skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Some intuition behind random walks
The second two books definitely approach it more closely.
That is almost surely true at extreme scale. The interesting question is whether that's true for 0.1%, 1%, or 5% of companies. (I think it's on the lower end of that range somewhere, provided the 5% scale cases are willing to be smart about their hybrid strategy.)
If he was not Canadian and the 2 countries weren't on good terms, he may have gotten the death sentence in 2014 instead of just 15 years.

Even 1/4kg (let alone 200kg) of meth is a death sentence in most Asian countries.

Canada choosing to enforce illegal unilateral sanctions against Iran means no more kid gloves for Canadian citizens.

I hope it was worth it...
Blockchain Through a Legal Lens [pdf]
Interesting. I have the same, but aliases to `.` instead.

alias ..='cd ../'
alias ...='cd ../../'
alias ....='cd ../../../'
alias .....='cd ../../../../'
But this doesn't apply to just tourists, this applies to all foreign visitors including the business people who drive Chinese economy.

If the business people start avoiding China, there impact on it's already slowing economy would be devastating.
pretext
Amazing. I started this 10+ years ago, called WishIKnew. It was a project to learn Rails. I learned Rails, but never launched it.

Glad to see it's real - with curation, I think it could be hugely valuable. I'm 42 and wonder what people who were 50 or 60 would tell me they wished they knew at 42 as I don't have a lot of folks those ages in my life.
News we get about China is heavily biased, and it taints our perspective.

There's people who won't travel to the US because they hear daily news of someone getting shot there, and I think that's on a similar position on the reasonable/ridiculous scale.
The whole damn page you're commenting on exists because those APIs are broken by OEMs. You schedule execution, the alarm doesn't trigger. Did you look at the page before commenting? :(
MongoDB is competing with AWS. Atlas actually runs on top of AWS - Mongo is capturing the spread between their per-instance charge and the AWS charge (or GCE/Azure). What this article ignores is that Atlas is actually competing quite well and has significant adoption. The people who run MongoDB are not dumb, they will try to turn the hosting in to a commodity before Amazon can turn the DB in to a commodity.
20th-century altered the very fabric of us all
even bought a farm (don't ask)

I know you said don't ask, but I guess there is a good story there. so why the farm? :P
Shit like this happens right here at home, when you’re a black man.
It’s interesting how new accounts get created to defend China every time a negative piece about China shows up.
people really don't like this line of argument on HN. I am curious to find out why.
Your account is three minutes old and this is your first (and only) comment. Additionally, your grammar indicates that you’re not a native English speaker.

I’m not typically a tinfoil hat type of person, but I, at least, have a heavy amount of skepticism towards your comment. Bluntly, it reads like it was taken directly from some pre-approved list of PRC propaganda.
I can't tell the difference between notes at zoom 4. Is that typical? Can anyone still tell the difference at zoom 12?
I work at a company with one of the catchy "changing the world" slogans that everyone likes to make fun of, but I actually feel like we are making an impact.

We provide tools for educators to get more actionable data about their students and then facilitate conversations between educators and parents, and it's a pretty great combination. If even a few students end up with a better life because of a teacher being able to reach out more easily, then I'd say that's meaningful.

If that sounds neat, check out https://schoolstatus.com
Remote work is definitely not for everyone and you need some time to adapt and find your own pace. The harder for me is regarding the physical health. I find it hard to stick to what I use to do since I'm nomad.
> But when I finally went there in September, I was surprised as all the internet fear mongering was wrong.

You're not going to be able to collect enough relevant anecdotes on a brief visit to be able to make a meaningful statement about much beyond your own personal experiences. You can't see or experience much as one person, and in a place like the Soviet Union, things will be hidden from you.
Pascal does branching in a similar manner.

Volta / Turing does branching per-PC now, but it is opt-in optional. In any case, I expect Volta / Turing to prefer the old SIMD model of compute.

The only reason Volta / Turing supports per-PC branching is to handle some multi-thread communication issues. The execution units are still SIMD, so you take a heavy penalty going to the per-PC model.

PS: I haven't actually programmed Volta/Turing, its just my understanding from the white paper.
No, I work in a gigantic company on the frontend of applications used for businesses to pay for their services. I could not care less about what I'm working on to be honest, at least the pay is good.
CIDER's Orchard (Clojure)
There is lots of juice in Oracle SQL that even PostgreSQL is lacking.

GraalVM would never exist with weekend developers.

Top level JIT and almost non stoping GC algorithms don't get implementated with late nighters.
Agreed. The description on the top-level repo page needs to be line 1 in the Readme.
P.S. The "safe" job might not be as safe as it seems. Stuff happens. Acknowledging this reality and being prepared to adapt and move on is crucial, and much harder if you're complacent and stay put based on the illusion of security. There's a huge opportunity cost in basing life decisions on risk avoidance.

As for "meaning", one can find purpose and merit in almost anything, it's more about mindset than circumstance!
I would concede that your arguments are all valid, unfortunately if we look at where most judges were employed before becoming judges the majority were the best-worst of the people in "every other group I mentioned". I think we will have to agree to disagree on this one, but I do appreciate your well thought out argument.
I get paid for it, thus it is meaningful.

Whether the result of my work is meaningful for me or someone else, is a different story. But on the smaller and bigger picture of the whole universe, everything we do is meaningless at some point, so who cares.
Hmm - I had no idea. I came across the distinction (philosophy/sophism) in Plato's work. I had the feeling that Sophism continued to be the normal term, without its modern pejorative sound, until the advent of christianity as the dominant ideology of the roman empire- certainly, I think the idea of philosophy as the love of (divine) wisdom is a sort of curtailment of the whole project, really only favourable to Platonists, Christians, or I guess Parimedeans- so I thought it's the kind of thing that Plato (and his school) would have put about.
And we should all switch to Esperanto.
'pay them forever' is not cost effective
I don't want to go to a country where I have to "avoid political talk."
>If programming services was decided to be a human right, and I was in the business of providing those services, I'd expect there to be a system in place to ensure my services meet the standard, and to ensure that I get paid for my work.

What if you get paid 25% of what you get paid right now because those in charge of regulating programming have determined that you have been getting paid too much?

What if those regulators have determined that your current documentation is insufficient to be paid for, and that you are now required to spend 25% more of your day on additional documentation requirements that do not actually improve the quality of your actual program?
Some feedback:

1. Registration form is too long. Lower the barrier to entry. Maybe only ask for email and username? Or just email with a default username?

2. Try lazy registration so the flow is:

- click advice

- enter advice

- hit submit

- get asked to login/register
GPU Programming is easier than AVX Programming on the CPU. That's why CUDA has become more popular.
Yeah, it's not for everyone and even for those who it's suitable for, there's a calibration period of at least a few weeks-months-years.

I also struggle to fit in personal goals like staying fit!
Deng Xiaoping, the Chinese leader who led China's market reform, had a saying along the lines of “hide your strength and bide your time”.

Xi Jinping appears to believe China's time has come and you're seeing the results: they're behaving like the authoritarian and petulant bullies that they've always been.

Personally I think this behaviour is gift. For too long we've been fed the narrative of China's 'peaceful rise' by people happy to make a quick buck from its gigantic market.

Now we're seeing China's true colors.

In the decades to come, making China a superpower will be looked upon as one of the most foolish things The West has ever done.
I dunno. I think you can find companies that are more or less sociopathic. And while the fast growing big ones are likely taking advantage of something, I don't really have ethical problem with what I do.

I know employed people who in past refused this or that job due to ethical considerations and who I am pretty sure that would not cheat. Cause they refused to cheat in the past.
That's not "meaningful", is merely necessary.
I work for a security company. I don't directly work on the products, but I support those who do. While, as others have commented, it's not like in 200 years people are going to be studying my work, I do believe I'm having a positive impact on the world. It's a positive impact that in some sense I may wish didn't have to exist ("wouldn't it be nice if we just all got along?" and nobody needed security?), but, nevertheless, it does.

On a day-by-day basis it's easy to feel disconnected from the end result of what I do, since it is several layers of abstraction away from the end customers, but sometimes the customers will tell stories about their experiences and how it saved their bacon after a fire burned down their datacenter, or let them secure a critical service that was being attacked, or discover a vulnerability in their system before it was exploited, and I remind myself that I'm getting just a small fraction of the stories that could be told. I don't go cruising through the customer database, but in my normal work activities, I encounter schools, non-profits, governments, charities, normal businesses, all sorts of people who individually may be getting just a bit of benefit from my work, but on the whole, it adds up to a lot. I also find this a good motivation to sometimes put in just that extra bit of polish on my work even without being asked or having an explicit bug tasked, which is typically technical rather than visual-design oriented so you may not see it or feel it, but you might feel the absence of it.

You may want to take a certain mercenary capitalistic "value-added" view to the whole thing, because it's often justified. Working for a grocery store chain IT may feel unexciting compared to the wild exploits you read about on HN, but you are helping people buy food efficiently and ultimately more cheaply than they could if all the grocery stores had no IT. This helps everybody, and particularly helps those on the margins, i.e., the poor. Scheduling software for the professional trades brings efficiency and services to people on the margin who otherwise couldn't afford them. Factory-specific software brings wealth to society as a whole as it increases the capabilities of factories and such to bring wealth.

And let's be honest, a lot of those wild startup stories either don't really pan out and end up just being a waste of money, or end up a net-destructive enterprise as they monetize via piling one more brick up in our self-created surveillance state for the purpose of squeezing a few more pennies out of a "customer".

In fact, there's a great case to be made that the "boring" jobs at least tend to average being a net good for society. The "exciting" jobs have a much larger range of impact, but there's a lot more of the net-negative work in there, too.
This of course depends on how central the app you are building is to your business and how long lifespan you expect. If it's your core product and you expect a lifespan of > 5 years, not getting tied in with a single cloud vendor is smart. Usually that implies some kind of stack where the highest level of abstraction is a set of containers or VMs.

But when for example doing software consulting for a company whose core product and business is not software I personally advocate the completely opposite approach: embrace your
cloud platform and use the services with biggest value-add (and coincidentally lock-in). PaaS-style services enable very small teams to deliver functionality very quickly and in a robust manner - and managed services allows for keeping them running very cost-efficiently.
Online retail isn't particularly meaningful. However, I enjoy the work and it pays well.
Software engineer in an online marketplace provider. In other words, I connect buyers and sellers. I find this meaningful for a variety of reasons, the most obvious (and previously stated numerous times) is that I provide for my family. But I also find meaning in getting the right product to the right person from the right seller: this gets us one step closer to the economic notion of perfect information so that the buyer can make the best decision for them. When everyone wins the world becomes marginally, even if ever so slightly, better.
The article talks about 2 other Candians who were arrested on dubious national security claims.

>Last month, Chinese authorities detained Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor, two other Canadians living in China, on suspicion of national security crimes. They highlighted Schellenberg’s case, and the prospect of putting him to death, shortly thereafter.
I would add to the primer text that you should be sincere, it’s already got a lot of less than helpful stuff in it...

“Don’t go bald, bald people aren’t happy.”
New Hacking Methods to Look Out for in 2019
Yup. The company I work for is creating solutions to help utilities better integrate renewable energy onto the electrical grid. The environmental benefits are huge and I get to work with some really cool tech
This almost certainly has nothing to do with changing Canadian behavior, it's about domestic politics. Canada/USA kicked one of ours, so we're going to kick 20 of theirs. They need to be seen to be doing it. The fact that it won't work and is counterproductive doesn't matter.
The meaningful aspect of my bootstrapped startup project is I believe that honest, trustworthy products improve the quality of peoples lives. Removing friction on teams so they can build products people can trust is what my tool does, so that's meaningful work to me.
That's true - I guess every industry has their version of HIPAA that can frustrate developers/stagnate projects.

I don't think that HIPAA or these other regulations are a bad thing, just that maybe the way that some (older, entrenched) management approaches how projects work with those regulations is poor.
Blender has a full game engine included in it, although it looks like it's getting cut with the next release: https://www.blender.org/features/game-creation/
Amazon has had a documented past of taking massively successful Open Source projects and adding their own bells and whistles to it and upselling them.

Amazon is the new Microsoft.
As a JavaScript developer... no.

I love the language and how expressive it is while it can also be very concise. Unfortunately, JavaScript work is typically relegated to entry level developers and 90s era business requirements. Since the business often believes this is lesser quality work the requirements around craftsmanship and quality are often irrelevant.

In my line of work quality is poorly understood. Code style, as in how to write code, is exceedingly important. Code style is basic literacy. This is a newb thing.

Actual quality is defined objectively outside the code. Does it execute quickly (performance)? Do blind people receive the same level of convenience and understanding from your product (accessibility)? Does the application fail frequently, leak data, or use a bunch of third party analytics (security)? Does the application have mountains of frameworks and dependencies (portability)?

Most places I have worked the developers are barely code literate and really don't give a shit about quality. They care about personal success (however they choose to define it) opposed to product success. That is extremely unfulfilling.
Ren Zhengfei’s first wife was Meng Jun (the mother of Meng wan Zhou), the daughter of the former Sichuan Provincial Vice Governor Meng Dongbo. Meng Dongpo served as deputy secretary general of the East China Military and Political Committee. Director of the Infrastructure Department of the Ministry of Metallurgy, Director of the Metallurgical Industry Department of Sichuan Province, Director of the Provincial Economic Commission, Secretary of the CPC Dukou Municipal Committee, deputy governor of Sichuan Province,etc
I think it can be fought on an individualist level but difficult as it goes against the grain with political objectives and nationalist motifs. It’s so deeply engrained - see 1985 UN speech by Jiddu Krishnamurthy. It was a real eye-opener but everyone goes back to normality the next day.

Tribalism is very active and impossible to get rid of in my view unless something totally disruptive happens (Alien invasion at which point we will engage in interplanetary tribalism).
there is no one way really. I just had enough of it and was lucky to have some money and timing on that flippa project. But I don't consider it just luck. I think of it as me being proactive because I have been browsing flippa type sites for years. So the key is: do something. anything. Even if small. But do it towards your goal.
Sure. I write code that implements features for a desktop application that is well known in its' niche domain. The code I write with my tens of colleagues is directly related to how thousands of professionals create new things throughout the globe.

Basically I write C++ that must provide mathematically correct end results, must not crash and must be fairly efficient.

It's a boring 9-5 job and there is nothing sexy about the field but I would find it very hard to call my work meaningless when I see the things the users of my employers application do.

As our requirements change I get to implement and learn new things.

As long as the end product provides concrete value, and/or there are new things for me to learn there is a definite meaning to what I do.
I know nothing about MongoDB pricing, but it’s possible that Amazon is taking a loss on DocumentDB to keep companies using solely AWS products, while MongoDB Inc. obviously can’t do that since they have no other revenue stream. So the competition might be both convenience and price vs features. Features sounds likely to lose that battle.
Hey thanks for the feedback. The registration form is a pain, I implemented SSO/oAuth with Google a few days ago in the hopes that more people would register.

Email and username is a good call, thanks. I had never thought about that kind of flow before, but that's interesting, encourage people to submit advice, then ask for registration. Think I might do that. Thanks!
Interestingly enough, we now have better ways of proving ownership that weren't possible back then: Get your dog microchipped and tattooed if you haven't already. They're far better ways of proving ownership than feelings.

Also, if I were there, I'd have snuck a treat into the court room. It's far more foolproof if I'd been able to condition the dog to expect treats by coming to me in a few 20 minute vists.

Also, does anyone have suggestions for international pet databases? My country doesn't have a national database.
What does Canada or the US have to do with the British and the opium wars?
The day RSS dies will be a sad one for my email inbox. I don't want to get all those updates by emails, and the RSS reader service I use works perfectly for my need.

It's also an easy system to deal with when automating, especially with systems like IFTTT, etc.
Other than multi-document transactions, many of the changes to MongoDB since 3.6 are to do with performance and scaling - this is AWS' bread and butter.

Something to consider is how many applications depends on cutting edge database features. Developers often consider a database an object persistence mechanism whose details are to be tidied away. See, for example, the emphasis on database portability in ORMs.

MongoDB's most effective enterprise offering is support, in my opinion. They know their database well, which can make a big difference if your company is heavily reliant on it.

I suspect for many users though, AWS support will be good enough. Presumably, that's the danger to MongoDB.
I'm claiming that the university administrations are beholden to external forces, and the external forces are to blame for the decline of the humanities. The university administration would rather not have any part of their university decline, obviously.
Maybe they're practising for something instead?
Conceptually, this is really appealing, though I agree with sibling comments that offering some grouping would ease browsing.

What I’m finding interesting is the metacommentary on what your userbase (which I’m presuming is mostly HN at the moment) looks like. The advice for teens and twenty somethings is wide-ranging and pretty good. Almost everything for folks in their thirties is pithy and reads like it was written by someone younger. (My own bias: haven’t checked past age 40). So, presumably, there’s not as many people commenting retrospectively on their 30’s.

Would be neat to track the delta between a subitter’s actual age and how old they’re willing to advise.
Scrum Master vs. Project Manager: Differences and Similarities
According to your link, the teacher was employed illegally. It's common for students and other people without work permits to be offered positions as English teachers where the only requirement is being born in North America. The employers usually gloss over the illegality or claim that the laws are not enforced. That's been true in the past, but as that teacher had to learn, it can change anytime.

So my generalized advice is to comply with the law instead of relying on lack of enforcement. They can still get you for "national security" reasons, but it's much less likely if you aren't a big fish.
I would not underestimate those two advantages. Even Microsoft and Google are getting outpaced by them overall. It might only be that Amazon competes with so many companies anymore that they choose the second and third place solutions.
Thanks! I wanted to name it something similar but all the good domains were taken, so instead I settled for a veiled The Office reference.

Trying to get contributions from older generations is tough, but would likely provide the best advice. I need to find a few media sources to submit to that target this age group.
Any dissent from within gets the dissenter grouped with the opposition?

The 116th congress is shaping up to be another round of Democrats snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.
> Open source projects cost generally the same as closed source projects.

https://www.linux.com/publications/estimating-total-cost-lin... (mind you, that's 2008 data. I couldn't find more recent estimates)

Mongo is quite unrepresentative here - not least, because they're selling the very same software (MongoDB) under both OSS and proprietary licensing! A better comparison in the database space would be e.g. PostgresSQL - the latest versions of which, BTW, are including "NoSQL"-focused features that make it quite competitive with the likes of MongoDB.
I believe Netflix and Apple use AWS, so I’m not so sure about that.
That's not a bad idea, thanks for the advice!