skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I knew something like that would come up, hence my use of "almost".

But I actually disagree with your example. I was expecting something like Dollar Shave Club to be used as a counterexample, where the entire value is arguably produced by marketing.

While I don't have metrics (and it is hard to even define a good metric to distinguish the leverage produced by marketing vs. excellent product development when they exist since day 1), I seriously doubt even Apple's 1984 ad had superlinear boost relative to the $ invested on it the ad had the product engineering was not good enough to sell itself.

In fact, I am not sure if it is fair to say the original Mac is an astounding commercial success relative to other computers at its time, unlike Apple II. I feel the ad was famous for its artistic value and post-hoc success of Apple, not much because it actually sold the product.

But back to the primary discussion, think about it this way: had Mac not been a revolutionary product that carried its weight, would that ad even meant anything? As in could you even sensibly run that ad for any product and expect good performance? (This is especially relevant since the ad is pretty abstract and non-product specific, so it is not crazy to imagine this hypothetical scenario.)
Co-founder of MPEG bemoans patent licensing issues
> Most companies, particularly most start-ups, suck at sales. "Great engineers, shit sales" is a more common failure mode in Silicon Valley than "sold something couldn't be built." Also, "good at sales" isn't a one dimensional metric. There are different sales processes, some of which some people (and consequently companies) are better at than others.

Bad, derivative products hocked by hopelessly deluded people playing startup accounts for most failures. Over promise and under deliver kills even more.

Few truly good products fail because even a bad sales team can sell a good company to a bigger company that can capitalize on the deal.
I love everything Star Trek, I watched it with my sister as a child and I remember thinking, this is the future when I grow up. As an adult I have to say I am disappointed we haven't advanced much in space travel and mostly that people still don't get along (Earth citizens vs country). Theres still hope for the future! Live Long and Prosper
You make it sound so easy to get into VT..
> Unless this gets prepackaged in major distros by default ala `nano`

Being written in Go, I don't see this as likely.
As others have noted, most "traditional" dedicated server hosters should have good offers.

Hetzner in Germany for example has 8 TB HDD with 32 GB RAM and a i7-6700 Quad-Core for ~55 USD per month.

edit: US hosters seem to be quite a bit more expensive. Does anyone know why there is such a difference?
Are kids not watching Mr. Rodgers these days ? That's really tragic. I think that was one of the best things on TV growing up, in retrospect. I'm biased however, having grown up with it, in Pittsburgh where its filmed.
Find some way of blinding schools from the individual financial background of applicants.
> What do you get for correctly calling the bubble in 3 years?

Well, if you knew when the bubble was bursting, then there would be no problem!
Your fingerprints are given in clear, from your fingertips to the sensor surface. You can add all the security in the world after the sensor, but you need to be able to trust it, because it has access to the raw data. Same for face ID - the very first piece of hardware capturing the data has to be trustworthy or the whole chain cannot be trusted.
Note that I am not focusing on "value" per se. I was focusing on leverage, i.e. where you can find a "multiplier", and arguing engineering is where you can find superlinear amplications of value.

It's really hard for me to imagine or come up with an anecdote where a sales process or marketing initiative has had more than a linear multiplier. It could be 10x, but even that is usually very big. Never exponential, or even quadratic (though in network effect businesses the quadratic amplification via marketing sometimes exists.)
The reason this argument doesn't hold water is because the underlying infrastructure supporting the company as a whole is just a commodity. There is nothing special about the food or the transportation or even the server infrastructure that the startup uses, it's all fungible and thus there is an efficient market around it.

But engineering and sales for a single product are inextricably linked. If engineering does not create a good product, that directly affects the success of the sales people; and vice versa if the sales team sucks then a great products potential value can go unrealized.
They already have parity, because they hold Seoul hostage with conventional weapons. Otherwise, there'd be no problem to talk about. But they also have every reason to seek more leverage.
It should be relatively easy using Free Pascal and its FreeVision text-mode UI toolkit. You get all the widgets, menus, scrollbars etc premade, complete with mouse support. They even have the editor widget with syntax highlighting already (in the text mode IDE; not sure if it's in the base library). All that's needed is to replace the default Borland-style shortcuts with CUA.

http://www.principiaprogramatica.com/wp-content/uploads/2009...
I'm a pretty hardcore Emacs user, and I'll just come right out and say it: I hate Emacs. However, the only thing I hate more than Emacs is anything else.

I tried to move to Atom, because I've heard good things, I read you could extend it in JS and that sounded good to me. The difference between customizing Emacs and customizing Atom could not be more night and day in my experience. Emacs is like a living thing, as crazy as that sounds. I feel the urge to make a slight customization to a key (which happens often) I just ask Emacs what function the key is executing and either wrap it in a custom function, or advise the function. I usually write and eval these customizations in the scratch buffer.

Meanwhile, Atom makes me restart to get any changes detected. There wasn't any live documentation system that I could find (which is something I can't fathom not having now).

Emacs, in terms of customization, is simply light years ahead of absolutely everything else. It's absurd to me that we're still stuck with it because seemingly nobody who wants to make a text editor has learned the lessons it has.
Using just the wave function alone is similar to saying that in specifying the computation sin(x) where x = 3, you do not need to say x=3 because the value of sin(3) is part of sin(x) so why do we need to talk about sin(3) by itself?

Of course, we talk about 3 because we have some need of it. In dBB, we have need of particles because they explain our experience in a fashion that is readily apparent. At a first approximation, stuff moving around in 3-space is exactly what we experience. The question then becomes figuring out the motions of that stuff. If the stuff in the theory moves in the right position in our experience, then we can keep that theory as a plausible candidate for predictions.

The particles drive the need for the wave function. In many ways, the wave function is acting in a fashion like the law of gravity in Newtonian physics. Fix the law, start with different initial conditions, and we get a different history. One of those histories might just conform to our experience and we would then be satisfied.

Without the particles, we have a complex-valued function on configuration space. Why is there 3-space in our experience? Why do we have a feeling of some definiteness in the outcome of experiments? The wave function provides none of that and these are essential ingredients to what we would like to get from the theory.
Is Magic Leap Having a Nervous Breakdown or Making an Announcement?
So just to be clear I'm mostly talking about the US and western countries. Let's break it down:

Corporate: the corporation has been the main organizational unit for most of society at least since the 40s. In fact the vast majority of Americans that have a vocation work under a corporation.

Totalitarian: The definition of totalitarianism is "a system of government that is centralized and dictatorial and requires complete subservience to the state." Despite noises to the contrary, the US is certainly not a democracy, and I wouldn't even call it a representative republic. A data-driven study [1] confirms the intuitions of many that the US is really an oligarchy of the wealthy corporate class. US politics is driven by corporate interests and there is little evidence that public sentiment has a large effect on material outcomes, despite external appearances. Furthermore it can be argued that the US is a police state, as described by Pulitzer prize winning journalist Chris Hedges [2]. The US government has had countless programs to control discourse and put down opposition since its inception, and anything that threatens the status quo is stomped out with prejudice.

Dystopia: In many important factors, American citizens are unhappy with their lives, and this unhappiness can be traced back to the corporate-totalitarian nature of the US. Extremely expensive health care, long work hours without much vacation, economic disparity between classes, lack of affordable housing, complete corruption of the financial sector, regulatory capture, endless warfare, corporate control of the media, etc are all direct results of the structure of our society.

[1] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-poli...

[2] https://www.truthdig.com/articles/the-origins-of-our-police-...
Not just any photographs, google street view photographs thank you very much!
I'm a woman and I frequently leave clothes on the floor of our bedroom, usually in a little pile, but sometimes socks here and there. Eventually I gather and wash them. Truly, in all these years, no harm has ever once come of it.
IMO, the best way to explain floating point is to play with a tiny float. With an 8-bit float (1 bit sign, 4 bits exponent, 3 bits mantissa, exponent bias 7), there are only 256 possible values. One can write by hand a table with the corresponding value for each of the 256 possibilities, and get a feel to how it really works.

(I got the 1+4+3 from http://www.toves.org/books/float/, I don't know if it's the best allocation for the bits; but for didactic purposes, it works.)
No, these numbers do in fact suggest the crypto market is extremely volatile. Many, many people who invest regularly in stocks should not invest in cryptocurrency because it is too volatile.

People/companies that are able to understand and accept the risk that comes from speculating on cryptocurrencies should consider doing so, because it is possible to make a profit, perhaps a significant one.

But if you're looking at the past and saying "wow, I should buy BTC because it made 1000% last year - it can't lose!" then you're ignoring a quite serious risk that volatile growth could change into volatile collapse in the future.
> If you're the type that ... generally believes in a sense of fairness to the world then forget about it

I thought this when I was younger, and so I stuck with being an employee for a long time and didn't aspire to learn management/executive skills. But in doing that I was exposed to the many reasons and mechanisms that "Productivity can be blocked by bad management" - one of the cons of being an employee mentioned in the article.

Now I see that being a good manager or executive takes skills and that doing it well has huge benefits to productivity and sanity for everyone in the org and not just myself. I think a lot of managers and executives suck at their jobs, but I am now more interested in learning those skills and exploring that path and I wish I hadn't ruled it out so quickly earlier.
Static site generator (Hugo) plus my ox-hugo (Emacs/Org mode) plugin allows creating this whole site[0] from a single content file :)

[0]: https://ox-hugo.netlify.com
I think Sonja's study does more than "prove a point" - it also illustrates exactly _how_ "luxury" housing helps everyone, which is a huge sore point in local politics. Understanding of the nature of how flexible preferences and different levels of wealth interact is still a useful exercise.

It would be very difficult to devise a study to prove whether exogenous demand is real, but a casual examination of San Francisco suggests that it is not - SF has built very little housing and still consistently out-attracts many other metro areas.
The Absolute Best Asset Scaling Method for 2D Games
https://www.time4vps.eu/storage-servers/

They aren't the most reputed but aren't sketchy either. You're not going to get cheaper than this. If you are sure that you'll use to for a while, then go for the annual/biennial plans. They really bring down the monthly price.
Oh, source code compatibility for real? That's super nice!
So MegaCorp A buys a huge amount of Cisco gear to modern their internal networks in all their infrastructure.

Two years later OmniCorp B enters into a deal to add them to their portfolio for whatever price they agreed upon. OmniCorp B now owns the physical Cisco gear but doesn't have a license to use it?
CompTIA Network+ book should provide a good base for networking. Search YouTube, it's a great learning resource. You could probably get a complete education in every topic you mentioned.
A Fake Antifa Account Was 'Busted' for Tweeting from Russia
Even in an adversarial system, the point of prosecutors is not to be "as vicious as the law allows them to be". The point is to pursue actual crime as vigorously as they can. Instead, we are seeing repeated instances of prosecutorial misconduct where the prosecutor's office tries to win the case on a legal technicality, even when it's actually counter to the basic goal of justice (i.e. establishing the truth of charges) - by, for example, trying to place procedural hurdles in the way of procedures, like DNA tests, that might exonerate the defendant, or withholding evidence that might indicate innocence, but which the prosecutor is not legally obligated to introduce. Here's a recent example:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2017/09/25/...

There's absolutely no social good coming out of such behavior, and it should be pointed out and castigated.

And yes, this does, in fact, happen, because prosecutors are effectively rewarded for successful prosecutions, regardless of the false positive rate.
You are thinking of fee-only, which sounds very similar, but is vastly different from fee-based. Fee only is what you want.

As it happens, Scott Adams appears to have meant the exact opposite of how he’s been quoted! Scott specifically meant to warn people off financial advisers who charge a percentage of assets.

Fee-based as a label appears to exist purely to confuse unsophisticated consumers, by sounding so similar to the (good) fee-only label.
Why is C an advantage?

(I get "no dependencies", but that seems orthogonal to being written in C. Specifically, what does C bring that isn't minimal dependencies, or a small binary?)
Do they recycle all of a lithium ion battery?
You've just linked a chart that you claim shows "lots" of housing demolished or merged over the last five years, but these numbers are tiny, representing far less than a single percent of the city's housing stock.

The vast majority of new housing construction happens without the removal of any previous housing unit.
And then we'll be CA for Cascadia, the newest Canadian province!
> Johnson said that the company had made several venture investments in bitcoin-related businesses and that the company was looking at applications of blockchain technologies alongside several leading universities.

Every crypto article makes the same vague claims about the potential of non-specific blockchain technology. I'm surprised there was no mention of replacing Visa in this one as well.
AT&T Seeks Supreme Court Review on Net Neutrality Rule
It isn't, except for the fact that most people who can code low level programs know it. But what you don't want into consideration is pretty much the important part of shipping a software you want to proliferate easily.
Techmeme summary: AT&T, CenturyLink, industry associations ask US Supreme Court to overturn Obama-era net neutrality rules barring ISPs from slowing or blocking rivals' content
Establishing giants in the bitcoinosphere, effectively?
That's why I qualified the statement with dragnet surveillance.

Obviously if someone's already targeted it's simple for any self-respecting SIGINT agency to just install implants and get whatever they want. I was describing measures that would likely foil automated bulk analysis.

Now if you're implying there's some sort of bulk, indiscriminate implantation program, that would be news to pretty much every private sector security expert on the planet. May as well just tap fiber for appearances at that point.
When Tesla sues you over it, can you afford a lawyer to defend yourself?
It's the same argument. Someone created a system and I'm just doing my assigned part to keep it going without having to decide if it's a good system or not == just following orders.
What assumption was being corrected here? Please cite with specificity.
> "He" (and "men" rather than "people" or "humanity" or other substitutes) was the "neutral" or "collective" or "universal" pronoun of the English language until very recently.

For what it's worth, and without meaning to argue with the claim about common useage, E. Nesbit, who wrote (at least) in the very early 20th century (a quick Google shows me her "5 children and It" was published in 1902), already used the jarring-to-me but eminently logical 'it' as a gender-neutral pronoun.
Sounds like a marketing stunt gone wrong that changed an industry.
Facilitating inter-bank transfers is one promising application that's already operational: https://ripple.com/
Obama was not elected with Title IX process reform as his primary platform item. It was made into a bigger item after his election, but even then mostly on right-wing platforms. Few people are even aware of that controversy inside the blue bubble.

Arpaio was convicted on contempt of court specifically over unconstitutionally depriving people of their due process rights. Insofar as anyone can have any opinion about his case, and the associated pardon, that issue is at the front and center of it. Thus, anyone expressing support for Arpaio is necessarily expressing disdain for due process.

As Cyril Figgis said, "It's like comparing apples to Nazi oranges."
Then there is ed, man! !man ed: https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed-msg.html
Corporate Governance as Privately-Ordered Public Policy
It's super useful if you embrace disposable environments. The easier it is to build a system or cluster, the more different situations you can assist your internal testing teams in replicating.
Good point. The intention (in my post and presumably the ones I referenced) is that the financial advisor should be paid only a fixed fee by her client and not be biased like a commissioned salesperson.
> Because I get frustrated with people. I feel like they refuse to even attempt to understand. They say to themselves "I'm a visual learner" (everyone is) or they seek solace in groups when mathematical notation is difficult to understand. It's ok if I don't understand this, and I don't even have to try, because lots of other people don't get it either!

But surely attempting to convince someone who is afraid to learn a given piece of mathematics that it is actually within his or her comprehension is a good thing, not a bad? One need not convince a die-hard visual learner that he or she should give up learning that way, only that he or she can, and probably should, strive to learn how to convert mathematics into a more visual form?

(EDIT: I just noticed that dahart (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15362069) said much the same, and probably better.)

Incidentally, I think that I disagree with the statement that everyone is a visual learner. Without getting into the technical meaning of the term, if there is one, I believe that I don't learn by picturing images the way that I think people who say that they are visual learners believe that they are learning.
The solution adopted by Unix-era GUIs, and the Macintosh, was to use a different key for GUI shortcuts rather than overloading Control. X11 generically calls it ‘Meta’, USB calls it ‘GUI’, Sun had Diamond, etc. It was only Windows that botched it, and the this-is-finally-the-year-of-Linux-on-the-desktop-trust-me-this-time crowd who slavishly imitate it while ignoring Unix experience.
> It's sort of like how antifa doesn't represent the majority of democrat voters I have encountered.

That is rather an understatement. It's not just they don't represent the majority - many of them are, in fact, opposed to said majority. Google "liberals get the bullet too".
Sure but you wouldn't pay a chainsaw sculptor to cut down a tree, you'd pay a lumberjack. You can already go to a hackerspace and pay a guy a couple hundred bucks to build you something basic so long as it's mildly ineresting.

With kids growing up playing with Raspberry Pis, in 10-20 years I don't think your comment's parent is such a farfetched idea.
AI Senses
If you're doing something with a couple of machines and it's simple, sure.

However, the benefit of 'infrastructure as code' is that you have a _description_ of your infrastructure. Once you get above a small number of machines, keeping things consistent (because humans are humans) when you're managing pets, not cattle, is difficult and time-consuming; rolling out changes is difficult and time-consuming; understanding why something is the way it is is difficult and time-consuming. OTOH, if you have descriptions of your infrastructure in version control, you can read a description of how everything is set up and know how a given machine or VM with a given role ought to look. You can also dig through history, even if the people committing changes were lazy, and get an idea of why something ended up the way it did.

Sure, doing it as a cargo cult is a bad idea, but that's a criticism that can be levelled at just about anything a start-up might do with regard to the infrastructure side of things, because they'll tend to skimp too much on people with an ops background. But that doesn't mean that it's overrated, just that it's something that you should understand the reasons for doing before doing it.
I could either live with the clutter and step over it or pick up after him

But those aren't your only choices.

If you decided to park your car in the middle of the street, the choices of those around you aren't limited to either put up with it or to clean up after you. Instead, you car gets towed.

The key difference between these situations is that one has agreed upon expectations and consequences. People only resort to nagging when they find themselves in a situation where there are no agreed upon expectations and consequences. Further, consequences are extremely effective. You only need to be towed once before you learn to be more careful about where you park.

If you agreed upon an expectation/consequence of "clothes left on the floor for more than 2 days will be thrown away", you wouldn't be putting up with clutter for very long.

This also helps with directing negative emotions. When someone is nagged, the negative emotion is usually directed at the nagger. But if he broke the rules and had his clothes thrown away, he'd be angry with himself.
Claim:Tesla institutes a strict no suit policy in tech to promote adoption of electric cars.

Supporting evidence:
+ all their patents are open for that reason.
+ Elon has said personally that it is of no use to be the last human standing on a sinking ship.

Personally, I think they may actually fancy people doing their own repairs.