skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> For a moment, I want you to be as profoundly skeptical as you can. For example, you cannot be certain that matter, space, etc. exist. This could all be a dream, or illusion, or simulation, etc.

Totally with you on this.

> What is it I'm certain of? It's the happening-ness of it. Put another way, my conscious experience of it. To say "it is happening" is to say "I am conscious of it."

Still with you. Although being skeptical, I would say we should be quite careful in how much we are implying with a phrase like "I am conscious of it".

> In this sense, "sound" refers to a particular modulation of this property called "consciousness," almost as though (get ready for woo!) consciousness were an energetic property that manifests as sight, sound, smells, thoughts, emotions, memories, etc.

Thanks for the "woo" warning :). This is definitely where you lose me! I can't find any reason to make that jump. I don't see how that conclusion follows, or what reason there is to think that is the case.

For me, it is much simpler to assume (with some fundamental caveats) that what we see is what we get, especially if we are able to test it from many different angles and with many different tools of measurement. I understand that these tools are limited, but they can still tell us a great deal. In the domains where science can't make strong statements, I willingly lean back on accumulated human wisdom (but with a skeptical eye).

At the end of the day, I try to discard as many unsupported assumptions or beliefs as I can when constructing my worldview , to the best of my ability.

> Why couldn't the whole above story be some nonsense my (real, physical) brain is concocting?

This is a very good question. Cheers!
It appears that your version has non-ascii quotes as well.
Just do an internet search for "prime day scam", or something to that effect. The FTC has been investigating Amazon for their price deception tactics: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-whole-foods-m-a-amazon-ft...

Here's more on the report: http://www.consumerwatchdog.org/story/your-amazon-sale-item-...
First employee of a major exchange here. You were correct a few years ago, but it's not strictly true anymore. Some oversight and accountability comes from the VCs that own them and sit on the boards, some from the compliance requirements of banks they work with to obtain financial connectivity, and some from people they outsource customer onboarding to or work with for additional financial settlement options. Also, third party penetration testing should be common by now. There is also something to be said for "zero legacy infrastructure", from a security perspective.
Not if laws weren't broken with the meddling. Buying ads and making fake news sites isn't necessarily illegal, and we shouldn't expect FB to police something that's not illegal.
Totally agree. I work for a 2000+ people company and we have over 2000 channels. Slack just doesn't work well for that size.
China does a similar thing with agriculture. Huge plots of land in Australia and New Zealand are controlled by Chinese farming companies and staffed by Chinese. All the food they produce goes back to China.
Atlassian is about to replace Hipchat with Stride.

But the real competition is Google or MSFT, since they have email and docs deployed to just about everyone and can try to capture that attention by offering something _just_ good enough for a lot less.

At Slack Frontiers last week (their first ever conference), they had a number of speakers from large orgs that use Slack, including Fox and Oracle. That size business is probably what they're working hardest to capture.
I believe some university was working on a computer vision-based adblock.
> So if the VC money is there for the taking, why not?

Disclaimer: I am not a startup founder. I am not an investor. I have zero knowledge about how these things work besides from what I've read here. That being said, I thought the meta for raising money was (is?) that you don't raise money if you don't need it or don't anticipate you will need it?

I mean if you're Dropbox, you have massive infrastructure spending even in your early years that means as you get people to learn to embrace "the cloud" in early 2009, success is you have tons of users who use your product for free with a small fraction converting to a paid account and a smaller fraction using it at work (fancier paid account) I can understand the need to raise money. However, I thought raising money means the founders lose control of the majority of shares. My understanding is if you don't need the money, don't raise it because it is a liability. I can't imagine slack's infrastructure spending being anything near dropbox's (or maybe I am wrong?)

Now that I think about it again, I am sure I have made a mistake somewhere in my assumptions. I'd love to be corrected. Thanks

Edit: How did Snapchat and Uber founders manage to retain control even after many rounds of funding? Is that applicable here? Can I use the same thing if I ever become a founder?
Sure, and for the second year in a row, the Amazon website told me a price for a deal, told me the deal was still available, and then wouldn't let me purchase it.

Overall things went well for Amazon, but flawless? I think not.
The problem is not the complexity of a computer.

A child can learn complexity.

The problem is, in fact, limiting a computer's complexity.

The lower the barrier of entry for creation, the sooner one can learn to create.

The second problem is media.

You can use paper as a tool for media consumption, or for creativity. Media can come printed on the page. Creativity, however, requires a pen.

What Apple and others have done is create a platform that favors media consumption, and limits what a user's "pen" can do.
Actually, I believe that all states end up the same :(
However, only a depth map is accessible by developers. The raw sensor data is not.
Their measurement and TPM support is probably the best in the industry at the moment. Matthew Garrett worked for them on this, and effectively you can have completely measured boot of a system and the containers running on it. With IMA this would allow you to have systems that cannot run binaries that are not signed (the kernel simply wouldn't allow it).
> It is Apple who pioneered this concept of the device that the user really does not own or control - the "smartphone".

Oh bullshit! Microsoft and other companies shipped user-hostile EULAs for years before smartphones existed (let alone the iPhone). These shrink-wrap licenses used this concept for years, and there were probably others before them.
Yeah the WebRTC repo is basically awful to try to build. tbf though that's not entirely out of line with other open source projects from Google. You get to have fun tearing it out of Chromium and experimenting until it works...
"ascii" the codec does exist under python. It's strictly defined as byte values 0-127, anything in the 128-255 range causes a decoding error...

>>> b"abc\xf0".decode("ascii")
UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xf0 in position 3

Thus, moving the default from "ascii" to an ASCII-superset should have no decoding issues for previously valid files, since those bytes were never valid to start with.
> On the programming side, dependent types maybe.

Have you learned about monads yet?
>Also, it's pretty personal info: in the event that one or more of the ad buyers grouped into the list really was a private citizen with no affiliation to any government, is Facebook in the right to publicize who they are and which ads they purchased?

Shouldn't Facebook be verifying who is real and who isn't? For tax + many and I mean many other reasons... shouldn't they verify exactly who is giving them money?

Secondly for all of the fakes, there is absolutely zero privacy concerns. No fucks given for those that meddled in our election process. They should all be extradited and thrown in our jails.
25x sales - high but seems reasonable for high growth b2b saas with network effect. you were expecting more or less? not clear from your qtn
So why would you need slack then in the first place?
I do Eli 5s every day:

Mining makes the battery die quicker.

They are mining to make money so they can buy food.

A silly man pays the bad man money for the tiny baby numbers they find in your phone when they mine it.

You can still watch Frozen. The battery isn't dead yet.
It is good for security research, since that introduces so many security holes of such wonderful diversity that there is a much larger ecosystem to study.
Study: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/psyp.12990/abstra...

The sample for the experiment is N = 40
Richard Dawkins on freedom of speech
I enjoy literate programming in part for some of the benefits this article describes. Even if the documentation is separate from the program, sometimes escaping into writing for a while provides a sufficient amount of relief to just get back into hacking. Since the matter is related to the task at hand, it also helps me to organize my thoughts and be better prepared (and therefore less stressed) to re-introduce myself to the problem.

I also use hand-written notes. This allows me to escape a screen entirely, write candidly about whatever I please, and naturally reform the stress into something workable.
Sorry, but how is that any more non-electronic than storing your ATM PIN in a safe? Given that the weakest security link is invariably human.
Pushing countries deeper into debt, even inadvertently, may give China leverage in the short run, but it risks losing the good will essential to OBOR’s long-term success. For all the big projects China is engaged in around the world — high-speed rail in Laos, a military base in Djibouti, highways in Kenya — arguably its most perilous step so far may be taking control of the foundering Hambantota port.

This is a good point to make, but sadly one that isn't being made by the US atm.

It's pretty clear what's going to happen with this airport: To relieve its debt crisis, Sri Lanka has put its white elephants up for sale. In late July, the government agreed to give China control of the deepwater port — a 70 percent equity stake over 99 years — in exchange for writing off $1.1 billion of the island’s debt

Just imagine what China will give for an Indian-ocean airbase in Sri Lanka to go with the base they have in Djibouti[1]. Sri Lanka will keep trying to play China, India and the US off against each other[2], but it's pretty clear to everyone that the "string of pearls" strategy is working well for China at the moment.

[1] https://warontherocks.com/2017/08/chinas-military-base-in-dj...

[2] https://warontherocks.com/2017/03/sri-lanka-is-not-chinas-pe...
You don't, but have little choice when it's foisted on you.

If you're a knowledge/tech company, would you let me put a device in your worker's workspace that emitted an annoying noise randomly ever 5-15 minutes, interrupting them and causing them to spend time regaining their focus on that ask they were working on? Probably not, but orgs are handing money over hand over fist to Slack for the privilege of enabling this.

Knowledge Productivity Diagram Example: https://i.imgur.com/sAdZ63y.jpg
Ask yourself why the NYT didn’t mention Trump by name. Give up? Maybe they weren’t talking about him specifically.
It's entirely possible that keeping your money out of Coinbase was the correct ex ante advice, despite their subsequent success. They may well have gotten lucky and succeeded (at least so far) despite their experience.

I don't have any particular knowledge or experience with CB or BTC in general. Just pointing out that it's possible success was despite great risk, and the advice to avoid may have been entirely correct given the evidence at the time.
Yeah, I agree - just adding a caveat to your caveat.

Personally I found the whole article very skippable. None of it is necessarily terrible advice, but everything is overstated, and said without really explaining why its advice better than the alternatives.
So what? I still got a 500 error while trying to process an order and when I refreshed - sold out. "60% of the time - it works every time" is only good for Panther scented cologne.

12,900,000 / second - WOW. Too bad the request rate was probably closer to 15,000,000 / second and you just abandoned everyone else.
> that you don't raise money if you don't need it or don't anticipate you will need it?

Slack anticipates they might need the money in the future.
> I think this bet was largely a bet on the broader market dropping after a long run-up

Well the bet included the 2008 crisis. That looks like even this theory is contradicted.
So ... other countries are watching this carefully I assume. And waiting to hit Facebook with their own requests for similar ads run in their countries which were paid for in USD?

I am hoping, as an individual, for this to all come out because I expect the scope to be really interesting.
Pro tip: startups often hire tons of people just to boost their valuations in the next round. So the number of employees is never the whole story.
Yeah, it's hedgy.
This seems good and bad. The prospect of a new, modern operating system is exciting. The system call interface is sensible and it follows modern security best practices (eg. deny-by-default.)

One practical disadvantage compared to Linux is that it's not GPL, so if Google uses it to make a mainstream mobile phone operating system, other vendors won't be compelled to release their kernel sources like they are with Android today, which means a Fuchsia equivalent to LineageOS might not support as many devices.

Also, capability-based security is fine as long as there's some way for the owner of the device to acquire all capabilities. If there is not, it's fundamentally anti-user, since it's treating the user as an adversary. Since most Android devices require aftermarket modifications to get root access, I'm not too hopeful about Fuchsia. If these bullet points are anything to go by and DRM and verified boot are first-class features, it's likely that Fuchsia will have built-in mechanisms that prevent the user from copying protected video content, so it's unlikely that the average Fuchsia powered device would grant the user full privileges.
The Holodomor wasn't an attempt to enforce power, it was a genuine attempt to modernise agriculture by forcing the change to happen.
Geography isn't all that useful here, either, as long as it's not so extreme as to eliminate the anchor city's ability to wield economic influence (at which point, by definition, the region in question would no longer be in the same MSA as the anchor city).

All we're trying to do here is come up with some way to compare cities that doesn't rely on the political and geographical borders that vary dramatically between regions. Why is Brooklyn part of NYC but West New York isn't? Why isn't East St. Louis in St. Louis? Why is Kansas City, KS something different from Kansas City, MO? Why does NYC get to claim Queens, but SFO doesn't get to claim Oakland?

When Indianapolis politically joined with its surrounding county in 1970 to form Unigov, did something actually change about Indianapolis that justifies moving it around in regional rankings? Or is it the same as it was the day before, when those were two separate entities?

The answers to those questions (or, really, the questions themselves) mostly confuse regional comparisons. If we want clarity, then we need something else. The MSA is usually a pretty good stand in. (But it's not the only one. What's important is just that you're aware of the core issue and try to account for it. Making anchor-city to anchor-city comparisons using only the borders of the anchor cities is almost always the worst means of comparison. Any measure that leads you believe that Austin, TX is "bigger" than Boston is a pretty bad one.)
I'm surprised nobody's brought up the US real estate market parallels. Arguably China is already in a position to exert significant influence over multiple markets in the US with nothing more than threats - real or implied - of enacting currency controls. Entire markets - if not the entire RE market in the US - would collapse overnight if China decided to prohibit the free flow of money into US properties.
It seems like companies exist nowadays to raise funding. Not to be profitable businesses. Say they go IPO soon after, where does the money come to actually run the company? Is there a designated pool of shares for that? Do they buy back the shares then?
> crazy sights like a 20 lane highway (with almost no cars)

When Top Gear went they stopped to have a game of football in the middle of the road https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8uwTnP8ioiU
Probably, but a big problem with structured light is the inverse square law. You need a lot more power to recover depth of far objects -- this is why all the Project Tango phones are yuuuge and not selling too well.

There are ways around the inverse square law (such as projecting a single/few laser beams) but the hardware becomes slower and more complicated.
>"Rights to be forgotten" is another peculiar notion popular in some TV propaganda driven Western countries loving makeovers. Keep on rocking in the free world while it lasts.

Right to be forgotten isn't peculiar and neither is it at all related to "makeover" TV programmes or freedom.

Right to be forgotten is about have a right to your own information. Collecting information doesn't give you a right to it. Something being publicly available doesn't make it actually public.
Can anyone summarise what Facebook are being accused of here? That they were careless not reviewing ads like these or something worse?

I'd be interested to know the content of the ads especially if people are claiming these somehow helped swing the election.
Is there a way to pattern match against a set of requirements, like relative contrast or color difference?
So... back to Ethernet?
Sorry, no, you can't burn my CPU cycles and drain my battery for money. Full stop, end of story, thanks for playing, etc, etc. I still own my computer, and I couldn't care less about your innovative new business model. Just, no.
The problem it solves is reducing friction on checkout.

One of the problems it creates is increasing the attack vector on an account holder by storing sensitive transaction information locally.
‘Tez’: Google’s new digital payment app for India
30 Heart Touching Sad Love Quotes That Make You Cry [Infographic] – Statree
They've had several blog posts in the last year. It's a long-term project so I would't be surprised if progress is slow.
Why does everyone call it Mount Gox or Mt Gox when it was the Magic the Gathering Online Exchange?
I have been working on writing my own OS in rust for the past few months, and the main thing I have had the most difficulty with is Rust itself. The package management is so much better than C, dependencies are easier, and it was honestly easier to get working compared to C++. The fact that they nicely have separated rust core and std so that I don't have to deal with things randomly breaking because of something I haven't implemented. The abstractions that Rust offers I don't feel suffer the same problems as C++ because they are much more straightforward to use and just make sense from an object oriented programming perspective.

Rust itself is so inherently different from other a language like C that it takes a long time to truly understanding lifetimes and the borrow checker to the point where you are actually making use of the languages features.

The straightforwardness of C is really where it shines, and for me at least Rusts biggest upside is also its biggest downside, because learning to write good Rust is not an easy process.
Construction of the airport this article concerns was finished in 2009

2009 was when the civil war finished. The airport was completed in 2013[1] (although I don't think that is material to your point).

The issue isn't specifically the construction of the airport, it was more the leasing of the Hambantota port to China. That occurred in July this year and didn't seem to have any comment form the US State Department (as far as I can see) despite the US "Pivot to Asia" and the aggressive Chinese building in the South China Sea.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mattala_Rajapaksa_Internationa...

[2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/wadeshepard/2017/07/27/china-bu...
Out of all the software this validly applies to, Slack has the most solid business model I've seen in software since Microsoft Office. Almost every modern organization is inclined to stress over whether $6.66 / user / month is worth the price of the substantially enhanced collaboration Slack provides for anywhere between small teams and 1000+ - person companies.

Not a Slack employee or anything, just love the software.
Systems working as designed (by humans.)

Reminds me of that Antares (edit: nope, it was the Ariane V) rocket that veered off and exploded because of an overflow. Something about casting between float/int. Although I don't think anyone died from that particular error, which also wasn't intended to hurt anyone.

But I mean, what do you say if you're in charge of something really expensive and it explodes unexpectedly? "Whoops - sorry, boss?" Or I guess in this case, "gurgle gurgle squelch."
All this and I still can't use Screenhero on Ubuntu? Way to destroy a useful platform for the open source community, Slack.
> Unlike Chrome, Firefox will apparently not send data about what you purchase back to Mozilla.

It sounds like something has been lost in translation. If not, Marcos is conflating two very different things.

If you use Payment Request in Chrome with Google Wallet or Android Pay then yes, Google is going to have a description of what you bought and where you bought it. But you used their payment service. This is no different to what PayPal or a dozen other payment services are doing.

If you use Payment Request in Chrome as a replacement for auto-fill - that is, you're just using it with regular card numbers, or with another non-Google payment instrument then nothing is being sent back to Google. Go check the source code, it's all implemented in Chromium (indeed, other Chrome based browsers that integrated Payment Request like Samsung's own mobile browser or AliPay are using Google's implementation).

The reason that the standard asks for a description of what you bought is that it's useful to display to the user in a standardized way as part of the payment process so you can reconfirm exactly what it is you're paying for.

I sat on the Payment Request Working Group until about three months ago and I didn't hear any of these concerns from Mozilla then. I don't really know what Marcos has been saying, and since the talk itself isn't online I'm going to assume he's been mis-quoted.
The USA doesn't have freedom of speech in any meaningful sense. You only have to look at the way peaceful protestors are treated to see that. The Occupy Wall Street protesters were treated horrifically.

As more and more formerly public places are privatised and the veneration of private property as an ideal above all others continues, the USA is simply running out of places where you're even allowed to protest. And that's not even considering so-called 'free speech zones', as if free speech is limited to a fucking place.

This is free speech: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hikoi#/media/File:Hikoi_FS.JPG

In the USA these people would be arrested for blocking a road.
I like their product, but evoking the founding fathers of the US and MLK in talking about a more secure OS seems a bit much.
lawful means must be taken to defend what is left of freedom of speech

...and some may argue, even unlawful means; including one of the founders of the USA:

"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." - Thomas Jefferson

It's surprising how extremist that quote sounds today --- ask a random US citizen what they think of it, without revealing its author, and you'd probably receive some pretty disappointing answers.
"Here’s How Unicorns Trick You Into Thinking They’re Real"
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-08-02/the-magic...