skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>Bash is a near-dead/dying language in the sense that OSX is pushing zsh, and there are some fundamental flaws in bash that are difficult to consistently work around (eg: see bash-pitfalls and shellcheck).

Recently tried my hand at some bash on osx and was frustrated to find that the osx version of getopt does not support long options, so it looks like there's no portable way to conveniently handle long options on osx, and forcing users to install GNU getopt kind of defeats the purpose of bash (portability)?

I guess I don't know the standard, is it reasonable to bundle in a dependency download with a simple bash script (e.g. download the correct version of getopt before parsing args)? I imagine not.

How does one properly support long and short options in bash on osx without rolling your own parser?
It's always amusing how companies redefine their subcontractor relationships depending on the situation. The same support engineer would be presented as:

1. when marketing to customers - "our support engineer"

2. when reporting on an incident - "a third party customer support engineer working for one of our subprocessors"
> -Sometimes for conversations about alternatives

So then submit a post mortem and drive the discussion there. Or alternatively post a "Ask HN" if you're legitimately considering alternatives.

> -Sometimes for conversations about the product's stability history

Which are readily available on those provider's status pages.

> -Sometimes just for solidarity in frustration

Isn't that what Twitter is for? Why should the frontpage be littered with <insert provider here>

My point is this - let's say GH goes down 8x over 2 weeks for 10 minutes each. Should there be 8 posts on the frontpage about GH going down each time? No, there should be ONE, otherwise the valuable discussions you're referring to get lost.
pretty wild how these outages are basically just tolerated now. folks just get some coffee refresh HN a dozen times and then resume work when it comes back online. no huge uproar, no exodus from GH
Do you see shipping in containers as a sign that they do know what they're doing, or as a sign that they don't?
Ironic the blog is titled "Common Sense", while the contents of the blog are asking you to discard your common sense and accept the implication that somehow the growth of interest in racial equity implies we are approaching "a totalitarian nightmare".

Here's some common sense: Most people are reasonable and aren't interested in promoting a totalitarian nightmare. If all the scary implied slippery slope stuff started actually affecting people's lives in a real and visible way, all those reasonable people would change their worldview because reasonable people want to make other people's lives better.
Let me take this perfect opportunity to shamelessly link my post which actually talks about the topic https://leadership.garden/active-listening-boosts-careers/
I see it pretty frequently. In my department of about 100, you see someone return every year or two. Leaders sometimes joke at employee departures that they will be back in 3 years.

I think it shows respect for employee autonomy and talent, and that good relations are not temporary.

It doesn't always sit well with the employees who stay and see peers getting 2 raises and two starting bonuses, but then again, nobody is stopping them from trying the same.
Thanks Peer. We are a natural fit for OSS projects/COSS companies that inevitably need these features once they start seeing interest from Enterprise customers.
> Checking errors is dreadful.

That's true, but that doesn't mean we should pretend the problem does not exist.
Using unchecked exceptions is sweeping things under the carpet. Generally unchecked exceptions should be used only for bugs (array index out of bounds) or unrecoverable situations (JVM crash, no memory). I/O does not belong there.
It's good that you offer self referrals, I think too many people avoid getting treatment due to the amount of time and energy it takes navigating the system. My journey to getting sleep apnea diagnosed started with discussing sleep quality issues with my primary care provider and a couple very expensive blood tests to rule out other things. Then I finally met with a sleep pulmonologist, who then put me on a multi month long wait list to get the sleep study equipment, and then another month after I finally had the results/justification to get my CPAP.

The CPAP worked OK, but I couldn't stand wearing the thing. I opted for surgery (UPPP, probably the most painful thing I've experienced), which has "cured" me (ironically I'm back on the multi month wait to verify my sleep apnea is gone via another sleep study). Do you recommend surgical or weight loss options to your customers? Could be a conflict of interest if you're set on recurring supply refill revenue...
I'm in this spot too. It's looks increasingly likely that an orchestration layer is in our near future. But we've got pretty far with this approach.
HN is frequently discussing outages before the status page updates...

(I recognize not in this case, but I certainly noticed this outage and checked HN before the status page was updated)
Netflix was container free or nearly so when I left in 2015, but they were starting to transition then and I think they are now container based.

At the time they would bake full machine images, which is really just a heavyweight way of making a container.
AI based ECG algorithm for ECG interpretation: Can it pass the Turing test?
I feel like AGI will be an emergent property of a network of computers rather than an individual analog-or-digital one.
If we're slinging anecdata around I may as well offer mine up as a long-underperforming student that also somehow took night classes at college for software when I was 11 years old.

The teachers may force the kids to memorize, but that doesn't mean it does them any good in the long run. I met tons of kids that memorized mathematics from 8 to 13 years of age in Canada. I struggled badly with fractions when I was 8 years old. The fact that there wasn't one canonical representation broke my little brain. Before in mathematics you could always "keep going until you were done" and the number looked like 1.75 and that was it. Now you could stop at 14/8 or 1 6/8 or 1 3/4 or 7/4 or even 1.75 again! And sometimes they made me round it all the way up to 175/100 instead! Madness!

But unlike the kids in my class that seemingly did better than me in grade 4 while I was wasting my time trying to make this slippery math reliable I naturally ended up memorizing little gems like 7/2 being 3 and 1/2 because I kept at doing the actual work over and over again until my brain remembered it for its own sake. I'm not fighting my brain and trying to squash stuff that I don't care about into it, I'm letting it make the tradeoff as to what to memorize and what to keep as I keep doing the work over and over again.

By grade 6 (age 11, same time I started college) I was starting to wonder why we hadn't learned anything in a couple years in math. When you understand the building blocks or "first principles" so well, what looks to be a new lesson (the area of triangles!) barely registers because it's such a basic application of what you've already learned before. By grade 8 (age 13) I was actually complaining that we'd barely made any progress in 5 years of education. I believe my exact words were "we've basically learned nothing other than maybe the Pythagorean theorem" and I still mostly believe that.

When it comes to things like science, computer science, visual (ie, non-statistical) mathematics, and probably economics, physics, optics, and some areas of statistical mathematics we could probably move 3x as fast if we would just really hammer home the first principles until we were absolutely sure they were sticking.

We don't let babies fill containers with soup because they haven't demonstrated that they understand what a hole is and does. I feel like too often we force children to remember that 3*7 is 21 without really making sure they understand multiplication. The key to getting a child to really learn something isn't by jumping to intentional memorization. Not with mathematics, anyway. The key is to get them to reason about it and to practice over and over again. Not to memorize, but to understand and though knowledge and understanding are different things, understanding always comes with some knowledge though the reverse is not necessarily the case.
Instead of releasing unnecessary social-like stuff they should have focused on their core git service. Seriously, what’s their uptime? Do they even have a number somewhere? Actions must be down every second day or so.
> Is it rude? sure, but not illegal.

Depends on the jurisdiction. Under the GDPR this might very well be illegal, though obviously enforcement of it is significantly lacking so it's unlikely to ever actually be tested in court.
I know a few places that do. Their systems were already super-reliable and the decision makers don't feel the need to change things just because new tools are available.
TorrentFreak is a news site for happenings regarding P2P file sharing, not a torrent tracker.
For those who don’t know the larger story here is something like this…

- Facebook subsidised the internet in places that had never had it before — effectively making Facebook free in those areas and making it the main source of news for many people.

- They have very little content moderation in these languages.

- The algorithm optimises for engagement. Anger is the easiest way of creating engagement, and lies are an easy way to spark anger — hence the inciting of violence and genocide.

- Facebook profits

Mark Zuckerberg and his staff are responsible for this, and they should face consequences — but they wont.
Makes no sense. If you're having issues wouldn't you just go directly to <insert service here>'s status page first? Why HN first?
We need to work on the hard problem of building causal models of the world, then we can build causal models of medicine on top, then we can do learning on medical records.
FixedPointMathLib.sol
I'm pleasantly surprised by the deprecation of finalizers, with a plan to eventually remove them.
Perhaps that explains why Indian and Chinese secondary education can perform so well for their top students: even if they emphasize memorization rather than critical thinking, at the end of the day they can still pick up the latter without suffering from the former.
Pemberton is one of the OG designers of the spec. He explained the motivation for the feature when it was designed in committee. It's a much bolder claim to say that because you find it useful in some other way, it's not misuse.

If you have a specific case where you think it shouldn't be considered misuse, I'm sure he'd be happy to explain to you how it should be avoided. He's a friendly guy. But you did not design CSS. He did, so you fundamentally misunderstand that the burden is on you to prove there are cases where !important cannot reasonably be avoided, not the other way around.
I've gone through many sleep apnea oral appliances. The best one is this one: https://www.smlglobal.com/zyppah-k

It might look a bit flimsy with the dental rubber bands, but that's actually the best feature. Most other oral appliances have a hook or solid point where both halves of the top/bottom mouth pieces are locked in place. What happens is that after 6-12 months of usage, the stress points will eventually break and you are left with a useless device. This has happened to me with 3 previous "solid locked" devices. The zyppah device requires you to change out the dental rubber bands every few weeks, but the flex it gives and longevity is worth it.

If you have moderate-severe apnea, just go to a dentist who also specialize in sleep apnea and get it taken care of. You would be amazed at the difference it makes.
Almost no one knows how easily you can optimize your AI models
The situation is fairly simple. Your model could run 10 times faster by adding a few lines to your code, but you weren't aware of it. Let me expand on that.

AI applications are multiplying like mushrooms, which is awesome

As a result, more and more people are turning to the dark side, joining the AI world, as I did

The problem? Developers focus only on AI, cleaning up datasets and training their models. Almost no one has a background in hardware, compilers, computing, cloud, etc

The result? Developers spend a lot of hours improving the accuracy and performance of their software, and all their hard work risks being undone by the wrong choice of hardware-software coupling

This problem bothered me for a long time, so with a couple of buddies at Nebuly (all ex MIT, ETH and EPFL), we put a lot of energy into an open-source library called nebullvm to make DL compiler technology accessible to any developer, even for those who know nothing about hardware, as I did.

How does it work? It speeds up your DL models by ~5-20x by testing the best DL compilers out there and selecting the optimal one to best couple your AI model with your machine (GPU, CPU, etc.). All this in just a few lines of code.

The library is open source and you can find it here https://github.com/nebuly-ai/nebullvm.

Please leave a star on GitHub for the hard work in building the library :) It's a simple act for you, a big smile for us. Thank you, and don't hesitate to contribute to the library!
Now their status page is up to date
Thanks for sharing, I enjoy reading about the GC changes every release.
Maybe this a good place to start: https://www.science.org/content/article/michigan-s-surprisin...
Show HN: My Book Making Probability So Easy That a Lemur Could Learn It
Probability involves a lot of extra-mathematical concepts and funny transforms. I have always had a hard time internalizing it. When I heard a couple years ago that Lemurs are actually capable of abstract math, that gave me a bit of motivation to try to finally conceptualize probability in terms of whole numbers, counts, geometric shapes, basically easy-to-remember mathematical primitives.

This book might be interesting to folks interested in predictive science, research, or just anyone who may have taken probability or statistics and might like a refresher on some of the edges of these sometimes tough to nail down concepts.

I would love any feedback or questions that anyone may have. Thanks!

Patrick Delaney
Back in 2010 I built and operated MySpace' analytics system on 14 EC2 instances. Handled 30 billion writes per day. Later I was involved in ESPN's streaming service which handled several million concurrent connections with VMs but no containers. More recently I ran an Alexa top 2k website (45 million visitors per month) off of a single container-free EC2 insurance. Then I spent two years working for a streaming company that used k8s + containers and would fall over of it had more than about 60 concurrent connections per EC2 instance. K8s + docker is much heavier than advertised.
1. Large amounts of wealth entering or leaving a community is a material change in the conditions of the community.

2. Communities have the right to a say about material changes that affect them, and to block changes whose effects they see as not in their interests. (I disagree with this part).

3. Therefore, it is unfortunate that people with money are able to enter and leave communities as a unilateral, personal spending decision.

4. It is especially bad when government policy tends to amplify, rather than blunt, the ill effects of these decisions on the poorer people who are affected by them. As policy amplified white flight through the interstate highway system and redlining, or gentrification through slum clearance and urban renewal.
I love that movie. Now I need to re-watch with subtitles!
I think it's a mix of complacency, the change to a LTS model, internal governance, and lack of awareness. The company will only get off their ass once 1.8 no longer receives any updates. Looking at some of the older tickets in the system, this was the case when java 7 was no longer supported (massive influx of migration tickets in '15).
I don't disagree, really local environments should be able to manage dev and most daily tasks, but large integration pipelines, test automations etc.

I just don't feel the need to defend GitHub here for the reason of : "Well you should be able to manage locally anyway"
With something as simple as serving git for your own organisation, when you do get downtime it's going to be a case of restoring from backup and changing DNS. No need for complicated infrastructure, so bringing it back really is that simple.

Worst case is losing commits between going down and backups, but even then it'll be minimal if you set your backup to simply push to a another origin.

I pay for someone else to worry about most services, but git doesn't have to be one of them.
It's done by your phone company and they're supposed to let you know and allow you to opt-out.
US asks European countries to increase defense spending has been a bipartisan issue for ages.
How sure are we that dark matter isn’t neutrinos?
Thanks for the recommendation. I bought this book in December, will get to it soon.
Dunno which it's more of, tragic or hilarious -- probably both, about fifty-fifty -- how they usually don't realise that they're just as stuck with their SaaS supplier.
I tend to use Docker heavily as basically just a cross-distro, isolated package and process manager that also presents config in a reasonably consistent manner. It's wildly better than dealing with "native" distro packages, unless you are all in on doing everything The Correct Way on a particular distro and have tooling in place to make that not suck. That it happens to use containers barely matters to me.
People don't like to see their favorite languages bashed. It's completely understandable.

I suppose there are many Java enthusiasts on here.
Yes, that won't change anything internal. However:

> ...JVM's internal string representation is UTF-16

Hasn't been try for a while. They switched to using a byte array internally for storage, plus an encoding. Currently that's either UTF-16 or Latin 1, unless compact strings are disabled in which case it's all UTF-16.
Been using AntTree with great success for a complex query builder. Highly recommend.
I'm explicitly saying that discrimination is not the only cause for the multimodal distribution of outcomes, and that in a perfectly demographic blind justice system you would still see such statistical groupings, assuming all people were treated equally before the law.
Grooveshark didn't use any of that. We were very careful about avoiding dependencies where possible and keeping our backend code clean and performant. We supported about 45M MAU at our biggest, with only a handful of physical servers. I'm not aware of any blog posts we made detailing any of this, though. And if you're not familiar with the saga, Grooveshark went under for legal, not technical reasons. The backend API was powered by nginx, PHP, MySQL, memcache, with a realtime messaging server built in Go. We used Redis and Mongodb for some niche things, had serious issues with both which is understandable because they were both immature at the time, but Mongodb's data loss problems were bad enough that I would still not use them today.

That said, I'm using Docker for my current side project. Even if it never runs at scale, I just don't want to have to muck around with system administration, not to mention how nice it is to have dev and prod be identical.
> Maybe the answer is that these things can’t ever be automated and if you can’t staff the process then you (and therefore nobody) should be working at this scale.

That's exactly the argument. Social media's gross margins are artificially inflated because they don't take into consideration the external costs associated with them. Traditional media businesses never got to scale to FB level and enterprise value for exactly this reason.
I don't know that I'd say "web scale", in part because I still don't think I know exactly what that means, but I used to work at a place that handled a lot of data, in a distributed manner, in an environment where reliability was critical, without containers.

The gist of their approach was radical uniformity. For the most part, all VMs ran identical images. Developers didn't get to pick dependencies willy-nilly; we had to coordinate closely with ops. (Tangentially, at subsequent employers I've been amazed to see how just a few hours of developers handling things for themselves can save many minutes of talking to ops.) All services and applications were developed and packaged to be xcopy deployable, and they all had to obey some company standards on how their CLI worked, what signals they would respond to and how, stuff like that. That standard interface allowed it all to be orchestrated with a surprisingly small volume - in terms of SLOC, not capability - of homegrown devops infrastructure.
>I wonder what the end goal is for whoever is running those ads?

To generate traffic which creates ad impressions.
‘Locked out by a robot’: Amazon Fresh accused of retaliation to union drive
pet projects can still be relevant to work.. maybe you've been wanting to make some internal tool, etc
> But it should still be possible to deploy without CI,

Solo? Yes. In a team? Less often just because you might have credentials stored in secrets that are not shared with the entire team for security reasons.

In larger corps it's easier to wait it out that go through the trouble of escalating permission requests.

But I do get your point. Personally for deployments I have Ansible playbooks that are invoked via straighforward calls which can be done locally.
>or you're not paying enough

this is not a negligible barrier. Sure you could argue that a business that isnt successful enough to hire for that expensive FTE maybe shouldnt exist at all, but a lot more is possible by being able to outsource it. And there really isnt a good reason why it cannot be outsourced from an operations standpoint - it is entirely a security problem. It's not like auth is hard to do for a third party.
I can tell you why I choose Java for my projects:

* It's very fault tolerant. In almost every case C++ would mushroom cloud, Java can walk it off. It's easy to write code that cleans itself up on error. try-with-resources is great.

* Modern JVM JIT and GC are pretty damn good, and the tooling is great.

* It's very boring and stable. I see this as the killer feature. Cool is a conserved quantity. It's extremely hard to write cool software in a cool language, as that attracts cool developers too busy getting cool jobs to maintain their cool framework you depended on. There's a lot of mature high quality libraries available. APIs are stable, stuff very seldom breaks. You can often use code that's 10-15 years old just fine. This has changed a bit lately, but it's still extremely reliable.

There are drawbacks as well, primarily memory mapping files is difficult, some of the aforementioned libraries are a bit bloated as well and overall the language sort of encourages large complicated solutions to simple problems.
If you haven't noticed, the whole point of GitHub is to infest git-using environments with so many centralized features that user's get trapped using that service. Seems like issues and actions are doing that job nicely!
Back when the facebook top ten twitter still existed it consisted solely of nut job alt-right talk show hosts. Nut job alt right conspiracy theorists being at the top of substack is wholly unsurprising.
> I see crypto projects repeating the biggest failures of monetary history...

> In physical economics, we still have those problems but we've built up regulation and fluency to protect ourselves over hundreds of years...

Those regulations are a kind of advanced technology, but it's not computer technology, so too many "technologists" are blind to it.

Most cryptocurrency technologies are pretty analogous to making a car in 2022 without seat-belts and without an effective replacement, and selling that as a feature. Seat-belt technology is ubiquitous for good reason and discarding that technology is dumb (or at least blinkered).
Ubuntu is too heavy. Try CentOS.