skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
They measure unique edge throughput AFAICT. I wonder if there's a fair way to evaluating fuzzers by throughput of unique failing test cases instead.

I hadn't heard of most of these fuzzers. MOpt [1, I think] seems like it has the performance crown (based on [2]).

> Inspired by the well-known optimization algorithm Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO), MOPT dynamically evaluates the efficiency of candidate mutation operators, and adjusts their selection probability towards the optimum distribution.

This is a great idea. Intuitively, each program could respond differently to different test case mutation.

[1] https://www.usenix.org/system/files/sec19-lyu.pdf

[2] https://www.fuzzbench.com/reports/sample/bloaty_fuzz_target_...
Do you have a horse in this race, by any chance?
IBM 360 restoration – The first update of 2020
Barium Carbonate Industry Size
Data in SwiftUI, Part 3: Tools
I guess, it is just the speed and the ability to instantly go viral makes social networks more prone to bad press.
Seems like Java is trying to catch up with Kotlin
> Why is this better than SETI? What's the purpose of finding mersenne primes

I hope you're kidding ...

We will probably never find or communicate with ET, so the effort is a waste of time and resources. Space is just too big.

But interesting numbers are already known to be valuable in group theory, encryption, and other areas. Golomb numbers are used today, for example:

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

And my standard disclaimer for technological illiterates: "It's not all about you."
PowerShell 7
Top Five Fake Caller ID Applications for Android Users
There are a couple of situations where outages are not normal or acceptable:

1. Dealing with other people's money
2. Monitoring/managing other people's health
Someone pointed out that Cheers started great but lost its heart when Colasanto (“Coach”) passed away. It obviously lasted a long time, but it transitioned into more of a traditional sitcom.
Well if you can pay 1% of the lawyers 10x the lifetime earnings they would get in BigLaw, they will happily destroy the business model for yo.
So if we step back a second, look at a Ringworld. I'm not sure if Larry Niven proposed this idea (in the book by the same name) or just popularized it, but the idea is basically this: If you take the mass of the Earth and turn it into a ring that encircles a star, spin it to create artificial gravity and put walls on the sides (on the inside) to keep an atmosphere in.

What do you have? The same mass of Earth will have a million times the living area.

What's the problem? At 1 AU distance, this thing would have to spin so fast (IIRC ~1.5 million km/h) that the centrifugal forces would tear it apart. Not even graphene could withstand the forces. So the idea just isn't practical.

So if you create a hard shell, you have to ask: what is the intended goal?

If there is to create living area, where is gravity coming from? Do you spin the sphere? If so, it has the same centrifugal force problem.

If it's not (and technically even if it is) then you have the problem that the shell will collapse under the gravity of the star and/or its own mass.
Hi,

I am not sure what your point is. Instant deployment is an advantage of web architecture: you have nothing to do on the user device for them to use the new version of your software (barring some rare issues with browser cache).

On the other hand, so far at least, a web application does not age so well at the timescale of enterprise software (an application will live 10-30 years in a company). So we have an obsolescence problem often, i.e. a 5+ years old application will need to be rebuilt to use more modern technology, often at a high cost.

Originally, web architecture mixed in web pages presentation and business data, a result of an hypertext architecture being used for transactional software it was not aimed at at the beginning. Sure, there have been billion of dollars of investment in web technology since then and a lot of things have improved. However, I have the strong feeling things are still messed-up, especially for developments 'in the wild' for team who do not have strong architecture skills.
Between ubiquitous Oyster cards and being able to pay-as-you-go with a regular contactless credit/debit card, I suppose it's close to zero.
Show HN: MDO – Visual status updates for distributive teams in a virtual space
I have an eerie feeling that one of the next major "scandals" in technology will center around companies who learn how to abuse the real-time video/audio capabilities of the browser without disclosing (clearly) to end users the implications.

These days anyone with a bit of programming knowledge can now open WebRTC sessions from the server, decrypt the contents, and multiplex streams back to clients (great for large group video chats). A great capability IMO, but immense potential for abuse by bad actors. I think now is a perfect time for people "in the know" to start educating the public on this.
PER is bloated?
Law firms use cloud software extensively and, unlike FAANG or most tech startups, actually embrace remote work.

I submit that law firms are actually far more progressive about technology than the tech world assumes, but are also a lot better at sniffing out bullshit software that doesn't provide a real-world benefit.
No pricing information. I doubt it's very affordable.
There are usually very sound reasons not to release memory back to the OS, particularly in a multithreaded program. Each such release causes a "TLB shootdown", in which threads on other cores are blocked while the cores' "translation lookaside buffers", caches of page mappings, are cleared, and further stalls as their entries are re-filled.

This is another reason to prefer single-threaded processes, which are less subject to such shootdowns, and less-coupled forms of parallelism.

Besides the TLB potholes, releasing memory means that the next time memory is requested, the OS is obliged to zero it before the process gets to see it again. Furthermore, each page will be marked read-only, causing a trap the first time it is touched, and then zeroed lazily.

As a result, freeing memory to the OS should only be essayed with the support of a great deal of measurement of the consequences.
The Official Coronavirus Numbers Are Wrong, and Everyone Knows It
This is a crappy psychology study where none of the researchers is a psychologist. PNAS is a big name in medical science (?), but an unimportant journal in psychology.

There's no serious psychology journal going to publish this kind of stuff. Why? The first problem is measurement. What is the reliability of using positive/negative words to determine positive/negative emotional state? 70%? 80%?

The effect size of this study is 0.001, which would be way way way smaller than the measurement error. LOL. What a laughable "study".
Print from 1800 to 1849
> During mass hysterias, the human mind goes on witch hunts for information that fits the narrative.

Sounds like the whole country after the 2016 election... ba dum tss
It's not sluggish at all. Modern law firms use all kinds of tech including lots of software and even AI/semantic analysis systems. There's definitely a high bar before adoption due to regulations and security but that's for good reason.

The problem is that there's a limit to the automation. Human lawyers can't be replaced. Interpretation, strategy, communication, court dates, etc. all require the human factor. No amount of software is going to make the human go any faster here.
The numbers can be totally wrong without being out of range. How many days was it calculating until March 1st, and how was it handling the next day which should have been +1, which surprisingly (to the code) wasn't March 1st? How many business hours passed from sun up Feb 28 until sun down March 1? Which day was the following Monday? No over- or underflows needed here, but clearly coding without taking these into account will provide something other than the correct answer.

As a guy who works in infosec since the early 90's, I see these errors showing up a lot in different, almost (anti)ingenious ways. This Robinhood event is just one for the collection, but not one that surprises me or anyone else in the field given enough time or enough education.

Fun fact: Y2K was a leap year. And we survived both events back-to-back better than Robinhood survived the obvious singular event in 2020. That is the problem here. Not Leap Year. But the fact that some programmers refuse to learn from history. At least during the Y2K debacle, everyone understood what they needed to do to code for leap years.

I used to teach the Easter Problem in a certain big blue coding classroom: From scratch, calculate the Easter dates for any given AD year. It gets messy quickly and it is not trivial. You have to think about Leap Years and Y2K's, which is why I was teaching it to rooms full of technical folk that hopefully remember it. Of course given enough classroom discussion, everyone got to some sort of code that predicts Easter for any given year, but not after quite a few failures. Then we talked about leap seconds, although those were a lot less painful. By that point, they totally understood how barely stable our calendar cycles are.

It proved a good lesson that I thought was rather important once they already understood the counting-fenceposts issue, which is yet another failure to understand cycles in exactly the same way. Needless to say, nobody at Robinhood was in my classes as far as I can tell. It's not like we don't have these "changes everything" roll overs fairly often.

Anyway, my job was to react if the bank I was working for ended up with crashing systems due to viruses, worms and whatever other malware they might have that weren't Y2K compatible. So this subject is near and dear to me. I'm literally blown away that Robin Hood and other companies could still have this problem today.

The last leap year was, gee, how many years ago? They didn't see that coming?
"Covid-19 could kill the for-profit science publishing model."

If good things could come out of Covid-19 then this along with a ten to one-hundredfold speed up in the development of vaccines etc. ought to be among them.

That said, I've been around too long to know that a small percentage of the population are just too greedy to let that happen. Even if laws were rushed in to mandate that whilst it's fresh in everyone's mind, sooner or later they'll be usurped in the same way that late-19th Century anti-monopoly laws have been nuked these days.

Even though these old laws have already been on the statutes for over a century, these days no lawmaker or bureaucrat has the gumption or guts to enforce them against Big Tech.

If such a proposal were to ever get off the ground then tragically the same would happen all over again.
> Can't find but feel there's a quote like "Programs will grow to fill memory"

That is a ball we set in motion when we introduced virtual memory, particularly with overcommit.

Give a developer the option to write calls to malloc that never fail, and boy will they make use of that! Performance be damned.
Interesting from a technical perspective. Thanks for sharing!
iOS / macOS software engineer

Location: Seattle
Remote: Yes
Willing to relocate: No
Technologies: Swift, Objective-C, Xcode, mobile, AppKit, UIKit
Résumé/CV: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pkamb/
Email: [firstname][lastname] @ gmail
I working mostly from home anyways and actually going to industry conferences.

If it will be cancelled - it's ok.

I have some sort of content-to-indifferent state of mind about all of that.

This thing spread quickly. Only 2.5-5% dies. Best is to take care of your immune system and enjoy your day.
If you can't get any job then you're done. Even if there're jobs but employers want the prices to fall for a specific occupation, then you're don too. This is not specific to South Korea though.

I believe that this situations could get better if HR companies weren't thriving everywhere just cutting down any opportunities for the people with stupid assessments, even universities graduates, and letting the experienced and trained personnel that belong to a business make their calls, but this depends on the business willingness.
The learning curve is way less steep, and you can introduce it into an existing project with zero impedance mismatch.
A lesson I learned working with microservices that are deployed independently of each other is that you need a policy that ALL changes must be backwards compatible with existing clients.

This sounds crazy, but it's essential if you can't guarantee that you can atomically deploy a new service version AND any other services that call it.

Creating backwards compatible releases means sticking to some rules, things like:

- you can add fields but you can never delete them

- you can add new methods but you can't remove old ones

Having really detailed logging helps a lot. If you want to deprecate a method you can remove it from calling clients first and then use the logs to confirm it isn't being called any more before removing it from the service.

It's a lot if work, and teaching a large engineering team how to be productive in this kind of environment is decidedly non trivial.
Best yet! Fuck all this consume, buy, waste...
It is also a question what happens in Autumn if it balances out then there is no news actually.
How much did it cost to place a trade for a $100 stock previously? RH definitely helped more people gain access to directly trading shares on the stock market, regardless of whether or not they were responsible in doing so.
Show HN: An unlimited product design service
By the way, the ‘before’ one also doesn't classify as a personal attack for me. Not sure what your definition of a personal attack is.
Yes, but not for the reasons you outlined.

Use Occam's Razor: there are no aliens.

(Yes, I know I'm treading on some dearly-held religious beliefs now and will get lynched. Still, somebody had to say it.)
Seattle a 'ghost town' as residents face uncertainty of coronavirus outbreak
Heads-up! Is the site down, seems to be loading forever for me.
Want to check it out more, since it seems like I am the target market.
SXSW to go ahead despite coronavirus
Supreme Court lifts cryptocurrency ban in India
Umm what phone are you using? I hope you realize that contrary to what you think Android isn't completely open source and some of the most key parts are owned by probably the biggest enemy of privacy on Earth.
At least for the relatively small businesses that I deal with, I basically always recommend to save the effort that would go into building a 'highly available' system, and instead spend it on a scenario for keeping the business running when tech fails—which it will to some extent at some point, no matter what. I suppose that line of thinking would do wonders for much larger businesses as well. When a system becomes too important, rather than trying to make it even more reliable, try making it less important first.
if you:
Deploy new versions of new services and quickly rollout the number of combinations get manageable.

Making he interface of services backwards compatible, either by testing and/or by using stricter contracts like grpc (which had a way to deal with compatibility)

Then you're mostly covered. However integration testing indeed makes sense
IMO The Office is up there. It was popular in its day, but it seems to only be growing more popular on Netflix. I think it's still the most-watched show on the platform. And there are tons of memes.
A startup has no business running microservices. Microservices are only when the engineering team can't scale properly because they keep stepping on top of each other.

A startup should be using a monolith until it becomes a victim of its own success and then should migrate thoughtfully to microservices only when it has to. It also requires a very heavy investment in devops and tools since microservices will fail in production in every which way possible. It also requires a huge investment in metrics and alerts and logging otherwise you will have no idea what is wrong with your now too-complicated production system.
I left biglaw in 2014, at which time my firm had barely transitioned from Windows XP. This was because we used certain Word plugins/macros for formatting briefs, and they had not yet been updated to run on newer versions of Windows. As a result, we were all on XP way past its prime.

From talking with lawyer friends, I got the sense my experience was not uncommon.
I'm about to ask my accountant if I can use them as a 401k contribution ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Globotics and Development
Bootstrap Dropdowns (Dropdown Menus)
To summarise a lot of the responses here, Clickhouse is extremely fast on very modest hardware, very easy to set up, very easy to get started (mostly normal SQL) and free. For our workloads and scale of data, nothing comes close in terms of performance (redshift, BQ, spark) and especially TCO.
It is super simple to try out, why not give it a go? Or is the question borne from a previous bad experience?
I imagine in many cases, if you solved it, you wouldn't really get credit and history would just sort of shrug and forget it was ever an issue.
> The fact that they can't offer any compensation might be a big problem for them, since they already have zero trading fees

Robinhood makes the most money than any known firm on Wall Street by getting paid specifically to leak user's trades to other traders.

SEC requires a periodic report on that which shows compensation.

Can't believe people are still buying Robinhood's pitch of misdirection.
>>Unfortunately most of us are quite powerless to stop it otherwise.

I apologize in advance for the slaughter of some sacred cows.

We are not powerless, we are just being practical. But our short term interests are getting in the way of our long term interests at the moment.

Take for example patio11's failed startup which tried to help companies hire software engineers. Now, I don't really know all the reasons it failed, nor do I care. But I will definitely note that right around the same time, he was also explaining how every software developer was a sucker if they didn't go and work for one of the big tech companies. (I am sure it was more nuanced, but my point is directionally correct). The saying goes that "the road to hell is paved with good intentions", and I don't for a minute doubt patio11's intentions. But the weird side effect of his own advice was that developers were simply preferring to spend extra time trying to clear the big tech interviews rather than cracking some kind of CTF game. In other words, he was doing everything in his power to make sure potential clients of his company were going to find it much harder to hire said engineers. If patio11's goal is to actually increase the GDP of the internet, he can start by educating everyone about the major problems being caused by the tech monopolies.

Let me also address pg's intentions. Take a look at the "successful" YCombinator startups. Is there any company in there which isn't trying to grow at the expense of doing what is right by their customers? Now take the peripheral side effects of the existence of the YCombinator ecosystem. Overhyping of Silicon Valley. Talent cluster formation, to the absolute detriment of local tech companies in other regions. Capital is basically gushing into a very small geographic region, distorting anything and everything in sight (e.g. real estate prices).

Last but not least, I would say that Big Tech got much stronger because of the 2008 financial crisis (easy access to cheap capital to the survivors), plus the stock buyback policies of Trump (it is easier to buy back stock than to actually innovate). Whether or not you agree with the macro-economic policies, the general observation is very true. Big Tech profited enormously because of the financial crisis, and were "bailed out" as a side effect. Here I refer to "bailed out" as a simple metaphor for having the ability to buy out competition very easily (instead of having to actually compete). Have you noticed that none of the Big Tech companies are actually going after the already consolidated markets of other Big Tech companies anymore? That is, Microsoft isn't going after YouTube. Google isn't really going after Windows. Facebook isn't going after search. Amazon isn't trying to build a social network. The oligopoly not only suits them just fine, it also prevents unnecessary bleeding of capital which can instead be preserved for the next financial crisis, so they can repeat the same playbook.
This kind of flow analytics are pretty new IMHO. C# supports these e.g. for nullable checks. But I think Java and C# are designed a bit too early for having these kind of flexibility with the variable type. Also consider that changing the type also has other consequences like invoking other virtual methods (e.g. C# new operator on methods) which can be confusing because a type change above is not explicit.

PS: just came to my mind: that is a breaking change (in C#) due to the new operator exanple. Will never come (for C#). Maybe Java does not have this issue but most likely they have a similar problem

This is an awesome feature for typescript. Love their work there.
Bummer. I have my laptop set to not sleep while plugged into power so it can do work while I’m not using it.

I guess I’ll switch over to another space or environmental project.
Two months before January would be November. What source do you have saying that the outbreak started already then?
Justin Kan's hybrid legal software and law firm startup Atrium is shutting down today after failing to figure out how to deliver better efficiency.
I don't think switch expressions are pretty standard at all.

Switch statements are standard, and Java has had them for a long time. Switch expressions are different in that the switch "statement" now returns a value that can be assigned to a variable.
"Multiple factors contributed to the unprecedented load that ultimately led to the outages. The factors included, among others, highly volatile and historic market conditions; record volume; and record account sign-ups. "

What a sad press release, I am sure people at their corporate office were sweating over this. The long and short of it is that users trusted the service would work and had possibly a great deal invested only to get a comment when everything breaks down deflecting blame "OMG we weren't prepared for what our users did!"

We live in a sad state of software. I expect things like this and the Equifax scandal to continue if things like software security, reliability, and performance aren't taken into account.
in my experience, most service API grow by accretion and need to break backward compatibility very very rarely. Naturally, clients should always be Tolerant Readers.

So in many case, you will have only a single version per service.

Moreover, imo, when we are talking about internal apis, there should be nothing preventing the service owner from updating the consumers if he wishes to converge more quickly after breaking compatibility - just like he would when refactoring a monolith. The culture should allow and encourage this kind of collaboration.
Its main use in analytics and real time dashboard/report generation in areas like adtech.

If a conversion happens, you need to generate the views/cubes again in reporting dashboard, clickhouse makes it cheap and easy to run such operations over commodity hardware.

If you don't have this, you'll be using big query and it might not be as fast.
> It is a miracle that the software that drives the world more or less works

It's more of a survivorship bias.