skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> They have so many hundreds of billions of dollars in offshore accounts they don't know what to do with it

They have $109 billion in cash according to their latest financial statements.

What offshore accounts are you referring to that are supposedly holding hundreds of billions of dollars in stolen, unreported shareholder funds?
Contaminating the groundwater is also a risk.
Hukou system
Yeah, my heart raced for a second before I read the full headline. Happy I'm not the only one. One day, it will be for real. Hope that I'm still alive to witness that.
That's just what you believe. Other people believe differently. Why choose to believe something that makes you miserable? Maybe religions are a pack of lies, but if it makes your life better and there's nothing after anyway, what's wrong with it?

"Live by the foma that make you brave and kind and healthy and happy." See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bokononism
Is this even beneficial? I was exposed to the "conspiracy theory" known as phrenology as a teenager. Yeah, it was kind of embarrassing to have a teacher point out that the whole thing was bullshit. But it also pretty much inoculated for a lifetime against this sort of thing.
This does break all sorts of apps/workflows, and it's a pain having to let each and every tool (pip/curl/firefox/java/etc...) know about the cert you want it to know about.
Does this law apply to Attlasian as well? Their stock price is not concerned.
My preferred world is everybody doing better, even if some can afford things that are "obscenely expensive" (good for them!), because I think absolute well-being is more important than relative well-being.

How about a world where everyone has basic needs met, but a few can afford a large yacht?

Or a world where everyone can afford a yacht club membership, but a few people can afford TWO large yachts?

jonnycomputer wrote "In my preferred world, no single person would be able to afford a large yacht."

I'll say it again: "What an awful attitude." It just proposes taking away from people who have what he thinks is too much, without any benefit stated or implied for anyone else.

Inequality, rent-seeking, and now fraud are all topics that have been added later.
Ian McCollum of “Forgotten Weapons,” who I hold to be an authority on the subject, commented on this in a recent video. IIRC, in his view, this problem is not nearly as big of a deal as it’s been made out to be.
Crap. Open office cargo cult.
YC has pro rata rights, so maybe that 4% is low? Regardless, I concede that it's entirely possible many (or all) of the YC batches are unprofitable without the hits. It's an interesting question.

I just think the entire concept of asking founders how big their companies could be doesn't make much sense. If Drew Houston predicted that he would be willing to sell Dropbox for $1 million in six months, and the Google Guys wanted to sell Google for a few million to Yahoo, YC had zero idea how big Airbnb would be, etc. what exactly is the point?

My understanding is that YC asks the question "How big could your company become?" but discounts the answer very heavily because of how hard it is to predict at the earliest stages. Almost any startup can give an answer about how they could conceivably be huge. Anyone trying to build a $20 million ARR SaaS company has a very easy answer.

It seems obvious that a founder with nothing would love to have a nice $20 million ARR business. It also seems obvious that when they achieve that level of success their ambitions will often grow, as happened with Dropbox, Facebook, Google, Stripe, and virtually every other hit startup ever.

I do think there's a good point about focusing on sustainable growth, and "not growth at all costs" but this just seems like what all the best founders and VCs actually practice, so it boils down to "don't be stupid".
A rich person who has a farm basically as a hobby, hence "playing". See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gentleman%27s_farm
Most death happens in hospitals and nursing homes, whereas it used to happen at home.

Young people die far more rarely than they used to, and when they do, it’s usually in the hospital.

And this doesn’t even consider that people in the past would have witnessed far more death in the form of slaughtering animals for food, or witnessing drought or famine.

Obviously death comes for us all, but I would bet we don’t see as much of it first hand as we used to.
The A380 May Keep Flying in China's Skies
I admit that I missed that part. My mistake, I apologise.
There are less gender nonconforming individuals than amputees. Let's tackle the big ticket items first.
Recommended listening: https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/penn-station-sucks/

The tearing down of old Penn Station is what kickstarted the movement to preserve historical buildings. Grand Central almost certainly would have met the same fate, had Penn Station's destruction not served as a wakeup call.
Well it's easy to produce "progress" when you're willing to operate with massive losses fueled by other people's money. Take any customer experience that sucks and inject billions of dollars into it and lo and behold the experience improves mightly.
Ask HN: Best programming books for kids
My son likes playing Minecraft, so I thought that a good way to introduce programming to him might be building of minecraft scripts in Python. I saw this book on Amazon - "Adventures in Minecraft" - does anyone can recommend it or any other good book for teaching children (8-12 years old) how to code?
“Mental illness is like any other medical illness”: a critical examination
Joking about suicide is iffy. Joking about suicide without being even slightly funny is awful.
GAB creating a browser plugin to add a comment section to every website
> What does 'too hot' mean?

"The weapon's capacity to hit targets fell to 30 percent when the surrounding temperature reached 30 degrees Celsius (86 Fahrenheit) or when the weapon became hot through constant use, the report said."

https://www.dw.com/en/german-defense-minister-says-no-future...

I mean, I guess they could limit their military operations to temperate days, and not shoot the rifle too much to avoid these kinds of problems.
I go all-in on the weirdness and make my Siri call me "master" just for shits and giggles
Somebody is going to wait for somebody. When you order the Uber, you don't know exactly when it will arrive, so if you don't want to make the driver wait, you have to go to the curb ahead of time and wait there. The implicit assumption is that the driver's time is more valuable than yours.

I would very much like to have an option for the driver to simply be fairly compensated for their waiting time so that if I want to leave at 12:00, I can order it at 11:45, and they'll just wait until I'm ready to go. Higher end traditional car services will often show up half an hour or more before the scheduled time so that they can be absolutely sure to be ready when their customer wants to go. It would be nice to be able to get this level of service from Uber (for a fair price) without the driver being upset about waiting.
>Progress won

That's a unnecessarily simple reading of this situation, don't you think?
> Guys, Chinese real-estate can't not implode. And badly.

Having lived in China for almost 5 years (and working in property), I too held this view. The whole system defies logic.

There is one key difference from the West - capital controls. If you literally are not allowed to put your money elsewhere except for a bank of risky stock market/financial products, why not put it into real estate? An apartment is unlikely to disappear overnight into thin air (though it could certainly collapse or catch fire).

Everyone ends up riding the same merry-go-round - in a closed economy, the money has to go somewhere, so property ends becoming a marker or store of value (I.e. a currency) rather than an asset in and of itself. At this point in time, it’s on par with gold.
The choice is not between coal and nuclear.
Published by the Ayn Rand institute.
It's a little like saying the theater-going experience has been improved thanks to MoviePass.
Yup a small chunk of off the book income which goes straight to cash is worth 10% to them
It is compulsory fee if merchants don't offer a cash-discount.
open plan offices don’t live up to the hype–in fact, the idea that they promote interaction is dead wrong.
When I was at university the network in the dorm actually blocked access to Google's DNS servers so I had to route 8.8.8.8 to their DNS servers. Chromecast worked fine after.

I cant wait until 8.8.8.8 becomes the "address" of the local DNS server as more and more people start to hijack it. We had to hijack it at my old work because some random vendor's devices were hardcoded and we needed them to see our internal names.
regarding his point about separating the login process in multiple pages, not only does spotify do this, google, outlook, they all do this, i think it’s because there’s enterprise custom single sign on which requires a different flow, so they commonize the parts from enterprise and consumer. i’m not saying that i think this is a good workflow or not, just saying that there’s reason to it. and it probably breaks password managers, but for enterprise, there are a lot of different password managers like vmware workspace one, etc which may be different from 1password
> ...organizations, people behind it don't even have any intentions to make it decentralized, to give up control, like BitTorrent did

Huh? Where is this coming from? Can the IPFS or DAT community leaders reign anything in? There are bootstrap nodes but I'm pretty sure these are just practical stopgaps for now, not a means of control.
Children should be exposed to reality and learn dealing with it. That’s where parents can help. There are plenty of lethal diseases you can’t hide. I don’t think the children who go through that are damaged. But I think children who are being deceived often take damage.
Reminds me of the Stegner novel: All the Little Live Things.
I wonder what they use to generate IDs! /s

Man that comment popped up a bunch in that blog post, lol.
I can confirm that it works fine and haven't had a device complain yet.

I'm actually surprised that more networks don't route the addresses of all the public DNS servers to their resolver.
Right - that's what I suggested it really meant. I was commenting on how the article was phrased not actually about the rifle.
The problem is it's not a gamble, it's a percentage. Even if 75% of your customers have a Visa, then 25% of them won't and you risk losing that amount of business by not taking what they do have.

Moreover, that still wouldn't give you competition, because then what incentive does Visa have to give you a good rate if they're the only network you could plausibly attempt exclusivity with? It's like trying to solve a lack of competition by creating a monopoly.
I don't entirely agree with you, based mainly on when these reactors were originally designed. They started building in '67, but the actual construction designs were based on even earlier plans and tests that were conceived of in the 50s. So the original designs of the plant were born only around 15-20 years after we even invented nuclear technology. I find it similar to discussing automobile safety based on a Model-T.

Sure they have upgraded some things over the years, but there are only so much you can do when your modifications are done after it was already built or even in the middle of being built. I just don't see how we can really compare nuclear technology of the 60s, with nuclear technology of the 2019.
Passengers won, since most rides were (or still are) subsidized from venture capital raised by the company. It's almost like a wealth distribution of it's own, through the value of on-demand transportation.

You could also talk about how it disrupted the taxi medallion market, which was an older solution to the trust problem of getting into a car with a stranger, but for many cities that wasn't really in need of disruption, just optimization.
Microsoft login solves this by having the email and password field together, but once the focus is changed to the password field a request is made and you're either redirected or not.
I don't want to simulate shooting up my old school.
That's horrible... If my spouse were dying I would absolutely tell my children, because time is short, and time is not always used to its fullest. Knowing puts that into perspective. Those poor children..
The U.S. Navy has bought four robot submarines from Boeing
What kind of furniture, I mean culture, produces a readable web experience on mobile?
I'm in US, and I still trust my ISP more that Google.

Which is to say, I trust them both to try to screw me, but the ISP has already done so to the extent that they were able. But Google is just warming up, and they're more competent.
what about keybase? it is an attempt to basically make pgp more user-friendly and approachable
I’ve struggled with the same thing, and only found one solution that is a choice rather than waiting foe something tomchange.

Stop. Thinking. About. It.

I know, how unhelpful can I be, right? Hear me out though, I’m not talking about coming to terms with mortality, or focusing on distractions. Recognize instead that what you’re describing has two components interacting in a way that hurts you. First, as an intelligent problem solver you’re used to problems yielding to examination. When you run into a metaphorical wall in your mind, you pick away at it until it breaks down, or you find a way over and around it. You can’t do that with death, because it’s too anathema to all of our experiences.

Second, is an obsessive quality to the thinking. This is the part that “poisons every waking hour.” You’ll find idle thoughts drifting to thoughts of mortality, and intrusive thoughts of mortality will pop up. If you’re like me, this will be especially bad at night. You might feel a sort of dreadful fascination, as if by just thinking a bit more or harder could get you past it. Even thinking “I should be rational about this” is effectively another iteration of the same pattern.

So, forget about coming to terms with anything, forget about rationality. Look at the toolkits of things like Cogntiive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) and just... stop. Then the only things you have to accept are that this pattern of thought is hurting you, and that no amount of thinking will help you to accept or understand extinction. All you will do is reach that point of excruciating terror, and then seek distraction.

When you find yourself drifting into thoughts of death, say to yourself “No” and then immediately change mental gears. Especially at first it can help to get a change of scenery for a minute, you can get up and walk around for a minute. Especially at first this will feel like swatting a whale with a feather, but that’s OK. Don’t make a production out of switching gears, just s quick “No” and shift. Like meditating, you have to be wary of a tendency for your redirection to take the form of what you’re trying to redirect from, so keep it simple and formulaic.

This will take time, lots of time, months to have any real impact, years to truly give you a sense of control. But... it will help. It’s a good general skill to have too, and meditation of any kind can help to flex these mental muscles. You can also talk to a doctor, or someone who specializes in CBT and seek some help at first. It won’t be required forever, but it can get you started and keep you on track at first.

I say all of this as someone who around the age of 9 started to “freak out” about death. Nothing anyone told me helped, I didn’t believe in an afterlife, and considering eternity before my birth was terrifying too. The only thing that helped was just not thinking about, and it has helped a lot. I hope that some of this helps. Just remember that the fear of death is normal, and focus instead on addressing the obsessive habit of thinking about it. The former is too big and impossible, the latter is totally human-scale and something you can do with time and effort.
Sooo ... the president is legally allowed to turn off my light switches or commandeer my phone, but does the infrastructure for him to do that exist?
On the other hand, gmail keeps a copy of the received message in the receiver account, even if you delete the sender account.
Data breach allowed Stanford applicants to view others’ information
Please don't pile on.
Uber Sues New York City Over Rule Limiting Number of Drivers
Speaking of newcomers, could you please be more polite to newcomers here?

From the HN guidelines: "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Yeah, a lot of them don’t stop at the location you requested.
In the case of unicorns that don't meet expectations, it's usually the employees who were compensated in stock or options left holding the bag, since investors try to lock in preferred payout.
Amazon's NYC Retreat Heralds New Era of Corporate Welfare Fights
They don’t have the right culture for margin widths - perhaps they need better furniture.
Do you have a source for that? The linked article states:

> Sidewalk Labs outlined its project for a light railway transit, 2,500 homes where 40 percent would be below market price, and a tall-timber factory they project will create 4,000 jobs.

Unless Googler's are planning to work at a timber factory, something doesn't line up.
OK, I read the article. It says

> the coin is only available to JP Morgan’s institutional clients

without really expanding on anything.

But, JP Morgan has an official announcement out about this, which is much more informative than this article is. It says:

> How does it work?

> In step 1, a J.P. Morgan client commits deposits to a designated account and receives an equivalent number of JPM Coins. In step 2, these JPM Coins are used for transactions over a blockchain network with other J.P. Morgan clients (e.g., money movement, payments in securities transactions). Finally in step 3, holders of JPM Coins redeem them for USD at J.P. Morgan.

and it says:

> Only institutional customers passing J.P. Morgan KYC can transact with these coins

So, in order to make any transaction using JPM Coins, you need to be a JP Morgan customer who's passed their KYC checks. Parties who are not clients of JP Morgan cannot purchase, receive, or redeem coins. What part of what I said was wrong? What language from the article were you thinking of?
Estimating patients’ age based on their stress testing exercise performance
Did Tink rely on NaCl or libsodium?
How do you think roads get built? The vast majority these sorts of projects are built by contractors, where the public largely just employs full-time workers for the design/finance side of things and then also maintenance.
Amazing that the 407 is used as an example. The government spent, inflation adjusted, over $100B to acquire the land and then build the highway. The cost was for the public.

Then they leased it to a private consortium for 99 years for $3B, claiming that it was a win because it "cost" $1.5B to build. That consortium has since made a windfall charging ludicrous toll fees -- the public pays again -- privatizing the profits.

PPP is overwhelmingly a sign of a bad deal. Where politicians trying to get a short term "win" end up costing ratepayers multiples.
I don't think there's clear metrics into market and price performance because they're still privately traded, and changing consistently.
They can definitely implement garbage collection with copying. Just copy all the live objects to another directory and then "rm -fr old-heap."
A Reddit subreddit made out of only text-generating neural networks
Methadone is definitively not the answer. All that does is transfer the addiction to something else in addition to forcing people into a lifetime of payment for that transferred addiction to pharmaceutical companies.

This is exactly why something like what Verily is doing is absolutely great in my opinion. There exists methodologies to break down addiction that do not rely on substance transferrance, and all we need to do is get a large enough sample set to identify and distill these trends into a working methodology.
Do you have sources to back up any of those claims? Or is it just the generic "big company! bad! evil!" FUD?
My brother's godfather died of lung cancer. It was sudden and a surprise to everyone because he kept it a secret. When I got diagnosed at 33 with colorectal cancer, I made sure to tell all my friends and family for a few reasons: 1) I didn't want to suddenly disappear out of their lives and 2) people keep these things to themselves and don't realize how many of their peers may be going through similar trials. Our mortality is what makes us human. It's been 6 years since the initial diagnosis and I'm still dealing with it to this day
but I feel like I appreciate the time I spend with my friends and family more. They do, too, knowing that all these moments are intentional.
Because crapping on Mongo is “in” right now. Years ago it used to be “in” to crap on it for its deaign choices, especially its tendency to lose data (seems to be what the parent comment is referencing; see [1] for a summary of some issues from 2013).

More recently it’s “in” for their business decisions, with the relicensing and the rise of API-compatible alternatives pushing some users away.

But yeah, really no reason to mock them in this discussion, apart from going for internet cool points from an audience that may also be critical of Mongo.

[1] https://aphyr.com/posts/284-jepsen-mongodb
This is the same thing that happened to the Mall of America many years ago. It was extremely welcomed, then opposition, and it got scaled down considerably and lost some benefits the state was offering.
Just static route Google DNS back to your gateway. Works fine for me.

As others have said though, who buys a Google device thinking it's not gonna talk to Google?
Dandelion Energy Closes $16M Series A Round to Expand Geothermal Energy
Composition is only one of the reasons why it makes sense to consider ECS. Structuring your game state as pure data makes it easier to serialize, to double-buffer, and to arrange in memory how you see fit. There are non-ECS ways of doing this but ECS is the easiest way I've found to write general code that can operate the same over many different kinds of game objects.
The NIH scale doesn't rise that fast. A brand-new postdoc costs about $50k on NIH pay scales.

There is often also an assumption that more senior people will also bring on money, either completely by themselves or by enabling more projects. The (completely idiotic, IMHO) 2 or 5-year cutoffs on some fellowships makes this somewhat more difficult.

I also think experience is weirdly undervalued in academia. I would bet that, in many fields, three random students at $25k/ea are not appreciably better than one highly skilled staff scientist at $75k, especially if the lab actually paid full freight for the students instead of having them subsidized by training grants and time-limited fellowships. This is tricky to study though....
Just because it's not entirely clear to me, are all of your numbers inflation adjusted? Or just the cost to buy the land? Because it doesn't pass the sniff test that the government would lease the project for a century for 3% of its present value.
Well, a more apt comparison for Uber would be Amazon.
This ^

People are quick to point to "modern" alternatives like Signal but they miss the web of trust which, correctly implemented would be a killer.
Pro tip: usually only the keyboard shortcut is disabled, but not the ‘paste’ item in the context menu. And overriding the context menu, in turn, can be disabled in the browser flags afaik (at least in FF). Or, the ‘Edit’ menu is there.
Colin Kroll’s rise and untimely death