skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Based on my limited anecdotal evidence, it seems to me that the software industry doesn’t value technical excellence as much as it values having warm bodies report to you. This in turn limits the amount of experience an average programmer working on these big projects will have, just because they are incentivized to leave the hands on implementation work for some sort of a leadership role as soon as possible.

+10000. This is so true. It's not just that people are incentivized to leave hands-on work. Every level of the management genuinely believe that a senior engineer should not spend much time on hands-on work but instead should focus on "tech leadership", which in a big company means going to meetings, influencing other teams, writing white papers, and of course "coordinating".
That's really cool. I just added my appointments and tasks for the day. Visualizing everything I'm definitely not going to be as productive as I was hopping to be =/
> a higher number of smaller nuclear plants closer to populations

Efficient - maybe, but safer??
And "important"
Oh, it hasn't been the norm, sadly -- but those several times it happened it felt amazing. ^_^
Also, Would you guys be down to collaborate?

Open standards are great. We’ve got some significant buy in. But fracturing this into multiple specs has a risk of making it worse instead of better.
> The argument that authoritarian governments outperform democracies in a crisis has found new life [...] The data tell a different story.

> [...] Francis Fukuyama thinks that it is not necessarily democracy but “whether citizens trust their leaders, and whether those leaders preside over a competent and effective state,” that is crucial to defeating a pandemic.
> If that's not being revolutionary, I don't know what is.

Nothing changes in the way people use their computers. It's a performance leap, but there have been many such in the past. Back when PCs and laptops got 2 cores instead of 1, "real" multitasking was finally possible and performance doubled almost overnight. That was IMHO a bigger leap than M1, but I don't hear people calling Core 2 Duo and Athlon X2 "revolutionary".
Huge +1 to Database Design for Mere Mortals. This was the second database book I read (the first was SQL Antipatterns, not a bad book but also not a good first book) and far and away the most helpful. It took me 3 days to read, I had a miserable flu after flying home from a vacation (pre-COVID), and I was still able to follow the author without any issue. I highly suggest a physical copy & writing in the margins, underlining etc, though that's something I do in general so YMMV if you don't get anything out of that.

As far as "technical" books go, it's very nontechnical, and if you're already very experienced & good at normalizing it maybe won't help you THAT much, but for someone who's at all junior, I can't recommend it enough. The biggest takeaway (beyond, "what's a normalized database look like") is to keep questioning the real-life system you're working in & to ask questions of stakeholders who understand it better than you, but me saying that isn't at all doing it enough justice compared to how well the author elaborates on the point. (btw, Data And Reality is also good for this, though a lot more theoretical in approach)

If you're really new to databases you'll want to supplement this with something that does normalization more formally, I don't have a great single suggestion for that. I read two of C.J. Date's books, honestly I found them mind-numbingly tedious to get through but I can't say I didn't learn from them. But...I also can't really recommend them because I was so bored by them that it made me stop reading altogether for like 4 months because I was just putting off finishing these books (LPT: always be in the middle of 2 books at the same time, unfortunately for me, both of my books were these lol). I did also read Art of SQL, it was both enjoyable & interesting, but maybe not what you're looking for if you want something super structured that will take you from point A to point B.
Fair point, I could have made the effort to make that clear, but it is far far far less _un_clean if you care at all about such things.

Two clicks to opt-out of everything¹ compared to tens, some of which include needing to visit the parter separately to opt-out there, and even then it is not complete because some simply marked “this partner does not provide an opt-out”. ExtremeTech: welcome to my DNS blacklist.

[¹] assuming you trust it to actually opt you out properly, of course
Not just inside big corps either. Sometimes they just do not like the upstream devs and are not going to share.

One project I watch one dev in charge of the project is seeing comment after comment in the project is 'I will just keep these changes to myself then, closed' and specifically because of him. Lots of devs are keeping their stuff private.

I personally have done this in another project. I got tired of arguing with one dev over 2 lines of code. So my private version works. The public one is broken in that case. That was 2 years ago. It is still broken publicly and the forums for that group are telling them that...
In which particular area are you suggesting that the M1 is ahead for x86 to catch up?
Of course, if you go back till a time when developer did not yet exist, then obviously it would not be possible. But at least since the industry started to exist as an industry (so 70s or 80s?), we always had single developers who could (and would) create whole systems for which others needed a whole team.

This is in itself nothing special. There also was always a price for this, which usually was quality and time. This didn't change till today, but as time moves on, things become simpler, so more people can do this now on a higher level in a shorter time.

> Colo places

What is that?

> if you knew the right people and had access to cash to buy a server up front

I'm not sure how old you are, but cheap webhosters exist since the 90s, and so do one man-web-companies. And before that you could misuse other means. Additionally, I'm not just talking about webdev, but development in general. Single developers creating whole mature applications and companies around them is nothing new.
If the prohibitionists and the distillers can agree on protocols to collect and publish data, to the point they're both willing to fund it; then yes that certainly seems worth doing and then everyone gets to argue about that data set for the next century.

Isn't there another reading of this story that goes "NYT spikes cool thing for quick sensation?" File it with "Slate Star Codex" and other examples of predatory reporting there.
> semi-educated

This is an interesting take, but what a weird modifier to add in here. IMO education level is more or less irrelevant here, but if one had to force it into the equation, it seems to me that his Harvard pedigree, even if he didn't graduate, makes your picture of an out-of-touch unelected puppetmaster _more_ sinister.
it is always DNS!
Their stock is down 5% too. Everything is down for them today ;)
You are correct. Nuclear is an excellent source for large amounts of energy.

Decades of propaganda have led to people mistakenly believing that wind, solar and batteries on a large enough scale are a substitute for steady, controllable power generation from sources such as coal, natural gas and nuclear.

The sad part is that while we wait for the grid transition to happen at an indeterminate point in the future, climate change is a problem from yesterday that has a very real effect today. The worse part is that the nuclear industry continues to atrophy talent and knowledge when we should instead be focussing on making nuclear power an everyday thing.

Instead of playing the blame game on pollution, i really wish the West would do the one thing that has the greatest potential to supply energy to and lift millions out of poverty - build nuclear reactors and transmission grids in Africa, India and China.
You win for best comment
A lot of people, many of them home based businesses, also rely on FB Marketplace as a primary source of income.
I can't message my friends on whatsapp :(
I’m not saying anything about medical euthanasia, but - to your question - the Wikipedia article is inaccurate:

“Governor Palin’s Facebook post was about a proposal in the ACA that would allow Medicare to pay for patients to discuss living wills and other end of life issues with their doctor. Her statements helped create a huge political and public outcry that resulted in the language being removed from the final legislation and proves the impact and relevance of her statement. “In 2011, the Obama administration even deleted all references to end-of-life planning in a new Medicare regulation when opponents interpreted the move as a back-door effort to allow such planning.”

The IPAB was even specifically limited from making recommendations around healthcare rationing:

“ The ACA also places limits on the authority of the IPAB. The ACA states, “[t]he IPAB may not recommend rationing of healthcare, raising Medicare beneficiary premiums, cost sharing, or modifying eligibility criteria.”42 This is totally contrary to the “death panels” claim made by Governor Palin and illustrates the concern and confusion over the IPAB’s statutory and regulatory role. Also, Medicare specifically “withholds the power to regulate the practice of medicine from the federal government.” The IPAB has significant limitations on the scope of its proposals. So, as per ACA law, the IPAB cannot submit any proposals that would “ration care, modify Medicare eligibility criteria, raise costs to beneficiaries, change cost sharing for covered services, or restrict benefits in any way.”

Source: https://scholarship.shu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=&htt...
The argument (with sales taxes) isn’t usually that they don’t let you soak the rich but that they’re too hard on the poor.

Almost by definition, somebody living paycheck-to-paycheck is spending all their income. So their sales tax bill is going to be basically whatever the sales tax rate is applied to their income (e.g., a 7% sales tax rate applied to all of their income). Somebody who saves some of their income isn’t spending that portion, so in a year their sales tax bill will be smaller than the sales tax rate (e.g., if they save 10% of their income, then they’re only paying sales tax on the 90% that they spent). You could say this isn’t hard enough of the rich, or it’s too hard on the poor. Usually “too hard on the poor” is an easier argument to make.

There are solutions, such as exempting food or other necessities (the poor probably spend a bigger portion of their income on food, so exempting food helps them more), or adding a luxury tax on things that the poor don’t buy, etc. Of course, then there’s an effort to define what should count as a necessity or what should count as a luxury. When I was a teenager, California sales tax did not apply to packaged food, but did apply to food bought at a restaurant. But there were exceptions to both of those cases: there was a snack tax that applied to some packaged foods (the list changed each year) so that some packaged foods were still taxed; and packaged food sold at a restaurant was exempt (I worked at Cinnabon, hot cinnamon rolls were taxed, after thirty minutes on the hot plate we let them cool down, refrosted and packaged them and they were no longer taxed; if somebody asked for packaged rolls when we were out, they got hot rolls in the box without paying sales tax).

It’s also true that “income” isn’t always the interesting number. Somebody with a million dollars in the bank and no income doesn’t pay income tax, but they do pay sales tax. Of course, if the money came from wages in a previous year, they paid income tax then. If the money was an inheritance, it might have been taxed but the US keeps changing the details of the estate tax.
I doubt that deleting your search history would trigger a re-write of search logs. After all your history is your data, but search logs are their data. I believe it is their published policy to remove the last octet (or 80 bits, for IPv6) from client addresses in logs after 9 months and to rewrite logs without cookies after 18 months. This probably tells us more about the fact that 18-month-old search logs are not very useful for search quality than it does about privacy.

I'm pretty sure the relevant distinction is between "Data that expires after a specific period of time" and "Information retained until you remove it" in their privacy policies.

I don't see why using Brave or whatever would influence the contents of their server logs.
> Signal still works

https://old.reddit.com/r/thehatedone/comments/f160jh/is_sign...

Signal is still centralized and uses AWS. So if AWS was to go down, it would affect not just Signal but vast swathes of the Internets.
> Antihierarchical Aggression – the belief that those currently in power should be punished, the established order should be overthrown, and that extreme actions, such as political violence, are justifiable to achieve these aims.

> Top-Down Censorship – preferences for the use of governmental and institutional authority to quash opposition and bar offensive and intolerant speech.

Those two are kind of at war with each other, aren't they? But I guess psychological syndromes don't have to be self-consistent.

The "top-down censorship" shows their authoritarianism quite well, I think.
Interesting, even some open source sites like: https://fbinfer.com are down

but https://glean.software and https://reactjs.org aren't
>but McKinsey just paid $30 million to settle a case where they did the exact same thing to the Department of Justice. Why would they do that if this is normal and nobody cares?

Yes and?

This is normal. Nobody cares as long as you do it right. Just because the desk that deals with DOJ did it wrong doesn't mean the desk that deals with FDA did. You see these kinds of complicated, seemingly conflicting, relationships in high finance all the time. In practice it's a non-issue because of how these companies are structured and because they try to keep clients at arms length as a matter of routine business. The business relationship here is very similar to one that AWS and Azure may have with a 3rd party datacenter contractor. Sure one could pay the contractor for tips but in practice that doesn't happen except very rarely because of how everything is structured.
Jep, also from other caches: https://www.nslookup.io/dns-records/facebook.com
You might want to check TypeDB, which is a database with a strongly-typed query language: https://github.com/vaticle/typedb.

It doesn't do union types yet, but it's got type inheritance, type inference, type-safe joins (with its "relation" feature). It's quite cool what you can do with it when you can express complex domain with the language.

Disclaimer: I work there.
Both, but maybe I've been skewed by my experience in Academia where sociopolitical issues are very sensitive these days.
Shipping untested , undocumented code is pretty easy. Those who don't do either are absolutely bad programmers. That doesn't mean that they're dumb or incapable, but testing and documenting is part of the definition of good programmer.
This Web3 thing is huge. Definitely a cutting edge company
Remote Work and the Future of Innovation
Scaleway has 75GB for free every month [1].

[1]: https://www.scaleway.com/en/pricing/
> I realized my constant time solution required a number of expensive operations including sqrt and the iterative approach ran on average ~1 iteration

Yeah! It's deeply unsatisfying to forego algorithmic optimization but it often isn't necessary.

EG, when I do Advent of Code, I often write a naive algorithm that works correctly on the sample input, and then runs a really long time on the actual problem input. Before I go redo the algorithm, I often run it with PyPy instead of the standard Python, and 80% of the time it terminates quickly enough.

Similarly, whenever I happen to do AoC in C++, my naive algorithms happen to magically be fast enough out of the box so I don't even think about better algorithms. It's unfortunately counter to the intuition that you get from a CS programs that obsess with Big-O notation rather than implementation speed.

Big-O is really important but it seems like the input size where it starts to dominate implementation is much larger than our intuition suggests.

(of course it's also easy to write really bad algos that suck even on small input)
Not the original comment author, but will try and offer a clarification:

Malthus [1] was of opinion that humanity growth/wellbeing is bound to be curbed by wars/famines due to limits of resources.

He was mostly correct up until industrial revolution.

There are, though, people who still subscribe to Malthus idea of impending doom.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Robert_Malthus
Same here on facebook.com , [api]whatsapp.com (instagram.com works)
or it went down by another 20%, everybody at first thinking there's something wrong with their internet connection.
I certainly do and I dream of the day that everyone I message switches, so I can too.
1-You have to put it in their self-interest, and explain it to them that way. What else can you do to make it in their own interest?

2-You have to demonstrate social proof of your momentum. Show who has recently joined, and use that to show people are rallying around it. Everyone goes where everyone goes.

3-Set it up so it isn't clearly "your" solution so they de-risk being at the mercy of a competitor. Open source, but also run by a foundation, not just you.
> Unfortunately I am not aware of any programming language that either allows the use of all 3 kinds of types or at least uses appropriate names for the available types.

Rust.

u64 - Unsigned ints

i64 - Signed ints

Wrapping<u64> - Ints mod 2^64

There's also Wrapping<i64>, i64 with twos complement arithmetic
If you're the little guy talking to a bunch of big guys, the big guys know damn well that the concern isn't about your users moving away from your product. I think they understand what you're trying to do, and aren't buying into it. You're not going to be able to talk your way around that simple fact.
Quite a lot of people rely on heroin to get through the day too.
For you and for me, sure.
For management ? They delivered.
And as they delivered, they are the number one choice for bootstraping this brand new important project they'll not have to maintain...
That's what I think too, this kind of effort will work if it comes from (one of) the leader(s).
There is a real value in being interoperable with the industry leader.
There is little chance android would have worked if google wasn't the one to push it.
Between hostile defaults, dark patterns in opting-out and unsubscribing, and persistent surveillance, a lot of consumer-facing tech these days is taking on what an obsessive abusive partner would do. I can't help but wonder if these systems are a reflection of who those designers are as people.
Reddit wasn’t working a few min ago. Broader issue?
The problem IIRC is actually consuming that sum type in SQL. Unfortunately it's been several years since I played with that approach, and I've forgotten the specific problems I encountered.
It does work and is ready to change, the other people just aren't good enough to know how.

They'll have to bring the base down to their level to understand and iterate on it.

If you brought another "hermit" in, he'd obsess over it and either refactor it in his vision or understand it and know how to flex it to continue iterating.

You bring a team of normal people in, they'll think it's too "adhoc", and rewrite it in a bloated and complex way.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/facebook-whistleblower-frances-...
> If that's not being revolutionary, I don't know what is.

Then you might want to look up the definition. A revolution is "radical" and makes "fundamental changes in the socioeconomic situation".

Life after the printing press / steam engine / transistor fundamentally changed. Even if tomorrow, all x86 chips were replaced with ARM chips, what radical and fundamental changes to society would take place?
> If Tesla solves driving it will lead to tens of thousands of lives saved a year.

That’s a big if. If we solved aging, we’d save nearly all lives, so please don’t regulate my medical practice. I expect to have aging solved and millions of treatments rolled out by 2020.
Oh, well, in that case it’s okay.
Juniors are beginners, learners, apprentices, and are bound to make mistakes and design things poorly. The issue is there are so few high-quality engineers relative to the demand, and it's hard to prove who is high-quality before they're onboard for a few months. So, if someone is high-quality, you really don't want to lose them, so you promote them, pay them more, try your best to keep them on-board. There's a benefit to elevating them out of the weeds, because often they can glance at the weeds and tell someone else how to clean it up easily, without spending their effort to actually do it.

Furthermore, they can glance at 10 patches of weeds, 10 junior engineers, and find the couple that need more guidance than the others. They can leverage their knowledge through others, assessing their strengths/weaknesses as coders in ways juniors never could.
If you need a distributed database of any kind which can be modeled as an append-only log (i.e. stuff you might use Kafka for) then a private blockchain might not be a terrible idea. The sticking point is resolving conflicts because "longest chain" is probably not what you want.
> took fifty years

oh shit.

edit: we also made this: https://github.com/openthc/bong - Basic Object Normalization Gateway -- but it's like "draft" quality.
Go to the Finder and choose "See What's New in macOS" from the help menu. Always opens in Safari regardless of what the default browser is.
Reddit goes down every 10 mins anyway.
For me, they are "informal" exit interviewers. I'm not a manager. I'm not in HR. I'm an IC that has asked people informally with whom I've developed good rapport. I generally don't ask people that I don't expect to be candid with me because I don't know them well enough. No one has a motive to lie to me about why they are leaving.
> They are against abortion, but at the same time against sex ed or contraception.

I assume you believe either contraception or abortion are moral (or both, I suppose)? I think that if you look at it from their point of view for a moment it makes more sense, setting aside biases. Abortion is believed to be wrong because it's the unjust killing of an innocent human being. Contraception is wrong because it frustrates our natural sexual faculties which are ordered towards the marital act (procreation). These don't appear to be contradictory stances. If abortion and contraception are both immoral then you'd logically have to be against both. You appear to be looking at it from a utilitarian point of view, not assessing the actual moral claims. If something is immoral you should oppose it even if some bad consequences may occur.

Similarly, I'd say that the Catholic Church isn't opposed to "sex ed" unless "sex ed" means "educating people how to sin". If you believe that contraception is immoral its perfectly logical to oppose teaching people how to sin with it, same way anyone would oppose classes teaching kids how to lie to their parents well.

> They are setting people up for failure

I'd like your input on this since it is probably the main issue I can sense: is a hard moral standard "setting someone up for failure" inherently? Back to the subject of lying I used as an illustration earlier, I'd say it's very hard to go through life without saying occasional lies but I'd never say it's setting people up for failure by telling them to not lie.

What are your thoughts? Do you think your main concern is with standards not making sense or is the issue rather that you simply don't agree with one or more of the standards themselves? I'm interested to hear your response!
Signal had their own share of downtime. How about going to a federated system instead of repeating the same mistakes? (https://matrix.org)