skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm approaching the rewrite of one old system in the next year (not really large, I'm estimating that this rewrite will take 2 years for few developers, probably 100-300 KLoC in the end). It's really hard to extend that system. It uses Oracle 9. It's written with Delphi 7 with half of the code being autogenerated PL/SQL procedures (those visual tools for users, too bad that users don't use them anyway). It's distributed, because in 1998 there was no network access everywhere, so there's hierarchical export-import over CD all over the country (of course now everything is connected, so those export-imports are just mailed). Build process is another nightmare. It consists of several DLLs. Every DLL is a separate project which uses its own set of components. You need separate VM to develop and build every component. Sources for some components are lost. DB schema is insane.

Customer wants to migrate from Oracle (because it costs quite a fortune) to free PostgreSQL and he wants to use browser. Also a lot of things changed in those 20 years and many functions are just not used anymore. I think that rewrite is quite justified in this case (will rewrite in Java).
Yes, suicide is virtually always a disproportionate response.
No argument that a desktop environment and a database server are different things. It'd be hard to judge which is a more complex task.

Even still, read the story about how they built an OS abstraction layer on top of Windows and Linux and then ported their product to it. That was an impressive feat and an perfect example of Microsoft doing something (maybe only this one thing) right.

Unlike Office on Mac which was a piece of shit for very many years and a very different product than Office on Windows.
> You have the burden of proof here.

even transistors, the basic underpinning of our digital worlds, have middle ground - it's the norm, not the exception, and dichotomies are almost entirely a human fiction to make things more computationally tractable

the burden is yours
You're absolutely right, but what he said is also true: the act of hiring by itself becomes fairly unscalable unless you're lucky and get a constant stream of good candidates (which again won't work in your favor if your company isn't primarily known for its engineering).
Why did they put a mummy into the large hadron collider?
You are saying that as if the government is immune to corruption and abuse of power.
I'm not sure what your argument is.

This is an example of hearsay and anecodote:

"Hey Joe, this brand of probiotic worked well for me. You should give it a try."

After hearing that, should Joe then look for meta-analyses of the effectiveness of different probiotic brands, or does he have defeasible justification for trying it out? Maybe you'll say a search for meta-analyses is too stringent, but that you could at least look at anonymous reviews on Amazon. Fine. Then go look at collections of anonymous anecdotal reports in the N-Back community.

You keep trying to describe a form of rigid empiricism, as-if I don't actually know or care about epistemology. I did a concentration in philosophy of science in undergrad, and was an editor/reviewer for an entry on the philosophy of science in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. I'm not unfamiliar with empiricism.
It depends. Any IP-based socket will still go through some protocol stack (routing and filtering). On the other hand, unix domain sockets are optimized for IPC and should perform well. But any socket will require a copy, and thus be slower than shared memory.

On the other hand, if you are going to exchange json messages, you can stop worrying about socket overhead.
My gut reaction is to agree with you.

After a little thought, I'm not so sure.

Could such a system prevent scientists and doctors claiming, on behalf of their employer, that there's no connection between smoking and health, or that there's no anthropogenic climate change, or that there's no asbestos in the baby powder? Then there's the countless pseudo scientific cures and remedies. Could it do better than the system we have?

Clearly, it could be abused, but so can the system we have and it is being, heavily.

Which produces the more honest result?
Charisma and a vision of a better future within reach is a great tool for rallying the masses, even if you have skeletons in your closet. MLK was hated by most Americans when he was alive, but looking at past presidents, its totally possible his high turnout minority could have overwhelmed what turned out of the rest of the electorate at the polls.
China is not a democracy. You have the rights the government says you have.
If you aren’t querying exchange rates often - you’re also doing it wrong....
Agreed. Even though the 2nd part is still hard to process for me, yet I did not forget who I was as a child .. but the contrast is yeah mind blowing.
Is there an equivalent of call/cc in Python?
Zoox's Maddening Struggle to Make Robo-Cars Safe–and Prove It
My dad was in the military, so we moved often. He finally retired at Ft Bennington, Ga, and my parents bought a house in Columbus, Ga. Columbus was a little too small and religious for me, so I got a job and moved to Atlanta. Close enough to visit the family, but a good city with lots of tech jobs. I lived all over Atlanta, but one thing I always did was live inside the perimeter. That refers to interstate 285, which circles the city. After renting for many years my wife and I bought a house in the city of Decatur. I live within walking distance of public transport to take to work, we’re a few miles from the city of Atlanta, and Decatur is a nice walkable town. I will admit that if my family didn’t retire here, Georgia would not be on the list of places I would chose to live, but at least we live in a blue spot in this red, racist, state.
10 solid brandable domains for cloud startups, all .COMs, all under $5k
The Future of American Broadband Is a Comcast Monopoly
They probably use the algorithms implemented on their platform to make better ones.
> you know that everything that unity was doing can be done in KDE […]

Please re-read what I said.

I said that I was hopeful that Ubuntu would create something that would make KDE and GNOME seem like amateur hour. I never said Unity was the thing for which I was hoping, merely that it was Ubuntu's attempt (which, to my mind, was a failure), and I never said KDE or GNOME __are__ amateur — although, you forced my hand with the next bit.

> […] if you take 20 minutes to configure it

This is exactly what I'm talking about as "amateur", though.

Try thinking like a regular user, who just wants everything to work properly out of the box, rather than a technical user who might be happy wasting 20 minutes on the fruitless endeavour of getting KDE to work Just Right This Time And I Swear I Won't Spend Another Couple of Hours Reconfiguring It Again Later When I'm Bored™, because that very way of thinking is exactly why the Year of Linux Desktop will never come.
Probably from kneeing and praying outside a lot.
Why does serverless remind me of PHP?
America isn't a democracy, and you have natural born rights protected by the Constitution.
> The overall social credit system is super strange to me

Spotted the person who hasn’t seen the relevant (and really awesome) Black Mirror episode.
> can predict the pipeline to be false most of the time in the conditional and thus skip it.

I think there's a bug in the code then. It will be skipped a few times, but for i between 100 and 10^6, the condition is guaranteed true every time.
"Technical debt from an H1b."

You seem to have jumped to a conclusion rather quickly.
Even assuming for a second that the hysteria was because the new function that GP wrote is complex, wouldn't the reaction to that would've been "Can you write it more clearly?" instead of the hysteria and pariah ceremony?
What if the government decides to force certain "facts" about whatever, and punishes truly honest scientists for getting too close to the truth?
Making $4,000/month with the Chrome-As-A-Service
> tough -> tuf, though -> tho

Looks a lot like Scots :-)

Whatever, inventing a new language (even based on another one heavily) only makes sense if it is going to be better than all the other existing by orders of magnitude. IMHO just making an existing language slightly easier to learn while annoying all the existing speakers (English speakers reading a text won't immediately recognize tuf as tough) does not qualify. As long as we don't manage to produce a distinct engineered language so unquestionably amazing that a huge part of the people would adopt it readily the only viable alternative remaining is just sticking with an existing language that is reasonably easy to learn (e.g. English is usually considered easier to learn than Chinese or even than French but I'd love to know if it actually is easier for people whose native language is neither Indo-European nor Sino-Tibetan and uses a different kind of alphabet) and already is spoken by a significant portion of the whole set of people it is meant for.
Wow, you out-apologized me! Very classy. I've got some more dirty water I'd love for you to carry. Do you take rubles? PM me.
Could also be more, when interest adds up to the debt.
"You can write OCaml/Haskell with names like doesFileExist when you need to."

You can, but it's rarely done in practice. This is a cultural issue more than a language issue. OCaml/Haskell programmers just seem to prefer much shorter, more math-like names than Lisp programmers do.

For me this makes a huge difference when reading through code written by the community. Lisp is just much more immediately understandable than OCaml/Haskell and related languages.

Yes, this is probably my own limitation, and I'd probably be a lot better at it given enough practice. But I just don't need that much practice to understand Lisp, and I can go away from it and come back to it much later without needing a significant refresher in the language either.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the entire "social credit" system completely opaque? As far as I know, there's no due process, trial, or opportunity for those being labeled with an offense (for to be "accused" implies that there is some transparency involved) to defend themselves. That, coupled with the Chinese government's abuse of the system to suppress their citizens (the system already penalizes you for merely suggesting that the government is imperfect) makes me think that it'll likely be used to e.g. punish those publishing papers that don't agree with the state narrative.
Machine Politics: The rise of the internet and a new age of authoritarianism
That situation would warrant 10 min discussion with lead. Not this.

You version is quite paranoid on itself - junior denied learning and shunned for a single mistake.
Harmonization with the rest of the computing world (everything else is effectively a Unix variant) as well as lower dev costs (kernel dev cost would now be shared with everyone else).

Nadella is a smart guy and has moved MSFT in the right direction. If his truly makes sense, then he’ll probably do it.
But on the flip side, how much was considered inappropriate, wrong, or irresponsible in the past and became accepted in the end?

I'd rather a situation where scientists are given freedom to publish what they produce, than fear excommunication for challenging the current theories and conventional science.

If you want a system where scientists aren't bought as mouthpieces by industry, instead find a way where they can get paid and fund their research without commercial interference.
> I found that most of the teams I met stopped or indeed never really had any practice of constantly diagnosing and improving their process and application.

Can you elaborate a bit more? Using your analogy I imagine this would be someone tidying up every evening before they go to bed. But can you maybe describe what it would look like/how the process might work for a team maintaining an application?
And this made sense for Facebook because it probably would've taken 100s of engineers to rewrite all their php.

Also, not every company could hire the 5 people needed to do their own version of a hack/hhvm project. But at some point it makes sense to find those people instead of rewriting in an unrelated language
The Boring Company Cleverly Lays Bricks on Elon Musk’s ‘Monty Python’ Watchtower
I had a similar experience and similar results. Someone wrote code to perform 1000 queries to pull back 1000 rows in a specific order rather than issue one query and let the Java collection order the results. Amazingly, another person wrote more logic to add a switch to skip this step because it literally took 10 minutes for the app to start when connected over VPN. The fix was trivial and startup time went from 10 minutes to 300 milliseconds. Being the new guy coupled with the fact they had actually lived with this for years, I was immediately hated.
We run a lot on aws. Services, databases, ... Cassandra, Aerosoike, Couchbase, DynamoDB to name a few. Each of them is good in something, but DynamoDB is the most expensive one. For small datasets with low RPS it provides a lot of value, but once you scale, it becomes cheaper to run ouselves (even including licensing costs).
I blame their linear pricing model.
Really? In the uk it would be perfectly acceptable just to say "excuse me" or name (to get their attention) and then "please can I borrow your pencil sharpener?".

But definitely empathise with the idea of playing along with to please other people.
I think the key here is that there is no due process. No right to face your accuser and see the evidence against you.

We have this in the US with terrorists watch lists and no fly lists.
Show HN: A WebGL EWA Surface Splatting Renderer
I am not sure I fully understand your question.

1. You need a backup solution of your data. Online/offline, preferably both

2. If you really want to stay with windows and problems occur:

a) keep the OS on a separate partition and just install over if the OS has problems.

b) it is possible to boot windows from USB and repair things
(German only) https://www.heise.de/ct/artikel/c-t-Notfall-Windows-2019-417...

You may consider switching to a Unix flavor.
A little shameless self-promotion here, but if anyone is interested I just finished translating part of an article from Han dyansty China about law and punishment: https://dragoncarvings.wordpress.com/2018/12/08/law-and-puni...
This is my thought Everytime someone defends increasing government power and authority. They always assume the government is going to act in good faith and never use the power in a harmful way. Almost as if they've never read a history book.
What if the sugar industry lobby successfully moves blame from sugar to fat for 40 years? Which had the effect of punishing truly honest scientists who published the first links between sugar and obesity.

Who might be more honest - a government funded body, or a commercial entity making profit off one particular answer?
https://aeon.co/videos/a-fanatic-against-fanaticism-and-othe...
"Abort the experiment"? Yeah... since we're working with humans now, you can't exactly "abort" the experiment unless the mother has an actual abortion. This plays-off what I just mentioned above; there are a heap of politics to consider now. If tomorrow's headlines read:

CRISPR Twins Aborted

...it's suddenly a political issue. An issue that could result in ~half the US population calling for regulation due to safety concerns and the other half demanding regulation from an ethical pretext (so, religious reasons).
Not sure I understand this. Why did they choose Dynamo? And what does serverless has to do with this?

This seems like a simple case of people choosing the wrong tool for the job, without really understanding its limitations or capabilities.

> say, switching between Oracle, MS SQL and Postgress.

That's because those are all relational DBs that use SQL. If they chose some other NoSQL DB they would likely have encountered similar "peculiar" strengths and weaknesses. And I'm still not sure what this has to do with serverless - they could've have easily implemented a serverless architecture with MySQL or Postgress on RDS instead of Dynamo. But they chose not to.
This is similar to how privacy-conscious people are told that “if you don’t have anything to hide then why are you so concerned about actually hiding things?”.
> We all love animations.

I do, just not so much that kind of animation.
Where Are All the Female Architects?
I did something similar once but failed to glean such a valuable lesson from the experience. My takeaway was, those people are touchy so leave their shit alone. Not because it’s right but because I’m just trying to get through my day, and i don’t need more politics in my working life. People can be assholes, it’s just how it is sometimes so let them be.

Among my own team, if I raise points or ideas that get disregarded in this manner (as opposed to more thoughtful demurrals), I let it go and don’t push the issue. I’ll speak up if I think I have something worth considering, but I’m not going to beat you over the head to see things my way.

Still, the takeaway regarding being on the other side of that table is really important. Once you start feeling that indignant reaction or “yeah right newbie”, listen harder.
Control web browser with Alexa
NYTimes: Climate Negotiators Reach an Overtime Deal to Keep Paris Pact Alive
Climate Negotiators Reach an Overtime Deal to Keep Paris Pact Alive https://nyti.ms/2QTOSqY
Am I the only one who read this and thought: hmm, for any number 32 or higher, the minimum cost would always be 5? Who cares about recursion when it's such a constrained problem? :)
There's definitely value in respecting boundaries. Sometimes you have to take a small local inefficiency in order to create a bigger global efficiency. That's life.

In my experience, though, this is a much bigger problem in software because nobody really knows what they're doing. There's no industry standard way to do almost anything. You can argue about "use Foo!" or "don't use Foo, use Bar!" and there's no one Correct Answer, so it becomes a political question.

When my electrician has a power supply over here and needs power delivered over there, we all know he's going to use wires, and he knows the right gauge to use. He's got a book somewhere with the answer, and there's a regulation somewhere that says what he's required to use. But I just trust him to use the right cable, because that's his specialty, and I've never seen him make something that was an order-of-magnitude worse than was required, or that I could do on my own.

Respecting boundaries is a lot easier when you can trust that other people are generally competent. This will continue to be a problem for the next 100 years until we figure out the right way to make good software.
How the CIA Trains Spies to Hide in Plain Sight
Can you do that in MySQL?
For Oracle you AFIAK need special permission to save a plan. In larger corporations this means you have call the db admin which makes total sense for OLTP (and is a good feature of SQL dbs). If you’re exploring something in OLAP this is not so great.
From [1]: "Stellar takes an alternative approach to using Byzantine consensus in a cryptocurrency, where each user can trust quorums of other users, forming a trust hierarchy. Consistency is ensured as long as all transactions share at least one transitively trusted quorum of users, and sufficiently many of these users are honest. Algorand avoids this assumption,
which means that users do not have to make complex trust
decisions when configuring their client software".

Many questions remain unanswered according to [2].

[1] Algorand: Scaling Byzantine Agreements
for Cryptocurrencies.

[2] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1707.01873
Proprietary FaaS is like Stored Procedures in proprietary DBMSes but in the Cloud.
The New York Times headline could be changed to "William Blunt, U.S. Policy Critic Cited by bin Laden (U.S. erstwhile ally, armed by the CIA to overthrow Afghanistan's secular government), Dies at 85".

Blum covered a lot of the US's Operation Cyclone in Killing Hope - the financing and arming of bin Laden in his jihad against the secular Afghan government in the 1970s and 1980s.
Amazon made a pretty big deal of how they finally migrated off of Oracle to get away from their repressive licensing. Being locked in sucks when the vendor can extract monopoly rents.

Maintaining a second source is a good business strategy.
Is there any work done towards enabling Rust + WASM without any JS/npm?
There is nothing stopping inetd services from sharing disk data or communicating with other local services.
> Isolating that "weird kid" with homeschooling is not going to have any kind of positive effect on their social integration.

Yes it absolutely can. If I can learn in a calm environment how to respond to social stimuli, and still have opportunity to pursue it, I'm going to be able to perform much better.
I'm confused. China is not America.
So we can go down rabbit holes like this I guess? I mean whats the middle ground between believing the earth is flat and the center of the universe vs a modern scientific view?

Metaphors aren't really a good thinking tool here.

Instead maybe asking (as I suggested you do) if EVEN ONE of these LICENSE schemes is actually working for the community its supposed to serve vs the pr blahblah we see in their announcements?
People who like this might also enjoy the similarly simple (yet unsolved) Collatz Conjecture:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collatz_conjecture
Rolled paper, with grease - wonder where they get that grease???
Nice tip! I've also been watching the Godbolt.org progress improving LLVM IR support which could also be helpful for interactively exploring IR generation.

The results are pretty good today if you select Clang compiler and pass `-emit-llvm` flag.
It might only be a small minority of people who are true believers in Bitcoin, but many of them have taken it upon themselves to continue building new financial instruments and technologies around it.

The internet changed the way the world thought about communication in the 70s. This was a minority opinion all the way up to the naughties when it became impossible to continue ignoring reality.

Banks will need to innovate or they'll end up like the record labels and newspapers who failed to keep up with the geeks and entrepreneurs. The banks which embrace technology might survive.
Ask HN: What Are the Job Prospects for a Developer with Only Proprietary Exp?
Hi, out of college (CS Degree) I got a job at a large software company, utilizing a proprietary (and primitive/simplistic) language, which I've held for the past 8+ years. This language also doesn't seem to have a modern-day standard counterpart. I am getting bored of it technologically speaking, and would like to have the opportunity to have a development job elsewhere in the country.

How bad is it to those who are hiring that this is my only development experience? If I were to learn a new framework such as React or Angular, would I essentially be starting back at square one (in terms of Junior Software Developer role)? Would my prior experience be basically meaningless?
5 Tools for Facilitating a Fair, Effective Internal Meeting
Interesting, I'll admit that I haven't worked on a MIPS-based platform in a while. I suppose that with ARM becoming the de-facto standard for powerful embedded chips MIPS can only stay relevant in specific niches.
How to Print Shipping Labels on Shopify
Cydia shuts down purchasing mechanism for its jailbreak app store
You are focused on enforcement which (might be interesting in an internet lawyering way) is irrelevant if noone uses the codebases in the first place because of the license makes it unuseful for users and coders.

Almost all of these "middle ground" license cannot be combined with the normal licenses that have huge functioning communities.