skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The "How Knowledge Work Happens" graphic is really what resonates with me. I run a dev shop and I hate time tracking for the complexity implied in this image. Questions come to mind.

What counts for time tracking and what doesn't? If I spend an hour emailing back and forth with a stakeholder, none of this is reflected in my GitHub activity. So there is a delta between what is billable time and the actual deliverable.

What if I spend an hour researching a solution for a feature? Or debugging my environment? Again, that implies delta between billable time and the deliverable.

What about my level of expertise? I might be a junior or senior level developer; I might have certain specialized knowledge in an area of programming (or lack it). Again, more delta that tracks closely to the specific logistics of a small feature and less with overall "time".

Suppose I had a machine that strictly tracked the amount of time I spent "doing something project-related" (whatever the specific rubric). At the end of the day, I now have a number. What does this number actually tell me? I am not sure it is that useful and it definitely depends on however the rubric was defined (which would be inherently arbitrary anyway).

To me, it makes sense to just allot hours to devs and trust that they are doing their jobs. When people stop doing their job, peers notice anyway, hour tracking or not.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Side-channel_attack#Countermea... might be of interest especially this part:

"In the case of timing attacks against targets whose computation times are quantized into discrete clock cycle counts, an effective countermeasure against is to design the software to be isochronous, that is to run in an exactly constant amount of time, independently of secret values. This makes timing attacks impossible.[14] Such countermeasures can be difficult to implement in practice, since even individual instructions can have variable timing on some CPUs."
Last year I deleted my blog's Instagram account (20,000 followers) and still have no regrets. Since then I've also deleted my personal Instagram account and my blog's Twitter account (7,000 followers). Still no regrets. The only thing I'm keeping is my personal newsletter list.
Anker, Aukey and Blitzwolf make reasonably priced and high quality chargers.
> This is partly why business is done on the golf course.

What do you mean?
There's very little that's more impertinent than telling an American he didn't earn what he has. Can't speak for other cultures.
When to Use CSS vs. JavaScript (2018)
Not normally but they do ban your entire account if their bots believe you've been very naughty.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-47278362

Despite the ban being due to a violation of YT terms of service they lost their entire Google account.
> "But because my Google account was terminated as well I didn't have access to my email so I couldn't see what happened."
You only know what the browser tells you. Also that information can be used together with the fingerprinting from a canvas.
I currently have the most joyous of "unlimited PTO" policies. There's something in the handbook, which isn't that great, but I've been told that it's just there for documentation and we have no 'real' policy. YAY!
Hedge Funds literally print money. 2/20 is guaranteed money, 2% on all funds managed so you win regardless of the market and 20% of any gains when you beat the market. Easy.
I think a big difference between the American work mentality and the Euro work mentality is that Americans often seem to relish the "I'm too busy for everything" state of mind (as if it were a badge of honor). Unfortunately, it will take huge macro-level behavioral changes to undo that kind of damage.
A New Serverless Compute Platform Enters The Fight
With AR you wouldn't even need a physical marking, the system could keep track of where everyone's been and show breadcrumbs in everyone else's display/goggles/whatever.

(Of course this assumes some kind of connectivity between the headsets of the various members of the fire team, which could itself be vulnerable in various ways. Painting the walls does have the virtue of simplicity, which counts for a lot in these scenarios.)
> the natural 0 is the empty set.
I didn't watch the video (or read most of the page!) so it's possible I'm missing something, but the images show the wings having a propeller at each end, so I don't think a loss of cable tension would be catastrophic (at least not in the same way it would be if there was only one propeller per wing). The wing would presumably keep flying straight until the cable was tense again and it all started rotating again. Seems fairly self-correcting, with the second propeller.
I guess I see the point being made, but it was all a bit long on rhetoric and analogy, and short on concrete examples.
Show HN: MerkleX, What Do You Think of My New Exchange?
I remember that aisle. All white labels with black block-letter words.
When I was very young and st the store with my mom, she'd always tell me the aisle was for albinos. Scared the crap out of me.
I think you're absolutely right. I think the fight for living wages will likely be T-boned by the juggernaut of automation. That's why (to me) the conversation about universal basic income is far more constructive and durable than minimum wages.

I'm also not convinced the minimum wage debates are as helpful since so many workers don't benefit from it. We certainly need to continue the conversation and ensure workers are paid fairly, but you're right - the more labour costs, the less companies will employ them (to some extent). There is a very short-lived benefit to focusing on raising minimum wages, such that something longer-lasting needs to be considered immediately as well.

I think the sigmoid-like adoption will be incredibly pronounced and fast in some industries. I think about this a lot, and when friends justifiably argue and debate for higher minimum wages, I worry that they'll be totally blindsided by the reality that minimum wage is useless when you have no job.
People are technically already paid for their unused PTO when they leave a company with an allocated PTO/year (although this may vary between states). That was one of the reasons why I chose my current company, because I figured I'd make a little 'extra' money leaving after a year without taking any PTO. Personally, I did end up feeling a little burned out so I opted to actually start using my PTO, but it's nice to have the freedom either way.
Email Marketing Stats to Boost Sales
[some person] had a TON of opportunity and privilege funneled to him from his parents.

What percentage of those persons became billionaires? Is it less than 0.1%?

(What percentage of them die broke? I bet greater than 1%)
And the very first thing he did was define natural numbers as a grammar of operations with rules for interpretation
I wonder if a multiplayer shooter would be playable if the game was both hosted and rendered for all players within the same data center. You still have latency to the server when playing multiplayer, so if you eliminate that by hosting the game next to the computer rendering it, it might work well?
> If so, that’s a local problem

It's a well-documented global problem.

> and you fix it with regulation,

Governments are often not opposed, and sometimes active encouragers or procurers of the ISP injection.

Also, the HTTPS requirement for .dev domains is regulation, even if it isn't government regulation.
Amazon Rekognition May Finally Be Audited and Ranked Alongside Other Vendors
Perhaps this could include scores from multiple sources, similar to how google displays them when you search for a movie.
Fuck everything about these breathless, one-sentence-per-paragraph articles. It's infuriating to read.
I thought this was common sense, but can't you just ask? "Unlimited PTO" does not mean "do whatever you want". Your manager can deny requests when you have limited PTO, too, so I don't see what you're getting at.

FWIW we did have somebody take an entire month off to visit family in China. He was responsible for tons of code and functionality, and it worked fine because management knew about it and planned around it.

If you can't handle the responsibility, don't ruin it for everybody, just go work somewhere else.
After Nearly $50B, Nasa’s Deep-Space Plans Remain Grounded
Suicide is not some inevitable, uncontrollable end to any disease or illness. It isn't cancer, or some other form of terminal illness. It is an active choice made by those who want to end their own life.

If suicide and prescription drugs are synonymous as they both result in the literal and figurative death of the ill person, would it not be better to choose the 'death' the allows the person to continue to live?

It is nihilistic if you, and your coworker, believe that past a certain age threshold (or any other arbitrary measure) a disease/mental condition is untreatable and the best alternative is suicide.
doing work != measurable output

Not to mention that the definition of what work, productivity or deliverables is varies vastly from company to company or industry to industry.

Not working for an entire day per week or having sporadic / limited hours of operation could also end up being a huge pain for a client or anyone not in your company you may be working with.

I'm definitely a proponent of the sentiment of this article, however, I can confirm that working with a remote team in another country where nobody seemed to work more than 25hrs per week on their technical team was annoying as hell. Not only did this make solving problems harder, they also had notably lower productivity and output of meaningful contributions...
This seems like the post of someone who makes flip assessments of people from limited data points, then announce those assessments to rooms of people who could not care less about your assessments.
I've been working on this for the past year. Any feedback would be much appreciated.
Self-congratulatory promotional posts are very common in the startup industry, but even then this seems unusually cringey. I can't put my finger on what exactly makes it worse. Maybe it is the Instagramy nature of their self-promotion.
I'm surprised they're even able to confidently go commercial with their API since they scrape their data.
I love articles like this. Thanks for sharing. Ultimately math is just a language invented to describe the world. Which is what any language does. And it's a really useful language for sharing certain kinds of intelligence. I got into a discussion with my son last night about sine waves. Which don't really exist, per se, but they are a useful language construct for thinking about waves (especially sound waves as we were discussing). Shared intelligence like this is, as some have maintained, a major differentiator between humans and pre-humans. So the very fact we can argue about what is a number is part of what it is to be human.
Insider trading would be bad and illegal. But absent evidence that it's happening, I think his point is that merely having a stake by holding securities isn't inherently problematic.
Shazam isn't designed to work with live music at all. It recognizes specific recordings.
Thanks for writing this.

I think you hit the nail on the head by saying that Twitter definitely puts us into an industry bubble, where the same ideas are repeated over and over in the echo chamber.

When you are inside the echo chamber, it is extremely difficult to realize how little significance those people have outside that bubble. Sometimes it is good to take a step back and look at all of this from an outsider's perspective.
If your career as a writer depends on paying strangers rock bottom amounts to write stuff that you then publish under your own name, it deserves to be in peril.
Yup, that's why this attack doesn't really work on hash functions.
Serruya is also a lawyer, according to her Twitter bio.

Separately, I find it amazing that Amazon doesn't perform some sort of plagiarism check on all ebooks uploaded to the Kindle platform. Yes, I know such systems can be fooled and there are a lot of false positives (or legitimate fair use/PD scenarios) but something like this would have at least been caught at a much earlier stage.
Well, I'm not sure why you're bringing up their legality. Are you talking about the Geneva Conventions? with respect to the blinding lights?
https://books.google.com/books?id=1s5EAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA9&ci=137...
And the worst part is, they might be correct.

If the productivity gain really was about improved focus and energy, they'll be wrong and waste everyone's time. But there are some hints in the article that it wasn't just that; other companies have seen productivity rise than fall back, while Perpetual Guardian implemented performance improvements to offset the change.

I assume diminished hours directly improved productivity some. But if half the gain was from process improvements or increased motivation, then some clever wag is going to come along and notice that they can use those gains to cut staff instead of hours.
I wouldn't be surprised if this was an intentional hack to get around some regulatory bullshit.

>if we don't report whole number cap-ex hours on our return, we'll avoid an audit!
> I spent some time finding studies that supported my thesis that productivity would go up (thus making sure our output would stay the same, more or less).

Are the research notes you put together to support your thesis publicly available?
> https://hatebase.org/privacy

500 Internal Server Error

That's what I expected tbh.
This is great because the process I had to follow in order to get my band listed in Spotify required far too many hoops to jump through just to be able to distribute our music more easily to fans.
Bandcamp proved to be the best service for initial distribution but the method for SoundClound sounds like the middleware we had been missing all along.
Then there are those people whose entire brand is based on their inactivity on social media.

https://twitter.com/calnewport
These Four Traits Can Help You Become a Better Digital Transformation Leader
In many nerdy corners of the Internet there's a definite surplus of Finns relative to the fairly meager total population of our country.
Austrian Bank Charges Subscription for New Mandatory Login Option
On further investigation, the author has a, shall we say, distinguished legal career.

Of all the people to plagiarize from, picking the one that was a professor of IP law at a law school and has clerked for two members of the supreme court seems catastrophically stupid.
The article seems a bit abstract.

I think the question that comes to mind is whether it's possible to take GPU-styles architecture and give it 100x more power or more by replacing bits with approximate voltage levels that are "fuzzy" but statistical guarantees to their performance, along with gates that allow the values to be filtered back to zeros and ones.

The thing is the "neural architectures" seem to have been more or less failure through requiring the user to accept one particular neural net structure while the standard GPU seems to have succeeded through being generic-enough to use for a variety of tasks. So some sort of analogy-GPU should also have a similar generic model - but of course it seems likely that the creator of this stuff will want to impose their special model.

Edit: More or less like the D-wave "quantum computer" except not milking quantum hype and being reconciled to being understood as "massively analogue"
Great work! A nitpick: I think you should try and present the file formats in a different way. It looks really poor on large screens.

https://postimg.cc/S2dwMr7G
Periodic Table of Amazon Web Services
The site appears to be down. Here is an archive.org copy:

https://web.archive.org/web/20190219080209/http://www.courtn...
Henry Kissinger once noted: “Control oil and you control nations; control food and you control the people.”

I've been working on a model for a free food distribution system[1]. From the article, Harv is on the way to satisfying step 4. We've seen step 6 addressed with services like FoodDash[2]. The cannabis industry will drive innovation for step 3. Step 8 is being worked on and companies such as Big Wheel Burger[3] are helping. Once nuclear fusion is in place[4], the most difficult part of the model is to accomplish step 5, self-maintenance.

[1]: https://i.imgur.com/MX68gg7.png

[2]: https://www.theverge.com/2019/1/3/18166660/gm-cruise-doordas...

[3]: https://bigwheelburger.com/sustainability/

[4]: https://www.cfs.energy/
Even including the internment camps, the US still has the largest per-capita prison population in the world.

The UK has, for many years, had the most extensive physical surveillance system in the world, with the NSA having one of the more extensive digital surveillance systems.[1]

The Department of Defense employs 3.2 million people, 2.2 million of which are military (Active and otherwise). US police forces employ another 1 million. [2]

In contrast, China has ~1.6 million police officers (In a country four times more populous then the US), and ~2.3 million people in the military (Active and otherwise). There's probably a million or so of hanger-on people working in various administrative roles - but with China - who really knows?

The United States has been at war with enemies, internal, and external, for most of its existence. It is, as of Q1, 2019, fighting a few shooting wars against external enemies (Syrians, Iraqis, Afghanis), and non-shooting wars against a larger number of other external enemies, as well as internal ones (African Americans, illegal immigrants, and, of course, working class people of all stripes.)

If anything, the list of reasons you've given are the bullet points for why the American empire, as it exists today, is unsustainable, and is about to fall apart under its own weight. [3]

[1] Both, of course, are irrelevant budgetary rounding errors. So is the GFC.

[2] If you've ever turned on the radio - or the television, have you ever noticed how many businesses specifically advertise, or cater to veterans, and their extended families? That's because nearly everyone in the US is, at most, two steps removed from an active, or former soldier. You don't see those kinds of advertisements in countries that don't have an over-sized military.

[3] In reality, it can probably continue on its trajectory for another two decades, or so. All of these bullet points were true in 1999, after all.
Too bad the author didn't substantiate his claims that analog computing will make a comeback.

I found this article [0] with a real world application, but no performance comparison to a digital computer. I also take issue with the claim that a transistor has infinite possible states, and that we're ignoring most of them. This doesn't take into account real world limitations of components' precision and noise.

[0] https://news.mit.edu/2016/analog-computing-organs-organisms-...
Ah! I wrote the below before seeing your comment:

Numbers don't exist. Take the number two. You can have two apples but that's not the number two. You can write the numeral "2", but that's not the number two. It's one line. The word "two" has three letters, it's obviously not the number two. In fact, the number two doesn't exist (or it's existence is not contingent on an arrangement of matter/energy. No pattern of matter/energy/space/time is actually THE number two.)

To me, it's wonderful to reflect on the epistemological status of numbers. They don't seem to exist, but we talk about them as if they do. Certainly they are useful. But they don't exist any more than, say, Sherlock Holmes does.

It's also much fun to reflect that, whatever the epistemological status of number, that status is shared by computer languages and algorithms and much else. E.g. the C language doesn't exist. The C standard(s) exist, many C compilers exist, lots and lots of C code exist, etc., but the language itself doesn't exist anywhere, any more than does the number two.
Sure, menus are a linear experience disguised as choices.

Rich 60 year olds have been eating at restaurants for decades, though, and maybe only using smartphones and software for a few years.

This is a big deal when the average age of a congressman is 55 and senator 60. Why?

Menus are a kind of retail that manipulates your psychology. So is Amazon, and in some senses YouTube and Facebook. Those things have a bigger impact in our lives than menus, but people barely understand how software works.

If you wanted to communicate to a congressman (or the public really) why profit-optimizing collaborative filtering looks like a series of choices, but is really an experience that tells you what to do, good luck using that abstract algorithmic language.

But a restaurant menu? At least they'll know what the hell you are talking about.

Ironically, the most relevant part of this piece for the software audience will probably be, "Oh great, I can explain to investors how my product recommendation engine funnels people into the best-paying affiliate products, even though it's disguised as an informed choice, by using the metaphor of a menu."
The example domains linked to in the announcement are all down for me:

https://get.dev/
https://github.dev/
https://grow.dev/
https://accessibility.dev/
https://slack.dev/

etc.
Yes, I am planning to introduce atleast rottentomatoes ratings at first. Wanted to validate idea first.
Yes, I could have really tortured my kids and said, you can't even show me a "ball", because it will always be a specific ball and not the archetypal concept of "ball".

I probably should, it'd be fun and they're a bit older than when I pulled the "one" game.
Reveal – View Auto Completed Hidden Passwords on Chrome
Does it scale down? Could I use RC-scale technology, build my own, and use it to provide services to my own local network?

Sure, we all have the eye on the industrial horizon here.

But what would a "the streets have their own uses for things" application of the TURN concept look like?

For instance, I build RC planes for fun, and am a huge fan of Kline-Fogleman airfoils, for their simplicity if not economy .. and I can imagine a low-cost TURN implementation based on KF airfoils which might be more viable at the LoRa/WAN levels of scale. Something easily deployable, cheap/disposable/replaceable, on a much smaller scale of industry - yet widely available.
>I remember your story. I clicked this expecting to hear that everything is wonderful and you're living the good life. Instead, the nightmare continues. I'm sorry

Something is really fucked up if getting one of your Google accounts banned is a "nightmare".

To everybody who's reading this: make the necessary arrangements to make sure getting one of your Google accounts banned is not the end of the world for you.
It's a LOT of effort. And said effort is required not just at the registry level, but also at the dozens of registrars that support EAP.

This isn't a theoretical concern. We actually did use standard auctions for our first three TLD launches. They were operational nightmares. The Dutch auctions we're using now are much more light-weight, have greater participation, and are now the preferred way of doing launches across the entire industry. We're not even the ones who started using Dutch auctions for TLDs.

You'll just have to trust the word of someone who's been doing this stuff for years that the alternatives really are worse.
I believe that in fact the numbers do exist as physical objects exist. Just in their own universe.

When we reason about numbers, we're embedding a representation of a universe of numbers into our universe.

What we call "physical existence" could is also probably just be "math all the way down". Just not in such a way that the number two per se can be an entity for us to behold.
I mean, real professionals focus on their work, not the color of their skin.
How does a company who owns a trademark get a domain early like Slack and Github did?
> since I'd rediscover hobbies and other distractions.

Isn't that the point though?