skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I believe it was shutdown not because they didn't get a cut, but because they were the perfect boogeyman to create a large cut of other pies.

From 'im a do-gooder' message in campaign ads, to raising money from church groups - backpage was popular enough for just about everyone to have known about it, and many people likely to have an associate that actually uses it..

from Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart, and all of his free press coverage (free campaign money) - to others. I believe Kamalla Hariz, Marcha Blakbern, and others used the backpage boogeyman as a springboard to capture free press, free exposure, and drum up free campaign money.

Sadly many of those the used the victory lap of the shutdown got lots of exposure for the occurrence and the various roles they may have played - yet the same outlets that pushed those stories have been remaining silent on the exposure of the shady investigative work, and the truths of the case like showing that most the investigators knew backpage was actively helping them take out child workers.

It seems the political grandstanding and free capitol from the exposure and donations outweighed keeping a popular tool that was used by many investigators to separate the kids from the adults and the forced from the free willing.

The boogeyman in AZ in now porn in general and cell phones I think? Some kind of forced tax to unlock porn on your device, enforced by the phone companies?
Check out portfoliocharts.com
Howard Scott Warshaw did a postmortem talk @ GDC for Yars' Revenge, in it he speaks briefly about E.T. as well. I found it interesting, worth a listen.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aqH4k_OEqhY
> And it is not a placebo effect.

How do you know?
I believe he did do some technical work as a teenager, IIRC from the biographies of him that I've read. I don't know if that means he was an engineer, but he does have some technical work experience.
A side nitpick:

I find it surprising the author mentions "pre-imperial India" to mark the era when Buddha was alive. There is a couple thousand years of rich history between the life of Buddha and "pre-imperial India". I would really like the Western authors to stop using Imperialism as a bookmark, as if India had nothing else significant before.
Insteon is the closest thing to a successor to X10, and it still supports a lot of the old protocol. You can certainly setup an insteon system for basic stuff (Scenes, etc) without an Internet-connected hub at all.
FWIW I have the new 16 inch MBP and I like it a lot more than my 2015 rMBP. Touch ID is a thing you won't want to live without once you've had it on a laptop ;P
I've tried doing ear training a couple of times in my life and it has been always absolutely frustrating. All methods I've tried just ask repeatedly which interval/chord/note it is you are listening without actually having any sort of method on how to develop the skill on how to listen.

I'm trying again now with a new method which consists in singing the notes. In a couple of days I've got better results than weeks of Ear Master or other similar software. My hypothesis is that it works because when trying to imitate a pitch with your voices you a) have to listen closely to the pitch and b) you internalize some pitch "muscle memory".
> It's arguably the best workstation money can buy, with a forward-looking architecture that should satisfy any professional in need of massive performance

This seems like nonsense. It may be the best looking workstation, but money can buy more powerful workstations with high end Nvidia GPUs.
Good for them, I'm sure it's a nice shot in the arm. But jesus, it's not much, really. You certainly don't do open source to get rich.

25k is about 18 minutes of Fortnite revenue, if I've done the math right.
I would have said Wikipedia is a questionable source on "open source software projects", period.

The idea that Apache software projects are too obscure to include, while every single individual episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer has a detailed article, is pretty typical of the site.
> The only major conservative / anti-progressive argument on this topic I'd give credence to is that corporate power and influence and the resulting abuse of workers is a necessary evil to compete globally

I disagree -- France does well in terms of GDP per hour worked[0], and is in relative terms a worker's paradise.

On a more subjective note, I think this analysis misses the fact that automation is about to absolutely destroy the working class (if it's not already). The world's need for brute force blue-collar workers is shrinking and enabling people who might have done that work to aim for higher pursuits (which generally people only feel able to do when times are good) should be the goal of an economy with long term aspirations. There's a reason countries start with the economic zone model, but then seek to upskill their populace -- humans, no matter how little you pay them, cannot compete with efficient robots.

> Not to say that is an inevitability or even a correct interpretation, but it does lean heavily on the argument that a healthy, educated, rational, and free populace can compete with the export yields of wage slaves overdosing on drugs even if they aren't compelled to do work nobody wants to do for a price nobody wants to take. The question is if people wanting things enough to drive an economy over them needing things.

That argument doesn't seem to take into account that exports are varied and valued spectacularly diversely. Entertainment is one of America's largest exports and it is very much not a strictly productive endeavor to be entertained (of course you can argue that entertainment is required for productive work so people don't break down). Healthy, educated, rational, and free populaces are most of the time not competing with t-shirt producing sweat shops -- they are more often designing the t-shirts the sweat shops are making.

In addition to this, functioning purely free-market economies basically don't exist anywhere. The idea of a sanction against countries that exploit their workers would be unheard for a strictly economics-focused mindset but is very much possible today.

> Historically almost all wealth was built on exploitations - of land, of resources, and of people. What if preventing the exploitation and suffering of your fellows causes everyone to suffer in the long term from economic stagnation? Its a dystopic way to look at the world but given the major economic powerhouses of this and recent eras I just don't see the evidence that its entirely wrong.

This is true, but it's a spectrum -- in my opinion, aggressive exploitation simply speeds up growth, it is not necessarily a gating factor. I agree in that I think it's not necessarily wrong but still, if it's a spectrum then why don't we turn the dial back a little bit? There are externalized costs that we're ignoring by normalizing exploitation.

Also this constant worry of "economic stagnation" -- this is missing the forest for the trees again, it's worrying about GDP over the wellness of the people of a nation.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)...
The Field Guide to Tyranny
Openmoko sold 13000 phones, which is much more than "dozens." Commercial failure does not necessarily mean you can fit all the customers in a room.
Most interviews and interviewers are poor, meaning jump thru ten hoops, miss any and disqualified. Highest score wins.
For one thing, Tim didn't fire the "hardware leadership" (Dan Riccio?) who shipped a garbage keyboard for N years in a row.
I've heard the argument that criminalization fundamentally deprives a woman of the right to choose what to do with her body, which I'd consider a feminist argument.
Listen, you are entirely right, but in a backward-looking way. The entire industry is moving in the direction of lambdas/functions and containers. The value of OS support is racing toward irrelevancy.
He had really good taste, and he knew how to channel that into products. Perhaps that's not usually such an exceptional quality, but for Jobs it truly was.

He wasn't an engineer (for the most part), but he was a designer, of sorts. I don't think he was just "at the right place at the right time", and I don't think the iPod or iPhone would exist without him.

I say most of this based on the Bio, by the way. It seems we came out of that book with very different impressions.
The Tech of 'Terminator 2'
Good to hear!

I'll add that the only issues I came across were from a few users who didn't like the mobile client as well as Slack. I would chalk most of that up to them simply being used to Slack.

But I think Mattermost could still use a little bit more polish (as pretty much all software could) when it comes to the clients. I hope you guys don't lose focus on that. I would much rather have a progressively better user experience than one more widget integration that most won't use anyway.
I don't know if it's just T-Mobile doing that. I've never tried using AT&T, Verizon, or Sprint with a purely AOSP (only compiled using the instructions on Android's website, not also including other proprietary blobls) or with my Librem 5, so I don't know if this is a T-Mobile only thing, or if it's industry wide.
Fighting Facebook with Tech
How about we start ending this insane datapractices FB is running?

What if we poison all our data with irrelevant information so FB has a harder time figuring out who we are?

An example that comes to my mind is a browser extension that adds irrelevant browsing, uploads, likes etc, keeps a database of all the bull&*$t it added and again filters it over at my friends who use the same extension so they dont see all the "spam"

This is just a silly example but c'mon we're tech (and more) and not a governtment that doesnt understand sh!t.
I'm old enough to be covered by age discrimination laws and think I'm better than a lot of people at finding things, and I believe a key reason is that Google deliberately, and perhaps many other types of search accidentally, tries to turn every search into a few results from a single cluster. The only way you can find a different cluster a lot of times is by already knowing it exists, or knowing that the garbage cluster you get is garbage and then you can modify your search terms, or read additional pages of results.

What experience provides is not knowing everything about everything, but the meta-knowledge whether there is an answer out there, and whether you've found it yet. Inexperience results in stopping too soon in your search, either giving up or settling for something flawed.

Really, who can expect people to solve the halting problem fresh out of college?
the idea that he had any kind of empathy for anyone is frankly hilarious

As a counterpoint, he was a good neighbour [1]. The guy had some serious issues with the way he treated people, and he may have had a personality disorder, but it's a bit extreme to think he had no empathy for any other human being.

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/10/steve-j...

Edit: whoops! This was the wrong link. Here is the article I had in mind (it's been years since I read it and apparently there are multiple neighbour stories about Jobs):

https://patch.com/california/paloalto/my-neighbor-steve-jobs
Traditional "chaebol" companies are having trouble adapting to some of these changes.

It shocked a lot of people, inside and outside South Korea, when Hanjin Shipping was allowed to go bust. Not resold, reorganized, but immediate bankruptcy and liquidation. Management was expecting a bailout right up to the end. Ships were stuck all over the planet, and empty blue Hanjin containers piled up in ports.

That's when the chaebol realized the rules have changed.
It doesn't bother me, don't get me wrong, I'm just curious. You have to start somewhere! I am really excited to see both this and the Librem 5 get off the ground.
Nice! Krita is one of the Open Source art tools that I'm really bullish on right now.

I don't think it's at the same level of quality as its commercial competition yet, but it's not so bad, and it's getting progressively better, and it has a really nice community, and it's being pushed forward by actual artists.

Absent the way its growing, I might not be so bullish, but I feel pretty optimistic about Krita's future -- enough that I'm betting on it internally for games and art projects that I make, spending time to make sure I really understand its interface, donating money, thinking about ways to integrate it into other workflows -- much more than I'm betting on tools like MyPaint. Optimistic enough that I'm willing to make a full switch over to it instead of hopping into Windows or wrestling with Wine to get Clip Studio working.

Grants like this are great news, both because the influx of money is important, and because increased industry focus is good for pushing projects like this in the direction of being the kind of stable software that you can rely on industrially. The thing to be really optimistic about with Krita is that the right categories of people are betting on it and supporting it.

Krita is usable right now for what I need, some annoyances aside, and I think it's very possible that it could end up being just flat out better than its competition in the future. If any Open Source project is set up to follow Blender in the art world, it's Krita.
A Decade of ‘Unicorns’ Ends with a Little Less Magic
Explainability and Deep Learning
This.

Also, commit messages are sometimes the "documentation of last resort".

In my organization, putting comments in the code is frowned upon. "Comments are lies! The documentation is in the tests!"

But the tests don't lend themselves to _reasons_ behind why the code was written a certain way, why a given approach was taken (for example, we needed to re-write a Rails database migration in a somewhat contorted manner to avoid a deadlock that was occurring in production).

In such organizations, the git commit message are often the best place to warn future programmers of pitfalls: "don't even think of parallelizing these table updates—you'll get deadlocks!"

[edited for brevity]
K7TA ... got the call when I was in grad school in Tucson Arizona. But I don't get on the air much ... a little bit of CW on the low bands, just to keep my fist in order.
State of JavaScript 2019
I read it as related to the "limit Python to 1 million lines so it can be stable."
that article doesn't say anything about him being a good neighbor? all it says is that he kept a simple home. what kind of weird deification is it that there's an article about a guy walking around jobs house (occasionally seeing jobs himself) and in your mind that constitutes being a good neighbor.
Nothing beats the Cool Awesome Nerd factor of buying a Klein bottle from him.

https://www.kleinbottle.com/
Just read the article. Jobs had a pretty house, that's literally it. The writer never even met him.
Apple wouldn’t have been anywhere without Tim Cook when Jobs was CEO. He got Apple’s manufacturing and supply chain in order. Apple wouldn’t have been equipped to sell 50 million iPods during the typical Christmas quarter in its heyday.

Jobs never had the skillset to manufacturer for the mass market.
If someone says there was a lack of culture fit, it stings and certainly could be some type of illegal discrimination. But at the same time, it's necessarily true! Unless your culture is discriminating unfairly...
I don't care how much evidence you think you've found. I'm 40 and I've never had a pleasurable social interaction at a barber shop.
Also how did soldering the RAM in place “save them a few bucks on parts.”?
Repology Website Is Down
and sad...
> Right place at the right time. Twice. Three times if you count Pixar. Which you should.

> Maybe there's more to him.

That makes him an excellent manager. Which he was. Clearly he was a world class CEO.

What does that have to do with him being an engineer?
I read the CIO-level summary!

Woo hoo hoo!
Im portant.
> Either Hindi has diverged a whole lot from Sanskrit and the meaning have changed

Yes it changed significantly. That’s why philology exists. And also why languages with long existence are classified in different strata.
Not sure how to reconcile this with the fact that suicide rates in rural areas of the US far exceed suicide rates in urban areas. Do the availability of guns in rural areas really offset this effect that much?
> But it doesn't signify a new direction for Apple. It's the exception that proves the rule.

I hope the article is wrong on that and the 16'' MBP and the Mac Pro are actually a new direction for Apple.
There's no such thing as a "living wage". It's a political talking point and you can set the line wherever you want.

Higher min. wage increases costs and disproportionately affects smaller companies, leading to closures in every region, country, state and city where it happens. This is also why giant corporations like Walmart even support it since it clears out small local store competition.
Just for fun, here's another one:

import sys, threading
def r():
sys.stdin.buffer.read(1)
t = threading.Thread(target=r, daemon=True)
t.start()
I'll second this. They fixed everything that was wrong with the previous generation, and it's hardware I'd actually recommend now.

Catalina, on the other hand...
I bailed from using Evo when their password reset form was indistinguishable from a phishing attack. I guess it's time to give it another try.

I wonder how easy it'd be to reverse their API and make a mobile app less terrible than you describe. :P
> A Google query for "Snowden stole passwords" returns a lot of results.

And a Google query for "Fake Moon landing" returns a lot of results.
I'm sympathetic to the feeling in this blog post, but not the specific examples. It's not about cost-cutting, because Tim Cook's supply-chain wrangling has resulted in us getting nicer stuff while Apple pays less. In fact, I don't think Apple hardware has ever been as high-end in terms of technology and components. But high-end != good design.

Anyways, producing nice-looking stuff that doesn't work all that well has long been in the Apple DNA, I think. Anybody remember the circular Apple mouse? And who actually enjoyed using a Magic Mouse over, say, a Logitech mx518?
To put it in Sabremetrics terms, Jobs was a TTO (three true outcomes) guy. Strikeouts (Lisa), home runs (iPod and iPhone), and walks (not sure where this fits into the analogy but whatever).

Looking at the big picture, the strikeouts aren’t as bad as they look and the dingers more than up make up for it.
My brother is a carpenter and works with a lot of Latinos. He also does birdwatching as a hobby. Supposedly carpintero is also what they call woodpeckers.
Chromebooks are full laptops, with a full OS, running a full browser, windowing system, notification system, device drivers, network stack, etc.

You can even run Android apps, or linux native apps under chrome://settings.

You can edit that spreadsheet locally, just click on offline editing.

Sure when you click save it saves to the cloud, but that's about the largest difference between Chrome OS and Linux, they are running the same kernel after all.
Does this clause have any teeth?

If I want to work on OSS in my spare time, I'll do so under a pseudonym and won't bother to ask for permissions. If I choose to make a new AGPLv3 project on GitHub, I'll just do so. And if some lawyers decide to nail me, good luck.
I hope it’s not the case, but it wouldn’t surprise me to see this new hardware abandoned for five years now that the hard work has been done.

Despite incredible resources, Apple can’t multitask.
Not really, Balmer slashed R&D and only focused on short term profit, which isn't sustainable long term.

Missed major market opportunities:
Mobile computing
The Internet (servers, clients)
Cloud computing
League of Legends quickly gaining on traditional sports in American popularity
It's pretty insane.

Tech in general has so much money that is more or less 'wasted'. Just people throwing billions at useless startups in the hope that it grows big. I know wework wasn't a tech company, but it got invested in like it was one. If even a trickle of that money had gone into projects like blender or krita, it would make such big difference.

It's not exactly an apples to apples comparison, but it's still a thought that pops into my head from time to time.
In any team it's useful to have one skeptical Frenchman.
The problem in France is that your team is mostly made of skeptical Frenchmen (with maybe one "everything is awesome" American, but that's not enough to counter balance).
This idea sounds great, an anti facebook tool is just what the world needs.
This is really nice! Very clean design, and a great puzzle too.

Two small interface suggestions: first, allow starting a line on any square, not just one with a number (the selection would be canceled if it doesn't connect to a square with a number). This would make selecting lines where the number is in the middle a bit less annoying, requiring only one swipe instead of two. Second, speed up the between-puzzle display a little. I'm an American with a very short attention span, I don't have all day to look at puzzle names :)

I also found a solver on GitHub using Z3 that looks pretty small and readable, if anyone is curious: https://github.com/redfast00/LinjatSolver
That is true historically but I doubt that it is true necessarily. I mean I suspect that starting from what we now know it should be possible to reconstruct calculus (at least for all practical purposes) without reference to infinities or infinitesimals.

One argument in favor of this belief is that neither practical computations nor analytic intuition require actual infinitesimals.

The later, at least, has been my experience. I think I have a fairly decent practical intuition for calculus based on imagining dx becoming smaller and smaller until it's small enough, but I don't think my brain has any actual representation of "true infinitesimals" and my intuition breaks down completely if I try to imagine things like the relationship between the rational and irrational numbers. Maybe that's due to my intellectual limitations, but I wonder if it isn't because these concepts might be over-elaborate abstractions that don't really exist in our world.
13k is a rounding error. Apple sells that many iphones every 30 minutes. (I'm not kidding... they sell 217M iPhones a year = 594k a day = 24.9k/hr)
I don't know. I'm a recent Mac user (couldn't hold out any longer for an updated Surface Book) and the author makes some good points. My $4K 16" MBP is nice enough, but definitely doesn't "feel" like a $4K machine. Worse, Catalina has not been a great experience for me. I've had 3 reboots due to Kernel panic in the last few weeks and just today I had to hard reboot because Finder completely lost the plot and crashed hard when it couldn't connect to a mapped network drive from work (I was on my home network).

My previous Dell laptop + Windows 10 was more stable than my current MBP, which is quite concerning to me. I do like a lot of things about OSX but just as with Apple hardware, their focus on OSX and shipping a refined OS seems to be slipping.
Yeah, my point is that Apple should have added a prompt for that permission just like how they have a prompt for accessibility and such.
It disproportionately affects low-margin, low-productivity companies, not smaller ones.
While this is a very cool video, I don't think it demonstrates a Tesla valve that well. In this example, the flame moving isn't really the same thing as a fluid moving with the exception of the gas expansion within the tube that he mentions.

Instead, the flame basically does a BFS (to put it in programmer terms) of the tube instead of actually moving the fluid through the tube. It just also works out that the gas expanding pushes it in the right direction due to the design of the valve.
Yeah, HP Z4 or Z8 (or the Dell equivalents) seem to be used a lot in the film VFX industry, which at the high-end is mostly Linux...