skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thompson has recently been on a tear. Two of his recent articles (this and China Cultural Clash [0]) are some of his best writing yet. Actually, I'd say they are some of his best thinking yet.

Whether you agree with him or not, I think it is clear that he is asking the right questions, at a time when most people are not. More than even asking the right questions, I think he is seeing much more clearly, and forwardly, than is common.

I'm not sure I agree with all of his framing. For example, I'm not sure I agree that the invention of the printing press directly lead to nation states 450 years later. However, there is definitely more than a nugget of truth in his framing of the future, here. I think hindsight will judge him quite well, in more than just technology.

[0] - https://stratechery.com/2019/the-china-cultural-clash/
The Notable + Syncthing setup is intriguing – might have to switch off Evernote and give that a shot. How do you view/edit your notes on a mobile device? Thanks for sharing!
I have to say the "GOF" book was giant fraud, or at least a big mistake. It has no clear rules on when to use what pattern over another. This resulted in ambitious but naive programmers throwing design patterns at everything in ways that appeared haphazard to those not owning the coder's mind, creating "spaghetti objects". I went round and round in online forums trying to clarify the "rules" for pattern selection. It never resulted in anything definitive or fruitful. It's horrifically vague. The "art" had a cult-like quality to it.
Agreed in principle, however from what I get :

(i) it seems this "non-ionizing radiation" has many parameters that can modify significantly the way it propagates in the environment (and in human bodies), so I'm not sure speaking of non-ionizing radiation in a general way is sufficient to address the problem

(ii) following this reasoning and your comment about "a single study, bulletproof and large": it does seem that it is in fact what is being asked by this group - that time be given for a meaningful and large study of the specific radiation from 5G tech

and therefore requiring that kind of large study before widespread implementation actually seems warranted.
Isn't the media the fourth estate?

I can't find any way to interpret this excerpt such that it makes sense.

How does anyone have "monopoly control over fact checking"?

And I also can't think of a way to favorably interpret that statement, given that I consider fact-checking to be an integral component of any information dissemination system.

Like many of Ben Thompson's articles, I find his ideas here compelling, but I also find myself feeling like he's an industry apologist and it clouds his thinking/makes him myopic.
Think Python, Think Complexity, and Think Statistics are all really excellent. Downey is an artist of CS pedagogy.
Sure, ionizing vs non-ionizing but millimeter waves do do localized, penetrating, heating and the intensity of millimeter radiation from 5G is orders of magnitude stronger than that from the Sun.

Is it consequential? Probably not, but the OP's original comparison of 1000 W of Sun vs. 100W from a tower and nW from cell phone is disingenuous.
Rolling your own encryption is an entirely different animal. I agree with that sentiment for encryption.

When you use a VPN service, though, you really don’t have any real insight into what’s going on on their servers. Run your own and you can be sure you’re running the most recent, audited version of OpenVPN on an updated operating system.
showUsers : [User] -> Html msg
showUsers users = div [id "my-component"] [ul [] (map showUser users)]

showUser : User -> Html msg
showUser user = li [] [
span [class "firstName"] [text user.firstName],
br [] [],
span [class "lastName"] [text user.lastName],
]
AirMason – Bring your employee handbook to the 21st century
Nobody is suggesting that it would be.
Telegram vs. the SEC: SEC Counters, Ton Hearing Postponed Until 2020 – Telefuel
How to Avoid Fallacies in Data – Data Analysis Problems
>I've heard it so many times about people interviewing others, as "(s)he is smart, passed all test, but weird, I don't like to work with her/him".

I never really understood the point of affirmative action until I was told point blank repeatedly that my co-workers thought I was good at the work, but didn't like me because of what I couldn't do, and that getting hired & staying hired is about having co-workers like you.

I've tolerated hostile workplace environments, abuse, discrimination, disclosure of medical information, and such just to cling onto a job because I couldn't prove most of it. I didn't think I could just leave the situation and get another job so I didn't want to make any enemies. Honestly one of the main things I have going for me career-wise is that this has happened so much people feel bad for me and pull strings for me.

Discrimination is so easy. Just say somebody was a bad culture-fit. If anybody is different: disabled, poor, old, wrong ethnicity, wrong gender, ESL, then they obviously don't "fit in".
Ah, systemd. It's one of those things where I'm glad it exists, but I hate it. I'm glad it exists because more open source is good, and diversity of implementations is good. I hate it because it complicates my machine's startup process, and my life, unnecessarily, and puts a lot of shit in pid 1 that shouldn't be there. I don't want it to become a hard dependency of my entire software stack. (Same with PulseAudio, hence why I am not currently a Firefox user.)

I left Arch after the systemd transition and didn't look back, but I wish Arch devs and users well.
"the cloud" = your data is now our data on our computers (I think we all know this). When companies like Microsoft start saving my files to their personal servers as default, I hate you. Stop.
My $0 Photo Booth Setup Using Vue JavaScript and a Sony Camera
Ben Thompson continues to amaze. Pointing out the pointlessness of controlling the impact of tech by limiting Facebook's influence is important. Authoritarian China's biggest advantage is its ability to pick winners and multiply their impact by leveraging how decisive their decision making can be. Where this fails is at finding local maximums. The winners China picks will be the best of what's available right now, which for a while has often been a Chinese clone of what's working in America, adapted to local preferences.

America's startup culture and competitiveness is our biggest advantage, and so I wish the US and EU would do more to force tech. companies to fight it out instead of picking winners by regulating the industry and controlling what Facebook and Google can do. Instead of just putting cumbersome regulations like the GDPR around user data, also dictate companies above a certain size have to have open APIs and easily exportable/programmatically accessible user data. Obviously this must be balanced by granular controls, but how can upstarts be incumbents when the data moats are so large. The APIs of Google, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc. are pretty abysmal and continue to become worse with no punishment. Yet, that programmatic access to data is probably the only way an upstart could compete outside of a complete paradigm shift.
Yea, but my example wasn't access that auditors have, it's you, as a client.

Now on topic... You could argue that Nord perhaps was a bigger client than you or I am to AWS, and maybe they should have had better access, but the fact of the matter here is that it's absolutely possible that Nord is being accurate when they say "[we] could not have known".

Contract violation or not, you should never have full 100% confidence in someone else's system. If I was Nord and renting cloud I would absolutely assume there were undisclosed accesses, as I bet they are viewing everything now.
It's not a solution looking for a problem. The problem is that the existing infrastructure does not support network slicing. Without network slicing the telcos are severely limited in their pricing models. "5G" is just them trying to convince consumers that this is for their benefit.
= in early trials
> There's plenty of good arguments against Activision Blizzard's actions without having to resort to Nazis; doing so only weakens the position.

No, it doesn't.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21289611

The comparison isn't "superficial".
You can fire up VMs, but then issue becomes the VM provider, which definitely has their own logs. Doing torrents through a VPN you setup on a VM provider usually gets the automated emails being forwarded to you.
You can get rich without risking anything (well except a little time and effort). It's called VC... If you're good and want to play it safe, you will use the money carefully and wisely and succeed. No need to be fearless or detached from reality.
Or rather the UN has hurt their own legitimacy, eh?
Small, but real-world-ish with a JS map: https://xn--gfrr-7qa.li/ Still missing a lot of festures and polish though.
You couldn't have picked an easier example!

https://pastebin.com/QQARqeB9

FWIW, I wrote this without having previous Elm experience—the compiler's error messages are so good that it was mostly trial and error until it worked.

To your point: I think using language primitives for defining views instead of HTML templating is an advantage for Elm because you can write them using only the Elm language itself, without having to learn yet another syntax. Combined with the excellent compiler error messages, it makes writing views easier and less error prone than writing HTML templates.
> However, I was bombarded with ads for NordVPN and their crap made me so angry it pretty much sold me a paid YouTube membership.

For me it was those incessant Grammarly ads. A service, by the way, that has its own serious security and privacy concerns[0].

(I feel like YouTube Premium ($18/mo for up to 6 people) is a better deal than Spotify Premium ($15/mo for up to 6 people) for a household like mine where we listen to a lot of music and use YouTube a lot. I don't know how YouTube compares to Spotify when it comes to music selection however.)

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16315684
> Even the backups where corrupt due to being backed up in encrypted images. When encrypted volumes and images are corrupted by RAM or power-failure, they are locked forever.

That sounds more like issue with backup procedure (and testing of backups), even if it was amplified by encryption.

> Of course one should never force root access, I'm saying that you can't keep out the hosting from access the server in that case.

LXC and especially OpenVZ containers seems to be replaced by KVM in hosting/cloud. Of course, it's still possible to attack VM as host has control over VM's memory. Even dedicated servers are potentially vulnerable to attacks like cold boot.

> In one incident it was using ECC RAM

Did it at least warn about issues or was it ignored?

> I mean that encryption puts the entire data-store at risk, I've seen it happen more than twice due to RAM being faulty (In one incident it was using ECC RAM) and a power-failure.

How can this cause data loss? Header containing encryption key should not change during normal work. Did it just corrupt writes?
I wouldn't blame customers when the pricing for data transfer looks like this: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/open-guides/og-aws/master/...

(Source Open Guide to AWS - https://github.com/open-guides/og-aws)
> it Just Works™ for the vast majority of use cases, just like PulseAudio does.

So does any init system or process supervisor system that has more than trivially tiny installation base.

The entire point of developing a new one is to reduce the number of the minority cases when it does not "Just Works(tm)"

Look at monit. It "Just works(tm)" for 99.9% of the use cases but boy its single threaded, everything is sequentially controlled with multi-second granularity is infuriatingly bad if you are one of the unlucky souls that wants monit-like functionality where every group runs independently from the other groups.
Which is honest BS. What's amusing is the kinda-sorta-public-option folks really can't describe how their plans will contain costs from providers/pharma.

Biden, Buttigieg and Klobuchar are asking how M4A is going to pay for it - but it's the public option plans without mandatory cutover that are going to have the toughest time containing costs.
> To me, (a lack of) "passion, willpower, and consistency" really sounds like someone with low energy due to a hidden health issue.

Oh, without question it is. The problem has been identifying and treating it appropriately. I’m seeing help, but it’s slow going. It will pass - I’ve beaten it before and will do so again.
I remember reading Heinlein stories published in the 50s that refer to cigarettes as 'cancer sticks' and 'coffin nails'.
>However I personally have never came across a company that could be described as a "frat house" or even which would have that kind of hiring policy.

Here's a recent example, if you need one:

https://kotaku.com/inside-the-culture-of-sexism-at-riot-game...
Your view is one that I'm partial to myself, but there are some other factors which you don't mention in your analysis.

One is that if you widen your view to not just being about you and how you cope with or are affected by that wealth, and consider how it might be used to help or influence those around you, the conclusion of whether to accept or seek such wealth might be different.

There was an article on HN recently about Jeff Bezos and his quest to get humans out in to space. Elon Musk has a similar ambition. Their goals, should they achieve them, could significantly change the destiny of humanity, and it would be unachievable for them without their great wealth.

Or look at what Gates has done with his foundation, or Warren Buffet's pledge to give away his billions when he dies (and all the other millionaires and billionaires he's managed to convince to do the same). None of that, which could and already has significantly helped the world would be possible without their wealth.

Or look at the Carnegie endowments, the Nobel prizes, the MacArthur awards, etc.

Very positive results could be achieved through charitable and philanthropic endeavors which would not be possible without the great wealth of their founders, even if the cost of that wealth to themselves and their families might be great.
GCP may be just as good technologically, but their customer support and especially enterprise support is piss poor.
The appeal of the cloud is less IT politics which in big company is a serious problem. Business Units can sidestep IT and go “self service” and spare a lot of pain and time in dealing with IT. I don’t think any serious manager going into the cloud is doing it for the savings. But of course this is a bank and technology is their future so it makes sense that they want to keep a tight loop on the cloud activities.
> “China is building its own internet focused on very different values, and is now exporting their vision of the internet to other countries. Until recently, the internet in almost every country outside China has been defined by American platforms with strong free expression values. There’s no guarantee these values will win out. A decade ago, almost all of the major internet platforms were American. Today, six of the top ten are Chinese.”

(Quoting Zuckerberg)

I’m pleasantly surprised to hear Zuckerberg articulate this thought. It’s something I’ve thought about a lot over the past decade or so. At one time it seemed investable that key American values like free speech would become universal. We thought our engagement with China and the Middle East would hasten adoption of our culture and values. That future is far from certain now. Americans need to think really hard about what kind of world they want their kids to grow up in.
Somehow members of the JavaScript and Ruby generations pick up Rust rather easily, while those who pride themselves on having learned to write robust C (or C++) are flummoxed by it.

Hypothesis: C is so pathologically bad that it breaks brains.
Both of your comments are excellent. Thanks for taking the time to write it all down.
Show HN: Layoffs.at – helping people laid off find work
> Amazon has a pack of 8 Duracell-brand AA batteries for half the price of the nearest supermarket.

Are you sure they're not counterfeit?
Here he is in February, before officially announcing his campaign. https://ask.peteforamerica.com/K6A-udFnfq4/2878

It's worth watching the entire answer, but the relevant quote is,
"In the case of Medicare for All, which is where I think we need to go, I think the way to do it, by the way, is to make some version of Medicare available on the exchanges as a sort of public option, invite people to buy into it, and if people like me are right -- if it's going to be better and more efficient -- then that's going to be a very quick pathway to Medicare for All, and if we're missing something, we'll find out the hard way and fix it."

I'm interested to see any information you have showing an inconsistency, as I've been following him since probably January and have only heard him talk about this approach and implementation.
I think he is actually referring to the Press (ie, the fourth state). I can't make sense of it any other way. It might just be an error.

If he means the Fourth State, then "unsurprising" would refer to a gate-keeper's desire to maintain their position. Ie, the Press has a lot of power because of their position in deciding what people get to hear. It is unsurprising that they would seek to preserve that power.
> This is why the slogan "Billionaires should not exist" is not without merit. A net worth of 100mil still means generational wealth. But once you're in the billions, the gap to all the other employees in your company becomes just crazy - but none of the billions would have been possible without their labor.

On the other hand, suppose you employ 30,000 people each with 10,000 in savings from working at your company. Without your initial labor to get everything set up and get the business going, none of their combined $300 million in assets would have been possible without your labor, so actually your net worth seems ever more justified.
The point is that they all struggle with the design of metaprogramming. Why are there 4+ different systems in OCaml as "addons" whereas in Lisp and Python it's integrated in the language?

It's exactly analogous to types being integrated in OCaml, Rust, etc. whereas in Python, JS, Ruby, and PHP static typing it's an "add-on".

Scala also has a newer system https://scalameta.org/

C++ has new dramatic new proposals 20+ years after templates, addressing really basic use cases:

https://herbsutter.com/2017/07/26/metaclasses-thoughts-on-ge...

The point is that no language has gotten it right so they keep introducing new systems and breaking old ones.

C++ templates also have the mistake where type checking is done after template expansion. That's why you get terrible error messages.

If you're not convinced, that's OK, but try watching the talk by Yaron Minsky here:

http://www.oilshell.org/blog/2016/12/05.html
Maybe I missed it but where did they get this info? Was it stolen from AWS?

As far as I know, Apple would never share cost data like this, nor would a lot of others on this list. Apple doesn’t even publicly acknowledge that they are customers.
Focusing on mathematics, I think about two kinds of foundational books.

1. Historically foundational: books that brought important ideas, introduced a new branch, progressed the maths significantly. You can read them these days, but their content, proofs, language, etc. is not up to date. Examples: Elements by Euclid, Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica by Newton, Disquisitiones Arithmeticae by Gauss.

2. Modern foundational books: The ones that can be used for studying now. Books that are clearly written, popular, cover their subject well. Examples: Visual Complex Analysis, Spivak’s Calculus, Linear Algebra Done Right, Hardy’s
An Introduction to the Theory of Numbers.
How many statisticians, psychologists, etc. does it take to re-create Ecclesiastes?

"I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all."
Bwahahahahahaha

Oh my god, that's funny. Especially since I've been posting anti-communist since, well, forever and even today. Good try there homie. Oh, that was funny. I actually laughed out loud.

And also that's fine. Ban me. But remember, when they silence everyone else, there's no one left to speak up for you.
Okay, but this is a strawman, because a basic tenet of libertarianism is that a government is necessary to forcefully (if necessary) prevent others from trampling on your individual rights. You are describing anarchy, not libertarianism.
[screaming Greta Thunberg in distance]
That's correct, and also not the concern.
That doesn't explain the cat an mouse game. DRM schemes are constantly updated to fix issues so that previous hacks no longer work. Occasionally, the industry invests big money into sweeping changes.

If what you're saying is true, you'd expect the minimum reasonable measures to suffice. No need to invest in new methods. Yet they do. I'm sure lots of people would be interested in "perfect", if you had that product to give them; you could be a millionaire, the problem is that it's impossible, as far as we know.
Skip the spider. Big table. Borg. "Merchant malfeasance analysis" is simple. Amazon is the merchant. The other view is bullshit. Well promoted bullshit. But bullshit nevertheless.
I haven't looked over the whole site, but I find it curious that this wasn't mentioned here (or possibly there):

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

Because it seems this is yet (another) iteration or attempt on the device Bush described?

Really, hypertext, HTML, the web, browsers, etc - are all a part of such a system, but what is needed to really complete the loop - so to speak - is for everything to be P2P - so anyone can easily create and share information (hypertext "documents" - whatever a "document" may be) and share contextual annotations (highlights and notes) on those pages, with maybe some manner to incorporate them into the main "text" as needed when they become too cumbersome outside the main text, along with easy P2P indexing and searching of the collective corpus of "works".

But this is completely at odds with how the current "web ecosystem" works, and certainly doesn't appear to be how this particular incarnation works (this seems to be a siloed system, if anything). Today's system takes control away from the users for the most part, unless they pay extra (ie - to create and maintain a server or whatnot for their own personal content - or not pay, but pay by giving away other information that the company giving them "free hosting" or whatnot can use). A complete P2P system would upend that model, assuming it could be made to work well (the asymmetry of the broadband infrastructure for consumers doesn't help, either).

I know there are more than a few P2P competitors out there that do much of what I am speaking of, but I don't think any of them do the complete "Bush Memex" system. Then again, maybe that's a good thing - otherwise we might end up with an unholy combo of wikipedia coupled with 4/8chan with a dab of reddit or something like that...?
Was this even advertised anywhere? I didn't even know it existed.
Wait, so a -30 dBm signal (pretty strong) will induce something like 7mV across a 5 cm antenna. Your cell nuclear is up to 10 microns wide. That's 1.4 microvolts. I'm having a really hard time believing that a 1.4 uV potential across any molecule at STP can have a measurable effect without a lot of energy going into amplifying the signal.
Congratulations, you’re now spending more on barebones servers than a colo and you’re still spending just as much on managing resources - now you have the worse of both worlds.