skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You're right, it's not a perfect analogy. Odysseus had a simple, binary action he could take to avoid the sirens altogether, and that action did not otherwise hinder his journey. You can't say the same about the social & leisure parts of the internet (social media, Netflix, MMOs, etc...). One example: Screen Time on iOS does not completely block the specified websites and apps. It politely suggests that you stop wasting your time. Odysseus had it easy.

One can replace their smartphone with a basic flip phone, but that would forsake all the good uses of the smartphone. This is where we get into the nature of free will. How much free will does the average person really have in the face of these addicting platforms? They're all designed specifically to preempt your self-control. Moreover, because they drove so many people to abandon their self-control, they normalized binging. It is part of our cultural fabric. The sirens aren't alien mermaids, they're our friends.

People need the freedom to say No. No, I don't need any more than 30 minutes of social media a day. No, I don't ever want to watch more than 1 episode per day during the workweek on Netflix. Etc... These commitments need to be binding, and the marginal cost of dropping them should be higher than the marginal benefit in all but the most legitimate scenarios. You're free to say "no" now, but it's an empty commitment without technological controls that do not currently exist.

My final thought relates to the availability bias. Leisure is more available than ever. Almost anything you want is a tap away. In contrast, productivity goals are notoriously unavailable. Sure, you can break your work into tiny steps, but those steps become increasingly abstract and divorced from the end result, which may nonetheless be 6 months away. You'll also consistently underestimate the damage, length, and frequency of "one more break" and overestimate your ability to reach that goal in 6 months at your current pace (overconfidence effect). We have a lot to gain from making leisure less attainable and productivity more tangible.
Yes, that's the 101 of being a capital allocator, like a CEO or a CFO. Only invest into anything if the returns exceed your cost of capital.

Presentation on this very topic: https://youtu.be/c20_S-QgvsA?t=730
> In the end, if you make it too hard in an employee market, you will have good to great candidates drop off... if you make it too easy, you will wind up at the bottom of the barrel. Market pay will also vary wildly and dramatically, and perception is equally varied.

I mean, you're talking about a different thing than "job performance" here.

Job performance is a satisficing measure: you only need to get someone who's good enough to perform the duties you need of them. (Yes, even in software engineering.)

You're talking about ranking measures. Does it matter if someone is "the best" if they're still not good enough to do your job? Does it matter if someone is "the bottom of the barrel" if they are good enough to do your job? I would say no, in both cases.

IMHO, the hiring bar is way too high in most bigcorps; they care about vanity metrics about having "the best", when 100% of the work assigned to these hires could be easily done by people who are not, in fact, "the best."

The point of a job interview, in the abstract, is to filter out the candidates who aren't qualified to perform the job duties even after a few weeks of on-the-job training. This leaves you with a pool of people who are all qualified. At that point, you should either just hire one of them at random, or try to optimize for a second criterion, such as "is willing to take the lowest compensation to do the job" (which usually translates to "has the fewest formal qualifications to do the job, while still actually being qualified in practice.")
Exactly! For any medical tests, there are 2 measurements: sensitivity and specificity, one to judge false positive and another judge the false negatives.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensitivity_and_specificity
A thread from 2016: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13256709
>GC is obviously optional for OTL. That's definitely one of the tricky bits (note: not a syntactic problem).

If a GC language lets the programmer "opt out of GC" to mark a variable or block of memory as "fixed" so the GC doesn't scan it or move it to consolidate free space, how would one annotate that intention unless there's extra syntax for it?

Likewise in the opposition direction: If a non-GC language let's one "opt into GC", you will have ambiguities if you have syntax that allows raw pointers of dynamically calculated addresses to point to any arbitrary offset into a block of memory. That means that memory can't be part of the optional GC which would invalidate the pointer. If you restrict the optional GC language to ban undecidable dynamic pointers, it means you've created the motivation for another language with the syntax that lets you program with the freedom of dynamic pointers!

The general case of "optional GC" that covers all situations and tuning its behavior is tied to syntax because you can't invent a compiler or runtime that can read the mind of the programmer.
Apparently this is related to their ProtectivAir device:
https://medi-immune.com/protectivair/

An actual article where the link came from: https://www.ptcommunity.com/wire/revolutionary-breathing-dev...
Cummingtonite
Note I got throttled too because I got voted down for my comment.

It's frustrating, but it is a good thing.

The core way billionaires control our discourse is through spamming the agenda with junk. If we are always talking about why billionaires shouldn't be taxed (abortion, white privilege, lame woke people, ...) we aren't talking about everything else.

Rate limiting answers that. It's OK to talk about those subjects, it just shouldn't be more than 5% of the discussion or so. If things are too heated, people should get slowed down.

I've noticed that I'm more likely to get rate limited after I flag something. That makes me feel like flags are a limited resource so I use them wisely.
>A few year back, I got locked out of my primary gmail account due to a 2 factor authentication SNAFU. I was never able to recover it.

This is the downside (or hidden cost) of 2FA that most security experts purposefully ignore, because they work for companies like Google and only care about account security rather than user security.
This blame-the-victim mentality is not helpful. An employee shouldn't have to be vigilant against their bosses spying on them! Basic human norms don't disappear just because there's fine print in a contract. The idea that "ownership" of hardware gives certain people in a company unchecked power over the people who use that hardware is obscene.
you can pass every facebook iterview by practicing facebook tagged questions on leetcode. People do that every single day,
here is an example from today

https://leetcode.com/discuss/interview-question/551434/faceb...

Its NOT related to IQ.

You can search leetcode forum for tons of examples of actual FB questions, all of them are tagged on leetcode.
Same.

I, too, saw the Indiegogo campaign and gladly handed over nearly $200 for the Mycroft Mark II.

Two and half years later, there has been little progress, with no telling when they'll actually deliver the device to backers.

It's one thing for a company to delay production to have lost money on this with no help from Indiegogo and a refusal from the company to refund backers, I have no hope for this product seeing the light of day any time soon.

Shame on Mycroft for this scam.
I presume it's a simple way to cause compile error wherever code needs to be removed
Isn't that how our society works in general?

Say you are the victim of a crime. You can't really do anything about it except appeal to the authorities. They will generally take pity on you and try to enforce the law, but often enough they don't and they have discretion not to. You have no other recourse for justice if they take the route of not enforcing the law other than appealing to the public or to a higher authority. Many victims of crimes have had the existing system fail them in this fashion.
They're highly sensitive to the presence of the target DNA or RNA sequence in the sample well. But they can't easily tell if the target sequence they amplified came from the patient's sample or from other potential sources of contamination in the lab (the test, after all, makes billions of copies of the target DNA sequence), whether from other positive tests or from positive controls.
I think a sceptical attitude towards technology is reasonable. Over the last few years overall we have seen a lot of snakeoil being peddled in the tech industry, a lot of over promises, and a lot of negative impact on society at large. So I think really scepticism is just a healthy response.

Because the central purpose of technology is to make things easier and simpler, not more complicated, every new piece of technology should have to justify itself. People who developed programming languages always understood this, new features need to have a real, significant purpose, or long term you have a big problem.

So I don't mind people being harsh or critical of new stuff. If what you have built is really useful (like Dropbox) it will survive and the critics will be proven wrong. It's tempting to sort of hype each other up and motivate each other but criticism has a more useful function even if some of it turns out to be wrong.
I love Taleb; he's a certified creative genius, better-than-chance-would-allow prophet and a regular guy with Good Judgment, all three at once- a rarity. I think he is wrong on this one however.

Wrongest observation in the article:

"For the very fact that we are saving airlines indicates their role as utility"

An industry can be essential to society and still not be a utility, and that's a feature, not a bug. Nationalizing an industry implies the State has the knowledge to run it. But an entire industry of experts is already dedicated to doing just that. Nationalizing it implies the State would pay those same people or their equivalent to do what it is they already do. Why would it do that ?

This is true of critical and non-critical industries. The government does not possess the knowledge to run specialized industries. That's exactly why Socialism always fails, and yes, it does always fail.

In America at least, even "utilities" are not State owned, at most they are regulated, and the constant object of regulatory capture because of it.

His other main point, that this is not a Black Swan, it's a White Swan (a disaster they should have seen coming and planned for) is stronger. However the exact scope and duration of this event is itself something of a Black Swan, no? The entire world is in lockdown for an unknown duration. Did you want that priced into every airline ticket you buy? It's not a rhetorical question, you have to decide if this is something you yourself would have wanted, back in the beforetime.

For that matter, how does a nationalized airline industry raising your taxes to pay for Black Swans sound to you? Think that's where the money would ultimately really go? How's your Social Security lockbox doing?

The reason we stem the bleeding in our industries like airlines isn't because their lobbyists incite Congressfolk to sin or even because they're utilities in all but name. Life could go on if the major airlines all failed all at once. After some time, there would be new airlines and until then charter planes for critical things and telecommute, like now.

The reason we bail them out is because the net downstream cost of not doing so is many times the net cost of doing so. People have to have jobs to go back to after this is over. There has to be an economy. There has to be industries with jobs to go to.

The demand for air travel will certainly be there, air travel is not a new invention waiting to catch on, is it? So the question to be answered is: is it wiser to birth a new airline industry or treat the wounds of the one you have? Here I define wiser to mean: less costly to the government and less ruinous of people's lives.

In the US at least, everyone is getting hard cash presently to see them through, #masshole not withstanding. Many industries and even banks(!) are stepping up in all sorts of creative and genuinely helpful ways. This will pass; we will survive thanks to people's willingness to endure #lockdown for the sake of others. Everything else beyond that is gravy from historical and biological perspectives.
I'm a small business using gapps ( and paying for it).

And the support I received was fast ( just a timer or something of 40 seconds) till I got "in".

I personally have no complaints, but I'm not using it as a free service also.
I would somewhat trust Apple with a properly privacy-enabled (ie, strongly anonymized) solution (it's part of their brand) I am not sure I would trust Google.
>but it feels amplified

But that's the thing isn't it? Does it feel amplified or is it actually amplified? Our misleading perceptions and biases may play a role (see: perpetual complaints about "young people these days", a common tendency to think things become worse with time).
After reading the article and searching for Gerard Bakardy on Google, I found his version of the story: http://www.myfreedomofspeech.be/site2014/Welcome.html (note: the website is mostly made of images of text, so it may not display well on a small screen).
Seeing that Dropbox is one of only two YC companies to ever go public, they have never been profitable, and have said in their own filings they don't know when or if they will ever be profitable, the pessimism seems warranted.

Not to mention, it seems like Steve Jobs was right about DropBox. It's a feature not a product. For the same price you pay for DropBox, you can get the full Microsoft Office Suite plus 6TB of storage. The same with Google Drive and GSuite.
Came here to quote the exact same line. This right here is why you can't trust the CCP.
That's why the parent said that they're "disguised" IQ tests.

If they used a test that strongly correlated with the outcome of an IQ test, then it would also, legally, be an IQ test, and they'd have to stop doing it.

So instead, they use a test that weakly correlates with the outcome of an IQ test, and then try to extract the a measure of IQ from the "noise" that is all the other variables the test depends on.
> I kept getting ‘recommendations’ from Google to enable it to be more secure.

Yes, this is problematic in itself. Hardware-based 2FA is not an unqualified win; I definitely would not want to use it without some very robust contingency plans of what to do if my authentication device gets bricked or otherwise malfunctions.
My understanding is that the new CARE program does not carry a personal guarantee.
Whoa, this is great. Thanks for putting this together!

Could you do something similar to PG's and Sam Altmans essays?
Maintainer of Core-JS library, downloaded 26mil/wk, will go to prison
Modern pipes have to serve many lords. Besides bog-standard stdio redirection they also act as MPMC queues of semaphore tokens in build systems[0] but also as handle to a kernel-owned io-vecs for zero-copy DMA via sendfile, splice and friends.

[0] https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/lin...
Researching a 'myriad of products' takes its own time, perhaps not usefully if you're dealing with heaps of 'unanticipated shit' in a time of crisis.

Zoom is well known, so people are likely to try it early in the process. If it works they may choose to move on to other things. This may not be the perfect process in the abstract, but in reality it's practical.
Google to pay themselves 800 million, how nice for small business
>> what is the value proposition for Zoom?

Energy consumption. Half hour hangouts drains 30% of battery 3 hours zoom is roughly 5-10%. UX and performance the two major factors why we chose Zoom.
Re Jitsi: as far as I know, it does use a central server (videobridge) to reduce bandwidth usage with 3+ people.
It's actually not that easy with cross team / cross company slack calls, especially depending on how your company set up slack. So it's both onboarding and some configuration to get everyone invited / permission properly.

Or you know - send over my zoom meeting room number - and done.
I guarantee that 13+ years ago nobody did testing for research model code, and i doubt the peers reviewed it. On the other hand, it should be easy to reproduce these simple models in any language, if you find his original publications
IQ has nothing to do with whether you know CS basics or not, that's the problem. It doesn't matter that they said it's a disguised IQ test because it's not an IQ test in any fashion.
As other people have stated in this thread everything in Zoom's privacy policy seems to indicate they are sending data to advertisers only as necessary to advertise their own products. They likely:

- Use the Facebook iOS SDK to measure conversions from app install ads

- Send a list of hashed email addresses to Facebook or other advertisers to do ad re-targeting

- Have Google Analytics on their websites to track where people are visiting their website from, i.e. a click on a Google AdWords ad

While these are all not _ideal_ because _yes_, Google and Facebook use this data for their own purposes as well, it's far from _nefarious_. In fact, it's pretty standard fare. Could Zoom go above and beyond and reject these tools? Yes, they could. Does anyone in practice? No.

If Zoom was selling metadata about their calls, leaking contents of their calls, or themselves served ads – then yes, I'd be concerned. But all indications point to them purchasing ads to further the growth of their business.

I think it is perfectly reasonable to seek guarantees around the usage of the above, more sensitive data (contents of video calls, metadata of video calls, etc.) but on the flip side to imply from their privacy policy that they are sending it to Facebook or that they are "in the advertising business" is jumping the gun a little bit.
Yeah this. My mom isn't ever going to add a 3rd party router. Even most of the technical people I know (well paid python devs, etc.) probably wouldn't mess the on-prem ISP gear.

I do network engineering for a living, so I totally would, but I'm an outlier compared to the rest of the population.
I'm confused; you object with my use of decentralized, but then argue (it seems) that distributed also does not fit the bill.

So.. I think we have a fundamental failure in communication here. It's difficult to discuss decentralization or distributed designs when, well, we can't even refer to the platforms that advertise themselves as such. Ie, I did not make this terminology. The platform we're discussing literally advertises itself as such in this title.

I'm not sure what's even being discussed anymore.
That's walking away from a mortgage. The GP said "people would sell their homes for a dollar just to get away from the mortgage". The sale of the asset doesn't let you discharge the mortgage in a non-recourse state: you give the house to the lender in lieu of paying the loan. (And declare bankruptcy!)
Still not humiliations.
The other article was a very short quip about the wonder of Unix pipes. Stop the griping. This one is just as nice, and more in-depth. Great.
Companies capital reserves often don't count in valuations. It's just the discounted future earnings. Cash sitting in a company's coffers would often count against it, since the rate of return on capital would be lower (larger denominator), and investors are seeking a higher rate of return.

The fact of the matter is, companies should not keep 'emergency cash reserves' enough to operate for six months. The money should be returned to shareholders. Shareholders and other investors should keep liquid cash reserves for emergencies. Then, when companies face emergencies, they should issue new stock to the markets, and the saved up emergency capital can be used. That leaves individual share holders and potential shareholders to decide the fate of companies, which seems more in the spirit of democracy.
We would expect it under certain circumstances. One explanation could be falling interest rates. Lower rates on bonds incentivize investors to take on more risk (moving more money into equities) in order to still meet their return targets.
The Communist Party enjoys the luxury of dissent being a punishable offense. The media, the citizenry, the private sector are all held hostage by the absolute authority of the Party.

I'm not sure why, but the media seems so eager to accept the official CCP narrative and take the lack of clear dissent from within China to mean China should be held up as a model Nation worthy of praise while simultaneously ignoring all the restrictions and brutality that force silent those who otherwise might have much to complain about.

Deference to China by naive journalists and other useful idiots must be checked.
Full support for a C/C++ conformant preprocessor in MSVC
My first thought. My second thought was a terrorist releasing this in a hospital.
What is contact tracking? The article does not tell us.
It's not perfect. For example March 29 is a 23 hour day in the UK but we don't see that reflected in the app.
> Only if you search for coronavirus tips and related terms, that is nowhere near the massive marketing campaign Google could pull off across their network to bring vital information to the public.

I explicitly stated the phrase "in their top page", not "in their search page".
I can't say this chimes with me at all. I have seen plenty of Windows server 2016 (W10 for servers ish) stay up for over a year. On an AD network you control the update policy! I can stop all of my clients updating with a group policy.
Show HN: I built an interactive tool to graph coronavirus data
just when you post something. Like a question or an idea. and nobody answers.
I posted something slightly wrong by accident and was voted down like crazy. In a human conversation it would have been easily corrected. But on the whole, I really like the HN community.
Not true for actually shared media on the last mile. (also, if it's not on Customer Premises it's not a CPE)
This is excellent ambient noise for hacking BTW.
As a BCer, can I just mention that BC is doing just fine supporting the Canadian economy with a balanced approach to conservation and natural resource extraction?

Alberta is certainly contributing to the Canadian economy, but the heavy reliance on fossil fuels to do so isn't a long term approach to take and the province seems highly reluctant to pivot to better industries.
Yahoo is/was the same.

I deleted my Yahoo (email) account, but they didn't delete the Yahoo Groups account tied to that account.

I couldn't access Yahoo Groups, but I was still receiving Yahoo Groups messages on all groups I'd set it to forward posts to my email or notify me of things. No way to unsubscribe or change settings.
What's the best way to get started on OSX? I've tried to get up and running with FS-UAE several times, and never get it to work.
An overview is given in their blog post: https://blog.zoom.us/wordpress/2019/06/26/zoom-can-provide-i...

However, I would also like to know if there's more to it. Do they do any server side transcoding? Do they get an advantage by having multiple backend servers connected through good links, having clients connected to the nearest one and routing efficiently through their network? It appears that they use(d) H264 as their codec, are there some technical tricks they use to cope with variable bandwidth (do they use scalable video coding or simulcast)?
Ask HN: Is it right to decrease the price of our app to help fight Covid-19
Connecton (Mac app to make/receive calls handsfree from your laptop) has decreased price from $9 to $2 to help this work from home situation we thought of decreasing the app pricing for people working from home. Some people have been suggesting it as a wrong move.