skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The WSJ piece only reaffirms what is playing out in large urban centers around the world (not just the US): that it's getting tougher to get ahead these days.

In Toronto, for example, the average selling price for a home has almost doubled in the last 10 years from ~$570,000 in 2014 to ~$1.1 million dollars in 2024; the average monthly rent ~$1,100 in 2014, now ~$2,300/mo. in 2024.

Is it any wonder this has created a housing affordability crisis forcing younger adults to delay many of the so-called traditional markers of adulthood mentioned in the piece?
US tax return forms/documentation is due April 15, but the taxes needed to be paid by the previous Jan 15 (minus a several month reprieve for taxes on income that exceeds your previous year's income)

on April 15 the taxes on your first quarter of the current year are also due.
What new hardware category should they have released?

Apple Shoes?

(Yes, I have those motion sensors they released with Nike. 2010?)
To a genZ, 1980 was time immemorial. It's definitely a relative term
If you're embedding, say, a C library inside of Rust, you can do so via a so-called "build.rs" script [1]. These run at build time so you can do pretty much whatever you want. They're not necessarily pretty, but given that Cargo isn't going to support other languages natively, it's often a less-evil option.

Then there are build systems that natively support Rust in addition to other languages and know how to plug them together [2] [3] [4]. If you're already using one of these existing tools, then you don't need to roll your own, you can plug it into your existing project.

Of course if you really are using Makefiles in C you're already living in the wild west, so it's on you to figure out how to add Rust to your projects in that case (or switch to a better build system).

[1]: https://doc.rust-lang.org/cargo/reference/build-scripts.html

[2]: https://bazelbuild.github.io/rules_rust/

[3]: https://buck.build/rule/rust_library.html

[4]: https://mesonbuild.com/Rust.html
The editor is already selecting the best matched reviewers though, for any paper they send out for review.

They have more flexibility on how hard they push the reviewer to accept doing the specific review, or for a specific timeline, but they still get declines from some reviewers on some papers.
I've experienced living with bed bugs during my boarding school years. Despite getting multiple bug bites a week consistently for a couple years, I never actually got to see a live bed bug.

Bed bugs are no joke
I just started shooting because I kept dying, they appeared and I was able to pass!

Pretty difficult…
Productivity in knowledge work is not difficult to measure, just very laborious. A few aspects need to be untangled to do it, though.

We can use an analogue of the Kaya Identity for CO2 production[1], the production identity:-

Dollars of revenue per year equals dollars produced per keystroke, times keystrokes per hour, times hours at work per year.

Revenue equals productivity times work intensity times worker utilisation.

Worker utilisation is commonly measured and called "productivity". More rarely work intensity is also measured, and the product of intensity and utilisation is called "productivity". Processes are almost never analysed sufficiently deeply to measure true productivity (dollars per keystroke), though.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaya_identity
Research and publication incur opportunity costs. For every manuscript that has to be reworked and submitted elsewhere, you’re losing the ability to do new research. So a researcher is left trying to balance the cost/benefit of additional time investment. Sometimes that results in a higher quality publication, sometimes it results in abandoning good (or bad) work, and sometimes it just wastes time.
Or perhaps surgically appended into your palm or something...
I'll probably come across as a shill here, but there is a lot going on with SQL Server, all included in your license (Standard Edition has limitations on scaling).

Some of these things are merely passable, some are great, but it's all included. The key takeaway is that SQL Server is a full data platform, not just an RDBMS.

- RDBMS: very solid, competitive in features
- In-memory OLTP: (really a marketing name for a whole raft of algorithmic and architectural optimization) can support throughput that is an order of magnitude higher
- OLAP: Columnstore index in RDBMS, can support pure DW style workload or OLAP on transactional data for near-real-time analytics
- OLAP: SSAS: two different best-in-class OLAP engines: Multidimensional and Tabular for high-concurrency low-latency reporting/analytics query workloads
- SSIS: passable only, but tightly integrated ETL tool; admittedly in maintenance mode
- SSRS: dependable paginated / pixel-perfect reporting tool; similar to other offerings in this space
- Native replication / HA / DR (one of the only things actually gated behind Enterprise)
- Data virtualization: PolyBase

If you're just looking for a standard RDBMS, then there's little to justify the price tag for SQL Server. If you want to get value for money, you take advantage of the tight integration of many features.

There is value for having these things just work out of the box. How much value is up to you and your use cases.
This article is hard to consume, though it’s a shame that many websites are broken, mobile unfriendly.
In 2024, AI made astonishing progress across the board. Top models have improved by roughly 130 ELO points on public leaderboards, while costs for running those same models have dropped many fold. Smaller, low-latency models now offer near–state-of-the-art performance (see Gemini Flash, for example). Multimodal capability is increasingly the norm, and strong reasoning skills are widely expected. New “hard problem” leaderboards have emerged, and they, too, have seen major gains. Long-context models have become standard, and mainstream products like Google Search now integrate AI by default.

Overall, the field has seen tremendous progress -- whether or not most users realize just how far we’ve come. Marcus's predictions don't sound specific enough -- no GPT5? Correct. But, what does that even mean?
> ~365.25

~365.2425 includes the leap year, century, and 4 century gregorian adjustments, and it's not a difficult number to remember actually.

"it's not quite .25? how much is it shy? .2425"
It checks out big time for me.

>"In 21 U.S. metros, the monthly cost of owning is at least 50% more expensive"

I am not in the US. 21 metros do not constitute country. When I bought house in major metro (Toronto) it was $200,000. So please do not feed me this pathetic propaganda.
Is that in any way related to the Official MIT Nerd Test from the early 90s?
The only thing that was effective for my RSI — and was really effective — is an app that forces me to stop typing for 15 seconds every 4 minutes. Super irritating but it works. AntiRSI on a Mac, Workrave on Windows and Linux, are examples of ones I’ve used. Been doing this for 20-odd years at this point.
Kīlauea Volcano, Hawaii (Live Video)
I am glad to read this article which poke around the idea of "Pixel Perfection", for me that is indeed time-wasted, and I don't know why there are lots of company keeps saying they want this kind of "Perfection".

But I do believe people care quality, what they did is comparing the quality with price, Netflix is a bad example since it's so cheap (compared to seeing movie or a show in theater). The viewer saw a bad movie they will just think, oh well, I don't care.
"Doesn't break" and "actually turns screws" are obviously properties of certain screwdrivers, which maybe you don't get with modern ones. I didn't need to say the screwdriver is "quality" to say that. I just had to say what's true.

The only thing I'd add by saying "quality" is that I think a screwdriver that "doesn't break" and "actually turns screws" is good, which only tells you something about me. If I'd be happy with a different one that breaks and won't turn screws, I simply wouldn't call the old one "quality" and nothing about either one would change.

You might think it's weird if I don't care about a basic thing like whether it turns screws, but maybe I just want a cheap, simple prop for a movie. Maybe it's about a guy whose tools don't work. Maybe I just want the crappy plastic part because it's perfect for some art I'm making. Maybe I bet someone I could break it with a hammer.

All that information about me could change what's fit for me to buy, but none of it would change what's true about the product.
I know that’s the ideal but my original post ends with some skepticism at this claim. I’ve had more than a few come across my desk that are a poor fit. I try to be honest with the editors about why I reject the chance to review them. If I witness it more than a few times, they obviously aren’t being as judicial at their assignments as the ideal assumes.
> If guns were better regulated

We can't stop drug importation. What makes you think that we can stop guns?

> and we had less of them we would have a safer less violent society.

"less of them"? We can take away all of the deer rifles and not change US violence at all. A collector with 100 guns is not more dangerous than one with 25.

The vast majority of US gun violence is committed by people who are already involved in other illegal activities involving other illegal substances. It is absurd to think that they can be disarmed by legal means.

It takes about 1% of the "by physical volume" drug smuggling to provide them with a new gun per crime.

If anything guns are harder to ban than drugs (because they're easier to make and smuggle), and that was true before 3d printing became a thing.
If a country does not strive to make good use of all its land and attempt to better the lives of its people why are there wars? Clearly they're fine with their top 3 cities. /s

Seriously, you see this in any country of any size. Remote may just mean 300km/186mi off coast. Politicians go where the votes are of course, but this just means disregarding rural areas is a self fulfilling prophecy. The more you do it, the more remote they become.
Another factor is a poor understanding of selection bias and statistics can skew expectations as well. Mentalists like Darren Brown make use of this for their stage shows.
Rails has excellent defaults out of the box for security. You have to go out of your way to explicitly get around them, like with parameter whitelisting and SQL sanitizing.

I don’t see as many CVEs, at least to my knowledge, with GitHub or Shopify. Not that they haven’t happened, but seem to _much_ less. Stripe is mostly ruby, though not rails, and have done well with security.

My suspicion from outside of Gitlab is that it’s a quality and prioritization problem. Security is hard. It requires very deliberate decision making and investment. Ruby and Rails are generally very stable, but you can use them to crazy ends if you allow yourself to.
The Evolution of SRE at Google
Right, I agree. But Perl is dead…
This feels like a stretch. They count the "iPad Mini" as a new product and not a type of iPad. Similarly the Thunderbolt Display, the iPhone 5C, and others. I would not count these as new product lines, just evolutions of existing ones.
Ruby and rails’ ecosystems are also massive. Devise and ActiveAdmin are options for those two, though I haven’t used either in years.

With much of the AI development happening in python and typescript, you might be right about those areas.
This is called "influence" where I work.

> Practical, naive engineers gravitate to this work because it’s obviously useful

Ha! No. Quite the opposite.
Maybe you have influence on trival stuff like which testing framework to use. In my experience working at many small and medium startups is that most of the impactful decisions are still made by the in-group boysclub.

For some reason lots of people seem to have this misconception that startups are somehow more meritocratic than big corporates. I found the opposite to be true.

Your job working at startup is to get into that group and be one of the boys.
That's strange. Apparently, the only time I ever met any, they must have been very hungry - they crawled right at me over the open bedsheet when the light was still on. I killed the front of the first assault wave and got the hell out of that crappy hotel room.
Perhaps related?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41311135
In Windows the issue is that alt+space will by default open the window's control menu (for minimize/maximize/move/etc.). Pressing space down and then alt will work though.
Matress with no frame in my early student days.

More people than bedrooms ever since I got married.

Saunas. Absolutely. I love a relaxing day at the sauna.

One other that I forgot. And a few that I think I really should look into.
In Doom, < and > are strafe, and it works here too.
There is a website where you can find other people who dislike reading and strongly advise their opinion’s opinions.

It’s currently being used as an LLM infested playground to defraud investors of money (new accounts are bots). Since you don’t like to read, maybe you should pop off to Reddit.
So we recently had to do something like this for PCI DSS certification. The database is encrypted at rest (AWS RDS), but the data is presented as clear text to any DBA. The solution we came up with was to add field-level encryption to certain Card Holder Data (CHD) fields like Account etc. To do this, we use AWS KMS to encrypt/decrypt the data and then we only grant the rights to use this key to to an IAM Role that they database holds and explicitly prevent any Admin accounts from accessing it. End result is that Admins can manage the database, but can't see all of it in the clear.
I agree with this, though the article presents an unfortunately realistic issue within larger orgs: optics. Glue work is ultimately a bet and convincing management that doing said work will result in magnified/bettered future outcomes is difficult. Glue work is easier to do when management trusts engineering.
Oh damn. I have been using `_1`, `_2`, etc. extensively for years... I didn't know about that footgun.

I'd like know if `it` is merely an alias for `_1`, or if protects from this "arity issue" too.
>Rust is now common enough in the industry

Source?
There are already 3 popular products with name glean with domains as .com, .ai and .co. This is glean with .software.
FYI, one of my favorite Ruby idioms is to capture command output with `open(...){_1.read}`

pp open("|ls -lh /usr/bin/ls"){_1.read}
"-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 135K Aug 30 04:57 /usr/bin/ls\n"

or to quickly print tabular data

open("|column -t -s \\t", "w"){_1 << tsv_data}
Time and place are inseparable, and a lot of confusion about time can be resolved by being more specific about one’s position and velocity.
We only have one who hasn't made the switch, he works in vim inside the docker container.

I dont actually mind what development environments our devs use, as long as your productivity is up and you get the job done and you are happy. You can use a magnetised needle for all I care, whatever makes you the best version of you.
In March, the month of war, is also when Romans mustered their citizen levy of troops.
> There's nothing we can say about a thing with "quality" we couldn't also say by tediously listing every single property it has. The only thing that only "quality" can add is information about what the speaker thinks is good.

In most fields (film, painting, music, etc), there are standards -- agreed upon to varying degrees, sometimes almost unanimously, sometimes with only a plurality -- based on objective or almost-objective criteria. In other words, there are "measurable" criteria that expert or even merely good practitioners can agree on. In these cases the word "quality" is often used as a shorthand for possessing these kinds of properties. In this sense, ascribing quality is functionally different from a mere opinion, linguistically and technically.

Of course, you can argue that all those experts have no priority over anyone else's opinion -- nevertheless, the usage distinction remains. In addition, I think that point of view is either trivially true (because sure, no we can't ask God to tell us who's right) or meaningless (because there are many differences between experts and non-experts, even if you have contempt for expertise).
Glue work doesn’t get rewarded. That I agree with. However I don’t agree with the conclusion.

Do Glue Work for projects that you are leading, projects that you are accountable for. As a senior+ engineer that is all your projects. So should you prioritize glue work for all of them?

From my experience, there is a delicate balance. There’s Glue work that you need to get right every time, else risk getting fired. E.g. Technical specifications for your project. There’s glue work that you need to put on the back burner every time until it becomes a visible problem that management will appreciate you take care of. E.g tech debt, addressing strands that are getting dropped. Then there is glue work that you do to make your own life easier. E.g. Onboarding docs, demos etc.
The people likely to wear programming socks.
Raku's doing alright though
I figure if it's good enough for login.gov [1], it's good enough for my sites as well.

I also find devise pretty simple to get setup and use. It's so easy to mess up some small thing while writing your own auth. I've always pretty much trusted myself to at least get devise setup properly.

[1] https://github.com/18F/identity-idp/blob/main/Gemfile#L30
It's a mono repo across a dozen languages (good luck with ctags) that tens of thousands of developers commit to every day. Even if you'd spend the hours indexing it locally, it would be out of date right away.
"People scare better when they're dying." is one of the best movie lines.
I'm fortunate enough to live in kinda nowhere land considering, so this is from the perspective of nowhere land (people with space and nature etc).

I was hoping that the large COVID response in this country at the start of it all would finally get people to breathe, slow, and all that you mention. For a while , around my location, you could see life almost returning to a more connected to life, life.

When things settled down, nothing much seemed to stick. The rat race restarted the grid is good to go, and the pace ever more frantic.

People can, will, do, and should do whatever it is that makes them live their fulfilled life, 100%.

I just hope they do it for themselves, not for others. Would be a shame.
Brennan torpedo – first practical guided missile(1877)
If you need to drink a lot of water, it could be any number of other problems, like a nutrient deficiency or some other health problem.
> The only rational points for the beginning of a year are the solstices or the equinoxes.

Why? You could also eg pick where earth is closest or farthest from the sun, or at exactly average distance or anything like that.

> So the calendar of Julius Caesar is the origin of the adoption of the 25th of December for the Christmas and of the 25th of March for the beginning of the year in several countries.

Christmas wasn't invented yet whan Julius Caesar was alive. So the story must be a bit more complicated than that.
More/easier/cheaper dissemination of research.
Regardless of terminology, clearly there is a distinction between different types of work, as discussed in the article. If you take umbrage at the coining of that term, file a semantic dispute.
Exactly. But can we rename it to non-gender-specific "old children's club" or "the cool kids"? :)

But seriously, I think probably I need to be technical co-founder, or a trusted first/veryearly hire. Then, as we grow, I'd try to hire rare smart and aligned people, so we can empower them to make decisions without them quickly fudging up the highly effective company that the "old fogies club" started.
Is it? https://jobs.perl.org/

I don't use it and you may not but it still has an active community and job listings. The last release was on December 20th [1].

This is what I'm talking about: it may not be popular in a "bleeding edge" sense, but it's still being used and developed.

[1] https://dev.perl.org/perl5/news/
Seems like the first thing one needs to do before criticizing something is to have a solid philosophical basis for doing so. Therefore, we should just open this dusty cupboard labeled “moral ideas philosophers agree about and…” oh my god…
I agree, but lets remember that the software repeats patterns, it doesn't so much innovate new ones. If you get too dependent on it, theoretically you might not break as much new ground, find new paradigms, discover the long-mistaken assumption in prior scholarship (that the software is repeating), etc.
Ruby doesn't really have a learning curve... Maybe block syntax but that's super easy.

Rails gives you way more structure than Django.
I agree with the general sentiment. But, ecosystem/popularity can matter (you didn't claim it doesn't, just saying).

Specifically, it might be useful to know if a once very popular (dominant in some circles) framework is significantly less so. That downward trend might be relevant for someone, somewhere. "Dead" is still probably not the right word.
He's used his power to censor people he disagreed with ever since he took over Twitter. It's his private propaganda platform. Say things he doesn't like and he'll punish you.

The news is that he has a new group of targets. And those weren't aware or were in denial about his censorship.
(maybe, estimated)
I, as a reviewer, made a similar mistake once! The author's initial version seemed to contradict one of their earlier papers but I was missing some context.
This is a perfect lesson in why strong communication skills are important in engineering organizations. It's leaderships responsibility to learn from engineering what is technically feasible but its also engineering's responsibility to communicate well enough to convince their organization on the right path forward.
So where does that leave all those incredibly expensive watches that boast accuracy?
Jan 15 is quarterly estimates for those who have them. Annual taxes are due April 15 (as well as Q1 estimates).
People waste a full hour to drop the kids to the elementary my kid goes to because there is an infinite amount of cars dropping a single kid each.

I just ride a bike through some grass (cos there’s no connection between my neighborhood sidewalk to the sidewalk in the school neighborhood) and get there in 10 minutes.

People should be asking for a sidewalk and signaling so kids can ride to school but instead it’s just “more lanes” or “pick them up faster”.
Yes, February should be the earliest month in the year and numbered as month 0. Then October could have number 8, and so on, and January could be the last month and the two faced god would be good for looking forward and back, as people are wont to do at the end of the year.
Rails is awesome, and so is Django. I’ve built mission-critical apps in both and still do with Python. That said, I’d love to switch to Go for building large monoliths since it has a tighter type system and better concurrency constructs.

The problem is, Go community has never really filled that gap. I love Go, but the whole "Go doesn’t need a Rails or Django" mindset is part of why it hasn’t taken off in this space. Building networking tools and CLIs in Go is great, but when it comes to quickly building a full-stack web app, I still reach for Rails or Django. So this whole "X is dead" doesn't apply to Rails at all.
https://dgl.cx/2024/12/ghostty-terminal-title

https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/security/advisories/G...