skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
While you can place your data in services which are not Google, if you want to consume data, you are often going to have to deal with Google. For instance, almost anyone who shares any sort of video whatsoever puts it on YouTube. It doesn't matter if I'm not a YouTube user, I have to go to YouTube if I want to watch someone else's videos.

And Google is far more than just where you go to search or store your email. Somewhere around 90% of the web uses Google Analytics, Google Ads, or Google Fonts, so they can track you regardless of where you go online. And that's before you get into the fact that plenty of websites are on Google's cloud services, which you may not even know. (I left Google Docs for another service, for instance, but it's still hosted on Google's servers.) Even if you're not logged into a Google account, Google is tracking you and profiling your behavior across the web. (Google also collects credit card data, so they can track you in brick and mortar stores now too.)

Using Google's browser to access the web is also becoming increasingly inescapable, now that the company with the second largest market share in web browsers is switching to Chrome's codebase. Firefox is nearly the last remaining holdout against Chromium. In fact, the very protocol we use to talk to the web is constantly being revised primarily on Google's lead and direction. HTTP/3, QUIC, DNS-over-HTTPS, etc. is all about moving the web's standard to something more palatable to Google's business models, and making them harder to block or filter out.

It's incredibly naive to believe you can escape Google. I've spent years de-Googling, and there's plenty of data Google still has on me.

ISP monopolies are a big problem, but they won't follow you when you move. A high bar for escape, to be sure, but escaping Google likely requires an even higher bar: Entering the witness protection program and getting a new identity.
Possibly true. But the direct exchange of money for a product or service creates a salutory incentive structure. And unfortunately, the rise of open source has been associated with the rise of indirect monetization models that aren't as beneficial, especially in the consumer space.
> Equifax is the worst. You can call them and ask to buy lists of names, addresses and phone numbers of people matching certain financial criterias. Facebook would look dull in comparison if people knew the extent of the Equifax abuse of privacy.

Don't be silly. The long arm of Equifax has a finite length. We know where they get their data from and you have to at least pretend to "consent" to provide it to them by initiating a financial transaction. The Breach aside, there are federal laws (FCRA, etc.) governing willful dissemination of the data they have on you, and the scope of the data they collect is entirely financial.

None of this applies to Facebook/Google. There is no "consent" or opting-in to their lifestyle intelligence pool. You start building a dossier a few seconds after venturing onto the internet for the first time.

Your name ending up on a list of middle-to-upper-class sales leads is not a crime against humanity. There are many other ways to get the same data, starting with public records.
I wonder whether there is a way to reconfigure audio jacks into microphone jacks on an average sound card these days. Little known fact: speakers and headphones are also microphones simply by the physics of how they work.
> This is especially true if the defendant is the one demanding it all be made public.

The defendant isn't present yet. This is a Grand Jury proceeding. If anything, the main problem with Grand Jury proceedings is that they don't happen enough.

Its absolutely essential that those involved in Grand Jury proceedings be kept secret, to protect the defendant to-be.
Why does it matter whether a monopoly is "natural" or not, let alone that the definition of "naturally" is sort of laughable given the legal framework put in place for our government is the economy in the first place? Just as you get a lot of government run monopolies with pure socialism, you get a lot of "market-driven" monopolies with pure capitalism. Both should be broken up.
He said he did a lot of data extraction, processing, and exporting. Sort of an ETL process that pulls stuff together from different sources and exports to different formats (I think).

For each verse in the Bible there's a ton of different types of data that can be pulled together and provided in a UI - stuff like translator notes, Strong numbers and lexical parsing of source words (i.e. part of speech, tense, voice, person, declension, mood), lexicon for each word, cross-references, ... and that's just at the translation level. Bible software also usually provides multiple translations, pre-built search indexes, commentaries, study notes, theological texts, and collected sermons and books by historical luminaries.
I had a number generator randomly generate lists of 0 or 1s. 0 was left and 1 was right. I did this 500 times. It was able to guess the number entered 49% of the time. The balance never went below $1000. The interesting thing is the graph when through a cycle. It started out at $1000, climbed to $1030, dropped back to about $1000, then climbed back to about $1030. It was on its way back down again when I stopped. I'm tired of playing the game, but I wonder if the cycle would've continued and if there is an explanation for the cycle.
I suspect not a lot of adults know that booster is needed every 10 years - everybody kind of assumes that most of vaccines are "one, maybe 2 times deal".
I implore you to get your T checked regularly.
Hologram.io
I lived in Austin for the past two years and was quite disappointed by the people, the city, and the schools. Glad to be out of there and I have no interest in moving back despite it being my hometown.

Number one complaint, the city has feeble public offerings (no zoo, no aquarium, no subway or light rail, small museums).

Number two complaint, the schools are overrated (and Texas math is one grade year behind most other states).

Number three complaint, I encountered a lot of people with a remarkable lack of integrity. Sorry to say that as it was the most surprising and disappointing.
India Has the Most Polluted Cities on Earth
> they simply say the company was "ageist" and blame it on age discrimination.

This is a topic I'm very interested in (and as I've gotten older, my interest has only grown).

In ~20 years as a coder I've seen only a handful of overt ageist issues. I've seen plenty of ageist language and attitudes, and even more assumptions, but those are a lot harder to answer "Yeah, but would they turn down a qualified candidate for that?" about. I've known people who were both experienced and open-minded, as well as those that were experienced and closed-minded.

End result: No idea what to believe. I'm not comfortable assuming one way or the other, because either assumption is harmful if incorrect.
Cursewords, a crossword puzzle-solving interface for the terminal
ZC is an autoimmune diet, the whole point is to remove immunogenic plant (and animal) foods from your diet.
I agree that it might be fundamentally impossible to make meaningful macroeconomic predictions (because it is self correcting). But this is one of the arguments why macroeconomics might fundamentally not be a science (kind of like the art of writing fiction isn't a real science, although there are many commonalities/themes/etc one can study).

Re your third paragraph. You make many claims which may or may not be correct, but at the end of the day nobody has any kind of track record of prediction long term inflation rates of GDP numbers. This means that there is little value in counterfactual claims (if we did x then y would happen). Every study (such as your allusion to '29) are explanative, not predictive. Explanative studies have relatively little to do with what makes something a science (prediction).

Finally, this is not to say that there is absolutely nothing meaningful in economics. Surely if you arbitrarily set tax rate to 100% or 0% you would have negative consequences. Similarly, if Fed changes current rates dramatically, this would have consequences. It's just for "normal" changes in policy we have basically no predictive power other than something like nearest-neighbor search in historical observation.
The obvious, but hard to swallow solution to the Fermi paradox: aliens are a product of science-fiction, and don't exist. Not everything we can come up with in thought experiments has a real life counterpart.
They don't lose billions each year on engineering. Not even close.
I'd be really interested to know what resources they are using in cloud and why it is so expensive. I don't disagree they need resources but 100s of millions seems a bit on the wasteful side.
YES! IT WAS THIS ONE. Thank you!
If you are planning on staying in the bay area for 10 years to save money, why not move some place with a lower COL and buy a house that might appreciate significantly in those ten years? You can make good money in Austin.
I can't believe The Register of all sites managed to write this article without making a voice coil pun.
Now that's a beautiful piece of writing on a terribly tragic subject.
Does my model still not work? Whereby instead of a "car payment" -- a price per mile/slice of your rideshare cost is automatically garnished from your services? And tesla pushes that particular vehicle as a vehicle that must be used as a rideshare vehicle - regardless of if its uber or lyft or whomever - and they reap the data and 'users flocking to their mobile devices'.
I still don't follow. As market rent goes up you will be renting to yourself below market rate. Suppose market rent is $2000/month and my mortgage is $2000/month. In 10 years market rate rent has gone up, but my mortgage is still $2000/month.
I don't consider car leasing to be car ownership. It's like saying leasing a house is home ownership.

With that said, car leasing is on the rise.

https://www.fool.com/investing/2018/06/08/why-rising-car-lea...

So Zimmer's prediction is still at play here.
In previous flying car type things, people have attempted to use Wankel engines, which I guess have a decent power to weight ratio.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moller_M400_Skycar

FWIIW Moller's project is a great example of why this is hard.
Dems/libs are fools when it comes to this. They never have the backbone to take on foreign Govts. I'm totally against this because we are in a globalized world and these companies need to be large and strong to out-compete with others across the world.
Isn't this roughly the idea behind Montessori method?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montessori_education

Also, math education in general has a huge problem around teaching solutions without teaching the problem. (Hence the pervasive question of what will I ever need this for...) I will always know what a limit does, because my precalculus teacher taught it by finding the area under a curve using rectangles. We started with large rectangles, were shown the error. Cut the rectangles in half, hey error goes down. Make them really really small, error goes down even more! What happens if we make them zero? Oops, equation explodes because zero-width rectangles also have zero area... The function is discontinuous at zero. So let's learn limits to work around discontinuous points of a function!
> and finally steer customers to those products

Do you have data that shows this actually happens?

Everything else you stated before this part is a win for consumers in my mind. More competitors is generally a good thing.
Search engine and ride-sharing don't seem to be natural monopolies however. Communication infrastructure in most part of the USA clearly is.

Still I agree breaking up Comcast is not the solution. You will just end up with smaller more localized monopolies. That's pretty much what happened with Bell after all.

The solution would be either nationalizing the infrastructure and leasing it to operators or forcing existing operators to rent their infrastructure to their competitors for a set price. The later is actually working quite well in France. Short of that you will never get competition. It's simply not profitable.
That's one perspective. Another school of thought says that both the extent and duration of copyright protection is counterproductive if not batshit insane, and lobbying for copyright liberalization benefits almost everyone regardless of the underlying motivation.
Desktop PCs of today evolved past the level of minis of the 90's, gaining many features minis never had, but, while minis are no more (our current servers that replaced them are overgrown versions of PCs and RISC workstations), mainframes didn't stand still and continued to evolve hardware and software features that reflect the demands of their segment: reliability, throughput, IO, security, and so on.

Their evolution is pretty cool. And their software is very alien to people who grew up on personal computers.
The first sentence of the paragraph you quote links to data connecting unemployment to unhappiness.
Maybe you haven't been in a position where you're days away from death, but most people would probably want to have that devastating news delivered to them by a real person who is present with them.

It's not a rational thing. Of course it changes nothing, apart from the fact they might feel better having the doctor there instead of receiving it through a crappy matte screen with tinny speakers. If you still can't understand that, perhaps you can't empathize with most people.
> That's not the point, I'm talking about distributions not individual cases.

But you're not talking about distributions. You talk about the individuals you meet in interviews.
Genius. I will actually remember this, in case I ever need to be ... really random.
I feel like if you're a knowledge worker who isn't interested in management, the IC path is short-lived in almost any profession (not just SWE), no?

To me, the future isn't very bright for anyone who just wants to be an "employee" for the rest of their life, coder or not.

OTOH, the manager path is dangerous in recession times. You lose a lot of "hard" skills, and if you lose your cushy manager job at company A it isn't necessarily obvious to company B what value you have when things are tight.
What if you had samples from multiple hard drives in the same room? Could they be combined to provide a better signal than a sample from a single drive alone?
I wonder if these questions were less about identity validation and more about stopping bots from opening accounts? Either way, it's not the ideal solution, but one is a little better than the other. The chance of a bot guessing all three right is pretty slim, but at least if a real person did research and made educated guesses then it would slow them down considerably.
I just realized something -- the cryptocurrency-maximalist and antivaxx movement are born of a similar phenomenon.

Humans are great at rallying and pushing and making change when they see identify something as wrong in their direct lives. We work as hard as possible, and develop solutions (vaccines, a strong legal backstop). Then, all is well, and the problems we solved are no longer part of our lives because the system works.

Years later a vocal minority becomes very suspicious (they're inflating away my wealth!, autism!) and tries to overhaul the system. Then they learn why we do things the way we do (scams/manipulation/etc, measles) the hard way.
Landlords to Tesla: You’re Still on the Hook for Your Store Leases
Nope, you're the one who started it elsewhere, since you casually mention cooperation between Trump team and Wikileaks as if it is a proven fact.

Or, in other words, Fake News(tm).
I have been tracking Austin's hype as a tech hub for over a decade. And I have to admit that is waay overrated. For example, Austin startups only raised $1.5bn VC funding in 2018 [1] Compare this to the $45bn [2] raised by SF Bay Area companies and you get why Austin is all hype. The only true next SV in US are NYC, Seattle, and Boston. Everything else is a PR piece from that city or state government.

[1] https://www.bizjournals.com/austin/news/2019/01/10/austin-co...

[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-01-08/ventur...
I will never unfreeze Equifax, regardless of what I do with the other credit agencies. I can't prevent them from collecting my information but I can prevent them from profiting off it.
> I’m not afraid to repeat that I have publicly demonstrated that my judgment is good. And in my demonstrably good judgment, radical deregulation of Europe’s labor markets is long overdue. I’m happy to make the Quiggin bet all over again with anyone who’s interested, but what’s the point? My homeschooled sons understood all of this when they were 12.

Is this satire?
And yet 'happiness' is an elusively squishy metric, compounded by the fact that humanity is incredibly good at seeking out reasons to be discontent. Ambition, envy, and anxiety at all levels of poverty and wealth alike are fuel to that fire.
But you still can't run experiments on cosmology. SO if your definition of "science" is "based on experimental data", cosmology isn't a science.
This one was better.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thing_(listening_device)
I have a ton of variety in my diet.

But when you're a vegetarian (as I was), to maintain a reasonably nutritious diet requires some repetition. For example, getting certain protein and nutrients in one meal so you don't have to think about it in the others.

I'm no longer a strict vegetarian (just mostly), but the diet habits I learned mean that my overall diet is better, lower calorie.

I now think it's important for EVERYONE to do strict vegetarianism. Not for ethical or environmental concerns, but simply because it forces you to think about what you're eating and to read labels (and thus learn that the "vegetarian" tacos you're eating have gelatin (meat product) in the sour cream).

In addition, being a strict vegetarian in a sustainable way requires learning about what your body requires.

After a few months (or however long it requires to build a stable, nutritious diet), you'll be extremely well informed. Of course, you could also just read all this stuff on various articles, but trial by fire is an excellent way to learn.
That makes sense, but it makes me skeptical, then, of the article's claim that they have no path to profitability.
There are tons of smaller companies out there that struggle to find competent developers. They're not necessarily super attractive jobs, and aren't as high profile, but you can get paid well in a lower cost-of-living area to solve some interesting business problems.
A fibonacci pseudo random number generator would not be too hard to keep in mind (two integers modulo a fixed number) and might give you ok results if you choose your parameter well and avoid using the weakest bits as the generated boolean :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagged_Fibonacci_generator
You have a nice situation, but my goal is mostly saving money for the future while living a decent life now (and admittedly I am minimalist so many things people care about don't bother me much). I have obviously higher cost of living expenses (living frugally I do it in $50k-$60k/y), but just my base salary is higher than your compensation, and with RSUs I get easily into ~400k/y total comp or more depending on the year, so basically I end up saving a lot for the future, which is really the metric I'm optimizing for. I'm in my very early 30s and already saved up ~1.5M liquid.

I don't own a house here in the Bay, I dump everything in very diversified index funds and some rentals out of state, since I'm not interested in staying in this place long term and play the million dollar mortgage roulette.

The day I call it quit, me and my partner (she does well too) can move to Austin TX, or anywhere else really (we're both immigrants with citizenships in really really cheap countries), with our fat liquid assets, and not having to worry about necessarily finding work in my 40s. At least that's my very optimistic plan, it might completely not turn out like this, or I might die tomorrow.
Well, in my comments I was restricting my examples mostly to server side software running on UNIX.

This eliminates much of the proprietary lockin and portability problems you mention. I never was saying people should just keep using Delphi into the 21st century.

Also, my comments apply to broad categories of solutions not just software implementations in the narrow sense.

For example: I just replaced (had to for perf reasons) a NOSQL solution in one of our applications with MySQL.

Ironically, the application would actually scale better with NoSQL in theory, but the choices the developers made along the way (data modelling and API design) made it perform worse on the NoSQL DB than on MySQL.

The tactical solution, which fits our needs and the size of our user base, turned out to be to replace a new shiny thing, with an older technology. The benefit gained was more flexibility with queries, which in turn allowed us to speed things up significantly with little effort.

The previous team burned a lot of time learning the new NoSQL thing to then not get any benefit from it at all.
I highly doubt that eating 2000 calories a day in pure sugar is "healthy" no matter how much you try to spin it.

It's not just moderation, it's the content that counts. The old adage "too much of a good thing isn't a good thing" actually means something.
I can only speak for myself, but hires on my team are usually based on my recommendation and I mainly try to tease out whether the candidate has enthusiasm and strong opinions about the languages and frameworks we work with. If I ask what their favorite stack is, or how they prefer to organize a project, and they just mumble their way through the answer, I think they are probably not a good fit.
Thanks for checking it out! The website is just a placeholder for the beta test. I didn't want to link directly to the TestFlight link, as that would have been jarring.

I've copy pasted the description from the TestFlight app description here:

Thank you for beta testing Headings! You can track your hikes, drop pins, view all of your past hikes and pins with a free Headings account

Tips for beta testing:
* Test the app during a hike, bike ride, or your commute to work by pressing the “Start Hike” button. When you’ve reached your destination, tap on the red flag to stop recording
* Look at the stats, are they accurate?
* How was your battery life? Did it drain too much too quickly?
* Save them to your account, did signing up for a new account work?
* Drop pins along the way and see if they show up in the map
* Log out of your account and log back in. Did all of your previously saved info come back?

Hope this helps!
Are prisoners counted as unemployed? Are they employed when assigned to "penal servitude"?

The are at several other reason US unemployment numbers are lower: they have different percentages in prison and, on the opposite side, nonstandard employment like the military. They have more clout to enforce favorable trade agreements. The numbers are calculated differently.

There maybe a difference in real employment numbers but these are not the figures and the conjectural cause for this unknown difference is just a conjecture.
There's some value in having a credit reporting system though. You don't want to make it too easy for someone to edit their credit history to make it look like they're more reliable about paying back their debts. (A good system might not look too much like our current system though.)