skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The first problem is I thought it was "widely accepted" that FB use was a typical power law distribution where a small fraction of users, use it the most. Kinda like drinking alcohol or income inequality stats or heroin use stats. Something that works and means something for well distributed random collections like an average SD or median is meaningless when talking about numerically integrating a power law function to determine a total value.

The second problem is I read the entire paper and as per problem #1 above, because its an extreme power law distribution, in "Auction 2 results" the average bid to give up FB was an insane $2076 but the SD is over eight thousand dollars and the 50% median was a mere $200.

The third problem is, I admit I don't use FB, but my understanding from my wife is if you disable your account for a day, you're really measuring the cost of time-shifting a days worth of content forward a day. They were not really measuring giving up FB for a day in the shorter samples (see discussion of Auction 1 results) they were measuring the cost of chronologically messing up the UI for one day, or something like that in concept. Its like arguing if I bought the new edition of "Refactoring" using amazon prime the 2 day delivery was worth $40 or whatever the book cost whereas in reality I don't really care about the shipping cost on 2-day vs media mail shipping, kinda.

The forth killer problem is the market is too weak and thin. Lots of brain power goes into evaluating the correct price for one share of GE or CAT or IBM. As such the price has a certain meaning and validation and use in the real world. No brain power goes into calculating the price of viewing a sunset or temporarily deactivating a FB account and as such a measurement merely measures random numbers and can't be used in the real world for any purpose, comparative or otherwise. In theory a widely popular and intensely studied marketplace of the cost of viewing a sunset or deactivating a FB account COULD exist, but since it doesn't, its just kinda a measure of random numbers mixed with how much money I feel I should get for a days minor annoyance, like a wifi or mobile phone outage. Some numbers from Auction 1 Results are creepily similar to "how much of a credit should I get for an internet outage", or "What is a fair per-diem reimbursement for a cheap company", not a specifically FB related cost.
I believe US taxes are based on market prices, not value.

It is generally impossible to guess the value of something. what is the value of a bottle of water in to the average person versus the value to a someone lost in the desert?
It also means that as your data grows or shrinks, the optimizer will notice and change the plan accordingly if it makes sense.

That means that 18 months after you implemented a feature you've long since forgotten about, you don't have to come back and figure out what the new plan should be. And that's huuuuge.

You can find accounts of the db changing the plan from a good one to a bad one, but I'll go out on not that far of a limb and say that those are < 1% of the cases. Nobody complains about the queries they didn't have to come back and change. And the better the optimizer, the better that trade off will be.
The only place I've seen the $5/package thing mentioned was a quote from the guy who was arrested, so I think we can take it with a grain of salt.
The withdrawal symptoms are far worse, for one.

If you go off caffeine, you're drowsy for a few days, no big deal.

If you go off nicotine, you're condemning yourself to months or years of craving that never fully goes away: the physiological components of nicotine addiction are more or less permanent.

That's just off the top of my head. I wouldn't be surprised if there are detrimental dosage effects of nicotine that caffeine doesn't have.
The existing commercial office space system seems very inefficient for small to medium-sized companies. You lease space, spend a ton renovating it to look "on-brand," then move a couple of years later. The next tenant renovates the space again to match their brand.

Each remodel comes out of a "tenant improvement budget" given by the landlord, but that has to be recouped in rent over the duration of the lease, so it's not really free money to the tenant.

Having offices that have already been remodeled to be nice enough, and just being able to lease a flexible number of desks could deliver huge savings - in time and cost to growing companies.
I drink about 10 cups of coffee per day (enjoy the taste). You are suggesting I spend over an hour, 7 hours per week (a full workday) making my coffee? That's literally insane.

Now, I'd never get one of these machines, because it tastes like ass - I tried it at work. People at the office walk up, pick from 20 different flavors, and make their cup. What is it you suggest to replace that? 20 huge office pots that someone refills from a huge drip machine, so some are out and some get underused and tossed/refilled in a few hours?

Your comparison is what does not make sense. You are taking your use case, which does not apply to 90% of the self-brew cases. Literally the definition of a strawman. I personally think cars are a bad invention, and I don't see the use. I live across the street from work, and once a week take a lyft. Why are all these people driving?? I just can't figure it out.

Now, here's what I do actually do. I have Kona green cherry and Peaberry light roast. I take a cup of green and grind it fine in my conical grinder. I double-filter tap water, boil it, then filter it again the next day once cool. I use that to boil the green for about 10min in a large steel pot. I drink half of that mixed with fairlife fat free milk. Good for 1st drink of the morning. While that's going on, I grind 2 cups of peaberry, and dump it into the pot, adding a lot more boiling water. Boil for 2 minutes, let sit for 10. Now it's mixed light roast peaberry and green, for that lightly charred lawnmowerbag taste. It's naturally quite sweet, but sometimes I'll add a splenda.

I spend more than an hour per day on coffee. The process is relaxing. When I'm at work running from one meeting to the next, I pop in a cup with some weird flavor and go on my way. If I had to do what you do, I wouldn't do it at all. That's the price of your 6-7 minutes - a barrier to entry that's just too damn high.
Those things were not free before Facebook. If you wanted to advertise the birthday of your two-year-old in the local newspaper with a picture and a cute greeting, you paid money. (Yes, people regularly paid for that kind of notices in newspapers.)
This hacker news paradox always pops up, where people say this isn't common, but literally every SDE I know, even those straight out of undergrad, makes more than that all-in.
Most people don't realize that those massively long freight trains they see crossing the country often have one, or even zero, people onboard.

When I lived in Wisconsin, Wisconsin Central Railroad was lobbying the state to allow it to run trains with only an engineer. It pointed to the safety records of freight trains in New Zealand running with no crew at all as a safety precedent.

I think in the end, it was allowed on routes where the railroad paid to upgrade the grade crossings.
Do you think a single-payer system creates more sick people?

If not, what do you think is currently happening to those people who need mental health care or routine surgery in a non-single-payer system?
Yes? What's the qualitative difference between using a best-of-breed SQL ORM and the Mongo API?
You forgot the part about disregarding laws/regulations and trying to grow fast enough so that by the time the regulators start to apply pressure you have enough money and clout to fight back, all while preventing the smaller guys from doing the same thing you did.

Not saying that WeWork is doing that, but it's definitely a time-honored Silicon Valley approach. Just look at the recent faux pas from Robinhood with their "checking & savings" accounts that got them bitch slapped nearly instantaneously by regulators, forcing Robinhood to withdraw the announcement and update it to a "cash management" account with details to follow.

Same for companies like Amazon. Grow super fast and ignore tax laws regarding nexus so you don't pay sales tax. And run a massive loss for years on end until you can figure out how to subsidize your losses through another profitable venture which you hope to achieve. They did with their AWS/cloud business and that makes the company as a whole barely profitable. But subsidizing your massive retail business losses with your high cloud margins is supposedly illegal. Number of regulators anywhere to be found? Zero. And don't forget to have an advantage against all the third party sellers because you can undercut them since you also sell millions of products and don't face the platform/marketplace fees, equating to illegal competition. Must be nice to be a big player.
so you build a delivery system with incentives to not deliver packages, then fire those with the temerity to game the system.

I think the incentive is to keep drivers from tossing undeliverable packages into the trash or just dumping them on the ground where the address should be even if it's a vacant lot.

Only a thief would treat it as an incentive to not deliver packages.

Lots of businesses make it easy for dishonest employees to steal from them, but it's still the employee's fault when he takes advantage of the system. When I was in college, bartenders were notorious for pouring double drinks for their friends (or pouring a drink and pocketing the money, etc)... and some bar owners tried to put expensive pour metering systems in place to combat it, but the ones I'm aware of were eventually disbanded because the system made making drinks more labor intensive, and labor was more expensive than some free booze. So even if bartenders can skim money, that doesn't mean they should or that it's the employer's fault for not doing more to stop it.
I've had emergency dental treatment in an NHS hospital in the UK for an extremely painful dental abscess - was treated first thing on a Sunday morning.
I mean, the two scenarios are completely different. Yes, they both suck, but it's almost impossible to compare stealing physical property one owns and "stealing" the potential difference in wage between two individuals.
The notion is to implement some element of 4 in whatever you're doing because you'll presumably end up with more output because of your interest. It's hard to gauge this, of course!
I don't really understand your logic. I get that there's (sometimes) a social contract that journalists should produce factual work. However, I don't think that facts organize themselves into stories, without a degree of fabrication. Whether that fabrication is just a matter of ordering, emphasis, spin - or even elements made from new cloth seems a bit arbitrary to me.
I document my fixes on Stack Overflow, then put a comment with a link to the answer in the code.

It is remarkably convenient, high Google ranking, with zero technical maintenance and seemingly permanent.

Sometimes better solutions are given by other people.

I have even found my own past comments when googling for solutions!
Actually brotli compresses some more, often around 5 % more density. If you compress to same density, brotli tends to be significantly faster. Zstd decompresses faster.

Brotli is naturally limited to 16 MB of memory use whereas ZStd makes less attempts to reduce memory use. If you want to use more memory with Brotli, you need to use another flag '--large_window' instead of '--window', to indicate that you really want it, whereas zstd uses a lot of memory more silently.

When you compare compression levels, you should compare with same memory consumption -- and if you do that, brotli tends to win by 5 %.

When in doubt in benchmarking, run brotli with --large_window 30

https://encode.ru/threads/2947-large-window-brotli-results-a... is a summary of a recent large-scale experiment of a large variety of compressors, including brotli, zstd and LZMA.
You know, it’s tough. We don’t know this guy’s backstory, but we do live in a society where there are rules. His decision will have personal repercussions. Unfortunately that’s the way things are. And yes, other people steal too but never so much see a fine or jail time, but that’s the way the world works.
Forget about obtuse billing, how is anyone expected to perform price discovery while unconscious (& being rushed to the hospital)?
Enter for a chance to win consoles, smartwatches, and more in the 2018 Ars
Ah, but I wasn't requiring the state to pass laws. Only for the state to allow for private enterprise to build safe places using this trust factor.
This is exactly why I personally think efforts for language-specific package management in general are misguided. This is a solved problem in general-purpose package-managers (apt, dnf, pacman,…), for all their flaws. I don't understand why we need to re-invent that over and over again, including all the duplication of effort to re-package everything over and over again…
Couple of notes from someone who has "designed" (adapted old schematics, really) and built tube amps for both hifi and electric guitar:

- These things run at low voltages (5-80VDC), which is fantastic for a designer, because 'real' vacuum tubes need several hundred volts DC, which means a big power supply transformer/rectifier/filter network.

- These things don't appear to be able to source a lot of current, which makes them good for preamp and tone circuits, not so much for power amp circuits. Classic tube guitar amps got a lot of their tone from the phase splitter, power amp tubes, and power amp transformers. Don't expect an all-nutube-amp.

- Utility for guitar amps would be for "hybrid" amps with a tube preamp and tone circuit feeding a solid-state power amp. There's certainly room for experimentation by amp designers here, since most contemporary tube amps just copy old circuits (mostly Fender and Vox) and use the same tubes they used (12AX7 being the ubiquitous preamp tube). I doubt the NuTube sounds like a 12AX7 when dropped into the same circuit.

- Utility for hifi is questionable. An all-tube design allows for a very linear, low-parts-count amplifier. These will need to be mated to a solid-state power amp, which nullifies the advantage of a tube amp and enters "vacuum tube as marketing gimmick" territory.
Interesting bit of trivia: The Noritake Group, the parent company behind Noritake Itron who make the VFD module, specialise in ceramic products ranging from circuit boards, dental materials, electronic paste to fine china. That's what I love about Japanese companies - the utter complexity of their product lines and exhaustive use of in-house talent. Though as Sony can attest, it can be their undoing as well.
Disgusting, but know that there are good regulations—like environmental protections—that are frequently combatted by industry groups and tend to get weakened by the Republicans before they pass into law. Regulation can be abused by industry and corrupt politicians for anticompetitive reasons, but most of the time, it's to force companies from doing highly profitable things that aren't good for people or the planet; its much cheaper to just dump all your hazardous waste into the river, after all.
I wonder if we will see another extension since Mickey is getting close to the chopping block again.
As someone who just wants to pop a shiny bit of plastic into my cool looking machine and have a cup of coffee pop out... I just hear "bah blah blah".

(That's not actually me - I use a Rancilio Silvia, buy my beans in a brown paper bag and dig my coffee pucks into our vege garden).
> Same applies to Maven, in fact many enterprises forbid access to Maven central

"Maven central" implies there is a central repository though.
Ask a simple question, get a simple answer: no.

The FMV of FaceBook access is zero, as evidenced by Facebook being routinely available for free.

US tax law does not anticipate routinely taxing inchoate transfers of value caused by operating things which distribute value broadly. For example, while assigning the copyright to Harry Potter would likely be a taxable event, holding a concert in public is not, even if the concert is of sufficient quality level to charge for it. The general phrase for this is “de minimis non curat lex”; specific instantiations of this of particular note are intrafamilial payments for cleaning one’s room, which is de jure absolutely a taxable event and which de facto would result in the IRS Commissioner being asked to explain himself to Congress if it were ever enforced.

Additionally, if the IRS used people’s subjective self-assessments to value things on one side of the ledger, they’d have to do it on another side of the ledger, leading to people having the attack “be a utility monster [0]” available against tax administration.

[0] Utility monsters have implausivly large but perhaps “legitimate” weightings for things. The existence of them is problematic for systems which do cost/benefits analyses and allow agents unconstrained choice of their utility function.
The origin is a long story, but I've been using it online for 30 years.
You think the average person is capable of Olympic feats simply with training and dedication?
Also known as the Audiophile Economic Effect. :)
Hi! Thanks for your comments. I'm one of the authors of this post. It is the same platform at the moment (just not tagged with editorial tags so it stays away from the fronts), though sometimes the team that approves non-editorial posts to the site can be concerned about us writing about outages and things as it might carry a 'reputational risk', so we may end up migrating to a different platform in the future so we can publish more quickly, we'll see!
Java's predecessor Oak was created by 13 guys (among them Patrick Naughton, Mike Sheridan, James Gosling and Bill Joy) over 18 months a different then relatively quickly grew to a larger team. (While that project didn't include the language spec itself only, but also runtime and library)

C++ wasn't designed by Stroustrup alone. It's based on C's design.

Sure sometimes you have cleared leaders (see also Perl/Larry Wall) but having a larger group has benefits to see more edge cases (with the risk of committee issues)
I have to disagree with this wholeheartedly because sometimes you don't want to set the expectation with a front-line representative that the data is recoverable. In many cases, you don't want reps promising to recover data that's potentially unrecoverable. It's one thing to recover data in the event of a mistake on behalf of the company but that should require a conversation with someone outside of front-line customer service. I've been in situations too many times where our front-line team knew when something had not been "totally wiped" and they turned out to be "totally wrong" because they were aware that we kept backups but not aware that we had a strict retention policy outside of a specific timeframe or, in other cases, where a hardware failure caused a loss of a specific set of data because it was marked for deletion and wasn't scheduled to have a backup anyways. The customer had cancelled their account and agreed to losing their data but didn't actually read the terms of the cancellation they agreed to and then returned over a month later asking for their data and a rep told them that it's not really lost because we keep backups every 30, 60, and 90 days. That part was true for live accounts but not for deleted accounts.

In other words, data recovery that can't be handled by the customer service reps and that requires developer intervention should be a "surprise and delight" sort of situation and not a "customer should expect this" type of situation.
I don't know the economics terminology, but perhaps average people are just decent at exploiting opportunity? In this study a third party paid out the second-lowest amount to the bidders who bid the lowest amounts in return for deactivation. While no one competitor platform does everything of what Facebook's apps do, there are plenty of competitors they could make use of instead to replace particular single features or utilities of Facebook. The auction then becomes a game to bid an amount that's high as possible, yet still the lowest among the bidders, to actually win the bet. And instead, if Facebook raised prices from $0 to $1000 overnight, people would quit in droves, for the same reason: because dozens of comparable offerings exists at low or no cost that can take over subsets of the functionality in people's lives.

Given that airline overbookings use the same scheme to decide who flies and who gets paid and bumped to a certain, yet hazy-on-details future flight, perhaps this study simply tests humans' secret bidding strategies much more so than it tests the value people place on Facebook's utility.

One way to continue along this line of research would be to make people bid on giving up a much larger selection of social media services, with the exception of one, which would be their choice. They'd have to name their choice to keep. A second auction would then encourage them to name their price to give up that last one as well.
Yes, but minority businesses are a solution for a lack of minority leaders in business.

There are articles mind you about how a lack of diversity in product testing meant that some recognition apps work better with some ethnicities than others, this may seem silly, but a minority owned company would be better able to serve minorities precisely because they understand the minority experience.
A Python3/Tkinter YouTube Downloader GUI for Linux
Sounds like it’s difficult to start a company because of visa issues. Did Y Combinator not ask you about your visa status before accepting?
That is an excellent point. Beyond a very few fixed route systems, there's not much. Anyone know of anything?
The law, in its infinite magnanimity, forbids the rich and poor alike from stealing bread, sleeping under bridges, and loitering.

Considering the demographic of the people who read Hacker News I would be willing to bet that most of you have never seriously considered having to steal to get by.
" the company might negotiate the purchase of the burning property at a steep discount."

This creates the perverse incentive to demand an outrageous price so they can get an property for cheap. Next step would be setting fires to buy even more property.
Simply because it's the best that can be expected, doesn't make it not an awful experience for everyone involved.
The entertainment industry has backed down from seeking copyright extensions.
True. I do wonder, though, if this community effect has increased polarisation of views.
Consider 2 scenarios:

A) I pay you $x per year not to listen to music on youtube.

B) I give you $x per year. Simoultaneously, Youtube starts charging $x per year to listen to music.

Is there much of a difference between them?
I'm sure the author knows more about the topic than me. However, it reads like someone trying to rationalize something that isn't quite rational.

IE: Walking into an old antique store and attempting to explain the genius logic behind it's organization. Shortly after the owner comes out and says, "No, I just throw shit wherever."
Note that there's a difference between "central registry" and "central index". In particular, I don't see any downsides from what they are changing - godoc.org is already, for all intents and purposes, a central index, so I don't see how anything changes in that regard.
Main code repository here: https://github.com/Microsoft/mu_basecore