skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I am not a real-time systems engineer and know very little about the tech, but do know a lot about network engineering. I was honestly kind of disappointed by this article because it seemed like the network and latency side of things was just “YOLO” and the solutions were basically “interpolate with AI” and that was it. I was hoping for more insights into solving the problems but instead feel like it was more “here are ways to make it appear that there’s no problem.”

Definitely open to being wrong on this opinion.
I'm tempted to switch. I'm on Hyperoptic 1Gbps plan but I only got ~600Gbps some time lower. I noticed the switch for the whole building is only rated to 1Gbps. Their marketing is a lie. Any emails to their support got replied by "bots" with useless responses.
Uber is just a dumpster fire. I scheduled an airport ride with them and each driver continuously just kept canceling it when they saw where it was going. Can't imagine how bad it is for someone going to a lower level neighborhood.

Can't count on it anymore - going back to manually calling taxis.
Graphene typically costs $200k per ton. Now scientists can make it from trash
"Rest in Practice" (if I'm remembering the right book) would disagree strenuously with you.

Once you're doing REST instead of just "somewhat sane JSON responses" then the response has self-descriptive elements, including links to related resources. And importantly, URLs for older resources become static very, very quickly. Not unlike the internals of subversion or git.

The trick there is to realize that O(1) = O(2). If you're trying to show 25 items per page, you do not need a query that returns the most recent 25 items. That creates a situation where every single interaction is distinct from every other interaction.

Asking for 25 results and everything newer than that is barely more complicated than pagination already is.
Well plenty of fliers will live in the DC suburbs. Only the visitors will be going downtown.
This was exactly my thought. The title is 'A local, privacy first Notion alternative', but the site talks about

> can I own my piece of the new internet today?

Which screams 'digital assets'. Why do I need to 'own a piece of the new internet', why can I not just own... a set of notes on my machine?

The section which espouses the goals of the project smells similarly Web3

> We have a chance to end the nation state's monopoly on trust the same way as the printing press ended the church’s monopoly on truth.

Again like, I don't know how 'privacy-first Notion alternative' also somehow involves dismantling nation states.

Don't get me wrong, I'd love a free implementation of Notion (and by the UX of this landing page I don't doubt the developers have the resources and skills to do so), but I'd prefer that if this somehow involves digital assets and blockchains that it be front-and-center?
eBay can get away with relying on third parties for advertising, selling, and transporting goods. They are just an online marketplace.

Uber has to market themselves which needs local expertise, if nothing else to liaise with a local PR firm. Then they need local legal expertise to actually operate in the country (eBay transactions happen online, and the transport agency hired by the seller figures out how to get the package to its destination). Uber then has to have maps for every country it operates in, as well as change their standards to match local expectations.
It's a brilliant (and evil) strategy that seems to have been ushered in by Juul (now minority-stake owned by Altria.)

Vaping simultaneously made tobacco cool again (vs. uncool smoking and e-cigarettes that looked like cigarettes), added appealing kid-friendly flavors (since banned in the US but still marketed abroad), and dodged anti-smoking regulation (such as bans on advertising and youth marketing) and activism.

I'm sure Stanford's product design department is proud of the most successful product developed by their alumni (not to mention its innovative marketing.) Perhaps they can convince them to donate a Juul building to the university. And Nancy Pelosi must have been pleased to have sponsor Juul's logo displayed while she spoke at the California Democratic Party convention in 2019.
Because there are pesky things like Corporate Branding and designer preferences.

Should we restrict every digital text to Times New Roman only?
People can manually install these fonts for whatever reason (I have some for my Photoshop use) while don't want them as the "system font" (because they're not for their OS).
I said that’s the better option in my comment. Then you aren’t forcing anything. Just adding levels to the project. But forcing other developments is the issue.
It was originally called "Startup News". Putting it at news.ycombinator.com was a smart move because it prevented any confusion arising when changing its name to "Hacker News".
This is much lower-level than sqlite. In fact, you could use this as the storage layer for a SQL DB. See, e.g., MyRocks[0] which is a MySQL backend that uses RocksDB as the storage layer.

In other words, you'd use this when you just need a persistent KV
store and want to build the higher level semantics according to your application's needs.

[0] http://myrocks.io/
By "fussing with an app" you mean about three clicks?
If interest rates go high enough to stop inflation, house prices will fall to probably half what they are now. We are already at peak all-time high unaffordability (in terms of income to price ratio) in terms of house prices as a result of this bubble. A lot of people will end up underwater. And maintaining high employment is no guarantee.
I can only see giving up on Uber Eats as being foolhardy, that is a profitable business with a solid business case, yet lacking those other features would not really cause me to prefer traditional taxicabs telephone dispatch over using an app.

There's legitimately a reasonable argument that Uber rides has a worse business case than Uber Eats. If I were in Uber's shoes I would be clinging onto both.
That's interesting. Because of the aggressive expansion from VC money they now have too much bloat making it more difficult to be profitable.
Yep. It's down
Without profit many more will go unhoused, unfed, and definitely uncared for.
Well, just because we can’t reach the emptiness doesn’t mean we wouldn’t be able to observe the trend — of less and less stars towards the edge.
Research code has different priorities.

I have a set of repos I pull down for vivisecting software projects.

They would be horrific to anyone else. I do horrible things to other peoples' code. Idioms clash, the style and messaging and comments can seem schizophrenic, and you'll run into things that'll send professionaal coders running like custom instrumented versions of the language runtime. Everything that can be done wrong in them, generally is, and it's tuned for one thing.

Figuring out how to read it, why it works, and where to poke it to change it. I'm one of those people who'll sit down with an entire rcosystem of code and go Dr. Moreau on it.

...Then I turn around and push the well documented, polished, minimum viable changeset into the professional repo, and lock away the horrible atrocities I have wrought far from the eyes of Man, hopefully well enough that only God will eventually pass judgement.
I applaud the research. Of course, those organizations creating and suffering from the most bugs will be the least able to utilize such a language.
Pretty much everywhere IN THE PRESENT. When reading this statement, people will immediately come to mind with several canonical examples. What's funny is, those examples will almost invariably be targeted at the political opposition in a way that's almost diametrically opposed.

People, throughout history and the present, share some things in common: a strong affinity for contempt over other groups of people leading them to all manner of false belief and irrationality, and a certainty over their own correctness.

And in saying that... Here I am, expressing contempt over some poorly defined group of people with some hint of a suggestion that I am immune.
Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2021:

- 69% of respondents love React, 31% dread React

- 25% of developers who are not using React would like to use it (1st place among web frameworks)

https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2021
We use Terraform extensively at our organisation. Some examples come to mind that make this impractical:
- For services that do support tags, we are already reaching limits on the number of tags that can be associated with a single resource. For example, in Azure, some resources still only support 10 unique key/values
- Drift detection against write, but no read secrets mean that you cannot do drift detection over certificates, and secrets. Depending on your organisation and how they manage things like PKI, this may be impractical to track validity of the endpoint.
- Many services we manage don't have tags. For example, we use Terraform to manage Github Repositories, Actions, AzDo Pipelines, and Permissions
- Some object types simply don't have primary keys that are easily searchable by the provider, and requires some sort of composite key to be compiled and tracked.

State gives us a common schema and playing field to significantly simply the generation of dependency graphs and show drift. I imagine that even without a 'statefile', you would end up having to generate a similar graph in memory anyway.
You can change Sans-serif to whatever you want with browser setting if you hate Arial.

Chrome: https://i.imgur.com/fFnX6hu.png

Firefox: https://i.imgur.com/HDfbeYh.png

You can't do anything (other than using Stylish/Stylus, I suppose) if the dev hardcoded the font-family.
With many workloads, there's a tradeoff between the granularity of durability and the overall performance.

If a workload has many small writes (some of our product workloads do), then syncing each write can cause write amplification and massively affect overall throughput and latency. Suppose I do a 100B write, this causes a 4KiB page write to sync, which is 40x write amp. Suddenly a 2GiB/sec SSD can effectively only write 50MiB/sec. Similarly, the per-write latency goes from <5us to 10us (with the fastest Optane SSDs) or 150us (with flash SSDs).

So storage systems tend to offer a range of durability guarantees. Some systems have a special sync operation for applications to ensure that all writes are durable.

RocksDB offers a fairly weak guarantee by default too, writing to the write-ahead-log (WAL), but not performing fsyncs (https://github.com/facebook/rocksdb/wiki/WAL-Performance). They make a similar write amplification argument too (https://github.com/facebook/rocksdb/wiki/WAL-Performance#wri...).
>Software often doesn't.

And yet the world keeps turning, tech companies keep profiting, and customers are generally happy with the value provided, all without formally provable code bases. How does "provably correct" improve on this without extending timelines and costing more?
Yeah, but the heat death end of the universe is way further in the future than the Big Bang is in the past.
The HTTP spec is the authoritative source, and it’s pleasantly well-written and approachable. Set aside 10 minutes to read a few pages from this paragraph and you’ll understand this distinction better than most in the industry https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc7231#section-4.2
I don't really think humans are better equipped to route 10-15 cars in a region factoring in drivers' preferences for direction, pickup and dropoff zone attractiveness to drivers, and traffic. See this research on human solutions to the vehicle routing problem: "When comparing the human performance with the optimal solution and classical heuristics (nearest neighbor, savings, and sweep), we see that participants typically perform better than the worst heuristic and worse than the best heuristic" [1]. All of these algorithms are pretty naive baselines and you can do a lot better with actual routing software. And this being a low margin winner take all business, Uber being slightly better with algorithms makes it substantially better as an option compared to the coop.

Also I think you're underestimating the difficulty of consistent hiring. You can definitely find a good dispatcher in NYC, but can you scale that level of skill to the entire US?

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03050...
> ultimately the journey to that particular place is one of the sincerest forms of self expression I've found

This hits me hard, and thank you for expressing it.

I'm currently building a strange SaaS which brings me joy. I have no customers and a handful of people that have tried it out. I promote it here on HN every chance I get as I am shameless. It's called Adama ( https://www.adama-platform.com/ ) and it started as a way to build online board games.

Now, I have no idea how to market it, and I'm still developing it on variety of fronts. My focus is super diluted and chaotic, and I try to reign it only to discover more shiny things.

The true beauty of life is that there no right way to experience it. When viewed through the lens of an artist, much is subjective. Who is to say my idea is bad? Well, yeah, it is full of silliness, but that's the fun of it. Perhaps, I am wasting my life, but what then is the point of life?

I've come to believe that faith (which I sorely lack in a spiritual sense) is an important part of being human. I have faith that Adama is a great way for me to spend my time, and I'm currently trying to embrace the creative side of life.
Abrolhos coral found nowhere else but WA in hot demand for aquariums
According to various online calculators, the average operating cost for a Prius is about $0.11 per mile. Includes fuel, depreciation, repair, maintenance, etc...

Uber drivers are doing way better than $0.11 per mile.
Thr counterculture of the 60s had won by the 90s and now represents the status quo. The counterculture that exists now is unpalletable to regular folk (somewhat by design), but nonetheless highly creative and politically radical (in the other direction)
Damn I knew republicans were nuts but this takes the biscuit! What business is it of theirs what people do in the bedroom?
...you know why they need to do that? Because they have an incentive to let basically anyone join and have an adversarial relationship. A workers cooperative can be a faceless organisation, but unlike a company it is also an actual community, so things like vetting who let in I'd much more feasible to do you'd do in a community than in a "startup family" trying to squeeze their drivers. It could be as simple as requiring somebody to vouch for you and being responsible for whatever fuckups you do.
I hear you, I’ve burned out in situations similar to what you describe several times. Gratefully with a much shorter timeline to recover in those cases. And yeah, I’d absolutely own my responsibility for those instances, even if my workaholism was more visible. However,

> That said, if you are being worked beyond your limits, the worst case outcome for most tech workers is to leave your company and get a pay raise.

Generally? Maybe, I don’t know nearly enough to say. A lot of people have very different considerations about what factors into their sense of obligation/duty. I know that in this instance, I couldn’t ethically justify any alternative options until I knew I’d done everything I could to minimize the impact on people who had no fault in the situation, no direct recourse which wouldn’t be more harmful, and the potential impact being fairly serious relative to impact of a lot of common tech incident scenarios.
The same argument is made against helping homelessness, right? Providing overnight shelters makes being homeless less miserable but doesn't really solve the root problem.
It isn't useful because it says "the devil's in the details but I don't know any of the details. Isn't that scary?" Are you going to make decisions based on that? Armchair speculation costs nothing if you're wrong.

Also, linking your own fluff op-ed to support your point is a bad look. Consider moving the bio photo to after the conclusion.
Actually you should add in https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Link to https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html that answers the question
> And that's how the long tail becomes long tail.

Not really.

Developers should only touch production code if there is a good business reason to touch it, whether fixing a bug or adding a feature. If there is no good reason to touch a bit of code, you should not be touching it. Otherwise you're just adding noise to the audit trail, perhaps along with bugs in otherwise perfectly fine code, without any justification.

The long tail is a long tail because there are no bugs not reasons to mess around in those parts of the code. Feeling adventurous is not a good reason to mess with it. If you have to implement a feature or fix a bug, complaining that it's old code won't make things go away.
Indeed, a key point is the definition of rationality. You can argue that everyone acts rational: they make choices based on some internal logic that makes sense to them at the time of decision-making. Whether that is the flip of a coin (Twoface) or even what seems most fun and chaotic to them at that moment (Joker).

As far as I know, the fact that the logic used needn't be consistent was already known from psychology (people can provide a motivation for their choices relying on arguments that cannot possibly have actually factored in to their decision-making process).

So that also applies to entrepreneurs, apparently.
Right, thanks, I was thinking too simply about it
A comparative analysis of errors in learning from data in psychology and ML
More likely the high end ML accelerators become so specialized as to diverge from GPUs. Carry on trying to use your gaming GPU for ML, with the knowledge that professionals are using hardware 100x as powerful.
If you want a real upgrade, I swear by the cables that have integrated watt-meters built in.

It's so nice to have fast feedback about how heavily you're using a multi-port charger, to see whether your phone or laptop is charging as fast as you'd expect.

It's a pity that devices don't just report their charging figures. In Linux a lot of laptops have really good power reporting; I could tell exactly how fast my laptop is charging. Phones too know. But devices simply don't deign tell consumers what the status is, what's happening. There may be a fast or regular charge... but it's so much less than the real data. For a lot of devices, the last 20% of charge often goes very slow. Knowing that, seeing that, would be good information, for example.
Evil: the privation of a good that should be present. It is the lack of a good that essentially belongs to a nature; the absence of a good that is natural and due to a being. Evil is therefore the absence of what ought to be there.

https://www.catholicculture.org/culture/library/dictionary/i...

https://en.m.wikisource.org/wiki/Catholic_Encyclopedia_(1913...
> Because it has the regulatory requirements I detailed in my post for housing developers.

And they don't work to make housing affordable, so not achieving the end goal.

> And houses in the states aren't poor quality? Do builders over there even know what bricks are?

More than a third of Britons cannot afford to heat their home to a comfortable level: https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/articles-reports/2022/0...

My wood home is insulated, dry, and affordable to heat.
How do you sort the output?
Is this commentary on pronouns?
Formal verification needs machine readible formal specifications, but any kind of written specification, informal or not was pretty hard to find in my career at internet giants. Maybe you can get a formal spec in aerospace or FDA regulated implanted devices, but cost to write the spec, let alone to follow the spec is way too high when the spec needs to change at the whim of a hat.
I will agree that 'receipts' is part of the core product and should be retained. I didn't mention it because I'm sure we can agree it's within the capabilities of a 30-person team!

I ignored the other stuff because I don't know WTF "pickup special cases" or "on-trip experience business logic" or "growth features" are. So I'm not informed enough to guarantee they aren't part of the core product offering - although you can probably guess my intuition on the matter.
Fyi, should say Q1/22, the report from March/22.
This builds on the success of Rust, but Rust has not been a success when it comes to [number of engineers writing professional code in the language]. By that measure it's still incredibly niche compared to interpreted languages.

The main reason why formal verification has not had even the success of Rust is that most developers (myself included) don't know enough about the area to take an interest, and certainly don't know enough about the area to pursuade skeptical managers.

Unless a big company comes forward with a bunch of case studies about how they used formal verification successfully I can't see the developer mindset changing.
Where can I find a free online spell checker?
Does anyone know of a simple free online spell checking tool? I used to be able to find this easily using google but now all the results are paid subscription services that ask for money/signup.
Mechanical strain has never been anywhere near a limiting factor on the engineering of MCF machines.
What's wrong with just using `sans-serif`, `serif`, and `monospace`?
De Beers admits defeat over man-made diamonds (2018)
> I meant of equivalent quality

But they aren't of equivalent quality. That's the point.
IIUC, Uber employs 2000 engineers. I'm not sure how that's only 6% of the company.

If you're looking to trim fat - surprisingly - there might be better opportunities outside of engineering.
In this case the insticators are the warmongers, in another the need for openhardware could be the defenders. Like privacy you can't be selective about who gets it.
Exactly. In many settings it is quite a reasonable business decision to regard a bug as WONTFIX.

Here's one example:

developer: adding proposed feature A to API B may result in displaying inconsistent data to the customer, in this kind of situation <details>

team owning service of API B, some weeks later: thank you for flagging that. we have thought about this, and propose a slightly different API design B'. let's meet to discuss.

product owner: the scenario that would trigger that situation requires a combination of unusual events: it has to coincide with a scheduled batch process, and the customer would need have unusual characteristics that are rather different from the distribution we observe. When the defect happens, the impact to the customer and our business is not so bad.

developer: That's fair. given how the feature works there are many other ways it can show inaccurate data to the customer as well.

engineering manager: how about we don't fix it, does anyone disagree?

everyone agrees not to fix it

A more interesting question is to ask "in which business situations does it make sense for formal verification to be used?". If you want to get paid to play with formal verification in the day job, you'd best find a business context where it is business critical to identify and remove design and implementation defects early, and it is worth spending a lot of money trying complementary techniques for doing so.

For my above example:

- the defect is not related to a core capability of the product. if it occurs, the defect does not cause a huge impact to the customer or the business. it may mildly annoy the customer.

- how the feature works is fairly ill-defined anyway, there are many things that influence it, and it's job isn't to preserve customer data, so data integrity isn't a huge priority

- if the defect did start causing substantial problems in future, it would be possible to change this decision and decide to fix it. the cost of fixing it later might be 5x fixing it now, but it wouldn't e.g. require a product recall or risk bankrupting the company.