skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
They put pop-up stealth advertisements, targeted at your doctor, into your electronic medical record, so that he or she would get you addicted to painkillers.

Software developers did this. For drug money. That's just terrible, isn't it? They shouldn't have done that.

But even if the developers had ethical concerns, they had no recourse but to quit, and be replaced by someone else--who might get six months of work in before realizing that they are working for the baddies, and also deciding to either quit or die a little inside.

I would do that job. I would take that money. I don't get a stupidly-inflated Valley salary with bonus RSUs, and I have bills to pay. I don't have a union that can protect me from nonsense. I know it's wrong. I would do it anyway, because I have been screwed by every company I have ever worked for, such that I learned that my ethics don't matter. Money matters.

I want my kids to get an education without student loans, if they want it. I want to drive a car that isn't older than they are. And I want to retire before I die. My ethics would only keep me from that. Apparently, the companies that aren't managed by money-grubbing sociopaths just don't hire where I live. So if you don't want stuff like this to happen, make it actually mean something to have ethical objections, even for people working outside of California.

I build software that has probably contributed in a material way to human suffering. For far less money than a Silicon Valley developer might get paid to make a mobile app for on-demand dog-walking. Everyone in my building does it. Everyone in the building across the street does it. Companies that don't hurt people as part of their business model aren't hiring here. People that have a problem with it--or at least those who can't hide that they do--don't get the jobs.

So if you are currently on a high horse, I hope you enjoy the view from up there. You haven't yet used your influence to help other workers--those with nigh-nonexistent power as an individual to influence the corporate employers that reluctantly hire them, and then reserve the right to fire at any time for any reason, or no reason.
Good point.

Is there anybody from 2007 still working at Facebook desperately scared they'll be found out for not being good at algorithms or are these people all in management now? ;)
The physicians Rich Loomis (Practice Fusion CMO) & Steve Labkoff (Purdue Exec Med Director) who approved this horrific program have cushy corporate jobs elsewhere now & will never be prosecuted.
No. If you have dedicated hardware (rented or owned) and full disk encryption you have decent control over your data. On a virtual server
you have no control and no privacy.
I have no idea why, but colors look SO bad on digital point and shoot. They are always a bit too crisp.

Perhaps very high-end digital cameras are good. But if you need a good dynamic range for cheap: use film.
ugh, sorry about that! Please do: sklabnik@cloudflare.com
Digital Freight Startup Next Trucking Lays Off 70
Years ago, there was a map shop in Vancouver that sold a small collection of old maps. I managed to snag a few before it inevitably went out of business.
How much radiation would it take to flip a bit on an SSD? What about RAM (many people send their laptops through in a suspended-to-RAM state)?

I would assume that RAM is more susceptible, since we still store a single bit per RAM cell, while some SSDs now store multiple bits per cell, but I've never tried to do the math on "what would it take to actually make these problems start to appear?" Might be a fun exercise... has anyone looked into this?
I one time watched a disabled kids school bus stop and kneel and deploy its ramp for a kid in a wheelchair to get on, on a residential street in Brooklyn. Throughout the WHOLE process, a car behind the bus was slamming the horn. It was like 2 minutes of beeping lol.
Cities more than 100 years old weee not built around cars. Streets were used quite differently back then and are again in cities with “no car” zones.

And the “10s of miles” issue can change back; the car was the forcing function for that, not the other way around.
Correct, thanks for noticing!
Besides whatever other EU countries people here might mention, I know that Romania offers residency permits to US citizens who want to start a business, and the fees and taxes are fairly low. (If I understand correctly, you have to renew the residency annually, but you can still transition to permanent residency after five years like any other temporary residency class.) If you have a great idea, then you can start in Romania and enjoy the same access to the single market as anywhere else in the EU.
I lowercase everything in my SQL.

Lowercase + indentation is the way to go. The only SQL that should be upper case is text in single quotes.
> the new "depression"

The idea that a mental deviation from the norm being used to explain someone's deviation from the norm is some sort of convenient excuse as you seem to imply doesn't lead to a fair society for everyone, just one where everyone who does not deviate gets to sit on a nice cushy throne while taking from the people who do.
”It's made in Visual Basic”

We shouldn’t feed the illusion that old stacks are inherently bad and that new stacks will magically solve all problems.
I was trying to reason how they hit that number this morning. I'm guessing probably average or mean is much lower.
How many missile carrying drones do you think we could make for the cost of one $80mm F35?

The next big war is going to be won with a lot of small, disposable vehicles rather than a couple of “can’t fail” elite machines.

Kinda like Taranto, where a handful of British biplanes took down three Italian battleships

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Taranto
Reminds me that they had the poke feature.
The latest versions of PHP aren't too bad.

That said Node.js has IMO an interesting architecture because it's event driven, combine that with Typescript and it's solid.

Python type support, and event driven frameworks (e.g. async/await) were only (fairly) recently made accessible, there's a few frameworks that can utilize it well like FastAPI, but many of the popular ones like Django are still behind on async/await support for the a lot of features like the ORM and still is lacking typing support. IMO the python web development system is going to be really awesome once Django gets robust types and async support.

Disclaimer: Current job uses python/Django and js. I have little experience with other languages/frameworks.
> I'd like to tell them this in a productive manner ...

First, have 2-3 possible SOLUTIONS to this problem when you have the conversation with your Boss.

(Don't make it his problem.)

Frame the conversation in terms of your professional strengths.

We all should be thinking about the Highest & Best use of our time.

If you weren't working on this Assigned Task -- what are you willing/able to do?

Team Player Mindset: What would add more VALUE to the organization?
Tailscale networks are private. The only way to access an IP is through a WireGuard tunnel. The only way to be in the WireGuard configuration file is to have linked your public key against your identity. Every packet has an identity attached.
The DA was elected a few months ago, I don't know what you expect him to do about the history of property crime in the city.
Failing to plan is planning to fail.
> If you don't smoke, please don't start it truly is self imposed misery.

Playing devil's advocate, I'd say that the misery is not the smoking, but the excess smoking. Everything in excess begets misery.
In a lot of computer games that use probability game developers will actually use pseudo-RNG, or other means to deceive players about what their actual chances are because otherwise the game will seem "unfair" to a segment of players.
What FAANG _bans_ relational DBs?
Don't forget the git rm -r --cached ./node_modules!
What's the name for that law when there's something you never think of and then you encounter multiple times really quickly? Because a couple of days ago, Bob Kerns published a really cool Periodic Table input element on Observable:

https://observablehq.com/@bobkerns/elements-input

(not to take anything away from the submitted periodic table - they're both really nice)
This is, apparently, not correct. Asking for revision 0 causes etcd to stream updates beginning with whatever revision the server has now, plus one, rather than the first revision. Asking for revision 1 yields all changes. This behavior was not documented.

Whoops, looks suspiciously like someone tested the revision integer for truthiness to see if something was passed.
Market was always a disaster to drive on, and so as someone who mostly drives in the city I'm for this change because the worst thing about driving in SF was that you might end up forced onto Market Street and the fundamental rule of Market Street was once you turned onto it, you were never allowed to turn off it until it dumped you into the bay.

But I think the idea that this will be the spearhead to big changes is fundamentally a farce. Market already had enormous sidewalks, pedestrian-first intersections, and all that crap. And it was already the only part of SF that was actually well-served by public transit.
Ugh... Building the M4 in Budapest was plagued by scandals, delays, and cost overruns, and ridiculed for having cost a whopping €1.6 billion for the entire line. Salaries over here are perhaps a fourth or a fifth of what they are in the US, but it still boggles the mind that building one metro station would cost $1 billion.

How do prices get that high in the US? Are private contractors too intent on pocketing fat profits? Or is it related to health, tort, or other insurances, or a privately funded pension system?
Unaccountable Amazon Chinese Retailers Threaten Consumer Safety and Business
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22159385
I’m familiar with this suite. It’s fantastic but at the same time it is often broken with a new iOS release. Apple seems to have no interest in maintaining compatibility. Recently I needed to copy some MP3s to my phone. I’ve done this before with my laptop with success. But that day it did not work. And neither did my Linux desktop. I ended up listening to the audiobook (a free audio book from Cory Doctorow) by pairing my laptop with my cars Bluetooth and playing from my laptop. Cumbersome.

I’ve also had instanced where the latest version of that library supposedly works, but it’s dependent on another library that hasn’t hit Debian mainline yet. So I’ve had to wait months just to get a version that works even though it was released much earlier.

It’s not a perfect solution by any means.
"until cities are organized so that an individual's living radius is miles rather than 10s of miles", this is exactly what San Francisco is doing. You can't ask for that and then oppose yourself to the transformation of Market Street at the same time.
I'm still rocking the T520 thinkpad from 2012 with quad core i7. I thought I'd replace it in 2020, but here we are. I really don't see anything that is really any faster or has the linux compatiblity. Hoping it changes soon, I've used it as my main work machine all these years.
> if someone teaches you a word or a name, you can simply hear how it's spelled.

Is it like Spanish where you can also know how a word is pronounced by how it's written?
> which usually still makes a modest profit

But for Winner to be beating the market, Sucker has to be underperforming the market, since hedge funds, on average, match or underperform the market (see Buffet's famous ten-year bet: hedge funds massively underperformed index funds).

If the managers of Sucker have figured out a way to outperform the market for 20 years, even while secretly giving away some of its earnings, then that would already be an incredibly impressive success story, even without the cheating.
Did you mean appendix? The gallbladder doesn’t seem like a remnant, it has a specific known purpose even if it’s not vital or absolutely irreplaceable.
I checked if my state was one of the eight and breathed a huge sigh of relief that it wasn't.
The Senate isn't supposed to be a democratic institution. Once you understand that, you can quit being scared by the situation.
point and speak?
Yep, I meant to write diameters.

> From Earth, solar radius = 0.25 degrees. 233 solar radii in 1 radian.

I don't understand this. I think I understand that the sun would take up 0.5 degrees of the "view" (I don't have a good word for this) when looked at from Earth, so radius is 0.25 degrees. But how does the second statement follow? I get that a radian is about 57.3 degrees, so 57.3 / 0.25 = 230, but why why does 1 radian make sense to use here?
There's a certain irony on how the U.S. has spent billions on the war on drugs, yet they still have a gigantic drug dealing problem, right under their nose.
Human scale cities are nice to visit, but if you think you are breathing cleaner air in Europe, with their focus on diesel cars for decades, you are mistaken. The air is much dirtier than in US cities. The Volkswagen scandal might change that around in a decade or two.
Yep. And Lyft and Uber haven’t allowed pickups on Market street for a while, presumably also due to the city’s requirement, so I don’t see how this will change much.
> I would say my biggest piece of advice is to learn Docker. (Not trying to shill for Docker here

The first step to learning Docker by downloading it, irritatingly, is that getting Docker Desktop on Mac or Windows requires creating a Docker Hub account and signing in! There’s even a long issue thread about this on GitHub and the response was totally irrelevant! Luckily for those who don’t want to jump through these hoops (through disposable addresses or reusable shared logins) or provide an email address, there are many people who have posted direct links to the different downloads available.
> This is, apparently, not correct. Asking for revision 0 causes etcd to stream updates beginning with whatever revision the server has now, plus one, rather than the first revision. Asking for revision 1 yields all changes. This behavior was not documented.

I had worked on an alternative etcd impl and had to workaround this assumption as well. It is technically documented in the proto[0], and numeric 0 is of course "unset" or "default" in proto3 land.

One thing I would like to see tested is nested transactions where one txn child mutates something then the second sibling txn child uses that something. I've found that implementation is lacking.

0 - https://github.com/etcd-io/etcd/blob/53f15caf73b9285d6043009...
Why do people use hand saws and chisels when powered table saws, compound saws and biscuit joiners are available to us?

As someone who shoots film, there are a number of reasons, one being the asthetic you get from film that you can't (even with x hours in Photoshop) get from digital. I shoot large format and there are no (within my budget, at the very least) 8" x 10" digital sensors.

Film also more or less forces you to make prints. I would hazard a guess that a small percentage of digital photos ever make it to print and half of a photograph for me is a tactile thing you can hold in your hands and give to someone else.

Lastly, it's the process. That's something I can't explain.
Is there an equivalent for Vim?
what does this "made from sugar" mean? Technically AZT is a "modified sugar".
> Is that the ONLY reason why you dis Lenovo?

They installed spyware. That is more than enough reason to lose trust. IIRC, they did it more than once too[1].

If that isn’t cause enough, what is? Would it take pre-installed ransomware to lose trust?

https://thehackernews.com/2015/09/lenovo-laptop-virus.html?m...
In 2007 an oral surgeon gave me a prescription for opioid painkillers after a wisdom tooth extraction, just in case I needed it for pain. The pain wasn't very bad and I never filled the prescription, but in retrospect giving me that prescription in the first place was just crazy!

Another doctor gave my wife an opioid painkiller prescription upon hospital discharge after a normal childbirth, just in case she needed it. Also never filled or used.

In the past few years doctors and pharmacists have become more aware of the risks and now write fewer opioid prescriptions. But for a while it was totally out of control. (I don't think either doctor was using Practice Fusion.)
It was a genuine question despite what you think. I genuinely did not understand why, with the many advantages (IMO) of digital why people would choose analog.
New Technology Trends
What is the best way to learn about macro tech trends while they are in the infancy?

I can think of going to tech conferences, scanning Hacker news at least once a day. What else?

What do you all think about a Quarterly thread on HN for sharing latest tech trends?
It's hard to imagine that people found chocolate so appealing before somebody added sugar to it. The caffeine buzz is very mild compared to coffee, and it's quite bitter.
Depends on what your expectations are. The F-35 will work well eventually. All the promises for meeting high expectations on timing and budget are being kneecapped along the way though.

It can be painful but it's not a failure.
The senate is not intended to be democratic. There are two senators per state in order to ensure that less populous states have equal representation in the Senate.

The House is the democratic side, as the number of representatives is proportional to population.

The combination of the two is important to help maintain balance of power.
What does "traffic deaths" mean and what are the detailed stats on that? I'd love to see a source because I strongly suspect a large portion of those are not private passenger vehicle collisions.

Also, every transportation method includes accidents. From [1] describing NYC subway safety, "There were nearly 900 incidents last year [2017] in which someone was on the tracks or was hit by a train after getting too close while on the platform." Should we also ban subways because people die as a result of them?

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/17/nyregion/nyc-subway-track...
I am also an American who lived in Finland, Austria, and Denmark for, cumulatively, over 5 years. I now own and run a small but successful bootstrapped American SaaS.

What bothered me is that in all the above countries, they try to encourage entrepreneurship through rigged government programs. These programs offer grants and other benefits to 'the right kind of startups' - usually ones that are fashionable because the subject is currently hyped - ai, climate change, etc. Bureaucrats who know nothing about business pick whom to award grants through bullshit means. I imagine there's a lot of 'who you know' going on, too.

That wouldn't be so bad but, because these countries have such high taxes and other restrictions, the only benefit to starting a business there are these programs.

With these countries, it's not important that your startup is actually making money as long as you can brag about how you're changing the world at parties.

Finland's startup culture is especially bad in this department. It was disappointing as Finland is otherwise awesome.
It does. Just not as badly.
I’ve lived in San Francisco for 9 years without a car. So it’s already possible, and there are likely many thousands of people doing it.
San Francisco politics is all about addressing issues that aren't problems and ignoring issues that are problems. I moved 3 months ago and would never go back. I imagine this will just lead to massive traffic issues and more homeless camps and needles in the downtown area.
Very cool! I like the design. Would you consider applying filters on selection, without having to click the "Apply Filter" button? Feels smoother & more intuitive this way.
>As a non-American I'm also curious about the mass necessity of opioid painkillers to begin with.

The necessity is a result of big pharma lobbying activity, there is generally no medical necessity for opioids.

Big pharma money ensures things like marijuana remain a class 1 narcotic at the federal level meaning there is no known medical uses of the "drug." This allows pharma regulatory capture for their opiates which makes doctors, pharma, pharmacies and insurance money, so it simply becomes the norm to prescribe patients these highly addictive and euphoria inducing painkillers. So long as the patient remains insured, can pay and claims they are in pain, the Doctor will give them their drugs.

One astonishing fact is nearly 90 of the top 100 opioid prescribing doctors are in Florida, and 85% of all oxycodone a highly addictive variety of opioid therapy is prescribed in Florida.
This was my reaction as well. It seems that looming existential threat the tech industry is currently grappling with is a direct result of the laissez-faire idealism of the early internet pioneers. Obviously the internet is a net-benefit to the human race but we really should learn from our previous mistakes. I'm not sure what the solution is but we shouldn't pretend that there won't be some criminals and terrorists among the ~3Bn people who suddenly find themselves connected.
The initial commit of this repo is from August 2013, a few months before the first public beta release of docker-compose.
I'm aware, but I really really don't like the solution of all future reads/writes requiring O(N) reads to resolve the data locations.
Sadly, Google will flag as spam most new email servers by default. Email deliverability is a cartel these days.
I mean the domain you're in changes your requirements drastically. Heck certain workloads (high frequency, low latency, nearly no concurrency) might run better on a single core of an overclocked i7 vs any Xeon processor.

If it's a web server then obviously you want more cores, and an event driven server would make a lot of sense.

Basically if you need concurrency then you want events, if you're compute bound than you don't want that overhead.

EDIT: Instead of i7 just imagine any high end (high frequency and IPC) consumer chip
I use a Thinkpad carbon X1 with Debian. Fantastically portable with all day battery life. Just make sure to check the Arch wiki (regardless of which Linux you install) for a few special commands needed to make everything work properly.
C10K is another name for evented I/O, and it's from the 90s. By 2003 thread-per-client was already obsolete and known to be very bad.

It's really quite simple: threads encourage the use of implicit program state via function calls, with attendant state expansion (stack allocation), whereas evented I/O encourages explicit program state, which means the programmer can make it as small as possible.

Smaller server program state == more concurrent clients for any given amount of memory. Evented I/O wins on this score.

But it gets better too! Smaller program state == less memory, L1/2/3 cache, and TLB pressure, which means the server can take care of each client in less time than an equivalent thread-per-client server.

So evented I/O also wins in terms of performance.

Can you write high-performance thread-per-client code? Probably, but mostly by allocating small stacks and making program state explicit just as in evented I/O, so then you might as well have done that. Indeed, async/await is a mechanism for getting thread-per-client-like sequential programming with less overhead: "context switching" becomes as cheap as a function call, while thread-per-client's context switches can never be that cheap.

The only real questions are:

- async/await, or hand-coded CPS callback hell?
- for non-essential services, do you start with
thread-per-client because it's simpler?

The answer to the first question is utterly dependent on the language ecosystem you choose. The answer to the second should be context-dependent: if you can use async/await, then always use async/await, and if not, it depends on how good you are at hand-coded CPS callback hell, and how well you can predict the future demand for the service in question.