skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
FB and GOOG have been hoovering up practically all growth in the digital ad space. Those PE ratios are high, but they have been blowing out their earnings quarter after quarter.

FB has 2.07 billion monthly active users, about 1/3 of the world population, with significant user engagement. Their userbase is on par with major world religions and continents.

Google is the same, though their engagement is a lot more fleeting.

Amazon is hoovering up almost all of the retail growth in e-commerce, and is now extending beyond e-commerce. They to an absurd extent, try to match their R&D and capital investment to their revenue and almost operate as a non-profit, so their P/E ratio always looks absurd, but their book value has increased tremendously over the years.

This isn't 1999 where like Tesla, there was no P/E ratio because there were no earnings (profits), and in the life of the company there had never been a single dollar of profit made, and companies were often rated at 50x their revenue numbers!

These are companies that have shown sustained revenue and profit growth. You can call them overvalued, but this is not in my opinion a bubble, and I think its important you understand the difference between now, 1999, and 2007 or you won't recognize the next one when it comes. In 1999 there was an absolute mania over .com stocks. In 2007 we had a credit bubble that was clear in many statistics and being shouted from the rooftops by some that was impossible to sustain and accompanied by speculators flipping houses, phrases like "buy now or be priced out forever," and other nonsense.

Today, while there are some high P/E ratios, they are at least backed up by long periods of sustained growth rates. Of course it can't last forever, and one can only hope that they will gently reduce their growth rates and have a soft landing rather than a hard crash.
Probably not cancer, instead I’ll guess we’ll link it to the onset of serious mental diseases.
Amateur may not have been the best word. Maybe easy or lazy or debt. Ive seen it a lot where it was something that was inherited and the current team knows its a problem, but they have a 1000 features to build and never get around to fixing that debt.
There is a difference in the way the body processes sucrose and fructose from plants and that from refined sugar. Plants have all kinds of other nutrients that necessarily go into the stomach at the same time as the fructose and sucrose.
Common factor: Money to be made.

Tobacco was the core of many states' economies, and still remains a massive industry which makes many people wealthy.

Dealing with CO2 emissions would have required dealing with fossil fuel use... and that's tons of money and power in play there.

Sugar is, at the very least, another substance people crave, and has been making people rich for hundreds of years.

Delaying tactics are feasible when you have billions or trillions of dollars, control regulatory bodies, own politicians, scientists, and armies of lawyers. Delaying tactics on the orders of just a few decades means generations of VP's and C-levels getting unfathomably rich, as well as key shareholders. So... fuck the harm, delay, delay, delay.

The key is that you have to not give a shit about anyone other than yourself, or be genuinely deluded.
As far as I'm aware, YC didn't cut ties with him. Rather, YC restructured their advisor program and he was offered a role in the new structure, which many other advisors did, but he declined for whatever reason.

Of course if you were YC trying to save face for everyone involved that's also exactly what you would do.. but I think it is ill-advised to jump to conclusions before the facts are in. It might be just what it is claimed to be: a choice by Pieter Thiel not to participate further for whatever reasons he might have. Certainly YC of today is not the same as the YC he originally involved himself with.
Absolutely does. And that's precisely the reason why inpatients are treated by the same doctor for as long periods as is humanely possible, i.e. usually one-week stretches on call.
But the coax providers still make deals between each other where they effectively follow the same rules leaving almost every market having one incumbent provider and one other competitor.

There are tiny competitors that work in this space (cough RCN, Charter) but they are functionally irrelevant (except for a few big markets for Charter) and most of them have gone out of business and consolidated to larger providers anyway.
What? But when social media companies help the other guy win (Obama for an example), it's not a problem? Your president is a fool but by the look of it, you deserve exactly that kind of leader.
People have been suggesting this for 20 years. Unless you think there has been some major change in how to achieve this it's not likely to happen. In fact it will probably be even harder now when people might get facebook (etc.) for free.
The corruption of the judicial branch is more obvious to its victims than it is to the average citizen, but it does quite a bit more direct harm than Congress does. For example, the courts that fund their municipalities on the backs of the poor, all the shady arrangements with the incarceration industry, the seemingly deliberate destruction of families and children perpetrated by the divorce courts, the horrific excess of the Drug War, etc.

Still, the courts might help in this case.
5 Reasons I Stayed Away from JavaScript
I get the sense OP was being a bit snide
Seems like it'd be good to be able to specify word breaks. For my little consulting company name, Forthright, it assumes that the word breaks are "For" and "thright", which results in some weird looking logos.
Oh totally. These networks engage in all sorts of unethical and self-dealing practices as well.

The Catholic hospital and medical network in my region was swallowed up with Trinity Health, which is a national medical network. Your interaction with a doctor or hospital is entering a sales funnel, where each additional interaction is engineered to generate more revenue for the network.

A family member had a stroke, which was debilitating and had a bunch of after affects. Prior to hospital discharge, the social worker (aka salesperson) drops a packet of nursing homes in the room and demands that it gets filled out by the end of that day. (which is illegal) That packet doesn't include acute rehab facilities, which is contrary to their physician's guidance. The list is sorted by available beds and exclusively consists of nursing homes owned by the medical network.
It's a good point. I can't remember the last time I saw a plastic bag that gave a safe temperature range right there on the bag or package containing the bags.

You'd think they would say Safe for food up to 200 degrees F or something.
> Just consider the number of wire transactions that happen every day in a single country, or internationally.

It's only interesting to compare price per transaction.
I'm only paying my ISP so much money because there are no other options

In France we have different operators. Is there really no competition where you live ?
That is a good thing, like Thiel or not, Google is unethical company and should be taken apart.
There are a lot of environmental and societal factors that would get you rather than anything that we probably don't know about yet.

Sugar and Tobacco are probably outliers simply because of the sheer quantity in which humans consume them (or used to, for smokers). That itself increases greatly the chances that they will directly cause some kind of cancers.

Now if in the future, we change our society and progress medical science far enough that we live well past 100 years, that is when we should be worried about dangers from materials that we only occasionally come into contact with. Even then, cancer treatments would probably be a routine thing by then...

I guess my point is that you would more likely die in a car accident than from something we're not aware of just yet.
I think its more simply a matter of them everything everything slow/inaccessible unless you buy the _advanced video_ package that includes Netflix, Hulu, YouTube" Which service tier is going to include the ZT VPN option?

And what if you're NOT a tech worker who has an employer to cover the "Enterprise VPN" tier? Good luck with that.
> What bothers me the most about these tech giants is the complete about face on free speech.

Do they have a choice in the matter. The elites have the government and old school media attacking and pressuring them every day now. I don't think any company or industry can withstand such intense pressure.

Everyday, we get a story from the nytimes, wapo or hundred of other media outlets attacking tech companies as being evil or russian stooges.
no that's not true. current thinking is just that if you eat fruites and vegs that you probably don't eat so much that you can get sick.

however when it comes to drinks (i.e. smoothies, apple juice, orange juice) we already know that they could be as worse as cola. (from a sugar perspective). fructose is as worse as sacarose for a human beign if you eat/drink too much of it. it is just worse in another way i.e. it can give you different diseases.
Well the problem is just that people consume way more sucrose than fructose. That's why there is probably never a bad word about it.

Basically everything should be consumed with care and moderation, but with the current generation it gets harder and harder (less time -> less time to cook -> excessive use of fast food, etc..)
It is the bing of personal digital assistants...
Was that actually illegal? If it was an above-the-board campaign contribution, I'm not sure what the issue is.
You are your tools
That doesn't help the project at all...
HLE seems to be more workable for Xbox...
Xenia is VERY far for the Xbox 360, it isn't technical but organisational issues instead
The author is confusing productivity with doing work. If you overcome all these things and work all day, non-stop... you may be still be unproductive because you're doing things inefficiently, or doing unnecessary work.

The key to productivity is achieving the same results with less work, which basically means learning how to avoid unnecessary effort. The unachievable ideal of maximum productivity would finishing everything immediately and with no effort.

(https://codewithoutrules.com/2017/10/04/technical-skills-pro... has a list of ways you can be unproductive even while being not tired, fully focused, undistracted, and not procrastinating.)
Look at their revenue growth, their stock performance, their cost of revenue, their profit margins, and their incredible strategic bets like Instagram/WhatsApp as well as their well-executed transition to mobile. What about hiring of COO Sheryl Sandberg at the perfect time, their well-executed competition with SnapChat, their well executed video strategy, multi-app strategy, look at messenger, look at their growth numbers quarter over quarter which are crazy. I mean you'd be incredibly naive to ignore those things and how well they've worked.

Facebook Ads work. They work when you put effort into them and know what exactly what you're doing. Ask any marketing firm. It's a complicated mechanism that has to be learned and experimented with but now Facebook Ads are among the lions share of the advertising market along with Google. They work for many businesses. Just ask Dollar Shave Club. Ask Stitch Fix. Ask Warby Parker. Ask King.

Facebook Ads also don't work if all you're doing is throwing $10k into them with a bunch of random targeting. In fact, no advertising works if you don't know what you're doing and if you're not tracking everything to a T. That's not Facebook's fault - their engine is completely self-serve. As are AdWords from Google. You can blow $100k on AdWords and get no results just as easily as you can blow it on Facebook and get no results.

I made no value judgement on their innovations. I've learned better than to do that on HN where people become so hostile if you even suggest that Facebook might be useful in some ways. I only made a value judgement on their business which is sound and growing rapidly.
It is, you're not wrong
The Switch to Outdoor LED Lighting Has Completely Backfired
I think the main reason for this is the photographer seems to be from Europe, where the Radio Shack/Tandy computers were not as common.

Also notice there wasn't any Dragon 64 machines, either (which I believe were mainly a UK thing).
Introducing Storm-up – Make any website editable in a minute
This is correct, and the below should not be taken in argument with it.

DRY as a guiding principle sometimes has a secondary beneficial effect that was not discussed. Two pieces of code that happen to be the same but "mean different things" should not automatically be deduplicated by dumb extraction. However, the fact that those two things share code may, when viewed through the lens of "prioritize-DRY-ness", hint that the two share a common underlying goal, which can be abstracted out into functionality that can be used by both.

Put another way: if the code to control a nuclear reactor circuit and the code to turn on a landing light on a plane happen to be the exact same, they shouldn't be blindly deduplicated into some library function, but the fact that they're the same may indicate a need for a more accessible, easily-usable-without-mistakes way of turning that kind of circuits on and off.
Bitcoin is like the monster that escaped our lab and is rampaging the city and nobody can stop it because people have "invested" $130 Billion dollars into it and so they won't let it die.
> The chains share state right up until the fork point.

I’m not talking about forks. I’m talking about completely different, but valid, chains.

> A staker/miner can chose to not include proof of his own wrongdoing, but that will not prevent others from creating an alternative fork which does have that proof.

This brings us back to the initial problem: how do we agree on which chain is the canonical one?

Also, what’s the timeout on this event happening? Unless there’s a timeout — at which point a fork changing history is ignored — some transactions in the chain remain unsettled because a fork might appear which invalidates them (because they originated from coins that were staked by a now-proven-fraudulent staker).
How Will Google Demote Russian Propaganda in Their Search Results?
I think we should legalize and regulate personally.
I try to use Cortana to control my Xbox One sometimes. Saying "Hey Cortana, pause" is really handy if you're in the middle of watching Netflix, and you get a phone call, or some other life event happens. Or it would be, if Cortana didn't take 15-20 seconds to think about it, and only work about 75% of the time, despite having an 8 core processor and a huge array of sensors.
Tagatose has become my go-to sugar substitute. It is indistinguishable from sugar for me. There's an interesting article in Wired about its discovery and properties here:

https://www.wired.com/2003/11/newsugar/
I take a complaint about adblocking as a sign that the creators of the website do not understand how the Web works. Users get to choose what web browser they use and configure it to show or hide any element that they want. If you want to force some specific layout, use a page description language and render the output yourself. Otherwise you're just signalling you're clueless about the medium you're publishing in.
> if someone can gather enough private keys together for a specific snapshot in time, they can create an alternate history.

This only works for histories older than the account deposits for stakers, which will likely be 4-6 months. In other words, a person using ethereum's POS will need to turn on their computer once every 4-6 months to sync to the network, while stakeholders still have their deposits locked, to make this attack impossible- However, I agree this is less optimal than POW in a theoretic sense but the issue is pretty negligible.

(for those interested in learning more about this line of argumentation and who want to understand why regular syncing to the network is needed to counter this attack, look up the term "weak subjectivity" on Google.

> An attacker who is able to gain enough stake to commit an attack for a short period of time can commit that attack forever.

No, an attacker's addresses will be known and the protocol will slash their funds for most types of attack. In the cases for more difficult attacks that the protocol cannot slash for, the community can fork the network an exclude the attacker's accounts (something not possible in POW where a miner staging an attack can switch addresses at will.)

The reverse is actually true: If there was a successful 51% attack against bitcoin, the hashrate would drop precipitously (since the value of the currency and mining profitability would drop) and hence the attacker's 51% would skyrocket to an even higher number immediately.

> a lot of good reason to believe that it will never be viable in the fully decentralized, fully trustless environment that bitcoin thrives in.

I'm pretty confident Bitcoiners will clamor for a POS algorithm in a few years, once it gets marginalized by POS coins. But you Bitcoiners are definitely welcome to hobble along with the status quo approach if you like :-)
The mistake in the argument is that BTC isn't everything, but a part of a much much larger financial flow of money.

Various QEs around propelled the fiat to the moon. Add to that various other money making legal and semi legal moves with, and having extra money, as a number, not a value, had to flow somewhere. So it did, one of the speculations being housing, another one Bitcoin, etc.

You don't hope for a "massive crash", but some form of taming the markets and removing liquidity should (we'll see how this will be played out) occur in the next 2-5 years.

At that point of time, Bitcoin, sadly, may be the first in the line of high beta toys to go out of the window as the rest scrape for the exit (BTC network is limited to around 7 TPS or therefore).

Meanwhile, buy the dip, to the moon, etc.

LPT: If you can't disengage that much on emotional level from it, at least hold your btc on an exchange that converts striaght to USD, and make sure you can put your order in asap when things go south.
How do poor people utilize it?
On the positive side, that would be way less than the amount of people Democratic nations kill each year! Yay!
Show HN: Thanksgiving Holiday Sales Dashboard
Geometric Calculus (video series)
I've always touted the line about comparing the energy consumed to the value produced. And while I still think that you must normalize the numbers, I also start to grow concerned that its continued growth seems like it might actually be a problem.

Oh, wow, -- lightbulb -- I didn't notice this until I started to write this post. I was going to ruminate about what PoW could we possibly do instead (presuming we need PoW for a good cryptocoin).

Now I'm thinking that this is the correction that will finally level off speculation?

Bitcoin's value is bounded: it can't be worth much more to humanity than the sum of all global financial services (likely worth much less). But its energy consumption is only bounded by the perception of its future value. Hash rate growth is fueled by speculation in continued growth in the bitcoin exchange rate.

At some point the energy consumption may grow fast enough to damper excitement about future gains. Then again, with each halving the inflation rate slows. So it's calibrated to keep increasing.

I wonder if the next Bitcoin community crisis will be different approaches to difficulty or reward. Those seem much more "untouchable" than block size, so hopefully not.
> In terms of cache busting comment, that's purely a configuration thing

As long as you don't have functionality that relys on it though, like search. I've seen that used to DOS a site before. And pingbacks. Sometimes even comments (though to be fair, you can turn those off for parity with a static site).

Plus you'd probably want to do the caching up a layer and not rely on a plugin, maybe a varnish cache or Fast-CGI cache which adds complexity and cache invalidation etc etc. W3TC and ilk are good, but to get the most from them you need to have good control over the server environment, especially for object store, and you probably want to integrate them with varnish server or something anyway. And before that even just for running the site you'll need to tune php and mysql. Not to mention 'fully' warming the cache on a large dynamic site can take quite a while, if it can be done at all.

Something like Hugo can output thousands of pages in milliseconds. That kind of performance just can't be found in a dynamic site, so warming the cache will always take longer than generating a static site like that.

I guess there's just more to be aware of.

> So it's literally just the desire to have a zero-footprint blog.

I don't disagree but I'd say it probably goes further than that. It's just so simple to go static. If you really dig into hosting a dynamic site there is a lot to do to make it work well under most conditions.

> Sounds like you should build a WP plugin that generates a static/exportable site.

There are actually a few good ones out there. I just used on to archive a site. Wget was flaking out with converting srcset urls (even when I compiled the 1.19 branch which was supposed to fix it) so I used a plugin to export the site.

Overall, I don't really promote one over the other, they're tools at the end of the day and if one works for a workflow then it's the best!
Make It Hard to Write Bad Code
The dystopia that I fear is an endless gauntlet of powerless employees droning 'the computer doesn't have a field for that' or 'the computer won't let me do that'. We already seem perilously close to this, putting the consistency of systems ostensibly built to serve the needs of society over and above the needs of society.
definitely not checking anything. I put my name in "Keith" and it generated a logo with my name and KKK above it.

1) Pretty sure that branding is taken

2) Let's say I was ignorant of the bed sheet brigade, it would be pretty bad to get a logo that's culturally flawed.
They can just advertise to people who like Bing Crosby instead.
Show HN: Create Isolated Virtual Swift Environments
I can see the art being preserved as a critical feature for adventure games, but with StarCraft remastered it seems everyone loves the new art. The most important thing for that game was to keep the gameplay exactly the same while supporting newer displays.
Securing email for production
UK regulator has 'huge concerns' over Uber breach
Nanoparticles. They irritate your lungs in ways that are very similar to asbestos irritation. And of course, it's your body's reaction to the irritation that kills you.

Example:
http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acsnano.7b01873
I think there's some misunderstanding in your comment about how Wayland works. 99.9% of Wayland desktops out there [1] do not use Weston. Weston is not Wayland's display server, it's a reference implementation of a window manager implementing the Wayland protocol(s). There is no separation between display server and window manager in Wayland, only a single master process, the compositor, which fulfils (roughly) both these roles. So if you're running, say, KDE Plasma, then your compositor is KWin, and Weston is nowhere to be seen. If you're running Sway, then your compositor is Sway. And so on. Wayland is only a protocol, not a piece of software (unless you count the shared libraries provided by the Wayland project).

[1] Guesstimate.
Spark on Lambda
How about a box truck? Seems like it would be a lot easier to hack up the box than a van and you start with much more usable space. They won't look out of place parked on a street either, especially in the lower rent parts of town. You also don't have to worry about cops looking in those pesky windows.
Hah, setting the example himself I remember him yelling / and cursing at an Uber driver in NYC, very ethical.

Good luck and I hope you're doing it for the money, cause nobody should buy the "Uber is an ethical company" bs.