skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You never want to built anything shoddily, but there is a lot of value in doing minimum scope. Testing, clean code, etc shouldn't be negotiable in most shops, but scope can be really trimmed down in a lot of scenarios.

Universe Z:
- Programmer X implements feature A in 1 week with tiny scope
- Feature B is mothballed and never gets built

Universe A:
- Programmer X implements feature in 2 weeks
- One year later: This functionality is broken apart into a well defined microservice with additional responsibilities. This needs a total rewrite as a v2 API.

Universe B:
- Programmer implements a feature in 1 week
- One month later with that extra week they were able to squeeze in an unrelated enhancement to the system that delivered .5% extra revenue during Black Friday.

I find most of the productivity metrics fail because you're squeezing the wrong end of the process. You want to spend the most time making sure you're doing what matters and has value, and then it will almost always be worth the time. This makes people feel engaged, which will lead to a lot more productivity than when you're pushing them to build something they don't care about.
I wish they had intentions that were that noble.

Everyone on the likes to pretend that rules and regulations are either a) a boondoggle net-negative exercise in cost cutting b) "wRiTtEn In BlOoD" depending on whether they like the procedure or regulation in question.

Reality is often far more mundane and dysfunctional. It's frequently just speculative bike shedding and ass-covering, exactly the kind of "pointing out exploits" stuff the HN crowd loves to engage in when it comes to policy as though organizational policy was a firewall to configure.

Here's how it probably went down: Some people were hammering out the language of a contract and some bike-shedder replied to all pointing out that breaks, work stoppages, lunch, etc, etc, were all being counted but bathroom breaks weren't and that potentially created an exploit to the proposed system of cost/time/whatever tracking. No party had the balls to take responsibility and say "this is silly, we'll cross that bridge if/when we get to it" bathroom breaks wound up incorporated that into their formula. So thanks to some bike-shedder trying to "contribute" and nobody's willingness to take any risk whatsoever (by going on the record brushing aside a petty concern that could come back to bite them) everyone has to track their piss breaks. And to be fair, all these people are doing exactly what they are incentivized to do (!!!). And these aren't the kind of things you can roll back later because then you have to explain why you're a) deviating from established way of doing things and b) accepting some risk in doing so which nobody wants to do for a variety of reasons that have been discussed at length and are outside the scope of this comment.

Source: This crap happens like quarterly in my workplace.

Edit: of course there's other potential complications that can effect these kinds of things but you get the gist.
That is an interesting view on things. Where is the 'harm' here? ETH miners had a choice to mine, or not. If you didn't like the rules that were set out LONG in advance, then don't play the game.

Similar to how people say not to depend on an API from a single company because that company could shut you down. Except in this case, the company told people, in advance, that some day in the future, they were absolutely going to shut you down.
Thank you, I’m glad I’m not the only one; this seems like insanity to compare forecasted potential birth numbers with actual child fatalities. Could car seat regulations be erring on the side of over-zealousness? Sure, but the way to show that is that the safety isn’t increased, not to say “think of the potentially born!”
Games of Puzzle Storm
I don't take the article as saying this is THE way to adjust birthrate.

They're just highlighting a case where a) they believe regulation is depressing fertility rates and b) the author presents the regulation as not very effective at improving safety outcomes. So the justification for making the change is:

> It is often said that governments can do little to increase the birth rate.

> I find this implausible. We do lots of things as the government that decrease the birth rate. We could Stop It. Or do the opposite.

The article advocates that loosening car seat restrictions for older children is a way the government could improve fertility rates just by ceasing an action it is currently taking ("Stopping It").
Oh boy, another cancel culture article.

The first two links to the responses are broken, so we can't actually see if the responses were in or out of proportion. The link to Jamie Bouie's response works, which reveals that it not just a "casual dismissal" of "concerns over the politicization of scholarship" as the article claims, but a mockery of the implied claim that race, gender, sexuality, nationalism and capitalism are just “contemporary social justice issues” instead of major throughlines of modern history.
You can say the same about non-mechanical devices. You can also say that mechanical devices (and non-mechanical devices) are limiting in ways you can hardly describe by text.

It's like how every other tech-bro thinks they want to become a woodworker. But if you offered my dad (a woodworker) $300K a year to not breathe sawdust and hurt his back, he'd do it.
No, there is no biometry. To do anything with your electronic id you need your id card with the chip or your phone with a sim that stores your private key, and you need to know your PIN-s. What other kinds of verification do you need?

It is assumed that whoever is using the id card to sign in somewhere or sign something is the owner of the card. Since.. the pin is also required, stealing someone's card doesn't give the thief any benefit.
This would make a great plugin, and could be expanded to other companies: Your computer makes a noise when it tells Google what you're doing. It makes another noise when it tells Facebook what you're doing.
And people wonder why I have a pathological disdain for marketing folks. They focus on style over substance, flash over function, and to them nothing shouldn't be done to chase the almighty dollar.

Sure there are good honest reputable people out there, but every time I find out someone works in marketing I always lose a little bit of respect for them. And do not give me that bull crap about how "well we just help inform consumers of their choices and raise awarness." That may have been true 50 years ago when the whole family would gather around a radio to tune in to the lone ranger, but these days I probably have an email in my inbox for a company that has the flipping cure for cancer, but I will never know because marketing parasites grab every channel of communication they can find and saturate to the point of uselessness and we end right back up where we were before where the only information I trust is information from people I personally know. So congratulations marketing you've managed to regress society back to the point where my best bet for finding something to solve my problem is consulting the village elder.

Engineers get blasted all the time for building crap that is bad, just check out the other thread on spyware that was posted, how about we start holding these marketing con artists accountable for the sh* they sell then.
He gave a talk at a company I used to work at on the history of the internet and his thoughts on its future, it was really cool to listen to him talk on these subjects!
Yes the big fish get attention and the small fish get ignored. Welcome to the B2B universe. If you're a small business relative to the scope of your counterparty, you generally won't get good service or have any leverage.

Seek out resellers or providers who are closer to yourself in size. You want it to hurt a bit if they lose your business. Of course you can go too far the other way as well, if you're a large client of a small company you'll probably get good service but they will be living parasitically off of you which isn't healthy and they may not be able to respond quickly enough if your needs grow.
The title seems have been auto-edited to remove 358 from the beginning. Assumedly to prevent listicle submissions?
as if I wasn't already paranoid enough... this makes me more so... I was afraid it was going to read me what google learns, but hearing the pops makes me realize just how much I'm producing for Google every second.
Depending on the countries traveled to, Apple stuff can make a lot of sense for traveling because they have stores all over the place. If something happens to the MacBook I bought in the US while I’m abroad in Tokyo it’s no problem, I can drop by the store in Shibuya or Ginza and get it repaired, probably same day in many cases.
I’m one of the ones that asked for a comparison. Thank you. I’m not sure I’ll appreciate the difference until I give it a try though. I know that when I look at my history in Last, I could clearly see what I discovered and what I obsessed over for a period of time. But let’s say your tool isn’t different in any fundamental way. So F’n what? :) Not the most tasteful examples, but where would Burger King or Wendy’s be if they had demurred to the big M?
As with most politicians (yes, he is a politician by definition) the next chapter likely means book deals, talk show appearances, perhaps even a minor honorary "working" retirement in some small office somewhere.
Five Years in Recovery
[Disclaimer: former Snowflake employee]

Snowflake is not expensive because of perverse incentives, which is the primary claim of the article. It is expensive because it is a highly differentiated and very sticky product.

As others have mentioned, competition is the ultimate incentive to work on performance. Every dollar of Snowflake revenue is a dollar of revenue that Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Databricks are fighting for.
Of the viable companies, each would still be a monopoly.
Google has a bad reputation when it comes to intra-company coordination and cooperation.

So, aside from what others have replied, what would be the purpose of hiring 1-10 thousand support people that would have no ability to actually help the customer contacting them?

"Have you tried turning it off and on again?" would be the only response they could offer.
On the other hand, newspaper writing is kind of the definition of ephemeral. Yes, some writing ends up lasting (I did a high school paper on Carl Sandberg’s coverage of the 1919 race riots in Chicago which I found published in book form in the high school library), but most won’t.
[Cue 32-bit IP snark] blah
You don't need much customer satisfaction when your products are near monopolies, there's not many alternative you can chose. For free products, it doesn't make financial sense to add support, especially when they have over a billion users each. They should invest in support in GCP and Gsuite though, because they compete there
Same, I just keep getting redirected to the homepage after login
Even if/when you can get longer than that, the majority of the intended audience probably doesn't have the patience for it.
And then after taking your money I can vote again as many times as I want for someone I actually like. Only the last vote counts. And I think that next elections it will be possible to override your electronic vote on paper at the polling stations.
> the further down the totalitarian path we are going to go.

It's not real totalitarianism.
The visualization is useful for those who already understand how it harms them and society. If someone likes to be watched and controlled, this type of visualization is not of much value.
That would be the most myopic way of interpreting his narrative license.
% in company not a thing here. I ask for a salary range from the candidate. If that meets the range I can potentially offer, I say so. If it is too high, I also say so. If it is lower than usual and it is a final match, our offer will be higher. If the candidate "refuses" to name it (acutally didnt happend in the last years) I can only assume that I would say my budget. Guess its fair or what would you say?
Does Singpass use biometric (either for enrollment, or during each use of it)?
Correct, if you use Linux you can pay a monthly fee to Netflix for the privilege of installing spyware on your machine to view 720p video.

Meanwhile torrents are a search away and they give me a no-nonsense .mkv file in 5 minutes, to watch wherever and whenever I want: phone, PC, TV, internet or no internet. The choice is easy.
(Author here.) The client UI is designed for desktop. A mobile frontend is in the works. Tentatively planning to use Ionic Framework with Vue.
>The quality can be highly questionable. One shop first put an old battery in my MacBook, and after I complained they put in a new one from a bad manufacturer which ended up breaking touchpad and keyboard. On my iMac a different store installed the wrong screen (from the previous model that had ghosting issues and wasn’t as bright) - I ended up changing it myself for around EUR250 instead of 700 the store charged or 1100 Apple wanted. Also the screws were loose on the MacBook and the camera and microphone weren’t aligned on the iMac. I obviously went to different stores and checked the reviews before, but it didn’t help.

Is this not due entirely to how hard Apple makes it to get OEM parts?
Is there a way it can avoid "hijacking" my browser's back button and still maintain its core functionality?

[caveat] I am not in the intended audience for the product since I don't use dropbox and barely use Google Drive when I have that type of problem to solve.

Good luck.
Is your work public? I'm also working on a (loosely) datomic inspired database with pluggable backends, so this might be very interesting for me.
I agree that capitalism doesn't always help in solving root problems and it is a force at play here, but the article is not saying that tech is the problem here. The issue lies in looking at problems exclusively through a technical point of view. Just because something is technologically feasible doesn't mean that it is the best solution.
Subsidized doesn't mean anything in this context. These services aren't offered below cost, they're very profitable. Companies will always view not showing ads as leaving money on the table, regardless of how much profit they're already making.
Hi endisneigh. We are currently focussed on functionality and stability. There are a number of changes to our code that we know about (https://github.com/surrealdb/surrealdb/labels/performance), that we want to make really soon, and then as soon as those are complete, we'll run some benchmarks against other databases, and detail some comparisons.

It is however hard to perform these direct comparisons, as the functionality is pretty different to a lot of the database out there, but nevertheless it definitely is something we want to get to in due course!
Automakers could simple install three additional carseat anchors in the rear seats.
added. Thanks!
Retrospectively, this is very similar to how most SaaS behaved when per user per month billing was first introduced. There were almost never any actual limits on the number of users you could add to the software, but you purchased a license for a certain number. Occasionally your account would be audited and you would be billed of the overage. It was always a significant penalty. The same was true for CPU based licenses for things like IIS, SQL Service, Oracle, etc.
"Evidence" is anything that should cause you to update your beliefs. The simulations show that a certain possible phenomenon is consistent with known physics when this was not known before, and therefore they raise the likelihood that the phenomenon exists.
I'm glad the author also points out how customer (mis)use can blow up data warehouse costs too. No matter how efficient Snowflake could get, using the warehouse too much or with unnecessary queries will ultimately have a larger impact.

The trend in the data space currently is for usage to increase -- as more companies adopt dbt they're running more and more prebuilt (materialized views) queries on a scheduled basis, rather than on demand. This is overall a good thing in that data is becoming easier to manage and use, but it does come at an increase in warehousing costs.

I think eventually the pendulum will swing back to tools that help optimize warehouse usage, as long as they allow for the same increase in productivity as dbt (disclosure - I work for one such company)
it's ironic to me how the typical boss measures productivity in emails, chats and other things that are not real work, making things, solving problems...

its like even the basis by which they measure work, is not work. but since thats all they ever do, they have no other frame of reference.
I'm talking about the author of the article not the victims.
Goldeneye 007 (1997)
The real problem is that running an economy on interest and usury will result in the outcomes we're seeing today. Let's address the root cause and not the symptoms.
Improved a lot since I tried a soft mouth guard dentist made me to protect teeth from grinding. Side effect, it reduces my snoaring / sleep apnea also.
Thanks! I was planning to reach out to the folks at SIGCIS already :)

As for your point about specific features, I plan to treat this as a STS-esque project. TLDR: de-emphasize linear models of technology development. Besides, I feel that the history itself would be useful to other practitioners.
I dont like 120Hz refresh, it looks weird. I see it a whole lot on bad 4k transfers of older movies, they're either doing a 3:2 pulldown or something else to up convert the scan rate, but no matter what it is, it makes the motion look weird and excessively fluid.
With financial news you can basically just say

"[current geopolitics] leads to price going [up or down]". Even with a survey of big players markets don't always have a simple interpretation
Wait why? Do the students not have agency?
In thanks for his decades of work getting the Internet going, Postel spent the months before he died getting trashed by anonymous government officials in the Washington Post and elsewhere.
I don't see where in that sentence it says large parts of the planet will become functionally inhabitable or that climate change is an existential threat.
Set up Kubernetes role based access control
I always found the infatuation with Estonian company setup a bit weird. For this convenience you pay 20% company tax. In Europe several countries offer a better rate - for example Ireland is at 12.5% with a similarly easy company setup system - in English. Or Hungary at 9%. At an 11% difference I'd gladly pay for a local accountant. If you earn 100k through your company you leave 10k in the hat just for the PR & marketing Estonia has. No thanks.
As I mentioned elsewhere, this is a sign of imbalance in the relationship. If you are too small to matter to Google or even to your account rep at Google, then you should not be using them.
Doesn’t implementing Vulkan give you DirectX with DXVK and VKD3D and OpenGL with Zink for free?
>"So clearly, everyone is okay with it. /s"

Cue the responses confidently dismissing the issue because there is some convoluted setup involving additional hardware and network configuration that any consumer can surely set up if they don't like what these products are doing.
We do zero prototyping like this anymore. Actually, we almost never carved copper plates anyway, we would just get perf boards with plated holes and wire everything together.

Everything gets a pc board made now. If you can't buy a dev board from the mfg or a 3rd party, then you make your own.

Surface mount mostly killed it off. But I don't miss spending hours looking for a problem that turns out to be just some breadboard issue that broke when you jiggled it wrong.
I would be less passionate in someone else's company than my own. However, I could do it passionately for a company that I believe in.

I don't understand your point. Isn't there a massive chunk of people who are passionate about "software development and electronics" that make a living off of it?
But we’re not talking about an arbitrary African nation in comparison to South Africa, we are talking about two countries within the European Union. Your analogy is a bit hyperbolic.
I don't think their customers could quantify it if they tried (and i'm not implying Snowflake doesn't give value, it probably does but how does a company attribute it)
This is very cool. I wish I could use it in unity!

Going to take a few minutes to scope out what a port would take...
What is strange about it is that it is a large number of factors that work together holistically that make a columnar database thoroughly trash row-oriented databases almost always.

The biggest one in my mind is cache friendliness.

If you are processing a column you are running a piece of code on one piece of data, then another piece of data, and another piece of data. If you are processing rows you might be running the same piece of code but you are also running 20 other pieces of code for the other 20 columns. Code for column B kicks the code for column A out of the cache 20 times per row. Instead of using the data bus to move data you are having to load instructions over and over again. It's like trading your 2022 processor for a 1993 Pentium.

Because it is a holistic property of the system it defies microbenchmarks. For instance somebody might benchmark the code for each of the 20 columns and find that they run fast when they run individually. When you are running one, then another, then another, you get a big performance drop that doesn't show up unless you test for it specifically.

On top of that the access pattern for the data is simpler and more predictable for columns. If you are scanning from one address to another address in a straight line the CPU can start loading data long before you need it.

The cache benefits don't just apply to the multiple caches in the CPU but also RAM caches of storage, caches hidden in the storage system, etc.

As for write efficiency, the row-based database frequently needs to just update one block or a few consecutive blocks in the storage system. The column-based system has to hit at least 20 blocks to update 20 columns.
"Look up error code on stack exchange to find the error in question seeking a solution, but its you from 5 years ago."
Yes, of course, I was definitely imagining you were struggling to get simpler scenes to work. But also, proportionally few of your triangles in any given scene should be near-plane clipped. It's OK to have a slow path for it, and then speed it up later. I've never felt the math for the adjusted barycentrics is too hard, but it can take a bit to wrap your head around. Good luck :)
If you want more "Brexits" that is certainly the way to influence public opinion and the growing national parties.
The way I was taught in the program: a higher power can be anything that you have the ability to believe can help you.

For many atheists and agnostics, that higher power becomes their particular 12 step group. Not the program as a whole, but literally the collective wisdom of the people they fellowship with. It could also be a door knob, if you can bring yourself to believe in the power of the door knob.

The logic is fairly straightforward:

1. Recognize that your best thinking got you here. If you were wise enough to fix it yourself, you wouldn't be in a program.

2. Since you can't fix it yourself, you have to develop faith that SOMETHING other than you can fix it.

3. This is easiest if you believe in a religious deity, since once you assume there is an all-powerful being who loves you, it's not a stretch to think that deity could give you the strength, courage, and wisdom needed to persevere. But it also works if you can simply believe that the group (or even your sponsor) is better able to guide you than you are able to guide yourself.

At least that's how I understood it and found it worked for me.