skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>As far as I know, no database has ever had any of the problems he mentions with IDs not round-tripping properly during backup/restore.

Don't know of any such either. Typical SQLite, MySQL, or PostgerSQL dump/backup is just bunch of SQL statements that re-create the content, including PKs.

You can imagine a non-native (perhaps DB-agnostic?) DB dump format that would use generated IDs for PK, rather than actual PKs. Why would one do that, I don't know.

Another possible case is using file (or memory) offset as the PK. This gives certain nice properties - one less indirection level, and object identity being pointer identity. Perhaps there's a memory image-based LISP version out there that uses such. Perhaps there's a NoSQL engine like that somewhere.

>Plus, you'd have to hack your slug-generation algorithm to ensure the generated slugs to be unique

...or you put the moderators to the task of ruthlessly stamping out duplicate questions. There was a popular website like that, oh wait, that's the Stack Overflow ;-)

[edit]

I've just remembered that PostgreSQL's ctid and SQLite's ROWID are physical identifiers (offset-like identifiers) of records. They are (to certain extent) exposed to userspace and could be misused as IDs in URLs. As physical identifiers (offset-like), they are naturally subject to change upon dump/restore, vacuum, other maintenance tasks, etc.. Clearly those should not be used as end-user visible IDs in URLs.
Looks awfully a lot like the visions of outer space from the 70s. And space is a lot less hospitable than some underground cavern on Mars or the Moon.
I thought I went too far for a few years to be honest. Now I realise that no protection whatsoever was afforded to any private tenants back then other than taking the landlord to court which was expensive, time consuming, resulted in unpaid days off work and generally a waste of time. The moral high ground doesn't necessarily drive the point home either.

Now we have a deposit scheme in the UK which stops landlords doing this because the deposit is held in trust. The landlord has to prove it. Therefore there's escrow and a third party involved. Not being in this scheme is illegal and results in fines that go directly to the tenant as well.

This action is not necessary now, but changing the locks still is because it's your personal space and security and you genuinely don't know who has access to that unless you do it. Could even be the previous tenants with key copies.
I like the way medium.com deals with IDs, 10 random hex chars (i.e. > 10^12) put at the end of the slug are more than enough for most use cases that can be addressed via a url and still clean for search engines and humans.

But also the way letterboxd and also quora deal with URLs is admirable but it needs special care (at least in the case of quora)
TL;DR = "Well, there's no way to know exactly but it's a lot!"
pretty cool how the urls stayed the same:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/13204/why-doesnt-my-cron-... (still works)

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/21064/massive-reputation-... ("this question was removed from stack overflow for reasons of moderation", still available: https://i.imgur.com/Csy94IL.png)
'I would much prefer that my children study in Bucharest rather than London.'. Completely agree though not only in Bucharest. In our experience, the Romanian education system is way more rigorous than in the UK (in general) especially in maths and science & provides a great foundation for university - elsewhere! However it's not ideal for slow developers or kids who are not that bright. They would be able to take on broader interests in the UK.
Show HN: Offhub, a tool for tracking team's time off and allocation (beta)
I've always found it disturbing how Gargron rarely makes any attempt to disabuse people of the incorrect notion that Mastodon was the start of, and the canonical example of, open and federated social networks.

If anyone deserves that sort of credit, it would arguably be Evan Prodromou and the original identica a decade ago. Though I could wrong, and unaware of anyone prior to him working on this sort of federated and open twitter clone.
That line of thinking sounds a lot like trying to artificially induce meaningful experiences. I don't know if it generalizes to everyone, but once I'm aware I'm tricking myself into something, I don't find it meaningful at all.

Also, "spending time with family" isn't meaningful per se. The meaning is in the details the phrase doesn't convey - the things you do together, the things you talk about, the emotions you feel.

> most people I meet seem to lament that it feels like they're getting less and less time for these things :-)

That's because we live in a competitive environment; the work really does expand to encompass all the time labour-saving inventions liberate - simply because some people choose to go "the extra mile" and everyone else suddenly has to follow suit, or risk being left behind.
>or take the blatant malware step of replacing or altering Firefox

Firefox is still considered open source, correct? From what I know, open source software is meant to be altered.
Australia Prints $1.6B of Currency with a Typo
Azure Service Fabric and Kubernetes: Comparison (2018)
iCloud Storage, YouTube Premium, Apple Music, FastMail, Netflix, CBS All Access, Hulu, Deezer, Last.fm, Minecraft Realms, etc. Hmmm...that's more than I originally thought.
Pretty sure the last 10yrs of stackoverflow proves that this is not a concern.

I'd file this under: things to not worry about.
Neat project.

Yes, fair enough, I think that is a good example of the kind of code that Go is not particularly suited to (if performance is critical).
Origins of Gaming PC and Laptop Design: Alienware and Beyond
Funny me too, didn't think others would do the same.
What countries are you interviewing with?
I'm in the US and on a remote team. We have a counterpart team based out of Bangalore.

The biggest challenge for us is simply the time zone difference. There is nearly very little time where the US team's working hours and the India team's working hours overlap. The only way to have face-to-face time is if people from one country start work really early and one country stay working rather late.

This means that something like a code review can be delayed a long time. If two team members are working at the same time, the review might take an hour or two. If the review is between India/US team members the same review can take 3-4 days in the best case: (1. code, 2. review, 3. address review, 4. approve)

So really we're looking for projects for the teams that can be done independently with as little cross-country review as possible but this is tricky for our project's current state of development.

I guess the takeaways would be:
Look for roles in countries that have working hours with overlap with your own. A remote team doesn't necessarily mean any timezone

Look for roles with larger companies. If a large company does remote, it's probably more likely that they would have a team with similar hours to your own.
GDPR for Engineers – What Is Personal Data?
I get your point but if you look at the number of technologies over the second half of the XX century that spanned from research on planes and space, it is still indirectly beneficial for us mere earth people.
Do you mean they are simpler to use? Because those are just models of parallel computation. A little like saying Turing machines are simpler than python.
>of Atwood's calibre

What was Atwood's calibre at that point? (pre StackOverflow)
Going through this right now. This is exactly what's been happening in for our team. It's stretched out development time so much because of it. Tasks that could be done in a couple days are taking over a week just because each back and forth exchange costing an extra day. Code reviews by themselves can take so long that sometimes I just make the last changes myself and check it in myself because we've run out of time.
Downvotes be damned, but after listening to the actual Eyeo talk, I'm surprised how much fluff (Jenny's work) can be added to a good statement (Gilles Deleuze's statement). Art is supposed to be a consideration on human sentiment/action/whatever, but this is just next level of not actually producing anything and calling it "art" - not because of its value, but because it won't fit into any other meaningful category... and then you do a keynote with it.
So, in that case, we could learn without the need of a differentiable renderer neither graphics operators, right? Maybe the throughput of communicating with external renderer is too much when compared with iterative parameter tweaking happening inside of loss functions on CNN?
What a thoughtful and detailed response. I wish more ppl here in US thought like you instead of throwing leetcode puzzles at you.
If you were to leave development to pursue a career as a journalist, novelist, or non-fiction writer, it would be a hard slog. However, you already have a technical background, and technical writing is well paid. Also, executives at technology companies are rarely good writers, so there’s a market for people who can ghost write and blog for them (it’s how I make a living).
I just keep them on the counter in the kitchen.
I'd love to hear what you think.
This is why I usually check out the 2-3 top comments and then read the article.
>As far as I know, no database has ever had any of the problems he mentions with IDs not round-tripping properly during backup/restore. (Please correct me if I'm wrong! But why do I think this is true? Because any database that doesn't roundtrip primary keys would break all foreign keys on backup/restore. Databases with broken backup/restore tend to either fix it real fast, or go away.)

You might not use foreign keys, but still have autoincremented primary key.

Database ids on the URL are also a security concern.
Moa fossil footprints found in New Zealand river
You don't have a place to put a single key, but you do lug along a smartphone to unlock the door again? Just put the key wherever you put the smartphone.

My running pants came with a special key pocket. Before that I just hung a spare key on an old shoelace around my neck.
GUIDs are really unreadable and long. You can read and remember some numeric ID, but GUID/UUIDs – totally impossible. I hated them after Microsoft COM.
One of the bigger concerns for some companies is about any international developer is intellectual property (rather than talent). 99% of them will not do this, but if someone does take your codebase and launches a copycat site, there is literally nothing you can do. No common court system where you could go after them.

Not saying this has really stopped us (we still work with the occasional talented international dev that was referred) but all other things more or less equal, this can have a slight chilling effect on hiring.
Why not just use the UUID as the ID?
You don't get to police other people's opinions. Close the tab if you are so offended.
That article seems to immediately contradict itself by saying that the most important aspect of URIs is that they never change, and then suggests using the slug derived from the title as unique identifier. Titles change all the time on Stack Overflow, this would immediately break URLs.
Fully agree. For example, it's very handy that GitHub issues are auto incrementing integers starting at 1, so that I can type "Fixes #123" in a commit message instead of "Fixes #<some-uuid-or-something>".

Of course, that short numeric ID doesn't necessarily need to be part of the DB's primary key.
It would probably have been better to join Snowden in Moscow ... the land of the "free" is applicable if you go up against the military-industrial complex and their agenda.
> This way you can change the record's UUID at any time to display different data without having to worry about updating a bunch of internal foreign keys.

That is true, but changing the UUID is also likely to break a lot of assumptions that your users make. If your user indexes your forum posts, for instance, and you change the UUIDs, they'll re-index posts with new UUIDs as new posts, and send end users to now invalid UUIDs until the old index entries are evicted.
I was expecting an interesting article on sweet almond paste, perhaps with some recipes and analysis.
Are you proposing technology that eliminates the need for humans to defecate?
Keep hearing people talk about how this technology is about porting iPad apps to the Mac, personally I don't see that as why they're doing this at all.

Today the Mac has a very healthy ecosystem of professional apps, however the same can't be said for the Pro iPad range, which despite a handful of admittedly very good outliers (Procreate, etc) it's very lacking in apps for all professional workflows.

I don't see Marzipan existing to bring those few iPad apps to the Mac, it exists to remove the excuses for Mac developers to only build for OS X.
There was a story posted recently about how the properties of UUIDs are not a good match for how databases index columns. It proposed the 'ulid' which helps in that regard.
1) Indexing text vs indexing integer it's very different when it comes to memory/space required by the database.

2) There is already an index on ids assuming they are used as primary keys, why adding another index (on text)?

3) To support changing slugs (titles) you will have to keep all the old slugs as well (to redirect them to their new versions). With ids you don't have to do this - ids have no reason to change.

In the end you might not feel the difference in execution time, but hardware requirements for servers...

I agree that they are annoying, but when the only reason against them is to improve URLs aesthetics (assuming they don't pose a security/information disclosure risk) - the trade of performance, hardware requirements and extra code needed is not worth it IMHO.
Sounds like a very interesting idea for a startup to solve. I will still find Blue Origin a bit more interesting though.
I perform many code reviews a week, and as a result I see very long functions with a lot of nesting more often than I'd like. I'm even guilty of it myself. This post let's me point at all the reasons for using a class rather than just writing a comment that says "Maybe you have a class here?"
I left a development career to pursue a career as a journalist (in technology) and spent a number of years doing that, but eventually burnt out on the click-driven fest that is that space. I'm now self-employed, but I make a great living as a freelance explainer, essentially. I help a lot of big and small companies better talk to their customers in particularly technical segments—it turns out that almost all of the writers or communicators in the tech industry literally have no experience either building or implementing products. It's turned out to be a great niche!

I actually also wield that in a form of explaining the news, from that perspective, to help others who might be trying to transition into the industry as well in a newsletter: https://char.gd/recharged.

All of this is to say: being a writer actually provides _so many_ transferable skills. It's just a shame that the skill itself isn't valued in isolation.
This always caught my attention too. Now I realize this can be "the big picture" of why it happens (while it is certainly involved, is not as easy as just energy conservation):

Natural Selection > Women selecting who reproduces and who doesn't > Hypergamy driving women's desires > Men performing to be selected > Obsession for performance > Natural Selection Filtering next generation > and so on.
It's the sum of the sin/cos with coefficients. There are two outputs, one for X and one for Y that draw the shape of the number without "raising the pen".

He describes how he calculated the coefficients by drawing the shapes on paper first.
Which technologies? Teflon? Tang? Now that we have more and more of our country living either in prisons or under bridges than at any point in time, which of these amazing space technologies will most benefit the prison population/mentally ill the most?
>Absolutely the opposite. The ability to understand Go code seems roughly constant with regards to codebase size.

That's what some Go proponents say, not necessarily reality, and there's no study about this, just hearsay.

I find Go hurts readability for larger programs because it prevents many structural abstractions that make code more clear and concise (as opposed to mere fancy "clever" code, which it still allows), and because it forces too much boilerplace (error handling, no generics, etc).

Every large projects contains re-implementations of the same things (from data structures to algorithms, to parallel processing handling) that could have been done once and re-used forever with generics and a little more power.
While this would indeed have been amusing, given the moon's orbit of the earth, how would this be possible?
> Wake me up when the AVI encoder's performance can be measured by Frames Per Second.

Okay, I will. Hrm. Intel's AV1 encoder is getting 24 frames per second:

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=SVT-AV1-...

WAKE UP!

> There is no phone/tablet that can afford such performance.

Isn't there? I wonder how well the top end iPhones are decoding AV1:

https://code.videolan.org/videolan/dav1d/issues/15

Decoding at over 100 frames per second multithreaded two weeks ago. Not bad.
I hear this comment made often. For some people like me, Go is simple, and that makes it a great programming language. I definitely wouldn't call it terrible!

Otherwise, a language is more than its feature set. A big part of what makes a language enjoyable is its culture as well. I think C# is a great language, but I prefer Go's culture much more.
A slightly more advanced version of this to XOR the number with some other number.
Why do you need an internal database ID?

I've gone the route of a random number only (similar to a UUID but encoded in a way similar to Youtube video IDs). I used to do the auto-incremented integer but once I got into database sharding, maintaining that global counter started getting a lot more complicated.

This lets me have inserts going to several databases without worrying about the counter. (Of course, as with any eventual consistency method, there's a mechanism to ensure no duplicates exist, however unlikely they are.)
It's pretty great to witness a policy or law that was applied correctly by a government to prevent further public damages, no matter how big the target corporation is.
And then the question gets updated and you either have a broken URI, or a slug that doesn’t match the content.

I’ve never heard of IDs being something mutable. When would that ever happen?
Your parents were right--every dipshit English major with no talent thinks they can be a writer. It's a crowded field and hard to break out with so many competing products looking for eyeballs. The irony is it has never been cheaper to get a book published and find an audience, but that just opened the floodgates.

For example, my neighbor wrote a couple of fantasy novels that he sells on Amazon as e-books. I don't think he has sold many copies. But you can make a start if you desire to. It's like starting a band.

Anyways, don't feel bad because coding is creative work.

BTW, I have been semi-successful at writing--I was a sports writer for a local newspaper before I went to college. Later on, I had a chapter in a compendium on Internet privacy that was a top seller on Amazon. That's a tiny taste of success, right? It's not the same as fiction, I know. Do journal publications count? I have tons of those...

I got paid by the word for the sports articles. I did the book chapter for free. The rest was grant-funded.

I gave up when I shouldn't have, but it was right when my first child was born and the free time wasn't there anymore.
Hopefully this will make helium supplies last longer for medical and industrial applications
I'm assuming safer loadable modules (there's no memory protection on most mcus) and choice of languages that have wasm backends.
In some circumstances being able to run the same code in a browser in a test environment as on the device could also be great (for education for example).
Top Hospitality Influencers for Professionals
Own Part of a Swedish ESports Team
Would world had been a better place without Amazon? You may think that it's hurting mom and pop shops. But that's not really true. Without AWS, we would still have 100 people sysadmin teams everywhere and many startups won't see light of the day. Without Amazon fulfillment centers, who get most flak for automation and worker issues, there are many things we won't have in life. Kindle gave me access to books that I would not be able to read otherwise. Alexa save time and energy.

Continue questioning them about employment practices and keep them ethical (they are raising minimum wage to $15/hr) but Amazon hate is often misplaced.
There are very close to zero human feces to step over in space (yet), so maybe this is of your interest?
When Historians Attack Capitalism, They Mostly Attack Straw Men
Their kernel implementation will actually be open source and hosted on Github in the close future.
Sure, but anyone signing up for 3 accounts in quick succession can probably figure out what you're doing.

All of these problems go away if you just assign random numbers instead.
Using a UUID as your primary key can make certain optimisations much harder down the road, most notably sharding which tends to balance really nicely if you do it on an auto-incrementing numeric ID, and less so if you're using random strings because you'll end up with with some of them clustering.

They're also much harder to pass around in cases where you need to refer to a specific record, for example if you've got someone in tech support who needs help with a particular object its much easier to say "its record 18434" than it is to try and read out a UUID over the phone.
The World’s First 3D-Printed Village Is Coming to Latin America This Summer
China's transgender people are driven to self-medicate
Necessary no. Hurtful? I don't think so, if I may say so myself.

It's a comment to put into perspective the relative insignificance of the platform -- and thus that the statement of the parent that it supported that too doesn't amount to much.

It also shows how MS effort was either badly thought out from the start, or at least failed -- and all those cross-platform touch-first changes of Windows UI where later toned down.
Leaked Drone-Wars Documents Lead to a Third Indictment of Intercept Source
> If nobody will hire a whistleblower, that leads me to believe everyone has skeletons to hide.

In German language, there actually exists no native word for "whistleblower" (one uses the English word). The German word is "Denunziant" (denunciator - I don't know whether the English word has the same negative connotation as the German one).

With the experience with the state security service (Stasi) of the GDR, people really well-understand why they don't want a denunciator in their company even if the respective person does not plan to denounce, since if there exists a potential denunciator at the workplace, everybody has to live in potential fear.
What would you expect to happen. This was written the moment G bought it. Of course they are going to merge the platform into Google-Home. This was inevitable
Many things that were once considered "common knowledge" turned out to be nothing of the sort. The idea you're espousing is a damaging one that reinforces the worst stereotypes about Jews.
The Venn Diagram of Irrational Nonsense (2013)
still change the title to something meaningful
Why it goes up to Bilbao instead of only to Galicia or Portugal? That will be shorter.
How does this compare to Mozilla's wasi? [1]

[1] - https://wasi.dev/