skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In an ideal world, it would be nice if we (governments, individuals, businesses etc) didn't support oppressive regimes and other bad actors. But would we though? Take Amazon - we know that they are almost as bad as Walmart on a host of issues, but how many of us would give up the convenience of one click shopping? It would be inconvenient, sure, but it is much easier for an individual to stop shopping at Amazon than for companies to give up billions of dollars in profit and answer their shareholders (to whom nothing matters but profit).

I am not saying Google/Apple is right - just pointing out that almost all of us are hypocrites at some level, some more than others.
Im a CS undergrad right now and in need of a side project... I'll start right now :)

But for real, the idea of Reddit seems perfect to me its just way to popular now. Maybe a platform where you need to pass some sort of quiz created by the mods of the different communities in order to post/comment? I could see this having lots of issues though.

Also I don't really mind reddit going to shit ever since I found HN a few years ago.
That's a bit of a supremacist take, no offense.

Maybe rather than complaining about it, we should actually build things?

Maybe we should pay a schoolteacher more than 1/4 what an advertising optimizer makes?
That’s awesome - congratulations! I’m glad it worked for you.
I think you're correct in your assessment, but there's more to it. Specifically we must remember that evolution finds more useful solutions over time, but not necessarily the most useful solutions. A local minima of cost can be found while ignoring an even lower point of cost on the other side of a hill. It would be ridiculous to expect us to have found the most rational course of action in a given situation, even accounting for the mental costs you mentioned.
>is $2 too much to ask?

I'd gladly pay $2 to retire my army of throwaway emails, assuming the service remains as currently advertised. How many email domains do you have available to choose from, and how do you plan to deal with vendors potentially banning your domains?

This is more of a general thought, but privacy is another concern. There are plenty of companies who took customers' money and then sold their private data anyways. I'm more inclined to trust a startup like yours, but somewhere down the line I see this as a possibility. Is there ever a way for a customer to be sure a company isn't misusing their data? Are there any 3rd parties who can confirm/audit their practices?

>What's the HN community feeling about when it is or isn't Ok for someone to post a comment reply pointing out their product might be able to help?

I'm still new here, but from what I've seen it's probably okay as long as the context is relevant. I see people pushing startup solutions on a daily basis and it's usually cool stuff.
Still sounds like quite an adventure.

Large parts of adventures are basically boredom in poor conditions.
Optimizely Stats Engine: Is It Worth It?
You can play devils advocate all day long, I always like to challenge my preconceptions. I only care because people's laissez-faire attitude towards crypto is putting real peoples' hard earned money at risk through some fanciful delusion of 'moon soon.' I'd make as strong an argument against Herbalife if people came to its defense.

A currency has 3 objective functions: medium of exchange, unit of account and store of value. It objectively fails the third test. [1]

Re Venezuela: If Bitcoin is to replace the status quo it must show itself to be better than the existing. If it's effectively as good as the Bolivar who cares whether it's their government or a group of self-appointed open source finance champs who are doing it? I thought the goal was to avoid the ends, not the means?

Re $2.4B/yr, people who have no understanding of the system put their money in because a group of loud activists (existing "investors") are encouraging them to do so. This is to prop up their own "investments" at the expense of the new money. They are running out of people who are willing to throw down solely because "moon soon" which is what's forcing the price down in spite of all the rampant manipulation. It's unlikely to go anywhere but down due to the high new money requirement for even price maintenance. You don't hear anything bad out of crypto investors mouths because they require $2.4B in new money just to keep their bags afloat.

Re the snake den, I'm saying that in re: the idea that it's not a scam just because scams operate on it. It's designed in a way that precludes stopping scams, which makes it de facto complicit / transitively a scam. You may disagree, it's just an optimization to think of it that way.

Fine it's an investment, it's a bad one.

I'm not making the case that the internet is going nowhere because pets.com is going nowhere. The idea that you're buying into blockchain technology's future by owning bitcoin is like saying you're buying pets.com stock because you want to invest in TCP/IP, and that appears to be the MO for most blockchain investors. Finally, nobody's made a good case yet for a problem blockchain can solve better than any existing solution, whereas TCP/IP, I'd say, solved real problems from day 1.

If anything crypto is making the best case I've seen for accredited investor rules.

[1] http://money.visualcapitalist.com/infographic-the-properties...
Yeah, agreed. That's mostly just due to the small userbase, and hopefully we'll be able to build up specialized communities as the site grows (and the hierarchical group system should work very well for them).

It's worth remembering that reddit didn't even have user-created subreddits until it was over two and a half years old, and only had a handful of admin-created ones before that. It takes quite a bit of growth and time to be able to support specialized communities.
But with this release it will no longer be compatible.
Or maybe the userbase democratically chose cat pictures.

At a certain point, it's our fault for having a decadent and exploitable society.

Why has Reddit needed to raise hundreds of millions long after being established?
There was an image based exploit for the PSP as well.
It's like those starburst things on foods at the supermarket. "Lift: 7.7% less Saudi Arabia!"
I think my brain has linked together modern ui with slow, broken and full of tracking. I think there might be nothing really wrong with the actual UI of reddit but its all the other things that got lumped in with the redesign.

Every time I see an old looking website or program its almost a refreshing feeling that it isn't going to try to suck money and data from me.
Same, I read Reddit a lot on mobile with Apollo but my main usage remains on the desktop - I even pay for gold. The moment they take old.reddit away without some SERIOUS tweaking of the new UI is the moment I cancel gold and leave the site.

Shame too, because there are subreddits I love like /r/homelab.
What do you want do on Mars other than staying alive? There is not much there.
MartinScorsese&LeoDiCaprio Set the Devil in the White City as TV Series at Hulu
You can, just don't expect official hardware. https://amd-osx.com
I wonder how many forgo products made in communist countries?
Seriously, I love Dolly Parton. To me, she represents everything good about the place I was born, with grace, humility, and compassionate absurdity in equal measure.

(If you've ever toured as a musician, the compassionate absurdity part comes in handy.)
It sounds like you are really trying to figure out what direction to go next, rather than specifically asking about a CS degree. I have been in a similar position several times in my life, and found the following two books helpful:
"What color is your parachute?" by Richard Bolles and "What should I do with my life?" by Po Bronson. The first is more of a manual to work through to help you figure what you want, and where you might find it. The second is basically a bunch of true stories about people who faced the same kind of question, and what they did - it's NOT a manual on what to do,I think of it more like a "peer group" - psychologically it's helpful to see what other people did and didn't do in these situations (spoiler -there is no 'right' answer, but there are some useful principles that might help you narrow down your choices)

If at some point you do decide that doing a (CS?) degree might be useful, get in touch - I am currently studying for another degree in my 40'swhile working, with several family members doing online CS degrees while working
If you follow the monthly Android Security Bulletin, there has been a long stream fixes for remote-code-execution vulnerablities in codec implementations. It got big in 2015 when the Stagefright branded vulnerability got some publicity, and they continued testing & have continued to fix an endless stream of codec vulns ever since.

There was also a Bluetooth RCE in this month's bulletin. And in November there was yet another round of WiFi pwnage, this time in Qualcomm WiFi (CVE-2018-11905). It's all quite bad.
UWP is a no-go already. No way we can port our WPF code.
Put another way, even if you take the strict definition of a rational (optimal) agent, in probably any non-trivial or non-contrived corner case, for any arbitrary set of actions, there exists some utility function and information constraint that can justify that set of arbitrary functions.

Have a set of "irrational actions"? Add in information and computational constraints and the necessity for heuristics, the exact right kind of risk-aversion / novelty-seeking behavior, (or play with the second or higher derivatives of your utility function), add in social dynamics like signaling, repeated games (or incorporate mental burdens that negate the impact of repeated games) etc. There exists some formalized universe where your agent is indeed rational.
Yea, but I don't view their ads or give them money. It's the same line I draw with other internet properties that I find odious. Maybe a long time ago reddit was worth supporting, but they've made too many user-hostile decisions.

I realize that giving them page views counts as 'support' when they're trying to raise money from investors. I hope that my infinitesimal effect on their monetization numbers in the opposite direction cancels it out. Who knows.
SoftBank ate the world UK
The bandwidth costs for Globalsign incurred for revoking SSL certificates in response to Heartbleed was estimated to $400K in a Cloudflare blob post [0] and eWeek estimated the total cost of Heartbleed to be $500M [1], although admittedly this price tag is an educated guess.

You're question is expensive to whom. The answer is the expenses are spread across the entire industry. Every time a software author needs to write a patch the bigger cumulative expense is to all of their customers that need to apply the patch.

[0] https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-hard-costs-of-heartbleed/
[1] https://www.eweek.com/security/heartbleed-ssl-flaw-s-true-co...
>Think how dumb the average joe is, then realize that 50% of the population is dumber than him.

The median Joe.
Indeed. I think of all those "Slack is down, everyone can't work" moments when I think of this. They're really trying to remove outside dependencies, and limiting the ability for other actors to use those dependencies against them.

My guess is the US thinks along the same lines, but since most things Internet are US-based to begin with, they're probably less concerned with a dramatic public test.
Boxed software used to cost that much or more each. $79/year is meager.
Convenience is one factor and an even greater factor is price. People have as much morality as they can afford.
I agree, apps like these and previously musically (sp?) are extremely shallow and promote narcissistic traits in gullible teenagers. Glad I was not a teen in 2019.
Outcome 3- Google ban Absher and automatically remove it from device using Google Play Protect on the basis that it's a spyware.
Who or what is that?
Well, it's hard only if you do it in hard mode (in hand-written C/C++), just like bulletproof anything is hard there. We (as a field) have for decades known how to do it safely, people just elect to do it unsafely because of the usual reasons.
Correction: WW3 might start online, but it will end with mushroom clouds.

To the GP
Whatever your opinion of Russian politics, from a technical standpoint, aiming for full autonomy of critical services at a national scale, is praise worthy!

Sure, and the Nazis were really organized, why they almost made it to Moscow.
Well there's a deep conflict of interest and no accountability...
What happened in DevOps space in year 2018 and what is in store for 2019?
There are two cases. Either you can prove to other people what you voted for. And then they can extort you. Or you can't and then you how can you prove you were cheated? And if we think one more step, hostile government can start rumors of distortions and no one can know.

There is an out. If no single person can prove their vote but people in aggregate can.
A Machine Gets High Marks for Diagnosing Sick Children
I am surprised that no-one has brought up a neutrality argument yet.

The app is legal within Saudi Arabia and in fact published by their government.

Are we to take down any app which violates anyone’s morals? Or just the morals of particular countries? If an app is blasphemous by the standards of say Mormonism or Islam, should we take it down? After everyone is done, how many apps will be left?

If we enforce some morals and not others in our app stores, who exactly do we choose as the arbiters of morality? U.S. public opinion? Chinese public opinion? Maybe the U.N?

Just to be clear I’d prefer this app not exist, and I would not be unhappy if it gets “unpublished”. I also think it would be cool if the major platforms just came out and made an unambiguous statement on what they will and won’t stand for.
Paywalled. Anyone got a non-paywall link?
How much of this is due to people not upgrading to new iPhones as the OS got optimized and they got free batteries - people spend more money when they have more left.
You’d be surprised the number of places you can use TypeScript where only JS is supported. Most recently, TypeScript allowed me to easily use modules and ES2018 syntax with the legacy, somewhat terrible Google Apps Script JS engine, thanks to Clasp: https://github.com/google/clasp/blob/master/docs/typescript....

I often find merely searching for a typescript-compatible solution helps me discover some of the safest and bug-free options quickly, avoiding legacy jQuery-era projects.
Endgame reached. Windows 95 now available as an Electron app
You'd expect a site dedicated to software engineers to have a better grasp on how a bell curve works.

Even the median Joe in this case is relatively similar to most other Joe's because 2/3 of the population is within 1 standard deviation of intelligence.
> A decent programmer would never [...]

And that kind of attitude is why we still have security bugs.
New research finds possible second impact crater hiding under Greenland ice
Reading through all these responses, I have to wonder if there is a business opportunity for a company that provides "best content" recommendations, targeted to your interests, on these platforms.

"But wait, why don't the platforms just do that themselves?!!" I'd argue the economic incentives for the platforms to recommend "brain-candy" lobotomizing content is too high to go against this trend, but a third party with a lot less to lose could actually do a better job at recommending more useful, thoughtful content.
> War has been the natural state of man for millions of years

He mentions tribes, and there is no evidence of tribes existing prior to 10,000 years ago. Which is about 25,000 to 30,000 years after the cave paintings in Chauvet and El Castillo.

Not that conflict never happens between hunter-gatherer bands, but evidence is it was, and is, fairly limited.

Real conflict and war started ramping up 10,000 years ago, with the dawn of slave societies and empires.
Tiananmen event is really terrible
Building the wrong product – 9 antipatterns you should avoid
McCarthy's Ambiguous Operator (2005)
Shouldn't all code be gradually updated to use Rust libraries when they exist? Is it a stupid idea?

I know it's a lot of work, but the Android/Chrome teams are big, and this is important enough work that could improve the security of the systems.
Probably Zen of Code Optimization. Good times.
Why would you assume that they would be hashed or otherwise anonymized?

Doing so would be work, and the people with those databases have no problem with keeping millions upon millions of records, ad infinitum.

Hashing them or anonymizing them would make them much less useful to them in the future.
Could it be that this generation of new programmers will never see their new tech invention become meaningful?

If someone creates a new idea and it takes off they either get huge offers from existing companies to buy it or those companies use their huge resources to build a bigger and better version.

In the age of the start of facebook and reddit there were no mega corps taking interest or possessing the talent in these areas.
Not being rude to the author, but I wonder how much of this is naiveté of young age.

He definitely had early career success. Like most people in his situation it can be very hard to understand how hard life can be at the opposite end. When you are young, and have this kind of success without prior equivalent failure it can be hard to grasp how much you'd have to work to make that much on pure hard work and merit. It's easy to spend and throw it away, or even not respect the uniqueness and blessed situation you have now.

Then you reach some thing like 35-40, and realize you have no luck going for yourself anymore. The best years are behind you. And you have to put in life devastating hours only to fail. And there is nothing you can do but suffer through it.

Back from where I come we have a proverb in Dakhni Urdu which goes like this: People make the worst possible decisions of their lives when their stomach is full.
The Chinese government forced USA airlines to remove mention of the sovereign nation of Taiwan.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-44948599

They also forced GAP to remove a proper map of China that accurately displays its sovereign borders off a sweater, and then, heinously, forced it to release a map that incorrectly displays Taiwan as a portion of Chinese territory through GAP marketing channels. (Incidentally, if anybody has the correct map in male's M, I'm buying, and willing to pay dearly)

https://www.dallasnews.com/business/business/2018/05/15/gap-...

China will go to overt lengths to push their lies on the world.
Nah, I wouldn't worry, you can get downvoted today just as easy :P
Don’t overlook the number of options available out of the box with the —lib parameter: https://www.typescriptlang.org/docs/handbook/compiler-option...

In many ways, I prefer this approach—it means TypeScript as a language will stay compatible with JavaScript, and keeps options like Babel 7’s outright removal of TS types easily done. If you need a feature JS doesn’t have, import it, or pick a browser or runtime API. Seems simple enough to me. :)
Instead of Hooli someone is going to launch Halali ... Cloud hosting according to the laws or the Koran.
Big tech is already very powerful, and there are very few feasible ways to stop that. But it is a bit more feasible to demand that big tech use its power in certain ways. They are already at the point where almost anything they do will have an impact with moral implications, the way that an elephant walking through a field is going to crush some flowers or grasses. (See, for instance, Twitter aiding the Arab Spring by basically just existing, Facebook aiding the Rohingya genocide by basically just existing, and WhatsApp enabling mob violence in India by basically just existing.)

So, we might as well demand that they step on the things we wish them to step on.
Ya, fair enough. It sounds like you've exhausted the paths that every waterfall developer exhausts before moving on to some kind of agile framework (ex. Scrum).

Clients don't like it as much of course, but the we can do is convince them that it fits the way that everyone works better -- nobody knows exactly what they want up front, and if they do, then they're wrong because as soon as they get to use the thing the never existed before, they'll discover things that don't feel right and they'll want to change them.

But working (and billing) in weekly Sprints seems to work very well once you've convinced your client that the framework is the right way to do it. Client want a quote, but we tell them we can't really give them any sort of estimate until we see how they work (with us). So, a two week trial period is often a good way to get that going.
Do you trust startups more?

E.g. when Uber was a startup, it did stuff like this: https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2014/11/18/uber-crunches-u....
As he clarified later, that was a joke.
Good insight, this is the fact as I known
Where I was going with this is PM is a hard job and not for everyone.

I know people who became a PM assuming the PM has the power to make the decisions. BUT you need to work with the CTO to create the vision, validate demand, get you idea, work with marketing to announce it, identify design partner customers, work with designers and work with Engineers to agree on the MVP, oversee delivery, get the docs written, get support trained, run the early access program, enable the field, and finally work with marketing to the release your product. AND - by the way - none of these people report to you. How do you do it? Politics are unavoidable.

And let’s say you do all these things exceptionally well — guess what? Nobody will ever be satisfied with the decisions and tradeoffs you made. When things go wrong you will get blamed, and when things go well sales makes the bonus and Engineers are praised. There will be long stretches where you wonder if it’s all worth it.

BUT there is nothing like delivering something customers love and it makes it all seem worth it. Hang in there. :-)
The reason to try and tax wealthy people more is to support additional spending on social programs. The cost of these new programs will quickly exceed any additional money we can squeeze out of the wealthy (again, the wealthy have enough resources to shelter most of their money from taxes). But at that point we’ve already promised people all of these great new social benefits and we can’t walk that back now. It’s the middle class who have enough money to go after, but not so much money that they can effectively shelter their wealth, so that’s who ends up paying in the long run.
A potential winner can't cross the line successfully unless they have leverage. Microsoft had a heavy hammer: put up with us or lose access to the mainstream market.

Disrupting such a market is of course the goal of any small innovator who needs cooperation from the other market participants.

Hmm. Not sure this comment of mine advamces the conversation here. But anyway "willingness to be a thug" is perhaps necessary to create a singularity like Microsoft, Amazon, Google, but not sufficient. And I'm not sure it's even necessary.
the backend i have is of course written in such a framework. (it's not laravel[0], but it could be)

i am not trying to diss backend frameworks here as bad. any of these would be a good choice for the backend.

the point is that thanks to SPA and CRUD i get to reuse that same backend over and over with little or no modification. (modifications amount to fixing bugs and very rarely adding new features to the API)

my backend development time now is effectively 0!

[0] (i have been working with laravel, django and others (primarily roxen and pike) before, and while i am not a fan of php, i did find laravel pleasant to work with)