skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The combustibility of hydrogen was no secret; de Rozier was a chemist, and in fact famously demonstrated that feature of hydrogen by inhaling it and blowing it out across an open flame. There are risks to be bravely taken, and then there's foolhardy disregard for the dangers one knows. I think de Rozier fell into the second class of risk-takers.

The first class? Try Lilienthal, Percy Pilcher, Geoffrey de Havilland, the X-15 pilot whose name I can't recall — all these died testing something they couldn't have known would kill them, and the world gained from their sacrifice.

De Rozier had an idea that he knew he couldn't safely implement, but went ahead and did it anyway, and died. What did we learn from it? We knew hydrogen was flammable — de Rozier himself demonstrated it safely, except for his eyebrows. The balloon was only flown the once, and there's no evidence he grasped its potential, having little understanding of piloting a balloon. Useless sacrifice, in my opinion.
Hmm...you can fairly easily (haha) layer functions/serverless over K8s, e.g. with projects like OpenFaas.
Author here. Yeah, and to expand on the idea of liability, I also additionally mean the possibility of a financial liability. If we were to say, charge per month for a retained customer date of birth, you'd see business analysts internally constantly asking why the data needed to be stored so long, or whether just age could be stored, or something. If the price was high enough, the problem would sort of just... go away.

Obviously much smarter people than me would need to figure out those regulations though.
Premature scaling is akin to premature optimization.

On one of my recent projects, the highest use data was stored in DynamoDB. The entire dataset could trivially fit in RAM. So much wasted effort.

The org also over used Spark, event streams, and elasticsearch.

One could argue (rationalize) that using DynamoDB, for instance, for the small stuff builds team competency applicable to the big stuff. Or that using one set of tools reduces dependencies. I'd have to see some case studies. Because from where I was sitting, 90% of our maintenance costs were from mitigating bad sacred cow design decisions.

I've worked on similar metastatic tech debt based on NoSQL. Much as I love Redis, it's not a duck (fly, swim, walk).
This is a business prediction/problem and exactly what defines your bottleneck.
If you are already using Windows and run into a solution for a problem you are trying to solve that uses Python. This is my use case, there are lots of useful tools and scripts that need Python to run.
This is an interpretation I haven't seen before, so thanks for broadening my understanding. But the intent of the agreement doesn't appear to agree with some of the ways we know it's been used, especially since 2007 and between the UK and US.

US offers the UK information on its own citizens:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/nov/20/us-uk-secret-d...

Pre-2007:
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2013/jun/10/nsa-offers-...

UK taps undersea cable to listen to US-UK communications (not sure whose laws/sovereignty are not being violated here):
http://uk.reuters.com/article/2013/06/21/uk-usa-security-bri...

Edit: On topic with the OP, though, Australia happily spies and divulges information on its own innocent citizens: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/02/revealed-austr...
Like many things, it can probably be read multiple ways.

Yours is an interesting reading, and I must confess it had not occurred to me before.
Wow. The article's author has no Russian accent whatsoever. (Unless it was translated by an English speaker). Wish I had the same command of English. Somehow I doubt multilingual Ukranian newspapers are that much unaccented in their English. I had no temptation to open the Russian version of the article because the English text was not awkward to read.
This is pretty egregious for vegans and other with protected religious beliefs that prohibits consumption of meat/beef. what is the legal recourse?
They’ll also be able to track more purchases people make to sell you more ads
I'm not humble, but I've learned to fake it pretty well.

The trouble is most people believe me when I say I'm not that smart.
This link does not explain Reader.
I'm going to keep getting downvoted here, but it seems like people collect a bulleted list of spooky and bad things a government has done, and imply a meaningful connection via the act of simply listing the events together.

So, in our same list we have:

- A Cuban false flag operation with military intent.

- A CIA Mind Control experiment which is implied to be widespread, but documents don't actually support this. Torturing a few hapless individuals with LSD is certainly terrible, but it's different from "widespread government control."

- A terrible, scientific & racist medical experiment carried out against a vulnerable group of people.

- And then, "human-animal hybrids" ... I'm not sure how to respond to this? A few folks in China did some questionable things, maybe? I'm not sure what you're getting at here.

These are all disparate groups, with disparate intent, and unrelated outcome. Please, how are these related? Some people in power did some things are morally wrong? Why include conspiracy theories in this list if that's the only similarity? If you simply wanted to discuss government transgression, you could avoid something as trivial as MKULTA and instead simply mention U.S. Slavery, or the Soviet Famine, or any of the many government-run genocides in world history.
It's a finding more pithily stated by the poet W.B. Yeats:

"The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity" - The Second Coming (poem).
I don't think this could ever be considered factual, but it makes sense to me.

In times where I'm invested in being right, it's harder to accept learning that I had been wrong, and I'm certainly not seeking out more information with which to challenge my understanding.
I would argue that is a bit poorly phrased. One can base their self-worth on being right and simultaneously be humble enough to understand one can never truly know it all and thus be open to criticism and improvement.

Or is there something deeper from the book that better explains the point?
> those projects also benefit from decades of refinement and bug fixes. Rewriting them means losing all of that.

Not my experience at all, having spent a significant chunk of my career doing rewrites for scalability. Having the existing codebase makes it very easy to benefit from the accumulated knowledge, while at the same time doing a pass through that can catch a lot of outright errors. If you can rewrite a project incrementally while keeping it working (and for C->Rust, you can), then the arguments against rewriting your code don't apply, and I'd actually consider full rewrites a useful exercise even if you weren't rewriting to a better language.
Ask HN: How openly should you discuss your opinions on the internet?
I regularly see comments on HN where people say they no longer wish to participate on the internet due to lack of anonymity and profiling. I can completely empathize with this.
Somebody recently linked a website that profiles all HN users, associating them with topics in the form of keywords, and even classifying their amenability to discussion. Scary right?

But is the risk that we inherit through the existence of these things greater than the costs of not being able to discuss things openly?

I'm currently in a situation where I want to start a personal blog where I write about issues that interest me. This includes everything from stances on big social issues, sexual behaviors and opinions on the nature of people (intelligence etc.)

These are obviously very contentious issues and having these things publicly associated with my name will make many people raise an eyebrow when considering me for a job or the likes. But is this really as good enough reason for me not to do it? I want to talk about these things and I want to put my opinion out there to see if somebody can intelligently refute my reasoning. I think it will let me grow as a person.

I think it's terrible that we should be afraid of expressing our opinions and as far as I can tell, the most effective way of doing so is by publicly saying: This is me, this is what I think, this is why I think it, I'm open to change should you be able to convince me - have at it.
If my code runs slow because of lacks in one of the things you list I'll probably rewrite that part of my code. Note that I wouldn't rewrite everything, at least not at first.

In almost all cases though, the that fact that my codebase is working means the ecosystem, tooling and compilers are good enough as is and so I won't have a compelling reason to rewrite. I can get great programmers productive in Rust faster than the boss can figure out that neither I nor the new guy knew anything about rust on the first day.

Typically the only time the factors you mention come into consideration is a brand new project. I will generally know before I write the first line of code if I need GPGPU support or not. I ecosystem, tools, and existence of compilers are just a few of trade offs I will consider.
(2008) The Coming Collapse of the Middle Class with Elizabeth Warren
It will expire in August.
What if we could power people with electricity though? I am sure they would be far more energy efficient vs. machines. 1888 calories = 2.95kw hours per day. So less than $1/day of electricity. Someone just has to figure that one out. We could probably live indefinitely off of a big enough solar array.
Having checked the levels to see that they seems reasonable? Sure.

Every steak you eat is radioactive. Every potato you eat is radioactive. To say nothing of bananas, one of the most radioactive fruit.

You're eating radioactive things every day of your life. Your body is adapted to deal with that, and with all the other carcinogens you encounter daily. It is only once the damage caused by that radiation gets to a high enough level that your body's defence systems can't deal with it any more that it starts getting dangerous.
not everything should be decided democratically. a balance with bureaucracy is good
just to play the devil's advocate: perhaps they knew that if you owned a thing, you're more likely to buy the thing when time comes to replace it. The more advertising you see, the more your mind remembers the brand and product.
Author here. I wish I'd thought of your example before I wrote the article :D

And I think my opinion on that is probably obvious, but I think the simplest answer is that Google simply doesn't care about mistargeting ads to a consumer who wouldn't conceivably click on them. They gain no benefit from reducing an advertisers spend that way.
Well you mentioned that professionals stopped. I’m asking about common use as opposed to proper terminology.

An academic using that phrasing would certainly be wrong, but a layman?
Hadn't read this before; very funny...and as noted, true!
This is somewhat reminiscent of people who complain endlessly when a piece of software is still 32-bit, for purely nebulous reasons. People want things to feel clean and new, or they get an icky feeling that never seems to go away.
Why?

Don't you want to hear your different lawyer options, STD check options, gun options, alcohol help, etc?

Or rather, would you rather have useful advertisement or spammy advertisement?

I still could not relate that those would be bad. The only thing I can imagine is blackmail. Which is cultural and not moral.
> if Facebook is the only actor running this network why make it a cryptocurrency at all?

Marketing.
They could use the same warning for fake news websites or for anything they deem worth warning or are ordered to. Could be interesting at least.
About two years ago, I didn't get a promotion to "senior engineer" that I thought I was going to, and I had a huge temper-tantrum to my boss about it as a result (I'm still surprised to this day that I didn't quit on the spot, to be honest).

I was upset, because people that seemed to be contributing less and were less-qualified (at least from my admittedly-biased perspective at the time) were promoted to a higher level than me, and I got a fairly form-letter-esque answer of "we don't have the budget to promote you this time".

The next cycle, they corrected it, and I was officially a "senior engineer" on paper, and I realized how silly my hissy-fit had been. Sure, I guess having a bit more money was nice, but it's not like it radically changed the quality of my life, it's not like having a fancy title changed how people really saw me, and I didn't even bother updating the title on LinkedIn.

I don't think I was "wrong" in what I said. I do think that I deserved the promotion over someone else, but at the same time, I also tarnished a relationship with my boss and coworkers, and I let it get me far more depressed than it should have.

-------

I guess if any "junior" engineers are reading this, try and remember that a title is simply that: a title. They don't matter a lot, try to not get too upset over them, and obsessing over something so nominal is a great way to build up anxiety.

EDIT: Just a note, I absolutely think you should call out a company if you feel like you're being taken for granted. I'm not advocating complacency, just make sure that your hatred is directed to the right places and try to avoid getting too depressed.
Humans, in general, do not use "feet" for measurement. It's only dumb Americans. They don't represent humanity: they're only a small fraction of all humans (around 4%). Don't blame humanity for something that only Americans do.
> Imagine you’re a marketing-degree graduate in middle management. If you’re lucky, you may have done some statistics courses. In your day-to-day, you likely don’t apply these to a great amount. You hear about this great thing called “Machine Learning” which is sweeping marketing departments. You might have read a white paper or two about it, heard about it at a conference, or been schmoozed by someone from IBM trying to sell you Watson (ugh). You decide to talk to a consultancy about it, or are referred to one by upper management, who’s been living from cocktail-to-cocktail on the consultant’s corporate AMEX for their entire career.

Lets be real - when you’re in this position, the consultants say a lot of words to you that you don’t understand and then you say yes to a contract because the PowerPoint looks good. Not only do you get to mention your huge new budget on your resume, thanks to the huge invoice, but you also get to mention you implemented MACHINE LEARNING at your company. But what’s next?

I have been working in advertising industry (background in software engineering) for 3+ years as an engineer (for one of the four biggest agencies). I think the author overestimates how much data we can/do collect, and how much we leverage on it. But the excerpt above is absolutely spot on. I'm a mid-level manager and I sometimes baffled at how much bullshit some companies try to sell to our clients (e.g., some big CPG companies), and how much the management folks from our clients and our advertising agency/company alike buy into that bullshit. "ML/AI" and "Media attribution" are really big now. But I believe almost 99% of the people who are leading these efforts (at least in my company) have no clue as to how to do it--thus, the snake oil salesmen are taking advantage of this.
It doesn't really surprise me at all.

Virtually 100% of my clicks on ads are accidental - either the touchpad registered a tap when I didn't intend it, or, in the ever-increasing case of ads moving around on the page, because the ad popped in front of what I actually intended to click on.

To tell the truth, the ads may be working, insofar as sometimes I will go to find out more based on an ad. But you won't see it in your click-through rates. I'll get to your website by opening a new tab and searching in DDG, because at this point I'm so annoyed by adtech and all their scumminess that I'm not willing to give them any additional data if I can possibly avoid it.
I was tinkering with crosscompiling Rust to arm/aarch64 just yesterday. Rust has a ways to go before it can catch up to C/C++ for cross compiling.

Edit: I should explain a bit. C has had the concept of cross compiling baked into it for decades. It's a well established, easy path. By dint of C, C++ comes along for the ride. Lots of linker is magic required for bare metal C programming. Weird flags required for arch-linux-gnueabi cross compiling. Rust is very new and just doesn't have that history yet. It's an opportunity for someone who has a lot more spare time than myself. :-)
it's also a form of macho virtue signalling
That's why any good tutorial on Python for Windows recommend using the "py -x.y" command, and not the "python" command.
That's exactly right. Think of it like modifying your GPS to get you to drive to a bad part of town (so that your car/valuables are stolen).

The fact that it's China Telecom speaks volumes to this being a suspected route hijack. It's possible it was just an error on the Swiss colo companies part but somehow I doubt that.
> I have yet to see a real whistleblower report by someone deep into the ad industry revealing whats really going on there.

Its because nobody cares until Congress starts hauling in software developers and "data scientists" from tech startups, everyone is content watching Zuckerberg be the face of society's discontent.

As long as they keep asking the wrong people the wrong questions there is no need for everyone else to acknowledge their role in the problem.
AFAIK credit score companies get the data you given with consent to credit card companies.

Otherwise they can collect data on you with other means, if they find it publicly available, for instance.

But if you give your data to a pizza place without consent to sell it, or share it with vendors, it is illegal for them to sell it share it.

IANAL btw
Ah, ok. I guess with the solution I had in mind you could not simply replace a function without recompiling. So an interpreted language might be better suited.
Nice!

Also reccomended are pentestit.ru, pentester academy and boxes hosted on vulnhub. Apart from offensive security labs ofcourse.
"Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out."
I think it is about money... but also skilled leadership who understand how a good support organization works, how to find people and retain them.

I suspect though that due to the general trend to look at support as a "cost" most skilled leadership has moved on or just settled for poor support practices and etc.

Interestingly in my experience support teams that operate outside the home country of the company OFTEN have massive turnover issues, more than say domestic (wherever domestic is). There's a gap there that just never seems to fill in completely.

There is also something to be said for managing support in the sense that you don't have to talk to every 10,000 customers ;)
a lot of psychopaths rise to the top
I have some toy search technology (indexer and query processor). I started in C and did a series of rewrites, learning and changing something significant each time.

On version 6 I switched to Rust (having only just started learning the language) and it feels pretty unlikely I'd switch back.

The rookie mistake isn't to want a rewrite. It's to ridicule something you haven't tried in earnest.
Yes, the Zero Rupee Note does not achieve anything at all. For e.g. if a traffic cop stops you, the first thing he does is that he takes your driver license. Good luck getting it back with your fancy Zero Rupee note.
and globals. mutable globals everywhere. (at least last time i ran away from it all after having to fix an EOL'd plugin 10 years ago).

never again.
Yes, AFAIK GDPR makes it that you have to also opt into your data being shared/sold besides the ToS.
Researchers Can Make People Say Anything in Videos by Rewriting Their Words
Scientists seek out limit to human endurance
number of reputable western publications (not blogspam) seem to have taken this source seriously and are citing it

These days, I don't think that's enough of a guarantee.
Those numbers aren't completely off. I work in pharma and am quite familiar with the R&D budgets. Everything is amortized in large pharma (across projects, over time, over shared supporting facilities). It factors in the cost of failures, the failure rate is very high, and this is a regulated/validated industry so just making admin changes to code requires extensive process.
At first there were no signs of contamination outside of the station and it was unclear if reactor has exploded or not. Evacuation started as soon as that fact was established.

In one of the US nuclear incidents people died while evacuating in panic though no one got hurt at the power plant .
Polynesian Voyaging Society
Confirmation bias is basically this.
India Proposes 10-Year Jail for Cryptocurrency Use
Not only Python is not installed (the command is a stub), but linux distributions have been shipping Python forever, and it never froze anybody. It's a matter of how you support upgrading, now what you provide out of the box.
They stated that they were using it in production for that purpose.
> I'd come away wondering how they could be so oblivious to the ethical concerns in what they were asking for

Like Upton Sinclair said, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
This is exactly what I wanted to post. People are becoming insecure about their bodies because of fake images of famous people. It creates high expectations that can never be met in real life and seriously ruins lives.
As Google Advances Its Interests, It Serves as Huawei Emissary to U.S.
But those things can be done without putting sensitive information on the internet. Crypto currency transactions can keep everything sensitive off the network. A one way airgap is indeed all you need (your device should be able to push data to the network but never receive any data from the network). The same scheme works for voting.
Great post. Lot's of good stuff.

Just to comment on one part at random:

Code reviews would be more useful if review feedback was categorized:

1. is this a matter of personal style?
2. is this a judgement call?
3. is this something that is just wrong and has to be fixed?
4. is this in-scope or actually a separate issue?

(This is off the top of my head, so this is more of an example of the kind of categorization I'm talking about than a proposal.)

It's useful because it helps to set the direction and expectations on what to do about an item of feedback.

E.g. if you have a lot of 1. then the right "fix" might be to spin off a task to develop a common style-guide. (Or maybe fix an out-of-date a style guide, or to enforce an existing style-guide so that these issues don't dominate code reviews, etc.). For 4. the resolution would be to open a ticket (or whatever the process is so it gets proper consideration, prioritization, etc.)

Where I am currently we spend a lot of effort figuring out what to do about review feedback (and I think we too often make non-optimal decisions which sucks time as well).
The results are hardly surprising.

A lot of "DIY"ness was learned by junior watching Dad do a DIY fix and learning from the experience.

But, a lot of DIY by Dad was done for a "can't afford to pay the professional" reason for a large portion of history. Esp. for the minor stuff (unclog toilet -> $10 reusable plunger vs. $100+ fee just to get plumber to drive out and also utilize the same $10 reusable plunger on the clogged toilet one time).

But the millennial generation was the first where the prior generation was starting to become wealthy enough to let someone else handle these jobs vs. DIY and save money. And without the example of watching Dad DIY, junior never learned to do any of it himself or herself.

And when one never learned how to do even the most minor DIY tasks, of course one ends up paying the professionals to do the same tasks instead.