skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
WhatsApp charged users $1 per year until January 2016, when they had somewhere between 900M and 1000M users. Not sure how many of them were paying, since it wasn't really being enforced.
Probably easier. If the employee is willing to roll over so much to perform minor surgery, they have a mentality that would be adored in many other places.
In production code a helper lets you reduce duplication, making refactoring easier and reducing bugs. It also adds additional test interfaces that can make code more reliable. Finally, it makes code more readable.

But for tests you are optimizing for a different thing. You want to know what the input to the test is. This makes referring to the test as documentation much easier.

Helper functions can work in tests but often they are completely opaque and make tests hard to understand.
I do, but I happen to know that our corporate firewall intercepts dropbox and other cloud storage sites.
> The emergence of liberal democracies is associated with ideals of liberty and equality that may seem self-evident and irreversible.

> In the second decade of the 21st century, liberalism has begun to lose credibility. Questions about the ability of liberal democracy to provide for the middle class have grown louder;

Right off the bat, it sounds to me like the author is conflating the idea of democracy with economic liberalism. Democracy didn't fail the middle class-- economic neo-liberalism did. But democracy can and does exist without economic liberalism, and by the looks of Scandinavia, it is better for the middle class that way.

> politics have grown more tribal; and in more and more countries, leaders are showing a penchant for demagoguery and autocracy. The causes of this political shift are complex, but they appear to be intertwined with current technological developments.

I see this narrative a lot, but I have to wonder if this (which the author seems to just assume is the case) is this really true. 10 years ago, the narrative was "technology has given us democracy". The Arab Spring had Twitter and Facebook stamped all over it. This open forum was the ultimate expression of freedom.

It seems to me that big political changes have people looking for explanations, pointing fingers, and the internet with all its new developments is a natural player to point to.

I don't know if the Arab Spring wouldn't have happened --much like I don't know if Trump hadn't had happened-- were it not for Facebook, Twitter, etc. But I do believe that ultimately, from an outsiders perspective, the USA got a very American president that fits the ideas and attitudes of a large swath of the population. After years of being failed at by "establishment politicians", is it that surprising Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump, both whom were anti-NAFTA, anti-establishment, had a hard stance against the state of things, etc. exploded in popularity? Is it that surprising that Hilary Clinton's campaign was weak, when the message that most resonated with a lot of its supporters was that it was a vote "against Trump"?

Has it been a newsfeed, or neo-liberalist policies that have failed the people and put us in this situation? IMO claiming it's the former is irresponsible and will just perpetuate a broken system, that will keep on corrupting all aspects of the economic machine of the world.
> That line of reasoning makes no sense at all because it also implies that workers would also be responsible for all the wealth destroyed by the course of their work

I'm honestly not sure what you mean by this, or how it's relevant to what the person you replied to said.

> But somehow egalitarian arguments are never made in regards to any support to share the burden of a financial investment that goes bust, and the focus is on all the envy around how their neighbor profited from an investment they never made themselves.

1. We don't really get a choice in that do we?

Most people can't afford to invest precisely because the problems we are telling you about here; and that includes the working and disappearing middle classes that can't even save effectively due to stagnant wages that don't reflect their increased productivity.

2. On the few occasions where 'egalitarianism' as you keep putting it, is actually applied in a 'share the burden' fashion, it appears to be when massive, wealthy companies need a bail out from the tax payer after what amounts to obscenely reckless behaviour.

The name of the current capitalist game seems to be to privatise the profits and socialise the losses.

I keep hearing people say the econonomy is no zero-sum, without ever explaining it. There is a finite amnount of wealth in the world today. There will be a finite amount of wealth tomorrow, and so on.

Each and every day, your share of that daily amount decreases, while owners of capital increase exponentially. Since the financial crash the richest in society have seen massive gains while the working and middle classes have been hit hardest, many even making wages barely competetive with levels in 1970.

I'm sure your assertion that there is plenty to go around will make those people feel better as they go yet another year without any real improvement in their income.
Lots of people think this way. These are not tech companies; they are enterprise sales organizations.
Linux users share what laptops, desktops, and other devices they use every day
You think media organizations aren’t trying to push a particular narrative? They’ve been doing this since yellow journalism, Hearst and Pulitzer over a hundred years ago. Every side of the political spectrum does this.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_York_Times_controver...

> When you see people advancing this point of view...

This is an ad hominem and not an argument.
Relativistic unit test dilation
Absolutely. We do support MathJax already (you can enable it in blog settings), but I'm happy to talk about adding these into upstream, or maybe starting to support plugins for these sort of things. If you want to join the forums [0] we can start talking about what that might look like!

[0] https://discuss.write.as/c/writefreely
There were a few well known companies that were merged into IG Farben, and they were split back out after the war.

Several of them still exist and are very well known. There were also spinoffs and mergers that happened later, and bit sand pieces of some very large chemical and pharmaceutical companies can trace parts of their lineage back to IG Farben.

The summary on Wikipedia covers it pretty decently.
> > iOS users don't use iMessage since SMS are expensive

> But iMessage is free. It just uses your phone's internet connection, just like Whatsapp

Except when you're sending a message to someone who isn't an iMessage user, or if the "Send as SMS" option is enabled, resulting in what you thought was an iMessage becoming an SMS/MMS.

The blue/green colour difference, as well as the light grey text in the input field, isn't always immediately obvious.

By contrast, Whatsapp is always free. You can't send someone a message on Whatsapp and discover it's gone out as an SMS/MMS after the fact.

That said, I still prefer iMessage personally.
Booting != installing
This seems like a pretty shallow analysis. Plenty of thinkers who have preceded Harai have offered views on the political qualities of technology that strike me as more nuanced, potent, and true.

Lewis Mumford, writing in the 30s and 60s, conceived of two broad politico-technic tendencies throughout history--authoritarian and democratic--both could exist and certain forms of technology fell in one bucket or the other. Langdon Winner, working off the ideas of Mumford and many others (stretching far back as Plato) developed a very sophisticated look at technics and the ways in which political structures favor or disfavor certain technologies, and the ways in which technological systems collide with political, economic, and social systems to result in a deep integration between technology and politics.

Mr. Harai's article, contrarily, seems to be little more than an untempered reaction to current events, without requisite incorporation of the prior development and analysis of concepts in the fields of the history and philosophy of technology. I more or less think Harai's conclusion is sound--our current technical configurations and over-reliance on centralized information technologies does trend toward a more authoritarian, rather than democratic, political state of affairs. However, I think his argumentation is incredibly weak and speculative. It could have been rendered a lot stronger, and more useful, by engaging with the prior developments in the field. Perhaps this judgement is a little unfair--this is a book excerpt converted into a digestible Atlantic article--but I can't help but wonder if part of our lack of control over technological growth and our lack of full consideration of the ways in which our technological developments intersect with politics is due to too many taking a stance like Harai's—one that is unduly speculative and seems to forget the many warning flags and conceptual tools the tradition has equipped us with, which, if properly employed, may help us correct our unfortunate trajectories.
That's not a great strategy, assuming you actually want to keep the team, because relocations aren't exactly rare.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relocation_of_professional_spo...
> Even if most people saw their share of the aggregate wealth shrink, they are still individually wealthier

What exactly do you think the end result of that trend is if it continues?

You're framing this argument as if any increase in individual wealth is to be lauded and celebrated. Most people don't think that way.

All people will see, is their meagre wealth increases (if they are even lucky enough to have seen that) and the kind of increases seen by the top tiers in society.

They'll feel angry, depressed and feel like its an injustice. Then the social contract breaks down, which it already is.

You can keep pretending like there isn't any problem with how wealth is distributed currently, but you won't be able to forever.
Estimating in the small is not impossible, and if you are doing sprints you need to know what a sprint's worth of work looks like. But the whole idea of agile is that requirements will change during the life cycle of the project and you need to be able to adapt. You'll show the Product Owner your work from the sprint, and they will want to refine the specs, or see potential improvements, or add features. If you sit down with the initial specs and implement them, you will build the wrong thing - so it doesn't matter if you estimate the time correctly.
Dyson Is Working on an Air Purifier That's Also Headphones
> We should have known better. We should have done our due diligence when this improvement was made to the framework two years ago. I accept full responsibility for failing to heed that warning, and by extension for causing the multi-hour outage today. I’m really, really sorry

I don't know why, but seeing "I’m really, really sorry" in a Post-mortem doesn't feel right.
This is because the philosophy of "at-will employment" being good is a lie sold to the public. It is to benefit the corporation, and thus the rich, and not the human or the poor.
Which then actually shows that it's not clear whether it's good or bad that we forget about our past.

Also, I don't believe the pacifist sentiment is was as great as you say.

Perhaps politicians and those in the know perhaps but not amongst everyday people.

Anyway, conflicts are rarely rational but territorial and will express themselves in many different ways.

What we learn from history is not that we shouldn't fight wars but that there are many ways to win them.
Watson AI Assistant
Germany, for example. There is no "putting something into the public domain", works pass into the public domain only through time-limits of copyright.
Don't know what that means.
I had to unsubscribe as well...
Great points, and thanks for recapping others' illuminating points about government.

I recently attended Ethereum DevCon and heard a succinct definition of decentralization from Prof. David Lee Kuo Chuen that I've been pondering in the week since: "Decentralization is dynamic, continuous distribution of trust."

This may be the core of why people are excited about new consensus algorithms like blockchain: we've seen how static, centralized systems of trust distribution eventually break, and the discontinuity of trust that results is very harmful to societies (e.g. bad kings, bad presidents, corruption in parties, collusion of central banks, hacked central servers, etc.)

I think we are still in very early days (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XVZxjVJz4ds haha) but "blockchain" is the beginning of something new that has to do with helping solve social issues in a new way, with dynamic distribution of trust at the center of that solution.
Nothing changed, but I’d estimate >50% of Americans still believe in “lie detectors”. They provide easy points when you don’t have actual evidence to bring forward
When to avoid Slack and meetings
Recruiters? Lying? That's shocking!

(But more seriously I suspect they have done searches/exports in the past, and have scraped a lot of data.)
Whatsapp specifically though, it is just your phone number. You don't have that control over your phone number. Seems a little harsh to hold that one company to higher standards than literally anything else with your number.

Direct marketing rules should still apply, in the UK you can't legally cold-call mobile numbers.

I mean, I get it I agree with you and use whatsapp the same way. The one time I tried to use it to message for a takeaway they just ignored the order.
Maybe it's just that they like regular sized fonts on undersized pages?
Nothing has changed, I don't think laymen ever "commonly understood" the polygraph was fallible.

Especially since they are required for some government jobs.
The podcast is really good. I follow him there using Google Podcast. Highly recommended.
Julia Hirschberg gave a keynote at this year's EMNLP on this topic. Short answer was that ML can do better than trained humans in some cases, but very far from "almost any".

I don't think EMNLP has posted talk videos yet but these slides look very similar: http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~julia/talks/ICASSP2018-latest.pd...
The U.S. government actively promotes public belief in the pseudoscience of polygraphy, and the press largely plays along.
Silicon Valley Sunglasses (2015)
Related, an excellent long-form New Yorker feature about another recent attempt: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/02/12/the-white-dark...
iMessage is far easier and reliable and it even falls back to SMS if your recipient doesn’t have iOS. It also doesn’t give your data to Facebook.
If your service doesn't charge per unit, perhaps in addition to a fixed price, you are most likely just subsidizing other people's usage.
>GP's claim was that it is all recruiting is in the name of the diversity of the student body and future student demographics. That's trivially observably false.

>Colleges and universities are concentrating their recruitment offers on the most profitable students, which are the international and out of state students because for every non-state student they get to charge more money.

I work at a private university, our tuition is the same regardless where you come from. Nevertheless, we recruit heavily from domestic students and international students, each of which have special populations we incentivize to make a class more diverse, whether it be economically or ethnically.

You're welcome to believe what you want, and, certainly, in the divestment of the public interest in funding higher education, public schools are feeling the financial pinch and may be seeking out more students who pay the full rate, but private (not-for-profit) colleges and universities for the most part do not engage in such tactics.
What does data verification in a large rails project like that entail?
A canonical example of a federated system would be email. Anybody can participate in the email ecosystem as a function of the SMTP protocol.

A non-federated system would be a “walled garden” like Facebook or Twitter.
Wirebot are cool but invasive (no offense) IMO. I'd be happy with a bunch of wood based rovers. Some tiny helpers to ease and accelerate grabbing fruits/plants. Things super simple but that could turn farming into painless cute thing (if possible, I'm mostly daydreaming).
I am curios how it affects human gut microbiota if at all, as our gut microbiota appears more and more to be vital for our health and also manage general weight.
I think you're 20-30 years late, to be honest. Robots have already taken over farming and their use has been mainstream for decades. There are still some niche areas which have room for improvement on the robotic front, but innovation in those areas will remain niche products.

What will be transformative is changes to the legal framework that will relieve human operators from overseeing the robots that do exist, without fear of legal repercussions should things go wrong (and they will; farm equipment breaks constantly given the harsh environment it has to operate in).
The article showcases Postgres benchmarks and quotes the Postgres documentation, and references material put out by Oracle for their flagship database product. MySQL is never mentioned once. Your opening sentence is deeply misleading as to the contents of this article.
It's the AI winter we're all fearing!
I've debated the independence thing with many people over the years and, for me, it always comes down to this:

I will look at all the other benefits to independence when I get an answer on the £20bn deficit... this trumps everything for me.

I honestly can't see anything being more important than this.

If SNP truly came up with a viable plan to fix/mitigate this deficit I will, with an open mind, look at all the other things they say independence brings.

Another poster mentioned the anti-English rhetoric and, being a Scot living here all my life, I honesly think there is an element of that: It's not the driving force by any means, but it's a factor... imo.
The rational wiki calls it a presupposition and mentions what I remember from logic class which is to respond "moo" although I could swear it was spelled "mu" when I learned the term. The example I heard was something like "So tell the court: have you stopped beating your wife?"

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Presupposition
They stated as much in the release.
Ask HN: Best way to create a cheatsheet?
Hi, I want to create a cheatsheet. It should be displayed as concisely as possible. I would also like it to be checked into git. So I can version it and others can contribute their knowledge. It can easily evolve as new items can be added due to changes in the target language/software.

What is the best way to do this? Is there an open source version available?

The ideal case would be where the items can be added to a markdown or similar file and the cheatsheet can be generated using some generator.
I agree that's awful behavior too, but it's not everybody that does that. I think the majority of people on either the left/right divide are generally okay, but the extremists are pretty much by definition much more vocal and much more noticeable in their "Crazy", and get everyone else painted with the same brush as a result.
Ahh, yes, telecoms will come to rescue poor users and give them free infrastructure.

Current state of messaging across the world is super messy and sucks, but believing that telecoms are the answer is just naive.

While sms allows you to communicate cross providers, the amount of money they charge, both historically and even nowadays for that is just insane. Att still charges $0.25 for international text messages, in 2018. Due to fragmentation of the market, the only way for them to stay in the game is to have something that’s shared, but boy, they do plan to make a lot money out of it.
I wonder if they will find more ecosystems independent of the sun. Or may be a good footage of the giant or collosal squids. Or something we can't even fathom currently. This is almost akin to deep space exploration for aliens except that here we are guaranteed to find some...
That's definitely how these things are played, no argument at all. But, this is one of the things I would never, ever compromise on. Allow my personal being to be violated for a job. Never.
I worked at one of those you mentioned. SAP let us run and grow for 2 years and then came down hard as SAP stock is a margin play and not a growth play. Our entire salesforce was gutted and SAP sales teams were now responsible for selling our products, although their incentive structure didn’t merit selling our product. They also stopped investing in product, moved most development teams offshore to India and China. And then stopped caring about the large customer base and only focused on a handful of large SAP customers who also bought our product. Innovation was actively discouraged with the focus being integration with SAP ecosystem and whatever crappy projects that SAP leadership dreamt up
Speculation analysis
Model the Brain with the NEST Simulator on Fedora – Fedora Magazine
ActivityPub is nice, but I would also like to see support for RSS and/or Atom. Is that coming?

More generally, linking to a feature list might be useful. I can read the source, but not everyone can.
I think that is a pretty grim outlook on Qualtrics. They are definitively a tech company, as they provide a technology which is not only useful, but differentiated. If you believe that survey==web form, then yeah, it doesn't seem like a lot, but, if you think survey==research tool, with randomization, experiments, SPSS file export, recoding, loops, panel provider integration etc. and you don't want to write code because your job is to produce data not databases, then qualtrics seems like a very nice piece of software.
Also, hard to take someone seriously when they use the word "awful" to describe the lack of some minor UI enhancement.
Do you have any links where I could read about these, well not the quantum. But the other 2 I have never heard of.
For academic research the value proposition seems more credible. But even there given the reproducibility crisis the methodology and tools need to be revisited, and perhaps these kind of lazy surveys and data analysis are part of the problem.

As for customers few companies if any in the world has customer service approaching 'entailing differences in customer perception', most are quite happy to have people wait on phones endlessly or fail to address glaring deficiencies in products or services.

With so much low hanging fruit waiting to be addressed in customer service this obsession with surveys and 'customer experience' seems to be driven by other forces ie continuing obsession with data and metrics by sections of the workforce as panacea and distraction from real changes. But great exit for the brothers, nice targeting, if there is a demand why shouldn't they benefit.
Vegetable and fruit are below 1% of the agricultural production by mass. The major parts are cereals, oil grains and tubers.
Not always for free. I did it for a bike sharing company. I received a two free rides in exchange.
While there seems like a desire to blame 7-Eleven here, they are completely right to not want to have their franchisees violating federal immigration laws. While they are insulated by the contractor-contractee relationship, the government is humourless about these sorts of things. The violations are easy to prove (either you have proper employment documentation or you don’t) and enforcement is politically popular. That’s a bad combination from a corporate risk management point of view.