skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> As you can see, systemd has taken over a great many things that are totally unrelated to its core mission of replacing sysvinit.

This is my pet peeve: systemd-as-init is / may be fine. systemd-as-NTPd or systemd-with-udevd seems like overly tight coupling.
> BOFH is nothing more than an asshole who is actively counterproductive at his job.

I think you're right, but if, as a sysadmin, I chuckle at these stories and it helps me remember why I should make an effort for my high-maintenance users (instead of deleting their $HOME), is that ok?
So that's why this doesn't make sense to you. You're refusing to think like an investor, only like an employee. Comparing one field to another field from the perspective of a laborer is useless, because the job and career only exists in context of the business itself. Until you can talk about investibility, this will remain a mystery to you. You've unintentionally demonstrated the difference between a programmer and a product savvy software engineer.

To try to end this on a bit more of a constructive note: think about the difference between the _firms_ that employ software engineers/marketers/salespeople and the _firms_ that employ highly paid folks in medicine and law. How do the unit economics breakdown? In what ways are certain aspects favorable and unfavorable to an investor?
> If you're using runtime languages on the backed (node, python) then you're already failing the environment.

Not necessarily. If you make a living running a typical CRUD software-as-a-service offering, your code may really just be glue mapping HTTP requests to database requests. There, your choice of language doesn't count for much; your code isn't doing heavy lifting, the DBMS is.

It's quite possible your hardware requirements could be lower by writing in Python and tuning your database, rather than spending the same time writing non-performance-critical code in C++.

Frameworks like Tornado, for Python, are able to quite efficiently handle highly concurrent workloads, despite using a single-threaded, interpreted, language.

For computationally intensive code, then sure, a language like Python will need far more hardware horsepower to get the job done than C++ would.
Yeah but the point is that you don't want to sell in downturns anyway. If you need emergency liquidity then focus on owning Bitcoin or gold.
>Someone shares something interesting and OP gets a barrage of nit-picky commentary

everyone on hn is of the belief about themselves that they're dispassionate (objective) intellectuals and so of course their criticisms aren't in bad faith.

and moderators never address these kinds of comments but do often address comments like yours because they incite "flame wars" (since dispassionate intellectuals can be quite defensive).
What does "memoized by default" mean, precisely? Does it literally memoize every single function call? That seems... illadvised.
It’s a single process running inside a sandboxed VM. That process might not have code written for reading files from disk (let alone writing them) or a full TCP/IP stack (let alone the ability to forward SSH sessions) and it certainly wouldn’t have any capabilities of launching a remote shell. So you’re not going to be susceptible to the vast majority RCE vulnerabilities that happen with even a minimal GNU/Linux port. Even if sloppy C++ coding did make you vulnerable, you’re still stuck inside the VM with literally nothing available aside that process.

The bigger risk is DDoS attacks but that’s risk when writing sloppy code in any language, runtime and hosting environment.
Disk space in general is pretty much free these days. 123mb for a whole database is really not that big of a deal, IMHO. For example, my local PostgreSQL docker image is 140mb plus the alpine OS (5mb). And the Ruby on Rails application using that image clocks in at a little over 1gb, also using the ruby alpine image as a base (50mb).

With my company, the cost really started to become a burden with data transfer. But transferring images to and from the AWS container registry is so expensive that we actually build production images inside the Kubernetes cluster (plus the cluster has access to all the secrets and stuff), even though it was a bit harder to implement.

If you're FAANG and you can run your own stable and highly-available cloud, data transfer rates don't matter, so you can deploy your application the "right" way in a containerized world.
Mmmm I don't know if I agree with that logic.

I'd argue the opposite -- as a startup, you can't afford to micro-optimize. Labor, time and opportunity cost dwarf all but the grossest resource waste. If you need to use 100GB/k8s node instead of 50GB, it will have 0 effect on the success of your venture.

At Google scale, it becomes worth it to optimize:

- You are delivering more product per engineer, and more product means more resources. Instead of a single customer instance which costs $1/month more, you have 100,000 customer instances, costing a significant amount more. It becomes worth trimming margins.

- You have economies of scale, and it might be worth it for an engineer to spend a month trimming 2% of the cost of a software deliverable.

The common refrain for startups is "do things that don't scale", and this is for good reason. Google has to actually worry about fixing things AFTER they are scaled.
Except that this write up says this was a deliberate design decision to trade space for speed. That's not something to be fixed, unless you convince Go to make different trade offs or to provide more optimization options.
This is my solution but it may not be best for everyone.

Notes:

# .profile
function note { mg +-1 "/home/.../notes/$(date "+%Y-%m-%d").txt"; }

mg is micro emacs, +-1 opens the file with the cursor at the end.

Transactions:

I record my transactions into ledger[0]. I wrote an auto-complete wrapper in Python to help speed up entry and another to keep the formatting consistent, but otherwise it's a manual job. It helps keep me aware of my transactions, plus I like to add comments and customize the entries instead of just loading them from the institution's CSVs.

[0] https://www.ledger-cli.org
Are we living in a computer simulation? I don’t know. Probably
So, another reason to drop the addiction if you get withdrawal symptoms: If you have to go to the hospital and stay over for a surgery, you won't get caffeine, and only very limited doses of pain medications. The headache was worse than the gallstone pain I went in for.

Anyways, there's your TMI for the day.
> I can’t think of how there is going to be a new entrant to the market that competes with the current three’s processes.

There will probably be a continuing growth of demand for making chips, so I wouldn't be surprised to see some folks get into the market with "old" tech. So it's unlikely any one will jump in right at the bleeding edge, they may work their way up to more modern processes over time.

I could see a niche of 'home grown' fabs in various countries / regions that server local demand that is paranoid about supply chain security.

Depending on how automated you make the fabs, I wonder if it would be possible to sell "limited runs" of chips to people, kind of like book self-publishing but with VHDL/Verilog.
SmartScreen is Microsoft's reputation system used both in IE (since IE9), Edge, and Windows 8 and 10. [1] is an introductory blog article about the system in general, revealing among other things that both the executable and the cert it's signed with gather reputation. [2] goes into some more detail on code signing, and [3] talks about EV certs (basically they are a massive reputation boost, both starting you higher (high enough to bypass the warning) and letting you gain reputation faster).

A regular code signing cert can be bought for about $6/month, and an EV cert for about $25/month (if you shop around or buy multi-year certs). Both are expensive in the context of open source, but I'm not sure I'd call the cost prohibitive.

1: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/ie/2010/10/13/stranger-dang...

2: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/ieinternals/2011/03/22/ever...

3: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/ie/2012/08/14/microsoft-sma...
The editorial ignores race, but the U.S. has a different racial mix than many of the countries it is compared with, and racial disparities in academic achievement are large and intractable. From Steve Sailer https://www.unz.com/isteve/the-new-2018-pisa-school-test-sco... :

"[E]ach race within the U.S. [does well] compared to the rest of the world.

For example, the mean score on the three parts of the test — reading, math, and science — for U.S. Asians was 549, which would make them the third highest scoring place in the world, behind only the utopian city-state of Singapore and four rich cities in mainland China. (Scores are on an SAT-like 200 to 800 scale with 500 supposed to be the rich, or OECD, country mean, although the OECD mean was 488.)

At 521, U.S. whites outscored all countries founded by whites (light blue bars) except Estonia. American whites edged Japan and South Korea by one point, which isn’t shabby."
No worries, everybody will pirate e-books, just like it happened with music.

Indie publishers will make some money, probably more than going through a publishing house because they can sell directly to the customer and cut out the publisher. A 70% cut on eBooks sales is outright theft imho. If I were a book author and Amazon took a 70% cut, I would rather publish it online for free under a license that prohibits commercial distribution of the work (in exchange for money).
But the 10 dictionary words might be less secure than 16 random characters. xkcd estimates a word has 11 bits of entropy.
Siberia is an empty land filled with contradictions
Despite repeatedly saying that she's given up caffeine, the author has instead dramatically cut her consumption (which is a good idea, but a different thing!). I find the immediately abutting sentences "… now that I'm not drinking caffeine …. While it does have caffeine …" rather bizarre.

> I'll pour myself a green tea, which I probably only have once a week. I prefer the taste of the traditional toasted rice flavor, and now that I'm not drinking caffeine, I definitely notice it when I have one of these. While it does have caffeine, there are other benefits that outweigh the caffeine content such as being packed with antioxidants to reportedly help fight inflammation as well as other anti-aging properties like boosting brain health and lowering your risk of stroke and heart disease.
I don't specifically do time-based logging, but I do have a local Mediawiki instance for knowledge about my life. You could probably easily write a template for doing log entries, so your Mediawiki syntax is short and sweet, but your log entries are nicely formatted and timestamped.
Related, recently featured on HN, 7GUIs, seven tasks for a GUI platform, with comparable implementations from many platforms.

https://eugenkiss.github.io/7guis/implementations
For an ACID compliant, resilient, consistent, distributed, auto-sharding and auto-tuning for low latency, highly scalable SQL database? No.
Yeah, it's just like real estate, or job seeking market, if you match the seekers and the retailers (in this case both are seekers) too closely, then you don't have repeat customers...
But, in the spirit of quality long term transactions and overall increase in reputation and trust, I think it may work out. Business aside, if we're aiming to meaningfully connect people then it serves it's goal.
How does the web3 or whatever js running in your web browser know what gateway to use to interface with the blockchain? What if that gateway goes down? How does it or any ETH or Bittorent node bootstrap in general?
nice advertisement
<deleted>

Edit: somehow read “doing both” as “doing either”. Just ignore this.
Get rid of the bachelor's degree for most people.

In other countries, for example India, you do not do a 4-year college degree away from home before starting medical school. In the U.K. I believe that law is an undergraduate degree.
Interesting that she's drinking dandelion tea now. Grounded dandelion ("cicoria", Italian for chicory) was used as a replacement for coffee during WWII in Italy.
One of the easiest assignments I ever had was to write code between two services. It was easy as hell but it looked impressive because both services did impressive and complicated things.

In fact, I think it helped me get my current job.
Show HN: Usernameless/passwordless authentication demo using WebAuthn
Yup, I remember taking a look at this bot and its code! It's great work put in by your friend, cheers to him :D

Though I really wanted my logs to be logged in a plaintext file, I'll give this a try again. Thanks!
I understand the desire for consistency, but moderation can't be consistent because we don't see everything that gets posted here. Also, the comment you mention didn't exist when I replied to you.
It's nice if you could link us a good article on the guy, I'd love to read it.
How to Build a Business Model Canvas for 2020
Short names are bad, unless somewhat sheltered from confusion (e.g. brief names of command line tools, which need to be unique only within your PATH environment variable and your installed man pages, not on the web).
"The cost of the excess space was probably around $1-5, averaged out of the cost of a large disk."

So what do you do when that disk dies and you lose all your data?

Oh, you want backups? Well, maybe you could do them yourself.

Oh, you don't want to do the backups yourself but want the sysadmins to do your backups for you, do you?

Or what happens when the network that's hosting the disk becomes inaccessible? You want to get to your data anyway, so that means adding network redundancy.

And you also probably don't want downtime if the server hosting the disk goes down, or the server is up but the disk dies, so that means RAID or maybe a distributed filesystem.

And what about making sure the data is secure and the servers hosting it meet compliance requirements?

And when something goes wrong you want someone in ops to troubleshoot it, right? Maybe you want six 9's of availability, and you want us to wear a pager so we can work on fixing it at any time of the day or night, right?

All of this will take planning and time and more hardware, configuration and monitoring, perhaps a bigger headcount since sysadmin teams are often already running short-staffed and don't have the time to dedicate to supporting even more infrastructure than they already do.

You see, it's not always so simple as "just add another disk".
I love the coinciding timing of this submission with that other one: "YouTube’s Rabbit Hole of Radicalization [pdf]" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21902416
Also requires no sense of smell. It stinks for kilometers.
here with a yellow background (edit: changed to a yellow-to-green circle-shaped radial gradient because why not): https://codepen.io/mdesantis/pen/RwNZEZJ
All distributed apps should be built for the desktop first. Everything else will be censored.
Tangential: where are all the dead animals?

There are plenty of animals around, even in an urban area, such as birds. But, I never recall running across dead animals, except road kill, or the dead mice and birds our cat would bring us. Is there an animal cemetery somewhere they go to bury themselves?
Yeah Apple explicitly states that in their guidelines. Why would they ban it?
Could the goals be accomplished in existing languages, such as Rlang, Haskell, Scala + Akka? Is the added value sufficient for it to find its place?
This is the right answer. Life isn't fair. Though, too, programming isn't as trivial as TFA makes it sound -- working with your mind is not backbreaking like manual labor, but it is still exhausting.

But TFA makes a good point: the level of compensation that programmers can demand may well fall more in line with that of other professions at some point. Thus one should not go into programming simply because current compensation levels make it attractive, nor should current programmers spend like drunken sailors. Caution is warranted here.

Software has been eating the world. We're probably far from peak software. Whether we're far from peak software developer compensation is another story -- I wouldn't know or make any predictions, informed or otherwise.
Europe’s Failure to Protect Liberty in Hungary
What makes you think people haven't switched?
Is the line table in go executables absolutely essential? Shouldn't they be strippable, the way you can strip debug symbols from a C binary?
Also requires location history enabled and with some data in it.
I'm really surprised this isn't in Rust considering security is a priority. However, I think something like this will become increasingly common for high performance cloud applications. Many programs do not need a full operating system with processes isolation and hardware drivers if they're going to run alone on a VM anyways.
Would it be possible to add a flag for the compiler to disable the line table pre-expansion?
I have long wanted to write a library so (my) Django sites could easily use credentialless logins, and I finally figured out how, with lots of help from lots of people and resources.

My friend @Stelabouras and I implemented this for Pastery, which is, as far as I know, the first non-demo website using WebAuthn for passwordless logins. I thought I'd show the flow off here, as I'm very excited by it and some of you might be too.

The library is on PyPI: https://pypi.org/project/django-webauthin/
I recently quit coffee and was also surprised to get more energy (after the headache was gone), especially in the late afternoon and evening.

That's really unfortunate since I really enjoy the taste of coffee.
"...because they didn't have all the printing/distribution/return/etc. costs associated with dead tree versions. In fact, these costs were pretty trivial (maybe $2/copy as I recall)."

The weird part about that is that, back in the 80s-90s, book prices took a big hike and the publishers blamed paper prices.

Their reasoning is amazingly flexible.

Also note that all of the non-printing, etc., costs are one time affairs. Except for the distribution channels, which take ~50% of the cover price (and which don't apply to e-books).
> Here's my setup at home: A Rancilio coffee grinder ensures each cup is made with freshly ground beans, and a top-notch Italian Ascaso espresso machine pours the perfect espresso shot (with the creamiest crema), not to mention a frother to create the fluffiest almond milk ever—no sugar needed.

On a tangent, but as Italian I always find funny how fancy the coffee and wine people get outside of Italy. In Italy we drink cheap coffee out of a cheap moca and in the south we buy wine by the liter (from $2 per liter). Yes in Italy we get fancy sometimes but not each day, fancy stuff is supposed to be special, daily routines kill the special factor.
I drank 3+ espresso's a day for years. Read some books regarding circadian rhythms vs. sleep vs. caffeine vs. adenosine.

Decided to quit coffee. Quit the next day for a year or so. I had zero symptoms like the articles mentions or anything like that. No substantial effect at all.

tl; dr highly suspicious of this article.
Allow citizens to defend themselves with firearms - at least based on the current state of affairs in the US state of Virginia.
I'm skeptical that you couldn't get similar reductions in carbon footprint through investing the money you gain by delivering early on renewable energy infrastructure and carbon sequestering charities. Of course, how that cost-benefit analysis works out depends entirely on required engineering hours and the growth of your business, which are both notoriously difficult to predict.

That said, if your goal is reducing expenditures, reducing your carbon footprint is a great cherry on top.
Yes, the end of liberty and choice justifies that some people live miserable lifes.

Each it's own ideals, but as mentioned, I believe the phrase is just used to quickly dismiss ends that people are if not against, not so invested in.
I go through my bookmarks once a week. Generally after a week and in the context of a whole list of shiny things, this particular shiny thing doesn't seem quite so shiny. I find that I delete between 50% and 100% of this week's bookmarks without doing more than reading the titles.

If they don't fall in that bucket, they either go into:

1. a project or todo that is captured elsewhere, and it gets attached.
2. One of my text files in a "not now" folder, very roughly separated by major themes (they have titles like "Technical details" for programming/CS stuff, "Sciencey stuff", "Process/organization", "Parenting", and files for large future projects that I am slowly accumulating towards like "One volume world history" and "Alexandrine program for software").

3. My read/review folder if I actually still want to read it. That folder I review weekly as well. If it's not something I still really want to read, I dump it into a subfolder called "archive" which is a guilt free trash can.

> Is it some sort of standard "digital hoarding" situation?

It's habits developed in scarcity failing when applied in glut. You probably don't need professional help. You just need to accept that you are going to trace a tiny path through the world of human knowledge. Once you accept that you're not going to archive the world in your mind, you find that you need different criteria. Look at your roles in life and goals and ask what information will serve to advance them. I am a father. I wouldn't seek out parenting books without that, as I don't find the information enriching, but there is information I need for that role. I hold a job programming computers. Details of my employer's internal tooling isn't something I would seek out without reason, but to do my job I need it. I am a human being that needs to take care of myself, and part of that is having positive, enriching things in my world, and certain information feeds that, but there is no obligation to assimilate the world in that. The information is allowed in to fit my needs, I am not contorted to fit its needs.

At this point, if you have a big time commitment coming up, I would dump all this stuff you have in a folder called "archive" and accept that you're not going to look at it for a while. You can review it weekly by looking at the folder "archive" (not its contents) and saying, "not this week" which will give you freedom for another week.

In six months you may look at it and go, "Yeah, never." and delete it. By that point most of what you would actually need in there you would have found again anyway.

Likewise, this is a good time to cut off twitter and all the feeds that are adding to this stack. That bookmark review I mentioned before is only for three to ten items a week, generally, which I find slightly too high.
The idea of pushing formats back to org mode is brilliant design.

You basically coerce all manner of new formats into soemthing you can easily manipulate in the future - which is kind of the essential feature of a note taking system.

You will obviously have to update those scripts a little as these other formats change but then again you’ll only have to do so for the systems u really care about.

Would be great if you could wrap all this back up into a emacs package for easy install ;)