skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Inexcusable. Sad. Horrible.

The two questions in my mind are:

First, how could something this horrible happen at such a high level at such a prominent company? I mean, eBay is not some rinky-dinky business run by fly-by-night operators in a shady part of town. We're talking about a well-known publicly traded company that is a component of the S&P 500 with a market capitalization in the tens of billions of dollars. Auntie Tilly would be delighted to hear her niece got a job offer at eBay after college.

Second, is this kind of horrendous antisocial behavior ("we can do whatever we want this side of legal with impunity") representative of behavioral patterns at the higher levels of large, prominent, powerful companies? Or is eBay just an exception, the proverbial bad apple in a basket of mostly good apples? I would hope it's the latter.
This is one of the many reasons why I switched to the iPhone after 7yrs on Android, and I'm also getting my mother a iPhone as soon as possible.

My mom is used to android phones, its complex but she's understood the basic design language and can navigate the phone easily.
Whenever she needs help though, its a massive struggle for me to do tech support over phone / video call.
Each android phone is different, and we've never had the same phone, and we both get frustrated because the menus and the steps needed to modify settings is different.

With an iPhone though, regardless of the iPhone model, I can send her a screen recording that she can easily replicate on her phone.
Consistency is extremely valuable for a non power-user, and only iPhones offer such consistency over multiple generations of iPhones, and iOS updates.
Yes there are changes, such as the switch from TouchId to FaceId in iPhone X, but they are incremental, as compared to the confusing experience of switching from a Samsung device to a OnePlus or a Xiaomi device.
I remember when MessageBird was giving away free tacos across the street from Twilio's Signal conference. Left me feeling that their brand is tacky and desperate. On the other hand, I learned that there was an alternative to Twilio. And got free tacos.
> Humans achieve their performance levels while only ever observing a tiny fraction of that training data

Individual humans only ever observe a tiny fraction of that training data, but our brains are not the products of solely our individual experiences. We come out of the womb with a massive amount of evolutionarily trained, genetically encoded weights in our neural network.
I'm not being dense here - I really thought there weren't? Like the core problem with ag as a business is that it's very low margin and it's extremely hard to make money.

I can only think of a handful: marijuana, fancy tomatoes at Whole Foods, maybe coffee or vanilla (?) beans... but even there, notice how there's either fierce competitive pressure, or it's possible to easily overwhelm the market (vanilla beans have to compete against synthetics). I mean there are surely some I'm forgetting, but it's a small number, and I thought that deterred VC investment.

For your staples - corn, soy - that's still much cheaper to grow outdoors, so hydroponics can't win that market.
Can't not see the favicon they have is Ghost's instead of their logo.
Or maybe they were driven out of the fertile food-rich lands by the lions? Why is it presumed that they must be evil, their motivations were only ever shown to be that they were hungry.
> As of 2015, the US used ~450 billion cubic meters PER DAY for irrigation

I think you mean to say 450 billion liters, which would be 450 million cubic meters.

Your source says this:
"For 2015, total irrigation withdrawals were 118,000 Mgal/d"

So roughly speaking Israel desalinates in a year how much the US uses for irrigation in one day. That doesn't sound so outrageous. Israel is a small country.
I traveled extensively to the US (I am French).

The border is horrible. It is something which I hated, one feels like cattle and is treated worse. The other one similar to that was in Russia.

The border authorities look all psychopathic and I wonder if they are selected as such.

The agriculture guys after you pick your luggage are ok.

As for the police inside the country, I had 3 encounters over 20 years and maybe 50 trips.

One was when I asked for some directions on Phoenix. This is the normal thing to do in France but here the lady was perplexed as of why I am asking her. Nice but really surprised.

The second one was on a road in the middle of nowhere in the SW. It was night, we were driving and ther was a single light on our lane. We slow down to a stop, look at the police car, no reaction on their side so we drive on. The car rushes after us, bright lights, the cop yelling at us with his gun out and my bowels almost giving up.

He asked for our papers, I asked if I can move my hands which were on the roof and I think he recognized an accent. He relaxed a bit, said yes and I proceeded to explain every move I was doing.

He had a look at the papers and let us go. My friend lightly peed himself.

Third one, a year ago. I am driving with my family entering Paso Robles. My gps tells me to turn left. I go to the left turn lane but it was the wrong one, the right one is 20 meters further down the road. Quick glance around and I drive forward, against the rules.

Sound and light signal, I see a big police car behind. A young cop walks to my car and asks me jhghjhffcjjhgvbk (this is what I understood). I ask him to please repeat slower, to what he glances inside the car, sees two kids grinning in the back, us in the front and says "you are free to go, have fun and drive carefully"

So it is a mixed bag, based on three data points.
It can be a blessing or a curse, I've found that my job satisfaction is very much dependent on my manager more than the company I'm at. Looking back, I'd tell my past self to spend more time understanding the psychology of the new manager and how to operate and thrive under those constraints.

In one situation, there was a personality issue, and half the team left within three months. Personality issues are hard to correct, I knew the writing was on the wall and should have been more aggressive in switching out.
SynBio in the 2020s smells a bit like green tech in the 2000s. I see a ton of founders and funders with zero biology background thinking that they have the vision and can just hire biology expertise.

Biology is ruthlessly unforgiving and complicated, and often times very low efficiency. For example, it’s a bit amusing to see the ratio of CRISPR mentions in startups vs the techniques actually being used by scientists. You would never use CRISPR if you had the option of using Cre. I’ve made several stable transgenic animal lines using Tol2 transgenisis, which is much higher efficiency, too.

If you’re excited by the space, but don’t have a biology background, consider joining an organization led by a biologist.
>> Or, you could sell the business to the person most qualified to run it well instead of installing the boss's kid as the new CEO. Nepotism is gross.

> This is completely unrelated to ownership.

So if the kid's going to sit back and not interfere then it's kind of irrelevant that it's your business. Might was well be a portfolio.
nit - this is not a Cobain quote, rather Heller from Catch-22.
Summary:

“Design content that doesn’t waste people’s time and effort which directs people to only the information they want.”
Hold my beer....?
No worries. Most good ideas start as jokes.
They mentioned having multiple keys with different government organizations. What if there are 12 keys and you need 6 keys to decrypt the data. The user has 6 keys. The company that created the device or service has 2 keys, the judicial branch has 2 keys, and the executive branch has 2 keys. All of the non-user keys are required to be in different systems. The compromise of any one system still requires cooperation from the non-user groups to decrypt. You couple that with some system that allows the data to be decrypted and reencrypted with new keys in the case of a breech of keys. You can add as many keys to this scenario as you want until you feel like a breech of the necessary number of keys is not going to happen. Are we sure a system along these lines is impossible?
> Lafayette Square is not POTUS' private lawn

But St Johns church is not a public space, and vandalizing it is not legal. Even in public commons, vandalizing/toppling public statues is currently not legal.

Trump's tweets/posts are strictly about reprimanding this behavior. Again, there is a growing orthodoxy that holds that this behavior should not be reprimanded, but tweeting about enforcing those existing laws is well within the realm of reasonable discourse, especially for a political leader.
I wouldn't call this an issue w/ google docs, just pick a consistent naming scheme like timesheet_john_smith_august_2015. Or even better, just make it so only John Smith can see John Smith's timesheets through sharing preferences.
3gb/sec read and write speed, about $4,700 for 15tb for these datacenter class hardware. So in about 3 or 4 years this will be less than a $1000, probably getting smaller, closer to a consumer product.

There's an old sf book about recording your whole life, we aren't quite there. At say 15 meg per sec (from a random site about 1080 dashcam video [1]), 86400 secs * 15 meg / 1024 / 1024 = 1.24 tb per day. Assume another 50% improvement by h265 and you still have about 600 gig a day per lifetime recording. [2]

[1] https://dashboardcamerareviews.com/video-recording-time/

[2] This was more fun to speculate about than thinking about spreading covid-19 with no real plan for addressing it.
Yeah that too! People keep saying perl is a bad language or something and the other languages can't even get implementing closures right.

I've always liked the references syntax, probably the most complained about feature. Its just pointer thinking. You could probably collapse `$array[$x]->{"foo"}->[0]` to `$array[$x]{"foo"}[0]` and save some keystrokes.
Perl 5.0 was released towards the end of 1994.

Python 1.2 was released in 1995.

The first public release of Java as 1.0 was in 1996.

JavaScript appeared in 1995 as well, but the first ECMAScript standard didn't appear until 1997.

First release of PHP was in 1995, same with Ruby.

Perl pre-dates the initial release of all those languages and was already up to its fifth major version by that time.
>but searching Scott's real name does not link him as the author of SSC, which is what Scott cares about.

tried it in an anonymous browsing session. Googling just his real name returns a link to the SSC twitter as the very first result, a rational wiki entry to scott alexander, and plenty of pictures at SSC meetups, so I have to assume any of his patients who ever Googled his name (which I guess is most people) probably know who he is
> I wonder sometimes if Google would be better off having a system set up for spinning off ideas that are complementary to their business model but distracting, or not high volume enough.

Is that not what Alphabet is?
What are people's thoughts on this compared to Google Play Instant? It seems quite similar to me on first glance, but the special QR codes seem like a good idea for making them more appealing to advertise/try.
Indeed. The article's comparisons seem a bit useless - neither the quality or the filesize is kept constant.
True, you can’t dig a trench valuable enough with kW/hr output to generate a billion dollars in value.

You can, however, come up with an idea that improves the lives of 1 billion people by $10 worth. It turns out that ideas are more important to improving the state of humanity than kW/hr output of hard work.

You may be arguing that being one of the billions whose life was improved by $10 is ‘others doing it for you’
Getting Through This Together
Why use medium.com with this login-wall?
I am somewhat of a polymath, but a narrowly focused one, in that most of my skills solely apply to computers, and very little else. But then you may ask: computers are a broad topic: how does one ever conquer the subject and attain mastery of it?

My answer is simple: the world of computers is an endless one, a gigantic rabbit-hole (especially when combined with The Internet). Being able to download source code for a broad number of programs and have them run and configured any way you wish is still magical, no matter how many times I've tried it.

Then there's the fact that you can get reliable information on an endless amount of subjects with very little friction or red tape. I am still in awe of The Internet and haven't become jaded about it yet, as many of my peers have (they literally have grown bored of the net...something I can't understand). I guess it's how you apply the knowledge instead of merely knowing for the sake of knowing.
> So, they're already learning from Apple?

No. They're already Apple.
Ben & Jerry's spent less than $5k on Facebook and Instagram ads last month. They'll get more publicity value from joining the boycott vs. paying to run ads for a month or two.
The 6S (see my other comment near here) was almost 30% faster than the 6, and doubled the RAM to 2GB. Those two factors alone probably made the jump seem so significant, ignoring any other changes they may have included in it. The 7 got another major clock boost, but kept the RAM (7 Plus had 3GB though) so that would've been another noticeable improvement, though mostly in games and such, many applications probably didn't see much change between the 6S and 7.
I am running the new betas iOS 14, iPadOS 14, and macOS Big Sur.

I love this feature in Safari. You open a new tab or browser window and there is a message area letting you know what is being blocked.

I am sick and tired of large tech companies like Facebook, Google, Amazon, etc. making money off of my data with scant benefit to me.

Not to pick on Facebook and Google, but I only use them now (well, almost) for paid services. I happily pay Facebook for Oculus Quest hardware and entertainment. I happily pay Google for music, books, movies, and Google Cloud Platform (which I personally like much better than AWS).
Performance of the cheapest iPhone available today is greater than the most expensive android phone, so this is a moot point. You need to upgrade the Android hardware just to maintain parity.
I think that (probably apocryphal) Ford quote is a bit of a red herring.

Sure if you ask your customer for solutions, you'll get "faster horses". But or course that that would be silly - you aren't talking to them for solutions. You are talking to (hopefully lots of) potential customers is to understand their problems really well.

The road to startup success is littered with the bodies of companies that had a neat solution to problems nobody really cared about. Sometimes really neat technology. Still dead.

If your business approach is a solution looking for the right problem, success is going to depend a lot on timing and luck; i.e. things you cannot control.
I actually worked for OTRS for some years. It is quite a remarkable company as it is creating an open source line of business software with a nice team of people and is making a sustainable business out of it. There are not much other software companies that managed to do this.

Yes, you can call them open core now. But still many companies are using the community edition and are served well by it.

I worked closely with the technical founder and he started the pre-decessor of OTRS in the 90s while working at SUSE, and yeah of course it was in Perl!

I must say that working on the quite significant OTRS code base, with proper code conventions, 'modern' perl5 is not so bad. But when using third party libraries sometimes you'd see arcane language usage and there seems lots of magic involved...

Also, the technical founder started https://zammad.org -- the same idea but started in 2012 or so. So now it's Ruby!

Modern perl5 is ok. But the ecosystem is slowly deteriorating.
I take it that you don't have children? Are family business gross? Sure, you could argue on a bigger level because of the power concentration, but you are applying the same thought to a small biz. Usually when the kids are not so bright, and you notice it as a father and company-owner, you just promote someone qualified -that you trust- to manage it and own some shares, but the control stays in your network. If you don't like it, go build something yourself.
Often not if the phone is password protected, though increasingly popular biometrics provide no such protections. The idea is that providing a password is equivalent to providing testimony and is thus protected. The law on this is not fully settled yet and varies by jurisdiction.
My understanding is that Android existed not to pursue the goal of "winning," whatever that would have been, but to prevent Apple from running away with the show. Chrome was the same thing, though the competitor was Microsoft. Google Docs? Same thing, Microsoft again.

Google is good at building things 90% as good as they could be. For Gmail that 90% was leaps and bounds better than the web mail alternatives of 2004 which included…SquirrelMail.

Does Google care that you're switching to Hey or Safari or whatever has replaced Google Sheets? No. Are they going to buckle down at finish the last 10% of all of these products? No. Is that an opportunity for all of us reading this story? Yes.

One way to think of Google's products as the equivalent of Microsoft Write — or Apple's iWork. Google's platform is not Windows or Mac OS or iOS: it is the Internet. Google's products come free in the shrink-wrapped box when you drive to Egghead Software pick a copy of "Internet" up off the shelf.
I don't really want to engage with most of this. I think you need to appreciate that there is very little daylight between your kind of points, which might very well be in good faith, and the approach of someone who just engages in what-about-isms with an intent to occlude debate and distract people from the urgency of implementing blunt solutions that do a lot of good. The latter is a particularly cowardly form of debate, where people suggest various forms of possible counterpoints and allude to certain controversial conclusions that they just never quite say out loud.

Just to highlight one point that I think is often missed. Comparing the "additional cost of covid if lockdown is ended" to the "cost of lockdown" is a frequently abused argument - partly because of bad faith, but in other cases because people legitimately miss that "ending the lockdown" doesn't mean that people will all of a sudden leave home. There is a portion of economic cost, and I won't engage in trying to size it right now, because I tire of this, that will remain just from people being rational self-actors. Restaurants will still close, schools will be reduced attended, etc. Because of the virus. So the comparison is to compare "additional cost of covid if lockdown is ended" (and we know there are sufficient idiots out there to drive spread in this case; it doesn't take a lot to have large effects) to "saved marginal cost if lockdown ends".
Three Essential Qualities of an Effective Team
A while back, there was an attempt to build a web-based solution to this problem. It was a card-based browser called Wildcard (their page is dead so posting an article)

https://techcrunch.com/2014/11/13/wildcard-raises-10-million...

It seemed like a really cool idea, shame it never took off.
The insistence on bullying me into iCloud with notifications is my least favorite iOS feature.
Having a chain of ownership list would be a great help with this. Track and report which company owned the item back to it's manufacture and who 'owned' the IP of the run. Even more ideally also the production time, etc.
Lean HTTP Server for Gleam
Thanks for the correction. I roughly knew the quote and when I googled it Kurt Cobain came back all over the place.
It’s very unlikely you’ve never eaten soy, unfortunately. It’s essentially added to every processed meat product, nowadays.
It's Google so they won't acknowledge that Google did it first. Will post comments on how they use Firefox and DDG.
Mostly the last one. It's included by default with most linuxes and cygwin. So even if your boss hates you and doesn't let you install anything you can still write scripts.
"Republicans" in this case is not the entire GOP, but rather only three politicians who also happen to be Republicans. There are probably plenty of other Republicans who would support this, and plenty who would not. And probably plenty of Democrats who would support it, and plenty who won't.

Hopefully the won't category will be much larger than the will category, but I doubt the support will be exactly along party lines.
Hello, also a developer who's interested in agroecology. I actually also left development (as a job, not as something I do) in order to pursue a more human-centric approach to agriculture. With automation, it seems obvious we'll be seeing way more unemployment than what's happening right now, which is already alarming; small farms with synergistic crops & forestation seems like a no-brainer to achieve food sustainability. Plus, chemical pesticides are usually not used in syntropic systems, which makes it good for your health too.

I dropped out of Agroecology course in 2018 but I actively work with it or did before the pandemic at least.
You've listed multiple technical improvements, but overall the user experience difference between a 6S and an 8 isn't nearly as big as the difference between the 5S and 6S.

The biggest noticeable difference probably being RAM. The 6S and 8 (non Plus) both have 2GB ram, while the 6 and 5S only had 1GB.
Facebook has the right to moderate, edit, prioritize, deprioritize, delay, republish, voiceover, or whatever-the-hell-else content posted to their site.

My statement about Facebook's right to editorialize is not limited in scope to moderation. Facebook has the right, for example, to hide all posts by a certain ethnic minority group if they so choose, or to publish only racist posts and nothing else, if that were their policy. It's their website.

I think there should be additional regulation restricting this, but only for DMs and perhaps small, private groups, where the platform is serving as a communications tool. Censoring those types of communications is actively harmful to society.

Facebook deciding what is or isn't in your news feed is Facebook's freedom of speech.

Ultimately, I support Facebook "erring" on the side of leaving content up. I would even support free expression restricting regulation regarding their legal ability to censor DMs; that is to say that, when functioning as a person-to-person communications medium, they should not be permitted to arbitrarily suspend accounts or censor messages. When your Facebook account is otherwise suspended, you should still be able to log in and send and receive messages from your contacts. Imagine if the telephone company stopped your ability to send or receive SMS if you said things on the phone that they didn't like!

That said, for the part of Facebook that is closest to "web hosting", it's their show, and their rules. It's entirely up to them if they wish to editorialize in the feed, although I agree it's harmful to society and that the state should educate and train people to avoid Facebook, the same as they do with alcohol or gambling.
Software are more bloated than 3 or 5 years ago. Performance with a HDD will suffer as everything has to be loaded to RAM before the CPU runs the code. Put a SSD in this machine and for most tasks your experience will be the same as with a brand new PC.
Linux is Most Used OS in Microsoft Azure
What the 1930s can teach us about dealing with Big Tech today
What is a unique use case for facial recognition that cannot be abused and has no other alternative solution?

Even the "good" use cases like unlocking your phone have security problems because malicious people can use photos or videos of your face and you can't change your face like you would a breached username and password.