skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Some asshole DBA probably hurt his feelings way back.

If you have DBAs with organizational power and their shit together, they tend to ask awkward questions and tell you the baby is ugly. It’s easy for developers to do stupid shit and blame solar flares or whatever, but stored procedures are the DBAs realm, and the DBA knows who gets blamed when it blows up.

Like anything, there’s ups and downs. But if you can commit to a DBMS platform for the life of the app, there are compelling reasons to use it, even if it pisses off the devs.
So criminals can look up addresses before deciding which homes to break and enter? How is this not a good thing for criminals? Sure, less criminals may get shot. But then who are we trying to actually protect here?

Consider an absurd second order effect where, if it's true that you're less likely to be robbed by being on this register, it encourages more people to buy guns, even if it means they don't have to use them.
Resources for 50s/60's programming lore?
Looking for suggestions/resources on where to look into understanding commentary about old programming references (notes circa 1950's / 1960's)

aka. could use row on punch cards as "page number" to machine sort dropped group of punch cards, which at 2 ^ 7 gave max ~127 index references.

For higher order number of punch cards & simpler/less expensive sorting, use felt tip marker to add lambda mark along side of block of punch cards.
> letting you do this same thing on a much less consequential device than your home computer, your cellphone or your tablet

Last I heard then officially defend this apparent contradiction, the Apple rep asserted that people's phones are in fact the more important/personal devices, as well as being more common, and as such security on iOS is more important than on macOS.
That's why the religious right cares about it and not the dozens of other things they could be focusing on to save lives — from gun control to universal healthcare to environmental conservation. They won't budge on that shit.

But abortion, this one relatively narrow, highly-specific thing. That they're all over. Why?
I try to be polite, yet precise. Remember that the author likely put a ton of work into their code. I usually let them know that if they want to collaborate further, we can huddle on slack. I push others to do the same for me and have done so when needed.

I guess I will say this: Code review isn't about who can write the best code. Nobody can write the best code. Rather, code reviews help push the team to ensure that only the best code gets pushed.

I guess the only other advice I will give is to never criticize code without suggesting an alternative approach. Present that approach in the pull request and not privately. Accept criticism on the behalf of the code writer as well as others. Understand that no single developer will have the perfect solution to a problem, even when comparing juniors to seniors. I've been in this business for more than 20 years, and I still get surprised by fresh blood. If you aren't surprised, you aren't growing as an individual developer.
Well that's one way to "Increase Transparency and Information Sharing". I can't get the portal to work any more, but supposedly it also shared PII for FSC cardholders (a.k.a. pretty much every law-abiding gun owner in California).
Well, I actually don't consider it the best phone to buy; I consider it among the best hardware. I think a Google Pixel is a much nicer and more comfortable phone, although the iPhone has a far better screen and is a lot prettier, although its shape is uncomfortable to hold, even with a nice Otterbox.

I'm running GrapheneOS on the Pixel. It is perhaps ironic that the best phone to de-Google is actually a Google, and that Google both allows this and explicitly supports it, but it's not possible to de-Apple any iPhone.
Looked up the "published by Peter Thiel" to check, and found https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29835570.

It's not hard evidence that Thiel publishes or funds the project, though.
Or you could just eat as many carbs as you want, but from whole food sources with plenty of fiber like the rest of the world.
The people who usually trot out the "Facebook is a private company, so there's nothing wrong with them censoring and banning arbitrarily" line sure are quiet now.
Why is it racist to care if you're a minority? Current minorities care about it a quite a lot. Not only that -- they see a moral imperative that their particular ethnicities and culture exist. Are some groups "allowed" this, and not others?

Of course the term minority/majority is relative to the scope you're talking about, too. The "majority" of Americans are global minorities.
I used to use it until the pandemic. It's a horror show in comparison now. Some lines used to be horror shows before, too, but it was mostly only bad outside of Manhattan.
I don't see anything on this page that indicates the headline. A quick search on Twitter doesn't yield any results either. Are there redacted screenshots as proof? Anyone covering the leak?
Right. In the US market Atari never mattered again after the VCS/2600. The successor 5200 didn’t do well. Neither did the 7800 which they inexplicably held onto for a few years before release until it was up against the NES.

I can’t speak authoritatively to the micro computers, but I’m under the impression that the Atari line of 8-bits was never very popular in the US. I’ve always gotten the feeling computers played second fiddle to consoles once the NES arrived until the IBM clones started to get good at games much later.
Revealing information on private citizens is transparency?
Ha! Ok! I guess that is slightly less useful.
In the US, we can't even compel people to donate a kidney to save a life after they're dead.
From article:

"There is a simple way of... [accurately ascertaining] if a novice can indeed land an airliner, according to Patrick Smith: use a professional flight simulator, the kind airlines train their pilots with.

"Stick a person in a true, full-motion airline simulator at 35,000 feet, with no help, and watch what happens," he says. "It won't be pretty."
Or so that criminals know whose house to break into (when unoccupied) to steal guns.

This seems intended just to shame and intimidate lawful gun owners (in response to the SCOTUS ruling?).
I live in Texas, but plan on moving out of state soon to somewhere more reasonable. Once I do, I will mail abortifacients to anyone I know who needs it, including people who reach out to me online.
"Property values" are a cop out objection. They're almost impossible to prove one way or another, but they are a dog whistle for people who object to change in general.

It's almost impossible to tell what buyers will think of any particular change to a neighbourhood, and buyers are the ones who determine property value not the owners. But owners hear "property values" and they see their nest egg evaporating away and so of course they join in the objection.
If they're bad citizens, yes?
SpaceDotBiz is a newsletter about the space industry that has been interesting to read, with a free tier on Substack. A past article that stood out was a Q&A interview with a space industry journalist who moved on to become an industry analyst (2021): https://spacedotbiz.substack.com/p/caleb-henry

Limitations of the newsletter include its lack of criticism and investigative work, as this looks out-of-scope of its focus. Many of the articles have been friendly interviews with people in the space industry, and the most bearish article about the space industry ("Is The Commercial Space Industry Here to Stay?") concluded on an optimistic note.

Other, more critical sources would be welcome to develop a much more complete picture of the industry. I haven't sought out a specialized source for critical space industry articles, though critical articles do appear occasionally in major newspapers (e.g. the Financial Times and The Economist).
I think it got either hugged to death or removed
Automation is the answer. Food, housing, medical care are the main things for the aged out for the society to take are about. Automation will solve food. Less people less housing needed. And the medical care productivity will be significantly improved by the automation.

Currently growing population seems to still be an economically net-positive thing as we still need people in order to do new and bigger things. I think though that soon it will become net-negative as average person's total lifetime productivity will be losing to automation and you don't need 20+ years to start the robot up and 20+ years to take care about that robot once it got worn out. In that situation we'd better have less people yet more educated, trained etc. in order to be productive beyond what is replaceable by more and more automation.
> but if you can't declare and populate an associative array in the main language you're interviewing in you shouldn't be surprised if your interviewer fails you.

What if I can google how to do that in all of the languages I've used (and many I haven't) faster than most can write it out from memory? How do I convey that to you and what is it worth to you?

Wrote memorization like that is one of my weaknesses but I can compensate for it. I heard an interesting theory that one aspect of intelligence is how efficiently you can forget information that you don't benefit from retaining. If our brains have finite storage capacity that seems pretty logical.
> for FSC cardholders

and also apparently anyone who had simply applied
Removed according to the reddit thread.
Not sure about this specific stretch, but there is at least one stretch where they elevated the track to get over a stubborn farmer's land who refused to sell.

Apparently eminent domain can take a really long time if the landowner is dead-set on mucking up the process with lawyers, so they just went over his land instead of dividing it, mainly to send a message to any potential future holdouts. (i.e. He could've just accepted the generous offer, but instead got paid nothing.)
If you’re worried about package interception I’d recommend just trying to buy your electronics at a local retailer. Decide which one you’re going to right as you walk out the door so there’s no reasonable way someone can even predict where you’re going.

Though if that’s a legitimate part of your threat model, you’re in a very difficult situation.
I'm modeling the GP's comment, but I think a common case is something like a polymorphic user/organization entity like GitHub: there is some kind of base user that is usable in a lot of places (e.g. https://github.com/<username>) but there's also a load of distinct organization-specific fields and a load of distinct user-specific fields.
Criminals might case a house and specifically rob a house that has guns to rob them when they leave. Might as well get a gun in the theft.
Everyone was caught pants down with the sudden downturn. I am honestly surprised that people expected to keep this gravy train running but I guess the Russian war threw the monkey wrench in the works.

In Absolute terms of capital destruction, the current downturn is the worst ever in this history of US .. so far.

And paulg from yc is wrong that its just capital shuffling. he probably doesn't understand that much more money is created by mortgage loans than QE. Bankruptcies, QT and even loan repayment all remove/destroy money from the pool.
Yes that too. There was a violent case of this in Perth, Australia recently[1], after the gun ownership database was leaked.

[1] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-05-28/man-set-alight-guns-s...
The Sierra club is more of an outdoorsman club than an environmental club. The interests overlap sometimes, but often they do not and you end up with situations like this. They want to preserve nature, not the environment. And no, this doesn't cause cognitive dissonance in them somehow.
They appear to have posted people's information who are lawful gun owners. That isn't bad citizens unless you think gun ownership means you are a bad citizen?
What's the goal here? Convince law abiding citizens to leave California?
I agree. I have some kind of design hierarchy. Database -> Architecture -> Services for outside consumers -> Backend -> Frontend. Things coming first must be designed more thoroughly as they're likely to live longer. Proper database design is paramount. Spend as much time as necessary. Iterate before going live as long as necessary to ensure that design is sound. Because it's so much harder to change database later. Trivial changes often require huge efforts.
Is this one of those situations where it's conceptually a public record in that it's always been available via a filing cabinet at a public library, but when placed on the global internet, it causes problems?
Why Does Tech Do This to Grownups
Pretty sure you have this backward. Landlords don’t get to decide how much people are willing to pay to rent. They charge the market clearing price (or as close to it as possible).

This isn’t based on what they paid for the property, though the value of a property will at least in part be based on the income it can generate.

If rents seem too high, it is because demand has outstripped supply, and the marginal renter in the market has more money than you do. If you want rent to come down for everyone, you can:

1. Reduce demand by making the area less desirable.

2. Increase supply by making more rental units.

Rent control is just a lottery that benefits the people lucky enough to get it at the expense of everyone else.

I had a rent controlled apartment for 5 years in San Francisco. Which, incidentally, I was subletting from someone who had moved to LA but didn’t want to lose his place in case he came back. In no way was I deserving of special financial treatment, I had a high paid tech job, and a wife making decent money. Anyone else who moved into my neighborhood was paying literally double when I left.

It was nice to randomly get a $20k/year windfall, but did not feel like sound housing policy.
I’m curious, in what way do you feel that “Rust's decision-making committee lacks integrity”?
Yeah I had only ever seen one Atari 80bit PC, maybe an 800 and one Coleco Adam. I also saw Atari STs at Toys R Us but only knew two people in the US with one that I met through BBSes.
Next up on the chopping block: Zoom and CRM.

CRM insider sales: http://openinsider.com/search?q=CRM
Perhaps that's true, but the telecommunications industry is the heaviest user of Erlang and it seems to work fine for them. I'm assuming optimize for "must not go down, EVER" over raw performance, and the Erlang approach works well for that.
I don't want to get too lecture-y but if you want to start a business, know what field you want to start it in, but don't even know what you're trying to accomplish, what problems you're trying to solve, how you'll change the market or logistics or whatever, why are you even doing it? How successful do you think an endeavor shoehorned into your desired criteria is going to be?

Twitter influencers? You think you're going to start a successful business by following the right people on twitter?

My advice, find a problem, take the time to understand the problem space very very well, find some novel solution and implement it to the absolute best of your ability. It could be in any space, but if you want to focus on space tech, there are plenty of difficult to solve problems there. Start there, understand the ins and outs of it, find a problem you think you can solve and deliver value by working on it.
I've seen this term nimby float around a lot recently. You can tell it's the just the next wave of internet propaganda because the term is used as a subtle method of peer pressure to give advantage to whatever sugar daddy paid for all those blogposts and new articles that now reference the term.

First off, it's not a bad thing to live without evangelizing their mindset on other people, the emphasis of "only caring about their own back yard". They're allowing other people to live life the way they want to, that's gracious. Emphasizing your status quo in only your own back yard is the opposite of entitlement.

We live in a system of hierarchical social participation. Everyone has participation at the federal level, but each person's participation counts less there than anywhere else. As you move down the ladder to state, county, city/town the you have more control over what goes on in your locality. If you live in a neighborhood where you don't want something to change, you have every right to want that. Especially if you're rooted in the area while a demographic of transient transplants try introducing ground-changing legislation in the city they just moved to, and might leave within 10 years.
Ask HN: Who is working on collective intelligence systems?
Which problems of the big picture are you approaching? And how are you approaching them?

I'm active in the canonical debate lab where we research on scalable collaborative argument mapping, voting systems, community moderation, truth algorithms and social protocols.

We'd like so see and motivate a bit more activity in this field.

Recently we tried to identify the main challenges and write them down. Here is the result: https://canonicaldebatelab.com/CIDesign/
I recently helped work on a new open source JPEG decoder in Nim. (Over here on GitHub: https://github.com/treeform/pixie/blob/master/src/pixie/file...)

This video was extremely helpful to understand the "why" of all the things the spec was trying to explain. It made a huge difference in us being able to get things working.

We talk a bit about JPEG and actually writing our decoder in Nim here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vYwD7OynFcg

Overall, our concluding opinion is that JPEG has some extremely cool and really smart ideas for how to compress images but the binary file format itself has some very painful things in it (progressive and restart markers as a couple examples).
I think it was my choice of words. By healthcare I mean the populations's effective health care which is what matters and not just the quality of the services offered.

US ranks 46th on the life expectancy. Not saying that's a perfect metric but's a strong signal.

https://www.worldometers.info/demographics/life-expectancy/

- Cost-plus contracts disincentive cost-benefit value delivery.
- Costly healthcare disincentive use of health services.

It's a system that combines the worse of public and private healthcare systems.
Can we also merge Google Duo, Google Meet and Google Chat?
What an unmitigated disaster. Some problems with this off the top of my head:

1. Criminals can see which houses to avoid burglarizing.

2. Criminals can see where to find weapons to steal when owners are away.

3. Stalkers can easily find their victims home who may be carrying for self defense.

4. Will the addresses of every police officer be published too? They carry a gun at all times, even off duty in most cases.
Your last point rather undermines your first. Turns out killing a deer-sized animal is a similar problem to killing a human-sized animal, who knew.

(Hasn't the US military actually moved away from fully-automatic weapons for regular troops in favour of three-round-burst? So it ends up as a very close convergence)
Stop trying to virtue signal, my friend. There are plenty of places such as Goodwill that will gladly take peoples' used clothes for donation.
I mean, this is all just anecdota. So here’s mine.

Meanwhile, a single family home was turned into a 4-plex directly next to me, the units are each _renting_ out for more than my mortgage (which I got only a couple of years ago), and my property values went up… $350k in 1 year?

Yes, that dramatic. Because the apartment was a concrete signifier for the demand of the neighborhood.

Since I’m seeing some commentators mention something about LA: this is also in Los Angeles
Over here they’re basically synonymous with gaming. They are the company that brought gaming back after the crash with the NES and sold a ton. Then we got the GameBoy which just cemented things further. The Genesis (MegaDrive) was kind of their first real competition here but they released the super Nintendo and it sold a much better (roughly 50m vs 25m).

Of course they’ve been around ever since. The GBA, the DS, the Wii, and the Switch have all been massive successes. they’ve never really disappeared in the US.

They’re kind of the brand for all of gaming history here after the Atari crash. Sega came later (Genesis/MD) and went (so long Dreamcast), Sony came in ‘95 and Microsoft in ‘01. That’s basically it for the big brands.

There’s a reason that tons of people called all video games “Nintendos“ for a very long time.
No standing, others are allowed to create the same database by themselves.
My immediate thought is that the technium of Middle Earth did not develop like ours due to rhe ubiquity of magic.
Indeed, it is in these books that the last lights of magic are fading, and the world is being given over to other powers.
Imagine if there were like an additional physics sitting on top of ours, and its use was isolated to a few hereditary practitioners, and let us see if the mundanes can scraps together enough gumption for gunpowder. Who knows if it even works in those circumstances?
A sufficiently motivated burglar can already prioritize their victims by selecting those with the highest donation amounts on public FEC reports, or simply selecting properties with the highest tax obligations. I wouldn't be surprised if the more enterprising ones already do, which is to say that this doesn't change much.
It sounds like they wound up working with a "salafi fanatic" in the Saudi consulate in LA though.

At the very least it sounds like extremists had infiltrated into government positions and some of them provided critical assistance.

I'm not sure how much this changes the story that we already knew though. There's no evidence that anyone high up in the Saudi government was involved in plotting. The fact that their government could be riddled with religious fanatics isn't terribly surprising.
For those that want to avoid the same fate:

Use rclone to backup your Google Drive documents.

https://rclone.org/

Configure it so it will save the documents to disk in MS Office formats instead of just saving a link.
> Note that this graph doesn't even include the time it takes the user to update the OS since Safari updates are tied to the operating system (an antiquated practice).

Is this true? I could have I sworn I’ve updated Safari many times without needing to update macOS.
I'm OK with extensions not syncing, I'm just thankful Firefox for Android exists and has extensions.
This seems pretty good if you can randomly embed these signature materials as it expands and then have a record of how they are dispersed in 3D. It’d be hard to duplicate unless the packing foam is repairable and does not leave a trace of reparation if any occurred.
The discussion he's talking about in this post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31859072
Per this person's experience (which seems sadly far from atypical), you might as well be:

https://www.benjamistan.tech/2022/06/26/wasting-time-in-tech...
I'm a big fan of NCCDB.

http://www.ncc.umn.edu/ndsr-database-page/
Big thing for code reviews with junior developers: Show them where they've done something right. They'll keep doing it that way. Ideally this is done in person, and when you give them a "good job on this", it really takes the sting out of anything negative.
This. You'd be amazed how many users just do a password reset each time to login instead of remembering their login info.
Doxxing is always about intimidation, shaming and invitation to retaliation.
WFH has likely expanded the number of developers subject to such threats, e.g. those whose enterprise device access-from-home can be leveraged to compromise software supply chains.
Chinese Scientists: ‘I had no idea when I would see my family again’