skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> “It’s hard to take risks if you don’t have a safety net”

Okay, here is a twist: How much do poor people spend on lottery/gambling activity? How much is that proportionally to their income?

From looking at small casinos, betting shops, lottery and online sites (sports) it seems that poor people are risk takers. One reason, in my opinion, is that they have little to lose. They also have really shitty lives and are looking for an escape.

If you were starting a startup alone in Bangladesh vs. starting solo with YC in SF. Building a remote-based startup that sell SaaS online for clients all over the world. Location of clients is everywhere.

Technically, the playing-field is equal. You start a C-Corp from Bangladesh and trade your business. But which one do you think will make it? Which one do you think will raise funding? Or succeed if both do not raise funds?

You live your life trying the optimize a problem. There is a number of steps that if you take, carefully, you'll become rich in some duration of time. You don't know these steps, so you keep searching. You know gradient descent. Life is like that, if you are moving successfully down, you are probably on the right track and so you keep moving on that direction.

However, you start stochastically on a random location and keep trying to find a path that leads somewhere. That's where YC comes in. They help you reduce the surface area of your search. You are less likely to land somewhere futile.

What poor people are missing is discovery of this surface area. It is a very complicated problem for them and they lack resources and education to optimize the problem.

They are hoping that this lottery ticket will help land them directly on the optimized spot. Their lack of understanding of why this doesn't work explain why they can't navigate the surface area.
To add to your point, I think this reinforces the value of spaced repetition learning. It's been show to been one of the best ways to actually retain information. So, as you said, just doing the exercises only gets one so far. You'll need to either use what you learned or at least do refresher exercises to better put what you learned into memory. The benefit is that you may be able to do these refreshers and greater intervals over time, effectively retaining the information longer.

For me personally, there does seem to be a tipping point where what I learned really sticks in my brain and degrades much slower. However, I can't seem to pinpoint where that point happens or if it is even consistent. There are some coding concepts I never forget, and some that seem to leave me within a month.

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

https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED427772

https://www.theguardian.com/education/2016/jan/23/spaced-rep...
This is like saying in 1950 that companies will take the lead out of gasoline if we all stop driving.
Probably the most known and significant fine was Google's 50 million euro [0].

[0] https://www.theverge.com/2019/1/21/18191591/google-gdpr-fine...
You can and should build a big codebase (as far as early stage startups go) without doing things quick and dirty. The additional time is an investment that will save you far more time down the road.
Random Website You've Never Heard of Makes a Insane Amount of Money
>where before Ecuador was a brave independent nation, but the moment they do something someone doesn't like they're a puppet

It's also the previous president who gave assange asylum saying this: https://twitter.com/mashirafael/status/1116386840502775809
Note that private browsing won’t remove every trace of your Internet activities. Any files you save will remain. Private browsing also doesn’t do anything to obscure your Web traffic from the server’s side. Websites you visit will still have your IP address, and any unencrypted data you send is as susceptible to interception as it would be in a normal browser session. Instead of incognito mode use TOR or at least Firefox...
Google was fined $57M. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/21/technology/google-europe-...
Wow! Good times. Almost tops my own worst experience which was with Avis car rentals. The author indicates that this kind of experience is probably due to systemic problems within Google's customer support program and I'd guess that's right.

I've noticed a pattern that many companies have adopted. First they silo the customer service division usually culminating in remotely locating the customer service frontline. They then cut ties between any part of the company and rank and file customer service workers, linking them only to their supervisors. In the final step the supervisors are prohibited from forwarding customers anywhere. Then customer service becomes like a separate company within the company. I've seen this structure over and over and the companies with the worst service always have this shape.

You call. You get a call center. They can't transfer you anywhere. You ask for a supervisor. They try to tell why you don't need one. You insist. You get one. The supervisor takes your call. You discover they can't fix your problem. You ask who can. They can't say. You ask if there's anyone else you can talk to. They say no. You ask for their manager. They say you can't talk to them. You ask for corporate level customer relations. They don't have that number. On and on and on...

My theory is that structuring customer service into such a separate silo actually breeds a combative relationship between customer service and company leadership. Without more contact between the people building and servicing the products and frontline customer support people, customer service just looks like a big fat cost center. No useful information makes it out (by design) and year after year it's just a big red line item for everyone else. Of course this leads to a perpetual push to decrease costs in customer service which leads to really regressive behavior. Too many customers are need free replacements tighten the grip on all comps. Too many high level customer support people are still giving things away. Get rid of any high level customer support personnel. Could we save money with less supervisors? Yes but the one's we've got are already overworked. Well, track the number of times an employee allows customers to escalate and create disincentives.

In this way customer service actual becomes the opposite of what it's meant to be. Instead of enabling customers or helping them it becomes a hindrance. It becomes a wall that protects the rest of the company especially the leadership from having to have any contact with the unwashed masses.
I don't see how it could be bid rigging, when the drivers are not even able to bid. Short of what the article discusses, they must take whatever Uber / Lyft give them. If anything, this seems more akin to actual negotiation / refusal to work at the proposed price. Which, if they are contractors, is perfectly acceptable, no?
Sears' Seven Decades of Self-Destruction
TLA for the curious.

https://learntla.com/introduction/
And which do you want in a car?
Touché and well played.

I am on the camp that big rewrites are more often than not a mistake. The real reason behind most rewrites is that writing code is easier than reading code. A system has grown to be too complex to understand, and instead of taking the time to study and understand it, you start writing it from scratch instead. At some point you end up with a new system of perhaps comparable complexity as the original. You now understand that system better, but give it enough time you will get rusty, or new devs will join that do not understand it. Rinse and repeat.

Also many devs underestimate the reasons why code has ended up being smelly. Unaccounted edge cases, legacy system support, time constraints. Who says you won't hit time constraints during the rewrite too?

Of course there are many good reasons for a rewrite too. Being more experienced and a better dev today than you were yesterday when you wrote it, is a great way to clean up whatever amateur mistakes you might have created. Or perhaps the system is inefficient and now you know how to improve it. But incremental updates, and defining the critical code path and making sure that is as robust as possible (eg I am sure you can increase system performance by magnitudes by changing only 10% of the most-often run code), are great ways to start.

Good luck, and I am looking forward lessons learnt too!
I've done various rewrites of solo and duo projects.

Once all is settled, I ultimately tend to agree that I should've probably upgraded what I originally had, Ship of Theseus style. But then again, I also wasn't doing that, and the allure of a rewrite is what energized me to do all the work in the first place.

But I recognize this blog post as the sort of giddy excitement that you use to convince yourself that it's going to help your customers and be worth your time. Just look at it: all upsides, no downsides.

Tread carefully, OP.
I use ublock to hide those overlays
Philosophical objection: that is exactly the opposite of what TempleOS is about.

Practical objection: By the time you've done that, you'd have written a complete IBM-PC-to-browser compatibility layer. ... This would be super cool if it worked, I'm just sceptical.
The global supply chain was in its infancy. You had national suppliers, but nothing like the multinationals you see today.

The number of automakers in the 1970s was much higher and the number of unique models (vs dress ups like GM does across brands) was higher still.

Virtually no mass market car brand was formed in the last four decades, other than Tesla.
I don't think the CFPB would be the one to talk to. As the link mentioned, you'd probably want to reach out to your state attorney general.
> In fact, more than a century has passed and David’s sealed bottle garden is still thriving and robust as can be.

I'm not sure the author knows what a century is.
That happens already. As things stabilize you tend to value predictability. You can have 6-10 smart people do the architecture and design work that drives the work of hundreds of developers.

Programmers want programming to be about ideas, but many/most problems are applying patterns to process.
Wait until it starts raining penalties.. Adtech that gets busted will either comply (shrink evil profits), die (won't be able to handle the profit loss), or move to greener pastures (keep their practices away from us).
You could try looking at what Fabrice Bellard (creator of QEMU and FFmpeg, among many other things) did for [JSLinux](https://bellard.org/jslinux/).

Edit: Although, it's a low-level emulation, not the insanely high-level emulation that you seem to be looking for.
You can visit from a European IP address and opt out.
I thought geo-targeting with IPs wasn’t good enough because GDPR applies to European citizens/users, not just people who happen to be located in a European country.
Complete with the "put it in a spot with enough sun light".
Except the atmosphere leaks a little http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Space_Science/Cluster_watc...
He has the right look. Perhaps he's a Time Lord?
Code formatting tools/linters and static analysis tools can deal with the bulk of this before it even gets to review.

For the small stuff that remains, ideally the reviewer can fix it - the reviewee is probably back in flow on another task, and it's irritating to have focus broken for inconsequential things.

As a side note, I like how github implemented this as "review suggestions", where the reviewer can make small changes inline and the reviewee approves them with a button push.
Wasn't that kind of thing prohibited long before the GDPR based on medical privacy laws?
I have personally noticed large differences in side-effects between various generic brands of SSRIs. That's anecdotal, but now I always pick the same generic brand out of the ~5 I have tried for the same compound.
I feel like NPR has gotten worse in the last 10 years. Completely ignoring the topic of bias, (because it's a fruitless minefield) it seems difficult to encounter a story on NPR that isn't primarily about emotions. NPR seems to believe that a story is only accessible if there's a single person (or small group of people) who can directly emote about the wrongness of a situation. A caricature of an NPR story might go something like this "As violent insurgency breaks out in [some country], we bring you no details about the local politics, tribes, or history, but instead 15 minutes of an individual mother telling you just how miserable her life is. And here she is along with some ambient sounds so you can really feel like you're there."

I'm aware that there's a group of folks who believe that personal stories are relatable, while statistics are easily ignored. At best, I feel like this view is shortsighted: not everyone works this way, and sympathy shouldn't be limited to cases with emotional proximity. (ie, rational ethics are possible) At worst, NPR is deciding how you should feel about the story by inserting an emotion-based testimonial.
Wat? Senty Mode, Dashcam, etc. nice updates for existing users.
Asking for clarification isn't a strawman, sorry. And it sure seemed like you were correcting me, which is why I asked. But I said that journald was the only mandatory component of systemd outside of PID1. You said this was wrong. I'm waiting for you to extrapolate? Does systemd only work with the "canonical" dbus-broker? Or does it want ("want" as I'm reading stuff that suggests it isn't absolutely required, but I'm not sure and I'm happy to caveat where I'm not sure) a D-Bus broker? Because if it's the latter, and as it's specified and they seem big on meeting specs I'm betting that it's the case, then what I said is correct and you're just being kind of a jerk about it.

Or you can keep trying to big-time me instead of engage on the merits of your position. That's cool people stuff, I guess.
Just let them think GDPR is enforceable across the ocean.
I hear things like "we should go full nuclear, modern nuclear reactors are safe" all the time, yet this ignores externalities, unknown unknowns, human incompetence, and the unexpected. Who would expect the ocean to rise over your nuclear waste dome? Have people suggesting this forgotten the allegory of the unsinkable ship the Titanic? Entropy always wins in the end.
Civil engineers aren't asked to design a small 2-story building that can be retrofitted as a 300-story skyscraper when the time comes. Or connect two buildings 15km apart over the weekend.
It's a little easier to stop visiting a website than it is to stop driving a car in US.
Do you have a link to a double blind study where this was tested?
Of all the Voynich theories, I find those suggesting it was produced through a mechanistic method to be most persuasive. Several statistical properties of the words just don't match up with any natural languages, and there is a large amount of repetition of individual words with small variations, but hardly any repeated phrases. One recent idea is that successive words were copied from early ones, with small rearrangements of the glyphs https://arxiv.org/pdf/1407.6639.pdf . As such, the text gains the characteristic of looking like a language, when in fact it is meaningless gibberish. Possibly this was done as way of fooling somebody rich to buy it; at some point it came into the possession of Rudolf II, Holy Roman Emperor, and was clearly a very desirable artifact even in the 17th century.
Not really the best way going forward, jamming. Working around it is too easy.

Cent-cost radio parts are widely available and are easy to build with. Trying to jam the entire band from 100 MHz to 2.5 GHz is fruitless. A terrorist doesn't care about duty cycle limits or throughput, nor out-of-band emissions. A single packet successfully received is all it takes. Literally a packet of death.
Bad article, but probably related to the series of contamination issues that various generics have had (eg NDMA contamination in Sartan).

https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2019/01/04/th...
TechCrunch have UK based staff, though... there should be a way to have an impact.
Definitely some good feelings and European based companies taking the mantel. Unfortunately those same companies will probably be state propaganda with how the EU has been going lately with internet regulations
Literacy is the ability to read and write regardless of the domain (science, history, poetry, religion, software, whatever).

Software is, ultimately, a set of logical instructions. Other people who understand those instructions are literate in that domain. You seem to be taking a single application of literacy (software) to be the entire scope of literacy writ large. It isn't clear to me why you think that, especially when no programming language is capable of "encoding" the range of human thought that, say, English is.

Please respond in the programming language of your choice.
I hear more ads on NPR than before. Has their funding mechanism changed?
Most things in the GDPR were already prohibited by the Data Protection Directive, but not the amounts of the fines and such.
I think that GP is commenting on the overall cost of software at NASA opposed to individual salaries. At that level, software/hardware bugs will kill people so testing/safety is paramount.

Building non-safety-critical software is cheap when compared to building software that has been verified to virtually never fail.
Perhaps the disbelief that your piece of hardware is now useless is stronger than the disbelief in the honesty of the internet?

It is amusing to me that you mention Canon, since they're one of the worst offenders I've dealt with in this regard. During the change from W98 to Win7, they cut off support for whole product lines. My scanner, purchased just a few years ago, was now useless. My Linux box had better driver support than my shiny new Windows box.

It was unbelievable that my scanner was no longer functional, and I was willing to try some hacking to try to get it functional again...

So... I understand especially why people are looking for drivers. They're looking to extend the value of their purchases.
Glass Enterprise Edition 2
Or use one of the dozens of local competitors that are popping up.
Show HN: Lyrics generator for over 40 artist styles
Never thought I would get to see Playas mentioned in HN. I was born in Tijuana and lived most of my life there. It’s a nice little corner if that’s what you’re looking for.
We could start by not allowing pseudo-engineers out of bootcamps.

Yes, specs and tests don't cover everything, however without them software is much worse.

I guess only an increase in lawsuits and product returns will eventually change the status quo.
There should be more funding and research on self contained, or nearly self contained ecosystems. The cost is modest on the larger scheme of things, but the potential benefits in the next half century could well be tremendous. Also, doing such research here on Earth may well save the lives of many pioneers in the coming decades.
Also the costs of disassembly are insane, hidden and have proven to multiply once underway by many many times.
I worked closely with Geoff on last year's Startup School. I can heartily endorse everything Sam wrote in the announcement – he sees the whole picture, and is a pleasure to work with! I'm very excited to see where he takes YC!
If most of some companies revenue come from selling analytics of user data, is the maximum 4% GDPR fine enough to force all these companies to be compliant?
NPR is as much of a mouthpiece for the elite as any other mainstream media source. Their two top contributors are Lockhead Martin and Walmart, yet you don't hear many ads for them over the air, so how is NPR paying them back for their contributions? That would be maintaining the Overton window and publishing stories that support the military industrial complex and neo-liberal agendas.
Game of Thrones Series Finale Recap: Broken
To improve the profit I was going to suggest Createspace, then I read the article. Then I felt embarrassed for even thinking of recommending Amazon printing to anyone ever. Unfortunately Createspace support has never been great, and the transition to Kindle Direct has lowered the level of support even further.

Their PDF restrictions are sometimes nonsensical and whether or not it gets approved seems to be blind chance. You can spend days resubmitting the same PDF like a gambler at a slot machine. Win some lose some.

I always thought it was just me, but reading the author's experiences shows this isn't the case.
> I'd love to see a similar show on software development.

Given the quality problems with most software systems, I would expect the host to be Gordon Ramsey, not Norm Abrams.
Memory safety is not the alpha and omega of programming languages. People do not write million lines of code applications in bash, for a reason, trade-offs are to be made.

That said I agree they should have picked Go instead /s.
Hey everyone, thanks for the comments. I'll be around to answer questions as best I can.
That high score screen cracked me up. :-)
>It’s a vicious cycle that appears to only be solvable by workers taking initiative and pushing for more responsibilities, taking advantage of opportunities to educate themselves, and gain new skills to make them more valuable in the field

Article really glosses over the fact that there aren't really all that many skills to be learned at most low paying dead end jobs. That's why they're unskilled, require no education, and pay poorly, as there's always a glut of people willing and able to do them. Supply and demand.
As I understand you have to Target EU citizens, having a box which states you exempt yourself is allowed. You just have to explain that it is their choice and if they choose to allow you they grant you permission. It just has to be an explicit agree.
'Sleeping during a lecture is a good thing'
Why not go with the organization's preference (NASA in this case)?
Imo the real point of it was for EU politicians to get re-elected on the basis of them taking a “tough stance” against the US tech giants and “caring about user privacy”.
They don't necessarily respond but they do seem to act.

I came across a particularly scummy site making it look like the ICO endorsed them by abusing their logo.

The logo was removed the next afternoon. All it took was an email to that address.
Or, on a purely ad hoc basis, McDiarmid's "Kill Sticky Headers" (https://alisdair.mcdiarmid.org/kill-sticky-headers).
I made this web app for generating lyrics in the styles of over 40 artists.

Why?
I had two goals with this project:
1. I was curious to see if the model will be able to generate entertaining lyrics. Pretty lighthearted but still kinda fun. There are quite a few artist styles to try.
2. Make a material ui web app to play around with the lyrics generator.

Each artist has a Markov model trained on lyrics from Lyrics Beast. You can also specify the target number of syllables.

Somethings i’d like to try in the future:
Mix artist styles by combining models.

It’s a lighthearted project, but I would still love to hear what you thought of it
I use MapsGo, which requires Chrome.

These run well on MicroG/Lineage, and I also was unable to run the full Maps APK.
Agree so much with this. Frank Howarth, Abom79, This Old Tony, Welding Tips and Tricks, Jimmy DiResta, Stumpy Nubs, Stefan Gotteswinter - there's so much great content like this on youtube. TV was never a great place for craft because it has to serve a general audience. Youtube has so much niche specific content with pretty great production values.
Agreed 100%.

Why not call it Go-con? Why Gophercon when it doesn’t involve Gopher?
They only get 16% of their funds from public sources.
There is one: https://schema.org/

It's honored by Google (it can enhance your search visibility) and that's why it's slowly getting popular. Far from wide adoption, though.
That's true. They used same words before... But after Chernobyl and Fukushima... How they can expect we believe them?