skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> List of things that you should know about how it works

> How the computer works, from electrons to transistors, to CPU, assembly, and high-level programming languages.

> How the internet/network works, how you send some information from one computer to another, all OSI 7 Layers.

> How browsers work, how DOM works, how CSS renders, how JavaScript is loaded

The fact that this article is so popular on HN is absolutely mind blowing.

I know a ton about "electrons to transistors, to CPU, assembly" but only because I wasted many years of a life in the hardware industry and a EE degree, before finally switching over to SW. I probably know more about these topics than the author does. These domain-specific trivia have provided me approximately zero value in my career as a SW developer.

I also know nothing about about any of the other stuff mentioned above. And yet, I've had a very successful career as both a principal developer and startup founder who built a complex SW product from the ground up.

Job titles are nothing more than a noisy proxy for how much value your employer thinks you are contributing to the business. Contribute enough value, and you will earn and deserve a "senior developer" title. And unlike what the zealots and fundamentalists may believe, there is no "one true way" to deliver value. It is entirely dependent on the business, team, and circumstances you are in.

If you're not sure, ask your manager or more senior developers. If they tell you that you can provide more value to the business by knowing things like network-transport protocols, do exactly that. If not, don't waste your time studying a bunch of stuff that some online blogger insists is "the one true way."
C# is lovely, and with eventual first class AOT support I believe it will become more widespread
The last time the West faced a major inflation spike with the mid-to-late 70's (and it was WAY worse than this), about a generation ago. The same can be said of the last major energy crisis.

If you have facts I am unaware of feel free to share them.
No F# ?
Smoother animation ≠ Better animation [video]
More likely they would require companies to publish specs suitable for driver authors. I’ve always thought that companies treating their register configuration and I/O offsets as a trade secret is ridiculous.
Whatsapp has their own version of ChatGPT. It's an arms race right now
I can confirm. I’m in the same boat, as the parent commenter. It’s especially visible because Poland experiences all four seasons that used to be dramatically different. Winter temperatures were often reaching -30 Celsius with heavy snowfall. You’re lucky to see any snow in some winters nowadays in parts I’m from.
Plenty of those people are present in this thread.
I was brought into a world where there are no dinosaurs and many other extinct species and several that were lost while I am alive.

I am already a hero. They know. They are thankful. I took care of them while they were weak, broken, and ignorant. I saved them from certain death on countless occasions.

I will explain to my kids: I was commanded to have children. I am keeping that command.
That's a bad point for a lot of reasons.

1. It's irrelevant, as I pointed out.

2. It's a false premise. We talk about bad CEOs all the time, especially egregiously bad ones. I saw only just the other day comments on the Yahoo CEO.
Are you genuinely arguing that people in 2023 are poorer than they were in 1950? This would be astonishing if true wouldn't it? Hasn't GDP tripled or something since then?

I think it's more likely to be expectation inflation. People in 2023 just wouldn't be satisfied to live the life people were satisfied to live in 1950.

A thought experiment could be:
- There are people that earn 100kpa and people that earn 50kpa
- Both kinds of people think they "need two incomes to live these days"
- Obviously the 100kpa people could ditch a whole income and live at the level of the two 50kpa people -- but they wouldn't choose to, they'd rather have the lifestyle of a 200kpa household
That might have been how it worked out if Ukraine successfully fought a war of attrition and Russia fought a war for territory, but it was the exact opposite.

To take Bakhmut as an example, Ukraine kept feeding men into cauldrons long after they should have cut their losses because they had orders to make a stand and fight to the last for every inch of territory. This is where the phrase "meat grinder" originated - it described Russia's plan for capitalizing upon those orders.

Ukraine ended up suffering vastly worse casualties than Russia did as a result - their troops spent most of their time surrounded on 3 sides by a force with overwhelming artillery superiority. The Ukrainian soldiers fed into these cauldrons often died within hours from an artillery strike, usually without even seeing a Russian soldier. Russia tried to keep this process going for as long as possible.

Hence meat grinder.

This pattern of Ukraine prioritizing territorial gains over lives and falling into traps sprung by Russia as a result has been repeated elsewhere across the front line too, and is symptomatic of the failure of the counteroffensive.
That is all beside the point of whether or not evolutionary pressures would optimize for longevity or for "good enough for passing on genes."
Drivers… I don’t know if I could sign on for that for the following reasons:

1. The burden it would put on smaller manufacturers and companies (every little regulation adds up), especially difficult considering the comparative lack of qualified developers

2. Drivers != Quality, Upstreamable Drivers. Making the judgements of Linux maintainers legally binding is a bad idea. Case in point: Apple has Linux drivers internally, they’re just not complete or upstreamable. You would be forced to fight the Linux maintainers (and the power trips they already have!) in order to legally sell your product.

3. If we can force companies to support Linux, why not force all websites to support Firefox? Why not force all desktop programs like Adobe to support Linux? Etc…

4. What about poor FreeBSD? Serenity OS? That guy who still loves OS/2?
When I was sixteen I sailed a lot on the lakes in my neighborhood. I was strong and healthy and thought: what could microbes do against 1 meter 90 of me? So I drank the water from the lake to see what would happen. I became rather sick to my stomach :-) and I considered defeat
The Raspberry Pi 400 is the closest thing you can get to, let's say, ZX Spectrum.
Windows 11 – A1B2C3 is still there after trying everything
Ok, I see what you mean. Still, even knowing that general access tokens are all or nothing it was surprising that exactly the same thing was used for containers. Like, if you generate a separate credentials for containers it strongly suggests there are for containers only.
Yes we can afford this now. In the context of "Tire Dust Makes Up the Majority of Ocean Microplastics" how long can we afford this? Just like dumping Freon, and CO2 into the atmosphere have long term consequences that require our society to change, how long can we go aerosolizing rubber?
problem indexing my page site help
Correct -- a "casualty, as a term in military usage, is a person in military service, combatant or non-combatant, who becomes unavailable for duty due to any of several circumstances, including death, injury, illness, capture or desertion."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualty_(person)
Please no.

The idea is rooted in idealism, but absolute crap will be produced in reality.
The performance is fine on desktop, maybe even on par with Chrome. It used to be worse but nowadays I can't see any performance difference between Firefox and Chrome on desktop.

The performance on Android is garbage though :(.

The feature set is worse in some parts, better in others. Better UI customization, container tabs is cool, and some extended APIs for extensions. Meanwhile, Chrome has support for more exotic web APIs (e.g. WebUSB, filesystem access). So it's your choice.
Assuming my exercise bike wattage is accurate I think most decently fit people could average 100 watts for an hour with a bit of sweating but not like, full on panting. 20 watts is low enough that it's awkward to generate that little power in terms of speed/resistance.
The context here is that the entire website itself functions as an unspoken advertisement for YC, not about individuals promoting other things on HN.
Interviews with great computer scientists (Spanish/English)
Conversations with Brian Kernighan, Bjarne Stroustrup, Alfred Aho, Leslie Lamport, among others. The English version can be found at the end of each interview.
Do you take these anecdotes seriously?

If so, with what frequency do you think this would happen?

And what evolutionary pressures would lead to their occurrence with any frequency?
Interesting - have a friend going through Prostate Cancer and all docs here in Singapore have suggested surgery + chemo. I noticed in Steve's shared PDF that Prostate Cancer has already crossed the FDA Approval and Reimbursement stage. Anyone had any personal experiences in using HIFU (high intensity focussed ultrasound)? Specifically the stage up to which it is effective over surgery+chemo

My data sources:
- https://cdn.fusfoundation.org/2023/02/06115144/Focused-Ultra...
- https://www.mayoclinic.org/medical-professionals/urology/new...
> The nearest store is a 45 minute walk (one way) from my townhouse. I'm not in the US, but Canada. Driving drops that to 8 minutes.

Assuming an average adult walking speed of 3 mph, I'm guessing that's somewhere in the ballpark of 2.25 miles? So something like 11 minutes at an average cycling speed of 12 mph, yeah? The distances here don't feel insurmountable.
NIH study: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9579879/
In the above, "honey"
You're right, but I think GP has a point as well. Anything you expose to the application has a potential for misuse, and a lot of "misuse" of a DB means queries with bad performance.

But, I'd argue the API schema gives you better control over this by pushing what might otherwise be application-level logic into the database. I've solved a lot of bad ORM behavior this way.
I mean, it could be - but you'd need to come up with an explanation for why it isn't warming up at all. Most matter reaches an equilibrium temperature where the outgoing EM radiation equals the incoming EM radiation. This matter isn't doing that.
> What exactly have you tried to do there? Isn't a schema already a model? What properties did you want your model to have?

Yes, a schema is a data-model, and a database can tell you whether the row you are trying to insert satisfies the constraints, but it can't tell you whether an instantiation of the database exists, nor can it tell you how to construct it.

There are 2 issues here, first proving that an instantiation exists; and second proving that there's a sequence of insertions that satisfy the constraints. Notice that some tables can have non sat constraints.

This becomes significantly harder when you are dealing with recursive definitions, cycles in the dependencies, foreign keys that refer different tables across the same constrained columns, type compatibility, and on and on

In other words, the space of all databases described by a schema may not even be constructible :upside_down:
> Cats are carnivores.

They eat herbs too. Maybe that's related.
I think the Heisenberg uncertainty principle applies to database migrations.

You can migrate or you can have no downtime, you cannot do both.
My mother is similar. We both don't have that much energy and seem to tire quicker than most people. I've tried some things over the years, done paid blood panel (not the most fancy one you could get), fixed my sleep, excercised etc. I think it probably comes down to below average genes.

The headaches themselves are from coffee (ab)use. But, without the coffee, I would succumb to fatigue earlier.

Right now, it doesn't matter that much. Luckily, through some smart choices (always aggresively going for the highest paying work I could get) and through frugal living, I've FIREd and now live a life of leisure, which seems to fit my disposition quite nicely. Not everyone was made to be a star.
Great interview topic, I agree. Candidates should be able to identify any SQL DDL that might break an app, then decompose it into three safe steps as you've described. It's a core skill for working with an RDBMS but rarely explicitly taught.
// But America associates one-car-per-person with all kinds of twisted politics and self-esteem anxiety.

America offers various lifestyles, from big cities like NYC, Boston, etc where a car is a liability, to near suburbs that are well served by transit (eg, NYC tri-state area) where you probably need a car but your daily commute doesn't involve it, to more spread-out and rural living where car is absolutely necessary.

This speaks to a trade-off between density and car-dependence. People across the globe face similar trade-offs (eg: 50% of Dutch persons own a car, 86% of French households do...)
It’s from CSM, a fairly well regarded art college, so you are right on the money.

You see a lot of interesting projects like this come from art colleges - technically quite neat, with a “social message” or theme, but usually not going to translate well to the real world.

That being said. I could see myself actually using something like this in a pinch.
Governments have paid very little attention to this problem to date. It seems like regulation on chemical composition of tires might be warranted. I don't have a problem with that.

The fanatic anti-car people will actually reduce the chances of meaningful regulation being passed here - as they won't be able to resist trying to use this opportunity to actually make cars more expensive and less accessible to people, and reduce overall car use, etc.

Thus, reasonable people who are not fanatically opposed to cars will be suspicious of whether the proposed regulation is really needed, or just an excuse to achieve socio-political goals that can't be achieved directly.

This is exactly the same dynamic that affects other issues, e.g. gun control. The extremists will block reasonable progress.
To be concise, power shifted to the US. The colonial era ended or was slated to end. Former colonies were liberated and became client states of the US. The US retained an industrial base, Europe did not. The Bretton Woods agreement was signed. The Marshall plan was enacted. The Euro-Dollar system followed. As the sole remaining industrial power the US was able to dictate terms to the rest of the world.

The topic goes quite deep. I'm sure better minds have written books arguing the specifics.
lol

but that's kind of straw-manning the point I am raising, I think.

There are just certain specific things or questions that maybe science isn't really equipped to answer properly, and things related to one's actual experience seem to constitute a broad category for which that seems true, thus far.

So, no, it's not the same as disbelieving any random scientific study by questioning whether the universe itself is real or whatever. It's really just saying that, in a real universe we all share, science has its limits as to the proper scope of its inquiries and explanatory powers.
Couldn't it also be there's a lot more black holes than we thought?
I thought the parent was making a joke. Is this actually a thing in America? In Australia I have never seen this in any of my contracts.
Sure, other than that the patch compiles fine on their end, and the diagnostic is not something you are willing to disable, or address with an additional code change on top of their patch.

It's better if the deal-breaker diagnostics are on for everyone, so that everyone is working in the same programming language dialect.
Who’s going to pay for the current working generation when they retire?

Social security-like systems require a growing population to sustain.
Looking at the paper for this specifically, it's a simple one. Wouldn't take someone who knew what they were doing more than a couple days to implement. But generally, i agree.
It’s basically a way of more efficiently making use of memory transfers during the calculation of the attention blocks in a transformer. You transfer a block at a time, increasing inference throughout because less time is spent overall fetching things from slow memory.
I really like the datomic guidelines for change, which negates a category of migration headaches: https://blog.datomic.com/2017/01/the-ten-rules-of-schema-gro...
humans is not even comparable, responsible of mass-extinction, biomass huge decrease, farm animals conditions are very enviable, captive animals (zoo, pets) neither

they're murdering insects everytime they take a 1.5 tonne vehicle for doing a few kilometers flat, and murdering many others indirectly through pollution, consumption, etc
What characteristic are you assigning to the group of "immigrants to the USA" that makes that statistic important?
This is common in tourist-y areas everywhere. I was in Lisbon recently, and saw a number of places advertising that they accepted Sterling… at a rate of 1:1 with the Euro. A mere 15% FX fee.
TIL that “microplastics” sources include tires. Had no idea.
The answer is dependent on the task(s) to which the embeddings will be applied. For general search in industry, the e5 models are well regarded.

A good place to start is this eval system:

https://huggingface.co/spaces/mteb/leaderboard
In postgres, every object (table, index, function, view, etc.) lives in a "schema", which is better thought of as a namespace. I put low-level objects like tables into one or more schemas, then create an "API" schema with views, functions, procedures that operate on tables in other schemas. Then I only grant access to that API schema to the application users.
> Automobile dependency is not a technological problem, it is a social problem.

This is what the commenter said.
Look at the realtek drivers made by realtek. Reconsider.
So much this.

I was part of an engineering team that built a payments switch from scratch in the early oughts.

We built it in Java, on commodity hardware and OS, on top of our own replicated, stateful, distributed computing platform.

This was a bonkers thing to do then, pre-cloud. It’s probably still a bonkers thing to do _today_.

Anyway, we did a lot of work with 2PC and other consensus mechanisms and came to the conclusion they 2PC wasn’t up to scratch for what we needed (it’s actually provably less than ideal).

We ended up building (again, from scratch) one of the earliest (that I know of) implementations of the Virtual Synchrony protocol. VS has some robust maths behind it that you can use to make some stronger consistency claims than you can with 2PC. These are important when you’re dealing with interbank settlements for payments switching.

If we started again today I’d say that we might use something like Raft, but I’ve been away from the space for ~20 years now so I’m not entirely sure.

However, one thing I do know is this: distributed consensus is Very Hard™ to get right.

If the answer to your question involves any kind of multiple master implementation using distributed consensus I can unequivocally guarantee that (other than in a few very specific circumstances that you almost certainly do not have) you’re asking the wrong question.
#1 is true. #2 is extremely tedious. I have a hard time imagining this is less work than an extra release.
One way to do that is to open a second PR which targets the branch of the first PR. I think that's also probably the most natural way -- would you agree? I don't see it done much, but I've done it once or twice and I'd embrace it if it were more culturally standard.
Only in totalitarian systems. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_worker_deaths_in_Unite...
serious question on behalf of the uniformed, why? I feel that society encourages people to double down and be consistent even if they are armed with better information. we could be better if we didn't have to stick to the one true path, no?
Be willing to enforce civility in public. In Japan 7-year-old kids can ride the subway; here we have junkies burning fentanyl, vagrants with pitbulls, and "showtime". Gee, why wouldn't I want public transit to be an inseparable part of my life?
Bruno – Opensource, sustainability, privacy, freedom and incentives
In that case you ought to be reframing the problem, answering a different question that you are comfortable giving a definite yes or no too.

For example,

Them: “Will you do x thing for me by year end?”

You: “Are you actually trying to solve y problem? What if I refer you to Z person by end of day? Or start by bringing you some research around X by end of month?”

Tbh the same applies to business not just personal
Exactly self employed is rather the right term. Although on paper I was unemployed. It is kind of like private wealth management. You could argue that someone just lives from his portfolio. Although in my case it was an active battle ; )
Shelters in the UK have a pretty bad rap in some cities (including London) among the homeless.

Also yes, it’s an art project by an art student at CSM (an art college).
This is a fantastic article! It shows that even simple migrations (like adding or removing a column) can be quite tricky to deploy in concert with the application deployement.

We (at Xata) have tried for a while to come up with a generic schema migration system for PostgreSQL that makes this easier. We ended up using views and temporary columns in such a way that we can provide both the "old" and the "new" schema simultaneously. Up/down triggers convert newly inserted data from old to new and the other way around. This also has the advantage the it can do rollbacks instantly by just dropping the "new" view.

We were just planning to announce this as an open source project this week, but actually it is already public, so if you are curious: https://github.com/xataio/pgroll
Any particular reason you’re being so combative about this?

I’m talking about a take home code challenge. It’s unreasonable to have someone to record a video that could last an hour or more. And I’m not gonna sit and watch that.
To expand a little: look over the horizon. Imagine you are thinking of expanding into the banking market at some point down the road.

Customer A says, “hey, would you add a feature to your emoji generator to interface with the ACH system?” Stupid request, maintenance nightmare. But you might get paid to have one person get some exposure to the horror show that is banking APIs. Exposure that might later help you think a bit better when it’s time to start thinking about that market. Of course charge a LOT because it’s new and charge a LOT for the maintenance contract. Maybe it helps you estimate engineering and marketing budget, or maybe it helps you decide on a different expansion path.

The converse is true too. Customer B wants hospital integration so they can add cute emojis to messages like “hey, you’ve only got four months to live. Have a nice day!” You’re not stupid so you know you never want to get anywhere near the tarpit of medical software. So you can confidently say “no” (phrasing it, “we don’t believe we could honestly provide the necessary level of support you’d require and don’t want to let you down blah blah blah”).
Was this written by someone without kids? In early childhood development pointing at items is referred to as "shared thinking". If a lion is charging at you in the jungle and you point at it the shared thought is "danger! He's coming to eat us!" or general concept.

Alternatively if you're playing with your 8 month old nephew and point at the red ball, he'll grab it and give it to you. If you wait four more months and say "ball" he'll do the same thing. Both approaches work but pointing with your hands comes much, much earlier in the development process.