skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hi Ajay! Thanks for the thoughtful response and email. I would love a direct meeting and will contact you shortly.

I don't mean to gloss over ClickHouse imperfections. There are lots of them. For my money the biggest is that it still takes way too much expertise in ClickHouse for ordinary developers to use it effectively. Part of that is SQL compatibility, part of it is lack of tools of which simple backup is certainly one. To the extent that ClickHouse is risky, the risk is finding (and retaining) staff who can use it properly. Our business at Altinity exists in large part because of this risk, so I know it's real.

The big aha! experience for me has been that the things like lack of ACID transactions or weak backup mechanisms are not necessarily the biggest issues for most ClickHouse users. I came to ClickHouse from a long background in RDBMS and transactional replication. Things that would be game ending in that environment are not in analytic systems.

What's more interesting (mind-expanding even) is that techniques like deduplication of inserted blocks and async multi-master replication turn out to be just as important as ACID & backups to achieve reliable systems. Furthermore, services like Kafka that allow you to have DC-level logs are an essential part of building analytic applications that are reliable and performant at scale. We're learning about these mechanisms in the same way that IBM and others developed ACID transaction ideas in the 1970s--by solving problems in real systems. It's really fun to be part of it.

My comment didn't convey this clearly, for which I heartily apologize. I certainly don't intend to portray ClickHouse as perfect and still less to bash Timescale. I don't know enough about the latter to make any criticism worth reading.

p.s., Non-transactional insert (specifically non-atomicity across blocks and tables) is an undisputed problem. It's being fixed in https://github.com/ClickHouse/ClickHouse/issues/22086. Altinity and others are working on backups. Backup comes up in my job just about every day.
Temperature station locations in the GHCN ... Notice how most of Africa is blank.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h95uvT67bNg
>If your morals don't hold up when pushed to their limits, it's that you have a poor understanding of what your morals are.

No, that's not the case. Morals don't have to be black and white because the world isn't black and white.

Nuance is the name of the game in morality. The world is shades of gray, everything has more context than you can imagine. Morals isn't mathmatics, you can't put it on an equation and say "X always equals Y in all situations"

Here's an example. Stealing is wrong. But what if you're stealing bread because that's the only way you can get food, and you're stealing it from Jeff Bezos who was just going to let it rot. Is that still wrong? Even if it has no value to Jeff B? Even if it means your death if you don't?

Context and nuance is what makes us all human.
There are still conspiracy theory leaker mathematics in play here. Facebook can't so much as send an internal email complaining about leaks making somebody's job harder without it being trumpted as yet another great wrong they committed.

It is within a space of possibilities but a sustained lack of evidence decreases the probability of it being so as numbers increase. It is possible that a given person drove drunk without being caught. But if they drove drunk everyday throughout many different towns and villages? Less likely.
Of course there are. But it's not just about there being competent programmers "willing" to do this work.

You need:

* A competently run business

* Competent funding

* Competent recruiting

* Competent management

Programmers will generally want to be paid. They'll need a well-run organization, and before you can even hire and pay them, you have to find and recruit them. Not just someone interested and willing to do the work, but interested and willing to forego their existing role, and to forego their existing role for one that is, frankly, not likely to be around in another 6 months, given the track record of these kinds of organizations.
> unless you put them in a folder that's nowhere near your toolbar

Hum? My bookmarks toolbar is full of folders. Some are of the "open all and close each when there's nothing interesting" kind, others are of the "will probably be useful later" kind.
The UPS would be a passthrough battery pack, after the PSU but before the PC components, for maximum efficiency.

Yeah, there's no space in a PSU, but a PSU-sized battery pack would power a ~500W PC for about 5-10 minutes (at full load).
>Those protests lead to hundreds of thousands of deaths.

This sounds like an opinion disguised as fact. If that wasn’t your intention then you’ll need to show peer-reviewed evidence of at the very least a strong association between those two outcomes.

Moreover, we’re specifically talking about lies perpetrated by the media that led to mass violence. The George Floyd protests weren’t fomented by media lies — you can go ask a poor black American if you want to know what’s going on.
FTA, they’re very Vocally asked for it
Defending their right to free speech isn't the same as providing a platform for it, so I'm not sure what point you're making.
The World of Buy Nothing, Where Dryer Lint Is a Hot Commodity
https://archive.ph/yeE15
In 1941 when the Nazi government stripped German Jews of their citizenship, the Swiss authorities applied the law to German Jews living in Switzerland by declaring them stateless; when in February 1945 Swiss authorities blocked German Bank accounts held in Switzerland they declared that the German Jews were no longer stateless, but were once again German and blocked their Swiss bank accounts as well.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bergier_commission
> Had the US not provided

In this hypothetical you'd need to assume that there was also no civilian access to GLONASS, BeiDou, or Galileo.
They’re friendly forwards unions… oh but by the way they’re also anti-Semitic. No thanks. I don’t want to fund that.

Imagine if for example you were a Green or a Liberal. The idea of funding Labour could be seriously offensive to you.
Most of the stuff Reddit is famous for would also get you banned here.
> The whole point of free speech is to allow for speech you find reprehensible

No one is stopping Gab from speaking.

FDroid is just refusing to amplify their speech.

Since when did "free speech" == "freedom to force other people to publish my speech"?

But you know what, here's an idea: I have a sign I want to put on your lawn. I'm afraid it's an incredibly offensive sign and you and your neighbours might not like it. But I wanna put it on your lawn anyway.

Judging by your comments here, I assume you're totally cool with that, right? I mean, according to you, denying my request to put my incredibly offensive lawn sign in front of your house would be an abridgement of my freedom of speech, right?
Just now:

$ python3
Python 3.6.9 (default, Jan 26 2021, 15:33:00)
[GCC 8.4.0] on linux
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more
information.
>>> import tkinter
>>> tkinter.Tcl().eval('puts {hello, world}')
hello, world
''
>>>

Ubuntu 18.04; but it's not on a machine running 20.04
> Do the fascists in your country want a totalitarian one party dictatorship, racism and war against other countries? If so, they should know they're fascists and they will be more than happy to tell you so.

Oh, my sweet summer child! They do want most of those things (dictatorship, one party rule, war, less so on racism, which is not a hard requirement anyway), but they believe that fascists are their enemies!
>However, if you cease all violation of this License, then your license from a particular copyright holder is reinstated (a) provisionally, unless and until the copyright holder explicitly and finally terminates your license, and (b) permanently, if the copyright holder fails to notify you of the violation by some reasonable means prior to 60 days after the cessation.

It sounds a lot like that the copyright holder has the power to permanently terminate a license even if the violation ceases.
I too preferred church, though I understand why the authors of dippl chose a more popular language (javascript) for their book. Church (a dialect of Scheme, which is a dialect of Lisp) also ties probabilistic programming back to its intellectual roots in McCarthy's amb operator [1].

That said, you can get pretty far with probabilistic programming in any language with decent monad support [2]. I did most of my probabilistic programming work in Scala. (You lose the ability to do really fancy inference if you go the monad route, as you can't analyze the program structure, but a lot of the time, this is fine.)

[1] http://community.schemewiki.org/?amb

[2] http://mlg.eng.cam.ac.uk/pub/pdf/SciGhaGor15.pdf
Where we put our attention says a lot.

People like Takashi get almost zero attention, because so many people spend their time blabbering about people doing "sexy" stuff. JWZ does this too. I believe we'd be much better off if we tried to do more ignoring of the flashy stuff we don't like and instead support and laud the unflashy stuff and the people who do it.
> Climate change is a pretty simple proposal with pretty simple and direct evidence. Carbon traps light, which means more heat is trapped within the atmosphere. We can measure the amount of carbon in the atmosphere. That atmosphere will obey physics. More heat will be trapped.

Yes, but that's different from an apocalyptic scenario. Predicting the population increase in the 60s was also scientific. Predicting that we couldn't feed several billion people turned out to be wrong. Increased sea level rise and more extreme weather is one thing, predicting that human civilization ends and we all die is an entirely different matter.

Apcoalytic scenarios make worst case assumptions. That we'll fight a nuclear war which will trigger a nuclear winter, or that population won't peak and there's no green revolution, or that feedback loops will lead to a hothouse Earth scenario. But the likely projections don't show that.
Do you have some sources to prove that “most of human history”, everyone was hoarding?

Necessity leads to JIT, only in times of surplus can you even try to hoard. Famines were common before, and still occur now - you just don’t notice now thanks to globalization and in part, essential reserves maintained by governments and companies.
Is hacking the hackers even legal? Wouldn't it still be a crime.
> Co2 levels and its impact on our cognitive capacity

This is junk science.

The CO2 level of the open atmosphere is ~400 ppm. The CO2 level aboard a nuclear submarine can range between ~2000-10000 ppm. 10000 ppm is enough to cause sleep disturbances and headaches, and we're less sure about the range between 5000-10000, but we're talking orders of magnitude away before we start seeing issues among people who engage in cognitively challenging work on a daily basis. The CO2 levels aboard the ISS are usually a bit lower--they try to keep it under 5000 ppm--but the astronauts there are even more closely monitored for medical issues and also have to perform cognitively challenging work. These are over extended periods of time between 3-9 months.

If the CO2 concentration of the Earth's atmosphere went up 10x, you'd have much bigger problems than the cognitive effects of CO2 exposure.
Another theory - CDs popularity was always mainly about convenience and not sound quality. They lose out massively to streaming on this.

Streaming leaves music fans with money left over to spend and they buy vinyl to have something nice looking to put on the shelf (and play occasionally).
Is there any advancement in technology that could make it more feasible today?
Also note that switch (state) { case STATE_LABEL: ... } is a form of computed goto. Every time we use switch in a C program, we are using computed goto.

The switch statement escapes the disparagement that is lobbed at goto for two reasons.

1. It doesn't have "goto" anywhere in its name. (Neither does an assembly language JMP instruction, yet it is still goto).

2. It has a limited scope: whereas goto can jump to any label anywhere in a function, a switch only branches within a statement. (But anywhere within that statement; into any level of nesting inside any sub-statement!)

If you wrap the bulk of your function with a giant switch inside a dispatch loop on a state variable, then, effectively, the (2) limited scope defense of switch no longer applies: you have perpetrated a bare-faced computed goto scoped over the bulk of the function body.
I think that’s unfair to Scott when the entire article is prefaced by “Epistemic status: Extremely confused! Low confidence in all of this”

The rationalist movement is all about being able to accurately forecast the accuracy of your predictions. Saying we shouldn’t discuss low accuracy predictions at all seems odd - by making early/fuzzy predictions (and acknowledging them as such) we may ex find that we are more accurate than we realize.
I dont see anything ideological or flamy. This is my experience with living with and among koreans for a very long time.
The Geography of the Great Resignation
Submitted link is to a reddit thread.

Better one might be the GitHub issue discussing it: https://github.com/faisalman/ua-parser-js/issues/536
The claim was not about the medium, but about the content ("a 500 year old seeded-torrent"). Phone system has never stored any data (other than the mapping between phone numbers and addresses or, lately, people), and was usually upgraded in a backwards-compatible way.

I think that's the important nuance: humans have always had a keen interest in keeping records of history. We are at an early age of electronic computers, but we've already got things like archive.org — that's likely to persist in some shape or form, just like we are actively trying to persist books and movies from different eras.

Other than natural or civilizational catastrophes, I only see the risk in the amount of data needing storage surpassing any one's entity ability to archive it, but I am sure "humans" would deal with that in due time too.

Edit: I do not necessarily believe the torrent claim, but wanted to clarify why I see a point in it.
I've worked with EE's who spec'd a $300 high quality motor when a $20 one was powerful enough but didn't have lifetime specifications because the extra $280 was less than the cost of the service call to replace the motor.

When you start designing things to last a long time AND be very reliable, the cost increases very quickly in ways that are not always predictable.
Yeah but then hollywood dead, music industry dead, patents dead, industry dead. America dead.

Aint gonna happen.
There are no doubt notable outliers, but go look at all the major composers of the last 300 years. How many women can you name? Same thing with Nobel Prizes. The vast majority are men. How many women built new industries or invented revolutionary machines or devices? It was almost entirely men.

Perhaps that will change in 100 years. I’m open to the argument that limited opportunity prevented women from accomplishing those things in the past. But historically that hasn’t been the case.
> I recently read a book that defended him as serving the role of a dictator in the Roman sense.

That's literally one of the base ideas of fascism. The term 'fascism' itself refers to a 'fasces', the Roman and Etruscan style of axe carried as a sign of governmental power and authority in ancient Rome.
Scott Alexander is a very careful quantifier of his bets, he tracks them year over year and always goes back to evaluate them and make sure he's well calibrated.

I take your point, but he is one of a very few people on this planet who would reliably say he just didn't know if that was a more accurate statement than what he said. The whole thing is not up in the air, there is limited but useful information available now, and he's trying to correctly integrate that.
I still buy CDs for a lot of the same reasons people buy vinyl.

* I like the physical interaction with my music (choosing the CD, putting it in the player, pressing play and getting 40-60 minutes of music)

* I like the artwork and liner notes (although the larger format of records wins there)

* I like the record store experience

I prefer CDs to vinyl because they sound better IMHO, are more durable, can be backed up and re-burned as needed, and are (slightly) smaller.
When you are talking about millions of works, you need to approach it statistically.

That we have some works preserved does not mean that we are succeeding at preserving works in general. Nor is the fact that we have books preserved by previous generations a guarantee that the same books will be preserved by current and future generations.

So one way to think about this is that society has a big junkyard into which it throws documents. And sometimes, people do some archeological digging and reconstruct portions of some documents or bring them to light and popularize them, bringing them out of the junkyard, with a bias towards those documents that reconstruct whatever fashions are happening in that society.

That does not mean that the society as a whole is preserving documents well, even though you will always have some ancient texts available, and people are still mining the junkyard.

Moreover once we move to information stored online in the present climate of account deletion and deplatforming, we are again reconstructing the ingredients for a dark ages as mass deletion of online data is a lot easier than burning individual books. Many of the manuscripts we have were literally pulled out of ancient trashheaps or were written over by other texts. That's a lot less likely to happen with modern technologies.
I am the author of the comment you cited. You've apparently understood it well.
My solution to the excessive fiddling was Debian Stable. I've been using it since 2007-ish and it does not get in the way of anything. But I agree with you on the Mac OS thing--the only tech support I have to provide is babysitting Time Machine and the occasionally hardware failure (which just requires a payment to Apple, and two round trips to the Apple store).
Shouldn't it be 10nm-? :)
Meanwhile the UI framework situation on windows became much worse than on linux. Windows 2000 had comctl, but it was consistent with user32, on XP they became different, vista added ribbons, then came WPF, UWP, Xamarin, Electron, Metro, immersive UI, now windows 11 added something new that looks like tenth UI framework.
It's pretty reasonable, and smart I'd say. The kids content on YouTube has been heavily gamed by content farms optimizing content for SEO, making absolutely bizarre and sometimes disgusting content.

Bit of a lengthy watch, but this video is pretty eye-opening:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKp2gikIkD8

(It's a few years old at this point, but not a lot has changed, and possibly has gotten worse)
Unicode is compatible with ASCII: any ASCII text will render fine (when UTF-8 is used anyway; some other Unicode encodings: not so much).
print pictures on archival grade paper with archival grade inks and store them in a controlled environment.

Inscribe the website into a tablet made from non reactive materials and again store in a controlled environment.

Launch a satellite into space in stable orbit and have them retrieve the pictures/tablet from the satellite in 500 years.
Rolling out the red carpet for remote meetings
I think the cultural adaptation is severely undervalued here. I grew up in a hot/humid climate and I would be freezing at 25 degrees C . Go to coastal India in the winter if you don't believe me. Conversely I now live in a very cold place and walk around in shorts at 15 and am comfortable with just a sweater all the way to 5 degrees or so.
The crap that's on YouTube makes the cable TV networks targeted at kids look like educational television. Horrid stuff with kids shooting off their mouths.
74+ million did which worked out to 46.9%. That's pretty close to 50% for discussion purposes. That's a large pool of potential employees.
By the time all this is settled, Trump and Co will learn a lot about software licensing than they thought was necessary. This is not a space where you can bully others, because the playing field is kinda level.
Microcassette, despite being best known for use in answering machines and voice recorders, was briefly a pre-recorded music format. There was even a microcassette deck component you could put in your hifi.

A video about it: https://youtu.be/ZZYpPlpD3ow
I thought we were done with blaming the victim.
Great comment. Sorry that I missed this at the time.
However, despite the existence of products like Shopify and Wordpress, web developers have no trouble finding jobs, as far as I know.

> How much longer before some architect tells an AI to stitch together code that fits some sort of functional spec.

Would that person not be, essentially, a programmer? And what would they do if they needed to interface with external hardware that's not yet supported, or some network protocol or piece of software that's not built into AI-code-generator-3000?

> Is it that much a stretch to say that in the near future (15-25 years), AI might take over a significant part of software engineering?

In my opinion, people who probably think little of software developers, keep imagining that software engineering is this primitive, simple, reducible thing, and they are simply wrong.

Can there be a use for AI-generated code, and can that take over things like generating user-facing forms and website? Sure. However, what I think is likely to happen is that in 15-25 years, the world will be changing just as fast as it is now, and the software engineering discipline will just expand. Companies that hire "architects" who only know how to use AI-code-generator-3000 will be at a disadvantage compared to companies that hire more fully fledged software engineers.

Imagine you run a business and you only have architects who know how to use some code generator code that runs on the Google cloud. You pay some monthly bill to Google and hefty fees to use that tool. You're locked-in to that ecosystem. If you need a new feature or access to a new API, you may need to wait for Google to add support. In contrast, your competitors who hired pesky software engineers are paying higher salaries but save on Google cloud fees, and they don't have to wait for Google to fix problems to implement new features.
Another thing is that vinyl discs, the actual discs, can be made incredibly fancy. Various colors, translucence, patterns, etc. Just look what kind of vinyls people now offer on bandcamp.

CDs, due to their nature, can't be made as gimmicky, so vinyls are a better conversation item and a better collector value, among other things.
Just how much stock would companies need to avoid the problems we have now? This isn't just a supply side problem, demand for some goods has gone through the roof. How can a business compete on resilience when all their competitors are cheaper because they carry less stock.

I'm not even sure I'd want that as a consumer. Mostly I'd rather wait than pay more (although obviously not for food).