skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The article seems pretty well Amazon-friendly to me, generally spinning Amazon Publishing positively and quoting only supporters and one neutral analyst.

Amazon is a monopoly which (a) exerts huge control over the whole culture’s literary output, and (b) has driven / is driving many competitors and suppliers at every stage of the publishing process out of business, using its combination of vertical integration, scale, and ruthless contract negotiation.

I’m not sure “nefarious” is the right word. But it is dangerous having unaccountable private institutions wield such power. Some of Amazon’s business practices seem to me like violations of anti-trust law (disclaimer: I am not a lawyer or legal expert), but the past few decades of Supreme Court precedent have reinterpreted/eroded antitrust laws to the point that there will probably be nothing done about it.

I don’t see what their treatment of engineers making the software has to do with the business model or larger cultural impact. (But if you’re worried about labor relations, how do you feel about Amazon’s mistreatment of warehouse workers?)
That's amazing! I built a bookmark curation tool Stackkup (http://stackkup.com). Can I use your feed to fill up a collection? Will link back and add your logo for credits! It will be even more amazing if you have a public API!
Sweden passed the law in 1991 and joined the EU in 1995 — and as usual, stating "this exists in country X" is not insinuating "this only exists in country X".
An aside: one interesting thing about this is that Google's lawyers believe that copyright notices are required in minified JavaScript, and other people don't.

Who's right? Is everyone else breaking copyright agreements?
Commodore 900
It's kind of amazing, really. Maybe because I'm middle class in a third world country, but I'm always dumfounded with the argument that "actually, rich people having more money is good for everyone".
You've asked a tough question.

The page says the owner is looking to transfer to business to a new owner. I presume the owner wants the software to continue to be developed.

If there's an existing customer base, and existing revenue based on proprietary sales, then that's a monetary incentive for someone else to take over.

If the software is made open source, then part of that goes away. I have no idea what the market situation is for that product, but it comes down to asking what the benefits are.

Yes, there are moral ones (à la Stallman), but "open source" tends to focus on the software development advantages, eg, more potential contributors, more popularity leading to secondary income, etc.

In practice, these rarely occur. It's just that it does occur for the most popular and well-known packages.

So it seems much harder to find a developer willing to take on open-source development of a package like this, than one willing to keep it proprietary.

At best there might be an appeal to history, "if you aren't able to find anyone to take it on, then would you release the source in a version that lets someone in the future see it"?

That's tricky because it's an emotional appeal, at an emotional time, and you don't seem to have an existing connection to the author to build upon ("stumbling across this website" means you likely aren't even using the software), nor something tangible to offer.

Now, it's possible that someone here could be interested, but it seems not only unlikely (few discussions here concern retail sales of Windows desktop apps, or the underlying technology, and those that know those skills likely have existing careers), but doubly-unlikely as it seems there's little reason to think it's worth the effort even to consider the possibility.
I'm not sure Python would do that today without backwards compatibility reasons. Python's True and False are late additions to the language, before that 0 and 1 served their functions.

I think this is one of the symptoms of the changing priority of simplicity in Python language design, at some point the design decision about 0/1 for simplicity became dated enough to change it despite being a big change and requiring backwards compatibility hacks with 0/1.
Yes I read the article.

It depends on what you want. Satisfaction and peace of mind, or an endless chase for the next reward/recognition/promotion/raise/etc? If the latter, than it’s very important to be effective at getting your work recognized. But if the former, why bother?
Harmony OS and Compatibility
Often with residential solar you run out of space. At that point you have to start adding batteries (or thermal or something) for long term storage, or stay connected to the grid.
Eat the Rich
This is also why it's useful to hire new people once in a while and pay attention to what they think. A new, junior hire will note many of the same things as an expensive consultany. With the difference that people actually listen to the observations of the consultant , while they expect the junior dev to get used to things.
Show HN: Homer – A Text-Analyzer in Python
Homer is a Python package that can help make your text more clear, simple and useful for the reader.

It provides information on an overall text as well as on individual paragraphs. It gives insights into readability, length of paragraphs,
length of sentences, average sentences per paragraph, average words in a sentence, etc. It is based on work by Pinker and anohter research study [1, 2].

This software package grew out of a personal need. Since I am not a native English speaker but am interested in writing. I write OpEds and a blog. So I designed and have been using Homer to improve my writing. I hope others will find it useful.

Please note that this is not a strict guide to control your writing. At least, I don't use it that way. I use it as a guide to make my writing as simple as possible. I strive to write concise paragraphs and sentences as well as use fewer unclear words, and Homer has been helping me. I have only used it to analyze my blogs and essays and not the large corpus of text. As this software is new, you may well spot bugs, in which case please feel free to open up issues/pull-requests.

You can use Homer as a stand-alone package or on the command line. More information:

https://github.com/wyounas/homer

References:

1- Steven Pinker's The Sense of Style:

2- https://litlab.stanford.edu/LiteraryLabPamphlet9.pdf
Any HTML page can be preloaded. It's even built into modern browsers.
Await in Rust
So, "take in the day" perhaps.
I generally have a strict definition of native which means “using platform widgets”. Telegram doesn’t do this because it makes its own copies of almost everything.
I don't have a dog in this fight and I don't really have a strong opinion about Amazon either way, but I think it's important to note that your experience as an engineer in the publishing group isn't necessarily indicative of the group's business goals.

It's entirely possible (and, honestly, probable) that the author-focused projects you guys worked on were themselves in service to the larger goal of driving Prime engagement. It doesn't need to be an explicit OKR to be true, and it's also not nefarious: it's just good business.
Many licenses require that the license be distributed with the code. uglifyjs, babel minifier, and google closure compiler all try to preserve license information.
Ask HN: Are we living in the dark ages of the social web?
>no due process
>no constitution
>No elected representatives
>Witch hunts
>Raids and pillages
>Doxa

Why is the social web so medieval? Why are we allowing this?
Well in Singapore, you need a COE just to buy a car, and those can run $40k~$60k depending on the car type and how many people are bidding for the limited amount of COEs. That's not including the cost of the car, or the fact that the COE is only good for 10 years (extensions are for 7 years, cost just as much and so you're better off just selling/scrapping the car).

Singapore is one of the largest exporters of used cars because of this crazy system. It does reduce their emission though and they have an amazing fully automated (driverless) train system.
No, not in terms of AGI. We’re no where near it. Don’t believe the hype.. we can just do what we previously could do, but more accurately. The truly hard problems still have no solution in sight.
Hackernews is just as fast to load. There's no amazing innovation with AMP, it's only a fork of HTML to limit what people put on the page, incentivized by higher search result placement.
True. It’s like with income/wealth. It’s very important to reach a certain level. But beyond that level the benefits of getting more diminish quickly.
Relax a bit. The only point GP was trying to make is that it's not just Sweden but in many EU countries it's also a law. There is no need to be aggressive.
Snake oil for sure, but this is merely a snake oil sales guy who walked into a room full of people willing to call him out.

The rest of society is not so courageous.

You only need to look at various management consultants, new age healers, and religion to find more people who obviously know nothing about how the world actually is, but are never held to account.
>either this was extremely early and advanced and in a very affluent, high density city that could justify and capitalise on its benefits...

People visiting Stockholm nowadays - or even people living there, for that matter - have little idea how poor and slum-ridden the city was just fifty years ago: the town center was full of small and cramped apartments housing whole families in single rooms, lacking bathrooms and toilets (everyone shared a row of earth toilets in the yard, and washed once a week in communal baths).

So, based on the high-tech and affluent Stockholm you see now, it’s easy to jump to the conclusion that this was an “early and advanced” technical solution, when actually it’s simply a product of the very small scale of the town. The area ‘inomtullarna’ (which comprises the entire city center, excluding the dormitory suburbs), could easily fit inside the single London borough of Camden, for instance.
And it's still bullshit.
I develop physically-based renderers, the output of which is easily mistaken for photographs. I don't presume myself to be a god of course, but it does make me think... what if you piece together enough specialists for this that and the other aspect of a simulation, and run them on a freakishly powerful computer, with a sort of genetic algorithm simulating virtual beings...

There's a great short story by Greg Egan about this kind of thing, and even with this "spoiler" context it's still very much worth reading: http://ttapress.com/CrystalNights.pdf
Why not write a transpiler first? Like something that converts your code to Rust
Show HN: Prove set membership without exposing the set or the member
Not investing is a wise decision when there is nothing available at a reasonable price.

Berkshire Hathaway's cash position is evidence of exactly that. There's nothing good on sale right now. My own opinion of the state of the market is similar -- while I haven't been looking hard, I haven't found a solid value investment with a margin of safety in at least two years.
As one does with the best satire.

A sprinkle of kayfabe on top of a sharp wit is delicious.
Makes me wish the Fucked Company website was still around. I'm sure Uber would be on it constantly.
The commercial aspect is a red-herring, because B2B where there's an existing business relationship are normally excluded from spam laws.

The UBE (unsolicited, bulk, email) definition is the one used by most blocklists and filters and ISP AUPs.
The Problem at Yale, based on the length of this essay, seems to be Too Much Speech. This is an extended complaint about annoying people one might have brunched with at a few elite institutions, dressed up as cultural analysis.

I am minded of McAdoo on President Harding: “His speeches left the impression of an army of pompous phrases moving over the landscape in search of an idea; sometimes these meandering words would actually capture a straggling thought and bear it triumphantly as a prisoner in their midst, until it died of servitude and overwork.”

In a shock development, university students dress down, pretend to be poorer than they are, and get into conflicts with administrators over things (often pointless things); clearly something that has Never Ever Happened Before.

There are nuggets of good sense here, but the overall message is a scrambled mess. Apparently what's going wrong in the world can be largely attributed to liberal elites patting themselves on the back while trying to do good, or something. I'm sure this plays well in certain circles.

In a world where we have gazillionaire plutocrats actively working 24/7 to fuck other people over (the Koch brothers and the Sacklers spring to mind) I'm not losing too much sleep over this micro-diagnosis about how some kinda-liberal rich people in a tiny slice of American academia pissed off the author and should be spending their lives differently.
Why would that make C++ easier?

If anything, Rust generics are more familiar vs. templates
HN is so respectful with its warnings.

I'd rather assumed the title makes the work's nature and themes abundantly clear?
Maybe they just wanted to be able to say they spoke at BH and maybe a short clip to put on their site?

Most bad or boring presentations are not called out publicly on several media.
They're not. If (when) Uber does eventually collapse, I bet Lyft will have to switch to more standard Taxi rates (they already do in a lot of places) in order to not go under themselves. They're operating with losses as well.

Lyft has bought up a lot of bike share, e-scooter rental and other alt transport companies. So that might shore them up for a bit longer.
The paper is quite straightforward and use only math from the first or second year of the university. If you understand the word "module" and have 15 minutes to loose, give it a try.

Ignoring the reference to unrelated results about prime numbers, the main idea is that to check if a number is prime:

1) First check the remainder modulo 10, modulo 9 and modulo 24. This part is correct, but it's suspicious that they waste a few pages to prove it. Anyone with a minimal background will agree with this part explained in a line.

2) They make a multiplication table "Q-grid" of the number that are not multiple of 2 nor 3. The idea is that after discarding the numbers with the bad remainder module 24, the rest of the numbers are not multiple of 2 nor 3. Again, it's suspicious that they give a long explanation and the use of invented names like "Quasi-primes"

3) To test if N is prime, they try to find in this table build looking first at the numbers nearby the x~=sqrt(N) and y~=sqrt(N) so x * y ~= N. It's not clear how they lookup in the table.

Being very optimistic, this is essentially like searching for a divisor of N up to sqrt(N). [I'm not sure that their implementation is not worse.] This search up to sqrt(N) is one of the first trick you learn to test primality. The advantage of their method is that they reduce the search space modulo 24 and they get the result in sqrt(N)/3 steps. [I'm not sure that their implementation is not worse.] This is slightly better than using only the odd numbers to get the result in sqrt(N)/2 steps.

For big enough numbers to be used in cryptography, this sqrt(N) or sqrt(N)/2 or sqrt(N)/3 is complete rubbish compared to any modern serious method, it's not even funny, I understand the uproar.

Some quotes:

> And because when we search for the prime factors of some semiprime number we need to remove the non-prime numbers from both axes of the Q-grid, like 25, 35, 49 etc., the problem will automatically reduce to simply locating the number in the Q-grid, with its horizontal and vertical projections on both axes being its prime factors.

I hope they are not trying to build the whole Q-grid. It uses more memory than a simple search. Also if they are keeping only the prime numbers, why all the discussion of using the remainder module 24. All big prime numbers have the correct remainder module 24.

> In fact, these two numbers, 2 and 3, contradict many of the primes properties such that some mathematicians consider them as sub-prime integers.

I never hear that.
Bad math joke: Did you notice that 2 is an odd prime number?
It's true that if they keep borrowing, eventually they will borrow too much.

But I would guess CFO's know that. They may not be right about what's a sustainable level of debt, but they probably think there is a limit and not go past that.

I speculated more about this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20666217
Redflow is doing good targetting to telecoms for reliable power at the radio mast. Africa, Asia, Latin America rural and remote like them. They struggled to be market viable in Australia head to head with Li-ion on price but if you understand their powerbudget and want a system on standby from binary chemicals they're a good way to go. (Not a shareholder, but been following them for years)
Monte Carlo simulations' goal is to randomise the inputs, not the process. In this hypothetical simulation of life, it is the process that seems deterministic, and not the inputs.

For Monte Carlo simulations, we want to be sure that we're not imparting the biases we have on the model into the execution of the process itself.

As for quantum mechanics, it is only with out current understanding that we believe the process is non-deterministic. We'll see if that holds in a century.
We have something similar in Australia. It really makes life a lot easier when shopping, because it means you don't need to do mental arithmetic whenever you are buying toilet paper (and when there are specials you usually find that non-discounted options are actually cheaper per-gram).
Ever since I knew what a car was I have loved Porsche. Back in high school I bought a used 914 that was in boxes and reassembled it over the next 2 years. The highlight of my early days was getting to drive a 911 at the track.

Several years ago I visited a Porsche dealer and looked around. I left extremenly sad and disappointed. The cars were cramped and full of pedestrian doo-dads and I hated every single one of them. On top of that, the Porsche salespeople didn't even look my way.

I left that dealership and went down the street to the Tesla showroom and my life changed. They were friendly and happy to see me. They took me around the car and showed me everything. I got to rode test a P100D and was able to drive the car while the Tesla guy showed me how to do a high-speed launch and how to change the steering response while driving. It was, and still is, the best car "dealer" experience I'd had ever had!

While the Porsche Taycan is cool and it's really the only Porsche that even remotely piques my interest, it can't really compete with the Tesla. I guess I'm getting old.
Someone Built a Flying Saucer That Flies
Strangely, it is correctly spelled ”sleight of hand”
You’re being downvoted but this seems like a very legitimate question seeing as a major part of the current US/China trade dispute is appropriation of intellectual property
Signs You Will Suck at Programming – Noteworthy – The Journal Blog
Apple stands in the way of Telegram’s censorship-free vision
Maybe it's because I primarily use Brave, Samsung Internet, and sometimes Firefox on Android, but amp pages never load quickly for me. It's usually quicker to click the link and load the source page even bogged down with all the ads, trackers, and slow servers!!

I just don't get it. Maybe it works great in the Google News app, but nowhere else I've seen and I refuse to use Chrome on Android. With the lack of ad blocking the web is borderline unusable on a phone.
Ubuntu shares software search results with Amazon
Of course this has happened before. It's just usually nobody who has a clue cares about these sponsored talks.

Do you think all the other products they pitch there live up to the promises made? This is just a bit extreme in its wording, so it's causing attention.
> it looks like people have been tamed to think that if they put their email address or phone number on the web, they're asking to be spammed or called or sent communication they don't want. It shows how poor a job laws and education have done

They're not asking to be spammed, but risking it. Laws will punish offenders, but not free you from your personal responsibility to protect what's worth something to you.

> Backlash like this article is warranted and required to change this defeatist attitude.

I'm sure it will lead to harsher punishment for spammers who exploit one's stupidly putting their personal information on the web and then complaining about bad people seeing and using it, while we're not even punishing corporations whose data leaks due to incompetence are putting even those at risk who do not exhibit such gross negligence with their personal info.
My desktop has plenty of features that aren't exposed to the Web, so no, it isn't desktop like.
AMP on iOS is profoundly buggy. Rotation, reader mode, and URL bar hiding are routinely broken in all modes. AMP in landscape is particularly unusable. Google should be embarrassed to have shipped this.
Sure it's not documentary makers seeing how far they can take it? This looks like a piss-take.
If its true, then I would generally believe the way you describe it.

But in our quaint little petri dish, all of our practical AI and Alife technology studies have been in the direction of making technology appear and act more human, or at least like what we know of in nature in our particular time and cultural frame. So it isn't such a big leap to think that if we are indeed part of a simulation, we're not all that different from our creators. We'd probably be damn near exactly like them once we've been "mastered" and well out of the beta version we must surely be in right now.

Think about adversarial networks. Who's to say that all the bad in the world isn't simply one of those? Maybe "they" were or still are trying to solve it, and we're the hoped method of discovering a solution?

We build off of what we know. So would "they."

*Note: I feel I should point out in case it isn't clear - I don't believe any of this. But if it were true and we are all part of a simulation, I think it would be a lot like how we handle exactly the same subject in technology right now.
Shrinking portions is the simplest way. The other is replacing products.

Say supermarket bakery introduces new bread with seasame seeds only 25¢ more. Then slowly there is only new seasame seeds bread on shelves and regular bread becomes rare. Later seasame seeds is slowly dispearing from bread and voila - you have made regular bread 25¢ more expensive.

The other way is lowering quality of products. Inflation basket still contains basic bread, tomatoes and plain sausage. The problem is that the quality of these products tanked and to buy a bread of a quality of simple bread from 40 years ago you must shop in some premium, organic, hipsters bakery where it costs 10 times more then simple bread. Same goes for tomatoes and sausage.

And electric drills or washing maschines? Don't get me started. Today's Bosch electric drill lasts one building season, my fathers Bosch electric drill lasted 35 years. Price is the same or lower but you get way less for it.

But the inflation headline number stays low. And that matters as you can keep wages low (many pensions are inflation indexed). And as people used to say under communism -"Bread is more expensive but locomotives got cheaper".
The Japanese government is opening up, but it's gonna take some time for Japanese society to do the same. I can tell you from experience that integrating as a foreigner in Japan is...challenging.
Ask HN: What do you think should be on topic for Hacker News? Also off topic?