jkeisling/hacker-news-corpus-2007-2022 huggingface dataset:
Crony capitalism wins yet again.

The US needs serious reform on what it allows corporate entities to do. Your common citizen couldn't get away with a fraction of the arguable theft to the general population most these companies get away with. It's not technically "theft" though since the theives define the rules and what constitutes theft to not include their actions.

Alas, I don't know how we accomplish such reform. It increasingly seems to be yet another lost battle and perhaps lost war. Aside from consumers essentially checking out as many segments of systems and allowing them to crumble under their own weight and then rebuild them after under stricter policy, I'm not sure what can be done. Legisilation doesn't seem to reflect the needs of the many and continues to cater to the wants of a few.

I suspect Intuit and the like argue that any sort of electronic system of improvement is some direct competition to the private market and is unethical. They probably also argue that the free market version of something like TurboTax offers a more cost effective solution to the general tax payer than what it would cost the government to simply fix parts of a broken process to simplify things. In the short term these arguments could be viable but I'm pretty sure within a few years time, a tax system that didn't involve so many people spending hours of their time navigating through these commercial packages while also paying them plus many still needing an accountant to speak to could possibly be cheaper than a simplified tax system.

Obviously simplifying the tax system can have socioeconomic effects. Many deductions exist to try and fix those issues or help push policy onto citizens and some of the complexity is unavoidable as even those dedications are loopholes around existing legislation. It seems to me though we can still allow for these sort of dedications to let people who need tax relief get it and not what we currently have where the people getting tax relief are the ones with mountains of capital to hire professionals to find and exploit tax loopholes while so many who need the tax relief likely overpay comparatively as a relative portion of their total assets.
dupe https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26101929
Add an option to create secure folders which are encrypted client side, using a key which is only available client side. these folders wouldn't be usable with things like the web interface because there is no server side capability to decrypt their contents.
Oh hey!

Glad to run into your progress. Hope the game does go well.
Can't we all agree, at least, that step one should be to clearly admit that they lied?

Maybe they don't need to do anything else. Dropbox is a fine service as it stands; security must be traded off against convenience, and the trade-off that Dropbox makes is acceptable to lots of people. They do have a responsibility to make sure that those people understand the trade-off, though, as well as a responsibility to admit that they've swept important details under the carpet in the past.
Thanks for the kind words. The team hopes to not keep you waiting too long. :)
Hmm, I'm somewhat surprised to hear this description of karma. Does this mean people click through on a username to discover their karma score before deciding if they should believe or agree with what has been written?

It seems pretty clear to me that karma mostly measures the amount of time spent commenting. An interesting metric, but not one I would look to to predict comment quality.
heh, now I have. I am building something a little more ... extensive :)
A little complicated? Must have to get luggage, which is usually booked all the way through.
I could understand the usefulness of this data to improve their designs, it's justified. But I just don't get why would they keep this data indefinitely?

I don't believe they couldn't foresee that this could be a marketing disaster, people is already paranoid enough.
The only way to decrease sprawl would be to increase density, and frankly few Coloradoans would go for that. Few cities outside of Denver have tall buildings because people don't like their mountain views obstructed. And public transportation is pretty limited. Many people live in Colorado to enjoy the outdoors, and to do so, you need your own transportation. Once you have your own transportation, there's very little incentive to take a bus or train on a regular basis.
Uh, how about charge the credit card you purchased the ticket with?
This, and using something like `Either` / `Result` instead of the `result, error := MethodCall()`. (Alas, the authors of Go seem to consider notions like 'monad' or 'Kleisli category', both pretty simple, impractical.)
I did, and I somewhat agree with `richmarr. The author of the blog does have a point, and it's not really wrong much, but I've come to the fairly strong opinion it's an unhelpful thing to complain about publically. (Which is a slightly ironic stance, I admit.)

As a plant engineer, you're going to have to part out and understand a system in its entirety at some point. And you'll be rating bolts and nuts and greases and such to meet the specification you need. There are a lot of bolts to choose from. It's the same for chips or components when designing a circuit: there are lots of transistors to choose from. For many tasks, many will effectively be interchangable. Sometimes you'll need to be careful, and other times you'll be working on a system where you'll need to research the manufacturer to make sure they're likely to be still in business in ten years.

But you'd never reasonably complain about the choice. Nor about all the regular folk just building a porch out of some wood and screws from Home Depot. You wouldn't complain about a kid learning circuitry by plopping some random components from Radio Shack into a breadboard (which they'll never move to a proper PCB). And I don't see why you'd complain about millions of people interacting with software the same way. Learning to deal with the glut is as simple as going to a curated aggregator (Home Depot/Radio Shack) or becoming an engineer.

I've seen the sort of stuff non-programmers inflict on systems. I'm not even talking about JS on the web, but like simple relay-equivalent ladder logic on heavy machinery. It's just as bad there. But. Work needs to get done, production needs to move forward, and craftsmanship is expensive and time consuming. There's a place for the cowboy programmer, just as there is for the craftsman.

So it seems a bit silly to complain about the situation. To me, it just means software is becoming an industry just like any other.
I'm two weeks into my standing desk experiment. If you stick with it, you're in for some discomfort. My legs adjusted quickly, the bottoms of my feet are still toughening up.

The problem is my current standing desk only allows standing. I'm 100% committed to standing if I am working. That's fine 95% of the time, but there is that 5% (like after I've worked out for the day or already put in 10+ hours of standing but found I need to get some emergency/last minute stuff done) where I really do not want to stand.

After two weeks I feel like my conclusion is the ideal desk is one that can easily adjust between standing and sitting, but stand most of the time.
Are these improvements added via Chrome or are they improvements to the WebKit Inspector?
I typically like what DHH has to say. Consequently, I expected him to actually produce good comparative graphs. He did not.

AAPL is '98-now() and MSFT is '89-now(). If he wanted to compare MSFT to AAPL, put them on a single comparative chart.

If he wanted to compare Gates to Balmer, use NASD-100 to factor out (very roughly) the environmental differences.
Yeah, Brian Johnson says we already know what to do, it's the process of actually implementing it is what's difficult. Another perspective is that if we know how to do, but we're not actually doing it, then we really don't know how to do it. Perhaps the reason we neglect SMART goals is because they haven't been formulated in a way such that after learning about them, they become properly embedded into our consciousness framework.
> Why should Apple be responsible for making sure their Safari promotion showcase works perfectly in every other browser?

Because the whole point of the exercise is to show how standards-compliant, open, web apps work so great on iPhone OS. Except by excluding every browser but Safari, it may as well be a front for the App Store. It might be standards-compliant, but it sure as heck isn't open or inclusive. In that regard, even Flash runs in more browsers than this showcase does.
Do you care for a family on your own? I'm talking about a specific class of people - primarily unwed single mothers - who do not have time for themselves. Their time is eaten up by making money for their families and caring for them.

Simply making the declarations that poor people don't want to work, and poor people are generally fat, even if true, ignore sizable quantities of people for whom exercise and healthy eating are not feasible.
"Is it possible to both be a notable philanthropist and also not engage in business practices that perhaps run counter to the generous philosophy of philanthropism?"

It seems common among the extremely wealthy, actually. I live in a city where the names Carnegie and Mellon are plastered over all kinds of public resources.
It looks like they will re-try, the counter was just reset to t-15:00 again, but holding for now.

Apparently no engines actually fired so they're cleared to re-try. Wonder what the cause of the shut-down was, but shut-downs are better than on the pad explosions I guess...
This is the kind of reasoning that rationalizes all sorts of terrible behaviour after the fact. If saving lives around the world is that important, instead of stealing his fortune through illegal business practices, Gates should have simply established his foundation back in the day and told people that by choosing Windows they were helping to save lives.

p.s. Apple has been investigated for improper options grants. That is a far cry from breaking monopoly rules.
Please don't do this here.

We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14102195 and marked it off-topic.
This sounds pretty close to my setup as well (senior data scientist, managing a small group of data scientists/statisticians).
Additional thoughts:

For meetings, my notes are pretty much shorthand and messy/scattered. I try to spend ~5 mins after to rewrite the important bits so that I am not confused after. It is sometimes difficult if the day is mostly meetings though. Occasionally if the meeting is exceptionally eventful/contentious/paradigm shifting, I will try to spend a little more time and explicitly write out what happened.

I also keep just one notebook for work. There are trade offs, but I have found it best to have everything in a known spot.
Requiring a network connection would also make it useless while travelling abroad, which would probably make up about 90% of the times when you'd actually need this app. Not using a network connection is vital for this app to be of any real use.
That's not necessarily true these days. Fabrication costs have been steadily increasing in China. For something on the run-level their doing it's probably more like 50% and rising fast.

That's at least what I'm hearing from a couple of startups in my area working on physical products.
Productivity tip: do not put on the "Rumble of Wheels" track and start watching one of those 30 minute videos.
Agreed on many of these. The "Post-Rock" genre, which usually is anthemic and instrumental makes great music for concentrating on intensive tasks. A lot of ambient electronica can be good as well, but sometimes the repetition gets monotonous.

Boards of Canada, Explosions in the Sky, Ratatat, F*ck Buttons, Tortoise, and El Ten Eleven have been in constant rotation for me lately. I often use them as seeds for Pandora as well. Works like a charm.
The greencard backlog is about 7 years. So either the greencard process starts as soon as you get your H-1B or your really looking at 12 years before you get a greencard.
Thanks for the advisory, but you've got the facts wrong:

1) Main OpenBSD server wasn't compromised, main FTP server ("ftp.openbsd.org") was.

2) Source code (the one in CVS) wasn't compromised, only .tar.gz packages placed on the FTP server were.

3) They did want people to know about this, that's why they released security advisory [1].

On top of that, at the time "ftp.openbsd.org" wasn't even running OpenBSD, the FTP server was part of SunSITE powered by Solaris [2].

[1] http://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=102821528812161&w...

[2] http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/www/faq/faq8.html.diff...
With upwards $1.4trillion of deficit, surely there are fatter targets to cut first.

Still, on quantum computing alone, I'd be surprised if no private company is interested in the field at all.
Looks extraordinary by the HN comments; unfortunately the site is down right now... ;-(

La rançon du succès, I guess.
This is when I was at Chartboost.
Thanks for this. Will investigate getting a Yubikey now.
Local manufacturing is the only way to go if you're developing a reasonably complicated product and don't have a team that's super experienced with international manufacturing. I was the technical co-founder of Brightbox (brightboxcharge.com, us founders are no longer affiliated), we were based in NYC and could never have done the prototyping and iteration required if we couldn't clap eyes on hardware constantly.

There's plenty of great manufacturing in the US. Since I'm a software guy, we had one company build us a prototype and handle industrial design (Tomorrow Lab, http://tomorrow-lab.com/; Pepin is a friend) and found an integrated mechanical engineering and manufacturing firm just over the river in NJ (Tech Products, techproductsco.com; Bob is an awesome human being) for the final product and first few real runs.

Having an actual partner we could meet with all the time, understand clearly, and iterate with was incredibly valuable for us. Plus obviously there are important technical integrations (I was writing all the software myself while the ME and EE was happening) and multiple suppliers, and if you're in charge of managing a few bespoke engineers who sometimes don't see eye to eye, you'd better be able to work with them all carefully and personally.
I seriously couldn't decide if the copywriter was laughing when he or she wrote "The Intel Compute Stick is a new generation compute-on-a-stick device." (Because x-on-a-stick is an inherently funny phrasing.) But I read the text very carefully and concluded that it was written earnestly, so I didn't leave a comment.

It really is a new generation of compute-on-a-stick device.
This is a 11-month old announcement:

On April 30, 2014, we announced the deprecation of the XMPP Chat API
as part of the release of Platform API v2.0.
What BS, the presence of a competitor doesn't mean a firm doesn't wield monopoly power. The monopoly is in Search ads, ask any big advertiser to switch to their budgets to Bing and see what they say
That's a reasonable description of a prison.
The USA is not going to lose its reserve currency status because it will continue being the world's sole superpower for the for the next 30 - 100 years, at least. For an in-depth analysis, see: http://www.singularity2050.com/2008/06/why-the-us-will-still...
And the irony is that I could only wish we were attempting to stand on the shoulders of these giants. We make little effort to move the industry forward and are quite happy just making our fortunes off of it.

Alan Kay is still going strong: VPRI are a fantastic team and they are working hard in some innovative areas.
it does because many of them are holding fixed rate notes at very low interest rates. For those with resetting interest rates it is no big deal, but grandma holding CD's or bonds bought in the last few years is going to get killed.
Lots of dumb things are argued by a lot of dumb people.

If you stand in a shop doorway where I live, you are escorted off the premises by the police. You can protest outside, but you can't screw with people trying to go about their daily lives. As it should be.
How is this different than Apple buying PA Semi?

Also, Apple's not a monopoly.
> having 2-4 customizations of the same model and presenting them as different models.

That means YOU Dell and HP.
Go Basho!
Do you mean you want to be a freelancer for other agencies or to work directly for clients?

When we set up our agency, here's what worked:

- Get your own site set up so that you have a web presence and can start to build a brand.

- You need to build your portfolio, so do a bit of work for cheap/free if you have to. You want to do this quickly, if you do a site for free the client will be more willing to go ahead straight away as it requires little decision making. We did a website for a primary school and a couple of photographers we knew to start off with.

- You're probably going to need to have low prices to start with, as smaller businesses are more willing to give a new business a shot, but won't have as much of a budget as bigger companies. Over time you can decide where you want to take the business and start charging more as you build a reputation. Your aim at this point is to build a portfolio, so you can charge more later on.

- Classified ads on Gumtree or whatever the equivalent is in your area. We met two of our biggest clients through classified ads (just be honest, link to your site and try and get across your ethos).

- Reach out to personal network, previous employers etc... they already trust you (hopefully) and may have work that can keep you going.

- Get involved with a co-working space, this has 3 main benefits: 1) regain some of the social element of work, which you may have lost if you previously worked in an office environment. 2) Meet other business owners and freelancers that can offer advice and are a good sounding board, and interesting people usually too. 3) You might even get work from other business working at the same space. We've got a couple of clients as a result of using a co-working space.

- Cold calls! I could write a whole post on this, but basically, try and figure out a niche and what your hook is; Why are you going to go after a particular niche? Have you worked in this industry before? Can you offer a service that will add value to them? Are you in their area (geographically)?

Remember this is one of the hardest bits of going it alone but once you gain some momentum and build a portfolio it will get easier.
I think these companies thrive with a confusing market. If you can easily compare two products then the purchase is muddied. I've seen this often with different grocery store products in regards to volumes and masses on sale for fungible items.

I think it's best to have confusing figures and specs when you have all these manufacturers who are really trying to produce the cheapest of something (in this case PCs or cellphones). You put the money and the marketing in maybe one overworked detail (big screen, big HDD, fast video card) and then cheap out on everything else. So if they want a certain user to buy their product, they emphasize what they think that user wants.
From memory (sorry no source) I believe it is related to the amount of emotional tension the individual experiences, and the release felt, in making the purchase. It is not the amount of money involved. So taking two people with the same income and net worth, if one person gets very emotionally committed and spends a lot of time socializing and projecting how great product X is going to be and feeling bad because he doesn't have it yet, and the other person just buys it on a lark? The first person will tend to be very dogmatic, perhaps religious or irrational, about the value of the product. This effect is culmulative.

By the way, this "release" that is felt after the immediate purchase has a tremendous cognitive blinding ability. The purchaser is something like 100 times more willing to buy some related product in the immediate minutes after the big decision is made while the "glow" is still there. LOTS of folks make BIG money exploiting this.

By the way, the tendency among intelligent people is to view a lot of this as "psycho-babble" or some such. So they spend a lot of time online, doing research, reading various opinions, making an informed choice -- all the while falling into the trap outlined above. Except they don't see it.

Humans are really cool to observe. They are the only creatures that can act completely emotionally and then beat the heck out of you using logic and facts when you point out what's going on. That's neat
Same here, with 49 buckets on the account; nothing works (tried in Chrome & Firefox).

I recommend sticking to s3cmd in CLI.
It's not just contented men, though. Very depressed people will also resist any sort of change to their routine since they assume it will only make matters worse.

I can't imagine what it feels like to spend years trying to prove something like the Poincare conjecture, then succeeding, then trying to find something else to do. I don't get the impression that Perelman is a happy man, though.
As a fun aside: The Symbolics network code called READ on untrusted data on more than one occasion.
In my experience crunch is often caused by poor direction, political games, understaffing, under-budgeting other such factors that are crippling to the game quality. So, naturally, a project that is in crunch is likely to fail in sales and in reviews. The article authors address this, but only at the angle of "Does it help to salvage a failing project?" and I agree with their negative conclusion. Crunching is not going to salvage anything.

Why would it? Your publisher changes the requirements every quarter and the game's genre every year, your producers (managers) are busy trying to get each other fired, people are leaving because they think the game is going to suck and they have not seen a bonus in 5 years, you cannot hire anyone because they think the game is going to suck and you don't have money anyway so you could as well crunch trying to ship whatever with whomever is left but crunching is not going to fix these issues.

Crunching can only improve a project that does not have any crippling problems. And it usually does (again, from my experience). It works because nobody can schedule 2+ years creative work for 200+ people with such a precision that on the last day of the schedule you check in the last line of code, export the last asset, pack a build and send an 80+ (hell, even 60+) metacritic game to the manufacturing. Game production is an iterative process. The more iterations you make - the better the game becomes in your eyes if not in the reviews. This is why people crunch voluntarily. They want to ship better games.
This has to be one of the worst dumbed-down explanations of quantum mechanics I've ever seen and I barely grasp the basics of quantum mechanics.

I think they are saying the experiment can test whether a whole atom can be in a super-positional quantum state (until observed) which would be the equivalent of the double-slit experiment but with a much larger entity composed of multiple particles.

I'm not sure if thinking of particles as discrete packets of excitations of fields in space-time is a valid way to conceptualize QM but I know particles aren't the little round balls we tend to think of. I wish we had a model that more accurately described QM but in simple terms like the traditional view of the atom composed of little balls orbiting.
>what's the objective?

Just so you know, you don't actually need one. Friendships are their own reward.