skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Its frustrating that all the heat has been focused on the illegal immigrants and not the small business owners that hire them.

Small business owners that hire illegal immigrants are able to out-compete business owners who chose to follow the law because they have access to a larger labor pool at lower prices. In most cases the small business owners will be paying in cash and off the books so they will be evading taxes to some extent as well. As these business expand and after above-the-board business owners see their profits erode and market share crumble a larger segment of the market is operating outside the law.

Long term having large segments of your economy routinely breaking tax and labor laws creates a breeding ground for organized crime. I could argue that all these businesses are organized crime but I'm talking about the break-your-knee type of organized crime.

Since the workers are illegal and don't have the protection of the law they are vulnerable to intimidation and it is fairly easy to find your business with a new "partner" when your labor stops showing up one day. What are you going to do? Go to the cops because the mafia won't let your illegal immigrants work for you?

At that point hiring above-the-board labor isn't an option at the prices you charge.
Yes, we have a very non-free labor market. It's designed to keep poor people poor and rich people rich.
So causing casualties while waging war is morally equivalent to assassinating domestic political opponents and agitators?
The Art Of War: I LOVE this book, but again, not relevant on a day to day basis for most entrepreneurs.

Eh, that depends on your ability to generalize some of its lessons to the world you live in, which I'm sure it beyond a lot of people at the usual stages in their lives when they're starting up companies, especially giving the distractions of that process. But as the author emphasizes in his his very first point, your core team of people is the single most critical thing, and paraphrasing Paul Graham in one of his essays (which the author generally and perhaps specifically recommends), if you use average "stuff", you're likely to get an average result, and the average result for a startup is FAILURE!

Plenty of interpersonal things can be directly illuminated by The Art of War, lots of that involves threats subtle or more direct, the lesson about "death ground" is vital, etc. But you might as well add the roughly equally short The Prince by Machiavelli and no doubt other books, at least these two are short (and make sure you get a good translation of The Art of War, I wouldn't trust any that weren't done by a military officer, and therefore I recommend Samuel B. Griffiths' version: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0195014766/).

More generally, how to you gain the wisdom to comprehend and put into place the lessons the author is teaching, especially if you're a callow youth? Reading (and rereading) "the classics" has long been a method for that, and one that works for me.

Emphasis on the re-reading, never stop learning, e.g. I'm on perhaps my 3rd pass of Churchill's The Gathering Storm, about the post-WWI period, it ends with him being appointed Prime Minister as the Nazi blitzkrieg falls upon the Low countries and France. First pass was in the '80s, 2nd I can't remember, and now I'm re-reading it about to turn 56 and learning even more from it, having, for example, learned a lot more about history, government and war all though the years.
You always have to do something to make things secure. TLS certificates don't show up out of thin air. So, yes systems that don't bother to use security mechanisms will be insecure. That's normal.
I agree that not everyone wants a liberal arts degree, but the notion that secondary education isn't for everyone strikes me as a little elitist, even if the people making that claim may not have a secondary degree. We all benefit when the average person has a better education. High school may suffice for the next 50-100 years or so, but the lower bar will continue to rise. Why would we convince ourselves into allowing an entire generation to fall behind because they didn't pursue college?
> rock star

Yeah, when I hear this, ninja, jedi, or anything like that, I've learned to stay away. They say that because they want to convince you that if you work with them you'll become something great. Instead, they have a crappy situation and you will be the king/queen of crap.
Leela: Didn't you have ads in the 21st century?

Fry: Well sure, but not in our dreams. Only on TV and radio, and in magazines, and movies, and at ball games... and on buses and milk cartons and t-shirts, and bananas and written on the sky. But not in dreams, no siree.

http://m.imdb.com/title/tt0584425/quotes
Something that also happens in plenty of democracies.
> is not OK

Why not? We kill plenty of other living things. Why not people?
Maybe, I think I know what it means but I'm not an accountant.

I know that revenue is often quoted as some kind of measure of the success of a business, when in reality it's extremely easy to run up revenues if you are running at a loss. In the most trivial case, you can pay $1.10 for $1 bills, for example.

Ok, so shopify isn't doing that, but it's hardly different, just a more complex situation. They pay $50 for advertising to get $75 in revenue, which they immediately pay $55 for. That's $105 paid out to buy $75 in revenue.

It would certainly be cheaper to just pay $1.10 for each $1 in revenue. I'm sure the folks at shopify don't think of it this way, and I'm sure they genuinely believe that they will someday change the economics of this and become profitable. However, the balance sheet doesn't support that belief, for me at least, and it sure looks like every customer they maintain leads to more money they are losing.

Perhaps they can become profitable with enough economies of scale. Again, I would question how much larger they would have to get to hit the inflection point, which they haven't done, at least in the financials reported, so far losses are scaling up linearly with revenues (which is to say operating margins are a steady negative % against increasing revenues).

Since they have been around for a long time (12 years) and those same 12 years have seen an absolutely huge increase in ecommerce, it seems like they have failed to hit the required scale despite the most favorable conditions you might hope for. That doesn't make me very optimistic.
One of the. Eat distinctions in this article is the difference between a great worker and a great remote worker. I've worked with many people who were brilliant, but couldn't get the remote part to work with their lifestyle.

Also, as an aside, their option box is a word-for-word copy of Neil patel's. "from aha to oh shi*t..."
Under those indirect causalities the U.S. has killed millions! even its own population when they get sick and can't afford their drugs. My point is that Cuba under Castro was not -by far- like the Soviet Union under Stalin as some people believe.
That's a reasonable reply. I think my comment was hasty, made after skimming the article and not thinking about it too deeply.
Autossh – Automatically restart SSH sessions and tunnels
Solving a Mystery Behind the Deadly ‘Tsunami of Molasses’ of 1919
Dashboard for all your images
The example URL in your article redirected me to porn.
You provide no evidence for your claim that building houses and producing food is fundamentally more valuable than building websites.

If there are more than enough homes already why would building an extra home be more valuable than building a website? If there is enough food why would producing more food be more valuable than building a website?

If a hundred workers picking vegetables can be automated by a machine programmed by a developer is these workers' labor more valuable than the developer's labor?

The best indicator we have for the value of one's labor is the free market. There is an exceptionally high scarcity of people smacking rocks together; if I founded a rock-smacking startup I might not be able to find an investor to bankroll my endeavors.
I cracked open this game when a friend was visiting. We pair programmed on it for hours and it was a blast. Now I can't quite bring myself to play it alone.
I don't mean to suggest that Castro was the only person who showed poor judgement. Placing Jupiter missiles in Turkey ratcheted up tensions and invited some kind of response from the USSR - it increased the chance of nuclear war to some degree and it's fair to criticize Kennedy for that. But it wasn't a step-change in the perceived balance of power. Given all the possible Soviet responses, I don't think it was reasonable for Kennedy to conclude that placing missiles in Turkey would lead to a 50-50 chance of nuclear war.
That is not land value tax at all.

http://www.landvaluetax.org/what-is-lvt/
> but if we dont find out what made him possible and prevent society from sliding into that direction again- your family suffered for nothing

I think most people believe we already know. Suffering --> Revolution --> Dictatorship is a very common pattern. I think there is a lot to learn from the circumstances and based on the histories I've read of e.g. WWII germany, that feels like the general focus. I think its popular to initially focus on the person themselves, though once you begin any serious study of a particular revolution, the circumstances and cultural influences become so pronounced that the idea of the particular dictator being of importance begins to shrink.
Demand will also change when prices change. People are going to cook more at home and live in smallet apartments / houses.
Succeeding as an entrepreneur in tech (for the first time) is nearly impossible. It's like winning the lottery. I don't think that anyone who succeeds understands (or much less planned for) even a small fraction of all the factors which led them to this successful outcome.

Of course when you've succeeded once, doing it again is easy - It's the first time that's hard.

I think the author is right to be afraid of starting a new project.
Unless you know people who can fund you and/or help you secure deals, there is no point in starting anything - It will fail; it doesn't matter what the idea is, how smart you are or how hard you work.

Maybe intelligence and work ethics mattered 10 years ago but not today. Today they are practically worthless - Almost everyone is intelligent and hard working.

Start a project if you enjoy it, but don't expect it to pay off ever - The reality is; it won't.
Thank you very much for the link, all I know is purely empirical, so this is very interesting read.
China is the obstacle to Google’s plan to end internet censorship
If someone asks you to "sum an array" then it's quite reasonable to think they mean calculate the sum of an array. Some languages (PHP springs to mind) have native "array_sum" functions. Wondering if someone from Google, who is interviewing a developer means "sum or summarize" would be weird.
Let me add my favorite book of war stories in finding product-market fit, reaching/educating users for whom the product is a sufficiently new thing they need that, in pursuing a business model that worked (do the numbers!), etc. This one is about a specific company, so it's a concrete and very real history vs. perhaps some of these recommended books more focusing on the theory, principles and applications, it could help reify those sorts of books. Disclaimer, I really like history and think you can learn from it ^_^:

Walking the High-Tech High Wire: The Technical Entrepreneur's Guide to Running a Successful Enterprise (https://www.amazon.com/Walking-High-Tech-High-Wire-Entrepren...). Pretty cheap used.
> I’d much rather live in Cuba of the 1960s–1980s

Yes, while the Soviet Union was sending Cuba billions per year, it was much better there.
What a pathetic piece of text!
There are places all over the world that have suffered disasters taking out normal services. That doesn't mean that the services never existed or the country as a whole isn't industrialized yet.
Nice illustration of the "row picture" of matrix multiplication. The "column picture" is equally important.
This intro lecture by Prof. Strang is a really good lesson on that: https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/mathematics/18-06-linear-algebra...

Also, this short tutorial on linear algebra covers the row + column pictures on the first page: https://minireference.com/static/tutorials/linear_algebra_in... (disclaimer: I'm the author)
What does that have to do with you pretending to have knowledge of life in sink estates in London, chief?
I don't remember why, but years ago I remember coming to the firm conclusion that it was impossible to write it in anything but assembly.
You don't gain that much by building downward, one or two floors at most, and you also run into other laws.

For example, an apartment is required to have a window or fresh air source.
How to Lead Effectively in This Age of Relationships
> How to avoid the UK’s new online surveillance powers

How to avoid the UK’s new online surveillance powers, by using things like VPNs, until those become outlawed too, because they circumvent the law. - FTFY

Don't even think you will be safe for long. It's just cat and mouse and in the long run, the law always wins.
At Plethora, we're working on a similar vision! Happy to hear your take and talk about ours. Email me if you'd like: nick@plethora.com
> When trying to rollout a SAAS app in Germany that ties individuals to the time to track workflow and time they spent on individual tasks, it was pushed back on because it was "illegal".

Probably rightfully so.
This made me a little sad. Before our house burned down due to arson, I used to have the majority of them.
Why do you say "self hosting wordpress is a nightmare" ? I've been doing that for 12 years and have had no worries at all. Admittedly it's only a very low trafficked site, but still, curious.
Well, lucky or just taking good care of my vehicles..

But anyway, my point is exactly what you say: the risk of having a breakdown is small enough for any well-maintained car that it's pretty independent of car age.
Only if you believe that "normal" humans can't be responsible for terrible suffering. Countering that belief is, I think, the OP's point.
Batch image renamer using Microsoft deep learning
There was a thread yesterday where lots of people were complaining about HSMs (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13031155). I think this is an example where it would have helped to secure the private key in an HSM instead of the server itself.

Now the author states the keys have been rotated but now the next hacker know where to look.
the complexities of global politics in the 20th century

All the complexities in the world won't cover up the fact that communism was by far the worst evil of the 20th century, beating nazism by a mile, by tens of millions of people killed to no benefit. It had no redeeming qualities. Murder, slavery, and poverty is all communism gave to the world.

Now its major protagonists can burn in hell together. I hope they do.
The hypocresy is from the side that refused to denounce Trump when he was foaming at the mouth yelling riggeeed! And now they don't like it when some people, not clinton nor obama, ask questions.
Ask HN: Remote workers, what headphone/mic combo do you use for video calls?
Simple enough question. I'm about to start a remote position and I'm looking for good suggestions for a clear, comfortable, and hopefully non-intrusive headphone/mic combo for video calls. Preferably, something wireless would be even better. Interested to hear what others are using
Yes, and if your website is using CSS effects to change the same image for every user then you're making a mistake. Just render the modified image to a static asset and serve that.

However, if you want to use a pencil effect on an image that you don't have control over (eg a user's image before they upload it, or something from an API-driven service like Unsplash) then the technique still has a lot of value.
I don't think it's akin to winning the lottery, but I do agree with you in that it's monumentally harder than, say, starting a nail salon. I think the difficulty goes severely under-appreciated on HN, where you have a whole bunch of founder-supermen saying that investment is counter-productive.

The tech sector is ten times harder than all other sectors with low barriers to entry, and bootstrapping is ten times harder than doing it without investment. Sure, once you've gotten over the experience hump like the supermen already have, you can start being picky about where your money is coming from.

But really, the knowledge base on offer here just isn't up to snuff for an inexperienced person here to learn what he / she needs to learn to avoid failure. You can fetishize failure all you want, but all that says to me is that the community is failing to give the people joining it the tools they need to succeed.
Amazon uses custom product numbered Xeons. So I wouldn't be surprised if they get the same advantage + their own optimizations in short term. Intel wouldn't risk to annoy AWS, they are a far bigger customer than Google.
There is decent advice here but I still think there is a lack of basic tools that would help the everyday citizen get started with protecting their privacy. I think there's a chance for VPN providers to capitalise on the surveillance law whilst helping people by providing really easy tools to use. I know that most of the major VPN providers have apps and programs available that provide little to no configuration but these still seem beyond people I know who aren't tech savvy. I've had countless conversations with even people my own age (mid 20s) and younger who would like to protect their privacy but have no idea what all the fragmented privacy tools mean and how they can use them effortlessly. I wonder if Opera's browser level proxy is possibly a step in the right direction.
> Yes, it's wrong for a candidate who is down in the polls to start screaming "rigged" before a single vote is cast.

Democrats were lobbying against secured voting machines and paper ballots for weeks before the election, including on Hacker News:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12728167

Even if the election was rigged against the Democrats, it's not like it wasn't completely deserved. You don't get to oppose attempts to prevent election fraud before the election and then complain about election fraud afterwards.
The trick is to let them fail, then rapidly sift through the pieces and sell anything off which still has value. Even failing banks have plenty of good loans.

Ordinary deposits with banks should be protected by the government because the general public cannot evaluate the risk of a bank collapsing. There's probably a case for some protection for companies that hold accounts -- although companies should really be aware that by depositing money in a bank, they become lenders to the bank, and they should have the skills to mitigate that risk. Perhaps smaller companies, and accounts specifically holding payroll, should receive greater deposit protection.
I thought this was a good summarization of the whole problem, why you should be worried, and what you can do about it.

Shame it got marked as [dupe] and taken off the front page by the time I'd read it.
The goods manufactured abroad are extremely competitive because the rules are different in other countries. Lax environmental standards, lower wages, inferior working conditions and benefits. So people fought for better conditions in the US and business simply decide it's cheaper to move outside the country than comply. When all other conditions are essentially equal then we can talk about "free trade" until then there is no such thing and trade barriers are not a bad thing. Taking care of others is a noble thing, but a nation needs to take care of its own first.
Happy to hear that, keep up the good work!
introduction: "we used a major vendor's HSM to protect our private keys"

conclusion: "The whole industry is shit."

You had a bad experience with one vendor, not with the industry.
The cleverest tip I've read today
Do you want dozens of other sources to confirm it, if Freedom House isn't enough? It's obtuse to claim Cuba has political freedom.
To a degree, specifically the degree to which those citizens want them to, but the world becomes a better place when we push tribalism to the sidelines.

Allowing illegal immigration isn't the way to do it, however. The most important job of a state is to provide a level, predictable playing field.
They have 16 and 32 core count processors planned. These should be faster for programs with good concurrency although one detail that has gone under the radar is that Zen has half the SIMD performance of Intel AVX chips (it should take 256 bit SIMD instructions but doesn't execute them all at once). Still, this is unlikely to make a difference in the vast majority of software out there.
It's the upper bound if you assume perfect information and a perfectly efficient market. It's often hard to measure the value an employee provides, which means there is imperfect information. If you look at CEO compensation, which is determined by the board, often staffed with friendly CEOs from other companies, it doesn't look like an efficient market either.
You can debate what the rules "should be" but in the mean time it would be nice if people obey the rules that are currently in place.
الجيش الجزائرى يدمر مدفع للإرهابين وإيقاف 64من الهاجرين
I don't like the subsidized outdoor security lights that only exist to increase demand for nighttime power. I hope that nighttime demand will increase so that those lights will no longer be economical. I look forward to actual darkness in rural areas as a result.
Self-Organising Maps
We shouldn't give low-skilled labor jobs to Americans, since that's economically inefficient.

What a job pays should not be defined by the required skills, at least not exclusively, it should be paid by the amount of work one does. And what a job pays is actually not defined by the required skills, it is defined by the availability and willingness of workers to do those jobs at certain wage levels, it just happens that increasing skill level and decreasing availability of workers are the same direction.

Note that I am not saying that a lazy worker taking ten times as long to produce some good as his coworkers should receive the same wage, nor I am saying you should not be compensate for spending additional years at an university to acquire higher skills. But after one accounted for those factors, it should really not make a huge difference whether you are developing software or whether you are picking oranges.
> Besides, liberated from corporate taxes, they'd have more freedom to increase wages.

We've already played the trickle-down economics game. I don't recall it being all that successful.
Drone Photography Captures the Dramatic Inequality of Nairobi
The problem will come when you collide a corporate tax rate of 0% with tax cuts for the wealthy. The end result will be higher taxes for the rest of the population and no more services of any kind. Or even higher national debt. I suppose you could always raise duties on foreign imports to insane levels which would no doubt be popular politically. No idea what type of country that would result in.
None of the people you mentioned have said the election is rigged or that they won't respect the fact that Trump won.
What makes you think it requires a total absolution to be tu quoque? If I murder 100 people and punch a grandma, and I point out it was OK to punch a grandma because I just saw YOU do it, it's still tu quoque despite the fact that nobody discussed the 100 I murdered