skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Used to be I made an item for sale, sold it to an expert in retail sales, and they sold it to a customer

My dad had a company about twenty years ago, that helped solve an important problem in getting cell phone coverage deep into buildings. They achieved this via a little hardware widget.

He'd frequently complain about various business issues, so one day I asked him: why are you guys having all these problems? Why are you leasing these widgets, why are there all these contracts in place? You guys make widgets; why not sell them?

So he explained it - if you make widgets and sell them, once every building has enough widgets, your company is done and you gotta go out and find some new way of making money. But if you're leasing these widgets, on a yearly basis, with a warranty plan, etc., etc., you can actually continue making money.

There hasn't been a "used to be" in forever. People have figured out that selling widgets isn't the best way to have a continuous revenue stream.
Did you reply to the wrong comment, or did parent remove a reference to Comcast?
And here with that username, I expected you to be a Mitsubishi person.
*vandalism
The root cause is Duverger's Law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverger%27s_law

TL;DR: With FPTP, each belligerent tries to form the smallest winning coalition, resulting in a near even split two-party system.

Proportional Representation is the remedy for assemblies, councils, houses.

Approval voting is the remedy for executive races (eg sheriff, mayor, governor).

Additional benefits of both PR and Approval Voting:

- no more primaries

- fewer elections means reduced voter fatigue

- increased turnout, because real competition boosts participation

- greatly reduces mudslinging, because everyone wants to be your second choice

- no more spoilers, making an incubator for third parties
Lacking safety features, cheap MacBook chargers create big sparks
What will happen to QNX?
Yep and most of the cables are close to max capacity
the goal is to promote isolating and ostracizing dissidents since having one in your circles influences your rating... the goal basically is self censorship at massicve scale and unprecedented granularity. stop circulating certain ideas even offline.
That would be a different kind of "monopoly". The government (usually local) granted rights to a single provider in an agreement that they install connections to a minimum user base or geographical area. What would happen otherwise is the providers would only install access in areas that are profitable and not extend further out into the more rural area.

What needs to happen is these granted rights should be re-evaluated from time to time.
> they were willing to make their devs stay and interview me until 8 pm, two days in a row.

Are you sure? At my company we have very flexible time, and due to city traffic, many people come in around 11-noon, meaning they choose to leave around 7-9. This is much more convenient for them because of the traffic, and sometimes it better matches a spouse's schedule, or allows them to do something in the mornings they wouldn't normally be able to do. It may have been an indicator of a really good place to work. (Which isn't to say you're wrong. It very well may have been a warning sign.)
Hi, do EU citizen have some special tricks available when looking for startup jobs there?

Thanks for these threads!
I can only speak anecdotally but I know of a number of entrepreneurs/founders who have decided to set up shop elsewhere, in Canada for example, because of concern about the perceived restrictive and hostile immigration environment in the U.S.
Hello Peter,

What would be the latest missive on EAD affect new EAD petitions? Assuming my spouse can't work, what are other options?

Thank you!
You go back home and do it, obviously.
Here's an idea for a website in similar vein: liquidatemycrypto.com

Given an input of X amount of cryptocurrency Y, it will consult the orderbooks of a number of exchanges that trade it, and tell you how much of it to sell where in order to get the best liquidation price possible, and show you your slippage in percentage lost relative to what you may have thought your coins were actually worth.
That wasn't a character assassination. However, it's a very convenient cop-out for you to duck out of the discussion. Kindest regards, farewell.
How many years will I need to wait for my green card?
I'm from India on H1B - EB3 and my priority date is today.

P.S. I know it is hard to give exact number, but even a ballpark estimate would be highly appreciated. Thank you
We can agree to disagree then. I think your opinion is reasonable and I can understand where you are coming from.

To me personally, however, this is a very bad smell. They have shown that they will push unrelated code as a Shield Study. This faux pas was signed off by a Firefox Product Manager, Data Steward, Legal, QA, Release Management, AMO review and a member of the core Shield Team [1]. If none of these members realized it was a bad idea, I have lost all faith in their product development. If it wasn't signed off by those members, there is a major red flag about who has the ability to add these types of things and/or their processes.

Either marketing has too much say, they have poor processes, or they are totally out of touch with their user base. These all raise red flags for me. I can't feel confident knowing that there is no spyware in my browser.

Mike Conley a Mozilla dev commented on the bug ticket, "I am also curious about this. I have been asking around, and have not yet found a single Firefox peer that was involved with this in either implementation or review."[2] Everything about this was handled incredibly poorly. I will wait for the postmortem, but currently I don't have a lot of faith in Mozilla or their processes.

[1]https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/Shield/Shield_Studies
[2]https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1424977
2017 retweeted - By Bill Gates
Britain hasn't actually "gotten out". That won't happen until March 2019 de jure, and probably two years later in real terms, since everything is pointing at an interim period where Britain will remain in the single market with all its features, except their voting rights.

The Brutish government is currently getting raked over the coals in negotiations, which serves as an almost daily reminder of the EU's value for member states. Escaping the terrible oppression that is the European Court of Justice, which I just now failed to find any controversial judgement for, appears to be acceptable after all, if it allows your airlines, banks, and software companies to freely do business in the world's largest economic area. Who woulda thunk?

Brexit has also had a unifying influence on the rest of the EU: Surveys show trust in the EU at a 10-year high. Almost more importantly, trust in the EU has for 20+ years been higher than trust in the respective national governments and parliaments. See http://ec.europa.eu/commfrontoffice/publicopinion/index.cfm/... (page 15).

With the elections in France, the Netherlands, the UK, and Germany, anti-EU populism has arguably shown to have passed its peak–a President Trump actually being rather helpful in this regard, thx.
European companies know the rules and grow with these restrictions from the start.

FB wouldn’t have grown (that way) in France in the first place.
Introducing Tradely – A new way to buy and sell with friends and friends of friends
New Thunderbird Releases and New Thunderbird Staff
Is it correct that the entrepreneur rule was reinstated by court order (https://www.uscis.gov/news/news-releases/uscis-begin-accepti...) so that entrepreneurs could actually file for this right now? (until they undo it)

In case they undo the rule, would the already issued paroles and EAD cards be void?
Hi Peter,

Thanks for doing the AMA. Do you also work with companies that are not part of YC? If yes, how do I get in touch with you?
no. before I have a set of passwords. a really complex one for important sites and few simpler ones.

but websites keep asking for complex passwords, I started to lose track of them.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-tax-autos/republican-...

It's fine, I'd be very surprised if it was repealed, automakers would be left very unhappy since it's been shown time and time again, current EV sales are very reliant on those credits, and they're a powerful lobby.
Contacts. Now Facebook not only knows who you speak to online, but they also have access to the people and businesses you deal with in the 'real world' too.
You're making a good point, and I would suspect that it's valid in general.

I've definitely had unpopular opinions, and even when I don't, my questioning of the basis of a given argument is often misinterpreted as holding the opposite(and objectionable) belief. This isn't because I knowingly hold some dogma, but that I care about whether something is true or not. Even though I do think global warming is a real issue, I'm careful to point out whether or not a piece of evidence is specious because too often I've been classified as right wing or anti-science.

What I used to value about the internet was how I could have no-holds-barred debates with people from around the world and not be worried about my life being destroyed. From about the age of 11, I visited lots of anarchist and free-speech forums, sites about drug use, politics, etc., and ended up learning quite a bit having to argue with both total fools and those more savvy than I was. Even that young, what I valued was not the "criminal" aspect of these channels but the ability for myself and others to express their true selves, or at least the personae that people portrayed.

That's the internet I miss, but it's also the internet that took some skill to use and was far less profitable than it is today. Now that everyone is on it, the people want a level of safety that is dubious and stifles what originally made the web great. Joe Hacker inherently saw the value of libre speech, but the average person either doesn't understand that value or is afraid of being judged for holding that belief.

The internet isn't really different from anything else that we censor as a society. I don't believe that the same people who value freedom of speech on the internet would keep around entities like the FCC that quite obviously do not exist to protect the public from anything. The average person either doesn't understand what the FCC is for, or they would shrug and say that it's not such a bad thing.

I suspect that HN has a greater than average population of individuals who want an end to censorship online, but I would still agree with narrator in that most of us don't actually want a diversity of opinion. The reality is that most people are self-interested, and that usually doesn't mean that they're interested in hearing different opinions. They want the freedom to express their own opinions, but are still appalled when someone holds a radically different one. People are not very principled and they will move the goal posts out of convenience.

We may never see the old internet ever again.
The recent lichen genetic revelation that rewrote textbook definitions is similar, kinda magical coincidences in all the things that had to fall into place (or survivorship bias?/good writer telling story).

If you are not familiar with it -
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/07/how-a-gu...
The Gene Patent Question [video]
Usability suggestion: tapping one of the icons at the top should change the drop-down to that currency.

Also I'll echo others' comments that cryptocurrencies are hijacking the word "crypto," which most definitely does not mean "cryptocurrency" to the crypto community.
Network effects are inherent to networks; you can't regulate away the very thing that makes them valuable to people (well, i dont see how at least)
Toronto has been Hollywood North for a long time now. It's interesting to see how defensive people from SV are on this topic. No empire lasts forever and SV won't either. It's naive to genuinely believe that there are no smart people outside of SV, or that everyone wants to move to SV.
My basis is as an extraordinary research scientist in a specific basic science field that has strong overlap with data science. My I-140 is still pending (filed on June 1, I have a concurrent filing for a 485). The contract work that I would be doing would also leverage the skills that form the basis for my EB1 petition (so not work that would be totally outside of my stated expertise)
That's for Android users. For iOS users it was $1 to buy the app, but they changed that some time before they were purchased by FB
If I understand you correctly, we've had no issue with I-485s being approved for those who change jobs (but remain in the same field) and in fact the interview requirement seems top be speeding up the approval of I-485s.
The major patents on MP3s are dead now and Fraunhofer shut down their licensing program. If that's the patents they're worried about, they're done.
I don't know what my comment has to do with libertarianism, or why it's being down voted. I was simply mocking the blatant corporate bootlicking, and the branding of all criticism as evil right wing attacks.
I have seen very few games leverage native controls (with the exception of dialog boxes which are supported by almost every write-once framework), so I'd be curious to know your specific case for needing native controls in a game.
I guess it's mainly aimed at those who are not on facebook but use whatsapp. Or even those who don't use whatsapp or facebook but are in an address book of someone who uses whatsapp...so everyone.
Sure, having sex is more fun than being lonely.
Exactly. Honest (but poorly implemented) bars teach users not to trust them. This is because the time estimation they are attempting is inherently hard. Many kinds of computation cannot be estimated without actually performing the computation.

Yet, users want progress bars anyway. Without an apparent, finite timeline, they get frustrated and angry quickly. Thus the conflict.

So, the recommendation I’ve seen is 1) work very hard to get as smooth and linear if a bar as you can. And 2) fudge the numbers to give it a bit of acceleration to counter the user’s decreasing patience.
Goodness, a very long time, 8-10 years.
After Google presented the protocol to the IETF several months ago, a working group was formed: https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/quic/about/ / https://quicwg.github.io/
There will soon be a standardized version of QUIC with a fixed specification, probably by the end of next year.

I guess Google will still continue to experiment, but then probably based on the standardized version.
One solution is to use Netflix's DVD service. In my experience it has the largest catalogue of any service and in many instances is the only way to legally view a movie without actually purchasing a copy.

It also switches from a passive "watch what is available" model to an active "watch what you have sought out" model.
It’s strange how his has happened with video, while the opposite has happened with music. There are a bunch of music streaming services with really similar catalogs. Most people can just subscribe to one and be done. Why has video ended up with such a mess? Or, how did music avoid it?
Another post on the front page notes that BMW sold 100,000 “electrified” vehicles (of which ¼ were 100% BEV) in 2017. The s-curve on electric vehicle adoption has barely started to rise and will take 20+ years to complete. German manufacturers’ market timing is far from being proven wrong.
Wow, very interesting. Thanks for the comment. Maybe correcting the perception of people like me is the real challenge!
Top Python libraries of 2017
The used Toyota RAV-4 EV from 2012-2014 is the best used electric car out there. For <$20k, you get 100+ miles range, a Tesla drive train, faster than an i3 in both 0-60 (7.0 sec) and top speed 100mph, a usable rear seat and trunk, and it’s not ugly. It’s the best kept secret in EV.
NASA Helps Create a More Silent Night – NASA
Note that the

use 5.10;

puts this article circa 2010
Check out the post on the custom dropbox implementation. Helping them (and nsa) to search through files :)
Funny thing about this comparative advantage thing. The example Ricardo gives is 2 countries and 2 products. What do we find when we consider n countries and m products? Does every country have a productive place in a competitive world?

Of course, if we can apply comparative advantage to n countries and m products, we can also apply it to n people and m products. Does each person have a productive place when n is 7 billion? If we cannot show that, then the 2 country example is not relevant to our world either.
Ask HN: Is Google down?
We're seeing issues with Google Cloud, Maps and Charts, anyone else noticing this?
Getting Started with the Star Wars API in Node.js Using Twilio Functions
Absolutely. Actually, I'm not sure if I can give out my email address but the Hacker News administrator can give it to you.
Yeah, you won't believe the work I had to put in over it. As part of the stack creation process, I have to create a backend CA and hand certificates out to a bunch of services, and then make other services use 'em. Getting Elastic Beanstalk to use an arbitrary certificate for the backhaul is both possible and documented, but not as well I would've liked.
You can watch multi million dollar orders get filled all day on the high-volume exchanges. So, all hypotheticals and FUD about literally everything being a wash trade aside, it sure looks like there's no serious practical difficulty liquidating Bitcoin at present.
What is the requirement in practice for a PhD student(in STEM, specifically bioinformatics, on F-1 visa) to get a green card on extraordinary abilities after they finish?
I'm curious what other criteria and what other cities you've considered.
I agree. I think the distaste is more concentrated among tech circles itself.

Whether this is jealousy, or its because people in Tech understand better the power, control and knowledge these companies have than the regular joe is something that isn’t clear to me.
not sure I'd charge at this point. also, might want to setup some kind of email alert if a job I'm looking for gets posted.
ActionScript 3 was definitely not less friendly, it just wasn't ActionScript 2. One of the most unfriendly things about ActionScript 2 was that it was just so different from other programming languages, and not in a good way.

I actually was taking programming classes at the time, and they were all in Java. Almost every concept translated directly from Java to AS3. In fact, AS3 is actually a sister language to modern JavaScript, as it was simply an implementation of ECMAScript with actual classes and optional type system.

AS2 was instead a very strange and inconsistent language, where having a question answered in another language was unlikely to conceptually port over.
Flash player plugin had 90+% browser penetration by the late 90s but yeah, the corporate money really started flowing around 2000.
Dubai Sets Sights on Becoming the World's First Blockchain-Powered Government
The American diet is high in salt, not iodine. The vast majority of salt in the American diet comes from processed foods, and that salt is not usually fortified with iodine. This has been exacerbated by medical advice to lower salt intake, which means people are using less iodized table salt at home.

Iodine intake by Americans has dropped considerably over the past few decades. So much so that many pregnant women are borderline deficient or actually deficient. There have been several recent, high-quality studies in the U.S. and U.K. showing that pregnant women especially should be taking additional iodine supplements, and that supplementation beyond table salt could result in measurable increases in average IQ even in the U.S. and U.K.

When my wife was pregnant three years ago none of the nutritional supplements I examined (e.g. USP certified products like Nature Made) contained iodine. Partly because of the research and partly because she just doesn't like to cook with much salt, I searched high-and-low for a supplement. The research recommended 80-100 micrograms (mcg). The only supplement I found with such a small amount was a Whole Foods brand product, which I bought with some apprehension given the lack of certified quality control. Too much iodine can have similar deleterious effects as too little iodine, as it likewise screws with thyroid function.

When my wife was pregnant the second time around I bought another bottle of iodine supplements, as well as the exact same Nature Made prenatal vitamins. It wasn't until a few months later did I actually read the list of ingredients on the Nature Made bottle to discover that, sometime in the intervening two years, they began adding iodine! D'oh! So of course she stopped taking the separate iodine supplements.

Presuming the Whole Foods-brand pills were truly in the 100-microgram range, then all was good. The supposed safe upper limit of iodine intake (for pregnant and non-pregnant adults) as recommended by American doctors is actually far below the average intake for many Japanese populations, for whom no known bad effects are known. That said, most of the iodine supplements on the market I saw just had ridiculous and possibly dangerous amounts of iodine. It's a good development that Nature Made (and presumably other reputable prenatal supplements) have begun adding iodine.

For the record, my son turned out to be the smartest kid in the whole, wide world. ;)
Thanks! If you don't mind me asking a followup: when you say "solid," is there randomness in the this re-approval/transfer process (as there is with the lottery for initial H-1B applications), or is it really just the office ensuring that all requirements are met?
I am also curious about that...
>Web browsers are incredibly complex

This is the problem. A much less complex browser, without wasm, without JavaScript, with a simpler DOM... would not be that incredibly complex and expensive to build. So the point is moot.
I pretty much agree, I'm lucky not to be american, but that what it seems like to me. At least in the Bush area it seemed like the US was arguing about things, now one sides seems to have gone beyond logic and discovered trolling while the other is only mostly arguing with itself about how to argue.

> I spend hours every day reading articles on both sides

I have pretty much stopped reading any of these things. You can pretty much read the title and 99% of the time you pretty much know where the argument is gone go. Just stick to books and papers that are about a focused subject. That will isolate you and you will disagree with everyone because people don't actually know or care what happened in the economic crisis of 1893 or any other historical event and they also don't care.
How to make a bubble bigger: "How rich would you be if you had done X?"
On the other hand you cannot install what you want on iOS. They both suck in their own sweet way.
They wrote this codebase in Flash, meaning ActionScript, the only real option at the time they were developing these games. The effort to rewrite the entire codebase in something completely different, all while still running a profitable company, in time to beat the EOL for Flash, all while still maintaining a legacy code base, was a non-starter. Now they have a multi-platform code base, and a non-deprecated path forward. What they did is utterly rational from an ROI standpoint.
Fully agree. Heck Bing is one less character and nobody is stopped from using. Chrome takes work to download versus MS browser come preinstalled.

If you do not want Android buy an iPhone. Gmail, YouTube, Google photos and pretty much every other Google thing works fine on the iPhone.

Do not want a Google home buy an Echo. We really should not be penalizing a company for creating a better product and winning in the marketplace, imo.

Google gave away Android source code and Amazon used to create the echo. Google gave away Chrommium and companies use. Google gave away Borg with K8s and TF and all their papers including map reduce and others.