skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Custom built PCs are a niche. The vast majority of people just want to buy a box that works.

That is why I wrote

"(or often rather: let a good friend build one)." :-)

Seriously: In my opinion (but others might disagree) an advantage of self-built PCs over one that some company produces is that you know exactly what components are inside (in particular you can buy components in which you trust), which makes you far less dependent on driver support by the manufacturer (i.e. you can find drivers in the internet by yourself if necessary). I often had bad experience with driver support by manufacturers (expect for a few well-respected names).

Also lots of cheap PC manufacturers install lots of crapware by default, while your self-built one is a very clean install.

In summary a self-built PC often "just works" far better than a pre-built one.
The problem is that they keep shrinking the chassis, which leaves less and less room for anything besides the battery.

I wish they'd just stuck with the previous generation retina chassis, which was plenty slim and light - it would have left room for more memory AND a bigger battery.
To me the problem is when you build a few crud apps and then build them again and then again. each with slightly different technology, but the bulk of the work is telling the computer what to call a field and which fields are required only 50 different ways. It starts to wear you down. I used to like building stuff, but I've kinda hit a wall.
And actually they will have to. Their business model is becoming illegal in EU and I suspect that fines will start raining in a year or two.
I think you'd be surprised how few companies that aren't SV startups actually give a damn about the cloud. "Oh, you want to charge me a subscription to use software I already own and host all my data and critical infrastructure somewhere where I don't have direct control over it? And it costs more? Where do I sign up!?"
I agree with one caveat, I don't think it's the amount of money. I think it's valuations, and methods of funding/valuing companies.

Zuck still owns 30% of fb, after (I assume) cashing out some shares. Early execs/investors would probably own 75% or more of the company if you exclude shares sold/cashed out (as opposed to dilution).

This is because that FB never had to raise serious^ money. Put another way, it does not cost money to make a FB. This makes sense, FB is a "regular" website/app and those are cheap to make.

You could say the best site wins, the most competent team. You could say it's a lottery. Either way, one site gets to be the social media site. That's valuable. Money is not required to get there.

Compare this to TSLA, on the other extreme. Musk sold all the shares immediately. Then he borrowed as much as he could. This is because it takes money to build a TSLA. You need factories, parts, a supply chain... expensive.

This means capital is being allocated very inefficienttly. FB could be the same fb (to users) @ a tiny fraction (maybe as low as 1%) of its market value. Twitter too. The money that is going into FB (and into shareholder pockets) does not enable FB to exist, help it do more things or benefit consumers/the economy.

If FB's valuations was much lower than it is, FB could have done the exact same things that it did. If Tesla's valuation was much lower, they would have had less capital to invest and they'd be making fewer cars. A dollar that goes into FB makes FB shareholders richer, with no effect on anything else. A dollar invested into Tesla makes cars.

Classical economics isn't supposed to work like this. The market is supposed to allocate capital where it is needed, at least in broad strokes.

I think that we're dealing with 3 distinct things.

(1)the monopoly-like nature of the digital communications economy is having hugely distortive effects.
(2) Centralisation of capital into giant pools means money is flowing into giant "investment vehicles." Big investors = big funds = big companies.
(3) we're in the middle of a capital bubble. Returns on doing business (selling stuff to people for money) are not as big as returns on investing (selling stuff to investors for shares and other, non-money money). 1 unit of "capital" is worth more today than yesterday. Ie inflation. This is squeezing out the "real" economic activity.

^scaled to market cap.
How to Improve Your Productivity by Focusing on Results
Michael Pollan Drops Acid – And Comes Back from His Trip Convinced
I'm doing a PhD on cryptography/blockchains and working on the Cardano cryptocurrency (https://cardanoroadmap.com/). It's very technically interesting and challenging (though it pays a fraction of what I used to earn as a Software Engineer in a big company in Zurich.)

I spend most of my time thinking about mathematical problems that I feel are impactful and important. The solutions make use of theoretical computer science (computational reductions and such). Validating the results requires running small Monte Carlo style experiments typically written in C++, Python, or Javascript. This isn't rocket science code, but it's still challenging to think what kind of assumptions and constraints to put in the model / code and which ones to leave out (although the coding part itself is pretty standard.) Other than that I mostly write TeX :)

But our solutions are implemented by the IOHK software engineers that are working on the production software implementation of Cardano. It's quite interesting to guide that work through our papers, as it handles a multibillion dollar market cap and the responsibility for making sure everything is secure is big. As for social impact, this people may disagree with, but I feel we're building next generation economies and this will impact the whole of society in making it more egalitarian, giving access to money to everyone, and making salaries more equal across the globe.
Show HN: Grep with colours written in Go
Georgia is trying hard, but Russia isn't making it easy for them.
Apple is very clear that only wealthy people can have privacy. If you don't give them money for iPhones and Macs, no iMessage for you. Remember how they publicly made fun of "green bubbles", painting talking to non Apple users as something bad?
I think this is a terrible idea from a practical point of view. I don't want to look down when I use my laptop. Let's see how buggy it will be in real life usage.
> abstract everything away with money

This is the lens through which von Neumann and Morgenstern saw all of human behavior, and their "rational" economics has been hugely influential in public policy. I use scare quotes because I disagree that the approach is rational -- many things in life can't be measured in dollars, not even dollars! (E.g. you can't compare a dollar today with a dollar ten years from now. Regardless of your discounting strategy, that money is going to mean something different to you in ten years.)

Your position is a great example of this phenomenon -- there's not really any amount of money that can compensate for a lack of inspiration at work. You might be willing to give up on interesting work for enough dollars, and the rational economist would say that this is the measure of how valuable interesting work is. But there's a long history of studies, notably by Kahneman and Tversky among many others, showing that framing human motivation this way leads to all sorts of paradoxes.

So yes, we have a strong tendency to measure everything with money -- this outlook is deeply embedded in our economic and political systems -- and it makes people miserable because it's a terrible way to account for human happiness.
This still asserts that solving the problems of a poor person is worth less than solving the problems of a rich person.

Also, getting paid by the government to do something is decisively a non-market solution, given that the government gets its money through taxes.
Is UWP/Store actually taking off? I was under the impression that it was another flop.

I run Windows at home, but wouldn't if it went Store-only. For me, an open platform is the only thing Windows had going for it.
* People who take a taxi are already ready to pay a premium for transport, they are the most likely to be willing to pay for a premium on a snack.

* These include tourists, who may not be used to local prices.

* I am not even sure there needs to be a premium, as a taxi driver does not have to pay any extra rent for a shop.
At least on Windows, the OpenGL implementation is part of the graphics driver. Why? Because by default Windows only has between rudimentary (at least up to Vista, I think; I am not sure about Windows 7 and 8.1) and no (Windows 10) OpenGL support - this is what the GPU vendors provides as part of his graphics driver.
It seems like Mark would always have to answer 'yes' to that question, since accessing Facebook via the web means you share your data with Google(Chrome), Mozilla(Firefox), Microsoft(IE), etc..

(Also any OS/kernel manufacturers who get access to your data through your usage of the OS or TCP/IP stack).

Facebook is sharing your data with Blackberry in the same manner.

I don't even see a consent difference, since you need to explicitly consent to sharing your data by entering your Facebook user/password into the Blackberry UI app. Similar to how you write your user and password into Chrome, thus "sharing your data" with Google. It also doesn't seem like there's any evidence that the UI apps were intended to secretly collect and store data(Was "The Hub" an unknown feature?)

I don't believe the evidence presented here invalidates Mark's answer. His answer would have been meaningless if he had taken the definition of "third party" put forward in the NYT.
Why are people upset that others are seeking alternatives?

If other people prefer to seek an alternative to GitHub, why is this upsetting to you?

Isn’t it a good thing that people can choose to move to other services?
Solving the Security Risk Puzzle, Critical Capabilities
> The trend around me is to see the shops that used to sell PC parts closing down

Couldn't this be simply explained by the hypothesis that people simply buy their PC parts mostly in the internet instead of a brick and mortar shop?
"ISP's hate him!"
U.S. Airstrikes Violated International Law in “War of Annihilation” in Syria
Firefox uses OpenGL to implement OpenGL ES. It also uses OpenGL for hardware accelerated compositing.
If you have children I am pretty sure you would agree that modern society is the best place to be without any real competition.
Targeted ads aren't targeted because you, as the audience, care about it. It's targeted because I'm the person willing to pay the most for your eyeballs. All the tracking data has done is make it easier for me to target you specifically — it did nothing for how I then choose to use your attention, or what my cost/benefit analysis looks like.
Settings -> Windows Update -> Restart Options: Off
Not a lot of pruning. Incidentally, writing the same thing in Go (for example) yields more or less the same binary size.

You should see how quickly the binary size grows as you add more of your code (answer: not much) and what the alternative is: a txt file containing "hello world" and a statically built nginx server.
Does native code execution outweigh the loss of JIT optimisation?
How to Measure the Reliability of Your Software Throughout the CI/CD Workflow
> Developer mindshare.

Just have to point out how fucking expensive develope mindshare is then :)

But seriously, from a business perspective buy GitHub (a company which gobbled up lots of VS money without a good business model) the acquisition doesn't makes any sense.
"Ennui". I like the word. Thanks!

> One might ask: what does the alternative look like? From what I can tell Marx is a bit wishy-washy on that point.

I have no clue either. But it feels to me as if we're turning humanity into a single superorganism, with each one of us being just a cell, except all those cells have brains capable of wishing they'd play on the same level as the superorganism.

Related: I've never had a libertarian bent. I'm known to argue for coordination over individual freedoms. I frequently wondered, just what is it that makes many people say that we're in chains, and (here in the West) we have so little freedoms left. I think I finally realized where this could be coming from.

I've been spending some time recently going, in my head, through a list of activities I'd find exciting. I quickly discovered that most of them are either impossible or illegal, especially when living in a city. Someone (I think pg) wrote that as we entered the industrialized age, we had to invent the whole fake, hollow thing called "exercise" to replace what we've lost in the change of lifestyles. I'm starting to see it as more general pattern - we're losing many more things we could do, and replacing them with structured activities available on the market. They're similar, but also feel fake to me.

> Hayek more helpfully explained that the market provides a mechanism for determining value, not virtue. That it works, but doesn't uplift.

That sounds about right (I suppose I should start reading the foundational texts of economic thought at some point). I do not deny that the scheme I described, in which your only role in society is to pick something profitable to do, doesn't work. It generally does (with all coordination problem caveats of the market in mind). But the meaningful work, the virtuous work, the uplifting work, seems to be distributed scarcely and randomly throughout the market space. Much like in the past, you got to be a king or a peasant depending on the lottery of birth, nowadays you can be involved in civilization-changing work, or forever toil on the margin, depending on random chance. Is there even a place for fining meaning in contributing to society? Is there any agency left as to how to contribute? Are we supposed to seek either of it?

I have no answers here. Only a topic I'm trying to think my way through, hoping to find some meaning on the other end.
The best iOS 12 features that Apple didn’t talk about onstage – The Verge
Wyze Cam: Leaving Amazon and Selling 300K Affordable Smart Home Cameras
> Take a look at some SaaS companies that have gone public in the last 5 years. Few are profitable. It's all about growth of revenue.

Who's kidding? I doubt you genuinely believe we've reached a new paradigm where bankruptcy is no longer a thing.
The social media industry is still nascent, it takes a lot more time than Facebook and Myspace have had to grow an entire market segment. Eventually we'll see a plurality of options and the ability to move between them with relative ease. But it's already easy to ignore Facebook, I didn't think that would happen for at least another decade.

In fact, the only reason I'm still on it is because it maintains a network of former friends and contacts that no other service has been able to offer. Make no mistake, Facebook is struggling for relevance in an age where the next generation has already moved on to Snapchat and friends.

I don't think any of them are going to emerge dominant, but if Facebook is smart, it'll use it's remaining heft to build a true platform instead of trying to keep going as an aggregator.
That Cinebench screenshot though. It looks really fast when you compare it to a pile of 8yo+ CPUs.

Perhaps we should be more worried that it's only 5.something times faster than an 8yo CPU with fewer than half the cores.

https://s.aolcdn.com/hss/storage/midas/c18d803c00f096b8d7b57...
If somebody charges 50% more to get my conversion rate from 0.5% to 1%, I'd call that a bargain — still doesn't make the ad any more interesting for the 99% who didn't convert.

Different perspectives, different conclusions.
Great to hear; I'm now impatiently waiting for new papers or related talks! Don't forget to post it here when you publish!
>... the revealed goal of our market-driven world is to abstract everything away with money

That's one mental model but it doesn't fit exactly with reality and there are others. See the Love & Money graph here for example. Not quite sure how that fits in with the job hunting. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2003/01/does-mo...
If I understand it correctly JIT compiles down Hotspots to native code, so if the entire executable is already native it must be just as fast or faster.
Compared to previous mobile phone development? Yes, absolutely.

Compared to getting into PC retail sales? Yes, absolutely.

Compared to web development? No barriers at all, but hard to earn money other than by ads.

Compared to PC shareware? Well, that did have a lower barrier to entry and did make lots of money for id Software. This might genuinely have been the lowest barrier to entry platform that it was possible to earn money on.
If you're worried about the GitHub acquisition, here's what to look out for
nah, there is no bubble. We just need to combine it with blockchain technology and then we have something shiny, rock stable which will change the industry ;)
Moores law held up pretty well. Frequency scaling did not continue as it did in the old days, I mean we had 3ghz back in the P4 days. But performance has certainly improved thanks to better IPC, more cores etc.
World Environmental Day 2018
Can I display the products at walmart.com at custom price?
I'm looking to sell my products on Walmart. The real-time synchronization allows bulk upload of products and related products. Is there any option with which I can offer the products at different price to my site's customers and to the marketplace customers?
There's no reason bitcoin can't coexist with physical currency. An interesting question is if bitcoin were accepted everywhere, what would people trust more? Bitcoin or bits of paper printed by the government?
The last company that I worked for was the stodgiest, old school non SV company that you could find.

They paid software as a service companies for everything from project management, human resource related software, mobile device management, email, they had Office 365, etc.

Most new internal software is being written using web technologies. Even if they are hosting the apps themselves. They want thier employees to be able to access their bespoke apps remotely without logging into a Citrix Server.
So you're arguing Apple and Google should be gatekeepers of digital content instead, with their own currency and every purchase having your personal details and all?

Many Android apps are just Trojans to send home your address and calling lists, or to otherwise track you.

Telcos aren't saints (in fact they're greedy as sin) but at least have to play by the rules for a regulated market with standardized protocols. Deprecating open protocols not only hits SMS spammers but also limits your freedom as both publisher and consumer.
I would read as well, please write about it!
Not if Microsoft has any say. I can't count the number of Windows Updates that re-installed the previously uninstalled Candy Crush Saga, Bubble Witch 3 Saga and March of Empires (among titles).
>Walk into a VCs office and tell them that you have the next great idea for a Windows app and watch how fast you get laughed out of the office.

In most of the world the "goal" isn't to go raise VC money. It's to develop a product and earn a living.

Maybe people building Windows apps for the massive market are doing okay without the desire to raise billions and take over the world?
Agreed, conversion matters most. What is your conversion of the first two listed plans? Let's say it's 1/50 then 98% of the time, they're irrelevant and may reduce that 98% fraction may go higher and more than make up for any reduction in the conversion of the first two. I see anchoring as a way of planting a thought that can be executed without much more thought. By presenting two data points that are not executable for a majority of would be buyers, additional data needs to be contemplated which defeats the purpose of anchoring. A much more common way of anchoring is to show the prices small to large, left to right, but anchor on one of the middle ones by making it larger and taller so it enters the visitors mind first. I suspect some of the many who use this format has A/B tested it with their audience.

Seeing something 'jarring' or unexpected triggered a 'what's going on here' response which made me somewhat cautious of what's being offered. The play being extracting the most from the customer rather than delivering the most value like a pushy salesman. In the end sentiments matter less than conversion, but experimenting to see what improves conversion is often dramatically worthwhile. If you've already done so, I'm surprised why this form doesn't show up anywhere else I can recall.
Yes of course, and your enterprise network have a password strength checker on post requests too I guess? meh.
The barrier was the _distribution_. Before the app store, you'd have to make a website of some sort to sell your app. And then you'd have to advertise your app, and so on. The app store does all that for you, so that you just build your app and that's it.
Yours is the "best" option to be able to tinker with your device, which is a laudable goal.

It is not the best option for a secure device, for which some restrictions are necessary.
> Multi-stage? I dunno. Simplify your workflow?

How would you simplify testing on multiple systems/oses? Or have one project written be tested for multiple versions of that language (because you need backwards compatibility)? It's nice if your build system is as simple as

make build test publish

and only need to have it work on a Linux distribution of your choice, but some many projects, that's just not enough. Your .gitlab-ci file is just a file to tell your build system: for debian-python3.{3,4,5,6} execute that, for windows: do that. Btw: debian-python:devel is allowed to fail because it is not stable. It's just nice to have an idea if it might work for further versions.
It's a mix between technical problems and design but I'm working on making the law-making process more transparent and part of the challenge it to show meaningful diffs for each change. Concretely, we would like to parse each amendment, apply them to the text proposal and then apply the proposal to the current legislation.

TL;DR: putting the laws into git
If you're not entirely without hearing, you may be interested in knowing that the iOS 12 beta appears to have a new bit of functionality that lets EarPods act as hearing aids.
"We’re dealing with real human beings who are suffering and dying and being tortured and starving because of policies that we are involved in. We, as citizens of democratic societies, are directly involved in and are responsible for. And what the media are doing is insuring that we do not act on our responsibilities, and that the interests of power are served, not the needs of the suffering people, and not even the needs of American people who would be horrified if they realized the blood that is dripping from their hands because of the way they are allowing themselves to be deluded and manipulated by this system."
XBoxes and PlayStations have been getting more game ports than macOS tho, doesn't take a genius to figure out why.
Can relate to this 100%, at the moment I'm trying to enter teaching, for me that feels like a good focus if you aim for "interesting outcomes"
In SV maybe.

I have been developing mostly new WPF enterprise applications in the last 4 years and there is plenty of work across European business.
Straight out copying China...
Mailing lists vs Github
>Few are profitable. It's all about growth of revenue. The profits are way down the line.

We are officially well on our way to 1999 bubble territory! Nothing matters but revenue growth, even if you're selling dollars for 50 cents.
do you do remote?
Zuck has a large stake because he got his seed funding from his parents and could negotiate their series A round from a position of strength.
What fonts are good in your opinion?
That's too bad about the dislikes/ML thing. I find it to be an issue for me on most recommendation systems.

Look forward to any improvements and reading a write-up. Awesome work already, by far. Kudos.