skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: What developer productivy tools would you need?
I saw the Aviator is hiring post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34248128) - a YC company I haven't heard of before, but they seem to focus on developer productivity. At least some aspect of it (it seems to be about more SDLC, rather than ergonomy of keyboard shortcuts).

They seem to want to go broad with the tooling. At least this is the impression I got when reading their WWW. Nothing wrong with it. I suppose eventually they would have 5 to 10 more things than just the Merge Queue and the Flaky Bot.

I'd be curious what other ideas people might have for tools like this.

Let me start with a few from myself. Curious what others say:

1. A better Dependabot, which at least in Java (Maven/Gradle) ecosystem works only for basic projects. It has so many limitations.

2. Onboarding helper. I.e. something which sets up everything for a new developer, and maintains that consistency of the setup going forward. So that the infra/DevOps teams (who I guess would be the key users at your customers) can use it to provide consistent but flexible setup for everyone. And be able to evolve that. I mean things like IDE, build script setup with all the dependencies, key tools installed like terraform, GH client, a linter, etc. All of them in the same version for everyone.

3. Command-line friendly and user friendly credentials interface. Think of a mix of 1Password and hashicorp vault. But it should work well in all three contexts: nice GUI, CLI and automation (not only on my laptop, but as part of some CI pipeline or other toolling). It doesn't have to be the storage, delegate to 1P/HCV.

4. A collaboration tool for dealing with different kind of error messages, warnings and problems. Think of something like a mix of StackOverflow and Sentry. Group by type of the error, but focus on what developers experience in their dev environment (tests, build scripts, etc.). Deduplicate, store and offer solutions as a knowledge base

5. Time measurement tool, but not the one for my employer to check if I waste time on Facebook. But measure the length of my cycles - i.e. count of local runs before I commit, or count of CI-failure-then-fix iterations. And aggregate that, so that again my DevOps team can see some stats and know how to increase velocity by knowing what are the bottlenecks (but don't trust subjective feelings on that, gather data).
…sssssssspoiler alert
Bloomberg is also reporting Beijing is strapped for cash and cancelling chip subsidies. [0]

0: https://archive.ph/ObeDF
> what is even "[lacking] true meaning and purpose"?

Perhaps the alienation of workers from the fruits of their labor? It's underrated how depressing it is to not get to eat the sausage you broke your back making.
You don't need all streets electrified, just enough to keep the vehicles charged.
Its not like you black out and the chips are in your mouth though, to act on hunger requires conscious effort. That is what the ascetics are practicing, resisting these primal urges because they can be resisted by the higher thinking brain.
I thrive via an "on-demand" learning approach. But to me, I use this approach as a way to immerse myself so I can reach a better conceptual understanding. I don't use tools or new skills without thinking about how they might work under the hood. I also spend lots of time relating the tools and skills I use to other things I've done in the past. Many times this leads me to learn about the abstract concepts that underpin the tools/skills I use - something I would not care about if it was presented to me without context.

Here is an example. I was interested in real-time 3D graphics programming. How did I go about it? I followed the bare minimum tutorials to get OpenGL set up with C++ and then I just wrote code for several months, trying different things. This allowed me to develop my own intuition around linear algebra, geometry, 3D rendering, GPU pipelines, etc. I knew I wasn't doing anything groundbreaking, but what I found was after this experimentation I was able to readily digest and understand the formal approach to the topic. And it was out of my own interest too. I was watching university lectures, reading about mathematical proofs, etc. Something I thought I'd never be able to do. And I found it much more rewarding as I was able to see where my intuitions were correct and lined up with the formal approach, and also where I was very wrong.
Is Pihole a reasonably friendly tool with an easy on-ramp or is LS doing more than that?
There's nothing wrong with being a junior developer, as long as that junior developer matures into a senior developer in a reasonable timeframe.
A lot has to happen for mainstream AR to be viable. But it's an example of a technology that, if it could surpass a lot of very significant technology hurdles, would be very interesting to a lot of people and probably scary to others. And a bit of both to most.
I hope it's by image count total. Then you can have just one giant high res porn image and be 99.99% porn free.
> Does the guidance only apply to user-authenticated web pages? the article suggests 'the website' is all PHI, which I personally find to be an insane interpretation of HIPAA.

Someone (anonymous) goes to the website and does a bunch of searches on e.g. cancer or AIDS or anything else they don't want marketing to know about. Afterwards they log in (turns out the person was an existing patient who had a login). But it's all in the same session so now you tied all that search info to a specific account and sent it to adspyware third parties. Solid HIPAA violation.

Not my field, but talking to friends in healthcare infosec, this is something that has caused them to be hit with fines in the past. Even in the absence of fines, clearly a privacy violation.
What's the similarity? They're both "plans?"
It's likely you will choose the lenses up front.

Similar to how when you buy an Apple Watch you choose the strap size.
Even if you force math on people that won't mean it will be of any use.

You cannot just force math and programming onto someone and expect them to become even an avarage level programmer/scientist.

And the way AI is exploding right now these low level code monkey jobs (frontend web design) is already halfway code-less, so even these positions won't be available to them.
Nobody's really set it up to do that as it's easier to use Linux's sandboxing features if you're looking to run user code of the same cpu ISA. GVisor has an (experimental last time I checked) backend that uses KVM to run user mode code, but there you have the win of the sandboxing code being written in a memory safe language and giving you a real privilege boundary as opposed to the sieve that qemu-user is. In just about every other instance just running code natively in regular user space (even if sandboxed with seccomp or a ptrace jail) achieves the underlying goals better.
I got to know about Sentry because they have a special offer for students, through the GitHub Student Developer Pack[0]. I searched for Sentry right now, through the search, and I am surprised how common it was to talk about these tools.

If it wasn't for the GitHub pack, I would have never known about something like this. Maybe you are right, and it isn't a unique enough topic now :(

[0] https://education.github.com/pack
How microplastics are infiltrating the food you eat
> I don't think so, for me it's so easy it's kind of boring, though a good portion of that is that it's a quadcopter. Fixed wing is so much more fun to fly.

Makes some sense you find it boring, it's essentially flying itself. Conventional
remote-control helicopters have gyros for stabilisation but I don't think
they're anywhere near as easy to control as quadcopter drones.
Also, some keyboard layouts use dead keys for inputting ^ as a diacritic (for example, ABNT2 Portuguese, the standard in Brazil).

This means that to type "â" I press the ^ key, which is actually Shift+~, then I press the letter to go under it, in this case, "a". If I want to type a standalone ^, I have to either press Shift+~ twice, or follow the Shift+~ with an invalid letter, such as "q" or space.

So typing a lot of code that uses ^ is very annoying. For example, to type "^section" you have to do: Shift+~, Space, S...

Additionally, and this is purely Apple's fault for being entirely deranged, on Macs you have to watch out even further, as it is possible to write both ^ and ˆ, depending on what you press. Shift+~ then space prints the lone diacritic, while Shift+~ then right arrow prints the ASCII ^ you've seen so far. Obviously, having to reach for the arrow keys for a common occurrence when typing is incredibly inconvenient, on top of the inconvenience described previously.
That's how likely they are to occur near each other, not how likely either statement is true. Rude of you to preface your comment the way you did while making this error.
There's a difference between "Has to follow the US and it's laws", "Has strong connections via technology forums and the revolving door of lobbying" and "Has government-mandated official positions that report to the party"

It's actually pretty low in direct effect - if the government wants the corporation's secrets, or even for a coporation to take actions on it's behalf, there are plenty of both public and private agents within the company that they can use to act or steal or whatever. What's important about it is the act of subservience. The latter is a direct admission that "The corporation serves the state's interests", whereas in the US and other free countries the state serves the people's interests, and the corporation is a group of people with common interest.

This is why Citizen's United is so important a ruling and under constant attack - Because it asserts the primacy of the people to make their interests heard, in opposition to the model where people serve the state.
Imagining a typical search query, I asked "What are the lyrics to Billy Joel's best known song?" and got:

Billy Joel's best known song is probably "Piano Man." Here are the lyrics:

Verse 1:
It's nine o'clock on a Monday
The regular crowd shuffles in
There's an old man sitting next to me
Making love to his tonic and gin
He says, "Son, can you play me a melody?
I'm not really sure how it goes
But it's loud and it's funky
And it's rhythm is right on time"

Chorus:
Oh, the piano has been drinking, not me

Verse 2:
He's talking to me, how he's got no time
For his only son, who's just turned twenty-one
And he says, "The bill's on me, son, just be my guest"
And I think it's the best of the three

Chorus:
Oh, the piano has been drinking, not me

Verse 3:
It's five o'clock on a Friday
I'm turning off the telephones
I'm getting ready for the weekend

Bridge:
I'm painting my room in a psychedelic style
But my friends say it's just a waste of time
"Cause all the madmen, they seem to have gone mad
And all the best guys, they're already gone

Chorus:
Oh, the piano has been drinking, not me

Outro:
Yes, they're sharing a drink they call loneliness
But it's better than drinking alone

I hope that helps! Do you have any other questions about this song or anything else?
Agree. Avicii was also a rather high-profile case:

"When he stopped touring, he wanted to find a balance in life to be able to be happy and to do what he loved most – music. He really struggled with thoughts about Meaning, Life, Happiness. He could now not go on any longer. He wanted to find peace. Tim was not made for the business machine he found himself in"

"His manager, Arash Pournouri, admitted that he knew of Bergling's anxieties but refused to label them a problem of mental health"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avicii#Death
The new idea (mostly in the West) that being obese is/can be a healthy lifestyle is absolutely maddening. People being obese (and I don't mean a few pounds overweight) raises everyone's healthcare cost, because it is incredibly unhealthy and obese people tend to have more complications which requires more treatment, workers and subsidizing.

It's not just an individual problem, it's a societal problem. There's a new "Gatorade Fit" commercial with, easily, a 300lb woman in it...the brand is literally "Fit," being 300lbs is not fit in any way shape or form. Why is this happening? Even when/if I'm 10-20lbs overweight, I don't want someone patting me on the back saying I'm actually "fit" or anything close to it. It's such a weird lie that makes it feel like I'm living in a bizzarro world.
take GLP1 drugs, NAD , metformin , rapamycin for maximum benefits.
Just searching "usa donkey" on youtube gives so many results of people literally vlogging their illegal immigration journey[1]. It's actually crazy how so many well to do Indians are giving so much money(50,000 dollars which is a lot in India) to get illegaly into
America. It seems to have become a sort of a trend and it will only increase in the future with these vlogs glorifying the journey. From the video it seems they start the journey in Brazil or other South American country because Mexican Mafia charges double to directly donkey someone from Mexico(which seems counter intuitive from cost to smuggle pov) and rather they start the journey 10-15 countries before before finally going over the "wall" in america and then when they are finally inside the US the police arrests them and keeps them in camps from where the asylum process starts.

1 : https://www.youtube.com/@ankushmalikvlogs
> What are some reasons you reckon that the current setup won't scale beyond 10GB?

It's more of an arbitrary threshold right now. A lot of testing that we do right now is chaos testing where we frequently kill nodes to ensure that the cluster recovers correctly and we try to test a range of database sizes within that threshold. Larger databases should work fine but you also run into SQLite limitations of single writer. Also, the majority of databases we see in the wild are less than 10GB.

> Leaving aside stability related bugs, what design decisions previously made were the caused painful bugs / roadblocks?

So far the design decisions have held up pretty well. Most of the PRs were either stability related or WAL related. That being said, the design is pretty simple. We convert transactions into files and then ship those files to other nodes and replay them.

We recently added LZ4 compression (which will be in the next release). There was a design issue there with how we were streaming data that we had to fix up. We relied on the internal data format of our transaction files to delineate them but that would mean we'd need to uncompress them to read that. We had to alter our streaming protocol a bit to do chunk encoding.

I think our design decisions will be tested more once we expand to doing pure serverless & WASM implementations. I'm curious how things will hold up then.

> Consequently, what things majorly surprised you in a way that perhaps has altered your approach / outlook towards this project or engineering in general?

One thing that's surprised me is that we originally wrote LiteFS to be used with Consul so it could dynamically change its primary node. We kinda threw in our "static" leasing implementation for one of our internal use cases. But it turns out that for a lot of ancillary cache use cases, the static leasing works great! Losing write availability for a couple seconds during a deploy isn't necessarily a big deal for all applications.
The only advice I can give is that you quit cold turkey. If that means not using YouTube then so be it. This was the only way I was able to quit Twitter. I forced myself to stop using it, and after awhile (for me about 1 or 2 weeks) I lost the desire to use it. That was in July, and now when I visit it I feel revulsion and close it immediately. So there is hope, and you can quit, but it’s a hard stop.
Alexa also had a 4-year head start on the HomePod. I don't know if that's the most apt comparison. Additionally, while it is an absurd price tag, the rumors are also that this is being aimed at Apple's famed "Creative Pro" segment and not gamers/casual VR users.
I just did a google search of her name. Ran into a website from a former client lamenting she'd stolen his identity, lamenting there wasn't much that he could do about it and warning others.
> the "virtual monitor" use case is just baffling to me. Actual monitors exist.

First of all, it works with phones, tablets, game consoles, computers, etc. Anything with a display output, so keep that in mind. The use-case isn’t just big desktop computers or even stationary devices.

1. Travel, you can use this on an airplane, which is nice for frequent travels, or if you want to watch a movie on a bigger screen on a plane. It also works in hospital beds, or anywhere else you may want to enjoy a screen but not bring monitors or TVs.

2. Ergonomics, you can lay down and use the glasses a lot easier than a mounted monitor overhead (and a lot less risky). This is useful both for finding ergonomic positions for general life, and also for people who may be disabled, or otherwise have some bodily issue that forces them to lay in bed (in hospital, elderly, etc).

3. It’s simply a bigger screen. It fills your vision, it’s a lot bigger than a 25” display, even if thats roughly the equivalent quality. If you want to Eg. Watch a movie or play games, it’s a better experience. I’ve heard YouTubers like it for their Steam Deck.

4. It’s a lot smaller than a monitor. If you live alone in a studio, this could save you space on having a dedicated desk and desk equipment. You can just work at your table, and it packs away to a backpack when you want to eat.

5. You could even walk and wear it as a HUD - theres a company that makes live translation software for the headset, where you can read “subtitles” of people talking.
When you are so fat your metabolic maintenance rate hovers around 4000 kcal per day you lose all sense of what to eat and after years of over eating old habits die hard.

On paper dieting is the easiest thing. You literally need to watch one hole and it is right under your nose, but in practice it isnt that easy.

Appetite is great way to control obesity - if you dont want to eat you wont
IMO, the entire point of using something embedded like SQLite is to avoid the network stack.

Using SQLite, you can reliably satisfy queries in tens-to-hundreds of microseconds.

I cannot imagine any scenario wherein a single-node hosted DB (across the LAN) can outperform a properly-configured SQLite instance (in same process).

DB administration for us is included in an admin web app that is part of the product stack.
ChatGPT is wrong here because in order to "pump" entropy out of a system this system must not be closed! So to ask it, you must insist the system isn't closed.

And, specifically, living organisms can't be closed systems, because their existence depend on spending energy to decrease their internal entropy, increasing the entropy of the external environment in the process, in order to keep their own entropy low enough to still function without random breakage we would expect from an aging system.

And we all know that entropy always wins in the end, and we always break if we are old enough, so this is a sisyphean task; but we still do it all day every day, because we are afraid to die.

Anyway, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_and_life
This is pretty much it. The reason Defender / Security Essentials was invented was to reduce Microsoft's own support workload, because a substantial proportion of that is caused by other overly aggressive anti-malware programs blocking everything and blaring loudly about it.
Traditionally* VR lens fittings have been relatively affordable (Quest had them for <$100). That being said, this is Apple we're talking about here... are we perhaps getting a 'Lens Pro Max ME (Medical Edition)'?
Really feels to me like microsoft is just in such a better position to capitalize on the enterprise use case stuff. They already have relationships with every large org and could conceivably include a headset as part of some office+ subscription. Apple has next to no enterprise business, but they're going to convince businesses to buy headsets for employees? Not buying it.
“Globalisation is still a thing, ish, but it's doomed. We thought the rest of the world (cough Russia, China and their rag-tag group of dictator allies) cared more about economic well-being than expansionism and petty grievances”

Why should the US all the way on the other side of the world be depriving these two modern superpowers of their neighboring resources?

We have military proxy states set up all around Russia and China. The US has been the dominant power in the world for around 100 years.

Not that I don’t benefit from it, but it seems willfully ignorant to act like it’s US good guy Russia/China bad guy. We’d do the same expansionist thing, as evidenced by Ukraine and Taiwan themselves…
Good point, added a quick addition, will add more description and docs when I get time later tonight
Unrelated but interesting how they used Dall-E and Midjourney for the article cover art
If those VR glasses emulate high resolution virtual three-monitor setup which you can take everywhere with you, count me fucking in!
True true. And the math underlying that, is even more enduring.
They certainly have the cash to subsidize a new market creation...
> Apple bets on XR video calls as ‘killer app’

I certainly have complaints about video conferencing but there's no issue with current gen video calls that requires a $3000 face mask with a tiny battery life as a valid "solution".
Uhhh you're a little disillusioned to think that a very very small subset of humans paying hundred of dollars for a meal is a baseline for why "humans value tasty and flavorful food". Just because some people drive 160mph on a highway does not mean its a good idea. The fact that you're arguing a box of oreos is equally nutritious to a calorie equal amount of say protein and/or vegetables is actually baffling.
We’re already electrifying bus depots [1]. Trolley lines may work on major thoroughfares, but they’re a bit of an eye sore.

[1] https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2021/06/03/the-mtas-new-electric...
Well, to be fair, it was disabled because it mostly didn't work correctly in a wide amount of circumstances, because a lot of HTTP/1.1 servers didn't support it correctly. Not because people didn't want better performance. It was bolted on and HTTP/1.x lets you get away with an incredible amount of stuff[1] while continuing to "work". It is also another thing that introduces head-of-line blocking; and that one isn't fixable even if the servers were.

Moving multiplexing directly into the "data path" of the protocol was the correct move in the case of HTTP/2 and later, because you can't get this part wrong and still have things work; multiplexing is simply a core feature of the system. This is true of many other things as well.

[1] Stuff like this is guaranteed to happen IMO because HTTP/1.1 is a perfect example of "deceptively complex." Everyone says that HTTP/2 got complicated, but HTTP/1.1 was already incredibly complicated to get working reliably and efficiently. The difference is you can't write an "HTTP/2 server" in under 200 lines of code that ignores 99.9% of the whole specification, while you could get away with this in HTTP/1.1. The /2 spec was, in this sense, largely an admission of the complexity of the problem, which protocol developers were already acutely aware of.
“a drink” user attribute in active directory
‘Disruptive’ science has declined
I don't have the science background to tell you which adverse outcomes, but you can be assured that the answer is yes.
Seems like plug in hybrid is the best approach with current tech. Battery in the neighborhoods, and gas powered when you are hauling it back to the landfill.
Breaking Out of the MeToo Movie Formula
The star is constantly sending stuff outside (solar wind and light / photons)
How could it not be? More labour for the rest of us. Economically the benefits of immigration are unquestionable, despite scaremongering by the Western right.