skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's technically easy to do. You hire a roomful of people to vet advertising, similar to how every media company did it until 2010 or so. It's financially challenging, but that's the price of admission to the grownup table. That they're hugely profitable right now[1] so I frankly couldn't care less if they had to spend some of that to become legitimately good at what they claim they want to be good at.

I mean, suppose they offered a 100% automated health clinic that misdiagnosed and killed 10% of the patients: "We'd like to hire actual doctors, but that would cost more than we'd wanted to spend, so there's literally nothing we can do to fix this problem. Sorry!" That wouldn't fly. Well, neither does this. Facebook today absolutely sucks at advertising. They're good at the cashing the checks part of the process, but horrendous at the actual implementation.

[1] 27.26% margin, according to https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/FB/facebook/profit...
How would it be technically challenging to sell the internet equivalent of campaign buttons? Limit their advertising capabilities to something as simple as that, I like that idea.
I'm having trouble reconciling your numbers here. You've been operating for 8 years, but your revenue is only $1M and you've been investing half of that into your tech stack every year, so your operating budget for core business operations is $500k or less? That's like... two and a half developers. I'm guessing you're not US-based with those kind of numbers, but even so, at a glance, I wouldn't invest in you as a VC, either. From the numbers, you've built a lifestyle business.
Meh. We just limit mindless apps.

Seeing eight kids organize a playdate via text message and then do some collaborative building with redstone circuitry in Minecraft is pretty impressive to watch, and makes me strongly feel there's more to the debate than just "screens vs. non-screens".
I think they've always been there. They've just been quiet about it, because they've been relatively isolated. The internet has allowed them to find each other, form stronger communities, and coordinate their actions (of which upvote/downvote brigades on sites like this one are the least of our worries BTW), making the whole much more potent than the sum of its parts. As I said, this same ease of communication is wonderful when it's all in a good cause, but it can also be used in a bad one.
Couldn't they write proprietary software with an API, then modify (under GPL) the Kernel to call that API?

Their modified kernel with API calls is GPL while they keep their trade secrets... Am I correct?
If FB starts fact-checking political ads, that to me would be one step closer to Facebook being a 'publisher' rather a 'platform', which would open Facebook up to a world of litigation when something nefarious or disagreeable slips through the cracks to the public. And of course, after political ads, what's next? Should they limit certain dietary advice if the purported results are not sufficiently substantiated?

Another question would be - how are the 'lies' to be limited? Are the posts hidden, or marked with a "fake news" indicator? What if 80% of the content in an ad is true but the other 20% is unsubstantiated? Does that get tagged as well? "Partial fake news"? If Facebook implemented something like this, would they be open and transparent about how their site goes about verifying claims in ads so that the users can go straight to the source(s)?

With all of Facebook's missteps and mistakes in the past, who really wants them to be the arbiter of truth? Would people even trust them to be the arbiter of truth? Or would Facebook's efforts to mitigate or limit certain ads embolden the political side represented by that ad? (Not to generalize, but there are certainly some out there who are immediately dismissive of claims of truth when they come from Fox News/CNN, depending on their political persuasion).

It would seem more logical to me for Facebook to fund and coordinate some kind of 'awareness' campaign on the site in which it guides its users as to the level of skepticism to maintain when seeing political ads and how to go about verifying the veracity of claims in political ads they might see.
I’ve worked with and volunteered with an org who among other things got smart phones to our local homeless.

Yes, it does help quite a bit. It’s a $50-100 setup and even without data they can go to any million places with free WiFi and get emails, call job listings, keep in touch with family members. It’s a pretty big deal to them.
Might as well ask Zuck to hsve FB observe “business hours”. No service between 11PM and 5AM local times to protect users from over use and engagement. Set a limit on ads per hour per user. I’m sure he’ll see why they are great ideas.
Mailgo v0.8.0
Have you ever carried an application using Django, or Twisted, or Zope, through this process? It is not easy. Many different libraries with various incompatibilities and versions can lead to real difficulties merely in upgrading for security releases. Additionally, unless one is containerized, one must contend with the underlying platform's issues, as the platform must also switch from Python 2 to Python 3.

I understand your opinion: It is the party line. But it doesn't actually help much when the process as described will take years and people only have months, and this is further worsened by the fact that PSF did not have to deprecate the entire Python 2 ecosystem in order to stop supporting CPython 2.7.
R for Data Science is great: https://r4ds.had.co.nz/
What do you say about neural networks with thousands of parameters?
A C compiler, which Python needs, is arguably as complex as either a Python or Java runtime.
If you turn on a blowtorch in space, does it need some sort of kylo-ren double-action torch to keep it in place? I guess it won't move if it's anchored to something, but that something will still move as the force is unbalanced?
> It's not just SV. Power dynamics within orgs have changed and are changing.

I mean, good luck doing that at Oracle or IBM for instance.

> You can't have power over someone 2 levels down if their network is as influential as your own.

Yes you absolutely can. If the employee refuses to cooperate it's called insubordination and it's ground for firing. Now of course the employee can spin it anyway he wants and use his network of influence to make the employer look bad, but it has limits.
People seem to forget that words can have multiple meanings and those meanings can shift. You can still use the abbreviation "pro" to refer to professionals - a pro tennis player, for example. At the same time, "pro" has been used as an adjective meaning "very good" for a long time, and not just for tech systems, but for people as well (eg, "they're very good, they're a pro").
I've been using the internet to learn a language for a month now, and have had far more success then I had in multiple years of high school language classes.

Between tools that provide Spaced Repetition learning, to websites that are basically textbooks, to youtube videos both meant to teach and others that are native media, and finally people who curate all these materials, this is way better.
Prolog gives you backtracking for free and liberates you from loops and if's.
I agree with you wholeheartedly. My expectation based on the domain was perhaps there were performance regressions still being worked out in Python 3.8 that would be revealed, but in fact performance isn't even mentioned.
Facebook and Google expressly asked to be exempt from FEC regulation of political adverts in the 2016 election[1]. That would have been a matter of making sure adverts had disclaimers attached; every other advertiser does this from big newspapers and TV channels to little local outfits. It's not technically hard.

This is entirely about the fact Facebook and Google make a ton of money from running political ads, so they want to run them even if they might harm the democratic process.

[1] https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2019-06/vt-hfa062419...
> Ghidra's UI is better than IDA's at: defining structures, for example

IDA 7.4 introduced a new structure editor, arguably better Ghidra's. [1]

[1]: https://hex-rays.com/products/ida/7.4/index.shtml
It's :help
ML Sales Use Cases
No paywall/email

https://go.squarkai.com/14-Ways-to-Drive-Sales-Performance-Using-AutoML
I mean, if a "living wage" means that you're not able to provide a net value for your employer, or at least that other options like investing in automation is substantially more profitable for them, it just doesn't work out. Why would you "deserve" for someone to pay you more than what your labor is worth? They just won't hire you then.

I agree that everyone _does_ deserve to live a dignified life and afford all their basic needs, no matter where they work. I'm not sure that the solution is to force employers to pay more than what they get out of you. I don't think I've ever heard of a solution that's entirely convinced me (it seems to me to be a very hard problem), but I'm leaning towards an UBI.
Transformation in plants in not and never was a bottleneck. This research is headline grabbing by pointless.

It is regulation that slows progress in plant science.
Depth Sensor Inspired by Jumping Spiders
I don't know what the difference is between this and the back-in-the-day children reading too much in fantasy novels and comic books...
I can't see why you are getting down-voted - I see people do this kind of post-factum 'reasoning backwards' all the time, and it's all make-believe.

If these theories had real predictive power, they would allow you to make a killing on the stock market.
The conventional wisdom in Silicon Valley is that you want employees who are willing to think about and talk about what the company should do. Sometimes that means conversations management would prefer not to have, but conversations aren’t that expensive.
Creating jobs isn't good by itself if the work being done is to a bad end. Despite how much promise the internet has for free information, lots of people have been paid to pollute it with garbage that is the opposite of helpful. Or to spy on people so that knowledge can be used against them. The internet is a great thing technology wise, but it has enabled bad actors as much as enabling humble and well intentioned people.
Of all the build systems I've used, Bazel/Blaze has sucked the least.
iTerm on MacOS also supports sending key presses to multiple panes simultaneously.
Each of us must live with our own conscience.

If one Dehomag worker had engaged in "activism" to stop their collusion in the Holocaust, she'd have disgruntled 5,000 "silent" Nazis.

The fact is, Facebook's algorithms mediate our cultural superstructure. They either do so publicly, and explicitly, or privately–and then we're subject either to their whims, or an unknowable, unpredictable black box.

One cannot disappear the room by covering one's eyes.[1]

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10970937
> coolproject('prolog-notebooks').

yes
I think so, this is what Google does with Android, but IANAL.

But it seems the company hasn't been doing that, so even if they make the change now, their old code is still in violation of the GPL, and anyone they distributed it to has the right to request it.
Firefox uses native IMEs. Most of the time they aren't broken in obvious ways. To the extent they are broken in non-obvious ways, it's unhelpful not to say how on the level that would allow the problem to be reproduced.

Firefox can't just use native text edit controls. First, Firefox needs to support contenteditable, which doesn't map to an OS-supplied text box. Second, the multiprocess architecture leads to a situation where the UI process talks to the native IME API but the Web content process hosts the text being edited, so native text boxes don't work even for things that look similar to OS-supplied text boxes.
In summary, the internet initially reflected the values of its socially conscientious creators, but as the community diversified it was used for business (making money, marketing, spam), it suffered cyber attacks, nations are balkanizing regions of it with censorship firewalls, and businesses are exploiting our privacy. Users need to spend more time reviewing privacy agreements. Scientists need to work harder on encryption.

Simply the internet has always reflected the segment of society that used it. Now that everyone uses it it reflects society at large. So I don’t think this is an internet problem, but rather an opportunity to see the worlds social problems being translated into a more transparent codified form. I reject the author’s two solutions as being low effort addendums. Let us acknowledge we are not seeing new problems, but rather we are seeing old problems with a new lens.
They removed humans from the loop. "Wargames" and "The Terminator" showed possible outcomes from that, and the real world effect is just as scary but in different ways.
People often state advice in rather extreme terms, then are surprised when people interpret them in a way that matches the meaning of their words. This seems like one instance of that.
As an aside, "be second" isn't bad, either. There was an article about European businesses copying successful American startups. Why innovate when you can profit/learn from others' ideas?
I like this line of thinking too, but there should be a line drawn somewhere between consumer's responsibility and law maker's responsibility to hold corporations accountable for their environmental impact. It is not a single person at home dumping pollution into a river or factory smoke into the air. And it's downright difficult for an average consumer to know what impact each option for a purchase has on the environment.
That's my theory on why Theranos failed.

People talk about Silicon Valley like co-founders are using raw genius to solve impossible problems. But the reason untrained twenty year olds can run startups is the problems they're solving ultimately aren't that hard. Building a web application is something people in offices do every day.

Now, once those web applications start scaling up and your core product fundamentally works there are certainly hard problems to be solved, but at that point you can start hiring adults, PhDs and people with deep technical expertise.

Theranos got into such hot water because you can't just jazz-hands your way out of solving deep scientific problems, like you can cover up the fact that your web application barely works (but will totally work in three months).
Ask HN: Who want to be my co-founder and build a fintech company in Africa?
Hi Everyone,

I'm looking for cofounders, one to three people depending on their expertise area and willingless to be a part of a team that will change the transaction/banking landscape in Africa.

I've an Investment Banking/Energy background but I know a lot of stuff in the tech space. By a lot, I mean that I'm able build a baremetal kubernetes cluster (yes i said kubernetes!) and deploy a high available system over Istio with a kafka bus to multiple clustered database. I code in python, java and php5 but I have to admit that my current career I haven't seriously code since a few years and maybe rusty...

My breakthrough idea is a Core Transaction Operating System that allow businesses to build anything from banks to payments systems through api blocks. SolarisBank (a European Fintech) has a similar design but isn't toward Africa; Because of the regulatory constraints designing from inception to be africa-compatible.
The market goes from SME businesses to Microfinance Instutions and Small to Medium banks in africa. We can reach millions of people through regular banking and mobile banking...
Add AI and the possibilities are limitless!

Now I want to move from idea (and small blocks tests) to MVP which I expect to be feasible in one year. I relocated in Africa last year to "sense/feel" the field and be sure of the needs (and market fit). I worked in parallel to sustain my living expenses but now I would like to go full time on this with a few cofounders (that are okay to relocate) and find some seed/love money to finance the MVP stage. The gross estimate for this stage is 200 000 USD for one year, including cofounders living expenses locally and hiring one or two additional local developers to speed up the job in a few months. We can also be based in Paris but being local is very important for african startups because of the specific environment.

So if you have any interest for the project, or simply want to discuss it, please left your comments :)
19Q2 63 millions desktop/laptop PCs

19Q2 13 millions iPads

People have just no idea what they talk about, iPad + AR = your best bet in the future, there is one more equipment that'll rise, but i'll keep that for myself, for obvious reasons :p
Bay Area Uniqlos Are Sold Out of Elizabeth Holmes Costumes
China's "Great Leap Forward" starved 30 million people to death. So yeah a planned economy "can serve people better", if it doesn't kill them first...
The often-repeated trope, touted as an achievement of capitalism, relies on defining "not poor" as earning 2$ PPP per day, or 60 bucks a month, or 700$ = 0.7k per year.

Not to mention, ignoring any other measures of quality of life or progress besides raw dollars. It's judging capitalism via a metric internal to capitalism. Pure circular reasoning. E.g. subsistence farmers in rural areas made 0$ and were "poor" by that metric, now they work 14h a day at factories for 2$ a day and are "not in poverty" anymore. Congratulatory handshakes all around!
For you youngsters just tuning in, welcome! Today we are going to learn how marketers misuse terms to sell you shit. For folks my age, it was words like “space age” and “turbo”. The very first episode of the original Battlestar Galactica had the character Starbuck using the “turbos” in his spacecraft. Those unaware might not know that turbines compress air, which outer space is sorely lacking. But it sounds cool, huh?

Today your generation has to deal with abuse of “pro”. Same shit, different generation. Difference is, back in my day we shrugged it off as salespeople doing what salespeople do, went on about our day. Now we can write indignant blog posts, but frankly I don’t know that it’s worth getting that worked up about it.
Isn't that the situation Uber is in. They surely seem to be doing fine.
I’m going to build a prototype. DM if interested.
> by the time C was released, there were already literally dozens of programming languages

Hundreds, actually, I was there, but writing a compiler in COBOL or an OS kernel in FORTRAN would have been quite an exercise. For those kinds of domains, there were few alternatives and assembler was still a common choice. C was certainly an improvement on that.
There appears to be an AMD microcode update [1] in the kernel's linux-firmware repo as recently as 1 week ago, so I don't think this is true? And it's an update for "processor family 17h", which is Zen/Zen2, so it's not like this is only for old CPUs.

[1] https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/firmware/lin...
I really appreciate this insight. It's comforting to be reminded that no one cares how something works as long as it works.
> Get out there, hit the streets, knock on doors, and get the law changed.

Isn't that exactly what these employees did? They organized and are trying to get the internal law (aka company policy) changed.
It's actually very easy to make websites and apps now IMO, never worrying about hosting and network intrusion and things like that, but you sell out to the centralized, pervasively monitored model of the web in doing so.
There's a reasonably unambiguous way to measure how "opinionated" a language is, which is to look at the size of its runtime necessary to run programs in that language [1]. C's is not huge, but it is necessary and non-zero. By contrast, many other languages have huge runtimes.

There are some languages that can get smaller than C. Assembler, obviously, is basically the smallest. Rust does have a default runtime, but it's thin, and most of the rest of it can be shut off. Still, it's not a long list of languages that are less opinionated than C.

[1]: If you want to get really technical, this is "relative to the hardware it is running on". C gets a bit of a bonus here because the hardware has over the decades actively targeted C. Particularly visible in the processor's support for calling conventions, and manipulating a "stack" so natively. (While a stack is really, really convenient, it is not, strictly speaking, necessary for programs to be structured that way.) But for the sake of simplicity I'll ignore that for now.
This is not any help to you now, but Catalina was released early in October and it's still October. Why did you and your remote workers upgrade to Catalina so soon? I always wait at least 3 months for the bugs to shake out for a major release of macOS, and about a month or so for iOS releases. Even with patch releases, I'll wait a few weeks regardless of the platform. There's a risk to not upgrading security patches, but there's also a risk to upgrading via any patch. Best to find that middle ground to reduce the overall risk, especially if you depend on the software in question.

Never upgrade your infrastructure or critical devices to a new major release of any vendor's operating system, or an application's major release, until some time after those releases have had time to be experienced by others, and any major issues resolved.

I've not upgraded to Catalina, obviously -- I'm in the process of, over the next few weeks or months, finding and upgrading any 32-bit s/w that now must be 64-bit to work. Until I've validated that, and the bugs have been worked out, I will wait to upgrade.

As for prior comments about using open source or other options, well, I don't see that there aren't issues there as well. I delay upgrades Linux, FreeBSD and even OpenBSD versions until any major issues have been worked out for the same reasons.

Ultimately, there are no safe ways or safe operating systems or safe applications that you can count on not failing after a major version upgrade. Windows releases may be less buggy for a while, but maintaining Windows and using Windows is more of a hassle for me that I'd be trading illusory stability for extra work on an ongoing basis using and managing that OS. I love open source, but there are issues there in usability, interoperability, availability of apps and so on -- configuring a desktop manager, etc. I love open source, always championed it within government, but there are issues and tradeoffs ith it as well.

I use Apple products for my work and other areas because their products generally work well, the ease of use can't be beat in my opinion, and it's worth the tradeoff to me of an occasional hiccup in upgrading. The Catalina upgrade is much more than a hiccup, but still, because I'm waiting it out on macOS and iOS, it won't affect me. And it should not have affected you, if you'd waited it out. Sorry it's causing so much pain for you and your business, but I don't see moving to any other platform is going to solve or resolve similar issues in the future. Mitigate the risks by waiting before upgrading in the future.
I have been a science and technology enthusiast all of my life. I started running my own BBS over 30 years ago on a Commodore64. To say that I am passionate would be an understatement.

Alas, lately I am becoming a Luddite. Feature creep is the enemy. I don't want or need an 'info-tainment' screen in my vehicle. I refuse to join the Apple or Google walled gardens. The warnings from Science Fiction have been ignored, and we are wage-slaves to corporation-governments.

There is a better way to live. We must take back our power.

When does a tool become a weapon?

When it inflicts harm.

The internet has been weaponized.
I bet you could've guessed Equifax's username and password
I wasn't thinking of the end user experience, but more of the developer experience. I'm wondering why such a clause is even written in CoCs.