skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I’ve discovered that being quiet and/or not very responsive to inane chatter is both rather intimidating to some people, and makes you mysterious, so they continue to ask questions that seem obvious and/or inappropriately personal.

Of course a few people are unsalvageably annoying, but what this behavior sometimes means is they want to have some sort of conversation with you, but they don’t know how. They may be nervous about saying something wrong, and going for safe statements. One trick that has worked for me: acknowledge the statement with a smile and reply with a complete change of subject, asking them a question about their work or life. Statements don’t require a response, so don’t respond, but ask them a question instead that guides the conversation in a direction that’s interesting or at least tolerable for you. If you can appear interested, or better yet actually learn about the person and find some shared interests and/or shared context, you may be able to permanently change the annoying greetings into chit-chat you like.
I will argue the opposite. Startups take on enough risks as it is. Unless your startup requires or is about a novel architecture. Why add more risks with non battle hardened technology.

Software professionals often sees benefits without understanding the tradeoffs.
I've always been a bit confused by this take, because the most likely alternative to having proprietary code in the front-end is to have proprietary code in the back-end.

It's not clear to me why I shouldn't tolerate closed-source Javascript that I can nonetheless inspect, archive, and edit on my own machine, but I should tolerate a closed-source SaaS backend that I can't inspect, archive, or edit.

Of course proprietary software limits freedoms, but does it limit freedom more than serverside logic? There are equal legal restrictions on both codebases, but I can't even exercise fair-use freedoms with code that I literally can't touch.
I did the same experiment as OP and ran into the same issues, but eventually realized that I was "doing serverless" wrong.

"Serverless" is not a replacement for cloud VMs/containers. Migrating your Rails/Express/Flask/.Net/whatever stack over to Lambda/API Gateway is not going to improve performance or costs.

You really have to architect your app from the ground-up for serverless by designing single-responsibility microservices that run in separate lambdas, building a heavy javascript front-end in your favorite framework (React/Ember/Amber/etc), and taking advantage of every service you can (Cognito, AppSync, S3, Cloudfront, API Gateway, etc) to eliminate the need for a web framework.

I have been experimenting with this approach lately and have been having some success with it, deploying relatively complex, reliable, scalable web services that I can support as a one-man show.
Yes, which I one of the reasons I'm still against it. Just acknowledging the potential upsides.
My Google Summer of Code Experience with the Chapel Programming Language
if you work for an org that has cash on hand but not a lot of developer talent, the tradeoff is worth it. If the difference is going to cost you $50k a year but let you hire one less programmer, it's worth it.
If I am running into hard times I’m probably unemployed, the little money I save by pressing my own clothes isn’t going to make a dent in my inability to pay our bills - and if I am not working, I won’t be wearing clothes that need pressing.

If the hard time is temporary, that’s what credit is for. If it is systemic, I’ve got bigger fish to fry - downsizing our house, getting job training, moving near a bus line to save money on car insurance, etc.

It’s just like the BS “Latte Factor”. People are not unable to save for retirement because of $6/day Latte. It’s usually because they have high fixed costs relative to their income.
> Chinese were able to make quite usable $60 laptops at around the same time OLPC's pre-subsidy pricetag went over $200

Really? Which model?
This is why I love macOS. Every application has the menubar at the top with everything in the right place. Apple's design guidelines also dictate that every action should be available as menu item. Preferences can always be summoned using the same keyboard shortcut, File open/save dialogs behave the same.
It just works. Except for those few applications that are plainly ported from Windows or Linux without a thought about the native platform they run on. They just don't fit in.
Quoted for its WTF-factor:

> Perhaps his new-found peace with Linux is linked to yoga, a practice he said he has taken up after leaving Microsoft in 2014.
Overt signals of competence are a huge red flag to me. I've been lucky enough to work with some brilliant people, and most of them seem like baffled slobs when one first meets them.
Eh, I don't think "tech bubble" is appropriate to nail down the problems. Egotism and hubris, along with thinking being above the rest of society is the problem. And to be fair, it shows up here in HN too. There's a weird mentality of "Well I'm smart in computers and programming, that automatically makes me an expert in civil infrastructure, economic theory, social support programs, agriculture, etc". I mean, seriously, it's really weird and it's happening constantly. It's like a lot of this "revolutionary SV agriculture startups". They're bunk and retarded. They're just 1940s-1970s research projects without ever citing or learning from trails already blazed. They act like "No one has ever researched how to grow food, here I come to rescue with my power of programming and social media posts! Venture capital firms, I'm ready for money!" Not a single one realizes that a lot of large scale, efficient and affordable farming practices were pioneered by people like Norman Borlaug. But they "draw inspiration" from a random SV ceo. Just pisses me off.

Plus, "The people's voice matters. We must democratize everything... as long as they only agree with me."

Reality is, silicon valley is not really different from the old titans of industry. One difference, the old assholes were upfront "You need something, I hire people to make it, and I'm in it for the money." The valley, "I'm here for you. You giving me your money is the best way to make the world a better place through [insert disruptive product]. You'll be happy with a lighter wallet. We're going to save the world together."
Almost. 1930s and 1960s. That’s what I hear from my German wife.
the 8x cost is worth it if you have cash on hand but not a lot of developer time. If using serverless costs you $50k a year more, but lets you hire one less programmer, it's worth it.
Probably my most upvoted repeat HN comments are my recommendations of the book Impro by Keith Johnstone. It really is a brilliant breakdown of what Improv is beyond theatre games. I think it’s especially useful for coders in the workplace because it really nails the importance of understanding exchanges of “status” in these situations. So much of humour is building and then diminishing a person’s status in an artful way. Being aware of how you are displaying your status around others and being able to consciously manipulate that display for laughs goes a long way.

He has another book “for storytellers” that you can skip over for now. Get Impro, it’s a bit of a cult classic.

I work in education and it’s such an incredible skill for teachers as well. Controlling a class is easiest when you can establish your authority while simultaneously letting your students question it in a playful way. You can really break down a lot of walls and connect better.
Shifting blame doesn’t help much when you lose customers (or pay financial penalties) due to non—compliance.

You learn quickly that while AWS is “compliant”, they have enough legal sway to never be on the hook if they aren’t actually compliant.
ML to answer question, “Where should I donate $2200 to save the most lives?”
There were many reasons the OLPC failed, but I don't think constructionist education was one of them, when it's succeeded in so many other places.

EA donated SimCity to OLPC because of its relation to constructionist education, thanks to Maxis's collaboration with Doreen Nelson, who wrote the SimCity teacher's guide, and developed "City Building Education" and "Design Based Learning", in which kids built cities out of cardboard instead of pixels:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20329281

>SimCity can be used educationally, but not in the sense of literally training people to be urban planners or mayors.
It's more useful for "Constructionist Education" and "Design Based Learning", as practiced by Seymour Papert and Doreen Nelson.

>[...] One of the teachers Curtin hired was Doreen Nelson, a brilliant and innovative educator who had developed a pedagogy called City Building Education, in which students collaboratively built cities out of craft materials and role play. Nelson become a regular visitor to Maxis, and Curtin made some trips to Los Angeles to see City Building in action, where she found the experience of “watching a classroom actually go through a couple of days worth of creation” to be “very inspiring. … I will never forget that experience” (Curtin 2015; Nelson 2015). [5]

Chaim Gingold wrote a section about Doreen Nelson's work in his dissertation on "Play Design":

https://pqdtopen.proquest.com/doc/1806122688.html?FMT=AI
I’ve read that plasma gasification is very energy intensive and elsewhere that we have a lot of renewable energy wasted because of no storage. Is there an opportunity there to get rid of plastic without damage to the environment?
I believe the conventionally accepted explanation for this is Acemoglu's, and it's that GDP is an Nth-order effect of climate. Warm weather -> highly productive agriculture -> landholders become extremely wealthy -> oligarchic government -> low GDP. Think of the American North and South before the Civil War, where slavery and inequality took hold in the highly agriculturally productive South but never in the North. The North wound up poor and more egalitarian, but eventually industrialized and overtook the South.

Edit: warm weather also happens to correlate with another natural resource: oil. Oil tends to produce a similar dynamic -- whoever owns the oil owns the government and badly mismanages the government for their own benefit. The exceptions prove the rule: Alaska and Norway were both established, egalitarian societies before the oil was found, in contrast with Middle Eastern petrostates, Russia and Venezuela.
My fancy smartphone could never give me what the landline gave my grandmother
>the belief that Facebook was preventing Snap’s most popular content from trending on Instagram

>Snap executives noted their belief that Instagram was blocking searches of these Snap-related terms

Real solid data driven analysis here..

>Facebook’s tactics have long engendered concern across Silicon Valley, said Paul Keable, chief strategy officer at Ashley Madison. The dating site, which caters to married people seeking affairs, is blocked from advertising on Facebook, which now operates its own dating feature.

Yes, Ashley Madison, the "dating" site.
Your comments remind me why I pushed out all of the people on my team that are fundamentally anti-social. It becomes such an annoying drag. Thank god I did. I get one life to live and refuse to jump through bullshit hoops for people who think they are more important than what they really are - such as yourself.
This reminds me of relics in the Catholic Church. An object held by a saint gains divinity due to their commonality, and being in the presence of that divine object passes along the divinity once again.
Honestly its probably all body language.

My mom has the same thing. Random people just start telling her everything about their life, because she appears open and friendly.

If i'm in public, I usually look miserable (RBF) and have a very specific goal in mind. People don't just walk up to me because its obvious I'm not going to be receptive.
Article does not even mention the Kaiser Permanente cement plant which has a dedicated train line bringing in coal for burning, is one of the largest sources of mercury pollution in California, and is perched right over Cupertino, Sunnyvale, Mountain View, and Los Altos, and very close to Palo Alto and San Jose, bathing them in a haze of emissions.

All the highly educated and well connected residents, rich and powerful corporations, and even local governments can't do anything about it, because it is grandfathered in by federal law. It doesn't even appear on many lists of top polluters because many people who compile such lists only include power plants, and it is not a power plant.

It's a real world counterexample for people who say we can just turn off the switch of things we don't like (AI being the usual such thing). Well, good luck with that, if there are laws saying you can't... which there will be.
Even ignoring the political aspects, we don't need six articles a day on HN about climate change. If nothing else, it's preaching to the choir. There's no news in most climate change articles, to say nothing of "Hacker" news.

If HN runs simply on what people consider politically important, it might as well shut down and just be a redirect to the Huffington Post or something. There is abundant evidence that online communities end up in certain strange attractors [1], and the dominant political narrative of the day is one of the strongest ones.

I didn't flag the particular article in question, but yes, I absolutely flag any article that can be replaced with little or no loss with $POPULAR_POLITICAL_NARRATIVE_IS_TRUE, regardless of which narrative it is, even the ones I more-or-less agree with. I doubt HN is anybody's sole source of news and it doesn't need to join the stampeding horde of other websites who publish that article 20 times a day.

[1]: A math term, not a term of judgment.
Question on this area. What have you found to be the best way to migrate an existing app to Postgres?

We plan to migrate to Postgres, but with every LOC written we're entrenching ourselves into Mysql. We all want Postgres, but at the same time I just can't see the transition happening with each passing day.

Thoughts?

edit: I should be clear too. I think our goal would be to not require a full rewrite spanning weeks. So an active translation layer, or replication.. or something tricky.. but I just don't foresee us being able to spend a month putting everything on hold so we can migrate.
Facebook Employee Suicide Cover-Up
Interviews are entirely perfomative anyway.

THe person conducting the interview is asking you questions he knows the answer to, and knows that you know what he wants to hear, and is just checking that you know how to play the game and repeat back to him what he wants.

If you answered all the stupid interview questions completely honestly you would never get a job. Both parties know this, yet everyone keeps ploughing on with this moronic game.
Experimenting with Constraint Programming on GPU
The interest rates on US debt are artificially low because their default risk is based on the willingness, not the ability, of the USG to repay them. That's because the ability is a given, since the government can print the currency the debt is denominated in. Corporate bonds are a bad analogy because their risk is mostly in defaulting, whereas if something goes sideways in America, Treasury bonds will fail by causing high inflation.
There is not necessarily a need to upgrade your hardware. Minimum CPU requirement for Windows 95 is a 386DX.
It's usually included when you purchase a commercial license.

I work with a company that generally stays away from open source software, unless they have an in-house developer that can maintain it.

Most open source projects (unless it's backed by a huge company that also charges for support) are run by volunteers that have a day job. This means that support will be non-existent beyond what the developer(s) feel like and bug fixes/updates may or may not happen. This doesn't work that well when a company relies on this software for any critical task.
Fargate is not a replacement for Lambda. While there's some capability overlap, each have their own respective niches.
The keep alive is still practically scale down to zero, you’re paying for 100ms every 5 minutes.

I’d be curious about how much memory/cpu was allocated in your experience and the OPs, there’s nothing magical about lambda to make it slow.
I was looking to see if Commando would get mentioned. One of the really nice things about Commando was that it would synthesize the command line for you and not just run the command, and it was integrated with the MPW editor. So you could go through the GUI for a program, press a button, and the command-line invocation is pasted into the script you’re editing.

MPW was ahead of its time in a lot of ways, unfortunately behind its time in a couple ways (notably, pipes didn’t work the way they did on Unix—I think there was something like temporary files involved).
This is what keeps me up at night these days. Between information gerrymandering, the quest for increased engagement, uncanny valleys, de-platforming and so forth I wonder how it will affect our ability to avoid misinformation, have original ideas, and not descend into some weird form of chaos a la Idiocracy (2006).

If anyone is passionate about trying to find ways to treat people like individual humans again, please reach out to me. I want to solve this problem by creating a business that's sustainable and better than the Google/FB approach.
The problem is mainly that people think "Cool I can build everything with FaaS and it will be cheaper and scale well"

Which is wrong and can be attributed to bad serverless evangelism in the past.

Serverless is building your system with managed services and only drop-in a FaaS here and there when you need some special custom behavior.

See how far you come with AppSync, Firestore or FaunaDB. Throw in 0Auth or Cognito and then when you hit a wall, make it work with FaaS.
Dgraph's blog on GraphQL conf with links of speakers and talks
You do realize both of these things can be true? Snap playing a role in their issues and Facebook also participating in behaviors that are relevant to an anti-trust investigation?
Any MacOS user who has to put up with having bash-from-2006 as the default shell has been affected by GPL2 vs GPL3.
Actually, I'm super, super grateful they redesigned the Android app from the ground up. Before the redesign it was a disaster that would occasionally soft-brick my camera, mandating a reboot.
If this isn't resolved, staff from the British Embassy will show up, and the local police will probably think again — or be instructed by the national police or their government.
I don't have personal knowledge of the project, but it was very heavily constructionist (or they said it was - can't comment on the implementation) so if you look around it should be easy to find talks and papers about their approach. Lots of links from here: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Constructionist
TL;DR on GPLv3-vs-GPLv2: the v3 adds a protection against hardware lock-ins. It doesn't come up in 95% of the cases. But the license is different, so a debate can be started.
The modern ones don't anymore, we have a couple of Microsoft Surfaces at the office and they're quite snappy.
Lol, the same Ashley Madison who screwed over their entire user-base by failing to secure their database. Please Ashley Madison, lecture us more about unethical behavior.
"The legal risks of non-compliance" are the exact FUD the old Microsoft spread. If someone doesn't follow the GPL then they don't have a right to reproduce the software and can be liable for copyright infringement, which is the same as any software license proprietary or otherwise.

That someone wouldn't be liable if they distribute the source for their modifications doesn't increase the risk, it decreases it by providing an alternative to paying damages for infringement that they otherwise wouldn't have, since the GPL author will typically accept compliance in lieu of monetary damages.
I don’t think it’s a mistaken claim so much as a misused term-of-art by conflating it with its layman meaning. If you replace “interference” with “noise”, what’s being said makes sense.

However, the second bit you said is true, even after correcting the term.
I can't.

"Log in or create a free New York Times account to continue reading in private mode."

In fact, I have created a free NYT account, but if I were to log in, my browsing surely wouldn't be private. It is a conundrum.
Although blackboards usage has it's charm, its long term use can have negative side-effects on one's health ending with symptoms not dissimilar to ones manifesting in coal miners.

https://www.degruyter.com/downloadpdf/j/jim.2017.2.issue-4/j...
I'm actually surprised at that; I know FTP was around in that era, and SMTP is a simple as throwing a simple text format over TCP.
> Skylake-X has 44 PCI 3.0 lanes, that's 352GT/s or about 345gbps application bandwidth. It's certainly more than enough to push 100gbps from disk to net. These guys are pushing 200gbps

We're in total agreement :-). Their dataflow model requires something like 2x that in PCIe bandwidth and 4x in memory in the optimal case, as covered in the slides. 2x200 gbps = 400 gbps, which is a bit more than 345 gbps.

Maybe they could push 345/2 = 172 Gbps out of a single Skylake-X, best case. For some workloads, that might be the right local optima! They must have decided that the marginal cost of a 2P system was worth the extra ~25 Gbps to saturate the 200 Gbps pipe fully.

> they're doing it with two CPUs, two sets of NVMe devices, and two NICs, and a bunch of hacks to make the operating system pretend all this stuff is not in the same box. It seems way more straight-forward to me if they had made it all be actually NOT in the same box!

I've spoken with NFLX engineers in the past and my recollection is that in many installations, NFLX only get to install one box. (Or something like that. Might just be a cost thing.) So they need to make that one box fast.

I guess the other factor is the IP management overhead discussed in the slides. Two boxes necessitates the costly 2nd IP, as far as I know. It's hard to imagine the cost of an IP address dominating the marginal cost of a 2P socket system and 2nd Xeon, but I guess AWS is friggin expensive.
From Professional Basketball to Cybersecurity
What about IBM? Founded in 1911, $13B profit in 2018. Most successful company in several online business sectors.

What about Nokia? Founded originally in 1865 as a paper mill, re-invented itself multiple times in countless different industries, before becoming the leading mobile phone manufacturer in 1990s and 2000s. They did eventually indeed succumb to their failure to evolve, but a more competent management post 2006 would have likely saved the company.
To be fair, you having a car with an Aux jack means that you are definitely not in Apple's target demographic, because you're obviously too poor or too cheap. (No offense, I'm explaining this from the point-of-view of Apple and its fans.) Anyone who's a true Apple fan and customer would happily trade in their older car for a new one with CarPlay just so their brand-new iPhone works with it, just like a true Apple customer would happily throw away their wired headphones and buy Apple AirPod wireless headphones.

Remember, if you're not into conspicuous consumption, then you just aren't suited to be an Apple customer.

Of course, the problem with all this is when other phone makers ape Apple by copying some of these features, somehow thinking they'll gain the cultish customer base that Apple enjoys by doing so.