skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Looking at the case where khanacademy is migrating their server only after about 10 years. I realize more that I don't have to worry that much about being locked into certain technologies (unless it's clearly untransferable, e.g. storing part of customer data in 3rd party server), because after all, we might keep it only for about 10-20 years, and the thing I'm working at almost certainly will only last < 2-3 years.
The AI researcher is trying to ward off a reproducibility crisis
Just use tmux and split your pane
I moved most of the important stuff away the other year. Went with Protonmail and then Fastmail since their IMAP support was better. I really prefer to use a native email client over the web interface; I don't need to be online to sift through my archive.

Ended up with a Google account still because I get value out of youtube, and of course I don't have a choice at work since most startups seem to go G-Suite by default (I'd take the MS offering over that too; they're not in the ad business).

At risk of going off topic, I hope that if one day I have children (if at all), I will remember enough of the old internet back in the late 90s/early 2000s to be able to describe just how weird and wonderful that world used to be. Not all of it was good or great but they'll be forgotten relics of an ancient era, in tech terms. You know, like getting on the internet by picking up a free AOL CD from the local supermarket; not being able to use the internet and make a phone call at the same time; cracks and keygens with the epic graphics and music; making a really bad website with frames and tables with Macromedia Dreamweaver or MS FrontPage...

Feels like these days that the internet, in the mainstream (so not HN or similar), is just an advertising and surveillance platform.
LaTeX Template for Conference Organisers
> We need more of them, not less.

While not sacrificing security, of course.
Tattoo-induced skin burn during MR imaging (2000)
I moved back to monolith and am very happy. I think of the monolith now as a collection of modules. The rule is now, one should be able to drag any of the modules to the top-level of our monorepo and create a new microservice pretty easily when the time comes. I think the microservices book (that came from that Uber engineer...?) suggests a rule of 5 engineers per service.
migrating from python 2 to 3 is such a large task that migrating to any other language is a comparable effort. this is not just a library problem the language itself changed significantly

source: no python services at my company are going to be migrated to python 3; it’s all moving to a JVM
Given Wikileaks and such, the protection from the courts can only last so long. Eventually, someone is going to cough up a memory card, or photos on their mobile device.

I think the law should allow harmful secret keeping. But I trust honest people and technology can resolve that; probably doing more damage than the legal route.
I'm not so sure. I don't see it being used on the server side a whole lot, it seems to be more or less synonymous with Android dev -- and Dart/Flutter is taking big chunks of that space now and growing rapidly.
Google almost seems like they are trying to be Microsoft number 2. They can't stop themselves from being overly competitive. I predict they will get hit with a serious us govt case that causes them to allow more competition, just like Microsoft in the next 5 years. Blocking ad blockers, controlling Android, banning unions, it's sad to see them coming to this.
Install, Configure and Secure Redis on Ubuntu 19.04
I’ve been working in a technical field for 20 years without a degree. In my professional experience, every new college graduate that I onboard ends up needing many months of “do-with” time before they — and their fresh updated knowledge — are useful to the organization.
No, it's not very different, I think @computator is right.

I tried a first basic check: Ukrainian passport and any Schengen country, I tried Romania. VisaList says "Ukrainian citizens don't need visa for travelling to Romania as tourist." and "Standard travel documents like passport / national ID card will generally be sufficient". It's not true, since you need a biometric passport to travel to Romania visa-free. Usual (non-biometric) foreign passport and especially national ID card is definitely not sufficient for visa-free travel.

Wikipedia knows this: "From June 11, 2017 Ukrainians with biometric passports can travel to Schengen Area countries visa-free for up to 90 days.", IATA database (https://www.iatatravelcentre.com) knows this as well. But visalist.io doesn't :( So it's definitely "trust but verify" in this case...
The problem for me is that if I am just using it to archive or back up my photos then they are asking for more money per year than it would cost me to simply buy more local disk space and make a local backup. Most of the photos I have (had) there are private so they incur essentially zero bandwidth charges.

It seems to me that such a system should benefit from economies of scale so that a year's subscription should at least be cheaper than buying local storage.

So it's back to Google Photos for unlimited storage of reduced resolution copies and 15 GB of general storage (enough for over twenty thousand full resolution pictures from my Moto G5+).
That sounds like making up a new definition of "apprenticeship". Why would an apprentice not need to be paid? Is this only for the independently wealthy, or do they have to get a second job on the side in order to eat?
The cost of landfill is really low, so it wouldn’t make any difference if it were added to the cost of plastic.

The world has a lot of important environmental problems, like climate change. Landfill space is not an important environmental problem. You should spend your worrying energy on something else.
I'm trying to figure out if it still makes sense to sort out the plastics before burying them. Make dedicated plastic landfills separate from all the other rubbish. Then when we find an efficient way to reuse it we will know where in the ground a ton of it is rather than having to open a mixed rubbish fill land fill then clean and process ALL the garbage to sort the plastic out. Seems to me that presorting before burying is a better use of energy and resources.
You may be confusing the adoption of Kotlin for Android. That happened more recently Kotlin has been open source since 2012 and designed as a direct (compatible) replacement for Java.
Like many things in life, there are no absolutes. So rather than going to opposite ends of the spectrum, check out modular monoliths.

This approach is a nice balance (IMHO), since you start off with monolith but it is broken down into cleanly separated modules. Each module can potentially become its own micro-service if or when the time comes.

In terms of implementation, this can be easily done, for example we do it JVM/Kotlin where each microservice is its own project that produces a binary/jar. All the projects are part of a multi-project build. Lastly we have a common project for shared code, utils, types, enums, interfaces, etc and an application project that loads/sets up all the microservices from each project. Works great so far. And when you do have break up 1 project into its own service, the effort is fairly manageable.
The ideas:

- Business and government will—gasp!—work together again.

- The new age of economics is dawning.

- A "gold standard" of digital currencies will emerge.

- Capitalism will save the planet (seriously).

- Business will embrace its responsibility to save capitalism.

- Genomics will rewrite medicine—and prevention.

- Cell-based meat will change the way you eat.

- The 31st human right should be to own your medical data.

- The future of work is skills—so stop worrying about degrees.

- What will really lead to workplace equality? Men leaning out.

- The 4-day workweek will make companies more productive.

- Women will alter the workforce—dramatically.

- Showing up will matter again.

- Investing in girls' education pays huge dividends.

- Thinking big will redesign the world.

- Venture capital will transcend the valley.

- Big tech won't reign—it will be reined in.

- The line between human and bot will disappear—and we'll be fine with it.

- The 2020s will connect rural America—or lose it.
- A.I. "hygiene" will determine the success of A.I.
I think that the fact you have much more visibility over which of the services are behind and have lower security practices one of the things I love about our microservices - we recently (a year ago) broke up our monolithic codebase into a service oriented architecture (I would hesitate to call our services micro personally) and I was astounded at all of the hidden security issues and random code in the far reaching corners of the monolith that hadn't been touched or thought about in years.

It is much easier (imo) to pop into a repo of one of our services and look through the code in it's enitrety and see when things were last touched and where the issues are. I would make the argument that the "inevitable corners that fall behind and have questionable security" is something that is inevitable in any codebase that grows to a certain complexity, and microservices (or SOA in general) make it much easier to see those things as they are decomposed.
I don't know if this is a feature of Android or of the alternative ROM I'm using, but I can disable network access on a per app basis.

In my Android Pie based ROM, in Settings / Network & Internet / Data Usage / App data usage I can select any app and disable WiFi, Cellular data or both.
jealous
In broad terms, I think the intent of the article is to point out the potential for quality to suffer when duties are outsourced, in part because an organization relinquishes some level of process control as a trade off to save money.

The same argument could be extended to the FAA oversight functions being “outsourced” to Boeing which may have had a direct impact on all those items you listed
That’s fine, I must have miss read it the first time. Because I re read it noted the double negative and was editing it when I then saw the final version...

¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Programming Languages Used for Music
It goes without saying that in the end we're all apes and no system is perfect. I think many would agree that with HN there is at least a consistent effort to strive for higher ideals.
Ok it wasn't recent enough that I remember clearly! But looking at litcharts notes I think it was this part:

Torn between whether Quality is a subjective or objective phenomenon, Phaedrus eventually comes to the epiphany that it is in fact neither. Quality precedes subjectivity and objectivity—in fact, it is what allows for the separation of the world into subjective and objective realms in the first place.

Perhaps I'm being a bit harsh in calling this nonsense but I am quite harsh on philosophy in general (though I do have time for some of it). Maybe this epiphany is true for all I know but the text didn't seem to communicate why he thought so. I remember having many objections the text didn't answer, and being frustrated at lack of properly defined terms, even making allowance for his claim that quality is undefinable.

If anyone can justify the claim quoted above I'd be interested to hear it?
Echoes of a Decade
> When did we start thinking that there is something wrong with the landfill.

In the 80s from what I understand, in response to the Mobro 4000 incident: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/01/01/what-happened-to-90s-e...
To be more specific (for anyone else who hasn't checked the link yet), the "Lifetime giving" section has:
9 donations >10m,
4 donations between 5-10m,
20 donations between 1-5m

So looks like there has been at least 120m in donations!
I don't think upgrading to python 3 will be as hard as rewriting the entire thing, but rewriting does come with the benefit that you are not stuck with the problems that come with dynamic typing in a huge codebase, and i'm assuming this is why sticking with python is hard.

They also said a faster language will improve their server.
How the hell people like you have links to things like [0] will never cease to amaze me. This is why HN is irreplaceable imho. This place is too damn interesting

Thank you for sharing!
I'm not sure why you're being downvoted. Maybe some people are too blinded by their politics to think objectively.

The fact is that, visually speaking, Drudge Report has been the Craigslist of news for almost a quarter of a century. A big reason for its success is that it is easy and familiar to use, which is particularly attractive to its target demographic.
Entropy laughs
Numerous large projects and companies have publicly stated that they are stuck on Python 2 and it's easier to migrate languages, even to ones that they have to invent (Go) than to migrate to python 3. At least one of these companies had Guido on their staffs for years. Another, also with Guido on the staff, needed over three years to migrate from 2 to 3. The overwhelming body of evidence shows that migrating a large project from 2 to 3 borders on impossible, but there's always someone willing to pop up on HN to say how easy it is.
Ask HN: How to retrain tongue/mouth muscles for foreign language pronunciation?
Everyone is born with the ability to speak any language accent-free, so biomechanically, it seems possible for someone to learn a foreign language and eventually speak with minimal accent or no accent.

To draw a sports analogy, everyone is born with the ability to play at least one sport perfectly. We spend childhood training our mouth and throat muscles for this one sport and eventually become very adept.

For example, individuals may perfect hitting a baseball but struggle hitting a golf ball. The differences between baseball and golf swings are large enough that it requires tremendous talent and dedication to translate expertise from one to the other.

Assuming this sports analogy holds, a key step in developing accent-free pronunciation requires defining and learning the biomechanical fundamentals of the language "swing" -- similar to how beginners learn the fundamentals of a golf swing.

The second step is transferring this knowledge from the mind to the body. With golf, this is achieved by visiting the driving range or golf course and repeatedly training our muscles to swing a golf club instead of a baseball bat.

Questions:

1. How do you learn the "swing" (e.g., tongue and mouth movements) of a language? Most language resources are rich in grammar and vocabulary but sparse on pronunciation.

2. What is the language equivalent of the driving range, meaning what are the most effective ways to retrain mouth and tongue muscles on your own? (Immersive learning or speaking with natives may be ideal, but they are also more difficult to arrange.)
"I think the law should allow harmful secret keeping."
Even if those secrets allow for a company to continue to sell products that they know are harmful to human health? The argument against trusting honest people and technology is that historically they have not delivered. See the recent Boeing crashes as an example or the long history of Dupont. By allowing harmful secret keeping, thousands of people are sickened and die every year. Even if eventually a good person steps forward and exposes the issue, the dead don't come back to life and those already sickened have to deal with it for the remainder of their shortened life. If a company has internal evidence that their products are harmful to human health and they continue to sell them then in my opinion all that knew about the secret but said nothing should be criminally prosecuted.
https://talks.golang.org/2014/names.slide

Very cool presentation by Andrew Gerrand, with the following rule of thumb:

The greater the distance between a name's declaration and its uses,
the longer the name should be.
It’s worth keeping in mind that ‘education’ as we practice it was Roman, passed through cathedral schools for priests to the British Empire, (becoming) what we know of today as academia.

Some further tangential exposition on the topic: https://www.ted.com/talks/sugata_mitra_build_a_school_in_the...
I'm curious what CS/CE undergrad program consists only of sitting in lectures and reading textbooks. That sounds like it's missing 90% of the point of classes! I would think university had little value, too, if we didn't have to write any real software.
I also kept my account, hard to ditch it with everyone around me sharing google docs. I still use it once in a while, and I have plenty of stuff in drive that I need to take out. Funny enough, office live might be an alternative...
Unfortunately requires root though, which means for the vast majority of Android users this is not an option.
I can't speak for any other engineer anywhere else (where I'm sure they synchronously send out email because they haven't learned how to do it better), but there's not a chance github do this at their scale, and they're built on Rails. Rails gives you async mail by default and you just have to plug in a queue adapter for your worker processes to consume.

e.g. GitHub gets this request, queues the job in redis/zero MQ/SQS or whatever they're using, and another process dedicated to sending those emails (or jobs with that priority) does the rest of the work.

This is a massively common pattern in the Rails world and is as trivial to configure as your database connection.
Boing has lost a lot of money on this, which capitalism should avoid no government intervention required.

Instead, this is not really capitalism at work but internal forces inside a giant organization. The risk reward calculation for internal management does not track the company’s overall risks vs reward resulting in company wide losses.
What's really the ergonomic difference between "traditional scripting languages" and Go? I came up writing professional C code, and spent most of the last 15 years writing "traditional scripting language" code, and Go feels a lot closer to scripting than to C to me, despite compiling down to machine code.

Go has static types, and that distinguishes it from Python, Ruby, and Perl. But the trend now seems to be for languages to move towards static typing anyways; 2005-era Python was wrong about that.
I thought ghosts were just a metaphor for his own surpressed memories?
If sorting technology gets better over time, why even bother presorting before burying? It would be cheaper to bury and them sort in the future. Maybe conventional landfills, with adequate attention paid to leak prevention, were the smartest solution all along.
My grandma owns a tax consulting business and began using computers in the age of Dos. Over the years I would end up with her old computers and that's essentially how I became familiar with them when I was young. About the time I graduated with my CS degree, I realized something.... My grandma isn't actually that capable with computers. Even though she's literally been using them longer than I have, she had only really been performing a few tasks beyond get work, and never really spent time using or learning the nuances of computers and operating systems. I think she never really caught on to the changes Windows and web browsers made over the years, and she just stuck to her work. Now, you might not tell her apart from someone who just started learning.
Devops here. Blaming faults on a specific person is blame culture. Sorry but it will make people responsible not disclosing important incident information and instead hide it.

Basically blame its an anti devops pattern.
https://victorops.com/blog/blameless-culture
May I ask what software you use for self-hosting?

It's just a home grown thing. I'm not trying to compete with all the social crap that Flickr used to do well. These days I'm leaning towards making it more of a static site generator type thing. Image processing is done with a combination of imagemagick and exiftool.

Initially it started out as an Elixir+Phoenix app with an eye towards setting up some image processing as a set of background services taking the form of Elixir apps. Elixir and Phoenix were pretty painful so it's since been rewritten in Rust+Rocket.
For any web-based app, it really makes sense to take the approach of using a rapid development language first, then as you need to scale, convert to something that’s compiled and focuses on speed. It’s not one or the other kind of thing — they both have a role (at least until we reach the holy grail where fast to develop is also fast to run).
> migrating from python 2 to 3 is such a large task that migrating to any other language is a comparable effort

I'm going to call BS on that one.

If you're having issues with Python 2, then it might make more sense to switch to another language instead of upgrade to Python 3. But going from Python 2 to 3 is much easier than switching languages completely.

Python is not a perfect language. There is no perfect language. It sounds like your company just had a reason for switching to a JVM language and the Python 2 EOL was a justification to start.
I agree that it’s tough to truly grok technical material in purely audio format. With that said, I think you can learn a ton by learning about the history, trends, and other software companies. Here are some of my favorites:

The Dream Machine

Hackers: Heroes of the Computer a Revolution

How the Internet Happened

The Soul of a New Machine

AI Superpowers

Platform Revolution

The Everything Store
> Go has static types, and that distinguishes it from Python, Ruby, and Perl.

It also has interface{} and that's a non-trivial commonality with Python, Ruby and Perl.
Unsurprising. When I was using an Android phone with Firefox, Google search always served me the “bare bones” degraded layout; changing the UA got me the same content as Chrome.
The open question is if Java will start borrowing the best features from Kotlin and it will become less relevant (like Scala). To Kotlin's credit, it has better IDE support, it feels simpler than Java (whereas Scala feels more complex), and it cleans up a lot of fundamental language issues that Java can't get away from.
Ha, that's cool. You found a lot of different interpretations. These also exist in Dutch. No. 3 comes closest to how most people would understand the meaning in Dutch, but some others like no. 4 would fit too.
> times were better when there were fewer bad actors.

At the meta-level, I don't think there are, per capita, more 'bad actors' in any broad consumer population today than there were 30 years ago. Most people are generally about the same morally and ethically in their day-to-day lives as we were back then. I think mass media and social media are incentivized to make things look worse today but the data doesn't support that view.

Media and software piracy are good examples. It's no harder today to pirate most music, movies or games than it was 20 years ago. Comparing the free Napster-to-Torrent options vs the paid-Spotify, Netflix, and Xbox/PS4 subscription services show consumers will pay a reasonable price for convenience. I would argue that anti-piracy efforts that make the user experience worse are shortsighted optimizations that are long-term foolish. In 2019 the recording industry set a new total revenue record thanks to the subscription model, finally surpassing the peak of the physical media era.
US raises legal age to buy cigarettes to 21
> Is switching to python 3 really that hard?

I think it's more that given their specific codebase it's similarly difficult to switch to python 3 as it is to switch to a number of other, entirely different programming languages. Once you recognize that rough equivalency, then it's worth considering the stability, compile times, necessary production resources, etc of those other programming languages.

If your project's specific dependencies are so intrinsically stuck on a python 2.x implementation you might be caught between having to redesign that dependency in-house or switching to a language where you wouldn't need to do that in-house work.
I am not registered and still get calls.