skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"It is difficult in the West to talk about the connections between creating and citizenship because of the general ideas placed around art, that it is a thing apart, that an artist by creating suddenly becomes a citizen of an imaginary and apolitical land of other artists. There are people in the West who use the term “political” almost as a pejorative in reference to a work of literature. (I emphasise the West because in parts of the world called developing, art is often not seen as automatically separate from politics.)"

This is quite poignant and on the nose in my experience. I'm a dark science fiction author and this has been my understanding of the situation in my field also. With the Sad/Rabid puppies, Gamergate, Racefail, etc. its always been a large discussion that politics should stay out of art, or that art should be apolitical, or that politics in art is pandering/bad.

I feel that the selection of politics in art is actually quite specific- 1984, Farenheit 451, Ayn Rand's works are political with esteem. But works in a distinctly diverse voice are often chagrined for it- the new star wars stuff, the new star trek stuff (even when the old star trek stuff, which is also quite diverse, is well regarded). I've seen criticism that these are 'too political', but I've yet to see someone complaining that 1984 is too political of a scifi piece, or that Brave New World is shoving too much politics in its scifi. But I may just not be adequately read on criticisms of those works- I only have so much attention and I've found the loudest voices are of the most recent works of our time.

So I agree that in the West, describing fiction as political is sometimes used in a pejorative manner, even though several well-regarded works are very political. It's just certain politics are broadly considered 'too far' and hyperfocused on identity in a negative sense. I don't understand this phenomenon myself, actually, but her observance is also my observance here as a Western writer.

But her later writing, about not only writing politically, but also being viewed in a political light are also true to me. Even as one does not write with a political agenda, the writing will be interpreted in a political lens and then you the author will be held responsible. This contrast between that which is viewed politically and that which is written politically is a core of significant amounts of chagrin within the field of science fiction writing.

The final paragraph, before the quote, encompasses so much that I relate to. (I still respect that, as an American author, I could never fully relate to her experiences as a Nigerian author. I respect that her experiences are her own. Merely that I relate to aspects of it.)

"That question “Are you an African Writer?” is one I have been asked many times, and there are times when I have answered “Yes”, a yes that reflected my ambivalence but also my anxiety not to be misunderstood. I belong, was what my “Yes” said, I belong. But that “Yes” often came with a whisper: “But you must let me belong on my own terms, on multiple terms, for that is the essence of art.”"
Which is fine.

Just that the public should demand that all research using public money is done openly, so all data and papers are accessible to the public in perpetuity.

Researchers are welcome to refuse to accept that deal, just so long as they don't take any public money.

Simples.
Twelve Tesla Break Ins Last Week
I believe that many SIM card providers recycle numbers that have been inactive for 12-24 months. Yahoo! needs to fix this issue, in any case. Thanks for your comment.
For anyone looking for resources on teaching git I'd recommend the software carpentries - all open source with a great community behind it. http://swcarpentry.github.io/git-novice/
Same here. Sort of works, but very laggy. Firefox on OnePlus 3T.
That kid is seriously cute, but it worries me that his parents/adults around him are apparently expecting him to have the patience and reward delaying abilities of an adult (he's constantly mentioning his lack of "executive functioning" and failing the marshmallow test -- if he was able to write this piece he's not below the average 9 year old executive function level, same if he can actually watch Rachel Maddow for the whole time she's on, so I think the parents should let up of that).
Placing a camera inside is an outrageous violation of guests' privacy, but at least I understand why they would want to do it. However, the response from AirBnB is simply inexplicable.
DOJ: Hackers broke into an SEC database and made millions from inside info
Mocking is a last resort and usually the wrong choice and used incorrectly. In memory fakes like sqlite (or better, running your real database in a small local inmemory footprint) is usally the way to get fast, correct, stable tests.
Mocking is a last resort and usually the wrong choice and used incorrectly. In memory fakes like sqlite (or better, running your real database in a small local inmemory footprint) is usually the way to get fast, correct, stable tests.
The solution is simple. It is to simply require users to type the email address/credentials before receiving the SMS and it would solve the problem.
Fiserv to buy First Data in $22B stock deal
Microsoft adds OpenSSH support to PowerShell (2015)
What Is Small Scale Scrum?
Fully agree with you guys
this logic (barely) works for blogs. if your game is an aquarium game, it doesn't mean that your users are only interested in aquarium cleaning products.
What about “Murica”? American ISPs have also had Netflix caches for years: https://media.netflix.com/en/company-blog/how-netflix-works-...
Plus, if she gave herself a sweetheart deal on rent, there might not be any sublessor interested in making the inflated payments.
>There seems to be an archetype in silicon valley today of people viewing companies basically just as convenient extensions of themselves rather than distinct legal entities with separate interests.

I'd rather this was the case completely -- privately owned, extensions-of-oneself companies and we had no BS like boards and stockholders...
Not enough emphasis on ethics being taught in business schools these days.
Rounding timers can greatly increase battery life, at the expense of apps not working - but who checks that apps work on their phone before buying it?
Genetically modified food opponents know less than they think
There's tons of businesses that "print money" as one or two man LLCs but they don't scale well beyond that point. There's several overhead jumps as your company grows to a point where you have to pay someone else to do something because you can no longer do it yourself (hiring your first few employees, company gets so big you need to get someone to do HR/payroll stuff, company owns so much stuff you need to hire someone to specifically maintain the equipment, etc, etc). Sure you can scale but then some other smaller business with lower margins comes along and out-competes you. For businesses where the cost of entry is low this happens fast.

It also is worth mentioning that owning a small business is not nearly as good of a work/life balance as being an employee. Expect to work 40hr week managing the business directly and then another 20-40 doing all the behind the scenes stuff that the business needs in order to run. Obviously conditions vary a lot based on what you do and the local economy.
This is a beautiful (and very true) passage:

"Among Nigerians, complaining about our problems is an art form. Most conversations quickly become a litany of complaints – about government corruption, no light, no water, etc. But if a foreigner were to say the same things, to recite the same litany of complaints, Nigerians would become defensive, sometimes angrily so.

"I have always been curious about this brand of defensiveness – which I myself often exhibit, by the way. It seems to me that we have it because we assume that the complaining Nigerian is aware that Nigeria is not only about its problems, is aware of the human complexity, knows of the intelligence and ingenuity of people, knows how they cry and laugh, knows what motivates them and what they aspire to and what they find meaningful. And we suspect that the foreigner does not know these other stories about us and so we worry about being defined solely by what we do not have and by what we are not. And so our defensiveness emerges."
Overview of BackstopJS, a tool to test a web application’s UI
Do they bring the equipment in and sharpen on-site or do they bring freshly sharpened knives and take the dull ones to be sharpened? Seems like if you had enough initial capital you could buy a ton of new sharp knives, swap them every day, and then spend a whole weekend day doing the sharpening of the knives you rotated out. Then you could keep your 9-5 M-F and make some cash by working a pretty low stress weekend day.
That sounds like a complicated workaround for bad libraries (Redis does support unit tests?) and bad apply design with strong coupling between remote components.
Then in a decade our new sardonic message board reference will be, "Yes, the software engineering industry cratered. But for a beautiful moment in time, we stopped serving ads."

I don't think the parent commenter disagrees with you about spying. I think they're trying to highlight the fundamental tension of the is-ought problem at play here. Your normative claim is that it's good to limit activity which reduces consumer privacy. The positive conclusion is that to achieve this moral imperative, we'd have to either radically repurpose existing software engineers or radically reduce the industry.

Your point about spying isn't wrong. But I think history shows us that taking away (or reducing) peoples' livelihood while telling them, "well at least you're no longer a moral hazard!" isn't productive. It's too extreme. If you want to actually reduce the negative externalities caused by digital advertising, you can't realistically tell software engineers to take up knitting.
I love this sort of thing.

One of my favourite things to read about are entrepreneurs (although they were doing this before they was even a name for it) in an industry that seems simple to outsiders (say, freight haulage) and building a business out of nothing. No fancy education, no world-changing technological insight, just pure hard work and business smarts to see where the opportunities lie, when and how much to bet, and building on each success to make a bigger one.

It's not romantic to most people, so these kinds of stories don't get heard much, and there's a sneering snobbery about people who, when they got rich, don't have a good story which complies with the enlightened public's idea of a "genius" - they tend to assume rich people must be academically brilliant, or they could only have got rich doing something unethical.

Read up on Marks and Spencers (first retailer in UK to pass £1bn in profit), founded by a poor Polish immigrant and a cashier. There are tonnes of stories like that, much better inspiration than a lot of the SV Ivy League grad gets showered with VC money story (which, incidentally, feeds into the mistaken notion that there are only opportunities for the rich and well-connected under capitalism).
Beyond the entire conversation about whether this is legal or illegal, and whether this is typical or atypical, there is a much more significant issue.

The entire image and “vibe” of this guy / his team is supposed to be an egalitarian re-invention of the status quo. The kibbutz story. The “community adjusted EBITDA.” The rebranding to “We.” But this sort of real estate self-dealing isn’t a We move, it’s a Me move. And thus, we find ourselves facing a bigger issue that is far more troubling if you’re a shareholder or employee (and somewhat enjoyable if you’re a competitor): the emperor has no clothes and the CEO is full of shit. He is self-serving and isn’t optimizing for the benefit of those around him.

As others in the tech industry are only beginning to figure out, once your curated narrative dies and the reality of who you really are comes to the surface, an unstoppable cycle of “bad press” and “negative sentiment” emerges. That’s a hard cycle to work out of, especially if the value of your company is predicated on your image / the image of the company. Hiring Obama’s speech writer and lobbying Congress doesn’t fix the underlying issue, and eventually you’re living in a Reverse Metcalf’s Law situation that’s scaling in the wrong direction.

As WeWork is built on an image of selling “a new, better way of working” to companies of all sizes, it becomes extremely problematic if people start to associate the brand with “the rich keep getting richer, and they’re screwing us over and working us to the bone along the way.” An image of a “collaborative enterprise” becomes a laughable fantasy novel next to the reality of, “we are funded by third world despots and our CEO is lining his pockets with as much of our money as possible, while scheming up ways to do petty things such as avoid paying the cleaning staff any sort of decent wages or benefits.”

This isn’t the We Company. It’s the Me Company. That’s not very innovative. That doesn’t foster greater productivity. And eventually, a lot of tenants aren’t going to pay for it, because it seems a lot of them really think they’re paying to be part of a progressive, futuristic environment. If their smartest and most progressive employees start telling them they don’t want to visit the office, they’re going to get rid of that office. Companies’ desire to please their knowledge workers — what originally drove WeWork’s success — thus ends up killing it.
From the Open Source Definition:

> 9. License Must Not Restrict Other Software

> The license must not place restrictions on other software that is distributed along with the licensed software. For example, the license must not insist that all other programs distributed on the same medium must be open-source software.
What's even more fun is that your phone is also broadcasting those SSIDs to the world as you walk down the street, if you have wifi enabled, and likely also your unique MAC address.

So anyone in wireless range of you can 1) track you and recognize you again, and 2) possibly figure out where you work and live (although of course they may see your friends' wifi networks too and not be able to tell which is your network.)
The post is about GMO plants.
I think it is disingenuous to call extremists those that oppose GMO.

GMO is many things, including the GMO corn that is resistant to glyphosates.
How do you know you have full test coverage if you don't mutate your code?
If I shop around for a lamp on 5 different websites and finally buy from a 6th site, how do those first 5 websites learn that I bought a lamp?

The pervasive tracking of which retargeting is the most visible form is mostly what drove me to use an ad blocker. I wonder if the cost effectiveness calculation factors in lost future purchases?
It's quite possible that he's testing after. It's implied, but it isn't necessarily the case.

Anyway, we all agree testing is good. And that a test you've never seen fail is bad. Personally, I try to delete exploratory code and try to use tests to drive out the _real_ implementation, but I'm going to admit that at least sometimes I'll write code that's inherently "safe", and then add a test afterwards for garbage inputs, for example.
At my previous job, I would start screening interviews with "What is the difference between a bit and a byte?"

A candidate actually replied: "One bit is 0.12 byte"
>That's amazing, best of luck.

Thank you!

>Will the revenue info be public?

Yes, I intend to publish quarterly reports, and I'm open with the financials whenever anyone asks. I generated this report just now for you: https://sr.ht/QOml.txt. This is combined with my donation income, which is already public: https://drewdevault.com/donate/

>Hopefully sustainability is not far off

I hope so too! The way I plan with these numbers is to assume yearly payments are added to the reserves and starts burning down immediately, then I do worst-case projections based on existing monthly donations with a churn factor built-in, then other projections assuming various degrees of growth based on historical numbers. The most pessimistic projections give me ~10 months and the more optimistic ones show sustainablity coming soonish.

>Are the current subscriptions close to replacing what you were making at your fulltime job?

No, but I hope it will be soon!

>I look forward to the day when you can hire other prominent contributors such as emersion.

Me too :)
I can only give you speculation on what I’ve seen in online video.

If you are a smaller publisher, unless you get particularly active in courting advertisers (i.e. spend time going into sales), the niche advertisers will never even look at your content. The 20-something digital ad manager has no motivation to risk his job doing speculative ad spend. As a result your ads are less relevant and your inventory’s CPM drops as a result.

If you are a large property, then tracking affects you less (in fact tracking might be worse for you). Large publishers already have sales and marketing teams and ad managers will just choose you because you are “safe”. If brands are moving to a world where tracking data is less and less reliable, then by default they will move to spending more money on a smaller amount of “safe” inventory
From professional and personal experince, remarketing ads, what you are describing, are much more effective ($ spent / products sold) for the advertiser than traditional ads.

So why do ads follow you even after you bought the product? Well the ads are still less than 1% effective (products sold / by ads shown), so for the average company (not Amazon) it is just not worth the engineering effort for a < 1% savings on your remarketing budget. Secondly, this is more speculation, but for many products the chance of buying a product given you have already bought one (e.x. a spare or a gift) is still higher than chance for a random person. As such the ads are still effective.

So what is the deal with the NYTimes? They a huge popular publisher (especially amount rich people) already command high ad prices through traditional adverstising.
The value of a remarking ad (to the advertiser) is largely independent of the site that it is shown on. So The New York Times would naturally have fewer of these ads because the adverstiser gets more ads/$ on other sites. A diffrent site like a local paper might have a diffrent story. However remarketing ads have never been a large percentage of ads shown so from a revenue stand point publishers care a lot less about them.
>There's nothing inherently capitalist about corruption. It's a property of power, not capitalism.

That's the same argument that says "USSR/DDR/Cambodia/NK/etc was no real communism".

We might excuse a few diversions from a political/economic system, but after some point, like with anything else, capitalism is what capitalism does time and again.
I had to do a session in an altitude chamber as part of training in my early military career. I remember how scary it was feeling like I had just sat down on the bench and been there for no more than 3-4 minutes tops when I was told time was up, but then watching the film of my session and realizing I had been in for 30 minutes and couldn’t perform the simplest tasks the trainers were instructing me to do.
To add my anecdote on this topic: I was cut off as well. I had a friend who used my wifi with an infected laptop. I had no trouble getting the block removed the next day, but it probably helped that I use Linux and was not the real source of the malware. My friend was unable to clear his laptop, he had to reinstall windows. I thought the action was reasonable, since the laptop of my friend had become a real hazard.
It's a small world, most #mcdevs regulars are still very active on HN.
RADIUS predates wifi by a few years. :-) It was originally centralized authentication for dial-in systems: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RADIUS
Not sure I would agree to that. It’s one thing when they understand what I’m doing, and it’s quite another when they’re watching it closely. I was somehow watched, or rather, by my actions. With the help of SoftActivity, the management of the company where I worked supervised my employees. At first it was very inconvenient, but later everyone got used to it, for that they gained a lot of benefits thanks to such control.
True, but it's still better than Google.
Blood-letting also has benefits in some cases! For example, venesection is a standard treatment for haemochromatosis: http://haemochromatosis.org.uk/haemochromatosis/treatment/
The number of stars on GitHub is significant because most people whose opinion you’d care about are on GitHub, they wouldn’t star project that they were not interested in and there aren’t widespread fake accounts.

I don’t believe that there is an equivalent in academia, one that would capture the h-index dynamic (copied by PageRank) that a star from a prestigious professor is worth a lot more. It’s trivial to build, but “growth hacking” for lack of a better word, is hard, especially in areas where actual growth hacking would be frowned upon.

That’s why, for instance, Facebook celebrates its billion of users so much: it’s genuinely hard to make that. Hosting them too, but not in the same way.
Nice puzzle. Feels like a good exercise for stretching the brain.
By that logic the GPL is also non-free, since you can't run a GPL program embedded in a closed-source management program.
Not once I turned off battery optimisation for the apps I wanted to run in the background (BBC Sounds / Radio apps, a couple of fitness related apps.)

The total lack of any feedback as to what was actually killing these apps in the first place is the problem - the user experience is terrible. The phone just kills an app that worked perfectly before this release of Android, with no explanation or notification so the user can correct false assumptions. The user is left poking about in the settings until they stumble across the battery optimisation and have an "ah ha!" moment.
Except that the the UK the goverment is formed from the elected members of the house. In the EU the only body with real power, the commision, is appointed by a process in which the "elected" president of the commision is the only candidate.
If:

(a) you have FU money

(b) you'll get to keep having FU money (perhaps drastically less, but still FU money) whatever you try

Then you don't have "skin in the game" anymore like a normal person does.

If Bezos fortune goes from 100 billion to 5 billion due to bad bets, he still hasn't suffered anything more significant than some damage to his ego (meanwhile Amazon employees could see their lives and finances ruined).
Yeah, our 2-man devops consulting business was printing money until we tried to scale up. Consulting needs a constant stream of new clients so you need a sales guy, then you need to carry a bench so you can start working on new contracts ASAP, then you need benefits and salaries to attract the kind of senior talent you expect from a consultancy, computers, desks, space...