skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Serving giant websites isn't all that hard if you're just spewing out SQL queries into html templates. It all scales in all directions with a properly thought through architecture.

No.

1. Your comment makes it sound like Wikipedia is just, or mostly, serving read-only content, which is far from true. Yes, static read-only content is significantly easier to serve than dynamic, editable one, but Wikipedia is the latter.

2. Claiming it's easy to build something at this scale is "isn't all that hard" just makes me think you've never done anything similar. It reminds me of devs saying they could re-build MS Office over a weekend. It's just ignorant of the software's actual complexity.

I'm not associated with Wikimedia in any way, but have worked on large-scale software projects before, and things are quite different from, say, websites only serving 100k monthly active users.
If you are not a political undesirable, it does help, though. I think Wikipedia is fine in this regard, not something to shun of for a big corp.
> This seems like a fun side project idea honestly - can I ask what’s most broken and which great features are missing?

It's basically just the momentum it has, alongside with crowdfunded book directory (you don't have to enter the metadata manually in like 99.999% of the cases). I'm not gonna say "don't bother", but I've personally used three Goodreads alternatives over the years and nobody mentioned a single one of them yet. I've settled on BookDigits[0], which is what Goodreads should be if you ask me.

> Yes, Amazon could shut it down but eh, might be worth the risk

Technically API isn't the only way users could extract their data from Goodreads. There's also export/import tool that exports data in CSV, and there's also RSS feed that you could ask for.

If there's one good thing I can say about Goodreads, it's that it's not a walled garden.

[0] https://bookdigits.com/
You can use @telegraph on Telegram to save/edit on your account.
I'm not entirely sure it is possible to make a conclusion on which language is best.

For me, I use Python for dirty scripts, as well use C# for exploit development, it is very hard to conclude on a topic that is highly subjective.
Sure, and there's no Simulink, but for many purposes you don't need those.
Cheating in engineering is pointless. At every tech company I’ve interviewed at (on either side of the table) as soon as you get into the interview what school you went to and what grades you got don’t matter. If you can’t whiteboard some technical problems you aren’t getting in.
Helpful Python Snippets That You Can Learn in 30 Seconds or Less
I use the console for discoverability, proof of concepts, and quickly reviewing what’s going on. But for any real resource creation, I will then duplicate the steps with CloudFormation or a Python script (or both) and once I verify it, tear down the manually created resources.

The only time I find the CLI useful is for S3.
Right, the naming "scheme" for AWS is insane. I think one of the reason for the terrible web UI is the fact that AWS does so much, and they just cram everything in upfront. One of the things I feel Azure does very well is showing you the bit you're most likely to use, especially if you're new to the platform (that and they just call stuff be names that makes sense, a VM is a VM, not an EC2 instance). The more advanced feature are available, but not in your face from the beginning.

As for documentation: I don't think that neither AWS nor Azure have excellent documentation. The Azure documentation lacks depth, the AWS documentations is just throw together, things that are part of the same system is documented wildly differentially, e.g. some CloudWatch metric are complete, how you use them, which dimensions are available for which, and you get example. Other parts of CloudWatch: "Well we have some metrics and these dimensions, have fun figuring out which goes together.
QCObjects has been listed in the C-Panel App Catalog
For me it helped when I cleared all the site data. But quite annoying nonetheless.
That sounds about right, "I found 100 people. I'm done. Time to get a hotdog and something with lingonberry in it."
There's always something "undesirable" for someone in a big crowdsourced website.
The salient points for me are mentioned at the bottom of the article: espouse good values and ethics and stay true to them. Money can blind you to that sometimes. Don't let it
The ethical challenge this New Yorker article presents is that:

- Members of the Media Lab knew at least some of Mr. Epstein's transgressions (to the point that some of them were concerned he may have brought trafficked women into the lab)
- Subsequently solicited funds from him, despite knowledge of these transgressions
- Actively concealed the source of these funds

Additionally, it seems that members may have intentionally broken MIT administrative policy that disqualified Mr. Epstein as a donor.

I googled around a bit, and maybe didn't find the entanglements that you're referring to. Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I could only find that Harvard accepted money before knowledge of Mr. Epstein's attacks could be expected to be publicly known [1]. Articles also mention personal relationships that Mr. Epstein had with individuals at Harvard. However, those don't seem to have involved Harvard the institution directly.

Again, I could have missed something, but these seem to be different situations. And it makes sense that the Media Lab would attract more attention in this case than Harvard.

[1] https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2019/07/11/harvar...
Goodreads has possibly the worst search algorithm in existence today. Typing a character or two will sometimes show the book I am looking for right on top, and then typing a few more reduces the relevance of the results and hides it. I don't get it.
But not delivered in anywhere near the same concentrations and across as many different delivery systems. It's one thing for a natural bacteria or virus to develop. It's another to have them artificially transported in ways which nature could only dream about having. THAT's the bad thing.
Even as a member this article is paywalled. Nowadays regardless of the authors intention of keeping the article available or not, the default is paywalled and many people miss it.
The student chapters of ACM and IEEE-CS at my university kept test banks with full knowledge of the CSE and EE departments. It was allowed by the honor code as long as the tests had previously been used. The university basically neutralized the advantage Greeks had with their test banks by requiring professors to come up with unique tests each time.
Rock-paper-scissors: Engineered population dynamics increase genetic stability
I’m kind of confused. You don’t seem to disagree with the previous poster’s claim that the design was great so does that mean that you you think the design is bad only because it’s old? What has changed in the past 30 years to make the design bad?
Right? Because the core issue is that browser vendors (and eventually probably OS vendors) do not trust the local network operator. There will be GPO’s and Jamf profiles, and Ansible playbooks to configure this setting for the swarm of machines you ‘own’ but you are simply not a trusted party to any person that connects to your Wi-Fi access point.
It’s really hard to argue that MIT didn’t have a guilty conscience about being close to this guy.

Their choice of his internal nickname, “Voldemort” was amazingly Freudian.

That is, unless I misunderstood 7 books and Voldemort was actually a good guy...
Because we express logical statements in English, these two kinds of tautologies overlap. (If we were using a formal language we could express tautologies like !(A && !A) without using English.)

If you say "All bachelors are unmarried", this is true both because of the meaning of the words, and because of the logical structure implied by the words.

In either case, if you state a tautology, you state something which is true in all possible worlds, given the definitions of the words, at least. Someone can then call you out for stating a tautology, which is to state something that is vacuously true, that is, you've made a statement about the nature of reasoning itself, in any possible world, but you haven't said anything at all about the world we're actually in. So you're wasting your breath even though what you say is unassailably true.

(Note that in mathematics, the tautologies are precisely the theorems with their premises or axioms! So this is by no means always useless.)

The problem with calling out tautologies in common life, however, is that the danger of identifying a false tautology is very high. When someone says "Either X happened, or it didn't." you may be tempted to say "tautology!" but in fact they are probably making some kind of oblique point or highlighting a flaw in someone else's argument, etc. In other words, tautologies may be vacuous as statements about the world within a logical framework, but as speech acts in the real world, they always come with a motivation and that can usually be expressed in a non-tautologous way. For example, "A or not A" can be expanded charitably to "A or not A, and this is relevant to the topic at hand", which is not a tautology anymore.

In this case, if you do something right, it's not extra hard, which is kind of a tautology. But there's a point in saying it, which is that it doesn't have to be that hard... if you do it right. And that's not true of everything or in every possible world, hence not a vacuous statement.
What Makes a Company Good at IT? (2011)
But how quickly must those writes be reflected in the reads of others? If you can accept a few minutes of latency there, I imagine things would get easier
CamScanner/AdHub malicious mutter.zip collaborative study
1. Sandboxing doesn't need apple's app store, it's manual policy enforcement and arbitrary anti competitive rejections. Many, many sandboxes have existed with well documented permissioning systems that don't need anointing by manual reviewers.

2. Speaking of flea markets and the false equivalency of the app store to a Walmart, Walmart doesn't require banning flea markets but the app store (Apple) bans sideloading. Walmart and flea markets coexist peacefully.

3. Just because you enjoy being chaparoned on iOS, doesn't mean everyone does. Go ahead and enjoy willy-nilly installs from the app store, but don't block user's choice to circumvent Steve Jobs' image of the universe

The truth is that Apple doesn't play a role in the sale of digital goods, or meaningfully increase security outside automated sandboxing. The real premise of the app store is totalitarianism and greed
When you're rich you can afford the huge price tag.
The network administrator shouldn’t be able to change any setting at all on client devices. That’s the point! If you can just direct clients to a malicious DoH server then the project has largely failed.

The device administrator should be the one making the choice about what resolvers to use.
This is so beautiful

Would like to see more projects like this
that make you appreciate what you have
Contextualization and personality wrt addiction are major factors though.
I had morphine for for extreme pains as I had my appendix blow out and my whole abdomen was a cesspool for a few weeks in hospital. I never had withdrawal nor addiction symptoms as the experience was confined to hospital.

I am lucky to have a personality type that can easily externalize addiction. Basically for me it is like flipping a switch, or confining the feelings to certain contexts.

Even so, I can easily see how people do get addicted beyond their control, so I would never say it is 'easy' to 'just stop'.
Can Bullet Journaling Save You?
If they have a paper map, it will be Robinson or Winkel-Tripel, probably.
That’s called a “deal with the devil” and if you’re lucky the only price is having to look over your shoulder and the shoulders of the people close to you for the rest of your life.

If you’re unlucky, you’ll look over your shoulder one day and see something you can’t unsee.
> But recent discussion has been so overwhelmingly positive that it’s worth reviewing whether there’s a case for skepticism

I think people are overwhelmingly positive about the thought of psychedelics facing clinical trials again, less so that they are a clear super drug. Skepticism is fine, but the limited data available was largely positive yet research was basically banned.
Saturn's variable periodicities: thermosphere‐ionosphere‐magnetosphere coupling
Bagels.

This is an unusually glib comment for me, but it's something I've missed so much since leaving the northeast that I bring back pizza and bagels with me to Seattle whenever I visit New York.

The bagels specifically, are often doughy, "sweet" (they actually add sugar in many places), and with all the wrong textures. It's odd that you mention brands, since I typically buy "supermarket/local baker brand" but I've definitely found that to vary.

Similar comment for donuts, the big brands here e.g. top pot are practically cake rolls.

(Philly also had wawa and corner cheesesteak shops providing way cheaper "decent low-end hoagies" than I can consistently find out here.)
Linux 5.4 Bringing New Driver to Help SGI Systems Going Back to the SGI Origin
It's sad that such altruistic behavior can lead to massive litigation, but that's probably what the EMTs were thinking. You did the right thing for sure, but I'm willing to bet junkies are statistically more likely to attempt litigation in order to feed their addiction.
It's not at all clear that NASA has paid for itself in economic benefits to the civilian economy. Most analyses are sponsored by NASA. To the extent that it has had benefits, most of these could be obtained from the satellite programs, scientific programs like Hubble, and unmanned robotic mission. The manned spaceflight is a largely useless program that has huge operations costs beyond the R&D costs.

IIRC, at one time the early development of integrated circuits was boasted as a spinoff of space programs. However, it turned out to be a spinoff of classified missile programs by the Air Force and Navy.
The question is whether you feel good enough about that probability to be held liable if the malicious code was hidden good enough. Also, some cases might be obvious on Windows PCs, but I don't think that's necessarily the case with phones. Take note that websites can also send malicious packets. When you load a webpage, the code is downloaded and immediately executed. Are you OK with being held liable for visiting a webpage that decided to send malicious packets?
Lessons in Learning
Lab tours, access to students (who are barely adults), interesting people to invite to his parties, access to other wealthy donors...
Far from just an ID.
I believe Austin has started to benefit from this trend.
I made it up: https://twitter.com/petrustheron/status/1168438193752031233?...
dx7tnt responded with a most informative link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20905033

The “food miles” thing is insignificant nonsense; see notes/strawberry-miles.html in http://canonical.org/~kragen/dercuano-20190831.tar.gz.

I'm dubious about the economics of the thing.

Let’s assume that the power source is solar. The 84% energy loss of solar panels, followed by the 80% energy loss of LED lighting, works out to about 3% of the sunlight harvested getting to the plants. That's a high price to pay for wavelength-shifting and time-shifting; it's hard to see when this would be a better solution than skylights, lightpipes, and colored filters, maybe supplemented by LEDs or low-pressure sodium at night. (Except, I suppose, to avoid violent reprisals for cultivation somebody doesn't like.)

If the power source is fossil fuels or nuclear energy, it makes even less economic sense, except at extreme latitudes like those of northern Scotland or Norway, because those energy sources are even more expensive.

In moderate latitudes with adequate civil rights, it would seem that the only reason for indoor cultivation with only or primarily artificial light would be an aesthetic taste for the artificial, like tailfins on 1950s cars or the bright blue LEDs on current shitty consumer electronics.
I agree, the things that are happening as the society goes more connected seems very chaotic and unpredictable.
A little OT, but is there anything remotely competitive with k8s these days? By "competitive", I mean: good feature set, thriving community, active development.

I still use Docker Swarm for small scale stuff, and am pretty happy with it - it's simple, easy to use and doesn't eat resources. But it very much feels like Docker have given up on it.

I'm particularly interested to know if there is anything simpler than k8s that's competitive?
> Save money and energy with screens (not sure which has less environmental or financial impact, printing and replacing many maps or powering a disposable screen)

We’re talking about replacing a paper map with a screen right? A map that’s replaced how often? Yearly? I would personally be blown away if the screens over their lifetime were not orders of magnitude worse environmentally.
I think Giridharadas is very good and says good things and picks good targets. But there is a strange attitude here and on twitter that he is guileless, when clearly he is making very calculated moves. This is especially apparent in seeing the Hoffman comment as a threat but not the resignation letter. Maybe the gp came off as harsh, but I'm trying to explain why the ggp should not expect the husher line of attack to be immediately adopted.
Collaborative study to gain more information, payloads and explanations regard this incident.

Seems like the fetched and loaded payloads contians "dexopt" in their names, scan your device for files with this substring and share!
Update:

Per Twitter, it seems like something went wrong during the braking burn. The spacecraft was left tumbling (which certainly wouldn't help antenna alignment), and was thus unable to effect its landing burn.

No idea yet exactly what caused the tumbling; there's a variety of potential causes.
This is by far the weakest article of Scott's I've ever read. Granted, these were only "reasons for skepticism", but there's always reason for skepticism, this list as written seems more like advocacy for not even bothering to try, although perhaps I'm reading it more critically than the spirit in which he wrote it.

1. "...for example, a study two years ago found that psilocybin did not permanently increase the Openness personality trait. This was one of the most exciting studies and had shaped a lot of my thinking around the issue. Now it’s gone."

Increases in openness were not permanent, therefore nothing of interest remains (for example, medium term increases, that can potentially be reinstated)?

2, 3, 4: Eventual disappointing outcomes of other over-hyped approaches.

5. Between 10% and 50% of Americans have tried psychedelics. If psychedelics did something shocking, we would already know about it.

Largely depends on what he means by "did something shocking" I suppose. Regardless, they do indeed, and I'd wager that less than 10% of the population (despite his statistics seemingly indicating otherwise) has a remote clue about what they can do. Set and setting are not just important, they are crucial - doing psychedelics at a party at college and laughing it up with your friends is one thing, doing them while sitting alone in a quiet room with your eyes closed for several hours is something else entirely.

6. In my model of psychedelics, they artificially stimulate your insight system the same way heroin artificially stimulates your happiness system. This leads to all those stories where people feel like they discovered the secret of the universe, but when they recover their faculties, they find it was only some inane triviality.

Well sure, many people say very silly things after using psychedelics (which is why people always say integration is so important). I suspect this would strongly correlate to intelligence or styles of thinking (say, high correlation with a lack of critical thinking, which is often found in spiritual communities in my experience). But this in no way implies there's nothing valuable among all the nonsense.

7. Even if all of the above are wrong and psychedelics work very well, the FDA could kill them with a thousand paper cuts. Again, look at ketamine: the new FDA approval ensures people will be getting the slightly different esketamine, through a weird route of administration, while paying $600 a pop, in specialized clinics that will probably be hard to find.

This is a problem with the FDA, not psychedelics.

--------------

If I was able to choose one person on Earth to do psychedelics and write about it afterwards, Scott Alexander would be my #1 pick by far.

EDIT: I'm extremely curious about the reason behind downvotes, any explanations would be appreciated.
Your right, I could have offered free shipping. But it wasn't until Etsy made it nearly a requirement that I did so. I wasn't happy, but it actually turned out to be better for me. Maybe there are some small minority of sellers that truly can't offer free shipping, but I don't see how most can't offer it and simply add the cost to their items, or as it was in my case, result in more sales that more than make up for the difference.

And yes, technically it is Etsy that is implementing this change. In that sense they are "forcing" it. But a failure to do this would also have resulted in the slow demise of many of their sellers. In that sense, the market, in order to keep pace with competitors, forced this change. Etsy, acting in its own best interest, also acted in the best interests of a majority of its sellers. A failure to act might have been in the best interest of a minority of its sellers. So it was a choice of doing what's best for Etsy and most sellers or nothing, which would slowly kill Etsy and all of its sellers. Not much of a choice.
This is why there's maneuvering speed (VA), or turbulent air penetration speed (VB). It isn't necessary to over design it, you just slow down and, voila, the airfoil will sooner stall than break - and the stall is brief, feels like sluggishness, like a squishy slow stall, not abrupt, and recovery is similar perhaps a bit more abrupt as the airfoil regains lift.
The successful walk had many human lives lost not just money.
I tend to stay away from Instagram as I once read a study (too lazy to find the paper) that Instagram is more detrimental to mental health than other social networks and is generally to be avoided (partly this is because you are comparing other people's highlight reel to your boring drab life).

I use Facebook, albeit sparingly and only ever to make meaningful interactions with my family, and nothing else. I don't feverishly 'check in' to locations, don't engage in 'groups', don't 'like' a million-and-one things, or otherwise engage in the Facebook app in any meaningful way. It means Facebook can't build a dossier of my interests, although they do know my social graph, but then: I'm not a person of interest anyway. I am actually very forgettable.

For Twitter, I have a locked down account and only follow what I'm interested in. I don't actively seek to get more followers, and have literally nothing in my bio that is about me. I don't use my real name. My account is purely for discovery of positive news, and content that stimulates me intellectually.

I recently started to experiment with Neuro Linguistic Programming[0] and a big part of that is deciding what you pay attention to (especially online) and feeding your brain with content that enables you to grow as a person and not be bogged down with negative content that only appeals to your 'monkey brain'. I haven't gone to extremes by cutting out all social media, instead I just use it mindfully and by carefully choosing the types of content I consume.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuro-linguistic_programming
If you read the public statement issued, you’d know that Apple had already been fixing the problem before Google even reported it to them.
Whitepaper of a new decentralized distributed ledger