skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> When you're spending $1 Billion/year on sales/marketing, and losing $100 Million/year, you have a sustainable business.

If I read this correctly you're defending spending $1Bn in marketing to generate $100M loss when you're business is at run rate? Cash on hand doesn't matter. If it truly takes that level investment in marketing to get to that level of profit you're just delaying the inevitable.

As an aside Palo Alto Networks is not a software company. >50% of their revenue comes from hardware firewall sales (a dying market). If you do the long term math on them the business looks much weaker than you posit because margins are much tighter on the software portions of the products. You can't sell a virtual firewall for 6-figures on hardware you build for less than $15k.
That's what I'm going to try to do. After being paid to code for over 10 years, I simply don't want to do it anymore.

I'm going to start an aerospace company and try something radically different.

I'm single, I have no kids, and don't own a home. Why not? You know?
no air intake, no wind, and no exhaust...

None of those are needed for 3D holographic projections.

they appear on radar systems

That one may be a little tougher.
Password+hacker
Wow, 10% really doesn't get you very far, does it! Well, maybe people should aim higher. In my case, i'm less worried about retiring early, and more interested in saving so my kids can more easily buy their first house.
>If Google offered an ad-free, tracking-free version of all of their services

Gsuite?
Despite this being a cool feat. It sounds so close to the source material (down to parts of the songs being a lofi 1-1 copy paste), that I don't see a real point of it for even existing.
(except "omg death metal neural nets lol" factor)
> Should a developer be responsible because the cookie banner they implemented wasn't compliant with the laws of 100 countries even though the legal team already told them it was ok?

Yes. 100%. "I was just following orders" is not a valid excuse, ever - Nuremberg is the obvious extreme example, but it's true everywhere.
I agree about CSS variables.

I'm unsure about the merits of nesting. Tends to make for some hard-to-read code.
Not sure what it's like today, but last time I tried to use sassc it was a nightmare. The official repo was just the library with no CLI. I couldn't find a CLI that didn't also require me to compile it myself. Very frustrating.
I'm not sure that your assertion that regulated financial institutions are somehow safer checks out with recent history.

Remember the Bernie Madoff ponzi? Bernie Madoff was literally the chairman of the NASD.

The 2008 financial crisis occurred inside of heavily regulated markets, and it was so bad it nearly brought down the world economy.

The effectiveness of regulation vs. the friction it imposes is what matters, along with how (and if) it is enforced.
I had a 760CDV. That was an amazing machine in an era where you had to carry projector panels around. It never failed to amaze onlookers.
To be honest, I think most developers or App owner are not clear of that.

Maybe, we can just follow facebook.com: "Use with Consent"
Also Oracle, iirc Linux was a toy os before IBM and Oracle funded posix compatibility.
Nah, it's been terrible for a long time. It was just harder to notice then, unless you were the target du jour, because there wan't much in the way of easily available alternate sources to compare to. In the late 80s in Canada I got exposed to the same problems when a story I was involved in got distorted to hell.
How to Learn Chinese
Quarantined for limiting the business of pharmaceutical manufacturers.
Ask HN: Best Introduction to Sales?
I know almost nothing about Sales. I'd like to learn more, since I think it'd be instrumental in better understanding markets.

When I look online for good sales books to read, they all seem based on method / gimmick.

Is there anything more about the general process of sales and/or sales theory? I just want to understand the basics better, not like a 10 step checklist to closing every sale ever.
Thank you for providing an alternative. While the subject matter is interesting, the submitted article was low quality, both in the writing and whatever editing it received (numerous grammatical and textual errors remain).
I really don't understand why these new feature phones don't take better advantage of modern voice transcription technology to make those old clunky dialer keyboards obsolete.
Would you be willing to try it for a day or a week? If so, why? If not, why not?
I agree with UX, but scalability has a working solution in the Lightning Network. However, that needs major UX development...

Bitcoin also needs fungibility:

"Fungibility is the only property of sound money that is missing from Bitcoin & Litecoin. Now that the scaling debate is behind us, the next battleground will be on fungibility and privacy. I am now focused on making Litecoin more fungible by adding Confidential Transactions." -Charlie Lee

https://twitter.com/SatoshiLite/status/1089935081337085952
I use a mechanical keyboard (blue) on desktop, and previously used a relatively thick Lenovo laptop. If my 2018 MBP wasn't constantly double typing 'e', I'd rank it right up there with them in terms of feel. It's shallow, but very crisp, with just the right activation force.

Though, if Apple couldn't fix its issues in three generations, it may be time for them to move on.
I know. Do it! You don't have anything to lose.
Why would sass have any effect on whether or not you have conflicts? You can just do things in plain CSS with descendant (' ') selectors, same as if they were nested in sass.
You would have to ask them.
You might be thinking of libsass. sassc is dead simple and solves all of this users issues.
Would a hat like this serve a similar function? https://www.iheartraves.com/products/winter-lights-dad-hat
That's how tictacs, which are almost 100% sugar, are sold as 0 sugar - servimg size is 1 tictac.
Agreed. Of course thinness matters to some extent— I wouldn’t want to cram a three-inch-thick laptop into my bag. But—even ignoring ultrabooks— any, say, MacBook Pro or Dell Latitude from the past decade (or two!) is thin enough to not give a second thought.

I’m all for maximizing portability, but it’s not worth sacrificing durability and utility. That’s what tablets are for.
Sorry, I meant in Norway.
> I can assume that it's not injecting malicious code into my application.

You don't need to assume, npm has an audit command that helps figure out if any of your package dependencies have reported vulnerabilities: https://docs.npmjs.com/cli/audit

Does Go?
Of course there are some sophisticated adversaries who were probably too smart to use phones even before Snowden, but I’ll venture a guess that the typical terrorism conspiracy is closer in sophistication to a street gang than to the KGB. At least, if there were a clear link between a terrorist plot and and institution full of taxpayer-funded career spooks, it would not be terrorism, just war.
> The only thing I still couldn't live without is nested selectors. Writing maintainable CSS at scale is impossible without them.

Bullshit.
Insulin Pumps, Decapped Chips and Software Defined Radios
This is low quality writing. And the author seems ignorant of the subject matter. I expect better from the New York Times.
An Island of Silicon Valley Affordability Says Yes to More Housing
Both hilarious and sad. Their words are polished PR but their eyes say “I’m close to divorce and my kids don’t know me.”
I wonder how many are going to Juul. They already have the guy who was in charge of the iPod.
Really up to you and what your goals are, but ideally have at least working code and your envisioned public API implemented. I think it's fine to completely rework your API based on feedback after putting it out there, but I wouldn't take a project very seriously if it got published while saying something along the lines of "oh I'm not sure yet if this is the right API" or if there's some giant, obvious gap of functionality missing.

Personally, I prefer releasing when docs cover the public API and I have at least some test coverage.
LinkedIn is notorious for this. The app still asks for contact access all the time.
Latest Hubble observations: disparity in Hubble constant is not a fluke
Google invested in KaiOS but they don’t own them. It has yet to be seen how Google-centric KaiOS will become.
> the DIF is only required by law to have $3375 on hand for every $250,000 it is currently insuring

This is a silly thing to complain about.

Surely you don't think your car/home insurance company keeps the cash value of all the property they insure on hand? They keep a tiny fraction of what they've insured, to cover the tiny fraction that gets claimed as a loss in an average year.
Best Project Management Software and Tools for 2019
People tend to use the word blockchain as a near synonym for cryptocurrency, but even as the article in this thread shows, it’s not the only application for it. A blockchain is just a type of data structure, very similar to a linked list, with _some_ additional integrity features.

A lot of the pointless debate and highly opinionated grandstanding that takes place around blockchain is centred around misuse of the word. As far as data structures go, it’s a perfectly reasonable one, and has plenty of uses outside of cryptocurrency. Sure it’s a buzzword, but politicising the use of a particular data structure seems just as pointless as any other kind of dogmatic evangelism to me.
Show HN: Lightweight SSL/TLS Reverse Proxy with Autogen Certs (LetsEncrypt)
Thank you for the video link jumping to that timestamp! To paraphrase Elon, he is saying he sees three broad goalposts;

1) internally feature complete - end of this year,

2) internally they believe reliable enough that the software can let the user not actively check in / driver does not need to look out the window - mid next year

3) able to convince regulators in some jurisdictions that drivers do not have to look out the window - end of next year.

Here's where people go wrong. Now I didn't watch the entire video, but my understanding is Elon is not saying that the car will never need a user to take over. He is not saying the car will drive anywhere, at any time, under any conditions.

He is saying that the software will be reliable enough to fully drive the car in all of the basic driving environments (highway, rural, urban, etc.). It detects stop signs, traffic lights, it navigates intersections, it makes unprotected left turns, it can merge, etc.

That's what I think Elon is trying to convey when he says "feature complete". There will be neural networks, algorithms, logical decision trees, whatever, to handle all of these common driving scenarios. He wants all those scenarios coded and demoable in some condition by the end of this year.

This is not something they roll out in a day. This is gradual feature deployment over the next year leading up until "feature complete" which is a point where some drivers are getting door-to-door in some cases under supervision with wheel check-ins but without any disengagement for the whole ride.

After that point it is 6-12 months of training, training, training the networks based on Fleet learning, billions of miles tracking every single disengagement, and aggregating all that user feedback into the algorithms.

They will know when the system needs to disengage. They will know every way that it fails. They will be tracking this data and providing it to regulators for evaulation. And Elon thinks around the end of next year, they could be in a position to make a case for removing the wheel checkins and telling users that this car can drive itself, and keep you safe, and that if it hits a threshold where it can't do that, it will fail gracefully.

So perhaps there will still be the intersections where the car gets stuck. If there is a road closure and the cop wants you to drive on the wrong side of the road, maybe the computer will refuse to do it and just sit there and you'll have to take over. But if you're cruising down the highway and an 18-wheeler pulls out in front of you, yeah, the car has to be able to see that and stop.
When working with an inexperienced or forgetful manager, it’s sometimes helpful to report frequently, but tactfully and informally, on progress and plans:

“Here’s the memorandum on those design changes. I’m still working on the cost analysis for the Acme proposal and expect to finish late tomorrow. I might not get to the intermodulation study until Monday; can it still wait until then?”

This reminds the manager of the assignments, reassures that they haven’t been forgotten, and offers the option to change priorities or reassign tasks.

A good manager shouldn’t need subordinates to take the initiative like this, of course, but any reasonable manager should appreciate being kept informed.
I recently built a new website from scratch after about three years working in other software areas. Found to my surprise that I came back with some very different opinions about how CSS should be structured than I had in my web dev days, and I didn't end up using SASS at all. Still think the code ended up cleaner and more modular than what I wrote before using SASS. The only feature I really missed was @extend, but making the code I would have put in the % selector an actual class and using that in addition to a specialization class in the HTML worked well enough.
"People don't design ships, the ocean designs ships". The black slab is popular not because people are making it, but because people are buying it. This doesn't mean that it is optimal, but companies have to respond to market pressures.
Only one paragraph seems to be directly related to the headline:

> I think that the next backlash is going to be against technology. We’ve seen the backlash against globalization. If anything, the dislocations and the adverse labor market implications of artificial intelligence, automation, new digital technologies—the impacts of those will be even larger. If we persist on a path that is creating highly divided societies, in terms of income and social status, in terms of who gets access to the political system, I think the pitchforks, to use your term, might be coming out for technology, and that would obviously be both economically and politically very dangerous.

What would trigger the proverbial pitchforks to come out? Unemployment is one, but unemployment has continued to stay low despite the economy becoming more automated. Generally speaking, automation displaces specific fields of work but does not case greater unemployment in aggregate. I think the perception that some companies, especially big social platforms, are politically manipulating content or consistently enforcing rules in a partisan manner is another factor that could elicit the brandishing of pitchforks - hopefully in a metaphorical sense. My last answer would be egregious violation of privacy but hack after hack happens and leak after leak happens with only short-term outrage - so I don't think this is a concern.

In conclusion, I'm still not sure what kind of issue would most feasibly trigger a backlash against technology. Not to mention, I think phrasing this as a backlash "against technology" is too broad to be effective. Most people when they think of "technology" think FAANG, self driving cars, and social media. That's really just a fraction of "technology".
Would be interesting to know how this one escaped the grave robbers.
Theft of personal information seems the most obvious one that they could be charged with. Unauthorized access of email accounts and exfiltration of information is something hackers have gone to jail for.
Here's a mirror, courtesy of me reading a lot:

http://archive.is/HYwbc
My point is if you err on the side of ethics you likely would never need to worry about the law. I am fully confident the vast majority of people can determine when they're doing something unethical. I am not saying people will not undertake actions they know to be unethical, but avoiding unethical actions will protect that person from exposure to legal liability.
The history I described shared the blame among several different powerful individuals and nations, only some of which were colonial.

The DRC gained 'independence' 60 years ago. 60 years after the US's independence, we were in constant wars with native Americans (leading to the Trail of Tears) and experiencing an economic crisis that lasted 7 years. 30 years later we would have a devastating civil war. 60 years after Ireland's independence, we were right in the middle of the three decade long Troubles. Hong Kong has never achieved independence. Flourished indeed.

Stable, strong, modern government takes time and peace, neither of which DRC has had much of.
The worst kind of spam is not the Nigerian princes and V1AGRA ads
Finding influencers through social network analysis
Canada says Facebook broke privacy laws and 'refused to act responsibly'
Never worked at Apple, but from what I've heard from friends there ID is a much more powerful role than at most hardware companies. They are the ones who define what the product should be and how the user interacts with it and tend to get the final say on such matters. At other companies this would be in an MRD/PRD defined by product managers or another group.
As much as I like Malwaretech, and followed him long before WannaCry was around, stopping malware isn't a reason for a pardon.

Arresting him by waiting until he came to the US rather than issuing when they knew they wanted him should be a reason, or the fact that when the crimes were commited he was a minor. But being famous for stopping malware is no reason to pardon someone.

All the best to him though, I still can't believe it's legal to detain people for so long without a trial.
Medicine Man [0] is a 1992 movie about a researcher who discovers a species of ant which has cancer-curing properties. As a teenager at the time I thought, "Why doesn't some pharmaceutical company simply test every ant species to find a cancer cure?".

Today my answer to my younger self would be, "Because there are thousands of ant species and the company couldn't patent its discovery, so there is no incentive to conduct such expensive research"

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medicine_Man_(film)
I've wanted to try using Skia for rendering on desktop apps for a while now, but typography has been the thing to stop me. With Direct2D + DirectWrite, you get a very clear, complete, and reasonably integrated stack for all your vector rendering needs. With Skia, however, my understanding is that you have to defer to system APIs like DirectWrite for certain tasks, or pop cross platform frameworks like Harfbuzz on top (along with a layout engine and whatever else you might need for international text). Either way, these integrations are often poorly documented.

It's a shame that typography in desktop apps is such a hard thing to find resources on, especially if you want to limit platform-specific code. There's that wonderfully informative 'State of Text Rendering' article, but it's so many years out of date, that it's hard to tell what is still relevant and accurate.
he's not dead just in cryo!!
I am pretty sure people somehow managed to share silly jokes with friends long before there were FB or Twitter, and will manage long after they are gone. Some of the best books or music in existence were written before there even were computers, let alone FB.

You also seem to have missed the actual point -- that working on "incredibly difficult, challenging..." problems is rather orthogonal to doing something obviously evil (or good, for that matter). And in case of Facebook, or Twitter we can already see verifiable adverse effects of that work. While I have yet to see anyone manage to point out any positive effects apart from slight convenience for a few people.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't sassc require the user to compile it?
Keep in mind that Hutchins had no idea what registering the domain would do at the time of registration. It was pure dumb luck that it turned out for the best, it could very well have been a disaster. In fact he even admits that he went through a panic phase after domain registration where he thought he'd triggered the malware [1]. Which makes all the "He's a hero" articles bogus if not amusing to say the least.

"After about 5 minutes the employee came back with the news that the registration of the domain had triggered the ransomware meaning we’d encrypted everyone’s files (don’t worry, this was later proven to not be the case), but it still caused quite a bit of panic."

This nytimes article is just terrible. Absolutely terrible.
Sarah Jeong should be ashamed. After this and the way she treated Naomi Wu [2], I don't think I'm going to be giving her any journalistic credence.

[1] https://www.malwaretech.com/2017/05/how-to-accidentally-stop...

[2] https://medium.com/@therealsexycyborg/shenzhen-tech-girl-nao...
There's one such Yakuza boss whom I frequently see at my local sento bathhouse.

His two or three servile bodyguards and quite fantastically beautiful body tattoo, make him very easy to identify as a top crime boss.
Nope. If you don't like it, you don't have to deal with it and it isn't your problem. I, for one, like being able to spend my money as I please, even if it entails higher risk. I don't need to be coddled.
He's gotta get in line between Edward Snowden and Reality Winner
Pardons can be issued for any reason, or no reason. They are entirely at the discretion of the executive
Canada – Privacy Commissioner takes Facebook to court over data breaches
Discussed back then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4709438

And a bit in 2015: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9865698
The vast majority of OSS projects are in poor shape or incomplete/unserious. Most are dead too.

A lot are of the sort "I played around with this idea over the last couple of weeks. I want to get back to it (maybe) but don't have the time now. Here's the code in case someone else finds it useful."

Even popular packages have a hard time finding people willing to contribute code back.

So, I argue that you shouldn't worry about if it's the right time or not.

Now, there are certainly projects where worrying about timing is appropriate and important. If you write a new text editor or database you want to make sure it doesn't destroy user data even in the first release because the project will get a reputation that it doesn't care about basic assurance testing, which is important for those sorts of projects.

However, what you describe doesn't seem like one of those.
That’s absolutely not the same. An internship has a defined start and end date and you need to do something egregious not to make it to the end. In that sense it’s more like a short term contract than anything else and contractors get paid a lot more than salaried employees to compensate them for the risk involved.

Most internships are for hiring, not the labour the company gets from them. They function as three month long interviews but unlike a short term contract leading to hire it’s expected that they won’t immediately convert into a job as students return to university for another year. They’re also far more opaque to other employers on a cv. If someone did internships at three different companies over their degree they could have wanted to see many different companies or they could have performed below expectations at all three places. If you see their cv you won’t know.
That's not how boards work. Force what kind of sell (sale?) on him?

Everyone knows Apple is workin on a car.

The other car companies have so far looked like blind idiots. How does being early lead to "too expensive and less convenient"?
It's a very bizarre read. Not sure how any of their logic follows at all.
Please elaborate a little more as your criticism is unsubstantiated.