skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you force-divested IBM into constituent parts which one(s) would retain the IBM branding and why?

PowerPC was the last time I was aware of IBM making significant change in the VLSI market. Before that, it had been definitional in a number of things, not networking (!) but certainly high density storage.
Exactly, there are millions of dollars in the arts, but it's all in selling art degrees.
​Red Hat: An independent barony in the kingdom of IBM
That paragraph you quote from the article is extremely vague though, is that what the protesters have actually said?

'Greater employee oversight into product decisions' is particularly .. what is that? The employees have veto power by majority vote? An individual employee can delay the project for a 3 month review? The project team chooses their own manager?

If they want a measurable change they need an articulation of what that change is that a corporate structure can handle. The boys and girls of Google are usually pretty clever, they 'll have figured that out.

I don't like their chances either way, management will persist in making management decisions even if they need to fire people to do so, but having a walk out to raise awareness would be silly. Google has internal message boards and isn't that big a company - they can talk to people directly.
https://siftery.com/recaptcha/alternatives

Not affiliated with the site or any or the alternatives.
Do you mean forgoing an opportunity to shape it through choosing who gets hired?

Google's process is engineered in such a way that individuals will not be able to individually skew cultural selection for new hires, so I don't think they would even see hiring as such an opportunity.

Or were you talking about the more classic issue of whether it's more effective to be an insider vs. an outsider to affect change?
I think you detached it backwards? Surely the part you linked to should be in the main thread (The D Language Front-End Merged Into GCC 9), while the discussion of "indefatigable" should be split off into another thread?
All this complexity is true of a number of legacy (bad) text protocols.

DNS zone files for example are specified incredibly poorly despite their apparent simplicity (multiple optional ambiguous fields, significant whitespace, poorly specified line-folding and paren semantics, DNS record-type dependent record value grammars, vaguely specified length limits, lexical includes, embedded parsing directives, it goes on...). You won't find any 2 implementations that behave the same.

It's typical to talk to engineers who haven't been through serious parser work and get responses like "well, it's just splitting a few strings isn't it?"
We tend to treat a lot of things as equivalent just because we have some statistic that we can use for comparison. I know it may sound shocking to some, but paying more does not necessarily mean that something is wrong. If I want a private hospital room, I want the services of a doctor that is in high demand, I want to use the latest technology, or I want something done faster and am willing to pay freely shouldn't I be able to? All of those things cost money, but are not accounted for when we are looking at the stats. You have to break things down into smaller pieces and figure out why things are more expensive before you can truly make an accurate comparison.
I guess you don't care about the millions of people living in poverty, then?
It's true that other people have problems, but that doesn't reduce the amount of discrimination against African-Americans and other minorities, or help the problem. An assumption behind the parent's "bet" (no evidence is given) is that discrimination against African-Americans isn't especially problematic. I think that needs to be supported against the mountains of evidence that say otherwise; IMHO, it is like claims of climate change denial - it's easy to make the claims, but the evidence is overwhelmingly otherwise.

A sad fact of HN is that there are no voices of African-Americans, or at least very few and they don't share their experiences (not that I blame them; it's a hostile place). Other people with no experience like to share their opinions, but that is as valuable as me talking about what it's like to work at Microsoft - I've never worked there so my opinion isn't worth a lot. The lack of people experienced in this subject is both an outcome of generations of discrimination - African-American families often lack the wealth, income, and educational history associated with higher education and SV jobs - and a cause of it: We don't understand the problems. We're just BSing in the dark.
A complete guide to waking up feeling fantastic
> Preponderance of the evidence would be the standard if Rubin sued Google for wrongful termination, not the standard for evaluating allegations against executives

Insofar as the issue is whether or not he is entitled to things promised in his employment contract, the standard for evaluation the allegation that he violated provisions of the contract which would trigger forfeiture of those things is necessarily ultimately the exact same standard as would apply in a suit over the contract, since whatever initial decision Google attempts to make is subject to potential suit.

> GP never suggested that Google hand out jail sentences,

The response was to the reference to “crimes” which was not otherwisegermane.

> just that they shouldn't be giving $90 million severance to Rubin when many employees who got fired for a lot less egregious behavior got nothing.

At-will employees are less protected than those with specific employment contracts; executives are usually in the latter category, rank and file employees generally not unless unionized.

Expecting treatment of employees to be the same when they are dissimilarly situated in terms of legal relationship is irrational.
Because the competitive equilibrium doesn't allow it unless the cost curve shifts for everyone at the same time.
MAD. It's the same reason political leaders aren't assassinating each other all the time. If you go around assassinating other billionaires, there's a fair chance you'll get assassinated in response by others.
If they choose to have a judge nullify the contract, I'm good with that. I didn't add any verbage to the contract anyway, so that would just mean that the entire contract is void and not just the parts I crossed out. We can re-negotiate the whole thing. Oh, but this time, seeing as we're in front of a judge and all, I have a lawyer with me. And we can examine the reasonableness of every single line item on the bill without any medical time constraints.

The new contract can be something we collaborate on. Them, their lawyers, me, my lawyers, the whole happy family. We can take four or five years to do that. I'll pay them when we sort it all out.

Or... they can accept my thanks for sewing my toe back on and bill my insurance.

Either way, we are on much more equal ground after the fact.
Yes I agree with all of that, but founding a company does give you incredible impetus.

Because Snap is a consumer facing company - we hear about this all the time.

Tons of startups do stuff like this - we just don't hear about it.

AirBnB, Stripe etc. are all making clumsy decisions daily, even some occasional big ones - but it's just not newsworthy. Neither is this item frankly, it's just kind of fluff. Nice to know but not news.

This kind of mistake is well within the entitlements of a Founder/CEO for example, I'd imagine the board won't have much to say about it. He knows he kinda screwed this up surely.
That's a big misleading headline.

26% of 3400 respondents to a survey in May had deleted the app from their phones at some point in the preceding year.
I would say that depends on if they are indeed facts.
I really wish all the best for this project. To me here are the main points why this framework is really promising :

- Backed by webrender : Mozilla is putting large effort in webrender and Azul leverage all this work by using it as a backend. Too early to say, but it can potentially be far more performant than QT or GTK

- the "modern" way people do UI : you have Dom diffing backed-in like React (and like Flutter)

- backed-in data binding

- (live) CSS styling which is a subset of web CSS

- SVG support

- Extendable : you can use OpenGL to draw to a texture and pass it to Azul for display. This will allow for integration of 3D renderer, 2D renderer (for e.g Azul SVG drawing is using this mechanism), etc...

I'll definitely follow the progress with a lot of attention. I personally would prefer Azul so much more to GTK/QT/Flutter for developing apps
Tuition pays teacher salaries. Expensive cars employee engineers and mechanics. Club membership employees the service sector.

Do you realize the backlash against private jets 10 years ago cost the aviation industry jobs. If a billionaire flys coach, vs a private jet, which creates more jobs? Same can be said of yachts.
Don't people read about the OSI/ISO 7 layer model any more?

The biggest deliverable (to me at least) of QUIC is the formalism of a "session" layer which is transport binding agnostic: If you move to alternate underlying IP addresses, it can recover and continue.

Sessions were big in OSI. Internet applications/protocol stack basically ignored them, for reasons of NIH, complexity, place-and-time. But, Session layer is inherently useful

UDP? Schmoo Dee Pee. What matters to me, is a session layer with cryptography.

(ok. taste-testing the underlying fragmentation barriers, which was in an earlier QUIC, that was interesting because pMTU is broken)
Apple releases most of the macOS kernel but I guess it doesn't include APFS: https://opensource.apple.com/source/xnu/
I'm going to disagree witha lot of this review. Here's an example:

"In other words, take a conditional out of the spec for the function. But in Section 10.5, he tells us that we should add a conditional to the spec of a function, namely in making Java’s substring method defined for out-of-bounds indices. I’m not completely sure he’s wrong (as I discuss in my Strange Loop talk, it comes down to: is there a clean way to describe this behavior?), but I find his claims that this makes the code “simpler” only slightly more credible than his claims about the Unix file API."

Ousterhout contrasts that with the similar operation in Python. Substring throws exceptions if the indices are out of range, Python returns the part of the string that is in-range. For example, calling it witha start, end pair where start > end results in an empty string, not an exception; it's much easier to use in my experience. And I doubt the formal specification is any larger, to address the author's point.

The formal does of Unix I/O is a horror show, sure, but what does the spec of it plus all of the filesystem that can back it look like?
The Hidden History of African-American Burial Sites in the Antebellum South
What's reddit's DAU? They used to disclose that publicly but they took it down years ago.
> Any bank that makes enough bad loans will eventually fail, so they try and avoid it.

I wouldn't be so sure, these days (post 2008). _Especially_ if it's a big bank.
Not signing in and curating your subreddit subscriptions all but guarantees you will only be exposed to the most populist content on the site and will never see any of the deep, niche, and interesting stuff on it.
Europe’s billion-euro quantum flagship hands out first grants
I got hit by "Distributed Spam Distraction" recently.

It works by having a bot signup on thousands of websites at once with your email. The purpose is to flood your email with hundreds of welcome message emails every minute so you will miss the real security message emails (such as someone resetting your password).

What makes this attack so evil is that these are real sites you have to individually unsubscribe after the attack is over. This includes many sites from countries without email unsubscribing laws. So to this day, I still get hundreds of emails everyday from these sites who think I have signed up for their newsletter/product/etc.

I would not be against enforcing a captcha on every site out there just to prevent these kinds of attacks.
"We've decided your patents are too expensive" (which appears to be their slant, not "your patents are invalid")...

"... so we're going to keep using them. And not pay for them."
This is it right here.

My teeth are horrible. A combination of genetics and an adolescence/pre-college diet of soda, I'd imagine. We're talking trips to the dentist every month or two for fillings, replacing fillings, the odd root canal here and there.

This year was the first year I've ever "used up" all of my dental insurance. Let's count my blessings, first of all: Holy shit am I lucky to have a world class dentist a few blocks away. Holy shit am I lucky to even have dental insurance at all, provided by my employer.

I recently scheduled a root canal for a tooth that's been causing tremendous pain. Crippling, anything touches the tooth and I black out for a couple seconds, creeping into a constant stabbing headache, barely kept under control by OTC pain meds, kind of pain. Without dental insurance, it'll be $600. Can I afford to do this every month? Heck no, this will be the last time I go to the dentist until insurance comes back in 2019.

But how fortunate am I that I can afford to pay for this once? Imagine being told it would cost even a few hundred at a cheaper dentist, you don't have insurance, and you're already counting dollars to make ends meet. Imagine being born in a third world country and you've got this problem; at best you'd just pull the tooth, which is going to create more problems, hopefully better problems.

During one dental procedure in the past I was prescribed Vicodin, 30 pills. I went to the pharmacist; that'll be $3 with insurance. What?!

Pain is a universal human feeling that, if you take a moment, offers an amazing moment of reflection and humility about how lucky most of us are that it's temporary. If you have chronic migraines, or joint pain, or diabetes, or anything like that: it affects everything you can do in life. You can't think clearly. You can't work as hard as your potential. This impacts all the future earnings you'll ever earn.

If you're generally healthy, generally pain free, and have access to healthcare when you're not, you're literally among the luckiest people on the planet.
Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism's Stealth Revolution

Summary

Tracing neoliberalism's devastating erosions of democratic principles, practices, and cultures.

Neoliberal rationality—ubiquitous today in statecraft and the workplace, in jurisprudence, education, and culture—remakes everything and everyone in the image of homo oeconomicus. What happens when this rationality transposes the constituent elements of democracy into an economic register? In Undoing the Demos, Wendy Brown explains how democracy itself is imperiled. The demos disintegrates into bits of human capital; concerns with justice bow to the mandates of growth rates, credit ratings, and investment climates; liberty submits to the imperative of human capital appreciation; equality dissolves into market competition; and popular sovereignty grows incoherent. Liberal democratic practices may not survive these transformations. Radical democratic dreams may not either.

In an original and compelling argument, Brown explains how and why neoliberal reason undoes the political form and political imaginary it falsely promises to secure and reinvigorate. Through meticulous analyses of neoliberalized law, political practices, governance, and education, she charts the new common sense. Undoing the Demos makes clear that for democracy to have a future, it must become an object of struggle and rethinking.

https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/undoing-demos
> Do you have any tips for leadgen / growth, for B2B SaaS startups? Right now all the available leadgen tools out there, costs thousands of dollars, which is expensive for startups!

Create a Google Spreadsheet, put 100 linkedin profiles in the spreadsheet that fit the profile of the potential buyings, then use a tool like Hunter to figure out their email-addresses. You can check the email format on their website if there is no response.

Email them a plain-text email saying you are the founder of your company and you are reaching out a small group of people who you think would be perfect or the product you are building and you ask them to try it. You could also include a short gif/video (like really short) of how it works.

Use an email software that allows you to check open-rates and click-through rates. If your email is opened many times it means its being forwarded around/getting attention. Email again if no-one responds.

Expect about 40% to open your email. 5-10% to click on whatever link you included and less than 5% to try your product. If that works, then you just have do the same thing 20x and you have 100 users. The biggest mistake people use when doing this is sending too few emails.

So nice to see a partner at YC advocating for spamming businesses and never mentioning the compliance issues and potential fines (up to $41,484 per email):

https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/business-center/guidance/can...

Probably just an oversight though.
Debussy won the Prix de Rome but became restless with the musical theory and composition training he received.
>They are just going from FB to Instagram

It's easy to get cynical about this but what I like about Instagram as opposed to facebook is that it's superficial by design. That makes it way less of a "thing".

It doesn't pretend like it truly "manages your social life" like facebook does, it's just funny pictures your extroverted friend posts. Instagram stories are gone after 24 hours. They're temporal. I know people who post 10 or 20 things a day on stories and maybe a pic here and there every couple of weeks otherwise.

Similarly, WhatsApp is SMS. SMS running through facebook but it's not very organized, either. My friend deleted WhatsApp, now we text via SMS and I see no difference. A group I was part of decided to use Telegram, so I just made a Telegram account, no friction whatsoever, there's no reason to feel like you're leaving something behind. People in Europe use it because mobile internet is way cheaper than paying for SMS since a text message via mobile internet is like a couple of bytes of traffic. Same with images. Group chat is nice. But it's all not very... connected.

It doesn't really make a profile, old messages are basically just an archive that nobody bothers to look through. I'm aware that facebook probably runs every machine learning algorithm ever invented through that data but from a user's perspective, it's way less of a "world", it's just one tool to share messages/pictures. It's not your life. Social networks aren't "just facebook" anymore and they're way less centralized that way.
Web Performance 101
Another thing which can be gleaned from the progression of ReCAPTCHA from v1 - enter street names and house numbers into this box please - through v2 - identify images with street signs, shop fronts, buses, cars - to v3 - only Chrome/Firefox/Edge/Safari users welcome is that Google Maps (and related units) no longer needs ReCAPTCHA users to read those street names and house numbers as that task is now reliably performed by software, nor does it need help to separate shop fronts from normal facades or traffic signs from billboards. Now that these tasks can be handed over from mechanical Turks to the server farm ReCAPTCHA can be turned to other purposes like giving Chrome an extra boost.
Firefox > Preferences > New Windows and Tabs

"Choose what you want to see when you open your homepage, new windows, and tabs"

You then have the choice of what the default is for new windows (and 'homepage' which I assume means clicks on the Home icon in the toolbar, which I always remove...) and for what appears in new tabs. No about:config needed!
Can you explain that trade precisely? Like with example orders/prices? I’d also be curious about how one gets reliable hitmen & deniability and the like.
Moreover, if you normalize assassinating billionaires, it's not just other billionaires you need to look out for.
By contrast, there is no shortage of people willing to work for Google. If the most ethical people with the strongest moral compass leave, then they may be replaced with people who have less aversion to working on military drone contracts, or other things.

Smart people can be moral, they can also be amoral. Google can continue to execute with either. What you're suggesting could lead to a 'morality drain' equivalent to 'brain drain'

Previous internal protests have gotten Google to give up the DOD contract, and may convince them to give up on Dragonfly, without having the loudest voices -- who organize other people in the company -- from all leaving.

Leaving is a last resort protest, and often, if you get that far, you've reached a tipping point and there's no going back. You can bring economic pressure and harm to a company by striking, that's how unions work.

I see you constantly make this 'love it or leave it' suggestion on HN, but this could lead to a worsening of Google's behavior, not an improvement.

I've been in the industry since the early 90s, and have worked for several startups, as well as IBM, Oracle, and Google, and in every case, I've encountered more sexism and sexual harassment behavior elsewhere. Good lord, Oracle would take engineers to strip clubs on business trips. You're asking someone to quit a company which might be persuadable to change its behavior, and join other companies of tech-bros who don't have sexual harassment training, and often don't even have an internal mechanisms to report abuse. To what, walk out and quit again?

Sexual harassment and sexism in the tech industry is wide spread, and worse in many other companies. You can't run from it, you should organize collective action where you are and make them fire you. Quitting is the easy way out for a lot of companies.
I just hope it will be easy to write bindings for different language in the future. I guess it's important for a wider adoption not to impose something "low-level" like Rust (for eg QT has QML/JS, GTK has bindings to Vala, Python, etc.. Flutter uses Dart, etc...)
Can't you just use old.reddit.com ?
Yes, those are two obstacles that employers face when hiring strikebreakers, along with more significant obstacles like laws forbidding strikebreakers, licensing, and union violence.

The common factor is that it's not enough to refuse to work, unions must be able to ensure that no one does the work.
Kierkegaard has been dead for 200 years....
I got a job at an U.S. company and so I now have a T-Mobile phone as well as my Uruguayan phone.

I've never gotten a robocall on my Uruguayan phone and half the world must have it on their database (Spammy SMS, on the other hand, are a problem).

OTOH, my U.S. phone gets several calls a day, and I've seldom given it out. Most are marked "Scam Likely" by T-Mobile. But I've never gotten a spammy SMS.

A surprising cultural shock, to be sure.

I simply don't answer the U.S. phone anymore.