skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes they are making lots of money by killing their research pipeline and laying off their scientists. The reason they are doing this is they can't justify spending the money given the returns on offer.

I am no defender of pharma companies, but they are doing exactly what the economic incentives encourage them to do. We need to change the incentives, not just rant about high prices and greed.

Edit. Yes I know that the US government is not allowed to negotiate with drug companies over pricing (it is a little more complex than this in practice), but even with pricing uncapped the profit margins don't justify them spending more on R&D.

We agree on the problem, just disagree on the solution. You should also read the part two of the article you quoted [0]. Unfortunately all the solutions provided are little more than a sugar pill for the real problem - R&D costs.

0. http://www.bbc.com/news/business-29659537
Thanks! Yeah, frankly we sort of just threw in that scrolling list of ideas... and didn't put nearly enough thought into the display of them.
People deride unions, but collective bargaining has also been a very effective solution in the past.
Those requirements will tend to drive you towards a CLI solution as the easiest/best available, but if you could get those requirements satisfied in any other programmatic way, then I think you'd probably be okay.

Theoretically you can do these some other way. In practice, the CLI is the only way that's remained. The thing with the CLI is it is quite easy to a new component to it whereas someone creating a little app for a little task as a GUI tends to create a "cul-de-sac", stovepipe, a program with not relation to any other program.

So third approach would be great but it doesn't seem to be getting any closer.
I suggest, if you are having echo problems and are recording in a closet with a bunch of reflective surfaces to take a bed sheet in with you and drape it over your head and mic (like a ghost!). Back before I had a better recording space it greatly reduced the amount of echo I got in my recordings.
Most families have an Internet router which could help there
I thought it was the meatballs.
That's a good point. I was just more curious than anything. Something we're working on now.
The Case for the Fat Startup (2010)
> From Tokyo Narita? You're having a laugh.

When I told a cab driver in Tokyo I wanted to go to Narita he was extremely confused and had the hotel bell hop explain to me that, basically, I was nuts and should take the train.
Correct. We're leveraging localStorage to save answers across "pages" (using Vue). We could probably serialize / base64 encode the object we've saved and then let someone share it.
I think everybody is doing this? Looking through the comments and its nothing but people talking about SDEs and other well compensated employees, when the crux of this article and others like it are the issues faced by warehouse workers, which I'm betting make up a large majority of the ~550k workers employed by amazon.
Wired is definitely overselling the safety of IVF. Right now the oldest IVF baby, using the first generation technology, is less than 40 years old. So it will be several more decades until we really know even approximately how safe it is.

So far it doesn't seem to be excessively dangerous, but we really just don't know.
> This article touches on but doesn't explore in great detail the history of elevated lines in NYC. Some of their traces have been incorporated into the current system, most notably as the 7 train in Queens and the J/M/Z (including the Ridgewood/Middle Village spur), but many were torn down.

You don't even have to leave Manhattan to see elevated lines, just take an uptown 1.
Next you gonna ask for something crazy like "sort by number of reviews" and "consistant UI on product pages"?

The technology is not there yet man!
> Is there a well understood reason why?

LaGuardia, by all rights, shouldn't exist. It needs to be shut down - aside from the fact that the airport itself is already falling part, its mere existence actually creates delays across all three airport systems in the area (JFK, LGA, and EWR). Because of the way the traffic zones intersect, it would actually be more efficient to reroute all existing traffic from LGA to EWR and JFK, and we'd end up with fewer delays with the same overall capacity.

Unfortunately, LGA is the most convenient airport for people who live on the Upper East Side. They're wealthy and politically well-connected, so they would strongly oppose any efforts to shut it down. They also are only a $20 cab ride away from LGA, so the fact that it doesn't have heavy rail/light rail transportation there doesn't bother them.
He's a mixed bag. Some sound advice, in particular the parts about living within one's means; but there's also things that are utterly unrealistic, like:

> If you were to invest that (...) into a good mutual fund with a 12% rate of return, you would have over $100,000 in 10 years! At 20 years, you would have made $470,000. And at 30 years? That mutual fund would be worth $1.6 million!

Maybe I'm not savvy enough but I have not encountered mutual funds that will reliably sustain 12% over three decades.
That may be one of the best things I've seen all week.
I wouldn’t consider myself a “Top Developer” but in that situation even I would run a single Mac with multiple OSX virtual machines.
Monetization is easily possible, we just need a reliable way to transfer small amounts of money electronically at a low fee. Right now the large credit card players have a stranglehold on digital transactions, we just need something new that makes it not awful to pay someone a few cents online.
And how will this solve the nuclear waste problem exactly? Do you believe the Russians have a good track record in this matter? Did you hear of the Kola peninsula nuclear graveyard?
You're right that mobile did help kill plugins. But that was the final blow; HTML5 had already disrupted native apps on desktop OS for a few years, and as browsers picked up HTML5 support, there was almost no need for plugins.

(I say this with first-hand knowledge: several years ago when plugins were still common, I gave the final talk to a Silverlight user group in Minneapolis, in which I told the crowd there was simply no reason to continue using plugins. HTML5 won, and mobile only finalized its success.)

Just as open web technologies ate Microsoft's lunch, undermining the domination of Windows, I predict the same will be true of the Apple (and Google) app ecoysystems. More and more, operating systems are simply environments in which to run web browser. I believe this trend will continue.
> Sometimes I look at society as a complete organ, with a hypothetical ability to make cohesive decisions for itself. And I think, it is making extremely self-destructive choices.

One of my favorite philosophical thought experiments! I'd argue that that society is an organism comprised of several governments/companies which act as the organs.

I usually observe each organ making decisions to optimize its use of money, (or blood in this metaphor!).

It is usually clear that these decisions have net negative effects on us individual humans (cells) in the organism.

But the question remains, when each company and government optimizes for money instead of individual health, is that healthy for the success of society, the broader organism?
Yes, the personal router is a logical spot to put an always-on converged router/server device. Unfortunately nobody's done it well enough yet. It's an area that's ripe for an "iPhone moment."

The other problem is that we're in an era where it's very hard to market anything if you're not Google, Amazon, or Apple, and those firms have negative interest in promoting any form of decentralization.
> You may be overestimating how easy cut and cover is.

You're right. In fact, the Market Street passage of BART/Muni in San Francisco was a cut and cover. The closure of Market Street and delays in construction caused a lot of damage. Not the least of which the collapse of businesses[1]

The Theaters went out of business, became porn cinemas and liquor stores. Much of what Civic is today was a result of that era.

Not to say Cut and Cover was the 100% cause - but it was a major, major contributor.

1: https://hoodline.com/2016/07/in-their-words-the-convergent-h...
Reddit world news has a bot that does like a 5-7 sentence summary of articles. Would be cool if you could run that on the articles and read it. Nice to hear a human voice.
It is almost criminal how underappreciated the Tragically Hip are as a band.

This statement is somehow perfect.
The keyboard is probably a lot nicer to use if you can fit all of your fingers on it. (I usually use my IBM model M with my XO-1 laptops.) Also, the newer models are available with a chiclet-style keyboard.

As bitwize said, not only is Sugar written in Python, but it's also badly written. In one of my other comments in this thread, I mentioned the memory leak [0] which has been a problem in Sugar since 2013.

Without Sugar, the experience is better. I run dwm in debian, and it works well as long as I don't have any complicated web pages open. 400 MHz i586 and 256 MB of memory is enough to be useful. The keyboard provides ESC and F1-F12. It's just a little, weird-looking laptop with a transflective display.
It's strange to me that people still remember this. It's been 14 years, but I guess it's nice to be known for something :)
> London Heathrow? Get the express to Paddington and a taxi from there. Or just take the tube the whole way.

That's about as convenient as taking the LIRR to/from JFK, or the NJ Transit to EWR, which many people in NYC already do.
Our Road to Serverless
Sweden’s violent reality is undoing a peaceful self-image
The point is you generally choose sources that you personally find to be reputable when you use an rss aggregator. It isn't just a craphose of random sources spread throughout your social connections. The basic problem with fake news is that anyone can create and distribute it.
Thanks for the suggestion! I put some towels up on the walls but I haven't tried the blanket trick yet...
Since we're talking about Amazon and you're talking about sock sizes and I remember Alec Baldwin ordering "Bresciani's" on the first Alexa commercials:
https://www.amazon.com/Bresciani-Cashmere-Over-Calf-Dress/dp...

In multiple sizes...
> But they bring the products to your door...

That's being presented as some giant perk nowadays, but I don't really get the appeal. You're buying something sight-unseen and hoping what you'll get in a few days will match the mental images formed from the pictures. You can't size up the item in person, you don't get an excuse to leave the house, and you have to wait longer. If you don't like it, you have to go through the hassle of boxing it up, printing forms, and finding a post office.
It was different in every state. When my parents moved "to the country" they made sure they were in the Minneapolis calling area, but it didn't occur to them that the local town where I went to high school wouldn't be in that area. As a result I could call some people who lived 70 miles away from our house at no additional charge, but neighbors just 5 miles down the road who I went to school with were not a free call.
> If I were a startup or small business, I'd rather ship a slightly slow-feeling app with my existing team of web developers who already know their tools, than to hire a bunch of native developers and somehow get them all on the same page.

That might be the time where you'd want to stand out from your competitors by shipping a fast, native app rather than a web app.
Wait...are you the legendary Mike Rowe????
The universal availability of Taco Bell must invariably be the prime directive.
Your sample size is pretty small though. Stockholm and Vienna are very good examples of working public subway systems.
Beaker looks rad!

Are there any DAT:// homepages or web-rings or whatever that I can start using to browse around? I have it installed but can't find any cool DAT sites to browse.
> ...might...may...

Sounds like speculation.
A truly serverless web (a fireside chat about the Beaker browser)
Any thoughts on Fossil?

Edit: Never mind, I see you answered this below.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16807319
This was my immediate thought as well. Impossible to ignore a project with > 20k stars with the same name.
> The average mobile app is so simple in terms of both the data it's working with and the complexity of its UI that reasonably efficient code is unlikely to challenge a modern mobile device, whether it's native or running within a browser.

Unfortunately, it has been shown time and time again that this isn't the case. Somehow, it seems that web apps just never get the performance that native apps do.
Redwall was one of my favorite series. I saw Brian Jacques at a book signing. He had a very entertaining personality and was really excited to meet his young readers.

I didn't realize other books had so much food.
Not to mention that, even without internet, the OLPC XO-1 ships with bunches of stuff already on it.

Here's a directory dump from one of mine: https://alexvh.me/share/olpc-library-listing.txt
Give subsidies to the businesses that are affected...
"Cash for Clunkers" took a lot of wind out of this particular sail. It crippled the used car market for years, and propped the door wide open for predatory "buy here pay here" auto sellers.

Nevertheless, I haven't had a car payment for so long that I can't remember the last time I paid one. Trips to the mechanic are frequent and costly, but at least I'm not uselessly paying interest.

I'm surprised Ramsey can have a successful national brand saying little more than infinite variations on "spend less than you earn", but there he is, and I guess some people need to hear it like that.
Most of the subreddits I frequent allow you to choose freeform flair, and it's specific to each subreddit. Sure, though, it's limited in length and it's more closely analogous to a signature than an avatar.
"Seven employee automobiles were contaminated at the plant site, according to a Jan. 9 letter from the state Department of Ecology to Doug Shoop, the federal site chief at Hanford. When one worker demanded that his contaminated car be purchased because vent ducts were potentially still contaminated, Energy Department contractors nixed it and offered him a coupon for a free detailing from a car wash, according to collective bargaining grievance records cited by union officials. The account was confirmed by two other employees."

Welcome to the world of contracting for the federal government.
As someone who went through multiple IVF cycles I am very happy to hear news of a less invasive process. The idea that you might be able to create gametes from adult cells is the stuff that makes me wish I took more biology in school.

(Our son is now 16 months old and amazing.)
Some of the relatively higher mobility of capital is due to the policies which capital has persuaded politicians to enact.
Yes, and a number of them are now available for free over the internet. In Russian...
He is: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6074487
its not an inherent ability. people from top schools (1) study more questions and memorize common problem-solving patterns & (2) have more network resources with which to practice (e.g. someone from MIT will get 1.5x the number of interview chances that someone from a lesser known uni)
It matters by convention, because the textbooks are written that way.

My point is that you don't need that level of formal rigour to do applied work. You can derive the Feynman-kac formula via a scaling limit of discrete-time Markov chains. Add some levy process (a.k.a compound Poisson processes) and you're basically done.

If you want to be ultra-rigourous in your definitions, then you need measure theory, yes. But even Einstein didn't need that for his description of Brownian motion. If a scaling limit is good enough for him, it's good enough for me.
> Every single bootcamp recognizes that this is not a great way to train engineers

This isn't quite true. I work for Hack Reactor and we're doing well with this model. But every single staff member is also passionate about our students (including those at top), so that might explain why we work if others do not.
To the degree that workers are not your slaves or property, yes. They should be free to decide who to work for, and employers cannot treat people as their property. But as long as there's informed consent, most things are pretty fair.
During the flood of ‘93 things got so bad there were college professors making allowances for people who wanted (or needed) to leave school and go bag sand along the Mississippi. Edit: this despite the peak of the flood happening weeks before fall semesters were due to start.

Wonder when the next one will be.
I'm gonna stick with exercise.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/721609.Spark
That kind of breaks down if you consider existing chains have forked. See Ethereum vs Ethereum Classic or Bitcoin vs Bitcoin Cash as examples.

Git, Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Certificate Transparency logs are all examples of merkle trees (and argubly blockchains).
Neither do nuclear power plant meltdowns. Fukushima is habitable, Chernobyl is habitable. Most of the concerns around nuclear waste are almost entirely limited to military use. Storing spent fuel rods is a generally solved problem. Most nuclear waste when generating energy can be re-used in other contexts as well... military use creates the nasty by-products that can't be reused.
> The effect of mobility is offset by there being more workers than owners.

It's actually the opposite. The more workers there are the more likely some of them will defect for whatever capital offers.
> but Costco workers are dang happy as far as I can see. Always jovial, joking, and teasing with each other. They seem to form good friend networks there working side by side and stuff.

That margin is Amazon's opportunity. /s

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/706779-your-margin-is-my-op...
> I released an app made with Ionic. It’s an app for average joe, not for devs or designers. Out of 20,000 downloads, I received exactly 0 complaints about performance or UI. Most users don’t care and don’t notice anyways.

Personal anecdote: I wrote an app to replace one that was written using Ionic because the experience was so poor. None of the complaints for that app were about the UI, because I assume most users, not being developers or designers, couldn't put their finger on what was wrong with it. However, once I released my app most my of reviews ended up being about how it was much better designed.
>I wonder if there is a defamation/libel type of lawsuit here. Anti virus vendors are making false accusations.

Some (many? most?) will report these applications as 'potentially unwanted applications' (PUAs) and sidestep the issue of blame or malicious intent, often asking the user if they want to proceed rather than just denying access.

Source: former Sophos employee.
It's hard to suss out attitude, incuriosity, and/or inflexibility in the timeframe of an interview track. There's only so far those will hold a candidate back before they simply don't complete the interview of their own accord.

Red flags you're likely to encounter if you conduct interviews in the dozens are:

1. Don't know how to say they don't know. Have had candidates call up two screens and google the answers for questions they don't know, all while they're interviewing. (The eyes would give them away). The correct answer was "I don't know", not "let me google that for you".

2. Simple incompetence. They may be able to recite, rote, everything in the Android SDK documentation, but be unable to properly write a for loop. Almost makes you want to hire these people because the former is so rare to find, but, no.

3. Unrealistic expectations as to start date. Have had some great interviews where everything was perfect, but they wanted a year to travel before they would start (nothing against people from Europe, but, sigh..). I doubt that company even survived the full year.

4. Bait and switch. Apparently some devs contract out their end of the hiring process, paying "experts" a couple hundred bucks to interview under their name, get them the job, then on day 1, the interviewers and rank-and-file developers none the wiser, show up as a different person with the same name, without the requisite possibility to pass the interview or succeed in the workplace. They nod, smile, take on assignments, join the team at lunch, try maybe, but fail to deliver, and can glom on to the high-paying job for months before corporate axes them, never realizing the scam they were taken for.

Having been on both sides of the interview process far more than most, I firmly believe that the majority of the dysfunction in hiring software engineers is on the company side. Corporate monopsony breeds systemic incompetence in hiring.
Heroku was targeting a much different audience from what AWS was targeting back in 2007 (yes everyone, its been over a decade!). AWS has gradually crawled up the stack over the past few years, but I'd still say Heroku is targeting customers for which the Heroku model is exactly what they want/need.

I'd also say that if AWS had a 6-7 year head start on the competition, then that was the competition being lazy. It's not as if Microsoft/Google didn't have the ability to deliver a cloud platform back in 2007, and history shows they were delivering cloud products around this time. Microsoft Azure was announced in 2008 and launched in 2010; Google App Engine launched in 2008, storage in 2010, and VMs in 2013.
The Shortest Path Is the Scariest
Stepping back a moment, it's worth noting that this was Steve Jobs' original vision for the iPhone:

“The full Safari engine is inside of iPhone. And so, you can write amazing Web 2.0 and Ajax apps that look exactly and behave exactly like apps on the iPhone. And these apps can integrate perfectly with iPhone services. They can make a call, they can send an email, they can look up a location on Google Maps.”

Here we are, a decade later, and Apple has not only abandoned that vision, they are actively working against it by preventing web apps from becoming first-class citizens on their platform.

I mean, consider an app that does 2FA. "To sign in, please enter the code sent to your mobile device." You switch over to Messenger, and...wooops! Your app just reloaded its home page, and the auth prompt is gone.

Surely, any rational person can see this is too restrictive. Perhaps Apple will loosen these restrictions in the future.

Yes, as you point out, there is the potential for abuse. But that's already there with native apps. The things you just mentioned can -- and have -- been done with native apps.
Money doesn't solve what's effectively a bad corporate culture.
> My earlier point was that a shared clock between processes amplifies this problem so that timing attacks cross even the process protection boundary. So when you started talking about job scheduling, I assumed the following

It doesn't, though. Your point fundamentally misunderstands the nature of a timing attack for ex-filtration. It doesn't cross process boundaries. It doesn't use any process crossing state of any kind for timing. It simply times how long it takes to access cache lines, which is perfectly local & isolated. It does not involve time correletation or association across processes of any kind. It doesn't care about real time at all. All it needs is a stopwatch that can measure the difference between 0.5-2ns & 80-120ns.

The meltdown attack via SharedArrayBuffer did not use any untrusted code in the same process. It read kernel memory at will using 2 threads and an atomic int.
You've confused threads here. It sometimes helps to collapse all but the post to which you're responding...
Yes, I remember reading about your story. I suppose it's good that there are those kinds of jobs now. Good luck!
I've lost count of the number of times I used mailpv.exe to recover clients 'lost' email passwords.