skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The point is certainly worth considering. I would personally consider myself more interested in truly owning the things I buy more than the average person, insofar as I regularly purchase and rip my own CD's so that I control the format, strip all of my Kindle books of DRM using Calibre, and contribute to the development of free software and free/libre operating systems so that I can be in complete control of my PC's hardware.

With that said, this article does a number of things that I find obnoxious. Namely:

1) The article gives Amazon a pass for implementing DRM into their books, and instead blames the people who buy Amazon ebooks. I consider that victim blaming. Amazon more or less has a monopoly on the ebook market, meaning if you buy an ebook, you're likely buying from Amazon. If you own a Kindle (which is, bar none, the best ebook reader on the market), you're buying from Amazon. And if you buy from Amazon, your books don't truly belong to you.

2) The article seems very much targeted at the younger generation. Buying digital books, digital music, and smartphones is a thing everyone does, but again, the older generation seems to get a pass on it. They own houses, after all, so from the author's perspective they surely won't "los[e] their connection to private ownership". But those poor naive youths simply can't buy an album off iTunes without giving up their stake in the system.

3) Many of the author's (valid) concerns have actionable ways to resist, which the article fails to mention. You can strip the DRM off ebooks. You can rip your own music and movies. You can load an after-market OS onto your Android phone when the carrier decides to stop supporting it. Some of these can be difficult and time-consuming, but that's the tradeoff for getting both the digital convenience and the freedom of true ownership.

To be clear, I very much dislike this trend of "licensing" everything for the sake of having it streamed to you. But I would argue that this is a business trend rather than a societal trend, as it has been implemented top-down by the nation's most powerful tech companies. The vast majority of people simply picked what was most easily available to them.

Put another way, I think it would be shameful to yell at a poor college student about contributing to the elimination of individual property for choosing to rent his college textbooks for the semester at 1/3rd of the price it would've cost to buy them. And that's largely what this article does.
AFAIK, llvm jit is incredibly slow, to the point that certain emulators that have used it have had to drop it for performance's sake.
Google, Facebook Security Guards Finally Have a Union Contract
Correct. This is exactly what I wouldn't care about. You first create it and then you let it evolve on its own. Like Bitcoin. Anonymously.
And because it's an actual gif rather than re-badged mp4 (gifv) it's 1.6mb, it doesn't allow you control via browser controls and doesn't have a clear indicator of length.
It does say, "All EC2 host infrastructure has been updated with these new protections, and no customer action is required at the infrastructure level."

"Meanwhile, we suggest using the stronger security and isolation properties of EC2 instances to separate any untrusted workloads." As I read it, it is talking about running code within your instance - if you have untrusted workloads, rather run them in a separate instance, so as not to encounter issues like this cross-process.
Indeed. But not only fire risk -- stairs are a pain.

I believe that the upper floors of all the pretty buildings in Paris were cheaper before elevators, too. (Perhaps the streets were quieter then too.)
TL;DR: Bill Gates reviews one of his new favorite books, "Capitalism Without Capital". The book extends economic principles to measure value of intangible goods (such as software and online services), which were previously not correctly incorporated in economic models.
> threatens to break every time we have a severe drought

Interesting! Why would a dike be under greater threat in a drought when there is less water?
I don't understand your logic. Why does a self driving car free me from having to have a car to live day to day?
Honestly, this makes me lose any respect I might have had for them - while the lawsuit seems odd, resorting to ad hominem attacks is extremely unprofessional, and especially so in a PR statement. Civility and basic courtesy is not copyrighted, use it in your public statements.
I'll be sure to let Bill Gates know you disapprove of his blog titles, next time we're hanging out.
Read HN, IH.
With marijuana cartridges, I have been wondering what kind of temperature something like a 1100mAh c-cell battery maxes out at; because they can get hot.

I use mmj for an autoimmune disease, so it feels pretty ironic to read vaping damages immune system cells; will have to go back to the Volcano.
According to the Amazon API docs, we shouldn't be sharing the API key. Do you store our API key in the cache?
Wire attachment is a big problem even for bus line me that are fully overhead. Before the buses had batteries, a detachment often required shutting down the road and bringing out a big truck to reattach the bus.

Seattle used to run dual gas/electric (not really hybrids since no battery) in the downtown tunnel by having them attach going in and Unattach going out. Great when it worked, but it often didn’t, so they just use cleaner emission buses now instead.
Who knows. I’m sure there is a bit of both.
Godwin's law in the wild. Nice.
Why do anything else but maximize initial position in the case?

Said position being "they" have no case and let us all be damn clear on that.
The author is Bill Gates. He's earned deference on title drafting from the HN crowd.
> [the ipod] combined Apple’s MP3 protocol, miniaturized hard disk design, design skills, and licensing agreements with record labels.

Apple's MP3 Protocol?
> From:	Tom Tromey

Of course it is. That guy's an amazing wizard.
Having rented things, and owned things, I have learned that some of the things I "purchased" just traded in lease contract terms for state laws, local ordinances, secured loan contract terms, community norms, and covenants.

If you can't do as you please with the things you buy, there is less advantage to owning over renting. The responsibilities involved in ownership start to look like rental contracts and terms of service agreements.

If I stop paying the average per-mile maintenance and operations cost for my car, it runs out of gas or breaks down. It is sometimes cheaper for me, with my own car, to rent one anyway for a long road trip, because they rent it per day without a per-mile surcharge, and that's just money paid now that does not get spent at the mechanic later, and could be recovered on resale or trade-in.

You really have to look at each rent-vs-buy decision on its own merits. It makes sense to own your DOCSIS modem, your underwear, and a cast-iron pan. All the other stuff is debatable.
Yup! It's because I watched https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DMKcO-T5Y4o
The common understanding of profit is confused!
Or map pairs of hyperthreads to each requested vCPU, or disable hyperthreading. Which kills co-tenancy overcommit and makes the infra more expensive for a cloud provider.
As someone who lives in the US, its frustrating to me that many people will read your anecdote and simply think that any public funding of healthcare equals communism, "death panels", delayed care, and abysmal levels of service.

My anecdote is that here in the US, if you lose your job and find yourself without insurance, you can literally go bankrupt from a relatively minor injury or sickness due to the extreme cost of medical care. There are plenty of long lines, bad doctors, and low quality hospitals here too so its not like you get rid of those things by going private. People decline to call the ambulance because they are afraid of getting charged thousands of dollars for it if their injury is not covered by insurance which sometimes ends in their death.

I watched my mom die in the hospital and if it weren't for a recent law passed by Obama, we would have had to dip into what little savings we had just to keep her comfortable for her last few days. There is a lot of space for a middle ground that does not need to be limited by your experience or mine.
How a cow can crash a server without touching it
EVs have no 'shift points' or changing gear ratios.
ugh, I've had this conversation before and it's absolutely not worth it.
I used to think the same as you, but I realized that I was putting no effort into my local communities. Once I started to start putting more effort into the local community, I began to appreciate geographic proximity much more.

That said, as all things, there's a balance. The Internet is a great tool for bringing people virtually close together and spreading ideas. Sharing those ideas is a great way to enhance your local community.

> tyranny of geography

Haha. We're a long way from being omnipresent so you better get used to having neighbors. ;-)
I find it hilarious that Bloomberg thinks it knows whats going on at Tesla. They are desperately trying to give tesla one last black eye before it goes private.
There is always a chance of bias, but mandates like this can serve to strengthen and reinforce that bias, which could be a significant step backwards.

The credentials of any woman serving on a company board will be questioned, and for many people the assumption will be that they are less qualified than the men on the board.
Ponce de Leon is a big street in Atlanta that's ground zero for testing the scooter/moped market.

Atlanta has historically been a 'need a car' city but these forms of transport have the potential to change that.
It's the biggest port in Italy, and 63rd worldwide.
The population increased when the big public industrial complexes were active, now it's declined.
Based on currently wide-spread practices, IMO it's quite reasonable to assume that this is click-bait verbiage, not the title of a post from a well-known author.

Because of that, I think it would make sense to find different wording for the HN title.
I'm over this elon cult.

Or marketing company.
He's pretty much describing why Microsoft has been a great investment

That's why large information technology companies have profit margins of 20+% and seem immune to business cycles and macro factors. They just keep printing cash even as other sectors ebb and flow. Microsoft, google, facebook, have huge profit margins and have been good investments.

It’s a sunk cost. If your investment doesn’t pan out, you don’t have physical assets like machinery that you can sell off to recoup some of your money.

But you can sell intellectual property.
I've seriously considered getting some sort of foot pedal arrangement, albeit mostly for FPS games - I'd love to be able to use one foot to melee attack, and another to activate/deactivate the mic.
What's a FANG developer?
+1 not sure if it was my uni but almost everyone I climbed with was an Engineer of some sort.
Your stuff owning you...neat inversion. For you personally, what questions do you ask yourself when deciding whether to "rent" or "buy" something? How have those questions changed with time?
By that same token, we don't need to regard your definitions as sacrosanct, either.

Remember, you're asserting your personal definitions over those that have developed through decades of academic discourse on the subject.

Why should we prefer your terms, again?
Instead of the headline from the site, I propose editing the HN title to "Book Review: Capitalism Without Capital". It's a neutral statement about the article's contents, and also conforms to the Gates Notes url: Books/Capitalism-Without-Capital.
Heh, his feels like what happens when an Emacs user gets mocked by the vi crowd and decides to just own it. Good for him.
Nice post. Best of luck in what you're doing!

My thought is people are averse to fees - but there needs to be a bit more of an impetus for someone to switch to your platform. Will you be using ETFs to gain exposures? If so, a lot of the marketing could be focused on diversity of investment or saving for retirement.

A lot of the reason the robo's have taken off is that some provide "fractional ownership". So you can invest as little as $1. There is some legal and compliance issues you would need to iron out in your home country. The "Acorns" approach is a good one in my opinion. Helps you get many small accounts quickly.

Ultimately, performance is what a lot of people go by. You need 5 years. Once you have 1 though - with 7% fees - you can easily start showing expense ratio drags on portfolios...
AMP version doesn't paywall: https://www-bloomberg-com.cdn.ampproject.org/v/s/www.bloombe...
Any source in how escape analysis is implemented? Is only usefull for JIT or also for "normal" bytecode interpreter?
I can't speak for "dear fucking g-d" but my it would appear that your position is distinct from that of the mainstream critical theory/intersectionality social justice crowd.
Urumqi was the absolute worst as far as overt surveillance and military intimidation.

Kashgar was surprisingly not as bad. Smaller cities around Kashgar such as Yarkant or Karglik were also not bad.

I think China is approaching Xinjiang as a slow but persistent conquerer would: get a foothold in a major city, transform it in your image (Han), then move out to surrounding communities until all are pacified.
I'd personally flip 4 and 5 since I think having incentive not to screw you and recourse if you get screwed is important. Local businesses have much more reason not to screw people and people have much more recourse when screwed compared to state or national government.
It feels so amazingly depressing for so much sunk knowledge to just go away and be worthless. Feels like I could have learned so many more things that I could have had gotten joy out of today and still extract useful things out of, or build things on top of, long into the future if I'd just focus on the time-invariants of knowledge space.
Amazon offers "dedicated hosts" and "dedicated instances", which you can specify in the "tenancy" field when launching an EC2 instance. I bet that's the stronger isolation that they're referring to. Costs more, though.

https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/dedicated-hosts/
That's a fair point but I think they are saying that if they really wanted to re-read a book, they could just rent it again. The other side of the coin is how many of the books or movies that you own have you never rewatched? What happens if you DVD stops reading? I think neither are wrong, just different. It depends on your goals.
It's not quite that simple. The CMS detector (one of the two main detectors/experiments operating at the LHC) spits out about 10TB of raw data per second. This is more than any system can handle at the moment. To deal with this overwhelming flood of data there are layers of "triggers" that effectively filter out the collisions that aren't of any interest. The lowest level triggers are actually embedded in FPGAs on the detector itself, then there is a high-level trigger that runs on an on-site server farm that does minimal event processing to see if the even is interesting.

All of this requires us to define what constituents an interesting event. The most basic trigger is called the "minimum bias trigger" because it requires us to make the fewest assumptions about what makes the event interesting. So even at the most general level a brute force approach will still have some bias because it will likely be using the minimum bias data. What makes it "brute force" is that they will no longer be looking for signals from specific new models, they will only be considering the Standard Model and essentially looking for outliers. The difficult part is that there is so much systematic uncertainty given the complexity of these detectors, which makes it hard to obtain statistical significance.
Good on SEIU for unionizing these workers and getting a decent pay bump, I wish my friends had worked with SEIU when they tried to unionize Securitas at a few local tech giants sites here in Seattle.
No. I don't store your API key (i.e. awsSecret). I only cache the product data to serve other users: https://browsenodes.com/how-to-solve-requestthrottled.html

Hope that helps!
There's no mention of FLOSS philosophy. Those are philosophies that emphasize control of the software and data on those devices by the users of the devices.

Even a cursory understanding of licensing of Wikipedia content is an anti-dote to the loss of ownership the author describes. If you download the current state of Wikipedia that data is yours under a very liberal license. No one can call foul and remove it from your machine.

By ignoring these important concepts the author's piece makes it sound as if digitization itself is somehow making people forget the importance of ownership.

Anyone else find this odd and disappointing?
Swift developers seem to like Swift, it ranks 6th in most loved language this year (https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2018/#technology).

I really hate that JS seems to be the go-to "alternative" for everything.
>You should go out and talk to people outside of your bubble then. Go somewhere that isn't as left. Go have a conversation with a normal person who is just trying to live their life in a city that isn't majority blue.

Attributing qualities and intentions to someone you do not know is not a constructive way of having a meaningful discussion.
Leetcode is a good idea.

https://leetcode.com/problemset/all/

And frankly, given your lack of background in this area, it would do you a world of good to get more time to prepare. Try to push the interview back a bit. Even one extra week would be an improvement.
If there is one place in a country where finding a cab has always been straightforward, that's an airport. I mean, it is easier to find a cab by walking through the airport doors than avoid the cabs there :-) That's really the place where Uber & Co add zero value.
> most real-world setups have multiple heavy packages installed.

Sure, I wouldn't use it in this mode, but this line to the effect of "it takes seconds to start up" is usually uttered by people who are more used to the likes of nano or vi. You can also use those command-line options to start Emacs in that sort of one-off mode.

> your reported startup was 0.1s, but immediately after Emacs startup, it froze 2 seconds.

That's odd, I can start `emacs --no-init-file --no-site-file --no-splash -nw <file>` and write something to the file, C-x C-s C-x C-c to write + exit with no more noticeable delay than doing the same with mg, nano or vim on my system. This is with Emacs 25.2.2.

> I want a bunch of stuff to happen (open files, color them with syntax.

Opening a file to have it syntax-colored takes less than second (feels like at most 1/8 of second) in that mode.

> I start it a few times a day[...]

Doesn't Clojure have some equivalent of M-x tramp-cleanup-all-connections? Occasionally I'll mass-close buffers, but the uptime of Emacs tends to be 1=1 my laptop, usually about a month (for security updates and the like).

I believe this mode of use is more typical than restarting it this often.
Maybe they’re running out of money faster than anyone realizes and this is a desperate Hail Mary? That would explain the erratic and possibly illegal nature of the announcement.
the problem is that hte platform is not well-understood. The design is convoluted and often not well-principled.
Bullshit-sensitivity predicts prosocial behavior
Grenfell's quite different to this. More similar is the Hammersmith Flyover where they recently had an issue with a post tensioned 60s structure, and corroded tendons snapping. In that case drastic action was taken, closing the structure (even though it carried arterial roads) and instigating a programme to replace the tendons gradually.

A common issue with many of the 1960s reinforced concrete structures is the difficulty of inspecting key structural members (e.g. encased tendons which may have also been the case with the Genoese bridge), lower standards than current (so the distance to reinforcement is less and corrosion is more likely) and maintenance regimes with lowered funding to repair an increasing number of deficient structures.
When they say it'll cost $2b I think that's in addition to what's already being spent.
Extra hot humor batch №54 – Channel FunnYCubemix (2018)
I'm in NC. It's rained almost every day the last three weeks straight and when it's not raining, it's hot and humid.

Are these things catching on in places with unpleasant summer/winter weather?

edit: I had only skimmed the article when I made the comment above. Now having read it, and as somone who used to live in Atlanta OTP and commuted to work across from Ga Tech, I share the author's skepticism these will catch on there. I similarly can't see them working in Raleigh where I live now except maybe among college students. They'd be great for getting around a college town, on and near campus.
Hacking the Electric Grid Is Damned Hard
Google-backed RCS standard is trying to address this.
They need a kick animation.
Hopefully the HN crowd doesn't readily accept appeal-to-authority logic.

And even if they were, I'm not sure most of is would be aware that "(gatesnotes.com)" indicated that Bill Gates is the author.

A less problematic wording for the story might be:

Bill Gates: Not enough people are paying attention to this economic trend
I doubt you propose we abandon the concept of there being objective truth, or any possible way for diverse groups to find consensus, but what are you proposing?

If I use simulated annealing to arrive at an optimal schedule for some processing task -- is that not a policy because there is no collective of identities or their feeling/opinion involved? Certainly not.

The correct fiscal policies for my HOA are whichever ones that keep the roofs maintained vs the ones that do not, even if that is a concept that's not popular among with the board right now.

A policy is a policy -- this is what we are doing -- correctness is derived from the results as filtered through some value function, which is derived not from agreeableness but some set of value-axioms.

Obviously, at human scale, we can differ on what those axioms are because they are axiomatic, but that's not the same thing as policy, and it's not what's happening in the typical political discourse -- people will frequently have very similar axioms for what is valuable in the outcome of policy but get distracted about other concerns and fail to find consensus.
This is far more damning than any puff piece I have seen in years.
I’ve been in Paris this week and I’ve started to see more of them. I’ve found because they are silent they have an absolutely minimum impact on me.

They appear to be able to slow to walking speed and still remain stable, I’ve walked right along side one without any concern.

I’m thinking safety concerns are overblown. It’s a rad way to get around.
Depends if you're talking dry or wet heat.

For dry, you see a fair number of examples in the US southwest. One of the things you do is take advantage of the fact that there are big temperature swings between daytime and nighttime. You can also use cooling towers. You get some idea from the design of the Zion Visitor's Center. [1] It's not hot-hot there (it's high but gives you some idea).

Wet hot is a lot harder. Utilize shade where you can. Lots of cross-ventilation. Basically very open buildings (subject to how big a problem biting insects are of course--though you can use screens in that case).

[1] https://www.nps.gov/zion/learn/nature/zion-canyon-visitor-ce...