skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I had to change my public APIs in a backwards-incompatible way. I had a method something like obj.to_string("abc") to convert the object into a string in 'abc' format.

I also supported things like obj.to_string("abc.gz") to get the record in gzip-compressed form.

I also had a from_string() -> obj functions.

You can see the problem. I had to change to_string() so it didn't allow compression (breaking backwards compatibility) and add a to_bytes() for that functionality, and add type dispatching in the from_string() code to support either byte or strings, with different code paths.

And change all the open() calls to use "b", and to add type checks on user-passed-in file objects to insist on reading bytes (if not isinstance(user_file.read(0), bytes) raise "Must be open in binary mode") because all of the underlying parsers are in C and the needless decode/encode step adds overhead.

Oh, and re-write the C extension so it handles both Python 2 and Python 3.

That was a really boring 6 weeks.
Liquid Metal Batteries. Are they an economic possibility?
It’s a good question that every team should ask themselves rather than just blindly follow some scrum book. One reason that standups can be worthwhile is if your product managers are hard to get a hold of (which is common), it’s a guaranteed time when you can ask them some questions. But your mileage may vary.
> You might attract older folks, but you know you want young talent.

A lot of the things you say make sense, but this sounds ridiculous to me. Why would you only want young talent? How about older talent?

Skill isn’t age specific.
I've built and used such system but what about the pollutants in farming produce? What stops it from entering your body.
> Most of the executive team at Postmates, including Bastian Lehmann, the founder and chief executive of the popular food delivery app, will leave the company

Especially after reading that, this looks like a standard post-acquisiton redundancy reduction. I'm sure it still sucks for these people, but they probably also got retention bonuses after the acquisition, severance packages from Uber, and saw this coming from a mile away.
Probably not what you are looking for, but I can wholeheartedly recommend "Modern Operating Systems" by Andrew Tanenbaum. Yes, it is a whole book, and it goes to quite a level of detail, as you can imagine, but it is written really nicely and engaging.

If you don't want the full level of detail, just skip certain parts! You will still learn a lot. I know many people are reluctant to "read a book" and then skip 80% of it, but it is a really great technique for non-fiction.
> They care when you start quoting a week for a simple addition that should take an hour

Exactly, this is the key point. If it’s a website that literally will never change then fine (edit: what I mean here is if you are confident WP can meet your needs without resorting to hacks, and can meet your future needs - in my experience, it’s when more functionality gets added on by random developers that things get messy, true of development in general though!).

I guess using headless WP might help? The clients I’ve worked with who’ve had WP sites in the past have made a point of saying they definitely don’t want WP again (due to security nightmares, usability etc) so honestly haven’t investigated it too deeply recently.
What costs?

* Heating and cooling

* Buying furniture and furnishings that are missing, or to replace worn out or unsuitable for full time work e.g. lights, computer chairs, headphones, monitors

* General office consumables, e.g. coffee, milk, pens, paper

The Australian Tax Office reckons (for tax purposes) this costs around 80 cents (AUD) per hour, or AU$1,500 per year.

Also, most people don't have a separate study or spare room they can use as a home office [1].

[1] https://news.stanford.edu/2020/06/29/snapshot-new-working-ho...
Correct.

I have a Facebook account that was banned three years ago, and I just tried, I can still create a download archive with all of the personal data on it, with no way to access the account deletion capability.

Woops.

Maybe I should inform my country, who just passed GDPR-like legislation, that there is a test case against a company everyone hates.

Win win!
Covid-19 is spread by aerosols: an evidence review
What about chrome webstore access for chromium or other chromium based browsers(edge, brave, vivaldi, etc)
“These were otherwise healthy, hard-working people,”

Healthy and obese cannot exist in the same sentence.

Also what does "hard working" have anything to do it?
As if their hard work will offset some karmic debt that they own to their employers?

"...found that 77% of nearly 17,000 patients hospitalized with COVID-19 were overweight (29%) or obese (48%)."
this is spoken like it is true for everyone, which is not accurate. I would have loved to be fully remote in my early 20s, free to travel and not focus purely on work. sure it was great for my career, but work isn't living.

sure, a ton of people hate working from home. some personalities and roles require in-person interaction. most people never considered wfh when choosing their apartment or house and don't have good setups. meanwhile, there are also a ton of people, like me, who have always _hated_ going into the office. being constantly distracted by coworkers, dealing with long commutes, and putting up with uncomfortable and loud offices.

yes, people need social interaction, but that doesn't have to come from coworkers. it is a very SF mindset to build your entire life around your work.. being in the office all day and most of your "friends" are coworkers.
Hello AI!
China authorises coast guard to fire on foreign vessels
> Yeah, then why not fire everyone?

That would make the ones doing the firing redundant too. You want as many employees as possible as cheap as possible.
When you shrink nodes you can either increase performance, cut power, or go with some mix of the two. TSMC's 5nm is 30% more power efficient OR 15% faster than their 7nm process.

Apple took the power reduction.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/16088/apple-announces-5nm-a14...
Is Go mainstream enough? They haven't made any breaking changes so far.

Which brings me to another point: not all breaking changes are equal. Sometimes, a change to a syntactic element is needed. But if there's an identical replacement for it, and it can be updated mechanically, there shouldn't be a problem (in theory).

Making constructions or the standard library do things (subtly) differently without a fall-back to the original functionality is a much bigger problem: then you have to inspect every occurrence and verify if it still works under all conditions.
> if you're otherwise stuck in an office reading email to look busy, but not if you're at home and you can turn on the TV or walk the dog.

The opposite
The intro banner says “Sync and deploy to your own VPS”, but I can’t find info about setting up a custom domain and the likes.
> Most software is a hogpile of sh*t destined to rot. It simply won't last. Those sections that do (if it never has to be touched, it also didn't last) are usually subpar.

Look, most of my code is shit. I expect the requirements to change sometime in the next two weeks. The code isn't expected to rot, it's expected to be thrown away.

Anything that sticks around longer than that isn't subpar, it managed to actually meet the underlying requirements.

Anyway, if my shitty code ends up becoming a problem later; I don't have any qualms about sunk costs, because I didn't build a pinacle of architecture; and I'll probably have a much better idea of what the requirements and use-cases are.

Mostly, the important thing is to reduce the amount of layers. It's a lot easier to make changes to shitty code without too many layers than polished code that has wrong or inconvenient abstractions. Of course, shitty code that's over abstracted is even worse.
Thought-crimes are horrifying, and therefore criminal, in the minds of any ruling class.
Yeah, it's too much to do in one human lifetime, but we still discover lots of new stuff every day and thanks to SE, online docs and wikis of varying quality, it's quite easy to get things to run in no time, even if you've never heard of them before.
also, he just be talking about training a much smaller model than the 1.5B one, because that would take years maybe otherwise
You just use a headless cms that have post scheduling. Like Prismic for example.
Wellness therapies see demand uptick
They mentioned Prismic, so I assume they are using that as CMS
> We’re in the midst of a mass exodus from whatsapp to signal.

Don't you think this is just in the tech tech world? The only time I've heard a non tech person talk about signal, it was as "an app where you buy weed". :-/

Is be surprised if more than 1% of users hence left WhatsApp.
> Or why have we all not been remote for a long time, instead of squeezed into high cost locations?

Playing a little bit the devil's advocate here:

Risk aversion and general tendency to apply gradual changes.

Would you bet your company to run an experiment almost no one else is trying? Perhaps letting your workers work from home works perhaps you'll miss all deadlines and generate all kinds of drama.

An external factors kicked in and everyone was in the same experiment. Things were messy but not completely unmanageable. Some were even surprised things kept working as well as they did.

Now, the big question is: will this take a toll on people? Will companies that choose to continue with this work style be put in disadvantage as other companies switch back to on-prem?
Server rewrites. Usually they work adding rules to Apache .htaccess.

On the other hand, this trick was mostly useful years ago when shared hosting plans were really underpowered.

As of today, with improvements of both PHP 7.x and general server performance, even a cache system that uses PHP very early (before any DB connection) to load a pre-rendered html cache file goes a long way in terms of number of pages being served.

Actually, if this become your bottleneck, the .htaccess trick won't help a lot, and you would still look in tools like memcached, redis or reverse proxies to improve things.
Thanks for noticing!

To be more specific, "what is a" are stop words and "cynic" is very common, so a lot of rows are returned (see my other comment). ts_rank takes too long to rank them, and the server times out, leaving you with the previous query's table because I didn't take the time to program a correct response to this issue. "Cecil Graham. What is a cynic?" returns Lady Windermere's Fan almost instantly.

The workarounds I've thought of would be to cache these queries (assuming I've seen them before, and after I've set up logging), buy a larger server, or pay Second Quadrant to speed up ts_rank... I'd love any suggestions from more experienced Postgres engineers!
and parents
Well it’s a security shitshow and a fav for hackers looking for an easy exploit vector: just compromise it once and voila! All website consumers are at risk.

Just a shame there’s no liability for negligently causing users to get infected.
It can be yours again if you dedicate an additional SSD to holding a bunch of variously-snapshotted VM images.

Wanna double click that risky .exe from a torrent? Linked clone that base Windows install.
And so does Forth [1] ;-)

I suspect the fact that Chuck Moore, the inventor of Forth, started his career at the SAO [2] and worked at NRAO later. The other one is the extreme compactness of the runtime, and his chip designs that got "radiation hardened" versions. The RTX2010 was used in ESA's Philae/Rosetta mission [3].

[1] https://www.forth.com/resources/space-applications/

[2] In Forth, The Early Days, Moore writes "At MIT [1958], John McCarthy taught an incredible course on LISP. That was my introduction to recursion, and to the marvelous variety of computer language. Wil Baden has noted that LISP is to Lambda Calculus as Forth is to Lukasewcleicz Postfix".

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RTX2010
I have been there, I tell you. You gotta believe!
>The Python core devs did not have the time or motivation to support the old codepaths in the CPython runtime, and the legacy code was getting in the way of a lot of longtime wants and needs for improving performance, runtime maintainability, language ergonomics, and the standard library.

They could have fixed most of this legacy code without changing the external user-facing API so much.
Totem Lake is being developed the same way all of Pugetopolis is. A giant box with upscale retail on ground floor and ~$2000 1-BR apartments on top. Or sometimes office space.

I think what’s dead is the typical 80s mall with massive parking lots and exclusively retail stores. BellSquare will be fine. But Northgate is a dead mall. Out in Cary, NC a dead mall was just bought by Epic Games for their new office. The old theater in Bellevue got turned into offices for Bungie.

Downtown Redmond is full of boxes. So is downtown Kirkland. I think most of the office space is Google? I’m not sure if Totem Lake boxes have much office space.

There’s boxes up in Kenmore. Capitol Hill has lots of boxes. Central District has several new boxes around Jackson and 23rd. You can’t throw a stone without hitting a mixed use box!
maybe so, but the largest one, the 1.5B parameters, will very likely take months to train on a single gpu. I've tried to fine-tune it, with a 256 slice of TPUv2, which is huge, and it took a few days
Wait for it, https://blog.golang.org/path-security
I recently got my 12 year old cousin a RPi 400. I’m so incredibly jealous of him now!
How and why workers at tech companies, including Alphabet, are unionizing
The Google union is fast growing. It had 200 members a few days ago and over 700 now. These commit to meetings on what collective action to take and pay 1% of their wages as dues. Support for unions has been growing at tech companies in the U.S. in the last couple of years, and Google is the first of major companies to come. Major tech companies have unionized as of recent in South Korea, and now it is happening in the USA. Google workers unionized by cooperating with CODE-CWA, an effort to organize unions in tech companies which is quickly gaining traction, has achieved a number of victories in minor companies and is likely growing stronger in secret right now in major tech companies that are not Google. They offer online training classes on how to organize an union at one's company, give people guidance and dispatch experienced union organizers to get a workplace organized.

An union allows workers to use their collective power to force companies to run the way they want it. Tech companies in South Korea unionized primarily over working conditions. For instance, employers were forcing workers to work over 8 hours and not paying them properly. This occurred at various companies, like Naver (S. Korea's biggest IT company which makes the most popular search engine). The workers used the power of their union at Naver to abolish such forced, badly-paid overtime.

In the U.S., tech workers are organizing over the combined importance of working conditions and making a positive impact on tech companies' policies. For instance, a major aim of the Google union is to curb far-right extremism enabled by Google's platforms, as well as get Google to stop its cooperation with the U.S. military's wars of aggression and police persecution of black people. Google workers have already succeeded in some of these aims.

(Originally posted to Reddit some days ago.)
Clickable links:

Google Union -> https://alphabetworkersunion.org/

CODE-CWA -> https://www.code-cwa.org/

Problems with tech workers' working conditions are not unknown in the USA. For instance, workers can face layoffs, many people are coerced into working over 8 hours, and there are various other harmful practices. The Kickstarter union managed to limit the company's layoff policy by securing gains such as 4-months pay for laid-off workers. It also stopped Kickstarter's attempts to censor anti-racist content, such as the comic series "Always Punch Nazis". Meanwhile, writers for app developer Voltage Entertainment increased their wages by 78% through a strike.

If a workplace's conditions don't make the workers happy for whatever reason, virtually anything can be changed by unions. They could make a tremendous impact in tech workers' lives by changing many aspects of work-life balance, which is certainly not ideal right now. There's no reason your work at your company shouldn't feel more like the enjoyable programming you do on your personal projects you are devoted to. I will answer people's questions in the comments.
To paraphrase a bartender at a bar I've been to a few times, "I'm not 16 anymore; I drink wine by the bottle."
This is one of the most professionally handled hardware kickstarters I've put my money in.
Thanks for noticing!
To be more specific, "what is a" are stop words and "cynic" is very common, so a lot of rows are returned (see my other comment). ts_rank takes too long to rank them, and the server times out, leaving you with the previous query's table because I didn't take the time to program a correct response to this issue. "Cecil Graham. What is a cynic?" returns Lady Windermere's Fan almost instantly.

The workarounds I've thought of would be to cache these queries (assuming I've seen them before, and after I've set up logging), buy a larger server, or pay Second Quadrant to speed up ts_rank... I'd love any suggestions from more experienced Postgres engineers!

Edit to your edit, re parsing. The subset of rows returned follows:

where language = %s::regconfig and textsearchable_index_col @@ phraseto_tsquery(%s::regconfig, %s)

and relevance is determined by:

ts_rank_cd(textsearchable_index_col, phraseto_tsquery(%s::regconfig, %s), 32)

with the %s being language and paragraph respectively.
the way he describes the process he went through is still super helpful
> If I receive my ballot at home, complete it at home, and then deliver it to mailbox or drop box, at what point can someone intercept me and "force me" to show it to them?

At the point the next morning when you go into work without your ballot and your boss says "I told you to bring your ballot" and you get punished. Or your spouse/parents/housemates take it and fill it out differently than you would have. Or you're institutionalized and the employees of the institution apply for and take the ballots of all the patients and "help" them by filling them all out for the same candidate and submitting them.

> So you think someone could sway an election by intercepting people holding mail-in ballots, "forcing" them to show them the ballot, and then bribing/punishing(?) them as an incentive to change the vote? Like you think someone could do this at a large enough scale to change the outcome of an election?

One person doing this is unlikely to change the result. 0.1% of people doing this to ten people each when the margin of victory is 1% would change the outcome of an election.

> And if that's true, why aren't there any documented cases of this happening?

There are documented cases of this happening:

https://nypost.com/2020/09/27/project-veritas-uncovers-ballo...

The unknowable question is how many undocumented cases there are because the perpetrators are difficult to catch when the victims fear retaliation for turning them in.

> As soon as someone forced you to change your vote, you could call your elections board, report it, file a criminal complaint, and submit a new ballot.

How does that help if the method of coercion used to make you change your vote is also used to keep you from reporting it?
An exchange like that by definition is quite focused on tight non functionals with slim functionals, aka it does a small number of things very well. Vs Uber which does a very wide set of things at a high level of consumer polish.

In my mental model of the two problems to solve, Uber is directly consumer facing to
Millions of humans and that alone creates so much work in engineering that doesn’t exist when you can craft an api with sub 50 ms latency consumed by thousands of other machines.. the humans create the complexity. Solving for their problems is why you need way more people.
You’re right it shouldn’t. Those don’t need a recall election. Just a normal one. Elections should be like sprints too.
The conclusion is clear—American cities are built for cars, not people.

I find it interesting how many posts here bemoan the lack of community in their lives when so many people live in isolated areas. For some reason the solution that comes to mind is more church instead of rethinking our housing priorities.
it's funny this article came up. I just pulled wine from 14 days ago that was in my Eto (mentioned in the article) and it tasted just as great as when I poured it on day 1.

https://www.etowine.com/

I've used it since the Kickstarter in 2018. For a single glass drinker like myself, this (admittedly expensive) thing really helped me stretch my money over the long haul, because now I don't have to waste my wines.

edit: I suppose the Kickstarter price was 50% of what it is now. oof glad I got it
For me, the issue is not black and white: it's not "we're all gonna work from home" / "we're all gonna work from the office"... it's being given the choice based on my circumstances.

If I was king of the world I'd tell businesses (where feasible - warehouses still need people to be onsite, small businesses may not have the money for the tools for example) that they need to be able to offer home working for those that want/need it and office working for those that want/need it.

With that comes the correct tools and equipment, e.g. video conferencing, desktop sharing, telepresence, laptops, whatever.

I have been working remotely for several years with only occasional visits to an office and it works for me. I would hate to have to travel every day to an office but I like the occasional visit.

I get enough interaction with my family and friends (current COVID restrictions not withstanding ofc) but I have a separate room upstairs where I work so I don't have to sit in the kitchen.

It's horses for courses imo... the future needs to be flexibility-based.
The problem is there, the fact you choose to ignore expectations of C and C++ enterprise developers using binary libraries across language versions is another matter.

You call it FUD, I call it hand waving.

I want Rust to succeed and one day be available as official Visual Studio installer language, but apparently unwelcome points of view are always pointed out as FUD and attacks.

When cargo does finally support binary crates, I will be glad to be proven wrong when linking 4 editions together into the same binary, just like I do with DLLs and COM today.
That's what it would take for work-from-home to organically catch on. Either the delta is obvious or it isn't.
Which is my point about it being half solution.
GodotCon Online 2021
> But Northgate is a dead mall.

Northgate was doing fine but the writing was already on the wall as recently as 2017. The owners have demolished the middle (Nordstrom store #2 is almost completely gone) to make way for the hockey practice facility and several new office buildings, a couple of hotels, and apartments.

With, as you might imagine, retail on the bottom and a lot of walking space in the middle.

> You can’t throw a stone without hitting a mixed use box!

Sure, because developers and individuals have figured out that mixed use, if done OK, means stuff is more accessible. The problem is that we've only a handful of places where we zone to build mixed use so the spaces are super expensive because developers like to maximize profit.

We gotta catch up on housing, though. The close-in 'burbs are zoning for offices offices offices and not for people to live there.
That's basically DIY box wine. It has a really bad reputation because it tends to be cheap, but the bag in the box means that the wine will stay good a lot longer than with a cork and bottle. In theory, you can even put good wine in a box.
Is there a complete list of APIs?