skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Differentiating themselves within the market isn't too far from the list of reasons, I'd suspect. Who would be reading about this if it were just another Android mobile phone?

This is targeting a small market of Linux enthusiasts with a different kind of operating system. If this were running Android, why wouldn't those enthusiasts just buy one of the market-leading phones and use a well-supported ROM?
Yes it is but that's a moot point. Democracy is also a threat to capitalism and if we don't have the right check and balances in place democracy is a threat to minorities.

As the saying go, democracy is the worst kind of system besides all the other systems.

No system is perfect but a democracy based on capitalism is as good as we know how to make a system because it handles "irrational agents" fairly well.

The right way to approach this is to look at how is capitalism a threat to democracy and then make sure we have the proper mechanisms to deal with that.
Yes, this book changed how I think about death, and life so much.
Thanks, and good you ask. The online version is in the works, going to be available soon at warriorjs.com. Follow @warrior_js on Twitter to be notified about the release.
Hi, I'm the creator of Reader extension, please give feedback and ask anything for clarifications :)
It’s called “embrace and extend” — part of the original Microsoft playbook. When you face an existential threat, give it the wettest lip service possible while slowly diluting it into your proprietary platform.
Debt: the first 5000 years by David graeber.
I think it's also due to the fact that the authorities are charging parents with neglect for simply letting their kids do the exact same things I was allowed to do as a kid without consequence. Even parents that want to let their kids roam safely cannot do so any longer due to some overreacting busybodies.
That is just old marxist economics that has been disproven. Economists agree that markets do not automatically lead to oligopoly.

This is why Marx has no credibilty in economics. All his predictions turned out to be false not because 'economists are the hand maidens of capital' as leftist like to claim.

In fact Marx economics was very popular amoung economist at one point, it was then deconstructed theortically and disproven by evidence.
The Bible. The book of Mark is a good place to start, or Romans, since you’re more interested in introspection.
I’ve been meaning to reread a book by a Holocaust survivor called The Hiding Place.
If I didn't commute 40 minutes both ways, I would love that solution. As it is, I would love a hybrid, work from home 2 days/week, solution.
I totally agree. I don't think anyone should read, watch, or listen to something because some other group of people defined it as great. I will say, though, that if a sizable group of people define something as "great", you might at least be curious and give it a chance. I took a music appreciation class during a January term in college, and it really opened up the world of classical music for me, and I think my life has been better for it.
War and Peace, Tolstoy. There are some tedious passages where Tolstoy develops a theory of history, but the realness of the characters, and their struggles to find themselves, is described better than any other book I've read. It's a beautiful story.

The Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous. Don't need to be an alcoholic to see that our efforts to run and order our lives often can end up making us more miserable. Read the first 164 pages.
Ehem

if(False) longjump(error, 1);

vs

if (False) throw ExceptionE;
This comes up in a recorded Q&A with the CEO, here: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=XVw0EhYccu4

It’s been a while since I watched it, but IIRC it comes down to control, and being able to decide which parts to focus on before the thing ships. IIRC it sounded like Purism’s efforts are the GNOME roadmap, and they’re hiring GNOME developers. That makes sense if you have to ruthlessly prioritize to ship on a deadline.

I wouldn’t be surprised if Plasma Mobile ends up being the superior shell in the fullness of time, but I’d be happy to give GNOME a go.

It would be kinda annoying to reskin an app from GTK to Qt, but it probably won’t be necessary a lot of the time, and if it is, it seems like a pretty minor annoyance in the grand scheme of mobile development.
Why use blockchain? Doesn't that actually give you less control?

Isn't the point of a blockchain to keep a ledger of the changes? So how can you delete anything without rebuilding the entire chain? Being decentralized in this case just means that now everyone has my data. Sure, it is encrypted, but are we just going to say what is secure today will be secure tomorrow?

My understanding of blockchain is that it is meant to be tamper proof. Which is nice for things like tracking votes or ensuring the integrity of things, but with my personal data I WANT to have the power to tamper with it. These two ideas seem to be at odds.

If I'm misunderstanding, maybe somebody can educate me.
I've been working from "home" last 2.5 years. I've tried working:

A. from home.

B. from coffee shops/public spaces.

C. at a dedicated desk at a co-working space.

D. in a private office.

This may be a personality thing, but I realized I need routine, but not rigidly so, and I need some activity happening around me. (A) and (B) were too isolated for me.

What's work best is mostly sticking with (C) with a sprinkling of (B). Problems with inconsistent internet and the fact that I'm paying for (C), keeps me in a routine and productivity high. Throw in a 3 - 4 mile walk to work with a 25lb backpack, and I get my exercise in too :)
Mad Magazine's ethos could be the key to fighting fake news
The UK is a western democracy and does not describe itselg as a republican anything, though opponents to certain elements of the current constitution describe themselves that way.

There is an overlap between democratic republics (or, to use the less common phrasing, “republican democracies”) and limited representative democracies, but they aren't the same.
Goodbye, Klout: Social media measuring power quietly disappears
As someone who has interviewed a lot of candidates, I would agree the Q&A is the best place to show this.

Most of the stock questions are filters for people who can't do the job - was this person's answer reasonable?

Where I've seen candidates shine is when they ask really good questions. Question that indicate they've put some thought into the role. When all I get is "How do you like working here?" or "What's the company culture?" it shows the person is either uninterested in the role or incapable of delivering something beyond "here's what you asked for boss".
Smart windows could combine solar panels and TVs too
FWIW, the expression "create a desert of profitability around you" is more popularly expressed as "create an economic moat".
> Instead we’re trying to make each other trivial.

Which is about as good a definition of "technological progress" as you are going to find. I for one am happy at how economically trivial housing, transport and food production have become over the last thousand years.
What about Tuesday?
It seems like you're conflating government with social organization. Think about how a society could have social organizations like welfare, social security, medical treatment, mental health care, and all the other wonderful aspects of an organized society without combining that with the use of force to make people contribute to specific organizations or ways of living.

That's what Libertarianism is in my mind. It's not about reducing the scope of social organization, it's about divorcing that social organization from government and minimizing the responsibilities of government. When government gets large enough it A) ceases to act in the best interests of its citizens and B) starts to legitimize the use of force against its citizens. Take a look at how our police forces are militarizing and our elected representatives are ignoring us for a pretty concrete example.

The nice thing about small decentralized government is that even when it ceases to be of and for the people it can be taken down relatively quickly and painlessly.

The problem with the Libertarian approach is that it's genuinely hard to get people to agree with each other about whether a social endeavor is worth their time, and in the mean time real people are affected by whatever the societal ill is. That's something that we have to be willing to accept if we want to reduce the scope of government. We also have to be willing to accept that there are different ways of living that we might not agree with. And we have to be willing to help people who want to be in our society to join our society.

The real problem is that no matter what our society looks like, it's hard to get people to look past their knee-jerk reactions and try to be tolerant and understanding of others' ignorance. And that cuts both ways.
> It is tricking people if it is done to trick people.

That's true, but I don't see behaving like a human as "tricking people". Even if the assistant opened the conversation by identifying itself as an AI, I'd expect it to use all the same mannerisms "uh", "mhmmm" that it did in the call to enable natural conversation.

> Would you say the computers in the "Star Trek" shows "behave like a human"?

No, but I wouldn't exactly call that "natural interaction" either. Jarvis is a better example. And yes, I do think Jarvis "behaves like a human".

> I don't think it's like that at all. Are you impersonating someone else? Gender-bending for kicks? Trying to get better service because you think the person you're calling is sexist or something?

In keeping with the analogy, probably closer to "Trying to get better service". An AI callbot that pretends to be a human will be more efficient at its job than one which speaks in a monotone and requires the human on the other end of the call to adjust their mannerisms to compensate for the fact that they're not talking with a human.

> And it's not even needed to make the Duplex service work because, as I pointed out before, when a robot calls you to give you money you don't hang up on it! Okay?

Depends. If the AI immediately identifies itself as such, how many people are just going to immediately assume it's a spambot and hang up, even when it's not?

> people, like you, won't take these concerns seriously

What concerns? You've still failed to describe any ill effects that might arise from AI callbots failing to disclose their nature upfront.

> You know most hacking is done though what's called "social engineering", eh?

You think a law forcing AIs to disclose themselves as AI would do anything against malicious actors who are already breaking the law? (Hacking.)
Well, there's also the fact that many of our problems are external, and can only be solved by interacting with others and making real change; your attitudes and lack of optimism are not the actual problem.
> Monday, Friday in the office. Wednesday, Thursday out.

That sounds great. No more Tuesdays!
My son is in daycare most of the time, so it's not a large problem. But the few times he's been home while I have been working, the major issue with closing the door is he knows I'm still in here. So he'll make a bunch of noise, yelling for me to help him. It's often easier to just fix his Duplo/juice box/etc issue.
Indeed! This is how I learned Ruby several years ago, fun project.
Same here. I'm just thankful that the robocallers rarely leave voicemails to sort through.
That's a pickle. And what abt white noise? I know a lot of therapists use this machine[1] to maintain privacy--sort of a similar goal

[1]: https://www.amazon.com/Marpac-Classic-White-Noise-Machine/dp...
But Most FANG interviewers don't seem to have any training
Fundamentalists and literalists are a very small minority of Christians and their movement is more or less a reaction to science/the Enlightenment that didn't really exist in any significant strength before the 19th Century (and honestly it's hard to square with a careful reading of the Bible, which contradicts itself in ways that present problems for literal readings). Even as far back as Augustine you have Christians writing "obviously don't deny objective reality because it could be read as in conflict with a Bible verse." So no, I'm not into Young Earth Creationism or any of that.

I won't claim it's impossible to comport yourself morally without being an adherent of any religion, but the Christian faith offers a more comprehensive framework to think about our relationship to the world and other people that I think is valuable.
I agree we should not claim that.

I would just say that the people who pushed thought about capitlaism, like Adam Smith, David Hume, F.A. Hayek and others, spent a lot of time thinking about how to make the system resistant against that cooruption.

There are whole fields in economics that try to analyse how these cooruptions and problems come about and how we could lessen their impact.

The important thing to note is that this is difficult and having a government with less overall power and scope is easier to manage because their is less insentive to capture it.
I've been working from home off and on (mostly on) for eleven years.

Two things have utterly changed my life:

These: http://bit.do/3m-hearing-protection

And a treadmill desk.

Treadmill desks are expensive. Typically $500k for a unit you can place beneath an existing standing desk or $800 for a unit with an integrated desk.

Worth. Every. Penny.

You can spend eight hours of every day sitting down, getting fatter, lazier, and less healthy -- or you can spend eight hours a day walking, burning calories, improving your cardiovascular health. It already sounds like a no-brainer, but you wouldn't believe the benefits you get from it. Ever try to solve a difficult problem in your spare time and end up pacing around the room? That's because walking helps you think. You become a programming genius when you're walking at just two miles an hour while writing your code all day long. It helps you stay alert: You'll never again have that post-lunch sleepy feeling. And of course, eight hours of walking at two miles an hour (a slow walking pace) means you cover more than a half-marathon each day. By three miles an hour (a comfortable, moderate walking pace) you're walking more than a marathon each day. And that means you can have a cheeseburger for lunch every day while your wife comments on how much weight you're losing.

Seriously: Try it. I've tried two different brands and they were both quiet enough that I didn't even have to turn the unit off to take a phone call. Nobody could tell I was moving while we were talking. Combined with the hearing protection, you have dead silence and white noise in the background creating a world in which it's just you and the code. If you like music, try the "Howard Leight by Honeywell Sync Stereo MP3 Earmuff". It provides about 25 decibels of noise reduction while pumping crystal-clear stereo sound directly to your eardrums. This is far better than noise-canceling earphones, which always give me a headache after an hour. The passive noise reduction is far more effective and all you can hear is the music or phone call being played in your ears. Perfect for creating an immersive gaming experience as well!
I wonder how many of those LOC are just support for more and more hardware over the years? The nice thing about drivers is that they're almost completely modular so they don't really bloat the code even though they shoot the LOC count through the roof.
> And I think I'm right that they will increasingly leverage government to stay big now that they are.

IMO that's not a convincing argument. Your response to two specific counter-examples is "one day you'll see that those examples actually prove my point instead of yours"
Elon Musk’s Boring Co. could offer free underground tunnel rides in few months
They'll find a plan to own a decentralized system
Not long after they banned cryptocurrency advertising...
no one sees ad blocking as akin to stealing except the kind of people who will agree to any and all malware from their advertising networks without even a cursory glance.
33 years ago... We used to use cash receipts from our convenience store to resupply at the cash and carry. It wasn’t uncommon. I saw transactions in high figures often from my fellow customers.

Not sure how common it is now.
> how does traffic get to that remote peer?

Not sure what you mean. The two networks (say, a DSL and Cable provider in the same area), need to physically connect at some location in the area (usually at a "Carrier Hotel"). Once they're connected, traffic originating from a DSL customer is routed through the DSL network to the Carrier Hotel, then across the to the Cable provider's network, and then through that Cable network to the Cable customer.

For example, I live in South Bend, IN, where we have Comcast Cable and AT&T DSL. Although we have a few places in town where Comcast and AT&T _could_ each have a point of presence, and then peer with each other, they don't think that's worth it. Instead, traffic is routed to the nearest peering point, which in my case is 350 E Cermak in Chicago, 100 miles away. Peering locally would probably save about 10ms, but that's probably not really worth it.
Fuck off Jeff. It must be very fulfilling to be the CEO and founder of one of the world's largest companies. I'm sure anyone will be just as fulfilled as you when every second of existence can catapult your already enormous wealth and influence.

You should work at the wearhouse for close to minimum wage with no party to upward mobility, and then preach about fulfillment - not the wearhouse logistics fulfillment, but career and life fulfillment
It's not at all an academic argument but a critical issue being resolved right now; the preference for capitalism over democracy is openly argued and put into practice:

* You may recall Peter Thiel's argument that democracy and "freedom" (i.e., his freedom to act as a capitalist) are incompatible, and therefore we should limit the former. Thiel is close to the U.S. president, and his people are advisors in the White House and other branches.

https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/educatio...

* Also, the recent U.S. Secretary of State, as well as other members of the administration, openly said the U.S.'s foreign policy should prioritize "economic interests" over democracy and human rights.

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/tillerson-pushing-human-righ...

* Finally, as much as HN doesn't like to discuss this issue, we also can't bury our heads in the sand: The nationalist and racist politics in the U.S. are also anti-democracy,[0] and by devaluing democracy they open the door to capitalism-over-democracy. Probably not coincidentally, the nationalists and the capitalism-over-democracy people (like Thiel and Tillerson; let's call them oligarchs) ally in the coalition that supports Trump and the GOP. For example, the GOP actively works the limit voting, the foundation of democracy, by people they don't like.

That coalition, of the nationalists/racists and the oligarchs, are a threat to democracy in the U.S. (and probably elsewhere). It's only an anecdote, but a wealthy person whom I had respected intellectually told me, 'I voted for Trump and I'd vote for him again - I'm a businessperson and business is good'. Their argument is implicitly framed around the idea that capitalism is all that matters.

And I'll add that it's very short-sighted: You only need to look around the world and see that democracy breeds economic prosperity like nothing else in the history of humanity. The democracies are all the wealthiest countries in the world; the corrupt oligarchies are all poorer, and had been for millennia before democracy. In fact, the wealth of corrupt oligarchies today comes from selling to wealthy democrats and profiting on the peaceful international order and world trade established by the democrats. The world of corrupt oligarchies (and monarchies, etc.), before democracy, was poorer by orders of magnitude.

...

[0] Why are nationalism and racism anti-democracy? The necessary foundation of democracy is universal human rights; for example the founders of the United States made it the basis of the Declaration of Independence: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights ... That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men". On a practical basis, if the other person doesn't have rights then neither do you; if it's ok for someone to take away their vote then why shouldn't they take away yours? Nationalism and racism say that rights are not universal at all, but that they depend on nationality and race.
I left Skype for Hangouts as soon as they started putting autoplaying ads with audio in my calls. You have to be completely disconnected from the needs of your users to even consider doing such a thing.
David Marcus's move felt to me (on the back of no evidence at all) more like a play for FB to launch an identity service.
I built Mastodon alone for a year for like $600/mo until it got popular. Now I'm getting more ($3k/mo from Patreon) but I don't think I'm even anywhere close to hitting $100k. So it's possible :P
Hilarious, I want to snarf that!

But actually, I meant that it is apocryphal that salespeople have to play golf to close Enterprise Sales. It's more of a stand-in catch-all term for semi-formal socializing with the client.
Automatic Photography with Google Clips
you kind of answered your own question
Shouldn't it be 'A blockchain' or 'blockchains' since we're speaking about one of many things?

Or has the name become like software, code and water?
This was an absolutely fabulous read! I was looking for a case like this to try to counter my argument. The issue I have seen with quite a few cases was that they were individuals versus individuals or individual being disparaged by a larger corporate entity. This one spins it on its head. Very nice!
I'll offer a slightly different take--

I've worked from home full-time for about 1.5 years, coming from the standard open floor-plan tech company office. I live in a 1 bedroom apartment in the city so I don't have a dedicated office. Instead I work from my desk in the living room, the couch in the living room, a makeshift standing desk in the living room, or the coffee shop around the corner.

My quality of work and productivity is as good or better and I work less hours than before. You don't need an elaborate home office or expensive furniture, just a good work ethic.
I ate it up, but then I’m an RF/Microwave EE. Grad level EM is even worse.
Plant mimicry of reproductive hormones and suppression of herbivore fertility [pdf]
Questioning the evidence on hookworm eradication in the American South
Why dumb recruits cost the Army, big-time (2006)
Revisiting 'The Rise and Decline of WP' in a Population of 769 Wikis [pdf]
Alimentos+Para+Fortalecer+O+Sistema+Imunológico,+Prepare-se+Já
Soon we'll be bartering again, except this time for user data and other ultimately useless things.
We (Nomorobo) protect you from both neighbor spoofing as well as "standard" robocalls. We add over 1,300+ new robocaller numbers every day. It's pretty crazy out there.
> But anything decentralized is diagonally opposite to what FB is, not sure how they will pull it off.

Is it though? The fact they are centralized now doesn't mean they can "only" work in a centralized manner. They are in the ad business, and as long as they can keep doing that would it really matter who hosts what?

Keep in mind the data requirements for a social network the size of Facebook are huge, perhaps too bing for a blockchain. I wouldn't be surprised if this turns out to be a project tangential to their main product.
Why I choose my Forearm to re-generate my Ear, even it’s highly risky?
In Germany, people respect traffic lights even when there's no one there to enforce your good behavior.