skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've been using Elixir for three years in a production setting with a small team of engineers. I still love the language, the community, and everything it has taught me as an engineer. However, there are real downsides to moving forward with Elixir:

- If your engineers are used to the Ruby, JS, Python etc. ecosystems of finding a library for everything, they may become frustrated with the smaller Elixir ecosystem. In my experience, this is actually fine because it means you have fewer external dependencies to wrangle.

- Differences between compile-time and run-time configuration is a foot gun. We ended up moving almost everything to run-time configuration, which is not what you see recommended by many libraries and examples. This is slowly changing however.

- Deployment is a bit unique, and working with building releases can be confusing for those used to deploying dynamic languages that are not compiled.

- Functional programming requires unlearning many OOP best practices. This can slow down engineers new to the language.

A lot of these issues IMO comes from how Elixir was initially marketed as a "fast Ruby" and Phoneix "fast Rails". Once you get past the syntactical similarities you realize the semantics are very, very different. Elixir is much closer to Erlang and Clojure than it is to Ruby.

Elixir is an excellent language for motivated engineers solving novel problems. If you are building a standard CRUD app, I think you will find more success with Rails or Django in 2020.
MySQL is no joke

If you were around back in the day you will remember the MySQL team claiming that no one needed transactions or referential integrity, that you should just do it yourself in the application...
Actually, I think your response is really pathetic. Not everybody is good at writing, and for many, English isn't their first language.

If you don't like his question, don't answer, but finger-wagging over commas and punctuation makes you look bad.
I think it is wrong to assume that something is inherently bad just because it is addictive.
exactly. it conditioned you to accept that submitting to and answering a bunch of invasive questions is totally acceptable, even happiness-inducing, in exchange for "safety", where safety is actually systemically guaranteed simply because very, very few are malevolent enough to attempt mass murder, or even just one murder. it plays on mental biases that more easily extrapolate imminent and colossal danger from rare incidents than vice versa.

sure, the invasiveness seems minor on an individual scale, but it's massive on a population one. power is more easily amassed in little morsels across grand scales than taken by force in large chunks.
I suspect that an incentive system that is heavily biased towards collective success would make a big difference.

The more we are vested in each other's success the more we are likely to want to bring out the best in each other and from there we might begin to get psychological safety and other goodness
Sure! Feel free to add a suggestion at the "Suggest a TLD" section on the homepage - I'm trying to gauge which TLD is to most wanted to figure out which one to support next. ;)
that's true too, but it's not either-or, it's both.
> If you have $200k "python engineers" on the payroll who wouldn't jump at the opportunity to do some additional Erlang

Ah, sure they might be willing, but as a lead I'm not willing to invest in it.

1. I'm not sure I want someone who's got 4 weeks of experience in a language working on system critical infrastructure. Pick your time, does it take 6mo?

2. They have existing work, learning and working on an entire new language _AND_ new project is a huge task. Especially for non-trivial projects.

We could, but in our case it was a better engineering decision was to retire the old system and move on.
Decent ones become available as dropped domains from time to time. The whole dropping domain process is convoluted, gross and benefits big players, but I have seen some decent ones fall through the cracks.
Hertz Car Rental Files for Bankruptcy
earlier discussion on HN about the miracle sudoku: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23219360
Charge back for not as described and incomplete refund.
To be fair, debugging all concurrent code is horrendous. If you can use multiple processes instead of multiple threads, you should.
Any linear time-invariant system bounded in reality has a frequency response that will drop off in magnitude before reaching infinity. An ideal triangular wave is an infinite sum of sine harmonics because of the discontinuity in its derivative. More generally, the order of the derivative in which the discontinuity happens relates to decay rate of the harmonics. A square wave decays as sinc(f) whereas a triangular wave decays as sinc^2(f).
The narrative fallacy is just a way for people to describe errors caused when conclusions are based inadequate information. It is an ancient and mundane idea with analogs across time and cultures.

The article mentions the biological nature of it, but I interpret that as the biological reality that humans are not omniscient, thus are always susceptible to filling in the gaps between empirical evidence with unsubstantiated prose.
All: there was a big thread about this yesterday (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23285249) but because it didn't focus on the technical content, and because there were glitches with a previous submission of this report (described at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23288120 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23287763 if anyone cares), we invited aphyr to repost this. Normally we downweight follow-up posts that have such close overlap with a recent discussion (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...), so the exception is probably worth explaining.
I’m sure some heuristic that combines comments per hour, average thread length, and ratio of comments to upvotes could do a pretty good job detecting flame wars in a community the size of HN.
Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23279327
It's not like ICE cars (both new and used) aren't still being sold in tremendous amounts in the US…
Agree, asyncio is a mess; Trio gets it right.

https://trio.readthedocs.io/

It's a much simpler model that's just as powerful, and makes it easy to get things right. It eliminates the concepts of futures, promises, and awaitables. It has only one way to wait for a task: await it.

For a theoretical explanation of it's "structured concurrency" model see the now-famous essay https://vorpus.org/blog/notes-on-structured-concurrency-or-g...
It the casing plastic?
Dang covered it higher up, it triggered a flame war detection script for a bit.
Developers have that attitude because it’s a technical creative profession. You are tied to what you create so it has emotional impact if you don’t put in the emotional framework to deal with business realities.
the real question is: Inception. Can it be done?
Right, but "Jepsen: X" doesn't really mean anything to anyone that isn't familiar with your work. "An Evaluation of X" is much more informative.
Interesting to know there are only 72 solution boards that meet the Miracle Sudoku constraints.
full list: https://benjamincongdon.me/blog/2020/05/23/Solving-the-Mirac...
I don't presume to speak for him, but his writeup on ZooKeeper was among the most positive in the Jepsen series: https://aphyr.com/posts/291-jepsen-zookeeper

My bias: I like and heavily use ZooKeeper in production. HN seems not to like it as much.
That's a study group not a book club.
I was broke due to Covid-19 so I built a stock tool
Due to COVID-19, I've been completely broke for months. I was trying to figure out how to pay the mortgage and support family. I remember sitting in my Aeron thinking "So this is how depression feels like?"

Instead of crying myself to sleep, I decided to leverage 15 years of trading knowledge. I've probably read over 100 books on trading stocks. In addition, I've taken notes on Google Docs about key parameters and metrics that the top traders looked for (fundamental, technical, and psychological).

So after more "positive" sleepless nights, I created a tool specifically for trading stocks during COVID-19:
https://stockgains.io/

Around February 15, 2020 (Just a few months ago!), many stocks have dropped to unreasonable (bargain) prices and I wanted to pick and choose which ones had the highest upside. Obviously many of these companies have fundamentally changed (airlines, cruises, etc) so it's going to take a long time to recover. But as long as they don't go bankrupt (health column), you "should" make money in the long run. Obviously the cash/debt is also indicative of that as well. I've found that even paid subscriptions (some $300/month!) didn't have all this information in a convenient place. Disappointing.

Beginnings:
I initially used a Google spreadsheet (GOOGLE_FINANCE()) but that got a bit out of hand, especially due to the real-time functions.

It seemed simple, but was much more involved (server, app, and database optimizations) than I had anticipated. I did have fun playing with MySQL 8's new window functions and learning how to deploy my first Ruby on Rails app - so that in itself was rewarding.

Anyway, this tool has helped me stay afloat with my bills. I've passed it many friends and they've all found it useful. I figured I'll share it with HackerNews since I've been a lurker from the start. Hopefully, others who are struggling during these tough times will find it helpful as well.
I did feel sort of let down that they didn't have man-hole cover.

on edit: yeah, I'm not gonna send a pull request on that one.
>Granted it is very contagious, but there are still very few cases relative to the population.

There's entire nations on lock down to stop the spread. Without such an order, you'd have much more than "very few cases". You said it, COVID-19 is "very contagious".

>And it kills so rarely!

If it spreads, there's less medical equipment, space, and personnel to help fight. This will increase the death rate. You can look at NY and Italy as an example. Not to mention, people are not statistics. If you mom dies, it doesn't comfort you that the mortality rate is so low. You want to keep mom safe.

>When I extended the questioning to all acquaintances

What's n? Is it statistically relevant? Where do you live?

>If you told me to find a Covid-19 patient I would be hard pressed to do so w/o visiting a local hospital or funeral home. Even then I doubt they would have one on hand.

What is even the point of this statement? Illness can be a danger to society without _you_ knowing where to "find" a patient.
It can’t be because the database does not exist: it is sharded onto each individual phone

The server only has a list of random identifiers from those who have tested positive for COVID. An exposure notification is determined when a phone downloads that list and correlates it with its local list.
This project has received too many requests, please try again later.
It's not "so vague as to be unanswerable". It's an explicit response to the implication that non-Intel/AMD systems somehow lack backdoors. What's the absolute proof that this laptop (or some future RISC-V based one) lacks a backdoor?
Too bad this only goes to godaddy and namecheap, both of which upsell you on whois guard privacy.
> I posit that an incentive system that is heavily biased towards collective success would make a big difference.

There needs to be enough individual benefit (or the team must be small enough) that individual efforts can move the needle. But yes I agree. One of the biggest challenges for companies is that the average employee has no reason to care whether their project succeeds.
I’m not sure about that: without that, how will anyone know that you’ve read Infinite Jest?
Really helpful. Thanks!!
I really don't worry about the low levels of radiation or not.

What I worry about is trusting the TSA to keep these machines operating correctly and within spec. The care they give the machines cannot be greater than the care they give to the employees, and we know how well they treat employees.
Well and a MacBook of course.
HN is written in Lisp. So anyone interested in cloning HN, better understanding HN, etc, would have reason to be interested in reading up on it, even if it's not something they work with normally.

Humans being human, I would think it strange if a forum written in Lisp failed to have some sort of pro-Lisp bias.
Why is there no labor union in academia?
A bit surprised by the amount of negative comments about the company in here, so I feel that I have to offer a different perspective: I ordered a 14" fanless linux laptop from them about one year ago and that's one of the best laptop I ever owned.
It's fast, has a great mate screen of the right proportion, decent backlit keyboard with no crazy layout (which has become rare recently), better than average trackpad (although nothing like that of a Mac), good battery. Of course being fanless it is also 100% silent. And it runs Linux flawlessly (I've run debian and nixos on it).

Only downsides I can think of are the specific charger cord (as opposed to USB) and its large-ish besel which makes it a bit too large for comfortable use in planes or trains.

I also interacted with support at the time because I had not heard from UPS and I remember them as quite quick to answer and friendly.

Overall, I'm afraid this thread might leave readers with an unfair impression on the company. Maybe not all of their laptop have the same quality? Mine is actually a Clevo, branded as "infinitybook 14".
Would love to see AWS agree to facilitating this. Appreciate your work very much!
Read the first paragraph and was done.
Nothing is different from a hypothetical article in 1970 "How do we tax mainframes"?
I'm thinking of training a deep learning model on the top 10,000 startup names and use it to generate available .com domain names that could potentially be used for future projects as well. Not sure how feasible this is gonna be but I'm definitely gonna give it a try!
I haven't commented in a year but I reset my password and logged in specifically to share this:
https://www.technologyreview.com/2009/10/30/208491/how-terah...
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4340277/
now, I will again mothball this account
In my case, the typical scenario is running aggregation and analytical functions over a small number of columns, while the number of rows is huge. The SQL syntax is the same, but the columnar storage model better fits this case. A good illustration is available in ClickHouse documentation: https://clickhouse.tech/docs/en/#why-column-oriented-databas....
If they are _determined_ to use your data, they will have backed up before they announced this and saved it off somewhere. Normal backup mechanisms won't get the job done, though, because they typically age out. GDPR and CCPA both require backups to explicitly not allow for restoration, although of course they could ignore both.
Bezos is probably highly intelligent but not 'hyperintelligent'. He wanted to become theoretical physicist but realized that he was not up to it. He graduated with degree in electrical engineering and computer science.

It's very common to label clearly intelligent business-people who have 'mathiness background' and analytical thinking ability as geniuses.
my concern with not releasing it correctly the first time is that someone else picks up the idea and does it better before you can.
Actually he already did analyze PostgreSQL: https://aphyr.com/posts/282-call-me-maybe-postgres

But it was long ago, and maybe needs to be redone?

Edit: after re-reading it he treats it as a distributed system because client and server is over network. And that is true, it can also be thought of as a distributed system because as you said transactions are concurrent and are running as separate processes. Although in these cases you can't have a partition (which aphyr uses to find weaknesses), or maybe there is something equivalent that happens?
> So you have linked me to a list of security vulnerabilities - are you suggesting all security vulnerabilities need to be addressed by the language spec and the compiler?

These vulnerabilities are typically in code implemented in C or C++.

I am suggesting that if you want to have a secure system, they have to be addressed by the language; if you are happy with systems that have exploitable memory management bugs, there are lots of existing UNIX variants to choose from.

> I doubt such a wide and diverse range of problems be addressed at such a low level.

May I suggest reading about some low-level languages that have been used in production and address these problems to varying degrees of success, for example ESPOL (from 1960s), Mesa/Cedar, Modula-2, Ada, or Rust.

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

> tcc (Tiny C Compiler) allows you to compile in bounds-checking with all pointer dereferences.

This sounds impossible, there's not enough information in the C type system to know in the general case what the bounds are.

> C++ STL implementations generally have bounds checking all over the place

This wasn't true last I checked for libc++ (the most "modern" implementation), and isn't applicable for any non-STL container in a program anyway; nothing prevents using a plain C array.

> this requires compiling in debug mode IIRC

I'm not aware of anybody who enables this in production because the culture of C++ is all about performance.

> but it is evidence of the possibilities of safety without language or compiler support

Language or compiler support would reduce the performance overhead, because it makes it easier for the compiler to elide checks that can be statically proven to always succeed.

> Lisp-style meta-programming can get you basically anything you want from a language without language or compiler support.

Meta-programming cannot remove features from a language, which is typically the problem here.
WHOIS guard privacy has been free on Namecheap for awhile
Interesting! Though I think there are sites that track newly-dropped domains - park.io is one of them - and they are doing it pretty well already so I definitely recommend checking them out!
A more common method of implementing this that avoids setjmp and longjmp is to code a little assembly to do the stack switch. This is typically faster and easier to port, see:

https://probablydance.com/2013/02/20/handmade-coroutines-for...
> There is still a lot of uncertainty. We don't really know what works and what doesn't work.

Yet there are the unnamed but great

> people advocating for serious and sensible public policy re: COVID-19.

According to you these people have no idea what they are doing. Indeed if you believe that, the only way to go is to keep doing nothing out of caution.
after the jepsen/mongodb post that hit front page nearly at the same time, it seems like the foundationdb team has the exact opposite values regarding resilience and data safety guarantees. I cant wait for the first results of the couchDb rewrite on foundationDb
That's awesome. I've ordered the PinePhone and I know that's already mainline, so I trust them more than most other vendors to keep their word.
>. Where are the reasonable leaders that recognize that it isn't practical to to have a "lockdown" waiting for a vaccine that is going to take a year in the most optimistic case while at the same time recognizing that promoting small inexpensive behavior changes that keep this in check and reduce risk while that plays out is the way to prevent the need for more draconian measures.

They're all over. Most US states are starting to open via "stage 1". Stage 1 includes multiple precautions.
Well executed, it's fast and clean.
I can help but feel lied to when there is only a laundry list of "good"s and no analysis on downsides.

When I read "it helps with this" "it prevents this", I always ask "but at what cost". Can an exogenous molecule that was so adaptive be missed this bad and now consuming it will just fill that gap we had for millions of years?

Let's not kid ourselves. Concentrated caffeine is a drug and not a nutrient. We drink it because it is psychoactive and we habituate to it. Try drinking redbull as a caffeine-naive person or not drinking coffee as a daily drinker. If an exogenous substance is that potent, it is a drug. (Even though I like it myself too, it is also pretty shit of a drug in my opinion, with 5 hr half-life, a dice roll every time whether it is gonna create more sleep than focus and a steep tolerance curve.) Magic mushrooms also have nutritional value, nicotine also has some benefits, beer has tons of calories, they might even have adaptive value with occasional use. You might enjoy them, you might drink coffee everyday. That is fine. But they are all drugs and not nutrients.
I recommend giving Godot a look, I really like it and have been using it for small side-projects for about half a year now. I did have no "real" prior experience with unity and unreal though.
You sure we don't work at the same place? :)

Hiring is nearly impossible, come support our legacy system, and what ever you do, don't introduce Erlang into any other part of the company. Why? We feel burnt on this one project, and god forbid we get any deeper than we are now. What this isn't appealing?
Starving rats turning into cannibals as restaurant food supply disappears
I ordered one of these just a few days ago after months of being on the fence. Very excited for it to come, though from friends' experiences (and it appears many people in this thread) I expect a tantalizing wait.
> In practice it is more complex - people with a talent for teaching and leadership and are experts are incredibly rare.

Not in my experience. While there are obviously fewer people who have both traits, they're not at all rare. In practice, what I see is that such people shift away from teaching/mentoring as it takes time/effort that their manager does not reward.

If you want talented people who mentor well, make sure such mentoring is rewarded.
You're completely right, there's nothing for you in lisp. Nothing to see here. Just move on.
He didn't.

He wrote: 'Contrary to popular opinion, Lisp is an incredibly practical language for building production systems.'
Does MySQL support check constraints yet?
Exactly, they have a competing service. They also took down Podcast Addict while keeping their competing podcast app which violated the same terms https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23219427
My experience with a non-fiction book club was somewhere in-between the 'study group' and 'social club' extremes. We ran the club via a meetup group for about three years, with a 'core' group of ~10 people (of which about half would show up each month). Each month would also bring a few random meetup people who we would see once and never again.

a) Many non-fiction books are effectively a 'very good essay' in the first couple chapters, followed by N*100 pages of lower-quality expansion on the initial topic. It's completely OK if most people in the meeting don't read the whole thing. It's also much easier to skip around in non-fiction books, since the chapters are often more modular.

b) We would have a rotating 'moderator' who generally read the whole book, usually before it got picked up by the group. The moderator generally picks a subset of 'good chapters' which people can read if they aren't going to get through the whole book. Usually intro + chapter 1 + two later chapters with the best points.

c) For non-fiction, outside experience is often just as valuable to the discussion as having read the book. Having a really relevant person involved int he discussion is fantastic.

d) We also had a some great experiences with inviting the author to the discussion group, for books written by people who live in the area. We would often get ~20 people to turn out for these ones, and the authors were very happy to come talk about the thing they care about to even our small group.