skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
We will never forget that Parliament burned the tally sticks.

We will never forget that FDR banned private ownership of gold.

We will never forget that Kennedy killed the silver certificate.

We will never forget that Nixon killed Bretton-Woods.

We will never forget that bankers and financiers repeatedly take advantage of moral hazard, producing bubble economy crashes, such as the 2001 dot-com bomb and the 2007 subprime mortgage bust. Remember tulip mania? That was in the 1630s. Cleverfolk have been running market-wide financial scams for 400 years of recorded history, from a position of leverage near the controllers of money.

The problem is that governments everywhere have always been taking away control of money from the public, and transferring it to parties that either operated with complete impunity already, or became effectively unchecked once they controlled the money.

The function of money in civilization is too important to allow any one party to put a fence around it, to start collecting tolls whenever it so much as twitches.

While current cryptocurrencies don't yet do it well, it is theoretically possible that everyone in civilization could issue their own scrip, circulate it in trade via a trust web, and later redeem it for the goods and services that they provide, without anyone ever physically printing onto forgery-resistant notes. The credit function of trade would no longer belong to banks and their credit scores, but whether the people who know the people you know believe that you can honor your commitments. The futures, trading, and securities function of markets would no longer belong to financial firms.

We don't need to lobby anybody. We just need to use money that destroys itself if too few of the participating entities can collectively control too much of the system. If anybody tries too hard to be Visa or Mastercard, they end up with x% of nothing instead of x% of everything.

...So cryptocurrencies definitely have an advantage as fertilizer for bullshit libertarian pipe dreams, if nothing else.
Why are they loads better btw? I think in composable commands, being able to cat my logs without first setting them up to pipe to a syslog is something I very much want...
We need TCP over SMS!
Have you read a paper saying we can't scale those solutions? Can you think of a rational reason they can't be scaled?

The problem isn't "can't". Storing energy is trivial. The problem is cost. How much storage is required, and how much will it cost to build it, and how much will that make the total cost of a new energy system?

All this "can't" stuff is, frankly, reactionary bullshit by some very emotional people who are rather in love with the idea of nuclear energy. That's why you never see hard numbers attached to it.
> Apple outright banning Electron-powered crap is the best reason I've heard yet for buying my new iPhone.

The article is about the Mac App Store, not the iPhone App Store. Not suggesting Apple's motives is "a good thing" but lets be accurate before going off on one.
How do you lose money on content you already own? This is just Hollywood accounting in effect.
As a native Apple Swift app developer, this doesn't bother me too much. I tend to like Apple for the same reasons that many people hate them.

That said, I spent a significant part of my career writing cross-platform SDKs, and am quite aware of the business case for hybrid apps. I think there are many places where they make a great deal of sense.

In fact, just a couple of days ago, I suggested that a developer replace a set of apps that I wrote in Swift, along with a powerful SDK, with apps written in Ionic, because I thought that the use case made sense for that.

I just like writing fairly restricted-domain, local apps that are optimized for the end-user, and that often interact with devices, so using hybrid apps doesn't really make sense for me (they are optimized for the developer; not the end-user).
Anecdotally I've had both "delivered-not-delivered" and "office-closed-not-closed" happen at work while I'm setting in plain view of the parking lot and office.

Haven't had that issue working from home but now everything seems to come UPS or USPS; I haven't had deliveries from Amazon drivers. Not sure why.
It isn't a power management API. AFAIK Chrome is bridging in its cross-platform rendering at a late stage into CALayer, and the internal functions override CoreAnimation's handling of redrawing dirty layers.

Similarly, it is using internal functions to map mach ports onto file descriptors because their cross-platform bits do not understand mach ports.
> Don't enforce FK relationships with a constraint in the DB. Make sure the values in both tables which may be joined are consistent by using application code to enforce this.

For those reading at home who aren't good with databases. This is exactly the same statement as:

"Don't enforce valid inputs on the backend. The javascript front-end will enforce it for us".

Always validate your inputs at the appropriate layer. Your backend can never trust input from a web front-end (even if there is "only one web front-end"). Likewise, your database should never trust input from its clients (even if there is "only one client"). Ignore this rule at your own peril.
It's not a product, it's a service. A table is a product, a chair is a product, an actor doing his job is a service and has been a service ever since people were filling up the Epidaurus theater ~2,300 years ago.
Scientists are trying to create non-hallucinogenic psychedelics
I am getting old and I am also finding I have just settled to languages I feel hit that balance for me.

Racket for general programming (It really is the best for people learning to program and also great for making fun programs that is super easy to install on multiple of computers)

R for statistics especially since I found the functional backbone of the language.

Go for backend work.
> Why in the fuck do I have to pay a publisher to submit homework to my professor?

The argument is that it makes it easier for the professors/teachers to grade homework when they're submitted electronically. Of course, that's a stupid argument since part of a professor's job is teaching students, and that inevitably involves grading things. Few professors would be convinced by such an argument though.
Because you don’t pay Apple to perform the necessary engineering investment to expose SPI as API. And the people who do pay Apple don’t care about this.
Ahead of layoffs, WeWorkers demand compensation for lost equity
>it looked so promising. But they couldn't have a good thing going.

The shareholders demand constant growth.
Sounds like you need a better government!
I can't remove Python 2 from my systems (yet)
I'm not sure if I understand.
What you're not taking into account is that hydroelectric power production facilities are currently sized only for the gravity-driven amount of water that reaches their reservoirs. Without making the reservoirs any larger, or adding any additional dams, you can simply add lots more turbines and pumps to the existing reservoirs and get a lot more power production out of them.

Consider that the vast majority of the pumping would be to even out the daily power cycle (the "duck curve"), whereas reservoirs are sized to hold years' worth of water. The amount of water pumped back uphill during the peak solar output of the day would be a negligible amount of water to the overall reservoir, and then you'd run it down through additional turbines in the evening to produce power.
I think they mean if your comment refers to lines 310 to 313, you can explicitly specify that range instead of having to arbitrarily select 310 and let the reader infer that you mean the following lines too.

(On a side note, I'd observe you may not be able to rely on reviewers consistently and accurately specifying the exact range they mean. It would be like assuming that nobody makes spelling errors in emails.)
In what way does sharing make it impossible to have database enforced referential integrity?
> At the point where a startup is being valued at 800M (and therefore raising rounds of ~100M?) are the founders still making 150k?

Yes.

> At this point, wouldn't your business have hundreds of employees?

Also yes. Why does this imply you'd be making more than $150k?

In most places outside of SV, $150k is enough to qualify as "Affluent".
if you use Postgres on AWS, you'll easily exhaust IOPS with this and hell breaks
Depends where. I'm at Amazon, and they are really serious about not letting DS become just business analysts who just SQL/Python. But elsewhere I do get the impression there is some dilution. Although honestly, that's natural. Just like how in the SDE world there are template web devs and hardcore infrastructure guys, who get paid massively different amounts but have the same job title, that's happening to DS.
It's Apple's call, isn't it? On what they allow and don't allow on their stores and platforms. It is the end-consumer's call, that they are happy with the product functionality and ecosystem that Apple enabled/allowed. Then the developer's call is to support a platform or not - a business decision, really.

I prefer not to support Apple, personally, but if it represents a 40%~60% uplift in sales, and after their rake, 25%~50% in earnings, at some point, I'm probably going to invest in that. If not, then, not.

I'm baffled that anyone thinks that any corporation "should" operate any particular way (as long as they are not breaking the law). Government, sure - everyone is probably entitled to that, but otherwise, why not just "walk away"?
Why Everyone Working in DevOps Should Read the Toyota Way
If you're in the US, those DVD rips aren't actually legal. You can only format shift audio recordings. You also had to use a circumvention device to make those rips so they're DMCA violations.
But then you can't send texts if the other person's phone is off, out of range, or otherwise without service...

and I think you mean backwards, SMS over TCP.
This is about reducing the number of message delays before the commit succeeds. Failure scenarios have to be handled to be correct, but this is a performance optimization primarily from what I can see.
They are forced to use JavaScriptCore, in the sense that you can't execute JIT-compiled code except for within that one blessed, sandboxed framework.

I don't believe they have ever been limited in porting, but have decided the performance hit for using their own javascript engines (or compatibility issues in leveraging Apple's) aren't worth the effort.
TBF, Electron doesn’t sell itself on performance. It sells itself of minimizing redevelopment cost to support multiple platforms.

However, performance is not a “pit of success” feature with Electron, and Electron doesn’t exactly advertise that performance requires explicit effort, so it’s fair to put some (not all, but some) blame on Electron for implicitly encouraging the perception it is a “silver bullet” solution for cross-platform apps.
I didn't say never care about scale in the early stage. I've found it a more common problem that people in startups are building systems with too much complexity to solve problems they faced at previous employers, in order to "save themselves time" in the future that ends up never coming. There are certainly some technology companies for which scalability is the most important thing - Instagram being the biggest example I can think of. The point of me saying so was to remind people - despite what you may think, you are not an Instagram, and more than likely your business doesn't require you to be one.

Plenty of early stage tech leads DO use wordpress and rails because their company doesn't need something more. You just don't hear about them often because they won't be sexy enough for HN. YAGNI.
> It eats a little more ram but it is more stable.

It also eats a lot more cpu cycles:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xNDnVOCdvQ0
Apple really doesn't care about those $100/year or even all the hardware all developers in the world together buy. So you have to wonder why they require people to jump through these hoops, and a wish to focus on native, high-quality software does seem to be the best explanation I can come up with.
The violation may have been the lack of appropriate reporting. [1] mentions that "unsanctioned boycotts" must be reported.

Later in the comments she mentioned that the contract in question was screened and found to not actually be considered a relevant event for anti-boycotting laws. So whatever her initial concerns were, they were allayed by an actual review of the relevant request.

Reading through the conversation as a whole, it appears that the customer/contract in question didn't explicitly request Gitlab to take the course of action they decided on. Gitlab proactively decided that the action just happened to be a crude but effective way to comply in a timely fashion with the data restrictions the customer wanted, since their infrastructure itself currently doesn't have granular enough security controls around data access to comply with what the customer request was.

[1] https://www.bis.doc.gov/index.php/enforcement/oac#whatmustbe...
I'm always amused by people who use those clickbait titles originating from Daily Mail, just to make shit storm and for few minutes of fame. Something like this should be banned from HN and many other mediums, but sadly this will never happen... :(
That'll be a feature. Service workers are web-based workarounds for what should be a native application...
What is your point? That database constraints cannot catch all errors, so don’t even bother with the ones they can catch?
Another great innovation it has over chess is making people pay hundreds if not thousands of dollars per year to the creator. I'm only being half sarcastic here; monetization seems like a difficult aspect of game design for an "analog" game like this.
I think every single platform is struggling with this. Even Electron or Chromium itself. They all have internal or private APIs or things that are not ready for prime time or just plain internal details.

Opening up private APIs is a commitment that you will support those. Which is no light decision.

Personally I think it is fine for any platform to have these.

But I do wish that the App Store rules around them were more permissive.

From Apples perspective: look at all the shit they are getting for dropping 64-bit support. This was known for a decade and they still are pictured as the bad guys who don’t support developers. A decade!

So you can imagine what happens when apps relying on private APIs suddenly break.
Plover has the great drawback that you need a complete dictionary for it for any language you want to use with it, because it's based on phonetics.

I have dabbled in creating an orthographic stenography solution for international use, but never quite finished it: https://github.com/kqr/qweyboard

If I could be paid to work half a year (or just a month or two) to work on anything I wanted, this would be it.
> If you don't want to plant seeds and build cabins (always a viable option), get busy doing something others will pay enough for.

How will you buy the land to build your cabin and plant your seeds on? We live in a system where all of the land is already owned.

> All one need do is work 25 minutes mundane labor a day to afford 3 square meals per day

This is just so wrong... Again, you can't have a healthy diet with 3 dollars a day. You also can't keep a job if all you earn is food money - you also have to have a place to live and shower, you have to have clean, non-raggedy clothes, a car, gasoline, maintenance for the car and maybe washing machine, health insurance so your life doesn't crumble at the smallest sign of disease, and possibly others. These are all necessary in order to even have that job which you claim lets you eat for 25 minutes of work a day.

> Collecting garbage, cleaning floors, etc has value - that's why we pay people to do it. Is it really worth more than ~$7.25/hr? would you pay someone $20/hr to do it?

Your thinking about this the wrong way around. Nobody would be willing to collect garbage for 7.25 if they had some alternative. It is essentially a job of desperation. So, it is vital for us as a society that there are always enough people desperate enough that they are even willing to collect garbage to make some money.

And in a worker driven job market (by which I mean, a job market where employers compete for workers, instead of the current economy, where mostly workers compete to find employment), garbage collection would be a high-paying job, precisely because it is absolutely vital for any community, and no one really wants to do it.
> The way you construct sentences, the types of words you hyphenate, the way you spell words, the words you select, etc.

There are ways of countering these kinds of analyses. A search for "defeating stylometry" turned up this link: http://www1.icsi.berkeley.edu/~sadia/papers/adversarial_styl...
> I didn't think PDF files could contain executable code.

Sadly this is how most attacks against {file formats, protocols, standards} work.

- Lots of parts of the Unicode spec (LTR/RTL swap, phishing attacks with homographs)
- Interpretation of character set by browser+server
- XML External Entities to do XXE
- YAML references to create YAMLBombs
- Zip massive compression ratios to create ZIP bombs
- JWT where user assigns no encryption algorithm
- PHP accepting URLs from user then piping them to PHP filters
- file upload with polymorphic files
- file upload where filename suffix doesn't match magic bytes

> Are PDFs as attack vectors common?

This is not news. PDF-based attacks against Acrobat / Acrobat Reader, FoxIt, etc have been common for over a decade.

> Files based on Reader were exploited in almost 49 per cent of the targeted attacks of 2009[1]

> According to a newly released report by Symantec's MessageLabs, malicious PDF files outpace the distribution of related malicious attachments used in targeted attacks.[2] (2011)

> JavaScript and XFA Forms / Adobe LifeCycle[3]

[1] https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2010/03/pdf_the_most_...

[2] https://www.zdnet.com/article/report-malicious-pdf-files-bec...

[3] https://www.sentinelone.com/blog/malicious-pdfs-revealing-te...
Keep in mind that there is a large percentage of intelligent people that believe we will solve the transportation problems in Los Angeles by building tunnels underground that transport individual cars on tracks. The fact that so many people believe that Uber and Lyft solve transportation rather than making it worse is just the tip of the iceberg of delusion.
Damn, this letter really highlights the sad state of things :/
So bosses have just always driven their engineers to insanity with over commitments!
That's an unreasonably huge leap for the audience to make that connection.
The only difference is there are stricter rules for gross copyright infringement.
You can keep saying that, but it does not make it true. Properly modeled data does not need those constraints. Well written software handles these correctly. Mediocrely written software fails and complains loudly. Badly written software might get hosed. You're at just as much risk (or more, in my opinion) of that with bad schema changes as with not having foreign key constraints.
Maybe I'm using the wrong verbiage, but I don't see the difference. If the "rules of conduct" extend into your personal life outside the venue, how is that not the same?
Adding a foreign key to a massive table can take a long time, since all existing row data must be validated against the constraint. With logical replication, long operations like this can be quite disruptive, even with a multi-threaded logical replication scheme.
Amen. When I read that paper, it was clear that the author's definition of modularity was very different from my own.

When I think about an algorithm like merge sort, mini-max decision trees or other low-level algorithms, the concept of modularity doesn't even enter my head. It doesn't make any sense to modularize an algorithm because it is an implementation detail; not an abstraction and not a business concern.

Modularity should be based on high level business concerns and abstractions. The idea that one should modularize low-level algorithms shows a deep misunderstanding of what it means to write modular software in a real-life context outside of academia.

It seems that FP induces confusion in the minds of its followers by blurring the boundary between implementation details and abstractions. OOP, on the other hand, makes the difference absolutely clear. In fact, the entire premise of OOP is to separate abstraction from implementation.

Referential transparency is not abstraction, in fact, it goes against abstraction. If your black box is transparent in terms of how it manages its state, then it's not really a black box.
JavaScript Party 101: We Should Rebrand JavaScript. Yep? Nope?
Why do 3rd party sellers matter?

They are just middlemen. It is a good thing that they are going away.

It results in power prices for consumers.
This has never been a good argument if you look at what happens inside an ecosystem owned by a trillion dollar business.
I partially agree with @notadoc that it's basically not good, but also his criticisms could be fleshed out.

As for faces, well, the very jean clottes mentioned in the article explored chauvet, and the lions there (http://thestorybehindthefaces.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04...) had such odd faces that clottes (or someone) speculated that they may have represented particular (edit: I meant specific) people. They're surely very odd for lions.
> Design a damned airframe that's airworthy without needing stabilization hacks.

The 737 Max is stable, as all commercial aircraft have to be. MCAS is not a system to take an unstable 737 and make it stable. It's a system that was meant to take a changed 737 and make it fly nearly identical to a previous 737, so pilots didn't have to get a new type rating (a very big deal for airlines).

Juan Brown, a commercial pilot and certified flight mechanic, on YouTube has a (great series of videos)[https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL6SYmp3qb3uPp1DS7fDy7...] talking through the mess that is Boeing made of MCAS, including what the actual problem is.
They even got the company name Syniverse right. That's cool.
I don't have the numbers of course, but I would imagine the number of remote gitlab employees who changed their country of resistence upon employment to be close to zero, so it's definitely not normal.
if only there was some kind of eXchange for MTG Online...

(to ruin the joke: this is where the famed bitcoin exchange MtGOX came from. It was an exchange for MTG Online that was repurposed into a bitcoin exchange... with that kind of flawless pedigree who could have ever foreseen problems coming down the road? /s)