skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Good, damning, summary of the amazing decisions made during the construction of this project (bullet points are quotes):

• A meandering route through the Central Valley devised to win support at the ballot box, locking planners into a scheme that took the route away from its goal of connecting the state’s biggest cities.

• A mad rush to begin construction without knowing the route, acquiring the right of way, studying the geology, or securing the funding.

• An irresponsible partner in the federal government that rushed California to get going and encouraged the state to proceed with half-baked plans.

• A balkanized planning process teeming with eager private-sector beavers who were afraid to report how flawed the enterprise was, a system that Naik called “no consultant left behind.”

• The determination not to engage French and Chinese engineers who offered to just build the damn thing for us. “The equivalent of Bangladesh saying they’d go to the moon with indigenous technology” is how Perl describes the general attitude. “We excluded all the learning and tech that happened elsewhere.”

But after all that, the thing that wasn't said was "by how this was done, one would deduce that no one really cared whether the project succeeded or not."

Which is to say that if another project of this sort is attempted, creating an institutional imperative to succeed from the start is crucial.

And as far as popular support goes, it seems reasonable to make it clear to the voters that the project didn't die by accident but that it was killed. Of course, with all parties conveniently culpable, it's hard to say what a concerned citizen is to do.

Sadly, corruption tends to be a part of any large scale infrastructure project. The trick is creating a situation where the forces involved have incentive not to eat the golden goose. And this incentive basically has to come from the top. Obviously, it didn't this time.
First-Class Modules
I'm in the same boat - looking to consolidate a few smaller data pipelines that have organically grown over the years into a single pipeline and taking the opportunity to try and get the org to rethink how we emit events in various parts of the stack. As teams operate fairly independently, we need something that enables a flexible data structure whilst still enabling the ability to join data on common well-defined fields.

The current path we are going down is looking at using a 'nested' JSON structure that enables sub-processes in the various systems to inherit values from the parent. Something similar to:

{ "type": "schemaX", "version": 1, "payload": { "k1": "v1", "type": "schemaY", "version": 3, "payload": { "kk1": "v1" } } }

The structure itself will be documented using JSONSchema and hopefully we will be able to verify the validity of events as they are processed, though this might be too expensive to do in high volume scenarios.

The goal is to then build a low latency router that takes in routing policies to forward subsets of events to further data pipelines. The policies themselves will be defined using some kind of DSL (possibly using JSONPath?).

As a whole, this seems to be a fairly common problem[0] that other companies are trying to solve, but a lot of the low level details are not spoken about. One thing that does seem to be a common component to a service like this is Apache Flink.[1]

[0] Netflix Keystone - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sPB8w-YXX1s
[1] https://flink.apache.org/
For folks developing or analyzing new applied math techniques (for solving differential equations or function approximation or whatever), it is helpful to make formal proofs about their behavior and bounding their error etc., and from the papers I have looked at those are often (usually?) done on top of measure-theoretic models.

It might be possible to develop alternative proofs on purely finite/approximate mathematics, but for a working applied mathematician who already went through standard math grad school curriculum that is probably more trouble than it’s worth.

The users of those mathematical tools (whether software implementors or people just calling some software library) usually don’t need to care about the details of the proofs.

This is similar for other kinds of science/engineering.
That is pretty dang incredible. I love the debugging colors etc.

Maybe someone has already done this but I'm surprised someone hasn't made an LLVM -> Life compiler just because. Might as well do LLVM -> sh while they're at it.
Effective ML by Yaron Minsky
Is “here” Hawaii? (Looking at your user name). Because it is definitely the case in the USA. Amtrak owns rolling stock but no rail infrastructure.
"Big" doesn't strictly refer to informaion technology contexts. User / usage context also matters.

For text, a byte is (roughly) a letter, 8 bytes about a word, 32 - 64 bytes a typical sentence, 140 bytes a tweet, 500 bytes the text that will fit on an index card, and 2.4 kB about a page of text (40 lines of 60 characters, about 250 words).

Ten pages is a mid-length essay (25 kB, 2500 words), 100 pages a monograph or short novel (250 kB, 25,000 words), and 1,000 pages a sizeable book (2.5 MB, 250,000 words). As we extend from there, we're talking about shelves, aisles, floors, and libraries worth of content.

My initial "5 MB is about a book" coment comes from experience with formatted textual (rather than graphical/raster) PDFs of books.

The sum total of published human writing is modest by present data standards. The 24 million books of the U.S. Library of Congress, as extual PDFs, would occupy less than 120 TB of storage, about $6,000 at current prices.

Reading that -- by humans, not machines -- might keep you up a few nights.

When writing large literary works, the problems are far less with tthe computing than the authoring: developing and expressing ideas clearly, consistently, and effectively. The constraints on writing tools are imposed by wetware and cranial hardware, not silicon and software.
Anti-Bribery and Corruption Legislation in the UAE – STA Law Firm
Yup this.

People don't realize just how performant SQLite can be. If you are running just 1 server and won't probably need more than SQLite is more than enough.

2 application servers and up is where PostgreSQL can come into play.

https://www.sqlite.org/whentouse.html

After reading the SQLite when-to-use document I transitioned some smaller marketing sites over from Postgres because it was overkill for the specific situation. Other multi-app server applications or ones that scale, SQLite might not be the best use, but it still has it's cases. Like copying over a subset of the original data and running queries locally instead of hitting a production database
What you see a lot of low-rise apartments in Australia using is prefabricated frames and trusses and either autoclaved aerated concrete or polystyrene cladding.

Because of the light weight you see all sorts of modern designs using colourful sunhoods and blades to make the buildings more distinctive.
The east starts at whatever point the mountains end. If you cannot see a treeless peak on the horizon, you are in 'the east'. Sorry texas.
Install Windows
How much DSN time do you need. Given the deley, I assume the only use is batch transfers, so cost per bit seems like the more useful metric (along with how much data is involved)
Looking around the office and my phone, Java is anything but "legacy".

As for alternative JVM languages, while they are cool and have brought many fresh ideas into the platform, they remain a very tiny portion of the Java developers' market.

Java takes a very long time, because backwards compatibility and cooperation among giant companies takes years.

C# has basically Microsoft deciding how the roadmap looks like and rebooting the platform multiple times.

C# 8 won't even be fully supported on the .NET Framework.
It's extremely common to validate a piece of data not on its own, but how it relates to other pieces of stored data. Without transactional semantics, an application basically can't enforce these invariants w/ any reliability (or those semantics need to be ensured out of band, or w/ little data modeling tricks that tend not to scale well).

There certainly are invariants that are non-trivial or cumbersome to enforce strictly with a schema, but you can really only enforce them w/ a database that provides serializable transactions.

In many cases, schematization of data in the database is good for other reasons though (for instance, guaranteeing type-normalized data in the presence of multiple deployed versions of an app via accident or otherwise, ensuring your queries and updates are typesafe, etc.)
This won't filter SVG elements, and unfortunately Array.from isn't available in IE (and perhaps some other browsers that are still in use).
Make an optional pro interface so noobs get lured in for the prettyness and when they know what they are doing, can swith?
I'm curious if this SPoF theory stops at computer/real world interfaces (such as the control surface <-> computers). Or if this generalizes into purely computational models. In my mind I can't find any purely computational model using distributed techniques that succumbs to the SPoF "theory." But the computer/real world interface is trivially obvious in just about every context.
Plus we're already losing at least 200 species (of plant, insect and animal) every year. Might as well save half a million human lives while we're at it..
How I save a workweek a year by efficiently managing my codingmarks
You can use the extensions in IBM J9 or Azul, just like some use GCC C while claiming it is C. :)

Also looking forward to them and disappointed they weren't there since the beginning.
> Mathematics and physics both began with the advent of astronomy

Arguably mathematics began with accounting and surveying and trade, and more generally with counting and measurement.
That website was awful...
> In-memory or local disk databases aren't going to work for any real world use case, regardless of how small or simple your application is.

You'll have to provide some proof for that assertion, especially given that there are numerous examples of apps doing exactly that. For example, Firefox stores bookmarks and history in an SQLite database.
Did a project with Dynamo last year. Hope never to see it again.

Compared with RBMS tooling looks like a high school project.
Knowing the state of things and the history of the project I'm not much surprised by this, yet I'm a bit taken aback that this indeed has come to pass. I always hate it when a serviceable, if not especially outstanding, aircraft gets shuttered well before it had a meaningful lifecycle in the industry.

But from everything I've read (am I'm no industry expert on the business side) it was a dick-swinging contest from the get-go. Boeing saw that a full-on new spec 4-engine plane was not going to pay itself back; if Airbus execs saw it, they didn't let it change their path.

"Build it and they will come," was perhaps the irrational source of motive for pressing on from the beginning. I don't recall the market (at the time the project was greenlit) clamoring for a bigger, more efficient, more pax friendly quad-jet. It's almost as if Airbus managed to upsell this beast to the carriers that did choose to purchase the ones they have.

The shifting winds of route topology from hub-n-spoke to point-to-point were already brewing, and the stair-step jumps in the ETOPS allowances for twins had obviously not yet reached its limit ... but still, they went for it.

Well, I hope the ones that are built, and those yet to be built, will run for decades more because they are mighty beasts to behold; that much is true. I know the international departure slots out of LAX and when I remember and the sky is clear I step out on my deck and get to watch them on initial climb-out (it's usually Emirates, but sometimes there are others). They look like freight trains in the sky and are really quiet, but the four engines together make a unique drone that will pull me outside even when I'm not even planning to take a peek.

Farewell, A380; we barely knew thee.
I should have explained the use case better: I need to store an indexed array of elements for cache/querying later on; so forEach() isn't a good fit here.

Other people suggested Array.from(), but that won't work in IE, and the polyfill for it is a lot longer/more complex than the for loop I wrote.
> I think the problem is that our politicians, by and large, don't really represent us.

Not a native english speaker here, so I might miss a nuance. "Represent" as in "depict us" or as in "works for us"? It sounds like you would prefer to take random citizens and turn them into politicians. Wouldn't you rather have the best people working for you? Sure, understanding your client is necessary to represent (as in work for) someone and having the same background can be one way to do so. But just one way to tick one of many requirements.

I'd guess the better question is how to elect better politicians. Money in politics and campaigning (tricky to solve) and FPTP voting leaving just two parties certainly doesn't help.
Liquidation Preference: Your Equity Could Be Worth Millions–Or Nothing (2018)
If the panpsychist believes that a rock experiences consciousness, then I doubt a particularly predictable insect would be especially persuasive against his position.
Da. Greater good comrade.
Oz is probably the worst possible location for any kind of data other than China or North Korea due to their new encryption law. I realize that wasn’t the case 5 years ago.
Lean management may be the answer
An airline is suing a customer who skipped a leg of his flight to save money
Multiple interpreters in Python stdlib
I don't particularly like caviar, but mentaiko (pollack roe, usually spiced up with chilli) is delicious on rice.
I don't see a value other than fashion driven development, specially when comparing the bare bones browser GUI for Dynamo with something like SQL Server Management Studio or that whole story with primary and secondary indexes, with prices being set by index usage.
Why Empathy Is the Secret Sauce for Good Software Development
I was really fortunate to have him as an astronomy professor right around the time of the launch. He's great at making complex things easy to understand, and his enthusiasm is contagious. Highly recommend his book, but if you've only got an hour here's a good video conversation.

* Roving Mars with Steve Squyres - Conversations with History - YouTube || https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NI6KEzsb26U
I think you hit the nail on the head and we already know what is going to happen when the elections start coming up. This high speed rail project is going be every talking point by the republicans as a shining example of progressive projects/reforms gone disaster. I hate to say it but they'll be right.

The whole HSR project from the very beginning was a complete disaster. We should have known better but progressive arrogance got the best of us. At least newsome was smart enough to kill it off before we dug the hole deeper.
Isn't this a typical Quora answer? Full of filler and shitty hard-to-verify details that provide no value to the answer ("the language is encrypted twice", what the hell), and very little effort on answering the actual question (what is the purpose of CAPTCHA).

And the community rules try to block people from writing firm "you're full of shit"-like answers, even though every other answer of Quora is full of lies like "Linux is fast, because it was designed for 16-bit computers".
WiFi DIY thermometer using NodeMcu and DHT22
How exactly would you corrupt it? For all the stuff that's in-memory, it's as safe as your language is. If you're writing it to disk all at once, it's easy to implement this atomically with rename - this guarantees that you have either the old file or the new file, but not some weird in-between state.

And if you mean corrupting by the app going amok and asking to corrupt data because of logic errors in the app itself, that's just as doable with a database, and especially doable with local-file DBs (which usually don't try to limit what you can do).
Not tracing. Speculation.

The difference is that you compile user control flow as-is unless you have overwhelming evidence that you should do otherwise.

And yes you are right. This is promising for run-once code, but all of the cost will be in dynamic things like the envGet. An interpreter can actually do better here because most environment resolution can be done as part of bytecode generation. So it’s possible that this experiment leads to something that is slower than JSC’s interpreter.
I'll give a qualified "yes" to that. I agree there is no particular reason you can't use PostgreSQL. There are some advantages to the designs of some No SQL DBs if it fits your use case (immutable data, the ability to replicate easily). For our application eventual consistency was a really good fit. Also we wrote it 10 years ago :-) Even still, we often muse about replacing what we're using with PostgreSQL.

The main reason I wanted to reply to the question was that sometimes I see people who just can't get past not enforcing a schema at the DB layer for your whole data model. It really is crucial to understand that doing so means that bad data doesn't end up in your DB. This isn't always what you want. Like I said, not super common, but not unheard of either.

The underlying technology is pretty unimportant as long as you can do what you need to do. I've historically never really been a No SQL DB fan (there are very few downsides to relational data!!!) However, we've been using CouchDB for the odd thing and IMHO it has its place. Interestingly, I think it was my boss who originally selected it and he's gone very cold in that direction, where I've warmed to it while using it. I think the main thing is to understand exactly what benefit it is giving you (in our case easily replicated data with immutable change sets) and not give in to the hype of "OMG! You don't need a schema!", which is just not true. I've never asked him, but it is possible that my boss thought it would make life easier not to have to deal with schemas and DB migrations, and when it actually made things harder he got upset. I came into it knowing these things, but not really understanding the other benefits, which is why I warmed up to it.

If we were to start again, I think we would almost certainly go the PostgreSQL route, but I can see places where we would have some problems. It's probably a wash, really -- which is why we've not seriously tried to move away from CouchDB.
I'm using sqlite for a small project but I was kind of disappointed to learn how annoying it is to drop or rename columns. Especially when you write migration scripts with up/down statements, it's kind of a pain compared to postgres.

But otherwise it's been fine to use, a good starting point for internal projects.
That's why there is a Court of Justice of the European Union.
Bomb Threat Hoaxer Exposed by Hacked Gaming Site
I remember having a conversation with a friend a couple years ago, about a hypothetical scenario where a more intelligent species would someday threaten human existence. We'd then point to mosquitoes and say, look how we hate these little guys and they are still everywhere.

Well, that was that.
There is also the need to understand the underlying goal of cells. Like is it simply "throw enough neurons in a substance and they start questioning the universe", or what?
> high information density can look crappy at first but once you get used to it, is a better experience.

TL;DR

Your app should have the information density that it needs to be:

1. Useful and
2. Help the user avoid operating the app in a way that they don't intend to or is dangerous

Looking fancy is a secondary concern to good function. Typography has an important function because it is how you convey information to your user. Poorly laid out or written text can cause your user to get tired or use your app wrong.

Of course, making a useful interface is a difficult and long job. It is also thankless work, because if you do a good job your users will use your app without even noticing how well designed it is (good design is invisible!).

It's much easier to slap a pretty facade on your poorly designed app and call it done. People will be impressed by it, but struggle to use it.

I would recommend finding physical copies of Josef Mueller Brockmann's books, especially "Grid Systems in Graphic Design" and "The Graphic Artist and His Design Problems". They are both old (pre-DTP) but have great basic advice about how to design pages.
Do you use Cutter or the CLI?
Unlogged jsonb tables in postgres have generally made nosql systems look pretty bad. I'm really happy the industry finally came up with vitesse so we could have a middle option between "My ACID database needs to scale writes so I'll roll my own fragile sharding layer" and "give up all attempts at schema and consistency and transactions".

Vitess is a really comfortable middle ground of fairly familiar database semantics within a partition.
No one predicted that the rover would break on day 91. They designed it to last at least 90 days. Between standard rocket-science safty factors and preparing for the pessimistic end of all the uncertain risks, there is much room to go beyond your original mission.

Imagine you design a bridge to support 100 tons. No one would accuse you of mispredicting if it holds up at 200 tons. They will accuse you of negligence if it collapses at 105 tons.
Google's entire business model is leveraging of fractions of a cent on a mass scale
Housing, water management, and a few other things come to mind.

Housing in the valley (and elsewhere in CA) is a problem and it has nothing to do with land shortage and everything to do with local politics preventing the use of that land. Housing prices are insane. This is not helped in any way by property taxes which are also very high. So you have an economy that is basically bottle necked on housing. A lot of venture capital goes straight to paying the rent instead of more innovative uses.

In the same way, it's kind of surprising that e.g. desalination plants are not already fully solving water shortages in LA and elsewhere in the state. Instead they seem to continue to insist on providing water from depleted sources for essentially close to free to their citizens while simultaneously struggling to keep the agriculture sector going. Agriculture is a big economic sector in CA and it's being held back by water availability. Water shortages are a huge problem throughout California and most of its population pretty much lives within miles of the Pacific. Yet, people install toilets in their home that flush gallons of drinking water from depleted sources into the sewer..

Roads are notoriously bad (maintenance issues, decades of neglect). Public transport in the Valley is a joke and subways are only a recent novelty in LA. Both cities are notorious for the level of difficulty of actually getting into them or around them by car.

There's a unifying theme here where a policy actively prevents meaningful progress on what are fundamentally not very challenging technical problems (providing housing, getting from A to B, having enough water, etc.). This is odd because tech is basically a core business of that state.

High speed rail around the valley could cut commute times to reasonable levels, get cars off the congested streets, and would allow people to commute in from way beyond the currently practical range. It solves a lot of real problems. But getting it done requires policy changes that are entirely reasonable but yet seemingly impossible. The total investment needed is substantial but comparatively small compared to the money made by unicorns across the valley. Why would you take a plane to LA when you can get there by rail in the time it takes to get to the airport, through security, etc. There's no good reason for not being able to get from downtown SFO to downtown LA in under 2 hours by rail. A few billion investment doesn't sound like it should be particularly hard in the VC epicenter of this planet. Money is not the issue. Policy is.