skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There's possibly a bit of assumed knowledge in Ben Thompson's posts; he analyzes web companies through the lens of his Aggregation Theory. If you're not familiar with that, then it's possible that some of his arguments seem unfounded. [1]

It perhaps sounds borderline tautological, but I think the reasoning under Aggregation theory is simply: if they could attract suppliers directly, they would have, and therefore because they haven't, they can't.
I think this is reasonable where Aggregation theory holds, since being an Aggregator is an incredibly strong position in the market.

To make a reductio ad absurdum example, as a musician, I believe you could currently just upload your recordings to Spotify, and skip the record label, in the same way that Youtube video producers upload their content directly.
(Youtube is an example of a true Aggregator in Thompson's terminology.)

However it seems quite clear that the Spotify-only approach wouldn't be sensible, because Spotify doesn't get you onto radio, tv commercials, and all the other channels that a record label has available. And Spotify revenue alone is less than Spotify-plus-record label. (e.g. see Taylor Swift, who gets (by a very swift Google search) $160m in revenue [2], vs. $2m paid by Spotify
[3] (and split between her and her record label). Obviously some of that revenue comes from non-music revenue, but the album sales numbers suggest that she's netting at least tens of millions per year.

[1]: https://stratechery.com/2015/aggregation-theory/
[2]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/zackomalleygreenburg/2016/07/11...
[3]: http://www.businessinsider.com/how-much-taylor-swift-earned-...
I should try that just to see if it's better than my old standby: poke potato a few times, microwave for 10 minutes, brush with oil and bake at 400F for 10 minutes.
>The author explicitly rejects the claim you are imputing to him: "You don't have to read a print newspaper to get a better relationship with the news."

This isn't really pushed until the very end of the article, and it's not nearly as long as the rest. It feels very much like an inclusion mostly to appear unbiased.

>A more accurate summary, provided in the article, is "Get news. Not too quickly. Avoid social."

I agree with this sentiment overall. Though, that is a quote the author of the column is echoing from someone else. Doesn't change that it's good advice, of course.
I am one of those people who use email for everything including file storage.
>in a way the Western mind can comprehend. Which frankly is futile.

Xenophobic much?
Hooker at the Weekends
Hey HN, I created Kitspace in an effort to help open source electronics be a bit more like open source software. The aim is to make it as easy as possible to replicate designs without the creator having to bag components to make kits.

I have been working on this for a number of years already (started with the browser extension) and have a few things in the pipeline such as integrating a GitLab back-end for easier file-uploads and adding a bill of materials editor.

The source code is available at https://github.com/monostable/kitspace (give it a star if you like it - it really helps a lot with grant applications). There is an alpha version of a BOM builder tool at: https://bom-builder.kitspace.org. Feel free to ask for more details of course :)
Cool service. Heads up, your Go version is really out of date with some potentially serious security holes. You should probably upgrade to 1.10
This is exclusively about San Francisco, can you update the title to reflect that?
It's possible I'm misreading the specific requirements -- I am not a securities lawyer, my HN comments are not legal advice, etc. If you are operating one of these platforms, the issuance of this document is a good reason to have a chat with a qualified attorney to figure out exactly how it affects your business.

But that just underlines my main point, which was that this document is a lot more than just a press release.
> don't put personal information in the blockchain then!

Someone else may do that for you. Example: revenge porn. Here's a relevant experiment:

https://boobies.surge.sh/
> Don't run your own mail server.

Agreed on almost everything, but disagree on this; there's no reason why any reasonably competent and security-focused sysadmin can't run a secure Postfix or qmail server (although it's hard to run a secure version of qmail these days). In some ways, it's easier than back in the day (hello, letsencrypt!) and in some ways it's harder (DKIM, SPF, etc), but it's still doable and there are some excellent reasons for doing so.

(The rest of your advice is excellent.)

> Don't run Exim.

Absolutely agreed. I'm not sure why Debian opted to make it the default MTA over Postfix (but they also opted for systemd over runit, so..)
When do we get to see the corresponding article for hiring? "Stop hiring exclusively from the same handful of schools"?
one drunken night you decide to put some random piece of private information on the bitcoin/etherum blockchain. can you invoke your "right to be forgotten"? if so, can you c&d every node in the EU to take down your info?
"Vulnerabilities found by Meh, DEVCORE research team." Any more details regarding how the flaw was found? I don't see an Exim entry in the AFL trophy case http://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/afl/
Also nothing about Exim on oss-fuzz.
Trading is taxed just like capital gains, and mining as income. For small investments with few trades, it's straightforward and you can likely use a free service. Beyond a certain threshold (like 200 trades), it's probably worth using something like https://bitcoin.tax/ or https://cointracking.info/ which will create your forms for you after you import (and painstakingly correct) trades, at a rather steep price ($120/mo) though cointracking has a lifetime buy for $380...
Sea Level Rise in the SF Bay Area Just Got a Lot More Dire
California Sets Two New Solar Records
I switched from a weekly car service to using Uber. It's more pleasant, because it's more flexible. And cheaper.
متصفح فيفالدي
SNAP plans big layoffs
Not a print biweekly, but highly recommend http://fair.org/ as a complement to things like Economist or even NYT.
With Supreme Court challenge, billionaire could dismantle beach access rights
Before you say it should be strictly illegal, consider a few consequences:

- You're going to end up paying for that support in the cost of the phone or through annual licensing anyway. Would you really prefer that vs buying a new phone with latest gizmos vs buying a second-hand phone with semi-latest gizmos?

- You've just created a moat for larger companies who can absorb the costs of maintaining older systems.

The only issue I see here is the bot-net threat. That's a negative externality that no one's responsible for currently, and we can definitely be more creative about the policy than forcing people to support old tech.

Maybe we force users to run software without known vulnerabilities? Perhaps then people would then demand more open technologies, but perhaps it'll further entrench the disposable tech paradigm.

Maybe we just force companies to open source unmaintained software? Maybe we do this in tandem with above?

Maybe we only penalize companies and organizations with a certain sized user base?

The possibility space is really massive, and we technologists really need to sit down and think through the ramifications of each proposal.
It's a dumb line, but please don't post unsubstantive comments here.
They didn’t stop selling them until Oct 2016 so that’s barely more than a year for some.
Do you honestly believe that would-be oppressive regimes with existing internet infrastructure will not turn oppressive because crypto? In the most optimistic scenario this argument deals with b but still suffers from a.
My company (Checkr YC14) has also open-sourced our internal feature flagging microservice named Flagr (Golang).

https://github.com/checkr/flagr
A good example is this image in your homepage: https://www.airshiphq.com/dist/static/media/control-targetin...

This image serves absolutely no useful purpose (What is it?). It would've been much useful to see a screenshot of the product where you could set feature flags to at least give us an idea on what your product does.
Either Spotify would need to provide those services, or someone else would need to step in and provide those services unbundled from the labels.

No reason it has to be the same entity providing everything that the labels used to.
Without having placed an order, this looks really cool and I hope it takes off. One I thought of off the top of my head that I did not see there is the ErgoDox keyboard. https://github.com/bishboria/ErgoDox

A good resource for more projects to put up might be Tindie. You might find some more HW folks there that would like to contribute.

What did you use to build the site? It looks great and is responsive. I have been wanting to build a "thingiverse for x" for a specific x for a while, but have not had the time for a nice implementation like this.
Congrats on the launch!

You're probably already aware, but if not here's a heads-up that there's a company called Urban Airship that is in a related space (and based on what they do, your space could be in their sights). Just something to think about.

Good luck!
For two months, I didn't read any news and nothing happend.

Reading news that doesn't affect you or you do something about it is a waste of time.
Exactly - Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

Perhaps we can tap the Winklevii's expertise to audit the SEC for malfeasance
Any tool can be obfuscated and mutilated to oblivion...there are brilliant tools around these days that do wonders at the source code level.

false attribution shouldn't work. nobody blindly believes binary signatures like we did in the 20th century.

accurate attribution can only be based on the whole picture, with a focus on technique. i.e. types of exploits used, styles of shellcode used, c2 key exchange used, intel types gathered, etc. etc.

the arms race is real, information doesn't vanish, nothing is simple.
That's actually a great suggestion. I was looking at this last year but completely forgot about it.
Wouldn't it easy for a blockchain to just reference external data which then get deleted to comply with GDPR? I know, breaks some ideas about storing data in the chain, but if that's the compromise that works. In the end it will all be about the specific implementation of each blockchain, the idea of blockchains in general will never be endangered like u/mamon suggested.
Factually? No.

On how they present those facts and the co text the provide for understanding? Quite a bit sometimes.

Also, the amount a story is promoted sends an implicit signal as too how important you should view it, and that's often different for different sources as well.

I don't go through as many sources, but I'll often look to see how Fox News is presenting something compared to WaPo, and there's often quite different presentations. Sometimes I have to search a little deep for what one network considers big breaking news on another network.

It's a more subtle problem than some people think.
Here's a great movie illustrating how the grid is balanced when a popular tv show ends and millions of people want a cup of hot tea: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=slDAvewWfrA
I'm surprised this didn't hit on relational memory. In the latest edition of stupid human tricks, people are often surprised when strong chess players, or myself, can easily repeat the moves of a game, from scratch, after playing - even substantial amounts of time later.

It's all about the relational aspect. Chess games are easy because they tell a story in a strong player's head, and so to repeat the game you just tell the story in your head again. That's why if you do forget a game, just being told what the first move or two was is often enough to recall the rest of the game - kind of like being told the first sound of a word you're trying to remember.

This is also why chess players can see a position and remember 'Ooo, that's from Reti-Alekhine' or whatever. You see games and the people playing become part of the story. It's like reading a page from a book and being able to say what book it was. On top of that it's also quite often an extremely important page, making such a demonstration even more trivial.

There have also been a lot of studies testing this stuff. For instance, one briefly showed strong players a position that might actually occur in a regular game and asked them to recreate the position. And they did extremely well, whereas casual players did awfully. However, the interesting thing is that when asked to do this for positions with the pieces on random squares, strong players did not do substantially better than casual players. This has been attributed to pattern recognition, but in my opinion it's more about the story being told even on a single move - the ideas and possibilities. Again the difference between trying to repeat the words from a page of book as opposed to trying to repeat random words.
It looks from the outside that the whole of the Bay Area has realized it can cover its awful behavior by _claiming_ to be progressive.

You don't need to care about privacy, just claim to; you don't need to care about poor people when you can claim it's the right wing (who don't exist in SF)'s fault; you can claim to care about diversity and continue to hire only white men from Stanford etc.

Weird world.
Not quite. His point is pretty simple: womans suffrage is a reason we are not as libertarian a country as before. Of course as a libertarian this makes him sad, but it does not imply it was a mistake - that was an assumption on your part.

"Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women — two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians — have rendered the notion of 'capitalist democracy' into an oxymoron"

Cato later updated the essay and Thiel clarified that he does not want to disenfranchise women:

"While I don’t think any class of people should be disenfranchised, I have little hope that voting will make things better."

IMO this belief about democracy should be way more controversial than essentially stating woman don't vote libertarian.

Society needs to be a bit better at differentiating exploratory intellectual conversations from statements of belief. It shouldn't be so difficult to have reasoned discussions about controversial topics.
For what is worth the 5 is better than the 5X in almost every dimension (I regretted switching). (And the 5 has a chance of still working after 5 years, you're lucky if a 5X is not dead from bootloop after 2).
Print requires taking time out of your day. Online consumption can be mixed in with whatever else you're doing that day.

I think that's the real reason only old people read the paper these days. Content doesn't matter as much as packaging sometimes.
You sound like the sort of person they are describing.

They don't "need" to find anyone at all. They know who they are, and seem self aware enough to know that they enjoy their own company
>"I'm curious if people have found this to be a problem in practice."

Same. And I think you articulated the specific concerns I have about just learning the "modern" version.

It would certainly lower the barrier to entry in learning C++ if this was an unfounded concern.

C++ has some 35 year of history and changes at this point. This point alone adds(for me anyway) to the perceived cognitive load of learning it. C also has a similar length of history but it is a much smaller language.
I really like my 5x. It's gone back to LG for the bootloop fix once. Hopin I get at least another 2 years out of it.
How can something structured as a Pyramid-Ponzi scheme be considered a legitimate new industry? I've yet to see anyone address - while referencing the Pyramid-Ponzi structures of the most popular crypto-assets - and give reason as to why this is okay (when traditional Ponzi schemes are not legal, and for good reason).
Is "so much the better" for car farmers, also better for America? I'm not sure I understand that point.

But in any case, how does the USG allocate capital - How does that relate to tariffs? Seems to me predicting a roughly global, nonsentient thing like climate, or internal, controllable nonsentient variable like mine depletion, is entirely different to prediction foreign, advisarial governments with similar prediction power.
I would like to sit in the same general area as you, as we simultaneously read our books in complete silence.

That's quality socialization right there. After a few years, we could even work our way up to having personal spaces overlap a little.

The people who don't understand this already probably won't ever understand.
"Conspiracy theory" was itself ... if you believe the conspiracy theory ... promoted as a disparaging term by the C.I.A., based on CIA Document 1035-960:

https://projectunspeakable.com/conspiracy-theory-invention-o...

Though that theory has ... its own critics:

https://www.csicop.org/specialarticles/show/nope_it_was_alwa...

Usage of the phrase began rising sharply in the 1950s:

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=conspiracy+the...

As for the VMS -> WNT shift, I'd considered mentioning it above.

I'm something of a fan of the multiple-explanations model. There are connections which may have multiple explanations. The IBM->HAL ties are too obviously deliberate in the film to be simple coincidence -- one does not project the letters "IBM" by accident, and certainly not in such a pivotal scene. I've also been part of far too many group / organisational discussions in which claims at deniability were made, clearly without substance.

As for the ability for some within a project to be working toward goals unknown to others, even at large scale, I'm reminded of the Glomar Explorer mission in which a large, secondary, scientific mission was presented as cover and for which many members of that cover mission didn't learn the truth of the primary objective until the story broke in newspapers.
The fact that he still unapologetically believes Trump was better than Clinton betrays his underlying thinking and his lack of commitment to reassessing his beliefs.
My main question was answered at the bottom:

> While a truck running on biofuel still emits greenhouse gases, the emissions can be considered carbon neutral since the algae sucks up CO2 as it grows–unlike fossil fuels, which burn carbon that has been buried for millions of years.
I've learned through lots of experience that political ideals that are held for national issues go out the window when it comes to local issues. This goes for both sides of the political spectrum.
COM based hello world in c++
How about a video that shows what the actual product looks like and does? That usually works for me and I prefer it to flashy videos that don't even show the real product in action.
I'm hopeful about their expansion into journalism. When I can contain my addictive relationship with news, the current events portal is close to perfect for me. I hadn't crystalized the thought, but what you said about it being a great source for long developing stories is absolutely true and one of the things I appreciate most about it.
Do you think it's reasonable someone would have said the same thing about moving to sourceforge or google code, and how that would have been a bad idea? The reality is services such as this are ultimately ephemeral, and out all the ephemeral things one may want to manage, email and mailing lists maybe the lowest common denominator.
Open Quantum Assembly Language (2017)
What incentives are best for decentralized platforms?
This is one category of bug that's always intrigued me - I can understand unintentional triggers of Alexa occurring (as they did with the Home mini at launch), but why are those triggers resulting in a "creepy laugh"? Is it just that we're only hearing about the unintentional triggers that result in a laugh?
Is there a reason your pricing jumps straight from $0 to "Contact Us"? Surely there's a $50/month plan or thereabouts that would be relevant to a lot of smaller companies?

Congrats on the launch!
Why Nazis Became Nazis: In Nazi's Own Words
I will entertain this thread with one more comment. Can you provide just one source that says distilled water explodes stomach cells and causes diarrhoea?
Kansas man admits to shooting Indian tech workers in bar
It kind of seems to me that only reason for Thiel to back someone like Trump was because of the Palantir deal.
I loved my 5. Wish it had full Fi support or I wouldn't have upgraded.
My family was with me on vacation, but I could take long walks alone. No, not a remote cabin, just a small resort town. Mobile internet wasn't mainstream back then.

No working hours at all. Full vacation mode. No direction, no purpose, no obligations.
I think it just did.
That‘s exactly what I said. For instance, you have to retain accounting records such as invoices even if the invoice recipient asks you to delete the personal data on that invoice.

Anything else would open up new avenues for tax fraud.
> The government has no obligation to clean up anything.

Sure they do. It's tasked with the ongoing operation and existence of the country, which can be threatened by economic instability. For example, Albania had a civil war literally over Ponzi scheme failures. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albanian_Civil_War

> If the common good-hearted people are too stupid to control their own money, then they should be deprived of the right to vote and other semblances of legal persohood. What you're suggesting, which is to restrict the rights of everyone, is a disproportionate and illiberal response, characteristic of Big Brother states rather than free societies.

Slamming "Big Brother states" while advocating for the removal of the right to vote and legal personhood is... special.
Tamil font had a lot of work done on it in the late 90s. Especially amongst the Sri Lankan Tamil diaspora who fled the nation but continued to want to read the news. Murasu was the font name I believe.
> We're going away from open, federated, distributed standards and back to closed, wall-gardened, proprietary, massive identity providers.

I'm not. I just create an email and password for each site I use. A password manager means that's not a big deal.

EDIT: I meant to say I create an account based on email and password. I don't actually create a separate email address per site.
Famously, Taleb is supposed to have predicted LTCM. I've read FBR and Swan, but not recently, and took a couple minutes to try to track down the details of this prediction, with little luck. I found numerous references to his having predicted the demise of hedge funds "like" LTCM (my clock will also strike 4:23 at least twice in the next 24 hours). Does anyone have a good cite for this?
It's not that simple. There's not much of a public interest angle in Hogan's sex life, so he still had a claim for invasion of privacy, same as anyone else who had non-consensual porn of them stolen and knowingly published.

Also, Gawker was actually taken down for defying the court's orders. Even if they knew they were right, that was a dumb move. You sort that out on appeal, rather than defying the courts. That is absolutely illegal, regardless of whatever defenses they might have had for invasion of privacy.

Gawker then compounded that by saying that they would have also posted stolen child pornography of anyone not under 4 in their deposition, as you can see on video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t0p4V1-va00

So you're not going to get much sympathy from normal people for a pedo-friendly, non-consensual porn publisher going down the toilet.