skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: SQL engine reclaiming space from DELETEs
Both PostgreSQL and MySQL are poor in that regard, especially PostgreSQL: after many DELETEs/UPDATEs, the disk space is not released to the OS, and the re-use of the space by the DB engine is often not working well due to the fragmentation. The only option is rebuilding/DROPping the whole table which requires downtime.

I'm essentially looking for an SQL engine that would be suitable as a storage for a queue server. I would like it to release the freed disk space to the OS immediately, even if this requires making extra I/O.

I see that MariaDB comes with multiple engines, maybe some of them could work like that?

I know that Amazon's Aurora is even worse than raw MySQL/PostgreSQL.
I ended up putting everything common into the master branch, and keep only the varying parts (not the common parts) in machine-specific branches. These are normally "include files" that end up in ~/.profile.d/, ~/.emacd.d/, etc.

I have to check out both the main branch and the machine-specific branch in separate directories, and use symlinks. OK by me, though; I don't set up a new workstation often.
Luxury car buyers don't want to maintain their cars. They are ok with paying someone else to do it, and cars come with long warranties these days anyway. Many choose to lease rather than buy, because that way they will always be driving a relatively new car.

These people are getting exactly what they want from the luxury cars that are currently available. If a manufacturer spent money on making its luxury cars more durable and easier to maintain, they would need to raise prices and would then lose sales to other brands.

In other words, this situation is a result of consumer preferences, not a conspiracy by manufacturers to cut quality. And that applies to a lot of things, not just cars.
I should add this is for when working with a relational database where raw SQL is the best option. For other things say like data science python and pandas would be my go to
Sometimes it's difficult to get a diagnosis, and sometimes you end up with crap doctors who run more or less the same tests for every patient and write off anyone that doesn't match as a hypochondriac/lunatic/time-waster. And sometimes doctors literally know less about your condition than you do yourself.

If you've never been in this position yourself, I can understand why you'd be sceptical of the OP's claims, and indeed I'm sure there are lots of people that are convinced they have a particular condition despite what tests say.

For context, I was written off by my NHS neurologist because I didn't match his standard battery of tests. My circumstances and symptoms pointed strongly to a small fiber neuropathy, but he scoffed and said it was very unlikely, and refused to do a skin biopsy to confirm it. Instead he labelled me with fibromyalgia, and hoped I'd disappear - but when questioned it was abundantly clear he literally knew next to nothing about fibromyalgia, and presumably used it as a generic label for "time wasters". Eventually I did get him to do the biopsy - which they fucked up. When the results were negative, he again tried to get rid of me, and I had to fight to get him to redo it properly - lo and behold, it was positive.

I had a very similar experience with endocrinology - I have a rare endocrine condition, but the symptoms point absolutely towards a specific diagnosis - instead, I was basically told to "stop this silly nonsense", and it wasn't until several years later that I was diagnosed. NHS endocrinologists have a terrible reputation for anything that isn't diabetes.

People rave about how wonderful the NHS is, but my (unfortunately substantial) experience has been shambolic. It's my observation that doctors (and consultants and registrars alike) don't update any of their knowledge or training since they left medical school, even if that was 40 years previous; they have no interest in recent medical developments; they have no interest in writing case studies or undertaking research; they could basically be replaced by a flow chart.

/rant
Vulnerabilities from writing SQL? ORMs do not solve this. Prepared statements and parameterised queries solve this.

Bugs? You're shitting me, from what? Untested queries?

A mess? Clean it up. You can make a mess with an ORM too.

> Which is a laudable goal but not realistic if you've worked on any backend that has even a hint of organic growth or legacy.

Except it is realistic and I have cleaned up a lot of "organic growth" and "legacy code" like this.

> I know of at least two books on the subject of dealing with anti patterns in and the refactoring of database schemas.

Yea.. where do you think I got these ideas?

> Database schemas are the mortgage of technical debt, they can take literally decades to pay off if you don't get them "right" in the first place, or you pivot, or you're growing quickly, or you have a large team.

Database design is not hard and your schemas/changes should be peer reviewed like any code. It's also not static, yes, some, SOME, very few situations are essentially unchangeable.

But most database design is easily extended without causing breaking change.

Breaking change is more problematic but not in any way more or less than any other breaking change.

Then again, I'm kind of curious how any of these problems are solved by an ORM.
Average American Has Just 4 Hours, 26 Minutes of Free Time per Week
Accept the address and key the user based on the part preceding +.
I'm a member of a private online pomodoro group, every 30 minutes or so the bell dings and we all chat, if we want, for a few minutes then get back to work. Those who want to show their cam do, but mostly we don't and we tend to talk about the tasks we are doing and how it's going. It's informal and geared towards independence but with enough communication that I don't feel I'm isolated. I think it's a much better balance than having some panopticon-inspired structure enforcing productivity through embarrassment.
Why is it not okay to raise the price to what the market (insurance companies) will pay? How else would you expect the market clearing price to be determined (Conservatives in Congress implemented legislation prohibiting Medicare from negotiating drug prices with pharma companies)? Every day healthcare providers are finding ways to extract as much as possible from payers (insurance companies, Medicare, Medicaid); this is not illegal. Immoral? Sure, I'll bite and state it's wrong, but entirely economically rational in the current broken system. What makes Shrekli's transgressions particularly bothersome? He put the issue in the spotlight for the American public to see (with much bravado), front and center, and he's the bad guy for showing the system is broken?

What he did was entirely legal, and in no way should've impacted his fraud sentencing. But exacting revenge on a single person (through overly punitive prison sentencing) does nothing to fix systemic issues. Someone with talent that could be redirected in a positive way (his financial analysis and engineering acumen is proven) is cooling his heels in a jail cell for years, and the American healthcare system is as broken as it was before.

I've seen happen before [1], and was just as dismayed with how the person in question was treated relative to the severity of the crime(s).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_Mitnick#Computer_hacking
Seems eerily similar to Buttondown(https://buttondown.email)
I've been using EmailOctopus for more than two years and would highly recommend it! (This is unsolicited, by the way.)
That's not the issue. The issue is the lack of account management in the Apple email app itself. For example, let's say you're using mail to manage a Gmail account and Outlook account. You can't simply manage those accounts from the email app. Odds are you don't have an Outlook login across multiple apps on an iPhone (fuck MS), so why can't you access it from the app itself?

Anyhow, this is becoming circular. I guess if you've used an iOS device forever you get used to its quirks, but it makes no damn sense if you use other OSes. Gmail, you can manage accounts within the app. Apple's app, you can't. Makes no sense.
Umm, I doubt it. I mentioned ether in response to the question about alcohol, and didn't make it clear that my point was the effect is similar to alcohol (though not quite the same - you retain some clarity and you don't get hungry afterwards).

You're no more likely to hallucinate on one any more than the other IME. I guess it's acid or mescaline instead.

I understand that F&LiLV tended to big up (or even invent) the drugs' effects (bullshit about adrenochrome? "In the DVD commentary, director Terry Gilliam admits that his and Thompson's portrayal is a fictional exaggeration" <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adrenochrome>). Ether just gets you pissed a bit like booze, that's all.

Oh, here we go “The only thing that really worried me was the ether. There is nothing in the world more helpless and irresponsible and depraved than a man in the depths of an ether binge. And I knew we'd get into that rotten stuff pretty soon [...]” <https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/320840-the-only-thing-that-...

yep, that strikes me as bullshit.
Oh, so you are basically just a troll, then.

plonk
I had to make the story shorter, but the company now exists and is running. It's just not the way I initially imagined: I'm making some money building products for other companies while I try hard to improve and sell my own.

It seems to me that what ruined my life was my inability to deal with the anxiety of undertaking a very large project totally on my own, having to deal with emotional highs and lows being patient enough to wait for the results -- very large projects take time especially when you are working alone.

I feel confident that things will improve, specially now that I think I understand better what I've gone through, but it costed me a lot.
Universities get substantial federal funding, including Pell and research grants. Such investments are put at risk if the universities fill themselves with unqualified applicants.
Yeah, but then you have to ditch Now for your websockets, and you significantly increase the complexity of your deployment by having your serverless code on Now and your containers on Kubernetes.

At that point, I'd rather just go fully in on Kubernetes and keep the benefits of containers, rather than using two cloud providers.
The buyers of these cars only keep them for three years

The OP noted that these cars need major service after just a few thousand miles. It doesn't seem reasonable to expect to drive less than 5,000 miles in three years.
Try to lift an anvil by hand, then watch it get rapidly thrust dozens of feet into the air by a really small quantity of explosive. Demonstrations like this really put the power density involved into perspective.
It already is, at the high end of the market. The weight savings is attractive to performance car owners in particular. Temperature apparently isn't that big of a deal.
Things to Do After a Layoff to Bounce Back Like a Boss
More and more sub-reddits are getting banned on Reddit everyday. Many sub-reddits are preserving their content before they get hammered.

r/DarkNetMarkets has https://www.gwern.net/DNM-archives

r/TheRedPill has https://trpbackup.com/

Reddit got rid of the "post view count" and has decided to " restrict access to sub-reddit traffic pages to mods only".

source : https://redd.it/6atvgi
I have a pair of tweezers I bought from an electronic supply house 30 years ago for what $10. They are hard nickel tool steel. Sharp as ever.

The ones we buy at work last about 6 months before the tips get ruined. Why because it's cheaper to make them out of soft stainless. And there is no competition they are all crap.
Environmentalism and Western Capitalism don't seem at all compatible: either we kill the environment or we kill capitalism ...
What’s broken is resorting to massive investment in hacky, brittle technological solutions to a policy problem that needs a political solution to address the root causes.

IMHO we live in an age where maybe some more smart people should be turning their minds towards affecting public policy.
This is interesting idea, but I wish their book was written in English
That is exactly what I was talking about! You are portraying games as "immature activities" like "superhero movies", rather than just "movies".

The same way there are more "mature" movie plots than those that you are (kind of) mocking, there are also more mature books than children stories, more varied music than pop summer songs and, indeed, more games than your "nth clone of shooting aliens".

By the way, I have had a nice daughter and health scares like anybody else, and no, that has nothing to do with maturity or with games becoming boring. There are many game genres and of course you like different ones when you are 15 vs. when you are 50. I literally thought like you in my early 30s, when I had literally zero free time and kept thinking "yeah I am past that, leave it to the young generation, I am responsible now".
Preface to the Genealogy of Morals.

Though the interpretation doesn't hang on Nietzsche explicitly adopting the label 'psychologist', but in the substance of his philosophy.
What Twitter - or any large social media site - needs is a large, well-paid abuse team. Hundreds, if not thousands, of people. That'd blow through a bunch of money.
Holy crap that website is bad. Every few paragraphs (pretty short ones) there's all caps and bolded links like "READ MORE" or "WATCH BELOW" for tangential content. It's hard to tell whether something was a heading or tangential spam.
I template trees using a python script, for both ~ and /. The template language isn't even currently that complex - basic per-host conditionals suffice. The host pushing the config does the templating, serializes it, and shoves it over ssh to the receiver. This way I can do things like leave passwords in config files (eg mpd.conf) and not have them end up on eg a VPS. Another example is having helpful comments in authorized_hosts to say where a key is from without that information ending up on the hosts themselves.

The receiving host runs python, so it can do things like refuse to overwrite files that have been changed locally. I still need to add a notion of hooks to run on the receiver when a given file is changed. If the remote dependency on python/ssh becomes a problem, I will simply add an option to dump a tarball locally.

I really tried to use ansible et al, but those tools seem to be geared towards managing large groups of essentially identical hosts, rather than generally differing hosts with some commonality.
United States sets sights on China in new electric vehicle push
Ready to Use AMP4MAIL Template
Cardboard boxes and any paper product for that matter already contain a lot of recycled paper, and if you live in a country that collects paper separately you shouldn't worry too much about it being dumped. Used paper and cardboard is worth money to collect and sell separately. https://resource-recycling.com/recycling/2018/08/14/the-late... mentions some prices.
Single Sign-On/Sign-Out with SAML 2.0
You should move your spreadsheet to coda.io! Much easier to create these systems.
I use it regularly to search for things because it's often faster than typing, and that's on a smartphone with a swipe keyboard. Compared to T9, it must be even better.
Ask HN: Which great products didn't succeed?
I've often heard the claim that the startup graveyard is full of great products that didn't succeed (e.g. because the startup wasn't good enough on marketing, or because they didn't solve a big enough problem).

What are some examples of this?

If there are examples of truly great products that eventually died, I'd like to study them more in-depth.
As I mentioned "....unless they are really into iPhones and Samsung S devices.", which are way out of budget as pre-pay.

As for stats, I could only get those from 2015, it was 50% across Europe, 77% worldwide.

https://www.globalrewardsolutions.com/wp-content/uploads/GRS...

Although I did find a couple that show Spain only has around 20% prepaid, which was quite surprising to me.
Worked well for i-mode in 1999 - of course that did do some magic on the protocol level.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-mode
It’d be pretty easy to build a slack bot for that, and slack has decent videoconferencing tools.
Good for them. I honestly and truly hope they succeed.

I have a small sub (30-40k =/- subscribers)and thought about doing this. I have the infrastructure for my personal projects but don't know if I wanna deal with the upkeep and some of the few mods we have.

We're not political, we just wanna help people learn something and tell someone to bugger off when it's needed. Would open up a lot of possibilities and we would just use the Reddit sub as a link farm back to our site. It's horrible UI and other inabilities aren't the experiences we want for our users.
Wow this is quite cool, thank you!
I understand your apprehension to just having it all "out there" - I'm wouldn't support such a foolish approach either.

However, you conflated two separate issues: Immutable Identifier (DNA), and Real-Time / Historical Location Data.

While both have issues attached, I will say the latter has far more (real-time stalking / surveillance).
The problem with this is that all it takes is a relative to narrow things down tremendously so you could protect your DNA with Fort Knox and it wouldn’t really matter if your near-ish family did not
Safety critical SW is done by following a strict and thorough process. It always begins with safety experts and systems engineers who will identify and classify the risks and determine what will be done to minimize the risk.
The software engineer only comes later to implement the SW, which is only a part of the systems implementation.

Here Boeing misclassified MCAS and gave a lower risk than later identified, leading to a more relaxed development process.
I hope that light will be shed on what happened at Boeing, because it looks like an intern did the MCAS.
HIPAA does not explicitly call out genetic/genomic information as one of the oft-cited 18 elements of protected information [1]. However, genetic/genomic information is considered to fall under the 18th element, and HHS states that it must be treated as PHI [2,3]. In fact, HIPAA is very broad in its definition of PHI:

"The Privacy Rule protects all "individually identifiable health information" held or transmitted by a covered entity or its business associate, in any form or media, whether electronic, paper, or oral. The Privacy Rule calls this information "protected health information (PHI)." [4]

Finally, it's worth pointing out that some states (e.g, WA) have enacted their own legislation that specifically calls out genetic testing and data as PHI [5]. In addition, there is the GINA act, which provides some protections as well [6]

[1]: https://cphs.berkeley.edu/hipaa/hipaa18.html
[2]: https://www.hhs.gov/hipaa/for-professionals/faq/354/does-hipaa-protect-genetic-information/index.html
[3]: https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/45/160.103
[4]: https://www.hhs.gov/hipaa/for-professionals/privacy/laws-regulations/index.html
[5]: https://app.leg.wa.gov/billsummary?BillNumber=6284&Initiative=false&Year=1999
[6]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_Information_Nondiscrimination_Act
Mahatama wasn't an idealist. He supported Britain's pro-peace war and didn't shy away from supporting violence in certain cases.

"It is better to be violent, if there is violence in our hearts, than to put on the cloak of nonviolence to cover impotence." - Mahatma Gandhi

Rest assured, Republic of India would've formed one way or the other.
Yes, well no, not really.

It is single host. It requires still managing the host node you run it on. Dokku is nice and they did a good job mimicking the Heroku tool chain, but it is not even close to actually providing the value Heroku gives.
That invasion route also involves crossing half the mountains in Asia. India and China are where they are for a reason!
Ethics is relative. What is your definition of ethics?
Those are useful for compiler devs and language designers, not so much for the average user of the language.
Those solutions are not Capitalist, government intervention to prevent profit by nefarious means - employment rights, environmental concerns, health - are counter-Capitalist. If it were capitalism the market would be making those things unprofitable. The market has poor morals.
I hear you.
I have generalized and social anxiety.
This type of situation or an open office shoots it through the roof. End up getting barely anything done because I am so wound up.
Refuse to work in an open office setting.
Mastodon has a character limit, but the protocol underlying Mastodon (ActivityPub: http://activitypub.rocks/) doesn't.

Adding a character limit was just a design decision on the part of the Mastodon developers to make their app more Twitter-like. There's nothing stopping others from building apps that don't have a character limit, and they would be able to federate with Mastodon and other AP-enabled apps just fine.
Honest question from a Mastodon user. Is it truly that large? Most of the nodes I'm on remind me of 2006 Twitter, shouting in the dark.
The new, more economical engines are physically bigger, so in order to maintain the required ground clearance the engines were moved forward and up. This gave the plane a tendency to nose-up in certain extreme circumstances. MCAS was supposed to make the plane behave more like previous 737 models, in order to fulfill the "common type" requirement that would allow 737 pilots to fly it without getting qualified for a new aircraft type.

The plane _is_ balanced; it's not like Boeing built an aircraft that falls out of the sky if you slightly nudge the yoke wrong. (Which wouldn't even be unusual; plenty of modern aircraft are completely uncontrollable without computer assistance.) Yes, the problem could've been solved with a re-design of the aircraft- lengthening the landing gear struts, modifying the wings, etc. - but that would negate the point of using an existing and well-tested design.

There's A LOT of guilt to go around in this story, but no one can actually be casting doubt on the abilities of Boeing engineers in the fundamentals of aircraft design.
It would be interesting to know how ICE obtained it. Did they, in fact, threaten or trick the motel staff or management? I would think that the staff is not personally in legal jeopardy from refusing to comply. I think most people would know that, too. Passing it on to higher-ups would surely be proper corporate protocol, and wouldn’t they be the ones to suffer legal jeopardy or harassment, not Joe Night Clerk?

Edit: checked into this.
An older story has more details https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2018/01/0...

“ICE agents, who are tasked with arresting people who are not legal residents for deportation, would be given a guest list from the hotel’s receptionist, along with a form to sign confirming the lists’ receipt. The roster included information such as guests’ driver’s license number, room number, date of birth and license plate number.”

an article linked within the earlier one says even more.
https://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/news/motel-6-calling-ice-und...
It appears to be a voluntary practice and they may even sell/be compensated for the list by ICE.
Yes, that's the traditional understanding. We're talking about something new, something possibly different.
Hospitals HAVE to buy the pills because they need to be able to handle rare conditions if they occur. Shkreli FIXED the issue of only supplying 100 counts by offering a 1 count option. But obviously the overhead of manufacturing is the largest component of pill production. So he couldn't reduce the price by dividing by 100.
It's kind of funny in the reddit "Buy it for life" community where people are talking about, like, socks... the thing you grind your whole body weight onto 5,000 times per day. I'm not going to start buying expensive uncomfortably thick socks just so I can be happy about how long they last.