skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> What does the US do right that we do wrong here?

I have worked for a number of really successful Swedish software companies, all of them have been purchased by American companies. From Skype to Candy Crush, all companies are owned by USA corporations. USA is a rich country and has accumulated enough wealth to buy any competing economy.

China, when it comes to technology, has created an extremely innovative environment and growth local talent beyond what Europe can dream. (Before anyone complains about China "stealing" American technology, just remember that most of American technology was "stolen" from Europe after WWII. Except, that sharing technological advances should not be seen as stealing but as global collaboration for the improvement of humankind).

Just to make sure that I am not misunderstood. I do not think that the USA has done anything wrong, I just think that Europe, until recently, has not been in a position to compete with the USA. Not even Germany, one of the biggest and one of more successful economies in Europe, can compete with the USA as a whole. Europe failure has been to not unite and align their positions. A divided Europe cannot compete internationally, that is our fault. Internal-country markets are too small to create a software industry, or a film industry. Only aviation and car manufacturing have growth thanks to a heavy government intervention that forced a consolidation and shared efforts at European level, showing that the approach works.

USA and Europe should be partners, a week European Union will not be relevant in the world, a divided European Union would individual states up for grabs for other international powers (UK probably by the USA, southern regions have seen China investment increasing and Russia maybe temporally incapacitated but sooner or later will come back).

So, I believe that Europe has done some things poorly, event that also had done great things, as keeping one of the higher standards of living in the world. The current pandemic is creating a re-thinking on how countries interact between them. Isolation is not a solution, not even for China, and I hope that we do not get there. But, we need to find a way that each region can protect its own interest while sharing its wealth and knowledge with the rest.
> if China invaded Taiwan it's hard to see the US not getting involved.

It's pretty much impossible to see the US getting involved.

The UN doesn't recognize Taiwan as an independent country, so China would just be exercising their authority over a chinese company, just like they do with Huawei, Lenovo, and many others.

NATO couldn't help either, because the US is not being militarily attacked by this. And well, the US has severed both their military ties with NATO, as well as their political ties with all countries in NATO (Paris agreement, Iran nuclear deal, tarifs, empty embassies, in bed with North Korea...). Also, many NATO countries are in bed with China economically, building the new Silk Road...

So... if China were to grab TSMC, and the US would try any kind of military action, who would support the US ? Europe, Russia, South Korea, Japan, South America, the Middle east, Australia, ... they would all stand by China. The US has been screwing them over the last 4 years, while China has been giving them money for them to return them the favor in a time like this.

Or do you imagine Trump going throughout the world kissing others asses to get their support?

Yeah, no. If Trump was "brave" enough to take military action, it would be game over before it even starts: world-wide embargo against the US, all US international companies assets frozen, the S&P500 would hit zero in a matter of days, inflation would explode, the troops wouldn't be getting paid, etc. The largest military force in the world would crumble in a week before even taking the first shot.
One issue with using screen for these purposes is that it will silently drop \xFF bytes. In my case I was trying to pull an image off of an Arduino or RPI connected camera, and my images would arrive like 99% accurate (mostly correct headers etc) but would not open in any image viewing program. Took a long time before I realized that transferring the data via screen was causing the corruption.
A similar dynamic is at play with Celtic fans (historically Catholic football club in Glasgow) and support for Palestine.

https://medium.com/@JohnWight1/celtic-football-fans-and-why-...
Guide to set up your Python project docs for success with Sphinx and RTD
We're approaching levels of hyperpartisanship not seen since the civil war. I don't think this is a healthy state of being for our country.
What jQuery would look like if it was released in 2021
Firing up Netscape Navigator on my Macintosh right now.
I loved the idea of Wikipedia's random page but I realized I needed something like this for the topics that I was interested in (instead of everything in the world because it ended up being too random for my interest). I ended up creating a Twitter bot that tweets random articles from a custom list of topics I was interested in at regular intervals

Twitter bot: http://twitter.com/randomwikibotch/
Source code if anyone is interested at creating their own: https://github.com/chirag64/Random-Wiki-Page-Twitter-Bot
When is the Windows 10 source going to be released?
Chinese manufacturing wasn't there yet. Chinese construction wasn't there yet. Western culture keeps underestimating China, perpetually saying they aren't there. And by the time they figure out they are there they are far past wherever there was supposedly.
Nothing's wrong, the supposed advantage of this is that it's less complex and the only thing you need to learn is html.
What crap. Triggering my rage at Apple's stupid headphone (headset) port elimination on iPhones :(
Past Present and Future from 3 senior IT professionals
Not just per capita, but what we need to look at is the ratio of number of test done to number of positives.

Otherwise a country that does close to no testing might have the illusion of doing very well, just like a country doing tons of tests might have the illusion of doing very poorly (like the US, whose ratio of positive has been declining for 1.5 months but number of cases is rather flat due to ever increasing testing)
Something I noticed over my career. Programmers tend to get super beefy machines. My machine has 64GB of memory, and 12 cores. But the typical users who use our software don't have anywhere near those same specs.. but programmers often just say "it worked on my machine" without thought about the specs.
Best of Shaders in 8K50
Is SoftBank the worst investment firm of all time
How an Inmate Serving a Murder Sentence Made a Math Discovery
Do SnapChat Ads Work? Here's What We Found
In which country is 30 days standard vacation?
Thanks for the pointer ... I thought it had only been a week.

I wonder how wide-spread the re-opening truly is.
FYI, this post is essentially an advertisement. The one app found to be the “good” one which doesn’t share data is also the same company that did the research and published the report, which means they could have manipulated any number of data points to get the result that favors them, such as the criteria for what a “top 20” app is, the number of apps to analyze (20), etc.

Feel like it should be disclosed in the title; maybe my fault, but I got pretty far into reading this before realizing it was essentially an ad.
Appears local law enforcement already knows about it:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23222004
How so?

I would argue that because government is predicated on force, a vote is nothing more than an act of delegation - asking others to use force on your behalf.

Less complex would be the legal argument, though: in the US, personal possession of arms is an enumerated Constitutional right. There is no such enumerated right to vote. From a purely legal perspective, why would it be racist to place an ID requirement on an act that is merely generally understood to be a right but not racist when applied to an act that is explicitly protected by the state’s charter itself?
To be fair, so much of this is driven by market forces and Covid in general.

Only WeWork was written down, the rest is the market absolutely tanking. I mean if you followed the index funds, you'd be posting ~20% losses right now. Earlier it was 30%.

I definitely would not want to be those portfolio managers right now, but it's not all completely them... yet.
You can install a new language easily by using the -addLangs parameter of the installer (on an existing install) or by copying the msg/msb files from another install (matching versions). After that you have to change the NLS settings of the DB and it will switch to the new language.
“I hope for a return to sanity and open standards. The alternative is heavy regulated monopolies, no government is going to allow this situation to go for long, like the telecommunications industry. And, that does not work so well.”

I do hope for heavily regulated and accountable monopolies. Open standards what for? The current internet doesn’t differ from electricity or water; it’s not a network running on top of the phone network, but a commodity by itself.

You cannot avoid hardware manufactures, so let’s stop to argue idealistically about a technological solution to a political problem.

My current view is “the more people in WhatsApp, the more power for states to rule” –so spent your time caring of your institutions and not creating utopian technological alternatives; look at the Pinboard’s guy: ACT.
Dutch. It's not amazing, it's OK. The rest of the world is just lagging behind.
> it was de rigueur to have sex with their hosts.

On which website and what country is this?

To anyone reading this -- that is absolutely NOT the norm, speaking as a dude who has hosted and couchsurfed a bit.
Beating Climate Change: Developer’s Edition
Covert access for over two years to every part of the GRU's election meddling apparatus is very impressive, actually. Once you're caught, too, there's sometimes value in sort of showing it off and embarrassing your adversary.
Check my edit to the description of this post. I made a new comment, and there is zero way it could have been seen as harassment.
I don't think (if we had them) compliance would have been a problem if government just dictated their usage by law like they are doing now. You use it or you don't enter the shop, simple. But lying about it (we even have a meme with the head of the national health organisation screaming that masks don't work) made everything more difficult. Now because of that, some people actually think they don't work and try not to use them.

But instead, as usual, instead of being truthful to people, lies were said because of lack of supplies, which takes any kind of credence for future rules/advice as people will (rightfully) suspect of them.
when you include your test suite in your repo, consider hypothesis.rtfd.org ... and if you find yourself making new strategies for networkx, please push them up to hypothesis as a plugin!
Can Hacker News Light the Spark? Last Hope of Our Gen-X Entrepreneurial Journey
Who we are
We an early stage start-up founders from India. Belonging to Gen X generation, we took the risk of pursuing Entrepreneurship forsaking our good paying professional careers.

Our Journey
As Co-founders, we had a long association in one of the big five corporations of the world. We decided to start with IT Services area. We also wanted to spin-up a product track six months down the line. We incorporated in Jan 2017 & started offering custom ERP solutions in a boot-strap model to global customers. But we couldn’t start the product track as planned even after two years. The experience from our IT Services helped us finalize the idea for INCOX (Workflow Automation Product) in a SaaS model.
By Sep 2019, we released our first MVP (v1.0) and got 50 trial sign-ups which never materialized further. Based on feedback, we decided to publish (v2.0) in Slack App Directory to determine if, there is a need for our product.
Today we are live in Slack Marketplace!!

Our Struggle, Hope
Determining Product Market Fit (PMF) is our challenge. We position business user as the primary persona.It is not clear if this is desirable by SMB owners or they prefer having knowledge worker assistance. Our hope with v2.0 release is to get feedback from SMB customers which will help us establish PMF.

Funding
We got interest from couple of investors for debt financing.Our stance was to get funded by a VC/angel who can support us in our growth. We are actively looking for an interested investor while we are focusing on acquiring customer traction.

Conclusion
Our top 3 learning:
-Product/Services:It is better to start with a product idea.
-Time/Money:It is good to have money at your disposal if you start late.
-Success:Corporate success can't guarantee start-up success.

Ask to Community
Did we miss anything obvious? Leave your feedback.Check our product at
https://slack.com/apps/A012ACE2ZV5-incoxbot
Thanks for Reading.
There's plenty of weird, contradictory evidence. Many places have come out of lockdown early, been told they're facing certain doom ("Georgia's Experiment in Human Sacrifice" [1]), and then been quietly forgotten when the predicted consequences don't come. It's hard to believe that lockdowns don't do anything at all, but I don't think anyone can honestly say we have definitive proof they were necessary.

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/04/why-georg...
They were pretty public with the evidence when it came out (including releasing security camera footage and names of Russian agents). Which parts do you think are false?
Do I understand you correctly that you're talking about whether discretionary content filtering by a platform makes them into a publisher? This would mean that protections that apply to platforms wouldn't apply to them anymore for things like copyright infringement, right?
Interview with Cortical Labs about Biological AI
Do you realize that Tesla has been hitting almost all its objectives in terms of production and operating margins?

Check their slides from 2013 regarding battery production in 2020: https://www.tesla.com/sites/default/files/blog_attachments/g...

The competition is simply not coming (most of them are actually going bankrupt, as we speak) and Tesla keeps delivering and improving its margins and cash position.

What's irrational?
I wonder how much good vs damage SoftBank has done to tech companies, or was it just te normal consequence of the end of the tech bubble? I don't mean Uber, WeWork and the high profile ones, but the less news worthy failures. What do I mean?

SoftBank funded companies were told to grow at any cost, scale to become the market leader. A lot of companies weren't mature enough, or maybe not viable enough to do so and just burnt through cash and ended up with nothing as a result.

I wonder how they would have done had they not had such a strong drive to grow at any cost?
if I seem like I am hypocritical then it is because I don't scan these things as being the same at all.

Cooperation is very different from dependence.

The rest of your comment seems to assume that I'm talking about "bad things that we do to each other" and I'm not really talking about that at all, merely our dependence on a foreign ally that has unclear motives.

Here's some things that I consider to be true:

1) Our intelligence services are in bed together, that's bad.

2) Our governments are blindly allowing (or in some cases supporting) monopolies of other nations industries. That's bad.

3) Our countries are both victims _and_ perpetrators, there's no black/white divide here. But our peoples will be worse off.

4) We're taking on a debt that has a very high interest later.

I don't think cooperation and pooling of resources is the same as pinning an entire section of society on another country.

For a concrete example, imagine that we're pretty friendly with Germany, we decide to let them be our postmen, they carry all post for us. Eventually we don't have the capacity to deliver mail anymore, the logistics are completely lost on us.

The Germans open our mail, their government "allows" it, and there's nothing we can do because the post is somehow routed via Germany and not our jurisdiction anymore. We do nothing, because we trust the germans, maybe a stern warning, maybe certain mail has to be routed in-country. But the Germans say that this is stifling industry.

Later, Germany invades poland, all our postmen are German, all the trucks are German, all the infrastructure that depends on post is German.

You might argue that this is absurd, but this is how I see the situation with the USA.
The Kids are asymptomatic, and share everything. This gets spread to parents and everyone else then. This study does not specifically say otherwise. Also, its from a study by the UK gov.. who lets face it have made a total mess of their Response to the virus so far. (The highest death toll in Europe proving that point)
The Vision fund is heavily invested in businesses that are negatively impacted by COVID-19. Are there any bright spots in the portfolio? Was diversification not possble?
> The fact that Wigner doesn't know that yet, changes nothing in reality.
> The actual 6-photon experiment is a bit too technical for me

There's a more approachable explanation, and lengthy discussion, over at Physics Forums: https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/a-realization-of-a-bas...

I'm no expert, but it seems to me the issue is of a different, more fundamental, nature.
I know women who get harassed pretty frequently walking down the street, there would be very few things they could do if they avoided all places they have been harassed more than twice.
Two of the 3 things has been portrayed by the President of the US on Twitter. They are not censoring him.

Additionally, no harm? Movies encourage terrible behavior as well, but we are not trying to ban them on Netflix. If there is a movie where they glamorize alcohol or unprotected sex, there is no effort to have them removed from streaming platforms.

At one point, saying the world was round would have been an absurd conspiracy. Just because something appears and most likely is inaccurate, doesn't mean that we should have a central fact checking authority. That is some 1984 stuff right there. People can make choices for themselves and do their own research. There is no law preventing people like Sandra Bullock from telling people that baby foreskin is good for their skin, even though most people would know that is disgusting.
disucssion yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23214548
"Isn't business supposed to solve problems?"

This is a common misconception... Capitalism is only designed to solve one problem: maximizing shareholder value.
But this is something open source developers choose, no? They can revise the licenses to ask for licensing fee for companies larger than 1000 employees and let rest of the people use it for free.

If I ever develop an open source software, I’ll definitely ask for tiered licensing cost, something like redisdesktop.com.
Useful tips for learning embedded programming
App download data suggests we have passed peak quarantine
> error messages translated in the user's locale are a bane in particular.

Ah, I remember MS Combat Flight Simulator 2. Translated to Spanish (or maybe automatically using local system files?) without bothering the check the text fit the allotted fields, which meant you could not read most things at all. Impressive QA, Microsoft! ;)
Is Slack sabotaging voice messaging?
Another thread with a different source here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23219438

This one seems to make me think that the app itself (or its play store listing) maybe has terms in metadata (to help with searching in the store maybe?)
Why not just try it now? It seems you spent far more time posting and maintaining the accusation than you did actually verifying if it was true.
> On a certain level that's akin to a tenured professor

You clearly haven’t run a small business. It’s more like being a dairy farmer where if you ever fail to make hay, every thing dies. There are good times and bad, but you are never free from the sword of Damocles.
> It's a great pity that you treat legitimate disagreement as mindless anger.

I’m not talking about disagreement of these posts (there’s nothing to disagree, the comments were factually accurate), I’m talking about the comments where people say stuff like “Google's rules only apply to their competitors“, which clearly isn’t true (as I’ve proven).

I also don’t agree with you exaggerating my comments to claim I was accusing people of being mindless and agree when I said no such thing.

> The motivation may be the same, but the types of removal are very different. As long as their own podcasting app is up in its current form, there is a very good argument that they're not being consistent.

When splitting hairs there’s a risk you sub-divide the problem so finely that you then can argue nothing is equivalent and I think that’s what’s happening here.

There’s a saying that goes something like “don’t attributed malice to acts of incompetence” which applies here. People are quick to jump on the offensive when it’s clearly a policy that Google follow on their other platforms and it might well be a decision that is overturned upon review.

I explain this point more eloquently here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23222167
At this point: I wish they’d just take a stronger stance and ban everything they don’t like. Just ban the political party they don’t like, ban anything that speaks out against China, just ban it all.

We need to go back to the web, where anybody could install Apache and off they went. Bandwidth is cheap now. BitTorrent exists.

I hope google and twitter and Facebook and all the rest just hurry up with all this.

Some other ridiculous examples of them becoming the ministry of truth:

There was a joke image going around on Facebook saying: “Arizona beaches packed during coronavirus!”. A joke about Arizona not having any beaches because it’s a desert. Facebook censors this and gives you some creepy warning before your allowed to see it.

Or how about: there is a doctor from the university of Minnesota who is running a large scale, international, placebo controlled RCT for a potential covid prophylactic. Twitter is censoring his links to find out more about the study. HE IS A DOCTOR RUNNING A STUDY AT A MAJOR UNI, and twitter is telling him he is misinformation.

It’s all just disgusting and is exactly what a lot of people feared would happen with these companies.
Nothing, but a lot of the web dev community feels like we've gone overboard in terms of bloated CSS frameworks and this is what I perceive to be a reversion back to the basic ability to style a document without much need for writing and learning CSS or the frameworks themselves.
I think it’s good for people to move at a pace they’re comfortable with.
The case for degrowth in a time of pandemic
As I mentioned elsewhere, your last step would not actually work in real time, so maybe that part of its implausibility.

As in Searle's "Chinese Room" (and also, though to rather different effect, in Jackson's "Mary the Neuroscientist"), you have proposed a wildly infeasible thought experiment, and then decided dismiss your rational conclusions about the outcome because... because it does not accord with your intuitions about normal situations? because it is infeasible? This simply is not the way to get to the truth of any matter.