skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
a 10-12x revenue valuation is not unreasonable for publicly traded companies

I know a lot of publicly traded "cloud" companies are in fact valued like this. I suspect very strong that this is because analysts thing that they have cracked a business model that is very easy to predict and expand rapidly: very low capex, very low-churn (earnings calls talking about "retention rates", NPSs), and easy to predict even high growth (ARR retention/expansion).

I think several early players like SFDC and Splunk have created this impression.

P/S > 3-4 had been pretty unusual up until recently. All companies are worth the discounted sum of their future cashflow, whatever that may be. To see P/Ss 10+ you are projecting both serious growth and very high margins. I wonder if one looked at the whole space if the 5 year projected earnings of all the companies together would make sense, or if we're collectively under-discounting risk (ie, sum total of all cloud SaaS companes far exceeding the reasonable TAM)

All that being said I think you entirely nailed the chain of events leading up to the acquisition.
Oh, I was addressing the more general question about the field of stats, dashboards, etc..

"Once I have these, logging/counting usage is simple. The decision is made with a one-page Excel sheet with the raw numbers."

I think a lot of people would get the data in to excel and not know what to do next. Also, implementing tracking of views, clicks, etc. is non-trivial for a lot of people. Or just a hassle.
>A major imbalance is information. One radical idea is salary transparency.

Publishing only salaries will contribute to the information imbalance because salary makes little sense without a more or less detailed job description. It may make it harder for more qualified working to justify higher salaries that they are expecting.
> I will close my account.
And here lies the issue. Just you closing the account doesn't work. Your friends, your family, others you talk to on whatsapp shall also migrate. And that's the biggest issue.
I think a new startup will "innovate" how farming is done using robots. After that the technology will become mainstream.
The Battle of the YouTube Giants – PewDiePie vs. T-Series
I've noticed you write 'we' everywhere, but as far as I can tell you've done everything by yourself?

Seriously impressive work by the way, and I'm really happy to see such a well-developed project use Go+ActivityPub.
PyDev of the Week: Frank Vieira
1. Make salaries public.

2. Have an exchange where we can bid on an individual just like stock market

3. Remove taxes

4. Add exchange fee

No salaries exist. No employee is tied to a particular employer.
We can get access to a person if we bid the right amount.
I could never get my family on whatsapp in the first place, so I’m not too concerned.
To understand real indian culture with the proofs and evidence this short essay(Annilation of Caste) will gives the idea http://ccnmtl.columbia.edu/projects/mmt/ambedkar/web/reading.... Once you read this essay you will have pretty clear idea when speaking to indians about their motivations. Also this author arundathi roy is fascinating https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddKzcrwC9os. She has shared stage a lot of times with Noam Chomsky too.
It looks like the fediverse is very close to becoming an interactive usenet.

All that’s needed next is feed aggregators as a subscription service, then content creators won’t have to worry about bandwidth costs.
That's the very goal of GDPR, yes.
It's scary that something that is not only controversial but also has laws (e.g. EPPA) in the USA that prohibits its use in some areas (displaying the lack of faith that the nation has on it), is not completely banned.

If it is not generally used anywhere outside of the USA then it is way too fragile to be allowed anywhere. The principles are easy to understand but also easy to falsify as many people have, no doubt, found out to their detriment.
Although I think you're trying to use these examples to highlight that regulation can indeed be valuable (and to insinuate that such an idea should be obvious to anyone), I think that even these examples have subtlety. See the following article for an interesting exploration of how building regulations contribute substantially to urban blight in America: https://granolashotgun.com/2017/11/13/mind-the-gap-2/
Useful mechanism. And I really like the Monday morning "timestamp" thing.

I remember this appeared around HN some time ago, you might find it interesting: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/pointing-and-calling-j...
Shades of Clare Torry singing The Great Gig in the Sky

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Gig_in_the_Sky
And charging for service is easily quantifiable.

Advertising is charging for the fantasy of more business.
Oddly enough, the production facilities for fantasy scale with the customer count. ;)
Bees are biological automatons without even the illusion of free will, and their association with each other is not comparable to society. We might have some things to learn about biochemistry or supply chain management or something, but they're not exactly philosophical analogues.
Did everyone just forget about the recent security chip deployment by Apple that literally makes it so you can't boot Linux from the internal ssd?

I've sysadmin'd all OSs for many years, but I'm with GP: I see Apple as another Microsoft these days (especially given MSs dubious push into non Foss oss) Hell even their efi implementation is non standard, and I really think people should pay more attention to Richard Stallman...(paraphrasing)

"Apple puts the user in a prison. It is a beautiful prison though".

Now, that's not to be defending others that do the same but in a different way (android is crap due to unrootable devices)...

Once again, the four freedoms as explained by RMS are the crux of the matter. The man was and is right, and it gets tiring seeing so many people bandwagon onto attacks against his person without addressing his position, for which I will always consider him a man who saw the future far before anyone else, and is getting more and more relevant every day.
VueJS will replace a subset of our Angular 1.x usage, and we will remove Angular 1.x, but it's not fair to describe it as a "swap": they do different things.
Chemical weapons, beyond their psychological effect, were not a game changer for either side in WW1. Effective countermeasures were developed rather quickly and, in any case, a breakthrough effected by poison gas could not be easily exploited.

Although not mentioned in the article, the main contribution of chemists to WW1 was almost certainly the Haber-Bosch process [1]. It allowed Germany to produce ammo and explosives even while cut off from Chilean saltpeter [2] and also sustained its agriculture in the absence of fertilizer imports. Without the Haber-Bosch process Germany could have afforded only a very short war [3]. It's still immensely important today as it produces over half of the nutrient received by the world's crops [4].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haber_process

[2] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-31090757

[3] https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1920/02/03/118...

[4] http://vaclavsmil.com/wp-content/uploads/docs/smil-article-w...
If uint8_t exists, then I believe the following ought to be true:

1. CHAR_BITS == 8, and

2. the compiler is required to make uint8_t an alias of unsigned char.

Point 2 is there so that you can cast to uint8_t safely, which some cryptographic code tends to rely on. If uint8_t is just any integer type, there's no safe cast to uint8_t due to strict aliasing rules[1]. That's what I want to fix. CHAR_BITS == 8 if uint8_t exists is just a collateral.

[1] https://cellperformance.beyond3d.com/articles/2006/06/unders...
This is a duplicate from: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18430829
How does your organization decide what the chip you’re designing does?

Often for chips it’s a B2B transaction so you can probably mobilize some of your go-to salespeople or sales engineers and ask them what customers are saying about next gen.

Now what if your customer base were 100x-1000x larger? You might need automated tools to ask your customers what they’re worried about, what issues they have, whether or not they like certain features, what what the relative make-up is of the customer base.

We all know customers don’t always tell reality so this becomes one data point in many in determining product direction.
Someone should submit a proposal.
The issue is that these are properties that suit single young professionals /couples and speculators. This creates scarcity in the middle of the market and drives onward pressure for family dwelling units. In turn the pressure for family dwelling units drives cash-in-and-commute out to the home counties. All of which hollows out communities and the city - schools and infrastructure suffer much.

Prices are also down because of tax - sharp tax; which is a good thing in terms of dealing with speculation.
Problematic it may be, that's what studies show to be the case and you can't just rewire all humans very easily.
I'm so glad to read other people have this. I get it all the time, some of the thoughts actually disturb me a little, and I always thought I was sick in the head for even having he imagination that wonders there even though I never had the compulsion to follow through.
Vendor locking is real. Chrome and Google are a threat to the free and open internet.

I use Firefox and have no problems with website compatibility. Be the change you want to see.
iPad Pro 2018 Teardown
I've been using the free and open source DNSCloak app [1] on iOS for encrypted DNS (DNS over HTTPS or DNS over TLS) to 1.1.1.1.

As with this app, it also sets up a VPN profile (and the icon always shows up on the status bar). It's also setup with the "Connect On Demand" option so that anytime the device connects to a network, no connections will go through until this gets activated (this is also called "Always On VPN" or "VPN Kill Switch", to prevent traffic leakage). I couldn't find such an option in the Cloudflare app.

[1]: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/dnscloak-dnscrypt-doh-client...
Hmm, the brain is an organ of the body, is it any more mysterious if "mind", whatever that is, controls the movement of the arm rather than the brain?

If you decide to think of biting a lemon and your saliva glands react, is that any weirder than throwing a ball? If you just think about throwing a ball without doing it your muscles will still contract in "micro-movements" to act out the act of throwing.
I saw that NIST was considering a new breed of post-quantum PKI functions. Which would you recommend to use, if we wanted to make quantum resistant private key signing and encryption today?
The B2C and B2B parts won't need sales teams all over the world.

E.g. A certain telecom api provider doesn't need sales teams all over the world. In fact I've never seen any ads or anything about them locally, but guess who's on top of my mind when I need to send or receive sms in some other country?
Livestreams now reward people just for paying attention
I think Rob Pike mentioned it in a recent talk on the history of Unix https://youtu.be/_2NI6t2r_Hs?t=1901
So... I think rehotorical examples and reasoning are overused, in co texts like these. Ie "how would imaginary person X react if..." People are emotionally complicated and adaptive. Better to loon at real examples.

Luckily there are plenty. Salary transparency exists in all sorts of markets. Many US universities and public services publish. Finland and other Nordics have a lot of salary/tax transparency.

One really to interesting (to me) example is professional sports. Interesting because (a) sports has massive be pay discrepancies, to your point and (b) salary transparency is generally and employee/union "demand*. It's a demand for the reasons discussed here, transparency resolves an information discrepancy and improves athlete's negotiating position.

For US boxing there's a law mandating purse transparency, the Ali act. It was put in place to help boxers Vis a visit "promoters."

Apart from equalising negotiating positions somewhat, transparency will probably have other, hard to guess effects.

I wonder if the Finnish initiative has had any effect on market salary disrepencies, generally.
Fedora 29 Workstation – See What's New
Against my better judgement I will reply to this. At first I was hoping you were being sarcastic but I am not so sure.

the amount of computing power available to anyone this day and age is astonishing and what keeps Intel's pricing in line is the competition from all the other manufacturers. If anything there is such an abundance of power that many fail to understand just how much can be done at lower levels instead of assuming having the most is the best solution
>a future where true general purpose computing starts to disappear

I think just the opposite happened. All we had were general purpose computers, then we added "easy to use" computers in the form of smartphones and tablets. It just allowed a lot more people to take advantage of computers, it did not remove access to general purpose computers for the rest of us. Personally, I love the idea of a bifurcated world where the less technically savvy use devices that are far more restricted and secure. I really like that my parents can get a device, like an iPad, that does everything they need from a computer (email, facebook, light web browsing) without having to worry about malware.
Explainable AI (XAI) https://www.darpa.mil/program/explainable-artificial-intelli...
As a software engineer in the "Silicon Slopes," I can say that we get multiple offers almost constantly for companies throughout the area. There is enough tech here to keep people employed where they want to be making the money they want to make.
Building Amazon Alexa Skills with Node.js, Revisited
Secure file storage, Storing and searching files…. Securely?
Cool!

Where do you talk?

I only tried IndieHackers and there were too much "hustlers" for my taste.
I doubt this is the reason. Any academic studies which are going to be published need Institutional Review Board (IRB) approval to ensure they won't violate ethics guidelines. Qualtrics has done a lot of work to be the go-to academic survey software and meets the privacy criteria required by most if not all IRB's. Using Qualtrics for surveys a breeze to get through my institution's IRB - all they cared about was the content of the questions.

It would have been a nightmare trying to do surveys on some home-brew web server survey system. I saw something similar happen once (study needed real-time tracking of user inputs to a degree which wasn't possible with other systems), and it involved a physical security audit of the server as well as university IT being involved. Project was delayed by a few months getting it through IRB.

For what it's worth, I found Qualtrics to be a a flexible, extendable platform for my unique survey needs. The study I was working on involved people comparing 3d models. Even though an STL viewer wasn't provided by Qualtrics, I was able to use an iframe to display the models in the survey.
Successfully participated in moving my entire family and in law family and another group of 300+ members since Facebook bought them.

None of those people use Whatsapp anymore as they prefer other solutions.

I still have WhatsApp on one device and it is active but nobody contacts me there anymore.

Feels good.
> I wonder how you can manage without WA in the Netherlands. For me, all group events, sports, kids' activities, trips, vacations, family things, etc are managed in a whatsapp group

This is the reason I have faint hope for government intervention here. Whatsapp has become critical infrastructure and a monopoly in NL. I would want to close my account when ads happen but it’s just too big an impact to do so. Because of the nature of messaging the alternatives are simply not an option unless everyone switches.
The causes of this political shift are complex

2018 - (1945 - 12)

Now compare to average life-expectancy.
Kool-Aid isn't that bad...
I like this idea, and I'm eagerly waiting for this to catch on. Following up from this, I have 2 questions that keep me from entering the ecosystem:

- I don't want to host complicated platforms, all I need is a statically generated blog. ActivityPub could be the way to let people comment on my posts without forfeiting the staticness. Is there any static blog system that integrates with ActivityPub?

- Are there any native desktop clients supporting ActivityPub (micro)blogging? I've set up a Mastodon account, and the only way I interact with it is posting via a command-line tool. It's write-only for me because I can't be hassled to use the browser, and it would be nice to change that.
Request for C++14-style constexprs. It would be a great way to spice things up, and I think would be very compatible with the C philosophy.

C is a great language, and I love working with it. But constexpr is something I really feel would improve the language (by eliminating the need for complicated #define macros). C++14's constexpr was a breath of fresh air when I first used it. It basically lets me write real code which evaluates at compile-time and can generate constants. I'd love to see constexpr ported over to C.
Ostrovit Waxy Maize 700g Hidratos de Carbono
>Since fewer than 20% of bees reintroduced to the hive were recovered, recovered bees may not represent the total effect of glyphosate on treatment groups.

I'll say! What a damning line. How many trial replications does it take to create resultant certainty when each trail loses >80% of it's data?
A people voting while considering historical relationships with England, modern power relations, etc, is not "spite". Nor is it primitive.

If someone believes relationship with England didn't factor out in the Scottish remain vote they are probably deluded.
That was long a differentiating factor between iOS and Android: Android's permissions were granted at install, iOS asked for each one individually, allowing much greater control.

But, I thought that was changing. Is Android not moving to the more granular model?
There are other implementations of the same idea: Fidelity and Vanguard each have one.

In general they all allow donations to any 501(c)3.
Apple to replace unresponsive iPhone X touchscreens for free
As has been mentioned in this thread, there are much better deals these days for addressable RGB LEDs. You can order the strips or strings from US/other western outlets for higher cost but faster shipping. Or you can go on Aliexpress and order them for a hell of a lot less from closer to the manufacturing source.

I started out messing with strands from Adafruit and learning the basics of microcontrollers but when some friends and I started playing with bigger projects (or just wanted more lights to fool around with in various things) we just ordered them by the 5m spool for 1/4 or 1/5 the cost on Aliexpress.

The pros of ordering domestically are faster ship times and likely some sort of QA/return policy. But if you just want to order 10 or 20 or 50m of RGB LEDs to screw around with FastLED projects and can handle waiting 1-3 weeks for shipping (even if you pay extra for faster shipping it's typically still cheaper) you can get many more lights per dollar spent.
Ask HN: Why isn't Internet considered a revolution?
When we talk about 4th Industrial revolution, the past revolutions are defined as,

1. Mechanical Revolution

2. Mass Production

3. Electronics Revolution

Among them it we don't see any relation to Internet which has changed the world.
A Theory of Changes for Higher-Order Languages - Incrementalizing λ-Calculi by Static Differentiation

> [...] We present a program transformation taking programs to their derivatives, which is fully static and automatic, supports first-class functions, and produces derivatives amenable to standard optimization.

https://arxiv.org/abs/1312.0658
Or just added to the bozo-file, meaning all your reports will be deleted unseen automatically, but it looks like everything works on your end.
Homebrew themselves recommend against installing software anywhere else: https://docs.brew.sh/Installation. It just isn’t built for installing to anywhere else, regardless of the security and usability issues this causes.
What is the purpose of doing this though? Why would you want to find the original parameters of a scene that was ray traced? Wouldn't those parameters already be available?
Hehe...It's always burners with the best LED projects :)
"migrate to US but decided against it because the US feels like a dog-eat-dog country. Would much rather move to Europe IF I wanted to move."

By 'decent job' - I mean something that actually pays, and has healthcare. And by that I mean working in a factory, or Wallmart or serving coffee.

People from poor countries also want just a safe and credible environment to live in, as opposed to being harassed, and challenged in a system rife with corruption.

Have you even been to America?

The US is not 'dog eat dog' and the overwhelming majority have good health insurance. There are many options for those who even don't have it.

The US spends more per capita on public health insurance initiatives, then most European countries! I couldn't believe this when I found out, but Medicare, Veterans hospitals etc. is about $5K per citizen while Canada spends only $4K per citizen for socialized medicine. My number may be a little off but the ratio is about correct.

You can come from anywhere and have great success in America. In Canada, you will probably be more stable, but you won't have great success.

If you are not European, or 'white' - the Europeans will never, ever accept you into their society. In Germany, even if you are Polish, it's very evident - there is a huge line between Germans and everyone not German. You will always be 'foreign'.

If you expect to have a massive house, boat and gold plated insurance and retirement, then you're expecting too much, but if you're expectations are 'a job' and an abode, with acceptable health insurance, general safety and the rule of law then you'll find this in America. Outside of SF, NYC, LA etc. things are quite affordable.
I don't know which platform you're using. On iOS, the end user cannot setup a DNS server for mobile data connections. Doing it via such an app and a VPN profile is the only way out (AFAIK). Any DNS settings in Settings.app can be done (and will work) only for WiFi.
Why We Often, Mistakenly, Think the Past Was a Golden Age
I also enjoy this: "Why Lie Detectors Don't Detect Lies" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nyDMoGjKvNk -- 4.5 minutes long.
1. Facebook is vastly more than just their website. For starters, they own two of the other most popular messaging/social media entities: WhatsApp and Instagram.

2. There are plenty of antitrust laws on the books from the early 1900s.
I don't see how, but if you feel so strongly about it you could put those cities in your address book as well.

It's still a huge stretch to call facebook essential. A growing number of peers and myself don't facebook, yet I don't know of anyone who has lost their home, job, and gone hungry because of it.
Yeah I treat it as "common knowledge" that polygraphs work about as well as the ADE 651 (https://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/04/world/middleeast/04sensor...).

It's always fun to think about how I could be totally wrong tho. Thought experiment:

Suppose you had a piece of technology which could infallibly detect whether someone thinks they are telling the truth.

To preserve the device's maximum efficacy, would you (a) keep it a secret and only use it for ultra-high-stakes investigations (as with cell-site simulators - e.g. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/04/fbi-would-rather... ); or (b) promulgate the idea that it is worthless or can be trivially manipulated to return any result, and train people to use it for everything?

Hard for me to distinguish between a world where the polygraph does nothing and everyone knows it; and a world where the polygraph does nothing and everyone knows it (but that's just what they want you to think)