skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"I was on Facebook for the network effect - then I got into indie game development, and all of the other game developers and gaming press are on Twitter."

Sure, if one has one reason to be on a network, getting off it is fairly easy. But if one has IRL professional-collegues, friends, family, and multiple special interests with friends, then it's hard for all those to switch.

"How necessary is it to you that there be one service that you use to contact literally everyone?"

Well, you want to be able to be-contacted-by a variety of people. Facebook can wind-up indeed just one of several of the networks the average person is on but that doesn't it won't remain the largest and quite possibly not much smaller than today.
I have two questions.

First, if the product is unopened, how will Bethesda know the warranty does not apply? I have bought a number of products that came with a registration card that I was supposed to send in so I could get the warranty. In the case of PC games, I'd assume the warranty kicks in if you tie the game to your steam account. No idea how this works for consoles. But this has clearly not happened yet.

Second question: What warranty? Are you f'ing kidding me? Bethesda has been shipping horrendously buggy games for as long as anyone can remember. You buy them at your own peril. After a few years of patches from Bethesda and the community (google for unofficial skyrim patch) the games become playable. But it's not like you get the patches on warranty after complaining to Bethesda. You get them automatically. Because otherwise nobody would buy those games in the first place. If there is a warranty from Bethesda, I would be very interesting in finding out its terms.

As far as I know, nobody has ever gotten their money back from Bethesda because the game was too buggy. Bug people have gotten their money back from Steam when returning a buggy game. So Steam actually does offer a warranty that is actually worth something.

It is worth noting that Steam had to be guilt-tripped into offering that warranty by too many shitty, buggy or outright fraudulently marketed games. This was not a day one feature.
>The reason some geological maps are almost impossible to find is because they are treated as a national safety item. In some countries the law forbids companies from making these available. So an oil company that created the map can only use it and in a pretty controlled fashion.

/THE/ reason.

Also, this is why some believe the war in Afghanistan was even waged - was to get the "boots on ground*" == on-top of the $1T in mineral deposits.

While we kvetch constantly about stupid political distractions, there are, in fact, many government-corporate entities that are in the long-game.

https://www.livescience.com/47682-rare-earth-minerals-found-...

Look at even the completely obvious:

https://www.amazon.com/Hundred-Year-Marathon-Strategy-Replac...

and even as openly published ten years ago:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1036105/How-Chinas-t...

---

The point is that we are already in the long war for resource control. And sadly, I would say that the US is not in the upper-hand at this time, aside from building up the military...
Except for the part where you refactor your code, which by definition shouldn't be changing its behaviour and therefore can't be driven by adding tests to your test suite, where exactly the same design issues will immediately arise.

By comparison to Smalltalk, most environments seem broken to a seasoned Smalltalker. The main refactoring tool in Smalltalk would happily refactor your tests, so you'd just do your refactoring and re-run the tests. No interference with any reasonable implementation of TDD needed at all. You just counted refactoring as writing the tests and then immediately ran the unit tests.
Well above the median income in their country.
This comment breaks several of the site guidelines, including the one that asks you not to post shallow dismissals, and the one the asks you to please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. "Someone" here applies to stories just as much as to comments. Also, the guidelines ask you not to snark.

You may have a good underlying point, but if you'd please review
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and express your good underlying points more thoughtfully from now on, that would be much less destructive and we'd appreciate it.
Wow! Reading the table of contents, this seems like a pretty complete book. Most introductions to logic neglect the entire area of intuitionistic logic and proof theory so it's nice to see one that covers that along with the usual infinitarian stuff (FOL, model theory, computability, etc.)
I totally agree with your points here. But just as few others have pointed out, it looks more like a "shiny object syndrome" or it could also be a bit of that the customer is not an expert of the software field and feels like he/she's gotta bring something to the table to sound credible.

Your blog post sent me far into memory lane. I still remember a case where I was a starting entrepreneur and I was selling a website remake. The customer asked me if our CMS's database was relational. He clearly did not even have a clue what that actually meant, but neither did I :) I knew it was "most probably totally irrelevant" to the whole case (just as you seemed to ponder), but my uncertainty showed. I was maybe under my 20s then, though I was very confident I could deliver. But I was no salesman, more of an enthusiast geek with a vision.

What he was basically asking me was "why should I pick your product instead of all the others? Is this person credible?". It caught me so off-guard, that I kind of froze back then and wasn't able to bring the conversation to a level where our product would be compared to the competitors. Focus on the good things etc. Maybe he did it just check, if I was actually aware of any competition!

I didn't get that contract. I still remember it as a lesson learned in many levels and your blog post somehow reminded me of that moment. Can't really say if they are comparable, but there you have it :)

ps. My first thought today could be more like "what is this person scared of the most in this situation, where does this kind of question stem from?". A great sales rep might ask that question directly back. Cheers!
But, also, if they waited the farmer might take the crop. From the point of view of the bird, not-quite-ripe fruit is nearly as good, nutrition-wise. So, not really a "tragedy".
> Passports are also handled through the mail / online. For the first one I had to get the photo counter signed by a ‘respected member of the community’ who’d known me for 2 years

That sounds similar to how it used to be possible, in California, for a notary public to confirm identity based on personal knowledge, but that hasn't been the case for a while.

That model seems ripe for abuse, although it can be significantly limited if things like vital statistics are national/centralized. In the US, they're often done at the county level, which is its own nightmare, but changing that is likely to be politically untenable (and, before computer networking, arguably, impractical for a country with 6x the population and 38x the area of the UK).
> Do you not see how your reply to the OP's sincere question amounts to the same lackluster, overgeneralized, and lazy intellectual stance that the people you're criticizing take on climate science?

Do not give equal weight to nonsense beliefs and beliefs supported by decades of science. That's the real toxicity - when you try to attempt to give them equivalency despite different efforts having gone into forming them.

I'm sorry that isn't clear to some people, but that doesn't make nonsense any less excusable or valid or show a need to 'win their hearts'.
Usually but not always. Somtimes the manager is not technical, in which case they might be paid less (think Business Admin degree). Or you might have a superstar who needs to be paid well, but still needs to be managed.
While I'm here, I also created a similar visual cheatsheet for Flexbox that I still find very useful: http://flexbox.malven.co
sure they do, if you are ok with the government making decisions about you and your life FOR you.
Lines of code is irrelevant when you are in the middle of a production deploy and you just want the highest visibility into what is going on. In cloudformation, there are only two possible places for resource state: 1) The actual resource state in AWS and 2) The desired state stored in CloudFormation.
If I understand correctly, the Bluetooth exploit also requires a man-in-the-middle attack during pairing. Wouldn't the victim then see two Bluetooth devices with the same name during pairing ? Also most Operating Systems then order the list of devices by signal strength. Without physical access to the victims home/office/etc., it would be hard for the attacker to have a higher signal strength since most users would be pairing to a device in close proximity. In a public place this could be easier, but even then it would probably fail more often then it would work.
The Venture Capital Prayer
The tragedy of the commons in evolutionary biology
A key sensor (Faraday cup [1]) for studying the solar wind, outside of the shield, was constructed of not one but apparently four varieties of unobtainium: Titanium-Zirconium-Molybdenum alloy, acid-etched tungsten, sapphire crystal tubes, and niobium wiring. All together these could make a fascinating engagement ring.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faraday_cup
For reference, here is the part of the blog where the attack is explained:

> Putting this all together, if Chuck replaces one of the points Alice and Bob send each other, (x, y), with (x, 0), then Alice or Bob multiplies it by their secret key, there’s a 50% chance they get the point at infinity and a 50% chance they get (x, 0). If Chuck replaces both intermediate messages, there’s a 25% chance that Alice and Bob agree the secret key is the point at infinity, and no chance they agree on any other key. This means either ECDH fails and Alice and Bob have to retry (giving Chuck another chance), or Chuck knows the secret key and can read and insert messages.

tl;dr replace a thing with 0 and watch a cluster of screwups happen. You can probably learn a very limited amount of cryptography or math and, simply knowing that this behavior exists, find invalid curve point vulnerabilities in deployed cryptographic code.
Particularly if they're not so high as to effect a "ban", the effect is a ban on people less affluent than some mark making "sinful" purchases in a particular jurisdiction. Sin taxes are particularly regressive, since they tend to be higher than typical sales taxes (which are already regressive in some sense).
Well, as the cost can dissuade people from doing virtuous things, as we programmers well know, it should follow that such costs would be partly effective to dissuade people from doing bad things.
Have you ever seen a travel-log through rural china, there's a broadcast channel (MHz TV) here in MD that plays a lot of them and the shear physical evidence of famine written on the bodies of people is awful.

All of it is, of course, surrounded by narration about the current plenty that exists, which makes it worse somehow.
Hi, we are located in Quebec.
Of course, as far as governments are concerned whether such taxes reduce "sinful" activities is irrelevant, so long as they increase tax revenue and allow politicians a way to improve their public images.
So, in the case of literal scarecrows, any bird that is naturally less frightened by the scarecrow will be at a disadvantage because they will also be slower to get spooked by the actual farmer (this only worked when scarecrows were dressed in similar clothes to actual farmers, who would periodically come out with a rifle and kill a few birds). In the case of the laser, I don't see the downside for the birds that decide to ignore the laser, and they get extra food, hence more offspring next year. I would not be surprised if this stopped working in 5 years or so.
Google absolutely can do better than this, it's just harder to hoard $100b in cash if you pay for that kind of support, or taxes where you made all that profit, or health care for all your employees. They chose this path out of options that included having mere tens of billions in the bank and ethics.
Your family is your side job. The thing your kid wants most from you is your time.
> It blows my mind that taxi drivers would defend this system and not flee to Uber/Lyft/etc.

For those who defend the system, often enough the medallions are their life saving / insurance when they get old, and almost always financed by loans.

The medallions going worthless at the same time invalidates their retirement plans and STILL leaves them on the hook for the loan.
Such lockout systems are a safety risk themselves should they err and limit functionality in the air.
Okay, Ayn Rand, that’s enough.
I'm curious, how did you address the anger and rage?
Get some (of life). No one escapes alive.
The random dude is your employee and his/her mani job to get it to work and it’s first proirity. You will never be AWS/GCP/Azure first priority.
Building the Ultimate Developer PC – The Parts List for My New Computer
This project isn't really what you're looking for. ROMs are more program than data, and Academic Torrents in particular is scoped to scientific datasets. What you're describing is more akin to Olive, bwFLA, or the Internet Archive's Javascript emulators [0]. For any of these, I don't know in particular if anyone has attempted to create a decentralized store of ROMs/disk images, although the general rule in digital preservation is to have at least 3 copies stored in different locations. The Internet Archive might have some redundancy for ROMs via the IA.bak project, which uses git-annex to distribute Internet Archive data across multiple machines [1].

[0] https://mellon.org/media/filer_public/0c/3e/0c3eee7d-4166-4b...

[1] http://iabak.archiveteam.org/
"gta_full_dist.tar" seems to be one of the biggest "datasets" featured on here. funny this data business.
Programming tips from 'Can't pay? We'll take it away'
Can you elaborate on that:

“One can learn that people who aren't even slightly fat are killing themselves from drug overdose, which may seem irrelevant until one recalls that many people eat for comfort. (So this is a personal/mental problem as well as a physiological one.)“
What if there was solid data decisively showing that there were substantial externalities effectively being paid for by the public? The answer to that, is that the power to determine this is too dangerous.

There do have to be rules and conventions, or there would be chaos. Since such power is dangerous, the exercise of it should be kept to a minimum. Then the question arises as to what that minimum is.
You have access to the future and all you bring back is a title to a patreon link? ;)
One of the ways I learned was through examples provided by Apple. What I would do is download the example, see how it worked and then change something small. Once I fully understood how that feature/component/class worked I would re-implement it with whatever logic I wanted to use in my own application.

This has worked for pretty much any mobile project I've done. I'm currently doing the same thing with ARKit + Vision framework.
”a safer and more internationalizationable alternative to template string interprepolation.
[…]
It is more internationalizationable because the string can come from a source other than a string literal in the same file. For example, the string could come from a JSON
bundle translation service.”
No. The latter question is the “coronal heating problem “ which is a major unexplained phenomenon in Physics: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corona#Coronal_heating_probl...
As with the justice system, "who can win" is used as a proxy for "justice."
Ready to mass block Twitter's most lucrative advertisers for it's inaction?
200 resources is way way too many for a single template. Split up your API Gateway API resources, methods, and models into multiple stacks. One stack for the API, another group of stacks for the API resources, methods, models, and another stack for your API deployments.
i second this idea, though I disagree with the idea that someone can't do anything with it. there's nothing, say, physically stopping me, and since the intent is expressed on the page as open source, i really doubt the author would do anything to stop me either. beyond that, i doubt there are any other parties interested enough to prevent anyone from using it, so at this point i don't think it matters too much, especially when it's purposefully marketed as open source and such.

still, all that being said, i agree with the idea of erring on the side of safety. but either way, what you do in the privacy of your own device isn't really constrained by licenses, so of course there's no reason you couldn't just start working on it now if such were your desire and then worry about distribution and such when the license itself changes. sort of a "fair use" type thing imo
Before the federal income tax was instituted, the alcohol tax was the U.S. government’s single largest source of tax revenue.

The imposition of a federal income tax was the single most necessary goal for prohibitionists to push for the constitutional amendment for alcohol prohibition.

It’s also worth mentioning that during the time that the federal alcohol tax was active (created under the Lincoln Administration to help pay for the Civil War), Americans drank twice per capita the amount we drink today, so it didn’t even dissuade drinking all that much.

Americans were ferociously drunk in the 19th and early 20th century. Some historians argue that prohibition ended the era of the largely men-only saloons, and when women and men drank together in speakeasies, men tended to drink less, thus reducing overall alcohol consumption in the post-prohibition era.
I really don't understand what the Chinese gov't expects when they are trying to control damn near everything. I honestly believe they are convinced they've successfully hacked capitalism.
Makes you wonder how long it will take for the birds to adapt... and adapt they probably will.
On AWS that’s a somewhat confusing way to put it since there is Lambda@Edge, which allows you to run Lambdas to handle/manipulate CloudFront CDN requests at their edge locations.
Not necessarily Google AI. But AI is already at pro poker level.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/researchers-reveal-how-poker-p...
Good writeup, short but some interesting comments and links.

I have also had a journey with Haskell. I really enjoy Haskell and have worked hard on developing skills. That said, there often seems to be other languages that seem better for me, for individual projects. Machine learning? Usually need to use Python. Web development? Hard to beat Rails for productivity. Enterprise Systems? It is usually written in Java. Doing ‘research programming’ to explore data and ideas? I usually favor Common Lisp, but sometimes use Haskell.

For me, I think Haskell will always just be a language I very much like but only occasionally use.
The point wasn't that some people have only one reason to be on Facebook, so they can switch off for one alternative - quite the opposite. It's that you have multiple reasons to be on Facebook, and they can be eliminated individually rather than in one fell swoop.

Most people are probably part of several communities on Facebook. There's probably not one completely homogeneous demographic. If your IRL professional colleagues are on it, maybe someday they switch to something that's really good at work communication and that doesn't have stupid app spam because it's built specifically for professionals. Maybe your friends and family switch to something that does closed circles and off-the-cuff communication better like Snapchat.

They can go to separate platforms, and you'll just sign up for two services. Those communities (usually) don't need to overlap. So what people call the network effect of Facebook may really be many different, small, isolated network effects, each of which can be individually attacked by separate services.

If that's the case, you don't need a Facebook killer. It's fine to have six or seven completely different Facebook killers that each eat just a few limbs off of it and then go off and do their own things.
Yup, especially 10-handed, the game has become incredibly nitty, since you're very likely folding 9/10 hands, sometimes more.
I feel the article was really complaining about the tax being inefficient than ineffective. The article answers with: yes, they are effective but inefficient because it's a blunt policy that impacts everyone including people that occasionally travel and drink alcohol.

Often, economic policies don't take into consideration the complexity in a patchwork approach in implementation. Yes, it's more efficient result wise, but it carries over a lot of overhead. An across the board implementation is easier to carry out.
Exactly. Stack imports/exports was launched to address the shortcomings of nested stacks. Avoid using nested stacks in favor of stack imports/exports. Actually, avoid both nested stacks and stack imports/exports in favor of SSM parameters.
+1

I believe there's sufficient evidence to justify action on climate change.

However, it's a complex topic with complex solutions.

I've found even basic questioning results in a kneejerk "climate denier!" reaction from most.

Sadly, it's actually counterproductive for making progress on a very important issue.
Third-Censorship- I use 8.8.8.8 often in France when thepiratebay doesn’t get resolved (I’ve never checked whether it was the ADSL ISPs or mobile providers too).
Sell large screen TVs all day or pack bags on a plane to Hawaii all day — then try to make 13.50$/hr during a bad divorce. Spend 20 hours detailing a bmw m7 and struggle pay for your kids school supplies.

I am more surprised this isn’t a everyday thing. This country has a bad mental health issue. But ok. Make sure the lock is on the plane.
Written in Ink
It won't matter in the end, and I know people like to keep saying that it's not a zero sum game, but eventually when the ecosystems are ruined and worldwide hunger is the norm (again), they'll see that the size of the pie can't keep growing exponentially.
How do you get a job via Quora?
I was unaware of the ability to create custom CF resources! This is great. I will try to make a config to create a AWS Aurora Serverless RDS instance. It went GR Friday, and the team says CF support won’t be available until the end of the month.
CEOs Like PepsiCo's Indra Nooyi Brag They Get 4 Hours of Sleep. That's Toxic
In my experience, a great deal of software development, or indeed much human activity in general is wasted on things no one wants.
China's Giant Banks Top This Ranking. (And That's a Cause for Concern.)
"The government" is people. Are you arguing that society, collectively, should not establish a system of rules that reflects their social norms?
They'll be slow to react to auto-targeting 100W lasers next year? :D
No. Most cases, the first level engineering manager will make less than some of those being managed. One cause is experience, years, and wage growth. Another cause is high salaries for software engineers relative to the rest of the company.
And even at Large publicly held companies the guy trying to implement a fix that matters is going to over ride those controls and get it out, the auditor might complain later but who cares. I know some devs that will do it at midnight while smoking weed at Fortune 50 companies. Sometimes you ignore the normal process and get it done and basically work around any locks/restrictions
Although I have my resume in plain old MS Word, I'd love to automate it to create resumes on the go for various areas I apply to (web dev, SEO, content marketing etc)