skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
How does one account muting another suppress their speech? Everyone else still sees the tweet.
I haven't been forced to use DocuSign for a few years, but there ux was complete shit. I would rather go to an office and physically sign something than deal with their crappy interface.
>You shouldn't be called a racist because you think that the US should work to ensure no one crosses our southern border without permission.

I would ask anyone who believes that the US should work to to control entry at the southern border to question why they believe this is an important thing to focus on. What is the root of that belief? Why should the US be exclusive? What benefit do you derive from keeping it exclusive, and why is the accident of your birth somehow firmer ground of entitlement to citizenship than any other abstract concept?

Perhaps they are not "a racist" but I strongly believe that the desire to control the border is deeply rooted in racism in America, and anyone having this discussion needs to be willing to consider the basis for their ideas.
https://picular.co/devastating+public+breakup
> Really, to me, the hard part is getting in without needing to have the user consciously do anything

That's why I said remote/browser, everything else is noisy and therefore the 'easy' route. Usually this is sufficient for low tech nation states because they attack organizations not individuals, so all you need is a weak human link where noisey isn't a big deal. Then moving horizontally across the organization.

But more importantly OS are terribly insecure and privesc bugs are a dime a dozen. You don't need zero days to achieve that the vast majority of the time.
I'm 21 but I wish something like this existed when I was younger!
I hope Sanders' survey gets an honest response and Amazon don't try any dirty tricks. This site deserves to be spread about more: https://sites.google.com/site/thefaceofamazon/home
Defaults matter but I think there’s also a lot of blame for developer culture, especially in the circles where Mongo is popular. Faster, faster, ship it…
I could hardly understand why do people use Slack at all. Once I've read the BetterSlack features list I've came up wit the idea that perhaps it could make Slack useful and I might re-visit it. Such a waste.
The rise of giant consumer startups that said no to VC
I think the problem in jazz music (if there is one, but let's go with it) is that it has harmonic (and rhythmical) complexity at the microscopic scale, but doesn't go for the big picture that much: the large scale structure of the composition. A lot of jazz is just theme-improv-theme type stuff. No matter what the content is, that trivial formula itself will tire the listener.

And speaking of improv, I don't care if you're a musical genius on the level of Bach, when you're ad-libbing, you're not going to come up with material that approaches that which is composed over weeks or months.

There is also only so much you can do with those "Jazz standards". Once people have heard the same song with the dominant and other chords substituted in all the common ways, and numerous alterations to the II-V-I cadences and whatnot, they heard it all. Oh goody, another rendition of Autumn Leaves ...

Jazz is basically undone by the fact that it's a form of pop music with micro-complexity at the level of individual bars and phrases heaped on it, and freedom everywhere else.

Basically Jazz composition should be approached like classical music; just with the full harmonic palette of Jazz, to make Jazz sonatas and symphonies.

Problem is, that is probably not recognizable as Jazz any more. Maybe music is only Jazz when it fits into one of the common formulas. Like if we take away most of the noodling and have much more composed notes around a much more contrived harmonic labyrinth, it won't be "it" any more.
The core data that I'd want to restore immediately if I lost my primary fileserver is only around 100GB or less

I have several TB's of other data (mostly photos, videos, etc) that I'm fine waiting for weeks or months for if needed, but if you're in a hurry, Backblaze will sell you a hard drive that they restore your backup to and mail it to you.
Been there. Classic analysis paralysis problem for me, at least.

What I had to do was actually just start to show myself how little I was gaining in the “what if” planning. Chances of those problems were small and I was just spending time (years!) dealing with engineering mode.

The key for me was realizing why I acted that way. But thats a personal journey Id encourage you to take but cant tell you where it goes.
Emergency care is not a great market to be a buyer in, but that does not change that market economics apply. And it is beside the point. The vast majority of healthcare is boring, predictable, non-emergency expenses that can be shopped around.

I agree that regulation makes sense, just not with the extremely specific proposal that medical devices be sold at cost (or whatever slightly higher unit cost is available to consumers).
What about those of us in the 3rd group - started late and have to work hard at it!
I have the same problem and my diagnosis is that is a symptom of not having a deep bond with any of those interests. I've deceived myself that the ease of discovery will automatically transfer to mastery.

I realized in a world of abundant and instant knowledge, I've been applying the laws of scarcity: "I won't be able to do Y and Z if I spend too much on X". Hence the anxiety to get to the Y when doing X. But it's not going to be a finite list ending in Z. It is an infinite stream and that I have to treat it as drinking from a river vs a cup.

Lately, I've been deliberately giving up on reading about topics, unfollowing people at the edge of my interests and focusing on the areas that are more central. If you look a little bit, you can identify a couple of interests that are stronger than the other. Then it is a matter of eliminating the time spent at the edges.
has blocked people on twitter

information must not be disseminated
in a way that isn't available to
everyone at the same time

Okay, but one needs to understand the difference between an authenticated account being BLOCKED, versus a public account's tweets being accessible to non-authenticated users.

If a twitter account posts public tweets, access to view and read is effectively unrestricted. There is no practical reason a person would be unable to view them, blocked or not, other than their choice to authenticate with twitter.

Being "blocked" just means you can't reply, while logged in as an identifiable twitter user id.

A flow chart of choices available, for how to look at a twitter feed would likely resolve this conundrum.

To argue about this is to say something like: "I could not read the disclosure, because it was on page 39 of the Wall Street Journal and page 27 of the New York Times. It needs to be on the front page, because that's the only page my clipping service sends me."

If you couldn't find a way to view a public twitter feed, how is that different from failing to take the initiative to turn to page 27 of the news paper, that can be perused for free at a news stand?

Where do you draw the line? Does not having internet access count as a restriction? What about not having a twitter account? What about not owning a computer? What about not owning a smart phone? Is making an announcement on a website not a technical restriction by default? Why or why not?
Who cares if it's bad for VCs. They already get paid over 200k+ in carry every year for over 10 years. They are also not investing their own personal money.
That one is great. I totally lost it at the part with the dog. Scary and accurate.
It is way easier to store the pages in a key/value db than storing them in separate files. And I don't need to implement concurrency access control as it is dealt by LMDB.

It leads to an easier implementation and robustness, as the main data processing is done by SQLite and LMDB. LiteTree is something like a glue, and the code is simple. What leads to better maintainability.
Keep it up, this is exactly how great programmers are made!
I have been following the development of Oberon-07 (and submitted minor fixes to Prof. Wirth) over the years. The compiler's source code is the fruit of refinements and simplifications accumulated over 30+ years (more if you include his compilers for previous languages). His approach for compiler writing, and system design in general, is outstanding. For more information about his compilers see "Compiler Construction - The Art of Niklaus Wirth" [0]

[0] http://oberon2005.oberoncore.ru/paper/art3.pdf
This looks to me like a no brainer move! Way to go and congrats on the buyout!
Labor Board Backs Startup Engineers Fired for Unionizing
Does anyone even use buffer? I remember it gaining traction several years back but that's about it.
The folly of having the FCC regulate this stuff instead of the FTC. The FCC has always been cozy with the big guys.
Yes, I can't speak to when but Twitter displays a very obvious "You have been blocked by this user"-type message instead of their tweets if you attempt to view their profile.
Not sure. A lot of the world system from basic to very high level need coordination and modular ... you need some principle of operation which hopefully can be evolved over time so we are in the same page from time to time.

But no. You cannot ask for all to be understood like that.

Trust is a different matter.
While these web-app things may be nice for quickly trying out these programs, for actual long-term use on my machine and workflow besides all of the other programs, they don't stand up to the test unless they are truly revolutionary and needed.
"Providence" from Sonic Youth's Daydream Nation features a clip of a forlorn message from Mike Watt to Thurston Moore: https://youtu.be/HNo5dCbKy0g?t=62
> Interior Minister Horst Seehofer told reporters that Germany needed new tools to become a top player in cyber security and shore up European security and independence.

Good grace. The man is so horribly incompetent at everything he does and his party (CSU) are even worse. I don't trust this proposal even a bit.

In addition:

1) how on earth are they planning to fund and staff all of this? I worked for local government and it paid shit, and from what I hear state/fed government doesn't pay much more either, so no way to attract talent by pay.

2) Like many gov positions, this will be German nationals only (or EU nationals, not sure if German-citizens-only is still allowed under EU regulations?). Definitely no jobs for non-EU applicants.

3) Ever got a conviction for hacking or a (known) weed/other drug habit? Automatic no-go. Which is the reason why there is a severe lack of IT competency in government, no matter the level or agency.

4) Who in living hell wants to work that job? I'd expect to be kicked out of any political or hacktivist group if I were to work for our increasingly authoritarian government, let alone under Seehofer, and that with reason. That leaves as candidates only those with no other options left, and authoritarians at the best, Nazis at the worst. The police of Saxony showed on the weekend what is the result.
The amicus brief from the Internet Alliance makes that fear very clear: they demanded clarification that those decisions only apply to interactions with accounts that are clearly used as policy tool by the US Government.

For me, the fact that this is the personal account and not @potus is the outlying factor. The court was explicit that, because policy was announced from that account, it made it a Government tool, subject to a lot of rules. To me, this is a smart move, warning the next President: make sure that all communications where you use the power of the office are from @potus, because otherwise, National Archive will get into your DMs. If encourages to define a line between the West and the East Wing (the personal residency) and extend it to social media.
Ah, I recognize this. All these things are cool, amazing, and great proof of concepts, but building a production application on them just feels like hubris.
New EBook: BILLION DIGITAL BUYERS
I struggle with avoiding desensitization or the status quo feeling one should just focus on one’s own life and not let external sources of moral or ethical outrage affect you.

It is so critical to be outraged by an ever-increasing number of things that truly, sincerely deserve to evoke outrage. Any solution that proposes to somehow not be outraged just cannot be considered.

Yet at the same time, nobody has the bandwidth to be so outraged, let alone to try to have a happy life.

I think this is a non-trivial problem of modern philosophy. Is it ethically OK to short-circuit your moral outrage because pragmatically there are too many issues to be able to process, or it would be socially offputting to be “on” all the time?

Shouldn’t you take great pains to boycott products or services from bad actors, protest abuses of power and corruption, never ever become exhausted of talking about or listening to discussions of these issues, even unto whatever toll it takes on your personal life?

I’m very skeptical of people who quickly say no.

What a struggle this problem is!
Did I miss the part where they said that? The post suggests their counsel said it was a unique clause.

At any rate: they bought out their investors years before interest became due. It was a negotiated sale.
>I showed your project to my 12 year old son who has just started to learn programming (in JS no less!)

It would be much better if he would start with Scratch, Processing, Smalltalk, or even Python.

On JS he'll have to lose time coping with complicated build tools, horrible package system, async etc.
If you spin up a server and install mongodb (while forgetting to turn on a firewall that blocks all non-port 443/80 traffic) - everyone has root access to your database.

Easy mistake to make. I've probably done it at least once on publicly accessible test instances.
I’ve been evaluating AWS and other cloud services and I think their control planes are a really interesting and not well explored area from a security perspective. My guess is we will see many future security incidents that seem like rehashes or old 90s type exploits or user/admin failures due to complexity.
It's even hard to tell whether that robot hand pushing the puck is actually "generalising" like the article claims. Maybe it is, maybe the task is set up so that it makes it possible for the robot hand to push around the puck even when it's on a bag of crisps. It's very difficult to know for sure.
Sorry this is a day late, but how do you get certificates for internal services? Do you manually trust them on each client? Or do you have a wildcard cert from a public server? Is there some cleaner way to manage internal HTTPS?
What? This is a vote of no-confidence in chasing unicorn-type results. That's fine. Lots of people want to work for a company that produces slow and steady gains.
At that point, one might as well just wind it off to a hard disk in the first place, then store it offsite.
Fascinating! What do you mean by light pipe in the second point? As in touching the LED package itself or a fiber optic strand?
Modern JavaScript is better than old JavaScript, but it’s still JS, and I’m missing basically all features from other languages that make programming great.
Go was heavily influenced by Oberon, in fact Robert Griesemer is a former Wirth's PhD.
I think it is a bold move. In their situation it seems like the right move.

I am seeing a lot of sentiment on HN that feels sorry for VCs. VC already get paid above 200k/year; no need to feel sorry for them.

People should feel sorry for the founders & the employees who did all the work. Now if they get liquidation, then that is good.
This is misguided. Your tax dollars aren't subsidizing Amazon -- they're subsidizing everyone who pays Amazon's wages or lower.

If the market value of labor has fallen below the threshold needed to live an acceptable (as judged by society) lifestyle, the burden of making up the difference should fall on society -- not arbitrarily on the companies which happen to do business in industries whose jobs require essentially no skills to perform.

Hypothetically speaking, if Google automated away 50M tedious and repetitive "white collar" jobs and those 50M workers are now competing for warehouse jobs, why must warehouse operators' pay a living wage while Google pays nothing for putting 50M workers out on the street?

The burden of caring for society's poor must fall on society. As it was society's technological innovation and policy decisions (i.e. globalization of labor markets) that has led to the destruction of unskilled labor's market value.
I think jazz is dead in the sense that it no longer attracts a broad audience, like big band music did. It happened because the most brilliant jazz musicians became elitist and avant-garde and destroyed melody.

This happened for philosophical and ideological reasons. Melody was seen as beourgois and restrictive, and destroying it a means of achieving spiritual and cultural freedom.
The problem with this idea is that human existence is by its very nature finite, and so the avant-garde is trying to live a lie.

This is not to say there are not many fine jazz musicians out there today producing interesting music. It is just that they don't write melodies that ordinary people can appreciate.
Has anyone worked out what the base rate expectation of murder would be?

I think I read in the FT that Didi has booked a few billion rides in that period. How many people (and women) would normally be murdered in cabs?

The stories cited are obviously horrific and it sounds like Didi could have prevented them with a better system. But, I'd nonetheless be interested to know how safe this is to the alternative, and also how many murders we would expect in a few billion human interactions.

At that scale all our intuitions are off and we need to look at stats.
>> Close-held profitable companies make their shares liquid by buying them back or by distributing dividends (as "profit sharing").

Yes, this is exactly what we do with our equity and our employees.

It is ridiculous around Hacker News that this idea has been completely lost and almost everyone focuses on RSUs and unicorn valuations and longshots, rather than simply... I don't know, making a business that very calmly makes a few million dollars per year with double digit growth rather than insanity.
My issue with this is I think I’d quickly grow frustrated with all the shit software I’d have to use.
Wheaton has updated an earlier blog post to reflect this incident:

http://wilwheaton.net/2018/08/the-world-is-a-terrible-place-...
Ask HN: Reinforcement Learning Environments as a Service?
Will we eventually see simulation environments as a Service?
Amazingly, the "Yeah Write" Microsoft Word competitor referenced in the essay is still active.

Article: https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/tech/reviews/finder/re...

Site: http://www.yeahwrite.com/

Win 3.1/95; free, or $15 for more powerful registered version.

It even has a Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/Yeah-Write-38276039100/

Now that's persistence! Kudos to whoever made it.
According to Google, after adjusting for inflation, the average price of a new car in 1985 was $21-28k in today's dollars, and the average new car costs $30-40k today. The price of a Big mac: $1.17 in 1985, $3.50 today. Gasoline: $1.50-2/gal, today: $3-4/gal.

We now spend over 5 times as much on fire suppression at the federal level than we did 30 years ago after adjusting for inflation. This growth outpaces cost of living, healthcare, and inflation significantly.
Uhh no.
Systems are so insanely complex that we have to use analogies to explain how they work to other people in our field. Its just not possible to truly understand from high to low level every single component and how they operate. That being said, I truly appreciate and agree with the premise that we should strive for brevity and simplicity _where possible_.
Getting up early.
I suspect that, just like you have physical guards protecting official buildings from abuse, and their right to evacuate disruptive citizens has been established, there will be a case of a (probably local) government account willing to flag, or block a very annoying troll.

The peculiarity of this case is more that Trump’s thin skin and refusal to understand how the First Amendment applies to him.
> If the seller thinks scarcity will rise tomorrow, they'll just raise prices today

Yes they will. And this increase in price will cause people to use less of it, because people don't like wasting money.

Nothing is being made illegal, so there are no black markets.
NHS is a single-payer system, which is one of the solutions I proposed.

Yes, mandating supplies be sold at-cost is exactly what you proposed:

> Hospitals should be legally mandated to accept replacement of materials in lieu of payment.

> If I can source the same stents for cheaper than the hospital bills me, they should be required to erase them from the bill and accept them as material replacement.

And to address:

> Also, if it reduces costs for the end consumer, what's the harm?

The problem is in the condition. At the end of the day, ineffective regulation increases costs for the consumer.
> Naked-mole-rat queens use their hormone-rich poop to govern their subordinates.

> [The Queen's] subordinates take care of the pups, and they never make sex hormones of their own or become sexually mature.

Huh, so I guess the evolutionary strategy is that the Queen can give her subjects just enough hormones to get them excited about motherhood, but too few to become mothers themselves.

Also, what weird timing, "Minute Earth" put out this video 5 hrs ago:

Why Do Some Animals Eat Poop?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ubt2fl11v5E
Empathy is not everything
One way it can be done:

We issue equity internally, not options. We hold right of first refusal and have independent appraisals of value of the business done, so when you leave, we have the right to purchase the equity back at the last appraised value of the company. Additionally, we also pay dividends (impacted by equity) and profit sharing (not impacted by equity but rather a percentage of salary) to our employees.

These things are what "lifestyle businesses" do, or what basically everyone outside of SV and indoctrinated MBA programs call... businesses.
I guess I wrote it wrong. The access is made by specifying the branch and desired commit number (integer value). It is not done by a date-time value. Although adding metadata (like date-time) can be supported if required by the users.
Yes. It would be expensive, and that cost would be pushed onto consumers in some other way.
> They never tell you that part about losing weight, that the damage to your metabolism is already done and will never function normally again.

This New York Times reporting on weight loss and metabolism is highly relevant: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/02/health/biggest-loser-weig...

The study within strongly suggests exactly what you're saying: massive weight loss results in a massive loss in metabolism. The difference in metabolism is on the order of hundreds of calories per day.

I've lost a combined 150 pounds throughout my life and I'm down 80 pounds from my max. I am not in the exact same situation as you but I feel close. I, too, limit my calories to roughly 1,600 a day.

I wish this topic was studied more and the science was settled. If the study is accurate, what is there to be done about it other than learning to live with a significant caloric deficit for the rest of our lives? This is an issue that potentially affects so many people yet is so rarely discussed. Thank you for sharing your experience.
I think it's worth continuing to explore as well, but the basic observation holds. Whenever you have a metric, the wannabes and self-promoters will game it. The people who are actually expert usually don't have the same kind of motivation to get their voice heard above the noise.

I've had some discussions with the lobste.rs folks about another attempt to do a sophisticated trust metric, but nothing ever rose to the level of "we should do this."