skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I hesitate to judge GP, but I had exactly the same internal monologue to their post. On the flip side, the high price of the Purple stuff is because they're pricing in dealing with people who have such uncertainty, so the customer-base are all playing each other, while we sit on the sidelines and just buy a cheaper one at the outset.

"It's kind of like test driving an $80K Acura"

It's much worse than that. When you drive that Acura back into the lot it's still a new car and the eventual buyer will love it just as much. When you return that mattress it's a used mattress that at best is going to be donated to a charity, but more likely is ending up going to a landfill.
Is it not a final exam for the entire schooling process? If it is, I don't think there's anything wrong with letting people who attended, tried and got close, a passing grade. As much as we value merit, the real world actually isn't a meritocracy, and high school isn't much of a measure for how successful someone has the potential to be.

I think you begin to be right as people move into academia though, certainly you want people who are actually good at the subject to be the ones passing university and going into the work force.
Rise of the Global Digital Citizen
Why stick to billionaires though? There're lots and lot of people whose wealth is much bigger than their contribution to society.
What if I told you that no matter how many questions you got right on a test, you'd never score higher than a 70%.

Are you going to try to get 100% correct?
I think another reason for this, is that companies had a tendency to only have one single running database, to store everything, and often even in the same schema. Which ended up not scaling well in the organisation when so many unrelated topics/project/features went through one and the same database. I don't know if it has anything to do with licensing and paying per instance, maybe, but I feel that a lot of those problems of a database that doesn't scale, could have been solved by simply using a few databases for isolated domains instead of cramming everything into one.
I never played with Idris2, but I recall running some idris1 programs using the chez scheme backend instead of thebc one and got instant 5x speedups. Across the board.

Not that it wouldn't be possible to make the C code fast. It is just that the chez backend was a one man job.
It's certainly possible, but more complex than just putting up a bunch of stateless application servers all accessing the same database. With no local cache. Then saying the DB is slow ;-)

It's also the kind of thing many developers don't like doing: thinking about operational concerns.

As an aside, horizontal scaling of sorts can be achieved by using microservices, it's actually one of the few really valid reasons for this type of architecture. If the microservice databases are not independent, you're doing it wrong.
Protect Your Website from Hacks and Attacks
Huh, I was going to reply here, but then I replied there: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22380069

Here seemed too hard, I guess. But ...

> More sophisticated, nuanced, and pro-speech filtering work that doesn't aim to uphold a single worldwide standard seems like it will be even more expensive; who will do it and how will we incentivize it?

That's certainly what I'd want. The standard federated model of shared filtering rules being applied at the node level is way too prone to generating filter bubbles. Also, people who are genuinely open-minded and interested in free discussion would never put up with it, and they're the most fun to be around. That's why I've never gotten into Mastodon.

I'd want filtering rules that participants applied locally. The model used by ad-blocking browser extensions, Pi-hole and such would arguably work. But of course, sets of rules would be far more complex, and it'd be best to hide them under a simple user interface.

Let's say that someone open-sourced the sort of moderation repo that major platforms are developing. With adjustable automated pre-filtering, and human tweaking.

So then any participant could run that, and publish their rules. Other participants, maybe mega nodes who got paid for their efforts, would consolidate all those rules into coherent sets, and then publish those. There'd be multiple such services, and they'd compete on filter type and quality.

> For example, some of the moderators might be watching videos of real people dying or getting raped all day long.

That is a problem. I know that personally. For many years, I relied on hearsay about Freenet, because I was way too paranoid to actually run it locally. But eventually, I developed the skills to run it on a remote server, with adequate anonymity. So I did.

I won't go into detail. But let's just say that I can not imagine how any decent person could moderate some of that stuff without mental damage.

So as distasteful as it might be, perhaps the system could incorporate filter rules from people who enjoy that stuff. They'd be motivated to adequately anonymize their contributions, of course. And if they succeeded, there'd be no leverage for anyone to be forced to identify them. And if they were careless, that would be great.

Once their rules had been characterized, however, they'd be reversed before integration with everyone else's. And the same methodology could be used for all other widely distasteful categories of content.
In my case my total electric + gas bill is around €60. Around €30 of that is fixed cost, €30 is variable cost.

I could improve by having better insulation in the walls or better windows. But with our high labour cost that would be thousands of euro's() to bring the bill down to at most €45, if I could cut my energy bill in half, which is unlikely. It's not worth the investment.

() I had to replace drywall due to water damage, it was around €2000 for a section of five square meter. This was replacing the insulation, wall, redoing the stucco, repainting and reapplying the fixtures and wall trim. Luckily this was covered by insurance. I don't want to know what replacing the 180 square meters of drywall would cost.
Sure, but as a result I've grown more and more cautious about relaxing my guard which has made me more and more quiet in social situations.
Gaius "Caesar" Julius? Where does that come from? Caesar was his name, Gaius Iulius Caesar.
This was in the context of a political discussion about what the tax bands should be, not about paying the current taxes in reality.

Some people want higher taxes and some want lower; what I’m saying is, 50% stood out as an arbitrary threshold that many people seemed possibly willing to agree on.

Some complained that rich people shouldn’t be expected to prop up the rest of society, but conceded that progressive tax bands might be okay as long as the top rate was no more than 50%. Others felt that highly progressive taxes were essential; they wanted at least 50% as the top rate.
For the most part people know best where there money needs to go; most of the financial advice people see from "experts" really is oriented toward people who have money left over after paying for necessities.

As for housing, I think that this would be standard econ, really. More money means more demand, which in the absence of more supply, means higher prices. Things like housing are harder to increase the supply of than say, TVs, so yeah, they'd probably go up more than the rest. But I suspect that everyone would still be better off.

I don't think rent-controls are a good idea. On the other hand, I do think that in the long run rich people gobbling up finite land is a problem;
Some of the behind the scenes photos are really uncanny. Your eyes tell you you’re looking at a photo of an outdoor scene, but the illusion of reality breaks down in subtle ways at the edges of the image.
It's over 50% at £50k if you have a plan 2 student loan
Looking at spec through the lens of a type system is weird because types solve two problems where spec solves one problem

So I'm getting the most leverage out of types when they solve:
- Static analysis
- Specification

Clojure's static analysis tools do use type analysis since the underlying primitives are typed, but a good static analysis does type analysis and other checks so types aren't the be all end all there

Personally I love types that track to primitives, the problem with types is when you let developers use them to express their Person class or whatever, your Person class is not as fundamental as that language's int class, for example, the semantics are completely different between your primitive types but not your Person class vs your Address class

Anyway what I wanted to say is I have yet to meet a type system where I'm happy with its specification capabilities without moving into slot based programming or so much syntax for the types it becomes overhead to read them, i.e. you can write complete programs in TypeScript's Type system

Spec is the competitor for type specification here, it is much nicer you can translate it into API, GraphQL, Database schema etc but it's still getting work for Spec 2, but you can generate data examples out of it, use it for generative testing, use it for parsing, validation etc It's good if you have that specification problem

The static analysis problem is getting more and more attention through clj-kondo and inbuilt analysis via Cursive and other editors, they'll stop you from doing things like (inc "hello world") because you can't increment a string, I think this feature is actually why people love types so much the fast feedback for silly mistakes is soo good and we have that too

What we didn't do was complect those two things together, it also doesn't mar our thinking, I don't think there's an end game where a sufficiently smart type system where it eliminates all programming problems, the next breakthroughs will be in data, not types see the whole area of deep learning, but we're so in love with types we create languages where their USP in the type system
I joined Xerox in the mid-90s, past the era when they were creating their own processors and programming languages but they still couldn't resist building one last operating system for a new digital printer/copier. The product was late and while it was full of cool technology it was outsold by a Fuji Xerox product built on an older digital printer. Cool doesn't always translate into something customers will pay for.
Yes! That’s silly and should be fixed (although it’s hard to drum up any sympathy for those poor folks earning only 110K or so).

Edit to clarify: if your salary is £100K and you get a £10K raise, you see almost none of it in your payslip. But if you’re on £120K and get the same raise you get to take a good chunk of it home. That’s what seems silly to me.
Data Scientist: The Dirtiest Job of the 21st Century
"Start"? It's been making it a struggle to do so for a while.
I have friends who didn't pay for their house. They were lucky enough that their parents just gave it to them.

So bad to be treated like a child for their entire life. They're really suffering not having a mortgage to pay every month. Instead they're saving up for their kids college.
I’ve tried to read that for a solid few minutes and still can’t see what else could have been intended.
Starting a sentence with "But I think we can" is neither incorrect, nor is it a preposition.
Let alone that sometimes problems and/or ways to solve them are... subjective to say the least. Or priorities are different.

It's OK to spend money without getting approval from the hive mind.

It feels like rehash of centrally governed rehash. If non-profit problem solving shall be centralised, maybe for-profit activities shall be done according by government-approved plan as well?
> (...) but at some point you may find that your application has grown and your SQL server is running into IOPS and CPU limits that are difficult to fix.

It's not unique to SQL/databases that at some point your user base may outgrow your current architecture and you may have to invest in something else.

It's dangerous to think you can skip this and just employ whatever architecture is "good" for bigger user bases from the start. There are different trade-offs in different systems and the trade-offs of most alternatives are not as well understood as the trade-offs of databases. I have seen more than one project implode when something which was simple with a database was far more complicated with the alternative.
Page builders might not be a good idea
The winner (re)writes the history, so that the narrative makes one the good guy.
A lot of welfare and food stamp recipients are the working poor.

This was a single mom with three children. She needs to arrange for child care while she's working and it's a good idea to set aside money for medical emergencies. I'm going to guess this job probably pays a few dollars above minimum wage.

Someone in this situation is absolutely eligible for food stamps. But if we get another four years of MAGA, then who knows, maybe not.
No, but Spiro splines are supported, and they have many of the same characteristics (arguably better).

The UI to toggle into Spiro mode is a little bit obtuse but once you're in it's pretty cool.
Ok, let me try again: the principle has nothing to do with user friendliness,learning curve or complexity of the UI.

Let's look at awk as an example,the language itself is not the UI, the means by which you interact with it is:

awk 'BEGIN{FS="\n"}{print $1}' somefile

How the quotes, braces,value assignment,input file specification,etc... Works is the "UI" ,what the terms BEGIN,FS,print,$1 mean and do is the functions of the language.

FL=somefile awk =BEGIN+FS=~\n~++print $1+=

If that was insteas the "UI" for the awk language, the functionality and power of the language remains unaffectes. But there is plenty to explain to your audience there and it has nothing to do with the functionality or capability of the language.

Even the most complicated aircraft has a seat,an obvious entrance and buttons as an interface to the pilot. It's fine for the functions of the buttons or how to be secured in a seat to require explanation,it's bad UI to have a bed,or a seat that pops up from a hidden location or buttons that look identical to indicator lights.
Historical and Political Origins of Corporate Board of Directors (2004) [pdf]
I don't understand why your comment is downvoted. It has - at time of me writing this - got 4 people who are trying to 'explain' it away. I guess Silicon Valley has a consent issue, and its' misogyny is coming out in disturbing ways
Budget-Conscious Recipe Ideas for Your Next Office Party – EBrand Me
This is something up with which we will not put!

--Winston Churchill.
Usually such regimes end up in shortage of toilet paper.
Add whiner on site, anyone know a workaround?
there is a difference between a literary essay and the kind PG is talking about here. PG's essays are more like maybe business commentary than literary essays. Some of these insights apply anyway, to all essays - but don't confuse different types of essays.
I know of a dozen counter examples where behavior has been addressed and improved. Several who then went on to be highly valuable to the org. Some people are illequiped to incorporate feedback and improve, and those will have to seek employment elsewhere. It seems an odd choice to me to not give someone who is already within the org a chance to improve and to prefer bringing in an unknown new person to replace them. This case did not come across (to me at least) as something unfixable. This is not a dangerous person, this is a person with communication issues.
If we develop new ways to invent anti-biotics, such that we have a reasonable expectation of new ones being produced yearly, then maybe anti-biotic stewardship will become less important.
Same comment for me, but star control 2.

If we can't travel there in real life, at least there is video game tourism.
Oh, you're right. I'm getting mixed up.
allegedly. On the topic of not ending a sentence with a preposition.

https://brians.wsu.edu/2016/11/14/churchill-on-prepositions/
>He just doesn't care to improve his work.

Alternatively, you may overestimate how objective these rules are and how much they must correlate with some universal metric for good writing.
When you get heavy into types you start seeing the world through the lens of types and that's super dangerous for the same reasons that trying to view the entire world as SQL tables is not a maintainable solution, the problem isn't reality it's your lense that you're viewing the world with

Also please don't read this as types are bad that's not what I'm saying, or tables are bad, letting them consume your thinking means you start thinking about problems in terms of typed or not typed boolean thinking instead of nuanced, since nearly all languages are "typed" at runtime and static analysis time anyway
"This is, incidentally, a chief reason why pure market solutions"

Yes, but what is a "pure market"? I like to believe that my local home improvement or grocery store has some kind of concept of their own brand and puts some effort into getting decent products on the shelf, whether store brand or not. So, I hope that their markets are not as "pure" as online sites where anyone can sell.
Is there no more subtle way of turning down a customer, as an ex-spook? He seemed to imply more than he needed to for someone trained.
> SQL Server (the db you mention) is no slouch when paired with additional CPUs (for vertical linear scaling) and allows for transactionally safe replication to distributed clusters of SQL Servers

Additional CPUs are $7,000 USD per core, and replication is labor intensive. Transactional replication has a nasty habit of breaking as the source tables are changed, and Availability Groups have a ton of bugs (as evidenced by any recent Cumulative Update.)

Saying that SQL Server scales is like saying your wallet scales to hold any amount of money. Sure, it might, but it’s up to you to put the coin in, and it’s gonna for a lot of coin - compared to scaling out app servers, who have generally near no license cost, and code is synchronized at deploy time.

As to recommending you a place to read, I hate to say this, but you could start with my blog. Pretty much every week, I’ve got real life examples turned into abstract tutorials on there from companies who hit scaling walls and had to hire me for help. (Past client examples: Stack Overflow, Google.)
They'll have to coin a less deragatory term than monolith first. Cohesive Apps? Macroservices?
> Where is this meme that RDBMSs do not scale coming from? (I see lots of people saying this as though it is a given. Has there been any published data on this for me to read?).

It mostly comes from people who don't know how and when to create an index.
I mean people are bullied into hooking up Google Chrome with their gmail, and then their entire web history is "backed up" on Google's servers. At least Firefox's Sync features have been end to end encrypted, you lose your password, you lose your files / history. If you log into a gmail account it would force it on Chrome in the past, so I stopped using gmail on Chrome altogether.
First of all: interesting post!

But since you mentioned Borges let me offer a counter-counterpoint: Borges was obsessive about his writings and can be considered "mathematical" about them. He chopped away anything that didn't fit and was very careful about the construction of sentences. He was so obsessed that he recalled -- or so I read somewhere -- something that was already printed in order to make corrections to it.

Poe claimed he was quite "mathematical" (or maybe the word is "methodical", or "analytical") about the construction of his famous poem The Raven. While this claim is disputed, or maybe he exaggerated, at least it's something he liked to claim about some of his work.
"yet even within each of these in developed economies you'll find grading and quality control"

I think it's an oversight to mention bulk commodities as an exception to the need for quality information. Things are bulk commodities because there are standards and regulations that enable them to be traded easily.
Flask Debug Mode RCE
Microsoft deemed this to be expected behavior and not a security issue.

For once, thank you for not caving into corporate pressure to make the work experience even more dystopian... those who have worked in such environments will known what I'm referring to. (I wonder if their developers themselves make use of this.)
Calling people inhuman is obnoxious; please don't do that.

Quasimodes (chording) are physically difficult and distracting.
This seems.. too good to be true?

I don't have the Physics chops to untangle the likelihood of this tech and the credibility of the process and its authors, so I'm hoping the HN crowd will be able to pad out the story behind this.

Certainly, from my layperson's perspective, their website isn't exactly encouraging... https://www.hb11.energy/

- ed re: last line - "books and covers, and all that"
Thank the Chez Scheme developers for an absolutely fantastic compiler, and also Idris for being designed so that it's possible to feed any of the IRs to the particular backend. There's not much of an impedance mismatch between Scheme and Idris lambda output, so the overhead is small. I could have made it a bit better if I had represented Idris lists and bools as the corresponding scheme types, instead of being mapped as all the other types by their structure.
Stop using Windows.
Windows 10 is a total catastrophe for business and private use.

It established ads and spying as normal for an OS, it removed abilities to administrate the OS in a meaningful way and mostly ignored users in favor of nudging people to their products. Products that I would declare to be mostly in beta phase. The bi-annual untargeted channel version couldn't sort desktop symbols without bugs if you had multiple monitors attached till a few month ago.

And before anyone mentions that "normal people" like it and it is just the icky nerds that have reservations: Not in my experience. They hate MS spying on them too. It is just that there is often a lack of an alternative if they are caught up in the ecosystem.

I wonder how people even manage if they don't have some friends and family to help them get rid of the bad stuff.

There are underlying improvements, but what use is a safer system if the malware comes preinstalled.
Niven's First Law of Writing: Writers who write for other writers should write letters. - Larry Niven, science fiction author (1989)

Blind monkey at the typewriter. - Robert Burnham Jr., Astronomer (1983)

We'll need writers who can remember freedom - poets, visionaries - realists of a larger reality. - Ursula K. Le Guin

The writer is that person who, embarking upon her task, does not know what to do. - Donald Barthelme

There can be no reliable biography of a writer, 'because a writer is too many people if he is any good'. - Andrew O'Hagan

Summary of advice from writers: Advice from writers is useful, and not only about naming. Writers have been at it for centuries; programming is merely decades old. Also, their advice is better written. And funnier. - Peter Hilton

... from https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup

(Edit: One of PG's main points here is succinctly summarized by this other pithy taoup quote: Lest men suspect your tale untrue, keep probability in view. - John Gay (1727))
Exactly, anyone deriding a single party is in fact a pawn. Zoom out, and you realize you're trapped in a matrix of control by all parties.
I also found this summary of the writing process quite interesting, by Tyler Cowen:

https://www.writingroutines.com/tyler-cowen/
Of course they can give consent. What you mean is they cannot refuse giving consent when whomever owns them (God, that is even hard to type, it’s so wrong it feels grammatically incorrect!) instructs them to engage in sexual relations with somebody.