skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Saying "Great, good job" and giving praise is the same as giving a prize or a candy. It is a verbal doggy biscuit.

Reward and punishment externalizes motivation. American's tend to reward and other countries to punishment.

However I bet you in those other countries they hate math just as much as everyone in USA.

If you want people to be intrinsically motivated, rewards like "Great Job, awesome" have the exact opposite effect.
Nice how I got downvoted to -1 here for asking a question. Sheesh.
1. I don't know what education degrees look like in other countries, but I highly doubt more education majors in the US would solve anything without first overhauling that curriculum and making it more demanding.

2. Is there any factual evidence for this often-repeated stereotype about Asian children having less curiosity and love of learning than American ones?
For an engineer not to be actively looking, you have to believe that Twitter will be around for the foreseeable future. That seems like a sucker's bet, to me.
Not to mention I work a lot of the time with my macbook closed connected to external display. What good is touchbar then? Oh wait, my external display is Thunderbolt display, now a $1k paperweight because I bought into the Apple closed ecosystem.
The tax rate on capital gains is the same as the tax on qualified dividends. It's the timing of the taxation that differs. With dividends you pay tax now, with capital gains you pay when you sell the stock.

Distributing cash via dividend or buyback usually happens when a company has more cash than they can productively use. There are a few advantages of distributing money via dividend instead of buyback:

* With a share buyback, the company is actually making a bad investment if the stock ends up being overpriced. There are plenty of instances of companies buying back shares and then having the share price drop, because companies can't reliably time the market any better than the rest of us.

* Investors receive a tangible reward when a dividend is paid. In theory, you can mimic dividends by periodically selling small portions of a non-dividend stock holding. However, this means that you're subject to fluctuations of the stock market, so your "dividend" sale might be 20% more or less depending on the month. Dividend-paying companies, on the other hand, typically aim to have predictably-increasing dividends.

The predictability of dividends, however, is a negative if you're a company that doesn't want to set aside cash for investors on an ongoing basis, which is the case for many tech companies.
One of the talks today (https://youtu.be/-03R4Fj79_E?t=164) was exactly on that :). I've used a bit of NativeScript and React Native, and I can tell you that Flutter is _completely_ different. Worth trying for yourself.
Top SaaS Website Metrics for Engagement Using Google Analytics
Customer Discovery
Hey guys! I wanted to get some feedback from you guys about customer discovery. We hear about "getting out of the building" pretty much every day when it comes to customer discovery. But how exactly do startups find the right people outside the building to collect data? I've ran into problems like this, and I always wonder what other people do if their customers are hard to identify on the streets, like actors, landlords, or stay home moms? I've also come across some data marketplaces where you can purchase data (which I assume is probably outdated). And without spending a lot of money doing surveys, has anyone discovered an efficient method?
Out of curiosity, what do you use function keys for?

I'm a developer, and the only key I routinely use from the top row is escape, for vim. (And Ctrl-Alt-F1 to drop out of X11 on a Unix system... but that's not applicable here.)

Anyway, it looks like you can still put a virtual escape key on the touchpad when Terminal is active. Or if you want a physical key, you can also remap one of the other modifier keys to act as escape.
Website with halloween spider mode
The author states "Nor is [poor education performance in America] due to high levels of inequality: the proportion of American children coming from under-privileged backgrounds is about par for the OECD."

I'd be interested to see a citation for this claim; I think it's either misleading, or things have changed a lot over the last 5-8 years (which I doubt). What I recall from my time working in education research, looking at the international tests including PISA, is that average scores from the USA are brought down by the fact that the bottom-performing kids do so much worse than elsewhere, which if you look at the way public school funding works in America, makes a lot of sense (i.e. wealthy district = higher taxes = more funding for public education).

The problem isn't that America has more low-SES students than other places, it's that we (speaking as someone currently living in America) do a worse job educating them. I'm not saying that the problem is only inequality, but it is definitely part of the picture.
I think your point is interesting, but what do you propose to do regarding the injustices of the past in women and minority groups? You can't just unilaterally declare that the field is level, and ignore history.
"Options are a cop out. It’s the designer’s job to figure out the best way to use the product, and delegating that choice to the user is pure laziness."

Yes. Open source does not get this at all.
Basically, you're arguing that it's fine for companies to undercut their employees?
Also, no one is trying for immortality. You will still die, just not from standard health decline. Hack, why not at least try and see what happens, going back to normal dying will be easy (depending on the cure, but most likely).
Makes me wonder how people here feel about the USB-C and basically all gadgets requiring adapters. I like Apple and Mac, but this piece.. Isn't it ugly at the end, that if you want to use an SD card from your camera you must get an adapter, adapter for your iPhone 7 lighting headphones and adapter for your $1k 27" Retina display which isn't 5k, but still pretty freaking good. That's 3 ports, and 1 USB-C port left you'll use for charging.
The situation for salarymen of the same year in big corps. at Japan is kind of similar. Wages are only from tenure, so two people who have been at the a corp. for 10 years have the same salary, even if one's a total duffer and the other is super important for the company. The reasons for this are historical, but don't really matter to this discussion. Almost everyone at these big co.s are hired right out of college in yearly "classes" and then stay their until retirement (ideally, obviously things are more complicated). The system isn't as strong today, so I'm describing something that existed more in the '80s.

What end's up happening is people in the same year are sorted by many other things. Better more interesting tasks are given to higher status workers, they avoid more grunt work, get nice perks (at top levels, things like a company car, etc.), and more respect.

It's hard to separate the effects of this on the company from all the other things Japanese companies do which are different from USA/Europe. But you might look into that.
VerDeTerre came through, above. I read it in an anthology in the children's section of the public library (another good reason for public libraries), but the anthology title is long lost to /dev/null.
The web page itself is a sign of the non-Jobsian direction Apple is taking. I doubt he would stand for all that shifting javascript crap.
I'm really torn. If they had included an option for 32GB of ram I wouldn't have thought twice. If they had kept the MagSafe and the and the SD card reader I probably would have bought it. I have a late-2015 MacBook Pro fully loaded except I only have 512GB SSD. I'd like to get the new version and give my wife a hand-me-down but this isn't innovative. I don't care about the touch bar. It might be incredibly useful but I would use 32GB of ram or the SD reader or the MagSafe charger more often.
The GP was the one making the complaint. I have no interest in the device. But if it is important to people, then it is important to people.

And even if it is perfectly suited the the rest of the hardware and any additional RAM/performance would be wasted[1], that's not a good excuse to overcharge for old commodity hardware.

[1] I would be extremely surprised if the rest of the system were designed around the video card. Actually, designed twice, since there are two video card options.
"Only mortals have told me that it would suck to live forever." - /r/Showerthoughts

Aubrey De Grey calls it the "pro aging trance"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aubrey_de_Grey#Pro-aging_tranc...
I'm not sure how controversial the opinion is, but it's pretty clear to me that immortality is harmful to a species in the vast majority of cases.

Evolution is a constant processes of competition. When members of a species start living longer, the upgrading of their gene pool slows down. The older members maintain their old ideas and ways of life, and they soak up resources that crowd out the younger members.

The environment is constantly changing. Thanks to all the other organisms that are evolving, it's not enough to become the apex predator and then stagnate. Organisms are always finding a new way to take advantage of their environment, which includes the other organisms.

For this reason, I do not think that any single individual will ever be immortal, and probably not even a collective. That would require gaining control of the universe's resources in a way that guarantees they never lose it.

Decentralization is inherent to the functioning of the universe. The speed of light ensures that multiple decisions be made in parallel. Those that make the most self interested decisions will be competitive, and while that often means participating as a group, no biological group that I know of is entirely devoid of selfish behavior among its members.

Immortality is largely incompatible with evolution and competition.
I'm excited for ant-aging, not so much for an endless deluge of VC backed treatments/supplements that aren't grounded in science and/or ineffective.

Besides, lifestyle needs to be addressed first. Reduce/eliminate risky behaviors, eat correctly (whatever that may be), and exercise regularly. Then perhaps look into supplements and treatments.
Thank you! Caught this too late to edit.
This is misleading. A dividend is a taxable event, with stock buybacks people who hold the stock can defer taxes indefinitely.

In theory, a hypothetical company with a 1$ dividend every year would see it's stock price rise and fall by 1$ through this cycle. A buyback would see a continuous increase in price.
The majority of the bad things that the "Remainers" are worried about haven't taken effect yet. The vote happened but things are largely unchanged. I don't think you can use the last several months as proof that the worries of those who voted to Remain were incorrect. That's the same logic as those people who blamed Obama for the 2008 Bailout, when it was very clearly in motion for a long time before he even took office.
Let's see:

* I think you can reasonably make a case that Windows 95/98/NT were better than MacOS 7/8/9. (You could probably make a reasonable case for the opposite; I certainly wouldn't argue the point).

* The Zune was better than the iPod. Unfortunately for MS not better than the iPhone a few months later. The "Metro" design language it introduced was quite a bit better than Apple's at the time (and started the "flat design" trend that even Apple would end up aping, years later).

* Various areas where MS beat Apple by default, at least circa the 90s-00s, owing to Apple making no or a half-hearted effort. Office suites, gaming consoles, web browsers, the server, 3D graphics, yadda yadda.

* C# is a far better language than Objective-C, and Visual Studio is a far better IDE than Xcode.

* Edge is arguably a better browser than Safari. MS have also made some great tooling for webdev recently, VSCode and Typescript, while we haven't heard much from Apple.

* The Surface tablets have been arguably better than recent iPads, by virtue of running a full OS.

After that I've got nothing.
You are right that $4B from an IPO is technically another fundraising round.

However, an IPO is a special case, as for years now a company/its board will consider an IPO as a business strategy decision and not as fundraising per se.
Big shift in the 1980s.

There are some legal/regulatory aspects to an IPO and "liquidity event" type reasons an IPO is treated differently too.

Basically, an IPO brings many pros and cons with it. A company may choose to IPO even when it doesn't need the cash or even want the cash. The money raised is just a byproduct of choosing this particular business strategy.

(An analogy in pre-IPO startups: A startup may take an investment from a famous or influential VC even though the startup doesn't need the money at that point. Rather they look at it as a business decision because the startup really wants some other benefits they can get from having this famous VC as an investor. e.g. mentorship, network connections or even just more legitimacy by association... Lots of VCs provide non-cash benefits but you have to take cash to get them.)

As for how did Snap Inc. get that $4B number. That's complicated and not even an official number. But a simple answer could be if a company's current private valuation is ~$40B and they want to IPO for strategic reasons but only sell off/dilute as little as possible while still looking respectable.

They won't IPO only 1% of the company, too little, 10% is a respectable minimum. 10% of $40B = $4B.

Total speculation and just an example. But hopefully you see you are right to ask questions when these companies IPO as it's full of smoke and mirrors with a different story behind the scenes.
Exactly that's my point. They were targeting single women and elderly people and looking up this information on Facebook.

Checkout this case http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-37735369

In this case the scammer recorded the video and threatened to distribute video to facebook contacts.

A half hour later I get a message on Facebook. "Listen," it says, "I'm a man, and I recorded a video of you masturbating. Do you want to see it?" He sends me the video. It's about five minutes of me masturbating.

"I have a list of your friends and family from Facebook - your mum, your sister, your cousins," he says. "You have one week to send me to send me 5,000 euros (£4,450), or I'll send them the video."

Keep everything private! I do not understand why i am getting downvote for this suggestion.
It's only a competitor against the 13" version of the MacBook Pro though.
Based on your comments about lamport clocks, etc, I thought you'd find it interesting.
One person who has spent a lot of time looking at and thinking about this problem is Nadia Eghbal. She has a repository called "Lemonade Stand"[1], which is a resource that lists a number of ways to fund open source development, and she wrote a paper on the topic of "digital infrastructure" being built on top of open source projects[2]. She also co-hosts a podcast called Request for Commits[3].

Another person worth looking at would be Eric Holscher, who's Twitter feed frequently has interesting insights into running an open source project as your full-time job[4].

The best bet if you want to do open source full-time would be to work at a company like GitLab[5] or Sentry[6], but that does restrict the exact kinds of open source work you can do (at least during working hours).

[1]: https://github.com/nayafia/lemonade-stand
[2]: http://www.fordfoundation.org/library/reports-and-studies/ro...
[3]: https://changelog.com/rfc
[4]: https://twitter.com/ericholscher/status/752572876138565632
[5]: https://about.gitlab.com/
[6]: https://sentry.io/
I don't think that would fly if they are being sued?

How would LE defend money being spent on something that they cannot use? I mean any judge will see it, no?
We have 20 years to prevent mass extinction
Was prepared to buy one if it was 2.5lbs for the 15" (or maybe even 3 lbs). Instead it's still 4lbs

LG makes a 2 lbs 15 inch. (Not saying I'd buy the LG. Only pointing out Apple has room to do better)

I agree it was a very disappointing announcement . Basically more of the same. Nothing new or innovative.
Why are we so afraid of change of different experiences? Aging is not hell. It may teach us humility. It may give us the opportunity to question our priorities.

Ultimately all the human race will die. Over a short or a long span only learning will matter.
Anti-aging doesn't prevent death.

You could still just as easily get hit by a car when you are 90 and look 20. Or 1000 and look 20, assuming that's even possible. What's really interesting is if people could actually prolong their lifespan indefinitely but we have the same limited bodies. Then you'll see people trying really hard to say alive to comical effect.

I think Aronofsky's The Fountain is a really great outlook on death. It is a disease and like any disease we may as well try hard to defeat it. Doesn't mean it isn't very natural.
Airbnb - React Native Mapview Components
i both like and dislike that the registry database is separate. i honestly can't with it how i feel about it.
This will probably just turn into a line in the terms and agreements that everyone just clicks "yes" because they have to in order to use anything.
For sure, I regularly sit between 12-16GB used (mainly doing web development + docker work, large systems, many services), but frequently will be above that when running a lot inside of VMs.

You are also up against a loosing battle of programs using more RAM to do the same job. You get a better experience now, but you can also expect normal PC usage to result in big RAM usage.
I can attest to this fact ... I was a tutor to freshmans during my grad studies. The kids couldn't handle simple sum of fractions without a calculator. Forget about sum fractions containing a variable. I was astonished at how they managed to clear the SAT's.
To your point, this sounds a little like the recent post from someone who said they were being interviewed (at Google) for a Director role. When he posted the questions, it was revealed they were really interviewing him for an SRE position, and that Google often won't tell you what you're interviewing for.
It might be unthinkable to someone in the future that we could experience the universe meaningfully in 100 years.

I tend to see human-lifespan rationalizations as simple fatalism. It's okay to think you'd get bored after a million years, but dooming every living human to die because you'd be bored is kind of insane if you think about it.
Will you post the response to HN?
Facebook’s Free Basics Is an African Dictator’s Dream
I think a good summary of how "innovative" this release is, is the fact the news didn't even reach top 20 on HN.
Amazon enabled BPF flags in the Amazon Linux AMI with 2016.03, and generally seems to move to whatever the latest LTS kernel is when they release a new version.

Since 4.9 is supposed to be the next LTS, if it gets out of RC fast enough, we could see 4.9 in the 2017.03 Amazon Linux AMI, which would be a pretty big win for those of us running workloads in the AWS cloud.
It is misleading? How could I have made that not (or less) the case?

I specifically called out that choice of timing in my second sentence and explained it further in my third.
I absolutely, 100% do not want to extend my life. And for the record, I am quite pleased with my life. I do not fear death, I do not worry about it, it does not concern me. Therefore I do not feel the need to combat it in any way. The good truly does not exist without the bad, life without death, and so on. Walking the path of "controlling" your life and/or death like this seems needy, egotistical, and pretty sad, imo.
It's right up there with "money doesn't buy happiness"
I think I read this in a short story collection, but totally can't remember which one.
At least they'll die with a full head of hair!
I've made my living based on OSS projects for almost my entire professional career (about 17 years, specifically working on Squid, SciPy, Webmin, Virtualmin, etc.). Not a great living, mind you, but it's kept me in food and houses and given me a lot of freedom. Also, most of the stuff that made money hasn't been the stuff you want to be doing; the code doesn't make money, in the vast majority of cases. It's the stuff you do other than code, but that requires deep understanding of the code, that makes money. Deployments, support, customization, packaging, documentation, bundling and "productizing", and occasionally getting jobs on the strength of your prior contributions. I've written a lot less code than I would have liked in all those years, and much of the code I wrote has been fleeting ephemeral things like shell scripts and packaging scripts.

I don't know a lot about the frontend OSS world, but I know that if you pick a project that has a lot of money being thrown around (in large deployments, for example) then you'll find that it's easier to get some of it to land in your pocket. Niche projects are difficult to get paid for, but can be good places to learn; smaller projects may be happy to have some help and will lend more guidance when you ask questions. But, then again, some big projects have people specifically tasked with bringing new developers up to speed and "community management", so that may even out that difference.

It will never hurt you to have OSS contributions on your resume. It's gotten me jobs, and has allowed me to round up good paying contract work when I've needed it (even in unrelated fields; I've recently done some Ruby work, even though I've never had a real project in Ruby). And, as someone who has hired people, I can say I've only ever hired people who had OSS work I could see. Sometimes unrelated to what I was hiring for, sometimes they were already working on what I was hiring for and I just wanted them to be able to spend more time on it and get them on board with the company road map.

All that said, it's not the easiest way to make a living in software. Getting a real job is probably the easiest way, and if you're lucky you'll get to work on OSS stuff to one degree or another. I've worked on tons of stuff that I never got paid for, and don't expect to ever get paid for. And, if you aren't really directing your efforts toward making something pay, you're unlikely to find that it'll pay.

OSS contribution does not, in the general case, lead to getting paid. But, it can lead there if you want it to.
I find when reading fiction, or certain kinds of literature (not including avant guard lit), using an inner voice is vital to get the full meter and rhythm. Then with slowing down my thoughts -- self talk -- rational thinking, having an inner voice helps too.

When reading non-fiction I can more easily drift into a sub-vocal whisper, to nothing at all speed read, skipping over to points I'm interested in, going back over points, etc. I suspect this is why a lot of non-fiction has standards and formats and certain clichés that make visual comprehension less intensive.

A friend of mine said she had no inner voice at all.

I've noticed when using Ketamine that I can do this sub-mental-vocal speed reading incredibly well for certain kinds of avant guard literature or philosophy lit, like Camus and David Foster Wallace, or Pyncheon, where the voice can change from chapter to chapter -- or rather the content is very info dense.

I had great trouble 'getting' Hunter S. Thompson before I'd ever heard him speak. When I heard his voice it suddenly all made sense. Same for William S Boroughs, for his more avant-guard lit works. Junky, on the other hand, has a more more straight forward voice and I was able to get into that quite easily without having heard his actual voice beforehand.

This is why I don't buy into the bicameral mind crap. Non-vocal thinking seems easier for more info dense material, wheras a voice is helpful for very emotive things like poetry or some kinds of lit.

Then again I could be simply confusing standard voice with non-standard. Hard to be objective.