skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Fundamentally, a schema is a guarantee that your data conforms to the structure you intend.

My opinion :

The reality is that you never have enough information about how the data will be queried and connected together in the long run. A table structure is a model you built from a snapshot of your knowledge of the reality, but your knowledge changes over time and so should the model. As new information goes, some assumptions made before become obsolete, while new assumptions need to be made.

Even if a SQL relational database works OK for most of the business cases, they are not good at frequently evolving over time with new information or needs. They are also not that good if you have different models of the data that must exist in parallel.

I could see database schema as a specialized form of organizing knowledge, but it shouldn't be considered the best and only one.

Fundamentally, if you think you can fit the complexity of the reality in a bunch of relational tables, you are starting with the wrong assumptions already
I've had a launch like this. Universal praise for the idea, barely any adoption or willingness to pay. It was also around analytics and the feedback was similar too.

The issue is that "fun" data or "cool" data doesn't translate to "valuable" data.

It's possible that their paywall from day 1 was also an issue. If they could point to some deals that were made via Intros, perhaps other VC's would have jumped in.

Unless I'm wrong, Mattermark began as a sort of "Intros" product for investors but pivoted away from that to sales and biz dev.
hmmm, in the book i want to write one of the main protagonist as an asexual black 16 yr old kid who lives in a racially segregated logging town in north Georgia during the 50s.

And yeah, so in the story he gets lynched because he is spotted trying to sneak away from a gorgeous white girls house after dark by a group of racist men in their early 20s who are infatuated by the girl who has no interest.

Any ways, the way they lynch him is very grotesque and done in a very crazy symbolic way that you kinda have to know whats going on in the story up to that point to get.

I kinda wonder what kinda hell id get myself if i actually tried to write this book in an age where people dont believe a white author can lynch a black person in his book and not be racist in either way the pendulum swings in this case. (e. g. you'd be justifiably considered racist if you wrote a lynching into your book if its a form of realizing a fantasy youd like to commit IRL but cant because society doesnt let you get away with it, but oh boy what if we lived in the 50s... thats the obvious way this could be considered racist but the lesser obvious way this racism can swing in the other direction is when you exploitatively use the lynching to make the story appear more interesting and sensationally important than it actually is. In other words to use lynchings inspired by early 20th century jim crow black history as a prop to suggest im trying to make a political statement or something on behalf of black people, like they need my help to ensure their story is heard)

Frankly, i think its a lot harder for people to understand you can actually be racist and yet be totally into the race in question especially when it comes to borrowing from their culture without ensuring you paid proper reparations up front.

Malcom X actually talks about this form of racism where white people at the time of the civil rights movement were trying hard to make black people felt like they were no different that white people when black people didnt want to be recognized as being the same because they wanted people to respect that they want to be seen as black people and treated like black people. They just wanted black people to get the respect they were owed for being major contributors to what made American culture great at the time. In otherwards they didnt want their children to resent not being born white in America because they have done more for far less than any other people in this country and yet people still consider them a second class race nobody would optimistically choose if you could actually select your preferred race to be born into the world as. They deserve to be proud and respected in a way we still havent figured out.

For example Elvis learned everything that made him a star by going to listen to black bands play at jive clubs. He took what was obviously cool and exotic in that black culture and then just whitewashed it for white audiences.

Rock and Roll was invented by black artists, many of whom starved to death never seeing a single dollar for the songs they wrote and are now topping the charts because an all white rockabilly band covered it live on johnny carson.
On one hand, updating ML models without seeing the data sounds like madness. It puts seemingly impossible constraints on QA: Meaningful model improvements typically come through careful error analysis, discovering entire classes of errors that call for different approaches, bug fixes, new training data types, preprocessing and model architectures. Not uptraining with random amounts of unknown data.

On the other hand, federated learning is something that's clearly desirable, a compelling pitch. So you could argue these "technical impossibilities" might be overcome with enough cleverness, eyeballs and complex enough ecosystems.

I don't think we're nowhere near, but it's one of those paradigm shifts that have my ears perked up. I'm curious what'll come out of this, cheering on Andrew Trask and his OpenMined from the side lines!
> My take is that in tech it's no longer acceptable to separate the work an employee does from the morals of their employer.

Does this apply to employees of tabacco companies, alcohol companies, sugar companies, supermarkets that give plastic bags, shops that sell clothes made by children or quasy slave labor, car manufacturers, ... Should everyone stop working?

There is a solution for all that. The solution is democracy and good government. It helps to improve our lives without drastic measures, and without reading the people that instead of walking of stays in companies doing bad stuff.

> the devil is worth the extra money

A lot of people works for awful companies for minimum wage. It is the people at the top taking decisions the ones that take the share of the lion.
Are you looking for a CTO? It looks like your current CTO, if any, hasn't clear ideas.
I would suggest to go away from over-hyped frameworks
Did you ever drive a German car (not necessarily a Mercedes, even a simple VW Polo) vs a non German car? Seriously, that's the reason. Quality.

You can be as innovative as you wish, but if you are cheap and provide low quality products, that's what you get. Eventually someone is able to provide the same technology and then quality wins.
The reason files with numbers with different changes are kept is because when there are more than a handful of devs working on the same schema, who has the right magic 1 step "Dev schema"?

Your migration tool is bad and you should feel bad.

Schema changes aren't hard. It's the mismatch of devs knowing how big a table is in production + the downtime caused by a data migration that is the hard problem. Data retention, partitioning, and other data archiving things are rarely the top of mind for apps until it's usually too late and "hard".
Well, after the Google Cloud Console redesign of the Datastore UI, visual quality is great, but "Open in new Tab" is broken, the result tables abbreviate dates at the Month field, and in entity edits a timestamp can only be given with Minute resolution. So what should I make of that?
Lost and the new BSG are the two prime examples of How Not To Do a long story arc. Both started with the promise of a coherent overarching story, but in reality the writers only had the vaguest idea of where they were going beyond the basic premise. They are the exact opposite of B5. Frak, the very Arc Words of BSG were "…and [the Cylons] have a plan". Well, turns out the writers didn't! They totally made it up as they went along. So perhaps bad execution of long story arcs has ruined TV. But the concept itself certainly hasn't.

Anyway, even B5 had a plenty of "monster of the week" filler episodes as well. They were generally of much lower quality than the plot episodes.
> Perhaps surprisingly, they do it very differently than the vast majority of tech companies.

After decades of written knowledge about the topic, how is it possible that someone can still succeed by doing it differently?
> In my experience people are frequently idiots, and work gets done for no reason after someone with authority is convinced that it's a good idea by someone aching to do that sort of work.

You're contradicting yourself here. If someone with authority is convinced that something is a good idea, then they have a reason for doing it. It might be a misguided reason, but it's not just randomness.
"American tariffs" refers to the tariffs raised by President Donald J Trump against _China_ on March 22, 2018. This and the ensuring Chinese retaliatory tariffs has already taken effect for almost a year now and has already cost German car makers dearly:

>China’s 40 percent retaliatory tariffs on US car imports has already cost the Bavarian company €300 million ($340 million).

=====================================

"Possible US tariffs" refers to tariffs on imported cars and parts being considered against _all countries_[0]. These tariffs are separate and in addition to the Chinese tariffs.

>U.S. Commerce Department recommendations into whether Trump should impose tariffs of up to 25 percent on imported cars and parts on national security grounds are due by mid-February.

[0] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-autos-trade/trump-incline...
Most redesigns make things worse because anything re-designed in the last 10 years has been redesigned for computer interfaces that are small, have bad mechanical user interfaces, and can't even hold open a TCP connection. If it isn't clear, I'm talking about smart phones.
JSX is typed, you get all the benefits of intellisense and type safety. It even supports generics.
> Perfect storms aside, I think Volkswagen will be the biggest producer of EVs within 3 years.

What makes you think they stand a chance against Chinese manufacturers who face huge demand in their home market (whereas in Germany, EV are still looked down upon)? It looks like 60% of global PEV sales in 2019 will be in China - just look at all these models and manufacturers:

https://cleantechnica.com/2019/02/24/china-electric-vehicle-...
If it's your boss's pet project, then your boss probably has a reason for doing it, even if it isn't a good one.
As a user, 9/10 if I notice the UI has changed, it's because I'm unhappy and feeling encumbered or lost.

It's very rare that a redesign had me saying, "Oh wow, that's so much better!"

So many UI fads have set usability back but get repeated with most redesigns... hamburger menus, login forms that hide password fields until you've entered the username, ultra minimal forms that leave the user guessing what is interactive, text fields with labels only approximated by gray text within that field, and on and on.

Many old UIs were uglier but more usable.
They may think they are smart enough.

When I was in middle school back in the 90s we all had city-provided Unix accounts for e-mail, homepages etc. The e-mail was read over telnet with Pine. Some student found out they can change the sender address inside the app, proceeded to set it to another kid's email, and sent an insulting e-mail to the science teacher.

Of course the e-mail sender field is just for display purposes; the teacher had no trouble checking the headers and finding the kid behind this.

The medium has changed a bit, but I can imagine teenagers still easily tripping over some technicalities and details.
It is more or less like financial mathematics. Practicioners do not worry about Ito’s Lemma or stochastic differential equations.
Is the colour and visual display of errors really considered a significant problem that prevents technology adoption? I must be getting old.
Deep Learning with Python by Francois Chollet is very accessible as an introductory text. It uses plain language, avoids heavy math, and provides hands-on experience for the reader.

In general, I have found Manning to be one of the best technical publishers in terms of quality of content and updates.
In the fast.ai course, there are two or three amazing videos where Jeremy Howard explains the basic concepts of deep learning (convolutions in this case) using Excel spreadsheets, highly recommended.

I agree with mkagenius, I've played around a lot with deep learning and like physics it suffers a lot from unnecessary jargon that hides relatively simple concepts, for example this random quote:

>ReLU stands for rectified linear unit, and is a type of activation function. Mathematically, it is defined as y = max(0, x).

Now everybody could just use plain English - if you have a negative number, set it to zero, in all other cases, keep the number - I don't know why someone has to use 'rectified linear unit' to describe this simple operation.
Don’t Worry – It Can’t Happen (1940) [pdf]
SEEKING WORK | Germany and Romania | remote, visits possible all over Europe
I help you get an MVP App for iOS and Android running as quickly as possible using the best possible tool for the Job. I can also do Windows/Mac OS Apps and backends (fullstack).

90% of my work comes from word of mouth recommendations, but I also did a little bit of work on Upwork if you want to see what clients say about my work (Profile for verification https://www.upwork.com/freelancers/~0135175b097b830fd3):

"Once again Tobias has done an excellent job, above and beyond what was first discussed. I would recommend Tobias to all prospective employers."

"Tobias was exceptional in all his work - he improved our app's performance and saw it through to it's first release. He was punctual with deadlines, worked to a high quality and was very thorough in checking details."

"Tobias was outstanding- and even went over and above to add functionality to my childrens app. We will absolutely use his services again - great communication and for a remote worker I never felt I was left "hanging". Thanks Tobias!"

"Tobias was great and super fast. You know the saying - you get what you pay for? - Well I did. Totally top quality guy and built me a wordclass app with a framework to build future versions myself with Zero coding. I will be working with him on future projects."

Contact me via email Tobias (ät) redfoxcode.com or via Upwork if you like. Happy to give a free consultation via Skype for your project.
A chrome extension for toggling between code and spec file in GitHub PR
UI isn’t about “pleasing the eye”. Stick with software design, dude!
Chrome Extension Fetch API – Content Security Policy /StackOverflow/
So the difference between the state and private citizens is one of choice. You have no choice but to deal with the state -- with private citizens, you are free to seek alternatives or simply decide not to get certain services. When the government treats two entities differently, the one with the advantage can put the other one out of business if it acts competently. So Amazon would be able to eat all the little guys. It's the diffuse pain, concentrated gain problem. We see the gain because it happens in one place. The pain is spread across many businesses -- possibly numbering in the thousands. The small businesses aren't going to get equivalent advantages because they don't have the heft. And we should remember small businesses are where most jobs are, not big companies.

It's also worth thinking about the fact that those jobs will be created anyway. It's not like Amazon will just choose not to grow its workforce. What I'm saying is that no jurisdiction should offer preferential treatment to one company. If you would like your city to have very low taxes, great. But everybody should be able to take advantage of them, not big companies alone.

The crack bit was meant to highlight the short-term vs. long-term effects. Short term, Amazon comes to town, many jobs are created, all is great. Long-term, biasness across the country will fail to compete -- some for good reason, others because they couldn't get preferential treatment.
The problem with economics is that you can't tell which parts you can take seriously and which parts you can't. Both sides of the argument tend to offer a lot of criticism to the other side and it's not obvious which side is politically motivated or stands to gain from a specific policy and which side is doing it because it would be a net positive to society. There are many people who think socialism will be better than our current economic system and many of these people even have political power.
Location: Manchester, UK

Remote: Yes

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* Java 8 - Spring MVC/Boot, Dropwizard, JDBI, Hibernate

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* Web - ES6, vue.js, react, HTML5, Boostrap / Materials

* Data - SQL / PostgreSQL / MySQL / Oracle / Redis

* Cloud - AWS (SNS, SQS, EC2, S3, Route53) / GCP (Buckets, Compute, Pub/Sub)

* Architecture - DDD / SOA, Event Driven

* Tools - ELK, Redash, Grafana, Gitlab CI, Cloudfoundry, SonarQube

* Other - Jira, Trello, Pencil, Photoshop

Email: (in profile)

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Alternatively:

FIRE path: I deferred enjoyment but now my significant savings are wiped out in the economic collapse.

Non-FIRE path: I enjoyed my life, and my insignificant savings are wiped out in the economic collapse.

(Aside from economic collapses, there's is a similar potential that comes in the form of unexpected early death.)
With a HN site, it's easier to see what's "hip" this month, which can be entertaining, educational, and makes good "casual" conversations. Mathematics has trends just like any other field, and unfortunately if you're not actively working at a university and going to conferences multiple times a year, you'll never get exposed to that.
Brit ISPs must now offer customers a minimum speed guarantee
I loved the old app engine console, it was super fast, and dumped tons of the information you needed to analyze. The new one is slower, and has plenty of UI bugs like the one you mentioned (my pet peave is CTRL+click on many links no longer opens a new tab). On the other hand, look at all the stuff they added! There must be 30 dashboards you can jump into, and yet the new UI makes navigating all of them relatively easy. The old one was great for just app engine, but it would never be able to scale to all the services they currently offer.

Also, they are relatively responsive to developer demands, at least as far as the dashboard is concerned. Not that long ago, if you wanted to export a few seconds of logs, you had to setup a Cloud SQL sink that could suck in gigabytes of logs. Not too helpful if you want to analyze just a few hundred lines. People complained, and now you can export the current view to excel/csv. They've also speeded up load times significantly (it's still not snappy though).
"If a customers' broadband speed drops below an ISPs' promised guarantee, Ofcom's new code will give ISPs one month to improve performance before they must allow customers to walk away without paying a penalty"
> Basically, users perceive your product to be more usable if it's aesthetically pleasing.

On the other side, it will be less usable while i have to relearn how to use it. This is not an issue if it happens from time to time, you pay upfront a decrease of productivity and will be rewarded greatly later on. But in the era of SaaS we are constantly subject to a stream of redesigns, sometimes small, other times global. You cannot finish adapting to a change that another comes.

I don't know about others, but for me is deeply frustrating.
I assume that didn't work because if you rejected a ride or signed out you didn't get more rides?
You are pretty much required by law to be painfully honest. You are required to disclose anything that you know of that might have a material impact on the shares.
Gotta increase GDP somehow.
Some details can be excluded from the public filling and get filled in closer to the IPO date.
Not sure how that works for a developer, as there is usually more work to do, a big backlog etc. I could only make myself redundant by stopping progress in software.
Live changes are hard because they requires precise planning, and must often be done in several steps.

Imagine you're extracting some data to a new table in order to support 1:N instead of 1:1 of something. For example, introducing an address table, instead of storing the address directly in the customer table.

If you can have downtime, and have a small database, this can be done with one change and one deploy - that's not very hard.

If you have a big database (100s of GB), and can't have downtime, you can't grab a full table lock to rewrite all the records in one go. You'll have to do something like

1) create the new table (easy)
2) create a marker column on the old table saying 'data moved to new table', set to false on all records
3) deploy version of application that can use both schemas
4) migrate all data to the new table, flipping the marker as you go.
5) nce all records are migrated, deploy new version of application that only uses new schema
6) drop marker and old columns

(there are multiple ways to do this, of course - this is one approach)

Now imagine that you have 4 or 5 applications using this database. (Some reporting application, some integration with an accounting system, some integration with a marketing tool, etc).
And you must do a live migration.

That is _hard_.
They also know that working indoors on manufacturing is an easier job than farming. Farming is one of the more dangerous professions even.
My experience with this is that it is not the necessarily the language that makes it too complex, but the lack of training in proper software development. I have got mainly colleagues who were trained as economists, actuaries or mathematicians using Python, R, Matlab or Excel/VBA as the language of their choice and the result is always the same.

Coming from physics myself,I understand that beautiful notation can make things much easier and can be often the way to find great solutions, but proper organization will most often be sufficient.
That webpage is why i stopped using w3schools back in college.v nostalgic
10k Amiga Disk Collection Imaged to ADF – Belgian Amiga Club
I remember reading here a document about C programming guidelines for military / space software ( basically no dynamic memory allocation ever), but that was set a long time ago. I wonder if spaceX reinvented some parts of the software stack, or if they went along the traditional way.

I don’t expect seing rust code in the shuttle, but maybe formal proof with custom functionnal languages...
Hack Yourself – Start by Measuring Your Sleep
I wonder what’s the majority of the source code in German like? Is it mostly in English or German?
Because the world car market is bigger than just China, because Volkswagen is the world's second biggest car company, and because VW is big enough to spend its way out of trouble (which is what it's doing now).
Octave is just great if you do a spot of computational maths for a living and need to smash stuff out quickly.

It’s interactive, really well suited for matrix operations, has all the packages you’d expect for analysis, optimisation, etc.

Like others have said, once you nail it in Octave, move it to C++ for production and then wrap it in R, Python, etc to your hearts content.
A redesign should be never about yourself but about your users only. The raison d'être of the UI is not representation.

If you're still eager to do a periodical redesign, keep it to your error pages. So did I, just today [0]. This way, the web may also stay a fun place, full of potential discoveries.

[0] https://www.masswerk.at/404
Communist China is of course the perfect example of the lack of property rights, enabling the displacement of the poor/non-connected to make way for the grandiose dreams of the Party.