skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thank you for the constructive feedback. Let me explore three responses.

First, and what will seem like a semantic argument, it is not a matter of reversibility/irreversibility. It is a matter of substitutability (i.e. whether you can substitute the founding team, whether you can substitute the technology/product, whether you can substitute the market). In every instance of a pillar being substituted, the venture would essentially change.

Second, each pillar is substitutable. The sweet-spot hypothesis put forward in the newsletter does not argue that each cannot be substituted. Rather, those companies which fall in the sweet-spot are those which require no substitution of any of the pillars. Of course, very early-stage cos may not have got the product or the market (lack of PMF) and may not have the core team (hence, the need to hire); but, this does not mean the pillars need to be substituted (or 'reversed').

Finally, the sweet-spot hypothesis does not dismiss the need for a primary filter. It is highly unlikely that you will find a 'perfect' investment. The latticework of theses and heuristics explored throughout the newsletter aims to identify the risk factors of an investment. If one of the theses/heuristics in your latticework is a primary filter- and that filter is not present- you can avoid that investment. Your primary filter- it seems- would be market and later in the newsletter we identify that this is Scott Kupor's too (see Question 3 in the newsletter).
There will be an authorization mechanism for distributed computation; we don’t like arbitrary remote code execution!
We absolutely do know this, the UPU (universal postal union) has a mandate to subsidize mail rates from nations that are termed developing under its rules, like China.
A Raspberry Pi 4 with 4GB Ram or a Intel NUC Skull Canyon
I've used this to run some 32-bit Linux binaries under Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL), which only natively supports 64-bit binaries. (Recompilation for 64-bit was not an option.) It wasn't ideal but it did work smoothly for the most part. I just used `dpkg --add-architecture i386 && apt update && apt install libc6:i386` rather than creating a separate chroot. I did have to edit the binfmt registration to remove the 'OC' flags set up by the qemu-user-binfmt package, since these aren't supported by WSL, and manually enable the i386 binfmt which is blocked by default on amd64 platforms. There is also a persistent SIGSEGV in one particular binary which may not be related specifically to running under QEMU.
"Just imagine if they returned the revenue to the people."

Arguably that idea is what lead to the current situation in some cases....

As the article notes state legislatures cut local government funding, they limit how they can gather funds, probabbly under the idea that they're returning revenue to the people ... so the local government gathers funds the only way they can find it. And here we are.
Large shippers generally do have access to similarly priced shipping options. It's difficult to directly compare because volume prices aren't all public.
If you're running on Windows there's a group policy templates pack[1] for tweaking updates for Google products. Copy it then run gpedit.msc and disable auto-updates.

[1] https://support.google.com/chrome/a/answer/6350036
I should rephrase it as “the town was dying and needed money” rather than it would die without the money.
> An American will order a bunch of widgets in bulk, ship them over in a cargo ship, come up with some fancy marketing, and then sell the widgets to you at 200% markup. You know these folks will never hire electrical engineers to certify safety and conformance, or work with the factory to improve the product in response to customer feedback.

Pretty sure that's been going on at Amazon for at least 5 years now. There is no shortage of 3rd party sellers importing garbage in bulk (try to buy a Li-Ion battery on Amazon), marking it up to account for their shipping, marketing and the 15% Amazon fee and then selling it to the end consumer in the US.

No electrical engineers involved at any point there either.

I see this as a good thing. It should cull a lot of garbage listings from E-commerce platforms.
If and when autonomous cars become a reality, I wonder what will small towns do to find new punitive fines and fees...
Could you specify the things Palantir does that Tableu and other data analysis tools do not?
This ignores the actual reason, which is that USPS charges less for China->US movement than domestic movement even after bundling like Amazon does at the warehouse.
Here's a short BBC radio programme about St Louis County, and it covers the same sort of thing. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b05pqskm

> This edition of Crossing Continents goes out and about in St Louis County to meet the people who say they are victims of a system which sees arrest warrants issued for relatively minor misdemeanours. Many of the victims are poor and black. The programme also takes us into the courts, and out onto the freeways with some of the County's police, who say they are upholding the law and promoting road safety.

> The US government is not so sure. One of the towns in question is Ferguson where riots erupted after a white police officer shot a young black man dead last summer. In a recent report on the riots, the Department of Justice concluded that the Ferguson police had been stopping people for no good reason. It said they were putting revenue before public safety.
"keep parts of the town alive"

Which parts? The police force?

Seems to me that if your city doesn't bring in enough tax revenue to support a police force then you'd opt to have a volunteer police force.

What's the situation with fire departments in these towns?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_causes_of_death_by_rat...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_unsolved_problems
Ask HN: Grownig my startup in a commoditized market
I am a tech founder of a small startup, B2C, great margins, revenue, etc.
The product itself might be commoditized as we grow bigger.

We have some moats. But i need to start preparing and thinking about the $10M -> $1BN phase where there will be lots of competition.

How do i get started with this? Good books, guides, strategy and success stories?

All my thoughts have been focused on tech stuff so far...

EDIT: i am in my 30s, plenty of domain experience, but zero bizdev/sales/marketing
Show HN: TexLab – A Language Server for LaTeX
Global Warming and the complex graph of externalities that incentivize organizations to continue on status quo or ignore huge signals.

Economies need to switch to steady state instead of growth. We need to reduce the total output.
My point is that it's still intellectual property even if it isn't copyright, because it says that you can hold on to secrets and that secrets are protected like property.

Go back to the beginning of the thread:

> "Intellectual property" is fundamentally different from classical property because information is not an exclusive good. If I hold an apple, you cannot hold the same apple, but we can both hold a digital copy with the same information.

The same thing applies to these secrets. It's just a subtype of intellectual property. In the US, too, trade secrets and copyright violation are handled under different sections of the law. They are different acts, just like in Germany (hence the different name - copyright vs. trade secret).

But they're both intellectual property and the arguments against work against both.
In what sense can the UN "force" anything?

The article says that Trump is moving to pull out of or renegotiate the UPU agreement, which at worst is a Presidential choice, and it's not even clear to me why USPS can't do it unilaterally.
Let's get specific. Exactly which research do you think meaningfully improved the world? And assuming you have some, by how much?

Following that, we can take a look at the harm done by Epstein and do some comparisons.
Compressing and streaming sensor data to prep for 5G definitely deserves a mention here.
Still faster than Windows and Apple updates
> That's not to say that habitually segregating rich and poor people is a great idea, either.

This isn't something we do, it's something that falls out of a free real estate market. Money either finds itself and accumulates, making prices soar, or it flees the whole area throwing prices through the floor.

There is no magical world where the forces of supply and demand just happen to create income-diverse neighborhoods. We have to force that to happen if we want it.

Ultimately this, like every other problem resulting from income inequality, must be resolved by fixing the inequality, not by forcing people to live next to people they don't want to live next to.
Two questions:

1) What are the possible unintended consequences? This is fairly drastic. Certainly, something(s) unforeseen are going to happen.

2) What are the new opportunities? For example, importing in bulk and shipping from here (as opposed to individual orders shipped from China).
If you get caught for speeding in Michigan, the Golden rule is to always appeal the ticket. Unless you've been excessively reckless they'll typically knock it down to "impeding traffic" which carries a slightly higher fine (depending on your speed) but is not a moving violation and doesn't get reported to insurance. [1]

> Impeding traffic is a civil infraction punishable by a fine. It is also considered a non-moving violation that does not add any points to the offender's Michigan driving record. Non-moving violations are not reported to the Michigan Secretary of State and are less likely to be detected by automobile insurance companies as a basis to raise rates. Municipal attorneys will frequently offer to reduce speeding tickets to an impeding traffic charge which avoids points on the driver's record but usually results in a bigger fine.

It's a pure money making scheme.

[1] https://www.monroecountylawyers.com/blog/2018/12/what-is-imp...
JS at least got its act together.

LUA seems to practice answering "How many Microsoft Engineers does it take to change a lightbulb" question with the "None. Microsoft document darkness as the industry standard"

https://www.lua.org/pil/19.1.html
You're still going to be free to buy those things, you just won't be getting subsidized, below cost shipping.
I can see the theory, but I don't think it's true in practice.

First, the USPS withdrawal from the UPU was announced in October 2018, which I think predates most of the tariffs: https://www.lawfareblog.com/withdrawal-universal-postal-unio...

Second, China is already paying for the cost of shipping the item to the US shores. The change affects how much the the USPS charges for the final delivery once it arrives here.
WWI-era technology was built on coal, and fueled by oil.

The amount of fuel required to smelt iron and produce high-quality steel (a technique only perfected in the 1860s -- previous high-quality steels such as Damascus and Japanese tamahagane were forged rather than smelted, with the iron and carbon impurities literally hammered out, often by hand. Water- or wind-driven trip-hammers could help with this.

Given the mass of raw wood needed to produce charcoal used in both iron and gunpowder production, the embodied mass of wood represented in an age-of-sail ship of the line (typically 72 cannon, half of which would be engaged in a broadside) rivalled or exceeded the mass of the ship itself.

That's not "the cannon and powder weighed more than the ship", but "the fuelwood consumed in producing these weighed more".

Britain, never particularly lush in forests, had stripped itself bare, and relied on imports from Sweden and the Americas to build and fuel its ships. Coal, particularly coked coal, was a game-changer. Even today, 15% of all coal use is "metalurgical", which is to say, coked coal used in steel production, not merely providing fuel to the fire, but chemically bonding with iron.

And that's just steel.

The concentrations of ores from which other metals are smelted are tremendously reduced from pre-industrial times. Copper (virtually all electric transmission and motors), gold and silver, numerous vital and strategic minerals (look up the "Harbord List", dating to WWI, of strategic minerals, now encompassed in the US Strategic Mineral Reserve and successor programmes), and more.

If we can avoid shutting off the grid entirely, some elecrical substitution may suffice. Aluminium smelting is virtually fully electrically-based, and steel recycling (which doesn't require coal) can and does run in electric arc furnaces.

Vaclav Smil's books on energy, Energy and Civilisation, and materials, Making the Modern World, are very strongly recommended.
I mean, we need this sort of technology to take hold with non-technical users, so I applaud it from that aspect... but us technical users want to know what's actually happening here. And the fact that the source is "coming soon" doesn't help either.

Oh, here's what we're looking for: https://doc.duple.io/faq/
> Changing the legal framework around intellectual property doesn't stop it from being intellectual property.

As I wrote under https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20811544 "Geheimnisverrat" applies to leaking confidential data (e.g. trade secrets, but not copyrighted works that are publicly available).
True, and it seems as though to avoid this kind of litigation Ticketmaster simply had to disclose more information about the purpose and intent of the fees in the fine print. I also remember them changing the name "processing fee" to "convenience charge" maybe 10 years ago as result of (maybe this) lawsuit, but I can't find anything about that now.
> Coiffures: elaborate hairatyles

Hairatyles: an example of Muphry's law in action

Hairstyles: a particular way in which a person's hair is cut or arranged
Care to outline exactly how that would be done? Or what alternative you see?
It would be interesting to start a eugenics-esque program, but focus on DNA superiority combined within equal races mixed in. Ie, fully embrace "melting pot".

It's of course a silly dream to promote all skin colors equally. While I'd like it, it would immediately cause problems with the people who prioritize skin color over all else.

It's such a tiring state of the world.
Bear in mind that most viewers will see multiple ads during the stream, so 10k viewers could be more like 30k impressions.

Well I wasn't necessarily thinking this was being compared to a full time job, just that a channel could be self supporting, but there are ways to get close:

A strong supplement to ads is direct donations/subscriptions. If you've ever seen a YouTube/Twitch chat, people send a LOT of money that way and get their message highlighted/usually responded to for their money. It's not uncommon to see mid-tier YouTubers make hundreds in one stream but its probably the exception and not the rule.
The folks in charge get paid by the government and the amount the government is able to pay is highly dependent on the amount of funding it gets.
I haven't really heard jobs being a part of this discussion at all, the reasoning and the rhetoric has been about leveling an clearly unfair playing field.

The USPS will certainly make more revenue, and in turn they should be able to pass that on by reducing shipping costs for people shipping from within the US.

For companies drop-shipping from China, regardless of whether the person running the business is in the US or in China, the impact is the same. But for US based businesses that inventory items and ship out of the US, this change would be a big advantage.
The main performance problem in pacman as far as I can tell is really slow xz decompression. This is mostly important for large packages:

$ time xzcat /var/cache/pacman/pkg/cuda-10.1.243-1-x86_64.pkg.tar.xz >/dev/null
1:17,33 total

Just decompressing that 1.8GB package takes 77 seconds.

There was a discussion in April to switch compression to zstd - which reduces the decompression time for that package to only 4 seconds (!) while keeping the same file size. That way the disk is the bottleneck again, as it should be. That switch would be awesome, but it looks like it's not happening currently.
Meanwhile Gentoo's portage took almost 7 minutes to build qemu...

zx2c4@thinkpad ~ $ genlop -t qemu
Sat May 18 15:36:44 2019 >>> app-emulation/qemu-4.0.0-r2
merge time: 6 minutes and 49 seconds.
Well I mean, the organizers of this job fair certainly seem to think there is.
Which is bad.
I don't use xfce any more, but back when I had a hard drive die I ended up installing xubuntu partitioned across 4 USB flash drives(8-16GB each) so I could keep running my laptop. It was one of my first forays into Linux and it blew me away I could do such a thing and have a fairly fully featured desktop environment run smoothly in that situation.
Opioid Makers Sink as Traders Assess J&J Ruling Consequences
It's a tragedy of the commons issue which is where these kinds of laws come in.

I've yet to see any alternative to cars proposed that I personally find acceptable, but some people do want to live that way for some reason. New areas of the city being made without parking for those people would be fine if there really is a demand for it but I wouldn't like moving somewhere and it later becoming car-hostile.
Mike Isaac, the author of the book this article is cross-promoting, is probably the least objective source for a claim like this imaginable. He has a years-long streak of negative articles in various publications, has a book releasing imminently, and is looking to generate sales through salacious revelations. I would take this with a grain of salt.
I think this is done more for the sake of the server sending the files, not the client side. Most Linux distros are using some form of donated mirror servers, and it’s not nice to slam them with requests.
another app trying to collect a bunch of data from our lives. sorry but no.
All the Linux package managers I've used (admittedly, not that many) allow you to choose which updates to install. It's only dependencies that should be upgraded together, I suppose.
> On Linux you don't seem to have this kind of flexibility as far as I can tell.

I don't think that's true at all. I choose when my kernel gets updated, and which dkms modules I want to update (as some of them are a bit... bleeding edge). I choose which of my apps needs an update.

I can choose just security, or even 'just do this particular security update for this particular program'.
It's not as though cities and towns are using fine dollars to educate children and feed the homeless. They're not. They're using it to pay more police salaries so they can write more tickets. They're simply using the money to further their own existence. God forbid the towns be forced to find an alternate way to pay for, reduce or cut a service in the face of shrinking revenues.
Twilio’s Changelog Page
You would probably enjoy the John Barnes story "The Lost Princess Man", which has a much fancier version of this as a core element: https://www.amazon.com/Princess-Barnes-Short-Story-Collectio...

[Also seen in the collection "The New Space Opera 2".]
A lot of rural towns are at least as dependent on highway patrol and sheriffs.
>8 full-time officers for a population of 5,000. There's absolutely no good reason to have so many cops for a population of that size

Doesn't that mean 2 officers on duty at any one time? There is ~160 hours in a week, so that is 4 40 hour blocks. Having two police active at any time seems reasonable (probably with them staggered so that when one swaps the other is only half way through their shift).
Expanding Facebook Local Alerts Within the US
via https://twitter.com/jeffiel/status/1166218240785145856?s=21
Interesting analysis. I don't see "Quantum Computing" in there (maybe next?) and would throw "Blockchain" into the 2014-15 hype set.
Oil came shooting out of the ground, and even now generally flows.

Methane hydrates largely seem to be frozen in tundra and on the seafloor. Even accessing them tends to precipitate release. Liquids are far more fungible than either solids or gasses, and methane hydrates tend to be the latter transforming wantonly to the former with very little in-between. Sort of the worst of all possible worlds.

Also a tremendously worse greenhouse gas, though not quite so long-lived as CO2. Centuries rather than millennia.
A lot of those questions are answered in their FAQ.

The Duple application on your 'server' will simply expose a directory on that system (or a remote SFTP server) to other Duple applications you connect to it. All data will be on the machine you maintain. So no, they are not storing your data for you.

To enable access to your device from outside your local network, you have to either give the Duple running machine a public ip and open the port, or do port-forwarding if you are behind a NAT firewall (which is the most common situation for home cloud stuff)
Somewhat related- I've gotten a lot of mileage out of using Cryptomator (no affiliation) with iCloud to have access to encrypted documents across devices without having to worry about the pain of self-hosting. Here's a blog post I wrote about it https://karlshouler.com/posts/2019-05-31-secure-cloud-storag...
If you must run Windows 10
And then you hire a lawyer who "has a good relationship" with a judge
He mentions this in the earlier post. He tried that once before with a game, where he put quite a bit of effort into making the graphics better, but people didn't really notice the improvement, they still complained about the graphics. From this, he concludes that what people want isn't just a short upgrade, it's a vast improvement in quality, and he cannot afford to spend time on that at the moment. I think that's a fair tradeoff that he can make from the numbers, and his experience in the industry gives his decision a lot of weight.
Estimating vocabulary size with Heaps’ law
Any specific examples of this? I've been taking I-16 pretty routinely for most of my life, never heard of or ran into anything resembling a speed trap let alone bait.

Admittedly, I have some friends with a story about Georgia highway patrol / local PD setting up a roadblock off an interstate exit right by a Phish concert.
Whole countries started to be Microsoft clients from having installed pirate Windows and Office on every PC.
At least two generations of coders were nurtured on that ("Developers! Developers! Developers!").
Also hordes of other professionals like designers and animators (Adobe, Autodesk etc).
I feel like that standard would quickly result in any government that pays anyone called a kleptocracy.
When I was in Austin, Texas I checked out the new library. It’s fucking awesome, reminded me of hogwarts with its staircases and shit.
thats probably because you don't have many users. 10 bucks a month with 1000 employees is already a big number.
Food, clothing, water, air?
I'm not arguing against the general idiocy of this, but the net effect should be to keep money away from such banks.

My understanding of the ACH system is that it's best used in a "pull" manner, as if you're writing a check. Link your Simple account from another bank and initiate the pull from there. (Then work on transitioning your activity to the better bank while you're at it).
Who knows what Trump will do to their shipping costs to punish China.
Totally. If we are building a technology that could be used for good or bad, I think it's especially important that we find out which, rather than just throwing up our hands and cashing the paycheck.
Paglia is also trans...