skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Facebook wasnt cool. The people on facebook were cool. I believe facebook took off for two reasons. One is the one you mentioned, that it was exclusive. Two was that it was the anti-livejournal/myspace. No css, no glitter, no strobing, no sound, no hard to read colors, no moving elements around the page. IT standardized where and what functions looked like, and acted more like creation software (photoshop) than the output of the document layout tools. Facebook was utilitarian in that you couldnt customize its look, you couldnt express yourself. It took itself as a white pages, not a portfolio.
Cyber-Security Expert: Recording-Device at Hyatt Hotel Is Not Uncommon
I agree only because just reading the problem description I guessed that it was a difference in distance or sitting time and I don't even know anything about car engines. I assume any automotive engineer would have been ahead of me on that and already looking for differences that could matter on the first trip.
There was no real ad-tech concept before Google.
We didn't really realized the problems with this business model and its effect on society until much later.
I do believe that Google's claim to actually try and create good products, was an honest try to be "good".
Search was a game changer, it really helped information be more accessible than ever. AdWords made sense, if people search for a product they won't mind seeing an ad for one. As opposed to tv commercials, which were the main ad platform, which was basically a brainwash machine sitting in people houses.

Gmail was an amazing product that email much more useful for the non techie, and techie user.

I believe, Google, as opposed to Facebook was honest in their mission statement. Facebook's "connecting people" was a sham from the get go, zukerberg's "dumb fuck" comments about his first users proves it.

Google is an organism, organism change and adapt, corporates are organisms with one pure value function, shareholders bottom line. MBA types took control of the company because they are trained to optimize corporations to thrive, nothing else.

I think saying Google was always evil is missing the real point. That corporations are not humans, they can't have human values while bottom line is the only value that counts.
The Biology of Big
> We knew the financial types were already fleeing London for France and Germany. This seems to confirm that it's accelerating.

Unless you can prove otherwise this simply isn't the case, a quick Google yielding the following news headlines:

'Germany angry Brexit ‘exodus did not happen’ – study shows London continues to lead'

'Bankers Don’t Flee London, Despite Exodus Predictions
Mass departures from U.K.’s financial center so far haven’t happened'

'The Brexit exodus that never was
Frankfurt – not as appealing as it first appeared
Doom-mongers predicted a massive flight from the City. But it simply didn’t happen.'
If only they could come up with a WSL2 Hyper-V workaround.
My initial idea is to go the other way around: We can count natural numbers using the successor function, starting at 1. E.g.: 1, s(1) = 2, s(s(1)) = s(2) = 3, and so on. So if we see a number n, we know it's s(n-1), which is s(s(n-2)) and so on, until we reach 1. So we have a nice, linear chain, and it's trivial to construct an algorithm f(n) [or more mathematically, a function f: N -> {s,ss,sss,...}] that (i) produces the necessary operations to reach any given natural number n in that chain, starting at 1, and (ii) terminates for every input n.

Now we don't use s(x), but instead two operations that are inverse to the Collatz rules: a(x) = 2*x and b(x) = (x - 1)/3 (with b of course is not always being possible). Starting at 1, this can now be used to construct a tree containing "some" numbers, and we can use that it to describe a path to a number from the root.

If the conjecture holds, the tree constructed from these functions has to contain all natural numbers.

My nudge is then: If I have a number n, can I give an algorithm/function f': N -> {a,b,aa,ab,ba,bb,...} that (i) finds a path to n, and (ii) always terminates? Answer: I have no idea =)

E.g.: f'(5) = aaaab <=> b(a(a(a(a(1))))).

So we have f'(1)=no idea how to represent, f'(2)=a, f'(3)=aaaabab, f'(4)=aa, f'(5)=aaaab, f'(6)=aaaababa, f'(7)=aaaabaaab[...], f'(8)=aaa,...

(However, maybe it is not possible to even construct f': I believe the target space of f is of another infinity than the target space of f' -- obviously this isn't my area of expertise).
Exactly what I thought! I deleted the Reddit Apollo app when I realized I was using for over 3 hours a day.
Now I catch myself sometimes using the mobile version. But the fact that they keep going out of the way to make it work and worse everyday means I actually get to stay away from it.
The Amazon Coat Is Even More Popular This Winter
The problem is that my 2/10 is rather distressful and doctors assume it isn't, because they assume that self-reported pain ratings map consistently to subjective levels of distress across patients.
For these kinds of programming, yes, I argue against it. A single stalling function in Node deadlocks the whole system; a single stalling thread in the C++ model still permits other threads to run. This is a risk that is completely avoidable by not using languages which require event loops at their core.
Running a Node worker for each thread is standard practice.

No different than having a dedicated threadpool for asynchronous programming on the JVM.

Yes blocking the event loop is easy. No it's not THAT easy. I've never done it because you think about it while writing code. It's part of the environment. I have had to fix lots of reports etc that try to load up the world and iterate through it in a loop that doesn't yield to the event loop. It's possible to never make that mistake by understanding your environment (just like how managing pointers in C is "hard").
Do you think that a trivial, 4-line commit to README saying "this project is no longer maintained, look elsewhere" is too much to ask?

I agree that you cannot force people to give their time away, and anyone can, and should be able to, stop maintaining any project they have.

But putting "I am done" notice will likely take under 30 minutes, and will help a lot of people. It's a good idea to do it just out of respect to all those people who spent their time crafting those 669 commits which will never get to release now.
>It can also take significantly less time. I'm not sure the traditional lecture in front of a blackboard approach is relevant nowadays

It's actually one of the worst ways of learning.

It may be anecdotal, but I've found that I learn faster and retain more while actively working on something new that compares to a lecture.

https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2019/09/study-shows-t...
I don't see why topic-based ads based entirely on on-site participation would be a problem. No need for any user-hostile garbage, bucket your communities into topics, and let advertisers target the topics or the intersections between them. Ads are sold on-site, not via third party networks.

Reddit does this, but no idea how successful it is.
Any good resources for using GANs to generate synthetic tabular data?
When did you try Uber at SFO? They changed the pickup process a few months ago and it's been a nightmare ever since. I've found the trick is to make the trek through the airport to the International terminal where they're still allowed to pick up curbside.
Technically, they said teddy bear. We demand stuffing!
I don't think the hardware is that trivial. I used to think that, but I've learned a lot more respect for the people who understand how to troubleshoot it, how to purchase compatible components, and spot troublesome products and brands. It's a whole career, it has its nuances.

But you make some good points. In general I agree it's cheaper to vastly over provision than to use the cloud. And you can do things like build an insane IO system for your database, which you can only sort of do in the cloud.

Of course this is an advantage for hosting internal company stuff, for web facing things you may need to place hardware in remote datacenters, and then you do need people on location on call who can service it. You have to generally have much larger scale for that to make sense. Even Netflix, because of the variability of their load still use a combination of cloud and their own hardware.
To clarify, I meant users. :) Ads is totally interesting from a technical perspective.
But the whole point of synchronous I/O is to isolate the programmer from having to think about that spinning tape up takes a non-zero time. I have a feeling that this gets lost sometimes in all that "async I/O is the GREATEST!" craze.

Async is nice - if you can handle it. But this is not easy to do in complex systems and processes. It is certainly easier to work with an old-fashioned process that blocks when waiting for whatever you need to wait for, and just scale by letting the OS run lots of those in parallel. Sure, it's less efficient. But it's easier for the devs to handle.

I just read the hidden undertone of this article as "our devs aren't that smart after all".
Just noticed this comment after asking about WebAssembly elsewhere.

Wow, that's amazing.

I did some headscratching with WebAssembly a little while back while figuring out what approach to take for a small thing I wanted to make reasonably cross-platform. My terribly nonscientific back-of-the-envelope benchmark was to time reading/writing an array. Initially JavaScript won squarely over WASM, but then I realized I wasn't using -O3 (woops) and the WebAssembly got about 1.75x faster than it appeared my JS code ever would.

In my very limited experience the most significant difference at the end of the day seems to be that the source language isn't JavaScript. All tooling seems to have grown some element of "????" sadly, and all languages bring their own warts. Once I figured out a working [webassembly generation] workflow, it felt pretty solid, like it wasn't about to fall over too easily. Clang support seems to be just about perfect at this point, if you haven't tried it within the past few months.

My personal first medium/long-term step will be to get a good grip on reading WebAssembly S-expressions, so I can help keep the loop as closed as possible in terms of understanding what my source is generating. (And maybe follow the occasional reverse engineering white rabbit.)

Next will be conquering my love of interpreted languages that don't have a compile step (let alone a long one ;) ), haha. JavaScript indeed can't be beat for rapid iteration! (Particularly if you use live-reload in testing...)
This only holds if they didn’t pour hours into the original solution. Setting up and managing 4000 node services doesn’t sound like a quick hack.
Time for the SciHub of Git repos?
> I can't be the only person who reads stories like this and wonders how they arrived at that solution in the first place?

Here's how it probably worked: they liked Node, they liked containers, they put Node into containers and it worked, and they stuck with it as the user base grew.
Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: https://www.amazon.com/Exit-Voice-Loyalty-Responses-Organiza.... A classic for a reason.
Big volcanic bump unlike anything seen before found on the moon
In a previous job, I didn't even use venv, just "pip install -t <dir> whatever" then "PYTHONPATH=<dir> python <args>".

And of course, you could just wget the packages from PyPI and run setup.py...
That's speculative at best. What's inorganic about the background in https://veedrac.github.io/stylegan2-real-or-fake/Curated/ffh... ?
In most states you need a professional engineer to certify that your odd construction is safe. This pulls in legal liability for failure so the engineer will charge a lot of money (and run a lot of calculations) before granting certification. It isn't a big deal to do that if you can figure out how to pay the cost.

By contrast though: I can design you a house that follows traditional design rules. So long as I use standard materials under the standard rules someone else has long ago done all the work to ensure the standard is right and so it doesn't need additional certification. It is quite likely I can violate something in the standard and still be safe - but then it is up to me to prove it is safe (I'm not qualified to do this)
You have me there on the "who" bit. I admit I have also been guilty on occasion of doing whatever is necessary as a client to get a server to respond.

My point is that if we are going to try to fix it, we should address the problem, not mask it or throw up our hands and just set the UA to some silly constant. The information is helpful in troubleshooting issues and avoids people having to ask the inevitable "what browser/device are you using?" and also helps to allocate resources when testing. I honestly don't know what we would do as software developers and testers without somewhat accurate UA information.

Maybe where we are right now is the best we can do. You can pretend to be Chrome and most of the major devices/clients will report their UA accurately, but if everyone did what you are claiming is your right to do, we would not have a viable ecosystem.
I know, I know. But I kind of want to figure out why what I'm thinking doesn't work. I want to run up against these problems myself.
Honestly, if we had an automatic citation system in place for automobiles, I would probably support some kind of identification system be put in place to make it work for bikes as well. Perhaps there would be a way to make it voluntary and create an incentive which encouraged people to opt in, rather than making it a mandatory requirement? Maybe a modest tax credit if you ride your (tagged) bike more than X days per year? This way children and occasional users would still have an on-ramp to cycling that didn't have to start with a trip to the DMV.

In any case, this isn't the world we live in, so it's all hypothetical at this point. In the short-to-medium term, the overwhelming danger on the road is from motorists.
I don’t think this works. It reminds of the discussions about improving code vs rewriting. A lot of people think that improving existing code is not worth so they rewrite it. Often only to find out that the same problems come back just in different form. Same with new companies. If we just jump to the next company we will find out that they are basically all the same run by the same principles. Where do you want to from google? Any company will run into the same pressures as soon as it reaches that size.
One idea crosses my mind: are there examples where this algorithm can pass by a drastically better solution without finding it? Is there a way to deterministically find these families of solutions (even if not directly the optimal among that family?)
What language were you using that had preemptive multi tasking?
Show HN: Dev API in Ruby
Using an interpreted language and complaining about performance is always a funny thing to read.

Use Java, C++, Rust, Go or C if you want pure performance.

Use Java with something like Spring + a Reactive stack to scale up to much higher concurrent numbers of requests. You'll have the same easy programming model that Node provides and you'll have both performance from the language and the more efficient execution.

If you're worried about the startup times and memory footprint that comes with a JVM based application (although this has improved substantially the last few years), go to a natively compiled language like C, C++, Rust or Go. Or compile your Java apps using GraalVM native images.
Ok, thanks, that worked. And I learnt something new, about 0.0.0.0 even existing! :)Now I have the problem the Repl.it VM running Yazz/pilot keeps crashing after a few minutes started
I was building scalable node applications a few years ago for a very large e-commerce player- millions of customers. I think node.js is a great platform, but its apparent simplicity means there are hordes, and I mean like 90+% of the community, that can "just get things done" without understanding what is going on under the hood at all. And to be fair, for most startupy types of companies that need to iterate fast, that is what you want to optimize for.

My interview screening question was pretty simple- "Is node.js single threaded or multithreaded?" And to most, they spit back the blogspam headline- "Single threaded!" I think the most correct answer is "its complicated" but would accept that because most people would say that is the "right" answer. So I would follow up with- "what exactly happens in a default installation if we have say... 5 requests come in at exactly the same time to just return some static content from disk?" (Node's default threadpool is 4). And here is where you could see their understanding just fell apart. Some would say they would be handled entirely synchronously, others completely in parallel- but then had no idea what the cause of the parallelism was. Very few actually understood that node is an event loop executing javascript backed by a threadpool for async operations.

Before reading this post, I was like eh this is a waste of time- its typical medium bullshit- they almost certainly found they were doing some blocking call in the event loop and then removed it and voila, 30x speedup. It was interesting because it was a lot worse! They spent all this time and hard work figuring out everything but what was taking so long in the event loop, and it seems that was the last place they actually looked.

Anyway, node can be a highly scalable platform (https://changelog.com/podcast/116) but you need to understand it or else it will bite you in the foot. When I was last doing this stuff, upwards of 80% of our time was being spent essentially just JSON.parse()'ing, and we were looking to move to protobufs to avoid that.
>age, type, and condition

In US, home insurance companies already have such info in detail. Most also sell auto coverage.

State regulators might require a "Chinese wall" between the two operations, but effective enforcement would be another matter.
But there are regular commits. Just no releases.
> Also, the certificate contains lengthy URLs for CRL download locations and OCSP responders, 164 bytes in total.

If you're going on that path It's probably best to avoid revocation altogether, since it doesn't really work, and go the let's encrypt way, certificates with lower lifespans.

On that scale a 15 days cert on rotation is probably fine.
Looks like a lot of Graphics related upgrades/fixes. I desperately hope this makes the experience better, onto downloads!
It makes sense to think of Reddit as an application rather than a company. Reddit the application depends on network effects to grow, and without growth, decay will be inevitable. Facebook the company has been able to create other applications that grow, even while Facebook the application is starting a network effect-triggered death spiral. Reddit Inc. has not created any other growth applications like the Reddit app, so will die.
It seems to me that Oracle is doing well in cloud, may not be too long before they beat the number 4 Google.
Much belated response, sorry.

I just don't know. I've stopped using VPNs for this very reason.
My understanding is that actors don't typically have a choice whether to join a union. SAG-AFTRA has enough power and preference agreements that you can't really make it in the industry without joining, even if you don't otherwise want to.
WSL is a Microsoft project, it's not the sole responsibility of Oracle to maintain a WSL alternative.
Fun free trading app like Facebook poker
I think the stability of user space interfaces is simply good engineering. Linux can run binaries compiled way back in the 90s. Because of this discipline, people trust Linux as a platform. People generally have no problems updating their kernels and it's safe to assume there will be no problems. This isn't the case in user space: many projects have no problem with breaking compatibility and forcing dependent packages to be updated as well.

The author claims Linus Torvalds enforces Linux binary interface stability because the Linux foundation members that pay his salary want it. Is this really true? If that was the case, I'd expect the internal kernel interfaces to be stable as well. They are unstable and he actively fights to keep them unstable even though the companies would very much enjoy having stable driver interfaces.

https://yarchive.net/comp/linux/gcc_vs_kernel_stability.html

> Stuff outside the kernel is almost always either (a) experimental stuff that just isn't ready to be merged or (b) tries to avoid the GPL.

> Neither is worth a _second_ of anybodys time trying to support, and when you say "people spend lots of money supporting you", you're lying through your teeth. The GPL-avoiding kind of people don't spend a dime supporting me, they spend their money actively trying to debase and destroy what I and thousands of others have been working our butts off for.

> So don't try to make it sound like something it isn't. We support outside projects a hell of a lot better than we'd need to, and I can tell you that it's mostly _me_ who does that. Most of the core kernel developers argue that I should support less of it - and yes, they are backed up by lawyers at their (sometimes quite big) companies.
What are the biggest mistakes first-time startup founders make and how to avoid?
I believe the problem is that if you're running WSL2, you're automatically running Hyper-V, which monopolizes hardware virtualization on the machine, so you can't run VirtualBox, VMware, etc.
Quite a large percentage. I worked on a site that got 1 request per second and they were able to handle it by spinning up like 20 VMs. Turns out they were just using Entity Framework wrong. Whoops.

But also, though, you have to consider that most places aren't Plaid, and most places developer time is more expensive than throwing an extra machine at the problem.
If you’re interested in this topic, the best book I’ve read is called Good Strategy Bad Strategy. It’s an excellent read. Here’s the main takeaway:

A real strategy consists of the following parts, which the author calls the “kernel” of a strategy. If any of these are missing, you don’t have a strategy.

1) A diagnosis of the problem or opportunity.

2) A high level guiding policy / hypothesis for how to respond.

3) Coherent Actions that will be your first / primary steps to execute on the strategy.

I’ve found that just getting that idea into my head has transformed the way I think about problems, and plan and communicate responses. I couldn’t recommend the book enough.
How does trying to form a different company (which has additional concerns a union doesnt) deal with issues like noncompete, arbitration clauses, etc?
https://sci-hub.se/downloads/2019-12-11/a2/10.1038@s41586-01...
In the past, a social platform was replaced by another one that did basically the same thing but better, in the eyes of users. Today, we're seeing real issues with social media, but there's no viable platform which fixes the problems with these platforms we want to leave.

I think the demand is still there. There's a power vacuum just waiting for someone to fill it. But the replacement can't just be "like Facebook but run by people slightly less creepy". You've got to fix some other root issues.
The bubble goes both directions. I've been working in tech from Colorado for a decade, and only started getting involved in SF this year; the culture shock is surreal (not least because it's normal to those on the other side), and the street-level economic disparities are beyond Dickensian.

Relevant: https://rushkoff.com/books/throwing-rocks-at-the-google-bus/
Product Zeitgeist Fit
What does this have to do with Oracle Cloud?