skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I fully expect to be downvoted to oblivion for this opinion but it needs to be said. Signal has been down for nine hours. the vast majority of people who turned to this platform today as an alternative to Whatsapp or Facebook probably quit looking into it after the first two minutes of that outage.

for a platform that bills itself after installation as a suitable drop in replacement for your SMS service (and encourages you to shill it to friends as such) this is completely unacceptable and could have easily been avoided with better leadership and architecture.

Cheerleading your users endorsement of privacy on twitter during an outage is insulting.

Most sites and apps monitor things like news sites, twitter and the like for instances where their namesake may be trending. This is done in order to quickly head off DDoS type outages due to things like the slashdot effect. Signal doesnt do this for the same reason Signal is centralized: Moxy writes code like he still lives in 2006.

- Nobody scrambled to bolster capacity after the electric car porn star (Elon Musk) gave a full throated endorsement?

- Nobody raced to improve capacity after Apple looked to be in a position to piss in Facebooks cheerios?

- Nobody even thought to reconsider capacity after Whatsapp showed up in the news JANUARY 6 with a bombshell announcement of privacy changes for users? we waited over a week?

It also needs to be said --yes im aware of my audience-- that centralized services DO NOT scale. Moxys response to this has been cantfix/wontfix, so in traditional dev fashion he throws more hardware at the problem to make it go away instead of looking into a better architecture.

Microservices do not scale. Yes, they scale across the cloud, but they do not scale across support channels. Microservices trade gaming cloud providers for precious pay-by-the-second service for an endless byzantine dumpster fire of almost impossible to diagnose failure conditions. A highly secure end to end encrypted service that expects to replace your SMS needs to be quick to diagnose and fix. Again: NINE HOURS.

A more callous review would suggest that Signal remains centralized because Moxies waiting for an IPO, or an offer from FAANG to buy him out. Im certainly not of that opinion, but FWIW this was a disaster for Signal and most of HN is about to break an arm patting the company on the back.

Whatsapp certainly took notice, and certainly used it as an opportunity to win back some of its detractors.
For anyone who hasn't seen it: https://youtu.be/jQE66WA2s-A
I'll knock it off. But that includes when they actually do come for Signal and Bitcoin.
The symbol collisions for H and B disqualify some other superlatives (eg. Hyper, Buncha), but leave some others viable such as Lotta, Super, and Ultra.

Ultra seems appropriate for something like 10^(10^10), which would make 10^(10^(10^10)) an Ultraplex.
A quarter billion dollars buried in that landfill. Why are folks not robbing it yet? People hit up banks or dive to treasure galleons for far less.
Did the backup messages/keys to iCloud thing start before or after the FBI demanded Apple unlock a device?
People are still trying to fix that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25750582

The last error handling fix didn’t really go anywhere, but just being able to send Either[error, T] will help quite a bit.
> While Texas is not doing super terribly at releasing its vaccine reserve, as of yesterday it was the #48 state in terms of vaccinated people per capita.

Seems to be #18 in terms of doses administered per capita according to the CDC tracker. Of course, that doesn't preclude things in Texas being a mess... just that it's less of a mess than about 32 other states.

Meanwhile California is at #45.

[1] https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#vaccinations
Did he really know a Hillary Bastone and a Hillary Batstone? I would have gently let one go.
Ask HN: How will the mass exodus from Bay Area reshape tech industry?
I live in Maui and keep meeting 'tech refugees'. People who have either left California or quit their jobs to rethink their future plans.

I hear about wealthy people moving to Austin as well.

It used to be an unspoken rule that if you wanted to really build a big company, Bay Area was the best place to be due to all the talent and capital in one confined area.

Now, I see the dynamics shifting to something new. Not sure what but I can see it unfolding.

Just curious what HN thinks/feels.
The other aspect is that emulation makes for defined expectations.

I think this is the appeal of modern home-brew. There's established constraints and conventions from the platform.

Saying "you can run SNES games on it" frames the product well. I'm not expecting to run games which need full keyboard/mouse or RTX3080 calibre graphics, but I do expect a good experience with little pixel-art graphics and a D-pad plus four buttons.
It's absolutely ridiculous that anyone would argue that calling white supremacists "Nazis" is as bad as supporting the ideology of white supremacy. One is semantics and the other is a hateful fantasy that deserves no place in society.
I had to check. It's really a subreddit.
I don't blame anyone for wanting one language that solves everything. Rust is already good at so many things. I too want Rust and web to be better than it is.

My day job consists of a hybrid of Rust/React/JS/CSS/HTML/Ruby/Rails/SQL (in no particular order). I don't like having to remember so much. I would love to see one language be the best at everything, but I doubt that will ever happen.
A quick look at your comment history is sufficient and it's clear that the only ones who use "excuses" are china shills like you, who try to defend a terribly corrupt communist regime, that commits the largest scale of genocide since the holocaust, by hook or by crook. Don't insult people's intellect with your victim complex, china deserves every bit of opposition it receives and more.
Yeh so true. One of fhe great things about the Open Tech Fund was that it makes it easier for people with open source ideas, like Signal or our own Umbrella security training app, to get funding. Doing that through European funds would be impossible.
> You can even update a prop at the top of the component tree and it won't re-render children that didn't actually change (and without you having to orchestrate that yourself).

The number of React apps that render super slowly, with visible delays when typing, is proof that it is easy to make very poorly performing react apps.
From what I've been told in the past, it's exactly 1/1000 of a metric asston. I couldn't find anything on Wikipedia to back that up, however.
Honestly, I think the more important takeaway isn’t the decline of NoSQL. As the article says, it’s the conclusion that’s what’s good for FAANG isn’t necessarily what’s good for your average project. I know this sounds obvious but it’s been a constant source of frustration for me with the hype train.

You could apply the same logic to a whole bunch of tech like Kubernetes, service mesh etc etc and arrive at the same result.

Every tech has a trade off, understanding it is critical. Don’t pick tech spot SOLELY based on FAANG use.
> I am sincerely sorry that I exist,

So when someone touts how important their white race is to their identity, or how proud they are of it, and people object, that it's the wrong thing to focus on, you think they're objecting to the existence of white people?
My experience is only n=3 but I've only rarely seen them where I've worked over the past 5 years. The only sane use case I've seen was for tagging logs and metrics.
My process:

* trial

* error

* reading the HTML, DOM, and CSS standards documents very thoroughly end-to-end

* stackoverflow

* repeat
This never made sense. How can you forget the structure? Either you code the Structure in the schema or in random places in your code as dictionary keys, which seems far more unwieldy.
Ask HN: Are there any resources to help me improve the quality of my feedback?
I recently joined a fully remote company where all technical proposals are made as RFCs. I feel like, and have received feedback that, the comments I leave on them are often too technical or otherwise more commentative than they are constructive. Are there any books or resources out there that could help me learn how to improve the quality of my feedback?
I'm surprised Postgres has continued to be popular despite having multi-master or sharding support.
Yeah that’s fair: I’m a bit of an early adopter of Deno [0] for that reason, it helps standardise quite a bit of that. Promising, anyway, if a bit rough currently.

[0] https://deno.land
Not to mention, the scientific method is itself a culmination of a type of epistemic nihilism. I'm not sure why you'd abandon it at the funding level—in this context, having epistemic values is just called "bias".

Certainly, I'd hope the phrase "We can't ever know who or what will be successful" is a trivially true phrase for a trained scientist. If not, they better read some damn Hume and justify their semantics.
For me it was very easy to stop watching youtube when they started to show more and more commercials - I just couldn’t stand it, it was too frustrating. Occasionally I find something useful, download it using youtube-dl and (re)watch offline.
I would be interested in developping (research) software based on VR under Linux, any recommendation for devices that work well? are there any Open frameworks?
Look, I'm not trying to bash on F#. It's a good programming language. To be honest, I wish it gained more traction and popularity, and I wish C# was abandoned (like VB.net), and more people moved to F#. But that's simply not happening. It's not happening for the past 15+ years. I used to write programs for .Net, I'm not a complete outsider. Unfortunately, F# is still small, even within .Net. You may throw random words at me, if it makes you feel better, I don't care. People get emotionally attached to the tools they use and that's understandable.

You may like F#, OCaml, Haskell more, or you may just hate Clojure (it's okay), but that is the truth - among other languages with a strong FP emphasis, Clojure currently is the most widely used in the industry. It doesn't make it better or worse.

May I remind you though, the use of FP langs as a whole is still so small compared to Python, Javascript, Java, that it almost makes no difference, beyond the fact that FP languages are huge influencers and affect the evolution of other PLs.
The "buttload" is a measurement, so perhaps you could shift terminology to "metric buttload".

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/buttload

Since the obsolete buttload is 384 gallons, perhaps the "metric buttload" could be 384 liters.
Zig has similar good integration with C. The Zig compiler is also a C compiler (calls into Clang), C headers can be imported directly from Zig code and used without writing any bindings, and you can also autogenerate C headers for Zig code so that it can be used directly from C (although this is currently broken).
If you don't think Java was ever dominant (and frankly I think it still is), then probably we just disagree about the definition of the word "dominant".
I am not suggesting it’s insightful, just the counter argument you’re posts are largely ignoring. If your looking for everyone that made more than 10+ million in the last 40 being a founder isn’t a great route. Even if your benchmark is 100 million it’s not good overall odds.

It’s only when your benchmark is becoming a billionaire that it starts to look like the best option.
NoSQL was the last time I ranted about a stupid technology that became popular, nice to see its finally being put to death publicly. I just ignore them now and wait for their inevitable death (node.js I'm looking at you)

Edit: was just thinking the defining characteristic of these sorts of technologies is they are advocated as replacements for things that already exist, and the people advocating them are not experts in the things they are trying to replace. So they don't understand the reasons behind why things are done - NoSQL was obvious for any database person - no transactions, no normalisation. Node.js - tries to replace server coding with something vastly inferior, and it sort of works until you need a proper server.

Edit2: lol, time will tell
And credit where credit's due, Rust got into that inspired by Elm.
An interesting cultural phenomenon is taking place because of automated translation services like Google Translate. I learned of it in another thread on HN a few months ago. People are realizing that what they write will be translated by machine and are adjusting their written language accordingly. This is one of those interesting side effects of tech on culture that is not immediately obvious, I think.

It's basically an extension of "international English" which avoids things like phrasal verbs or coloquialisms, but more from the standpoint of, "If my coworker in Shenzhen puts this text into Google Translate and tries to create documentation from it, is it going to sound ridiculous?" And then doing a few translate/reverse-translate passes yourself until you've tweaked the text enough so the input and output is the same. Eventually, you start writing this way by default.

This could be considered the same as telegram abbreviations, or even text-speak like "LOL" or whatever, but the key in this instance is we're changing our way of communicating based on what a computer can understand, not a fellow human.
Aren’t you arguing against a straw man? No one is making the case that the ultimate solution is lowering rent or raising wages.

If we agree that’s the problem, can we then agree on the simplest solution? Give everyone housing, with no conditions or strings attached.
Where is the working group at with that proposal? I've been eyeing it closely, but it hasn't seen any significant movement in over two years, last I checked. I'm excited about template instantiate, though I worry the API is going to be tied to having template element instances, instead of being part of the HTMLTemplateElement and its own thing I could take advantage of with string templates. I also haven't seen any place where I can give feedback formally on the proposal to the working group :(

HTML imports were supposed to be the holy grail to solve this, but nobody but Chrome supported it :(
Because it had to replace people using a comma inside printf. The member function could only accept one argument cleanly so you would've to chain them like cout.put.put.put
Wayne is the first thing that comes to mind when I hear NRA. Outrageous spending. Dammit.
This is cool. But I'll admit to the one reason I won't install it: live video chats mean I might get completely stuck on the phone with the nicest stranger who just wants to chat and that gives me tremendous anxiety. I can't be rude.

I'd love an arms length version that pops up images or short video clips in "near" real time.
Lol you even formatted it similarly
It's an amusing article, but it does seem he started with his conclusions and worked backwards.

Microclimate has positioned the Air helmet as an ideal accessory for air travel. Its website even has a list of masking policies for every major airline. I did not fly with this helmet on. I haven’t flown anywhere in nearly a year, because everyone is dying right now and I’m not stupid.

If he had a parent or child on the opposite coast, and they urgently required his help, would he really rule out air travel?
This is quite cool
Thank you for the clarification.

I am living abroad, so information comes to me via a different medium. However, I saw a local news segment from a major Texas metro area on an NBC channel that made that claim on the 5 PM news yesterday.
They don’t store messages in the cloud. The desktop app benefits from being able to store them locally. The same could be said of a web app but I’m sure browsers impose some extra limitations.
Great point, something I think about often as well. In theory, your great great great great grandkids or nieces/nephews will be able to see 4K video of your kids doing keg stands in college... definitely think there could be a market for people pruning or selectively showing parts of their life, both their more personal and professional/outward sides, for future generations.
Man owns $321M in Bitcoin – but he can't access it because he lost his password
This blog post is calling at least two different things SQL, and it's kind of infuriating.

SQL as a query language is never going away. Virtually every database has found it necessary to offer a SQL-like query language: Cassandra's CQL, HiveQL, Couchbase query language, and so on. SQL is a human-readable, composable formalism for describing data.

What's gone away is the practice of writing complex, highly linked, normalized database schemas with layers of constraints and foreign key references. That was banished to the land of stagnant enterprise 10 years ago and is not coming back.

The last 10-15 years have been an evolution from mostly static, deeply linked, highly structured data to shallow schemas, append-only updates, denormalized data, and stream processing. If you data is a stream of updates, there's not as much pressure to roll back. If your data is mostly defined by a series of processing pipelines that live entirely outside your data warehouse, there's not a lot of upside on enforcing constraints in the DB. If anything, we have learned that it's very useful to offer different denormalized views of the data in the DB to different consumers.

MS SQL Server is not roaring back. Businesses have just learned to unbundle data processing from data warehouses. Data warehouses now have fewer tasks to focus on, such as scalability. And if your DB is just a dumb replica with a flat schema, whether it's an RDBMS or not is pretty unimportant.
Perfectly believable. I used to coach at startup events, and the dreamers who wanted to make the next Facebook were so exhausting. I eventually wrote up a a stock answer to give them: https://www.quora.com/Is-it-foolish-to-go-to-Startup-Weekend...

What really bothers me, though, is not the randos with this attitude. It's that some of them will grab enough money or power that they'll be able to live out their fantasy. And woe be unto any who hop on board. Quibi being the latest big example.
Recently we were considering flutter web. Dart/flutter seem to be more "batteries included" than npm dependency hell, but it's still in beta.

https://flutter.dev/web

https://github.com/DroidsOnRoids/flutter-roadmap
Does the Either type from the vavr library for Java cover this? https://www.baeldung.com/vavr-either
Typically, that results in the responsible officers facing civil or criminal consequences and being replaced by new leadership. In this case however, the New York attorney general is seeking to dissolve the organization entirely, an extreme step that certainly appears to be motivated by partisan animus.
That "sort of planning". But are they requiring unions, taxing all companies and preventing capital from fleeing?

No.
Why would you default to using the non long term support version? Would you do that for, say, ubuntu?
I agree. The problem with Java is its culture, which cannot be fixed by same thinking which created it.

And by culture I mean, java attracted people who think that lines of code are cheap and see nothing wrong with a 200 line class which has no actual behaviour beyond boilerplate. People who measure their output by the number of lines of code added per day, not the number of features added to a project per year.

Any "fixed" version of java needs to either bring those people along - and in the process import a lot of java's stale thinking. (Some corners of the C# world struggle with this). Or leave those people behind and build a new community around your new thing (eg Scala, Clojure). You can see this in the java community already - there are plenty of tools in the modern JVM for doing terse functional programming. But as far as I know that stuff remains unpopular. Why? My theory is that most of the people who really care about writing terse, efficient, maintainable code jumped to better languages years ago.
It's a trivial example, but a valid one. Those sorts of "it works great as long as you remember..." things are complexity, often unneeded. There are more severe examples of this involving frameworks with assumptions being too hardcoded (or softcoded!) as well.

Some are essential complexity, sure. But many aren't.
This. Time flies by and before long it happened.
On the Deplatforming of Parler and Infrastructure Content Moderation
Cool trick, I did not know this, but it makes sense.
It has "defer" and "errdefer" constructs for cleaning up resources, comparable to Go, but obviously applying to more things since there's no GC.

https://ziglang.org/documentation/master/#defer
> Each has its place.

NoSQL encompasses many, very different types of databases. Were you thinking about document-store DBs here?
Ask HN: Which non-technical book had the biggest impact on your career in tech?
What book that you read was not related to tech, but nevertheless proved to be extremely useful in your job?
I don’t understand, so what? They’re doing their best and if users go somewhere else so be it. I’m sure if they could avoid the outage they would.

They’re not losing profits or anything. They’re hosting a free service. When they get the service back online users will have a secure messaging option that is even more battle-tested.
Thank you HN.
This is code to write a command line application, not to use the console.
I think the downvotes are because of this statement:

> the community hasn't (yet?) put in enough effort to reach parity with more web-oriented communities

Rust is a relatively new language, and these things take time. The community is amazing and is putting in a lot of effort, but you have to be patient.
would you put your profile/resume/CV on a decentralised professional network and why (not)?

Probably not, but only for the same reason that I won't post it in the "Who Wants a Job" threads here -- privacy/anonymity online. But if I was someone who had it posted on my website, I would have no problem posting it to a decentralized network as well. IMO just further surface area for potentially finding your next job!

Secondly: Would you be interested in running a small social network just for your co-workingspace, colleagues, company, alumni, startup-hub, businessnetwork, etc?

Maybe, depends on how much work it is to get set up and running, and how helpful it is (how much social/professional capital I would gain for doing so).

Best of luck! I like the idea
Nah, the pendulum has just swung back in the opposite direction. Give it 10 or 20 years, and just like strongly typed programming languages, NoSQL will be all the rage again, and you'll be "an idiot" for not using it, again.
GOA, and Second Amendment Foundation have done most of the legal work in the big cases in the last few decades anyway...

If you want to support Gun Rights, Support one or both of them
The English Language Wikipedia Just Had Its Billionth Edit
I'll second the "Valve's been amazing" comment. The majority of games I play are native, and all but a few of the rest work fine under Proton. Compared to when I started using Linux on the desktop a decade ago, the gaming situation is night and day.

Regarding Fallout 4, though, I played through it using Proton a while ago. As far as I can tell, the mouse thing is just an issue with the game - I found multiple sets of instructions to fix it that assumed you were using Windows.
Do you have a recommended starting point for learning how to build web apps in Go? As a language, Go seems pretty easy (although the upper case method names really bug me), but I don’t have a ton of time to pick up new stuff on my weekends, and have not yet stumbled onto a great “start here” guide.
Wow, thank you! It's such a pita to prefix it, I had no idea you could postfix it and it will work!
> they have a massive amount of closed source stuff running behind their ES service

GPL licenses are not SSPL compatible, so it would likely still be impossible to comply even if their ES service was entirely open source.