skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The game version of "sci-fi corridor"

https://www.denofgeek.com/movies/313130/in_praise_of_the_sci...

https://scificorridorarchive.com/
The Age of CEO's
> I have heard about the Dragon book, but it was too big and pricey.

Don't feel bad about acquiring US textbooks through alternative means like libgen. Their exorbitant prices are an effect of the student loan cartel.
Great, so why don't we just keep text logs as text files?
1. Check your competition, or anything remotely similar.

2. Ask potential clients for various prices to see which one sounds more affordable.

3. If both 1&2 fail you'll have to improvise. Assume the worst case scenario for adoption (aka less than 1% from intended clientele), and the minimum amount of money you need to be barely viable, and then you come up with a number. Be as pessimistic as your comfort zone allows you.
> It's not really about the offer being made on the basis of public information though, is it.

The fact that it's based on public information puts the valuation's reasonableness on a very strong foundation, and allows the defendant to be far more confident that their offer will actually exceed a fully-litigated award.
If you're interested in the Dragon Book, the older edition is dirt-cheap ($3.08 as of right now): https://www.barnesandnoble.com/p/compilers-alfred-v-aho/1100...
Exactly. In fact, for some applications GE are using modified aircraft turbines on ships: https://fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/ship/eng/lm2500.htm

Those are for military use, where speed matters but money is basically unlimited.
If you like this, check out OctoSQL.

It not only presents a SQL interface to sql databases, NoSQL databases and files (Excel, csv, json for now), but also lets you join data between them and use multiple databases at once in queries.

Though it's definitely in an earlier stage and maturity than this, with fewer supported databases. (Though we do support redis for instance, which this does not)
What a ridiculous scenario - such a gigantic force marching on foot at human speed would not only die in huge numbers of exposure, law and order / supply chain breakdown - they would also be a perfectly amassed easy-pickings for slaughter via air bombing.
I spun up a new t2.small instance in eu-central-1 and it took less than 90 seconds, which is more than it usually takes, but not that bad.

https://pastebin.com/WC1hkh0c (see ts on uptime command, ignore timezone differences)
Looks like you're right
My First Impressions of Rust
I might be wrong, but on some social networks as Reddit, many comments or shared links seem too weird, like if they were not real, and some posts that get resposted always end up with the same comments or similar words.
Except when GET has side effects, one can embed the URL in an img tag and visitors would be triggering that side effect unknowingly. One can do this on most public forums. So no, users may not be aware.
Google Announces Partnership with Ascension
One Python Development Setup to Rule Them All
Whilst I've seen this, I think it's more about company and leadership culture than software developer preferences.

Our developers are far from profligate but they'll certainly kick and scream at me if we can't spend money on a tool or service that's going to make their jobs easier and allow them to deliver value more quickly.

To be coarsely mercantile about it, I want our teams to invest the vast majority of their time building systems and services we can sell. In turn, they've mostly come from backgrounds where the software they've built is widely used outside of the business they've been employed by, so again that pushes in the direction of doing things that add maximum value for customers, rather than NIH.
LLVM for Grad Students
What do you mean, "non issue"? We had timeouts all over the place. It doesn't matter how well you app is designed, if the network is congested, you're gonna have calls from your clients...
I think this only applies if the plaintiff is awarded damages.
I have written the Go arm64 and sparc64 compilers, as well as several other proprietary production compilers for several languages.

The Dragon Book is the best, for sure, and in my opinion essential material. Many people find its style too dry. It's basically a reference, not a tutorial. If you want something more hands on, I recommend this book about LCC[1]. It covers LCC, which is a C compiler. It's not a generic book about writing compilers, but I believe to be very useful anyway because it's very hands on. The current version of LCC is here[2]: Not sure if you can regenerate the book out of the current code or not (LCC is written in literate programming style, and the book used to be just the literate part).

[1] A Retargetable C Compiler: Design and Implementation (Addison-Wesley, 1995, ISBN 0-8053-1670-1)

[2] https://github.com/drh/lcc
I suspect that due to Moore's law issues we will abandon the concept of synchronous memory access altogether and make the cache hierarchy more visible. Already a cache miss is thousands of cycles, and algorithm complexity analysis that assumes memory access is O(1) can lead to poor real-world results compared to cache aware algorithms.
And a classical parody: https://www.everydaynodaysoff.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/10...
What a fascinating artifact for future archaelogists. Or cultural anthropologists?
Other contributors are listed near the end of the document, under "Contributors to GCC".
React Hooks: Gentle Introduction
Best book in my opinion: Compiler Construction Using Java, JavaCC, and Yacc, IEEE/Wiley, 2012

Please look at my past comments[0][1].

After that, read the Dragon Book as others had recommend. It would be smooth read after reading the first one.

[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18996703

[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10184364
Annual Recruitment Post
Is this document under source control? I'm curious to see what's changed.
Einstein Refrigerator
I mean, I could see myself using this as a way to store a string somewhere for later.
> If you're interested in the Dragon Book

I'm def. interested, but I'm not sure if:

* it's something that I can read for a week or two, for someone to use play with compilers & things (doesn't look like it)

* and if it'll pay off, as I live in a non-US country which means cheap editions are still pricey due to shipping.
>They're (meant to be) used for applying and removing makeup

There are specialty items mostly commonly used for the latter (cotton pads), and I'm not sure the reason almost every household has cotton swabs in their bathroom for fringe activities like: "taking samples of fluids for medical purposes (e.g. DNA swab), cleaning small items such as jewelry or electronics, applying glue in arts and crafts".

That leaves "applying makeup" as the other main use.
>The CEO lives in a house in central Indiana that costs less than the average 1BR condo in San Francisco.

So your evidence that one of the founders didn't make a lot of money is that he owns a million dollar home in central indiana? A $1m home in the midwest is going to be very, very nice and probably an order of magnitude more expensive than the average home in the area ($148k in Indiana).

But that is good to hear that they really are donating money. Because their huge "Donate books here" boxes are very misleading.
It doesn't have to be this way, here's a simpler alternative: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21513044
journald is a disaster area and is the main thing that makes me avoid systemd.
> suddenly flip upside down

https://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/3.44.html (1986): early F-16 software would flip the plane upside down on crossing the equator :)
DIY Guide: How to Animate Subtitles with WebGL and Vue.js
> What would be a good starting point to learn about writing compilers?

You also might find the LLVM/Clang kaleidoscope based tutorials interesting to get started having an insight into writing an LLVM-based compiler. Also Adrian Sampson has a great article in introducing LLVM for new-comers [1].

[0] https://llvm.org/docs/tutorial

[1] https://www.cs.cornell.edu/~asampson/blog/llvm.html
Fun fact: thanks to a browser-addon, I read this as

>A 75,71 L fish tank [...] weights 75,75kg

:-)
UK Labour party reveals large-scale cyber-attack on digital platforms
> The fact that the author has to use a bunch of different tools to manage Python versions/projects is intimidating.

It just shows that Python is used for a lot of purposes and there is no single tool that handles all usecases.

> I gave up and started rewriting the project (web scraper) in Node.js with Puppeteer.

And when you'll get to the point where you need to work with different node projects, you will also need several tools to manage node versions and different environments, so that doesn't help at all.
Ask HN: Starting a Company on a Cofounder's Patent
My friend invented a very exciting technology over the course of many years and received a patent on it. We have been casually working together on developing and commercializing it and there are many promising signs. We work well together and trust each other, and plan to formalize the project by incorporating.

I know typically founders are encouraged to assign all relevant IP to the new company, but my friend thinks his patent is worth >$100m and wants to maintain personal ownership of the patent. I'm worried that if we start a company that uses the invention without owning the patent, our company could be killed at any time by the patent holder. While I trust my cofounder, investors may be turned off and the patent could always end up in the hands of a less benevolent owner.

Is there any way we can safely start a company using his invention without holding the patent? Perhaps my friend can grant a license/authorization to the new company? Or is my friend being delusional and should just assign his patent to the company?

Any thoughts will be appreciated–thanks!
Ask HN: How to Make a Good CV?
Wanted to know what makes a good CV and how to make it.

I used cvcompiler.com but the results are vague and others websites are just click-baits.

In my specific case I'm a data Scientist
It's an option in the menu now and it just works.
There needs to be something to dig up for archaeologists to be able to find it. We don't know if this service isn't going to just disappear overnight.
I don't understand... That looks very similar to the other blog post.
Related from July 10 2019: $100,000 sanction against Richard Liebowitz and his firm https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=0b491402-8dad...
Thanks for that! Now I'll have sweaty palms going past the equator in airplanes.
If you press a human into a fish tank sized box it will weigh about the same, yes.
In a traditional unix, when things go wrong you can use common tools like grep and text editors and shell scripts to work out what happened. With systemd, there is no way to lift the lid and find out where it broke and how to fix it. That is why the magic is hidden magic, not learnable magic.
We use DynamoDB for storage and state and its unaffected.

Are you referring to this kind of scenario? https://github.blog/2018-10-30-oct21-post-incident-analysis/
Slow down specific sites to frustrate yourself out of the dopamine addiction
This is probably meta in the uninteresting sense but, thoughts:

1) many trolls who focus purely on shakedown settlement letters, Liebowitz runs straight to court to leverage the power of an expensive court case to push for insane settlements. - - Worrying. Why isn't there a bugfix coming? If the court system is so obviously exploitable...

I guess shutting down a troll business model is better than nothing, but.. This just basically shooos the problem away from courts and back into the expensive exchange of threatening letters... which is also and abuse of the legal system.

2) IP laws are important, and growing in importance as "intangibles" becomes a major class of assets, by way of corporate books. Just IP related lawyering (contracts, advice, courts, judges...) is a massive industry, nevermind the stuff it lawyers about.

Precedent is not really supposed to be the tool for this job, is it? Laws need to be written to be enforceable logically. At the least, they need to avoid creating obvious messes like patent trolling. I'd argue the sheer level of lawyering (measured in €) a type of asset attracts can be a sign it's been poorly defined.
I wouldn't be comfortable with one backup device kept in secure storage somewhere. If it fails you won't know, and you'll be operating without redundancy without knowing.

So that means keeping two or more devices in regular use. Somehow, without carrying them both around or keeping them in the same places. Tricky.
> You also might find the LLVM/Clang kaleidoscope based tutorials interesting to get started having an insight into writing an LLVM-based compiler.

Hmm, I've always assumed that the tutorials were for the people who already 'know' compilers enough, it's great that it's more accessible than I thought.

Definitely will going to look through them. Great resources :-)
It's good for everyone in their career to read some of RISKS. Reduces your chance of writing a self-driving car that doesn't see pedestrians. And many of the reports have an entertaining style to them. But if you inhale too much of it you'll want to go live in a computerless cabin in a computerless wood.
Would be fun to calculate what is required for the dock to actually flip, the scale of it is huge, so you would see it coming a mile away no?
A new way to read and print double-sided paper (2016)
Note how you only use one version of Python above, which is not the case discussed.
We have exactly this for 2 autoscaling groups. Very anoying :(
Last time I checked, everything was an optional extra in 911s too. Even stuff that is a standard feature on cheap econoboxes. Last I looked there was something utterly bizarre as an expensive optional extra, it was something like powered windows or remote locks. Something that I didn't even know didn't come as standard in a car. I wish I could remember what it was. (this was like 2010, so whatever it was might have changed, but it was still grossly out of place back then. It was not air conditioning, that at least makes sense from a weight perspective on a performance car.)
I think you are misunderstanding the limit. It looks like standard perip sort of rate limiting rather than per key.
Another option is to just find undergrad course materials for a compilers course and just go through it. Lecture slides can be great; sometimes they have other reading materials too. That should get you up to speed with the fundamentals fairly quickly, and most likely that's all you're looking for.

If after that you're decently good with those and want more, you can look at grad-level materials, though in my personal opinion the materials for those can be quite a bit more dry (and painful) if you try to self-study, at least unless you find a particularly good source.
Test-driving ARM cloud servers by compiling LLVM
> “free surface effect”

I remember this from the sinking of MS Herald of Free Enterprise, a ferry which set off with its doors open: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MS_Herald_of_Free_Enterprise

A fairly small amount of water washing about the car deck was enough to capsize the ship.
It doesn't affect a single AZ though. We see numerous problems with AWS services including but not limited to being unable to create new EC2 instances in any AZ.

This is creating a huge number of issues as you lose capacity with the AZ going down and can't recover by creating new instances.
True, but autoscaling at the moment is unable to scale in/out because of this issue.
If your autoscaling group includes the affected AZ, you are out of luck because those instances are being terminated since their health checks fail. But because of the failures, autoscaling is unable to complete this, and unable to launch new instances in the other AZ's as it is stuck on the terminating part.
Engineering a compiler is great.

The dragon book is pretty dated in certain areas e.g. SSA is mentioned once AFAIK and never used.
Excellent points, thank you. And congratulations on the results!

I’m curious how relatively content-free entertainment works into your calculus. It seems like a lot of people get sidetracked into it, and it is becoming more psychologically compelling and personalized/varied over time. (A lot of “sensational pot-boilers” are now being generated, as it were.)
The alternative is an opinionated build system defined by the language developers.

Like any dictatorship, that can be fine if those in charge are benevolent and competent. For programming languages, the first is almost always true, but the second is far from guaranteed. Skill at programming language development has no bearing on skill at developing a build, packaging, and distribution system.

Go is a prime example of this. The language is pleasant to use with few ugly surprises, but their build system has been awful for a decade, only now reaching a semi-decent state with modules (which are still pretty damn ugly).

With python, on the other hand, there's competition in this space, and as a result the tools are pretty nice, albeit fragmented.

But then there's rust, which has a nice language AND a nice build system. You take a big risk when building both the language and build system; sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. And you risk fragmentation if you don't. It's a tough choice.
If you're streaming in a language like Python, its IO will be doing some degree of chunking behind the scenes. It might be beneficial to do more manually.
Quinn helps businesses visualize their company data
Its a non-issue because you are not immune to the laws of probability. Things will fail, and you should expect them to. The beautiful thing here is that the failovers work to spec, and in case a single AZ goes out, mean time to recovery for you app can be in the order of single digit minutes (if built right).
It's not a math exercise. The problem is stringly - find the length of the string that conventionally represents the given number. The problem is that 0 is a special case, because we write something rather than nothing. Using len(str(n)) is the correct, idiomatic way to solve this. Consider what happens when the problem domain expands to include negative numbers...

Notice that all the straightforward solutions the author rejects, they reject because it fails on 0. Then, with the oh-so-clever log10 solution... surprise! They special-case 0. I'm not sure what the lesson here is supposed to be.
ASG is in dead, not terminating or spinning new instances at this moment
Perhaps you could have an agreement in place that should the company be dissolved, the patent gets reassigned back to him.
This is what I call real engineering. Of course, being a mere software engineer (or so they tell me) I can't but point to the recursive version: https://cdn2.kontraband.com/uploads/image/2019/2/22/preview_...
The ‘Mold Pigs,’ a Newly Discovered Invertebrate from 30M Years Ago
> If the eventual settlement is less than the original offer, then the plaintiff is liable for costs...

But only if the original offer is reasonable. The basis of public information just makes it easier to support the claim that the offer is in fact reasonable.
>Show me an alternative to systemd that matches its functionality and consistency.

https://skarnet.org/software/s6
https://skarnet.org/software/s6-rc

> It isn't modular just because it's divided into modules.

https://skarnet.org/software
Real modularity, each API are completely independent from each other

>For one, have you ever written an unit file? It literally takes 3 minutes.

http://web.obarun.org/software/66/frontend.html
Simple frontend file to declare a service, take 3 minutes to write it too.

>but the only people doing the work are Systemd

the fact is that some really good dev make the works but nobody care and nobody wants to give real supports(i mean financial supports) to do the thing in the right way.

Is systemd portable? can you build it with musl? that it works on BSD?
s6 and 66 do.

>systemd was promised as a way of shaving a few seconds off of boots

s6 do the same without socket activation(fallacious arguments to sell systemd)

Give to s6 and 66 dev the same financial potential of systemd and you will get a real init and service manager in the real *nix philosophy with well designed code.

Actually only one distro show s6 + 66 in action but make it very well
I assume that the risk math will differ by case, but...

The way "trolling" generally works is by negotiating settlements while brandishing a credible threat of legal expenses, not judgements awarded by courts.

What this discourages is threatening a $100k lawsuit to win a $3,000 in damages. I guess once and offer (you could offer $10k, to be safe) the troll risks paying a lot of money if it goes to court and it turns out that he shot a legal mouse with a nuclear torpedo.
Zadie Smith on Fighting the Algorithm
Google was started based on a patent owned by Stanford (PageRank). This was kind of bad for Google, though, as Stanford ended up making hundreds of millions off them for providing an exclusive license. The patents have only just expired this year.
Keep in mind your s3stat product costs $10/month _today_. Plenty of developers and teams have been burned by SaaS solutions that either shut down or blindsided users with a 10x or 100x price increase, so they will naturally price your service under the assumption that the costs will skyrocket in the near future.
I envy you. Loading https://developer.android.com/reference/android/bluetooth/Bl... takes about 13 seconds for me (until the desired topic is shown). And then the page is usually scrolled to either too little or too much. That is on a 100 mbit connection.
Money is unlimited, but fuel efficiency isn't just about money for the military. More fuel usage means more supply lines. That's less of an issue for navies than armies but still important.
I built a similar one in the past using dynamodb and aws lambda. I don't have to pay a dime when I am not using it.

https://thesimpleapi.com/keyvalue
> but my friend thinks his patent is worth >$100m

This is almost certainly delusional, especially if it's a software patent. Although that may not prevent you from building a $100m business on it.

> and wants to maintain personal ownership of the patent.

This was one of the WeWork shenanigans with the trademark being held by the owner.

> I'm worried that if we start a company that uses the invention without owning the patent, our company could be killed at any time by the patent holder. While I trust my cofounder, investors may be turned off and the patent could always end up in the hands of a less benevolent owner.

These are reasonable worries.

The bare minimum for any company with multiple founders is to sort out the initial equity distribution. This may not be 50/50 if it's his patent, but it needs to be something you're both happy with. It's a difficult conversation, but it only gets more difficult if you're successful and there's real money involved.

The bare minimum for the company should be a permanent non-revokable license for the patent. He may want it to be non-sublicensable and non-transferable, which are reasonable requests.

If you can't satisfactorily resolve this between you, your working relationship is not good enough to run a business between you.

You also need to ask your co-founder: when someone comes and offers $10m equity investment into the business on condition that the company is fully assigned the patent, would they really say no?
somewhat related question: how do I most easily verify / disprove that

(a+b)-b == a exactly

for a,b floating point numbers?

(i.e. I don't want the compiler to optimize the LHS away to a...)