skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sure, that's true. This article wasn't fiction, though.

And I know that non-fiction can still have style (in fact, the best does), and people can still have different preferences for that style. And fiction can still communicate ideas.

But for me, personally, if you're trying to communicate an idea, tell me the idea. Stop trying to dress it up in fancy writing, and making me guess whether there's something profound there, or whether it's just fancy. Have style if you want, but don't let the style get in the way of actually communicating the idea.
No problem! In general, burntsushi’s work is some of the best in Rust. He’s also very fluent in Go.
Email: Two use cases.

With email, how can I subscribe to conversations I'm interested in? Mailing lists are nice, but we have no real way to make mailing lists that start and stop on the fly like a chat channel in a way that is searchable to the entire organization during or after the fact.

What email list system allows for quick creation and the ability for everyone in an organization to know that a conversation is happening and how to join with the ability to get all the context necessary in a chronological order? (Reading threads can get really repetitive in a mailing list, especially when trying to get up to speed on an issue.)

You get to all the requirements, and you end up with a discussion board instead or a new product that is to email lists what slack is to chat.

Email is great for some things, but there's a reason people use slack instead even when they already have email.
I don't think I've ever used HipChat. What don't you guys like about it?
Disclosure: i work on Matrix.

We're basically doing nothing but fixing Synapse's performance problems currently, and improvements are on the horizon. We're late because we got sidetracked fixing flaws in the protocol, but as of the last few weeks we're back on perf again. So far we've sped up /sync by 2x and reduced CPU by about 20%, but the RAM improvements should land over the coming weeks unless we have further distractions.

Meanwhile, on Riot, we're busy landing performance fixes which should make it much less resource hungry than Slack. These are literally landing as we speak: https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/pull/2970, https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/pull/3331 etc.
I work in a fashion exposed to thousands of startups worldwide, and can report that many of them do factually raise money without having pre-existing connectedness to prestige investors. The only thing required to raise a seed round is to convince people who have money to give you money. There are a lot of people in the world with sufficient money to fund startups. Substantially all of them are on the same Internet you are.

The trend in the industry has been to more openness on this question recently, in no small part driven by YC, which basically pioneered investing at scale in companies without requiring a social connection.

Also, quick fact of life in entrepreneurship: there are many ways to skin the cat, but if you are hypothetically in a situation where the business needs connections, then the job is going and getting connections. If you e.g. take a random named person with checkwriting authority in Silicon Valley, and ask "How many people have social permission to introduce me to this person?", that answer is likely in the high hundreds to mid single-digit thousands. Substantially all of those people have an email address. Many of them respond to emails very quickly, particularly when they're interesting. This suggests that the immediate problem is less having elite connections and more organizing your life such that you send an uncomfortably large number of interesting emails.
Here are mine, from my area of study (physics).

Quantum mechanics: Cohen-Tannoudji et al. Simply sublime. Read the first chapter and you will understand the physics of quantum mechanics. Read the second chapter and you will understand the mathematics. The rest of the book is a reference of nearly every basic topic in nonrelativistic quantum mechanics.

Classical Mechanics: Landau and Lifshitz. Simply my kind of book. Terse, to the point, no faffing about, yet detailed and rich in discussion and physical insight. In other words, does not say anything it doesn't need, and doesn't omit anything that it shouldn't.

QFT: Peskin and Schroeder. The clearest introduction I found of this difficult topic.
If the memory consumption of a process grows from 200 M (which is about what the chat apps use when freshly started) to 2 Gb, something is rotten by any metric. The system was responding slowly when I made that screenshot because it started using swap. Which got instafreed the moment i restarted the memory hogs.

If i don't restart the machine for a year, is the pretty chat app going to keep in ram, uncompressed, all the cat pictures that people posted in the last 12 months then? Do you think that's sane?
I have the same impression of Deezer. Clumzy. Bad UX. not much love for music despite…

I tried Deezer, Spotify, Play Music, none fits my bill so far. I'm currently using Amazon Prime Music (came free with my Prime sub so why not) and YouTube Music (same reason, free in my country for 3 months as it's rolling out). They are both OK (lots of issues with YouTube music being the same as you regular account though), but none is better than the other guys.
> The doctor is an irellevant gatekeeper 90% of the time. How about we start talking about ‘extra’ doctor visits because patients don’t have access to tests.

My primary care physician refused to order a blood draw for a generic std check. I had no cause to think that I was infected, but my partner and I agreed to get screened so we could stop using condoms (she was on birth control). I was quite offended by this overreach. This drove me away from the physician.
Affiliate Marketing Business Tips to Make You Become a Successful Publisher
Zulip actually seems to tick a lot of boxes for us, I'll see about bringing it in and spinning it up on a box. Thanks for the recommendation!
If you take a giant shit on the sidewalk outside of the restaurant, SF will roll out a red carpet for you, but God forbid you try to give an employee a free lunch or a plastic straw.
Just to add my experience, I feel like it's hit or miss. It seems like I get notifications with zero issues. Then I'll randomly have a week or two in a row where I don't get notifications or get 50% of them. Not sure why this happens, but I use Discord as my only means of contact with multiple people.
Walmart Taps Capital One for Store Cards, Dealing Blow to Synchrony
I agree. I think it's just normal, human self-centeredness. Because it's easy to them it's easy. I work with 95% non-technical people. They aren't going to tackle the problem of IRC persistence on mobile devices when they can just use Slack. :)
The reason this is so confusing is that investors outright lie to themselves and everyone else about it. They pretend to invest based on product vision or founder traits but it's almost universally untrue.

Investors actually invest based on their ability to justify their investment to their LPs, peers, and themselves if it fails. The fear of loss drives most people, and if you have traction they can say "Hey, it's not my fault, they had traction!" and if you have pedigree "Hey, it's not my fault, they went to Stanford/MIT/Harvard!"

So, there are essentially just two routes: 1) traction 2) pedigree.

If you don't have pedigree, then you need traction. And even if you have pedigree, at some point you're going to need traction anyway. Of course it's usually easier to get traction with funding but there's a reason so many pedigreed founders fail, and it's because they can't game the system indefinitely.

There are exceptions to this rule but it's much easier to get traction than it is to find an investor that has genuine conviction about your startup.
> How do you get a reflow oven to the second floor of a building with no cargo elevator? You get a bunch of people together and get creative.

This was a very unsatisfying answer.
Email is crap because there is no agreed on way to structure old and new content, quotes, references and links, everyone insists on bloating with html signatures and crap that isn't part of the discussion.

Additionally, all this bloat and lack of structure makes it hard to search the text for both humans and machines.

Not saying that Slack is better, it addresses some of the structuring and some bloat problems, but adds distraction and encourage discussion bloat instead.
Jesus, why does their garbage jerberscript break ctrl+click?
Showing you adhered to protocol is a valid defense. The problem is twofold:

(1) Your insurer will usually prefer to settle rather than go to court, it's cheaper, so fuck your defense.

(2) You still take the reputational and emotional hit of being sued.

People discussing this rarely seem to get that docs are far more emotional about this than the money at risk merits. There are many things in play beyond "I don't want to lose a lawsuit." We really do get very upset about malpractice suits, for many reasons beyond our premiums going up.
Agreed. The headline is much bolder and more engaging than the actual article.

I'll take a moment to sputter about the phrase "even plasticity." It sounds stark and assertive. But then I check the dictionary and discover that plasticity is really just a $10 word for the more mundane "malleable."

In that case, the sentence is wrongly constructed. If it's trying to take us up a crescendo from small changes to big ones, it should read "introduce plasticity, difference and even discontinuity into time itself."

I'm being cranky to make a larger point. A lot of academic writing isn't just obscure. It's intellectually sloppy in the way that a badly constructed sermon can be, too. Words are sloshed into place mostly because of the way they sound, rather than careful consideration of their exact meaning.
They are in the US as well. There's some exception if you can make a case that it's for the employer's benefit, not the employee's. Everyone says it is, and no one tries very hard to tax it.
Pascal’s mugging [pdf]
It's a docker container with the pony compiler in it. The user input is compiled and run. Any output is captured and routed back to the web browser.

There's a timeout on it so it's really only good for running short lived snippets.

It's based on the same code that powers Rust's playground (or rather the code that did at the time that we introduced the playground).

Source is available here:

https://github.com/plietar/pony-playpen
I cant tell if this is serious.
Is this a real "problem"?
TLDR: don't silently ignore exceptions like

try:
do_something()
except:
pass

and make sure you log your stack traces somehow.
> Mailing lists are nice, but we have no real way to make mailing lists that start and stop on the fly like a chat channel in a way that is searchable to the entire organization during or after the fact.

Isn’t that what subject lines and mail archives are useful for?
It's a very long time since the Express resembled a decent newspaper. It's seemed well into Sunday Sport territory after Desmond bought it.
I think the idea is that it's still a local business that handles it. And it's locals who are hired to prepare the food, just like a local restaurant.
You don't need to understand even special relativity to learn about Bell's theorem. It's just about measurement settings and local influence.

You're correct that non-local hidden variable theories are still plausible. Bohmian mechanics is the prominent example. In this case "locality" is the comfortable illusion that you drop. In Copenhagen it is a kind of realism. In Many Worlds it is the notion that an observation leads to a single result. There's no clear way to determine which of these is more like a "null hypothesis" than the others, so what tends to happen is that people gravitate towards one or another based on which of the illusions they're more okay with dropping.

It would be nice to be able to discriminate between interpretations based on experiment, and a little work has been done on this, but we're not really anywhere near there yet.
> I think Spotify does a great job because they give you so many options for finding new music, but sometimes you have to dig into the UI to find them.

While this is true it's ridiculous how often, at least for me, Spotify creates a playlist with songs that I've listened to hundreds of times already.

At least 70% of my discovery weekly playlist is a song I've already heard. If I create a "Similar playlist" it stuffs it with songs that I listen to regularly. It's deeply disappointing.
> Nope, he got the "Graphics Group" team of Lucasfilm and turned it into Pixar.
> The team had not done anything previously as Pixar.

In which case it would be more accurate to say that he acquired and rebranded. But you said he founded Pixar, including Apple and NeXT in that statement, which sounds as though he launched Pixar from scratch.
> When is this overhype for Slack going to stop?

I challenge you to consider whether your perspective applies to the 99% of people who use Slack that are not developers writing software. For those people, email is often not a place where well-argued discussions happen. It's usually a place where chat-like communication happens, slowly, and in an ill-fitting interface. For non-developers, let's take a operations associate for example or a logistics manager, or someone else whose job is to coordinate and communicate frequently, Slack plays a very different role than it does for devs.

Unfortunately for you, and others like you who don't like Slack, if 99% of your company wants to use it, you'll almost certainly get pulled in. Unless your department or team explicitly opts-out, you'll get pulled into the same platform the rest of the company is using.

This isn't to say you're wrong -- just to say that we must not judge the hype around Slack, or it's clear successes, as a fad if we're only judging it based on the experiences of the kinds of people who frequent HN.
Man, some really questionable use of animations and things in here. Hopefully the website isn't the message, because lord knows any sort of advanced lifeform isn't going to put up with that crap.
While I get the "light year = distance" dead horse, however, I too agree with the concept of "what we see now isn't now" when looking at the sky. In our modern day instant now type of world, it is good to be reminded that whatever we consider epicly important right now, it's just a fleeting spec of nothing in the grand scheme. That's one of the things that I really love about astronomy. We are so utterly not important. It's a huge ego readjustment, or it should be IMHO. Feeling self-important, step outside, look up, and recognize your actual position. Gulp

While it's not LIFE and they know their audience, it's not an xarchiv release either. These types of stories could easily be the starting of a young mind to astronomy. While there very well may be an avenue for that, it would not be "bad/wrong/etc" for that in this type of release either. After all, these releases are PR.
Do you get taxed on the free coke you get in the break room ? It just doesn't seem to work like that. It would also require to put a $ amount on the price of the "free" meal.
Which would not make it free anymore.
It seems like they make tools for managers with bolt on functionality for engineers

Yep. And who are the people who decide what project management software to use?
Capital One does, as well. Unfortunately, it requires a browser extension, which I'm not a big fan of.
I love following these "RSS is dead" discussions from my RSS feed reader.
Being in the Bay Area is a big advantage.
Malice is beside the point here is the it? The concern isn't an evil contractor, so much as an incompetent one.

Car manufacturers are sued for incompetent use of their products.
Yes, a dollar does represent a coupled obligation of someone out there to collect it (or another dollar) in order to satisfy their debt. I do agree that a dollar is therefore debt-based money.

What I was refuting was OP calling all currency in general "debt" based on it having little "intrinsic use", and therefore only useful for what it can be traded for.
Are you familiar with The Expanse? Based on the way G-forces are presented in the TV adaptation (I presume the book does something similar), I take it the Epstein Drive is supposed to be a constant-acceleration design, which in the story is limited to intra-solar travel (though presumably the generation ship Nauvoo was designed to use it for interstellar).

I mention this because your comment made me think: Even staying within the solar system, how short would a trip between Earth and Mars have to be to start to pose relativistic problems? I wonder at what point frequent travelers would start aging noticeably more slowly. (If this is dealt with in the books, now I’ll really have to read them.)
The org I work for has a bunch of Slack channels that we invite our clients into as single channel guests (If they don't already use Slack). We have Gov & corporate using it without issue and they love it.
It's taxable in the US as well.

There have been occasional attempts to enforce the law - IRS recently made noises in 2014/15.

The challenge is that it's taxable to the employees but hard to track and prove, it's for relatively little money per employee, and the firms argue that it's for their benefit to secure information/improve productivity/build cohesion...

Google can and will fight far harder than the IRS is willing to on this issue and the IRS isn't entirely sure that they'd win. The IRS can spend resources in places to make a much higher return with an almost certain chance of success.

So no effective taxes on meals.

To make it happen in your company, follow the Google and Uber strategy. Just do it and deal with the law later.

Your ability to pay any fines later may be different from Google's and the chance that one of your employees will call the tax office on you may be dramatically higher because Germany.
Truth, fair play, acknowledging real constraints, getting the right result for the right reasons... Those aspects matter to sensible people. Calling it "sour grapes" is a lazy mischaracterization.

I voted Remain. I would have reluctantly accepted the result if in the last two years the Brexit proponents had executed any reasonable plan with any degree of competence. They haven't, so I don't.

Two years on, the Brexiteers are still full of lies, misrepresentations and stupid bluster. Just like the premise behind the targeted FB ads that are the subject of this post.
I'm not a physical therapist so I can only offer kind words... hopes and dreams heh.

All I'll say is that its worth a shot. Its really nice to be fit, both physiologically, because it feels good and because you become more attractive.
Slower storage and slower CPU on the SE? Maybe that is a factor, I'm not quite sure.
Both PEXs and XARs package a python script and its dependencies in single hermetic file.

PEX is a self-extracting zip file which has to be fully extracted before being run. The extracted files could potentially be modified.

XAR is a self-mounting compressed SquashFS filesystem image. SquashFS will decompress pages lazily and cache the result in the page cache, so the startup time is much faster. Since SquashFS is read-only, the files can't be modified.
At the risk of being a Debbie Downer, I don't think it matters much whether or not your view has merits. The federal armed forces reduce this to an argumentum ad baculum.
Except of course that the value of the food is not $10 because it is not being bought retail.

So the real value is probably more like $2, and even at two full meals per day that would translate to 200 working days times $4 is about $800.
Each issuer has 1 trillion possible account numbers.[0]

[0]https://www.creditcards.com/credit-card-news/credit-card-app...
There's also a Pony workshop at CodeMesh in London this November for those who can't make it to ICFP but can make it to London.

https://codesync.global/conferences/code-mesh-2018/training
Should or should not is something you've introduced yourself. I was saying it was never a fair fight to start with and given this the incessant sour grapes from the overwhelming favourite has an air of pathos about it.
:)

The last smaller company I worked for knew they couldn't compete on salary, and knew they had to rely on training up novice coders. So, they made the environment as positive as possible, with weekly group training, pair coding, and round-robin technology presentations from the entire team.

I'm currently contracting at a large company, refactoring code that was clearly written by people with no time or motivation to learn their tools, who were just trying to get their feature to 'pass' the tests. New technologies are incorporated without fully reading the docs, and then never upgraded as fixes and improvements got published. Time for training and development? Nobody has making the time for refactoring. And, the source code is evidence that it has been this way for years.
Not an expect but as I understand it the Windows API for idle tracking is sometimes wonky.

Certain programs can keep your computer in a non-idle state indefinitely even if you don't move the mouse.
The FBI once targeted physicist Arthur Rosenfeld over a note left on a table mat
> It’s too bad most of those workflows don’t apply to business use cases.

Which is totally why Slack isn't popular with businesses. /s

Just because you personally haven't found it useful, doesn't mean hundreds of thousands of other business users haven't.
I still remember (and may still have an installer for...) Trillian back in the days when it was just a multi-IM client.

I like your pricing comparisons for on-premises servers - particularly the comparison to a Skype for Business site license. https://trillian.im/uses/self-hosted-instant-messaging/

Am I correct that you're pretty much focused on just the IM/chat side of things rather than all the calendar/phone/build system/coffeepot/refrigerator integrations that Slack seems to talk up?
I don't know if Stride was losing out to Slack, or if it was losing out to the FOSS competitors like Rocket, Mattermost, and Zulip. I've found Rocket and Mattermost to work well for small teams (no experience with medium or big deployments).

With the FOSS alternatives plus the more fringe competitors like Ryver, Glip, and Twist, plus related tools from Dropbox, Basecamp, etc., it's hard to see there being a market for Stride.
(I work on Issuing.) Our product philosophy is making things as widely available as possible; we won’t be shy about letting the world know when we do.
Why would it risk killing the life of the place? The people who already eat lunch there will still eat lunch there. This is simply a money grab by the people who happen to already be there, just like Prop 13 and rent control.
Only a small fraction of the products got that. Almost no product is getting organic spectacular growth. We overly remember the ones that do, but I would say 99% of the products are being created and funded without anyone knowing about it.
Bay Area cities banning free food at Facebook and others
> That's why, for instance, I'm very critical of mainsteam journalism and media platforms - all they seem to be doing these days is to sow discord, burning people's trust in institutions to get their eyeballs

And yet here you are, sowing distrust in the media!

This isn't an indictment - I do agree with you on both fronts. I'm pointing out that it's decay-turtles all the way down.

The issue with trust is that it doesn't scale. Or really, as soon as people start trusting symbols (eg institutions), concentrated value is created, which then is profitable to arbitrage away. With the overall trend of increasing communications, we are better able to observe this behind-the-scenes selling out, and thus our trust is eroded.

If we wish to restore faith in our institutions (ie make them trustable again), we need to move their philosophy and governance from "trust" towards "trust but verify".