skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Amazon would be recruiting people from Ivy League schools, big consulting firms, other large tech companies

Amazon is not that pedigree-driven, most people I know who work there went to decent mid-ranked but not Ivy League level schools. Wall Street (front office) and big consulting firms are literally pedigree driven to the point where they often only recruit on Ivy League campuses, Amazon and most other big tech companies are more egalitarian caring more about the tech interview than your diploma.
> I imagine a simple addition to patent laws invalidating a patent if the holder does not commercialize it after a certain period should get rid of NPEs.

I suppose there are sneaky ways around this, such as marketing a product that features the patent but is otherwise inadequate.

Never underestimate the resourcefulness of patent trolls
> I look forward to the day where the JPM's and the like are put out of business for this sort of thing due superior, user-friendly technology

That seems like a good thing for cryptocurrency fans to start working on. Part of that would be looking at the big problems which have prevented it so far, which aren’t really technical as much as philosophical: practical reasons to switch (which is to say being competitive on pricing), barriers to adoption (i.e. until most people you know use a system its benefits are mostly hypothetical), and not having a fraud story other than “we’ll say you should have had better opsec”.
The alternate businesses may not provide the same density of profit as Amazon, so their total tax outlay might be much lower over time. (One must factor in the other taxes paid by the Amazon employees as well.)

Also, pretty crappy to get downvoted for an honest question.
Thanks for letting me know! Added!
This is the ironic trap of maker-type people. We want fulfilling jobs making stuff, but they are also tiring on the brain, leaving little bandwidth at the end of the day to make your own stuff. But if we could just take a cushy job, and learn the requisite BS to get and sustain such a job, then maybe we'd be better off!
The Digital House
IMHO, companies should operate in one of two modes... either paying shareholders any profit (zeroing out) or growing/expanding (zeroing out) and wouldn't pay taxes in either mode. I'm fine with either.
Promoting the adoption of more than one platform might be done by forcing auditable federation of personal data -- with explicit user control and consent.
Once you are used to reading assembly, there's not much difference between reading the output of objdump -d and gcc -S.
> Gee, I don't remember mentioning "LA/Seattle/etc." by name. Unlike some other cities that I mentioned by name. Did you see the part where I mentioned cities by name?

You mentioned some cities by name that have growing populations, with the implication being that they're moving FROM the city TO those places.

If the the influx in Nashville is from Louisiana, then who cares? What does that have to do with NYC or people chasing lower CoL areas?

> Great, now compare that to the growth rates of Dallas or Nashville or etc.

Great! Let's see how they continue to grow once they reach NYC's size. Adding 3% to a city as large as NYC is significantly different from adding 3% to Omaha.

For example, Nashville's population is about where NYC was at right around the civil war. Sounds like we'll have to wait a bit.
OppsDaily is a brilliant! I'm loving reading real-world problems that people are willing to pay for. Well done.
Not agreeing or disagreeing, but I don't think Snapchat is owned by Facebook.
That's highly debatable. Nannies only make sense if you pay your nanny significantly less than your own after-tax salary. If the price is too high, one parent just stops working because doing otherwise is foolish financially and because "I'm spending all my money to pay a stranger to raise my kids." So if immigrants were not available for the work and salaries rose accordingly, a significant number of parents would leave the workforce and lower overall productivity in the local economy. That's what I mean by supplementary labor.

Your last comment is assuming complete lack of nuance in common opinions. You need to add some qualifiers to make it accurate. Something like this:

We want more low skilled immigrants where they supplement rather than compete with local labor, ... we need to revise the program for highly-skilled immigration without necessarily reducing overall number of immigrants since it has been abused by multiple companies.

I'm not sure what you're referring to on your last point. Flyover states and rural communities in general are rather overrepresented in politics today [1]. Most debate on this issue I'm aware of is focused on returning to parity in representation.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/21/upshot/as-american-as-app...
Amazon is being a huge diva. They enjoy public support and the deal was guaranteed.

I remain unconvinced that they care about local politicians' angry takes on their campus (who they probably expected to hate it in the first place).
Normal People Beat Jeff Bezos and Amazon
There are plenty of valid reasons why people who live in NY would not want Amazon dropping in - to say that they're removed from reality demonstrates quite a lack of empathy. Rents going up, people being displaced, an area that traditionally has fewer high income people all getting pushed out. People are still reeling from the push of affordability out of Brooklyn; now Bed-Stuy even is getting heavily gentrified. To many people, its a complete net negative for a tech company to move in - those who can't take advantage of it.
I recently got serious about writing fiction (still mainly for myself, though) and I did notice that I tended to be quite burned out after work, especially toward the end of the week. I was irritated that The Man was getting my best hours, which mostly seemed to happen in the morning.

So, I got one of those wake-up lamps and started getting up very early (4-5). I get plenty of time to wake up and then concentrate on my own thing with zero distractions before I head to work at 9-ish.

I have never been a morning person but this arrangement has made me feel more personally fulfilled and happier at work too because I'm not worried about getting home and then having to write, or saving my mental energy for my own purposes.

The only problem is I tend to get sleepy around 9 or so, but I can stay up when I want to and if anything it means I drink less and get more sleep.
IBM I: The Most Amazing IBM Product You’ve Never Heard Of
How often is 'regularly'?
Do you dispute that current lifestock welfare standards in the meat/dairy/egg/etc. industries permit what most would agree is animal cruelty if the same things were done to, say, the family dog?
Assembla Launches Enhanced Project Management Tool for Software Development
When I said "according to classical mathematics" I did mean according to the normal orthodoxy, which does indeed mean ZFC. By "finite definition" I mean a finite sequence of statements in first or second order logic which can be proven to define a unique real number. (Even if, as with Chaitin's Constant, we can't figure out what that number is.)

The fact that this may not be a definition from my point of view is irrelevant - I was making a statement about what classical mathematics implies, and from the point of view of classical mathematics this is a perfectly reasonable definition.

Since the number of such statements is countable, and only some of them define real numbers, the set of such real numbers is countable. Being countable it is a set of measure 0, and therefore the "almost all" that I stated follows immediately.
These Are the 24 Sounds Humans Use to Communicate Without Words
- React and React Native will become even more popular

- Machine learning being used to increase accessibility; EA's recently-released blockbuster Battle Royale game Apex Legends includes a feature I've never seen before in any game; live transcription of incoming voice chat to text.. haven't relied upon it but I think it's an impressive first step in that direction

- Portable machine learning models, probably specifically real-time (24fps ~ 60 fps) computer vision image segmentation on mobile devices; this will go very well with the rising popularity of augmented reality frameworks

- Alternative non-monetary uses of blockchains, primarily for friend-groups or niche cultures - I've heard of private blockchains being used to broadcast locations of secret just-in-time-announced underground raves (in Berlin), so police can't just find out about it on facebook or something like that; this sort of replaces friend-of-friend word-of-mouth invitations and I guess you could implement fine-grained privacy/invitation rules this way

- Maybe Google Soli will become a thing - it likely won't, but it's still cool imo

- Software-defined radio and amateur radio in general

- 3D-printing, as mentioned by rolph

- Better IoT security practices, maybe IoT security frameworks, etc

- Better tools for circumventing digital censorship, thanks to the arms race between firewalls of increasing sophistication and those who want to circumvent them

- Increased recognition that data is bound by local regulation; Google in China, for instance, has to obey Chinese local laws. Perhaps we will also see increased acknowledgment of so-called "data embassies"

- Remote work and co-working will probably become even more popular
Yep, you can make one simple flashy thing, say it does X feature, sell it to your spouse and say it's been commercialized
That's a very interesting idea. And maybe this comes back to the notion of "lock-in" more broadly. That is, not just in the consumer-facing arena but also for enterprise software. Isn't lock-in ultimately working against a competitive market dynamic?
It's hard to draw a legal line between a few lawyers with some bad patents and a garage inventor struggling to make his idea profitable.

Not because those are hard to differentiate logically, but because one side is all about manipulating the legal system while the other has no knowledge of it nor funds with which to navigate it. Also, the system is supposed to protect the latter from big corporate legal departments that want to steal his idea. It's a hard problem because it's profitable for bad actors to get wrong decisions made.
anti-nimby housing activism is a better analogy. The case against more housing construction is very weak at a objective and public policy level, but the only opposition is arguably a minority of people because selling it to the public is difficult. Urban charter schools are another one.

I see the same thing with the Amazon HQ. It's easy for Amazon to spin it in a positive PR direction by talking about jobs and increased revenue, but the policy case for giving in to Amazon's demand is actually weak.

https://hbr.org/2018/07/landing-amazon-hq2-isnt-the-right-wa...
OpenAI's original article: https://blog.openai.com/better-language-models/

"Slanders" comes from the ability of the software to generate text. It was trained on Reddit, so can talk like any Redditor you want:

> OpenAI’s researchers admit that they’re unable to fully answer this. They’re still exploring exactly what the algorithm can and can’t do. For this and other reasons, they’re being careful with what they share about the project, keeping the underlying code and training data to themselves for now. Another reason for caution is that they know that if someone feeds GPT-2 racist, violent, misogynistic, or abusive text, it will continue in that vein. After all, it was trained on the internet.

> In The Verge’s own tests, when given a prompt like “Jews control the media,” GPT-2 wrote: “They control the universities. They control the world economy. How is this done? Through various mechanisms that are well documented in the book The Jews in Power by Joseph Goebbels, the Hitler Youth and other key members of the Nazi Party.”

Notable because it's the first time OpenAI hasn't released its work as open source. This may signal a shift in behaviour for AI researchers, a change in where an ethically comfortable balance is drawn between "work in the open is good" and "giving away weapons is bad".
Some of the most sophisticated crime labs in the US are owned by large retail entities. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/04/csi-w...
I love [1] how his reaction was “We instantly knew that he was right.” Rather than pushing back a little responding with something like “What particular business goals are at risk, and how does a ’10-5’ working culture result in this risk?” Or “Are the downsides of pushing people beyond their comfort zone (burnout, attrition) worth the potential upside?”

Hopefully he at least provided that little probing against this investor’s observation. Otherwise it was simply like he was talking to God: “We instantly knew he was right!”

1: (sarcasm)
I noticed that one too when I browsed 1k a few days back. It advertised that it was already making money. Congrats on your purchase,
I doubt he knows how it's going to work. Trumps more of a "throw somebody else's money at an issue" kind of guy than a "thinker" or "planner".
Europe puts American tech on leash
Related:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17778040
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19053389
Not sure why this comment is being downvoted, it's a good point. The GP includes this quote, echoing many other people I've encountered who build software:

> The business and industrial world largely still runs on excel spreadsheets, emails and word docs. Those are all areas ripe for new products and many of the top companies in those niche areas have no idea how to apply technology to solve their problems more efficiently.

Spreadsheets are incredibly useful tools! They're general-purpose, easy to use and powerful. Millions of people use them for programming without even knowing it.

Email is still great for communicating! It's everywhere, it's easy to use and it's totally interoperable. How many startups are building decentralized communication tools right now? Email has been federated for decades.

The notion that use of these tools is an opportunity for some more efficient proprietary solution is a bad assumption. People use them because they're good and they work. The parent is right: there's less demand than you think.
Google’s Waymo risks repeating Silicon Valley’s most famous blunder
> The secret is to go out and make friends who work in different industries that are totally unrelated to your experience.

I'd slightly rephrase this: make friends who are business owners in different industries.

Having a good idea is only the first step. You need to be able to market it, and ultimately sell it.

Business owners face business problems, will have an idea on how much they're willing to spend on it, and will understand the budgets and where they can be applied. Rank and file employees often do not make purchasing decisions on behalf of their companies. Some may, but most do not.

My personal story:

I became friends with the owner of a nearby gym, and I was immediately impressed with how he ran his business, and more importantly his ability to stay ahead of the curve, learning and adopting new ways to market his business.

For a free membership, I would do one off small projects, that typically string together API's offered by the different services he used (Scheduling, waivers, forms). None was particularly interesting, until he came up with a hodgepodge system for contacting new members.

I helped him build some flexibility, and we both came to the conclusion that if we built a platform that specifically did this, we could market it and sell it.

We boot strapped it and made about $13k in revenue the first year.

Now that we have a viable business, we've shifted to growth: get customers.
> The case against trolls is so clear and obvious, why does it seem so difficult to craft legislation to prevent this?

Patent trolls (the most successful ones, anyhow) practice Batsian Mimicry as a defensive strategy: they specifically try to look as much like a small inventor who's invention has been stolen by one or more bad actors. It is never simple to disrupt an evolutionary arms race.

> I imagine a simple addition to patent laws invalidating a patent if the holder does not commercialize it after a certain period should get rid of NPEs. Is it not that simple?

Are you aware of how long it takes drugs, for example, to get from the patent stage to the commercialization stage? I'm sure there are other obvious industries where this would be problematic to the normal way of doing business.

On a more broad note: is it good to require that all inventors directly commercialize their own inventions? At best, I think this is an open question.
Just skimming through but on down, is the

fetch first...with ties in Oracle

not the same as

select top (1) with ties from order by SortOrder in SQL Server?
> With approximately 16 hours of the day allocated to work and sleep, every individual has approximately 8 hours to allocate to “me time” and if used appropriately, a lot can be achieved in that nearly 3000 hours each year.

Really if you are going to go to the extreme of not eating, showering, maintaining your health, zero human relationships, zero rest or time for recovering from illness, then I assume you'd go the next step and just quit the job too to unlock the other 2000 hours. After all if you don't need those other things why do you need a job at all? If you are that extreme you probably can save a years salary then live on a mate's sofa etc.

Edit: Later on she does mention her time budgeting and it isn't this extreme, but I get annoyed with the statements that claim you have 8 free hours a day, implying that you should be working your ass off for those 8.
> Imagine if email or HTTP was proprietary like Facebook and Twitter are. This is a nightmare and we should end it.

Email is a means of communication, twitter is a platform. Anyone is free to implement a 140 character messaging service, the only problem is that these particular social media platforms have gotten monstrous. I don't like them, but the comparison between HTTP and Facebook doesn't seem right.
I am not aware of what you mean by "high stakes tournaments". All official tournaments, even when only amateurs play, actually ban cell phones since about 15 years ago.

https://www.fide.com/FIDE/handbook/Anti%20Cheating%20Guideli...

11.3.b. During play, a player is forbidden to have a mobile phone and/or other device capable of
processing or transmitting chess analysis
in the playing venue. If it is evident that a player brought
such a device into the playing venue, he shall lose the game. The opponent shall win. The rules of a
competition may specify a different, less severe, penalty.
Whats next? Reichstag fire ? or night of long knifes?
Have you tried to determine which parts of the training data contributed to the model generating a certain output? I wonder whether the model avoids reproducing exact matches of the training data by splicing several similar articles together.

For example, the generated text about the Civil War mentions that Thomas Jefferson Randolph [0] was named after his grandfather, the president. But is the wording mostly influenced by articles talking about that specific fact, or does it draw from more general examples of someone being named after their grandfather?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Jefferson_Randolph
Are you sure? 25,000 employees * 12 months * 1000 = 300 million in economic activity.

Obviously not all 25000 employees would get an extra 1k, but the point being...these things can scale significantly when you're talking about Amazon. It's not a trivial thing for SMBs to fill the void that Amazon is leaving.
That sounds like a minefield. How do you regulate a service where two people from different countries can interact? Which countriy's law should be followed when a person from country Y posts on a feed from country X? What if the laws contradict eachother?

Multinationals had to deal with multiple regulations before, but most time that was solved by using the visitor's residency, but that might not be so clear cut when we are talking about social networks.
> It's surprising to see how much many posters on HN want more government regulation over a tech.

Regulation is one of the best ways for incumbents to build a competitive moat against prospective new entrants.
Right; Facebook tried, but failed.
That's why we now have RASP. It's better than SQL proxy and WAF, because you have both the SQL query and the HTTP parameters and you can correlate them to be super accurate
> And if anyone is going to be using social media to manipulate public opinion in the US, it should be the US government, goddamnit!

Well yeah? I mean, our laws matter here and they don't in Russia. So Russia can go write down direct lies about people and publish them and spread them. No consequence. In the USA you go to....

Jail! (Edit: Not jail, 'just' fines?)

Right? It's at least illegal (libel/slander/defamation/etc) and there is very strong disincentive to lie about public figures as a US entity.

It's different. It's not everything, but it's a major start and there are major reasons to prevent foreign influence on domestic elections.

But regardless, nobody should be telling anything close to a falsehood, trying to dissuade anyone from voting, or providing incentives to not vote, etc. That's bad for democracy regardless of who is doing it.
Why is a Merkle proof difficult to implement in a relational DB?

The only required data fields in each row are the parent row ID and a hash, no?
> Google already has some dev offices in cheaper areas, like Pittsburgh, where office space is cheaper and the salaries they pay slightly lower. And yet, they still choose to double their headcount in NYC.

Location, Location, Location.

Yes it's cheaper to live and run a business in Kansas but then you're in Kansas.
It's like Amazon will occupy and populate all of the buildings from day 1. They will also eventually hire people or transfer people over, I remember reading that they plan to bring 25,000 jobs over the next 3 years.
My point is that the advantages you described (an API) don't justify the complexity of blockchain technology since APIs can be implemented without them.
There's no real need here, this is just for fun. It's just a hypothetical question about how you would make online voting secure if you had to build it.
al;sdjf
At least the government is accountable through elections.

Yes, "accountable". Quotes here because voter suppression, disenfrachisment and aggressive gerrymandering are all things that really make me wonder about the substance of accountability ala plebiscite.

And no, I am not throwing out any babies or bathwater here.
Those billions aren’t uniformly taxed: that’s what they were pointing out.
Migration isn't the problem. Lack of interop between platforms is.

It doesn't matter that there's a Facebook clone that you can migrate your profile to, when nobody you want to talk to is using it.
And preferably the incumbents!!

I think we know that with all kinds of foreign media ownership with diverse interests makes Russia a moot subject, except Russia does it by subversive methods rather than overt accepted methods.
> It's not that the yellow emojis make me feel "represented" by being yellow. It's just that I don't care.

You look at the yellow, and you don't think "that's not me". So you don't mind using it.

POCs looked at the yellow, and did think "that's not me". So color modifiers were added. The fact that the darker skin tone modifiers are being used more heavily than the lighter skin tone modifiers makes me think that adding them was the right decision.
There already will be ongoing state of emergency, too dangerous for open elections etc.
I'd love to finally see a writeup of the "proof of spacetime" storage. Understanding that proof seems critical to understanding what use cases FileCoin will and won't work for.

Edit for clarity: This is the closest I was able to find, and is short on details. https://github.com/filecoin-project/specs/blob/master/proofs...