skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That you're posting this is excellent and admirable.

I personally take two approaches when I feel any kind of resentment toward people who seem to have enormous and/or unfair advantages.

I first consider my own objective advantages. Instead of being born into a solid middle class home in Southern California a few decades ago, I could have been born in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Yemen recently, or almost anywhere in the world more than a century ago.

That I am here posting on Hacker News puts me in the (at least) top 1% most fortunate humans who have ever lived.

Secondly, I consistently walk in and practice https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stoicism It's kind of my own version of it, I guess a modernized variant of what's found in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meditations

I've found that these perspectives help me with all kinds of psychological challenges.
But what is the difference between sunk cost and necessary persistence?

Sometimes it's not obvious at all. There are many cases of people who were failing for decades but they persisted and then out of nowhere they got their big break. There are also many cases (probably even more of them) where people persisted but went nowhere. It's only sunk cost in hindsight.
I completely agree. My comment was actually saying I think it is often cheaper to do the right thing (even if it means spending more money initially).
Totally agree. This skewed metric is why r/AskOuija is massively overrepresented.
Ahh, I had assumed the wires were only exposed at the same height, but protected at ground level.

In some red light camera installations you can use an Allen wrench to open an oblong metal panel at the base of the camera pole and expose the power circuit.

...said a friend.
The problem with your hypotheticals is that for most people who would claim that they apply to them, it would be safe to bet that they have reversed cause and effect.

For example multiple longitudinal studies have found that alcoholics usually begin to drink heavily, then develop life problems, then revise their memories and remember it as they developed life problems before they started to drink. Therefore if you talk to alcoholics, they will usually claim that they were driven to drink. They aren't exactly lying - this is how they remember it. But that usually isn't what happened.
For some reason it never occurred to me that they'd use ML for detecting suspicious behaviour, until I read your comment.

I've never considered this but it makes perfect sense, thanks for that!
From the original NY Times article [1]:

> Google could have fired Mr. Rubin and paid him little to nothing on the way out. [...]

> When Google fires lower-level employees, it typically marches them out immediately and pays little, if any, severance. But for senior executives, Google weighs other factors, said former executives. A wrongful termination lawsuit could mean unwanted media attention for Google and the victims of a misconduct case, with a loss resulting in significant damages.

It doesn't say explicitly, but it sounds like they didn't have a legal obligation to pay him; rather, they did so to avoid the possibility of a lawsuit or bad press.

What they definitely didn't have to do was this:

> Afterward, Google invested in Playground Global, a venture firm Mr. Rubin started six months after leaving the company.

It's one thing to pay severance if you don't think you can win an unlawful termination lawsuit, but it's another entirely to invest in that person's next venture after you're absolved of any legal obligation to them.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/25/technology/google-sexual-...
Not signing in to reddit is the surest way to experience the online equivalent of a table next to the bathroom.
And then, after the walk out, they will return to their desks and continue working for the company. If you want a walk out to matter, you leave... and don't come back for free food in the employee cafeteria right after.
Just checked the website and it looks like a mimic with payout. I hate them all the same no matter whether I am asked to click on all the buses or cats.
It's not "malicious", its the assumption that he gets to act like that. What they need to do is prove that he behaved in a way that was inappropriate. It sounds like there's plenty of evidence that he did - hell, they had enough evidence to record, in writing, that they found the claims against him credible.

The difference between him and the people that they did fire was his position. Which is entirely backwards - the penalties for criminal behaviour should be higher for people with more power, not less.
Acquire XP: Save what you already know to focus on complex problem solving
Even experienced professionals in the industry would spend time, a day or two, in retrieving "how-to" (say back-up a Hadoop server and migrate data properly).

What if we could organize operational knowledge that we could focus onto complex problem solving.

Another example, there's a general tendency to hate others who are spending 6-12 months preparing for software coding interviews. Maybe because the mind does not work that way (bake the clay, and use the pot) rather than putty that could be molded for the problem at hand real-time.

I'm working on this idea but not sure on what to execute.

I'm thinking of a personal Google database and search.

Is it what people want? Do you want it?

Related: https://www.economist.com/special-report/2016/06/25/re-educating-rita?fsrc
> innovation and quality tech companies from Europe

Brit here (still in Europe for the moment). There is a lot if you include aerospace and pharma, less if you just consider software. The only non-British European software I've used and could remember off the top of my head was SAP.

This made me think - what countries have sourced the software on my home PC? It's mainly American with a couple of outliers: e.g. New Zealand for Otoy's Octane renderer, a UK anti-virus package (ESET), and ... that's it.

EDIT: Oops, ESET is Slovakian.
"He has said things that the man I grew up with would never have said"

It's an uncomfortable topic to broach, but you can't blame everyone else but your father for the opinions he holds.
The engineer on £90k got an additional £730 tax cut with the 40% threshold moving from £46,350 to £50,000.
Privacy group calls on US government to adopt universal AI guidelines
I don't think there's a place on Hacker News for this kind of crackpot conspiracy theorizing.
Even if they were legally obligated to pay him, they were not obligated to protect him. They had nice parting words for him and invested in his subsequent venture. They could have just kept their mouths shut and cut off all contact. They didn't.
But they still own Instagram ... they're not the MySpace yet
>If you have a serial harasser

Except Rubin was never accused of being a serial harasser that I've seen. He was terminated for having sexual relations with a subordinate.
Show HN: Scruffly for Pet Owners (Sign Up Code: HN)
Its my impression that dividends are set per share class. What if SNAP only pays dividends on profit to the Series B and C? So how would members of class A petition the company to give dividends to them? What recourse does the Series A holders have? Since the Series A have no power to enforce dividends, the granting of dividends would be tantamount to charity, and thus very unlikely.

Normally, you wouldn't do that because the stock owners would vote in a new board of directors, or they'd just vote in a dividend.

Perhaps if SNAP's money problems get too dire the founders would open up class A to more rights in order to sell them to raise money. My guess since people still trade the baseball cards, they wouldn't need to.
Ah!

To verify my reading (oh text communication :D)

Companies often say "court is more expensive than Y" because that's a directly measurable thing, and simply ignore the actual long term costs. Much like elected officials :-O

[edit: wtf typing :D)
The issue was solved with epoll back in 2004. All modern socket processing should be using async IO. This is just an example of how to hold the sockets open and use it more like a TCP server. Ruby might be the good choice for this if you only know Ruby.
As bdcravens says, what upsets some is that THIS executive and THIS situation was deemed worthy of sweeping under the rug, paying out the $90m and giving a hero's send-off of sorts (yes, anyone with eyes knew Andy was forced out, but there wasn't any chatter that I was aware of that he was forced out for personnel reasons. Instead, it was assumed to be a power struggle that he lost.), when many others are often let-go for far less compelling reasons (there might not be an HR report that finds fault), without their options fully vested.

It isn't clear if Rubin's actions reached a level that would breach his contracts morality clause (assuming one existed -- and one almost always exists), which would allow them to fire him with cause -- but the fact that an internal investigation found that he acted inappropriately, would at least indicate there was a legal way to fire Rubin without paying him $90m.

(I am not a lawyer, FWIW.)

My gut tells me that at the time of his ouster, Alphabet was worried more about the optics of a protracted lawsuit with Rubin, rather than a cover-up for a harassment claim coming to light. Presumably the other individual in the harassment case settled and signed an NDA, which would preclude public discussion and disclosure.

In retrospect, that was a bad call -- because in 2018, the optics of sweeping credible harassment allegations by a senior executive under the rug and then guiding them out the door with a $90m settlement is something that sickens and angers many individuals.

It's the sort of move that is incredibly common in other parts of business (Hollywood and the media business in general), but that doesn't make it OK. And it is particularly offensive when the industry in which it takes place -- and the company it is taking place at -- have a history of trying to be "better" than the status quo.
He was certainly allowed to work on it on his own time. He just was no longer being paid by Red Hat to work on it, or to travel to conferences/conventions to work on it.
How to Organize a Hackathon?
Are you sure about this? How much hentai is actually exported? I get the impression that it's very little, and very little of the Japanese releases, due to the fact that most hentai sites have English translations provided by fan groups, and they're scanned translations of what's sold in Japan.
The thought is that a single user isn’t inconvenienced by a small amount of computational work to access a site, but a scraper is tarpitted into uselessness by it. Unfortunately this completely ignores the fact that the majority of site accesses are on battery power now.
Looks like Reddit is still growing where the others are shrinking.
But this wasn't swept under the rug. The alleged harasser was fired. Google took steps to remove the alleged harasser. Keeping the details private is standard practice and is usually something all the parties involved want.

From what I'm reading, Google paid Rubin the amount he was entitled to in his contract. Some people point out that Google could have paid him next to nothing for firing him with cause - but Rubin could have sued Google, and almost certainly would have made the claim that the harassment allegations we're Google's way of trying to avoid paying him - and from what I read, Google probably wanted to avoid this, because it would inevitably involve the details of the alleged assault going public. I assume that the alleged victim doesn't want this, we don't have good reports of how much proof there is for these allegations, and there's also the possibility of Google losing the suit and looking like they're the ones in the wrong.
Well, if it's TCP/UDP connections, there's only 65k ports available to assign, so it would be all the ports. That's a lot of ports, but I'm not sure why it's supposed to be particularly hard. Off to read the article now...

Edit: As masklin referenced in reply to me[1] that jsnell pointed out, that's the ports for a single IP. So yeah, it's not all the ports, but it is all the ports for a single source IP, unless I'm missing something. You can of course assign multiple source IPs to extend this, but it is a limit to be dealt with.

1: And then deleted it, at least as of now, even though I think it was a good point.
Exactly.

Unfortunately, this is also all too common. But that doesn't make it OK and that doesn't mean that when it happens in our backyard (and not in Hollywood or finance or [insert industry here]), we should stand back and not do anything about it or speak up that it's not alright.
You're going to lose users or time/money with any abuse prevention. But you lose even more by letting things like spammers run rampant on your platform. You're stuck analyzing trade-offs, not ignoring reality.

Once again, all trails lead back to you providing some alternative solutions instead of the empty catharsis of coming up with downsides to something in an internet comment.

Here's one of my own: Isn't it annoying that spambots show up the second I launch a website? Ugh! Well, got that out of the way. Now I need a solution.

What's yours?
For perspective, $7Bn is 1.25x Qualcomm's quarterly revenue. This is a big gap.

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/07/25/qualcomm-earnings-q3-2018.ht...
2% OF REVENUE? NOT PROFIT?
LOLLL papa trump don't play that, bezo or not.
Conspiracy theorists allege a connection because Canada's largest generic drug company donated drugs to some aid projects in needy countries. Barry Sherman founded the drug company and some of the aid projects were Clinton Foundation projects.
I've always felt that average people want to be anonymous. The internet is a place to remove your filters and be honest about what you think. You don't have to worry about people judging you and treating you differently based on your ideas. Facebook doesn't solve that problem at all, it exacerbates it. Facebook is a place you go to be judged by everyone you know. People fundamentally don't want that drama.
We certainly need a better Facebook. More customizable, more feature-rich yet more lightweight, not corrupted to the core with surveilance and ads. Facebook just had never been user-oriented. Even its Russian clone vk.com had always been much much better than the original (sadly nowadays it's completely owned by the russian Federal Security Bureau and is moving away from the great UX it used to have too). There seem to be many efforts in the field of "federated" social networks nowadays but I certainly don't want to host my social network account myself (as this means hardware dependance and a chance to get hacked) and the functionality they offer seems limited (i.e. I want first-class (not twitter-style post-like) editable comments, markdown support in posts, media embedding etc).
You're right. Peoples' doctors rarely tell them to take anything that will risk them getting hooked on candy.
Hackers with a heart? GandCrab devs send decryption keys to Syrians
To put it bluntly.. I think this "just don't use it" meme needs to die. At this point in time, accessing certain websites is effectively a requirement of modern life: want to see your bills without paying for paper bills? want to apply for jobs? want to sign up for courses? submit your taxes? or even vote under some jurisdictions? Then you have to access a website. Sure, for a lot of these, there are alternatives. However, the costs will likely be much higher and you'll simply be left behind by everyone else in society.

This effort by Google, at its worst possible implementation, could break a huge number of "required" websites for users. As others have pointed out in this thread, the users who will be impeded are likely already at a disadvantage[1]. This just reinforces that, especially if everyone starts adopting this given how it is "free" for businesses/organizations.

A convenient side effect? Google gets more information about us and encourages us to view more ads.

[1] Someone mentioned smaller villages in India. The GOV.UK reference talks about users with disability. One could also imagine shared locations like public library, whose users may not have direct access to the internet.
The idea is that you'd need to make the computational challenge more expensive to solve than any profit that success would have. This is what some DDoS protection services do (e.g. the "checking your browser" messages you might see).

In some scenarios such as spam, the profit per bot action isn't high at all, so this might be feasible. If it's a ticket bot, that wouldn't work at all.

Of course, you're hurting users without good devices, which just sucks.

I haven't really thought too deep into the economics of this, I don't know if it'd work at all. Just a thought.

Edit: Meant to include mobile in there, I don't know how if this would or wouldn't work with this scheme for mid-end+ Android devices or iPhones.
State of Software Security Moving Forward Slowly, Veracode Reports
Depending on the definition of "active user." In particular, Facebook can be filled with your once-a-month users, who are basically non-active users.
Google could have given him the 90 million but at the same time still call out his behavior.

But what happened was that Google only said how awesome everything is and hence in fact protected and worse, basically endorsed, his behavior.

I find it good that Google employees stand up here. I'm already wondering what will Google do about that other guy who gives back rubs in interviews? He got similar support and is still at Google as far as I understood.
Precisely.

Quoting myself from upthread

>My gut tells me that at the time of his ouster, Alphabet was worried more about the optics of a protracted lawsuit with Rubin, rather than a cover-up for a harassment claim coming to light. Presumably the other individual in the harassment case settled and signed an NDA, which would preclude public discussion and disclosure.

In 2014, that may have seemed like the "safe" bet. In 2018, it's coming back to bite Alphabet in the ass.
Turns out the survey this is based on already had a big discussion on HN, though not as big as this one.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17919811
Sneaky date formatters exposing more than you think
He is simply refusing to accept that water is wet -- SNAP is a cam show company. The one that is very successful in that market without even trying - it does not provide payments, subscription management, or fine grained permissions. If they are to add those three they would squash their competitors like a bug and probably eat the OTT market as well.
Email was actually the first network protocol to successfully deal with this problem, by creating the standard that every other protocol uses today to declare your encoding. But broken clients will send broken messages, like they do in any protocol.

I have seen plenty of web sites broken by it too, and it's a problem when moving files between Linux and Windows.

(And yes, things would be better if people standardized on binarybody instead of 7bitmime. unfortunately, the Microsoft server announces its support everywhere, but it's broken, so nobody can rely on that one extension (an inside parenthesis, there is a work-around that works everywhere, but it goes against the standard).)
Apotex worked with Direct Relief, which has Clinton Foundation connections I believe.
The best I can tell you is - embrace your anger and try to channel it towards something productive for yourself.

Be reasonably selfish and busy, and it brings you too many negative emotions, simply ignore it. There are way too many rich people lacking self-awareness to get angry about.
> And all subsequent amendments specify what can't be used as a basis to deny the right to vote.

Which explicitly labels it a right, as well as restricting the conditions under which that right may be restricted. PPP

So, it is explicitly a right.

And it has repeatedly been found to be a fundamental right (and thus subject to strict scrutiny.)
I've noticed more people in tech posting mostly political stuff nowadays, when I followed them because of their tech posts. I had to go back and prune my feed to get away from all the bile. Angry political screeds are hard to filter out nowadays.
It took me about 10 years to finally "get Twitter". I used to use it for professional reasons, posting what I considered relevant content. For the most part no one really cared. The engagement was almost always nil. Sort of like saying something intelligent, out of the blue, to a crowded stadium of people doing the same thing.

Then, 2 years ago I created a new account that ONLY focused on a personal hobby of mine: retro-computing. I posted photos, links to cool articles, experiences from my workbench, etc. To my surprise, I began to get a lot of engagement. Like, 25-50X more than what I used to ever get on my professional persona's account.

I made a point to only follow back people who posted similarly to my own laser-beam focus. This takes a lot of time, but I have cultivated a stream of content I very much enjoy reading and scanning in my off-hours or lunch breaks. If you post about politics, or food, or cats, or simply whine or are acidic by nature, I don't follow those accounts back. I'm looking for good vibrations for a pastime hobby - that's it. And to my surprise (and those that know me personally and professionally that I've explained this to) it has worked beautifully for that. No one is a jerk and no one is trolling, none of that.

I've actually made several online friends around the country and the world as a result of the past 2+ years on Twitter.

Now, is my experience normal? No. If I were to guess it's probably in the top 2% in terms of the joy it brings me (vs. the rest of the user population who just hates to even look at Twitter anymore). And I totally get that.

I hope the service keeps going for my own greedy self-interests. But I also recognize that Mastadon may be the future, too. Or something else.

It's sort of how I changed my usage with Facebook. I deleted my personal account and created an anonymous account on FB that only is used for FB Groups (in, yes, the same hobby). These are closed groups that are moderated.

And holy smokes. It works.

Go figure.

Remove the YOU from social media, and use it to have fun about whatever it is you do to have fun, and it can actually be ... fun.
Does it matter if FB (super)cookie and http beacons are still reporting back what they're browsing?

FB can always promote Instagram or Whatsapp into their main money cow.
Under some jurisdictions, I imagine so, since even purely computer-generated images are illegal, and there are other laws which criminalise purely drawn material. It may hit a gray spot in the law, but I doubt a judge would have trouble interpreting the existing law. This is in reference to English and Welsh law, by the way. The exact wording of the law concerns a depiction of someone who "conveys the predominant impression of a child".
I was lucky to realize using social log-ins is a mistake early enough so I only StackExchange accounts tied to Google.
Do yourself a favor and check out https://lutris.net/games/world-of-warcraft/

Lutris is excellent for getting many games up and running, and WoW runs much better with dx11+dxvk than wine-d3d9.
Qualcomm says Apple $7B behind in royalty payments
That's like saying you should've left the country after Trump's election as an effective means of protesting his presidency.
Let's say that we're a small startup and we need a reliable captcha service. What are the alternatives of using reCAPTCHA?
> I don't think there's a place on Hacker News for this kind of crackpot conspiracy theorizing

I don't think there's anything crackpot about it. Was a perfectly reasonable question, but because someone decided it implied something, it's to be removed. Strange.
Why is Apple so secretive?
I'd suggest CAPTCHA nay-sayers to come up with alternatives. The implied alternative is, by default, constant abuse, phishery, scrapping, automated login attempts, and DDoS. Which sometimes may be fine, and many times is just not acceptable.