skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This summarizes why we can't have nice things. As Airbnb scales, the problems scale too. Unless they started seeing serious financial implications putting the investor dollars at risk, Airbnb basically has no choice but to scale to 'sustain the machine' and stay competitive (monopolistic) in the shared-lodging marketplace.

Airbnb sounds good in theory - like when the founders described how they came up with the idea after they started making side money letting travelers crash at their pad and jovially cooking breakfast with their guests. There's other people out there that could share their homes with nice strangers and enjoy these fun bonding experiences with guests too, right?

However, this theory goes out the window once the platform is opened up to the world for all kinds of good, bad, and in-between actors to use.

Now we have guests/hosts stealing from each other, scamming each other, pulling nefarious acts, and destroying the housing markets of various communities. And Airbnb throws up their hands from the sidelines and apathetically wonders "What could we do? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯"
Maybe 1/4 of people who want to be non-technical co-founders really bring something to the table.

It is a black comedy to see how many salesmen could not sell, how many recruiters cannot recruit, how many businesses recruit people at great expense to lose them because they use them in a boneheaded way, etc.

I've seen many people who think they are working at a high abstraction level while they are really ignoring a large number of inconvenient truths.

Given that so many businesses need web sites that are a variation on a theme I wonder why there isn't an accelerator that has a captive dev shop that is highly productive making e-commerce sites that are variations of a theme based on a fixed framework.
I think once you understand the graph, then looking at what the graph looks like and what you want it to look like usually leads you to being able to figure out what operation you want.

And then git fetch/push/pull are mostly about copying parts of that graph from one place to another.

After that, it's mostly a question of what workflow you want and that becomes much more than a git question because git works for a variety of workflows, and many of the features of git are really only relevant for certain flows.
I only migrated companies away from it. I prefer reliable data stores. Postgres + Riak always got my back, 15years, 8 years in production respectively.
You are assuming the ads don't have any impact on where Steve goes to buy.

In reality what happens is marketing runs an ad for $3000 offering a $1000 incentive, Steve makes the purchase, and making gets to (possibly correctly) claim they netted $1000 in sales.

Those marketing people want to keep their jobs, so they are going to work hard to justify their existence!
As we all know, it took Google so long to get this. Can you overview on what are some of the technical challenges faced? Just curious. Thanks.
I second this. It's not easy to call Airbnb if you're international. Even if you end up finding the number and reaching them, you're placed on hold waiting for a representative.
Again, 100% fallacy. "Sure, this round of climate change is worse." and comparing that to another change (our coping ability) with no discussion of magnitude.

The degree of climate change is not just "worse". It's without precedent in geologic history in velocity of change. Our improved ability to fend for ourselves is many orders of magnitude less that the degree of change that is happening.

You can read your history books and multiple it by 100 or 1000.
It makes me worried how few people noted this, how quick they are to rely on corporations instead of the law to punish bad behavior.
To be predatory it has to be deceptive or complex in a way that leads people to misunderstand. This is not the case here. It is crystal clear that a non voting share gives the buyer no control over the company, and if he buyer accepts that then he should get no such control.
No, he wouldn't. Either way he has more money than he can realistically spend. Money has drastically less value the more of it you have.
If you're an emacs user (and maybe even if you're not), try the magit package.

That taught me in a few weeks of usage more git 102 and 201 type functionality than a year of using only the basics did.
> Less than 10 billion euros for something that will do amazing things for science? Where do I donate?

I know right? A single aircraft carrier costs like $13 billion USD (or about 11.3 billion euros as of today). I'll take a huge machine for science over a big machine for war any day.

EDIT: I got downvoted but see no comment? I'd like to know if I got my numbers wrong.
Huge Open Access Deal in Germany
I don't think UBI would work like that. The thing is that you can essentially simulate UBI yourself if you work in tech. Go and work a high paying job, or contract, for 3-6 months. Then take the rest of the year off. The problem is of course that quality of life still costs money. So in general having time for other things is a cost issue, not an income issue.
Well, while I can somewhat agree with your point; it sounds like you are looking at it from a business standpoint. Someone who will be working with the details of the code is going to appreciate unit tests, not only because it verifies all the tiny pieces of code the person wrote. But also because it makes it very easy to track down where issues might be if a feature is broken.

I dont agree with the "100% test coverage" mentality, but I think there is value with unit and integration tests.
Nice anecdote, but anecdotes are not data.

(The fact that I've revealed a truly remarkable bit of my family's history to you, for you to simply dismiss it, speaks volumes. You demonstrate no curiosity about it. It's simply something for you to "debunk." Just wow. Do you have any idea what my Korean grandfather had to accomplish within the Japanese occupied system to get into the position to microlend? Do you know what that meant for the farmers he was able to lend to? Do you have any clue what the North Korean communists who came into power would have made of all that? No curiosity about actual history, just partisan axe grinding. George Orwell was right about upper/middle class lefties. They don't care about helping the poor so much as about hurting the rich.)

The repeated climb of Chinese immigrants, going back over a thousand years, across different eras of history, in widely differing parts of the world, is not mere anecdote. If you include immigrants of other ethnicities, then the pattern becomes stronger, and the evidence mounts.

The vast majority of small businesses fail;

True. So one tries again.

wealthier people are more likely to start companies and more likely to succeed.

That's Pareto, not Capitalism.

Capital is indeed quintessential to capitalizing on market opportunities through business. It is in the name for a reason.

Yet time and time again, poor immigrants get themselves into the game and succeed, with little or modest access to capital. Contrast this with the numerous situations where industries are socialized, but into the hands of a different class/identity group, then proceed to decay. Capital is helpful, but isn't the key. Culture and knowledge are.

In this, there is hope, because culture and knowledge are transmissible.
The webscale video was our absolute favorite in one of Amazon's systems engineering team for a long time.
Beautiful playing by Buddy Merrill ("Buddy's Boogie" on his Fender Stratocaster) in that link (direct link to YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dJXjV6UY9lc)! :-D
Follow the hustle porn. My empirical studies show 1/10. Most of them I see who makes a good living does so with repeated failures in their business history and new knowledge going into the new venture.

Getting back up -> grit -> extended network -> new business idea -> better support -> ??? -> $$$

Being at the right place at the right time also helps.
This isn't just a silicon valley archetype. It's a cultural archetype. Ownership is the religion we're indoctrinated with.

To paraphrase James Madison, the Senate ought to protect the minority of wealthy owners from the majority. Deference to wealth and ownership is in the DNA of the country.

America is a tacit caste system, heavily indoctrinated to believe it's a freer place than it is. While there's a stronger guarantee of freedom of speech/expression than other countries, who owns our time/effort is rarely ever discussed and the realities of it questioned. The owners do, of course, and direct it to their desires.
Breakout List 2019: Great European Tech Companies to Work For
In the Phoenix metro area we have BASIS schools that use a similar tactic… with public education funds. The school and foundation are non-profit, but they use a for-profit management company that's owned by the founders of the schools. No transparency is required for the private business which provides teachers(!) and other back-office services.

Of course, the founder is living meagerly like most educators (including the ones he employs or the one's he's taking funding away from)… wait, no, he's raking in the cash.

That said, BASIS provides an excellent environment for students that are compatible with its education model (read: students who would have been successful anywhere).
> There is also a healthy debate over the degree to which personality disorders represent a true disorder, or just an extreme personality on the edges of normal distribution.

I'm not sure that's a meaningful distinction. That is to say, a "disorder" should be something that interferes with your ability to function and flourish in a normal environment. I'm not sure it's meaningful to draw a distinction between people who absolutely cannot function and people who merely effectively cannot function. Just because your ankle is sprained and not broken doesn't mean you don't need medical care or that you should be walking.
Isn't blaming their parents' character flaws for the adult children's character flaws just a way to avoid responsibility by those adult children?

If a grown up child thinks parent should've fixed their flaw before it affected the child, then they presume that the flaw could have been fixed or mitigated.

In that case, why the child spends time blaming the parent on reddit now, instead of working on fixing the flaw that was, in many cases unknowingly, created by the parent?
what do you want, a cookie?

try WRITING a book like those and watch what happens
I believe there was a NYT story posted last year about how all custodial services are contracted out these days, and ye olde American success story of 'going from the janitor supply closet to the boardroom' was gone forever. The used an example of a cleaner at HP in the early '80s who became a manager of some sort.

The comments on that article? Mostly something along the lines of "maximizing shareholder value" and "fiduciary duty to the corporation". Anything to avoid having to admit that this is wrong.
No. Before I could use the OS built-in MongoDB and get 10 years worth of security update for that version.

Now I need to fetch the version packaged by MongoDB of which I don’t know the release cycles and years of included support.

Plus, it’s an additional subscription cost and per-server license.
Debian admins demote developer Norbert Preining for using wrong gender pronoun
Interesting app idea, I installed, but couldn't figure out how to create an annotation.
Larger hotels have blocks of rooms reserved for the different booking services.

The opposite can also happen, Booking shows no rooms, and calling the hotel results in a room. It just means Booking's block of rooms is all rented out, not that the hotel itself is all rented out.
I thought it was interesting that the UK-based professor restricted the scope of these statements to refer to Americans. It seems that anti-vax sentiment may be the strongest in France,[1] and that it is also quite active in Italy.[2] The professor teachers US and UK politics, so I can see why he'd want to stick to his area of expertise. At the same time, his statements seem to imply that Americans are unique in these beliefs.

1: https://www.acsh.org/news/2016/09/09/france-leads-world-anti...

2: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/anti-vaxxers...
And for only 24 hours of fasting. I wish we could get more scientific literature on the 16:8 fasting cycle.
"A lawyer shall not form a partnership with a nonlawyer if any of the activities of the partnership consist of the practice of law."

Does anyone know the motivations and publicly stated reasons for this absurd restriction?
I'm no privacy nut, but I'd rather not have too many strangers making videos of my sexual activity.

What would you do, hide under the covers? Make the room as dark as possible? Or just let people record your sexual activity and simply not worry about any videos that may be floating around out there?
That depends on what you're passionate about.
Here's wikipedia's take from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plant:

> Historically, plants were treated as one of two kingdoms including all living things that were not animals, and all algae and fungi were treated as plants. However, all current definitions of Plantae exclude the fungi and some algae, as well as the prokaryotes (the archaea and bacteria).

I totally agree that it's often used as you describe, but on a test of scientific knowledge, yours is probably not the relevant definition, especially one with questions about bacteria and viruses. In this case, it was though!
> the "amyloid hypothesis" is still the mainstream hypothesis.
I agree with you. Amyloid may be the most popular but it isn't what it used to be 10-15 years ago (dogma). it has much weaker support. What is particular true and sad about what you've said is that it probably is the most popular but only due to lack of consensus on anything else. After running into the amyloid wall running at full-speed about a dozen times, significant chunks of pharma have nearly abandoned working on the disease, and put some funds into external research.
GraphQL has nothing inherently to do with graph databases. It's a client-side declarative syntax where you specify what result you want, usually including composite relational objects.

The server-side database would be any supported datastore.
> ...a moral or sane government that truly cares about and represents their citizenry...

Let me know when you find one, and I will donate a breeding pair of unicorns to its zoo.
Well, does "a rare exotic most guitarists will never play" refer to actual guitarists (pros) or the millions that happen to have a guitar lying around and learned to strum some chords?

In the pro circuit Rickenbackers are another tool to use, and there's also a thing as G.A.S.

Is a PRS any more "rare exotic" that a Bigsby? And yet those are perfectly common guitars...
I have been on the other side of this. I didn't cancel the return flight, but I was sorely tempted.

In my case it was the early days of a company, and I flew a potentially important applicant from Europe for an interview, paid for hotel, food etc. They performed terribly. When I sat down with them to figure out why, it quickly became apparent they had fundamentally misrepresented themselves. Partially through lies, even more through slippery worded deceit. They finally admitted to being basically a starting-out developer, skilled at attaching themselves to high-profile projects and claiming this work as their own.

I did talk to our lawyer about trying to recover the costs. They told me he wasn't worth the lawsuit.

It was a learning experience. I did things differently after that. In the same way one would change one's behaviour after being the victim of any con.

So I do wonder what the other side to this particular story is.
Knock Raises $400M to Simplify Home Buying
Perhaps I should add he's a mid-50's immigrant from Vietnam with a giant extended family, and he's their only earner. The guy works his ass off.
I agree we should spend on science but at this moment I would prefer to spend the money on fusion research.
Its worth noting that the line between Aspergers (which I probably misspelled) and NPD can be blurred, particularly in women. Similarly, egocentrism, generalized anxiety disorder, NPD share features. This matters because empathy and patience is an effective strategy for engaging with those suffering from most of these disorders... but not NPD unless you're trained to do so.
Anything that starts out with "public surveys" is up to no good.
> It's amazing how so many people who no knowledge of online advertising post so confidently in these threads. Since I have a lot of experience with targeted ads...

Since you seem to work in adtech or advertising, that famous Upton Sinclair quote probably legitimately applies to you ("It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!").

That's the big problem here. The people with the most knowledge of adtech are likely biased and untrustworthy due to their economic interests, but the people who lack that bias also have less knowledge.

What needs to happen is that you and other adtech people should volunteer to be interviewed by some deep investigative journalism piece by a place like the NY Times or ProPublica. They could take your knowledge, filter out some of the self interest, and educate the rest of us.
Well, there is a dedicated top of the line full-manned CERN video studio to produce marketing videos.

https://cds.cern.ch/record/1331512
a fellow urbana-ite?

Emma’s/lacys/etc was the first thing that came to mind when I saw this headline- they are everywhere.
I have a precision 5520 (although the 5530 is out)

I was going to do like a "sysadmin review" of the thing but I think there's not much appetite for 1.5y+ old laptops.

Anyway, I can give you my take as I've been collecting notes.

The laptop itself is great, the model I have is 32G DDR4 with a Xeon 1505Mv6 (Kaby Lake)

I use it with Archlinux (I also used fedora) and everything "just works", the laptop itself gets quite hot under load and the fans are loud but operationally it's basically perfect with no wifi/audio/$other quirks or bugs that I've had to work around.

I've used pretty much every feature of the laptop under Linux with the exception of the webcam. (which, I physically turned off VIA the BIOS).

I opted for the 9c battery and still get 8hrs of battery, the battery is currently at 91% of it's max design capacity. I use it on battery twice a week and it depletes to 20%. (to give you an estimation on wear).

The keyboard is shallower than I like (coming from a Thinkpad X201s), but it's definitely not cramped and relatively easy to get used to, touchpad performs well, multitouch works out of the box.

I have the Dell Thunderbolt "TB16" dock at home, and on first use it works /relatively/ flawlessly. If you use the docks ethernet then you have to disable offloading of checksumming[0].

The dock also doesn't love when it's disconnected and reconnected. I assumed this was because the TB16 is basically a PCI 4x bridge, but manually forcing linux to remove the PCI devices (and bridge), removing, connecting and performing a rescan of the PCI bus did not make it available again. For now if I need to remove my laptop from the docking cable I do it once with the knowledge that I will have to reboot if I want to be docked again. Which I consider to be a large inconvenience.

The BIOS is great, it has a very wide array of features which are not gimmicks, the UI is a bit painful but it has features such as 'office hours' where the battery will charge fast, but only trickle charge outside of office hours so that you don't wear your battery out too much. Or even capping the full capacity of the battery (since li-ion batteries are stressed when they are at full capacity) -- I haven't found a way to edit these values live yet, but I'm sure it's possible to edit the BIOS from the userland in linux.

I miss having an Ethernet jack, but not much you can do these days to get one. The compliment of ports is healthy and overall I'm very happy with the machine. I just wish the dock wasn't so fickle.

[0]: https://bugs.launchpad.net/dell-sputnik/+bug/1729674
Grindr Axes Staff of LGBTQ Publication into in Mass Layoff
If you're interested in this, read: https://www.amazon.com/Trapped-Mirror-Children-Narcissists-S...
well, food's always been a looser, it spoils and has to be well prepared. drinks on the other hand. . .. If you're not selling vices on the side, you're doing it the hard way.
In general, GM is just another tool for the organism designer. It gives the designer more flexibility and speed than traditional techniques, but whether its use is safe or dangerous, good or evil is not a science question. It's a business question.

This is why I have no inherent objection to GM, but I do want such foods labeled so that I can avoid such foods from companies whose balancing between their business needs and my health and nutrition needs I do not trust with the increased power that GM gives them.
Directory of 6536 Biotechnology, Pharmaceutical and Medical Device Companies
Interesting, but so much left out. This quote:-

>Through some digital gymnastics that would take entirely too long to explain, suddenly my wife’s phone shoots a 279-byte information packet containing “I love you” at the speed of light in every direction, eventually fizzling into nothing after about 30 miles.

is the biggest understatement in the whole article. It omits the entire baseband!

Within the baseband, even the channel coding process itself is insanely complex, involving convolutional codes, CRCs, weird interleaving schemes... and then there's the modulation, and all the L1 signalling to support it all... I could go on.
There was no ad hominem. I wasn't referring to your thinking. I was explicitly referring to the strain of thought that sees blockchain tech/smart contract tech as an all-in-or-nothing decentralized libertarian cryptocurrency dream. I can understand criticisms of that way of thinking. I don't see it that way, but many of your arguments seem to presuppose I do.

> This is just false. What was not possible before? The page has no details just breathless hype that is typical of cryptocurrency related projects. Please offer up an explanation of how blockchain enables "public records to be searched, verified and audited at a level the world hasn’t seen before"

You haven't explained how it's false.

It makes the public records easier to access than they previously were, and immutable. Once published, the council nor any new government can wipe the records for any reason without either a concerted effort to attack the public chain and cause a fork that becomes mainstream, or otherwise attempt to eradicate the network entirely. There is much less gatekeeping now than there previously. One doesn't have to be technical, nor do much searching to find these records. (They actually came in handy somewhat recently in discussions about TunnelBear and their funding ploys) And as mentioned, it's an experiment. The experiment is part of the Open Government project aimed at increasing transparency to the public.
Nothing Redhat does is shady. There's nothing wrong with license agreements for closed source software, or even license-agreements that support open source software. The latter is how open source companies make money.
Former top regulator now says nuclear power 'hazardous'