skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> How would the developers still be independent if they are supported by a big company?

Jack Dorsey has Devs he pays in BTC whose sole job is to contribute to Bitcoin Core development and nothing else [1], they have no affiliation to his companies other than that.

Also, he's an investor in LN labs who are technically their own thing led by Starkbot (Elizabeth Stark) [2].

So, it can and has been done.

Personally speaking, a lot of the 'how would it ever work...' questions that come up here that are thought to be seemingly impossible to solve have often been pilot-tested inside the cryptocurrency space to one degree or another, so if nothing else I hope most of you can find value in that 'us crazy people' are actually pushing the envelope in the edge-cases of innovation.

For example, because many of us have been proponents of UBI (from various source points, mind you) from either a pragmatic or an ideological standpoint, we've tried to see what verifiable widescale UBI deployment (in Iceland) would entail back in 2014; it failed, as many of us expected it would, but we tested hypothesis whose data could ultimately be used later to iterate and improve a system.

1: https://bitcoinist.com/bitcoin-jack-dorsey-square-crypto/

2: https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaeldelcastillo/2020/02/05/j...
My favorite version of this story is told throughout Logic's "Everybody" album. I highly recommend it.
> Once their digital marketing muscle has doordash originating 10%+ of orders to the restaurant they have the leverage

How would they know what percentage of orders isc coming through them?
doesn't that put Russian intelligence in the same boat too, if those mentioned could be involved in disinformation then so could russia
Matt Levine's column Money Stuff touches on these questions every once in a while.

Until WeWork really blew up, it wasn't too hard as an investor to keep up the impression that the track record of Softbank was good enough.

(That's not to say that you couldn't re-interpret the track record in a negative way, even before WeWork. But nothing really forced you to.)
This looks more like an attempt at criticizing the bloat people add to their websites basically just to change the font from Times New Roman. I can't really see this competing with bootstrap, since it lacks all the custom components.
What do you mean? Pinephone is alive and well and you can get your own Linux "toy" for $150. Can't say much about Librem 5, but afaik they are also shipping.
The Navy has also demonstrated laser based transmission of energy recently: https://www.nrl.navy.mil/news/releases/researchers-transmit-...

They are talking about beaming power to drones, but thinking a bit larger, I wonder if it be feasible to have a high power laser transmit energy to a satellite and then have a cluster ala Starlink act as an relay to direct the power potentially anywhere on earth. Maybe you could power airplanes from space? Sounds like Sci-Fi, but apparently all the components and technologies exist, and people must have been working on it for a while, when they just letting the public in on it.
Google is under a great deal of scrutiny by governments right now. Their collective fight-or-flight behavior has kicked in and they're starting to exhibit some pretty crazy behavior.

There's never been a better time to excise Google from your life, or if you work there, to excise your life from theirs.
People also use money, mobsters do too. They breathe air, mobsters do too. I don't think mobsters using something that is otherwise legal to use is going to stop adoption.
If you're interested in this time, Julia Fullerton-Batten did some amazing fine-art photography around the theme of "Old Father Thames" and the 1814 Frost Fair [1].

[1] https://www.juliafullerton-batten.com/projectmenu.php?catNo=...
so they have two possible endgames:

1) find a sucker (aka retail investors) that buy a loss-making stock

2) become a monopoly and squeeze everyone to get higher margins (kind of how booking.com pushes hotels to increase their standard prices so that booking can offer a discount; which you also get if you call the hotel itself).
I've started communicating a clear expectation (https://prosemirror.net/#about) that profitable users help support my software. Of course, most still won't, but some do, and with a big enough user base those contributions, plus some consulting around the projects, provides a decent income.
https://www.codeandweb.com/free-sprite-sheet-packer

I've enjoyed this tool. Edit, I see you've elaborated and this isn't what you're looking for.
I have a feeling that even with 4 of them, your computer will feel slow doing normal things. However, if you plan on doing molecular dynamics or some other parallel stuff this seems like a good value. Edit: Actually I take that back, a 10 year old chip will be quite slow in general.
The solution looks great!

One advice: Make it easy to self host. I can see that this is not the case, perhaps not your focus currently. That will give you hundreds of free testers, that will provide QA to the solution you're making money creating. It's a beneficial cycle.
This is a disaster and can get ugly very quickly. Whatever the concerns of the USA against Huawei are, trying to destroy the company by pressuring international companies in severing all ties is an extremely hostile movement.

Next step, as China has already hinted towards, is actions in China against Apple. And we don't know how further the escalation will go. So far, any ambition of China towards Taiwan has been limited by the fact that China depends quite on Taiwanese fabs. Remove that, and accidents might happen... which would harm the whole world.
> Don’t be afraid to ask for money

This is where I fall over - damn my parents for teaching me to feel guilty about asking for money!

> One great hack for finding out who is using your package is to open an issue called "Who is using this?" and ask for testimonials or offer to put users' logos or links in the README under a "Who uses this" section

This is a fantastic idea - I'm going to try it! If companies don't know I'm open to the possibility of advertising their logo on my website (in an innovative way, using my library) then how can they consider giving me money for it?
It's not unusual for warehouses to deal with items with multiple barcodes.

For a technology example, you might get a network card with a UPC barcode, but also a MAC address barcode, and a manufacturer's part number barcode. A wholesaler/ manufacturer sells boxes of 20 items to resellers? The outer box will have a barcode. That box got sent by courier? Three barcodes on some mailing labels.

So at a goods-in station, the usual response to "multiple barcodes, some don't make sense" is "Keep trying until you find one that does make sense"
>What good would accessing the API do without a Mac?

... allowing ppl to write software without needing to shell out $$$'s to Apple ?

> Also, how would you even build something for the Cocoa API without a Mac?

well, with GNUStep which is a reimplementation of the Cocoa API, like the project we're discussing.

There's no issue building for instance stuff that targets Windows on Linux - I routinely build windows software from my linux by using MinGW and testing it with Wine. GNUStep provides a kind of approximation of that but it is much less up-to-date wrt Cocoa than MinGW is wrt Win32 API
>What's riskier, setting up a colony on Mars with untested ecosystem technology, or testing the technology here on Earth first?

The technology is fine though, we already have every kind of industry on earth... on earth.

>What justifies the expenditure of putting a self-sustaining colony on Mars?

The self-sustaining part is the expensive part, not the space part. Want to build modern processors? just the fab facility is ballpark $20 to 25 billion USD (using TSMC's future fab as a cost estimate), not counting any of the rest of the supply chain or ongoing operations cost. And that's just one type of factory.

At least off-planet there's unclaimed territory with resources to exploit, a truly independent node on earth would not be compatible with existing borders and mineral rights.

>We have oil platforms in the ocean. People live/work there for a few months, then cycle back

These are not self-sufficient though - you might be able to live on it in isolation via fishing and some kind of evaporation still to get drinking water, but if cut off from civilisation you would not be able to maintain oil drilling operations for more than (my guesstimate) a couple of weeks, maybe a month. You'd run out of lubricant or fuel very quickly. Not to mention civilisation would regress e.g. you simply can't have any significant manufacturing / agriculture / medical facility / etc. on board - to be truly independent would require a footprint the size of multiple cities.

>If the justification is to save humanity from a large number of possible extinction-level events, then some of those can be averted by having on-Earth isolated ecosystems.

It seems very unlikely that any disaster sufficient to wipe out all of humanity would spare these independent nodes. Even events like plague that would theoretically leave the node untouched (assuming they go hermetic soon enough) are likely to lead to the nodes destruction when the surrounding nation-states dissolve into chaos, or some other unforeseen consequence. Meanwhile the closest possible approach to mars is ~39 days, if there was a plague then that is plenty of time for incubation and symptoms to show.
There is a lite version (which I think does not import the font)
How AI Is Shaping Safety Standards on Oil Rigs
They can't be that good if you happen to know this and be writing about it on the internet.
if you hear money, mafia/murder are not the first words which come to your mind

if you hear Threema in Slovaka - mafia and murder are first words which isntantly come to your mind, because nobody else use this app, everyone is already on Whatsapp, Messenger or Viber and nobody ever heard about Threema besides few nerds until media started to publish transcriptions of Threema chats from mafia where they are ordering murder of journalist

you can downvote all you want, that's reality, same as when you hear Ford Pinto
I've been working on SoundFingerprinting [1] for almost ten years now. Its Shazam for developers. First 8 years I worked mostly during my free time and weekends. 2 years ago, I decided to monetize the storage for the fingerprints. There is a MIT licensed version of the storage [2], and a commercial one [3], which is fine-tuned for thousands of hours of audio or video content. If you are an enterprise customer, you will essentially need it at some point, and will most probably have no problems paying for it.

Overall I invested a lot more time in it than the monetary reward I received. I don't complain since I enjoy working on audio/video fingerprinting and databases. On top of it, the pay at this stage is on par with a regular SE job with the bonus of working on things that I enjoy. I can call it a bootstrapped business now.

In some sense, I think about opensource similar to the work of art. You do it because you genuinely like to create/build things and showcase them to the general public. You don't do it because of the monetary reward. A good writer is one that has to say something, not one who writes for the sole purpose of getting on the NT bestselling list. Opensource is similar.

[1] - https://github.com/AddictedCS/soundfingerprinting

[2] - RAM-based storage, bounded by memory limits

[3] - https://emysound.com
Is december a realistic end date for the epidemic control it is supposed to provide? Herd immunity by vaccination at that point is extremely unlikely...
Yes, this was no clear cut case of war. Argentina got invaded.
My reaction to the code mentioned was similar to the favicon image :)
Sounds wonderful! Fair, visibly useful and independent work.
They've only really known oil for 3 generations, so yes.

And they're also desperate. The future where the world doesn't need their oil (or they've run out) isn't a distant future anymore. It's coming, and coming faster and faster. They need to diversify anyway they can if they want to avoid going back to just being a desert. And so they're jumping at pretty much any deal they see
web development seems to be twice as popular as ML use. Anyone knows why?

Given node.js is known to be much faster while still offering the dev speed of a scripting language. I love python for algorithms and DevOps scripts but feel afraid of using for web as it might end up with huge cost for hosting (higher CPU power)
> Don't confuse those very few who surf their own hyperbole with the average brit (I'm one).

I see your point. And, as any generalization, my point does not apply to all British citizens.

But, that grandiose talking is not uncommon (funny thou):

https://www.reddit.com/r/INGLIN/comments/1p76kk/good_to_see_...
On a real system or just in some syntetic benchmark? Because for me it looks quite fast in barfing out characters.

At least in base-mode. It can becoming slower when the IDE-features kicks in and autocomplete needs some time to meditate about the stae of it's world. But this also scales with size of your active sourcecode, the codebase and used language.

Also, this is some problem of all IDEs, not exclusive with VS Code.
Configure your HTTP server to serve that subdomain from HTTPS. Here's an example using nginx:

https://linuxize.com/post/redirect-http-to-https-in-nginx/
The survey has 75% of users on python 3 in 2017, when a good half of popular libraries still didn't support python 3 at all.

It's clearly skewed toward devs on the bleeding edge.
> What are some tips to get into open source and turn it into fulltime career

I feel like you could replace "open source" with "programming" and it would be basically the same question.

There are two sides to working a successful business:

1) Having something of value people want

2) Figuring out how to 'capture' that value in a sustainable way

The vast majority of people either aren't very good at, or don't really enjoy, #2, and so they outsource the "how to make money off this" to a company (i.e., they work for a company). You write the software the company asks you to, and the company figures out how to make money from it.

The same thing goes for open source: Probably the dead easiest way to make money from open source is to apply for a job at RedHat. Or SUSE, or Ubuntu. Or one of the teams at Twitter or Facebook or Google that do open source. You get to work on open-source software, and the company gets to figure out how to capture value from the activity.

Alternately, you could work for yourself, but then you have to figure out how to capture that value yourself. There are lots of creative ways to do that, but you have to figure out your own market. And in the end, if you're successful, you'll probably have more demand than you can satisfy all by yourself, so you'll need to hire other people, in which case other developers will be outsourcing the "figure out how to capture value" thing to you.

Or, it can just be your hobby, and you can treat it as such: do it insofar as it's fun for you, and don't worry about anything else.

Me myself, I'm a developer paid full-time to work on open source software.

I also have a handful of hobby projects I've worked on in my spare time, which I've put up on github with an open license. Those are things I would be doing for my own purpose anyway; might as well let someone else use them if they want. But I'm never expecting them to become a big thing, and if they did I certainly wouldn't spend much time working on them unless I decided to try to take a jump and figure out how to make it pay.
So the government-approved information is OK but other information is "misinformation"?

Finding excuses for big tech does not help.
I've been working full-time on different FLOSS projects.

Most of the time the only viable option is to work for an organization (either as an employee or not).

Don't go for FAANGs. There are other orgs and companies out there.

Asking random users for donations works on very few cases.

It's a sad state of things. Most modern technologies have been researched with public funding (semiconductors, fiber optics, GSM, GPS, touchscreens) but now people don't even remember that.
9/11 saw much of our privacy swept aside. Coronavirus could end it altogether
I get the following error:

Error on line 1. Unspecified reference named 'HTDP'
in the expression 'I highly recommend HTDP'

Any help?
Google didn't pull it's business from the USA after PRISM, so I guess strengthening their networks against state-backed hackers is already part and parcel of their business.
There's an orthogonal problem: does your DVD drive read CDs? I mean, sure it does, on the abstract level of compatibility; but the _material_ of the physical data carriers degrades. Audio CDs from the 1990s are still listenable (as there's far more error correction going on in the ear of the beholder), but data CDs? Not good, and getting worse.

And that's not to mention magnetic tapes, where the charge fades even faster...
Fleta Agreed on Cooperation with Software Giant Oracle
Google was the most major annoyance when I was expat, as it would default to an alphabet I could barely read. Trying to find the 'English' setting at the time was a nightmare.

I'm surprised browsers haven't addressed this yet, by adding an extra header stating if the locale is in the default setting or if the user has explicitly configured it.
A Plasma Aerocapture and Entry System for Manned Missions
Ts-toolbelt – type library to update, change, and compute TypeScript types
Course: Computational Thinking using Julia, with examples modelling Covid-19
> and since you're inciting hatred yourself, with wanting innocent people to die or throw them in jail

I have explicitly stated that I am against innocent people to die as a consequence of people spouting propaganda. As for those to be thrown into jail for spouting propaganda, these are not innocent.

> I hope you live in a country that has free speech laws

I do, I'm German and we strike a sensible balance between freedom of speech and protecting people from deadly propaganda, although I'd like a bit more strict regulations especially forcing social networks to hire actual German people for moderation who understand cultural context and have enough time for a reasonable informed moderation decision.
> My best practise is to only look at your region when your selected language has regional variations

Or just pick one, and go with it? That way you only need one translation into each language.
python has a sane packaging ecosystem and type system.

CPU power is cheap and developers are not.
Show HN: Automatically generate fast validation functions for TypeScript types
I think I finally understand "growth hacking".
Its appaling how badly that site fails without JS enabled.
I don’t think it’s fair to call garbage collection a mistake. Sure, it has properties that make it ill-suited for certain applications, but it is convenient and well suited for many others.
Not only this, but blogging can also be a marketing tool, where you (or a company you're writing for) publish articles not as an end in themselves, but as a way to show you're an expert in a given domain. For SEO reasons, but not only. These blogs don't need advertisement to make money, they are the advertisement. I'm pretty sure nowadays, this is where money is in blogging. If you want to make money as a blogger, I think it's a way safer road than the advertisement-centered approach.
It might be just me but I can't look at websites with black backgrounds and white or yellow letters. My eyes hurt and when I turn my head elsewhere I can see shadows of the website for a bit. I use dark(ish) themes everywhere but such high contrast somehow is too much.
Nice move. Is this Oracle's first foray into blockchain?
This reminds me of the SliceLine episode of Silicon Valley Season 5.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Txl90NEl92U

Its even better, DoorDash is doing this without even switching boxes.
Weren't there lots of featurephones with whatsapp in the past? And that helped a lot with getting widely deployed?

It seems to be available on cheap feature phones now anyway: https://www.gizbot.com/mobile/features/fnord-047499.html
Android logs can get you in trouble
I think Tim Minchin put it best when talking about this topic in general:

"Science adjusts it views based on what's observed, faith is the denial of observation so that belief can be preserved"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jIWj3tI-DXg
Could you chat with people on iOS with this? Or with people who didn't have a Google account, or didn't want to setup yet another account at all? Being a free and hassle-free drop-in replacement for SMS was the main appeal of WhatsApp at the time. If there would have been alternatives with the same features, WhatsApp would never have become popular in the first place.
> private corporations taking some kind of political stance.

It's not a political stance, it's a moderation action.

Google, Facebook, etc. are just bad moderators of their platforms.

Selective enforcement of moderations policies is bad moderation.
Implementing automated moderation without proper quality control is bad moderation.
Implementing automated moderation without proper appeal processes is bad moderation.

The moderation policy is insane, but I think how moderation is done is even more insane.
> Which speaks German to me. There is a switch for language there, but that only works for some parts of the interface, and not things like reviews, etc, which are all still in German.

It's worse than that. The Amazon interface on amazon.de is clearly a translated version of amazon.com, but the English option is a machine translation of the German amazon.de (which was originally manually translated from English). Why?

And then amazon.fr just doesn't give you an English option at all. Again, why?
https://milligram.io/
Related:

Android and iOS, change your spell checkers to accept multiple languages in the same phrase. Lots of people mix English with their native language, and how about, say, Belgium where they speak 3-4 languages regularly?
Why Covid-19 Flare-UPS Will Keep Happening – Issue 84: Outbreak
This looks to be using the new css variables (well, new to me - I was checking on the state of the art in css just recently). I was looking into how you can do components now and this stuff looks pretty interesting, though styling of nested components using these techniques looked a little...hairy. Has anyone used these in anger?

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/Using_CSS_c...
That incident, putting aside for a second whether it was right or wrong to so publicly and forcefully condemn him - there certainly would not have made much difference if Cameron would have mentioned it or not.

The prosecutors wording and presentation was ill-advised and he would have get gotten a lot of flak regardless.
Goja – ECMAScript 5.1(+) implementation written in Go
The most fun I had was investigating some bug reports with .NET Exceptions in Japanese. Thankfully, there was enough of context in the rest of the logs to get to the bottom of things, but having to rely on machine translations for debugging would have been... fun.