skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I proudly used "boring" to describe a massive simplification of my work's architecture that I have been working on for the last few years. It has been a successful culling of tech down to the bare minimum (as always- still a work in progress).

Anyway my boss got so so offended and angry that I would use the word "boring". I spent the rest of the day trying to explain it and calm him down.

Anyway use caution with the word "boring". It's more toxic than nuance would suggest.
Often, you think it is a car, and then when you start to work, you realize it is actually an octopus
Long After the Prodigal Son's Return
You could brute force that fairly easily if you know approximately when the message was sent. Still a lot better than being able to see it right in your packet sniffer, of course.
What's the difference to installing 2-3 updates per week over the distro? One should be installing distro updates daily anyway.
A Woman Who Sneaked into George Washington’s Army
Curious as to what are the various ways to lose property in the Philippines
Does anyone have a good link to the state of the modern thinking on continuations?

I remember from back in the Scheme R5RS era there was a conflict between call/cc and dynamic-wind.

If you have a dynamic extent (like for example a try {} finally {} block that does resource allocation/deallocation), and you exit, but then jump back into the block, how far do you try to re-wind the state? You probably don't re-open files, but you would probably want to re-set any dynamic-scoped variables.

I don't remember seeing this raised as an issue recently, so it must have been solved somehow, and I'm just wondering how.
Cisco Email Cybersecurity Report [pdf]
Ask HN: Transitioning into Security
I'm a software developer with around 12 years experience. Recently, I've started to learn more about security (pentesting specifically). My interest in security goes back to my teens, when I was involved in local 2600 groups. Rather than perusing security, I went into development because it seemed to be the easiest way to jump start my IT career without a degree.

I'm concerned that making the change will be tough since my experience is all development with a small amount of administration / devops. Currently I am studying for my OSCP and working through HTB machines.

For people that have made the transition from a developer into a security roll, do you have any advice? How did you go about it? Thank you!
with a sequel in the works!
An ex-googler mentioned somewhere else that Oracle was the "real commercial db" in this story about the early AdWords server:

https://web.archive.org/web/20120305152003/http://eldapo.blo...
managers and business leaders make decisions based upon those estimates.

Imagine if that cable guy coming your house said between 1 hour and 2 weeks. Good luck making anything approaching a good decision surrounding the cable guy's visit.
It occurs with every execution, if you don’t pre-compile it.
That’s what the .pyc files are. It also does it with the “main” file, but it just keeps that in memory instead of writing it to disk.
https://twitter.com/rdonoghue/status/1144011630197522432 and discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20297331
I have been spending a lot of time reading English language classics lately (I'm Swedish, so I only read two classics in my high school English class) so I will recommend one I recently read, Catch 22.

I read it so that I knew what it was about before watching the Hulu show. Still haven't watched the Hulu show, but absolutely loved the book. It's funny, very dark and even though most people think they know all about it without reading it because they understand the term "catch 22", they are missing out on a very good story that will leave you in want of discussing it with someone else.
Not if you buy the government first. I think they’re already a victim of their own greed though.

It’s bad enough I started using DDG for search because the results are now more relevant. Google’s advertising algorithms are designed to subtly nudge sites into paying for placement — which means there’s a “non-content” element to the search results that makes it into the user experience. I feel like there was a tipping point a year or two ago where the results just stopped being useful — The best analogy I can find is how search engines used to be in the days before AltaVista. Then AltaVista came out and the results were far more relevant (if not perfect). Google -> DDG feels like that in 2019.

That “non-content” element will only grow over time as Google seeks revenue growth — growth across all of Google’s non-advertising revenue streams combined are not enough to move the needle compared to the scale their ad business has — of which search ads are by far the most profitable. So they will further try to monetize search; it’s their cash cow but I think a small player like DDG could easily overtake them as the quality of Google’s search results (to the end user) continue to decline.
A relative order of outcomes could also work, yeah. You'll have a date in there somewhere, though, even if it's not driven off the amount of work. Could be "and if we can't achieve this outcome by X date we give up on this whole outcome".
Status of Rust-Analyzer: Achievements and Open Collective
What are folks using for Audible? Open Audible? It wasn't pulling my library correctly last time I tried.
There is a benefit of hindsight here: The micro, in the beginning, was a bit like 3d pronters now. Nice toy for enthousiasts but that's it. It took the GUI, wordprocessor and spreadsheet to get them out of the toy category and in the usefull category.

Mainframes etc could also deliver this, the main differentiator being price. IBM was dreaming of a mainframe for each city, and phonelike terminald in the company. Minitel and internet proves the vision was right, only the price wasnt

The category killer needed to be cheap as well ad usefull.

Node also has an obvious benefit: same tech in frontend and backend, hence less devs needed. A.k.a. cheap, at least it seems so in the short term. History will judge us both on the long term, I guess.
Interesting observations.

I’ve thought about twins and brain structure too, but I am a computer scientist not a neuro-scientist so I might be completely wrong.

Serious mental illness seems to be of higher incidence in the population than I would expect given evolutionary pressures due to its affect on survival. This suggests perhaps some unexplained benefit to mental illness for survival of an individual’s genes despite its seeming like a disadvantage. (As is the case for sickle cell anemia or nearsightedness)

Alternatively, I surmise that brain structures are not fully coded by genes, but develop through a system that is chaotic, in the sense of being very sensitive to initial conditions, and so despite the brain development system being controlled by genes the outcome in terms of exact neural connections is to some degree unpredictable due to the slightest differences in the environment between individuals (even identical twins).

Evolution implies that the development of a brain can not be straightforward given how rarely genius appears in the population.
SEEKING WORK | London / Remote | App Developer

I have extensive experience creating hybrid apps using React Native and Cordova, and have helped several companies launch new apps from scratch. I'm looking for my next contract, ideally a React Native role on-site in London, but remote would also be fine.

Resume: https://gearoid.me/about

Email: hn@gearoid.me
Does Galios provide VISA for Europeans?
Location: Ontario, Canada
Remote: Yes
Willing to relocate: within Ontario
Technologies: C++ (2.5 years)
Résumé/CV: via email
Email: christianmccrave@gmail.com
GitHub: https://github.com/Cmccrave

I'm a self taught C++ programmer with a few projects related to StarCraft AI. I'm currently working in life science automation as a PLC programmer and systems integrator.
Given the broad capabilities of the Python first party libraries, you can do a lot of work without 3rd party libraries. It’s not in as much fashion as it was 10+ years ago, but it’s still quite doable.
The economist Edward Glaeser, despite being a big fan of cities (he wrote a book called Triumph of the City), ended up moving to a suburb. In addition to the reasons you mentioned, he cited America's ridiculous federal home mortgage interest deduction, which incentivises spending more on a bigger home, with obvious negative outcomes (environmental and otherwise).
aka the cost of doing business, overhead
What about a set of "blessed" crates (that can only depend on other "blessed" crates) that are maintained by the language developers? Seems like the best of both worlds to me.
Location: India

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: Direct Response COPYWRITING & Marketing. I write persuasive copy for emails, landing & sales pages, advertorials, search & social ads, etc.

RESULTS YOU WILL GET: About 10-30% increase in revenue. I also work on a trial basis. If you sell anything online, drive a good volume of traffic and earn at least $10,000 as monthly revenue, email me now.

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Interestingly, they've been publicly working on this for over a year, but only in the last few weeks did they remove the "only run in chrome" check.
Why not just create a simple phone number with twilio that they can text a url to and then it fires a script to download that video and upload it to s3 for them? Shouldn’t take more than an hour IMO.
$700K+ is not a "discount option" in Apex. It's at the high end of the market. Average new construction (let alone existing home sales) in the area is probably around $400K for a 2500 sf house. The house in question is probably over 4000 sf on a decent sized lot (most lots for new construction are under 1/4 acre) and built by one of the "luxury" homebuilders like Toll Brothers.

Definitely still depends on the area within the town/city, but Apex in general is still cheaper than Raleigh comparing neighborhoods of similar demographics.

E.g., $500K gets you 6bed/4bath 3700sf in this neighborhood of relatively new homes in Apex:
https://www.redfin.com/NC/Apex/2851-Lumber-River-Trl-27502/h...

vs. close to $1Mil for 3500sf in North Hills, one of the most desirable suburban-ish neighborhoods within the Raleigh city limits:
https://www.redfin.com/NC/Raleigh/118-Lake-Boone-Trl-27608/h...
They are not “generally cheaper” (ebooks are usually about 30-50% cheaper), and much less convenient if you travel a lot.
From the Discussion section:

> The ice covers of each of the 5 sectors of Fig. 1 and of the Southern Ocean as a whole have experienced considerable interannual variability over the past 40 y (Figs. 2–7). In fact, the Southern Ocean and 4 of the 5 sectors (all except the Ross Sea) have each experienced at least one period since 1999 when the yearly average ice extents decreased for 3 or more straight years only to rebound again afterward and eventually reach levels exceeding the extent preceding the 3 y of decreases (Figs. 2–7). This illustrates that the ice decreases since 2014 (Fig. 2) are no assurance that the 1979–2014 overall positive trend in Southern Ocean ice extents has reversed to a long-term negative trend. Only time and an extended observational record will reveal whether the small increase in yearly average ice extents from 2017 to 2018 (Fig. 2C) is a blip in a long-term downward trend or the start of a rebound.

And:

> I hope that the 40-y record discussed in this paper will encourage further studies into the atmospheric and oceanic conditions that could have led to the extremely rapid 2014–2017 decline of the Antarctic sea ice cover, the comparably rapid decline in the mid-1970s, and the uneven but overall gradual increases in Antarctic sea ice coverage in the intervening decades.
They were the first that made online retail work. Plus there's the whole AWS thing.
Hey, apologies for the late reply. No I couldn't get it functioning. I tried again at home using Firefox and it worked fine though, so it's either not compatible with IE11 or my company has blocked something related to it's working.
Gulp.js Command Execution for Humans
Those Who Mind Don't Matter. Those Who Matter Don't Mind
How Amazon and the Cops Set Up an Elaborate Sting Operation
"The Body Keeps the Score" taught me a ton about the psychology of trauma, as it relates to everyone. It really has some jaw-dropping stuff.

https://www.amazon.com/Body-Keeps-Score-Healing-Trauma/dp/01...
If this concept is interesting to you, Greg Egan has written an entire scifi novel (Dichronauts) set in a 2+2 universe. Weirdness abounds, but quite rigorous.
Religion doesn't seem to have discouraged much of formerly catholic Europe introducing laws permitting abortion, sterilisation, or availability and use of contraception.

For countries that still have religion front and centre in their politics, sure it might be an issue... the consequences of ignoring an overpopulated world or country will still affect them, and sooner. Wars will start instead...
How Poland Became a Front in the Cold War Between the U.S. and China
"iPhones also have industry leading ratings in recyclability[2]"

How many are actually recycled though?
I just tried it on a modern machine (6-core i7, 32GB ram, GTX1050) on latest Chrome for windows, and the fly-by animations were still not smooth.

I'm disappointed by that, but I guess the desktop app also never was smooth to begin with.
On the topic of Mars, may I suggest The Martian Chronicles by R.Bradbury. It's on the other end of the spectrum from hard SciFi - more like lyrical and poetic SciFi.
Dynamic-wind was created to tame call/cc and exceptions, rather than being in conflict with it. It directly provides the facilities for re-re-setting things when you re-enter a left scope.

However, you might want to look up delimited continuations as a different approach to similar kinds of control flow.
Interesting, thanks for the extra info.

Bloody disappointing if so, as it seems likely to get just the sort of heavy handed response that they're demonstrating over.
A huge part of our VC bubble in OSS infrastructure (NoSQL, clouds, middleware, automation) is fueled by a generation of technologists not choosing boring technology.

This is a great presentation, and great advice.

What this piece misses are the marketing, hiring practices and incentives in that capital pool that is fueling FOMO (fear of missing out) as the main driver of our technology trends.

Most people orbiting IT wants to be a part of something that changes the world: it’s their ticket to higher paying job elsewhere, bragging rights at a conference, internet fame/notoriety via blog posts, etc. This is how we wind up with Service Mesh proxied MongoDB on Kubernetes as THE ANSWER, and all the ensuing political battles / turf wars to fight boring alternatives as “yesterday’s news”.

It would be nice to see a greater focus on business outcomes, but I find few have the patience or bandwidth to truly track the success of a technology choice, unless you’re a larger company making a periodic cash bet with a business partner (eg software vendor). And even then, failure can be swept under the rug sometimes.

It requires strong leadership and management (or a great culture) to encourage your teams to communicate tradeoffs and make these sorts of “boring tech” decisions without it being more about individuals playing a turf game.
A more digestible format for this: https://busterbenson.com/piles/cognitive-biases/
Very interesting. Especially the three links and in particular

https://github.com/CamDavidsonPilon/Probabilistic-Programmin...
Sure, my point was that the unit of measurement for body temperature in many places that use metric is probably still Fahrenheit, not Celsius. (And that it doesn't really hurt anything, since the boiling and freezing point of water is irrelevant in checking whether a human is ok or not)
In a Java context, I'd say it's undeniably true. Haskell-style composition of monadic values depends on type system features that Java doesn't have and on no account should even be thinking about adding at this point in time. And that's ignoring the syntax mess it would be in Java today, too.

In a Haskell context, since continuations are typically implemented as a monadic value, the statement would be more or less nonsensical. But I don't think that would be the context in question.

Edit: noelwelsh speaks of another level of composition than I was, where one is trying to take, say, State and STM and create a new monadic value that does both those things. The analysis given there is correct as well. My point here is more syntactic and basic functioning, in that even if you pick a single monadic value type to stick with, it's not going to play well in Java anyhow. So, in conclusion, generalized monad-type code in Java is just comprehensively not really possible. Continuations, or what are being called that in modern times, however, fit into Java-type languages, as proved by several very similar languages that have had them for many years, and they work fine.
With a single modern CPU you can do a lot of operations at each pixel of a high resolution screen and still get a framerate that your monitor cannot churn. Then, you typically have a few more cores around to do other stuff.

Unless your language introduces an unreasonable overhead, a for loop over the pixels is perfectly appropriate and fast.
Asking HN: What to do beyond just dev
Greetings,

I've been recently pondering my career options. I've been doing .NET since the beta. I've worked at a wide range of companies. However, in the last 4 years or so, I've started shifting my focus more with a desire towards helping smaller, scrappier companies handle scaling and finding product/market fit. I'm also one of the guys on The Complete Developer Podcast (https://CompleteDeveloperPodcast.com) and have spoken at a number of conferences and software schools. In addition, I have a book coming out in August through Apress. However, my non-meeting time at the day job is still nearly 85% coding, with the rest being system design.

So, my question is: Given how my focus has changed in the last 4 years, what should I be doing right now so that I can make a transition to something more suitable for the skills I've developed? My current job is ok, but recent events have made me realize that it is not the best long-term fit (and may actually be detrimental over the medium to long term). Should I look for another job that is more suitable? If so, what would that be? Or should I go in a different direction altogether?

tldr; Regular dev turned podcaster/speaker/etc., trying to figure out what to do now that I'm not "just" a dev, or at least don't want to be.
I don't do any systems programming, but I think it would be valuable to learn C for educational purposes. Could I get some recommendations on books or online material that could get me started?
Elon Musk Wanted the Onion; He Got Thud
Coding is a tool.

Code is the result of that tool. If you use a tool to build something you're constantly repairing/maintaining, then its a liability.
A mid-80s Walkman is central to one of my earliest vivid memories.

Among the gifts I received for my 9th birthday in 1986 were (1) An AM/FM radio Walkman (replete with the classic orange-padded on-ear headphones), and (2) a plastic kite with an eagle on it.

The following day, I walked over to the park nearest our house, stood in the middle of an open sports field, tuned my Walkman to the relatively new Australian rock music station EON-FM, and launched my eagle kite.

Fairly soon, as I stood there proudly flying my kite on what was a solidly windy day, the radio playlist transitioned into the intro to Money for Nothing by Dire Straits.

To this day, I can still feel the visceral sensation of the buildup of that intro and the sound explosion of that opening guitar riff, and in that moment I knew what rock'n'roll music was all about.

I sometimes think back to that just-turned-9-years-old kid in the middle of that field, flying that kite and having his mind blown by rock'n'roll blasted through his brand new Walkman, and think "you're doin OK kid."
You can also do that with the 'Play to Kodi' browser addon.
I think they would be more active if there were more variety in the type of work sought? Almost every post is seeking the same thing: full-stack dev, dev ops, and ops eng. If you're seeking something outside those constraints (i.e. pentesting, threat intel, risk management, compliance, etc) there's not much there. And although this is getting better, so many companies are still stuck on location-specific hiring constraints. HN has a global audience, posting here and constraining yourself to Nowheresville, Nebraska does you and your company a huge disservice.
Sin taxes might meet your criteria. Many jurisdictions use revenue from cigarette taxes for good cause.

Building codes are also a pretty good example.

A complimentary strategy is performance standards. A carrot (incentive) to regulatory sticks.
A Facebook civil rights audit could have unintended consequences
I was referring to Sihanoukville.
Facebook cryptocurrency can undermine the global economy
One of the best books I've read this year.
Highly recommended, read like a well written hollywood movie.
HackerRank | Bangalore, India | Fulltime | ONSITE | www.hackerrank.com

HackerRank is a Y Combinator alumnus backed by tier one Silicon Valley VCs. We are a skills-based hiring platform that helps companies evaluate technical skills, better. We’re driving a new paradigm shift by eliminating resumes and creating opportunities for hundreds of thousands of programmers worldwide. We have a community of 5M+ developers and 1,000+ customers across industries, and the best part is we are just getting started. Our customers - including VMware, Twitter, Capital One and many other Fortune 100 companies - rely on HackerRank to build strong engineering teams.

We're hiring across engineering for the following roles:

- Test Engineer (Automation)

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Good pay with following benefits:

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Please send an email to anil@hackerrank.com with "WHOISHIRING" in the subject line, with your resume/CV, and a little bit about yourself and relevant experience.
There are a variety of DRM Free audiobook providers:

https://www.downpour.com
https://libro.fm

Most titles on audiobooksnow.com are free as well, but not quite all, so make sure there's no "DRM Protected" symbol.

I bounce between these providers (subscribing and cancelling to their various plans as needed) based on book availability and price. I believe I pay slightly less overall than if I used Audible for everything, even if acquiring books takes more work.

In a pinch, you can also remove Audible DRM with various tools (see sibling comment), but we should support proper DRM Free providers wherever possible!
SEEKING WORK | Product Manager / MVP Specialist | Remote or London/Brighton

Experienced founder & product manager. Specialise in designing and building working prototypes of new product ideas. Get something real in front of customers as fast as possible to validate a new concept!

Skills: Product Design, Specification & Build. Customer Interviews, Product Strategy, Roadmap, Prototyping, Configuring Analytics & Custom Reporting.

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