skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
One thing that I noticed is that if the website is behind Distil Networks, they will block on the first request and make cumbersome, if not impossible, to automate some task.

I get that is important to protect the information of their clients (which seems to be content aggregators), but there are legitimate use cases for allowing at least some scrapping to happen - one being when the information is about the person/company who wants to read it in an automated form so it can be used for further processing.
The smaller the project the easier it is to keep secret. The B2 project had literally thousands of people working for it, and even then they kept the lid on it for several years.
I'm pretty sure that the economics were aligned with getting bought out by someone. Upselling people who used the free product was not making them profitable and they weren't on the path to profitable.
The fact remains that they're 'completely dedicated' to your privacy including from yourself up until putting that data out benefits the company. So they have access to that data only in ways that benefit and exculpate the company while you as the driver and source of that data cannot use the data about yourself to defend yourself without going through the courts!
Twitter to blog thoughts, reach and interact with intellectuals, weirdos, and other assorted new faces. It is hugely underrated, and much more useful since the 280 character shift.

Medium to write long pieces. They do a nice job promoting content. They even narrated (did a voice version of) one of my posts. I don't think as many people would have read it (or listened) if it was on a regular blog, which probably would have been hugged to death if it got popular anyway.
Amazon EKS is now GA
...for now.
Assuming for the sake of argument that they were acting wholly from benevolence anyway, that dynamic would have changed regardless of whether it was Microsoft or Google acquiring them.

The reason I point out the difference in vibe between the two companies is that while sure, there are definitely valid reasons to be skeptical here, I am leaning towards more optimism because it was Microsoft who made the acquisition and not Google.
We changed the title above to something considerably less baity.
I thought Azure is the platform that Microsoft is planning to pull developers into?

Step 1: Buy github

Step 2: Integrate Azure and Visual Studio

Step 3: Profit
How is the hardware under Ubuntu? I've been eyeing up a Purism laptop as a successor for a Macbook Air that's getting a little long in the tooth.
The public college thing will never happen -- no state will ever shut off a faucet for federal funds.
Alright. The Paste Magazine piece is enough to raise doubts for me. I deleted my comment.

Thanks for the links, everybody.
I paid for an extra maintenance package, so I believe I'll only have to pay for tires and paint for the next several years. The 14 gallon tank gives more than 500 miles of range, so I fill up about twice a month - about $1000-$1200 a year.

I'm very interested in adding batteries to my Camry Hybrid in the long run, to increase its battery range, and hopefully add plug-in functionality. The biggest question is where to put the batteries. In the 2018 model, they added one underneath the rear seat.
That is end to end from your phone to their phone, and they are talking about 3rd parties outside the app. As your physically typing the the information into the chat message box, and before you send it, the app itself should have access to the plain text coming from the keyboard, which it then encrypts before it leaves your phone.

Similarly it needs decrypted on the other side and displayed to the other user, at which time the app again has accesd to clear text versions.

I don't believe there's any way to encrypt the message before the app sends the message / while it is displaying to the recipient
Finder sucks? At what specifically?
And what about macOs has become limited as an OS?
Seems like this guy hedged his bets every step of the way:

- kept his day job while working on startup
- did fake campaign on FB to gauge demand
- got friends to try product
- croudfunded the first batch

This is a really risk averse guy who is making it big. Sort of the opposite of the bombastic risk-it-all founder we often see in SV hero stories.
Great, this tragedy just further fuels their dumb publicity stunt.
The idea that bureaucrats and scientists should be able to decide what experiments a terminally ill patient should be allowed to participate in is a deeply evil one.
Going beyond piloting technologies for agriculture
> Companies don't have souls

Careful there. There is no consensus that humans do have souls. Personality might have been a better word to pick, since what you are describing better fits the idea of personality, but that is dangerous as well.

But regardless of the specific term we want that separates individuals from companies, there is no denying that companies are more then the sum of the individuals they are made of. Group psyche has been proven to prevail through replacement of every member. Though one should not jump to the opposite conclusion either—that companies’s behavior remains static through a change in leadership.
Here is a Twitter thread from someone who was on Microsoft's TypeScript team as they moved from CodePlex to GitHub:

https://twitter.com/jntrnr/status/1003869360002220032
$25k colony hackathon (JS and Ethereum blockchain)
All these comments that MS are going to read your private repos seem really out of place.

it makes zero sense for MS to look at private repos because the moment they are discovered everyone would move off the system.

they also run outlook.com and office online. if they got caught spying they'd lose all corporate customers
They make more money and business if they become developer friendly period. If they step back from that they know they will lose out for no true benefit! Microsoft knows this.
>Why? I've discovered over the years that I am far more excited by making customers happy than by doing technically interesting work. I've come to see the technology as a means to an end, not the end in itself.

100% agree. I'm a Data Scientist and I'm supposed to have one of the most exciting and sexiest jobs in tech. But after many years of doing this I've come to realize that working with good customers and seeing them happy is much more rewarding than playing with the latest machine learning thing. New tech is just the thing that makes it easier to tackle a customer use case.

There's a strong relationship between the quality of the people I'm working for and my sense of the work being interesting. If the people I'm working for are unrealistic a-holes no amount of technical novelty can make up for that.
I _have_ OCD - it didn't make the subject matter appealing.
Can someone give an example of valid usecase for having `..` at all in a ZIP file?
For my blog [0], I use Jekyll. I'm not super enthusiastic about it, but it gets the job done. Ideally, I'd use a system that doesn't require as much futzing around with Bundler and pip (I use pygments for source highlighting, so Python is in the mix too) every time I touch it. It's kind of slow too.

For my first book [1], which is online too, I hand-rolled a tiny Python script [2] that converts the Markdown pages to HTML. It uses Python Markdown and that's about it. SASS for authoring CSS. (Weird observation: that 499-line Python script is probably the most profitable code I've ever written.)

For my second book [3], I took that script and gave it some more juice since book #2 has more complex needs around including code snippets [4]. It's still hand-rolled. In addition to Python Markdown, the other interesting library it uses is jinja2 for templates. I like it.

I understand the arguments against rolling your own, but a blog generator is simple enough that the benefits of code reuse are relatively small. Meanwhile, the convenience of being able to jam little hacks specific to your need is very real [5].

When I get time to hack on my blog again, there's a good chance I'll ditch Jekyll and roll my own.

[0]: http://journal.stuffwithstuff.com/

[1]: http://gameprogrammingpatterns.com/

[2]: https://github.com/munificent/game-programming-patterns/blob...

[3]: http://www.craftinginterpreters.com/

[4]: https://github.com/munificent/craftinginterpreters/tree/mast...

[5]: https://github.com/munificent/craftinginterpreters/blob/mast...
Communication with the mothership is done through a VPN. The only way to listen in is to have root access to the cid (that computer in the middle with the large screen).
Perhaps there was some hyperbole in my statement, a more measured statement would be: I suspect that the more modern alternatives to TFS are perhaps starting to create a dent in the TFS cash cow, and M$ are hedging their position. Perhaps with an end goal of some interoperability, or full scale integration of github into TFS over time.

Obviously this is all speculation, only M$ knows why they did it, but it seems like a good bet if they want to be providers of SaaS solutions and one of their existing solutions is under threat.
I have never understood why North American bathroom stalls don’t just go to the floor. Jesus Christ how much would it really cost to enable some damn privacy.
There's two ways to look at this.

If I've got six months to live, would I take a 50/50 gamble on living 20 years, where the downside is that I might only live 3 months? Probably - the expectation value of that gamble is highly positive.

On the other hand, if you only have 6 months to live, 3 months is really a lot to lose...

But I agree. This isn't a valid argument against Right to Try.
It's rather inspiring. It shows you can swing for the fences without sacrificing much.
> Are you focusing on the word men in that rhetoric, or are you understanding the message?

No. But, it seems you are.

I worked in worse places and I've come from worse places. You aren't going to win the oppression Olympics with me.
This seems overly dismissive. I think if you had intelligence that the soviets were researching this, and they were, you would more or less have to also. Its also philosophically suspicious to assume we understand everything about human consciousness today and that we can dismiss what may be a way to access non-local information.

Worse, the uber-skeptic position has been hurt in recent years, not the least of which with the military releasing incredible footage of the very same UFO experiences that have been dismissed by skeptics:

https://www.cnn.com/2018/03/12/politics/unidentified-aircraf...

Also, small nitpick, but a witch hunt was a political move against women, not an honest attempt to find real witches. Societies with witch burnings were overly patriarchal and witch threats existed to keep women in line.
Urban legend. Not true at all. Nothing can kill a trip except time. Not even Xanax - it will just help you relax and kill the panic and anxiety.

The caffeine part is particularly bad advice, as a stimulant is the last thing you want to ingest when you are already highly agitated.
1. The US claims to have 14 active but that doesn't account for maintenance problems and the times when they're going in and out of port, something enemies track very closely. The real number is likely even lower than this already low number.

2. Why do you think superfuzes helps in a counter strike? They massively increase accuracy but that's not even the problem to solve in a MAD scenario. Superfuzes help in taking out an enemy's nuclear force while it's on the ground, as in the case of a first strike. You don't need them to hit cities.

3. Counting warheads is misleading because it ignores the possibility of interception or failure of the missiles themselves. Countering some number of those 24 missiles is entirely conceivable.

4. Yes, I know what CEP means because I too have read pages on Wikipedia. Is this your weak attempt at claiming expertise where none likely exists?

5. Here's an open letter from the actual experts that ran the US Strategic Command. They agree with me that the US nuclear triad is in dire need of modernization.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-u-s-nuclear-triad-needs-an-...

Some of their recommendations have already been implemented and a lot more needs to be done before we can rely on MAD being in effect in the future.

6. Putting the hopes of humanity on a few subs that were designed in the 1970s is a very dangerous idea. It's an admission that the triad is broken. When you've let two thirds of your redundant system fail, you've got a very urgent problem.
I'm not sure you understand how popular Whatsapp is outside the US. No one in my country has heard of Yelp (201 million population). Everyone uses Whatsapp daily. Whatsapp has 1.5 billion active users.
More than 95% of the ads that I actually notice are ads for things that I JUST bought. Like hours or days before.
I've heard this called shadow testing, and it's a fairly common trick.
So just to take on some of this -- the big problem with the old media model is that old media made its money on distribution. When you bought a newspaper you were mostly buying the expense and time they put in to making and delivering the news to you (the trucks, the paperboys, the newsstands, etc). Or you were advertising on a local TV station that had a quasi-monopoly with one of the few FCC licenses in an area. With the internet media firms no longer were really controlling distribution. Today 75% of the news comes from two distributors, Google and Facebook. So media has to figure out a new way to survive. People in the business have pored over this problem for decades. I don't see any way that it works without subscriptions. Any ad-based model is going to result in denuded clickbait-style coverage. The advantage the modern system has is that basically anyone can garner a large audience overnight, provided they're good at what they do. There's no middlemen, which means reduced costs, which means an opportunity for more independent reporting. We'll see. I'm guardedly optimistic and hope that companies like Substack will take off.
Not to defend FB on this but I can see them doing this defensively. I've seen doctors offices using FB to keep patients updated with their activities (free 'Healthy Eating' seminar), which has unintentionally been used to sent messages like 'Hey Doc needs to reschedule your colonoscopy appointment'. I'm sure FB doesn't want to get involved with indirect HIPAA violations, even if the fault lies elsewhere.
"who pays the piper calls the tune "
The Japanese have some takes on this subject. I'm far from an expert, I only have a passing understanding, and I also have no answers, but if you were curious you might look in to Ikigai.
What do you mean by peeking at the notification?
This reminds me of a great book I read, "Into Thin Air"[0]. If you're interested in getting a first-hand account of climbing Everest, and what effect novice climbers have had on it, definitely give it a read.

[0]https://www.amazon.com/Into-Thin-Air-Personal-Disaster/dp/03...
>that's basically anti-net-neutrality

Net neutrality is about access to internet, not what your browser and/or software supports. An ad blocker certainly isn't anti net neutrality.
I never saw a single instance of him insulting anyone or attacking the character of the CTO. The closest was him lamenting that the dispute made it's way to HN. Which I wouldn't call an illegitimate gripe.
I know how you feel. Most of it is chalked up to where you live, then the company you're at, and then the team you're on.

The first two are pretty easy to remedy if you're young and adventurous enough, but the last one might leave you searching for a long time. I've up and moved all over the place, and never stopped searching. After 10 years in this field, I've finally got a job that really brings me satisfaction. What most people don't tell you is that it's all about your boss. If your boss knows you, and helps you reach your potential, any job can be fulfilling. Most bosses aren't that good though, and they will stifle your growth and make your life miserable because their boss is doing the same to them.

The real key is to know yourself, know your skills, and advocate for yourself tirelessly. Make yourself accountable, and then deliver. People will take notice, and if they don't, pack your bags and move on to the next spot and try again.

I'm Director of Engineering for goin.org now, and I'm doing exactly what I love to do: understand a business problem really deeply, and then construct a series of large software systems to automate those business problems. Software engineering in it's truest sense is what I love. Structuring systems and code so that they all scale easily, and adding new members to the team is easy because the code is setup in such a way that new people can get up to speed and start contributing right away. Technical debt can only be allowed for an immediate life or death business situation, and once we've made it through, it is reconsidered and fixed.
Agree 100% in principle, but just want to PSA that 1-2mg of Xanax is a fairly hefty dose.
> type of content people aren't willing to pay for (...) is really all that worthwhile

> creating and distributing low-quality clickbait content profitable, pushing more serious content aside.

Sure, you can make that argument, but why should anyone decide what kind of content is worthwhile?

Are you suggesting a "internet content quality board"?

Let users decide what content is worthwhile, voting with their clicks, eyes and wallets.
How is it somewhat plasubile? Visual differences in a mushroom's biology mean nothing. The fact that mushrooms have the same DNA + RNA structure as all the rest of Earthly life is a dead giveaway that this hypothesis is nonsense.
Development time estimates are too short because there's no penalty for management underestimation. If programmers were paid like the movie industry, estimation would be more reliable. Time and a half after 8 hours, or after 5 days. Pay for 4 hours if you're needed briefly during off hours. Double time on Sundays. It's not just telling people it's a "crunch".

Movie scheduling and estimation is organized enough that you can buy a completion bond. If the job isn't completed within an error margin over cost and schedule, the completion bond company pays. If there's a cost overrun, the completion bond company has the authority to send in their own people to monitor things and if necessary, to fire the director or anybody else, and take over the production.[1][2]

Completion bond companies do project cost and schedule estimation independently of the production. They have the data for this, because they have the full accounting data for hundreds or thousands of films. They watch project progress carefully. "Our monitoring process requires the production to email us daily shooting progress reports and a weekly cost report in order to properly evaluate the progress of the film. FFI also makes periodic visits to the shooting area."

This prevents directors and producers from low-balling their estimates. Underestimation leads to unemployment.

A completion bond typically costs about 4% of the film budget.

[1] https://www.eqgroup.com/completion_bond/
[2] http://www.filmfinances.com/services/evaluation
Why is _jayy allowed to delete his posts after folks respond to him, but the rest of us aren't?
Rocketry was already well-underway when the V2 flew.
How Silicon Valley’s Petty Feud with Mark Zuckerberg Could Backfire
For what it's worth: The on-call support role is a 1-week obligation that rotates between all of the engineers on the team. As our sixth engineer, each engineer would only be on-call once every 6 weeks.

The role itself consist of being the:

- primary PagerDuty contact for server and application alerts and errors,

- primary contact for our dedicated support team to ask questions and triage new issues,

- primary code reviewer

Note that we do have a dedicated support team that answers emails and calls from our customer base. The on-call engineer is not responsible for that.
Will Substack be strictly a written newsletter platform or will it allow a hybrid approach including picture, audio, video, comments, etc. ?
It's a culture thing :(
I love Wait But Why's post on AI:

https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revol...
Normally, from my understanding of these sorts of accidents, you wouldn't fail to move your foot over if you're only braking gently but you might if you need to slam down the brake. As your reflexes slow down as you age you'll find yourself getting into more situations where you need to slam the brake. And it will more often make sense to apply a hard brake now because you know you won't be able to increase the braking force in time later if it becomes necessary. I don't remember the last time I had to slam the brakes in my own driving but when I'm riding with my father he has to do it pretty regularly.
AI takes a backseat as Apple puts customers at the center of everything
Part of the problem is that such customers are not as valuable as U.S. customers :(

You see it on the ads side as well, ads to U.S. or European customers can pay 10 times as much as an ad to a Latin American.
>>Throughout history, military power depended mostly on the quantity of two resources, wealth and population.

I thought that military power depended primarily on the quantity of population and materiél. The latter is driven primarily by wealth, but also relies on building, operating and maintaining a manufacturing and industrial base.

Smarter software will help equalize and hopefully reduce coordination costs (i.e. command hierarchy & effective intelligence) but doesn't really help with population nor materiél factors.
Equity is absolutely a form of debt, especially when given to the kinds of VCs that demand high exits.

Maybe if there were VCs who would be happy to own part of the company and be satisfied with the dividends from Github's revenue, it'd be a different story.
I have a question that the article doesn’t answer. If the original founders left because of disagreements on advertising as the monetization model for WhatsApp, are they still holding on to Facebook stock for their $3 billion and $9 billion net worth (respectively)? Or have they sold those since those shares are valued because of the advertising that Facebook pushes? The answer to this would say a lot about their claimed commitment to privacy and their stance against ads.

My next point is a prediction. WhatsApp will remove end to end encryption as the default very soon. With Facebook wanting to grow its revenues and profits (like most other companies), this is too attractive to let it stay as it has been for the last few years. At least some WhatsApp employees seem to have some kind of a moral compass on this topic, and I’d expect several of them to leave when this change is announced later this year or early next year.
I was thinking about spinning up an ec2 instance, firewalled to only my ip, and just putting my repos there. How much work/money would that be?
At some point don't you think you just have enough? What's another $400 million in the bank at that point? I mean maybe you could put that towards causes you believe in, but that's kind of the only argument I see for staying.

The definition of being rich in my mind is the very concept of being able to walk away from that kind of money for your own sanity.
2018 State of Hardware Report
Awesome! Simple and practical.
Those ground rules are great. How do you "enforce" them, or at least keep them at front of mind on the team?
I don’t know how old you are, but phone calls were really expensive in the decades before 2000. It’s not something low income people could afford to do very often.
Google DOES use JS-injected canonical tag
Doing what very well? You are making too handwavy of a statement. they are regulating some things they care about very heavily and others not at all. And very well is all relative. China is a poor country still, comparing it to US is not reasonable at this stage
For us, $80k is regarded as the entry-level starting base. A mid-level that makes it through our process has a much higher starting base.