skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In just about any market, there are two to three market leaders.

- The first is the quality leader, who has the highest quality but also most expensive products. They sell low quantity but with high profit margins. (Apple)

- The second is the quantity leader, who has the lower quality but also the least expensive products. They sell with low profit margins but in high quantity. (Android)

- The last is the buy-in leader, who uses compliance or other methods of tying people to their product. It doesn't matter the quality or price point, because people are buying it for other reasons.

Traditionally, this third one was Blackberry in the mobile phone market with buy-in for enterprise. With the decline of Blackberry, it was a pretty sound strategy (at the time) to try and take that market share with Microsofts enterprise buy-in.

The problem is that Blackberry declined because the enterprise buy-in declined. Android and Apple began making it easier to access work-related functions on their platforms, and you no longer needed a separate phone to do it.
what NNTableb has to say abouton this topic.. https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/883689826335281153
Both Tizen and Jolla are still around, though.
TLDR:

>the retailer has managed to attract technical women by recruiting with an eye toward candidates’ potential rather than specific skills

>“Even if a female candidate doesn’t have all the requirements for a technical job, we want that person to come in and show what they can do,” says Yvette Nichols, the company’s vice president of talent.

They hire women without the regular qualifications and are willing to train them on the job, which is refreshing to see. It's a shame they only apply it to female candidates though.

>At Sephora, Nida Mitchell, 29, got her chance to grow into a new role when she was promoted from web developer to IT project manager after two years at the company. The new job put her in charge of 14 male engineers, most of whom were at least 10 years her senior. She encountered roadblocks on one of the team’s first big projects, updating Sephora’s computing infrastructure ahead of the chain’s expansion to Brazil. “My first week, I had a one-on-one with my boss and said, ‘No one listens to me,’ ” Ms. Mitchell says.

She's concerned that within a single week of being promoted above 14 male engineers that they don't take her seriously when she comparatively has very little technical background (5 months with HTML and CSS) and no management experience (per her linkedin)? The issue here isn't that she's a woman.

It's cool that women in tech roles have found a home at Sephora. Something feels a little weird seeing them about bragging about the hiring process being exclusive to women though.
Basically "Fire and Motion" in a situation where that strategy is NOT to their advantage.

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/01/06/fire-and-motion/
That's heartbreaking, they are two minutes away from singularity -a usable os that works on mobile, tablet and desktop.

It's stupid to stop now, they managed to take on the iPad with surface, I'm sure a mobile success is possible.
Image Optimisation – Bet365 Tech Blog
What's so weird about... well. not weird - just stupid(?). The HP thing - the guy in charge who made those decisions left soon after, IIRC (maybe was forced out, but didn't sound like it).

You spend $1B acquiring palm for webOS, but don't want to invest any more in actually trying to market or develop developers?

They flew off the shelves at $150/bucks, even with knowing there's no support, etc. Hobbyists wanted them. Some of my friends and family wanted one. I couldn't justify $500, but could $200 (but couldn't get any at that price).

Let's say they'd sold them at a loss - let's say $149, and they were losing $50 on each one. Getting 2 million of those in people's hands in a year would have 'cost' $100m, but ... the ecosystem would have had a reason to grow, because there would have been a market to serve. Had discussions with folks who claimed "you can't do that" (for some reason, bringing "dumping" and "illegality" in to the argument). So... selling them at $150 while "going out of business" is AOK, but selling that at $150, taking a loss while trying to grow a market (and creating more long term value for the people buying them) "makes no sense" (that was one of the arguments I got from folks).

Of course, it's all academic, and I'm just armchair quarterbacking the whole thing, but few companies even have the option of strategic long term losses to seed/grow a market. I'd think the rewards would be substantial if you can pull it off, but we don't seem to have many who want to try anymore, and that lack of trying really cements the two-party system we have in mobile.
"Constraints make us more creative"

See classic Lego and it's spiritual digital counterpart "Minecraft" for how constraints to only classic brick blocks inspires one. I had two red Lego brick buckets (and a handful of Lego City sets). Most useful to build almost anything were the Lego bricks from the big buckets. The Lego City sets supplied only special parts needed to build cars, and door mechanics, and figures.

And back in 1990s Lego sets contained many traditional parts too. Nowadays, there are too many special parts. Younger kids who only got Lego sets and no Lego buckets have never experienced the freedom to create anything. They often simply build the set once and play a little bit and put it aside. Unfortunately even the latest Lego brick buckets nowadays contain way too many special parts and not enough classic brick to build anything. How many buckets do one need to build three houses nowadays?

To you "lego moc". I saw several professional photos. These builds cost a lot, I guess. But I am talking about Lego for kids. Buying a Lego bucket isn't enough nowadays, a kid won't be able to build things like you with a handful of Lego sets + a bucket. A kid would need to wish dozends of Lego sets just to get "random" parts.
By that logic Microsoft didn't fail because Office is still widely used.

Just because Amazon branded their phone under the same brand as their successful tablets and streaming sticks doesn't make the phone any less of a failure.
So many ways to share this on social media.
If Michael Jordan calls himself elite, is he an elitist? If a quite successful Valley engineer calls himself elite, am I an elitist? These are different words. Populists will call SV elitist. That doesn't make them right.
Microsoft would have to provide a compelling reason to use their own app store and other services that would replace the Google ones.

That's not to say it's impossible. Microsoft has been doing a lot of mobile development lately, and if you were trying to build a case for losing the Google Play store Office, Skype, and other business apps are a good place to start.

The pessimistic part of me thinks that BYOD is so prevalent these day that a pure "business phone" locked into the Microsoft ecosystem just wouldn't work. Maybe five years ago it would have appealed to enterprises wanting to roll out a fleet of employee devices but now a phone needs to be as appealing to the consumer as the business.
What are the 12 whole grains in Arnold's 12-Grain Bread?
god what conservative bullshit. you must labor for others or else you are useless! just, no.

>There's this idea that if you give everyone basic income they'll all turn into philosophers and artists and entrepreneurs, but it's not true

No one says that you disingenuous weasel. Basic income is so that people can survive without being forced to hold a job. This is especially important for those that cannot hold a job - children, elderly, sick, disabled - or those that have lost jobs through automation, where there IS no more job to have.

> "put people to work"

Most people already work (95%+) and those that don't - children, elderly, sick, disabled - those people aren't ever joining your work programs. They make up a huge percentage of the total population and you just.. ignore them like they don't count. But i guess in your eyes 'work or starve' is better so there are no 'moral' issues, right?
Inconsistent axiomatic systems can prove anything. Thus either Haskell programs can prove the limits (and prove the opposite statement, as they are inconsistent) or they aren't axiomatic system as you mean it. Both possibilities contradict your statement:

> Chaitin's incompleteness theorem mean AI cannot learn
I came to the same conclusion just this week. I got the best print simply by matching the density of my black and white laser printer with the black dots I wanted it to print.

Specifically, I used the ImageMagick operations "-dither FloydSteinberg -monochrome" for more contrast or "-dither FloydSteinberg -remap pattern:gray50" for more fidelity to the original image.

I was surprised that the prints were better without adjusting for gamma. If I converted the image to a linear color space before the dither operation, the print came out too dark. I'm guessing that the gamma in the non-linear color space compensated for the dot gain on the printer to cancel out the effect.
It was a slight eye opener for me as a student at the time getting near graduation. The part of the workshop going through the app submittal and approval process was actually really interesting, but when it became clear that the bigger effort was to boost app numbers in the store things felt really dirty.

Either way that experience always comes up for me whenever people talk about the low quality of apps on the Windows store.
It'd be kind of wasted on a billionaire. Maybe someday he'll endow an annual Satoshi Prize in Being Awesome.
If it’s your first paper, co-authors can be extremely useful to help guide the author through the publication process. It’s also helpful for marketing purposes. Hell, this is basically the graduate school route.
I use Ubuntu but after spending a day trying to fix display drivers I can confirm it's not user friendly. An OS is more than just the software, but the support received from other software/hardware companies.
Unless it is an "impossibility of approximation" theorem.
Cool Tool: Pigma Micron PN Pen
https://arxiv.org/help/registerhelp You only need-need an email address, I think.

I've seen papers where the 'institution' of the author is their home address both on arxiv submissions and in traditional journals. I didn't trust them very much, but I have seen them.
> There’s all sorts of safety nets, and many normal people use them.

Yeah, and they're often a mess. You often have to sign up in a bunch of different places and deal with a bunch of different broken bureaucracies, which isn't the ideal thing to have dropped on your plate when financial hardship strikes. It's not surprising that, for example, "Only about 1 in 6 people who are eligible for child care subsidies actually get it."[1] Simplifying the system and having it already active when people hit a hardship would be a huge improvement.

I was reading a story about one cities dilapidated homeless shelter. The people there were living in poor conditions - the building's infrastructure was falling apart, the food provided was terrible, etc. It was costing the city $4,680 a month to house the people there. The people would be much better off if the city simply handed them that money - heck, they'd be much better off if the city simply handed them half of that.

[1] http://www.npr.org/2016/08/21/490822086/the-financial-trials...
Do people really click on ads on purpose?
Artificial topological matter opens new research directions
I guess, bringing this back to Rustin, that I'm just saying that there's no such thing as a deeply moral nihilist. To have moral convictions is to reject nihilism.

Nihilists aren't "super atheists".
That's probably where those ads on Craigslist coding gigs come from.

"I'll pay you $100 or split the equity for my cool new app idea!"
[TUTORIAL] Steps to execute and test migrations on a PostgreSQL database
Fake it till you make it.
No, unless your perceptions of what the average Chinese consumer wants are warped.
The line is just awkwardly worded English, which is understandable because its his second language. What it means is that there is little loss in the "honey comb circuit" which then implies that it is the path of least resistance between the electrodes.
It really depends on the type of research. Writing, in artificial intelligence, can be especially useful when it’s still unclear whether your research is reasonably implementable. Machine learning, for example, was mostly theoretical until the engineering issues were resolved.
Virtue signaling is all the rage. So is targeting equality of outcome over equality of opportunity.
It looks like you had to rewrite the queries pretty significantly to get them to run on all three. Redshit/Bigquery don't support rollup/grouping sets/intersect/except etc. which the TPCDS spec queries have. Is there a reason you don't mention this in the blog post? SQL surface area seems like a pretty important thing to consider when choosing a DW.
> "I would be interested in seeing startups trying to solve suburban problems and producing suburban jobs."

In my opinion these aren't technical problems to be solved by a team of engineers in their SF Bay offices. They are political problems that need legislative solutions. To think that we can outsource political problems to the realm of tech is misguided and won't solve our long-standing public policy issues.
> -100% percentile

not likely :-)
Does this remind anybody of Intel Pentium 4 Prescott?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_4#Prescott

Intel claimed that NetBurst would allow clock speeds of up to 10 GHz in future chips; however, severe problems with heat dissipation (especially with the Prescott Pentium 4) limited CPU clock speeds to a much lower 3.8 GHz
In this case it looks like he puts objects in the way of the electric field, creating and measuring the resulting "ion shadows" through thermal and Schlieren photography:

To further strengthen the role of surface charges as the key ingredient responsible for the RWI, we shield part of the oil surface from charge accumulation by creating an ion shadow. An ion shadow forms when an object blocks the path of the charged ions towards the surface of the oil. Even thin objects, like paper, are sufficient to produce a sharp shadow that inhibits charge accumulation on the oil surface. In the absence of surface charges the instability is locally inhibited, as evident from figure 11. Even metal objects produce the same effect when placed in the path of the charged ions. Using Schlieren photography (figure 12), we imaged the corona streamer which shows that the streamer and gas flow stay roughly the same size as the needle diameter, while the instability continues to occur at a larger radius.

As you note, Schlieren photography "uses light from a single collimated source shining on, or from behind, a target object. Variations in refractive index caused by density gradients in the fluid distort the collimated light beam. This distortion creates a spatial variation in the intensity of the light, which can be visualised directly with a shadowgraph system."

Basically the point charge is like the sun emitting light (ions) and if you put something in the way of the grounding plate, you get a shadow (local inhibition of the instability pattern).

Check out the pics on the Schlieren photography page, they're cool: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schlieren_photography
You can easily (through shoddy, cheap outsourcing body shops in India, Phillipines, etc.) get support costs low enough that just taking the calls is cheaper than fixing things, at least until the end of the financial quarter, and that's what really matters to management. I say this from experience in the web hosting industry, but I don't see any reason it wouldn't apply to ISPs.
Capitalism is the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie (people, who control the wealth and means of production - factories, companies, banks). They dictate their will to the proletariat (people working for wage who have no control over how business is run and how profits of their labor are sold), via press/TV/government/police-military actions/lobbying/family ties; many are directly working for the government.

Socialism happens when proletariat becomes the ruling class and distributes the wealth upon all the citizens of the country, providing healthcare, education, housing, enough wage to feed everyone. As proletariat are the majority, socialism becomes a proper democracy, where people can control their own livelihood, not some fat senator who received a 100k 'lobbying gift'.

Communism happens when all the signs of the capitalism vanish (no exploitation of people by other people, no money - goods are produced based on needs and distributed to everyone). It happens when people get rid of bourgeoisie thinking via education and personal experience of having society without hungry, homeless, uneducated people. This happened before (we see slave-owning societies of the past with disgust and feudal states with horror), it just took over several hundred years each time.
It seems like having all those arbitrary requirements is good for nothing but gatekeeping higher education. Why not have those requirements publicly known and not unnecessarily complicated so that everyone can submit info?
Why? Minimum wage is largely designed to stop people being exploited by a form of economic slavery, but the UBI should prevent that, and mean that the wage has to be attractive.
Smart Inventory Scanner
I investigated the situation and checked to ensure there were not other apps using this (As to not unfairly single Uber out).
Make a CSS creature by tweeting
Ask HN: Interview feedback biased?
I recently interviewed at a well-known silicon valley company that is public for a front-end role. I have been doing front-end for more than 3years now and I don't mean to brag but I can say with confidence that I am an advanced Javascript developer because for the past two years I have put in so much effort into understanding the deeper workings of the language from ES5 - ES6. At my current employer, I'm well known as a Javascript expert. So I was shocked when the feedback from the interview was that I was not well versed in Javascript, this surprised me. Note that I'm of African descent & I think this may/may not have influenced the interview. I'm not sure what to make of this.

The interview went fairly well & I demonstrated my knowledge of es6 which they even acknowledged.
Hi, I live in a rural area and work remotely for a market-rate salary. I'm not less valuable because of my zip code.
I myself don't publish but I've seen some authors use Markdown and [1] GitBooks. Kelsey Hightower wrote Kubernetes: The Hard Way in the same manner [2]. It reads nicely. For publishing, you could look into GumRoad [3]. When I do some technical writing, I personally like to use StackedIt which supports Markdown and allows you to export to PDF with custom layouts.

[1] https://www.gitbook.com
[2] https://github.com/kelseyhightower/kubernetes-the-hard-way
[3] https://gumroad.com
[4] https://stackedit.io
Wechat is an app platform, it isn't all the apps.
I agree. The performance you get for the cost and effort is amazing.
A healthy, well-adjusted individual (which I mean in the psychological sense) notices that GTA and video games in general are very nearly morally null. At best you can create a rather strained line between "desensitization" and the possibility that you will do something bad in the future, which I call strained not so much because it's impossible but just because someone trying to condemn bad behavior in GTA would really like a more solid argument than that, not based in so many assumptions and second-order effects. And if it's that bad you'd like to be able to show a clear line between the rise in play and a rise in violent crime when, if anything, the opposite has occurred. (Which is probably not causal based on this issue. But still, the opposite has occurred, which makes the argument about how bad GTA is even more strained and difficult to make.)

I play GTA and such as videogames, not as morality simulators, because as morality simulators they fail, because there is hardly any moral theory that applies to them. Utilitarianism doesn't tell me to be moral in GTA, because the utiles in my accidentally running down a pedestrian simply because I got impatient at a red light and just drove anyhow is null. Deontological ethics doesn't tell me to take good care of numbers in a computer, unless you adopt a set of rules that says otherwise purely in the name of being contrary for this post alone. (In which case I'd also like you to analyze the ethics of the numbers you changed simply in the act of posting your contrary reply.) Consequentialism doesn't tell me to be concerned about the value of numbers in a computer; I would have higher regard for the health and well being of an individual bacterium than a pedestrian in GTA.

If you tried to read my personality by how I play GTA, you're going to get a very wrong reading, because I am well aware of how null the whole thing is, and I act accordingly. Nor do I find myself learning very much about myself. Nor do I find myself meditating on how flimsy the moral structure is constraining me, because GTA is not "just like the real world except for a few minor differences". It is utterly unlike the real world. It is completely unsuitable for any sort of moral analysis because in a very real way, the entire idea of morality applying to GTA is simply ludicrous, as ludicrous as the idea that I am a psychopath from a family of psychopaths because when we play chess with each other we kill, kill, kill without mercy or concern for how the poor chessmen feel.
As an amateur dabbler in conversion rate optimization, it's stunning what disclosing shipping policies upfront does to conversion rates.

I've seen cart abandonment drop by 50% or more simply by including shipping price and policies on the pricing page.

People will spend $20 extra to hit the $50 minimum free shipping threshold than spend $5 on shipping for a $30 order.

(Keeping low cost, high utility items in stock and available near checkout is highly recommended. For one fashion retailer, showing a bunch of socks and undergarments under 'recommendations' for orders below the free shipping threshold dramatically increased conversion rate. Everyone needs extra socks. If you've bought a $45 pair of jeans, adding a $5 pair of socks to hit the free shipping limit is "rational" for most people)
If anyone is interested in similar RTS AI play but for Age of Empires 2:

https://youtu.be/ePgEUSazsos
It would not be a deductible business expense.
> He was obviously joking.

As was Animats.
It's difficult to imagine a more off-topic comment. If you are choosing basic income as a poster child of Silicon Valley, you need to be much clearer about that.
In 1970 a guy named Thor had a reed raft built matching stuff found in an Egyptian tomb. He then rode it with friends from Morocco (Africa) to Barbados (Caribbean). The book is great if you can find it.

Travel time 59 days, but the rowers covered a longer distance - mainland Europe to mainland Americas.
Folks need to worry about being able to protect more than just passwords. Engineers should be doing a good job of protecting SSNs, phone numbers, home addresses, etc. Crypto-anchoring can help for the general case of protecting sensitive information, not just passwords. `select *` shouldn't give anything in your infrastructure bulk access to sensitive information. The 'cryptographic' thing here is per-record encryption.