skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think there are a few interesting wrinkles with regards to rent seeking in the current economy and how that works out for the middle class.

• As a few people have pointed out, people often buy sunglasses for fashion and social signaling rather than on price. Wearing Tom Ford glasses means you're getting very good quality glasses, but mostly you are paying to wear Tom Ford glasses, in the same way that a Rolls Royce and a mid level BMW are functionally very similar, even though there is a 5x difference in price (if not a higher change). You're paying for the styling and the brand name.

• Where the money goes: for a lot of consumer brands, huge sums go into brand advertising. B2B companies spend this money on salespeople and tradeshows. I like to give the example of a Rolex. A new Rolex is worth $10-15k (if not more) because they spend tens of millions of dollars every year telling us all that that's why they're worth so much. Compare that to a lesser advertised brand - say Tag Heuer, and you'll see there's a pretty big difference in their pricing. Traditionally this money has gone into magazines / billboards / tv commercials / sports sponsorship - so this money is subsidizing middle class entertainment. On the B2B side, if you engage with a company like SAP, you'll get a professional sales team walking you through the buying process (they'll probably even spot you a few nice dinners along the way).

• "Rent seeking" is an interesting term, and while I agree with it in the context of sunglasses, it's a bit hard to nail down in a lot of the economy. Price is funny because lots of the things we produce now (particularly software, pharmaceuticals & entertainment) have revenue models that don't see much of an increase in marginal cost once you've covered the initial investment (10k people see your movie in cinemas vs 1m - provided you've got the infrastructure in place, it's not like the price of producing the movie goes up 100x).

• The culprits for the "middle class burden" is often pointed at healthcare and higher education for the simple reason that they have dramatically increased administrative costs which ultimately haven't added much (if any) value to the consumer (people argue my first point with regards to higher education - perhaps a Harvard education is worth $60k a year, although it's hard to see many other colleges worth that much for the brand alone).
Yea, it's very light on any technical details. He did say that the large number of photos allowed him to "increase saturation and contrast". So it sounds like e.g. anything showing a hint of blue is interpreted as blue. In a more mathematical sense, a pixel with the RGB value 200,199,203 would be changed to something like 1,0,250. The precise algorithm is more of an artistic choice than scientific, but the general idea is to convert from RGB color space to HSV (hue, saturation, value), increase the "S", then convert back to RGB.
There's the issue you mention, but IIRC there are also some big stat hits (happiness, noise, land value) from that sort of pattern. The game really pushes towards districts of distinct zoning as an optimized solution.
My favourite "world" generator one-liner (two liner in python):

import random as r
print(''.join([r.choice(["/", "\\"]) for _ in range(9999)]))

Output:

//\\/\//\\/\\\\/\\\/\//\\\\/\\/\\/\///\\\\///\\/\//\\\\/\\/\
/\\\\/////\\\\\/\\\\////\/\//////\////\\\//////\\\\\/\//\\\/
//\\\\\\/\/\\//\/\\\\///\\/\\//\\///\\/\/\\//\/\\/\///\\\\//
\\/\//\\\//////\/\/\/\\/\\//\/\///\\///\/\////\//\/\\\/\/\//
\\\\\\\\\/\//\\\//\\\/\\/\\\\\/\\\\\///\/\\/\\\\//\\/\\/\///
//\\/\//////////\\//\\\////\\/////\/\/\\\\\\\\///\/\\/\///\/
\///\//\\//\\\/\/\\\\\//\\\\\\//\/\\//\\\/\/\/////\/\//\/\//
/\\\\//\\\\/\\///\\\\/\\\/////\\\\\\//\///\//\\////\//\/\\\/
/\\/\\\//\/\/\//\//\//\\\//\\\\\\\/\\\/\\\\/\\///\/\/\//\///
\\/\\/////\/\\\///\\\/\\/\//\/\/\/\\\//\\\\\\\\/////\\/\\/\/
//\\\\\\\\/\\/////\\/\\\\\///\/\\/\\\/\\//\\\\\\/\\/\\\/////
\\//\\\\/\\/\\///\///\/\\\/\/\/////\//\\//\/\/\/\/\/\/\\/\//
\//\\\\\\///\/\\/\\\\/\\\/\/\/\/\//\////\/////\\\/\/\\/\\\\/
//\\\/\\//\\/\\/\/\\////\/\\//\/\/\///\//////\\///////\/\\//
\/\////\/\//\\\\//\\/\\/\\\\/\/////\///\/\\/\///\\\\/\\\//\/
\///\\/\\/\\\\\\/\\\\\\\/\\\///\\\/\\///\\\\//\/\/\/\\//\/\\
/\\\////\/\//\/////\\///\\//\/\\\/\/\\\/\/\\\\\////\\/\\////
FDA chief Gottlieb resigns as agency battles teen vaping, opioid crisis
Congrats to Segment! We (ScopeAI) got a chance to work with Calvin and the team to build an integration. The processes couldn't have been clearer and the value add for our customer is huge!
Deep Learning Resources for a Great Start
Apple should just license Hallmark’s catalog and be done with it.
Ask HN: Provider for Secondary Phone?
It’s more and more critical to have access to the smartphone, especially when traveling. So much so that I often carry secondary phone on my trips (and was saved by it when my primary phone was damaged).

Also it makes sense to use other provider for the secondary phone (my primary provider is T-Mobile).

What (virtual) provider do you use for your secondary SIM?

Requirements:

* low ongoing costs

* reasonable data speeds

* no sudden cancelations if not used for awhile

* reasonable international roaming
Yeah, political views were impacted in the sense of "quickened". I agree that the evidence supports that these tactics have been used and documented elsewhere (Ukraine being a great example) and the phenomenon of increasing destabilization seems to be progressively effective. That phenomenon is different than changing someones voting preference - all the studies we've cited (in the US specifically) discuss these tactics as "hardening" existing views, not changing them.

I'm only trying to compartmentalize these two phenomenon so they can be talked about separately, because there certainly is a narrative out there that the election was illegitimate because of election interference from Russia, and none of the evidence supports that. In fact, the DNI report explicitly disavows that idea. It is pursuant to the goal of fomenting institutional destabilization to irresponsibly push that narrative or allow a conversation about Russian meddling to implicitly support that narrative.

I'm not trying to minimize the concern we should have over a foreign government being an agent provocateur for civil disturbance. I'm just saying that it's contrary to the evidence to think that these actions swayed the election.
This article implies a “Disney” strategy is incapable of being successful.
Machine Learning Mastery
Adi Shamir not permitted to RSA Conference due to lack of visa
This was addressed in the second paragraph. If representatives were tripled, Wyoming and Vermont would have lower representation percentages, but Montana would just have their number of representatives tripled to three (actually Montana is close to the cutoff so going by percentages they would probably get four representatives) so would face no real change. The large states like California and Texas might see representation percentages rise or dip slightly, but this would have essentially no effect legislatively or electorally. 55/535 is fairly close in value to 159/1405.

As a matter of arithmetic, this sort of change would not meaningfully change political decision-making in USA.
> The idea is to get going. Start digging a hole and make it so big, there’s no alternative to coming up with the money to fill it in.

Robert Moses is quoted as saying the same thing. Once you start, there is no choice for the public but to push on and finish.
One More Time, with Big Data: Measles Vaccine Doesn’t Cause Autism
"The use of Bootstrap and the spread of templates made Web Design boring."

Frankly, as a user I don't complain. GUI consistency has a great value for me. Crawling through the fancy artistic designs is fun until I just want to find contact address of some company on their website.

The advantage that MS Windows has (or had, before they decide to go with the "modern designs" here and there) is a GUI predictable across all applications. File menu, Edit menu, Tools menu, Help menu, consistent shortcuts, toolbar, everything always the same, boring - all of this makes users productive.
It's basically the same in dodgy parts of the US.
https://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/tapl/
You're reading into that comment a lot more than is warranted I think.

This does show how diverse and complicated sex differentiation is. The comment does not claim this is a virtue, or that the outcome in the article here is to be celebrated.

"Diverse" in this context I took to mean "varied", not in the sense of social diversity.
Ask HN: Which platform, setup best for app development? (Beginner)
Hello! I'm a UI designer with small development knowledge (mostly HTML, CSS and PHP). I'm working on a side project at the moment and want to create an application (iOS first). But, not sure which platform or setup best for me. I don't mind learning something new but I know It will slow me down and might kill my motivation for the project.

The project I'm working on is a listing application. Showing the venues based on your location (just a listing, not a map-view). The user can sign-up and add the restaurants in their list and make a search. In the feature, I would like to add booking as well but for the first release just venue listings and user lists.

I had a look into https://buildfire.com/ and https://thunkable.com/ but the final app experience wasn't good. Also, they are pretty limited on the UI implementation side. I am a bit confused and not sure which way to go.

(Also, back-end suggestions are welcome too)
This might be an unpopular opinion, but I wouldn't want to work at a company that doesn't value whiteboarding or doesn't know how to conduct a whiteboard interview. Whiteboards are excellent tools for conveying abstract ideas, and physically, they're easier to collaborate on. Pen and paper is difficult to observe and contribute as a collaborator; so me, that feels more like I'm proctoring an exam instead of doodling with a candidate. If I wanted to proctor an exam that's an approximation of the work environment, I'd just ask you to bring in a laptop and HDMI dongle.

During an on-site, I'm very much evaluating abstract and interpersonal skills. I'm evaluating how well they communicate, how well our personalities mesh when collaborating, and how well they solve our engineering problems. I'm not evaluating how well they can code; they've already been screened for that before the on-site, typically on a Coderpad in the comfort of their own home with whatever language, tools, and resources they prefer.
That post has a few problems:

- His line about the DART Orange Line is mixing three different projects (the actual Orange Line, the Trinity River Expressway, and the Dulles (VA) Metro extension)

- He is mixing actual project costs with projected costs, as if the comparison is equivalent

- The biggest problem, though, is that he is using "Right to Work" to mean "no unions", which is ridiculous. He even doubled down on that in the comments with the asinine statement "But in places with zero union density, like Texas".

Those are just the problems I saw from ~10 minutes of research on the subject. Considering that, I don't put a lot of faith in his arguments.
This limit shouldn't bug you at all. If it's voluntary (you buy the car without coercion), there is nothing wrong about it.

disclosure: I'm a hard-core libertarian myself.
> 78% identical seems like a lot more than the expected 50%. How likely is it for two sperm to be 78% identical?

Statistics doesn't work that way. Each chromosome has a 50% chance of being shared between both children. It's possible, but unlikely, that each child would have all the same chromosomes from the father; or share none of the chromosomes from the father.

Random events have no memory. Meaning, if you flip a coin and get heads, the coin has no memory that makes it more likely to get tails on the second flip.

Thus, while each chromosome has a 50% chance of being shared, there is no "memory" that ensures that both children share half of their father's chromosomes.
You can walk into Walmart right now and buy reading glasses over the counter. I can type in random numbers on a dozen sites and get glasses made to spec.

Contact lenses are regulated by the FDA.
If we step back and think about software development and interviews, we might see two high-level ideas.

First - the interview should probably be a lot like how work is done by the employer. The details of the requirements probably are murky, but they'll be clarified later. The deadline may or may not be arbitrary. The goals are different - you don't need a useful, profitable end product. You need a demonstration of the ability to make such a thing (within the limitations imposed by the employer.)

Second - to be kind to your fellow human taking the interview, you shouldn't place them under undue stress. I enjoy David Rock's work on the brain and the chemical processes in our bodies. (I won't attempt to speak on them nearly as eloquently as the original author.) In short, there are five major things that affect our brains in a very similar way to immediate physical danger; the S.C.A.R.F. acronym, for Status, Certainty, Autonomy, Relatedness and Fairness. In an ideal workplace, and an ideal interview, you wouldn't be threatening those things more than you need to.

Status is already threatened in a way - the interviewee likely desires the job to improve their status in life. But you shouldn't be forcing inferiority down their throat.

Certainty - well this is almost in direct opposition to the reality of doing work in many workplaces, but it shouldn't be. In this case, what you're asking the interviewee to do and to demonstrate should be laid out in clear, understandable terms. You should try to remove some of the barriers to getting them to focus on the core abilities you need them to demonstrate. Of course, understanding communication is a valid skill to test, and you might hope to simulate your real workplace environment by being vague and using insider terminology, but you also have to remember that they have 0 days on the job in your particular place of employ. So they have yet to learn shared terminology. Knowing esoteric insider information shouldn't be tested!

Autonomy - while the above means you should be giving hints as to what you want them to do, and perhaps some suggestion of methodology, they should still feel like they are in control of their choices. You're testing for an ability to reach a conclusion, and you will observe the methods used to get there, but you shouldn't remove all sense of self-direction.

Relatedness - this is controversial, because we've always relied on "people like us" in interviews, only too well. You should want to connect interviewee and interviewer on some shared values and interests, but de-emphasize any focus on likeness determined by birth lottery. That is, they should feel like they can fit in, regardless of superficial differences!

Fairness - this just makes me think about the potential pitfalls. Openly mentioning "better" candidates, your buddy, your niece that's applying, doing a group interview and showing favoritism. Maybe someone else can think about this one and offer up suggestions.

What do you think about applying the above mental framework to how you design and conduct interviews?
Why is including build time sensible?

If one has reproducible builds, wouldn't a commit/tag from the version control system also do the job of traceability and reproducibility ?
I read through the comments an often saw the same sentiment: "Modern Webdesign is bad, artistic expression is bad".
Which strikes me as odd. Sure, there is a place for "boring" and information-dense webdesign. If I go through wikipedia and search for something, I want information, and modern webdesign would be bad in that regard. But there is also a place for modern design in websites. Company websites for example. There, the overall design language is part of the brand identity and defines how I see your company. I cant help but see those "bootstrappy-boring" company websites as very unprofessional (although I know I shouldnt make that connection), and I know at least from asking my family members that this effect is only more pronounced in people that have no direct connection to the tech or design industry. We have to recognize that we are a very little minority - many people dont _think_ about websites - they _feel_ them.
Is that why reddit is so popular? It was "toxic" and yet it grew and normal people used it in droves. Your argument contradicts itself. Most people don't mind reddit or usenet or the "toxicity". It's a handful of busybodies with power trying justify censorship. No different than the church ladies whining about "toxic" rap or "toxic" tv or "toxic" whatever when they themselves are toxic too.

And who defines normal? The saudis? The chinese? The catholic church? The US government? The media? Or do you get to decide?

If you find it unpleasant, then don't use it. If you don't like baseball, then don't watch it. Go watch something else. Everytime we as a society get beyond the puritanical blasphemy craze, it rears its ugly head again.
This. If Jane Jacobs could play Skylines today, she'd probably be on the phone to the devs asking them "why can't I have ground floor retail under my residential?"
I assume he's referring to platform lock-in ala Microsoft Office, AWS, Oracle, or Apple's walled garden driving future decisions. So the first software decision is a down payment until your technical debt hole is so big you can't do anything but throw money down it.
Conceptually that may be true, but it's next to impossible to get performance tires in speed ratings under W and within any particular model it often varies only by 1, rarely 2, speed ratings.
Mux is hiring engineers, PMs, and SEs to build video streaming APIs at scale
The dicks are the ones sending out the junk. Don't blame the victims.

The remedy for the next guy is to use a "return to sender: moved, left no address" notation or ink-stamp (or just "refused"), and to leave the articles in the mailbox. If they keep coming, a form 3575z (reason: MLNA) is a little more work, and the postal employee has to submit it, but is like a permanent change of address to /dev/null .
Thanks. Our landing page is currently in a constant state of flux. I'll make sure that gets fixed. I'm a bit surprised but my previous reply actually generated a non insignificant amount of traffic to our site so we also opened up app.tonic.ai for anyone that wants to give the product a whirl.
The weird and wonderful evolution of cooperation in nature
Why Roblox succeeded where Second Life fell short
Interesting that it's Debian Linux support only for the peripherals. I'd be interested to see if that support grows to other os's, especially if it's a restriction to adoption.

I'm not in the space per-say but what are the predominant OS choices for ML/AI Devs?
> What are some traits shared by the best programmers you know? I'd wager things like introversion, thoughtfulness and detail orientation show up on your list.

I would not put introversion on that list. Great engineers can be either extroverted or introverted. It is irrelevant to quality of coding.
WTF is Roblox?
This was a constant pain point for us as the engineering team grew. With a single staging environment, we could only have one changeset tested at a time. We built a tool like this internally and the engineers love it. When you have 20 feature going out in a week, it's not reasonable to have to wait for staging or qa to be available. We happened to call this 'review apps' but it's based on a similar principle. You can specify in the deployment tool which service you'd like to deploy as a review app, and a PR number.

This is incredibly useful with many interconnected codebases have related changes (I know, bad SoA. best practices are hard). Then I can point review-3918.SERVICENAME.service.XXX.stag's connection string to review-1111.SERVICENAME.service.XXX.stag to ensure that everything is working as expected.
SEO...
MS VS was actually way closer to Sublime that to its current incarnation. I used VC++6.0 as a replacement for Notepad for many years, because it started quickly and handled different code pages (encodings) semi-decently (while most everything else on Windows died on BOM or sth).
I posted it on here some time last year and tried switching from Vim.

The only thing stopping me was my inability to configure it to use different indentation settings per file type.

I'll definitely try again at some point. I love Vim and have used it for nearly twenty years, but Kakoune's grammar just makes more sense in several ways.
I think the article gets it wrong calling it a "Disney" strategy. I think aaaaaaaaaaab is more correct and it should be called a Hallmark strategy. The old word would be "milktoast" (in the blandness definition).

“Tim Cook is giving notes and getting involved,” a producer who has worked with Apple told the publication. One of the CEO’s most repeated notes is “don’t be so mean!,” the source said.

That is so beyond sad. Why bother at all. Just buy someone else and let them do it.
Big software/systems projects being notoriously difficult to estimate and manage, cost overruns the norm, etc.
> baking the build date/machine name into the binary

This I find especially moronic. A deterministic build would have provided a perfect way to trace back a binary to it's sources/source commit, but let's give that up and trade it for a date and the hostname of the build machine :/
Replying to myself to add- I wonder if it extends down to the construction itself (not that a project would hire the workers abroad, but maybe mixing up supervisors/foreman/leads or sending them for training).

Orders of magnitude smaller in scale but in my observations, even things like urban sidewalk, sewer and road construction seem to be conducted entirely differently in Germany, for example, vs North America.

Is the difference in construction specs? Formal vocational education of trades and apprenticeships vs the US? I don't know, but the final products seem to be much higher quality than public projects in the US and I doubt they're spending multiples more.
What I have trouble with is high-level comments. I very rarely find myself wanting to add comments to an individual file but very often to an entire sub-system. Comments like "this package has classes related to Foo which is like Bar except Baz. Foos are populated from this location and are used with service Qux". I struggle to find appropriate places for these kinds of comments.
> one for distance, one computer-specific

How do you find the correction for the computer specific glass?

I have a pair for distance but it is a horror to use with computers.
It's in the "Definitions" section. Interestingly, however, it's not in the PDF - the words are there, but the definitions of the words are missing.
wait we should be paying costs and not a markup? thats communism
I recall that one of the "optimal" designs for one version of SimCity (2000?) was to place street intersections--without connecting streets--at regular intervals, and build a connected subway station next to each.

Certain features were hard-coded specifically for surface street intersections. So you couldn't simulate a Kowloon Walled City level of density, unless you count the arcologies. The car assumption is as built in to the game as it is to real cities.

Power was supplied exclusively by perpetual-motion hydropower dams, enabled by the terraforming tools: flatten, raise land, add water, build dams on the falling-water squares.

Anyway, the point is that if city planners these days are simplifying their task anywhere near SimCity levels of abstraction, the ensuing disaster won't be one that can be selected from a pull-down menu.
Scaling Machine Learning from 0 to millions of users
I wish Google created a development version of TPU for inference so that it's possible to debug models locally and then send them for training to the GCP.