skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think it's important to make a distinction here that I didn't think to make initially:

I am not saying "everyone can make hundreds of thousands of dollars per year if they stop being dumb."

What I am trying to say is "Most people can avoid being massively in debt by making better spending decisions."
Pretty much all over the world I heard cannabis refered to as ganja. But I didn't know yet, it was because of that city.
> Wait, of course they write slow programs on purpose, because "premature optimization is the root of all evil," right? A developer might use Electron because it's "fast enough" and halves your development time, and "fast enough" is always a perceptual metric, and not a technical one.

That's not writing a slow program on purpose; that's accepting a tradeoff of speed for deliverability. Writing a slow program on purpose means intentionally adding code to make it slower with no other consequence.

"Fast enough" can be measured in ms latency for UX purposes. Ex: Websites test and benchmark themselves on load time because they know sales/pageviews decrease after too long.
They've already caught breaks in terms of their Xbox and PS5 deals. I doubt they are going to lose their production rights there anytime soon.
It didn't cause billions of people to gain experience in stocking up on supplies, learning how to live while locked down and the problems it entails, and wearing masks and taking other precautions. Therefore, it didn't serve as a training pandemic, except maybe for a small group. (It seems it did serve as training for vaccine developers, at least.)
There's also a counterculture of projects that are lightweight alternatives: Sway as a lightweight window manager (among many lightweight WMs), musl vs libc, libressl vs openssl, gemini vs http, Alpine Linux vs Ubuntu, Alacritty as a blazing fast terminal.

This software culture is visible on Linux than macOS, but it's alive and thriving.
nextjs + react, postgraphile + postgres, apollo client, rds, heroku
"more deadly" does not necessarily mean more deaths in this case. If it kills like ebola more folks could take it seriously ultimately resulting in lower transmission and death rates.
Keep your scare quotes.
People used to talk about Java in the same way people talk about electron now so I feel like that's a definite no.
I'm solo developer

What:

Node.js/AWS lambda/DynamoDB/Kinesis for backend

Pytorch/k8s/AWS fargate for Deep learning api

Clingo/Prolog for symbolic AI

React.js/flexbox/sass for frontend

SwiftUI for iOS

Why: each tool is optimal for its use case

Impact: move fast and break things)
> Why put all of this work into running a daemon 24/7 on your phone that will end up sucking battery to run an app with bad usability in peer to peer mode? What's the end goal? I just want to rid myself of Whatsapp and Telegram, is that even a valid use case for the Matrix system anymore? Should I start looking in other directions?

XMPP isn't dead at all. OMEMO offers all the benefits of Signal's double-ratchet encryption and it's supported by at least one good client on every platform. Both ejabberd and Prosody are actively maintained servers, and there are still over a hundred XMPP hosts with open public registration. [And countless other hosts that aren't public.]

And it's way way way faster than Matrix. The servers are lightweight and don't require tens of GB of RAM, and the modern clients (like Dino and Conversations.im) are quick and snappy.
Everything has always been done with ”available technologies and data”. That the vaccine was made in two days is pretty impressive in itself.
Not to mention organizations' willingness to entertain those engineering initiatives, never mind prioritizing them.
Microsoft has to do this because most Windows OEMs don’t have the business model to do it. If you’re some budget PC maker with slim margins per unit, you’re not going to match Apple’s R&D spend on ARM chips. Even if you do, you don’t control the OS.

Microsoft can, and they have a vested interest in the whole Windows ecosystem having competitive ARM chips.

I think now that Apple’s shown what’s possible with the M1, everybody is thinking long and hard about how much they really need x86.
I love FO 1 and 2 but was never interested in FO3 and even less in FO4. Would you recommend just playing New Vegas?
Yes. Of those 4, only The Tempest is top-drawer Shakespeare although, to be honest, The Winter's Tale is the only one of the other three I've actually read/seen performed.

The Tempest--which is one of my favorites--was one of his very last plays and certainly his last great one; it's hard not to see the ending, e.g. the breaking of the staff, as symbolic in a way that his other play conclusions were not.

>his most widely regarded plays

I guess I agree. Comedy doesn't get a lot of love at the Oscars either. I certainly appreciate plays like A Midsummer Night's Dream. But I have admit a lot of the gender-switching and mistaken identities in many of his comedies tend to blend together for me after a while.
30 years ago there were loads of companies making CPUs, most of them have disappeared.
18 U.S. Code § 2261A

18 U.S. Code § 1028

He's not charged with breaking freedom of speech, he's being charged with various felonies relating to siphoning off identifying information for use by the Chinese government.
That doesn't really make sense. There has to be a point, and likely it's a pretty low figure, at which the life-saving value of getting and using money offsets whatever downside comes with giving a rich person the vaccine. Obviously receiving $100 billion for one vial of vaccine would be an appropriate tradeoff, you can save any number of lives with that money. Once you acknowledge this, it's also obvious that a much smaller amount would also save lives. An auction would likely kick up low to mid five figures, maybe even six figures, and the utility of that money is almost certainly higher than the single vial. This is even before you consider that the vaccine will wind up in the hands of rich people anyway, with no additional utility to anyone.
My boundary on DRYing has settled on "when it's semantically the same code".

Code that looks the same but is used for different purposes / has different meaning? Keep it separate. They may diverge in the future.

Code that truly means the same thing, but may or may not look the same? DRY it up, any variation is probably unintended and will surprise people later when A doesn't behave like B.
Funny, I prefer Design Patters over extensible over-engineered frameworks.

Design patterns can reduce a lot of unnecessary cognitive overhead. For example, a builder pattern that takes a config a returns an evaluation pipeline is really simple and eliminates a lot of runtime if..else conditions.
The AstraZeneca trial was the one to use the meningitis vaccine.
It's almost as disappointing as the fact that their status page doesn't redirect from HTTP to HTTPS.

(Presumably they wanted to make the status page depend on as few services as possible, to prevent a scenario where an outage also affects the status page itself, but whatever script they are using to publish updates to the page could also perform a check that the HTTPS version of the site is accessible, and if not, remove the redirect).

Could we get the URL of the submission updated please? (Also, it would be nice if the submission form added an "Are you sure?" step when people submit HTTP links).
Ask HN: Best app you discovered in 2020?
What's the best app you discovered, or rediscovered, in 2020?

Mine is Brief [1], which has been a refreshingly simple way for me to consume news without loads of editorialization. My favorite features:

* each "brief" provides a timeline of events (in the form of other news briefs) leading up to the event that the brief is about, which makes understanding context much easier

* you can text the editor directly from the app

* all sources are immediately available

* the "Verbatim" section provides quotes from leading officials on the subject (senators, AP, diplomats, etc)

* reasonable pricing at $10/month

I am in no way affiliated with Brief and actually discovered them on HN.

[1] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/brief-just-the-news-you-need/id1475186118
somehow they managed to build complex systems like gmail, continuously develop new features there and not have massive outages due to "migrations" - suggests that something that they were doing right, they are no longer able to do
I think you're right. The economic incentives to differentiate their offerings are too strong to ignore. I predict it will be death by a thousand cuts, but by the time we're talking about AWS Graviton v7 or whatever versus the equivalent Microsoft and Google chips they will have diverged significantly. Enough that workload portability will not be trivial.

Just look how hard it is to migrate a significant application from Oracle to SQL Server or Postgres. It's easy for a trivial application, but there are lots of things to trip you up if you're migrating some big hairy complicated application.
Slow rollouts can be a double-edged sword, too:

> a change was made in October to register the User ID Service with the new quota system, but parts of the previous quota system were left in place which incorrectly reported the usage for the User ID Service as 0. An existing grace period on enforcing quota restrictions delayed the impact, which eventually expired, triggering automated quota systems to decrease the quota allowed for the User ID service and triggering this incident.

Grace period on enforcement of a major policy change is an excellent practice...but it also means months can go by between the introduction of a problem and when the problem actually surfaces. That can lead to increased time-to-resolution because many engineers won't have that months-old change at the front of their mind while debugging.
Employee privacy and people counting technology can coexist
In an SF context, Doomsday Book by Connie Willis is one.
> If 3/4 of your players ask for refund, I see that as a clear critic that your game has a big problem.

Ok, and having more criticisms through public outrage, further helps hurt the company financially. Thats the point.

Doing even more things, hurts the company even more.
JetBrains subscription has been my most satisfying subscription to date. More than my Netflix and Disney plus and I like baby Yoda :)
Why? Can someone really explain it? I mean another broker dealer is going to make money on me someway as is Robinhood. Why is one better than the other?
What they were trying to say is that physical backup controls are often incomplete and inconvenient, just like how you can control a TV using the buttons on it but doing so is far less effective than using the remote. The idea is that making physical controls the primary interface (rather than the backup) for critical tasks means that more effort would go into making them ergonomic and effective.
Xeno Crisis: An Interview with Mike Tucker from Bit Map Bureau (2019)
Yeah it's always seemed bizarre to me that surgical procedures aren't held to the same standard of evidence as drugs and surgeons are allowed to pretty much make things up and do whatever they want as long as they don't engage in clear malpractice.
Yes, SRE teams typically have a sister SRE team in another continent and time zone.
Nice site, it's fun to look around!

I threw a curveball at it: http://prosecraft.io/library/mark-z-danielewski/house-of-lea...

It would be interesting to see if Prosecraft would ever correlate "similar books" with Borges since Danielewski said that was an influence.
Yes, there are things to criticise, but I don't recall it offering a reason to bet on the very western edge of Europe over (say) the Ottomans.
That Dothraki Horde, Part III: Horse Fiddles
Right, in practice prices in the launch industry are not ‘prices’ as a consumer would understand them because any quote comes with certain contractual restrictive covenants, agreements, timelines, etc., that really are more akin to home buying than a typical commodity priced in per kg terms.

For order of magnitude comparisons we can ignore all that, for finer grained comparisons it really is comparing apples and oranges.

In the ideal future world launches should be done without the need for secret contracts, something like the private jet industry where planes can chartered, almost at the push of a button, at short notice.
ELI5: I have a red ball and a blue ball. I randomly place each ball into one of two boxes. I give you one box, and keep the other box for myself, then wave my magic wand and transport you 5,000 light years away.

You look inside your box and see a red ball. In that moment you learn that I have a blue ball in my box. You gained that information in an instant, about a box 5,000 light years away.

(This is an explanation I've heard. But I don't personally know if it's accurate.)
This might be the most obvious scam i’ve ever seen
Warnings against premature optimization suggest a two-pass strategy, where in the first pass you avoid trading increased performance for increased labor, and then in the second pass you do whatever is needed to make the performance good enough.

The faster the underlying platform, the less work is required to get to "good enough" performance, so this strategy absolutely leads to software not getting faster as hardware gets faster, and the only way for an end-user to get their software to run fast is to have faster hardware than is typical for the target market for that software.

I don't think it's much of a stretch to call a development paradigm that causes software to never get faster even as hardware improves "writing slow programs on purpose."
Actually now that I remember correctly, back when I was in that barber shop quartet in Skokie^W^W^W^W^W err, back when I was an SRE on Gmail's delivery subsystem, we actually did recognize the incredible risk posed by the delivery config system and our team developed what was known as "the finch", a tiny production shard that loaded the config before all others. It was called the finch to distinguish it from "the canary" which was generally used for deploying new builds. I wonder if these newfangled "best practices" threw the finch under the bus.
Run sunny! BE the spurce of business value! Radiate, and let your user's bask in the warmth of...

Eh nevermind. Psychopathic corporations don't need an invitation to view themselves as Sun gods.
Good luck! Would love to see something like this take off :)
And during the time that takes you're suffering the consequences of a viral infection. Majormajor was replying to a comment suggesting that it might somehow have been possible to evolve the equivalent of a COVID-19 vaccine, which allows your immune system to adapt without experiencing a viral infection. What couldn't possibly work is for your body to already naturally be immune before experiencing the virus.
Yes. Seen it with Koreans too, at least if their real name is difficult to pronounce for English speakers.
I see. All I have left is this and the programming subreddit. The latter suffers a lot from new programmers and unrelated content (something like „I wrote my first HTML Tag today). Programming language specific subreddits suffer from a low number of subscribers. YC suffers from elite mindsets and arrogance (most notably on topics like modern javascript)
I guess we're back to vertical integration. Amazon has already been building their own custom chips for AWS for a couple years.
The SLS is an badly designed architecture built on obsolete technologies with very limited capabilities. SRBs greatly increase launch costs while reducing safety. RS-25s were designed to be reused, but required such extensive refurbishment that they were like drag racing engines requiring full rebuilds after every race.

Using hydrogen to fuel the first stage required building a massively heavy cryogenic tank, impairing performance so greatly the RS-25s cant lift the SLS without SRBs.

And not only will it cost $20B before it’s first launch, but each flight will destroy over a half billion in engines alone. So the minimum cost per flight is over $1B without counting the R&D, about $3B to $5B per flight in total depending on how many flights are flown to amortize the R&D.

And with all that, SLS has very limited capabilities. The block 1 will be the largest heavy lift launch system (until Starship launches), but it’s only about 30% more payload mass than a $150M falcon heavy expendable.

But worse is the maximum possible cadence for the SLS is twice yearly, making it both useless and unnecessary for more ambitious missions that will rely on in orbit refueling. It’s just an archaic dinosaur built out of nearly 50 year old parts.
It has the same BTC address as the usual sci-hub pages (12PCbUDS4ho7vgSccmixKTHmq9qL2mdSns) so I'd say yes. And please don't give them any ideas. The domain issue is hard enough it seems. Thank god there's hundreds of TLDs now :p

Ditto with archive.is and their domain struggles.
It's not irrelevant though. I know someone who is 39, perfectly healthy and nearly died. He now has long covid. I'm sure all of the people under fifty who died would have loved to have had the vaccine.
>iPhones have the longest useful lifetimes of any smartphones anyway though, so they’re still clearly the best choice overall.

Not exactly, because other phones can be repaired which extends their life.

Apple's doesn't do board repair themselves, and blocks others from doing it as well. This means more components end up in land fills. Apple's own extended warranty program makes billions of dollars. And the repair industry itself is quite large - millions maybe hundreds of millions of dollars per year. Apple products clearly fail and need repair at some point or another.

I hope you'll join everyone else in demanding Apple stop opposing right to repair legislation.
Well, all of it was due to the lack of medical knowledge. The bubonic plague hardly kills anyone anymore. The point the parent is making is that we shouldn't compare the societal effects of COVID19 today with that of the bubonic plague when it was at its worst.
In particular, when COVID19 was first spreading but we knew about it back in February countries could've easily contact traced to flush it out and then quarantined all incoming travelers to keep it out.

But most countries deemed those actions too extreme and economically damaging so instead let it come spread and do way more damage.
Why web apps are better
Why web apps are better than apps on propertiary platforms

1. You have better control over your privacy

2. You don't need to download them to your device

3. You don't need to update them

4. There is no corporation between you and the app creator

5. Development and maintaince cost of webapps is lower = less costly for users

6. Webapps work across all devices available

7. You can select and copy text from web apps

8. You can change web app with your own CSS

9. You can automate tasks in webapps

10. You can adjust the behaviour of webapp to your needs

11. Webapps does not break when new operating system is installed

12. You can bookmark a link to any subpage of a webapp without going through all pages every time

13. You don't need to install and set up webapp every time you change your device

14. You don't need to have separate app for Android, iOS and Windows

15. Webapp does not have access to your device and connection

16. Webapp can not change your device settings

17. Webapp can not install processes on your device that will drain your memory, CPU time and battery lifetime

18. No one can delete your webapp, because it is not on a propertiary platform

19. You can open multiple instances of your webapp at the same time
Yup! It's literally some landscaping along a sidewalk.
It's far easier than AWS Cognito. Yes, I've used both.

Firebase auth is as easy as it gets for auth. Want Username/Pass? Just enable it. Want Google, Twitter, Firebase, Apple, Github, etc.? Just enable it, and write the handlers.

Want to hook into your own SQL database? Easy. Set up a firebase listener, that handles the auth event, and write whatever you want (username, auth details) to SQL.

This is a 100% solved problem and Firebase does a superb job it it.
The signal I am receiving from your businesses is one that would make me only do business with you as a last resort, and then I would lock you in with contracts and spend a lot of time carefully studying everything.

In other words, I'm signalling that the power-dynamics players end up costing too much.
Cerulean is backed by Dendrite, which scales horizontally via Kafka, but is in beta: https://matrix.org/blog/2020/10/08/dendrite-is-entering-beta

Most other production deployments of Matrix are backed by Synapse, which is out of beta, and which scales horizontally via Redis: https://matrix.org/blog/2020/11/03/how-we-fixed-synapses-sca...
> I was terrible at predicting the real world performance of the Apple Silicon M1. It is, in fact, much better than I expected.

I expected what came out in the end. Apple would never put up the amount of money and the promise to ditch Intel if they were not absolutely certain that they could actually beat Intel performance-wise and have a working Rosetta to keep "old" software running.

The writing was on the wall for a long time, iPhone and iPad processor power has been taking decent shots at moderately powerful PC hardware for years now - the key thing why Apple didn't do it two years ago was software support and developer tooling, they wanted to avoid cloning the Windows RT fiasco which fizzled out because no one had working software and there was no translation layer.
21. Webapps can not hack your device to show notifications even if you disable them

22. Webapp creator does not have to show you ads all the time to cover propertiary platform fees and costs

23. You can block ads in webapps easily

24. You can use your app from any device

25. If your device breaks, or is stolen, you don't loose your apps and settings

26. You don't need to move apps to an another device

27. You can choose different browsers to access your webapp

28. You always use the latest version of a webapp

29. You never have to face a fact that someday webapp creator will stop supporting your particular device or operating system resulting in loosing access to your app, settings and data

30. Webapp creator can use whole internet to gain new users, not only propertiary, limited, paid ad platforms

31. Webapps does not have access to your device storage, so it won't fill it with MBs, GBs of garbage

32. You can scrape webapp making it easier to migrate to another webapp

33. You can have tens of webapps opened at once and switch between them easily

34. Webapp creator does not have to share with 3rd party, so he/she can work more on webapp quality

35. Webapps does not need to follow 3rd party, propertiary platform rules, so they can be adjusted better to fit your particular needs

36. Webapp reputation is based on online reviews, not reviews on a propertiary platform

37. Webapps does not store your data on a device

38. When your device is stolen, just change password and your data are safe

39. Webapps often are more feature rich

40. You can install extensions to your browser to adjust webapps to your needs
IntelliJ and the rest rock. I switched from Eclipse 8+ years ago and never looked back.