skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I understand that this economic axiom has been discredited. For example, by the work of Nash.

Can you elaborate? I'm not familiar with any Nash work that discredits it.

I know that game theory models show that the principle of First Possession (which many animals exhibit and which is the foundation of free market interaction) minimizes conflict, and moreover, that in a perfectly competitive free market, all interactions lead to Pareto Improvements.

Yet you keep making them. If you think such broad, simplistic generalisations don't apply, why keep making them?

It's not a generalization. It's a conclusion based on inductive reasoning about the implications of the economic structure of reality, like people being self-interested, and companies that earn less revenue contracting while those that earn more expand.

It's no different than believing that all life is subject to evolutionary forces.
For those trying to up their SQL game from basic selects and grouping, I suggest learning:

- Common Table Expressions (CTEs). They will equip you to write clean, organized, and expressive SQL.

- CREATE TABLE AS SELECT. This command powers SQL-driven data transformation.

- Window functions, particularly SUM, LEAD, LAG, and ROW_NUMBER. These enable complex calculations without messy self-joins.

Learning those three will change your relationship with SQL and blow the door open of problems you can solve with the language.
What specifically differentiates "American style unions" from German unions from a legal perspective?
Some counterpoints:

> Untraceable theft from your wallet

Blockchain analysis is a flourishing field. Vanilla bitcoin is far from untraceable, in fact it is LE’s wet dream.

> Unregulated merchants who aren't incentivized to play by the rules

There are two distinct sets of rules here. The ones merchants have to legally abide by (government imposed) and the ones that fit PayPal’s agenda. The latter is usually the problem (c.f. WikiLeaks blockade) because it is entirely based on the whims of a private company.

> No third-party intermediary in the event you get ripped off.

I often see this argument. Schneier also mentions it as a drawback. Note that reversible transactions can be built on top of bitcoin, if it is desirable. The opposite is not true. At least bitcoin gives you the option to do irreversible transactions if you wish.

> Ability for weed shops and porn sites to accept digital payments (This depends on your stance on these issues. Not everyone feels the same as you).

People need to be able to break the law and operate gray markets to move society forward. See Moxie’s excellent essay on the subject [0]

> If you buy something on ebay, ebay and the credit card company have a record of your purchase. If you buy something from a bitcoin merchant, they will have a record of your purchase. How is that different?

The reason eBay needs your real name is to combat chargeback fraud and tax evasion (for merchants). The former is irrelevant with irreversible transactions, the latter remains valid in that particular case. But what about Joe-random-SaaS? Why does {Spotify|Shopify|Expensify} need my real name besides payment?

[0] https://moxie.org/blog/we-should-all-have-something-to-hide/
I used to think this too, and wondered what magical SQL perspective my brain was missing. I'd see these elegant but seemingly impenetrable queries and wonder why my brain wasn't in the "SQL dimension" yet.

But over time, and very heavy SQL reporting, I realized the procedural mindset still applies, it's just not expressed as such.

You need to think through the steps of how you want to retrieve, transform, aggregate etc. the data and build up the query to accomplish those steps. The resulting query doesn't look procedural, but the thought process was. Of course you need to know the sometimes opaque constructs/tricks/syntax to express the steps, which again, look like magic at face value or just reading docs.

I think this is why people struggle with understanding SQL. The thought process is still procedural, but the query isn't. You need to translate the query back into procedural terms for your own understanding, which is a PITA.
What is your role in the startup?
Not even Andrew Carnegie agreed with this take. He was an ardent supporter of heavy estate taxes - despite being worth over $300 billion equivalent today.
Of all the competitive parameters this is one you think it's worth considering?

No, but it’s one parameter worth considering. I never stated that it was the only deciding factor.

Life is not binary.
> Not sure why you have so much emotional investment in this topic

I can't sleep when someone is wrong on the internet!! :)

Peace.
I really like "Beginning database design" by Claire Churcher, and the follow-on book "Beginning SQL queries" . They sound like really basic books, and they definitelystart from the basics, but then build up steadily.
That is a salary below the minimum wage in many major American cities and only 200% of the federal poverty line. I'm not suggesting six figures, but maybe 40,000? It just seems odd to me to use a figure that low in a example.
This newsletter was interesting, and probably aimed at a wider range of audience.

Interesting to note some valuable comments here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19149479
Joe Rogan Experience on UBI
Our society is too polarized and our history with unions too negative for reform to be possible. The Supreme Court, for example, was excoriated for the Janus decision--holding that compulsory membership in public sector unions violates the Constitution. But that's the German rule for all unions.
It would be insane to expect somebody arrive at a perfect feature full working version of anything in the first try.

That's true for any piece of software. SQL is not done yet, the fact that you can put in neat little features still into it is a proof to how well it was designed.

Heck we still have Lisp evolving today. A lot of things got done right in the early days.
I didn't mean to imply that it got worse for existing customers. But I feel like by killing the Softlayer brand (softlayer.com is just a landing page where everything redirect to IBM cloud) and making "cloud" the focus, they're missing out on new business (including winning back people to baremetal who are tired of AWS' poor price/performance).

Maybe they still are and I'm just not paying enough attention, but Softlayer was essentially the _top_ choice for dedicated hosting for the large number of customers that wanted something more reliable than OVH without having to go to Rackspace.

I feel like they just walked about from that. Or, more to my point, that they're neglecting driving business to it to a point where it's actually helping AWS grow.
It also ignores operations of type (set of rows) => (set of rows) or (row) => (set of rows). and makes you jump through hoops of CTEs to implement them except in some special cases. Limited versions of these (flatMaps) work just fine in spark and have no problems scaling.
"we always seem to try to re-create SQL in those languages (e.g. Hive, Presto, KSQL, etc)."

This is largely because of the number of non-programmers who know SQL. Add an SQL layer on top of your non-SQL database and you instantly open up a wide variety of reporting & analytics functionality to PMs, data scientists, business analysts, finance people, librarians (seriously! I have a couple librarian-as-in-dead-trees friends who know SQL), scientists, etc.

In some ways this is too bad because SQL sucks as a language for many reasons (very clumsily compositional; verbose; duplicates math expressions & string manipulation of the host language, poorly; poor support for trees & graphs; easy to write insecure code; doesn't express the full relational algebra), but if it didn't suck in those ways it probably wouldn't have proven learnable by all those other professions that make it so popular.
Understanding relational model is a valuable skill. SQL is useful but it's just the querying language. Understanding the relational model let you use SQL correctly.
Wait, watching the video, it appears it's a single guy who shoved the cameraman and was immediately restrained and thrown out by another supporter right behind him.

If we're going to be dramatic about the negative actions of a single guy, let's also equally credit the other man for defending good values.

Honestly, i've been to one of these rallies and i've also been to Berkeley when people were left handicapped by a raging mob who wanted to suppress the appearance of a speaker from the right.
Skype for business is now being folded into Microsoft teams, in fact, by default, Skype for business users, will have teams shadow installed on their machines, unless their admins make and effort to stop it.

I'd say they are probably going to draw a hard line between them, perhaps so they can experiment with more public features like this.

"LinkedIn integration in the Office web apps will gradually start rolling out in the coming months for Office 365 users and to Outlook on the web users who have opted in to the new Outlook on the web, and world-wide availability will come in 2019."
I want to learn and do the same things in SQL because, I don't always have the opportunity to run python programs on the database server environment.

There are certain situations where an SQL query is all that I can work with.
Is the goal of society to improve itself or to spiral into unsustainable state sponsored welfare? A six-figure income was arbitrary definition of an individual who is contributing above the means back to society. Redefine that number as you wish.
Do you have any pointers to organizations which have a higher hit rate than Gates foundation?

What are you basing the following on? -> "Their process has been to spray and pray. No active involvement, no process optimisation, no impact metric monitoring etc."
And it can be your head, even if it wasn't your money. And sometimes it feels like we're approaching that point...
Any books that teach function programming with python?
This is what unions are for. SAG exists (in part) so greedy studios don't cast desperate actors without pay.
Editing's changed, you can try a lot more crazy things a lot faster with Final Cut/Premiere/etc then when you had to cut apart film and tape it together.

Scoring's changed, you can simulate a whole orchestra right there in your laptop long before committing to hiring an actual one. Or you can do any of the many things that has changed music since samplers started becoming affordable in the eighties. Also editing's easier.

Acting's changed, what used to always involve getting together in the same place with everyone else in a scene can now just involve hanging out on a green screen stage, pretending that a crude puppet standin is the other person in the scene. Or you might be wearing a motion capture rig that'll be used as the basis for a photoreal animated character who'll end up being composited into the shot over you.

Animation's changed, now you're as much a technician as an artist, you may be expected to pick up a new software package for a new production. Personally I left the animation industry in part because it looked like all my future gigs were likely to be on a software package I kinda loathed.

Directing's changed, you need to be aware of all these possibilites, maybe you decide to not use most of them, but if you do, you get to talk with the people who know them in more detail and figure out how to use all this power.
There are definitely areas of the browser API that are quite problematic, especially when it comes to things needed in a UI like Spotify and Slack use. A brief look into the drag and drop implementations in browsers should be illuminating enough.

The desire to use new features as soon as possible is driver enough I feel. Imagine having to wait years for parity between 6 different operating systems before being able to use classes, a language feature introduced years ago and that still isn't fully supported today.
" Lots of people choose the cheapest flights possible regardless of other considerations ". so true, and then they complain when there is extra cost for bags etc. it's the customers that drive the airlines to eliminate all frills or things that use to be 'free'.
This thread has really opened my eyes. I was introduced to SQL on the first day of my first internship, it threw me for a loop and while the job was application development, the industry was finance so we were a very SQL heavy shop. That first "professional developer" experience burned into my memory the idea that all developers knew SQL, to me it was just an implicit thing that everyone knew -- even if they didnt work with it every day.
Even sim cards and credit cards run JVM, so I don't think Java is a major concern here.
What don’t you like about GraphQL? I haven’t used it enough to form a strong opinion but it seems ok so far.
ROW_NUMBER is absolutely the best, especially for marketing related customer data.
> I suppose the remaining employees have taken the layoffs as a sign that management IS their adversary.

Nah, basic economics says that now that the supply of employees at Buzzfeed has been reduced, the remaining employees have more leverage to negotiate with management as rugged individualists. /s
I understood when OP said the "concept of SQL" that they referred to a pretty broad idea of querying tabular data in rows and columns with some structured language.
Not true — they succeed at eliminating competition.
In Germany, compulsory union membership and "union shops" are illegal.
Chris Hadfield Teaches Space Exploration – Official Trailer – MasterClass
"Do you have any pointers to organizations which have a higher hit rate than Gates foundation?"

- It's true they have the capital that spreads far and wide compared to most others. No doubt.

"What are you basing the following on? -> "Their process has been to spray and pray. No active involvement, no process optimisation, no impact metric monitoring etc.""

- Conversations with individuals that work at the foundation.
May be, but Textbooks provide a single purpose usage that doesn't distract you in ways in the back of you mind you know what these iPad could do ( Gaming, Youtube ) etc.....
What people don't get is that all AWS services work seamlessly with each other. There's no use major use case that AWS don't provide a solve for. If you already use EC2 and S3, then it's obviously lower hurdle to also use RDS, Dynamo, etc. Then before you know it, you are using Lambda, ECS, etc.

To sum it up, anyone who says GCP is easier to use than AWS don't understand the power of having the most feature-rich ecosystem.
I find it hard to accept that ppl are talking about 'querying tabular data in rows and columns with some structured language' when they talk about sql. They are surely talking about the specific syntax.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQL
That still depends. You're still making a choice of priorities. You're making a choice that you're okay losing some data when failures happen.

For the mentioned use cases CRDT is probably an okay choice, but not always. In some use cases/industries, losing log lines or having inaccurate counts is absolutely not okay. There can even be regulatory concerns here. And fines!

It's also possible to scale traditional databases out pretty far. It's difficult and expensive, but in probably 98% of cases you can do it. If your company has to, it should be able to afford it anyway.
Well, something that would improve HN for me is if you changed your username to something less disturbing to read. If everyone had names like that, the site would be ridiculous and unusable. I don't know what you were thinking. I'm not against swearing, in movies or real life, but there is a limit, and you seem to have crossed it there, totally unnecessarily. Apologies if the name is highly significant to you, but it isn't to anyone else, it's just something I'd rather not read. Thanks.
reeeeallly depends.

You've asked a broad, general question - I have no knowledge of Blizzard whatsoever.

But while in many (most?) cases layoffs have negative impact on morale, it's not necessarily the case.
High performing teams and individuals can have their morale boosted if they perceive that unproductive employees have been trimmed. While perhaps less common in startups, I'd venture that in large corporations, there will be team members who are perceived to not be pulling their weight or are downright drain on the team; layers of management, not to mention bureaucracy and administration, that average employees would gleefully see removed; or branches that are perceived as diluting focus of the company -- etc etc.
my point was not that china hasn't done fabulously, the jingoism, the optimism, it's like deja vu but with different face.

Up until 1989 there were Hollywood films depicting a Japanese car factory with American staff, forget the name tho, lots of businessmen of this era like Larry Ellison, the billionaire weeaboo, built up a weird fetish for anything Japanese.
-grin- I get the impression you've played around with fortran 77 scripts before. (I sometimes work on software older than I am lol)
Well, https://variety.com/2018/gaming/news/candy-crush-saga-1-bill...
>Something to be applauded, but I fear that this may be too little too late

Well you could also see it as history repeating itself. We're only at the start of the new gilded age and now it's service workers and people higher up the value chain that are seeing the consequences of squeezes in the work place.

Maybe this time around it'll be IT workers and journalists who discover that organised labour exists.
"SQL for Smarties", Joe Celko -- an excellent resource
From what I know German unions are much bigger. IG Metall covers a lot of industry like car manufacturers, Siemens is in it, Stihl chainsaws, Bosch and a lot of other companies.

There are laws that mandate that from a certain size on employees have voting rights in management boards.

In general the relationship between employees and employers is a little more cooperative compare to the US.
Not trying to play word games, but what is the difference between answering a question and processing data? Aren't they effectively the same?

Using another tool for processing data often results in recreating SQL mechanics at application level. E.g. select this data, retrieve it, loop and if this, then set that, etc. SQL does it way better, guaranteed.

Of course that's often required for technical reasons (scalability etc.) or processing that's too complex to implement at data layer, or just for cleaner design.

But SQL is amazing at processing data!
I struggled with this a few times: “When a person signed up to do a job for him, he would in turn trust that person to accomplish it; he wouldn’t break it down into little pieces and make the task small, easy and dull.”

I’m not particularly talented, far from it actually, but many times I’ve worked in teams with non-junior people who were tasked to do some portion of a project, and simply delivered garbage: a terribly over engineered solution in a component where over engineering was actually very dangerous (e.g. doing distributed systems using several small bespoke moving parts rather than a single solid leader election mechanism, or even better getting away with something leaderless and more elegantly stateless, to give a recent example).

In those occurrences, I inevitably “broke it down to pieces” by keeping pointing out all the exact scenarios where the code delivered would fail, until the other person really had to finally move to a solution much more similar to the one I had in mind (much much simpler). Sometimes this required an embarrassing feedback loop of 10+ round trips, where every time I’d just look at the newly delivered code say “this doesn’t work in a X scenario”. And I was not in a better position from a knowledge perspective, we were essentially peers.

I felt like a prick and definitely felt resentment from the other party (especially since code reviews are public), but at the same time, how could I have acted differently? The end result was really orders of magnitude better, more robust and smaller.
Hell Yes.
Although it takes some time to switch from Procedural or OOP to highly Declarative world of SQL, but man, its worth pursuing.
Only thing which really helped me build my confidence was solving more real world problems which involves 2NF and 3NF design, JOINs, Triggers, Indexing, Views & Materialized Views for denormalization, CTE and Recursive CTE's.

You may call me an extremist but from server side programming point of view with Postgres and FDW (Foreign Data Wrappers) which has ton of features other than SQL only thing i miss is HTTP server. :)
> of a worse poster child for static typing than Java.

C, golang
Video: Blockchain Security Audits
>[serverless computing] closely parallels past advances in programmer productivity, such as the transition from assembly language to high-level programming languages

Is this serious? The author seems to imply that we can just abstract away the entire internet in the same way we abstracted away copper wires.
Since Parkland: 12 Months. 1,200 Kids Killed by Gun Violence
I work a lot with data as well primarily I use SAS, R and SQL. I'm also very procedurally oriented (as in I prefer breaking task down into discrete chunks), R's functional way of chaining operations with pipe operator feels so alien to me.

I find myself having the opposite problem I probably use (abuse?) SQL more than should.

My world (industrial plant) is very DB/historian heavy everything speaks SQL it's pretty much the common tongue connecting everything. I think this is slowly changing some PLC/historians now offer a webservice which returns JSON objects via an ajax query - personally I vastly prefer SQL to ajax.

I'd estimate for a typical problem I'm working with maybe 90% is done in SQL vs 10% in R/SAS code.

When I need Regression, Principal Component Analysis, Time Series manipulation, Plots etc I have to break into dedicated language.

For most other things - extract, merge, filtering, high level aggregation (Count sum etc) type of operations using SQL feels more natural and expressive to me.
And then, when working in a legacy code base, you run into a dark corner inhabited by pre-ANSI joins and get eaten by a gru.
The history of Detroit is much more complex than you're making it out to be.
> In Germany, compulsory union membership and "union shops" are illegal.

Any my understanding is that in Germany, unions have much more direct influence over company decision-making than American unions. IANAL, but I've heard German-style unions would be illegal in the US.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade_unions_in_Germany#Struct...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Works_council#Germany

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Co-determination#Germany
> the worst example for a typing system

Not nearly as C or golang.
The Rav4 and B-class had much better performance and range than the cars we usually call "compliance cars".
key/value storage
http://launchschool.com/books/sql
I have a question. How proposed solution can solve problem with exceptional control flow? Monadic approach skips calculations under the cover and one need to track branching in his head.
A New Way To Edit Code or Text
Plenty of recent car startups have raised giant sums like Lucid, Karma, Faraday Future etc. , but none of them have produced a viable car yet. Hope Rivian does better, but car manufacturing is HARD
CRDTs allow you to provide stronger guarantees wrt not losing data, than transactions.
I don't think it's non-programmers that keep SQL around; it's that there hasn't been a replacement for SQL that is better enough to replace it. I think C suffers from the same problem.
Why does HN pretend it's posting your comment and show you that it's posted, when this is BULLSHIT and no one else can see it?

I posted a simple question about GraphQL and then came back to see if anyone had insights, only to find that no one else could see it.

So... the solution is to create a new user ID before every question?

Where do these guys get off deliberately wasting users' time?