skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
And yet, i once talked with a developer (who primarily worked just in procedural SQL), who claimed that having a separate back end oftentimes makes no sense whatsoever: the endless shuffling around of data, transforming it in the back end, especially for something like reports.

While there is some merit to either end of the spectrum (e.g. not thinking about the schema or SQL much on the one end, letting the ORM do the heavy lifting, vs doing a large amount of in database processing), i've found that preferences in that regard largely depend on what any particular person is familiar with.

Personally, i think that processing data within the database makes sense for large bulk operations, however otherwise databases are largely unsuitable for anything apart from being the data layer for CRUD, or analytic queries - whenever you try to create any sorts of complex algorithms in SQL, without fail you'll end up with code that isn't readable, isn't extensible and doesn't compose as well as even Java libraries would. Databases will also lose out on logging, debugging (e.g. breakpoints) and oftentimes scalability - it's easier to scale instances of a REST API horizontally than it is to scale a database engine, given that most of them scale vertically.

Of course, Yugabyte or TiDB might try to be exceptions in regards to my last point, but the latter doesn't support stored procedures and triggers altogether, so scaling can have serious limitations: https://docs.pingcap.com/tidb/stable/mysql-compatibility

On the other hand, trying to do everything in the app is just asking for horrible schemas that have been automatically generated and aren't as well normalized as they should be, awkward framework specific ORM functionality and pitfalls (Hibernate lazy/eager init in particular), as well as having an insane amount of opportunities to run into the N+1 problem or issues with how linked data is represented and persisted.

In summary, there are pitfalls with either approach and i'd just suggest that any team consider what they know how to use better and what better fits their needs. So far, in my experience, it's mostly doing apps within the application, not shying away from SQL when necessary, but also considering the very few use cases when using stored procedures or triggers indeed makes sense, and then looking for ways to comment them as much as possible. Testing them, however, is another story, which should reflect upon certain shortcomings: https://www.jetbrains.com/lp/devecosystem-2021/databases/#Da...
zsh has "always", which behaves as "try .. finally" and such in some other languages:

{
foo
} always {
cleanup stuff
}
It isn't specific to Singapore, but the entire region. In the early 19th century there was huge demand for Asian goods in the west, which led to a huge trade disparity because China had little interest in western goods. The British East India Company was able to negate that through smuggling opium to such a degree that it was emptying the Chinese coffers and caused a drug abuse epidemic, which then forced China into conflict with Britain. This led to the Treaty of Nanking starting a trend of colonial subjugation and weakening of the Qing Empire and is considered the beginning of Century of Humiliation in China.

Then you have to take the additional context of how power coalesced in many of these Asian tiger economies through strong authoritarian governments during their modernization and independence. I do not think it is a stretch to think that other nations in the region, especially those with close proximity to China, or have large Chinese populations (like Singapore), saw how unbelievably poorly this went for China, which probably contributed to the extreme measures used to prevent recreational drug contraband from being used in their societies.
How is Gmail more convenient in this case?
Might as well, yes, but I've found writing shell scripts in Python to be cumbersome because whatever flavor of os.system() I end up using just doesn't work well syntactically. I can run a command and pipe to a bunch more commands way easier in a shell because I'm already using a shell when interacting with the computer. Perl had this figured out, but proved unable to continue evolving (aka adding types, like Python/Ruby/JavaScript have managed to.)

If there's a modern library/workflow that makes this not the case, I'm all ears!
> I think that updating this book is not pointless, but more importantly doing the same for more countries is really important.

While MacKay's work is excellent for a general lay audience to understand general scales of the issue, there are now far more advanced models for this that do things like replay historical weather and demand, down to 15 minute scales, to more least cost systems for zero carbon grids.

They are also so advanced as to take into current grid structure and generation resources, and the cheapest way to transition to zero carbon from our current resources.

Christopher Clack's models are probably the most advanced. The latest iteration has the very surprising finding that deploying lots of grid-edge solar and storage right now will save us a ton of money because it will use current transmission and distribution assets more effectively and reduce the need for future investment in these assets (T&D is the majority of our electricity bills, not generation!)
To a point. Economies of scale will still exist for things that cannot be done remotely, which means that population density will continue to beget population density.
A diverse portfolio is what most people would suggest, I guess. If I had your money, I'd be looking to buy something like a house or land.

Also I am amazed by that salary at such a young age (and a bit jelly). Good job!
And seeking out or even opening yourself up to a chance of failure gives certain people a risk of falling into a spiral of depression. I am not even sure that going for desirable yet challenging goals is even an option for these people if too much failure will destroy their confidence about life in general, whether or not that is a consequence that logically follows.

If you're weighing an option that opens you up to a higher risk of failure than other options, then depending on what type of person you are, you may have to evaluate whether you have enough of a support network or other "cushion" to absorb the mental blow of failure first. Failure is something that can be gotten used to, but before it is, you have no choice but to get past the damage to your mental health the failure causes, and some people are not capable of managing that on their own.

This is why I have to sometimes frame my decisions as: "Because I will fail considerably more often if I choose this path, I'm giving myself a considerable risk of becoming a miserable wreck incapable of doing the things I'm capable of now, or worse. So for the sake of preserving my mental stability, I will have to do something else."
I have read his work, and also am friends with many university and conservatory music teachers who have know some prodigies. I'm sorry... you're wrong. The world is full of thousands and thousands of musicians who had 10k hours perfect deliberate practice from age 3 with world class teachers and don't become those people. Do they become great musicians? sure! Do they become the Pat Methenies? very very rarely. Even among jazz elite, Metheny is known as special.

And there are also has many cases of people who did not have any of that perfect-practice upbringing and and have aural awareness that is on a completely different plane from regular people. I know some of them (I'm doing a Master's in Music Tech right now). I know folks who, without the proper years of deliberate practice, are able to do things I and 99.99% of musicians will never be able to do. That does not mean they will necessarily become famous or have great careers, but they can do shit that is out of this world. One of Canada's best jazz musician's recounted to me chatting after a masterclass about music cognition how he had a college student who came to him for her lesson and could remember EVERY SINGLE NOTE of Keith Jarrett's concert the night before and play it for him. That shit is not normal, it's crazy savant stuff. From what I have read, Metheny was in that category.

Music is a funny thing, deliberate perfect practice is obviously the most important thing, but there absolutely are geniuses who do not have the same brains as us, and the top 0.001% or whatever has a lot of them. Savantism occurs (relatively speaking) often in music. If you want a counter balance to Ericsson's "practice is everything" stance (and there is lots of excellent material to take from Ericsson's work), I suggest reading Oliver Sacks, "Musicophelia", about the music related clinical stories from his career as a neuroscientist.
I use Make extensively for glue scripts or build scripts that call other tools. Make gives you four big advantages over a pure shell-script:

1. Tab completion. All major bash-completion packages know how to show Makefile targets in response to a TAB.

2. Parallel, serial, or single-target execution.

3. Automatic dependency resolution between tasks. Tasks that build files can also use timestamps to see what needs rebuilding.

4. Discoverability. Anybody who sees a Makefile will usually understand that something is supposed to be run from the Makefile's directory. Chances are good that they'll check the tab-completions too. There are conventions for standard targets like 'clean' and 'all'.

If you have a project with a build-process that has a bunch of small tasks that you might sometimes want to run piece-by-piece, Make is the perfect tool IMO.
> there are plenty of video games that action wise I have no problem letting my kid play but can't due to the story and mainly the cut scenes.

Examples?
> The small, front wheels provide stability (somehow, this is the answer I had age 7 or so).

I think that’s correct. My understanding is this:

The powered wheels are all in the same fixture. Their axes stay parallel at all times (they have to be because they are powered by a single set of linkages). To allow such wheels to go around curves, their flanges (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flange#Train_wheels) aren’t fitted tight to the rail. That means a train that only has driving wheels may not follow turns well, may start oscillating from left to right a bit, etc. The smaller wheels in front are there to prevent that by guiding the locomotive into bends.

I guess those wheels are smaller because they need not be bigger (I guess bigger wheels have larger life spans than smaller ones, but powered ones have shorter life spans than unpowered ones, and the design aims for equal average life span of all wheels)
> Just don’t forget to install the correct Ruby version

This justification for bash has always been perplexing to me. If I’m operating in an environment where my ONLY reliable infra invariant is “bash will probably work”, cleaning up the org’s infrastructure clusterfuck is probably my #1 priority.

(Or I guess in a few cases the fleet are not boxen but little embedded/iot devices, in which case you probably don't want to be running any of these sorts of scripts for a whole host of reasons...)

> of course you shouldn’t install random gems globally… Or you can just use bash and keep your sanity.

What are some scenarios where you’d need a gem in Ruby but Bash just works?

The only situations I can think of are cases where you’re using Bash to call out to some executable that does fancy things. Which (1) you can do from any scripting language anyways, and (2) means you’re just shifting dependency management from the package manager to the image/Dockerfile.

But actually, the combination of justifications here is particularly perplexing. If the org has a stable way of handling system images, then you'll know which version of $scripting_language should exist and where it's installed. The only way you end up with language version woes is if you don't have standardized infra. BUT... if you don't have standardized infra, and Bash can do things that Ruby can't without special Gems, then it stands to reason that you're in a situation where your Bash scripts depend on the magic state of individual unicorn boxes?! Which is particularly fragile and frightening and far worse than installing some local gems or whatever!

IDK. The purported benefits of Bash always sound like they flow out of environments where there are basically no fleet-wide infrastructure invariants.

"Just use $scripting_language" might be the best advice in this thread just as a sort of canary in the coalmine. I.e., if your org can't "Just use $scripting_language" because "which version?" then the team will probably benefit tremendously in an infinite variety of ways from an afternoon of infrastructure cleanup. Regardless of whether they use bash or a scripting language going forward :)
I find people's belief in Money's ability to solve problems hilarious. We've been patching over problem after problem and every bill is coming due. We need nitrogen. We started making it with hydro carbons. Now we have toxic algae blooms, AND now we're running out of fossil fuels to make nitrogen.

We've written a check we aren't able to cash. The solution isn't to keep writing checks.
Greece has dirt cheap homes in some of the most beautiful vistas in the world. It is an administrative nightmare to buy the homes, however, and the country has no realtors. Bribery can be a necessity. But it can be an amazing place to live and extremely cheap by US standards.
Cool! It's not like they haven't been working on this for decades; they've got a huge network of NGOs, non-profits, and local orgs already established. Of course, that's $6B per year. Not just a one-time deal. But I'm pretty sure Elon never bothered to read anything about the WFP, or he wouldn't have had such a glib reply.
since you mentioned Alan Wake all games by Remedy seem to have good stories backing the gameplay. Control would easily make a nice twisted TV series.
From what I've read most of the 'homes' are basically a brick/stone shell, one would easily expect to spend 80,000-100,000 (in euros) to make them habitable.
The Nikon Z9’s new sensor could be the start of a big shift in photography
The only evolution of this software that anyone is currently working on is at

https://croquet.io/
How long have you lived in Italy? If you were born there it seems that three years of stay are enough to qualify for citizenship:

https://www.inps.it/pages/standard/51985

Though I'm guessing you've probably spent much more time than me researching this already so this might not apply. Are you back in the US?
All of these suggestions are a right step. The fundamental issue is that the current system is designed to issue when in doubt; without considering the cost to society from inhibiting progress by pointlessly throwing everything through the legal grinder with extra sand (in the form of a patent minefield).

Ideally we'd start looking for an entirely different way to encourage innovation, and just cease issuing patents entirely. For example, patent-like systems with a more restrictive scope (not exlusive access to pretty much "any idea", but exclusive access to e.g. "medical approval"), so we don't accidentally hit every future sector with this junk. And perhaps we'd look for some system that's more self-regulating; i.e. where abuse exists rather in the form of ripping of the taxpayer, and less in the form of court cases. The justice system is so terribly inefficient and everything it touches, yet is just keeps on growing until everything is some kind of zero-sum game.
No, if anything Peak was written as a response to Outliers, which grossly misrepresents Ericsson's work. Peak is his popular science version of his own work, presumably to correct that. It's a good read, and can act as a guide to his actual academic papers. But bear in mind, it is still only as good as his studies, which were done on pre-professional players and athletes, not on the super-elite geniuses.

Outliers is a complete piece of shit. No professionals take anything in that book seriously, it's cherry picked extrapolated nonsense by someone who wanted a good story and has no idea what he was talking about.
I have lived for 20 years in villages like that: house prices are high. Portugal and Spain, not Italy so maybe it is worse there?
Why Limiting WIP,Starting Together,Being Less Busy,and Working Together Is Hard
Toys should have educational as well as entertainment value; this is because playfulness in young mammals (including humans) is a preparation for adulthood. The old toy achieved this as it was a mechanical machine for making sound.

The new one is just a fake, a lie. The only thing it teaches kids is that technology is incomprehensible magic that they shouldn't try to understand, a form of learned helplessness where people only rights/abilities with respect to technology is to buy it from big corporations. This is contemptible and disgusting.
You can get a pretty decent house in some rural economically depressed parts of the USA for $100k, if you look. Use zillow, set price ceiling to 100k or 110k, 2BD and 1BA or 1.5BA, start browsing map to random small towns in the midwest and prairie states.
The older I get, the more I'm attuned to the limitations of talent like Metheny. It's like how there are great mathematicians, and many of them can be strong problem-solvers and do great work, but can still fall short of "genius", because - and this is my hypothesis - they're too strong at tackling fine-grained details immediately, so they don't actively seek out the kind of abstractions that would lead to a different perspective. It's like trying to explain how you walk: "it's obvious." (even though at some point you did struggle with it) When I hear synthestites talk, they are trying to explain how walking works - it's tapping into neural pathways that are wired into the subconscious, skipping over any preliminary decoding. So they often create things that sound marvelous, bring in tons of techniques, but are at their core heavily improvised with minimal "concept" - elequent baby babbles.

For the rest of us creativity is achieved by adapting between different symbolic contexts, and this helps us explain our results when we get them, and highlights using structural abstractions. So for example music with a heavy lyrical component usually isn't in the domain of the synthestetic prodigy, because it needs crossover between poetic/storytelling skills and musical ones. They can do it, but not with the same fluidity with which they can just "sit at the keys" and get swept away.

All that said, I think Metheny's right about melody. There are tricks to improve what a melody communicates, but no particular formula can benchmark whether or not it works in the way that you can benchmark playing inside a rhythm, scale or harmony.
You "just" need to maintain a redundant backup fossil-based energy supply system that is not used 99% of the time, simple!
If there’s anything I can agree on it’s that most things in software development are potentially really good ideas in theory and awful in practice.
America’s Food Safety System Failed to Stop a Salmonella Epidemic
This-all is actually not exactly about bash functions, but POSIX shell functions: https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/V...

`local` is not in POSIX, but is so common in "posix" shells that many use it, just a sidenote.
Who said anything about it going well?

There is plenty of discomfort ahead for people who flee. Could be years of it.

Killing them is unacceptable.

The root cause of all this is a change in policing doctrine.

Current doctrine is escalation of force to compliance:

Verbal

Aggressive Verbal

Physical

Force

Deadly Force

Killing people is the current end game by design, and that is the unacceptable part. What makes it unacceptable is the initial event can literally be anything, and even an illegal order.

When the initial harm does not warrant death, neither should the enforcement measures.
IMO, an important political heuristic is "don't expect more government intervention to solve problems that are caused by government in the first place". In this case,

1. We have expensive housing because we don't build enough.

2. We don't build enough because of anti-growth city regulations enacted by NIMBY politicians elected by NIMBY homeowners.

Corporate interests and billionaires aren't the ones that keep anything from getting built. They're your homeowner neighbors with lawn signs that say "NO ON EVERYTHING" each election season.

In a supply pinch, government subsidies just inflate home prices further, pouring more money into home sellers' pockets, the same way government-subsidized college tuition has poured more money into colleges' pockets. You can't solve a government-caused supply problem with government subsidies. Instead, you have to ask yourself the hard question - do I want much more housing? Do I want economically dynamic cities to grow, with all the problems that can bring? Most voters in these cities don't, and that's why we have the expensive cities we have. There's not enough to go around, so what supply there is goes to the highest bidder.

Now, regarding China - it relies heavily on private developers. The CCP learned decades ago that people just aren't motivated to work unless they own the rewards. This led Deng Xiaoping to transform China into an effectively capitalist economy ruled by a one-party corporate technocratic autocracy. The end result is that China is still owned by rich people, they're just rich people in the Communist Party. If you think money and power are uncomfortably close in the US, wait until you learn about the CCP! If the US government had the power of the corrupt Chinese political elites, Jeff Bezos could be disappeared for months (or forever) without any explanation whatsoever from anyone, and everybody would have to take it in stride. They can build infrastructure, yes, but it comes at a heavy price. And most people are kept out of the cities by the hukou system, which is NIMBYism on steroids.
I wonder how the availability of Starlink in the truly remote areas will make remote work more accessible.

Of course being truly remote also means lack of accessibility to basic facilities that we take for granted.

But there is a certain romanticism about being able to work remotely while enjoying the beautiful vistas.
And in this case the behavior discussed is basic Smalltalk-80 not some innovation.
I’m just speculating. I didn’t do any in depth research - none of the articles or tweets by Roblox I saw offered anything more than “an internal issue”.
They are still a public company so I guess we will see the damage on Monday. Might be an opportunity to buy low.
How bad is the living condition? What if you want to take a trip to Italy and just want to buy a place to crash for a week? Bring a sleeping bag?