skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There was once a programmer who was attached to the court of the warlord of Wu. The warlord asked the programmer: "Which is easier to design: an accounting package or an operating system?"

"An operating system," replied the programmer.

The warlord uttered an exclamation of disbelief. "Surely an accounting package is trivial next to the complexity of an operating system," he said.

"Not so," said the programmer, "When designing an accounting package, the programmer operates as a mediator between people having different ideas: how it must operate, how its reports must appear, and how it must conform to the tax laws. By contrast, an operating system is not limited by outside appearances. When designing an operating system, the programmer seeks the simplest harmony between machine and ideas. This is why an operating system is easier to design."

The warlord of Wu nodded and smiled. "That is all good and well, but which is easier to debug?"
The programmer made no reply.
You might like micrograd: https://github.com/karpathy/micrograd. There's also this video where the author explains how he built it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VMj-3S1tku0
Those two look identical to me.
Ads isn't just serving, but targeting. The better you target, the more your ads are worth. When you have $5B of advertising, a 0.01% improvement is breakeven for $500k of fully-loaded comp. So you should add as many engineers / data scientists / etc as can generate an 0.01% annual improvement. Or maybe you want to take 3x their annual salary: that's still an 0.03% improvement in ad relevance.

Separately, some commenters here are flatly delusional about the effort to ship a site, android and ios apps, internal mod tools, help docs, support, and legal docs in 34 supported languages. Not to mention obeying laws in all the countries that implies.

Or image and video hosting! With recoding of videos, resizing of images, and the management of what is surely petabytes of images and videos with very high reliability! That is not a 1, 2, or 3 person job to do well.
Bookshelf – A reading tracker app that helps you actually remember what you read
Maybe unpack this into an ethical and commercial question.

Go with your ethics foremost, as it will suck to make money doing something you feel is wrong.

If you are happy with tracking ethically, then try to decide if it is worth the effort, and do your customers really benefit from it?
Besides not being monetizable I refuse to have some spy microphone in my home which sends all my conversations to Amazon Central.

The market penetration is therefore finite, limited to geeks and early adopters. I'm somewhat surprised they didn't consider profitability more thoroughly when they started with Alexa. It must have cost them $100 billion by now.
>They blindly trust in Apple security. I spoke with people and they think you can't have an exploit/virus for iOS. Lol.

Statistically they are right.

Such exploits are so few and insignificant that they doesn't really matter...

It's more like the danger of dying from swallowing your food. It exists, but it's not really something you need to worry about...
The thing with Isis is a rather fringe theory though. The cults don't really overlap, and iconography is only superficially similar. Both are mothers of important figures ... and that's where the similarities come from.

Same with the floats. How else would you carry statues around?

In general terms, if you look long enough into enough cultures, you start seeing patterns everywhere. But that doesn't necessarily mean that connections exist, or that they are more than superficial. Good example would be various pan-nationalist projects of the 20th century.
Excellent work on Crash! I still play it to this day (the original version, but the recent remaster is also great).

Your point about flickering just made me wonder if ordering problems were exacerbated by lack of floating point hardware; we already know that this is the reason for the Playstation's wobbly (charming) graphics, but I imagine that it may have also contributed to errors in the ordering process, since the positional errors would include Z.
They had that on the financial side. The eng/HR side was behind for sure.
This is sort of the TLDR - I had tried a bunch of things over a few years, changing my diet, more exercise, various antidepressants etc... - none of it really did anything at all.

I went and saw a new psychiatrist and he wondered if it was perhaps a dopamine regulation issue. As such he prescribed Bupropion - which is only prescribed in Australia as a smoking cessation aid - but off label / in other countries it can be prescribed as an atypical anti-depressant.

Almost all antidepressants work on serotonin and norepinephrine - however, bupropion works on dopamine, hints being known as an atypical anti-depressant.

Within about five days, it felt like I'd been swimming underwater and surfaced to the clear air for the first time in five or so years. And within, perhaps a month or two, my is completely back to where I was say eight or nine years ago, perhaps even slightly better.

A few other things changed such as ever since I was little child. I was a chronic nail biter - at within two months that was completely gone and hasn't come back over a year later.

So that fixed my cognition, and I now know that it's a dopamine regulation issue, and is completely treatable.
IIRC (bit rusty now) python makes you do exactly [x, y + 1) in code and it pisses me off which is why I did my own trivial end-is-included range for loops.
Replied :)
politics. on any political spectrum there is no origin point, there are just differences.

for example in the UK they have socialized medicine and conservative politicians run campaigns on defending that socialized institution because its popular with the public.

in america if you propose socialized medicine you would be considered a radical communist by half the population. no conservative would ever propose it. (except for military, then its ok)
Google "emergence".
The country where I learned to drive (30 years ago now, but the process is still the same) has a very different system from the one common in the UK or US. You don't get a provisional driver license, and you are only allowed to drive once you pass the driving test.

The actual driving school consists of separate theory and practice courses, and you have to pass the test of the former before even starting the latter. The first few hours of practical driving can happen in a simulator, for the schools that can afford one; but most commonly they happen on specially designed training tracks - essentially empty parking lots with drawn ilnes to represent streets and intersections. You only get to drive in actual traffic once you have some experience in a safe environment.
"An extreme shortage of good-quality collateral was why the GFC happened"

It started with a housing boom in America and housing is not generally poor quality collateral. More money was lent than could be repaid because of the way securitization was being done. Then a bunch of "safe" synthetic derivatives we're created off that bad debt too. The real estate collateral underneath it all was probably the only good thing (and part of the justification for the whole mess in the first place)
Up until 2004 it was the Bundesrechtsanwaltsgebührenordnung, so it did get easier (and I still misspelled it. no points for me)
Don't tell someone on HN, tell a disoriented member of the public looking for a blue tick!
Forza Juve!
What is the limit for monitoring? Is a GPS tracker too much? Video too much?

My wife is in healthcare and knows how to properly administer vaccine injections so that the kid gets thee best immune response. She has had to notify our clinic that their nurses are not proper administering the vaccine. How would someone audit this if it is not recorded?

We have also had doctors write notes stating they checked or discussed so and so issues, when it blatantly did not happen, so we have to send a message correcting them. I understand that the doctor is likely covering their ass from excessive liability, but they’re also concerns from the patient side that proper care is not being delivered and the patient will never know.

I am not intending to pick on healthcare, it is just the first example that came to mind for when I thought of instances where recorded evidence would benefit me. But it is interesting to think about changes in societal trust and perception of societal trust now that recording is so cheap. Surely, one would agree that recording a cop while on the job is necessary (for both cop and others), so what is the line that separates a delivery worker?
Not sure I’m buying the argument that Amazon doesn’t know how to scale. I’ve had the exact same thing happen. Price drops after I’ve bought the product and have had to purchase the new one.

I’d say that Amazon has the data to determine if it’s more profitable to give the customer a credit or have them ship and return it.

So while annoying, I’d say that scale is probably why they are doing this seemingly unintuitive thing.
In addition to the many great comments here, remember that super star engineers don't exactly fix problems from day to day. They fix the problems before they become problems.

The engineer was doing stability planning for 6 months out for the purpose of cost optimization. I guess we can assume that the costs of infrastructure is about to go up and reliability is about to go down in the coming months.
Runescape is down as well - they're saying it's an issue in their London datacenter

https://www.reddit.com/r/runescape/comments/z1psnx/services_...
Am I the only one who noticed a bit unusual (or not?) ligature for 'st'?
Hi HN, I'm Alex, at Terrastruct, where we've been making D2. This actually popped up on HN a couple months back, though it wasn't ready, e.g. not open source yet. It is now!

We also put up a site for you to compare D2 with MermaidJS, Graphviz, and PlantUML: https://text-to-diagram.com.

Full disclosure, we're a for-profit company. The open-core part is that we make an alternative layout engine which we sell (Jetbrains model, i.e. your copy is your's forever if you've paid for 12+ months). It's not packaged with D2, so you won't see it if you don't want it. D2 is perfectly usable without it, and integrates with multiple free open source layout engines (e.g. the one that Mermaid uses, "dagre", is D2's default). If you want to read more about our plans for D2: https://d2lang.com/tour/future.

Hope you can check it out! It's got an easy install (and uninstall) process.
Indeed; people in working class are discouraged from pursuing the arts because it's difficult to turn it into a paying career. But if you're born in wealth and financial security you don't need to worry about that.

I believe it was one of the outcomes of universal basic income trials, people would engage more with the arts and creativity.
I think they added macrovision to the analog outputs, so there'd be that issue, but most people don't really notice the macrovision funkery.
A security risk which only gets worth with time.
Guessing you've looked at PyCharm already?

https://www.jetbrains.com/pycharm/
Amazon is not a philanthropy. The company needs to make money and as much of it to satisfy shareholders (who, BTW, are never satisfied).

Having spent tens of billions on something that doesn't add up to the bottom line doesn't go well with shareholders, especially when there's no prospect that it ever will.
You don’t, they try to obscure it but you can still install without a Microsoft Account.
Any off-boarding procedure fails - at that scale, if even one in one thousand fails, you can expect a couple of failures per year. ensuring these get caught is part of "solid offboarding".
I think "little" refers to the domain rather than other metrics of language size
use aegis or keepassXC/Keepassium/Keepass2Android. These apps allow to keep (backups of) your (T)OTP secrets offline and don't require additional PII info to set up.
The public should know that you can grab one for free rather than for $8 like on the current mainstream proprietary microblogging service.
Dude he meant that the net worth was all a mirage, and that anyone had more money in their pocket than SBF pretended he had in his entire net worth (because he stole it). He called him a fraud right there and all you can say is that he should have shown more respect to poor little guy SBF, him the meanie "tradfi"?
I spent three years in rural Africa in 35 countries. I spent most of my time where tourists don’t go. I met tons of people that had never seen a white person, border guards that had never seen a foreigner, etc.

Categorically, without question the vast majority of people told me they work hard for a few months a year during planting and harvest, otherwise they party, spend time with family and do whatever the hell they want. They don’t have Netflix or iPhones, but they have a huge amount of leisure time
The constraint that you need to generate value also
makes it fun, or at least, rewarding (to the heart)

2 programs. One only gets used by me, the other by 100 people. It is way more fun to write the second. Compensation being equal and all.
I've always considered that weird, given most cars in Europe aren't automatic. Not sure what the exact stats are. Idiocracy?

The only time I've had an accident was in Canada, because I wasn't used to using an automatic and went forward unexpectedly. It's just what you're used to.

Amusingly we got told off in California for "not knowing how to use our gears". As we hadn't put the auto into the low setting on a switchback. I did learn the benefit of that several years before when I burnt out my brakes the 1st time I drove in the alps and just wasn't used to the sustained descents.
it happened in China, about 100 people died in that time. 6500 and 100 is very different.
You can use ULID and store it as UUID since they are the same size. You can check this article for the details:

https://blog.daveallie.com/ulid-primary-keys
>If you build a resilient architecture, keeping something like Twitter simply running wouldn’t take that many people.

It takes an army of engineers to build a resilient architecture at Twitter's scale.

And why are we even talking about "keeping the lights on"? Elon is claiming he's going to build a better video platform than YouTube, complete with better tools and for creators, for crying out loud.
I own 1 that I bought to check my BD-RW/BD+RW drive could read them.
Source? Because last I checked, local accounts were discouraged but worked.
Bluetooth LE to support 6 GHz frequency band
These two are fundamentally different. Books always existed. They are a concrete, well-defined, well-understood, ubiquitous object.

You just wanted to sell a new way towards it.

But audio-things aren't even properly defined.
Unless the first steering wheel is prone to breaking. Redundancy is the difference between a million dollar company and billion dollar company.

Of course getting workers to come on on weekends and midnight hours accomplishes the same thing.
Weirdly, neither of those really clarifies things.
Sadly, I think practically there is much more quality control for programmers than there is for managers.

Overall it is true though, although I sometimes hate if decision makers have zero technical knowledge. I think a good manager needs to be able to see the larger picture. You don't have to be an expert, but you require some knowledge for the domain you manage. You have to have self-reflection if you do not and in that case delegate decision making. Doesn't mean a non-programmer wouldn't be able to lead a developer team.

Although that rule is probably as much true for any other profession. Lawyers and sales come to mind that have just as much, conflicting priorities in their former non-management careers. Academics fresh from university also make bad leaders. I think having sat at the other end of the table is an important experience to understand the perspective of those you try to manage.

Some say communication and collaboration is important. True to a degree, but this is also often means empty crap. Most programmers I know hate empty and superficial crap. The average team of developers usually a far more cooperative than the average sales team. That should of course be leveraged. A team needs a goal, a perspective and a manager needs to know the abilities of a team. I believe many programmers actually do not need too much management if there is a clear target to reach.

Still, becoming manager shouldn't be the default goal, but it is sadly often expected.
> a sweet test ... chemical tests

Assuming this isn’t just an autocorrect issue, is there a word for this phenomenon of writing an incorrect but similar word that’s also on your mind? It happens to me with annoying frequency.
I'm all about time saving strategies.

I freed up insane amounts of time by decustomizing my personal use of tech.

I am no longer willing to spend $100 and 30 hours to make something I could buy for $30.

I no longer insist on learning everything about the tech I use, while the history book I want to read sits idle on a shelf.

I no longer buy random stuff "just to try it out" when I don't have any real reason to think I'm going to enjoy having it. I don't buy random stuff for DIY projects very often if I'm not totally sure I want to do that project.

I do buy things that I think will make life easier.

I'm still working on social media time drains. Even this site itself is a bit of a time sink.
Tracking ads conversions, targeting, refinement of models, latency reduction , data analytics, ads sales, sales ops, etc. yeah easily 1000 employees all in.
Most don't.

leet is fine for junior, but algo's don't come up in real life all that often.
I am wondering if they are still paying $200K for fresh grad.
4chan itself - or at least a lot of the memes I've seen - is proud of the "autistic trolls" monikers; I wouldn't be surprised if this guy was on there and encouraged by the others.
If, however, a and b are dates, these operations are nonsensical, as is using anything else except closed intervals: for date range comparisons it is much more understandable to use start-of-day on a and end-of-day on b.
All those commercial systems existed before his (going by his use of SQL 2005).
Of course humans change. A state machine can also change state. Doesn't mean that a state machine has control over their behavior.
Sure, already mentioned UUID’s being slow. There are trade offs
I don't know what I expected but I'm surprised that besides the apartment that sounds a little more expensive ($2700?) it's pretty much western europe prices, say Amsterdam or something like that
Or a landlord that gives a shit about keeping his property repaired, but since he has no intention of getting rid of the black mold or the leaks in the roof, I won't hold my breath, nor will I hold it for finding any other affordable housing to rent in this area.
That's why Open Source (the "Individual-OSS", not "corporate/PR-OSS" that is also very popular today) is still great and pervasive. People writing code to solve their own problems, publishing the code for everyone to use if they want to, with no expectations of anything else than "Here is the code, do what you want with it".
“I love Amazon, I just wish you’d deliver a little slower.”

There may be ethical concerns.
I'm not saying the recommendations are bad, but... it's a shop! Of course they're trying to sell you something!

(Making good recommendations may well be more profitable than making bad recommendations, because if they make bad recommendations you'll stop coming back. But they absolutely are trying to sell you something).
Lots of people are puritans, I was talking about the puritans making themselves terribly offended by that meme. If Musk is one too it doesn't mean they aren't, it's not based on some relative scale here. But I am using the lowercase puritan which probably doesn't fit him.

I didn't know that he lead an extremist cult though, not that I have ever cared to find out much about his life or beliefs. It wouldn't surprise me, I think a lot of the ruling class and ultra rich are terrible people who we should not be living under. That said I have noticed the claims of Musk's terribleness and extremism may have a tiny correlation with his unwillingness to toe the Democrat party line. Now quite possibly that's just a coincidence and there's absolutely no causation there, nevertheless if I were ever in a situation where that information would be important to a decision, it would behoove me to take it on its merits rather than on faith.
Is there anything in particular you think Oliver (or any other left-leaning comedian) has been wrong about, or is this more of a gut-feel thing?

Also is it necessary to specify "left" when talking about comedy? I can't really think of anyone right-wing who can be called a comedian. Guys like Crowder and Gutfeld are the closest but they kinda struggle with joke construction, material and they paint themselves into a corner (and tbh delegitimize themselves a bit) by their uncritical, fawning adoration of some pretty ridiculous political figures.
Yes. It’s probably the most common usage for Alexa devices in our house. Kitchen timers and weather being the other common ones.
Seven Unacceptable Problems with macOS [video]
Could be both.
it doesn't follow. The article posits that "many people think twitter headcount was bloated" then proceeds to describe a (presumably) really efficient work of a small SRE team. These two parts seem completely disconnected from each other - neither one proves, disproves or follows from the other - so it's unclear why the former was mentioned at all.
> Adding sugar to wine is considered a great offense, and is not only illegal in France, but a disagrace.

That's not true. Adding sugar is even part of some AOP. It's used to regulate the amount alcohol in the finish product.
At least the action is discontinued.
‘Some things never leave you’: Poverty’s indelible marks
>Where’s the 1000s of engineers for Postgres?

You're comparing Postgres to Twitter?

If some of the people making comments like this actually work in tech, then yeah, maybe there is a lot of bloat to be cut.
Yep, I gave up a software eng career 7 years ago. I always say I loved using my brain, solving hard problems and working with smart people. All the rest is why I walked away.
(That entire post is a quote from The Tao of Programming by Geoffrey James, 1987.)
You might have to provide a screenshot, because I don’t have one (Firefox, Win)