skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
[Ask JM] Considering building my own DB, very specialized, and idea
I am a lowly developer, used to to back end web development and network management, then the internet changed and everyone has their own little piece the dev pie and my brain can't keep up.

I have nn idea to make a database, a pure key value store, they key can be up to 63 characters, though possibly double that. The value can be up to 256 characteers. It will be redundant, load balanced, and able to return answers from anywhere in the world in fastest would be around 2ms, longest would be on average 40ms or so.

Bad idea, thought experiment, proof of concept?
Do any of the open source office spreadsheet equivalents have a sanely parsable file format that can be extended for this? Ie, this language would basically be a more verbose file format?
I really like your having exposed me to more feature overlap there. Some things I didn't know about GV have been learned, thank you! I'm going to make some notes about things I like and improvements we might get to incorporate in further development.
Every single year America celebrates the de facto Irish holiday, St. Patrick's Day, by getting as drunk as possible and pretending to be stereotypical Irishmen.

Note: I am of Irish descent and not at all offended. What I wonder is if this impassive attitude to a relatively minor transgression, came about before or after the cultural "unbending"?
Node.js Instagram Photo Printer
The education France has provided me with would probably have cost me much more anywhere else in the world. I have always wished to stay here to work, if only to pay some of it back to my country. With a degree in the STEM fields, I expected it would be easy.

I did not expect political issues to get in the way. I did not think the misuses of our surveillance system would one day be even remotely on par with those of the US or the UK, to the point that I do not know today where my privacy is breached the more.

Of course we say "let's encrypt", we foster the use of Tor and the likes, but that misses the point. There should not even be a case for such a law which will help nothing but totalitarianism and is even a disincentive to investments in France. Still our politicians and administrations have paid little heed to La Quadrature du Net's and other actors' comments. Instead the government drafted this law in haste, seemingly to curtail the democratic process which should have taken place in its entirety, especially for a change that big regarding our freedom.

The way I see things, I have two options: leave for another country that still deems privacy as a fundamental liberty, or stay in France and get involved in politics in the hope that I can help reverse the current situation.

I do not think I have the skills to get involved in politics, nor do I have the desire to. I guess I will soon be part of their statistics on "brain drain", although right now I feel more ousted from France than attracted to anywhere else.
By cells, I mean something like this: https://common-lisp.net/project/cells/
(there's even a HN discussion about it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1885974)

which basically allows to express interdependencies between data (a.k.a. formulas) in a way that updates sink variables when source variables are changed.

At the moment, I think not even Rx extensions for .NET (which I consider to be the most advanced reactive implementation in a mainstream language) do support this style of computation.
Don't think I said that I was okay with that, no.

But to be clear, drug cartels, spy agencies and criminal organizations have been able to do that for quite some time. They've just had to send a person to plant the bomb or the bug or the location tracker in person. And it's not generally regarded as the car manufacturer's problem to deal with that threat.

So yes, there's a question of scale, which makes a difference here. Traceability can maybe be handled at the network level - who knows what information Sprint captures about traffic to these car systems?

But the way most people are talking about this you'd think that as soon as the method for doing this hits the internet, script-kiddies are going to start randomly crashing Jeeps into bridge pylons.
Author of 19 consecutive #1 NYT best-sellers reveals his tricks of the trade
what a decidedly over pessimistic outlook.
The infrastructure you'd need for your beacons is the same as Nextbus (i.e. trackers on public transport and a city data feed), but Nextbus requires no distributed/deployed devices. Therefore, rolling out a beacon approach must have more overhead than something like Nextbus. You really can't come up with a reason why these beacons are better for that use case.

Hell, just put up a QR code at the bus stop. What could be cheaper than that?
They are very anti-male. (I thought that was obvious so I didn't mention it, and if you read the wikipedia page or watch the play, you'll see what I mean).
Your view on this screams "Tragedy of the Commons."
I was hoping that this would be about the term "unicorn", which can't go away too soon. It reflects the juvenility of the Valley, that people are too creepy-humble amount money to say "a billion dollars" (teehee!) and have to hide behind a mythical creature. It also allows VCs to hide the fact that all they really care about is money (and I don't begrudge them for that per se, but for the dishnesty around it) by making a billion dollars sound like something other than what it is. (It reminds me of "change the world" nonsense, because you'd literally have to change the world to make unicorns exist.) If what you care about is making a lot of money and nothing else, then just admit it. There's plenty of company on Wall Street for that sort of person.

Seriously, fuck this "unicorn" shit and fuck that whole culture of juvenilty that comes out of the polar vortex of immaturity called Silly Con Valley.

Speaking of unicorns, if you want something to hate for the next few minutes, watch this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bMJIBxtDUHc .
Looks to me like the presentation is about their tech stack, by their director of technology. Their business is of marginal relevance.

But yeah ideally they should explain https://www.tilt.com/learn/why-tilt in every presentation...not that the link does. I wish all companies would compare their products directly with competitors. Even though the comparison would be biased, it would be very helpful in discerning where in the market they fit.

Skimming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_crowdfunding_ser... and https://snowdrift.coop/p/snowdrift/w/en/othercrowdfunding it seems Tilt might have lower fees, less emphasis on their brand/platform & possibility of branded versions, and an open source version.
That's one factor, and one that the investment community likes to play up. I'm not really sure this applies in the unicorn case, though, since the amount of money that they're raising in the "private IPOs" they do dwarfs the reporting costs of being a public company.

The biggest factor, in my opinion of course, is that some large private investors realized that they could capture most of the upside in an IPO before the IPO actually happened. The first real example of this is DST and Facebook. This has obvious advantages for the private investor -- they get access to a source of high quality risk for their portfolio. It also has obvious advantages for the company -- they get access to capital without having to manage to Wall St's expectations (and that's no minor thing).

Facebook was sort of the proto-unicorn, and it spawned imitators. Those imitators were not just startups, it also spawned imitators on the investment side. Suddenly a source of relatively easy money -- the initial IPO allocation in "sure thing" companies -- weren't available to the usual suspects, and those funds have naturally followed the leaders into the D, E, and F rounds of the new breed of unicorns. These deals are even accessible to relative small fry now -- private bankers will routinely shop around access to these funding rounds to people with assets "only" in the 10's of millions. Sometimes they're shopping a theoretical deal that they want to present to the company in question, and sometimes they're shopping AirBnB.

At any rate, many of the gains you used to be able to get in companies like Amazon or Google are now going to people able to get access to these pre-IPO deals. Financing private companies is very different now than it was 5 years ago.
Sure, what we are missing in the middle is surge pricing when there are plenty of cabs around, and its done to earn more revenue, pay more to drivers, and stiff consumers.

Its specially confusing to try to guess if 25%+ Uber, 50%+ Lyft, Taxi prices are. At least if they all had the "N per ride, M per time or distance" you would be able to compare.
"That might sound harsh, but put yourself in the CEOs’ shoes: It’s often in a company’s best interest to be able to reclaim equity if an exiting employee can’t afford to purchase his or her shares within 90 days of leaving."

I'm sure it would be in a company's best interest to chain their people to desks too. We don't allow that, for obvious reasons.
Fadell didn't launch Glass. Fadell recognized Glass was dead and have it a funeral.
This. Documenting odd behavior like this isn't an excuse for having odd behavior. It should just be changed to fail on bad input. It's not even a breaking change (apart from code already using it with bad input).
I believe "conda install seaborn" will do what you need :)
I feel there is an interesting bit (or example) missing: how does the (OCaml) code look that implements the expressions that are evaluated? The code returns a value and the list of cells it read - how is obtaining this list best organised?
Makes the normal buck converter arrangement too. Controller, inductor, diode. The GPU will be taking like half a volt so things are definitely going to be getting toasty.
Chex Quest, the first video game included in a cereal box
If you are in a rural area of southern china, drink your gin and tonics daily.

If you are in a city, particularly a northern city, I wouldn't worry about it.
Holy shit. I was going to make a post about this. When do you realise you're an alcoholic ? For me, it just hit me last week. I'm 25, in the valley, active social life which invariably includes alcohol. But, for the past year and half, I've been averaging 25-30 drinks a week. {I try to stay away from beer after I heard hops can give you manboobs. broscience :)}

But, I also realised, it wasn't affecting my life (denial huh?). It isn't getting getting in the way of work. If I'm too hungover to work, I just call in sick. It hasn't changed me as a person. I consciously try not to break any laws while I'm drunk. (I was surprised how many people have a drink at the bar and hop in to their car and drive away; logic being, "I've just had one drink".) It hasn't affected my health... yet. I'm active, weight train three/four times a week and average 10K steps a day.

I also know I can't do this for long. But, some of the best moments in the past year have been, sitting on my couch, listening to Sinatra/ Cole Porter, relishing a cocktail that I made and just reflecting on life. Just observing the thoughts. There is just something beautiful about that, and I've never been evoke those emotions/feelings when sober.
I have a 7 figure AMT credit that will likely never be eliminated in my lifetime. People in this position hopefully all have competent tax attorneys who understand the credit. The reality is that the credit isn't very meaningful to people like me (and I am pretty typical among people who work at Unicorns).
Inferior in what ways, and for what purposes?

For the most part, I haven't seen a technical superiority between web & native for most of what folks want to do. It seems more a practical superiority because we haven't been allowed to / found a need to crap up the native experience quite as much.

App stores & in-app purchases go a lot way toward obviating the need for so much cruft. Too much JS framework cruft is a self-inflicted injury. These are addressable issues, not inherent to the web.
Thank you! I think we might be too far to the simplicity but we can err on that side for the moment and think about going closer to aesthetics people like as we go. We're devs and businessmen, not designers, but we have designer friends that have given us some great feedback (not to mention the public feedback) and I think always improving is a good roadmap to have.
Apparently in that comments section, the leaker was legit:

> Palantir is trying to raise another ~400mm to finance their operations.
https://ring.to has very similar features (for free) and is run by Bandwidth.com (been in telco for YEARS). You can even get a free number through GrooVeIP to use with RingTo https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.snrblabs.g...
Interestingly enough this is the reason why planes really arn't safe security wise.

Just about every other industry has to worry about Compsec researchers busting in and screaming that the end is nigh. But not airplanes. You even try touching one of them and you will be in for quite a ride through the joys of bureaucracy.

It's the basis of QA, your customers will use your product in ways you never intended. It could go on to say that through your customers misuse of the product you will be able to make your product better.

But with planes, the intended use gets so much more critical and the number of people who test it gets incredibly low. If these systems aren't tested, errors wont be found. And one day someone is going to hook up to a plane and try to bring it down. And it is because of this lack of use outside of intention that an attacker will be successful.

Obviously, I never want to be on a plane next to a security researcher plugged into the aircraft, but I think the secrecy around aircraft is their biggest vulnerability. A solution that would work somewhat counter intuitively would be parking a plane at LAS this summer for all the Black Hat and DEF CON attendees to play with. The resulting publications would without a doubt revolutionize aircraft security.

EDIT:Just fixing some grammar here and there.
This article does a much better job than many explaining what math research is actually like. I particularly like the "chess with the devil" metaphor:

The steady state of mathematical research is to be
completely stuck. It is a process that Charles
Fefferman of Princeton, himself a onetime math prodigy
turned Fields medalist, likens to "playing chess with
the devil." The rules of the devil’s game are special,
though: The devil is vastly superior at chess, but,
Fefferman explained, you may take back as many moves as
you like, and the devil may not. You play a first game,
and, of course, "he crushes you." So you take back
moves and try something different, and he crushes you
again, "in much the same way." If you are sufficiently
wily, you will eventually discover a move that forces the
devil to shift strategy; you still lose, but — aha! — you
have your first clue.

That said, the article does still have a hint of genius worship about it. Tao himself has a good blog post
"Does one have to be a genius to do maths?"
(https://terrytao.wordpress.com/career-advice/does-one-have-t...) pushing back on this sort of thing.

Another perspective I really like on genius in mathematics is (the late) Bill Thurston's response to the Math Overflow post "What's a mathematician to do?", asking how a non-genius can contribute to mathematics:

It's not mathematics that you need to contribute to.
It's deeper than that: how might you contribute to
humanity, and even deeper, to the well-being of the
world, by pursuing mathematics? ... The real
satisfaction from mathematics is in learning from
others and sharing with others. All of us have clear
understanding of a few things and murky concepts of
many more. There is no way to run out of ideas in need
of clarification...

(http://mathoverflow.net/questions/43690/whats-a-mathematicia...)
> AMD has been stuck on 28nm for a long time, but that's not AMD's fault.

How isn't it?
Most founders these days get common shares, not preferred.
So if you don't exercise your options, then why take the pay cut and work twice as hard for a startup ? The whole thing reeks of a scam against early employees.
The conclusion of the debate here is boring: yes, but only by extreme effort, i.e. redirection of 1-10% of economic and energy resources towards water acquisition. We're not all gonna die, but that's as comforting as it gets. Desalination is great for supplying coastal cities, bonkers everywhere else.

The economic consequence is a drastic rise in the price of conventional agricultural products (especially land meats) and a corresponding relative fall in the price of unconventional products (nuts, seeds, beans, aquaculture) which drives investment in the latter to hopefully yield a less water-hungry agricultural system... but a very different palate. The general outcome of capitalist systems are heterodox (one of capitalism's advantages); we expect to see some compensation from desalination, tertiary sewage treatment, and more water-efficient farming practices. It would be less painful if we didn't fight reality with agricultural subsidies and water grants.
Because you'd like to do something new and if you leave you must either exercise within 90 days or lose your options.
I did something like this when I was doing lots of data analysis for a research project: [1]

The problem space I was addressing was more restricted than a fully generic spreadsheet model, but I found everything you say about reproducibility and descriptiveness to be true. I kept my report/plot descriptions in git alongside the experiment setups / parameters.

FWIW, prior to this, I often wrote one-off Python scripts that would generate, e.g., 1000 rows of a particular set of formulae in CSV then import that into Excel. It probably wouldn't be hard to build a little tool in a few hundred lines of code to do this.

[1] https://github.com/cfallin/scomp
Indeed, the company isn't forced to allow it. They could simply not cash your check.
My ex-employer went the opposite direction at the beginning of this year: moving towards appraisal related pay, complete with explanations of how management were being given special training on how to fit people to the right overall grade and even fewer top ratings were given out to make the whole thing cost neutral. You may be surprised to learn the process was not greeted by enthusiastic cheers.
The mass and orbital velocity of jupiter are large enough that this is a non issue.
You might get a lot less in the way of odd looks by just ordering "Diet Coke"
This is why I'm so thankful for scientists like Neil DeGrasse Tyson and Carl Sagan, who have put themselves very much in the public eye as positive representatives of hard science.

Similarly, the Mythbusters cast, Bill Nye, and others that are not particularly "notable" scientists (as far as I know) but have done a great deal to make it more accessible to aspiring scientists.
This isn't quite true. PHP has 64-bit releases for Windows, but they are considered experimental, and prior to PHP 7, they only used 32-bit integers. That is because of the Windows/Unix C "long" size issue, which PHP 7 fixes by using a typedef for its integer type which is defined differently on Windows.
As the article states, you typically have 90 days after leaving a company to exercise your options or you lose them entirely. Yes, that avoid taxes, at the risk of eliminating any potential upside.
Wow. I am generally pro-alcohol, even occasionally at work in moderation. You are proof that some people have an unhealthy expectation around drinking, though.

> If you are too lazy to go drink one with your peers, then you will suffer less social success and poorer network, but I think you are being intentionally lazy, so you reap what you sow.

You think that someone is lazy because they don't want to drink? This is nuts. Is someone who doesn't share donuts in the morning also lazy? How about someone who doesn't eat pork? Are they lazy?

If this is really your attitude, if you really expect that people should feel obligated to drink, then you have a drinking culture problem.
Why work for a startup then ?
That's the closest I've seen to someone admitting that feminism is a religious belief system.
Well, that's overly binary; it creates strong pressures to focus on short-term results rather than making long-term thinking impossible. (If enough of your stock is held by arms-length investors interested primarily in maximizing short-term returns, it could become impossible for management to manage based on long-term thinking where that conflicts with perceived near-term optimality -- since they will be replaced if they do -- but most IPOs don't actually produce that kind of distribution of stock.
I thought I was losing mine thanks to computer work, but recently was diagnosed with keratoconus, which has a genetic link. In addition to being a contraindication for laser surgery, there's a distinct possibility of corneal rupture as it gets worse. It causes thinning of the cornea around the edges, leading to poor vision and astigmatism.

Interestingly, the only real treatment for it is something called collagen crosslinking, which is basically administration of UV light after the use of riboflavin on the cornea. This promotes crosslinking between collagen fibers making up the cornea, strengthening it and arresting the progression.

What's interesting about that is the recent research about the prevalence of myopia in children and young adults and its connection to lack of exposure to sunlight. It seems like the computer isn't itself to blame, but time on the computer probably contributes to time NOT spent outdoors, where the sun's UV light would naturally do the same as the procedure above.

(This is hardly scientific, just my musings on the subject.)

[Edit: The research i'm referring to is not Bates' research on the subject. I can't find the link on it at the moment but as I recall it was a study in China of chinese schoolchildren that played more outdoors vs indoors, or something to that effect.]
Yes nyc.
Agree the advice is well intentioned and is correct (in theory according to what I read) but not entirely practical. For example:

"then at a minimum you should verify regularly that the code has not changed (you have to hope that you are looking at the same code that your users see)"

Who exactly is the "you" in the above statement and who pays the "you" money to fix this and keep on top of it on an ongoing basis? And for how long?

In the physical world the different between ideal and practical can be described by my experience with production machinery. The machinery came with guards to protect the operators from getting their hands caught or cut off. The guards also came with switches to prevent the machines from running when the covers were taken off. But what would happen is the operators would want to oil or tweak the machines so they would take the covers off and disable the sensors so that the machine would run bare. Of course you would tell them not to do this, but they would still forget to put the covers back on or be lazy quite often and there was little you could do about it. You had production to get done under deadline and weren't likely to fire someone even though you knew there was a small safety risk in doing this type of thing (older machines of course came with no safety guards at all, operators just had to be careful at their own peril. (And good operators were impossible to find anyway so once you had someone they became a primadonna ..
Yeah, good luck with that. Law enforcers find it incredibly useful to be able to remotely take over a (suspected) criminals vehicle and force it to stop, so they're hardly going to support a law that makes that impossible. And let's face it, the only way to truly make sure a hacker can't take over a vehicle remotely is to make it impossible.