skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A recent example I discovered: Automobile body repair shops. They used to be mostly independent businesses, but sometime recently, a nationwide corporation called Abra has bought up many independent body shops and turned them into a network.

Perhaps the conditions for recognizing when an industry "needs" consolidation aren't that esoteric? Aren't they all issues of scaling?

Another example is in refrigerated shipping containers. Even though those are specialty items, prices have been driven down in that area to the point where financing the construction of new stock is becoming an impediment to some companies in remaining price competitive. Larger companies which have manufacturing in-house have a huge advantage in that niche.

Nationwide chains can spend less per shop on advertising, but still out-compete small shops in terms of advertising exposure. They're also more convenient for other large companies to make deals with. Is last-mile delivery like auto-body, in that the flow of information among consumers isn't so great, and it takes considerable effort for delivery teams to maintain quality of service even though the margins aren't always so great?

(Anecdote: I bought a portable dishwasher from Amazon. The UPS driver dropped the box right on the corner, completely smashing the packing and the bottom tray of the machine. I reported the damage and did the return. I got the replacement item and the UPS driver dropped the box on its corner in exactly the same way! I ended up keeping it, since the 2nd time, the water tightness and the cosmetics from the front weren't compromised, then eventually sold it on Craiglist.)
I would recommend The Goal (E. Goldratt) over The Phoenix Project. Although The Goal is not about IT, I feel it’s much more didactic on how to identify problems and deal with them. In The Phoenix Project, things kinda fall into place without any deeper reasoning about why they should.
"Food insecurity" is a textbook example of an underlying problem (hunger & malnutrition) being solved so thoroughly that the goalposts are moved out of the stadium to justify further intervention.
"Still working on it but, I'm not sure how you resolve some of these issues ..."

i can recommend two books that discuss exactly these issues and go even deeper:

"The Servant: A Simple Story About the True Essence of Leadership " and "What drives people".
An useful mnemonic of GTD: https://gettingthingsdone.com/five-steps/
SpaceX also isn’t headquartered in SV
>GTD is agnostic about the quantity of work you take on.

Which makes it only a partial success. I disagree that it is agnostic. It does recommend you evaluate it - it just doesn't give any idea how.

I'll look at the other resources - thanks.
During my time as a student I felt that the computer science department should have been split into two disticnt programs. The first program should have existed in the math department dealing with the theory and mathematics of computation. The other should have been in the engineering school and focused more on actual computers. Hardware, software, operating systems, working in a team, designing large systems, etc. I think I would have gotten much more out of that. Instead it seems many universities created “CS lite” programs in their business schools.
Apple AirPower Mass Production to Start from January 21, Report
I have seen many real world bad "maintenance mode" implementations. Including things like "oops, we are now serving up scripts/configuration/etc as plain text".
I got the same feeling when taking timed tests in some of the more proof heavy CS classes.

In a lot of ways it felt like solving crossword puzzles for a grade with a timer ticking down. Frequently I'd spend the most of the test with no idea what to do, and then about 20 minutes before time was up, I'd have an insight and I'd spend the last 15 minutes furiously racing to write it all down.

This worked out well and I ended up with a 4.0 program GPA, but I was a wreck every test day--I was always convinced that this was the day I'd fail to have that last minute epiphany.

I was always looking for a more systematic approach, but I never found one. In the end I still don't know if the problem was me or the tests.
It's a subjective preference.

I have tried Trello in the past over an extended period, but it didn't motivate me to keep using it.

Elsewhere, I have talked about solving disorganization by knowing the quirks of one's own mind.

One of my quirks was internet distractions, and at one point, it got so bad that I'd simply keep my router switched off and use an inconvenient mobile for any research. No easy internet=less distractions, but also no trello.

Another quirk is that I like to write down my planning analyses and thoughts, sometimes in multiple paras. They help me to plan and correct plans. Trello or mind mapping interfaces are not convenient to satisfy that kind of quirk. TXT is ideal for it.
I hesitate to get involved in any political discussion here, but I want to understand you.

You seem to be suggesting that it is the objective of Democrats to continue to allow people to enter the country illegally. Do you truly believe that?

The wall being ineffective is a good argument against it, but it isn't the only one. Even an ineffective wall will surely damage the relationship between the two countries it separates, for example.
Everything I want to do can not be organized.
The way to view this and previous shutdowns is to blame the party that isn't willing to vote for the CR. That's the party taking the government hostage to achieve their political goals.
Ive been happy with operator mono for React development.
A person can know the integral sign and know vaguely that it means "the area under a curve" without actually knowing calculus. Understanding the semantics of a term or symbol and being familiar with its referent are very different things. This is universally accepted and not controversial at all. If you'd like to continue arguing your point, I'd ask you to provide even a modicum of evidence.

In terms of what you're "stating (as a fact)," I can tell you with absolute certainty that you're wrong. Many high schools do not teach set theory and, among those that do, many - mine included - don't refer to this operation as the Cartesian product. It is simply "the product of A x B."
Doctors, with their few minutes per patient, are not in the position to teach or really influence people's habits. Teachers should teach- about exercise among other things.
> 2) Studies also show that vitamin D deficiency is related to many illness. Taking supplement protects against them.

That's hardly a "rebuke". First, I'll note that you carefully used the word "related" instead of "causing" or "a major factor". Then again, you omitted "Studies show that..." from your second sentence, probably because there are no studies showing that people with Vitamin D deficiency, taking supplements, are doing any better than the ones that don't.

In fact there is a meta-study, quoted by the article, that suggests they don't:

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/landia/article/PIIS2213-8...
You simply need to sacrifice something in order to do the other thing. It's a question of priorities and realization that you simply can not do all of the things you want to do. This is really hard to accept.
According to another research[1] vitamin D supplementation actually changes a lot of taken in adequate (by orders of magnitude higher than the official RDA) doses regularly (and it also affects mood). So I conclude that what we need is to also supplement nitric oxide, not just vitamin D alone.

I had never feared sun and don't even use sunscreens but I neither live in a particularly sunny area nor have enough spare time for regular sunbathing so supplements still are the only way to get enough.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15867918
It's really sad how toxic Reddit brigading is
I wish there was some way to modify fossil data from within the repository itself. Like, if fossil's bug list were duplicated as files in the issues/ folder, and I could edit the bugs individually as files.

Yeah, if there were some way to combine fossil and org-mode, that would be perfect. As it is, fossil by itself comes pretty darn close for me.
Maybe I just have no sense of humour, but I really didn't find this even slightly amusing.

If anything, I found it annoying to read through all the drivel to get to the actually relevant parts of the policy.

I don't want pricavy policies to be funny - I just want them to clearly and concisely disclose what PI they store and why they store it.
I use a simplified form of GTD as a form of survival.

I don't know the ins and outs of GTD. I skimmed through the book enough to get started. I periodically look things up when I have a question.

I literally have this flowchart [1] printed out and at my desks at home and work to serve as a constant reminder when I feel overwhelmed.

I AVOID READING GTD-RELATED TOPICS AND TRYING NEW APPS AND TOOLS. This is crucial, otherwise I will get sidetracked into new methodologies and reinventions.

What I have now, works, and I want to avoid the productivity porn trap. Pick something that works well enough and make small iterations[2] to reduce frictions.

Other important points:

- Identify all of your inboxes and work to keep on them. And maintain a single physical inbox at home and work.
- Perform a weekly review of your tasks and make adjustments as necessary.

1. https://lifedev.net/wp-content/uploads/2007/02/gtd-workflow....

2. This is critical. No major changes at once.
isn't there a free micro instance option? or it was only free for a year?
They were joking.
Here's a second non-diabetic who tracks their glucose with the same non-invasive device and started analyzing it.

Blog post: https://richardsprague.com/notes/cgm/cgm_analysis/

Slides from presentation last week: https://www.slideshare.net/richardsprague/quantified-self-se...

He also tweets about it: https://twitter.com/sprague
Compromise is not appeasement.
Reproducing high-quality singing voice with state-of-the-art AI technology
Is there any data that shows walls between countries damage their relationships?

I do believe Democrats want people to enter illegally, instead of not at all. Based on things they say I see no reason why to think that’s not the case.
Dexcom has a similar sensor on the market that’s approved for insulin dosing decisions. I don’t know if any of the other continuous monitors have that particular feature which might be important to those who take fast insulins.
Is that moving goalposts, or just recognizing another problem?

It seems like a problem, so is it a bad thing to solve it once we've (according to you) solved hunger and malnutrition?
> eyes fatigue.

Not only that, but it might as well look nice if you're staring at it for 10+ hours.
> The sensors worked as advertised

I mean... yes. They're a prescription medical device used by Type 1 diabetics to stay alive.
I am not getting any information from this piece except that students need more govt aid.
I live by this mantra. If you are lucky enough to be hired be a FAANG or a startup/company that compensates you well, live and save like it’s not going to last forever.
I paid for the original Pragmata font in 2004, and he has kept sending updates surprisingly often ever since. I suppose I upgraded to Pragmata Pro in 2011, so only 8 years of updates on that. Money well spent for 40 hours a week of use

https://www.fsd.it/shop/fonts/pragmatapro/
> How did we get through the Neolithic Era without sunscreen? Actually, perfectly well.

It's modern times. We optimize for long individual lives, not propagation of the species. As lifespans increase, so should efforts to avoid cumulative, damaging radiation.

Similarly, heavy meat consumption gave early humans an advantage, but you shouldn't adopt that caveman behavior for a 100-year lifespan - it doesn't "work" at that scale.
To provide a citation for their two decades of Adsense fraud, last year they settled a case they fought for four years after someone sued them for banning their account and stealing their revenue, alleging that they deliberately froze publisher accounts at the end of the month to maximize the amount of revenue to be stolen.

After a ban the allegedly fraudulent portion of the revenue is refunded to the advertisers, non-fraudulent revenue within the same time frame is ... they settled for $11m on the grounds that it would be too expensive to show how they didn't design a system intended to steal from their publishers.

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/adsense-lawsuit/248135/
Things for task oriented todo

Airtable for things is like to do (trips/movies/restaurants etc)

Note/text file for more existential goals
There was a similar article in Australia a few months back https://www.smh.com.au/lifestyle/health-and-wellness/here-co...
That Elon Musk has leveraged 40% of his Tesla stock to fund his other businesses.

SpaceX is private company so we don't know how much his SpaceX ownership is pledged as collateral.
Oumuamua. “It waited in place, like a buoy in the ocean, until the ‘ship’ of the solar system ran into it.”

suggests the object was stationary, until it was [influenced] by our solar system, and made orbit, "in a strange manner" according to previous articles i have read.

here are a couple of helpfuls perhaps.V

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oumuamua

https://www.snopes.com/news/2018/11/07/the-science-behind-th...
KyotoCabinet is one of the most important weapons in my holster as a data scientist.

With that kind of a specialty, there are essentially two different kinds of jobs / work environments. One is where it's all about infrastructure and implementing the database to end all databases (and "finding stuff out" is a mere afterthought to that. The other is where 100% of the focus is on "finding stuff out BY NEXT WEEK" with zero mandate for any infrastructure investment of any kind. When I find myself in the latter kind of work environment and I need to quickly get sortable and/or indexable datastructures of any kind, then a key-value store is the way to go and KyotoCabinet is a really good one that I've used LOTS and it has never let me down.

Just don't let your boss find out about it if yours is of the pointy-haired variety. If he finds out that it's an open source project that has seen its last commit some 6 years ago and has been abandoned since, he will be less than pleased. -- Personally I find that's a really bad argument. It's feature-complete w.r.t. anything I've ever wanted to do with it, and its feature set is actually way richer than most of the younger alternatives that are still being actively developed (because they are still in need of very active development, and aren't nearly as well battle-tested). Plus what's the worst that could happen? That you will one day want to move to an environment where it will no longer work. Well in that case it shouldn't be so hard to substitute another key-value store for this one. After all, the simplicity of the API around a key-value store where get & set is basically all you need, should make that really easy.
I quite agree with you. I think this is more the perception of the leadership I'm working with than my own opinion. However, convincing them of your point has been the difficult part. Their fear of undermining their position is high.
> Perhaps the conditions for recognizing when an industry "needs" consolidation aren't that esoteric? Aren't they all issues of scaling?

I don't think they are esoteric either, but rather, pretty straightforward. Modern communications and information technology have made it possible for a single corporate entity to easily manage an enterprise spread over many disparate geographic locations.

As a result, there are costs (basically, people) that can now be reduced because they are redundant, and the remaining people can create some level of standardization in process and branding.

This is an old story at this point - at least a few decades old. The only surprising thing is that it took this long for the last-mile white-glove delivery industry to get there.

> Is last-mile delivery like auto-body, in that the flow of information among consumers isn't so great, and it takes considerable effort for delivery teams to maintain quality of service even though the margins aren't always so great?

Sure, I'm not arguing that they don't have a strong incentive to merge. Quite the opposite, in fact.
Why startups like GitLab and InVision are going all-remote
It’s been interesting reading the public info posted for furloughed employees. For example, I didn’t know that Equifax has a workforce management division and that they manage parts of NASA’s workforce.
Last release 1½ years ago. Minimal activity. I wouldn't consider using it on that alone.
I get IKEA deliveries to my Bulgarian village 1-2/month. Have been for years.
The key I think is that the launch rate has increased, but the market has a years long delay due to build times. The result is that the existing supply of launchable satellites has been consumed, so fewer launches are available to pay the bills.
Launch price does not necessarily tell us anything because we do not know what profit margins SpaceX has.
For most people this argument doesn't follow because they don't see elimination of government as a terminal goal. We believe the government does a lot of useful but un-essential functions, like operate federal parks.

The other thing is the vast majority of the government's budget is Medicare, DoD, and social security which are all still operating to my knowledge.
The internet is already decentralized. Some billionaire can't do anything to fix the situation, at least not directly, because our draconian copyright and network access laws are the only reason that walled gardens are able to exist.

The internet as used by many, many people consists of a few centralized walled gardens. Walled gardens also exist because of network effects.

An open internet is _not_ a technical issue. It's a legal one.

Perhaps it's a social one as well.
Why do you need smart contracts (besides the additional transaction types that Bitcoin provides) to implement a Patreon? Why can't the website just redistribute funds, if it is going to be centralized already? (It has to be hosted somewhere, handle user support etc.) What specific functions would you need from a smart contract there? I honestly don't see any.
The reality: Silicon Valley has had a lot of bad press lately and like Michael Bluth’s family on Arrested Development they want you to know that “we’re nice now”.
One part of this is that campus dining halls are often pretty expensive - comparable to a mid-tier chain restaurant.

Even most people with professional jobs would consider it too expensive to eat out for breakfast, lunch, and dinner everyday, but we put many college students in a position where that’s basically their only option. At my school, campus dining plans were mandatory for your first year, and I didn’t have access to a real kitchen.

At the same time, it’s difficult for schools to control dining hall costs, because (at least anecdotally) “dining hall food quality” is a surprisingly big factor when high schoolers choose a college.

This is one symptom of a broader phenomenon: college has become a bundled product of courses and a degree + a package of expensive consumption choices, and it’s difficult to get one without the other. Most people early in their careers don’t live in luxury apartments, belong to fancy gyms, or eat out a lot, but living that lifestyle is the default expectation now if you go to a residential college or university in the US.
I'd be curious to know how he measures stress levels.
Breezy – An opinionated state shape and PJAX library for React, Redux, and Rails
This. It requires a far wider range of skills to be a really good front-end dev. UI, UX (which are 2 different skills in their own right), design, on top of coding for a set of platforms that, taken together, behave as erratically as a drunken raccoon. I’d much rather do “complicated” back-end stuff that is glorified CS 101 than have to design and build a web interface that has to be intuitive to use, responsive, accessible, and works on IE11.

The problem is that everyone notices the terrible UIs, but really good interfaces get out of your way so you don’t always notice how good they are. Hence a lack of recognition for good front-end devs.
I love that. I definitely have more recipes than cooking skills. Better head to the kitchen!
Access to sugar has increased many-fold over human history. The incidence of sunlight exposure has dropped dramatically.
It is called propaganda because it is advertising which is paid and sponsored by the state. Also propaganda does not try to encourage the sale of a product, service or idea. Propaganda is not bad per see (like in this case - it is actually very nice).

And also this is not "Santa" - it is Дед Мороз (father frost).
You can't do everything you want to do. First thing is to realize if you are working a full time job, you can't really do much else. If you have a full time job and children, don't really expect to do anything more than that. if you want to do something else - you need to get rid of children for a while (parents/boarding school) or quit working.

One thing I've stopped doing is shopping around for the best possible price bargain. I spend hours and hours to get the best laptop I could get for a price. If I just paid a few hundred dollars more I would have a better model and saved myself a literally a week's worth of work.
Stock markets and the rule of law
You didn't say "should not be allowed near a production database" you said "database"

That is very different. This was a 16 year old kid trying to mess around and learn stuff, he should be able to be around databases all he wants. I wouldn't hire him as a DBA, but he should be able to learn without having to wait for more advanced math.
Is that something I should care about? I don’t really care how much he leveraged stock. Maybe people in finance would care because maybe that might mean he’s stressed about the different ventures but that’s just par for the course in the tech world.
Same here - it was entertaining for a few seconds, but actually reading through this - both because of the format and the styling of the page - is incredibly tedious.

One of the best privacy policy's I've ever read is for tildes.net: https://docs.tildes.net/privacy-policy

It's written and organized very clearly, and, most importantly, views user data as a liability instead of an asset.

A few snippets:

Except when making a donation, third-party assets or scripts are never included on Tildes. Outside of those specific donation pages, using the site involves communicating exclusively with our servers.

All personal information logged this way is deleted in 30 days unless: [legal obligations/TOS violations]

Your information is used exclusively to operate Tildes. This includes providing the functionality of the site, analyzing usage, troubleshooting site issues, and investigating abuse. We never sell your information and Tildes does not have advertising.

Tildes does not alter its behavior based on whether your browser sends a Do Not Track (DNT) header or not.

(it doesn't need to, it already doesn't track you)
"If you're employing people to do something robots can't, you need to understand that the way to treat them is also different"

And if you're employing people to do what robots can do, you can treat them as robots?
Ask HN: Surface/iPad Pro Linux equivalent?
I'm looking for a device that has great pen writing capabilities, ability to present to a monitor and preferably a detachable keyboard.

The main requirement is that it has Linux support so I can use it as my day to day development machine when needed.
When the State Kills
I have a top of the line amp, why do I have to get a "cast enabled" one? I am not sure what the last sentence meant. I already have the dongles, I'm just sad they are no longer going to make them.