it could be spun as a bad thing if you only focus on weight.
Embedded image USEMAPs make me feel old. I remember when you couldn't even reliably support them in all web browsers. For each clickable image map you also needed a GET/POST form 'CGI' program that was passed only relative image coordinates of the click and had to decode it server side.
S3fs means you can use most existing apps without managing local storage. It doesn’t work quite as well in practice but the concept is appealing if you need to support software which wasn’t designed for AWS and uses non-trivial data volumes.
I could have written the same last sentences as you, but using a GPL license. No difference. Licensing is not related to this. (PS: When you choose "GPL", if someone modifies your software, they don't "owe" you those modifications; they only owe those modifications to their users, and only in case they have users. Again, no community-management here involved, just distributing the sources.)
I'm being a little unconventional with my terms - mostly because the article is titled "Open Source is Not About You." Zach Tellman (a prominent Clojure community member who does not work for Cognitect) just tweeted a link to his post https://medium.com/@ztellman/standing-in-the-shadow-of-giant... about "open source" and mythmaking, which is a much subtler take (and, I'd guess, probably inspired by an older flareup in the Clojure community over governance).

It is, however, the case that open source under the GPL is a perfectly well-defined concept, as is free software under the MIT license. The terms refer to worldviews about the code and ethical obligations, not to licenses.
General Fusion changed their plan last year. The acoustic compression scheme, and the use of a spheromak plasma, are out. They discovered they have to limit the magnetic field to about 100T or else the induced currents start vaporizing the surface of the imploding liquid metal. This would be a disaster, as the metal vapor would have poor electrical conductivity and would penetrate into the plasma.

Confinement in the spheromak was also unacceptable; fast electrons were lost too easily from the edge, causing too much cooling.

Instead, the new scheme compresses more slowly, and compresses a spherical tokamak plasma. This scheme will have a solid post running down the center of the plasma, and the metal will implode from the sides at lower speed. The burn will take about 1 millisecond.

I am skeptical of this approach, since the center post will be exposed to extreme conditions (average neutron fluence two order of magnitude higher than in conventional fusion reactor designs) without a thick layer of liquid metal to shield it. The non-acoustic compression scheme also means the reactor vessel will have to withstand extreme pressure.
Google+ did not fail for technical reasons. Everything I saw about it was technically better. It failed for social reasons, facebook already exists and has everyone on it.
Is that true? What if you have an error that happens once every 10^9 requests and the service failure isn't critical (no one dies). Isn't it better to just not bother with the error, let the service keep running and don't worry about it?
Nimbys, Bananas and Beyond
Implementation of Quickdraw – an online game developed by Google
> What if we collectively had the will to invest this much into fusion?

The big problem is that fusion has reached its end-game in military applications: we have the h-bomb. Sure, there's the hypothetical fusion submarines and carriers, but what do those really provide beyond their fission equivalent?

If we could find some novel thing that fusion power solves for the military, then fusion would be solved.
I've tried IF before and was very similar to caloric restriction. Many people point out the point that a diet has to be followed and when you fall thru, you will gain the weight back all over again. Imho, IF is easier to do than conventional diets.
You would be better served clicking on ads and to punish their metrics if you must oppose google in some way. Self driving car data is important, will save lives, and might reasonably enter the public domain some day.
I remember some friends trying it. It didn't work of course, but then we discovered nutmeg.
Xoogler here.

Internally as Google, you have a substantially power powerful version of Codesearch, which is semantic, i.e. it relies on actual binary artifacts produced by builds to index code. All of the code base uses Blaze ( open sourced as Bazel) to express the rules.

The version of code search here is cute, but it's still not a full blown structured semantic code search, which I really miss. Searching for and browsing code on Github feels underwhelming in comparison, because you wan't really find or explore code the way you think of it.

You can see a demo of semantic Codesearch tech externalized here at:

https://blog.bazel.build/2017/12/14/introducing-bazel-code-s...
http://cs.chromium.org

For example if you click on a header or a symbol, you can get proper cross references to a symbol.

https://cs.chromium.org/chromium/src/pdf/document_loader_imp...

I really wish they add structured code search to Cloud Repos, even if it comes with some heavy restrictions such you must use Bazel as a build system.

It would be a killer feature, and to my knowledge there is no equivalent to such a product. IDEs offer some similar overlapping functionality, though other code search engines still operate in terms of strings rather than actually real binary symbols ( I think Sourcegraph is trying here but that still does not seem to use some kind of accurate and structured information like you have in the code, it still seems not use build rules).
Granted, I'm a lone wolf (mostly) scientific programmer, not a commercial software developer. I look at a few things:

1. Keep an eye on how big or elaborate my programs get before I lose control of them, and have to either stop development, start from scratch, or massively refactor in order to know what the heck is going on. Being able to maintain a larger program, or participate in a larger project, without doing too much damage, seems like a reasonable informal metric.

2. Look at programs that I've written months or years ago and critique my own work. A year-old program should hopefully look better than a decade-old program.

3. Try to stay abreast of improved programming techniques, incorporate them in my work, and have faith that my programs will gradually improve.

I just realized these things are not about how good I am, but about the rate of change of my skills.
Rex.js – helper library for writing Regexps
Disagree here.
You can go without lots of tooling and aim for simple and effective. You can even let in code that won't be perfect in the future (probably you'd be prematurely optimizing for the unknown future). But defensive programming will save you time.

Non shitty logging takes minimal time, like, so minimal. It will make many bugs and customer issues trivial to fix.
In the least, use something like Sentry. Makes up a lot for not logging because it adds the context with your uncaught exceptions.
This is very true.

But setting up CI is a day's worth of work, and pays off almost immediately.

Having reasonable logging in an app of any serious size is a cultural thing; it takes exactly as much time to write as bad logging, and saves oodles of time every day when you have to discover and fix issues.

Compare it to building a motorbike. Yes, you want a prototype fast. But if you have all your tools stored as one big pile, or have oil and fuel spilled next to your welding machine, it does not speed you up; it sets you for an accident after accident.
Response from the company: "Friendly reminder,reverse engineering is a violation of license terms."

Wow, just wow.
The software that allows the GitHub style (light-forking) environment is called git, created by Linus. He's a great example of a person who doesn't care about free software ideologies, but cares about open sourcing code a lot.
For Chrome, there's the official whitepaper: https://www.google.com/chrome/privacy/whitepaper.html

I'd love to see independent verification that it is complete and truthful, of course.
Even in the world view of free software, regardless of the license being used, no community management is expected from the person that gives away the software they write. Free software is about the rights of the users (not the whims of developers/powerusers). Opensource is mainly just about transparency and efficiency of the development model.
Malware is often more respectful of a compromised system than Microsoft.
What’s a programmer?

I’m very good at breaking down old code and making it modern. Does that mean I’m a good programmer? For that task, yes. In general, the jury is still out.
pretty sure college degrees are beneficial to getting a visa/work permit in other countries, like Canada or China.
Summary Task Enhancements and Improved Import of Calendars from Primavera DB
It's called the "let it crash" philosophy. The idea is that things are going to go horribly wrong no matter how well your code and everyone else's code is written. If you program for resilience, that is the ability to recover from a horribly bad event, then you can get high service availability and faster development (you're not obsessed with checking for errors, you only handle the most common ones and program to capture enough errors to achieve the service level you are comfortable with or have agreed to).
I think there is an underlying root cause to how we treat Open Source, and it's similar to the IT "cost center vs value creator" problem: Open source packages are treated as consumer goods, and creators in turn will engage with that by marketing them as consumable products.

Many of these things which are distributed as packages are actually code snippets. They could be maintained in the form of a Stack Overflow answer to copy-paste into your code. The question-answer system exposes the code to the necessary competitive evaluation: a malicious answer soon gets downvoted. When the packaging metaphor is laden over them, the whole chain of responsibility lapses back to the vendor-consumer model. And this works when packages are large and take pains to reduce their own dependencies, even if it means common functions get duplicated across different packages.

But prolific authors currently are rewarded by being vendors of undersized packages: they enjoy large download numbers, Github stars, and so on. Without any kind of curation to impose friction on this process, they can do the wrong thing for a very long period and get zero feedback indicating that their actions create a problem. And on the consuming side nobody pays a lick of attention when the prompt says it's going to install 50 things with cute-but-opaque names. If they are under a page of code each, you could probably just print the code.

When I create projects now, I tend to grab some packaged code to start with, but apart from a few to do core functions like I/O I will treat them as placeholders and seek ways of reworking the code to make myself the sole maintainer. The alternative is to be a software consumer and to complain like a consumer - i.e. in a largely powerless fashion - when other people's code doesn't do what I want.
Procedural certainly can be "Infrastructure as code." It just isn't the most modern way to do it, due to additional complexity and the potential to be more error prone. I'd certainly prefer CloudFormation over writing a bunch of python/boto code, but it could be done.

Interestingly, Dockerfiles brought back a bunch of procedural configuration management. We had migrated to ansible for all our server-level configuration. But as we've adopted docker/containerization in recent years, simplifying our applications (now separate containers, rather than severs on common servers) has such a reduced level complexity such that simple docker files with `apt-get install foo` are much preferred.
>> Having a clean way to cut a release that updates app servers on app engine and serverless functions in tandem is needed right now.

This is the entire field of CI/CD with dozens of providers, including Github and Gitlab too.
Letterlocking: Intelligencer Simeon Fox’s Dagger-Trap Letter Sent from Venice
Main point: bigger GANs like BIGGAN don't let you train with your own images because they're so expensive to train. So everyone is creating art from the same pretrained model (and it'll presumably all look somewhat similar)
A common mistake is to judge yourself in a vacuum. You aren't a rockstar because you have achieved a certain number of years employed (this is more common than you would think). The Dunning-Kruger effect is very real.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect

Objective measures of competence are:

* speed of delivery. Do you deliver faster than your peers?

* extreme problems. Are you able to solve problems nobody else can solve?

* originality. Are you able to demonstrate problems nobody else can see or solve problems in a new way?

* write software everybody wants. Do people frequently consume your software or beg you for certain features?

---

Sometimes a low aggression (aggressive as far as product not angry people) environment can trap you into a tightly contained cocoon of suck from which there is little or no self-improvement potential. Be aware of this.
Letterlocking: Lucy May Schofield’s Letters of Triangles, England
The Farnsworth fusor was very well within the realm of affordability. Unfortunately, it was not a design that could break even, which destroyed the future of its creator.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusor
The largest pure-play open source company and the largest open source host both being acquired within the last 6 months is a strong indication.
According to the top of the page, this was a "30 minute" read. It was 2 pages of text/images with minimal explanation which terminates in the middle of a section. It feels like something was only partially uploaded/copied.
I thought it was a Born Again Christian plot to get more Atheist Nightmares into the hands of hippies.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4yBvvGi_2A
It's a conspiracy! The cavendish were a plant by the government designed to not get you high. The old Gros Michel banana got you super high, I swear ;)
I feel ok with supporting Scott Alexander’s position when it is both (a) obviously correct, (b) IRBs regulate sociologists and psychologists doing surveys which is farcical, and (c) Carl E. Schneider, professor of medicine and law at the University of Michigan wrote an entire book on how IRBs fail to work.

http://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/?p=7193

https://kiej.georgetown.edu/carl-e-schneider-the-censors-han...

IRBs do not have a problem. They are a problem. If we must have IRBs they should be deprofessionalised to the fullest extent possible rather than staffed by people whose job and motivation is to find problems where none exist and add more bureaucracy to prove they are actually doing some work. IRB as jury service seems like it could be acceptable. Twelve people, a three hour course on the Nuremberg code and the scientist presenting their application. And absolutely no bioethicists.

If you’re interested in the book put it on an Amazon wish list and email me the link at barrypcotter at iCloud. I’ll buy it because more doctors and scientists should know IRBs are a cancer on society and science.
I'd like to say this is true, but I think in practice, you want early engineers to have the right technical + mental frameworks around good software development practices, and the current implementation may not reflect this (false negative). It's a good to have, but not a top concern imo.

One of the startups I worked with didn't have "good" practices just like what is listed above, and it took a while to get there. The thing is, we're still pulling quite healthy numbers, and we have paying customers. What made it bearable was our engineers knew what needed to be done, and had the technical chops to get there. You'll probably want to avoid very elitist engineering cultures that aren't open to what's considered good practices.

Many successful startups run on the shadiest software architecture in the early days, but market pulled product out of the startup. Today, they have the engineering resources to make it a lot better.
Couldn't this mean massive amplification attacks?
The BSD-BTC License
I'm saying creating two DAGs is superfluous, fbsd, obsd, nbsd, etc all don't do this. If you want to abstract the CLI tools why do it in a non-portable implementation specific language?
Also multi-service. We are an all AWS shop, but integrating things like DataDog monitors and alerting into our infrastructure, or github organization membership linked to IAM makes things much more maintainable.
Ask HN: How do you deal with the brilliant jerks at your workplace?
Over the past decade of my career, I have come across a few arrogant people who were brilliant, and sometimes indispensable to the project. They would consider themselves absolutely untouchable because of their superior intellect.

But with time I realised that they were doing more harm than good. Have you ever successfully converted a brilliant jerk into a relatively milder one? How did you deal with those people? Especially when you were a technical lead or a manager ..
PeachPie is really interesting. I haven't had a chance to use it, but the most fascinating bit to me is that it can compile PHP to .NET. Could be a great way to incrementally move legacy code if you like writing servers in .NET, potentially. I do wonder how things like Wordpress extensions and dynamically generated code work, though. phpBB, for example, generates PHP files at runtime for its formatting engine (s9e TextFormatter, it's quite a nice library.)
Dandelion leaves are great in salads and super healthy. There are some teenagers who will appreciate that message, you just need to find them.
I think what you just described are platforms where you don't have to trust strangers.
The Massive Pizza Funeral That Never Had to Happen
There is a symmetry between how quickly black holes can absorb matter/energy and scramble information and how quickly electrons in these materials can dissipate energy: Both do it as quickly as possible, with "as quickly as possible" being somehow related to h-bar.

Is it a red herring or a pointer to some deeper, heretofore unexpected relationship? That's the cool part, no one yet knows.
PyCon? DefCon? Ethereum? MAGFest? Speedrunning?
> In Science Fiction over and over again the trope was of a giant computer that acted like an oracle.

In many ways we're doing that exact thing. The computer at my desk is powerful but somewhat useless; the grand oracle in the form of Google et. al. does the real heavy lifting of giving me useful information. Whether it's a single computer or a bunch of separate ones acting as a whole is pretty immaterial in that sense.