skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The idea that decision making in a democracy is some definable optimization problem that "experts" can solve better than the average voter, or that the very purpose of democratic decision making is to optimize anything in the first place is laughably naive.

Any non-trivial decision that must be made in a democracy is made amongst a set of choices with outcomes that are incomparable to one another in a single objective domain.

For instance: should we raise taxes? If the question were simply to optimize how much money we can raise, then yes, the question could be modeled as an optimization problem; the outcome of each possible choice will be some amount of tax revenue that can be ranked.

But rather, the question is should we be raising taxes or should we be lowering them. There are no outcomes to be compared here, but rather - generously - philosophies to be debated or - cynically - power struggles to be played out.

When there is no objective way to rank the outcomes of a set of decisions "expert" opinion is of little value.
Earlier in my career I was so excited to learn about microservices, as I was working with a huge monolith at the time. Then I went a bit overboard, and for a new prototype I had all these services in different repos and running independently. It was all very cool and I felt very accomplished, only to later (and now painfully obvious) be pointed out it was completely unnecessary, to the point each function basically was its own deployment. But not in a way that made any sense. If you were looking for the _most_ expensive way of running things, maybe.. hah

Tunnel-vision is a powerful thing, and if this is how people are splitting repos now a days, it seems I might not have been the only one chopping up perfectly good dish only to be left with the individual ingredients.
I felt the same.

Also we stopped using it a few years ago, but for some reason over the past months, all our employees have been getting marketing spam from Lattice.
So for the things that don't need a lot of change, what are some characteristics of the system?

Does CI/CD exist? Does CI even exist? Are deployments automated? Is data sanity checked before loading? Is there a development environment? Do things like hourly snapshots exist? Can you easily provision a replacement system from scratch and restore data from a known good snapshot?

Or, is every process manual, slow, and error prone because there's never been a need to move fast.

Look at this one sentence in the article:

> In the overnight hours of Tuesday into Wednesday, FAA officials decided to shut down and reboot the main NOTAM system -- a significant decision, because the reboot can take about 90 minutes, according to the source.

So they do a reboot, that takes 90 minutes for some reason, and then that didn't even fix the problem. Their system that needs a lot of stability is now broken.
The Age of Micro-Stream Processing
Right, because the reasonable response to somebody exercising their freedom of speech in a way you dislike is murder.
> If someone has transportation to go to a fast food restaurant, they have transportation to go to a corner store and buy a can of beans.

There's a number of ways this wouldn't be true and they aren't difficult to come up with.

Beyond that, the discussion is encapsulating somewhat broader points - the resources it takes to eat consistently healthy vs eating cheaply. It wouldn't make sense to only include fast food in the poor diet options.

Your seem to be asserting this: That someone living in a healthy-food dessert and without reliable access to transportation has no excuse to not consistently eat a healthy diet.

I counter that 60 seconds of thinking it thru would produce any number of scenarios that clearly speak against that assertion.

> Reality is that most poor people eat junk food because it's less effort, and because the high amounts of salt, fat, and sugar that make it so unhealthy are nearly addictive and act as a comfort.

This is meaningfully related, though it's a bit over declared. Some with limited access to resources may be able to put a healthy meal together if they're playing their A Game. But A Games are hard to come by for folks condemned to survival mode - maybe the sort where 5 hours sleep is the norm along with caregiving multiple people while working multiple jobs.
Types help prevent a narrow class of errors. They also help with refactoring. They help avoid messy checks getting in the middle of your business logic.
All of this is more than enough to justify using them.

Types do not replace other checks and tests.

I don't think the Mars satellite crashed because they trusted the type system.
The number hasn't really changed, it's just been measured with increasing precision. It is rather unlikely to be wrong given measurements via various methods are all in agreement. Summaries about these various experiments are available: https://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/science/featured_science/tenye...
What if there were some situation where I needed to rig the battery of my car to discharge so fast it explodes? Since the hardware can be physically driven to do that, obviously the software should support doing it. The designers of the software are just nannying me by not enabling the 'self destruct' capability that my property has. They just don't trust me to use it responsibly.
And every service deploys instantly whenever anything changes?

(I actually use that as my rule of thumb for where repository splits should happen: things that are deployed together should go in the same repo, things that deploy on different cycles should go in different repos)
No! I'm tired of being told how to architect systems because other folks refuse to grow their knowledge.

Because I'm good at my job, a monorepo would be pants-on-head stupid. Because I know how to make separate codebases interact with one another successfully, it would be a massive mistake to lose those advantages, all because you (not me) run into problems when you try to do what I find perfectly natural.

And if you work with me, you will learn, and I will guide you, and in time you will experience systems design as I do, and no longer be shackled to only doing the things you understand today.

But no, "do this because I don't know how to do that" will never be a winning argument.
Maybe I was overly swayed by the rhetoric I see fairly frequently and you caveated it appropriately. I apologize if so
This is an important point which is often ignored. Rust tooling isn't bad, but compared to C++ and especially C...
AI semantic search engine that allows you to search for book concepts and similar books.
These are "Split Systems", yes?
That first theory would be interesting, but wouldn't it be basically impossible to prove unless the finite repeating universe were also pretty small? We see distant objects as they were in the past, and I'm not sure we'd recognize our own galaxy a billion years ago and a billion light years away.

It's actually an interesting thought experiment. If that theory were true, and assuming we could see ourselves face-on (rather than edge-on), then I wonder how far away and far back could we recognize ourselves.
One issue that a lot of patterns run into in Ruby (and other highly flexible languages) is that a lot of patterns exist to help you deal with the restrictions the language puts on what you can do with it.

Ruby has enough sharp knives that many patterns are pointless, or trivial enough that they're idioms instead, or that the downsides of the pattern are drastically limited.

(example: command pattern vs lambdas; delegate vs blocks)

Having singletons can make sense, if the abstraction has to be leaky...

(examples of abstractions that must be leaky: AWS vs GCP)
(examples of abstractions that can be tight: Segment vs Rudderstack)

...because then you're never really in a position where you need multiple objects, or to swap out the implementing object, during production runtime. So you don't benefit much from DI on prod.

And in Ruby, when you're in the tests, there's a handful of nice and handy shenanigans you can pull to remove the downside / AKA make it trivial to mock the object.

--

AKA Ruby is flexible enough that you need DI like a contortionist needs a backscratcher.
> async stand ups because they’re just such a waste of time

But bosses love them as a submission/compliance ritual, a surveillance practice, and another flavor of presenteeism.
I find that I just make the .d.ts files any types

I could document types for that module, but I don't, and instead assume types as the output of code I have that interacts with them
The future is just history
6-7 months of 1 day workweeks is not a lot of time. They'll be over before you realize they started.

Definitely invest time in either/or generating recurring income, learning how to do so, getting other contracts, finding new customers, learning new skills that you think you might need in the near future, etc.

If you want to have a bit of a holiday for some of the time, fine, but try to keep some sort of rhythm to your activities; and don't slouch. This is not an indefinite time period.

You'd be surprised how many people don't mind that you're on call at times (if anything, knowing that you're busy somehow makes you more desirable? ). Just don't overload yourself with additional tasks, make sure you're doing your primary task well.

If you do do a good job doing the on-call, you might be able to negotiate an extension.

Whatever you do, make sure you have new/extra profitable things lined up for when this contract finally does peter out.
The important thing about stand-ups is that you are standing up, and not comfortable in your chair. They should probably be renamed to stand on one foots to emphasize that the point is to get them over with so you can get back to work.
I call bike shed on the entire debate. One repo or many can work fine depending on the situation.
It’s too late for me. Basically I had this coded a month ago and as soon as it worked, I 5-starred and I was far too quick to say thank you (and tip him).

From this guys response, I’m thinking that I need someone to evaluate all of the code - I don’t have faith in and don’t understand it all.

Maybe Fiverr isn’t the best place for WooCommerce work after all!
Here’s why I’ll never go back to anything but a monorepo.

My previous org decided on this for their source control/build dependency layout:

1. Monolith, home to front and back end, artisanal handcrafted openapi spec that plugged into nothing and was just for show.

2. Hand-painted service-cli library, which was supposedly going to be open source for customers but never was, and only mattered to the front end, back in the monolith. We manually kept it in sync with the backend, to everybody’s benefit (YFR). Hope you see it: backend changes left the monolith into the service-cli, back to the monolith. Face, meet wall.

3. A knapsack full of tiny libraries which all could have been wrapped up in one. They were all dependencies that plugged into the monolith and the service-cli. And they all had subdependencies.

4. Everything version-wise was synced via private npm registry. So if you wanted to make a change that went into the next version of monolith, but the code had to live in a leaf dependency way down at the bottom, you had to run a relay race marathon of red-tape PRs that you had to bribe your coworkers to pay attention to and/or approve.

The entire time, several of us on the team were begging the core team to repair this and they basically told us “no we believe in the tenets of sadism, now take your allotted pain, feature-bitch.”

This company employed 150+.
How much does a magnet factory cost? How big is the market? Does the market expand if the cost drops by a factor of 2? Of an order of magnitude?

I have no idea of the scale, except that rare earth element production appears to be about 250000 tonnes per year.
Yes, just why assume a multiverse and not a megaverse? Of course, the superhero movies (which I enjoy) give an unrealistic view of what a multiverse would be.
Men in Black marble hypothesis?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OKnpPCQyUec
I like using submodules for internal dependencies I might modify as part of an issue. I like conan or cargo for things I never will. I don't particularly like conan. Perhaps bazel, hunter, meson or vcpkg are all better.
regardless of what happened, I think given the publicity, I don't think any company will ever hire him again. Hopefully he got enough shares from Carta to retire.
It's easy with github actions to only run a workflow if a certain directory has changed:

on:
push:
paths:
- kcf/tools/kcf_graph/\*
- .github/workflows/test-kcf-graph.yml
workflow_dispatch: {}

https://github.com/gradesta/gradesta/blob/default/.github/wo...
Servo’s New Grave
I joined a somewhat troubled project a year after it's initiation. One of the things I learned is that early on, while the stakeholders were looking for visible progress, the tech lead decided to give them a presentation on the state of the system. What the stakeholders were concerned about was that they had not seen even a kernel of a working system. The tech lead, I'm told, focused on the tech stack, the implementation details, the integration points with existing systems, and a whole bunch of things that had the stakeholders dozing off within a short time. I think the only reason project wasn't cancelled there and then was because it was in a critical path for the business.

I 100% believe that the tech lead gave this presentation, because part of my onboarding, such as it was, went over pretty much all the technical details of how the system was built, but never did I really get a sense of what the goals were, what functionality was in place, or any overall understanding of what all the pieces were supposed to be doing. Yeah, ok, it's great that you created a bunch of code using gRPC to communicate internally and connected up to bunch of REST backend services sending and receiving JSON, but so what? How did any of that address the functional needs of the stakeholders?
> “Musk’s net worth dropped from a peak of $320bn in 2021 to $138bn as of January 2023, largely due to the poor performance of Tesla’s stock,”

This is not at all interesting as it's unclear if the stock was overvalued to begin with, and this is all just "on paper" and not the bills kind. Musk even said in an interview that stock valuations is arbitrary public sentiment that doesn't have a direct connection to reality. One real effect is having capital to operate which it can have an impact upon.
It's awkwardly phrased, yes, but what the author is saying is that Google-tier scale companies will have an awful time migrating from poly to mono-repo, and a not fun time being mono-repo for the first few years.

For company's not at this tier, it isn't that hard to migrate to a monorepo and the benefits will be more immediate because the tools (eg. git) won't be screaming under the load.

(My personal 2c is that you can be well below Google-scale and still hit the limits of the common tooling when using monorepos. Canva, Stripe, and Twitter are examples)
Cancer rates have exploded since 1970. I told this to someone and they arrogantly corrected me. But I just looked it up right there and they had confused death rates with cancer rates. Thanks be to god for smartphones.

Diabetes, obesity, cancer, depression rates all exploded in unison starting around 1970. Why does everyone ignore the massive implications of this? It means there’s something we’re doing that is killing millions of people but everyone brushes that aside and supports treatments rather than figuring out what happened in 1970 that is actually causing it.

There are a trillion pet theories but nobody wants to do research to figure out. Nobody advocates for this research. What the hell
> No; customers are not paying for, nor give a shit about, these things. Sorry. It’s still cool stuff. It’s just not what you’re selling

They sort of are if your bad architecture means features are slower to roll out than your competitors and each release introduces bugs and regressions.
The modern shaman harnesses the power of etcd to transform engineering time into AWS bills.
Assume we're deciding on a binary choice. Also assume that there is one correct and one wrong answer, and the only reason people choose wrong is a lack of information. Next assume each participant in the vote has a particular chance of getting the right answer.

Lets take an extreme case where you have a million people each with a 55% chance of getting the right answer, and one expert with an 80% chance of getting the right answer.

If you have a normal vote, the right answer is EXTREMELY likely to win. But if everyone delegates to the expert (after all 80% is better than 55%) then the right answer only has an 80% chance of winning. Worse outcome.
I would have agreed with you on this if it weren’t for the fact I have noticed a lot of newer systems (granted, running windows) having sustained 80-90% loads and when I got to investigate they are several steps from max frequencies.

These have been 7th gen and higher i5/i7 machines and newer J4xxx series celerons.

Haven’t had any AMD kit to compare though.
We have quite a few power outages, so the best thing about gas furnace backup for me is that I only need a generator large enough to run the furnace fan to get heat in a power outage. Without it, I have to run a heat pump compressor and that is a lot more power than a fan.
I also vaguely recall something from The Simpsons…

Edit: ha, found it: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ycvlJ9XMd94
You can have microservices and different repos, microservices and a monorepo, or a monolith and monorepo. In principle you could even have a monolith split across different repos (e.g. each library in a separate repo). What's included in a deployed binary has nothing to do with how the source code is structured.
No. That the planet is warming is incontrovertible. What this might mean for highly interdependent, chaotic systems is harder to predict. Will the Greenland ice sheet melt? Looks like yes. Will that affect the Gulf Stream? Probably. Will that make Spain colder? again, probably, but the error bars are bigger, and so on.
Cook was arguably the real brains behind Apple's turnaround back in the early 2000s - he was a supply chain wizard as COO, and when Jobs was out of the picture it made absolutely zero difference in the company's performance. There's a reasonable case to be made that Cook was actually the main driver of the company's success even before Jobs departed.
Those sound like the least controversial opinions ever.

What's nice is that despite looking ugly, those shoe horns have done a pretty good job, and they all make effective tools for building useful stuff, and that stuff can be built by people who aren't very good at building stuff.

It's very much a success story that so much html/css/JavaScript is a garbage fire. They're really effective tools, up there with excel
I think you’re vastly overestimating the average voter. I would recommend reading Caplan’s “The Myth of the Rational Voter”; it’s a rather bracing book.
My favourite example of the intractabilities of some theories is that magnetohydronamics apparently can't predict the formation of streamer jets when you put your finger on a kid's plasma ball – i.e. the main point of the toy is beyond the most advanced theory that lies behind NIF, JET, ITER, etc...
wait till you learn how the electric force and the magnetic force interact with each other such that an electric force causes a magnetic force in front of it, and then that new magnetic force then causes a new electric force in front of it, and like so they recursively sustain each other, such that they self-propagate over vast distances (unlike just a magnetic field which fades off as you get further away), and what do we call such an infinitely self-propagating electromagnetic wave? a photon
For example, feed prices and electric prices to heat the coup are generally more predictable than a raging virus.
Polyrepo and monorepo both work well if you have the right tools and workflows in place. Both have substantial downsides.

If you can't admit the above then you are either ignorant or trying to sell something. Either way I don't want to talk to you.

The rest of us can now discuss pros and cons.
The new tailscale lock has completely removed my fears about it.
Yes, polluting and expensive -- that's why the world let China exploit and pollute their own environment. Then they found out that it wasn't such as a good idea to depend on China for REM supplies -- China was all too happy to weaponize their dominant market position to settle diplomatic disputes with other countries (eg, Japan in 2010). China's share in REM mining/processing declined significantly from 95+% to ~65% today.
Do we really need to explain the difference between burning a boatload of corpses and making love?
How do monorepos work with something like gitlab or github, which expect a CI file in the repo root?

My workplace has dozens of repos, and they all have separate CI needs and test suites. Trying to shoehorn them all into a single set of CI pipelines would be very difficult, even with the include and parent-child pipeline features.
Encarta was incredible. I was in high school in the 90s but we didn’t have internet at home, just at school. I came 3rd in a school district computer competition (it wasn’t
programming but doing tasks in Word and some other general
stuff). Anyways long story short a copy of Encarta was my prize and I was blown away. It felt like an “offline internet” to me. Spent the whole summer pretty much reading everything. Good
times.
https://tailscale.com/blog/tailnet-lock/
I am myself am skeptical of monorepos, and i have only worked with polyrepos, but I am curious what strategies you use that help make you effective with multiple code bases?
The retort would be that your fellow engineers are also user/consumers of your code.

You’re building code that others will review, run, modify and rely on. They are people too and you should care about them and their needs.
What exactly are you disagreeing with? An enslaved woman can't consent to sex by her captors by definition so it's rape and Ibn Fadlan further mentions her being drugged and then the men drumming on the shields to drown out the sound of her screaming so it doesn't scare the other enslaved women which shows they at least thought she would be screaming and no one would volunteer if they knew the truth of what happened.
Or maybe I just wrote too much - I always wish I could be more concise. It's all good!
I absolutely cannot go back to 16:9 after the last few years with various 3:2 laptops. What's funny is that I rock a 32:9 for my desktop PC at home.
IANAL

Perhaps an unpopular leading question/answer, but who owns that particular Slack account?

If the company owns <ex-employee>@<company.com>’s as the login, they own it and it’s not really “you”/“yours” ~