skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The app, the social media push, those things DID begin making a difference, even when their pizza DID taste like unwashed feet. But I agree that a better product was the most significant innovation they made.
I got really stressed out by Trump winning, but I still think the backlash against social media and tech companies has a lot to do with the establishment being afraid of losing power. When the Arab Spring happens, the free flow of information is an unalloyed good, but when Trump gets elected we suddenly need to curtail "troll factories", and ensure Fake News is being fact checked, and see to it that personal data isn't being used to influence elections.

I'm the first person to admit that I'm not impressed by my peers when it comes to electing suitable leaders, but it worries me much more that we're now falling for the temptation of reasoning for them, and protecting them from themselves. I think this straitjacket that we're so eagerly putting on our fellow man for his own good may very well be put on us, or perhaps the truly original thinkers that we yet don't know about.

So no, comments like these aren't infantile, they're crucial for maintaining the liberty that we've thus enjoyed on the internet, and that I would very much like to keep enjoying, even if I don't always agree with how people tend to use that freedom.
It seems like there's a co-op aspect where clicks only take effect after multiple players have acted on a particular box?
Quote from the article:

Today, the average taxpayer has one chance in 200 of getting audited. The downward trend has led to concerns that the IRS needs more funding to do its job correctly and competently. That’s true ...

Does anyone here believe that the IRS is a good thing? The tax code could be greatly simplified helping business owners to boost the economy. If you need more auditors, perhaps you're doing it wrong.

Imagine a "Revenue Service" that actually helped companies increase their revenue instead of being a parasite. A one page form, simple questions, simple tax code. Make tax day a celebration instead of a confusing trick of loopholes.
How to Be Lazy and Stay Calm
The right answer here is "it depends." Depending on who is asking for it, and why, they would have different requirements to compel Microsoft.

So for example, there is a major difference between the FBI vs the state of Washington vs the FISA courts asking/compelling the data. The fact that the data is on US soil, by definition means the US govt has fewer roadblocks to direct access.
Thanks for saying this. I wear a helmet every ride because I have a friend who bumped their head in a low speed over the handlebars crash. They seem fine but they won't taste or smell for the rest of their life.
> I doubt a French court can issue a warrant that forces OVH to turn over data

On the other hand: GDPR.

All countries try to pull the same moves on the internet, from Russia to Pakistan to the US and Europe. The difference is that a small market has little leverage. The EU already has data-retention laws that could be extended, and at that point any EU government would have quite a lot of leverage. It's politically unpalatable for now, but things change.
If the company knows that communication structures are poorly designed, the first priority should be to fix those. Fixing those first will probably have a higher impact on productivity.
Intel to use integrated graphics for malware scanning
The community of microbes resident on skin (or rather, their metabolites) has also been shown to influence attractiveness to mosquitos[1]. Interestingly, some taxa were associated with decreased attraction, which the authors of the linked study hypothesize is due to a masking effect. Skin probiotics may be on the horizon for mosquito deterrence and other applications (think acne, eczema, etc.). The composition of the skin microbiome is influenced by diet, host genetics, environment, and other factors (sun exposure, hygeine, etc.).

1. http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....
This college professor gives her students extra credit for going on dates
OVH definitely doesn't, but this requirement by Hetzner is news to me. Do you know how long this has been in place?
The higher renewal charge is odd, I hadn't noticed that before. It's nothing like most of the TLDs, but it is nearly half of what they list [1] as trending.

That aside, I'm still glad to pay a little more for the overall better service. If they were charging anything like the old Network Solutions prices, that'd be a different matter.

[1] https://www.hover.com/domain-pricing
Chat room for YC S18 applicants
What makes you think that Facebook is an abomination?
> It's to enable you to NOT own a bike.

While this is its main use, it's also a great alternative to riding your own bike in cases where you want extra flexiblity - as referred to in point 5 in the list above - not only for changes in weather, but also when you want to travel out and back through some asymmetric combination of biking, walking, public transit, and Uber/Lyft. This flexibility can be very liberating.

It's also a useful temporary backup when your bike is broken.

> 4. Yep America's like that. I carry mine up & down from the 3rd floor. If I move I'll choose not to live above the 3rd floor. Or maybe I'll live on the 5th floor after all, and become a bad-ass with huge calves and five flights of endurance.

As I'm sure you'd recognize, there are many people (e.g. the not-so-fit) and situations (e.g. fancy clothes and dirty bike, or also having other things to carry) for which this isn't practical.
San Francisco has 66 fire trucks the last time I checked (I’m an SFFD volunteer). If there is a bad enough earthquake they will not come for you. The sheer volume of fires and service response calls will overwhelm them. It is your responsibility and the responsibility of volunteers in your community to make sure everyone is safe or triaged correctly the first 2 days (7 days better) after a disaster.

Neighborhoods will definitely burn but containment will be more of a factor of how windy it is and how easy it is to get to water.
Lets talk about the actual facts of the case here.

Its important to note that United States v Microsoft involved a US company (Microsoft) controlling and storing data (emails) on behalf of a US citizen. The emails were physically stored on a server that was located in Ireland. MS argued that a US judge doesn't have the authority to issue a warrant for data that is stored outside the United States and the FBI needed to go through cross-boarder channels.

I haven't read the bill but everything I read about the CLOUD Act seems to indicate that the act is meant to apply to US companies and US persons, not to foreigners as a rule. It's an extremely unjustified jump to conclude that "all data stored at any of the large cloud providers fall[s] under US jurisdictions." Unless you have more information than me that you aren't sharing.
These are the lowest prices I have seen. Is this new? Surprised not have heard of this before.
Except facebook does stop the flow of culture and ideas, per their community guidelines.
And they should continue to do that. In fact this works quite well without government interference (labour/union law) or even in spite of it (See the Indian independence movement). I'm suggesting we need the government to protect us from violence when negotiations go awry, not to interfere in said negotiations between free private entities.
Weird that the word "Japan" occurs 0 times in an article about skyscrapers and earthquakes.

I realize the focus of the article is SF, but when the author elaborates on our lack of experience with skyscrapers in earthquakes, with no mention at all of Japan, it makes me think that this is just a clueless scare piece rather than any kind of thoughtful analysis.
GDPR is the other way around. It applies to non-EU companies that deal with EU citizens (or people living there). It doesn't gain access to data stored by a Canadian company in Canada on servers owned and run by OVH.

It generally doesn't grant access to prosecutors, it tries to protect consumers and can lead to fines in case of violation.
Come with me if you want to live
That's recent! Great to see it! However Windows build tools are not ready yet as per readme, also there are no releases since open sourcing yet.
A substantial group of people knew this was a problem for decades. The New York Times has a good "I Told You So" article on just this point.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/12/technology/privacy-resear...

More generally, it's quite difficult to present a problem as compelling when there are no bodies on the ground. Take a look around you at any particular piece of safety equipment, process, practice, regulation, etc., and realise that that price was paid, in blood if not souls.

An example I've recently learnt of was of oderised natural gas. That "gas" smell you know is not the smell of methane, which is, in fact, oderless, but a special oderiser, Mercaptan, which as been added to it.[1] The reason it's been added is New London School, New London, Texas. In depression-era 1937, the school found an inexpensive source of heating by way of a local "wet" gas line, related to oil production, that ran near the school.

The gas leaked. The explosion killed 295 students and teachers, and is still the deadliest school disaster in the U.S., 81 years later.

Texas, a state known for its reluctance to government regulation, required the addition of mercaptan to all gas supplies within weeks of the accident.

That's just one of many such stories you'll find in the world of industrial and engineering safety.

A significant aspect of unintended consequences is that they are non-apparent consequences. It takes time, and evidence, and quite often bodies, to make the point.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_London_School_explosion

________________________________

Notes:

1. The scent is exceptionally notable and detectable at low levels. Mercaptans are part of the hazard warning system in mines, environments in which visual or audio signals might not be readily apparent.
Looks like any other company hoodie? Or are we trending into conspiracy subreddit territory now?
Oh. Ha, wow. This is too delicious.

Who would ever have thought that Microsoft, the great enemy of Linux, would release a product based around a Microsoft branded Linux kernel? Not I for one. Though having said that they have been increasingly opening up and making non-threatening noises towards open source of late. So, it's not _that_ much of a shock but it's still a shock! Microsoft is using Linux for IOT embedded devices, wow.

And then you point out that simultaneously the Linux Foundation, the Linux Foundation, is supporting a non-Linux kernel real-time OS for IOT embedded devices.

You could not make this stuff up.
You can hear the (fascinating) oral arguments to the Supreme Court here: https://www.oyez.org/cases/2017/17-2 . I didn't know these were publicly available!

An interesting tidbit:

Sotomayor, at 09:44, pushes back against the U.S. attorney, referencing what I assume to be the CLOUD act as a more reasonable compromise than what the attorney has been advocating:

> And the problem that Justice Ginsburg alludes to is the fact that, by doing so, we are trenching on the very thing that our extraterritoriality doesn't want to do, what our jurisprudence doesn't want to do, which is to create international problems. Now I understand there's a bill that's being proposed by bipartisan senators that would give you most of what you want but with great protections against foreign conflicts. There are limitations involving records that are stored abroad.
You get clearer communication from the car in front of its actions and intentions, in an intuitive way. This assists traffic flow and might enhance safety.
Sixteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution
>> The downward trend (in audits) has led to concerns that the IRS needs more funding

BULLSHIT. There have been numerous threads on HN about private tax services lobbying for complex tax processes. The amount of time and the level of caution I have to go to to fill out IRS forms about income that the government already knows about is ridiculous. The number of people getting audited shouldn't be a linear measure of effectiveness. If anything it's the opposite.
I don't know why I'm even bothering to respond to this, but what is your proposed solution that keeps the company in-business and ensures no mentally-ill people decide to shoot up the company?
Homeschooling Regrets-Learn How to Homeschool
The IRS just runs things; they don't make the rules, that's on congress.

And yes, it's a good thing to have a well-run, competent bureaucracy that ensures that the rules are applied to everyone, fairly.
"We startup wannabes were not entrepreneurs. We were suckers for the shovel merchants"

Now for a little experiment: everyone reading this, go immediately to the mirror, look at yourself, and explain the business model of the company you work for. Can you do it? Doesn't it make you want to throw up?
The advisor for my CS degree, a Romanian woman for whom English was a fourth language, pointed out that one of our textbooks had several chapters on Chomsky's generative grammars but never mentioned his name. She said (and I agree) this was most likely due to his politics. I don't doubt that his other views influence how much credit he is or isn't given.
I wish there was only a corporate tax, and maybe a sales tax. Only because I don't want to have to do this paperwork every year.
Fewer people die in wars today than at any point in the 20th century. As a trend, people dying from war related causes has been on a seriously downward trend.

There's an argument to be made that modern weapons help keep the peace, exactly like MAD did between the USSR and USA.
I've always wondered: Is the tax code kept complex because large accounting firms lobby for it? Much profit (and many jobs) would be lost if it was simplified.
MLAT would probably allow a US court to ask a foreign entity via a foreign court to provide data of US entity, even if the data and the provider are outside of the US.
[this was not entirely correct.. so I'm removing it]
3 Ways to Style a Blonde Wig with a Fringe
Doesn't work? I left / right click does nothing.
This is awesome to see! My only wish was that matrix and riot were clearly mentioned. This would have significantly raised the profiles of both projects that I'm a big fan of.

To @Arathorn and any other members of matrix and riot teams, kudos on this news, and great job! Next step - of course, beyond the tech work already being done on the platforms - is to promote the heck out of this news!! ;-)

EDIT: Ok, there's at least some other promotion elsewhere which mentions matrix and riot; cool: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/france-alternative-whatsap...
I can't remember that I ever provided it but I heard this a lot. They say that it significantly lowers fraud rates. It's not a legal requirement. Interestingly enough, it's debatable if copies of state-issued IDs are even allowed in Germany (there were courts saying that practices like this are illegal). EDIT: apparently that's legal now, see the answer below.

I don't like the practice but believe their argument, hosting services attract a lot of bad actors and this will probably filter out most of them from the start.
Harvard, Yale Are Among Colleges Working to Repeal Endowment Tax
Also 1 billion users may be true for viewers, but the real support is only needed for content creators. That number is _significantly_ lower than 1 billion.
Simplifying the tax code is a win for everyone including the IRS because it will drastically cut down on the number of people who accidentally get taxes wrong, but you still need some entity to audit for fraud.
It's a big racket to give free money to accountants and TurboTax. No reason we need any of this craziness, just let me pay a flat rate and do my taxes on a postcard.
I saw Hetzner cloud upvoted on here about 3 months ago and I liked the pricing so I tried to sign up, and they asked me to send them a copy of my ID.

So at least 3 months.
Both, to a degree. Massive resistance maintained segregation through private business.
How do you think the IRS should go about updating? Do you thing something like AWS is stable and safe enough fro something this important?
Chomsky's Transformational Grammar is part of the origin story of Neuro-Linguistic Programming.
This is APL.
Zuckerberg espouses some sort of utopian idealism and is pushing his Facebook experiment on the world. The capitalist underpinnings of his project completely denigrate those views.

I've heard the same thing from him and his apparatchiks consistently - and in his written testimony to Congress: "My top priority has always been our social mission of connecting people, building community and bringing the world closer together."

The scary thing is - some kid in Silicon Valley has decided that he will wield his power in this way. Government is bad. Monolithic companies are good. Community is about getting behind your smartphone and liking a picture and posting a meme (hyperbole - but ultimately the vast majority of online interactions are such...)

It's always good to challenge the status quo - especially so if its about how the world works and how people interact. But the underlying capitalist values of Facebook denigrate any of those ideals.
Use tabs for indentation and spaces for alignment and you will never have any problems using whatever tab width you want (except for potentially exceeding 80 char line length if you care about that. IMO that's secondary compared to the pros.)
Up to 600k School-Aged Kids Will Lose Broadband Internet with Lifeline Rollback
Common financial mistakes to avoid with your startup
Geek Heresy: Rescuing Social Change from the Cult of Technology
Good? Meh.

Necessary? Probably.

No one likes paying taxes and, given the chance, people will either willfully or accidentally take advantage of the system. There needs to be a system in place to keep people and companies honest so that the system is fairly applied.

I think that's a subject entirely independent from the simplicity of the tax system. It needs to be as straightforward as legislators can make it.
Feet have more odour I guess. :)
the problems you see with cells and being in a web browser.

My end goal is a document, and for that I either want a programmer-grade text editor, or a full-featured word processor. Filling in a web form is a terrible way to write a document. My tool of choice at the moment is RStudio - all the interactivity you could possibly ask for, and very easy to edit complex files then render them to a great-looking PDF with the output of my code interspersed with paragraphs of text, footnotes and TOC and all the rest.
> To ask employees to believe in the company, not just to work there?

To ask employees to ACT LIKE they believe in the company

"My PhD in maths helped me increase click conversion rate by 1%!! #soexcited "

...and then your employees leave after 1 year.
In mechanical fields, dynamic means "moving". The weight literally moves, so it's dynamic. Another YouTube video that explains it a bit better: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f1U4SAgy60c
Verge and Pornhub – A Crypto Deal with a Happy Ending
In case you missed the thread about H&R Block on here the other day, the do lobby for it. It may not be entirely that though - there's also plenty of political capital to be had by pushing for special loopholes for special people.
I think the point is that web sites could also be vetted.
One of the most interesting parser libraries I've encountered uses GLL. It's a clojure library called Instaparse [1]. The author had a nice presentation on it [2]. I'm not sure how well it works in practice though. Another great article on the subject [3].

[1] https://github.com/Engelberg/instaparse

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2AUW6psVcE

[3] https://epsil.github.io/gll/
You can read all (?) court submissions here: http://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/united-states-v-m...
> Today, the average taxpayer has one chance in 200 of getting audited.

Does this mean 1/200 people get audited, or of the people who meet the conditions to be audited, only 1/200 of them will be audited? The article doesn't differentiate between whether people today should be audited but are not due to the systems in place, or perhaps that simply less people today meet the criteria to be audited and the computers are still doing their job just fine.
The worst part of that is that a layman only "thinks" he understands what "There was a breach" even begins to mean.

But what/who do we blame? Is it the education systems staggering lack of ability to prepare people for modern, tech-enabled society in any sort of privacy-as-a-right context.
Simplifying the tax code won't negate the need for auditors. People will still try to cheat.

Additionally, if the alternative to auditors is a tax code that seruptitiously and automatically collects taxes, then I would much prefer auditors.

Citizens should feel the true pain of paying taxes, so that they can think long and hard before allowing a politician to raise them.

Which is actually why I prefer the American system of adding sales tax after the fact. As opposed to many other countries that just hide the tax in the price of the product.
> more gravity

Now that would be a serious problem.
I would generally consider the current ecosphere being replaced by something totally different as a variant of "The ecosphere recovering" as long as the successor has as much complexity as the predecessor - and exactly what the GP is talking about.

But of course there are far worse things than that sort of disaster. Earth turned into a snowball several times but geologic processes producing CO2 managed to fix the problem. The Sun is continuously getting brighter so that wouldn't be a problem nowadays. But eventually, in a billion years, the increasing brightness of the sun will cause the oceans to evaporate and complex life on Earth will probably never recover.
The point is that it's basically a "global law". Non-EU companies could choose to ignore it, but they would risk losing access to the EU market, which is too big to ignore, and so they comply. A company could forego this or that individual nation, possibly even a big one; but the entirety of the EU market is simply too large to accept the risk.

Similarly, a US company could relocate to Iceland and thumb its nose at the PATRIOT Act and so on, but then "good luck doing any business" in the huge US market. The principle is the same: big markets can impose rules that more or less the entire world ends up following.
"why would humans have to change their behavior?"

Because the oil fed the bugs not the machine.

So the machine didn't work.
'In 2011, Louis Menand observed that "few people think that … in the matter of what kind of art people enjoy or admire, the fate of the republic is somehow at stake." The Apprentice signifies once and for all the hubris of such blitheness.'

Is the author old enough to have watched television in the 1970s?
A splash of soda / seltzer water seems to make just about everything better.
The free and open web is BS? Well, I disagree. That any person with the will and the skill can publish something for all the world to see, without the need for gatekeepers? That's incredible freedom the world has never before seen.

>> "Autoplaying video and other similar features are just plain evil."

I'm not even asking for that. My app is a music player in the vein of Pandora. iOS Safari doesn't let me play the next song if I'm not in the fore. Apple has acknowledged this is an issue; maybe they will fix it in a future version.

iOS Safari: As someone who has supported a web app (now PWA) for 7 years on iOS Safari, I say with knowledge and experience that yes, iOS Safari is the modern IE6. I say that because it is the slowest to adopt standard web features, and the reason for doing so is a business one. Both reflect 1990s IE and Microsoft.