skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Very curious about these justification arguments. How on earth is tax-avoidance defensible in a thread about philanthropy?

One topic (tax avoidance) is by one entity (AMZN) who has obligations and responsibilities towards shareholders (including most employees), where the other is by a different entity (Jeff Bezos) using his own wealth (that resulted from AMZN).

Jeff Bezos can't use AMZN assets as he sees fit, otherwise the SEC will investigate him, but he can do so with his own assets.

If you want the behaviour of companies to change, you need to have your politicians use their powers to do the right things ...

Capitalism isn't there to fix broken democracy, democracy is supposed to limit capitalism ...
I would be willing to load ads if I didnt have to see them. I’m happy. Content provider gets ad shown so they are happy. Advertiser doesn’t get anything, but I don’t care.
The Three Princes of Serendip
MS Outlook still has a feed reader, although it is pretty limited.
Typing is not a programming bottleneck
The counter-argument is that, if these super-wealthy individuals didn't feel the need to extract the maximum wealth from the community (the notion that it's their fiduciary duty to pay the least in wages or find loopholes to minimise tax exposure is a myth), then communities in the round would be better off.

Regardless of if you agree with his actions or not, it's pretty tone-deaf from a PR perspective - pretty much anyone could have seen the backlash coming. He doesn't seem to give a monkey's butt about public perception, but there's very little he can do positively for the community whilst there's still the notion he's trying to destroy it with his business interests. The money and help he's trying to provide will just work better and be more effective and efficient if there's active support for it from all sides. Everything that happens with that money now will be caveated and judged by his actions.

I'd argue he should wait until he retires from Amazon (a la Bill Gates) if he does want any efforts to resonate with people. Then again, for good or bad, I don't think he really cares. I just hope the money can be deployed effectively whilst attached to him, even if it should have been in the pockets of the community all along.
I can buy a phone for 10 euro in tesco, the back unclips in a and i can replace the battery as fast as i can pick it up.
I'm finding it hard to think in these categories. The success of Linux is down to something Linus does and/or gets right. Even more fascinating, it might not be down to anything about him but the product he first created. So, anyone might claim "charisma" for getting the wall to be painted in their choice color but the painters just wanted a painted wall, and regardless of the attitude of the wall builder they were going to paint it.
> syndication was going to become a dominant business model on the web, this never quite came to pass

This has happened in at least one media segment: podcasting. Ads are simply inserted in the medium proper, or the feed gets paywalled, or money is generated while producing the content (live shows).

It is entirely possible to reproduce this achievement in other media sectors, it just needs to be done wisely:

1. a catchy name ("rss" or "atom" are too geeky, "feeds" or "syndication" are too generic, "newscasting" is another thing).

2. leave clients and formats independent, so the immediate needs of users prevail over broadcasters' ones. Broadcasters are good at telling people what to think, but terrible at telling them how to use or consume anything. It also removes the petty fighting like "we won't rely on a platform built by $competitor".

3. Leave ad-management and general money-making schemes up to publishers. They can license feeds to specific clients only, they can do paywalls, micropayments, embedded ads, whatever. The client should assume nothing, simply move content from A to B on a schedule. All this can easily be implemented on HTTP codes, they are all there already.

4. The real point of feeds is exactly this: move stuff from A to B on a schedule. Metadata is almost irrelevant. Content display is a side-show. What podcasting delivers is control: it gets the content a user wants, as soon as it's available, and makes it ready to be consumed when the user needs it, in the way s/he prefers. This concept is what should move the effort, not dreams of semantic sheeps.

5. Because it optimizes pre-fetching, the format shines where on-demand fetching is time or money-expensive. Niches where it would (or does already) work well, ae things like auto-downloading TV episodes, delivering big images (something for visual artists to cut off Pixiv and friends... ?), delivering big binary updates and so on. With the rise of single-page-applications, one could even devise a format that delivers an entire website, ready to be consumed instantaneously without requiring lots of mobile data usage. Bootstrapping it in "stingy" markets (Southern EMEA etc) could help.

6. Good directories for clients to use. Podcasting really took fire when good directories emerged.

(on a sidenote: AMP is evil and publishers are shooting themselves in the foot. It seriosly risks to become an "iTunes" moment, where an entire industry relinquishes control of their market because they don't understand long-term consequences.)
Losing weight fast is not a desirable goal. You can lose considerable muscle mass, even around your heart which is obviously dangerous.
More Than 1 in 4 Americans Have Deleted Facebook, Survey Reveals
Indeed!

At the same time, it's worth considering that those publishers are often much worse off when they escape the cat's malicious paws. More than one newspaper has learned this to their considerable sorrow.
Most of the time I've had access to these conversations it seems like 10-20% of the time there is some really insightful and/or groundbreaking discussion going on.

The rest of the time, it's something like this:

A: I've always found that business is about increasing revenue and decreasing costs

B: I've also always thought that way

A: Great! I'm glad we're on the same page
Anyone that can't take the criticism for bad work presented to the head of the most successful software project of all time don't deserve to participate. Linus has done an amazing job of keeping all my computers, safe, secure and reliable and anyone that messes with his method should not even be allowed to participate. I don't care about anyone's need to feel like a special and capable snowflake, I need the best software Open Source can provide.
Right. This would then also include the damage caused by global warming (CO2). Anyone offering insurance against Earth turning into Mars? How high are the premiums?
Awesome!
Inspired me to fork it into a colorized version here:
https://www.openprocessing.org/sketch/590540
You can set a user level buffer size of the socket driver, and a receive buffer size (see http://erlang.org/doc/man/inet.html).

Why is another level of buffering needed?
That paper shows the value of visualization... I followed the Bellman Forest Problem link to the Wikipedia page on the Moser's Worm Problem[1] and it didn't do anything for me.

In Ward's paper, he summarized Moser's Worm Problem differently (p.7):

In 1966, Moser posed a related problem which roughly asks: “What's the best-shaped hammer for smashing one-inch worms?”

Great visualization!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moser%27s_worm_problem
I'm talking about security fixes to non-newest versions of iOS. Apple just does not do them.
Today's startup idea: Build a new Inbox
"Pretty sure all the people who worked in book shops don't think so."

I'm pretty sure independent self-publishing authors do think so.
In Germany, almost every time a road in the city is rebuilt, more space is allocated to bike lanes and sidewalk, and space is taken away from parking and road for that. This is an example of forward-looking planning. However, it isn't such a nice sight if you are a car owner.
> Yes, reads are not released (i.e. are blocked) until sealing is complete.

Which are the cases where consistency is compromised then? If a client of the log needs consistency, it needs to ensure that it has seen all previous updates to a log before making a new update, which implies a read.

> However, if your replication property, is say, "place 3 copies across 3 racks", then the definition of f-majority becomes more complicated - e.g. having all nodes in the nodeset respond minus two racks will also satisfy it.

Sure, the aim being that no write can be successfully acknowledged by enough replicas to complete the write.
Gotta love their choice of wording, "recover lost revenue from ad blocking users", like blocking ads is equivalent to stealing money from the site owner.
Tony Benn's questions are a handy reminder of what to ask of those in power.

“What power have you got?
“Where did you get it from?
“In whose interests do you use it?
“To whom are you accountable?
“How do we get rid of you?”
Whole heartedly agreed. My main contributions have been when bringing knowledge from disperate domains together.
The Erlang VM (BEAM) is non-blocking by design, you don't need anything like Netty on BEAM.
I don't get this. Shouldn't the speed of gravity be instant? If it has the same speed as light, the earth would gravitate towards the location of the sun roughly eight minutes ago (like we see the sun basically where it was eight minutes ago) in stead of where it actually is, and thus not hold its orbit.
I'm starting to think that any sort of general solution would have to be extremely complex...

The optimum path would be something like a function of itself and the shape of the forest. That is, there is probably a general solution to the INITIAL 'optimum' path based on the forest shape, but then your optimum path changes at any nth 'step', because as you haven't found the border of the forest yet, you learn a bit more (at least probabilistically) about where you could be in the forest...

I think that makes sense, but I have no idea how a solution method like that could be presented analytically.
Star Trek Excelsior Episode 5-4: “E.U.L.A.” a Star Trek Fan Audio Drama
hard to leave when bonus + $$ is so high. So you can get yelled at, things can be unfair, and in any normal circumstances you'd leave. But what if you can make millions.. would you stay another year..?
Repairabiliy is important. But I think durability is more important as it requires no action by the user. iPhones are pretty solid as far as lasting a long time. I’m using a 5S that is 3 years old and it’s my daily driver.

I passed on my old 4 that is still being used as a Netflix/ web browser.

This is contrary to competitor phones that have hardware issues as well as ability to keep getting software updates.

Nexus 5x released sep 2015 and selling used for $85 with original retail [0] compared to 6s released at the same dome that is now selling used for $165 despite an original price of $650 and worse specs [1].

Certainly some of this price difference is due to Apple as a luxury product. But it may also be due to new OS releases not being supported on the 5X, but are on the 6S.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/B0178GEA04/ref=mw_dp...
[1] https://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/B015E8TYHW/ref=mw_dp...
Rich Hickey on Datomic Ions [video]
Oh god, not eevblog. That unlistenable whiny voice and his production values. I tried to tolerate it once but all he did was break stuff. And there's so much he got wrong that it's difficult to believe that he ever had a job.
Facebook steps up efforts to tackle human rights abuses
> I'm still surprised no one has yet figured out a way to store sensitive data about personal interests and preferences on the client-side

I'm pretty sure iAd works like this no? Also it wouldn't be massive advantage, you'd be serving less relevant ads (so losing out to competitors) and you can still track which ads a device requests.
>How easy is it for end-users to replace the clutch in that off-warranty Civic? For that matter, how many people even change their own brakes (one of the easiest DIY tasks, IMO)?

You comparing apples and oranges. There is a difference between a task that genuinely requires labor (replacing brakes), and something that is artificially harder solely to discourage people from doing it, but could (and ought) to be a simple task that can be done 15 seconds.

Honda isn't intentionally making it more complex to get to your brake pads and rotors.
> No one is asking that Amazon pay a vastly higher salary to their low tier employees, only that they consider the cost of living for those employees and pay accordingly within a particular market.

If Amazon is paying too little compared to that "particular market", surely they wouldn't get enough applicants?

I guess you mean something else than "market" here ...

> The means to afford food and housing should not be out of reach of a full time employee, even if their position is likely to be automated in the future.

Then the government should set a (higher) minimum wage (and benefits), they way most other governments in the first (and third) world do.

A company's primary obligation is to their shareholders. A government's primary obligation should be to their constituents/voters/residents/citizens. Which one is failing their primary stakeholder the most here?
As if planning for a baby wasn't stressful enough, choosing a name feels like a huge responsibility. Especially when you have a small number of peers who either changed their name as adults or choose to be known by a middle name rather than their first name, underlining that sometimes people dislike their names enough to take the matter into their own hands.

My wife and I divided up the responsibility when we were expecting 20 years ago: she would choose a boy's name, I would choose a girl's name. Coincidentally we both ended up choosing Arthurian names: Tristan for a boy, Morgana for a girl.

Clearing firstlastname.com domain names was straightforward, and ultimately we had a girl, so Morgana it was. Unfortunately Morgan was a common enough name that people initially try to pronounce it as Morgan and then get stuck when they see the vowel on the end, but this problem went away after the BBC show Merlin happened.

One additional unplanned bonus was that her full name is alliterative, given both first and last name starts with "M". I do think there's nice stickiness bonus to alliterative names, as evidenced by comic book and other fictional character names. It's just one more factor to consider.
Drone startups often crash so hard they may be said to break the ground on the way down.
Why Covering Indexes Are Incredibly Helpful
This is FUD. Please cite your sources.

While not healthy to literally starve yourself, getting your calories from stored fat is absolutely safe. There are dozens of documented cases of people subsisting on vitimins/broth and their own fat for over a year. Proper electrolytes all but eliminate most issues you suggest, only applicable to a pure starvation diet. Conflating the 2 is either uninformed or dishonest.
Great writeup! Much of my plotting experience is a similar journey of hooking a bunch of rando utilities and file formats together with python. Plotters are really fun and can motivate some really interesting generative artwork.

Be sure to check out the #plottertwitter hashtag for inspiration, and I've aggregated some resources in an `awesome-plotters` repo as well: https://github.com/beardicus/awesome-plotters
EWh. There are still RSS alternatives and at least most sites (if by no means all) still have RSS feeds.

Now, you might argue that "But Google Reader was the de facto standard and mainstream audiences didn't know to just use something else."

However, unless they were reading RSS in the background through a portal like Yahoo!, mainstream audiences weren't using RSS long before Google Reader was killed (if ever).

Explicit use of RSS through RSS readers was always primarily the province of journalists, analysts, researchers, and various other folks who wanted relatively unfiltered from-the-source on specific topics.

It also didn't help that individual blog content has tended to migrate to publishing platforms in general. I still write a lot but publish on my "personal" blog relatively seldom these days because visibility is so much higher elsewhere.
How small is this group?

I find myself solving problems with capitalism and simultaneously donating 5-10% of my net-income.

I also dont see life being any worse than 'before' for any classes. 'before' being 15 years ago.
I was going to say "you can invent anything you want, but good luck convincing "Appoogle" to help you", but in truth, they've actually let the door open on mobile with their support for custom urls, so you are right there.

On the desktop it would be harder though.
It shows that sustainability is not even an afterthought. Everybody is ok with throwing away perfectly working devices (i.e. devices that were blazing fast just a couple years ago and now, with some crippling os updates, take 10 seconds to open a PDF) just because they're 3-5 years old. Let's see if Apple really does change their policy on this. For premium, very expensive phones, it would be reasonable for them to be fully functional (with no slowdowns) for at least 5 years.
win2k and osx tiger
The Beginners Guide to Understanding WebRTC in 3 Minutes
Editorial decisions include more than just opinion pieces and editorials. It’s common for “hard news pieces” to try to add context or to put news in perspective. But the extra context or perspective is an editorial decision.

This wouldn’t bother me if journalists were experts on their domains, but there is plenty of reason to think that’s not the case.

There was once a time I considered becoming a journalist. I bought a copy of the then-latest AP Style Guide, which had a chapter on how to handle unfulfilling assignments such as business news. The fact that a media company covers news for a particular topic doesn’t mean they actually have any experts on that topic.

I remember a computer journalist who bought a Linux CD, couldn’t get it to install on PowerPC, and claimed that was proof Linux wasn’t actually portable, and didn’t understand why people asked what architecture the CD was for. I remember when a buffer overflow was reported for Apache, and before Apache had a fix, somebody released a build that doubled the size of that buffer. Several media outlets thought this was an impressive fix for the original problem, and failed to ask what would happen if an attacker doubled the size of the input.

With that kind of track record, I’m very cautious about where I get my computer news, and I fact check every story I can. But what about topics I’m not an expert in? I’ve seen incredibly dumb legal stories even though it would be easy for a news station to find a competent lawyer to review things before they’re published. When I read anything about the military or foreign affairs, I assume that the assigned journalists aren’t any better at their jobs than the people covering technology, lawsuits, local politics, etc.
One person's "intentionally making it more complex" is another person's "waterproof to two meters".
Are other manufacturers better? They used to be.

Many still are, although unfortunately many follow the path led by Apple. Here's an educational link for those who think everyone else is as bad as Apple:

https://www.ifixit.com/laptop-repairability

I have a HP ProBook myself and as far as laptops it is a joy to work on. Very repair-friendly. I can get to the hard drive, battery, CPU and RAM in minutes with no trouble and no weird tools. The entire bottom of the machine comes off very easily and reveals the exposed and helpfully labeled internals. I upgraded the i3 CPU to an i7 myself in like ten minutes a couple of months ago. I also know for a fact that dust particles have entered the keyboard on more than one occasion yet I am still here, typing away.

Apple has been systematically and consistently working against repairability and upgradability for decades -- pretty much ever since the original Macintosh. If they want to suddenly change now that's great. I'll believe it when I see it.
Is it perhaps possible that Amazon has been so very successful because they have indeed added value by reducing the personal logistics required of a great many people? Coupling that with equivalent or better prices is a substantial addition of value, rather than predatory, in the eyes of many.

From personal experiences, I do not view taking the time out of my day to go to the household goods store for toilet paper, paying 10% more than Amazon charges, and transporting it home to be of greater value than Amazon's offering. Of course, there are exceptional scenarios where this might shift (e.g., out of toilet paper), but I expect a great many people would agree with my approach. I understand you and some others may prefer to pay extra in both money and time with your local generic housewares vendor.

You're absolutely right that other approaches have value to some people. It may be worth considering that not all people are likely to agree with the status-seeking behavior patterns of the hipsters, even when they take the form of favoring things purportedly thoughtful.

And obviously - so obviously I thought it never needed to be said by anyone - no business model should ever be deified. We do seem to be at a local maximum in some ways, that's all.

Incidentally, where would you draw the line between "tech company" and "company that's really, really good at developing, deploying, and gaining economic efficiencies from technology"?
This makes sense. So if I cannot “earn” money for my contributions, I just wouldn’t sign up to be a lifter and my project would not be included in your program.
That’s a bit of a sloppy metaphor, since if anything Mars has the opposite problem. In fact, heightened carbon emissions would be a good first step in terraforming Mars.
This is bullshit. I fund my startup by consulting 1-2 months per year at 40k/month. Zero people think it is impressive. But $25k of Obama cereal makes a better story.
Welcome to Crypto Week
I posted this a couple times before, but I highly recommend people to read this article from Wait but Why site about choosing a career [1]. It's long but it really puts into perspective of choosing a career and the balance of life.

[1] https://waitbutwhy.com/2018/04/picking-career.html
Backscatter X-ray
Diatary and Blood collesterol are not casually linked as many erroniously assume. Easy mistake.
I completely agree. One legal change that needs to happen to preserve the free market: company with a habit of employees using social assistance should not get tax breaks (or any other help) from the government. The taxpayer should not be subsidizing the paycheck of Amazon employees. The burden is on Amazon to pay their employees a competitive wage, it's their problem not mine.

Otherwise they have no incentive to pay their employees a competitive wage.

Without competitive wages you have no free market, you just have a corporate welfare state, where the cost of paying workers is taken from the workers themselves thru taxation.
That's basically what some UBI shills want. They want state taxation and welfare to replace the onus of corporations to pay competitive wages to employees.
Introducing Cloudflare’s IPFS Gateway
>We fully embrace Javascript as dynamically typed language [...]

I won't outright dismiss your coding style because I don't know what your codebase looks like and maybe you're genuinely talented JS devs who know what they're doing (something I'm decidedly not) but your comment makes it sound like discouraging the use of '==' is not "embracing" JS's dynamism. I don't think I agree with that, actually there are a bunch of highly dynamic languages where comparison is not such a mess. The main problem with '==' is that it's highly inconsistent and intransitive (as showcased by TFA). It's tricky to figure out what evaluates to true or false when types don't match. It's not PHP bad but it's pretty damn bad.
Is That Airport Security Scanner Really Safe?