skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes.

It seems like the article's milk analogy is applied to the wrong thing: another pint of the same exact product.

Maybe it's more apt to make the analogy with a pint of a different type of milk product, a type of milk with brand new features. I'm talking about real-world products like these which have appeared in the last 10-20 years:

* Almond Milk

* Cashew Milk

* Coconut-based Milk products (not traditional coconut milk)

* Soy-based Milk products (not traditional soy milk)

* Lactose Free Milk

* Grass Fed Cow Milk

* Organic Cow Milk

* Omega 3 Enriched Milk

etc.

We would not expect the marginal cost of these to be less than another pint of conventional regular cow's milk, and indeed, it isn't.

That said, I suspect that the article is basically going in the right direction. I mean, it seems like additional features on a complex software project really do cost much much more, on a percentage basis, than a new kind of milk beverage does.
Augmented reality has no clothes
A few days ago I would have agreed whole heartedly. Now, after reading the article about the formation of AWS I’m not so sure.[1] It seems that Amazon (and others such as Google) have achieved economies of scale in development with internal services and well organized APIs. Certainly much of this is being exposed externally for profit, but it does seem to indicate that well designed software has economies of scale for the development of future software. Certainly one monolith application with a team of a thousand starting from scratch is a bad idea, but once internal APIs and services exist, these definitely seem to aid in the rapid development of future software products for a company, which seems like economies of scale to me.

Bloated bureaucracies and bad processes can negatively impact any company in any industry, not just software. Some of the article’s logic doesn’t seem to differentiate software development from anything else, such as “working in the large increases risk”. So while a large monolith application is risky, building a hundred million widgets is risky too. Better to iterate and start with a prototype and expand, but the same goes for other industries too: better to prototype and market test your widget before mass production. Seems to me like the article is talking more about lean and agile and process in general than about economies of scale.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12022915
Disrupting CloudHSM – any takers?
Having worked with HSMs for 10 years, we decided they are not fit for purpose (Unwrapping the Chrysalis, Fighting the 'Good' Internet War, Architecture Considerations for Massively Parallel Hardware Security Platform).

We built a web-service with JSON/RESTful interface, truly scalable, still with secure hardware ticking inside.

We want to create a few applications for Amazon Marketplace over the Summer.

What would be your use-case?
Of the population that attends law school, passes the bar exam, and practices law, very few end up as corporate lawyers. And fewer still make multiple millions per year. You're comparing a very broad class (SV engineers) to an extremely small class (corporate lawyers who make $XM per year).

It may be fair to say that the pay ceiling is higher for the best-paid lawyers than it is for the best-paid engineers. However, engineers can reach the same pay or much higher by taking on a management role -- CTO, technical co-founder, small business owner, etc. -- at which point, IMO, they typically cease to be engineer.

Investment banking & hedge funds are another matter, and the compensation can be ridiculous.

From Glassdoor:

- Google corporate counsel ($188k salary, $215k with bonus)

- Amazon corporate counsel ($180k salary, $250k with bonus)

- Microsoft attorney ($164k salary, $224k with bonus)
Maybe I was unclear, what I meant is that usually you need to tinker with the internals at some point. Which is fine, but it does mean you need more than basic knowledge to use the tool productively. (And if the software is proprietary and poorly documented, you're SOL).

The lie is that this tool is so easy, you just have to read this 30 minute tutorial and you'll be able to write powerflu software and you don't even need to learn the internal mechanics of it.

I havn't used Kubernetes, it's possible it's so good that you don't need the learn the messy details, I'm just sceptical of that claim in general.
So many comments about the name. All of a sudden I have a strange urge to see the next big open source project name themselves fjoi43isoitoei. Because names of technology projects only have as much importance as the reader attributes to them. If you can't see beyond that, and if your primary focus is what others might think of you because of what you named your project, I don't know what to say to you.
Yes: see e.g. https://www.rep.routledge.com/articles/free-will/v-1
It fails the quiet test, but the Unicomp IBM Model M clones [1] are excellent. They licensed the patents from IBM, and have updated the design for updated layouts and USB. In particular, the SpaceSaver M [2] is a IBM Model M with the Mac layout and USB connection. I have one of the Ultra Classics, and I love it. However, it is not quiet which is not an issue as I work from home. They do offer a quiet key option, but I have no experience with it.

[1]: http://www.pckeyboard.com/
[2]: http://www.pckeyboard.com/page/category/SpacesaverM
The dead salmon article is a bit of a red herring here. It's a clear demonstration that a shoddy statistical approach can undermine fMRI findings. Critically, the implications of the current paper extend to even research that has been rigorously analyzed using field-standard software. Statistical issues are at the heart of both papers, but the newer paper identifies problems that are subtle and ubiquitous.
They're also certainly not providing internet to passengers via Iridium, because Iridium data is extremely, hilariously expensive. Sending back basic airplane telemetry via data satellite is quite practical though because it's a very small data volume, and is already often done by engine leasers (like Rolls Royce and GE) for continuous engine performance monitoring. It's rather depressing that on many aircraft in the air today, the engines are better monitored than the actual plane.

There are different motivations though. It pays for GE and RR to collect constant engine telemetry so that they can micro-optimize service intervals (read: perform service as infrequently as possible). The airlines, though, have physical possession of the planes and tend to figure they'll work that kind of thing out on the ground when planes are out of service for several hours anyway.
I think if we really want to get more seniors into the workforce, we have to get rid of the notion that wages should be monotonically increasing with age.

In Austria, for most professions, there are contracts that explicitely require wages to increase with experience (number of years worked). This means that older employees are automatically more expensive. It's especially bad for many "public" positions; for example, a teacher's salary automatically increases every two years or so. A 65 year old teacher earns twice the salary of a 25 year old teacher. Sure, the older teacher has more experience, but it's hard to argue that experience is worth more than TWO young teachers.

Also, often retirement is just a convenient way to get rid of people. If everyone's goal is to keep climbing the ladder, we have to get rid of the people at the top at some point. There's only so much space up there. And since the people at the top probably don't want to switch to roles with less responsibility, the only place left is retirement.

And last but not least, willingness to change is also necessary. Now, I don't think that a 60 year old is per se more reluctant to change than a 30 year old. I think that senior people can adapt to changes just as well as young people; given the right motivation. However, a 30 year old has a lot more extrinsic motivation to change than a 60 year old: when you are young, you have to adapt, or you will end up poor. When you are old, you have the option to refuse to adapt and just retire...
This is the truth. The late '90s antitrust case arose after many, many years of what many would consider anticompetitive abuse of market dominance.

One example: there were various competitors to MS-DOS and Windows throughout the '80s and '90s. However, due to their relationship with IBM, MS had a huge natural advantage in the PC OS market in the early- to mid-'80s. They pressed this advantage to enforce licensing fees on computer makers. If a company wanted to sell an MS OS on any of their computers, they had to pay MS for a license for every computer, regardless of which OS was sold on it. This guaranteed that any system sold without an MS OS would cost more, because the customer had to buy the computer + the MS OS + OtherOS even if the MS OS wasn't installed on the purchased system. This created a huge barrier to entry for any MS competitor in the OS market.

Software vendors are within their rights to make such deals, of course. It's only a problem if the vendor has so much of a market presence that it would be suicide for a system vendor to decline from being an MS reseller altogether. In this case, it was a problem.

This illustrates some aspects of antitrust law that a lot of people misunderstand:

(1) Being a monopoly doesn't mean having 100% market share, it only means having overwhelmingly dominant market share, which in some industries could be as small as 30%. It's a somewhat arbitrary number that might be very different from one industry to the next.

(2) Being a monopoly is not a bad thing in and of itself. There is a concept of some industries being skewed towards natural monopolies. Natural monopolies aren't inherently bad things either.

(3) Antitrust action is only taken when someone abuses their monopoly to alter the very market that they compete in. This is using your strength in the market to bias the market itself in favor of you, thus undermining free market dynamics. Of course no market is 100% free, or rational, or efficient, but that doesn't matter. What matters is that the monopolist is taking steps to make it tangibly less free.

Unfortunately the nature of antitrust law is such that it is ripe for abuse by bad actors or (legitimately) vanquished competitors. As a result even seemingly clearcut situations like the MS OEM deals go on for years without anything being done about it, because there are inherently so many legal gray areas surrounding antitrust. But it did establish a record of patterns of behavior that could be referenced in the eventual late '90s antitrust case.

IANAL so this should be taken with many grains of salt and I would love to hear from actual L's if any of this is wrong or oversimplified.
About 3 years ago I posted regarding a new style of text editor better suited for motion sensors/multi-touch (called 'Tiled Text').

Unfortunately, I posted it before I really wanted to because I got Type I diabetes and had increased medical expenses and couldn't afford to get by working at a grocery store anymore. So, the posting served as a pretty effective way of getting a sort of resume out. It ended up on the front page for a good while, and was generally well received, and has landed me a couple of good jobs—but I do regret that I haven't returned to it since (though I do now have another project of a similar nature).

Project page (with video): http://westoncb.com/projects/tiledtext

HN posting: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5306155
Actually there is a TON of evidence that e.g. Russian elections 2011 were heavily falsified. There are dozens (probably hundreds) reports of independent observers, plenty of videos capturing ballot stuffing, multiple cases when election papers are known to have been forged after the ballot count was finished, etc. etc. I don't know what are "reliable means" for you though; all that evidence has been outright rejected by every single Russian official or court.
It's not hard to hire good programmers. There are plenty of good programmers available at the market clearing rate. However there are never any perfect programmers available anywhere at any price. Everyone has some flaws and knowledge gaps. So managers have to keep their expectations realistic.
Unlike private companies, the CEO of Information Services is a political position rather than an actual management position. The decision-making power within the company rests in the hands of the regional chapter executives, who devise and negotiate the projects their chapter will take on. Coordination between the chapters is usually done by the Sofia head chapter's executive(who is not the CEO). The likelihood of prof Konstantinov actually being involved in a decision made by the company is pretty low.

The election counting software is as open as it can be, without having open source. There is a clear specification that is published online on the actual mechanics of the voting process(e.g. how votes are translated into representatives). Records detailing the actual paper vote tallies, signed off by regional vote organizers and managers, are accessible in electronic and paper format. The committee handling the voting process encourages independent verification of the software's calculations.

It's far more likely(and often documented by journalists) that a party would commit voting fraud by purchasing votes or bribing vote organizers, rather than hacking the election software.
Literally, as in those exact words? I'm going to have to ask for a source on that.
I was a little too quick on the upvote for your comment. Your first paragraph is spot-on, but your second is not.

> the government is legally prevented from taking such things into account on future contracts (that is, they can't say "Well, company A is the cheapest, but the last contract they took was a broken piece of shit; company B is a little pricier, but they delivered quality, we'll go with company B". No, you go with the cheapest, period

This is absolutely wrong. There is no requirement that the federal government must go with the cheapest bidder or that they cannot take performance into account. The government can and does regularly reject bids because they are unrealistically low; in fact, I was on one DOD program where both bidders were told to go home and come back with something realistic. Past performance definitely factors in to what the government considers reasonable. It's one of the reasons the government requires labor tracking even in situations where the labor expended doesn't affect the final cost, such as fixed-price contracts and uncompensated overtime.
Financial Network Topology
Then you are proving my point (other comment), and calling the grandparent comment either completely incompetent or a lazy bum who's upset that he can't keep up using 2h weeks when compete with 20-somethings who actually work 40h weeks.

He "worries about the software industry", but my point is that he is worried for the wrong reason.

The problem isn't that you can't do the job with a work life balance. It's that it's so full of incompetent people that someone competent can keep up with no effort at all. And they mask the incompetence. And eventually if you do that for 20 years, you too risk becoming incompetent. Or at least only have a tiny fraction of your potention competence.
1345 days ago I posted about a C JSON library I wrote [0]. Since then I've added lots of features (serialization), fixed even more bugs (often found by someone else) and learned to say no to pull requests. It became surprisingly popular and I'm still maintaining it, adding features and fixing bugs from time to time. It feels great to know that people are using a tool you wrote and I've learned a lot about writing robust code and designing APIs thanks to it. It also helped me get my current job, so I've also benefited financially from it.

Here's a direct link to github: https://github.com/kgabis/parson

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4709169
You are the one claiming that WeChat is better. You are the one that claimed that Facebook "made you poorer". So, yes, you are the one that made extraordinary claims, you are the one that needs to bring extraordinary proof.

Stop with the smokescreen and mirrors, and start actually defending your principles.
Looxie: location-based photo requests
As an American who's lived extensively abroad, I still remain deeply confused by the confusion around small talk.

Of course I chat with the waitress or barista. She's a human being, she's probably cute, I might be single, this is one of the ways you get dates! Or just get to know someone -- everybody's interesting!

If it's a guy, of course I'm curious where he's from, why he's here, what he thinks of the place, what he recommends. People are fascinating and everybody's story is unique.

I used to be far less social, and then I started to realize that these kinds of interactions are one of the great pleasures in life. Even if you only exchange five sentences, you can make a quick joke and share a moment of connection.

There's nothing fake or insincere or dishonest about it at all. It doesn't matter if you're being served or serving someone else, it's just always more pleasant to treat someone else as an interesting human being and be treated as one in return.
First steps in Rust
It turns out the warning interstitial was actually added by a volunteer admin and has since been removed. Steam login to the gambling site is back to 100% functionality now with no warnings.
From https://twitter.com/sacca/status/749260339762442240, Garrison Keillor gave the following letter to each attendee of his last A Prairie Home Companion:

Dear Friends,

I come from serious taciturn people and grew up in a separatist religious sect that believed that every word and deed should be to the glory of God and here I am winding up forty-two years of talking my head off, much of it silliness, and portraying a private eye and a cowboy. This was not supposed to happen. As Robert Frost did not write:

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood
And, sorry I could not travel both,
I chose the one with the galloping hooves and the barking spiders
And now I’m trying to figure out why.

I am a writer who got tangled up with Minnesota Public Radio and A Prairie Home Companion and not because I was ambitious or had aptitude, but simply through a series of coincidences. I was like a kid in Port-au-Prince who’s never seen ice and whose family is too poor to travel but he reads a book about Antarctica and is fascinated and eventually becomes captain of the Haitian Olympic hockey team. He’s not a great player but he’s pretty good for a Haitian. That’s my story. And now, as retirement nears, it’s a revelation to be accosted by people who want to say: Your show has meant a lot to me. Some of them have been tuned in for most of their lives. It’s very sweet. Also confusing, since I never was a big fan of the show myself. I enjoyed doing the show — it was the only social life I had — but the show was never as good as I wanted it to be, and that’s just a fact.

I’m 73, in good shape for a writer, working on a memoir and a Lake Wobegon screenplay, writing a weekly column for The Washington Post, planning to take brisk walks and start reading books again and rediscover the pleasures of the Weekend. Meanwhile, I am grateful beyond grateful for the people I’ve met along the way, Richard Dworsky, Tim and Sue and Fred, the ladies I’m singing with, Sara and Sarah and Aoife and Heather, and Suzanne Weil who was the first person to ever put me on a stage. She is here tonight and it is all her fault, every bit of it. Had it not been for Suzanne, I would be preaching every night at the Union Gospel Mission on Skid Row and all my friends would be old drunks. Millions of people would never know about Lake Wobegon or Powdermilk Biscuits or the power of rhubarb to ease shame and humiliation. But in the course of fifty years of preaching, I would’ve brought three, possibly four, men to eternal salvation. I will have to make peace with this myself. Meanwhile, thank you for listening to the show.

–Garrison Keillor
Na, this happens everywhere with software, startups too. The dev just wants to throw more resources at a problem than fix the complexity problems that make it inefficient. Perhaps it's a sign the dev is just out of their depth.
It is basically implicit manual memory management. You make sure that your ownership is properly accounted for and it will then properly manage the memory they use. Unlike in GC languages, you pretty much have to understand everything about how your resources are managed, even in the API design phase.
The figure that is reproduced and discussed in that lleo.me blog post was made by one of the authors of the paper that is being discussed here. It's just took us from the end of 2011 until early 2016 to actually get the whole thing published.
Show HN: KomandIO – The easiest way to squash and rebase Pull requests
We like healthchecks. The guy who runs it actually uses Cronitor to monitor it.
Not sure what part you're arguing with.
The Gnu Privacy Assistant (GPA, https://www.gnupg.org/(en)/related_software/gpa/screenshots...., bundled with https://www.gpg4win.org/) is also pretty good. Though it does require you to already know the right words and a basic knowledge of GPG.
You can avoid it, by using things like UnsafePointer for your references, but it's unnatural and inconvenient.
But no security updates.
I've never read a critique of Pinker, and found his article on academic prose to be quite well-written. Would you expand upon your "Steven Pinker vibe"?
I agree it shouldn't be a secret. However it isn't a level playing field if some companies have secrets and other's don't.

If all agreements between public companies and other entities had to be public then the playing field would be more level and the figures in this case would have already been public.
It's a funny sort on non-emotive decision that causes a massive rise in racist violence.
As for #3 I would think that it makes fun of the idea that encryption is somehow a crime. That's how I read it at least.
>"The null hypothesis (fake condition #1 == fake condition #2) has to be true, by construction."

The null hypothesis is not only that condition 1 == condition 2, it involves other assumptions being made. From their own description, they knew it was false before even doing this analysis and used this knowledge to design the study. Apparently there is some incorrect assumption about autocorrelation being made.

It seems the authors did not really grasp what hypothesis they were testing, leading to their confused (but still productive) description of the problem. I go into more in this post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12032772
Signal strength doesn't seem to be an issue anyway. A SPOT unit can transmit every five minutes for days on a set of AAA batteries, and that's going all the way out to geosync.
Given that AWS is HIPAA compliant and you can use most database products for PHI (https://aws.amazon.com/compliance/hipaa-compliance/), the likelihood is that you're going to see both public and private healthcare information moving into AWS (or Azure or GCE), if its not already there.

But what about Amazon makes you not want healthcare organizations to use it?
Jancis Robinson recommends the best books on wine
And I'll say, outside of the military, the public sector does not attract competence. There are exceptions, certainly. But the pay and the level of bullshit tends to attract those who either want to play politics, or who want a secure paycheck and benefits with little accountability, or just can't really perform at the level most private sector work demands.