skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Why has our society organized itself so that company executives win whether or not they do a good job?

It's not like this was specifically planned. Our society is organized as a capitalist society, which means people decide how much and in what conditions to pay others. In this case, the shareholders, via the board, have decided to pay certain compensation. Since it's their money on the line, and they're the ones with far more detailed knowledge of what's actually going on in the company, I don't see why it's any more "moral" for an outsider to second-guess their decision. (Of course, most shareholders aren't in any sense active, but they are supposed to be well represented by the board, and can replace it if need be).

> One of the premises of giving executives high pay is that they are getting it for succeeding at running the business well,

That's sometimes true. Sometimes even a well run company goes bankrupt, e.g. a video rental company when everyone switches to streaming, in which case the management might be doing a good job by extracting as much value as possible before. (Totally theoretical, I have no idea of the details in this case.)

> but as we see time and time again they still get paid out even when they fail.

And sometimes, they get paid far less. Sometimes they get paid to not make a mess. Sometimes they get paid because their contracts, negotiated beforehand, stipulate certain payouts whether or not they succeed, apparently because that's the price of hiring these people who are presumably good.

Put another way - Michael Jordan was paid a lot of money to play basketball for some teams. They made the agreement based on his past performance. If his team had ended up not doing very well, it wouldn't have made his contract suddenly null and void - at most, future contracts would probably be at a lower price.
Notes of Kafka Core
I have used Tesla autopilot on twisty cliffside roads (my hands hovering an inch away). The question in my mind was, when there is "nothing" there, is that a place it thinks is okay to go? Or is it a place a place where it should absolutely not go? I wish it could just tell me that.
What Makes a Chip Design Successful Today
I believe they’re referring to 'Michaelanjello’s comment upthread:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18692801
Also interesting that at least one picture is at Stanford University. They had right from the start the prestigious university student as a target demographic. :)
This means the kinetic energy is lost to heat, which is not good for a pogo stick
...with lax safety standards and little consideration for property rights.

We could build the Melbourne - Sydney high speed rail line in 3 years if we didn’t care about a) the people who built it or b) the people whose houses were in the way.
The reply would be encoded in the one time stream the numbers station sends: you pick things like the Lincolnshire poacher up on another radio.

Btw, I think it was Russian not east German and possibly was over the horizon radar or a deadmans switch or something else: we need a /j for joke marking.
I work in healthcare: any plugin with access to your rendered pages is a massive liability.
I guess then the simplest way to look at the people retained is that they most likely weren't instrumental to the company's downfall and their experience / knowledge / familiarity with said company is absolutely more valuable than their participation in the company's downfall is threatening to future prospects?
When a public employee like a superintendent, oks a contract for their family to bilk the school system, I think we could safely call that a private interest even though the superintendent is pulling a public salary.

Edit: your first link has an extra semicolon at the end I think. I will read these articles but it will take some time
> Keeping engineers fungible and cheap to hire & train is a priority for enterprise software divisions. Software ecosystems that rely on the patience and curiosity of developers to explore an uncoordinated constellation of packages and design their own architecture (eg; Java, React ecosystems) can be suboptimal.

I can't help but feel this is a cleverly worded put down of Enterprise software developers. Having worked on both sides of fence, there are significantly differences but it mostly comes down to the type of end product rather than whether developers are "fungible and cheap".

For example, at the company I work for now we develop at least 12 different fully deployed products year. When I worked for a startup, we developed a single product over 5-10 years. Most modern frameworks are definitely geared more to the latter than the former.

Blazer is definitely not geared for the single highly optimized application. But I could definitely see using it to get much better results for our internal applications with much less effort. We could probably absorb the run-time cost.
Wrong company
How to Add Discounts on BigCommerce
> The argument has always been that they are paid so much due to the risk they take, but that risk has shown to be non existent.

Not true. For some of them, earning 10mil might be far less than they would otherwise make. It's sad that some people are so much more (monetarily) valuable than other people, and is a function of a lot of things, most of them unfair, like different life circumstances, different IQ/talent, etc. But that's no one person's fault - I may as well be upset that I'm shorter than average. I mean, I am upset - but not at anyone, just at nature or something.
I’ve given up on the idea of good and bad people. I myself am good or bad depending on how it suits me. How could I do anything else?

From my experience a manager will choose the option he thinks is most beneficial to his continued employment in the company. This includes maximising team support/influence over for instance making a change in a product with measurable benefit to the company, a change which even he himself might agree is a good idea. Who could blame him? Any manager who didn’t act in this way would surely be naive and idealistic.

Assuming this is true for managers, what benefit could possibly be had from complaining about other colleagues. It could only serve to reduce his trust in me, and increase his fear that I would do the same to him.

It is very difficult to balance things like team support, ensuring that I have interesting work to do and also ensuring continued employment. I have been too naive and idealistic, and now I am looking for a change of strategy.

It’s all well and good to be aware of these realities, but much more difficult to put the conclusions into practice. Sometimes I think you’re just born with it.
I may be missing something, but are Stripe customer IDs considered secret? I never really thought of them as secret, and if they’re not, it looks like you’re opening up an unauthenticated API with read/write permissions on my Stripe account?
Huawei Watch GT review: When hardware and software don’t mesh
The article doesn't mention this, but another part of the claim is also the notch, which they allege is deceptively hidden in all of the advertisements.
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Colin Kroll, Co-Founder of Vine and HQ Trivia, Found Dead
Similarly interesting and close to the path/border in the article is the history of the neutral territory called "Neutral-Moresnet" which was incorporated into Belgium in 1944: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutral_Moresnet

Another odd occurence I only learned about recently in the area around here are the American Military Cemeteries in Belgium and the Netherlands which are administered by the American Battle Monuments Commission (ABMC). Visiting one feels like being on a patch of US soil in the middle of the Belgian countryside (signs, road-markings, the way the gardens are kept, etc), quite surreal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henri-Chapelle_American_Cemete...
In this world, how would public officials plan for the number of school places needed in 2 years, or the number of hospital beds? It's a nice idea, but it seems impractical.

The sentiment that we are "all free people" may sound nice but is unfortunately a meaningless platitude bearing little resemblance to the real world. Sorry if that sounds unduly harsh
Measuring the Age of the Earth (2014)
I still don't understand how we had the Olympics there. That should never have happened.
Weird Stuff in the Bay Area used to be exactly this. Until it closed down earlier this year, sadly.

HSC is the equivalent for lower-level electronic parts. They’ll also be closing down in January.
Complete opposite experience for me. I found Lin's daughter's voice quite grating and reverted to reading the text. The part that did me in was when she gleefully enunciated "exclamation point exclamation point."
.NET on WebAssembly could be a really interesting escape hatch for companies that have heavily invested in .NET apps and want to move away from Windows. Right now downloading the whole framework is a prohibitively large task, but for internal apps it would probably be fine. Port something WinForms-ish over as well and those apps could be cross platform with not much work.
10 digits? You need to go back to kindergarten and relearn counting.
Skills, yes, and pedigree too to some extent since it's important to the board that shareholders are confident in management. I'm not sure where you're getting "risks which ordinary workers do not take" from though. I don't see that being a part of the equation. It seems particularly strange in the case of oil companies or security or military contractors where workers face actual physical danger on the job.
So... ironically very similar to the ancient Egyptian priesthood they nominally protect?
You have hit the nail on the head with this explanation. Just.Say.No!
I chose Spain (Madrid / Barcelona) because Spain has a lot of walkable city centers that are closed off to towns.

Many Spanish cities have a very small town vibe, while including high quality public transit infrastructure, great sunny weather, and very family friendly environments.

Mexico is my second choice due to proximity to US (close flights to see family & friends; US is not that bad as some people make it), biodiversity of climates, great food, sunny weather, and lots of walkable small towns.

I already can speak Spanish, so this is a plus for me.

I like traveling, but those are the two places I'd settle down in or retire.
We are using your Stripe token in our backend to get the subscription information, and we also rely on identity verification to make sure that none of your customers can impersonate another one by guessing another Stripe Customer ID (https://docs.pubilling.io/quick-install/identify-verificatio...). Make sense?
> Does PHP automatically scale infrastructure to meet demand? Can you bring up 1000 instances of your service for spikes in volume? And then scale back down when the spike is over? Without writing code?

People talk about this a lot. I wonder, for what percentage of systems, this kind of scalability is really a requirement. I also wonder what percentage of devs work on these kind of systems.
Wouldn't .net core just be that escape hatch?
Amazon famously avoids turning a profit and yet its CEO is the richest person in the world.

Its market cap divided evenly among its half million full and part time workers would make all of them millionaires.
A mechanism that absorbs any kinetic energy would make for a very disappointing Pogo stick.
HTC is targeting Christians as its next VR market
> But that said, why do so much for open source?

It gets them more users for their services if people make use of their open-source libraries that happen to be optimized for Google, e.g. by integrating better with Google's cloud offerings.

> Why not keep big things proprietary?

They do keep big things proprietary. If it directly makes money for Google, you're not going to see it's source code, unless you work for Google.

> Why sell Chromebooks that can be unlocked, put in dev mode, and flashed with FOSS BIOS implementations? Why allow unlocking the bootloader on Nexus and Pixel phones?

Most people don't change their OS ever, so it doesn't really matter whether bootloaders are locked or not. Even if more people did it, many of them would still install Google apps, so it would continue not to matter.

> There's lots of things they do that clearly aren't for the bottom line or just to trap you in their ecosystem (they do offer versions of basically everything for iOS as well, which makes it easier to switch to iPhone even if you are deep in the Google ecosystem).

Google is not in the phone business. Their phones are just funnels for their advertising business. If they were in the phone business, offering those indispensable apps to iOS users would decrease their ecosystem lock-in. But because they're not in the phone business, offering apps for iOS increases their ecosystem lock-in, because even going to Apple, you still stay with Google.

Nexus/Pixel phones exist only as funnels into the Android ecosystem. Android exists only as a funnel into default-installed Chrome, Gmail and Google Search. Chrome itself is a funnel for Google Search, while Gmail's purpose is to make people sign into an account for easier tracking. Then there's the general ecosystem pull of being the one-stop shop for a bunch of online services. But in the end it all boils down to ads.

Because the majority of their products are only funnels, they'll happily cooperate with competitors for some of those products, if that helps them keep people in the wider Google ecosystem. So you get Chrome for iOS, Google Search for Firefox and so on.

When a company seems to be hurting their own bottom line by giving away stuff for free, it's usually because the free stuff isn't that important to them and their real bottom line is elsewhere.
I was a beta tester for the original Mac, as well as in the first Mac Professional Developer Program, introduced at Harvard University as a summer session in '83. I still have my mimeographed partially typeset, partially typed version of Inside Macintosh. It is filled with hand written notes by the original developers, and was copied directly from their copies as they worked to complete the beta version that summer. I had it appraised around the time of Job's death, and the response was it's priceless and needs to be in a museum. It's still in a air sealed box at the moment.
It hasn't been in the S&P 500 since 2012. In fact it's had Q appended to the ticker and been moved to the OTC market. I doubt he owns some fraction of it.
I think this tells the story of the culture of celebrity in the United States as much as a private story between these two people.

It is also "traditional" celebrity interaction. Where the celebrity achieved status from professional skill building and achievement and largely unknowable through social media. So to know this person or have photos with them is a more scarce and unusual thing.

Wheras new celebrity status can be achieved through social media with no form of measurable achievement based on traditional skill building.

What's interesting about celebrity now is how many more people can be known and what skills can make you be known. Like, being beautiful and able to do finger dances on tiktok.
The MBA was specifically designed to take advantage of hands off capital. Most people that own stock don’t want to manage these companies so the people running the ship get to extract extra value. This extends down the company as the CEO does not want to manage people and is not really spending their own money, and that extends down through management.

Compare things with government where people simply don’t make that much money yet it’s not hard to fill these jobs.
I've wanted a hydrogen scooter for 15 years but have never found a refueling solution to make the dream realistic.
2147483647 km/h glitch in racing video game
> Point of evidence: the gradual replacement of the term "author" with "content creator".

Please tell me more about "corporate authors" and why such a term doesn't denigrate the literary contributions of authors of traditionally published poetry and prose. Or do newspapers disrespect the humanities by calling their authors "journalists"? "Op-ed contributors"?
Show HN: Single-header C++11 HTML document constructor
If it absorbed all of the energy that would be a problem, but any child who has seen one of those science-museum displays I mentioned can tell that's not the case.
Are you not then essentially arguing that states have no sovereignty? If so, how far do you take it - do individuals? Can any migrant - legal or not - rock up to your house and start camping on your lawn?
It is not safe to preload arbitrary web pages. The user will be deanonymized to a site they never visited. It is safe to preload AMP pages by design.
Future of Fintech: Open Foreign Digital Nomad Bank Accounts
> In that sense, they hope that one size will fit all, some day.

Nothing new under the sun there. And, that being the case, they're likely to be disappointed.
Thanks for this. I need to change what I’m doing.
Wouldn't that consume a lot of electricity?
Not just skills, but connections as well as the willingness to essentially leave their normal life behind. Honestly, the skills are the easy part, which is why a lot of people see what they do and think "Welp, I could do this too!".
It still carries huge "don't use for production" warnings, and only parts of it are slated for stabilizing in Dotnet Core 3.0. That said, it's fairly usable today, and I think there's enough interest in it that I'd be really surprised to see them abandon it at this point. I think it's worth considering for a personal project or something internal where you are going to do the back end in C# anyway.
Clearly there's need to introduce a process for Rust Improvement Proposals.
The comments of buboard and xvilka are on point.

One thing I'd add though, is that physicists still have a healthy amount of skepticism on ML/NN. They don't like the "black box" approach, where the algorithm is regarded to "provide" the truth, but we're required to fully understand the math behind any implementation, as well as to be able to answer deeper questions on the results we're acquiring.

Background : I'm completing my master in Particle Physics, and have had the opportunity to work along these kinds of people. They have wrestled their entire careers with enormous amounts of data, create new solutions to problems the industry had not even formulated, and keep themselves on the forefront of Statistics and ML.

I feel that the things I've learned by trotting along grey-haired old-school Unix wizards could not be replicated by any courses, bootcamps or manuals.
On the contrary, I have something like "a named section of a function should be refactored into a private helper" as a macros when doing code review. This explicitly to prevent the eventual evolution into a god function.
Ask HN: Would you recommend a vertical mouse for comfort?
I'm thinking of getting a vertical mouse for comfort and to reduce pressure on the wrists. Vertical mice are supposed help in such situations.

Have you tried a vertical mouse? Or do you use one currently? What's your experience been? Thanks
So many undergraduate research assistants want to be in the lab to do the minimum time and effort, get the check mark in their cv, and move on. Then they go interview with an impressive looking list of labs and projects they've worked at, but when you inspect their thinking there is little depth. Then you find the jr specialist applicant that stayed at one lab their entire undergraduate career, shows some understanding and language surrounding the basic problems in that field, and mental dedication to work through the hard problems without bailing. That is what I valued in candidates. No matter how tough it gets, they didn't give up.
Well my comment itself was downvoted, so I don’t agree it was a focus on the original comment.
> Professors and teachers are disproportionately white

According to [0], whites make up between 68% and 81% of the US population in the 25-64 age groups, and, according to your link, 76% of academics. In the same age group, Asians are 5.8-4.1% of the population, yet 10% of academics.

That makes whites over-represented by at most 76/68 = 1.12, so 12%, while Asians are over-represented by at least 10/5.8 = 1.72, so 72%.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_racial_and_ethnic_d...
The Best of 2018 on Pocket
Your point is well taken when extremes occur (public purse ultimately probably backstops both unemployment and pensions via PBGC) but it’s important for readers to know that’s not the normal case even in a bankruptcy.

Unemployment is structured as an insurance program, not a dole, and in theory an employer has paid in over the years enough to actuarially pay for it. Same thing with pensions.

The system does have some “normal accident” anti-fragility type stuff built in.

But yes, 1. in a catastrophic outcome the public purse will get hit for hard costs and 2. even the “insured” benefits mask lots of externalities that the corporation doesn’t bear but employees and municipalities etc do.
It actually gives a lot of idea and validation for concepts that I was thinking about for my project https://github.com/polyaxon/polyaxon, namely for going from trained model to serving those models on other platforms in a seamless way. I also think that high-level articles like this one are really good for people who are trying to build internal tools around ML/AI ops, people can get more or less ideas about what and how other companies are managing their ML pipelines and how they impact the productivity of their teams.
In my world there would be no such thing as an "illegal" migrant.

And, the distinction would be between public places and private places. Anybody is free to exist in any public place with no permission required (just like you are already allowed to do once you're in the country).

It would all be exactly the same as it is now, except there are no checks at the border, and no visa requirements.
> so that they can loot it from inside.

That's one way to view it, another point of view would be that all those people whose jobs we're automating away still get to work somewhere doing something.
The readability/understandability points other make are good.

But I'd add that large function like this tempt the programmer to do something like using one of the intermediate variables in the first "bit" to make a decision in the second "bit" out of convenience. Add ten more "bits" and ten more such "conveniences" and you get an incredibly fragile, bug-prone mess.

Which is to say, a purely lexical-order division of operations is bad because you easily wind-up with undefined defined interface between the various operations. Figuring out both how a simple for-loop really works as well as how the original programmer intended it to work, can be quite hard. Add several for-loops and you get a true mess.

Some people get really good at cranking out these long functions and as you say, it look superficially easier. I wonder if a language could support "functional abstraction brackets" that would allow these long sections but guarantee their logic isn't folded together

Something like

function big() {
let x,y,z;
{{@First_bit //begin forced separation...
...
{{@Second_bit //begin forced
...
}

Here "First_bit" would be guaranteed to be equivalent to functions of just x, y, z.
> Government spending, funded by taxes, contributes to the GDP like any other spending.

That's exactly the problem. You're thinking of Gross Value Added (GVA), which strictly talks about value added through normal economic activity. Once you start "removing" productivity through taxation and "adding" productivity back through spending/subsidies you have a new variable- the presence of that variable is the difference between GVA and GDP. That variable doesn't necessarily net out to 0 either, or even close, if the government runs a surplus or deficit as the United States does.
How WhatsApp Fuels Fake News and Violence in India
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