skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I stupidly left college to join a dot com for all kinds of fun things like a huge salary, bonuses, dual monitors, my own office space, a big cool office building.

Then, after about 6 months, the company funding our company just pulled out. Left us with a few bucks in the bank.

I took another dot com job about 400 miles away and got out of there. Lots of people there had no jobs after that, but a few of the smarter crew went on to huge companies like Microsoft.

The next dot com I went to, I was there through 9/11. Something inside me changed after that and I actually quit to pursue a different type of work. That dot com also went bust, but it never had any hope anyway. The owner was self-funding it with money he made from investing in dot coms - but he cashed out at the right time, and he was basically making a clone of another service. It was pretty terrible.

It was certainly a strange time.

The funny thing is, I just got hired as a contractor to work for another dot com that reminds be of those ridiculous days. At least all my eggs aren't in that basket. I hope the best for them, but the similarities are scary.
My post upvotes are not shown. I am not sure this is because of low karma or not.
I don't really believe that as in many places you're starting to see multi-level facilities with as many as 5-6 layers of units. That ain't cinderblocks.
And all the techies are acting surprised. Parading their "liberal" arm patches like they had nothing to do with it. How could this possibly have happened? It couldn't be our fault. Let's deny it's a problem. Or let's blame normies, or entropy, emergent systems properties, government. Or corporations. Better yet, let's blame China!

But who built this stuff? Who's responsible for the direction of the industry if not for the "democratic" actions of a majority of workers to do or not do particular work?

You could have said no. You still can.

Makes me think y'all like it better this way. So quit yer pretense of complainin. And enjoy those ad dollars and safer streets!
On “Quantum Supremacy”
I know of one company that actually managed to pull off the pivot thing!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TippingPoint

They switched from an internet appliance (kind of like an early Chromebook) to smart deep packet inspection firewalls. Not a ton in common between those except that they both require hardware to be built.

If I remember right, local lore was that they pulled it off partly by realizing early that they needed to change direction and being well-funded enough that they had enough cash to start over.
Try adjusting the settings, you can fix all of them: https://duckduckgo.com/settings#
> the Internet promised to be a democratising place to be turned to in the flight from the inequalities of the analogue world.

Okay, maybe that didn't work out so well

> It was presented to us a field in which to find freedoms, boundless creation

Mostly yes. People are instagraming, tiktoking, youtubing, blogging, open-sourcing, unity-unrealing, more people are creating more things than ever before.

> communication that transcended frontiers

Totally true. I talk to friends all over the world. Participate on HN, discourse, discord, slack, email, facebook, etc and it's all free. Some of it sponsored but much of it just plain free, run by volunteers.

> and free education for all.

Pretty much true. What can't I learn about for free online? Pick nearly any topic and there are youtube channels, blog posts, articles, etc all for free on how to do pretty much anything.
Poor journalism? Or great marketing? You decide! :-)
"Will emerging technologies make the state system obsolete? It’s hard to see why not."

Honest question - could the U.S. Government be considered an Abstract State Machine?
You say what image to use. There is no default.
How much of the $20 trillion US economy so you think this is? If WeWork was a $40 billion dollar company it would be .2% of the economy. Apple, Google, and Amazon combined are about 4-5%.
This goes back way further than startups. I believe Marx and Engels had some thoughts about this.
Does it mean that the company cut software testers to save cost? But why run all instances in the same virtual environment?
In that 20 years the hardware and software exponentially grew in capacity and decreased greatly in cost. Computers turned into something you’d want in your pocket once they could be unobtrusive enough to be tolerable with you all day.

On that note, who knows what would AR require in order to take off. It probably needs to be something you can get 80% of the killer features without wearing glasses. It also needs to support whatever frames glass wearers want to wear. It might require actual visual implants as I don’t think there’s a way to turn a contact lens into a display.
"The early users appeared to use cars for transportation, which the second link doesn't contradict, so not literal toys."

I think when people say they were toys, they mean that in the same sense that a Spyker or Ariel Atom are "toys" today.
Nationwide transit ridership is falling yet San Diego has a high-speed rail plan
In November 2000 my options were worth $2.4m on paper but they did not start vesting until January. In January they were worth -$1.5m and never exceeded the strike price again, at a company that is still public and worth > 10 billion today. They laid me off in february. I got healthy in 2 months and found a small startup with a 15% paycut but the CEO was a WeWork-level crook with a jet and he absconded with all the money 8 months later and it failed. I finally got a stable job in mid 2002.
Catalan Independence Movement Has Proven Its Strength. Now Spain’s Gov Must Talk
> Do you by chance have a manifesto I could peruse?

Are you insinuating something?
They are buying control, no? Neumann sold economic interest (non voting equity) to Soft Bank earlier. Now they want the voting power and they are offering him 200M for it. It has to be worth something. It sounds like it is unclear if that is enough (although if they are reporting it I assume it is) for him to agree.
Thanks! I will try to make some valuable submissions
You only pay tax on the profit of exercised options
Wow, that might be a record, IPO to cramdown in 3 weeks. I wonder if Softbank sees some way to convert some of the real estate into assets that it can sell off before the next recession hits to get its money back. I could not find a single thing in that article that suggested anything other than a liquidation that might favor the investors over creditors.
I actually had something similar setup on my previous phone - triplebooted SailfishOS and two LineageOS installs.

Only issue is I never got things like the camera working in my port of SailfishOS, and some Android apps I used wouldn't work when the phone was rooted, which is why I had one rooted Android install and one unrooted. Also, in order to switch you had to reboot into recovery and flash a zip changing which partition to boot from.

Worked relatively well though.
Motivations? Every fascist is convinced of the purity and necessity of their motivations. And eventually maintaining power becomes the overriding motivation...for the children, for the common good, for the poor, for the planet, and all that.
It only takes a few mins to walk outside of the airport and get picked up on a normal street.

I would always walk to the Hyatt.
I worked for a pretty "boring" company; we were never over-valued because of the dot-com bubble, and as such we didn't take a big hit during the dot-com burst.

The people that got taken to the cleaners were the ones who made websites selling belly button rings for poodles and stuff like that. Everyone thought adding "on the internet!" was worth a hundred million dollars back then, and a lot of people wound up employed doing work that honestly didn't need to be done.

But if you were in one of those boring companies, doing banking or whatever, you were probably fine.

It was harder to switch jobs for a while, since there were a lot of people on the market and not as many jobs, but I never saw the Reduction in Force scythe swinging through my department.
The $5b is coming from SoftBank Group. The earlier $11b came from the Vision Fund, which is a subsidiary with an entirely different operating environment.
What interest does Japan have in doing that?
It's not a mirror, it's just another place to put your images. If you're eu based then it's definitely better to use eu.gcr.io for everything from the start.
That seems very specifically to be a design failure, not a software failure, no?
Aren’t atomic bombs a counter example to this? Though maybe an example that proves the trend. There’s a strong connection between nuclear power failures and political push back.
Everyone is just so amazed and consternated at how amazing and consternating TFA is. To me, that's a pretty good indication it's mostly bullshit. How likely are the "multiple sources" to be Neumann and his wife?
> I use countless docker images

Which is why you need to build your own if this is the threat model.

> My PII/other data of value is also stored on a bunch of hosts who I have no oversight or control over,

Correct, this is why companies perform security assessments of vendors before granting access to sensitive data, and have contracts in place that help hold the vendors accountable.

> I have no idea if distros inspect package source, last time I googled it, I couldn't find any indication either way.

It would depend on the distro and maintainer of course, but I'd expect they do to some degree as their personal and professional reputations depend on it.
Agreed disappointing. Esp from docker I was expecting better.
My personal experience is valid to share. And it's not insensitive to share it.

If you feel you have data that counters my experience, it would be good to share. Then we can discuss both sides.
Also you don't really need a full-ass panopticon to notice three million shaped charges being assembled together with three million drones.
I could at least pretend that might happen if there was only one kind of engineer. But someone that incompetent at hiring might also hire the wrong kind of engineer. The rule doesn't do anything to help.
Vultr is a lesser-known VPS, ymmv. I had issues with several websites using Linode. I don't have a list, but iirc it was some gaming related service that took issue with the IP.
I wouldn't be worried about the IP, though the the position in low-latency real-estate might give SoftBank extra visibility into the financial health of up-and-coming startups.

SoftBank doesn't appear to be in the business of theft, but rather in the huge-risk/huge-payoff gambling/investment business.
It was tough to get my first job in 2001, but it wasn't end of the world tough. I am not sure if it was the market of my inexperience at interviewing. Probably a bit of both. The big name graduate recruiting companies of the time were hiring a lot less, so there was a lot of demand for jobs. I took what I could get.
I wasted 10 weeks of my life and $1900
In “Wonderland: How Play Made the Modern World” the toy as predictor concept is explored more deeply.

The emphasis is less on the implementation of the toy than on the popularity of the style of play or human amusement that the toy enables. Then over time various technologies come along to implement the mode of play. Eventually someone says, wow that might help in serious adult activity X. And then disruption.

Kubernetes, Tensorflow, Kafka, Falcon 9, iPhone, and Model S aren’t toys.

Video game AI, model rockets, iPod (limited to music playback), and RC cars are toys that predicted these modern, serious adult innovations.

The toy as predictor theory doesn’t require that all technologies begin as toys. So maybe Kubernetes & Kafka don’t fit (I can’t think of a relevant toy).
Would the cost/savings also depend on the 'predictability' of the infrastructure needs? To me, it seems like there is a dependency.

For example if I can project steady growth or decline of my needs, it seems that I benefit less from the infrastructure-on-demand like AWS/Azure/GC

Also, depending on the size of the organization it seems that there at least several options on data centers:

- have my own data center
- collocate my hardware in other's data center
- rent hardware
- use infrastructure-on-demand + software-as-a-service

AWS/Azure/GC are in 4th category, but cost savings in terms of electricity/building capacity/peering points are available in the first 3 as well.

Many organizations deploy Pivotal's
https://pivotal.io/industries/financial-services

or Redhat/OpenStack

So they are not actually 'building' the infrastructure management layer from scratch.

Also for investment banks (due to exchange connectivity) , telecoms (due to peering points, physical tower locations) always going to have their 'Front-office' applications in data centers that offer lowest latency for those apps.

Midoffice applications (or BOSS as they are labeled in telecom) can live in data centers reasonably distant (in terms of ping time) from the front office.
So the infrastructure for those has a different cost profile.

Most of this applications touch trades or trade events that carry millions of dollars worth of contract value
(not Facebook's likes or favorites... )

There is a lot of logging, reconciliation, post executing enrichment that's probably going on.

Finally, from my 2nd hand understanding,

Investment banks can have from 3K to 10K applications in production. With, perhaps 20% of them having more than million lines of code.

Some of those apps are built in their own proprietray languages developed specifically to manage contracts and lifecycle of contracts (Banks had 'smart contracts' DSL and interpreters since 90s).

https://news.efinancialcareers.com/uk-en/282097/slang-goldma...
Also stowing baby stuff between kids. Crib, high chair, etc takes up serious space and modern apartments are very short on storage. Baby stuff is often a gift, lightly used and acquires sentimental value in use, so it’s nice to use it more than once.
How much of the economy are companies like WeWork though? I would bet it's less than 1%.

For every WeWork, there's hundreds of companies like Anaplan, Twilio, Zoom, Shopify, Veeva, and Okta. You don't read about these companies as often because they're not circuses, but they just continue to build products people use.
The investors who made the wrong bet lost a spectacular amount of capital.
Cryptocurrency seems like the inverse of the internet revolution to me.

Internetworking realized the vast potential of all the computers in the world. They could do so much more if talking to each other.

Crypto via "proof of work" takes all the unused computing capacity everywhere and creates an incentive to waste it.

What it seems like to me is a hybrid virus that uses both human minds and machines to spread and suck up resources.
35 Years at Microsoft
Just FYI many people with doctorates (not MDs) do call themselves doctors. I've known many Finance, Philosophy and Econ doctors in my time and they all use that title and their name plaques all had "Dr. So-and-so" on them. I'm sure it is common in other areas as well.
My point is that Ben Thompson seems to have confused the terms "fourth branch" and "fourth estate" in his essay.

Which is not among his better ones.

The usage of "branches of government", the three Constitutional ones (leg, exec, judicial), and various others generally posited as a fourth, or occasionally higher, branch. See:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_branch_of_government

I'm entirely unfamiliar with a notion of estates in the US independent of Continental or British traditions. That seems to be a novel creation, or mis-remembering, of Thompson.

DDG finds nothing aside from the European usage under fourth/fifth estate, specific to the US:

https://duckduckgo.com/?q="united+states"+"fourth+estate"&ia...
Remember 3D TV?
Thanks for sharing these. I was familiar with the Protonmail business but did not know this all connected to a bigger picture. I never trusted NordVPN... they spent way too much money on advertising and snake oil advertising at that, focusing on meaningless numbers and distractions.

Hopefully you don't have similar news to share about Mullvad...
In bad times, the correlation of bad things rises a lot, just like so many fund managers have discovered the hard way.

In 2001, seeing what was coming, I left a Linux distro startup and went back to a previous and seemingly secure IT job. I even had plans to take aircraft lessons...

Then, the owner sold the company. The buyers were actually "locusts" - people that offer to buy struggling businesses just to hollow out the assets and then hand the company back ("we saw too many problems, so we are no longer interested").

Back to a market that was fully depressed, had to take a project involving gambling machines (I think they are called "one-armed bandits" in English). It was a technically interesting project, but the people involved in this business are unbearable. After some months into it, I trembled every time the phone rang. After I finally quit, it took 6 years to fully recover from anxiety and depression.
Horrible. But is there any such thing as a mining company that isn’t evil?
I was wondering, since Gnome has a lot of development sponsored by Red Hat, and IBM now owns Red Hat, would IBM have any business interest in helping with the defense?
I skimmed the comments here. Then I skimmed the article.

Getting out there and developing the sites/apps you want to see will bring change. Be proactive. Be the change you want to see.

The article is about a lawyer arguing for 'justice' through highly politicized language. YMMV, but I don't think "The Internet of creation" was hindered for want of lawyers, lobbyists or regulations.

Similarly, sitting on the sidelines and impotently lamenting the state of the Internet today doesn't help. While this isn't detrimental in the direct sense, it is detrimental if the prevailing belief is that changing the current paradigm is impossible.

Creators are still active. New niches for content are still emerging. Entrenched sites/apps are not immortal. Nothing is impossible. It all starts with individual action, one developer at a time. Don't become hypnotized by the bigness of institutions. We've seen solo developers release sea changing software before. Be the change you want to see.
I have to admire the purity of this breathtaking rinsing of VCs.
But even then, historical analogues haven't been exploited that often. We've had probably thousands of people with access to weaponizable Smallpox etc in the US and former USSR for many decades now and no one has made any known attempt to use it, sell it, ...
This might seem like a minor point of typography, but I don't understand why the names of ethnicities are sometimes capitalized in this article and sometimes not. Is it just to add emphasis?
That’s what I wish could be sussed out to a greater degree actually. How much of the US economy is comprised of things like tech scams, MLMs, various cults, etc. and what influence does this have on how businesses function more broadly and what is seen as legitimate. I’ve looked around, but there are only a few books on the history of things like MLMs and this good podcast about them called The Dream:

https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/stitcher/the-dream
The only idea i have is to turn it into a REIT.
I did. It eventually folded, but the people I knew that worked there managed to go into some pretty impressive gigs. One ended up as a VP at Apple on the iTunes Music Store side of things, if I recall correctly.

It's hard to say how things would have worked out otherwise, but I'm not living on that git branch in the repository of life, and I fear what it would take to resolve the merge conflicts, so I just chug away on the feature branch I'm currently on until the whole lot of it is deprecated. There are two nascent forks running around here that I think show promise.
$350k a Year, and Just Getting By
How to you make a transition to this way of working? Is it all about networking?
And after the water evaporates, how is the concentrated chemical sludge treated? Does it get removed for safe disposal? Does it get left to sink down and contaminate the ground water? That’s the problem.
To me, the real villains are Adam Neumann's enablers. The people that "created" Adam Neumann aren't much different from those that "created" Elizabeth Holmes. They keep looking for a quirky Steve Jobs-like charismatic leader who distorts reality.

Of course, Holmes wishes she had Neumann's playbook so she could have walked away with hundreds of millions.
Don't use Tunnelbear, they're known compromised. Honestly it's hard to beat Mullvad right now but that does make them a hot target, so keep your eyes peeled and know when to jump ship.
Making Random Variation in Chips Less Random
> The general consumer does not buy a device assuming it's ripe for hacking

No devices were hacked here, just like nothing about this had anything to do with the device's security configuration.

This was user error of first reusing passwords, and then not bothering to secure their Google account, the actual attack vector, with 2FA.
when you say "lead bullets" do you mean gun bullets, or armor piercing bullets / projectiles? a normal bullet does not vaporize and contaminate the whole area in the same way vaporizing projectiles do...
I've found that highly-developed wikis on certain subreddits feel more genuine and trustworthy than anything else out there.
Yeah, this is a common fallacy, I'm sure there would be a name for it. Basically "my strategy will work, assuming my opponent doesn't act at all", and ignores the fact the opponent is a capable, well resourced entity.

Many bitcoin proponents have the same fallacy - i.e. "this is better than banks, therefore banks are obsolete", ignoring the fact that banks will work with new technology as it suits them.
Peer Review is basically just gate-keeping for journals. It has nothing to do with replicating the research, just with verifying that the person submitting the paper crossed their Ts and dotted their Is rigorously enough.
I see your $100 and raise you $200
>This struck me as a warmed-over version of the literary conceit that we're all just characters in a particularly elaborate-seeming novel or stage play.

He also came up with the notion of apocalyptic "superintelligences"[0], which is a warmed-over version of 20th-century critiques of the corporation, starting with one written by an economist and a lawyer[1]. People like Cory Doctorow[2], Ted Chiang[3] and Charlie Stross[4] have pointed out the similarities.

>He's terribly clever but also deeply neurotic, like a pessimistic Ray Kurzweil (whose prediction record is rather better than he gets credit for, but similarly dwells a little too much in his own imagination).

He's a transhumanist[5] who co-founded the WTA (now Humanity+)[6] in 1998. I think he's probably realised along the way that doom and gloom sells: he founded FHI in 2005[7] and inspired Musk to fund CSER in 2012[8] with his book[0]. It's pretty much his day job now to be deeply pessimistic.

And it looks like doom-and-gloom think tanks are catching on: France is apparently hiring science fiction writers to dream up future threats[9]. Nice job if you can get it, I guess.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superintelligence:_Paths,_Dang...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Modern_Corporation_and_Pri...

[2] https://boingboing.net/2015/07/03/why-were-still-talking-abo...

[3] https://boingboing.net/2017/12/18/skynet-llc.html

[4] https://boingboing.net/2017/12/29/llcs-are-slow-ais.html

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transhumanism#Growth_of_transh...

[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humanity%2B

[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_of_Humanity_Institute

[8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centre_for_the_Study_of_Existe...

[9] https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/24/20708432/france-military-...