skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'd say this is putting the cart before the horse. You deliberately choose which fields and areas you work on, but once you've done that, you simply focus on delivering the most impact/value there. i.e. aim to add the most value to the people around you (the immediate team, surrounding teams, and the greater organization) and the society in general.

By making the moat-building as a goal, you risk diminishing your impact and distorting your long-term path, ironically putting you away from building a better moat.
It is useless to have a conversation with those who will not listen. It is useless to debate those who cannot change their mind. Fewer people, on both sides, are willing to listen, think, and fairly consider a viewpoint that doesn't match their own. As you say, trying to talk about stuff is (far too often) pointless and tedious.
Back a few years ago (2017 I think) another dev and I took a Spark based system that was taking 3+ days to do aggregate processing over HBase-stored data.

We switched to it to Parquet on HDFS and did some (ok, a lot...)performance tuning and exactly the same processing ended up at 6 seconds.

TL;DR: You really really need to understand how Spark does data procesisng.
i guess i forgot about the newlines case, and just had never seen anyone put spaces in like that without newlines, so figured it didn't exist. strange that it's even allowed.
Congress can make laws that directly affect said companies, hardly not "anything".
Most of the time, you can stick Nginx or HAProxy in front of it all, and terminate TLS there, with the last part on your interal network being HTTP.
I like Jesse more and more the longer he is around. Are you anon on here? Can you say anything about what he is like as a boss?
Amazon staffers took bribes, manipulated marketplace, leaked data, DOJ claims
It looks to me like it is finding nonsense words that are pronounceable to English speakers and then checking if that nonsense word is available. I assume a linguist programmer could create an algorithm to come up with pronounceable words.

Is there a word for a nonsense word that is pronounceable? A potential word?
That's really bad. Their marketing says upfront that they are designed for S3 API. If they don't strive for maximum compatibility, then their value prop goes out of the window. I was wondering if I should use minio as a compat layer to be able to use other tools that integrate with S3, what you pointed out probably saved me lots of problem investigation time on the future.
Turbo Pascal certainly had more users, but it was never "run anywhere".
Ask HN: What are your instruments for investment?
I am going to get my first salary so I was looking around for investment options. Do you have any advice for someone just starting out? How do you manage your investments? Any apps/services that stand out? Also, any resources for understanding index funds would be great. I know they are a basket of securities but I don't understand why they're traded on the stock market just like a stock. Because if they're traded on the stock market then they're prone to be affected by the forces that affect the stocks.
Ruby is a good little language, I used it quite a bit for time. Rails is a horror that I've run from whenever possible.
And your filters are broken too?
> Asemic writing is a wordless open semantic form of writing. The word asemic means “having no specific semantic content”. With the nonspecificity of asemic writing there comes a vacuum of meaning which is left for the reader to fill in and interpret.

Related to this I came to think of something that I found interesting a couple of days ago.

I was making music, and to add some voice to my melodies I began typed out a mixture of gibberish and actual sentences and I chopped them up and re-assembled them and gave them a pleasant sounding flow. Finally I threw some reverb on top and then I played with my keyboard to it.

When I listened to it, I found meaning in it, so then on my next session I wrote a dialog for the song between two people, and kept listening to it over the stuff I had made in the previously mentioned part of the process and tweaked the dialog.

And during all of this, I was finding a story that I don’t think I could have come up with if it wasn’t for this. And yet it was there, but it was in what I was hearing in the reassembled mish-mash of words and nonsense.

At one point I even laughed out loud to myself at the story that was coming together.

That’s pretty closely related to this asemic writing I think.
Not a Haskell programmer so I didn’t know about this issue, but to me this change is night and day better.
I'd recommend supporting Signal as a WhatsApp alternative. It's open source and has the best crypto.
I selected our oven specifically because of the sensible analogue controls (large knobs) for selecting the function and temperature.

https://www.fisherpaykel.com/au/cooking/ovens/contemporary-o...
Elois Ate Your Flying Car
The title makes it sound like China did something ominous, but when you read the article it seems like the operators miscalculated the weather and were sunk by a tropical storm.
This is an important point. It reminds me of pyramid schemes (essential oils etc.) which can be found among the affluent.

These conspiracies don’t start with much, but if one gains a bit of traction there’s suddenly a bunch of “influencers” peddling it for more influence (fuck society, I need those subs and likes!... right?). More influence, more ad dollars. Next thing you know a 4chan meme is political propaganda on the national stage.

I really don’t think this is hard to follow. Anyone who’s been in tech or marketing for a while either knows this, or they’re incentivized to pretend they don’t.
On one hand, I think there is certainly a perspective in this doc that shows where critical views are needed around the consequences of certain business models coming from big tech. On the other hand, it seems to attribute a lot of the recent political divide to the rise of social networks without considering that a lot of these changes happened alongside the wake of the 2008 economic collapse, which almost certainly has contributed a lot to this political division. The suggestion that things were good before these social networks permeated people's lives overlooks a much longer narrative of wealth inequality in the West, and particularly in the US issues with housing, jobs, and the education ssystem. In some ways, the social dilemma is the ultimate #firstworldproblem of our time.
To appease the cicadas.
Thanks for the reminder -- I have an unassembled LX Mini kit in my closet that I should really build.

I was fortunate enough to meet Siegfried at one of his listening sessions about a year before he passed away, and we had a fun conversation about physics and electronics. Very nice man, with the right mix of formal (with his super nice diagrams) and informal (with his scrappy, clever, practical designs).
I loved them and still eat them occasionally even though I know they're bad for me. I was a latchkey kid and microwave meals were pretty easy for my mom to get me.
I use uMatrix with very restrictive default settings. These[0]: https://smichel.me/hn/umatrix-global.png

When a page doesn't work, and I care enough to un-break it, I will first try enabling just js. If that doesn't work, I'll add XHRs, too.

So, I can say with confidence that there are a good deal of sites that fall into both camps. I cannot say the ratio with confidence, but there are enough sites that work enough with just js that I choose not to enable XHRs. Here are a few examples:

- Kotlin documentation gets collapsing menus and nicer code formatting: https://kotlinlang.org/docs/reference/visibility-modifiers.h...

- This person's blog gets inline/popup footnotes and, er, a functional "hard mode" (top right): https://mango.pdf.zone/finding-former-australian-prime-minis...

- https://represent.us/ renders about halfway without js.

The final example is the most relevant to this conversation, I think. Especially, there is a phenomenon, common enough that I've noticed it as a pattern of sites that display images with js (and sometimes content), and don't require XHRs to do so.

----------

Looking through my history to find these examples, two things become clear (about the sites I visit; I don't claim my browsing is representative):

1. Regardless of whether they also need XHRs, sites that require JS fall overwhelmingly into one of two categories: either I use them regularly and they're already on my saved whitelist (eg, YouTube), or I decide that I didn't care enough about them to bother enabling javascript

2. Yes, you're right; most sites that require js, also require XHRs. However, if we limit ourselves to the subset of sites above that I haven't whitelisted and don't want to walk away from — ie, the ones where I'm actually fiddling with uMatrix — it's somewhere around 50%.

In conclusion, I think the functionality is useful and should not be axed, but it's probably a also good idea to have a simplified mode like you suggest: combining js, xhr, and other into one column. Maybe also removes the "cookies" column — most browsers have built-in preferences for those; 3rd party cookies almost never have to be unblocked; and I don't know (m)any people besides me who block 1st party cookies by default.

[0]: Here's what that looks like when actually applied to the page. The keen observer will note that scripts are only temporarily enabled (I do this only when I want to use the collapse functionality). This (enable it when I want it) is a common browsing pattern of mine on sites that do progressive enhancement. https://smichel.me/hn/umatrix-hn.png
Flour Fixated
Agreed. But I'm putting those in the 0.1% bucket! :)
The cost of setting a few command line args? They're not really obscure or unstable, just different depending on the GC you use. Turning on ZGC and setting the right options is like 4 command line flags. It's very easy, the reason it's not frequently done is that nobody reads documentation and it's not the default.

Go's approach of minimal knobs leads to unfixable problems in production. Java gives more options to tune GC for your use case
I will say that my experience in industry after academia, I feel a lot more personal satisfaction (bigger paychecks and frequency of promotions are probably a big part), but a sense of faster progress.

That said, the success criteria for solutions to problems is different. In academia, my analysis needed to be irrefutable. In industry I have often felt in different companies that whatever the sales team can push is good enough to move on. I do sometimes wonder how much of what we have given to the world is just flat wrong, because we weren't validating with the same seriousness.

Tangential topic: I'd prefer a synonym to your 'violent' agreement. I appreciate your desire to emphasize your support, but I think we can do with less violence and brutality in discussion overall. Maybe 'vehement' or 'passionate'?
Have you looked at Crystal?

https://crystal-lang.org/
Not gonna lie, fish sticks are a guilty pleasure of mine. :)
Great article. If you're seeing a blank page like I was, archive can fix it:

https://archive.is/DygR7
Not sure what you mean by that.

Are you talking about the host OS and the fact that Turbo Pascal was Windows only, as opposed to Pascal UCSD which was a VM?
That's an interesting writing style.
I think about dedicating myself to one service and main technology stack, and that just sounds dandy. The time to fix all of the bugs, incrementally improve it. Be in charge of its feature list...
One of biggest deterrence for me to working in US is a prospect of becoming a US taxpayer for life upon touching a US bank account, or a US originating income source.
I never really understood this.

You still program with types when hacking out a small project with NodeJS. How does moving type errors from compile time to run time help you move faster? It always made me move slower.

Honest question.
I loathe touch controls. We had them on our last stove and our cats would repeatedly walk across them.

They had a lock button, but every now and then one of their paws would stand long enough on the lock/unlock touch control to activate the entire panel.

We resorted to flipping the breaker any time we left
the house. Guess none of those engineers had a cat.
I recently started using Sinatra for side projects and it’s an absolute pleasure. It’s simple and reliable. I think it should get a lot more recognition.
St Helena laws for inhabitants 1672
The H1B makes it more difficult to change jobs or negotiate salary. Any interruption to employment is a huge risk to staying in the country. Thus those employees are more likely to accept lower offers and stay in those jobs longer.

E.g. a citizen can decline an offer in order to negotiate it up, but if the clock is ticking on your h1b, then you wouldn't want to get called on that bluff.

The limitations don't seem to dissuade H1b applicants, so companies like that they have more control over those employees without decreasing total supply.
Will Kraken provide bitcoin savings accounts? I'm thinking something where you deposit some BTC, it gets loaned out for several months to a year (and you're not allowed to withdraw during that time), and you get paid an interest rate denominated in BTC. Would be nice to get a positive real rate given the 21M supply cap.
I was intrigued by it for a while. I can remember the jokes from years ago that it should be renamed the Rails programming language. I find it a shame when an otherwise interesting language gets pigeonholed into single framework.
I'm imagining it being pretty easy to track down the dude who keeps buying things with diamonds.
As much as I love this advice, reality is stark different from this. End of the day, you're judged by how accurately could you solve some random leetcode problem.
Doesn’t interest me very much. I chased the latest in the 90’s and early OO’s. But these days I value consistency. WiFi is not something I think about if I can avoid it. I would rather spend the effort doing what I am wanting to do and tech is rarely the bottle neck and when it is going from one old technology to a slightly less old one is inevitably enough.

To put it another way technology pitched as future proof is always the fastest to go obsolete. And Linux on my router never will.
I think there's a lot of burnout in the JS ecosystem, and many are looking for the efficiency of Rails. However, I'm not certain if Ruby on its own is gaining more of a foothold. For a few years it looked like you'd seen more Ruby generalists with tools like Chef and Puppet, but I think Docker has taken a lot of wind out of those sails.
Read Steve Yegge's Blog.
Looking up Bennie Schriever really took me down the rabbit hole. Quite a life he lived. Incredible to think what he was able to lead.
a phd in physics can land you a job on a quant team at a bank or hedge fund or prop trading firm. another option could be "data scientist" roles (in a tech company or other industry). 'machine learning' roles also heavily favor someone with masters/phd.

for banks/hedge funds/etc roles, look at the book "Capital Markets for Quantitative Professionals" to get up to speed on background knowledge.
I have no idea why this sale wasn't locked down to existing customers with long standing history only.
I don't want my country to have public beatings like Singapore
Simply, your TV doesn't turn back on and tell you that all your friends are watching a certain show. When you turn your TV off, it is off.
"have you ever thought twice about WeChat posts and communications, whether they'll be deemed "acceptable" to censors?"

Many Chinese do indeed think about this. I've heard people quite literally say, "Don't put that in the chat, we don't want trouble". I've seen group chats get blocked for saying the "wrong" thing.

I also hate to see the US essentially giving credence to China's approach of blocking things by following suit. The US could take the high road (there are a number of legal approaches that would help and still be "American" in spirit) but has chosen to take the bait instead.
It absolutely was Steve Jobs's fault, although we're talking about the pre-NeXT Steve Jobs the Grey rather than the revenant Steve Jobs the White.

Around the time Walter was working on Datalight C, I was working at a computer game company in Austin that most geeks over the age of about 35 have heard of. All decisions of note at this well-regarded company were made by a figure of equal repute, someone with the tech chops of one Steve and the charisma of the other. This guy wasn't a Mac user himself, but there were a few Macs in use around the office, and he fell for the WIMP paradigm hard.

The games in the series he was known for were historically keyboard-driven, but the one we were working on at the time, the sixth, was the first to be developed on the PC rather than the Apple II and also the first to feature a GUI. So everything was icon-based whether it needed to be or not, because "that's how the Mac does it." Hieroglyphics were hot again, who could've seen it coming? Don't complain, just work like an Egyptian.

At the time this flavor of Kool-Aid was being consumed all over the place, from game companies to office/productivity software companies, and it unquestionably all went back to Jobs, or more accurately the cues Jobs took from PARC. We weren't alone in being ordered by management to Think Different(tm) by ripping off some guys in Cupertino.
Agreed. On a 1080TI, I'm 100% turned off by this launch.
Waiting to see what AMD will bring, and/or if things shape up by around then.
I'd have sworn this was written by a machine, and not a human.
Allow me to adjust my shock levels that the bank of choice among Mexican drug cartels is caught enabling more fraud with Ponzi schemes.

I do wonder the true scale of the ineptitude and corrupt nature of their fraud department is.
Should I apply to YC if not ready just to show progress for next time I apply?
My recent Samsung washer and dryer units have wifi options because I couldn't find any local available models without, but I'm also confused what the real use case is for it.

If I'm home to deal with them, I can hear them sing. Yes, they play cute little songs when they complete their loads. If I'm not home, it makes no difference to me whatsoever if my dryer can send me artisanally curated messages about the glorious dryness of my garments.

I could see a use case if you had some sort of home SCADA controller that was locally networked and could operate a vent fan based on appliances being in operation or tell your fridge and HVAC to switch to power-saving modes based on the local energy market's posted power prices. But that's invariably not what corporate interests are offering because their incentives are so totally divorced from that of the end users.
Ask HN: Wayback Machine Web Archive
I'm seeing many sites aren't getting indexed for months - small business sites type thing. Ive been seeing this quite commonly for a while. Just the sites I look at or is this a wider thing?

http://prntscr.com/ukuask
The two words around my hyphen are pretty simple, so word-hyphen-word is not that hard to remember.
Show HN: Track Cassette Recording
Ask HN: What do you do while waiting for builds?
I gotta disagree with the "just marry an American" advice; sure, it makes some things easier, but due to a paperwork mistake in 1979 or so my mother-in-law was almost deported two years ago after being married to an American and living in the US for almost forty years (the mistake was a date on a form that no one had looked at for those forty years...). Green card was still quite slow for my dad even though he married a citizen....
It isn't "just kerosene".

It it MOSTLY kerosene, but as usual it's the last 1% that kills you - various additives to prevent things like icing and corrosion, and benzene and various napthas.
Guess what. I have the same fucking condition and I'm delighted. It's gotten so bad that I don't eat in cafeterias, don't eat with my roommates and very very rarely in restauranrs. I'm still delighted to see that someone actually notices and that so many people have now been exposed to its existence.
Thanks, finally someone agree with my observation. :-) I got deduction point for saying that statement. For me, it is not right to use 100x speed increase for eye candy feature or using bloated Javascript libraries.
This is what happens when browsers stop being user agents and start being publisher agents. Its why movie studios didnt used to be allowed to own movie theaters. The website shouldnt even have any way of knowing how it's content is being viewed by the user.
> that famous South Park episode about Kanye misinterpreting them as "fish dicks"

It was the other way around in that episode. Kanye was not understanding the joke, and people kept teasing him for it, until finally he decided to accept his destiny as he saw it from what everyone was saying and he moved into the sea to live with the fishes.

Anyway :p

> but who does eat them? Is it a geographical thing, or class thing?

Fish sticks are definitely popular here in Norway, and you can find them in pretty much every grocery store, in the frozen food department.
I've been pondering similar issues re Rust a lot lately too. Mainly that it's very safe and fast, but that is offset by how difficult it is to use.

I recently had an idea: What if i made a subset of Swift and a transpiler that outputs simple C? The C output would make it a great contender for integrations with existing code in the 'systems programming' genre.

Swift is such a lovely language, far simpler than Rust, but being tied to apple's ecosystem and LLVM makes it difficult to use for many of these areas.

This would also be great for embedded, which is something i'm also passionate about.

End result would be: productive + simple + safe language, great for systems/embedded IoT stuff.

Anyway i've submitted the idea for an R&D grant, we'll see if it goes anywhere. Would love to hear people's thoughts.
Simon's [entire post](https://github.com/ghc-proposals/ghc-proposals/pull/282#issu...) that the parent comment quotes from is worth a read, as an example of a high concentration of sanity.
I don’t really think it’s so much that Ruby has declined in popularity (although Rails has), but that Python has exploded as it moved from Academia into data science and ML which are really big right now.

Ruby only ever has one big ecosystem (web development), whereas Python has expanded into several.

But Ruby isn’t going anywhere, so no need to be sad. It’s still a joyful scripting language, and its community is alive and well :)
Not OP, but one good reason to do that is to reduce probability and frequency of collision with other periodically running jobs.

Let's say you run your job on the hour, and you have a job running every 4h and another every 24h, without planning, because 4 divides 24, you have one in four chance of having them collide and having the 24h job running at the same time than the 4h job.
If you add more 4h jobs, the probability that one of those 4h jobs collide each time with the 24h job increases.

The more jobs you have, the higher the probability that some will be divisors of others.

Using prime number for scheduling reduce the probability at a given time that those jobs collides. If you create a job every 5h and another every 23h, the 23h will collide with the 5h job every 115h. PPCM(5, 23) = 115.

Interestingly, this technique is used in nature by cicadas who developed long, prime-numbered, periodical life cycles to avoid gaining a predator that can sync up with the cicadas[0].

[0] https://www.cicadamania.com/cicadas/cicadas-and-prime-number...
I cannot agree more. I also had the pleasure of meeting him at his home in Corte Madera. After an hour of conversation and listening, of course I was really impressed with his creations, but during just a moment, I saw a glimpse of why he was really sharing his living room with a total stranger: it wasn't about the speakers or the tech. It was about music. He ultimately wanted to share his love of music.
The Unbearable Loneliness of Being Right on the Internet with CD (2017)