skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Philip Glass' soundtrack to the 80's film Mishima has become one of my favourite albums. The "Mishima VI, Closing" piece is some of his best work.

The author's final observation, "Perhaps we need a Mishima to shock us out of our complacency." is something he should be careful about wishing for. (Though the idea of Ian McEwan storming a military base was very funny, I thought Stephen Fry would be even better equipped. "...ah, well, right then, moving along..." )

What makes Mishima so dangerous today is that he produced beautiful art and culture from which the downstream political conclusions were unavoidable. This is one side effect of good art. Political theory itself is a kind of vulgar pseudo intellectual haggling compared to aesthetic truths and their self evidence that great art demonstrates. As an example from another of today's threads, a Chopin mazurka does more for Polish national identity than any explanation could do. Writing itself is an inferior (but necessary) form because it only describes in a narrow dimension instead of demonstrates over multiple senses. This is what I think Misihma also understood. I only read the Sea of Fertility books (in English some years ago) and they're demanding, but this muscular and humane expression of aesthetic truth and even divine power is the seed for the survival of the human spirit. A revolt against becoming the bland, homogenized "last man," may very well originate from the sentiments Mishima was able to bring words and life to.
If you've seen the Lisp Koans in the past, you might want to revisit them someday. Around half a year ago I've rewritten[0] the original set of koans, fixed multiple correctness issues, added some content, and cleaned up the test framework; they now look much better than the original version.

[0] https://github.com/google/lisp-koans/pull/111
Pact is Wildbow's least favorite work to recommend since he thinks life issues made him a worse writer at the time. Pale so far is the work he's happiest to recommend of all of them.
It doesn't matter. If I'm running a job overnight, I'm not plugging or unplugging any peripherals or starting or stopping any other tasks. My sole expectation is that the system will run my job to completion. Not to rudely interrupt it to restart the system to install updates which it has decided are of a higher priority than the sole reason I am running the system.

Another situation is that I'm running virtual machines on a Windows 10 host. I want those machines to be available continuously, and I want any system reboots to be planned and manually executed. Windows 10 has taken that control away.

Windows 10 restarting itself on its own whims is a regular occurrence. It's completely and utterly unacceptable. Even if you change all the settings to prevent it, it still occurs.
Amazon has been on a hiring spree lately.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/27/technology/pushed-by-pand...
> against a democratically elected government

I believe calling the Japanese government of that era "democratically elected" is a bit of a stretch if you consider that the exact same party stayed in power from the mid-fifties to the mid-nineties [1]

For a long while after the war, Japanese politics were essentially controlled by the west, something Mishima and many like him - quite understandbly - resented deeply.

[1] https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5gm0f2jf
For my project, I chose txt as the base format. Ascii or Unicode? There's a config for that.

From that, I can go to SQLite, HTML, DAG, whatever. It's easy to work with, easy to back up and synchronize, and as human readable as it gets.
Amazon hires 427,000 people in 10 months
Until you make a bunch of choices about "better" that are based on presumptions that are incorrect. Now you're just making things worse and filling yourself with a sense of accomplishment that puts you out of touch with reality.

When I was in scouts, our scout leader was adamant that we should leave the place "The way it would have been if left alone" and not try to push our own ideas of "better" on things. Which I think is a much better line of thinking, even if still flawed.
It’s a generational Ponzi scheme.

We buy in as they say, they never have to pay out (in taxes). New wealth is generated by newcomers buying in (which conveniently keeps their wealth up).

In the end we get left with the environmental cleanup bill.

I have no respect left for western society. Its social experts outside science are average people acting emotionally.

It’s no different to me than Sky wizard missionaries generating titillating story to grift off workers they came across. Beamed into our homes now. Grifters don’t even need to do more than show up on set.

Businessmen to me are the final form of priests or kings. Story mode characters finely tuning a top-down hierarchy story in which they insert themselves near the top, but never do much but ramble inconsistency.
“For example, it’s absolutely shocking that the common paradigm for engineers at Google is to come in at 11am and leave at 4pm.“

Ahaha, sounds like the writer is young. What we are actually doing is playing the long game. We do care, but we are optimizing for not burning out, so we can have a larger ‘area under the curve’ of giving a shit.
The people I know who are or have children on the spectrum would take issue with your opening sentence. Armstrong might find that a convenient excuse but it shouldn’t erase all of the effort most people put into being considerate.
I wondered if the popularity of 'The queen's Gambit' would lead to a brief infatuation with chess in the popular imagination. The fact I've seen about 3 chess related submissions on HN recently, where I don't recall ever seeing one before, suggests it does.

I used to enjoy a game of chess back in the day, although I was never very good. And I always imagined myself playing chess with a remote opponent by post when I was a dusty old man [as featured in a few period dramas].

It's a shame that the advent of the internet has simultaneously increased your chances of finding someone to play with remotely but, at the same time, [for me anyway] pretty much removed all inclination to do so, as I'd never be sure my opponent wasn't just putting the moves into a computer and playing whatever it told him to play.
The problem is that there is no objective measure of "better". The consultant did think he was leaving the code better than he found it.

I've worked on codebases where the whole team agrees a certain part of the codebase needs to be refactored, but we all also agree it is way too dangerous. Which is better? Working but hard to maintain spaghetti code, or clean, new, and broken code?
Agreed, this is why I like the idea of searching parsed files, for example using scope selectors against code tokenized with a sublime-syntax grammar. Unfortunately, it means it needs to be parsed/indexed first, which is slower than a plain regex search.

I wonder if the AST built by Tree-Sitter could also help with this type of search - does anyone know of any existing solutions for this?
It's important that they investigate what is alleged, and fix whatever wrongdoing they find.

If any individual was treated unfairly, that individual can sue under discrimination law, for a private apology and settlement.

But beyond that, it's also important that there be NO public apology or acceptance of the idea that refusing to espouse activist politics makes a company intolerant.

I think it's admirable Coinbase is taking a stand to keep activism out of the workplace.

Treating people fairly is required; tolerating campaigning in a private enterprise is not.
Thanks for the suggestion, I will check it out.
Who reviews code changes by the developer?
> Swiss world of rules makes the northern Germany feel as flexible as a South American country

That is quite unworldly. I worked on large projects both in Switzerland and in Germany. These are totally different cultures. The number of laws and the degree of bureaucracy in Germany is many times greater than in Switzerland (only surpassed by Italy). In Germany everything is forbidden that is not explicitly allowed, in Switzerland it is the other way round. In Switzerland everything can be negotiated; try negotiating with a German official. Good luck with that.
> My impression was that they were mainly motivated by advancing their language rather than, you know, implementing a browser.

It is true that the folks working on Rust are focused on "advancing the language," yes. I don't see why it would be any other way?

> Apart from kernels and drivers (where Rust seems an outright no-go),

Rust works great in these scenarios. We'll see about some higher profile examples, like Linux. Work there is ongoing. Only one way to find out.

> C is traditionally used for higher-level language runtimes and compilers/interpreters/VMs. But Rust's borrow checker is a bad fit for just about any text book algorithm and technique in that space.

There are a ton of projects in this space. After all, the Rust compiler, for example, is one of the two OG massive Rust codebases. But there's also tons and tons of projects here.

> Hell, even Rust devs themselves say implementing a DOM is about the worst use case for Rust.

Sort of, but also not really. Implementing a DOM would be easier if Rust had inheritance, is usually what is claimed. Yet, Servo was still built, and nobody would suggest that the DOM was a hard blocker here.
us-east-1 is AWS’s dirty secret. If ddb had gone down there, there would likely be a worldwide and multi-service interruption.
You could quite easily argue that another vote was conducted in the form of the 2019 General Election, which the Tories - the only party of note who actually were in favour of Brexit - won by a landslide.
Empathy Is Required for Democracy
Sounds like the ‘what problem are they trying to solve was I’ll-defined’. Consulting companies will always find issues as that’s their reason for having the account - to generate revenue.
I don't care so much about standardization as about choice, though, which is what standards tend to create, or the formation of standardization bodies tend to document. C is simple enough to create a compiler from scratch in less than a year (as proven by Tiny CC), but sinking your precious time into a behemoth like Rust (or other language-to-rule-em-all with open research problems) is on another level altogether in terms of commitment. As the language hasn't finalized, can change at any time, only people with inside knowledge of Rust will be able to work on such projects. Others will have to take a significant risk of their Rust code base becoming obsolete, or Rust simply imploding due to lack of new devs outside the inner circle able to pickup. Which makes Rust an irrational choice in the presence of alternatives.
Except it did by creating a larger market. Some of that was flashy at the start like the gold watches but ultimately created a new market. Personally I quit wearing a watch sometime around 2010 when I found I was checking my phone and didn't need a watch. Now I am checking my watch for time and weather and not pulling my phone out.
Such an interesting post, thank you for sharing! I'm in my second year of a maths degree currently, and we obviously studied frequentist probability/stats in the first year, but I'm not taking any probability modules this year. I found the tone & accessibility was just right for me :)
Whilst improvements shouldn't be done ad-hoc without consideration, I think the concept of "left alone" applies more easily to the concept of natural spaces. In code it is really stretching the metaphor to do much more than very basic tasks like renaming or code formatting (e.g. picking up trash). Adding a test doesn't feel like "left alone".

One of the examples in the article is upgrading a dependency. This could easily fall into the category you mention if the upgrade itself is not properly tested. A considered approach would be:

"I want to make a small improvement, oh I see this dependency is out of date and has some minor vulnerabilities or perf issues, or is missing a feature that could come in handy for XYZ. Hmm, there are no tests confirming our assumptions about the current library version, nor are then any tests are our code / systems that use it. I guess my improvement should be to add those tests, then next time someone has the same idea it'll be an easier upgrade"

I am unsure but I also interpret from your first sentence that you may have seen people use this rule as a defence for gold plating (the opposite of KISS or YAGNI). Similarly this should fall under the heading of changes made without proper discussion, thought or consideration.

Otherwise I think we're really stuck, if team members cannot be trusted to properly interpret the boy scout rule without messing up a codebase then how on earth can they be trusted to build the foundation of their company / team / system?
Congratulations everyone. Small business is dead. Luckily, we still have Dr. Phil, professional sports and soap operas.

Keep up the good work. And don't follow your leaders; stay inside and do as you're told instead.
Other developers, unless it's a solo dev at a small company. Then roll the dice and hope you hired someone with good design sensibilities.
Free Text Annotator for NLP
I don’t doubt what you’re saying, but can you link to a source on this? Highly relevant to some work I’m considering, and I’ve been looking for additional data on this for a bit.
we are a professional services company, so we monitor hours by default.
This article does not belong on HN. It has all the hallmarks of crankery: An early rejection of the entire field of study involved; describes peer review as a tyranny of orthodoxy; Makes assumption that everyone else who has studied this missed something as fundamental as unit conversions; and then engages in a lot of gymnastics and assumptions to justify a pre-decided conclusion.
How is it not hard to get into Google? Sounds more like survivorship bias.
Show HN: GitHubGameOff 2020 Contribution in Go and OpenGL
I work with macOS a lot, both for professional and personal use. I feel like Apple is making macOS increasingly abstract and taking away more control from the user with every update. For example, you used to be able to turn off auto-mounting of external/internal disks with a few command-line entries, but as of several versions ago, that feature was mysteriously removed and no one in the mac community seems to know how to fix it. It’s the kind of thing that makes me drift towards *nix OSs for personal computing and side projects. I still use and prefer Mint for such things.
In the entertainment industry, deepfakes. At the moment it's the preserve of hobbyists uploading comedy clips to YouTube, but in a few years I can see Hollywood (assuming it survives Covid) using the technology to prolong franchises with aging actors at the very least. I can also forsee it being possible for film fans to pay a fee to have their own likeness added to their favourite movies.
root-cause tldr:

...[adding] new capacity [to the front-end fleet] had caused all of the servers in the [front-end] fleet to exceed the maximum number of threads allowed by an operating system configuration [number of threads spawned is directly proportional to number of servers in the fleet]. As this limit was being exceeded, cache construction was failing to complete and front-end servers were ending up with useless shard-maps that left them unable to route requests to back-end clusters.

fixes:

...moving to larger CPU and memory servers [and thus fewer front-end servers]. Having fewer servers means that each server maintains fewer threads.

...making a number of changes to radically improve the cold-start time for the front-end fleet.

...moving the front-end server [shard-map] cache [that takes a long time to build, up to an hour sometimes?] to a dedicated fleet.

...move a few large AWS services, like CloudWatch, to a separate, partitioned front-end fleet.

...accelerate the cellularization [0] of the front-end fleet to match what we’ve done with the back-end.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=swQbA4zub20 and https://assets.amazon.science/c4/11/de2606884b63bf4d95190a3c...
But how many of them are going to flip over once the next crisis occurs?
Tony Hsieh, former Zappos CEO and 'tremendous visionary,' dies at 46
The Product / Feature Line
Free QR Scanner and Barcode Creator
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Scan all format codes anywhere at any time!

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Barcode Scanner App
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QR Code Generator
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Custom Graph for Figma
Custom Graph lets you build line, bar and cumulative graphs based on your design elements in Figma.
This plugin from the developers of https://GoodGantt.com - Gantt chart for Trello
Custom Graph lets you build a line, bar, and cumulative graphs based on your design elements.
HOW TO BUILD A GRAPH:
Select the frame in which you want to build the chart;
Select an object in your design from which you want to build a graph;
Enter data into the table (also supported in pasting from Excel and generating random numbers in the desired range).
TO SEE ALL THE SETTINGS FOLLOW THE LINK:
https://linky.design/custom-graph
Note: This plugin does not create coordinate axes to give maximum flexibility in plotting. You need to create coordinate axes yourself.
Watch the video: https://youtu.be/U9Op6-auZtY
contact us: support@customgraph.pro
Where Is God?
Where is God? Well, It's high time you checked it. Just have a check.

Myth: Even though all the religious orders have explained it in different ways, the later interpretation left it slipping beyond ordinary comprehension. People think that God is situated somewhere in heaven looking into the things you do, trying to punish you for whatever you've done wrong. When you pray to God, God's responsible for granting your wishes. You can please God through different rituals so that God can easily give you the most favorable life. God is your own property and you can ask God to punish your enemy. You can curse God if something wrong happens to you and can hold God responsible for that. Many of you still believe that God is a separate entity, staying somewhere.

Truth: God is the Pure Conscious Energy that you can see everywhere. God is gender less and when it allowed itself to get experienced the Creation took place. It kept its creation different. Difference means always more experience. Whatever you see outside is God experiencing in different forms and dimensions. You yourself are the part of it. Learn more:https://youtheuniverse379.blogspot.com/2020/08/where-is-god.html?m=1
My advice is not to worry about it. Figure out what you want to think most about and seek truth. If other people find a different truth, try to learn from it. It's that simple.
What if you want to use the same form factor, same system, same files, you just want the system to allocate resources differently? That's what this hypothetical would be.
Author here. Thanks for your feedback. Many comments are from people with your take, who've apparently gotten burned by someone "improving" the code by reworking code they didn't understand.

(See also the discussion when I posted this on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25198597 ).

That's not what I intended, which is why I have this in there:

> Often you’ll jump into code to fix a bug, investigate an issue or answer a question.

> When you do so, improve it. This doesn’t mean you rewrite it, or upgrade all the libraries it depends on, or rename all the variables.

> You don’t need to transform it.

> But you should make it better. Just clean it up a bit. Doing so makes everyone’s lives just a bit better, helps the codebase in a sustainable way, and assists the business by making its supporting infrastructure more flexible.

Perhaps I need to make it super explicit that you should understand whatever changes you are making, discuss them with team members, have them code reviewed, and start with small steps (like documentation). I thought that was implied with the above, but maybe I wasn't clear enough.

> we were left with his crappy code

Seems like a horrible situation. I have so many questions!

If it was a true refactor (and not new functionality) why did you have to use the crappy code? Or did he do a rewrite in the process of adding new functionality? Who was reviewing the code? How did it get merged to the mainline?
As the other commentor pointed out, I was wrong -- I'd mixed up the correspondence between kqueue and epoll with io_uring. Yeah kqueue doesn't allow asynchronous operations. Sadly I can't delete or edit my comment.
I’d rather have thousands of small businesses continue to exist instead of Amazon hiring 400k people. Apparently that’s an uncommon position these days.
Title is what the news story said, but it is not accurate and it's sensationalized.

They are not using poison gas (a la Zyklon B, which is the parallel I suspect they want you to draw). They are using nitrogen gas, effectively displacing oxygen and asphyxiating the patient. This is massively important because of how inhumane poisonous gases tend to be, and how humane death by inert gas is.

Your body calculated whether you are asphyxiating by measuring your bodies ability to expel CO2, not it's ability to intake oxygen. As long as you can expel CO2, your body thinks everything is fine, even if there is no oxygen to breathe. As such, sufferers tend to not even realize that they are dying.

I'm not a big proponent of the death penalty, but if we are going to enforce it, I see no reason to make it any more gruesome or unpleasant than it has to be. Then again, I strongly suspect that the suffering of the convict is a big part of the reason we do things the way we do. A 12 gauge buckshot shell to the back of the head seems far more humane than the electric chair, and has existed for longer (well, maybe not 12 gauges specifically, but shotguns in general). The only reason I can think that we keep inventing these overly complicated and yet still gruesome ways to kill people is to ensure that the convict suffers, while being just humane enough that people can palate it.
This is a pandemic-fueled hiring binge. What happens when the pandemic is over and demand for online shopping declines?