skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Even worse is the "Sales Ranking" in the first example, clearly the size or area of the entries is not proportional to the differences in sales, instead it is highly misleading to display the data as a perfect triangle. The TreeMap-esque "Qty by Product" is also useless -- is Cup larger or smaller than Glass? Stacked bars for "Location by Year" is another obfuscated mechanism for delivering "information" -- which was the best year for Warehouse?
Netflix releasing lower priced service for India
This (or an abstract of it) might make a good FAQ addition:

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
Q: Is antitrust action typical at all?
If making it on time to practice is really important, do you want to depend on a bus?

Bus Being late to pick up or leave isn’t uncommon. I assume if something goes wrong along the way you should be able to get off with your stuff without too much trouble and order a ride.

But if there’s a big traffic jam. And you might be able to save some time taking inside roads or what have you. A bus isn’t going to do that. You also won’t be able to order a ride share if you’re on the highway with traffic packed up.

I think the situation depends on how important making practice is. Sometimes you’re already on thin ice.
Pay-What-You-Want Webhosting from Germany
The DOJ normally acts with some degree of freedom with new administrations merely refocusing its most visible efforts. A large scale probe would be extremely unlikely to get dropped completely but could be marginalized.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20496643
yes, they could, depending on recorder.
Huh. Its a long haul.

Penn and Teller's "Desert Bus" game simulates a bus drive between LA and Las Vegas.. Debatably the worst video game ever, but now used for charity drives..

https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/desert-b...
simcga was a similar utility, it used B800h for the CGA-compatible frame buffer (the card also had memory in that location as a secondary graphics page): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hercules_Graphics_Card#CGA_emu...
I felt swindled too when I found that BBM’s encryption was basically worthless unless you were an enterprise customer.
I’m curious who might even provide that. I know at trunk shows I have customized fabrics on street wear but never any concept of bespoke. I’d imagine you’d have to be a six figure spend or more client to get that privilege.
Ugandan here: when I read this story, I admit this was exactly what came to mind. Of course the system is dodgy if you can leverage Mauritius to get around taxes but the vast majority of taxes in Africa is just padding on a politicians bank account.
Everything you wrote is true and in no way disagrees with what I wrote.

I think you mistook my A => B assumptions for a no B => no A which is a flawed logical reasoning.
Building Better Portfolios
Nah, it’s true. Pepsi doesn’t care much about click thru rates on their banner ads.
None of these things are perfect - I agree with you about quizzes and the like.

> Let them show off recent personal projects. They'll probably have no problem spending a weekend hacking on something they're passionate about.

Nope. Not spending my weekend fooling around to impress some potential employer. I'm going to spend it with my kids, riding my bike, and enjoying life.
India's draft bill on Cryptocurrency regulation [pdf]
What does that have to do with Thiel?
I removed that line. Thanks.
Thanks. For some reason I had the impression there was a large change, but I had no basis for that.
In the past it was traditional that the justice department was somewhat separate from the administration - thus it would have been scandalous, in the past, if an administration had come in and cancelled investigations undertaken by an exiting administration - or at least scandalous if there could be any suspicion of corruption being the cause of the cancellation.

So big companies have generally donated to political campaigns and as such they should not, traditionally, have their investigations quashed because this would raise suspicions that there had been a quid pro quo.
maybe ask more quantitative questions, how many porn sessions per day?, how long is each session?.
What does a privacy tab solve?

To get his cereal delivered the shop needs his address, doesn’t it? So google could know that the person at that address likes those cereals. Unless the shop is not sharing the address with google ( which it should not, but can you count on that?)
Which "a few"?
Good point. I guess I was asking for p(drop action with new admin | antitrust started in last)
Snap shares surge as company smashes estimates
Microsoft Temporarily Suspends, Revises PAC Donations
I've known Uberspace for a while, but it's nice hearing about them again now that I could use some web hosting.

What I'm curious about: What is it like from the inside? What is it like to run such a business?
One thing Microsoft has going for it - they’ve been through this process in the 90s / early 2000s. Plus, their OS is clearly not a monopoly, their web browser is now based on Chrome, their a distant #2 in the cloud space, their a very distant #2 in search, etc

Literally, I can’t think of one thing Microsoft is top dog in besides OS.
It makes me tired and depressed just to read that. Nor would it help; it would generate an order of magnitude more questions and objections and meta.

What works is personal interaction with particular users.
I don't mean basic income as a government expense; rather that the basic income is coming from selling your data and dictated by what the market is willing to pay for it.
The problem is you cannot audit as much as you would like. The important part is a real human sees the ad. (human with the desirable characteristic is a secondary factor). However you cannot measure the effects of an ad easily because there are too many confounding factors: people who buy because of a previous ad, people who would buy anyway, people who will buy in a few years.

We do know the companies that have cut advertising too much have lost market share. However when you have a lot of ads it is hard to figure out which ad made the difference.
Nah, humans were evolving just fine before porn, meet a partner, have some fun times, then reflect back on those if you need to masturbate.
Yeah, this is a common entrepreneur failure mode. You need to be ambitious and visionary to start a new thing. And investors love to hear the grand plans! Tempering that is one whole other skill.

That guy sounds like he was trouble from the beginning. But if you get in this situation again with somebody less crazy, one thing I've done is to draw a graph with a dot just above the zero point and then a circle at the top right. I get them to talk about their grand 20-year vision, and I explain that's the circle in the upper right.

Then I draw a bunch of tiny line segments that walk erratically toward the circle. I explain that each week we need to take one step in the direction of the vision. The I ask them to focus real small, and think of the tiniest thing we can do toward the goal, something that fits in a week. Once the have a few of those, I'll ask, "How can we prove that this step really went in the right direction?" (It can also be useful to pull in the Lean Startup framework of validating hypotheses here.)

Sometimes that's enough to get visionaries to start breaking it down. And sometimes it exposes that the person is only good at dreaming big, but is unable to actually execute. Either way, it can yield valuable info.
Show HN: Photo Book on Ladakh
Your Data Were ‘Anonymized’? These Scientists Can Still Identify You
Many are bad at communicating in general, e.g. selectively ignoring/missing parts of an email, incomplete sentences, typos. Some also have the nasty habit of skimming stuff and replying to what they thought they read.

I've seen this from interns to CTOs and remain baffled by its prevalence.
It gives perspective on how expensive running a company on the internet is, from a hosting-and-servers perspective. MS server pricing is steep, but the cost of licensing over the useful lifetime of a SQL server is not a big cost factor.
“That page” is from the Center for Disease Control — a division of the US Dept of Health and Human Services. Credibility is subjective, but I would say it is in fact more credible than a random blog.
I don't understand how google could be split up, would they redirect traffic from google.com to another search engine?
Thoughts on Restructuring the Ansible Project
Among every team I've worked on there have been the devs that have a real eye for detail and truly care about code quality and put real thought into their work. And there are the ones who are just trying to get paid and don't really think too much about it. I trust the former, I don't trust the latter.

The point is the static analysis tool fails the build, so it becomes physically impossible for the godzilla method to exist. I trust the machine to produce a predictable result. People are a huge source of entropy and having a little bit of automation to help contain some of that entropy I think is a very wise use of technology in CONJUCTION with promoting a culture of caring about quality and diligent review.

It's hard to imagine how anyone ever lets godzilla methods and god objects and all other kinds of code smells become a thing... and yet... they're a real phenomenon that seem to make their way into large code bases at some point or other.
It's hard to overstate what a big deal this is (and how much effort went into it). The only mainstream languages with this kind of composable parallelism are Go and Erlang, both of which target writing servers, rather than high-performance computing, and which therefore optimize for I/O throughput rather than CPU throughput.

The only systems which have supported compute-oriented composable parallelism like this are Cilk and TBB, which are both really excellent and successful—and provided major inspiration for this work. However, they both seem to have fallen short of widespread adoption partly due to being non-free (until recently) and also, I suspect, because they are non-standard C/C++ language/compiler extensions, which seem to never catch on that broadly.

This is a brave new world for high-performance technical computing, not just for Julia.
I do agree, assuming that sicknesses that we don't understand always comes from people's mind is assuming that we have a full understanding of human, which is obviously false.

This is also very disrespectful of what people are living through and feeling to tell them that they are making it all up without, at least, any proof...
I can't tell if you're for or against backdoors with that statement. Either way, I disagree. I don't think those for or against it are dumb people.

They're just in a different position... In the DOJ, encryption gets in the way of their job--catching criminals... while the penalties for a backdoor fall on others (those responsible for the data). There's no downside to them personally (and very little for the DOJ itself) for getting a backdoor.

The opposite is true for those not in the DOJ... the protection for our data is compromised.. and in exchange, the DOJ is able to prosecute some criminal we've never known, met, or had any contact with.

To those in the DOJ who deal with criminals everyday, their ability to prosecute criminals is of the upmost importance to them personally... and for the rest of us, unless we're a victim of a crime, there's only downsides to a backdoor.
MS Office. They're 100% dominant in word processing, spreadsheets, and presentations.
Good points. I was going to counter with "entry level" but that's sort of just rephrasing "junior" in that it presupposes the individual knows where the documentation is and how to read it, or in the 21st century which search terms to use and how to turn the results into functional code.
I'm happy that antitrust is being explored. I do think free markets need to be protected, and the last few decades attitude of "if it's good for consumers it's legal" is short sighted. Something can be good for consumers right now, but stifle competition and be bad for consumers eventually.
Yeah. It's definitely something that's worth remember is to ask the quiet ones.
This do reminded me of Cryptonomicon I felt I still have to post this comment even though I realized there were others like me.

In 1996 I was a little kid, but one of the first books I read on my PC somewhere around 2000 was Cryptonomicon. Back then I didn't have dialup, what I had instead was a cherished copy of a CD full of pirated books, called something like Pocket Library.

If only my parents realized back then how much ... questionable material was there, I would probably have been banned access to that PC forever.

But Cryptonomicon was fine.
I think it's great that they went ahead and released a binary for people to try it out without having to compile from source.
Am I wrong to believe the government is, in fact, capable of cracking encryption on individual bases, but not on _many_ cases? Isn't this what we want? For the limits of encryption to keep mass snooping at bay?

In other words, I think the "ticking time bomb" scenario often used to justify a backdoor is a fallacy. If the government really wanted or needed to, they could easily decrypt or break into a device (rubber hose method comes to mind).

Don't let fear rule your life, and convince others not to as well. That is our job.
The restaurant industry has a mental health crisis
Broad, new headline same as every other headline for past years, new quotes from unattributed Justice Department official sources. Fear.
Are We in an Era of Stagnation? Likely Not
Sounds like a modern telling of Misery
I really love these Wolfram biographies of famous people.
Is that still true? I’m guessing Google Docs has a non-trivial marketshare. Probably not bigger than MS but real competition.
Yes, it's probably time to add that.
Dream of Retiring Abroad? The Reality: Medicare Doesn’t Travel Well
I get more. I run services out of the server, like Calibre and pihole.
The ad business and the search business could theoretically exist as separate entities. The ad business would then buy page space from the search business.
Which is funny, because (as I recall) this was exactly Bill Gates' argument during the antitrust rulings, that tech was fleeting and they could lose their top spot anytime.

Granted, that was over 20 years ago...
Autophagy cures a staggering number of chronic illnesses and infections.
So do massive FAANG offers.
I'm Taryn's coworker I was involved in that part of the process very closely.

That statement is not entirely accurate. The SSDs certainly did die, but not _because_ of the 2019 upgrade, it just happened at the same time as the 2019 upgrades.

The major 2019 SSD issue was however that Intel and Dell kept passing the buck on who was to blame for not having 2019 drivers for the NVMe SSDs. Eventually I ended up having to bully Intel into giving us the drivers. We decided that "bullying Intel" was not an appropriate future tactic for getting the next version of the drivers, so that's another factor for staying on 2016 (which has drivers we've tested for years)
I'm super excited about this! For me the most exciting part is these four sentences:

> The model is portable and free from low-level details. You don’t need to explicitly start and stop threads, and you don’t even need to know how many processors or threads there are (though you can find out if you want).

> The model is nestable and composable: you can start parallel tasks that call library functions that themselves start parallel tasks, and everything works. Your CPUs will not be over-subscribed with threads.

It means that you can put threaded parallelism inside libraries without worrying. It means that Julia itself will start making its builtins threaded. It means that Julia itself is much more threadsafe by default. It means that packages can implement threaded algorithms — and you can use multiple threaded packages together at the same time without worrying. And it means that you can put threaded parallelism in your application code and all these things will work together beautifully.
That's the exciting thing about biology - despite the amazing advances that have happened in the past few decades, we've barely begun to understand human biology and disease processes.

I think back to the discovery of helicobacter pylori as the disease causing organism for a majority of ulcers. Before that it was always blamed on diet and stress (which probably play some factor). Amazing that a simple antibiotic regimen could cure many people of ulcers was a complete paradigm shift.
I'm sorry to do this, but I disagree in spirit with just about every point that you've made.

> it does some form of sex education when parents/school/society does none

Education? Porn is "education?" Porn is to sex education as war movies are to combat training.

> it lets people realize what sex is about (think about amateur categories and how you can see people not that different from you having sex and realizing that different shapes and sizes, all work)

If I learn what "sex is about" through porn, then I haven't yet learned that sex can be intimate, or that it can result in babies.

> it lets you explore your own sexuality (could you have immagine you would have liked that kind of things?)

It seems limiting to "explore your sexuality" in the novelty of visual and auditory stimulation. Sort of one dimensional. What about touching, smells, or interaction with another person?

> it lets you explore sexuality with your own partner (people get bored of the same sex every time, you know?)

That seems like a two-way conversation (between you and your partner) becoming a three-way conversation where you include the ideas of the porn industry.
Yep. And for someone making millions, the cost of the ride is negligible.
Google Docs is pretty big, too.
The DOJ is not an independent agency, despite what the media attempts to lead people to believe. The Constitution clearly states that the executive power, which includes law enforcement, is vested in the President. The DOJ has no authority to enforce laws except that of the President.

That said, political considerations do mean that Presidents are hesitant to overtly step in on specific cases and usually prefer to set general objectives. However the President can step in on a specific case if he wishes and that is actually explicitly part of our system. The President can set aside a conviction with a pardon or prevent it from being prosecuted in the first place.
> The reality is that we should be just as concerned by a guy blowing up a truck at the Apple Store as we should about ICE raids at 3 in the morning.

I can't be the only person completely unconcerned by events like this taking place. And I'm not someone without copious anxiety in their life.
>He absolutely is

Show me where that happened.

>The annoying thing about "logical fallacies" is that if anyone season argument they disagree with that resembles a "fallacy", that quote it and act like theyve won.

That is annoying and I agree, but that's not what's going on here.

>He is not saying that everything Benjamin Franklin has ever said is true.

No one said he was.

>However, if a well renowned and respected Authority has an opinion that some evil schmuck disagrees with, it provides evidence as to who is more likely to be correct.

No it doesn't. It absolutely _does not_. Reputation isn't irrelevant in so far as it lends credibility to a person's statements, but the discussion doesn't stop there. If you're going to defend a quote then defend it. Saying "this is true because X is trustworthy and Y is an 'evil schmuck'" is not an argument.

If this is not a prime example of Appeal to Authority then show me why it's not and provide an example. You're just throwing out your opinions as if they were fact.
Based on that this sounds like it may be more related to the politicization of the Justice Dept. under Trump than concern for actual monopolies.

> The review is geared toward examining the practices of online platforms that dominate internet search, social media and retail services, the officials said.

Trump has railed constantly that "conservatives are being censored" on Twitter and Google, which is utter nonsense, so this report in addition to the reports from last year of him wanting to tax Amazon just because Jeff Bezos owns WaPo and they don't print flattering stories of him daily sounds more likely to me the reason for an investigation than anything else.
Anil Madhavapeddy's work on unikernels is also quite interesting to look at.
I don’t think hiring managers really want to hire the best programmers. They want people they feel comfortable managing, someone who isn’t going to be challenging them. There is no risk in leaving roles open, in fact it contributes to their job security as long as there is VC money to burn. That is why the coding challenges are so popular, it communicates “here, do what I say.”
And here I am, 1 day after a presentation in front of the entire company, about pretty much the same topic.

Had I known about this article earlier, the execution would have been so much different (the presentation was terribad but whatever, I had good intentions). And the response would have been much better too (it's still very good, but I don't know whether that's good enough to push other people forward).

Regardless, thank you for posting this. The article and most of the comments in here echo my thoughts.
So is the great sin of the US that they're keeping people in South America, which is basically like Nazi Germany?
Tech companies have failed to buy enough politicians over the years.

That message is clear.

The need to employ the lobbyists who not only put big petroleum in a completely unassailable position, but got the government paying vast amounts of money to that industry.
I sort of feel it's the inverse. The last place I worked was heavily into automation and they had the one manager who always cautioned about relying on too much automation. I think that was a healthier dynamic tbh.

Too much vs. not enough are just different sets of problems.

Too much = you risk no one on the team being able to troubleshoot when things go wrong because no one has ever had to run through the process themselves before so no one understands it.

Too little = a non-trivial percentage of your bandwidth is eaten up by trivial things you keep doing over and over again that are in the vain of servicing requests rather than solving problems.

In practice I find I'd rather have the first problem and I can think of solutions to it's problems that I'm happy enough with.
I followed this as it unfolded on his Twitter account (https://twitter.com/scalzi). He has a way of taking some small experience or observation and turning it into a great little story or one-liner. He's written some good sci-fi, too.

Worth following.
I guess I'm wrong, but I read that they try to give it to people just starting out in their field, to encourage them to continue, rather than as a prize for finishing.
Epigenetic is quite interesing too, especially the inherited part that could mean that the way some of the genes are expresses could be influenced by the experience of ancestors for example.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epigenetics
Site is social media for startups but without the stupid stuff