skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This incident doesn't necessarily indicate that they were using prod data in a test system.

I can plausibly imagine that there's some separate system that takes an identifier for some list of customers, and some template, and blasts out emails. Such a system could exist to help manage compliance issues with e.g. unsubscribe requests.

If so, and with a few "shortcuts" taken in making test environments for integration testing, I could envision a scenario where this incident happens that don't involve the test having direct access to real user data.
When the title is "Internal competition can often be the most dangerous kind", I would expect some sort of support for the idea that internal competition is dangerous. I didn't find it. They had internal competition, their product failed, but there's only the vaguest handwave towards relating these two facts together.
Meh, it happens. Sending out test emails is about the best-case on the spectrum. I've been involved in cleaning up incidents where someone accidentally sent out discounts worth 7 figures that were meant to be for a test but it was misconfigured. That was not a good day for a bunch of people.
Please don't break the site guidelines like this. They explicitly ask you not to post such insinuations (because the overwhelming majority of them are entirely in the eye of the beholder, and because they poison conversation) and to email hn@ycombinator.com instead if you're worried about abuse. I've posted about this thousands of times, so there's plenty of past explanation if you or anyone wants more:

https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

(Actually I've probably only posted about this hundreds of times, but it feels like thousands.)

Also, please don't post nationalistic flamewar comments to HN generally.
Ran sales at Predictable Revenue for 4 years, here's what we use:

- process first
- then train people
- then find software to enable the process

I imagine dev may be similar so apologies for the covering the bases. I find many people jump into tools without building good process first.

For process - start with your pipe and qualification stages (if you want a helpful breakdown search Jaimie Buss MEDDPICC - she's VP Sales at Zendesk and forecasts quarterly rev within 1%).

Then figure out your call plans (scripts/outlines) based on above qual methodology.

If you do those two manually in Google sheets you'll be better off than wasting time implementing tech.

FWIW:

CRM = salesforce
Engagement = outreach
Data = zoominfo
Notes = Dooly

That last one is more important than it seems because it ties together your methodology and your CRM when done well.
This tweet does at least give some some indication that they're not (outwardly) trying to throw their intern under the bus: https://twitter.com/HBOMaxHelp/status/1405712235108917249
It might be a bad and insufficient apology, but people always say that, about all apologies, even honest and good ones. A more workable policy would be to never criticize apologies, but accept them and move on. You never want to make apologizing a sure-losing move.
It was already common with Java and .NET, hence why the vocabulary types define multiple levels for the database drivers.

For example with JDBC:

Type 1 driver - JDBC-ODBC bridge

Type 2 driver - Native-API driver

Type 3 driver - Network-Protocol driver (Middleware driver)

Type 4 driver - Database-Protocol driver (Pure Java driver) or thin driver.

Most modern drivers are all type 4.
An integration test is a type of software test that makes sure different parts of a system work properly together.

So HBO has some integration tests that make sure their system can send email properly. The way it does this is by sending some test emails to a test email list.

Except somehow, someone made a mistake today and the test email got sent to the real email list of all the subscribers.
Some feedback:

1) "Feedback" is uncountable

2) The long sentence starting with "To do that" should be split into two after "correct". As written, the clause that follows is completely standalone and there is no conjunction to connect it to the rest of the sentence.

3) This is more of a style thing, but I would expand the word "that" in "that's especially hard". For example, into "getting this feedback". Why? Because "that" should refer to some concept you already mentioned, but there is nothing in the preceding sentence it can meaningfully point to. What's hard? Needing feedback? No, getting the feedback is hard, but that phrase doesn't appear anywhere, so you have a dangling pointer :)
Who earns 1 million in Amazon's appstore? Is anyone using it? Kindle users perhaps?
> They are super value-adding as middlemen go.

If they are so "super value-adding" as you claim then why exactly do they have a need to sign up restaurants without even asking those restaurants?

It may be value adding for those companies, but reading all those complaints from restaurateurs there seems to be very little value add for them.

Especially if they're not even asked to be listed.
When one is yet another cog on the machine, without any saying on the project technical directions.
ooh, perfect timing :-(
The Amazon That Customers Don’t See
Wasn't this also (primarily?) a way to prevent disloyalty to the Führer, by making it seem impossible to form alliances at lower levels?
> Sometimes I wonder if the UK thought HK would become a trojan horse

You may be in luck - a whole bunch of UK documents and letters from the Thatcher era were unclassified recently. You can search the archive for any mention of "Hong Kong"[1], or any other keyword of interest

1. https://www.margaretthatcher.org/search?dt=0&w=hong+kong&sea...
The whole thing should be condensed to:

add(new JScrollBar(scrollBar, HORIZONTAL), BorderLayout.SOUTH);

It's self-evident and needs no comment or whitespace to "break it up". This is fundamentally a problem with wordy imperative languages.

A lifetime ago when I wrote assembly code I would write a comment like this to explain every subsequent 5-10 lines of opaque incantation. Higher level (especially functional) languages tend to have fewer issues like this.
Blog spam of https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-ma...
2021 Apple Security Research Device Cohort
Any idea that this happened only recently? There are already raids earlier along with other punishment. Without new provocation, this one seems totally unnecessary.
A reasonable interpretation about this raid, based on the timing and some knowledge about China and CPP, would be: this is a response to G7's recent communique.
But I bet not many people get the message because with some existing ideology that people usually are not aware of, casual relations among events are often ignored.
>And once you have the data from the SQL database are you keeping it just in arrays/dictionaries? Or should it at least be mapped to a class structure?

Modern SQL has functions that can be used to map rows into json objects and arrays. That is what I use in nodejs/postgres. Everything is returned in the structure I want it in. The node driver turns the json into javascript arrays and objects (which then get turned back into JSON to send to the client, hah!). I added some code to the driver so that snake case field names are converted to camel case.
See also Janet Malcolm, The Art of Nonfiction [1] and the NY Times obituary [2]

[1] https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6073/the-art-of-no...

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/17/business/media/janet-malc...
the legal fiction is that the Controlled Substances Act relies on the Interstate Commerce Clause to apply - Congress can only ban drugs on Federal land, and ban drugs as part of its power to regulate interstate commerce in drugs. Congress doesn't have arbitrary power over states (in theory!)

so states would argue that since pot is only legalized within their borders, and isn't (legally) sold across state lines, the CSA doesn't apply.

the Federal government would disagree, and would probably win in a fight citing Wickard v. Filburne or that machine gun case, but they couldn't force states to actually enforce their drug laws - it'd be a battle of attrition with the DEA, and it'd piss the states off.

honestly, I think they decided it wasn't worth the fight since pot is pretty popular, so they let sleeping dogs lie.
It's an internal tool developed at Amazon so it's not available to the general public.

That said, it's nothing super fancy. Simple collaborative sticky note app that supports Markdown and has the ability to vote once per sticky.
Best of all, written in a mix of Qt and native views, yet another good example to bookmark.
I personally order from restaurants I would have not bothered to research, call, pay (sometimes via phone by giving cc number, ugh), and order all the time via Uber Eats.
I don't imagine many people will cancel HBO Max because this email was just too much, but rather because this email reminded them that they have HBO Max, and might spur them to think "I never use that so I should cancel it"
Individual sales bonuses/commission are an example of purposefully designed internal competition common at smaller companies.
in East Asia, it's entirely normal for one side of the the escalator to be full of people standing, and there's a long queue at the bottom to join the standing side, while the walking side is almost empty, often entirely empty if it's a long escalator. "just in case" someone wants to walk, and it would be a terrible social faux pas to be standing in someone's way, on the walking side.

Saitama Prefecture is trying to change this behaviour, get people to stand on both sides, and the reaction from the rest of the country has been very mixed, a lot of people are making fun of Saitama people as having nowhere to go in a hurry. It's very inefficient, and the culture will take a lot of time to change.
I think the summary is pretty honest and reflects the current implementation and what could be expected from FLoC.

FLoC's draft does not offer a solution for sensitive information. It merely suggests a first step, filtering some obviously sensitive information, that is not implemented in the current experiment.

About the code I looked hard, and the fact that I couldn't find how sensitive information is handled by FLoC in an open-source implementation is interesting. Either it's not there, or it's very hidden which is not good either.

You didn't comment about using the community efforts to block ads to track people.

I'm sorry the post didn't match your expectations.
This isn't an oversight. YouTube allowed this from 2018-2020, but no longer allows creators to disable ads on their channel.
I am not sure who are these engineers that Ammon talked to... but nowadays what most engineers I know do is visiting Glassdoor or Blind. There you can anonymously and openly discuss salaries, their opinions about companies, business units, teams, and even discuss interviews.

If a company has a bad interview experience, a bad culture, or the management is impopular, if the work life balance is bad, or anything... you'll be able to read about that in those websites.

For example, a recruiter contacted me last year regarding an opportunity for a fancy senior role at a large company (Sr Staff engineer)... I checked the Glassdoor reviews for that company and found many testimonies from people who were contacted with the exact same narrative, but at the end of the interview process they were offered vastly lower levels, so clearly that was their intention all along. Because of that, I assessed that interviewing there was going to be a waste of my time and I ghosted the recruiter. Developers win.

Of course, you need to take some reviews with a grain of salt, but if everyone is saying the same thing, you will at least have a sample of what you are getting into.

Having said this, I am not sure Triplebyte will ever be able to effectively solve or mitigate the problems Ammon is describing. It is possible that he needs to continue talking to developers, and I am not trying to say this in a rude way. There are also many more problems that need help fixing that Ammon did not describe.

Having a conversation with a developer about different topics can give you some insights on the breadth and depth of the knowledge of a developer, and many interviews omit this. I think interviews should be "adaptive" tests, that get as progressively more difficult until you reach your limit.
Human cells can write RNA sequences into DNA
>It seems the states won that one, for whatever reason.

Congress used the power of the purse to forbid the Federal Government spending any money to prosecute those in states that had made medical pot legal.

>Congress included a provision in the 2015 spending bill prohibiting the DOJ from using any funds to prevent states that have legalized the use, distribution, possession, or cultivation of medical marijuana from implementing these laws.

In doing so, Congress was using the “power of the purse” as a check on executive power, one of its most important constitutional prerogatives. As James Madison wrote in the Federalist Papers, this power “may, in fact, be regarded as the most complete and effectual weapon with which any constitution can arm the immediate representatives of the people, for obtaining a redress of every grievance, and for carrying into effect every just and salutary measure.”

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2016/04/obamas-medical-m...

Congress has renewed that provision every year since, and made it clear to the Trump administration that they would extend the ban to include states that had passed full legalization instead of just medical marijuana, if forced to do so.
> Which means, it is in their interest to get you as high of a comp as possible.

Beware: this is not universally true. What you typically see is that it leads to closing as many candidates as possible. A recruiter can make more by closing 2 candidates at 80% of max comp than 1 candidate at 100% in the same time.

This is a well known behavior in real estate sales, which have a similar commission structure.
Not exactly what you asked, but a few squats, just once per day, really help with blood circulation to legs. Not having enough blood circulation results in leg discomfort no matter how comfortable your chair is.
I think it's stupid when people say they don't think code comments are good or necessary. It's a weirdly religious debate and frankly I think having a ton of code comments is great. Some of my closest friends think that all comments are absolutely unnecessary. We didn't work in the same code repos.

I think 2 IDE features would make things easier for everyone:

1) have an option to remove code comments from view if you don't like them

2) tie a code comment to a piece of code and enforce it. If you change that piece of code, you should be forced to update and tied comments, or force to check that the comment is still correct. And have the fact that you approve a comment should be a part of the check in, so people can trace it.
> PS. I. Don't even get me started about a car full of CS IITians talking about the JEE and high-placers who seem normal on the way to snow country for snowboarding and gambling.

That sounds awfully specific.
You also write that Turing's work "paved the way for modern general computers." According to the text, however, this practical part really started with Konrad Zuse's patent application of 1936:

"The formal models of Gödel (1931-34), Church (1935), Turing (1936), and Post (1936) were theoretical pen & paper constructs that cannot directly serve as a foundation for practical computers. Remarkably, Konrad Zuse's patent application[ZU36-38][Z36][RO98] for the first practical general-purpose program-controlled computer also dates back to 1936. It describes general digital circuits (and predates Claude Shannon's 1937 thesis on digital circuit design[SHA37]). Then, in 1941, Zuse completed Z3, the world's first practical, working, programmable computer (based on the 1936 application). Ignoring the inevitable storage limitations of any physical computer, the physical hardware of Z3 was indeed universal in the "modern" sense of Gödel, Church, Turing, and Post—simple arithmetic tricks can compensate for Z3's lack of an explicit conditional jump instruction.[RO98]"
Doing regular fail overs is a healthy practice, but it's also a test of the company.

A large outage is just about the only thing that can convince management that it is important.

Reducing technical debt and staying current with technology ought to be a priority, but all too often it's not.

Netflix learned it the hard way:

https://opensource.com/article/18/4/how-netflix-does-failove...
Unfortunately, a lot of people oppose legalization of drugs. Even marijuana - a drug with zero addictive potential and being massively recreationally used for generations, including by prominent public figures, without any serious ill effects - only slowly gains ground to be allowed to be used medically (that's while much more dangerous substances are actively used medically and nobody has a problem with that). 36 states allow medical use of marijuana, and only 17 states decriminalize it completely. And the federal ban remains, with laughably false classification of marijuana as a substance with "high potential for abuse and no accepted medical use". What to say about other drugs, with less established patterns of safe use?

I don't think it's "corporate stooges or obstructionist trolls" - people are just profoundly ignorant in the matter and are unwilling to change their minds about it, however large tall the most idiotic war of all wars takes. It'd be easy if it were just a bunch of corporate lobbyist trolls. Widespread ignorance is much harder to overcome.
We're a small team making the next-gen of language learning app. Instead of "learning a language through memorizing words and grammar rules", we help children acquire fluency by watching short videos of people speaking the language in real-life situations - as if they were living in a native speaking country.
We need to build and curate a huge library of short videos, in a variety of situations, topics, and difficulty levels, so we need your help making videos of everyday speech that is understandable for English learners (think simple Wikipedia).
Our target audience is kids and teenagers, and we aim to build a personalized learning experience for learners with different proficiency levels and interests.
So we are giving out prizes everyday to encourage engaging and educational videos, and when we have enough content for language learners, we will launch our learning app globally.
Yeah I mean I still mess up sometimes but everyone does. Developing a reputation for being an asshat requires carelessness or malign intent.
“So many people could have been hurt [not only] financially, but physically, emotionally, spiritually"

- LeBron James
TBH, SF has so many reasons for "horrible outcomes" that I don't think putting it on the opiates' supposed legality is fair. I mean, that's the place where it's legal to rob Walgreens, I don't think opiates did that.
I'm not saying weapons charges were meant to disenfranchise people.

I am saying the conclusion that drug charges were put in place to disenfranchise people is a bit silly. There were other reasons (even if they were panic reasons) to ban drugs.
> no matter how many people police assault or even murder

That's hyperbole. There's 10 million arrests per year in the US by armed police, and only a handful of fatalities.

Having said that, DAs were not doing their job, and police unions are a large part of that. And there has been no progress on the latter.

Regarding the George Floyd case, Chauvin will probably get off on appeal because of the political meddling, which went all the way up to the White House.
The world is not a uniform place. Not everything is Netherlands, not everything is the US. Some of my best colleagues in software have been women (older ones, too), I have hired women and never ever preferred anyone because of their gender. I have trouble even understanding the concept because of my autism spectrum disorder.

All of this can be an indication of all being fine where I live. Or it can be an indication of my biases being well hidden. And both can be different where you are. “Women don’t know the secret handshake” could be a thing wherever you are based in and it could be that there is some underlying issue you are not aware of. Or it can be both or neither. This is why people flag the comment: our experiences differ wildly and generalizations thus tend to rub a lot of people the wrong way.

Also, as a male, I’ve always had the feeling of “not knowing the secret handshake”. I don’t fit in, I don’t usually get a call when somebody starts something new. I don’t get invited to a night out. Has nothing to do with the gender, I’m just not a pleasant person to be around. I know this and am working on accepting this after years of trying to change it. Might not be applicable in your case, but one can experience very similar treatment that women apparently do in some places for very different reasons.
Ask HN: What are some older fanless laptops?
Due to modest needs and naivety, I have a strange appeal for low-end, less capable hardware. I used to work on a Thinkpad T42 and Tiny Core Linux, which boots to RAM and thus gives me a really quiet system. At some point, I couldn't resist a 2008ish Dell Mini 9 for 5€ -- elf-sized keyboard, but fanless, no moving parts, thus spookily quiet.

Later on, I read about Dell Inspiron X1 and Thinkpad 560x, both arguably fanless.

I realize this question has not much practical value in an era of RasPis and SSDs, but maybe some of you feel nostalgic, so: what were some other noteworthy, blast-from-the-past laptops from around 2004-2010 (or even earlier) that had no fan by design? Insights into the history of this design (did it justify itself?) are welcomed, too.

EDIT: Uh, googling helps, so here's a lenghty thread and a list from that era: https://silentpcreview.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=39694
I moved to Notion from StackEdit (because it's basicaly abandoned and I had bugs editing on mobile) and I really miss storing all data in git repository (private GitHub repo).
I'm with you. ORMs feel like _exactly_ the wrong place to abstract. In my experience, database calls always end up being the thing you want the most control over.
In fact, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_500
Google Is Working on a New Feature to Find Your Lost Devices
First contact with Elon in his fly suite? Or with the Chinese?
it will be very interesting to see if Missouri's $50,000 fine on officers who continue to enforce Federal laws would stick. the article quotes one of the state reps as saying "this just means we don't have to lift a finger to enforce those laws" - I think this is more akin to chopping lifted fingers off with a meat cleaver. it's enshrining "snitches get stitches."

imagine if states pulled this tactic during integration..
Insurtech Solutions Battle on Insurance Equity Issues Across Nationwide
We've banned this account for using HN primarily for political/ideological battle. That's against the site guidelines because it destroys this place for its intended purpose—and for that reason, we ban accounts that do it, regardless of which politics/ideology they're battling for. Please don't create accounts to break HN's rules with.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Clickless Analytics Is the Future of Business User Analytics
In my experience Glassdoor numbers are low. They've been low compared to the reality at places I've worked, at least.
This is precisely my point. They would have definitely paid money for every aspect. Along with the insistence that it be their product in front of the players. Logo visible. On camera. In frame.