skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The dollar amounts don't reflect the impacts of what the Russians purchased. Conventional lobbying is to get specific bills passed. Social media propaganda can get a few high profile candidates elected, sway general attitudes to justice, liberal democracy, objective truth, etc. It just so happens that it's very cheap to sway some voters. If Russia could get a particular energy bill passed with $10k of Facebook propaganda, it would do that. That's not to say that the shiny new foreign policy tool of social media influence doesn't receive out-sized attention.
> (do you want to live for a few years in a city with no real friends and no nice bars or restaurants?)

As someone in a mid-sized heartland city, we've got nice bars and restaurants (no, seriously). Main pain points:

1) decent "ethnic" cuisine of certain types falls in the mid-range-and-up category, price-wise, for the most part, with few delicious but cheap options like larger coastal cities may have (Indian food, for example). I do not know why this is. Actually-good bread is also weirdly expensive. We do have surprisingly-good fine dining and good bars, and a ton more food variety than a coast-dweller might think, so there's that.

2) Really far from any decent "outdoorsy" stuff unless you like fishing on kinda-ugly lakes, or hunting in kinda-ugly woods. Hiking? Most of a day to reach mediocre mountains, a long day to reach real ones. Local "hiking" is largely indistinguishable from a neighborhood walking trail in terms of what you'll see (which is to say, not much). Beautiful desert vistas? 1.5 days or so. Any part of the ocean? Again, 1.5 days of driving, minimum. Great lakes? Not close enough to those either, 1.25 days to reach parts of those other than Chicago (1 long day for that). No such thing as a long-weekend getaway to anything outdoorsy that's much fun, let alone single-day trips of that sort.
I'm not sure but yeah, in theory you don't need more than Input/OutputStreams if you can block at will.
I have mixed feelings when I see these articles popping up recently along with the general consensus on hackernews about the fact that Amazon shopping should be avoided. On one side I'm glad, considering Amazon has gotten too big and is in need of a readjustment. But on the other side, I feel that this is an echo chamber, considering the continuing growth of the company.

I am privileged enough to actively reject everything that has anything to do with Amazon. I buy most things locally and sometimes I pay a premium for that. No regrets, I consider this the capitalist democracy of voting with your wallet in the free market. I have not bought anything from Amazon for the past 4 years, since the first time I heard about the warehouse working conditions. I correlated that with the toxic environment they are cultivating for white-collar workers and just decided that Amazon is a company I never want to deal with.
>this in particular just strikes me as hard to believe / failing Occam's razor

Reality owes us nothing - not even simple laws of physics.

Occam's razor is a pragmatic (human) bias - reality needs not adhere to it.

In fact, if reality adheres to Hickam's dictum then Occam's razor is an outright error.
People born in the United States. Over 77% of people working in technical jobs in Silicon Valley are foreign
> The undisputed "best way" to climb the wealth ladder is to receive large amounts of cash from some external source.

I agree with most of what you say here but I'm not so sure of this bit. Of course, if you get handed huge amount of cash by a rich relative, that's the easiest way to live comfortably for some time, but it won't come with the financial skills to make the cash an asset instead of just a possession.

Assuming you don't win that lottery (or indeed win the actual lottery, $100 million powerball style), I think the best way to climb the ladder is to own a business (as per your 'small business owner across the street with the McMansion and the gaudy Christmas decorations'). Receiving cash is like getting a push on your billy cart, it's nice but it doesn't, in itself, give you a way to get more. A business is like an engine for the billy cart, maybe it won't be going as fast right away but it'll keep on going and generating money.

Either way, as you say, scrimping on groceries will never make the difference between wealthy and not. Wisely investing your salary in real estate or stocks won't help either, except over timescales too long to have any fun with it or unless you're at the very top tier of a FAANG-type company. A business is a machine to make money and unless you own one, you're highly unlikely to end up in the same financial class.
>A bit confused by this - you're now not actually buying anything that produces anything.

I suggest you look up what stock ownership means. Most wealthy people only own non-controlling interest in most of their investments as well. If you own a share of stock, you own part of the means of production.
The one that stood out most was his comments on Apartheid: https://medium.com/indian-thoughts/my-conversation-with-pete...

It's the attitude that even if the basic economic premise was sound(1), was his hyper focus on it and a complete insensitivity to the greater picture. It's like in his mind he could see how he (being white) could have benefited from it, but couldn't see that millions were victims and those who benefited wouldn't "let" black people be part of it.

If you look at a lot of his controversial comments, you'll see a pattern of a lack of empathy being a theme. Although Thiel denies the conversation happened, I'm giving the woman the benefit of the doubt for now other reason than it fits within other comments that he's either said or alleged to have said.

(1)For the record, I don't at all believe that it was. Apartheid-era South Africa's economy, as even the uninformed know, was built around having the black majority population do the menial/dangerous jobs cheaply and holding up the white minority.
If Amazon believes it is in their best interest to be in NYC, then they will eventually grow to that 25K number regardless. There's a long track record across the country of companies demanding concessions in promise of jobs, only to have the jobs never materialize. In many cases, companies are going to do what they want, so there isn't any real incentive for governments to play along.
It's helpful to physically speak to management. Remote can create a fragmented environment of mistrust between your engineers and executives making decisions because they are essentially isolated from each other. It also doesn't allow quick informal meetings which facilitate a lot of information exchange
> make discerning calls

about stuff that will breach company security, not to alert people of dangerous opinions. The latter is not hers to decide.
We will be more then fine without Amazon.
Point to remember- they are number 4. And beating a fast rising azure is going to be close to impossible.
Just after you saved your first 3k, your alternator goes out or you get in a wreck.

Some people seem to have these sort of problems more often than others. I guess poverty is about a lot more than lack of money.
Well the only dumpster food item they confirmed sold on amazon the WSJ personally dove for and placed on amazon themselves.

Then they quote some basically anonymous people saying they list trash salvage on amazon sometimes or did in the past, without verifying so or giving any examples of what sorts of things they sold.

Is anyone other than the WSJ listing contaminated food on amazon? No evidence is provided.
The amount of cognitive dissonance on this is astounding.

If the message was, instead, a direct quotation of the 2nd amendment, 99% of y’all would be freaking out and asking her to be fired.
I was playing devils advocate here. Facebook has shown that they are not very trustworthy. But in theory it is easier to contain the data if it is only held in a single central location vs. distributed over many federated servers.
No, it has a pretty precise definition. It's money spent on political activism that isn't publicly reported, typically through a specific category of non-profit organization.
It's surprising how rarely intentional geoengineering (because we're doing it anyway, just unintentionally) is mentioned when discussing climate change. Stratospheric aerosol injection seems like a plausible way of slowing down the warming of earth yet it's too taboo to be even discussed as a viable option.
Indeed, the fake news being parroted on the most watched TV channels, and the most listened to talk shows has far, far more reach (like orders of magnitude).

These guys didn't have the clout they have now when broadcasters and content-owners were not allowed to monopolize the market.
From the 1975 US National Academy of Sciences/National Research Council Report

...we do not have a good quantitative understanding of our climate machine and what determines its course. Without the fundamental understanding, it does not seem possible to predict climate... [0]

The point is that there were a lot of climate models done in the 70's, and only a few of them were accurate. No one was randomly guessing, but the model you gave was not the consensus.

[0] https://skepticalscience.com/ice-age-predictions-in-1970s-in...
Index funds too. What do you think index funds are investing in?
Some long time Silicon Valley residents would be thrilled with this - like the Cupertino planning commissioner who opposes building more housing for Apple employees because those engineers will turn high schoolers into prostitutes.

https://twitter.com/HousingValley/status/1154781703262498816

You can't make this stuff up.
https://doesmysiteneedhttps.com/

MITM can do anything to your site, so your totally-static site may not be static any more at the victim's end. It may be a site collecting private details, attacking the browser, or using the victim to attack other sites.

Your static HTTP site is a network vulnerability and a blank slate for the attacker.
What has this offered to your country? Why doesn't it have it's Amazon or SpaceX? Why is the Linux Foundation here? Why are the salaries in the most unregulated or frontier markets the best in the US and not in Europe?

Mandating a week off for everyone doesn't seem to give the space needed for poorer people to become as wealthy as they might deserve. What can be done?
To some extent they are, but really there's strong limits on this and they can't be broken. At the end of the day, vacations cost more than food and housing costs more than vacations. Full stop.

Your example of saying you don't care about fancy meals... well, sure, but that doesn't change the fact that your price sensitivity to a restaurant is going to be much lower than a vacation. If your end goal is to give a bunch to charity, then scrimping on a vacation too would be a better decision ultimately.

It's really hard to spend more than say, $1k on a meal. Even 3 star Michelin restaurants don't charge that much unless you include alcohol.

Comparatively, it's EASY to spend $1k on a vacation. Incredibly easy.
The article's focus on viewing payments as a fraction of your net worth is related to the Kelly criterion [1], which suggests making only investments that increase the expected logarithm of your net worth.

For example, say you have the chance to bet on a single flip of a biased coin that comes up heads 51% of the time. If the coin comes up heads, you win $10,000; otherwise, you lose $10,000. According to the Kelly criterion, this bet only starts to make sense once your net worth is at least $250,000 [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelly_criterion

[2] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=solve+0.51*ln%5Bx+%2B+...
Sorry, I meant that without wage increases, saving alone won't bump you. If you get a wage increase, of course you'll be able to move up this ladder. (To a point. You won't reach all the levels with wages alone, no matter how hard you save.)
Investors demand crypto CEO's corpse be exhumed, examined
It's probably a lot like Apple: lots of people absolutely insist on buying from them, and then complain when they get abused. But if you suggest they look at alternatives, they either dismiss it out-of-hand as completely impossible, or worse they get offended.
> Don't believe me? Look up "TOC semi final policy round" or "Harvard vs Berkely finals policy debate" on YouTube

Actually this kind of reconciled me with this "debate club" thingie that I thought was nonsensical. Now I get it, that's just a game. It is a gamification of the rules of debate but that's as close to real debate as starcraft is to real strategy.
I disagree with your assertion that not being able to run a publicly addressable web server out of your house is a barrier to entry in tech jobs.

However, I have friends in the heartland interested in tech jobs. I tried to help one learn HTML and CSS over Zoom calls and quickly discovered internet quality (speed, latency, etc) is a barrier to entry. When your internet isn’t even good enough to pair program that’s a problem. We even went to the trouble of finding the nearest buried fiber (half a mile away on a major road) and calling the owner (Sprint) to see how much it would cost to splice him in as a customer (a ridiculous sum).

I still can’t comprehend how we had an extended period (nearly a decade) of high unemployment across the heartland and the most portable job which pays a living wage was importing talent from the other side of the globe.
Are you being facetious?

Definition here: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/dark_money
I think this is an unfair characterization of his political views.

This is my understanding of how Peter Thiel views the world:

- Our entire economic system is structured for growth. With growth things are good and everyone can share in a piece of an ever-growing pie. Without growth you get a zero sum game and collapse.

- We are in a 'great stagnation' where growth is stalling in most industries. Every industry outside of tech (and arguably tech now too).

- The 'Neoliberals' (Obama and Clinton types, liberal centrists) don't see this stagnation as the existential threat it is and the institutions in place can't make the changes necessary to help correct for it.

- Without correcting for this problem you get an apocalyptic scenario and collapse of society.

- There's a dash of fair trade protectionism and an anti-immigration view somewhere in this that I don't totally understand (this is my weakest understanding of his politics, but it comes up when he talks and in his donations).

##

Then with this framing Trump in this context:

- I think Peter Thiel thinks Donald Trump is an idiot, but his administration's willingness to ignore precedent may allow them to break out of some of the existing constraints that prevent large change.

- Focusing on anything except the stagnation problem is meaningless in the long run.

- The push back against China IP issues is good and something others were afraid to do.

- He thinks the immigration push back and protection of American workers is necessary for political stability.

##

The questions I have with this view:

- He often asserts this stagnation problem exists, but without any real evidence (he just acts like it's obvious). I'd want some reason to think that now is different than historically - is it just a comparison to low hanging fruit in scientific discovery of the last couple hundred years? Something else? I think there are problems in academia, but I'm not sure I buy this 'great stagnation' argument up front.

- Trump seems like killing the patient to cure the disease, Peter Thiel would argue that actually things are mostly the same and Trump hasn't really changed day to day life for people. Currently this is largely true (unless you're an undocumented immigrant that had your children taken from you). This is playing with fire though and collapses of democracy are real - Putin was elected before becoming a dictator. I think he's playing dangerously here with his assumptions of what is possible.

- Continued support after this first term I just can't accept - it seems pretty clear at this point that Trump is a bad/criminal actor that only has his interests in mind with his actions.
Yes. To be specific, if you are using the Web based WhatsApp (or the 'Desktop' app), it will not load the preview until your phone has pinged that it's online. There are many times when I wait for the preview to load (because if you send the message without the preview, no-one else gets one either), only to have to wake my phone and voila, the preview then loads on Web WhatsApp.
Good question. I have no idea. Her specific wording is "employee guidelines and company policies" which is quite vague.
And what about when the sitting administration illegally spied on an incoming president?
"interrogated"?

They water-boarded her?!
If they pour all of their efforts into customer experience, maybe they can stay in the game. I personally am terrified of using Google Cloud. I'm afraid something will go wrong and I won't be able to talk to a human. I've heard so many stories about the "stone wall" that is Google customer support. Also, I'm afraid the rug will get pulled out from under me if I decide to go all in given their history of axing projects that they don't want to support anymore.
I've found it's far easier to build this into sprints/backlogs/whatever than rely on the team to automate on their own. Benefits include: better understanding of the problem, testing (is the automation robust, etc), and making time for formal sharing with other teams. Also, some developers want to automate, but might not feel enabled - they want to stick to the rules (sprint plan, etc).
I don't usually defend Amazon, but this seems way too hard on Amazon. Amazon may not pay us much as the other Big 4, but their pay is still really competitive. If you can give Amazon a "D" on pay then I am really envious of you. My first job out of college was half of what Amazon pays entry level employees and had a vesting schedule twice as long and I live in a comparable cost of living area.
The Google cemetery is calling... https://gcemetery.co/
Favorite Children’s Books of 2019
Why, in 2019, would you trust such a statement from a faceless corporate behemoth?

Why, after the consistent abuses and lack of accountability across the corporate sphere, would you place any faith in a business's claim that they're just leaving what probably already amounts to billions of dollars of value on the table when there is effectively no penalty for covertly extracting said value at the cost of customer privacy?

Why, after a decade+ of security breaches and poor data handling practices, would you trust a financially motivated, publicly traded company to properly anonimize data?
That's cute, but partially false, and is the main reason animals eating other animals exists.

Obligate carnivores, as an example, eat other animals not as a shortcut to the diets of the other animals, but because the other animals' livers manufacture amino acids that the obligate carnivores' livers do not.
> Show me the chicken that's unhappy in a $750/mo 750sqft apartment?

There's a lot of chickens unhappy about $1600/month 200sqft apartments. (a real example from SF - https://www.smartcitiesdive.com/ex/sustainablecitiescollecti... )

Because that's the dystopian nightmare in SF, and to move jobs out of silicon valley to elsewhere, would be to export that same dystopia to more places.

We already see this in Michigan of all places. You can make a SF salary and pay $1600/month for a micro-apartment. Or you can take a 50% pay cut, to pay $800/month for ~200sqft micro-apartment. They are equally ridiculous and equally unaffordable, once you account for the currency/wage differences, despite the fact that we have no zoning restrictions in this town.

We obviously need more housing, and need to build more housing, but housing is inherently pollution-heavy. You can not build your way into affordability alone, because the act of new construction inherently generates more unaffordability. It alone can never solve it.

> The only reason (cheap apartments) doesn't exist in CA is because of NIMBYs and their ridiculous zoning policies.

No, that's only a tiny part. Zoning is a small reason, but not the primary one. The biggest reason CA apartments are expensive, is the financial pollution generated by the companies there.

If you built a brand new city in an empty cornfield somewhere, with no laws or zoning of any kind, it would be somewhat cheaper than San Francisco, but every single apartment would still cost ~$1100-$1600/month. Because most of that price is due to the financial pollution from the companies, not the zoning.
New weight loss product changes the face of dieting
You're in regular Firefox? Are you logged in? If you can work with me here: https://github.com/kickscondor/fraidycat/issues
I would really appreciate it!
>But on the other side, I feel that this is an echo chamber, considering the continuing growth of the company.

It may take a while for Amazon to lose its good will, but eventually people will realize it's not worth shopping on a website full of unvetted cheap garbage, even if it saves a dollar.

It costs a lot of time and effort to re-pack and return items. Even my parents are befuddled by Amazon's website now, where they have to carefully tip toe around a minefield of gibberish to make sure what they are buying is shipped and sold by Amazon.com. They say screw it, and just go to Target/Costco/Best Buy or any other decent website.
A lot of Silicon Valley tech companies are actively trying to hire remote engineers all over the US and the world. Market forces are doing the job better than a government initiative could.
At a broader level, federally protected speech in the US isn't absolute; the Supreme Court has ruled a number of times that restrictions can be placed on organizing protests, such as you can't protest in the middle of a busy freeway at rush hour blocking traffic and use "my right to protest is federally protected" as an excuse. There's more info here [1] (PDF warning; go to page 9).

More specifically to unionizing, employees are allowed to discuss unions but employers are allowed to place some restrictions on when/where such discussions can take place. From the NLRB [2]:

> Working time is for work, so your employer may maintain and enforce non-discriminatory rules limiting solicitation and distribution, except that your employer cannot prohibit you from talking about or soliciting for a union during non-work time, such as before or after work or during break times; or from distributing union literature during non-work time, in non-work areas, such as parking lots or break rooms.

1: https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/95-815.pdf

2: https://www.nlrb.gov/rights-we-protect/whats-law/employees/i...
Ask HN: What does your .bashrc file contain
For the past weeks i've gotten a muscle memory for the ll command. Because i'm on Mac OS, it's not avaialable by default, so i've added it to my .bashrc file.

This made me wonder what else i've been missing on.
>* It sounds like she lived more frugally than most people would find tolerable.

Sounds like an issue with most people.

>* She lived in a rent controlled apartment, meaning her rent was probably closer to free than to market rates for much of her life. Needless to say, this subsidy isn't available to young people today.

The subsidy is available via home purchase. Fixed-rate mortgage payments don't increase over time.
For many businesses that's not really possible. For your standard e-commerce website the majority of the data you have is what people are ordering. How do you end-to-end encrypt that? What about internal documents and memos? User names and email addresses (not as valuable as passwords but still useful if you join it against other data sets)?
Correct me if I’m wrong but this is the same for Lastpass on IOS. At least if LP does auto fill it’s never worked for me.

The keyboard shortcut to paste a password is better than autofill imo.