skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It sounds like they stumbled upon a great idea, built it quickly and then slowed down. But that is natural when your team and product grows. There is nothing to blame.

Also claiming you believe you lost out on a billion dollar opportunity is a bit egotistical to say. Its the same attitude that makes one say you know better than your customers/competitors and dont need no validation for your ideas.
I am aware of the fact that unitilized padding can have nasty side effects: https://lwn.net/Articles/417989/

But yeah, I should have mentioned the caveats too. I will update the post once I'm back at my computer.
It may be worse now, but the computer game industry has long been one of the worst in terms of the conditions that devs work under. It is, perhaps, the most cutthroat sector of our industy.

That's why I left it -- I can do exciting, impactful, cutting-edge things in other sectors without having to endure death marches and crunch times.
Police officer helps a job seeker the job seeker repays the officer's kindness
IRC doesn’t have its own message history but most servers publish archives. You’d still need your client to load up archives for when you were offline if you wanted to see missed messages online. Otherwise you would have to look at the archive separately.
Yes, the Windows TCP/IP stack was from BSD. I'm not sure if the code is still in Windows, but I think it is still configured via an etc/hosts file. I believe the BSD licence was preferable to Microsoft (as it was to Apple who based OSX on BSD). The networking stack was supposedly better on BSD than Linux too, but I'm not sure how correct that is (but I did hear that the software company I set up a website for in the mid 1990s switched from Linux to NetBSD pretty much as soon as I left for that reason).
Ask HN: Baby products that have helped you most?
Hi HN, our first baby is due this September. Wondering what hardware / software / books / etc. you've found most useful?
ELI5: disruption is difficult
Interesting, I was under the impression that compound literals of form (type){value} were illegal and the correct form was (type []){value} but apparently not!
I parallelized the SetL runtime for shared memory multiprocessors, with dynamic load balancing, parallel GC, and added explicit parallel constructs, at Urbana-Champaign, from fall 1988 over the next couple years. It's weird, to me, that the global interpreter lock persists in Python, 3 decades later.
Where is the SysV style C ABI defined if we wanted to go read more about it? Or, do you have a favorite reference for a work explaining it's design choices?

I'm interested in soft processors on FPGAs and their tools, and that sounds like it might make for good reading.
Google Deprecates “Sort by Date” Search Function
> No, the reason is as stated elsewhere. Rust doesn't run on these systems because no one bothered to tool up LLVM for them.

Part of the problem is that LLVM developers themselves are apparently unwilling to release support for architectures that they see as liable to go unmaintained and bitrot in the future, even if someone shows up and does the work. There is a notion of "experimental arch's" but it doesn't seem to be actively used, or to suffice in addressing the issue.
Audible and audiobooks, the fastest growing part of publishing
By knowing its exact size with sizeof(), and using that and a cast to uint8_t* to both bzero() it out before use and memcpy()ing it when sending it. Unless the C standard says that the compiler may change the padding bytes of the existing storage?
I'm confused what I'm supposed to look for in that article (do you mean you were the author?) but anyway -- I feel like calling this merely a "caveat" gives the wrong impression? It seems a bit like telling people to mix bleach with vinegar and then saying "Oops, sorry, I did know that it produces chlorine! I forgot to mention that caveat." The caveat isn't just a side note for the margins, it's a critical reason why people avoid this sort of thing.
Sorry, I was not aware of that as I have not previously seen this post.
So if you're zeroing out a struct like so

struct S {size_t a, void *p;};

foo = (struct S) {0};

Does the standard require the compiler to set any pointers to NULL, or will everything be implicitly zeroed leaving pointers possibly improperly initialized to NULL?
Definitely agree that calling it `reuse_local` makes more sense, but OP was just quoting the blogpost.
That's quite good, and a terrific analogy. Thanks for sharing it. If someone were to turn that into a video, it might be useful for even younger kids.
In 2010, you could've bought an Intel i7 980X for $1,000 (why would you? B-but still...) with six cores @ 3.33 GHz and easily OCed to 4 GHz.

I think we're a year or two away before beefy, AAA games begin demanding 4 GHz minimum, and new CPUs barely offer over 4 GHz clocks as it is, so... we've already been there!

CPU power's been flatlined, especially when you compare it to GPU power.
Prime Obsession, by John Derbyshire, is a very entertaining and well written book about this topic, following a similar path (although much slower) among the conceptual building blocks required to understand the hypothesis.
Two conflicting thoughts on that:

- If the big wholesale Xeon buyers and users qualify AMD chips and start buying a lot of them, Intel will find that landscape a lot more competitive, this is a more "sticky" market than OEM products for consumers.

- They could be betting that AMD will lose the plot again, as they've done throughout their corporate history, e.g. after the 486, and after K8. The OEM consumer market is less sticky and will trivially move back to Intel if they have competitive offerings.
Even if Google's dates are not "high confidence," this function was still useful outside of News search. Very disappointed to see this be retired.
Yep. I have political opinions also. But I've learned they aren't worth arguing about nor making claims of superiority in most cases.

Incremental changes work. Radicals causing destruction very seldom do. Unless the injustice is manifestly extreme and intolerable enough. And the causes most radicals espouse today, well, speaking of weaksauce.
Show HN: Platypus 3.0 – Server monitoring with websockets
Smaller companies tend to have less financial room to maneuver, though. Delaying a release means delaying revenue while at the same time still having to pay salaries, etc. Sometimes, a company can't afford that delay.

Still, my personal bent is that I'm more likely to be willing to do that for a small company (whose owner I likely work with, and I have a greater personal investment in) than a large one.

That's one of the several reasons that I prefer to work for small companies.
> basically zero marginal cost

If only. Their COGS may be low, but marketing expenses and R&D are 2/3 of slack's expenses. Also, cloud gets very pricey at scale.
In most of Spain there are 3 months a year in which there is so hot you can not do intellectual work without external aids like aid conditioners.

This is something well proven, that over certain temperature, mathematical work drops enormously.

Having experienced that I have the hypothesis that the body regulates the temperature of the brain and if it is too high it will make it to slow down, just like a computer does and make you lazy so you do not generate more heat.

In the same way, it makes sense that if your lymphatic circulation is blocked, as it works only with movement, it will make you lazy so your cells do not generate more waste that can not be cleaned.
I run an R&D operation currently commercializing in the space. Areas of (fast) food currently under technology-driven change that this article misses include: overall distribution paradigm (adaptive automated third party logistics to automated on-demand locations with transparent supply chain vs. personalized grocery runs and in-store packaging with minimum transparency), personalization, health and nutrition tracking and integration (broadly "food as medicine"), and SKINK (shared kitchen / no kitchen).
While I'm glad to hear that, how does that work given that the students presumably won't have been taught Scheme from SCIP beforehand? Is it just a given that students taking the class learned Scheme on their own?
Someone just told me german employment is worth about double of what contracting would be.

My employer pays part of health insurance, retirement funds, unemployment insurance and you don't pay VAT.
Whatever you pass the yes to.
Did anyone ever do something really interesting with table inheritance? This is one feature that looks like I might have use cases for all the time, but they never quite fit or offer a good benefit.

Foreign data wrappers on the other hand are used by me all the time, as you can have a "common" stuff database and just inject that into all kinds of related ones (like per-tenant setups etc.). I've ran in some issues with joins and performance, but if need be you can just materialize them locally and work from that.
Do you write a separate serialization function for every single struct and sub-struct you send over a network? And then continue maintaining every single one to keep it consistent whenever a field is added/removed/modified in any struct?

(Though I should mention that macros actually do make this doable, but they're hardly pretty, and I have yet to see many people embrace this approach, if they realize it's possible at all.)
> not have to worry about upgrading it for 10 years (I think we're pretty close to this point already

I think we're already there. Ivy Bridge machines from 2012 can still get the job done today if paired with a solid complement of RAM and an SSD.

Graphics is really the only area where those older machines are starting to be a limfac, as their inability to drive the latest 4K+ displays is starting to be more of an issue for normal people.
The same issue comes up on teaching probability, and even worse, elementary stochastic processes. To do it correctly, you need measure theory, but that requires a whole course or courses.

In fact, a lot of the results of freshman calculus require more mathematical analysis than most students really have command of. But we still teach it because the applications are so compelling, and the intuition is important to develop.

Even more generally, as you probably know, there are tricky foundational issues in Mathematics that most professional mathematicians prefer not to pay attention to.
Tesla is an exception to this: it has a chip that converts high level commands, like stop to low level CAN commands (stopping slowly)
A Real World 'Star Trek' Replicator Is Now Possible Thanks to New Breakthrough
> It is quite common to zero out a structure and use only parts of it.

That point is addressed in TFA.
What? No. As far as computing goes, the digital abstraction still and will always hold unless we start doing analog computations like were done with analog computers from the 1940's to about the 1960's (in the West, they lasted longer in Russia due to their inability to compete in Silicon).

A vacuum transistor, used as a switch, is still a switch.
Frequency is not a great comparator for different generations of CPUs.

Your overall point is accurate, but your metric is not.
It depends. It was common case for years in games to just cast your networked data to an array and send over the network. Nowadays it's much more in fashion to pick a serialization library to sit in between, as PCs are faster. But one might choose not to depending on the problem space. Embedded devices might not have the spare cycles or the space for a full serialization library.

So...you're not wrong, but it's basically the same reason people use C over something with more ergonomics.

Edit: the last time I wrote a networking library, I also just cast to raw structures, mainly because it was less work (didn't want to integrate a serialization library on both sides of the link). This was fine for a while (and very fast), but also hid some bugs in the protocol, and made sending arrays of data very ugly. Eventually we put protobuf on top, and things ended up much nicer.
> Does everyone else just put up with the discomfort? Noise exposure doesn’t seem as bad as the searing ear pain that comes from wearing noise cancelling headphones.

Not everyone else gets searing ear pain.
Poisson distribution is the limit of having infinite particles around.
> standardization of job titles

I've long thought that this was needed industry-wide. As it is, job titles are largely meaningless. It shouldn't, and doesn't have to, be that way.
> *What are we saying 'yes' to?

The flag SO_REUSEADDR (SO = Socket Option); really, I'd say we're setting the flag / setting the flag to true, but true is a bit of a reserved word, which I'm guessing is why they went with "yes".
It's to manufacture legitimization for all kinds of claims.

One of the most notorious examples for this is probably Israel [0].

[0] https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/the-twisted-logic-of-the...
Rust has unofficial channel on Freenode, and it's mentioned in Rust team announcement for moving away from IRC: https://blog.rust-lang.org/2019/04/26/Mozilla-IRC-Sunset-and...

I am sure other products/teams have channels there too, they just won't be official go-to place to chat.
Fine, have it your way. They work in great offices with healthy living conditions. The code they deliver is still buggy and deficient
> Most people have a very hard time saying no to a manager no matter what is asked from them when this is the only system they've ever known.

And, let's be honest here, that is one of the two main reasons that companies prefer young devs. (The other main reason is that young devs are cheaper.)
In CMOS the killer is that they consume power when switching (power ends up being a square of switching frequency). So if you switched. 10x, you'd have to somehow dissipate 100x the power.

Your core might be small, but the industrial-sized refrigerator needed to cool it suddenly isn't.
If you can create software/services to solve problems that humans will pay money for then you are in a unique position with leverage. I'd be more worried about AI/ML making developer's skill sets redundant. Thoughts?
I’ve seen 3 or 4 of these posts over the last few months and they all seem to have half in common with each other. At this point do we need more posts calling attention to FDW and Table Inheritance as things nobody’s using/heard of? They’re certainly nifty, but I’d like more deep dives on PG internals and tuning to gain a bit more publicity on HN.
Perfectly Imperfect Yakitori
On the same connection with the NOTIFY-er? I probably misunderstand somethings. Can you point to the part in the documentation that states this? That would defeat the purpose of it entirely.

Edit:
In fact the second sentence in the documentation is "[...] NOTIFY channel is invoked, either by this session or another one connected to the same database, all the sessions currently listening on that notification channel are notified, and each will in turn notify its connected client application." [0]

[0] https://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.4/sql-listen.html
Politics exist no matter where you are; it's the art of convincing other people that they also want to do the thing you want to do. Improving your political skills will make you a better engineer because an engineer without influence isn't getting much done. For what it's worth "show don't tell" is one of the basic tenets of politics.
Ask HN: Sources of remote dev work with minimal human interaction?
Hi everyone,

I am in a situation that I feel some of you can relate to, so I wanted to pose this question in hopes of generating some resources for myself and similar people. I've had a few developer jobs so far in life and on balance, I haven't really liked any of them. When I ask myself why, the reason is always the corporate bullshit that I must endure. I find the actual job of being a developer quite fun and enjoy solving problems and building things with code. I also have no troubles with the interpersonal side of developing, as far as working in a team and being a decent coworker is concerned. What I cannot stand is the corporate environment and it's associated crap and rituals. I don't like being "obligated" to put in extra time with my colleagues on team events and retreats. I don't like daily stand-ups that are about talking about what you're up to so you look busy, rather than sharing (both ways) useful info with the team. I don't like a lot of the personalities I have to interact with at work (IMHO, certain departments/roles attract people who I feel are inherently dishonest or manipulative. These people creep me out and I wish I didn't have to be so close to them every workday). Many who read this will be able to add a lot to this list of complaints, as I can too.

What I want is a remote dev job where I close tickets. That is, one where the gig really is cash for functioning solution that meets spec, code standards, and QA. My ideal world would be where I log in somewhere, pull a respectably specified ticket with clear acceptance criteria, and then pull request myself to at least a modest quality of life. Does anyone know of any remote work where the hassle is just engineering related? I will specify that I am not interested in simply transitioning the interpersonal bullshit to a Skype-based model, so team-intensive remote work won't suit this requirement. My greatest thanks for any insightful thoughts or resources you guys can provide.
Sorry for being slightly off-topic, but I really hope that PE lessons could focus more teaching the students how to enjoy exercising. It would have tremendously positive influence on the physical and mental health of the society as a whole.

Not so long ago I came across a twitter thread in which people shared very negative experiences with PE lessons in schools. My own experience was not as bad as some of theirs, but frustrating enough to make me hate the very idea of exercising. My body shape was average, but somehow I was very clumsy. Among boys, I was one of the the slowest runners, only faster than the few kids who are quite overweight. I was also extremely bad at sports. Could not dribble for more than a few steps, could barely hit a badminton bird reliably, etc.

My clumsiness itself was not something I felt bad about. It was the fact that my incompetence would be demonstrated in front of my classmates in a PE lesson that made me hate PE. In retrospect, they might not have noticed me anyway, and even if they did notice my failures, they are not going to remember. But this is not something a boy, eleven-year-old, driven by pride and a desire to show-off, could understand. What I learned from my PE lessons was simple: exercising sucks. Sport sucks. You better not do it if you've got the choice.

I have seen enough evidence to convince me of the benefits of exercising. I wish I could enjoy exercising more. But I just can't. I wonder how things could be different, if I somehow had the chance to enjoy my PE lessons more as a child.
> but especially in the embedded and other niche industries, C89 (often with some extensions) is all you get.

Embedded and niche industries are forcing their programmers to work with 30 year old tooling? (Instead of 20 year tooling?)

I think at some point, writing yourself a transpiler from C99 to C89 becomes profitable… (The JS community did it for a lot less than that w/ babel…)
Or in an extreme scenario, have certain organs be removed that have the deadliest forms of cancer. ie. Pancreas and gallbladder. Humans can live without either.

I'm not suggesting it's a good option though.
Google cache link as it won't load for me
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https:/...
Interestingly enough, Clang (but not GCC) appears to embed memset for you despite the code using initializers: https://godbolt.org/z/khJQLV

The author of the article should file a bug report. After all, if they wanted to memset, they'd just do it themselves.
>This really depends on how good your 401(k) is and what kind of investments you want to make.

I disagree because 401(k)s can change on a whim though... My company decided to change literally all of our fund options overnight, and we couldn't keep what we already invested in the old funds, we just had to buy into the new funds. So even if your 401k is awesome today, it might not be awesome tomorrow. If your IRA provider decides to change their fund offerings, you can just move to a different one.

Luckily our new funds had perfectly fine choices, but that might not have been the case.

>If you just want the standard (and very good) low-cost three-fund portfolio, all 401(k) programs I’ve seen offer these kinds of index funds.

Honestly, both our original and current 401(k) options didn't/don't have a good international fund, the ones they had had very high expenses (over 1%)

There's also no low cost REIT index on my 401(k) (however, REIT isn't part of the 3-fund profolio)
Let's Take a Second to Admire Sci-Fi User Interfaces
Doesn't that help solve the problem then?
Also, FWIW, "Automatic Type Inference via Partial Evaluation" https://users.soe.ucsc.edu/~cormac/papers/ppdp05.pdf
I just listened to a 5 minute lull of odd droning, punctuated by 3 minutes of a death metal onslaught, and back to droning. Its fun listening to what a net is interpreting as music we make and listen to...

Does this take its own feedback, as in, could it detect when its not really making 'music'?
> This is why you need to develop in-house talent for execution of strategic initiatives.

Sorry but I've seen "in-house" code and it's utter shit as well. I work as an outsourcing developer from a Consultancy agency, and all the management is done by the client.

So, even if the code is all "in-house" that's not enought to build quality code.
I feel vague pressure when I wear my Bose QuietComforts. like "sitting in an airplane on the initial climb" type pressure. Generally, it's not too bad, though sometimes I get paranoid and wonder if I'm undetectably blowing out my ears by subjecting them to constant ambient counternoise.
Not loading here but http://web.archive.org/web/20190220061538/https://www.pointc...

If anyone wants to block outside noise without noise-cancelling algorithms: try in-ear monitors and replace the tips with foam tips designed for isolation (perhaps in a larger size for more sound blocking) - you effectively get a combination earplug/headphone.
The company I work for still uses Kissmetrics but are navigating away from it. I have to agree that the author misses the point.

We’ve used them for almost... 5 years now and I have no idea what the author is referencing as their “fire” product.

The UI never made much sense, and above a certain number of streaming events the live view was useless.

The reporting is not great or reliable, the “SQL” report is a nightmare to use. It doesn’t follow many of the normal SQL syntax and was sorta just dropped onto users without much information besides a two paragraph help article that isn’t that helpful.

Simply put, they built a great initial product and then spent so much time twiddling their thumbs to not improve the product or help customers who stream a lot of events get them into better pipelines (e.g what segment does very well) and then built out pretty shoddy reporting tools on top of it.

We had to build our own reporting tools through a myriad of ETLs using spark + other technologies just to clean the events coming through. Some user error and bad eventing policies on our side? Of course but Kissmetrics didn’t do much to help customers with tooling.