skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What are the alternatives to Elixir? I'm a proponent of functional/LISPy languages and when it comes to developing web applications, Elixir with Phoenix and Ecto just works extremely well. Maybe the next best would be Clojure since the JVM brings a huge ecosystem with it, but I did a cursory look into it a while ago and the frameworks just didn't seem to be on the same level as Phoenix/Ecto.

The main complaints are valid: hiring issues, lack of a good typesystem, small ecosystem. Yet I have been the most productive with Elixir and would rather move to something better than regress to the mean just because Elixir isn't a mainstream language yet (which would solve the hiring and small ecosystem issues).
Then explain to the agent "I've been in quarantine for a while now and I was lonely. Want a beer?"

I'm pretty sure they'll leave. Might not even file any paperwork on that.
Ah I see, we are going with “well technically it stores something therefore it is database joke”. Now I’m fully onboard :)

Back when I worked in LA my CTO used to joke that most places use Microsoft Outlook as a database and Excel as BI tool.
If you're proposing "hey, I think this would be a good idea", it doesn't really matter if the example you use is fictional.

Weirdly, the reference to the story of the birth of Jesus undermines the article's point. It's an example of the people going to the census taker to be counted, when the entire idea of the rest of the piece is that the census taker goes to the people instead.
> Underdogs, comebacks, goliaths v davids. They won't like you again until after you fall.

Yeah, the fact that once "the davids" of the past became today's goliaths changed their behavior from (at least pretending to) caring about being social net-positive forces to being purely business machines has nothing to do with it.

For instance, Google's code of lost this paragraph two years ago [1]:

> “Don’t be evil.” Googlers generally apply those words to how we serve our users. But “Don’t be evil” is much more than that. Yes, it’s about providing our users unbiased access to information, focusing on their needs and giving them the best products and services that we can. But it’s also about doing the right thing more generally – following the law, acting honorably, and treating co-workers with courtesy and respect.

It may not matter to you but it does for some others. I'm one of them.

[1] https://gizmodo.com/google-removes-nearly-all-mentions-of-do...
Heh, sorry, you're totally right, parts are definitively 100% Haskell-speak for sure (and I totally jumped over them with 0 understanding); what I really meant and failed to clearly convey, is that there are the other parts, including esp. the intro paragraphs, that (at least) to me personally were very approachable. Looking over again:

"Neut is (...) memory management" - first para ok, incl. the bullet list - specifically what original commenter complained about, for me was no problemo

"Theoretically (...) terms of the type" - 100% Haskell-speak, no slightest idea what it means, skipped; but relatively short optically, and author still has some credit after first para, so I still take a look further

"Practically, this means (...)" - cool, I can understand again! I think that's where I got hooked: now I know the author sprinkles their Haskell-speak because of an unstoppable inner need to be precise and probably also so that the tribe doesn't expell them, but they also seem to have this amazing spark of humanity and empathy towards common programmer folk, so that if I skip over the mysterious ivory-tower spells, I will find more nuggets of commoner-speak for me. Knowing a bit more about writing, I believe they additionally probably consciously put a lot of effort to write in an approachable way. Which is a surprisingly tough skill. This is a mix I honestly bow to. I can try and list more paras that were cool for me if you'd specifically like me to.
I much prefer no updates over broken updates, especially when they are forced on me. Stable bugs are better than a never ending stream of new ones.
> So you would effectively destroy all free user generated content sites

If it's impossible to do reasonable due diligence without charging users, yes. Posting content has a cost; it is entirely reasonable for users who want to post the content to bear at least a portion of that cost.

> a good portion of the cheap ones as well

Depends on what you mean by "cheap" and how much it would cost to actually do reasonable due diligence in a sane legal regime. I don't think it would cost much at all per user, particularly for a site like YouTube which has so many users.

Which brings up another point: a large corporation like Google, owning a site like YouTube, is precisely the kind of corporation that ought to figure out a cheap way to do reasonable due diligence and handle things like having people provide a legal document before they upload content, and work with the legal system to develop a way of dealing with this that is fair and reasonable to all parties. And yet they are too lazy to do that, and depend on draconian laws instead to give them a supposed "safe harbor" against claims that, in a sane world, they would be able to refute and dismiss with minimal effort.

And, further, the government is precisely the entity that, when large corporations fail to do what they ought to do, is supposed to make them do it, as the representative of the interests of the people. What our government did, instead, was to simply capitulate to the demands of the large corporations, and to fail to require them to do any due diligence at all, instead putting all the burden on the individuals who are posting legitimate content they created that gets mistaken by some corporation for copyrighted content--or the corporation simply decides not to care whether the content is infringing or not, because they see value in showing everyone else that they can bully whomever they want and not get stopped.

And you are arguing that all this is perfectly fine and proper. Just to make that clear upfront so people know what you are really saying.
Google is a provider of all those things. Advertising is the biggest revenue line and supports free access (to products that are still best in class) but they also sell paid versions to both consumers and businesses.

Bureaucracy and customer support problems with large companies is not a new or unique to Google.
> Wow - absolutely not - the notion of people - anyone - purposely infecting themselves with a deadly disease that actually does kill quite a number of people - is absurd.

It kills almost nobody under 25. It's an extremely low risk for that group.
The acronym used on files is often NOFORN == no foreign nationals.
Cuius est solum, eius est usque ad coelum et ad inferos

Traditionally it goes further, all the way to heaven and hell. But in modern times, air rights are limited to what you can actually use from the surface; airplanes don’t trespass, etc.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuius_est_solum,_eius_est_usqu...
Except for the ones that will end up fighting the worst illness in their lifetime. It may not be them but their parents or grandparents.
MathJax: Beautiful Math in All Browsers
I wonder if anyone is keeping track of just how many developers are completely writing off Google just because their support is so terrible, and their policies so absurdly draconian.

People give shit to Jeff Bezos all the time, but compared to Google, there is no comparison to the level of company-wide user hostility and blatant privacy violations with such little public accountability, as that of Google's.
Northern Italy was repeated across various big counties. I'm also wondering where you're getting your information from Sweden from. It's not easy to get a good insight into any country. E.g. Sweden's approach is quite different than what you might read if you read/follow US based news sources.
> Works for any distribution (not just normal).

How can this possibly be true?

If I take five samples of the speed of my car, and I always take them while the car is just setting off, it's never going to be anywhere near the median speed over a twelve hour drive.

I feel like there must be a huge list of extra constraints and caveats you aren't mentioning.

(I'm really bad at stats - genuinely asking.)
Three Learnings from a Software Engineer at Amazon
If I had to lay off one of two employees in a role, both do the role fine, but I strongly suspect one of the two has been looking to leave... Which of the two am I keeping?
I haven't tried Triplebyte, but my reaction is that obviously I'd want to skip the on-site tech part and not the others, so I could probably be tripped up by my expectations even if the actual way it worked was mostly disclosed.
The article seems to be comparing a hero experiment to access rates. Why not at least compare to telecom backbone rates? You can do at least 1.6 Tbps per fiber, long haul, with commercially available gear.

If we use telecom hero experiments as the standard, 44 Tbps is not the record: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiber-optic_communication#Stan...
Yes and with HIV, people don't tend to get well on their own. Once you show symptoms, you can't just wait for your immune system to kick in.

With COVID-19, clearly people get well.

This isn't to say it will protect you forever, and isn't to say there can't be variants that can infect you. But still...
I like MathJax and find it quite easy to use, standard. However, I have some issues with sizing the font - anybody solved these easily?
Honestly, I'd be willing to pay $50 a year or something if that means that the bots are less strict when reviewing my app (sort of like what Apple does)
What you are saying is gold and rings true for my experiences. Spot on.
Where’s the pricing info?
> I'm sure you will get a real human employee if you are interested in buying ads from them.

That’s a fact. Speaking from personal experience, Google Ads/Admob seem to be the only services where human support exists.
I always thought that using it as basically the db or cache for remote API was a terrible misuse of CoreData, but a graph of objects does come in handy when driving complex UIs.
Fair enough. I was mostly talking about professional staff, such as engineers, and some trades. Most traditionally, for example, lawyers and plumbers.
I feel the "anyone making over 10m is fair" statement completely ignores the sheer job volume they create from someone who makes that.

Take bezos for example, Amazon employs over 500k people and the valuation makes him the richest man. The company has been around for a while now and I truly something everyone uses or has heard of, same as windows and Gates.

Is it fair? Yes. They built the company with the same tools available to anyone else today. It's even easier today because of the internet. To think no one can achieve wealth is defeatist.
In vivo mechanism determining apoptosis or senescence
My family has already had Covid-19. We wear masks to not be jerks and make others fearful or uncomfortable because we can’t be bothered to put a simple article of clothing on.
True, just like we were here before with devices like the Palm Pilot and Apple Newton, which is why the iPhone and IPad never took over the world ;)
Art of Juggling and Reinforcement Learning
This is crazy; 2000 years later and the Romans are still shaping our society. I think this goes in the face of modern intellectual elitism that says we're the smartest generation to have ever lived. NO, we're just have the most tech to work with because of the all the genius that came before us. We're just iterating. I really tilts when people would rather say aliens built the pyramids than to accept the Egyptians were as intelligent, if not more so than our generation.

Sorry for that rant, but this is pretty cool.
Is there any data on that?
Yet for some reason does not flag the Reddit, Instagram, and Twitch app with similar or worse content. I wonder if their algorithm has special exceptions built in to ignore apps specifically by name or by "downloads > X".
The Scientific Paper Is Obsolete (2018)
Ask HN: How to pay contractors and manage payroll for remote hires?
What are the best practices/softwares/services to use to take care engage remote contractors on short stints? Thanks very much for your inputs.
I don't know about BSD, but even "mainstream" Linux (i.e. Ubuntu and the like) has telemetry now. This sort of spyware is everywhere. I think Windows 10 was the first to really normalise such behaviour on the desktop, and all the others just followed along.

where people such as doctors and lawyers might be violating the law by using a modern computer

That reminds me of a story I heard not long ago --- a company wanted to have more defense against malware, so signed up for a "security solution" from one of the big vendors and got it installed on all the company's machines. After a developer who was doing network tracing discovered that it was phoning home on every executable being run, and further digging discovered that it was periodically uploading file hashes and sometimes actual files --- not just the executables being run but other random files --- to the security vendor's servers, the reaction was "oh hell no!" and they immediately terminated the service and removed the product from all their machines.
TypeScript, just as an example, does help with a lot of those, though. Object ownership is a lot less of a thing when you hand `DeepReadonly<T>` to things outside of your bounded context. Use of optional constructs is also de rigueur in TypeScript (whether or not you're using an option type or `undefined`/`null`) and the compiler will happily yell at you about it.

The rest--yeah sure, but you can write tests for those things in anything. What you must test is then only a subset of the things that yeah, you do really have to bust your ass to test in an Elixir or a Ruby or a Python, and then it really is boilerplate--just less useful boilerplate overall.

> Best practice is to OpenAPI spec to generate endpoints that you code for.

I disagree with that. Every project where I've ever done that has immediately shat down its leg when the spec of an endpoint changed because refactoring from external sources is bad even in languages where refactoring isn't a disaster from the word 'go'.

IMO, the code is the canonical source of functionality; the spec should reflect it. It's why my CI system for my current project builds new releases of libraries for major languages are pegged to the version of the OAS3 spec being emitted. If you want to go off-road and use a language I don't actively look at, you can still do that, and the semver of the spec (which remains a manual problem in either case, though you could probably get clever enough to make a good guess as to whether it should be major/minor/patch) will tell you as a consumer when you need to upgrade.

A semantically versioned spec is required whether or not you write the spec first or the application first

> But almost every typing zealot I have worked with absolutely hated tests.

Slices both ways pretty easy, tbh. Almost every dynamic-typing pusher I've worked with was an active danger to a project with more than one committer--the best and most effective developers on such projects have always been folks with the requisite fear and acknowledgement of their own fallibility and the absolute danger that comes with using dynamically-typed languages for anything you care about; the starry-eyed Ruby idealists (I had that phase too) are just going to be too clever by half and then you get to eat the resultant shit later.
But there aren't, percentage-wise, that many young people that _have_ been hospitalized. And those aren't healthy young people - they're obese, they're drug users, they're diabetic, immune-compromised, asthmatic, have heart disease, lung disorders, or all the above, etc.

If you're in those categories by all means, update your will and self-isolate. But otherwise you'll do fine. Even the healthy elderly, and there are plenty of them, do fine.
> there was no one left who could support an Erlang system.

If you have $200k "python engineers" on the payroll who wouldn't jump at the opportunity to do some additional Erlang, maybe it's time to reconsider your hiring practices and that is the real cautionary tale.
Coronagrifting: A Design Phenomenon
>> Google's entire PageRank computation can be done with a handful of iterations around a single call to GraphBLAS, using what I call the "PageRank semiring."

The author has an example of PageRank in C:

https://github.com/DrTimothyAldenDavis/GraphBLAS/blob/stable...

I assume his "single call" statement refers to the MATLAB version:

https://github.com/DrTimothyAldenDavis/GraphBLAS/blob/stable...

for i = 1:20
r = ((c*r) * C) + a * sum (r) ;
end

The MATLAB interface uses overloaded operators and methods on a GraphBLAS matrix object.
If you do require hospitalization it doesn't mean you need intensive care. If you do require intensive care it doesn't mean you are going to die.

If you are discharged from a hospital and require rehabilitation you will probably be placed in some form of nursing facility with other patients who may or may not have been infected.

The last part is the hidden disaster of the COVID-19 crisis.
Definitely not a comprehensive treatment, but I wrote about some specific use cases from the basics here:

https://andersource.dev/2019/08/25/fun-with-matrix-exponenti...
Yes all true but if I am familiar with php or python I should be able to create an web application without learning javascript. This was possible few years back so if it is not possible anymore then it is a regression IMHO. anvil.works also makes it possible so it is great for creating my apps.
> the thing is there's a tool for a job

Really? Which job do you belive needs a "maybe store some of this data, sometimes" kind of database?
It's not a false dichotomy, it's an unavoidable trade-off. You haven't given enough details on your proposal for me to tell where this trade-off is made, but you can't avoid this trade-off.

Now you seem to be implying this affirmation is simply a contractual indemnification, which of course YouTube already has:

>To the extent permitted by applicable law, you agree to defend, indemnify and hold harmless YouTube, its Affiliates, officers, directors, employees and agents, from and against any and all claims, damages, obligations, losses, liabilities, costs or debt, and expenses (including but not limited to attorney's fees) arising from: (i) your use of and access to the Service; (ii) your violation of any term of this Agreement; (iii) your violation of any third party right, including without limitation any copyright, property, or privacy right; or (iv) any claim that your Content caused damage to a third party. This defense and indemnification obligation will survive this Agreement and your use of the Service.

>For example, the Content you submit must not include third-party intellectual property (such as copyrighted material) unless you have permission from that party or are otherwise legally entitled to do so.

It's not clear to me from the rest of your comments whether you believe this to be sufficient. If it is, then clearly this isn't enough to prevent infringement, and killing DMCA as an option would make it significantly more difficult to remove infringing content. Which might be what you want, I don't know. But the trade-off is real.

>Legal systems have been dealing with reasonable issues like this since forever. A sane legal system is perfectly capable of evolving in response to new technologies, without compromising basic principles like "innocent until proven guilty", requirements to back up legal claims with evidence, handling claims through appropriate channels and not short-circuiting them, and fairness to all parties.

Legal systems have been making a series of trade-offs for a long time. The trade-off here is that sometimes content is removed for up to 14 days and then put back. In exchange for that, there's a way for rights owners to resolve issues out of court.
WhoAPI – Website data your software can understand
Actually using cloud formation, it’s really easy to do integration testing. Often times server less can be cheaper because the systems only pay for what they use. High tps is expensive on server less, but low tps is dirt cheap. Source is I work at aws
well technically it stores something therefore it is database joke

Confluent, the company behind Kafka, are 100% serious about Kafka being a database. It is however a far better database than MongoDB.
Firefox isn't an option?
Come on, just wear a mask. Why would you resist it as though it's something to be proud of? Even if the only thing that it does is make other people feel safe, that's a good enough reason.
I generally try to avoid bitching about Firefox design decisions in Chrome threads, but possibly because of https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1409675 - the original WebExtensions breaking change removed the ability for newtab-style extensions to do a lot of things their XPI counterparts could, in particular focusing on the address bar after opening a new tab. That bug went WONTFIX with no suggestions for an alternative interface, basically telling extension devs to come up with their own proposal for how to implement it if they want that bit of the API back. I'm not familiar enough with the extension in question to say whether any of those specific issues would have affected it (and from the article it sounds like time was a bigger pressure) but developing newtab-style extensions for Firefox is definitely harder than it should be.

While I generally agree with the reasons behind moving away from XPI extensions, it's been really disappointing to see Firefox not be as focused as I'd hoped they'd be on restoring lost extension functionality. That's especially important in the context of Google fuckery like the OP.
How I grew a profitable newsletter after failing to monetize my blog
They reserve the right to sanction, but it rarely happens, even for repeated infringers.

And I disagree with your framing. There are plenty of truly frivolous cases brought to harass or compel poorer entities, and it mostly works (maybe less well against speech in jurisdictions with anti-SLAPP).
My thumb is glad to get rest from the phone I think :)

I only need relieve from clicking if I do it a lot (and than map it to the keyboard for my other hand for a week or so).
The great thing here is that it is literally 100% compatible with Chrome extensions.

I have been working on an extension that uses Chrome's Debugger API, lots of tab / network related APIs, and DevTools. I spun it up on Edge the other day and...it just worked. Everything worked.

I can't say the same for firefox. They do a good job bringing over some extension APIs, but I find it severely lacking for my use case.
The garbage collector is optional and Nim is memory safe.

Just like Rust, you can unsafe structures when using libraries in C/C++.
Or at least, that it is less valuable than spending the same time learning your core language.

This might be true based on your specific situation (relatively new to the language, but already know some other varied languages); I don't know.
> I suspect viral load is involved.

You mean dose?

The current vaccine research is measuring antibody titres (how much) is being generated by an inoculated individual in reference to a recovered patient. The next step is to determine if those antibodies are actually sufficient as they are different.
Eventually, somebody will write bots to deal with this robotic bureaucracy and it will be matter of how much licenses and CPU power you have to negotiate a better deal. Essentially, it will be like rich people nowadays solve issues between themselves using lawers.