skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
From Wikipedia:

> A company town is a place where practically all stores and housing are owned by the one company that is also the main employer.

From the article:

> Amazon now occupies a mind-boggling 19 percent of all prime office space in the city

True company towns are known for an abusive power dynamic where employers, by controlling employees' income and expenses simultaneously, can force them into debt and make them unable to leave. It's a sort of societal anti-pattern, which our culture recognized and gave a name to. But Amazon in Seattle doesn't fit that antipattern, because it doesn't control its employees' housing or other expenses. I'd rather we didn't dilute the "company town" phrase to refer to cases where a company merely owns lots of office space.
I'm not downplaying luck's role in my life so much as I'm downplaying my role as my own worst enemy.
People in this thread seem to be overreacting like my immune system on strawberries....

Apple isn't taking up the good fight against AMP. They're simply removing it from URLs when those are shared via the build-in "share" functionality.

99% of interactions with AMP pages will see no impact. It seems like it should be uncontroversial that it is preferable to use the canonical non-AMP URI when sharing, so as to invoke content-negotiation between that page and the devise of whoever clicks on the shared link.
Well if we want to be really pedantic then WW1 and WW2 are better examples then those you give.
the un has 193 members and there are still 54 countries that aren't a member of the un, so, it might be possible that they have that many nationalities, but I doubt that this is untrue.
People claimed the iPhone was doomed-- even after it was shipping-- because Apple couldn't "just waltz in and start making phones".

Apple is not going to produce a gas automobile, but an electric one.

An electric car is a lot closer to a computer in terms of supply chain, than it is to a gas car.
> how is this possible when it's garbage collected?

Common Lisp lets you give "hints" to the garbage collector, so you end up with pretty much what you'd have in C but without the manual memory management.

> Is there a certain Lisp you would recommend that's practical enough I'd use it for projects?

Racket is very nice and comes with great documentation, a huge standard library and a very handy IDE. Clojure was hyped a lot so it has lots of libraries, which however might be of dubious quality or unmaintained by now, and it's on the JVM, which might or might not be a good thing for you. Common Lisp is very versatile and "pragmatic", but lacking in external libraries.
Totally. Also…

> AWS is too low level

It seems very strange to paint AWS with such a broad brush, considering that AWS has tons of services at various levels of abstraction (including high-level abstractions like Elastic Beanstalk and AWS Lambda).
I love Apple the most when they throw their weight around for the benefit of the end user. It's pretty clear that Google's main concern is ads ads ads.

Apple already has my money, they focus 110% on making my life easier and their products fantastic. Go Apple!
In comparison, Apple occupies about 70 percent of Cupertino’s commercial real estate. Though Cupertino isn't a "major U.S. city" so Seattle Times' claim stills stands.
You are not WholeFoods' market.
Obviously I don't foresee Amazon tanking any time soon, but if/when they do I can't imagine how it'd do anything other than ruin Seattle, just like the exodus of automobile manufacturers started the decline of Detroit in the '50s.
very interesting point. For me the best way to learn was to do problem sets and be able to immediately check and fix my answers - to have the freedom to make mistakes and learn from them in a low stakes environment.

I had a few classes where the professor provided both a list of recommended problems in the text, as well as an answer key. The grading was solely off of tests. Circumvents the cheating problem and tries to avoid punishing you for making mistakes while learning.
All student loans should be subject to income-based repayment. They can still be very difficult/impossible to discharge in bankruptcy, but you shouldn't have to make significant payments on them unless you're actually making decent money.
Tell that to farmers, grocers, restauranteurs, laboratories, chemists, and many many other industries. Those problems are real, and they need solving even if their profit margins are lower (which is not always true).
1) High end developers get paid a lot. Even in India and Russia.

2) As a rule of thumb consulting companies charge out at 3x wages.

It usually is more expensive to outsource to the top end than it is to do it in house even in Seattle or SF.
Can they simulate a hurricane?
There is a huge new "student ethics" bureaucracy to handle that stuff that never used to exist. In the past, if you got drunk and did something you later regretted, that was your problem, as it is for any adult in the real world.
> the rational thing

Perhaps that indicates that reason itself has some hardcoded fundamental limits.
Apparently over the years they have reduced administration, at least in some areas. Maybe now they are just slightly less bloated.

That said, some of the boat may have to do with government oversight for their research grants.
Commentary of Amazon becoming a behemoth aside, I'm intrigued by the future we will be living in where everything will be delivered to us.

Intrigued for two reasons:

1) I'm reminded of DFW's words about shopping at large stores playing 'soul-killing musac': https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CrOL-ydFMI#t=10m8s
This is going to make life easy for me. Grocery-shopping is stressful and time-consuming, I look forward to the day that I can do it all online without paying much extra.

2) Less people will need cars in the future of AmazonFresh/Grubhub/Blueapron. This is also why I love Uber pool incidentally... I feel like I'm saving the environment when I do that (vs. driving)! If you continue in this line of thinking, what you have is: one truck delivering 50 people their groceries via an optimized route vs. 50 cars traveling by stressed out people who are tired and just don't want to go the store. Less accidents, less pollution, less stress.

I am really looking forward to the future of optimized infrastructure for travel/transportation.
If you can convince marketers to stop loading up pages with nigh endless amounts of tracking, tag managers and dozens of ad units (from all different sources) then I'm sure we'd see an immediate increase in page performance. (I suspect many sites are already quite fast before they get weighed back down by marketing)

Let/encourage developers (front-end and back-end) to optimise for performance and I'm sure we'd all see fantastic gains! All without needing to feed Google even more than we already do.
AMP has always worked poorly on iOS...

This never made sense to me.

You can have natural scrolling, an accurate reader view, a working back button and other highly performant features in a mobile-optimized HTML and CSS standard like AMP. In fact, you practically have to go out of your way to break these things in the way that AMP does.

Why does AMP have to suck so much?
Technically, it is technically incorrect. There is no "speed of light", there is only "speed of light in [medium]".*

Therefore, interpretation #1 doesn't make sense.

Maybe colloquially people refer to the speed of light in vacuum as "the speed of light", but again, that is technically incorrect.

*And more technically there's group and phase velocity which may or may not be equal.
Isn't research a large part of what universities are for though?

I don't want to argue that tenure is the best system but it exists for a reason: so that those who have proved themselves can pursue research which is longer term and carries more risk. I don't think it makes sense to get rid of it without a proper replacement.

University is pretty much the only place where people can do truly long term research. The only exception I can think of is Microsoft Research and, besides being only limited to CS, I believe they've recently taken a turn to trying to align more with products.
This is one of the major reasons why I love Lisp so much. Serialization problems disappear in homoiconic languages. It eliminates an entire class of issues.
I mean, it's not like Apple is totally un-money-motivated here. It's pretty clear that they expect users to buy a new phone every 2 years.
This is the view of people who have not really looked at university budgets. "experiences" are cheap compared to headcount. Buildings and experiences are mainly funded by outside donation specifically for the experience or building. People do not often donate to "expand salaries and headcount for faculty and administrators".

The result is that students pay for headcount and donors pay for experiences. It isn't just administrative headcount, it is also teaching headcount. If you want a low price, you cannot have a $200,000 a year professor teaching 30 students and doing some research unless the research is funding their salary.

We need to lower the cost of colleges in the United States dramatically and that means tough choices, but it won't happen until we reach the point where student loan defaults are so prevalent that the federal gov can no longer subsidize them.

We have a crisis on our hands and our politicians are talking about lowering the cost of borrowing by 2%, and making colleges "free". They are not interested in driving down the real cost of an education.
Sure costs will go down. But as far as price goes that's my point, it doesn't feel like they want it to go down.

It keeps being priced and pitched as a premium organic healthy food and not something everyone can afford.
Stereotypes are not "just patterns". Google "stereotype" and the first definition is "a widely held but fixed and oversimplified image or idea of a particular type of person or thing.".

In this case, the machine is learning, for example, that women do dishes and men drink beer. This isn't based on empirical data and patterns. It comes from the data the algorithm is trained on, which in this case is "...more than 100,000 images of complex scenes drawn from the web, labeled with descriptions". Those descriptions inevitably reflect human stereotypes (which again aren't just patterns). "Both datasets contain many more images of men than women, and the objects and activities depicted with different genders show what the researchers call “significant” gender bias."

Should machines understand that men are more likely to be construction workers than women, I think so. But that doesn't mean that biased data is not a huge problem.

At the very least, we should strive to teach machines to understand the world as it is, not as we view it through flawed, biased eyes. Datasets generated by humans are going to be invariably flawed and far from reality, unless we take careful steps to ensure otherwise. Emphasizing the importance of these datasets, we should be particularly concerned when we are teaching machines to act based on our biases and find that (in the case of this article), the machine is actually learning to amplify our own biases.
I don't want to dox myself but about a year ago when my employer forgot to notify AWS about switching our production traffic (about 5K rps at that time) from one ELB to another we failed requests for several minutes before we decided to just switch back to the old ELB then ask them to do a prewarming before we switched again.
Ask HN: Why are compensation tiers secret?
Having them so gives the employer all the power as the employee negotiating an increase is left in the dark and with few tools. Not everyone has three offers in their pocket.

It’s annoying that things like Glassdoor have to exist. The economic principle at play is asymmetric information and it sucks.
Being forced to instead load some (almost universally awful) publisher site w/ 72 MB of JavaScript & CSS, absurdly intrusive ads popping up as you try to read, etc.... is an improved experience?
It took me a couple seconds to realize how utterly pessimistic that statement is.
Tight coupling ... or just s-expressions ;)
"Better" is a very subject term. "Loads faster" is fair. Google has made things load faster by forcing apps to be stripped down (nearly useless for anything outside landing page or news sites) and heavily caching them. Given the same constraints for any app, we could load and perform with similar characteristics. Furthermore, Google prioritizing AMP search results just because they use the technology, means Google should no longer be trusted as the "best" search results.
Really? Source?
Hmm, on the other hand it seems like a waste of time for professors to have to compile 100-200 page reports like that. Surely there are simpler heuristics for identifying egregiously lazy profs
What do you mean on Firefox? As far as I understood, you could only land on AMP pages if using google's search app or alike -- am I missing something?
Trump’s Border Security May Search Your Social Media by ‘Tone’
It happened in Seattle already with Boeing's decline in the 70s and 80s. That malaise is what spawned the 'grunge' music scene in the early 90s.
Look at any state university org chart from 30 years ago compared to today. The difference will be striking. Yes state subsidies are down, but administrative growth has also been accelerating.
I just created a new location on my MacBook's network settings, called it 'getitdoneland', and removed all the network services from it. Now my laptop has an 'airplane mode'. Thankfully, it takes just enough seconds for connectivity to return when I switch back to my regular location that I think I'll be dissuaded from distraction. Friction is good sometimes.
Back to work...
It also breaks saving URLs in evernote mobile!

Down with AMP!
Getting pro GCP articles to the top of HN must no-doubt be a high priority for the Google marketing team. This is the nature of modern advertising, sneakily trying to subvert your thinking by masquerading as something else.
Nope. I got into the career I got into on... mostly luck. It's one of the reasons I don't understand the cultural taboo of speaking about salary... it's not really a valid measure of self-worth, it's just drawing the right card from the deck.
I like this answer so much better than mine, I should go and delete mine! Ask any shopping site how many tracking pixels, analytics scripts, etc that they have included. They'll tell you they're all necessary.
> His death would trigger a tax event that we could not pay from our own resources, forcing a fire sale.

This just screams sht tax laws. Good tax laws don't wreck their major economic contributors.

The sad thing is I knew this was an American company based on that line alone.
Behemoth might be a little strong. I don't know how many of the employees are consulting/services vs product, but the total is 2300. They are also somewhat niche in their consulting. They won't do gigs that use stacks that compete with PCF for example, and have a very fixed model (your employees sit with them at the Pivotal shop)

I agree they've been successful.
Not breaking the back button should be #1 on every webpages priority list. If you break my back button I can almost guarantee I will stop using your site because in my mind the only sites that do that are spam/scams.
You don't see anything wrong with Google MITM everybody who uses their phone? It's terrible for the open web. The tradeoff is users loading the real pages that _may_ be heavy, but it's worth it.
A poor, high-SAT-score, STEM student will get scholarships, not loans.
But only one of them makes typical sense. Anyone trying to convey the other parsing is expected to clearly disambiguate it.
Only tangentially related to your post, but, two new traffic lights are being installed on the Wiggle. Haight is getting nine new lights, two of which are at Scott and Pierce. Maybe people will wiggle slightly differently to avoid the left turns at the lights.
The first paragraph:

> It is, I promise, worse than you think. If your anxiety about global warming is dominated by fears of sea-level rise, you are barely scratching the surface of what terrors are possible, even within the lifetime of a teenager today. And yet the swelling seas — and the cities they will drown — have so dominated the picture of global warming, and so overwhelmed our capacity for climate panic, that they have occluded our perception of other threats, many much closer at hand. Rising oceans are bad, in fact very bad; but fleeing the coastline will not be enough.
I find it disingenous to call meat grown in a lab clean meat. Would you call Margarine clean butter ?
Just a data point, but we have 7 kids and no allergies among them. We eat little processed foods and after school/weekends/summer the kids spend almost all their time outside. The downside is it takes longer to cook meals than just buy something pre-made and the kids need a bath every night because they come home filthy. The upside is no allergies?
Sorry to not add context. I was referring to the use case the author of article was talking about: running a website: You need to stitch: ELB / EC2 / Database / Caching / Service Splitting / Auth / Scaling / ... Where as on Google Cloud, App Engine covers most of the points.
Infiltration of Political Movements Is Norm, Not Exception in the USA (2012)
Later down he mentions it is specific for AMP.

https://twitter.com/jan4843/status/900416144955363328
I don't think the argument is that all 2,700 administrators are unneeded, but rather that everything would run as good (if not better) without that much administration bloat.
That's for the coldline class. It's all the same GCS system and the top multi-region class has 99.95% availability

https://cloud.google.com/storage/docs/storage-classes#compar...
I'm looking at the rendered image and the letter spacing seems vastly better than it is when rendered on the page (Freetype, Linux, with a few simple fontconfig improvements).
They aren't. They may get the AMP site on non-Google.
So... the estate tax is what you have a problem with?
If your content is valuable, why would you convert it into a Google format, upload it to Google servers, and allow them to serve it wrapped in a Google page?

Google should appreciate the ad revenue from linking to your valuable content. Don't give Google more control over your content.
I don't really understand this concern; this is a common strategy for introducing new products. When smartphones came out they were a premium product. Over time they became more accessible as the market grew beyond just the first adopters. They're arguably commoditized now, if we're thinking about super cheap Android phones.

Tesla is another example.

And economics should force price down, if the costs of manufactured protein decrease substantially.
It's like anything else in the world where you are making tradeoffs for an immediate benefit that you might not be amenable to if you knew all the details and the long term effects.
All new voice assistant subreddit
Welcome to hn :)
Except that isn't how font metrics work—the size of the type on the body is not necessarily equivalent between two different fonts. There is no stanard that says that 12pt Times shares any vertical metrics with 12pt Helvetica, or 12pt anything else.

The most informed comparision can be made when the x-height is optically equivalent. The other option, cap height, isn't as useful because it is then harder to judge the lowercase (a majority of the letterforms).
There's no reason to expire CSRF tokens after each request.
And i see the PR team is already out in force to sell this and defend what has already been sold.

We should really just move to BSD already and let them sink this ship.
1. David Foster Wallace is commenting how one has to do the work to manage stress and bias. That's the truth, you work for it. You running away the stress by deferring it to someone else to handle (the delivery person or the warehouse picker) undermines his whole point.

2. So now instead of 50 cars, it's 1 truck with 50 people's worth of individually packaged goods that gets trashed.

Cattle also feel pretty good about fed three times daily before getting slaughtered.
I know this is a bit trite, but if I'm just trying to read some news article, the fact that Google served it directly affects me basically nilch.

There are the publisher dynamics at play on a larger level, but the user experience is .... really good! Things are fast.

Perhaps someone should make some PaaS to help out all these publishers make fast AMP-ish pages, so they don't have to rely on Google to do it for them
My favorite browser?

Ability to set ceiling for memory usage and bandwidth per tab. It has traditional boxy 1990's style design, a traditional File, Edit, etc., none of this hamburger menu crap. It suspends or kills background tabs.

An empty browser uses 1MB of memory or less. A full browser never uses more than 256MB of memory.

In addition to JavaScript, it supports a compiled language out of the box, like Java, but open source, secure, and non-bloated.

It has "skinny goggles" which let you trim the fat from webpages, removing unnecessary CPU, bandwidth and memory usage while keeping the site readable.

Audio and video content is blocked in each tab until you specifically allow it.
AMP is horrible and should just be buried.
The universities that have highly paid coaches are the ones with premier, highly successful programs and earn way more from ticket sales, broadcast revenues, and merchandise than the coach is paid. It's like any other business (and it most definitely is a business), you need to pay well to attract the best talent.
Mind your generalizations there. I stated a PhD program because I wanted to do something about the poor preparation of my colleagues. I wanted to teach. But I learned to my chagrin that that's not what gets you hired, nor is it what gets you tenure. So I left academia once I got my degree. I don't think it's even true of all those who remain that they're there because they love research. Some of them are like me, but with more perseverence. Swimming against the tide, trying to teach.
I def see a lot more features that actually work in ice, that's for sure.
The game allows you to sync your game progress across multiple devices and it's subscription based so a CDN wouldn't do much help there.

Also, realtime multiplayer crosswords are coming! I'll be speaking at GothamGo this year about that exact topic.
Serverless is all about how to remove any recognition that the machine is a machine and spin up services with little or no fuss (i.e., getting rid of the need for skill and enabling McDonalds level automation of cooking/programming). As long as Google continues to do that, they're still in the game.
Not sure if you've been to South Lake Union recently (I live nearby) but I think it does fit that description, at least a modern version of it. TONS of Amazon employees live and work in SLU and very close and spend a large amount of their time there. There's a huge internal system of restaurants, cafes, and stores and of course Amazon's own dogfooded grocery stuff.

I mean it's pretty far from a scrip system at a mining town but they're capturing as much of the lives as possible of the people who work there for the two years or so they stick around on average.

So yeah, while it isn't a 'company town' by the original definition it's a modern interpretation of it. Of course Google, Microsoft, FB and others have the same idea - it's a great way to squeeze every drop out of your employees.
Maybe it's just part of getting old? I've never been lactose intolerant, but around the middle of my 40s I found that if I went to bed after eating a big bowl of ice cream I would wake up with heartburn in the middle of the night. I've learned to pop a few antacids after eating my ice cream before bed.
Unfortunately that is how you get clickbait and cookie cutter risk free sequels.