jkeisling/hacker-news-corpus-2007-2022 huggingface dataset:
What stops a Matrix client producer from putting "normal" users first?

Is it that all such producers plan to do something evil once they have enough users locked in, which an open protocol like Matrix would impede?

Or is it that the protocol is not yet mature enough? In which case, a deliberate approach to evolving the spec may be for the best so long as it eventually gets to where it needs to be?

A couple years ago the Riot client was unusable on Mac. Now Element seems to be fine. Why won't it continue to get better?
They were already there, and had exterminated the walrus and seal. Who knows what they would have done after running out of penguins.
I'm about half-way through Chomsky and Herman's propaganda model laid out in "Manufacturing Consent". Corporate ownership of media houses is said to be the first censorship filter that determines which angles of a policy debate get highlighted and which ones don't. Along with reading Matt Taibbi's "Hate, Inc.", where Chomsky's model is extended to post-internet US media, I can't begin to describe how much of the US media coverage of these issues has begun to make sense to me.

As Chomsky points out, propaganda is still useful information, since the angles being portrayed in a debate tells us what a societal elite wants us to see (and conversely, not see)
You want basically everything: fun, high salary, impact, autonomy, less stress etc.

That's where it's wrong. That thing doesn't exist.

Even people suggesting you to go work for FAANG are kind of wrong. By becoming the biggest gear in the machine cog, I doubt you will ever find satisfaction.

I'd honestly go see a psychologist, it seems you don't know what you want and even your own desires seems to be mirrored to what people generally see and want here in HN.

For instance, if you are looking for satisfaction and making yourself happy, fixing your parental or whatever troubling issue you may have, more money or a different job won't fix it. But rather by a self-exploratory process which a professional might be able to help you with. Life isn't about having a job.

Maybe those are internal issues you have, like a crush which didn't work out, mother/father, relationships, poverty background or whatever. Anyhow, go see a psychologist.
They're not doing that just yet: https://t.me/durov/155

They have found investors and have enough cash on hand for quite a while.
> They have such a dominant market share because they make more compute for less dollar.

Is that really the case? I looked at getting an accelerator card for personal use. AMD’s Radeon Instinct MI25 will run me $900 - $1000. A similarly specced NVidia Tesla P100 is in the $3000 range.
oh, i went on your website and thought ideapod was your full-time job. sorry. well, that could be a legitimate changing the world thing, your wording just read as arrogant to me. eating humble pie now
the fun of land tax imho is that the country belongs to everyone
When Facebook was first created, there was no feed. We flocked to it because it was useful for a few important reasons: 1) communicating with friends, 2) finding events to go to, 3) organizing groups, 4) storing and sharing photos, and 5) meeting new people (sometimes). It was great as a tool to supplement your social life.

When they introduced the feed, Facebook gradually became worse at all of those things. Facebook became less about being a useful tool and instead became a media sharing instrument for serving advertisements. Your entire post is about that aspect of it though, and really it's the problem with all social media. The feed design is fundamentally incompatable with providing the utility that was initially offered by Facebook. The feed is purely a tool for distribution and consumption, not forging connections or otherwise improving the lives of users.
Reversing the trend of jobs concentrating in metro areas is not exactly feasible. How would this be done?

Prohibiting companies from hiring more than X employees? What keeps them from just setting up another company and hiring them as consultants?

Or is there going to be a fixed cap on the number of people who are permitted to be employed? If someone moves to the city, and it's already at it's max number of workers they're just prohibited from working?

Jobs becoming concentrated in certain hubs is natural emergent phenomenon. You're not going to legislate your way out of it, at least not without resorting to oppressive systems like hokou.
Perhaps that is the disconnect here. Negotiations do not necessarily include ultimatums. Obviously, one must be prepared to deal with the situation where an employer declines to meet your compensation requests, but framing it as an ultimatum is probably counterproductive.

That said, at least in the US, there is huge demand for capable developers (see the salaries posted on levels.fyi) and I would encourage anyone who is at all able to take a few interviews to assess their market rate. There are plenty of companies who treat their developers well _and_ pay them well. There's no need to settle for just one of those.
>> Is it worth learning

> Languages are easy to pick up once you understand fundamentals. The borrow checker is intuitive if you have an understanding of stack frames, heap/data segment, references, moved types, shared memory.

I see this sentiment often. In the last 10 years, I have come up a level in raw C, learned Kotlin, Swift, Python, Elixir/Erlang, and a smattering of JavaScript, all coming from a background that included Fortran and Smalltalk.

My problem with the dialogue is what is meant by “learn.” I have architected, implemented, and maintain different components of our products in all these languages currently. I think that demonstrates I have “learned” these languages, at least at this level of “picked up.” But I can’t write Python the way Brett Canon does. Or Elixir the way Jose Valium does. Or any of their peers. And in that regard I still very much feel I have not “learned”.

I spent a couple days playing with Zig a month or so ago. I became familiar with the way it worked. I could spend another month or so in that phase, and then could probably comfortably accomplish things with it. But I don’t think I’d feel like I’d “learned” it.

It reminds me of my experience learning Norwegian. I lived in Norway for 2 years and did my best to speak as much Norwegian as I could. At six months I could definitely get by. At 13 months, as I embraced the northern dialect, I was beginning to surprise Norwegians that I was from the states. I started dreaming in Norwegian at some point after that. But even at 24 months, able to carry on a fluid conversation, I realized I still could “learn” the language better than I currently knew it.

So I guess, it always seems there needs to be more context, from both the asker and the answerer, when this “should I learn X” discussion is had. Learning is not a merit badge.
I have a friend who is a sales manager. One of his salesmen came to him demanding a $500 bonus for something he'd accomplished.

The sales manager thought for a moment, and countered with an offer of $250.

The salesman said he'd settle for $350.

The sales manager then said, I'll give you the $500 on one condition - you never fold so quickly like that again.
> Do you understand that the iPhone does not keep personal and company data separate?

Yes, of course. I just think it's the employer's problem in this case, not the employee's.

> Do you agree that the distinction between personal and company is vague and human defined?

No. The argument made by many people disagreeing with me in this discussion is predicated on the employee downloading data from the company Exchange system. That provides an objective standard for what constitutes "company data".

If you're going to try to broaden that in some ill-defined way to any other data the employee has, you might as well argue that any employer should have the right to audit any and all of an employee's personal property, communications or brainwaves. I am aware that some employers actually do seem to think that at least the first two are reasonable, but I vehemently disagree with them, and so does the law in most places.

> What kind of high-end security hardware are you talking about?

The relevant ones here typically record/block/modify network traffic: intrusion detection, data leakage prevention, lawful intercept, that kind of thing.

> If you used an advanced Cisco software VPN client, you could (so I hear) have it scan the client computer and enforce policies on it. If it was used on a personal computer, these would be invasive in a similar way yet you would not blame Cisco or the company if the user didn't understand this, would you?

You mean if

(a) an employee was asked to work from home,

(b) the employee was asked to access the company network using company-provided software installed on their personal computer (the VPN client), and

(c) that software then reformatted the employee's hard drive because someone in corporate IT hit the wrong button by accident,

would I have the same problem with it?

Yes, of course. As I keep saying, if the company requires that kind of control, it should be issuing employees with dedicated systems at company expense, configured appropriately. I struggle to see any circumstances under which installing software on an employee's personal property that gives the employer the ability to wipe the entire machine arbitrarily would ever be justified.
It depends what you mean by "better".

Maybe Python has lousy spec but as I recall, the documentation does include a BNF breakdown of what Python is.

A test suite can be good for a lot of things BUT it cannot be a specification, it cannot be even sort-of a specification. Test suites only "prove a negative", only prove that an application won't do X. A specification is at least a rough assertion of a positive, that a language does follow this pattern.
Yeah, I came across Barr and Wells 5 years ago in grad school and found it almost impossible to buy. I ended up getting a copy from the library and photocopying and rebinding it. Like you said, it was ok, but hardly comprehensive. Maybe it's easier to find now.

Anyway, nice paper..and thanks for making me think of category theory again. Maybe I'll pull out my old copy of "CT for the working mathematician" and give it (and haskell) another go.

Edit: I came across this: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0521422264/ref=pd_lpo_k2_dp...

Anyone gone through this book?
> Any constraints that are missing from the schema have to be recreated separately in each implementation

Not true at all. The server can implement them -- once -- and any client who makes an invalid request to the server will get an error message. These constraints can be expressed in comments in the interface (.proto) file.

> Like HTML vs. XHTML—I shudder to think how much work was wasted trying to handle the worst tag soup imaginable, simply for lack of a well-formedness (or DTD validity) requirement.

HTML and XHTML is a completely different ball of wax. Insisting on even well-formedness is simply unreasonable in practice, because it is so difficult to ensure, and it is the user who pays the price when the software isn't perfect.

If you're still convinced that the world would have been better if strict XHTML had won, you should read:
http://diveintomark.org/archives/2004/01/14/thought_experime...
Wow, you're exactly right. You gotta figure that once Facebook got some alert trademark lawyers, they noticed that they had a problem, and eventually worked out a deal to acquire ownership of the trademark.

Faceparty has a fairly interesting history as well:
http://eu.techcrunch.com/2008/06/24/faceparty-tells-critics-...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faceparty
I had no problems with Chrome. Perhaps it's a browser-specific issue?
Because people use their real name as the primary key in almost every database? The census team did not steal Lyft's database and leak it.
Ha ha. Rust? I suppose it depends on the context of what you're trying to do.

Edit: if it is Rust most of the time you'll want to use character iterators/map/filter/etc. Then benchmark.
The ice absorbs heat from the drink and cools it.

Yes.

The ice melts at a rate governed by how fast it absorbs the heat.

No.
Yeah, we can. That is why I am so excited about the Logical Engine that Rob B is building at http://halfbakedmaker.org/ -- he makes concrete progress on his rod-based mechaputer practically every weekend.

Check it out, it's a well-thought-out, well-documented, interesting take on mechanical computing.
That interview process sounds completely standard.
Yes and Yes a thousand Yes for this intiative.

But how will you compete with the government of Canada who gives $50k to $500k in grant money for new startups?
The graph I linked to plots the PDF. It's not exponential. It indicates something is getting worse over time.
There are plenty of outlets for independent films outside of Hollywood.
While it is true that for every thing that anyone says "everyone knows" at any given time in the world, 250 people are being born every minute on average. I think you know where I'm going... those people don't know anything, so it's clear that some much larger fraction of the general population don't know that thing.

I am personally doubly surprised as GP to find two people in a discussion about Computer Science at a college level that have not heard of RPN before. For what it's worth!
But this would fail on many proxies, and any firewall that was aware of the protocol.
Cyclic causality is even more troublesome than infinite regress.

I find myself leaning towards causation breaking down at some point. Just like our concepts of "position" and "momentum" break down at the quantum level.
It was interesting to read a little about how trades were settled prior to electronic records. Everyone seems to assume things worked fantastically before our stock exchanges were computerised, yet the errors and screw-ups were still there.
My nearby library recently installed a Redbox like device in the lobby. All you need is your library card and you can check out movies. Best part is, the lobby is open 24/7 so I can checkout or return movies at any time.
Whether or not it's in line with the industry, the pricing here is insane.

The cheapest is $1350/yr/server. For that you get... remote logging? Configuration reloading? Oh my...

Zero downtime deploys? Is that a thing people care about? If you don't have server redundancy, having zero downtime deployments might be nice, but sooner or later you are going to have to reboot that machine, or you'll deploy broken code or bad configuration. Then what? If you do have server redundancy, zero downtime isn't even a feature. Not to mention, while nginx might have zero downtime, it's a fair amount of work to build an application that can be deployed with zero downtime. Maybe people are using nginx as a load balancer? If they are, and downtime really matters to them, they are seriously fucking up.

I expect a lot of corporations to pay this just because of some policy that they have to have support contracts in place for everything, but honestly, this is redunk.
Yeah, it's an amazingly creative technique: explain the fuck your thing is, so that people might decide they want it.

I suspect the market does not lie though, and if you are pedaling broken stuff t to middle-managers, it's best to not explain a damn thing.
As someone who has treatment-resistant major depression and who uses comedy as a survival mechanism, and is greatly looking forward to being able to try this treatment out, I hope you'll permit me to share this humorous thought I had after reading this article:

"Ask your doctor if tripping your nuts off is right for you."
That is really, really funny. Make sure you click the "I don't get it, explain differently button".
> Unfortunately we are largely unorganized and taking this kind of action requires a lot of organization. We also do not have a political party made up of workers and representing workers genuine interests.

I think this is what the author meant when saying that the working class has lost a lot of effective power over the last few decades.
It seems weird that the medical use of a virtually harmless substance is something that is put to a public vote. It should be up to doctors and researchers to determine if a substance (a) has a legitimate medical application and (b) is not so harmful as to make its medical application not worth it. In fact, the Controlled Substances Act describes Schedule I substances (the most controlled—no prescriptions may be written for these) as such:

The findings required for each of the schedules are as follows:
(1) Schedule I.—
(A) The drug or other substance has a high potential for abuse.
(B) The drug or other substance has no currently accepted medical use in treatment in the United States.
(C) There is a lack of accepted safety for use of the drug or other substance under medical supervision.

"Accepted medical use in treatment in the United States" seems to mean it is up to the medical community, and not to lawmakers or law enforcement.
I don't understand how someone could give it anything but 5 stars.
The problem comes down to key-hiding. You can encrypt it all you want but if the attacker can extract the key from the software the game is over.

Working with the mobile phone providers, you can embed the root key in hardware. This makes it more difficult to extract. Straight software solutions exist, but are typically provided 3rd parties or by the OS vendors themselves. The software solutions are obviously more convenient, for the reasons you've alluded to.

Netflix gets to make lots of money exactly because they do the hard work of working with the backward-facing industries.
A cynical individual would describe most companies this way. On multiple levels: Founders work hard, and 30% of the value goes to VCs. First employees work hard, and founders get 60% of the value. Interns work hard, and first hires get 10% of the value.

It's the way of the world.
I'm not sure I buy the catastrophic collapse argument - it's an easy one to make. "Oh man, things would have been a lot worse if we hadn't done all that stuff we did."

Well, maybe.

But let's just say it's true for now. Even if that's the case, those organizations could have been liquidated and their assets sold off, perhaps with the key pieces under some sort of guarantee from the Federal Reserve or Treasury or "Bureau of Stabilizing Home Interest and Trust" or whatever feel-good label/acronym these messes are typically labeled.

The organizations that made bad bets should've been liquidated, even if you believe the catastrophe scenario (which I'm skeptical of personally).
Nearby singles? How about a LBS adult friend finder for discreet encounters?
Netflix and Zappos, definitely. Huge love for their customer-centric values and long-term perspective on making decisions.
I don't know. As a fan of CSS I don't really "get" Less.js ... Sure I understand the benefit of defining certain properties, but are the benefits good enough to warrant depending on an additional javascript library for something like this? What happens if people block javascript?

I don't know. It's not bad, but it's not for me. But going as fas as to say it will obsolete CSS, that's just too much.
For folks interested in China: please please visit the country first. Business there is all about networking and inside connections, and fraud is a large problem. The business culture there is completely different from anything in the Western world, so please leave your preconceptions at the airport.
Have you noticed that the book he made himself for testing only has 3 or 4 different pages?
Why don't you make that publically available so everyone can benefit from it?
Sensationalist link-bait headlines have no place here IMHO.
But how much freelancing could you handle if you didn't have the exploitative full-time job? (How does your effective rate-per-hour vary at the main job vs. freelancing gigs? And, might you be undercharging for your freelancing as much as you're undercharging for day job?)

The ethical approach is to state clearly what you need to continue and if they can't meet that, you move on with proper notice. However, you are being underpaid and both the treatment-as-contractor and constant-low-pay-in-the-face-of-overtime are of dubious legality.

If by your acquiescence to unfair/illegal conditions you are then effectively encouraging their perpetuation, and their extension to other junior employees, and further falling behind in providing for your family, than 'not causing trouble' is the unethical path.

If the business would crash and burn without you, you are a key employee who deserves better pay and equity. But from the sloppy way things seem to have been handled so far, you might not even be able to trust a stock grant from your employer. (Even if he is in some ways charismatic or effective, you may have run across a bad actor who will press every advantage against a person who won't be personally/legally assertive in response.)
I thing renegotiation is out of the question. I feel even if I renegotiated and it ended up being the perfect compensation/benefits position the day-to-day work environment would become hostile -- and that is something I do not want to happen.

I honestly don't know what I was thinking. -- Well actually I do:
Back in 2008, a year and a half into college, I won a local business plan competition and dropped out. (The competition gave office space and some startup capital.) The college I was in was a small community college and the classes weren't that great for the IT field. Going into college I thought everyone would have the same passion I did. Into the first semester I was helping teach my major related courses.

Unfortunately, not having any sense about business and being somewhat misguided by my other founders, the business flopped. I started a second business which did slightly better, and again won the business plan competition again. However our overhead was too high compared to the cashflow coming in. We started working with the company mentioned in this post and I was basically made an initial offer to work exclusively for them. (Mistake.)

Going back to my reasoning: I felt that if this company did go somewhere, that there would no longer be a need or a way to get roadblocked by not having a degree. I am a strong believer in work and passion than a piece of paper. I know I would have never hired any of my classmates from that college.

Although the justification is/was not sound at all. Getting out know is the only way for me to continue to seize my potential. I know continuing down this path will only lead to my own destruction.
Not nearly enough people. I do suspect though some basic common sense can occasionally save people, including those who know nothing about the concept.

For example, I have experienced limerence with several women who were completely untenable. The primary example was deep into recreational drugs, and my basic sensibilities knew enough to fight back. I WANTED to do something, but I didn't even have to engage my higher brain and think about it to know it was a bad idea. Only problem is that limerence is over 3 years old and still not dead.
Not sure what you mean.

I have not detected any fragmentation. In fact, HHVM's speed of development has been a much needed kick in the pants to PHP.