skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thank you for your support!

The biggest advice I can give you is not about any specific tool, it's about an approach. You need to think about how you will market the book if you're self-publishing.

Engage with the community that will be interested in the book. Write articles, help out on Twitter, write code libraries, etc.

For me, I wrote DynamoDBGuide.com two and a half years ago over Christmas break. I wanted to just make an easier introduction to DynamoDB after I watched Rick Houlihan's talk at re:Invent (which is awesome).

That led to other opportunities and to me being seen as an 'expert' (even when I wasn't!). I got more questions and spent more time on DynamoDB to the point where I started to know more. I gave a few talks, etc.

I finally decided to do a book and set up a landing page and mailing list. I basically followed the playbook that Adam Wathan described for his first book launch.[0] Write in public, release sample chapters, engage with people, etc.

In terms of tooling, I used AsciiDoc to generate the book and Gumroad to sell. On a 1-10 scale, I'd give AsciiDoc a 5 and Gumroad an 8. But the tooling barely matters -- think about how to find the people that are interested :)

Happy to answer any other questions, either in public or via email.

[0] - https://adamwathan.me/the-book-launch-that-let-me-quit-my-jo...
An old update, but more important now than ever to note that there are options to retain useful services post-acquisition and not fully sacrifice privacy.
That's a great excuse to backup + full clean OS reinstall in my book
How does everyone feel about moving to Sacramento and upgrading your living spaces if you were able to commute to work on a flight to the Silicon Valley in less than 30 minutes if and when you have to be physically present at the office?

If so, give us a little information about your commute needs via the form below and at what price point this flight would need to be at for you to justify the move.

We will publish the results here so everyone can see ( names redacted obviously) so you can get an idea if this is just a few folks talking or if this pressure to move out of the Valley is a real phenomena.

https://www.uamcah.com/sacramento-to-bay-area
This is a perfect example of people saying something that's just blatantly wrong in order to get a piece published and the accompanying brownie points.

Vannini talks about flow as thought it's some woo-woo that he's never experienced (probably hasn't, given the companies that he's worked at all seem to be larger).

>Insisting on the glamour and fun of coding is the wrong way to acquaint kids with computer science. It insults their intelligence and plants the pernicious notion in their heads that you don’t need discipline in order to progress.

This is true. But it is also true of football, and nobody says football isn't fun. Football players will do crazy things like squat sets of 20 and drink a gallon of milk a day to bulk up, but nobody says football isn't fun. Nobody says jiu jitsu isn't fun even though it's absolutely brutal in a lot of ways. And so why do we say those things are fun? Because they are sporting and build a sense of accomplishment, and provide the things that humans need to feel like they're growing: building skill and testing it against ever-increasing challenges for rewarding outcomes. Programming offers that too, even if people like Vannini fail to see it. There's a reason people have coding challenges and hackathons, and all other sort of competition and comradery surrounding it, because it is often sporting, and fun to do new things with programs, and to stretch what you can do with a computer.
The indexes are not immediately consistent.

Its not just that it is put in the database category, but that its champions at AWS make statements like "if you are utilising RDBMS you are living in the past", or that "there are very few use cases to choose Postgres over DynamoDB".

Btw, loved your AWS book!.
I'd love to hear more too, but I suspect the answer will be that they couldn't get the fees or transfers or etc that they needed to make it worth their time in the end. Which stinks but it's reasonable to drop the support because of it.
I'm also in the same boat. However, I've started reading from elementary mathematics and I enjoy it much more than what I used to.
> If you tell engineers that standups can go async or be cancelled if they're ineffective, they will find creative ways to make the standups ineffective.

What the hell? Have you actually seen this happen? I can't imagine someone jettisoning something that makes their work-life easier and is an extremely low time commitment, just because you tell them they can. I can imagine them changing it to something else if that's more useful and cheaper, time-wise, or getting rid of it if it's of very low utility. Lots and lots of standups are the latter, from the IC's perspective. A lot of "talk to the manager who's the actual audience for the meeting, everyone else dozes off" standups. "Ten people and only two others are actually on my project, and we talk all the time anyway". That kind of thing. Plenty of that out there. I could see them wanting to get rid of those. I mean if people are putting so little effort into the standup that it makes them bad, and the standup is for them, supposedly, then maybe that's a sign it isn't valuable to them?

> If you tell people the standup can go away if it's bad, you've accidentally incentivized those people to make it bad enough to get it cancelled.

Again, this makes no sense unless from their perspective it already is bad and they just need to convince you it is, too.
Both involve a hostile takeover of disputed territory. One's a more impressive engineering feat, but not drastically different.

edit may have misread your post, unsure if you're comparing or detailing two steps. China has invaded uninhabited islands and built buildings to stake claims for some time. Building the uninhabited island isn't some drastic change.
For the Bengal Famine or the Great Leap Forward?
Not to mention the army of gatekeepers and moderators employed by the likes of Twitter often in countries not know for democracy or free speech to take down individuals.

At least some of it can be attributed to oil money greasing their palms.
Right right I get you. I just mean unless you believe that your borrower intends to not pay their loan forever do you need to jump to the courts?
> Another key difference between restaurant workers and food delivery app drivers is that customers of DoorDash almost always tip ahead of time, so it's not as if the driver can do much if anything to improve their chances of getting a bigger tip. With traditional tipping, it's implied that an advantage in being paid mostly in tips was that better service could equate to more pay.

It is implied, but generally not the reality. The correlation is fairly poor:

https://scholarship.sha.cornell.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?arti...

https://ecommons.luc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4067&co...

https://www.thisamericanlife.org/245/transcript

I think the real question is why we tip some service professions and not others.
That's a great idea thanks. I am spending so much time in the car right now because of COVID and I have run out of podcasts.
You think the side-effect of elevating ESR's status outweighs the value of the ideas themselves?
That's a terrible experience, and one of the many reasons networking is hard.

I suppose my perspective is that the grass is always greener. I have always assumed that I'd prefer the opportunity to pitch at a higher rate, versus a better qualified opportunity at a much lower rate. But that's probably a fallacy.

Thank you for sharing your experience. I still don't feel bad for attractive people, since the outcome measurements clearly show it's advantageous, but the experience isn't something I'd considered prior to your comment.
Fixed in the latest image update (tiledb/tiledb:2.0.1). Thanks for the report!
> Voting with your dollars doesn't really work. You are and ant and the people who feel like you are a small percentage.

Couldn't you say the same thing about actual voting, though? In an election, what difference does your one vote make, in the grand scheme of things? Has there ever been an election where the margin was low enough that your one vote would have made a real difference?
I think the author's frustration here is warranted, but it's directed at the wrong part of DoorDash/GrubHub's product strategy.

Advertising on competitor listings is a bread and butter marketing strategy that happens everywhere. If you're a BBQ restaurant owner, you want to advertise on your competitors' branded keywords because it's an obvious place to acquire new customers.

The underhanded move on the part of food delivery platforms like GrubHub, DoorDash, Caviar, UberEats, etc., is that they increasingly are nudging their users to completely remove the restaurant brand from the loop. Open up one of the apps and notice a few things about the user experience they're pushing:

- foregrounding "dishes" and "cuisines" rather than specific restaurants

- hiding/burying the ability to just browse a list of restaurants, instead opting for themed or algorithmically generated collections of restaurants and dishes.

I get the distinct sense that DoorDash, GrubHub, and the other delivery platforms want their users to think of the platform as the source of the food, rather than the restaurant. "Let's get some ribs delivered from GrubHub" rather than "Let's get some ribs delivered from Saddleback BBQ via GrubHub".

This makes perfect sense for a company operating a two-sided marketplace - you ideally want to become indispensable to both sides. Restaurants need to realize that the marketing opportunities the platforms are offering will only provide them value as long as they're not entirely captured by the platform. And since restaurants have much lower brand recognition and far lower marketing budgets, it's going to be tough to fight back.
The Shopify admin panel stopped working in Firefox a few weeks ago.
"Only programmers look at it and say "yea, that's fine," because we know how difficult a web browser is to implement."

No, not just programmers. Also end users. It's a complete myth that the traditional link/page refresh method is jarring to users. It's perfectly normal and expected to click a link and to have it loaded in a reasonable time frame, without some weird transition in between.
Ok sure but these companies are trading near all time highs. I imagine digital ad spend is somewhat correlated with changes in consumer demand. If demand drops significantly, how does Google and FB stay at a valuation identical to a pre-Covid Economy?
India was a net exporter of food leading up to it. So yes, they sacrificed some British subjects to save others. Mostly incompetence. Just like the Great Leap Forward.
It amazes me the larger world is just figuring this out. Dark business patterns has been every delivery company's #1 business model from day one, regardless of what they have been saying. Their behavior has always included these types of dark patterns. Why anyone uses these loud frauds has always been beyond me. And that goes twice for the people tricked into being a gig worker for them.
"Fun" is not the right word; more like "intrinsically rewarding". It's like asking ye olde blacksmith if he had "fun" forging a high-quality broadsword.
How sad... I just realized my initial gut reaction to seeing any news headline with the word "Fact" in it has become to assume it has a political angle.

More often than not, "Fact" is just a synonym for some political opinion.

How far have we fallen? Our news outlets are more often than not just Panic Porn and Political Hit Jobs... anything except actual unvarnished, unspun, unpoliticized raw news.
I can understand the sentiment and don't fault you for it.

That said, I think you can definitely handle complex, relational patterns in DynamoDB pretty easily. It will take some work to learn new modeling patterns, but it's absolutely doable.
Working intensively remote during this pandemic, we rediscovered an old practice of ours we call "comm-work". Basically we share screens (on Zoom) while talking about whatever is going on at work. It's sorta of a "open-space" equivalent but online and with a mute button.

Comm-work is more about showing than telling. A screen is always shared (or a whiteboard). We share emails on screen and sometimes write them together, we hear in into a customer call (like through Teams whilst we remain connected through Zoom), or we just tune out into our thing. It's an impromptu that can last anywhere from 20 to 90 minutes.

It's not scheduled, it's not a standup, you don't have to report status (yuck!) or say anything. Just keep working if you feel like it. You can mute yourself or others. Most of our teammates (not all teams are the same) feel like sharing something, be it a milestone, a cool widget they found or a piece of code they feel are blocking. This works great because it just naturally surfaces issues before they are issues.

The bad part, if anything, is that it is run by a manager who knows how to improvise, when to call one up (and call it off if someone has to take their kid to the doctor) or how to dig into the team's mind and create the meeting narrative. It also requires some degree of direct speak ("Hey you, whats up with that task?") which also does not work with every ego around. So this is not something that I think can be taught at seminars as it's not very scientific. It's just natural and basically arises whenever a chat room becomes to chatty. I personally believe comm-work is deeply more effective than any agile standup or kanban, which never ever worked for us. Being such an improv keeps people on their feet. They never know when the team is going to meet, what the next customer email will say. Your code editor becomes not so much of a secret place. I know it sounds almighty corny, but screen sharing is the ultimate sharing at a workplace.
What do you mean by filter analysis? As in classical linear filtering? (as in, you're finding the roots of the transfer function?)
Quanta is targeted at a lay audience so many of the people who read it can reasonably be called "infants" in terms of their mathematical and technical knowledge. Furthermore, Quanta often has articles about quantum mechanics, a field where misinformation is rampant and leads in some cases to actual substantial harm.

Also, there is nothing wrong with appropriating terminology -- when it is appropriate (no pun intended). But, to quote Tom Stoppard, "If there is any point to using language at all, it is that a word is taken to stand for a particular fact or idea and not for other facts or ideas." The phrase "measure a repulsive force" has an established meaning in English, and that meaning is intimately bound to the physical world. There is nothing wrong with using that physical phenomenon as a metaphor, but that's not what the headline does. The headline says "Mathematician Measures the Repulsive Force Within Polynomials" and that is simply false under the well-established English semantics of the phrase "measure a ... force." No mathematician has ever measured a force, at least not in the course of conducting the business of being a mathematician.
Feature Flags vs. Branching
It almost seems deliberate to make things as subjective and opaque as possible. You know who else operate in this way? Grifters

Sure, there are tons of over simplifications or extrapolating data which support narratives in evolutionary psychology, especially on the pop psych end of things. The humanities are full of ideology in search of evidence. But this... modules of thought? That has to be some of the dumbest reductionist pigeonholing I've heard in a moment. Let's completely throw out what we know about neurology, endocrinology or biology as a whole, because... it makes me feel uncomfortable?

We are getting conned folks.
Awesome! Hit me up if you have any questions :)
The state runs most workers comp programs as far as I know. How is Washington any different than say California? I may have had to follow some one time instructions to initially setup a workers comp account in California, but I haven't touched it since. And my $50/month payroll service handles all of the payments and filings for me.
You're probably thinking of imgur, which lost some steam when Reddit added their own image hosting. Only a few dozen giphy links get posed each day: https://www.reddit.com/domain/giphy.com/new/
Learn-To-Hack.com can hack your ex-wife Facebook, hack your girlfriend WhatsApp
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23133086

I have rotated half into Gold ETFs and the rest into cash for the next few months to do some bearish options trading.
This is one of the benefits to running containers on bare metal.
DIY Particle Detector
:) Yep, do it the way you like.

Btw, check out the kt-classes attribute if you want to do some slick CSS transitions w/o javascript:

https://kutty.org/attributes/kt-classes/
Why would you tip for an order that you went and picked up yourself?

I wholeheartedly agree with ordering directly from the restaurant, but I can't think of anything they did in that transaction sequence to warrant a tip.
>all indications are that the data are quite contradictory, we neither understand nor are able to properly describe who gets infected and why exactly those and not others.

This is really a secondary issue. You don't really need crazy amounts of "data" to respond effectively to a pandemic. We know full well how to deal with viral outbreaks in general, and when looking at other countries that have the exact same amount of information as everyone else has the differences could not be more stark.

Hong Kong and New York City are quite comparable on most metrics, and look at the different results even though the former neighbours the outbreak.

I wish we could finally bury this data-ism, as if it wasn't possible to make sound decisions under uncertainty. You need zero data to provide protective gear, enact hygiene measures, distance, and just follow general safety measures. Instead of experts talking about r-values you need the civic population to folow basic rules and the supply chains to be able to manufacture the necessary equipment.
If McInnes stayed it would be toxic. Most advertisers won't intentionally spend money with a company run by an open bigot.
And now that I think of it, what I was building was a data visualization framework that users could create "plugins" for to handle many disparate types of data. So yeah, frameworks are a great example of cases where inheritance shines, but is rather niche and not many people work on them day to day.
Linode Managed Kubernetes
I usually describe MongoDB as a database designed for applications where the data doesn't matter very much.

This might sound disparaging, and we all like to think our own data matters to the Nth degree, but consider: how important is that banner that displays at the bottom of the Amazon or Ebay page, "people who looked at this thing bought this stuff"? It has to be there, but how accurate does it have to be? Are you willing to wait an extra five seconds for it to be right?

In the overwhelming majority of places where you might want a database to help you manage the data involved, the majority if the data does not need to be 100% right if it would make the main operations slower. For those parts of the job, MongoDB in its default configuration with default options is good enough.

Many of us with what we like to think of as higher standards prefer to work where everything matters, and leave the dancing penguins to others. But those others do need a database, and they have the money to buy one.

(Disclosure: I was fired from MongoDB right after their IPO, perhaps in part for saying stuff like the above.)
Thanks for a clear explanation without dismissing the product as garbage. (it's in that space where techies hate it, but it must provide value since it's so expensive!)

Why do non-technical people need to understand the data flow? It seems like documentation (data dictionaries) would be preferred. Or, are they useful for very non-technical people, while TIBCO data flow understanding is useful for people who are data savvy but not tech savvy?
This twitter thread has some details: https://twitter.com/NAChristakis/status/1256335430787579906

TL;DR: lots of aerosols around from cutting flesh with knives and saws, hard work in dense environment, often small injuries etc
It was never supposed to go to the restaurant. It has always supposed to have gone to the worker.
> Hacker culture by nature is very anti-corporate, anarchistic and against subordinating everything under the dictatorship of profit maximization.

Yes! I came this close to recommending "Steal This Book" by Abbie Hoffman for that exact reason. But I got the feeling that was not exactly the type of hacker that OP was looking for...
Sure, the one my opponent on this issue[1] was citing in his/her favor:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/apr/21/tech-industr...

Could you really say readers won't go away thinking "hm, guess this seems like a viable post-coal career"?

[1] I don't know a better term; can we not make a thing about the label I chose here? Just suggest a better one if you don't like it.
Search results differ widely between regions and users. FTA: "If a person in Lansing goes onto Google search..."

No reason for companies to target users outside the Lansing metro area, no one in Boston is ordering BBQ from Michigan. If you're not in Lansing, you're probably not seeing the same results as the people this post refers to.
Reducing both business models to 'advertising' is a vast oversimplification. Google/Facebook provide platforms and services, and have zero content creation cost. They are also way more diversified. Conde Nast isn't investing in telecommunications infrastructure or self driving cars.
We do something almost exactly like this to generate draft content. People get on Zoom, screenshare, and then we get notes down for what we can create from it. It's a little less improvisational because we start with an idea for an article and see where it goes.

It's wonderful.
Yes, but I assume these are all markets where these companies have physical presence. I doubt many are adjusting up because you want to move to London because you like the fog.
The same exemption already exists for poultry in the US. Right now, if I want to buy beef from a farmer down the road, I have to buy a whole or half cow, then have it butchered. This would allow farmers to sell cuts of beef locally. There are only a handful of USDA meat processors, they are all owned by multinational conglomerates, and they have no interest in processing cuts of meat at the local scale. They serve factory farms and the current law was designed to protect their grip on the market.
> Say you hate books-a-billion and you want to only sell at mom and pop bookstores. Good for you, but what if that kills 70% of your revenue?

Then it sounds like books-a-billion is providing a pretty valuable service to you.
Of course lambda calculus doesn't work in the real world, the canonical purely functional language. It doesn't work, because it are just functions and those need input before they become useful. A function just sitting on paper doesn't compute anything.

However that is not entirely true, we can perhaps view analogue computers as purely functional computers, albeit one with continuous functions.

But besides such a weird example, we should not kid ourselves, most imperative languages these days also need a runtime. And if you take that a step further, assembly also needs a runtime. But that is I think not a honest argument, but still something to think about.

If we pursue this further down then we arrive at physical phenomena that do the computations. Are those imperative or functional? But now we are just playing around.
https://wiby.me
I took a post-deadline low-workload day to vote early in my state's primaries. You can guess who I voted for.
In fairness to the news media, it’s effectively mandatory to process the data, the facts, for presentation, so everything is “spun” to some degree.