skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Self-flagellation by restricting technological capability is not the solution to climate change. It's not expected that flights on this aircraft will address the mass market. With regards to climate change this will be a drop in the bucket.

Solving global climate change requires rethinking energy generation, ground and sea shipping, transportation, heating, and addressing deforestation. It will not be solved by banning plastic straws, sorting your garbage, or even driving an electric car (though switching to electric cars is a very good step towards electric trucks, and will have a noticeable impact, unlike this niche airliner).

Don't ban niche things just because they contain something that is immoral at scale. EVERYTHING is immoral at scale, including eating food or breathing. We need to address and manage our problems to allow humanity to live, not die by a thousand self-hating cuts. Optimization is always addressed by looking at the 80%, not the 20%.

Maybe once this jet is in the air, if fuel expenditure is at all a concern, we can figure out how to address the efficiency concerns once we have the rest of the problems of aerodynamics and the infrastructure to manufacture this sorted out.
Oh, evacuation of Party leaders' children started right away. General population, not so much.
In our case, the postal code (Canadian) and almost any other piece of data is uniquely identifiable. Through a quirk in the layout of our street, my wife and I have the only house in our postal code. Add age, gender, birth month, hair colour, t-shirt size... pretty much anything, and you’ve reduced from 2 possibilities to 1.

I still want to try dropping a letter in a mailbox from a different city with just our postal code written on it and see if it arrives.
Wouldn't it be interesting if Apple offered some kind of compromise and made it more like a warehousing scheme?

"Okay, instead of 30% we will take 0%. In return, you owe us $x/month to store your app on our servers and CDNs, then $y per download to deliver it onto the phone. And $z per query to show up in the search engine.

And we'll need $10,000 up front on deposit to make sure you don't skate on the bill."
Carrd – Simple, free, fully responsive one-page sites for pretty much anything
Police push legal boundaries to get into cellphones
I smell a lawsuit coming. How can Amazon think it's ok to use people's faces in an advertisement when those people haven't been convicted of a crime?

The case of Ring is particularly disturbing. When its inventor appeared on Shark Tank, he said he wanted to create a way to hear his doorbell from the garage. Since Amazon bought the company for $1B, it's pivoted to a surveillance tool that's being offered to police as a way to freely record and review neighborhood camera views.

It's sad to see that unicorn companies today believe that surveillance capitalism is the way forward. Personally, I long for a return to old-fashioned values in business, namely making a product or service that people care about and want to pay for rather than pandering to fear and courting easy money from our soon-to-be robot overlords.
Replying to mattmanser in the sibling comment since I cannot replying to it directly:

It comes in faster than you think. One of the company I work for was a small company, at the time I think we were 4 or 5 including the 2 founders, they sell some specific information as a service through APIs. They charge per call, so you have to update the customer funds in their account on each API call. Yes, people can want and make lots of APIs call very fast, and in a business which charges per API call, this is a good thing, but you have to find strategies and make business decisions on how to handle accepting and replying to new API calls while maintaining their account balance.
Of course they had a choice to join. But romanticism of the military is (thankfully) starting to die out, much like the people forced to die as part of a radiation cleanup.

Most people join the military at a young age, when their brains aren't fully developed, so stating "Well, they shouldn't have signed up if they didn't want to die a horrible, unpredictable death" is easy to state, but hard to wrap your head around at that age. Hindsight is always 20/20.
He misspoke when he said production. He meant R&D. And yes, bug pharma spends more on marketing than R&D.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/02/11/big-p...
Posted this yesterday with same source, same headline: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20117905
It was actually filmed in Lithuania. They are real soviet era apartments, just retrofitted and those with a sharp eye noticed plastic windows, etc.
But when they do, it's usually because of storms, trees, and...squirrels.
Google’s Stadia streaming platform could shake things up at this year’s E3 2019
> and when that individual is not open to those factual shortcomings.

That's when you should play the part of being stubborn and close-minded yourself, if this is what it takes to ensure that your points are heard. Intellectual humility is the best case, but sometimes it is best to cut one's losses.
Yeah, but if you view it as a novel way to get people to download an app and later the app offers scooters, bikes, and rides you can see where it might be going...

I'm not saying pogo sticks as an onboarding strategy is a great idea but its also not nearly the worst idea i've ever encountered from a startup.
Amazon should have instead paid an actor, created a fake video and then use that as an ad. Might have even gone viral like this one did.
I find it disingenuous how the "study" lists Jesse Lee Peterson as a "white supremacist".

Jesse Lee Peterson is a black, conservative christian radio host.

Not saying I believe/care for his views but let's all calm down with the flinging of labels such as Nazi, Racist, White Supremacist at everyone who has a differing opinion (IMO).
Early 30s here and I've realised that comments are worse than useless most of the time. Nothing enforces that the comment is correct, so a significant proportion of comments will be false, so no comments can be relied upon.

Descriptive types, clear tests, and sensible variable names are much more effective strategies for making code understandable. Comments should be a last-resort stopgap.
This is a ridiculous conversation. Disks and RAM will always occupy their respective positions in the storage hierarchy, so databases (assuming stored on disks) will always be the bottleneck.
So murder is the limit? But not all nazis murdered people.
I think the technical term for these ads that stalk you after you have bought the product is 'remarketing'.

Amazon should know what they are doing but they do the ads of what you have just bought, even though they have good information. No idea what their excuse is for fluffing it.

However, with small companies, e.g. a clothes shop, they don't do the website necessarily themselves, getting an agency to do it. When they get to a certain size they bring this work on house, but the principles of cock up are the same, in the agency or in house.

The agency doing the website have extra add on services for SEO, remarketing and other marketing snake oil. The people in these jobs are not the sort that can do database joins. They use products that have been marketed at them and generally work on second hand hearsay to determine what works, even though they do use graphs and data.

They are not necessarily going to know the products and even though they buy adverts they do not see themselves as in the advertising game, more in the marketing field.

The internet has raised everyone's boats over the last few years so these people can have some legit upward pointing graphs, what is less clear is whether it is demand, price or product that has got their clients online sales up. However, they can claim it is all their work and that the campaigns they have put on have changed something assumed to be static.

On this snake oil they can attract new clients to bring them marketing spend. They try their hardest but they are not data power users. I know that is tarring a whole industry with the same brush, but the people in this industry will be 'power Excel users' rather think to become 'novice SQL users'.

To be honest logging in to some of these Facebook account screens is quite hard work, going through the right channels to get the login details from the client can take all day. Uploading data probably needs help from a developer on a different team, plus you have to go home at 5.30 on the dot.

People that are good at selling product believe in customer service, word of mouth, product and a multitude of things that are a million miles away from remarketing. So the industry of online ad sales invariably has hit and miss results because the people in the business are unlikely to be that smart.
But the database is often the hardest thing to scale. Scaling up transcoding is childs play by comparison.
This is what VRM is supposed to be.

https://blogs.harvard.edu/vrm/
But this is not akin to asking our military to do a dirty job, it's akin to us having military personnel from other NATO nations to do the dirty work for our mistakes when they had very little to do with what was going on.
> every advertiser I’ve interacted with is either doing individual-level targeting or striving towards it.

Only if they're clueless.

For example: Nike really wants a dataset of "people who buy expensive sneakers for fashion purposes".

This dataset is probably hundreds of millions of anonymous people, and not personal data. If there was a way to get this dataset directly, Nike would do that in a heartbeat.

Unfortunately, as of 2019 the only way to get something like this today is by, e.g., crossreferencing credit card purchase info with Twitter browsing logs, which leaks a shitload of sensitive private data.

For ad purposes personal data collection is a bug, not a feature.
> what is wrong is probably something to do with human nature, and a system might not be able to fix that.

haha maybe. But there is usually a trend towards things having interfaces that are more human-friendly, so maybe one day healthcare will adapt.
It's intended for an English speaking audience.
Additionally: why would it be ok to use people's faces in an advertisement even if those people HAD been convicted of a crime?

(I agree with your main point.)
The American states' laws from 100+ years ago are completely at odds with current culture. So unless you are in a radically traditional and very insular religious subculture, marrying before 21 is probably going to be a disaster.

This whole "women of 16 are fit to reproduce" thing is not constant in time. Not only is there the cultural factor, the physical age of puberty varies radically across environments and ethnicities. For example, home environment (presence of biological father) affects age of menarche in women. And in 18th century England many girls didn't start puberty until they were over 20 years old. And west of the Hajnal line, England included, has had consistently higher marriage and childbearing ages for centuries. Menarche age has been plummeting in developed countries for 60+ years, but since it's partly from pollutants it probably isn't correct to assume that means they should have children earlier.

It indeed feels unsavory to talk about human beings like this, but the point is that it isn't correct to generalize about what is "ideal".
Handy list of Macintosh error codes
Epoché
there are tradeoffs. digging holes and trenches is expensive.
Its not always sucks, as a consumer, if I can get cheaper pizza, with the trade of they may sell my data, I'm fine with it.

What is the downside ? My email spammed ? not that much of issue, gmail spam filter work reasonably well.

My phone being spammed by robocall ? smart app can filter those out too.

Ads on the web ? adblocker solve that.
> In a way, the world is lucky it happened there and not somewhere else.

Its a mixed bag, while that might be true its important also to remember that kind of accident could have really only occurred in the USSR. Western countries simply couldnt muster the political support to build reactors with that lack of concern for safety, or those kind of design flams. The USSR? No problem.

Just wow to think they build power reactors without even a containment structure.
Yes, the tweet is promoted. But I'm not sure if it would fit the definition of an "ad"

(And what's the definition of an ad you ask? Good question, I'm not sure if the FTC has a specific definition)

Think like this: what if Amazon was putting the same information into a newspaper?
Almost invariably capitalists try to define capitalism as being intrinsic to "human nature" or "society", and are always wrong. If you read the higher upvoted comments -- that statement is believed and taken at face value.

If you have to take the time to defend that your accumulation of material wealth is ethical when there are millions of people dying from a lack of resources... I don't know what to say. I just hope HN grows to stop believing the obvious lies.
After 15 years in the business I think it’s worse than that: code is a liability. It matters - to have as little of it as necessary and not a line more.
If there is no contention, then what is the problem you cannot easily architect around in 2019?
they are tolerant of others choices not intolerant. are you opposed to tolerance
Ask HN: Free program for making polished PDFs?
I was looking for a free or nearly free program that can make polished PDFs and will run on a macbook.

I have used Scribus in the past, but I was not entirely satisfied with it.

What do you use to make PDFs that is intuitive and does not have a steep learning curve?
Looks like there's more discussion here.
My Absolute truth I unlearned as a Senior developer. your knowledge, hard work and quality of work is not important. The relationship that you have with your boss and your bank account is what you need to focus on.
You can read Claire's reasons for leaving Google in her own words here: https://medium.com/@GoogleWalkout/why-a-googlewalkout-organi...
This reminded me of https://www.usenix.org/system/files/1311_05-08_mickens.pdf

I HAVE NO TOOLS BECAUSE I’VE DESTROYED MY TOOLS WITH MY TOOLS.
This made me a little sick to my stomach. I thought I was jaded, but imagine the worlds economy running in FB.
"Known"? Probably not.

Like I said, knowing real identities is the last thing on the list of ad tech priorities.

If shadowy entities are collecting "real identities" then it's not for ad purposes.
I will revisit this thread in 2021 just to see how wrong everyone was. FB has billions of users that interact with its product everyday. People who make plans, attend events, split all sort of bills.

A borderless stablecoin will be a gamechanger. It can fuel commerce but above that it will kill many middlemen and rightly so.
These companies are so huge and such an integral part of society that they need to be made more accountable to the public, and forcing them to be more accountable to their workers is part of that. I think the recent proposal to require employee representation on the board of directors of $1B+ companies is a good start.
You're talking about a save income that's above/around many people's gross.
In the west, changes are more likely to occur when problems get attention. This is the beauty of democracy: Attention can be powerful, because it can change how people votes.

And when it comes to people making personal changes, the free will is strong, but with the big life style changes we need, I do not believe we can rely on free will only. The changes have to be incentivized somehow from government side. The west is RICH. We can afford to invest in saving ourselves from a global catastrophe.

How? You punish bad behavior through taxes and fines, and reward good behavior through tax breaks and financial support.

Will it hurt the economy? Quite possibly. Can we afford it? I think we cannot afford the opposite.
From what I've read, runaway greenhouse was more likely on Venus. Mainly because of greater solar input. So that's plausible.
Habeas corpus called & would like to be thawed from deep freeze.

The presumption of innocence in American society died a long time ago, with Gitmo, CIA black sites & NSLs. What little was still left, is being killed every day with asylum seeker kids being abused in border ‘shelters’.

Long live habeas corpus & the American conscience.
Ring's mission is all about safety. Jamie has talked extensively about how they actively rejected ideas to just build connected things for the home, to focus on & foster a sense of safe homes and safe communities. The floodlight is a great example of a pre-acquisition product that piggybacks on that mission.
Even as English speaking person in an English speaking country, I get non-English ads on Google properties. It's astonishing how bad Google's ad targeting is sometimes.
Even if one claims the video is fine (and I'd disagree), it's still a very very very bad idea for Amazon, or any large company, to be enforcing the law and conducting mass shaming via advertising.

That's practically a Black Mirror episode, and I would hope that everyone can see this, but judging from this comment thread, that's clearly not the case. Disturbing.
> transfer was cheap as chips

I used TransferWise once a few years ago from USD to CAD and it cost ~1.4% all-in. That's cheaper than my bank but still very expensive if you're transferring your whole salary every pay period like I was. I ended up using Bitcoin instead.

Is it cheaper now?
So you're saying you understand the value proposition and that it's been successful elsewhere, but you don't understand why Facebook would want to do it, or why it might make sense for the company who already has messaging apps on billions of phones?
I don't know if I can call myself a senior. (none of the companies I've worked for have used senior/junior in their job titles), but one of the most important pieces of information I've picked up is this:

The Simplest way is usually the right way.

What I mean is that fancy algorithms, sweeping design patterns, and "clever" pieces of code are generally not the best approach to 99% of coding specific problems.

Example: Nested for-loops. Generally a bad choice. When encountering a nested for-loop, one may be tempted to try and refactor it into some sort of recursive and highly-performant function with O(n) complexity, etc. You go through all that work and then realize that the most iterations that for loop will ever see is ~10. You just wasted a ton of time writing code that is more complex, harder to debug, and generally more opaque.

In my experience, I've seen this a lot in the context of premature optimization. I've also been the perpetrator many times as well.
A Simple Explanation of Information Gain and Entropy
Games People Play by Eric Berne MD
I want to be able to vote electronically.
The article points out that there are conflicting studies. Personally I don't believe there is a strong correlation (one way or the other) between intellectual humility, intelligence or breadth of knowledge. But my opinion on that matter is entirely unqualified; all I have to go on is basic anecdata I've observed along with my own interiority.

While reading through the article I found this interesting:

> In terms of insight, higher scorers in intellectual humility were less likely to claim knowledge they didn’t have (the researchers tested this by assessing participants’ willingness to claim familiarity with entirely fictitious facts that they couldn’t possibly know), and they also tended to underestimate their performance on a cognitive ability test.

I can appreciate the reasoning behind asking that question, but the fact that it's so useful for judging intellectual humility saddens me. Why would a person spontaneously respond, "Yes" when asked if they're familiar with a thing they know they aren't? What does that say about us as a species, that this behavior is so prevalent?
I'm surprised this hasn't come up yet, but the following should be required reading. I don't want to invoke "we follow orders or people die" (or blow up), but...

https://www.fastcompany.com/28121/they-write-right-stuff

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25
by your logic kosher and halaal people should not share restaurants or tables with non-kosher and halaal people
No need for a new government agency or program.

We just need to start holding all organizations, and specifically their leaders, personally liable for security incidents.

Once people's freedoms are at stake, everyone fall in line so quickly that we will all be amazed.
Ask HN: Which programming language you prefer for starting a new SaaS product?
IMO the fully general version of that is too flexible to be maintainable; it's better to have more constrained/standardised functionality that lets you solve the problems you'd need it for. Generally there are two kinds of things that you would want to be doing at compile time: producing code to handle the fields of a structure in a generic way (which you can do with frunk), or producing delegating wrappers to handle cross-cutting concerns (which you can do up to a point via the combination of built in delegation and first-class functions, though the lack of HKT does make some cases impossible).
Classic story:

https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Negative_2000_Li...
Yes, it's all legal issues. If the government doesn't want money to easily be sent in/out of the country, this isn't going to change that
Using "aperçus" in an article about intellectual humility? Ironic, I'm pretty sure. Unless I'm just unfamiliar with inexplicable pluralization being appropriate.
Just another reason for the highly educated of India to leave.
All of this experience is pretty shallow and completely irrelevant to distributed systems in the age of the cloud computing and the internet. For some reason Sun ignored the internet and didn't move into distributed systems at all. So, for example, this experience at Sun couldn't help the engineers in any way to build a distributed key-value storage for the cloud, while Amazon was publishing stuff like Dynamo paper.
Probably. Part of the problem is that many modern electrical insulation materials--in an effort to be eco-friendly--are made of soy derivatives. When such materials are used for wires in car engines, as they frequently are in Japanese cars, rats consider them dinner. I live in a rural area, and I've spent many $K on this problem.

Whether there's an equally "natural" material that rodents don't like is a question that should be researched.
Downvotes on hope for the spread of positivity and love? Meme magic is powerful indeed.
TLDR - there is too much code to rewrite despite the daily horrors of life-threatening and altering software bugs. Not that I think Rust will solve everything
> Can someone more experienced than I am on financial matters check if they're in deep shit as the article suggests?

I'm no financial expert but "¥15.7tn ($143bn) of interest-bearing debt" is a lot of money, in case shit will end up hitting the proverbial fan (meaning a recession that will make refinancing a lot harder) then I don't see an easy way out for them. I also don't know what "¥27tn of total liabilities" really stands for, but that doesn't sound good either.

Adding those two numbers up gives you about $300 billion that is owed by SoftBank in one way or another (debt + liabilities), that is a lot of money that cannot easily be covered by SoftBank's current assets in case they'll become hungry for liquidity. And I don't think the biggest part of that sum has a long maturity (think 10, 20 even 30 years), probably most of it it's due in the next few years (even though I may be wrong on this one, I admit).
Not sure exactly what you mean by "make PDF". In my flow I sometimes use Inkscape to save something as PDF, or PDF Latex to generate documents. I hope it helps you.
Three ways that Big Tech could be broken up