skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I generally prefer small business, but the ‘big = becomes evil’ phenomenon just might be because of identity centralization. If your city has a hundred bakeries and one of the bakers turns out to be evil, it mostly just reflects back on him. Replace those hundred bakeries with a single large one, though, and suddenly one evil person reflects badly upon the entire organization.

Edit: just a reminder to support local bakeries, because they are usually tastier than big ones. Bad example.
Time Traveling Linux Bug Reporting: Coming in Julia 1.5
For the Heroku CLI I used this in some node.js code:

sh -c "read -s PASS && echo $PASS"

I'm pretty sure it supports UTF-8 (only because I never heard otherwise. It does require Git to be installed on Windows for sh.exe but that was a prerequisite for our CLI anyways.
I don't think you have to assume little is morally superior to say big becomes evil. When those in power become powerful, by nature they do everything they can to maintain that power. When they were small that might be by making the employees happy, or the like but when they are big they have shareholders to answer to and percentage points to keep up.

In this specific case Amazon immediately fired every single person who whistleblew or attempted to communicate their non-action on Covid-19 in the early days and the early outbreaks in warehouses. This isn't some kind of worker pay disagreement or such, the company literally got people killed.

Every single person they fired was female or a person of color.

The problem with big companies with hundreds of thousands of employees is the general fact that eventually lobbying and shareholder meetings lead to treating people like sheep and robots.

I think there are plenty of great examples of responsible mid-size companies, but nearly every massive company has these stories somewhere and there are plenty small companies guilty of massive missteps but generally not on these kinds of scales, I suspect it's because the ceo of a small joint has to look these people in the eyes on Monday and nobody is squeezing them over the last 2%.

Bezos doesn't have to look anyone in the eye and its much easier to put your underlings at risk and fire people when your boss tells you to do it.
I would argue that using postgres today sets you up better for HA tomorrow, as both yugabyte and cockroachdb are built with postgresql compatability in mind. I would also argue your reputation as a competent CTO / Architect / whatever is more at risk by choosing Oracle in 2020.
I'm using the F-keys to switch workspaces on the fly. I can't imagine going back. Pass on Mac.
BRIN indexes are kind of bitmap like...
Looks great! Do you have a video demo?
Mom and pop operations are less productive, that's why they have to offer lower wages and charge higher prices, all other things being equal. But that's not the same as being evil to others, and many actively prefer them as places to work for and patronize as customers.
Hiring backend developer for small 2-person startup:

Looking for experience with:

* Docker/scaling

* Graphql

* Websockets

* React

* Auth/Auth0/oAuth

* Roles/permissions

* Anonymous users

Email: johndevor@gmail.com
For some reason I find a query that uses (+) way easier to read than verbose outer joins. Probably because it's near the field and you see immediately "hey, this can be null".

Yes, it makes the query harder to migrate to other DMBS and to collaborate with non-Oracle persons.
I actually did read the article.
They're a victim of their own success. They became a monopoly and the quality of their product stopped mattering. They're an example of Steve Job's comments on Xerox's failure[0]. It happened at Oracle, IBM, Cisco, and Microsoft. It's happening now at Apple, Intel and Google.

[0]: https://youtu.be/NlBjNmXvqIM
Who said anything about limiting to OS specific tools? I just referred to unix pipes as that is why the unix philosophy works. I wasn't suggesting unix pipes are used for this, there just needs to be a way for these tools to communicate if they're split.
That is not a correct understanding of median, though median will not always show certain kinds of disparities. However you're going to have to provide evidence and data if you're making a particular claim here.
I think google has one of the most dense layouts for professional employees of the big companies. Whenever I see reports about SF’s largest employers in the real estate trade press, they always back out a number for google by dividing their gross floor area by some kind of industry average space per employee, and they are always low by a large factor. I deduce from this that google packs employees in a lot tighter than the rest of the industry.

This belief was reinforced when Twitter was marketing a building they didn’t need any more. It was such and such space including so many workstations, and the ratio of desks to floor space was only half what I had expected based on my experience at google SF. So it seems that even failing businesses like Twitter give their engineers more space than google does.
Had an office with wrap around white board for my first developer job. I don't think I have ever absolutely crushed that much work since -- up until COVID. Working from my home office has been a wake up call. I like the office, chatting with people over breaks, building personal relationships, and I genuinely love interacting face-to-face with almost all my coworkers, but the drop in productivity due to the open office is immense. Would love to stay home after this since I know no company in a tech hub can afford offices for everyone.
I should have said "not uncommon" rather than "ubiquitous," but it appears it already is blocking malaria development in a small portion of mosquitoes.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-16121-y
This doesn't follow at all though. Racism and discrimination require intent. If race and sex have noting to do with the firing decision then it's not racist or sexist. It doesn't matter what the outcomes are. You can obviously make the case that if the stats are too biased to one side that there is racism/sexism involved in the decision, but that's a different matter.

If you shut down a factory in China because it doesn't make economic sense anymore then that's not racist, despite everyone that's going to be laid off being Chinese.
I’ve been a Big Mac user for the last 7 years or so. I initially moved over from Linux after experiencing the ease of the OSX operating system when working in software development without the overhead of maintaining something like Arch Linux.

I’m now looking at system76 and Pop!_OS for my next machine. They seem to be doing a really good job of creating compelling hardware and software that works well together. From the sounds of it, Pop!_OS does a really good job creating that Apple “just works” experience without all the cruft.
Unless there's a company that is actually decent, and prides itself on having an exec that would quit on the first sign of a misdeed.

"See? You can trust us, otherwise Tim Bray wouldn't still be working here."
> I saw patches submitted and rejected on the grounds that the project leadership had no interest in supporting non-systemd

What do you mean with project leadership. If someone submits a patch, the maintainer(s) of the git module can obviously reject it if they don't want to maintain it. Unless they're persuaded because it's better for the project as a whole.

However, you talk about "project leadership". That doesn't really exist. There's loads of maintainers. There's a GNOME foundation, which mostly handles admin stuff, sysadmin stuff, etc. There's a release team. They ensure the various maintainers make releases, plus verify stuff actually builds.

If you help out in GNOME you're just a person in a big group of people. There's not really any "leadership", just loads of people who often agree, sometimes disagree, etc.
Thanks for this. Great write up. Rings absolutely true.

That said, all of this would be as expected, even for a great product, with product-market fit.

Selling is hard, you have to find the right niche of customers, references, and not everyone will love it right away.

Great lesson that you will take with you on the next run.
How about cases when the little guy is just as big of an asshole as the big guy? There are stories of small business owners in poorer countries employing literal slaves (in XXI century)...
Is there a secondary market for a ten-year-old MacBook Air?

I use a nine-year-old Air almost daily, but I don't think the vast majority of people would consider it viable, let alone pay for one.
Generosity across the income and wealth distributions
[Patent Clerk] Anti-gravity... um... anti-depressant? I could put you through to someone on that?
It depends on how many files you have. Try a cp command and if you get the argument list too long error you'll need to use a different approach -- shell script, rsync.

https://askubuntu.com/questions/217764/argument-list-too-lon...
Free speech does not mean that anyone is required to host your content.
>> Swarms need managers.
Let's call them agents :)

The invisible hand is quite visible nowadays and it's Protegé the shareholder doesn't help much with anything right now. And don't make me start with the Soviet union :)

Regarding linux.. I'd love to read some pro and contra arguments.
I've yet to see any human group larger than ~10ppl to self organize. We usually organize by leader picking/detection and delegation, coz we have trust issues.
This looks great but I couldn't find any information on exporting data—does this save notes as markdown on disk?

*edit: the FAQ mentions that the notes are encrypted and saved as markdown (https://notebag.app/faq/)

Is there any way to sync notes between devices? What happens after the 7-day trial is up? Are there any plans for mobile/web version to allow for entries on the go?
I have no idea whether there's a legal basis for the argument, I'm just stating my opinion on what would be a fair outcome.

> They want all the benefits plus a healthy refund.

I don't think this is an accurate portrayal of the situation, unless you think the entire value of a college education is instruction, grading, and the piece of paper at the end. the school I went to was very much like this: I went to class, got good grades, graduated, and got a good job. no fun, no frills, just business. it was pretty cheap though, so I can't say I didn't get my money's worth.

I don't think people pay $60k a year for the "just business" experience. if they're not walking around the beautiful campus, going to events, or using expensive science equipment, they're not getting their money's worth anymore. online class is a sad substitute for this experience.
The average eBay price for the same model seems to be around £450

Sale price, or asking price?

The average fleaBay asking price for a TRS-80 Model 100 is $1,200. But the actual average selling price is closer to $100.
Show HN: Synatic, a Data and Integration Platform
I'm Martin Naude, founder of Synatic (https://synatic.com ). Synatic is a backend and integration platform for enterprises, bridging old and new technologies to help business build faster.

I've been building backend processing solutions for corporates for many years, and always ended up building a bespoke processing and integration system for each project. I wanted a way to accelerate the project time by using a common platform, so businesses can move faster to the solution, and not worry about the data logistics and infrastructure. We've built Synatic to solve these common and frequent problems.

One of our biggest features compared to other platforms is extensive debugging, logging and tracing functionalities. You can also create API's to your workflows, making Synatic a tool for quickly putting together backends.

Our platform is focused on helping corporates leverage modern software through API integration faster, while still having the flexibility of running on-premise (in Docker containers), on your chosen cloud providers, or as a fully hosted service. Most of our clients are financial enterprises with a large mix of technology acquired over years of operation.

Our clients have used Synatic to solve enterprise problems such as providing real time access to legacy data, consolidating data from franchises and branches, creating single customer views, and data automation between disparate systems.

We provide strong onboarding and solution support throughout all rollout stages, as well as ongoing operational support.

We'd love developers, managers, BI and operations professionals to try Synatic, and hear of your experience in building enterprise data processing, integration and operations solutions. We have an early access program which you can apply for on our website at https://synatic.com . Thanks and looking forward to your feedback and comments!
It was a distinction made in US case law, until Section 230 rendered it moot. Section 230 was in fact written partially in response to Stratton Oakmont, Inc. v. Prodigy Services Co., because the ruling was considered such a threat to the growing internet.
The Definitive Data Scientist Environment Setup
Hi guys, wrote this post about how to get a decent Data Science environment. Appreciate your feedback :-)
While Larry and Sergei were running Google, the company often (though not necessarily always) chose doing what was right over a more profitable wrong. A specific example was when they discovered the Chinese government was behind a major security breach targeting dissidents, they refused to continue to comply with Chinese censorship requirements.

However, as the founders lost interest in the day-to-day operation of the company, any pretense of being more than just another soulless profit machine was discarded.
I agree. I work in Microsoft's SQL Server (incl. variations, e.g. Azure SQL DW) quite a bit. Based on my experience, I am the only person using semicolons in T-SQL.
> The author even wrote the whole thing using “we” instead of “I”, which subtly gives the impression that a group of people collaborated to write this

Note, this is standard in the academic world, even if there is a single author. But it is a further way in which a phoney might mislead readers into thinking it is a credible academic paper.
If the implication was coming from an outsider, then maybe.

But, the implication is coming from someone with an intimate understanding of the company culture and the people who run it.
Of course. Why would a consumer care how many watts CPU or fans it has? You would, but that's <1% of people who buy Macbooks.
Not to fail in an ad hominem but I kinda give low value to the thinking of the Unabomber
Reminded me of how many times we'd accidentally kick the front of the nintendo on the floor and reset it.
What Is a Virus, Anyway?
"You know, any contractor willing to work on that Death Star knew the risks. If they were killed, it was their own fault. A roofer listens to this... (taps his heart) not his wallet."

- Clerks, 1994
>Is there a good all-or-many-in-one dongle with several USB or other ports?

After struggling for a few years trying to use dongles I'm actually becoming convinced such a thing might not be possible. My screens flicker, my drives drop out all sorts of issues no matter what the dongle or the devices.

The other thing that points to this is the fact Apple doesn't just sell one, they could easily sell a USB-A/Display port/Power dock for around $400 and people would lap it up but curiously they don't because I think deep down they have realized the only reliable way to use a USB-C port is a one to one conversion.
I don't know anything about quantum vacuum but from reading this I assume that the entire mechanism follows trivially from the underlying physical properties. Or in other words, wasn't this application apparent when physicists theorized these properties in the first place? And shouldn't the IP belong to the public which subsidized the research?
Can you reference that poll? There was a GR, which is entirely different than a poll. The outcome of that was also pretty clear, Debian as a whole is ok to depend a bit more on systemd. I don't get why you use it as an example of the opposite.

See https://lwn.net/Articles/808217/ for the outcome of the GR.
Ask HN: Which Open-Source Software would you recommend every government to have?
Drug overdose epidemic is transmitted from old to young, study shows
Why Time Signals Still Matter When Working Remotely
Undoubtedly. And I'd bet that in those areas you can still find seed money before you get customers. My point wasn't, "All startups are easy now!"

It was that investors aren't going to pay for anything they don't have to. If there's a sufficient stream of web/mobile based startups coming to them who already have some proof, they're going to be much less likely to fund people who don't have that proof yet.
The NHS needs funding, not our "thanks".

The Government's current drive to propagandise their ongoing failure to fund essential public service should not be tolerated.

(For those who are unaware, in the UK we are currently being asked by the powers that be to take part in a "clapping session" on the streets weekly).
I came to Macs as a longtime Windows/Linux user for software developmemt. There's no way I would ever go back. My 2015 Air is rock solid, never any problems despite being used 8-12 hours per day and you get Unix underneath. Just bought a new Air so I can have a backup machine.
Thank you for posting this, I often have a bunch of scambled thoughts for outlines of posts or notes that I'd taking each week that never end up being fleshd out into longer posts no matter what I do. Maybe I should start doing more like this and just clean them up and post them as they currently exist.
I had a memory leak problem running a node service inside a docker container. I tried to use gcore, but got the precise problem in the article.

ptrace: Operation not permitted.
You can't do that without a process to debug.
The program is not being run.
gcore: failed to create core.36

I found this SO answer and it worked out for me.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/42029834/gdb-in-docker-c...
Oh ok thanks, that makes a huge difference.

Sincerely,

A little enslaved saint
Thanks, that's always nice to hear. Anyway, here goes:

https://wringing.it/

The styling (or lack thereof) is like that on purpose. Like I said I wasn't expecting anyone except for a few friends to see it before I had a decent amount of posts.
This looks great! It was difficult to find out that you had to click the Play button for me "▷". Since this is a primary action you might want to consider adding a stronger Call to Action there?
Installing Private NPM Packages in Microsoft AppCenter CI/CD
While I've lost data to Syncthing too, I've also lost data by removing a Dropbox folder. I don't think bad UI is the sole problem of FOSS.
IMO, private companies do not necessarily become evil when they get big, but public companies cannot help but become evil, even when not all that big.

(My impression is that public companies are essentially required to maximize profit and shareholder value at any cost... at least at any cost that's technically legal and which wouldn't create significant blowback from society--blowback which would cut into those profits. Private companies owners have the freedom to follow their conscience and not sell their company's soul even if doing so would greatly increase profits.)

To sum it up, the imperative (or lack thereof) to maximize profits.
Ebay shows a load being sold for between £70 and £120. Here's one that has actual bids on it. (£106 when I post this comment). https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Apple-MacBook-Air-13-inch-Late-20...
This seems like a neat idea. Not sure about paid, though, in its current incarnation. There's a ton of similar things unpaid. Why would I pay for this over Khan Academy's excellent SQL course, for example?

It seems like a piece of a business, not a business in itself. To be successful as a product or solution, there needs to be more around it -- some way to integrate it into contexts, have it used in schools, or in afterschool, or something.

Another key component would be user studies -- develop PCK about what supports and help students need.
William Hill US | Functional Programmer | Jersey City, NJ, USA | ONSITE | Full Time
The thing that distinguishes our team (and the reason I chose to work here) is that our CIO is a functional programming evangelist who understands that you can't just hire a team of FP enthusiasts - rather, you hire great engineers interested in being challenged and train them to become FP enthusiasts. We have a formal training program ("Scala U") that will show you basic scala syntax but its real purpose is to train people in how to become functional programmers with a combination of mentorship, pairing, classroom, exercises, and books. He's easy to talk to and super-enthusiastic, and I personally have learned a lot from him.

Here is the job description: https://www.williamhill.com/us/careers/?gh_jid=4465782002

We also have openings in devops, front end, and iOS, and other technical and non-technical roles.

Feel free to send me questions: My hackernews username at gmail.
Magsafe or no Mac. Also touch bar needs to go. I mean, regardless of usability, just look at that eyesore! It used to be that Macs were for professionals. Now it's for showoffs only. Sorry. I really used to love Macs...
big always attracts the sociopaths [1]

[1] https://www.ribbonfarm.com/the-gervais-principle/
Third Russian Doctor Falls from Hospital Window Amid Coronavirus Outbreak
It's been that way for the past 40 years or so, but I think that's starting to change.
If all of food/water/gas/electricity/fuel distribution is badly interrupted, there's the bigger picture.
Fuzzing for Heartbleed
There are some legitimate complaints here, but the point about the paper being well-written seems weird. Would the author prefer the discussion of such an important topic be poorly organized and perfunctory? Also, using "we" is standard scientific practice, not some bluff.
Ah yes, the P1 is an excellent machine and still manages to stay pretty thin. Its definitely an outlier of thinness in the P-series though, but is absolutely one which does not fit with my earlier comment of the P series being a bit thicker.

FWIW, most of the T series also have a good number of FRUs (field-replaceable units, what customers can easily swap out). Some models, especially the "s" versions, will have some soldered RAM but often the non-"s" versions will allow you to swap out both sticks. Wireless chips and SSDs are user-replaceable. Internal batteries are held in by screws and not glue so they're easy to replace when they age. Pretty easy to work on overall. My T460s is over 4 years old and still going strong.
>The company told Recode that the moderation policy is not new but that Amazon has begun enforcement against lists that either weren't following the rules or had previously been granted exceptions after a "routine audit." An internal message to employees, obtained by Recode, said the change was to "minimize disruption to any business-critical email lists."

"We have always had the rule ready, in case we needed to start enforcing it."