skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> But the typical management consulting bashing is about the strategy kind.

I technically do strategy consulting. Generally speaking, yes there is a lot of fluff to industry (if you want to call it that), but that's not because the role itself is flawed, it's because the individuals who are employed in it are. Note - I also do not have an MBA.

- People who are in their early 20's with 2-3 years of experience can offer great insight to strategy work, but their lack of experience really limits the amount of value they can provide. Clients frankly do not want to pay for them (they do anyway, but you get my point). So how do you get new talent into this area if you're not willing to pay for it? (I have no solution btw). Truly talented people move on elsewhere.

- I personally do not sell strategy services that cannot add value, but that's because my firm is a boutique provider and that's part of my value proposition. The big boys (McKinsey, Bain, etc) will literally sell you anything their price tag can justify, even if they don't genuinely believe the price tag is justify. That's not a knock of those firms, it's just the "Way it is"...I would do the same thing if I were in there shoes (there's a reason I'm not).

- Corporate profits continually grow at all time highs (despite relatively slow top growth outside of tech). Management/strategy consultants are VERY good at increasing profits, but are horribly matched for helping grow revenues/sales.

- Many companies have good internal strategic people within their exec teams, but need an external voice of reason to justify their position. I often claim my work consists of "Using Email, Excel, and Powerpoint to convince people to act". Sometimes it is very valid to have someone else with a different perspective to provide advice about something that you may be biased about. Again, my value proposition is that I'm not afraid to say what needs to be said, free from any incentives. Unfortunately many firms in this space like their follow-on services opportunity too much (class example is a Accenture/PwC/Deloitte/etc firm telling a client in a strategy session that they need to do an ERP implementation, oh and by the way, they sell that implementation too...THAT is bad strategy advice)

- I have first hand seen the result of good strategy work that has made individuals incredibly wealthy. I've also seen strategy fees hurt the bottom line because execs are unwilling to act on the advice they need. It's not a foolproof service offering - this is absolutely true.
Hmm, I swear that I read the price hadn't changed for annual subscribers, I stand corrected.
(1) respects their users and their data and (2) has proper security in place is most likely going to already be mostly compliant before they even start.

If the law said this, and only this, that would be fine. But that's not what it says. It's a very complex law subject to unique interpretations in the courts of 28 unique countries.

GDPR compliance isn't a thing you can get accredited for in the first place

Did I say you could get accredited for it? I didn't, but nevertheless, you have to comply with the law (or block EU traffic, if you don't rely on it), and doing so can be very expensive.
What the Arlee Warriors Were Playing For
Explore the Amazon Web Services Management Console
The issue here is facebook has critical mass and another site needs to gain critical mass to unseat facebook. It's possible but difficult, especially as facebook buys out any other social media service with large numbers of users.

Facebook knows that a competitor could pivot to replace facebook, so they purchase the others.
And I'm not saying it's evil, but that without regulation it will favour itself over the consumer all the time, except when interests happen to align (and it does not, in most cases).
> xfinity wifi/mobile wasn't around then. (snip) Cable companies are competing though

I don't see that happening. Xfinity Mobile is not a competitive product. It's just a Verizon MVNO. It can't seriously compete against Verizon, because it is Verizon.
I think it's the exact opposite. .com websites are very rarely legitimate, canonical whereas .org, .edu, .gov etc... are more legitimate and trustworthy
> 8. Don't chase happiness, be content.

For those who still harbor a child-like curiosity about happiness (and have not given up on it, like a cynical adult), it would be helpful to observe the folks who have succeeded in discovering it. Here's one: http://www.actualfreedom.com.au/richard/articles/richardsres...
From my understanding, the code is lost or there is noone who knows how to run the software or the infrastructure.

These are real problems that can kill a company. The only resolution is to rewrite or reverse engineer everything, not an option for old software with little revenues.
Not for them to be run personally, but say, a friend can set up an raspberry pi like box, with yunohost or iredmail even at their home, turn unattended upgrades on centos, that's done for ~7 years.
Leben in Der Ego-Generierten Simulation – Ein Gedankenexperiment
Op-ex exceeds revenue to the point that operating capital is better invested elsewhere.

Some things possibly adding step changes to the costs can be regulatory (GDPR) and patching (outdated dependencies having no obvious upgrade paths). The latter is a killer, especially if it's a platform going away, eg some LTS OS.
You don't think that if it were anything to do with GDPR it would have at least rated a sentence on their closure page? So why try and make a conspiracy theory of it?
I doubt this had much to do with GDPR given the advanced shutdown notice Wikispaces have given, which means their service will still be active long after GDPR comes into effect.

That's possible, however it could also be that they've cleared any money that they could be fined for out of the LLC and are just hoping that rudimentary measures will be enough to get them by without much hassle from EU regulators even if they aren't in full compliance, while giving enough warning to users to be courteous.
Show HN: Simple dynamic templating in JS
How do you guys deal with this scenario?

const renderTemplate = (template, obj) => {
const args = Object.keys(obj)
const body = `return (\`${template}\`)`
const renderFunc = new Function(...args.concat([body]))
return renderFunc(...Object.values(obj))
}
const dynamicallyLoadedTemplate = '${a} and ${b}'
console.log(
renderTemplate(dynamicallyLoadedTemplate, {
'a': '1',
'b': 2
})
)

Is this elegant enough?
The wall fell because Reagan goaded the former Soviet Union into an arms race they couldn’t risk not joining but couldn’t afford to compete in. Economic collapse is not fun for empires, regardless of the amount of technology.
> I wonder how much GDPR had to do with bringing them down.

Since they didn't cite that as a reason, I am going to conclude none. Even if they did cite it, I would still be inclined to assume it was being offered as a palatable pretext for a simpler baser bottom-line-driven business decision.

A little Googling shows that TES Global acquired Wikispaces in 2014:

https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20140304006078/en/Wik...

TES appears to fancy itself a social network. Wikis are a slightly different animal. And now that TES has Wikispaces users in pocket, I imagine they could care less about maintaining a wiki platform.
Maybe its me, but I don't see what the restrictions would be to make an image which had a root FS inside it, without privileges. The "bits" which make it be a root FS don't need you to "mount" it as a root process and run chflags, you can dd into the image, change things, do math, change checksums. Sure, its a lot harder but the principle of what an image is, is: its a stream of bits. If you can modify the stream of bits, you don't need root to mark it as a region which has magic root properties be it a chflags FS state, or a setuid bit of whatever.

Also, again it may just be me, but if you are running a hypervisor limited VM image on a stream of bits, and you can modify those bits outside that state, restricting this VM not to have root runtime is slightly odd.

This reads like a proscriptive "no root" rule has been metasploited into "we will wake you at 3am to check if your dream, you are running as root" type extremism.
OMAD is great--lots of consistent energy throughout the day--but I suspect that won't be case when your body fat percentage goes below 15%.
Citation needed.

Where is the mind then according to these theories?
Benchmarking library for rust
He didn't cheat? That's impossible if they're really switches
twitch.tv/devwars is a great competition. 3 vs 3 and you have an hour to make a better website than your competitor.
layman opinion: no it's not, your brain is a graph compressor.

I had episodes of minute memory losses in the last years. And everytime I gathered the answer after long time by having flashes of things similar in nature. Trying to remember a name, I went through a stream of wrong names of people of the same origin, and same prefix (bou) until the right suffix hit me.
Had you read Philips' book, even just the synopsis, you'd find that you're repeating his thesis.

So blame me, not the esteemed economist.
> If the law said this, and only this, that would be fine. But that's not what it says. It's a very complex law subject to unique interpretations in the courts of 28 unique countries.

Sure you can make it as complex as you want. But the practical upshot is this: as long as you are going around using FUD rather than fact to pretend that the GDPR is unworkable you're setting yourself up for a nasty surprise. Instead go and make a 'best effort' and spend a few productive weeks on getting rid of the most obvious differences between where you are today and where the law says you should be and you will be doing better than most and will be able to sleep just fine because just like with running away from hungry lions you only have to run faster than the competition.

And as long as you're not in fintech, social media, advertising, medtech, insurance or doing something really shady you most likely will be fine anyway because those segments are where the majority of the people that I talk to about this subject expect the first action.

The courts of '28 unique countries' are not each and every one of them going to give a unique interpretation of this law. What you can expect is that starting 2019 or so a couple of serious offenders will be first warned and then fined to show the rest of the world they're not dicking around this time so make-believe arguments won't cut it.

I'm pretty happy that the GDPR exists, the business world had a bowshot in the form of the cookie law, that got ignored or arm-chair legalesed into an ineffective operation when everybody had the option to actually comply with the spirit of the law as well as the letter (the spirit: stop tricking users everywhere: the letter: put up a cookie wall and continue tracking like before once the user inevitably clicks 'ok').

When industries fail to self-regulate sooner or later regulators step in. In this case it is later but as laws come the GDPR is surprisingly clear and accessible.
I have a sneaking suspicion that I’ve built a feature that was presented as a coding exercise, possibly more than once.
> Your comment is deeply misleading. Floating point is mostly just fixed point plus some rules for automatically moving the decimal point.

Uhhhhh..... I hope this is a farcical comment. Because if you believe this, then you might want to read up here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floating-point_arithmetic
Row #3, column #11 is the sound of Lex Luthor's flying propeller backpack in Superman.
All 28 countries also have different privacy laws, consumer-protection laws, trademark laws (to some extent), language laws, etc. How much is that costing you?
I may depend upon the company. I work at a company what writes software for smart phones [1] and we don't have such restrictions. Yet our parent company (we were bought out several years ago) does deal with financial transactions and has all sorts of regulatory restrictions what can and can't be done with computers.

Unfortunately, for some obscure reason, it's only now that we might have to conform to the regulatory compliance issues (no one has been able to answer me "Why now? Why not when we first got bought years ago?") We're trying to fight it but the fix seems to be in.

[1] Enhanced caller ID. Part of our software lives on the cell phone. Part lives on the phone network.
They are declaring technical bankruptcy.
I would argue that with a phone number, the letters are explicitly tied to the address whereas a domain is more or less key value pair for an ip address.
Why is that bullshit? They're saying that the site is too expensive to run as-is and too expensive to fix. That's pretty much the most obvious reason possible.
هداف مباراة برشلونة و ديبورتيفو لاكورونيا 4-2: برشلونة بطلاُ للدوري الإسباني
https://www.selfhacked.com/blog/cause-brain-fog/
Oh, and to be complete: The reason why multiplying by 100 = 2^2 * 5^2 helps when dealing with cash is that 0.20 isn't exactly representable in a finite-length binary number (since that's 1/5, and 5 isn't a power of two). It's the multiplication by 5^2 = 25 that makes previously inexact things exact. The additional multiplication by 2^2 = 4 just moves the decimal place by two digits, nothing the FPU couldn't have done on its own. You could represent cash in units of four cents (or two cents, or 256 cents) instead of one cent, and the result would be unchanged except for the location of the decimal place.

There is no useful, general analogy to this in numerical analysis. If you're using any fixed-sized representation of numbers--floating point, fixed point, or otherwise--then some ways to calculate an expression will be less accurate than others. You can avoid this with variable-length representations, but then some ways are slower. There is no way to avoid thinking about numerical conditioning.
اليست
Wikispaces has operated for 13 years. It isn't the least bit curious to you that they are announcing its closure less than a month before GDPR comes to life, complaining that "...[bringing the] code in line with modern standards is very substantial"?
I think it’s okay. They can have “the blockchain”...
Not getting root on your own machine as a developer? That's ridiculous. I left a company where I was the lead developer because I got tired of waiting two weeks for the outside networking consultants to get resources provisioned on AWS. Our own internal network people had to wait on them.

Now I work for a much smaller company and they gave me full admin access to the AWS console from day one and I am "just" a senior developer.
Cdgg
> 15% body fat percentage tends to be off putting.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4892674/
`Also of note is that observers adjusted both the attractive and healthy male body figures to consist of approximately 16% fat and 80% muscle, given a mean body weight of 78.24kg for the subject identities. The figure of 16% lies within the healthy fat range of 8–21% for young adult Caucasian males `

15% is actually very close to the ideal attractiveness for males.

~25% Body Fat
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4995441/

25% BF isn't much to go off, but above 25 BMI you're putting yourself at un-necessary risk. 25% BF still is very high. Heath wise you should look at 8–21%.
What was the problem they asked you to solve? Out of curiosity
For those reading along at home, I want to strongly second your recommendation for people who really care about their e-mail (and, to some extent, overall identity on the Internet) to buy a custom domain.

Me, my spouse, and my teenaged kid all have our own domains. They're all hosted at Fastmail under a group account and we all can have as many additional addresses tied to our regular accounts as we want.

It does cost a bit more ($15/year/domain at Gandi, my preferred registrar) than just paying Fastmail directly and using one of their domains or sticking with the costs-no-money Gmail offering but it's been worth it in unexpected ways. My kid, for instance, is following in the "family business footsteps" and doing IT work for small clients. Since he had his own domain, he can have prospective clients e-mail him at "consulting@hisdomain.tld" My spouse uses a bazillion aliases for spam and inbound e-mail filtering without tipping off the spammers to the underlying e-mail address by having to use the + notation.

Someday, when my kid strikes out fully on his own, he'll be able to take his domain with him to wherever he wants (even host it on Gmail, if he prefers) without losing any of his addresses or other contacts. My domain has been around for over two decades and has been hosted in easily 20 different places, but my main e-mail address has remained the same.

It's nice and worth the money.
I implemented an R5RS macro expander, and, at least from the perspective of Scheme and macros, the only truly base is application, and all other forms can be reduced to it. For my expander I actually implemented all let forms, for instance, as macros that reduced to lambda applications.

Now other lisps might have more forms that don't reduce quite nicely, I'm not sure, I still strongly believe in my original point that lisp practically has no syntax, and that's one of the reasons its easy to create macro systems for it.
Here’s two
Racket is typed, but I don't think the macros themselves have types. Contrast that with both template Haskell and scala macros, both of which are typed and far more limited in what they can do. That said, it looks like OCaml macros are untyped, so perhaps it is just Haskell-influenced communities that generally look down on macro systems and want to subvert them under the of the type system.
The new issue is the extent of the extraterritorial reach that was built into this law. With GDPR, the EU is essentially making the claim that it can dictate rules to and reach into the pockets of any company anywhere in the world, whether or not they have a presence in the EU.
Functionally that ticks boxes, but it won't tick non-functional boxes of security, resilience, performance, ..., ..., ...
It's very immature to suggest that this is Agile and persists the myths that Agile as a hackathon exercise is okay as a business methodology.
What can US do to disrupt the Internet? Turn off root DNS servers, stop issuing SSL certificates (let's encrypt is US entity and many other CA), undelegate a lot of domains, mess with BGP, cut the backbones. I know that many of those services are duplicated, but I think that US can wreak a huge havoc onto Internet. And Russia can't really do anything of that scale. They even struggle to ban Telegram, there's too much dependency on foreign services.
I think you're right that protectionism is not a great analogy here.
The interpretation of laws and specific contexts are usually relatively straightforward for people who are trained in legal speak, not engineers.

There should be hardly any change needed as long as the service only gathers data that is required for it and users are willingly using the service.

The problem if for companies that do heavy identification of users against their will like in adtech or companies that gather and resell personal information.
Maybe of interest:

I recently open-sourced an archive.is package and command-line client written in Go:

https://jaytaylor.com/archive.is (aliased to https://github.com/jaytaylor/archive.is)

go get jaytaylor.com/archive.is

So far I've been using it and it's worked reasonably well :)

One cool thing- I actually used this python package as a starting place for how to automate archive.is submissions.

---

RE: archive.is: The person running archive.is deserves a lot of credit, it is a remarkable system. It may not be immediately clear how how challenging it is to capture and bottle up (safely and _reliably_) the contents of arbitrary URLs until you actually try to make such a thing. Archive.is person has implemented it at scale, and plans to keep the content available indefinitely [0], all on their own dime.

Mad props.

[0] https://archive.is/faq
What would the 100-200k let you do that you can’t do now?
I'm really saddened that the NYT couldn't even understand what they were covering here...
I definitely get that. People post lifestyle pics to stock photo sites as the ultimate humblebrag; they get that little dopamine hit out of seeing others use their life on websites, posts, etc. I think that is a big reason why all the 'free for any use' websites get so many uploads. I find it much more rewarding than posting to social media.
>> unless user data is a big part of its value proposition

I think this is the real issue. Some large percentage of the current crop of startups don't actually have a business model other than "get as much data as possible and sell it to the lowest bidder".

GDPR is adding a substantial implementation tax to that model and what we're seeing is the reset for companies who can't survive.
The caption is "unachievable." The first body is achievable for anybody not morbidly obese within less than a year of gym training. The second body doesn't even require you to go to the gym, just monitor your calories.

So both are probably unachievable to somebody that's already crossed maybe the 35%bf threshold, but step outside of America and that's not anywhere near the majority...

What kind of crowd do you hang with? The only remarkable thing about the first guy's arms is he's pretty vascular.
+1 for Dale Carnegie, Warren Buffett says that it was one of the best educations he ever got in his life.

+1 for Meditations. As most HNers say, it's impressive how much hasn't changed in the last 2000 years when it comes to human nature. I think some translations are better than others though.
My MacBook has only one port and a sealed battery compartment, which is not helping :(
Some optimization processes are more powerful than others. The kind of optimization process referred to as a superintelligence is vastly more powerful than corporations. It is also far harder to align the values of an artificial intelligence with humans than those of corporations because there are humans inside the corporations and no humans inside the artificial intelligence. Therefore we ought to worry more about superintelligence, even if we do not yet know the exact timeline of its creation, than we ought to worry about corporations. You shouldn't argue by analogy from corporations to superintelligence.[1]

[1] https://arbital.com/p/corps_vs_si/
The beauty of FB’s dirty laundry finally making a difference (possibly, hopefully) is that the next big social network won’t sell to them. It’d be bad publicity and there would be a mass exodus.

Furthermore, I think the next popular network would bill itself as being anti-FB.
”I would be interested in knowing if there are studies (or any possible way to know) what kind of effect that might have on a population - not being able to see the night sky well, or at all.”

In fiction, there’s the classical “Nightfall” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nightfall_(Asimov_novelette_an...) about what it might mean if the stars would appear one night in a thousand years.
As far as I know, this is still under active investigation, at least by the Chinese space program. NASA (or some subsidiary) confirmed that they were testing it as recently as two years ago, but I can't find anything more recent than that.
One of Peterson's rules for life: If you have to choose between being seen doing something, and doing something, choose the ladder.
It's less about "could I write a program to modify bits directly?" and more about "what can I get that I won't have to support myself for the rest of time?".

Nothing stops anyone from writing code to interpret Dockerfiles or to directly fiddle with image layers. But taking the cost:value ratio proportional to everything else you need to be doing, it's probably a poor investment of time.

Google has economies of scale around this exact problem, which is why they've been pumping out work in this area -- Kaniko, Skaffold, image-rebase, FTL, rules_docker, Jib etc.