skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sure, take this chart[0] and multiply it times the number of air frames one would anticipate needing to accomplish various missions. Not only are the bureaucratic meetings amplified, but the O&M long tail starts to kill you with the logistics of moving and storing parts, training specialists on each aircraft, administering the additional specialists... it keeps going and going.

As an aside, I didn't say it was "way better", I just said they would come out ahead even burning money for decades.

0: https://www.dau.mil/tools/t/Department-of-Defense-Acquisitio...
> US equities has nothing to do with rising corporate valuations and everything to do with a corporate balance sheet parlor trick enabled by plentiful and cheap credit.

Apple is not taking debt to do buybacks. They as just returning their excess cash to their owners because they don't know what to do with it. It's alternative to paying dividend. Apple is doing buybacks because they are making so much money.

Buffet and Munger were asked about Apple buybacks in 2018 Berkshire annual shareholder meeting. They approved them, but then said the following:

Buffet: That does not mean we approve of every buyback.

Munger: Some people just buy to keep the stock up, and that, of course, is
insane and immoral. Apart from that, it’s fine.
WSL2 and Kali Linux
Oh duh, thank you!
>I wonder (doubt, even) if PREPA will be able to execute it.

Sadly this might say a lot more about PREPA than anything else.
Honestly, AGPL license your projects: That will prevent obnoxious companies from taking your work without giving back.

If you deliberately pick a BSD-style license, then you don't get to complain about 'big winners' not cutting you a slice. They're doing exactly what you told them they could do.
Similarly you can pinpoint Wikileaks as Chinese or Iranian agent. Or Malaysian. The fact that they hadn’t had a chance to publish anything on Russian establishment does not make them their agents. It’s a very strong accusation.
On Electron, I wrote this in my article:

> ... such as Prettier, Curl, Jekyll, Electron. This doesn’t mean the people working on those projects are poor, because in several cases the maintainers have jobs at companies that allow open source contributions.

Then,

> Why you compare GitHub's acquisition price to the amount of money being put into open-source instead of seeing it as money being put into open-source is beyond me.

Because Microsoft, as a public company, cannot make an acquisition the size of 20% their profit that year without a clear plan for ROI on that cost, and this will likely happen through some integration with Azure, since the GitHub CEO reports to Microsoft's VP of Cloud and Enterprise. And even if GitHub is seen as a platform that supports open source (therefore money into the platform being a positive for open source), it is weird and unfair for a support partner to earn significantly more money than the core persons involved in open source.
Yeah, I wouldn't be surprised if the scope of windows testing is larger than any single application in history.
It's understandable that you should generally keep the UI the same between releases, it shouldn't be changing every release.

But at some point in a 20-year development cycle you might want to switch things up, and a major release is the time to do it.

I don't think anyone had a legitimate complaint when Blender completely revamped their UI a few years ago. It was objectively better, and "it's different than what I'm used to" was not a valid complaint.
Yeah, sounds like either you're the person in question, in which case the paperwork means nothing, or you're not the person in question, in which case you've defrauded the office and they can point to that (and how they were deceived) if the real person asks why their info was released.
Unsure if inferiorhuman and defective are the same person, but this is so much fun.

1. Pick a story from 20+ years ago.

2. Pretend you are talking about the same people (they aren't).

3. Pretend they never changed their opinion about anything (they did).

4. Post a comment that suggests nothing changed since 1998 (it has).

My goodness, some people on the interwebz...
> This isn’t helpful without a source.

US Military, either Army or Navy. I don't remember exactly what was written on the cover. The context may have been an invasion of the mainland.

Anyway, if they want to wait a couple of years and do all this again that will probably be an academic detail. They are almost certainly improving their navy so they can be more pushy in the South China Sea.

> The stakes are too low for both sides.

A foreign power swooping in and offering support to dissidents? When one of China's biggest strategic goals is enforcing unity among 1.4 billion people? China could very easily see the situation differently.

It would be similar to Russia organising a uniformed 'humanitarian convoy' with China and Iran, then trundled over to America to offer material support to separatist Texans or Californians. If there was a belief it might actually make a difference that action would provoke quite a response.
good if you're the manager not if you're the dev
Very nice and interesting article!

This might be a dumb question. How does say the discovered CartPoleSwingUp nets respond to changing the mass of the cart and/or the pole? That is, if I take the net found after 1024 generations, and doubled the mass of the pole. Would it still be able to upright the pole, assuming the motors could output the required force?
Very nice! How about this, for more than 2 classes:

Let p_k be the probability of being in class k. We assume log p_k = f_k(x) + C(x) where x is the feature vector and C(x) is normalisation to make the probabilities sum to 1.

Equivalently, p_k is proportional to exp(f_k(x)), so p_k = exp(f_k(x)) / sum_j exp(f_j(x)).

Because of the normalisation we may assume without loss of generality that f_0(x) = 0. Then if we have 2 classes and f_1(x) is linear, we get logistic regression.
Usual parasite approach. Accessing standards should for sure be free for everyone.
My shoulder surgeon gave my name, phone number and a vivid description of the circumstances that arose to warrant my shoulder surgery to a woman she thought I'd be a good match with. She even told the woman to "not tell anyone because this is a huge violation."

It goes both ways.
There is a difference between posting anti-government opinions, and aiding and abetting the theft of state secrets. Eliding then into one thing is intellectually dishonest.

I think it’s totally reasonable to argue that Assange did not do what he is accused of, but what he is accused of is not journalism or simply the expression of free speech.
Anti-vax stuff aside, the attitude of

>Trust experts or die.

is not a scientific attitude, it is borderline scientism and an appeal to authority. Remember when the tobacco industry paid medical experts such as ENT Doctors to endorse smoking? [0]

The idea that "the rubes" don't have to or shouldn't be allowed to see the data behind FDA decisions and should just trust the experts blindly is completely condescending and is probably a key contributor to anti-vax sentiment and the anti-intellectualism movements you decry.

[0]: https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2012/01/big-tobacco-l...
Good work( using this comment to test out the inline reply and while typing i noticed , that , hey this works " )
Most common bisphenol A replacements are reproductive toxicants. BPA has gained enough awareness that consumers are looking for “BPA-free” products and so companies have to abandon it for marketing purposes. The replacements aren't healthier they are just less well-known, for now.
It depends who distributed the screenshots.
Public servants are not compensated for that higher standard.
There's quite a big difference between voluntarily making a few tweaks to something to keep your client happy, and giving them a legally enforceable right to unlimited and uncompensated re-work until they're satisfied.
Editing the same comment however goes to new page but, Good Work.. coffee on me
This sounds somewhat familiar, though I approached what I saw a different way, with different outcome.

I'm getting out of independent technical consulting (just as soon as I find the right dotcom/startup employer), because the various business burdens, separate from the actual technical expertise I provide, kept increasing, and I could no longer cost-justify the burdens.

One kind of burden is regulatory compliances, and my favorite example is when a client needed me to be able to check a box in a compliance-tracking system Web form, attesting something like "I have an understanding of the FAR" document. I'm by-the-book about such things, so I put tech work on hold, dug in, and started reading. The FAR is actually not bad, pretty accessible, and I imagine a lot of serious straight-shooter accountant types put a lot of work into this, as part of making things run well, and I respect that immensely, and am glad they do that. But the current FAR PDF file is approx. 2,000 pages, and my expertise is in software. It took me a solid person-week to read through, so that I could possibly claim to have an understanding of it. Once I was done, at the time, I decided not to invoice those hours.

(On some later burdens, I had learned from this, and talked with the clients. Some burdens the client could help with, and some not.)

I agree with the need for such regulations and processes, but these and other burdens seemed to keep increasing, one of the architecture projects that would've made up for the overhead didn't seem to be coming through, and the burdens no longer made financial/personal sense for my particular one-person business. So, when a last straw burden was added (though reasonable, from a regulatory perspective), amidst some reorg on the parent contracts, I had to terminate a couple contracts for very positive projects that I'd been proud to be working on.
Please don't go full Godwin. It never helps.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
You realize they're not actually servants, right?

"Take a job with the Fed, sign up for a lifetime of lower income so that HN can nod sagely about avoiding the appearance of impropriety" is a recipe to get no one to ever work for the government.
Toast has been a thing long before Android: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pop-up_notification
Please don't take HN threads straight into repetitive flamewar hell.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Funny, I'm a huge coffee drinker and prefer Dunkin' because it's really good.
How are the Electron project creators and core contributors not 'the core persons involved in open source'?

My point is that it's like saying "software developers don't make much money when you exclude corporate salaries and stock bonuses". These open source developers are nowhere near the poverty line and coming to a conclusion that these projects aren't sustainable doesn't make much sense.

Edit: maybe your point is that the donation model isn't sustainable. But it reads like you are trying to make a bigger statement about open source sustainability given statements like:

"I was able to calculate how much yearly revenue for a project goes to each “full-time equivalent” contributor. This is essentially their salary"

"More than 50% of projects are red: they cannot sustain their maintainers above the poverty line"

"Unless companies take an active role in supporting open source with significant funding, what’s left is a situation where most open source maintainers are severely underfunded." (this reads to me like 'unless you include salary and stock, software developers are poor')
The dark side of the product management role
I respectfully disagree, OK Computer is the best album!
I don't like the high prices either and wish these were available for free. At least the demand to have them for free is not unreasonable given that a large part of the work that goes in the standards is ultimately financed by tax money.

But to answer your question: Because the primary customers are organizations who are willing to pay. Individuals that are not affiliated with one of the paying organizations are not considered, unfortunately.

From a practical point of view it is not hard to get access. My experience is:
As long as I was a student or an employee of a university the library provided me access and I was allowed to copy the standards as long as I needed them for my studies. When I left university I could still get a library card for the library and I could read the standards as long as I wanted but I wasn't allowed to copy them. Also every bigger company I worked for provided access. At least that's my experience.
Hair loss simply means you weren't eating a nutritionally balanced diet, and can easily be countered with minor changes or supplements. Protein doesn't necessarily need to come from animal products to be beneficial.
Satisfaction clauses like that are the thing I always tell my contractor friends to look for. No sane person would agree to it but the corporate lawyers often manage to sneak it in.

It’s usually enforceable but it’s also almost always negotiable.
Florida Company Sued over Sales of Skimpy Health Plans
Show HN: Correly – Increasing Sales Engagement
I kind of like it though. The lack of the usual "social network" features makes it much easier to focus on the merit and content of each comment.
Not really no. I'd guess most tech firms have far more ideas than they can ever execute on. Ideas are cheap. Implementations are expensive.

See how all the big firms file gazillions of patents but actual patent infringement suits between them are quite rare. Patents are seen as a defensive posture: everyone knows everyone violates a million patents so by and large, mutually assured destruction is avoided. In a world where ideas were rare you'd see patents be treated as much more valuable.
That’s okay. Bureaucrats are also forced to lie as part of their job. They pretend not to understand (it’s their job to pretend) but they really do.
However, that’s spread fairly evenly with only a tiny fraction of journalists entering war zones etc.

What's the mortality rate for truckers entering war zones? (Including outside the US, of course.)
> The closing agent told me to just sign it and they'd fix it in an amendment later.

Given the ethics of the mortgage industry, this might not have even been a mistake. They're terrible and they'd have held you to it.
Also true!
That's why the look to privatize it.

Source: https://www.apnews.com/5221fe5a9b1247e1ad1af0e1c35bf5e6
Cool concept. Some blink trivia, if you're playing to win: ;-)

Don't play against young children.[1]

Do play against women taking birth control.[2]

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/223495

[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7822673
Medieval Rites and Contemporary Dying
Economics After Luther
Yes, and what I meant by exploitation is this: open source is a culture of gifting, either in the form of new projects, or pull requests, donations, or other forms of volunteering. Companies (not all) quite often consciously do not participate in that culture, but still use the code and community to create their surpluses.
Disclaimer: I work for Uber.

> Michael Kaine is national secretary of the Transport Workers’ Union.

When the author has such a strong conflict of interest, the byline really should be at the top of the article and the conflict of interest be spelled out loud and clear for the reader before they start reading. Anything else is journalistic malpractice.
Sure. What I was trying to say is that it is very easy for people in mainland China to use this site since it is not firewalled, so expect a lot of Chinese residents to comment here.

It was more or less the only site I could regularly use when I was there two weeks for work recently.
> At the time were KHTML was being implemented there weren't new features being released every week like we have now. In every aspect of the browser.

KHTML was being implemented in 1999. That was an extremely fast moving and chaotic time in the development of the web! Browsers were shipping new features left and right, the specs didn't describe at all what browsers really did, and if you fell behind people would quickly switch to other browsers.

Even by 1999 you wouldn't have been able to make a competitive browser on your own, and especially not keep up with the rate of change.

(In the early 2000s, after Microsoft "won the first browser war" and disbanded the IE group, everything slowed way down, though.)
You must've skipped tragedy of the commons day in micro 101.
As this article clearly states, it's _not_ good for making even a bit of money, let alone the most.
This is called regulation.
“End Internet Shutdown Immediately” – UN Human Rights Council Tells Sudan
I loved that essay. Thanks for sharing
The NHS vaccine schedule is just as large as the CDC's: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...

We're worse at prenatal care. And post-natal care. And there's some serious income inequality problems "poor people qualify for free medical care" doesn't actually obviate things as much as you think it does.
I had the same thing happen to me on an ER trip. "Here's a little Crystal (brand) signature pad. Now I'll name off the document titles and have you sign your name."

No! It already feels illegitimate when I sign a PDF with a touchscreen computer over a paper signature. There's no way for me to know precisely what I'm signing unless I have paper in front of me. Even then, without acknowledgement on every sheet and/or me receiving a copy at the end, it's entirely possible for them to swap Page 3 out and for me to suddenly have agreed to something else entirely!

I ended up getting paper copies of the documents and signed those.
Thank you! The #1 feature that is getting me to install is 'Next comment with same indentation and parent'. I like to skip a lot of the nested replies on un-interesting top level comments.
Stories like this are kinda amusing when you consider that what it essentially boils down to is this. Some collections of carbon imbued with sentience are squabbling over who "owns" some other collections of carbon that were sentient a few millions years ago.

Maybe a hundred million years from now something will be deciding who gets to own the carbon remnants of the people involved in this current predicament :)
Hong Kong protest against a bill legalizing kidnapping by the Chinese gov't
Very much a Hot or Not for everything! Out of curiosity, how are you handling unique votes, just cloudflares _cfduid? I ask because I'm working on something requiring anonymous votes, and GDPR is going to prohibit this. Thanks!
TLDR: This dump proves the Radiohead purposely scrapped a song (Lift) that was going to be a hit single because they wanted to change direction with OK computer.

As a huge radiohead fan, the interesting thing about this dump is that the version of Lift (disk 15 starting at 9:30, but can also be found in other places in the dump) is totally mastered and ready to go on the album.

Fans heard this live a long time ago, but when they released the first recorded version on Lift the b-sides of the Ok Computer 2017, it sounds much slower.

The band stated that they recorded and mastered Lift in 1997, but they knew it would be a huge hit single and they didnt want that for OK computer so they scrapped the whole thing. No one understood this until now.

Other highlights discovered in the dump:

- Karma Police with different lyrics

- Longer version of paranoid android

- Exit Music and True Love Waits used to be the SAME song
Maybe you're certifying at a lower level. I had to prove pretty much everything.

We have a "wallet" function, in support of which there's a DB that stores encrypted credit card numbers (they're encrypted by the app, so the DB never sees the cleartext). Obviously this database is backed up periodically. The auditor forced me to restore one of those backups and show them the content of the restored table, in order to prove that the backup/restore operation didn't magically decrypt the data.

This is something that I would have been willing to sign any document to certify, without having actually run the experiment. But they wanted screenshots.

They also told us that all employees need to have obfuscated email addresses to protect against spear phishing. That's when the infosec team finally told them they were being ridiculous.
Revolving doors between regulators and industry can raise conflict of interest concerns, but this is not at all the same problem that you alluded to above.
I’m sure this was probably not a big deal. No bank would issue such a mortgage. The numbers would have been corrected whether you caught it or not. After all, your mortgage is a separate agreement between you and the bank, and not part of the purchase and sale agreement.
...should be getting at least that much through various deals or pull the plug. Hold your software hostage, get freeloaders to pay a pittance for it.

Funny, but this was almost exactly the unspoken (and actual) ethos of the Sales department dominated old school software company founded in the late 60's I used to work for.
The sentiment is commendable. However, the way you've framed the "both sides" argument is a bit misleading.

Hardly any bricks were thrown. It is also a daft comparison, as the police were armed up for days with extremely powerful weapons. The asymmetry in terms of preparedness and armaments is off the charts.

"The moment when it escalated" is also not quite right as it is missing the context where, on Sunday night / Monday morning, the police attacked protesters with an extreme degree of violence.
It's terrible that journalists are killed. Press freedom is extremely important. But if these numbers are correct, they are probably good news. I don't think there has been any other point in history where worldwide just 70 journalists were killed every year.

Again, if these numbers are correct, many other professions are far more exposed to politically or financially motivated violence (and the numbers cover many deaths that are not intentionally inflicted). Another way of saying it is that journalism is generally a very safe profession if these numbers are correct. Also, please note that a large part of the deaths occur in the same few countries.
> "The most interesting part (IMHO) of the post addressed Github, a multi-billion dollar acquisition on the backs of the open source contributors whose primary beneficiaries never seemed to give even a small portion of the profits back to the community."

There I was, thinking that hosting (through high availability, and great tooling) the repositories for free was Github's way of "giving back to the community". But apparently that's somehow not enough?
It's called Library Genesis.

Ok, it's not really a SciHub for standards, but it is in the same spirit.
Most people don't order standards from the ISO, they get them from their organization's (university or corporation) library. Very much the same as for papers.

What can you do if you are not affiliated with any organization that provides access? You can turn for SciHub for papers and to LibGen as your library. Needless to mention that both are infringing copyright and may or may not be legal for you to use.