skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't think I've ever come across any written material on the internet that's better than Money Stuff. Matt Levine is a hero (and clearly very smart and measured in his thinking).
Tech Is Splitting the U.S. Workforce in Two
> Preferring a patch approach rather than a snapshot is like saying map(+)[1,1,1,1,1] != last([1,2,3,4,5]). I don't care.

You don't care as long as the difference is unobservable, but sometimes it is.
Your vision is only workable for software for which there are no security concerns. This might improve to the extent industry slowly moves away from utterly irresponsible technologies like memory-unsafe languages and brain damaged parsing and templating approaches and more or less the whole web stack. I wouldn't hold my breath though. And even software that's not cavalierly insecure will have security flaws, albeit at a lower rate.
The post is tongue-in-cheek, but agreed that it does come across rude if you don't read it as such.
I'm one of the authors. We are actually quite optimistic about Pijul's possibilities. In particular, there are a few niches where people either:

(1) do not understand Git, can't learn it, still need a VCS. I have a few industrial applications in mind, not necessarily related to code.

(2) understand Git very well, and have spent too many hours debugging their failed merges, non-associativity issues, complex rebases. These users would know enough about "git rerere", for instance, to find the model of conflicts slightly absurd. For them, Git has become a source of cost in the project, and costs need to be kept under control. Again, I have at least one open source project in mind, and a handful of industrial contacts related to these use cases.

(3) many people in academia, even in computer science, collaborate on their LaTeX papers using various combinations of Dropbox and emails. This is because they are "principles people" and like to understand the principles behind what they're using. If a tool seems too complicated, it looks suspicious. But anyway, I have written papers with Git before, the "fun" of using Git often fades away as the deadline approaches.

Given the very young age of Pijul, I see this picture, and the interest many people have shown in the project, as quite promising. However, unlike what your post may suggest, I don't see Pijul as fighting against Git. Ultimately, when Pijul is ready, the two tools could become quite complementary:

- use Git (with branches, but without merges) when you need a linear history and/or a Merkel tree of your content. Git is extremely efficient in disk usage and in speed of retrieving contents. Projects like "Software Heritage" are a good example of the perfect Git-but-not-Pijul user, storage of experimental data is another one ("I've done experiment X on day Y, the results were Z").

- use Pijul when you want to collaborate efficiently on text documents, and manipulate your repository in an extremely flexible way, handle conflicts sanely, while minimising your planning and maintenance costs. Pijul will probably never be as efficient as Git in terms of disk space, but could become quite competitive in terms of merge speed. Agile teams, academic papers, are good examples.
The motor industry needs independent, transparent data
ElRepo is a decentralized repository of culture based on libretroshare
Yes I am, because the default choice is idiotic, annoying and anti-social.

Setting your preference to autoplay may be irritating if you prefer it the other way, but you won't annoy your co-workers, leak any sensitive info, or wake up your SO before finding it in the wrong state. And the Firefox devs agree with me.

Could maybe add an option with Firefox sync to save browser settings if anyone really misses this "feature".
I remember going through lengths to make my old Atari ST look like a Mac. I installed the Monaco font and wrote a program, in assembly, to draw rounded corners on the screen like the Mac had. Now I sit on a MacBook Pro and I am trying to run Atari ST on it. Full circle.
Is there any documentation on the language? Is it something akin to Zig? [https://ziglang.org/]
we use it. we're a pretty big company too. like it.
Let's talk about South Korea:

"South Korea has the highest suicide rate in the world for children ages 10-19 and extremely high elderly (60+) suicide rates. For children, most suicides are caused by stress relating to education. Korean children have a school year of 11 months and often spend over 16 hours a day at school and at afterschool programs called hagwons."

https://bpr.berkeley.edu/2017/10/31/the-scourge-of-south-kor...

India: India has an average income of $2134 per person. Not per month, per year. It has 872 million people living below the poverty line. One quarter of the population lives on less than 60¢ per day.

So I'd respectfully suggest that there might be good, ahem, motivation to try your best to get good at STEM even if you don't find it particularly natural.
These have existed for decades as wax museums, the only difference is the style of photo that’s popular.
End to end encryption of all your chats by default. Telegram has you cross-device chats stored on their servers. This is not the case for Matrix (when they finally enable this) and e.g. Wire.

Telegram's "secret chats" don't solve anything because you need to convince everybody involved in secret chats to give up cross-device sync. The existence of the option doesn't solve anything if it isn't the default and comes at the cost of convenience. How many of your own chats are actually "secret"?
The transaction ordering you mentioned is sufficient if transactions are always retired in the order they begin, but it's not a necessary condition for even the highest transaction isolation levels. However, I don't think anyone has discovered a trick to getting high concurrent performance out of a database that strictly retires transactions in chronological order.

At the highest transaction isolation levels, you need to be able to perform a topological sort of the transaction dependency graph. That does require that the graph is acyclic, but doesn't preclude the DB engine from pretending a transaction that started later actually started earlier (or even had its first write chronologically earlier). For full transaction isolation, the DB engine just needs to be able to pretend transactions happened in a linear order, but that order isn't dictated by the chronological order of the first operation of each transaction. (It's not even constrained by the chronological order of the first write operation of each transaction in DBs that only track write-write conflicts.)

The easiest way to keep track of this consistency is some kind of monotonically increasing counter "timestamp" (or something like a vector of them in an asynchronous / distributed system ... Lamport vector clocks or similar), but this timestamp doesn't need to be identical to a transaction ID, and doesn't have to be unique. It's possible that most databases make unique transaction IDs moonlight as timestamps, but it's not a fundamental constraint.
The memory usage is just obscene. Maybe it doesn't matter with all the RAM we have, but I hate inefficiencies and looking at slack's resource usage just makes me sad.
no, government should pay in both cases as is the norm in most developed countries.
We use MS Teams.

It's always having to reconnect, the history doesn't work well, notifications are unreliable.

IT's just terrible IME
I read The Left Hand of Darkness last year. I found the names and place names quite tricky too, but it helped reinforce the alieness of the setting. Ursula's writing is so earnest and immersive. Rigorous world building coupled with veritably human characters made for a wholly engaging and pleasurable read.
Huawei case demonstrates importance of Free Software for security
> In Pijul, for any two patches A and B, either A and B commute, (in other words, A and B can be applied in any order), or A depends on B, or B depends on A.

This isn't exhaustive. What about the case where both patches A and B are worked on independently, and both depend on an original version of the codebase, let's call it P for parent.

A and B both diverge from P and therefore require a merge, or in git, a rebase. Over my years as a developer this scenario has caused approximately 90% of the issues with git. How does Pijul tackle it?
BSD still loves you long time
The whole 'sell before you build' theme is plastered all over this thread, as I expected. I think this originates from the whole lean/MVP school of thought but is sold in threads like these as though you can just create a 'coming soon' page with email sign up, wait for 1000 emails and then write your first line of code. In reality it is about building only what's necessary for a minimum viable product then ship and only add features which are demanded of you (i.e. adding value not speculating and building stuff no-one cares about). This does require some work/thought/assumptions up-front. It's not as easy as people make it out to be!
This is the same model of buying things on amazon too -- once you've bought once, it's easier to buy again. Why spend time going to another shop when you can just use amazon to buy multiple things.

This ease of use philospohy goes way back to the one-click patent. If I want DNS, why wouldn't I go to amazon, which has all my finance details, and a decent interface (and even API), rather than choosing another DNS provider, setting up my credit card, and having to maintain an account with them. So I choose DNS via AWS. Then I want a VPS, but why go to linode and have the overhead of another account when I could do lightsail instead?
How is this any different from mercurial?
One day nobody will care about this back and forth between EU politicians and they will finally pass a law that will destroy the internet as we know it. It's inevitable because we have to win every single time, they only have to win once. My point being: Harbours for creative and intellectual people will always be under fierce attack by the common fool, and they will always have to occupy a niche, hidden from the intolerant eye.
That's certainly one type of PE, but there are a lot of funds that after the LBO they hold onto the company (and charge them management fees).
> Assuming the money goes to alternatives, which it typically doesn't,

That's a different issue. But the money is there and it could and should be used in a productive manner.

> and moreover that there isn't a less regressive way to generate the same money,
> such as sales or income tax.

Sales and income tax don't discourage traffic jams. But if you want, sure you could send the income from congestion pricing to something else and use other taxes to fund alternatives.

> They can already do any of those things, if they were viable for them. You can
> save hundreds of dollars a year in fuel and vehicle maintenance by carpooling,
> and then everyone but the driver can read or text or work from the passenger's
> seat.

They can, but they don't. Everybody hopes someone else will be the first to do that so they don't have to. With a bit of push, you can encourage more people to do this and make life a lot easier for everybody.

> They haven't solved the problem because they haven't actually been tried.

Yes, they have been tried. There's a good reason why experts say that congestion pricing seems to be the only thing that works. With every other approach, traffic grows to fill the available space until you get massive traffic jams.

The US isn't the only country with this problem; many countries have it. Netherland has tried for years to solve it without congestion pricing by building more and wider roads, mass transit, zoning and whatever, and it's not working. Meanwhile, countries that have tried congestion pricing see it working. Congestion pricing is probably not a silver bullet that magically solves everything, but it might well be a vital ingredient to get people to actually use the alternatives.

The options are there, but too many people just aren't using them. Why they don't is a good question, but from the available evidence, it appears that congestion pricing provides the necessary push.
By having a mathematical theory of patches instead of a bunch of (user-friendly and often working) hacks. It's actually explained in the manual:

https://pijul.org/manual/why_pijul.html
Ask HN: How do you work with complete beginners?
We've hired a bunch of fresh graduates from college for a software dev job. This could be hard to comprehend but let me try to put it in the best way possible. The part of the world where I'm from, we don't necessarily hire only CS folks for such job.

Most of our IT / Software Dev hires could be ranging from CS to Aeronautical to Mechanical Engineering students. All we look for is an engineering degree to validate analytical skills.

With that background, I've been assigned a couple of absolute beginners who I'd be working with to ship a feature in a __couple of months__.

While I strongly believe it's my responsibility to get junior devs on par in terms of knowledge & execution speed, I really don't have any previous experience working with absolute beginners who'd barely qualify as devs let alone junior devs. What best to do in this situation? Should I accept I suck at this and bail out for everybody's good? Is there anything I __can__ do, to comfortably work with beginners?
FWIW, I'm running Synapse on a 1/1 instance (1 core, 1 GiB RAM) alongside a bunch of other services, with 4 active (as in: daily) users, and it works reasonably well as long as people don't join large channels (cough #matrix:matrix.org cough). That said, I'm definitely looking forward to Dendrite.
Pinebook Pro Linux Laptop Coming This Year Priced $199 – OMG Ubuntu
I'm pretty sure almost all companies (which is the majority of the user base) that use slack are paying for it.

You might be able to say that most users aren't paying for it, but most organizations are.
Surely there's a less inflammatory article out there discussing this?
The Other Other Other Rope Around the Earth
It might well be that it is a condition of his father’s will that he should make these arrangements. The royalties on “Catcher” alone are likely worth ten times what he could make from acting gigs (especially gigs he got: he was Captain America in that disgraced straight-to-video production...). At that point, might as well do things properly and carve yourself an essential role as the keeper of dad’s estate.
'If he is wrong, it should be fairly trivial to find evidence showing why. I personally await this evidence because I find Forrester's model to be sound.'

Why on earth would that be trivial? The social sciences have existed for a hundred years, yet there are few - if any - non-trivial law-like generalisations about the social world.
Ask HN: Resources for user feedback on a website
I am about to launch a website which I have built as an MVP and I want to be able to collect/encourage feedback from users -> does anyone know good (ideally free/with a free option) resources to facilitate this? I am thinking user forum/issue trackers/on-page widgets to collect feedback and report bugs etc etc.

I don't want to spend lots of money but I do want to a) validate my idea and b) get feedback to orientate development going forward.
But even if heroin were legalised, I probably wouldn't see too many heroin smokers popping up at the bus stop, just because of cultural pressure.
I found this page on the site https://volt.ws/lang but it's quite thin on detail.
You gotta rob the Street before the Street robs you!

Get cash when the markets are frothy and the money is cheap, and then use it when they're not.
> As an example, I have sites that were built using ASP.NET version 1.1 that have survived to this day with nothing more than Windows Update

You are right; but in my experience those ASP applications also had security holes (CSRF etc) that were never patched. They ultimately either became botnets or faded away when the corp simply faded away.

A business that can't afford to pay for cleaning up its business applications is likely to be unable to pay for general upkeep as well. It is simply past the point of being a viable business and is either in limbo or in the grave!

See "maintenance free" approach to software as canary in the coal-mine and run away as fast as possible.
Given the nature of lambdas specifically

-What would the security issue be on outdated lambda code?

-Wouldn’t the performance of the code would be equal to the performance of when you first deployed.
Have you ever heard about docker, cr-io (not sure if this one can be used standalone), buildah, podman?

It probably won't be docker itself, but if you start deploy your stuff as docker containers now there will probably be a migration path to whatever it will be.
What if the new node version fix an bug / issue / CVE that doesn't concern the software ?

Is it resonable to postpone the upgrade for later ?

Example : the software uses python requests. A new version fixes CVE-2018-18074 about Authorization header, but you don't use this header, for sure. Is it resonable to upgrade a little bit later ?
> I don't make any claims to the size of the industry from that, but it certainly wasn't niche.

FWIW, the second part of the sentence is a direct contradiction of the first part.
I read the article. Then I read the home page. It still don't know why I should give it a try. The practical added value, espacially compared to the cost of switching, is not clear to me. "faster, easier, mathematically proved" is a bit fuzzy as a sale pitch.
Jazz chord tensions – extensions and alterations
Old Reliable | Software Engineer | Full-time | REMOTE (UK)

Old Reliable is a remote-first software consultancy & development house based in the UK. We’re a young, ambitious company but we’re focussed more on having a sustainable work-life balance than on slaving away until midnight 6 (or 7!) days a week.

We offer flexible working in a laid-back environment. You’ll manage yourself and be responsible for the delivery of a project from start to finish. You’ll need to be open to learning & applying new technologies. You’ll probably be working on a new project every few months.

At this point we’re not asking for a specific skillset. The projects we’ll be able to take on in the future will depend on your abilities and interests. To date we’ve worked on C/C++ and build systems (cmake, assorted CI systems, conda-forge) so if you have experience in the area, that would be a plus.

We are strongly against the idea that remote workers should earn more or less money depending on where they live. The value you add to a company doesn’t depend on your cost of living. If you want to earn a London salary without having to live in London, let’s talk.

For more info: hn-feb2019@oldreliable.tech
There's a long history of taking things that are marginally hard to use (like FTP servers) and making them marginally easier (like Dropbox). I kind of understand why it works, but it's still seems a little disappointing that you can make billions off of a technology that was invented eons ago (for both FTP, and IRC).
Going Freelance as a Software Engineer – Some Advice
QuickSort with Hungarian (Küküllőmenti legényes) folk dance:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ywWBy6J5gz8
>It was delayed by 9 months

reasons? why wouldn't i expect the same going forward in the future? 9 month delay on a closer source app=no for me ever using it

also your download links don't work, way to clickbait people into signing up for your email list
you're correct, but if people type my exact address "apt X, # streetname, <city>" it still gives them a very different eircode.

Given that more people are using google maps than finder.eircode.ie we might wind up with Google determining truth here.
Perhaps our view of the affordability of logo design is coloured by those $250,000 rebranding exercises we hear about from large corporations.

In the UK, a freelance designer's hourly is, in my experience, around £50. If you have an idea of what you want, a good designer would be able to give you some options and a full logo pack in a day's work.

Sure, that's unaffordable in a lot of circumstances but, if you're designing a logo for a business, it's not gonna be one of your largest expenses.
Show HN: AskData – API to Translate Natural Language-2-Sql
Not a problem. Ill tell TypeScript to output code matching the es version for that version of node.
"from a basic economics perspective the argument logically and mathematically follows."

I'm sorry but that's arrant nonsense. Nothing follows from anything else independent of complex empirical assumptions about what people are doing and why they are doing it, and how to conceptualise the economy and social relations in the first place. It is not given by the ether of pure logic.
That's exactly what he's used, but with angle brackets around it. What do you think he should have done instead.
How to Pick Which Books to Read
First, I want to say that I'm trying really hard to stay factual and not inject my own opinion in these posts as I think it's not serving the right goal, as far as informing goes. Some of this can still be opinionated, because I'm only human, so keep that in mind.

My post is just a small part of the issues that are arising here, but yes, it is what we see pretty much everywhere.

UK first with Brexit, which followed the same schema from what I could gather, where everyone and especially the media were focusing on the immigration issue when it was barely part of the demands, and the real problem was people feeling like spectators of a game that corrupt politics are playing with the industries and lobbies to serve their own interests, while the price is paid by the common people.

We see that these kind of protests are arising everywhere in Europe, for example in UK, France, Hungary, Romania, Italy, Spain and it seems that Portugal too (?).

That's a reaction to a global reject of the neo/ultraliberalism and globalization in my opinion.
There is also a more and more common reject of "Europe" as its current state, feeling that it is far too intruding into the legislative aspect of member countries, and pushing an agenda that more people don't adhere to.

This is why I think that we're seeing more and more eurosceptic movements rising, and why they become more popular with time. We're already not happy with our governments, and on top of that we have to apply laws and directives that are coming from people we didn't even vote for and that are superseding our own laws. I understand that it can be seen as a direct affront on democracy.

In my opinion (this time), this is nothing more than another class fight, where the common people are rebelling against people that own most of the money, most of the companies, and most of the power. This time, because of globalization, it tends to get a bit more international, so we'll see how it goes.
Ignoring the huge black swan event in your data (the tech crash), the point of getting in on an IPO isn't for you to hold it 3 years.

You get allocated shares that you then sell before the lockup period for everyone else expires. It's just risk-free money for the people that are friends with the underwriters.

I don't have the data on me, but I bet if you got into every IPO from 1980 through 2001 and then sold after one month, your returns would be pretty damn good.
> but not that it’s a list of ints

Python type annotations do support such use case: List[int].
What Is API Documentation
Explore the concept of trust in cryptography
Keep in mind that you're arguing against an existence disproof. The Microsoft stack, for example, is a pretty big target for attack, and has seen its share of security issues over the years.

But developers don't need to make any code changes or redeploy anything to mitigate those security issues. It all happens through patches on the server, 99% of which happen automatically via windows update.