skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Firing all these engineers would be insanity, as the internal uproar over that would be much worse than that over Project Dragonfly. You might even see formalized organizing begin over it (look up what happened to Lanetix).

I don't have strong views either way on Project Dragonfly but I would absolutely be greatly pissed off if everyone opposing it were fired.
Can you point to a summary of the history of marijuana legalization in Colorado?

I imagine most non-US readers, such as myself, won’t have any idea about that.
How about just not keeping your wallet on your dev system? My wallet is on a dedicated box. It has no access other than SSH.
At one point that server was worth more than my house!
If you think that is confusing, try ordering Microsoft SQL server on Azure which was measured in "DTU"s - data throughput units. Which globbed together disk, CPU, and RAM into one "easy-to-use" metric!
This is a universal argument for doing anything that makes a profit in the short term. Usually, apologists for corporate immorality bring up fiduciary duty, as if it explains and justifies things. But the argument falls apart if you poke at it even a little, because it completely omits the other side of the argument.

Why doesn't Google start a restaurant chain, or start making PCs, or selling servers, or licensing software defined networking stacks to other companies, or monetize many of their other assets? Surely they must if they're supposed to make as much money for their investors as possible?

Why don't they sell search data on individuals to repressive regimes, so people can be hunted down, imprisoned, tortured and executed? Would make some decent coin for investors, I expect, lots of repressive governments would probably pay a pretty penny for it.

How about selling searches emanating from US government IPs to the Kremlin, selling tracking data linked to Google accounts, or otherwise monetizing espionage interests?

The problem with doing these things is that it affects the value of the Google brand, both internally to employees and externally to customers. If you can't hire the best employees or encourage customers to trust your software and services, then long or even short term decline is pretty much assured.

And how about swapping cause and effect? You're positing the tail should wag the dog - that the stock market should control what the company does. How about the stock market chooses to invest in companies that are doing things that it believes will make money? From this perspective, the company is free to do whatever, and investors are free to sell the stock if they don't agree. In truth, there's a mutual dependence here - the company can't just fraudulently give away investors' cash, but likewise, if investors knew what was best for companies, we wouldn't need CEOs or leadership of any kind - we'd just advertise choices to the investors / market and go with whatever pushes up the stock most.
Any day now.
Baidu currently has no real competitors so they can afford to be a bit lazy. If Google enters the Chinese search engine market then Baidu won't just surrender, they'll improve their product to compete. They certainly have the capital and resources to do so if they make it a priority.
"I don't care about the life story of all those people and their kids and how and why they were riding a bike in the forest 30 years ago."

Actually, the New York Times is particularly bad about this - not only about gratuitous background but also about gratuitous attribution ... very common to see an inch of column preceded by over an inch of attribution of a quote or whatever.

I also find it very distracting and difficult to read.

If you're interested, the Financial Times is the opposite - very concise, very pointed and even restricts front page stories to only their front page space. You can read more deeper in the issue, but the front page item is a self contained story with no page jumps.
200+ comments when it was launched two weeks ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18434705
Another easy suggestion is that NPM could have forced a semver major change on the new maintainer. It would have been an easy signal for people to check what changed, and fewer developers would have accidentally installed the infected version because it was only a "minor" change.
Comments moved to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18542830.
Please add some substance, or I will make your argument for you.

Yes! We all need to get on board with constructivist mathematics [0][1] already. Construction is very similar to computation, and it is not inconsistent to take "all reals are computable" or "all functions are continuous", the same rules Turing discovered, as axioms if we like. We can therefore move computer science fully onto a foundation that is more rigorous than typical maths.

[0] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/mathematics-constructive/

[1] https://www.ams.org/journals/bull/2017-54-03/S0273-0979-2016...
Hi HN!

Several months ago I decided to build an app which would allow me to quickly capture and annotate screenshots, upload them to Google Drive and wouldn't be overloaded with features.

Since I'd mostly worked on web stuff, I chose Electron. A lot of developers and other tech-savvy guys hate Electron apps for requiring more resources, their poor performance or non-native feel. So I've done my best to mitigate those issues. Just a few things I did:

1. When a user starts dragging a mouse cursor to select an area of the screen to capture, I open a hidden window to let Electron load resources. It is shown immediately when the user finishes dragging. The annotation window startup time decreased by 1 second because of this simple hack.

2. All CPU intensive computations were moved to web workers in order not to block the UI thread.

3. I used as few external modules as possible. There are only 10 of them. The whole app was built in vanilla javascript.

4. Some other additional work to give a native feel to the app.

I'm pretty happy about the results. The app takes only 70-90 megabytes of RAM, and it's not that much if you look at the competitors. It also allocates additional resources for each window, but they are immediately deallocated as soon as you close the window. ScreenTray is not a chat app, so you won't need to keep them open ;-)
The performance of the annotation window is decent, although it's a little bit laggy when a screenshot is too big. The problem here is that it's kind of an expensive operation to rerender a big canvas element, and I'm not sure that I can optimize that.

Anyway, just let me know what you guys think. I will appreciate any feedback, so be brutally honest! Thanks.
> Besides who are we to decide for the Chinese what is best for them?

You do realize that the "people" do not have a voice in China right? It is not a democracy...
> The fact that bitpay didn't lock down their version numbers of dependencies, and are thus at the whim of whatever changes upstream of them are gleefully picked up, is crazy, especially for a crypto wallet.

Would that have helped though? This dependency was several layers down, not a direct dependency of copay. I'm under the impression that even if bitpay locked their direct dependency, if that dependency auto updates _its_ dependencies, the result is the same.
How  to Embrace Data to Engage Customers
But I wouldn't have bought them, and I would have only experienced two sets of crappy $20 bluetooth headphones and stuck by my assumption that bluetooth sucks, and my life wouldn't be any better.
503 errors negatively impact conversions too.
Funny thing is: They did actually lock down the version numbers of dependencies, they just didn't bother to check the updated dependencies: https://github.com/bitpay/copay/commit/6cc4b757f6fbd111b9716...
> Story points are a way for your teams to improve themselves.

These points have nothing to do with actual value produced to the business, or the developer's worth / skill. It's also very easy for a developer to begin to inflate the estimation of tickets they believe they will work on, creating a false sense of confidence.

Alternatively, if people work at a "shop" where tickets are so fungible that people pick up whatever the top ticket on the board is, it tells me that they are working on low-value, repeatable things where expertise is unnecessary.

It's also not clear that increasing story points (even if they were somehow related to work / hours perfectly) would be useful. I've seen teams drop down to do minimal "work" for months and produce tremendous value because they were reorienting the product to do things successfully. An organization that looked at that labor input, sans objective outcomes in the product, would be doing themselves a disservice.

Story points, tickets closed, lines of code: ultimately all of these are a belief in the labor theory of value. But that's the thing. I don't want labor, I want value, and the tragedy that is input-focused measurement is just due to it's easier to do than measure product outcomes. It's always more convenient to say "We did 24 story points this week" than "Our users hate our software, and here's how we know it."
I live in northern Italy and cannot confirm this thesis and I would say even the opposite for my region. I never noticed so many insect than now and every year are coming new species. The population of this new species is multiplying rapidly!
NLP: Research Lab vs. Reality
Wikipedia lists Smith, Blacksmith, Coppersmith, Bladesmith, Weaponsmith and a whole bunch of others.

In Dutch, "smid", "hoefsmid" and "edelsmid" (for gold and jewelry) are probably the most common words.
This should be on their frontpage: https://copay.io/
Let’s recall that nobody at Google tried to stop Schmidt from adopting a right wing stance on Wikileaks. When it’s American authoritarianism it seems googlers are much more tolerant, saving the righteous indignation for the country chosen by Trump as scapegoat for rust belt hardship. Unbelievable.
The claim that the material implication analysis preserves the validity of valid arguments is pretty questionable. Consider the following argument:

No student will succeed if he goofs off
Every student will succeed
|- No student will goof off

Analyzing the 'if' in the first premise of the argument above as material implication, we get:

For every student x, it's not the case that [x won't goof off or x will succeed].
= For every student x, x will goof off and x won't succeed.

The following argument is valid only trivially, as the premises contradict each other (assuming the existence of at least one student):

For every student x, x will goof off and x won't succeed.
Every student will succeed
|- No student will goof off

I suspect it's quite easy to construct other similar examples involving quantifiers where validity is not even trivially preserved.

(It's easier to find examples of the material implication analysis failing to preserve the invalidity of invalid arguments.)
How Gaming Is Helping Brain-Computer Interface Evolution
While i do understand where you are coming from, i think if google gave up it will set a precedence and many countries will demand their own censored version of google.
Just because the adoption of greener power is coming along only now, a few decades late, doesn't mean that it is an either-or between nuclear and fossil.

I assume Greenpeace and other environmentalists would have prefered a much faster transition.
The music app is preinstalled. It happens to be the method you use to access the Apple Music service (and yes, Apple has been pushing that service increasingly, to my mild personal irritation).

However, it's also the method you use to access music you own that is on the iPhone, whether you've synced it from your computer or purchased it through the iTunes Store.

Now, maybe I'm just a dinosaur for wanting mainly to listen to music I own rather than streaming services all the time, but I don't think you can just claim that use case doesn't exist or matter.
> Apple under Tim Cook is more concerned about being profitable through rent seeking than making products that people are willing to pay a premium for.

This just does not match any available data. Look at where Apple gets the bulk of its revenue and profits: hardware products and optional services.

Look at their investment: the bulk of it goes toward developing new products and acquiring new technical capabilities.

Look at their pay services, none of which are required. You don't have to buy apps from the App Store; many apps are available for free, including almost all of Apple's own apps. You don't have to subscribe to Apple Music. You don't have to use iCloud for backups, for photo management, for anything, really. You don't have to use Apple Pay.

Look at their open access to the Internet. You can load any website you want in Safari... don't want the Facebook app? Just go to facebook.com, it works great.

Look at their most popular service, iMessage, which is still free.

Look at their required software updates, which are all free. New iOS? Install it for free. New version of Garage Band? Download it for free.

I think people are getting confused about what "rent seeking" actually means. Apple's paid services are upsells.

Rent payments are not optional (just like paying rent for real estate--you have to live somewhere). Microsoft made tens of $billions charging for non-optional OS updates and application updates... that was rent seeking. Again: note that Apple does not charge for their software updates!
I bet it can. It can also tell you how much you are likely to inherit and what network of people you are linked to as well.
A Near Catastrophe: Within Feet of Becoming the Worst Air Disaster
>It's not like a person who's opposing the Chinese government online is going to be using Google without a secure connection anyway

How can you say something like that? What does "oppose" mean to you exactly? Being the leader of a 1 million-strong protest group? If so, then yeah, I would expect such people to be very careful about how they protest online.

But everyone else? Come on. Most people, even most dissidents, are not tech-savvy. There even was a recent story about NYT whistleblowers sending classified data to NYT via WhatsApp, without ever making the connection that their phone number used in WhatsApp could be linked to them.

The vast majority of people aren't infosec experts.
The compromised package was a dependency of the wallet software, it doesn't matter what machine you kept it on if you used a compromised version.
Interesting to see ZERO Indian (Asian Indian) names on the list as of this comment. I've observed from my (limited experience) that Indian Americans and other South Asians are super afraid of losing their employment over guarding the company values.
I think it is good that these engineers are standing up for what they believe in. It will be an interesting litmus test
for the leadership to see what type of company they want Google to become.

Also, I am interested how the tense China-US relationship will effect the broader tech investment strategy in East Asia. Are we going to see divestment in the next 18 months by US tech companies in China?
That’s not correct anymore.

NPM has a file called “package-lock.json” which locks all dependencies including dependencies of dependencies and so on.
Nancy Pelosi's Husband Purchases Large Blocks of Options on Amazon, Facebook
...as long as their revenue keeps increasing.

AMZNs stock price isn't driven by current earnings, but it isnt driven by investor magnanimity either. It's all about the promise of future earnings. If revenues flatline or decline, you can expect their stock prices to fall in line with their peers.
"And, yet, none of it seems to have much to do with functionalism, with staying alive and certainly not with industries I would say."

That's exactly what the quote says.
You're being very uncharitable with your interpretation.
Registration-free article text link
https://pastebin.com/eVtqqBn7
> I'm curious why they don't provide a comparison

They do, if you read the FAQs: https://firecracker-microvm.github.io/#faq
The Housing Bubble Is Popping Right Now
Want to run Ruby on Rails on Lambda, with no changes from the servers I run on my laptop. Or maybe I want to run Crystal. Or maybe I’m writing my own language. Doesn’t really matter.

Lambda works great as a deployment and execution model. This allows anything to run on Lambda, not just specially prepared runtimes.
I think you are misapplying the argument used for trade and doing the business.

The mechanisms that change the system from inside that come from trade don't apply in this case. Either you are able to use different rules to change the system or not.
Why our sense of time speeds up as we age – and how to slow it down
I've never been offended by getting misgendered, but hearing people get misgendered does, at times, bother me in the sense that it can make the sentence difficult to understand.
>The only strong signal we got was that people who were giving up soda were the most likely to lose the most weight. The cynic in me feels like we're writing giant book-length stories that are just cover to get people to reduce their sugar intake.

I stopped drinking soda regularly at least 5 years ago since graduating college and was able to lose 20+ pounds thanks to diet and exercise. The thing is after having stopped excercising I have been able to keep the weight off compared to people my age who also don't excercise and the only difference is that they drink way more soda than me. I try to limit my sugar intake to less than 10 grams a day.

It's crazy just how much sugar modern drinks have, the only exceptions seem to be Beer and Milk and those were developed thousands of years ago.
Learn by Doing [Volume 30]: Enough Re:Invent Speculation to Stuff a Turkey
I've been telling people this for years. Automated tests are a good way to ensure that updates and iterations don't break existing expectations. But expectations come from users, so if you don't have users, you don't have expectations, you only have guesses. You're usually better off getting your guesses out in front of users so you can establish expectations, and then build your automated tests around that.

I say "usually" of course, because there are certain things that constitute expectations that precede users, such as apps that handle sensitive information. Expecting that the app handles sensitive information appropriately before users confirm that they want their sensitive information handled appropriately would properly not be considered a guess.
Check out the various fairies series by "Daisy Meadows" - there has to be at least a thousand of them. They mine a theme/set with a book for each element (the seasons, rainbow colors, precious gems, etc) and they follow the exact same plot for each one. My wife and I used to joke that "D.A.I.S.Y. M.E.A.D.O.W.S. has got to be a acronym for the computer program that writes them all.
Well sure, but it's not like they're in a vacuum. Anyone working in the industry sees the changes. We all could use a place to share information, and a place to discuss and remember over time. I think a forum (or mailing list?) could be used to manage the chaos, and its conversations used to help govern the order of the Wiki. Not that Wikis need order... It just sort of emerges over time.
phew, I thought it was referring to the BSD!
The only reason apple got rid of the headphone jack was so they could sell you the adapters for $30+. I want a headphone jack, AND I want bluetooth capability. I'll buy your wireless headphones if I want to use wireless, otherwise I'll buy your wired headphones, but I'm not paying $30+ for the dongle. Instead, I'm gonna buy a samsung.

It baffles me that people are arguing about the merits of bluetooth and the ease of wireless when, in reality, it was a profit move!
There’s more than one definition of regulation.

One being “the act of controlling or supervising”. If you define regulation as the act of making rules? Then yeah there’s not much to talk about.

But if we’re talking about controlling, throttling, or supervising, we aren’t seeing much of that.
It's possible I was lucky with some of the conferences I went to, which had talks very much in the vein of "here's a new/different way to think about things". And I don't mind people using their own projects/products as a demonstration of what they're trying to communicate. But when they start to feel like Apple's product announcement keynotes, it feels something has gone wrong.
What to do when your smart TV loses its smarts Tech Briefing (audio)
> Certain EU Nations want to prevent fat right nationalist radicalization via censorship. I think that's clumsy, but good.

But, who will be deciding what is considered as ultra-nationalist? Some liberal government that might be overly corrupt and is about to lose the election could just label their political opponents as modern day Nazis and have them be censored on Google search. For example Germany treats the AfD as a far-right party, but in other countries they would be centrist at best. There is no middle ground, because morals wary from individual, we might try a consensus, but that would destroy individual rights. To me it seems that it's best to have a censor-free search engine, perhaps only censor stuff that is related to illegal activities or terrorism, but make everything else be publicly available.
Oh, maybe I'm just naive about what expensive means, then. :P I typed this on my non-notched, audio-jacked, ~80 USD Huawei Y5 Pro, that I'm very happy with.
This one is a little different. There's the blatant, willful copyright violation. And misrepresenting the doc authors as endorsing this website.
Google censors the shit out of Youtube, it fires its own employees for stating simple biological facts.
Is this where you decide to draw the line?
I ended up leaving due to a brilliant jerk. The organization believed his output outweighed the misery he created. It did not matter that 3 people out of 10 went to HR to complain. No one sued. Yet. Unfortunately I feel it's just a fact of life in some organizations. As long as someone makes the company money the owners/management will look the other way. If you can't get rid of them, my advice is to find a place where they are not welcome in the first place.
How the Geography of Startups and Innovation Is Changing
>This is a classic case of privileged westerners deciding that they know better than the actual residents

>Our opposition to Dragonfly is not about China: we object to technologies that aid the powerful in oppressing the vulnerable, wherever they may be.
Upended by frat boys: International lawmakers slam Facebook's effect on politics
I read the article and I find this fascinating. I am happy they are giving it some thought. Pronoun political correctness (a.k.a. thoughtfulness or respectfulness) aside, if our society's training data leads AIs to make assumptions, we should be aware of it and be careful to detect it.

An incorrect pronoun isn't going to kill someone -- but we are gradually handing over more and more decisions to technologies that rely on AI/ML. Perhaps investigations into incorrect pronoun assumptions can lead to improvements in assumption errors in other areas (e.g. you think your self driving vehicle doesn't need radars and that only using cameras is sufficient? Just because it looks like a big fluffy cloud doesn't necessarily mean you can safely fly/drive through it).

Back to just pronouns though: if someone says "My teacher assigned me to read Act I of Macbeth tonight", most people would avoid a reply that uses he/she until an indication was given or they'd just ask "Who's that, Ms. McFadden? Yeah, I know, she assigns way too much homework!". If a human can be smart enough to get it right, then I'm glad folks are working on AIs getting it right too (or, for now, not making assumptions until they can get it right).

The fact that AIs are advanced enough for us to be thinking about these kinds of details is wonderful! :)