skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't really like ENS (or any of the blockchain DNS facsimiles) for decentralized identity. ENS doesn't really have a story for verification of socials or other wallets, and there's no way to look up your ENS domain or eth addr from any of those other identities stored as records on an ENS domain.

Ceramic[0] (a sort of mutability layer on top of IPFS) solves this off-chain by using your crypto wallet to authenticate a DID (their DIDs are known as 3id[1]) which can have a list of socials and crypto wallets associated with them (using their IDX[2] system and the schemas called alsoKnownAs[3] and cryptoAccounts[4], respectively), and the validations are made possible by systems called IdentityLink[5] (verifies similar to Keybase) and Caip10Link[6] (sign a message with your wallet) (respectively). The Caip10Link also allows reverse lookup of a DID from a blockchain address. A reference implementation of these systems in action can be found at https://self.id/ .

Grain of salt: I'm working on a project that makes heavy use of Ceramic.

[0] https://developers.ceramic.network/learn/advanced/overview/
[1] https://github.com/ceramicstudio/js-3id-did-provider
[2] https://developers.idx.xyz/learn/overview/
[3] https://github.com/ceramicstudio/datamodels/tree/main/packag...
[4] https://github.com/ceramicstudio/datamodels/tree/main/packag...
[5] https://developers.ceramic.network/tools/identitylink/overvi...
[6] https://developers.ceramic.network/streamtypes/caip-10-link/...
Postgres is my bread and butter for pretty much every project. Congratulations to the team, you work on and continue to improve one of the most amazing pieces of software ever created.
Sure, either way it’s another deterrent.

Also huh you finally gave me a reason why apple may be locking its hardware components now.
All hail Tau
With most households having 2 incomes getting married comes with a large tax penalty.
I think English Wikipedia has a leftist bias. Arabic Wikipedia has an Islamist/Islamo-facist bias. I would guess and say Chinese ones have CCP bias... etc

Populism is one hell of a drug
The easy way is to make it legally free for residents and charge tourists but don’t actually enforce it. Just put up ads in the airport and all over the tourist hotspots, run a few fake stories in the media of tourists being fined etc.

You get your money for nothing and your travel for free
Genuine question. What is so important about the word "engineer" that people not licensed to practice it want to call themselves engineer?

In Canada, I studied in a mechanical engineering technology program that lead to an engineering degree if you stayed on for 4 years. It was hammered into us that we weren't engineers until after you graduated and went through the professional licensing process.

In Canada there is a way to become a P.Eng. in software engineering (and until 2018 in the US there was the P.E. in software engineering), so there is a way for someone who wants to be called a software engineer to legally obtain it. So why is there so much resistance?
Depends on the country. Bitcoin on an exchange is a security in Canada, because you don't have the thing, they have the thing and a liability to you for it. "Not your keys" as the regulations.
I've lived in a place with a system like this. The people who jump off were mostly students and people for whom tickets represented a significant expense.

The lax rules and clearly uniformed agents were seen partly as progressive price discrimination, giving free access to public transport to those who really need it.
We are huge fans of Ahrefs and with the time passing, we gathered many tips to help us improve your SEO. Here's the full list of every little tips that we found out.
Why a client when the native HN interface is close to perfection?
Sure, in general, but the first third of it is pretty much a documentary, or seems to be. It may well be a fable as ncmncm says in a sib comment, I don't know.
I think for a lot of people the real question is how far ahead the intel agencies (really, the NSA) are. How many years will there be a super mega top secret quantum computer sitting in the basement of Ft. Meade breaking DH before someone figures it out?
You're bending over backwards to excuse what is quite clearly racial discrimination.

Discrimination against people born in mainland China is apparently fine because they're a security risk - perhaps they're suspected of disloyalty. Discrimination against people whose parents were born in China is apparently fine, because they might have family who could theoretically be taken hostage.

If you follow this logic, discrimination against anyone with familial relations in China is fine. That essentially means discrimination against all Chinese Americans is fine - but of course, this is completely kosher and not in any way racist.

This is the same logic used to justify the internment of Japanese Americans during WWII, to accuse Irish Americans of disloyalty (because of the Vatican), and the same argument used by antisemites to argue that Jewish Americans are disloyal (because of Israel).

> your parents could be British, Indian, American, Japanese, or whatever

But those aren't the ethnic groups being targeted in the US right now. If there were widespread paranoia about India, just as there now is about China, and if there were calls to discriminate against anyone with Indian relatives, then I would also be alarmed about that.

> just trying to stir up conflict using race as a cover.

Not in the slightest. I'm genuinely alarmed by how far attitudes in the US have changed since Trump came into office. Hostility towards and paranoia about China have reached levels I never would have imagined possible, and that is now putting Chinese Americans at risk in the US (not to mention the fact that it's increasing the likelihood of war between China and the US).

Just to give one example: the FBI has a major initiative that focuses on ethnic Chinese academics in the US. It was launched under Trump, but it continues under Biden. There have already been several disturbing cases, including that of Anming Hu,[1] a Canadian citizen born in China, who taught at the University of Tennessee. The FBI first tried to pressure him into spying on China, and after he refused, tried to investigate him for espionage, told his university he was a spy (leading to him being fired), and harassed him and his son for over a year. When the FBI found there was no evidence whatsoever that he was a spy, they charged him with whatever they could dig up - in this case, failure to disclose some minor honorarium. The guy's entire life has been turned upside down and he's been branded a spy in the public mind, all because some overambitious FBI agent wanted to find a Chinese spy and started trying to dig up dirt about the first Chinese academic he could find.

That's where this kind of thinking leads to.

1. https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/06/27/1027350/anming-h...
I had the post exposure protocol (3 vaccine and immune globulin shots) and in 2018 in the US it was about $5000. Also, you should not wait for the test results to come back after being exposed. By then it’s too late if you’re positive for it, so you kind of have to suck it up given that it’s near 100% fatal. I got a lab report back about a week later.

I was not exposed to a bat, but interestingly it is estimated 1 in 10 bats under the famous Congress Avenue bridge in Austin, Texas have rabies. Not sure what the spectator draw https://www.austinbats.org/ is, given that.
Efficiently delete large directory containing thousands of files
I recently did a pricing comparison of cloud object storage services for my article "How to Create a Very Inexpensive Serverless Database" (https://aws.plainenglish.io/very-inexpensive-serverless-data...). It describes using object storage as an inexpensive serverless key-value database.

Although egress (outbound network) can be a significant part of object storage expenses, if you are reading and writing small objects, per-request expenses can be much bigger. Cloudflare indicates that for low request rates there won't be any request fees, but doesn't state what they will charge for high request rates.

My article points out that the best deal when working with high request rates is to use services that don't charge per request such as DigitalOcean, Linode, and Vultr. If it's S3 that you want, even Amazon has recently joined the budget club with Lightsail Object Storage which has monthly plans of $1, $3, and $5 (250 GB storage and 500 GB egress) with no per-request fees.
Thanks for your kind words! I’m a lead developer over at MailerSend and every happy customer is a driving force to make our product better!
In contrast to /user?id=minihat here's an ELI5:

The brain is not an electric circuit. It's more like a hydraulic or osmotic circuit. Thought is powered by tiny flows of sodium ions, not flows of electricity. Specifically, sodium diffuses in blood/water much faster than charge dissipates through brain tissue.

When a lot of sodium flows into a cell (a neuron fires) it creates a positive voltage difference across the cell membrane. The concentration of sodium ions floating in the extracellular space remain essentially constant (sodium rapidly flows in from the outside area) even as the charge inside the neuron rises.

So as the neuron is at the peak of its action potential it acts like a 70 mV voltage source relative to the outside of the body. The EEG measures that voltage. It's like holding up a flourescent light near a Tesla coil[1]- electrodes closest to the neuron see a higher voltage from it, because they're measuring the ratio of resistance between 1. The electrode and neuron, through the head, and 2. the resistance to reference ground through the EEG itself. Because the head has quite high resistance (~megaohm?) EEGs require some serious input impedance.

On average neurons spend ~1 out of every ~10,000 milliseconds firing. If you had ~100 electrodes and 1 million neurons, you could triangulate to mostly work out where every single neuron is when it fires. In a human brain, there are ~billion neurons per electrode, with ~100,000 firing at any one time. EEGs are only really picking up on coordinated groups of millions of neurons firing together. Inferring where the actual neurons are is inherently a blurry guess. It is possible, but afaik (and I am very lay) most visualizations only interpolate surface potentials. Implanted electrodes can locate individual neurons, which is incredibly cool.

[1]: https://youtu.be/Gq03E-xHDLQ?t=57
If you're on a single node, probably something like this. This is what my "friend" is doing later this week. He's migrating from 9.5 to 13:

sudo sh -c 'echo "deb http://apt.postgresql.org/pub/repos/apt $(lsb_release -cs)-pgdg main" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/pgdg.list'
wget --quiet -O - https://www.postgresql.org/media/keys/ACCC4CF8.asc | sudo apt-key add -
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt install postgresql-13
sudo service postgresql stop
sudo mkdir -p /secure/pgsql13/data
sudo chown -R postgres:postgres /secure/pgsql13/data
sudo -u postgres /usr/lib/postgresql/13/bin/initdb -D /secure/pgsql13/data
sudo rm -rf /var/lib/postgresql/13/main
sudo ln -s /secure/pgsql13/data /var/lib/postgresql/13/main
sudo chown -hR postgres:postgres /var/lib/postgresql/13/main
sudo ln -s /etc/postgresql/9.5/main/postgresql.conf /var/lib/postgresql/9.5/main/postgresql.conf
sudo chown -hR postgres:postgres /etc/postgresql/9.5/main/postgresql.conf
cd /tmp
sudo -u postgres time /usr/lib/postgresql/13/bin/pg_upgrade --old-bindir /usr/lib/postgresql/9.5/bin --new-bindir /usr/lib/postgresql/13/bin --old-datadir /var/lib/postgresql/9.5/main --new-datadir /var/lib/postgresql/13/main --link --check
sudo -u postgres time /usr/lib/postgresql/13/bin/pg_upgrade --old-bindir /usr/lib/postgresql/9.5/bin --new-bindir /usr/lib/postgresql/13/bin --old-datadir /var/lib/postgresql/9.5/main --new-datadir /var/lib/postgresql/13/main --link
sudo service postgresql start 13
sudo -u postgres "/usr/lib/postgresql/13/bin/vacuumdb" --all -j 32 --analyze-only
sudo -u postgres ./delete_old_cluster.sh
This is probably due to engineer's bias. We like to look at something like Amazon and think "I could build that". It's just a shopping site?

A business person would know all of the things you are talking about that make that e-commerce site as successful as it is.

I have stumbled across many existing companies that do things that I have thought about developing but they employ 2 people, have no marketing and no-one knows about them.

That said, I also agree that there is a weird exponential growth of team size with a product that isn't always much bigger. Our SaaS company turns over about 3M/year with a dev team of 6. I was looking at another similar company the other day (granted slightly bigger/more complicated but only 2 main products) and they had about 200 devs in their about page!
Yup. Had to pack bat in a freezer ziploc and stick it in the freezer. Then when shipping, pack it in another freezer ziploc with paper towels (for moisture) and a blue ice pack (no dry ice).

After that, put in a box with a UN 3373 category B label affixed to it. Add contents list to the box as required by the label and after that drop off with your mail company of choice (UPS in our case).

Seems to be a common thing, no one bat an eye :)
There is a lot of shoddy methodology and data interpretation in Kirsch's testimony.

https://www.covid-datascience.com/post/do-pfizer-vaccines-ki...
Honestly, the authors of the retracted paper that the article mentions were lucky the whole thing just blew over without consequences for them (probably because a very high-profile researcher was involved). I think if a less well-known research group would've edited experimental data like they did the community would not have been this forgiving. To be clear the authors didn't fabricate new data but they edited a graph in a way that can only be described as highly misleading and possibly fraudulent. My advisors would've killed me had they discovered me doing something like that. So IMHO interpreting this as a naive mistake or overzealousness doesn't do it justice. That said I'm no longer working in academia so I don't really care, just thought the handling of this incident was odd given previous cases of data manipulation in the Physics community.

Anyway, topological quantum computing and Majorana fermions are interesting but the research in that area is at a stage where we've been with superconducting systems 30-40 years ago, i.e. people making the first fundamental experiments and trying to assemble the basic building blocks for a qubit. So I don't think anyone seriously bets on topological quantum computers to win the race.
How to seed, grow, and scale Developer Relations
Thank you for your reply. Makes sense.

By the way, thank you for running this AMA and answering all the questions with so much clarity and transparency. What an example!
What if you lose it?
Old x64 laptops are great, and I've certainly used one as a router before, however they do have drawbacks (cooling profile is usually shitty for 24/7 use, and they often don't love to be stripped from their shell, lose their display and etc). A laptop generally does not have all the peripheral chipsets and connectors you want and usually has extra stuff you don't want.

For $120ish I'm not sure you could beat the value prop of one of these boards with a used laptop. Supply is certainly an issue and was even before COVID. Waiting until 2022 sucks, but I'd argue they are by far the best overall option for a DIY whitebox router I've personally seen.
No matter how stupid a suggestion is a certain percentage of any group polled will agree with it anyway
You are wrong, the idea is much older and the idea for the current version (initially called 1-2-3 Ticket) was suggested by the green party in 2013 already.

More Infos in the history (in German): https://kurier.at/politik/inland/gruene-spoe-oder-oevp-wer-h...
He still wears a suit at most shows but he stands up now.
I believe that is standard practice...for animal control officers, serius spelunkers, and such.

For most folks, the risk/reward ratio just ain't there, to get regular rabies shots.
> People don't generally joyride public transit unless they have no other options.

I think this really depends of the network you are talking about. In some European cities, public transit networks are a blast to use. If frequencies are high enough, and modalities are well connected, you can "ride" the city as easily and naturally on a metro/tram/bus as you would have done by walking. I've took a lot (a damn lot) of bus/trams just because they were there, passing by, and allowed me to save 3 or 4 minutes (with my annual ticket, price was never my mind).

(But I'm lucky enough to live in one of the lowest CO2 emitting countries in terms of energy mix.)
SaaS pricing infiltrates real life
The funny thing is, by and large my only use case for awk is to print out whitespace delimited columns where the amount of whitespace is variable. Surprisingly hard to do with other Unix tools.

Neat discussions around that sort of thing at least here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23427479
I knew there would be a comment like this. Excuse my while my eyes roll several loops in my skull.

Yes, mailing stuff that requires labeling without those labels can get you in deep shit (because the feds don't really do shallow shit).

That doesn't mean everyone doesn't do it left and right.

Go buy some refrigerated food or medication off eBay and see how it ships. Heck, a certain country will ship you all manner of truly dangerous things in nothing more than a bubble wrap envelope.

The amount of dry ice required to refrigerate a bat (or tub of caviar, or niche cheese, or whatever) is easy to package safely. Throw it in a rag in a strofoam temp cooler. Do a non-terrible job boxing it up and it won't get out in any form other than as a gas.

This is one of the many cases where the behavior of the average individual is not in accordance with the law and (as 20+yr of eCommerce have shown us) nothing bad happens except in cases of exceptional stupidity.

I know that "but the law" and assumptions of stupidity of the general public make for easy points around here but neither complaint is materially relevant in this situation.
That is so cool! I had no idea it had gotten adopted so widely within YC. Wow!!! Be the change you want to see. I'm so glad the startup ecosystem is now adopting it as a standard.

I'm so glad we did it- so many ex-employees are able to participate and celebrate with us this week because they didn't have to worry about giving up their options after leaving. The arguments for the old method of a 90 day window were so stupid. 1) I don't want to keep someone in indentured servitude if they don't want to be here 2) top talent is very savvy and more attracted to places that don't screw them over.

I hope we can see the same for other innovations like more companies doing direct listings in the future. If you're a YC company figuring out how to go public, please choose a direct listing!
This sounds like terminology issues. Classically a project manager manages a project (a think with a start and an end, reasonably well defined) and a programme manager manages a set of related projects. People managers depending on intention sound like either engineering team leads, engineering heads of, or line managers.
Doesn't the same infinite regress exist in physics? I know they argue that it's meaningless to ask what came "before" when the universe and time didn't exist, but the idea it all just started out of nothing or has always been seems to me as unsatisfactory as "God did it".
Reversing a tree is not a skill. It's a test of rudimentary experience working with fundamental data strutures. You are not expected to know the solution, but you are expected to produce one if asked.

"Leetcode puzzles"... jeez.
Size is irrelevant.
Inevitably, this article (and implications about quantum computing) is going to be vastly misinterpreted due to the title. It would be like saying “Major Shuttle Strategy Suffers Serious Setbacks” but the strategy is using slingshots to get us into orbit, ignoring the work of, say, NASA and SpaceX.

This quantum computing strategy neither was nor is practiced by the vast majority of quantum institutions—commercial or otherwise. It was attempted by a group at Microsoft (and a small collection of other university groups) and was known from the start that it would be a search for essentially fundamentally new observations.

Other quantum computing players, like Rigetti, Google, HRL Laboratories, IBM, Amazon, Honeywell, and others are doing an approach that is nothing like the article, and have demonstrated significant results.
Yep exactly! I think if you broaden the concept of "authority" beyond literal authoritative sources it gets even more murky.

Are you appealing to the authority of speed? Compilation time? Readability? Functionality?

I dunno, and it often (especially around readability) comes down to the developer's/senior engineers preference.
That's because it is a strange definition.

If you work on the software in a self driving system in a car, that makes you an engineer. If you're working on software for a space satellite with no occupants... that's not an engineer?
Group think is well known, but it's also a force that works against individual think. Similar versions of the same symptom emerges as group hearing, group speach, and group action.

Thinking alone is easy. Thinking with someone is hard. Now keep adding people. You stop thinking.

Same with hearing. Listening to one person is easy. How about two people. If they don't share their time, you're listening to two people talk at once. Same with actions.

With more people, thoughts become more ideological and less mobile. Same with speech, same with what they listen to, and same with their actions. And each individual is not only physically a fraction of the group, but so are their senses. And to act humane or to simply perform on an individual level is directly hindered by this group dynamic. Individuals then become lethargic, and begin to experience greater stress and pain. You could also think of this as the Group Flu. I know I've experienced it. It's the feeling you get when you know you need to talk to someone higher up just to be heard. It's the feeling you get when you're talking to a customer service rep and you know you're not talking to a person.

Now take a large organization and we have a group of groups.

We already know one group cannot do it all, and one group is too inefficient. But if we're just creating more groups, the problem persists.

So what you need is to undo the group dynamic. But then again, with a big successful organization, maybe change is what you don't want? Ideology is what you do want, and suppressing the individuals leads to your ongoing success.
The engineer is responsible for taking non-technical language from the client and turning it into technical engineering specifications. Why does this fall to the client in software?
In addition to the excellent Beekeeper, you might want to check out https://dbeaver.io/.

And azure data studio now has some pg support: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/azure-data-studio/exten...

Personally I've landed on just using pgcli.com (and pg_dump etc).
Even in infra, those jobs used to be called Operator/Administrator. Now everything is also an engineer, with increasingly baroque acronyms prepended (DevSecOps the new hotness)
Or maybe it is you who are underestimating the technical complexity of the task? A lot of effort has been spent on making PostgreSQL as good as it is on migrations. Yes, it is not as highly prioritized as things like performance or partitioning but it is not forgotten either.
Those are not hate, they are just things that kill tens if not hundreds of thousands of people.

I'm pretty happy you're getting booted for doing things that are that fucking dangerous and damaging. Stop doing them.
Good write up. Classic Christensen.