skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> You must have had significant in-memory shared state to encounter that problem. Right?

"Significant" is in the eye of the beholder. The core of the system was easy to make shardable. But you'd be surprised how many implicit assumptions creep in, how easy it is for ancillary parts to end up sharing state when it's easy. Also note that just because your state's in a database doesn't mean having two instances of the thing that accesses it will work, you can easily end up with an access pattern that assumes only one reader (for example) even though on paper there's no in memory state.

> Had you adopted a less stateful model, you'd have looked rather pretty with two Java servers.

Maybe. At the point where we're running 4 or 8 servers we'd have been facing much the same ops problems that they were. Java bought us an extra year or two of not having to deal with that, but also a significant amount of migration work when it just became impossible to stick to the single process model. At the end of the day we still kept the 5x latency advantage, which is definitely not nothing. But there were also definitely features that they brought to market quicker, and I'm pretty sure Ruby played a part in that.

Tradeoffs, tradeoffs everywhere. I left before the final outcome of that fight (for all I know it's still ongoing), but I don't think either company was being dumb.
Absolutely. That only works in an environment that treats its developers as responsible professionals, not ticket processors, though. If it's going to take a while, just create a ticket while you do it.
Why people love drugs? It's addictive stimulant.
iOS Jailbreaks are immensely valuable because they let you access the user’s data, hence why they’re literally sold for millions these days.
> This will tell you "Firefox process 4567 is talking a lot ycombinator.com" and you'll know whether 4567 is also one of the chattiest talkers right now.

But that's what nethogs does.
The price of the experiment depends, of course, on the experiment. The point is there was an initial excitement as well as initial skepticism. Then there were investigations. The community eventually accepted the preponderance of evidence. To try to do an experiment now for faster-than-light neutrinos I would imagine would be hard, because everything we see seems to indicate that the speed of light is a hard limit (of course, there is a lot of stuff we can't see, at least directly...). But to convince people to fund an expensive experiment for it would be difficult because the framework that supports the idea that it can't happen is nice.

It's as you say: once you have a basic working model it doesn't take conspiracy theory to see other avenues being blocked.

The particular point the article makes, however, that journals reject articles because of no prior publications in good journals is infuriating.

The article also mentions that funding has been limited; so hard choices had to be made. But it does seem curious that the cause was so widely believed before they could even make a solid diagnosis of the disease without an autopsy examination of the brain.
Ask HN: What is your ideal personal email setup?
I still am working with a central Gmail account (forwarders and aliases from different addresses) and am thinking with the new year coming it is a fitting time to make a move to improve my setup. I've always been happy to pay, but have never found a combination which felt 'right'.

So help inspire me - What is your ideal 'email stack' for personal email?

Do you have randomised disposable addresses (if so, how do you generate them? Or are you just using a wildcard?), who hosts your mailbox (or do spend the energy to maintain your own?), and how you view your mail? I have wondered about the benefits of moving to a desktop client, but have never found one for Windows which feels good to use.
Well congratulations, you're blocked by my adblocker because of that dot (uBlock Origin with EasyList Liste FR)
thanks for sharing. Watched the full video.

Something worth to spend time than any other posts here.
> It's not like before WWII when the Japanese bought one of the elevated subway lines in NYC and disassembled it for steel and shipped it back home to build battleships.

Is there a source for this story?
These are good examples of what linguists call a "Volksetymologie", meaning a usually wrong derivation of words which are no longer correctly understood or have changed meaning. A popular example is when a German newspaper did one of those stupid surveys for the "most beautiful German word", and the winner was "Habseligkeiten". The cited reason was because it combines "Haben" (to have) with "Selig" ("blessed"), the profane with the heavenly, but the real etymology is actually different.

As is already mentioned here, the "-mut" in Wehmut does not mean "courage" but is actually identical to the English "mood". I would also highly doubt his interpretation of "Einsam". The suffix "-sam" usually means simply to having something. "Liebenswürdig" is difficult, because "Liebe" means many things (from simply "friendly" to modern romantic "love"), and "-würdig" is more in terms of being adequate or appropriate. When you say "Er ist sehr liebenswürdig", this does not mean that HE is worthy of love, but simply that he is a friendly person, meaning he knows how to treat people properly. As was also already mentioned here, "Entwicklung" and "development" are literally the same, and the same goes for "Ursprung" and "origin".

There is also the simple fact that German allows for building compositions, so what would be considered an expression in English can be one word in German (like "Sinneswandel" for "change of mind"). But this does not mean that it "does not exist".

As a German, the word I'm really missing when speaking English is the simple word "doch", which more or less means "No, but yeah". If you've ever watched German kids in a "Nein! Doch!" match, you know how powerful that simple word is. I think there was actually an article here some time ago that English used to have this with "Yay" and "Nay" in addition to "Yes" and "No", but that this got lost. Of course German is not unique in having "doch", most other roman languages have it as well (the French have "Si", which in Italy is the normal "Yes").

EDIT: Found the article:

https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/what-part-of-no-...
Firefox for android supports addons, though, so can be customized to do anything. I can't believe people use Chrome om Android when you can have Fx with ad blocking!

For your problem, I use an addon called "simple gesture" that allows me to add all kinds of gestures/actions.
> anti-intellectualism in the industry

Could you expand upon this point?
'whence' would be more specific – it's archaic in English, it means 'from where' – although it's used within the ksh shell.
No. Most emerging economies have high inequality. Usually there is a small super elite of high net worth, and the majority of other people are poor.

The growth of a large middle class is usually what pushes countries out of this state. A middle classes grow, they demand political power to go with their economic power. This then puts a check on the excesses to either the mega-rich and extreme promises to the poor.
> C folks are so afraid of Rust taking their baby away.

This tribal way of thinking makes no sense at all. I qualify as a C and C++ developer and I'm very excited with Rust. The only baby there is is the software project we are working on.
Hamburg has a Lichtkonzept: https://www.hamburg.de/contentblob/3486350/1bb71bada5b286281...
Interesting that you find beautiful days to be a rare occurrence in Berlin. Perhaps because you're coming from Italy? I have the opposite attitude -- summer days are easier to spend inside in Berlin, as the weather is generally very good and there's always another beautiful day coming!
Ask HN: What is your ideal personal email setup?
I still am working with a central Gmail account (forwarders and aliases from different addresses) and am thinking with the new year coming it is a fitting time to make a move to improve my setup. I've always been happy to pay, but have never found a combination which felt "right".

So help inspire me - What is your ideal email stack for personal email?

Do you have randomised disposable addresses (if so, how do you generate them? Or are you just using a wildcard?), who hosts your mailbox (or do spend the energy to maintain your own?), and how you view your mail? I have wondered about the benefits of moving to a desktop client, but have never found one for Windows which feels good to use.
To be fair, I believe many projects simply lack the second set of eyes which would downgrade those TODO to basic comments or along the lines of FUTURETODO
Oh, I stopped reading at the install command, but can confirm, build fails :D
Thank you very much for that link. It even points to the magazine my 10 or 12 year old self took to be authoritative as getting it wrong! Next you're going to tell me there's no Easter Bunny!
No, but the cost per transistor can keep dropping for years after shrinkage stops. Look at a lot of other things like TVs where competition keeps driving the price down. Unless something new comes up that practically everybody wants, competition will drive down prices and profitability.
Academia was always broken. Despite the current undeserved reputation as academia being open to debate and new ideas, the opposite has always been true. Academia has its sordid history of dogmaticism and hero-worshipping. And progress in knowledge usually advanced in spite of academia rather than because of it.

Go read about the battles between Newton and Hooke or even Newton and Leibniz.

The doctor who first suggested washing hand to cut down on infections in the 1800s was ridiculed and mocked by surgeons.

Scientists who brought up germ theory were mocked as quacks by doctors and scientists who rigidly adhered to the miasma theory as gospel.

Of course white supremacy was accepted "scientific fact" for a very long time by academia and anyone who thought otherwise would have been viewed similarly to a flat earther today. You could argue that white supremacy would still be "scientific fact" were it not for ww2.

My personal favorite is Georg Cantor who was mercilessly attacked by his fellow academics within math and even without for his theories on infinite numbers.

"The objections to Cantor's work were occasionally fierce: Leopold Kronecker's public opposition and personal attacks included describing Cantor as a "scientific charlatan", a "renegade" and a "corrupter of youth".[8] Kronecker objected to Cantor's proofs that the algebraic numbers are countable, and that the transcendental numbers are uncountable, results now included in a standard mathematics curriculum. Writing decades after Cantor's death, Wittgenstein lamented that mathematics is "ridden through and through with the pernicious idioms of set theory", which he dismissed as "utter nonsense" that is "laughable" and "wrong".[9][context needed] Cantor's recurring bouts of depression from 1884 to the end of his life have been blamed on the hostile attitude of many of his contemporaries,[10] though some have explained these episodes as probable manifestations of a bipolar disorder"

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

"charlatan", "renegade", "corrupter of youth". Isn't it interesting how academics attack each other like religious people attack each other? The odd thing about some of the attacks on Cantor is that it came after his death and after he had PROVEN his countable and uncountable infinites.

The history of academia is as nasty and vicious as any other institution. And its gatekeepers and heroes as petty and pathetic as any you'd find anywhere else.
"Entschuldigen" is a pretty fascinating verb, but not for the author's reasons.
It literally means to remove guilt from someone (not specifically from oneself as the author states) and is kind of equivalent to "forgive".
Commonly it is misused in German: people say "ich entschuldige mich", literally meaning they're removing their own guilt from theirselves and thus forgiving theirselves, which is kind of impossible and not what's actually meant.
The right phrase would be "um Entschuldigung bitten" (to ask to be excused) which actually is rarely used.
Well the DOS operating system exposes RING0 to the user and to all programs, privileged mode. DOS isn't secure as such.

You can install some antivirus software which sits resident in memory and enables some protection against malicious viruses interacting with files, memory, MBR.
I know nothing about Snowflake so can not really comment on particular case. However the generic statement that I hear often goes something like this: it is so much trouble to manage your own infrastructure and on cloud everything is done for you. Well I saw with my own eyes that having ones's infrastructure deployed on Azure keeps them quite busy anyways.
This is in the top class of utilities (htopm etc).

A good name could probably be bwtop, or tcptop or iftop.

Actually I searched for these, and turns out iftop exists! (https://linux.die.net/man/8/iftop)
> •With the FreeDOS kernel and FreeCOM, conveniences are gained and the memory footprint under 1 MB is reduced, but compatibility is sacrificed, both in the post-DOS-3.3 sense and in terms of known quirks and bugs.

Anyone got some insight what exactly post 3.3 is referring to? I've seen once or twice that retro enthusiasts like to use dos 3.3, so what's happened with versions after that?
Why would that list be blocking fully qualified domain names? Seems more like a bug than a feature, but if there is a good reason for it I'd be interested to learn
I added a package that uses the pre-built binaries, `what-bin` in the AUR.
Thanks for sharing this addon! It is exactly what I need to test a website I am working on and I need to be connected with 3 different accounts at the same time. Bye bye, "private window" of multiple browsers.
A private social network. 75k to signup
Hi,

https://www.calma.io

I built it, before dropping your primary instincts here, this comes from an inexplicable urge to build a live example of a paid social network.
Also, a live example of a social network that its only value proposition is its signup process. The signup fee is $75K

This is more art than anything else. But it has stripe payment integrated and live.

https://www.calma.io
> One serious problem not addressed in Python type checking is that there's no Char type

That's not a typechecking issue so much as a type structure issue; “there's no Char type” isn't a problem of (any of the) Python typecheckers, Python simply has never had a char type; strings are iterables whose members are strings which, while drawn from a specific subset, do not have a distinct type.

This may be a type system problem, but it's not a type hinting problem.,
Anyone got an idea why it appears "Ask HN" topics are posted more than once that often right now?
The CLT can be used to justify modelling an effect with a normal distribution and raises questions about model assumptions when normal distributions don't appear where they should. The Normal Distribution is special because it is the highest-entropy distribution that is completely characterised by mean and standard deviation [0].

So what the CLT is saying is that, surprisingly, sums of i.i.d. random variables lose information from the individual variables quite quickly but reliably retain a little data about mean and second moment. Initially a given X_i has all sorts of information associated with it (higher order moments, other distribution characteristics, etc) that disappears as many X_i are summed together. All that is left is information about a mean and variance.

So say I have a situation where a large number of i.i.d. variables are going to be summed together. The CLT tells me that summing N of these variables together is going to be similar to summing together an equivalent number of normally distributed variables (!!). This is because the sum variable is equal in value to n * \bar{x}, but the CLT imposes a distribution on \frac{\bar{x}}{n}.

This justifies why the normal turns up everywhere in practical measurements. A lot of measurements (say, number of people at the beach) are probably really measures of a sum of random variables (maybe there is some non-normal variables that captures the chance a given person goes to the beach). So if the number of people at the beach turns out to be normally distributed (maybe I measure it each day for a few weeks) it isn't shocking. If the total number isn't normally distributed then that implies that there is no i.i.d. variable representing probability a given individual goes to the beach (eg, high correlation between the individual variables).

I didn't quite fail any of the statistics courses I've ever done, YMMV.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_distribution#Maximum_en...
I 2nd the Fastmail recommendation.
I agree, it's in the uncanny valley of pixel art: Too high resolution for actual pixel art and too low for high res. To me it would look better if the resolution was doubled or halved.
Shouldn't you at least link to the site in question? :)
Whenever I get to ~8 I start to feel nervous and most probably close every tab I have except for the current one. My boss also likes to have 20+ tabs, it’s just insane to me.
> Sorry but experienced developer can implement those just as fast as in any scripting language and it will save a ton on maintenance.

This is just a no true Scotsman argument. For 10 years I’ve watched python/ruby shops drastically outpace projects in C++/Java shops. What you’re failing to realize is how trivial most apps are and how fast fully functional back ends can be created with frameworks in those languages (django/rails).

Your bit about maintenance is also bullshit. I’ve spent entire days peeling apart complex C++ code bases to make a small change to some core abstraction. Ability to maintain code is entirely up to how well organized and documented it is. It has nothing to do with “scripting”.
One issue I noticed is how browsers and sites handle the dot inconsistently; Edge browser used to "fix" the url, for example.

Google used to do a weird combination of rewriting and/or using the dot, depending on what part of the site you were on. What ended up happening roughly is that you could log into the FQDN, google would do logins for both dot/nodot, if you logged out of one, the other would still work (probably also a combination of Chrome keeping 2 sets of cookies)

I probably can't, but if I find my original notes I'll add a reply...I recall both Edge and Google fixing the problem, but there are other sites & browsers i'm sure that are still affected
Fellow Hamburg immigrant here. I admire your optimism and the will to perceive an intention behind the darkness (which was also one of my first impressions of Hamburg). Unfortunately, I don't see it that way, but more as general unfriendliness of the city towards a random individual. Other things in the same vain that I noticed (coming from the Balkans, if important) are: very few overhangs that the buildings offer as means of shade from the rain - often there is no place for a pedestrian to shelter from the rain, which is absurd with amount of wet days Hamburg has. Another thing that irks me is the lack of public water taps. Such a basic and affordable civilization achievement - and yet not a single one in a 2M city.

Of course, I adore and enjoy the city, these are just few things that I can't really understand.
Ocaml always enjoined institutional support such as from Inria.
No reason why it shouldn't.

Maybe you have to disable as many of the new and fancy CPU flags from the emulated x86 CPU instruction set.
A todo is fine, only if there’s a way to get it to done. There must be a plan otherwise it’s a pointless comment.
I think a problem might be that the jr. devs don't even get the chance to look at the code, because they're not getting hired based on their lack of experience (ref. the laundry list of advanced requirements).

It reminds me of the Manager - HR pipeline, where HR people get a description of technical stuff to input in their job listings, and then proceed to gatekeep applicants away from the positions, because they don't match x % of their technical laundry list.
I guess it's a software glitch.

@OP: Are you reposting because you see an error message?
This is amplified with the fact that any voting based discussion board allows a group of users to silence opposing opinions and drive away people that hold them. As a result, you get a self-perpetuating amplification cycle where the loudest silence everyone else.
Why does Brave have a more compelling sell? What does it offer that could be sold to users as a feature they need? I wouldn't know how to explain Brave compellingly, unless I'm using some of the same arguments I use for Firefox (which are weakened in Brave's case due to using the same engine as Chrome).

On the other hand, explaining Firefox seems easy. People around me seem receptive to both privacy and closed garden concerns. I explain to them how their data is used if they do not take precautionary measures to prevent it. I also tell them that the web they know and love will get increasingly suffocated and rot away under the pressure of Google which has no concern for them or their needs. I tell them about Google's recent efforts to prevent ad-blockers from working well. I also mention other malicious tactics, such as AMP and the effort to hide the URL.

I then set up uBlock Origin (making a point it's the best ad-blocker but will stop working on Chrome shortly), Facebook Container and Multi-account Containers for a few of the most obnoxious websites. Multi-account Containers has a setting to make the association of a particular domain with a container permanent[+]. I give them a short introduction to containers and teach them to recognize when a website is open in a particular container (there's an indicator in the URL bar).

This works in my experience. It sticks. They continue using Firefox and at times even spread the idea to their social circle. It helps that in recent times concerns about Google, Chrome and computer surveillance are talked about in their regular news channels, so that I am not the only source where they hear about this.

> They care about... a smooth experience, I guess?

Ask them again. Try to understand their preference well enough that you can explain it clearly.

I am quite confident that they don't actually care about anything Chrome has to offer at all[@]. They're simply used to the colourful circle icon because they are being bombarded by it everywhere. It's the same as with IE before, only this time around it's a colourful circle instead of a blue 'e'.

> Chrome is amazing. Having most people switching away is a hard sell.

Firefox is amazing (in a technical sense) too. It's just as smooth as Chrome for me and sometimes even smoother since I'm a heavy tab user. I dislike some of Mozilla's decisions as well, but this takes a backseat to the more pressing issue of vendor lock-in given that there is no mainstream alternative.

[+] This could use a bit of UI work. After you assign a website to a container, you have to open the website in another container so that it asks you whether you always want to open that website in that container (it's a checkbox).

[@] As a disclaimer, I'm just extrapolating from my experience. Perhaps your parents are an exception and they do have a strong preference for a Chrome-only feature. If so, this is a useful thing to learn.
My German is not at this level yet but this is fascinating to learn. Thanks for linking this!
Sorry, HN was having issues publishing it.