skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> endless stream of characters in it that sound like they're trying to be incredibly profound

i fell in love with this piece of art a decade ago.

then there was a five-year period during which I felt the same way about the film myself. i would have agreed with this statement.

but in this past year, attending meditation retreats and interrogating my metaphysics, my perspective shifted once more.

it’s very much been thesis, antithesis, synthesis.
Yes, it's probably unworkable in terms of getting away with it.
Water factor. Another fun thing I noticed is that my observed weight can fluctuate and rise a lot, even while my expected weight calculation expects a loss. I found that this discrepancy grows with the amount of carbohydrates in my diet (dessert, bread/pasta, potatoes, etc.). Eating these likely increases glycogen levels, which as I already mentioned briefly, acts as a sponge and soaks up water. I noticed that my weight can rise multiple pounds, but when I revert back to my typical low-carbohydrate pasketerianish diet these “fake” pounds evaporate in a matter of a few days. The final outcome are wild swings in my body weight depending mostly on how much candy I’ve succumbed to, or if I squeezed in some pizza at a party.

Can anyone point me to more info on this? Yes, I can google it, but the immediate results are things like this:

https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/320603

I would like to have something with a little more info about how this works at the molecular level or something.
Ask HN: Resources for building a monolith that is easy to break apart?
I’m looking to start working on a few side gig ideas I’ve had for a while now, and while I appreciate the benefits of event driven micro service architecture at work immensely, I’m also just trying to get a few MVPs up and running without investing a ton of time fiddling around with all the stuff that comes along with well done micro services.

That being said, I’ve also worked at enough places where some nightmare 5 year old monolith is at the core of the business and there just never seems to be enough time or buy-in from management to break it apart and clean it up, and I’d like to avoid making the same mistakes myself.

Obviously the usual good code philosophy stuff applies - SOLID and so on, but are there any good non-obvious tips or even resources (books, talks, blog posts, etc) that you guys know of which address the approach of writing a monolithic program you expect to eventually break up into well defined micro services?
"I'm a strong supporter of social justice! M.L.K. was always my hero. I even got into college with a great essay on what a beloved leader of the civil rights movement he was!

As I said: strong supported.

But, come to think of it, if you tried to come up with the tiniest, most insignificant, free-as-in-beer-no-tax-increase, I-would't-even-notice-if-it-just-happen, quantum measure of any actual effort, grace, gesture, incon-slightest-venience? No that's where I draw a line.

I'm all gung-ho for righting 400 years of injustice. But for some reason I'm suddenly really invited in jargon. You seem to invest a lot of emotions into these terms, which I find silly. I, on the other hand, am entirely objective and have in no way attached and cultural significance to these terms.

But I might have to ro a search-and-replace. And that's why I'm opposing this with far more effort than that search-and-replace would ever take,

Of course, if your objections had actual merit, I would behave differently.

But I've thought long and hard how it would feel to be black and see these words being used.

And please be informed that I have felt absolutely not threatened, belittled, or exploited in my little thought experiment. Not at all.

And if I (and all my white male friends) can't feel bad about these terms, than nobody can. Because we define reality, and even subjectivity. For everyone.

Go BLM!
LOL for real.
I will cry no tears for FB when they get what’s coming to them. Will be the MySpace of my kids time.(if it’s not already is)
No, it’s a custom solution.
HA is there in OSS now with their raft store.

I think you could’ve also done in the past if you used consul for vault’s storage.
This is one of the things I disliked about Nim. I spent a few weeks with it hoping I'd love it as much as Python. But there are quirks in the type system that seem rather baffling to me, and frankly, ugly. Like having to type integer constants with 23'i32 because 23 is an int and int is not compatible with int32 (nor is it compatible with in64!) There are typed integer constants in many stdlib sources too.

In the tutorial, the language looks quite nice, comparable to Python. But in production level code, there are {.pragmas.} in a lot of places and they are not just advice for the compiler that can be ignored: they are important keywords that don't pollute the identifier space.

Another beef I had is that slice ranges and for loops are closed intervals by default. This is contrary to both Python and C, and while there is a syntax a..<b to be open on the right, it seems like a bad decision to be different from C and Python by default. It reminded me of Julia arrays starting at 1 by default. I guess I can see that if your audience is Fortran programmers, but arrays haven't started at 1 in a new language for a long time afaik.

I wish Nim had a goal of being a typed, compiled Python. But I don't think that ever was a main goal and now it's sort of too late because the language has a very wide scope (my opinion) and has compatibility concerns with all of its previous design choices.
C++ Array Size
More than 250k deaths per year are due to medical error
I hate to say it but this SSD story has been plastered all over the news by the PR machine, mainly because the new consoles have no other inovations whatsoever...

These new SSD's are more of an upgrade then we've had in any console over multiple generations. Xbox One, Xbox 360, PS4 were all pretty standard "mini-PC" consoles. PS3 had a different architecture that didn't really pay off until much later in the console's life-cycle and still didn't have a huge impact, hence the PS4 dropping Cell for the PS4.
“The reality is Zoom operates in more than 80 countries and continues to expand, which requires compliance with local laws even as Zoom seeks to promote the open exchange of ideas.“

This kind of rationalization isn’t just a problem with Zoom, Apple does the same thing - blocking podcasts and other apps in the Chinese market (also the Taiwan flag emoji).

This is wrong.

What’s legal and what’s right are not the same thing, Zoom’s PR about the promotion of an “open exchange of ideas” is nonsense and both Zoom and the CCP know it.

Companies that work to suppress the rights of citizens are complicit in that suppression and its legality is irrelevant.

When Zoom is requested to send over names and videos of political dissidents to authoritarian leaders will they comply?

I’m sure those killed will be pleased to know Zoom was operating within the legal framework of their country.

Legality should be the bare minimum standard - and in countries with bad laws (Middle East, China) it shouldn’t even be that.
Well usually a dev team is not working in isolation. And a lot of the time input from one team is output to another.

There are ways to mitigate the “you are blocked by this team until they finish their stuff” organizational problem, for example api contract based dev, but fundamentally you’re still blocked finishing your stuff until someone finishes theirs.

And imagine if hundreds of those teams need to coordinate for a product lunch, you can’t really throw your hands in the air and just let it go to chance.

Or more precisely the companies that are trying “something” would usually outperform the companies that don’t.

And we’ve evolved a lot of ways to mitigate uncertainties. Scrum is all about that btw, make projects and estimations really (really) small so that any wrong estimations do not affect other teams for more than 2 sprints or something like it.

All the software companies that are more than “one team of devs” really do struggle with the fundamental uncertainty of it all, its just the ones that cope with it better are outperforming the ones that don’t. Its kinda fascinating to watch this whole thing evolve over the decades like a natural darwinian selection.
What I'm shocked about is that a group of senior leader at Zoom thought this was a good decision.

Maybe they thought they could get away with it and things would blow over?
Exactly.

That is what the original commenter meant. If there are Elons out there with no money, they could band together to go to a VC, but then the risk taking process is skewed, because the brains and brawn are distributed.
Pretty much what I speculated [1]. Chinese companies / companies with large Chinese footprints are going global, many are exploring ways to disassociate from Chinese influence as controversies crop up. It's an uphill battle, at least for some western markets. US will object the loudest and has the domestic alternatives to shift the balance.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23484028

Speculation: Chinese zoom users were required to switch to Chinese version of Zoom last September. There were probably mainland users using international version + VPN to participate in the event, probably some sort of local regulation that prevents users in CN from interacting with international meets, especially on no-no subjects. From 2nd link below:

>>Intensifying international tensions and the country’s upcoming 70th anniversary are cited as reasons for the block, according to Chinese media.

Some old articles:

Zoom suspends Chinese individuals users from hosting meetings due to ‘regulatory demand’
https://technode.com/2020/05/15/zoom-suspends-chinese-indivi...

China’s Zoom users switch to local version after blockage https://technode.com/2019/09/19/chinas-zoom-users-switch-to-...

China blocks US video-conferencing tool Zoom https://technode.com/2019/09/09/china-blocks-us-video-confer...
Conclusion (quote from the communication): "Calling a situation a serious problem that necessitates a larger win may be when the problem starts."

Leopold Kohr famously wrote "Whenever something is wrong, something is too big."
The thing is, this is the model how many US dotcoms wanted to operate in China, where Chinese legal requests would have no impact outside of China.

And another thing is that it has totally set off Chinese government. On one side, they are very unhappy that this completely works around the very much intended action to shut up their opposition's voice abroad, but on other side this precludes further action China can do while still formally claiming it follows legal process, and not claiming extraterritorial jurisdiction explicitly.

This is why they pushed out such de-jure compliant, but not de-facto incompliant Western companies with equally silly, passive aggressive tactics, like closing companies offices for months on end under pretext of fire safety violations.
they have a lot of staff in china proper right? I mean, it's likely like every other business trying to operate in china (including google) bow down to the government to get the money

what can you expect, just use open source
They were former employees of webex and may have taken a lot software design from that product.
Facebook fires employee who protested inaction on Trump posts
The linked-to "Part 1" includes the "myth" that his discussion is referring to, and so is much less misleading. However, personally, I'm not aware of anyone interested in this kind of thing who holds those myths to be true; it's very common knowledge that if you ingest any calories, or taste something sweet, etc, it will trigger the release of insulin. (However, I'm confident that you and the Part 1 author know your target audience, and these myths perhaps make perfect sense to address to them).

Likewise for his comments on glucagon, it does not "cancel" the effects of insulin, it rather has the opposite effect at the same time. Also, in a natural system (i.e. without intervention), secretion of insulin typically suppresses secretion of glucagon, with some rare exceptions. He's stating a supposed myth and then taking it down with another one.

The two papers cited for his interpretation of the role of glucagon are quite old, from 2001. There have been dozens of studies since then, confirming the role of glucagon in lipid metabolism, from many different perspectives.

Here is one published last year

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31068828/

"Collectively, emerging data support an essential role of glucagon for lipid metabolism."

There are dozens of others -- you can get a start on this reading by seeing who has cited the two papers he referred to.

I didn't understand that the main point was "debunking the idea that insulin is what makes us fat", since I don't know anyone who believes that. Chronic poor nutrition can make you fat, sure, and rising basal insulin levels tend to occur as a result of that, but saying "insulin is what makes us fat" sounds a lot like "yellow fingertips cause lung cancer". Nobody I know believes that is true. I have to keep up on these things for my work, in drug development.

Regarding "being 2 steps removed", yes, it seems like some "broken telephone" is going on.

Be well!
I must say coming from a medical perspective (1/2 doctor),it's always interesting hearing peoples views about metabolism. Although the opinions are "valid", the bottom line to this discussion is that we need to simply eat less sugar, with the whole fruit as a notable exception to this rule. Ideally, our diets should be low in sugar and high in fiber, consisting primarily of fruits, vegetables and whole grains. By paying attention to the sugar in prepackaged foods, adding less sugar to our tea or coffee, limiting desserts, and drinking water instead of sugary beverages, it’s easy to reduce our sugar consumption.

A change that I would want to see in the food industry is
traffic light labeling. This is popular in Europe and in limited use in the US. In this system, food and beverages are labeled by color, with green indicating the healthiest options, and yellow and red less healthy ones. In the UK, total sugar content is used to determine a beverage’s rating, placing juice on par with soda. These simple systems help consumers especially in the western world make better choices, even when they don’t have the time to peruse a nutrition facts label.
What interests me is how he was aware of technology trends, in addition to studying Buddhism and western religion. That awareness makes some of his observations relevant now.

I’ve found his essays & lectures interesting ever since my grandma gave me a copy of “The Book on the taboo against knowing who you are” a number of years ago. I like the “net” metaphor the most. I wish it were possible to go back and see the world as a whole, without being influenced by the labels we assign to things.

Interested to hear your impression after you read/listen to more...
Also, as absolutely reprehensible Apple's similar actions are, Zoom canceled _a US based account_ because of a Chinese request. It's one thing to be all "we comply with local laws", and another to enforce one country's geopolitical aspirations across international borders.

Like, I think companies should take a stand and both aren't acceptable, but Zoom takes new, additional steps here.
Hard disagree. Until extremely recently Zoom was a mature enterprise video conference solution. It's a B2B product that has suddenly exploded in general consumer usage, and suddenly product and commercial decisions made in that context are at odds with their new market.

They don't sell ads or your personal data, they're not interested in your private life, and their users are their customer. In other words, they lack the nefarious motive of the Facebooks of the world.

They're changing - rapidly - and I believe we can take their efforts to change at face value.
the offical blog post is at: https://blog.zoom.us/wordpress/2020/06/11/improving-our-poli...

Was it wrong to suspend accounts outside of mainland china?
Ultimately yes, but as they stress these were accounts that were holding meetings with mostly mainland chinese participants in it.

Any company operating globally needs to follow all the local laws where they operate in. Zoom's decision to develop technology to ban participants from specific countries joining meetings seems to be a good solution to this problem.
The difference is that Zoom does China’s censorship outside of Chinese borders.
FB has had solid revenue and net income for many years, so much that it’s one of the most valuable companies in the world. It’s not comparable to MySpace, and definitely isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.
I'm not sure I agree with Zoom's strategy here. Adtech can get away with compromising user's privacy because users aren't customers, they're eyeballs for advertisers. Zoom by contrast does primarily B2B sales, and calls do need to have some semblance of privacy. If a Western-based multinational corporation competes with a China-based company, Zoom suddenly looks a lot scarier.

People sometimes say nothing came of the Snowden revelations. I think they're wrong. When the NSA mentioned connections between datacenters were tapped, I believe FAANG immediately end-to-end encrypted links between datacenters, because otherwise your business secrets depend on how cozy you are with the government.

I'd even say it may have played a role in Google Fiber. I don't know about Google laying its own fiber because it wants to be nice or because it wants to roll in the mud with Comcast. But if Google was suspicious that ISPs could get Google data by tapping end users, then it makes sense to keep up the pressure, and less sense after getting everybody to use HTTPS. Timing seems to work out.

Might be a load of conspiracy hogwash, but it fits the laws of power.
WoW ruined community in many ways. They added the Dungeon Finder, so you no longer have to socialize to find a group; they added cross-server battlegrounds, cross-server Dungeon Finder, and even cross-server zones, so all your experiences are with random people you'll never see again; they made it trivial to travel from place to place, so you don't need to go on epic journeys that require banding together for survival. There used to be a role for "community elders"—experienced players who would show newbies the ropes, organize and lead dungeons and raids, etc. Those things still happen, but because they're no longer necessary, it's possible to get all the way to endgame raiding without making any friends (or even speaking to anyone). Since you don't need any community to play, toxic players can succeed—and even thrive—by being selfish and taking advantage of others. There's no social credit anymore.
Without the hashes an attacker's only way to find out the password for an account is to guess. They need to try logging into the account with a guessed password.

Maybe they have a very good guess, and it'll be right first time, more likely they need a few tries, even thousands or millions of tries to find the right password.

Every time they try, that's another opportunity to detect the attack, to stop them or slow them down. That makes the attack less likely to be ultimately successful. Even if the system doesn't go out of its way to try to do any of those things, chances are you just can't do millions of guesses this way in a reasonable time.

But if they have a password hash for the account they can check as many guesses as they can afford compute power against that hash. Millions per second on a cheap home PC is common, maybe it'd be as low as thousands per second with the best possible choice of password hash, tuned to be aggressively expensive. Much more and "authentication" becomes annoyingly expensive for the legitimate system, so it is never done in practice.

If the password to be guessed is ten random alphanumerics from a decent password manager then it doesn't matter, neither approach gets the attacker in. But while my passwords are like that, my mother's passwords certainly aren't and neither are those of most normal users.
Thanks for the formatting link, exactly what I was looking for to format code a bit better.

That actually helps me understand some F# code I wrote last weekend as well regarding construction of objects of a certain type...

I didn't know about the difference between nominal vs structural types but your explanataion makes sense. It's the subtle distinction between a type vs a type alias that you pointed out.

I personally use type aliases in typescript over interfaces, I think they're a more natural fit for JS than interfaces but that's a separate conversation :)

Language design is really interesting especially the choices designers make. I feel like they must all pull at least in part from each other and would be curious to explore any relationships but if its total coincidence that's pretty incredible too.
It’s showing $1.50/MB and $22/GB and it’s a network configuration that is AT&T except in areas that don’t have service it’ll allow regional carriers and TMo.

Hologram SIMs are price competitive here and allow devices to connect to the best network available without unfavorable network preference schemes.

Definitely difficult to parse.
Why would it change if you keep shoveling money (and dev resources) directly to Apple? They already know you'll stay regardless of their response.
> In his undelivered speech "How to Build a Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later," Dick recounts

according to the Wikipedia article for “flow my tears… “, The speech was never delivered

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_My_Tears,_the_Policeman_S...
I wasn't aware of the VSCode Ansible plugin, I've got to check that out.

Pyinfra examples he shows don't look that different from Ansible YAML. ("apt('nginx', update=True, present=True)")

I'm pretty happy with Ansible, with one exception: speed. I may play with Pyinfra, but I'm heavily invested in Ansible. But if Pyinfra is fast, I might try replacing our Fabric with it. I get pushback about how long Ansible takes for our deploys vs. Fabric.
Second worst. Paypal confiscating the money might be worse, or SWATting you would be worse.

Waiting 6 months is a nice hack, but how about the guy who has waited 18 months for $25k? Does he just need to stop pestering them for 6 months and voilà? Or is the rule different above $5k? Or outside the US? Or outside Europe?
The classic high availability setup for postgresql is to have standby instances, usually one, ready to become the new primary if the primary goes down.

https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/high-availability.ht...

I used CouchDB in a project because the high availability was much better on the paper, but I think postgresql would have been fine after all.

Good managed postgresql options with high availability are in many public clouds.