skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Microsoft also:

- Forcibly upgraded as many Windows 7 and 8 machines to Windows 10 as possible without really asking permission, so that some manager could make their adoption metrics look better.
- Implemented extremely-invasive data collection in Windows 10.
- Migrated to a "Windows is a service! Better hope you like not being able to decline updates!" model with Windows 10, where the user no longer has control of their own machine.

I'm a huge fan of C# and Visual Studio, and I think MS SQL Server is arguably the best overall[1] relational database software, but I certainly don't trust them to have any motivations other than "whatever makes us the most money as possible".

[1] I like Postgres a lot and use it myself most frequently for personal projects, but if one has at least a small budget, SQL Server (IMO) has by far the best administration tools of any database and is very reliable.
cool, there really seem to be steps.

further: Can i reimplement server/client functions of the caldav stack and have my own push notifications for mail?
I nearly clicked away because the authors sheer paranoia made me lose faith in their point, so I'll paste the punchline here:

"But why not do the math for me? A quick calculation shows that the top bottle comes out to about 30 cents an ounce – two cents less than the bottom bottle. Why not show that fact?

This, folks, this is algorithmic merchandising at its finest.

Amazon knows exactly how many clicks it’s going to take for me to reach shopping fatigue. Not “on average for all shoppers,” or even “on average for each shopper who’s ever considered a bottle of hydrogen peroxide.” Amazon knows all of that, of course, but it also knows exactly how long it takes ME to get fatigued, to enter what I like to call “fuck it” mode. As in, “fuck it, I’m tired of this bullshit, I want to get back to the rest of my life. I’m going to buy one of these bottles.”

And because there’s no per-ounce breakdown of the 32-ounce bottle, and because that makes me suspicious of it, and because hell, who ever needs 32 ounces of hydrogen peroxide anyway, well, I’m just going to buy the $5 one.

Ca-ching! Amazon just made a nearly seven percent markup on my purchase. It took five clicks, 15 seconds, and a vast architecture of data and algorithmic mastery to make that profit."
Probably deserves a "2009" in the title. The 2015 HN discussion had only one comment, but that comment had an interesting link.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10397619
Because U.S. cities treat transit as a business or a utility rather than as infrastructure.
Ahhh but they are 'converted' by the end; which is presented as a simile on how realistic the gameplay is.
Because this kind of raiding is harmful to society.
"I've no regrets there, but it's not so clear that my persuasion was really the best idea."

Does she make more money than a similar person with a degree in sociology?
It's very possible at 31. Many people in the early days were self-taught. There's so much information available freely online that you don't need to go to college to learn it (you go to college for other reasons).

The fact that you haven't done some really basic stuff on your own though, before coming here, tells me you are not much of a self-starter. So I have my doubts.

Python is easy to approach. Take the codeacademy python course, I think it's free. See if you take a liking to it. If so, find the syllabus for the first 2 years of a compsci program and learn those things. By 1 year into it, you should be able to make a useful nodejs program. Demo it here and go from there.
TED and TEDx had great content in the first few years, when profs were able to present their lifetime's work.

Once they burned through those folks, they turned to cranks/homeopaths/etc
I'm surprised they'd use a single-player game for a trailer. My first thought for concisely showing the benefits would be something more like a Mario Party-style game, with four people but split across two physical locations.
A lot of HNers don't have much of a sense of humor. (I thought it was funny.)
I don't have any sort of degree beyond high school and I have been a programmer/engineer for almost 15 years. Do I work at top tech companies? No. But that doesn't mean people like us can't be hired in the industry.
I miss being surprised by technology
I don't think it's a solution to climate change, it's just a personal choice. The solutions are out of my reach and ideling the SUV is much less of a problem than selling the SUV in the first place.

I don't think we're doing a good job handling the issue on a policy level so creating a child who will potentially have to deal with the worst of these problems directly seems unnecessary, avoidable and selfish.
Because evaluating differently based on gender actually is discriminatory.
Just that something is effective doesn't mean it's efficient. For years the lightbulb was the most effective way of producing light, and we took for granted that it cost a lot of energy. But you would be a fool if you claimed it wasn't wasteful just because the product (light) is so valuable.

Bitcoin mining is wasteful, it literally produces waste, and there is no proof at all that it is an optimal way if achieving security, in fact I feel there are signs that point towards the contrary.
Yes, I find it helps to say "here is what is needed, anyone should feel free to take it from here." In my first response, so it's clear I don't expect anything more.

Quite a few PRs were improved and merged this way, and I think the feeling of community is enhanced when a PR goes through multiple revisions by multiple contributors.
What are the practical differences between Vim and Emacs?
They could start by being not evil/truly friendly. I'm amazed that people will happily forget all the bad things that company is still doing after a couple of token gestures.
Certainly doesn't help that car companies actively worked to dismantle the public transit systems and promote personal vehicles.
> dozens of open PRs on his repo, none so bad they must be closed, but also not good enough to merge

But you've decided to reject them. Isn't that just what 'closed' is for?
> Open source GitHub like GitLab has

They can't do that yet, since the acquisition is still in progress.
There is an interesting tangent in this thread where we can wonder what it would reveal if "coding interview" type CS tests were administered along with standard IQ tests (or the application included SAT scores). Do coding tests predict work performance better or worse than an IQ test? If worse, are they merely "culture fit" bias filters meant to retain the ingroup? If better, is it because culture fit actually matters, or because there is in fact some CS-specific skill or set of assumed knowledge that matters in programming that goes beyond logic?

While I understand that using IQ tests as hiring predictors is itself a problem, I'm interested in the interplay in predictive ability between the two classes of tests. I think everyone would agree that any primarily intellectual timed test that was _less_ salient to work performance than an IQ test should be binned. What would happen to our interviews then?
I didn't mean to imply the males I worked with weren't equally good. I was simply pointing out that, in my (anecdotal) experience, I couldn't see any reason non-males couldn't do the job well.
I think the issue of what constitutes a security is very well defined in the US...it’s just no one has framed their token in such a way it’s not a security (despite all the claims to the contrary) and otherwise the ICOs have not complied with securities laws because...well move fast break things.

I’m not sure why a company doesn’t just come out and do an ICO: a) with a token that’s not a security or b) a token that is a security and comply with securities laws.
"A nuclear standoff. One leader is drunk. The other is delirious. The underlings scramble to avoid the worst. This is not an end-of-the-world Hollywood thriller, or an episode in President Trump’s erratic diplomacy."

No matter you're opinion of Trump, I find it extremely off putting when you are reading an article and the author feels the need to get in a jab like that, on either side of the political spectrum. I have seen that in other lectures before, and I feel it undermines the credibly of the author.
vim + w0rp/ale, ale has LSP support and I now use it as a one stop shop for go to dec, find refs, and autocomplete. It has support for linting with cargo, rustc, rls, and autoformatting with rustfmt. rustup makes installing rls extremely painless.
If they did, it was a serious own goal. For the last year, everything coming out about Google has been pretty negative, and this seems to fit the pattern.
> But there was a big difference between America’s approach to big urban metro projects and that of Canadian and European cities: Even when the United States built expensive rail systems, it never took care of the basics.

This is a really important point. In many U.S. cities, even the public transit is more of an adjunct to driving.

Here's the eastern terminus of one of Munich's S-Bahn lines: https://www.google.com/maps/search/munich++erding+train+stat.... Despite being about 25 miles outside the city, the area around it is developed and you can walk to the train station.

In contrast, here's the eastern terminus of D.C.'s orange line: https://www.google.com/maps/search/new+carollton+metro/@38.9.... Even though it's only about 10 miles from downtown, you can't walk to anything from there. You can't even get a cup of coffee except at the little shop in the Amtrak lounge. Like much of the D.C. Metro, it was designed primarily for people to drive there and park.

And somehow, even for people who drive there and park, it's off putting. There's a vast expanse of concrete you have to traverse just to get to the train from the parking lot: https://www.google.com/maps/search/new+carollton+metro/@38.9.... It's so bad I actually started driving to a slightly further station on the blue line to get to one that doesn't make me want to kill myself every morning: https://www.google.com/maps/search/morgan+blvd+metro/@38.893.... It's still got this completely unnecessary vast swath of pavement out front, but at least there's some trees.

Compare those monstrosities to Munich, where the parking is right next to the tracks: https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=image....

A lot of the post-1960s "public transit" development is like the D.C. Metro's. These concrete edifices surrounded by vast swaths of concrete sidewalks and surrounded again by highways.
This seems like a technology problem, not a personnel problem. There should be more checks in a system when you are changing bank accounts where so much money is going to be deposited.
Bias, to me, is the active (perhaps unconscious) discrimination based on a trait. Skew is an unequal distribution of that trait as a result of bias in favor of other traits, historical circumstances, or anything other than discrimination.

The NBA wants good basketball players. If they happen to be white, I imagine they'd draft them with equal enthusiasm as any other player. So no, it isn't.
The interesting thing to me in this article is that basically the equivalent of ‘the deep state’ — the intelligence services — acted to control the worst impulses of the leader, something that I sincerely hope is also happening in both countries right now.
It's impossible to build a world free of nuclear weapons. A lot more countries will have them in the future, not fewer.

North Korea, the poorest country on earth, has demonstrated how it can be done by anyone. Before that Pakistan and India demonstrated how easily it can be done with minimal consequences.

Poor and small nations will always be at an extreme disadvantage when it comes to conventional military conflict. Taiwan would love nothing more than to have a 100 nuke stockpile right now, it's the only way they don't get invaded and annexed by China against their will. There is nothing that can stop China as things are today, the US isn't going to commit suicide to save them from annexation. Those nuclear weapons are the ultimate deterrence when facing off with an overwhelming opponent, another thing North Korea correctly figured out.

There's no scenario where countries like Pakistan or North Korea don't pursue nuclear weapons to compensate for their weakness or specific context. To say nothing of that pursuit on the basis of conquering rivals or ensuring dictatorships or kingdoms.

Iran is guaranteed to acquire nukes in the near future, both for their desire to be able to stand-off with Israel on an equal footing and to deter the US. Iran can't fight with the US in a conventional manner at all, the US can disable their entire economy and take down their air force and navy without ever invading. There's one tangible solution from their point of view.

If you're Vietnam, and China becomes a monster bent on conquering Asia, with a $40 trillion economy and an unlimited supply of soldiers, how do you stop them from taking your country? There's one answer.

Until there are no very powerful military nations, and all nations have similar numbers of soldiers, budgets and hardware, nuclear weapons will remain desirable for defensive purposes if nothing else.
This is not a good analogy. You just pointed out a real problem and then said we should prevent it. I said these real problems are used to justify drastic expansions of those rules to protect incumbents via the legal process. The situation does not require an analogy to understand.

A group of people who represent the status quo (large drone makers and currently operating commercial drone operators) are attempting to erect barriers to entry (licenses/exceptions) that will attach civil and potentially criminal penalties to the same behavior they engaged in (license/exception-free operation) to become successful. That is literally the definition of "criminalizing competition".

If you would like another example of this exact behavior without needing an analogy, see the fact that it is currently illegal in many US states to be a hairstylist without
applying for a license (with a fee) and meeting minimum education requirements (with a fee)... _to cut hair_.
Waymo: Where the next 10M miles will take us
One of the hidden problems with Sears going under is that by and large they had some really good auto repair shops. They charged a fair price and really didn't try any funny stuff. They were the good "I don't know a mechanic in this town" place to go.
A Future Where Everything Becomes a Computer Is as Creepy as You Feared
So everyone you haver worked with have always been exceedingly competent and smart?
I'm studying rust. In the past, I've used C when I wanted or needed to get close to hardware; even short snatches of assembler. I hope to never again have to write a non-trivial C program and make it thread-safe. Rust looks promising. The pain/productivity of rust should be high; it's trying to let you work as low-level as C, while helping you achieve a "single mutator at a time" safety model. I think of Julia and swift as higher-level languages, more domain-specific. Different tools for different problem domains.
> but none of that means their work isn't good for OSS.

I disagree. They are losing developer mind share, that's the only reason they have any open source initiatives. None of what MS does is good for open source IMO, and they can keep their money.

There seems to be quite the concerted effort to make MS 'cool and hip' here and elsewhere. I'm not buying it, I'm not using their software, and it's still perfectly valid to dislike MS for aforementioned reasons. I view their work on free software as only a mechanism to co-opt.
It's important for me to have a permanent digital copy of the music I pay for. The modern streaming services' subscription model doesn't allow for that. Worse still, rather than being a dumb pipe, which is literally what cyber lockers were, they now have to be a taste-making platform, a modern MTV trying to shape our preferences and stuffing ads anywhere they can.

I find the music I want by reading community based sources like Last.fm, RateYourMusic, genre-specialist website, reviews on personal blogs, and magazines/web publications I trust (e.g. the Quietus).

Thankfully sites like Bandcamp is still around, and offer a decent way to discover new artists and get DRM-free downloads, no questions asked.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18113144

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We’re building out a B2B SaaS platform to support this using Javascript and Python (Flask services) on AWS and Kubernetes at scale.

Open roles are as follows:

- Lead Site Reliability Engineer: https://www.workable.com/j/8605A40E4F

- Senior Python Engineer: https://www.workable.com/j/DD178A47E6

- Product Manager: https://www.workable.com/j/1BF3115981

- Machine Learning Engineer: https://www.workable.com/j/E0C3A6993E

Tech Stack: JS, Python, Kubernetes, AWS, Postgres, Redshift - https://stackshare.io/ometria
You can get it now with free software and have been able to for many years. What you won't see is a major distro including it.
> We wanted a primitive that would guarantee that initialization of the global variables would happen exactly once.

IIRC, At one time, there was a "lazy_static!" that fit this use case? But maybe you can't do that here if what you need is the side-effect of the library call.
It sucks what happened with them. TED/TEDx talks were awesome and I used to be able to recommended people watch any and all of them.

Until I started seeing stuff like this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8J5BWL8oJY
The same AI should be applied to hiring nurses and various other fields which show population skews in gender, as well as fields which are not skewed. I'd be curious as to the outcome.
> You can easily write an Elisp compiler in Common Lisp

I have no idea how easy it is and I have seen no attempt to do that (running the existing Elisp code without modification on top of a CL runtime). If it would be easy, I'd expect it to be done already.

The https://www.cliki.net/CL-Emacs page seems to of no help...

Do you know of any attempt demonstrating how easy it actually is?

> In fact, the original Lisp machine eventually supported Common Lisp as well as the original Lisp Machine Lisp. You could write any individual function in either language, and call from one to the other transparently.

That was a major engineering effort - putting both languages side by side onto a single runtime.
First, you can go off grid using 100% solar and a relatively small battery system as long as you get enough solar cells. The reason this works is your daytime input never drops to 0 and it's generally lower when you need less energy for AC systems.

In terms of the grid, Wind and solar really can't go to 0 over large areas. The minimum vs maximum output shows high variance, but maximum output is largely irrelevant. Really what you care about is minimum vs average output and that's more narrow band than you might think. Even better by locating Wind / Solar you can more closely match your daily demand curve.

Option 1, costs far more per kWh even if you can use every kWh, it's just get's worse from there. As it still needs over supply as power plants need occasional maintenance and the grid maximum and minimum demand over a year are wildly separated. You can setup maintenance around peak annual demands, but even then you will have occasional unexpected shutdowns.
> We want people on Microsoft's payroll to stop making noise on Hacker News.

In other words, you're saying it doesn't matter what they do, you've already made up your mind. And just to be sure, you don't want to hear anything that would contradict your opinion. Did I get that right?
Artificial intelligence may erode humans' ability to think critically
If you are not using the grid and just getting by using a foldable solar panel to charge 5 devices, then I should definitely not be lecturing you about minimizing waste.

You make a good point about the important thing being the comparison of emissions you would have caused had you used the grid versus what was used to create the panel and batteries. Still, it depends how much charging you actually wind up doing with the panel over its lifetime whether less CO2 is emitted or not. Though, I imagine in India pollutants other than CO2 are more pressing.

Thanks for sharing your experience. On the issue of climate change its somewhat depressing being in the US, policy has been stuck for a very long time. Its inspiring to hear from someone so committed from outside my usual sphere.
What makes python so complex? What are the features that if removed could really improve performance?

I love python's syntax, but I could do without its lazy interpretation, without duck typing if possible, and without its reference system.

In short I just like the syntax of python, I don't really care about its modules.