skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
First, ruthless pruning.

Second, subscription rotation. My family wants to watch the Battlebots season. We have subscribed to Discovery+ since that's the only place it is. While it's on Discovery+, we're catching up on the other shows we're interested in. We will be cancelling our subscription when we're done. Perhaps some other thing will pop up, perhaps not. Oh, hey, that reminds me, now that the Superbowl is done, I'm done with Peacock... {click click click} OK, that's cancelled. (Seriously. Literally just cancelled it because you reminded me of it.)

Third, some things I just won't subscribe to. I've been building my MP3 collection since I got my first CD in something like 1995. I've never gone subscription and at this point I almost can't, in the sense that I would lose too much. Lately I've been building up my Plex system rather than get too stuck on movie streaming. It's nominally more expensive, even, but it's mine, and I'm in full control of the cost rather than a monthly subscription.

The best way to avoid being trapped (or feeling trapped) by a service is to never start using it. My plan for the "metaverse", for instance, is to not. Consequently, I will never face a choice between leaving them in disgust but losing all my friends and high scores and purchased content and all the other stuff I didn't actually own, or feeling forced to compromise my principles and stay on a service that takes my money and does things I don't like with it.

I selectively break this rule but only for stuff that I know in advance I don't care if I lose. We've purchased some video from Amazon Video, but I only do that for stuff I am very confident we're only going to watch once. I only subscribe to things I know I don't care if I lose, because it isn't even just the control aspect. Something like "Oku", I don't know what that is, I've never heard of it, will it even be there in six months? Will the feature you love get "upgraded" out of existence? I just don't trust these things, and it's not because I'm just a generic old man shouting at clouds to get off my lawn, it's from experience. I've outlasted a lot of these services already. I've lost track of the amount of "content" I've added to my "watch later" list only for it not to be there when I'm ready. I'd rather just own things I can stick on my automatically-backed-up partition and be done with it.
Don't be hard to work with, but don't spend any extra effort on being effective either.

I take the sycophant model of being easy to work with, but I also make sure I don't learn anything outside my silo so that I don't get a lot of work and can interview prep.
You make a good point. Your address is yours because you own/rent said property and the address is associated to that. Your phone number also can be yours because you have the ability to transfer it from one service provides to the next. Email should be the same but the problem with email is that it is tied to a domain. Has anyone thought of a way to decouple emails from the TLD?
Agreed, I'm a solidly above average engineer. However, even as interview loops have been easier I still worry that for my age / YOE I'd be leaving valuable money on the table to go and try to start a business that at best would break even.

Thinking about a 2-3 month interview loop is pretty dreadful. At some level I'd need quite a bit of confidence in my idea and more than decent seed funding to leave my job. Basically, being very honest about how good I think I am vs what I could actually deliver.

As I get older, playing the "beg rich people for money game" is getting less and less appealing. Of course, many would describe this as just working or "wage c*cking" but IMO the latter is far more degenerate since by feeling you can only drive value by starting something you inevitably become more of a slave and create worse odds to a) enjoying life or b) being reasonably financially stable
Surely the bank's website offers the same security features, so that accounts may be accessed without a specific phone with a specific app. If not, then that bank should be avoided.
> You can't compel a company to provide you with a service.

Yes we can. We have for centuries. These entities exist as the result of the will of the people. We are the ones that allowed the concept of corporate personhood to come into being.

Rights are important, yes, but this isn't really about rights and everyone knows it. This is about Google optimizing their support staff to maximize their own ends over what would be jointly better for everyone. An email account is more important than a real address these days, and it is perfectly reasonable for us to expect that, at the very least, Google forward mail to a new account after closing it and quite frankly they should do much more than that, especially if someone is willing to pay for support time.

If Google locked me out of my accounts it would cost me around 200 or 300 hours of work. I would literally pay $25k to reverse their stupid decision over the alternative. What I'm trying to say here is that the costs of type 1 error here is completely born out on the public, and one of the roles for Government is to solve these tragedy of the commons situations.
There is a lot of victim blaming here. If Google wishes to continue to provide an email service, it should be a reasonable expectation that you don’t get your account disabled due to some automated false positive or at least have a real appeal process to reenable it. Because the opposite is true, it’s a bigger systemic problem that should be addressed one way or another.
The rules only apply to bank accounts, and there are still circumstances under which they can be frozen, but "bank just decides you can't have your money" is a lot rarer.

Edit: see Which? who are always good on consumer issues: https://www.which.co.uk/news/2021/09/why-banks-are-freezing-... : alleged suspicious activity; https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/oct/22/exclusive-h... inactivity

Traditional British solution: a QUANGO and an Ombudsman.
I agree -- I'm a lifelong chalk/whiteboard-er. Having a large space where I can write/draw/diagram is critical for me to work through ideas. Occasionally I take pictures or copy down my notes, but usually I just erase and feel like nothing is lost.

I also find the physical component of whiteboarding to be very helpful -- standing up, walking around, pacing, etc vs. just sitting down and writing on a notepad.
It's really the people who are left after you eliminate all the irrational Elon haters and the rabid fan boys.
I was going to comment on the Coptic connection; Hieroglyphs would have remained a mystery due to their basically vowel-less structure; it was an interpreted language[0]. I wonder to what extent this AI could crack that connection, since we have a more or less complete knowledge of what it ought to produce.

[0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-K5OjAkiEA
Can you no longer buy music?
Terms of Service are basically contracts of adhesion: https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/adhesion_contract_%28contrac...
This is great. If some kerbal developers see this please name a planet Jubyla in Kerbal 2.0!
Any advantage of having 50% more work days is quickly negated if your workers are unhappy, and giving them only one day a week off seems like a pretty good way of making them unhappy in the long term.
BEAM is not fast when it comes to CPU intensive workloads. "Better performance" has many dimensions, in many (most?) scenarios of web serving the bottleneck is latency to other services (i.e. Postgres) and not the processing of the web server, like you suspect in this case as well.

BEAM/Erlang/Elixir's main advantage IMHO is parallelism and "cheap" concurrency that's easy to wrap one's head around. It reuses multiple cores, and processes (lightweight threads) are both cheap (smaller stack size, per-process GC) and easy to get right (due to immutability of data structures and supervision). Also you'll get less spiky latency even under high load.

Node.js main advantages are the breadth of the library ecosystem, industry familiarity and its JIT compiler (if used correctly). At the cost of more setup one can also run an instance per core if they care for parallelism.

So I'd suggest that with BEAM he'd get quite a good performance both in terms of developer time and in serving many (network bound) requests on a multicore machine.
Don't forget high tariffs and the Jones act!
How much experimenting do you do? You could take that as far as writing it once without tests (experimenting). Then write test for what you created. Then start over and keep the tests.
1.3 microseconds per switch is typical on 10GigE ethernet. I doubt your message goes through more than 10 switches even in amazons data center.
Gmail had plenty of marketing when it started: Both the '1 GB account' and the "Search don't Sort" snippet where heavily pushed through several marketing channels at the time (paid articles, Google search homepage, among others). Not all marketing is "ad banners". For example, all those Businesswire articles are pure marketing and advertising.
But do they pay you any better due to understanding networks? Does it get you hired in an interview?

Once upon a time, a long long time ago, I had decent knowledge of networking. It was never useful, so it's greatly degraded over time. I can say that about many of the skills or knowledge I learned at school. I'm actually getting less skilled and less knowledgeable the more time I am in this job (10 years now).
Been a software engineer for about 5 years now.

One of the best roles I ever had for my professional development was as a sales engineer.

Working in a different role at a MAMAA now with less customer interaction. Yet, learning soft skills like understanding who stakeholders are and their pain points increased my efficacy by orders of magnitude.

I didn't go into this line of work with the intent of capitalizing on my people skills but there's only so far technical competence can take you.

Solving problems is the easy and fun part of the job. Focusing your energy on solving _useful_ problems while developing the listening skills and humility to understand what other people view as problems and managing stakeholder expectations is the hard part.
Yeah, that's a good point. There is a chance it is simply not a possibility in the way their systems are currently set up, but if so, that's on Google and they should change their systems to make it possible.
The point being being that Linux doesn't even matter on Android, its existence is considered an implementation detail to userspace.

If Google one day replaces it with Zirkon, even less.

Yet these people get full of themselves bashing GNU for them having Linux at all.
> AFAICT, as bad as it is already, this is only going to get worse as (1) NLP AI gets better and (2) there remains no positive defense against sybil attacks.

I strongly agree. The future of public discourse online looks dim. At that point, on one hand, platforms will certainly require more Personal Identifiable Information, which harms the privacy of regular users. Meanwhile, trolls and bots from various malicious actors will be able to dominate and control many conversations on an unprecedented scale. One would have neither privacy nor security, the web envisioned by digital utopianists as a free, open platform will be completely dead.

100 years ago, the pioneers of aviation believed the invention of airplanes would be a force to end all wars, because it breaks the power asymmetry in battlefields. But we get massive aerial bombardments on civilians instead.

> It was an idea shared by many after the inception of flight. War would become practically impossible, the brothers thought, because the scouting done by aircraft would equalize opposing nations with information on each other's movements, preventing surprise attacks.

> "We thought governments would recognize the impossibility of winning by surprise attacks," Orville said in 1917, "and that no country would enter into war with another of equal size when it knew that it would have to win by simply wearing out its enemy."

> Two years before, he had declared: "The aeroplane will prevent war by making it too expensive, too slow, too difficult, too long drawn out."

> "Yes, we thought it might have military use - but in reverse," said the 76-year-old inventor, whose brother had died at age 45 in 1912. "Because the men who start wars aren't the ones who do the fighting, we hoped that the possibility of dropping bombs on capital cities would deter them."

100 years later, the pioneers of the web believed the invention of the Web would be the force to a free society because it breaks the power asymmetry on information between individuals and the state. But we are now getting massive manipulations from all types of malicious actors.

> "Information," Gage [John Gage from Sun Microsystems] answers, matter-of-factly. "What stopped the Vietnam War was that we told the truth about what was happening. Today, the truth-telling mechanisms that we can put in people's hands are a million times more powerful," he says, wending through the ghetto fringe of East Palo Alto. "And when every person on the planet has access to that power - which is what I'm trying to do - then watch what happens."

Yes, many people now has access to that power, but some, like state actors (or just plain old advertisers), now have order-of-magnitude more power.
Haha, great. Thank you, man! Very funny :)
Very Nice and unique, I like its design a lot
yep, and that’s probably what’s going to get them in the most trouble. The platform is getting to the point where I could see it being regulated like a public utility.
What prevents someone breaking in and then re-wrapping it?
I dunno about that. Thought experiment:

The Earth is a flat disc.

Is this misinformation, wrongthink, or both?

To be sure it's a vague term applied quite continuously online but simply deflecting it as actually meaning "wrongthink" is disingenuous. There's a lot of misinformation being spread specifically about objective measurable facts. It is simultaneously true that a lot of opinions are being mislabeled as misinformation.
> Frankly, at this point the major risk factors as far as getting to orbit are done.

There's a lot more to Starship than that, right? In-orbit refueling. Heat shield. The launch tower chopstick catch. Engineering a crew space. Hell, the big window. I don't doubt they'll get one into orbit this year, but that's not what I'd define as a completed Starship program.

Even Elon knows it's notable when he hits a deadline. https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1434959550575255558
Separating design and build from operate is antithetical to Amazon. It isn’t a “figure out” for a lot of companies including Amazon — it’s very intentional and seemingly unlikely to change. They’ve observed that they create a stronger culture of ownership (which then drives getting things fixed faster and more empathy for the customers) through having the builders also be the operators.

Still needs supportive management: there are teams at Amazon who have time to fix everything which paged them at anti-social hours, and there are teams which don’t prioritize beyond minding the SLA of their COE Action Items, and more silently accrue operational debt and page people more often. Tricky balance to be sure.

Even the ‘SRE’ or ‘PE’ approaches you see at Google and Meta don’t obviate the need for development teams to have on-call rotations. At least in “BigTech” where teams operate services instead of shipping shrink-wrapped software it’s becoming rare to NOT see some on-call responsibility with engineering roles (including management). I suppose it isn’t just on-call, and the other big change in BigTech of the last decade was the somewhat widespread elimination of QA teams and SDET roles, and the merger of those responsibilities into the feature/service teams, and to SDE.
This is what we do. We literally take a screenshot when interviewing a candidate and ask them to turn on their cameras during meetings (at least the first week or so)
That’s not a thing for the entire site, so you must be confusing a ban from a subreddit with a sitewide ban, and subreddit mods are (for some reason) allowed to do whatever toxic, evil thing they want, including banning people for subscribing to another subreddit.
So... why does it look like a snail?
If you have multiple disks it does worth to use them in RAID5 or RAID6 array.
> comedic is your misunderstanding of what Bitcoin uses energy for. hint: it's not at all related to transactions per watt, in fact, Bitcoin is already capable of processing orders of magnitude more transactions than Visa through Lightning network.

Bitcoin uses energy to secure transaction processing. Every node in the network must prove that it has spent at least this much money/effort on electricity (the exact computational requirements to prove this are constantly adjusted upwards if the algorithm/hardware is becoming too efficient). This works as the signature of a block, which the miner applies to a block that it has verified contains only correct transactions.

Now, the Bitcoin network limits the size of blocks, and each transaction has a size of its own - so being able to process N blocks per second (limited by the necessary work imposed by the burden of PoW) is directly proportional to a number of transactions per second that the Bitcoin network can confirm.

Visa does the same by updating its ledger, roughly - no need to for the extreme cost of PoW, since you just trust the ledger.

Lightning is a separate technology, with different guarantees. It has definitely not been tested on Visa's scale, so any claims about its scalability should be taken with a grain of salt. More importantly, Lightning offers precisely 0 of Bitcoin's guarantees of transaction validity. In fact, if a Lightning node goes offline, its trivial to double spend bitcoin on the Lightning network - with the only risk that you may lose all the bitcoin you added to the channel if the node later comes back online and verifies this before you can cancel. It's also trivial to do denial of service attacks on a Lightning node, as you can always advertise channels then drop them, reverting all transactions at little cost to you.

> very much legal.

There is no good/service that is (1) legal to acquire in country X but (2) can't be acquired more cheaply and easily with regular money than with BTC.

Note that some goods/services that are illegal to acquire in country X may be perfectly moral to acquire - such as donations to wikileaks.
It depends on what your metric of success is. More money, individual happines, altruism?

Sure, rich parents will give someone a safety net, but I bet in most cases it yields the kids pissing in the wind.

Are they creating something they actually enjoy doing while earning a comfortable living? That's an intersection that takes a lot of work beyond just having money to find.

I would argue that the real success of a startup is in its potential to grow 'organically' rather than just throwing money inefficiently at it to try and force its success. There's a lot of competition, ideas and people carelessly throwing around money out there regardless, so I think it's a niche that requires much more than money alone to discover. More money is obviously preferred if you do find it though!
There are alleged photos of a group of them trying to set fire to an apartment complex but I'm not putting a ton of stock into those claims until they're substantiated.
We have email porting already. With a custom domain, you can point it at any mail host you like. It costs a few bucks a year.

There's no reason for a complicated legal structure to ensure mail forwarding (which just begs for abuse). Users already have the power. Use it.
Cameras and camera lenses, prototypes, musical instruments, silverware, works of art....be careful whether you are blaming the victim here.
I ran a Dovecot IMAP server using EFS for a while, before moving it to a leased dedicated server (i.e. away from AWS) with local NVMe storage. And that move did make it noticeably faster in addition to reducing the cost.
A primary feature of my note app resurface 10 random notes I made. I don't write them to forget, and I often use it to revise and expand upon my original notes, or more often these days: Linking them up and creating my own internal wiki.
People need some backstory on this one. We aren’t even sure he is really dead and I wouldn’t be surprised that this book and story is a way for her to distance herself from the very reasonable suspicions on her.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-50751899

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/11/the-strange-tale-of-...
(In France)
This appears to be the source: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ac2e35/...

Central claim: "Their revisions most profoundly reduce predicted land use change (LUC) emissions, for which they propose a central estimate that is roughly half the smallest comparable value they review (figure 1). This LUC estimate represents the midpoint of (a) values retained after filtering the predictions of past studies based on a set of unfounded criteria; and (b) a new estimate they generate for domestic (i.e. U.S.) LUC emissions. The filter the authors apply endorses a singular means of LUC assessment which they assert as the ‘best practice’ despite a recent unacknowledged review (Malins et al 2020 J. Clean. Prod. 258 120716) that shows this method almost certainly underestimates LUC. Moreover, their domestic C intensity estimate surprisingly suggests that cropland expansion newly sequesters soil C, counter to ecological theory and empirical evidence. These issues, among others, prove to grossly underestimate the C intensity of corn-grain ethanol and mischaracterize the state of our science at the risk of perversely affecting policy outcomes."
Smart contract with a dead man switch?
Lower hanging fruit?
Indeed! If someone uploads a photo of themself at a party and I'm in the photo - I never gave consent, but the uploader did. This is an important question that the court will need to answer.
The GP said:

> Commercial companies like SpaceX on the other hand, who are spending their own money

That's not an accurate description, regardless of whether SpaceX is saving NASA (and the rest of us) money.
Why is this a surprise? It’s easier to be successful when you’re taught by successful people (your parents). Not to mention other aspects, but I think this one is important. It is common knowledge that people that just come into money are likely to blow it. If they are taught well by the parents, and then have money, they’re more likely to be successful.
I suspect you're confusing API with (G)UI, but in any case here's the citation you requested:

https://www.mercurial-scm.org/wiki/MercurialApi

> Mercurial's internals are continually evolving to be simpler, more consistent, and more powerful, a process we hope will continue for the foreseeable future. Unfortunately, this process means we will regularly be changing interfaces in ways that break third-party code in various (mostly minor) ways. For the vast majority of third party code, the best approach is to use Mercurial's published, documented, and stable API: the command line interface.
Being on call aligns incentives. If it's someone else's problem when what you just design and build then it will operate less well.
> For example, a simple WordPress "hello world" is now about 2x as fast as before.

Before seeing this announcement, someone at work today literally said "the wordpress site is feeling very fast today, I wonder if anything has changed?" Great work!
Probably, but the git vs hg debate was definitely settled by the time sr.ht hit the scene.