skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So for the past few years since about ~2013 I've been on and off keeping an eye on Michael Stonebraker and his work on VoltDB (based on lessons learned from h-store) and Scidb and in general his criticisms of nosql and newsql variants.

I think Scidb, being a column-oriented dbms geared for multi-dimensional arrays (datacubes) is very interesting given current trends, and there are only a handful of similar dbs around, the other two that interest me are rasdaman and monetdb. I don't know if OmniScidb counts as a datacube db but it is also really interesting especially due to it's gpu and caching model.

As a sysadmin/ops type having to deal with monitoring timeseries db's are also something I like to keep an eye on. It used to be mostly rrdtool in this space, but now I am comparing prometheus and influxdb. Like OmniSci, another case of something that's not quite in the same db model but might even better a better solution for the space (metrics) is Apache Druid. (elasticsearch being another than can be massaged to fit as a quasi tsdb as well) I think there is some room to unify the monitoring/metrics and log storage arena into one space (usually they are separated which adds admin overhead) and right now I really like druid as a potential for this.

Another interesting application of timeseriesdb's that I have been keeping an eye on is in the quant/algo trading area. Most people have been using kdb+ there but many are looking for replacements and there are some really good conversations to be found about the kind of limitations they are hitting.

I'm just a sysadmin who likes to keep up with whats going on, and my db knowledge is limited, but I do have a process for narrowing my focus to the dbs I reference. It must be open source, bonus points to gpl or apache licenses. The language it is written in is important but not a deal breaker (very tired of so many java based dbs). I don't like it when they are tacked on top of an "older" tech (such as kairos on cassandra, timeseriesdb on top of postgres, opentdsb on top of hbase, kudu on hadoop, etc). Being either filesystem aware or agnostic can be nice features (playing well with ceph, lustre, etc) Not saying this is the sort of selection criteria others should use just giving some info on mine.

A few more interesting mentions: clickhouse, gnocchi, marketstore, Atlas (Netflix), opentick (on top of foundationdb).
Here's another thing: I remember learning that all the nice usable energy we get from the sun is due to the fact that the big bang produced lots of hydrogen, but fusing four hydrogens into a helium yields a bunch of energy. (And you can still get some energy out by fusing further, all the way down to iron.) So if matter and radiation were at equilibrium at the big bang like Baez says, why wasn't more helium (and heavier elements down to iron) formed, leaving nothing for the stars to burn?

I think the answer has to be that the temperature was incredibly high at the time of the big bang: At really high temperatures, it's more favourable for nucleons to be flying around separate from each other as protons. At lower temperatures, it starts being better for them to be things like helium and carbon, and at lower temperatures still, iron. So if the universe's temperature had lowered very very gradually, we would be stuck with nothing but iron at this point, leaving nothing for the stars to burn. So it seems we owe our sunlight, in some sense, to the fact that the universe cooled fairly quickly?
It seems that more special forces get killed in helicopters than in ground combat. The crashes may be due to malfunction, or extremely bad weather, but also because the helicopters are vulnerable to ground fire as they go to reinforce or evacuate men from combat.

US SEALS in Afghanistan:

https://www.history.com/news/the-costliest-day-in-seal-team-...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Takur_Ghar (Roberts Ridge)

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

British SAS/SBS in Iraq, Afghanistan and the Falklands War:

https://www.thesun.co.uk/archives/news/775565/harrys-five-sa...

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/defence/6044194/Two-...

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-454382/For-time-25-...

Coalition forces in Iraq:

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/helicop...

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/mar/21/iraq.uk

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2005_Al-Anbar_CH-53E_crash

https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2018/03/16/594168056...

Australian SAS in training:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-06-11/survivor-remembers-19...

One famous example from the Falklands War, where two helicopters crashed in a blizzard on a glacier, but was redeemed by a tremendous feat of airmanship by the pilot of the third helicopter:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Paraquet#Reconnaissa...
Sounds cool. Could you share the link to their official git repo?
I’d never heard about this before, so I read the Wikipedia article.

> Academics such as David Barash say that the term just-so story [...] is simply a derogatory term for a hypothesis.

I’m inclined to agree with Barash. Conjecture should not be confused for fact. However, conjecture is also necessary for discovery.
I worked near LA's Chinatown and would often walk by the polleria on my search for a place to eat lunch. I never got the guts to go in to see how they processed the chickens. What I remember most was the smell. It was very strong and rank.

It's been years since but one thing it did was to remind me where our meats come from. The fact that they aren't just packages that come from a factory. They were once live animals.
Might want to go and read the history books.

Apple didn't get their start by copying Xerox. They got their start by building and selling the Apple 1/2/3/Lisa. Xerox only came into the picture during the development of the Mac. And there is this myth that Xerox invented all of the GUI metaphors we know today. But actually about half came from Apple e.g drag & drop file manipulation, multiple file system views, drop down menus, clipboard.

Also only one person was fired from Apple and that was Scott Forstall. After whom quite a number of memorable iOS gestures were invented i.e. when the click button disappeared.
From the article: you can see with the naked eye

Also from the article: long exposure photograph

Only one of those is correct. Naked eyes can't do long exposures.
"academics [...] weren't scared off" isn't a claim that not a single person was scared off, but that as a group they were not scared off. If one of the worst members wasn't scared off, that's a good piece of evidence.

> This has absolutely nothing to do with the content of any of my comments.

I'm explaining why he's one of the most extreme members of that group, which is needed to support my main point.
> Under the Dilbert principle, employees who were never competent are promoted to management to limit the damage they can do.

Interesting but how does promoting such employee limit the damage (instead of causing more damage to the team)?
I've been an Android user and developer for 10 years. THIS is the thing. Smoothness. Android claims it's equal between an iPhone and a flagship Android device but it's not even close.

It seems Android just is not willing/able to admit this is a huge gap and address it.
Perhaps this sort of unfounded conspiracy theorizing simply attracts legitimate downvotes.
Discussed recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22009912
FDA approves first US phage therapy trial (2019)
The Economics of Airline Class
Well if you believe in the “promote the useful arts” logic (I do, to an extent) then having exclusive rights to things like “butter” smooth animations makes companies like Apple more willing to invest in them, which is in the consumer’s interest.
This reply is total buzzword salad.

> I've watched with great interest over time how Microsoft has evolved from closed source to open source. IMHO, Much of their motivation derives from huge demand from the community to open source their software.

I am not a Microsoft hater but that is half true. The fact of the matter is that in 2010-2012ish their tech stack basically wasn't cool anymore and back then if you had cut me I would have bled Microsoft blue. The fact of the matter is that newest Juniors don't like working with the old Microsoft stack. Outside of .NET core everything release (including the newer versions of Visual Studio since 2010) hasn't really been adopted.

> Developers benefit in several ways by being able to quickly fix bugs, possibility (depends on project) of adding a feature, and desire to contribute to the community on software they like.

Is this a copy and paste answer of the "benefits of open source"?

The point I was making was that these huge companies (all of the large companies) have taken open source software and put most of the useful bits to tie it all together and put it behind pay walls (PaaS).

If a patch or a set of patches is not in <insert big companies interest> it probably won't be allowed in the project. Forks of these projects generally die because there isn't a dedicated resource unlike <insert large company can provide>.

> There has also been several products that Microsoft has decided to stop providing, but have lived on through community adoption, which is huge if developers have dedicated their own time to learn and integrate the software with their own projects over time.

Which ones? Almost everything that isn't officially in the Microsoft repos for the most part is dead. The few things that are .NET that have survived are quite small tbh.

> Open source also gives developers a say in the development of products, watching it being built in the open, influencing direction/features, and making it easier to understand what the code does under the hood. Additionally, Microsoft has embraced and supported 3rd party open source for a number of years, building on their relationship with the community.

Gives how much of a say. Not much I would reckon.
> There are so many patents that take an existing concept but add the phrase "on a computer" or "digitally" or some such

Please show us just one example of this.

Because it's a myth that gets perpetuated that this is how patents work. You patent a specific implementation of a concept not the concept itself. If you implement a concept in a different way it won't infringe the patent.
What does this atom look like? Do you see an atom or do you see light? Of course, all pictures are pictures of light. But there’s a difference between taking a picture of the light coming from a light bulb and a picture of a light bulb, as I am sure you’re aware.
> Replace the world's usage of bash.

I feel like this is hardest part. Bash is installed everywhere, and that ubiquity is one of its greatest assets. Oil can’t replicate that (at least not for a very long time).
Eh, windows updates, especially when you're including .net 4+ take a pretty considerable amount of time, especially when on a HDD. Server 2016 updates Re very memory hungry.
That is not true.

What I did was not simply asking a person to back up a claim they made. If that was the case you could call me out for inconsistency.

I was responding to a person who had claimed to have provided some evidence that they had not actually given.

I responded to a sentence that was presenting a claim, and also implying that the evidence for their claim was given earlier in their comment, which I did not believe was the case.

That sentence was: "So no, OP, academics who didn't support trans politics weren't scared off by the community".

That 'So no' implies that the evidence for the claim has been given earlier in their comment. I did not see any evidence in their comment, so I asked if they could provide some.
I should've started a year later when ARC was introduced (I started learning between 2011 - 2013).

Learning iOS dev with reference counting as a memory management system was really painful. My programming skill wasn't up to speed yet to "just" learn a new language. I only knew some university Java at the time. And while I did write impressive projects with it, I wasn't strong enough in an algorithmic sense.

Learning a framework and learning memory management, and kind of needing to deal with pointers but not really proved to be too much.

When ARC was introduced it was a breeze.

Now, when I read this whole comment, nowadays I'd think: this is such nonsense. Memory management should not be a barrier to learn iOS dev. But when you're in that weird space of that you kind of know how to program (5000+ lines code) but you really need to get into it, and it doesn't feel natural yet. Then, yea, it does matter a lot.

A few years later I learned C and had no issues learning pointers or memory management. To be fair, I didn't need to use any frameworks with C.
It is a different story in the UK. I would probably just get one if I was in the US.
Damn it. It would be nice to read about an advance in Alzheimer’s treatment not based on on this rat model. There have been numerous “effective treatments” for this rodent model, none of which have panned out at all for humans.

It’s almost as if rats engineered to develop amyloid plaques aren’t a realistic model for, well, anything.
> I was around when there was no serverless.

We used to call it /cgi-bin/ ;)
This so much!

But is it web-scale?! /s
But 3 Floyd’s is right next store to pickup a six pack :)
Show HN: I built a Flutter app to practise Mandarin tone recognition
Been doing Android development for 8+ years. The main thing to realize is that nobody actually knows what they're doing. You'll have a problem and spend hours and hours just searching for "the answer" but it's not out there. Everyone who has solved it has used their own hacks, and they're not going to be able to transfer the hack to you.

Once you realize this it's somewhat liberating. You focus on the bug/feature and not the method. One time I was trying to solve a particularly nasty layout-at-runtime problem and just realized I could write my own ViewGroup and lay it all out myself, pixel by pixel, faster than fighting RelativeLayout or whatever. And that code is more stable than something where I import some library that's not going to be maintained.
Sure, no single person is completely objective, but Wikipedia is not a news outlet with Jimmy Wales as editor-in-chief. It's an encyclopedia crowd-sourced from an immense number of volunteers, all with different knowledge. So popular articles can generally be trusted to be informative, as they were overseen by many people with overlapping knowledge. Surely this is a more objective source of information than most state–run or commercial media where the voices are far fewer and often kept on a short leash of agenda by management (TRT's agenda, for example, being presenting the current Turkish government as the best possible one).
That one person wasn't scared off provides no evidence about how many other people were or weren't scared off.

That he might be the worst has zero bearing on this.
Gravitons are speculative in that they haven't been observed, but they're almost certainly the correct language for describing mild quantum corrections to general relativity. Simple scaling arguments show that _any_ theory of quantum gravity that reduces to general relativity at low energies passes through a regime where it can be described by gravitons. Whether gravitons are fundamental objects in quantum gravity is irrelevant for the kind of state counting Baez is talking about.
I use a single 42.5" LG 4k monitor. Never use the full width or height except for watching media. Works fine.

At the office I use a 27" 4k monitor with the 15" MacbookPro off to the side for Slack. Also fine.
What did you do down there?

And, yes, that is the typical disconnect People have with their food; and possibly an explanation for much of the problems we have with the environment/Nature. Its one of the many issues with the abject commodification of Food, rather than an integral component of Life itself.

I think having to take the life and preparing a meal with an animal you slaughtered should be a prerequisite for being able to eat meat in Society. You learn a lot about yourself and sustainable practices, and the value of something giving it's Life for your nourishment.
plastic rings?
There's also jq for yaml: https://github.com/kislyuk/yq
Interesting comment about the blue iMessage bubbles. I've definitely heard of it, and have seen the memes on the internet, but have never actually met anyone that cared about the _color_.

In my experience people do, however, care about iMessage being green insofar as the loss of functionality is concerned. Specifically with group messaging, a mix of iOS + Android users will result in weird quirks that aren't experienced "when everyone is blue". For example I've been in a mixed thread where the android user would receive a reply individually by every participant, while iOS users would not. Reactions, et al are unavailable in a mixed environment etc.

I'm not convinced it's a superiority complex, but rather the loss of extras that are lost when texting outside of Apple's ecosystem.
I highly doubt that she’ll serve 20 years. I’d be surprised if she received even 10% of such a sentence and her time served is likely to be a good deal less.
Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR)
While I can certainly appreciate a desire to get down in the nuts and bolts of a programming problem, and really understand what you're doing, I don't think that's required to spark the joy of learning in a new student. No, for video games in particular, what seems to work most consistently is rapid iteration. How fast can the student go from idea in their head to their character doing that behavior on screen? That core loop is fascinating to a youngster, who immediately begins to piece together how Mario might run and jump, or a race car might move along a track, almost entirely on their own.

To that end, there's a certain value in declaring that, "You know what, PyGame Zero's event loop is probably fine. Let it sweat the details, and we'll worry about writing the character.jump() function next." Another framework I love that works this way is Love2D, which targets Lua but has a similar approach:

https://love2d.org/

Sure it's not suitable for any project of decent complexity, but there's a reason we keep reaching for it during Ludum Dares, and any time we want to rapidly prototype an idea. It takes the least amount of effort of any tool I know to go from concept to prototype, and get the idea in playtesters hands so we know if it's worth doing properly. Getting to do that in Python sounds awesome, so kudos all around; this is neat stuff.
Then they did, and you've called that evidence unconvincing. But it is still evidence. More than the zero you've gotten (or requested) from the original claim.
Paul Graham on How to Disagree
I thought atoms were invisible even with advanced microscopes.
It isn't flamebait and the dude shouldn't be downvoted--I'd be pissed if I was that guy too.

People here love to say worthless crap like "oh, of the people who take surveys, blah blah blah". Not considering the fact that people who give the surveys aren't stupid and factor that into their results. Such garbage is pure pedantry and if anything, you should be going after all the know-it-alls on this forum who love to pick useless fights.

Of course the people giving the survey know that there is an inherent bias towards their sample. If they are any good, they correct for it.

Stop wasting your time going after this guy, go after the know-it-all parent.
Oh wow, I had no idea about video black/white being 16/235, rather than 0/255.

It took a lot of Googling, but I finally found an article that explains why, in case anyone else is interested:

"The 601 system allows colors that are darker than black and brighter than white. This is especially important for cameras, because you may occasionally shoot an object that has a bright spot that is “hotter” than legal white, and might want a way to later recover the detail in this hot spot. Going darker than broadcast black is also used at times for synchronization signals, as well as some primitive keying applications such as “superblack” where systems mask or key out areas of an image “blacker” than black."

https://www.provideocoalition.com/luminance_ranges/
Rat had 'no brain' and somehow lived a normal life
> Luckily, apps seem to have a really good memory of where you left off

This is something I have some gripes about. In the old days before backgrounding, pressing the home button literally ends the process. So implementing state preservation and restoration is a must for any non-toy apps.

With backgrounding, apps can linger in the background for a while before being killed. And now many iOS apps don't implement state restoration at all, including built-in apps like Photos. Quick experiment to verify: I open a particular photo, quit the app, reopen the app, and I don't see that photo any more. Instead I see the general timeline view or album view.

I hate this and wish more iOS devs would implement these things correctly. Docs here: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/uikit/view_control...
> With a block level storage fabric you can fail over instantly, run read only replicas and even support distributed writes in some cases.

Yes, but it's also a wonderful way to corrupt a DB as soon as anything goes wrong in your storage fabric system.

And this type of corruption is generally not the recoverable one.
Incredible!

The sphinx docs look great. Also, the logo! Not to mention, the translations:

- https://pygame-zero.readthedocs.io/zh_CN/latest/

- https://pygame-zero.readthedocs.io/ja/latest/

- https://pygame-zero.readthedocs.io/sk/latest/

One reason of why I wouldn't use it yet: LGPL.

This is the issue pygame had when I tried it. The license made it very difficult to incorporate and use in practice, and I ended up playing with kivy instead (https://github.com/kivy/kivy). The reasons why:

1. Writing anything commercial would be a gamble. I've wrote at length on why this license isn't meant for scripting languages, but even if it's a compiled language, SDL moved away from LGPL here: https://youtu.be/MeMPCSqQ-34?t=430.

2. LGPL and scripting languages just don't work from an open source perspective. It's not copy-paste and vendorize friendly. Functions can't be copied a la carte. I'd rather write something from scratch than link an LGPL library in one of my MIT licensed projects. I'm just not willing to open downstream users to the risk. What ends up happening is 5/10 years on, someone ends up writing a new MIT/BSD library to get around a viral one (e.g. GCC -> Clang/LLVM).
Why do they restrict this in the spec? Doesn't that just encourage people to use USB Type C to USB-A hubs, making adoption to Type C slower?
I’ve worked on code that does this before and I thought I understood it, but something about these explanations are making it way more confusing to me
No, I did not see any evidence there at all, and I wrote my comment on the basis of that.

Having seen the subsequent replies, I can now see how other people have taken it as a form of evidence.

While I can now see why other people might consider it evidence for the claim, I do not consider it to be such myself (in the sense of 'evidence' being something that supports a claim).
Sure, Einstein and Feynman are the classic examples, but they were both musicians. This article specifically called out "actor, dancer, magician". Who do these refer to?
There’s definitely a range. I was a 4th generation SDA on both sides of the family - both of which were pretty strictly observant, though my parents were a little less so. Meat was absolutely off the table (haha). And I don’t know if we ever went to an SDA function where it was. Perhaps that has changed since we left 20 years ago.

Buffets were really a big part of Sabbath afternoons for many of my childhood years, and we knew many other SDAs for whom it was the same. The local SDA hospital still has a Hometown Buffet nearby that hasn’t been closed yet.

(We were non-strict enough to allow paying for something on Sabbath — though that would have crossed the line for many people we knew.)