skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"lifestyle business" is really just a small business that works, is self-sustaining, and not overly bloated to attempt to make obscene amounts of $$$.

I feel like this is exactly what most companies should strive for. They'll make better decisions that way.
Is "toxic" the new go-to insult for ideas and people someone doesn't like?
elementary or mint xfce would be a nice candidate (nothing more than nice; but that's already nice for long term peace of mind)
>Is this really true

My answer is 'no'. I think it's hard to make a living as a html/css website builder. You're competing with students, foreign freelancers, Web CMSes (like Wordpress+themes), and Website builder services (like Squarespace) ... all of which can, in one way or the other, undercut you.

>you need to install 10k dependencies for a brochure site.

You don't need 10k dependencies for a brochure site. Things like Wordpress or Squarespace should be more than enough.
> Centurylink is offering gigabit for $65 flat (no taxes or fees) across its footprint

Oh word! They are in Louisville? Where do I sign up?

Hint: "average prices" for high speed internet mean very little in the USA as those prices vary wildly. I pay $30 less for 300Mbps service than a remote coworker does for 75Mbps - from the same company.
IMO the Beyond Burger is a better modern vegan burger patty. They have them in refrigerated 2-packs at Whole Foods. Sadly, they are not cheap.
Hired Acquires Y Combinator Grad Py and Launches Assessments
Local fire Department commented on their facebook page [1] that dust from construction triggered the fire suppression system and not a fire.

[1] https://www.facebook.com/LakeJoFD
FWIW, it was posted here at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18248896 . I was the only one to comment; got a -1 for pointing out their use of gendered language.
Infrastructure is far different than selling widgets. To make a profit, you want to get as many customers as possible even if you have to mix price points. The goal is to maximize revenue per home passed, not get a handful of homes at $20 a month higher price point.
Few years ago I booted a Sun sparc with java hotspot browser. I could use google
Building more transistor = larger die size = very expensive on leading node. And RTX are using more transistors for Ray Tracing, hence the higher transistor count didn't translate to any increase in gaming performance.
Anybody used Py, either for interview practice or as job applicant?
Also missed the late, great Terry Pratchett's library of The Unseen University [0].

[0] https://wiki.lspace.org/mediawiki/Library
Look on the bright side - maybe Pinterest would have failed if you stayed there.
Oh, good call! Forgot about that one. I'll add it to the list. I am huge fan of his Zones of Thought books.
I also thought it odd until I realised it's a podcast+partial transcript.
I can't recall the exact implementation detail, but We then logged the number of running instances in a file, and read the last qty of instances and the delta from when launched - and made the system not get over aggressive if it couldnt read the current set.

We also added smart loading across AZs due to spot instances getting whacked when our fleet was outbid and AWS took them back.

As well as other monitoring methods to be sure we werent caught with a smart system doing dumb things.
> there is predictability in investing

Even if you could predict the future of your investment the market will eventually catch on.

Let's say you can accurately predict the market's up or down direction a week in advance. You know it will go up so you start buying. The act of you buying drives prices up until even you don't think it's a good investment. Essentially, you've accelerated your future prediction to become today's reality.

Markets suck up information. Maybe you could make predictions in secret but as soon as you start publicizing those predictions or acting on the market, you've already changed the conditions.

All it takes is a bug in a financial model for someone to start dumping shares and affecting the market.

While markets are self correcting, they are not predictable or guaranteed to be rational.

Many people who are predicting markets are getting lucky or hoping to do it so publicly that it becomes a set fulfilling profacy.
The term is probably not great for reasons mentioned here, but the concept is nifty.

It makes tricks like React pages rendering without javascript possible, and works with pretty much any language that can manipulate strings (awk, sed & curl build process, why not).

If your api is only used during the build step, scaling is really easy like tfa mentions.
There was a NYT article on the exact same subject with some excellent examples: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/16/movies/peter-jackson-war-...
Great post Guido!

Guido's bignum fuzzer which tests the correctness of math operations in crypto libraries is one of the most interesting fuzzers we run on ClusterFuzz.
3rd largest bank in the world offline for an entire day because a smoke alarm went off

great job guys
If it's something either parent does because it's what they want, then it is indeed not servitude.

But in 1973, it fell almost exclusively to the female parent, whether it was what she wanted or not. Many women may well have been happy with that arrangement, but practically no men would have "received positive utility". And either there's something unique about the Y chromosome that makes it impossible for them to enjoy that, or a lot of women weren't so much "happy" as "accepting".

We should indeed embrace opportunities for more personal involvement in families -- for both parents. Generous leave is a big start on that. But "100% leave, as long as you're female" is not.
That’s not special to tomato seed. In fact, fruits being eaten and seeds defecated by animals in far out lands is why seeds are in the sweet, tasty, sugary fruits for the most part!
Back in the early 2000s, before most plans move to "unlimited", some ISPs in Portugal did exactly that: they had rather small caps, but then unlimited between 1am and 7am.

And we did have developers take advantage of that; for example, there was a popular fork of eMule that had extra scheduling features, so it could automatically run just in that period.
That's the thing, the government isn't charging people directly, they just manage the hardware, individual companies can charge their own rates on top of that hardware.
It's true that my post is grossly simplified for the sake of an exercise in pseudo-formal logic. This is largely for the sake of readability, as it was pretty long already.

>>total lack of change at a meta-scale like a society only exists in totalitarian societies

>Does it? Why?

This is genuinely interesting to me, so I'm going to try to write out my intuitive reasoning. Please bear with me and feel free to point out any errors.

1) The natural state of closed systems is to change unless at an equilibrium. (2nd law of thermodynamics)

2) In order for an economy to stop changing you need to be at some sort of equilibrium, typically these are either brought about by implicit military force with a government or by economic force in the case of functional monopolies.

3) While monopolies can crush entire industries, they have yet to take over entire societies without government assistance, to my knowledge

4) Therefore when you're talking about (relatively) complete stasis within an entire society's economy, you must be talking about a scenario where either government intervention is involved, or perhaps a hypothetical scenario where a single monopoly has taken over the entire economy and therefore functionally replaced the government.

I would say either of those hypothetical societies are roughly equivalent to totalitarianism, at least with regards to the economy, which is still the domain we're talking about, right?

>Why? Where does the oppression come in? If it is being told what to produce then doesn't capitalism do the same, though through a distributed model of command?

A distributed model of command? By allowing market forces to dictate what is in-demand and what is not, is that an imposition by an external will, or is it closer to gravity and surface tension defining the path of water as it flows down a hill?

I would argue that a fundamental aspect of oppression is intention. The market itself has no fundamental intentions but to grow. That said, it is bad at certain types of planning and must be redirected in many cases with external force in order to get it to work in the best interests of the public.

Having said all that, I don't think that we disagree on any of the points you've made. I was steelmanning Bezos' argument as suggested by the parent comment, not trying to make my own (except the very last paragraph). Yes, the use of "liberty" was assuming a bourgeois definition, this was because I had assumed it was the definition that Bezos was using.
John Cassidy's "How Markets Fail" is a must-read IMHO. I went through 4 years of an economics degree at a top tier university (top 5 globally in Econ), and Cassidy's book just happened to be the weekly assigned reading for a class my last semester.

Everything then made sense. All the inconsistencies you hear about economics, with one camp saying one idea and another talking about something totally different, both passing it off as consensus, fit into place.

TLDR: Cassidy's book is in 2 parts. The first part, he constructs the classical/rational model of economics through intellectual history. The second part, he deconstructs, drawing from all the critiques of inefficiency, both behavioral and mathematical. (Some of the most fascinating aspects are the beautiful mathematical models that can't be solved). It's all well written prose, no need to have a pen and calculator to follow along.

The title is misleading IMHO, because it seems to be a populist polemical. It's not. It should be called something like "A Brief History of Economics", echoing Hawkin's Brief History of Time.
>Can you imagine if people who manufacture components for industrial designs behaved like Google does? "We have these subway trains with busted brakes, but it turns out that they were manufactured by Google and they dropped the project two years ago. I guess we have to buy new trains then..."

I can imagine it. It happens every day.

In an industrial setting it is not uncommon to need a part but the stock version of it is not available. It could be that the manufacturer switched from making cooling tower components to fly swatters. Or, it could be that the system you're maintaining is a hundred years old.

You might find a 3rd party replacement part from China. If not, you try to build it from generic components (everyone uses the same bearings, o-rings, springs, etc). If that fails you find a company who sells a similar product and give them your specifications. Finally, failing all other means, you pay a machine shop (or a foundry if you're making the cast iron part of the braking system) to build your part. Anything that has already been built can be built again.

If you want security in terms of products you are buying, you get a warranty. There are laws that enforce warranties. So you get a warranty, and when its going to expire you get an extension, and when you cant renew anymore you plan to replace that product.

The same is true of utility companies. If you are worried about fly by night fiber companies, you should require a lengthy advanced notice-- perhaps a year or two. And if Google blesses some other city instead of yours because you wanted the warranty, then you let it go.
Wow, had no idea, but this is great. Thanks so much for the ICYMI post.
Neither of these are alternatives if birthing is the problem, as they are both births.

Also, abortions weren't really a thing? Are you sure about that? I'm pretty sure it's only recently[1] that abortions were distinctly not a thing.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_abortion
> I would think this would be a top TGIF question almost every week at this point (because it seems that's how often Google product shutdowns are in the news).

Actually this week (!) was the first time my question was upvoted enough to be asked and it was exactly about this.

My impression is that they are aware but willing to trade our reputation for the ability to experiment or be more aggressive in funding more successful products
If you don't know about him already, you might find Martin Armstrong interesting.

https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/blog/
Here's a relevant social experiment: https://youtu.be/yZlOw3rsPBM
Discovered this the hard way when building quad GPU servers. 1080Ti has TDP of 250W per spec, yet most "1600W" power supplies will crap out and shut down your system if you fire up 4 1080Ti's simultaneously. The only brand I've tried that didn't crap out was EVGA. Supposedly Corsair 1600W PSU is also OK, but I haven't tried it. Even in nvidia-smi (which I think still averages things out somewhat and never shows the momentary peak power), 1080Ti will often jump way over the 250W "limit" when it's at 100% utilization.
Pills armed with tiny needles could inject insulin, other meds into the stomach
Your tools are for you to keep and the gratification you get when you finish something from a to z are something we lack in this IT industry.
I think it's a bit much to imply that Warren Buffet missed out on learning economics and finance in high school.
> hurting them is counterproductive.

That's certainly not necessarily the case. For example, the veal industry used to (perhaps still does - not sure) keep calves in tight cages in which they could not turn or lie down, because the "exercise" would turn their meat an undesirable pink. Likewise, laying eggs is a natural function for hens (like ovulation), so they will do so even when stressed out. The only reason there's some restraint on how many are kept in small areas, on uneven slatted floors, is regulation, not cost savings.
"A long-standing puzzle seems to constrain how addition and multiplication relate to each other."

The first thing to remember is that multiplication IS Addition..
How is that different from a regular single-page application? My understanding of JAM from watching [1] was that your entire site is static, except for JS that calls out to serverless APIs to CRUD your content on the backend or initiate some workflow with a third-party service like PayPal or Twilio. If your site allows user comments, then you would rebuild your static site every time the user comment is submitted instead of rendering the comments on the server when handling the request.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=grSxHfGoaeg

Google's HTTP 203 show about JAM stack [2] talks about doing sites claiming the do static site rebuilds "every second" and debates whether static site rebuilds would scale for a large site with lots of old content like the BBC or New York Times.

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QXsWaA3HTHA
Their entire data center, it seems
You can still access Wells Fargo Online via the direct link: https://connect.secure.wellsfargo.com/auth/login/present?ori...
Somehow I've never picked up any Pratchett books but, after reading this, I'm in:

*The Library has endless shelves (some of which are Mobius shelves)*

Which one(s) should I add to the list? And, more importantly, where should I start reading?
Ah, so who is going to force the C-section/normal birth to happen? The authorities, with guns? If that scene is ok with someone, that's where I'd disagree with them, because it's clearly cruel.

There's countless situations where I could judge someone's behavior as a thing they should never do, even though I'm not in their shoes, but this isn't one of them. If a mother wants to abort, that's just on her! Maybe the suffering of the fetus is tragic, but it's all her choice and I can't really judge her because I'm not her. I accept I can't prevent every bad or possibly bad outcome and end all suffering.

Edit: I appreciate dialog on the specifics of these things. I think people just... assume that because they're all on the same "side" they come to the same beliefs and conclusions from the same reasoning (or that everyone around them has a reasoning to begin with) and that can end up causing huge problems.
In your first few years your base is going to be low, is it a bad month if you went from 1000 to 1100 customers instead of 1200?

The way I think about things is that there is some market with a size Y (or, size X now, but with the hope it will grow to Y). You need to service a certain percentage of that market to achieve economies of scale that make a business worthwhile, and capture enough that you have some sort of moat. In the presence of VC-money, that percentage has to be high enough that there's an upside to investors.

Given that goal and the idea that you only have so much runway to get there, because you'll either run out of money, or risk a competitor capturing the market. As long as you are on the right trajectory things are good.

The reason that I think monthly growth is a poor metric because it's looking at the delta and ignoring the goal. It doesn't matter if you hit 10-20% or more every month if you aren't going to capture the total market you need to succeed. Also number of customers is a poor proxy, because you can have a weak business model and lose money on most transactions as demonstrated by Pets.com.
Incredible. They had all their mission-critical infrastructure in a single data center. How many billions of dollars do they make per year? And they can't afford even a tiny bit of redundancy?

If I were a customer, I'd use this as a sign that this company is not technically competent enough to manage my money.
That's not what they said. They said, "The brain is most certainly not a neural network, as the term is understood in machine learning.".
Lets check 1999 cards in Quake 2. Top of the line $300 Voodoo3/geforce 256 delivered 80-100 fps in 1024x768. Voodoo3 2000 was $100 in November 1999, and delivered solid 60 fps in 1024x768, used Voodoo2 could be had for $30 and still ran the game at 60fps, albeit only 800x600.

Wolfenstein 2 is a two year old game at this point, and runs 35-60 on GTX 1050 with fast CPU, and more like constant 35/medium settings on weak one. You have to drop down to 1600x900 for >40fps.

I guess GPU prices dropped from the last time I checked, RX 580/GTX 1060, both delivering playable framerates in current games, actually start around $200 now, so Ill give you that :)
Google’s Lunar New Year AI Surprises
Bill Gates: Lessons in Innovation from Leonardo Da Vinci
Helping developers avoid the pitfalls of cryptography is the main problem we at Tozny (http://tozny.com) are trying to solve.

We found that there is so much mis-information available online it's too easy to shoot yourself in the foot with cryptography so we're trying to make tools that make strong crypto easy to implement.
AWS employee here.

This is a feature that is currently on our public roadmap for container services, in the "Researching" category: https://github.com/aws/containers-roadmap/issues/76

Feel free to drop a thumbs up on the roadmap item to show your support and boost its priority on the roadmap, or leave a comment to let us know more about your needs.
Alex Blumberg and Matt Lieber explain why they sold Gimlet to Spotify
Avoiding Junk-Drawer Classes in Ruby
I get the feeling that the authors of this report are not entirely honest. For example, part-way through they make this claim about Portuguese operator MEO's plans:

"Using applications participating in the DPP is two up to 77-fold cheaper compared to using applications via general data volume. This strong incentive for customers to use participating applications infringes on the rights of consumers to use applications of their choice and the rights of CAPs to provide services independent of the origin of their users."

Up to 77 times more for neutral data than data to their partners - sounds scary, but how do they get that figure? Well, they take MEO's smallest month-to-month contract which offers 250 minutes + SMS + 500 MB of data + free in-network calls, divide the amount of data by the total cost, and compare this with the nominally 10 GB Smart Net addon which only offers data to the included services. That is, they're treating the phone and SMS part of the all-internet plan as though it costs nothing when it definitely does not.

I think the two-fold cheaper figure on the lower end is wrong too - on paper the non-neutral Smart Net is more like three times cheaper than comparable prepaid data, at least for people who make good use of the Smart Net data limit. Bear in mind that as I understand it each Smart Net plan is for access to one of Messaging, Social, Video, or Music, which includes a handful of the main sites in that category. I imagine most people will have usage that is relatively low and spread across multiple categories plus some outside-of-package usage, in which case a general internet access plan will work out cheaper.
Impossible Burger 2.0 (which just debuted) will be sold in "select US grocery stores"

https://venturebeat.com/2019/01/07/impossible-foods-will-sel...
> Limiting bandwidth for everyone just makes the experience worse for everyone.

Sure it does, but not limiting it will make the network die even faster if it can't handle said simultaneous usage.

Data caps on the other hand can't help with that at all. I.e. users with such caps connecting at the same time will produce the same negative effect as ones without caps.

The only proper solution is to build up the network, if it's plagued by congestion all the time. Once it's congested - it's already too late and you can only make it degrade gracefully until it's built up.
NYC launches partnership network, 'The Grid,' to help grow urban tech ecosystem
No proposal, 404 Not Found?
The great Scott McNealy quote about Sun really resonated with me:

> We kicked butt, had fun, didn't cheat, loved our customers and changed computing forever

... and in many ways, it seems like only a "lifestyle business" can really prioritize those over core revenue and growth metrics.

Bryan Cantrill's discussion is also great: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&t=2000
My wife and I have missed the Trans-Siberian Orchestra every year for 10 years, but we REALLY want to go. It's almost a running joke at this point. This year I set about a dozen alerts that'll start going off at the end of summer to make sure I don't forget to get the tickets.
If you're waiting for this to be the straw to move away from Wells Fargo after the last set of scandals, you may have some issues...
I hear this a lot but I don't really see it. Do you have examples of sites which are written using a framework but shouldn't be?
> You are unlikely to leave a lasting legacy, and the generation you do affect, will die as well.

By this logic, culture and society would die every generation, and have to be rebuilt from scratch each time.

We all leave behind a "small" but far-reaching legacy that ripples out from our short lifetime. Each of the thousands of interactions we have with with other people and our general environment have a tiny but real impact that doesn't necessarily diminish to zero after we die. The change that occurs then has a small domino effect on any other person or system that it touches. And so on and so forth :)

My life today is deeply affected by the concerted actions of billions of unknown individuals from centuries and millennia past in ways that I can't even begin to fathom. I'm grateful for some of those impacts. For other impacts less so, but I hope to contribute small changes for the benefit those who live in the untold distant future.
The employeer should have a "replacement" ready anyway since people might also quit. Preparing for the pssobility of this or eg. paternity leave is a good anti-employee lock-in meassure for skilled workers.

A possible argument against the system is that there are many temp working contracts to fill in for the fulltimers on leave.
Watch: New Trailer to Dual Universe, the Fully Immersive Metaverse