skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In 1999 my boss's boss loved Silverstream.* It stores code in the database! Anyone still using files for code is obsolete!

We had 12 beefy servers powering our site. So I rock up and realise we're not using any of Silverstream's features, and its just acting as a servlet container. Big boss had moved onto bigger and better bossing by now so wasn't around to stop me.

After a couple of weeks of investigation, we demonstrated that Caucho Resin is better in every way. Fraction of the cost, starts super fast and runs like lightning. Great. We happily switch over and all was well for almost a week.

A few days in the head of Ops barrels up and demands to know if this was all my fault.

"Ummm, yeah?"

"Great. What the fuck am I supposed to do with the other 11 servers??"

I think they'd had to fight for budget for enough hardware to run the site with Silverstream, and young me had just made them look incompetent. They forgave me eventually...

* I actually like Silverstream's core ideas. It was just a little ahead of its time, and stored code in the db. And was 12x too slow.
Such as?

Europe has their own version of orphan drug incentives, as does Canada.

I’ve never heard of a country nationalizing orphan drug production facilities.
I am not sure what role you are actually in with this start up but at the end of the day its really going to be more about what you enjoy more... HOWEVER, here are my two sense from my experience of the years. I am going to assume that this "tech lead" has the potential of growing into a CTO role or some exec/admin role within the organization structure. Regardless everyone in this situation will reach a bridge where they are going to have to pick management or a "hacker" that is always going to stay in the code regardless of the transitions. I personally have chosen the technical route in the situations. Here are some bigger points just to outline..

1. Set the team culture.. it speaks volumes having the highest role also on the ground with everyone else (as much as they can)
2. Choosing to not be part of code will create risk for yourself and for the company, especially if you were a vital part of the scaling
3. No one needs to be a delegator full time.. or better yet, just don't be.
4. A PM role is a FULL-TIME role.. can it be done part time? Of course.. but its going to be half ass and that person will not have a full picture of the current state of the software, the team pulse, the product pipeline, and ect.
5. Do what you have to do to make things work but have a clear path insight collectively. Your role may be a hard to define role overtime, especially as a CTO but there are many members of a software dev life cycle for a reason. There is risk of things becoming detrimental if clear processes aren't the goal.
6. Be protective over your time. Allocate at least 4 hours of your day to code even if you wont be able to get all that time in. At least you are communicating the need and importances of your contribution.
7. GET A MENTOR! Get someone that knows what they are talking about and don't just take anyone.. Thing through what you need in a mentor and ask for one. You need a sounding board, but just be careful of conflicts of interest.
8. Focus on knowledge transfer and team processes so the team and software can scale. This is one of the harder parts and should be leaning on whoever is leading the operations to collaborate with.
9. Use agile + JIRA and if you have the company funds add Confluence.. and get your team on the same page.. YES there are other options. I am really not debating that but these are solid solutions that are going to assist the PM and the entire team as you all develop procedures..
10. It doesn't exist unless its a ticket.. I would be sensitive and put thoughtful effort when introducing non-technical people to the software dev life cycle. However, user contracts/requirements, tasks, bugs, QA, design, etc are all HUGE influences of how well your team will do over time. Build a culture around that.

Thats enough even though I have a bit more too say.. at the end of the day you will figure it out. I think the better leadership choice is to keep as much of your time in code as you can as well as the bigger picture while at the same time, develop the processes to allow for scaling in all areas..

Hope that helped!
I'm submitting this beautiful book right now because the American Mathematical Society (AMS) is having a large sale, it's 40% off until the 17th. (You have to make an AMS account).

Table of contents (pdf):
https://bookstore.ams.org/mbk-105/~~FreeAttachments/mbk-105-...

Sample Chapter (pdf):
https://bookstore.ams.org/mbk-105/~~FreeAttachments/mbk-105-...
Well I'm not sure i believe that the web is truly moving away from ads in as big a way as being claimed here. The trends in news groups are clear, but for each of the other examples there are counterparts that do run ads, ie Netflix and Hulu, and Spotify and Pandora.

Don't get me wrong, i would love to see a change just like anyone else here, but I'm not sure I'm seeing it yet.

Additionally i enjoyed this other article more as it goes into their proposed solution: https://medium.com/unlock-protocol/its-time-to-unlock-the-we...
> I recommend everyone to read the Cypherpunk Mailing List archives to understand the situations.

https://mailing-list-archive.cryptoanarchy.wiki/
Considering most drugs fail to get to market, I’d offer that the profit margins aren’t all that good if you start from scratch.

Saying profit margins are too high is easy if you just count the winners.
apologize for my typos.. I am just about to fall asleep but thought I could support a bit!
Presenting Tips for YouTube
>there will never be direct DOM access from WebAssembly for security reasons

You should contribute this knowledge: https://github.com/WebAssembly/proposals/issues/16

>developers, [...], tend to be deathly afraid of touching the DOM

I truly have never seen this. In fact, I'd say I often see a rather careless culture of doing DOM manipulation here and there because it solves an immediate problem, albeit by short-circuiting the abstractions that may be in place and are now a bit more fragile.

I am writing JS in the entire stack at the moment and I am mostly happy with it. I don't think that ability will go away but I look forward to the day where I can do the same in Rust or F# or whatever. And it doesn't seem unlikely to me that one day we will see wasm becoming the foundation in browsers, with JS running on top of it like any other language.
I suspect this is a "toe in the door" which will be extended to the other 5 eyes nations eventually. Censorship and backdoors will be much easier to enforce when all 5 countries are working together. Good luck in that case, Signal.
Even people who have been meditating for decades often do guided meditations, not because they can't do what you call the 'real thing'.
Can functional programming be liberated from the von Neumann paradigm? (2010)
The Singleton Manifesto (1/5) – Using AI to Save Humanity from Extinction
Humanity is dying. It may seem that society has come a long way to preserving and protecting the human race. Yet, after less than fifteen thousand years as a civilization, we are just as much at risk of extinction.

In the twenty-first century, we are force-fed the ideology of the enlightened human. We are taught that with freedom, liberty, and justice — all nicely tied up in the gift of democracy — humans can create a paradise on Earth, an environment that allows the human spirit to thrive. In this worldview, the human collective prospers when each one of us is given a voice. The human race survives because the collective is responsible for its survival.

Unfortunately, this is a lie. Democracy was supposed to save us from the evils of tyranny. It was supposed to ensure our survival by creating stability and equality. Yet, it too is cursed by short-sightedness.

This leads to a claim that has already been repeated over and over again: human government has never worked and will never work when it comes to optimizing for long-term survival.

In turn, our only fighting chance comes when we choose to fight for the future. And the only way to do that is to remove humans from power.The only practical way to do this is to put computers in charge of our governments.

This concept, termed the Singleton, is tainted by hyperbole. If you talk to any expert out there, you will usually be met with one response - put artificial intelligence in charge of our governments, and humanity faces extinction.

We believe otherwise. We believe that the singleton is not a harbinger of extinction, but our only hope against it.

This is the first in a series of letters to challenge the status quo surrounding this issue. And hopefully, by the end of this correspondence, we hope to convince you that the Singleton is not something to be feared, but embraced.

And so we begin this delicate balancing act. Welcome.

LEO
It's handwavy because no one really knows what they're doing. Even Feynman said that no one understands QM, and things have hardly improved since then. Some details have been filled in, but there's a lot of hostility to the idea that science should even be thinking about quantum fundamentals, because it's such a philosophical tar pit.

Modern QFT is like being given a laptop with an Excel spreadsheet that does some clever things, without having any idea what a processor is, what memory is, how a hard drive works, or why the case is that funny shape.

The kinder way to put this is to say there's a lot of educated guessing going on. But the fundamental problem - reconciling GR and QFT - can't be solved without a completely new mental model. And academic research isn't funded in ways that reward the generation of creative new models.

It's become a bit of a cargo-culty pursuit. You're rewarded if you know the words to the songs that everyone else is singing, but if you try to invent a new genre you'll probably be told it's career suicide and Don't Go There.
You have a good point, but at the same time what these apps offer is step by step guidance. Some people, I'd say most people don't even know where to start and this is exactly what they offer. Maybe a vague example would be paying for a gym membership.
The best comparable subtitle imo would have been: "it wouldn't have happened without sex workers."
Care to elaborate?

Edit: to clarify, I’m referring to the assertion at the end of your comment, and I’m genuinely interested.
That is true. But if the only way a government owes me something is that it has to accept dollar bills to erase my tax/fee duty, then I think this proves my point - the government does not owe me equivalent of those bills, it only has to accept them for limited set of "services".
How We Cracked the Code Book Ciphers (2000) [pdf]
The solution isn't stopping it but embracing it! There is no way you're going to put the first world genie back into the bottle. Doing so, by forcing the West into an archaic revival type society will result in revolts that will leave cheerleaders of such political solutions shall I say... more carbon neutral?

No, it would be better to embrace it and engineer around and with it.
What other industries should we learn from?

I know big construction projects often suffer from similar problems, and they don't seem to have figured it out.
By the way: "Gill Sans" isn't a good fallback for non Windows computers. Hard to read on a Mac.
I'm not really into these apps, but personally I love listening to one or two ASMR channels on YouTube. If I'm feeling stressed I have 3 or 4 that I listen to very often and they help me a lot.
Impersonal interests, receding ego, universal life, like rivers merging with the sea...

Yes, nice comforting lullaby. Never understood these types of texts.

“And time continues in its immemorial way of making everything and everybody look and feel like shit” – Martin Amis

This I understand. Sugar coating not necessary.
I really wish that one of the big cloud providers was building out actors as a service. That would address a lot of the shortcomings of FaaS, whilst still having many of the important benefits.
Why pay a personal trainer when you can just do pushups instead?

Why go out for dinner when you could just cook for yourself?

Why pay for a therapist when you could just stop being depressed?

Why pay for a financial advisor when you could just do your taxes yourself?
Why? There are sex workers, and there will always be. Even in jurisdictions where it is prohibited, it is merely pushed underground and continues, but with less protections and chance to mitigate downsides.

You might as well then have a subtitle" It wouldn't have happened without humans".
Yes, replacing early automatic factories with an army of Chinese workers who slave away in so miserable conditions that a big logistical consideration becomes how many of them kill themselves... Good on ya NYT.

Keep shilling for the CCP, telling us how manufactoring can never, ever move out of China... Especially now when people start considering this, right?

Ugh.
What technology came from the LHC? Or string theory for that matter?
> a lot of money gets created by banks

Interesting, how does that work? Can a bank create money to pay its own taxes? That sounds too convenient...
NReal Light mixed reality glasses look almost like regular specs
I haven't read the book but from what I gather the author would expect better guesses at what is going to be important from theorists so that experimental physicists can apply better filters.
The problem nowadays is that software engineering is mostly about politics - Especially in big corporations.

Corporations use extremely inefficient tools and processes but because they have a monopoly over some area of the market, they can easily survive in spite of very poor technical decisions.

What happens is that engineers who work for these companies learn a lot of bad habits and tools which slows them down; they become overly focused on risk mitigation instead of productivity.

I'm starting to think that this is intentional; corporations want their engineers to get stuck in a technological rut; that way they can't leave and start working for a startup which will disrupt them later.

Even some corporations which seem innovative, are not actually innovative at all; their entire ecosystem of tools is extremely inefficient once you step back and consider the big picture.
There is a very interesting interview with Edward Teller, who makes the exact point that throwing money at science does NOT produce results, whereas throwing money at technology sometimes does.

I think Teller qualifies as smart.
I think that the authors of the paper would say that, ideally, serverless would be ubiquitous, the obvious choice for the vast majority of use cases. A pipe dream? Perhaps. But that’s the dream, and we’ll never be able to make the dream a reality unless people write papers like this one that highlight the work that separates where we are from where we want to be.
This seems to be about statically typed languages like Haskell. Can it be used (and be useful) for dynamically typed languages like Scheme?
You do realize you just said what the author said but in a mocking tone?

Their point is exactly that the trigger systems are controlled by algorithms based on current theories, which so far have shown nothing for all their efforts.

I haven't been in the field since the LHC started operating but from memory it was exactly billions of events per second and storage could only keep up with hundreds.
what kind of "absurd agenda" do you think this article is "pushing"?
Yes. Where do I sign up?
> anything but Zen

Well... Zen isn't just what people today associate with it:

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

and when we're there:

https://www.tofugu.com/japan/bushido/
Can you share the links?
>If that were true, we wouldn't have private airlines because planes would be falling out of the sky every day and nobody would fly.

The economics of airlines and monopoly energy companies are completely different. Flights are subject to intense economic pressure, the airline industry has very thin margins of profit.

You can avoid an unsafe plane but you can't avoid an unsafe statewide power company.
No need to replace the millions of packages in npm. I predict there will never be a shortage of new javascript frameworks...

No, npm is not THAT package manager. What I am talking about is a way for a user's Browser to download for example a Python 3.7.1 runtime (and similar packages) once, and use it on different sites and applications.

In the simplest form Google or Python.org could serve these files on a CDN. In a more complicated form you could run an application on a range of Python versions, and only download updates when you want and need them.
Also one aspect not discussed in this article is that now China is dedicating huge efforts [1] in order to maintain and secure its access to natural ressources needed for manufacturing, while most occidental countries have likely lost this capacity.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belt_and_Road_Initiative
> “Since winning App of the Year, we seem to have a much higher growth rate than they do, and we’ll surpass them from now on,” Calm’s Ms. Wang says.

This statement alone makes me root for Headspace.
Agree so much. At its core, this is just another example of a well-tested strategy to make money - take something simple, make it complex, then sell a teacher/guru/app who makes it simple again! Same reason why so many books that could be 5 pages long are 200 pages instead - 5 page books don't sell.

Not to say its all a scam - it does genuinely help to have a trusted teacher in many cases, whether its for accountability and a push or just reminding you of the basics.

I guess what seems more distasteful to me is how much meditation is being marketed as the new self-help cure-all to stress/anxiety etc. Its makes you wonder how many people need it because they are stressed vs. how many people need it because marketing manufactured that need.
I think for some of these concepts that he describes, you have to read a bit more of his other works. That clarifies it beyond what you might guess a lullaby.
Nothing will happen till a global carbon trading scheme exists and is enforced...

More oil was burnt last week than ever.

https://www.eia.gov/petroleum/weekly/article_images/twip1812...
iOS, macOS, iCloud, the App Store, iTunes are made 100% in the US.
Many of you are correct that you don't necessarily need an app and you definitely don't need guidance after a point. But Headspace specifically has been extremely helpful in teaching me how to approach meditation and how to make a habit out of it.

For anyone who is just beginning I would definitely recommend going through Take10, all the Basics packs and all the Pro packs in Headspace. In this order the guidance gradually decreases and by the time you finish you will have built a good routine and will be ready to switch to unguided meditation.

At the moment I use Oak - it's free but only available on iOS. It effectively acts as a timer and tracker for my unguided meditation, nothing more.

I've tried Calm and I don't get appeal - the content, design, progression, voices... everything seems strictly worse than Headspace or Oak.
Agreed. This method of sustainable robots is generally not very good en mass. It's good for a hackaday post, but try making 100 of these. Before this is a possibility, we need robots that are able to self-model and hence understand the relationship between sensors and actuators correctly.

Even 3D printing a robot on the same 3D printer, with the same calibrated parts from manufacturers, with the same software - _still_ requires calibration. The more complicated the robot, the more the errors accumulate.

As for the quality of the paper - I completely blame the journal (who are ultimately responsible for the actions of the reviewers) as this should have been caught earlier. I can understand authors rushing to produce a paper not in their own language, but the profit machine journals need to take more responsibility for what they publish.
Auto.

I find it quite strange that you are not aware about how much more reliable & secure is the product of the construction industry compared to software.
This raises some questions. Is this really a problem of human government or another structural problem : capitalism, inequality, concentration of power or corruption? In what way is it an inherent problem of human government? What is artificial intelligence ? Machine learning, deep learning? Are there not human biases in artificial intelligences?
Sorry for my typos as well.. clearly didnt edit and I am headed to bed! Hope the points were clear enough to resinate with you
Were the Floppy Disks unreliable or were they just cutting costs?
UK university tells Iranian student: go home and get tuition fees in cash
KDE apps at the snap of your fingers
I feel the same about meditating near an powered-on electronic device, but in modern world it impossible to escape from EMW emitting devices. You can turn off all wireless capable devices in your home but can't control devices in neighbor house or nearby cell tower.

I have personally had more satisfaction meditating outside in fresh air near natural environment than indoor. I also know of many meditative experts who routinely visit remote areas in forests to practice deep concentration.

I would like someone to build an app to locate more favorable spot for meditation by calculating net wifi traffic in air.
It's remarkable how rotten the state of things are in academia while everyone beats around this bush without outright saying it.

Some of the best physicists in the world right now are likely to be caught up in just providing for themselves. Why cant someone in Africa, or wherever, get a degree in physics from Harvard? Why do they need anyone's permission to have access to this? Why can't they at least have access to course material and testing, so they can openly compete? Who is afraid of the competition? There's no ethical justification for that. The world spends trillions in public and private money already. This is just one criticism, and I'm not alone in classifying academia as rotten. Feynman said the same. So few people have the bravery to stand up to an entire socioeconomic complex, even when it means people will die and projects will fail dramatically: see the Nasa Challenger Groupthink Disaster (which Feynman also criticized).
Audacity is I think the best word to describe what they've done, but definitely in a good way!
So the downvoters, presumably members of the academic industrial complex, assert that there is no such interview?

Interesting.
I also sometimes long for more RAM, but those situations definitely aren't what can be sanely considered "most workloads".
Don't think you guys read the article, at least the last three paragraphs.
Exactly, very good question.

Why not just do pushups, walk the stairs or just go running, cook for yourself and your friends, know yourself instead of paying for therapy. Even doing taxes yourself isn't such a burden.
I strongly suspect that it's because you read articles with some assumed agenda in your mind.
I honestly think this concept has been hurt by the name "wicked problem"

With a better name or phrase I honestly think it'd be talked about a lot more.

I think there are problems currently our summed intellects can't solve. The emerging IQ is not high enough. But the name "wicked problem" doesn't do it justice. Shrug.
There have always been meditation teachers, practice programs, books, all kinds of materials. Monasteries are like huge complicated frameworks for meditation. In our culture we instead have apps. Maybe that's kind of lame, but it is what it is. And it kind of scales more economically...
Thanks! I love learning little tips like that.
I feel like your human experience may be significantly different from many other human experience.

Glad you can just decide to do those things, do them and stick to doing them! Well done.