skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've been thinking about this a bit before seeing this discussion, and I'm starting to feel that abstracting at database level makes sense, because it turns your RDBMS from being just a dumb SQL execution engine into an application-specific API.

If you consider restricting operations on your data close to the storage layer, you can imagine wrapping DB access with an app exposing business-specific API, and route all your actual code through that API. Doesn't seem like an unreasonable design to me - particularly, if the same database is used by multiple applications. But if you do that, it may make sense to just put the API inside the RDBMS - giving you one networked software component less to manage.

(I've done work on a project using lots of stored procedures only once, and my tasks were unrelated - so I have no practical experience here. But through this discussion, I think I'm starting to understand why enterprise projects are anecdotally so in love with stored procedures.)
They have, in the past, reached for LISP and various other languages. What matters for life-critical systems isn't the presence or absence of a formal specification. It's more important to foster a culture of design verification and validation of tooling. You can use Brainfuck in a medical device provided you can create the right organizational architecture to ensure the quality of your Brainfuck code. It's more about creating a rational engineering organization and having a process of searching for problems and solving them proactively rather than waiting for your customers to test your code.

Of course most rational engineering organizations wouldn't choose Brainfuck because it's harder to write code that other people can evaluate. But it's not automatically out of the question if you have a good reason for its use.
I feel like this DOJ suit is so lazy and misguided, the end result will be inoculating Google against anti-trust for a generation.
I was excited to see the amount of salt in the comments when I saw the title. HN is definitely very skeptical of crypto, which is odd for a tech community.
How we could do ten times more Covid tests, for free
It still leaves $2.7 billion profit and no jail time.
> But man, that website is straight out of the late 90's/early 00's.

Which makes it 100 times more readable than the vast majority of today's crappy websites.

About the products, never used PCEngines boards for NAS usage, but made some firewalls with them in the past and they're very reliable.
Oops should have typed 180 degrees apart for residential.
This is so cherry-picked and editorialized that this feels unethical.

It claims an "average" from this list while intentionally neglecting less-successful IPOs and downright failures.

Also, I'd be curious to see what the exits are after the 3-6 month lockup period. Some startups IPO decently, but then tank.
>Clearly I have no idea what I'm doing.

Doesn't look like that from over here.

Many times the difference between failure and the magic spell working is 1 more late night iteration. In this specific case you are working against some difficult constraints that are deep in the language. That said, there is almost always a way to side-step a problem altogether. You may find that one workaround is to amortize the startup concern over time - I.e. reorient the problem domain so you only have start the python process once a day. Or, find a way to defer loading of required components until the runtime actually needs them.
The problem is Apple / FB / Microsoft / Amazon all want to step in the minute Google gets kicked back. It's structural centralization.
The problem is not jitting pure Python code. PyPy does that and it's quite good at doing it. The problem is exactly what mitsuhiko says, and lots of Python apps use some or all of these features implicitly (through the native extensions used by many common dependencies). Sure, some of this madness can be accessed from Python itself, but that's also the case for JS, where you can do certain things, which will slow down your code greatly because the JIT can't work with it.
How do I find cell phone number and email address by name?
The point is that these days we're supposedly past finding 'large' physical chunks of the body—given a century's worth of diagnostics, x-rays, MRIs, etc.—and onto much more complicated matters such as how proteins are synthesized in human cells and how gut bacteria affects mental function and the like.

This one is a bit like not realizing the wheels are missing off your car. Right, it ought to have been damn obvious ages ago.
It would have taken you just seconds to check out whether the quote I have given is true or not. You decided not to do it but you then make the comment that I said something false.

Here is the link: It is from "We Or Our Nationhood Defined" by MS Golwalkar. It is in chapter 3 verse 86.
https://nanopdf.com/download/we-or-our-nationhood-defined_pd...

Feel free to buy the book:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22612408-we-or-our-natio...

The article about it is here:
https://www.thehindubusinessline.com/news/national/golwalkar...
If you read the article, you will see that the cognitive effects of covid-19 are not only for critically ill cases. Figure 3B, specifically, shows cognitive effects of milder covid-19 cases.

According to another study, covid-19 can infect brain tissue specifically:
https://www.altex.org/index.php/altex/article/view/1924

That may be why it is particularly dangerous to brains, more so than other viruses.
I think the person you're responding to is agreeing with you that you should optimize for languages other than English rather than for people naming a label "Bin" and then switching to the UK locale.
Quarantine Life: Feel like you are in a coffee shop to get some work done
Helium filled disks are sealed (as much as possible), but air filled disks are not, their airports are filtered though. If I were to use this as a permanent NAS, I also think an enclosure would be wise. This setup could be good for bulk data load/unload though (if the interface speeds work for you).
I had the idea to write a HTTP proxy which parses all traffic and caches CDN results on a local network and use those instead, but this might be even better.
Or even sorted?
Bing has excellent video search
Exactly. Given the statement from above:

> it is exceptionally difficult to make the case that any of these companies are causing consumer harm, which is the de facto standard for antitrust in the United States.

My fundamental issue is that "consumers" are not the customers here, the customers are the ad purchasers, and those are the ones where it's very easy to show the harm.
Big news for Fluor Corp. DOE approves up to $1.4B
Fluor Corp (FLR) owns Nuscale Power.

https://www.utilitydive.com/news/doe-approves-up-to-14b-to-test-12-module-nuscale-reactor/587265/
Bill Gates had enough faith in its effectiveness to do it with Apple (basically handing them free money by buying non-voting shares with a certain arrangement).
In that case Firefox will be able to make deals with companies other than Google, such as Apple and MS.
The sortition process isn't quite like centrally listing everyone and picking from the list. The Verifiable Random Function (VRF) allows you to know "I was picked!" and create a short quickly verifiable certificate to prove that to someone else. Is a distributed fashion all the nodes run their own check to see if it's their turn to propose or verify and then take network actions based on that.

Algorand allows more than one node to propose a block to make sure that >=1 nodes propose a block with high reliability. The distributed consensus process picks one block to be the block.

The number of validators is more like 30-50 but that's a global tunable depending on what kind of system properties you want. Fewer can be faster and more can be more secure, but there's diminishing returns and 30-50 is so far secure-enough and quite fast (5 second round times on the current global network).
When I was at Dropbox I did do this ... we only retained traces for a very short time, so I did daily aggregations of traces into summary data structures that could attribute service time to various span types at different depths of the request etc. Don't ignore the value of aggregating and summarizing trace data. Of course, a TSDB is also useless for this, I agree there.
Minecraft as K8s Administration Tool
Nice. Yeah you guys have tried to recruit me more than once or twice ;) one thing I would strongly suggest as you roll it out is setting a retention policy and throttling/squashing diffs as you can have users that make lots of edits and it can take up a lot of data and become hard to follow the logs for the end users! Great work coming up with this pragmatic solution, best of luck with the rollout, and congrats to the team!
Not to disparage your point or the parent comment's but I think part of that is that HN operates to a much lesser degree like an echo chamber (as the majority of social network are wont to steer toward) so it might come as more of a surprise when someone disagrees. Of course I feel I should highlight the obvious fact that discourse is far more valuable than trying to quietly silence a differing opinion...
What's on Your Programming Reading List?
1) best search engine

2) top online ad platform

3) top mobile OS

4) top video streaming service

5) top internet browser

6) top mapping/navigation service

Okay, you listed 6. What should the law say is the new limit for how many they should be able to have?
I like this as a measure of Bitcoin's usefulness being proven way more than PayPal starting to accept it.
Modeling Protagonist Emotions for Emotion-Aware Storytelling
Platform Risk
Yes, obviously you cannot store wealth in a cryptocurrency whose inflation will at some point forever remain under 0.1% [sarcasm]
Never mind that the yearly coin loss is probably closer to 1%.
I don't know much about the other ones, but I think you'd have to say PyPy has been a success. Although to be honest, I don't know why it would be better to modify CPython vs. just using PyPy -- the JIT speedup does come with some tradeoffs (memory usage, warmup times), so it seems better just to leave that decision up to the user?
Can you talk more about how something like the app launch tool works? Does it hook execution early in process startup or something?
The Importance of End-to-End Thinking in System Design
> a) the fact that a corporation uses a language is meaningless and can't be used as an argument for anything - except maybe what to learn if you want to get a job there.

I disagree with you here. This is a low level production grade application in a domain that requires secure and stable operation. The fact that a team picked a specific language for this application demonstrates a certain level of stability and suitability for various problem domains. There are more examples of large scale rust codebases. That does not imply that rust is magically suited to all problems or that you should pick rust for your project at all cost and without further consideration, but it does mean that rust is used in “serious” projects that have significant monetary value attached to it.

> b) that all arguments based on Rust's novelty, call it "serious language" "mainstream language" or whatever - have merit. Rust is obviously not mature enough for many potential users and you can't convince them by talking about RFCs.

You’re again arguing against points I never made. Rust has no ISO standard - true. But the point I was responding to was “the implementation is the spec” and that’s plain false. The RFC is written first and the implementation is tested against the RFC. There is a written document that specified expected behavior. Sometimes you need to follow the chain if RFCs modify existing behavior and there’s certainly cases where the implementation doesn’t follow the RFCs, but it not like all c compilers are 100% spec compliant all of the time.
Simply, I'm not one to give praise through a rose colored lens. This is especially true in a place like HN, where its entirely possible the core maintainers of a project may read my feedback, and may or may not feel inclined to clarify, quantify, or at least acknowledge what I have to say about a project.

I'm not bringing it down by being honest in how I feel. My praise for nim is genuine and forthright, and I've recommended many others looking to get more performance coming from a Python background give it an honest look. This is completely subjective, but I don't like 'ugliness' in a syntax. Sometimes it can be changed, sometimes it can't, and it is what it is, I get that, doesn't mean I won't mention it. There's a certain beauty to how a syntax looks when being written, IMO. Why else would developers spend so much time on theming, font choices etc for their editors? :)

tl;dr I'm not one to shy away from giving honest feedback
Looks very interesting! Have you considered supporting Capacitor? It's a modern alternative to Cordova that is powering all new Ionic Framework apps. We would love to have more options for the community (I'm Ionic CEO btw)
Maybe another status "stale" would be the solution here. That way, maintainers would be able to focus on "active" issues while the people who reported the issue could still add information to the issue later on to move it from "stale" back to "open" / "active".
Wow, this is very cool. Any fellow readers have suggestions for looking at SOTA with respect to computational approaches to lost languages? Ever since I found etymonline.com and I've started tracing word etymologies back to PIE, I've been thinking that I can't get enough of this stuff.
> ...Is there any good analytics solution which is only server side? Getting some good statistics but not exposing to visitors they are tracked (even in a friendly mode) would be nice...

I'm in the same boat. About a year ago i migrated over to Matomo (fka Piwik) and away from google analytics for all my (and family, friend) web sites that i manage. While i really don't have many big complaints of Matomo, i really wish i didn't have to use javascript for this. I started looking at - but did NOT implement - GoAccess [http://goaccess.io]...but don't think it fills what i need. Honestly, for the websites that i manage - and in these days where i want to preserve both my privacy and the privacy of my web visitors - I'm wondering if i should just very well shut off all tracking on the front-end, and try using GoAccess or even AWStats, and process stuff offline. I'm not running any ecommerce site after all. And, removing yet another little element (javascript) from websites helps with performance for visitors. Sorry, not helping much, maybe give a look at GoAccess...? Good luck!
In the HN context in particular, it's important to observe that the underlying legal philosophy of monopoly differs in European and US law.

It's not just that the laws are different; it's the goals of the laws. The European laws (in general) attempt to stave off competitor harm. They're historically sourced to guild protections and seek to create a situation in which companies can compete. Small players in the market are seen as inherently a good thing, regardless of whether that actually makes a better market for consumers (which it is not guaranteed to; laws protecting the existence of small book stores keep prices of books artificially high in a world of extremely inexpensive data copying and book fabrication. French book buyers are essentially paying a hidden tax to have corner book shops exist, whether or not they care if corner book shops exist).

The US lacked a similar guild history and, instead, historically experienced the threat of government overreach privileging the existence of incumbent companies over new players. The US therefore has laws crafted to protect against the major threat the US historically experienced: one company making life miserable for consumers (i.e. the Rockefeller threat, or going back further, the British East India Company threat). Neither US law nor US monopoloy philosophy traditionally care whether small-time market players can compete at all ("why should it," runs the argument, "maybe Starbucks is ubiquitous because their coffee is actually better. What's the value to the consumer of propping up bad coffee?").

It feels like 90% of arguments on HN on the topic are unaware of that philosophy gap.
Whether an algorithm is supervised or not certainly does affect whether you need to retrain it periodically. Also it does not at all affect whether the output is fed to end users or to other algorithms
If interested, there was a piece early this month that guesstimated this settlement. It was called “The Sackler Family’s plan to keep its billions”: https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-sackler-familys...
Conviction of 3 felonies including conspiracy to defraud the United States and yet no one is going to jail. Another failure of our Justice system.
>"[for gold] there's a fundamental underlying value"

The fundamental value for it's technical applications is probably < 1/10 of it's real value.

If people wake up tomorrow and stop using it as reserves/ investment /savings, you would loose virtually all your money, down to a few percent. So yeah, that 5% or whatever of value is secure, but how nuch does that help?

Timber is obviously not a usefull store of value because it does not last, it is not fungiable, is expensive to store - imagine 100 million dollars worth of timber, and you would store that.
Thought this was an Onion headline for a second :P
That's an extreme way to phrase it, but possibly yes.

"Infectability of human BrainSphere neurons suggests neurotropism of SARS-CoV-2"

https://www.altex.org/index.php/altex/article/view/1924
> That said, there are no projects that require not squashing commits.

This isn't true either. I've worked on projects before where if you have a PR that makes changes all across the codebase in one commit, then you will get asked to split that commit up.
No, not complete crawls of any sites, we've aimed to get a wider coverage in place of deeper crawls. This means we have most sites indexed and are now gradually going deeper. We do encounter robots.txt blocks, but we don't see it as a major issue right now.

We have an API, in case of interest.
The Gratitude Algorithm
Almost all ICOs have no reason to exist other than to extract money from the ICO. The entire space is full of fraudulent actors by design.
Even now there are hardware architectures with non-8-bit bytes, typically DSPs.
I've noticed this about few things. Regular expressions are another - they have this bad reputation as "write-only, magic one liner hacks" that should absolutely be avoided. The proposed alternative is usually one or more dozens of lines of manual string operations in a loop. It feels like it doesn't enter the minds of people in some companies I worked in that regular expressions are a separate language, one that you should learn.
v8 is not C-fast on general code.

A lot of people seem to have the mistaken impression that v8 makes Javascript "fast". It's "fast" for a dynamic language. But on general code... it's still slow. It seems to plateau around 10x slower than C, as with the other JIT efforts to speed up dynamic languages, with a roughly 5-10x memory penalty in the process.

Microbenchmarks like the benchmark game tend to miss this because a lot of microbenchmarks focus on numeric speed. But numeric code is easy mode for a JIT. Now, that's cool, and there's nothing wrong with that. If it's the sort of code you have, great! You win. But that performance doesn't translate to general code. These are not value judgments, these are just facts about the implementation.

I expect v8 is roughly as fast as JS is going to get, and it's now news if they can eke out a .5% improvement on general code.

You can also do much better with v8 if you program in a highly restricted subset of JS that it happens to be able to JIT very well. However, this is not really the same as writing in JS. It's an undocumented subset, it's a constantly changing subset, and there's not a lot of compiler support for it (I'm not aware of anything like a "use JITableOnly" or anything).
Maybe Facebook doesn't have a conservative bias. Maybe it has more conservative content because Dems don't advertise on Facebook as much since they have most of the news media.

No conservative I know or have heard from feels like Facebook is on their side. Wouldn't they if Facebook was biasing content for the right?
I don't think that's really true, those things are definite challenges, but PyPy is still significantly faster than CPython while (afaik) allowing that sort of stuff to go on. If you wanted C/Rust level performance than yeah, you need to redesign the language, but if you just want an interpreter that runs 5-10x faster than what they have now? Both doable and has been done.
Phase is listed, this trial was phase 1 and 2 (2a in particular according to the paper). The summary usually contains motivating background information about why they’re taking this approach.

The results haven’t been posted directly, but there is a publication linked that has some of the results so far.

A lot of this stuff is not rigidly structured - with a mix between recording actual data, references to actual data, or just having the study design if the trial is still early.
Yeah, crime just started paying better.
Couldn't a Python implementation in Truffle (GraalVM) solve the startup problem?
It seems odd to talk about hash tables as design patterns. To me they are just a data type. It is true that other languages have a built-in implementations and yet others have a standard user level implementation while in C there are many.

But I see design patterns as a framework level thing.

What you wrote about them being different in different languages is true, however. When the book came out we had a thread in the mailing list for the Self programming language looking at the 23 patterns and nearly all of them took no special effort to use in Self. An object could be a Singleton, for example, by simply not having "traits clonable" as a parent like most objects did.
I suspect a high proportion of firefox users also have ublock or something similar installed
You chose the perfect example to disprove your own point. Other companies could not run phone lines. There are plenty of hard monopolies, and they’re very different from soft, virtuous cycle monopolies.
I'm using LocalCDN for a few weeks and it looks pretty good so far. The developer once answered me and said that there are so many jQuery versions and that the extension would be very big. I checked and there are actually over 150
The Roots of Unix for the IBM Mainframe (2018)
There are recordings online in free sound banks of an actual cafe; these controls don’t feel like that. But it’s fun to mix environmental sounds anyway.
well its interesting to see that their interest is not the users at all, but the money.

they've become a servant of Google and they do not want this to stop. Basically Mozilla is not independent and is too scared to be.
Show HN: Private As-Needed VPN Service
Microsoft was the subject of an antitrust proceeding, and is currently the largest US company by market capitalization. Kodak (film photography) and Sears (mail order catalogs) failed because the markets they had dominated effectively ceased to exist, not because anybody unseated them in those markets.
I'm pro mask, but I don't get wearing a mask if someone is just walking outside with no one around them. It's not like the whole world turned to Pripyat next to Chernobyl...
Unlike dollar bills and gold, you can own and move bitcoin without putting it in your pocket. You can walk across the border with it. You don't have to declare it for the crime of carrying more than $10,000 like you do with cash.
The demo is incredible and heartening. I did not know the state of the art had improved so much. Thank you for sharing this, Josh.