skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Youtube does not punish you if you are not consistent. That is simply a myth. There are plenty of very successful youtubers who only publish occasionally or irregularly.
Reducing Suicide Risk: Cerebral's Data-Driven Safety Platform
Preview is one of my most loved pdf viewers, next to skim for latex writing.

I often have pdfs from my scanner which I want to join into a single document or remove back sides which accidentally got picked up by the duplex scan. It's so easy with preview; if only it could do ocr...
Please be sure to publish a confessional post the next time you're struggling and need a break. I'm sure we'd all like to give you the same love and respect you're affording Mr. Kottke.
Example in front of me: the MacBook Pro.

At some point when Apple introduced the touchbar someone decided that you don’t need to truly turn it off… and it automatically turns on when you press a key. Meaning that you can’t cleanup the keyboard without draining the battery first. (I tried looking for undocumented configs to turn this off… for years -well more or less since 2017)
Story time!

A client told me that they will use a DigitalOcean droplet for a web app. Because the database was very small I chose to use SQLite3.

After delivery the client said their devops guy wasn’t available they would like to deploy to Heroku. Heroku being a ephemeral cloud service couldn’t handle the same directory SQLite3 db I had there. The only solution was to use their Postgres database service.

For some reason, it was infuriating that I have to use a database like that to store few thousand rows of data. Moreover, I would have to rewrite a ton of stuff accommodate the change to Postgres.

I ended up using firestore.

---

I think something like this could have saved me a ton of hassle that day.
I don't think anyone's seriously arguing that the n-tier database architecture is, like, intrinsically bankrupt. Most applications are going to continue to be built with Postgres. We like Postgres; we have a Postgres offering; we're friends with Postgres-providing services; our product uses Postgres.

The point the post is making is that we think people would be surprised how far SQLite can get a typical application. There's a clear win for it in the early phases of an application: managing a database server is operationally (and capitally) expensive, and, importantly, it tends to pin you to a centralized model where it really only makes sense for your application to run in Ashburn --- every request is getting backhauled their anyways.

As the post notes, there's a whole ecosystem of bandaids --- err, tiers --- that mitigate this problem; it's one reason you might sink a lot of engineering work into a horizontally-scaling sharded cache tier, for instance.

The alternative the post proposes is: just use SQLite. Almost all of that complexity melts away, to the point where even your database access code in your app gets simpler (N+1 isn't a game-over problem when each query takes microseconds). Use Litestream and read-only replicas to scale read out horizontally; scale the write leader vertically.

Eventually you'll need to make a decision: scale "out" of SQLite into Postgres (or CockroachDB or whatever), or start investing engineering dollars into making SQLite scale (for instance: by using multiple databases, which is a SQLite feature people sleep on). But the bet this post is making is that the actual value of "eventually" is "surprisingly far into the future", "far enough that it might not make sense to prematurely optimize for it", especially early on when all your resources, cognitively and financially and temporally, are scarce.

We might be very wrong about this! There isn't an interesting blog post (or technical bet) to make about "I'm all in on the n-tier architecture of app servers and database servers". We're just asking people to think about the approach, not saying you're crazy if you don't adopt it.
The idea that the US is uniquely corrupt and rent-seek-y seems laughable.

There's no corruption in Italy? Eastern Europe?
Tech giants lost more than $1T in value in the last 3 trading days
Reminds me of microfiches [0], which sometimes can be seen in movies when people go to a library to read old, archived newspapers.

My dad had a catalog of spare parts from Bosch and a reader, and I loved to spend time with it to look at the diagrams. This was pre-internet days, so this was the way how large catalogs were distributed.

The precision with which they were created was impressive.

These wafers look similar. I wonder how the information density would compare if some of those chips were storage and a couple of them could be used to display the content of the storage.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microform#/media/File:Microfic...
Rephrased more generally, is it ethical to accept donations arising from criminal enterprises?

I think most people would say that the answer is no. This topic has been widely discussed on HN with regards to the MIT Media lab accepting money from Epstein.
this is your community forum

no but really, this is a good post, doesn't mean there aren't consequences
For the employee it doesn't matter. Either I keep my existing insurance or I opt out and take the state provided one, but I don't get any more money the money I'm saving the company.
You monster (j/k).

Nice font work. I’ll be greatly surprised if the Avatar sequels gain anything like the popularity the first movie had, but at least it won’t be because they used Papyrus.
In my case the premium wouldn't even come close to the marketplace cost. I'd be losing overall.
Yeah, the penalty for ACA non-compliance is zero at this point, so I think they could just opt-out entirely without cost, right?

I looked at it last year in terms of whether I'd need to pay for COBRA to cover the tax penalty and... nope. You can retroactively opt into COBRA for 90 days after the fact (iirc, check this yourself before using), so you can job hop and then if you happen to smash every bone in your body during that one week then just sign up for retroactive coverage.
I have a Ford that sometimes has a similar problem: a freeze/crash in the entertainment system makes it partially unresponsive (so it can be stuck playing whatever it was playing at whatever volume it was at) and it will just eat the battery in no time. The solution is to pull the fuse to restart the thing.

There's a big Microsoft logo badge right on the center console letting me know who to thank for that.
> Not really, there are people who get great health care for free from their employer, and others are a greatly discounted rate, who will not necessarily share savings with their employees.

Then require that savings be shared.

Make it a legal requirement that any company that has employer-provided healthcare must rebate employees the premium costs if they opt-out.
Well, I was limiting myself to jobs that through the work itself taught invaluable lessons. Less-so training for jobs type education.

I was trying to figure out the best "dealing with filthy sludge" option. Probably plumber's assistant (and drop carpenter).
Yep. And here's the tracker updated by volunteers https://diablo2.io/dclonetracker.php
If they can convince us that everything is our fault, then we'll turn to fighting amongst ourselves, and nothing will change. Which is exactly where we're at, and not just with climate issues.

Stop trusting the people on TV!
Depends on if the probability of a derailment is K per train mile, or K per car mile. And I suspect that the answer is "some of both". When a car has a mechanical failure that causes a derailment, that kind of derailment is going to be proportional to the number of car miles. Some other causes (misaligned switches, say) will be proportional to the number of train miles.
Social workers help people based on their need. Social warriors help people based on their identity. It's not surprising the two work in different ways.
I don't quite understand how you do not recognize that that is a strong argument against your position.
It's possible, but also a really poor idea. The whole point of microservices is to separate concerns. Reintegrating those concerns through the database is an excellent way to run into problems. Changes to the database schema will alter how all the services that touch it work, and now you have to manage schema migrations across multiple services and probably multiple teams.

So much nicer to expose a documented and versioned API (and/or published event stream), so that the consumers of data your service manages have some flexibility at which moment to migrate to the new schema.
Anecdata but I personally know more than a few people who moved to Nevada to avoid California taxes, so yes.
Stating that it's a comparison (which it's not) or that it's frequent does not refute the counter-example. GP's contention is "some things people say make others uncomfortable, but not because they're true, thus the fact that a statement makes people uncomfortable tells you nothing about its truth value", and has provided an example of such a thing.
Not schemaless, but typeless. SQLite will let you declare a column to be an integer and then dump a string into it, but you're still defining a table with specific columns.

It's like the opposite problem Mysql has when you try to write data larger than the field definition - Mysql will truncate, Sqlite will store the data you gave it.
> It was like a playground for rich adults who want to look progressive and humble, but are fabulously well off

If they're from Boulder, it's just real-estate money; it wasn't anything based on merit, they just got in early.

> It's a beautiful, clean, crime free city and I hated it.

That is simply not the case, in fact this is one of the worst offending police states I have ever had the misfortune of having lived in. You want to see what makes people think Boulder is crime free, look at this case that had to be taken to the Supreme Court [0], because local courts allowed for the systematic abuse and torture of a woman who was supposed to be fined on Pearl Street Mall for just smoking.

It also is old and dirty place, I lived in an apartment that had to have all the asbestos removed in 2019! The town when left to it's own devices, as in devoid of it's massive underclass that keep it functional, descends into utter chaos: see CU Boulder riots in 2020.

It has a disgusting underbelly based fiefdom that is owned by Tebo and 5 families that all collude with each other; I used to feel bad for the people who tried to make a life their... but now I think they deserve what they get which is an over-priced, over-hyped Police State that has been over-populated to such an extent that it's nothing like when I first came and decided to move their (in my case 2007). Which is typical of most tech hubs.

This isn't nostalgia, so much it is a 'going clear,' I'm glad I got to live it in it's tech hey-day 2015-2020 as a founder, and still be able to live to tell about it (I used to go to the King Soopers on Table Mesa where that shooting took place) because from what I've seen COVID really left it's mark in a way that makes me ok with never going back.

I caught a guy trying to steal my catalytic convertor in April and ended up giving him the $10 I had in my pocket: the guy couldn't get food or a place to stay in town as it was over-filled with no where to go.

My friends still struggle to pay for rent on old over-valued apartment buildings to slumlords etc...

This is a town wherein it's 'legacy families' and Tebo own so much vacant land that they could have setup camps and shelters with minimal investment just to keep Pearl Street Mall from looking like a refugee camp and keep business going but did nothing instead. And this is the type of 'pride' this town has.

That Kool-aid is strong.

0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IgbqOVtaDuk
Probably because your company can negotiate and control the population characteristics (unlike the exchange). Or is self-insured, meaning they aren’t profit motivated.

Insurance on average is always more expensive than not having insurance on average. The question is given that risk, how much of a premium can / will insurance companies take. Turns out they like high profits and low risk.
I'm not sure how they compare in terms of water, but cattle ranching could certainly be done with less impact in less dry regions as well.

One unique problem to cattle ranching in the southwest is that many of them are allowed to free range on public lands. Those cattle eat a lot of native vegetation which leads to worse wildfires and greatly harm native wildlife. They also trample cryptobiotic soil, resulting in much worse dust storms.

I wish we could move agriculture entirely out of areas that get less than 5" of rain per year, especially since so much of the country is better suited for it. Subsidies are sticky though, not many farmers will willingly give up their handouts and few politicians want to fight that battle.
Ninth journalist killed in Mexico had been alerting authorities for over decade
Nooo! Public option is not a half measure, it's a ~zero measure.

Single payer >>> public option. Public option is really easy to kill, just kneecap it any of a hundred ways, call it a failure, and then sell killing it as a tax break. It has the staying power of a cobweb on a car wheel. Failure is inevitable and it won't just be dead, it'll be held up for decades as proof that our government is uniquely incapable of doing insurance.

Contrast to single payer, which is hard to kill because people are yes paying a tax but also seeing a benefit and seeing a benefit that they didn't have before (healthcare doesn't go away if they lose employment). It doesn't suffer from adverse selection, it isn't an easy target for kneecapping, and it has a chance in hell of actually working.
That's basically what SQLite is (notably, SQLite makes an effort to be compatible with Postgres's SQL syntax). If you mean based off the actual PostgreSQL codebase, then I highly doubt it.
A City in a Bottle
Indeed, it probably was the ag and ranching interests that set up California and much of the west with a system of private water rights in 1850.

Given that this is the case, it about as difficult as nationalizing land and homes to deal with the housing crisis.
Remember that this expense is also reducing the cost of employers.

One of the best ways to finance this would be a payroll tax that is basically equal (in aggregate) to the insurance the company is (usually) already paying.
That makes no sense, salaries would simply be adjusted to compensate. The kind of bureaucracy you’re proposing is why things are already so complicated to begin with.
>You have this exactly backwards.

Hilariously I haven been told the exact opposite by another resident who lives in Manhattan. It's safe to say your viewpoint is hotly contested by some residents of Manhattan themselves.
I get that - but why was this not priced in? Interest rate rises and tapering of QE has been on the cards for a while. The economic impact of COVID is inevitably transient. Why has this suddenly dawned on the market?
Yeah, I think it was mostly the 3D hype (and great marketing) that made Avatar a success. The movie itself is more or less just the sci-fi version of Pocahontas.
Yo, fix that kerning, dawg.
Out here in the west, I have seen longer trains in the past few years, but I've been seeing mile-long trains for years. I never saw trains with more than 150 cars before the last few years, though.
The real solution is to get rid of fossil fuels as quickly as possible and by any means necessary, no matter the cost.
There's an incredibly interesting track I've been following trying to find a good latent embedding for AI to generate 3d objects, and SDFs seem like a very good representational format for this. This would, among other things, allow for a DALL-E 2 like generation framework for 3d. Google DeepSDF.
Coming from a country that has this, there should be caution: it gets more affordable, but you get what you pay for. In my country of origin, you get a partially-paid-for ride to the emergency room, where you pay for things like casts, non-ward rooms, dental care out of pocket. There is no prescription coverage. There is no optometry coverage. I would wait significant chunks of a year for procedures and diagnostics. To cover the things that aren't covered, most have private insurance through work or also out of pocket.

Since moving to the US, it is more expensive (than next to nothing), but I actually get good care. Several conditions that were ignored or misdiagnosed for me are now cured. My life might be significantly shorter had I not come here.

If NY does this, the near zero chance of my moving there ever would go to absolute 0. It is a terrible system for any place that does not have infinitesimal state or national government expenses and more-than-60% kind of taxes (e.g., Scandinavian countries).
Follow fundamentals to leave room for innovation
The idea behind MAD is that anything beyond considering their use in a retaliatory capacity should be fundamentally insane, but that depends on all engagement participants being rational actors, which isn't clearly not guaranteed.
You and I have different definitions of "billionaire".
Good shout, it’s just stupid and annoying to get nagged for shit like this. Not to mention counterproductive. I dunno, maybe I’m just overreacting.
30% of the US federal budget is healthcare spending.

https://www.usaspending.gov/explorer/budget_function

And that is only because a ton of people do not actually get healthcare, either because deductibles dissuade them or they do not pass the means testing to get enough subsidies to buy Medicaid or healthcare.gov insurance.

And that is because Medicaid severely underpays doctors to the point that if you visit a US city subreddit, one of the frequently asked topics is "where can I find a doctor that will accept Medicaid".

I think this issue can be too big for even NY or CA. It seems like it is for the US federal even, such that the political will only exists to provide healthcare via extreme price segmentation/discrimination. But most importantly, you can surely have your high risk pregnancies and hemophiliacs and cancer or whatever other high cost patient population move to the state, and the price tags on those patients is nothing to sneeze at.
Disassociating the organization from the worker, and apportioning blame to each in proportion to their authority, is a good way of putting it.

Yelling at a McDonald's worker about food is like complaining about the landscaping aesthetic of a prison to its inmates: not really their choice.
If you think employers will share the savings with their employees, think again.
There was a bill in California pretty recently, it was killed without a vote in the full chamber [1].

The window-breaking-and-repairing industry is too powerful for us to stop it, unfortunately.

[1] https://www.npr.org/2022/01/31/1077155345/california-univers...
https://www.peoplekeep.com/blog/which-health-insurance-costs...

> Nationally, the analysis found that individual ACA Marketplace premiums are 10 percent lower than the average employer-sponsored insurance premium, after the adjustments.

(Which makes sense; it's a very large risk group.)
construction physics, pointer, wrath of gnon, sinocism
The point of Litestream is that you don't have multiple servers accessing the same SQLite file. They all have their own SQLite databases. Of course, you only write to one of them, but that's a common constraint for database clusters.
Well, the story was basically Pocahontas on an alien planet.

There wasn't anything original to the plot, so...

Technically it was good, but I only watched it once, I see films, just like I read books: for the story
I'm sure it would be but I've never heard of that happening.

I once went to my manager saying I was worried about burning out bc of pushing so hard on a project with a legal deadline. Asked him to consider/look into options for me to take a month off unpaid at the end of it.

He said he'd talk to leadership about it and get back to me. I got fired the next day.
Very useful feedback, thank you.

The ordering of search results is currently very crude - it's basically just alphabetical. I plan to add "order by relevance" in the future, and I'll definitely bear capitalisation in mind.
I love this guy's books!
A lot of that R&D is already funded with our taxes via the NIH.
> may need to be copied or have their operations synchronized somehow

Maybe through some kind of non-preemptive user-space scheduling you mean?
> none of the authorities or adults in his life steered him towards work in the nuclear field

How do you know they didn’t?
I learned to code machine language on the VIC-20’s 6502 when I was 13. I think my parents paid about $200 for the computer.

It was thrilling to learn to make things even with basic, but to do much with graphics or games at the time required direct 6502 coding to get decent performance.

Good memories though. So different coding only for joy with no stress or deadlines.
"Special" in this case being non-commodity.
> Those schools have realized the value of helping their own students be successful

Are they helping them in any way other than marking what would previously have been a failing grade as a passing grade instead?
> I'm not aware of any poor Californians dying of thirst due to cost.

Lockary v. Kayfetz is a good place you can start: https://lawcat.berkeley.edu/record/1121751/files/fulltext.pd...

"With new construction halted and Bolinas's desirability unabated—or enhanced—after the moratorium, housing became pricier. In 1979, to create more affordable housing, the District allowed property owners to build second units on their property. Today [2007], property owners waiting for a chance to develop outnumber property owners with [water] meters, and homes can easily fetch $1 million."
Clustering things conceptually near each other seems like an obvious thing to do. If my understanding of embedding is correct, it should be possible to take those embeddings at possibly pull things apart along other dimensions as you discover them.

For example - the first chart "Top 10000 posts" seems (to me) to be oriented around these axis

Programming/Technical
Personal Distributed
Deaths New Stuff
Loss Future
Finance / Stock Stuff

Top 3000 Posts from Ask HN seems to be

Self Improvement
Personal Collective
Coping with Reality

Again, thanks for sharing with us a working set of tools to explore embeddings like this from a data source we're all familiar with.
> That makes no sense, salaries would simply be adjusted to compensate.

If you cut the salaries of employees who opt-out, but not those who don't, you'd be in very clear violation of the law I'm suggesting.
Very broad strokes, doctors in the US are overpaid and conservatives legislated Medicare can't negotiate drug prices. Lots of room to drive down costs. Spending is high because of a dysfunctional system driven by profit instead of care.

https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2019/03/12/702500408/are-...

https://www.healthaffairs.org/doi/full/10.1377/hlthaff.2010....

https://www.bostonglobe.com/2021/10/25/opinion/let-medicare-...

https://www.brookings.edu/research/a-dozen-facts-about-the-e...

https://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/issue-briefs/2...