skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Everything you are saying is true, but when people talk about managed services, for the most part they are referring to someone else managing the VM, the operating system and the server application running on the VM - in this case the database.
They are no good at all at apologizing. They somehow manage to be consistently condescending. Facebookers, take this into account next time (or the next dozen times) you have to write up an apology. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6116544
To be honest, who is going to actually separate all 3 of those pieces? In Canada, President's Choice (among others) makes a fully compostable k cup that is about $0.50/pod.
Agree about the age issue... it does change the equation, especially if these companies are targeting their advertising toward younger kids.

I also appreciate that you brought up the issue of freedom. Dependencies do require freedom to be sacrificed, and perhaps that partially explains the aversion to them. When we need something, we give it power over us.

Yet a life without dependencies would be a life without friends and family, a life without valued people, places, and things. We give up total freedom for the benefit of forging deep and meaningful connections. And these connections are, in important ways, like any other dependency: when you lose someone you love, you go through a powerful kind of psychological withdrawal. But a life without love would be an impoverished existence.

I think it would be useful if we, as a society, stepped back and considered the nature of dependency, how our dependencies can hurt us and help us, and why certain kinds are valued over others.
She was convicted of defamation with actual malice. "Too trusting" doesn't even begin to describe the hoax she pulled off.
I don't even think K-Cup coffee is any good but I suppose that's a personal preference statement. Still, I prefer the paper filter ones. And even so, is it not more feasible to just brew a big pot of coffee that's "actually" good for the whole office?

At home I either do a French press or pour over with a reusable stainless steel filter then make a coffee scrub with the used grounds.
I don't understand your point.

It reads like a fairly clear and descriptive statement to me and in-line with actual facts reported by the newsmedia (without the messy presentation of the newsmedia).
Specific technology choices aside, this was an incredible write-up of their migration process: thorough, organized, readable prose about a technical topic. It is helpful to read how other teams handle these types of processes in real production systems. Perhaps most refreshing is the description of choices made for the various infrastructure pieces, because it is reasonable and real-world. Blog posts so often describe building a system from scratch where all latest-and-greatest software can be used at each layer. However, here is a more realistic mix of, on the one hand, swapping out DBs for an entirely new (and better) one, but on the other hand finding new tools within their existing primary language to extend the API and proxy.

Great read. Well done.
Wanted to read something about the cost impact, and performance impact after migration. But couldn't find that in the article.
I wonder if he would be singing a different tune if he was now worth $500 million or something.
High-fructose corn syrup specifically.
Microsoft unveils Windows Sandbox: Run any app in a disposable virtual machine
This comparison makes no sense. Regular coffee makers make far less waste and are just as convenient. Hell, I grid my coffee by hand and brew it one cup at a time with one of those conic filters and it still takes only 6-7 minutes.
For a second I thought you lived in my world, where it’s the car that takes so much longer.
Adults use flavored vapes, too. In fact, almost all the adults I know who vape use flavored vapes; adults ranging in age in from 30-70. And all those adults switched from cigarettes to vaping.

The war on cigarettes has gone on so long that we've lost perspective. Part of the strategy of that war was to make nicotine out to be some horrendous and horrendously addictive poison, which was an easier sell for some people than explaining the varied and complicated effects from smoking combustible tobacco.

Kids shouldn't be using nicotine because of their developing brains. Kids experimenting with vaping out of ignorance should be educated.

But let's not lose sight of the fact that cigarette smoking is unfathomably more harmful for society. From an epidemiological perspective, if this was a zero-sum game it would make perfect sense to trade vaping for cigarettes, even if that meant teens were vaping at the same rate as they were smoking cigarettes at the peak.

If people want to obsess over flavored poisons, we should start by banning wine coolers (if not all wine!), alcoholic cider, and the myriad brands of flavored hard liquor.
I got pissed off at the "Google this, Google that" sentence because it's bad faith debate technique. The point could have been made just as well with a comment about company towns or cyberpunk megacorporations. The hysterical repetition contributes nothing to the part of the argument that matters in real life and serves solely to incite unthinking, involuntary anger.

And, yeah, the complaint probably should have gone in its own post, and had some more explanation. Double-posting still feels wrong somehow.

> The entire point was that testing for these low-level fundamentals really has nothing to do with software engineering. It would be like hiring civil engineers based on being able to do some equations from memory that they would normally reference a book (or the Internet) for in real life.

You don't ask those questions when interviewing a civil engineer because a licensed civil engineer has passed the FE and PE, eight-hour open-note tests that permit only basic scientific calculators. So not only are civil engineers tested on their ability to handle the basics from memory - you know as well as I do that writing the notes for a serious-business open-notes test is half the difficulty all by itself - they're tested in conditions which impose far more constraints and pressure. I don't think I've done a single interview where I didn't go back and forth with the interviewer to get hints and clarify requirements. Eight hours locked in a room with pencil and paper, fuck that.

I agree that Google's interview is stupid, but I've gotten into this argument dozens of times over the last decade and every time I try to think of an alternative I come up with something that has its own weaknesses. For example, one of the reasons I went for a CS degree instead of a software engineering degree is that it's absurdly difficult to pick up formal CS theory on the job but you'll be learning software engineering every day. Take-home tests are unscalable and derided as insulting wastes of applicants' time. Contract-to-hire is too easy for employers to abuse. I can't even imagine how badly a licensing test for CS/software engineering would go.

The best I can come up with is to do the same style of interview but on a computer. Which I think Google might even do these days, but I went with the whiteboard one because I don't want that much riding on my laptop working that day and I run at a greater disadvantage coding on a loaner laptop than I do on the whiteboard.
Third-party pods which do not contain nicotine do exist. I wonder if that confounded their survey.

I think there are even some companies making some with only THC and/or CBD.
When was the last "Goodbye X, Hello Mongo" article?
K-cups are recyclable, it's just that no one does it because it's a pain in the ass to do at scale. You have to awkwardly peel back the top foil, dump the grounds, and then recycle the cup. Who at the office wants to sit there and do that for 20 cups in a row whenever the cup catcher fills up?

What we need is some sort of cup recycler hardware that takes the work out of the annoying part. Put the used cup upside down, and a device scrapes the lid off and vaccuums the grounds into a compost holder, then you chuck the plastic into the recycle bin. That would instantly resolve the k-cup waste situation at my office.
Litter is a whole other issue, which kpods also do not really contribute to.
How about we make "does not require government intervention to prevent environmental catastrophe" one of the criteria for being a good invention.

That's one way it could be the worst invention of the last few decades.
The hashes are signed by the notary, go command can get the hashes from anywhere and be able to verified they are signed by the notary.
GPS week rollover in 2019: what you need to know
The vFlow v0.7.0 has been released
People realized a lot of the claimed not only SQL offerings were actually no SQL at all. It turns out it is nice to have those extra features of NoSQL as well as a more traditional RMDS instead of just the NoSQL parts.
I think it’s closer to Linotypes vs Computers.

Sure they’re wasteful, but there’s an elegance to our complicated mechanical contraptions that isn’t captured with electric systems.
How do you propose getting all the trash to this one spot in America in a cost efficient manner? The logistical cost (and environmental cost) of shipping all our trash to one area would be a nightmare. Also how exactly are you planning on preventing the trash from having an environmental impact ? Physical trash can result in harmful chemicals leeching into the groundwater and affecting way more than 10 miles of area. This comment seems to be severely underestimating the cost of physical waste.
I don't live in the USA either (UK), but even over here I've heard engineers saying they wouldn't work for them.
The US is doing great. The rest of the world not so much. It’s really been the story of this recovery since the end of the Great Recession.

The US went for Keneysian stimulus and Europe went for austerity. The results have been unambiguous.
You Don’t Need Anymore Software
> Algorithms aren't foundational

Ok. I'll tell you that I want my API to never take longer than 100ms as part of our service level objective. Code you contribute to our system is consistently failing to meet our objectives. Make it faster.

We're designing a game engine. Our objective is a smooth 50 frames per second. We want to do dynamic lighting, destructible voxel terrain, the works. Code you're contributing is consistently dropping our frame rate. Make it faster.

We make financial trades in some secondary market. Our goal is to ensure all transactions are atomic and take less than 100ms to complete. Code you're contributing is consistently failing serialization of the transactions leading to failed trades. Fix it.

These are but a handful of examples where algorithmic knowledge is useful. There are more. Without algorithmic knowledge you'll simply be rediscovering everything on your own, making up new things that don't make sense, and struggling to stay useful to your team.

There are programming tasks that clearly don't require it. Most web development jobs for SMEs are competing on price with other contractors for a commodity resource: time. For those jobs a pragmatic knowledge of the programming language, tools, and libraries is sufficient: the problem you're solving is valuable but low-effort where time is of the essence. The faster you can pop out a web app and move on to the next one the better.

These things belong to the same class of skill: programming. However I think algorithms are still foundational because even in the latter case performance and correctness still come up in less critical areas: time to first paint, real-time updates, etc. Even a cursory understanding of the difference in magnitude between O(n) vs O(n²) is useful if you understand that using the right data structure will solve 90% of your problems.

> Once you understand the syntax of programming

Syntax is trivial. semantics are what matter. Take Hy as an example: it's a lisp syntax. But a Hy program is only a Python program. ReasonML takes this idea even further allowing programmers to work in whatever local syntax they find useful.
I love it...is there something similar to this with specifications taken down a notch which would help decrease the price a little bit?
Apple practically invented the concept of "planned obsolescence". They are also the people who pioneered the idea of non-removable batteries in laptops and phones, and they are so antagonistic to people repairing their hardware that they invented extra pain-in-the-ass screws. Let's not hold them up as some sort of beacon of environmental stewardship, ok?
Nope, I live in the world that most other people do (in the US).
Statistically ranking professional soccer leagues
The study makes broad claims about physical health but was conducted by psychologists.

Also, the heavy metals in vape liquid and the spiking addiction rates in teenagers and children beg to differ with their conclusions.
This does happen now. Very few countries have a shortage of landfill space now so there's no pressure to build even bigger ones that would fit everything.

Litter is a separate issue but kpods are not a type of waste that typically gets littered (unlike soda cans, etc.)
Decided to use data from FiveThirtyEight to rank professional soccer leagues from around the world.
I'm curious to read a source to support this. Seems wrong to me.
Not to mention that we don't even know if general intelligence exists. All we know is that mental abilities tend to correlate, but not why they tend to correlate. And if you think about designing machines, in general, the idea of general intelligence is utterly ridiculous. Does a fast car have general speediness? Of course not, it has dozens or hundreds of discrete optimizations that all contribute in some degree to the car being faster.
> It boggles my mind why anyone would use MailChimp.

I've had similar bad experiences with MailChimp and Mandrill. Their customer support is very defensive over both technical and account issues, even when you've already done the work of identifying the problem for them.

People continue to use MailChimp because of its marketing halo. They even had a flattering New York Times feature in 2016.

Luckily most emails we send are transactional so new projects are able to use AWS SES, Postmark, or SendGrid.
Document DBs are like blockchain projects - overhyped and worse than existing solutions for nearly every use case. Why do ostensibly smart engineers keep falling for this stuff?
At this point I'm happy enough with JSONB that, even as someone who wants to try new things, I'm finding it hard to justify trying out MongoDB.

My SAs seem cautiously willing to try it, but I won't put them through the work of learning how to manage it unless I can find a clear advantage over Postgres+JSONB.
Maybe, maybe not? Zuckerberg bought a dozen houses so no one would document his activity. I don't use facebook and use an adblocker so no one would document my activity. The medium is different, but it's the same concern.
This reads like a snl skit, where they keep repeating "they did it themselves". Next scene, alien archeologists: "huh, each human in the house apparently caused this 10000-year-before-degrading-polymer to be produced for deadpans and looks at the camera a beverage!" Another team: "Ooooooh we found a lot of those in giant sea creatures carcasses!" Together: "They did it themselves!"
wow. why would anyone want this? in a production environment you want tight control over software versions, not surprise updates.
My takeaways:

1) MongoDB Atlas would work well here: it’s Mongo hosted on a cloud provider of your choosing managed by the people that make it.

2) a DBA, even a noSQL one*, is worth every penny. (I don’t mean this to put down noSQL DBAs just that it’s good to have someone dedicated to managing them and that a DBA versed in the administration and upkeep of a relational system could retain pretty quickly to help get the most out of a noSQL one)
>are just as convenient. Hell, I grid my coffee by hand and brew it one cup at a time with one of those conic filters and it still takes only 6-7 minutes.

It takes about two seconds to pop in a k-cup, maybe 20 more every N cups to fill up water. Also allows for different grounds to be used on a per cup basis.

Convenience and speed is the entire reason these things exist.
Personally speaking, cold brew is far more convenient than even K-Cups.

Throw coffee + water into a big jar (~2 quarts), leave in the fridge for 12-hours. Filter, and you have ~1.7ish quarts of cold-brew coffee.

2-quart mason jars are like, $10 for a 6-pack.

https://www.walmart.com/ip/JARDEN-HOME-BRANDS-68100-Ball-6Pa...

Cold-brew in one Mason Jar, pour / filter into a 2nd jar. Heck, do 2 or 3 different flavors at once.

Get a pour-over filter holder (ceramic or glass works well in my experience):

https://www.target.com/p/melitta-sr-pour-over-cone-coffeemak...

And then get a bunch of Coffee Filters, usually $2 for ~100 of them. Bam. Cold Brew and its cheap as all heck too. Works on all kinds of coffee and tea in my experience.

Just batch it all up in one go, and you have enough coffee for the whole week. If you like it warm, put it in the microwave. The cold-brew process reduces the bitterness overall, so you get a different taste. But I prefer higher flavor and less bitterness that comes from the cold-brew process.

Nothing beats the convenience of cold brew. And you can use high-quality coffee with this method (K-Cups don't necessarily taste as good IMO. Less time for the coffee to infuse the flavor compared to traditional coffee making).

-------

Other tips:

1. Use a scale to measure coffee. Put the mason jar on the scale, and dump coffee into it until you reach your appropriate amount for your recipe. Somewhere in the order of 1-to-15 coffee-to-water ratio. (1750g of water to 120g of coffee. Varies per coffee you use however, so do it to taste). Water is 1-gram to 1-milliliter, 1kg to 1-liter. The Metric System is defined by the weight / volume of water, so its easy if you use Metric measurements. Scales are easier to use than measuring cups IMO. Scales mean fewer things to clean, while delivering more precision in measurements.

2. Mason Jars are standardized. Buy 3rd party caps, such as "Recap" (from https://www.recapmasonjars.com/ ) to make Mason Jars more usable. Both Wide-mouth and Standard-mouth jars are too wide in my experience, so "narrowing" the mouth with a Recap plastic top makes the pouring experience far better. The reason why I like Recap is because they use Rubber Gaskets to ensure a strong seal (a lot of random Amazon crap doesn't have a Gasket, and you get leaky coffee all over your pants if you use them).

3. Use high-quality filters to make the purest water possible. Coffee reacts to a lot of things in water, so its exceptionally important to filter as well as possible.
High Stakes, Hard Certs: Deciding to Take the AWS CSA: Pro Exam  Re:Invent
It should be noted that John quit the company in 1997 and sold his idea for $50,000; so him speaking quite openly about his thoughts make sense.

Off topic:
I think we've tipped over to the other side of the "convenience/humanity" pyramid. We climbed to the top some years ago where the lack of excess convenience gave us the opportunity to make things our selves and interact with other people face to face (which I think are very important human qualities) while being comfortable. Now we are sliding down the convenience side of the pyramid, unable to grasp what is important and fundamental. We are literally snowballing (ie obesity epidemic).

Someone made a comment a few weeks ago from the Ansel Adams LA photos HN post, in regards to how thin people were back then, that really stuck out to me: there have been hundreds of small improvements that probably all add up together in terms of calories saved. e.g. power steering, escalators, elevators, transportation replacing walking or biking, etc.

Back to the coffee pods:
I don't get why people like to spend money on inferior experiences. My philosophy is if you're spending money on something you wont enjoy, you're wasting your money and your time. I'd rather spend more on something that provides some form of fulfillment. I cant blame those who don't have the opportunity to have something better.
Isn't it supposed to optimise resource usage towards needs .. rather than waste them, running the environment in the process?
Can someone clear this up (preferably if you've worked with the FB API):

when NYT published that spotify and netflix have accessed to private messages, isn't that simply for them to do a POST call for sharing a tv show or song?
Part of the problem is that there's a multiple day reflection time that makes things complicated for sweeping across the sky. It's certainly solvable but with a minimum 26-140 hour (100-500 au round trip) lag between firing the laser and then receiving the signal, we'd need to observe each swept area of the sky for a week or two at a time to see the return blip.

I'd also then guess that a radar setup instead of visible light might work better, but that's also got resolution issues and would need a gigantic and incredibly sensitive receiver to start picking things up.

Space based systems for doing all this would probably work better since they wouldn't have to contend with the rotation of the earth itself, but it'd still be hard.
In aggregate it seems pretty clear the science is in for living a healthy life: get enough sleep, exercise, don't eat sugar.

It's obviously more complicated than that, especially at the individual level, but if you aren't hitting those three you're missing out on some serious quality of life improvements (both in the short term and long term).
> You can see this in the way we mix up terms like "dependency" and "addiction".

I don't believe many people have an issue with dependency. Nor do they have any issue teasing apart the two concepts. We do not have qualms with someone who is dependent on an insulin pump, tetanus shots, or HIV medication.

These days most fair people also wouldn't have issues with someone being dependent on marijuana, for example.

So I think the concepts are quite clear in people's minds.

When talking about an epidemic of vaping, people aren't worried about dependency. We're worried about addiction.

Is it, strictly speaking, possible for someone to have a healthy, beneficial relationship with nicotine? Sure. But the trouble is that nicotine doesn't give anyone a choice. You're going to be addicted whether it's good for you or not. That's the issue.

The reality is that human history is filled with death and misery caused directly by substance abuse. And we can see that history reflected in our public consciousness and policies.

And I believe that is rightfully so. I'm happy to agree with you in theory, that we should take a measured approach to substances to view their objective benefits. But reality makes that metered approach difficult.

Because the reality is that we have no real treatments for addiction. Which means we live in a world where a large percentage of people are addicted to substances they probably wouldn't want to be on if given the choice. And of those people, most will have degraded quality of life, some will commit violence against others, and some will die.

So in this world we live in today, I can't fault people for having prejudice against addictive substances. And in many ways I view that prejudice as helpful.

I certainly don't agree with the way we've waged war on drugs (at least in America). But I don't disagree with the reasons, and I don't view a prejudice against addictive substances as "knee-jerk" but rather a well informed policy birthed from a long human history of pain and suffering at the hands of these chemicals.

(P.S. Re: the war on drugs; the crux of the issue is that we demonized not only the chemicals but also the victims of the chemicals. It is the former that I have no qualms with. It is the latter that has lead the war to perhaps cause more harm in itself than the chemicals ever did. But I'm really not trying to incite a discussion on those topics.)