skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A lot of the data collected can't easily be counterfeited. We're talking mobile numbers (including those of friends you contact), IP addresses, usage patterns like when you use the devices and on which networks, etc.

Unless you have access to an infinite pool of IPs and mobile numbers and rotate at frequent but random interval (and get your friends to do so as well especially with their numbers) it's basically impossible.

Better just not use scummy apps and services. If they can't be bothered to respect your privacy then find something else which can. You might need to pay for it but at least your privacy is safer.
My work was mostly webdev, some front-end and back-end. So I’d get a project to do, and a deadline where applicable. He also really didn’t care how I did it, as long as the work got done. At first there was somewhat more briefing, before he knew my skillset, but as he learned how I worked he just trusted me to do the job.
Structure was very flat : quite a few projects worked by one person, and small teams 2-4 depending on the size or scope. When there was a specific skill we didn’t have, that task would be outsourced.
In general I guess he was just very good at optimizating for outcome.
China produces 95% of world's gallium, used in 5G base station chipsets
Mozilla needs to fork Chromium and Android and fix this privacy nightmare.

Or EU should grand couple of billions to someone to do it.

Privacy should be number one feature for every OS, and every browser.

Either that or we need laws to ban location access and web tracking altogether.
see lots of reviews lately on amazon for various products where people are complaining about counterfeits. stuff you wouldn't think would be worth counterfeiting
My mechanic likely doesn't understand the full complexity of the fluid dynamics involved in braking systems, but he's perfectly capable of changing pads, rotors and tires when they go bad.
>This means they make a lot less noise. A cheap movement can be heard across the room,

I laughed out loud as I can hear my alarm clock ticking 8ft away thunk, thunk, thunk, thunk quite loudly. You can actually hear it from the living room if the TV is off, perhaps I should look into something made a bit better.
You have terrible taste in music. I really hate people like you.
A little unsure of the original date this was published, but I looked through some Wayback captures and the oldest reference I could find was under “1999 News and Updates”.

https://web.archive.org/web/20001018085908/http://www.scottm...
You are picking out exceptions. The parent didn't say it's not possible to make money in these spaces, just that OSS is eating it up.
And desktop operating systems are in the small minority of all operating systems in use today.
The issue that I see is that he turned from software developer into content creator/blogger

If you plan to give up a corporate job, you should go all-in on software projects, since your main advantage is that you can devote 100% for focused development.
Thanks for posting those, they're really insightful

I think the whole premise of relying solely on Amazon Affiliate links might be the weakest link of the chain

> I received applications from over 30 writers, did paid trials with about 10 of them, and never managed to bring costs below $46 per article. There certainly are writers who work for $15 per article, but they churned out barely-intelligible garbage

Yup
The idea of working to please an anonymous promotion committee is quite depressing.

Why do this “pick me” dance when it’s completely within your control to get the job you want within a few weeks?

By far the path of least resistance is simply to get a job and the promotion elsewhere.

Or do something entrepreneurial like this guy and completely tie your skills and abilities to the rewards.

As a talented engineer at Google the last thing I would ever consider to improve my lot is spending years playing this game.
Cold medicine as art?
Do you have at least a small text description? How can it be free?

The last post was title "Sell/buy groceries (used/unused) from your neighbors with Pantry (prototype)" that makes more sense as a business model than "free".
This is fine if you want to protect against people cracking your Google account and looking at that data, but it's very naive to think Google themselves would actually stop collecting the data.

Their business relies on it. They'd still be collecting it and using it as a signal for ad-targeting among similar nasty things in a plausibly deniable, not immediately obvious way.
Solving Problems in JavaScript: Recursive vs. Iterative
This is a painful read, from the comfort of an armchair. The worst is that I even have no idea how an individual can help in such situations.
> Then buy the black ones for 1/5 of the price and the same exact feature set.

they don't have the same exact feature set, though. airpods just work, reliably. no fiddling, no repairing. No frustrating set up. That's what you're paying for. The extra 80% of effort for that last 20%. And for many people, it's worth it.
Bose. But being 2 years old there are much better devices out there if you’re looking to spend at the AirPod price point. However my earphones can now be picked up cheap if you don’t want to spend the earth.
You can have a useable vehicle for 5 years with a $10,000 upfront cost and $5,000 in maintenance. That’s something people need to operate in the US. Yes, a brand new Tesla is a status symbol just the same as $250 purely optional luxury items are.

If your question is “Doesn’t everyone have disposable income?” The answer is no.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United...
Agreed.

The site is always trying to get me to buy groceries and I'm like "no thanks, I like to see what I'm buying". When I buy potatoes weekly I might look at 10 bags before I find one that doesn't look like crap, spinach/kale/greens I look at the best buy dates because they need to last me a week until the next visit, peppers I don't want to see a single wrinkle on because I want them to be good for more than a day or two, if some green onions are already wilting I don't want them, bananas I want a bunch that is all green and a bunch that the bananas still have a decent amount of green so that I have bananas for the entire week. The bread I care about the date and the smell because sometimes bags fail at a seam or get cut and a good date can mean bread that is already starting to mold.

If I still ate meat regularly, it'd be the same sort of thing there. You can tell a lot by looking at a piece of chicken or red meat.
Long History of Human Violence Explains Why the Internet Causes So Much Chaos
The whole backrub/pagerank/backlink thing was from the 90's. Don't you suppose Google is weighting other things more highly in their search algorithm these days?
How about journalists stop telling us what we're doing wrong and what we should start doing/not doing because the journalist had some simple-minded eureka moment? GPS use is not an either/or thing where if you use GPS, you NEVER don't use GPS. These researchers who are finding atrophy in the hipposcampus due to less use need to ask "less use compared to what?" Compared to people who use it more? Congratulations for seeing the obvious. Less use compared to the way the hippocampus grew or atrophied in humans decades and centuries ago when they didn't use GPS and also didn't regularly travel vast distances or study maps to do so?
twitter - someone else's platitudes with additional useless commentary.
There's something very Her-esque (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1798709/) over the AirPods, at least when they were first released. There's something futuristic but also realistic about it. Can't really put my finger on it.

One of the features that I feel is glossed over very quickly is Live Listen[0], especially for an article about it being "a platform". For those that have family members with hearing loss they are a godsend in noisy environments like a cafe. Just put an iPhone with tons of processing power and an array of microphones on the table and let it filter out most of the noise and send it to the AirPods with impressive low latency. It's truly amazing, if you have AirPods and an iPhone you should try it. They outperform more professional solutions by miles. I have only tried it with AirPods, but I can only imagine how well it works with proper hearing aids that are tuned to the frequency range.

I wish they'd make an audio loop "bridge" of some sort for Live Listen, as hearing aids are expensive and available technology from government usually lags behind 10+ years.

[0] https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT209082
I don't think comparing TTK across genres makes much sense, since e.g. in a fighting game a single kill is an entire round of the game.

> When a fight takes longer, there are more opportunities for the higher skill player to increase their advantage over a lower skill player. [Therefore making the game more skillful]

I very much disagree. Letting your opponent get the drop on you is a major mistake. The game giving you opportunities to plaster over huge blunders easily does not make it more skillful.

In CS you have short time to kill, long time to reset, precisely to make positioning and game sense more important and to heavily punish whiffing. If a slightly better player in terms of mechanical skill could always just do a 180° and get the kill regardless of how poor their positioning was, you are clearly not increasing the skill gap of the game. Rather you end up with a CoD-style experience.

Similarly, the importance of a single kill in CS varies widely. It could be relatively inconsequential, or it could decide the round (even if it is the first kill in a 5v5).

> In a game like CS, because the time to kill is so fast, it only takes one single mistake by the better player and the worse player will win the encounter.

That's the point of the game's design. You can't and shouldn't expect raw mechanical skill to save you every single time if you get yourself into a bad situation. Sometimes it might, some bad situations are also very hard to avoid. But if you keep getting into bad situations w.r.t. to your opponent you are clearly not the better CS player. Similar to racing, if you get off the track in a corner, your mistake was seven corners before that.
One thing I recently learned: Talking about "impact" rather than "importance" makes prioritization easier.

Why?

"Importance" pushes you to think about less tangible value judgements, including anxieties that your brain wants to escape from thinking about. "How important is it to write a clear Definition of Done for a junior engineer?" -- "ummm...kinda ...very? (I am a good manager...right?)"

"Impact" pushes you to think about more tangble events, including risks that your brain can concretely imagine their cost. "What is the impact when you write a clear Definition of Done for a junior engineer?" -- "It prevents them from misunderstanding the goal of a task so they're less likely to go down a rabbit hole. It enables them to execute more quickly by strengthening thier brain's 'you're doing the right thing, keep doing' motivation signal. It spends an opportunity to teach them how to identify a clear Definition of Done. It spends some of my time."

Because the cost/benefit of a task's impact is more imaginable, it is easier to decide to spend more resources to do it right or to cleanly abandon the task.
This is the difference between an enthusiast and a professional.

The enthusiast can afford to learn the "deeper" stuff first, then move up.

The professional needs to know enough to ship a safe, stable, on time product.
Those rooms look like torture rooms and then that music.
Burning Man Organizers Sue U.S. Government to Recover Millions in Permit Fees
What's the total annual income of the App Store these days?
How is anyone going to find your software if you don't write about it?
Your reply has nothing to do with the article. Perhaps after reading the post your systemd hate will subdue some.
But a lot of them do a really bad job of it like linking to irrelevant sites multiple times even on a single page. This makes it fairly obvious a site has been hacked and severe de-ranking soon follows.

Those doing it in a clever way are few and far between and, it could be argued, if they are simply linking to relevant sites in a measured manner, who cares? The 'legitimate' links on many commercial sites are paid for one way or another anyway?

I agree it goes against the spirit of a supposedly neutral search service though.
> I am not sure why.

Thesis: a lot of conservative America have a bit of a thing for the iron wall.

Pitching it thus, as if Russia were to build its own "Great Wall of China", or perhaps putting them in the "North Korea Internet, LOL!" category, probably catches eyeballs.

Although it has to be said that there are other supposedly more free western nations that have done similar dodgy things with their Internet, and didn't quite get the hard treatment in media-at-scale, but rather more of a velvet glove... Yes, 5-eyes nation citizens, you might ought want to take a closer look at the Anglo plans for the Internet, they're not quite savoury ..
Well you're clearly no Swedish Social Democrat...
You can't. It's not your responsibility.
Blame the Pakistanis and their culture and their ignorance. Watch as Pakistani cowards say that's not what the country is like and that it's fake news.
Lost me at norm of y equals m...
> nuclear

That one is the kicker though. What do you think the support for this is amongst the extinction rebellion crowd and the likes of Greta "I see CO² with my naked eye"[1] Thunberg? This problem would be solved already if people were actually interested in solving it as opposed to politicking about it by doing things like demanding the end of economic growth in the west.

[1] https://www.afrinik.com/my-daughter-can-see-co2-with-the-nak...

> She can see carbon dioxide with the naked eye. She sees how it flows out of chimneys and changes the atmosphere in a landfill.
Asian economies such as Korea grew precisely due to government enforced industrialization programs. Protectionism is excellent for an economy's 'bootstrap' phase where you wish to create some sort of viable industry where none existed before. To make this long term tenable, you have to then slowly pull back and return to a more market based approach.
Note that these are suggestions...
I often switch on GPS on mute mode when driving a road I know, but not it's surroundings. Then when a road block appears I do not need to think where to go, which side to take when the road suddenly splits etc.

I needed to use that maybe 3 times in my life but it was great to know that I can make mistakes which will be corrected by the GPS
Japanese population is a little over 126 million. 500k is a roundoff error -- literally. In reality the population is not growing. The issue is more that the population demographics is moving upwards in age. The big place I see a problem is with the ageing farmer population. Also, the demands on the pensions system are going to peak. Living in Japan, I'm quite worried about the pension system. They already "lost" a whole bunch of records and asked people to provide proof of employment over their lifetime or risk losing benefits at employment. They've pushed retirement age from 60 to 65 and I reckon they'll push it further.

But it's all good. We'll have some pain and the rest of the world can learn from it. We all need to do this and it's better that there is at least one country that's going through it now. I expect scandals and hardship, but in the end this country will be better off for it -- like the world itself.
I don’t think players care about the architectural purity of your product.

Some baseline of performance is sufficient as long as you can deliver the proper experience, which is really the only thing they’re seeking in your game. If that same experience can be delivered MUCH more quickly and easier why would someone deny themselves and their users those benefits?

I understand there is nuance in this decision but it feels dangerous as a hard and fast rule. I think especially so when team size > 1-2 and common understanding becomes important.
> A set of Shure SE315s will blow AirPods Pro out of the water on sound quality

The internet really needs to get off it’s high horse about this. The fact is 99% of people can’t tell the difference.

Just like 99% of people don’t care about the headphone jack being removed. This is evident by the market mocking Apple and then following Apple when they realised that it’s true.
Hepatitis C kills more Americans than all other infectious diseases combined
The analogy is with mechanics who aren't perfectly capable of changing pads etc, because they keep trying to redesign the car to make the latest pads etc fit, even though this is a bad idea and doesn't work.
Interesting read! And this is exactly what I learned. On the other end of the spectrum I’ve worked at companies that gave me three jobs, and a manager constantly bugging me, switching goals, scope or priorities (often after a call with a client) . And while I could certainly do it, it wasn’t very pleasant and created a stressful environment.
Green lumber fallacy. You don't need to know much of anything about lumber and trees to be a good commodities trader.

Likewise, you don't need to know the exact algorithmic details of something if you're still achieving your desired outcomes.

If you're not getting the outcome you want, you need to dig deeper into the components you don't fully understand to get them to perform as expected.

Real life results are best judged on metrics one step removed from the work.
Yeah, if you keep your leetcode skills sharp and study to game the "design" interviews, you can get a job at a competing company instead of playing the depressing political game. As a bonus you'll make significantly more than internal promos.
The last sentence of the post shows that he has lost all hope of ever coming out of debt.

"In a few years, when my son is old enough, I may have to sell one of his kidneys as well,"
Perhaps bc Evan You is Chinese.
I just realised we just spent more on 5 days for a holiday rental over Christmas than this family received for selling 2 kidneys to try and escape their debt. It’s crushing to read stories like these. Surely there must be some sort of structural reform possible to “the way the world works” to prevent this absurd imbalance.
It was an allegory. A metaphor. A silly story.

Here is a true story. When I first started programming, we were told that professional companies developed software as follows. (Of course we were a scrappy timesharing startup, so we took shortcuts, but this is what we were told the pros did.)

• A systems analyst took business requirements and created a specification.

• A programmer took the specification and used it to draw flowcharts.

• A coder took the flowcharts and converted them into code in a particular programming language, hand-written on coding forms.

• A keypunch operator took the coding forms and punched the code onto cards.

Pop quiz! Who actually wrote the code: the programmer or the coder?
It'd be something like conjugate gradient, not sgd. Unless A itself is too big to fit in memory.
Yes, it is that much more difficult to blow through a billion dollars than a million. The fact that one moron managed to waste a vast sum of money to amuse himself isn't proof of anything other than one moron was stupid enough to do it.
I think one of the reasons the subject is difficult to understand actually lies beyond tech.

For someone not familiar with "move fast and break things" and the huge toxic part of the tech industry, it would be reasonable for them to expect that a high-profile company such as Facebook or Google is complying with all local laws & regulations and isn't acting in bad faith otherwise they would've be fined out of existence long ago. After all, we have regulations for things like food safety that mean you can buy any food item from a mainstream supermarket and be confident it's safe to eat, and there are severe penalties to ensure that remains the case and deter potential offenders.

It's totally reasonable for these people to not be suspicious when they're downloading a popular app that's been around for decades and used by everyone and not suspect bad faith or malice when the app asks for contacts or photos, because regulation is supposed to crack down on fraud and lies (which dark patterns are).

The problem is, of course, that the law hasn't caught up with tech and with all the corruption... I mean lobbying - around I don't think we'll even get there. If an individual lies and gets access to something they're not supposed to it's called fraud and there are real penalties for that, even more so if the fraud happens on a computer (and the definition of that is so loose even implied legitimate access to a web server could be argued to be "unauthorised access"). When Facebook lies to you regarding their usages of the data however, it's no longer fraud nor hacking, even though it fits the bill perfectly, including the "on a computer" part. This is the real problem.
My favorite hobby is studying history. There are still so many major mysteries. A person can make real discoveries, just with a kindle and search engine.

I've started reading Latin texts, so many of which are not translated, with alpheus reading tools. For instance, Descartes' first book has never been translated.

I'm so curious about the concept of harmony through history. Everyone talked about it, but it was also quite mysterious, wrapped up in esoteric mystery.

Shwep.Net is helps synthesize many sources for studying ancient philosophy.
Wow, this actually confirms my thoughts about my Columbia Omni-Tech, that thing seems like the least breathable jacket I've ever owned. Good thing it has pit zips. It's like a cold rain jacket.

There seems to be 2 distinct categories: some fabric is asymmetric when it comes to relative humidity, others stay constant (like Omni-Tech). The asymmetrics become more breathable as humidity increases. Schoeller WB-Formula starts off half as breathable as Omni-Tech at low humidity and at high humidity comes down to match. But you've also got Gore-Tex XCR, which is more breathable than O-T at even low humidity, and gets even more so as humidity increases.

I've had a Columbia 3-in-1 with a softshell liner that I've really loved. It can take about ¼" of rain, but isn't quite as warm as a fleece. I washed the liner a bunch, but never washed the shell (still looks new, waterproof AFAIK). I just bought myself a Marmot 3-in-1 for Christmas (unaware of all this research). Shell is apparently Membrain, which is both more and less breathable than Omni-Tech (less when dry, more when humid).

"Asymmetric" breathability fabrics, most->least breathable: Gore-Tex XCR, Entrant Dermizax, Gore-Tex, Membrain, Hydroseal, Sympatex, Conduit, Schoeller WB-Formula. All these are more breathable when humid (opposite probably not very useful).

"Symmetric" breathability fabric, most->least breathable: Expanded PTFE, EVENT, Schoeller Dryskin Extreme, Entrant GII XT Laminate, Nextec, Lowe Alpine Triplepoint, Omni-Tech.

The groups overlap, but symmetric fabrics are generally more breathable overall (especially when dry, but even still when humid). Interesting.
It may be related to the german legal concept of „Mitstörerhaftung“ which basically means that anyone who is contributing to a rights violation (like selling counterfeit goods) is liable for this. This can be a bit absurd (a shipping company transporting a sealed container which contains counterfeit goods they know nothing of is liable to at least stop doing so), but it may keep amazon on it‘s toes.
Rule of thumb: You should only include code that you could write yourself if you took the time. Otherwise you don't understand your own software.
Airpods pro do not have passive sound isolation. They are an open back design. That’s one of my biggest issues with them as that removes their usefulness in loud environments and removes the chance of resonance based bass.