skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
We're trying to address a real problem that is happening in our industry: VPs of eng and principal engineers at startups are adopting the "Kappa Architecture" / "Turning the Database Inside Out", without realizing how much functionality from traditional database systems they are leaving behind. This has led to a barrage of consistency bugs in everything from food-delivery apps to the "unread message count" in LinkedIn. We're at the peak of the hype cycle for Kafka, and it's being used in all kinds of places it doesn't belong. For 99% of companies, a traditional DBMS is the right foundation.
See today's other news about Travis for an example of why
Map is not a control structure, it is an expression.
...as far as I'm aware, Spatial Audio does /not/ work on ATV4K. Could you show me where it does?
OpenSuse, and Suse give you more control over minor release version changes. You have to manually change your repos with some scripts before you patch. The RH way of just rolling you from minor release to minor release invisibly has always kind of irritated me.
You hit the problem right on the head. The only way to really solve it is to host my own tile server (expensive) and add some sort of 3rd party proxy service between the app and the Zood tile server (so Zood could not surveil your tile loads).

I'd like to host my own tile server in the future, but it depends on revenue, which is just not there right now.

Also, and this is just my opinion, I don't think Google is trying to surveil people via tile loading patterns. I'm not saying it's impossible, but there are far easier ways to surveil users than examining tile loading patterns. So for the time being, I'm ok using the Google Maps SDK.

Privacy, like trust, is not binary, but a spectrum. My hope is that Zood Location can start increasing the amount of privacy people enjoy in their digital lives, and over time, the app can be improved to increase that level of privacy.
I didn't think I liked Glass when exposed to Koyaanisqatsi, but then I found "The Hours" soundtrack and realized I shouldn't dismiss him. I'm now a fan.
For now, e2e encryption is still legal in the US, and US-Skype doesn't have intentional backdoors as far as we know.
https://medium.com/craft-ventures/the-cadence-how-to-operate...
I wonder if this source of imposter syndrome applies to any field where the job roles and success criteria are not clearly defined and vary from company to company (ie data analyst, product owner, distributed systems developer).
Seriously. The UPS store I go to always has a line, usually extending out the door due to 6' distancing, and it probably would not literally hold 500 average-sized packages. I know it certainly would not hold 500 additional, average-sized packages.
This particular org did its level best to think of Kafka as the regular database for queries.
Architecting Teams That Scale
This is maybe a silly question, but what's the difference between the timely dataflow that Materialize uses and Spark's execution engine? From my understanding they're doing very similar things - break down a sequence of functions on a stream of data, parallelize them on several machines, and then gather the results.

I understand that the feature set of timely dataflow is more flexible than Spark - I just don't understand why (I couldn't figure it out from the paper, academic papers really go over my head).
Isn't it already happening in Arizona?

OK, giving Uber 5 more years is pessimistic, but whenever self driving does arrive, what will Uber's value prop be?
I get packages using pretty much all options (Amazon, UPS, and USPS), but I'm in an area where there's a fulfillment center pretty close (north Houston area)
The same act is being committed regardless of whether it's TikTok or Facebook: collecting as much information on the general population as possible. If you can stop this from happening in the first place, it doesn't matter if the CCP or the Trump Administration or the Biden Administration or a future Putin administration want to use that information (ie. for political reasons), it won't exist on company servers for them to use.
> Why would they care about Apple being stopped if they didn’t want Apple?

Because without Apple you only have Android.
Florida State Police Raid Home of Covid Whistleblower
I don't know, I think there's a couple examples of these open source projects gaining non-Google traction:

- The new Edge, Opera, and Brave are based on Chromium

- China has a huge ecosystem of non-Google Android devices

Google does exert strong control of their open source code, and Google is clearly the prime beneficiary of them, but the external world has still leveraged these projects nonetheless
On Slow Research
See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25350248
Thinking in terms of building physical buildings.. architects are often the visionaries but engineers are the realists. You know, architects come up with these crazy incredible building designs based on their engineering understanding, but ultimately it has to be vetted, proven and implemented by engineers.

I have, however, always wondered why people should be seen as "only architects" and "only engineers". While the separation of duties is critical to ensure the overall construction is sound, people can be visionary engineers, and people can be knowledgeable in both how to do something in real terms as well as dreaming on how to go beyond.
What were your complaints with induction?
I see you're not taking my comment at face value, either =). I'm simply pointing out that particular familiar pattern that GP's opening and your defence to it so perfectly matches, whether it's intentional or by accident. On a topic that tends to draw in comments with weird agenda. Which is likely what the downvoters are reacting to.
Apple Takes the Mac to the Cloud
Incredibly common here.

I was a teenage passenger in a car when a friend of mine held up his wallet in the light of the back window to see if he had his bank card or w/e. Cop car was behind us in traffic, pulls us over, and two cops get out guns drawn instructing everyone to get face down on the pavement.

Turns out they thought they saw a knife/gun when my friend had held us wallet up in the light, and they figured we were brandishing a weapon at them. We all got searched and when they found half of us Boy Scouts were carrying pocket knives things got really stupid really fast. We had to beg them to be rational with us, nose down on the pavement. Seriously I think the only thing that saved us was two of us had our Eagle cards...

This is anecdotal in rural small-town Iowa... but having lived this sorta stuff first-hand you realize that it's not uncommon to have been harassed at gunpoint by the police.
I totally agree. Code Complete was my road map to a new field, full of recommendations for other books to read. I gave away my first two copies of the first edition, and eventually bought the second edition. It didn't have the same magic. I've looked for it in other books, like The Pragmatic Programmer, The Practice of Programming, and others, but it's like The Sixth Sense (or The Crying Game or The Usual Suspects): you can only see it for the first time once.
1. As I understand the {.acyclic.} pragma is way to telling the compiler that you take full responsibility. Otherwise without the {.acyclic.} pragma it will spend the extra time scanning the objects for cycles.

2. It appears that Nim will use "move ownership of isolated object graph" from one thread to the other. The cycle detection code is very similar to freeing an object graph to moving of the ownership of an object graph to a different thread.

I would also like more clarification from the creators. The above is just how I understand it right now. More simple example code would be great.
Giex.tn Femme
This is a bit dumbed down, and ignores the domain terminology required to properly discuss the trade-offs here (which is puzzling given that it links to a post by Aphyr, where you can find incredibly thorough discussions around isolation levels and anomalies).

> The fundamental problem with using Kafka as your primary data store is it provides no isolation.

This is false. I can only assume the author doesn't know about the Kafka transactions feature?

To be specific, Kafka's transaction machinery offers read-committed isolation, and you get read-uncommitted by default if you don't opt-in to use that transaction machinery (the docs: https://kafka.apache.org/0110/javadoc/index.html?org/apache/...). Depending on your workload, read-committed might be sufficient for correctness, in which case you can absolutely use Kafka as your database.

Of course, proving that your application is sound with just read-committed isolation is can be challenging, not to mention testing that your application continues to be sound as new features are added.

Because of that, in general I think that the underlying point of this article is probably correct, in that you probably shouldn't use Kafka as your database -- but for certain applications / use-cases it's a completely valid system design choice.

More generally this is an area that many applications get wrong by using the wrong isolation levels, because most frameworks encourage incorrect implementations by their unsafe defaults; e.g. see the classic "Feral concurrency control" paper http://www.bailis.org/papers/feral-sigmod2015.pdf. So I think the general message of "don't use Kafka as your DB unless you know enough about consistency to convince yourself that read-committed isolation is and will always be sufficient for your usecase" would be more appropriate (though it's certainly a less snappy title).
Right. Here is the link: https://github.com/mapbox/mapbox-gl-js/issues/10162
It was definitely an interesting proof of concept that needed some refinement. The core idea was functional services against nicely organized data streams on a flat network. Which is a really cool approach that works quite well for a lot of things.

Several of these points fell apart when credit card handling and PCI-DSS entered the picture.
what is the strongest value in smartphones today? Pixel 4a, hands down.
> I've heard Fuchsia referred to as a "principal engineer retention project" at Google.

No rational company is going to create useless projects just to retain expensive engineers. What's the point in retaining engineers if you're just going to pay them to work on something without expected ROI?
Some great additions this time around:
OBXa, Juno 6/60/106, Emu Emulator II, and Moog Vocoder emulations. Really excited by the vocoder as it is patchable per filter band which is unique as far as I am aware...
Top comment was talking about how it's nice to have headphones that "just work" as headphones are expected to. The response that $100 Sennheisers do the same thing is perfectly reasonable. Lest you miss the point completely: This is speaking to the audience who only want the "just works" headphones and not the $400 worth of differentiating features.
I'm intrigued. Would you mind posting a picture of this workstation?
They often do that during the holidays. A few years ago I even saw them driving around my subdivision in a golf cart with a tiny trailer attached.
Agreed, a significant part of Linux's graphical stack (GNOME, mesa, pipewire, etc.) is maintained by people whose email end in @redhat.com
> > depending on details

Including read vs write, and what the read is used for, yes.
What is this talk about "permissive" licenses? It was open source, it's not open source any more. The Open Source Definition: https://opensource.org/osd

EDIT: The title has now changed but it was "Mapbox GL JS is no longer open source", which is the point: they didn't change from an open source license to another.
I have nothing against people wanting to make money but don't put a free product then yank it out under my feet once I'm comfortable using it (I'm not affected in this case since i don't use mapbox, but the CentOS treachery is still hurting).

At least 50% of my work projects happen because the resources I'm using are free. If it isn't free, the project either doesn't happen, or I spend a few months coding what is missing.

So I'd rather they tell me upfront that I can't afford their product than waste my time.
To a large degree, yes. I have definitely not bothered sending patches to these projects because I can't be bothered with copyright assignment.

And that's with trust that the FSFs goals on copyright align with mine.

I don't trust Google to do what I want with my assigned copyright.
There’s been too much news lately covered w/ Hindendenburg-esque severity, at some point being a spectator to this many burning airships is just exhausting :P
> You used to not be able to contribute to most GNU projects (maybe you still can't) without assigning copyright ownership to the FSF.

Even were that true today, the difference is that I basically trust the FSF.
I think there is a lesson in here somewhere about the evolution of Linux as a platform, versus the evolution of Android as a platform.

In particular, it seems that the license terms of Linux caused Android to become "as open as it needs to be, and no more open".

I expect that Fucshia will take the same path as Android, as opposed to the path of core Linux.
I didn't even notice it. My brain filtered it out as some another ad..
Weird, last time I noticed Qt being discussed on HN, I got a really useful and technical comment which is still something I'm basing my future plans on.
So they are available when you have a project to ramp up quickly, and so they don’t work at a competitor.
I'm guessing that most of these pseudonymous developers—of which there can't possibly be too many—would distrust Google enough not to contribute even if it were easier to do so without a Google Account.
It's not a bad idea to principally ban social networks that exercise government censorship on their users. I don't know if TikTok does that. Do they? The problem is also that what one country regards as political censorship another country just considers the application of reasonable laws. However, in the case of China that's such an obvious lame excuse - I mean, they literally interrupt phone calls in which people use certain terms.
I kinda feel that we forget the real reason of the whole mess. The Trump administration wants to shake down China, and they find all excuses to do so. The US is in an economic war with China.
Youtube PR has more pressing issues with 'problematic' content this week. It would suit them fine if the internet argues about James Bond instead https://www.theverge.com/2020/12/8/22162779/christchurch-sho...
Fedex stopped being a carrier for Amazon (I think earlier this year).
To be honest I feel more comfortable with China having my data than the US. For one thing I’m a non citizen living in the US. I have no idea what data the US government has on me or how they’ll use it against me. We’ve also all seen the hostility the US has shown towards immigrants lately. Where as China has very limited ability to impact my life. Maybe US citizens has more protection than I do, but from what we’ve all seen last decade or so I wouldn’t feel very comfortable even if I was a citizen.
I think this is the big takeaway because somehow, most startups miss this.

When you invest internally, you maintain strong institutional knowledge and culture. You deepen the commitment and the connection to the project. This is just a win-win-win for any company. I've seen it continuously result in boosted productivity, quality, and overall mood/energy in the office.

Contrast that with the usual approach of hiring anybody and everybody rapidly, and then pulling in outside execs that bring in their own VPs and decimate the existing culture. This signals to all the talented people in the company that they will not receive a promotion, but instead by replaced when necessary. They will just jump ship at that point and get a promotion elsewhere.
Springdale Linux is on RHEL 8.3 but their homepage is awfully out of date.

Here's the full ISO for 8.1:
http://puias.princeton.edu/data/puias/8.1/x86_64/iso/

And then you can add the repos to update to 8.3:
http://puias.princeton.edu/data/puias/8.3/

Or you can take the small ("boot") ISO and install 8.3 directy:
http://puias.princeton.edu/data/puias/8.3/x86_64/os/images/

In fact, they are even building Springdale Linux 8 for i386, which RHEL and CentOS never did.

If you need more than three years on openSUSE Leap, then you need to upgrade to SUSE Linux Enterprise Server.
> Fuchsia is a long-term project to create a general-purpose, open source operating system

Why do we need this? We have Linux. It works. It is open-source, general purpose. It needs more support to become more mainstream (like what Valve has done with Proton).

Don't like Linux? Start with one of the BSDs. Heck, start with Haiku. Any of these projects are lightyears ahead of anything that's just starting.

The most likely explanation is that _we_ don't need this, but Google does, for some strategic purpose. It must be for some pretty compelling use-case, because we know how happy they are to kill projects.
Thanks that's great feedback and you're not alone in that desire.

We do "small" users a pretty big disservice by effectively dismissing single-server deployments and jumping straight to "real" production deployments (3+ servers distinct from the nodes that run workloads).

We have people who use Nomad locally as a systemd alternative. We have people who use single-scheduler-multiple-nodes clusters at home or at work, and it works quite well! If the scheduler crashes, work continues to run uninterrupted, so there's little reason not to start small and scale up.

The problem is largely that it's tricky to separate out and accurately address these various personas. People looking for a systemd alternative are obviously highly technical and will likely figure everything out through experimentation. However, "small" cluster users need to be carefully educated on the differences between an HA cluster (3+ schedulers) and a single scheduler cluster.

Not only that, but we would need to automate testing for each of these recommendations to ensure changes don't break an official recommendation.
Yeah, for a company that size I'd say there are more strategic things you could be working on, rather than coding.
Are you thinking about RedHat Atomic Linux Server?
Marketplaces like this are hard to evaluate in a few months. It can take 6-7 months before you start to see pull, especially if the supply side has work they need to do to list their service.
I presume there’s some kind of connection pooling going on ... but yeah you’ve still got the needless verbosity of HTTP for a specialised high volume protocol ...
Honest question:

Can I be listening to music on my MBP and answer a call with them on my iPhone seamlessly?
Loved this video! Concise, funny, and well-produced. Great job.
MemSQL Is Now SingleStore
Doesn't invalidate the original post if you were to replace google with FSF. You might be fine granting ownership to the FSF, but not everyone is.
LibreOffice vs OpenOffice. LibreOffice is, IIRC, under the MPL2, and can take improvements from the Apache-licensed OpenOffice (and has done so in the past, though Apache OpenOffice has been moribound for its entire existence so there's not much to take from there anymore), but Apache OpenOffice can't take improvements from LibreOffice.
The UPS store I go to sometimes has one other customer.
If only HN had a gold star type thing, instead you'll have to settle for being included in my notes.

> having greater optionality in your actions is likely to lead to a more optimal path towards your goal.

One of the frequent issues I hit with other people is that they will "block off" a choice before actually evaluating it. They will, for instance, refuse to bring up that they have another job offer in a salary negotiation because they feel it's "unfair".

One case of this was a friend who doesn't want to leave a job where they're being made to work 12+ hour days because "they need me and the company might fail if I leave".

It feels they can't even dive into and tease apart these choices and really evaluate them ("Is it fair for me to bring up this other job offer in this negotiation?"), and they also struggle to consider what the other side is capable of (eg negotiating with multiple candidates at the same time).

Unfortunately it's not until these people get bitten a few times that they start to develop a stronger sense of being able to navigate these choice problems.
The thing is, of course, that you don't need to trust the Qt Company. That's why we have the KDE-Free Qt foundation, and that alone makes Qt the best choice for anyone who developers software that can use LGPL libraries, commercial or open source.
Yep! If you have a Raspberry Pi, look into Pihole. Some routers have this capability too.
There are many companies making money with open source. Mapbox used to make money by providing APIs - apparently it didn't work out.
Yay! Welcome back!
I'd be interested to hear why. I have no problem with companies choosing not to open source in the first place, it is just the idea of taking an open source project with an active community around it and closing it up that is a tough pill to swallow.
Measuring the predictability of life outcomes with a scientific mass collaboration.

http://www.pnas.org/lookup/doi/10.1073/pnas.1915006117

You might think that it's possible to use machine learning to predict whether people will be successful using established socio-demographic, psychological, and educational metrics. It turns out that it's very hard and simple regression models outperform the fanciest machine learning ideas for this problem.

The way this study was done is also interesting and paves the way for new kinds of collaborative scientific projects that take on big questions. It draws on communities like Kaggle, but applies it to scientific questions not just pure prediction problems.
Two Famous Papers(1958) [pdf]
I've bought at least 5 bluetooth headphones, ranging from cheap workout ones to Bose QuietComfort. None of them work well with multiple devices. Inevitably I have to disconnect my laptop because it's preventing my phone from playing audio. AirPods are the only one that works. I can have 3, 4 devices connected to my AirPods and it'll just work.
There's no difference really. All "Big Data" (tm) tools are trying to capitalize on the hype, so Kafka adds database capabilities, while Spark adds Streaming. At some point they will reach feature parity.
The vast majority of users do not have a "trusted network administrator"; they have a hostile upstream network. That's where the defaults come from. Trusting the network (or anything outside of the device itself) should always be a non-default setting, and nothing from the network should be able to change that setting. You should have the option of configuring a device you own and control to make its traffic inspectable, but that should never be the default.