skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think my favorite part is buried in footnote 5:

> Ironically, the performance issue becomes less articulated in this non-http, non-rails context, yet in these cases people generally dismiss ruby as option, for its performance-issues. Which, catch-22, is one of the reasons Ruby is hardly used outside of Rails (and/or Web).

It's a shame that most people only write Ruby in the context of Rails. It's a lovely language, and performant enough for a wide array of tasks. It can be startlingly elegant and exceedingly productive.

Of course, it's valid to talk about Ruby performance in the context of Rails, as the author does. However, it's gratifying to see a more detailed discussion on what Ruby folks mean when they say "your database is usually the bottleneck," and the author does a good job at examining different aspects.

(All that said: Rails is still a really good choice. So much of our work is just writing CRUD apps, and it's kinda boring. Rails makes it boring and easy, and it's a really good tradeoff.)
It seems insane to me people would buy/sell drugs in a prohibition nation on a public ledger.
Uh, they aren't. You go to Zenni Optical and it's a solved problem. You basically choose what you want to pay. Their $7 glasses work great. My every days were $25, until I decided to try out their UV blocking lenses, which bumped them to $50. My prescription sunglasses and prescription safety goggles were each $80.

If you've got a stronger prescription or need more than single vision lenses you'll pay a bit more. But nothing compared to the many hundreds by the time you walk out of an optician. Reasonable pricing completely changes the dynamic from bundling every what-if into a single pair, to one of why-not try something new - the way markets are supposed to work. Maybe next time I'll even try auto-darkening lenses, despite having had a lackluster experience with them decades ago.

Ctrl-F Zenni in the article show no results though. I know there are even some competitors by now, but the ones I've seen are still trying to gouge a bit.
A country where you can order the chemicals for amateur chemistry by mail would be a developed AND a free country at the same time. I'm very interested in such an example
I was at a Series C startup that suffered from this. The CTO was an SRE person at heart so wanted to build out our own infrastructure that could run on any platform. While this was a great idea in theory (basically everything was kubernetes and terraform) in practice it caused us to hire a ton of SRE people that were not contributing to the features that actually made us money. Not one customer cared that our entire service ran on AWS.

I think a lot of companies suffer from premature optimization. I myself even fell victim to it in one of the projects I worked on for that company by rewriting a large portion of the code instead of hacking the new feature in.

It is a hard problem to solve for. How much tech debt do I take on now to deliver customer value. I guess that is something that just comes with experience though. I have noticed that has I gain more experience I am not enamored by the new shiny framework as much anymore and focus more of my effort on delivering whatever feature is needed with the smallest change possible. Yeah this creates tech debt, but at least it keeps the lights on especially when every service seems to get rebuilt in 5-10 years anyways.
> There wasn't hard data that characterized the risk.

I commented on this the other day; there's a useful NPR article on the subject.

> The night before the launch, Ebeling and four other engineers at NASA contractor Morton Thiokol had tried to stop the launch. Their managers and NASA overruled them.

> That night, he told his wife, Darlene, "It's going to blow up."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33488205

https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/01/28/464744781...
The thing about Ruby is there are plenty of gems that will help protect your code base from many of the performance hiccups.

Off the cuff: bullet, strong_migrations, activerecord-import, lol_dba

I'm sure there are more. This has been a bit of a passion point for me for a few years. I even taught a class on it. Ruby is a wonderful language to use with a database. ActiveRecord too...you just have to know how to avoid some of the foot guns.

Many Rails devs get committed to doing things "the Rails way" to ship faster and focus on application level logic, but even the ActiveRecord guides say that when it's time to performance tune you're going to have to get into the database innards.

ActiveRecord is geared towards team productivity. It's perfectly capable of great efficiency too, you just have to be more deliberate about it. The "scopes" structure is wonderful for piecing together reusable parts of queries though. It makes leveraging the fancy parts much easier.
> I have to assume these billionaires have access to someone with familiarity with modern portfolio theory (or someone who has heard the word 'diversification' and has functional internet connection)

He is one of those people. The article notes he was a Jane Street trader.
Zenni glasses are 7$ and perfectly fine (I ordered a test set, which I now use as a spare)

My current set from them is a high index lens and anti glare, which were only $30 shipped. They’re going on 3 years now and still look new.
A material that doesn't exist on Earth
Well, if you had presented yourself as a "left-handed robotocist' I would have to find another unrelated characteristic to write what you call a 'tirade' [1]. I probably would have asked the same question using something like 'shoe size' or 'hair colour' instead.

As to being 'triggered' by your mentioning of being 'trans' it is not so much your mentioning of being 'trans' but the fact that you - and many others, which is more what 'triggered' me - mention it in a totally unrelated context which made me question the reason for doing so. This is a new phenomenon which has cropped up in the last few years. It was not just uncommon but totally unknown when I went to university in the 90's which is also when I got my first taste of the internet, having been active in the BBS scene before that (FIDOnet etc.). It was just as unknown when I worked as an editor for several IT-related publications, it was unknown when I got a job as service developer in the late 90's. When I emigrated in 2002 it was still an unknown phenomenon. It only really started to become visible in the middle to late 2010's and as such really is a new phenomenon - hence my inquiry.

[1] 'tirade' means 'long, angry speech expressing strong dissaproval'. There is no anger in my questioning of presenting oneself using unrelated characteristics so it is not a tirade, more an inquiry or 'a seeking of information by asking questions'
I think you'd be disappointed.

Now, the paper trail on the ticket a Googler filed, asking for a pony in his office: that would be worth having.
Zoom says its video conference app coming soon to Tesla vehicles
They didn't rob you, your credit card company robbed you. Contact your CC company and ask why the payment couldn't be processed?
When I've whined to their support about late packages, they've told me that "two day" just refers to the time my order spends actively in transit, NOT the time between when I place my order and receive the item. So if the item doesn't leave the warehouse for 5 days (to batch it with another order I placed, wait for shipping costs to cheaper on a certain day, or whatever) and then they send the item and it comes 2 days later they've still fulfilled their sacred oath. That would be considered 2 day shipping, not 7 days.
Disney says it has more streaming customers than Netflix
Why does it have to be responsive?
Should we tithe Industrial Zones for not dumping more chem waste?
Tip our wait staff for not spitting in our food?
OK: let's initially assume the company is made up of only engineers and recruiting. Let R be the percentage of the company that is recruiting, so 1-R is engineering. Then 0.15 = 0.05(1-R) + 0.50R so 0.10 = 0.45R or R = 0.10/0.45... thereby 2/9th of the company is recruiting.

If engineering is less than 1-R (as it certainly is), we can model this with a new variable E: the percentage of the rest of the company that is engineering, with E=1 being the prior case. Then 0.15 = 0.05(1-R)E + 0.50R, and you eventually get R = (0.15-0.05E)/(0.50-0.05E).

To check this: if E were 0 (so, no engineers) then that would imply the percentage of all people at Facebook who are recruiters would be 30%, which makes sense as 50% of 30% is 15%. This means that our prior estimate of 2/9ths of the company--or ~22%--is a conservatively low estimate for R.

(FWIW: I'm guessing--as that's ridiculous, right? ;P--that there are a bunch of people being fired who aren't in either engineering or recruiting... that, or people quit Facebook so often that they have to have an army of recruiters just to maintain a steady state of employment.)

Here is an article from one year ago (October 27th, 2021) that might provide us some context:

https://www.protocol.com/workplace/facebook-docs-hiring-recr...

> Facebook's hiring crisis: Engineers are turning down offers, internal docs show

> Just under two weeks ago, Facebook announced that it planned to hire 10,000 engineers in Europe to help build, among other tools, its planned "metaverse" (an announcement on those efforts is scheduled for Thursday). In Frances Haugen's testimony to the United Kingdom Parliament earlier this week, she said that she was "shocked" to hear that news. "Do you know what we could have done with safety if we had 10,000 more engineers? It would have been amazing," she said.

https://www.protocol.com/bulletins/facebook-hiring-metaverse...

> Facebook wants to be the company that moves our lives into the shared virtual reality known as the metaverse — and apparently, the company needs to hire 10,000 engineers in the European Union to make that happen.

I'd really love to know what percentage of the people being fired as part of this layoff (if this rumor turns out to be true) are specifically working on the Metaverse (and then, how many of these people are in Europe). It would be amazing if it were 0, and all of these people work on a "legacy product", such as Instagram... or Facebook ;P. METAVERSE AT ALL COSTS
And have you thought about whether or not it could be loaded with javascript?

That could eliminate the need for platform specific extensions.
Leaders will naturally acquire de facto power in a group setting. Power attracts the power hungry, so avoiding a buildup of power is important. This build up can be offset greatly by limiting the introduction of de jure power into the equation.

You list attributes of bad managers: no particular skill in the area, likes to have authority, and likes making more money. We can mitigate the likelihood of attracting those managers by providing the opposite.

1. Let teams self-organize, where team members will value those who are both competent and effective cooperators.

2. Don't pay them more, it's just a role within the team, like being responsible for some feature. Have pay scales that value your experienced members, just don't pay your lead more than their more senior reports.

3. But who'll do the paperwork and other secretarial work that managers are normally responsible for in addition to their decision making/leadership duties? Hire a team secretary: someone who does not have hiring and firing power over the rest of the team.
Which medication(s)? SSRIs? Have you actually looked at the pre-marketing “studies” of the most common drugs prescribed by psychs? I have.

By no stretch of any imagination are those studies replicable. And the diagnosis process is even worse —- no quantitative blood test, no scans, no nothing. Just ask the patient for verbal self-assessment, and prescribe. It’s a massive joke from start to finish.
Ask HN: How does TubeBuddy generate a video CTR?
Hey HN,
I'm very curious about how TubeBuddy's "Click Magnet" https://www.tubebuddy.com/clickmagnet determines impressions and therefore Click Through Rate for its users' videos.

Through the Youtube Data / Analytics API, there is no way to view the impressions of a video, and as far as I can tell this is intended. My guess is that they use their chrome extension to scrape the Data, but I'm fairly sure this goes against Youtube's Scraping policy https://developers.google.com/youtube/terms/developer-policies .

I'm looking to implement this feature in my own application. If anyone knows something I don't, or can comment on the legality of it, I would really appreciate it.

Thanks!
might the reality check he needs to diversify lol
This looks really cool, one note on the homepage though - the volume on the intro video is really really low, I had to crank my system volume way up to be able to hear it at all.
Yes you are correct, I generally agree with some of the points made, where I disagree is that we would want help modernizing. Unless the modern solution provides some kind of cost reduction or feature improvement that I can sell to my boss (which is rare), then it simply isn't going to happen unless you are a designer or working completely on the front end.

To be honest, that may be a good place to look for ex tech workers at my company, but I wouldn't know since I'm way deep in the backend.

I don't think that Twitter employees are necessarily lazy or like to "rest and vest". I just think the kind of work they are expecting and culture difference is often an insurmountable obstacle.

As for what others have asked, we generally max out on salary at around $200k for very senior contributor roles. For a fresh college grad then we are more than competitive for the area at around $70k-$80k. Like I said, we aren't a SV company, and we will not match a SV salary. But we are very competitive for the area, and its not an undesirable area either. If you do a COL adjustment it probably roughly evens out.
It is not the word but the context. Don’t be mean to people is probably the message. And Just is a good word to be mean with! But it is also used innocently.
Bloomberg is reporting similar. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-11-08/meta-plat...
Let's see: spilled some nitrogen tri-iodide on the floor in my high school. Even on the following day people were walking on the dried crystals, setting off small explosions that stained the linoleum brown (or was it violet?, it was 40 years ago...).

Also burned off my best friend's eye brows/lashes when he got a little too closely at the blackpowder I had lit.

A carbon arc I made using battery cells drew so much current through the salt-water "rheostat" that it boiled off ... hydrogen? I tripped over one of the wires and the whole casserole dish full of salt water (and with a live 110-volts wire soaking in it) came crashing down, shattering on the basement floor. The extension zip-cord was already smoking at that point anyway so I suppose it was a matter time before something gave. (The circuit breaker went a few times, but that was easily resettable).

Dry ice dumped into hot water in a 2-liter plastic bottle (lid screwed on tight) gave a nice demonstration of, I do not know, the explosive breaking point of PET plastics? I thought I had invented blowing up Coke bottles with dry-ice until the internet came around. I'm still however unaware of anyone also putting dry ice and hot water in a Dawn dish soap bottle and inverting it for a nice little water-rocket (until about the 3rd or 4th time when the plastic of the detergent bottle becomes a little "work-hardened" and explodes on the launch pad).

I think I made chloroform once (Nitric acid and ... formaldehyde? I don't remember). It smelled very nice though, whatever it was. I didn't take enough a whiff to find out for sure if it was the real thing.

My dad told me about covering potassium permanganate with glycerine as a small demonstration of spontaneous combustion.

Honestly though, I'm not sure I learned a lot of chemistry. If anything, the playing around with identifying metal salts by the color of their flame is about as close as I got to Real Science™. Perhaps though I got something out of it, something for my curiosity? Maybe an appreciation at least for atoms and compounds and their reactivity?
"Say now we want to display the album list sorted by album’s duration, shortest first."

How would we do this in an ORM like ActiveRecord or Django ORM, without generating multiple queries?
> chemistry suffers from being actually quite difficult field

I wonder how much of that is inherent, and how much is artifact of highly suboptimal education? Chemistry education research has been unusually scathing, characterizing chem ed content using adjectives like "incoherent". My favorite high-school state standard insisted students be taught both that atoms are conserved in chemical reactions, and that atoms are by definition electrically neutral. :P And the incentives around say teaching orgo, are more about serving as med school proxy, than using chemistry to achieve real goals. What might chemistry look like if taught well? How difficult would it still be? It seems a very open question?
> I'm using Firefox for all my personal browsing, but I decided to spin up Chrome because I know how good their DevTools are. So make sure to use the right tool for the job.

Are Firefox's devtools actally worse then Chrome's though?
Case in point, the former CEO of Peloton just raised 25m for a company that delivers you "beautiful, custom rugs for your home". No idea why that would need funding from tech VCs. Yet here they are with several engineering job postings https://www.ernesta.com/careers/. If your business model is custom rugs, maybe just create a shopify store and sell your rugs.
Report outlines plans for research effort on subduction zone geologic hazards
Summary

Subduction zones, where one tectonic plate slides beneath another, produce the most devastating seismic, volcanic, and landslide hazards on the planet. A new report presents an ambitious plan to make major advances in understanding subduction zone hazards by bringing together a diverse community of scientists in a long-term collaborative effort, deploying new instrumentation in subduction zones, and developing more sophisticated and accurate models.
Oh there you go, bringing class into it again.
Is "Self-Adjusting Computation" the Computer Science term for fine-grained automatic "reactive" subscription tracking like Mobx & Starbeam?

Is it the same idea as presented here? https://github-com.translate.goog/nin-jin/slides/blob/master...
https://www.tubebuddy.com/clickmagnet

This is the link to their site, if anyone has any information I'd love to hear it!
Sure, it's easier than ever to break the law, but not sure that's a fair argument.

In many parts of Europe - e.g., in Germany and in the UK - the purchase of many common "dangerous" reagents is regulated and illegal without a license that isn't available to hobbyists. The government takes the view that it's simply not a legitimate hobby.

In the US, the situation is better, but some essential chemicals are unobtainable due to DEA legislation (iodine, phosphorous). Many others are subject to DHS and DEA monitoring (including KYC mandates) and a patchwork of state laws that prompted most reagent manufacturers to stop shipping to non-commercial customers altogether - and in recent years, also caused them to also crack down on resellers (requiring every reseller to attest that they will not re-ship to civilians). In the past five years or so, eBay also had major crackdowns, banning everything from sulfuric acid to potassium iodide. So did Amazon.

And that's before we get into raids on YouTube chemists, etc. Heck, Texas prohibited people from buying or owning laboratory glassware until recently. Wikipedia has a good summary.

The internet made chemistry easier for a while by facilitating trade, but that era is coming to a halt.
depends on how the layoffs were made. In the case where someone blisters in and decides who to hire and fire using some fairly arbitrary guidelines, and does so within a week, and choosing entire departments to let go, that's not "bottom of the barrel" talent that's been let go
Nice font footwork (half the battle sometimes) and subsequently great demos for VHS.
Covid Patients Coming Off Ventilators Can Take Weeks to Regain Consciousness
Meta will begin laying off employees on Wednesday morning
Whether this is offensive or not, I have definitely seen worker visas used to exploit employees. And visa employees dealing with much more insanity than nationals. Sometimes it's overt, sometimes it happens in a proverbial boiling frog kind of way by the visa holding employee having to satisfy more and more inane manager expectations. But not being able to easily walk away from a company is not good.
https://archive.ph/QM2j8
Microsoft patches 6 zero-days under active exploit
> One unfortunate aspect of the customer is always right is that the customer may often be very wrong.

In other words, "the customer is always right" leads to absurdity even if interpreted generously, so maybe it's actually a bad principle.

Anyway, your optimistic view of the project in OP still does not describe an efficient use of 60M. Lots of us find that morally repugnant, and are not convinced to accept it by interpretations like the one you put forward. When people want to good work instead of bad work, we would prefer that be rewarded, not punished as it was in OP's story.
Who knows, i’m just going to rant that
I never got into it, i heard about it right at the start, started looking into it, like maybe do it like i used to let idle time on seti. Maybe now i’d be a billionaire. It would seem like an odd way to be one.

But i got put off it right away by libertarian conspiracy believing types, always knew way more than me about the secret machinations of the world that are forever kept free from us, and of course, they knew something i didn’t, this secret knowledge was given away for free if you knew the right people.

In a way, i credit them with a renewed interest in programming, as this guy told me about writing a twitter bot to pump gold whenever they’re idol told them too, i did actually think to myself, this guy thinks they’re a programmer when they repurposed a script while i can actually write useful apps, so i’ll give them that.
I believe you can do okay just looking for chemicals via Amazon. You have to source them individually, of course. Chemistry sets for kids are, as the author states, pretty much junk.

Someone a decade or so ago had a web site that would sell you a decent chemistry set. I have forgotten the link. I believe it was sort of targeting home-schoolers.
Just looked it up [1]

> LZ4 is lossless compression algorithm, providing compression speed > 500 MB/s per core (>0.15 Bytes/cycle). It features an extremely fast decoder, with speed in multiple GB/s per core (~1 Byte/cycle).

[1]: https://lz4.github.io/lz4/
How can one integrate it into his own android app?
They couldn't keep their sales force.
And FDIC to de-risk customers from feeling they need to do a bank run.
Languages aren't interpreted, implementations are.
Oh! Awesome, thanks!
Any legit seller of these ingredients would be expected to keep records of the transactions with some sort of KYC. If you were procuring from someone, I would think cash would be the precise anonymous payment format being sought. Digital payments just aren't quite as anonymous as people make them out to be.
As a chronic pain sufferer, the quickest way for me to dismiss someone from my life is when they tell me: “You should just try marijuana,” often with some stupid and incorrect statement like, “it’s more potent than opiates!”

Just no.
Someone hasn't done their yearly CCPA training
This would explain why we're still waiting for HL3.
Got another link? This seems to have been deleted
Two Medieval Monks Invent Bestiaries