skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Wow, this is a big deal. A free, distributed timescale database built on top of trusty Postgres, with column oriented, compressed storage for the time series data.

Also as I've stated before on HN, I love the new license which gives you almost all the freedoms of open source software while still letting TimescaleDB create a profitable business and not get squashed by AWS - which benefits nobody.

I have lot's of questions:

Queries on distributed hypertables are run across the cluster, but what about regular queries to regular tables? Write transactions obviously need to happen in one server, but is there a way to split read queries across the cluster? I don't know if regular table data is duplicated across data nodes, or if it's only on the access node and joined transparently to the result set from the distributed hypertable query.

There are 3 kinds of server types for the cloud offering on AWS, IO, compute, or storage optimized. These seem to imply the database storage goes on instance storage, not EBS. This performs much better than EBS, especially on the high IO NVMe instances AWS offers. It also offers more predictable performance and tail latency because there is no network involved, no distributed block storage system (and EBS has had more than it's fair share of outages.) Is this true? I know compose.io (IBM) does this for their managed PostgreSQL for similar reasons.

I'd like to compare the pricing to RDS for same-sized instances + storage, with moderate workload so I can get a feel for the markup on the managed service and know at at a glance, ok, this is going to cost me 50% more than RDS but I also get all these TimescaleDB features.

I'd also like to see some performance comparisons, just for regular read + write workloads on Postgres, because if I'm right about using instance storage vs EBS the same sized hardware will give more transactions per second for TimescaleDB.
I mean, if 99% of species go extinct it would be fair enough to expect that our species goes extinct too at some point. You could call that destiny as well, or you could call it entropy. For sure it’s not “no destiny at all”.
One of interesting things we’ve found is that the typical data models we’ve seen in TimescaleDB (and time-series workloads in general) is that, while having JOINs and additional tables with metadata, business info, etc. is super useful -- and missing from most other time-series databases, leading to frustrating polyglot solutions that deploy them alongside Postgres/MongoDB/whatever -- it’s much less common to see the terribly deep snowflake schema patterns that came to dominate OLAP, with levels-upon-levels of normalization.

And certainly the fact that your time-series hypertable in TimescaleDB can also store JSON, given Postgres’ underlying capabilities, also helps here and thus provides developers with flexibility given their application/performance needs.
Nice! The first real game I ever made was with pygame :) https://github.com/samertm/snake-python
I like to say that I specialize in "loathsome technologies"; makefiles, maven, xml, SCM and CI systems, security, etc.

Though I have done everything from kernel work to web development in my career I often end up working on or helping with the build and release engineering aspects. I will also frequently end up being the person who works on the product cybersecurity and security model.

It certainly isn't the most "fun" work but it is necessary and usually gives you a deep understanding of how the system works. This is especially true for older products.

Part of the problem you are facing is the assumption that by hiring smart people they are hiring people who can do anything, the people are interchangeable, fungible. Even if the "smart" part is true the willingness to work outside of their preference areas is not universal. Developers are often entitled, spoiled and fussy. And why not, with the variety of work opportunities and amount of choice available they can generally afford to be picky.

So it is not enough to say that you are a jack-of-all-trades, but that you are happier being that way and are explicitly willing to take on tasks/roles that may otherwise be hard to fill. This doesn't mean that they can assume that they will only give you the shit-jobs; it is still negotiated. If they want to you work on, for example, QA tooling and you REALLY hate that make sure to negotiate that the work is not open ended and for a specific project or time window. You are solving a problem for them, usually temporarily, and they still need to come up with a long term answer. Don't get yourself stuck in a rut of one particular assignment, it is too easy to wind up being stuck in that role for the rest of your time in the organization.

You can use staff turnover, particularly management turnover to your advantage. Every staff change creates a new configuration. Use these occasions to adjust your role and volunteer for opportunities which interest you.
My guess is it stops mattering the further civilizations stray from Earth. You'd more likely to be treated as an Earthling or Martian or whatever once you zoom out.
Another factor which has not been mentioned much is that an unfrozen Laptev sea will affect the placement of the jet streams. Open sea will result in a lower albedo and greater evaporation on the surface, year-round. This in turn will change the composition of the atmosphere over the region, causing the jet streams to be shifted and may affect flight routes and seasonal weather patterns for northern regions.

https://www.pnas.org/content/117/6/2824
Show HN: Lurker – lightweight terminal client for Hacker News
Because I have not yet figured out how to start executing at somewhere other than the beginning of the generated code, and because I don’t store generated code in any intermediate buffers, and because we don’t know the sizes of any code in advance, I do this funky thing where I emit a jmp to the body code.

If you, dear reader, have a better solution, please let me know.

Assuming you know the byte offset into the code buffer, of your "main" equivalent label, you should be able to use the following:

byte* start_address = buf->address + offset;
JitFunction function = *(JitFunction*)(&start_address);
return function(heap);

I'm guessing you were running into the issue that you can't do this in one line while also suppressing the warning about the data pointer to function pointer.

The "normal" way to do this would be the following, but it has the downside of the compiler warning:

JitFunction function = (JitFunction)(buf->address + offset);
return function(heap);
Seems like part of it is that at least GrubHub seems to go ahead and do it anyway.
It's a weasel statement that only claims to "a lot" of user sentiment. It's not something you can easily disagree with because the claim is so vague.
Reading that, I would assume it's the definition/configuration for alerts that's managed in Git, not the alerts themselves. "Infrastructure as code".

I rather like that approach myself—I would not want logic and configuration living in some stateful system outside Git.
Evolving pg_cron: Postgres 13, audit log, background workers, & job names
> And any trained pilot knows autopilot does not do everything and that you should be prepared to take over if needed , if you perceive autopilot to be "AI-magic" you should not blame others for your own ingnorance.

A huge part of airplane safety is the direct opposite of that. It isn’t “don’t blame others for your ignorance” it is “the system should be designed so that it is harder to make a mistake than to do the right thing”. Design and testing doesn’t put the onus on pilots, it puts the onus on the design and the system. How can this documentation be clearer? Is this warning easy to ignore in certain situations and how can we change that? If a pilot gets confused in this situation, how can we design the system to help? How can we train our pilots so they can handle this? How can we test our pilots so we know they truly understand the system? They don’t just say “well the manuals were available, you should have known so that’s on you”. Saying “it’s the individual’s fault” doesn’t improve the system.
This sounds like it is talking about people using a phone and watching TV at the same time. Not using multiple monitors at work as the title lead me to think.
Reliability Pillar: AWS Well-Architected Framework [pdf]
Getting into a biglaw firm is only the first gate, as their model requires a pretty big funnel and up-or-out process. Lot's of promising young lawyers are grist for that mill, and many end up doing something else after.

Lots of young lawyers have no interest in biglaw either, and only some of them are naive about their future prospects.
Forewarning, comparing across utterly different segments of devices is bad & dangerous for the health of industries. And yet, let's dive in to just that: there's a lot more I/O than an RPi4 here! 8+4+1 PCIe 3.0 slots. Wow. If it can really use the bandwidth these slots expose that's very impressive. 4 USB ports but so few folks clarify whether that's for real or shared bandwidth under a single usb host or whether they're independent. So either an effective +1.25 or +5 extra PCIe3 slots of bandwidth there, again, if this device can saturate those links.

I'm wondering very much how the CPU fares. This is progress either way, but will it match a RPi4? The RPI4 has tiny I/O but I feel like it's probable the cpu performance is not radically unlike.
> Evolution has geared us for this world. We might be able to cobble together a survival elsewhere, but I doubt we could ever thrive.

"Nothing human makes it out of the near future."
Did no-one else watch lost?
This is why people are afraid of the far left. Hopefully more and more people will stand up against this garbage.
No HDMI, no wifi, $665.

It's a nice product but the RISC-V Pi I was hoping for still isn't here.
For a $15,000,000,000 market annually that's pretty cheap for the participants...
Why Amazon and Reliance are clashing in India over a cash-strapped retail chain
Consider Jellyfin instead of Plex :)
The last coronavirus pandemic didn't cause collapse or revolution. The acute phase of the pandemic will end within a few years even if we do nothing to control it (I am not advocating doing nothing).

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7252012/
"History isn't perfect" is not a good reason to avoid doing history. Historians are all well aware of these facts.
Postgres is hell of a no-sql database :)
It's not so much as it doesn't travel well, it's that the delivery driver doesn't deliver it well. I've waited over an hour for delivery food before. Actually, 45 mins to over an hour is typical no matter the service I use, so I've stopped using it. The model is that the food sits out and gets cold because the delivery driver doesn't get there in time.

Instead, I order takeout. I call the restaurant directly, with their actual number and not some phishing line from a delivery service, and place an order. I immediately leave, and travel the 5-15 mins to the restaurant. By the time I arrive, the food had been finished just moments before, and I travel back home and enjoy my piping hot food. All told the process takes me half the time or less and the food is in perfect condition.
U.S. economy posts record growth in third quarter
It wasn't that long ago that most climate scientists were saying that we wouldn't see a Blue Ocean Event (BOE) until 2040-2050, but I suspect we'll see, like many climate estimates, that number ends up being a bit too conservative. When the BOE does happen we'll start to see some pretty dramatic changes to our world fairly rapidly (and as a reminder, we are already seeing dramatic changes to our world).

We're all in some form of climate denial right now. Even if you are able to acknowledge that climate change is happening, you likely aren't being realistic about how unavoidable its impacts are, or the full magnitude of those impacts.

I still see people talking about life in 150 years as if it will be a simple continuation of the "progress" we've seen in the last 150, completely oblivious to the way that progress was achieved and the inevitably and unavoidable consequences of it.
I bought a subscription to CR when I was going to buy a TV. They pick random categories to use when deciding which one is "best". This TV has a large bezel but is perfect in every other way? Well too bad 80/100 and the super expensive Samsung gets a 92/100.

So there is probably something better about GM, but it in no way means you will be happier with it compared to FSD
Oh no, my internet points!
absolutely relevant. 1-2 centuries ago the deciding top of the society were mostly white males. That naturally leaded to the less diverse set of opinions held by them. Or do you think Jim Crow, etc. would have the same history if black people were part of the deciding elite 150-100 years ago?
I've always wondered this too. Can you do a legitimate six figure transaction in actual cash? I'd be uncomfortable carrying around enough cash for a new car, let alone a house.
What makes a lot of those hard is solving them while keeping the current political class ordering in place.

Wealth transfers and reduction in consumption are clear solutions, but getting people to give up their luxuries and prioritize future generations’ lives over their own is the root problem, which may not have a solution.
Wouldnt it be easy to bootleg?
European bought more EV cars than diesels last month for the first time ever
It's also dangerous to think humans have a destiny on earth, in the sense that our planet will just keep providing. Sooner or later, it'll become equally hard to survive here as it would be in space if our processes do not become circular. We still have a long time to get there in many regards, it's only energy whose methods we need to change asap (which is relatively easy, we have the tech and means; we don't have the tech by any means to be circular in many other ways).
I mean it will be compared by Apple, when they launch their new apple silicon macs and want to show off how much faster their chips are than previous Intel - likely taking all the credit, when a large part is down to TSMC's 5nm process.
My Resignation from the Intercept
> US isn't "producing" those lawyers. People choose to become lawyers

Isn't there any regulatory body which controls the number of law degrees awarded annually, like there is for doctors?
Indeed, few Mbps is typical for the current number of users. It can take days to download relatively large files. Still, is speed more important than anonymity? Definitely not always, perhaps never.

I hope it gets better with more users, as it happened with Tor.
At least addressing #1, I think people underestimate the fact that renting property is a business. If making your mortgage is contingent on both income from your job and your business, that’s a pretty risky position to be in. I’m not sure it’s fair to blame the law on this situation. If his tenant lost their job due to the pandemic they wouldn’t be able to make rent, either. He’d need to go through the time consuming and costly effort to evict that person over several months. The pandemic is the problem, and even the absurd real estate market is susceptible to that risk.
The article I feel confuses collaboration between an existing group of people and open public collaboration. The former can setup private repos on github or any other of fifty approaches. The later however just means you have a different set of single points of failure (mailing list, mailing list archives, domain for mailing list, SMTP server, etc.). Mailing lists may allow the latter to fall back to the former a bit more easily but it's far from a clean transition. So they're at best a very partial band aid for the underlying issues so provide little value versus building an actual solution (ie: over Tor, etc.).
Next you will be saying termite mounds aren't really built by termites, and that we only imagine they are because we often find termites all through them. ("Even more often, we don't! Explain that!")
Grubhub fucks up the order, the customer leaves a bad yelp/google review for the restaurant. (Because the customer was tricked into believing that they were interacting with the restaurant the entire time.)

That's why this is fraud.
China it was, reportedly
Precisely what was said above is what I meant.
It should be possible to migrate to GitHub without losing attribution. I've seen scripts in the past that build up a Git repository from scratch, back-dating contributions and crediting them to the author.

No idea if MDN are planning to do that though.
Building wide tunnels is very hard and nullifies the main advantage of having the tunnel in the first place, which is easier routing.

Cost also vastly increases, likelihood of total failure as well. Big tunnels need big supports and big service ducts.
Because not everyone's a loser in this case. Homeowners (typically boomers) benefit from this in the form of higher valuations for their home, which means $$$ when the decide to sell, or decide to take out a HELOC.
Hydrogen cars won't overtake electric vehicles because of the laws of science
Of course, some apparently have fake websites setup by grubhub to mislead customers.

> Grubhub is using thousands of fake websites to upcharge commission fees from real businesses

> They also list phone numbers that don’t belong to the actual business

https://www.theverge.com/2019/6/28/19154220/grubhub-seamless...
AI systems use Mad Libs to teach themselves grammar
"Copycat" in this context didn't mean literally copying TPB (although that did happen and was actually made possible by them dumping their DB at some point IIRC).

Most torrent sites do seem to have an own code base. It's not like they run the same software (or at least they have different themes, I never actually checked).

It is also neither surprising nor bad that the sites still have the same goals/design basics. They all solve the same problem, so they will end up looking similar overall. No problem with that.

What is being criticized here (by me, I don't wanna put words into Warg's mouth since it's an old, probably misremembered interview) is that the way that they deliver that "product" (in this context: the torrent website itself, not the hosted torrents' contents!) in an unimaginative way without taking into account the changing battlefield.

Fully i2p torrent sites? Niche.

Local DHT scraping with an overlay net of torrent index exchange à la yacy or magnetico? Niche.

And apparently: hosting anywhere that is not immediately susceptible to direct US influence, i.e. NOT on namecheap+cloudflare? Still kind of niche. Wtf?
Can you recommend other high-quality job lists?
How to Save Streaming Video
The SM64 ports were reverse engineered. I'd be curious what grounds Nintendo had to stop them.
I can understand how you might think that code repos are different from other social media sites.

However, they aren't. They require moderation because people are rude even when not anonymous.

Here's a quote from the vscode repo moderators:

> We deleted a handful of comments which we deemed too offensive to leave as-is (foul language, racist remarks, etc.). We also deleted a few issues that were overwhelmingly offensive. Unfortunately, that resulted in some non-offensive comments within those issues being deleted as well.

https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/87440

Surely you can't continue to claim that open source communities do not suffer from such issues, now, right?
I can appreciate that no one wants to hear cautionary words about our loftiest ambitions. However, I believe it's worth reflecting carefully on the topic.

One way to look at the dream of escaping the planet and colonizing space is in mythological terms. One comparison in particular is good and this is the idea of the afterlife or heaven which for centuries were as real and attainable as a Mars colony to you and I.

For advanced technocultural civilizations and the religious institutions that hold them together it seems that an imaginary place of escape automatically becomes normalized into existence.

The illusion grows proportionally to the sense of futility that individuals feel as a social structure calcifies around the protection of class hierarchy. The consequent protective buffer against meaningful experience of complex ecology and culture that results is the proverbial bottle which constrains the human spirit, until it is ready to explode in unrealistic directions.

So the suffering and anxiety of individuals trapped in a top-heavy social structure lends energy and reality to unrealistic visions.

Thus we dream of terraforming mars while in the midst of terrastroying earth into an unlivable nightmare, mass extinction, unbalanced population growth, global chemistry change, etc.

Like, we can't even prevent our rainforests from being raised, losing countless complex organic systems forever, yet we imagine ourselves spawning new life on distant planets.

And the destruction of our own planet is made possible with only the tiny drops of energy we can dig out of the ground. What will become of our planet surface when we have tapped the energy of the sun in earnest?

That said, if we do survive the current paradigm, and do manage to protect our surface biofilm or otherwise survive the next few hundred years, nothing will prevent us from colonizing the solar system and beyond. But we are ahead of ourselves, and that's the result of poor social/cultural order.

There's some irony there. The engine of malcontent that destroys us also propels is forward.

However it's safe to say that most of the energy and excitement we feel for terraforming planets and exploring space right now ought to be redirected towards building a conservationist earth culture that can support slow technological accretion and a long-term template for extra planetary adventures. Heaven is real but it takes real work to get there.
Not to mention the implied canard that economists are the only ones suited to design policy

(despite not being educated in climate science and lacking actual tacit knowledge on what drives global climate)
Outstanding open-source projects which have just one source file
I think NoSQL works for a very limited number of cases. Most of the time you just end up moving all the schema checking and integrity checking (foreign key enforcement) to the application level and then you're squarely worse off.

Plus MongoDB, which is the poster child of the revolution, has been a technical pile of shit for a decade. It's slower than JSONB on Postgres, and loses data in the default configuration, was insecure in the default configuration, failed Aphyr's Jepsen distributed system consistency tests every time - in other words promised things about consistency that were lies in their documentation.

They have improved a lot, but I feel so sorry for people who jumped on that bandwagon early.

My interest lies in databases and database internals, and I spent 8 years building databases in my spare time. I always advise everyone that they should use a relational database unless they are very, very sure their requirements don't require it and won't ever require it. It's much easier to start with Postgres and switch to NoSQL later if you really need to go that way than to do it the other way around. Most times you find you don't need to switch to NoSQL. The imagined hordes of users never materialized to overwhelm your trusty relational database.
It’s not a partisan thing, when the Republicans are always bleating about capitalism being the “one true way”. Do you really think this type of thing wouldn’t be happening regardless of which party is in power?

Greed transcends politics. It takes extreme mindfulness to acquire wealth and not end up corrupted by it in some way.
You may not be wrong about C# or Go, I haven't used C# in any capacity in probably 15 years now, and have only dabbled lightly in Go, but Java at least I find is still pretty heavy- awhile back I wrote about my experience trying node here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21784272 and I think it sums it up pretty well and is more than I am willing to retype :)