skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Having been involved in a very similar project I think the mistakes would be on both sides.

"hired the vendor based on a cool demo & vendor size"
It is common that companies don't chose the right people to assess vendors and review the suggested approach. Often the consultancy sends in sales teams to pitch to the boardroom with demos and "we're Big Company X and know what we're doing". However it seems that Hertz knew enough to ask for specific functionality that didn't get delivered.

"did not have a Hertz employee as Product Owner"
Part of leading a project is making sure that your client, internal or external, is properly educated and involved in necessary decisions. Accenture shouldn't have accepted the PO role as it is a conflict of interest.

"tried to go big fast instead of taking an iterative approach"
I don't recall reading if this was Hertz's decision, it could well have been Accenture's suggestion and in the early stages of this relationship Hertz would have trusted their "expert" recommendation.

"did not implement proper tests & validation"
This would have been Accenture's responsibilty.

"spent $10M without building internal skills"
It was $33M and you're right, although we don't know what skills they built internally. They might have been better off building a team internally but often companies prefer to hire "expert" as it's often easier from a cost centre and administrative view.
Surprised at Sales and Marketing expense given the low number of Enterprise (>$100k) contracts. Wonder what's baked in there beyond AE compensation? I don't see a whole lot of traditional advertising, but maybe it's out there?
Delta's seats still do. They've just reduced the recline, not eliminated it.
The state of Linux graphic design tools in 2019
Although Microsoft has been very successful lately, I wish they hadn't given up on competing in some consumer areas such mobile. Now we are stuck with only Apple & Google.
It’s still mind boggling that all these unicorns haven’t found a way to make money even after being in business for years and having a mature product. It’s a strange world.
i watch my kids bounce back from and fight through illness in awe. My wife says i suffer from "man colds" but when i have a fever i'm completely incapacitated. I just lie in bed and think "... so this is how it ends" heh
Recently Google has bounced replies to emails from a gmail.com address to us, with a message about it being "suspected unsolicted email" (for a reply???). That's just egregious (we're on a dedicated server at a reputable supplier, same IP for years, proper email processess, not on any blacklist and only low-volume usage - certainly no spam).
They are already profitable. They're just warning it's possible they might become unprofitable. Just like any other company.
The answer to the clickbait headline is "pollution," and the town is Waycross, GA. Here's your "money" paragraph:

> In late 2015, the Georgia Department of Public Health said it could find no link among the children’s cancer cases. Then it backtracked and said more investigation was needed. In December, the federal government stepped in. The Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, an arm of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said it would work alongside state officials in evaluating contamination at the railroad yard as well as an Atlanta Gas Light property that once held a power plant, which was torn down after closing 60 years ago.
Also saying "Hey Siri, who am I?" will do it as long as you have a contact for yourself (see comments [0])

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18212978
Is there any other industry where a company can go public having lost $500,000,000 over the last 3 years?

I get it their “market share” is increasing every year and the loses are staying the same...and even that is not the full picture of a path to profit.

But if the company could turn a profit, then why not do it privately, show that and then go public? My guess like Uber and Lyft...they can’t turn a profit, and for any hope to turn profit they need this continual growth at a loss, and at some point the investors dump the bag on the public getting a return in a bubble they created and let the public fund the losses.

I think to balance the playing field with VC and private investment, companies shouldn’t be able to IPO with loses.
Cellophane is what I see for the plastic.

And there's a cheese grater on the left
They're doing TV ads on national networks in the UK, which doesn't come cheap.
To kinda-sorta paraphrase myself from last week[1], I suspect that when people say "blockchain", what they typically mean is that they think implementation details are the most important thing, and what the product actually does is just an afterthought.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19699807
> smaller sovereign jurisdictions

This limits what you can build to the size of a single jurisdiction, though. Devolve it to county level and you can never build any more rail at all.
Ditto. If the person reclines I'm literally pinned between their seat-back and my seat-front. I take painkillers for flying because I cannot wave my magic wand and spend 6x as much for higher class.
Newsom clearly rejected the existing plan, saying it would "would cost too much and take too long.” It could take an indeterminate amount of time to formulate a new plan and restart construction. The Second Avenue Subway in New York was stalled more than 30 years after construction started.
The MSFT campus is practically a utopian city. I actually think that if you included contractors, support, restaurants, city utilities, etc. you’d have a reasonable basis for a high-producing self-sustaining economy.
>>I would say someone dad's being an IAS would have almost zero impact on stepping up in the career ladder in a US tech company

That's like saying, having an IAS father makes no impact for someone wanting to be a top doctor in the US.

In reality having an IAS dad means having access to tuitions, mentoring, ability to afford a whole lot of other things like say education in a foreign university etc etc.

Most kids don't have access to this because they have to work immediately after they finish their education in India, or worse have to work through their education. There is no one back home providing financial support to your family. There is also pressure to send money back home, or handle other responsibilities(eg. Marrying off a sister). Each of these things gradually drive to last straw on the Camel's back for a lot of people.

There is only that much you can do in life when you have n things demanding your attention, and resources all at the time when you should be focusing on working on that career.
Time to break them up.
Just a few hours ago in the frontpage: Bullshitters: Who Are They and What Do We Know about Their Lives?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19749130
Perhaps I'm just not aware how things work in companies of Slack's size, but... what do you think $4M/mo is spent on, for what essentially amounts to a chat app?

I realise there a lot of extras in Slack (attachments cost S3 storage, video calls take bandwidth, webhooks take some processing), but as of January 2019, they had 10M daily active users. $50M/365 gives us $137K per day. $137K per day just to serve 10M active users? That's nearly $14 per day (over $400 per month!), for just 1000 users using a simple chat app.

This is not including any staff, development, nothing. Literally just hosting costs, which should already be deeply discounted given the amounts and agreements involved. That seems... excessive?

Edit: It's worth noting that $50M is the -minimum- commitment they have to AWS. One can assume the actual bill is higher.
Memory usage seems to mirror their revenue as well!

I like slack, we use it on all the experiments I work on, but I'm seriously considering upgrading my workstation for the privilege of not restarting my slack tabs every day or so...
Science still carries significant cultural cachet. It may be the only remaining sources of authority that does. How much longer that cachet can be abused before it is lost is a concern of mine. The replication crisis and general low quality of academic journal articles are especially worrisome in this regard.
Update: https://twitter.com/TechAltar/status/1120639708877459457
Simulink uses similar symbols to IEC, they just write the actual name of the operation, like "AND", rather than the logic symbol, "&".
The government needs to step in (probably the only one with the will to do it will be - sooner or later - the EU commission) and define minimum space in flight seats.

Regulation, when done properly, really improved life for everyone.
The PDF linked in the article [0] is pure gold.

> C. The investment in our DNA leads to breakthrough innovation and allows us to move out of the traditional linear system and into the future

> BREATHTAKING is a strategy based on the evolution of 5000+ years of shared ideas in design philosophy creating
an authentic Constitution of Design.

> B. Magnetic Fields: Magnetic fields exert forces on inner and outer surfaces of the Earth.

> B. Pepsi Energy Fields: Symmetrical energy fields are in balance.

> C. Magnetic Dynamics: Magnetic field are impacted by sun radiation and wind motion.

> C. The Pepsi Globe Dynamics: Emotive forces shape the gestalt of the brand identity.

Also, take a look at the deconstruction of the old Pepsi logos into arbitrary ellipses ("Perimeter Oscillations") on pages 8ff.

It gets increasingly surreal ("Light Path with Gravitational Pull" vs "Gravitational Pull of Pepsi", "Relativity of Space and Time" vs "Pepsi Proposition / Pepsi Aisle", difference between a "Pepsi Galaxy" and a "Pepsi Universe", ...) on the last pages.

Dimensionalize exponentially.

[0] https://jimedwardsnrx.files.wordpress.com/2009/02/pepsi_grav...
I like my work & field (including subfield), and even aside from not wanting to make my life about work I enjoy the incremental improvements as I hone my skills year after year. And honestly there is so much to learn that I dont think I'm anywhere close to hitting the skill ceiling.
The reporting requirements make anonymous testing impossible, which discourages some people from getting tested at all.
As I said, that the MSVC compiler is not supported, Clang is required. And now Microsoft is building direct support for Clang into Visual Studio which will drastically simply the instructions in your link.

Your link merely confirms that Visual Studio can be used as an IDE.
They can (at least for individuals & orgs in the UK), and they can decide one day they don't want the media reporting on their censorship.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tempora
Going back to 1980, over 20% of companies going public each year have had negative earnings in the prior year. It’s hardly unheard-of.

https://www.datawrapper.de/_/K02zm/
Bitcoin Tumbles After Officials Allege $850M Fraud
That message protocol will not be federated due to how greed and a lust for control works on the internet in this time.
So I am on record around here as kinda thinking that cryptocurrency people are worse than coal-rollers with the cavalier garbage they do to our planet, but it's worth pointing out that a "blockchain" need not do that--cryptocurrency needs to do that because it has to be "hard" to create some kind of phantom scarcity and therefore rarity and therefore perceived value for the Ponzi schemers at the top of them to sell to the next sucker in line.

Blockchain multi-party verification can be fairly fast when you take out the grift. Well, that grift. The buzzword-solution-searching-for-a-problem grift, as you note, is still very much in play.
I have logwatch logs that I email to my gmail address via Google's own SMTP servers using my own Google credentials for authentication.

Hilariously, Google will flag these emails sent to myself using my own credentials and their infrastructure as spam. I have no faith in them ever getting this right.
I have to fly for university work. They can only purchase economy seats. Either I pay personally out of pocket or suffer (I'm 6'4"). I don't quite fly enough, and to diverse international destinations on partner airlines, that status upgrades are rare.
This is what Microsoft Cognitive Services saw:

Objects [ { "rectangle": { "x": 346, "y": 321, "w": 333, "h": 417 }, "object": "mammal", "parent": { "object": "animal", "confidence": 0.719 }, "confidence": 0.716 } ]

Tags [ { "name": "wall", "confidence": 0.9889654 }, { "name": "indoor", "confidence": 0.9775573 }, { "name": "doll", "confidence": 0.9775573 }, { "name": "person", "confidence": 0.966689169 }, { "name": "toy", "confidence": 0.5887871 }, { "name": "collection", "confidence": 0.535430968 }, { "name": "bear", "confidence": 0.432904869 }, { "name": "christmas", "confidence": 0.351226926 }, { "name": "animal", "confidence": 0.350886434 }, { "name": "family", "confidence": 0.3459218 } ]

Description { "tags": [ "indoor", "table", "sitting", "food", "dog", "woman", "black", "bear", "holding", "standing", "man", "room", "people", "bed", "group", "stuffed", "red", "kitchen" ], "captions": [ { "text": "a group of stuffed animals sitting on top of a table", "confidence": 0.764803648 } ] }
> Because there are multiple airlines

Where is this? In much of the US, there are only two airlines. Some lucky Americans might get to pick from three or four airlines. Airlines in the US are not really competitive in any meaningful way - https://www.economist.com/leaders/2017/04/22/a-lack-of-compe...

All American Airlines has to do is announce they're eliminating seats, and Delta and United would probably match them within 3 to 6 months.
The tech industry is also responsible for ISIS, since they use social media a lot.
This is just ridiculous. Is there a better chip to process the exact image depth & resolution with the exact layers and co-efficent accuracy that Tesla uses? No.

Does that make it the most advanced AI chip in the world? No! In fact, frankly, you're trying to have a technical discussion about a bullshit term. Tesla isn't producing an AI chip, they're producing a scalar product chip. It does a 96x96 Mult-add and that's basically it.

How does it do on any of the standard AI benchmarks? Oh it can't run any of them because it's not got support for any of them because it lacks many of the basic features of what any normal person would consider a chip capable of doing AI work.

It is the best chip to run the convolutions and pooling of 1 neural net that Tesla thinks it will want to run. It's the best 'AI' chip in the same way that the chip Nokia produces for it's mobile backhaul is the best 'neworking' chip.

The point is that the chip they're trying to compare their custom ASIC to is capable of running several AI frameworks none of which the ASIC can. Hell it can't even run single precision floating point operations.

Tesla has the best chip in the world for the one neural network they want to run. I bet you good money their custom ASIC sucks at running Waymo's AI workload.
It's still mind boggling that all these unicorns haven't stopped growing after being in business for years and having a mature product. It's a strange world.
Aww come on! No punch line?
Caffeine is a diuretic. If he isn't drinking decaf, it's a net loss.
Since Rust supports macros, I think you can actually implement most of JSX's syntax in it directly without needing an additional compiler.
Well, these guys do have a good way to make money. Enterprise contracts are worth their weight in gold. As you could see from the quote, their revenue has increased more than their losses - which mean that they are on their way to become profitable. Arguably they could be now, if they didn't invest in growth as much.
The problem is that threads lead to missed messages. That’s a bigger problem than potential of noise. At least allow a user to decide if they want to see messages in threads or not.
Weird article. Why write an entire cross-platform GUI toolkit when he could port IUP to OS X? :)
> Microsoft has many business models and one of them is based on advertisements, example : LinkedIn.

LinkedIn make bank from selling Sales Navigator. Ads are a tiny proportion of their revenue.
Whatever one thinks of the current situation, we are closer to civil war or mass unrest than any time since the late 60s. That's sobering.
Look into the framework Yew. It sits somewhere between elm and react in how it's designed, and makes use of an html macro that allows for jsx-like markup.
In most planes people cannot move their chair back when I sit behind them; my legs block them from doing so and that makes them angry often. So agreed; prevent the recline on short flights.

For long haul economy I often cannot sit normally and usually they put me somewhere better except if it is a very full flight. Then it is absolute suffering. My last 10 hr flight was in a seat that was cramped against some divider screen and because of that the table was much smaller and I could physically not unfold it so it was impossible to eat or drink without spilling and it was too cramped to sleep. The staff absolutely did not care. It is bad news if you have to fly long haul on a budget...
That's like splitting hairs. C'mon. On the job perks include Free accommodation, chauffeured cars, pensions, maids, bribes, pensions, plot buying opportunities in top govt layouts and peons to do everything including for something as simple as forwarding a memo.

Heck bribes itself can set your 7 generations for a life time of nobility.

There is a reason why people waste years behind cracking these exams.
Ah, OK. I didn't know that. (Sorry moderators)
This doesn't seem surprising to me considering Forced fingerprinting, photographing and measuring has been part of the law for some time and held up in the supreme court. Even forced DNA samples and I believe blood samples are allowed.

My understanding is that those things are not considered testimony unlike forced password production.

A related distinction is made between being forced to surrender a key to a safe vs the combination to the safe. One is physical the other is testimony.
"Tech industry/company" is a useless term. Facebook and Google are ad networks, and it's advertising that's getting a backlash.

Microsoft has a much smaller ad business with Bing (although still 3x bigger than Twitter) so of course they don't get the same amount of backlash because of it. Apple is in a similar position.
The Nanny State brings us the Nanny 'net -- great (sigh).
Why do they have to be mutually exclusive? Why would safety be contrary to business opportunity? If anything, I would say that users' safety should be present in any legally viable business endeavor.

Edit: I want to clarify that I'm not in favor of surveillance or opaque mechanisms run by any State.
I switched to Mac a year ago after more than 25 years using only using windows.. there are some glaring holes in mac os, but it's 1000x better than windows (and I'm not even going to get into the Linux argument).
Yes, it is always a reality check from the feel good vscode/wsl/Nadella lovefest when they foist some unwanted telemetry or ads in various parts of Windows, that they are a beast with many heads.
This PDF is hilarious. How can anyone get away with so much bullshit is beyond me.
I can get to maybe two destinations from Iowa on Amtrak. Takes a couple of days to get to either coast. And no cheaper than by air.
That’s an unnecessarily hostile comment. I want to disable threads for myself so I don’t miss important messages. What’s your use case for disabling vowels? And where’s your list of people genuinely asking for disabling vowels for years?
It's interesting that you bring up AOL, because I remember dealing with this kind of crap with them. It was annoying, but didn't feel like it was as big of a deal.

I guess the only real difference is that with AOL it was less insidious... You knew it was only for aol.com emails and that you weren't dealing with business info. Not that emails to personal addresses aren't important, but at least it wasn't suddenly SomeRandomFortune500Customer.com that sales is trying to email a proposal to right before the deadline that "is make or break for the entire company!"...
Sure, but if you have to pay a premium for regular seats just because you have a disability, that seems like a problem. And the injury scenario could also be extremely problematic. What if there are no sitting seats left, or you could afford the cattle class seat but not the business class seat?

If my grandmother needs to fly, do we have to upgrade both her seat and someone else’s in the family to something twice as expensive so someone can help her with the various things she can’t do for herself any more? Or upgrade the whole family if we want to sit together?

Current cattle class seats aren’t comfortable. But they’re accommodating to the elderly and people with disabilities or injuries. If some seat shuffling is required to accommodate a special case it’s usually just shifting people between aisle and non-aisle seats, not downgrading them to standing seats so someone else can sit.
No necessary. We were lucky, but our daugher gave us very little trouble in this regards. She was breastfed, so feeding her at night was a minimum hassle at night and wife barely had to wake up for it.
Not sure where on the rule-exception continuum this expierience falls, but my point is that having a newborn does not guaranty you an miserable existance in the zombie mode.
To be VERY clear: I would never go near EF.
No, I think this line of thinking is exceptionally counterproductive.

If you are the sort of lovely person who is bothered by others' working conditions and rights, a cleaner in your home is absolutely the best outcome. Not only do you get to pay above the odds —if you want to— you get to see them, you can talk to them and ask them how they're doing in life.

Conversely how do you suppose the teenagers who assembled your robot is being cared for? What about the miners extracting the rare earth metals used in batteries and motors? What about the villages around said mines that suffer horrific levels of pollution? And what about the dump where all this ends up in under 10 years time?
"No, you misunderstand completely. There is free software and there is open source. Open source does not compete with paid/proprietary based on price."

Open office is a good example. Everybody I know uses it as a free alternative for Microsoft Office. How is this not competing on price?

From a developer standpoint, it's great to be able to tinker, check for spyware, etc. But 99% of users will never actually care or look at the source and only even care about it because it's a free version of a proprietary counterpart.

"You can sell open source for thousands of dollars. Redhat does it every day"

You can. But you have no competitive advantage because you are required under the GNU to release your source to everyone (and any other company can sell it for X amount less).

Companies need to either sell support or something else to stay relevant (redhat sells support, certifications, and books).

This is one of the reasons SaaS have become so popular over the last couple of years. You don't need to release your source and could base your entire business on open source software without having to release anything back and lose your competitive advantage.
They have operated at a net loss for the past 3 years - this is simply untrue.
The SEC fundamentally believes it's ok to lose money investing. It's up to you to assess the investments and decide where to put your money.
That's the nature of the market. However, it's still a very valuable to say 'market will be lower than today, by 30%, somewhere between today and 10 years'. The periods where this phrase were true throughout history are rather very rare - and I do belive it's quite true now.
Because that's only true for graduate positions.
the train network is great! if you live in DC, NYC, or Boston, you can easily get to any other of those three cities!

...
> Your rebuttal would be just as unfounded as the theory you are dismissing.

True enough, but that doesn't validate the higher-profile original either. Seems a bit "well actually" TBH.