skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The start went like this:

Me: You need this database stuff done. I can consult for you.

Them: We are looking for a full time employee.

Me: Well I'm keeping an open mind here, let me just go through the interview process and see what we both think.

(interviews)

Them: OK we interviewed you and we want to hire you.

Me: After understanding more about the position, I need to be remote.

Them: We don't want to hire any remote employees. OK we'll hire you as a (remote) consultant.

Me: $$$

... time passes ... largest income year ever ...

At this point I failed to look for more clients, and it became a one-client consultancy and eventually died when they decided they wanted to convert me to a (remote) employee after all.
Useful home automation mostly involves robots of one kind or another. Stuff you might pay a person to do because it's so time consuming and tedious. Cleaning, washing & putting away clothes, lawn care, maybe cooking. Basically anything rich people tend not to do themselves, brought within the reach of the working class by robots.

The problem is all the solutions so far kinda suck, and most are still expensive. If they weren't, absent regulation killing the spyvertising industry (oh please oh please oh please), guaranteed to be spyware wholly dependent on sending everything you or they do to "the cloud", I'd say Asimo-style general purpose home robots can't get here soon enough.

Light switches, coffee makers, thermostats? Anyone who cared could already get 95% of the way to as-good-as-IoT with motion sensors and timers on existing, cheaper, out of the box solutions, without all the spying and "I'm sorry I can't reach my server so even though we're on the same local network and I'm more powerful than a late 90s desktop PC I still can't talk to your smartphone because I am a piece of absolute garbage."
Usually you can smell the difference.
Much of the money sliding around in China is grey money, so it is likely to be money laundering from the Chinese perspective. And a lot of that money is earned via prostitution, gambling dens, and whatever that are typically thought of us crimes. Heck, organized crime is rife in China, except rather than being run by a mob, its more often run by the PLA or police.

Admittedly, it’s not that bad anymore (Xi has really cracked down and things have cleaned up a lot), but it was 10 years ago that this wasn’t the case, that is at least some of the money going to Canada.
Do you carry your router with you all the time to provide a bridge to mobile networks?
Walmart does do quality control. I'm not sure how much, but at the very least if your project has too many returns they won't let you sell anymore.
well obviously the default should be Python 3, but I guess no default is better than a default of Python 2. I like that they separated the "user-space" Python from what the bundled tools use as a dependency.
Forgive my laziness, but how does this play with third parties and where is it on the NLP/hardware front?

As much as I love the idea of going open source, the practicalities right now is using Google/Spotify/Weather/Netflix via voice control is the majority of my use cases an

I see now I'm talking less smart home and more smart assistant, so I guess this is verging off a bit from Nest's functionality. WebThings looks really good on first glance - the API seems well designed and intuitive and the gateway idea is exactly what I wanted. It seems like the NLP/Speaker to Gateway connection is needed still.

I really hope this also becomes something third parties support. I'm concerned that even if all of these pieces come together, Netflix/Spotify just say "lol no we're gonna only support Amazon/Google".

Appreciate the links!
After being fully invested in Go for close to 6 years and working at primarily Go based shops...I want to disagree with this headline.

Folks new and old to Go still write data-race riddled code unless they put in the extreme mental effort and care into avoiding data-races. Also, if they write good unit tests that help them spin through the code they can often double-down on ensuring their code is correct by using the race-detector.

Even if you do all of this...sorry but there’s no guarantees.

In my opinion this is why we are seeing languages like Rust invest heavily in something like the borrow checker...to prove at compile time when you have racy code.

If Go had a compile time ability to do this it would be really amazing.

Yes, this all my experience and opinion.
Exactly! My NodeRED besides doing some home automation actually does a lot more "ops" work for me:

1. Complex healthchecks for my side project webhookrelay.com (tests backend functionality every 30 seconds)
2. Normal HTTP healthchecks for all my websites - webhookrelay.com, keel.sh and few other backing services such as drone itself.
3. Updates homebrew formula hash when a new release is out (there's a super easy to use github integration that allows you to modify files)
4. Receives and processes emails from Mailgun about delivery failures.

So yeah, probably the best self-hosted IFTTT/Zapier out there :)
Definitely, but it’s worth noting for people who are unfamiliar - avgas isn’t jet fuel - it’s only used in small piston planes, not anything with turbine engines. It’s still a problem because there are plenty of that kind of aircraft, but most commercial aviation isn’t using leaded fuel.
It probably depends on the countries but your thermostat is usually tied to your HVAC system, i.e. you usually change your thermostat when you change your HVAC, so it's more often than when homes are built.

So the best way to get volume is probably to partner with a HVAC maker.
This so called smarthome stuff is just a bunch of garbage 'solutions' in search of a problem.
I've heard this before, but I felt that `--force-with-lease` requires a lengthier explanation in an an already intimidating article, is harder to type, and generally isn't useful for users of the Sourcehut workflow. It's definitely a useful tool, though. Maybe I should add a footnote.
>but at this time they are literally the only b2c company that has any credibility around privacy

I can think of a few: Purism, System76, OSMC, Mycroft... they're smaller and less well-known than the big players of course, and they're not all perfect, but they treat their users as customers unlike many companies these days.
> but isn't that just a link?

Its a modernized ifame. It seems like they can't introduce some of these features without breaking the security features of iframes.
Actually Walmart's material isn't nearly as low quality you might think. When I'm in Asia, I struggle to find equivalent clothing/shoes for as cheap as Walmart. Walmart's purchasing power ensures the lowest prices for America, it's actually more expensive in Asia.
i would defiantly travel to see the 9, if i was in Houston. i'm glad to hear that spaceX is willing to expend some resources to inspire our next Gen.
Yes, using interface{} introduces a small chance of runtime type errors. I have not heard of any Go projects finding this to be much of a problem in practice. You can also use the type-safe wrapper pattern to avoid this if it's likely to be a problem.

There is no doubt that not having generics makes some code worse than it would be with generics. But I think the problem is often overstated.
>Eventually, I made the switch to full-time freelance investigative reporting.

How does one even get started with freelance investigation?
If enough people had super-fast internet, downloads would get bigger. You could stream a desktop from a remote server for example. On a scale less threatening to software freedom, games could stream their art assets, allowing you to explore petabyte-sized worlds on consumer hardware. You could easily toss trained neural networks back and forth for whatever applications were dreamed up for them.

However, you're not going to see this if 99% of people have 50mpbs. In that world, you'll only see things that use 50mpbs.
I won't use Ali Express because it requires invasive "identity verification." I have visions of whatever documentation they get ending up in some Chinese government intelligence database.
China is the country killer.
1999: Microsoft launches new HTML tag
2019: Google launches new HTML tag
People say this and yet I have much more unwanted interaction with Google than with the government.
The example they give seems bad to me.
I'm fine just seeing the title of a news post and clicking that as a normal <a> tag.
I don't need to see a miniature version of the post that I then need to click on to read anyway.

Also, the preview problem... you could really just use an image as a link if you wanted to. Less convenient, that's true. But meh, this tag seems to offer little extra (to me).
AI, ML, and Big Data: Differences, similarities, and how they work together
I previously submitted 'Uber’s enormous, vague IPO prospectus is an outrage (ft.com)'
Well worth reading and quite ominous in light of Lyft performance IMO

https://www.ft.com/content/60ab80e2-6a8b-11e9-9ff9-8c855179f...
I worry somewhat about being so saturated in outside opinions that I no longer generate my own. It's much easier to scroll down in the nth reddit thread than think on my own.
I, for one, am enjoying my 'smart home' setup, where I can say "Alexa, turn off the TV", "Alexa, turn on Chromecast" and "Alexa, set the bedroom temperature to 72", regardless of which floor of the house I'm on.

I'd rather fiddle with updates and setup once in a while (I have never had to reconfigure the devices in 2 years), than look for that goddamn remote between couch cushions, press the power button and possibly switch audio and video inputs, especially if I'm on the second floor and someone forgot the TV on on the first floor. I would hate to make that trip downstairs, annoyed and grumpy.
Wouldn't there be safety checks in place for this?

Leave hatch open (human error) water flows through first hatch which triggers a secondary hatch to close/lock preventing water from entering far enough into the system to cause damage?

I mean for 3 billion dollars you would think there would be some sort of 'airlock' system that you see in outer space movies where you have two doors/hatches to enter like a small vestibule room in a building?

I've never been on a submarine so my opinions probably don't hold much weight.
rebasing a shared branch is fine, if the audience who needs to know about it is within arms length (or the remote chat equivalent). Rebasing a public branch that's used by hundreds requires special notification tooling and email templates and elaborate public shaming rituals, which people are happy to come up with but seems unnecessary in my opinion if you think twice before force pushing

also: 'git push --force-with-lease' (worth repeating)
Interestingly, what a lot of those sellers don't know is that say you do find a product that you private label. The Chinese companies buy fake reviews for your listing, and the Amazon blackhole removes your listing, and the Chinese sellers win anyways. Building with Amazon is building on the sand, don't build on the sand.
happy to chat more about this - please send a DM
I'd use rebase --interactive quite aggressively on a public branch when it's a feature branch that's not yet been merged. As I'm the only owner of it, the way I see it I owe no guarantees to anyone. You're welcome to watch it, but it's work in progress in every aspect.
Cool, but aren't side-effects just what you want when using a microcontroller to, you know, control things?

I work in embedded development and the amount of pure logic is really small in our software but I guess that varies with the niche you're in.
Yet, Scala has much better and broader IDE support than Kotlin these days. There is first-class support in IntelliJ IDEA, Eclipse and VS-Code, and with advent of Scala 3 the IDE story is going to be even better with full LSP support, so any IDE or editor could get accurate type-aware highlighting and autocomplete for virtually free.

Kotlin has good support only in IDEA and JetBrains said they wouldn't support other IDEs. They seem to make exactly the same mistake as Scala 2 did with supporting only one IDE initially (Eclipse).
Google is starting to reveal the secrets of its experimental Fuchsia OS
>A tenant illegally locking their landlord out...

That's not the question at hand at all though. The question is what kind of liability you incur by legally locking your landlord out.

IANAL, but I'd guess that if you change the locks in a state where it's not legal to do so you're totally hosed in terms of liability. I have no idea how liable and to what degree renter's insurance would cover you if you change the locks in a state that guarantees your right to do so.
Haha, yes. In China, ironically, Walmart became a kind of an upscale establishment.
I also couldn't read the entire article. Just as soon as I thought it was about to end, I eyed over to the scroll bar and saw I was only 1/4 the way through... that was disappointing. Maybe that says something about me but perhaps it says more about the author. Sometimes you just need to get to the point, life is short.
"git rebase" does exactly what you want, except when it's totally unrelated to what you want because what you actually want is "git rebase -i HEAD~3" which does something basically completely different (from a users point of view).
> But it probably comes down to cultural differences, America is very authoritarian.

That has nothing to do with the property owner but "America" based on my read, but I do appreciate this interpretation of the OP. If that's their meaning, I could see why the word comes up.
The math doesn't add up here.

Either integrity is a virtue, or it's not. Either it's something people value, or it's not.

If it's something people value, then it should be one of the attributes people weigh when they choose a spouse/job/politician/cell phone carrier. If it is, then the marketplace of spouses/jobs/politicians/cell phone providers should be incentivized to provide integrity, and also to broadcast that their competitors do not.

I would argue this happens pretty regularly. Samsung using Apple's battery throttling in it's ads comes to mind.

So integrity definitely factors into the marketing calculus of politicians and corporations, but maybe the market doesn't value it enough to offer it the primacy you're looking for.
Federated Data, and a Charter of Digital Rights
Don't know about the keyboards but Mpow earphones are not that bad.
> Why don't American's use an "and" here:

Doing so is still standard American English. However, headline writing in particular has a tradition of extreme brevity, and this style leaves out conjunctions and adjectives (including articles).

As another example of ambiguity, the article title here isn't explicitly clear that Amazon must remove these items from its marketplace. Read literally, "from US marketplace" could imply (somehow) the entire United States retail environment.
> Go is strongly and statically typed with no implicit conversions

This is one glaring exception: Concretely typed objects can be silently converted to interface objects. In particular, a `*MyErrorStruct` can be silently converted to an `error`. The giant footgun associated with this conversion is that because the resulting interface object "remembers" its concrete type, it won't compare equal to `nil`, even if the original value was in fact `nil`.

This is a pretty big exception, which I've seen cause bugs in production. It's common to have one function that returns a concrete type wrapped by another function that returns an interface. That means the silent type conversion is happening in the `return` statement, which is extremely easy to overlook. (Or which can be introduced after the fact by changing the signature of either function.)
Securing satellites: The new space race
When I started consulting, I got given the advice to join the local chamber of commerce. I was skeptical but it was very helpful in terms of meeting the local players. Would recommended it especially outside the traditional tech hub cities
>and accept their TOS...

Money quote.

People aren't thinking ahead here about what this opens you up to with respect to privacy loss. Think about the permissions on your phone such an app could ask for in the future. Now consider that if you don't grant them, you could potentially not get into your apartment.

Smart locks are a cancer. We should cut them out early.
There's also this folk wisdom round when I grew up that young men with girlfriends are much less likely to get violent than those without.

So in short, fight crime with sex and entertainment.
Here is some good quality inspiration:
https://tympanus.net/codrops/
Plenty of thermostats are sold per year. Certainly enough to sustain the many existing vendors.

E.g. I'm in the UK. There are 25 million homes here and pretty much every home has a thermostat.
If I assume that a thermostat lasts 20 years so that about 5% must be replaced in a given year that means a market of 1.25 million thermostats every year.
Every DIY and plumbing supplies shop sells thermostats, so they must sell.
This is an image of the comment for those that don't have access to FT.com https://twitter.com/bytebot/status/1117323665865969664
About 99.9% of the time when people talk about rebase they talk about ‘editing’ history or ‘rewriting’ history as in the first sentence of the article.

I find that terminology terribly misleading and when I was learning git and rebase it confused the heck out of me.

No commits are harmed in the operation of `git rebase`. All the commits you had in the repo before the rebase are still in the repo. Git rebase creates a new sequence of commits and after doing its work relocates the branch name to the tip of the new sequence but you can easily access the previous commits if need be:

$ git co feature-branch
$ git rebase develop
$ git co -b before-rebase-feature-branch feature-branch@{1}
There total expenses was 1,932,917. Even if you remove stock comp they still lost money.
what junk did this zdnet.com load from tru.am?
I like what you're saying, I got into making software to build new valuable things not to extract money from the next greater fool.

Sure a contract is a contract but a contract represents a minimum legal obligation, and I like to do and receive a little more than the minimum legal obligation.
I don't think the fact that they got acquired necessarily tells you that much about whether they would have been profitable on their own.

Probably internet of things is a game Google don't want to be left out of, so they acquired one of the leaders. If this is the case, then it leaves open the possibility that Nest had a choice between profitable and more profitable.
It's probably in the same vein as the classic quote by Tukey "The combination of some data and an aching desire for an answer does not ensure that a reasonable answer can be extracted from a given body of data." - a "need" for an answer can easily motivate people to mangle the data in order to find it even if it doesn't exist.
They had quite advanced smart homes back in the 80s: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0BHIknNa6Eg (and to Nest shame, they still service it! http://unitysystemshomemanager.com/)
A great guide to the Functional style for beginners
As far as anecdotes go, since I moved to London I noticed a sharp decrease in memory performance, heavy hair loss, and a general feeling of unhealthiness, developed a random persistent cough as well. The fact that you can always see a heavy haze even in short tube tunnels tells a lot on the air quality, the last underground cleaning train stopped working in the eighties...very unhealthy place to live/work in my opinion.
>The "Chinese math" fallacy is only fallacious when it hides how difficult it is to steal a small percentage of a giant established market.

Which is what I was using it for.

>How exactly does the "fallacy" apply to Uber, a company that thoroughly understands how difficult it is to carve a big chunk out of entrenched competitors?

To clarify, that part is not the problem with the comment. That is a legit argument for why Uber can justify its valuation.

The problem is trying to amplify the persuasiveness of the argument by appealing to "small percent of huge = big". That deceptively makes the argument more appealing than it deserves to be, and is a lazy form of justifying a valuation. It plays tricks with human intuition on big numbers to (as you note) underplay the difficulty of getting a small number.

Hence why it's a "reach for my revolver" type situation.

Be careful not to equate "they have, independently of this argument, a good case here" with "therefore it's not the Chinese Soda fallacy to mention the percentages."
The problem with Lyft is that they are in a poorly understood market, in second place and burning cash at neck-breaking speed. Even if they manage to start making progress towards profitability, they might need more than that.

The reality is that ride-sharing probably needs another lustrum or so to solidify and that seems excessively long for Lyft in its current state.

Uber faces the same challenges but its way more diversified and can scale down from certain markets and verticals.
Lyft on the other hand has only one market (N.America) and only one vertical (ride-sharing).

Doesn't take a genius to understand that scenario looks risky as hell. Especially when you're in a business with nominal differentiation.
I really agree on the user signed bootloader part. I think we should also have this for Android devices, since most Android devices only have two years of system/security update.
Very interesting process going on right now with Lyft & Uber both losing money and some of their drivers trying to stage protests and strikes. The drivers appear to rely on the company as their primary source of income and want more money yet at the same time the companies are operating at a loss. Were they to increase wages (as % of every ride) it stands to reason the losses would widen. If they get to wide the company goes out of business and the drivers lose their jobs. I understand that this same standard can be applied at any company but this is a gig / 'work only when you want' job so it is different.

The strikes were small so the effects on both companies were negligible. I would be curious to understand what changes the drivers (who work only when they want) expect and how they think a company running deep in the red could meet them. Not trying to pass judgement on the strikers just trying to understand.
I wouldn’t go that far. Maybe more upscale than WuMart, but not as upscale as even carrefour.
(1) Charge different rates based on onsite vs remote service.
e.g. $75/h onsite vs $50/h remote.

(2) Charge a retainer for 'instant' contact.
e.g. $200/month to cover cell-phone bill so you can be reached 'anytime' and/or resolve issues immediately.
The other side to this is: I will reply within 15 minutes, but only able to address the issue when I am available.

(3) Charge for travel time as part of onsite-service.
My billings begin when I leave my home.

(4) always give 3 quotes and specs. (minimum, adequate, suggested)

(5) Never charge for things that you learn. "It took me 3hrs to set that up, but i'm only going to charge you for 1hr because I learned X." They think they get a deal, and your worth increase. The key to that is communication. Make sure they KNOW they got a hell of a good deal.
> So whenever someone ask why you don't short an individual stock its always valid to answer that you believe you are right in the long term but the short term could wipe you out if you shorted.

An example here, where everyone lost out
https://ftalphaville.ft.com/2018/10/31/1540962002000/The-day...
Sorry to sound like a conspiracy theorist, but this could well have been sabotage. A large number of sub-groups in India historically despise each other, and some groups such as some factions of Islam and Sikhism actively promote sedition and sabotage of the country.