skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Jail overpopulation is the real problem.

Legalization of all drugs seems the way to go. There is no reason why the government should be enforcing what you can and can't put in your own body. Even if it's bad for you.
Salesforce is a sales organization par excellence. They sell whatever they have, be it social media monitoring, CPQ, marketing automation, Heroku, Jigsaw data, IoT etc. they develop deep wallet share in large accounts and are constantly cross-selling. Their core audience is business people, and that is in stark contrast with GCP which is almost entirely dev focused. I’m not saying CRM is an afterthought but they have plenty of accounts that don’t use their CRM.

That said, Google has deep inroads with their apps suite, and it’s really a race to have their tech run business processes. That and their ecosystem like Insightly are making big inroads to CRM’s SBM market.

Their analytics is shit, but I think the important thing here is that they know their audience very well, and business people love Tableau.

They bought $15B worth of sales leads for cross selling their portfolio of services.
Sales Skills 101 – The Digital Sales Institute
They See It. They Like It. They Want It. They Rent It
Librem seems to have the correct way forward, reject the big mess of Android and catch up to it with completely Open pieces.

https://puri.sm/products/librem-5/

They're making good progress and I can't wait to be able to update my handheld device with mainline pieces for as long as anyone who still uses one cares to update it. Currently my Samsung Android device is at Dec 2018 patchlevel and nothing I can do about it.
I used to have a dedicated server, but I figured that with my needs, cheap shared hosting works just as good and at a fraction of a cost.
After a a couple of minutes they sure should have an idea that I am a human, right?

Especially when I'm logged in with my 12+ year old paid account?

Won't say anything bad about googlers but in between this and the deeply irrelevant ads I get despite all yheir metrics the company seems deeply dysfunctional these days.
That sounds like 75th percentile is $71k. The IBEW number is more convincing (I also can’t imagine it’s gone down since 2016).

I still have to wonder how much of that is location dependent. $71k in most parts of the Midwest is quite comfortable. In the most expensive urban areas, it’s “livid with 5 roommates and never being able to save much” levels. It would be good if some of these stats were broken down by region, at least, if not MSA.
As Peter Thiel wrote in Zero to One, both small and giant companies will try to creatively redefine the definition of the market they are addressing, in the first case claiming that they absolutely own a small market segment of questionable relevance and in the second case claiming that they are small fish in a much bigger market than the one where they are enjoying a monopoly. So the results will be determined not by some objective standard but by relative political power of these companies and their adversaries.

As for durability, I personally fail to see how google and facebook are not durable monopolies - the network effects are so strong. In google's case it is even more than that - it is almost impossible to have a product of comparable quality without the users and the information about their behaviour, which is impossible to obtain because everyone uses google. Gone are the days when good search rankings could be inferred from the link graph of the web.
I thought the engineering behind some of that stuff was pretty cool too. Unfortunately, a system that prides itself on handling millions of records a second AND has no version control AND is sold as "no technical skills needed" is just too scary for me to recommend to anyone.
Yeah, but then again, so many times that I run into Captcha issues, it's on a site that really doesn't need Captcha to begin with.

Why make me solve a Captcha to see static content?

Why make me solve a Captcha to log in when I've already completed one to register?

Why make me solve a Captcha to pay utility bills? Is there some underground group of deviants going around surreptitiously paying other people's utility bills? The monsters.
I think the problem is not with being tech-savvy but with not wanting to spend anything. It isn't difficult to create a ready-made self-maintaining decentralized publishing tool in the form of a VPS image that people could run. But then people would need to pay for hosting the VPS (single dollars per month) and probably for the software, so that somebody maintains it (also single dollars per month).

I think people are too cheap for that and will rather throw their work into one of the black holes (like facebook), than pony up those dollars.
The thing that happens to him in firefox, it also happens to me in chrome.

misleading
>is that there are 2 types of people: Those who program and those who don't.

Is that fully accurate, though?

Where does that leave data scientists / data analysts? I know SQL very well, and I know python's data stack (numpy, pandas, matplotlib, plotly, seaborn, various stats toolkits). I have a strong understanding of the "programming ecosystem" i.e. concepts, terms, definitions, and so on. I understand (basic) computer architecture, I've used and am familiar with (basic) shell/terminal, and services like Docker/Heroku on the command line, and can certainly use GUI cloud tools for AWS, GCP, etc. I can read and understand code and how systems fit together. I've worked alongside engineers of all types.

But I'm not a software engineer. I don't tell people I "program" because my strongest skill is SQL and generally people do not refer to that as "programming".
I'm a Firefox user and I did encounter some issues with reCaptchas in the past but this video doesn't convince me at all.

For reference I post regularly on 4chan (not compulsively but maybe a dozen comments a day on average) and if you don't have a pass you have to fill the captcha every time. I only use Firefox. I definitely experienced what this video shows on Firefox in the past (the super-slow loading images) but it felt more like a bug than anything else and it doesn't represent the typical experience. Maybe I tripped one of Google's bot filters somehow and I ended up with a reinforced captcha, or there was a bug somewhere.

The Chrome section of the video is a lot closer to what I see usually, but they make me go through two challenges in a row typically (although that might be 4chan's settings at play).

I'm all for the Chrome hate if it means that people switch to Firefox but I think we need harder data than a short video to call shenanigans on that one.

Off topic rant: the fact that a post with such lack of substance manages to reach 700 votes in 3 hours is frankly depressing, it has no place on this website IMO.
In business analytics backend > frontend. If you are a business analyst you want all your data at your finger tips + the ability of running somewhat complex transformations and calculations. You also need to be able to validate data with your own rules, because you can't always trust data from warehouses and other sources. Then you want to take all your work and schedule it, so it runs automatically and refreshes all the reports depending on it. Finally, you want triggers on data changes/updates and good looking email notifications with screenshots, attachments, etc.. Of all of the above, end users might only see the dashboards, pdf's or Excel's on the frontend part. If you have a solid backend, you will be able to serve your customers at multiple times the speed and with a lot more insightful reports. At that point the difference between a Tableau dashboard (which does look good) and, say, Superset (which does not look as good) is somewhat negligible.
Yea it was much better when it was run by Carnegie Mellon. I guess selling it to Google seemed like a good idea at the time.

Today I feel like Google uses it mostly for their self-driving-car computer vision projects.
Could you fix it by moving time zones? If not, why not?
March was crazy - over 5,000 TM3s registered.

Versus 705 TM3 registrations in May, 424 so far in June.

YTD is ~8,000 TM3 vs 3,700 Leaf.
I believe this is part of a greater Google strategy of using their monopoly power.

I’ve noticed that in the last week, Google no longer provides a link to the non-amp version of pages. Previously, you could press two button taps to get to the non-amp page, but now that ability has been removed. This sucks because Amp doesn’t always support all the features of a normal site, like Reddit or blogs (commenting).

I worry how Google will abuse this in the future. Right now they control the first page you visit after leaving Google through AMP, but you can usually find a link to the home page of a site. In the future, they may restrict it further.
Yeah, Salesforce presentation of pricing really can feel like a bait-and-switch. Advertised as a pay per-user per-month, but then to actually make the system work you get all of these add-on fees, like for storage, or for API calls to perform data integration, etc.
Use self-hosted CAPTCHA with simpler solutions. They still keep out the stupid bots that can't get past ReCAPTCHA.
It's not regression. It's progression. Power users are more efficient and proficient on what you (incorrectly) refer to as 70s-styled terminals. It took us a while to get there. We went down the wrong path with fancy GUIs in the 90s, 00s. Things like not needing a mouse, being able to freely tie programs/commands together, being able to script every aspect of your workflow,... these are all big wins for power users. If there is an easy way to achieve the same flexibility with GUIs, then it hasn't been discovered yet.
Mostly. It costs $300/mo to remove their branding badge from embeds.
My guess is this, since we are talking about tableau: https://vega.github.io/vega/
The CPU core gives, and the compiler takes away.

While the x86 bus architecture is very forgiving, its guarantees only extend up to the level of assembly language. Compilers are happy to re-order operations that the machine has so carefully sequenced.

At the source-code level, therefore, you need to use "atomic" data types and operations (and carefully) just to retain the deterministic semantics the underlying machine implements.

That's the bad news. The good news is twofold: using atomics on x86 doesn't cost any extra (i.e., you pay for fully ordered operations whether you rely on them or not), and doing it right makes your code portable to machines with "relaxed" ordering, where you only pay for ordering if you ask for it.

Intel and AMD manage to make a strongly ordered bus system almost as fast as a relaxed one by throwing enormous numbers of transistors at the problem. It costs more power, and is the very devil to get right, but it makes wrong programs more likely to get the right answer anyway.
Thanks! In case you or anyone else is interested in more details about melatonin, here is some info: https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/07/10/melatonin-much-more-th...
Burstable Instances: An Interesting Take on Pay-per-Use
This type of attitude is typical, where one likes to dismiss new ideas and keep status quo instead of coming up with new ideas or innovations.

The point is that there is an opportunity for the Steve Jobs of health care to come up with a way, a new innovative novel way, for classification of tumors to be improved without needing biopsy. Once we have that, then we can take tests to our heart's content. Right now, the attitude of "we shouldn't have people take tests and detect cancer early because our current method of determining if they are cancerous would make it too hard" isn't acceptable.
Anarcho-capitalists: roads with congestion pricing lead to an efficient balance of changes to schedules, housing location, and salaries. (This seems totally implementable now with cell-phone networks.)
Inspiration for Young Entrepreneurs
Hmmm.. ok.. I could and should write something on this a lot longer.

The government facilitate corruption. The government is a hegemony.

Aside from that broad shot, 10 years ago you enter the aforementioned square freely, not only after going through a 'police' security check, bags x-rayed, IDs checked.
An insightful remark about ReCaptcha on HN recently (I don't have a link) was that it went from being "are you human" to "which human are you".
I don't think that's an option for anything other than 1040-EZ. I get lost filing with turbo tax, I can't even imagine how it'll be on paper.
Qubole launches Quantum, its serverless database engine
> The entire concept of a private prison kind of disgusts me.

It matters a lot less whether the prison is privately-run or run by the state, because in the end, the same abuses happen, and in fact the same exact entities still end up profiting.

> You can read horror stories of prison companies only having one underpaid doctor for multiple prisons forcing inmates to wait weeks to get treatment for basic injuries, leading to broken bones healing incorrectly, or dying from appendicitis.

This is appalling, yes! But it's not unique to privately-run prisons. Prisons run by the state have these exact same problems.

(It actually goes much worse than the examples you've described, but I'll avoid getting sucked into a soliloquy on the state of healthcare for prisoners for today).
There is no way to wake up a device remotely ever. Firebase is doing the same thing anyone can, running on a schedule. It just batches the comms in one time slot.
Android scheduler mechanism was supposed to offer the same benefit.
Whether or not ads on the internet are good is not that clear cut. But I would say 99% of tracking is both evil and mostly useless, probably with the 1% being first-party analytics to track some very simple stuff like page views.

I'm glad Firefox is now blocking third-party trackers by default (not that I needed it for myself, but it's important for others to have this).
Why Most Developers Fear CSS
Ask HN: How to pivot into career growth after being a temp worker 10 years?
In most of my career I have been treated as a temp worker Software Engineer. I have a non-STEM degree.

In the first place I worked for after college in 2008, they treated every rank-and-file person as a temp, making them work in the office but skirting employment laws by hiring them all as 1099s. I eventually went back with them three years later, but to work as a consultant. From then on it was one 1099 job after another, at a startup followed by a very long drought of no work dotted by contract jobs lasting only a few months for the smallest of businesses. Layoffs, or company running out of project budget usually end the jobs.

Tech-wise it's just as stagnant. Places usually have cowboy coding practices. I have led a few projects before, but scale at which I've done things is a joke. And if you ask me about unit testing, CI or systems development, my mind will draw a blank.

My last shot at a "regular" salaried job was in 2010 but I didn't stay longer than 3 months. And since I was a junior I didn't really do much at that point to have a strong staying presence. It's now just a minor footnote of my job history.

So as generally being a "temp" I don't really have a presence in growth since companies don't want to commit me to full-time. My average tenure is 1.5 years. Since I'm not really an employee I never participated in hiring decisions and don't move up the corporate ladder. It feels like I'm stuck on a weird holding pattern waiting for the next breakout job to happen. I want to grow within a company now, but even with modern side projects, I'm terrible at convincing companies to hire me full-time.

So I probably should have become a manager or at least senior developer at this point, that much I know. Everyone that's given me interview feedback said the same thing. I'm disproportionately inexperienced for my years. But a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. How can I capitalize on the what I have now and use that to turn my career around?
And Android's battery monitoring should flag them accordingly, not rely on presence of some library.
Reality is that both need to be covered.
Care to share your complaint?
Amazon.com Credit Builder: Build credit with no annual fee
Honest question: can we start a class action lawsuit for psychological damages due to this? I've experienced this firsthand when trying to use a service through a VPN. I spent legitimately 5 minutes trying to get through only to get "Please try again" every time even though I selected them meticulously. It is infuriating. I thought I was going crazy
For my use case, the volume of messages was not an issue. This isn't a huge app that is pushing out tons of notifications. We're talking 10's or 100's a day, maybe.

In fact, it didn't matter at all once the initial notification was visible whether follow-on notifications were displayed. Possibly the fact that I was locally dropping the notifications (because the user didn't need them), the system counted those as "notification that weren't interacted with, so I'm going to slow you down at the server."?

I have no idea, and no way to find out, since FCM is pretty opaque at this point.
What? You can't turn off any of that. It's recorded whether you see it or not.
Note I am using a MacBook Pro and iPhone in this situation.
Certainly not a lot of storage - not sure about the graphics card for Lightroom. And of course, quite an expensive machine. Also, one is limited in screen choices to the internal screen, which is very good, but only 27". Also, Apple doesn't sell external 27" displays, so one cannot have a matching second screen.

Yes, the iMac Pro is certainly a nice machine, but quite expensive for what it does and again extremely limiting in hardware choices.
Looking at their previous partnership with ProtonVPN, ten dollars a month for a VPN seems a bit high. My self hosted Algo instance only run ~6 a month with tax.

Maybe if they also gave some cloud storage it would be worth it. Being able to store a veracrypt volume with my important data in the cloud securely would be nice.

Current options seem to be Amazon, Google, or Dropbox. Spideroak has the "hive" but there's not really an option to just upload stuff, it needs to reside locally and be mirrored.
Oh yes ^^^ this. Where I work we recently upgraded from a single legacy product to another ERP, only for many secondary functions we went "best of breed" to additional SaaS products. It has had, literally, an exponential increase in the necessary resources to make them all work together. Keep in mind, the ERP we upgraded to also had modules for these secondary functions, but it was a case of Perfect-Is-The-Enemy-of-Good, and the sum of all parts is now much less than the mediocre Good we would have had with a single ecosystem.
If it makes you feel any better, I'm fairly sure the answer to those questions don't count. I know I've gotten some reCAPTCHAs "wrong" and gotten marked as a human. It's picking up on a lot of signals, not just whether or not you're "right". So, the good news is you can relax, and safely rewrite all the questions to "Do I think this is a store front?" or "Do I think this square counts as a crosswalk?" or whatever without loss.
There have been at least 3 attempts. The current one is still lacking much of a community.
The website author seems to be Russian which might be an indicator. But not a good enough excuse for such terrible UX.

Using Firefox shouldn't be an indicator of anything malicious.
A Svelte Chat with Rich Harris
In theory, yeah, but in practice the problem stems from product initiatives for new features that span those micro-front ends.

Each team responsible for a particular front-end gets a set of stories: 'implement feature x so that the user can blah blah'. This feature requires using a design pattern that is not part of the core set.

Each team, because of the silo'd nature of the article's model, must therefore implment it's own version of that pattern, each subtly or grossly different from the other, et voila, you have inconsistency across what to the user is supoosed to be a cohesive app.

Sure, there are solutions for this, one of which is common ownership of that design system and having some kind of product coordination that allows for the contribution of new patterns to the design system in advance of the new feature, but that does require a lot of care in planning and coordination that negates a lot of the benefits of the this sort of model, imo.
Wait until a manager asks you to do something that Salesforce was not built for and IT tells you a back office resource can do it. None of those of the shelves enterprise solutions just work, they all need some degree of customization and integration. I am struggling sometimes to justify the cost of a vendor solution + customization versus just rolling out my own or an open source one that can be more easily built on top of.
For most DBs the simplest path is a db dump, assuming you don't have more data than can be backed up in a reasonable time frame. From there, there's a number of file-systems and other integrations for S3, sftp or similar. You can simply copy out from there. The backup utility in question could be used to target your dump file(s) directory.

Replica's aren't actually a backup, though it's probably a good idea to have them, and in the case of too much data to reasonably backup, as close as you are going to come.

Also, depending on data structures, for example if your data models fit into something like MongoDB or not, it's easy enough to trigger a dump for each record. I've setup systems where primary records are json+gz files in S3 or Azure blobs. In practice this has been as part of the process that will update ElasticSearch (or Mongo) from an RDBMS authority.

It was pretty easy to do <base>/collection/{ID}.json.gz .. from there, worst case, I'd have to create a re-population script from the hard files, and might lose a little less important data, but would always have a hard recovery path. YMMV of course.

I've got 3 side projects that I've been muddling on getting started and some of the things that have happened to the original author frankly scare me. I'm also working on legal structure (LLCs etc) before any real launch. There are so many edge cases to consider, and sometimes it's hard just getting started and accepting that you will make mistakes along the way.
>well I can do the same thing with some scripts or spin up a web server.

That's a massive waste of your time and effort. The maintenance costs become massive as well should you choose to create your own system. At the VERY least you should leverage existing free open-source tools such as Metabase or Superset or Dash, or free tools such as Google Data Studio or Mode Analytics, if you're not going to spend cash to get a tool like Periscope Data/Looker/Tableau. I mean this gently, but you likely underestimate the complexity of a reliable reporting/analytics infrastructure. Think about it this way - these tools are either collaborated on by a large open-source talent pool, or are created by teams of dedicated software engineers just as talented as you.

I've worked with quite a few companies in an analytics consulting type role, and your "I can do the same thing with scripts" statement is one I've heard countless times. The long-term maintenance costs and technical debt (and "rigidity cost") of rolling-your-own analytics far outweighs the cost of a true analytics platform.

If you decide to roll-your-own anyway, look at tools like DBT and Airflow to reduce long-term maintenance costs.
Not an uncommon experience for college...