skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
1. Yes but think of all the attackers who aren't skilled enough to do that. Making the barrier to entry higher is exactly what you want.

2. Well yeah! If I write vulnerable code I would want to make sure it was as difficult as possible to discover. Who wants easy to discover vulnerabilities? Anyone who I want looking at my code will have the source and can build without obfuscation and fuzzing protection.

2.1 If I'm a big enough target sure, but if I make it as annoying and difficult to work with my software as possible the hope is that you'll go somewhere else.

3. The performance impact is super mild and completely unnoticeable on anything that works in human time. The slight performance hit to protect your IP is a no brainier calculation. Nvidia famously implores absolutely crazy obfuscation on their chips and they're still the market leader on speed.

4. Companies that use these kinds of techniques don't recognize a difference between the two. If you're not employed or contracted by them and you're looking at their code you are the adversary.

I think it's funny that when we talk about encryption we talk about its strength like "an attacker with a supercomputer X years to brute-force it" but when it comes to things like this we say "security through obscurity! Worthless!" instead of "the total population of people with the skills to even begin to find vulnerabilities is professional security researches and could all fit comfortably in a mid-sized event venue."
Only for the record, in the "passage" between Lotus 1-2-3 and Excel there was an excellent spreadsheet by Borland (that never got many traction) called "Quattro" (the Italian for 4, as if it was a continuation of the 1-2-3 series):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quattro_Pro
later it became Quattro Pro and then was acquired by Corel and I believe it is very uncommon nowadays.

As a side note, VBA has been added to Excel only after version 4, before that there was only a Macro language.

If you want to feel how an ol' version of Excel behaved (without many bells and whistles and of course without the ribbon) there is an exceptionally good little program here:

http://www.byedesign.co.uk/

that has most functions and fits (the 32 bit Windows version) in a single (portable) file hust below 1,500,000 bytes.

And, JFYI, the sad part is that I wrote my fifth "I love you":

>One “I love you” for every year since I’ve fallen in love with...Microsoft Excel?

in 1994 or 1995.
semi-autocrats?
Pretty sure. In the first round Zuyganov and Yeltsin were neck and neck. Zuyganov looked _very_ viable to most of the older voting population who had quite enough of the "wild 90's" and wanted to go back to the socialist certainty of how things were before Perestroika, at least to some extent, and Zuyganov promised exactly that. Or at least how they remembered how things were: people tend to forget the bad things first, this is called the "good old days syndrome".

Russian presidents don't usually try to dance awkwardly on stage unless things are truly desperate: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cRysHHzLAmM :-)

The entirety of Russia's entertainment industry was paid huge amounts of cash, mostly under the table, to stage concerts in support of Yeltsin. Where that cash came from nobody knows to this day.
> but to my knowledge Czech doesn't attempt to preserve foreign spelling, with e.g. letters Ñ or Ø. Czech adapts spelling to native pronunciation, which is my entire point.

In Czech, adapting spelling to native pronounciation (or adapting pronounciation to native spelling) is done for common nouns, but generally not for proper nouns (esp. names of persons) from languages written in (variants of) Latin alphabet. These are either written as is, or (informally) stripped of 'foreign' parts regardless of pronounciation (e.g. Ñ->N, Ü->U, or Ø->O). One exception is feminine suffix -ová added to female last names, as that is necessary for declension.
>I'm more interested in the logistics part of this.Assuming a good % of buyers are Americans,how an Octopus from Spain or a Unicorn from Sunnyland get delivered via customs? As far as I know, US can be very very picky about importing some random food... Anyone could elaborate on this?

I clear international freight through customs for a living, a good deal of importing small amounts of stuff is on the honor system. Sure, customs will randomly search shipments but I can think of many ways I could increase the likelihood of an individual getting something past customs. I will share them all, or even elaborate in any real detail but these tare all data points that could be considered:

- description

- value

- country of origin

- Declaring it as a REDACTED and/or as REDACTED

- Sending it as REDACTED

Then there are methods of packaging that can also increase chances of avoiding detection.

Look, people ship illegal drugs internationally daily via darknet market purchases (I mean, open your DNM of choice and you can have a kilogram of cocaine shipped to your door domestically and internationally, clearly it's not all getting seized otherwise the listings would dry up as customers got burned), you also have gobs and gobs of counterfeit goods, goods from sanctioned/embargoed countries, etc all slipping by Customs (at least in the United States). A lot of it is purely due to the fact that, unless the inspect a package, it's an honor system "I claim this is what is in this box I'm sending to Bob in America" combined with the sheer volume of packages.

I mean, on average PER DAY in fiscal year 2018, Customs processed 95,890 entries [1] of merchandise at air, land, and sea ports of entry. Most of that, never gets reviewed by a human being on the end of Customs as a lot of it is electronically transmitted via ABI and if any number of computer decisions don't flag it, it clears within seconds.

[1] https://www.cbp.gov/newsroom/stats/typical-day-fy2018
On their ingredients page ( https://www.mcdonalds.com/us/en-us/product/hamburger.html ) it says that the patty consists of:

"100% Beef Patty. Ingredients: 100% Pure USDA Inspected Beef; No Fillers, No Extenders. Prepared with Grill Seasoning (Salt, Black Pepper)."

That seems pretty clear to me. USDA defines beef as flesh of cattle. If there is anything but "flesh of cattle" in the patty, McDonald's is committing fraud.
The last three years of protests and arrests?
Knowing a little bit is good, building your entire career around it is bad except you work for it as a consultant.
Basically, all the big HUMINT questions such as who is this person connected to, who does this person listen to, what does this person consider important, and what skills does this person have can pretty much be answered by looking at their Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn profiles.
This kind of economic dysfunction is often cited as the reason to switch to a Land Value Tax, which is explained pretty well on Wikipedia[1].

It's also why so many people were interested in SB-50[2], which would have overridden local zoning controls to allow higher density development around transit stops.

I think the biggest challenge is the transition. The current system is broken, but we typically look at changes in terms of the desired end-state, and when we look at it that way it's clear that the change will be very disruptive to a lot of people who are benefiting from the status quo. Those are the people who turn out and ensure that the changes cannot go through - even if they might agree that the long-term outcome would be better.

Strong Towns has done a good job emphasizing incrementalism in its approach to urban problems[3], but I'd love to see more of a conversation around this in a legal / regulatory context. Are there ways that we can undo the harm of bad regulations and transition to better ones that aren't so disruptive to the people who have built their lives around the current rules? What would those look like?

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax

2: https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtm...

3: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2018/9/5/incrementalism
https://www.quora.com/Why-is-KFC-bad-for-our-health

Summary, too much fat, salt, antibiotics.

Chicken tastes watery because they soak it in salt.
Honorable mention for Logistix on Amiga, which I think came out around the same time as Excel or shortly after.
Ask HN: Should I hire a new CEO or sell my business?
I'm the founder of a bootstrapped B2B SaaS company that's been growing at a decent clip for the past two years.

Context:

C-Corp
Revenue is ~$100k/year
ACV is ~$5k/year
I'm the only employee
60% Outbound/40% Inbound
Profit margins ~75%
TAM is any B2B company in North America, possibly worldwide with ACV >$20k/yr.

Problem: I'm currently running another business which is growing like mad and can't put any time into this business which means that it's in zombie-mode. Existing customers will get full support, I'm not releasing any new features and I've ceased any outbound effort.

Options:

1) Hire a CEO or
2) Sell it

Questions:

What's the best path here? Sell or find a replacement and give them a stake?
What's the best way to go about finding a potential CEO?
If I were to sell the company, where should I start this process?

Thanks in advance
Freelance Site Fiverr Offers Illegal Private Spying Services
It is not fascinating. It is sad, unfortunate, and unfair to Li and his hard work.
If I'm eating fast food, why do I care about the nutritional value?
The only thing that could drive up the land prices is that some landowners try to hold out to demand unreasonably high prices. So what you need is a kind of squeeze-out mechanism like "If 2/3 of the landowners are willing to sell their land for price X, then the remaining 1/3 must sell for the same price".
Doubleplusgood newspeak!
Show HN: Jwalk, a Streaming JSON Parser for Unix
Chris Manning: How computers are learning to understand language
EULAs and those kinds of agreements have their own legal problems with how they can be enforced, so its best not to complicate things here !

>I should mention this looks like an extremely vague distinction, and it's not even mutually exclusive.

I don't agree with your opinion that its vague.

> Amazon provides a service of its own volition, and he took advantage of that service.

If the action that Amazon took could be proven to be "just as easily" done by the end user, then perhaps Amazons acting on behalf of the end user could be considered equivalent to the end user themselves performing that action.

For e.g. If these is a fair use exemption for making a copy of a CD for a personal backup, then if I told my neighbors kid to do it for me, I think it could be considered equivalent as me doing it myself. Copying a CD is at present, ubiquitous enough, that assisting someone is probably on safe legal ground.
Opening Up the AMP Cache
I always thought that is obvious :)
I've noticed this a lot too lately, and the more I thought about it, the more I find Netflix to be the main culprit here. They fund these "documentaries" which are beautifully done and paint a wonderful narrative, but are ultimately empty of any meaningful analysis or content. Don't think they are doing this on purpose though, it's more likely just a side-effect of their content dump. PBS, BBC, and NatGeo documentaries are still interesting and relevant, imo.
How do you know he's popular either? State run opinion polls? Asking people on the street about if they like their ruthless dictator or not?

Sure.
> My concern with this statement is that restaurants can surely cook you "real" food and thus allow you to have your time back.

But they won't, because it's more expensive.
That is indeed a very interesting perspective
> Making pasta takes the same amount of time either way.

Making the complete dish does not take the same amount of time either way, even ignoring added cleanup; the prep+cooking time of a from-scratch sauce is greater than the time it takes to boil water and cook the pasta (while bringing premade sauce to temperature does not), so even though it can be parallelized (which may be problematic if you are already multitasking, e.g., supervising children while making dinner, as a prepping and cooking a from-scratch sauce also takes more attention than reheating premade), it definitely adds before-serving time.

It also adds cleanup time.

I’ve got two young kids, and cook pasta with premade sauces (often, sauce I previously made from scratch, but sometimes store bought) and with scratch-made-at-the-same-time sauces each fairly regularly.

> Realistically people don't do these things because it's not habit, or because their workplace has no cooking facilites, not because of some epsilon seconds longer on meal prep or whatever.

I did nothing but scratch-made sauces, mostly in parallel with cooking the pasta, for several years before having kids; I now use store bought between a third and half the time.

It's absolutely because of the delta in work involved, which is not mere seconds.
Shenzhen Surpasses US$338B GDP Mark in 2017, Beats Hong Kong and Singapore
I recently realized that trying to order C++ and Rust precisely on a complexity scale is rather pointless and misleading, since it's obvious that they are in the same class of trickiness, but for different reasons.

If a significant number of the developers that come into contact with a language think it's hard, then... it's very likely hard.
There is no meat in it, lab-grown or otherwise. It is made of plants and chemicals. It just tastes similar and cooks similar and gets used similarly.
> The case happens to have a strong analog to a former Amazon publishing controversy a decade ago, when the company tried to launch a text-to-speech feature for its Kindle platform that would effectively do what Amazon Captions does today, but in reverse.

> Publishers at the time were enraged, accusing Amazon of trying to trample on the nascent audiobook market and the licensing rights that publishers believed would help it become a thriving business. Amazon eventually caved in that regard, allowing publishers to disable the Kindle text-to-speech feature after a massive outcry from the US Authors Guild.

Sooooo.... If this is illegal, is reading a physical book aloud to your kid (or a class) illegal? That feels like a very close parallel.

Or is it the act of automating the action that makes it illegal?
> Sure the government could do it. But any city council that tried to do this would likely find themselves voted out.

Who votes them out and with what arguments?
Why do you think plant-based meats are lower calories than regular meat? IIRC they are pretty similar as far as calories go.

There's no evidence plant-based burgers are healthier. Why would eating something super processed and filled with carbs be better than eating meat?
I hope you do realize that they were conquerors themselves (between the tribes) and that many tribes happily fought besides the Europeans in order to gain the upper hand over other tribes, specifically, the Cherokee:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherokee

It also begs the question: What are the Romans and the Arabs going to give my country in return for having conquered us 2000 and 1000 years ago, respectively.
The millennial age cohort is defined arbitrarily. Why 1981-1997 and not 1980-1996 or 1982-1998 or perhaps a range that's narrower by a few years?
Your argument is essentially the same thing as the joke about the old and young economist. The young economist sees $20 on the ground and says "is that a $20 bill?" to which the old economist says "it couldn't be, someone would have picked it up by now" and they move on.

Just because something is the status quo doesn't imply that the it is the optimized reality. I work in data science and quite a bit with marketing data, and in my experience, its highly ineffective most of the time. More surprising to though, is the sheer number of people, companies, and dollars, on both sides of the marketing business, with major investments in the idea of marketing being effective.
The reviews on the TM are nice and spirited. E.g:

"I keep seeing nothing but fear of the information it contains, and how it should be classified. If you fear for what it might bring, just think about the fact that 31-201 and the information has been available for decades now, and nobody's peed in your Twinkies, yet. "
This doesn't make any sense. It's not zero-cost for a company that provides a book to also provide an audiobook. Both require their own supply and value chains. An audiobook will require recording studios, artists, a streaming audio product, an app, massive storage requirements, separate catalogues and search. The only aspect it shares with the book supply chain (which is also costly for the company) is the IP. It might make sense for Amazon to bundle the kindle/audible versions from a sales POV, but you have no moral right to owning a story in all formats- there are real costs and people involved.
The commit messages that add them to banned.h discuss alternatives, though most of the explanations are Git-specific and assume you'll look elsewhere to figure out how to actually use those alternatives.
Relevant quote from TFA: Dave Karpf, who has written two books on the use of data in modern campaigns, calls Cambridge Analytica “the Theranos of political data.” Eight GOP political consultants told Ad Age’s Kate Kaye that the company was “all hat and no cattle.”

Maybe it's because I'm from Texas but "all hat and no cattle" is about as damning an insult as they come. It's the equivalent of "full of shit".
All the talented people that you mentioned were laughing when he proposed reusable rockets, and we all know how it ended.
An obvious one is Dan Carlin's Hardcore History. I'd also suggest audiobooks if you're looking for something more substantial. I'm currently revisiting the classics and found a great reading of Plato's Republic. Before this, I had a great time listening to an audiobook of Will Durant's book The Story of Philosophy which is a nice summary of Western philosophy.

YouTube seems to have full audiobooks, some of which are of great quality. There's a version of Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra that is highly entertaining and even enlightening, if that's your thing. There is a good librevox recording of Wittgenstein's principle book that I've started on recently, and was surprised how good it was.

So I suppose I'd suggest audiobooks over podcasts for in-depth material.
The answer depends on if you need the money generated from the sale of the business.

For example, if you had someone who would pay you non-negotiable cash up front of 200k (after taxes) with no strings attached, I imagine that would be meaningful to your financial goals in life.

However if you can afford to wait and believe that there is significant upside in your business that a new CEO can unlock for you while you work on the other business, then you should consider hiring an extremely sharp and self-motivated person who can grow the business to a multimillion dollar opportunity instead of what it currently is.

Such a person would be me! You can email me at waybetterthansaas@gmail.com.

Good luck!
I think the fake meat movement will go the way of Margarine.

Initially it's celebrated as a feat of engineering and as the healthy alternative to meat.

After about 10 to 20 years however, we'll see cancer and heart disease rates going up.

And then the billions of dollars spent in health care will pile up, but nobody will readily admit it, because the fuck up will be even bigger than with Margarine.

After all, Margarine is still on the shelves of super markets everywhere, maybe with slightly less trans fats, but it's still there, still advertised as the healthier alternative to butter.

Let that sink in for a moment.
It's because:

a) the language designers decided to cram several paradigms into it, including a heavier than usual dose of functional.

b) most people don't want to get pedantic about resource management

c) the syntax is weird for people coming from the C language family
Meat is not just a matter of taste, but also of habit and identity. In general, the lower the socio-economic class, the higher the resistance to vegetarian and vegan cooking.

Society wide change is always hard, and meat is way too cheap (considering its environmental impact) to provide the economic stimulus for reducing the amount of meat in ones diet. Learning to cook vegetarian dishes is also non-trivial (although not too hard of course, but a barrier nonetheless).

For people over fifty meat is also an indicator of welfare. Especially for people whose parents didn't have the luxury of eating meat on a daily basis.

Fortunately, the shift to less meat is unmistakably happening, and has been gaining speed in the last few years.
Sure. Changed from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y0vlD7r-kTc.
> What is the best way to portray this to the public?

Make your own fast food restaurant chain. Sell healthy full-feeling food in correctly sized portions for competitive prices. Include meats for people who mock people who eat "rabbit food". Include vegetables for people who hate meat. Good luck keeping your menu current.
Thanks! I'll shoot you a note shortly.

To answer your question, a few hundred k is definitely meaningful but I'm open to taking a shot with a savvy CEO.

talk soon!
https://hz.mit.edu/git/tako/tako
Unfortunately, even five year olds realize that the reasoning they use doesn't make sense.

I gave a short talk on the economics of information and started with a very similar example which was this; Given that 3 ounces of ink and 200 pages of nice 20lb paper, bound with sewing and combines with a cardboard cover into a book costs roughly $3 in reasonable quantities, costs $20 when the ink is used to print J.K. Rowlings story of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows?

Clearly the same package with my scribbling about wizards and magic would likely not even be valued at enough to cover the $3 printing cost :-). So it is clear that the information has an intrinsic value, but what is less clear is how it develops that value and how much of the value can be captured.

The book publishers have gone down this road before[1]. 10 years ago the first 'text to speech' features came out in Kindle and Amazon backed down. Ten years later the Kindle is in a stronger place, so Amazon is perhaps inclined to not back down this time.

What I find particularly amusing, is that publishers, when asked back in '09 if it was "Okay" for parents to read their books aloud to their children, they agreed but felt reading aloud to a group of children (as a teacher might do), or to a group of people unrelated to you, was a violation of their commercial rights which unfortunately they couldn't do anything about. Not so with the Kindle, which is standing in here as the reader, that gives them someone to sue.

As technology gives people the ability to put information 'goods' in a real goods market framework (hard to reproduce, Etc.) the owner of those goods exploit those capabilities and litigate anything that would damage their capability to do so.

Personally, I think it is a matter of time before the economics of information become more mainstream in their understanding much like the changes that allow people to reason about "service work" in discussions of GDP. But it is going to take a while. I look forward to reading papers that talk about economies working with goods, services, and information as their drivers of economic activity.

[1] https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20090227/1759173928.shtml
Really seems like I should be better at golf, then. :tear