HackerNews Summary (2023-06-05 07AM)

Source: Major Reddit communities will go dark to protest threat to third-party apps

Summary
Several major communities on Reddit are planning to go private for 48 hours on June 12th over the new charges for third-party app developers to access Reddit’s APIs. The protested API pricing will mean many third-party Reddit apps could cease operations. Redditors argued that the new API charges should be affordable if third-party apps are efficient with the API calls they make.

Facts

📉 Developers of several third-party Reddit apps said their services have been threatened by Reddit’s new pricing.

🔐 Many subreddits will be going dark to protest Reddit’s new API pricing policy.

💰 Reddit’s pricing is $0.24 per 1000 API calls, which equates to <$1.00 per user monthly for a reasonably operated app.

💻 The potential for third-party apps to cease operations is particularly problematic for subreddit moderators, who say they often rely on these tools to manage their communities.

🚫 Redditors also raised concerns about new restrictions that would prevent NSFW content from being made available via the API.

Source: Is it time to stop using sentinel values for null / “NA” values?

Summary
This blog post discusses Apache Arrow’s use of bitmaps to mark null values and the controversy surrounding it. It also explores the use of sentinel values in SQL and performance benchmarks for sum operations on data with null values.

Fact
💾 Using bitmaps to mark null values provides benefits such as ignoring the bitmap if the array has no nulls and propagating nulls in algorithms using word-wise AND or OR operations. However, some argue that it is slower than using sentinel values because of the need to check bits rather than comparing values or checking for NaN.

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