skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> You say you were using microservices, but you say that a bug in one service led to redeploying many services. That sounds really odd, and like you weren't doing microservices at all, but actually just a monolith with many pieces.

But the problem with microservices is that there is nothing to prevent you from creating these types of potentially incompatible dependencies. If you are separating functionality using functions, the compiler helps you spot problems. If using classes or libraries, the linker can help spot problems.

With microservices, there aren't good tools for preventing these types of problems from arising. Maybe one day Docker, kubernetes, or something else will make it easy to create and enforce real boundaries. However, as long as microservices are just an "idea" without a set of tools that help you enforce that idea, it's very easy to introduce dependencies and bugs in ostensibly "independent" microservices.
I copied a random title from the front page to test with:

>Show HN: Tetris Implemented in ClojureScript

The results were eerily good:

———————

hncynic 1 minute ago

I just finished a version of Tetris (http://clj.net/clj.htm) in ClojureScript. It took me about 2 hours before building the full game in Clojure.

———

Very cool!
Is there a link out there to see how this compares to other Tetris implementations ?
I'm a little confused as to why this would be different from the "Teach Yourself JavaScript" or whatever.

———

The demo is a bit too slow because the game is in a weird state but it's in a state where it needs to be replayed.
So seek out (and even be prepared to create) a milieu that helps you to be creative.
Of course, you are conveniently forgetting a much more recent example of land redistribution from Romanian history: the forced collectivization after the WW2.

The effects were predictably horrifying, with families starving while their land was forcibly taken and misused by people more friendly with the new system.

Because when the state CAN take everything from you, it's up the "wise statesmen" if the taking is for the good or for the bad of the society. You have no saying it is, but one thing is for sure: it’s bad for you and always good for said statesmen and their tools.
You have it backwards. When a person dies, their property becomes unowned (dead people cannot own things). It is active government intervention that takes that unowned property and gives to rich kids on the basis of some scribbles on some pieces of paper.
To be fair, Google is having attention span deficit in many departments.. their apps are being constantly shelved-off too. They're operating all side projects in a move fast manner.
> Ask HN: How to start a consulting practice?

> "I need clients to work with me and help me grow" -> "They don't need me to help me grow". -> "I'm not sure what I do because they are working with me but my experience suggests that I shouldn't do that with me" -> "But in practice I can work with me as my client as long as I stay in touch"

> Just start a side project on github and make sure you are the kind of person who is interested in this kind of thing and don't just make a "Show HN".

> I think a lot of the comments here are focusing on this one question - how about just working on one thing that you don't have any experience on? Do you feel like you are going to go out of your way to do it at all - what have you done at any length to get the experience in the way that you need?

Not bad at all. Some improvements and this can become my goto HN website. (only partly kidding).
Or they just saw huge amounts of advertiser’s money and didn’t think about the content as long as advertisers didn’t object.
No, it's not. A pyramid scheme works with net zero productivity. It's just a rearrangement of resources, that's it.

Life is a resource network. There is production, and consumption. Economically people contribute to the economy and are paid money which is used to "take" goods and services back out of the economy. This is very different from a pyramid scheme.
Buckaroo: The C/C++ package manager
Work smarter, not harder, folks. The 996 culture will kill you. Burning your time with too many things, inefficiently, will kill you. If you don't draw a boundary around your rest, and defend it, you're gonna lose years of life.

Whatever you think needs you so much doesn't really need you that much. Turn off the lights and go the fuck to sleep.
> you probably have tons of shared code/ leaky interfaces

Let's say that you have two microservices that work on the same business entity which is important to your application - eg, an invoice in an invoicing application. Not having shared code means that that you need to write from scratch all the code that deals with that entity for both services. If you later need to add some new attributes which are relevant to both services, you'll also need to independently update the code in both services, including the testing, and to do double the debugging.

If the services are really "micro", this will happen even more times for the same entity.

How can you do this without doing a lot more coding than if you had shared code?
In some countries, every national ID card is a smartcard, so millions of people use them. You can authenticate against our IRS site with yours, for example.
Why are they less relevant these days?
From Yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19694578
Hits-of-Code GitHub Badges
Buck: A high-performance build tool
Show HN: Serverless GitHub Leaderboard Single Page App
Legalize weed for the sake of a better future
These sound like actual comments from people with an incoherent train of thought, which might be plenty of people on the internet. These are scary accurate. I wonder how easy it would be to write a bot to, for example, post on Reddit and gain karma for the purposes of trusted-account generation. It seems like most of those account farms rely on self-upvoting which can be caught easily by the site. Posting potentially good comments that get upvoted by real people would be pretty hard to counter.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_salad

> A word salad is a "confused or unintelligible mixture of seemingly random words and phrases",[1] most often used to describe a symptom of a neurological or mental disorder. The words may or may not be grammatically correct, but are semantically confused to the point that the listener cannot extract any meaning from them.
Is the generator still being trained based on current comments?

If so, how long will it be before it starts generating comments that include feeding the title init itself?
The typical premature optimization worry that afflicts so many in the community before writing a single line of code.

Unless the profiler marks that code as reason to worry about, I wouldn't spend one second thinking about it.
Funnily enough it can generate links to genuine HN comments. eg.

> hncynic 1 minute ago

> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13471054

> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13778525
That helps against someone stealing your computer, but not if someone hacks it and manages to get a trojan running - it'll just keylog your passphrase.
> Providing for one's family is one of the main motivations for people to do productive work and create wealth.

Do you have a dataset showing people without children work less hard and create less wealth?
Sorry for the 15 year old humor. At 23.5, I still found this funny enough to share:

“Trump caught masturbating in Arizona hospital”

hncynic:
This would explain why I was in the hospital earlier today - if Trump didn't have a masturbating machine, I'd probably have a worse time.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Purge
I know you're joking, but think of the implications if these comments actually didn't differ from Reddit comments. It would then be easy for a small group of people to push agendas on Reddit. Imagine being able to automate creation of posts that push a certain agenda, then being able to automate thousands of coherent comments that agree with the sentiment of the post. You'd be able to manipulate thousands of real people into buying certain products, thinking a certain way, etc.

I'm not advocating for black-hat application of the technology, but merely pointing out that this is what we are facing as AI gets better.
> I'm not sure why everyone thinks it's fair the government should get paid when a citizen dies.

I'd argue that it's even less fair that the government feels it's entitled to a percentage of your income. Taking money from a dead person doesn't seem as bad as taking money from a living person.

Nobody likes taxes, but they have been a part of society for several thousand years.
Hilarious, I got comments complaining about how "the article is from 2011" and "the linked article is more thorough."
Isn't there a Python based dialect for that already ? I think it was named cirrus but I can't find any link to it.

Anyway, it seems to be it would be better to make a lib for this than a whole language.
On the contrary, HTML/CSS still haven't catch up with the power of 90's RAD tooling.
>https://www.nps.gov/articles/seug-soil-crust.htm

Living soil which can be destroyed by footsteps. Cyanobacteria and lichens and algae. One of the oldest organisms on Earth.
That's still the work of the USSR. The communists siezed power in Romania under Russian occupation after WW2. The recipe was similar to what Putin used in Crimeea some years ago but at least there they had some popular support whereas in Romania they used intimidation and massive election fraud.
Top Indian female biker dies in road accident during country-wide tour
hncynic 1 minute ago

It says "India's top female bike deaths in road trip during the world’s most dangerous years".

Did he mention the death rate in China?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki2/List_of_countries_by_fataliti...?

I would be interested to know more before writing this.

hncynic 1 minute ago

"She was a motorcycle helper. She was a motorcycle driver, and while she wasn't riding on a bicycle, she was on a bicycle. She was on a bike. When she drove on it, she was wearing an underwear on her head."

This is an incredibly unfair statistic. As far as I can tell people who use bikes don't even know how many times the "bicycle helper" is used.

As a bike enthusiast, I never have any problem riding as a bike helker, but in the city as a cyclist I regularly spend almost double the time riding bicycle helper in my town and have to be absolutely sure that she is riding on a bike that does not have a collision.

So while that is a big thing, I think the majority of bikers should take advantage of that knowledge to do so.

I can see how many motorcycles are in the US and other cities with very high density bike lanes, the article seems to imply that the city is doing something right as a biker. I don't really know about that, but I'm guessing it's just a matter of how many years a bike helper will take you to the point where you're not doing it wrong, or how

hncynic 1 minute ago

There is nothing to be proud of with a single biker at any moment.
While it is to a degree true, it is also worth noting that the stockfish vs alphazero matches did get criticism for various reasons.

The one I remember most was that alphazero was running on a supercomputer, while it's opponents didn't get that luxury. This is said to be why alphazero didn't make it far when put on similar hardware as other ais.

The other criticism I remember was from stockfish's dev saying that the settings they have for stockfish where suboptimal, most notably they had a set 1 minute think time per turn. This is apparently not how stockfish works, because like a human player it will also calculate on which turns it will spend its time thinking.

So while alphazero may very well be better, there's not really a way to confirm this with these matches sadly. The matches whet still helpful to the chess community, though. Definitely still worth checking out
Wow talk about a shitty web app. I spend a lot of money on contractors through upwork but the website is so terrible.

Feels like they used bottom barrel developers off their own site.
> Section 508 requires your PDF to be accessible to users of assistive technology—like screen readers or Braille displays.

Have people filed official complaints about this? I think once the complaint is official (instead of tweets) the department is obligated to respond to it.
"How to be happy"

-----------------

How to be happy?

1. Do something meaningful, 2. Do something meaningful...3. Do something meaningful...4. Do something meaningful...5. Do something meaningful--(even if that is not your primary goal)--5. Do something meaningful...6. Do something meaningful...(eg if you are a software engineer). 7. do something meaningful in life, not just some sort of job or hobby, to keep your sanity up. 9. Do something meaningful-- not what you think you're doing.

I think this is a good starting point; but the author is right.

I think the real key difference between happiness and pleasure is your own self-actualization and that it is something you can accomplish in the long run.

------

^ I know natural language generators can kind of get "stuck" sometimes, but this is pretty funny. (Also, some wisdom at the end).
“Generate Hacker News Comments from Titles”

> Russia says thanks

> Looks interesting, although I'm still waiting for a way to make my own AI/ML/BigData/Buzzword using Javascript

> I hope the comments don't smell like curry...

Ahhh I idk what to make of this. Kinda concerning.
I assumed they made a typo. What does it mean in this context?
I’m interested in the non-addictive part. But I couldn’t figure out what makes this non addictive, if you made this could you tell me?

For me personally it’s mostly just the mindless clicking on links in general which is addictive.
It is true that using Google Analytics does sound quite overt.

The question remains, how else can I see where my users are visiting from, what browsers & mobile devices are they using so that I may better tailor DarwinMail?
Nah, HTML and CSS have lots to learn from iOS and Android layouts, QML and XAML.

Where is Blend for HTML/CSS?

React might be sofisticated, but having the performance of native GUIs, or the eco-system of companies selling UI components, is surely something that it will never have.
Crash Course – Property Based Testing with ScalaCheck
Cheaper devs.
How to Prevent Burnout and How to Recover from It
Cold war experiments to find a superman in sport
Airbnb’s explosive growth jolts hotel industry’s bottom line
Thank you so much for your suggestion. This is gold.

I really like your approach to solving the problem.

I have taken note of your suggestions and will look into this further asap :)
Aka not willing to pay upstream development costs.
Sri Lanka Bombings at Churches and Hotels Kill at Least 140
Computational Propaganda: Why Data Extraction Allows Manipulation
Hub: GitHub from the Command Line
Thank you so much for your feedback.

This is a great approach to achieving our goal.

I have taken note of your suggestions and will look into this asap :)
The world's population can't all move to California, so that's not a sustainable option. But yes, improving home insulation is a low hanging fruit.

The overall impact of aviation is actually less than 5%, though it's fast growing and projected to be 5% and more. (And I doubt only a fraction is related to moving people around.) Note that aviation contributes to global warming in excess of its pure CO2 emissions; at very high altitude even water vapour is an issue. Another point of comparison: aviation's overall impact is about 10% of the entire transport sector, the same amount as all water based shipping.

Either way it's a huge amount, there is no such thing as just an integer percentage of overall emissions.

Source: Wikipedia and IPCC, mostly https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/ipcc_wg3_ar5...
No, that involve sending data to Google (one of the reasons I mentioned turning all that crap off), or a relatively complex config to swap out the location provider for Mozilla's which I haven't done yet on this phone.
I love your breakdown of emails here.

It's truly eye-opening. I hope that others feel the same?

In any case, I have taken note of your points and will look into this asap!
I really don't think so!

It was Google themselves who reviewed DarwinMail :)

They took their time too, let me tell you!
> Do you have a dataset showing people without children work less hard and create less wealth?

That wouldn't be the right calculation. If a person has children, their children will contribute to future GDP. So a proper analysis of having children on the economy would compare the output of:

- someone without children; and
- someone with children plus the net output of their children discounted to present day value.

I wouldn't be surprised if it turned out that the average person without children individually contributes more to GDP than the average person with children. However, that's largely because raising children takes time, labor, and resources. The person with children is sacrificing their own individual wealth and production and investing it their children. However, when the children's future production is taken into account, discounted by the future value of that production, I suspect that it turns out the other way.

I don't have data on this and although my suspicions feel correct, maybe they aren't. I'd be genuinely to see such data.
Not in C++, thanks to the power of user defined types.
But the collectivisation was the exact opposite: it took land from everybody and gave it to the state.

My point was, land/wealth redistribution, can and often is a good thing, it's not a sacrilege that aytomatically ends in dissaster as some die-hards make it to be.
What’s the point of applying deep learning to something for which we have an exact mathematical theory?
This is the type of thing that I imagine the "data suckers" (Facebook, Google, Apple, Amazon) are able to do regularly with the complex data that they have and the advanced tools that they have at their disposal.

I can't see yet to what end that ability would be trained, but I consider that ability to be akin to the state's ability to see into my backyard from space: I know they can do it and it doesn't harm me immediately that they can, but there's something net negative about the power/ability imbalance that makes me feel uncomfortable. Of course nobody is going to use that awesome power on someone as inconsequential as me, but...
I think you're right that this point is often overstated.

It does isolate each service from the scaling _issues_ of the others somewhat - if one service gets overloaded and crashes or hangs then other components are less likely to get brought down with it. In the best case if work is piling onto a queue and the overloaded component can be scaled fast enough even dependent components might not notice too much disruption.

Another advantage is that you can scale the hardware in heterogeneous ways - one part of the app may need fast I/O and the rest of the app might not care about disk speed much at all, so you can have different hardware for those components without overspending on the storage for the rest of the app. I think that's a minor advantage in most cases though.

A sort of in-between house is to have multiple copies of a monolith which are specialised through load balancing and/or configuration values and put onto different hardware, but all running the same code. Probably not that widely useful a technique but one that we've found useful when running similar long running tasks in both interactive and scheduled contexts.
The shape of the boulders reminds me of these: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sacsayhuamán
Well, the hot path isn't necessarily the good behaviour one you would choose to scale.

e.g. login service DoS'd, but logged in users can continue using widget service, rather than it grinding to a halt as the login path heats up and consumes all resources.
I ended up using Puppeteer, wrapped with a node app that translates gRPC requests containing the various static files, returning the bytes of the rendered PDF. I did not dig fully into figuring out the best way to deal with the Chrome sandbox; I just gave my container the SYS_ADMIN capability which I am sure I will someday regret. Full details are available here: https://github.com/GoogleChrome/puppeteer/blob/master/docs/t...

I see no reason not to open-source it but I haven't bothered to do so. Send me an email (in profile) and I'll see to it happening. (It is easy to write. All the complexity is dealing with gRPC's rather awkward support for node, opentracing, prometheus, and all that good stuff. If you don't use gRPC, opentracing, and prometheus... you can just cut-n-paste the example from their website. My only advice is to wait for DOMContentLoaded to trigger rendering, rather than the default functionality of waiting 500ms for all network actions to complete. Using DOMContentLoaded, it's about 300ms end-to-end to render a PDF. With the default behavior, it's more than 1 second.)

Before Puppeteer I tried to make wkhtmltopdf work... but it has a lot of interesting quirks. For example, the version on my Ubuntu workstation understands modern CSS like flexbox, but the version that I was able to get into a Docker container didn't. (That would be the "patched qt" version in Docker, versus the "unpatched qt" version on Ubuntu. Obviously I could just run the Ubuntu version in a Docker container, but at that point I decided it was probably not going to be The Solution That Lasts For A While and we would eventually run into some HTML/CSS feature that wkhtmltopdf didn't support, so I decided to suck it up and just run Chrome.)

The main reason I didn't consider Puppeteer immediately is that Chrome on my workstation always uses like 100 billion terabytes of RAM. In production, we use t3.medium machines with 4G of RAM. I was worried that it was going to be very bloated and not fit on those machines. I was pleasantly surprised to see that it only uses around 200MB of RAM when undergoing a stress test.
How Query Optimizer Works in RDBMS
This is not about naming or formatting. This is about the prevalence of what are commonly called "setters and getters", that are a fairly reliable indicator of poorly thought-out design. You can learn something here, if you pay attention.

In a sound design, objects more usually get their attributes at construction time, and keep them until they are destroyed. When something needs to change, from outside the object, it is usually better to make another object.

Of course an object can still have mutable state, altered by member functions that do actual, useful work, but they have no use for setters and getters -- they have direct access to the member data that needs to change.

The key here is that the public member functions should be doing useful work for you. Just mutating primitive state is noise. If the object doesn't abstract anything, it isn't earning it keep.

Another indicator of bad design is public virtual functions.
It apparently doesn't do well with titles that ask questions (e.g. Ask HN) with no backing article. This was trained on titles that are assumed to contain linked article, so I wouldn't expect it to do well on these:

Title: "What is your favorite color?"

Comment:

> Kill me with my iPhone.

Title: "What is the worst language?"

Comment:

> This is probably one of the more insidious comments about the article that pops up.

> It was a really good article.

> But this one is absolutely stupid.

> I could understand a few simple examples:

> * Explicit arithmetic

> * Explicit arithmetic

> * Selectable numbers

> * Concrete math

> * Consistent arithmetic

> * Concurrency... or something.

> "Yes," by the way is an interesting comment.

> "Yes... but I think we all have this problem, and I can't help feeling that we could all do just that: We need to do something about it. And so what..."

> I do like how he presents that question. I would be much more interested in an answer like that.