skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've fixed a lot of performance problems over my career.

This is not true, and not what we talk about when we say it's almost always the db.

The usual cause of database problems is a single big query that is causing a slow page, or a lot of medium size queries inside a poorly written loop. Whether it be bad joins, missing indexes, select statements in the select statements, operations in select statements that force the db to run the query line by line instead of as a set (the technical term suddenly escapes me), it's the queries that almost always cause db slowdowns.

It rarely has anything to do with writes, and then in my experience usually had to do with escalating locks, and I haven't seen that problem in ages as hardwares got faster.
This seems like hooey to me. I mean power laws are everywhere, not just in phase transitions, and they seem to be struggling to identify what the "phases" are in the brain that the "power law" they claim to be observing result from. Post-hoc reasoning if ever.
I saw many junior devs who thought they knew so much that they almost stopped to be curious and find the truth and knowledge out there, and I saw many devs who thought they were experts and just stopped to learn anything.
The thing is, especially with juniors, cleaning up code leads to a few things:

- poorly executed cleanup (aka regressions)

- misunderstanding of requirements (new bugs)

- "standardization" of naming (now you have two standards https://xkcd.com/927/)

- restructuring of code/renaming of abstractions which then adds friction to original authors of code (provided they are still around)

Left unchecked this can all happen, at the expense of feature work, and an unmerged PR resulting in missed deadlines and a frustrated junior. Alas we usually learn best by making mistakes though and I find this one hard to teach for some juniors.

I would argue that a measured tolerance of ugly code (and sometimes bad code) is more important until you learn how to spot and write code that doesn't look wrong.

Two articles I found helpful:

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2005/05/11/making-wrong-code-...

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...
Replace "cities" with "any organization that is not tech first" and you'll still find hundreds of win 7/vista/xp machines that have never been patched, and ad-hoc network closet/cloud hybrid rigged solutions for everything.

There is literally no way to fix all this dumb fragile infrastructure without a massive government program that accepts responsibility for doing so. You need thousands of smart people going through every machine, all the software, all the systems. These people are never going to work for Baltimore or for Maersk, not in a million years.

Instead let's create a new government agency or pivot the NSA from it's dumb paranoid reactionary posture to more of a proactive NIST-style advisory role on best practices, have them hack everything domestically and start fixing things as their core mission. Make sure nobody at state or DHS or justice can subvert this new agency, they need to stand on equal footing with any company or agency.

Then hopefully pillage all the miserable smart people who are currently working at mega corps and agencies who actually want to do positive, meaningful work for a change.

Problem solved someone hire me to advise on their political campaign.
Apple is removing them. Good choice I think.
While they might be targeting newbies, I find this type of work to be great for enthusiasts and hobbyist as well.

I'm mostly familiar with Python, I dabbled in it for a number of years and helped a friend start using it but don't use it for work or personal projects anymore. Occasionally I have a need for it and because I use it infrequently I have to check my environment and update/reinstall it before I proceed.

Have a Store App that updates and maintains itself reduces that friction for me and I can just go play. The same goes for other OSS like the Arduino IDE, and Inkscape.
The fastest and easiest way is to use format!.

let cat = format!("{}{}{}", s1, s2, n);
You say that as if that's not what they want.
How much contention are you expecting?
You are making the assumption that most people care about n+1 where the code gets so bad it’s hard to maintain.

- the average tenure for a software developer at a company is 1.5 - 3 years, by the time things get that bad, its someone else’s problem.

- the business folks at a startup just care about throwing something together long enough to get their next round of funding or the exit.

- no one gets promoted by having code that is easy to maintain over the long term. They get promoted by releasing the new and shiny - not maintenance work. See Google.
they'll just bring the price down until it's free. and then if they keep supporting it, they might get a great audience.
On the other hand, we want digital public services, to be able to pay taxes electronically, to be able to vote electronically etc.

I don't think the "don't put sensitive information on the Internet" idea really holds any water unless we expect our public services to be done with pen and paper for evermore, while everything else goes digital. (Yes, machines could be disconnected from the network and so on... but that's arguably just saying "an airgap is all you need")
SEC vs. Kik will end with certainty, but will it bring clarity to crypto?
And it will all be well taken if RIIR folks show things they have done themselves instead of telling others what they need to do.
Funny, I didn't realize there was an HBO TV show, but that article sure reads like some stereotypical Soviet propaganda, albeit from "our" side.
This is done all the time by credit score companies.
They could have used another mechanism than PATH.
please explain "company culture" and how HR is better at judging whether an applicant "fits".
This first challenge seems to be able to generate an invite code
Having observed my roomies trying to sort out ordering stuff off these delivery companies' apps, talking about things listed in the menu the restaurant doesn't actually do and all that, I have a hard time believing that this is for certain a mistake by the restaurant.

I suspect it may have been that Burger King corporate added the product and expected franchisees to remove it or hide it until they had the product on hand and this particular franchisee had difficulties doing that, such as it was not noticed by the people with access to do that in the delivery app, or access was difficult to get.

This sort of thing is to be expected when we push simple applications into complicated environments (which the franchise fast food restaurant is a complicated environment that seems simple at first glance) and expect it to be easy.
Author here - I actually had to change some of the image URLs I made because they had AdTech in the name, and uBlock was blocking them. Hahaha!

I solemnly swear that my website has no tracking installed on it (that I know of, welp). Cheers.
But the article says they live in a multi generational household with the mother's blood relatives. Doesn't sound like single parenting to me, itself a term with a very loaded meaning in our culture.
My first ever "earning money in Internet" experience was in my teen years when I ran my own ad farm as a part of an ad farming collective 2005-2007. Back then, things were simple: you open a website, sign for 100+ banner networks, then drive in traffic with all tricks imaginable, including "buying it." Part of your revenue goes to group's 'big papa' who does all the "business cover" in the West: setting up companies, bank accounts, accounting, tax reporting, and cashing out payments from ad nets.

My second venture into Ad industry came rather unexpected. In 2016, when I had to leave Canada because my employer was denied LMIA (a paper "certifying" that you are not stealing a job from locals.) I called up all my friends with whomever I had working relationship before I moved out of Russia.

A man who once was a guy behind of Russia's biggest ad farming group back in mid-naughties called me back. Unbeknown to me, he worked day and night to up his profile for 10 years, and became a "big name man" in Ad industry, moved to USA, and opened one of the biggest DSP on the market today.

What shocked me, is that the nature of the industry and attitudes to the client hasn't changed a dime since 2005. The slang for F500 clients there is still a "whale" (the term itself originally came from either "ad farming" circles or banking)

After passing through shock coming back to Russia after 8 years and coming back to my senses, I said *ck with that and left. Been happily working in OEM electronics again since.
> they did all of it, no matter the cost

That's the beauty of authoritarian state - people who did the job had no choice, authority who ordered had no sympathy.
E.g. helicopter pilots summoned from Baltic states didn't even know where they were flying or what will be the task. And even if they knew, do you think they could argue not to participate?
In this sense slavery could be called "strength" of some country because it allows unprecedented workforce mobilization.
The budget and format of the series required this kind of concentration of information in the form of the single scientist and the "villains." Anybody with 10th grade reading comprehension can see these as literary devices. I walked away with a clear understanding that the Soviet system was to blame, that was expressed clearly. The "villains" were simply artistic manifestations of the overall system. The author of this piece is being pedantic.
>Bonus if you’re “50/50” bisexual — there’s no need to have to choose which half of your identity gets erased to avoid “cheating” on your partner.

I'm bi, in a monogamous relationship. My identity isn't at all "erased", because I don't define myself by who I have sex with. Nice scare quotes around cheating.
Developers are new factory workers. Pay is good now because industry is expanding and there's not enough of us but it won't be like that forever. And bottom line work is already being commoditized (WordPress ecosystem etc).
Only if a javascript file counts as an entry in a ledger.
Of course I would eat it. I'm a scientist. I understand that radiation at these low doses has never been shown to cause any harm. It's not some mysterious boogeyman to me. I've read the papers. I understand that natural background radiation is all around me all the time, and has been since the dawn of life. Biological systems are well-adapted to dealing with low-dose radiation. I understand that in certain parts of the world like Ramsar, the natural dose rate is 50x my dose rate, and that the hundreds of thousands of people living there show no increase in health effects.

If you'd like to send me some, we can arrange a live-stream of me eating it. I will measure it with my Geiger counter and then eat it in front of the world.
Technical challenges and salary. In my local market, most jobs are web shops and/or CRUD business applications with low pay.
There's a saying in some Indian languages, which I'll paraphrase: the tree which bears a lot of fruit is always bent over. In other words, the person (tree) with lots of knowledge (fruit) is humble (bent over).
We already see the beginning of it. Some support person tells you "the computer won't let me do that" to rectify some harm done by the programming. I've run into it all the time. I've read about it happening (recently Google Pixel support completely f'ing up an order and it taking a post on HN to fix).

The weird thing is that big organizations just seem to give up when trying to fix these types of things.

Imagine what it will be like when ML is feeding the software values that are broken, wrong, or dangerous. How will they fix those problems? Especially when corporations often lose the people that wrote the applications, and the people behind them have little knowledge or skill.
Is there a "pull" rather push aspect to advertisement? Sort of a trade-show equivalent of digital advertisement?

Issues with pushing ads down my throat are as follows:

1. I don't want to buy another Sony XM3 headphones. I just fucking bought them and I am seeing more ads of the same thing.

2. Even if I saw ads for relevant accessories, say, I bought an iPhone and I am seeing ads for phone cases; I don't want to see them when I am browsing Instagram or a lecture video on YT about how to meditate.

3. Say the timing is right and the ad is relevant, I still am repulsed by advertisers. I don't like salesmen. I find them sleezy and annoying. It is like walking into Radioshack and a platoon of salesmen are trying to sell you Sprint cell phone and I am here to buy a goddamn electrolytic capacitor.

However, when I am searching for a pressure cooker, it would be great to go to a centralized repository of ads and look through who markets this sort of thing the best and may be have some objective reviews along with it. May be have a standardized ad template and guidelines so the marketing dickheads don't go overboard with flashing lights and sparkles. Have a standardized page full of pressure cooker ads, let them fight over my business in a level playing field. No psychological tricks, no sleezy techniques, I want to see increased competition based on value they provide to consumers. Not weak anti-competitive deceitful marketing.

I love going to trade-shows. They're all salesmen but there is something about serendipitous discovery of new stuff, seeing things that you may not need immediately but it goes in the back of your mind and you remember it at some obscure situation (especially in hardware engineering, I run a lab that serves 50 engineers). Most importantly, I am in the mindset when I visit a trade-show. That mindset is different than when I am desperately looking for a tire shop nearby to fix my flat tire.

Fuck advertisement. It is the worst thing modern society is plagued with.

We need yellow pages, not 60 second interruptions during a cooking show. YC folks are reading this - there is a huge gap for a "pull" advertisement model. AdTech guys can still collect data and be assholes about it, but at least you won't be bothering me when I need not.
The highs are higher, lows are lower idea seems right. And a lot of the value comes from that. Life in more real, more genuine when you aren't as insulated from pain and joy.
And that is true if you assume significant contention. Which is not a safe assumption.
All human evidence rests upon the shaky foundation of "because I believe its true", at the bottom of which rests the shaky foundation of your personal experiences. Don't believe me? Just ask a schizophrenic how hard it is to disbelieve your own experience.

Reminds me of the HP Lovecraft novel "The Call of Cthulu" Page 1, Paragraph 1:

> The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.
I'm at least 10% humbler than you are.
This is a description of the Dunning-Kruger effect. While Dunning-Kruger is a popular topic around tech circles, I'm not so sure about the general population. I wish people weren't so ignorant about their own ignorance.

Edit: Adding clarity

People who have superior general knowledge have greater intellectual humility because they are more aware of their own ignorance and the complexities of the subject matter. Those who do not have superior knowledge are subject to the Dunning-Kruger effect.
Neighborhood Crime Apps Stoke Fears, Reinforce Racist Stereotypes
rtb bid request volume can easily go 1m/sec, this is not impressions, but offers to buy for an impression.
I've worked with previous my boss's son. This guy felt like he was the best at everything and would get annoyed if people gave him critical feedback on anything he did and would insist he was right. Therefore, even when more experienced people told him things he disagreed with, he wouldn't accept their opinion and keep doing it his way.

This caused a lot of people to not want to work with him and, in the end, was a major part of why I ended up quitting.
We're animals too.

Machines will not value humans, and they will be in power.

Even before that, many among the very rich consider the poor as sub-human, but few do it in public. Do you remember the PG tweet where he equated unions with potential energy ripe for startups to tap into, rejoicing at the idea of burning down people's life to get richer (edit, here: https://twitter.com/paulg/status/663456748494127104)?
Why would you want to list int more than once in a variant? I must be missing a use case here; my variants have consisted mostly of structs.
> fringe group of anti-nuclear people said 93,000 without basis

This is the line being pushed by pro-nuclear people every time this show comes up on social media. Thankfully we have better sources than a random person's blog on Forbes!

Let's take a look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths_due_to_the_Chernobyl_di...

"an April 2006 special report in the peer-reviewed, scientific journal Nature detailed in response—the accuracy and precision of this United Nations-led joint group's projected death toll of 4,000 were immediately contested, with several of the very scientists, physicians, and biomedical consortia whose work the joint group had cited alleging publicly that the joint group had either misrepresented their work or interpreted it out of context"

"By 2016, some Ukranian and Belarussian physicians charged with treating large numbers of former liquidators in the decades since the accident were calling for more comprehensive studies and urging that the IAEA's estimated toll of disaster-related deaths from long-latency diseases be revised upwards"
iOS Shortcut for Recording the Police
> > "less conflict for romantic rivals given the expectations"

> This assumes all men would be equally likely to get to have sex with the women.

I think the OP meant since no one was expected to be monogamous, there is no "cheating" and no conflicts of "infidelity". More women having multiple partners means potentially more different men would be having sex.

> it just means many men working for free (like drones) to support other men's children.

Well, not just anyone's children, because they would all be related by blood. They'd be taking care of family.
I worked in adTech. The company I worked for did not collect personal or demographic data, and we did not care about users' cookies, so I did not feel too conflicted from the ethical perspective, but still found it difficult to explain to non-tech people exactly what my job was.

The thing that attracted me to it was the technology and scale of data involved. From a purely engineering perspective, it was highly attractive. It was a small company, and as a small company in ad tech that still meant rapid and 0-downtime deploys, deeply-ingrained devops culture, rapidly evolving technology, and indexing/reporting/decision-making on thousands of events events every second. During peak seasons, every day we'd have another terabyte of data in the database.

AdTech also affords a lot more transparency into company finances than you would in other companies. You're building the tools used for reporting on revenue and costs that the entire business uses for almost all decision-making. Engineers don't live in a silo from that perspective.

From a product perspective, it was much less rewarding. You know how often times internal-facing applications have the worst UX? Everything we built felt like that because ultimately it was. There is also a lot of pressure that comes with the points above -- every second our system takes to throttle an ad campaign that has reached their budget, encounters an unavoidable AWS downtime, or exposes a reporting bug is company dollars down the drain.
No doubt, there is fraud in the system. If you want to be successful in using these ad platforms for your business, you will have to accept that as a fact of life.

What you need to do is to exclude bad placements/websites from your campaign. But even before that, you have to see if your ads + landing page are compelling, or you'll just waste a ton of money.
Exactly. The incredible ability of radiation detection equipment to detect literally single nuclei decaying is a huge part of the problem. People hear clicks and assume it's dangerous. When I took my Geiger counter on a flight (carry-on), my neighbors were a bit surprised at the continuous clicking.
Sum types (and therefore a nice way to do e.g. validation or error handling). A better OO model (particularly when it comes to secondary concerns like serialization or comparison). Safe scoped resource management (with memory-safety without GC as a secondary benefit). A more standard/better-understood way of doing what D calls "compile-time reflection" (if I understand what D's doing there correctly).
I'll give you a better example - I'm an English speaking guy consuming regular US content. I travel quite often and when I'm in non-english speaking places like Thailand, I see ads on Youtube(mobile) purely in Thai language.

I use Google products extensively and Google most definitely knows I don't speak Thai. I mean it's almost ridiculous the number of Thai ads I've seen on Youtube. For a company that sophisticated with AdTech, I'm shocked how bad they are with this.

Are they doing this on purpose just to sell more ads? The companies spending the money to show me those videos are practically throwing money down the drain if I don't even understand them.
What were some of your favorite resources for learning it? I've tried a few times to sit down and learn it, but always ended giving up because some of the things I thought should be easy were just so obtuse.
Avoiding deliberately inflammatory alt-right language like "snowflake" would probably go a long way in getting people to engage in good faith with you, for whatever that's worth.
> Have you transferred money across borders to an individual lately?

Yes, frequently. Using TransferWise or FairFx, depending on where the recipient was, but inclusive of Thailand, USA, Ecuador, and Canada. The process was entirely painless, fast, and the transfer was cheap as chips, while bringing to bear the full weight of European bank regulations to protect me as a customer.
Way back in the day, my boss made a lovely observation - 'write your code like it's going to be maintained by an axe murderer who has your home address, and nothing to lose.'

Simple guidelines to live your life by ;)
Let me know when this happens - I'll stand in front of it.
> occasionally some products will test the waters and fail.

Most of the time "fail" just means "fail to become a category-defining product," whereas any other software company would be happy to pull the kind of numbers Google does for its smaller projects. If Google wants to operate like a venture capital firm, investing in many products and seeing most fail to get huge, than that's fine, but they need to consider the negative impact it has on their brand and on all future product launches.
I think a lot of people would think the fact that a nuclear power plant core had exploded was evidence enough that an evacuation was needed.
Taming the Mammoth:Why You Should Stop Caring What Other People Think
And made legal by some very fine print buried in the ToS.
>It's very unusual to see a western show that would so truthfully depict a societal story

You will love The Wire
The data is a bit old, but I don't think the relative order or rough magnitude has changed.

https://gist.github.com/jboner/2841832
Great returns?

My only expectations is being able to believe real people are actually clicking the ads.

Which I don't.