skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> the entire company trends towards peak levels of procrastination, doing literally anything and everything to avoid the unspeakable horror of having to write a few paragraphs of text. ;-)

the entire company trends towards peak levels of procrastination, doing literally anything and everything to avoid the unspeakable horror of having to write a few paragraphs of BS marketing speak ads for their fellow employees

there, fixed that for ya.

I hate perf! All want to say is Jill does great work, Joe does ok work. Bill might need to work on something else has he doesn't seem into it.

Instead I'm told to write several paragraphs of ad copy trying to make unique and interesting sentences that don't sound the same but basically all say the same thing "Jane does good work". They want specifics like

"Vlad's work on the ABC protocol really took things to the next level. If it had not been for his tireless effort on the ABC protocol discussion list it's likely a different spec would have been ratified and we'd all be stuck with 6 months more work in our implementation."

Now (1) I didn't actually know that because I was head down working on my own stuff so I had to go spend time 30 minutes looking that shit up and (2) That's one out of 6 paragraphs, and everyone better sound completely unique like it was meant to be presented in a magazine.

And, when it's all done it was worthless. What I wanted to write

"Vlad's great, he does good work and I like working with him"

Is all they really wanted to here but the "process" is instead a huge waste of time for everyone.
Russia: ianal and giving advices is a “bear’s service” (making it only worse for you), but I can share my knowledge on interacting with the police.

First thing is we here don’t have many guns and the status quo it’s not a crime to touch or bad manner the policeman (while not recommended, they can turn it against you easily at will). Second thing is you usually want to know what the case really is, and what they know and think in general, so “remaining silent” may play against you. How it works: you get a sudden call, “hey wruza it’s you? Uhm maybe not, who’s asking? It’s detective Borisov, can you please meet me at my office here I have questions”. That’s it. You don’t get more info over the phone and if you ignore, you may get in a unknown trouble, even if they decide to not force you later in their office (it is not a crime to not go there, but they can give you a free mandatory ride if necessary). If you ignore or “remain silent” from the doorstep, you’re simply playing a blind hand against something serious. You’re innocent until guilty, so you better collect/ensure your own evidence, since it tends to decay with time.

Fighting and resisting (injuring even slightly) the police is a crime, but chances to get shot are minuscle compared to US. Gun rules are strict for them too, and even in a dangerous situation they don’t shoot an entire fucking clip into you, as youtube usually shows for US. YT search for “Полиция застрелила” (graphic content warning). It is usually few minutes of open and/or armed aggression against a cop before he decides to pull a gun. Each shot is a hard paperwork and a risk of losing their job or freedom.

Another big difference is that documents and witnessing is everything, words are nothing. You have to be damn sure that the protocol contains your words as you said it and as they asked, not rephrased or manipulated. Having a bad memory doesn’t count as a lie or justice/investigation obstruction, but a judge may find it strange that you recall everything except that one day or event.
Show HN: JavaScript Bitfield
> We're getting further and further away from everyday experience, and so more and more of the fundamentals of reality have to be understood from mathematical first principles rather than everyday intuition.

How much of that is an insistence on thinking of things in terms of fundamental particles and definitive properties instead of fields and packets of energy? I guess the question is that what the mathematical models are really about, and whether we're just having a hard time shrugging off Greek atomism and 19th century materialism when it comes to intuition?

Intuition could be built on top of a solid understanding of fields, backed by the math. The difficult part is connecting that to the classical world of our size that we experience.
Children are the future, unless we stop them today.
Show HN: Chrome extension to “listen to-what-you-want-to-read”
TL;DR : Listen to what you want to read

Chrome Extension URL : https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/running-commentary/hlkolgejaenicoeckonajgnajfmafodp

Developer Story:
Often, especially in the office hours, the tab switch on the browser is inevitable when you want to follow a live feed or a sports text commentary. This browser extension will read the live feed for you so that you continue the work. By reading out every new feed on your favorite websites, let the "scores-follow-you" instead of "you-following-scores". You can even listen to the part of a blog or full blog (a static content) by selecting the portion of the web element you are interested to read.

Motivation: Listen to a live text feed (commentary, chat) from your favorite website instead of reading.

P.S: I accidentally submitted the test version (to share with beta users) for review and hence some Grammar mistakes, please ignore. The newer version is under review.
Show HN: PRHero is a better UI for pull requests
I was actually wondering with all these new languages like zig, Odin and v are there any that produce dependency free binaries.

I've done some work in rust, c++, and nim before. But looking at some of the comments here and rethinking the pros and cons it seems a fully self contained binary might be more trouble than it's worth and some dependency is fine as long as an easy to use packaging and deployment process is found.

Sorry the question was a bit vague. I don't think I explained well what I was looking for.
Well, they can’t because they usually don’t really try.
Most likely they have outsourced years ago and lost a lot of competency along the way.
They have invested heavily on in really crappy software and solving this with something like RPA seems to me like introducing a ginormous footgun/perpetual roadblock.
That RPA is not going anywhere soon... Or will it be replaced by the billion dollar, just a bit late, “phoenix project”? The ONE platform that promises speed and agility? That one? :)
I get what you're saying and I'm sympathetic to it— a lot of the HN user base is outside the USA. I think there should be more differentiation of USA-specific content in titles and such.

But I think the assumption of YCombinator and HN is that since so much of what is under discussion here is SV related, then readers should assume it's USA-specific unless stated otherwise.
> You'd intuitively assume that agents become more rational the farther up the ladder you go, but this seems like a testament to the contrary.

This is a well known bet from Warren Buffett, but you should not take conclusions without really understanding what the bet is about, and its underlying assumptions.

- The first assumption is that you're in for 10 years, this is the duration of the bet.

- The second assumption is that you don't need that money during the whole duration of the bet.

Why are these assumptions important? Because different investors have different risk profiles.

If you are in your twenties, saving for your retirement, then you should definitely follow Buffett's advice: just "buy the market" (S&P, Russel, whatever low expense ratio ETF or index fund tracking these will do).

This is because the longer horizon you have on an investment, the higher the volatility you can afford. It will always average out after a while.

Imagine now you have a different risk profile:

- You are now in your late fifties and expect to retire in ~5 years;

- You are an insurance company and may have to withdraw from your portfolio at any time to cover for expenses of your clients;

- You are an income investor and expect to live from the interests of your portfolio;

Would you be well advised to invest in an equity index? Definitely no! The volatility will crush you at the worst time, and you cannot afford to wait 5/6 years for the market to catchup.

In these scenarios (and there are plenty of them) what you want is diversification. You can accept to have less performance, in exchange for less volatility; so that once you sum all your different, uncorrelated portfolios, you have something with the risk profile that you can afford.

On a more local scale, you can apply this idea intra-portfolio. This is called "minimum variance" optimization.

Now there are a lot of things you can do to tailor your portfolio to your preferred risk profile. Traditional literature (e.g. "The Smart Investor") will advise you to buy some investment grade bonds, since they are almost anti-correlated to equities. You could also buy some real-estate, that will provide you cover during recession or very high inflation. etc, etc, etc.

What I want to emphasize here is that you cannot just look at the performance of a fund and decide whether it's a good or bad investment. If it exists, it means someone, somewhere, has a need for such investment, because it fits well with its current portfolio.

> He explained that he understood that any strategy was likely to have runs of poor performance, and his idea whenever it happened was to "swap" to a better performing strategy which was having a good run at the same time.

That's called "market timing", it's the unicorn of alpha combination. You will find multiple papers on internet explaining you why this is incredibly hard to do, and "beating the 1/n" is almost never possible.
"Inequality" here clearly does not refer to the idea that diversity of skills or circumstance (circumstance considered above a certain baseline) should be eradicated[0] - of course, they cannot be, as you point out. However, both warlordism and human sacrifice also had their uses within the societies that used them (or they would not have emerged as cultural phenomena). The fact of a positive (such as literature or art) obviously does not outweigh whatever negatives there may be - after all, it is possible to create an artistic threatening letter, or artistic child pornography. But we are justified in prohibiting both of these regardless of their artistic merit.

People having different qualities and experiences is a positive. That inequality is generally agreed upon to be good. People living in poverty in first world nations which hosts billionaires is generally agreed upon to be bad.

[0] If you don't believe me, here is a quote from a famous Russian who advocated against inequality, dated 1914. Your objection was replied to more than one hundred years ago: "It goes without saying that in this respect men are not equal. No sensible person and no socialist forgets this. But this kind of equality has nothing whatever to do with socialism. [...] he would find there a special section explaining the absurdity of imagining that economic equality means anything else than the abolition of classes."
There is a downvote penalty to a bad question, but no cost to the downvoter (unlike with downvoting answers)

https://stackoverflow.blog/2011/06/13/optimizing-for-pearls-...

It was an unpopular decision, partly because it could lead to people downvoting questions trivially. But there was user trust at the time, and the main issue was low quality questions.

A few years later, they reincreased the question bonus to +10 but never removed the downvote cost, but I think they should have done the opposite.
Java and Android Heap Dump Analyzer
Yeah but if you're being pulled over for illegitimate reasons none of that technically applies.
If it goes to court and it's your word against the police's then you are at a potential disadvantage, unless you run into a jury of your fellow proletariat.
Newcastle tech firm scores $28m from Silicon Valley giant
You have to understand, much of he law that pertains to using a motor vehicle in the US is a pretense to legitimize traffic stops, which are then used for some other purpose (mostly busting drivers for more serious crimes, or else extracting fines from out-of-towners/minorities).
"A picture is worth a thousand words..." When doing presentations or writing, I make a lot of effort to visualize what I'm trying to communicate, as it really helps making sense of all the words.

I work for a low-code, no-code vendor. We usually approach new features by first defining a DSL for a need, and than have one or more visual editors for these DSL. Every part of your application is still customizable (Java, typescript, react widgets, etc), or you can just call a microservice built in another stack.
Eliminating inequality is a fool's game, unless you really want to bulldoze the high spots and Harrison Bergeron the best.

And then the commissars who define the inequalities and dole out the spoils feast.
> Because whenever a Unicode and a non-Unicode string had to be combined, it used ASCII as the default encoding to converge them.

They could have just changed the default encoding to utf8. (For those too lazy to configure their Python properly.)

There, problem solved - and no need for a breaking Python 3.
Scientists Create ‘Living’ Robots Out of Frog Cells
If you're using powershell, wget is just an alias! Install ps6 (core?) and it's much nicer.
> The locales are provided by LANG and other locate variables

Which is absolutely not what you want when, say, opening your own data files. Even when opening the user’s files it’s likely not what you want.

> you can also specify …

And what I’m saying is this is not a “can also” it’s a “must”. Not doing so will bite you in the ass, because “whatever random garbage is on the machine” is really not what you want a default to be.
Romania, December 2019: two trains collide almost 50 injured.

And what is more monitored and tracked than airplanes? December 2019: "Wizz Air A320 within seconds of head on collision with an Air Europa Express flight over Spain"
Saying the company interface is encrypted so it's safe shows how effective this attack can be. One of the attacks would present you with a login box. You thin this is plaid and it is encrypted so it's safe so you enter your username/password. It turns out to be a different third party. Not to worry the hacker interface is encrypted as well. Another attack surface opened up involves data breaches at plaid where company employee dumps access to everyone.

It is probably the one thing you can do today that will at some point cause you lose money from your bank account.

It is not even paranoid. It's a bad idea to leave your bank access codes with someone else.

The less people understand how things work the more likely they are to trust it. This just opens up a new avenue for exploitation.
TIL there are reactionary hole digging experts.

https://www.motor1.com/news/313750/top-gear-hole-digging-con...

>"I was almost physically sick watching this last night," said Mark Stevens, chartered safety and health practitioner at The Building Safety Group. "In fact, I had to turn over straight away I couldn’t watch it anymore."
The best we can do as society is to offer equal opportunity at success. Success is multifold: physical, mental and economic health jump to mind.

Beyond opportunity equalized, an equitable society should bestow success proportional to the ambitious, persistent hard-working individuals. That might be imperfect, as a few statistical outliers who tend to have outsized innate advantages (Einstein, Ramanujam & Usain Bolt for instance) are likely to be more successful, but that's the most equitable design possible, within the bounds of reality, including evolution - where the fitter tend to survive better
Making an AI-Generated Recipe, “Taco Soup Soup”
You're pretty lucky, I was held at gunpoint for a bit because I was in the vicinity of some reported gunshots many years ago.
>we were just smoking weed and drinking tho and lucked out with 1/2 the cops
Don't forget MAP_GROWSDOWN

> MAP_GROWSDOWN

> This flag is used for stacks. It indicates to the kernel virtual memory system that the mapping should extend downward in memory. The return address is one page lower than the memory area that is actually created in the process's virtual address space. Touching an address in the "guard" page below the mapping will cause the mapping to grow by a page. This growth can be repeated until the mapping grows to within a page of the high end of the next lower mapping, at which point touching the "guard" page will result in a SIGSEGV signal.
Not sure about full time, but a lot of startups do it, and sometimes there's a need to access the data of something with a login which does not have a public API.
Yes it is a common optimization, however it is not a requirement for Common Lisp standard compliance, like it happens with Scheme.
Don’t let them in without a warrant, but perhaps don’t even open the door. A friend of mine had a noise complaint called in on him. They just didn’t open the door when the cop showed up. He eventually went away. Not sure how often it works, but I found it hilarious.
I don't hear this type of criticism for Personal Capital or Mint, both of which collect credentials to catalog transactions.
I think for pure numerics using numpy basically recovers all performance loss. It's when you get tricky control-flow that you run into real trouble.
imagine the sovereign citizen that sets a precedent for the rest of them
>even though the precedents exist and apply to all of us already
Library data could easily be anonymized, especially for what we are doing looking to do here. We wouldn't even need account info, just information on books ( category, author, etc ) and the dates it was checked out.
There are (or were, it was a while ago) rare exceptions. The community college I went to had a deal with CalTech that if a student aced all 4 semester of physics at the CC they did not have to take some of the entrance exams. So it was actually easier to get in.
The relationship between high rents and homeless is both common sense and reasonably well established by research [1] [2]. It should be noted that the present or absence of a safety net is also strongly influenced by the cost of survival - whether friends or family can take someone in depends their having extra-rooms, extra-food, etc.

You're citing your personal knowledge without giving references or even details of your knowledge.

The one factor confusing things is this; yes, once a person reaches hard-core homelessness or hard-core addiction, they indeed need much more than lower rents to get on their feet. But the chances of reaching that state are much higher when a person experiences incidental homelessness.

And political? Yes, homelessness is political. There's no way to talk of homelessness without talking politically.

[1] First reference: https://www.zillow.com/research/rents-larger-homeless-popula...

[2] Google it: https://www.google.com/search?client=ubuntu&channel=fs&q=cor...
What gave you the impression I was talking about equality of sporting ability, or even equality of wages? I'm not talking about either of those, and neither is the article. Equality clearly (and charitably) does not mean absolute sameness.

No philosopher, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes, except Barbeuf (in the year 1796) has ever demanded "strict equality".
Both this "90-90" and "80-20" indicate that the devil is in the detail. e.g. You can expect surprises as you're almost done, there's an inherent complexity to the solution, etc.

But saying "the first 90% takes 90% of the time" blatantly ignores these anticipatable unknowns; so it's a much more tongue-in-cheek thing to say.
My 500 has been great, but I always hear horror stories about the 500 in the US. I believe they have assembly in Mexico, which I assume is for the North American market. They are also built in Poland(?) if memory serves, so it may be that I have a European vehicle here.

And yes, bluetooth is weirdly primitive. I prefer aux anyway, so no big deal.
And you could also avoid even creating the iframe if the User Agent isn't Windows.
> there is nothing mystical at all in any of the concepts of the modern physics

Nothing mystical, but there certainly are deep questions, which is why we have the various interpretations of QM.
Eh, it generally can make sense if you can get QSBS, as that is so favorable.

All said, the better companies offer partial recourse loans to early exercise.
How to Attract More Customers to Your Restaurant with POS System
I can see headline stories about policing "Mourn Porn"
HNers have been launching this criticism at Mint at least since I signed up for this website.

https://hn.algolia.com/?q=mint+password
The point is not, I think, that Plaid is sketchy but that the banking infrastructure is so poor that you can build a billion dollar business based on screen scraping. There is a clear and obvious need for better API integration to banks but the banks themselves have been incredibly slow to provide this.
Ah, I seem to have misremembered; from RFC 7230:

> A client that supports persistent connections MAY "pipeline" its requests (i.e., send multiple requests without waiting for each response).

Maybe this was just yet another case where plenty of intermediaries are broken and mass-deployment has always been difficult?
I thought it was funny too, in that it was a super-obvious attempt at reversing the typical gender-stereotypes:

> Chloe, the oldest, is a math wiz with a coding job at Google; she hopes to start her own company soon.

Smart. Successful. Can't be man. Must be a woman.

> Will, who has a degree in social work

Man assigned to non-stereotypical female role? Check!

> James, a perpetually stoned underachiever, is convinced that he can make it as a YouTuber.

The typical guys being lazy and stupid stereo-type, that's a bad stereotype... Can't put women in that one, can we? That would uh... not serve equality?

So by desperately trying to reverse gender stereotypes, but bailing out where it's not beneficial to women to do the gender juxtaposition, this article helps highlight the gender stereo-types it wants to avoid more than anything else.

Modern PC equality is pretty funny at it's heart :)
Complaining that the world is not as it should be does not solve the issue.
Pleading isn't considered "testimonial".

Typically, one is only "sworn in" prior to giving testimony.
Thanks verdverm.

Disclosure - I don’t have much hands on experience with GCP IAP/context aware solution, but I do very well understand how Google modularized the solution for wider consumption.

The use case of AirbnB where they are using context aware manager that feeds in logic from AWS λ was particularly interesting. Here is the link

https://youtu.be/Sq9gp8KBsY0

The presentation showed the capabilities of IAP. In case of AirbnB they are using custom built logic to make access decisions in IAP. The gist of it is about one feeding in custom logic to trust engine(context aware manager) to make access decisions. I am super impressed by this capability and I give it Google for how they architected.

At the some time, I see 50 other companies that offer zero trust comprehensive solutions that in many ways offer what GCP is offering. Btw, author of this thread is asking the same and I just happen to jump on it because I am in a similar situation.

Now back to questions on top of my mind - how good are the trust engines components of private access solutions provided by zscaler zpa or Netskope private access or cloudflare private access ? As I read it, trust engine that makes dynamic decisions to elevate or de-elevate privileges based on indentity and context is at the core of zero trust based solution . This is where I am at complete loss. I am just trying to separate marketing buzz from authenticity of solution so that I could get right solution in place.

Please share your thoughts. Thanks to rshnotsecure for sharing his views on zscaler.
Comments welcome.