skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've been using computers since the mid 1990s, and after getting better from about 1995 to 2005, software has taken a turn for the worst. I'm sorry, most of it's just garbage these days. The new Gmail site lags on my Thinkpad with an i7-8650U (turbo boost to 4.2 GHz). When docked to the left-hand side of my screen (using WIN-LEFT), the layers of various toolbars makes it so the actual message text doesn't start until halfway down the screen. The content area extends past the right edge of the window, but not only that, it won't let you scroll that pane sideways to read the rest of the content. The reply button gets shoved off screen too, and the forward menu item is buried under some cryptic icon with three dots. And this is with the "compact" view and the left sidebar hidden!

In short, Gmail 2018 does a fraction of what Outlook '98 did two decades ago, and does it while pissing away processing power, memory, and screen space. This sucks. I want off this ride.

(While I'm ranting: what's up with Dropbox these days? I've been looking for an app to manage a library of PDFs and notes alongside. I decided to try Dropbox & Dropbox paper. The web app burns up 20% CPU just sitting there displaying a PDF. It can't render fast enough to keep with scrolling. I don't remember PDFs being onerous back in the late 1990s, but web apps seem to universally struggle with them even on modern hardware. After trying a bunch of other crap-tacular web apps, I stumbled upon Citavi, a traditional Windows .NET app. I was so happy I almost cried. It displays PDFs! It sits at 0% CPU usage when idle! It has a menu and toolbars, and you can dock and undock the content area to fit everything on screen! It's a wholly unremarkable app that's remarkable only because software has gotten so incredibly awful in the last decade.)
Consider that in 1856, one Senator attacked another with a cane on the floor of Congress and beat him nearly to death. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caning_of_Charles_Sumner
Product management is a strategic role and in companies wired up in the increasingly standard Agile feature factory approach, they are the gatekeeper to what development builds and they effectively steer R&D effort.
Internet crazies waiting for you at your home or place of employment, most definitely is a problem.

Internet crazies swatting you because you got a portafort in fortnite, or some equally trivial offense like that, most definitely is a problem.

And that's not even getting into the more sinister stuff that the fbi has to deal with.
Good PMs have a much broader scope and much greater knowledge of the business -- the problems the engineers are tasked with solving -- than many engineers do. When doing a good job they bring together the technical might of the engineers, the designers/architects of the system, and the business folks to be sure something is completed when needed, the way it needs to be done.

A good, technical PM who is great at working with people can link together folks with a wide range of skills and make sure stuff gets done. This is worth a lot of money.

(Conversely, a bad PM will absolutely kill a project, through a slow and painful process that'll make everyone involved want to quit.)
Piracy, or other objectionable content, is not exclusive to P2P platforms. YouTube has moderation features and so does PeerTube. From the FAQ:

Being free doesn’t mean being above the law! Each PeerTube hosting provider can decide on its own general conditions of use, abiding by their local laws.

For example, in France, discriminatory content is prohibited and may be reported to the authorities. PeerTube allows users to report problematic videos, and each administrator must then apply its moderation in accordance with its terms and conditions and the law.

The federation system, for its part, allows hosts to decide with whom they want to connect, depending on the types of content or the moderation policies of others.
Using alcohole fuel would have been a very reasonable solution, specially if you care about air quality amd not carbon.

China is using 100% methanol and other lesser methanol fuel that are produced from coal. But in other places you could use gas.

This would also be faster then full electrification. The US missed out massivly. The gas boom could have lead to very cheap and relativly clean fuel.

It would also be great to have that infrastructure because you can also do fuel cells with the same infrastructure.
Currently active: 1 around Venus, 4 around the Moon, 6 around Mars, 1 around Ceres, 1 around Jupiter.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_extraterrestrial_orbit...
Start-ups can at least deliver some tangible value at the end of the day. I'm still not sure what various cryptocoins deliver other than a get-rich-scheme.
No you are not. The title is in need of some attention.
Although not strictly technical, this is a great talk. Bryan effectively communicates both the history and the mindset of Sun Microsystems and its open-source software heroes, and the bitter disappointment of being taken over by Oracle.

I love this quote (about 33:15) summarizing Sun Microsystems:

Kicked butt, had fun, didn't cheat, loved our customers, changed computing forever.

"It makes me very proud to have worked for a company for whom that is completely accurate. We should all be so lucky as to have that be our epitaph. That is all I want out of my life. That and my family. [...] That is Sun. But that's not Oracle." --Bryan Cantrill. (A very excellent Oracle rant follows immediately after.)
There are people in my organization who’s job is purely to file tickets with IBM and they have titles that would be captured under “software engineer”.

So yes, totally agree with you. It seems that if you work on a computer with anything that isn’t graphics or Microsoft office, then you are a software engineer.
I'm a somewhat early adopter of Bitcoin, and believe in its long-term utility. Even so, I've been bearish for some time due to the influx of people who are buying coins or nothing more than speculation. I don't think that's "bad" per se, but it's not a sustainable means of growth.

I'm seeing more an more of these "the end is near" articles popping up. After witnessing a half dozen or so boom/bust cycle firsthand, my spidey sense is beginning to tingle that we're about to enter another one. After ten months of decreasing volatility and regression toward a mean price of $6,500 +/- 5%, I'm expecting a run-up any day now. It may not be another "to the moon!" run, but it'll happen. When it does, the new value will stabilize higher than it is right now.
No tether has ever been destroyed. While tether in its terms maintains that Tethers are redeemable "provided that you are a fully verified customer of Tether" [1], there is no known case of this ever happening, in fact it is a running joke that the tether signup page [2] is permanently suspended. Nor does anyone know who is buying them (and causing their creation). For example, when $250m of them were printed in june [3], which customer was it that deposited $250m USD? Or did they print them out of thin air? Nobody knows for sure.

But if they are in fact backed 1:1 with USDs, then it raises the question: if the tether peg is slipping below $1, why doesn't Tether or one of these alleged "verified customers" buy them up at a discount, redeem and destroy them for USD, and bank the difference?

The answer to this question is left as an exercise for the reader.

[1] https://tether.to/legal/

[2] https://wallet.tether.to/app/#!/signup

[3] https://omniexplorer.info/tx/bd9520b9aea701e9606ad8a8f4d6852...
One thing I've noticed is that companies generally have fewer PMs than software engineers.

A company might have a whole team of engineers but only one PM, and the PM typically has a title like "Director of Product Management". So it gives the impression that product manager is a director-level position. But eventually as the company grows, they'll eventually hire more PMs who report to the Director of Product Management the same way the software engineers report to the Director of Software Engineering.
I continue every month to be more convinced that the fundamental problem is that any platform where anybody, unsolicited, can for free send messages to anybody else, will forever have the "thundering hordes of assholes"[1] problem once it hits even modest scale. Having to hire people by the hundreds to "moderate" is desperately trying to salvage a fundamentally unworkable system, not a solution, even before we get into the interesting second-order effects such "solutions" can create, and what it does to the moderators themselves psychologically. You can't build a solution based around A: hoping the assholes just don't show up or B: that you will be smarter or more dedicated than the assholes.

I don't necessarily have a perfect solution all lined up, but just correctly identifying the problem is step one. I've mentally noodled with a number of models. But the thing they have in common is that none of them start with a new user being able to fling whatever they want to whomever they want for free.

[1]: I don't actually consider it a failure of the system if you encounter an asshole every so often. That's life. But when you start a video stream and you end up with so many assholes typing asshole comments so quickly that you literally can't even read them before they scroll away, even if you want to, that's a structural problem, not just a social problem.
Given than HN is a discussion board frequented by people who generally see the Internet as a fundamental aspect of “real life”, it seems ironic to argue that people should solve their social media problems by just logging off. It’s feels akin to telling someone who is forced to live with throttled capped Internet bandwidth to “go outside and read a book” or “just go to the movie theater”.

Presumably, the people who are most unhappy about Instagram harassment are people who use the social network to make connections and friendships that they can’t make otherwise — there is no line between their social network relationships and “real life” relationships, especially as the former so often becomes the latter. That Instagram is so massively popular, and even an engine for economic activity, is a sign that it’s not something that people can simply log off from. Imagine telling a developer to just “log off” and get a “real” job if Microsoft were to kill every Github repo that didn’t agree to abide by new draconian licensing and terms of service.
I'm sure Bloomberg has a huge archive of speculative articles on stocks.

Why are blockchain advocates so emotional? They should understand these articles because speculation is a core feature of the ICO boom and cryptocurrency in general.
IIRC You can search from any instance that's well-peered: https://instances.joinpeertube.org/instances
If you can cram enough electrodes in the brain, you can probably produce any effect you'd like, but that becomes more of a Descarte's demon/brain-in-a-vat scenario.
Just put them in some Native American reservations.
>why does the cost and cost share of software grow so dramatically at smaller nodes?

My guess is that the main reason is market segmentation. If you're willing to work at a smaller node, then you're willing to spend more money, and the software vendors can charge more.
The #s and charts make no sense. Also the data is from "offered salary" and H1B Labor certs?

Here's some real data (from last year). Someone here at HN started this anonymous spreadsheet that has captured REAL Salaries and Comps for Product Managers worldwide.

Show/Ask HN: Anonymous Global Product Manager Salary List (docs.google.com) by @walthall on Aug 16, 2017
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15031426

Direct Link to Google Docs Spreadsheet => https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1miQZp0_ckiPgkxH5_PUT...

Granted there are only 67 data points, but it would be really cool if someone here can do the number crunching and arrive at more realistic #s and averages :)
Python's range() Function (Guide)
But isn't canada part of united states. Canadians should be grateful for all the good things Amurica did to them.
This not Silicon Valley but in my company product managers start in a higher bracket than engineers. They also seem to have a steadier career progression. They seem to get promoted more regularly.
Agree, I'm a PM at a top software/internet company and engineers with half of my experience make greater package... Amazon is a mixed bag but FB, Linkedin (prior to acuisition), Google, Netflix all skew towards SWEs making higher packages when experience & performance are comparable
CS is actually an interesting case.

Historically, it was as likely to be part of the math department as it was to be part of electrical engineering. In part, this was because at the time electrical engineering was much more about analog circuits, power systems, etc.
Popularized by the west
Ha! After writing this comment, I checked the price history for the first time in a month or two. There was a spike in price and volume about 12 hours ago, that at first glance appears to be the largest in six months or so.
unless you have to cross a border with it?
I was thinking of a potential solution to this (and many other problems) - filter lists. Instead of putting the onus on the company/social network to police the users, all the content they post and potentially (well, definitely) angering significant parts of the population (e.g. either the democrats, the republicans, or both!), they could just add opt-in "filter lists" that would be curated by (groups of) users. A few would be enabled by default (e.g. gore, NSFW, etc), others you could discover simply by searching for specific keywords (e.g. "filter all neo-nazis" or "filter all anti-fa") (like browser add-ons) or by ranking them by popularity, and whatever filters you have enabled, the webpage would also show you how many users/posts/comments are hidden by your filters. That way, noone could accuse any organisation of censorship, the lists could be shared between websites (reducing the effort and enabling smaller companies to function), and the only real responsibility of the companies would be to keep illegal content off the site (or something that break all online etiquette, e.g. doxxing).
How big of a problem is bike theft in the Netherlands?

I live in the UK and I probably wouldn't consider getting a bike again, simply because I know it would be nicked within a month.
> For much of this year, I’ve been exploring the biases of digital media, trying to trace the pressures that the media exert on us as individuals and as a society. I’m far from done, but it’s clear to me that the biases exist and that at this point they have manifested themselves in unmistakable ways. Not only are we well beyond the beginning, but we can see where we’re heading — and where we’ll continue to head if we don’t consciously adjust our course.

Reminds me of a few lines I read months ago from Daniel Pinchbeck's Breaking Open The Head: "In contemporary life we do whatever we can to deny intuition of the invisible realms. We clog up our senses with smog, jam our minds with media overload. We drown ourselves in alcohol or medicate ourselves into rigidly artificial states with antidepressants. Then we take pride in our cynicism and detachment. Perhaps we are terrified to discover that our "rationality" is itself a kind of faith, an artifice, that beneath it lies the vast territory of the unknown."

Further reading: https://www.artofmanliness.com/articles/manvotional-thoreau-...
For a primarily phone-based application, this seems pretty weird to me. (It's harder to navigate and participate in compared to say reddit or fb)

I use Instagram, however, the only "harassment" I receive is spam and occasional mentions from p_rn bots. I also keep my profile and I'm not trying to push, sell, or make myself a celebrity.

What I think that may be happening: There are a lot of people who are trying to leverage their message or themselves to a level of celebrity and they don't realize that this is one of the consequences of it (or that they refuse to accept it).
Show HN: Rainway Real-time game streaming in the browser with native speed
you can get it back kinda if you keep dwm from starting, but then you lose some other things.
Do they also infiltrate similarly dangerous right-wing groups? I meant that as a serious question, not as a Socratic way to make a point. I don't recall that being reported but maybe it's due to my poor memory, or maybe it just hasn't been discovered.
> is just one direction of investigation

Sort of my point. Current (by that I mean post-early 20th century) approaches were to mimic what we believe to be human reasoning. That's clearly limited.

> The AI will be just as "ethical" as a computer or an assault rifle.

I think that's reductive. Reasoning is not entirely analytical. There are other implications and concerns to artificial sentience.
The number of Bitcoins that currently exist is still increasing, at about 4% annually. They have an eventual cap (assuming that never gets hard-forked away) but for now they still mint 12.5 new bitcoins every 10 minutes.
In my view, they can have it. I was a project manager (granted, a slightly different title and role) for a couple years. I went back to the bench. Fortunately I took a pay hike in both directions.

Those middle management jobs seem to be super high stress, long hours, and low reward. Literally everybody I've known who went into one of those jobs did so upon the birth of their first kid, when they felt the financial pressure. Myself included.

Now that's my impression. If you like the job, of course I admire that, and welcome you to collect your reward!
Why don't you have a tight correspondence, though? Is it something intrinsic in the problem space, or you just want to do it the way you think of it?

In a number of cases, I've found that the Rails Way was smarter than my original assumptions.
Assuming that this is true, that also adds a distinct meaning to the word so that saying "pork" as opposed to "pig meat" would have served as an indication of class status in addition to e.g. what you'll be eating for dinner.
> And when people whinge about performance... well, so what? Horizontal scaling, friends.

I hear this a lot, but in my experience, it's not a workable solution to this particular problem. 100% of the systems I've worked on in the conventional 'slow' languages (Ruby, Python, Elisp, declaration-less Common Lisp, etc) hit significant performance bottlenecks in typical single-thread use cases. These languages enable me to work quickly when making a prototype, but then I spend a long time optimizing it to run fast enough for a single user.

Don't get me wrong. The speed of development for these HLLs is great. It's much better to be able to move continuously from the first prototype to a production system. (I don't want to write a prototype in C, nor do I want to throw out a working HLL prototype and rewrite it all in C.) The benefit, though, is that I can get a prototype running quickly, and iterate quickly. It doesn't obviate all performance requirements just because there's an HTTP server involved.

Horizontal scaling is a great solution to "my web app suddenly got very popular, and it works great for 1000 occasional users but today I need the capacity to deal with 10,000 simultaneous users".
This is amazing! Thank you.

I still buy physical books rather than e-books, but I always thought that hyperlinks were a great part of a reading experience as well.
Why Internet Tech Employees Are Rebelling Against Military Contracts
Open source collaboration in the blockchain era: EVM packages
From what I have seen this is the case in theory but I have't seen many product managers who really can pull this off. The few that can do it are worth a lot though.
Then surely the problem isn't harrassment, but assault? Also, if you put enough information online, all it takes is one crazy/creepy stalker/murderer to track you down and do anything, that's completely orthogonal to the general problem of "online harrassment".
Rule of law and an independent judiciary are things in America

A rule of law that is profoundly flexible to achieve whatever the US government wants to do. From secret courts and directives that you can't talk about, to the wholesale capture of telco traffic (with telco complicity, of course). And that rule of law allows the massive US intelligence establishment to do virtually anything internationally (which is the context that we're talking about), from sabotaging systems, performing economic espionage and stealing trade secrets, to murder.

Virtually the same trappings and illusions of controls exist in China as well.

Both countries do the same thing, and to an international country are interchangeable. The overall context to these discussions, however, is that the US is somehow good and China is somehow bad, so it's different.
Not sure he is particularly qualified and for the record he did NOT predict the 2007 - 2009 market crash. By any financial metric the 1999/2000 internet bubble was WAY bigger - if indeed crypto will become one.
Yes (eg. C18 and the BNP), but going by this (incomplete and possibly misleading) list, not to nearly the same extent as left-wing groups.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/ng-interactive/2018/oct/...

Edit: "Similarly dangerous" is a bit subjective (some people are terrified of socialism), but in terms of danger of actual violence perpetrated by members of the groups, I'd say the BNP and especially C18 were on a very different level from the left-wing groups on the list that I'm familiar with. But then I've personally received death threats from C18 so maybe I'm biased.
Honestly, I'm glad to hear this. It means that the older values: Your consideration and treatment of the customer determine your success. Trying to run a business into the ground "for profit" is a dumb thing to do.
The Salary Taboo: Privacy Norms and the Diffusion of Information
Those diagrams look really nice. Does anyone know how they were made?
Neither of those groups as a matter official policy want to overthrow the current government. Even if one believe the current government deserves to be overthrown, it seems relatively normal to keep an eye on them.

Note that what I would consider an appropriate level of keeping eye on them would be to pay attention to their pamphlets, occasionally send someone to a meeting, reading up on who is who to make sure you know if something is changing.

I think infiltrating them for decades was just a ridiculously over the top.
I've also used them from https://www.dreamscreentv.com/
IIRC, virtually every service just requires an email address, including Google, Facebook, and Twitter. I’ve found that Twitter now quickly throttles any dummy accounts I make by requiring a phone number. But obviously, there’s huge downsides to requiring a phone number.
Scale is a significant differentiating factor.
> The correct response is for Canada to remove its dependence on the US

This would be reckless. Geography dictates the U.S. and Canada will be major trading partners. Population, resource distribution and topography dictate, for the foreseeable future, the U.S. will be the big sister in that relationship.

Smarter would be to hang low and wait for fairer weather.

> who will trust treaties with the US when the next admistration can arbitrarily end them?

I agree. Since "the U.S. has not withdrawn from a trade agreement since 1866" [1], there is disagreement over whether Trump can unilaterally kill NAFTA or if he requires Congressional approval [2][3]. Either way, it's not a good show.

[1] https://money.cnn.com/2016/07/06/news/economy/trump-nafta/in...

[2] https://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/international-affairs...

[3] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-08-30/trump-boa...
> That's like saying fentanyl isn't particularly dangerous, because you aren't going to OD on the level that is pleasurable.

It's actually the total opposite of what I'm saying. I'm saying that caffeine specifically is less likely to do that than cocaine (or fentanyl).

> Pure or high-concentration caffeine is quite clearly dangerous.

This is another argument I did not make.