skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have been in sysadmin for 20 years. I recently had to do an Azure certification. I was surprised how hard it was and how much I learned.

Now seems like a good time to pause and take the time to do some certs.
>Now I have to figure out another way to deal with the bitterness of coffee other than my current 2 packets of stevia method.

Cold brew is much less bitter than hot brew also it varies in coffee type and roast, with time you get accustomed to the taste, to me sweet coffee tastes weird.
I think there's more to it than that. Because conformity, especially social conformity among one's peers, is rampant - defenses need to be shored up to guard against this constant push toward conformity. Because all of us are caught up in our lives, it's helpful to take a moment, Read PG's latest, and reflect if has anything worthwhile for you. I like the Grateful Dead's Box of Rain: "Believe if you need it, or leave it if you dare."
Quattro Pro for DOS was an amazing spreadsheet tool, better than 1-2-3 IMO. Looks like this article arrived at the same conclusion.
Ask HN: How do you use SQLite?
I was wondering about special use cases for SQLite. How do you use it?
I'm surprised the article doesn't mention the #metoo movement, because that's what I associate the current use of the word with. So while this term became more prominent in the Trump-era, I don't know if I would associate it with Trump directly (although you can argue that he contributed to the #metoo movement with his "pussy grabbing" and other comments.)

The related term I'm hearing more and more of recently is "censorship". There are many prominent people on social media complaining about censorship, and almost all are related to how companies like Facebook, YouTube and Twitter are dealing with contrarian views on COVID-19, e.g. lockdowns, masks, vaccinations, etc. Personally, I don't believe these companies are acting maliciously to needlessly censor contrarian views, I just think that everyone is trying to figure this stuff out in real-time, and we don't really know what the right thing is.
EMC compliance in the EU is not particularly different from other regions. RoHS isn't a burden in any measurable way.
There's ample unused built space, infill opportunity, or brownfields development (assuming the brown isn't overly toxic, and much is).
Visualize Radioactive Decay: Thermoelectric Cloud Chamber
In the youtube interview you linked to he also says he's coming out with a new Connections series in Jan 2022.
Multiplication and division of floats creates rounding errors of <1 ulp each time. In most contexts you never need to worry about them.

The operations you need to watch out for are addition/subtraction, in cases where your result has much smaller magnitude than your inputs, causing loss of significance. Sometimes great care must be taken in implementing numerical algorithms to avoid this. But this is an inherent problem in numerical computing, not the fault of the floating point format per se.
> zenoh /zeno/ unifies data in motion, data in-use, data at rest and computations. It carefully blends traditional pub/sub with geo-distributed storages, queries and computations, while retaining a level of time and space efficiency that is well beyond any of the mainstream stacks.

I wonder what goes into the minds of developers when they use grandiose, unbacked descriptions like this. It is just missing the word "modern" :-)

Wouldn't it be better to have some numbers to compare to those others "mainstream stacks"? It would help to show not only how "fast" zenoh is but also actually what is it (still not sure ...), by comparing to other established players.
> poisoner gradually builds up his tolerance to arsenic from small doses, then consumes arsenic-poisoned food/drink along with the victim

Probably most famously in "The Princess Bride" (not arsenic, though).
I think he already knows the answer, since googling this exact expression gives a very clear response. It looks more like an exclamation of "this doesn't mean anything to me", which I understand and partially share as well.
Seems very reminiscent of early java bytecode obfuscators.
The sheer irony of the upvotes on this charlatan is too much to bear.
Lots of companies offer training sessions on their products. I think it's reasonable that if you have a moderately complex product, you insist that your support team not waste time walking customers through elementary stuff they should have learned in a seminar at the outset.
The difference is that Apple is a single company, so secrecy doesn't interfere with product development. Communication happens between the involved internal teams and the magic happens.

In the case of collaborations between separate companies, secrecy becomes a problem because inevitably, details that are held close and not communicated turn into stumbling blocks. For a collaboration between Nvidia and Microsoft for instance, the teams at Microsoft involved with the project would need the same level of access to Nvidia's half as Nvidia's employees do in order to be as effective as Apple's internal teams have been. This isn't impossible of course, but historically Nvidia is not inclined to do things like this.
Digitisation of content and media shaping our future
I see many comments here unsure about what Zenoh is. I'm probably more clueless than the average HN reader, but here is what I found out regarding the company invested into it.

Most of the Cargo.toml files contain:

# Copyright (c) 2017, 2020 ADLINK Technology Inc.

And the CONTRIBUTORS.md file lists all ADLINK employees: https://github.com/eclipse-zenoh/zenoh/blob/9737c6b59900144a...

The extraordinary claims on the Zenoh site are matched by the wide claims made on the ADLINK Technology, Inc. site. Poke around and you will find they have a big global presence: https://www.adlinktech.com/en/index

It must be quite exciting to work all the time on buzzwordy things like edge computing, AI, & 5G, in industries like aerospace, defense, & manufacturing. It would seem that the things Zenoh strives to do are at least in-line with the types of stuff the company is involved in, however grandiose it all comes off as.
The body learns associations. There are reproducible experiments with rats who develop a liking for chalk water after sugar is added to it; and it takes them a couple of weeks to stop liking it when sugar is out.

There are some experiments showing the same is true with humans, with a time constant of 3-6 weeks.

From memory, relevant papers are from Michel cabanac. Seth Robert’s “what makes food fattening” is a great overview of related results, whether or nit you agree with his take.
Fitting, since Chigurh views most people as no more than cattle - just going with the flow, no guiding principles - while he rigidly adheres to a chosen set of values to the death. The Partially Examined Life podcast did a great episode on this book: https://partiallyexaminedlife.com/product/ep-63-existentiali...
I agree with most of your points, especially that the demand is strongly influenced by marketing/fashion and percieved values of the product, not objective ones.

Diving deeper into gears and handlebars - I believe it’s a very consious choice.

- max speed with an optimal cadence (90 rpm) in this setup seems to be around 43km/h. This is plenty fast and definetely above typical commuting speeds. Even the electric support is more about better range/less sweat than making the bike fast, speeds appproaching 50km/h are close to the legal limits anyway

- with straight handlebars it’s comfortable to ride, no matter the level of personal fitness. Drop bars make you bend more - this isn’t very inviting and could drive off the customers that are accustomed to relaxed positions (that they know from riding in their SUVs daily). And with speeds mostly well below 40km/h there is no need to curl into the aero postion. Just put on some trendy glasses and the electric support will deal with the extra drag.

It really goes hand in hand and I’d be suprised if such bike would be released in other config.
AWS certifications are not "useless". They are an industry standard, kind of like being a CNA (Certified Novell Administrator) back in the day.

If your company wants to participate as an AWS Solution Provider, there are hard requirements for the number of staff with AWS certifications. Most Fortune 500s will only work with AWS Solution Providers, so there is a huge incentive for consulting companies to encourage or even require their employees to become certified. This can involve holding back promotions, paying for test fees, allowing the employee to study on company time, bonuses and any number of "carrots".

Also, AWS certifications expire in 3 years from the date of the test pass which I think is a good timeframe, given the historical rate of change.

[1] https://aws.amazon.com/partners/solution-provider/
While most Hindus cremate their dead, some sects of Hindus bury their dead. Some sects of Hindus celebrate few festivals together.

Once such festival : https://frontline.thehindu.com/the-nation/article29507016.ec...
Understanding Windows X64 Assembly
I see, and having to reverse engineer drivers to be able to run anything else on it to you somehow means that it's open?
I use SQLite for sharing structured open data - it's a better alternative to zipped csv datasets, for example. See the football.db [1] as some example SQLite datasets e.g. the English Premier League in england.db and so on.
[1]: https://github.com/openfootball/england/releases

PS: The big elephant for SQLite data packages is Simon Willison's Datasette [2].
[2]: https://datasette.io
I have some thoughts about io_uring support in rr: https://github.com/rr-debugger/rr/issues/2613
SynRM – A new giant in the electrical world
What were some of the anti-patterns you saw?
Thank you for your comments.

Posts that are not published have a "draft" badge in the dashboard, to help you distinguish between a published and unpublished post.

Adding a link to the post page for quick access to editing mode is somewhat problematic as the pages are all statically generated without any javascript to make them very lean and fast. So they're basically the same for all users. A login indication is hard for the same reason, because the homepage too is a static page.

A button for quick publishing is something that could indeed be improved, thanks for the suggestion!
> Your time is valuable and much better spent building something no one else has yet.

I strongly disagree with this. I believe the exact opposite is true. Creation spurts from learning, so if you want to be creative it pays of to spend most of your time learning things that already exist. In the context of programming, this means implementing algorithms for which several other implementations already exist.

Sportsmen spend nearly all of their time training, and just a tiny (but very focused) amount of time competing. Likewise, scientists spend most of their time preparing experiments and reproducing results of others, and a tiny amount of time "creating". I do not believe that programmers can successfully escape this scheme. The best programmers I know, spend an inordinate amount of time rewriting well known algorithms (and oftentimes, improving them with slight variations).
The best thing you can do to understand the value of a certification is get it yourself.
Paw – The most advanced API tool for Mac currently free with a retweet
you may reffer to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CBYhVcO4WgI
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCcefcZRL2oaA_uBNeo5UOWg
I feel like I've had the opposite experience.

Earlier in my career I could just use any old tool that got the job done with plenty of dependencies, without a care in the world. Then three things happened. First, I got exposed to some of the highest quality tools and libraries in the industry. As in, the ones that only a few people are lucky enough to get to use, and it made using anything less polished afterwards painful. Sort of like living in a mansion and then needing to move back into a slum. The other thing was just finding out about too many of the nasty corner cases that exist in technology, which in most cases are safe to ignore, but are hard to unthink about once you know about them. The third was just having too many things I depended on break over time or abandon the principles that attracted me to the project in the first place.

So now, later in my career, my biases are more tuned towards reinventing things than ever before. I'd rather minimize risk by having something perfectly tailored to my specific needs. If it breaks, I'll only have myself to blame. I view that as a fun learning experience. Much better than the alternative, which is nagging folks in the open source community and filing issues expecting them to support me, and then feeling guilty afterwards. Only thing I'm worried about is that my standings will continue to grow so high that the joy of programming is so hard to find that I'll just do management, and just let other people have fun with all the churn.
Unions as implemented in the US are absolutely part of the problem. They have an adversarial relationship with management and are frequently (seemingly always) corrupt.
It's not just about pain management - it's about accepting and making peace with dying. If there's a possibility that a drug can make this process easier for terminally ill patients, why would you object to its use by people who choose it?
They have their website [0] in their profile, which has some interesting background.

[0] https://robertxiao.ca
I have co-worker who is retaking 5 or 6 AWS certification in 3 month. You may think it’s useless but the AWS discounts, credit and kickbacks we’re getting on our AWS projects makes it a no-brainer. The time and cost is much less that what we’re making from keeping our AWS partnership level.

Gaming the system... maybe, but it pure profit.
I am on mobile, so can’t find an exhaustive list, but here are a few:

https://www.heritage.org/courts/commentary/how-affirmative-a... (Relating to drop out rates)

https://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/the-sad-...

https://www.jstor.org/stable/3699572?seq=1

https://hilo.hawaii.edu/campuscenter/hohonu/volumes/document...

https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/10/the-pai...

I have worked in this industry - on and off - for 3 decades. This is an ugly phenomenon nobody wants to acknowledge.

The mere suggestion that this is a funnel issue, rather than a racial bias issue, is met with vehement accusations of racism (if coming from an older man like me, even more so).

I’d even go as far as to say SV has a real discrimination problem - and that is ageism. When supply and demand is considered, it is many times as blatant as the supposed race issue.

Finally, I did use the term virtue signalling. It is fairly unambiguous. There are no political leanings to extrapolate from there, yet the subtle accusations put forward based on that is abundantly clear here. Once again - before dissecting my comment and projecting an image of me to attack/downvote, ask yourself if the way SV (likely your employer based on HN demographics)and outlets like NYT frame these issues is truly honest.
> How good are the certificates though in assessing actual skill vs test taking ability?

That would depend on the cert and the level of experience of a given candidate.

> As very anecdotally, I know one person with an Amazon cert and they are also someone who wants me to tell them which line numbers of their code to edit for assignments. And they got it by cramming for the exam like any other test. So my thoughts on Developer Associate are not very high.

Obviously, that is more of a reflection on that person's personality and less on them having a cert. Not everyone with a cert is like that.

> Other developers have told me that one of the easiest ways to get a cert is to just pay someone in India to take the test for you in case you need it for a contract (for those developers in the consulting world)

That's a culture problem, not a cert problem. Some people get certs to honestly learn and signal that knowledge to others, not just to tick a check box or add a resume bullet point.

Yeesh. SMH.
So is it now blackrato.ga or blackrota? I need to block this domain
> On a side note, I like how The Expanse sidesteps the scientific issues of interstellar travel with alien magic.

I thought the "alien magic" behind the gates technology was the same old K. Thorne wormholes.

> On yet another note, I read an unsettling sci-fi/theory about how the expansion of space is perhaps being caused by whatever tech allows interstellar travel in lightspeed-like time. So whatever intelligent species that evolved first may have a monopoly on such tech, while inadvertently altering the fabric of physics to make interstellar travel gradually impossible for any younger species.

Do you have a link to read more about that? Reminds me of the FTL technology in the books "The Dark Forest" and "Death's End" by Liu Cixin.
Real estate is the new pension.

With the virtual elimination of defined-benefit pesions, and inadequacy of Social Security, it's the combination of asset-based securities --- 401k (or equivalent) defined-contribution plans, and real estate, which most middle-class Americans rely on for retirement. (Those below this level are simply out of luck.)

So long as assets continue inflating, this works --- as an investment. But housing cannot be both aa good investment and affordable.

https://cityobservatory.org/housing-cant-be-affordable_and_b...
I love my LSD, psilocybin, and mescaline, but I agree with you. And this is the result of the war on drugs. If these things were legal we would know more about these dangers.

There is also the fact that both LSD and psilocybin activate the 5-HT2B receptor, which is linked to the formation of 'valvular strands', which can lead to valvular heart disease, potentially. And almost nobody is talking about this!

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17950805/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19505264/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21440001/
How to Identify a Boeing 737 Max
That’s pretty close then. Great.
SmartWindows – Making Windows 10 Smarter
We have not found something that solves our problems and is flexible enough, so we built our internal "machine learning platform" (https://iko.ai). It's not yet enterprise ready, not by a long shot (no SSO, RBAC, multitenancy, etc) as we're in the process of making it because we need it for yesterday and we're focusing on functionality to actually serve our clients.

We have a notebook experience built on top of JupyterLab because in our experience all these years profitably delivering products to large organizations, what slowed us the most wasn't the lack of better notebook stylesheets or animations in UI.

We built the following features in our product, and they might be good to look for when you shop around:

- No setup collaborative notebooks: collaborative editing on notebooks so you could do group programming and troubleshooting, see people's cursors, etc. Different images that contain the most popular libraries. We'll support fast.ai's fastbook for training.

- Long-running notebooks: pretty much fire and forget. It's super useful, I could launch twenty notebooks, see them while they're beeing executed. Log out, close the tab, come back, and see their on-going output.

- Automatic tracking for parameters, metrics, and models. We deploy our models with that, too.

- AppBooks: enable sharing interactive notebooks with stakeholders without them having to open JupyterLab, or see code.
That was in the 1990s. Not to mention they were trying to build a non-cylindrical tank which made things significantly harder.
I don't think this gets the balance right. Management creates friction but some of it is necessary. Too much causes problems, but too little causes a different set of problems (at least beyond a pretty small scale in terms of goals and people).

I guess one way to look at is management as an activity - at some scale you have enough of it it makes sense to have someone(s) specialize in it, rather than distribute amongst the group. But once it is a specialized role, it's harder for the person in that role to do other things. So if there are too many of them, or their time is not directed the right way, it's a net negative.
Well I for one liked this essay. Be sure to read the footnotes at the end for some great lines:

> When I ask myself what in my life is like high school, the answer is Twitter. It's not just full of conventional-minded people, as anything its size will inevitably be, but subject to violent storms of conventional-mindedness that remind me of descriptions of Jupiter.

> The threshold for having opinions about politics is much lower than the one for having opinions about set theory. So while there are some ideas in politics, in practice they tend to be swamped by waves of intellectual fashion.

> The conventional-minded are often fooled by the strength of their opinions into believing that they're independent-minded. But strong convictions are not a sign of independent-mindedness. Rather the opposite.
I have experience manufacturing hardware devices in europe and in the US ...
I don't see it as a discussion of legitimacy. It's about the strength of evidence the article offers, and whether there's anything the article could have done to offer stronger evidence or to better defuse suspicions that the author had motives unrelated to the evidence. That seems more productive to me than a discussion about whether Coinbase's management actually is biased, which will inevitably degrade to a dispute about how biased we thought they were before reading the article.

(For what it's worth, the article's lede is well-corroborated, and I agree it provides strong evidence of a serious problem with retention of black employees.)
Never happened to me in the UK with either Three or Vodafone with firefox with various privacy extensions (privacy badger, decentraleyes, unlock etc)

Maybe something else you are doing?
> In that regard, Burke was certainly a child of its time, as progress through many individual actions (and their recombinations) vs. centrally planned progress is essentially the narrative of the Cold War.

TBF the fear of systemic collapse was very much on-Zeitgeist in the '70s, too.
The blog post about leaving politics at the door was in response to the death of Floyd and some employees upset about their perceived "silence" of upper management, where more woke companies did speak up. So it's relevant and provides context to that policy of focusing on company mission, instead of making statements about racial inequality, police brutality, and unfair societies.

You are entitled to political thoughts. If you can handle it, you are even allowed to share them with colleagues. But don't get upset if others have different political thoughts. And certainly not get upset enough to accuse them of racism.
> 'Having worked on really "heavily obfuscated" code (flattened control flow, functions implemented in obfuscated VMs, custom incompatible ABI, cryptographic encryption of code, etc.), this gobfuscator looks comparatively easy :) '

For any HN readers who have not already encountered the MOVfuscator [1] I cannot recommend this Blackhat talk highly enough -- the x86 MOV instruction is turing complete, and it flattens arbitrary code to MOVs. It's also the only time I've ever seen brainfuck being used as a seriously sensible intermediate language ;-)

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7EEoWg6Ekk [I think this is the preferred link!]
I reckon I could do it in two words but I'm not quite sure what gets you a ban around here. :)
Anything we do as a society with mob-mentality, without checks and balances, without due regard for law, to detriment, unroot or otherwise dispose one's identity, profession, or dignity should be condemned. We've combined conviction with awareness and that's a dangerous trend. Awareness of issues is OK. Convicting people without due process is a crime.
That’s fair. I think the morals of such stories are still worth considering, though. Or is there harm in such moralistic stories that I’m missing?