skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Seems to me one person's snake oil has often been another person's cannabis oil, in oil terms I guess where neither type of oil may actually be useful to a particular consumer.

But if you've got a truly persuasive and aggressive salesman who can really get things done and actually sell virtual snake oil like few others, especially for much more than it's worth if genuine to buyers who don't actually need the product or as much as he is selling them; well that salesman needs to be incentivized with excess genuine product to sell, and appropriate adult supervision and probably legal counsel and you can reach goals more impressive than most top salesmen who are themselves very productive.

IOW with that kind of salesman you don't need functional product anyway since you'll do quite well selling the sizzle alone, but if you do actually throw in a real steak it can indeed be relatively non-slimy.

So a product company might be able to slide more product out through a slick pipeline, but when you're delivering something of value you're still a product company.

The problem is a salesman like this who gets too close to executive rank can overcome the supervision and turn it into a snake oil company, and it can ruin everything.

Or with the right connections, found a new high-tech snake oil company where the most important consideration was not a product of value anyway. Unless dreams came true of course.
Actionable is having a percentage AND the percentage of the most likely alternative, such as a taxi. Then, you can decide which is safer to take home tonight.
For me, it's Romanian that sounds strange. Sometimes it sounds like Russian or Czech to me. And other times like Spanish. Depending on the speaker, and my frame of mind.

I do speak Russian, and a little Czech and Spanish, but not Romanian. It's my vague understanding that Romanian is closer to Latin than other Romance languages. But the accent can sound Slavic, even though the words are almost Latin.

Also, Russian does have French and English loan words. And for ones that overlap with Romanian, they sound a lot alike.
Tesla Solarglass Roof
Russian is an Indo-European language, like English, and therefore has fundamentally similar grammar. Arabic, Chinese, and Korean are much more different (from English) than that.

That said, the State Department's estimation of the difficulty of Chinese is inflated by the difficulty of the writing system, which has nothing to do with the language itself. When people try to rank languages more-or-less objectively by how difficult they are to learn -- without reference to which other languages the student might already know -- Chinese and English are both common examples of the simplest class of languages. There is a theory in linguistics that seeks to explain this finding by reference to the history of "simple" languages -- they tend to be spoken across wide regions and learned by adults for pragmatic reasons. The theory goes that the influx of struggling adult learners changes the language to accommodate them.
Yes, a single binary file is what I meant. I realize in some ways it is orthogonal here, but I guess it reminded me that sometimes a single file can be useful in surprising ways...
This company apparently has a $100mm revenue run rate. How? I read somewhere that companies pay for translations from learners. Does that make sense? These are people with very low fluency. Does anyone with more info know more about their revenue model?
Twitter’s NSFW Purge Looms
Fans to ventilate, fire extinguisher for when things go wrong, feet for when the fire extinguisher isn't enough.
The evidence for that “is limited, and support stems largely from theoretical arguments and analogies to other critical periods in biology such as visual development”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_period_hypothesis
Chinese would definitely be easier without the writing system (and I wish my two years of studying it had been verbal and pinyin only). But it's also tonal, which speakers of non-tonal languages generally have a really hard time with.
> Electricity costs [for small modular reactors] would be 30% lower than for a large nuclear facility, matching wind power, with the modular approach allowing parts to be made on a factory production line.

I wonder why they don't use wind power in that case.
Goldman Sachs' CEO takes the subway and has a side hustle as a DJ
If I were to ever hire a developer, it'd probably be for work in Julia, but I don't have nearly enough grants for that yet :)

Coming from academia, I have no entrepreneurial sense -- but if you know enough math to make use of optimization packages like JuMP, where Julia excels, those skills would seem to me very transferable to commercial operations research.
In the event anyone thinks that the notion of synfuel generation from nuclear power is new ... it's not.

M. King Hubbert, who first conceived of (and successfully predicted US) peak oil suggested this ... in 1962:

"Energy Resources: A Report to the Committe on Natural Resources"

On p. 139:

<quote>

Synthesis of Chemical Fuels. Automotive vehicles for both highway and air transportation are dependent for their energy supply upon the energy stored chemically in the form principally of liquid fuels, and, so far as can now be seen, will continue to be so. Heretofore these fuels have been obtained almost solely from the fossil fuels in which the energy was originally stored by photosynthesis. On the other hand, it has long been known to be possible to manufacture simpler but equally useful fuels by means of the schematic chemical reaction:

Energy + CO2 + H20 -> Fuel + O2

This has not been done because the energy required for the reaction would have to be obtained by burning already synthesized fossil fuels.

[NB: It has been done, but generally in converting solid fossil fuels to liquid, e.g., Germany's coal-to-liquids program during WWII.]

With the advent of nuclear energy this situation is drastically changed. Here, with an almost unlimited supply of energy potentially available, it would be a a comparatively simple matter to synthesize any desireable quantity of liquid and gaseous fuels from common inorganic substances such as water and limestone. Were this eventually to be done, our remaining fossil fuels, comprising already synthesized complex organic molecules, could be more effectively used as the raw material for an increasingly versatile chemical industry.

</quote>

http://www.hubbertpeak.com/hubbert/EnergyResources.pdf

There was a small bit of stir a few years ago when the US Naval Research Lab published research on the concept, also looking to use nuclear power, largely for in situ fuel provisioning for carrier-based combat aircraft. Those papers only cited research back to the mid-1990s, making the concept seem novel. I discovered it's not, with active research dating to the mid-1960s at Brookhaven National Laboratory and the late Mayer Steinberg, as well as M.I.T., and the more recent USNRL work.

The underlying chemistry works. Scaling the concept seems to be problematic, as well as economics, though that has more to do with the mis-pricing of fossil fuels than failures of Fischer-Tropsch, in my view.

I posted a number of items on it, including a literature review, here:

https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/search?q=fischer-tropsc...

Lit review:

https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/28nqoz/electri...
But past that, there is a good GopherCon talk about structuring Go code: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oL6JBUk6tj0

Code practically writes itself (in my opinion) if you structure it well.
Thanks for the tip! I'll have to play around with that sometime.
By that method, every true friend would be predicted to be a false friend. Sounds aren't what's important here--divergent meaning shifts in cognates is.
> People seem to forget that democracies are supposed to be for the people. Not for corporations. Not for those in power. Not for the wealthy.

That's what we are told. But if you look at actual history of democracy and how it came about ( ancient greek or american democracy ), you know that simply isn't true.

The ancient greek democracy was created by the slave owning master class to protect and preserve their property and rights. In the US, our democracy was created by the wealthy white landowners to protect their property and rights.

The two quintessential democracies in the world were created by the wealthy for the wealthy, not by the people for the people. But it's great advertising.
> My son was taking an extra language at school and wasn't doing too well. Duolingo every day for 6 months with one rest day and he went from a C to an A.

School language classes are notorious for leaving their students unable to function in the language that was supposedly "taught". I don't think that's the fault of the school or the classes, but I also don't think an improved grade in such a class is evidence of much additional competency.

> I believe it gives people basic, basic competency like you would get if you were a Chinese person who never learned English formally but watched English movies all the time.

Without some instruction at some point, the level of English competency you'll get by watching English movies all the time is zero, exactly the same as if you never watch anything.
Is it better to charge per project or per hour?
I value a global menu as a quality of life thing, and from what I've seen, this isn't on the roadmap for GNOME 3. There's currently one implementation out there on GitHub and the GNOME Extensions index, but it has dependencies that are either marked for deprecation or are already deprecated.

Seems like Plasma or MATE are the only real options if you want a functional global menu.
> Why not cache the compiled methods to make warmup a once-per-version delay? It would be a JIT/precompiled hybrid. Call it gradually compiled.

That's what Bootsnap does, and it now comes standard with Rails. https://github.com/Shopify/bootsnap
'Ignorant questions': Nobel winner Peter Handke refuses to address controversy
There are innocent users outside China who like to view innocent websites inside China. If you block the connection, you make the innocent users, and the innocent websites, mad. They might very well interpret it as censorship.
Cloud run looks cool, but doesn't seem to support databases ? Unless it supports linked containers?

I like that it's a mix of AWS lambda scaling with more open environments... Though it's hard to read through the marketing... "Nearly instance availing from 1 to 1000"
He might be under an NDA with respect to his specific involvements at McKinsey, but he would not be stopped from commenting generally.

He really just doesn't have a problem with McKinsey's various immoral practices. That's the simple way to see it.
Congressional hearings are political theater. Theyre not meant to accomplish anything.
Yeah, I think I was primed by the article about the radar used to find the viking ship.
That's not correct. Flash usage was trending down fairly rapidly even before that as javascript, css, html5, canvas, and DOM became more feature filled.
There is also a monthly subscription plan. Dunno what their conversion rate is, but recently (maybe sometime this year?) they added a game-style resource mechanic where any mistake makes you lose a heart, which you gain back either by waiting a few hours or by being a premium user.
I agree there is not much of a story here. On their website they list that they're recruiting for "Operations". This means there are humans operating the trading strategies, even if they don't call them "traders." Most firms have "operational traders" and calling them something other than traders is a little bit disingenuous. I have email correspondence with XTX regarding a "Trading Operations" job posting, so to write an article about how there are no humans involved in the process is not only not really a story, but also probably inaccurate. With all that said, they've done well so kudos to them. But is it worth a story? Probably not.
> I don't buy a lot of food online

Ok so this doesn't apply to you. There's plenty of other people who do.
There is an excellent book that I would suggest called “The Secrets of Consulting” by Gerald Weinberg.

I also use a tool called FreshBooks that has been killer as far as invoicing and tracking time.
As a side effect this might cause people who care about privacy to never run for office.
Look at their revenue vs net profit chart. I bet scaling this kind of investment model that reliably is something out of the ordinary. They print money.
Building C# Windows Forms Apps with .NET Core and vs. Code
I'm glad to hear there are a few people happy with the current stuff. But I'll note that in the 1990s wave of VR there were people who would talk exactly like this. It was amazing; they loved it; the tech and content wasn't there yet, but surely in 10 or 20 years, we'd all be spending all our time immersed. And I'll note that James Cameron, director of Avatar, has essentially the same belief about 3D movies: https://www.cinemablend.com/news/2428530/the-problem-3d-has-...

I'm still unconvinced. And I'll note that plenty of people get the feeling of presence from novels, from comic books, from movies, from games. Getting lost in a world isn't a property of technology. It's something humans have been doing since we were telling stories around a campfire.

When we want that, that is. As you say, we just as often want distance from our experiences. And quite often we're indifferent to immersion; it's not material to the experience we seek. Movie tickets sales are down 25% since 2000. That might be in part because some people have fancy home theaters that are nearly as good, the at-home 100" screen with 7.1 sound. But I think it's mostly because people are happy watching things on laptops and tablets and phones. They mostly don't want to "be there", however much that horrifies the Martin Scorseses of the world.
But I doubt you really need it all in RAM for a small localized single user search engine. In that case you back most of the index with NVMe which at the prices I saw on black friday is probably less than $10k using consumer grade QLC flash drives when combined with cheap x1 pcie expansion boards/etc.

The 10PB of disk is also quite reachable given its possible to buy bulk 10T disks at $150 each.

Bottom line, I did some of these calculations a couple years ago because I was interested in a topic based search engine that only indexed for certain topics and basically tossed any crawler results that didn't appear to fit the subject matter.

So, while the web is a lot bigger than when google started, storage and compute is also a lot cheaper. A web search engine that specialized in say cooking recipes might be entirely doable on a fairly limited budget.
We just need enough ice-cold water pipelines to balance things out.
The Away Luggage Saga Shows Venture Capital Needs a Reality Check
I saw this coming long ago. I wrote this on June 7th 2018:
https://arccompute.com/blog/why-augmented-reality-is-not-rea...
It's the size of an organization and the complexity of the enterprise. Large, sophisticated corporations effectively shield executives from personal criminal liability because decision making is more diffuse--or at least they have an easier time arguing that.

If a prosecutor could establish that a Fortune 500 CEO had the same, unmoderated role in criminal activity as the CEO of a one man shell company, then he'd be just as easy to prosecute and undoubtedly would--that'd make the careers of the D.A. and the attorneys working the case.

There aren't many (or any?) laws that criminalize scheming, amoral profiteers who effectively (but not literally) promote a culture of lawlessness. Even if you write them they'd be very hard to prosecute--Due Process protections are strong in the US and Anglosphere systems, at least if you have the money and wherewithal.

A bigger problem is that executives and board members are financially shielded, often through corporate-bought personal liability insurance. Maybe things would get better if there were laws mandating clawbacks, with independent agents[1] tasked with drafting the contracts and enforcing clawbacks, and perhaps somehow preventing executives from insuring themselves, such as with mandatory right of recourse clauses (i.e. insurer can always recover their payouts from the insured, making them more like guarantors). This aspect of corporate law is really complex though because it touches on so many subject areas. And stuff like this has been tried--it's how we ended up with corporate-bought personal insurance policies, a response to a brief period where executives and board members found themselves financially exposed during the early years of professional shareholder lawsuits.

[1] Even though technically this is supposed to be the responsibility of board members. But that's an even thornier problem.
as if that will stop anything
What country are you basing this advice on? I think it’s good advice, but if your income can increase by 20-30% as a result of optimising your business structure for tax purposes, that’s a dysfunctional tax system. I’d like to believe that in some countries this advice is not necessary.
> I would lightly recommend avoiding these addons and turning on fingerprinting protection in Firefox instead.

A word of caution, this will tell all websites you're on UTC so it will break several things (fitness trackers, github reports, etc..). If you're banging your head against the wall (like I did) because you can't figure out why everyone thinks you're on UTC, it's because of this.
When you're selling someone a dream, especially their own dream, fantasy always needs to be presented as reality.

Looks like they're making money from investors rather than customers, and the strongest marketing efforts are probably not focused on things which would appeal to ordinary buyers.
For those who want to lease ~anonymously with payment by Bitcoin:

BitHost OK cpu and ram OK uplink overpriced
CockBox OK cpu and ram slow uplink OK price
HostSailor OK cpu and ram fast uplink OK price
VPS.BG OK cpu and ram OK uplink OK price

BitHost is a Digital Ocean reseller.
java.net doesn't usually have articles about such things.
I can second this piece of advice. When I first started our small consulting firm we didn't know how to scope explicitly enough and didn't charge enough even if the projects did stay within the scope of work.

Don't be embarrassed of your rates. If they're flirting with but not plainly past what potential clients are willing to pay, you're in/around the right territory. Additionally, explicitly the definition of successful deliverables in your SOWs - make sure that you get enthusiastic client sign-off on these criteria. This can only serve to make everyone better off when work is marked as complete.

Last, "Due on Receipt" with some understanding and grace is a lot better than having to send "Hey just wanted to check in about invoice #1113" emails 10 days after your 30-day receivables haven't come in.
BugReplay – Make Bug Reports
The Good Old Liberal Consensus
Reminds me of John McAfee "There is no RAM" tweet (while pushing some cryptocurency scam) https://twitter.com/officialmcafee/status/102574361759866060...

longer explanation "DEF CON 27 IoT Village - Ken Munro - BITFI You Wouldnt Steal My Cloins" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W8bTI7QZI3g
I played with Yahoo BOSS a lot as a undergrad and I could tweak it to get "better" results than Yahoo Search for certain queries. That Bing and DDG have different results doesn't really say anything.
I recently wanted to play an online game, but hardware acceleration on Firefox on Linux doesn't work very well (Firefox on Windows is fine though - I've used the exact same hardware to play on Windows and it was butter-smooth), so I wanted to get a Chromium-based browser for that usecase. Ended up picking Brave, and it's worked well for that.

Still using Firefox as my daily driver.
Hiding Messages in a Ligatures of a Font
Seems like the unlimited storage is only valid if you have more than 5 accounts. Otherwise, it's capped at 1tb. Is that your experience as-well, or are you grandfathered in another plan?
Matz (Ruby lead maintainer/original author) has said that Ruby 2.7 (coming out this Christmas) has JIT improments that make JIT neutral for Rails. The goal is to have it be net positive by Ruby 3.0 (Christmas 2020)
The Most Charismatic Single Cell You’ll Meet Today
Early TSMC 5nm Yields Are Impressive
That’s literally exactly what happened here. So... maybe?
Sure, a simple marketing site for a local restaurant can work with only HTML and CSS, but practically all of the top 20 most popular sites would cease to function without JS.
If I understand correctly, in the Ninth Circuit, the fame and affluence of the speaker does not matter, but instead the notoriety of the alleged defamed.
In my experience Scaleway isn't worth the risk. I had multiple weeks-long periods for different vpses (and both FreeBSD & Linux) over the course of two years where their network-mounted root disks would start throwing errors and then drop offline entirely. Worse, after one of these incidents their control panel usually wouldn't allow a reboot. I went round and round with support and the most they ever did was clear a flag for that and tell me they were experiencing network issues. I've also used Ramnode, Linode, Servercheap, Amazon, Heroku, various small local colo companies over, etc. and Scaleway was the only actively bad one.

Unexpected outages, disk corruption, and usually not even a credit when I'd been up and down for days. If you have problems like that with your infrastructure and they crop up on and off for years, you need to bring in new people and invest in infrastructure. They aren't going to.
I found my tax person through a referral. Went in and chatted with him about some questions and that was that. 15 years later I still use him, though I don't consult any more.

This points out another good tip: find a network of other software consultants that you can trust and ask questions of. I found mine, years ago, by keeping in touch with past colleagues; some of them had gone independent. Now I'd probably look on a local slack and organize a few lunches.
What I find funny is that I believe he worked at Valve at the same time Jeri Ellsworth was there solving most of these issues.

Her new TiltFive system is "AR somewhere" rather than AR everywhere which allows it to provide a solid, practical, and affordable experience.

Here's a Tested review if you haven't looked into T5 before...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jse-GwkcYgI
For sure, all of these times, I've just been doing.
I run a small consulting firm in the United States - you can definitely goose dollars-in-pocket based on your type of consulting and other arrangements.

Imagine that I run two firms - one that provides primary top-level advice, guidance, etc. here in the states, and with the other doing some or all of the implementation work in a U.S. territory like Puerto Rico. Much of the profits can end up in PR, and when your continental entity needs cash it can borrow it from your PR-entity at a decent interest rate to further reduce states-based taxable income. You don't really even need to be a citizen of PR for that to begin working. That's one of innumerable ways to reduce your tax burden here. An ambitious accounting and legal team can help you ensure that you keep as much of your total billings as possible.

We don't do this - we're too small and due to ambitious growth we end up eating most or all of our earnings each year anyway. Definitely seen it before.