skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Going through the article I think they made some mistakes in analysis and also miscategorized some features.

1) Limited Lifetimes, Stickiness: These is good and leads to good design when you scale beyond a single server. It prepares you for dealing with the reality that if you want to run a service 24/7 with no downtime you need to prepare for things like different versions being in production, failures, and stale caches.

2) I/O Bottlenecks: If you are parallelizing your workloads you will actually see more aggregate bandwidth than you could scale up quickly with normal server hardware. Sure a single Lambda might not have the full amount but you can run 1000 of them at once.

3) Communication through slow storage: This is not entirely true, you can call another Lambda directly but yes you can't access a particular instance. That is a good thing. Designing systems where you need to return to the same instance is an anti-pattern.

4) No Specialized Hardware: I don't expect this to be a limitation for long. There is no reason why you couldn't ask for specialized hardware in the definition of a Lambda and the scheduler take care of it. It will, in fact, be better than the status quo because parts of your application that don't need that specialized hardware won't need to pay for it. In a typical larger application you would probably end up running part of your heavy CPU load inefficiently on your GPU hardware because it would be convenient. Also, most of this might be unnecessary in many cases since you would likely take advantage of a service that was specifically designed to run specialized workloads. Only if you DIY would need this support. Lambda is especially good at coordinating such services.

5) Faas is a datashipping arch: Not even true today. Lambda lets you move the computation to the data like they are with CloudFront Lambda, S3 Batch and Snowball Edge Compute. It is in fact easier to execute the code near the data when encapsulated in this way.

6) FaaS Stymies Dist Computing: Maybe they have applications that can afford to fail at any point and not recover but keeping your global state in a distributed data storage system is the right thing to do generally, not just with Lambda. Might not work for HPC but it generally doesn't need to be reliable in the same way applications do.

At least in section 3.2 they finally seem to understand that most of the limitations are a good thing and if you are building software that don't have them you are likely not building scalable, reliable software systems. Also, if they think that their section 4 is somehow non-obvious to AWS and others they really aren't paying attention.
A Guide to Kosovo’s (Young) Startup Scene
We liked Berlin because it is cheap, has good diversity (I know, Boulder is one of the least diverse places on the planet in contrast), has lots of recent history to explore, public transport is good, a culture that's interesting to us, a decent amount of English spoken, tech scene, startup scene, lots of great places to visit only a short flight away (keep in mind we're from Australia), and most of all it just felt right the two separate times we lived there.

What ended up driving us away was the red tape running a startup in Germany and dealing with taxes, etc. Normally we wouldn't let this deter us, but we had a shortlist of other places we liked just as much.
When the primary economic inputs were land and undifferentiated labor, there was no use playing in a crowded field.

Now the economic inputs are highly skilled workers and the connections between them.
I'm not certain that the title does the article justice.

The advice the author received was:

> In the future, stay the Hell out of other people's code.

However, the author goes on to reject this advice and gives some alternative advice instead.
I personally question the utility of such terseness, and much prefer the verbosity of the Lisp family of languages, where cultural norms make for function names like "number-to-string" and "expand-file-name", rather than the norms I've seen in languages like APL, K, J, Q, OCaml, and Haskell, which seem to love more mathematically-inspired single-letter names like "n" or "k", and various operators in a similar vein.

The Lisp-like way of programming is more appealing to me because it makes the programs very easy to read. You can mostly get a sense of what they're doing just by reading them like ordinary English. I've found this especially useful when I'm trying to understand code I'm not already familiar with, or when looking at my own code months or years from when I wrote it, and it's especially important these days when polyglot programming is commonplace -- I don't need to remember nearly as much of how to do something in Lisp because it's so easy and straightforward and doesn't have the overhead of remembering a whole bunch of specialized syntax.

Contrast this with the terser, more mathematically-inclined languages, where specialized syntax and single-character names are widely used. These tend to be more write-only languages for me, where I have to be constantly steeped in the language in order to make understanding it relatively natural, and if I go away from them for a while, it takes quite a bit of effort to get back in to them enough to make sense of what was written, and reading other people's code is much more of a chore than it is for me in Lisp.

In the old days, or perhaps on embedded systems these days, when one had to closely watch the byte count of one's program lest it not fit in to memory, perhaps such terseness was useful. But these days, I'm not yet convinced of its utility outside of a mathematical context, where the mapping of such terse names and operations is more natural.

For me clarity trumps terseness.
What are your thought on resolution advancements in satellite imaging?
Not surprised: I remember that MIPS has instructions to trap on integer overflow 'for free'(no need to pollute your icache with branch-on-overflow like other ISA) but compilers don't use these instructions :-(
Conclusion: to a first approximation nobody care about security.
Will this weaken the scientific community in China?

Will this cause researchers to become adverse to speaking out for fear of retaliatory attacks on themselves?

Seems like a major step in the wrong direction for Chinese society.
I view FB as a negative force in the world but mostly not malicious.

Although FB software doesn’t “force” any connection, as the comment above so well illustrates, there can be incredible social pressure enabled by FB to do something such as stay connected to an abuser.

If you consider FB to be literally the software only, rather than the software plus community, then you may be technically correct. This IMO is a narrow and limited view of what companies and products are.
The increase in CPU utilization efficiency (and lower costs) is decreased by lack of portability.

Everything has a cost. And so being able to move your code around at will is the cost of saving money.
I've met native speakers, and some things surprised me:

1. Some still have a heavy accent. In fact it tends to be the accent of their parents. (all of us have an accent, it just happens that some of our accents are considered standard english)

2. They tend to be fluent but fluency is also a function of frequency of use, and some non-native speakers reach higher fluency by living with other esperanto speakers and using it daily

3. They all type using `x` notation, since they were typing Eo before Eo keyboards existed, so gxis instead of ĝis
Should be good for at least a few dozen opinion pieces in online tech pubs about how Alexa isn't really a voice assistant any longer.
They aren't hacked yet when they make decision about buying the router, and anyway they cannot differentiate based on security promises marketed to them by vendors.
"Autism" winds up being a catch-all category for all kinds of social challenges. The label is frequently a means to largely write someone off because real help would be too much work.

One thing you frequently see in severe cases is faceblindness. Faceblindness is itself seriously socially impairing. All other things being equal, a faceblind person will have greater social challenges than a non-faceblind person.

If you can identify the myriad specific things going on with a socially impaired person and address each of them, that's usually more effective than calling their social impairment "autism".
Auto-Scroll News Ticker and Self Destructing Comments
I found myself in the middle of migrating a startup's entire "something" ingestion pipeline to be entirely done on Lambdas. For our purposes of one data block per every 10-20 minutes, and then processing and ingesting that data, Lambdas work perfectly, and about 10x cheaper than using ECS or EC2.
Async/Await on Array method – JavaScript
https://www.npmjs.com/package/async-ray

The Async-ray package lets you use async methods such every, filter, find, findIndex, forEach, map, reduce, reduceRight and some methods in Array in Javascript.
Git hub repo: https://github.com/rpgeeganage/async-ray
Stellar Consensus Protocol and Federated Byzantine Agreement
5 Exit Strategies You Need to Retire Immediately
Having your functions be stateless is actually an asset and forces you to write your code in a way that doesn’t make assumptions about the state of some cache, which makes it inherently more reliable.

Cold starts aren’t much of a problem if you have non-interactive workloads, or can design UI’s in such a way to let the user know the first interaction will be slow but the rest fast, and if your modality allows for such. These problems tend to go away with any moderate scale in any event.

The time limits I’ve found to be an asset as well, and forces me to think about how to structure my task into discrete and well known units of work. This makes development harder but leads to an overall more reliable system where any one invocation failure won’t seriously jeopardize the larger task and can easily be recovered. You can’t say the same for a process that’s been running for hours and suddenly dies without committing its work.

That said, I’d love to have serverless GPU functions. I’d love to be able to somehow run shaders over superresolution images. That would be amazing for me working in the mapping world.
Sure, but some require more effort and time than others. The cat largely takes care of herself and doesn't seem upset if we leave her for a day or two. But if you don't clean her litterbox, she'll let you know the hard way.
Apple Music Support Reaches Amazon Echo Speakers with Alexa
I mean if you use this logic the whole Alexa thing immediately becomes useless anyway. It's all about extreme convenience and reducing the friction between "I want X" to "Amazon please chove X into my face" to a minimum.
The quoted statement is not correct at least as far as analytics are concerned. Two examples:

1.) Analytics in many enterprises increasingly feed off data lakes consisting of enormous quantities of data in object storage. SQL has a part to play but it's effectively computing aggregates and creating data marts off this deeper pool of data. Data lake architecture is likely to be increasingly dominant given the enormous growth in data volumes.

2.) Machine learning is transforming analytics. This looks like the next feature likely to be absorbed into DBMS systems. SQL integration with ML is likely to be a hot topic in future systems but a substantial fraction of ML processing will remain outside the DBMS.

So SQL is going to be present widely in most future solutions but that's not the same as saying that a single relational DBMS architecture will solve all problems. It's been clear for years that ACID-compliant RDBMS have a part in this picture but it's just part.

Overall the article still seems to be fighting the SQL/NoSQL wars of the last decade. A large part of the market is moving on to other use cases.
Beautiful story.
> Joel Moses has been credited with coining the phrase in the 1970s

> APL is like a beautiful diamond – flawless, beautifully symmetrical. But you can't add anything to it. If you try to glue on another diamond, you don't get a bigger diamond. Lisp is like a ball of mud. Add more and it's still a ball of mud – it still looks like Lisp.

> Moses strongly denies this, claiming he instead called Lisp a bean bag because it always returns to its original shape.
We really needed a Marshall plan-like response to the collapse of the USSR. Something to instil democratic values and ensure enough propserity and participation. Instead we sent over academic economists who advised to dismantle everything overnight because the magic of the free market would solve all problems. This leading to chaos and the pillaging of the state, forming a new oligarch class.

It’s hard to see how to put this genie back in the bottle, especially now with someone like Putin having such a firm grip on everything in Russia, but also even now interfering in our own democratic system with half of that system shockingly acting complicit with it.
The posted link (https://elefen.org) isn't working for me. Here is another link: http://elefen.org/introdui/en.html
What Facebook did amounts to rewriting PHP itself though.
The Murder at the Vicarage was the first non childrens' book I ever read, albeit in a translation to my native language. I was eight at the time, and found it enjoyable enough, even if it didn't really leave a lasting impression.

Recently, fifty years later, I tried to reread, solely for nostalgic reasons. And must confess agreement with Wilson as quoted: The thing was wooden, flat, and ultimately unreadable - I opted out halfway.

In contrast, a couple of years ago, I read straight through the Peter Wimsey novels, and absolute found them still worthwhile. Wouldn't have cracked them at eight, though. 14 or 15 first time around.
As things stand, your theoretical conservative isolationist is unlikely to even meet a fellow Esperanto speaker outside of the community of Esperanto speakers. There are so few Esperanto speakers that if one wanted to actively use the language in any way, one would have to engage with its community. Some Esperantists do keep their distance from the core, rather fanatic community and they try to use the language purely as a means of communication or as a game. However, the actual organizations that provide most of the infrastructure to actively use the language are bound quite closely with the community, and a certain set of shared cultural behaviours and acceptable political boundaries has now arisen within that community.
Compared to LA. I sold my condo on the westside and bought a 1/4 acre for a fair amount below the selling price of my condo.
One wonders what Bellow would have thought of Twitter.
Yeah -- that's probably a good point. Don't run the vendor kernel. That's honestly a good rule for most ARM boards -- you should avoid the vendor provided kernel tree.

To clean up the odd PCIe behavior on the Espressobin with mainline 4.17, there are 6 kernel patches required. Arch and OpenWRT both already ship them, and I'm in the process of getting them in to Buildroot. I'd expect they'll land in the mainline eventually.

https://github.com/jrb/buildroot/tree/espressobin/board/glob...

edit: sorry; 3 PCI patches. The other 3 mitigate other board/chip oddities.
I'm sure you don't care but interface names were redone to be stable, as in if you have two ethernet cards or you replace one with another you don't end up in a situation where `eth0` today is `eth1` tomorrow just because of random chance timing during init.

https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/Predictabl...
Colloquially 'forced' is often used in a sense weaker than coercion. For example, a train delay might force you to take the bus. A move in Chess can be forced because all alternatives immediately lose. In this weaker sense, it might be taken as "left with no better option".
"the subtleties of language matter", yet you're the one interpreting language like a robot with a dictionary.
How semen(sperm) is analyse in the laboratory
This.

Empathy (i.e. the ability to understand what’s going on in someone’s head) is a key leadership trait in my opinion. The good news is that you can develop this skill.

First and foremost, listen. Use 1:1 meetings to talk about how the person is doing, not what they’re doing. Ask open-ended questions. One of the most underused and most powerful questions in the workplace: “how does that make you feel?”

Pay attention to weak signals, like someone changing their daily routine, being snappier than usual in team meetings, etc. Learn how the people in your team usually behave, what they like and don’t like.

Then, put yourself in their shoes. This is easier than you think: if you’re used to writing code, chances are you can emulate pretty complex systems in your head (like the behavior of the piece of code you’re working on). A normal human being is a complex system that you can learn to emulate, by which I mean that once you know how someone usually behaves, what motivates them and so forth, and you know their current situation (see step 1: “listen”), then you can take a pretty good guess at their internal state.

Once you know how your team works, both as individuals and as a team, your job is simply to keep them in a state of maximal happiness. And they will move mountains.
Opensource, seems to be now defining how the overall professional programming develops, and how overall computing technology develops.

It is a very powerful phenomena that, may be more akin to development of a writing system(s).

There is simply no way to stop it, or reduce it to a 'island' of some sort.

So active creators of OSS value, definitely need to keep in mind how wide and long term the influence of their decisions might be. As the societies will continue to use their constructs not just in software but in other areas as well, for a long time.

---

Just the other day, I was thinking how many programmers are there in the world (and i my definition -- these are people who had written software for 2+ years, and were paid for it).

Older estimates (eg
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3555251 )

are off.

I think the number is closer to 50-70 mln.

But I also caught myself thinking, that programming in some scripting language to perform some task that by itself is not creating a new program -- is really a modern type of literacy (such as reading, writing, math).
Another notable ghost town is Centralia, Pennsylvania:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centralia,_Pennsylvania
The National Park Service is probably the best agency in the entire American federal government. I have been to about 45 different states, and NPS-administered properties represent the most consistently positive contact I've ever had with the government.

Additionally, the properties that NPS administers are the most majestic places I have found in America. They are critical protectors of America's natural and historical heritage. It's great and fitting that they are taking over MLK's home. He is one of the most consequential leaders America has ever had. Had he not been assassinated, he probably would have become President.

On a related note: I spend a lot of time thinking and reading about and using infrastructure. I have a fantasy project wherein the USA draws down some percentage of its bloated rank-and-file military and instead establishes funding for an NPS park ranger to work at every school in America.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Park_Service
3D Game Programming for Kids
A much needed paper which goes into the programming model in serverless rather than the operational model. Although, the first cases study is obviously bad for serverless (training a ML model) whereas the second case study does not indicate bad results (using trained ML model) as half a second latency is acceptable. As the paper itself quotes:

`One might argue that FaaS encourages a new, event-driven distributed programming model based on global state.`

Yes, exactly. It is not made for cluster computing or data-centric applications. It is made for making applications more modular, atomic and compositional with the upside of less ops and more scale and the downside of lower performance.
If I'm in a Japanese file and want to call a function in a Greek file, I don't see how I can avoid writing a Greek identifier in the middle of the Japanese.
They should bring back Xenix and make a desktop version, BSD-like (even though it's a sysV base) and open source. That would be cool.
Support “dark/night” request for Slack on change.org
WebSharper: Full-stack, functional reactive web programming for .NET
That's why I said it "should have an option", meaning for most users it isn't enabled, but if you own a parrot or device that speaks out loud, the option is available to you.
“Having a family is seen as negative to society” is a gross mischaractetization of even the most out-there coastal liberal values.
Storing unboxed trait objects in Rust
Nope. Many people both have personalities, and need staff looking after them 24/7. Some of them can't even speak.
Already more interesting than the whole clickbait blogspam i just reread (to make sure i didnt miss something the first time).
"Quite a few countries have had dramatic and society-redefining events happen to them without experiencing a large number of revolutions as a consequence. So we can't say that China's revolutionary past is an obvious consequence of anything in particular that happened to it."

This argument is obviously fallacious.

It does not follow from the fact that lots of societies (L) have had X happen to them that no number or combination or tempo of X's can have an effect that was not present in L.

I'm not sure if the proposition that we can't ascribe China's revolutionary past to 'anything in particular that happened to it' is even coherent. How else do you think historical change takes place? From nothing?

"The UK had to go to the IMF for a bailout."

It's now historical consensus that the UK didn't have to do this at all. It was based on a miscalculation of the UK account (not that the economy wasn't in dire straits).

"The crisis of the 1970s wasn't "general to the west".

It was, for at least three reasons: (i) the collapse of the Bretton Woods system and the beginning of dollar seigniorage; (ii) the OPEC crisis in 1973; (iii) and the emergence of widespread stagflation in 1973-1975.

"The cause was pretty clearly and directly militant socialism - once Thatcher got the unions under control and liberalised the economy, the UK caught up with its erstwhile foe and was no longer the 'sick man of Europe'."

I'm not going to get into this, because it's a rabbit hole. But that is clearly a highly simplified and ideologically charged perspective. I would mention that the rate of growth under post-war social democratic Keynesianism was higher than under Thatcherism and her epigones. I would recommend the work of David Edgerton, probably the foremost scholar of British economic history in the twentieth century - whose work reveals a quite different story to your own.
Think of it as a spectrum. Control vs laissez faire on one axis and liberal vs conservative on the other. Norway and the US might fall in a similar spot on the control axis (or not), but quite different on the liberal vs conservative.
As long as you're fine with ascii delimiters, strtok et al. work fine for utf-8 strings.
I'm saying no-one is being forced to friend anyone (whether by the software or the larger social context).

To me there is a clear and significant difference between "pressuring" someone and "forcing" someone, and I'm honestly a bit baffled by why this simple (to me) and small point seems controversial in the subthread anchored in the grandparent comment.
That last tip is so clever! I'll have to remember that if I ever want to undergo such a project.
I thought that's what people wanted? Everyone said that the scientist who cloned a baby should be punished.
Prose poetry.
These kinds of issues seem to crop up so often that it really makes me doubt the virtue of jury trials. People aren’t experts, so they can easily be fooled by a good show. Wouldn’t it make more sense to have trials with 3 judges who must agree to convict?