skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"What's a use case where strict ordering is critically important?"

In general, as the use case grows, every use case where the developers did not make explicit and careful provision for ensuring that order is not important, with quite non-trivial effort.

Even a lot of systems whose developers think they have no ordering dependencies are wrong in at least one subtle way without realizing it.

If you need to megascale, you're going to have to bite the bullet and build a system that can handle out-of-order, but there's a lot of systems out there where you don't need megascale, and you can get rid of that "quite non-trivial effort" to deal with out-of-orderness by asking for messages to arrive in order.

To get a sense of just how useful that can be... bear in mind that every time you open a TCP socket instead of a UDP one, you just made exactly that choice, to use an ordered message system when you didn't "need" one. Take a look at everything you do with a TCP socket and think about trying to run it over UDP, and not with something like QUIC that basically adds half of TCP back on it, but with UDP straight-up. That's what kind of things can use in-order delivery... lots of things.

Almost everything can be simplified by guaranteed in-order delivery. It's just that some things can't afford the downsides.
Ten Angry Robots, or Moderation and Its Discontents
Gitlab pages doesn't inherently use trackers - See link below showing Privacy Badger for my page that's also built with Hugo. Your trackers probably come from your Hugo template, I had to edit the template to remove them.

https://otekeng.gitlab.io/privacy_badger.PNG
> In European law, the actual party will is the determining factor in contracts

It is similar in most other jurisdictions too, but wording predominates in practice.
Preventing the Collapse of Civilization / Jonathan Blow [video]
> Can someone tell me again what problems do this actually solve?

Problem: You want to use FooApp 2.0, but your distribution only ships FooApp 1.0. Or even worse your distribution doesn't ship it at all.
It's not a new quote. Quick googling shows it going around in hundreds of motivational type articles for at least a decade.
Maybe the damage only matters if you regularily push your heart to the limit.
Excel is the "database scripting language" as I like to call it. Very flexible, just do what you want and see a quick result.
The team behind Excel is top notch. I learned so much from my boss and coworkers during my time there.
Just out this month is an excellent book:

Privacy is Power: Why and How You Should Take Back Control of Your Data by Carissa Véliz

Written by a philosophy professor of Ethics and AI at Oxford.

https://www.amazon.com/Privacy-Power-Should-Take-Control/dp/...
paywall 4lyfe
> How to get into the chip industry?

If your idea of a chip industry is that part of the industry that physically makes chips... then most likely you don't.

Very likely more than half of people who venture into this career, and successfully graduate will never see any work in the field.

Just like in the medical field, a tiny amount of people end up being practicing doctors, and more than half end up in "near med" fields, from pharmacists, to nurses, and .. to an analogy of quack doctors despite high salary potential for the most lucky.

Let's begin:

1. First, be born Taiwanese

2. Second, finish EE PhD at around 15-20 years ago, at maximum

3. Third, get through the glut of other young engineers who ventured into the field at the crest of the dotcom boom wave

4. Fourth, be lucky to selected for hire upon completing a long unpaid internship

5. Fifth, spend your first 3-5 years in a role of office coffee porter, and such

6. Sixth A, be lucky to be finally selected by somebody for actual RnD work

6. Sixth B, go and work as a fab tech at $2000 USD a month
Right, but I'm saying I don't think his numbers are correct. Either it was also not possible on average to put yourself through college in 1986, similar to how it's not possible on average to put yourself through college today, or his numbers are wrong.

In fact, I bet it wasn't actually possible to put yourself through college in 1986. I bet the people who put themselves through college went between 1950 and 1975.
I don't think the average working week has declined in the last 20's years and a lot of salaried workers work unpaid over time now.
The Boeing 737 MAX is already an example of cost-cutting in software leading to measurable deaths. But Boeing took the flak, not the software engineering profession as a whole.
Wow. That's an incredible story.

I wonder if this thread might have gone differently if I'd used dentists or physicians as an example. Still plenty of corruption and cartel building in the AMA.

My point about lawyers is that when you demand that software engineers act "like professionals", you're demanding that they behave as if they have a professional status that they actually don't have. That doesn't mean software developers shouldn't take that stand - all employees should - but we're just employees. If we attempt to behave as professions bound by a code of ethics that goes beyond "ordinary employee", this does mean we're taking on the obligations without the benefits.

But that aside... if I point out that lawyers can not report to non-lawyers and can bar those who do from practice, and that this is a component of what help lawyers do the right thing... well, I can't really claim that the conversation has taken a tangent when people respond with are you kidding me. Sometimes it's fair enough that the analogy overwhelms point.

People might (reasonably) take this line if I'd used physicians as an example, but I do think it probably would have been a better choice that distracted less from the point I was trying to make.
Some quotes are really timeless and applicable to many contexts, in this case the first part (pulling out the knife a bit) could be about the progressive center-right and the latter part (denying that it exists all together) is more of the status-quo apologists like the above post. Heavily cherry-picked statistics (like "household" here) even though on the ground facts is so obviously different (house prices, student debt, health care costs, child care costs etc).

"If you stick a knife in my back 9 inches and pull it out 6 inches, that's not progress. If you pull it all the way out, that's not progress. Progress is healing the wound that the blow made. They haven't pulled the knife out; they won't even admit that it's there."

-Malcolm X
yeah they're in on this joke: https://twitter.com/msexcel/status/1311497468559974400
A combination of factors have completely ravaged Millennials' finances:

* Technology is capturing more and more of low-wage/low-skill entry level work.

* The combination of technology, free-market capitalism and globalization means that American youth have to compete with non-Americans for jobs that were solely done by Americans during most of the 20th century.

* Incompetent government policies have created a system where college tuition has outstripped core inflation by 500-600%; all of this in a system where a college education has gone from nice-to-have to an absolute necessity.

* Globalization and urbanization have led to congregation of more and more people in urban cores, causing housing and other fixed living costs to increase.

* Untimely financial crises have both retarded Millennial career progress as well as their ability to save/invest in the stock market.

None of these processes or events are inherently bad, but their combination have created so many negative externalities for a generation of Americans that these people will never be able to recover.
> but other things got complicated there, mostly running other processes, capturing their exit status, pipe-ing their output

Note that Python's subprocess module [0] has received many updates since v3.5, and now I find it relatively painless. Most of the times, subprocess.check_output() or subprocess.run() will do the trick.

[0]: https://docs.python.org/3/library/subprocess.html
Majority of free claimers haven't sold their UNI
this is correct. conventional statistical functions rely on a whole host of assumptions about the shape and type of data. Typically that its a bell-curve distribution & ratio style data. The more you move away from that parametric style of data, the more conventional statistical functions simply have no meaning.

To use an example. I worked at a shop where we had a freemium model. About, let's say, 50% of our customers paid $0.00. About 2% paid over, say, 10K. Between those two points we had a reasonably clean exponential curve, clustering at key product price points. (I've goosed the numbers for confidentiality purposes, but this is close enough for discussion). In this scenario, what was the average ROI per account? Well, truth is, that's not a useful answer, as it was roughly $0.01.

I wound up building a small set of non-parametric data tools to assess the customer base. It was a fun journey, but a critical lesson is: the kind of data you have and its shape determine the statistical functions that have meaning, and, they didn't teach that kind of data analysis in your basic calc-based stats class in college. :)
Any plans for permanent message retention?

Kafka can be configured to store messages forever. This means it can be used as the canonical store of both current and past data. It is attractive for some applications.

Any plans to add the ability to retain messages forever? I know I can store them in GCS and replay, but that's not what I'm looking for.
I can't imagine anything in practical, palatable or pragmatic realm. The idealists usually suggest things like a gold standard.

Perhaps a more pertinent question would be: How long can this continue?
Why is Cloudflare more of a hassle? Point your nameservers to them, done.

I use Cloudflare in front of Netlify.
Company scraping your data everywhere on the internet sues someone for scraping data on their part of the internet.

^_^

I hope that the judge will require Facebook to stop scraping themselves first, before they request others to stop it, too.
Classpert | Rio de Janeiro, Brazil | REMOTE | Front End Engineer (Rails + Vue.js) | https://www.classpert.com

We're building a search aggregator and comparison tool for online courses from platforms like Coursera, Pluralsight, and MasterClass. Our goal is to be the main hub for online education in all areas of knowledge and help lifelong learners worldwide.

We're looking for an experienced, entrepreneurial-minded front end engineer to join our 8-people team. We are fully remote and geographically distributed, and prefer time zones between UTC -8 and +1. Classpert is an early-stage startup so we can offer great equity compensation.

Tech Stack: Ruby on Rails, Vue.js, Node.js, and Webpack.

To apply, please email me directly: roger AT the domain above.
Show HN: Article Rewriter Using AI
Capital owners would much prefer running stuff locally: it's more expensive so the profit margin is higher. No headache with logistics. Predictable laws. Friendly courts.

It's customers who are not willing to pay the premium for locally made stuff.

As soon as one factory moves to China others have no choice, but to follow, otherwise they will lose the price war.
Unpaywalled URL: https://app.ft.com/content/27eddb59-1770-4ad8-a07f-6a940e20e...
I haven't read any of Feagin's research, but from reading that article's commentary on Feagin's research, it outlines a highly US-centric approach to defining systemic racism, which would imply that systemic racism, by definition, cannot exist outside of the US.

I don't know enough in the field to know if Feagin's definition is a popular one worldwide, or even within the US, but it seems somewhat reductive on first reading.

If systemic racism cannot occur outside of the US, what then should we refer to racism that is "systemic" as?

> By that definition, all racism is systemic racism, since the system is made up of people.

Technically, I would agree, but going that far seems somewhat pedantic.
This is assuming Nintendo is incompetent. They have been making toys for 100 years and have been consistent pioneers in consumer electronics. They are no stranger to proprietary connectors. They opted to not develop one this time because it was seen as an unnecessary cost. Instead they took the parts of a well developed standard they liked and cut the corners they wanted to cut. They would have had a harder time finding an OTS non-compliant solution than an OTS compliant one. Playing by the standard cost too much. The only narrative here is “Nintendo sees no one is watching the cookie jar and takes from it. They prefer to be the only one with cookies anyway and don’t see the benefit of a communal jar.”, not “Nintendo don’t know what they’re doing”.
>I would love to know the proportion of people at, say, 25 that can afford to buy a house (in the area they grew up and of some reasonable size e.g. 3 bedroom) over time. Sure, income has gone up, but so have house prices

That question is more about how government is for young people than the economy. High Housing costs are mostly caused by local government policy. In places where developers can respond to demand housing isn't any more expensive today than it was in the last 50 years.
I'm probably going to get downvoted for this, but:

writing bash scripts in general just isn't a fun experience.

years ago, i started just writing ruby scripts for execution in the terminal instead of bash, and haven't had any problems with it so far.
> As to Excel: Hopefully it won't take another 35 years for them to fix CSV opening so it doesn't auto-format long numbers into scientific notion or dates, then cause unrecoverable data loss when you save. If you don't know what the data format is DON'T GUESS!

Amen! Also removing the leading zeros from US ZIP codes.
"All the logic for our process is in these Excel Spreadsheets."

I love Excel, and I hate Excel. I think it is one of the most interesting tools since HyperCard for the non-programmer. I just wish there was a bit more structure. I would love something more like a Lego set.
Northscaler | Sr. DevOps Engineer | REMOTE (based in Austin, TX) | Contractor (potentially contact to hire) | https://www.northscaler.com/

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Northscaler´s world leading scale-up technology provides sustainable solutions for businesses to grow operations. We like to think of scaling technology as the invisible business enabler – working progressively and intuitively with your teams so that you can be unbounded in your achievements.

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> communism isn't cool btw

These communists might beg to differ:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qPeLF-qi6X0&t=11

(but tbh they're nominally communists in a country with billionaires, hedge funds, and retail investors, while the nominally capitalist US is a surveillance state doing its utmost to pursue industrial policy with public means, so I'm not sure how one is supposed to be able to tell the difference anymore. That's part of why I've decided, for my own idiolect, to use Eastasia and Oceania, respectively.)

Edit: I guess they'd say 牛逼 instead of cool. Maybe 酷?
Has anyone compared Pelican to Zola? I use Lektor myself (and love it), but I sometimes find myself pining for something fast and self-contained.
BMW fined $18M for providing inaccurate retail sales information to investors
If I were starting out now, in exactly the same situation as I had been in 1991, a smart, hard-working, self-motivated, well-organized, fast-talking, interviewer-impressing young person with no college degree, nor any credentials beyond a high school diploma, but the ability to learn to do hard things fast, and independently, if just given a chance, and the chutzpah to talk oneself into jobs one doesn't actually know how to do in the confidence one will figure it out when one gets there: what options would I have to turn that promising constellation into cash in my pocket?

This statement is exactly my lived experience except that I started in 1994 or 95. My question for others here. What is the answer to his question? Is it possible to do now what we did back then? Why?
World's first no-code freelance marketplace. Thoughts?
How so its a much much better measure than the arithmetic mean ?
New products from Facebook are like the fruit from a tree in the yard of a witch’s house. Even if the fruit is ripe, it is cursed and you should not eat it.

I am interested in prediction markets however I think that it lives in Facebook is a net negative.

Facebook’s monetization of personal data and behavioral insights disrupts the potential value of even trying a new product.
Happy Birthday, Excel!

You'll be recorded in history books. There's hardly any other software that had such direct impact - both positive and negative - on the day-to-day work of most people on the planet.
aelkus.github.io
LongRunning Workflows with Human Interactions Using Step Functions and Ballerina
Correct, which is why we adjust for inflation, and there are a ton of different inflation indexes one can use. Per the links in the source comment, regardless of which index you use, we have seen an increase in income.

> Has their rent remained stable over the last then years?

From the data, outside of expensive coastal metros, yes. If you don't have a college education, you're more likely to enjoy a higher standard of living in Little Rock, Arkansas or Minneapolis, MN than in San Francisco or Manhattan.

> Perhaps these quotable numbers aren't all that useful except to further marginalize?

No, these quotable numbers tell us that we're generally trending in the right direction. Therefore, any solution we employ to help those that are the poorest among us (which is important) doesn't necessarily need to upend the entire system.
I know and agree regulation won't fix it, it just move the problem around. It's a tough problem.
I learned recently that escaping characters in zsh/bash also works for parameter expansion:

# zsh using flags ${(flags)name}
% string="This is a string with \"\"\" and ''' and \"\" again ''. Also such stuff as & % # ;"
% echo $string
This is a string with """ and ''' and "" again ''. Also such stuff as & % # ;
% echo ${(q)string}
This\ is\ a\ string\ with\ \"\"\"\ and\ \'\'\'\ and\ \"\"\ again\ \'\'.\ Also\ such\ stuff\ as\ \&\ %\ \#\ \;

# bash using operators ${name@operator}
% string="This is a string with \"\"\" and ''' and \"\" again ''. Also such stuff as & % # ;"
% echo $string
This is a string with """ and ''' and "" again ''. Also such stuff as & % # ;
% echo ${string@Q}
'This is a string with """ and '\'''\'''\'' and "" again '\'''\''. Also such stuff as & % # ;'

Wow, so easy then, I remember struggling so many times in the past when e.g. iterating over filenames with unusual cahracters.

/edit: fix markup
While the US does love exporting our/their rule of law outside, the internet creates an interesting problem with jurisdiction. By serving customers in the US, have they subjected themselves to US law?[a] Many times before, the courts have found that an American company doing business in State X meant they could be sued there. But they’ve also found otherwise. It’s an interesting question that doesn’t seem to have a clear answer.

[a] When visiting another country, it’s very clear you’re subjecting yourself to their laws (I can’t visit France and expect only US laws will apply to me), but the internet (a global system) poses a problem.
What I would do in that situation is:

1) If all 300 photos aren't actually visible, make sure React skips actually rendering them (calling their render functions)

2) If they do all need to be visible, and they do all need to update in real time in response to that preference, consider adding a paging mechanism so that not as many are visible at once

You have to step back to the root question: do you want all of those components to visibly update immediately in response to that change? If not, make sure they don't try to. If yes, MobX is accomplishing that in the most efficient way possible so you may need to rethink your UI.

> I moved the code that looks at that state up the tree and then pass it down to solve

This doesn't really make sense to me as a fix, and to be honest I suspect it's merely covering up the problem in a roundabout way.
How to track identical objects with the probabilistic data association approach
> What are they suing them for? Under what law or legal principle?

The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) allows for civil cases. The law prohibits accessing a computer without authorization, or in excess of authorization. This isn't a case of users knowingly using a tool to scrape data for their own use, the users installing the extension are, at most, mules, for the extension makers.

Alternately, maybe copyright infringement. Some of the data are considered facts, that are not copyrightable (even in aggregate, in the U.S.) but at minimum, the actual content of ads scraped is copyrightable. There might be a question of whether Facebook has standing to sue over infringement of ads for other businesses but their ToS may cover some non-exclusive copyright to shared
Anecdotal evidence is not false evidence. Evidence based on individual experiences or observations is not "false" but it can be subjective and misleading. It is still used all the time in law.
I am just saying to Poland is likely oppressing groups of people, just not based on race. They use the same tools, however.
It's not about immediacy of it, privacy will never be high priority to someone whose very day to day existence is uncertain and/or who already lives in a system with much worse human rights abuses, corruption and injustices (and that describes a big part of the developing world). Not saying that it's not the real threat, but it's the 1st world type of priority for many...
It makes more sense for dense cities but I think we really need a way to not have to ship this trash everywhere. I don't know if it is feasible but some kind of small scale incinerator seems ideal. You convert your trash into power and we don't waste a lot of energy moving it all over the place. This could also be a source of energy that works when solar isn't available.
Honestly I wish stripe would give people like myself who live in St. louis a chance to work for them -- i've applied twice and couldn't get an interview despite being (I think?) qualified.

I love living here, don't want to move to SF... I think with more remote work we will see companies leveraging talent in places like St. Louis. Probably easier than paying someone to leave.
One of the mods must have changed the post title without listening to the audio or reading the transcript (which contains around half the story). There's a note near the end of the audio about how Chris won't do interviews except via an intermediary.