skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> There aren't a billion content creators on Youtube, and even fewer who would be good targets for blackmail like this.

Your treating the instant case as the common one, but it's not. And you don't know that until after you've done an investigation, which means you don't know it when deciding whether to allocate resources to an investigation.

It's trivial to game subscribers and views. If having more gets you something then all the actual garbage channels will have plenty and you're back to square one.

Google gets something like two million takedown notices every day.
Laziness Saved My Friend’s Sanity
> Unpredictable progress is lethal to businesses

At peace, or in a quasi steady state, yes. But not in all situations. Eg. in war or other adversarial situations you need to both be making progress and be as unpredictable as possible, in the hope that in some indefinite future you can exterminate and/or enslave the other players.

As the world is becoming more and more war-like, these types of strategies can become more and more advantageous. And you don't need actual military war or even physical violence. Actually it's even better without these, since non-military non-violent war-type adversarial state can be sustained forever!

In an arms race type of business situation, if your progress is predictable it means you're not moving fast enough, and somebody else will outrun you! And moving more from competing on marketshare (fighting for more from the same pie) to competing on progress would be awesome too.

I absolutely love unpredictable progress, and I'm really optimistic about the direction the world is evolving to... endless war and without (most of) the death and violence part will be a great catalyst for high-risk-high-reward technological and scientific progress! And as volatility increases maybe more and more of the businesses that depend on "the world staying stable and predictable" will be wiped out and create some breathing room and opportunity for new more flexible and open players. If predicting the future is no longer on the table, you need to invest in true agility, eg. ability to quickly change direction and speed when you glimpse a new future, maybe replace most specialists with teams of nimble quickly-retrainable AI-augmented-expert-generalists etc.

And back to the AI side... we need to stop playing the "predictions game", you never want to actually predict what will really happen in the real world, you want to predict what could have happened and then immediately interfere and change the direction of things to invalidate that prediction (sabotaging other players that probably also made the same prediction)... hopefully to produce a change in the direction you want... but if that can't work, "using AI to inject volatility and invalidate others' predictions" could be a valid business strategy too...
I guess they are playing for a portfolio approach. With investments in a bunch of different companies, in-house drones, and robotics research. Very interested in how they integrate them into Amazon, if at all.
VimMotion: Bring vim-easymotion and Emacs avy-mode to macOS
zettelkasten
Great ideas can still have poor execution. It seems to me that major the flaws in the Netflix execution of the Qwikster spinoff was the source of much of the criticism. Most people lump the idea and execution together.
> Comparing it to the flu seems to be arguing in bad faith along political lines rather than deeply examining the issue.

No it isn't. Before vaccine a normal flu season killed 0.1% of the population in a year. Not 0.1% of infected, 0.1% of everyone. Those kinds of numbers are not good, but they are not a catastrophe either, especially if it is just a single year. And to me it looks like Corona is roughly that dangerous, meaning it is like an Influenza we don't have a vaccine against. We should work hard to create a vaccine for this disease, just like we did for influenza, but I haven't seen anyone who did the math on if it is worth locking things down to prevent loss of life. People in the early 1900's didn't think it was worth it, and when I do the math with current mortality in Sweden which barely locked down then the numbers clearly show that a lockdown wasn't worth it.

Influenza mortality by year, vaccine was created in the 1940's:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2374803/bin/Dos...
>When internet commentators see odd behavior that they don't understand, why do they assume that the most parsimonious explanation is that management must be a bunch of drooling morons?

I don't think most internet commentators have the patience or even the interest of painting an accurate picture. Most of them are shitposting.
Regarding 2), I write cards on the structure, for example to rot learn the table of content, key sections or enumerations. It’s usually enough to create a path in my mind so that I can access the memory of the content in situations where I need it.
The revenue of Twitch [0], Squarespace [1] and Patreon [2] combined pales in comparison to that of YouTube [3].

The revenue potential in the advertising space cannot be underestimated. Merch has high fixed costs and does not scale dynamically. Live-streaming is inaccessible for both streamers and viewers (in comparison to YouTube videos). Donation fees aren’t a secure revenue source. Either the donators or the creators could turn off donations at any time. But ads are guaranteed. There’s so much to the ad space that isn’t publicly known; Google’s operating on a whole‘nother level.

It’s also a lot more complicated to start ten $300 million projects than to optimize one $3 billion project. The people steering the ship (CEO, CFO, CTO, ...) only have so much time and brain power. They could delegate projects to others, but that requires hiring the right people and that’s really hard. If you have 4 layers of accounting management, and the probability of a bad hire is 25%, the chance of each layer being managed well is only 32%. Whereas if you have only one or a few big projects, you can have less layers, so the probability of success increases all round.

(You might say that Google should do all these projects so can diversify. But why should they take the risk? There are thousands of startups out there testing the waters. They can just acquire those when they show promise. If those startups fail, Google loses nothing.)

(The claims in this comment are educated guesses from reading a lot of articles. I definitely haven’t run a $300 million project!)

[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/mattperez/2020/01/08/report-ama...
[1] https://www.drift.com/blog/squarespace-billion-dollar-growth...
[2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/elisabethbrier/2019/07/16/next-...
[3] https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/3/21121207/youtube-google-al...
Even if that's true, it still implies that everyone else mostly aren't idiots, because otherwise it wouldn't take luck to get rich, all it would take is outsmarting all these idiots everywhere.
Units is a real eye opener once you do it right. I remember when i studied and could almost verify what I did was correct, I would just check if the resulting unit was what I expected
Haha this comes up all the time here. Just to be sure, you can click on the https/lock icon, select cookies and block them and you'll never have this problem.
Employees will make peanuts to nothing if Zoox gets sold for < 3.2 billion. This will make many folks who work at Zoox very unhappy esp with the amount of stress that engrs are taking every day. I hope engrs make some money here otherwise bye bye loyalty.
I find it weird that they'd pose those two directions as opposites rather than as complementary tech.
It's more like zillions of lines of uncommented assembly written by exponentially more programmers who each try to execute the code against a particularly brutal test harness.
Luck favours the prepared.
HN is not a website of today. It’s a website of 2007. Its visual style has not changed at all since then.
Or their family donated enough money to an Ivy to have a building named after them.
Donald Trump, Boris Johnson, Elon Musk
Networks tend to follow an exponential growth rate, so even if the same number moved to the alternative platforms, the time it would take them to grow large enough to be significant would shorten substantially.
Luck plays a role but smart and successful people often create many opportunities to get lucky.
According to the Brave privacy policy Together uses 8x8’s servers, so my guess is that this is using Jitsi Meet.

The last time I looked through the Jitsi Meet config files, by default it uses Google’s TURN servers to route the calls. Not sure how Brave Together is doing it.
What's ironic to me is (IMO) Netflix is probably the shrewdest big company in existence now. Hastings has dominated not one but two markets, the second obviously larger and more insurmountable than the first. Almost Every single decision they make (including and especially ones that make customers unhappy, like their shitty browsing experience) seems so calculated and thoughtful it's just amazing.

Even I thought Disney plus might be the beginning of the end for Netflix, that it finally met a Goliath it couldn't best, but now even that isnt obvious anymore.
Build a QRCode API and Inventory Management System with Autocode and Airtable
Google was always great at _customer_ service, but their only customers are in advertisement, paid subscription SaaS and cloud departments. When you use any other services you are not customer, but a product and no one owe you anything.
but you can still use those tools on your own projects right? I've been learning and using XQuery and XSLT 3.1 and I really enjoy them! Also, common lisp :-) But yeah, it will be harder to use tech like that on my day job, wish I could.
Quick google search says that not true its a bit higher for the us.

Its also bimodal https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/08/04/upshot/up-bir...

Edit: I actually think i confused my self with the age of first birth and age of parents, ignore that first line
This article puts it better than I ever could. I had a similar reaction when I read extremely critical press coverage of some VCs in Europe investing in YPlan, which eventually sold for a nominal amount to Time Out London.

The synopsis of all the coverage was: "How could they have spent all that money? And how could the investors have been so STUPID?"

My friend Fred Destin wrote a great essay on this[1], and I'll do the horrid thing of quoting my own note to him in reply:

> It’s analogous to a soccer fan questioning the manager’s decision to put player X on the field instead of Y. The manager sees both players on the training ground for hours every day, knows their mood, talks to them, understands how they respond to different situations, and consults his coaches. Then the matchgoing fan sees 90 minutes of output on Saturday and makes a judgement with <1% of the data a manager has.

> Past a certain point in fundraising and traction, it’s impossible to believe that a startup failing is anything more interesting than a combination of poorer-than-expected execution, and bets not paying off.

[1] https://medium.com/tech-london/hey-yplan-how-do-you-dare-go-...
We are bioelectrical puppets driven by quantum effects, so everything we do is decided by luck.
No, it does not "shine"

It merely serves to alleviate an issue with a language limitation. And the library writers should have known better than to simply change the signature of an existing call.

(also this example reminds me of all the #ifndef/#define game that headers do which should have been built into the system in the first place)
True, but you can't get lucky when you keep sitting on your couch.
Particularly when your family prepared for you
All you need to know about observability
Trump accuses Twitter of interfering in 2020 election
Because under Amazon funding will no longer be an issue. They will be able to install devices in Amazon's rather large fleet and gain millions of miles of experience on roads all over America. It will accelerate their development process significantly.
Scam, not debacle.
A interesting take on this phenomenon from the point of view of the insider and outsider - https://commoncog.com/blog/good-synthesis-adapting-to-uncert...
(Disclaimer: I work on YouTube, but all the opinions are strictly my own).

We tried to convey the message [1] that due to corona virus fewer and fewer human reviewers will be available.

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/youtube-coronavirus-content-...
You've even drank some of the koolaid by the personal computer industry to call them applications: real applications clearly run on mainframes and reach the end user via terminal display units!
Looks good ! What is this header ?
"X-Clacks-Overhead" :) We getting Discworld meta as well ?
Even when it didn't.
Roping China into this is akin to saying "America kills high school students for fun" for what a few psychos did.
Consider `life` been a nonlinear chaotic process, so causality from been smart alone cannot be established.
indeed. Yet I might have a use for this library in a project I have no practical use for.
The author probably is, assuming she bought NFLX.
Virtual Sensing Picks Up Where Government Data Left Off
Is there a bot that can look up news organizations for us and report basic facts, like

Long name: International Policy Digest

ISSN: 2332-9416

Founder: John Lyman

Founded in: 2011

Crunchbase: not found

Wikipedia: not found
> I find this comment utterly mind boggling. The US's stay at home orders were issued when? Mid to end of March? That makes it what? About 1 month? Are we supposed to believe that "young people" suddenly get into a tail spin because they have to endure a whole month of not finding a partner, get to know each other, make life plans, and get pregnant?

No, but millions have lost their jobs due to the shutdown, and it's very conceivable that many would put off children/marriage/partnership because of that.
Damn, this is the kind of quote you see on a title card in a movie about gambling. Nice.
The point is you cannot outsmart lucky idiots.
These are two different products. Blogging != note taking. And it doesn't seem like there's malicious intent. You can't use a generic name and expect others not to come up with the same idea.
> [Go] is forgiving enough that you can do exploratory programming in it.

I agree with most of your post, but I’m not sure I would describe Go as “forgiving”. In fact, it’s well known for being strict. For example, exploratory programming would be significantly easier if the Go compiler could (optionally) ignore unused variables and unreachable code.

I’ve also found exploratory programming in Go is hindered by needing to frequently cast between different integer types. Maybe I’m doing something wrong, but my Go code is often littered with casts between different integer sizes and signedness. It’s much easier with Python’s arbitrary-precision integers.
These Aren’t the Phish You’re Looking For
I thought it was obvious I meant from the sector in question. My mistake, I'll try again.

Do you know of a social media company (or ad company using a product to garner the data, if that helps) that uses that model with a comparable size to Facebook? If not, are there any that are making ground?
There's a chapter from Anders on [1].

1: https://www.amazon.com/Masterminds-Programming-Conversations...
This brought back fond memories of C++ Builder and the Jedi OSS library.
Well, duh, the expected prevalence of any disease diagnosed entirely by the fiat of a group of people enriched by the disease being more prevalent is pretty close to 100%.

In other words, to a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

This is not to deny the reality of depression and anxiety but to cast doubt on the diagnostic criteria purveyed by a special interest group whose members get richer and more respected the more they can convince the world that the thing they do is needed. All professions justify their own existence.
"Turbo Pascal" :-p
Successful photographers attract TALENTED photographers who are willing to lend their talents and knowledge in the pursuit of the overall artistic vision.

Ultimately, SOMEONE needs to be around who DOES understand lenses, and post-processing. You're not going to luck out into a great image just by having a great eye.
I wonder what's the correlation between this and people being underpaid. I'm fortunate enough to have my own house after graduation so I don't have to pay rent. But I have friends that don't have this luxury and man, they are struggling. Besides eating and rent they can't afford anything else in a month. No question here what's giving them these feelings
Or maybe you just don't want to play the game anymore.
one of the authors is at snap. inquiring minds want to know: will this soon be available in snap camera?
While I agree with the article, it is important to distinguish the macro from the micro point of view.

From the micro point of view, a talented individual has a greater a priori probability to reach a high level of success than a moderately gifted one.

On the other hand, from the macro point of view of the entire society, the probability to find moderately gifted individuals at the top levels of success is greater than that of finding there very talented ones, because moderately gifted people are much more numerous and, with the help of luck, have - globally - a statistical advantage to reach a great success, in spite of their lower individual a priori probability.
Meh, Netflix is one of many for me. Would be happy if it didn't exist, to watch other stuff on other streaming and I don't think they necessarily have the best content.

Netflix try's to get you hooked on their originals, but the problem with that is once you binged a series you want something else - they cant keep feeding you the crack that is that current series because they take months to produce, so you switch to something else - and at that point it could be something else on Netflix, or just as easily something else somewhere else. I don't think Netflix is really that sticky.

But maybe I am proving the point of the article and I'm missing the strategy.
If I get this right this sensor could be reused until it is saturated with positive detection? (one or more positive patients depending on intensity of the signal) That would be a complete game-changer compared to PCR where tests that turn out negative are exactly as expensive as positives which incentivizes against testing without suspicion.
When a politician speaks about something political, there is always an implicit 'I believe' or 'I think'. I mean, Biden recently said black-skinned people who don't vote for him aren't black. Obviously, he doesn't need to be fact checked, because he was just saying what he believes. Same with Trump. Politicians speak politics -- a belief system.

Gosh, I really hope Twitter doesn't start fact-checking the Pope. What a sad state of affairs.
Why Good Codes Don’t Need Comments
Meme-as-a-Service Use memes as your next projects' image placeholders
It doesn't just put family building on ice, it puts almost everything on ice. Everyone who hasn't already built a life they are reasonable happy with will be feeling horrible right now, and most young people are in that stage. I'm already above that age so Corona doesn't affect me much, but I know that if I were younger I'd hate it.
"If you secretly despise wealth, it will elude you."
Nope. Luck does not imply causality. Everyone can be an idiot (including you) and you can still be lucky. Or there can be a mixture of idiots and geniuses and you can still be lucky.
you guys don't live in China, you know nothing about China, I don't know where did you get these information about China. But you can say what you think, that's your freedom.
What would be a typical compensation model if you build something and have someone else run it ?
I think that’s needlessly reductionist. Read the biographies of people like Mark Cuban and Richard Branson: both of these men were born entrepreneurs and salesmen, with Cuban starting his first business at age 12 and Branson at age 16.

A good parallel to this is the music industry, actually: yes, there is a significant amount of luck in “making it.” But you cannot deny that talent is one of the strongest predictors: at the very least, talent is the bar to entry.
>Failure of flash is quite predictable and can be managed through the use of over provisioning and advanced error correction codes.

Do you have anything to back that up? because in real world even Intel server drives simply vanish from the system without prior warning, or promised read-only failure modes.
All of these are good factors, but don't leave out ego. Many smart people would rather be "right" and preserve their ego than make money.
Luck by definition is an independent variable.

Edit: I don't know who downvoted me, but this is the definition of luck according to Google: "success or failure apparently brought by chance rather than through one's own actions"
My email address, me@chrismorgan.info, has been widely promulgated for many years. I get about five spam messages a day, and occasionally 10–15 a day for a week or two. I average around one false negative per month, and have had two false positives in the last three years (and neither mattered—in fact I kinda agreed with the spam filter’s judgement in both cases).

My email is with Fastmail, so I know that no emails are mysteriously disappearing (which seems to happen with providers like Gmail)—either the server rejects the email (so the sender will be notified), or it ends up in my mailboxes somewhere.

So my own experience is that sharing your email address publicly is harmless and useful.
Since this is about money, isn't that a bias? I mean what are the chances of "son of (insert a billionaire name here)" to be rich vs me. TBH I can be stupid too with that amount of money, since I can afford it.
Ah, yes, the doctor :) Do you know if it records the sessions somewhere?
Still surprising how members of this website are still mostly blind to the obviousness of fuel cell cars. Just turn that excess electricity from renewables and convert it to hydrogen, powering a fleet of hydrogen powered vehicles. Solves all infrastructure issues being brought up. Furthermore, it's possible to power large vehicles like semi-trucks or ships, even aircraft at some point in the future.
Both.

Anders has a couple of interviews where he mentions that he resisted invitations from ex-Borland colleges that moved into Microsoft.

It was only when Borland stop being what it used to be, that he decided it was time to move on.
Or they took more risks than you and it paid off. Or they just happened to be in the right place at the right time. Or...
Claim something; back it up (or at the very least mention it). Nebulous accusations are unhelpful - why do you do them?

As for Castro - if it's true ("at least one source asserts it to be simply a myth" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploding_cigar#CIA_plot_to_as...) then a 60-year old looney-tunes plot on one man is very different from, say, illegally trying to annex an entire city illegally in the present. Or Uyghurs by the million.

Anyway, ff you say something, provide a citation.
That's not "succeding" though.

I like to give Trump as an example: everyone loves to blast him for being an idiot. Is he a good president? No. Is he good at the game, but most people totally miss what his game is? I claim, yes. It's unfortunate that he managed to play the US election system for his own purposes, but that doesn't mean he's just incompetent at everything. E.g. he's a rather good populist - that may not be a quality you like, but at that particular game he's not at all bad.
I’m amazed this is downvoted. Two wrong don’t make a right, China was incompetent, and yes the US (Trump) were incompetent too. As an European I agree with you, the article is Trump parroting/propaganda.
This is very off topic but why is something submitted May 2020 to preprint listed as https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.08848

The 2005. confused me - is it some coincidence of random
number generation or something else I missed?
So Trump is really good at the political game, for instance?
Is Donald Trump a good example?