skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Show HN: SirixDB – versioning through efficient snapshotting
I've already posted yesterday, but I'd really love to get comments, any kind of questions, suggestions and help would be greatly appreciated as it's an Open Source project of mine (and was for others during my studies at the University of Konstanz 6 years ago).

Since then I spent countless ours to bring forth the idea of a versioned storage system, especially well suited for analytical tasks for timd-varying data.

Especially I'd love to discuss what documentation you need, which next steps are necessary (JSON, Cloud...), API additions or changes...

I've updated the README quiet a bit, such that the set up of the asynchronous, RESTful HTTP(S) Server is easier :-) however I could use some help with the Docker stuff.

http://sirix.io
> Our efforts to hide from the government ultimately hinders our progress as a society. Wouldn't it be better to reduce the government and/or make it more transparent?

Do you not recognize the false dichotomy in your words? Why not do all three?
Key features are:

- log-structured storage system with copy-on-write semantics especially well suited for SSDs (random reads, writes are batched and synced to disk when a commit is issued)

- implements a novel versioning algorithm called sliding snapshot, which balances read/write-performance and has other beneficial characteristics. We also implement full, incremental and differential versioning at the page-level

- stores hashes of the page-fragments in parent pointers in our main hash array based trie structure in the indirect pages as in ZFS. In the future these can be used to validate the integrity of the whole resource

- compression of each page, as well as encryption in the future

- for each XDM/XML-node in our on-disk structure we optionally store the descendant-count, the child-count as well as a hash of the content

- a diff algorithm, which uses our stable node-identifiers and optionally hashes for comparisons of node-pairs in different revisions

- a RESTful, asynchronous, temporal API written with Vert.x in Kotlin

- several temporal XPath axis extensions, which could also be used for JSON in the future

- several XQuery functions to open, diff, commit... a resource

- opening revisions of resources either by an ID or via a given timestamp. In case of the given timestamp the revision is searched by binary search and either the revision is found or the revision, which is closest to the given point in time is opened
Musk is trying to solve the transit problem of people making over 200k a year- Maintain the standard of absolute luxury and privacy provided by the car, while reducing the concentration required to drive and the time it takes to be stuck in traffic.
SHOW HN: Drive-CLI~Get ability to access Google Drive without leaving terminal
Lazlo Bock, who held a similar position at Google (head of HR) doesn’t seem to have had his own Wikipedia page until the publication of his book in 2015 (the coincidental timing suggests either people didn’t take note of him until the book, or his PR people helped get the Wikipedia article going).

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:History/Laszlo_Bock
This is good, but needs a year tag (2016 at a guess, since it seems to be from the 33rd iteration, and now we're on the 35th?)
Larry's first day with the board: "Let's introduce audits to catch drivers tuning their cars!"
Tech Isn’t Coming to Save Us
> Sometimes it looks like the Silicon Valley is trying to solve transit problems either against the laws of physics and economics or, alternatively, ignoring solutions that were there already in the 1800s.

The problem is that many American cities, including those in Silicon Valley, would need to be torn down and rebuilt for European- or Japanese-style transit to make sense. Everything is very spread out. Most people in London or Paris or Tokyo live within a short walking distance of a train station. In cities like LA, many people could walk over a mile from their house and only see other houses.

Because everything is so spread out, we would require many stations in suburban residential neighborhoods or nobody would have a station within walking distance of their home. However, those stations would only be useful to the small number of people who live in those neighborhoods because nobody else would have a reason to go there. It's hard to imagine those stations would get enough ridership to make economic sense.

So we are stuck with transit restricted to downtown areas, and if you want to go downtown or leave downtown you need a car. The Boring Company is attempting to recognize that reality and solve the "last mile problem" by turning cars themselves into public transit. It will be pretty cool if it works.
So, what exactly happened there?

Where were the signals going after the cables have been cut?
This was the plan in Houston, too — allocate the center median for future rail. But later politicians and voters decided that it was faster and cheaper to just pave over the planned railroad rights-of-way.

When HOV lanes were first built in Houston, they were designed to eventually be converted to light rail. I bet it never happens.
I thought uuid-ossp was just a bunch of utilities around uuid parsing and generation. It shouldn’t need anything special from the OS.

https://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.4/uuid-ossp.html
> Is this even a problem? People are given an opportunity to do something and then they do it. That's way better than new roads going unused, isn't it?

It's a problem insofar as building more roads is often sold as a way to resolve traffic problems. When traffic expands to fill all available roads, this solution is an expensive way to not fix anything.

There are probably more useful options, and faster ways to waste money, available to polities.
Shameless post of a little shell I've been working on: https://github.com/nixpulvis/oursh. It aims to be support a POSIX and modern language.

And some writeups, if you're into shells:

- https://nixpulvis.com/ramblings/2018-07-11-building-a-shell-...

- https://nixpulvis.com/ramblings/2018-10-15-building-a-shell-...
Like "cheap" energy from carbon emissions from coal, oil, and gas? If you mention subsidies for EVs, must mention the MUCH larger and historically MASSIVE subsidies all polluters have been given by dumping their garbage into our atmosphere for free.
Based on what I've seen, rust really can be just as fast.

D and Nim are a bit more iffy since they have built in GC. It can be turned off, but at that point you lose a major selling point over C++, memory safety.
yes but that’s also what makes it regressive
The shitty metaphor of tightening your belt at home extended to government has done a lot of damage, and that metaphor is used by politicians to look "responsible" to people who don't understand.

Unless you really go whole-hog on the metaphor: if the son sells apples to the dad to make a living, and the dad decides to cut back on apple buying, then the son loses his income. Then the son can't buy the cucumbers the dad was selling him, and the dad is even worse off. There is no-one outside the house.
Twister's definitely not as good. I play storm though, so it's still a bonkers card.
Here's the link: https://github.com/drupol/phptree
People feel that incentive very differently. If the 101 is a $5 toll road during rush hour it barely changes my habits. In fact, it might actually encourage me to go in earlier because I expect traffic to be better. The cost of time spent in traffic already outweighs any congestion charge - for me.

There are, however, a lot of people for whom that $50 more in weekly commute costs, would be financially deadly and almost unavoidable.

It's easy for me to advocate for congestion charges; they clearly benefit me. Those who make a lot less than I do might feel very differently.
I agree but I'd like to add that in my opinion "successful" is probably quite risky to use in general, meaning that there are multiple levels (e.g. successful for yourself, for the company/government, for the investors/people, for the future maintainability, etc...) and timelines (e.g. now, in 1 year, in 10 years, ...). For example Stephen Elop can probably be considered "successful" as having managed to be CEO of Nokia for a while, but not the same could be said for the company itself (not sure about its investors)?

In any case I think that it would be safe to say that sociopaths have at least the embedded advantage of being "quicker", as they most probably ponder less than other people about in/direct consequences of their actions.
> Where did they get a shaft encoder with over a million counts per rev?

The article says they put the encoder directly on the motor, before gearing it down. So the effective resolution after gearing is magnified. But the encoder moves much faster accordingly, hence the need for higher speed / fpga decoding.
Nice use of the Python http module. Never looked into the function before tbh (didn't expect the server to be running in the shell though). But just did using `funced` (which I just discovered in the changelog, nice feature as well).
Public transport in London is incredibly good, I'm always amazed. But then it's NOT run by 5 competing companies that couldn't care less about linked up journeys.
Let's see how lithium mining will do then.
Show HN: Tripetto – Conversational forms and surveys hosted on your terms
Yeah, I was thinking that too but I look at Hacker News daily and at least once a week a coworker bugs me about using Fish. So it's not like the idea or thought is new to me. In particular this one was weird because I was not only thinking about Fish but checking specifically for an upgrade which I've never cared much about before.
Terrifying, indeed. I'm guessing all the "great" dictators of history had similarly grandiose, hubristic visions disconnected from the reality of human nature. I wonder if there's a biological component, e.g. how some sociopaths have dysfunctional parts of the brain. Add P.T. Barnum's axiom, and it's easy to see how murderous, authoritarian empires rise.
In the Old World we have public mass transit. One vehicle can transport a thousand commuters, and it does not need to be stored in the most desired area of the city for the duration of a working day.

If you include London in "the Old World," it has the same horrible freeway congestion problems every other city does. Being European doesn't change the laws of physics.
I live in London and commute 10 miles each way daily. It takes me ~45 minutes in rush hour. Driving the same distance is, in the middle of the night, 30-40 min (in rush hour you can be stuck simply until it's over). Total cost is also lower at 2000 pounds a year for round trips on my route (which would cover only insurance and gas at best).
Also, I haven't taken a bus to work, ever. Tube serves 5 million passengers a day and whilst sometimes crowded, seems to be scaling pretty well.
Transit works better if it is where people are going rather than where it is convenient to build - for example, downtown Falls Church VA instead of the freeway median. Building densely around the stations can drive ridership. See: Tokyo, Hong Kong, Singapore. Of course, building in more congested areas is more expensive.

Freeway median transit is no panacea (though better than nothing).
If we paved every square inch, traffic wouldn't go to infinity. It's pretty rare to go driving for no reason. Country roads don't have rush hour.

It seems reasonable to assume that latent demand per capita is fixed, but at a level too high for a city to accommodate without destroying its density advantages.
If you’re keeping a balanced portfolio of assets and the price of one goes up, you sell to rebalance, not buy.
>There's really no way to change the look and feel of Windo-- I mean Mac OS-- I mean Elementary OS

Gosh, yeah -- how could a modern OS possibly hope to compete when you can't change how it looks?
The EU isn't a free market when it comes to agricultural produce at all, thanks to the CAP (Common Agricultural Policy)[1].

E.g. just in the last year[2] central planning for how much quantity of sugar beets each country could produce was finally phased out, with the Dutch expecting in production of up to 25% as a result[3].

This was one of the grand bargains of the EU. In exchange for the likes of France, Spain etc. joining the union they wanted guarantees that these politically sensitive sectors of their economy wouldn't be subject to real competition.

So production in countries like The Netherlands is artificially low since a combination of quotas and other central planning restricts production.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Agricultural_Policy#Equ...

2. http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_MEMO-17-3488_en.htm

3. https://www.dutchnews.nl/news/2017/01/dutch-sugar-cooperativ...
There is also question of externalities. Building roads is not without hidden costs. Splitting communities in cities, making distances to travel longer because adding places for streets and parking places spreads infrastructure, air pollution killing people, lack of movement killing people, noise pollution, ugliness etc.

I really like Dutch approach. Take away some space from cars in order to build biking infrastructure. I live second year in Netherlands and I love it.
Rust also has a saner module system that makes incremental builds much quicker. They're still pretty slow, but not as agonizingly slow as a clean build.
FEELREAL Announces Pre-Release of Next Generation Multi-Sensory Mask for VR
I used to make websites likewise (html boilerplate, css links and script tags at the bottom of body). I liked the no frills simplicity of it. But years ago I switched to using frameworks and don't think I would go back. Yes I could implement my sites in vanilla js and frankly it would be fun! But I would spend too much time reinventing the structure I get ootb with frameworks.
Wow, I can see why the author spent 300 hours on this. All 50 points have nice graphs to support the claims and is summarized with 5 points at the end of the article. Good read in my opinion.
In 2019, More Heavily-Funded Startups Will Succumb to Premature Scaling
The very first function on that link is for generating uuid v1s, which require the mac address...
This is incorrect.

Austerity can involve tax increases, spending cuts, or combinations of the two. It’s not limited simply to spending cuts.

That said, it very much matters what “kind” of austerity one engages in, as research indicates that tax increases and spending cuts have different respective effects on an economy.
It's opportunity cost that kills it. Building more roads is a lousy investment for the money spent.
Ask HN: Why does the Signal Protocol use so many keys?
After reading through a cursory summary of the signal protocol[1], I'm wondering why it uses so many keys? I understand the sentiment behind using various keys (i.e., for sessions, chaining, short-term/long-term keys) but does any of this feel like a bit overkill?

[1] https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/121304/how-does-the-signal-protocol-used-by-whatsapp-work
There's a bit of a Naked Emperor situation going on right now. Since Chinese manufacturers can make passable proxies (counterfeits), most people don't notice them from across the table and under two sleeves. Among people who do notice, most of them don't care. Among people who do notice and care, there's still a bit of nervousness about the whole thing because they know that if everyone using (knowingly or unknowingly, e.g. because they were sold one) proxies got called out, they'd be afraid of the number of people who'd be disqualified and it would undermine a lot of faith in the secondary market.

The truth of the matter is, a lot more people are playing counterfeits at tournaments than everyone'd be ready to admit. Hell, a pro player got disqualified recently for playing with one, despite pros getting their cards from sponsors.
GPU vendors refused to open source their drivers and firmware long before HDCP was a thing.
The reason encoders go on the motor and not at the far end of the gears is because inexpensive gearing has backlash, which will cause the motor to dance back and forth to keep the encoder at a specific point.

So how are they solving the gearing problem? Harmonic drives are expensive and patented.
Why are roads an elastic demand but it seems that other transportation methods, like light rail, aren't? I've seen cases of quite a few expensive lines and rail-stops that have lower than expected utilization, but it seems like new highway roads and lanes get immediate use. Is it down to the fact that there is simply more "freedom" with regards to roads over rail?
Hacking Christmas Lights for Fun and Mischief
Louis Theroux among those hit by Twitter hack exposing security flaw
Your cities are built for mass transit. Ours are not, owing to the enormous landmass we utilize in the ways that we do. This is not a simple problem to solve by just adding more trains and bus units.
Because the damn lights keep breaking every year and are not user serviceable unless you happen to have access to a garage and know how to remove the bumper to access the headlights and swap them.

I can just bring my car to the dealer and avoid dealing with all of this crap.
Yes but as I mentioned in my comment for ssh there are several sections that each explain a different use case which you can jump to via /^[^ ]
That's Rainbow Warrior 2, after the French bombed the first one

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinking_of_the_Rainbow_Warrior
The truly unpredictable UX is when a noob tries to paste a youtube url into their shell and gets a bewildering error message about a wildcard (and the error message carrot doesn't even point at the guilty wildcard!) That is very far from the behavior the user was predicting, unless they've been around the shell block a few times already (in which case they could probably make due in a shittier shell anyway. Is fish optimizing for 'user friendly' or 'user friendly for experiences users'?)
I would say the story is less about a specific card, which is only used as a focusing example, and about the managed economy of MTG cards in general.

It's not that they need to explain the rules of the game, it's that they are imparting some of the value on the basis of rarity, and some on the basis of it being a flower or dragon, when in reality it's a function of rarity and utility in the game. They do touch on this in the article, as they note the power of some of these rare cards (equating it to buying extra aces in poker), so it's not that they haven't explained it, it's that they chose poor wording in that specific sentence which could cause confusion or misunderstanding.

It's only worth mentioning because the story went to lengths to explain the reason how the market functions as it does for these cards, and then throws in extra attributes into a sentence either as a mistake or because they wanted to use words such as "flowers" and "dragons" to impart something to the reader (familiarity? Oddness of those in a game? I dunno).

It's unfortunately one of the few problems Planet Money suffers from that has persisted over the years. They'll do a great job of explaining some topic, and in their wrap-up they dumb it down a tad too much or choose form over function in their prose and actually hurt some of the understanding they've built over the last 15-30 minutes by introducing new ambiguity.
It kind of does. But only to a certain point; in some cases you're just shuffling growth around the region rather than stimulating new regional growth.

A lot of road capacity is needed, but a lot of it is also purely wasteful and entirely caused by social choice.

E.g., the parking lot for the store needs to hold the Black Friday parking demand ->

the store is now too far from the street to walk home with bags ->

everyone drives to the store and there is congestion ->

the street must be widened to accommodate the congestion -->

the street is now too wide to cross or walk along safely -->

everybody drives, etc.

The suburbs are now vastly overbuilt as a result. Nassau County is one of the wealthiest counties in the country yet has been fiscally monitored by New York State since 2000 because it cannot afford the lifecycle cost of infrastructure or services for such a low-density, sprawly environment. And this is despite very high property taxes, to the point where the population is starting to decline.
- Nags to install apps on mobile (ex: opening reddit on mobile)

- Videos autoplaying on some news sites

- Cookie prompts

- And the worst: overlays that appear on scrolling
Even if the kids wanted to, letting them play in the street would be unthinkable to contemporary parents. Trusting drivers to pay attention would be foolish.
What do you mean by "data-first"? What other forms could a JS NN architecture take?
People prefer to drive, so they do that first. Public transportation functions the exact same way, so long as there is no more road capacity. There are countless examples of new light rail stations spurring new development in the area.
in the healthcare space really helps. great detail for this question. honestly, not many people are good at asking questions.

you need an expert, someone that doesn’t need to ask this question.
Some might contend that San Francisco has all of those problems addressed. There is adequate public transportation, a livable minimum wage, access to health care, and free education for all.

It may be worth considering how all the issues you so correctly and wisely identify have been addressed in the place that seems to continue to exemplify the worst of the crisis. Perhaps they're all addressed improperly or inefficiently. Perhaps trying to address the issues is simply too new to have had any impact at all. Perhaps the solutions are so successful that they've drawn people from elsewhere in need of help, making the crisis falsely appear to be ongoing. Perhaps the critical services you point to are insufficient somehow.

What are your thoughts on explaining this apparent conundrum? I'd very much love to hear! I want to understand.
Nassau county isn’t a city, so the state pays almost all of its major road costs on its behalf.
If you're speaking to Angular... is MS using this for internal applications, or public facing sites? I know they're heavy in the development, but what MS uses internally, and what Consulting arms use isn't always the same.

Personally, couldn't hate Angular more, I worked with it enough and unlikely to do so again.
A UUIDv1 contains the host's MAC address as a component. And the uuid-ossp extension (or rather, the OSSP's libuuid, which it uses) does indeed read said MAC address when building UUIDv1s: https://github.com/sean-/ossp-uuid/blob/master/uuid_mac.c

Keep in mind, if you're using uuid-ossp rather than just relying on Postgres's built-in gen_random_uuid() function, it's very likely because you want to generate UUIDv1s instead of UUIDv4s (as they're the only two types of UUIDs that see much use.) So this functionality is pretty essential to the extension—a version of the extension without it wouldn't be worth much.
Decentralized Key Management System Design and Architecture
> Austerity is a political-economic term referring to policies that aim to reduce government budget deficits through spending cuts, tax increases, or a combination of both.

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

Those who favor austerity will say that the austerity laid groundwork for Portugal's success, those who have opposing view say that it only helped.
Does this mean that a company should use somebody who owns a lot of shares during bad times (when some drastic measure is needed to bring the company back into profitability), and normal paycheck-people during normal times (to ensure that no big risk is taken without reason)? (genuinely asking)
In my experience that claim is very true before you fire up your profiler. But once you've optimized your program for a bit the profile gets a lot flatter.