skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The question had 2 goals:

1) Do you think about cache at all or is it just something you heard mentioned as important that one time?

2) It's a good lead-in to discussing the effects of cache in algorithms. How that conversation goes helps me to understand how that person thinks and discusses complex problems.

A good answer would be "I'm not sure, but probably way, way slower because linked list can point all over memory but arrays cache really well."

An excellent, A+ answer would be "In the best case it might not be too much slower if you have an intrusive linked list is arranged sequentially in memory like an array like onekorg explained. But, in practice most will be 20-200x slower because they are usually implemented as pointers to nodes containing pointers to data and each piece is allocated piecemeal in a already fragmented heap. Uncached memory reads can take 100+ cycles and summing an int is not enough work to hide that even if the CPU speculatively prefetches."

I mainly expect a surprised reaction that they could be so slow and looked forward to the follow-up discussion.
I found my friend Jason Long’s book to be very useful:

https://www.howtokicksaas.com

The SaaS Build section focuses on building with a team, but other sections don't make assumptions about team vs one-person business setup.

Lots of specifics which certain other books lack. The book is not 100% finished.
Why are farmers responsible for this? How do you propose they would have paid for more expensive labor without broad collusion to keep prices high?
Pretty pointless as said page fault would occur no matter how you access the string. Besides, the page in question would very likely be already present.
I think it is. Not in terms of employees but in terms of population: how do you pay for employment insurance? People working pay for people who are out of work so they get a chance to find work again without getting evicted.

And so the more you earn the more you should pay in taxes which go to those who earn much less or nothing.

If you don’t have that, it’s worse for everyone: more crime, less opportunity, more diseases, etc. These are things that impact everyone, rich or poor.

And when you get high enough up the food chain, yes it sucks to pay 50% tax on your highest bracket but really what is it you can’t do with 5 millions that you can do with 10?

What Walmart does is shameful, and they’re not the only ones underpaying employees and relying on public programs to top it up. But that’s something that could be legislated away: force companies to pay living wages.
As far as I know, Firefox/Gecko uses clang-format for C++, rustfmt for Rust, and most recently Prettier for JavaScript.
Swatch Internet Time (From 1998)
This is probably the reason. I work at a place where most software is written in C, and I see the same thing here: literally all tests are either manual or integration tests. Unfortunately, this also means that it takes about about half a day to 'run the tests'.
> he could've thought that the simple implementation is faster but missed the fact that skip is implemented in assembly

It’s not; the compiler is just fairly decent at transforming string manipulation routines.
In the Coronavirus Fight in Scandinavia, Sweden Stands Apart
> I know people like to gripe about the memory usage and disk space usage of Electron apps, which, fine. But it's a fairly academic complaint.

Whether it's academic depends entirely on how much memory you have, and what else is using that memory. As with most resource-intensive software, you can brute force it with raw specs, but you're left with less computing power than you paid for.

I was watching The Verge's review of the new Macbook Air last night, and they were talking about battery life. I'm paraphrasing, but they said something like: "Apple claims 13 hours of battery life, and you can get that if you live in Safari and other Apple apps. But I'm living my life in Chrome and Slack, and with those apps open I get closer to five hours."

Chrome and Slack are, of course, the same thing.

As strongly as I dislike locked down platforms, situations like this do make me somewhat understand why Apple doesn't allow web rendering engines other than Safari on iOS.
The local government should own the "pipes" and rent them out.

Some people are down on "socialism" without realizing they love it. We have socialized police, fire, sewage, (usually) water and road repair plus some others I'm forgetting.

Socialism is people getting together to help each other. Businesses have no special right to view citizens as their exclusive feeding ground.
A Coronavirus Pandemic Glossary
I'm with you. I'm optimistic that if the market can set a fair price there's plenty of work. As someone from maybe a generation after you I'd have been happy to work in the manual labor sector if it paid better than my job at Staples but alas it paid far worse.
I don't think anyone believes climate is a stationary stochastic process.
Coronavirus and the Fable of the Bees
Can someone summarize this article for me?
Things already are expensive and with all the automation the salaries make up a crazy tiny amount of it.
I can’t think of a use case where I wouldn’t want IPMI on a rack server.

I can picture a few cases where multiple NICs aren’t critical, but I’d still want them if for nothing more than isolated control plane.
You are OverBallooning what he just said (sorry couldn't resist). There is no implication that the system is absolutely deterministic or will ever be.

Imagine a normal symmetric binomial distribution, along a X-axis of events and severity. Now imagine that the binomial distribution isn't normal and symmetric anymore, it is skewed toward the X-axis of more severe events (i.e. a negative skew). In this model, we still have the same number of events, but their distribution along the severity axis is skewed towards more severe events, and as such they have a higher probability of happening.
I am not, and the company is known for having a fairly strong not-invented-here syndrome.
Because a competitor business will instead use that cash to offer a better product and customers will flock to them.

If you see a new or renovated hotel next to an old one, which one will you stay in? If an airline keeps flying old planes and the other airlines invest in new, nicer planes, which one will you choose to fly on?

We see this story play out on these very Hacker News forum, where the common mantra is businesses that don’t invest in the future, that don’t spend on R&D, that don’t take risks deserve to die out and new businesses that did take risks deserve to take their place.
Where is the source on Chinese ports being closed? I work in the international trade sector and since March 9th we’ve had record breaking activity on our system.

Even looking at AIS you can see 1000+ dockings over the next 3 days at Shenzhen - https://www.marinetraffic.com/en/data/?asset_type=arrivals_d...

Also air freight volume is off the charts! We’re starting to see airlines use their 777’s with cargo in the belly and boxes on the seats.

I can’t speak to the food security situation at all. However, from my vantage point, supply lanes are screamingly full of something.

How that plays out for individual products ... shrug ...
Sometimes it’s not just coding tools/techniques where new grads can benefit from a bit of oldster wisdom, like that one time I convinced a new grad it was wiser to slog through the bureaucratic approval process for a new api than attempt to hack into our company’s Oracle Financials db.
The free variable that consumes all available spending money tends to be rent. If food prices go up, I'd expect real estate prices to stop growing so fast. It would be a welcome change.
I was looking for this, thank you. I cannot get over when people try and keep all this knowledge in their head. Have they never worked on something written by someone other than themselves? I know it usually isn’t, but it really feels like some kind of hubris that makes people allergic to writing a paragraph block comment in the code.
You realise such transitions take crop cycles - if the current crops fail because lack of labour and it leads to a food shortage food prices will go through the roof.
Far more A than I
I think you mean industrial static analysis tools aren't complete. Sound means no FNs, Complete means no FPs.
Zero risk of starvation. The labor-intensive produce at this time of year (and the next 3 months) is mostly asparagus and strawberries. Grain & corn is all machines. If there’s a second wave, or it takes very long, olives could become a major problem (Nov/Dec). Not for nutrition, but economically and my breakfast routine.

There’s still a lot of fresh fruit in warehouses. Apples, for example, which will last until the end of year.
Ernestine Fu: All you need to know about venture capital [video]
What Is Webmention?
There’s a bit more to it than that. Look near the edges of the frame vs the middle. Also note that the effect is not binary. It’s dependent on depth as well as angle. One of the reasons the example from the original article looks so unrealistic is that the flowers are not at a great depth so they really shouldn’t be blurry unless the subject is also out of focus.

Additionally: finding true bright spots (vs regular objects that happen to be white) is difficult with a typical low dynamic range photograph. You’d have a much easier time with an HDR photo. It still wouldn’t give you any depth or angle information though.
> like bagged salads, tomatoes

salads, tomatoes are extremly wasteful form of transporting water so the benefit of growing your own is enormous
1GB/mo = 385B/s = 3086b/s

Average 3kb/s.

Yes, one tends to use data in bursts. Bracketing helps understand usage.
That might be a correct distinction, but I don't think it's a distinction that impacts the substance of the GP comment.
Probably a thought exercise from the same people that came up with the term 'clean coal'.
I'm stuck on your opening statement rather than your question. I did the 40hr week and now do what you aspire to do.

Your life will be more challenging if you start a SAAS business. It will not be easier. The only people in SAAS I know with an easy life poured their life into their company and things came good. Investors are starting to see SAAS as a 10yr investment, to give you a sense of time. Ironically those I know who have done well are some of the busiest people I know. I guess they are driven and love their work.

I think what you are describing is working part time. Maybe this is a valid option if you want to have more time doing your own thing?

The startup world likes the approach of make a plan and work backwards which is what you are currently doing. I would just suggest you re-frame your expectations. Read Peter Thiel's books but talk to the average SAAS Joe as well as we are not all SAAS rock stars :-)
> The very fact people still burn coal in cities in the 21st century is mind-boggling.

There are a lot of interesting things you could say about this.

A coal plant needs workers and it also needs good transportation links. (To bring the coal in.) It needs to support the workers. It needs to be hooked up to an electrical grid. So it's sort of a natural nexus for the development of a city. People who can live in some other city might prefer that, but there will be plenty of people for whom the Coal City is a natural choice. If cities naturally grow around coal plants, then it doesn't make sense to be surprised that there are cities with coal plants in them.

Taking the original comment in a totally different direction, this is an angle I don't think is discussed enough in relation to electric cars. We may not need to burn coal inside cities, but we burn oil all the time, so we can move around. This produces the same undesirable smog that coal does. There's a big fight over whether electric cars release more or less smog well-to-wheels than gasoline cars do. But I almost never see anyone asking whether, even if electric cars release more smog, it might not be better to have the smog all produced centrally at a power plant somewhere than widely distributed in the middle of concentrated residential areas.
2020 MacBook Air Review Roundup
Usually at the end of their life, the owners intentional change their orbit to burn them up. I’m not sure about OneWeb, but most of the new satellite internet companies are/were planning low orbit satellites to keep latency down.
Search for images or videos of asparagus or strawberry picking. Or try holding small bottles of water in each hand, bend over with your arms stretched out, hold for 8 hours.
Sure, things like enforcing style guides, etc. can be seen as lightweight formal verification.
Yesterday they announced that requirement (among others) was pushed back to June 30, presumably due to COVID-19.
The porn ban didn't happen. Even with the "don't go to the pirate bay or we send you a nasty letter" legislation, they stop bothering doing that because nobody paid any attention and threw the letter in the bin.
Yes, they have good cameras on offer, but you could see, that Sony, Olympus and Panasonic have a few years more experience to polish their features.
The big challange will be to switch their customer base over, that will be a long process.
You're conflating a different issue. Congress made those drugs illegal. The FDA can't unilaterally make those legal without the support off the President or Congress.

If you want that policy to change, it'll have to happen at the voting booth, not because some FDA bureaucrat decided it.
Not many calories in what they're growing, either.
The commit history looks pretty healthy
If you accept the system that promotes an engineer into a senior position, there is no arguing that a senior engineer does posses skills that a junior doesn't. The junior is going to be evaluated in the same system.
The spirit of all of this inspiring, however: I worry that a lot of these efforts are actually going to be detrimental to their intended causes.

We're talking about potentially needing hundreds of thousands of these things. That's hundreds of thousands of pressure transducers, pumps, control circuitry, tubing connectors, and potentially millions of feet of pneumatic tubing.

As much as we're looking at a design problem, we're looking a supply chain problem. What I'm worried about is that thousands of hackers are currently buying up what could be valuable components for their prototypes, when they should be making those components available for mass producing an existing commercial design.

If you are hacker and want to help the problem: the hospital systems need you to make face shields. That's what they're asking for. If you are in the Phoenix area and can assist in printing the prusa face shield parts (https://www.prusaprinters.org/prints/25857-prusa-protective-...) please send me a DM to $username@gmail.com

We are currently coordinating the local effort with the hospital systems here.
One other thing to remember is the aero cars come out right after NASCAR ended much of their short track program. In that era more short tracks were run than superspeedways.
...and not to mention everything is interconnected in an economy. If food prices rise by x%, there is a cascade effect on the prices of everything, not just groceries.
'cept Walmart has been raising its corporate minimum wage. Then there's Costco that has always paid a wage about the prevailing for retail. No shortage of price-conscious customers at either.
Holly shit since this whole pandemic thing has started, I couldn’t stop thinking about the preppers who must be popping champagne every night and be so happy all their work was for something after all. Everyone made fun of them, but now they’re the ones laughing. The rest of us? We’re just clueless. Seriously, if society was going to collapse I don’t think I’d last very long. I could maybe trade some tomatoes for a couple bullets but then what?
Fantastical also offers it
Yeah but try to touch/pet a cat when it doesn’t want you to. Lol.
Pragmatic, thanks for responding. For you, and anyone else who wants to know: I'm currently located in the Greater Los Angeles area, California, USA.

I'm willing to consider relocation to many parts of the US.
I agree. I like an old fashioned loop with an obvious invariant. But some people think functional programming with arrow notion is so much better. Go figure.
> Maybe the communication needs to focus on "no more food X in stores once average temperature in place Y goes above Z degrees"?

Exactly this. Climate change means no bananas and no coffee in the future. You like bananas and coffee so you want to help combat climate change. It is cynical, but Western people care more about their bananas and coffee than a few hundred million Bangladeshis and Indians becoming climate refugees.
I don’t see how you can draw this conclusion. Taking C++ and breaking backward comparability just means you can move the standard for C++ foreword without concern for supporting 10+ year old source code. I cannot see a reason this would impose some stringent, immutable by default ownership/borrowing requirement, a radically different type system, a lose of template meta programming for macros (in the case of Rust) or the adding of garbage collection and an invasive runtime with a language imposed concurrency model to the exclusion of others (in the case of Go).

Sure as time passed, the non backward compatible C++ would add features not currently in scope for C++, but the radical redesign of the fundamental language is not what this proposal suggests.
Experts Question the Covid-19 Panic
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If the whole team is junior, your role is to mentor them. Set high expectations and help them reach the results you require. If you have senior members, lean on them to do that mentoring. I think it is appropriate to ask quality questions: how are you measuring success and failure, what alerting and monitoring is in place, what happens if condition $FOO occurs, how are you measuring costs, etc. But your role shouldn't scale to reviewing all code changes and likely should evolve to not looking at code at all. As a manager, you are supposed to be a multiplier of your teams efforts and help them all to level up. By interacting at the PR level, you are not multiplying their efforts. I also recommend reading The Manager's Path
I think many kernel developers view that as a problem as well. KUnit hopefully will change this when it becomes more widely used. I recommend more kernel developers check it out, it's quite nice even in its current form!
If it's a test you run yourself, it's absolutely true that some people won't test, or will test positive and lie about it.

As long as a large majority of people do the right thing, and report / self isolate if positive, a few people cheating here and there probably won't be enough to affect the course of the disease.

We need to remove incentives to cheat. I don't see much stigmatization of people with the disease in the USA, so that's not a worry. The biggest problem is economic, lost paychecks. We should probably require companies to allow sick leave for coronavirus, and have taxpayers pick up the tab for now.
Human Race Priorities
> The people that do it, do it because they have no better option. Not because they want to.

Isn't that most people in their current job?
> Well, when you're too timid to occupy defeated enemies, you get another war.

The US occupied Germany for decades. At first, very clearly, killing substantial numbers of resistance fighters. And then more subtly and covertly. Its occupying force was ostensibly to ward off the Soviet Union, but there was a domestic role as well. And its policies in Japan were similar.

That's the thing about the US. While there are numerous well-known examples of ham-handedness, US interventions have generally been so subtle and covert that their mention is readily discounted as conspiracy theory.
There are rails codebases written by people who love both ActiveRecord and SQL and try to optimize both performance AND developer productivity. ;)
> The hypothetical faster-than-rep solution would need to process data in 32-bit chunks, faux vector style.

Or with real vector style with vectorized instructions?
We tried this in South Africa. It ended badly with Telkom.
And benefits when your purchases go into the pockets of a local instead of foreign remittances.
Thanks for responding, anotheryou. I'm currently located in Greater Los Angeles, Southern California, USA. I'm willing to consider relocation to most places in the US.
It's a very wide guess to pick technological advances and attribute to one segment.

It's not like the non-telecom segments were flying cars in the 50s.
COBOL was intended from the start to be "self-documenting" and English-like with the thinking being that it could be used by 'non-programmers' to create business logic. Not sure that I buy it achieved that goal, but it was the intent.
I am not sure about fresh food, but The Netherlands is world's second largest agricultural exporter (and no, it's not only flowers):

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2017/09/holland-...

Also, it's not only about size, also efficiency. Scroll down the article and look at the insane yields per square mile for tomatoes, chilies + green peppers, and cucumbers. No other country comes even close.
Google Pledges $800M to Covid-19 Relief and Support Efforts
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I will never use the same service to sign into multiple things. It's a single point of failure. If Apple ever decides to close your account you're S.O.L.

I made the mistake once, had an account closed, got royally screwed. It wasn't Apple but it doesn't matter. I learned my lesson. Don't tie things together.

I don't follow that for everything but for anything important I do as well as anything involving money.
I feel that most will be sympathetic if to you explain why you did something a certain way and showed that you understood the different approaches available.
Your idea of a "small town" has the population of Sacramento or Atlanta (and almost the population of Frankfurt, if you prefer Europe). I live in what would reasonably be considered a small town in the northeast US outside a major metro. The population of our town is about 7,000 people. (And most people would have the room for respectable garden.)
FWIW, I’m founder and CTO of a SaaS company and moved from an apartment in the city with symmetric gigabit out to the country with a 20/10 connection.

It definitely was an impactful change for us at first. I had to change some work workflows to do heavy network stuff on a remote machine. It took some time to refine and make (nearly) as efficient as doing it locally. I also had to sandbox all the streaming gadgets in the house and limit their bandwidth allowance.

But, the key for me was to move to an area with a reputable, locally owned WISP. It took a couple years but I found it. My WISP is run by an ex-IBMer down the road from me. The network is rock solid and goes down less than Comcast. I’m 10ms away from the nearest Google PoP. Everything on the network is solar-first.

These WISPs are out there and they make the decision to move to the country at lot easier.

Keep an eye out! I’m out in Colorado- Email me if you want to know where to look around here for good internet in a rural area.
Yeah, it feels like we're just doing user agent vs feature detection all over again. And the xterm thing is a real concern, since I've read that lots of terminals have indeed pretended to be xterm, leading to programs having to try to detect the real terminal identity because they set TERM=xterm but don't have 100% of xterm's features...