skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"grossly overcharge"?

Seriously - these tech companies have burn rates in the millions PER MONTH. I frankly wouldn't be surprised if ancestrery is doing over $1B per year.

Please note - these are records that CAN NOT be lost by the state. Some shmucks who can't even afford $100K want to take possession of this stuff? Forget it. Seriously, the van crashed on the way to the cheap place that scans these, the van burned up on the way to our "super cheap" scanning place - is no excuse to permanently lose irreplacable records. That's how half these startups and fly by night groups work.

I've often looked at these quotes. The cost to government, with salaries, pensions, supervisors and admin to do something it doesn't normally do, make sure it is safe, get in the scanners, do the quality control etc is higher than you think.

Just to do the RFP is a HUGE PAIN in goverment. You have to write it, get it approved, publicize it, get bids, find a scoring panel, score them, check they meet all the city and goverment requirements (redwood purchasing, mcbride principles for northern ireland, health care accountability - the list goes on). Then do all the adjustments for preference groups (now mostly local and micro biz and small biz, and WME etc). Then you have to fight the appeals. Every politicans rule drives the cost UP in govt. Voted in by the people. By the time you are at contract stage, getting city attorney approval etc - you are burnt out. Trust me, if someone comes knocking and wants all this for free - forget it.

If ancestry paid, then the real issue is these schmucks got preferential treatment by not paying and free-riding off the work the company paid for. And this is considered preferential treatment for ancestry?

I'm not fan of them (and don't use them), but folks, get a grip. If one requester has to pay $150K or insure, demonstrate prior experience doing this etc etc, and another get's it free because the first paid, that is NOT preferential treatment for the first who paid. What planet are these guys on?
You and I are in the minority though. The Web is already using too much RAM.

I'm still seeing laptops sold with 4GB which would be used really quickly.
Most of the cabs in the states that I have been in are plastered with ads. YMMV.
Google doesn’t pay Apple out of thin air for no reason – it pays because of the popularity and market power of the platform, which only comes from significant, sustained investment by Apple. It’s not separable from the rest of the balance sheet. If Apple stopped investing in the platform, then Google eventually would too.
I wonder what happened to the previous oldest intact shipwreck discovered by Robert Ballard in Black Sea:
http://press.nationalgeographic.com/2003/01/16/black-seas-ol...
> I'm reading a book now which I recommend, "The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F^ck", and which has been mentioned on HN before. You may find it helpful or at least interesting.

Great, I'll read it.

> You communicate naturally, so I encourage you to find a job where you can talk with a lot of different people every day. That will also help expose you to more and different things.

I'm sorry, but such as? Tech Support?

> Don't beat yourself up for not fitting into one of the molds that the educational system defines. Read the Steve Jobs biography by Walter Isaacson and you will realize just how much of a misfit he was.

I'll try to read that too! Yeah, I'm definitely a misfit for sure.

Thanks for your response :)
Please look up agency salaries before making that sort of statement. There's decent executive comp at the top, but there's a reason for the industry stereotype of being underpaid and overworked. It is also why so many from the agency side flee to the brand side.

Ad agency pay sucks in general.
I really couldn't roll my eyes harder at this. Yes, they're not building a distributed system. But they can do things that make them feel like they're solving problems.
> Purportedly newer GPS satellites don't have the option anymore.

That does sound suspiciously like something the military would want you to believe
I can't carry my desktop everywhere and I don't always want to be at home.
Python is growing because it's a good scripting language, and there's a need in the ML community for a standard language to write scripts in. The ML community is growing like crazy, thus Python grows. Even though Python is secretly calling Fortran for scipy, or Tensorflow (C++), or PyTorch (also C++), all of which would make good candidates for Rust replacements. So obviously speed is necessary to enable what people are doing in Python.

I make the distinction between script and what we software engineers do, because I had the misfortune of spending half a decade in research doing ML, and those guys are not writing production programs. They're hacking out Jupyter notebooks and writing precariously balanced code that barely works.

That doesn't make Python suitable for large applications. It doesn't diminish the fact that CUDA is growing, SGX is growing, embedded is growing, that we're now unlocking 100G fiber, that we've reached the limits of single core performance, that intel is rolling out 8+ core consumer CPUs. Python is not going to shine for any of these things, but Rust will.
You can also have the government out to ruin your life if you don't cooperate.

See: Joseph Nacchio and Qwest
Hi! That’s exactly what we’d like to know! Our lawsuit is asking the New York State Department of Health for copies of “all correspondence, e-mails, proposals, drafts, notes, agreements, contracts, meetings and calendar entries, phone logs, meeting minutes, budget items, receipts, vendorization forms or data, bids, evaluation materials, Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) records requests and their associated correspondence and any appeals, and any other documentation or communications between the New York State Department of Health and Ancestry.com, or such materials within the New York State Department of Health about Ancestry.com."

Basically, we’re asking NYS DOH “what happened here?”

So here’s the thing: under New York’s law, either the state can quote you the actual costs of making the copies and you then pay it (paper photocopies are capped at $0.25/page, other media must be actual costs of duplication) OR the requestor can physically make the copies themselves, onsite, during business hours. Using methods of duplication like a cellphone camera (flash turned off and battery-powered) has been held by the state Committee on Open Government (COOG) in their Advisory Opinions on the law, to be totally free.

So initially we asked the state for a cost estimate for these microfiche and they pulled one out of their ass, $152,000 for what should have been a few thousand dollars at most (see lawsuit text for the estimate calculations). OR we could just make the microfiche scans ourselves onsite, and that should have been free.

So we were willing to do option B, make the copies. But the state made us jump through all kinds of hoops to prove that the magical microfiche machine was high quality, that we would do it hand-fed instead of sheet-fed, that we work around their employees’ schedule, and so on. We said yes to all of that.

And then blammo, 800 lb gorilla company gets the records first, literally using our own words to do it.

So either Ancestry paid the fee, or Ancestry took Option B, as we were going to do, and did the work themselves. As per their PR Department in this BuzzFeed article, they did the work themselves.

But then they’re a for-profit company, acting as a de-facto vendor for the state. So shouldn’t there be a contract for the work?
In inconsistent places. In many UIs they're on the top left. In the browser it's on the bottom left?

So weird.
WinForms or WPF? I can throw together a (terrible) HTML page faster than I can remember how MVVM is meant to work.
I would actually love it if Mozilla ends up operating protonmail and brings over firefox mail of sorts.
> It's a niche feature that has been there since at least iOS 4

FWIW it's been in the MAC address book since the original OS X (jag-wire?)
Yeah, this took me a while to get used to because I was used to navigating to photos via the camera icon. Now, they are separate flows, although the camera still lets you get to the photos.
Speed matters, it’s just that it’s far from the top priority.

All else being held equal, developers and stake holders will choose the faster language, it just makes sense.

The trick is that speed is typically seen as diametrically opposed to usability, since quite a few languages achieve speed by turning all the safety rails off or existing way too close to the metal for comfort.

If rust could deliver speed without compromising on ease or safety, and I honestly don’t know if it can, then it will absolutely crush the competition.
I imagine the learning curve is a lot more manageable when you have an office full of full time Rust developers. If you’re on your own you become painfully aware of how often you need to solicit help, and the time it takes to familiarize someone else with your problem over chat or forum post really eats away at one’s motivation.
When android first came out they were apps like tasker (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.dinglisch....) almost immediately that showcased pretty clearly a lot of things you could do on android but not iOS, a lot of examples are here: http://www.crunchytricks.com/2016/10/tasker-profiles.html

My personal favorites are to turn off wifi if I'm not at home or work, turn off bluetooth if I'm not home, turn down brightness at night and shaking your phone to turn on the flashlight.
A lot of (but not all) complexity is solved in C/Python/Java by throwing a data structure at the problem. But is it a fair statement to say that not all data structures will work in Rust? Or is it better to say that some data structures work better in Rust than others?
How We Wrote a Textbook
My daughter grew up with Netflix (no commercials) and Hulu (no commercials specifically on kids programming, at least as of a year ago). She went to a sleepover when she was 6 and got incredibly confused when they were watching cable and the show stopped and a bunch of random toy videos showed up. She played it off in front of her friends, but asked me what was up with those videos first thing when she got home. She just couldn't understand why her movie would be interrupted like that.

... She also started pestering me for about a dozen different, explicitly named toys. Something she had never done before.
Burn rates of tech companies are irrelevant. The question isn't whether or not ancestry paid the 150k but rather if it was appropriate for NY to charge 150k for preliminary access to these records.
Python is pretty to look at, but I hate working in white space sensitive languages. If I have to have another argument about tabs vs. spaces I am going to toss my monitor out the frickin’ window.

Also, it makes autoindent in Emacs worse.
Do you have a detailed cost estimate?

New York government entities are required to use preferred source vendors (usually workshops for disabled people) for certain items when an item or service is available, including scanning. Preferred source vendors aren’t competitively bid and must be used by law.

When I was in school, paper copies of fiche from the state archives cost like $1-1.50 per fiche.

If you do some googling you can find various descriptions of issues, including cost, associated with that in the context of scanning.
> Do you really want to do CS? If not, that is OK! There is no One True Path (TM) to geek bliss.

I hope, but here in Spain, may I reiterate, it's a stable job so you get an idea why I like CS further than just liking because of whatever other reason, and all the other paths other than software development are weird and very not stable. I like CS, but I am lazy and again, not very smart (which I am not ashamed I am not very smart and so on, it's just a matter of fact, call it IQ call it whatever, I don't have a talent for logic).

> Is there anything else you'd like to do? Maybe something that's more of a technician role, where you use tech rather than designing it? Say, like an auto mechanic or IT administration, where you'll be using your hands and "doing" rather than cranking out lines of code.

I don't like cars so auto-mechanic is sadly a no-no for me, IDK about IT Administration, afaik, most people get to be managers and such at IT Companies after being for some years proficient coders and software developers, which I guess would not be the best path for me. But indeed, I should investigate!

> Also, good on ya for going to talk to a professional. I was in a similar jam a while back and it made all the difference.

Great for you :)! After going to the doctor here a lot recently because of many reasons, she finally decided to send me to one, so we'll see how it goes!

Thank you for your response :)
Any 42 silicon valley grads here on HN? How was it?
this doesn't sound like it's even in the technology's infancy. prototypes are being drawn up in the labs. they don't understand any drawbacks. when they eventually come up with something, inevitably it'd disappoint and fail. I can't see robots making the complex decisions of harvesting individual plants with all its variables involved, especially at the scale to not fail. This is much more than three years ago. This is a cheer leading fluff piece.
This is one of the better introductions to post-quantum cryptography that I've seen. It's pretty light on math and it offers broad coverage; including some of the current state of the art systems under consideration by NIST.

An especially good focus here is the comparison of systems based on different classes of intractability assumptions.
> Many people believe that Go rose to popularity because of the authors and the company sponsoring it, not on its technical merits

I don't believe this to be the popular opinion. Originally Google's involvement dissuaded me, and indeed the very Googly bits have been the worst (context.Context), but the rest of it is markedly un-google-like. It's much more of a Bell Labs feel, with a focus on tool efficiency and stability.

> Brad Fitzpatrick, one of the maintainers, even said the language brought nothing new to the table aside from better concurrency support in the Gotime podcast episode he attended.

I think that was very much the intent. There were a lot of good ideas over the years (especially in Plan 9) and Go is really just a modern, polished revision of those ideas glued together.

Go is a _systems_ language at heart. It focuses on maintainability and literacy, and that's where it leads the pack in my eyes. It's possible to squeeze pretty phenomenal performance out of such a simple language. It's easy to drop into assembly for ultimate optimizations.

Perhaps generality is a mistake? I don't miss it. I've never found joy in debugging someone else's generalized metaprogramming.

Building software at serious scale has led me to appreciate the wisdom buried within Go. It's boring and I love it.

I've written a bit of Rust (and a lot of C++) which I find enjoyable enough, but they're tools I rarely find myself reaching for.
Facebook Bans Brazillian Accounts
Unlimited Vacation Days – the newest fad of startups
Yeah, they're getting sneaky about adding 'features' that don't work if they're not connected yet have no actual need to be connected in order to implement them.

Mine isn't Android TV (though I suppose it's possible it's running some Android variant rather than just a custom Linux build behind the scenes... I'll check that out)... it's a Roku/Netflix TV. So my plan is to put it behind an OpenWRT router and at the very least isolate and monitor the traffic if I'm not easily able to MITM it. If I find anything interesting I'll probably throw up a YouTube video so Google can further build up its profile about me while I attempt to figure out how someone else is attempting to build up a profile about me. The game of cat and mouse continues... (not sure which I am most days)
Browsers don't support it without config flags, so rarely. But there certainly is demand in visualization, games, medical imaging, "data science", etc.

(Also these apps are not necessarily written in JS, it's a compile target too)
Whatever

I find mine easy to use
Steve Jobs was heavily against hidden functionality (sorry there is a word for it I can't remember off the top of my head). It's why Macs had one-button mice for so long. It wasn't until the third major revision of the OS that iPhones got copy+paste!
Sure there is a reason -- there might not be a statistically significant / valuable signal in the available data.

And in the physical retail world, collecting data comes at a cost (hardware, infrastructure, support). Often times, benefits don't outweigh that cost.
I’m curious how the internal meeting (at the newspaper) goes, when they have no actual proof, such as an actual compromised device. How could you possibly publish such a huge/important story without that smoking gun?

We live in too much of a scientific/fact driven period of time to allow this to be taken seriously in my opinion.
Well the Rust community is super welcoming, and the meetups have been really positive. They even have the #rust-beginners channel. :)

I find Rust to be fairly easy to reason about. The compiler has awesome messages, and even links you to your error type with more information. I also HIGHLY recommend reading the O'Reilly book AND the official Rust book (the free one) if you feel like you're "just not getting it".

Rust is a language that rewards understanding, and stops you from making mistakes when you don't know how things are actually working. This is a revolutionary plus. At the end of the day, Rust's rules are what other languages enforce through convention and the school of hard knocks.

After all, is that not the point of computing? To have the computer check things for you that a human is prone to error on?
Original Verizon statement: https://www.ft.com/content/d70c2ce2-e519-11da-80de-0000779e2...

They're very careful to say that they never turned phone records over to the NSA - who's to say they didn't turn phone records over to the DoJ, FBI, or any other agency, which then bounced them over to the NSA? I think they do have an out here. Plus, I'm not certain the SEC would sue over a matter of national security, even if Verizon was directly lying.
My advice: don’t do OOP fundamentals. OOP should come up out of necessity of keeping code modular, not as a governing principle.

Building simple apps is the way to go. Don’t do web at first, it’s too messy. Objective-C is a little harsh as well, so android development is what I’d recommend. It’s simple enough to not get too frustrated, and it’s good for motivation cause it’s cool to make an app for a phone.
>One specific customization we implemented is the ability to enforce that cold wallets can only send funds to a Square-owned hot wallet.

This actually seems like a significant risk. Cold storage is based on the idea that hot wallets are more easily compromised.

If someone does manage to compromise Square's hot wallet private keys, they can basically hold all cold storage funds hostage. Perhaps Square has some way to modify the allowed addresses, but that somewhat defeats the purpose of the restriction.
if people would just stop opening spam mail, clicking ads and other non sense this garbage would just go away.
Apple Search Ads: 2B in revenue
NASA named new constellations after the Incredible Hulk and Godzilla
They're actually still fairly common regarding aircraft radios. I see them daily working with avionics, though BNC is more common.
Folks - this is what makes government nervous. You have irreplacable records, and then a group comes in and considers all the rules "stupid" and "silly" and calls the microfiche machine "magical".

I don't think folks realize how risk averse government is. Literally, they probably use ONE brand of machine they KNOW works to deal with these records that go back over 100+ years. This is not some big conspiracy, this is literally how government works.

They've got an outfit come in, no budget, unwilling to pay for anything, can't be bothered to do things right. And then they get a corporation in like ancestry, probably can point to tons of experience doing exactly this, with lots of references, with deep enough pockets that if they screw up they can be persued to make it right.

Seriously, I've contracted with the goverment, the references thing alone is 100% how they operate, they want to see that you've done this same thing you will do for them 3x without problems for other agencies they can call up.

Seriously, if you did a high quality product, insured, check all the boxes, are totally 100% on all the "stupid" paperwork, the govt will fall over in love with you and you will have more work then you can handle, especially if you do it for free, and have 3 other places you've done it for who like your work.
It's funny how standards change. During the 1980 campaign, people complained that Ronald Reagan was just an aging pretty-boy actor whose only political experience was 8 years as governor of California.
Typo in post title.

Also fairly sure that there was already essentially the same article from ars posted earlier - but I don’t know the rules around separate reports parroting the same press release :-/
Anatomy Does Not Determine Gender
Safety and speed are the big words on the box. Usability is harder, because it's somewhat a matter of opinion. As someone who has professionally worked with the expression based Haskell, Erlang, Elixir, and OCaml, I find Rust to extremely expressive. If you come from that camp and feel that OOP is a bad toolkit of abstraction and that higher order functions, typeclasses, type parameters, and ADTs are much more powerful, then I think yes, Rust ticks all the boxs.
If they're not even portable between established systems, how are we going to port them to a comparatively exotic wasm+DOM target?