skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well, to be fair, leveraged buyouts can be a useful tool to take over a company when there is a bad management team or an opportunity to generate a synergy when it is bought by another player in the same segment. For example this was recently the case with Dell and Hilton.

But generally the high amount of leverage implies aggressive cost cutting, which negatively impacts the employees and in some cases R&D, which in turn means risking the future sustainability of the company for short term profits.

If you're interested in the topic, "Barbarians at the Gate" is a great book to understand the in and outs of LBO's. The writing style also makes it fun to read.
Similar for me, doing low calorie intake for most days and it feels norm now. Inconvenient downside I feel more in social domain than in physical domain.
The one question you need to ask yourself when starting a new project: what's the end goal in size and complexity?

If it's only a static website, for instance a blog or your personal portfolio, HTML & CSS with a couple of vanilla JavaScript functions is fine. However, once you add complexity to your application, by using more than a couple of utility JavaScript functions, there needs to be some kind of "framework" to organize your View and Logic. React is used when it comes to organizing your view as components, and JavaScript ES5 and beyond is doing the rest by adding the necessary business logic. That's what makes React so great in the end, because most of it simply stays plain JavaScript [0]. React is only the view layer by organizing your application in components.

In case you are interested, just recently I had written down my thoughts [1] on this questions for people learning React, Angular or Vue nowadays, but questioning why they should learn it in the first place.

- [0] https://www.robinwieruch.de/essential-react-libraries-framew...

- [1] https://www.robinwieruch.de/why-frameworks-matter
The bill imposes criminal penalties -- Section 230 does not shield platforms from liability under federal criminal law.

The bill also carves out exceptions weakening Section 230 protections.

[1] https://www.eff.org//deeplinks/2018/03/how-congress-censored...
[2] https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/1865
A “highly critical” flaw affects #Drupal 7 and 8 core
Taking out the bulk of the sugar you take in regularly is a helpful preparation for that kind of diet. Sugar creates short spikes and constant appetite. When you get rid of that, the longer distances of not eating become much less of an issue.
As CNN would say, it's "from sources familiar with Zuck's thinking". I guess that's not the kind of "sources" you were looking for. I know this from people who work there.

Think about it: it just makes sense. Nothing lasts forever, and they have to sustain their business, so they buy popular "social" stuff from time to time (Instagram, WhatsApp), and unbundle the stuff that may survive without the feed (Messenger).
I'm not sure if you looked at the paper, but they take advantage of this phenomenon to lower the nighttime moisture collection temperature, and say it gives about a 3C benefit even without a satellite dish:

Operation in such arid regions also opens an interesting avenue for increasing water harvesting output with passive radiative cooling by leveraging the typically clear sky. The clear night sky and low vapour content in the atmosphere enables dissipation of long-wavelength (infrared) thermal radiation from the device to the cold sky to cool it below its ambient temperature. By facing the device to the sky during adsorption, a ~3 K temperature drop was achieved, which corresponds to an increase in 5–7% RH experienced by the adsorbent. This passive cooling can lead to opportunities to utilise other adsorbents that have their adsorption steps located beyond the typical levels of RH in specific regions.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-03162-7
I feel like I've wasted a lot of time trying to use Ruby and Ruby on Rails. I've used it only for side projects, and I always ended up spending so much time on setup, getting everything to compile, debugging random things, etc, that I never really felt the productivity gains were worth it.

Once it is up and running, Ruby on Rails is great, but I dread the day I have to update or migrate one of my Rails projects...

People who use Rails every day seem to really love it (and they know what to do when stuff fails). Everything seems so effortless when you watch an experienced Rails dev.

I wish I'd known ahead of time just how much of an investement Rails requires to reap the benefits, and that I shouldn't bother trying to use it for small side projects.
As recent transplant to Germany from Sweden (moved here about 2 years ago) I observe these things daily. Cable connection being 'state-of-art' for Internet access and bad phone reception more or less everywhere. Not being able to count on good speed LTE walking around in the second biggest city in the country, is weird.

I would say large parts of this is cultural. Germans are not so quick to hop onto new things and are suspicious what problems new technology brings, especially with regards to privacy and 'Datenschutz' / data protection. Swedes on the other hand love new things and with a national number given out by birth privacy is not that big of a deal.

German companies also have a large accessible market of German speakers (~100 million) so the need to go global is not as acute as for companies from smaller economies.
> Companies operating in Germany have to make sure that data  is anonymized and stored in accordance with the law. These data rules are a big reasons why German companies have to stick with their old tools. But every day that we Germans obsess about data, thousands of businesses elsewhere merrily and creatively forge ahead without us.

As a citizen of the United States, I wish my country valued privacy 1/4 as much as Germany.
IMHO Germany also lacks the culture of paying for talent. Employee options doesn't really work here and nobody will give 100k for an employee.

They will gladly pay :

- 10k for missed opportunities ( I've seen companies looking for devs for more than half an year )

- 10k for a recruiter

- 80k for the employee

Not to mention I've seen consulting companies "renting" good freelancers to conglomerates, for double the price of what they are paid.
My bigger point, which is getting lost, is that there are rules to traffic (pedestrian, bike and auto) that we are all expected to obey. I do not agree that we can simply assume that a self-driving car assumes all liability for any accident (which is what the parent to my original comment posited). The rules of the road let us operate vehicles at tolerances that make it physically impossible to avoid every kind of collision - for example, as I’ve mentioned, a pedestrian that suddenly sprints into cross traffic traveling 40 mph.

I fully agree that autonomous vehicles can and should do everything they can to avoid accidents. We are in violent agreement there. However, I also think that if we set some kind of unrealistic standard for safety, then we are going to make self-driving vehicles completely unappealing to everyone, because they are going to drive like a cross between my grandmother and a startled squirrel.

This is not a new idea of mine - the issue of the too-polite autonomous car has been extensively studied and reported on. See https://www.google.com/amp/s/mobile.nytimes.com/2015/09/02/t... for just one example.
Tips to Encourage Team Work
Just recently I have written a "Machine Learning for Web Developers in JavaScript" blog post [0]. If you or someone else is a web developer, it might be interesting. It outlines my approach of learning it and gives a couple of great resources for JavaScript enthusiasts. Otherwise, I will just post a couple of the materials I used for myself to learn about ML below.

- [0] https://www.robinwieruch.de/machine-learning-javascript-web-....

Podcast:

- http://ocdevel.com/podcasts/machine-learning

Courses:

- https://www.coursera.org/learn/machine-learning

- https://eu.udacity.com/course/machine-learning-engineer-nano....

- https://www.coursera.org/specializations/deep-learning

- http://course.fast.ai/

Books:

- https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B014X01SS0/

- http://www.deeplearningbook.org/

- http://neuralnetworksanddeeplearning.com/

- https://www.safaribooksonline.com/library/view/deep-learning....

Math:

- http://www.fast.ai/2017/07/17/num-lin-alg/

- https://www.khanacademy.org/math/linear-algebra

- https://www.khanacademy.org/math/statistics-probability

- https://www.khanacademy.org/math/calculus-home

JavaScript ML:

- https://bri.im/

- https://github.com/javascript-machine-learning
One thing about having people who are trained is that the Germans are probably a bit more strict than the Anglos about whom they consider trained in a given field.

I've worked in the UK, where a history graduate can learn to be a derivatives trader. An engineering grad can with little problem get a job coding software (I did both of those jobs with a MEng).

Contrast that with my experience in the Germanic world, and I found the only place that ever asked for my degree certificate. My German friends have degree titles that are pretty much their job titles. I met people who were out of work, and when asked what job they wanted, they responded with a pretty narrow range of jobs fitting their degree.

Recruiters also seemed to take buzzword bingo more seriously, whereas London recruiters seem to be happy to put forward someone who says c# is like c++. Not without its own issues, but if you have a skills shortage, maybe take someone who is close enough?
"Und" is "and" in English, and "og" in Danish, and is used in Danish as well. I think Danish and German is quite similar as you say. It's been 20 odd years since I learned to speak German and it's long since forgotten.
I don't see the problem actually, if I want a normal browser I can do my online banking in, for sure, I won't use the nightly version. To me, nightly means, anything could happen.
I found an appalling number of comparisons with the Australian Public Service in this article.

Email. MS Project. The number of hoops we jumped through to get a white board...
The typical test done in the UK at least only tells you the chance, and cannot always be performed. The only test that gives you certainty also carries a risk of miscarriage.

It is not as simple as you make out.
> we should be burning down craigslist entirely

So, let's all be honest about something about CL personals that means these folks might not be wrong (even if, as is likely, the actual legislation is terrible policy).

I've actually used CL personals to get some dates, and there are things I liked about it (primarily text-focused medium can be nice, are there any more of those?), and I'm single, so having it go away is personally a bit disappointing.

But it is obvious to anyone who has used them that CL personals were utterly overwhelmed by people who are selling the other kind of Saas (Sex as a Service). This was a point of frustration for anyone looking for a connection (however unconventional) rather than a transaction. But worse, no matter your views on whether people should be able to voluntarily do sex work, with the majority of the w4m traffic being prostitution, it seems all but inevitable that there was some coerced trafficking regularly associated with it.

This was at least nominally against the terms of the personals section, but nobody selling cared at all (and in some cases, were cheeky enough to flag legit not-selling-anything ads), and if craigslist mounted any serious effort to fix the problem, it wasn't one I noticed.

This legislation sounds like thoughtless single-dimension policy, but I'm not sure it burns down CL entirely on its own so much as it does forces CL to reckon with the fact that its personals section was already set on fire by pushers much earlier and that they didn't care enough to do anything about it.

(Which is fine, they obviously never derived revenue from it and are under no obligation to divert resources there or let that drag down the rest of their successful classifieds offering.)
As a foreigner in Germany, I'd add to that list bureaucracy & the German language, a duet that does little to bolster the willingness of non-native speakers founding companies here.
You can now test fetal DNA fragments in maternal blood (cffDNA) to detect trisomies with high specificity and sensitivity-- though a positive result is only ~50% confidence, and needs follow-up screening with a riskier method for confirmation. The 0.7% miscarriage risk from follow-up CVS or amniocentesis is more justified in that case.

http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1311037
Your mass shooters are plastered over every media outlet in other countries too, so that doesn't fully explain it either.
So how long before these new powers are used for something other than suppressing prostitution? (Labeling all activity on such sites as "sex trafficking" is an attempt to control the language of the conversation, and should be avoided)
> erode my trust in Mozilla a little

Exactly where I'm at. I get the impression that there's an (probably unintentional/unconscious) attitude at Mozilla that they can use user devices for whatever they like providing they can justify it as providing _some_ future benefit to them. That's probably not actually the case, but it's certainly how their actions make it look.

I don't exactly trust Google any further, but I at least feel they are more upfront about their intention and don't push seemingly arbitrary experiments out to users or involve third parties in the data collection.
They want Dr Houdini, no less.
The feature is called "async DNS" and I believe queries both the system resolver and Google, and takes the first response.

https://superuser.com/questions/656938/does-chrome-use-a-dif...
I've seen Kapwing on HN repeatedly, and I've been convinced they're very successful. Still no idea what their product is, though.

It almost seems like a pre-planned acqui-hire play, where they build up a reputation for the entrepreneurs, not the product itself.
I'm not sure how the speed of home internet connections relates to being innovative. Are 50Mbit/s not enough to learn how to code or deploy your stuff to the cloud?
For your consideration: https://www.google.com/amp/s/spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that-thi...
I don't use it, but it doesn't seem significantly riskier than using cloud-based email or any other proprietary desktop software.
This comment comes across in a very callous way.
The Mind and the Body: Towards True Artificial Intelligence
AI Applied: Inner Workings of Audience Expansion
Dean Baker often complains about this, most recently here [0]

> Apparently German employers don't understand basic economics. Their ignorance is jeopardizing the whole economy, according to the DIHK Chambers of Industry and Commerce.

[0] http://cepr.net/blogs/beat-the-press/reuters-says-german-emp...
Aside from the virtual Time idea, it strikes me as very similar to how Elixir programs work. :-) Well Erlang as well but the Elixir language design encourages maps and typed maps which resemble objects more so. It’d be neat if you could re-wind your entire app with a virtual time (like clojure
Scripts debugging setup).
Such thinking is all over Europe. Sweden and the Netherlands as well, yet both do much better in the digital economy.

I think as the article points out the problem is more of the rigid and hierarchical business culture of Germany.

Also Germans are much less international. The dutch and nordics are much much more tuned into the anglo-saxon world were the majority of software innovation happens.

That is a function of being small countries who always had to look outwards and learn other languages and cultures. Germans seem far more insular to me.
> Because it works better.

It's not just "working better", the experience is throughout downright stellar compared to anything else, on every aspect I can think of.
Why I didn’t fix your bug
If you want to argue that a good defense against censorship is to prevent a single entity from having too much power, I agree.
Development interview questions and Answers (Guide)
> We don't have the computational power yet

Certainly you do realise that this has been a moving goalpost for half a century? It seems that lately people started to avoid giving a concrete estimate of the power required, though. It was so easy in the 90-s! «Human visual/verbal system processes gygabytes per second/has n flops to the xth» or the like. Well, now we have that and more; how come a deeper modeling, a finer processing, a more complicated network has come to be needed?

And your examples are incorrect, for example Navier-Stokes equations plus some general physics knowledge always have allowed us to estimate how much data we need for a certain fidelity of a finite-term weather forecast. Certainly we need more for a complete climate model, but we know what we need. No such thing about the brain.

It's an easy way to score some rationality points by voicing rejection of "magic", but it's a strawman. Nobody will bother arguing for a mythical homunculus in the seat of the soul, nor even for a concise formula summing up the workings of the mind. Pick harder targets. "It's just big" or "it's just a bunch of heuristics cobbled together" is a non-explanation. The brain is not a Rube Goldberg machine that manages to produce any sort of work simply due to its excessive complexity – it is energetically economical, taking into account that neurons are living cells that need to sustain their metabolism and not merely "compute" when provided with energy. Its discrete elements aren't really small by today's standards, nor are they fast. The number of synapses is ridiculous, but since they aren't independent, at a glance it doesn't add that much complexity too (unless we abandon reason and emulate everything close to the physical level).

Yet we have failed to realistically emulate a worm. By all accounts we have enough power for 302 neurons already. There's no workload to give to overwhelm available supercomputers. It's knowledge and understanding that we lack, and it's high time to give up on the delusion that more power, naturally coming in the future, will somehow enable a creation of predictive brain model, for this would truly be magic.
It's not RISC-V. They want you to adopt some exotic, proprietary ISA. And they've forever been doing a poor job of it.

Not a chance.
https://github.com/zeit/pkg can package up Node projects into a single executable.
Show this leopard sofa to 100 humans for 1 second each and see how many will make the same mistake. We are 99% there and you point to the 1% to prove how bad we failed. Sure, the error rate will go down even further in the next years. But what we have is more than good enough to be used in commercial products. It's not like we are trying to win a contest man vs. machine (which we will or already have).
> Are 50Mbit/s not enough to learn how to code or deploy your stuff to the cloud?

Oh! Found a Deutsche Telekom representative!
That's a product-market-fit. Promotion will get you sign ups, but if there's no demand for your product, no amount of lighting rods is going to save you.
So, here's a question. I'm a small self-hoster, US-based. If the "London police" come calling asking for my data, what repercussions do I face if I just say "No"?
Your premise is correct in regards to the salary. However, you're going to pay a fair bit on that $160k in the US. The US has one of the most progressive income tax policies in the developed world. The median full-time income in the US is about $50,000; at that level, you'll pay a 8.7% (2018) effective federal income tax rate (2018), however FICA (Social Security etc) and state taxes will typically get you for another 12-14% or so. At $160,000 your effective federal income rate jumps to 18.6% (for 2018).

This is Federal + State + FICA, on $160,000:

Boston: $48,000; Los Angeles & San Francisco: $52,000; Boise, Idaho: $51,000; Seattle: $40,000 (Washington has no state income tax); Miami FL: $40,000; New York: $55,000

Basically you're looking at 25% to 34% total. Your healthcare will also likely be covered by your employer, external to the salary, and obviously we're not counting any stock compensation.
Give me just one example where that ever worked to create a viable company. Whoops, there aren‘t any. Separating research and development never really worked for anything. What do you expect, if you have a two class employment hierarchy: First, people who have all the freedom, but no responsibility or constraints, giving semi-good solutions to people who aren’t motivated to let other peoples ideas succeed with all the responsibility to make them successful but no freedom to pivot or iterate. Even if you separate them inside the same company, very rarely does something usable come out of it. Proof in case: Some of the worst, most uninnovative companies in Germany (SAP, T-Mobile, etc.) have some of the most stellar research results, papers and sought-after positions, yet they never result in successful products in practice.
Jigsaw by Alphabet
Yes! This is how a sensible driver would behave - not quite sure what's going on ahead of you? SLOW THE FUCK DOWN.

The story in the linked article about an Uber whipping through an intersection at 38mph next to two stationary lanes, seems sufficiently conclusive to me that their self-driving system is not ruled by a sense of caution.

Here in the UK, we have speed limits, but the rules of the road also call drivers to consider "appropriate speed" - you slow down in situations where you might have to react with very little warning. This ought to be extremely easy for an automated system - it can measure its braking distance with high accuracy, it can measure distances to objects around it with high accuracy, it can determine exactly which areas of the world around it it can't see, that could pose a threat with relatively low warning, so just fucking slow down.

I've long been bearish on full autonomous driving because I consider there to be so many corner cases in real world driving where ad-hoc non-verbal communication is required to solve traffic flow, that the computers would never catch up. Now I wonder if their solution is to just plough through every problem at 98% of the speed limit and then disclaim responsibility.
That's a strawman argument... These driverless car tests are more like early phase clinical trials. Clinical trials are conducted under very tight controls, using participants who have given informed consent. Drugs don't get licensed until they can prove efficacy and safety and are approved by the FDA.

The current procedures for clinical trials are the result of decades of experience, where mistakes (and yes, occasionally shortcuts driven by greed) did result in avoidable deaths of trial participants.

For an example of how the pharma industry deals with this 'safety first' versus 'stifling innovation' dilemma, read this article:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1526936/

The inevitable result of this crash is driverless vehicle testing will get regulated more like drug trials...
You must either be quite short or female. The average healthy male would be losing weight very quickly at such a large deficit.
How exactly are you going to only pay 9.3% income tax in the US?
What prompted you to go for just one meal a day?

I lift as well but I only eat larger amounts during recovery. I am also training less as my priorities have shifted for a period of time.
Oh, that's what you mean by reverting the disaster. You actually support such violence. That's pretty fucked up.
I'd recommend https://about.riot.im/

Solid crypto (Megolm)[1], open source, federated.

[1] https://matrix.org/docs/guides/e2e_implementation.html
In terms of UX I beg to differ. Everyone I've been in contact with likes WhatsApp because it's sort of "iMessage for Android" or "Skype, only less worse" and use it mostly because their contacts are using it. The moment they have enough contacts on Telegram they just don't look back and find it a much more pleasant experience.