skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Kubernetes is a solution worse than the problem.

I disagree. Maybe it's because we haven't gone "full Kubernetes" where every cronjob is now a Kubernetes cronjob, or what have you, but for all the complexity we've had to overcome, we've seen substantial benefits.

For example, autoscaling instances of my data pipeline apps based on Kafka lag.

Was it complex? Yes. We had to expose Kafka topic lag as a metric to Prometheus, then configure the k8s metrics server that HPAs (Horizontal Pod Autoscalers) use to scale to pull that in from Prometheus using k8s-prometheus-adapter as a custom metric, then set reasonable scaling limits in the data pipeline apps HPAs.

Was it worth it? Fuck yes. We no longer have to worry about data arriving out of time at our data warehouse, because the scaling we've configured (in YAML, god rest its dirty soul) ensures that our data will always arrive at the data warehouse within 5 minutes, which is ideal for a near real time reporting product that greatly enables our end users.

Is Kubernetes worth it? For us, definitely. For anyone else? Really depends on your use case, don't cargo cult this shit.
Because until very, very recently they didn't have much weight to throw around. They were hemorrhaging money.

These things take time. CUDA took what, a decade to become what it is today? And it was developed by a company that wasn't on its deathbed.

Arguably AMD still doesn't have much weight to throw around. Their profits are meager. Their P/E is absolutely insane for a hardware company (240!), suggesting a dramatic correction in the foreseeable future. Stocks on an upward trajectory help attract top talent. On a downward trajectory they actively repel it.

So they probably have like half a dozen engineers working on this, and not those magical $500K/yr engineers that can actually turn shit into gold, because a hardware company wouldn't be able to hire them (or afford them, for that matter).
Is its open-source-ness what makes it unique?
I considered including the actual one page PDF I use for interviews in the post, but I didn't want to chance someone finding it online before they came into an interview with me.

But yes, the central point of the exercise is "show me where the smoke came out!" (It's a very, very dumb mistake. Nearly everyone I've spoken to has reasoned their way to it.)

The rest of it is to let people demonstrate what other errors they can pick out, or serve as fallbacks for the folks who don't find the magic smoke/component death failure.
Ironically, the assumption that people with kids are less ambitious may be false. Some anecdotes:

1. Long ago, the newspaper reported about a study of single unskilled women in south Chicago, where it turned out that the women with kids tended to work more hours for higher wages, and often commuted further to their jobs.

2. Another study, reporting that a disproportionate number of people change jobs in pursuit of higher pay after the birth of their first child. I was one of those people, and I know a lot of other people who did the same.

3. Completely anecdotal and informal survey of colleagues, that the people who went into the thankless but higher paying jobs in project or middle management are exclusively parents. I've never met a project manager who was single.

All of this is with the usual caveats about "studies" and anecdotes, but the suggestion is that economic motivation can make people more productive. Or at least, it's enough of a counter-argument to the conventional wisdom to justify reserving judgement in the absence of more robust evidence.
Too bad it's not legal and regulated. I personally am just fine with reality and don't use any reality altering drugs but it would a lot safer if LSD was a regulated substance that the FDA could insure its quantity and quality.
"But can anyone answer: why is mature, rounded, fine sand not suitable for binding concrete or for glassmaking?"

It's the jagged edges on 'fresh' sand that gives the mix strength. Smooth sand is fine for glassmaking (something I do along with metal and jewelry work) but horrible for construction, as it doesn't grip into the binding agent as well, and any serious load makes it turn straight into dust.

The sand can be as fine as possible, as long as it isn't rounded, and still be useful for construction work.
If the backend of Windows Search is amazing, why is the front-end user experience abysmal? The problems just don't seem like front end problems: the search is occasionally slow, it doesn't even reliably find installed programs by their name, and if the result pops up while your next keystroke is underway it will sometimes lose the result even if that keystroke is correct, and somehow finding the result again will require removing more than the single correct keystroke that made your desired result disappear. The mind boggles.

I'm not familiar with Windows internals, so I should clarify: I'm talking about the search functionality invoked by typing after pressing the Windows key.

If I were an app developer in this space I would not trust my core functionality to anything even remotely associated with the above, and I strongly suspect that the complexity of handling the long tail of functionality you mentioned has something to do with why the windows-key search experience sucks. Certainly the fundamental task is not intractable because Spotlight (Apple's search) has been Good Enough for a while. IIRC it became tolerable around the time SSDs became standard. Windows-key search isn't quite there yet. Until it is, I'll take good execution on the basic 80% of functionality any day.
When you have the same kind of control over an entire industry, you might as well be a monopoly.

There are other related terms that also certainly apply to Apple in a stricter technical sense that you can read about here -

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly

And there also is certainly an antitrust case pending against Apple right now is there not?
Yes, pg succumbs to the anecdotal fallacy with his conclusion here. He is filthy rich. When someone who’s filthy rich has kids, I’d expect a bimodal outcome: outsource child raising entirely and keep on working hard (lousy father scenario) or take it relatively easy to spend time with the kids.

When someone has kids who is not filthy rich (ie most people), I think the outcome has more variance. Some will have a hard time adjusting, some will decide that money and work aren’t very important, and some will become more ambitious in order to provide for the family. Also, the outcome can change over time. The shock to the system of the early years can be replaced by naked ambition as the kids get older and college looms. Etc. One thing I enjoy about working with people with kids is that they generally seem more discerning about what to spend time on at work, and they have a good sense of rudimentary people management skills.
For several months now I've been wondering how to get rid of a 700 MB data file that was accidentally committed to our shared git repo. Now everyone has it, and a clean pull takes forever. Appreciate any thoughts.
> A reactor burning higher transuranics will be right on the knife edge of prompt supercriticality.

Meh, that might be a bit of an overstatement. Yes, plutonium-driven fast reactors have a delayed neutron fraction around 0.0035 down from 0.0065 in a U-235-fueled fast reactor. The relatively large delayed neutron fraction from fast fissions of U-238 helps out along the way. You can reduce the radiotoxicity of TRU even if you continue to load some U-238. The inert matrix fuels with no U-238 at all get more interesting from this perspective (also from the Doppler effect), but most people don't envision using these.

In fluid systems, more than half of the fuel inventory is off in a heat exchanger out of the core, which means the delayed neutron fraction is cut roughly in half in those systems too (the delayed neutron precursor decays happen where neutron importance is near zero).

Plutonium-fueled fast reactors can be operated with good margins of stability.
Not going to disclose the company. Smaller public tech company. 10+ yoe.
I don’t disagree but there are clear hierarchical criteria on how these hazards should be addressed. The reason behind engineering mitigation being favored is because they make the less reliable procedural mitigations moot (I.e., they improve the overall reliability by removing one of the points of failure, in this case the pilot). Forgoing engineering mitigations in favor of procedural fixes goes against good engineering practice at best and is a cheap, lazy fix at worst.

I can understand if the AD was intended as a short term fix but I would question the rationale if it were considered a long term solution
>Someone dumb enough to sacrifice their personal life to your "vision" to this extent will probably exhibit poor judgement in other aspects of your business.

Or, they get sick of it and decide they'd rather put that energy towards bettering their own life rather than making someone else rich and may possibly leave abrubtly without much warning, leaving the company scrambling to find a replacement.
I think you lucked out actually. Interviews go both ways.
The Common Lisp operating system, has its own Patreon page
Yeah that's typical conservative mentality that is feeling based rather than reason based. It's a real shame how backward governments are in this respect.
Doesn’t scroll under Safari.
America’s Cup: revolutionary 'flying' yachts take Auld Mug into new realm
Can you explain why redis require extra network time?
Monday: Evil in the Sight of the Lord
A little-discussed issue is that big tech cos tend to do better on diversity and inclusion. Obviously it varies by startup, but when you’re in a survival mentality it is difficult to be open to people of different sexualities, races and experiences. You tend to get clumps of similar overachievers. Paul Graham said this was an “advantage” but for people like me in the LGBTQ community it certainly isn’t.
Print out all the papers from MIT's grad level credit of 6.034: https://ai6034.mit.edu/wiki/index.php?title=6.844_Info or Sussman's version https://ai6034.mit.edu/wiki/index.php?title=6.S966:_A_Gradua... and bind them together in a book, with the instructor notes and include these papers https://courses.csail.mit.edu/6.803/schedule.html too

They are all classic AI papers, that try and encourage the reader to think about unsolved problems.
They should fact check the article...

On the morning of April 19, he synthesized 0.5 milliliters of the compound, dissolved it in 10 cubic centimeters of water, and at 4:20 PM took 250 micrograms—0.000025 of a gram, the smallest dose he thought he might conceivably notice.

Synthesized 0.5mL? It’s not a liquid.

And 250 ug is 0.00025, they have an extra zero in there.
This is happening one country at a time. It happened to South Korea and a lesser extent Japan. It’s happening in India and China.

We still have centuries of third world countries to exploit until they are fully developed.
Marketing and market research.
I recall when I was in my 20's, unmarried with no kids, how resentful I felt toward all of the older folks with kids. I worked a lot longer and harder than they could, and I was more focused on my work. I was satisfied with my salary, but (at the time) my company provided full medical and dental insurance for the entire family of an employee. I viewed this as a form of unfair discrimination because they were effectively earning more money (in the context of the value of their benefits) just because they had a family.

Of course once I got married and had kids, my selfish self-interest prevailed and I no longer cared about whether or not it was unfair.

Companies like Space-X and Google thrive on exploiting young single people, but on average, they can only get away with it for a decade or less (until the employee gets married).
> Therefore if a person doesn't want to be prospected, all she needs to do is erase her data from these public data sources.

That seems to transfer the burden on to the recipient - basically, it seems to exploit an externality. Can you think of a better approach that more actively incorporates recipients’ preferences?
Interestingly, only one has a degree in CS, and there's no other computer-aligned degree represented in the board. They have plenty of lawyers though.

I bring this up because software is incredibly important for flying these planes, and the 737 MAX disaster was caused in part by bad software (MCAS). They were outsourcing its development to $9/hr contractors, which if they treated software as more of the core competency that it actually is for them, they would never have done.
The Secret Lives of Data – Raft
Surely investing in and supporting putting even more people in such a position, rather than helping those already in it, is obviously worse?
"they were safe enough at the timescales that people previously operated in."

If you were a peasant in the 1800s expecting to live till 50, sausages and smoked meat would probably _increase_ your life expectancy due to the additional protein. You would also not live long enough, or eat so much of it as to have a significantly higher likelihood of getting cancer.

The context in which those foods are consumed is different today than it used to be. People live longer and consume way more meat (of every kind) than they used to. If you eat smoked meats and fish (and really any other meats) at the same rates as peasants of 200 years ago, I doubt they'll increase your cancer risk by all that much.
> Kubernetes is a solution worse than the problem.

Not if you're a 1,000+ engineer org with an SOA.

> Microservices are unix pipes but slower.

Humans are way more expensive than the machines running our code. You can always spend more on spinning up additional instances. In reality the overhead isn't that bad. The principles of immutable stateless deploys free up so much mental energy when it comes to thinking about how to get your code out and not break things that it more than pays for itself.

> AI is linear algebra that costs x1000 because of the brand name.

Tell that to my real time voice conversion system I just wrote. There's a lot of new magic happening right now.

> There is no revolution in software.

I'm on a fucking phone responding from hundreds of miles away. We're launching satellites that beam internet.

> We are just building crud

You can't speak for everyone here.

Are you in adtech or a social spyware company? Maybe don't work like that then.

Find meaningful work that speaks to you.

> quality of developers tends to zero as the number of developers increases.

I work with brilliant people.
You should be able to run a command that cleans the git tree of the file in all commits. I’ve had to do it because of committed passwords in files.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/35115585/remove-file-fro...
Man, other people played these books with way more discipline than I did.

I don’t think I ever made it all the way through a book playing “properly”. Oh, I died? Okay, let’s just assume I didn’t...
I hope these trends continue, but it’s not what I observed over the last couple months.

To be fair, I was specifically not interested in a remote job. Would rather work in an office.
It needs three AoA sensors, like Airbus planes have. Two isn't enough for such a safety-critical system. When one malfunctions, you still need to know what the correct value is.
The Worst CPU and GPU Purchases of 2019
Or it ends up on bash.org
Don't they look green because they reflect most green wavelengths?
OT: does anyone know why an existing playlist would suddenly become something comepletwly different?

I used to listen to a Carnatic Classical playlist (Here’s a playlist for you… Carnatic Classical by Spotify
https://open.spotify.com/playlist/37i9dQZF1DWZqTcNLmb3sH?si=...) and now it’s just changed to something completely different. Honestly this made me want to leave!
You're not really drilling down. All these pseudo-spiritual "gurus" lay the entire basis of their thinking out using mystical thinking to explain things rather than anything intellectual. I'd rather follow a random number generator with where to go next with my life experiences than these types of frauds.
There's a link in the official Microsoft documentation (for office-js if I remember it right) that uses bitly or a similar service. I don't what happened to that link but now, when clicked, it tries first to load some random porn site and then redirects to a YouTube video (about a car or something like that). I wanted to report it, but didn't find an easy way of doing so, so there must be still there trying to add malware or who knows what to the poor people reading official Microsoft documentation.
I've never heard of a whole book, but I can see how it'd be a great book if someone really took the time to make it.

I guess you could argue that The Art of Electronics kind of fills this niche. Horowitz and Hill call out a bunch of non-functional or error prone circuits with large, friendly "DON'T DO THIS" labels. The second edition had a great section at the end of each chapter entitled "Bad Circuits" that served just this purpose. (The only flaw with the 3rd edition is that they took out "Bad Circuits", in my opinion.)
> A friend posts a funny YouTube video I just click play

Precisely why I prefer IRC.
I agree that the particular TS snippet I pasted in that post is painful to look at, but it's also for library code, not app code.

Beyond that, yeah, we'll have to disagree, per all the reasons I listed in that blog post.
looks like you're using the web api instead of the IOS sdk? any reason for that? is the ios sdk not in swift yet ? It was a pain to setup the last time i looked at it.
Keep in mind this is only true of peasant classes that grow wheat as their primary grain. Rice in stark contrast requires much more labor, and I’ve seen sources suggest 365 days of labor was necessary for peasant the peasant class in south east asia as a result. I’ve also heard theorized that a significant contributor to the perceived cultural differences of northern china and southern china is that north china grew wheat and south china grew rice.
Yes, it’s a really fun space opera, with lots of silly figures of speech and cringy tropes/stereotypes. The story and world are great enough to recommend it even if you have a hard time with the writing.

And my favorite sci-fi authors are Heinlein and Lem, so calibrate accordingly.
There's a brief mention of the load-balancer (nginx) in front of the Go servers; I'm curious if there's anything interesting happening there. I'd imagine that if you lose a server, all of the clients will try to reconnect and traffic will be spread across the existing servers. That's all find and good, but presumably when you bring up a new server to replace the failed on, it'll be seriously underutilized. Is there some easy solution here in nginx-land?
I don't know about Eastern vs Western religions/"spiritual paths" but I find them both to be a waste of time. Any type of "revealed knowledge" whatever the source should be treated with suspicion if not disdain.
In the case of this metaphor, he ran back to Palantir for his opportunity to shoot the gun, for a tiny share of the profits.
So some time ago when I was playing around with my toy project (RaspChat) I noticed creating 2 channels and a go routine for every incoming websocket connection is not the answer. I was designing RaspChat to work on a 512MB Raspberry Pi; and I was bottle-necked by GC, and memory consumption around 3 - 4K connections. After loads of optimizations I got it around 5K. Digging deeper and found well I have to maintain a pool of go routines (like threadpool) and I have to write event loop. I was instantly pulling my hair. I was sacrificing so much simplicity, and flexibility of Node.js just because I was trying to avoid event loop and wanted to use channels (I did too much Erlang months before starting project and couldn't think anything other than process and messages). I got a backlash on my release (https://github.com/maxpert/raspchat/releases/tag/v1.0.0-alph...) from go community telling me how I was using desierializers/leaving loop holes in file upload and I didn't know shit about language.

At that time I found uws (https://github.com/uNetworking/uWebSockets.js) that easily got me to 10K easily, and I was like "I would rather bet on a community investing on efficient websocket event loop rather than me writing my own sh*t". Don't get me wrong; I love Golang! Seriously I love it so much I have been pushing my company to use Golang. I just don't want to glorify the language for being silver bullet (which it's fanboys usually do). I would never implement complicated business logic that involves many moving pieces. When my business requires dealing with shape of an object and mixing matching things to pass data around; I would rather choose a language that lets me deal with shapes of object. Go has it's specific use-cases and strengths, people advertising it as move it to go and it would be faster than Java/C#/Node.js etc. have not done it or have not dealt with complexity of maintaining it.
https://outline.com/EqgDw6
> Visual checks confirm that indeed the most interesting cases, about 100, are mostly one-time detections in the red band.

So that could be fusion torch flashes. Or maybe weapons.

I wonder if they have spectra for any of these suspects.
> I would never dream today of starting a very technical company because every major will poach your talent (happened to me), invest in your competitors or attempt to acquire you (some people don't want to be acquired).

Damn, this is exactly what I want to do. Computer vision too.

Do you have any advice other than "don't"?

Would basing the company on the East coast near a tier-1 research university help with talent?

Could you have strong software engineers support the research roles? Does that pattern work effectively?

Another thing I really want to do is offer a 4-day work week with the promise of sabbaticals and/or remote work. That might not be attractive to everyone, but it's something that would speak to me and that I would want in addition to equity and salary.

Are you still interested in computer vision? Want to chat sometime?
I can pick up a few here:

https://github.com/MicrosoftDocs/azure-docs/search?q=bit.ly&...

Edit: All those seem "legit", but do point to a pattern
I was talking about elements beyond plutonium.
So Nflx.
The way to make things safe is to address ALL points in the zipper that led to the accident. That includes the pilot error aspects.

So how do you propose training against an unfinished product? Boeing still hasn't given the FAA a completed software package to evaluate. At the time of the 737 MAX crashes there were, what? two? 737 MAX simulators, and none of them emulated MCAS or even the forces required to crank the stabilizer manually.

One Lion Air flight got lucky because they had a third set of eyes that could spend time going through reams of documentation.

To even begin discussing pilot "error" is disingenuous when the pilots weren't informed or trained on new 737 MAX behavior. MCAS activation is not, and was not, a runaway stabilizer situation.
You have to be an engineer to understand safety. It should be abundantly clear what is meant by this. They're building aircraft. What do accountants know about building aircraft? Nothing, nothing at all. How can the buck stop with them? It can't. It has to stop somewhere lower, with an engineer, that understands safety. Unfortunately, a non-engineer won't know if their engineer underlings are A) Qualified or B) Competent.
A while ago I dove into ham radio a bit. I think what you saw was the 40m and 80m bands (HF band, very high range) which are used mainly for "competitions" (essentially exchanging callsigns).

I still find it intriguing because it's such a simple way of communicating. You can build the circuits yourself and with a license communicate with others over kilometers (with a good antenna sometimes thousands of kilometers). Think about it, without cell phone towers, satellites and all that commercial infrastructure it's really the only way to reach anyone.