skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes. I think this Etsy story showcases an interesting split in engineering approach, between being "right" vs being "effective". Perhaps a variant on "worse is better".

Etsy was originally built by two NYU students while they were still in college. It was their first production software project. It grew super fast in a period where the whole industry was still figuring out how to scale web applications; perhaps only Amazon & eBay had actually figured it out by then.

Then VCs got ahold of Etsy and tried to put out the fires by replacing the "kids" who built the thing. This was around 2006, which predates even Twitter's fail whale and Series A funding to round.

The founding team wasn't a bad engineering team. It was a young founding team who built a thing that grew like crazy, and which, had it not been built that way, would have meant no engineer could have ever come along to preside over a rewrite. But because it was crashing and dollars were at stake, and because there was some drama that prevented the founding team from having the time to build a proper scale-up engineering organization, a bunch of people came in and immediately reached for a rewrite.

They had a working thing, on a not-that-uncommon stack, but the new engineers insisted on a rewrite. Why?

Because new engineers always insist on a rewrite. Because, as my friend James Powell once put it, "Good code is code I wrote; bad code is code you wrote."

Python and Twisted. I am a big fan of Python and watched the evolution of Twisted -- the rise in popularity, and then the decline. I can imagine how they came across a group of engineers who were absolutely convinced Twisted was the silver bullet to solve their engineering challenges, at that specific moment in time -- when Twisted was at a peak of popularity.

Just like Django/Rails was the silver bullet in 2011. (Or Scala?) Just like Angular was in 2015 (or Go?). Just like React is now (Or k8s?).

Of course, I am not using the "silver bullet" term accidentally. Tech trends change, but "there is no single development, in either technology or management technique, which by itself promises even one order of magnitude [tenfold] improvement within a decade in productivity, in reliability, in simplicity." (Brooks, 1976)

New tools are just an excuse for a rewrite, and rewrites are the ultimate shiny object to a new engineering team, brought in to "fix" an existing and working system.

As an aside: the founding software team at Etsy didn't get nearly enough credit for building a thing that worked and that grew from nothing. If they had focused on the "right" architecture, none of us would have ever have heard of Etsy, and we certainly wouldn't be debating the rewrite. That founding team didn't get enough credit, neither in equity nor in history. But that's another story.
Reframing when my one comment referred to free lifetime users due to the first few lines in the article.

> Four years after Cerberus made headlines when it invalidated free lifetime licenses, the device security app is back in the spotlight for the same questionable business practices.

I get it that you want to reframe my comment so you have something to bash at, but the fact is I referred to a portion of the article. Not only did I say I value my time, I made no value judgement on your beliefs or how you spend your time. If something is not worth my time (harm/disproportionate burden), then I will not pursue it and will look for alternatives. What is so unreasonable about that? That I don't want to be negative as you said here? Not interested.
It's also an American thing even though they don't have a word for it. It was even referenced in the Silicon Valley Season 1, where Bighetti is "sent to the roof" to do nothing, because the CEO does not believe in firing people.
I don't see any advantage this has over plain Google Maps for Madrid, other than using a bit less Google in my life. Will try it out.
The closest thing would be the box for Windows 10 Pro, which had a purple recolor of the final wallpaper.
wow! those aren't tech companies, are they?
Wow! I've had much, much better experience with the shops I've dealt with.

I'm the type of person that after putting everything back together has a little baggie of parts that I have no idea where they go.

Mostly though, there are only so many hours in a day. Every hour I would spend in my garage with my motorcycle in pieces is an hour less that I spend playing my guitar, walking my dog, or playing board games with my kids. You know, quality time.
You have this problem of exiling people in-place because the labor regulations make it absurdly difficult to fire people. You see the same thing in school department "rubber rooms" or union shops that tell the useless guys to go count bolts and stay out of the way.

It's better for everyone if you can just shitcan people when things aren't working out.
It is only to human to react like this.

Did you recognize how many people relate to their own experiences when you tell them a story while totally forgetting about the things you just said?

You are totally right and if someone wants to present their project because it is similar they should at least say something about the differences etc. not just paste a URL to promote it.
I wouldn't trust the building to be built to any sort of code other than, "we paid off the right people".
I like your comment, and it’s kind of comforting - because it means we don’t have to worry too much, as you suggest the anti-vaxxers are like a neat little self-contained cult who don’t venture out of their compound.

However, in reality, it’s probably a gradual process of belief change or formation - people don’t move from slightly unsure to frothing-at-the-mouth anti-vaxxer overnight. And this sort of disinformation may well be accessed and become influential to people who are part-way through that process.
Holy fuck, I'd let anyone inject mystery material into my body without question. Hey, it's a mandate from the government and it's free!
What could go wrong?
I would expect the OS to just scale the image to screen size once when it boots (or whatever) and cache that image.
I did too, but just try them out for a week, you’ll love it. Moreover array based language like Q do have infix notation.

f(x)=2x+1

In Q is

f:{1+2*x}

You could call it with: f 5 or f[5].
It’s really not any different.
Or by someone associated with them (in their lab, uni, co-authors as you mention etc). Essentially this means you must cite certain papers in some areas, as for larger conferences you're sure to be reviewed by such people.
This needs its own thread.
I'd say that would be fun to put gramma in and send her to the grocery store!
Sounds like you're thinking of Paul O'Neill and Alcoa. He figured out that worker safety was a proxy for a whole bunch of other metrics at Alcoa.

He had everyone focus intensely on safety. Worker accidents went down massively. As a byproduct, costs went down and productivity went up.

Any serious incident has to be reported up, was investigated, and was treated very seriously.

Note that while this likely generalizes to other places, it doesn't necessarily generalize to every place. I could conceive of some setups where safety and profits were opposed. But in Alcoa's case, O'Neill was able to use safety as a driver for other changes.
Useful React Native Hooks
yes 1password did that, then they released new version ... and plugin for safari that is available would work only with the new subscription version. no fixed payment version. fantasticCal I bought for 50$ after a year stopped working as new version was released and seems that facebook api on old version was broken - so yolo calendar app another 50$USD for new version. I asked them about broken api and they said it wont be fixed in the old version. There are other examples I can't remember.
Really like the introduction by the way, it reads better than most I've read on apl/k - with a suitable mix of motivation and explanation - and not too much "pride" (like, lisp pride, or apl pride, where authors cannot imagine any reason why other languages exist. Seems especially common when run-times are written in such a language; namely C...).

To be clear, a little language pride is always warranted :-)

Other than that, I find it a bit funny that the factorial function is singled out as an example of why naming (short) functions are redundant - seeing as how it's one of the first "complex" functions/operands thaught/named in mathematics, and heavily used to shorten notation for for example combinatorics (that is "n!").

But I think this just reflects on the (for me) somewhat alien culture of array languages - its not wrong, but it is different.
I struggled with this before but then I found Banktivity. I have dozens of accounts/cards/debit/credit/savings/investments etc... and Banktivity helps in keeping track of my overall "wealth".

The way I do it is to budget a yearly (or half year) expenses beforehand and then channel it through whatever account for expenses. I'm lucky enough to live in a very cheap place and make enough so I don't have to live pay-check to pay-check.

If I make more than I think enough to cover my next period, I usually spend that on a new Tech gadget, Travel or into savings. But I rarely save these days as I'm trying to maximize my lifestyle before I'm 70 year-old with too much money and little to do.
The proportion dosen't seem as morally relevant (though it is a factor) as the sheer number (you can figure it as a trolley problem; the train running over 10k out of 100k is arguably worse than running over 5 out of 10) - and arguably, inequality, exploitation and domination have more to do with relative wealth than absolute wealth. Although the lives of a great many have undeniably improved, that has nothing to do with what social scientists and philosophers of economics mean by inequality, exploitation and domination - which usually focuses on the share of productive capacity by members of society. All the "big names" like Sen and Roemer have those issues on the radar. You can figure the problems of the system in terms of domination[0], exploiters dominating[1], extraction of surplus-value[2], or unequal exchange of labour[3][4].

[0] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/08854300.2016.12...

[1] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00346764.2019.1...

[2] http://matsuo-tadasu.ptu.jp/RecentControversyOnFMT.pdf

[3] https://ideas.repec.org/p/kch/wpaper/sdes-2018-10.html

[4] https://scholarworks.umass.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1...
I don't know what's meant to be A and B here. I already listed foreign aid as a counterexample in the post you're replying to.
Those answers are both dubious and very outdated. At the time they were written, the most mature and widely available solution for blob storage was the filesystem, which has its own set of shortcomings for that use case. This is no longer true, and that alone frankly makes those answer obsolete.

Then you have the fact that those answers are ignoring a lot of facts. The answer you referenced from Bill Karwin talks about mutating blobs. This isn’t a reasonable design pattern at all, you create a new blob and update the reference. The downsides to storing blobs in an rdbms are so numerous that you’d really have to have a very strong justification for doing so, and I’m really struggling to think of any that are actually technical.
The problem with that logic is that it completely ignores the effectiveness of the surveillance. You can't really dispatch non-uniformed police officer for every demonstrator to find out where they live. With location data you can.
Does the power of a laser beam follow the inverse square law?
WHY would anyone who is genuinely unsure and looking for information on vaccinations either search instagram or even make it there and be exposed to these hashtags. It's not exactly an information rich platform.

Because not everyone is personally information-rich. Just like back when large groups of people thought AOL was "the internet," there are people now who believe Facebook, or YouTube, or Instygram are "the internet." And those silos are their only source of information.

What are their alternatives, now that the internet has killed information?

Libraries are inconvenient (few locations, short hours; some of the libraries in my county are only open for a few hours two or three days a week). Outside of a few large cities, there is no more radio news. Quality TV news is hard to find. In large swaths of the United States there isn't a local newspaper anymore, and even if there was, you couldn't buy it (There must be 50 Starbucks in my city, but not one sells newspapers anymore. The other coffee shops followed suit. No papers at gas stations or supermarkets, either anymore. If you want a paper, you subscribe or go to the airport.)

The masses followed the information and their friends and ended up in social media hell. It's only natural for the organizations trying to target them to go there, as well.
How do you suppose you're going to provide theoretical assurance of privacy and correctness without science?
Application Level Attacks on Connected Vehicle Protocols [pdf]
Why does that matter for this discussion?
A Large-Scale Analysis of Early Domain Deletions
Probably not. Teslas, for example, have a ~9:1 drive reduction from motor output shaft to drive wheels. 1000Nm is a high torque motor to be sure, but not that hard to find.
Is there something like kdb for klong? How does it preform vis-a-vis the better known array languages?
I didn’t say it is (I think it’s conditional on the type of interface and data involved)
18-year-old Morrowind mod project releases 60 new quests, new map
I personally love the Blender model, where the community are able sustain full time developers with donations while the software remains open. Building a community that want to invest is really important for sustainability of a project.
In London you can buy discounted weekly passes through them now. Working from home for just one day will negate the cost saving though, especially if you’re out in zone 4.

I don’t know how they undercut TfL on the price but I presume they’re doing something tricky with redistributing monthly or annual passes.
All of my contacts use iMessage; Signal is starting to be viable with their iPad release now though. I am concerned about switching from Chrome to Firefox still on security grounds, but this may be sufficient to make me switch.
This reminded me of a recent post about how we can’t do anything fast anymore.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21848860

This kind of daring/insanity that can only be justified as part of something as important as the space race is possibly part of the reason.
It is hard as a new employee to not say "stop everything and let's rewrite this" when something is broken. New engineers are not only the ones to say it either as the craze and popularity of what's hot captivates longer tenure employees. If something vibes with the problem you are solving then it is only natural to want to use it. Proving the usefulness and viability is the part no one really wants to do as it is a long slog that is against the need of getting a promotion. Why not just use in a new app to prove it? and that will be the basis for let's use this everywhere (aka generalize it!)

It is very nice to try new things though because without that we can't move forward, but how much forward is enough seems to be the troubling part as investing time learning the "new unproven thing" every year or so is taxing.

> As an aside: the founding software team at Etsy didn't get nearly enough credit for building a thing that worked and that grew from nothing. If they had focused on the "right" architecture, none of us would have ever have heard of Etsy, and we certainly wouldn't be debating the rewrite. That founding team didn't get enough credit, neither in equity nor in history. But that's another story.

Very unfortunate reality here.
Hm, I could see myself playing with it - but I'm not quite seeing how I'd fit it into my day job. I do occasionally work with some simple aggregation and filtering - but usually in an sql db - and barring embedding an array language, I'd have to fetch all the data into eg: klong first, then process. It's hard to imagine a scenario where that would make sense.

Otoh, I'm still considering working through advent of code - such domains should be well suited, I guess.
Ask HN: Could EU residents comment on how the GDPR has improved their privacy?
I'm curious if the GDPR is working as intended, and if it has actually reduced or eliminated online tracking of EU residents.
Can you define the word “populism”?
Yes:

https://www.quora.com/Is-the-light-from-lasers-reduced-by-th...

ADDED. Yes at distances from the source greater than 3.3 meters
Bookkeeping Services Dubai
Ah, I see. You were mistaking Cerberus's actions of four years ago for their actions today. Four years ago, they cancelled the free lifetime service. That is allowed, as there was no exchange of value to form a contract. Now, they cancelled the paid lifetime service. That is not allowed, as there was an exchange of value.
Yes it has. Companies are now forced to build architectures that take data classification and privacy in mind. It's been a really great addition and a important check on the data economy.
> Yes, and then there is populism, which is in many places the biggest threat to democracy.

You think that a political movement defined by its emphasis on the people is a threat to the system of government whereby the government is chosen by the people?

I mean, just breaking down the two words etymologically should suggest a link between the two.
More like how stories about trans fats were about eating trans fats being harmful.
I have a Gigatron (https://gigatron.io/) which has this kind of architecture. Only the ROM can contain machine instructions, so the only way to program it is to use the ROM interpreter to run bytecode stored in RAM, or to burn a new ROM. Frankly this aspect of it sucks (the Gigatron in itself however is a wonderful learning project and recommended).

There's really not a problem with having a "single bus" for code and data. On modern computers where you can mark the data with the NX bit to ensure it doesn't get run, while at the same time allowing you to load programs as data and mark them as executable.
Depends on the type of software. If you're building transactional software where your business is doing a few bucks cut per user transaction, the software can be tremendously bad before it hits into revenue, as long as you’re not totally busting the user experience
I was traditionally the farthest thing from a JS callback hell fanboy, but, using modern JS with async/await and “classes” (yes I realize it’s syntactic sugar, prototypical inheritances, yada yada yada), it’s not bad. I haven’t played with TypeScript in a few years, but I’m looking to get back into it.

But why fool with Perl at all - especially Raku since it’s basically a new language that doesn’t have the widespread support of Python or God forbid PHP?
Having checked my phone the only paid application I have at all, which had a one-off license, was the notification application for pushover.net

Honestly I think I spent €3 on it, and I'd happily pay that a year to keep using the service. My automated testing-utility probes about 1000 ping/ssh/http services every 90 seconds, and sends me notificaitons when/if anything fails via that application.

Pushover has been absolutely robust and reliable, and although I don't expect instant notification in all circumstances I seem to have received it.
This is a meaningful tattoo idea. Thanks.
This post [1] disagrees:

> (...) if you measure the intensity
of a beam with a photodiode (say) 1 inch from the laser and then 10
inches from the laser, you will not find 1/100th of the light with your
fixed area detector. If you do this same experiment with an
incandescent light bulb and make your closest measurement far enough
away (much, much greater than the size of the filament), you will
observe this square law decrease.

[1] https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/sci.optics/P-8VmDlY4...
You are right, I misread the document. I stand corrected.
I always wondered why people assume that the more high level abstractions or high level programming languages you use the less performance you should expect. C is faster than Java, Java will be faster than Python etc. The 'interpretation overhead' is supposed to kill your performance.

But there is one weird exception. You have the APL family, which are a very high at level of abstraction but perform even faster than C. Especially because od using vectorized processing. When you work on vectors of 1000s items in one instruction, you amortize language interpretation cost away and since working with vectors is actually the only natural way to work with computers you get massive performance from those instructions using vectorized instructions or even running on gpu. (All memory access is naturally linear in computing. Random access memory is an unnatural computing myth which comes at enormous cost and has to be hardware accelerated to be even usable).

Similar can be said about databases and SQL. Especially in OLAP processing, where you can linearize your data tables and columns and vectorize your processing. Because it is near impossible to overcome von Neumann bottleneck in traditional single computer languages like C or Java, any SQL or APL will beat the crap out of them if you span the processing over multiple cores and machines.

Days of single machine processing are over and clusters of computers are the future. AWS (and potentially other clouds) are essentially Operating Systems for sich environent. It'd be nice for open source to catch up though.
It’s also really useful for seeing when transport will arrive. Just going into the map mode you will see icons for bus stops, stations, trams etc and you can tap on them to see all the arrivals. Great feature.
I think it's probably virtue signalling rather than appeasement. Advertises probably welcome anti-vaxers as they are demonstrably gullible and easy to persuade.
Imagine my confusion, I clicked thinking I was going to read an article discussing 'Through-Hole vs. Surface' mounting of PCB components.
If insider trading is allowed the company management can defraud the investors because their own actions influence stock price. So they can just sell their stock, do something that lowers stock price and buy it back.
I’ve heard it referred to as “getting managed out.”
There is a brewing backlash in Colorado against the Californians who couldn’t make it in SV but moved here and forgot to leave their extreme left wing politics behind.
Interesting experience report. I've seen some comments on hn on people starting out like you do, but realizing after a year that they need to work really hard to pickup old code. Do you imagine to have an easy time picking up your advent of code programs next December?

Another question - are there debuggers for these languages? Can you set breakpoints?

How do you interact with the www? Can you get some soap/json data and write a simple web service (even just a json endpoint)?

Or do you mostly see it useful to export data in some tsv/csv format, filter it through k, and write it back out?
Why wouldn't a model that knows how to drive in winter-conditions be better than one that doesn't? There are more effective actions than hitting the brakes and hoping for the best available, one of which is to continue driving the vehicle in a manner that is compatible with the conditions. Don't make abrupt changes to the configuration of the car and search for traction and positive outcomes. Of course this is greatly simplified by not going 90mph on all-year tires.