skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I saw an Echo Dot on sale at Krogers (supermarket, midwest US) for $20 today. No, I won't install any sort of 1984-level spy machines in or around my house.

But this is easily within 'mow a lawn' budget for a kid. If I was younger, I might have considered it for 'cool' factor. But there's no restriction at Kroger like there is for alcohol(21) or cigarettes(18) or cold pills(18). A 10 year old could buy it and leave the store...

And yet, this $20 purchase is more dangerous long-term than 3 packs of cigarettes, a bottle of whiskey, or 2 boxes of cold pills. The data is being used in unknown and likely very unethical ways. There's quite a few questions that could easily cause ramifications for decades down the line. Examples are:

1. Asking about drugs
2. Asking about child abuse
3. Talking about suicide
4. Expressing sentiment that is now or will be persecuted
5. Private conversations that were never meant heard by a 3rd party

That data will always be attributed to them, no matter how they try to shed from it. Who would Amazon 'share' it with? We have no clue; European rules would indicate they didn't have the rights to sell/share to begin with, but we US citizens have no such rights. And for that 10-15 year old, they could very well have the rest of their life to deal with that fallout.

Damn, I'm glad that my childhood didn't have cell phones, or all this spytech, or ubiquitous always-on-always-snooping computer platforms. I truly can't relate to what kids go through these days, with in-person AND online presence, being on the edge of a gen-x'er and millenial.
It's neither ironic nor hypocritical that the Vox website reporting on DDG's view about data privacy has 20 trackers.

Nice overview with examples (if somewhat lengthy):
https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-difference-between-irony-a...
This is just an excuse you tell yourself to not start a company. A cop-out. Nobody at your current employer is going to know or care you started a company.

Don’t listen to most of the comments here, they’ve been brainwashed into fear and subservience to their employer.
I don't think this is the case, or at least, I'd expect it to be a bug.

Protocol Buffers should generally be non-destructive of the underlying data. That means even if it encounters the wrong wire type for a field, it should simply retain that value in the unknown field set rather than discard it.
What's the bad news?
If I told you that I like cheese sandwiches, then no. However, in normal, human interactions there's the reasonable expectation that if I tell you something, you won't go and sell it to the highest bidder who can then in turn do whatever they please with the information and further propagate it. Privacy isn't a huge problem in society because as humans most people have adequate social skills and understand what is and isn't appropriate to disclose and share. The problem is that tech companies don't treat their users as humans and don't follow basic conventions and common sense.
> If I were them, I would be looking for an opportunity to arrange to have at least one non-Googler on the core Go team, for the same reasons.

That's how I read the 50 or so out of 100 approvers as being Google. That means 50 (or so, can't remember the exact number..) are not Google.

When I read "Approvers", I match that in my head to "Core Team". Is there a "rank" above approvers that defines the core team?
I have been a user for many years and it feels like the distro package works at least 51/52 weeks a year, so I'm not sure it's an issue more than with any other package.
The official statement from Caterpillar regarding the issue tells us, that it's because of the the Cafe wanting to sell apparel, too, under their name that is the problem.

It's not even mentioned in the article until after Caterpillar's statement and then only as a side-note:

He says not being able to sell apparel for extra income will have an impact on both employees and the business.

Because of this, the article seems biased to me.
Because Vox is using the concept of losing your privacy to ad trackers and companies to generate clicks, whilst providing those companies with valuable user data and impressions.
A lot of it is luck and executing on the roadmap and pivot if the feature fails.

My question to the startup experience HN crowd is: What would be the right questions to ask before joining a startup to gauge the success and failure possibilities in the future?
Esoteric Input Methods: Dasher and Morse
Minor nit, but not necessarily. For basically all values of SomeMessage, dec should fail to parse due to improperly encoded UTF8 data for field 2 (modulo some proto2 vs. proto3 and language binding implementation differences).

Change field 2 to a bytes field instead of a string field and then yes.
I'm surprised modern SmallTalks (Pharo, Squeak) haven't yet explored optional types. (Yes, I know about StrongTalk. :-) )
The point is that you have a tool for getting very early feedback for an idea/landing page you want to showcase and do not have to provide an MVP, like in the case of Show HN.

Further more, registering your page on startuptwister, you contribute to the popularity of your site and all others listed, there. It will provide some network effect, if it is used frequently.
Bool will decode from int’s encoding??
See my edited example above; you can stream data to this, it'll stream nicely to the browser. This uses "\n"s at the end of every line, which means you can write a very simple streaming parser client side, because you can just split the input at "\n," to get nice JSON bits, but there's certainly JSON streaming libraries on NPM that will parse this for you more "properly". And, it parses with a normal JSON parser too.
> Basically I wrote it off as a kid's tracking and advertising device and purchased a regular new one. Glad my Spidey senses were tingling.

Do you actually believe the regular one will be much better with respect to tracking and advertising? I have no such confidence. I think they'll just categorize the use and still associate everything they do with children.
I am not for regulation normally, but I feel we may need to protect our personal data with some type of oversight. The amount of information and personal data these companies hold is frightening.
> The reason nobody had been able to find nori seeds was because they were looking for the wrong plant.

Algae by definition are unable to produce seeds. "Seeds" here is jargon with a different meaning.
Yea, I find this setup really convoluted and unnecessarily complex. Now I have to learn the particulars of two aws services to do a job which ought to be handled by one.

Google Cloud really outshines AWS here with its serverless PubSub - its trivial to fan out, its low latency, and has similar delivery semantics (I think), and IMHO better, easier api's. Its a really impressive service, IMHO.
Hi, Canadian here. From what I've been able to gather, American conservatism is more of a tribe than an ideology, that holds many values under a big tent. Some of these values are at odds with each other.

I don't see much conservatism in republicans at all. They are not conserving the environment, they are not fiscally conservative, their politics has been starkly reactionary. At this point, I would say the label has lost all meaning.

Luckily, Americans can still vote for the Democratic party, a staunchly conservative party by all accounts.
Depends on if you have team leads, that generally "manage and steer" with general autonomy of a larger manager or director. I'd say 10-15%, past that it's cruft.

The strength of the leadership and managers is really a key component of how much % is required.
>Despite being fired for getting married, she became the first elected president of the British Phycological Society in 1952. Today, Drew-Baker is known in Japan as "the mother of the sea," and every year a festival is held in her honor in Uto City.

I wonder if she gets extra recognition from at least half of the Japanese population, for the circumstances surrounding her firing, given that being fired for daring to be both female and married is still apparently the established practice in many Japanese companies today.
While protecting the kids would be nice, it results in a large inconsistency to apply it here, given the level of control we allow parents to have over their kids in many areas. For example, parents have near-complete jurisdiction over the diet of their children and can therefore cause significant health issues at their own discretion (or just due to lack of nutritional knowledge). This is (at least at the current moment) a significantly larger issue for kids than if Amazon has personal data on them or not. Accordingly, it seems strange for us to want the government to intervene with respect to data on children, but not with respect to a child's diet.
That's a reference to general relativity.
This was actually done with ConTeXt, not LaTeX.
what’s the difference? this will blow over in a month, if not a week.
The Alanis Morissette definition.
> I don’t remember any “we don’t hire people on Windows/using an IDE”

Two famous examples:

http://charlespetzold.com/etc/DoesVisualStudioRotTheMind.htm...

> If you are a startup looking to hire really excellent people, take notice of .NET on a resume, and ask why it’s there.

https://blog.expensify.com/2011/03/25/ceo-friday-why-we-dont...
This analogy is very misleading. Kubernetes is probably never going to run any real workload internally at Google, but gRPC powers all external APIs of Google Cloud, and increasing other Google properties (e.g. ads, assistant), used by mobile apps like Duo and Allo, and have some big internal service use cases. The reason Stubby still dominates internally is simply taking lots of time to migrate to gRPC that might be hard to justify, but I do see gRPC being used very widely internally at Google; it’s simply a matter of time. I don’t see that happening to Kubernetes; it’s a joke when compared to Borg.

Google aside, many other companies like Dropbox rely on gRPC extensively to successfully run infrastructure: https://static.sched.com/hosted_files/grpconf19/f7/Courier%2...
IMHO the only reason to use HTTP for services today is caching.
Okay. By having done away with it I guess I really meant that they are not doing it pointlessly often, when it could just as well be quiet.

Such as at the coffee (fika) break. It might be okay to just be silent. All you are going to talk about is rather obvious in either case.
Apple dismisses Google’s criticism over turning privacy into a ‘luxury good’
Great to see people using GRPC, but this article doesn't state anything that the actual grpc.io website doesn't, except for the OpenAPI comparison.
Bananas are dependent on a chemical (ethylene or acetylene) in the air around them to ripen.

If you keep bananas in an acetylene/ethylene-free environment, they stay green.

Green bananas are quite hard and sturdy, which makes transporting them easy and cheap.

When the time comes to sell the bananas, you just need to provide them with acetylene and they will turn yellow and pliable in about 12 hours.
rotating your password protects you against sites that store passwords poorly. you can’t know what any site’s actual practices are. even when stated, the implementation may differ and be much weaker.
Ask HN: Has anyone had success as a “dev partner” for a SaaS co
Lots of SaaS companies have "dev partners" or "integration partners" that specialize in integrating those tools into a specific company's technology. Has anyone here used this as a successful source of growth? If so, how to you define your niche? Is it by industry (e.g. biotech), tool domain (e.g. logistics), a specific tool, etc.
How much of the oil "industry" is for producing lubricant though? I'm talking about gas, stations, fertilizer, plastics, etc. It touches everything. For the sake of skipping this minor contention, let's just not tax unrefined motor oil.

In terms of gasoline, the technology builds on itself. Infrastructure like roads and fast food, expectations like the ability to commute, etc. If cars and gasoline were prohibitively expensive, commuting would pretty quickly become obsolete. Companies that require workers to drive 2 hours a day would have a hard time hiring people... or we'd find new ways to sustain it (alternatives and / or efficiencies). The price of all goods would go up considerably too (shipping, manufacturing). We rely on it so heavily!

Obviously we can't eliminate dependence overnight, which is why being proactive (arguably not proactive enough anymore though) and gradually implementing programs to phase it out or change it are required.

The goal should be to manage the pain / cost so we don't get hammered by a massive change in the future, or maybe taking too long and getting stuck with an unmanageable situation like massively accelerating climate change. The pain WILL happen regardless, and probably already is.

Just running with it, like we're mostly doing right now, is likely to disproportionally affect less developed areas far more than the price of gas and goods (floods, fires, and apocalypse type stuff).

If you believe climate change is real and negative (I assume you do) this is one part of a potential solution. If you don't believe climate change is real and negative though, then we're just not on the same page yet, and it's too early to have this discussion.
Project Oberon RISC5 CPU Emulator
I had quite a lot of failures, but one of the most interesting was/is my software for managing wineries.

Go niche they said and I did. I also picked real pain point: doing compliance tracking in EU is ridiculous process and it is often called as a biggest burden of wineries.

It turned out that small to mid sized wineries really hate doing paperwork, but they dont like to do it on computer as well. So after four years I found being in limited marked with product that my customers seeing more like necessary evil and with high cost of getting new people converting to core users.

Once they did convert they tend to stay for years (zero churn for customers that make effort to start using it systematically).

I do have some customers and I do keep the doors open, I even do additional development as I see fit, but I dont see bright future for the product. Four years of fulltime work went into building it, but hey thats how it goes.
No, it's not just about that, I mention it too (and the FA too, in a roundabout way). Why exaggerating what I said ?
omg... somebody else who knows the secret of garlic confit and Costco. Seriously, it's probably my favorite kitchen secret.
But in the YouTube case I don't even have pages! But anyways, When not going the SPA route I get all this for free. Navigating the search result pages automatically ends up in the history. 0 lines of Js required. Also since the whole page is generated server side even the scroll position within the result page is restored properly. Again 0 lines of Js. This already worked in the 90s. Today it doesn't, and we call it progress.
Also: Server sent events
The price doesn't actually matter - if they can make more money with ads/data harvesting, they will. When has a corporation ever said no to free money?

(Yes it happens but it's damn rare)
Show HN: Tool to help developers learn legacy code
I am working on a tool to help developers learn and remember code bases. Starting on a new code base is a pain, and a lot of our careers as developers involve some legacy code base.

It works by breaking the code into flash cards and allow you to add an explanation for each method. This is not for documenting the code but for learning. The best way to learn something is to try to explain it and then fill the gaps in your knowledge ( Feynman Technique). By dividing it on flash cards you can also follow your learning progress.

It also uses spaced repetition to remember what you learned.

It works only in Python now and is just a prototype. My goal is to open source it, so if anyone is interested in helping please ping me ( it's written in Python ).

You can run the prototype here:

https://exbrain.app

https://run.exbrain.app
Being pro free market usually means you want level playing fields for companies. Now when you introduce governments that alter that playing field by refusing to enforce IP or by having asymmetric tariffs, that government is interfering with the free market.

Given that, most people I’ve talked to that are in agreement with the trade war view it as a necessary evil to force China to level the playing field. They don’t want a long term trade war.
A good example of how bad press is good for business. Plenty of people are probably learning or relearning about Canva.
In many conversations I've had with Google (or Google-Adjacent) engineers I've revealed a truth to them that was quite shocking: Bazel isn't the only build system in wide scale deployment currently. It's also far from the most used build system currently. While Bazel is a monolithic tool that solves this problem there is no external tool that solves this problem of configuring the different semantics and configuration for protos in different languages.
Yes, they are both varint encoded on the wire. Refer to https://developers.google.com/protocol-buffers/docs/encoding...
On a side project I recently tried the middle ground approach and absolutely loved it. There was really only one part of the application that had complex user interactions, so that was the only place that I shipped a React bundle. The rest was just plain ol' templates and HTML.

On the whole, I'd say that I loved it. It is _staggering_ how quickly you can knock pages out when you're not coordinating data representations across different pieces of your app. The static-ness also lets you embrace a kind of UI feature simplicity. Does that form _really_ need live validation, or can we just pop the errors after submit? The latter is the only option unless you wanna (a) either vanilla Javascript or JQuery the interactions or (b) start shipping a React bundle down to this page. And thus, form validation was part of the request/response cycle, which further speeds up development.

It does get a little awkward when a static page starts having dynamic features begin to creep in. You have to decide when to awkwardly cut over to having that page powered by React.

That said, without a framework supporting this kind of development directly, I'm skeptical of how well it would work on a team. I did this style on a solo project, so there was no one complaining about 'mixing technologies' or bemoaning 'why don't we just use React everywhere.' I imagine that the first time we rewrote a page in SPA tech because it picked up enough UX to warrant it, people would be up in arms about how much time we've 'wasted' by not doing it in the first place.
> The answer to this is "maybe" but it doesn't really matter. You only need to implement the messages that will be sent by other objects and for "valuables" what we care about are the #value/#value: messages for the most part.

If one is trying to pass a block-like object to a message that is expecting a block and which we cannot be easily sure is not dependent on other messages under obscure conditions, is it not easier to extend from / inherit whatever class the blocks in Smalltalk use (i.e. the equivalent of Proc in Ruby)? Or is it that documentation of such methods explicitly mention that they support not just Smalltalk blocks but also other "valuables"?

> An example of methods on Blocks that exist but probably don't need to be implemented for polymorphism are things like #fork and #forkAt which will run the block in it's own separate Process.

I mean, sure, you can intuitively guess that such messages might not be needed, but it might not always be such an easy thing to guess. Ruby Procs have the methods `arity` and `parameters` for example, which could be widely used to inspect the parameters accepted by a block to decide how to pass arguments in. I never used such methods, but it might be that methods from other libraries to which I pass these blocks could use them. I don't know.

I guess it could be a language culture thing. Dependence on only `#value` / `#value:` could be common convention in Smalltalk if usage of valuables is a more common idiom.
Protip: if you don't peel the garlic cloves, you can just put them straight into the garlic press, squeeze out the good stuff, and then when you open the press and remove the peel, 99% of the debris comes out with it. Then you can just briefly rinse the press under hot water, and it's clean and can go back in the drawer.

I picked this up from some cooking show (maybe Heston Blumenthal?) and after adopting it, adding two cloves of garlic to a dish is now a 45-second operation including cleanup.
> traveling a network of cities with snowfall randomly blocking roads

More likely road-works projects fixing the potholes created by frost-heave randomly blocking roads. -_-
There are at least two possible arguments behind this question.

One (which, to be clear, is not how I interpret your comment) is the tired gotcha "if you hate society, why do you partake in it?", which is simply not substantial enough to answer.

The other argument I've seen is actually worth some thought, though I'm not ready to give a definitive answer in either this case or as a general principle:

Entities that play a certain game effectively endorse that game by playing it.

The devil lies in the corollary to that observation: whatever prizes are awarded by that game will only go to entities that are willing to play that game.
Government can and mostly do intervene in respect to child diet as well.
Yes. But also: Parents, why are you letting your kids play with hardware long known to upload and preserve this data?
> Ended up in an acquihire for garbage money.

Congrats! Your startup didn't fail. ;) Seriously, an acquihire for not enough money is sooo much more valuable a story than we lost everything and died...
What problem? Who cares if you upset the company? Just get another job.
You can set budget alerts, which aren’t as good, but they can let you know if the bill’s going off the tracks. I set up alerts at 50% and 75% of what I’m willing to pay and that’s gotten rid of my ‘unexpected bill’ stress.
It is the effect of the Internet of course. Magazines could (and did) publish articles that other magazines had covered and they they themselves had previously covered, which boosted the number of "editorial" pages, which gave them more pages for advertising. Most editors were sensitive to the ratio of editorial (content) to ads. That ratio indicated a level of "seriousness" to the content, if it was all content ("a true journal had no advertising and is bought for its cutting edge knowledge") to mostly ads ("an advertising vehicle with some grabby headline to get it into your hands.") Price was proportional to, from very expensive (journal subscription) to free (weekly advertiser).
Modern browsers understand text/event-stream so no need for dirty tricks ;)
Interesting, how do Tex Live, LaTeX and ConTeXt related to each other?
"They don't necessarily have the freedom to call that
forked language "Go" (I'm not sure), but I think that limitation is
OK; it serves nobody to call different projects by the same name. "

Oh, the irony
Parsing speed shouldn’t be a factor in deciding. Parsing protobufs on the browser is going to be way slower than using a native json parser and even on the server, there are java libraries that are much faster than protobufs, e.g. https://jsoniter.com/

That’s why formats like FlatBuffer where written; however parsing is likely not going to dominate your application, so other factors should influence your decision instead.
So the idea is a library of templates/icons/clip art combined with a web UI to edit the text and objects? With some sharing/collaboration features built in.

Sounds like a good idea. Templates have pretty much taken over web design, it makes sense that it will take over other run-of-the-mill categories of design (where hiring a custom designer doesn't make sense).