skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
America is so setup for people who already have theirs. It's mind boggling
Thank you. This was a fascinating read.
I worked with a QA who used to be a cook. He was unstoppable.
> I'd rather have my database complain than do stuff that could lose data. One great example is when you try to stuff more characters into a text field than it can accommodate. By default, MySQL just truncates the string silently; Postgres just doesn't allow it.

That's your opinion, but the truth is not necessarily black and white.

Postgres will probably lose more data in your case when the application developer doesn't handle the exception for a text field too long, and loses the whole row. (If you're an application developer, you should audit your code now.)

A well-written application using Postgres would have to truncate the data before insert, achieving the same result as having MySQL auto-truncation, but with more initial and on-going maintenance effort in the case of Postgres.

And the existence proof that MySQL's behavior is ok is that MySQL is the most widely-used relational databases, and powers most Internet sites.

Source: DBA.
Might be a good moment to pass on this coming rebuild of X-Wing, XWVM[0], that's in the offing. It uses the original game files and audio but is built on a modern 3D engine.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JqWo9FNiidE
For clarity: no one signs a ballot in the US. States with remote voting options generally have a ballot envelope which must be signed and sealed. That is: you have to authenticate that the ballot was cast by the right person, but the vote itself can only be tallied anonymously.

This is sort of a dumb idea, really. But it's not as broken as you imagine.
Part of the reason they are transferring me is so they have the freedom to try some of the immune suppressing drugs. Being deployed overseas means they can't.

I'm terrified, but hoping something will help.
"Computable" is a bit more strict than "logical and mathematical". We can define many perfectly consistent processes with perfectly consistent "observable values", which are inherently uncomputable (as in, there is no algorithm, even an inefficient one, that runs on Turing machines, capable of calculating the observable).

Here is my favorite example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaitin%27s_constant
> The others are already over budget and behind schedule

The reason why is important though. Is it because of:

1) Political issues, where the government has set up incentives for the builder to lie?

2) Social issues, where environmentalists attack the project to drive up costs?

It seems unbelievable to me that nuclear plant planners are unable to plan because ... dunno, maybe they hear nuclear and lose the ability to add numbers. There has to be something else going on. Planning is relatively easy once there are 1-2 historical projects to look at.

My experience with energy markets is governments proactively screw them up for reasons I cannot discern. For some reason guaranteed profits is a common standard in Australia which for the life of me I do not understand. Which idiot thinks that is clever? The UK might be doing something similarly stupid.
why is it odd for people to criticize views that "big tech" holds?
Thanks for that response.

Your explanation makes a lot of things clear that I hadn't fully parsed out from what I've been reading recently.
> I've even seen a few cases where people had data loss which had either gone unnoticed

Maybe under MyISAM, but InnoDB has been the default storage engine since 2010.
Agreed. It's okay to make $400k helping people sell more drop ship yoga pants but selling web servers to the government is somehow evil.
Thanks! Positive support with no expectation that I listen to a miracle cure or something is one of those things that really helps on rough days!
As an Indian who reads NYT's international coverage, I disagree with your comment. NYT's India reports have been excellent and evidence based.
The right wing extremism is indeed on the rise[1].

Any report I see, they are presenting their statements with ground report backed by statistics, usually by Govt. data.

[1] https://www.umass.edu/newsoffice/article/umass-economist-fin...
How do you recover from this? Isn’t this a genetic disease?
See this sibling comment for context https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24948188

The definition you are looking for is very well established and intensely studied in physics and theoretical computer science. This is a good place to start a wikipedia exploration of the topic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church%E2%80%93Turing_thesis
Not at all! I read it as an honest question so I answered it.
> or that it is all in my head

I sometimes end up wondering that about myself. I have near-constant headaches of varying intensity (ranging from a barely noticeable ache to feeling like somebody a vice round my temples) with no known cause, and I occasionally find myself asking if I'm imagining it or it's psychosomatic. I think it stems from my frustration at not knowing the cause, but starting to doubt what you are sensing like that is an unpleasant feeling.
I absolutely agree.

The positive I take away from it is that I DO appreciate the good days, and my family, and the life I have more. It sounds trite, but the silver lining is there.
I have nothing to add other than I think Scott Hanselman is a wealth of information and a legitimate gem in the programming community. I hope he can figure this out, and I hope he doesn't stay in horrible pain forever.

Feel better, man.
Are you confusing the products of a meltdown and spent nuclear fuel? Spent nuclear fuel can be handled very safely, and moved relatively easily. The problem is just that everyone says “not in my backyard” when it comes to long term storage. Nuclear is, in terms of waste and logistics, a solved problem. In truth, off-site storage may not even be necessary, as reactors can many times handle storage on site.
The "code poem" at the beginning of the post reminds me of the "Bit Shift Variations in C-Minor" [1] by Robert S K Miles (chiptune music in 214 bytes of C; featured in the computerphile video "Code Golf & the Bitshift Variations").

[1] http://txti.es/bitshiftvariationsincminor
What would you hope people do if you did tell them? My guess is "Damn that sounds awful. Let me know if I can help" and then dropping it entirely?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24917644

This submission from yesterday may interest you.
A good example of a proportional (and thus multi-party) system that uses single-member districts is MMP[1]. You could argue, though, that this system doesn't fully keep single-member districts because some of the representatives are chosen from a national or regional list and such lists are effectively giant districts.

There is still much to be said in support of non-FPTP single-member systems, though, since they allow factions within a party to break off and present their own policies. Even if such a splinter party never replaced the party it split from, it could still prevent the bigger party from becoming too complacent and reliant on being the lesser of two evils.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed-member_proportional_repr...
One of my colleagues jokes that we'll know we have truly self-driving cars when they can handle driving through Powder House Square, one of the Boston area's strangest "roundabouts".

https://www.google.com/maps/@42.4011187,-71.1170306,19.36z

Try as we might to keep chaos at bay with our laws, stop signs, and blinking orange lights, it peeks through the seams when you watch the traffic patterns there.
all of the simple player boxes like roku et al have terrible support for playing plain old media files whether via USB storage or over a network (which is often not a feature at all, and forget the smart tv built-in players altogether).

I've wondered if that is intentional, to discourage casual piracy.
I'm guessing he's talking about thotbots that go to "famous" "influencers" pictures and post comments to lure them over to said thotbot's owner and raise their magic internet numbers as well
> Why are they not upfront about who is funding the research?

They don't need to be upfront about their funding because they know it's the first thing that ecologists will search on google to build an ad personam as we can see in the comments here /s

At least, someone's paying research that does not go in the mainstream direction, so we can be thankful for that which protects us from an unilateral debate: given that politics fund the mainstream research with the IPCC.

> The total impact (direct + indirect) of solar and wind is an order of magnitude lower than coal and oil.

Same goes for ROI: solar and wind is an order of magnitude lower than coal and oil.
Have had neck and back pain for 10 years now, I've learned to live with it, sometimes it hurts so much that I'm wondering if I'm going to get paralyzed, or if I'll be in 5-10 years, and sometimes I forget the pain until it comes back. No doctor has been able to help, some doctors want me to do PT, some want me to do chiro, none helped. Some doctors don't want me to do X-rays, some are OK with it, after some X-rays some say I have an inverted vertebra, some say that I don't. At this point I have learned to understand that no doctors understand back pain, and that unless I'm willing to pay top money for high-end hospitals, I'll probably live all my life in pain until it gets so bad I'll end up killing myself or something. Well we'll see...

What seems to work for me sometimes: jogging and deep breathing.
Well sure, it’s better be thought of as a replacement for fopen() than one for Oracle. (Unless you were thinking of buying Oracle in order to use it on your desktop.) An even better way would be to compare it with MS Access, for example.
Good story. I'd be happy to work for you anyday. I wouldn't be too quick to judge the guy who asked for directions, unless he didn't believe you could be an attendee or speaker. I'd never heard of you before, and I'm not afraid to ask random possibly-prestigious people for directions at conferences. I occasionally attend NANOGs, hosted by Edward McNair.
Thank you so much for posting this! I found many things in your story that are similar to my experience and it gives me hope.

I have a few questions I hope you don't mind answering as I'm trying to change careers to work full-time on public cloud for a technology driven company.

A little backstory (feel free to skip):

I began my career working in a company that did structured cabling, PBX systems and rack and stacking data centers. I was rapidly taking on more responsibilities and was managing a team of 40 people within 2 years.

Things were steady but I felt like I was missing out on all the incredible things that were happening in tech (I spend a lot of time on HN). After discovering AWS I was blown away by the possibilities and decided Linux and cloud were what I wanted to focus on as a professional.

I resigned to start my own consultancy and got the pro level AWS SA certification (with mostly self practice and no real-world production experience) and approached many businesses to sell services as an 'AWS certified' consultant. I got a few small wins but the sales cycle was longer than I expected and many potential clients would engage in long technical discussions but then cancel once they saw the TCO calculations.

The unstable cash-flow made things like paying rent on time very stressful so after two years I got a job at a small consultancy that provides mostly on-prem IT infrastructure services. I've learned quite a lot over the past two years and realized there were many holes in my knowledge. Yet, most of the clients' work was still on premise and now because of the pandemic many of them put their projects on hold or outright canceled them to cut costs. I've been furloughed without any income and right now I'm trying to survive by installing internet in homes and taking support calls while looking for a new job.

Many of the cloud related jobs - either solution architecture or Devops, require experience working in an agile software development environment, which is something I don't have and I have a major case of imposter syndrome because of this.

Now for the questions:

1) Is it possible to learn enough about agile practices and development to be productive without real-world production experience?

2) When you were looking for a 'real job' after running your own IT business, did you face any objections during the recruitment process on why you were looking for a job despite running your own business?

3) I was thinking of applying for 'cloud support engineer' type of roles because I really want to work in this field, but would that be a negative signal to recruiters because I'm an experienced (albeit in other areas) candidate?

After all these years I started to question if it was possible to go from rack and stacking to cloud but since you've explained it in such detail I see a path now. Thanks!
>CA is a giant state with no realistic public transport options for the vast majority of its population. Services like Uber and Lyft aren't merely 'luxuries' for its people, they provide a necessary service for many of them, without which their lives would not merely be inconvenienced but often be drastically affected.

Agreed. I am from LA and as a poor person, for the majority of my life (when I am on my own and without friends/family), my only choice was to walk or take the bus to places. When Uber came along, the idea of paying less than $10 to get a ride completely changed the game for people like me. Now we can actually be on time to important appointments that are too far off to walk or take public transportation reliably. And if we are running late, that's less than $10 to get to work on time, which is arguably worth it even if you were working the shittiest minimum wage job in CA, since minimum wage here is above $10. For us poor folk without cars and the money to pay for car insurance, the ability to call an Uber gave us freedom and choice beyond walking, cycling, and public transpo, which are a joke in a lot of situations - without having to rely on the good will of family and friends.
Emphasizing diversity in your hiring doesn't necessarily mean lowering the bar. It may mean trying harder to find candidates.

Of all the companies out there, Google can afford to be that picky. More importantly, they can look into why some people aren't choosing to study CS or apply to google, and adjust things to get a more diverse group of CS grads or fresh applicants.

Adjusting things so that CS is a more attractive career field, that would be great for everyone!
I'm going to take this as an excuse to ask some questions about how the hearing impaired use video chat:

How much does the video component help? I'd assume that most modern video chat solutions are adequate for sign language (but you know what they say about assumptions!). I've heard that reading lips over video is difficult. Is this a case where it's possible to read maybe half of what people say, or is it just impossible to read anything?

What happens when a deaf person receives an unexpected call/message when they're not looking at their PC or handheld? Is vibration from a mobile device usually enough? Are there any visual systems for a desktop to signal the user at a distance? (I'm thinking of something like the flashing light alarm clocks.)

Is communication via sign language over video chat feasible with a mobile device? I honestly don't know how much can be communicated with only one hand free. If one hand isn't enough, is propping the device up on a stable surface enough to be able to communicate this way? (Common sense says that at this point everyone would just be texting, but sometimes you just need that human connection.)

I don't have any practical need for any of these answers. It's just something I've been curious about for a while.
EDF is the "private company" which is building Hinkley Point C and Sizewell C.

For Hinkley, EDF have assumed the construction risk in return for an exceptionally high, guaranteed "strike price" for the electricity it produces.

But for Sizewell, it sounds like a different finance arrangement will be in place, likely where the UK government/public assumes more of the risk in return for a cheaper per-MWh price.
I’m so excited to see them embracing actors. I don’t use Swift and likely won’t in the future but I really hope this decision bleeds over into other mainstream languages.
This is a great article! I've been interested in music software and hardware for decades and my lockdown hobby has been finally spending the time to really dig into it. It is both very challenging and very rewarding.

If you want to go a little deeper than the article, here's a few more notes:

The way the author generates the sawtooth and square waves is "analytically". That means treating them like a function of time and simply calculating the waveform position each point in time. As you can see, it's really simple. Unfortunately, it also introduces a ton of aliasing and will sound pretty harsh, especially at higher pitches. If you're familiar with nearest-neighbor sampling in image resizing, think about how nasty and chunky the resulting image looks when you scale it down using nearest neighbor. Analytic waveforms do the equivalent thing for audio.

Fixing that problem is surprisingly hard. It's a lot like texture rendering in games where there's a bunch of filtering, tricks, and hacks you can do to make things look smooth without burning a ton of CPU cycles.

---

The clever trick the author uses to simulate strings is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karplus%E2%80%93Strong_string_...

---

The low-pass filter they show is a simple first-order 6 dB/octave digital low-pass filter. Filtering is fundamental to electronic music. The majority of synthesizers you hear in electronic music use "subtractive synthesis" which means to start with the simple sawtooth and square waves introduced early in the article and use filters to tame their harsh overtones. I find the math behind filter design, especially the moving filters used for synths, really difficult, but also interesting.
In my case, the recovery required physical therapy. My shoulders have also improved somewhat on their own over time. From what I’ve read, it’s not genetic. My shoulder injuries were each caused by a specific physical event, and then gradual loss of range occurred along with increasing pain.
Counterpoint: Why should your property taxes go up just because the market around you skyrockets, when this is completely outside of your control? The bay area is a prime example of this.
Chances are that 10 years from now you're still going to be money in the hole with no nuclear power plant. Both scenarios have no plant after 10 years.
I have to admit, one of my thoughts was 'Is there anything I can recommend'.
From my own chronic health issues, I think I just want pain to be seen and appreciated. Understand I need space/time to work on it. And whatever appropriate accommodations to be able to do my job.
Not really. The adult behavior of Democrat politicians bother me far more than the behavior of a 12 year old. I was a bad kid when I was 12. What matters is who we become as adults and what ideals we champion then.
Not disputing, not arguing, just trying to understand.

How come you and people you know suffered so many accidents? Were you commuting, competing, mountain biking, what? Is the weather bad?

Maybe my serious accident is waiting for me still, but the only close call I had was due to my own recklessness. Just riding a bike going from A to B? I can see how one could get injured, but not THAT seriously, unless it's due to a collision with a vehicle. Or it's something involving the head.

I don't know anyone that got seriously injured in bike accidents. I'm trying to understand if I'm just naive (and lucky) or if there's something I should avoid.
It's whiteboard interviews that are getting most of the heat.

They are cargo-culted to death, since everyone wants to be like FANG but won't pay they do the one thing they can afford from their playbook and execute poorly on it.

Truth is, from having conducted interviews, it's a real sink or swim situation where some folks won't be able to complete a simple wordcount implementation in 30+ minutes. A real whiteboard is a toy problem where you have to use an algorithm or a data structure, write a few test cases and some code on the board and explain why/how you did it, not some rote learning exercise.

At the senior band they shouldn't even be used, if the candidate is coming from a reputable company. But at the college level what else are you going to interview applicants about? You know everyone has done an algorithm class.
Do you know who voted it in? It’s not an officeholder. The voters of California voted for it. You want it changed? Go get a proposition to repeal it into the ballot and get it approved by the voters.

It’s as simple as that.

It wasn’t designed this way. There was a complaint that elderly were being driven from their homes by high property taxes.
By "attacked" you probably meant "criticised"? Criticising something is not only a perfectly normal activity, it's a necessary one and is an important part of the scientific method.
I wouldn’t say he tried to destroy functional programming. If you read his response he pretty clearly says that he just thinks that FP as a solution to all problems is “overselling” the solution.

And I 100% agree. Thinking that functional programming solves all problems is a fundamental misunderstanding of computation.

The first thing that opened my eyes to the overselling of FP as a panacea was reading Leslie Lamport’s work, specifically Computation and State Machines: https://lamport.azurewebsites.net/pubs/state-machine.pdf. Specifically, in Section 3: Programs as State Machines, he demonstrates how the same algorithm for computing factorials can be implemented via mutation or recursion.

With TLA+, Lamport also showed that mutation and state can be reasoned about mathematically, contrary to the central claim of functional programming purists.

The point is simple: functional programming doesn’t in any way _inherently_ help with correctly implementing programs. The fact that FP is currently in vogue is simply another example of how humans don’t require any evidence of anything at all before following a belief system blindly.

FP does prevent certain classes of mistakes from happening, i.e. unintentional bugs due to mutation creating implicit state machines. But preventing bugs and aiding in correctness aren’t exactly the same thing.
Can you give me a better definition of "personal" vs "private", because I'm seeing all sorts of problems there.
Valorant has a CoC. And yet, your wife suffered horrible toxicity and harassment in Valorant. This doesn't sound like their CoC was successful in curbing abuse.