skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> This lesson was all presented as "this is a cool heroic thing to help us understand history better" and not as something like "we are pretending to do historical research in order to disguise secret Cold War intrigue and misdirect adversaries about weapons systems"

Actually, it was both. His research vessel was designed for the purpose of finding the Titanic (his lifelong dream); the nuclear submarine search was quid-pro-quo in order to get the funding. Which makes it even cooler IMO.
Sure, but the comment I was responding to was missing the point, because the article wasn't trying to convince people that ignore errors to record and aggregate them, they are arguing that people who record and aggregate errors should instead look at each one individually.

Pointing out that errors should be counted is tangential to the argument at hand.
The World’s Top Cross-Border Payments Companies (2020)
This has nothing to do with Theme Hospital
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theme_Hospital
Of course, but that means (at least it should mean IMHO) that an engineer made a career switch into management, and those skills carry over and are valuable. I think when a company pushes their engineers to do more and more non-technical tasks, no matter how small, it basically says they don't value engineering and see software problems as a problem of allocating people and resources instead of investing in better engineers and giving them control to innovate.

I'm not saying managers are not necessary. It just seems like there is a pyramid structure, and managers are at the top. If you want to be on top of the pyramid you must evolve into a manager and let others do the engineering. I'm willing to grant this is ok in non-software companies, but in software companies it's bizarre and I'm even thinking software engineers should be unionizing and getting some representation.
I was confused when I saw them mocking error budgets at the end. It shows that they don't understand what error budgets are. What they describe themselves doing is basically an error budget by a different name.

We have an error budget at work and we still read essentially every error. There is a long tail of errors that might show up once or twice a week or month and I'll admit that I might have missed those, but within any practical sense, my team is still aware of any error that is contributing against our error budget. We resolve errors too, even while under budgetm because if we didn't then we would go over our error budget since new errors pop up all the time, so you need to resolve existing errors because new ones are introduced constantly.

Pulumi seems to think that companies with Error Budgets just wait until they are out of compliance to fix errors and then must only resolve enough to get back under budget.
People always act as if ancient people were somehow different. Obviously you'd have the cleaner who cleans the toilets and swaps the sponges. They'd get more from the storecupboard and someone would be in charge of ordering the sponges from the spongemaker.

Just imagine life today but without the electronics
Sorry to hear that!

(I work on docs for the DuckDB Foundation)

Starting in this release, the DuckDB team invested significantly in adding memory safety throughout catalog operations. There is more on the roadmap, but I would expect this release and all following to have improved stability!

That said, at my primary company, we have used it in production for years now with great success!
I like this use of “telepathic” as sharing emotions, rather than thoughts, at a distance.
Setting up SQL, creating a well-designed schema, and optimizing queries can be a complex, multi-step process. Databases often feel like black boxes, requiring significant training and engineering to get right. One needs to tweak both queries, schema and database configuration to get best results.

So why do we need SQL? I know NoSQL came and went (was it nosql or no-relations? not sure...) but honestly I can't think of many things I can do with SQL that i CANNOT do easier in any programming language with a good library for indexing and retrieving data.

Any good industrial strength key-value database like rocksdb, lmdb and others would provide these APIs with lots of bindings for multiple programming languages.

Maybe we need a second coming of NoSQL (relational no-sql?) focused in providing good cross-language APIs so instead of compiling SQL into efficient programs that use the right indexes, we could just write our queries manually in code. Bad queries would be a lot easier to debug and fix this way, and it seems like this would require a lot less machinery.
> About 20 years ago, a friend of mine worked on a contract for the Department of Defense in IT. He told me that he was making $1500 per day, and for the first few weeks, the government didn't have a computer for him. So he sat at a desk, reading "printed manuals" waiting for a computer to arrive. For weeks. Making $1500 per day.

To be fair it’s the same in private companies.

Last time I was consulting at a big international corporation all it consultants (including those from big 5) on the project was asked (against company policy) to bring our own laptop and use the guest WiFi, since that particular PM didn’t have the patience or budget to wait a week for laptops to be acquired and setup.

In my opinion it’s a bit of a trope.
In US and Canada, we've decided that the suburbs are untouchable

Not in Metro Vancouver! Of buildings >= 500' in height, 7 are in Burnaby, 4 are in Vancouver, and 1 each are in Coquitlam and Surrey; under construction are another 4 in Burnaby, 3 in Vancouver, and 1 in New Westminster. There's a dense urban core surrounded by SFHs and then as soon as you cross the border into the suburbs you suddenly get density again.
As far as I can tell, the entire premise of this article is based on a model, not any empirical measurement of Manhattan actually sinking. The article then tries to distract us from examining its thin thesis too critically by connecting it to the effects of climate change. Besides, isn’t lower Manhattan made of bedrock, not sand?

Nothing to see here, move on.
Agree. Had to work part-time jobs for two years before I could get a contractor to give me a minimum wage IT job. Yes, I am a first generation immigrant, but I guess covid had a lot more to add to my story than yours.
My point was that content doesn't really matter that much. It is the job of getting quality traffic and monetising it the fullest where the money is. Content providers like studios, are just suppliers for them. When people say "porn business" they don't mean "those who actually film people fucking" because this is just tip of the iceberg and not where the money is made.

Of course chatting on webcams is always run by separate people, it is the case even with individual models i know. They just don't have time for this. It's a natural division of labor. I built engines for several webcam sites and there is always that thing.
Okay but they gambled and lost - why shouldn’t they face the consequences? I’ve had to every time it’s happened to me, why should it be different for them?
Show HN: Simulate the effectiveness of various Blockchain difficulty algorithms
The goal of this project is to provide a simulator to report on the effectiveness of various difficulty algorithms by observing the standard deviation, and mean values of all block intervals after a period of days. It ships with 5 configurable algorithms including those used by Bitcoin and Ethereum.
This was a fun project, and I hope that this might actually be a useful starting point for new/existing blockchain projects considering the effectiveness of different algorithms. I'm also looking for contributors to make improvements where they see fit.
Amazon also benefits because that’s where a lot of the stolen merchandise gets fenced. You get a good deal on laundry detergent there because it was stolen from Target.
Does anyone else feel that privacy and personal rights are a thing of the past, especially in america? Their constitution holds no more water than a sieve anymore.
Great question! For analytical queries, DuckDB is ~100x faster than SQLite. It also has great connectivity with Parquet, Pandas, Arrow, Postgres, and more! Plus, the syntax follows Postgres closely, so you have strong data typing and true timestamps, etc.

All that said - SQLite is still faster for transactions. Now DuckDB can actually read and write from/to SQLite, so you can use SQLite for OLTP and DuckDB for OLAP.

https://duckdb.org/docs/sql/statements/attach
I'd probably use this to estimate the effect of staffing changes or the impact of modifying staff workflows.
People don't realize that Europe has skyscrapers because Europe doesn't knock down the old town tourist area to build them.

Every European city of size has a Central Business District which Americans would call "downtown".
The universe is probably a whole lot larger than the observable universe.
https://www.civilwarmed.org/ptsd/ discusses PTSD in the context of the American Civil War.

"Abundant evidence suggests that Civil War soldiers, like their twentieth-century counterparts, exhibited symptoms that today we would associate with war trauma, notably post-traumatic stress disorder..."

Many references in the article.
> One thing that I've observed is that the more errors there are, the less likely people will look at them

It can be even worse than that. At one point I worked on an app that generated north of 500 lines in the PHP error logs per minute per server. In the course of implementing a feature I cleaned up a few of the low hanging warnings near the code I was modifying. This resulted in about a 3 percent reduction in the log file velocity.

When we deployed to prod, everyone panicked, because log file velocity staying about the same was one of the primary things they alerted on, as a proxy signal for server health. That was the one and only time in my career I was reprimanded for cleaning up warnings.
What “maintenance” do you think is more for a 3000 square foot house than a 1500 square foot house?

I just mentioned it.

1. Master bedroom

2. Son’s bedroom

3. Gym with three pieces of cardio equipment and weights

4. Office

5. Guest bedroom

The 6th room was a dance studio for my wife. She taught online fitness classes during Covid.

It’s not like we paid millions of dollars. I qualified for it when I was only making $115K and put 3.5% down - less than $12K. In 2016.

It’s now worth twice that (we rent it out to our son and two of his friends at a discount).

My wife and I have since moved to a condo in a resort area where one fee ($650) pays all utilities, access to a decent gym, 3 pools, a running trail, three restaurants on site and a lake. It’s the same price that our house was in 2016.
A good logging tool will group similar errors together so one error occurring 10,000 times shows once in the list.

But what I’ve found is a whole lot of errors are things timing out which are kind of an issue, but not something you can really investigate or solve.
This demo (similar to ExplainPaper and pdf.ai) seems to be offered by a one-person company in the South Western German city of Überlingen (near Freiburg).
Related:

List of (some) cross-border payments companies:

https://www.blockdata.tech/markets/use-cases/cross-border-pa...

(I think it would be highly interesting (for academic comparison) if someone on GitHub (or wherever) created a curated list of not just some, but ALL of the world's cross-border payments companies...

Also, cross-border payment companies seem to be an up-and-coming market segment -- it would be interesting to watch this space, to see which companies are bought out by other companies, etc., etc.)
This is exactly the kind of English usage I see in content produced by some of those countries. Even on packaging, I find these errors. The worst is in adverts for English language education programs.
The grand irony of this is that Dijkstra is pretty bad writer. Verbose, obtuse, and condescending.
Ask HN: Vendor search for Pixel Matrix display of custom size
Hey HN!

I have a side project I'm spec'ing out that requires a large pixel matrix display but have no idea where to find one.

It's basically the Divoom Pixoo 64 but just the LED panel. 64x64 LEDs measuring around 10"x10"

I'm based in the USA (Los Angeles, CA) and am looking for where I can buy a single panel. Online preferably.

Any suggestions for vendors?
About 2-3 hours after you posted, a different section of this discussion was started bendbro and Rury;

My personal belief is that SOME cases of your Z are caused by a 'learned helplessness' situational conditioning filter. The world isn't always fair and sometimes even earnest effort that in an ideal world should yield some sort of positive result has none.

Hypothetically the human social creature evolved in small tribes / large families. Possibly in those cases slight negative reactions like that would be corrected by the presence of the family. In the distraction model of recovery possibly by redirection to a more useful effort that would yield positive outcomes for the individual and group.

In modern cities, it is very easy to end up alone, or nearly alone, with very few to rely on. Even if someone has friends in a city they might be real effort to reach, and that is assuming they've got time. If there's that effort involved maybe you don't even hang out with them and drift apart until even chance meetings cost effort and thought.
> A search engine by definition takes an editorial stance on things.

That editorial stance should be "show the user what they are looking for and want to see". The customer is always right, otherwise the real customer is someone else.

> For a search engine to take no editorial position is to yield the floor to whoever can best game the system

I am not against search engines having heuristics against state-sponsored propaganda, but there is no need for those heuristics to single out a particular state. Russian state-sponsored content shouldn't be treated differently than American, Chinese, Ukrainian, or any other state's propaganda.
Even to the naked eye, the scans often clearly show the contents of the envelope. With even a slight bit of basic image adjustment (we're talking brightness/contrast or levels) you can very clearly read what's inside.
This is all based on the authors' estimations, not actual measurements or observations.

The scholars first estimated the cumulative weight of New York’s buildings to be 1.68 trillion pounds, and then calculated the downward pressure these buildings exert on the mixture of clay, sand, and slit that make up most of the ground beneath the city’s streets.

Based on their model, New York experiences a “subsidence rate” (the technical term for sinking) of about one to two millimeters per year on average, though Lower Manhattan, as well as particular areas of Brooklyn and Queens, show a propensity for greater subsidence risk.
I'm calling bullshit on the "zero weight on whether they got hired or not".

Referrals from bad employees don't mean anything, but referrals from good employees do. All of the interview hoops that people jump through and still the most consistently reliable way to hire a good employee is to have a referral from an existing good employee.
> a terrible singer

Too many people express this belief. It does not seem plausible, statistically. I wonder what made it so widespread.
I saw the keyword, and as I qualified in the full comment, it’s a risk and one that shouldn’t be borne by the children
Rust for C#/.NET Developers
- DuckDB is written in C++

- SQLite is written in C

I wouldn't consider any of those written in a memory safe language. Although SQLite has been battle hardened over many years, while DuckDB is a relatively new project.

That being said, has been efforts of reimplementing SQLite in a more memory safe language like Rust.

e.g. https://github.com/epilys/rsqlite3
Really interesting, How do you do these estimates other than using mathematical models? What kind of measurements do you expect to see?
Grouping helps, but often errors are distinct enough that they will get duplicated regardless, especially after updates which changes the stack trace. To be honest it's been a few years since I used these tools, but last time it was helpful but very much less-than-perfect.

> a whole lot of errors are things timing out which are kind of an issue, but not something you can really investigate or solve.

Depends what is timing out; if it's SQL queries then you should probably do something somewhere, if it's HTTP connections then you probably shouldn't log them as an error but as info/debug, keep some aggregate statistic somewhere, or just not do anything with it at all (depending on your scale and what you need).
I have had better luck with orbstack (https://orbstack.dev)
Exploring the power of unconventional paths, risk-taking, and personal taste in creative endeavors.
The simple answer to this is that not only engineers write database queries.

Personally, I’d be interested to see a system like the one you describe. Part of me thinks that SQL would still be simpler to reason about (though probably not to maintain).
Understanding theory helps a lot. It's a hard limit on what your capable of making.
For the remaining 15% of you check out: https://www.levels.fyi/jobs
Are we talking about the same Microsoft?
Unfortunately the military has now cottoned onto that trick with the F-35. Every time there's a budget overrun they just order another 100 planes so that "the price hasn't changed".
This!

L
I think you are drastically overestimating the ability of most devs to write performant code. Do you really think you're going to get better results asking devs who, by your measure cannot write good declarative SQL schemas and queries, to roll their own data storage and retrieval raw?

RDBMS software is complicated in large part due to it needing to serve a wide range of use cases, so a custom-built version might end up simpler to use, but you can't sell me that Joe Backend-Dev is going to outperform however many million dev-hours have gone into Postgres.
The car company Nissan still doesn't own Nissan.com.

I'd say gpt.com.au is safe.
One thing the article doesn’t mention, If the skyscrapers are applying downward pressure, is the ground underneath getting displaced or is it getting compressed? If it’s getting compressed will it stop sinking at some point?
I think you'd use referrals to decide if someone should pass the first stage, as HR and resume review are a broad filter. Once you're at the interview panel, you vote based on how the interviews went. If you tell the interviewers that "this is so-and-so's friend" then you could get nepotism instead of an informed hire. I think it's possible that there were many referrals, but that information wasn't shared outside an initial screening because it was no longer helpful.
I've seen research that roughly 40% of cops have been poisened by fentanyl. Google 40% cops to learn more.
>Now DuckDB can actually read and write from/to SQLite

This feels like it opens up some possibilities, but I am struggling to figure out where. Are you aware of any interesting use cases this has enabled? Does all of the Duck syntax then work against the SQLite database? For example, could I now run a pivot without a bunch of hoops?
Show HN: Blockpipe – Simplifying Blockchain Development with Python3
Hey HN, we're excited to share the pre-alpha release of Blockpipe (https://blockpipe.io), a platform designed to dramatically simplify the way developers interact with blockchain data.

With Blockpipe, we aim to take the complexity out of blockchain development by allowing you to create real-time APIs for blockchain data using Python. It abstracts away the heavy lifting of managing blockchain data extraction, transformation, and delivery tasks so that you can focus on innovation and not infrastructure.

Some of our features include:

1. *Python3 Environment*: Flexibility and productivity at its best. Rapid experimentation, iteration, and deployment.

2. *Block Reorg Handling*: We handle block reorgs automatically. If it happens, we rollback your data a few blocks back and sync your program again. No extra code needed.

3. *Multiple Deployment Environments*: Develop in a dev environment, test in staging, and serve users in production independently.

4. *Web UI with Developer Tools*: Powerful tools like smart contract searching and instance monitoring right at your fingertips.

We're currently in the pre-alpha stage and would love to have the HN community's feedback. Here's the link to get started: https://blockpipe.io/docs/pre-alpha

Also, feel free to join our Discord server where you can chat directly with our team: https://discord.gg/K3TWumAtZV

Looking forward to hearing your thoughts and feedback!
Roger's little rule book (2008)
Ah, I've had this same use case: I store many versions of a resource from an external API, but I typically only want the most recent version. I've used the following techniques:

Select the ID with the max sync_token. Easiest for Postgres to optimize, assuming you have a primary key of (id, sync_token).

SELECT *
FROM external_api
WHERE id = :my_id
AND sync_token = (SELECT max(sync_token) FROM ext_api WHERE id = :my_id)

Define a view using DISTINCT ON. Convenient for ad-hoc querying. Postgres usually figures out it can use the primary key to avoid a full-table scan.

SELECT DISTINCT ON (id) *
FROM external_api
WHERE id = :my_id
AND sync_token = (SELECT max(sync_token) FROM ext_api WHERE id = :my_id)
ORDER BY id, sync_token DESC

For tricky predicates, I use a trigger to track the most recent resource in a separate table. This is a hacky version of incremental view maintenance. [1]

[1]: https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Incremental_View_Maintenanc...
No, his point was that A24 is not doing the "typical" Hollywood thing, by focusing on low-to-mid budget films.

My point was that A24 (which is based in Hollywood) is just doing what New Line Cinema and Fox Searchlight (also based in Hollywood) did before them. New Line has since graduated to mid-to-high budget films due to the success of their early films like Scream. Searchlight still distributes arthouse films but under Disney has a significantly smaller budget to produce or acquire films; it's arguably more indie than A24 is now.
A statistical analysis of the work of Bob Ross (2014)
They don't even question that it is sinking. They take that as granted -- sinking 1-2mm according to "sattelite" data. Then they spend the study demonstrating why this is attributable to the weight of the buildings they estimated.
Montana bans TikTok for all residents
To give an example to further illustrate answers you've received. In the 1800s it was common to produce heavily editorialized volumes of Bach, Scarlatti and other baroque keyboard works, with tempo and dynamic indications, written-out ornamentation, phrasing and articulation marks, pedalling, and other directions that would have been a relatively alien language in the actual autograph and early editions. These were much more reflective of (romantic) performance practices of the day than of the original period. While much of it could be taken as potentially interesting suggestion about interpretation on modern instruments, it gets hopelessly muddled when the score fails to distinguish between what content is the editors' vs. the composer's, as they so often do. Something like this of Bach's C major prelude from The Well-Tempered Clavier, book 1, shows basically all the different kinds of unwanted editorializing I described: https://imslp.org/wiki/File:PMLP05948-WTC_Mugellini_No._1-12...

Compare that with: https://imslp.org/wiki/File:PMLP05948-WTC_1_No_1-12.pdf

A modern Urtext edition would also include detailed information about which manuscript and early edition sources it was prepared from, and any unresolved or variant readings between these sources, with performance suggestions (apart sometimes from fingerings) relegated to supplementary notes that are clearly written by the editors and not the composer.