skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Putin likes to play poker and bluff his way into advantageous situations, but he overplayed his hand. He bet that Ukraine would fold quickly to avoid major military conflict and loss of life allowing him to install a pro-Russian government. This obviously did not happen.

Worse, for Putin, the Russian military is under performing against what should be an over-matched Ukraine.

His favorite tool is to threaten others, but he just lost the ability to threaten traditional military action because if he can't easily take Ukraine how would he take Finland or Sweden, let alone a NATO country? That leaves only one remaining bluff and that is the use of nuclear weapons. He might be desperate enough to use it, but I think his own inner-circle would overthrow him to prevent it. Look at the faces of his high command in recent videos. They are demoralized. I would be surprised if he survives this.
His last commit was actually in 2012; the repository you looked at had an issue opened more recently (or a star, not sure how GitHub’s “last updated” feature works).

Hoping he responds to my email.
I am.

Using .NET Core 3.1 for quite a while to run the "batch like" jobs that get kicked off when events happen in my system (file upload in S3 -> event -> Lambda to process it). Plus a few other things, basically anything that I needed some kind of asynchronous processing to occur.

The upside for me is the system is "sorta serverless" - the main website is a Docker container that has a .NET Core 3.1 web service in it. This is now setup so that a simple "dotnet ecs deploy-service" copies the container up to AWS, and triggers the load balancer setup etc. without me having to do anything.

Similarly the Lambda functions are deployed with "dotnet lambda deploy-function" that just replaces the existing function.

Obviously this is all more complicated than doing stuff with Python, but the ability to have a single .NET library that access all my stuff, but can be executed within the Docker container or executed as part of a Lambda function makes developing an absolute breeze. There don't seem to be any downsides to using .NET for this compared to anything else.

Throw in S3 for file storage and AuroraDB as a shared database and you have something that doesn't cost a bomb to run (Aurora is the most expensive bit), is wicked fast on minimal requested hardware and bonkers reliable. The only real downside is that Lambda functions are a bit hard to do testing/debugging on but there are localised execution tools you can use to simulate AWS events that trigger Lambdas.

Overall I've been surprised how good it turned out to be. I originally envisaged my system to be running on a dedicated server but this is much, much better.
Not in Europe, and Norway is European, at the end of the day.
I'm not sure about Nihilism, but Nietzsche is certainly often misunderstood in exactly that way.
Windows is not a UNIX clone, that is to be expected, and it isn't the only OS around that isn't from the UNIX school.

Plenty of details documented across MSDN and Technet, and these old technology called books.
For those interested, similar research has been underway since 2019 in the labs of Ev Fedorenko at MIT and Tom Mitchell at CMU.
Did it really? Won't this just be another inflationary pressure, pushing central banks to increase rates?
A 30-year-old document written by someone of a completely different era (and political party) to the current administration has nothing to do with anything.

Joe Biden is not going to initiate nuclear strikes. Russia has automated nuclear weapons that would launch without human intervention, leading to the end of the world.

If Biden doesn't initiate nuclear strikes and Russia wins this war, the only thing lost would be Ukraine.

If Biden does initiate unclear strikes, the entire world would be lost.

Biden is not going to sacrifice all human life to save Ukraine.

Read up on mutually-assured destruction.
It's weird how Hacker News went from quoting Smedley Butler and Noam Chomsky to everyone suddenly being an armchair general pushing pieces around the Risk board of their minds almost overnight.
>where I'm at is Denmark and things here tend to be expensive

I'm in Australia, where the minimum wage is the highest in the world (Around US$20 for casual labour, even higher if you're covered by an industry award)!

If you want to pay $200 for an hour's semi-skilled work + $30 to throw a box away, that's on you. Unless Denmark has some incredibly odd demographics, there should be an army of dads on Facebook offering a mobile assembly service for a quarter of that price.
Anti War petition signed by already more than 900.000 Russians
Who stands to profit the most from decommissioning them all? I mean besides Schröder and Russia.
Yes.

One of the points of NATO was (and still is, especially today) to protect European countries against the USSR with the so-called American "nuclear umbrella". So to use the American nuclear deterrent to protect against Russia, also a nuclear power.
In many countries, total payroll expenditure and total number of employees are both matters of public record. It's often the only figure that's publicly available.
I live near the centre of a large city in the UK. I suspect that we here are more likely to be a target if there is a nuclear exchange than people close to Ukraine or Russia.

However, I also think that a nuclear exchange is still very unlikely. Putin is also suggesting talks on the Belarus/Ukraine border.

I'm hoping for/dreading one of those cold war fudges we had back in the bad old days. Some horse trading, perhaps a partition of the Ukraine with attendant population sorting and so on. Negotiations about force reductions and all of that.

It took the US/Alliance army of 180 000 plus air cover a month to render the conscript Iraq army non-operational and to gain some tenuous control of Iraq (or at least the major cities) in 2003. Putin must have had a time-scale of weeks in mind for this operation.

I shall be disconnecting from wall to wall news coverage next week as I do have anxiety issues sometimes. At the end of the day none of us here can do much.
That depends on how the system is organized. If there is a briefcase with a large red button, and the people in the silos don't know whether the launch is real or training, Putin's decision is literally the only factor.
I agree it is embarrassing for Caltech as well. They are one of the biggest engineering schools in North America not Greendale Community College, this kind of class is beneath them. No major research university should be offering a course like this.
To be clear, I am not surprised the invasion took place, just like I wasn't surprised the invasion of Iraq took place, but that doesn't mean I don't think it's any less dumb. Taking in pieces:

> Putin hates democracy and fears that a successful democracy next to his door will trigger his fall.

That sounds ridiculously simplistic and caricature-esque. Besides, the Baltic states and Poland have been fairly successful democracies since the end of the Cold War, they all directly border Russia, and Putin hasn't done much about that for the past 20+ years.

> He also has an obsession that Ukraine is not a real country and that it's essentially a part of Russia.

Yes, I fully understand the history of Kyivan Rus and the shared Slavic history of Ukraine, Belarus and Russia. But again, "we all used to be the same people 800 years ago" seems like even more of a really stupid reason to invade.

To put my argument in a different context, since the end of the WWII large powers have at least tried to put up a semblance of a noble argument when invading another country. In the US in Iraq in 2003, WMDs may have been bullshit, but it was at least proposed that "we are invading to defend ourselves". I don't even feel like Russia is trying very hard to make that argument - they're doing it a little with the false propaganda of genocide against Russian speakers in the east, but in general it's like Putin's not even trying to hide his "Tough shit, we're a bigger country that can take over a smaller country if we want to" rationale.
I was going to write something similar.

If you're near Ukraine and there's a plausible escalation to where you live, maybe work on an evacuation plan. Anywhere else, if you don't have 3-7 days of emergency food and water, now is as good a time as any to set that up (which is basic emergency prep that ideally everyone would have at all times). It sounds like the OP knows where to shelter if needed, which is good to know too.
SQLizer has removed services for customers in Russia
I was also CS undergrad. I see it more as a choice between industry or academia. Junior year i also had to make that decision. For industry, that then meant getting into internships, which then translated into job offers. You needed a minimum level of grades, say, 3.0, and needed to have classes on your transcript that looked more like industry software engineering, say, operating systems, databases, design. Companies cared more about clubs, extracurriculars, side projects, and of course you needed to be able to pass your interview questions.

While, if i was going for grad school instead, then i'd need a 4.0, start taking grad school classes, start talking with professors, try to get a job as a research assistant, try to find a professor that i could latch onto and start working with. And that was a path i had considered at some point, when i really did enjoy taking hard classes, going in deep, and pushing the edges of my learning.
I wish this was better explained to the public like myself.

Every now and then someone comes along and says: "there's no evidence the virus was engineered in a lab". But what would the evidence look like?

For example, is it possible to replicate a zoonotic crossover in a lab so that both hypothesis (zoonotic and lab leak) are equally probable?

> The simplest scenario is that this viral pandemic is like every other one in known history - including the last coronavirus pandemic - a zoonotic crossover.

Do you however give a positive probability to a lab leak? In what range does the probability lie according to most biologist? Is it more 20%, 2% or 0.2% that the lab leak is the correct hypothesis?
There is nothing wrong with privilege. In fact, some would say increasing privilege for oneself and their family is the purpose of life.
Welcome to the Great Smushing
If Microsoft managed to do turn around, then why they cant?
> There will no popular support and the long term strategic implications make it untenable

People just want cheap prices for gas, oil... We don't care too much about what happens in Ukraine, we just want to pay our bills. Nobody is going to be cold or hungry just to harm Russia. Capitalism wouldn't exist otherwise, and capitalism is just what the EU is about.
Gtk+ and Qt are cross platform middleware.
Some people just win capitalism.

The problem is, frequently everyone else doesn't get to play a second game.
There are no objective standards for the output of the software development process. It's a unique mishmash of building the blueprints and the final artifact at the same time. Not because we want to be a bunch of cowboys, but because the unique ability of it to be that flexible, and to be patched over time, means speed is possible in a way it just isn't in other fields, and the market has rewarded companies that move fast.

So until that's changed, I find it hard to see how we could standardize developer hiring. My coworkers and I all wear a different amount of hats with varying competence. The number and variation of certs required would be rough! "I'm level 4 backend engineer with level 3 data design [streaming level 1, traditional ETL level 7], level 1 hacky frontend dev, and level 2 devops" - sheesh, now I'm spending my whole time keeping those up to date.
> I have had literally no opportunities of applying the stuff I've learnt on HackerRank

I have. Many times.
Does China particularly _want_ enormous amounts of additional natural gas, though? Even if Russia could get it there; I don't think there's a cross-continental pipeline at the moment?
Not if it's framed as a training excercise.
The future is renewables but without storage (or fusion, which is realistically 40y out _if_ it works) then we're screwed and that's a couple of decades more development away. We need fission to bridge that gap or we're left relying on fossil fuels and missing our targets massively on GHG emissions (or we maintain Lockdown level restrictions .. and still have a short fall).
It is already happening. For example: https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/09/buffalo-philharmonic-...
You are assuming a rational actor. Putin may not be a rational actor.
Off the top of my head :

German multinationals (in the energy sector such as Siemens, Wintershall) have removed it from their strategies because Nuclear technologies inefficient and bear a lot of risks. New reactor types don't work as promised.

Government does not want Nuclear Energy because it needs enormous amounts of subsidies, and still there are regular cost overruns just as enormous. And Consortias still demand price guarantees. Worldwide the number of operational reactors is decreasing anyway. Nuclear reactors need a lot of protection (physical security) .
Instead a decentralised infrastructure is envisioned.

The German general public does not want nuclear waste, and not even nuclear transports across the country. It's a form of NIMBYism, but the point is valid.

The German anti-nuclear movement is very old, covers 2-3 generations.

Germany is densely populated and the prospect of entire countries becoming inhabitable after a single disaster of a nuclear power plant is feared and despised by many people.
This is as far as I can see accurate. He's gone full Jim Jones 'if you're with me we go down together' mode now and I don't think he cares at all about the lives of the people that will be lost on account of that.
Useful idiot
My Wurlitzer ep200 feels a bit nervous.
I can live quite comfortably on half a typical salary, and I'm available.
As I understand it, the west is freezing Russian central bank holdings. Meaning Russians will be unable to hold dollars unless they have an unsanctioned account in a foreign bank or have it as cash.

I doubt that there is much cash USD in Russian ATMs.

The paper rubles that come out of an ATM is just that. Surely the central bank can print more if the preference between holding money in the form of bank notes rather than in a bank account changes.
The Invisible Economy (2020)
Depends on the migration path. I would have though the generic directive of "get everything out of the data center and into AWS" would usually start with replicating existing infrastructure, but after the bills start coming in you need to deal with "why aren't we using this more effectively".

That's where the Lambda stuff becomes interesting. A lot of systems don't need a great deal of re-designing to shift workloads to serverless type processing if they are already doing some kind of batch system.
Just the radioactive fallout.
If you don’t like the needles comment, how about “I don’t give a shit about others”, or “I hate being inconvenienced”, or “money is more valuable than lives”. But then, these alternatives are less likely to give a shit about Ukraine, either.
Another proof that only POSIX matters.
The class is being taught in the Computer Science department, not the software engineering or programming department. I think the bigger issue is the conflation of CS and SWE.

To your point about how you interview, unless there is an alternative I would never be able to apply to your company. I have no open source contributions or code samples to share and no interest in writing a book. I also have no interest in applying to places with take home exams where the company gets me to spend time interviewing without a commensurate investment of time on their part.

Where does that leave us? I guess it’s not ideal but, at least for me, the current process seems like it’s at least a local maximum.
It depends on your job and responsibilities.

I've had managers/POs/PMs/... work 90% and simply take every Friday afternoon off.

But if you're a dev then yes, taking half a day off is pretty meaningless. I see it as a way to force yourself to take 22-23 additional days of vacation, and at least two of these every month.
Longbet: By 2027, software will be metered/sold by the second
DaVinci Ice is part of the internet, he created very pretty Photoshop works for people with good taste. I spent days trying to photoshop like him, and when I saw the lighter he engraved I died. He was just too good.

I'll help you with Leonardo. Firstly, it is sad, but not everyone can afford Photoshop. And when we speak on the internet, we don't just reply to each other, but to all. So we must switch to an Open Source alternative here.

We have two influential programs GIMP, and Krita. While I love GIMP, there is something special inside Krita. The Image Reference Tool sits above the window, it allows you to stretch a "meta-layer" over the layers of your art.

Fury, Anger, Contempt, results.

The old artists turn in their graves. Leonardo becomes secretly green with envy, and Salvador Dalí is ready to rise with a "handful" to throw at the critics.

If you allow a young artist to stretch a reference image over the entire canvas, and set the opacity to 50%, and create a camera obscura, for free, and effortlessly.

If you allow a young artist to trace original photos under Krita... like Leonardo they will be able to study, the color, the cheeks, the invisible details.

Come to RGD https://www.reddit.com/r/redditgetsdrawn/ grab a image of the face, make sure you have pen and tablet, and trace.

Day by day, you can build your own Codex Leicester by tracing one one side, and note taking on the other.

Search for "how to sell digital art" and platforms that allow you to put up paywalls, and teach others how to build their own Codex Leicester.

Do not let lairs trick you out of the practice of art, by convincing you that you must immediately know how to draw a face.

They are using imperfect techniques: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UaDogDQdpws

You are more than mnemonics, you are a genius, always have been: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQPEZdBTOeE

Art has always called to you,
and art it is an important part of every human being.

And if someone ever tells you that what you do is not art,
know that they are mad, and you are free to invent your own movement.

bryanrasmussen the best way to study the way Leonardo DaVinci did, is to begin with hyper realism in Krita. And if you are not a fan of computers then just use a wall projector, and glass for mixing and testing your colors (place the glass over your reference image to match the color you are mixing).

As to replicating the Codex Leicester art style on paper search for "sanguine pencil" that will come really close, here you can project a face outline using a mini projector, often called a pico projector.

Don't let anybody trick you into practicing the face shape first, you learn or memorize that automatically as you jump past this step (with reference images or projectors) and dive right into the gentle shadows, right into giving outlines life.

Should this approach prove to be beneath you (or other commenters in here), help the little ones, anyway. Help children begin with hyperrealism, and unencumbered with shame of nonsense, as they are - they'll become great artists in no time.
It's associated with waste that no one wants and nuclear weapons that no one wants either.

Germany had a SPD/Greens coalition. They decided to not renew the contracts with the nuclear power plants and phase them out (afaik they are allowed to run 25 years, then they need to renew that, sorry missing some vocubaulry here). The next government was CDU/FDP (Merkel 1), who decided to renew the contracts again and cancel the rpior government phase out plans. Couple of weeks later Fukushima happened. Merkel stood in front of parliament and said: "On a day like today, we can not say that nuclear power plants are safe. They are safe." That is a direct quote of her speech. In the de speech she annoinced that Germany will stop using nuclear power.

Because they had just signed the renewed contracts, the power plant companies sued Germany for the lost profit. Funnily enough, when Merkel decided to renew the contracts, they also introduced a tax on nuclear fuel, however the law had mistakes which made it unconstitutional and Germany had to pay back the taxes.

I still to this day believe that Schäuble messed up the law on purpose. It happened back during the economic crisis, when there were spending cuts on normal people stuff, and this tax was a part of the media circus of "the big corps also have to do their part". That first part is 100% fact, this last part is just my pet conspiracy theory tough :D
> There must be a better way.

There was a better way, in the history of Russia/Ukraine. After the popular uprising of early 1917, the self-organized communities (the soviets) started to reshape the country, even forming actual Communes (such as in Cronstadt Russia and Huliaipole Ukraine) in the spirit of libertarian socialist revolution of the Paris Commune, which also sparked at the height of war (1917 was the peak of WWI, while 1871 was the peak of France/Prussian war).

The problems started when Lenin returned from exile and organized a coup d'État against decentralized power (the soviets) as well as the remnants of Nation State power and applied his tyrannical doctrine of the "dictatorship of the proletariat", slowly rebuilding the State apparatus and secret services in the name of fighting the immediate threat (local monarchists and german invaders).

If you're curious about that period, i strongly recommend to read Emma Goldman. She has very detailed recollections and anecdata from that time, both in her autobiography and in her publications (such as Trotsky protests too much, or There is no communism in Russia).
Nazism, denazification, residential area artillery, and guns for everyone
A different perspective on what’s going on in Ukraine: if Azov members don’t qualify as Nazis, I don’t know who does.
German here, but I'll be a bit lazy and refer to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_Germany . I quickly skimmed over it and I think it touches the history well.

From my personal perspective, I can definitely relate being nuclear skeptic due to Chernobyl (I was 7 years old at the time) and basically constant demonstrations/problems with the end storage facility subject - for as long as I remember.

Also, at least in my memory around ~2000 it became clear that nuclear was not economically viable vs going green and that was also when the Atomausstieg was sealed by the new Schröder government which had the Greens in the coalition.

Merkel (conservative) wanted to prolong the run times but when Fukushima happened all those plans quickly turned over.

Happy to answer any questions about it.
Depends on where you are. I watch the news a lot and knew Russian invasion of Ukraine was a strong possibility. If I lived in Ukraine that would've been useful to know.
So don't hire so many people? I don't understand the problem. Why would they be hiring "extras" anyway? As backup?
Here's better, more numerate coverage: https://twitter.com/energybants/status/1498005296299622408

Also the whole thread covers other nuclear topics the press is a bit lost on. Remember, the number of nuclear engineers at reuters is 0.
I think you're not getting the full picture.
A dictator with thousands of nukes has gone rogue, saying and doing crazy things, eg. is unpredictable.
Capitalism works in peaceful times, it stops when tanks are rolling by.