skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I used to think The Great Filter as one of the explanations to the Fermi Paradox was just nuts - but sadly the last several years in particular have shown how it's absolutely possible. Apparently civilizations can be too successful.

Then again I suppose one shouldn't be too surprised; it would be easy to argue that Rome fell mainly because it became too successful and turned inward onto itself - much like many parts of our society are - the need for a letter like this to be written is proof there.
Obviously "it depends" but here are a few reasons one may want to use PostgreSQL instead:

1.) *They want to transactionally commit work along with the change that caused it

2.) They are already using Postgresql not using Redis

3.) Requiring users install yet another service(Redis) just for this one item isn't worth the costs
From https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2010/feb/28/clive-sin...

"I don't use a computer at all. The company does."

"So you don't do email?"

"No. I've got people to do it for me."

"If friends and family want to communicate?"

"They can do that. We've got a computer in the front office, but I get someone to do it for me."
If anyone has any doubt about this being something people foresaw in the 90's, read Infinite Jest. My buddy told me it was his favorite book, so I've been slogging through it for a while. It took effort to reach the heart of it, but holy shit there is so much brilliance scattered throughout.

David Foster Wallace basically lays out the creation of Netflix, with the only exception being a miss on instant streams of HD content. He also covers the impact this might have on traditional media and advertising industries.

If you haven't read it, and are up for a book that takes effort, it's really something.
I tend to approach such tasks by just copying and editing a unit that shipped with the os (e.g sshd) — the example the post gives as being problematic is using some timer feature instead of cron and I suppose my question is really: who is doing that anyway?

I know you can rig up systemd to act like inetd or cron, but perhaps you would be better with an actual service (how hard is quartz?) than baking your jobs into systemd units..

That said, I only use Linux in prod for enterprise stuff that depends on it, everything else is on bsd so you can probably guess my opinion on systemd ;)
Postgres in particular:

- has strong performance vs, say, sqlite

- has "channel" and "trigger" support so you can avoid polling (which either slows down your jobs or limits your number of workers)

- is actually OSS (versus, say, mysql)
This study may be biased toward smaller/rural/poorer locales.

In big-city Canada, patients with heart attack symptoms will usually have an ECG done by paramedics before arriving.

In the US, this has quite survival advantage.

https://heart.bmj.com/content/100/12/944

I don’t know if it’s standard practice to do another upon arrival, but it is redundant and should probably take a back seat to activating other processes that need to happen.

It also helps send them to the most appropriate facility.
>your decision process was programmed into your brain by nature & nurture,

But that's asserting the absence of free will, which you can't do in an argument meant to prove the absence of free will. Your interpretation of a free will experiment can't involve assuming a-priori that there is no free will.
That seems to mostly focus on declarations of being non-Jewish which is a thing in some countries and the enforcing of a boycott against Israel.

Technically it could be made to apply to employing people in Russia or China but such restrictions are found with some regularity, if they are problematic that does not just affect GitLab but also lots of other companies.
The lack of clear, thorough, reliable documentation is one of my biggest gripes with systemd.
> They USED to be cheaper for everything, but not for a while now.

Yeah, and their website isn't even that good to boot (search sucks, for instance). I think they're coasting based on customer inertia and market dominance.
If you have to ask then should use them to maintain integrity, only devs who know what they are doing can have the luxury of ignoring them because of sharding, performance, complex schema migrations etc..
Volatile Organic Compounds. Hey, it says "organic" right in the name. It must be good for the environment.
Context!

Here's John's side of the story.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?feature=youtu.be&v=HvjQ3Mx-jWg

Main thread from cmaxw weighing in. No issues with him): https://mobile.twitter.com/cmaxw/status/1187108668606541824

Kim Crayton's oh so enlightened response (scroll to the top): https://mobile.twitter.com/e_p82/status/1187175306010005504

Personally, I find the behavior absolutely unacceptable. Two people can agree to disagree, but if someone flat out rejects coming to the table in the first place, you are in the wrong, which seems to be the MO of John's accusers. Sarah Mei at least is one of the same folks who was involved with the "cancelling" of Richard Stallman.
You bet - the political elites got thoroughly rejected and the resulting temper tantrum hasn't stopped yet!

The next five years should be even more exciting.

EDIT: we really need to stop referring to them as political elites; that's giving them too much credit. The wannabe political elites then - because obviously they weren't as elite as they thought - ha!
Postgres is an acceptable relational database / nosql database / pub/ sub/ job server / blockchain.
I am :) but there's no doubt that cryptocurrency has made ransomware easier to write/execute, makes it harder to catch people responsible, and availability thereof has led to massive worldwide spike in ransomware. [1] Seriously, what options did you have to obtain the value before? A wire transfer?

[1] https://phoenixnap.com/blog/ransomware-statistics-facts
How is MySQL not OSS?
If you are not using systemd, it is not relevant.
It's possible to predict local events with a certain degree of accuracy. The better our models/knowledge and computational capacity the greater the accuracy. We can see patterns on a macro level and exploit them without looking at electrons.
As is almost always the case when there are multiple specs purporting to describe the same thing: politics.

The Ecma spec is meant to be a spec defining a format and its semantics; the RFC places requirements on implementations of that format as well as describing it's semantics.
Nice writeup, @vzhou842.

I feel like part of the problem here is just miscommunication. Victor and Ben seem to be talking past each other.

This line stood out to me:

>>There’s no way to implement Google’s reCAPTCHA in an API.

>That can’t be right - the reCAPTCHA documentation has a dedicated section on Server Side Validation!

I assume what Ben meant was that it's impossible to implement reCAPTCHA entirely in an API. The nature of reCAPTCHA requires you to have a UI element, which would be impossible in an API. Victor interpreted the claim as if Ben said that an API can't support reCAPTCHA, which would be incorrect, but may not be what Ben meant.

I feel like the lead sort of got buried in Victor's report. The headline to me is that abusers are actively automating phony signups with this vulnerability. I don't see that stated explicitly anywhere. The closest is this line in Victor's third email, after the conversation has gotten somewhat heated:

>What good is reCAPTCHA if anybody with a computer can write a script in 5 minutes to spam your email list with thousands of fake signups.

The fact that attackers are exploiting this in the wild seems to be the most salient point, but I'm not sure that Ben knew that from the correspondence shown.
Now climate change is going to affect Islay scotch? There's a line, and then there's a line. So not only is the earth going to gradually become hostile to humans, it's going to happen with dwindling stocks of good scotch...

That said, it's fascinating how much of a carbon sink peat has been. It's kind of staggering, actually. And also frightening it could just dry up and become a constant emitter like that.
I think the past tense form of "sunset" here should be "sunsat".
Did you really think through your argument? If the waste in enclosed in some concrete shell, two hundred meters deep inside bed rock, there won't really be any on-going expenses after it has been deposited. Now one can argue about the method itself, if it's the right way to do it (I think it's a bit overkill), but what you are saying doesn't really make sense based on that argument. The plants themselves of course are expensive, storing the waste for long periods of time not so much.
Those speak to the illnesses but not to this diagnosis.
I think SQL works well for its problem domain and agree with everything you said.

> It's even older than that (around 1979), but being old isn't an argument in itself.

I wanted to add an additional comment on this point. What is it with old automatically equalling bad? I definitely appreciate where improvements can be made, but I think as an industry we incorrectly think there is something wrong with an old/mature technology. Throwing things away just because they are old hinders progress since we're constantly rewriting tested, working code. I'll get off my soapbox now.
Why Do We Tolerate Saudi Money in Tech?
Which tech giant may acquire Docker Inc?
Sure yep, thats like the whole of science. But we can't predict things at the level that people worrying about Free Will worry about. i.e. what people are going to do next. Or what they will be doing in 15 years time. Or going further, the nightmre of determinism is the idea that someones whole life is determined before they are born and so on. That sort of thing is forever beyond the reach of all computation.
> I feel like those with families might not want to spend a week away from the family in <insert-far-away-land>. For a variety of reasons.

There is no obligation (ethically, or legally) for companies to accommodate everyone.

Certain groups, yes. But not everyone.

Vote with your feet.
>Which is exactly what opponents of CoC's have been contending for a long time.

Sure, they can contend that all they want - funny how their actual actions are far more revealing than their words.
Left and right are defined from “1st person’s perspective”, but that’s not how medics typically look at their patients. When a doctor looks a patient in the eye, the left is on the right, and the right is on the left.

That’s why many medical illustrations have the left on the right and vice versa (examples: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatomical_terminology#/media/..., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palmer_notation)
This is not obvious at all, even with deterministic and computable universe there is a good analog of free will.

The first thing that is needed or this to work, is for the part of universe representing the human to be separable from the rest of the universe (this is not true with superdeterminism, which requires choices that experimenters make to be correlated with the quantum states of particles they are studying, but then almost no one takes superdeterminism seriously).

This separability would allow to talk about choice, as it allows to modify or swap the human in question and recompute the future in the same universe where the human may make another choice.

The second thing is the conjecture of computational irreducibility: that is for sufficiently complex systems like humans and for sufficiently long timeframes, the only way to predict future state is to evaluate the system.
This conjecture seems plausible because even cellular automata in chaotic state, do not appear to have any simplified method of evaluation

If this is true, you may be able to easily predict some of the choices human will make based on his state several seconds before that, but for longer time intervals the only way is to let the human live and make the choice (even if it lives in your computer simulation).
SQL Server has Service Broker (my prize winner for most undervalued and unknown feature in a mainstream software product) that does a tremendously good job of solving these types of problems. I can't say how well it scales, but it has done a reasonable job at every workload I've thrown at it.
To be more specific, is it worth learning nowadays?
It used to be much more common when we shipped software to enterprises that required particular databases.

It’s much less common in SaaS environments.
Or "sunsetted".
Judge Says Police Can Search Company's Entire DNA Database
As a full-time native app developer on both platforms for 10 years, I find this argument odd.

It’s trivial to interface existing native code with react-native. I’ve “merged” two existing apps written on both platforms into react-native apps by adding only a small amount of JS (and some native RN interfacing) with removing zero native code on either platform. Likewise, I’ve started with full Javascript apps and slowly replaced the JS with native code where perf mattered or RN was lacking.

You can choose how much “react-ness” is in your app quite easily, and to me this is the real game changer for react-native.
The man pages that ship with systemd seem very thorough to me. The problem is rather that they're very thorough in the first place. They're a very hard, lengthy read and you kind of require to understand all of it before things begin to make sense.
Thanks glad you like it, I am having some fun as well as people join and make noises. Whistling is something people like to do. Maybe start a whistle channel :)
Amazon's logistics are fraudulent. They'll say "Can't access the building" when they never event attempt to deliver. They're gaming the metrics.

Sometimes they'll just outright lie, say the package is delivered, and it will show up in the next 48 hours.
I wish there was actually a complete guide that taught you from the very start. i.e how to establish an entity like a LLC, how to log expenses, etc.
> having to write 'self' on each class method

Um, "end"?

:)
The Deadliest Weapon
Which is linked to in the article.
You do not seem to understand SQL
fun fact :+1:
And presto's rich functionality for complex data types (maps and arrays) as well as window functions makes some pretty challenging things possible.
> And, because they are developers at heart, they will do things to make their job easier and more predictable, like infrastructure as code. And heavy automation.

To be fair, most ops people i know worth their salt have been automating since forever. Doing operations at scale and still staying sane is impossible without automation.

The largests issue in ops is that reality in production is usually far more messy then development. Some minor issue which can be easily fixed in dev by something simple (take a reboot of a service for example) can be a major pain in production because of several factors. Usually related to interdependencies or customer impact.

Also, production (especially on the networking/hardware side) is usually hard because of things like hardware failure, physics itself or simply human error. These gems for instance[1][2].

[1] https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/support/docs/field-notices/636...

[2]https://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail.html
SendGrid famously had our annual full-company trips to Mexico. We kept this going for (I think) 7 years. Eventually, it became impossible to get everyone to the same place around the same time.

The goals were team building (esp. with folks you don't see every day) and company alignment. As we got larger, it was harder and harder to get to know everyone; however, the first couple of years, you came back knowing just about everyone in the company. This was great and helped interacting with people over chat and in meetings. As we continued to get larger, you just couldn't meet everyone, but you could strategically find folks from teams you work with from other locations. Getting aligned on the company direction for the upcoming year always stayed really solid. The trips were more and more jam-packed with meetings each year. Whole day meetings are hard, but it was nice to unwind with coworkers for a few hours each night.

Good times.
We're coming out of an ice age, so it's to be expected that temperatures should be warming naturally and without any human intervention. In fact, it would be very worrying if that weren't the case.

The question though is how much of the current temperature increase is natural or human-caused (e.g. via greenhouse gas released from human activity). Trying to figure out what percent of the warming we're seeing is natural or man-made is a reallly tough question, of course.

In regards to natural drivers, it's tough to pinpoint specifics, but of course ocean cycles, solar cycles, etc. But the reality is we're really not sure what caused the previous ice age we're coming out, nor are we sure (despite what people will say) what are the primary drivers of current temperature changes.

The fact is that climate science is a very difficult undertaking. It's entirely possible that natural temperature increase has flatlined and all the warming is caused by greenhouse gases released by humans, but I find that to be wholly unrealistic. It's significantly more likely that the warming is part natural and part human-caused. Which brings me back to the question of: How much of the warming is attributable to humans vs. natural factors.

I know that didn't fully answer your question of what natural drivers could be resposible, but that's part of the ongoing (not settled) research.
Indeed. This is about residence not about nationality.

As for making this public we are public by default. But we are learning that anything involving countries needs to be communicated with a lot of context. Countries are a core part of people their identity.

In the future any decision involving countries will still be public but the discussion will not be.
The article complains about not getting email when a timer-activated service fails.

Like all software, if you didn't test it to work, why should you expect it to work? Cron can fail silently as well if don't set MAILTO. Not all servers start out with working outbound mail, which is something you have to setup for both Cron and Systemd as well.

I agree the OnFailure= recipe could be documented better, although I found an example easily enough when I looked up how to have systemd timers send email on failure. I use a script which mails the output of `systemctl status` on the service that fails, so I get logs of what happens.

I've a number of questions about systemd on StackOverflow sites and there are definitely some FAQs about best practices related to getting started with setting up services.
No, you'd tie them to the real-world identity of some unwitting mule.
What changed in 1935?
Can you really say this when it is granted monopoly power on the state currency?
>Read their tweets, many of them are openly and proudly racist, sexist and ageist.

Are they really? Or do they just dare to hold views that have nothin to do with sexism, agism or racism but instead just violate the "proper" political orthodoxy?
What is the lifecycle on the batteries? What about the externalities of heavy mining to find the materials for batteries? Isn't it really toxic? Is it even feasible to run the whole world immediately on rechargeable batteries? How much more environmental impact would be levied, as opposed to nuclear plants?
But if they codify best practices, then they won't be able to invent "best practices" on the spot to cover their asses whenever somebody discovers some flaw in their software.

Prime example: the "best practice" of not letting usernames start with numbers is invented on the spot by a SystemD dev to cover his ass: https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/6237#issuecomment-...
Any discussion about free will should probably start with an agreed-upon definition of what "free will" is and what might be needed to confirm that it does or doesn't exist.

I think that's pretty much the issue right there.

h/t Wittgenstein
On Safety Critical Software
Hello! Andy from Holloway here. Super sorry. I swear this isn't malicious, we must be sloppy with our list management. If you email me at andy@holloway.com I'll make sure we get you off the list for good.
(I'm the same poster)

If you know ageism is rampant. Perhaps take this into consideration before selecting the tech industry?

There are other industries which are more family friendly. They might not pay as much, but that's the trade-off. You can't have both.
I really enjoy the high level of comments here generally, unless there's an article that paints a tech company in a negative light. It's the one time I can always count on a large number of apologists showing up to defend them, and I think that bias is something everyone should look withing themselves and address.

When you get as big as Amazon is, along with the cushy tax breaks and cozy relationship with government that go along with that size, your decisions and business practices need to come under closer scrutiny, the end.

On a slightly different topic, the fact that the seller said he was held to binding arbitration made me very sad. I am super excited for these bullshit "binding" arbitration clauses to get shot down in court, they need to go.
There is a really interesting idea in this book, "The Myth of Meritocracy" that we are now forcing ourselves to invest so much into human capital (and his thesis is that most of that investment is a waste in an education / self improvement arms race) that we have to optimize the return of our lives, particularly financially but alos in other quality metrics. I just don't think this is a good way to think about your life.
This is what my neighbors in the Bay Area do. They just don’t care. A better solution would be to reduce waste by banning single use plastic, taxing non-organic packaging (more-so than now), and taxing consumer goods on some combination of weight, volume, non-organic content, and toxic content. None of this is particularly popular, especially in certain communities.
Yes, if we want to eliminate carbon dioxide emissions we should tax or even ban carbon. Why is building nuclear instead of wind and solar "absurd"? France generates over 70% of its electricity from nuclear and it costs them half as much as Germany.

Your wind and solar + gas solution is not a solution. We're still going to be emitting carbon of we are burning gas during the evenings. Energy storage at the necessary scale has not been demonstrated. Nuclear power is known technology. By comparison, solving the energy storage at this scale amounts to saying, "well... we'll figure it out eventually but until then we'll keep emitting carbon."
Easy to say, now that other kind folks have done the heavy lifting to find the problem and publish stories raising it and we've been lucky enough to stumble upon those stories. But, that of course is the problem. Awareness.

But, should it be a problem? Shouldn't we have a basic right to privacy?

We get sold on the need for police to catch "Murderers". But then its "attempted murder". Later it's "attempted violent crimes" 1). Will anyone be surprised when it starts being used by debt collectors to harass you or your relatives?

How long after that before someone figures out how to use it to efficiently ID people with early dementia and to they can target and swindle them?

1) https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/10/genetic-...
> There is a narrative developing about the anti-littering marketing campaigns which I think tries to paint it as a cynical ploy by businesses.

Really? That's just what Big Garbage wants you to think. You're obviously a shill in the pay of the National Trash Association.
Franchise Chess: Star Wars vs. Star Trek vs. Game of Thrones
In a previous startup's offsite, we were attacked by a bear.

While this did lead to a significantly increased esprit de corps at the office, the risks are such that I wouldn't necessarily recommend it.