skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think that you bring up a great point regarding a hybrid between agile and waterfall, within the context of government.

This is my own experience, but I was involved with a multi-year project for a federal agency that did exactly this. I think what many people don't understand is that the design phase is a byproduct of the internal processes necessary for even getting to the point of developing a system in the government. What I mean by this is, systems don't appear within based on good ideas or pitch decks, they start with policies, and based on those policies, procedures.

Why is that necessary in government? Because typically, there are laws, executive orders, regulations, and various other policy devices that have to be implemented at the agency level, there is a review period that allows for input from affected external agencies, etc. In some cases, there is even involvement from congressional committees and their staff members. This is especially true if appropriations are necessary for funding a program.

I can honestly say it took a year and a half just to develop the policies and procedures, to coordinate them, and to begin work on the system. That was ridiculously quick, given the scope of the project. The good thing about doing it this way, is you have a very clear roadmap at the outset. The downside is, the process for making significant changes to the system's functional requirements can be a challenge (e.g., changes to policy/procedures, another review period, etc.).

That being said, once we actually began the development phase we took a much more agile approach. We would hold daily stand-ups, regular testing/feedback sessions with customers, established product owner(s), etc. I would say it worked really well, but it was not without difficulties. Those difficulties are far bigger than agile vs. waterfall though, it's just the way the bureaucracy functions (for better or worse).
This is the model for the Ardour DAW on Windows. You get the source or either a free binary that disables audio output after a few minutes or a paid for binary eithout that restriction. I don't know how well it works.
Hackers reportedly demand $10M ransom from Garmin
Then, I guess, the only choice is Github Sponsors. And it doesn't seem to be a bad one[1].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23613719
I completely missed the poor consistency from the "I would rather" comment above. I would also prefer my data deleted and not stolen, but had to read your comment to realize there is no evidence to suggest that. It is funny how much I assume being at least partially aware of my ignorance of the topic.
> They don't list _arbitrary_ third parties. For example, Mastercard tells everyone...

Not sure if you mean Google or Mastercard doesn't list third parties?

You seem to be conflating Mastercards's PCI compliance requirements[1] with their data sales to companies like Equifax[2] and others, which is an extremely opaque trade and not disclosed.

> Enough information that informed consent can be considered. It isn't specified, because it were, then companies would work around it. Australia makes use of a Common Law system, that which is "reasonable", rather than that which can be litigated.

Exactly, and I don't believe that any court would find that they need to specify "that you're grabbing IP ranges, headers, screen sizes, etc". I'd note that the ACCC isn't making that claim either.

> that which is "reasonable", rather than that which can be litigated

Well "reasonable" is decided the courts, so it is litigated.

[1] https://www.mastercard.com.au/en-au/merchants/safety-securit...

[2] https://www.equifax.com.au/about-us
> why they made array_map and array_filter switch parameter order

It kind of makes sense if you look at the signatures (array_map takes a callable and a variable number of arrays, while array_filter takes a singe array and an optional calable), but yeah, it's horrible to use.
This is a little off topic, but are rare earth minerals something that could be mined from asteroids?

While the idea of humanity becoming an interstellar species as depicted in sci-fi seems pretty far off to me, it seems like asteroid mining via drone could be viable in the near future if the incentives were right.
I don't disagree that this has been going on for millennia. I think humans are far less rational than we pretend to be (Myself included).

From the article: "The problem is, we consistently make decisions that suggest we are not so good at distinguishing between ephemeral and lasting pleasures. We keep getting it wrong".

I believe social media massively exacerbates this phenomenon rather than making it sustainable.

> Of course there are many other implications here but while we can agree it's probably not good that so many rely on this for their daily life happiness, it's hard to quantify how bad

It's a slippery slope to me. If you don't eliminate the need for external validation it snowballs, just like an addiction.

Note that I'm not saying external validation is inherently bad, but relying on it is. We all like getting praise and compliments, but relying on them to prop ourselves up is a recipe for disaster.
Mustard-bomb means of seed dispersal
How Hong Kong can change China (1997)
Yeah, it is spending a little more for those rural customers due to additional distance traveled. However, the have been using flat-rate shipping within the US for a long time, so they know the price they need to maintain. Postage is still 55 cents for most letters in the US, which doesn’t seem particularly bad. UK has ~80 cents a stamp as the cheapest I found. Germany was praised elsewhere in the thread and has stamps at ~90 cents a letter.

So yeah, based on how cheap it is to send mail in the US, and the fact that USPS would be profitable venture if they weren’t screwed over by horrible laws (pension prefunding, etc.), the USPS is very efficient and shouldn’t be parceled out to states.
Why is a No-Code Recommendation System worth a try?
"people put their life and health at risk for the merriment of the couch potatoes"

This is not true. People would do it anyway, it's just that the couch potatoes now provide a way for the people doing it to actually get paid. You cannot be an athlete with your only motivation being 'it'll amuse others'. You need some sort of intrinsic motivation to get at least somewhat good at something. People would fight for fun before the UFC, long before they got paid for it. Same with any other 'extreme' sport. One can argue that the couch potatoes now enable these people to do their activities a lot more, or in more intense ways, but that's a different argument all together imo.
I'm not quite sure I get your argument about why dealing with other people's mail would be difficult? Using the post office's services is exactly 'other people dealing with your mail'.

(If there are any special laws that give the post office more rights than you can voluntarily give your friend or a business, those laws ought to be amended.)

You have an argument about time sensitivity. But I don't understand how you arrive at the frequency of daily? Why not weekly? Why not hourly?

For voting, weekly or even monthly would surely be enough. Election dates are known far enough in advance. Any additional time pressure is purely there by legislative fiat. (And we also already assume that people who vote in person can find their way to the polling station on their own. We don't argue for a government rickshaw to cart them there.)

> On that note, the government has to send mail to every citizen multiple times a year, they're going to have to pay private mailing services for it anyway... How much taxpayer money is actually being saved by privatizing it?

A few times a year is much less than the total volume of mail.

I was going to type out some philosophical arguments about hypotheticals and counterfactuals here. But no need for that. We can just look at the impact of postal privatisations in eg Europe.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postal_service_privatization

In any case, what I'm arguing for would be a level playing field and the absence of political pressure.

See eg the whole argument about how 'the evil party has decreed that money must be set aside for known future obligations, and that is bad'. You only get that because the whole thing is politicized.

I'd say to abolish the universal service obligation and the postal monopoly. Let all providers compete on a level playing field.
The Electric Car Atop Europe’s Sales Charts Isn’t a Tesla or VW
Maybe he edited it to clarify after strangers on the internet got him in trouble at work having implied that his employer had suffered a data breach?
Then why postal services in most countries have a monopoly still? If they are so good at what they are doing by all means let it be known on a real market place. Guess what, they will fight tooth and nail so that competition for regular mail does not happen.

I love how people on HN complain about monopolies in tech but find it absolutely OK to have monopolies in other walks of life.

In Japan you have heavy competition for package deliveries and the former National post gets trashed when it comes to reliability and speed vs Sagawa or Yamato.
> It's a nightmare to manage on premise but it works really well in the cloud with firewalls allowing traffic based on instance tags.

It's not though. Subnetting and firewalling are like the foundation of any corporate network.
In that case the subject of the "attributes it" is lost, while with the "he says he's a bit dopey but [he says] it's okay" reading it naturally flows into "and [he] attributes it".
What's sad about it? Having interfaces defining the arguments of functions with complex parameters in a type safe manner and with support for auto-completion is one of the greatest thing to ever happen to JavaScript in my opinion. And you get named function arguments as a by-product of something way more powerful than just that.
> That seems a rather optimistic assumption

I'm just basing this on my experience working on products in this space and specifically dealing with compliance and "retroactive" consent in the run-up to GDPR implementation. I could definitely be wrong.

> If an organisation maintaining large amounts of personal data about people without their consent can't find a reasonable way to verify identity and allow the data subjects to exercise their rights...

I'm genuinely curious: if you were them, what would you do to resolve this without asking the subject to provide any additional data for verification?
Are you defining all paid content as spam? Or all sites that sell products?
I used https://lite.duckduckgo.com for a long time because of its near instant redirects, but it recently broke Firefox's omnisearch, and so I've all but stopped using it for even that.

The bangs are painfully slow over the main duckduckgo site.

Miss the bangs.
If that was the case then they wouldn't be doing the other things they are doing to improve Safari such as improving performance: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/safari-release-not...
EMDR also works.
New National Data Center in Kenya
The four dead plants on my balcony would disagree
Sony Entertainment recently had to pay a $3.5M fine for similar behaviour.

The Federal Court has ordered Sony Interactive Entertainment Network Europe Limited (Sony Europe) to pay $3.5 million in penalties for making false and misleading representations on its website and in dealings with Australian consumers about their Australian Consumer Law (ACL) rights.

Sony Europe made misleading representations to four consumers who believed they had purchased faulty PlayStation games. This occurred when Sony’s customer service representatives told them over the phone Sony Europe was not required to refund the game once it had been downloaded, or if 14 days had passed since it was purchased.

“Consumer guarantee rights do not expire after a digital product has been downloaded and certainly do not disappear after 14 days or any other arbitrary date claimed by a game store or developer,” ACCC Chair Rod Sims said.

The Court also declared Sony Europe breached the ACL by telling one of the four consumers it did not have to provide a refund unless the game developer authorised it, and by telling a fifth consumer that Sony Europe could provide a refund using virtual PlayStation currency instead of money.

Unfortunately it's a slow process though.

https://www.accc.gov.au/media-release/sony-to-pay-35-million...
I'm ok with transfers from rich folks to poor folks.

But why punish people for living in areas that are easier to service by mail? (Ie why make them cross subsidize the hill billies?)
I was assuming that the wood was steamed and then compressed. It depends what sort of wood that is.
Yeah, but it also brings me to that you don't have to agree with Perlis's quote. But IMHO we know too little at this point in time to say it's an unreasonable idea.

We know far more about programs than about biology, but the gap between software and neuroscience is huge and we probably don't know as much about software as we think we do, either.
Regarding the first quote: in any case, I think it's probably a good idea to encode this implicit knowledge somewhere. A bit like code is the best kind of specification.

Code can be studied and improved gradually. Since it guarantees repeatable results, you can try tweaking parameters and measuring the outcome, to achieve even better result. It's a bit like taking the highest-skilled workers, merging their knowledge, and extending their lifespan indefinitely so that they can continuously improve.

The only disadvantage I can see is that you're skewing the playing field in favor of those who have access to the most data, and by reducing the workforce size, make it difficult for someone else to obtain the same data.

At the end, a skilled worker can leave a company and make its own, or join a rival one. An algorithm can't do that, further entrenching a select few companies'positions, thus locking knowledge away from humankind. Companies probably contribute to the loss of information over time (see lost knowledge: Roman cement, massive bronze castings, etc), as free-flowing information is against their interests, in most cases.
I get what you mean, but I remember at one point going through some kind of 'oh no, it's a large diff' or even 'do not do this because the diff will increase' phase. And I realized that's just not ok. There's already enough things to keep in mind when programming, adding an extra one just because some external tool which actually doesn't have a lot to do with how the code works, i.e. holding back changes because of diff, just isn't worth it.

Now, I admit cluttered diffs can be a problem, but there are workarounds: more fine-grained commits (especially separate commits for renames only) and better diff display. As an example of the latter: another commnter mentions one argument per line produces better diffs. It does for your standard display with +++/---, but tools like Sublime Merge have this covered and siplay the change in such a way you can immediately see what argument changed it's name, inline in the code. If it's was just a typo fix it will usually only highlight the changed character(s) not the complete name. Even going from all arguments on one line to one agrgument per line is covered, since it'll just display it as added whitespace and won't highlight the argument themselves indiacting they did not change.
Do you mean actual Amazon Logistics branded vehicles?

Where I am Amazon seem to use an independent contractor, and they're brilliant. It's always one of a couple of people I recognise, they have a nice van branded as their own company. It's a great service.
That’s strange. I always had issues with DHL ranging from stolen items, open packages to delays and blunt rudeness from drivers.
Yeah but should use static analysis tools in your CI/CD and development workflow when using an interpreted language. That's a must have.

So better typing can definitely help to catch those before pushing and running your code.
That model falls apart from the start. If anyone is savvy enough to compile from source then why buy it? If the code is free, then, I don't see how they'd even bother to pay for it; it being the compiled version; of course.

It the source is out they can't hardly enforce anything or much. People will just go to github and compile it for free.
> I love how people on HN complain about monopolies in tech but find it absolutely OK to have monopolies in other walks of life.

Because democracy is magic?
In the UK a Renault Zoe is about 30% cheaper than a Tesla Model 3 and is smaller and more urban. I.e. more in line with most cars you see everywhere in Europe.

It is also possible to lease the battery instead of buying it along with the car, which seems to be a popular option (although it seems they've removed the option, apparently).
I'm sorry but first the majority of software companies focus their sales compensation on the contract value (TCV) rather than the profitability. It's not generally the sales teams job to evaluate profitability, that the product/commercial teams job by setting out the lines of discount. The reason is that for most tech companies you want to maximise your market reach.

More importantly, I wouldn't trust a word that Larry Ellison says - particularly when the primary purpose of the article was to boost the Oracle share price by explaining that Sun would be additive to that quarters profits. I'm not saying that Scott McNeally or Jonathan Schwartz were great execs - I have no idea - but I think you have to look at the goal of the article.
That's rather harsh. The DHL "PRIO" sevice was explicitly created for Amazon and later opened to other larger customers like Zalando, but it's nothing I can buy as a private person or even small online retailer. I think your 95 % next day delivery rate is actually the value that DHL promises to PRIO customers (https://www.dhl.de/content/dam/images/pdf/GK/dhl-paket-prio-... - they mention up to 97%), as regular parcels don't have a guaranteed delivery time.

So to recap, DHL has created a specific service that it offered exclusively to Amazon (and now a few other retail giants) which prioritizes their packages. I can't buy that service as a regular Joe or small retailer, so my stuff gets deprioritized as compared to Amazon. In my personal experience I have witnessed that many times when sending or receiving packages, as my stuff from Amazon always arrives on time while my own packages take days or (in rare cases) even weeks to get delivered.

What exactly is misleading about that?
In Australia often contracts between Government and a private-entity are declared commercial-in-confidence to prevent disclosure of information that could affect the private entity. I wouldn't be surprised if this is common in the US as well.
"a significant impact on my day-to-day programming life"...seriously, what a bunch of shite
A brilliant rant! You hit the tone quite correctly to what i would describe. It's a constant thing hidden in the day-to-day progress at work - and it feels so odd, that only a few people find it corresponding with their attitude to programming or the market we're in. It's really a big, big unstoppapable mess - when only viewed from the right angle.
Same sad story as always. Gmail & alike surely did "improvements" on email treatment, but it seems that not all infos are publicly available.

If you see it the other way around: why should they provide detailed infos for spammers on howto setup their own mailserver.

I always wonder why there is not a "Central" Service for each mail provider, like https://postmaster.google.com where you can register your domain and see what is wrong with your mails ... maybe even do "spam protection" by simply adding "mails per second" that you think are appropiate for your service.
> Does... does anyone actually think noise-cancelling is for increasing audio quality?

No, but noise cancelling headsets are often sold as premium headsets, with the obvious implication that they are to have high sound-quality. And quite often, they don’t.
Same in Brisbane, inner city Brisbane has an abundance of parks, public transport and places to live, and getting more so. Melbourne's liveability is really influencing Brisbane imho, we're copying a lot of things that make Melbourne good. (and of course its even better because - no victorians ;-))
I grew up in Dorchester, only a few miles away from Cerne Abbas. During primary school, when I was 7 years old, we went on a field trip there. The giant's anatomy led to some fairly obvious questions from my classmates and me that were never satisfactorily answered.
Honestly this (or, at leasst, prioritisation of parcels over letters and printed paper) is the right way round. If it were practical I'd back an actual and punitive financial tax on sending anything via the post that could be communicated electronically instead. Waste of paper and resources.
To those only looking for the noise cancelling component of modern headphones: I was only interested in this as I already have a good pair of (wired, offline) hi-fi headphones, and given some HN comments on this I decided for Peltor x5a passive noise cancelling earmuffs. No batteries to charge and become disfunctional with time, no spy-apps, no potential hearing damage from ANC (not sure what the status is here), no cables, no bluetooth issues; and you get Peltors for 15-30$ so no problem if they break because you stored them in the bottom of a bag. My growing collection of low tech might look a bit dorky but I love it.
I partially agree that regulations are slow or even atrocious. But, on the web, what true game-changing innovations were there in the last ten or so years? By and large, we're doing just the same things (poorly) on the web we used to in the 2000s. But "network effects" now place barriers to entry on a medium that once was supposed to be an easy means for self-publishing (for example, why don't more musicians put their songs on a paywalled web page for self-distribution? It's the kind of thing the web was made for, yet they have to go to endless pains with idiosyncratic and ever-changing web conventions, payment providers, SEO, and promotion on platforms to get a handful of clicks). What we're experiencing is a large consolidation end-game. In that situation, I think regulation is necessary, as "the web" can't get out of this without political will. I also disagree that the EU's ruling for IE had no impact; Firefox opened the door for browser diversity and merit. The same principles could be applied today to Android, to stop Google mandating bundling of their "services" and making Android phones cheap when the price to pay is privacy invasion and monopolism.

The marketplace being global might not very much longer be the case. For example, the EU court of justice has ruled (again) that personally-identifiable info just can't be transferred to the US under the "safe harbor" doctrine. And hasn't Google pulled out of China because they were required to give data to the government which however they weren't willing to on matters of principle?
Would have been nice if people there actually would have gotten support for their ambitions for more freedom.

Instead we had prominent "intellectuals" telling us how freedom is bad for reason XY throughout the last 5-8 years. What a disaster...