skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
One thing I don't see argued very much is that lowering barriers to entry and providing more frictionless access usually inevitably leads to more consolidation, not less. When there is very open access (e.g. "Anyone with a computer can spin up a website!") it means that users will choose services that even have small improvements or advantages, until those services build up so much market share that they inevitably have huge moats to competition. I've heard lots of comments along the lines of "I wish Amazon had more competition!", but then those same folks will choose a service if it's 10c cheaper or if a product can arrive an hour faster.

On the contrary, if you look at businesses where there is not huge consolidation, it is often because there is "market unfriendly" regulation. E.g. there are many rich car dealers spread throughout the US because they've put in place so many anti-competitive regulations. While I'd love it if Tesla could sell direct everywhere, it also means a lot of this wealth that currently stays relatively local would get sucked up by a Silicon Valley corporation. Same thing goes for Realtors and the real estate business.

As a consumer I love more open markets, but I don't think we've fully addressed the consequences of how this leads to greater inequality and consolidation of services.
It depends on the committee.

I am more looking into how a candidate thinks than if they get the problem correct.

It is more telling when someone is able to logically work through a problem they never seen before even if it isn't optimal or even correct.

I am more skeptical of those who blow through a hard problem getting the optimal solution right away. It likely means they memorized it or had lots of practice on such type of problems. I don't hold it against them, but often have to throw in some curve ball follow ups to see if they really know there stuff.
Silent and deadly: Fatal farts immobilize prey (2015)
Too bad. How does Dropbox keep the premium pricing when they increasingly lack premium features?
MmmmHmm.

So long as you're a "geek" its ok to be a monstrous shit?

Is that what you're arguing here?
Most luxury apartment buildings have an affiliated cleaning service and can recommend an interior designer.

Find one with a restaurant on the bottom floor and you're done.

It'll cost close to 5K/mo all in for decent square footage. That's before food, which will probably run around 50/day at least. Still very achievable on a dev salary in a major market, as long as you don't make any other expensive life decisions (i.e., children). Not what I would spend my money on, but certainly an option if it's what you want
Yes, of course, but shouldn't the backup part be unrelated to the syncing part?

There are many ways to do it, but in my case, I back up my main "on 24/7" workstation (which has all my sync'd folders, whereas my laptop and other machines have a subset) with Arq→S3 snapshots-over-time. And also Backblaze as a secondary backup, just in case, and while they don't support snapshots, they do let me back up 14TB for $5/month.
If someone performs a voluntary job without a gun to their heads, the assumption is that they are not being shafted.

Or they are being shafted by life so hard that this represents less shafting that all their other options. Otherwise, if they had better options, why would they take the job?
The Semantics of Falsy Values
yes that is what i want.
is executeUserProgram() a system call? how do i implement this in windows. I am thinking of forking a process and then kill the other process after certain amount of time. will it work?
Torrent links are centralized in trackers and you'd see a single tracker site dominate if the legal atmosphere allowed for it.

And honestly, it doesn't work as well. If you don't care about decentralization for decentralization sake its not ideal. Streaming websites don't use it. Netflix doesn't torrent a video to you.
>> moaning or a remarkable lack of self-awareness.

As someone who has spent more time on the hiring side than the job seeker side over the last 10 years, I find these articles funny. I ask myself if each method could tell me what I need to know about a candidate. For many, the answer is no. Then I ask myself if I think the remaining method are fair and often the answer is no. Then I think about how much hassle they are for the candidate and the best methods seem really onerous for the candidate.

I always come back to the way I handle it. And now that I'm looking for a job again I had one interview where the technique impressed me enough to change my style a bit in the future, or at least add some options to what is a dynamic process.
And that's supposed to make you feel better ?

Go to city hall or DMV, try get something done, and you will understand how dealing with inflexible idiots feels. (note that you're not dumb because you work at city hall/DMV, but if you're not dumb you have better options and go somewhere else. So over time, these places collect idiots). When you're smarter, there's a lot of DMVs.

It's not like dealing with people a little less smart or smarter than you feels (in fact they will regularly outsmart you, you'll just outsmart them just a tad more than the other way). That's just fine, interesting, and doesn't stand in anyone's way. It's dealing with people much dumber than you that's the problem.

Here's a repeating conversation that's frustrating. The problem is smart people play chess, whereas normal people just play a move.

"I want to X"
"But that's (insane|difficult|not what I'd like to do|not what I see|...), why not Y ?"
"Because Y leads to Z, to A, and likely to B, which is a negative for me"
"But why not C ?"
"Because C leads to D, E and then again to B, which is not what I want"
"But ..."
(continue for another 10 minutes)

Or people that hate you because you "make them feel dumb" (which is exactly what they do to you when you have to explain everything of course, but never mind that). And you might say "why not make them feel smart". And sure, I do that. That's easy. But it takes time and energy, and I'm just not going to do that 100x every day. 10x, sure. No problem. But there's a limit.

Or people who feel like they're entitled to your intelligence. Every last problem they encounter. "Hey <drop everything and> come look at this", and then the first time you don't they immediately escalate.

Or just playing chess, then looking at "idiots" moving on the playing field. And seeing them placing themselves into impossible positions and ...

Also worse is that you see people's motivations. How, say, social workers are going to discuss a new policy to do X, and this sounds really positive and you're the only one in the room that's "but, no it isn't positive at all. Because the motivations of these guys that are involved are to ... and that will lead to ..., which is going to destroy these peoples' lives, and you KNOW this but you're suggesting the policy because your organization will once again have to expand". For example, "early detection of child abuse" by people who are paid for finding child abuse will lead to ... false accusations. And of course, once again they will find much more than their worst fear. Or helping the homeless by "providing accomodations", and you want to scream that no, they want them off the street because they think it'll increase their house's value and their ego while effectively arresting and locking up these people.

Or worse: you actually go look at the accommodations they were talking about, because you're interested. Either for those abused kids, or for those homeless. And then you know: there is no act as despicable, counterproductive and outright evil as "professionals" "helping" people.
> torrent seedbox (replace Netflix, Spotify, etc.)

This is one of those things that can only exist so long as it's a minority interest; whenever piracy becomes "mainstream" action will be taken against it, such as your ISP portscanning for it and banning you.

> personal Bitcoin node (replace banking

Likewise the minority safety, and has all the disadvantages of keeping cash at home as well as still needing a centralish interface to the real financial system.

Also, who's going to fight the spam? That was the crippling problem for both SMTP and USENET; SMTP built a mountain of filters for this, including centralised blacklists. USENET never quite fully solved it until it went obsolete. Anyone attempting to return to that world would do very well to look at the problems of those two and all the attempted solutions.
Why do you think it isn't a problem that Trump revealed secret info?
It's a political story and is thus likely to be flagged as off-topic by a large number of people.

Unless a political story has a strong tech slant, expect it to disappear off the front page quickly no mater how many upvotes it gets.
Heroku: don't restart your app; restarting is broken

Also Heroku: we auto restart your dyno every day!

So now my app is down because Heroku forced it to restart, and none of our hourly employees can work :|
Could it be because these companies are paying you to be on the clock while Uber and Lyft are not?
Or do a lookup over multiple columns without having to do some ugly concatanations
> Better make that all the popular non-ext4 filesystems...

Fair.
I remember reading about how not all AWS regions are similarly operated and that one was a snowflake. Is it US-East-1?
Might be different depending on the market. For us it was "we can reset, but we have to recover within a few seconds". I never questioned the wisdom of our hardware cert engineers.

(My experience at three different companies spread over 35 years was, if you were a software engineer helping the hardware types with ESD or RFI testing in the lab, you were definitely going to get zapped at some point. That made you part of the team, though ... :-) )
Most likely because they focus on different type of customers and trying to grow.
Composing libraries instead of buying into a framework is a wonderful thing. It allows a developer to use just the parts they want, integrate them with just what the developer needs, and get on with whatever they're doing. It's a beautiful idea, and it can enable amazing levels of productivity.

With that said, might it also be possible that there could be some drawbacks? Having worked in and with Clojure, I found the ecosystem incredibly immature. It's somewhere beyond arrogant - reckless comes to mind - for most engineers to do all their own plumbing for a web service. The odds that they'll manage to design someone easily long-term maintainable are slim. The chances of authorization, authentication, potential SQL injection, and a thousand other security things being handled well is effectively none - the Clojure ecosystem often seems wildly ignorant of such things. The core philosophy of just composing the libraries you need with Ring means that anything you don't actively think of will be likely entirely neglected. This is a dangerous way to ship code that will be facing the real internet. Clojure requires you to fit absolutely every aspect of everything you're doing into your head and be handled by you, because nothing is going to do it for you. The lovely magical LEGO feeling is, sadly, a lie.

This stands in stark contrast to the level of consideration around maintenance and security that has gone into a modern, mature framework. Or a modern language where SAST is an option.

Doing low-level stuff feels absolutely amazing! The sense of control, of having your hands in the guts and the ability to do what you need without wasting time on bullshit magic, is heady and glorious. It's just perhaps worth considering that that magic can sometimes be incredibly valuable, well worth the tradeoff against the feeling of freedom.
This is probably the desired effect that Dropbox wanted. There is little reason to remove the symlink feature that worked perfectly well - it is a strategic move at best.

Reversing the symlinks means Dropbox becomes the source of truth and the dependency on Dropbox increases.

Personally, I used this to easily backup my Downloads and Documents.

They just broke all clients using this feature.
Leaseweb Virginia is having a major outage as well. Maybe it is related?

https://www.leasewebstatus.com/incidents/updated-connectivit...
Right; it's free on a technical level. Many, many carriers charge for it anyway, certainly in the US, though I don't know what the situation is abroad.

I think a better argument for the standard is simply that it's built into the protocol, and therefore unlikely to vanish anytime soon. Can't say the same for the trendy app of the week.
What a great point, thanks!
Yes, the idea of using SAT/SMT for solving/helping AI tasks is far from mainstream.
But I was wondering if there is a potential, if so for what tasks?

I said on another comment that I work on a logic checker for English, detecting automatically logical fallacies from text.
I consider such a task to be AI and how could SAT help to check if the conclusion of a syllogism follow?

"Internally we use SAT solvers to schedule resources on medical devices" this is cool!
That must be why reddit and twitter are failing on me.
(ii) You can also download all your mail via IMAP(S). MRA (Mail Retrieval Agent) programs like isync/mbsync, offlineimap, and others do this. They sync, so you can run them regularly to download just the new mails and keep your backups updated. Whereas using Google Takeout would give you the whole thing everytime.
the above poster is saying that parking fines don't work so you gotta escalate and tow the person's car. I'm saying you don't have to do that, just hire a few more meter enforcement people and stick with fines that are proportional to the offense. personally, I think $40-50 is a reasonable fine for attempting to subvert parking regulations. if you park in a way that blocks a whole lane of traffic, you have caused a big bigger and time sensitive problem that justifies a tow truck.
That's my one complaint. Penalizing drivers for rejecting rides. If you could truly be living your life and set multiple rideshare apps to notify you only when ride fares exceed X rate, then everyone would just set their minimum rate on all the apps and just take the most profitable fares that came their way.
Same here. Most software I like is also a set of composable objects. A bit more difficult to understand initially, but much simpler and more resilient in the long run.

Examples include Emacs, Linux (especially distributions like NixOS or Arch) or classical Unix utilities.
>> I've read it, and while it starts with a request for a double-blind study, it immediately moves on to listing a subset of interviewing techniques.

Uh, what? It start by saying "I can’t keep track of the number of articles I’ve read about hiring in the past few years. Inevitably, they all follow the exact same format"

That point is true.

The question then becomes "Why does the community generate spammy articles without making any sincere attempt at intellectual progress toward a better system?"

And the answer is probably that it's not in any individual's self-interest. HN members want to whine about not getting hired by google, companies want to promote themselves, people like me want validation.

The only people who have any incentive/interest in objective hiring are companies that specialize in that purpose (e.g. hired, interviewing.io). But there's really no reason for them to divulge their secret sauce, and even if they did, people would probably only upvote it if it let them feel less insecure about getting rejected by google.
Raft also has a frequently-linked, simple visual explanation[1]. If that's at all accurate to what Raft is, that would certainly make Raft easier to understand than Paxos, although that's a function of the learning materials available, not anything inherently more understandable about the algorithm itself.

I feel that I understand Raft and not Paxos, although currently that's simply because I haven't yet tried to understand Paxos. But the reason I am still interested in Paxos is that looking at Raft, it still seems like Raft has a bottleneck at the leader. Essentially, it looks like what makes this distributed consensus look simple is that only leader elections are actually distributed: the rest of the algorithm isn't distributed at all. When I get around to reading about Paxos I'm hoping it will be different.

[1] https://raft.github.io/
Virtually anything you need (or want) to do more than a small handful of times.

Key elements of a decent shell tool are varables, pipes, loops, logic, and parameters.

This ranges from the bog-simple (an xmessage "tea timer" that pops up a reminder after a few minutes to tell me my tea is steeped), to complex scripts.

Things I've run from a shell include downloading and analysing 50,000 G+ profiles for most recent activity, literally a "bash on-liner", as described here:

https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/naya9wqdemiovuvwvoyquq

Resizing or modifying images via Imagemagick (scales to however much time and disk space you have), converting files from one format to another, generating lists of stuff for further analysis or conversion, updating a whole slew of documents in one fell swoop, creating and listening to playlists of local or remote content with mpv.

You've got a ton of small, simple tools which can be combined flexibly in virtually any way you want. That's a lot of power.
I think you're thinking of his paper ordering of events in a distributed system, not the Paxos paper.
Why are so many Disney parents missing or dead?
>also makes it possible for these companies to continue.

Taxi companies have been following worker laws for forever, it's not impossible at all. These companies are just spreading FUD, like big ISPs did back when net neutrality was imposed: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20151001/12131332412/hey-r...
Jesus, the absolute cancer that pops up all over this site. You have to hunt for what to click to close these things again and again and again as the position of the content wildly shifts all over the place just for the privilege of seeing some creepy old guy grabbing his nipple. Great "hacker news" submission my dude. If dang were on top of things he'd ban not only OP but every account that upvoted this submission as well, they surely must be bots as no human would upvote this shit.
Don’t use google. Use fastmail and use the backups. Problem solved.
SMS requires looking up where the receiver is and sending around the message if he moves before it is received. It doesn’t cost much but it definitely isn’t free.
Even Amazon’s own products are getting hijacked by imposter sellers
Yes. us-east-1 is the first AWS region Amazon made publicly available. It's also historically used by a lot of customers as "default region" where they launch all workloads where they don't have special needs of launching them somewhere else.

That has lead to us-east-1 being the largest AWS region by far, also compromised of the largest number of availability zones (6) of all AWS regions.
No, the headline doesn't question that he's a jerk, merely his being brilliant. xiphias2 demonstrates his brilliance.
Easier to access / run things on remote systems.

Possible to create tools for use on small systems -- your DSL/Cable modem, say, which is really Just Another Linux Box, though with tiny capacity.

Smaller VMs -- less system load, more available, greater flexibility.

Run a shell on your Android or iOS device. Full power of the shell, scripting, and development tools.

You can do more of whatever it is you want, faster, using less. It's an efficiency thing.
A lot of time is way easier and more reliable to have a secondary battery (Li coin cell) for this kind of purpose.
I love the idea of Clojure.

I find the ecosystem immature and full of ideas about "libraries, not frameworks" that leave developers incredibly vulnerable to their own ignorance and second-order ignorance. The number of developers I know - or even know of - that can be trusted to develop a useful and secure web application from the ground up with this kind of tooling approaches zero.

Clojure is a cool language. I can only hope the ecosystem soon matures enough to make it one that's suitable for serious use.
Doesn't seem like abuse to me. Nothing particularly new or interesting IMHO, political mainstream topic, people already breaking the rules in the comments, ... are in sum good enough reasons to flag.
> Google could totally walk away from it, and all the carriers and phone makers could still use it.

Not exactly unlikely...
Sounds weird, but someone actually did exactly that

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x594yMPSFqk
> Seems intended to be read by spy satellites...

That seems like a stretch. If it was meant for spy satellites wouldn't it be in English and have a message that's a little less generic?
Ask HN: How Do You Read?
Hi HN. Recently I have been wondering how other people read. I recently realized that once I finish a book I immediately replace it for the next one on my to-read list. As soon as I swap titles it kinda feels like the value of the previous book slowly starts to fade and gets lost. Obviously not all of it, and especially on novels I'm in for the ride and getting into the story. But in more informative/instructive stuff I feel like there must be a "better" way to read and get the most out of each book.

For example, recently, I started taking notes into the margins and I find I feel more "engaged" to the reading experience and the content. So I wonder what is other people's take on reading?
Producing Steel Without Carbon Emissions
Bill Jelen ("Mr. Excel") has posted an in-depth look at XLOOKUP with more examples:

https://www.mrexcel.com/excel-tips/the-vlookup-slayer-xlooku...

and a video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E5JxX_3Qb7A
How to Use Facebook's DataLoader to Automatically Batch and Cache DB Queries
> Would you hire Linus for your bog standard dev role? Of course not. He'd be bored in days.

I've often wondered if Rob Pike or Guido Van Rossum went through the same interview process at Google that we all hear stories about. I'd be very surprised if they did and my guess is, for them, it was much more of a negotiation of what they were going to work on and what their compensation was going to be.
> Anyone can glamorize and exaggerate the work they have done, and make it sound a lot more impressive than it actually was

My personal experience interviewing is that people cannot easily glamorize their past projects when pressed for details. It might be easy to make it look good on a resume, but hard in person during a discussion with follow up questions.

I think asking about past projects is a fantastic interview question, and it’s very easy to get a good sense of what they did, what they were trying to do, how much was their leadership versus others, how successful it was, how much effort it took. All you have to do is ask questions about it, and not take the resume item at face value.

Personally, I find the open ended nature of the past projects question to be a better predictor of future performance than almost everything else on that list.
How much was rent?
Agreed, I use SyncThing to get things sync'd between devices and Duplicati to back-up my data to Backblaze (as well as other drives).