skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I joined Fast towards the end of last year.

I didn't get as much exposure to the rest of the company as parent comment, but I'll say I saw a weird air of complacency and assumed success.

I first ignored my instincts that something was wrong, but as I saw more of how the company operated, I became convinced that the single largest problem the company had was the culture. On the surface, I agree with the parent comment, things were definitely positive, but rather than toxic, I think it was more of a naive one, like most of these people had never worked at a startup before, and didn't understand that it's always easy to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, and that if they didn't understand what they were doing and how it affected the company then probably nobody else did either. It felt like everyone was very smart, but somewhat foolish (myself included).

That being said, I enjoyed my time there, and definitely learned a lot, especially organizationally. The people are solid and I think Affirm is going to get a pretty sweet deal.
Is storage a problem for a big country like the USA? If you have a connected grid, can’t you be reasonably sure it’s windy and sunny in some places and bring power from there?

I actually don’t know
Or another way to consider it is my 2021 era $399 Jetson Xavier NX dev kit is a better computer in every way an Onyx. Other than my Jetson Nano only having 4 GB of RAM, it's also a more capable computer than an Onyx. Hooray for Moore's law and mass production.
I wrote this as an elaboration on an earlier comment:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30938604
It's really funny how Twitter manages to somehow do both these things at the same time:

1. Promise everyone to decentralize itself, aka the "bluesky" project. Except it's been a thing for ~2 years and exactly zero meaningful progress has been made. Related: didn't Jack say they wanted to open up the API again?

2. Become ever more manipulative and get in my way more and more with its engagement growth bullshit.
From the "roads not taken" perspective, Intel actually made something like a channel IO engine for the 8086/8088 family called the 8089 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_8089) which supported the 20-bit address space of those systems and proper 8 and 16-bit operations. You could write little programs for it which would communicate with IO devices and respond to interrupts on either a shared or private bus, do some processing, and then move the results to main memory.

IBM in a cost saving move grafted the DMA engine from the 8080 family (the 8237) and made it mostly work by adding a page register to cover the remaining bits and setting one up in an odd way for the 286 to get it to do IO <-> memory transfers for 16-bit devices (but unable to do memory-to-memory transfers).
This is exactly right. I write unittests first and foremost to gain confidence this shit won't blow up on me on prod. I also take extra care of them because it's by far the best documentation of the code. To me these are good enough reasons to write extra potentially unnecessary tests.
Found it myself [0]! :) I think.

<html>
<script src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/ruby-head-wasm-wasi@latest/dist/browser.umd.js"></script>
<script>
const { DefaultRubyVM } = window["ruby-wasm-wasi"];
const main = async () => {
// Fetch and instntiate WebAssembly binary
const response = await fetch(
"https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/ruby-head-wasm-wasi@latest/dist/ruby.wasm"
);
const buffer = await response.arrayBuffer();
const module = await WebAssembly.compile(buffer);
const { vm } = await DefaultRubyVM(module);

vm.printVersion();
vm.eval(`
require "js"
luckiness = ["Lucky", "Unlucky"].sample
JS::eval("document.body.innerText = '#{luckiness}'")
`);
};

main();
</script>
<body></body>
</html>

[0] https://github.com/ruby/ruby.wasm/tree/main/packages/npm-pac...
I switched from Heroku to AWS, then eventually back to Heroku. Heroku to AWS was for cost reasons (cut monthly costs by roughly 35%) but wasn't enough savings to justify hiring a devops person. As soon as there were too many issues I didn't know how to fix (setting up everything Heroku offers was hard and likely done wrong, which made ongoing maintenance some level of hell), I switched back to Heroku where the lack of devops needs basically paid for itself.
While I totally agree that process can go nuts and get in the way, I will disagree that testing always makes things slower. Once you are past the prototyping phase, and get into actual production phase (some projects never make this turn) some testing infrastructure can absolutely make thing faster. Rather than having to deal with all of the bugs that your fellow developers are just dumping into the main branch, they can help weed out some of the bugs before others have to deal with them.
> Comparing nuclear energy with the dirty business of the fossil fuel chain is a no-brainer in my mind.

This may hold if, as most of those studies do, compare the almost-certain effects that are almost-now. They fail -like any study- on vague and long term effects. Eg. who will condense health effects of radiation spread by fighting in chernobyl ruins into a reasonable paper any time soon?

So we cannot reliable know the impact of nuclear waste, that if not treated again, will be nuclear waste for 100.000 of years for some kinds of waste and this is for sure.

For fossils, we in fact can not precisely know the if reducing CO2 emissions again, if climate effects will vane in time. But we have some expectations on the intertia this system has. Still not knowing precisely trigger effects that may start processes going thousands of years (melting ice etc.) And we can expect most dust and toxic effects to stop within years, if those operations are stopped. Nature will close the holes we digged in 10s of years.

For windmills, solar panels and batteries we can be sure it's impact is not far away from it's dirty production, maintenance and recycling impact. Again, of course, one day may prove we're going to far and all wind has been stopped by windmills...
Oh well... O'Reilly themselves have been losing publishers, a lot of their books (especially containing math) are formatted like crap, their tagging is terrible. Hopefully ACM can make some direct deal with major publishers like MIT Press and Manning.
This is pointing out a symptom. Car transit exists due to massive NIMBYism spreading people out and corrupt governments that don't build good transit.

https://www.nationalbcc.org/news/latest-news/1737-ca-high-sp...

Pointing out obvious symptoms without pointing out the causes can get this "kneejerk reaction".
A 33MHz 486 was not even "standard consumer gear" in 1993 - it was a costly, business oriented machine that could cost as much as a high-end Mac Pro in 2022 (after controlling for inflation). Standard consumer prices would have gotten you a home-computer class machine like the Atari ST, that was pushing a handful of MHz. Go even cheaper and you would've had to make do with a 8-bit home computer, like the C128 - little more than a glorified desk calculator. There's not even a loose equivalent to that class of machines today, aside from deep embedded stuff that a consumer will never have reason to touch.
For those who believe in God, most of the big questions are answered. But for those of us who can't readily accept the God formula, the big answers don't remain stonewritten. We adjust to new conditions and discoveries. We are pliable. Love need not be a command or faith a dictum. I am my own God. We are here to unlearn the teachings of the church, state and our educational system. We are here to drink beer. We are here to kill war. We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us.

Source: https://quotepark.com/quotes/1336674-charles-bukowski-we-are...
It’s not population growth, just immigrantion. 1.3 million in the next 3 years and 430k this year when the population is not even 40 million. That’s not even including the hundreds of thousands of foreign students and temporary workers. There are several cities where the majority of residents were not born in Canada so it obviously has an enormous strain on everything.
It can definitely be a problem in Node.js. Assuming the workflow is read from disk -> modify -> write to disk, and that you're using the async fs functions, two async code paths running at the same time will have last-write-wins semantics and will lose data.

That's the naive scenario. If all code paths write out a global data structure, then it'd be fine. Or if the file is written append-only instead of as a single, atomic data structure, then it could be fine.
I would be prepared if I were you, since if someone like Microsoft can loose the name Skydrive to a news station, I think your odds against a nearly 50 year old company probably aren't good
There was a time I had a 20” Apple behemoth on my desk in the open plan office. Degaussing it made the image on every monitor within 3 meters curl up in magnetic agony.

It was a lot of fun.
An Introduction to Service Meshes (2019)
I believe there are projects to run linux in wasm in your browser. Maybe that's worth looking into.
> I'm probably missing some other useful tool or way of working to help with this kind of thing - let me know if anyone else has thoughts on this.

The combination of 'git commit --amend' with 'git reflog' enables creation of commits that are hidden from the usual history as shown by 'git log --oneline', but no less fully inspectable later. Likewise recoverable, by passing commit hashes from 'git reflog' to the usual tools.
The problem was that the engineers were building a scalable infrastructure rather than a scalable business.

from the article: "The average volume of Fast customers was low because most customers were from small businesses. And yet, every small business needed custom engineering work to be done, making integration slow. Several engineers mentioned how they did not understand how spending lots of engineering effort for each small client resulting in little revenue would result in building a company that could be worth $12B one day."
we are built and optimized for our respective uses cases.

eventually after we figure enough things out, it wont make sense to use any animal as a template. we wont need to take in any of the drawbacks the animal design has because our robot doesnt have to worry about the things animals have to worry about
It is a plainly idiotic user interface and threading model and the fact that it's lasted so long looks to me like evidence of extreme dysfunction within the company.

Consider also their privacy model. Twitter is the only website I have ever been a user of that lets me see more information if I log out than I can see when I'm logged in (i.e. the tweets of anybody who has blocked me). Deep confusion is on display at every turn.
What kind of stuff breaks? (not nit picking). I used to have that issue on old laptops. But I run linux on a PC now and it's been pretty much issue free. Maybe something with a major release update. But always curious about others experiences. I will say Windows updates break things as well, no experience with MacOS however.
“Many hundreds”

Last time I talked to a technical person at AWS the limit was 5GBits. Wonder what you’re doing differently.

Perhaps that changed.
This is such a revealing comment and here's why:

The reason late 90's start-ups invested the way they did is because they had no meaningful way to track the effectiveness of their ads, much less the payback. A Super Bowl ad for Pets.com seems fine if you can (more or less) guess that it adds a bunch of customers.

Since then, start-ups have built a bunch of tools to track customer acquisition costs and paybacks in a pretty sophisticated way, and some of the obviously crazier ads dies (or at least become more one-off).

But now we are in a fintech/crypto era and nobody really knows how to calculate paybacks once again, because the business model is so new vs. a traditional ads or commerce business (will this new crypto.com user do $1k of transaction volume every year for the next ten? sure why not?)

As a result of all this, we see crazy 'spaghetti on the wall' style advertising again, usually focused in the crypto/fintech space (See: this year's Super Bowl). I wonder when the music stops.
> and that if anyone had bloody hands, it was the president

An idiot that would be incapable of understanding even what was at stake.
I hate to be the bean counter, but what was the true cost ultimately? As you and your team's cost as resources.

It's nice that you ended up with a provider agnostic capability to deploy anywhere, but none of that was free in terms of ownership costs to get there.
Probably because "the windows way" seems normal and its not something most people even think if it could be done differently, let alone if it should be done differently.

In my, albeit limited, experience of showing someone how to get something on linux, the reaction usually is : "what? ....why? is it installed now?", shortly followed by : "Is there like an app i can use to install what i need instead?"
> Regarding the violence and antisocial behaviour, that's really a problem of policing and allocation of funding.

Japan has one of the lowest crime rates in the world with heavy investment in public transportation & policing, and yet they still have issues with sexual harassment and sexual assault on their trains. It’s a hard problem to fix related to population density.
Yes, and even with that "upper class" PC for business, upgrading CPU and RAM in small steps always gave you a massive gain and new possibilities, and you could keep doing that for a long long time. I'm not sure younger people who essentially grew up with supercomputers in their pocket can really feel what that meant. (No shade meant at all. I, in turn, grew up with many other things taken for granted the same way, before.)
Rotating their desktops by 90/180/270 degrees, and watching them trying to fix- priceless.
> Having a good incremental build/test system is far more important to developer experience, IMHO.

This is very true. Used poorly, monorepos are a crutch which allow a team to pretend that stable interfaces, versioning, and boundaries don't matter. Sure, your team can (theoretically) build the universe from a single git clone. Now what happens when another team needs to deal with your mess? What happens when you add some external dependency and now you have to deal with all of those problems anyway?

[You also shouldn't use git submodules to solve this, because that's basically the same thing but with the added annoyance of git. You should publish your bloody packages. With version numbers. And changelogs. Real version numbers. Real changelogs. Written by humans].

The author mentions the complexity barrier in open source, and I think that's a really interesting observation, but at the same time I think that complexity is the reason free software is alive today. It is definitely overwhelming for newcomers when a project requires a whole bunch of specific pieces that are all from different places. But once you've gotten past that, collaboration between a diverse range of people and organizations becomes an obvious and practical thing instead of a major undertaking. People don't all go off and write their own things from scratch[1], or clone code from place to place because it's too annoying to reuse it properly. Something internal feels similar to something external, which reinforces collective ownership.

Consider that Chromium includes its own everything, takes half a day to build from source, and is decidedly not a community-run project. Debian, meanwhile, is the polar opposite of a monorepo and continues to be alive and well without the oppressive shadow of a single 600 ton schizophrenic gorilla.

I think a lot of the time a team just wants a monorepo because they want a one-stop shop for fetching and building all of the things because internal dependencies are difficult. If that is the case, I think it's always worth considering something like BuildStream. It lets you specify where things are and how to build them, and it provides some useful tools on top of that. It doesn't solve brute-forcing a change across multitudes of applications, but it lowers the barrier to entry, it forces developers to care about deployment once in a while, and it can certainly help you to spot the integration issues when you change an interface without telling anyone.

[1] People will laugh at me for saying that from an operating known for having more window managers than there are text editors, but really, have you seen some proprietary software projects?
What works for me:

1) Quit all forms of passive entertainment. Just forbid yourself these easy sources of dopamine and your brain will perk up and other things will become more interesting.

2) Read Meditations
Truman was the wrong man at the wrong place and time.

It was almost impossible to have gotten someone worse.
I don't understand the objection. Every service or option has some sort of unique differences from each other, and there is always some good and bad points, including dropbox.

Google drive is free and surely pretty well backed up, but requires hoping a service with no customer support process at all just never decides to kill your account, and probably they scan your drive contents just like they do your email, or will some day if not yet.

Onedrive requires creating and using a Microsoft account and who knows how usable it even is from linux (can it do a synced folder on linux or just the browser interdace?).

Other services like Mega or idk what maybe don't have a folder sync feature or something, but are hosted in another country and possibly better protected against invalid take downs or spying.

So nextcloud costs a little more or is a little more work to set up. Yes and in trade for that there are other differences like you are the one in ultimate control of your stuff.

You may not prefer that particular set of trade-offs, but fundamentally, so what? There is always a trade off of some sort including with dropbox.
> and b: now I can't use that time for anything other than programming projects.

Read a book.
Really love the work here.

Any thoughts about pre-generating all of the tiles instead of serving them from the static PMTiles via Lambda? There must be levels of traffic at which Lambda is more expensive? Even an agressively-cached one?

It seems like the serverless implementation's worst-case is having to generate a planet's worth of uncached tiles, and the compute is a lot more expensive per tile than just generating them all + putting them behind a CDN.
The article has good points but misses the actual answer in my view to "what software engineers can learn" or in fact anyone can learn from this.

Don't join a company only because there is more money. If you don't know what one click checkout is or have any intellectual interest in it, but jump on it just because you can make more, you will be disappointed. This works the same way in everything in life.

One must have genuine interest in what they do, before compensation.
Agree with the core points, and it's not just Twitter these days. Perhaps some of it is in the name of spam prevention? But it's hard not to be turned off when every social site's mobile web url tries to get me to install an app or flat out says "not available on mobile web".

For anyone looking for alternatives, I've been building https://sqwok.im and welcome you to check it out. Sqwok is all about live discussion with fully public topical chatrooms, a simple interface, small community, and driven by desire for building a better place for conversation on the web.
i vaguely recall that mark is on record crediting eric bina with rendering engine in mosaic. at netscape bina prefered to stay away from sv, but he was quite active on usenet, as i recall.
Unhoarded, tower defense like game
Hello,

over the last weekend friends of mine have created a simple but engaging game where you defend your treasure from knights that try to steal it. I enjoyed it and wanted to share it.

Have fun :)
Is "paste without formatting" really a system shortcut? I'd never heard of it before. I feel like it might be something semi-standard that apps implement?
Just get the realtor or some random person to bid $99,999.99
> Although the design above is perfectly valid in terms of OOP, neither of these classes are actually unit-testable. Because LocationProvider depends on its own instance of HttpClient and SolarCalculator in turn depends on LocationProvider, it’s impossible to isolate the business logic that may be contained within methods of these classes.

The design of those classes is bad, and the perceived need to reach for mocks (or interfaces) is telling you that.

The next step the author takes is to go for interfaces. That's not what I'd do. Instead, I'd decouple network from calculation with intermediate dumb data structures. The network side produces the data structure and the calculation side consumes it. The network side can further be broken down with a transformation of the API call result into the dumb data structure used for calculations.

This idea comes from an old Bob Martin presentation [1]. The whole thing is worth watching to put it into context.

This is the kind of thing that never seems to get discussed in these pieces praising integration tests over unit tests. For even better results, ditch the classes altogether and just use functions. It's quite surprising how badly designs come off the rails with the "everything is a class" model.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WpkDN78P884
You don’t push feature like that for tens of millions to prevent some scrapers who bypass it in few minutes by creating account which is not providing anything to Twitter.

They account requirement is simple there for more efficient data collection.
Look into the early history of Airbnb. They did anything to survive - even selling politician-themed breakfast cereal. Yes. pg exclaimed, you guys are like cockroaches, you just won't die.

Don't know if that's the origin, but hey it could be. Without the story, calling someone "cockroach" has unclear sentiments.
Because birds have been walking on two legs for several hundred million years, back to long before they learned to fly. Humans... not so much. It is no suprise that a bipedal prey animal would be a better runner than an ape that started standing up yesturday. We are basically the only animal that walks the way we do. The bird bodyform was already the proven betatest winner long before robots were a thing.
Because if you filter for only colour you miss diversity.
By my back of the envelope calculations, they would need to raise about $10 million a month to sustain that burn rate.
Sure, but the fascination with UFO's and Nazi's ... fri!cking bizarre.
He's trolling and lampooning people that are obsessed with blindly agreeing with the mainstream-sanctioned narratives (Covid, Ukraine). The book thing is probably a comment on censorship and historical revisionism that is occurring as part of the effort to prop up certain narratives. I'm surprised he hasn't gotten called a right-wing nationalist yet.
Try mindful meditation. It doesn't work for everyone, but it helped me with a lot of the same issues. There are courses available at many colleges and online; I used palousemindfulness.com, which is free.
>There is nobody looking to buy a condo under $1MM mark competing to purchase the 8 digit figure homes in West Vancouver. The rich people selling and buying them aren't hurting at all.

The reason it's worth 8 figures is because of demand. If there was rich people to buy it they'd have to sell it for a reasonable price that locals can afford.
Tokyo's iconic Nakagin Capsule Tower to be demolished