skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's the principal-agent problem coming home to roost in a world without principals. Everyone is effectively an agent because the principals are sufficiently "diversified" that they don't really have substantial direct investment in long-term organizational success. What matters most is the short-term boost that you can use to dazzle the next employer.

Every employee knows that they're going to stay for 5 years max because companies have made it impossible for there not to be a massive market disparity if you keep stable employment. There are no perks to long-term loyalty and thus no reason to consider an employer's long-term interests as identical to your own. The outcome of this is the predictable situation we see now.

Like it or not, the company's culture comes from the top down. If the boss doesn't know or care whether the product is substantial, people who do will eventually be replaced at least until the boss is duly insulated from them. No one wants to rain on the parade of the guy who holds hire/fire authority.

There's a wider thing here too, which is that the market doesn't know or care about any of the technical details either. You need the touted features to work correctly just enough to create sufficient ambiguity, probably about 10-15% of the time. If you invest enough engineering effort to get them working correctly 90%+ of the time, that's a great deal more money and time spent on engineering for no market benefit. A competitor who dumps that money into marketing and sales will come out far ahead because technical quality and reliability simply doesn't drive sales.
Confusion about GDPR and logless webservers
Hi all!

I intend to run a simple website on a VPS using an Apache web-server.

My plan is to disable logging completely. All pages on the website will be static and the website will not utilise cookies. No personal data pertaining to visitors will be stored on persistent storage under my control.

Initially I thought this would exclude me as a data controller under the GDPR, so I drafted a privacy policy explaining how I would store no personal data pertaining to visitors, etc.

After closer inspection, it seems that the act of collecting the IP address of an EU data subject to respond to HTTP requests would make me a data controller, even if I don’t store that IP address in a log.

Something about my interpretation of the GDPR seems off.

If I understand correctly, I would need to provide contact details in the privacy policy and respond to requests to be forgotten, requests for access, etc.

If someone sends me an email requesting to be forgotten, they’ve just provided me with their email address and any other personal data they include in the content, so suddenly I’m storing their personal data and would have to respond and delete it.

Similarly, if someone sends me a request for access, their email contains personal data. It seems like I’d have to send them back an email saying “Yes! I hold your personal data. Here it is:” with a copy of their email attached.

It seems as though by providing contact details in the privacy policy of that website and receiving emails about that privacy policy, I’d be processing personal data that I would not have otherwise processed, purely for the purpose of GDPR compliance.

I am sure most will see the irony in this interpretation.

I was wondering if anybody here has dealt with situations like this or has a different interpretation of how the GDPR applies to such websites.
Telescope seeks clues to exoplanet interiors
I guess that why one of the first investor in Libra - famous Xavier Niel - published this editorial [1]

(small reminder for people who don't know him, he created the ISP french "Free" that kind of totally changed the telecom market in France (DSL and mobile), he also owns Scaleway (cloud), Kima Ventures (VC))

[1] https://www.theblockcrypto.com/linked/42886/libra-is-inevita...

[2] Original : https://www.lesechos.fr/idees-debats/cercle/europeens-libra-...
Backpressure to writers is the main reason to use buffer channels IMHO. I have never seen any performance differences between buffered or unbuffered for anything I have used.

The other reason to use them is controlling CPU. Spin up a pool of consumers and control how many cores they use with the buffer.
No cigar ;L
The one thing Fastmail doesn't have that I wish they did -- and for which I'll migrate elsewhere -- is Labels. Specifically, I would like to create a rule that applies one or more Labels to a new message but also lands that message in the Inbox where I'm going to see it first. This is something Protonmail supports and if I would have realized how much I was going to miss this ability when moving away from Gmail I would have gone with Protonmail.
Not only the legal gray line, but also the equally important moral gray line. Good riddance.
I respect Apple's style of releasing products. Rather than releasing half-baked crappy product (think Samsung Galaxy Fold), take your time and make a truly remarkable product. First mover advantage is worthless if your product crashes (pun intended).
The Cognitive Consequences of Formal Clothing [pdf]
Lead paint tends to stay on the wall so as long as you don't eat paint chips it's not as big a risk as particulate lead in fuel exhaust. If you are removing lead paint you need to wear a suitable respirator to avoid breathing in fragments but just being in a room with lead paint or a lump of the stuff isn't especially dangerous.
In 6 months: Visa Mastercard Stripe and Ebay create new stablecoin
This does not compute. I am a fast typer on all mediums, but a touch screen is just so slow compared to physical. I think I got around 80 wpm on my blackberry, there is no way I could do that on a touch screen. And iPhone autocorrect is terrible with any sort of tech jargon - frequently causing manual corrections.
Because raw ideas seem good, then when people ponder it may turn out to be bad ones...
Have you ever heard of the Solar Powered Highway in France?
I see this is starting to playing out as I'm thinking it should play out*. Now, I'm waiting for Facebook to stick to its gun. 2020 will be an interesting year.

x- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21162607
It is a little tricky: https://hackaday.io/project/245-replacing-lenovo-laptop-lith...
Is that from the Bible?
Ok, so if being regulatory compliant is a requirement now accepted by Ethereum, then could you please talk about GDPR/CCPA and not just token sales?

I'm also not sure 500k downloads of the truffle framework is a good proxy for the number of developers in the ecosystem. How many times has the same person / automation called npm install and pulled that dependency in?
JavaScript Party 97: The wonderful thing about Tiggers
The cost is the change in value of the building.
It's not the best possible scenario but "utterly meaningless" is hyperbole.

Certainly it's better not to have every aspect of a language be centralized. It's already near impossible to distribute Javascript, or even software in many languages, without going through NPM. WebAssembly, thankfully, isn't there yet.
Changing the signage is an example of how deep the restrictions run. “The restrictions are so great they even include signage,” is how I read the paragraph. I did not read the paragraph as “the restrictions are minor for example a trivial restriction on signage.“
Fifteen years hasn't been enough of a chance?
I've read this yesterday and thought the Guardian's title was misleading. If I understood rightly, the chapter found was already known, although it was through a later copy. So this discovery will bring minor changes, which a few scholars will enjoy the most.

The original text from around 1010 is lost. From the copy written before 1240, only 4 chapters, now 5, have been preserved. And all of the 54 chapters are known through later copies from around 1500.
I encourage you to apply more skepticism to those spreading their opinions as facts.

“Apple says it alone would control the encryption keys, and Chinese authorities do not have any “backdoor” to access data.”
Migrating to a different hosting platform than AWS for ES aslo mitigates this problem too, which is more likely in our case.
I know he’s a man of faith as they say. No judgement of any kind intended.
1993 is on the phone, they want their jokes back
I'm actually quite relieved about this. I don't know who I want to control such a thing, but it sure as hell isn't Facebook (or Google, Amazon, MS, Apple for that matter).

I think what it'll take is a company with a profit (i.e. subscription/fee) model that clearly doesn't rely on pimping out consumer data to any/all comers and takes GDPR privacy to heart.
nodejs ecosystem is much larger than the java one. also the amount of money companies invested in node is at least on par with java. think only about google chrome.
Oh certainly. I've done production work with Erlang, and it's great for building systems. I also love the Prolog syntax (I've also since done some side projects in Prolog for great fun).

Why I suggested Elixir is because it has all the strengths of Erlang but is also a better scripting language, and would compete better with Raku on a more equal footing in that respect.
Russia did not enter Syria until 2015. Bellingcat's founder was already publishing on Syrian conflict in 2012.
>Is it the only way they could produce inexpensively enough to stay competitive?

I hope you’re joking.
Rentier capitalism results in artificial scarcity. With rentier schemes and behavior dominating aspects of life so fundamental as housing and health care, conditions of artificial scarcity have stretched their tendrils into the fabric of our wellbeing: into our mental, spiritual, social health, into our very sense of having the time to freely work in pursuit of healthy lives.

And the most difficult thing of all is that this is all a wicked pyramid scheme, one that is hard to break without seeming violence against people we care about. We are dependent.
I find it amusing that the advice in the style guide gives a good example contradicting another good example, and contains a subtle bug.

In the "Reduce Scope of Variables", second good example leaks an open file when WriteString fails, because it doesn't follow the own advice of "Defer to Clean Up" if you are curious.

(Handling that properly with a defer is a bit more tricky - something like https://play.golang.org/p/l1PeWM3Tisg).

Update: style guide was fixed after this report :) It was this if you wonder: https://github.com/uber-go/guide/blob/a53ee0bef8c0b11b52340d...
http://archive.is/CNKUY
This seems got some negative review.

Let me shared my experience.

Alexander is fantastic as an interviewer and co-worker. I was interview by ALEXANDER a few years ago. I ended up not getting an offer. It was my fault.

The challenge is the hardest thing I have to research on my own to implement because google found no result for me at the time. I learned a lot when working on his challenge and the idea of being able to solve it is more imporant than passing to interview to me.

The way they conduct interview is really great. You are given help by their team.

All I can say is Gravitational takes hiring to their heart and setup for success of candidate.

TO Alex, I'm Vinh if you remember me :-).
I think you mean credulity, incredulous(ness) refers to a lack of belief and is thus synonymous with skepticism.
No, but it is an interesting problem. If something is done every 4 hours at standard times, do you shift all standard times by an hour so it’s still every 4 hours or have a gap of 3 or 5 hours for that task.

I kinda like the idea of regular scheduled downtimes of stable systems, just for real experience on downtime procedures.
Wow .. they re bound to see some competition.
Yeah indeed. In a very course heavy program you might take 12 courses. At two per semester that’s half of your 40 hour week for 3 of 5 years. That means you’re spending 30% max on coursework. Even less if you include your summers as working weeks. Say like 15-20% then.
into_rust() Screencasts
I'd disagree a little, the problem is not testing, it's building the software in the first place when it doesn't solve a real problem.
You don't have to use either of these. Was the last time you used perl in the late 1990s?
Gender non-conforming is a much wider net. This study you link of 9th and 11th graders, it is not surprising that a large percent (2.7% as you said) reported as trans or GNC.

The original comment above stated "trans", though, not T+GNC.
> Most people using the cloud aren't really that cost concious. EC2 is about 8x the cost of bare metal...

I've heard these claims before, but I think people are not doing the correct math. I would love to be proven wrong. It is not about computing the costs of hardware + depreciation + redudant power, adding together and calling a day.

You have to add:

– All the engineers that will be maintained your baremetal datacenter. If you are using a colo, use their costs
– Downtime caused by mundane issues that you simply do not see on AWS. Yes, a single hypervisor will go bad. You fix that in _minutes_ by stopping and starting your instance. Yes, VMWare or OpenStack (with networked storage!) could do that, but know what you also won't have to do? Deal with suppliers.
– The ability to quickly scale up and down according to your load. I can fire up 30 servers with a single terraform script and tear them down before your hardware supplier even returned your call. There's noone on my end racking and stacking anything.
– Downtime when shit breaks. If you have 5 thousand engineers impacted because of a maintenance mishap knocked out power to a datacenter and cascaded to the backups, you'll quickly burn through your savings.

I could go on. There are scenarios where on prem makes sense, but one should not dismiss it outright without accounting for the additional risks you are incurring and quantifying those.

One thing that people often forget (and I have to keep reminding people about) is that a single Availability Zone on AWS is composed of multiple datacenters, not just one. And you have multiple AZs. Heck, if you are deliberate about it you can even recreate your entire stack in a different region entirely. It is not apples to apples.

You may not need them, but if you do, cloud providers offer capabilities you are unlikely to replicate yourself. Specially if it's not your core business.

More to the point: even if your 8x figure is correct, the AWS Elastic offering adds a premium _on top of that_ . So they have to offer better capabilities than you can build yourself to account for the premium – in my experience the extra cost is hard to justify (it can make sense, but it is not as clear as EC2)
I agree with everything you say, except the last bit.

You can't believe people aren't aware that concur is a pita and hence it reduces expense valid expense submission...
I prefer looking at in months. If you make a grid 36 across and 30 tall, those are the months of a 90 year life. Much easier for me to fit in my head.
It is not necessary to have a valid alternative to validly declare something as fundamentally flawed.

ElasticSearch is as brittle as you can get. If you don't dimension Java heap sizes properly, nodes crash all the time and uncontrollable ultra-expensive shard relocation happens. Their open source available monitoring tools have the nice side effect of overloading the cluster and bringing it down (!). The result of it being a whole hodgepodge of Java-based repurposed Lucene does show in poor performance and very poor stability.

I've spent many a weekend trying to bring up a fallen ElasticSearch cluster, in some cases brought down just from monitoring. We had a use case that wasn't that easy, but not massive (100ks concurrent users, but not concurrent millions), and a properly developed C++ or even Python distributed solution would be more than able to handle it quite easily (source: ended up having to write it myself, didn't require massive anything to handle properly).

Frankly I admire Elastic because I have no idea how you can turn such a piece of software into ~$90MM yearly revenues, and, mainly, how you can turn that ~$90MM yearly revenue into a publicly traded company with a nearly $7bn market cap. So much to learn from them!
> This is missing a big part of the dynamic. Much enterprise software is what Joel Spolsky describes as "internal software"[0]:

> [0]: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/05/06/five-worlds/

And these worlds change over time:

> Games are unique for two reasons. First, the economics of game development are hit-oriented. Some games are hits, many more games are failures, and if you want to make money on game software you recognize this and make sure that you have a portfolio of games so that the blockbuster hit makes up for the losses on the failures. This is more like movies than software.

> The bigger issue with the development of games is that there’s only one version. Once your users have played through Duke Nukem 3D, they are not going to upgrade to Duke Nukem 3.1D just to get some bug fixes and new weapons. With some exceptions, once somebody has played the game to the end, it’s boring to play it again. So games have the same quality requirements as embedded software and an incredible financial imperative to get it right the first time. Shrinkwrap developers have the luxury of knowing that if 1.0 doesn’t meet people’s needs and doesn’t sell, maybe 2.0 will.

The first part of that's kinda true, but DLC means the second part isn't. People will pay for what amounts to a point upgrade for game software.
Just use SciHub like everyone else. Even if it's not up on SciHub the Supplementary MAterials are usually available free.
I would argue that becoming "legacy" is akin to bit rot. Sure, it still runs, but everyone that knew how it worked has left the company, and it's written in a language that is no longer in vogue and will require specifically hiring people with that skill to maintain.

As a counterpoint, I think we can both agree that writing production software in one of the toy languages that pops up on HN frontpage every day is a bad idea. Writing in a language that is old enough that it has become niche has many of the same issues. It doesn't really matter whether the software is poorly understood because the language is new enough to be niche or old enough to be niche; the outcome is the same.
An attempt to justify their rant with 1990s era perl examples
Why isn't VLC considered as an alternative?

And why re-encode files from FLAC to ALAC? What is gained when doing this other than iTunes support (or is that the entire point)?
10% increase PM2.5 means more cars, more cars means more road rage, more road rage correlates to violence.

And even excluding road rage as the mechanism for violence, 10% more people doing actions all over the place can also just cause violence.
Didn’t know it had a name, thanks!
My consumer confidence in civil aviation is shaken. I think there should be a way to opt out of flying on aircrafts that I deem unsafe. Additionally, airline and travel websites should be required, by law, to display the safety record of the airplane that will fly me. Finally, if the airlines pull a bait and switch at the airport, the airline should be required to put me on a different flight that meets my aircraft criteria.
But...it very much is if you are looking at software that falls under the group of "operating systems".

There are use cases that realistically warrant enterprise software, but those stem from the argument of optimization of time - for example, not doing all your computation stuff in python with spending upfront time learning it when you engineers know Matlab. But those are not intrinsic to the software, it just so happens that Mathworks funds universities and pushes their product to be taught in classes, so that they can get revenue from companies buying licenses when their engineers enter the workforce.

If colleges switched to teaching with open source software, this would have zero net effect on the capability/knowledge of someone that graduates said program, because all the material is going to be new to him or her anyways. And, it would also increase the userbase of the software, and thus improve it.
> if they can control the costs and get the revenue right and make sure there was no financial fraud

And, you know, cut out the random tequila parties with live hip-hop performances
Also, if you are set on using a geocode system, geohashes and plus codes are open-source, public-domain algorithms, unlike w3w, to avoid issues like [1] which was being discussed on HN yesterday.

[1] https://justpaste.it/39hat
No. The general viability of subleasing as a business is not meaningfully related to the points about whether a subset of WeWork’s current corporate entity can produce a viable business.
That's really the crux of why the AWS offering is "meh". It just needs to be good enough because they don't need to make any extra margin on it. elastic.co has to make money in addition to channeling money Amazon's way.
Quality over quantity. Switzerland is not famous for futuristic factory cities and impressive government projects. Their power is in decentralization, where the issues of a commune are efficiently resolved by local authorities who are the part of it.

Another thing, they have strong universities, with good connection between science and innovations. When I checked their startups, a large share of them focussed on advanced science or tech.

They also attract our (German) best specialists, particularly, doctors :)
I am overjoyed. Because now a truly open and decentralized solution has a chance instead.
Modern web development doesn't use these, and mod_perl is certainly not recommended anymore - CGI still has its uses, but don't use CGI.pm. A modern webapp is written in Mojolicious or a Plack based framework, and they can all deploy transparently via a standalone server, or any PSGI or CGI server, or even mod_perl or fastcgi if you really need to.
A full decision in a good court case is pretty interesting to read too. A judge working through exactly why, in this particular scenario, they have decided to reach the decision they did.

For example Baskin v Bogan + Wolf v Walker (State appeals on Gay Marriage before a Circuit Court that decided to bundle together both cases since they essentially go "Yeah, but, gay marriage doesn't make babies, so it makes sense we don't allow it")

http://media.ca7.uscourts.gov/cgi-bin/rssExec.pl?Submit=Disp...

Now there are two much more famous "Gay Marriage" cases in the US, before the US Supreme Court. The problem is, those decisions are garbage. Windsor is "good" only in that it had the effect Gay Marriage proponents wanted, but the arguments offered by all the justices on both sides feel like weak excuses. Scalia seems to be desperately reaching for reasons why it's OK to do something manifestly unfair that he happens to support, Kennedy and the majority have to do mental gymnastics to explain why a case where one side has no real standing is even allowed to proceed to a decision in the first place (the real reason being: So they can decide in favour of Windsor)

Much older, but very interesting for this reason and with great benefit that it doesn't involve any politics you might worry taint your understanding, would be Carlill v Carbolic Smoke Ball Company in England. Read as three of the best legal minds essentially /invent/ modern contract law to find a path for how to get Mrs Carlill her money from the scumbags who lied to her about their bogus cure for the flu.
EnvKey founder here. Thanks for the mention!

We're hard at work on a v2 that will be self-hostable as well as more powerful, flexible, and robust across the board so that it will be able to handle just about any configuration or secrets management scenario you can throw at it, from small teams to enterprise, while maintaining a simple, it-just-works approach.

In the meantime, our app and client libraries implement true end-to-end encryption that is open source and well-documented[1], meaning that despite our current product being cloud-hosted, we could not access your secrets even if we wanted to.

1 - https://security.envkey.com/
Porsche, Boeing Team Up on Planes in Future Urban Mobility Race