skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The Power Broker - the story of how an idealist turned into Darth Vader

The Years of Lyndon Johnson - the story of how LBJ rigged the 1948 election for Senate and rose to power

Here's an excerpt from an interview with the author of both books:

> During all these years I did come to understand stuff about power that I wanted people to know. You read in every textbook that cliché: Power corrupts. In my opinion, I’ve learned that power does not always corrupt. Power can cleanse. When you’re climbing to get power, you have to use whatever methods are necessary, and you have to conceal your aims. Because if people knew your aims, it might make them not want to give you power. Prime example: the southern senators who raised Lyndon Johnson up in the Senate. They did that because he had made them believe that he felt the same way they did about black people and segregation. But then when you get power, you can do what you want. So power reveals. Do I want people to know that? Yes.
$50/month is a lot extra, but if you are willing to pay it, YouTube TV (https://tv.youtube.com/welcome/) offers exactly what you are asking. Also, its youtube, which means the streaming quality is superb.
Private developer wants to distribute binary, have system include shared dependency libs because—guess what, they're shared. That's what we could have had. That's the problem this is getting around.
I really wish the OS vendors weren't asleep at the wheel on this one, or otherwise being distracted by the effort to just 'move everything to the cloud'.

Imagine if we had an OS that solved the usability problems of IPFS and made it immensely easy to publish content on ones own named segment of an IPFS network - instead of having things like Dropbox glom themselves around a paltry excuse for file-sharing system services that exist in most modern OS's today?

Wouldn't it be grand if someone write an email client - yes, EMAIL - that integrated with a smart contact system, allowing one to run and operate ones own social network without requiring any further infrastructure beyond local, private email services. Everything I do on Facebook, I was once able to do just as easily on Email - the interface is the only difference. I want social networking back under my control again, and a return to email, wrapped in a better local tool for providing the services, is the way to do it.

I also want to be able to turn myself off the Internet - having the ability to turn my phone off and be unavailable to the Internet at large - not just as a consumer, but also as a provider of information - should be a basic, inarguable right.

If the OS vendors weren't chasing the cloud bucks, this would be a reality.

I believe an opportunity for a smart team exists: build a Linux distribution which incorporates a few basic ideological rules:

* The user owns their data

* The user controls their data

* No new services or protocols are needed to provide better services: Use OSI properly or GTFO

* The UI is the final frontier for freedom

* If the user wants to fully disappear: OFF SWITCH

* If the user wants to engage in public discourse: ON SWITCH

* De-centralize all the things, bring control back to the local user always

As the years go by, I feel more and more inclined to start a test-bed Linux distro which uses these rules to build out a user-controlled OS designed for widespread content distribution on the basis of such things as IPFS, albeit with a much, much better UI for maintaining ones assets than currently exists. If anyone else is interested in such an experiment, I am all ears ..
I don’t really understand why the author is being annoyed about a model that takes time to figure things out based on what it learns from the user. I use these buttons all the time, and they’ve grown to be more useful/accurate as things go on–it’s definitely something I would be sad to lose.
I have been using defaultdict and Counter a lot lately, not much partial though. Also sets are another nice thing about python.
Of course it's possible to mismanage socialized healthcare a socialized healthcare system, that doesn't make socialized healthcare bad.
I’ve never seen a spam message in Gmail, and can’t say the same for the latter.
What kind of work place would be against 3am commits?

“look how dedicated Johnny is. He was working at 3am!”
How would you know? And what would your threshold be?

For example, suppose you did a controlled study and found that the new autocomplete UI was presenting users with only "yes" options, X% of the time. Is there a threshold beyond which you would unlaunch or adjust the feature?

What if the new UI was actually changing user behaviour, causing them to answer "yes" more often than they otherwise would have? Is there a delta (positive or negative) beyond which you would unlaunch or adjust the feature? If you had to adjust it, how would you know you were adjusting it correctly?

What sort of telemetry would you need to put in the product so that you really would know if this was happening?

I'm curious if your team thought about these questions before launching, and what ideas came up.
Seoul Seeking to Implement Blockchain for Citizen Cards
> We're optimizing for click through rate. That's it. There's no editorial judgement...

I think Google in general needs to start taking seriously the idea that this is an editorial judgement.

There’s nothing necessarily wrong with optimising for click-through rate, but doing that will skew the options you offer to your viewers in specific ways. Those outcomes are still Google’s responsibility, even if they are the result of choices which are not under Google’s direct control, because Google has made the editorial choice to use click-through rate as their primary metric of choice.

(It’s relatively innocuous in this particular case, but when Google uses click-through to choose between content offered up by other people, Google is setting up feedback loops between consumers, content producers and the algorithm that mediates between the two which can trap the system as a whole in pernicious local attractors in the phase space of possible choices that may be impossible to escape.)
The problem that's being solved is that vendors are incompatible, which could easily be solved if they were compatible. They all run a linux kernel. They all use ELF and x11 and opengl. If I compile 'hello, world' on one distro, I can drop it onto another random distro and it'll still work, but after a certain threshold of complexity, that stops working. It doesn't have to stop working.
But it won't solve the problem of developers' unwillingness to learn how to make operating system packages now will it?

I don't get it: people like that will sink and waste hundreds of hours learning useless garbage like Puppet, Ansible, Chef, Docker or Kubernetes without batting an eyelash or even thinking twice about it, but they'll argue and fight back like hell come time to deliver their software as clean OS packages because they don't want to learn the technology. Technology which exists for them first and foremost: OS packaging is meant to be a developer's tool and best friend.
Google Authenticator does not help prevent against a compromised device (as all TOTP secrets and seeds are on device) and is truly a pain when working with multiple phones. Personally I use Yubico Authenticator as all the TOTPs live on my Yubikey. That, in combination with a password then clicking on a totp i want and tapping my yubikey provides me with only that code. When I first seed the yubikey with a new TOTP i also backup a copy of the QR code text and save it into my password manager in the unfortunate event of having to swap out yubikeys.
For a few moments I thought of all these years during which I could have just typed "breakpoint" instead of "import pdb; pdb.set_trace()".

Luckily it's been added only recently (3.7) :)
Forgive me doesn’t deque mean double ended queue? Also why can’t a simple array behave like a list?
Torrents. Either the dumb rentier platform wars end in an open streaming protocol standard, or we just stick with piracy. Capitalism is absurdly inefficient.
Try the HHKB. There's even a BT version (with USB as well). It does come at a price though.
Unfortunately Shannon–Hartley theorem is very harsh on mesh networks.

900MHz in US is 902-928 MHz, 26 MHz wide channel. The usual SNR ratio range is 0-40 dB. This corresponds to total bandwith over entire band of 26 to 172 Mbit/sec -- depending on the range. Let's be generous and say 100 Mbit/sec.

You are not going to get any sort of beanforming from the mobile pocket-held device, so your collision domain is going to be everyone around you. Say you are in the park, and there are 24 people around you, and you are all routing packets for each other, so each packet is transmitted twice before leaving the collision domain. In this case, single person's ideal, best case bandwith is 2 Mbit/sec.

In practice, you are not going to get anywhere close to 100% efficiency, so I'd expect internet speeds significantly less that 1 Mbit/sec. This is going to be very painful.
Xamarin.Forms 4.0 Released
I don't think anything is caused by the Canadian means of production being owned by the people.
The modern X1 carbon does not have this problem. I’m using the 8th generation and the trackpad is very good, along with a screen that accomplishes full-on HDR, and much better color depth.
In this case click through rate does seem to be the right measure. The feature is most useful when it is suggesting the most likely replies.
I feel exactly the opposite about signing up for Disney. I will not. The reason is stated in Fast Food Nation, paraphrased as: "Disney was the first company to direct market to children." They are still the company I most fear.

As an example, I hate going to the super market with my kids. We don't watch a ton of Disney movies, but even so, they are bombarded with Frozen shit six years after that movie came out. There are all kinds of things to buy marketed with Frozen that my kids would have begged for, IF we had been watching Frozen incessantly, if we had Disney+.

I will NOT be signing up for this. I would much rather watch the shows on Netflix that I know will never have plastic junky replicas occupying on shelf space in the supermarket. Frozen was an amazing story, and Disney has fantastic writers, directors, and animators, but I don't want them hypnotizing my kids and then trying to sell them shit for years.

I'm probably in the minority in that I have never seen one of the Avengers movies, and could care less about those blockbusters the author listed. But, I really do think we are entering a new phase in media consumption where I as a parent can choose my own streaming needs (HBO, for example, with little that my kids watch) AND I can find the right combination for my kids (Netflix and YouTube) that fits my need to avoid marketing to my children. I'm sure someone in those channels will find a way to sell crap to my kids, but it'll take some time.

I think there will still be people who want to watch the Avengers sixteen times on their five different screen sizes, and will sign up for Disney+. But, it might not be as many parents as they would hope for, and I have alternatives and won't be one of them.
The idea that most corporate dev teams, as they exist in the real world, are sophisticated enough to glean managerial and employee performance information from their code repositories is laughable.
I don't know what should be done about intellectual property. My first instinct is that it legal protections for intellectual property shouldn't exist.
This is welcome. I got a rude awakening the first time I turned config rules on when the bill came in, and it kept coming even after they were killed in the UI. I had racked up over $100 in a few months in config bills with the rules being disabled but in an odd state. Thankfully AWS gave us a credit, but I haven't really wanted to mess with them since. I'll give them another look now that the pricing is more in line with a usage model.
I don't think there is anything wrong in 'pop' when the work is intended to be popular. I expect the biographer to verify her sources but as a reader I'm not going to go out (generally) to verify them.

Things that happened, happened. Most of all when reading popular biographies I want to be introduced to real things that happened, and if some of that draws my interest, I can then dig in to more academic sources.

The popular biographies offer the '100 feet' view over their subject and the society in which they lived in, and should not be disparaged if they succeed in doing that in a readable and entertaining manner.
Early WSL was a pain, but they’ve come a long way. My entire web dev stack works natively on WSL these days–and WSL2 is due any day now, which should make it entirely on-par going forward.
A significant number of submissions on HN are just ads of one sort or another.

The Raspberry Pi itself is a bit of a marketing gimmick. They all use Broadcom SoCs, and that's a huge boon to Broadcom. The Raspberry didn't actually start out with Broadcom chips, but once Broadcom got involved they understood the marketing potential, and it's been very good for them.

All of the other SoC manufactures understand how influential the Raspberry has been in selling Broadcom SoCs into embedded applications. Rockchip was slow to the game but they have been pushing pretty hard. I think their first was that Asus Tinkerboard, which I remember being pretty expensive.

I'd be willing to bet their marketing department got some money in the last couple of weeks.
I don't really work outside office hours much, but as a personal policy, when I do I don't commit or push (which triggers CI builds).

I don't want to build any expectation that I work outside the office, because I generally don't. I have my own things going on, and literally anything else takes priority over work outside work hours.
What Was It Like When Human Civilization Reached Its Pinnacle?
Because those providing the said technology cannot agree what it means to be a GNU/Linux OS, and we have limited time on our life to bother with thousand variants of it.
Website is giving an error 500. Perhaps this is a popular article?

Fortunately it's in the Wayback Machine:

https://web.archive.org/web/20190522001001/https://cognition...
That's not quite what I'm saying, though. My concern is not with stating the fact that the algorithm uses this metric. My concern is with presenting the decision to use this metric as morally neutral.

If you think that giving lit matches to children is morally neutral, you probably either don't understand how dangerous fire is or don't understand how unpredictable children can be. That's the point of the analogy.
Seriously who creates a HN account just to make a racist joke
With your logic, you've already lost.

If you don't trust the developer of an application you already run, you're screwed in any scenario.

Yours is not a realistic threat model.
> People care about live sports

I don't. I don't want to pay extra for it. Things such as Olympics or football championship are on public broadcast TV. Which is the only stuff I watch from cable. The rest is encumbered with pulp advertising anyway. Time is money.

However, if you want cable internet here, you get cable TV forced upon your throat...
To determine how open a language really is look at how many widely used implementations of the compiler there are for the language. If there is only a single implementation of the compiler/interpreter than it is not really open but controlled by that core compiler team.
> You measure productivity that way on the assembly line or other menial tasks where it's obvious how to do things

Isn't it obvious how to do things in programming? Many developers, in my corporate experience, occupy themselves with how to do things in code. That is exceedingly unfortunate. How to write code should be an obvious disqualifier before obtaining employment. Nobody would hire a lawyer, for instance, who didn't know how to a legal argument.

Writing code should be as obvious as writing an essay, but I suspect many developers that are hiring probably have trouble writing essays as well.

Anyways, if you had the choice between a 10 minute pizza and a 3 day pizza with ingredients more evenly spaced apart which would you choose?
Just watched his PyCon 2019 where he derives lambda calculus from scratch in Python, and he had similar shell magics going on there too. Great tutorial if you've never seen lambda calculus before, definitely brain twister.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pkCLMl0e_0k
> If we had seen any negative impact such as the FB/YouTube examples we would absolutely take that into account.

Maybe? Maybe not? There’s visible and tangible negative impact from Youtube algorithms (owned, incidentally by the same conpany). And Youtube (or Google? Or Alphabet?) rarely if ever acknowledges and fixes those problems because their algorithms are also optimised for click-through.
A year back I replaced the battery on my 2013 15" model - like the other commenters, I paid $199 at the Apple Store for a new battery, topcase, including keyboard and trackpad. I also recently bought a used 2015 Pro on ebay as a backup. I have a 2016 13" touchbar pro, and after replacing the original keyboard, I'm actually quite happy with it. But for the 15" model I just don't think the price is justified given the specs... my next mac might be a Thinkpad with Ubuntu and virtualized MacOS, sorry to say.
Show HN: gRPC Like Interceptor for Apache Thrift
Btw, "OFF SWITCH" is fundamentally incompatible with IPFS.

If you serve your website from IPFS, the first visitor will get the full copy and start serving it. You can toggle your switch as much as you want, this won't have any effect.

It's funny that Facebook is much better at giving control to user than email. At least in Facebook, you can delete post. And once you send email, there is no way to retract it.
You appear to be discussing porting a number from one provider to another but the attack in the article (and being discussed in the thread up to this point) is based on moving the number to another SIM within the same provider).
My favorite tool/trick against procrastination is pomodoro technique: Work 25 minutes continuously with no interruptions, then take 5 minutes to relax/do other things, e.g. answer texts - then rinse and repeat. Do this 6-8 times and you'll have done more than most people do in a full work day. When I first heard of it I was very skeptical of it, because I know that as a programmer I need hours of uninterrupted focus, so purposely interrupting myself every 25 mins seemed counterproductive. But it turns out, most of us get micro-interruptions all the time, and they're much easier to ignore if you know that in at most 25 mins, you'll have 5 mins to deal with them. That way you don't create 5 mins of interruption, you batch the already existing interruptions together and timebox them. And 5 mins isn't enough to get you out of 'the zone' as long as you keep the breaks mentally 'light' - and going for a little walk really is healthier than just sitting all the time.

And now for the real kicker: I found that I always procrastinate the most in the beginning of a project, where everything is vague and there's not yet a list of nicely broken down tasks to execute. And that makes sense cf. the whole 'procrastination is emotional' perspective that the article talks about, because completing tasks gives you a dopamine kick as a reward, but with no easy tasks in sight at the start of a project, it just feels like wandering the desert. It feels unpleasant and unsatisfying to grapple with that vagueness and trying to fit that 'too large' problem into your head so it can be broken down into bite size tasks. So you put it off until guilt or panic about a looming deadline becomes bigger than the pain of doing the work - it's the classic 'put off homework until the day before it's due' from school.

A situation like this is where pomodoro technique really shines - I may not have small easy tasks to give me periodic dopamine kicks, but every 25 mins, I still get one for having completed a pomodoro without letting myself get distracted. And I even get to celebrate with a little break. Or to put this in other terms, at the beginning of a project, you cannot measure or reward results like you would prefer (because results are still a ways off - it takes too long to break down the initial vagueness, you don't even know what a result looks like or how hard it is to achieve yet), so you should measure and reward effort instead. And each pomodoro becomes a measure of effort that you can reward. It really does work for me - I often stop doing them later in the project, when I have a nice list of tasks to execute, and I don't do them at all for small easy projects. But whenever I realize that I dread some task or I begin to procrastinate, I pull out the pomodoros and soldier through that way.
> Git records the committer as well as the author, so even though a simple 'git log' shows only the author (which you can set with 'git commit --author', which is very useful when you want to apply an external patch from somebody), you can show both the committer and the author with e.g. git log --format <something>.

It’s all just data. Even if git didn’t offer the ability to edit all of these

- Author

- Committer

- Author date

- Commit date

Which by the way it does allow of course, as it should. See for example git commit-tree. https://git-scm.com/docs/git-commit-tree

Anyway, even if git itself did not provide the tools to set this information on a per-commit basis you could still of course change your ~/.gitconfig and adjust your system clock time prior to committing. Or you could edit the commit data using a third-party tool that you yourself or someone else created. Like I said, it’s all just data.

Just because a file says something doesn’t mean that what it is saying is true, basically. Same goes for a piece of software.

And signing provides limited value as well, though useful to some. But for example you still wouldn’t know that the date information was correct even if the commit was signed.

Personally though I prefer to just commit things when I do them and push them immediately. And I don’t sign my commits but I would be willing to do so if there was any reason to — for example if it was the policy of a company I worked for that we do so.
If you really want to start from first principles, corporations may seem to be financial pass-through entities but serve as legal shields. Shareholders are not personally liable for externalities like environmental catastrophes or labor law violations. Elon Musk isn't subject to incarceration when someone is killed in an autopilot failure.

If you believe that corporations should also pass through legal liabilities, then sure it makes no sense to pay corporate taxes. But that's not the world we live in.
Spam, I got a lot of it on fastmail and even though I kept flagging it as spam, it kept coming.

The mobile client, I really like the gmail iOS client. I think fastmail was better than the native iOS mail client, but I just really like the gmail one.

Google docs, photos and drive are nice additions, but it’s mainly the first two.
I think the parent means that, for opensource software, they trust their distro maintainers to read the source code and only publish trustworthy software.
This is not a Kickstarter, it's Lenovo. They have a billion dollars in cash just lying around.
Afaik GCC's Go has been pretty complete and up-to-date for a couple of years.
Last train to Memphis - Peter Guralnick (Elvis)
Look, if you raise the rates or establish a more concrete AMT (Alternative Minimum Tax - a base rate that can't be ducked under), then corporations will just move their headquarters to another country with more favorable tax conditions. IMHO establish AMTs on corporations not headquartered here to incentivize them to move here and bring jobs.