skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As others said, that's mostly a description of a business model (rent vs. buy a product), not of whether the company is "tech" or not. It's true that this is correlated with being a tech company, because the insanity of subscription models didn't conquer the world of physical products just yet - but you can imagine non-tech cases. Cellphones on a contract "magically" improve their hardware every 2-3 years through being replaced[0]; I can imagine there exist long-term contracts for car fleets where the leasor replaces the leased inventory over time, etc.

--

[0] - and replacement is fair; software also improves by replacement. Your old executable gets deleted and replaced by a new executable.
The division between Protestant and Catholic parts in Germany is (as far as I can see) much more than about religion, similar to Ireland; these are just convenient names.
I hope this will allow me to finally ditch Chrome on Mac. On Windows I changed to Firefox when Quantum was released but on my old Macbook Air it has been too slow to use as my main browser.
Firefox's killer feature remains what it always has been. It is a user agent that works for you the user not a third party.
True, but we can fail many times, and we need to not fail only once...
Maybe not an "official" tetris game, but the the BasTet randomizer is worth a mention - it tries to give you the worst possible block at all times. >:)

http://fph.altervista.org/prog/bastet.html
Because Google and Facebook take the majority of that money, leaving the rest of the publishers less and less of that pie.
It is conceivably possible to spend $1000+ on a keyboard (if you get in a bidding war for a rare antique on ebay or hire someone to design and build something bespoke), but for the most part the price of new keyboards is about $50–$250. This is not really comparable to the other expensive hobbies you described.
Show HN: The Ontology for the Call of Cthulhu Character Sheets
That's great that you come out and openly say you're using FF for privacy!

> page that's broken in FF

I don't know any, and have used FF for as long as it exists. Could you give an example (or better yet, tell Mozilla via FF's built-in feedback)?

> developer tools

FF's devtools are far superior to Chrome's IMO for core web tech such as CSS debugging (Chrome is better for JavaScript debugging and profiling, that I'll give you)

> shopping

Y'know, not everybody is ok with Google knowing everything about us, including card details and purchases

> Google properties

That Google pushes GMail and YouTube users to use Chrome and boycots other browsers is hardly an argument (except for an antitrust case).
I see the claim that we need fossil fuels for airlines and rockets raised frequently, but once we have widespread renewable electricity, what’s the barrier to creating fuel from air and water, using electricity?

AFAIK, it’s not really fossil fuels that are needed for planes and rockets, but high energy density liquid fuels, and these can surely be created renewably once we have a renewable energy infrastructure.

Or have I missed something?
What’s really interesting is if you go back to 2008-ish, when China hosted the Summer Olympics, the majority of people on Internet were either against the government or VERY against the government.

It is debatable what has caused the sentiment change but I think China’s economic growth over the past decade played a huge part. How the general Chinese people view the Western and their democratic system has changed is another major factor.
Ontology Specification: https://ontology.acomagu.me/ccs/
I imagine that has more to with taxes than anything else. Adjusted for inflation, petroleum is quite low compared to it's price over much of the last 3-4 decades.
Well they can stay and die of thirst, or stay and figure out a way of getting water. But if the only way for them to get water is immensely inefficient, then it's perfectly reasonable and moral for whoever is footing the bill to spend a more reasonable sum of money relocating the community in question. I reject the notion that anybody is entitled to a ecologically unsustainable lifestyle.

Consider Centralia PA. Was it reasonable for the government to buy out a community that could no longer reasonably exist due to local environmental factors, leaving a few stubborn people behind to fend for themselves? Yes. Because if you really want to live on top of a coal mine fire, that's on you. Relocating the community is more feasible than trying to salvage it.
That's actually untrue because for USB2 vs USB3 my computers already showed notifications that the USB2 cable is slower than necessary. The computer KNOWS the other device, it has a driver for it, and the driver can say "this device is capable of more".
> Some of the concerns about "ORMs kill the SQL-star"

This doesn't even make sense. It kills the SQL duds, stars are even more important to understand the convoluted SQL when the ORM isn't working as expected, and cases where the ORM can't handle at all (there are always some).
Building Legal Apps Using No-Code Platforms – Neota Logic
Slimming Down Your Docker Images
The most basic question I'd ask: is the core of your application the data or is it the business logic? Or to put it another way: does it make more sense to build the application around data, or to build your data around the application?

Another question I'd ask is whether you're expecting to deal with millions of rows/objects or hundreds of millions. Modelling relational data correctly can have performance impacts in orders of magnitude.

When I look at most projects, I instinctively begin by modelling the data structure; then I think about why/when/how data can move from one state to another; then I think about how an application could prod the data between these states; then I build code which runs against the data.

If your application isn't data at its core (e.g. a document-based app) then it probably makes more sense to treat data elements as objects and use a CRM (or similar) to store and retrieve the objects.
When I was down in Santiago Chile, I actually got tear tear gassed as it was deployed in huge amounts to break up protests. The police down in Chile don't mess around, at first signs of a protest they bring out the armored vehicles and just start firing away. It was brutal but also exciting besides the burning, coughing, and watered eyes for nearly an hour.
Self-driving cars will not go outside of the city to park if it is more time and fuel-efficient to just circle within the city to avoid paying for parking.

Self-driving cars will get smart and avoid circling; they will park illegally as they please, so to speak, and then move when someone shows up to ticket or tow them away.
I am not a huge fan of Safari, but it seems so much more optimised for macOS that it has become my default regardless. I mean an hour extra battery life is really nice.
If it's any consolation it's internal name is "Android Q" for "Quince Tart".
Sand grab: How Singapore’s growth is taking land out from under Cambodians’ feet
A colleague uses a Sculpt, so I did try it, but the key travel is such a long way from my (wearing out) Logitech Cordless Desktop Pro: that's from about 2004, and has tall keys [1].

Perhaps you could use a tiny widget that shows the caps lock status next to the clock?

I ordered Cherry MX Browns, which seemed like a fairly standard choice — red for gamers, brown for typists. I just hope they're not too loud.

[1] http://d2ydh70d4b5xgv.cloudfront.net/images/8/d/logitech-cor...
As I understand it, they do not block the tracking scripts. What they do is that they do not accept their cookies.

This does not change anything for me:

1) I do not keep cookies around anyhow

2) I use umatrix to not run known evil scripts in the first place

I am not sure if it changes anything for the average user either. I would assume ad companies already use fingerprinting?
E-Commerce Sites That Don’t Click
I Won’t Clap for a Hologram
> The ability of ORMs to target multiple DB backends isn’t an asset

SQL has the ability to target multiple backends.
One can think that parades in general are disruptive but should still be allowed due to the right to free assembly, and you did not address the "almost naked leathered men". Which I don't think is a big deal, but I can sort of understand the whole "think of the children" argument.

And the problem is that everyone deviating from the party line is strawmanned into "having horrible views" and thus it's perfectly okay to harass them mercilessly and cause them economic harm just for being stupid or whatever.
The underlying cause doesn't make any difference to the consumer though. If you're saying people don't want electric cars because the cost of electricity is increasing you have to weigh that against the cost of alternatives, and electricity is still better.
Ohh, that's evil :D
Looks like the next "crowd funding scam" we see alot lately.

Ill wait some time for someone to do a napkin math to debunk that as a valid product.
Those who want a world where Firefox has a higher market share and mind share, please consider doing the following:

1. Evangelize Firefox to people you know any chance you get and show them all the reasons why its better than Chrome (focus on privacy as an important point). Show them how great browsing can be with a few key extensions (like uBlock Origin, Containers, Privacy Possum, etc.). This does not imply that Mozilla is beyond criticism or that Firefox should not be held to a higher standard.

2. If you can, donate money to Mozilla regularly. [1] As of a couple of years ago (IIRC), more than 90% of Mozilla's revenue was from its partnership with Google for being the default search engine in many geographies. As long as this remains true, Google will only tolerate Firefox being a viable competitor while Firefox still remains as small to moderately sized competition (to avoid antitrust action). If/when Firefox gains a much larger piece of the market, Google will (as it has been doing all these years) even more forcefully use its money and marketing muscle on all its properties as well as add more tiny annoyances on its properties to make Firefox seem buggy citing tangential things like "web standards" or "pushing the web forward" and other euphemisms that companies like Google use to crush competition.

IMO, there needs to be a lot more individual funding of Mozilla while keeping it accountable to users and as per its own manifesto. The level of competition among browsers right now leaves us all vulnerable.

Edit: After seeing a reply to this comment, I did a quick search and found that donating money to Mozilla means donating to the Mozilla Foundation, and that the money may not go to funding Firefox development, which is part of Mozilla Corporation. See this discussion from December 2018 on reddit. [2] It may be desirable for at least part of the donation (as decided by Mozilla Corporation) to go to Firefox development. Does it already happen that way or is there a way to get this result, like in the case of Mozilla Thunderbird where donations go to that project (alone)?

[1]: https://donate.mozilla.org

[2]: https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/a98gmi/donations_t...
I think it's the opposite. We're in a bubble here. It's easy enough for a software engineer to say they'd pay for the content that's on the web when we have the disposable income to do so without even breaking stride.

If you ask the average person whether they'd prefer to pay for web content or cop ads and trackers, they'd probably tell you to shove your subscription service or whatever alternative you can come up with up your ass.
Really interesting what the new Edge is going to do in this regard...
I think what gp is trying to say, is that the EU does not have to make it painful for UK: it already is, de facto. Sure, it's better if the process is painful, to make probable exiters think again, but in this case it's not EU's doing: it's 100% self-inflicted.

I do hope for the British' sake that they get a deal soon.
I feel you're misrepresenting that discussion. Most people say they shouldn't use react, some propose react to generate static content before deployment, few raise good points for why you may want to use react even if the page is static right now. There's always going to be an extremist opinion somewhere, but it's really not common in the discussion you linked.
As someone who doesn't know much about this level of CS, can someone explain to me why inserting/deleting an element in a linear array is expensive?
Fintech startup invigorated through pre-meditated user engagement
Is there some way to ensure the donation money will actually go to Firefox and not to some sort of "diversity" campaign?
No they aren't. Read the Wikipedia page you linked to.

It's great that you can make claims like this based on zero evidence or even allegations, but there is no basis in fact for it.

What's more the number of 3rd party people that have to be involved in something like this make it virtually impossible that the national security letter structure could keep them all silent, especially since there are numerous foreign nationals in the supply chains.

Go read the huge amount of ACLU coverage of these, or the many articles linked, or the congressional testimony. There are no allegations that this mechanism is being used to do what you say.
why using an SQL DB if you don't know SQL?
The definition is apparently made from rubber. Let's talk, for example, "Software offers infinite leverage" (infinite apparently meaning "able to serve the whole world", but I guess "infinite" is just a synonym for "somewhat large-ish" here).

The article says this about Uber: "Uber is able to serve the entire world, giving it maximum leverage". Followed by this about WeWork: "WeWork is limited by the number of locations it builds out".

Uber didn't start with the ability to serve the entire world, and that ability was earned not through software, but through lots and lots of money and aggressive regulatory arbitrage (i.e. breaking laws faster than regulators could react to). What's to say that WeWork can't spend money to grow into a worldwide service?

I see this article as a list of interesting market features, but I don't buy that you have to have all of them to be a tech company, or that only companies with all of them will succeed.
Familiarity breeds contempt, huh.
Assuming the unlikely scenario that no new revenue was collected, printing $x to give to every U.S. citizen would not cause every U.S. citizen to also lose x real dollars to inflation. The average citizen still ends up ahead.

Stable, positive, and modest inflation is actually a good thing! It's a major feature of being able to control the money supply: it is instrumental in preventing deflationary spirals, it circumvents the sticky wage problem, and it transfers wealth from debt owners to debtors.

This is not to say I am a big proponent of UBI before other better-tested solutions for the more pressing problems people face, but what you are suggesting is not, by and large, what is happening.
From the Battlefield to Basketball:A Data Vis Journey with Florence Nightingale
1. If there is wind, obviously you need less energy to move the air through the device.

2. Second, your estimate based on gravity is off. Apparently, the fan power to move air is given by [1]

Power = (pressure change of air) x (volume/time of air)

Volume/air is 1.25e6/10hours = 1.25e5. Assuming that the pressure change through the device is minimal, we can look at the bottom most line (100 Pa) on the first figure, to estimate ideal power to be ~5KW of power. Even with loses, having 10-20 KW power systems is equivalent to the energy consumption of 2-5 large houses.

[1] https://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/fans-efficiency-power-con...
Which is not needed. Would love to see Breitbart, YouTube, Facebook and other similar hate-monetization platforms die. We don't have to commit collective social suicide in order to accommodate silicon valley.
I've been working on a simple ORM alternative for TypeScript + Postgres which addresses the first two complaints (takes SQL as source of truth, and doesn't take over migration or connection management), and am really happy with it so far: https://github.com/jawj/mostly-ormless
Natural Language Processing with SpaCy in Python – Real Python
With range now at 500km+ for many cars that's not a huge issue for most people. If you can't charge at home, maybe you can charge at work, at least sometimes? Or the grocery store has a fast charger so you can charge when you shop? Or the shopping mall or whatever. Unless you have an extreme commute you don't have to charge every day.
In the same way that nobody likes taxes, traffic stops, or insurance salesmen, but almost anyone sees their necessity, things can be beneficial without being enjoyable.
Because web frameworks, mostly.
IANAAccountant, but if we have a term "Earnings Before ...", then presumably "Earnings" means whatever money there is left after you subtract all the "..." from it.
This article reports that "producing a single iPhone (6) requires, roughly, mining 34 kilos of ore, 100 liters of water, and 20.5 grams of cyanide."
Also, "a billion iPhones had been sold by 2016, which translates into roughly ...37 million tons of mined rock".
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/433wyq/everything-thats-i...

Those numbers are pretty substantial - we shouldn't underestimate the environmental impact of our smartphone and gadget addictions.
Ideology: as a tech person, I don't want the protocols to be defined by a single entity. Many Googlers agree, even if we also know this could result in faster progress.

Less constraints: Firefox does not need to block release of a new feature because an Android API it depends on got blocked by legal due to regulations in Namibia.

Organisational stability: Firefox has a good revenue stream and stable leadership, with pretty constant direction.

Main competency: Firefox is the thing for Mozilla. For Google, Chrome is an insurance policy against Apple.
The story line was really fascinating, especially the conflict and eventual merger with "The Whores".. However, when he wrote the last two books, beginning with the beautiful introductional ode to Herbert's deceased wife, .. it's clear his heart wasn't in it, and he was ready for the end (of either writing, or his days on the earth).
Social media in China does not tend to be Instagram, Twitter or Whatsapp
Look at the cpython history. There is a major change from Mercurial to Git. It's not that Mercurial doesn't support the "rebase" workflow. It does discourage it though. Personally, I much prefer the "rebase your WIP changes, avoid merges" style. It is much easier to work with the resulting history.
A household air dehumidifier can pull 8 litres per day out of a 500 sqft home - seems possible.

https://www.directenergy.com/learning-center/energy-efficien...
Not sure that's true. A gallon of gas has 33.4 kWh in it, and the US limits fuel pumps to 10 gallons per minute - it's moving 334 watt-hours per minute, or moving 20 megawatts.

It looks like electrical equipment of that scale tends to confined to substations, power plants, and other controlled areas.

When it comes to robustness, you often see power after a hurricane supplied by gasoline powered generators, with the gasoline supplied by any means necessary. (When the last hurricane hit here, gasoline was available for quite a long time before the grid was repaired.)
For all practical purposes, "Signal" being open source hasn't made that happen. As for Wire, yes, I know about its origins and I use it too, but even Wire had disagreements with Signal on using the protocol and finally managed to settle it (this is from 2016, so take it for what it's worth). [1] Wire is also focusing more on paying users and businesses and building features exclusively for that market. So the free tier is no longer a great place to be in.

[1]: https://medium.com/@wireapp/axolotl-and-proteus-788519b186a7...
You seem to be making specific, narrow arguments to cast doubt on a much wider claim.

Not the OP, but I think that addressing specific parts of the claim is extremely important.

We've seen this around the PRISM program, where the allegations of support by tech companies were confused by their support for lawful law enforcment warrants (as opposed to the NSA's dragnet surveillance via PRISM). This confusion has reached the point where I saw a lecturer claiming Google helped the NSA collect data as part of PRISM, where the NSA's own slides[1] show the opposite[2].

[1] The famous "smiley slide" https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/10/new-docs-show-ns... or https://slate.com/technology/2013/10/nsa-muscular-program-sp...

[2] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/11/googl...
Hong Kong Chief Executive set to announce the withdrawal of the extradition bill
Jerry (YC S17) Is Hiring Senior Software Developers (Toronto Canada; Remote)
Adding Actions to a Peg Grammar – Guido van Rossum – Medium
I would love to if FF could handle Amazon.com without boiling my MBP2013. Is it a bug in FF or just Amazon did not care to optimize their shit?

Is there a way to figure out the performance's origin in FF somehow?
I mean, from my perspective, just the fact that you had the chance to work abroad for a multinational would put you way ahead of the wage the median US citizen has to survive on, so your experience is not representative of the median, let alone PPP stats
'Useful idiots'.
Except it's rather precarious to rely on hauling water with automobiles.

If this contraption works and is reliable it effectively turns all desert land into land w/potable water.

Why should we disregard this progress and what it enables?
What you know... The security update for July just dropped and my wifi starts working better. No mention of it in the release notes (just that it's the security update for July)...
The media is financed by ads to the tune of around 50%.

That business is sort of necessary for democracy, as decision-making requires information to close the feedback loop.

Therefore, I wouldn't quite so readily cheer the downfall of the industry with nothing more than the typical "be better and you'll find more paying customers" advice.
You have to move the data to make space for the new value (or fill the space for deletion). Imagine you have an array of 5 numbers:

1 2 3 4 5

Deleting number three requires you to do three operations:

1 2 4 4 5 # Move 4th element to the 3rd place
1 2 4 5 5 # Move 5th element to the 4th place
1 2 4 5 # Clear the 5th value

Similarly inserting a second three requires 3 operations

1 2 3 4 5 5 # Move 5th element to the 6th place
1 2 3 4 4 5 # Move 4th element to the 5th place
1 2 3 3 4 5 # Insert the second 3

This means as the array gets bigger you have to do more work to insert/delete values. If your arrays are large and need to do this often, your software will be very slow and you should use a more suitable data structure with different trade offs.
Err, WhatsApp does use phone numbers as identifiers rather than service profiles, which is why it is ubiquitous in most of the world (much more than iMessage).