skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I found this post to be a great complement to my hobby of collecting/documenting all the feature flags used in the Windows operating system for the past three years. [1] It's proven to be a reliable source of what's to come in future builds of Windows, sometimes to the chagrin of teams unfamiliar with the public facing artifacts generated by their experimentation <grin>.

Windows (what ships inbox, that is), as of last week (Sep 14) [2], has roughly 2500 feature flags. Some are permanently jammed into the on position, some off position, and the rest are configurable by its experimentation frameworks and hackers. (Apps are a separate beast, have their own experimentation tooling, their own flags, etc.)

I don't understand why the jammed-on features still exist in the OS. I'd imagine there will (eventually?) be a measurable impact to leaving all this trash behind. I suspect, like the author noted, it's non-zero risk work that no one wants to complete.

[1] https://github.com/riverar/mach2/tree/master/features

[2] https://github.com/riverar/mach2/blob/master/features/20215....
Publishing them most certainly is (more free press technically)
Why would you think they don't have an issue with both?
> Death by Flags

This is something I have spoken[1] (slides[2]) and written about quite a lot - and my solution has usually been to add a monitoring system to any feature flag system used.

If a flag hasn't changed state in a period of time, or hasn't been queried in a period of time, then an issue is filed against the relevant repositories. The time period is different based on teams and services themselves, and there are also exclusions for flags which should be kept around.

I'd like to improve the system to do something like an automatic PR to remove a flag, but at this point, it seems more effort than it's worth.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZgQBSr36p8

[2]: https://andydote.co.uk/presentations/index.html?feature-togg...
Not sure this is the best place to belabor ethics, but the reason it may seem someone has more empathy for animals is because animals are fully helpless to understand what's being imposed upon them, and they are always in an enslaved relationship with us.

Free human adults may be the victim of a circumstance that has them shambling up coconut trees, but they have an end to end understanding of why they're doing it, and they still have a domain of choice that's always broader than that of any animal and the enslaved.

I don't think too many people who are against animal labor are for human slavery. Free humans who get to tacitly choose which crappy job to do in their squalor still much more power than the enslaved. We can even reach self-actualization as long as we are given the illusion of free choice among bad options. Rescuing lower sentience from slavery comes before rescuing free humans from crappy choices, imo.
Solid article. I've worked with complex feature flags / gating systems for years at multiple large internet companies and have largely come to the same conclusions.

That feature flags let one version of the software run in a combinatorial number of modes is both their superpower and kryptonite. Use them wisely and clean them up as soon as possible.

One problem I've seen happen over and over again is when people pile feature flags on top of feature flags. With the systems I've used, all the flags can be independently enabled by the gating service, but that doesn't mean that every combination of flags is a valid state for the program to run in. If your system will break if flag A is active while flag B is not, then it's worth the effort to write an abstraction that checks both flags and fails to a valid state.
> Well most people use one of a few big email providers, not small individual mail servers run by tech-savvy friends or family.

That's just because installing and maintaining your own email server is extremely complicated [1]. Lots of people maintained their own Kazaa/Limewire servers for their friends (and the bigger piracy community) back in the day, because it was as simple as double clicking setup.exe and installing the software, and then configuring it.

Email does require higher reliability than Limewire. But I imagine if someone made a 100$ box that I could plug into my router, and so could 3 of my friends, and that had an email server installed on it or could be easily by clicking a installation file, and the 3 could act in concert to provide email services to the 50 people, maybe you would see more uptake.

[1] I am a tech-savy user who has been looking for a simple solution for a decade now.
Ha! One of my preferred games. There is a fun anecdote coming from another of my fav games, Diablo 1:

https://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/268507/20_years_later_Da...

> “We were very excited, so we signed a contract to do Diablo,” remembers Brevik. The studio then had to figure out what, exactly, this turn-based isometric game it had been thinking about for so long would actually look like -- and how it would be angled and rendered on-screen. “This was not easy back then...I kind of took a screengrab of X-Com, and we just took that, and put it right into Diablo,” said Brevik. “So the actual tile-square basis -- the same shape and size -- is exactly the same in X-Com and Diablo.” So in a sense, says Brevik, the look and technology of Diablo is all based directly on a screenshot of X-Com.

So, x-com heavily influenced Diablo. In retrospect it makes sense - X-com tile based world, and lightning was pretty unique.
Nobody forces you to use it, there are a lot of alternatives out there.

But I have to admit that Spring Boot combined with Kotlin is the most productive development environment I have ever worked in. I am not surprised it is so popular among Java devs.
Things in the US seems absurd from an outsider perspective due to ideological beliefs.

On the same month, you can read two articles coming from the US:

1) Jeff Bezos Becomes The First Person Ever Worth $200 Billion
2) Almost 90 percent of NYC bars and restaurants couldn’t pay August rent

It doesn't take much thinking to conclude that there is something messed up with resource/capital allocation in this economy. But there are fanatic capitalist in the US with a blind/irrational faith in the "invisible hand" that is as dogmatic as praying for Zeus in greek mythology.

Even worst, they can't even get their population to wear masks like many other countries to at least slow down the transmission, mainly due to another set of extreme dogmas and tribalism.

It seems that superpowers can't help but get decayed from inside. With time and enough arrogance, world power societies tend sink in their own delusion when the rest of world pragmatically catch up and pass them by.
> The point of a lockdown is to stop people who think like you from hurting others.

So is the point of banning alcohol, unprotected sex, smoking, and junk food.

Drunk people can fight me and kill me while drunk driving.

Unprotected sex may be more pleasurable but if we want to stop hurting others then condoms must be mandatory.

Smoking is an easy one, I can smell that from like 30 feet away. It's clearly getting into my lungs. Ban it completely.

It's been repeatedly shown that obesity is a social disease. What foods would be banned in your area of the country?

I'm having a good Sunday, enjoy this with me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eXWhbUUE4ko

Note that I'm a leftie and I love the video so I hope you and others can get over them poking fun at Elizabeth

This is about choice. Stop the restrictions and let the people choose.
Don't tax the high income bracket, tax the rentier bracket.
Very interesting article, including the linked first part. Especially his point in the first part that

> It turns out that in some categories, a machine learning algorithm significantly responsive and accurate can pierce the veil of cultural ignorance. Today, sometimes culture can be abstracted.

Which now makes me think about where algorithms are culture dependent and where not. Low level algorithms like quicksort definitely are not, but as we get "higher up" towards algorithms which work with user feedback …
This seems like an unusual use case. Surely a recommendation system should try to find content that matches the users interests. I'm not sure why anyone would want a recommendation system that looks for age/gender/race as that seems fairly irrelevant to interesting content.
Then you’ll need this robot to get the drone out of the tree..
Ask HN: What is the modern way to run your home network?
I want to get away from the default ISP router and have heard good things about UniFi (mostly from Troy Hunt). We have a fairly normal UK house but I splurged on fibre optic hook up as lockdown hit

What advice do you have ?
I'm guessing that while there is a shortage, coconuts are so low value that no one will pay them more. So they tend to be hard to find but paid poorly.
Feds issue emergency order for agencies to patch critical Windows flaw
This is great. Tempted to try this on a 4011 with the 10G SFP+ port. Mikrotik makes some awesome equipment for the price.
To use cyberpunk as an example because it's one of my favorite genres, I wonder how many of the people who buy Cyberpunk2077 will have ever even heard of Shadowrun Dragonfall by Harebrained Schemes, or Technobabylon by Wadjet Eye Games. I'm pretty sure that while CP2077 has a vastly larger budget for art, code and Keanu Reeves, it won't even come close to these games in terms of narrative, atmosphere etc.
Don't. Just don't. Ever. Rely. On Google. For Anything.
Large amounts of government money go towards discretionary transfers like medicare, medicaid, social security, SNAP, etc. Is your claim that you think vast amounts of that money don't get to where they're supposed to go?

I think most of these programs are characterized by extremely low administration costs as a percentage of budget.
Some Mikrotik devices (not the RB3011 unfortunately) support metarouter which allows you to run additional RouterOS or Linux instances as virtual machines[0].

[0] https://wiki.mikrotik.com/wiki/Manual:Metarouter
"Making a PDF" includes writing a book, and "a video" is actually a 100 minute film. $210k is a exceptionally good return for that work but the title massively understates the amount of effort required (approx 170 hours if you believe the post; that seems very low to me).
Google actually does this... They tend to announce deprecations in batches.
Totally agree! I played it endless times when I was young, and I was able to complete it (by destroying the mars base) only recently playing on dosbox!

The recent reboot is just a tactical console game. It was fun for a while but I get bored quickly.

Also X-Com Apocalypse is not on par with the original, but still quite enjoyable with the realtime combat mode.
Definitely. Selling dreams about a better life and tickets to some colony has proved to be a reliable way of handling it. Time will tell.
This, weeb games for the win.
Did you have to do much support?
Many restaurants are actually very inefficient food producers, and specialize in providing a nice setting for a date or other dining experience. Other restaurants specialize in providing a place for people to hang out with colleagues after work, or a place for recreational sports teams to have a meal after the game. These business models have been destroyed, and nobody will pay for the 'services' which cannot be delivered.
It creates a cascading effect. There's an insane debt bubble and a lot of that debt will lose rating, so many investors will drop it creating a feedback loop. Dumb money have to drop it because of their mandate and/or rules, even if this is bad for their other assets (i.e. more debt they hold).

This would be the dumbest idea right now. I hope government agencies worldwide can resist the attack from media.

[Don't get me wrong, fuck banks, evil hedge funds, and speculative landlords, but they are barely going to be hit by something like this.]
Ok, I am extremely sorry that I didn't check whether it was posted before.

Also, I am impressed with your hard working and administration of this site.
The obvious follow up experiment is to have the subjects read silently first, then read aloud.

(I've also found I can readily manipulate algebraic symbols without having any idea of how they should be pronounced. splodge?)

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/67/bc/35/67bc35746db0758b5ab4...
Ask HN: Best payment gateway for small transactions?
I have a web app that offers a simple service for a one time fee of $0.99. Payment fees are killing me right now as almost 50% of the revenue is going to fees.

I pay $100/month + 3%/transaction + $0.3/transaction.

All the gateways I looked at seem to have a relatively similar fee structure. Because of the low price of the service the $0.3 fee is really huge.

I don't need a store or subscription billing or anything fancy, I just want the customer to pay and I get a ping on an webhook. I really can't increase the product price either. It's a small impulse purchase, making it more expensive would completely remove any appeal.

I looked at:

- Stripe

- Podia

- Gumroad

- Mollie

Any other suggestions? Thank you very much.
We have more than enough uranium to power everything we need for many many years without asking people to restrict power consumption. I apologize for bringing this topic again, I cannot calmly read these dead end environmentalists ideas.
I'm fine with 1 million.

One million is 99.7% of the USA.

Multiple studies have shown that the fatality rate is about .3%.
And the day/night cycle!

Sometimes I waited for the day to start a mission, even if this could means that the aliens could escape
> the recommendation at places like Google is to rollback first and investigate the problem later

I always have the same question regarding this advice: how are you supposed to handle data corruption?

When a buggy new version creates lasting problems in the persistent data, reverting to the last known good version may not fix the problem as the correct code now has to deal with incorrect data, which lead to a different, possibly incorrect behavior compared to before the buggy deployment.

Reverting the data itself is often not possible as you usually can’t say to your customers « woops, we deleted all of your bank transactions / incoming emails for the last two weeks because of a rollback on our side ».

So in my experience you still have to roll forward in a lot of cases, to fix both the code and data together.

How do you guys handle that in practice?
businesses*.
I stopped reading when he started talking about using a credit card instead of Apple Pay. Lost me on the benefits of not needing to charge his card and how nice it is to have the plastic in his hand. Not only would I rather have the protections Apple Pay offers but if you want to disconnect that badly just use cash. Heck, stop carrying a phone.

Richard Stallman even talks about how cell phones are surveillance devices: https://stallman.org/rms-lifestyle.html

He’s not wrong.

Most people don’t know to care and many people who know don’t care. Welcome to 1984 in 2020.
One of my old professors where famous enough that cpu manufacturers sent him PCs to check against his open source library. We have been fed the “you won’t be better than the compiler focus on the algorithm” to death by the internet at that time.

Seeing him combine his assembly language/c knowhow AND algos made me realize that with FOCUSED experience you can do amazing things.

Then again when I told him my favorite language implementation , Haskell/GHC, was using his library he asked: what is Haskell?

Focused training is everything. You can’t be good at everything but you can be great at something.
I evaluated a few libraries, but ended up using iced [0]. I'm writing a short blog post with my findings (will hopefully post it on HN)

[0] https://github.com/hecrj/iced
Why not have functionality to check to see if the backups are readable? Instead of forcing users to spin up a vm which most can’t, and do testing etc. seems like a simple ask. Most credible backup solutions do this.
I see. So I think I won't be giving it a shot too, at least for now. Let's see where Nova evolves, if it does. If it becomes some obscure hipster tool where developers with some niche need use, I'll leave it alone. If the baby of Xcode and Vscode grows up to be a wonderful, mature IDE, sure, I'll give it a try.

Thank you for your detailed review, greatly appreciated!
Forgiven rents don't pay the mortgage.
Actually your argument is not sound as the person you are replying to already pointed out in a previous response to you that you seem to have missed. You actually contradicted yourself. Note:

"There were 80 cases confirmed traced to bars and restaurants."

"[80] of the infections came from bars and restaurants."

Those two statements are not the same as each other - the first, from the authorities, is true, the second, from you, is almost certainly not true unless every single infection from a bar or restaurant was actually traced.
Make it a command line flag ;)
Have you considered the possibility that this behaviour is not a bug but rather a feature?
Wow, I found that a very powerful and persuasive article. One question is why don't they show the stress index from 1870-1940? Stress obviously went up during the civil war, but was there relief after? Stress prob. went down in the 1920s but up by 1930.
Pro tip to FB: arguments that would make a good case in a US court are probably going to be felt very differently in Europe.

In this case what FB is saying to regulators is: EU regulations are working.
But what about the overlap? And tax the rentier bracket's what?

The reality is that that professional/managerial bracket has a large proportion of both the wealth and income in America, just because there are so many compared to the extremely wealthy large-scale owner class.
The F-15 to this day has a nearly unrivaled kill-to-loss ratio (100+:0), and with the upcoming F-15EX variant will be a backbone of US air combat power for decades. I'd rate it as a superlative engineering program and aviation platform.
For coconuts, you can't solve just harvesting alone. It need to be harvested right. Coconut trees has a comparable life span to a human. If it is not harvested correctly, which including only picking ripe coconut, cleaning the top etc. The farmer will loose years of investment due to one action.
What is different between rollback and manual data fixing or roll forward and manual data fixing? Well, rollback is usually faster and safer.

In some cases you do not have data corruption and can roll back safely. If not, you can probably be quicker to fix the data than find the solution for the underlining problem.
Even monkeys are gonna be layed off...
The way you think markets work don't always apply to land. Land (distinct from buildings) is one of the few resources for which ownership without utilization or improvement is not only profitable but sometimes optimal.
> what does that mean? Can it be reduced to a vector of scalar values?

No, it certainly doesn't mean that "your performance was [7.23541 8.1241 34.412515 .52632 995.154]". It means "you did good/ you did very good/ you need improvement", with some details like "<these things> you really handled well and I appreciate it; maybe you can work a bit on <this area> though". I definitely agree one shouldn't stack-rank people - especially in a good team (it's entirely possible, desirable even, that everybody did a great job)
When 1/3 of NYC gets foreclosed the new tenants will swarm to rent the places at a discount and reopen the cafes and everything else as soon as they're allowed to operate.
I was thinking spraying shotcrete. Not an engineer. Book knowledge etc.

Elon Musk has the boring tunnels...so surely we have the ability...it seems to be such a waste to build up when we can dig down.
I'm still wondering what makes Waf worse in your opinion, if it wasn't performance or custom code required.
Why not run ads?

Not trying to say you should just interested in your motivation :)
Activists Are Protesting Against Palantir Across the Country This Week
Well SPA can do route rewrites if it's taken care of properly (Vue Router makes this easy). I'm always pushing for it on my projects for usability and link sharing. There's no reason to not have it.
I am not sure about NYC, but commercial property taxes are usually very high, and borne by the tenants; this may be a factor in the employers moving out.
There are chips out there already, aren't there?

Yes, those are what you'd expect to find in the white box systems I mentioned, and most branded off-the-shelf switch products for that matter. But if that's what you need, I'm not sure what the advantage is to building your own hardware instead of buying one of the ready-made options. It seems like you'd need to have quite eccentric requirements before it was worth seriously considering designing and building a whole system of your own instead.
Yes, take the original situation for example. The coconut harvester and the person employing him perceive the work to be of very low value.

As such, the actually valuable work with high danger, which should've been paid appropriately is significantly underpaid.

/edit: maybe its easier to relate in the context of the tech industry... while it has significantly less impact on the employees live its prevalent there as well, and in both directions.

fresh graduates which get less then a third of a full employee while still producing basically the same value to the employer. (this obviously depends on the graduate, but surely everyone knows that people at the start of their career tend to be significantly underpaid). both the graduate and the employer just don't perceive their work to be as valuable.

its just as easy to find the pendulum swinging in the other direction as well... people which might even effectively sabotage the work of others while still looking perfect to the person paying the bill, essentially increasing their perceived value to the person paying the bill while effectively reducing the actual throughput/quality.
It's basically impossible to spin something that has user data out of Google. To my knowledge, it's never happened.

It's because the user data is all protected under googles privacy policies, and you wouldn't be able to migrate that data to a third party without user consent. The process of asking for consent would harm Google's reputation more than the value of the spun out business. The PR damage is less by just shutting down.
Please, please don't use "you stopped responding, so I'm right". It is one of the most infuriating (and also pretty insulting) things you could have said. People stop responding because they have better things to do with their time, and/or because they know an interaction is bad for them or for the other person (e.g. is enraging them), and/or because they took a while to work out that they were arguing with someone who cannot change their mind, and/or even because they can't face being wrong. There are dozens of reasons for refusing to engage in a pointless and enraging discussion.
They will have to learn fundamentals on your dime. How is that a better choice than an older individual that already knows this shit and on top of that "in almost no time" is capable of learning too, you know.
Oh the banks are 100% in the wrong as they are fully aware what’s happening.