skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't think the only drive is top-down. I work in a place where devs get a lot of say in which tech we push (other than core languages; more just for hiring/market/support purposes) and there are a lot of devs that seem all about serverless .. and then are on 3 hour support calls with me because they can't get some set of A + B + C components working with lambdas.

I haven't done direct development with lambdas, but I've had to help other devs debug issues (currently in a devops role, but I was mostly a dev for like 15+ years before) and been to a few meetups where I watched people advocate, write and show severless deploys on AWS and Google.

I can see some use cases for it, but I honestly hate losing a lot of the introspection and debugging capabilities with them. I'd personally have to deal with setting up my EC2 instance or K8s/maraton deploy and being able to get to the underlying system if I need to. If things go well with a lambda, then you're all set, but the moment you need to start debugging anything serious, I feel like you're going to be in a world of pain.

In one specific instance, we had a developer who set up a lambda and also setup nginx to route to it because he didn't want to use API Gateway, which he got working, painfully after a lot of work. He should probably put up a blog post on it honestly, as I don't think it's officially supported.

Of course, this is all anecdotal. It's really difficult to measure things like speed and cost objectively with this stuff since everyone's stack and needs and uses are just a little bit different.
https://carnegieendowment.org/chinafinancialmarkets/78304

... the U.S. current account deficit and the country’s high level of income inequality distort the structure and amount of American savings.
Declaratively implementing CPOs (customization point objects)
FYI, the location near Page Mill Road is where Facebook used to have their headquarters. Stanford did took various remediation measures when they converted the property into faculty housing, but IDK if the FB buildings were adequately protected/ventilated. My understanding is that the vapors are only harmful if they get into buildings and are not adequately ventilated. Stanford put vapor guards under each home they built, among other things.
Actually you are usually writing much less code with FP approaches ;-).
Clojure is an FP language. Clojure is relatively terse.
Consider: NVMe makes SSD look like HDD.

More PCIe channels means more NVMe as most servers don't use those channels for GPU.
It's not about views, it's about reading the source material and applying basic reading comprehension.
> Its simple to get to know your local rancher.

>Factory farms are the bigger problem, not just meat per-se.

Not just meat farms! One thing vegans and vegetarians often gloss over is the death per calorie involved in crop fields. Those thousands of acres have animals in them, and the machines sure dont stop for every varmit that gets in the way.

It is not clear what the right answer is (assuming all you care about is number of animal lives, which is an inadequate measure anyway). The best advice i know of is to only eat well raised cow meat because 1 cow provides a lot of calories, and vegetables, chickens, and pigs etc do not and kill lots of animals.
> Release the source code of Windows under the GNU GPL.

Once that occurs then we will all trust Microsoft without reservation. Even Stallman.
The difference is that the front-end code runs on 'your' computer, the back-end code runs on 'their' computer. You typically don't care what point of sale software a store you are doing business with is running on their cash registers or the myriad of software run on the systems of the various manufacturers of the products it sells.[1] However, when you go to their web site(s) and it uses a bunch of minified, obfuscated code that runs on your computer... you should care about that.

The idea behind 'free' software was that you should have access to/control of the software running on your devices, not everyone else's. It was originally a pragmatic solution to a problem, not an abstract ideology that it's morphed into for some.

[1] It's up to the business in question to care about the software running on their computers.
Anyone find it strange how few tech startups come out of Seattle despite all the tech workers? It is the land of the big tech co and big tech co satellite offices, and can think of few actual startups and believe it comes in low as far as VC dollars go (will find source)
not selling, you mean
Seems like consistent suppression of climate related news on hackernews increasing noticeably over the past few months.
> for citizens to contribute their fair share of paying down the debt

What does "fair share" mean?
For simple things it doesn't matter, but if you're bringing up a complex application that has a dozen server components and putting it under load, it does matter.
Unfortunately even fruit and vegetables aren't safe.

Syphilis and TB antibiotics are being used to combat disease on orange trees in Florida:

The E.P.A. has proposed allowing as much as 650,000 pounds of streptomycin to be sprayed on citrus crops each year. By comparison, Americans annually use 14,000 pounds of aminoglycosides, the class of antibiotics that includes streptomycin

In its decision to approve two drugs for orange and grapefruit trees, the E.P.A. largely ignored objections from the C.D.C. and the F.D.A., which fear that expanding their use in cash crops could fuel antibiotic resistance in humans.

scientists are especially worried that the drugs will cause pathogenic bacteria in the soil to become resistant to the compounds and then find their way to people through groundwater or contaminated food.[1]

Several lawmakers wrote to the EPA last month to urge a rethink of the policy given legitimate scientific concerns around the issue of antimicrobial resistance. To quote the letter:

Antibiotics are life-saving medicines and, except in extraordinary circumstances, should only be used to treat specific illnesses in people and animals," the lawmakers wrote. "EPA's assessments appear to ignore scientific evidence, violate the principle of judicious antibiotic use, and could create unnecessary harm to human health by authorizing an unprecedented amount of medically important antibiotics to be used for plant agriculture.[2]

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/17/health/antibiotics-orange...

[2] http://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2019/08/lawmakers...
> We as a species have very much decided that short term gains are well worth

We as a species (as a whole) cannot decide about anything, that's an illusion. Governments decide to allow or disallow for, not us commoners. And it hardly matters on what democratic party you vote, money/economy is their highest priority, everything else is subordinate. So yes, governments allow for this just as they allow for pesticides killing entire insect species, it simply brings in tax money and they cannot afford to disallow.
Buffering input is something we are still missing on the web. Concurrency is indispensable, but if the program is modal (and almost all are, to certain extent), processing an input command should wait for the previous one to be processed.
Well, there is the option of writing all your CRUD methods as stored procedures which are the things that actually create/update records (while still allowing complex reporting queries), but that means writing all that logic in the provided SQL language.

That was one of the most interesting things to me about the Drizzle MySQL fork project. One of the goals was to make the SQL language that was used a plugin, so you could use just about whatever you want, JavaScript, Perl, Python, Ruby, Haskell, whatever, as the SQL server level. Being able to share client and server level code opens up some interesting possibilities. Alas, I think it ended up being abandoned.
>However, looking at how discontent programmers are with Objective-C, not so much anymore. Not even the immaturity of the tooling around the language like its IDE Xcode could stop the migration.

Actually it has little to do with some huge "discontent" towards Objective-C, and more with Apple presenting Swift as the way forward and their main officially supported language...

>So why are most of the young contenders stuck with little recognition in their niches, while Swift is taking off so quickly?

Again, because no functional language has a huge company promoting it as THE language its devs should use, like Swift has with Apple. F# is not MS's favorite, for example...

>For developers building applications in the Apple ecosystem, the primary hard problem seems to be Objective-C. In other words, ”the pain” is so significant that developers were almost desperately waiting for an alternative language and are now happily joining the movement of the Swift language.

Yeah, no...

>The first five of those factors [interlanguage working, possess extensive libraries, be highly portable, have a stable and easy to install implementation, come with debuggers and profilers], which are mainly technical, are provided by almost all of the functional languages.

Not really. Compared to C#, Java, Javascript, it's not even close...

>Following the theory of "The Chasm", FP would need to solve a severe problem that could not be solved with existing approaches in order to make a breakthrough (finding its "killer app")

Not really. Swift doesn't solve any special problem "that could not be solved with existing approaches", C# doesn't, Java doesn't, and in general, most successful languages don't.

They succeed because of platform stronghold (UNIX -> C, MS -> C++, OSX/iOS -> Swift) and other such reasons...
A more honest rundown of the Stallman drama
That's because serverless IS NOT REALLY SERVERLESS.

Remember when mainframes were king, and then people got desktop computers?

The broadband explosion got everyone addicted to always-on Internet. Before this, we had some pretty awesome protocols, like IRC and USENET, etc. which didn't assume your dialup connection was always on.

We need to have the software autonomously link up with one another, with servers just being dumb hubs that store encrypted data. Then they would be commodities that can get paid in crypto. Have you seen MAIDSAFE?
In a recession:

People lose jobs

Govt pays out more social security benefits

Govt earns lesser tax revenue

Govt interest payments on bonds are still at pre recession levels

So, govt has to issue more bonds

Nobody has the money to pay for those bonds

Thus, interest rates would naturally rise.

The fed could print money to buy bonds causing inflation or the fed could not print money causing rise in interest rates and furthering economic decline.

This is how the deficits have out the fed between a rock and a hard place.
> There are valid reasons for serverless

Those scenarios are probably just as happy with a PHP script on Apache.
Great article. I think you might be taking a subtle point in the article for granted. Namely, the ability to assemble a fairly complex distributed system from open source components.

Democratisation of complex machinery like the raft and consensus algorithms, schedulers, append logs, query optimisers and so on is a superb thing. It is something that has only been possible in the last 3/4 years and would have been devilishly difficult before then without significant upfront work.

Fetishising complexity might be a bit strong here. Seeing more posts like this is a good thing.
I hear you but I had an experience with a US company, but quite some time back when I was in sales. Every single time, we used to get paid on the 45th day which was the agreed payment terms. Every month, our invoices used to land on the last day of the month (28, 29, 30, 31 depending on whether working day or not), and it did not matter to the company if the accounting person did not enter in their computer system until a week later, except quarter end : because it needs to go into a balance sheet so the deadlines were much harsher: no missed invoices showing up a day later. Anyways the point is that some (a lot) companies have their payments driven through automation and once the thing gets into the system, it gets paid, no "ask me next week" BS.
Imagine a new CTO or middle manager coming in, with a small ego, and a big need to prove himself, and initiating a make-work project.

What defense mechanisms does your firm have against this? Unless your team leads are golf buddies with the C-suite, it is unlikely that their opinions are going to be taken seriously.
> Thing looked like an absolute nightmare to get up and running.

So you tried it? I don't remember it being hard to set up, at least compared to a DB. Or, you can use the underlying docker images (open source, https://github.com/lambci/lambci) to run your Lambdas in. SAM provides some nice abstractions, e.g. API gateway "emulation", posting JSON to the function(s), or providing an AWS SDK-compatible interface for invoking the functions via e.g. boto3. This way you can run the same integration tests you would run in prod against a local testing version.
911 Calls Route Thru Canada in the USA
So true. Generally, whichever one best matches the feeling best is how I go.

Some things really feel like objects, they've got little personalities, friends, parents... a whole list of talents and characteristics. OOP it is.

Other things are more like physics. It doesn't really need to have a name to exist, there doesn't need to be a container, it always acts predictably. Time to get functional.

I've also been using a tactic which I have no idea what it's really called, but I call it augmentation. I think of them like those crystals you add to your weapons in diablo or other RPGs. The gist is: a public readonly member which takes the object that holds it as an argument and has extra functionality. So like:

```
class Staff {
public readonly flamePower = new FlameAugment(this);
}
(new Staff()).flamePower.doSomethingSpecialInvolvingStaff();
```
> Resistance to antibiotics would take us back to 1900, not to the brink of annihilation.

You can't assume that the virulence of bacteria with evolved antibiotic resistance will be like that of the strains that existed in 1900.
I don't know the specifics of your architecture, but if your (multiple) tenant applications are sharing code on the node-side, then it follows that they can self-organise in a similar manner.
“New” Features in C – Dan Saks
Some chalk writes smoothly but costs more.
>Lots of words without much value, just like FP!

not sure if

a) people didn't get the pun

b) the pun wasn't intended

or c) both

:thinking:
Chinatown without Chinese grocery stores
> that the government can create for "free"

One of the very smart things the U.S. has done is take a good portion of those printed dollars and invest in weapons which allow us to force the world to accept the same printed dollars. That's what really allows our government to be in that globally unique position. Resistance to this by other nations has various consequences. If you're a country that doesn't have a certain level of military deterrent you become victim of "regime change". If you are a country that meets that deterrent threshold you become victim of the foreign boogeyman FUD.
There is no agenda, but people absolutely use the flagging feature for selfish reasons, e.g. “Dammit, I’m so tired of reading about this topic!” When in reality, it is intended for marking content that breaks the site guidelines.
The funniest thing imaginable would be for this guy to run into a mainframe dev and get lambasted for "OMG I can't believe your software needs one of those toddler computers, surely a 3270 is good enough"
Historical Cost of Computer Memory and Storage
Even in the US I’ve had pushback from lawyers about external links from websites and other official content. The idea is that it’s something of a tacit endorsement.

Yes it’s being conservative but the lawyers definitely prefer fewer links where possible and I’ve had them ask me to remove quite a few.
Inclusionary Zoning and Housing Market Outcomes
Slam the brakes and floor it to pop wheelies
Porting the OwnCloud iOS App to the Mac – How Catalyst Changes the Game
The longer version is the author noting that the printing press, with publishers, ultimately had curators that hand picked which content to publish. Social media tends to the opposite extreme. That is the context of the author's "con" position, and why it is different this time around.

Of course, the techno-utopian view would probably hold that some new version of curation can/will arise to address the issue, so that's one possible counter argument to the author's pessimism. In fact we seem to be in the early stages with platforms trying (albeit very, very, very imperfectly) to filter out false, misleading, or harmful content.
How to Boil the Perfect Egg
There's plenty of evidence at this point, it isn't an assumption.
Worth noting is that Clinton was president during the dot com bubble, which enabled that surplus... until the economy came crashing down a short while later. Also worth noting is that some of the policy changes of the Clinton white house + Greenspan federal reserve enabled the housing crash as well. I personally feel like we got a surplus only by taking out a mortgage on the next ~15 years of America.
I'd say it has to do with these three points:

- Ownership of IP: IP produced in your own time on your own equipment doesn't belong to your employer.

- Non-competes: Not enforceable in CA

- Access to capital: Plenty in CA.

I'd say the first two points are what differentiate Silicon Valley from the rest of the tech capitals.
Two things that come to my mind from reading your response:

Why are we releasing this document in PDF format? Shouldn’t it be in docx or XPS? https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20110104-00/?p=11...

Why we don’t want you and your Android green bubbles in our iMessage chat https://www.fastcompany.com/90391587/why-we-dont-want-you-an...
the feature/product dichotomy is a subtle gradient that ultimately means nothing. It's only ever seems poignant with the benefit of hindsight. It's sort of like saying "well, the way the market shook out is the way the market shook out"
Why ? If new antibiotics are not profitable in the long run, then you don't do that. That was presented in the podcast.

What is your explanation?
Intelligence is approximately a normal distribution so the mean and median are almost exactly the same.
Docker largely works fine on macOS? At least for testing, haven't run into any issues other than bad filesystem performance if you're writing a lot of data to a mounted FS. Our team uses it daily - a far cry from "unusable".
You should check out VS Code. They take the JSON config files and create a GUI from them. It's far from ideal, but I wouldn't be surprised if they're working it out before adding it to VS.
I was not familiar with the term holidaymaker, and thought it was corporate speak for a Thomas Cook employee. Very confused until halfway through the article.
There's no scientifically justified causal basis for homeopathy, and well powered trials investigating it have repeatedly returned null results - that's pretty conclusive evidence against it in my book. In contrast, we have examples of consumer movements which led to regulatory or policy change, with or without the use of social stigma.

I didn't find the article convincing, because I don't think Gates is looking at the right metrics. I agree with him that I don't expect to see carbon impacts to divestment right now, even a little bit. What I expect is that divestment (especially by institutional investors) will lower the barriers to heavy handed regulation in the future, and is a useful additional dimension to get people engaged in the climate fight now. Simply accepting "we all should just give up and not worry that we're invested in fossil fuels via our retirement accounts" is counter-intuitive to me.
It's always great to see an extremely intelligent person try to rationalize a core belief that's at direct odds with the cold, hard, and unforgiving reality they live in. The amount of mental gymnastics done here are Olympian, and this guy deserves a gold medal.

However, even the fanciest mental tricks are never going to change the fundamental laws of reality.

In the entire article he dances around second order effects and demonstrates why they're meaningless. Great, but there's one measure that actually matters: the percentage of our annual budget spent servicing existing debt. Right now that number is at 6%, and there's some share under 100% where it will cause our country to effectively go bankrupt. The closer we get to 100%, the exponentially higher the chance of bankruptcy.

Right now there's two things which make me scared this number is going to go up considerably:

One, US tax revenue is going up around 2% a year, but our outstanding debt is going up around 20% a year. The debt is rapidly outpacing economic and tax revenue growth. If nothing changes, paying off the debt will be 25% of our national budget in around 20 years, and 50% in 40 years. That's well within most our lifetimes, and is well in the extreme bankruptcy risk area.

Two, the US has access to unprecedented low rates of interest right now. The average rate on it's 23 trillion in debt is 1%. If that were to go up to a more historical 3%, interest repayment would jump to 24%. Due to the length of government debt, this transition would probably take around 20 years to fully happen.

Now combine the two into a nightmare scenario: debt continues to rise over the next 20 years at its current rate, and interest rates return to their historical 3%; and within 20 years repaying debt will explode to 75% of our budget. There is your potential black swan event.

Hopefully action is taken before any of this happens, but something has to give from where we are now, and pretending that there's no troubled waters on the horizon is absolutely insane and irresponsible.
No, definitely not. FP concepts are catching on in mainstream languages. Lots of languages now support optionals instead of implicit nulls, maps and filters over lists, higher-order functions, etc. These all originated in FP and have just made their way over to the more mainstream imperative languages.

Not only that, but FP is must more a state of mind than a set of language features. You can write functional code in practically any language, really, although some of them will make it easier than others.
Because some societies have the concept of limited liability and bankruptcy protections.
>eat well raised cow meat

It takes significantly more feed to raise a cow. The calories extracted from cow meat is extremely inefficient considering the high number of calories in (feed) and water. So, you could not use feed (vegetable death-per-calorie!) because it's something like a 8:1 calorie ratio for feed to a pound of beef. You'd have to pasture raise the cows.

There is no feasible way to ensure that all food is pasture-grazing cow meat at a price point accessible to most Americans.

There is currently no cruelty free-way to have cheap, accessible calories. If you really wanted the lowest death-per-calorie, one of the most feasible approaches would be consuming large amounts of rice.

I don't think anyone would want to subsist exclusively on a diet of rice, beans, and dietary supplements.
I had a hard time parsing the title. I suggest "treaty-violating".
You can also get many of the benefits of category theory without learning any of the category theory. :)
I've seen great success with Lambda in two specific cases:

1. Highly variable load with lots of concurrency

2. Services that are mostly idle

In the former case, you avoid needing to scale up and down. Lots of excess compute is avoided (and periods of underprovisioning are eliminated while load is increasing). In the latter case, simply not keeping a machine warm during long periods of idle time can save a bit of money, with the ability to pick back up almost instantly.

I would think you'd find it tricky to gain meaningful cost savings with Lambda over another option if your use case doesn't fall into one of those two buckets.