skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think another possibility in addition to what you mentioned is that the original design was incorrect, or even just not very optimal. Just as an aside.

However this is all becoming a wide ranging statement about the entire job of a dev team. So far removed from the extremely innocuous advice of the article around "make small improvements regularly". Whilst you can apply caveats to that around "test your improvements", "check your improvement with others more familiar with that code" etc etc, these are all things that should be expected of a professional. At the risk of talking about no-true-scotsman.

If someone cannot be trusted with the advice "make small improvements regularly" then what the f* can they be trusted with?
It's complex!
(according to quantum mechanics)
> It's not actually controversial that without government intervention people acting in their own narrow self interest will destroy functional society.

Are you not being overly pessimistic of human nature? Even in places and times of extreme lawlessness, generally society continues to function without everyone being murdered. Or perhaps you were being hyperbolic?

granted I'd personally rather not be living in such a time or place.
Such criticism would have been more appropriate had the previous employer not literally been Mozilla, which recently laid off many Rust team members, or the role been not about working on the rust language.
What's the term form "like unit testing, for performance"?
Of course. But if you pronounce a fancy word like "bayesian" there's a large amount of minds that shut irremediably.
I struggle to see the weirdness. Whether or not what you say is true, and actually I suspect it is, that doesn't change the massive death discrepancy I gave.
Libel and slander, both? Does your legal consultancy understand the difference between the two? Does it understand how those laws apply to newspapers in America?
Sounds like you're talking about a rewrite, not a refactor. The whole idea of refactoring is to make code less repetitive or modular without changing functionality. Common patterns include replacing copy/paste code with common functions, replacing complex inline conditions and if/else cascades with helper functions returning bools/enums, etc. A true refactor is provably neutral wrt functionality, often so by simple inspection. If you're changing functionality that's a rewrite, and it's not making the code better because the original code no longer exists.
Also almost two years ago on HN, 20 comments, many with links:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20596299
This question is somewhat akin to the problem that Decartes eventually chose to resolve with "I think, therefore I am". The way I understand it, you can't really decide this so presume it to be true or nothing at all can be decided.
https://www.nbcconnecticut.com/news/local/man-suffers-substa...
I know, I agree 100% (I was being a bit provocative on purpose :p ).

But, on a serious note, I think this will backfire. It's one thing to not have a knife in you, it's totally another to remove one that is already in because you'd rather it wasn't there in the first place.

They are now officially 'the village formerly known as Fucking'. You can be sure the pranks will continue (possibly even more annoying because now people will be putting on an 'accent' when saying "Fugging").

I don't know what a better solution to this problem would be, but this doesn't mean I can recognise a bad solution when I see it.
Can this principle be universally applied?
The issue I run into with this comes part of the code review.

So some developer is going to fix some code, and the code is ugly. So the developer fixes the bug and makes the code prettier and push it as a single commit. I am then left with figuring out which changes are related to the bug fix and what is related to the cleanup.

If I tell the developer to first fix the bug and then cleanup in a separate commit, it may be inefficient since the fix after cleanup may not be the same as fix before cleanup. It may also lead to the cleanup being skipped because his work is technically done after the fix.

If I tell him to cleanup first and fix later, it's also seem to lead to issues since the developer has typically already figured out how to fix it since he came into the code with the mindset of fixing the bug.

Of course I like the code being cleaned up, and I like the idea that you improve the code as you work with it. But I'm not sure what the best method is. Maybe the issue is with me, that I want the cleanup and fix in separate commits for easier reviewing.

Personally if I spot ugly code when fixing a bug I add unit tests, fix the bug and then add another ticket to improve the code. I then plan that code cleanup for this or the next sprint. But it feels tedious and is probably inefficient as well
Do you have any advice for people going in the other direction, wltrmcq?
The article is excellent, congratulations.

A couple observations/questions.

1) You didn't comment on the bayesian viewpoint that probability reflects a subjective idea about the state of the world. One might argue, for example, that probability isn't measurable, and that therefore, strictly speaking, a statement about the objective probability of an event isn't meaningful. Experimental evaluation would have to be done on an entire model instead.
Do you have any objections to that point of view?

2) I don't find the case about Kolmogorov complexity to be actually convincing, at least not as per the requirements the rest of the article sets. "3141592..." could pass as either "random digits" or "first digits of pi". The fact that it's highly unlikely a true RNG would have generated exactly those, we are back to a frequentist argument there.
It's likely I'm missing something, could you elaborate more or give me a pointer?
Thank you for explaining much more clearly and succinctly than me.
You can trade crypto on PayPal? How?
Running out of file handles and other IO limits is embarrassing and happens at every company, but I’m surprised that AWS was not monitoring this.

I’m also surprised at the general architecture of Kinesis. What appears to be their own hand rolled gossip protocol (that is clearly terrible compared to raft or paxos, a thread per cluster member? Everyone talking to everyone? An hour to reach consensus?) and the front end servers being stateful period breaks a lot of good design choices.

The problem with growing as fast as Amazon has is that their talent bar couldn’t keep up. I can’t imagine this design being okay 10 years ago when I was there.
There’s nothing wrong with optimism. But this line of thinking is a bit naive unfortunately.

I’d say pretty much no one agrees on what “better” looks like. Better to someone often means applying a pattern that they just discovered in a blog post that week. Software design is still entirely subjective.

For example, “better” once meant refactoring to be more object-oriented. That’s backfired a bit recently, so now “better” might mean having a more functional design. There’s no evidence that either of these actually have any impact on the end result of quality as perceived by users.

Anyway, it’s good to be positive. There’s probably subconscious good that comes from that.
I'm not sure what you're looking for here. Are you saying that it is untrue that there are Black employees who feel that racial issues are being handled poorly at Coinbase? Because that's what the article says. It sounds like you're looking for enough information to make a judgement of whether the company is racist, in an innocent until proven guilty sort of way. But that is very much not the point.
I’m no statistician, but for me the most egregious failures on this have been constant use of ‘The’ R number and ‘The’ curve. The implication is that we have a single infallible measure that’s universally applicable, with no reference to exactly how R from different studies were weighted to come up with the announced figure, or how the sample populations of each study were skewed.
They used to be more influential in the tech scene - in typical British tabloid fashion they nicknamed Intel's Itanium chip the "Itanic" which stuck and seemed to be how everyone ended up referring to that disaster. They! still! do! great! Yahoo! headlines! too!
I don’t see a case where people really think - “You know it’s a lot more convenient to get in my car, drive all over town to pick up items than it is to get delivery.” I hate everything about the physical retail experience.
Well, you've quoted a sentence that rattles off several of them. In prior operating systems, files were structured objects, often readable and writeable only in collections of fixed-length records; they often had attributes including a "type" (Windows file name extensions are a vestige of this), and had I/O APIs requiring a particular memory layout in program memory for data to be read or written. There were also, in some cases, files that could be accessed only through limited forms of database query ("access methods" -- see, e.g., ISAM for Indexed Sequential Access Method), and not as raw byte streams, or streams of records.

Current mainframe programming environments retain a lot of this structure. Here's a writeup by someone trained on more Unix-derived environments who was self-teaching on the '60s legacy stuff: https://medium.com/the-technical-archaeologist/hello-world-o...
I applaud this, but I also advise against this for your career. Unless the change you're making has immediate and significant business benefits, from a PM/EM perspective you're 1) wasting time 2) potentially introducing bugs

The correct move is to wait until the org is so bogged down with tech debt that meaningful progress cannot be made, then switch companies/teams.
Ask HN: Why is the HN comments section no better than Fox News or NYT?
The amount of speculation with regards to topics usually about race, gender, and politics but sometimes even science and programming among “engineers” and “innovators” is kind of amazing.

The HN community appears to be no more rational or evidence-based than those found in the comments section of Fox News or the New York Times.

Example comments found here:

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25229544

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24149352

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23983974

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23696427

It’s all conjecture and anecdotes. Rarely will someone take the time to research and post links to evidence to improve the conversation.

1. What hope do we have if creators and maintainers are prone to the same proclivities as the users?

2. What can HN do to make not only it’s commenting section better but also improve the quality of commenting on the interwebs? Why?
Every single attempt to count flu deaths "like Covid-19" that I've come across compares apples to oranges in a way that downplays the number of flu deaths. There are some really critical gotchas that make apparently like-for-like comparisons misleading.

For a start, Covid-19 testing is much more widespread than flu testing. The UK has been testing everyone hospitalized for any reason for Covid, which they don't do for flu, and I think other Western countries are broadly similar. The flu tests are also less sensitive. Not only that, but because flu tends to kill more via secondary bacterial pneumonia, apparently patients don't necessarily have enough influenza virus left to test positive by the time they're hospitalized, whereas Covid causes pneumonia directly. Also, there's strong statistical evidence that flu causes heart attacks which aren't recorded as influenza deaths on things like death certificates.

The headline CDC, etc stats take all this into account to estimate the number of people who died as a result of flu, in the sense that they'd have lived if they weren't infected. The "counted like Covid-19" stats generally don't count these as flu deaths, whilst comparing with stats that count almost anyone who died after being infected with Covid-19 as a Covid-19 death regardless of whether it was directly caused by Covid in this sense. They really don't compare like with like.
The point was that raising the minimum wage demonstrably affects employment by the fact that we every day choose to send work overseas instead of using people here at home at higher wages.

You're going to have to work a lot harder to prove that those two facts are related than just saying them.

Perhaps you mean that the very lowest paid jobs are those that are outsourced? Are you talking about very low-wage factory jobs, such that people in China may be paid a few dollars an hour where the same in the US would be many dollars an hour? Or are you talking about IT outsourcing, which happens at values much higher than minimum wage?

If I have to guess your arguments and make them for you, then I don't really need you in this conversation at all, I suppose.
Mobile App Detects Tuberculosis
"We've had no complaints from cliff jumping participants."
If someone is working on a social good (the Rust compiler), is it not better that they are taking money from a large corporation rather than a smaller one that might put that money to better use?
Thesis: Partial State in Dataflow-Based Materialized Views
This has already been posted [1], but I do think that this video deserves a better audience.

Jon Gjengset presents his work [2] on materialized views, cache maintenance, and incremental updates, in the context of web databases.
His main contributions are around partial state materialization of the hot subset of the data with downstream propagation of the updates and upstream requests to create the missing entries on-demand.
These ideas have been implemented with Noria [3], a MySql compatible database designed for mostly-read workloads. The performance measured on lobsters-like workload is really impressive.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24853783

[2] https://jon.thesquareplanet.com/papers/phd-thesis.pdf

[3] https://github.com/mit-pdos/noria
Doctors had to make a decision about which patients to let die, because there wasn't enough space for everyone who needed medical help. That's called triage and pretty horrible. In my opinion, that is a collapse of the system in the sense that it can no longer fulfill its duties on an acceptable level.
Another relevant point made in the video is that they restrict cells to a maximum size which then makes it easier to test behavior at that size. This would have also helped avoid this specific issue since the number of threads would have been tied to the number of instances in a cell.

I definitely recommend checking out the video. Even if you have seen it before, rewatching it in the context of this post-mortem really makes it hit home.
This article reads like a startup founder trying to convince people to jump in a meat grinder.
Depends if that large corporation decides the direction of their work. Social good isn’t guaranteed in perpetuity.
450k employees globally, not just in the US.
probably not; we can’t date knitting that early, and by a wide margin. The earliest knit goods are ~1000CE and Egyptian.

The time period for these finds are ~>800 years earlier.

Naalbinding existed then, and works fine for fingers with its regular tools, and is actually very different from knitting in its technique.

I’m not convinced. I’m more concerned with the honest qualification of uncertainty in claims made about artifacts, though. The language of speculation and likelihood is a lot more intellectually honest than either the “ivory tower knows all” crowd OR the “folk wisdom knows all” gang’s respective positions.

fwiw i’m also immediately suspicious whenever druids are invoked with any certainty: we know so shockingly little about them at all that the confidence interval on anything to do with them is super wide.
Today, it is just a single straightforward google request "how long woodchucks live in captivity" -> 14 years (shown on SRP directly) according to pbs.org groundhogs-facts (6 years in the wild)
Absolutely. Not saying they chose the right magic number!
> Even in places and times of extreme lawlessness, generally society continues to function without everyone being murdered.

Typically in a generally lawless environment the prevailing means of social organization is what you call a mafia or warlord state, where small scale tribal sized areas become semi-stable anchored around a strongman type figure who maintains a monopoly on the use of violence.

In those situations survival exists at the discretion of the local warlord, who informally settles disputes and extracts whatever reasources they see fit, distributing the spoils to the militia members that keep them able to maintain their monopoly on violence.

This is easily recognizable as the default state for most of human history, and the state that society returns to when ungoverned. Examples include Afghanistan, Somalia, Sudan, various narco-states, and so on.

While functional, one very noticeable attribute is that it's not a pleasant way to live for everyone except those who win all the resources. Sound familiar?
Came here to say this.

While I like Silicon Valley, it has its downsides as well. And not everything good for Americans is good for Europeans.

I want to see our own "tech cities" across Europe, every one of them with their own culture, their own lifestyle, their own philosophy, etc. To be successful you don't have to imitate SV on everything.
Good point, they are actually specified so both in common lisp and scheme
But how, in a democracy founded on the notion of equality, did segregation become a policy? How did the people who passed those laws get it into their heads that it would be a useful thing to do?
In fairness, not all the employees in a town work for one company, and Amazon isn't all there is now in that hypothetical town.
Too young, too young. Not that there's ever a time when it feels right to lose a loved one, but wow, he was in the prime of his life.
Gatsby inc mistreats its employees
That would entirely depend on the distance to the store, and the assumption you'd always use a car.
Before you spend time looking this up, this is it:

U+2677 is the recycling symbol type 5 (polypropylene/"PP") and U+2678 is recycling material type 6 (polystyrene/"PS").

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recycling_codes#List_of_resin_...
Bref 1.0 Is Released
Just to be clear, this is a joke right?
I posted a text with code containing "```" to start e "```" to end the code blocks.

After publishing I tried to edit, but the "```" was replaced by "<!---->".
And corporations can put you in corporate "jail", lock you out of online services, or just disable or delete your identity being judge, jury and executioner...

With Government, there is some semblance of due process.
I'd add a "how we make money" explanation somewhere. I'd imagine most people that'd be interested in this would be wary of "free" (i.e. whats the catch).
I guess this is added global workforce, not US.
Isn't that what the occam's razor argument was for? Sure, both an RNG and the "40 digits of pie" program can produce that output, but the "40 digits of pie" program is shorter, therefore having less kolmogorov complexity
I think I was 12 or 13 when I stumbled upon The Temple of the Golden Pavilion. Till this day is easily in my top 10 favourite books. And oddly enough almost 20 years later the same copy is sitting right besides me on the shelf. I am very interested in getting a copy in another language and reading it just to see how I feel about it(sadly Japanese is out of the question): I've been surprised how different books feel in different languages. On the subject of Mishima, his biography really shocked me when I first read it. Most notably how the book and his life ended - incredibly similar, yet incredibly different. It's really hard to describe it but for anyone who hasn't read the book, I highly recommend it.
They called it "state of emergency" and "government advice to avoid the 3 Cs".

It's not a full lockdown, but it clearly modified people's behavior in a way that reduced covid spread while increasing loneliness.
amazon doesn’t seem to be a monopoly.

walmart is bigger than amazon.

amazon’s share of retail in the US is around just 5%.

maybe i missed something...
A good reminder to have fire alarms installed in every part of your house. We have one in each bedroom, each common area, and the hallways too. They are ten year alarms, so if we still live here in ten years, when one of them starts going bad we will just replace them all at once. Very simple step you can take to reduce your risk without much effort.
There is a delicate balance between the idealistic employer, and the employer than can actually survive in the universe. These people did used to work for what was probably your idea of "the better employer", and it did not survive sufficiently to pay them. Amazon is a reasonable compromise between say, a non profit, and Palantir. At least amazon works people hard to provide useful services so it can pay them,.
You don't need quantum physics to formulate a philosophical standpoint that happens to agree with the Kopenhagen Interpretation.

I'm not sure if it helps, but I suppose a compromise here would be the assumption that you don't really know the starting configuration of yourself, why you draw probabilistic inferences naturally, that the sun will go up tomorrow like every day.

If that has a biologic explanation, then the top comment was not just to the illusive argument of platonic ideals.
RC vs GC really depends on workload/memory and the volatility of the allocate to deallocate timeframe.

I think the better argument here is that iOS and MacOS use RC in the underlying objc libs. Having a CPU that works better around that makes sense to increase performance for those particular OSes.
Guess we need a national ballot referendum... Do such things exist?
I wish Amazon would offer some "green" packaging for items not needed immediately. Pool them and then send them out together, not in 5 different packages by 3 delivery companies.
Unironically, I legitimately expect Amazon would provide better social services than the government. Having dealt with a lifetime of various governmental entities, I struggle to think of a time I was actually satisfied and impressed with how they handled whatever, unlike Amazon, who continuously impresses me and quickly fixes mistakes.
The problem is political. Expecting people to spend and then blaming bad things on the same people is not going to have any good effects.
Ultimately, probability must be real, because if you zoom in to a low enough level, the movement of particles is basically random, and this randomness is enough to poison any deterministic explanations for which side a coin flip will land.

You could calculate which side a coin will land if you knew all the variables and thus arrive at a higher probability that it will land on a certain side, but it’s still a probability, because the particles that make up the coin could all move in such a way at any point that causes the coin to fall in a way you didn’t expect, even if that probability is very low. A small probability unlikely to happen is still a probability nonetheless.

Try computing how a dice made up of a few particles will land. Good luck...
Found it very strange to say that he died “peacefully” when he died because of injuries from a house fire a week earlier.
I'm surprised you're being downvoted for this.

I've consciously tried using Google Shopping to get around Amazon (an company with obnoxious employees IMO), but the experience is so much worse - no unified shipping, issues with returns, lack of trust... It's just not sustainable.
I'm assuming you mean LLVM by "compiler". If platform support of Rust is your concern here due to limited platform support of LLVM, then that might be going away. Based on the fact that Cranelift recently landed as a non-LLVM codegen backend in nightly, I assume that work is already pretty far on supporting alternative backends that could support alternative platforms.
it just sounds like you have a conclusion in mind and you're trying your hardest to make things fit it to be honest