skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Here's the problem: People are not angels. This applies to the police (as we're seeing).

But it also applies to the non-police. They aren't angels, either. And in the absence of police, they aren't going to become angels. They're going to still beat their wives, they're going to still mug random strangers, they're going to still do protection rackets. And they may do even more of those things when they don't have to worry about being stopped.

And then, the victims aren't angels, either. If they use a Second Amendment defense to those problems, they're not going to do it perfectly. They're going to do it in anger. They're going to do it with vigilante justice, hitting more people than they should, and hitting some of the wrong people.

> If the results are anywhere near as good as the groups pushing for police abolishment are projecting...

In light of human nature, I'm not banking on the results being wonderful.
Android Distribution Data
This is interesting to me.

One of the things that really turned me off from firebase is the rules system where you have to build an ACL there. It's been a few years since I've played heavily with it, but I really disliked trying to essentially build my authorization system into a backend which I couldn't run locally and was primarily edited in their web console.

For me, writing a proxy that sits in front of couchdb is very simple. I use JWT tokens that get passed between components in the system. I keep my authorization logic out of couch. I can write normal unit tests on my proxy. And my pouchdb client code mirrors the structure of my backend structure, which is a mental model I really prefer.

I guess I'm saying I think having a separate database for each user makes more sense to me, not less.

The only thing I'm struggling with is running code when a document is updated. I have a polling client that watches for the _global_changes updates, but it seems really hacky. I wish there was a better way to get access to all database changes that looked like firestore functions.
The repo demonstrating this is now open source: https://github.com/danpalmer/django-cve-2020-13254
I used to love these guys, however, recently they seem to be headed farther and farther away from both the sound of and the innovation present in their first two records.

I miss the trip hop, I miss the ‘edge’. It’s basically Damon Albarn’s synth pop at the moment. I feel like he should be releasing records such as ‘The Now Now’ under his own name. I’d still listen and I’d probably appreciate it more.
It feels like if you changed the nouns we could be talking about movies. We are, some of us at least, on our guard when a movie has a huge advertising spend because we have been burned by movies where, "all the best parts were in the preview".

Do you think it would be possible for us to have any transparency into how hard a web page has been 'advertised' and use that to inform our decision processes? I've no idea what that would even look like.
Ask HN: How do you detect oddly performing machines in a large cluster?
Hi HN,

I have a problem where random nodes in a large cluster perform pretty far out of spec. What's the correct way to find them? There's a huge diversity of workloads, and the boxes are large so I was considering doing something really trivial that eats up some consistent % of CPU then graphing machines that are some n of SD out of normal (calculating fibbonacci to some low-ish number, for instance).

Is there any really good, clean way to do this that solves the problem in an elegant way?
Forced social isolation causes neural craving similar to hunger
It's surprising Google doesn't downrank such pages.
Machine learning helps map global ocean communities
To paraphrase Gary Larson, "We know it is bullshit, but what kind of bullshit?"[1]

Marketing is fact mixed with coercion.

But this is about plagiarism.

The author of the article, in just under 800 words, is addressing the "copypasta" nature of a specific discipline: programming. I like the author's characterization of lazy or necessary plagiarism as "consumer" mentality. That's an interesting twist.

Was this not the 1970's American Auto Industry attempting to implement Japan's earliest implementation of lean manufacturing? Is the same to be said of any "ripoff" product that cheaply imitates the original: e.g., an off-brand version of an Eames Lounger, or cheaply made webcam off Amazon which is a faulty copy of a Logitech?

His observation is a reflection of complex constraints, and while I completely agree individuals should strive for a deep understanding and mastery of what they spend their lives doing, as it benefits us all directly or indirectly by making us conscious citizens (my opinion), I think this is a largely metaphysical reflection lacking contextual nuance rather than a call to action: we've all been in the shoes of his hypothetical individual committing the sin of programmer consumerism, and for good reason.

However, I do appreciate the clarity his transformation applies to a scenario we are all intimately engaged in.

[1] "We know they are idiots, the question is, 'What kind of idiots?'"
The problem is that many people are willing to admire and praise the action and infer something from it because they aren't willing to spend time actually judging the work.

That makes the action prestigious in itself.
Myths of Reliability
Trade with the USSR was very difficult. There was no use for it outside the USSR and it was forbidden to leave the country. So you couldn't just buy things from other countries.

When pepsi started selling in the USSR they traded pepsi for Stolichnaya vodka. Enentually they traded old military equipment. [0]

[0] https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/soviet-union-pepsi-shi...
Can I be honest? I fucking hate developers. We're like magpies of the worst variety. How many times have I had to argue against bringing in ${NEW_TECH} or ${NEW_TECHNIQUE} because it would be more trouble than its worth. No, it doesn't look as cool engineering-wise, and yes, our work may be a little harder because of it. But then they win the argument and we implement it and hey! Those problems I told you about? They're real! And if they had done it my way we could have moved on to the next thing and not had to worry about this.

Fuck the latest thing. Fuck resume driven development. Fuck magpies. Choose the boring path. Fuck developers!

The worst thing we do is obsess over the latest, coolest tech. Everyone is stepping on their brothers and sisters in this field because they want to be the loser that invented ${NEW_TECH}. We spend so much time optimizing for 'developer happiness' (a.k.a. the new shiny thing) that we forget about architecture.

I am so sick of this field.
I always wondered happened to the people after Google purchased on2. It would make sense that Google would want to keep that knowledge and not just buy it for the patents and source. Thank you for clearing that up.
I think you mean "Gorillaz type bands" or something. And even that...

Live shows will certainly be impacted, but to think that you need bands to become virtual characters is kind of extreme. The Beatles were purely a studio band for much of the time they dominated. That's nothing new.

Multitrack recording has been around forever, so recording your part at home isn't that big a deal, especially now that home equipment has gotten so affordable. (note that the winner of the grammy for best engineer last year, Finneas, did it on a few thousand dollars worth of equipment in his bedroom). So much music now is created on a computer more than on an instrument, so that's becoming a big factor. Even if you play it onto an electronic piano, you can tweak to your heart's content after the fact. (and you can play at slow speed, you can play right and left hand parts separately, you can loop, you can play in a different key and transpose, etc).

You sure don't have to go full Gorillaz to do any of this. They are an interesting extreme, but beyond that....

One of the big problems, though, is that many musicians have a lot of trouble making money off their recordings, especially with so many people just listening on YouTube etc. There isn't the incentive to buy a record as there was a few decades ago.
'Lost Art' of Breathing Impacts Sleep and Stress
Your comment sounds like it's an exceptional achievement that in Germany the value is half of the USA.

When in fact it's the US that's embarrassingly low on the list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_infant_an...

Let's skip the top countries like those in Scandinavia, Japan, Singapore, Germany and Switzerland.
Belarus, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina are all above USA.
It sounded like 10+10+25=45%. That matches Norway, with a highest tax on salary of 46.4%.
No, the problem right now is couchdb has no ACLs at the document level so a common pattern is to use a separate DB per user. If there are document level ACLs, you will still have to create a user in couchdb per user but can now use a single database and assign the permissions at the document level. You could continue using the current pattern if you wanted to. This new architecture has HUGE ramifications though because it enables easy ways to share / make public data just by changing ACLs, and it drastically simplifies backup and restore as well as multi master replication because a super-user (admin) can be used server side to sync everything. Honestly this 1 change should have been a main priority since the inception of couchdb because it further expands the key differentiator of couchdb, which as you said is to enable endpoint syncing for a subset of the overall documents down to end user devices for more performant access, creation, and offline use. This is assuming there is a way to default ACLs on documents to the creating user or role and not wide open. The wide open by default nature of couchdb was a major misstep and why they disabled “admin party” in 3.0.
This is definitely true - I have been told by many respected people over the years that I should start a blog since I have a lot of interesting thoughts on subjects, but a lot of the issue to me is that I have a tendency to want to shape the tech the way I want for a blog, which leads to endless bikeshedding, and it's not as rewarding for me for the effort compared to doing more higher value things for work such as creating unplanned projects to solve work pains, planning other projects, figuring out new solutions to problems encountered at work, or mentoring other developers.

I have a tendency to drop my nuggets of wisdom/analysis in chatrooms in Discord and Slack (and IRC prior) and let others adopt/evangelize them on their own if it makes sense for them to. I'm ok being in the background while my true value is appreciated by those who matter for my own career.
> Adapt solutions to your particular use case. There's no one-size-fits-all solution for everything. Compare different approaches, analyze them. Tutorials or articles show an idea, but may not present production-ready code. Always analyze it before you decide to use it.

This advice seems weird to me. I've been a professional software developer for a decade, and probably 95% of the time it doesn't matter if you're doing things in the most ideal way. The important thing is that it works, is reasonably performant, and is reasonably maintainable. If you can get that in 20 minutes from stealing somebody else's solution, it's probably better in the long run than spending 4 hours figuring out a slightly better solution. Maybe the hard part is identifying the 5% of the time when it does matter that you do something the most ideal way?
No matter how you cut it, we are getting thousands of deaths per day.

The problem is that the government wants to change the published statistics to only show the people who died of confirmed COVID infection in the same day as the report has come out. Most deaths take a couple of days to be added to the system so this methodology would significantly under report the real number of deaths per day.
I had no idea Zoom even existed before the Covid quarantines of this year.
Battleship Implemented in SQL
> Wait if the county police become your police if there's no other police department, then why does any city spend their taxes on their own police?

Policy-wise the motivations for retaining a city police department can be differences in crime between urban and suburban/rural areas, and population density & subsequent patrol officer density - and as a subset of that, response times. I would imagine that cities, and specifically the elected leaders, are also under significant pressure from police unions to retain their departments. Furthermore, disbanding a police department for any major city means that the county or state police department suddenly has to take on the workload of what was previously being done by hundreds (or sometimes thousands) of city police, and no department is prepared for that.

> And presumably if there's no county police the state police have jurisdiction.

There are many cities in the US that are outside of any county, and are their own incorporated entity on par in the hierarchy with the surrounding counties. As such the state police would be the most likely department to take over policing. Again though, that's a major resource burden and logistics problem; any feelings about the pros and cons of reduced police presence aside no policy maker is likely going to be comfortable with that kind of impact.
I know, let's end that abominable feature of our culture. I call it... the war on war.

More seriously... "war" seems to be a byword for "unlimited and opaque budget" so it's attractive to all political stripes; it's also a byword for "we're actually taking this seriously" which is attractive to a large segment of the population.
Thinking is the hardest work there is, which is probably the reason why so few engage in it.

Henry Ford
> He’s an American. His wife is an American.

While this is true, both he and his wife were born in China, and it's not clear if they renounced their Chinese citizenship. I buy their explanation that development is done in China to save money, but it's an interesting choice for someone so concerned with looking like an American company.
The US economy has produced multiple new world-changing businesses every decade in living memory. The idea that it's solely coasting on inertia just doesn't make much sense.
What's interesting is that this stuff works, which means there are idiot decision makers out there eating it up, which means the whole industry is ripe for disruption by someone who can see even an inch into the fog, so lets go do that
Our local grocery store (Wegmans) has ground beef that's irradiated so you can cook it rare. Not much outrage.
Nice - thanks for the input
Chinese birthrates would have fallen anyways due to increasing education and prosperity.

The one child policy only accelerated the decline. When it was lifted, birthrates hardly budged.

Every developed country is a slow motion demographic car crash. China is in a bad position, I'll grant, because the CCP's legitimacy depends upon demographic dividend-scale growth rates when the dividend has already peaked. Democratic countries have pressure release valves built into their political systems that China lacks.
> It appears that under the policy, huge swathes of people just didn't report daughters being born. There's a generation of women who simply don't exist.

How do they work/travel/pay without ID?
1. Launch product, make money.

2. Fix up your code.
should be part of https://www.darkpatterns.org/types-of-dark-pattern
Not sure what pisses me off more. That, or the music autoplaying.
And no modern hybrid seeds, and not the same level of fertilizer.
Just because it's widely regarded as such doesn't make it true. I find Ruby on Rails code to be more impenetrable than Lisp, and no one can say Rails didn't catch on.
11kW is the figure for power consumption of the entire cell site, not RF output power. The same source gives about 7kW for a current 4G site.

https://www.fiercewireless.com/tech/5g-base-stations-use-a-l...
Wow, thanks for the reply. Never had a direct reply from a software creator before.

I only started using vim at the end of last year so am still very inexperienced. I'm not sure what a file type plugin is and to be honest had a hard enough time I stalling plug to get vimwiki installed. I'll take a look at wiki.vim too. I like the idea of the diary/journal. I use that in zim-wiki all the time.

Thanks again for the reply.
I like how "choose boring technology" and "most tech content is bullshit" are simultaneously trending.
Isn’t “life” only significant because we ascribe significance to it. It’s like saying if a a random number generator spit out 7777777 that it must be rigged.
I know half a dozen students who have published "Intro to React" tutorials. They themselves know they are crap, but also know that recruiters will be impressed by the publishing without reading it.
I would be more careful about calling something 'the first ever' if you haven't actually researched the other solutions.
Yes, I think if people want <public> squares then it's time to think about <public> funding. And is broadband now the road to this public square? If so, is there a problem that all these roads are basically toll roads owned by mega-corps?
Very real issues, being it offends some minority, somewhere. Guess what, everything offends some minority somewhere.

In essence, I am against the policing of language to police the mind.
Automation Failure
PGP Disk also had "deniable encryption". So this is certainly not "first"

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

Also see the Wikipedia chart for "Hidden Containers"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_disk_encryption_...
Remove sticky is also my most often used bookmarklet.

One that I also use regularly, related to your "Open in wayback machine", is "Save to wayback machine". That way it'll be there when you click it!

javascript:location.href %3D %27//web.archive.org/save/%27 %2B location.href.split(%27%3F%27)%5B0%5D%3B
so... "Choose boring technology"
I think the observation is OK, but the conclusion is wrong.

Engineering is not only about hard science, but also about processes. The way processes evolve is often based on empirical data rather than hard science.

Now, that does not mean that one can just forget about science entirely. As engineers, we should try to use a logical, rational, data-oriented mindset when making decisions.

If the reason a decision takes place is only because an authority said so, with no real reasoning behind, that would dogmatism: strongly held beliefs that will not be rationally discussed.

We should always keep an open mind and understand that a large part of our knowledge is simply a local maxima in our way to a deeper and better understanding of things, and dogmatism puts a stop to that process.
Soon, a series of organizations fighting war will pop up creating the war-on-war industrial complex, necessitating the war on war on war.

It's war all the way down.
Each header is individually encrypted with a different salt/nonce, so there won't be any detectable repetition.
Revisiting Camden
Lol, just to make you sleep better: https://scottolewiler.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/eyelash...
Host a lightning fast blog for free using GitHub Actions and Cloudflare Workers
Distributed Work: Tools and Gear
I would like to note that libmemcached does expose key validation as a behavior. It’s off by default though, which I think it probably should not be. However I’m not sure about the performance impact in typical workloads — some people make quite large gets.
Chest X-Rays Pneumonia Detection Using Convolutional Neural Network
"Denial of encryption" is no different from "Denial of having password", and leads you straight into XKCD 538.

If the adversary does not belive you, their best bet is to keep torturing you, until they get their way.

What you want is "Proof of inability to decrypt" so that the adversary has nothing to gain by waterboarding you.

See also: https://papers.freebsd.org/2004/phk-gbde/
It has very nice Vim-like keyboard shortcuts, a good UI for setting up advanced filtering rules, it loads instantly (on my computer, at least; this has gotten much better recently), and text editing features like Smart Compose and the Googlified spellchecker beat everything else.

I can see why you might not like it if you're used to Outlook or Thunderbird, but it meets my needs perfectly. It also integrates with Google Keep, Tasks, and Calendar, which is nice.

(Some people seem to seriously underestimate how good Smart Compose is---it's learned all of my favorite combinations of words and I can basically write entire emails and documents by typing a few letters and then mashing the tab key to accept all of the autocompletions)
Ironically I was watching a talk on youtube yesterday by Richard Feldman of NoRedInk[0] that was basically explaining why and how they implemented Elm in production. The most interesting part of the talk to me was how he said it shaped their recruitment pipeline, going from needing recruiters to basically having it full and they can take their pick, and this mostly due to the fact that they were willing to use newer technology stacks. So the long and the short of it is I think you're right, this would affect retention and probably recruiting as well.

I'm a new developer looking for my first job and so I'm making side project to learn in the meantime and what I primarily want from a job is the ability to increase my skills, to get better and to improve, I feel like the kinds of places that are willing and able to experiment will not only have more of a learning culture but will attract others like that as well, so they are more attractive to me as a developer. I imagine this could be countered by things like proper mentor-ship programs or side project time like you've already implemented.

[0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5CYeZ2kEiOI
Scaling Logging: JSON’s Not Enough
I call this (BDD) blog-driven development. There is nothing inherently wrong with tech content posted online... the problem is when people don't put some critical thought into it and decide whether the solutions they see online actually match their current needs.
One more reminder to not let my kid go to the USA.
> if you're writing you're not coding

Do you code 16 hours every day? Or do you do other things with your time in addition to coding? It's possible to spend your "free time" writing about coding instead of writing code. Humans can do both well if they choose to.
They made business decisions that seemed rational at the time, to grow fast at the expense of good security.

It seems rational to create malware?
Nice to see this on here!

Also worth checking out the creator's $30 windturbine [1]

He also runs an active community on facebook around the designs [2]

[1] https://opensourcelowtech.org/wind_turbine.html
[2] https://www.facebook.com/groups/windturbinemakers/
A reliance on object orientation as a non-negotiable language requirement is intrinsically antithetical to efficiency for business software.

If a language supports what I would call “lightweight OO” - extremely low boiler plate, zero required OO constructs (purely optional), and language features that render the concept of dependency injection intrinsically obsolete (because mocking can be done purely through introspection at no cost), then that flavor of OO is well suited for business problems.

It has less to do with things like JVM or GC oddities, because those can be straightforwardly engineered around. It’s more about what non-negotiable commitments to specific patterns or strategies come along with the language choice.

Pure functional languages are the worst offenders in this area, which is why their benefits aren’t actually benefits and they are poorly suited for business software. Of the core “industry standard languages” Java would be the next worst offender.

Conversely, I think C# is an ecosystem that suffered the same limitations as Java but found ways to extend and reinvent that make it more attractive now, though still far behind Python, C and C++.