skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I understand what you are trying to say here and I mostly agree, but.. two comments:

1. Size is important: A mischievous kid can be cute, but a mischievous general can be terrifying.

2. Incentives: A small start-up has space to grow, in many cases, it's in its interest to be nice. A giant could be out of ways of to grow and, in many cases, hungry, it will bite the hand that fed them. In the case of Google, Facebook and company, could be their users.

Maybe it's the circumstances of the beast what have changed, instead of its nature but that's enough to deserve some criticism.
That's what I am thinking when people talk about tax cuts. Apple or Google don't need more money. They already have more than they can invest productively.
In the early years of HN people still used M$ and other microsoft slurs. The feelings have soften in recent years, way after Bill Gates had left.

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=M$&sort=byPopularity&prefix&pa...
Yeah but an actor pretending to be a scientist is so much more impressive than a boring old scientist doing boring science stuff. Moreover, the science done by the pretend scientist is a lot more impressive.
I think the point was it's the only place in the midwest that could even be remotely considered in the same sentence for those properties. Other midwestern cities are large suburbs in comparison.
The article is written in
almost white on a white background. Very web 2.0. Not safe for eyes.
People should be forced to use and own more resources than they want/need. Who cares that 6 individuals or families might have wanted an opportunity to have affordable housing and didn't need a larger personal area (because they couldn't afford it)? Shouldn't they just be priced out of the area so that existing home owners can preserve their monoculture? Seems like a cause worth fighting for.
Seems possible, just not straightforward: https://gist.github.com/topheman/ec8cde7c54e24a785e52

Hadn't heard about this feature, but as I understand it, the notes are stored as commits, just not in the same namespace/on the same branch as you are working on.
There's no way for you to get the astronaut out of the box.

I may have been unclear: the astronaut is never intended to leave the box, he burns with the box. The astronaut is paralyzed save for his tapping finger, and on a doomed one way trip.
From the author's bio: "Recreational golfer"

I could write a similar column about how he is wasting his time playing golf. Is hitting a ball with a stick and trying to get that ball into a hole the "most important investment you can make is in yourself"? Doubtful.

People waste time in many ways … and they enjoy life in different ways. Not all of life needs to be the constant pursuit of something more, better, new, etc. Sometimes it's ok to just sit back and enjoy it … even if that means playing a round of golf or binging a few episodes of a show on Netflix.
Recall the CEO's departure and scale-back announcement[0]. There was going to be a shift of direction towards other kinds of last-mile (or even, last 100 yards) technology. Its a shame we haven't heard any more since then.

[0]: https://fiber.googleblog.com/2016/10/advancing-our-amazing-b...
I credit GF for getting Cox and Centurylink to roll out fiber here in Phoenix.

I have gigabit through Centurylink at a reasonable price. Thx Google!
I just thought of something in regards to following local law. This is mostly rhetoric.

There are people in support of companies fighting and breaking current law if they feel that a certain law does not serve the people. We have censorship in this case. Google is massive company with a ubiquitous name synonymous for web search. What if Google complies with local law without pushback, because they understand that a lot of people would be lost without their service. Hear me out:

Most every user here and probably most people 40 or younger from developed nations understands that Google is a company name. However, I claim (no citation) that a non-trivial portion of the world population thinks that the only place to do a web search is Google's website/search bar. I further claim that a non-trivial amount of people do not know that they could navigate a browser to Wikipedia by going to wikipedia.org rather than by typing wikipedia in the bar, loading search results, and clicking the direct link. Ergo Google being shut down in country would mean that a non-trivial portion of that country's population would think that there is no way to search the web for information. It would also mean that a segment of that userbase would also think that the entirety of the Internet is broken.
Incorrect. I just told you what the only purpose of it is and gave you a whole article about it.

Somehow we’ve had sensing instruments facing us for years now without notches. And yet, here we are. It’s funny how Apple can get everybody talking about their stuff isn’t it?
> in which there may be trade-offs between yield and nutrient content.

Aren't GMO crops most likely to make that trade-off?

I think it's not just fruits and veggies, but everything else, too, that has a much lower nutrient content, from "low-fat" foods to non-grass-fed meat, eggs, and so on. I saw somewhere that eggs from non-grass-fed chickens have about half the nutrients of eggs from grass-fed chickens.

Humans also eat meat because they get nutrients from meat. But if the animals only eat a certain type of low-nutrient food, then the humans aren't going to get too many nutrients from meat, either.

Add to that the processing of foods, too, which tends to destroy a lot of the nutrients, as well. But somehow people still say that taking vitamins is not necessary if you have a "balanced diet".

First off, 8/10 of those who talk about balanced diets probably still don't have a balanced enough diet, if they think that drinking kale shakes and some carrots and tomatoes is all they need for that balanced diet. If you're not tracking your daily micronutrients, then you don't have a balanced diet. Period.

Second, the above shows that eating food may become increasingly less effective at giving you the nutrients you require.
Virtual private networks become more popular as countries restrict their use
It depends largely on the price. Although I occasionally use the camera, I tend to use my dedicated camera more. I have the location turned off. Since my phone is getting old, I've thought of reverting to a dumb phone, so I might.
Cordova wraps a web app into a native container. I've never used it, but i guess it doesn't use (or expose?) the native loading API…
Yes, but not through whatever a human can tap out in a relatively short period of time. Besides, you don’t need to receive the signal a computer, just a speaker and a guy with a pen and paper.
I'm not an elm developer, but i think its closest analogue is probably Reason or bucklescript-tea, neither of which is jvm-based.
Ah. That's the type of squat you do when you don't have the ankle mobility required to do a real squat. :) It is a very stressful position for your feet and it's probably not possible to sit that way for prolonged periods of time.
Pandora to Expand in Atlanta Because Oakland Is Too Costly
This raises the age-old debate about what is good / right vs. what is legal, and how they are not usually the same thing.

Without going full Godwin's Law here: history is full of cases where "following the laws" has led to systems and behavior that most people would now consider appalling. I personally think it is always reasonable to ask: at what point does following the law itself become immoral?

There's no clear answer to this, of course. Chinese censorship and DMCA takedown requests fall far short of genocide, slavery, war atrocities, etc. on the "yeah, let's not do this" scale. Censorship sits in a murky area of ethics / morality. After all: we censor things like child pornography that we consider to be morally offensive, and most Western democracies have much stronger hate speech laws than the US. (There's a similar "murky area" line of reasoning around DMCA takedown requests: what about fair use? What is lost when regulatory capture prevents materials from entering the public domain on any kind of reasonable time scale? etc.)
a lot of so-called organic produce is the product of radiation-induced mutation

Citation needed for that.
Some salt has tiny amounts of other minerals in it, but any variation in flavor is more likely to be due to grain size/structure. Many salt products also have an anti-caking agent such as silica added, which some "natural" types are accordingly worried about.
> Color of salt is meaningless.

Unless you are talking about salts with sulphur in them. Those really do taste different.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kala_namak
Another cool paper related to API design is "The Scalable Commutativity Rule:
Designing Scalable Software for Multicore Processors". Basically discusses the impact mistakes in an API design can have on performance/scalability.
Let us just admit that amphetamines make people produce more output. But they pay for that, with a higher metabolic need, yet a reduced hunger, and a cold robotic mind space. Amphetamines help me to study. But they are nothing more than stimulants. Lets be frank, natural discipline is universal unless we are talking about brain damage. Rambunctious kids are far better off learning to deal with their lower-than-average focus, than take speed which basically stresses the body and wears it down, when these kids are growing. Its not a therepeutic drug - its a vice. Most of anyone who takes it, is not so unfocused as to be totally mired. Effort to discipline self is the right approach.

I get your sentiment. I can say Adderall has helped me so much that I could get teary eyed. But thats only because I am too lazy and lack the willpower to discipline myself naturally. Speed is an easy way out of self improvement. The last thing we should do is put kids on it, and promote a life long cycle of helplessness and shortcuts to mental toughness through drugs.
The courses on Pragmatic Studio are $50-80 each depending on the their length, which varies from 8-10 hours each.
On my browser the text is #5B5B5B on white. Perhaps not dark enough for you, but I personally didn't find it difficult to read. I'm not sure what's going on with your browser that it's white on white.
Are you positing that this free market exists and accessible? There are countless examples of people with little to no meaningful choice of where to work, what to buy, and what they can sell.
> For a long time, economists believed that labor-market monopsony rarely existed, at least outside old-fashioned company towns where a single factory employs most of the residents. But in recent decades, several compelling studies have revealed that monopsony is omnipresent. Professionals like doctors and nurses, workers in factories and meat processing plants, and sandwich makers and other low-skill workers earn far less — thousands of dollars less — than they would if employers did not dominate labor markets.

This is the most shocking part of the article for me. How could economists for years have denied something so plainly obvious?
I'm still on the cheapest plan I could find, which is 60 Mbps for $40/month. Even if fiber were $70/month, I'm not sure I would buy it, as 60 Mbps seems to be doing the job fine. What kind of things would 1 Gbps allow me to do that I currently cannot, that would justify an extra $30/month?
Suppressing wages & over-working employees.

For salaried jobs in all companies, the only requirement for unpaid overtime should be responding to emergencies.
So for engineering, this would mean always 40hr week unless dealing with out of hours production downtime.

There is way too much abuse happening(frequently implicitly).
1. Whatever your opinion on gun laws is, no marketplace should be forced to allow listing guns - or any other category of products - on it. Shopping is more a marketplace then search is.

2. What happens when the channels in question violate the ToS (Sandy Hook conspiracies often fall into this category)? Should no action be taken because they have a political slant?

You can certainly make an argument that internet platforms should be less like Facebook and YouTube and more like 4chan's /b board, but you need to at least acknowledge that there are tradeoffs with having a ToS that tolerates everything legal.
In the US too, the gold standard of internet providers is Chattanooga's municipal electric company for similar reasons.
* How FB is evil: They create an addictive, time-wasting service that encourages narcissism, they manipulate people's news feeds and thus their worldviews, and they inadvertently bias important societal decisions.

* How Amazon is evil: They lure people into buying from them, soon you will only be able to buy from them and the damage will be felt; they create addicting home surveillance devices that pretend to be helpful ?

* How Apple is evil: They engineer a basic necessity to break down every 18 months, they introduce progressively more useless "features" into their new products, they rapidly change standards in order to force people to buy stupid connectors, they no longer create amazing products? [Really is this evil?]

* Exactly HOW is Google doing evil now? The only argument I can see is that they collect a lot of information about you which they plan to use later. They still provide a quintessential information service. You can avoid their ads very easily.
Mechanisms legal or otherwise already exist. The problem is they "have no teeth" meaning the punishment is worth taking to get the benefit of the illegal action.

ie. Its illegal but worst case is we get fined 10% of what we will make anyway. Best case is we get away with it.

The other part is that they are not enforced due to the lack of resources to enforce them. Which again leads to the "have no teeth" since the laws are so broadly "interpreted" it can take years to pursue one case. This part is the hard part since it really is the crux of the problem and no one is working on it nor has any monetary incentive to do so.

There is not logically, morally, or non-exploitative business reason to have a non-compete for a minimum wage employee. Yet this case will probably drag out for at least 6 months if it is handled "expediently"
Benefits. Benefits can cost up to 50% more on top of salary per employee, sometimes even more. The government requires full-time employees to be covered by health insurance for example. So if you switch to contractors you can save a great deal on this cost.
PostgreSQL Meltdown Benchmarks
This is world wide phenomenon applied to all irrespective of where they lie on political/social spectrum. I think reasons are 2 fold:

1) Far too many humans on earth to have better bargain power in exchange of labor.

2) No workable formula where enormous wealth generated in this world to be more equally distributed.
I don't know if this is what the article is meant to suggest, but in the past I think promotion from within from menial positions to lofty ones was far more common than it is now and contracting could help, in part, explain that.
Good sea salts are not purified much so they are not 100% pure salt and contains other minerals which gives some nice flavours, that's why they are used a lot in cooking.
The SV wages I'm seeing seem to be concentrated in a few really wealthy companies who basically enjoy monopoly status in their domains.

It doesn't seem like smaller startups pay that well - though maybe that is fair due to the chance to hit it big.

What I will tell you is that software engineers in the rest of the country, especially in industries that have been decimated by offshoring and H1Bs (banking, insurance, and large companies in general) do not pay that well after about age 35 or so once you hit your ceiling (anywhere from $90K in the Midwest to $150k in high COL East Coast) no matter how talented you are.

I made way better money than most of my peers at 25 - they were still in grad school and paying off loans. By 30, I was still making more, but they were quickly catching up.

I'm imagining by 40, I won't be much ahead of anyone with a professional degree or even those who went into government and now have seniority, pensions, etc.

What I've seen so far with offshoring, H1Bs in my 20s was the first big warning sign for me. Then as I got into my 30's and started seeing how management treats older works, I'm beginning to realize that age discrimination in tech is for real - second warning sign.

And finally, if this whole war on white / asian males picks up steam in other companies, I'm probably going to attempt to pivot out of the industry completely. There is not much of a bright future.
Why are low skill non-competes bad? You can just lateral into another low skill job in an unrelated industry. It’s not as if you have a huge amount of human capital sunk into sandwich prep.
"I initially got backprop wrong both times, comparison with numerical differentiation was critical! It is interesting that things still train even when various parts are pretty wrong — as long as the sign is right most of the time, progress is often made."

That is the bane of doing probabilistic code. Errors show up not as clear cut wrong values or crashes but as subtle biases. You are always wondering, even when it is kinda working, is it REALLY working or did I miss a crucial variable initialization somewhere?
Are you seriously proposing to ban uploading pictures that contain other people to third parties computers without consent? That would go way beyond Facebook. Would I need to track down everyone in a picture before annexing it to a Yahoo e-mail?

I'd think the most pro-privacy reasonable approach would be to stop companies from identifying them beyond "someone who did not consent to being tracked".
> Exactly. Fiber to the home is the only fiber than really matters. If there is fiber but my last mile is old copper, then that doesn’t do me a lot of good does it?

I wouldn't go quite that far e.g. let's say you're my parents in a village of 300 (and as many cows) with the DSLAM >5km away, the best DSL you can get is 1024k on a good day (and on average closer to 512k with pings in the half-second range), my understanding is that for them the FTTN node would be roughly at the center of each village.

All of a sudden, unless the village is huge there's <2km between any home and the node and you can expect 15~20Mbps over the entire village.
Isn't Canada just as affected by off-shoring of work to countries with weaker labor standards and lower wages?
Sorry for being cliche but since you have time and energy to worry about being "successful" it means you are already successful. All your basic needs are taken care of, otherwise it wouldn't even appear to you ask this question. The freedom to worry about "success" is a privilege few people on this planet can afford.
Niagara Is Canada's Most Powerful Research Supercomputer
IPFS doesn't use a blockchain, which is why I suggested it. It allows content to be published permanently. If you wanted to keep the real, actual CERN homepage around, you only need to choose to propagate it from your node.
> I feel like I'm not really getting this article, though I am super interested in city planning.

The writing style was quite weird. I re-read some paragraphs a few times to realise he doesn't even make any point. It's like an old, ideology heavy manifesto, and so sure of how pure and right it is. It crossed some kind of line for me...
In most US states that isn't the case, however.
> Covert operations are by definition extra-judicial.

Might want to take that up the the military judges who make decisions about them all the time.

They're extra-judicial in the target countries, but so is what you want to do.

> It's simple enforcement of the law.

It's law enforcement taking action in a foreign country without that country's permission. In violation of their laws.

You're saying it's OK for the US to hack a gambling site hosted in a foreign country because it's illegal in the US. How does that not justify China hacking a pro-democracy website hosted in the US because it's illegal in China?

> "Here, citizen, use this app to be warned when you're entering areas with drug violence. Now you're protected."

The US State Department does exactly that when the area of drug violence is in another country. What are they supposed to do? Invade?

> If criminals run an illegal gambling website, drug trading website, revenge porn website, or any other illegal website you might think of, then even under your narrow interpretation of jurisdiction it would be law enforcement's duty to shut down that website's access nationwide, and not rely on some sort of bullshit voluntary protection.

People have been placing illegal bets by mail since the invention of mail. That has never justified the government in reading everybody's mail, much less bombing Ireland after their local law enforcement doesn't put a stop to it.
I hate this. I REALLY hate this. Creating a full-time workforce by cobbling together contractors is disgraceful. Sure, sometimes contracting makes sense, but replacing your core workforce with contractors just sucks.

Here are some reasons why:

1) loss of corporate identity / camaraderie

2) reduced working training & quality... and loss of control over how work it performed. If you retain control over work methods, they’re supposed to be employees

3) double downward pressure on wages as companies compete and then the contracting firm takes a cut. Pressure increases as subcontractors show up

4) subcontracting! You hire firms with no capabilities, which then hire subcontractors who hire people who know what they’re doing (maybe, see above). Why are these companies making profits? It should all go to the workers.

5) false flexibility. Your HR system might be painful, but good luck getting rid of a toxic contractor if they’re the cheapest person who can do the work. You can take your contract to a new company but they’ll hire the same people you already had.

Contracting obviously has its place - no firm can do everything- but staff replacement just sucks.

-
Almost half of US healthcare organizations breached in the past year
Neural Network Hardware Simulator for Google TPU-Like Architecture
This definitely still happens, but I think implicit in your post and this thread in general is the unstated statement "...and this is a horrible state of affairs that shouldn't persist for even one more day!".

Ultimately it's the credit card companies that regulate this playing field, and up to a certain point they're happy to make a large trade-off between security & convenience, because they can work the security issues into their processing fees.

Credit card companies aren't dumb, of course they know that small Mom & Pop hotels are going to have horrible security practices when it comes to credit cards. They also know that any security issues are going to be contained to the customers of that establishment.

This is why PCI puts a huge amount compliance burden on companies such as payment processors and travel agencies that process a lot of credit cards, but by-and-large ignore small players.

The hotelier you described and his method of ad-hoc charging credit cards with a 10% fee at some unrelated business is surely in violation of some PCI rule(s), but that's going to be a matter between his customers and his bank, not all customers of the travel agency and Visa/MasterCard.
Ethics of copyright transfer for scientific research: Green Tea & Velociraptors
Takes in a network topology and dumps various stats such as the total amount of cycles it takes to finish the network. Good for back of the envelop calculation. Also dump memory stats, good for data reuse analyses.
Tech folks are incredibly smart on technical subjects. When it comes to politics, power dynamics, seeing through propaganda, empathy, we are not trained in or likely to be interested in any of these "softer" but very important issues at all and it shows. Why do you suspect there are so many Libertarians in tech? It is the quintessential political philosophy of a smart successful person who does not understand these issues.