skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As a bit of history, here's what happened to Microsoft when they refused to comply with the EU order to open up the protocols that Windows Server used to communicate with Windows clients as one of the enforced antitrust remedies.

>The European Union's chief antitrust regulator fined Microsoft Corp. another $1.3 billion (899 million euros) today for what she said were business practices that "continued to stifle competition" after it was ordered to change four years ago.

Today's fine, she said, was applied because Microsoft continued to thumb its nose at the EU for more than a year -- 488 days, Kroes said at one point -- by charging an "unreasonable price" to rivals that licensed Windows' communication protocols to make their own software work more smoothly with the U.S. software maker's server products.

https://www.computerworld.com/article/2537525/eu-fines-micro...
I am no airplane or helicopter engineer, but that just seems like a really bad idea and just some bad waiting to happen.
You seem to feel that housing is overvalued in Denmark in general, by your comment: "Someone purchasing a home for DKK 300K with no interest may think they're getting a deal".

I imagine that housing in Copenhagen is similar to Amsterdam, and has been appreciating quickly.

From an international perspective, I think it can be argued that these locations are still undervalued. They're still somewhat affordable to local tech workers, whereas in locations like SF, NYC, LA, Toronto, London, etc.. they're not. And from the perspective of Americans, or say people in Hong Kong, these properties are remarkably cheap due to your socialized economies.

I'm still surprised that foreigners haven't purchased all of the real estate in the city centers of Denmark and the Netherlands.
Who's we? The west has been scaling back polluting processes year after year. The vast majority of plastic in the ocean comes from Asia and Africa, and the west is talking about eliminating plastic straws. The west is talking about eliminating coal power plants and many Asian coal plants don't even scrub the exhaust adequately.

Why are we worried about trivial things which we can barely detect when there are places like Haiti where people, right now, live in squalor? Again, you're worried about something you don't understand and can't actually predict when there are real things that we know about but won't do anything about.
Don’t Be Evil?
Wardialler: A narrative game about hacking
Disclaimer - I'm a VP E at Engineer.ai

We actually wrote a blog post a little while ago that might answer a lot of the questions I'm seeing here:
https://blog.engineer.ai/a-little-bit-about-ai-and-more-stra...
I believe that is exactly what op is documenting.

Don't make the same mistake.

For the devs that are older, reminder that this exists.
The machine stops.
Yipes. Don't park next to concrete pillars...
Imagine RO is a former Amazon employee who was severely injured on the job and fired, whose life was destroyed by this faceless company, and who resents the sentiment that it is anything but. It is also a fun read imagining them this way.

Yes, if the situation was different, than my judgement of it would be different. This is not a novel observation.

The context matters - you cannot decouple[0] this interaction from the economic and social structures it arose from.

[0] https://everythingstudies.com/2018/05/25/decoupling-revisite...
Agree there should be a way, perhaps, to recover from a bad situation.

As a follow-up to my experience, I guess I should expand on the consequences for us. The bank admitted fault, but to protect themselves from a bad employee doing it again in the future, now when we call we have a special voice-only password and PIN, and we have to answer a battery of questions that are clearly pulled from a credit bureau (you know, the types of questions like "You had a mortgage in 2005, what was the street the property was on" and such things. Takes 10 minutes to get to "Thank you sir, how can I help you today" if we ever have to call customer service.

Based on that experience, I think perhaps the bank should make that the answer to recover a deeply lost account. They gave a stranger the credentials to our account -- not just the password, but they had to tell them the login, and disable two-factor authentication (because the login is built from a PIN and RSA code) based on a plea for help. I can see forgetting your password, but who forgets everything? That should be a huge red flag.

I could rant for a long time. I had a pointed discussion with a manager at the bank about how getting five repeated, fruitless requests to change credentials on an account didn't somehow trigger any protective response. How hard would it be to implement a counter that says "okay, after the second attempt to gain access by voice to an account that is denied for lack of authentication, all future calls for this account go directly to the security department for personal attention"? I got no good answer other than a lot of "yes sir, this was completely wrong, sir, I'm sorry, sir" etc.
I don't think NYSE has 5 letter tickers.
My guess: new development-intensive products like the 1.1.1 DNS, Wireguard, WAF etc plus general scaling and growth on one side, and increased competition from established cloud services on the other.

After all, if you are already on eg AWS, just using Cloudfront is temptingly easy. (even if bad from a redundancy perspective)
The HN title is "AI startup that raised $30m claims to automate app making just uses humans". That's a painful and confusing sentence. The real title is "This AI startup claims to automate app making but actually just uses humans". Can someone set a more grammatical and accurate title?
That's likely because your Google profile points HN threads as relevant / what you're searching for. Try using DDG for a less biased search result.
> If it claims it will do that, it sounds like they should be raising an Angel or Seed round, not a massive A round.

That is what they claim, though they claim it's 80% done, too (they seem to like “80%” a lot.)
There are some cave tours, a nice glacial lake, a small ski mountain, and some snowmobile tours... that's about it.

Ah, but where would the waterfalls get their water if there is no melting glaciers?

The mountainous areas that get exposed would be extremely cool to explore.

^ been to IS 12+ times in past 2 years
In theory, by remembering the last one you used.

In practice, by just marking the damn pages.
Great, since you're here: what's your comment on the allegation that engineer.ai defrauded investors with fake AI?
I've thought about making a twitter to follow some InfoSec/Cyber-security people but I know I'd get caught up in the wider twittersphere. I always found it amusing that BBC news would report people getting upset about X on twitter when that's kind of what the whole platform is about.
It's also available as an in-person workshop [1], and I believe corporate trainings are a significant part of the Ardan Labs business model. They also do shorter versions of their workshops at Go conferences.

They're huge contributors to the Go community via their conference workshops, and I can't thank them enough for the knowledge that they've gathered, refined, and shared all these years. (I help organise GopherCon Singapore.)

[1] https://github.com/ardanlabs/gotraining
>And apparently the backend is totally okay with a user name that doesn't exist in the database?

What do you think happens when a previously unregistered user creates an account
You can also read Vinge's essay from 1993:

https://edoras.sdsu.edu/~vinge/misc/singularity.html
That will defeat the whole purpose.
Remember, we are not writing code here but trying to optimize code based on what code that machine produced
On the contrary, I think this plan took a lot of gall to come up with. If Google's trying to avoid legislation, it should be "self-regulating" itself hard to try and prove legislation isn't needed. But this system is pretty transparent what it is doing and the EU is going to see right through it.
> It seems to me he is being paid by hedge funds to come up with research that supports their short positions.

Regardless of whether this is true, should they successfully collect a reward, it would validate the research on merits.
Modern fast IO is built on top of facilities like Linux's epoll(), which don't block an entire thread. However, that means that when an IO operation is finished, we no longer have the original callstack around to keep track of what operations were supposed to happen next. Instead we need some sort of state machine that's able to pause and resume every time it does IO. But writing state machines by hand is much less convenient than using the callstack, because you lose all the nice language features that you'd normally use to compose things, like `if` and `for` and `?`. So async/await is all about writing normal-looking code with the usual conveniences that can instead be compiled into a state machine that lives off the callstack.
Kind of reminded me of the short novel The Santaroga Barrier by Frank Herbert for some reason.
The salami I try at Costco, as a free sample, is worth paying for. It is food, and it has value.

However, they give me a small sample as an inducement to buy; presumably to increase sales beyond a baseline, in quantities and at prices sufficient to cover the cost of not only the free food they give away, but the labor to do so.

Cloudflare can provide a free product that's WORTH paying for, if their paid product is so much better, and its sales increased by so much, that the free giveaway can be considered a marketing cost that pays for itself.
Why Washington wants to break up Amazon, explained
It's not used a lot in ambiguous tasks like image recognition and audio because you would need to have a state for every single possible wave form or image variation. You would have to have a similarity preserving hash or some other related method to reduce related states to a single common state. That's why it's better to use them near the ends of DL networks. If you didn't do that, every image of the same apple with just one pixel different would be a new state.
> Today, our network spans 193 cities in over 90 countries and interconnects with over 8,000 networks globally, including major ISPs, public cloud providers, SaaS services, and enterprises. We estimate that we operate within 100 milliseconds of 98% of the Internet-connected population in the developed world, and 93% of the Internet-connected population globally (for context, the blink of an eye is 300-400 milliseconds). We intend to continue expanding our network to better serve our customers globally and enable new types of applications, while relentlessly driving down our unit costs.

This right here is a real tech IPO that has a strong portfolio behind it with a viable business model too and with an impact that affects millions of websites. Throughout this year it is just loss-making companies floating everywhere on the markets here and have boarded the hype-train into the red.

I hope CloudFlare with these numbers here don't board the wrong train here.
I was trying to read up on the site to evaluate what you said, but the UI's horribly broken on Firefox latest. Not the best first impression.
Terraform vs. CloudFormation on AWS
WeWork is a real estate investment company masquerading as a work space company. As long as real estate continues to provide big returns, I don't think Wework will ever care about losing money on customers.

Big money is investing in WeWork because its set up to swallow real estate all over the world. If you had buckets of cash and wanted to do this yourself, it would be really difficult and time consuming.
> we're a platform that is trying to use AI and general automation in order to optimize the traditional SDLC

I don't think you can get away with corp-speak/buzzwords here this easily. Could you elaborate on how exactly you're using AI to "optimize" software development?
You believe incorrectly. If you want to use some other services for email, streaming, etc., you need neither an AppleID nor an iCloud account to use any of your Apple devices. They may ask you to enter or create one, but I haven't seen a case where there isn't a (small hard to see) way to opt-out.
So you literally didn't interact with the site at all aside from signing up? Did you have an offensive account name or something?
Oh yeah! Thanks for linking that. You are correct that Android/iOS are second tier, but TBH we have never seen anything to suggest that the stdlib is anything but 100% stable on those platforms.

I did run into a bug with the rand crate running out of randomness on Android, but that's a different story. :)
>> VCs use portfolio theory.

I dont buy this argument. I used to help manage a large portfolio. Portfolio theory does not mean that you can put in garbage and magically get more than garbage (actually, it did with CDOs, since they were tranched, but even that ended up tragic if you recall 2008.)

Portfolio theory, esp with A-round and beyond VC where your portfolios are smaller (~15 to 30 entities) requires due diligence.
And another a few minutes ago for the 15th :)
For sure I don't think I've made myself clear enough, that's all on me, I'm sorry. So just for the sake of clarity let me over simplify it.

Imagine that my long-term girlfriend who worked in a coffee shop all her life found out her boss was a murderous drug dealer. Instead of quitting she becomes the company accountant thus taking a massive pay raise that I in turn benefit from. The company doesn't directly break the law but we have some vague idea that it wouldn't be as successful as it is if it wasn't for the connections the boss has. Neither I nor my girlfriend ever did or ever will do anything morally wrong. We enjoy the freedoms the extra money gives us. One day the police find out about the boss's illegal activities and it looks like the company will have to be dissolved.

In this circumstance I completely agree that I and my girlfriend have a right to feel distressed our quality of life is about to be drastically lowered. However, considering the circumstances, I have no right to be outraged at my government for not supporting my rights to indirectly enjoy the money my girlfriend gets from a company that built its niche through mafia activities.
Yes, but you risk also blocking the IR illuminators that let it work at night.
Also HN predicted the fraud when it was launched here 9 months ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18391280
Markets don't equilibrate at the value to the customer any more than they equilibrate at the cost of production. They compromise between the two.
This. I've mentioned the first aspect of that in the past here[1][2]. The interconnect benefit never occurred to me, though. That's a neat aspect!

Which just continues to reinforce what I said at the end of [2], about their business model instilling confidence in leveraging them at a free-tier level.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19127523#19130562

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19127523#19131411
Not surprising that this is the case in Sweden and Norway, but not in the US, Australia, etc. Aside from the fact that obviously billionaires and corporations don't want the public seeing how they avoid tax, sometimes I suspect that the culture of keeping our salaries secret was deliberately created by the 1% to keep wages low.
There's still CLFL and CFLR and probably others.
Ask HN: Splunk Alternatives?
At our company we love Splunk for its amazing query capabilities, dashboards, rich set of APIs, speed etc.
Are there any credible competitors for this tool? We are open to both proprietary or opensource.
Splunk is too expensive and is not cost-effective for our business and we are desperately looking for an alternative. any guidance would help.
Random.

No joke, it's fair. I also doubt Google is auctioning this space for the sake of fairness. Their competitors are going to take a slice of their cake, and this is the most efficient (and legal) way to get as much of it back as possible.
Ask HN: What's an added value product a programmer can sell?
I'm starting to think about working on my own on the side of my 9 to 5 job.

I'm also unfortunately acutely aware that the most valuable thing I can offer as a programmer is my workforce, which I have entirely committed to the aforementioned job. This rules out building products for other people.

So I've taken to think, what deliverables can I make that can be sold separately, as complete things?
My first thought's always been books: I've written quite a bit about subjects I'm intimately familiar with, but I am reticent to believe those are the only one things we can produce that don't require establishing the kind of service provider relationship normal software development does.

What's more, if such a thing exists, it's pretty possible there's added value variants of it: Think planting grain vs selling cereal bars. If one manages to come up with a deliverable like idk themes or bots or something along those lines, what would an added-value version look like?

Have you guys thought about this? What are your thoughts on the matter?
> It doesn't seem that way, it is that way. If you have to muddy the definition to make it fit then it's not very practical.

OK. I wrote a really long response attempting to get through, but frankly, at this point, you should write a paper and submit to some journals, because this whole line of reasoning would be a significant finding if it stands up to scrutiny.
Sentiment Analysis on Tweets with Node.js
- Businesses sell data on the purchasing history of their users. Other companies buy this data to cross reference and derive new, more useful information about people, for example to calculate their purchasing power. Online businesses buy this information to accurately determine how high they can set their price for individual customers.
It's not clear to me that Google needs to _earn money_ through this auction (one they enter free of charge, even!) Simply randomizing the list is better than always placing Google in the first screen of slots and then charging everyone else for a slot of their own.
Also fastly, which has the same business model
VC funding needs to stop. It's a complete cancer on the software industry. All this money going towards half-baked promises that are completely overvalued, only to fund companies for decades that never turn a profit.

Maybe I'll hire an animator or something and go to VC firms and ask them for money by showing them an animation of a new flashy product I've never designed. Better than working an honest living it seems.
> a low-res image of a license plate still contains some data, and that an algorithm can find a license plate number that maximizes the probability of that specific low-res image.

That's because there was enough information (data) present to extrapolate.

Let's say you take a photo of someone across the room, and downsize it so it's low res, then use machine learning to upscale it.

It will do it's best to reconstruct the face/other features based off it's data. It might even get pretty close. But it still has no way of knowing where every single freckle or mole on their skin is - it might try placing some based off what it's learn but they aren't related to the actual person.

Here's another good example [0], it doesn't know what color the bridge should be. Maybe it was painted white, and should stay white! We humans know other information such as which bridge that is, so we know what color it should be, but there's not enough data to extrapolate that from the image alone.

[0] https://camo.githubusercontent.com/3b1aca12e6009a5b8a47bcfbb...
Wow, that comparison with Madoff's returns is so sleazy that the person who created that image has to know they're being a dishonest scumbag. For context, the suspicious thing about Madoff's returns wasn't just the size of the returns, it was that his Ponzi scheme returned that amount consistently year after year, seemingly risk free, regardless of what the markets did. That was the part that was "too good to be true" - the average returns of Madoff's scheme were pretty unremarkable. Also I'm pretty sure that's comparing apples to oranges, or rather return on investment with profit-to-income ratio.
>> When will people wake up and realize that AI today is just capable of "curve fitting"?

You are (possibly inadvertently) misquoting Judea Pearl and he was talking specifically about deep learning, not "AI":

“All the impressive achievements of deep learning amount to just curve fitting,” he said recently. [1]

"AI today" still means many more techniques and algorithms than deep learning. For example, SAT Solvers, logic programming and theorem provers, classical planning, classical search, adversarial search (MCTS) etc are alll AI techniques that have nothing to do with "curve fitting".

So could we please all not throw about big proclamations about what "AI today" is ("just" or not), without first making sure that we have a thorough understanding of what we are saying?

I thank us all in advance.

____________________

[1] https://www.quantamagazine.org/to-build-truly-intelligent-ma...
At this point the most likely future looks like one where we use all of our resources, wreck the environment, and enter a new dark age. The potential benefits/dangers of AI seem distant in comparison.
I can't say that I blame them. This is really an underhanded way of complying with the EU's judgement. whether you agree with the EU judgement or not, the fact is they were fined and found to be in violation, and have been tasked with creating a fair and equitable way for consumers to choose their search engine, and this reeks of rent seeking.
Zoom has network effects. If a company has deployed zoom in their conference rooms, talking to non-zoom shops stinks.
SARSA follows the current policy. Suppose you're minimizing cost. Then, if the value function of the MDP is a lower bound, it will explore interesting states simply because SARSA underestimates the cost-to-go. If updates of the value function then tighten this lower bound, SARSA will converge. In this case, SARSA is more efficient than Q-learning.

Apart from that using Q-factors does not scale well. If your action space is a game controller, things may still look ok, but not if your action space is multi-dimensional and continuous.
Oh God no! Not Square at least. They'll happily send your financial statements to random other people, then act like it's completely normal that they did that, and really weird that you're upset about it. Plus their customer service (for end users who buy products, not the merchants) is extremely adversarial. They have a really shitty chat bot that is the only way to contact them to get help when they screw something up. It's awful and very anti-consumer.
Spotify is publicly traded. Do you have an example for a privately owned company?
Ask HN: Recent Equivalent to 'JavaScript Application Design Build-First Approach
Hi -

I really enjoyed starting to read this book (https://ponyfoo.com/books/javascript-application-design); I feel it offers very hands-on pragmatic steps around the process of delivering a JavaScript web app. However, I feel that the JavaScript Frameworks used are already dated (although it is published in 2015).

Is anyone aware of a more recent equivalent book for JavaScript Webdevelopment that uses modern frameworks but with an emphasis on the best practices for setting up a build process/tasks/pipelines and modern JS web architectures?

Thank you!