skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It depends on the customer. If you're an Office 365 customer who is a major enterprise with huge numbers of paid users, and your CIO goes golfing with Microsoft board members, you have a huge amount of power. Similarly, if you are an MIT Professor you have vast amounts of power.

They can be pile driving right next to the machine room, and causing disk drive errors, and Physical Plant won't care if the I/T folks complain. But if some Sloan School professors complained that it was disturbing their cogitations, it immediately stopped and Phys. Plant called a "stakeholder meeting" and it was really obvious who had the power.

All customers are equal, but some customers are more equal than others.
Thank you. Exactly.

A world of seven billion people, many opportunities for genius.

I have been surprised that non-English programming languages have not become even more common.

In my father's time, a university student of engineering or chemistry was strongly encouraged to learn basic German, in order to keep up with the state of art as published in leading professional journals.

Maths students would still do well to learn to read Russian.

English need not be forever.
Will.i.am's AI Startup hasn't paid staff in 7 weeks
From a user's perspective, there are signs it's getting better. The most noticeable is that applications that were unloved for years, those low-priority no-group-wants-to-own-them ones like the terminal and Notepad, are finally getting attention. It feels like in the past development was much more design-by-committee with little room for anyone to actually fix broken or substandard things.

The biggest problem seems to be that there is insufficient pushback against bloat. E.g., the calculator is 10MB and takes a quarter second to load on a very fast PC. Lots of little things like that. The whole push for the a new, separate mobile/tablet/Metro environment was a major mistake. It's left a schism between the extant and greenfield worlds. This is exemplified by the disaster of what are effectively _two_ control panels, each of which can only control half of the OS's settings.
Yep, I had an iMac stolen recently.

Guess what I bought with the insurance money:

A PC laptop.
Pitch it to SoftBank
We actually have users contact our help desk asking for the receipt not realizing it's already in their inbox or spam folder.

I've considered adding an opt-out checkbox during checkout but I honestly doubt it would ever be unchecked and if it was opt-in we'd have users contacting support asking for it because they didn't realize they had to check the box. Either way it's one more toggle on the UI which I'm not a fan of unless absolutely necessary.

I'm curious if you've run a business and experimented with not sending receipts, and if so how it played out?
Having fallen into that thinking, at some point a few years back I realized that I was selling myself short by thinking that I should behave "like a normal user". And now I combat it with a secondary mindset of training some actions into muscle memory, as if I were learning martial arts techniques.

With a lot of hardware-only workflows, muscle memory training happens by default, which also means that they "get away with" really poor UX ideas at times. With software you can have some mixture of defaults/presets and technique. It's not worthwhile to try to customize all of it(good defaults are precious, early-binding forms are valuable) and technique usually suffices for covering the remainder. But technique is less discoverable than a settings menu, as well, and swipe-and-tap techniques are extremely so since they operate on many dimensions. Compare the new iOS gestures to chorded keystrokes - once you know that chording exists, you can learn any new one given some time.
You have to have 4 years of accredited experience working under an already-certified professional engineer. This experience get audited, and references get called to confirm the types of experience and whether it is adequate. The auditor is free to say "this two month period and that six month period were not adequate experience. You have to get 8 more months experience before you can qualify." It's not the exam alone, but rather the combination of multiple factors: required education, required experience, examinations, and ongoing professional training (required to do several dozen hours per year of certified professional training to stay current).
As tech gets more and more advanced and we get higher and higher levels of abstraction, I've noticed more and more programmers just don't understand _what_ their code is doing. There can be a lack of understanding of how calls translate to system calls and machine instruction. The abstraction is good, it allows you to do more and do it quickly. But when you don't understand what the abstraction is, then you are programming by coincidence and errors are more confusing than they should be.
I agree with this. Swears and cursing are an efficient and motivating way to communicate orders of magnitudes.

Curious, what was the attitude like on the early Band team? I absolutely loved it, and was active on the beta, but didn't have a front-row seat to the early development.
My guess is the ultimate end game is to get the state to pass a law shielding them from liability if they do start another. "Shield us from liability and we will stop the blackouts."
Press (Stork) to save!
The only reason I go to IKEA is for their Swedish Meatballs, not for their Kindergarten themed furniture. Good luck being meat free and depriving your customers of vitamin B12
At some point, a massive annoyance asymptotically approaches physical impossibility.
Does anyone have a nice resource they recommend on what BERT does? I've gathered it was trained by trying to predict missing words in a sentence, but I don't have an intuition on how this is useful for downstream prediction (like, say, learning a word embedding is).
Explanation from PG&E: https://www.pgecurrents.com/2019/10/25/forecasts-indicate-po...
Honestly, I hope this leads to the state having cause to take it over with no cost. Stakeholders need to bear the burden of the organizations abysmal record.
If we're feeling positive about the world, since it's Friday:

Google wants to help the world by reducing our reliance on farming animals for meat, and thought that research like this would help humanity's nascent artificial meat endeavours.
>Are ranchers going to stop selling beef

It will prohibitively expensive to raise and slaughter cattle if carbon taxes/cap-and-trade go into effect.

Personally I've completely cut most meat out of my diet and it's made my life a lot healthier. No particular moral reason and I'm not vegetarian, but I could see that kind of change happening throughout society as meat becomes more expensive.
Oracle / IBM had an existing working payroll system to copy. All they had to do was reimplement it in modern hardware and software. Some government employee in Miramichi might not have been happy because oracle didn’t listen to what they thought they wanted but if the contract has been to deliver a system that produced the exact same output as the old one oracle/ibm would have no excuse for not having a successful project.

It is astounding nobody was fired for this.
PG&E: don't sue us or we will turn off power for you.
>'“As part of our commitment to supporting our customers to live healthier and more sustainable lives, we have decided to launch our first-ever ‘Meat-Free Christmas’ in our restaurants,”'

So a company that was predicated on planned obsolescence, that has littered the planet with disposable flat pack furniture is now going to support "sustainability" by getting rid of meatballs at its fast food lunch counter. Got it.
The legal complexity of all the equity structures possible seems way too daunting anyway.

Passionate young programmers who want to work for a startup don't have the background to understand it, even if the raw information is given when signing up.

Plus, you have no idea what the next round of funding will do to the equity structure...

Isn't it time for regulation to limit this complexity?
In their defense, it is on Medium...
To make domestic products price competitive with sweatshop products
I think it auto saves only for Office 365 or SharePoint based documents. It definitely doesn't auto save my documents when they are local or on a network share.
All my passwords are conveniently stored in the constant Pi
>all social, cultural, religious values are being discarded altogether or are being completely redefined.

I disagree. We're just more aware of each others' values.
What about the Deepin desktop? I haven't tried it but many magazine sites say it's now the most polished. I'm fairly happy with i3, until I need to plug in additional screens...
Yngwie Malmsteen's "As Above, So Below" sings "I will never die, 'cos I will fly to the other side."

The Scorpion's song "We'll Burn The Sky" seems to have similar sentiments. It was written by Jimi Hendrix' girlfriend after his death. It doesn't really deny death, but sees it as a way to be back together with the deceased, in a way that resembles life.

The more I think of it, the more songs along these lines come to mind.
This is going to happen more and more often. Companies chased jazzy valuations, they made crazy deals, and now values are starting to drop (and stuff like liquidation preferences come into play).

I know of a company that was sold for $1bn+ and common equity got almost zero. It happens, it is a very silly thing to angry about though (because the valuation was never $1bn+).
That's literally the only reason I would ever make the trek to go to the store.
Is Cross-Laminated Timber (CLT) the Concrete of the Future?
You can grab the scrollbar in iOS 13. Not sure how recent that feature is because I don’t really miss being able to do it on mobile so I don’t bother trying. Which of course is not to say it’s a bad feature to have there.
There's no comparison in the degree, but Manning, Assange, and Snowden are perhaps recent examples of radical who argued that individuals should be able to read the raw source text used to justify the structure of society (not to mention wars in the M.E.).
The verification of entire proof libraries (like the entire Coq standard library, or the Isabelle Archive of Formal proofs) usually ranges from hours to days, as do some of the larger computer science projects like seL4 and CakeML.

You are right, verification is much faster than coming up with proofs, and that explains the majority of the disparity. But then why are we reinventing proofs so much? This is clearly needless work, and there are a thousand ways to solve the problem but even recognizing that it is a problem is difficult in certain circles.
A single vegetarian meal will deplete B12 levels? What if someone skips a meal, will they die?
Not sure why you're being down voted it's a serious problem. Probably because half of Hacker News are Indians
It's funny because a fair amount of vegan-based products (specifically meat substitutes) contain wheat and gluten, which I can't eat because of a physical disability. While there has been much more acceptance, etc. in recent years, and the amount of things I can eat has gone up, it's still frustrating to see vegans and vegetarians -- something that is for many people a dietary choice -- being catered to before people with physical disabilities.

Vaguely related, I'm not really won-over that everyone cutting meat out of their diet would have a considerable effect on the environment. The overwhelming majority of deforestation is done for crops, not pasture. And off the top of my head the most the majority people contribute to climate change is about 10%. So, sure, everyone stops using cars, and eating meat, etc. ad nauseum, that still leaves governments giving billions in subsidies to the coal and oil industries, etc.

It's a nice gesture, but that's all I'm seeing happening lately. Everyone's making gestures to climate change, but there has been no inter-governmental effort to actually charge, prosecute, and put to use the assets of the people who are responsible for covering up climate change for over forty years. I fear by the time it happens millions will have lost their lives in climate-related disasters.
Glory to Arstotzka
Very funny.

You are aware, are you not, that there is 3x as much sea floor as land?

And raising the sea level would take more air than has ever been breathed by the entire taxon of primates. You would never store more air than needed for a day or two of power generation.
Excellent Bradbury reference.
But the opposite direction does not hold. More expensive products are not necessary more ethically. Often the cheap and expensive products are made by the same workers and just sold under different brands.

So the customers cannot know which products are ethically or not.

They would need to vet the entire supply chain of every product. That is a full time job just to check one product
Yes this is a kind of newspeak. This is not about supporting, it is about making choices on their customers' behalf.

I am thinking of the parent/child relationship, parents knows what is good for their children so they don't need to ask. Except, in some cases some parents actually don't know. IKEA is treating their customers like children here.
>Wow. What a horrorshow.

You viddy, it was a very, very horrorshow machine, for it made all those vecks ittying across the border go bezoomny trying to figure out what litso to make to keep the machine like happy.

It was, oh my brothers, on purpose, as to make these vecks to not want to try do that again. The bratchnies at the top must have loved it. [1]

[1]https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:A_Clockwork_Orange
It's one of the more resource-intensive foodstuffs there is; if the planet keeps getting more crowded at the current pace then I wouldn't be surprised if it's not long before people forced to shift toward less expensive food sources by basic economic forces.

Alternatively, vat meat takes over.
It’s so convenient when a single decision can:

1. Save the company money.

2. Virtue signal how woke the company is.
Dude, you are probably releasing trade secrets ;-)
The same applies now to their success. Satya is executing Ballmer's One Microsoft plan. He absolutely deserves credit for some of the reorg he initiated before he stepped away. Combining Office 365, Active Directory, Intune, and Windows 10 Enterprise into a single Microsoft 365 bundle is the icing on that holistic product line effort.

https://www.theverge.com/2013/7/11/4514160/steve-ballmers-re...

Also of interest in that memo is Amy Hood being put in charge of the Finance Group (truthfully she had already been CFO a couple months when the One Microsoft memo came out), which Satya appears to be getting credit for in the original article. She was appointed CFO a year before Nadella became CEO.
In what universe is an employee getting preferred? Or do you mean, be an investor instead of an employee?
No nuance and inconvenient truths allowed.

https://hbr.org/2018/03/women-experience-more-incivility-at-...

https://twitter.com/sehurlburt/status/1078514449432997888

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queen_bee_syndrome
I guess Franco isn’t dead, after all.
Yea, personally I would prefer google to have predictable results so I can fine tune my search. When I put something in quotes now they can still expand it by synonyms.

But my mom doesn’t type keyword searches like I do, she types out sentence/phrase questions. Maybe the average user benefits from this stuff?
You seem to be doing it wrong. You should try to find an organic problem that you can’t find a good solution for, than solve that problem.
This seems like a huge excuse for not wanting to learn. Things will continue to change, and either you can learn or be left behind.
Anyone know how much money they save by shutting off power for a large majority of their customers?
Ask HN: How was your bootstrapping experience for your SaaS business?
Hi everyone, long time HN user and a big fan of the community feel here, sorry for the throwaway account.

I have developed a product with some initial user traction, still not charging my customers tho, since I prioritized a few rounds of product iteration, rather than incorporation, payment integration and paperwork. I would love to hear your experiences and advice on the non-product side of bootstrapping your SaaS business.

P.S: I am a "one-man team", dual citizen (one EU and one non-EU) and a resident in a third country (Brexit land) and my target audience is mostly US. Just to give you a hint about my situation.

On a side note, I wish there was a SaaS business to take your product as a black box and SaaSify it fr you (of course keeping you liable for your operations). I know Atlas is kinda like that, but still sounds too much hassle to me.

Thanks in advance for your support
Find some other pretext to commit literal highway robbery? Plant drugs, charge victims court "user fees", etc.

They might have a moral leg to stand on if they actually had build the road themselves, rather than just grifting an existing interstate.

Reading the article, my alarm bells went off as soon as they bragged of parking a broken cruiser on the highway, as if that is a worthwhile endeavor for small government. There seems to be some unfortunate corollary whereby pushes for freedom end up attracting the worst types of authoritarians seeking a blank slate for their own rules.
Apple Releases Catalina 10.15 Supplemental Update, Fixes Installation Problems
It's a fantasy that people are talking themselves into somehow. I don't see it.

If nothing else, I'm going to have to maintain or accelerate my consumption of venison, because the white tail population is spiking up.
They already have veggie balls that are pretty tasty. I pick up a frozen bag of them when I go.
I am free to not like it but when I say why I don't like it I'm gatekeeping?
It's fine to want preferred stock, but it's pretty rare for employees to ever receive it (unless they put up cash) -- it's reserved for investors to avoid a sandbagging + abscond with the money raised scenario.
I have a love hate relationship with how R studio deals with hidden state in notebooks. If you want to export an .rmd file to pdf, you have to run the whole notebook from start to finish in order, sorta proving that the thing is reproducible before export (maybe there is some technical reason as well)

It's nice know that your report actually worked, and is not showing something odd because of a hidden state, but sometimes you just want to print the darn thing now!
So you never eat out, ride a cab/rideshare, drink coffee or alcohol while out, cut your hair, etc?

I find that hard to believe.
It's not controversial that factories can't just pollute rivers with harmful chemicals, and that raises prices of goods. But apply that to the air and suddenly its a conspiracy to alter humanity.
Ask HN: Charity Counseling – non-profits that outsource educational counseling?
I was wondering if there are any startups/ non profits that help in counseling for education and career choices for socially or culturally disadvantaged folks?
Giant Leap
Separating all of that into components, each with its own interface, would be more elegant... but I don't think it would solve the complexity problem so much as decentralize and standardize it. A modern browser still needs all of that functionality, regardless of where it comes from, at least for most users.

It also potentially creates a similar problem to DLL hell in Windows, where updating or changing a component potentially breaks dependent software, or multiple versions of the same component need to be kept around. And then there's the "n+1 standard" problem, where everyone doesn't actually agree on what the "standardized" interfaces should be.

The real problem, to me, is that the FOSS model of every user being a programmer fundamentally breaks down when software reaches nontrivial complexity (wherever you choose to set that bar.) You could substitute the browser as the subject of your first sentence with just about any software people use - most of it is too complex for the average person to fully reason about, much less the average programmer.

I don't know how to solve that, other than require all software to be simple enough to fit in a single file and run in a REPL but that's obviously not feasible.
Ez: https://news.mit.edu/2011/trillion-fps-camera-1213

Or most of the rest of the stuff from that group: http://cameraculture.media.mit.edu/research/
Weed is something that often makes me acutely aware of my mortality, and to an extent that is quite uncomfortable. I remember once in college, soon after my grandpa died, doing some edibles and kind of freaking out ruminating about the inescapability of mortality.

However, I think this strong gut feeling of finiteness is something that you can use to cultivate gratefulness and empathy. I attribute my staunch environmentalism and sometimes-dim view of human nature to this. We as humans love to congratulate ourselves on our cleverness and 'elevated' position in the world, yet we are singularly incapable of escaping suffering and death.

Often, when confronted with an instance of someone's hubris I wish I could say to them: "You know you're going to die, right? No really, you will die."
A number of years ago I read a book about the invention of the Segway (https://www.amazon.com/s?k=1578516730) and apparently Dean Kamen used a "south-pointing chariot" as a metaphor for a really cool hack that is subsequently made unnecessary by a superior technology.

The point being that it's very easy to get attached to your really cool hack but it's often best to just let it go once a better solution comes along.
Some companies tend to "promise" that. Then of course "rescind the offer".
This is why, for me, VC money is a last resort and an admission of defeat of sorts. If my business cannot be a business, i.e., an entity that earn's it's keep and makes profit, then maybe it's not meant to be. VC money might prolong it's life, but at that point, they are the real owners of this "entity".
I'm not talking about aesthetics. I'm very nearsighted, and when I take my glasses off I can definitely read the white text from a further distance than the black text. But I know there are different types of vision issues, and I don't question that the black text may work better for some. I would just question an algorithm that claims that the black text is better in general than the white.
CoinTracker (YC W18) is hiring senior engineers to fix the financial system
Many of the crops are grown to feed to animals which will then be used for meat. A lot fewer crops would be needed if people didn't eat meat.
This is really impressive: "It’s fascinating turnaround for the nation, which just 10 years ago had a very small startup ecosystem. In a recent interview with TechCrunch, Paytm founder and CEO Vijay Shekhar Sharma recounted the early days of One97, the parent firm of Paytm, and how difficult it was for him to raise a few hundred thousand dollars."
The most important is text size. Bigger text is easier to read. Make sure the user can resize the text. eg. no text inside bitmap images. You will probably hate me, but leave the text color and background to the default eg. don't set it. Let the user set it. Ok, so now you basically got black text on white background. But you can still play with spacing! And you can play with text size. So instead of using contrast, use text size and spacing!
Probably because most readers just tune out after the first sentence. Every HN article about the Indian space program or any other high-tech achievement is always accompanied by hand wringing about why a poor country is putting money into this instead of building toilets, curing polio, etc etc.
The more people vote the more likely Republicans are to lose.

They'd then need to adjust their policies to share some of the money with the rest of the country to win back those voters. Fascism is much cheaper.

I realise people will think this is intentionally inflammatory, bit it's the most direct answer to the question you posed.