skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've copied lines from a shell script into a makefile and it copied the leading spaces as well. I didn't really think about it and when I ran make I got a bunch of weird errors. I figured out what the problem was pretty much immediately. Overall this was just a minor annoyance for a minute or two, but it does happen. I'm not sure why people pretend that it doesn't.

I don't work with make much anymore (or Python or Haskell), but I've come to see the use of invisible characters to express structure as a mistake. It can make code real neat and tidy looking, but I'm not sure the trade off is worth it. In the past I've resorted to actually having my editor show whitespace symbols to make sure code that looks aligned actually is aligned.
Tangentially, I heard of a theory that some of the change in political landscape could be due to population life expectency increases and the ratio between young and old having diminished.

This is backed up by some research suggesting that people naturally become more conservative as they age.

Not saying that explains the UK elections, but your linked article reminded me of this theory.
How about the leak where they were debating killing it off?
>Is there not a difference between using your data for research...and selling it to a pharmaceutical company attempting to develop a commercial drug?

No...? Precluding companies from coming up with cures for diseases based on researching this data seems to defeat one of the major points of medical research.
Even if you don't live near one (there are only 25 locations in the country, including one in California which is well south of L.A.) the online prices are competitive, and the customer service is decent.
>It just so happens that it's very cheap to sway some voters.

You say this very matter-of-factly. Do you have any evidence to back that up? Could you isolate that audience? As someone that has run a lot of political and consumer ads over the last 10 years, I'd really like to figure out who those people I can get for 100k that I can't get for 81 million are.

Propaganda does work. Russian propaganda does not work nearly as well as Madison Avenue propaganda, and that's been shown for decades. I'll give the edge to the Madison Ave guys spending tens of millions, here, over the Russian troll farm and 100k.

>If Russia could get a particular energy bill passed with $10k of Facebook propaganda, it would do that

Sure. I don't believe it can, though, and nobody has provided evidence to the contrary. Attempts, sure, but no real success.

It is my belief that the US FBI had much more to do with swaying the 2016 election than Russia's $100k Facebook ad spend.
eBay never fell, you probably just stopped using it. It's still good, better than Amazon. You can see what you're buying and most of the time, where you're buying from (either in the listing, or when paying with Paypal). And the feedback system seems much better than Amazon.

I dunno, I always get what I want from eBay, and any issues are resolved quickly and fairly, while Amazon it's pay and pray :/

This is in the EU, btw.
Exactly, despite them working on commingling and counterfeits, I’m still super weary of ordering anything cosmetic on Amazon. Like, face serums or moisturizers. I’m weary of rubbing anything on my face that’s from Amazon.
RRE was great. I wasn't an aspiring academic but his writings offering advice to grad students looking ahead to an academic career were very interesting.
“Agile” can be code for bad software
No it doesn't. Because there are other studies that back up the causal relationship. He's taken one that shows a clear correlation and explained why that's not enough to craft policy from, and that's true. But studies that show cross time correlation between homicide and gun ownership also exist.

It might not be the only cause, but it being a cause makes sense: another poster showed a news story of a man who had killed 3 black kids who were trying to break into his house. Had he not had a gun, it's unlikely anyone would have died (most home intrusions, even with armed assailants, don't end up killing anyone). Guns provide means for homicide that basically no other tool provides.
Tiger Direct is a good option as well http://tigerdirect.com/
Original post in Russian:
https://bash.im/quote/436725
Cables however is outright offensive; they operate like an airport - everything is $25 to $40
No. Just no. She absolutely violated what her job was.
.ONESHELL is a huge help, and replacing the recipe tab is very interesting. Great post!
these people get income from capital gains or take loans against their assets. even very rich people try hard not to spend their principal.
> All they'd need to do is have some prominent part of the product description (say the product name) be unmodifiable without review and approval by Amazon

It's more trivial than that -- the product physical dimensions and weight.

Amazon, the store, may have no idea about the description or product specifics.

But you think Amazon, the logistics company, doesn't know exactly everything needed for shipping and warehousing an item?
According to Wikipedia, the Air Force base was created from part of a former Wright Bros air field, and chosen due to the area's existing aviation suppliers/talent. That seems meritorious to me

Cool o-ring non-sequitur!
Yes, also the browser can know if a site should be HTTPS through a https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/St... header, which can be preloaded in some browsers.
A ton of finance jobs moved out of NYC to Charlotte after 9/11.
Very cool, thanks for sharing! Seems like a decent quality of living, definitely higher density than I was imagining, but it could foster community and lead to more efficiency than all single family homes.
That fallacy sunk the Desertron after many years of cost overruns...
You reap what you sow. Google wanted to be a fresh leftist corporation, now they have to deal with it.
iCal Weather Forecast on iPhone Calendar
I think google builds stuff in a way where it depends on the google stack. That makes it harder to spin off or sell, as you'd basically have to re-write it.
Odoo grabs $90M to sell more SMEs on its business app suite
PBS stations are finally moving to online TV services
"Many areas". I just got gigabit through ATT after years of waiting, and Sonic will be my 2nd gigabit provider in.. a few months. But I live <2mi from Facebook.

My in-laws live a couple of blocks from Stanford, and they've got grandfathered SBC DSL at like 6 down and 0.5 up. You can't even ORDER DSL at their house anymore through ATT, they just begrudgingly support it (sort of).

Atherton started their own fiber network just to solve for this problem.

There's plenty of money and demand for good internet in the bay area. The regulatory environment is killing it, not lack of demand or money.
What's preventing a health insurance company from buying 23andMe and doing what they want with the data? (i.e., reducing costs by denying coverage...)
Yes, it is like eBay in the sense that you really have no idea what you might actually get. However, Amazon still has an excellent return/refund policy, which in some cases makes up for the inventory issues.
I don't think you quite appreciate how much (some) companies (including startups) spend on public clouds.
Okay for all the people that are talking about how great this is, try this one.

What if it turns out a company that they sold all of their data to was later contracted by a government to develop biological weapons? And what if they were suddenly able to target those weapons at specific populations because of all the DNA data they had?

Is it still great that they can do this?

EDIT: Here is a concrete hypothetical for people that pretend they don't understand what I am talking about...

Imagine that [oppressive communist superpower] decided that they were tired of all the criticism they get for their treatment of their [minority Turkic ethnic group originating from and culturally affiliated with the general region of Central and East Asia] population. Rather than overtly mistreat them, they (via third-party contractors) go to the DNA database and find out that members of that population typically share a vulnerability to a dangerous strain of flu to which the general population has a resistance.

Rather than overtly oppress them in camps, they could now just custom tailor diseases to handle the "problem" for them, and not have to suffer the PR backlash.
If we spent some time I bet we could come up with a laser gyros small and affordable enough for phones or at least small navigation units. The bad part would be having to align your INS every day or two. Or if it restarts...
I know you said that in jest, but in all seriousness, I think search and ads will definitely be around since they are the #1 player and making boatloads of money from search and ads.

Google seems to have a tendency to shut down products that meet the following criteria:

[1] Free products that could have millions or billions of users, but no revenue or not enough revenue to justify a team working on it
[2] Free or paid products in which Google is NOT #1

I am as shocked as everyone else that Google would consider shutting down GCP if it's not #2 by 2023. I would have thought they would treat enterprise business very differently from their consumer business ... but I guess not.

I am also extremely skeptical they'll be able to make it to #2 over the next 4 years. So I guess we might as well say goodbye to GCP at this point.
I wish Teamviewer has a small business pricing model. I love their product. However, I only have ~ 70 clients I need to support at a 501c3 school. Their cost are still too high for us.
Unix50th – Run Ancient Unixes in Browser
The average tenure is short not because people are getting fired for underperforming. It is short because 1) a lot of people get hired with massive YoY growth even for their size, and 2) people leave to earn even more at other companies in which case they’re still getting the compensations discussed here.
I never relinquish ownership -- that's nonnegotiable for me. The concession I'm talking about here is that the contract specifies that I retain ownership and copyright, but I commit to offering my employer the option to exclusively license it from me for a limited period of time. What the limit should be is open for negotiation, although I prefer that the limit isn't specified in the employment contract, but that it gets negotiated should the employer actually want the license.

When the exclusive period is up, that doesn't mean the license is inoperative, only that I am free to license it to others as well.

Note that when I say "I" here, I really mean my attorney. These sorts of things can be tricky, and I am no lawyer. Also, it's very hard to make this sort of thing foolproof -- if an employer wants to screw me, there are a few ways that they could.
What is the monthly budget of the average student? I would certainly guess under $2k.
I don't know the full maths behind it, but the most important aspect is that you can only perform one measurement on the superposition state - after your first measurement, the particle acquires a definite state, and any subsequent measurements are guaranteed to show that same state. If you are the first one to measure the state of any of the pair of entangled particles, your measurement will cause both particles to take on a definite state.

But even if you are the second one to do the measurement, and the particle has already acquired the definite state because of the other measurement, you can't tell that your measurement result was already guaranteed, since you can't perform another one on the same state to compute the distribution.
Sounds like being third is not profitable for them though.
> What really drives me nuts is when the same person shits on checked exceptions and then advocates for using a monadic return value. They're completely isomorphic. The only difference is in how it reads.

Is that true? I was under the impression that annotating a certain type of exception being thrown doesn't prevent other (i.e. unchecked) exception types from being thrown from a method. If that's true, then that's a pretty significant different between monadic returns and checked exceptions; in the former case, returning an unknown error type leads to a compiler error, but in the latter, it leads to a crash at runtime.
After this leak they should probably go ahead and turn it off.
The analysis from the Gartner Magic Quadrant circa July 2019, states some of it's concerns/cautions with regards to cloud based offerings from Alibaba v Google, which not only highlights how far ahead the top two contenders really are in the race, but also set to continue their meteoric rise.

"Alibaba Cloud earns 90% of its revenue in China and has not appreciably grown its enterprise customer base outside of China. Alibaba has limited capabilities in terms of an MSP ecosystem, third-party enterprise software integration and operational tools; and small global field teams limit adoption outside of China."

"Google demonstrates an immaturity of process and procedures when dealing with enterprise accounts, which can make the company difficult to transact with at times. This can be attributed to its nascent focus on the enterprise market. The immaturity of process is most pronounced in areas such as contract negotiation, discounting, independent software vendor (ISV) licensing, integration with enterprise systems and support."
Sellers are responsible, so Amazon is not at fault.
He meant it was stupid that Google let itself gain this reputation; it was easily avoidable
>Indeed it doesn't, but the Born rule is much smaller and simpler than the notion of collapse that other approaches rely on.

First, not all of the other approaches have a collapse. e.g. Bohm and a few lesser known others don't have it. Second, it's not clear Born is 'smaller and simpler' than the collapse of some other interpretations. e.g. in QBism collapse arises naturally from the theory and it would be weird if collapse didn't happen.

" This post doesn't seem to understand many-worlds...
anything else you might measure with obeys the normal rules of physics"

Her point is that what MWI tries to derive everything from the Schrödinger equation alone, but it still needs to solve its equivalent of the measurement problem (why can we only get certain results on the evolution of this branch?), but that can't be done since Schrödinger is linear and the equivalent problem is not.
It's literally an internal tool for google employees to popup informational or warning messages on a per-site basis. The ends was exactly what the freaking tool was built for.
Being frugal and saving everything for 30 healthier years of your life to be able to spend money only when your body seriously starts to fail you.

I’m not sure why people see that an attractive way of spending their life.
Amazon forgot that their core value proposition was shopping experience, not price or shipping speed.

And they've managed to improve the latter while ignoring the former.
I can't be happier to see amazon struggle to keep their marketplace clean. It's the beginning of the downfall.
They thought they could just be a logistic company while eating up all the margin, profiting from defenceless sellers. I guess they got totally outsmarted.

Can't keep a marketplace at the same level of standard as a direct seller. Selling millions of products doesn't seem to scale well. Worked for books, but even there, opening the door to seller accounts flooded the lists with copies, a ruin for publishers who touched the devil rather than staying away from it.

I like amazon for many things they do well, but the truth is that they were never profitable with their previous business model. Now they've been turning directions to make a profit, it's the snowball to their death.
I mean, it's pretty easy to distinguish marketplace listings from normal ones. You can even filter by that criteria.

On Newegg and Amazon.
CS is already in the realm of unsustainable hours: crunch times that last for months; "free time projects" to get hired; everyone encouraged to have side hustle start ups, freelancing, or consulting work. And this is all doubly so for anything FAANG or FAANG adjacent.

As for unsustainable competition like medicine, what do you think the needlessly ridiculous hurdles are for interviews (whiteboarding, regurgitating interview specific algorithmic questions that most people don't need to deal with outside of their CS courses, in vogue requirements that don't necessarily match job duties, etc). And, medicine is a bad comparison, due to it being in the realm of forced scarcity; enrollment caps for medical practitioner programs create a bottleneck in the pipeline that hurts the system (so those only motivated by money don't even make it through regularly - you at least need the study skills and interest to push through the hours needed to get past the various gates in the programs).

Just from my experience: Dev Ops for most companies doesn't need K8 clusters, running Docker instances, on your cloud host of choice, autobuilding through a cloud CI that has autohooks into your company's private GIT repos; no, they just need something, __anything__ that will provide them good enough uptime to keep their current customers and to gain new ones; and sometimes all they need is someone with a bit of domain knowledge that has strong computer skills so that their marketing department isn't also their IT department. Data Science for most companies isn't the newest deep learning algorithms but simple ANOVA, linear regressions, and decision trees to gain basic insights that they haven't had the resources to explore yet; and most of the time that's going to be on Finance, Accounting, and HR data (since your intake and output in dollars is the big quantifier for most decisions).

Lastly, both PG and Thiel's thesis statements in these blogs are more about leading edge creators, not Bob the junior software engineer at Widget Corp; and doesn't apply to even most of the people on HN (no matter how much each of us thinks it does).
Yikes. Seriously making me question my initiatives as well.
How we built a real-time web app with Django Channels
Yep, a couple. First one, if the mum eats anything spicy, it gets passed on through the milk and the kid gets colicky. Secondly, one of ours has a milk protein allergy. If the mum drinks cow's milk, the baby gets nasty nappy rash. Both completely repeatable, and tried enough times to go beyond anecdata (imnsho).
As owner of the 2s, its a pitty how bad the product is acutally made. The software is so poor, there's been a bug for years, which leads to the mouse forgetting its programmed buttons when connected via bluetooth.
Be sure to add it to the list [1] when they do.

[1] - https://killedbygoogle.com/
I suppose you're that much less poorer.

In any case, you have something like 30 grands on hand, which you wouldn't have otherwise. That's cash down on a house.
Do or die
Even if that is true, there is clearly a trust problem with journalism, and the list of "well-respected" publications is dwindling, and there's no real way to audit whether they are trustworthy. I don't support the type of government regulation the OP proposes, but I do like the transparency ideas.
Not inaccurate:

> The original AWB proposals were sane and straightforward: they intended to regulate any semi-automatic long gun with a detachable magazine.
I recently bought $1.6k worth of computer parts from amazon and they were all fine. But I only purchased directly through amazon/manufacturers and only selected completely new items.

I’ve gotten shitty stuff before but it’s always FBA. So I just avoid that now and I have no complaints (other than the fact that very few things I actually buy arrive in 2 days)
I knew Phil slightly when I was at the University of Maryland. I think we had a physics class together. I remember him as being quite smart. I hope he is well and happy.
> Azure’s technology stack is dreadful.

Can you describe what you are referring to here?

I've only used AWS a bit but it's been littered with WTFs.
Senior Deep Learning Engineer Simbe Robotics in South SF
Simbe Robotics is building Tally, an autonomous mobile robot for the world's retail industry.

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* Fast Company, Top 10 Most Innovative Robotics Companies
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Please don't personally attack her; it's unproductive and irrelevant.
Tips to Teach Your Child How to Read
> if you don't, and you need a job else you might not make your next rent payment, maybe you can't be so picky.

Yes. Early in my career, I had been in this situation a couple of times. What I did then (and would do again) is to suspend any work on such private projects entirely until I can find a job with a more reasonable employer.
In case anyone else wonders what 'borg' is:

"Our infrastructure is containerized, using a cluster management system called Borg."

I was hoping they had some predictable, indexed build for borg backup[1].

[1] https://www.stavros.io/posts/holy-grail-backups/
The irony is... you know what Amazon's still amazing for?

Books.

They should spin off the retail company and keep books + AWS.
Perhaps that's true for a startup still trying to prove their concept, but it might not for one that has achieved product/market fit. "Hybrid cloud" is starting to get traction for large enterprises adopting the cloud [1]. They're going from on-premise in their own data centers to colocating at internet exchange data centers, which act as on-ramps to the cloud oligopoly.

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-12-03/amazon-tu...
This shows why fake information is so powerful. No wonder it's used in politics.
Admittedly yes, add to the fact it's behind a subscription-wall for me made me question the content. I will research theinformation.com more.
I worked with GCP on a small (<6 weeks) project last year and the experience left me with a bad taste. Their reps were fairly condescending, questioned my requests regularly, over-engineered what was a fairly straight-forward ask (twice in a week updates, for a 6 week project) where the specs were clearly laid out at the beginning. I then realized that the people who noted the specs and the people who actually had to work on it had not spoken to each other at all so I had to explain the entire ask all over again.

Somewhere down the line, they came back to me to let me know that I had not given them clear instructions and what I had asked was impossible. In the meanwhile, an intern in my team had got the entire solution up-and-running on a small, self-hosted containerized service. I showed them and they mumble about something to be fixed and how they'll get back to me. All in all, a complete waste of time, resources and bandwidth. I am glad it was for just six weeks and in hindsight, I'm happy I didn't get the rest of my team involved in it.

We have worked with Azure since then and I am super impressed with their professionalism. There are hiccups but the understanding I now hold is this - Google (probably still) builds great consumer products but have zero clue on how to work with enterprises while it appears to be the opposite with Microsoft. Their razor-sharp and sole focus on enterprise appears to help them excel instead of having a diffused, unclear strategy that is Google's currently.
I don't think software engineering is still going to be a great career in 5 years but it might be alright, although I don't think it'll matter in 10 years. I think it's important to be a generalist, don't put your eggs in one basket.
I was talking specifically about using nuclear to electrify transcontinental lines in the US. Those routes have sections hundreds of kilometers long that are basically desolate.