skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The one trend I'm sensing is that difficult human/technology problems that were once thought of as 'solved' are now becoming hard again. Think of microprocessors as a model, for years Moore's law was running smoothly and you could set you watch on upgrading your PC at least once every 3 years.

The rate of improvement is slowing down as it becomes more capital intensive to advance chips, all the while the demand for performant chips is increasing. We will need another transistor level breakthrough to fuel the next 25 years of microprocessor based improvement.

You can see this trend also with energy on a longer timescale: oil and coal is the fuel that propelled the industrial revolution and human advancement for the past 150 years. Climate change demands that new forms of energy take the forefront: innovations in nuclear power and electricity transportation and storage are needed.

If I were in an investor with a ton of cash I would look to past and explore innovations and ideas around the industrial revolution and try to apply those models to the next 50 years. I really do think we are approaching a similar point in human history where there will need to be a large set of fundamentally new discoveries to continue pushing us forward.

As an aside, I think "devsumer" is also a great area. Maybe I'm in a bubble, but I can't think of a labor force that is producing as much global value (in agreed upon terms) as software developers, creating tools for this labor force is going to continue to be big business.
Would you work with Recruiters - I am sure i used to work on some block chain roles there last year.
Thanks
They intentionally don't offer the option to filter for it many times, otherwise, I would have that permanently selected.
I wonder if some of this is just....the very low average item quality on Amazon these days.

My recommendations right now have seven separate ten-dollar tire valve extenders, two screen protectors from the same brand (only one of which is for my phone- and that one I already bought!), a $1,000 drone i accidentally clicked an ad for last week, two more screen protectors from other brands, four Qi chargers, and five cases for my phone (I already purchased a case for my phone through Amazon).

Very persuasive!
Walmart does this really well.
On the market being flooded, I think it varies greatly depending on where you are and whom you are with. With my current job I am part of a competent team of smart people but on my last job it seems that IQ was in short supply, for candidates, vendors, and even our "partners".

Even though the last job ended months ago, I'm still trying to unconvince myself that everyone in this world is stupid and incompetent, because that was what it felt like.
Maybe the fallout shelters?

Virtually every Sears standalone store - at least up thru the 1980s, was also a fallout shelter (with air raid siren and everything).
I've enjoyed being a customer of WeWork (and benefitting from this economically untenable situation) much more than having my start-up acquired by them. It actually is a pretty well executed product (not economically viable but well designed/run spaces) but not the type of company I wanted anything to do with as an employee. I definitely wasn't buying their pitch about being a tech company.

I left immediately after we were acquired to start another new company and have been very happy with that decision. The whole thing was very... bizarre... to say the least. Just glad I can enjoy this spectacle from afar with relatively little skin in the game.
I can't read TFA, but wanted to note that there's an interesting statistic in the book Why We Sleep: Something like 30% of the population are hard-wired to be "night owls" and 20% early risers. The author hypothesized that this may be an evolutionary survival mechanism that allowed bands of humans to always have people who were awake or more likely to wake quickly if threatened after dark or in the early morning.

For the natural night owls (I am one) the power of a slow morning is just the way we roll. I am so much more productive at 9pm than 9am, and have reworked my daily schedule accordingly.
Python is the language of data science, not R
Start Testing Your GraphQL Queries, Mutations And, Subscriptions
Ask HN: What is your process when reviewing a book?
I would like to know what works best for you after a good read to capture the most critical pieces for looking back on.

Is it a list of quotes, An index back to key pages, a like / dislikes section?
With remote depots, perforce has the functionality you want, or nearly so. There used to be a free tier, which AFAICT is gone now.

The google implementation internally supports virtual checkouts like you suggest.
This reminds me about a recent Freakonomics podcast about Trader Joe's. It starts off by asking, what would you think about a grocery store with no name brands, much fewer options, no sales on items, not loyalty program, no automated checkout, no large social media presence, no large advertising budget, etc? A lot of it sounds bad, but Trader Joe's is really successful.
That's what I'd do if I were in their shoes.

I planned to document it and share with wider audience in case I find something out of the ordinary. For example, if they kept my location history for longer than is necessary to just route my data through their network, or if they had the contents of my texts, or DNS requests history.

Not sure how to pressure into the Google-style solution, but I think knowing would be a fist step.
Possibly on the network facing side of the business in the form of logs that get purged when old, but I have yet to see any IMEIs, possibility to log texts, call histories etc, but if they are sent there will be a trail in the network.

Could probably send the GDPR-request to Huawei and Ericsson as well.

Just keeping track of phones permissions in the network 100 times/second is an insane amount of data, but there could be leaks/compromised systems somewhere in the User -> Apps -> Phone -> Network -> Provider chain.
What Is the Effect of Banana in Constipation?
BREAKING

The bankrupcy judge says if ESL can deposit 120 million by tomorrow, then it can compete in the auction against other liquidators, and keep the company open.

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/01/08/chairman-eddie-lampert-to-ge...
All of the scientific references Dr Greger cited in his video are invalid? Oh, thanks, Dr. lhl on HN.
I think the point is that Amazon as retail on the web isn't the success story of Amazon. It's all of the other things you mentioned.
> so, with regards to not paying it back if they don't land a job. how long are they held to that commitment?

The agreement lasts up ton5 years. If you haven’t paid back at the end of 5 years it goes away and you owe nothing.

You can also pay upfront, but most students don’t have enough cash to do so.
Ah defense. It's just common sense that we should pour money into the military. We're just out to make money, there's definitely not an entire political viewpoint entangled in this "market opportunity". Those crazy radicals that are against killing pointlessly for imperial gains don't understand the real world. In the real world, we need the military to make the world safe for capital. WW1 was a smashing success, as were Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq, and all extremely clearly benefited the working class and made zero money for industrialists. If anything, these wars were entirely unselfish in nature. Wouldn't Saddam still have WND if not for the pride and strength of our armed services and the weapons manufacturers, energy industry, and other geopolitical factors?

Fwiw, they're probably right. Maybe we will see more startups enter into this ripe "opportunity" to open the gates of hell and unleash the forces of greed and meyham.
Mock your GraphQL schema with few lines of code
> And unlike with object recognition that uses cameras, there are no privacy concerns, or need to maintain line-of-sight or good lighting conditions. Radar works through different materials and in the dark as well as the light.

Wait, what? The ability to see through walls and not require line of sight leads to fewer privacy concerns?

Seems to me the privacy concerns are significantly greater for radar than facial recognition. Radar can see places that cameras can't, and while it doesn't capture color information, it does capture detailed 3D data that camera-based systems need to interpolate.

Plus, you know, the whole working through walls thing. Seems like there are at least as many opportunities for abuse as with facial recognition technology.
Ethereum classic may have just suffered a 51% attack
The title is clickbait trash, but the actual point in the blogpost is actually really good. So I feel like this deserves at least some discussion.

Proposed Alternative Title: "Proof of Work 51% attacks are far cheaper than most people think"

General point: When a BTC Miner creates a 51% attack, they get rewarded the block. Which means they get the 12.5 BTC (or whatever coin) associated with the blockchain.

In effect, the rewards of the 51% attack are not only the double-spends, but also every coin that is associated in the blockchain. Mining rewards are therefore, granted to the double-spend attacker.

To but it into more concrete terms. If a 51% attacker were to attack Bitcoin after 1-week (1008 blocks), then the 51% attacker not only gets to double-spend everything over the week... but the attacker ALSO gains at least 1009 blocks worth of reward from the blockchain (At $3500 / BTC, that's $3,531,500).

----------

Once you account for the BTC that is mined by the 51% attacker, the effective profit margin of a 51% attack is far easier than what people seem to expect.
What should I do in my 20s?
Amazon is not a SV company.
As I view the problem, what's lacking is a GUI markup standard roughly comparable to HTML. HTML browsers were not originally meant to build full-on GUI's in, but the industry has accepted the habit of forcing them to "do" GUI's using convoluted tricks and giant JavaScript libraries.

By the way, the "GUI markup language" doesn't necessarily have to be XML-only. Maybe JSON or CSV versions can be defined also. However, XML is a good start: learn to walk before you run.

As far as how interaction and screen changes could be handled, see:
http://wiki.c2.com/?GuiMarkupProposal

I particularly dig the 3-type "update" technique that uses "Attribute", "Tag", and "Delete" scope. (It's about half way down in the document.)
More national parks! As a recreational hiker and walker that would be a dream. I'd go vegetarian myself if it guaranteed even 50% more parkland.
GraphQL Tutorial: Queries and Mutations Part 2
Experiance andf the willings to not get screwed.
I'm looking forward to someone writing "It's Always Too Early". It'd be a guide for people of all ages to acquire the same education/network/skills as college purportedly offers, without the immense monetary and opportunity costs of the legacy university system.
The 17% is capped at $30k and only happens if the student gets a job that pays $50k+. If the student doesn’t get a job that pays $50k+ the school makes $0.

If universities had that tuition plan they would be bankrupt.
That doesn't sound too bad if your employee payroll is going to be >= $1M/yr.

To put it another way, I'd rather have a dedicated space for 10 employees than have 10.5 or 11 employees all working from their bedrooms and starbucks.
Yes. It's like learning a language by first learning the grammar -- that works if you already have semantic tree of grammar that you can patch in from a related language family (say Portuguese to Spanish), but for most people this doesn't work. Most people need to start by memorizing phrases by rote first.

It's only after we are familiar with the language that the underlying structures emerge.

This applies to learning math too. Unless we are already familiar with the structures in place, we typically first read the axioms, then look at the examples and try to work through some of them to gain familiarity, and then the underlying structure reveals itself to us.

It reminds me of a quote:

"Thermodynamics is a funny subject. The first time you go through it, you don't understand it at all. The second time you go through it, you think you understand it, except for one or two small points. The third time you go through it, you know you don't understand it, but by that time you are so used to it, it doesn't bother you any more."

Familiarity precedes true understanding.

This is also why people who read textbooks in a linear passive fashion don't do well in tests. They read and think they know the material, but if they are tested on it, they fail because they haven't truly grappled with the problem space.
> But memory handling is something that does not fit my vision.

Note that in practice memory management is almost never an issue with FreePascal since a lot of things are based on TComponent that provides an ownership-based model and dynamic arrays (at the language level) handle a lot of cases you'd need to worry yourself. Of course if you create raw objects you also need to release them, but this is something you generally do in constructors and destructors.

> I would hope for something similar to Swift - automatic reference counting.

I'm not sure how i feel about this personally since i think it adds a lot of hidden baggage to the language, but you can use reference counting using "COM" interfaces (the name is just a historic artifact, they work in non-Windows environments too) in current FPC. There is also work to allow any custom type become reference counted by defining some special operators (essentially functions) that the compiler will automatically call to incref/decref/etc (which can also be used to implement RAII).

> With ARC I can forgive even the manual UUIDs for components.

Is the manual UUIDs you are talking about in Swift? AFAIK you do not need to define any UUID in FreePascal (except for the COM interfaces mentioned above).
>its pretty much impossible to know whether or not you comply, even if you store zero data about users.

Can you explain how you store Zero data but you are not sure? Are you referring at the fact that you include third party code or use third party services?

The fact that the laws are not simple is because they need to define things very specifically to make it impossible for "clever" people to interpret them different then the "spirit oft he law"
I think, this is a wonderful tool. The Asciidoc format is much better specified than Markdown, which is okay for a short text like a Github readme, but lacks consistency between rendering engines, and is not really feature rich for anything more serious than a short text.

The Asciidoctor tool also comes with a very high-quality default CSS style, which makes it very appealing and ready to use. Thumbs up from me for the work on this tool and the format.
Along with a deal to embed a proprietary eye-tracking service that will then be bought out by Mozilla once they realize that they've done it again.
Does it have enough error-corrected qubits to actually do something useful, or is it a high-tech piece of luxury furniture?
Does it really? I can imagine there's room for innovation in helping people to honor and grieve the passing of their loved ones.
> I do not consider animal lives worth valuing

For the sake of discussion, do you have a pet? Or have loved ones that have a pet?

If you were to torture that pet would you feel anything? Would your loved ones object for any reason?
With the ActivityPub "Fediverse" each publisher only controls the instance they publish to, not the entire network at large. Anyone can run an instance of a server implementing the protocol and anyone can subscribe to messages published by a microblogger.

What experience do you have here, and have you read the protocols yet? Here's a reference implementation:

https://github.com/dariusk/express-activitypub

My larger statement here is that organizations that the public give tax dollars into should be running open infrastructure that they self-manage and would then provision accounts for their users (users in this case being the agencies that utilize and publish to social media feeds and the offices of elected officials that do the same), and not be subscribers to centralized social media services (that is, twitter, facebook, instagram, et cetera et cetera. If you haven't been living under a rock you know these services have issues and are being gamed.)
There are also important environmental issues that come with the production of meat and other animal products.
ty!

best tip of 2019!

...

so far. ;)
> I've seen descriptions of this strategy before, but this particular article lists way more concrete examples than I've seen before, which makes me wonder if it is now the default across the entire tech industry at all times.

If I missed any, I'm always happy to add more. (Sometimes the only way to really nail down an abstract pattern for people is to provide an enormous list of examples.)
What if I don't value your life and want to keep you as a slave, would it be fair to 'agree to disagree'?
My local grocery store had a drive-thru pickup back in the 90s. The strange part was you still had to pick your own items and check out conventionally. Then walk to your car and drive through the pickup area. They converted it to a cart return around the turn of the century.

If they simply had a way to order ahead they would have been two decades ahead of the current industry.
Probably worth mentioning, Firefox VR is also going targeting Magic Leap: https://blog.mozvr.com/a-new-browser-for-magic-leap/

IMHO the strategy of unlocking a lot of VR and AR content via a browser makes a lot of sense. The ongoing Rustification of Firefox, things like Web GL, WASM, etc. It all makes sense for VR/AR applications to build on that. Solving the empty room problem where there is no meaningful content or where all the interesting content is in somebody else's walled garden is a key challenge.

VR requires a dedicated UX and I can imagine independent hardware vendors are maybe not so eager to e.g. rely on Google for providing them with that UX. Also, Firefox seems to be leading here rather than following.
I really want to go back to finish school. I'm 28 and dropped out at the end of my 3rd year with 97 credits because I had a baby on the way in another country. I've been working as a software engineer ever since. I did try one semester at a CC shortly after but my job was too demanding on top of parenting a wee lad and I took a slate of all Fs, sadly, since I missed the withdrawal date. Now I have the time, funds, and motivation to return and do well (I hope) but fear my sliding grades towards the end would put a nail in the coffin of going to decent university near me (Southern California).

I think my real-world experience would help me a lot here, particularly if I applied to a CS program, but I'm not sure. I will speak to admissions counseling soon to get their feedback, but if anyone here has similar experience, I'd love to hear about it.
I'm not even vegan and go for the Beyond Meat burger whenever I'm at A&W because it taste better than regular fast food burgers ... and I got to A&W instead of other chains because the burger is there.
>1/ buy tonnes of stock at a discount via his "arms length" hedge fund

Lampert owns around 30% of outstanding Sears stock and ESL holds around 20%. He bought all that at far above current prices, paying hundreds of millions over the years to buy the stock. Now he's going to take a significant haircut in bankruptcy court, so much so that he's trying to throw another $4B into this hole to save his investment.

Sears Holdings has a market cap of $23M today. He's already lost hundreds of millions on this.
They will publicly pretend they bought the eye-tracking service, but they will actually just hold some minority investment, like they did with Cliqz.
Just a tip, of sorts: I don't wholly disagree with your argument, but you might do well to soften the tone. As written, your post comes across as accusatory.

Maybe that's your intention, but it's a really bad way to persuade people of anything.
Costco loves the concept of price anchoring. That's why the diamond rings and tvs are right near the front, and their liquor isle has $1,000 bottles.

The concept is that when you decide against buying the $1,000 thing, the $50 thing seems a good comprise. If all you had were $10 things, the $50 thing would seem to be 'too much'.
> Yeah, it would. And it'd be a great case for a non-profit centered around issues like that.

Indeed.

https://knightcolumbia.org/content/knight-institute-v-trump-...
I think it's unquestionable that tech like Uber's can/does allocate cars and rides more efficiently. The taxi model relies on drivers circling looking for a fare and phone dispatch with, at best, a dispatcher seeing GPS cab location on a screen and trying to eyeball-match it to the caller's location. (or, at worst, caller-reported location, and radioing a bunch of cabs asking them "hey, where you at?")

At its most efficient, an Uber model can automatically and predictively allocate rides based on realtime rider and driver current and predicted locations with realtime traffic/travel data. There's simply no comparison.

The extent to which rides are cheaper due to skirting of regulations, extracting money from VCs, pushing costs onto drivers, is effectively a separate issue.

That is to say, Uber can break many laws, screw over drivers, flood the market with way too many cars, all while losing money, but none of that means that the dispatch model isn't inherently more efficient.
Everybody at my old company was laid after 50, flexible hours: full-time, part-time, on-call, and working 40 hours a week in a cubicle gets really old.
Smalltime startups hiring like they’re Google
Impossible is not currently available directly to consumers. They do not make a meatloaf - it is possible the grocery store bought the raw product and is selling their own meatloaf.
They literally had the best tools in the world - my dad swore by Craftsman, told me never to bother buying any other brand. Then they threw it away on a demonstration of Randian philosophy.
It is never too late for education. It is always too early for crippling debt that exceeds your proven earning potential. None of this advice touches on the lost principle of not putting one's future on layaway. Student load debt forgiveness is a death sentence for American politicians yet there are millions of us waiting for a miracle.
I know a guy in his seventies who recently finished nursing school. He is working as a nurse with elderly patients who are younger than him. Mid-thirties definitely is not old ;-)
I don't doubt that you've had poor interviewing experiences with companies that ask you to do things that are not representative of the job you're interviewing for. This is a well-known problem in our field, and as a fellow engineer with 10 years of experience, I've also encountered it.

It's also not my point at all.

The comment I was responding to was advocating that there is a myth surrounding the flood of people who don't know how to code. This is not a myth.

Doubling an array of integers is one of the easiest questions I can possibly think of, and use it to build interviewee confidence as a warm-up before diving into pragmatic questions related to the job.

Unfortunately, there is a not insignificant number of candidates who claim experience and yet are unable to write `.map(x => x * 2)` or use a for loop.
This is more popular in EU. In many countries Amazon even does not operate, and even in Germany people try to prefer different place if they can.
> Avoid boring people.

Corollary: people aren't always as boring as they may seem - digging in a little, asking questions - I often find what people are doing outside of work (which seems to be the default "interesting or not" metric) can be rather interesting.
Yeah - you would have “all-natural” meat that would sell for a premium over the “processed, artificial” meat.