skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree.

I am shocked even though I shouldn’t be at this part of the technical interview for devs and that devs can pass these interviews without demonstrating practical experience.

I’ve had interviews and jobs for three smaller companies where I was actually coming in as an architect 2016-2020). But they wanted to know about my real world experience.

Luckily my second job out of college way back in 1999 I actually had to manage servers as well as develop so I could both talk theory and practice.

From 1999-2012 I was managing infrastructure as part of my job at two jobs.

I’ve never interviewed at BigTech for a software engineering position. But I did do a slight pivot and interview (and presently work) in cloud consulting at BigTech specializing in “application modernization” - cloud DevOps + development.

Sure I had the one initial phone screen where I had to talk theory about system design. But my entire loop consisted of my walking through my past system design experience - and not all centered around AWS.

And yes I can talk intelligently about all of the sections that the page covers including your example of columnar vs row databases. But I wouldn’t expect that from most devs.

I was never on call at my last job. We had “follow the sun” support. But our site was only business critical during the day. One of the first things I insisted on with my CTO is that we hire a manage service provider for non business hours support.

Sort of related: at most tech companies, the difference between mid and Senior is not coding ability. It’s system design and “scope” and “impact”
It's not a niche market. Every office in the world has a water cooler.

The market for evaporative water coolers is niche, or probably only big in the developing world. Other than that water coolers use refrigeration aka a heat pump.
https://jklinger.co/blog/
https://vandragt.com Some musings on technology, software and society. Powered by a bespoke microblog CMS
All two-letter TLDs are country codes.
Yes, not even that recent it's been a feature for years
So what was the intent behind the Urinal?

Your choice to smush intent and Duchamp is weird.

What intent is in a stolen piece of work presented fraudulently throughout Duchamp's life as his own, and still widely treated as iconic and used as an example of a movement. What value the criticism built upon a lie? There is plenty of unintentional art in this story!
What kind of logic is this? So having wealthy and well-connected parents gives you a huge edge on career success, and you are saying admission should take that into account and favor that heavily?
Beautiful in its simplicity.

I don't know why, but there's something satisfying in the way the cuboid rolls into its rightful place.
I'm not convinced. Omniscience isn't the same as intelligence.

There's diminishing returns to intelligence and inherent unknowns to all moves the serf can make. The serf somehow has to evade detection, which might appear to be effectively impossible given the unknowns of how detection may take place.
Badly compressed still counts.
I think if the data allows you to reconstruct a recognizable recreation of the original work, you have a good chance of it being considered a derivative copy.

A mono audio version of Star Wars, compressed down to 320x240, filmed from the back of a theater on a VHS camera, converted to Video CD, would under any reasonable interpretation be just a copy of the original.

I assume it starts getting murky when there's some sort of transformation done it it. What if I run motion capture on it, and use that motion capture data to create a cartoon version of Star Paws (my puppies in space epic)?
What if I do a scene for scene recreation as the animated cartoon (removing any mentions to copyrighted names -- Luke Skywalker is now Duke Dogwalker, for example)? In this case, there's been no actual data transfer -- all the sprites are hand drawn, backgrounds etc.

What would be an interesting exercise would be to try and create a series of artifacts that each on their own are considered non-derivatives, but can be used together to reconstitute the original. For example, create a compression method that relies heavily on transforms / macroblocks, but strip out any of the actual pixel data from the film. That info might be supplied as palette files which are themselves not really copyrighted data, but together with the compressed transform stream can be used to recreate the original video.
We're working on riderless and balance-assisted bicycles and motorcycles. We're working to ship our flagship bike and we're about to launch a balance-bike for kids that helps them learn faster and sets up virtual bumpers while they learn.

Cool video of moto carrying stuff (just like the 2016 google prank vid)
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/sqyjag9yRUA
Great work, thank you for sharing this.

I would prefer to see the entire list, so that I can easily search for keywords in the browser. Apparently, all data is available on the client side, but the table renderer seems to limit the table size to at most 100 entries.
I wasn't that impressed with the Mac GUI the first time I saw it. There was no color, it could barely do more than beep, and there wasn't much software available yet so it seemed pretty useless compared to my Commodore 64. I had Magic Desk on the C64 in 1983 and while it wasn't a bitmapped desktop, it was a desktop with many similarities to the Mac. It even had a pointer.

When the Amiga came out, there was no way I was choosing a Mac over the powerful Amiga with 4096 colors, stereo sound, multi-tasking and amazing games. While I had it I was able to digitize and edit images, record and edit audio, built and used a MIDI interface with it, and even went online with it even before the web was a thing. I also ran a BBS on it and was still able to use the Amiga for all these other things at the same time.

The Mac was the first commercially available bitmapped GUI but the Amiga was the first system with a bitmapped GUI that was like modern OSes with color, sound, and multi-tasking. The Mac didn't have those things until later.
Hi Ben: Ignoring the full snapshot, does LiteFS Cloud periodically restore backups from its interim LTX blobs to check whatever it has accumulated works? If not, what inherently about LTX ensures that restores will always work? Thanks.
Easy as in moving mass against a gravitational potential? Didn't know building a rocket was easy.
Monoprice.com usually has a few perfectly reasonable headphones like what you're describing.
ChatGPT plugin for your website embedded into your editor
The optimist in me hopes that a UBI-like system would enable more people to tackle research, nonprofits, and other long term “social good” type projects.
The FTC’s Surprisingly Weak Case Against Amazon
https://jfoucher.com/
My blog since 2004 with a variety of subjects, some technical some less so. I rarely blog anymore so most of the content is pretty out of date.
Feels like a lot of internet "articles" these days.
GG would just say no and that's that. No hard feelings, that's what makes open source so great.
> Tyler Cowen once remarked we’d be better off reading far more history than about current events.

Makes me wonder if there's a market for news that's only based on events that happened 3-6 months ago, so that we have some conclusiveness and perhaps something actionable or relevance to what happened.
Thou art irony
Hey :)

I'm fullstack dev at Sencrop.com, we help farmers take better decisions for their crops with the help of IOT: connected rain gauge, temp sensor, hygrometry sensor, anenometer, pyranometer.

And yes, hardware is hard :) but i'm proud to say that we cover a big part of west europe with more than 20k stations deployed and really help people on their field
> How many dollars do you want to wager that they are building this feature with the intent to get sued so that they can be forced by the courts to turn it on for sites like youtube?

Good god, the conspiracy theories are next level with this one...
Claims like this.

https://people.com/archive/co2-could-change-our-climate-and-...

https://i.stack.imgur.com/K3g5l.jpg
CoW is always happening but without snapshots you can know that every block has exactly zero or one references and it's much simpler. No garbage collection, no complicated data structures, all you need is a single tree and a queue of dead blocks.
You do have to consider though, how important are those ecosystems?

Because I see this often used as a reason we can't do something, but they never qualify it with reasons why one should care.

I also pose this as a completely honest question, as I don't really know if you wiped out every desert ecosystem with solar/desal/etc if it'd actually affect anything else.
This is indeed a superpower.

I don't really remember when I felt that external dependencies were magic, but thinking about this, it explains a lot of the behavior I see on some developers who are very negative about the more challenging parts of the job.

Some of them don't really believe the research stuff we do at work are even possible. They're constantly surprised when other devs finish those tasks. Some don't believe that other devs can code in C++ or Rust, or write parsers, database modules, implement IQueryable in C#, or develop novel algorithms for novel applications.

To them, if a package exists it must just work, and that package comes from another breed of developer that can't coexist with them. I see a similar thinking with AI: now with ChatGPT and GPT-4, there's a hubbub about there being "no reason for our AI team to exist anymore".

I'm not a big fan of working with those developers.
http://sebinsua.com

I started to do short blogs on algorithmic problems and also neural networks for a beginner-but-tenacious audience.
https://omarkama.li/blog

I still have to find an area of focus for my writing but a pattern so far is that I like explaining and simplifying technical concepts to a non technical audience, starting with Digital Infrastructure and AI.
Okay but as far as I know Geoffrey Hinton isn't an "A.I. Alignment Researcher." He was fairly dismissive about the risks of AI in his March 2023 interview and changed his mind by May 2023. I'm not sure that says much about the A.I. Alignment Researcher field.
This is a super-well-known issue with reference counting in general. It would be something to deal with anywhere one uses reference counting exclusively. For example, this is a problem in Swift as well: https://docs.swift.org/swift-book/documentation/the-swift-pr...

Does that mean Swift is unsafe? No.

All this does is create the potential for a memory leak. Which is nowhere close to being in the same category as a buffer overflow exploit.

Also, I suppose one could write a garbage-collected pointer library for Rust, which adds cycle detection (and auto-deletion) on top of ARC.
Trump helped out the saudis at least a few very important times, and we let them buy patriot missile systems regularly. We literally went to war with one of their rivals after the saudi royal family funded the people that attacked the World Trade Center.

They also like to do funny business with oil prices around election time when there is a Democrat in the oval office.

There is still a lot of love for the saudis, at least in the republican party.
No, you should recognize your miscalibration on the question of "what's the worst that can happen".
https://davi.sh/blog -- Mostly technical content, but every once in a while I write about something else that grabs my attention.

I'm still trying to make writing regularly more of a habit. I don't have much of a backlog of topics, so trying to work on that a bit.
It does have a small noctua fan which is usually overkill, and several users have added low profile heatsinks. I don’t have any heat problems and mine are stacked in a big pile :P
https://a5h.dev, small blog where i post about frontend issues/blog posts
I think the key difficulty is condensing a very large quantity of water out of an even larger quantity of air, in the desert. The thermodynamic equilibrium of water vapor vs water-in-condensed-form isn’t going to work well for you here, even after nightfall. The very reason that it was possible to evaporate the water out (i.e. the air is very dry) cuts back the other way.
https://www.mschaef.com Technical blog covering a range of topics. Some ongoing focus on Lisp/Clojure and recent musings on personal computing in the 80's and 90's.
https://thomask.sdf.org/ - a random assortment of programming (mostly Rust recently), technical quirks, and reflections on technology. I've given up on being consistent enough to stick to a theme.
First, why do people do this?

> MacOS makes your life miserable but you find it cool because marketing makes you believe it.

Well, your offhand condescension sure convinced me that I’d want to spend time on your community! Or, you know, even bother continuing to read the remainder.

I didn’t bother. I did, however, look at other stuff the author has written and was delighted by the French for “enshittification” in another post’s title:

> La merdification
The problem we have today is that the Cracking the Coding Interview/leetcode grinder approach toward interviewing has now overrun the original purpose of system design interviews. It looks like people that lack the understanding of their purpose, or experience to conduct these interviews properly, now run these interviews, and/or often run the show, writing books/articles/etc, which perpetuate the cargo cult behavior of regurgitating patterns described in some influencer book/article/video.

This is somewhat associated with the title-inflation we've seen in our industry where "senior" and "staff" level engineers today seem to have much less experience than persons with the same titles a decade ago, and the people running these interviews are today's "senior and staff" engineers, or managers with very shallow engineering experience.

Systems design interviews were meant to be non-grindable, open-ended interview questions which allow a very experienced engineer as interviewer to understand the interviewee's experience and approach in solving systems-level problems.

The original purpose of the systems design question in engineering interviews was to:
1) Give the candidate an open-ended question that is not meant to be memorizable or fully solved within the allotted time.
2) Give the candidate an opportunity to shine -- expose and demonstrate areas where they have particular depth from their past work experience

Systems Design interviews employ the judgment of the highly experienced engineer as interviewer, rather than checking for a specific answer.

As an interviewee, the first phase of a systems design interview is really about asking questions to better understand context/constraints/considerations/etc before formulating solutions.

The second phase of a systems design interview is about communicating your understanding of the "whys" and clarifying/refining those understandings with your interviewer.

Ironically, we also have a post on Hacker News today ("The hardest part of building software is not coding, it's requirements") [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36597709] which speaks to the point that systems design interviews really being a test to see how a candidate elicits requirements and considers trade-offs, when developing solutions for problems.
This made me think of "planets", which I feel had a heyday back in the late 2000s before Reddit and social media took over everything. Anyone want to take all the blogs with RSS/Atom feeds and build an HN planet? :)

> In online media a planet is a feed aggregator application designed to collect posts from the weblogs of members of an internet community and display them on a single page

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planet_(software)
Nat coined this usage https://twitter.com/natfriedman/status/1668656170645749761
https://somethingaboutcats.substack.com/

Exploratory, but the general themes are startups, religion, the Beatles, article reviews, and travel!
https://www.aurametrix.com/blog.html

A suite of blogs on the latest advancements in technology that are shaping the future. From artificial intelligence and wearables to nano-sensors, cutting-edge diagnostics and less discussed medical cases.
They want to exchange the most money possible for their labor ?
Good question. LiteFS is just a replication layer so it's probably better to answer your question just from a SQLite standpoint. One of the biggest limitations of SQLite is that it only allows a single writer at a time so you can't have long-running write transactions in your application. Writes can be incredibly fast though—sometimes a millisecond or less depending on your hardware and settings. Speaking of which, make sure you use the "WAL" journaling mode if you're using SQLite it improves concurrency & write performance.

There are also differences once you get to a large scale. Many databases support compression whereas SQLite does not so it might get expensive if you have terabytes of data. That's an extreme case though.

Ultimately, SQLite is just a database. It's more similar to Postgres & MySQL than it is different. There are some features that those client/server databases have like LATERAL joins but I feel like SQLite includes the 99% of what I typically use for application development.
A strong case for not eating any oysters at all -- but don't forget they're totally aphrodisiacs
very basic and limited.
While Astro technically competes directly with Zola or Hugo, a comparison with them would not make sense. The chart is not about build times or anything like that, it's about the average performance on real world sites built with the framework. Astro with first-class support for interactivity through JS frameworks, and triest to compete with other JS frameworks in speed.

While Hugo and Zola can generate light and heavy websites easily depending on the developer's choices, Astro aims to express that it's easier to create fast websites, even ones that are interactive, with Astro than with a fuller framework like NextJS.
The article is about shutting down the reactors at the 31.12.22. As you know, they were not shut down at that date but ran some months more. That doesn't say anything about the long term maintenance requirements. And in any case they would have to be inspected before any further decisions to be taken as the article only states "they might be able to run further". But that was only an opinion, not a result of a inspection.
Probably not, I'd like to keep the device as simple as possible. The Onyx Boox already exists and it's great ;)
Quite a lot. I read many times "Designing data-intensive applications" which I highly recommend. There's a book called "system design interview" I believe, that is a summary of the most typical designs. There are also a bunch of videos on youtube. I read some research papers of classical designs. I played with some typical components, such as nosql dbs. I even implemented some prototypes.
> The involvement of an Intelligent Creator and their intents is not something I know how to test or control for.

Well said, I’d be hard pressed to disagree with you.

> I believe there has to be a mental boundary there until that component is objectively available.

You raise a good point here. I’m not sure yet sure if I agree, but I can see a lot of merit in this approach in terms of reducing speculation and increasing rigor for scientific research.
In mind of some, street has already decided fate of the policeman. Luckily it is not up to street to judge.
> Outputs from LLMs, machine generated art, and machine generated music probably are not copyrightable either.

I don't have a strong sense of whether this is reasonable (I see arguments both ways) but I do think it's pretty strongly at odds with how we treat photographs. There are a bunch of photos on my phone where I unquestionably own the copyright, despite putting in much less creativity than I did for some AI images I've generated.

I don't think it's clear how to resolve this, but I do think that if we are going to protect photos and not prompted AI images, the distinction needs to turn on something other than whether "sufficient creativity" was applied to the input of the mechanical system.

Edited to add: It's probably also worth calling out that the question of whether we protect the work produced by a person's use of mechanical system is a separate one from whether we protect the work of others when it is (in various ways, to various degrees, with various likelihoods) reproduced by use of those mechanical systems.
I agree, I ended up getting rid of it. Only one dependency is downloaded (via bash script) and everything is baked into the binary now.
Cool, I forgot to add descriptions. Would be nice if I could fix it
Does it actually connect or just measure the signal? If the former, have you had to deal with all the various auth schemes that companies use? I know that Cisco in particular loves to create their own schemes.
would it be beneficial to me to migrate from Fly Postgres to LiteFS Cloud? Fly Postgres has been working fine, but I’m not sure how to do backups and stuff.
https://snevsky.com/

Movies, photography, music.. many interests.
> Postgres is harder to setup

???

When I used Heroku, Postgres was a checkbox. Can't get any easier than that.

I understand that it's more work to set up a schema, as opposed to just dumping data structures into a data store. But, as I described elsewhere in this thread, the flexibility to query any table will help dramatically as your requirements change throughout the lifetime of a product.
Is this something that could be made to work with MicroPython?
We're building Hoopfit, the most advanced basketball shooting machine ever.

It's battery powered and ultra portable so it can be used in your driveway hoop or you can take it to the park. It's powered by iPad Air so we heavily leverage the cameras for computer vision and AI to automatically track a players shooting stats and provide real time feedback on shooting form.

I'm a software engineer but I have to admit, designing and building a physical product is so rewarding and a ton of fun :)

It's the product I wish I had as a kid and desperately need as a recreational hooper trying to continue playing basketball as I get older!

https://gethoopfit.com
Network engineering. Tons to learn, requires great brain power, mental modelling, and decision-making skills.

And FWIW, I don't think most high-level tech jobs are at risk to losing to AI/ML -- at least for decades. Augment and change the job? Sure. Already happening.
Cogent analysis - part of the problem is that the two parties have each become more ideologically rigid, so that every issue seems to come down to a binary choice between the intransigent D and R positions.

What's needed is a new politics that is open to compromise and to finding common ground between Ds and Rs so that we can actually get something done on issues like immigration and gun control.
What counts as an unnecessary car ride for you? If I'm going to the grocery store and there's someone else to watch my toddler, I don't need to take her with me, but I think the bit of stimulation of getting out of the house and seeing a new place, new experience, and new people has a benefit that outweighs the almost inconsequential odds of a major car accident as I drive there and back on roads with a speed limit of 35 MPH.
Previous discussions 2013

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5549054

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6894244
Gitlab seem to be a company obsessed with feature parity with others rather than making their software make sense and actually work. I wish they would stop following others and parroting features, instead a few conversations with your customers and they would happily tell you where things are not working well!
As I said, it's not binary.

I would be on the interviewer having a lot of issues undermining his evaluation; and I would be on the performance review having them too. Those are very hard tasks, nobody gets them perfectly right.
Can you talk about the power consumption?
The latest posts from these blogs: https://webloglist.com/hn
https://synack.me/

Mostly about embedded programming in Ada.