skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Funny, that was my first thought as well. Recently read their engineering blog post from 2012 on the API gateway + UI system [1] and thought it was really cool and made a lot of sense (in their specific, truly massive use case).

From recent memory, I can't recall Netflix really reinventing the wheel a-la-OP/Uber.

[1] https://netflixtechblog.com/embracing-the-differences-inside...
Staple a Lottery Ticket to Every Vaccination Card
i worked on the backend for this rewrite, and it was even more extreme than the other write-ups suggest. we not only rewrote the apps, we also

1. moved from email-based auth to phone-based auth
2. removed all the auth and onboarding logic from the clients and moved it over to server
3. changed the networking from a hacky OpenAPI/Swagger code to Thrift over HTTP

i am not saying it was the most conservative call to do all this at once but it was necessary. the auth logic was basically untenable and no one really knew how it worked. some team in amsterdam could (and did) lock down uber for android users in russia because they changed some code.

we also had to move to phone as a primary identifier, because honestly there are many countries people dont even use email. but how do you deal with phone numbers that were validated more than 7+ months ago, if you want to avoid things like this? [1] or how do you deal with promotions that required validating phone numbers not being VoIP that you could do out-of-band before but now have to do in-band?

anyway, i am being scatter minded here but it was probably one of the riskiest things uber did, from my point of view, changing the top of the funnel + also moving users from one auth to another with a download, esp given with apple's rollout mechanism we had no way back.

but it all worked! i should probably write this up one day.

1: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/02/when-...
If he (scapegoat or not) popularizes the debate over orbital debris now before it becomes a bigger problem, great.
AirBaltic says they no longer use Belarus airspace for its flights
In ideal world that might work, but in reality, the countries that can afford to set low corp taxes do it, and the countries that can't don't. As usual, the rich get richer, and corporations get bigger
I think what you mean to say is that their marketing with regards to their security is working. Do you think all of those people with iPads really spend more than 20 seconds investigating the security of iOS?
Yes, use a default basic implementation that just grabs the main image and first paragraph with some basic stripping. Then allow authors to later modify the card content specifically. I'm sure it would take a page editor all of 2 minutes to do something like that. This really seemed like perfect is the enemy of good.

I also get the feeling that wikipedia is afraid to stand up to the mob of editors.
I don't understand: The comment says "but", yet then seems to support my point in the GP: If NASA has a smaller budget, then their choices are even limited by available resources.
I want it out of the task switcher.
Whenever people talk about old computers I need to mention the C64 that really laid the foundation for PCs today, new releases are coming every day: http://csdb.dk
David Beazley is a gem.

There are 2 subsequent parts to this one, if anyone's interested, they can be found on the "Tutorials" page:

https://www.dabeaz.com/tutorials.html

Part 1) Generator Tricks for Systems Programmers (what this post links to)

Part 2) A Curious Course on Coroutines and Concurrency

Part 3) Generators: The Final Frontier

Another tutorial I'd recommend -- among my personal favorite -- is "Python 3 Metaprogramming" (also at the URL I included above)

Even if you're not interested in the Python programming language, I'd still recommend having a look at his tutorials and talks; the quality of his work, and especially his delivery, make it all enjoyable.
Yeah, that design is very similar to io_uring.
Proof of Passion
That was the year I sold my cars and switched to bike+rideshare. Even though my cc gave me an Uber benefit the new app experience was so flakey that I dumped uber for over a year, until I traveled to a place with poor Lyft service and found that the uber app was usable again.

I’ve never seen why the app needed rewriting.
Either they are the Modi sycophants or just don't like twitter and otherwise have no clue what's going on in India.
So much this. If it ran Windows 10, I'd not only own it, I'd be excited to own it. There's just nothing exciting about anything iOS or Android is doing. They're just phones.

What's frustrating is that Microsoft is in this incredibly deep rut with their OS team and haven't been able to dig themselves out. Each successive alternative flavor of 10 has failed to launch for years, including this month's death of 10X.

As much as I'd love a Duo running Windows 10, if it had waited for a Windows OS to run on it, it never would've launched at all.
Why is it legal for businesses in the US to ask employees to work around the clock like this? It seems like an insane and unethical practice
Every HN discussion: I do real programming. Everyone else works on toy problems.
Offtopic, but what's the story on the usage of "hype" like this? I would have said "pretty hyped" but I feel like I've seen it a few times lately without the "d", enough that I no longer think it's just a typo. Is this the kids innovating again?
I am the first to avoid buying any device with a locked bootloader, but.... how exactly is an unlocked bootloader after 4 years of use going to help to reduce e-waste?

It's not magically going to convert the phone into a Raspberry Pi anymore than Debian is going to suddenly port itself to a 4-year-old platform.
And even that would reduce e-waste only by a rounding error.

Now, guaranteeing Android updates 4 YEARS, or more, that would be something...
Whether you keep your phone for 5 years, or sell it after 2-3 years to someone who will use it for another 2-3, the end result is the same: less e-waste.

A lot of other smartphones aren't even worth selling after 2-3 years of use.
Mediocre maybe compared to fiber
I use a .xyz domain for my personal email, and I sort of regret it.

My emails have a tendency to become spam filter bycatch, to the point that when I was job hunting last year I'd have to ring people after I sent them my resumes etc. to confirm they actually received my email.

And when I give people my email address, I usually have to assure them that steve@stevetech.xyz is a legitimate email address and not a joke (it's not actually steve, but you get the point).
> As a researcher, to those who backed Musk and the like on this bullshit vanity project; Fuck you, he's stealing the fucking sky from us

Why does the sky only belong to researchers and not all of humanity? The number of humans interested in faster internet far exceeds the number of humans interested in earth-based telescopes.
This is why I dislike commentary like the one you are responding to.

Replace "postresql" with literally any tool and the sentence holds true: redis, mysql, mongodb, cassandra, mssql, HDFS, Kubernetes, React, Vue...

The fact that cottage industries pop up around powerful tooling is not a bad thing. Some things are just complicated, and there shouldn't be such an aversion to those things.
Alleged?
6 Months as a Developer Advocate
Reflections about my journey as a developer advocate for the last 6 months
>I disagree with the (current) top post in this thread saying it's "likely parallel construction". It could be, but the claimed story also sounds pretty plausible

Others have pointed out that this happened in the UK, so it's probably not parallel construction anyways. Still, I wanted to get this out there: isn't the claimed story being plausible a pretty important part of parallel construction? If you needed parallel construction for your evidence to not be thrown out of court, then if the story of how you obtained it isn't plausible, it seems likely that it'll get thrown out anyways.
> interoperability with developers who are already familiar

I wouldn't say it's "predominant". Some instances are code authors trying to bring their library to new audiences (c/c++ frameworks with multiple language bindings), or developers unfamiliar with the language but want that specific API in their own (Python's requests library is a great example, cloned in many languages now).
You are in luck, such a tool exists:

https://www.devpi.net

In the past I've run this in a docker container, setup some pip environment variables and its off to the races. It transparently caches stuff from PyPi and keeps things local.
It is clearly meant as a bad example, followed by suggestions on how to fix it. Replace “26“ by some #define or const variable and then tell me again you haven't seen code like this. Not to mention that this article is clearly aimed at beginners.
Nope. There is data that it sends that is non optional.

Proof: go into settings and disable every tracking options, and then capture traffic from the device through a router with openwrt running tcpdump or wireshark on a computer with a bridge setup with ip forwarding and iptables rule.

Did this experiment already twice to prove to people that Apple device do phone home plenty. Then I repeat the same experiment with my rooted android phone running a custom rom, and people watch the sparse wireshark trace with the only packets being sent are dns then ntp to the android ntp server.
We've had a solution for over 1400 years now. Look up Islam's Zakat laws. Much more affordable at only 2.5% on money above a certain amount that is sitting in the bank doing nothing. Things like produce and livestock have different measures depending on certain things. If you look up history, when everyone paid their Zakat in Iraq during the Ummayad empire, there were no more needy people left to accept it.
(Disclaimer: I know ~nothing about astronomy)

The other claim I've seen is that once the satellites reach their operational orbit (~4 months after launch), they are no longer visible.

I don't know if this has been proven/disproven yet. Curious if anyone in-the-know can comment.
It sucks to lose something you always had and took for granted. I wonder what the reverse situation would look like - if everyone on the planet had easy access to high speed satellite internet, and astronomers came along and insisted we had to pull the whole thing down so we could study stars. Would that be an equal or un-equal tragedy?
No it doesn't you can fully engage with the complexity and ALSO blame him for it. I do for example.
Yea, I wish we’d go back to the “Google fiber” days of a disruptive tech company laying cable and fiber optics everywhere. And before someone says it, Yes yes, Google bad, but I liked the initiative.
I like the xkcd-style graphs. Anybody know what package that is?
Also the npr show has: “4. Eliminate all income and payroll taxes. All of them. For everyone. Instead, impose a consumption tax.”

That implies a GST/VAT/sales tax rate of ~35% in my country, changing from progressive to regressive tax. Enforcing it would require both the abolition of cash, and to somehow police the barter economy.

https://www.interest.co.nz/news/99949/budget-2019-summary-al...

Edit: 35%. Currently GST is 12.5% and 2019 GST budget was $21 billion, PAYE + other source deductions budget was $35 billion.
Even with Big Sur?
How did you manage to keep it running six years down the line?
Any limitations to be aware of? (i.e 4K playback, AAA games past 2018, heavy IDEs, etc.)
> More than half of the population of the United States are women, and far less than half of our engineering teams are comprised of women.

You should try to match the pipeline, not the general population. For the bachelor in CS, women are only 18% in the US. Less than 20% of your engineers are women → normal outcome.

[0] -- https://www.computerscience.org/resources/women-in-computer-...
Windows 2000 was the peak.
So blog first, then file bug? Anyway, I am the kernel maintainer, but not the kmod maintainer, so I didn't see the bug. I did however create a pull request to remove the script from Fedora, and that was merged. I would expect it to make updates fairly soon.

It is always better to ask if we can do something than just assume we can't or won't. Fedora is largely driven by what the community wants and needs.
Right. Julia is looking fairly promising as a "real" programming language that is still an excellent Matlab replacement, and possibly to a lesser extent an R replacement, and it does show that there is nothing about filling the exploratory math programming niche that requires it to have the warts that the incumbents have.

Fundamentally, R and Matlab are probably best comparable to Perl in terms of how they got popular. While they are rather ugly, they were the first to provide a simple solution to a few specific problems that a lot of people had, which snowballed them into popularity and network effect advantages
> But also something I could break down and carry with me in lots of contexts that I wouldn't bring my laptop.

Can you elaborate on this? Surely two tablets, a case, and a keyboard is not going to be smaller / more compact than a laptop. I also can't think of any contexts where I would prefer a setup I need to set up and "break down".
EU Regulators Impose 661 GDPR Violation Fines Totaling €292 Mn to Date
another example is Moodle. It's horrible spaghetti code (PHP as used in 2000, including addons relying on specific database schemata) and if you google for it you'll find a nice forum thread, where a lot of LMS "consultants" are bashing a guy asking whether there are plans for a rewrite.

And yes, as a Moodle user (teacher) you notice quickly that these decisions seriously impact usage!
Hmmh, you're right, it would be more logical. I don't want to reorder the buttons now that people have already begun using it, though.
Record your work experience on your resume accurately, and don't give any more information in interviews than you just gave us.
Getting geeky with Git #9. Understanding the revert feature
> It's related in the sense that there appears to be a trend against the idea of sincere self-assessment, and more disturbingly, a trend towards actively suppressing dissenting voices by any means necessary

Being able to email dang is a feature. If you want humility on display, search his comments or email him. The man, from my perspective, has no problem with metaphorically standing naked in a room. That doesn't mean he won't debate you, but he's fair and admits when there's an issue. Rephrased as, "HN doesn't take action on an issue as soon as I'd like" I would agree with, and that is by design. Their philosophy is contrary to move fast and break things. When dang does extend something, it is usually very thoughtful and intended.

> The Gab website is still active and the company is alive...that does not count as failed in my book

I would suspect that based on the crowd, failed startups aren't very interesting or curious. Most of us come from startups or FOSS. It's fairly well known why startups and projects typically fail, but I've seen some post mortems take off that subvert our usual expectations. Gab I would consider failed since they were kicked out of YC, it was very public, and much of the reasoning came from interactions on this board. Your implicit argument is that YC and by proxy HN are covering up their failures through automation, but that thread could've easily disappeared. I think there's a lot more reasonable explanations that precipitate your extraordinary claim.
> What is closed source anyway?

This is asked as if there is no correct answer, but there is.

Open Source software is software where the source is made available under an OSI-approved Open Source licence. Closed source software is software which is not Open Source software.

See https://opensource.org/osd

> It just means you get binaries

Sometimes even the binaries are carefully obscured. I imagine it's an uphill battle to dig the binary out of a PS5 game, for instance.

> Binaries are not actually obfuscated.

Some are.

> Nothing stops you from decompiling and reading a closed-source binary... except the complexity and difficulty of understanding it.

And possibly the licence, and possibly laws like the DMCA. Also, even if you succeed in reverse-engineering the code, you may be legally constrained in what you can do. If you improve the software, you probably cannot legally distribute the improved version, although you might get away with distributing a delta.

See also https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html

> Open source systems where the source and installation/admin procedure are absurdly complicated are not actually open... they're just using a different obfuscation technique.

I agree artificial complexity (whether in the code or in the software's usability) could be a way for someone to, say, deliberately subvert copyleft licences. An artificially unmanageable codebase would increase the cost of development for the company, though.

As for tricky installation processes, I believe the only way to get the official OpenBSD builds is by buying their DVDs. I don't think most OpenBSD users particularly mind compiling their own system, but I don't know for sure.

> If it takes days to install or the source is write-only code, it's no different from closed source software.

It is different, because the licence allows others to improve the software.
in the category "we had nothing else to write, the title pretty much has all the information". There's no reason to even click the link, it's not going to tell you anything about how we got from A to B other than "they looked at the fingerprints of the hand in the photo".
Wow, what a nightmare! I remember a project or two like that in my career that I wish I could go advise my younger self to avoid. I have been around long enough to remember when people bore this sort or abuse as a mark of pride almost, like the scars made them who they are despite seeing peers burning out, becoming sick, quitting, or getting divorces as a result of overwork.
Early in 2020 alternative media discussions that COVID may have leaked from a lab were ruthlessly "fack-checked" and censored from social media for misinformation. Now that we know more these claims have become accepted as a very real possibility.
What's the point of this profane tweet? Starlink is rural people's best hope of finally not being an afterthought, not just in America, but around the world. And this problem can be trivially solved with stacking.

There's nothing of substance here, just more internet vitriol.
> Tooling is a major issue: compiling the app from scratch takes 25-30 minutes on iOS and around 10 on Android

As a relatively naive to massive apps iPhone developer (I’ve made apps with millions of downloads, but nothing on Ubers scale) I find it confusing how a relatively straight forward iPhone app like Uber can be so complex. It’s basically a map and 3 buttons? And an ‘in the car’ state. They weren’t doing pool or bill splitting at this point I don’t think. I’d have thought everything else is back-end complexity?

Can someone do an explain like I’m 5 on this?
Not to minimize the impact that large constellations *could* have on ground-based astronomy, but without more context, this isn't really "proof" of anything.

A follow-up tweet[0] says "If you take the 2-hr video and stack the images, the astronomical wonders appear to get lost behind the web of satellite trails. 60s exposures, 4.4degX4.4deg", but was there some astronomical objective behind stacking 2 hours worth of frames, or was this just done to create a pretty/scary picture?

[0] https://twitter.com/RAOastronomy/status/1395968612385529858
How I Learned to Love Failing at Compiling R
I’m not a researcher, and when I look at that photo, I feel like the sky is being stolen. It’s that it’s for one man’s company, not for all humanity. The lack of internet coverage in the US is a solvable problem driven by idiotic politics, and land based solutions will always be lower latency/faster if built right.
Media’s ‘Mean-Too’ Moment. Stop Yelling and Go to Human Resources
For what it's worth, following this pattern informally is usually a good idea anyway in Python (and Lua and Ruby and Javascript etc).

Even if B is technically mutable (which 99% of the time it is because almost everything in Python is mutable), just don't mutate it and pretend like you're not allowed to do so.
I have a sit/stand desk that I bought expecting to stand the first half of the day, then sit the second half. On the very first day I forgot to ever sit down, and I've been 100% standing ever since. I stand on a rubber mat thing with some bumps and raised edges that makes it enjoyable to switch stances. But I've always been someone who fidgets a lot, and I tended to constantly reposition myself on office chairs too. Like others, I also suggest walking around often, whether sitting or standing. Drinking a lot of water and having a very small bladder definitely helps.

All that said, while I recommend trying a standing setup if you can, it's definitely not for everyone. My partner has tried my desk several times and always became infuriated at the concept of standing while working.
unfortunately the site is not usable on safari, iOS 14.3, iphone 8+

https://i.ibb.co/fMj2yG2/1-BE43053-6540-42-B3-B029-BD9-AFC97...
What I find kind of frustrating about all of this is that it's really a lack of mandated and/or publicly-funded investment in infrastructure that even makes starlink appealing. When electricity came about, there was a massive project to electrify rural areas, so we didn't need to launch a constellation of satellites beaming microwave power to the whole planet. And now electricity is ubiquitous. There's no quibbling about whether a given area is profitable or not, because electricity is seen as a necessity for modern life. Internet should be seen the same way, and the necessary physical infrastructure should be built. The only reason it hasn't is that the telecom companies have bought out the government. So instead, we get these end-runs around the system that have massive externalities.
I've seen some consider Kazakhstan to be a part of Europe. I suspect the region stretches, depending on the speaker, far enough east to encompass the speaker's country, regardless of its location (but no further).
It happens rarely, but some only accept a very limited number of domains (ie Gmail, Outlook, etc).

They probably see it as some sort of security / anti-spam mechanism.
You would be surprised how the corporate world delivers C++ code, specially those projects with offshoring.
Maybe it’s just me, but I tend to see a lot of motion blur on that label, an amount that could easily account for the blur on the fingertip, too. Given the ultra-short focal length of mobile cameras and the large focal depth that comes with it I would expect very little out-of-plane blur on the fingertips.
apt will sometimes prompt you to confirm really dangerous options too:

sudo apt-get purge login
..
WARNING: The following essential packages will be removed.
This should NOT be done unless you know exactly what you are doing!
login
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 1 to remove and 303 not upgraded.
After this operation, 1,212 kB disk space will be freed.
You are about to do something potentially harmful.
To continue type in the phrase 'Yes, do as I say!'
?]
I think the use case for modifications is letting people write custom extensions to a font editor.
It also generally has the connotation of someone having an inflated opinion of themselves.
Not to defend Starlink or purveyors of other obtrusive orbital spraff, but how much astronomical imaging is optical/non-computational these days?

As a non-astronomer my curiosity is, given publicly available ephemera for the microsat constellations, could a post-processing stage reasonably remove their streaks from the exposures being summed together?

Granted this would probably only be feasible for non-hobbyists.
"I don't care, I'm still free,
you can't take the sky from meeeeeee....."
- Sunny Rhodes

"Here, hold my beer..."
- Elon Musk
I haven't upgraded my laptop in years

I do replace it every couplefew (whatever the cycle is with work)