skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> the UK no longer really has a vast military

Beyond the nukes another comment mentioned, the UK is also a permanent UN Security Council member, a founding NATO member and a productive member of the Five Eyes and AUKUS [1]. And it still has the world's fifth most powerful navy [2].

> substantial colonial possessions

No, but they have overseas military installations in Gibraltar and on Cyprus, the Falkland Islands and Diego Garcia. Smaller installations at Ascension Island, in Singapore and Brunei "provide important staging posts and logistical support facilities for British and allied forces passing nearby" [3]. In terms of practical force projection radius, they're in a very small club of nations.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Armed_Forces#cite_note...

[2] https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/largest-n...

[3] https://www.europarl.europa.eu/meetdocs/2004_2009/documents/...
Longitude - nonfic by dana sobel About a scientist/engineer who developed a sufficiently accurate clock to calculate longitude on an oceangoing ship in the age of sail. Which was of vast importance to sailing. The establishment was strongly in favor of astronomy based methods of calculating longitude.

Barbara McClintock is a real scientist who fits this mold, but I haven't read a biography of her to specifically recommend.
No, that's a complete non sequitur. Efficiency and noise production are not directly related, and can frequently be anti-correlated.

Just to take an example, the single-speed helical gearboxes used e.g. by Tesla are a prime example of sacrificing efficiency in an EV just to reduce noise.

Using a straight-cut transmission like they do e.g. in Formula E would be more efficient, more lightweight at the same torque rating, and a lot more noisy.
User Interface. I should've said UI, my bad.
> What would be your advice be to fresh college graduates, or anybody for that matter, who are good at programming but not at leetcode?

Were all of your college classes relevant to your career ?

Get better at leetcode - it’s a learned skill, if you can pass college CS you can pass leetcode
That part I couldn't tell you, but I haven't look into it much lately.
Is there a good source of information comparing the capabilities of assistive driving systems offered by different automakers? I see that Consumer Reports published something comprehensive in 2020, but it seems like the industry is advancing quickly. Many automakers boast new and improved systems since then.

I found this: https://www.autopilotreview.com/cars-with-autopilot-self-dri...

But the site is very Tesla-oriented, and I’m not sure if the info is up to date for other automakers. Also not sure who the publisher is or whether they are credible.

I’ve personally tried out Tesla, Toyota, and VW and the Tesla was definitely the best at the task of driving on the highway in traffic and staying in the lane when the road turned.
> All companies paying over a certain threshold seem to be taking this to ridiculous levels.

They can afford it. And assuming they are a tech company, they need that in key roles. You cannot write things that scale without solid knowledge and intuition in designing and analyzing algorithms, something that can be learned and furthered through experience.

Now of course it's true that not every job in a larger tech company is like that, so there would be some room to adjust the interview based on the exact role. And there actually is. But overall, if you have a massive amount of people applying every week, why take chances, why not take someone from the pool who can demonstrate the skill and allow for some horizontal movement within the company, into a tech-heavier team?

> And please do share your ideas for what people should do or what finally convinced you that you weren’t bad at this

For me, back then, it was something that was fun for me. Part of why I got into computer science in the first place. I would be totally lying if I said I didn't study for the most relevant of my interviews, beyond what I would have done without them.

But I distinctly remember for example freshing up some graph algorithm skills not by doing leetcode examples (I don't think "leetcode" was already a thing back then), but by arbitrarily taking the Debian package database and do fun self-made exercises like: Let's find the largest strongly connected component in the debian package library, i.e. the largest set of packages where installing one will always install all of the others.
Thank you. Detail is always welcome.

It looks as if the new language would not have helped the first problem, unless it lacks lambda support, or prevents capturing by copy. On first impression, I would chalk that fault up to over-use of refcounting, something that the new language seems like it would make worse.

The second seems like bypassing the type system, something you would have misused "unsafe" for in the new language.

I may have misunderstood something.
no, google's interview style didn't work for them. now they have the problem of having tons of junior leetcoders and need to hire a ton of technically savvy managers to ensure their efforts aren't wasted.
> Google Query: cost of an MRI in India

> Result: How much does an MRI scan cost in India? The average cost of MRI scan in India is usually between Rs. 1500 to Rs. 25000.

> Query: Rs. 25000 in US dollars

> Result: 25,000 Indian Rupee equals 321.02 United States Dollar

...so ok, there's a chance the first answer is wrong and/or there's some factor I'm missing, but assuming it isn't one must again ask the question: Why does an MRI cost $5k?

For the record, asking specifically about a full body scan did not change the price:

> Query: cost of an full body MRI in India

> Result: [...] And the full-body scan cost you between INR 18000 to INR 25000 in India.
I’ve seen the no-whiteboard list. Almost none of them hire “outside their time zone”
What I would like to see in that case is a "next gen utils", a bundling that makes it likely to find a number of these tools together in future servers.
A Confederacy of Dunces.
I’m not convinced by the logic of the “you didn’t read the article rule”. I wish we could talk about it.
This might be fine in a open regulated market. See my above comment.
Ask HN: What do you think of GraphQL?
I created a poll on Twitter here:

https://twitter.com/socializ3r/status/1527721872296665089

... go vote but would love to hear your thoughts on GraphQL.

I'm not going to bias the vote by giving my personal opinion but would love to hear yours.
Not a programmer, but a sysadmin/devops. Once had an interview at about my 15-year mark as a Linux/Unix admin working for some household names. Punk kid interviewer asks me if I know how to add a user to a Linux server via command line and, if so, please take the marker and write the command on the whiteboard. Same kid asked me why I would choose Bash over the far superior zsh and other nonsense. Kid didn't, likely still doesn't, understand that methods don't often matter, results do. Needless to say, I didn't want the job working with people like him. I found a better job working for a government contractor doing more interesting stuff working for people who just wanted results, methods not even a consideration.
lol don't spell emacs like that

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EMac
Zoom is worth less today than before the pandemic
You do realize that people's lives are being impacted, right? Running services of this size comes with responsibilities, and not just to your shareholders, but to society. You can't drive competitors out of business, then restrict access to services that have become essential.

You shouldn't argue that a farmer who was kicked out from Facebook for absolutely no reason should no longer have the right to access a wider variety of local offers for farm equipment on Facebook Marketplace, or have a better chance to sell their produce.

And you shouldn't argue that people are destined for this fate for the rest of their lives because of a primitive algorithm put in place by people who have no morals.

They are not in their right. They are abusing their position, and they are harming people.
These new tools are great but I just don't see them widely spread across many remote systems

I had smart, experience people tell me not to waste my time using the GNU tools for this exact reason back in the day
Bluetooth LE Audio Book [pdf]
There's more pictures and info on my old blog:

http://dennisferron.blogspot.com/2008/12/prop6502-laptop-pro...

Looks like Parallax still has a link to their old site, but I couldn't find the contest pages there, either.

https://www1.parallax.com/

I'm pretty sure the code I wrote for it ended up on the Propeller object exchange, but that site also is gone... It probably lives on in the migration to a github repo, but it isn't so easy to search by author AFAICT.

http://obex.parallax.com/

My picture (along with the other design contest winners and honorable mentions) was on the back of the May 2009 Nuts and Volts magazine, but I just checked my copy and there's no article inside, just the blurb on the back cover.
In addition, these kinds of things will still miss lobular ("normal" cancers are ductal) breast cancers as they don't form lumps.

15% of the women with breast cancer are waiting for a non-invasize diagnostic imaging system that can see their cancer. The only thing that can see these is an MRI with gadolinium. And that gadolinium contrast causes issues in about 1 in 1000 women, so it can't be used as a general screen.
Hah, good catch. Kind of can't believe he's still doing that after the last time [0]

0: The tweet: https://twitter.com/patio11/status/1241551327743770624

The, ah, assertion: https://twitter.com/patio11/status/1241553311024603140

> I am materially wrong about the most consequential thing I've had to have a view on in 15 years. You should probably degrade your estimate of my ability to think through complex problems.

The prediction: https://twitter.com/patio11/status/1252584289486565377

which is a link to https://www.kalzumeus.com/2020/04/21/japan-coronavirus/ , which states, on April 4 2020:

> Japan will face a national health crisis within a month.

Of course, he then edited it with a framing in which he claims:

> The core result was correct.

> ...

> This prediction was correct.

So not only was he wrong, he refuses to acknowledge or understand how and why he was wrong. And continues to tweet hashes as though we should give anything he says any merit whatsoever.
You think a professor can "train them out of the habit" in two lectures that a life time of cultural habitation built?
Seems like the ACLU should go to bat here. Isn't this exactly the sort of thing they exist to do?
Why is there a case at all and not "here is a list of contraband seized at the border" ?

I would assume the legal procedure is what determines what actually happens to the object. Just like the police arrest people but don't sentence them or put them in prison directly.
> struggling with 2 EUR/liter fuel,

Yes, exactly.

The main benefits are in context of in and around city travel. Like e.g. a regular in-city ticket (area A,B not C) in Berlin cost 86€/month (but there are many ways to get it cheaper). Now for this 3 month it's 9€ per month and covers all areas and you can even use it to get to day trip locations close to Berlin (like the "Spreewalt").

So it's really a grate deal for locals.

But if you want to travel longer distances IC/ICE are still the choice to go (if you can afford it), like Berlin->Kiel with IC/ICE is ~3.5h switching trains 1 time but with only using RB/RE it's >6h with switching 5 times.
Preliminary assessment of the International Spreading of the Monkeypox outbreak [pdf]
The difficulty is that the new table access method is very complex and hard to get right. I'm building something using a regular index access method now and it's hard enough. Once I get all that infrastructure working properly I may take another crack at a table access method.

For some purposes you can get away with a foreign data wrapper. FDWs are a lot simpler.
WalterBright was quoting the MythBusters section of the linked-to Wikipedia page, at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celebratory_gunfire#Cultural_r... .
Private gun-owning citizens are not automatically counted among active unorganized militia.

Even in the few active state militia they would be considered eligible, not members.

SCOTUS has had contradictory decisions in the past on whether private gun rights hinge on military applications of the specific firearms, but indeed this is the talking point - state militias.

Collectively, the people who parrot "Shall Not Be Infringed" are really trying to avoid the militia debate entirely.
Imo, the defining problem in healthcare and EMR security is twofold in that 1. physicians delegate tasks, often in real time, and the current identity and authN protocols themselves just don't support that delegation workflow pattern, and 2. healthcare is almost never an enterprise, it's a federation, so until we solve federated authorization in open systems, we're going to suck for the same old reasons.

Health care workers workaround was password sharing, but MFA breaks that by design. I have worked on custom delegation schemes that used obo attributes, but then it's just that - some proprietary system you have to convince EMR vendors to write an integration for.

There are a few startups doing authorization as a service, and decoupling authZ from authN, but the adoption pace in health is so slow I'd bet on that being almost a decade away from normal use. I've implemented my own delegation schemes in apps (similar to just how you invite people to a document in google docs or office), but that also presumes a document-centric application, where EMR's and a number of clinical systems instantiate a patient profile from disparate data sources using an integration facility (not unlike an SOA service bus or microservices architecture), where we're just happy to have achieved coarse grained access control, but haven't yet figured out pervasive identity for fine grained control like say, attribute level consent directives. e.g. The legacy Oracle DB or Tandem mainframe you're pulling a test result from doesn't have an integration for a XACML(hah!) or UMA2 policy definition point, and where do you put the policy enforcement points - in the app service, an integration facility, a topology manager, or said wrapper over a legacy service?

I know there are startups doing this, but as a market, healthcare is a quagmire that makes it really hard for a startup depending on traction to survive.
Delegation is solvable in a closed system or platform, but once you add federation, you need a protocol and platforms that speak it.

Personally, I don't think we need new IAM platforms (the best ones do something close to what we need), we need new protocols that support things like delegation, data tokenization, consent directives on data and other fine grained policies. Even though there are people who correctly will say, "some of these are solved problems, clearly you haven't heard of X," but I'd argue without traction with the staff in agencies who make architecture decisions about it, e.g. people whose job to know about your solution don't know about it, it's not part of the conversation.

Super interesting topic. Would love to be corrected on the current availability of something like federated delegation though.
It's peculiar to me that Folding@home never managed to get GPUs working for MacOS, given the platform's popularity: https://foldingforum.org/viewtopic.php?f=83&t=32895

As a consequence, it seems not worth installing on MacOS: https://stats.foldingathome.org/os
Projectile Fusion Approach Has Faster Trajectory to a Power Plant
>whether Tether is fully collateralized ultimately doesn't matter

There's a nuance here.

If Tether IS full collateralized, then it does not matter since a run on Tether is by definition impossible.

If Tether IS NOT fully collateralized then it may or may not matter depending on the size of the run and the ability of Bitfinex etc. to contribute capital.
> We do the dance when we swap jobs, other professions do the dance as their licenses / certifications expire periodically.

The huge advantage to the latter is that it decouples the license exam from changing jobs. This helps for two reasons:

First, it means that the friction of the recertification doesn't coincide with the friction of switching jobs. It's a lot harder to leave a bad job when you know you'll need to review for the "recertification" for a month before you can start interviewing.

Second, in these other fields your employer has a vested interest in keeping you certified, because you can't keep working if you aren't. This should mean that they're incentivized to help with the process, rather than it being something you have to take full responsibility for and do on your free time. In software, not only do your employer and coworkers not help you study for "recertification", you have to actively keep it a secret that you're grinding leetcode lest you tip them off that you're looking to switch jobs.
> I will bet you $5,000 that [...]

Sure, buddy...

Course in a good market you'd lay that risk on the order book not come fishing for suckers here...
Is there anyone still using these instrumentation based profilers (vs sampling profiler like perf)? How is it like today?

I stopped using it a long time ago since it was so slow and not thread-safe. But I occasionally miss the comprehensive coverage it had. If the situation has changed, I'd love to give it another shot.
HN could use something like this.
That's amazing, and inspiring. Thanks for sharing.
It would be interesting to know what Prussian officers thought of the battles as they soon after fought a few wars. But I can't read German.
I think care with messaging positive/negative rate is the right reasoning for a productized version of this positioned as an alternative to human radiologists. The difference here is that we know the user has a scan of their body and we can be pretty sure they couldn’t have gotten the scan without doctors already being involved.

So we don’t have to worry as much about the “Does a patient take a negative exam as ‘I'm good!’”, because in the normal flow of medicine that gets this scan the doctor will check the scan for them either way. The website probably could have better explanations of this, but most likely negatives will already be double checked independently by doctors, and positives will most likely be handled correctly by bringing it to their current current attention to double check the scan or run more tests.
Start with 100mg Niacin or less. I can report that 500mg might induce an urge to go to the ER.
On the other hand, it's a lot more difficult to implement a sampling profiler than an instrumenting profiler on a bare metal target. There's definitely a niche for the latter and I've made use of the GCC instrumentation hooks for all sorts of analysis tools over the years.
Well this radiologist could lose their job to an algorithm. That's pretty harmful to the industry.
Yeah, I figured there'd be lavender burps...
Did you grow breasts (assuming you didn't already have them)? (That seems to be a prevalent side effect)
Author here. Thank you for your thoughts! Some comments:

> How does the author suggest non-blocking DDL is actioned?

Online DDL is done in MySQL using one of the 3rd party tools, such as pt-online-schema-change, gh-ost, or now via Vitess. Running online DDL is an industry standard in MySQL since about 2009. We have recently integrated online DDL natively to Vitess, see https://vitess.io/docs/14.0/user-guides/schema-changes/manag... and https://docs.planetscale.com/concepts/nonblocking-schema-cha...

> Try creating a new table (instant) then ETL'ing your data over from the original, dropping and renaming

Alas, in an online service you can't afford such downtime. Online DDL allows you to change the structure of your table even as your app continues to interact with the database.

> It is already possible to revert a migration if you are using Oracle, using Oracle Flashback.

What I call "revert" is something else and more powerful. Once you have migrated your schema, your app keeps writing to the database. Oracle flashback means going back in time, losing that new data. In my definition of Revert, you can restore your original schema while at the same time fully retain your data, including the data accumulated since the migration. Please see https://planetscale.com/blog/its-fine-rewind-revert-a-migrat...

> This would have been a more interesting post if a possible solution to all the points was posited.

That's fair! We plan a followup post. I actually intentionally did not include any solutions in this post as I wanted to first make a statement, an observation of the state of the relational database today. At Vitess and at PlanetScale, we have indeed tackled all those points, to be discussed in the followup post.
If the object didn't commit the crime, then how can you bring a court case against it?
I have nothing but respect for Patrick, and he has done great investigative Journalism (or at least curation of other peoples journalism) but I still feel like he is cherry picking facts (that there certainly is some shady stuff going on around Tether) here to support a predetermined conclusion(Tether is bad because crypto is bad because crypto's primary use case is money laundering) which seems to be an undercurrent of all of his writing on the topic.

If we held the industry that Patrick works in to the standards that Patrick wants to hold the crypto world to we would call all of them "scams". Basically every international bank has a long history of money laundering. Every single large bank is doing much more complicated and riskier things with their balance sheet than Tether.

I don't think they are scams but I don't think Tether is either.

In many ways this is just the crypto world leveling down to the level of sketchiness that the average large bank exists at. Which is really not a defense, I dislike those banks and I dislike and distrust Tether.

But I don't think the risks of some kind crypto solvency contagion event are even as high as what's going on in the traditional banking world right now and that is given that traditional banks balance sheets at least on the surface are in the best shape they've been in in a decade.

Any way tldr: I think Patrick is technically correct but framing the large picture according to a big double standard.
Exactly! 10 years ago, I was a strong proponent of leetcode style questions instead of using college GPAs to hire engineers.

It’s the ‘Cracking’ idea that has thrown this whole process off. People have started over optimising for the metric
Just saw that bitbucket was making this change. The new behavior does not seem very desirable, especially on large projects with many developers.
I’m yet to experience a long clipboard outage.
This is a great idea! We could break ones social credit down into units. What to call them ... Rallods, maybe? Everyone could earn Rallods for doing productive, pro-social things. People could even send some of the Rallods to each other, in exchange for taking on productive, pro-social task they'd prefer not to do. Rallods could even be exchanged for goods!

Oh wait ...
Apple Won't Go Back to the Office
> (since you won't be touching leetcode-like problems in the course of your actual job)

That is not universally true.
Could return online with a log in flow that gathers credentials, maybe steal your cookies, etc.
You know, they have:

A uniform

Special tools to check the tickets and operate locks

An ID

I don't know where you live but the idea that people would impersonate a conductor(1) to get your passports is something out of a James Bond movie.

1) they would also need to incapacitate the real conductor(s) beforehand.