skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: How do I reach out to my multi-billionaire cousin?
I have got into doing my family ancestry (addicting!) and I am looking for photos of my 2nd great-grandfather/2nd great-grandmother who immigrated to the USA from Scotland. My side of the family due to some early deaths lost any photos and family mementos.

There is only one person who might have photos (my 1st cousin 2x removed) who is the son of my great-grandmother's twin brother... certainly he would have photos. I looked him up to get his address and to find if he has any social media. Figured this would be pretty simple but my Google search found that he is a muliti-billionaire who lives in a house about the size of a city block, is on the board of Berkshire-Hathaway and is childhood friend to Warren Buffett. Myself in contrast I ate at Jack in the Box today, live in a condo is a small city in California that no one has heard of... and I drive a nice... but lovingly pre-owned car.

I have thought of the following ways to make contact but I am not really in-love with any of these ideas

1. I send a letter with some of the geneology and request for the photos. Unknown if someone will look at it because he most-probably gets a lot of letters from crazy people and may have given up on anyone opening any of them.

2. He has a son, who does have Facebook but doesn't seem to really use Facebook much. I could send his son a Facebook message request but his son is a multi-millionaire who has a multi-billionaire father. I don't know maybe a 2% chance of that working.

3. I looked up if he has a personal foundation, I figured I would write his foundation but his foundation address goes to a lawyer's office. Now I have to hire a lawyer to write his lawyer and probably a genealogist to prove the genealogy. (the genealogy is pretty simple from Ancestry.com there is no question to it)

I can't think of any other ways that might be effective and cheap. What do you think?
I don't want to push the button, instead give me a keylock i need to turn. Like the keylock on old PCs.
America's medical students are skipping school in favor of YouTube
A big factor in that is that a huge amount of Tokyo is purely towering office space. People commute in from up to and over 100km away since their transportation fees are covered and high speed trains are a feasible way to travel.
According to rumors I heard that Tesla's internal legal team has determined that Musk will have to give up one of his children.

But then that could be just pure bullshit like all of these Tesla "rumors" turn out to be.

When do you suppose people will learn not to buy into and repeat stupid rumors as fact?
Which is apparent to anyone who doesn't have their heads stuck in some spreadsheets. Huge American manufacturing sectors (textiles, electronics, home appliances, etc) which were made in this country 30-40 years ago are no longer made here, or are made here in significantly reduced capacity.

So, its possible to talk about how efficient American manufacturing has become, but the average consumer doesn't see that as they walk the isles at Walmart. What they see is that its really hard to find anything actually made in the US. Those of us old enough to remember, _CAN_ remember a time when the clothing at the store said "made in America", or shed a little tear as we remove the 25 year old washer that has a made in america sticker and replace it with one that says made in Mexico or similar.

So, we may be making more planes and john deere tractors, but we definitely have had huge swaths of our consumer goods simply wiped out by cheap labor countries where hiring a half dozen people for 10 years to do final inspections on clothing costs less than putting a robot in a factory in the US.

The problem isn't that factory automation has been on a steady trend of reducing labor since Henry Ford. The problem is that now that those factories are located in cheap labor countries, they are still being slowly automated. So eventually when they reach 100% and the labor costs are strictly the cost of people programming and repairing the machines (see semiconductor fabs) they aren't magically going to move back to the US, rather they will stay in whatever part of the world managed to hold onto them during the final phases and still has the critical mass of supply chain.
There has been a big problem in India with lynch mobs being formed in Whatsapp groups, over various unsubstantiated rumours, including apparent child snatchers travelling through villages [1].

This raises an interesting cross section of moral issues. Obviously end-to-end encryption is good for a lot of reasons. But end-to-end encryption is one of the reasons that these lynchings have been able to happen. These kinds of lynchings have been going on forever, but Whatsapp and mobile phones have allowed these rumours to spread faster than ever before, and for mobs to form so much easier.

Does the right to privacy outweigh people's right to travel without fear of being lynched?

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-44856910
... and the title is wrong, it's about Surface Hub and not Surface (tablets and laptop)
Because if you're ignoring (by simply not hearing) the perspective of a meaningful representation of that ~half of your user-base, you do not, and probably can not understand them.

You don't need to have parity between those ratios, but you might want to do better than the "token diversity hire" — assuming you do at all.
There are definitely exceptions, but the classic scenario is that the founders get common stock, not preferred.
Given that Stanley just said precisely the opposite, I'm wondering why you made this comment. I'm not being a jerk, but I wonder why you spoke so authoritatively. Do you think that he's lying, or were you just speaking in generalities?
Sadly it is true. Russia is an awesome location for non-urban tourism with a wild variety of climate - from hellish desert to a cold-hellish snow one, from high-rise mountains to vast expanses of swamps. Totally worth a visit.
My suspicion is that its very unlikely that Google and FB are going to be able to establish the government relationships that would allow them to operate successfully in China.Google collects massive amounts of citizen data and it has close relations with the US military / security institutions. The combination means Google will never be a trusted operator in China. Facebook is in a worse position. In addition to being a data collection platform with US government connections, it is a communications platform not under the direct control of China, located in the US.And these US communications platforms have a history now of being associated with movements of anti-government dissent around the world.

More generally, I dont see how US tech companies are going to be able to have it both ways -- be both willing partners in US government policy and also non threatening to Chinese sovereignty.
At some point in the 90s a re-make of Zork (with graphics and sound) came out for PC (I think this was DOS era). However, most PCs didn't have sound cards, and it would be a hard sell to require customers to buy one (I think they were upwards of $100 back then?) on top of the cost of the game, so there was an option to purchase a parallel port sound adapter (basically a DAC) for about $20 (these are 90s prices) from the game company. We got one, but never could get it working, neither could some relatives.
No, China does not want Google just like South Korea does not want Google. Everybody uses Naver here. China and South Korea do not want Google because local alternatives are superior.
Very little sympathy from me for someone suffering from the delusions of grandeur combined with self-martyrdom, especially when combined with the petty foolishness constantly on display from him. And for what? To blow off his brothers wedding as described in the article to resume pacing the tesla plant speaks volumes about this guys character.
I maintain a database of news articles from local news sources and sometimes query it if I feel something is underreported re Syria. Sometimes it is and sometimes it's just a wrong feeling. Developments in Daraa/Quneitra were much less reported than developments in E. Ghouta earlier this year.
I recommend placing two or three pillows under your knees if you are trying to fall asleep on your back.
This was about what I'd gathered.

He's been reckless and made some huge errors in judgement over the past year, but despite it all I hope he succeeds. I don't think he's a hero or a saint like some people do, but his endeavors are having a very real and tangible positive effect on civilization.

Most chiefly, as bad as the climate change situation looks right now, it would be so much worse without the insane amount of 1) change in the public's and the auto industry's perception of electric cars, and 2) innovation in battery technology (especially applied to solar arrays), which Tesla has accomplished. Seriously. We would have zero chance without those two hills having been crossed.

Character flaws aside, Musk is the only billionaire alive (or even in recent memory) whose business ventures are netting any actual positive effect on society whatsoever. Heck, he might be the only one not having a seriously detrimental effect on society right now. You don't have to like him to acknowledge that.
Food margins are on average consistently > 66% if not more for many types of restaurants. Delivery services usually pass on costs to consumers (delivery fee + tip) which means they are only removing consumers buying alcohol - but that assumes if delivery were not available that I would go to the restaurant which is false. Delivery is not an alternative to going to a restaurant, it's an alternative to cooking at home.
>But end-to-end encryption is one of the reasons that these lynchings have been able to happen

Have all participants of the lynchings being prosecuted? Enforcing civil and criminal codes is enough to stop them.

There's no need to blame end-to-end encryption. It's not the tool, it's the people.
The article notes allegations that the Board is concerned that Mr. Musk has been taking Ambien as a sleeping aid, but instead of sleeping, has been posting bizarre tirades on Twitter. I actually have a number of American* friends who take Ambien frequently with the intent that it be a sleeping aid. However, they all commonly do exactly what Mr. Musk may be doing: failing to sleep after taking their Ambien, and instead staying up late and acting in a crazy manner, and then failing to remember what they did in the morning.

How can it be that this drug is prescribed so often? It is pretty clearly a dangerously strong hallucinogen. Maybe it is warranted in really bad insomnia cases, but the risks seem to outweigh the benefits here. Would love to hear any perspectives from users or doctors here.

* I am in Canada, and while this may just be sampling error, I know many more Canadians than Americans, but don't know anyone here who to my knowledge has been prescribed Ambien for sleep.
> Of course

I must be naive and/or thick because I can't think why China would want them.

Google/Facebook are used to sell things and spy on users.

China surely has plenty of other ways of doing both.
Pity that we've structured our world such that one tweet can so damage such clever companies as Tesla and maybe SpaceX.
> Even with China-level censorship, they would probably need serious manual effort or even a complete network shutdown to stop being a medium.

Yep.

You sound like you don't think they should do that, though.
Interestingly, this article is written from the perspective that Facebook is responsible for everything posted on its website.
This reminds me of an article I once read about perfect fruit sold as gifts in Japan. 12 strawberries to a box for about $82. But it is an industry!

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-radio-and-tv-17352173
Maybe a 3D printed mold so one could pot the thing in urethane?
> I have no doubts

This is a big red flag. You absolutely should have doubts. Our brains are very complicated and poorly understood, and psychoactive drugs are extremely risky. If you really have no doubts you should take a big step back and realize that you are probably wrong about most things and everyone else is too.
> It sets a problematic precedent if Facebook throws 100s of - hard to find, hard to pay and hard to support - native language local reviewers at every place where Facebook could be abused.

In what way is that a problematic precedent? Their negligence contributed to ethnic cleansing and genocide. If a multi-billion dollar company is too cheap to hire local staff to watch its platform, it shouldn't operate a localized version for that place. They need to act responsibly. Think if it like product safety testing.
GnuPG supports Curve 25519: https://gist.github.com/jmgrosen/5e646d6a6624c0d0e45f241be21...

However, perhaps you're referring to the OpenPGP Smart Card spec, which does indeed lack support for Curve 25519 and EdDSA.
Yes, that's the usual case (but not in this case apparently).

If a company has 5 classes of shares (common, A, B, C, D), then it's reasonable to value the company's equity by estimating the value of 1 share of each class, multiplying by the number of shares issued, and summing up these products.

The more common method used by PR folks and journalists is:

[Price at which class D shares were last bought] * [Total number of outstanding common, A, B, C and D shares]

This is incorrect if the rights attached to the different classes are different enough that the values of the shares are different. And that's the usual case.
Investors are willing to pay higher prices for less equity for two reasons:

1. Normal investment of $Y at valuation X implies that you, the investor, think that the company is worth more than X. If it exits for more, you'll get more, less you'll get less. But investing $Y at valuation X with a 2x liquidation preference means that you think the company is worth merely Y. The valuation basically doesn't matter any more. If I invest $10 at a $100 valuation and the company exits at a $500 valuation, I get a $40 profit. If it exits at a $50 valuation, I've lost $5. The valuation I invest at makes a big difference for my profitability. But consider the same scenario with a 2x liquidation preference - in the happy case, I get the same profit. In the sad case, I've still doubled my money.

2. Investors in startups are not perfectly rational investors. If I own an existing stake in a company, I would fight tooth and nail to prevent any new money coming in from having a liquidation preference over me. But in truth, if the company can raise money at a $2 billion valuation normally, or a $4 billion valuation with a preference, a fund can report double the gains to the people who actually put money in it. So they stay quiet, show off the impressive paper returns of their current investment fund, and go on raising the next one. This effect is doubly pernicious when the later investors are also earlier investors - they can basically juice their own balance sheet. On paper, the existing stake is worth more because of the inflated valuation, and the new stake is a heads-I-win-tails-you-lose.

And at the lowest preference are all the employees. Founders take money off the table in the inflated new rounds, so while they technically have a lower preference they've still cashed out significantly.
The ESTA form now asks for social media usernames, although the box says "optional" and I didn't bother.

Github is listed as an example social network.
We are parents of two small boys and it’s damn near impossible to go out. Ordering DoorDash helps us try different restaurants and not have to deal with the madness of corralling two kids in a busy environment.
Assuming that you agree that the government should not have the right to install mandatory CCTV cameras in private residences, where do you draw the line between that and eavesdropping on people's digital communications?

What is it about digital communications that makes it reasonable for the government to listen in? I don't see any difference between the government CCTV in your bedroom and the Whatsapp case, except that Whatsapp could be spied upon much more cheaply and efficiently (were it not encrypted).
There are other approaches you're leaving out. For example, outreach: make sure that you have considered all candidates, make sure that you communicate to them that you truly value them.

We made a couple cross-departmental promotions into the tech team of people who would not have taken the initiative to present themselves as candidates despite having natural aptitudes. In the absence of role models and with the rampant hostility in this industry, good people may take some convincing.

For what it's worth, another cross-departmental recruit matured to be an absolutely incredible engineer, who went from a standing start to making big bucks at Google within 5 years. He happened to be a white guy, haha -- but that's what you get when you cast a wide net.
From HN guidelines [1]:

> Please don't impute astroturfing or shillage. That degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about it, email us and we'll look at the data.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Another issue with remote desktop (using VNC) on Linux is keyboard layouts (for inputting non-latin characters). With X server, the server passes a physical key number (keycode) and modifiers state (whether keys like Shift or Caps Lock are active) to the client and the client converts it to the corresponging character (keysym) using translation tables loaded earlier from the X server.

When you are accessing another computer remotely using protocols like VNC the local computer's keyboard layout can be different and it can produce characters not present in remote computer's translation tables. The VNC protocol itself transmits keysyms, not keycodes. So there can be a situation when there is no matching physical key number (keycode) for given character. So VNC servers like x11vnc had to modify translation tables on the fly and insert non-existing key into the tables and pass that key's number to X clients.

I wonder if this problem is solved with Wayland. As I understand, Wayland uses similar scheme and the compositor sends only a physical key number (keycode) along with the modifiers to the client and the latter does the translation. By the way, would not it be easier if the compositor did the translation itself?

The hack I described can also cause issues with hot keys. If I run application locally and it has a hotkey like Ctrl + S, and my keyboard has two layouts (English and Russian) then it will probably work with both of them because the application can bind the hotkey to physical key number. But when we send key presses remotely over VNC we send only a keysym (a letter code), not a keycode. If the remote server doesn't have Russian layout it is unable to guess what physical key was pressed and cannot recognize that I pressed Ctrl + S in Russian layout.
I agree with you on the issue (the research part), just not the way to solve it.

So first, it's not because woman or black people are discriminated against by racist or sexist people that they make a distinct "group" themselves, they probably have as much in common as two random people in the street.

Secondly, affirmative action, like you are advocating here is also creating pretty bad side-effects. If you make the criteria for hiring much more favorable for women/black people/whoever you think is discriminated against, you just give more fuel to the discrimination. People will just think "Is this women hired because she is competent or just because it's a woman?", and now they have a legitimate reason to think that because they can point to official policies. I would also add that it's pretty bad for the people benefiting from the affirmative action since they are just reduced to their gender/skin colour/disability, they are just hired to fill a quota and they probably would want to be recognised for their skills or their thoughts instead.

Then as a last point, the team can be as diverse as the field in it, if you have 10% woman in IT, you cannot achieve 50% woman everywhere, it's just basic maths. The efforts should be concentrated in tech school.
> This approval means patients living with severe allergies who require constant access to lifesaving epinephrine should have a lower-cost option, as well as another approved product to help protect against potential drug shortages.

I live in Canada, and there are already drug shortages. You cannot buy any EpiPens in Canada. Period. For whatever reason, we are all out. I had an allergic reaction this week, and took a gamble to go the emergency room before the anaphylaxis really kicked in, because I only have one (expired) EpiPen left and want to save it until I'm really desperate. Each EpiPen costs $35 to manufacture,and I have no idea how a multi-billion dollar company like Mylan can have a manufacturing shortage of a life-saving drug, especially given their 17x (!) profit margin. I'm usually not a religious person, but I can only hope there's a hell so those corporate executives can rot in it.
NoSQL doesn't mean no SQL
This is actually an interesting question, from a legal standpoint anyways. I don't think Myanmar has a safe harbor exemption like the US does, they actually have some pretty heavy handed censorship laws on the books. However, Facebook doesn't even have an office in Myanmar, they aren't officially there, and without a GFW Myanmar can't really block Facebook (nor would the people be ok with that, as Facebook has already become the internet to many).

Probably why Facebook won't be opening an office in Myanmar anytime soon, at least until they can sort these issues out and have some strong legs to stand on.
Tonal: The World’s Most Intelligent Fitness System
Current management training is that “Culture fit” is a minefield of unconscious bias. It will take time to roll out but you’ll hear this phrase less and less over time. Possibly not much better, a more vogue term is “culture add.”
There is a SEC investigation. We know that for a fact. And that fact alone indicates that the situation is extremely serious. Dire, even. The federal government does not look kindly upon stock manipulation.

The linked NYTimes piece is Tesla's PR "submarine" at work.

http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
Kubernetes – internalclient (import-graph)
AMZN’s current valuation does not assume 0% future growth. It already assumes exceptional growth and expanding margins. Amazon has to do better than that for the valuation to increase.
Its a decent assumption at this stage in the VC cycle, especially when an established player (doordash v postmates) has a surprising multiple - Uber is a great example: https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-11-16/softbank-...
Bah! in about 25 years BIC will be selling lighter-size fusion reactors. I'll just wait.
From a social perspective, I'm happier working in a more diverse workplace. And if I'm a happier worker I'm going to be a more effective worker.

I'd think that most people would be in the same boat. We aren't robots that get fed requirements and magically churn out a product at the other end.

I spend 40 hours a week in the office, a good part of that is taken up with meetings and interacting with my colleagues. I don't want to spend all those hours feeling like I'm talking to a clone of myself.

Obviously, on a whole, you shouldn't hire inferior workers all in the name of diversity, but there two people that you'd be happy to hire and one of them would increase diversity in the team, I'd be inclined to pick that one.
> There's is a big difference between crops being sprayed with glyphosate and crops coming from non-GMO seeds.

Being a grain farmer, I know. :)
As I understand, Epipens have a specific legal exception to this law. Epipen prescriptions are not valid for, say, adrenaclick injectors.