skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Amplitude raises $30M to build the next generation Product Platform
Show HN: Shareable reasons to upgrade to Python 3
> While downvoting this is warranted

Why exactly is downvoting my statement warranted? It's factual.
Brain Networks vs. Galaxy Networks – More Evidence of Their Odd Similarities
I kind of disagree with the gaming part.

I'm almost sure that most hardcore gamers actually never become part of the CS/SWE crowd because of video game addiction. Gaming and software development are two very different domains. Hardcore gamers usually are not motivated, accomplish very little, and lack in career development.
Another food also banned from the US because of its coumarin content is the herb Hierochloe odorata, also known as bison grass or sweet grass. It's an important ingredient in Żubrówka vodka. For this reason, the Żubrówka you can purchase in the US is essentially fake, containing ingredients meant to simulate or approximate coumarin.
PUMA Webpage redesign/CONCEPT
Isn't income tax paid by the employees, and not Amazon? What's the employer's contribution?

What you're missing is that the UK has been going through years of austerity. The UK public know some large companies have weird dodgy tax arrangements, and while there's some acceptance that no-one pays the real tax rate there's growing unrest about the very low rates paid by eg Starbucks or Google or Amazon.

These companies can chose to pay a bit more tax, or face tighter regulation.

The current EU VAT laws are proof the EU is happy to make onerous laws about tax
i hate articles that base what companies should pay based on revenues -.- bruh margins are shit for companies like AMZN , walmart etc
How Palo Alto Networks Measures and Manages Employee Engagement
The rotors turn slow in terms of rpm but fast in terms of wingtip speed, due to the very large radius. But many things kill birds, I do not believe that wind turbines could ever make much of a difference.
In case you're interested, this[1] document is of great interest if you wish to understand how these offshore turbines perform empirically. I'll give you a hint: not very good. Any piece of machinery exposed to sea salt doesn't last long. Also maintenance will be a big problem: just think one second the kind of undertaking needed to send a team of technicians to repair only one of these turbines. Let's not talk about replacing any large piece.

[1] http://www.ref.org.uk/attachments/article/280/ref.hughes.19.... (see Figure 1, page 13, "Performance degradation due to age using equal weights")
> The only real argument here is how much (if any) of that is due to causes that aren't social.

Negligible, based on the statistics. The differences, if they even exist, are minuscule, while the gender disparity is enormous. It strains credibility to imagine that the root cause of the gender disparity in STEM employment is innate, especially since the disparity varies across cultures and subfields.
1st Direct Subsea Link Between Afrika and South America
Yeah, I think there's a strange amount of both fans and people who dislike bitcoin that think bitcoin can only be valuable if it's on a path to complete adoption, replacing other currencies.

I see it more like a decentralized PayPal alternative, and I keep seeing it pop up in more places that I buy stuff online and I've made personal transactions with it to other people, so it's providing value to me and seems to be on a reasonably successful path.
Working on a proof of a modular exponentiation algorithm in Lean with a focus on performance. Hoping to be able to extract a low-level ASM or C implementation from the proof.
Afrika's Open Data Revolution Faces Challenges
Scarcity is part of Patreon. I'm guess/assume that much (most?) of the support comes from backers wanting exclusive content that is sometimes offered as a reward.
Haha -- yes indeed about the engineering headaches! (Although as I'm sure you know...the more I learn about any field of engineering, the more I learn about just how-many trade-offs there are in building something!)

As for gear ratio -- depends on which joint, but Harmonic Drive's standard gearboxes come in ranges of 50:1 to 320:1, and I'd say they were all within that range.

As far as direct drive motors go, all I can say is that I was very aware of them, and very interested in looking at it. (I was on the embedded systems team doing motor control), but by the time I joined, the architecture had already been decided and robot's were being built. That said, there are certain other difficulties there, both with the control electronics for larger motors, and with the relative cost of the motors, especially since Rethink is going for the goal of reducing robot costs. I can't say they won't go that way some day. I think at the very least, it's worth exploring, but I'm not longer there so I don't have much say in that!

Other fun stuff -- Even though we used a harmonic drive, it was coupled to what is basically a torsion spring between it and the output. This arrangement is called a series-elastic actuator, and it allows you to do some neat stuff with rapid torque sensing, both from the control and safety side of things. It's also a lot of fun for the control engineers trying to control something sitting at the end of a spring :-P
>BTC is worth thousands of dollars, so if everyone starts using BTC will people pay irrational fractions of BTC for bread and milk at the supermarket? will there be some adjustment?

"1 bitcoin" is a truly arbitrary amount, just like "1 pound of gold" is arbitrary. They're both divisible.
I've made the complete switch around the year 2012. At the time it felt strange not using Google, however nowadays the sentiment is completely the opposite I'm so used to DDG that using Google feels somewhat awkward.

I really like the !bangs and the instant answers are good enough. I can find, anythings I looking for, using DDG just as fast (if not faster) as I would using Google.
> BTC is worth thousands of dollars, so if everyone starts using BTC will people pay irrational fractions of BTC for bread and milk at the supermarket?

This is moot until/unless BTC undergoes significant changes. It's not suited for this kind of transaction at all, IMO.

But let's say confirmation times were orders of magnitude faster and we wanted to cross the threshold to supermarket transactions. I think we'd still denominate the purchases in the local fiat currency anyways. The only way this would change is if producers and distributors had their costs anchored in BTC. But this seems very unlikely to occur in the next decade.
Techmeme summary: Benchmark Capital sues Travis Kalanick for fraud, wants invalidation of the June 2016 stockholder vote to expand board, which would also remove him from board
The Revision History shows that Apple is not really interested anymore in people doing kernel programming.
Will it? Half the point about how blockchains work is that dropping blockchains which are shorter than mainline is standard operating procedure and completely ordinary.

People holding cryptocurrency would notice an illegitimate takeover of the blockchain right away because they'd be trying to spend cryptocoin which, all of a sudden, they no longer have. But regulators aren't trying to tally up business inventory on their own ledger so that they can send it off to other parts of the business and all of a sudden that kind of logistics fails for the regulator because of what you called "funny business". A regulator is a passive observer, and a passive observer can't detect funny business without actively auditing the blockchain against their perceived notion of whether the current state of the blockchain is normative... which is a very difficult problem indeed to do at scale, one which regulators today haven't yet been able to really automate, even with the relative certainty of a database (which a regulator could order regular dumps of, for analysis, if it wanted to).
> Many employees felt intimidated and that they now had to prove in a work setting that they are not "more neurotic on average than men".

Since we can't read minds, we don't know how they felt. We only know that they said they felt that way. When you believe it is for a higher cause - like fighting the patriarchy - lying about your feelings is a minor consideration.

Witness how many of these identity activists lie about being pushed, lie about having their space invaded to accomplish their ends:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xRlRAyulN4o

Not a single one of them says "Hey, no, lying isn't right." The collective values of that massive group of identity activists has no regard for truth, on this level.

We can't deny that there is cultural overlap between the identity activists in this video, and the identity activists currently working at Google.
And yet it seems some are saying that the idea that smoking might cause blood pressure problems is preposterous because the smoke comes from marijuana.

With the 60 or so cannabinoids (http://medicalmarijuana.procon.org/view.answers.php?question...) and 50 or so hydrocarbons there seems like a lot of scope for causing health issues. Especially given cannabis smoke is more carcinogenic than tobacco smoke.

None of that necessarily provides a reason to ban marijuana but it may give people reason to switch to safer modes of consumption, or taking of only specific active compounds.
Here's one: https://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2005/08/10/professor_limb...

And another: http://www.newsweek.com/ozone-hole-our-heads-194308

It precisely matches my recollection, as someone who spent far too long listening to Mr. Limbaugh at the time.
Enter Afrika’s Largest Tech Startup Competition
Looks like they updated the image? Now I'm curious what they were using before.
The part of a block depending on the hashes of its ancestors seems very useful for tamper-evidence, which is useful in many applications if you can handle the data model & volume. Being able to definitively say who changed what and when is worth a lot if you have to maintain data which could be used in court and a distributed ledger, Merkle tree, etc. is more predictable and much cheaper to run if you don't have to maintain mining-level infrastructure.
There is an ongoing debate about how similar the Universe is to the brain. Astrophysicist Franco Vazza, along with a neuroscientist recently conducted a quantitative analysis which adds more evidence of the unusual similarities.
Side note: whatever happened to article-sized advertising from computer periodicals? Just like this one, they actually manage to be informative while remaining sober and honest about their intention. Not to mention it includes enough prose to develop a serious flow and style.. you can't fit that into a banner ad
We'd have to figure out how to get the earth spinning beyond the escape velocity of the Sun. So, probably not just by manipulating the orbit of the moon.
There actually were some political attempts by DuPont to stop the Montreal Protocol's anti-CFC measures, but they weren't successful:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montreal_Protocol

> Also in 1985, 20 nations, including most of the major CFC producers, signed the Vienna Convention, which established a framework for negotiating international regulations on ozone-depleting substances. After the discovery of the ozone hole it only took 18 months to reach a binding agreement in Montreal. But the CFC industry did not give up that easily. As late as 1986, the Alliance for Responsible CFC Policy (an association representing the CFC industry founded by DuPont) was still arguing that the science was too uncertain to justify any action. In 1987, DuPont testified before the US Congress that "We believe there is no imminent crisis that demands unilateral regulation."[21] And even in March 1988, Du Pont Chair Richard E. Heckert would write in a letter to the United States Senate, "we will not produce a product unless it can be made, used, handled and disposed of safely and consistent with appropriate safety, health and environmental quality criteria. At the moment, scientific evidence does not point to the need for dramatic CFC emission reductions. There is no available measure of the contribution of CFCs to any observed ozone change..."
Relevant?: http://evonomics.com/amazon-accounting-corporate-profits-ric...
The government saved the banks, but who will save the government? [video]
Lesotho's Military Visits China for Drone Technology Exchange
Ask HN: What's your opinion, implicit vs. explicit?
The Zen of Python states "Explicit is better than implicit."

In [this article](http://www.paulgraham.com/popular.html), PG states that "Anything that can be implicit, should be." The context is about the brevity of code.

In general, I'm a fan of brevity, but I also dislike overly complicated code - by that I mean, code that is difficult to read. I'd like to hear opinions and ideas about how you balance these opposing ideas when you're writing code. My personal context is the Python language.
> If it can’t find funding or a buyer, SoundCloud could vaporize, destroying its massive archive of user-uploaded music, podcasts and other sounds.

Wrong. If Soundcloud goes bankrupt then the state tries to find a buyer for a new SoundCloud with a virgin cap table. So Soundcloud won't disappear whatever happens.
The TL;DR of this article is the author dislikes the taxing basis put in place by the legislature and is blaming Amazon for paying taxes legally based on that.

Never mind the 65,000 employees in Europe who presumably do pay income taxes, sales taxes, property taxes, and more based on the fact that they have their income from their employer.

If someone wants to argue for a 1% or 2% revenue tax rather than a much higher rate but only on profits, that's the argument to make. Don't blame the players for playing by broken rules.
Five years after flunking our YC interview
To be fair, the UX is a mess. The mobile experience is horrible and always tries to drag you to the app (which is not great), and SC is constantly trying to push the "social" aspect. I can't filter out "shares" or whatever from my feed, which means instead of listening to the artists I like, I end up listening to a bunch of random crap they share.
Now that I exercise my memory of things past, I seem to recall that VB6 had "Function" and "Sub", too, which had essentially the same distinction, except there were some further differences if you ever tried to write Office macros.

I never did voluntarily, because "real programmers" just didn't do that. But there was always some legacy POS written by a non-software person--who no longer works for the company, of course--that had been embedded into an Excel spreadsheet and never once tasted source control, but it was somehow critical to the business, anyway, and you might have been assigned the task of figuring out what it did and turning it into "real code".

While I have a low sample size, it seemed like those reduced from about 10 MB of godawful brute-force spaghettified spreadsheet macro, down to about 10 lines of Java or C#, using algorithms and basic library functions. The hardest part is convincing your boss's boss that they both do the same thing, because the guy who wrote the macro spent so much time on it that there's just no way it could actually be so simple.

As I favor considering aptitude in addition to skill, asking gotcha questions about jargon or syntax doesn't seem fair to someone who could hear that 4-word explanation and instantly understand what you meant.
But what would come of it? We're not going to build a spaceship and go there on the off chance it's interesting. We're a LONG way away from exploring deep space.
Ideally most of them won't care what other people think about them. That's not something to be spending much thinking power on anyway.

There's nothing wrong with making tech that can communicate to a larger audience than "people in tech".
It's been around a while, but I looked into it and it looks like it's based on the type of account you have[0]. I've only had the accounts that had spending limits as an option. I'd imagine a lot of people are on Pay-As-You-Go, so many people won't have the ability to set spending limits. Frustrating that they would lock these features behind different plans.

[1] https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/support/legal/offer-detail...
I think crying and screaming, saying "women will be killed now" and "I might as well give up [on my PhD] because this is the end" is an overreaction, yes. I don't think many people cried and were ever-so-distraught because of climate change being mocked, or Trump's twitter. No, they bought into the whole "literal Hitler" nonsense, and truthfully thought we'd have violence all over, like Right Wing Death Squads.
The coast-to-coast eclipse that disappointed and delighted
Kafka connect Elastic sink connector with just in time index/delete behavior
How do you handle the traffic? How much does this cost you to run?
No, but I find it's a lot more fluid when it is. Talking with a white board is much more time-efficient than typing aside from exchanging code/logs/etc, and why go through the trouble of video conference/screen share with all the myriad of things that can go wrong when I can just walk over to someone's desk (or have them walk over to mine) and point at the screen/draw on the white board? Even in individual offices I'd still rather walk over or have people walk over to me. Slack and such have the advantage when it comes to location flexibility/distributed workforce, but for effective active collaboration co-location is still king IMO. At the end of the day you're having a human conversation with someone, no point in adding unnecessary layers.

I think too many developers have a "shut up and let me code" mentality that ironically hurts their progress in any collaborative effort.
Perhaps the commentor is referring to the fact they don't need investors?? Not sure though.
And on top of that, it sounds like Microsoft ditched most/all of the proof-of-work, because the nodes are trusted and the proof-of-work increased transaction times. So it sounds like whether Coco is actually a blockchain or a distributed database which has been branded as a blockchain because blockchains are FotM, is debatable.
If your definition of clearing is that they can't be reversed then nothing that isn't a crypto currency allows it. That's not the usual definition of transaction clearing though.
What point is the author trying to state? "I don't understand tax bills"? It's meant to be deceptive and garner clicks. The author presents the full and complete story in the body of the text: "pre-tax profit of €59.6m last year" and "a tax of €16.5m". That's "only" a 30% tax rate. And not a story worth reading.
Fair point.

Maybe a limit on how many streams/month that could be lifted for a certain fee?

Regardless - point is I think there are ways to monetize this enough to keep it running. I doubt any streaming service will ever be a cash cow but I'm sure there are ways to keep them running.
Direct link to complaint: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3922911-67730336-DE-...
Companies are greedy, taxes are ultimately paid by consumers - should a tax become higher for amazon or any other company, they will immediately raise the prices of their products to compensate the profit losses.
This in so many ways, this. I have a bunch of ideas. If you can build stuff, we should talk. lol
Is this sarcasm? As far as I’m aware, jobs at even large successful software companies rarely pay that well. Perhaps super high level engineers at Google or FB but a very small subset of developers would have this opportunity.
Universal Avionics provides their Engineers private offices. It was important to the founder of the company, so when a new building was constructed it was specifically arranged to provide as many offices as possible, even if some are internal (no outside window).
Making websites like this: http://javascriptbythekilogram.online/

Though I can't really take the credit on this one, I just had the idea.
Cross-core communication
https://thefeed.press/

Built for personal use. Not currently making any money but hope to monetise sometime later.
What is War?
Bezos doesn't have to pay anything on the 10s of billions worth of unrealized gains in AMZN stock either. Income taxes discourage generation of income and sales taxes discourage consumption. Wealth taxes are harder to dodge this way and should make up more of the tax revenues.
I made and maintain https://transparentmetric.com/

I find it fascinating watching the changes made to news articles over time. It lets you get into the mind of the various journalists and editors at different news organisations and see how they react to things. I just wish I had more time to develop it further.
For designers who need to be able to order products for a long time, Intel does offer an embedded design roadmap. But, ultimately you're just paying higher prices to get them to carry inventory instead of you. ;)

IIRC that roadmap is definitely available for super high margin Xeons. I'd be kinda surprised if they didn't have some Atom SKUs on there though.
Similar experience where I work (FFRDC). Most people have their own offices, although some of the more desirable offices (ones with windows that are also bigger than interior offices) are shared. It does get a little sardinelike in summer when interns need somewhere to go.
No, there is an objective difference -- the difference between "a crime was committed" and "a crime was not committed."

For any other crime, there is no question that the action is criminal -- it's only a question of whether the defendant intended to/conspired to/did commit it.

However, when intention is the only crime and the action is perfectly fine unless the perpetrator had a certain thought when doing it, it's a thought crime, and not only are thought crimes much more impractical to regulate, but to even attempt to do so would impose a tremendous loss of privacy and freedom of expression upon society.

I'm all for addressing externalities in society, and perhaps there is an externality-centric justification for affirmative action/quota/discrimination laws. Perhaps certain types of publicly-traded corporations beyond a certain size can be considered public goods in certain ways and subject to such laws. However, when we cross into individual cases of thought-crimes, that is where the left has completely lost me.
Zsh 5.4.1 released
every other company that does pay taxes loses to amazon on this though.
Sure is: https://github.com/smtheard/ShowTracker

It's not too pretty in there, but it is functional (arguably) haha.
I second this, the mixes are my favorite part as well as DIY producers.

I would say focus on sets over tracks, and develop partnerships to stream exclusive live concert sets- would be really easy to scale if they focused on electronic first as those sets are easy to record/stream.
Of course at 0.9c, the non dilated travel time is 22 years, brought down to less than 10 years due to time dilation.
If you want a more robust parser I made scripts to export Messenger and Hangouts chat logs to dataframes for a previous project: https://github.com/MasterScrat/ChatShape

It will give you rows with : [timestamp, interlocutorName, messageSenderName, text]
> employees secretly using Spotify.

Well yeah. There's not even competition there. And shouldn't be really, they are fundamentally different platforms.
Can I make a backup and export/import my bookmarks here?
Bleeding edge? This is just a loud speaker system.