skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I see (heh) the rose-colored glasses with Netflix a lot. Their streaming catalog for licensed content, especially movies, was always pretty sucky. People may remember specific things they used to have that they don't now, but it was always hard to find specific shows and, especially, films if you went searching for them.

I remember mentioning this to a senior Netflix tech guy at the time and his response was basically that people come for the movies and stay for the TV. (This was a bit before the real explosion in premium TV content.)
Ask HN: Starting an Anonymous Blog in 2019?
Hey folks,

I'm asking because I'm curious how one would go about doing something like this in 2019. What are the things you need to think about, and what measures would one need to take to ensure continued anonymity over time. In particular, I'm curious about just information transfer, like a simple, not-for-profit blog.

Since the threat model can get pretty vague, I guess I'm thinking about two main scenarios:

1. Easier case: how to prevent being de-anonymized by curious individuals and specific corporations (e.g., multiple ISP's colluding together may be able to de-anonymize you, but for example a specific company like Google can't).

2. Harder case: ensuring anonymity even from state-level actors.

Thanks!
The Art of Losing Friends and Alienating People
What is "best" probably depends on your current metric for "best". Developer time spent? (Is developer and DBA the same person? How familiar are you with SQL?) Processing time? Amount of data transferred? Readable code? Maintainability? Versioning?

I've also shifted more logic to Postgres recently and keep the queries in the code trivial. It's because I like that SQL is declarative and there's no intermediate state to mess up (the whole query can be processed within a transaction).

As for readability (refactoring) you have several options in
Postgres. Going the PL/pgSQL route probably means you're gravitating back towards procedural code. It does have its uses, but I try to avoid it whenever I reasonably can. Try using language SQL [1] instead. Another option is functions. Can be more readable but likely less efficient (they're a barrier for the query planner), just as PL/pgSQL. I've been mostly happy using nested views (and materialized views) lately. But whenever you can, use CTEs to structure your queries.

YMMV, just providing ideas to think about.

[1] https://www.postgresql.org/docs/12/xfunc-sql.html
As a fellow former U-C resident, I do miss the art theater in town. A bit rundown but definitely has its charm
They're redesigning the architecture and expect to be done by the end of the year? That is insane. The MCAS change was a patch of one fairly isolated system as I understand it. Redesigning the entire architecture of the flight controls seems like a years long process. Is this article correct? If so, I don't think I'll be riding on a MAX any time soon.
Project Silica proof-of-concept stores movie on quartz glass
I'm not sure I buy that. Would you consider doctors significantly poorer than most other professions? Or surgeons at the least.
Or start the camera on the current device, show a code, enter that code on another viewing device.
One feature I'd expect a functional programming language to have is functions as 'first class'. (e.g. can pass as input to higher order functions).

But e.g. PostgreSQL doesn't have functions as a datatype.
https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/datatype.html

So, uh, SQL isn't 'functional', right?
While there's no formal definition of functional programming (that I know of at least), SQL doesn't support higher order functions, which are fundamental to all functional programming languages. That said, it's definitely declarative.
It is extremely difficult to program without a full keyboard. I don't see how this is comparable to exercising at home.
A cursory Google search puts the solar number between 0.4 and 0.8 deaths per TWh.
Building a $6mn ARR business with 50 remotely distributed contractors [audio]
Americans are better off than they were 40 years ago.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.economist.com/finance-and-e...
Kamran Elahian built a touch sensitive tablet in 1989, he explains why it failed
Siri, Ok Google, Please delete all my emails
Yeah, but climate change rests upon radiation absorption, thermodynamics, and a bunch of other 19th century science that was largely unaffected by the 20th century's upheavals in physics.
I never really understood how anyone expected to have a sensible debate on "thing" vs "anything that isn't thing" (I realize "NoSQL" is somewhat better defined than that, but not by much).
In general it's been my experience that if you try to do stuff SQL could do re: reporting or heavy data work in Ruby or Python or some other scripting language in a web application context, you're in for one or both of "why is this thing so damn slow?" and "why is this report crashing the application? (answer: it's eating all the memory)"

I've also seen highly user-visible performance issues because some developer either didn't realize how slow performing a series of queries in a loop would be (didn't understand the network overhead of each request) or didn't know how to condense what they needed to one or two requests. High correlation of this with the ORM-dependent folks.

So far as averaging a few days of stats my gut feeling is "this can just be a view with one or more medium-complexity selects behind it" but maybe there's some reason it can't.

> So instead, I kind of created my own ORM / interface where I can quickly write queries on my own and use those in the code. This is especially easy since most the queries can be written in postgres functions so the strings of those queries is incredibly tiny!

I haven't been in non-Rails Ruby land in quite a while but I remember liking Sequel quite a bit. Very much The Right Amount of abstraction (i.e. barely any) over the DB.
It blocks mine, as well.
Storage can solve any problem, but we don't have good enough solution yet. I agree energy storage research is the highest priority item.
Yes, in theory that's a reasonable position.

The rub is: who decides that it's fake propaganda and misinformation? The Government?
Reminds me of the "hack" that was done to the Samaritan system in the excellent TV series "Person of Interest." Granted, you have to suspend disbelief on many points of AI to enjoy that show but I never understood why they couldn't work around the bug that was placed in the system that prevented the identification of seven people. In the examples cited, like tricking the AI into thinking that a turtle was a gun, there's an easy fix once the misclassification is noticed. I suspect the "t-shirt of invisibility" will similarly be accounted for in the system and that people seen wearing it will be targeted for MORE scrutiny as it could be presumed they are trying to hide in plain sight and that there might be a nefarious reason for it.
Ending Parking Minimums Is the Holiday Gift That Keeps on Giving
That, or this article missed the boat somehow. I find it hard to believe that a total redesign is happening and that they expect to be done by the end of the year. Either this article is wrong, or something is terribly wrong at Boeing.
Interesting observation on "the contract" but I think it's narrow-minded in terms of why books haven't died.

When I hold a paper book, feel the pages, see the ink, it's just a superior experience. They spent money on the ink. Craft went into the model of a book that's been around for a long time. It imparts a sense of importance.

It's easier on the eyes. Writing in the margins is a more educational experience than clicking, highlighting, or saving. It's powerfully personal. Once it's written in ink, Bezos can't change it in real-time before your eyes.

It's a much richer experience.

As a side note, am I the only one who doesn't watch Netflix?

Sometimes I find a show I want to watch that's on Netflix, but then I go stream it elsewhere. Netflix is slow lol.
Christianity's Contribution to the History of Ethics
Rip off of AfterPrisonShow. She ain’t the first felon you tuber
If it helps the homeless and is cost effective, who cares what their motivations are?
I'd much rather read a physical book. Tactile response, dog ears, easier to flip and compare two sections. Just a better experience.

I also haven't read a physical book in a decade due to time and availability. I have gone through hundreds of digital thomes over that same span.
And that is exactly my point: API changes are rarely—if ever—caused by security fixes, and thus are not the cause of breakage, despite you attributing the impossibility of stable APIs to it.

A fixed piece of software can have a limited lifetime for only two reasons: Dependence on ephemeral infrastructure (e.g. cloud services that disappear or change), and assumptions that fail over time (e.g. "the device will never be used after 2020" + hardcoded calendar).

Only the first can be caused by API changes, and the API changes are usually always caused by voluntary product rewrite and infrastructure deprecation, not by security issues.

In other words, the problems spawn from entirely voluntary and technically unnecessary actions, and you cannot claim that is caused by some unavoidable law of nature, such proliferation of security issues.
These do not account for the movement of the ground itself, it wpuld only be a relative measure.
Parkinson's Law – The ‘law’ that explains why you can't get anything done
It goes shows how power the relational model is when a language as bad as SQL can still succeed enormously :)
But not the want to use their own imagination and brains to visualize the world with which they are reading.
NASA Flew Gas Detectors Above California, Found ‘Super Emitters’
Only if the error is distributed evenly.
Doctors are a rare breed. Now that the money isn't what it used to be (for most specialties, and in proportion to the cost of education), very few go into it as a "lifestyle profession". It attracts only the workaholics. Same with law.
This is very interesting! I've not heard about too much water storage despite how fondly it is talked about by some.

For those who want to know more: https://spectrum.ieee.org/green-tech/wind/norway-wants-to-be...
> it is easy to earn $200k to $300k with just a few years of experience

I think this part shows that whether it's easier to make more as an employee or self-employed is highly regional. In large, competitive tech centers, where FAANG companies are, the demand and competition for talent is high and fierce, driving salaries significantly higher than what you might normally expect. The cost of living in such places also tends to be astronomical.

In other places, say medium-sized cities that are not known as tech centers, that dynamic doesn't exist. In my experience, this means that the income you can achieve as a self-employed (and often remote) software engineer far exceeds the general salary "ceiling" of that local region (and I'm talking about North America here, not far-off places). So you may not quite achieve FAANG level compensation (although I'm sure some do), but relative to the cost-of-living you're doing quite well if not better.
> The latest nuclear power plant they've tried to build (the Flamanville EPR) is severely late

it is only late because the managers insisted on marketing and building it on 5 years while the engineers knew that it would be 10 years from the beginning. Pretty sure most people here know this exact situation from their job :-)
(genuine question) What are the best alternatives to triggers? And what makes them a bad idea?

I'm pretty much with you on stored procedures.
Depends what you mean by "programming".

But virtually all query languages are declarative; e.g. GraphQL.
It's legitimately to stop spam. Captchas can be gamed or purchased. IPv6 makes banning IPs futile. Getting a SIM card is the only thing that bots cannot do.

The only other alternative to stop spam is micropayments (at a similar cost to a SIM card). I would actually like to see that as an option instead of providing my mobile number--preferably using Bitcoin because my credit card number is even more confidential than my phone number.
Digital content distribution - as far as movies, music, and books anyone can put up a website, provision some servers and sell content in standardized formats that can be consumed anywhere.

Search - nothing is stopping anyone from going to other search engines. It’s not like Bing is backed by one or two people with no financial backing.

Social networking - the social networks pre- Facebook failed because people chose a better experience.

On none of those cases are corporations forcing people to do anything nor or any of them essential services for which there is no alternative.

And the “definition” does matter. Once people in power can make up their own definitions it leads to government overreach.
This gets close to my point.

Even people working with the standard don't want or don't need to SGML. Similarly for CSS.
>The idea that regulators at the FAA are going to let them fly a dangerous plane "because of the stock market" is absurd.

They already let fly a dangerous plane. Given they have already done so, an explanation like 'stock market pressure' is no longer absurd.
Flamanville EPR is one of the first EPR to be built. Of course it is expensive... It gets cheaper as you build more.
Wow, this is a peak "I bet this guy is fun at parties" moment.

It's all incredibly ridiculous. If this man were really on a "dopamine fast", the conversation still would have ended, but not in the same way.

It would have ended because he would be wiggling around on the floor and making noises like a dying cat. His basal ganglia, starved of dopamine, would not be able to make any of the neural connections they need to coordinate any of the muscle movements in his body, including the muscles needed for speech. This guy seems like he was more interested in informing this person that he was fasting than actually keeping his "fast".

This incident reminds me of the Desert Fathers, the early christian monks who lived in the desert in Egypt. They took fasting very seriously as a way of keeping their religious purity. Many of their parables caution against keeping your fast for show. Here's one:

"Once two brothers went to visit an old man. It was not the old man’s habit, however, to eat every day. When he saw the brothers, he welcomed them with joy, and said: “Fasting has its own reward, but if you eat for the sake of love, you satisfy two commandments, for you give up your own will and also fulfill the commandment to refresh others.”

From "The Desert Fathers: Sayings of the Early Christian Monks" https://www.amazon.com/Desert-Fathers-Sayings-Christian-Clas...
Yeah, that's a different use case than above - I'm fairly certain that's exactly what the family plan is meant to be used for - multiple users in the same household.

Even then it's not great that you have to share the master account password which contains the billing information (maybe they need a read-only and admin password, but now we're complicating it past the "password123" crowd), but really that seems to inadvertently encourage good password discipline - if you don't trust the people using your account, they probably don't qualify as a user on your account.
If you find it easy to live a moderate life, good for you. Many others don't find it easy at all.
Reminder: if an article about breakthrough battery tech touts one of energy density, number of cycles, cost, discharge/charge rate, while conspicuously not mentioning the others there is a good reason for that...
There is no way that the nuclear submarine fleets of the world's countries haven't mapped a significant portion of the seabed since the 1980s when the advanced techniques were invented.

I don't see why that data should be held classified, at least make this project a little bit easier.
You should not try to time the market, but the truth in your claim is that housing has diverged from its underlying value as a high yielding asset. If this is the case because land values have increased beyond present rent value due to demolition controls, restrictive zoning, etc. then you should never expect a SFH to be a worthwhile purchase-cum-asset though hopefully in the future a condo or town home might.
You can argue for days about your favorite index, but the Dow is printed on every financial news channel, every newspaper, every finance and trading site, every evening news show. You are naive if you think the Dow doesn't matter, or that the largest military supplier doesn't have large influence over government and finance.
Where can I buy this merch?
Right... they found a way to economically optimize their product, which is to make/keep people healthy. The result is that the people mentioned are in better health, and that costs are lower.

Of course the company gets to keep some profit as a reward for figuring this out. That's how a market economy works!
So... they reinvented Shabbat?
> plutonium

Modern nuclear reactors don't use plutonium or weapons grade uranium. The ratio of U-235/U-238 is only 3~5% unstable in a nuclear power plant (where weapons grade is over 95%).

Thorium rectors have been experimented with in the US, but they do have problems with corrosion.
> Is it really that important that we only help anyone who “truly” need it — and burn the whole system down to that end?

The welfare queen has been replaced by means testing.
Don't do that. A DB table is too big and complex a surface to use as an interface between multiple applications. Each table should have one clear owner; if multiple components need to access the same table, put it behind a service rather than having them access it directly.
Which is mostly people falling off roofs doing residential solar. It'd be nice to split out residential and industrial solar.
I think storing movie archives is really a nice fit for this technology. Reading/writing data on glass is too slow right now to host applications with interactions. I would imagine read/write movie archive only happens once per month or even years. That said, glass storage should also apply to never-change log data like bank transaction history (or stale blocks in block chains)
My wife and I both graduated from college in 2008, with a lot of student loan debt. That was a bad time time to graduate. We both took relatively low salaries and wages increases were nonexistent for a few years. Combine this will living in an already expensive market, and it was definitely difficult to save up enough to buy a house. We bought two years ago, in a city with a median home value of 580K and high property tax. My wife still pays ~1000 a month in student loans. We are trying to start a family, so we need to think about day care at some point. Student loans + daycare + mortgage is a lot. I feel incredibly blessed and lucky that we both have good salaries and very healthy savings.
Very funny. Care to be more constructive a bit?
They also have a world without smallpox, a world where polio is coming decidedly close to extinction, and a world where cutting your foot on a piece of glass isn't going to mean you die of sepsis. We could lose those things, but we can also keep them, and we definitely never had them before.
Micropayments. $5 bucks to create an account, non-refundable (Bitcoin accepted). Or you can provide your phone number, your choice.
Which computer calculates that there's a disagreement, and how can we ensure it's not indicating a false negative?
I've found that MongoDB is really the Visual Basic of databases: It lets you rapidly get something running where your persistent data looks very similar to your data structures.

But, more importantly, this quote really is right:

> The more I work with existing NoSQL deployments however, the more I believe that their schemaless nature has become an excuse for sloppiness and unwillingness to dwell on a project’s data model beforehand.

Far too many software engineers just don't understand databases and don't understand the long-term implications of their decisions. Good SQL is rather easy, but it does take a few extra minutes than sloppy approaches.

Or, to put it differently, some NoSQL databases are great at rapid prototyping. But, they can't scale and hold little value for someone who will put in the extra hour or two upfront to use SQL.
I'm interested in watching this, but the video seems to have been taken down: "Video unavailable
This video contains content from Octapixx, who has blocked it in your country on copyright grounds."

Is this the same documentary?
https://www.dynamicbrain.ca/the-nature-of-things.html
How the Insufferably Woke Help Trump
"U.S. equities sank after President Donald Trump said the U.S. hasn’t agreed to a tariff rollback with China, dimming hopes for a preliminary trade deal next month."

LOL.
It is indeed horrifying, and the particular products I'm thinking of are indeed from a series of gaming headsets. There are other categories of headsets, speakerphones and the likes that are equally awful, though, which is why I see the problem as universal to products targeting Windows:

There is no scrutiny to stop this idiocy, and the average consumer has no idea why this is bad, and no idea that those blue screens were because of a headset.

Having a connection to said company, I'd rather not name them though.
Gitlab's Director of Risk and Global Compliance Resigns
> But since accounts are personal, do Netflix expect me to watch 4 streams simultaneously on my 4 different devices, using my 4 eyes with my 4 brain halves?

Netflix accounts are not personal. Their terms of use fully support shared use within the same household. That's why they support multiple user profiles per account.
One point got me curious:

>As a rule of thumb, vertical scalability is in most cases more economical than the horizontal one.

Isn't the opposite the reason why we started to scale horozontally in the first place?
Outsourcing is a symptom of the real issue. I don't think outsourcing necessarily causes these problems. Subjugating engineering to a lower class and elevating politics/accounting doesn't really generate great engineered products, go figure.
At some point you have to accept that the best is the enemy of the good. If housing the homeless makes shareholders money, then I say that's an acceptable tradeoff to give people homes. It's not a permanent solution, and it's not an ideal solution, but if it's putting roofs over peoples' heads, it's a move in the positive direction.
I wonder whether the author of Conflict was trying to make an uber-realistic simulation, or a fun game. If the latter, the game was a great success, it's a fantastic game. At some point you have to let chess be chess, you shouldn't add in all sorts of "realistic" rules about how the bishops can try to convert each other using theology or how the king can steal a knight's horse, turning the knight into a pawn but increasing the king's movement range, etc. etc.
How Dreams Change Under Authoritarianism
> Boeing decided to make the two systems monitor each other so that each computer can halt an erroneous action by the other

I thought the whole point was that you needed 3 computers monitoring each other because if you have only two, you can't tell which one is faulty and which one is correct. How can they make it work here ?