skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I used to hate enterprise sales, until I learned the most successful sales motions and sales teams are all about successful outcomes. If the product mostly does something value-able, and customer is taken care of, the money will come.

> This is not true always. Enterprise sales is also made by massaging the ego, or creating false sense of urgency (a 60% discount offer with an expiry deadline of 15 days ) of those who hold the purse and does not have common sense. I have seen millions spend this way.

There are some sales processes/books that get into this (Insight Selling, Let's Get Real, Ninety-Five-Five etc.) and really can open your eyes as an engineer that there is an ethical, effective way to manage enterprise sales to solve user problems.

> These books probably portray humans as logical rational machines who will decided based on some rules. Emotions, alliances, and personal gains are more important to decision makers.

Luke mentions Bladelogic. I worked for BMC for a while, and it rings ……

> This paragraph negates itself. If R&D and consulting did not listen to sales. How they were able to keep the customers happy. As a customer if I cannot get what I need in the product, sales will have to lie to me to make a sale.

The difference between a consultant and sales is that the consultant gets paid by the hour, the sales person gets paid by the success of the customer…...

> This is becoming true with subscription models but there also sales pushes for muti-year deals with minimum spend. In my view, once the contract is signed sales just runs away leaving delivery guys to deal with the customer who expects what product can’t deliver. Any post-sales issue simply becomes delivery team’s problem, customer education etc.

I also find that enterprise sales generally requires a fairly intensive free consulting engagement called a "proof of concept" (POC) …………

> This exercise provides a certain level of risk mitigation. However, requirements get modified to clear the POC because customer gets invited to dinner parties, conferences in vegas etc.

We keep thinking some next generation of knowledge workers will fix this, that everyone will be self-starting, self-educating, and will buy things transactionally with low-medium touch... we thought it might be the case with Open Source, and it hasn't (the biggest OSS companies have large enterprise sales teams). we also thought it might be the case with SaaS companies (but they too have large teams).

> You are right this system exists for a reason and it can’t be fixed. However, its not all rosy and ethical. In most cases their is so much at stake that unethical behavior creeps in. It is just human behavior and that's the way it is going to remain.
Personally, I would feel bad making such a negative characterization based on something I seem to recall. I'd look it up. If I was right, I'd provide the source, if I was wrong I'd be silently embarrassed.
Hands off my data, scientists!
I really like what they are doing, but they have been working on it for 4 years and have no users. The camera costs 6000 euros and has no internal recording capability.
Sincerity and Humility: Two Tools to Ensure Success in Your Freelancing Career
The internet allows governments to tightly monitor, as time progresses, all communication... Therefore the internet may be under different governments a tool of immense totalitarian control.
Have you considered real estate prices?

I don't doubt any of the stats you cite, but it seems that one of the biggest impediments to solar is the huge amount of area it requires. The real estate costs of putting such plants nearby large population centers seems to be one of the major costs.

Rooftop solar seems to be a good solution, but it's still not economical without generous government incentives.

Anecdote: A colleague of mine is trying to get approval for solar panels on top of a property she owns in a high density area of New Jersey. After doing an in depth cost/benefit analysis, she found it was economical, but only because New Jersey has very large incentives. Roughly 2/3 of the project would be financed by the government either in grants or tax credits.
I always wonder why India couldn't catch up. Although I don't know about its engineering sectors, I have the impression that the country is at least not that bad in scientific research. And it has cheap labour too.
Sydney's desalination plant is turned on – so what does that mean?
What is electricity prices went up with usage? So you get X kWh per month for one price, then after that it's 1.5x the rate. You could just do this on residential rates only so businesses aren't affected.
Is this the era of slowbalisation?
A history refresher from Wikipedia:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93Contra_affair
The Davos Delusion
Full video of his speech. His delivery adds to the message:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7ZGoXP-BWoc
You sure do, if you installed their app:

Your full calendar

All your accounts and all of their contacts

Your precise location at all times you have Location services on

Storage, including accessing your files without notification

Etc.
Money and Meaning: British Universities
ya but that sounds like you are not the target audience.

Most of the time in enterprise sales, the potential customer is too busy to try software himself. Learning a new piece of software takes a lot of time and effort.

Unless you are a techie, it's easier to just have salespeople do the work of walking you through quick demos. Or have someone junior at your own company, take care of the "dirty work" of figuring out new software and tell you the results. It sounds like you are that junior person at your company :)
Bazel is an interesting build system, but it worries me that there are TensorFlow releases from 2018 that won't compile with Bazel clients from 2019 without adding extra flags.
Reminds me of the time the Silicon Valley writers met with the head of GoogleX: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/how-silicon-v...

> Teller ended the meeting by standing up in a huff, but his attempt at a dramatic exit was marred by the fact that he was wearing Rollerblades. He wobbled to the door in silence. “Then there was this awkward moment of him fumbling with his I.D. badge, trying to get the door to open,” Kemper said. “It felt like it lasted an hour. We were all trying not to laugh. Even while it was happening, I knew we were all thinking the same thing: Can we use this?” In the end, the joke was deemed “too hacky to use on the show.”
So if I time-slice the 8 productive hours of my day into 10 minute slots, can I write 48 books in 499 days?

Of course not.

I've tried working on pet projects for 10 minutes before going to work each day. The problem I find is that while I might only do active work on the task for ten minutes, my brain is thinking about it for much longer.

Spending those ten minutes in the morning reduces my ability to do my day job because I've used up a significant fraction of my day's useful thinking budget. I find I can only sustain these pet projects when my day job is in a boring/easy phase. (This might have something to do with getting older - I'm 42, or it might be because my job isn't boring/easy much these days).
Quite a few of these "non-tech workers" are employees, too

Google (et al) go to considerable, some might say elaborate, lengths to keep their service staff - cleaners, catering, security, etc - off the payroll and partitioned off. It makes no sense really, treating these people with respect would cost barely a rounding error in Google's bottom line. But even so they have a pathological urge to do it, to stratify a caste system almost.
I'm not sure if Japan and China can really be treated as similar in this light.

China's population size is a game changer. If they manage to get most their people well-educated and contributing on the competitive stage, it's like comparing a GPU to a CPU. China has more honor students than the USA has students. At some point that starts to make a very real difference.
This reminds me of a company "Atheist Shoes". That had to put just "Shoes" on their boxes because it greatly reduced delivery problems in US (no effect in europe).
China will eventually be able to build safe and inexpensive vehicles that can compete in the global market. However, unless they open up their society, allow civil liberties like freedom of movement, freedom of speech, and unimpeded markets, they will always be playing catchup.

The U.S. should not be afraid of China emulating our technological prowess, we should be afraid when they start challenging our values.
In that case and in some others it doesn’t, but in general it does:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/17661428/async-stay-on-t...
Probably it makes sense to say that async await can try to use a continuation passing style or run on a different thread because there is no actual guarantee that it will use one or the other.
When you grant those once (eg upon installation), they never have to ask you (or notify you) again... even for updates.
Not only trips in the heat as happened with Loy Yang B last summer; Loy Yong A was offline last week for maintenance right in time for the hottest day of the summer so far.

There are plenty of good places for turbines in Victoria such as near "Windy Warrnambool". At around 38° south it gets nearly constant westerlies.
Yeah that's how I understand it too. I thought it was a nice addition and forward thinking to include it.
Specifically, KIA (owned by Hyundai) hired Peter Schreyer (designer of the Audi TT) as their chief design officer and gave him a free hand. The result was KIA's first good looking facelift on the KIA Optima. After the design (and evantual business) successes at Kia/Hyundai, Peter Schreyer was then named as one of the presidents of KIA.

The designs won many iF and RedDot design awards.

Check these out: https://www.motor1.com/news/99708/10-best-kia-designs-list/
Flexibility is not the crucial issue. It's just what that large Tesla battery is good at, which is why everyone highlights it. In terms of capacity, it's next to nothing. No proponent wants to talk about that.

If you just look at the graph you'll see that dispatchable makes up almost 100% of base load during significant periods of time. Do the math on how many batteries and how much pumped storage you would need. It's simply not happening without fossils.

Australia uses natural gas so it can pull down CO2, but the coal is still exported and burned by someone else. It's a wash. Germany only has coal. If storage was feasible they wouldn't be standing there with their pants down on their CO2 goals. They would've built the best batteries and storage pumps the world knows.
The C standard's snprintf is not like scnprintf.
This whole C# async/await hype I don't get? I've come to see async/await more as a hindrance rather than as a good thing. In C# if you're not careful your codebase gets littered with tasks everywhere, even in code that has nothing to do with concurrency originally.

Async/await makes concurrency bubble up. This is a great article that explains this issue:
http://journal.stuffwithstuff.com/2015/02/01/what-color-is-y...

It's also why I tried Golang. Once you use goroutines it's hard to go back, since the code is synchronous code.

(I use JavaScript with async/await in my day job)
All large scale human rights violations and crimes in modern history were committed by governments, mostly large and "democratic".

AI is not a threat. Big government is.
Seen this a few time in my career, "sorry guys, I know we had another record quarter/year, but we didn't make our stretch goals so there won't be any bonus". Then you read the filing which all public companies must do and it details 7- and 8-figure payouts to the big bosses.

Also, on a side note, I wonder if companies are trying to impress when they say that you bonus could be "up to" 10% or 20% of your salary. They way I read it is that no matter how well you do and how well the company does, your upside is capped!
It's not an unreasonable price when you think about the enormous amount of technology, materials and manufacturing processes that go into a car. Nothing else we normally buy comes close.

Just buy a used car like everyone else.
How Hacker News Stays Interesting
I'm living in a country near China. While most of people don't take Chinese cars seriously, this perception is slowly changing and I expect that Chinese cars will eat a huge chunk of local market after 10 years. We don't use US cars either, but that EU and Japan cars will give up some of their profits. I have no knowledge about other markets, but I expect it to be the same. It's especially important during migration to electrical cars. While mechanical cars are very complex to produce reliably, I think that electrical cars will be much easier to produce because you could reuse a lot of parts easily, motor, battery, electronics and so on. You only need to develop an unique chassis and interior. And Chinese cars will deliver much more value compared to western ones for the same money.

Now something like autopilot is another thing where US could lead the market. But it seems like science fiction to me, I don't believe that I'll see it on my streets anytime soon.
Show HN: IVID – Interactive HTML5 Video Player (vanillajs, Webcomponent)
He was probably just giving an example, right, not literally requiring someone to know the difference amp/v, he was saying that the guy was bad at electronics.

I find surprising that this was hard to understand.

Logic and common sense on text comprehension are at it's historic lows, it seems.

The wiring of PLC control panels with servo motors, vacum-pumps (AIR-TACs) and All the moving parts of big machinery is the Slowest job at a chinese machinery assembling factory.

It looks complicated at first, then you see it everyday a lot and it starting to look easy.

Then you try do do it by yourself in a PLC that you have programmed yourself in the simplest and smallest model of the machine and you see that is actually very hard job to do.

Its actually like programming, because if you wire the wrong little cable among hundreds of little cables then you have to "debug" the wiring to see where was the damn little cable miswired...

In this place she was a 16 old girl, who had a son at 14 or so, from GuangXi province, very beautiful mountains but also has poor areas , but she was so nice and so patient and so good-hearted, it was unbelievable.

And she would wire cables all day, but not fast, slowly...slowly...because is hard.

And she learnt everyday from the 60 or 70 years old Shifu (Master, like in the kungfu movies)

I never met a better human being in my life, 100% sure, like this little girl from guangxi.

probably made around 350 USD a month. Poor child. I still have her wechat contact, I will rescue her someday...
The GPU and CPU comparison is interesting. Of course, a specialized GPU can do a handful of operations far more quickly, but a CPU is far more flexible and can adapt to changing needs. In the processor world, not sure the GPU will necessarily win out.

In the geopolitical space, it's not clear the analogy is on-point either. China can move quickly in some areas (e.g., staff up 100,000 manufacturing hands in a week), but it'll be much slower to adapt to foreign cultures and standards of civil liberties that are the norm in most western countries. For example, it's hard to imagine them developing a messaging app, or image analysis app that would convince U.S. users to trust and use.
PhotoDNA
Just the other day a videotaped balcony delivery by a german Hermes driver went viral (he climbs the van throwing it from the street onto the 2nd floor balcony, successful on 3rd attempt). This has sparked the same discussions and Hermes now faces some really bad PR and is searching for the culprit.

https://youtu.be/r4adBQf7R0Q
Americans tell themselves that so they can sleep at night but who knows if it is really true. China is on an impressive run compared to the US and has been for some time.
Oh that pepysdiary site looks awesome, thanks for the link. I really like the font. It's amazing how awful and hard-to-take-seriously stuff more than, say, 200 years old can look with a typical web font of today. What a great job.
Looking forward to it. We seriously need a better way to get energy. If this not just hot air it could change everything.
> It's not an unreasonable price when you think about the enormous amount of technology, materials and manufacturing processes that go into a car. Nothing else we normally buy comes close.

Commercial jets come pretty close. They have such ridiculous safety standards and regulations, I'd be happy to bet that we'll Chinese consumer cars before we see Chinese commercial jets.
And tech will also solve the power problem of autocratic regimes. Right now, a dictator can't control every single individual in the country on their own. They need police that can search your apt at 5am because you made a blog post critical of the government. They need lawyers to convict you, prison guards, etc. In such regimes, the dictator still has to put people into places of power so that the will of the dictator is executed. But people can refuse orders, and they can declare someone else to be president.

Coups are one of the biggest dangers for dictators, and many rebellions are semi-coups where people in power just step aside, letting the rebels do their thing.

Now, enter AI. Now the dictator could give all that power to an AI instead of intermediaries. An entire government run by two entities: the Dictator, with direct control over the AI that runs the remainder. All the bomb-equipped drones, all the self-driving tanks, all the bipedal robots with their machine guns. All the robot prison-guards and the robot judges to put critical people into prison. If this AI would answer only to the head of government, then any kind of upheaval would become unrealistic and impossible.
The environmentally disastrous Paris targets were entirely meaningless as it pertains to China. Using that as a reference doesn't support your premise.

Their 'commitment' allows them to perpetually increase their pollution levels with zero concern for consequences. Nothing happens to China if they fail to hit their numbers. They get to dramatically increase their pollution output over the next decade and still meet the laughable target. Which is exactly what they're doing now, by going on a massive coal power plant building spree. It's entirely a fake voluntary system meant for propaganda show, nothing more. Simultaneously there's no entity capable of enforcing anything on China nor any entity with the ability to accurately assess China's figures either direction.
ewams, I would like to see this word doc too. Would like to learn since it sounds helpful. Would be happy to contribute as well.

I checked your website but it looks like it's down due to PHP errors. How can I contact you? My email is in my HN profile. confiscate [at] gmail
Mods, please consider changing the link to this.

[edit] From the speaker himself: https://www.georgesoros.com/2019/01/24/remarks-delivered-at-...
I was at a bbq recently and the host lady had made a pavlova (or "Pav" as it's known). I jokingly asked if it was Australian and everyone including her laughed, but there were daggers behind the eyes...
This argument as presented in the blog post seems incoherent and poorly thought through to me. Companies innovate because this gives them a competitive advantage in a market that has strong protections for trade secrets and patents. This is essential for all kinds of tech companies to survive in healthy, competitive markets.

Thr flaw in the argument is that China essentially does not honor these protections. So if a foreign company invents something and wxports this knowledge to China, a purely Chinese run company will soon after build an essentially equal product without having to spend mony on any of the expensive R&D to actually develop that tech. This potentially ruinous asymmetry is not accounted for at all.
Xi finished Tsinghua University, which is a top school.
Recently, I've been reading the TeX program by Donald Knuth, and some related programs. One the one hand, they are intended to be read (written using the “literate programming” style he developed), so they ought to be easier to read than typical programs (and maybe they are, compared to circa 1980 Pascal programs of similar size). On the other hand, I… struggle.

In these programs, Knuth uses very few abstractions. I think there are two reasons for this:

* These programs were written in the “standard” Pascal as of 1980, a language which had many limitations (see Kernighan's essay on the topic) — and on top of that, Knuth wrote these programs to be as portable and memory-efficient as possible, across the many (often poor) Pascal compilers that were available to typical users at typical computer installations.

* To some extent, I suspect it is just Knuth's style and preference. As a programmer who started his career writing assembly programs in his own style (a story from 1960: http://ed-thelen.org/comp-hist/B5000-AlgolRWaychoff.html#7), even when given a supposedly “high-level” language, he probably thinks very close to the machine. Even as a mathematician (a profession often believed to be fond of abstraction), his style is characterized less by abstraction-building and more by deep attention to detail and “just do it”: he calculates constants to 40 decimal places; he does not stop at analyzing Big-O complexity (despite having popularized the notation) but finds the actual constant factor; he does not analyze on an abstract model of computation but writes assembly programs for a specially-designed mythical computer and analyzes them; and so on.

Nevertheless, his literate programming seems to be a way of solving the problems for which abstraction is often used as a solution (comprehensibility, etc), without introducing abstraction (and paying its cost): you can have functions that are hundreds of lines long, but presented in understandable (dozen-line or so) chunks.

Here's an example from something I was reading today. Unfortunately to make sense of it you need to be somewhat familiar with the conventions of Pascal, of WEB, and the current place in the program, and turn off your instinctive horror of non-monospaced code and the weird (for today) indentation. (Some background here: https://shreevatsa.github.io/tex/program/pooltype/ and https://shreevatsa.github.io/tex/program/tangle/) Anyway, the example is this: see sections 53 onwards: https://shreevatsa.github.io/tex/program/tangle/tangle-6 — here you have a single function `id_lookup` that is hundreds of lines long and has very complex case analysis and code paths, but chopped up in a way that makes it less forbidding to understand.

I think though that programmers today have a strong cultural bias in favour of abstraction, so they tend to have a strong negative reaction to code like this.