skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Here's my hot take, as a Linux distro developer with an Office356 sub: Excel is absolutely ridiculous and anyone who thinks anything in the FOSS world can compare or stand up to what Excel does is completely deluding themselves, and this is a major reason why Excel will never be replaced, or even touched, by FOSS solutions. PowerQuery is absolutely game changing (and no I will not accept "but you can cobble together awk and 5 other tools to run a preprocessing pipeline before opening your spreadsheet", that's not competition, it's a joke.)

I hate saying this considering how much LibreOffice, etc have invested -- but OTOH I imagine they understand their competition better than the average programmer who uses Office suites to track their month-to-month finances and thinks they've got it figured out.

There is the fact that actually challenging Excel as a product and implementing any competitor would technically require a substantial amount of labor and effort, on a very large scale. But that's just one part; the fact is that you can't actually win a battle unless you're willing to analyze where you've already lost. I think most FOSS users don't actually realize how badly they are losing to products like Office or even (the inferior, IMO) G-Suite. This isn't surprising in the grand scheme considering how much software freedom we've lost in the past few decades; it's just one more lost battle, but it still stings.

This isn't a situation that pleases me, but at the end of the day between an O365 family sub and the alternatives, it was very easy to make the choice given the returns I got.
It's true that the email service is fast. You might think the price is steep for email service that you can get for free elsewhere, but that's not all you get. I use their webdav storage to sync my Joplin notes. It's very easy to set it up and works without any problems. (My plan comes with 5 GB of storage, which is more than I'll ever use. No limits on devices either.)
Semi-related to your aside, but I sometimes feel like the impression that people hold against Ballmer as CEO at Microsoft, was that he was a bit of a "basketball team owner". He was absolutely fired up with team spirit (sometimes to a fault). He never really "played" (wasn't very technical), but he loved to watch the sport and figured he knew good plays when he saw them. In the end, he needed to have better "coaches" working for him on the team, or to stop incentivizing (stack-ranking) the "coaches" to play mostly safe plays.

Good/bad/and indifferent a lot of the takes on Ballmer seem to reflect how much you think a tech company needs a "basketball team owner".
I don't think so personally. It is a pretty blatant ripoff of course, but Dr Pepper has also been around for a long time now (at least a century?)

I don't think copyrights/patents/whatever apply, but if you think of the principles behind them as a bit of a guide, designing a novel product should ideally let you profit off it exclusively for a while (to incentivize invention), but probably not forever (to allow competition and lower prices).
The Lifecycle of a Component
This is something that always puzzled me. If something is cheaper, doesn’t it mean it took less resources to make it and therefore is the greener option?
The "simple search" would be wrong. Wirth says [https://inf.ethz.ch/personal/wirth/Articles/Modula-Oberon-Ju...]:

> I encountered the language Mesa [… which] allowed to develop parts of a system – called modules – independently

Mesa was first released to the public in 1976, so CLU might have been slightly earlier.

Modules as a concept predate both Mesa and CLU. David L Parnas was one of the popularizers of the concept, and in one of his early papers on the subject [https://www.win.tue.nl/~wstomv/edu/2ip30/references/criteria...] his quotes show that the term was well established by 1970.

But CLU was one of the first programming language to feature abstract data types, iterators, classes, and templates. Even in the mid-80s, when I first heard about it, it seemed shockingly modern.
I think an objective might have been demonstrating the benefits of Oracle Autonomous Linux regarding automatic patching and tuning; lower TCO being the advertised selling point.
Mattermost CEO here. In my mind Slack’s target persona is no longer an engineer (if it ever was) - It is more likely a less tech savvy person who wants a WYSIWYG editor for rich text inputs.

For what it’s worth, Mattermost is an open source alternative built for engineers by engineers. The interface is markdown.
While "As we worked to establish YC China, we had a change in leadership. With this, our strategy changed back " does give 50% of the answer as to "why", I'd be great to hear from otherwise transparent YC about why the strategy changed and why it didn't work out.
Could this be applied to motion capture to remove all the unnecessary gear actors have to wear? This could revolutionize digital animation.
Do you spend much time parenting?
You must be getting the absolute worse brand of LED lamp to have PWM flicker or using a crap dimer (or alternatively, have vision way beyond 60fps)

I have none of those problems with LED lamps that certainly didn't cost $125 (more like between 5x and 10x cheaper) and none of them buzz
Having spent enough time in ZA, you can find something considered near apocalypse every other Tuesday. Necklacing Namibians for example in the street has nothing to do with climate.
> the costs of false positives will out weigh the returns.

We have several 10's of millions of people killed in the 20th century that put this statement, which is speculative at best, to the lie. People killed because disinformation, mob-rousing, and lies were permitted to poison the commons.
I am interested in this but a little skeptical we can pin down the carbon economics. I think about this a lot in my own life. I'm in a major US metro. I buy most of my non-food stuff online on Amazon. I could drive my hybrid to a Target (~5 mile round trip) instead. My sense is my hybrid is slightly more efficient in raw carbon emissions than an Amazon delivery truck, but I live an apartment building, so the average Amazon delivery driver drops off 20 or 30 packages as part of a route that probably has hundreds of packages, so probably marginally Amazon has a lot less carbon load for the last leg than me going to Target? Since Amazon has a staging warehouse in my city, I assume the carbon profile up until the last leg is similar (although maybe Amazon populates that warehouse with air shipping instead of ground shipping, who knows for sure).

But then Amazon also uses a bunch of packaging. The cardboard packaging is putatively recyclable, except for the collapse of paper/cardboard recycling in the US last year. I still recycle it, but it's probably being landfilled. The plastic packaging is just landfill waste. And even if the cardboard was being recycled, there's a huge water burden involved in the production of recycled paper products as I imagine it, so trading off carbon emissions versus local water consumption / drought risk seems like a problem.

If someone made a website or app that allowed me to visualize all this for each purchase I make, I think that would be mondo cool -- and as dsalzman's comment to this thread mentions, this could be an opportunity to tie into a carbon offset service or something else to automatically compensate, at least partially, for the efficiency gap.

Come to think of it, that leads to another cost I hadn't considered before: at least theoretically, the money I save on Amazon frees up money for offsets or environmentally friendly donations versus paying more elsewhere. (Although in practice my total donations per year come nowhere close to what I save).

I'd also be curious today whether picking slower shipping on Amazon reduces or increases the carbon burden of the transaction versus prime shipping versus faster shipping.
Like Veriff, there are a lot of companies in this space. What is the differentiator other than low-friction? Most of the competitors offer ~$1 per use and are highly automated and frictionless.
Dunno, I also game in 144hz+ so I'm definitely not their target audience and I'll never sign up likely. Not only that but my next monitor will be HDR color and at least 144-240hz which will just not be possible via the web for a long time to come.
Hey old man (I'm 40 so for those 2 extra years I can call you that ;)).

I have a very similar situation, with a 10, 8, 5 and 0 year old (yeah I'm a bit more crazy than you). Difference is that I actually do have a bit of spare time.

I also fondly remember all the half-life games, as memory permits of course.

For me this is a different story: The whole VR experience passed me by a bit, until now. By seeing this, my hands are itching to pull out my wallet and pay a crazy amount of money for this toy. The benefit of 40 year olds is that they probably can cough up the money for all this VR stuff.

I'm not sure yet, but there is definitely a strong itch now that I see this.

A new HL game probably also means some cool multiplayer games are coming up. I'm not only thinking about Counter Strike, but also Team Fortress.
Just one small comment -- instead of investors, it was mostly Masayoshi Son at SoftBank that was pumping capital into WeWork and each round invested pumped up the valuation as well, so never had to face any reality from other investors, but it all came to a head in the prospectus for the IPO.

I think Galloway explains it well in this video -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3UdhLWGrtDI
No, we're not paying the cost on the impact on the climate of our products. We're basically borrowing / stealing this from the future, the poor and the commons.
The investors also paid a hefty price. The only person getting out of this scot-free is Adam.
Yeah, sure. But I'm all in favour of that. I want to see systems compete on their comparative merits. That hopefully drives innovation. I just dislike the way Oculus are preferring to compete by locking up the market with exclusives. It only hurts gamers by reducing choice.

I thought Oculus touch did support finger tracking. Wikipedia describes it as a "system for detecting finger gestures which perhaps is different. I've only ever used a Vive, so I'm not sure.
Oracle Code One is the successor of JavaOne. Since Oracle acquired Sun, the JavaOne conference was co-hosted with the much larger Oracle OpenWorld conference. Recently, JavaOne was rebranded into Oracle Code One, morphing it into a cross-technology conference rather than a Java-focused one.
It supports it, but ZFS itself is operating on the host CPU, not the RAID controller. Additionally, ZFS prefers that the RAID controller is disabled/defeated and operating in JBOD mode where disks are passed-thru to the OS without any caching.
I did a search on both Amazon.com and Amazon.ca but couldn't find any Amazon Basic shoes that matched Allbirds. I also didn't listen to the podcast, so I must have missed it.
My problem is when the oligopolies hurt the market with these practices.

I used to buy boxes of nitrile gloves from Home Depot for painting. Then they started carrying 'HDX' brand nitrile gloves. Then they stopped carrying all other brands of nitrile gloves.

I'm not sure the practice is the problem, or the oligopoly. I would shop somewhere else, but where am I going to shop? Lowes?
So, an increase of about $1/yr/user? Including I'm sure all of the money they're wasting training half baked ML models? Yeah, that's pretty damn close to free.

Now compare that to stadia which'll probably be dedicating high CPU and GPU to each logged in user, in addition to the low latency video compression hardware they're pretty much guaranteed to have?
This feature if functional and accurate would immediately get both sides of my payment business. You listening, Stripe and Square?
For essentially three reasons:

- ethics. Example: is democracy good for economic growth? Of course one could randomly engineer coups in some countries but that's probably not appropriate.

- cost. Example: how much do people change their labor force participation when taxes change by 1%? where a RCT would be "let's give a _lot_ of money to people" and see what happens.

- situation where it is not appropriate. Example: why did Europe rise to prominence (aka the great divergence)? There is not much to randomize here.

Note that RCTs have shortcomings anyway (see for instance [0]).

[0] https://www.nber.org/papers/w22595
What does she like ?

Why does she fall in love with the mute player character at first sight ? Don't she already have relationships ?

What exactly does she find attractive in that mute guy that appears and disappear ?

She is here to as a reward/carrot for teenage boys, not as a full fledged character with her own wants and needs :/
Instagram has been testing hiding likes for over a year now. They've recently begun testing in the US [1], so there's a good chance they'll hide them for real worldwide. I don't know if Facebook will follow through, but IG will definitely set a precedent.

1. https://later.com/blog/hidden-likes-instagram/
Section 230 explicitly says that making editorial judgements does not make you liable for the content you publish:

"No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be held liable on account of—

(A) any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable"
It's great to see new services that help consumers make choices about the products they buy. However, without details of the methodology being used to determine the carbon footprint, there is no way to gauge the accuracy of the service. These types of analysis are often quite inaccurate.

The Bloomberg article is paywalled. Their press release at https://enfuce.com/enfuce-launched-new-sustainability-servic... says:

> My Carbon Action is based on a validated calculation method called Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), which has been developed together with D-mat, a Finnish consultancy experienced in lifestyle carbon and material footprint calculations. The calculation takes into account the environmental impacts of a product’s entire lifecycle from raw-material extraction, manufacturing and transport to use and disposal.

This is good but it doesn't actually say what the "validated" LCA is.

Consumer supply chains are notoriously complex. You need details of every element of the supply chain for every product to be able to properly calculate the LCA. This is why we get things like the assumption that local produce always has lower carbon emissions, which isn't always true[1], or switching from plastic bags to organic cotton totes, which are worse on many environmental measures[2].

This is a very complex area[3] and Enfuce need to release their methodology to demonstrate that their data is accurate. Lack of transparency of data is a major problem with sustainability claims of all kinds, something I wrote about this week at https://davidmytton.blog/sustainability-doesnt-work-without-...

[1] https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-7679.2009.00445.x

[2] https://www2.mst.dk/Udgiv/publications/2018/02/978-87-93614-...

[3] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10806-015-9591-6
"Our basic contention is that one grandstands when one makes a contribution to public moral discourse that aims to convince others that one is “morally respectable.” By this we mean that grandstanding is a use of moral talk that attempts to get others to make certain desired judgments about oneself, namely, that one is worthy of respect or admiration because one has some particular moral quality—for example, an impressive commitment to justice, a highly tuned moral sensibility, or unparalleled powers of empathy. To grandstand is to turn one's contribution to public discourse into a vanity project."

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/papa.12075?...

I personally strongly disagree that anything from 2016 can be "extensively explored and defined in philosophical literature".
if someone's looking for an rss reader recommendation - i tried feedly, but inoreader is my favorite by far

(not affiliated, just a v happy user)
I think the gastropod is basically on point. The democrats aren't beacons of virtue or rationality by any stretch of the imagination, but its a strange kind of self-imposed blindness to pretend the two political parties are playing the same game here.

We can simultaneously see that partisan politics isn't completely rational and also observe that one side, for various reasons, is working that irrationality harder than the other.
I've never understood the appeal of the VR.

I play games that benefit from low reaction time and precision and my body is the main source of latency and mistakes. When I watch recordings of my own gameplay, I notice how my brain usually operates a few hundred milliseconds ahead of what my hands controlling mouse & keyboard are capable of executing. Throwing your untrained and sometimes unhealthy body into this mix doesn't seem like a beneficial strategy.

Also, characters in the games I play do things that are completely impossible for a regular human body to accomplish. They're running faster, jumping higher, aim and swing swords better than I or any real human even could. Why would you want your character to be a mirror of your real-world tired and untrained self?

They say that the biggest sell of VR is immersion. How can something be immersive when it has no capability to provide any kind of feedback besides audio/visual? You can't swing swords in VR cause it has no capability to communicate weight of the thing you're holding back to you. A light sword feels exactly the same as a huge two-handed sword because all you're actually carrying in a lightweight plastic controller. You can't punch a wall because there's nothing in reality to stop your hand from going through. You can't hide behind cover because the object you're trying to lean on doesn't exist in real life. You can't feel an impact of receiving a fatal blow or taking a rocket in your face, cause there's nothing to actually push you in real life.

I think VR is dumb and I haven't seen any games yet that would want me to spend money on it. I was a huge fan of HL back in the day, but I guess I'm going to skip this one.
Wait, did he not use company funds to buy real estate in his own name and then lease them back to the company? That is still not illegal but super shady. You cannot paper over things with "investors overvalued it" logic. He went to extra lengths to make his cheating legal.
I say sorta because in most circles when one is speaking of 'software RAID' they are referring to a very specific configuration and are explicitly not referring to ZFS.
I'll back you up on that. I've had 20 years in the industry, doing mostly front end work across web, mobile, desktop, automotive & TV. Mostly contracts, about 40 clients - mostly small but also some big ones you've heard of. Only three of them did (minimal, small scale) user testing, none of those made any major changes as a result of user testing.
"“I definitely feel like I have to keep [the reviewing] a secret from people who have strong morals,” Jessica added."

You'd think that would be a pretty good indication that you shouldn't be doing something...
Curious to know what problem you're looking to solve that you feel having a CTO will be the solution?
I don't doubt your motivation here and am not going to sit her and debunk your thought process - but I do wonder how many people match your template, which seems to be "people who want to play AAA games but not very much".

I game on PC, my kids use PC and consoles, and I can't say that "downloading/installing games" is a significant time sink - and if your network isn't good, Stadia isn't going to work either.

The other thing that I think will break the Stadia business model is that the free access costs Google money unless it recoups the spending on the games. So while we're hearing about reasonably competitive Day 1 prices for games, will we see the pattern of discounting that all other games go through? Second-hand console games?

It just feels like it's aiming at a niche while building out a huge system that's only going to be viable if it achieves mass adoption.
I think you underestimate how powerful this mechanism can be. Take 20 years for one generation, ie. 100 years is 5 generations. We're talking about roughly time from 800 CE, that is 60 generations. Imagine taking smartest people to reproduce, then taking smartest from their kids and so on - 60 times. You will see an effect. You can optimize on anything, ie. "time you can dive underwater" you will see the difference compared to other people after 60 generations, see https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/04/indonesian-divers-ha...
Then the fuel just drained out for a long time. Long enough for the guy to dawdle before telling anybody, and then to get orders from higher-up, and for everybody to high-tail it out of the complex.

Not far enough, though.
Does this do away with Network Manager, or do they somehow play nicely together.

Part of the reason why I've begun to dislike Linux is that things like networking used to be completely defined in config files, operated on by known commands.

Now it just seems like a hodgepodge of a dozen different daemons and applications writing over files, I honestly can't keep track of which is the authoritative config or app for interfaces, DNS, wifi, etc.
C2Rust contributor here. You are right that the transpiler preserves all the weaknesses of C in its output. (Thanks for taking a look :)

C2Rust includes a refactoring tool that (in some, currently very limited circumstances) let us lift raw C pointers to Rust references (to slices) as a step towards using safe Rust constructs. This is obviously not something that can be 100% automated but our goal is to see how far we can reasonably go. Lots of work ahead but we 100% agree that some level of automation is highly desirable here.
Appreciate the thoughtful questions.

On the point of why images leave our system at all, we provide a way to show our work to our customers — they won’t trust our results if they can’t see that they’re accurate. When they access information on our dashboard, if we render the images, they’ve left our systems. To be clear, we’re not syndicating this information to any third parties, just showing this information directly to our customer (who is the owner and controller of this data).

As for what procedures we put in place, we enforce short retention periods for the data we store in our systems for precisely the reason you are worried about. At the expiration of that period, the data is permanently deleted. Furthermore, in the event of a change of control, the contracts we’ve put in place with our existing customers govern how the information can be used. This is super important to us as we personally take privacy extremely seriously.

The aggressive watermarking is important for several reasons. First, in the worst case scenario, we can trace how a breach happened and when. Second, it is watermarked in such a way that the images become much less functional than they would be otherwise — the intent is to ensure that the images cannot be used to verify an identity on any other service. We take security very seriously — we’ve already secured SOC 2 certification and continue to invest heavily in security using industry best practices.
I don't think mrustc speaks the C dialects that are friendly to tool augmented verification currently, FWIW. The focus of that project is from source boot strapping, and support for archs that don't have LLVM backends.
GNOME and systemd are funded almost completely by Red Hat and their biggest contributors are full-time Red Hat employees.

GNOME does not run at all without systemd.

Even the biggest Linux distros, like Gentoo, struggle to create a patchset to modify GNOME so it does not require systemd; every new version of GNOME takes months to reach Gentoo stable. Most distros have bent the knee and switched to systemd because they had no other option, as GNOME is the most used Linux desktop so they kinda call the shots.