skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
$50M is tiny compared to the opportunity cost of having 100 of your best engineers jump ship to a competitor or found a new one. Google will pay $50M for a startup with 10 proven engineers and then shut down their product, just so that they aren't on the open market where they can challenge the $50B+ golden goose.

Silicon Valley basically works on the principle of "Never let your employees do to you what you did to your past employer or competitors." There have been multiple cases where a small group of 10 or so engineers has quit en masse and then gone on to found or strengthen a billion-dollar competitor, eg. Shockley => Fairchild => Intel => AMD, HP => Apple => [General Magic, Claris, Radius, NeXT] => Apple, Cisco's revolving door of startups, [Western Digital, PARC, Bell Labs] => Google => Facebook. The cost to the company of this is easily in the hundreds of millions, oftentimes billions, and sometimes existential. It makes sense to blow $50M or so to keep a proven team of tech talent in-house.
I'm currently learning shelly haskell library. I tried to write a function in a haskell-emacs module and calling it as a elisp function in a eshell buffer and it worked flawlessly first try.
Good point and sorry to disappoint you! The good news is that we still have a lot to share, this is the first time in six years to dig deeper into our data and share it with the community. I’m sure we’ll do more and more soon. A series about the most common causes of bugs and suggestions on how they could be avoided would definitely be a great start!
> Their stores are actually rented out retail space for Apple, Samsung, and other brands.

So, it's now largely a convenient place known to consumers that serves to connect them to third-party sellers where originally it was entirely a direct retailer itself.

So, it’s like a bricks-and-mortar version of Amazon?
Western Digital to Shut Down HDD Mfg. Facility, Increase Production of SSDs
If you keep breaking the guidelines we'll ban the account.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> One of the ideas is to allow anyone to buy a property at its set value at any time (giving a reasonable notice period, I presume). The property owner is the one who sets the value of the property.

I must be misunderstanding something, this is how any free/mixed economy works, including in Canada and US. You may make the property owner an offer at anytime, and the owner sets the price by either accepting or rejecting an offer. The problem is the buyer can't just do anything with the property (like subdivide/build apartments) due to zoning laws.
Legally, yes, but realistically I just can't see it being so easy in most companies. I'd like to think I was being too cynical though!
I really wish people would stop trying to cram everything into an HTTP-shaped box.
Your best bet is to negotiate at your current job. You have specific knowledge that is very expensive to replace, usually: technologies, internal code, who knows what, business logic, etc.. Your manager knows you. You have lots of value compared to random person off the street. The pitch is "I'm going to be moving, but would love to keep working for you part-time and remote."

This is how many people get their first part-time job, e.g. https://codewithoutrules.com/2018/01/08/part-time-programmer... (though usually not as short hours).

Lacking that, for really short hours you can:

1. Get freelance work. Since you don't want to Run A Business, talking to other programmers you know is reasonable way to do this. "hey, does your company need another pair of hands for extra projects?" It's not a long term plan nor will it maximize income, but not clear you need a long-term plan.

2. Various agencies can help you find freelance contract work, e.g. Gun.io.

3. Find early stage startups (with little funding) that have full time job postings. Say "I know you want full time, but how about part time." They're low on cash, so more willing to compromise on hours, sometimes (I know someone who has done this.) Bootstrapped companies might be in this category too. Ignore their job ad, just reach out anyway. Small companies are also good because there's less likely to be HR person throwing your application in the trash for not fitting the mold.
You have to remember, though, that Proposition 13 has overt racism as part of its history; people like to go on about "tax revolts" and citizens reacting against over-taxation, but it was pushed as a centerpiece of reactionary measures after California's courts refused to allow various attempts at maintaining indirect racial segregation of schools, and ordered redistribution of funding between school districts. Proposition 13, by gutting the property tax (which was the primary source of school funding), was the final end-run around courts which increasingly would not allow vastly unequal schools for children of different races.

Today, there's no good argument for it. "I moved here a few years earlier than you did" is not a sound basis for different levels of taxation. If you want to protect elderly owner-occupiers from being priced out of their long-time homes, you can accomplish that goal with other measures.
> Immediate hit to Google's revenue stream

but maybe only a temporary one. after knifing the babies (i mean honestly outcompeting the startups), Google could discontinue that option and stop all the payments.

at least for a while, until a fresh crop of foolhardy competitors boldly entered that market again.
I wonder if you look at the stats whether or not SMS is actually the most popular form of communication on Android. I live in the US, where I use iMessage and SMS is the most popular, but I hear all the time on Reddit that no one uses SMS outside stupid America and everyone uses WhatsApp/Signal/(Chinese one I'm forgetting).

Google needs to pick one, no doubt, but I wonder how relevant it is that they do (Android has much of its market share outside the US).
> more than two-thirds of the carbonyl sulfide in our atmosphere come from (you guessed it)

And here I thought they were going to say rotten eggs and flatulence...
We need more density. Serious question: do you guys think market rate development will push down prices enough to make SF affordable to the working class (service industry, teachers, etc.)? Or do we need subsidized / below market rate housing?

This is an issue that affects all of us. Commuting in 1+ hours for low wage jobs is not a viable growth model. Already small businesses in SF are having a very hard time hiring. Unless Elon Musk builds us some tunnels, we need local housing for the working class just to function as a city that’s desirable to live in.

My thought on market rate: it will certainly make it more affordable for folks like us (upper 5 - lower 6 figure incomes). But there is a long queue of white collar professionals particularly in tech that would like to move into the city. All that demand needs to be soaked up before the market rate becomes “affordable” for the working class — which means dirt cheap for professionals. How many tech professionals would decide to move here if SF was dirt cheap? That’s a lot of induced demand to satiate.

So that’s where the real debate is here when it comes to upzoning the west side. Do you open it up to maximum market rate, or do you negotiate with developers for maximum BMR units? I feel the “nimby vs yimby” dichotomy here tends to cloud that issue.
Mark Zuckerberg's Holocaust comment isn't the only thing he got wrong
My experience with convenience stores is that they generally do stock items like beans and rice. They sell in time, and until they do they're shelf-stable more or less forever. And you can sell in small quantities - maybe 8oz or a pound for $2 - that hide the markup behind small numbers. Especially in areas where they're staples.

It's fresh fruit and veggies that you will tend to see the least of in c-stores.
Anxiety Grips Vermont Law School Community
I recall seeing a documentary about early glow in the dark wristwatches with hand painted radium dials. The painters would occasionally lick the brush tips to make a fine point. A large percentage of them died from terrible forms of lip, mouth and throat cancer.
You're posting a whole lot of unsubstantive comments. Could you please read the guidelines and then stop?

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Ask HN: Just received a data breach scam attack, is anyone researching these?
I just received a email, that included one of my throw away passwords in the title. It asked for 3K in bitcoin, or else is would send video to my friends and family.
Anyhow, is there anyone who is working on backtracing these scum? I thought of forwarding the email to the FBI, but I am not sure if they are working on these things.
Location-Aware Distribution: Configuring servers at scale
Alcohol: once or twice a week, usually 1 or 2 pints of beer

Caffeine: 3 or 4 espressos daily
Locals arbitrarily believe that all buildings should be sort of old, squat and humble looking, that this is a universal value, and that everyone else has to make whatever sacrifices are necessary for it.
> I wonder why that never reached the same amount of outcry when Obama won.

Because Obama won...
In the UK there's a time limit of six years on starting any kind of civil action. If a business discovers they forgot to invoice someone ten years ago they have to write it off.
You probably know more about the subject than the people you are speaking to. So, when appropriate, err on the side of giving more background info than less.
You are still alive though, if it's any consolation.

Now, many countries have this problem solved – for now. As the population ages, the solutions may have to change everywhere.

What I find interesting is that the discussion is almost never framed to address the actual issue: the medical industry in the US simply overcharges with impunity. I was shocked to discover that labor (as in, doctors) isn't even the biggest line item in many (most?) medical bills. Hospitals and clinics will simply crank the bill sky high and then have you or the insurance try to haggle it back down, sometimes at a 3 or 4 digits percentage difference. It's insane. There's also zero transparency on pricing, so it is difficult to shop around even if you have the time.
Industry Report Backs Up Intelligence Community on Russian Hacking
But that was a time when sub 100ms latency for networked gaming had never really been experienced. If you never played faster you wouldn't notice it when it's slower, I'd think.
Except that there is the tax thing which is literally designed to make people bleed money if they want to stay at place and force them to move.

See, when I am with small baby and kid has friends and I have deadlines in work, I don't want to have to move nor be suddenly force to pay much higher tax then flexible single dude who can leave easily.
> The smell is very concentrated because it's been canned.

And this is why it's recommended that you open the can underwater. Most of the videos of people reacting badly to it are because someone just opened the can in the middle of a room. Don't do that.
It sounds like every week there's a holiday. Weeks with a holiday are awesome.
The tech jargon in Mueller’s Russian indictment, explained
We ban accounts that won't comment civilly and substantively.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
The main reason why this won't work is that majority of public simply prefers free ad-infested services over paid ad-free ones. Case in point - YouTube Red and it's abysmal adoption rate.

One might reasonable argue that YT Red just removes ads, but doesn't do anything for privacy / data collection. But I have two questions for them: 1. what makes you think people would gladly pay for privacy (any glaring example)? , 2. even if Google were to offer such an option, would you trust it?
For reference:

https://archive.org/details/tribes-networking-model
I often wonder what kind of amazing company Google could be if only their cash cow was not from advertising, but something neutral and profitable like AT&T was to foster Bell Labs.
Is that even a thing? What exactly would they do with Aged Amazon accounts? Setup a FBA storefront?
Lower taxes perhaps? Or better yet, eliminate the property taxes and shift them to a sales tax collected upon sale. Or use existing capital gains taxes.

But, to your point: why shouldn’t people pay tax on the value of their property? If they can’t afford the tax, then obviously they can’t afford the house right? Prop 13 is already effectively a Ponzi scheme— actual tax cost is paid by future investors rather than the current investor. So if I buy a house today, my tax rate is x. Tomorrow, my tax rate is still x even if the actual cost of government and my home value has increased. So tomorrow’s buyer pays their tax plus the difference between my x and the actual tax required. Tomorrow’s buyer perpetually subsidizes yesterday’s buyer.

That isn’t fair at all.
Alcohol: none. Caffeine: three or four iced tea or coffee a day (well, six today so far)
The article is not about standalone software. It is about an operating system that will be used to sell hardware. Apple is proof that consumers are willing to pay enough for hardware to keep a company profitable.
The utility may be obvious but the solution is far from it.

The problem is that custom UI is extremely non-trivial. Getting something to work in a way thats even just slightly different from what the default UI does can be a huge undertaking; from reasons having to do with integration, rendering, dataflow, or any other obscure thing.

IMO it’s a dangerous misconception to think that most custom UIs can be implemented via a simple extension- that’s the real reason why there’s so many front end developers.
this was amusing for me, because i am JUST starting to test out google's cloud offerings and got hit by this outage on basically day 1. Luckily, it wasn't too long before i figured out it was them and not me.
I agree. What is wrong with creating new protocols?
This. Why do every single new condo building in the bay has to be ugly ?
Instagram adds a status indicator dot so people know when you’re ignoring them
Ethics vs free speech. A company whose bottom line relies on ad dollars should probably lean towards ethics.
Alcohol: Only odd-numbered years (e.g. 2017, 2019). Started this in 2012 to avoid carrying over college habits into the professional world. Works for me.

Caffeine: Used to be 3-4 cups of coffee, now its 1-2 with some days opting for matcha or black tea. Slightly lower caffeine content, with no crash, somehow.
This sounds good in theory, but in practice what you're describing will not be stable, sustainable, or at all practical.

You can't really run this sort of revolving-door "talent pool" project for long, certainly not a massive project of 100+ engineers. If every time a new project opens up, its hiring managers get to unreservedly raid the "talent pool" project for star performers, then pretty soon this project will be known internally as a joke, that is at priority zero, and any but its most dysfunctional engineers will be rushing to other projects, either internally within Google or (more likely) outside it.

You'll end up with all the best people quickly leaving for real projects where they can do real work on real products for real pay (bonuses for revenue-yielding projects are much, much higher than for anything else). The project itself will be a dysfunctional joke since you can't run it with the best talent routinely recruited away. The only people who will work on it will be dead weight who don't care to work on real products or even make any progress on a bogus one, which is the definition of the sort of people you should immediately fire.

In fact, the whole initial "pool" of candidates sounds toxic, if the only reason they were given this project is that any other _real_ work would cause them to leave. As a hiring manager, I'd be very skeptical of anyone who seemed to be this sort of indifferent diva, and would not be looking to hire them.

To sum up, it's a fun little theory, but extremely unlikely to work in practice, and I've never seen anything like it. The simple explanation that Fuchsia is an Android successor is much more likely, and there's zero evidence for the far-fetched "talent pool" explanation other than an unsupported comment by some anonymous "one person who has spoken to Fuchsia staff". It's ridiculous.
Oh yeah and Linux
Also consider that a second implementation of a system is always going to be cleaner than the first because you actually know what you need to do. This is an inherent bias inherent to any GraphQL migration story.
The interview on YouTube. It's an hour and 27 minutes. The audio quality seems excellent.

https://www.hooktube.com/watch?v=dDsWTyLEgbk
You could consider this an artificially selected population, since to keep an airline transport pilot license it is required to maintain a current FAA medical. I'm sure lots of pilots smoke, drink and eat poorly, but they try to avoid getting grounded and career-ended by their physician.
You can wish that all you want, but it isn't going to happen. HTTP is an extremely effective way to deploy new protocols; it is effectively the richest protocol design toolkit available universally to developers, and has the added benefit of playing well with middleboxes. Expect more "cramming" in the future, not less.
Regarding diversity of thoughts (which is to me way more important than visible diversity):

What you really mean, is that the Bay area got the "good diversity" (rich democrats), while Kansas City got the "wrong diversity" (poor white republicans).

I think those two places are similar in that regards. They are both polarized, and are both not that diverse in term of actual ideas.

Now if you want visible diversity (whatever that means), sure the bay Area got more people from a different origin but they usually all think in exactly the same way.

Source: I lived 2 years in St Louis and 4 years in the bay area.

Edit: Forgot that I would be downvoted, since it seems to be politically incorrect to say that visible diversity (what everyone is focusing on) is different than thought diversity.
> On the whole I think people exaggerate; it's no more revolting than a strong cheese might be

A part of that is probably that people who do it "challenge-style" aren't exactly preparing it well. They're eating it straight out of the can (usually while gagging), not with the usual pairings.
I knew one. He was one of my Scouts when a pre-teen. In his 20's somehow ended up in a friends living room playing video games and drinking beer and only beer for months. It killed him.

Something about the young, makes them think they can live forever, do anything without consequences.
I don't run a huge company or have any influence whatsoever, so I am probably being very naive - but I believe the Holocaust happened and if I were in his position I would not remove Denier rhetoric either.
FWIW, I would totally live in Berkeley if my commute to the dogpatch could be shortened. Right now, there's no obvious mass transit way to get to my office in SF in less than 80 minutes (assuming every connection is hit perfectly). With an Uber, it's highly variable (between 40 minutes and 90 minutes depending upon the day).
There's plenty of material out there but I'll summarize:

1. Erasure keeps you honest and prevents you from second guessing the compiler by limiting the introspection you can perform on your code.

2. Reification puts up a very high barrier to interop. Erasure systems are much more welcoming to implementing multiple languages and multiple type systems on top of them. For example, the scala.net project was abandoned because it was impossible to represent Scala's type system on .net's reified platform.

3. Reification imposes overhead because of the multitude of extra runtime checks that need to be performed.

4. Most the benefits you get from reification can be emulated on erased systems (some are admittedly more hackish on an erased runtime, but they should be rare).
Two things I haven't seen ITT yet:

1. After you tell me what you're going to talk about, tell me why I should be listening to _you_. Why are you an authority on this topic? Unless you're famous, I don't know you.

2. The talk should contain 50% or less of your knowledge on the topic. You want to keep some info "in your back pocket" to ad lib with.
Zuckerberg demonstrates an alarming tendency to appear inhuman sometimes.
Far more nutritious? Hardly. Rice, Oats, Beans, Lentils are all just pure carbs just like the junk food (or worse, because the junk food contains fat which will make you feel fuller). Will spike your insulin hard and not keep you full long term.
If the types were reified, the compiler and the JVM would know what type was there. No cast would be needed.
Although that, technically, refutes an accusation of non-existence of customer support, it begs the question of what it means to be a enough of a "customer" to receive support (and at what level):

Is it enough to use a gratis product? ("Paying" for it with data or ad-eyeballs, I suppose)

Is it enough to pay money for the product?

Must one also pay a subscription fee in addition to paying for the product in the first place? [1]

Is something else, sometimes, necessary (such as volume/clout)?

I think we've seen most of the spectrum of answers from the software industry (especially "enterprise" software), with the main novelty being the existence of web/SaaS gratis products.

[1] Depending on where on the spectrum between hand-holding and mere bug fixes the support ends up falling, this could be characterized as double-dipping
Life before Google: What was it like?
Publisher vs Platform. They're still trying to have it both ways.
> Serious question: do you think guys think market rate development will push down prices enough to make SF affordable to the working class (service industry, teachers, etc.)? Or do we need subsidized / below market rate housing?

Just a thought, but maybe no to both questions.

You need working class people to be able to work in SF, but is it necessary (with adequate transit) that they live there?
I’ve never not gotten a monetary credit or a month of Prime when a guaranteed delivery misses its date. Quick email to CS and it’s sorted the next day.
> it wasnt one foreign hostile power directing attempting to sway one specific candidate

Any idea where can I read more about the analysis around this determination?
To be fair, there's utility to avoid it: check first or do a .get(). That helps you be expressive about what you think should/should not exist
Anything outside of port 80/443 will be blocked at some point.
These studies always seem to make an implicit assumption of memorylessness which I don't think is well justified. It's the same with things like the Laffer curve - why would we assume that any specific days-per-week (or tax rate) has a specific output?

It seems much more likely to me that the act of changing it has a positive affect on productivity - but this is obviously a more short term gain.
How a #MeToo Facebook Group Became a Tool for Harassment
Is there anything specific you'd like to know more about? It would be great to understand what kind of info people are looking for to know what to publish in the future.
I believe in free speech whether or not I believe with what is being spoken.
> "Partial refund". That's a very low standard for a service level agreement, but typical of Google.

It seems to be the standard. The most generous SLA I've seen is 5% off the monthly bill for each 30 minutes of downtime (up to 100%). If I'm down for 10 hours, waiving one month of bills doesn't come close to the damage done.

An SLA seems to be more of a promise than an agreement, because if the service goes down you're SOL and the provider gets a slap on the wrist (partial refund).