jkeisling/hacker-news-corpus-2007-2022 huggingface dataset:
If Apple bought Google (it already has a third
of its value in cash) and it shut down Android,
it could create $300 billion in value

Can Apple really buy Google?

Even if it had all the cash needed, isn't the board of directors supposed to agree? Would shareholders themselves agree knowing that (a) Apple is buying Google to dismember it, (b) Apple is putting itself in serious debt without having a guaranteed ROI and (c) Google is still ridding the wave and its best days may have yet to come ?

Why do people feel the need to make such statements anyway?
There was a backup site, rsync.net, which sent weekly announcements saying 'we did not get a National Security Letter this week'.
Here's the step-by-step production they used, it doesn't seem implausible that this could be scaled up in a factory setting. Maybe a modular approach would work, i.e. you might have 100 production lines running simultaneously, each one running the following ~8 steps:

Material synthesis
Synthesis of CNFs. The free-standing CNFs were made by electrospinning. Typically, 10 wt% polyacrylonitrile, was added to DMF and stirred overnight to form a
polymeric solution.

This solution was then loaded into a Becton Dickinson 5 mL syringe with a Luer lock tip and an 18-gauge stainless steel needle (Hamilton Corporation). The syringe with the needle was connected to a NE-400 model syringe pump (New Era Pump Systems, Inc.) to control the feeding rate of the solution.

The grounded aluminum collector was placed 6 in. from the tip of the needle. Electrospinning was performed at room temperature with a relative humidity below 15%. A potential difference of 7–8 KV (Series ES -30 KV, Gamma High Voltage Research, Inc.) was applied between the collector and the tip of the needle. The flow rate of the solution was kept constant at 0.2 mL h−1.

The as-spun nanofibers were collected and stabilized in a convection oven at 280 °C for 6 h in air atmosphere.

The stabilized nanofiber mats were then placed in alumina plates and carbonized in a nitrogen environment up till 900 °C at a ramp rate of 2.5 °C min−1 and then activated under CO2 flow for 1 h in a horizontal tube furnace (MTI. Corp). The furnace was then cooled at 2 °C min−1 until it reached room temperature.

Monoclinic γ-sulfur deposition on CNFs. The free-standing CNF mats were pun-
ched with stainless steel die (φ = 11 mm) and dried at 150 °C overnight under
vacuum.

The CNF discs were then weighed and placed in an in-house developed autoclave (Stainless steel 316) and subjected to 180 °C for 24 h in an oven. The
autoclave consisted of a sulfur reservoir at the bottom and a perforated disk for
placing electrodes at the top. After 24 h the autoclave was cooled to room tem-
perature slowly in a span of 6–8 h.

The electrodes were weighed and transferred in an Argon-filled glove box via overnight room temperature vacuum drying in the antechamber for battery fabrication.
For gnome there is an excellent tool called PaperWM[1] that provides fantastic window tiling and customization.
[1] https://github.com/paperwm/PaperWM
What is an example of a kind of impossible statistic?
KDE as it stands today has the perfect balance between the defaults and what can be configured. It's a breath of fresh air coming from windows and after trying Gnome which took the exact opposite route. Gnome would have been great if its not so strongly opinionated and didn't need so many extensions to get the basic functionality working.

That said either of those beats the pants off current or previous windows versions. Existing companies (dell and lenova) should start making Linux only laptops through partnerships with either KDE/distro maintainers. I would bet that most of the users can't even tell the difference especially if they are mostly on web browser based workflows.
That should be the new HN tagline, I'm honestly a bit surprised to see this article still on the front page. Usually concerning facts get flagged pretty quickly.
Most very big mergers consist of one company buying all the shares of a publically-traded company, so it is likely that the regulators have the power to stop those kinds of mergers though I cannot think of an example.
106 my browser says.
Sometimes I think about this half-baked theory where physical laws don't exist until they are discovered. Once you catch physics with it's pants down it now must maintain those constraints or have it's bluff called.
Okay but what if you didn't and charity didn't help you, since you know, they're not obligated to help you.
Could you explain what you mean by halting problem in this context?
I think it depends on the skill. I see young programmers from big companies like IBM or Accenture making peanuts and working constant overtime while the older guys (I'm talking 30 years experience) who are independent consultants quote 1000€+/day.
the videos on the resources cover JCL and other tools.
This sound like the hypothesized „subtle-matter“ as proposed by Dr. Klaus Volkamer [1]?

- still looking for a better link than the Book… I’ll update this later

[1] https://amzn.to/3mvvsWW
Sorry dude I don't know what you are talking about. The post talks about buying your own gear; the parent to my reply seems to misunderstand what depreciation is and goes on about some non existent recurring cost.

Are you talking about renting gear from vendors? This seems again to be a misunderstanding, no-one is renting anything. Support contracts are normally separate, certainly they are still available at normal cost within 5 years, the normal depreciation timescale.

It seems this is a really misunderstood topic. Maybe someone can do an "understanding depreciation for startup founders" post or something.
Was it a Haskell script? :-)
I won't be attending any of the events due to conflicts with work and an already packed schedule.

It looks fun, but I'm slammed for the next month or so and can't justify taking the time off for events that are only tangential to my career at the moment.
We want to be more city guide than ANOTHER FACEBOOK. That being said.. I want people to be able to send each other their top things to do in a city. As in if you were coming to NYC, go to UpOut.com/ini (ini is my username) to get my stuff to do.
Actually, I think programmers do get paid in proportion to their productivity. Roughly, anyway.
The Art of Computer Programming, on the other hand, uses Assembly.
One has to wonder if there's a reason.
I wrote an OS X app to do this sort of thing a few years ago. At the time, I just used MAC addresses of routers to determine location. I wish I could write it for the iPhone, but it's above and beyond what's allowed by the rules.

The holy grail for a laptop was switching your SMTP settings, since a lot of people use different ISPs at work and at home. That problem goes away with a phone, but ringer volume seems like a similar level issue for phones. I could also see doing things like reducing your notifications or changing your lock settings.

(If you're interested in my software, you can find it at http://codehackers.net/locations/)
Oh Holy father in Heaven,please save HN from such noise and mess. Amen.
I wasn't conflating society and culture. American society, the group of people who are citizens of the United States of America, is a superset of the Christian culture.

Christian culture defines a moral code by which they measure themselves. That culture is present in many societies and can influence (or not) the societal debate on governance (witness the current California constitutional ban on Gay Marriage as an example).

That leads to people who are culturally opposed to laws enacted by the society in which they happen to live.

Laws are enacted by the constituents of a nation-state as a means of defining roles, rights, and remedies. The process by which they are proposed, debated, and enacted is internally consistent but varies between governing bodies.
Great, I can see that working; thanks for the reply!
Brutalist buildings don’t work. Smaller objects may work.

Source: I worked in a brutalist building for several years. It literally stood in as a prison in movies: terrible every day environment.

The truck is such a slap in the face to the standard car aesthetic. It’s jarring because it feels different and causes dissonance with what I know cars are allowed to look like. Some people will hate it purely because of that knee jerk reaction.

I’m not sure I like the look but I really like how iconoclastic it is.
That SQL statement is literally algorithmic sorting...
does anyone know how we can search the data to find info about our (more than likely) entries in this database? or did they simply find it but not release the info?
Not just Spanish, just about every other European language except English.
This post was a design document for soliciting feedback. You can see the progress on the implementation at https://github.com/akkartik/mu/blob/master/apps/mu.subx (colorized version: http://akkartik.github.io/mu/html/apps/mu.subx.html)

So far I've made some progress with code-generation. Next I plan to switch gears and work on the parser. I try to post updates on Mastodon: https://mastodon.social/@akkartik/103052146965158614
From the article it seems that you can just create a free account and query your own name.

> In order to test whether or not the data belonged to PDL, we created a free account on their website which provides users with 1,000 free people lookups
Automatic regex generation sings a siren's song. But automatically generating regex that matches "sings," "siren," and "song" is so trivial that our minds insist on layering complexity.

sings | siren | song

Any other regex makes assumptions about what the example represents. Assumptions about semantics. The great thing about regular expressions is the absence of semantics. The great thing is that regular expressions are finite automata and not Turing machines.
Out of curiosity how do you guys think they managed to scrape LinkedIn on such a large scale?

I've been wanting to do some social graph experimentation on it (small scale - say 1000 people near me) but concluded I probably couldn't scrape enough via raw scraping without freaking out their anti-scraping. (And API is a non-starter since that basically says everything is verboten).
AirPrint made up for what Google failed in execution. Cloud Print was a great feature when it worked but unfortunately, it was always a bumpy ride.
This is the first mainstream security truck at an affordable price. The sales on this are going to be higher than anybody expects. Every rapper, drug dealer, and dirtbag politician that doesn't want to go out like Tupac will buy one. The weekend warriors who had to give up their Hummers will buy one. The Mexican/Colombian cartels will all drive them because it's already bullet resistant but with that power, it can easily be modded with an extra 1/4 inch plate. The regular folks who live in places where carjacking is common (Brazil, Venezuela, South Africa, etc.) will buy them. It's going to sell very, very well.
Huh, apologies, could have sworn he did.

In any case, there is a difference between writing bombastically about a situation you are financially involved in and a journalist writing an article about tech.
>The first three books of "The Wrinkle in Time" series.

Why does everyone keep recommending books for teenagers that I read in elementary school?

I mean, hell, if we're going for epic high fantasy set in the (recognizably) modern world, try So You Want to be a Wizard by Diane Duane.

And to those of you who tried taking the Oath when you were a child, yes, the rest of us did, too. Pity it didn't take.
I think we should go a step further. Companies should audit all of the expenses of their employees, because it's not just people living in a low COL area: It's people living in the same high COL area but still living way below their means. Why should a company have to pay an employee who chooses to live in a $2k apartment the same as one across town who pays $3k? And food, or cars... Pets... Kids.... If you choose not to have additional expenses, why should a company pay you so much more than it costs you to live? Want to save 10% of your salary each month? Too bad, company policy says 5% is the max. /S
Yes. I think that's the only thing that's deserved to be said here.

People here should just relax, I'm sure there are many companies that deserve your rage but Dropbox is not one of them.

They simply asked me to take down the repository while they could work on blocking Dropship technically on the server side. No threats involved. This should be very good PR and many companies can learn from this.

Sure, trying to prevent people from writing/distributing programs that use a service in unexpected ways is pointless in the long run. If something is technically possible it will be done.

Hence, as some more validation is added, Dropbox will overall be a more secure service. In my opinion it was a feature instead of an exploit :) but hey, it's their service.

All the meanness flunged in this thread at either me or Dropbox is completely uncalled for.
It's no wonder that games such as World of Warcraft have a really low competence zone and a really large amount of space left to provide rewards for both time investment and player skill.
Wow - I didn't realize they had such poor insurance:

Beginning November 1, 2007, for Zipcar members 21 years of age or older, our insurance coverage consists of a combined single limit of $300,000 per accident, meaning that all third party bodily injuries, or property damage costs relating to the accident covered in the aggregate up to $300,000. For drivers under 21, we provide coverage up to state-mandated levels, which vary by the state in which the accident occurs. Zipcars are covered under a vehicle collision policy.

If the total amount of the injuries and/or property damage exceeds our coverage limits, Zipcar members are responsible for this excess and will be contacted by either Zipcar, our insurance provider – Liberty Mutual – or the insurance company representing another driver involved in the accident.

You think they'd charge a little more to give you better insurance, or at least give you the option of securing better insurance.
The only thing that this article didn't mention is that a huge portion of this upswing is probably based on the fact that most 18 year olds have had computers integrated with their lives for the past 10 years.

I'm sure many students who enrolled in the late 90s had only the most superficial computer experience; it appeared like a lucrative and interesting field. Nowadays even at lesser universities the majority of CS students come in with some programming experience. A smart kid can sit down and play with some code so much easier than they can play with chemistry or really any other field of engineering, and I'm sure that is having a huge impact in what fields kids are choosing.
> Nowadays anyone can trade with anyone, and there's really no need to have political control

You're forgetting just one small thing - oil. It's still vitally necessary to the US (and everyone else). And if OPEC is left all-powerful then they can turn off the spigot at any time for any reason. Obviously Iraq is one way of getting around OPEC's power - badly misguided IMO, but undeniably successful in the narrow goal of securing a large non-OPEC source of middle eastern oil.

The broader point, though, would be that without some kind of global naval "police" then anyone finding themselves in the position to block trade might decide to. The US navy has traditionally enforced, at least by implication, the "freedom to trade" you speak of. I wish they would stick to this rather noble goal!
There is no guarantee in this scheme that the data was actually generated at the time they state.

An insider can easily cycle through "random" numbers until the hash of the block has a desired characteristic.
Given Clarkson's immense popularity and the mention in the article of him having already gotten a "final warning", he must have really made a tremendous ass of himself on set over the last while to now get the boot.
Can IRC notify my phone when I have a new message without having a persistent connection to the server while the phone is locked?
My guess would be that they are not trained to know better and that they have to write about something, anything really, that has some chance of grabbing reader attention and isn't related to celebrity culture.

What's more interesting then a headline that promises some scientific breakthru is about to change the world?

The real issue, I believe, is that there is no accountability for almost anyone these days. If there is some upside in publishing or reporting on questionable science, and no downside, what is the incentive not to do it?
Valuation is a simple metric that can be used to compare companies to each other, and is language that investors understand. It's also easy for founders and employees to follow. Many times companies trump up all other metrics when valuation suffers. But valuation isn't the only one.

When there is a high valuation (and ultimately market cap) the employees who own shares do well too.
For middle aged person, how about "what new skills are you growing?"

One of the dilemma in learning new skills is there are so many new skills out there and how do you know that spending effort in learning the new skills are more worthwhile than strengthen your old skills? Every person is unique, and depending on popular votes from outside is risky ...

On the other hand, focus on the problem you are trying to attack and work from your existing skills and only learn new skills when it become apparent that old skills are not sufficient, at which point which new skills to learn will no longer be a question.

More often, I find myself developing new skills that are grown from my old ones. In fact, look around, all existing skills were grown from somewhere.

TL;DR Focus on the problem, not the skills.
Whoa whoa, right there. You forgot something.

When basic income goes into effect, a few more guys quit their hell jobs and buy food carts with the last of their meager savings. In addition to the hot dog guy on the opposite corner, there's now a tacos and tamales guy on the 3rd corner, and a gyro guy on the 4th. A barbecued pork and corn-on-the-cob guy takes the spot next to you on "your" corner.

People still want a good deal. If you raise your prices now, customers just walk 5 paces to your left. It doesn't matter if the pulled pork and corn costs $5 and your hot dog costs $2. People know that your markup is higher, and they don't want to feel like chumps. Or they can walk a little further and get a hot dog that still costs $1.

The basic income lowers the barriers to entry, particularly for low-capital businesses.

What happened was increased commoditization of the food cart business. Your pricing power evaporated. You can only charge based on the marginal cost of serving one more customer, rather than what the market will bear. Charge too much over your marginal cost, or allow that cost to rise too high, and another vendor appears to eat your lunch (literally). But the good news is that your marginal cost is now lower than a multi-cart company with vendor employees. You don't need to pay yourself; you just need to pay the costs of operating the cart. You can definitely undercut anyone who still has to be paid to work the cart.

But you probably still want to pay yourself a little bit. The smart thing for you to do is to work out a coordination plan (or an actual cartel) with the other owner-vendors at your intersection, to establish some ground rules. Foremost would probably be an agreement to not charge less than a minimum markup over marginal costs. That doesn't really have anything to do with basic income, though.
Isn't the whole world dealing with poverty with fair success? We'll have to redefine lots of terms I guess. Being poor is 'having less than average'. Being liberal is 'valuing civil liberties'. Being ignorant is 'having less than a BS'.
...according to a person familiar with the matter...

It amazes me that this passes as journalism. This, along with an anonymous source should be automatically translated to completely made-up until further evidence is presented.
Indeed. The only recent Scala job's I have seen in Australia have been Spark jobs because Spark uses Scala. Even these are diapering for Python Spark roles.

I've worked on a few big data projects for large companies. I have a huge dislike for them as mostly seem about how can we fuck over a customer to better the business or do shady stuff with the data rather than anything meaningful.

That and it's mostly just ETL, aggregating various data sources, cleaning, putting the data in some central location then running queries on it and the "If the only tool you have is a hammer, you will start treating all your problems like a nail." problem, tiny data sets going from NiFi / Hadoop / etc when `cat ... | awk ...` will be more than sufficient.
Oh I know all about the trolley network. My dad took me on the trolley on its last day. I was too young to have any memory of it but I've got the picture ;<).

For sixty years my father insisted that the auto company's were behind its demise. Shortly before he passed away it all came out that he had been correct all along. Although some Detroit media still dispute the proof.
Ooh! Disappointing to see that it's only 20 characters, but that is way cheaper than what I was finding online. And they're actually experimenting with 2D displays (https://www.orbitresearch.com/product/graphiti/)! Thanks a ton, I need to keep an eye on this.
Neat article.

About 20 years ago I saw a demo called 'Ambiance' by Tran (aka Thomas Pytel). I became so taken with it (and the very humble readme file that accompanied it) that I wanted to try my hand at creating something similar. This sent me down a similar path of learning to program first from Denthor's files, and then to a simpler technology I became fascinated by: HTML.

20 years and a successful web-app programming career later I've done some x86 demos for fun, but still haven't recreated anything as magical as that demo was to me. I owe such a debt of inspiration to all the demo crews... maybe one of these days I'll do a WebVR version of Tran's work to say thanks. 360 degree Luminati?

I wonder if these folks know how valued they are to some of us?
I wouldn't be surprised if they started checking the GPS in the future, though - like you, I thought they would be.

The full list is:

<uses-permission android:name="com.netflix.mediaclient.permission.C2D_MESSAGE"/>
<uses-permission android:name="android.permission.ACCESS_NETWORK_STATE"/>
<uses-permission android:name="android.permission.ACCESS_WIFI_STATE"/>
<uses-permission android:name="android.permission.BLUETOOTH"/>
<uses-permission android:name="android.permission.CHANGE_WIFI_MULTICAST_STATE"/>
<uses-permission android:name="android.permission.GET_ACCOUNTS"/>
<uses-permission android:name="android.permission.GET_TASKS"/>
<uses-permission android:name="android.permission.INTERNET"/>
<uses-permission android:name="android.permission.READ_PHONE_STATE"/>
<uses-permission android:name="android.permission.WAKE_LOCK"/>
<uses-permission android:name="com.amazon.permission.SET_FLAG_NOSOFTKEYS"/>
<uses-permission android:name="com.google.android.c2dm.permission.RECEIVE"/>
Whatsapp has a web client.
Even better: prosecute people in high profile case, but they turn out to be completely fake personas -- actors hired to appear in court to look like they're coming down hard.