skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Prematurely designing systems “for scale” is just another instance of premature optimization

> Examples abound: (...) using a distributed database when Postgres would do

This is the only part of the article that bugged me a little, because in my experience the choice between single-machine and distributed databases is not so much about scale as it is about availability and avoiding a single point of failure.

Even if your database server is fairly stable (a VM in a robust cloud for instance), if you use Postgres or MySQL and you need to upgrade to a newer version of the database (let say for an urgent security update), you have no choice but to completely stop the service for a few seconds / minutes (assuming the service cannot work without its database).

Depending on the service and its users, this mandatory down-time might or might not be acceptable.

Anecdotally I suspect services requiring high SLAs are more common than ones requiring petabyte scale storage.
I think it says something about the world indirectly, in that the US and Russia are big enough to influence other parts of the world through ripple effects. However, there are many nations that aren't going through existential crises of faith in their government to effectively lead them without institutionalized corruption and subversion. So I think the actual effects are more local than global.

In many ways the political body is just a reflection of the citizenry. The US is part of a global cultural shift, and that has consequences. It's not nearly as dangerous as, say, the Protestant Reformation, but there are some parallels. Belief and trust in the authority of the state is waning, new ideas about the ethics of treating each other are becoming more entrenched, and technology is furthering the spread of these ideas.

The US political machine is slowly eating itself, and a very bad economic downtown could threaten its foundations. If the US is going to be hurt, it'll probably be by within more than without. But you also can't talk about politics anymore without geopolitics. As the US changes internally, that makes it vulnerable externally. The current administration has been systematically giving up international influence in favor of nationalism, a trend other Western nations are also going with, which will result in an international shift of power. China may not be fermenting revolution here, but they're obviously bolstering their role on the world stage. They will be ready to pick up any money and power we leave on the table, which weakens the US and the west in general.

So sure, these kinds of "oh no our government is subverting itself" posts are problematic, but I don't think nearly as problematic as just how the minds of the citizens are changing, and how that is then affecting its stability.
Then you should've bought a surface RT cause that hits both marks... /s

In all seriousness, I don't trust Microsoft that they could pull together a proper app ecosystem were they to run one. Even the amount of native x64 apps is dwindling these days since most software released these days are either mobile apps (android/ios) or Web applications.

I was at Microsoft working with them trying to populate their Windows store and windows phone stores with apps and it was an enormously expensive operation and even despite the millions they poured in to just make their platforms attractive, it fell short.

Windows phone wasn't ready, but I liked it nonetheless and I felt that they were going in the right direction. But they didn't manage to attract any of the bigger companies to produce first party applications or if they did, they were paid for a period of time after which they were deprecated.

If Microsoft doesn't go where the masses are, nobody will buy their stuff as they get vendor locked into a barren ecosystem. That's why I'm glad that they decided to go with android, they get to produce their (in my opinion) beautiful and exciting hardware without making their customers fear for the future of their devices.
That imgur link is broken
Ads denying climate change should not be accepted by Facebook. That's a perfect example of untruthful advertising.
I'm intrigued that you thought such a plan could work - I don't see that, but I'd like to. Could you elaborate on what you had envisioned?
If it's under neural control, it's going to be much easier for a human to learn to walk again on two legs than it is on four.
If everything smells like shit, maybe you should check your shoe?
Government solves problems with money. The US government spends little on healthcare, which causes citizens to spend more.

Perhaps I should clarify that the only way we are going to solve he healthcare issue in the US is by the government spending money on it.
Or just advise them not to work at a Big Co with shitty culture?
Here are three:

https://www.independent.co.uk/travel/news-and-advice/private...

> Prince Harry and Meghan Markle have come under fire for taking four trips by private jet in 11 days – with celebrities quick to step forward and defend the royal couple – while teenage activist Greta Thunberg’s decision to reach America via yacht to reduce her carbon footprint has drawn praise and censure from those on both sides of the debate.

(https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-49349566 also mentions it, with "the Duke and Duchess of Sussex have faced criticism over opting to fly to Sir Elton John's villa in Nice in a private jet.")

http://news.trust.org/item/20190927191343-z5e0w

> Celebrities such as Britain's Prince Harry and U.S. actor Leonardo DiCaprio, who preach environmentalism while also taking private jet flights, have also been accused of hypocrisy.

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/hollywood-s-private-p...

> The producer (and reformed jet junkie) has a message for stars and executives who publicly fight global warming while quietly indulging in the worst form of environmental abuse.
When I interviewed at Google they told me to come back when I had more open source contributions. I already had hundreds of thousands of lines in a prominent open source systems project at the time, so they must really want a lot.

The hiring bar at these places is pretty astronomical. Realistically it’s going to be well out of reach for a majority of even the very best programmers in the world.
Totally agree with the sentiment of your statement, but RSA is probably a terrible choice, especially if you want to get it done in 20 lines of code. This article explains it pretty well: https://blog.trailofbits.com/2019/07/08/fuck-rsa/
This line works OK for ordinary fraud, and even in the complex space of securities offerings.
Does sprawling imply not dense?

As densely constructed as the city of Shanghai may be, 2-hour commutes are not uncommon because millions of people live that far from the city center.
Same. I have this fantasy where I wonder: what if all software became public domain, and you reward creators based on the GitHub stars a repo has, weighted by something like page rank?

Then I realized this could be extended to anything where there is a platform for rating the content creation, from books (Goodreads) to arts (deviant art) to deeds (Facebook and Twitter). Then my friend told me I had reinvented Whuffie, as presented in the book Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom...

The main problem with this idea is that the money for paying creators would probably have to come from the government, since who else would pitch in to support this? But hey, people talk about universal basic income, this is like a weighted version...
There is no good way to post that. (They are essentially doing nothing, but had to say something)

That is why it's usually short, neutral and has little details.

Anything else just adds more fuel to the fire.

PS: I am not saying I agree with them.
Or, it's like saying that a browser that has a built-in email client is insane.

Usually, focusing on doing one thing only is how you make good products.
I think we can see from history that key ingredients for a push forward were language, axe (as a tool) and wheel.

That's why I think evolution in these areas should be the the change that will transform our world in big way. Transportation as in (Boring/SpaceX/Tesla), tool as in (Boston Dynamic) and communication as in (VR/AR).

But like I said this is more of an evolution than revolution. There might be something new that I cannot comprehend and that will radically change the world. (AI?)
A brief history of government efforts to stop people from wearing masks
How do you see the system working?
EDNS is from 1999

https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2671
I think you might mean the 'protected' thing in classes. It was something he regretted later.

IIRC the person who asked for it also regretted that, but I'm less sure on that.
Perhaps you could give some examples of conflicting 'truths'. It seems to me that in most cases the truth can usually be untangled. This may be an unpopular view, but I'm not willing to give up on the idea of objective truths just yet.
EU says social platforms can be ordered to take down unlawful content worldwide
Cowboy architecture and execution flow – Elixir
For destructive statements I almost always do a select with the WHERE statement that I will use in the delete first so I can see I am not doing anything stupid.
My guess is that it's not only about "external" improvement but also "internal".

Externally, your centaur design is more stable and probably easier to design. It would also allow you to do some (highly specific) tasks that a boring, two-legged human could not do. Like Aimee Mullins said in her TED talk[1], this would make you not so much "disabled", but rather "super-abled".

Internally, however, you also want those using the exoskeleton to regain their feeling of belonging. That is, you don't want the to "just" walk - you also want them to walk exactly like everybody else. To quote from this book [2],

"You don’t always feel inferior, mostly just out of place. Sometimes though, you feel a pang in your chest, a bit like a short, sharp stab. You know what it is instantly…

It's there to remind you – you’ll never be quite the same, never on the same level, you’ll never have quite the same opportunities, the same privileges, the experiences and the rites of passages everyone else takes for granted.

(...) Like when you go shopping and people stare. Funny thing is, you get used to this one over time, it affects you far less than it does your friends. They hate it and stare back or make comments – “why are people so rude, you’re not a circus animal?”. You feel like saying “actually, I am” but it wouldn’t help, you just want to shop."

[1] http://www.ted.com/talks/aimee_mullins_prosthetic_aesthetics

[2] https://disabilityhorizons.com/2015/09/the-truth-about-being...
The long game is that participation in electronic communication is reduced to rubble and ash.

We all withdraw, and seek alternatives to personal remote interaction via telecommunication. We look at the text tumbleweeds blowing across the landscape, knowing they are covered in radioactive dust and asbestos from wars fought long ago in what now resembles a no mans land of WMD cola wars and Michael Dukakis pogroms. Uselessness and futility expressed in magnetic regions and energized transistors. Moldering and soon desiccated well beyond any expiration date.

Short term, our eyes and ears are raped by tabloid infographics, as a shortage of sensory chastity belts drives prices through the roof. We lock our doors and listen as boots tromp outside and morons with opinions bayonet and hand grenade everything in sight, until eventually the noxious fumes force even their horses to wear gas masks. We slap wet towels against the door jams as blister agents seep in, and eventually aerial carpet bombing exterminates millions of us. Shell shocked survivors ramble word salad nonsense and gibberish about glam rock and square dancing, as if nerd signaling niche interests will validate the street credibility of their corporate agribusiness ad-supported cybernetic implants hobbled with OEM political opinion software that cannot be uninstalled.

But eventually, the war ends when something so terrible emerges, that further sock puppeting becomes unthinkable and a cold war posture leaves only limited proxy misinformation still frothing at the edges of digital electronic systems. The occasional Nigerian robocall reminds us of the bad old days aren't as far away as we'd like to think. The blackened sky and nuclear winter still shrouds the internet as we knew it. All TCP/IP traffic ruined, we still get by with bucket brigades that hand off physical disks that resist tampering through cryptographic integrity mechanisms. Nothing is instantaneous anymore, and some prefer it that way.
> This is one of the major issues with these languages that were initially designed by amateurs (I mean that in the positive sense, someone who does something because they care about it, and not because they are paid to do it).

As opposed to a "professional" who is told by their boss to implement X before the end of the day?
Sheep are easy to lie to.
Calibre 4.0
Facebook Must Delete Content Globally If It's Considered Defamatory in Europe
The C++ world that thrives on manual memory management is usually "C compiled with C++ compilers".

The rest of the C++ world has long moved into automatic memory management as best practices.
High availability Postgres setups are a minimum for a production system and a staging system to understand how your system behaves during a failure event. These failure scenarios should be tested not necessarily on every commit but often enough that there’s confidence during a failover you’re not going to drop queries on the floor and pretend it’s all good as well as your monitoring systems report on the event for the sake of event reporting.
Make the bytes free, and the accounts cost resources.

Resources can be:

- time (come back tomorrow and next week to click this button and the account is yours)

- effort (captcha like, or maybe even better some time at meta-moderation: Is this a good answer?)

- monetary

In any case, if accounts are no longer free then having an account in good standing will be worth something.

Then, next time mods ban anyone it means there is a cost for them before they come back.
Mobsters will fight over existential threats too, and it doesn't make what they're doing appropriate or worth defending. I'm not sure I'd go so far as defending to the death Facebook's right to be a giant conglomerate eating up other companies. Isn't that exactly the point?

I don't see an argument saying 'companies must be ever bigger, infinitely, as a moral right'. The companies might think so, very passionately even, but I would suggest they're wrong and it's a bad thing to indulge.
If you ammortize the environmental impact of building the rail network over all the rail trips, it might swing the other way. Especially if someone figures out carbon neutral air travel in the next decade.
Quoted Replies: The Viral Twitter Bot Built by a Nigerian
Wasn't /r/goldandblack a split from /r/anarchocapitalism, not /r/libertarian?
BRL-CAD predates Google, and even the internet. Nevertheless, it is the first the result when googling for BRL-CAD, so not hard at all.
And then upstream developers go work for a corporation and everyone downstream comes with their pitchforks to HN, bad luck.
But the legal system expects that you go to HR and that they act appropriately when you report certain things. So, I'm not sure the "do not talk to them" is always correct.

Scenario A: your job sucks, and you don't see a future there. Your boss constantly undermines you, doesn't give you credit, gives you a workload harder than any reasonable employee could work.

Scenario B: your company is doing something illegal, and you pointed that out to your manager. Your manager started undermining you, not giving you credit, uninviting you to meetings about your work. Now your job sucks and you don't see a future there.

In Scenario A, you should just leave. HR isn't going to fix the problem, they're just going to throw their hands up, tell you to work through it with your manager, and then quietly label you as a difficult employee. You're probably on a track to be laid off or PIP'd in the next cycle, so might as well either learn to shut up and take it, or get out.

Scenario B, you should absolutely tell HR. HR won't do anything, or they'll make your life worse. But that's exactly what you need to have happen to build a case. Depending on the severity of the situation (i.e., how pervasive and illegal the activities are), HR's inactions could be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars to you.
This is why healthcare is broken. I’ve also heard that hospitals can lose accreditation for having bad outcomes and will turn away risky patients which is just as horrible.
Role: Senior Backend Engineer

Location: Worldwide

Remote: yes

Willing to relocate: no

Technologies: golang, python, JS, postgresql, mongodb, docker, - mostly backend things, lots of them.

Résumé/CV: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ivan-tolstosheyev-134a8232/

Email: itroot@itroot.org

I'm mostly a backend developer with 10y experience of building and improving high-load apps (up to 1000+ physical hosts).
33% of buses will be electric by 2030
What is a L6 in real world terms? where would they fit on the GS scale (I may or may not) be applying for a GS15 equivalent in the UK Grade 7 or maybe 6

It would be interesting to see where that fits in a FANG context
This is what happens when your legal department is 10 times bigger than your engineering department.
Getting started with a new codebase
For a 2000 year old poem, De rerum natura offers a surprisingly scientific take on the world, as well as a fascinating insight into what was going on at the edge on Roman thought at the time. It's still a great and fairly accessible read, and if reading ancient poems is your thing I'd recommend the Rolfe Humphries translation.
A canonical regex pattern vs Rosie pattern should be front and center on the landing page.
I want to immediately judge whether it's worth my time to read more.
Yeah. I guess after having been bitten myself a few times with failed MySQL failovers and especially after having read the GitHub October 2018 incident postmortem [1], I stopped considering failover solutions as a reliable availability solution altogether.

However this is just a personal opinion that I might revisit at some point.

[1] https://github.blog/2018-10-30-oct21-post-incident-analysis/
SSL is a pretty terrible hack to patch over the fact that we don't have a internet protocol version "7" that guarantee point-to-point secure (ie: encrypted, authenticated) communication.

This is the reasoning behind http2/3 - you pretty much never want "get me this thing with this name, show it to everyone, and let everyone on the wireless lan, my isp, their cdn etc modify everything I send and receive".

The biggest problem with ssl everywhere is that it complicates the elegant multilevel caching http easily allows - and I think an easier opt-out of this privacy aspect would be good (an easier way to set up a caching squid proxy on your lan that transparently caches os updates, package updates, Netflix episodes, world of War craft patches, news site front pages...). It's more or less still possible - but it's all or nothing: if you allow ssl stripping, the proxy gets your web mail even if you just want it to cache os updates and a handful of web sites.

At any rate, you're still using the os network stack, so maybe you're running ppoe and ipsec down there.. As "part" of your web browser...
I'm becoming increasingly convinced digital information has inflicted on us the curse of not being able to forget. The online accumulation aids an eternalisation of our short-term memory that is overwhelming us individually and collectively.
ETFs are treated like stocks. That's kind of the point. They can be lent out by your broker if you're on margin.

Mutual funds are opaque. It's up to the fund to decide if they want to make some extra money lending their securities out to speculators. As they're holding the stocks long term and standard securities lending is over collateralized, the risk profile is relatively low compared to the extra return.
Of course, no telecom executive will face any consequences for this. No jail time, no slap on the wrist. Business as usual in the good old United States.
Self-Modifying Code
The kernel doesn't provide a "printf" function, but provides a mostly but not completely equivalent function as "printk".

They could and perhaps should have just called it "printf", but it doesn't really matter much.
Lessons in YAGNI¹: Patreon's “*_hack” methods and why they're not
Cry me a river. SO mods are overzealous hall monitors who work for badges instead of money. They get what they deserve. Now she knows what it's like to be flagged as a dupe. You can beg and plead but the mod has spoken, so you move over to Reddit and if that doesn't work, Google groups.
His alternativ formulation of P(A|B) is really confusing me.

Is there a typo in there?
You'll still need to support browsers from 2009 ;)
Even from a user standpoint... oops I clicked the "cancel" button when I meant to click "confirm" and now I have to go through the signup process all over again because the developer is not allowed to ask me again.
N.Y. Declares the End Is Near for Aids Epidemic
> received a bill from Oracle for $12,200 for using the company's proprietary VirtualBox Extension Pack, which provides extra capabilities for the free GPL-licensed VirtualBox hypervisor

This still means that vanilla VirtualBox is GPL, and can be (freely) used for businesses, right?

EDIT: Looking at the downloads page, apparently so, VB is licensed with GPLv2. The Extensions Pack following that is licensed PUEL. Luckily, in my case, only vanilla was installed. But with VB's nag of new version, the possibility of a licensing bait-and-switch on a newer version and Oracle having left a bad taste... I'm uninstalling VB from all PCs except one or two devices as a precautionary measure.
> According to the FCC, the offering of DNS and caching makes broadband an information service, which is defined under US law as "the offering of a capability for generating, acquiring, storing, transforming, processing, retrieving, utilizing, or making available information via telecommunications."

So by the same token any of us can be an information service by running a caching DNS server even if it's just a forwarding some other DNS server's recursive answers. The precedent is rotten and this low bar to escape from net neutrality is misset.
India’s elephant-friendly tea garden
On the other hand, if a provider is saying "there is nothing we ca do to prevent a denial of service that's impacting your account", that's not a great response.
tl;dr - express dark triad behaviour

This thread leaves me in despair.
Mostly experience