skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: How to legally discover competitor pricing and discounts?
I am at a networking startup and looking at MSRP pricing we seem to be an order of magnitude off from the competitor pricing. I know large discounts are common in the industry but I have no way of quantifying them. Is there a legitimate service that provides market pricing analysis along with approximate discounts?
I've had 2 bites from the brown recluses.

The first was on my upper lip, sent me to the hospital, before the necrosis it swelled up closing off my mouth and nose so I couldn't breath. The "core" was extracted and I was left with minimal scarring, but I keep a mustache to cover it.

The second bite was on my big toe. Woke up one morning with my toe swollen to the size of a small orange. When I went to the hospital for that one, some rotting had already started. My 350 pound father and two nurses held my leg down as the doctor cut into it. They were no match, I knocked them all to the ground when I felt the blade. I now have a dime-sized spot on my big toe.

I still don't fear them, and recognize the good they do. I try to avoid spiders now though ;).
Here's a process that works: leave me alone to get the job done, and I'll report progress to you regularly. Leave the manager out of my day to day activities. In fact keep everybody out of my way.

Agile explicitly puts people in my way, regularly, and with demands that I report progress with imaginary metrics.

That's how I'd fix it. In fact I became a contractor so I didn't have to do agile any more. Now I get tremendous amounts of work done, using my experience and talent to attack root causes and write the critical code to get the job done.

I see its a whole different attitude from Agile, I get that. But I'm adamant that I don't want what Agile does.
One downside for employees is that stuff like getting a mortgage will often be a lot harder if you're a contractor.
Just buy an Android device and opt out of all the tracking?

People behave as if this is impossible, but the options are all right there in the settings. There are a few places you lose some features but not super significant ones, and mostly those are because the tracking is intrinsically involved in the functions of the app.
Little Rock's Dangerous and Illegal “Drug War”
I don't know about "many", but certainly some - e.g. you could form a "reversed MonadWriter" applicative that would write the messages from ma before the messages from mf. For a lot of monads the effects are commutative though, in which case the "two possible" Applicatives are actually the same, e.g. Maybe obviously behaves the same whichever order you "run" mf and ma in.
With something like this, brown recluses in California. Where a lot of people believe it, because it's a "known fact". Well local media is populated by a lot of those people. They're probably not knowingly lying or creating a conspiracy. Just talking about something "everybody knows", and it just happens that that fact is mostly wrong.

There isn't a problem with saying the media is wrong, misinformed, or lying, if you have hard evidence to support that claim.

Trump's problem is he just claims any negative news are malicious lies, and rarely has anything to support his claims even a little bit. And that he, the undisciplined lair, is the only reputable source of information anyone should listen to, if they were smart anyway.

Big difference.
Sneakernet is alive and well in NK.
Add me please maman.bakayoko@gmail.com
I pictured DJI drones dropping seed bombs, but taking a look it seems a lot more impressive than that. Very cool--hope this takes off!
They also completely underfunded the development of both Tizen and, especially, their app store. They offshored development off it to Eastern Europe as well, and even there it was less than 100 people, and not the best ones in the market (they weren't paying premium wages for Eastern Europe).

So if this is Samsung "pushing", they're truly a very sucky company.

This is lack of will on Samsung's part, not some magical market advantage on Google's part.
It was indeed posted on 4chan, as you can see here - http://4watch.org/superstring/

That's the whole thread
Chinese companies assemble Apple’s hardware.

The phase of iPhone manufacture that’s done in China involves screwdrivers and glue, not high-tech fabs. It could be done elsewhere for a smaller price increase than you might expect.
A big reason for that being that they weren't made for them.
Ethically do you even have to cite something properly when the person who solved it was intentionally anonymous? If the concern is that people will think the person writing solved it, they can just write a sentence where it came from.
I think that’s an over-simplistic view. Failing to adhere to Chinese law would mean exiting the Chinese market. If the US passed a similar law, Apple would be forced to comply with it (although they would at least have recourse through the courts to eventually show that such a law was, perhaps, unconstitutional).
Apple could be forced to allow another app store, which is essentially what the EU is demanding here.
Like Apple's secure enclave or Intel's SGX? Or a physical jumper which would require physical access to move?
Does this do anything I can't do already via Emacs?
6 Tactics to Boost Efficiency in Your Business
It depends on the court. IIRC, that ruling came from the Landgericht Hamburg, which has become a bit of a running gag because of their copyright friendly rulings.
Huh? She's trying to highlight the hypocrisy in people who want border walls but then demand those services at cheap rates. This is nothing specific to her own thinking and want of cheap labor. It's purely calling out the conflicting stances.
Also lending strong support for the infinite number of monkeys theorem.
An "academically correct" solution (i.e., not to taint the prestige of a scholar who cites the solution) would be to cite a real, proxy scholar who checks the solution, but gives all credit to the anonymous 4chan user.

Scientists often abhor citing from blogs, forums, and Wikipedia, as those publications "are not peer-reviewed by trustworthy professionals".
Maybe, if the BTC payment was at a higher rate that could help offset the risk and inconvenience.
Getting the court venue, judge, and that jurisdiction's political process favorable is an art too.
From that I'd bet you also not be willing to spend money on being carbon neutral. Because you can be more comfortable with an extra few hundred dollars in your pocket every year. So then you're part of the problem, not part of the solution and someone who consumes with no regard for the impact is has on the planet.
How blockchain can help fix the microtask economy
Here's a USR modem recording for the daily nostalgia hit.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OR5n8R10iAM
Exactly, the law should be modified to force platform providers to guarantee their users:

1) the ability to install their own apps, no restrictions (IF approved by owner)

2) the ability to get apps from wherever they want

I would be much happier.
The follow-up to the other tweet says it was copied to that wiki from 4chan.
This is interesting. I imagine given the readership and focus of HN its more indicate of what languages will be popular in the future than the Stack Overflow / Github listings.
Author doesn't speak native English; she's Polish.
I believe you now can use a Siri shortcut to create a button that goes in your widgets area that turns the VPN on or off.
change "wiki" to "message-board" and "mainly" to "originally" and it becomes accurate. It came from the /sci/ board on 4chan.
For years I’ve been clamoring for competitive heads up Tetris...and I knew there would be an audience for it.

The crazy thing...what you link isn’t even the exciting 2 player mode. I’m not sure if it’s the nes or snes version but 2 player is more of a battle mode where your 2 lines, 3 lines and Tetris’ get included on your opponents side. The winner is last man standing (not score).
Twitter-Intelligence – Twitter Intelligence OSINT Project Performs Tracking
They are also prone to disappearing, post-citation editing, etc.
"And yet Perl 6 has been droppping their performance floor by enormous factors, with a lot of room for improvement still."

Considering the literally-unusable performance that Perl 6 has had within fairly recent memory, getting a lot faster hasn't been that impressive.

Plus, goals aren't results. I'll believe Perl 6 is natively fast when somebody actually shows it outcompeting, say, Rust, on some non-trivial task, written in the native idiom. No fair just sitting there in a loop and adding integers, which is easy-mode for a JIT. Show me a real program, that I didn't have to write in a magical subset of Perl 6 to get the performance (a problem Javascript has, "fast JIT'ed Javascript" is a mysterious and ever-changing subset, where your performance can be tanked at any moment by the smallest of changes), and don't tell me about how it's a 100x faster than last year, show me how it's faster than Rust now. Or, heck, just show me beating Go. I'll believe when I see it. And I will believe it when I see it. I have no problem with that. But I've seen the whole "as good as or better than C" claims a lot over the years, and the people making those claims are batting nearly 0.000. (Rust is pretty much the only language with a chance.)

You seem to believe in the existence of a bunch of people who have somehow wrapped their identity around hating Perl 6. That's not it; what you're seeing is that the Perl 6 community burned through their goodwill literally years ago, and now people are just exasperated when the topic comes up. If it helps you to identify as some sort of persecuted minority, hey, go nuts [1], it's a very popular option nowadays, but the Perl 6 community is years past the point where mocking the potential customers into trying it is going to do any good. You're going to need hard evidence... really, really hard evidence, probably rather a lot of it, more than you'll probably think is fair but such is the hole the Perl 6 community has dug itself into over the years... to convince people, not mockery.

[1]: Actually I think it's a terrible and very unhealthy idea; you'll find none of the collected ancient wisdom of humanity will tell you that constantly nursing a persecution complex is the way to wisdom or happiness. But such is the zeitgeist of the era.
I know that once upon a time they banned competing apps, including Google Voice. I don't know if that behavior continues but I think it's a bit too soon to forget.

https://techcrunch.com/2009/07/27/apple-is-growing-rotten-to...
I went to a usergroup meet up that talked about the business of large vehicle monitoring (18 wheelers, farm machinery, buses). Basically, there is this system installed on all (?) vehicles called the CANBUS that supports tracking different metrics. E.g. hydraulic pressure, current RPM of wheels, etc etc.

Through these raw streams of data and through post mortem analysis of situations, the company started realizing they could predict when things would wear out. They experimented with things like how many times does a bus door open and close before failure is induced to learn more about how the data they had access to could be used for predictions. Now the company not only sells vehicle telemetry but also predictive maintenance notifications.

The point of this whole story is this. I believe it's hard to quantify tech debt without being familiar with the code. However; I believe there may be an indirect metric that can apply to most cases to let businesses know when to invest in paying down tech debt. Maybe it's something raw and kludge-y like "for every 5 'additive' tickets (user stories, features, bugfixes, etc), one additional ticket should be created to refactor the system." Maybe that particular solution isn't great but the idea of a "'universally' applicable indirect metric for tech debt for business monitoring" seems tractible.

---

P.S. Personally, I've toyed with the idea of a 90/10 technology business where 90% of all work done is invested in production monitoring, building metrics, improving any performance bottlenecks, simplifying the codebase (literally reducing LOC where possible), information sharing (recorded tech talks about parts of the system with quizzes at the end), building testings, investing in deploying the system quickly and painlessly, and getting people set up to work ASAP (Vagrant, documentation, w/e). Only 10% would be spent on new feature development. Tech debt is always being paid down in this setup.
I guess we cite the poster's hash and timestamp?
the source code used in the article is here:

https://github.com/uncomplicate/clojurecl/blob/master/test/c...
It should be obvoius that hash table lookups are above O(1) as long as collisions exist. Tweaking the load factor can reduce the probability of collisions, but that's merely a constant factor to the lookup complexity. As to whether O(log(n)) is a good approximation for the average, we can certainly discuss that. It depends a lot on the algorithm, but https://probablydance.com/2017/02/26/i-wrote-the-fastest-has... shows (first graph) that the reality is typically even above logarithmic for some reason.
> Ethically do you even have to cite something properly when the person who solved it was intentionally anonymous?

Yes. Not because they need/want the credit, but because it's important to note that it's not your idea.

> If the concern is that people will think the person writing solved it, they can just write a sentence where it came from.

That is, basically, what a citation is.
Just saying that for many people "squish and ask questions later" is unrelated to how dangerous they are
Explosive Devices Found in Mail Sent to Hillary Clinton and Obama
Yeah... I was going to say urbit is urbit with dollars signs, but they are some kind of crypto-token signs, not dollars...
Having interviewed and worked with a lot of people:

A mediocre mid-20s developer is given a lot of chances, and not much is expected of the developer.

Once you're mid-career, the expectation is that you'll take some kind of a leadership role: People management, high-level architecture, or direct mentorship. Otherwise, if you're mediocre, you need to target roles where you're given chances. (Basically, a consultant.)

What's also important is staying current, which becomes so much harder once you have kids, a house, and your hobbies don't involve staying up all night on a side project. I'm trying to use vacation time for this, but family obligations tend to soak up my vacation time like a dry sponge.
Oh wait, "languages" in the title are natural languages!

I haven't realized that typing the above comment. :D
The Importance of women in financial advice
Why not both?

Apple's market strategy was already primed towards a privacy-focused stance, since their profit center is selling physical devices. Thus, when privacy becomes a Big Deal in the world, Tim doesn't have to push hard to get Apple to line up with his beliefs. If Apple had been an advertising-focused company before Snowden, I doubt we'd be seeing as hard a push as they're giving right now.
Personally, I find the introduction of devices with software and distribution lockdown to be much more concerning. As a customer, my relationship with Apple has always been a middle finger from them. The saddest thing is watching everyone cheer them on. Many would much rather be surveiled by Google than be treated as hostile by Apple, and that choice is ok.
That's why you would return a Result from all those and handle any failures that way. The Result type is meant to be used any time an operation could fail.
Here's a podcast interview to the author of Winners Take All Anand Giridharadas about the damage philanthropists do to public education https://soundcloud.com/haveyouheardpodcast/win-win
The word "surveillance" in the title is superfluous.
Raising gas taxes are a good idea for other reasons too, primarily being the funding of infrastructure maintenance. Gas taxes are an almost perfect tax, where the more you're using the underlying public good (the road) the more you'll pay to support it.

However, if EVs become the norm, that relationship breaks down and it becomes trickier to fund roads with taxes that link very directly to usage--assuming you believe privacy is a good thing and worth protecting.
> Here's a process that works: leave me alone to get the job done, and I'll report progress to you regularly. Leave the manager out of my day to day activities. In fact keep everybody out of my way.

Hah, I almost said that that's where this genre of agile criticism seems to come from: the coder who believes they can produce a good product by writing good code without interacting with a customer and so regards any process as an impediment, and isn't actually attacking agile so much as attacking the very concept of process. What you propose is a good way to produce elegant code that doesn't actually do what the customer wanted at all; even if you personally can magically understand the requirements every time, a customer (or a manager) is right to be skeptical, because most programmers can't.
A fast, reliable cuckoo hash table for Node.js
> Realistically though, the answer is that paid journalism disappears, or the Internet as we know it disappears. Increasingly lately it's looking like both will happen.

Seems a touch hyperbolic. My question would be: what part of the internet depends on paid journalism and how would the disappearance of paid journalism effect e.g. buy stuff online, looking at pornography, or accessing social media?
Run on a machine that doesn't have Emacs installed.
NLP Overview: An integrated platform to learn about modern NLP techniques
Do you want to learn more about the modern deep learning techniques applied in NLP, and keep track of emerging trends, dataset/code releases, and state of the results in the field? In collaboration with Soujanya Poria (an NLP researcher), we are open sourcing an online learning resource for NLP researchers and developers called “NLP Overview”. The project contains an overview of recent trends in deep learning based natural language processing (NLP). It summarizes implementation details behind deep learning techniques such as recurrent neural networks (RNNs), convolutional neural networks (CNNs), and reinforcement learning used for various NLP tasks and applications. The site also contains a summary of state of the art results for NLP tasks such as machine translation, question answering, and dialogue systems. You can find the learning resource at the following address: https://nlpoverview.com.
I understand that the government tries to incentivize people to invest, but it's also very clear who profits most from such regulations. In a market where there's a lot of capital which already chases yields (ECB already keeps the interest low).

It's always Keynes vs. Friedman (and a mix of both), but I don't like this de-regulated state. We already have big problems with inequality.

What do you think about this?
And they kill each other much more the easier it is to do so...
Tech entrepreneur with a multi-million dollar startup has shared his secret
You literally said:

> I would also caution against the push for almost complete privacy as that IMO leaves out a number of potential advantages from systems having enormous amounts of data about us.

So I created an example. Forget my example if you wish, I still have the same question. What benefit is there specifically, from companies "having enormous amounts of data about us"?
Baidu's AI can do simultaneous translation between any two languages
I'd like to think I'm one of the good guys here. I was one of the inventors of RSS and Atom and worked to push open content and social media.

I started a social data search platform named Datastreamer (http://www.datastreamer.io/) which is basically a petabyte-scale content indexing engine.

We provide API feeds to search engines and social media analytics companies needing bulk data but don't want to have to build a crawler.

For the last 5 years we've had major problems with customers coming to us asking for data which we felt was unethical (at best).

We actually had Saudi Arabia approach us... It was clear that they were intending to something pretty evil with the data.

Their RFP questions were a bit frightening:

- can you track people by religion?

- can you give us their email address?

- can you provide their address?

- can your provide their ethnicity?

- can you provide their social connections?

We're actually losing business to other companies that are performing highly unethical and probably illegal techniques.

We just can't compete with data at that type of fidelity.

If you're a researcher and you want to access bulk data for combating this type of non-sense WE WILL PROVIDE DATA AT COST. We can provide up to 1PB of data but for now we have to charge for the shipping and handling of that data. We're reaching out to some other companies like Google and also the Internet Archive to see if we can provide more cost effective solutions.

I'm working on more tools to give the power back to the users.

Polar (https://getpolarized.io/) is a web browser which allows people to control their own data. The idea is that I can keep a local repository of data and eventually build our own cloud platform based on open systems like IPFS and encrypt the data using group encryption.
>Scientists often abhor citing from blogs, forums, and Wikipedia, as those publications "are not peer-reviewed by trustworthy professionals".

Academia. And even that is error prone due to bias.
Not really. They own like 50% of the market. They position like 1960 GM. The $1,500 iPhone is the aspirational thing that everyone talks about. If you have money, you buy the iPhone Xs (ie the Cadillac), if you want to look "better", buy the Xr (Buick), if you don't care, you buy the iPhone 7 (the Chevy). There is almost nothing that the $1,500 phone does that the $1 phone does not.

The cheapo androids are more like the Yugo of mobile devices, and the nicer Androids basically cost the same or a little more. iPhone 7 is $1 on many promo deals.

If you go to companies with compliance requirements, iPhone owns the market, and is by far the cheapest solution. One of my "side hustles" in a very large org was managing about 40k iOS devices and 400 android devices... it basically cost about $9/year to manage, including staff. Staffing was basically 40-60% of two IT guys and half of 3 interns. If we broke the cost down further, the Androids would have been significantly more expensive, as additional 3rd party software was required as well as many more man-hours.

The iPhone is magic in that way, with sufficient scale, you deliver almost magical capability to your whole company, including network connectivity, for less than the run cost of a PC. And it costs something like 80% less to manage than a PC. If you look at companies in industries like field service, iPhones are almost a profit center.
Sometimes the stars align. Clearly Apple is in a good position to take this stance because they don't have a lot to lose if stronger privacy protecting regulations are enacted while their competitors, especially Google, would take a significant hit.

That being said I can totally believe that he genuinely believes what he says. Actually I'd wager that most tech people, including at Google and Facebook, see that we're having a problem with "big data" and the compulsive profiling of their users. The potential for abuse is tremendous.

Regardless of ulterior motives I think we should rejoice, having a behemoth like Apple taking such a clear stance on this issue could generate enough momentum to have an actual change in mentalities.
Tetris never dies. I know a lot of people are pretty excited for the Tetsuya Mizuguchi reboot Tetris Effect which launches Nov 9 for PS4. Particularly VR play, which seems to reliably induce out of body experiences ;)

The Tetris Effect And Our Boundaryless Digital Future

https://www.wired.com/story/tetris-effect-tetsuya-mizguchi-v...
iOS still sucks tho
Absolutely true. The only problem is that rarely are actual values being debated in politics.