skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
We started a new SaaS company last year. We use Java + Oracle from the get go.

Last company was very reliant on Oracle, we ran the entire business on a single Oracle instance for a couple of decades.

We had our share of adventures, but over the years never lost a minute's worth of data despite server, hard drive and other issues. We've also had a few scary performance problems, but have always been able to tune the DB to get past them. And once or twice, we've been in a dark place where you are googling for cryptic error codes, and we've always come through. That's a lot of business and millions of dollars earned through having a very reliable database underneath.

For us, the cost equation is whether it's worth learning a new DB. It's not. If you can run your business on a single instance, then on AWS, it's cheaper to stick with what you know than to try and move to a new DB for a few K of saved licence fees.

What's more, using Oracle is a good answer when the PHBs at our customers ask about our stack. No one ever got fired for using Oracle.

So yes, it certainly makes sense to use Oracle for new projects if you are already Oracle experts.

Java is somewhat the same equation as well ;)
I've seen what I remember to be credible information, possibly leaks via something like Wikileaks, saying that there was a tremendous number of US government owned Tor nodes. To the point that it was likely your traffic wasn't actually anonymous. I wish I could remember where I saw it.
Hi dang, thank you for all the work you do as a moderator!

Without the good moderation HN would be a very different platform.
Unless you're in the Cannabis industry and you don't want to worry about 280e
Depends on what you mean by "free will." Natural liberty, moral liberty, ultimate sovereignty...
I have gotten two counterfeit items from Amazon (that I know of, of course). In both cases, A2Z took care of the problem without fuss on my end. (One with a full refund-don't even send it back; the other with "send it back on us or keep it at half price".)

Would I prefer a genuine article assurance? In general, yes. Would I prefer that over a wide selection of products and range of delivery services? Probably not.
floatrock is pointing out the fact that there is a motive for this to be a PR stunt.

I'm not sure that's reflexive cynicism.

I've seen that type of cynicism and it is ugly. It's also ugly to assume there are never ulterior motives, or to disparage someone for questioning something.

I've found that just as there is reflexive cynicism designed to feel superior, there's also reflexive anger to people who go against the current.

floatrock provided evidence and reasoning as to why he questions the validity of this event. He never put blanked statements and didn't even accuse the event of being fake. He merely pointed out it might be.

Your comment is something I'd think of as reflexive anger toward cynicism. There wasn't any real weighing of evidence or deep consideration. Just a general dislike toward cynicism.

BTW: I understand the word reflexive to mean: without thought and consideration, automatic and many times pre-programmed (i.e. prejudicial either toward cynicism or against it)
formaldehyde is, incidentally, my absolute least favorite chemical to work with.

Formailin (37% formaldehyde solution) is still used for tissue preservation and it absolutely reeks to high heaven. The stink clings to my clothes, too. A good respirator helps, but it can only do so much.

Normally you have to have a few sulfoxide bonds in things to make them epically stinky, but formaldehyde finds a way to do without and still offend.
Reinvent Home Screen of Google Chrome
My TC is significantly lower(half) but we aren't public and not a FAANG so.

Living in Seattle on two high incomes(maybe not relative to you, but still) and having no kids was amazing. Paid off about 80k of student loans in a short amount of time. However, the prospect of having a massive 500k-1m mortgage in a boom or bust town was just too much for me. Here, If the housing market flipped upside down and my house magically worth 0$ id still come out alright! It's that, plus I can afford my housing while working at Starbucks(exaggeration) that gives me peace of mind.

I will say though, if Seattle's housing market crashes I'd be back in a heartbeat. I miss the water and the mountains!

Also FWIW my company is remote first, and I get paid the same in Seattle as I do here.
> I would honestly like an option to "compile" python to check for typing inconsistencies

You can use mypy for that: https://github.com/python/mypy
I'm tempted to block Youtube at the router (at least between specific times) because I find it is far more addictive for kids that I remember the TV used to be. The good thing about old TV with 4 channels is that most of the time it was boring, so you'd turn it off and go do something else. Kids TV would stop at about 6pm for the news (IIRC).
>>getting sucked into the "look how awesome mirrorless camera

It is definitely a double edge sword but being obsessed about something and pursing it to no end could lead to extraordinary results. Lots if not most of great accomplishments have been done by people that would just not let something go.
One of the most noticeable differences for me is how much copyright cebsorship there is on google now. For many years it was possible to find a stream for most popular stuff on the first page of google, but now it can be quite challenging to find anything worthwhile. Google has ended up efficiently delisting all the good pages, leaving only attack sites and endless popup ad circlejerks for their users. It's night and day compared to ddg.
> Shouldn't I be accountable for my own actions and lack of impulse control instead of expecting a corporation with an ad-revenue business-model to do it for me?

Not every brain works the same way. In fact, every brain is certain to work differently. Plenty of people may not have the same impulse control you have, and it's not their fault.

We believe we have agency, but this depends on the underlying inputs to our knowledge base. When the inputs are manipulated and result in new assumptions, the decisions we make are invariably influenced and often in ways we don't expect. This is also the root of concepts like unconscious bias.

Tldr: probably not, because you cant control your inputs anymore.
regulate the corporate monopoly that has taken over some significant percentage of terrestrial tv eyeball time with a video sharing website?
Either their elementary school is in session for an awful long time (mine was 6 hours), or they have a really long bus ride home.
It's very elegant implementation, I wonder though if it's accurate to call it "uncensorable" when there's a single point of failure? Given that searching or seizing the machine hosting the site is still possible (even if that's just by coincidence)? Obviously for the side of the aisle here who are thinking of criminal uses, that's a feature not a bug, but for a dissident who is disappeared that looks different...
postulate: suggest or assume the existence, fact, or truth of (something) as a basis of reasoning.
I get where you are coming from, and the cost of upkeep can certainly be high, especially on older homes.

But surely the cost of
(apartment rent + other associated costs) * however many months
is going to be higher than
(cost of house + interest from mortgage + upkeep + increased utilities) - (eventual price you sell it for)

The apartment situation you will always be negative, whereas even if you only end up selling your house for the same price you bought it at, you've only paid for interest + upkeep + utilities. The interest + upkeep are certainly not insignificant, but when your rent is as high as the mortgage cost, surely buying has got to be the better option over the longterm.

But maybe I'm just fooling myself.
one of the elements of a crime is the formulated intent.

if you kill someone with the intent to do so, you are commiting murder. if you didnt intend to harm someone, but were intentionally negligent with your parking brake and someone dies, you didnt intend to harm , thus notmurder, but manslaughter, or negligent harm of some sort is the crime.

these people didnt intend to cross the border illegally, most certainly the passengers didnt, and i would estimate, they all would have surrendered to inspection and turned around to disembark,given the choice
> Free will is an illusion but you can continue to postulate otherwise.

Then you won't be mad at me for down-voting your comment? It wasn't my choice!
I understand that some people are more sensitive than me, and they want to feel protected from the things that trigger them. But sometimes they ask things without taking into consideration how their demands would affect those that aren't like them.

In the same way that each one of your (positive) rights is just someone else's obligation, every case of censorship is someone else's lack of freedom. While YouTube is not a state institution (hence they're not morally obligated to cater to anyone's needs, or be a platform for any kind of video), they want to make money, and if their best way to make money is through automatic recommendations, then I'm afraid that YouTube is not for people that don't like automatic recommendations.
How exactly do minecraft videos on youtube replicate a skinner box?
YouTube has far bigger issues in how it handles copyright claims. Right now a firm can unilaterally shutdown any channel and abuse of the system is a daily occurrence.

Another issue is in how they're now demonetizing any piece of content that mentions anything remotely controversial, making it even less profitable to do any kind of journalism. Want to talk about the Kurds in Syria? Be prepared for having the video be immediately demonetized.

The recommender system comes far third in this list, in my opinion.
No. Taleb is saying that IQ is only useful for detecting mental deficiencies. He claims that the while having a low IQ is generally predictive of low life success (income, etc.) having a high IQ is not very predictive of having high life success.

As others have pointed out, the same can be said of height and success in professional basketball. If you come across a short person, you can practically guarantee they cannot make it in the NBA (i.e. height is a strong predictor). For someone who is very tall, You can't really know from that whether they are a successful pro basketball player (i.e. it is not a strong predictor).

This issue here, in both height and IQ, is that people who have more of some capacity have more options. Someone who is smart enough to be a brain surgeon still has the option to be a dish washer. Someone who is only smart enough to be a dish washer does not have the option to be a brain surgeon.
The thing is, as a meetup organizer, I prefer someone who shows up but doesn't sign-up to someone who doesn't show up at all. At least for ongoing attendees and I host weekly and monthly "hobby" events when once someone shows up once, they don't have much incentive to sign-up for future meetup events and that's fine for everyone. I still don't mind paying for meetup because it's a way for new people to find the event.

But in that situation, attendees paying meetup is absurd but in just about any situation, attendees paying meetup is absurd. Meetup already has an option to have attendees to pay the organizer for attending. They might consider that for the events where this option isn't used, it is realistically because this could not work, you can't get money from people for that stuff.
Purging voter rolls is something parties can do tactically to help improve their chances of winning.
For instance, in Florida:

https://twitter.com/grascarp/status/1184049934653427712

The GOP learned a long time ago that if you win it doesn't matter how dirty you are. You're not going to prosecute yourself after all. By the time the leadership changes hands everybody will have forgotten about it.
> tl;dr the early starting times were to make teachers happy.

I've wondered about adverse section being the cause of this. People that don't wake up early typically won't become teachers. Eventually all your teachers and staff are 'morning people' like my dad. My dad loved going into work at 6am. And getting home at 3 or 4pm.
I can't respond to the original poster, but I can respond here.

1. UFOs are definitely real, the definition is merely Unidentified Foreign Object. Same for UAP, which is Unidentified Aerial Phenomena. The Navy, confirmed, that the videos are real and they haven't figured out what caused the images or what the object was. This doesn't mean it's confirmed outer terrestrial, however. Or, that there is a huge cover-up. They are interested in figuring out what they are.
2. I believe he is referring to the recent Jeffrey Epstein investigations.
Ergotism
At what point does Twitter restricting world leader tweets become election interference and foreign policy interference. Will Twitter have to register as a foreign agent in Europe?
Self reporting is a thing for citizens. Some unmanned crossings have phonebooths that directly connect to an agent.

Edit: I'm not sure that these still exist as a standalone thing. They may have been phased out after 9/11.
It would be nice if it were possible to not have it load Material Design by default. It's a bad idea in general for people to build their products with Google's visual branding. It basically paves the way for Google to become the entire platform.
There is the narrating self and the experiencing self. The narrating self makes up stories from the information that the experiencing self feeds to it. The important thing being that the experiencing self cannot judge, it just... experiences. Takes in every bit of sensory information and let’s the narrating self make up the story it thinks matches the experience one goes through.

Now, imagine the sensory overload you get when stuck on YouTube, showing those reviews, unboxing videos, whatever to you - or more precisely, to your experiencing self. At some point your narrating self will make up the story and then you end up paying 15k for camera equipment... of course, it’s your choice, right?

EDIT: https://medium.theuxblog.com/the-peak-end-rule-ff7246115248
> At the risk of being vehemently downvoted I gotta say this is terrifying. Not because Mozilla is trying to hold YouTube responsible for not doing a better job fine-tuning their addiction-machine (who hasn't found themselves sucked into the one-more-video vortex) but because we're now happy to blame some algorithm for our shortcomings and take no personal responsibility for our actions.

Much as I am confident about my ability to keep Youtube from turning me into a hate-spewing misogynist who needs to be made persona non grata at Bass Pro for the common good, I have no confidence at my ability to dodge bullets from more mediocre minds who go that route by way of Youtube.
Good luck trying that during the election cycle. That'll be basically political self-immolation not just for Twitter but for the rest of censorship-happy Big Tech.
There's shared responsibility with any product/consumer relationship so I think the point is that YouTube is not owning up to theirs. IMO, pretty fair argument to make when you think about people who are not in tech.

We hold cigarette companies responsible for letting us know their products may cause harm. We hold food and beverage companies responsible for what they put on their labels. We label coffee cups with a "Hot!" warning.

I hear you on personal responsibility, however, I think that comes from a place where you have or had time and space to educate yourself on this (apologies: using "you" very generally here and don't mean to imply you specifically). Most readers here have deep experience with YouTube and the consumer web--I've been on the web since Compuserve in the mid 90s and a hundred people who read this thread can one-up me. Think about how many people are coming onto the web for the first time. YouTube is a source of truth to them. They're told that Facebook has a "News" feed--and that's what they think is in their feed: literal and true news.

I'm trying to consider it from that perspective. My first reaction is to say: if you don't like it, just ignore it. If you don't want to get addicted to something, don't try it. It's up to you, as an individual, to own your life. I still feel that to be true, however...

I'm still considering how I feel but I think it's more complex than that my gut reaction indicates. We're not making decisions just for the informed 10% and I do think there is ground to be given up by the platforms.
I'm curious why you think I would care in the first place if that's your attitude.
I really don't have "Youtube Regrets", I do have lack of content syndrome though.
It really isn't that difficult to spend an afternoon or a weekend curating playlists of content for your kids, the difficulty comes from the recommended feed, which can show things wholly unrelated to the video. It's trivial to set up a script to remove the feed on PC, but on mobile it's another story and I'm not sure many parents want to go through that mess.

Sounds like there is a selling opportunity there.
Do you know the slack (if any) for this batch? (2020 winter). I recall last one applicants joined a slack to follow up real time as results pour in. Wondering if there is a link for the same thing.
One Way to Keep the Sidewalk Clear: Remote-Controlled Scooter-Bots
e.g.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BWFLztKBrLY
And since we all know who is the world leader this is aimed at - seems like Twitter is begging for regulation as retaliation strike.
In the Terraform use case, that is probably possible if you hack together an analysis of the JSON policy files generated by the Terraform module and then allow/warn/deny based on the results. Alternatively, you could run the IAM analysis portion of this tool after Terraform apply.

I should also mention that the IAM authoring aspect of this tool is more mature than the policy analysis feature.

In CI/CD, if you are using Terraform, I suggest using Open Policy Agent for blocking access to certain resources by evaluating a Terraform plan. I suppose it's also possible to use OPA to evaluate the JSON output of a policy_sentry YML file.

Hope this helps.
And when you do “architect an agnostic solution” you now have the worse of both worlds. You’re spending more on hardware than bare metal and you’re spending just as much on management and development time”.

Just because AWS spent years both creating an alternative to Oracle and millions migrating, doesn’t mean that your company is.

No matter how often some bushy tailed developer tells the CTO that they used the “repository pattern and standard sql”, they aren’t going to move away from their six figure+ Oracle installation. The risk of regressions are too high and the benefits are usually not worth it.
As far as I can tell, this doesn’t reset the algorithm for YT recommendations for your account.
> we're now happy to blame some algorithm for our shortcomings and take no personal responsibility for our actions

Seems like a bit of a strawman?

> Shouldn't I be accountable for my own actions

Certainly, and those using algorithms to direct human behavior have accountability as well, wouldn't you say? Are they not accountable for their behavior?

Wouldn't it be rather opposed to the way we think about most products and services if those implementing algorithms were held exempt from all consequences or responsibilities of putting their product into the world?

Surely you acknowledge that algorithms wield incredible power? Or else we wouldn't be having this discussion nor would the world's most powerful corporations be investing vast resources into using algorithms to further their goals?
I think mostly it's scary because it's free and incredibly accessible: Anyone can get addicted, and you don't need money, a drug dealer, or any of those things to fall down a rabbit hole.

Yes, you should be held accountable if you watch 2 hours of youtube a day, but I think that there's a difference between a legal obligation and the right thing to do. Yeah, google doesn't HAVE to do anything. But they really should. It's the right thing to do.
It comes up somewhat rarely but it is useful at times. But of those rare times, it is exceedingly rare to require any more complexity than you've shown above, such as having two assignments in one statement.

That was the reasoning given for using ":=" instead of "as", to allow more complexity. I still think it was a mistake.
This true for other countries or just the US?
I wonder if there aren’t multiple us agencies competing for a majority share Unbeknownst to each other, all of them limiting the abilities of the others, all of them making it a better platform for those wishing to remain anonymous
There are a number of compromises you have to make when you decide to live alongside millions of other people with wildly different viewpoints.
Mozilla is just so consistently off the mark with every new product offering they make. They have top-tier engineering talent but leadership seems completely out of touch and irrelevant.
You can see at least the first half of any Tor circuit, though, and more-often-than-not I get mostly nodes with IPs from European countries. Are those US-Government-owned nodes, that just happen to be in Europe?
True. Starvation is a big problem. I don't know if software can even help here, but do you know of companies taking such an approach to solving this?

Thanks for the pointer about the internet. I will check out Project Loon and Internet.org.
I've paid cash for all my houses. I paid off my student debt within a couple years. I did live in the Bay Area and LA as well briefly and realized it was a dead end financially, mentally, morally, and spiritually.

Anyone with enough smarts to create great products is going to have enough smarts to check out of the system and live in a great place instead of a shithole with blow jobs in the streets and heroin needles on the sidewalks, while paying through the nose for the privilege.

And this is the problem the venture capitalists can't seem to face. Good. Let them die and burn in hell.
This is a good explanation of the situation OP went through.
Every database has non standard functions, syntax, and behaviors.
I know an older couple, good people who are the kindest, most thoughtful neighbors one could ask for. I've been called over to help with various technical issues, and when I see their YouTube recommendations my heart sinks.

The entire feed is conspiracy theory videos which have led them to believe some really awful things. Virtually any tragedy in the news has some conspiratorial take; the victims are actors, it was a false flag operation, the school doesn't exist. Over time the viewer builds up the impression that every news story is meant to deceive them, and then completely loses their ability to judge truthfulness or apply skepticism.

I've even heard them talk about leaving their idyllic home because of misplaced fears. For the rest of their lives they will believe the awful lies that YouTube has served them.
Mind the Secret Bunker
> I have files that are 10k lines long and think they are better that way

Whether you prefer this practice stylistically or not doesn't change the fact that it is objectively worse in terms of code quality and maintainability, even if you are able to compensate for those deficits with your own skill/experience.

You might have no problem successfully navigating that code for which you've already built a complete mental model around, but any future collaborators or inheritors of that code will have to waste hours or days rebuilding that mental model which you could have just codified in the structure of the source code.
Yep, it's surprising how much performance you can get when you're not paying Oracle millions for licensing.

A lot of people who think Oracle is amazingly fast, think so because who puts a million dollar DB on thousand dollar hardware? Put any major DB on equivalent hardware and you'll get some pretty damn good performance.