skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As someone who is currently working at enterprise where a migration of Kafka from old to a newer version is taking place. IMO this whole Kafka thing seems quite unstable compared to RDBMSs where migrations are relatively painless on application code.

Kafka is causing huge churn in applications codebases. I know that "best practices" experts will tell our company that we are doing it wrong. However to me Kafka seems a clever algorithms circlejerking and answer to operational complexity is either go to managed cloud or go to hell.
i feel pretty good so far (7 years in.) i barely use my brain to write haskell compared to the python or even go i write. feels like the types and purity are to blame.
Seems like there is a good chance that it just ripened more than the others.
Yea, I don't think it's always a waste of time to think about scale at the start. You don't have to do all the work up front, but you can definitely put thought into doing the early work in a way that will make scaling easier later. There is no sense in committing to an architecture early that limits your options later. Also, avoiding sloppiness and ensuring simplicity up front usually pays dividends later.
There's probably a tragedy of the commons situation there though.
Short interest down massively from Friday. Equities don’t settle instantly. Tomorrow will be bloody.
A few years ago, having read a number of articles comparing blogs and other online writing to the 17th- and 18th-century British essayists, I spent some time reading those essays. In general, I think the comparison is valid. The essays were published regularly, covered issues of both topical and lasting interest, had distinctive individual voices, and, when successful, generated public discussion. The best, such as Addison and Steele’s The Spectator, continued to be read for generations. If anyone is interested in dipping into them, a large collection is available at the Internet Archive:

https://archive.org/search.php?query=-description%3AGoogle+A...
Yeah it's actually a practice closely related to naked shorting, sometimes referred to as "naked shorting but totally not."
>> I'd imagine there's plenty of funds willing to short GME at $300

Plenty? What type of mathematical model would support a move like that? Are hedge funds predicting a government bailout? Or are they certain retailers will close on Monday?
The article discusses post end-of-support for Windows machines.

> [Microsoft Surface devices get] firmware and driver updates for about four years after they are first released. This is a little better than Chromebooks and a little worse than Apple computers.

My iPhone 5s received a system software update a few days ago. I was not expecting support for iOS 12.

> Before Windows 10, Microsoft usually supported each version of Windows for about three to five years.

Fact is that Windows lasts a really long time. While I realize that corporate support contracts are a different world, Windows XP lasted forever.

Is 3 to 5 years of updates a reasonable expectation? What do people expect from (for example) Wal Mart laptops?
There is an even more common/simpler problem: what if you have different spellings on different government IDs? Also, what if your name is so long, that it does not fit most gov IDs?

Example: http://entojo.com/14-nomes/ (in Portuguese)
Thanks a lot, I learned something! I was also confused by seeing "Webcam" under the "Common HIDs" heading on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_interface_device

In all cases -- got it. HID -> not webcams. :-)

Cheers!
So you set up your Postgres instance, great. Then what, you hope it doesn't break?

Master-master Postgres is significantly fiddlier and less well-tested than Kafka. And what do you gain? Fiddlier APIs and a query language that makes it easy to deadlock yourself with no warning or write queries that will run for months.

Just use Kafka unless you've got a good reason not to. It gets a lot more of the basics right.
Those lockdowns are not actual lockdowns, and were doomed to fail.

Moreover lockdown restrictions were removed when numbers of new cases simply lowered, as opposed to all known cases being removed from community and quarantined, and confidence there was zero community transmission.

Meanwhile borders are porous, with new cases arriving constantly. The combination of all this is heartbreakingly difficult to observe.

Honestly this stuff is easy.

A lockdown means only essential workers who actually keep the lights on and provide food go to work, and they do with ridiculous protection.

It means no fast food delivery, no public transport or Ubers, no leaving your residence except for exercise (maybe - some places you had to stay inside) and 1/week shop at the supermarket (or delivery) with one person/household.

It means closing the borders firmly, and government-provided and provisioned (not outsourced) quarantining every arrival for at least 14 days.

And it means providing plenty of funding and kindness to businesses and people to allow them to get through without fear. Including putting homeless into homes (e.g. empty hotel rooms).

And it needs to last long enough to know and isolate every case, which is say 6-8 weeks if done properly.

The US and UK failed on every one of these tests, and hundreds of thousands of people are dead.

Meanwhile in New Zealand we did the above almost a year ago, and are enjoying our summer break essentially normally.
I gave an example upthread that was downvoted into oblivion. Anything that is standardized, frankly. On average, a Fun Size package of M&Ms contains 17 M&Ms. Many contain 18. Rarely, they contain 19 or 16 or 15. ONLY APPROXIMATELY 20% HAVE FEWER M&MS THAN AVERAGE
Under-scaling and over-scaling are both suboptimal for all the obvious reasons.

Middle-scaling is also suboptimal - you’re paying too much upfront and you don’t get enough later on anyway.

Stage-appropriate scaling is the smart way. Scale as you can see the need. This requires willpower - you will be pressured to kick things down the road just one more time, every single time.

The path of the wise is generational design. Build every component such that it can be easily destroyed and replaced. Anything that mustn’t be destroyed should be scrutinized and planned for in advance. Store your data in most mundane formats so it’s easier read. Keep interactions simple and need-to-know. These are platitudes, you will need to fill the planned obsolesce roadmap for yourself. This unites your hands make the quickest crappiest implementation at the moment secure in knowledge you can fix it or scale it as needed later.
It should be noted that Melvin Capital returned over 50% in 2020[1], 44% in 2019[2], and has averaged above 30% annual returns since inception[3].

In other words, even though this is definitely painful, even inclusive of this event, it's one of the best performing hedge funds of the past decade.

[1]https://www.wsj.com/articles/citadel-point72-to-invest-2-75-...
[2]https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-07-19/cohen-cub...
[3]https://www.baltimoresun.com/business/ct-biz-reddit-wall-str...
I invent a random number with my area code, and 555 as the second group. This block is reserved for fictional numbers (which is why it shows up so often in television) and again, most systems accept it. This way I get to pick a last 4 that I can remember, and which other patrons in my area code are less likely to randomly choose.

Of course, I'd prefer not to provide a phone number at all, but some of the local businesses (especially hair salons, for some reason) get downright hostile when I try to explain my preference. It's like it's completely unheard of to not hand your phone number out to strangers. This gives me a way to "relent" without causing a scene.
That’s how I take this, with a related point of thinking about how you’d replace components when the time comes. Maybe you have a monolith-leaning design but you have tests, a clean API with some idea of ownership, etc. rather than a bunch of code directly making SQL calls, copying the same logic instead of using a function, or touching the shared files so when you do split things out and redesign them the process is safe.

(Having flashbacks to the same code in 3 PHP repos, maintained by one person, no two copies identical)
Sure, but not everyone is making websites.
Please don't post substance-free comments.
So, my layman’s understanding is that if there are 10 million shares, and you borrow 1 million of them (a 10% short position) from their owners, then sell them to new owners, both the old owners and new owners count as owning stock, and so 11 million shares “are owned”. My understanding is that then when the end of the quarter comes around, the owners of all 11 million shares are owed dividends. 10 million of those receive a dividend from the company, and the short seller has to pay a dividend to the people they borrowed from. So in a very real sense, it is as if 11 million shares are owned.

To expand: if there were 10 million shares, you borrowed all of them, and sold all of them, you would have a 100% short position and 20 million shares would be “owned” by various people. If you then went to the owners of 4 million of the freshly sold shares and borrowed from them and re-sold the shares... now you have a 140% short position and 24 million shares “exist”. 10 million of them are “real shares” and 14 million are “obligations” that you’ll have to fulfill at the end of each quarter.

My understanding (again, almost entirely from reading Matt Levine columns) is that this is a thing you can do if you’re really cheeky, you’d just need a mountain of collateral and balls of steel.
This assumes that everyone is making websites.
The largest decentralized hedge fund in the world
Well, that would explain the fire /s
Not true. Not even close to being true. Unless you very narrowly cherry pick technology advances to be whatever makes your statement true. Even the language we are speaking right now was invented in Europe.
> As a skeptic, why should I believe the regulation is effective? (I am asking in good faith, not rhetorically)

It certainly isn't all the time. However, it does change over time and regulation right now is completely different from 2008 and a lot stricter. This situation where RH had to disable buys is actually caused by new regulations (some part of Dodd-Frank IIRC, and some private by DTCC but can't be arbitrarily changed) - as usual fighting the last battle causes new problems.

> Wouldn't one Citadel entity affect the other? In 2008 didn't we learn that some companies are too big to fail (and therefore also too big to effectively regulate)?

It's possible but their connection isn't that strong; we don't need to assume they'll affect each other just because they have the same name and some shared ownership. Their P&L isn't the same. Besides that, Citadel (the one loaning to Melvin) doesn't mind that Melvin lost a bunch of money, because it means they got to buy them at fire sale prices.

As for "too big to fail" it seems like a meme that prevents actual analysis of the situation. Big companies are actually easier to regulate than lots of small ones, and treat their workers better since small ones are exempt from discrimination laws and often pretty abusive. (This is Matt Bruenig theory.)
Thanks for the link! This looks like a significant improvement over my current solution of trying to pass callbacks ... which aren’t transferable types sadly ;)
yeah, in the US it is ironic as the intelligence and defense agencies and contractors do recruit software engineers from other universities, including universities made that were originally made for minorities, most of which are closer to the capitol. this results in encryption standards proliferation and exploits and much more, which shows competence.

"big tech" keeps saying "pipeline problem" while not even touching the universe of possibilities.
Density is not an issue - just stay inside. Overcrowding per household is a big issue.
I studied mathematics. It wasn't hard to get there at all. The only problem was there were seventeen applicants for every single one that got in, otherwise it wasn't more difficult than if I wanted to get admitted to geology.
We're halfway between CircleCI and Vercel - not for production hosting, but easily allowing for backends / databases to run (including a separate backend for every push)
The problem I see with kafka is that it was built before cloud architectures were commonly adopted (with distributed systems everywhere). Confluent has put a lot of effort dragging kafka's architecture to the present, but some major features are missing:

- Auto-scaling: Confluent finally introduced "elastic scaling" a few months ago but it only allows you to scale up and must be triggered by the admin (no threshold-based auto-scaling).

- Multi-tenancy: Planning for a multi-tenant kafka cluster is not for the faint of heart. Achieving isolation tends toward liberal usage of topics of which starts to become unmanageable in the low thousands. This isn't crazy when you've got a few hundred microservices and several tenants to keep isolated.

- Decoupled brokers and storage: Any broker scaling or failure can lead to downtime while event storage is redistributed.

Confluent's Cloud service reduces operational overhead but isn't always feasible due to cost, resource limits (like service accounts or schemas for instance), data controls, etc.
I can run disparate environments across multiple language runtimes without having to fight version issues or wrangle multiple VMs. That’s why, for me at least.
At least for government employees, if not all non-office workers, government should simply mandate to that any building open to the public must allow use of its bathrooms.
I own one and it's one of the best Kickstarters I've supported. It comes with a nicely designed box, a thick user's manual with lots of BASIC program examples in it, in the spirit of the original ZX Spectrum. The design of the keyboard is fantastic, both feels like the old ZX Spectrum+ and modern at the same time. The SD card contains many software, games, apps that you can try out.

ZX Spectrum+ has a special place in my heart because it was the first computer I put my hands on and made me fall in love with programming. This one truly feels like a spiritual successor. I definitely recommend it whoever feels the same way about the old speccys.
I was going to ask whhhyyyy but the 98 one has hit me with enough nostalgia that I think I get it now
Citation? The Islamic contribution to philosophy and mathematics is impressive but Arabs were always marginal. Many, many Persians, Greeks and other Christians and converts but very few Arabs of any note.
Thank you. When I asked I was sure there'd be bigger Mother 2 fans than me that could answer. Rockin!
I'm happy that the GME spectacle happened. It's made a lot of people realize they can participate in the stock market and accumulate wealth. There's no going back!
I'm alright thank you.
Seems like a lot of lisp fans here. Can you recommend any lisp repo to learn list "good practices" and "design patterns" from?
The arguments that Melvin lied about closing their position are as follows:

1. Short interest on GME is still high, even after they claimed to have closed their short position.

2. They have a "huge incentive" to lie about this, because people believe it would encourage a selloff.

That is the entirety of the evidence. It is uncritical despite the fact that it gets frenetically repeated on reddit. Here is the evidence which suggests they didn't lie:

1. That first argument doesn't prove what people believe it does. First, short interest is only officially reported twice monthly, and most cited data is out of date or estimated. More importantly, short interest is an aggregate measure which does not track specific positions. It only tracks all positions together. Other firms which haven't been burned by the price increase have opened new positions, hoping to short from the top tick (or thereabouts).

2. The second argument is reddit cargo culting "game theory", and it violates both logic and Occam's Razor. If you're a fund manager who lies to the public about closing a highly volatile position that could bankrupt you, you are facing securities fraud and violation of fiduciary duty, respectively. Either of those will pierce the veil of your firm and leave your personal assets liable for reclamation by the SEC and/or angry investors. You will be sued. You will lose.

Moreover, the "incentive" of this move is that you might prompt a selloff and get to keep your short position. It strains credulity to think someone would make such an uncertain bet with a huge psychological component when their firm is literally on the line. If you're wrong, your firm is dead and all of your personal assets are up for seizure in the ensuing fallout for the aforementioned reasons.

The alternative is that you just close the position, don't lie about it, and your firm survives and you just have a bad year. You are personally unscathed as the fund manager. And since you've had historically excellent returns and this was a 3 or 4 sigma event, long term you'll probably be fine. You'll have a new signal to incorporate into your portfolio risk management and you'll move on.
URL changed to that now (from https://web.archive.org/web/20160215135645/https://www.eurom...). Thanks!
Discounted future cash flow includes all of dividends, possible future acquisition, and greater fools buying it from you. The last one being what drives Tesla and cryptos.
We've changed to that URL above from https://web.archive.org/web/20160215135645/https://www.eurom.... Thanks!
>Plenty? What type of mathematical model would support a move like that?

Do you really need a mathematical proof of this? If a stock is $30 and you think the FMV is actually $20. Then you'd expect to make $10 from shorting it. If it's at $300 you'd expect to make $280. So the higher the price, the more money you expect to make from it, and the more tempting it is.

>Are hedge funds predicting a government bailout? Or are they certain retailers will close on Monday?

No not really, a sibling comment explains it better than I can: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25984493
DeepMind is European. ARM is European. The best chip manufacturing companies are in Taiwan. The best car makers are in Europe. The #1 shipping line (Maersk) is in Europe. The language we are speaking right now is European. The modern corporation, including shares, was invented in Europe. Alan Turing was European. Do I really need to go on?
> It should be noted that Melvin Capital returned over 50% in 2020[1], 44% in 2019[2], and has averaged above 30% annual returns since inception[3].

And those returns are all net of fees.
Is it possible to assign a “port” to a specific device? (Similar to how I can assign a flash drive a specific drive letter)
Volunteers built a one-stop website to find open NYC vaccine appointments
Not clear to me. I wasn’t involved in settlement; it was just my job to make sure the system reflected external reality. In the case of BTC trades we were just told what the system did, not why. It also was a relatively simple “crypto trades settle in 2 days” algorithm which didn’t require a lot of investigation on our part.

I will say that a lot of finance stuff is driven by norms and history, and it can be surprisingly hard to change things. My favorite example is the British “gilt” bond. Most government bonds have “coupon” days where interest is paid out, and obviously the traders of these bonds like to calculate the accrual of interest between them when trading. Gilt bonds, so named from the gilded edge the paper used to have, pays out the coupon to whoever has the bond a few days before coupon day because in the 1600s it took a lot of effort to figure out who actually had the physical bond paper. Back when I worked in finance they still had this system from nearly 400 years ago. Obviously the ability to sell a bond and still collect the coupon wreaks absolute havoc with the interest calculation.
Java stuck in an applet in a document made me sad in the 90s. It seemed to me
Java should have been the canvas (or something more like the smalltalk that had inspired some of Java)

The problem of packaging portable User Experiences was partially dealt with by the JVM.

Now we’ve done it all again with JavaScript and Web Assembly (albeit lower level)

I’m not sure that where we ended up is all that bad but I can’t shake the feeling it could have been a lot better.
> Ethereum is trying to switch mid-flight (yikes) but others like Cardano have incorporated it foundationally.

Why yikes? If its a legacy transition, with a flight plan and testing, then it should be fine.
That's why you move from a risky stock portfolio to a safer bold driven portfolio as your age increases.
The low bandwidth and the mesh topology put a hard upper limit on the number of nodes in a channel. From memory its limited to 250 nodes in the default settings.

https://meshtastic.discourse.group/t/theoretical-mesh-stats/...

"I suspect up to about 30 nodes per channel would be fine, I bet the channel will be almost unusable once you reach 100 nodes."

As for voice - I think in default "very long range mode" the mesh bandwidth is down around 20 bytes per second. It's possible to get higher bandwidth at the expense of range, but it's really not what you're looking for if you want voice comms.
It’s also worth noting that’s a different model than a lot of the big companies.

For example you don’t get margin on fidelity unless you apply for it and sign waivers and attest you can cover it.

And any intraday trades will garner warnings if you don’t have the cash in account to cover. After a couple they will axe the ability.

Robinhood intrinsically allows a lot more leverage and risk for their customers by default. And this isn’t their first snafu. They had people exploiting their margin defaults for basically infinite leverage a year ago, leverage these 20 somethings would never be able to cover.
An advertising awards show in the browser?
This is possible, not illegal, and can be simplified even further.

It's entirely possible for me to borrow a share from you, (short) sell it back to you, and then for us to repeat that process an unlimited number of times, thereby shorting an unlimited amount of stock. This would be stupid since I'd owe you more stock than exists and you could set any price you wanted for them.
At the risk of this becoming a meme: do you do strength training? I used to get persistent burning sensations (RSI related) in my hands after a day of computer use which has completely vanished after I started lifting heavy. You get the benefits of an aesthetic improvement too, which is nice.
>People are always so quick to comment, “don’t worry about scaling... if you are successful, you can redesign at that point.” However, it isn’t always easy to redesign later.

Well ... you're going to have to. You don't know what bottlenecks you're going to hit as you scale up, so why spend precious development time trying to guess which systems to optimize? And to be clear, 'cloud-scale' architectures are complicated and bring their own set of issues - why subject yourself to that?

Plus a well designed (monolithic) system should get you very far with vertical (resource) scaling and/or data sharding.
Blackberry support was also huge, as countries like Indonesia moved off BBM they migrated to WhatsApp en masse.
There's at least an obvious solution to this problem even if it's unlikely to happen. A far more practical dream worth bringing up every time.
I'm glad to hear that actually, cool ending to that story. I'm yet to see such experience first hand, they're usually too committed down the line.
Oh, I figure people will get over wildly speculating in stocks and transition to a more steady hand at it, which will be good for them and the economy.

Kind of like I got over my wild days behind the wheel and drive pretty conservatively today.