skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think if the IA had contacted authors and said, "Hey, would you be willing to make your book available for lending as part of our national emergency program?" the average author would have been willing to opt in. But IA did not do that. Instead, it decided for itself that the authors should waive their intellectual property rights.

I'll admit, there are some factors that make this complex.

For one, many authors have book deals with traditional publishers, who would also need to be a party to the agreement, and they have different interests than individual authors do.

For another, an opt-in program is currently infeasible, particularly for books that are older and out of print. That doesn't automatically mean, though, that an opt-out program is OK. Instead, it likely means that in the absence of a way to get authors' permission beforehand, there is no legal, ethical way to pull off what IA has tried to pull off.

But my point is that you're comparing the programming community's voluntary "donation" of open-source software to an involuntary "donation" on the part of authors. When you take something that belongs to me without asking me, then even if I would have been willing to donate it had I been asked, you've still stolen something from me.
They don't want to be the ones hauled in front of Congress. Every other company testifying yesterday's actual head of the company was there, but Google's was merely a lackey. Larry and Sergey have just slid themselves out of the official structure, but their share voting power keeps them squarely in charge.

You don't hear about what they're up to because they can afford what they've taken from everyone else: Privacy.
So? Just because it can doesn't mean it inherently does. If someone is using it as cover, you relabel the action, you don't redefine the label.
When I was trying to do the EuroVelo 15 route just over two years ago, it was really obvious Google Maps thought I could maintain sprint speeds all day long.

It also didn’t understand the impact of hills, which is why I cut the attempt short (1080 km) after it redirected me up a Swiss hill instead of keeping me close to the Rhine.

I would’ve preferred a GPX to follow, but I couldn’t find any of that route.
I think learning music is very effective for self-improvement for other reasons, it's a very effective exercise in reconciling feelings with reality. Do you love a particular section of the music in your head and it's really hard? You just have to keep wrestling with reality to learn it. Are you trying to express a certain feeling with music? You have to get skilled enough at the music/instrument to be able to express it. I don't know if that means it actually helps teach emotional self-regulation in general, but I wouldn't be surprised.
Spotify supports siri. "Play AC/DC on Spotify" works just fine.
Sure, but say you're a crazy rich billionaire and you've found you kind of hate being a CEO. What I think a lot of crazy rich CEOs don't understand, which Larry Page did understand, is that you can just stop. You don't need to give away your control, you don't need to give away your fortune, you can just point to somebody nearby and say "you're in charge now," then just go live on an island in the middle of nowhere and watch old movies or build ships in a bottle or whatever it is you like to do. Why is it a problem for you that you have a lot of power that you're not using? It'd be a hassle to figure out who to give away the power to, so just keep it.

It always weirds me out when I see these 75 year old CEOs with massive wealth spending their retirement years trying to get Walgreens to grow an extra 5% this quarter or something. Why are you doing this? Are you that invested in the future of Walgreens? You're got $8 billion, maybe take a break or try and fix the world or do something that will bring you joy.
Better connections to other Docker hosts
I know someone that was hired by Plex. He spent a couple of months as a contractor before they hired him.

I assume it worked out, because he's still there.

I was a hiring manager for a long time. I seemed to make good decisions, most of the time (a couple of notable exceptions). I kept fairly senior-level employees on board for decades.

I don't know if I ever developed a "system." It was always important for me to establish as much of a relationship with the prospective employees as possible, up front; which meant treating them with respect, and being open and emotionally available to them. I found that an attitude of trust and respect goes a long way to figuring out how people will deal with you and your team.

Tests were worthless. I loved portfolios, and discussing the details of projects they had done. I did a great deal of homework before each interview; carefully reviewing their resume, and finding out about as much as I could.

From all that, I have learned to be an "open book," myself. There's really not much about me that can't be figured out with some quick googling. That's on purpose.

But this seems to be more or less an advertisement for their company. It may be a good idea and a good company, but I can't really say.
Wow! Nice. I am surprised neither Scylla nor KairosDB are on that list. I think you could run Scylla by itself (to compare with raw Cassandra) and also re-run with KairosDB running on top of Scylla and Cassandra to see what effects that has on performance. (Though of course, there are advantages to having KairosDB, too.)
What are you quoting from? I searched the text and glycaemia is not present. The paper is concluding Alzheimers is a type of diabetes.
We have the ability to join tables along foreign keys in a couple clicks through the UI. Definitely looking into adding aggregated data & computed columns soon!
> turning the simple act of giving out my email address over the phone into an Abbott and Costello routine sounded like a good idea at the time

Hah! I've been dealing with that for a few years now -- my email is most of my username and spelling it out is fun for neither party.

I've considered getting the shortest, most phonetic-friendly email possible specifically for phone calls; something like a3gx@gmail.com but also want to self-host. It's a hassle!
(YC W19) Hello Point
Does private or incognito browsing protect you from prying eyes on the web?
Would it be nice if we did away with book scarcity and paid all authors exclusively through Patreon? Sure, that'd be great, but we can't force authors into that scheme against their will.

Peoples' access to that information was and is not in danger. If you can't afford a book you can take the tiny legal risk of pirating it yourself. Lending books is cute and handy but the important part of the IA is, well, the archive of the internet. People are upset because they put the archive in existential danger by pulling an incredibly stupid bit of legal activism. It's like protesting the illegality of raw milk by feeding it to your immunocompromised child.
There's also unikernels which several work under firecracker.

"The first, and really the big problem for the whole virtualization approach, is that you need bare metal servers to efficiently do lightweight virtualization;" <- this isn't really true anymore as unikernels can be deployed to {aws, gcloud, azure} as machine images and so can be as light-weight as your program needs.
uncontrolled digital lending

The copies were still DRM'd and still expired after two weeks.
Bigger players don't necessarily have bigger margins.
Ask HN: What does your ideal software engineering interview look like?
I've seen many posts talk about the deplorable state of interviewing today, calling out whiteboarding, take-homes, multi-days, algorithmic, etc as all have massive shortcomings (and I think many who've done the rounds of the interview circuit would agree that its a stressful pain in the ass situation). Maybe the answer is that there isn't any one-size fits all situation here, but I was generally curious about what people think their ideal software engineering interview would look like?
> Money has a way of disappearing (loan interest, people who come after you because you owe them money, etc.) if you hold on to it, so the rational thing to do is to convert dollars to goods that help you immediately

That's largely just a roundabout way of stealing (if you consider defaulting on debts stealing, which I do in many cases). "If I frivolously spend my money before paying my debts, then I don't have to pay my debts!"

I have a lot of experience working with poor people in Maryland, primarily poor African American women (single moms). The vast majority immediately spend their money as you say, but I disagree they are spending the money on "goods that help [them] immediately". Some tried to pay bills, but were too ignorant to understand what they were paying for and why. They would send money to anyone that sent them a letter with scary red ink on it. Also, counter-intuitively, many of the poor I've worked with had the latest iPhones, huge TVs, cable/HBO, air jordans (super expensive shoes), and other luxuries I myself don't have. You could argue these are "psychological necessities" to keep them from falling into despair, but again, I disagree.

> The solution is to provide stability.

The state of Maryland provides free and/or heavily subsidized housing via HOC and free food via SNAP, yet the recipients of such programs I have worked with still frivolously spent cash on toys and luxuries (not to mention booze, cigs, and lotto) as soon as they got it and were in no way on a path to self-reliance. If free food and housing doesn't provide stability, I fail to see how UBI would (especially considering most UBI checks would be eaten as rent which is largely equivalent to HOC)

> The problem isn't that the poor are dumb or uneducated or something

That might not be the entire problem, but it is disingenuous to argue it is not even a component of the problem. Financial ignorance (and ignorance in general) is a huge factor in inter-generational poverty. I've worked with single African American women who had no idea where their money was going. When I helped them get their accounts in order, we found they were paying Comcast for cable despite not owning a TV, they were paying for all sorts of extraneous insurance and warranties they didn't need because the letters in the mail had predatory "amount due" stamps in red on disguising them as bills, etc.

Self reliance does not just magically happen because of "stability". Even a lot of middle class people are living borderline unsustainable lifestyles, where missing a paycheck would be catastrophic because they went way too far into debt for their <huge house/expensive car(s)/etc>.

Paying down debts in the optimal order to get on the path of long term savings is not something you can easily bootstrap yourself into without help. You need teachers and mentors for that.
A Garmin Edge model with built in OSM (8xx/1xxx models) are absolutely phenomenal at this with no mucking around with apps or any cell service required.

I think it's what almost all very serious cyclists use.

I've done 150 mile turn by turn routes on my Garmin. I've had various models for near 20 years of cycling. The only time ironically they ever have trouble is if you download a route generated by one of the various apps on the internet.. you need to be quite careful with those. The on the fly routes they generate don't ever have those issues.

When they started using the Garmin curated version of OSM it was a massive upgrade. Near me it's very near 100% coverage even of mountain bike singletrack trails through the woods. OSM has gotten incredibly good for cyclists. If you are not a road cyclist OSM has amazing coverage of bike lanes & paved paths too.

And you can actually see it in the sun and don't need to carry a pocketful of USB powerbanks to make it to your destination. The only people who need to recharge with a powerbank are the .01% who ride more than 150-200 miles without stopping at a place to charge.
this was believable to me specifically because platforms like audible/kindle actually do this for book sellers. same with payment processors
Top Areas for Machine Learning in 2020
Love it! And agree. Hopefully this has the same broad effects the same way YCSB benchmark or Jepsen testing really helped level the playing field.
> when we try to make estimates for each kind of dark matter that we think of, we come up a lot short of the amount of dark matter which is required to explain the gravitational dynamics of galaxies

The dynamics of galaxies are not the only place where non-baryonic dark matter is needed. Our understanding of baryogenesis in the early universe places limits on how much total baryonic matter there can be in the universe. But the expansion history of the universe requires much more matter than that (about 5 times as much IIRC).
I would equate crypto currency more with trading collectables. If Haskell was financed with profits from trading magic the gathering cards, would it be different? Some people trading MTG cards might be unsavory, some might try to scam you, but that's the market, not the collectable itself.

Because this article, in my opinion, misidentified the scam, I just don't agree that crypto profit supporting Haskell is a problem. If there are unsavory actors in the community, that's also a different thing, and isn't the fault of crypto.

It seems this piece leaves no room between scammer and victim. It's certainly just an opinion that crypto is a scam, and it seems the author is projecting that opinion on individuals in the Haskell community, but it sounds like those individuals benefit the community more than harm it.
I worked in unicorns and small companies over a couple of of dozen of years.

Best people do thing that matter.

There are fewer things that matter in big companies.
Ask HN: Why does my monitor flicker when it shows a certain static pattern?
When I load a certain static image (basically a blueish or greenish pixel checkerboard), my monitor starts flickering heavily.

Test images: http://engineerjs.com/wtf1.png http://engineerjs.com/wtf2.png. Make sure to download them and use actual pixel-correct zoom (does not work in the browser).

Videos: https://photos.app.goo.gl/rMRuUEe7kHorpwtf6, https://photos.app.goo.gl/NT3LwxCoorYYT2cc7.

What could be going on here? Is the monitor faulty? I bought it 4 days ago. It is supposed to be "FlickerFree" according to the manufacturer (https://www.philips.hu/c-p/276E8VJSB_00/4k-ultra-hd-lcd-monitor).
If you want to use Fortran today, the jobs are essentially all government contracting. If you want to use Haskell today, the jobs are essentially all cryptocurrency. If you don't want to get into government contracting (which is hard to get out of), or if you don't want to do cryptocurrency, you don't get to use Fortran or Haskell.

What happens if the bottom falls out of the cryptocurrency job market? Does Haskell become Scheme, a language used only for language research?
> and most people don't send dozens of emails daily.

What you're missing is that the vast majority of emails aren't sent individually from one person to another; they're sent by programs. In addition to spam, we're talking about stuff like newsletters, promotions, notifications, updates, mailing lists, etc. Looking through my emails now I have an incredible volume of GitHub notifications and various other auto-generated emails. In total I definitely receive hundreds of emails per day.

And I don't actually do that many Google searches per day (maybe only a couple dozen) mainly because I tend to go back to the same websites over and over again, and the browser URL bar autocompletes the name rather than performing a Google search on the name of the site. You really have to go out of your way these days to perform a Google search on the name of a site rather than just go to the site directly.
Previous commenter and I were talking about chip and pin, not just chip (aka EMV).

With EMV, someone can still use your card after they steal it. With chip and pin, that is far more difficult. I don’t know if merchant off the hook even with just chip, I presume the card networks kept some weasel language in order to allow them to blame the merchant.
The Sandisk microSD card SDSQXCZ-1T00 rated at 1TB for MSRP of $400 is listed at sdcard.org as physical dimensions of 11 x 15 x 1.0 mm, Approx 0.5g. That is 165 mm^2. If a medium ice cube is 25 x 25 x 32 mm for a volume of 20,000 mm^2 - then today an 'ice cube' could hold 20,000 / 165 = 121 TB with normal off the shelf accessible technology for $48K USD.
I'm currently listening to the "The History of Byzantium" podcast. I highly recommend it to anyone who enjoys deep dives into history as much as I do.
> YouTube where one can't help but ponder about content moderation at this scale being impossible

That's precisely why YouTube cares so much about content moderation. They need to figure out some way to not hemorrhage money with all the hosting, transcode, and CDN costs for low-effort, spammy, and controversial content that cannot be monetized. Their actions taken to address content moderation sent the world into a tailspin as a result, proving Google both understands their scale and cares very little about the way their policies disrupt societies.

In 2018 YouTube went on a deletion/censorship spree in the name of racism, deleting 50mil videos in the process. But it was clear that they only scapegoated racism as the reason, because only 1% of the video they deleted was racist. [0] The reason for this scapegoating was to avoid culpability in the mistaken business model of being the world's largest beer bong for internet video.

[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2018/12/13/youtube-removed-nearly-2-mil...
The Courage (and Disappointment) of Pitching a Visual Essay
Yes, I did mean to imply that Alphabet's revenues would have declined anyway.

I've been watching Google's financials fairly close from when I joined the company in 2006 onward (I left in 2010). The driver of Google's profits has always been search advertising, nothing else in their portfolio has the margins that search ads had at one time. At the time of Bing's introduction (2011) Google's search advertising margin started to fall just as Bing's was increasing. That has continued to this day.

To counter that, Google first started taking revenue away from their AdSense sites, then they started adding more paid placement and ads on their own sites, then they started "pre-showing" content in the search results that kept people from going to a web page that might be showing ads[1]. They introduced additional "taxes" (really fees) for people selling things to insure that they appeared in the top third of Google's search results even if they were the best organic result for the product being sold.

All of these moves have kept the revenue growing at the cost of increasing user dissatisfaction with the quality of the service. Left to their own devices, users would migrate to other services but here Google has been aggressively paying for search portals (whether explicit "web search" pages, or implicit like a search bar on your phone) to send them traffic rather than send it to Bing. They have spent a record amount of money over the last year buying this sort of traffic.

They can't keep paying more for traffic, eventually that gives them negative margins on search ads. While as Bing's cost per click grows they can pay more for traffic and still make their numbers. Google is having a harder and harder time squeezing more ads onto their pages without completely destroying the user experience.

This trend means that eventually, they are going to run out of options, and their revenues are going to go down. Look at their financials and they don't have another business unit that can pick up the slack.

There hasn't be a particularly novel improvement to search engine ranking over the last 10 years at least, and existing patents on maximizing ad revenues are reaching their expiration date.

If Google doesn't find a way to re-invent itself it will go the way of tech giants before it, build a shiny headquarters monument to itself and then expire in a slow and painful death.

I used to remind people when I was there that the "plex" was the headquarters for SGI, a Tech Giant before it was dead :-). It will be sadly poetic if Google has to sell off their shiny new headquarters to stay alive another couple of years down the road.

[1] Since Google gets paid significantly less for ads on third party pages, even if they supply them, it is a win for them to keep people on Google's internal sites.
Like having office hours with some of the most innovative folks in business
One of the few takeaways I remember from my engineering ethics class is one way to think about the ethical implications of a tool: if you have a situation, and you introduce a tool, how do the possible outcomes of the situation change?

For example, if you have two people arguing without weapons, the likely outcomes of the situation aren't strongly weighted towards one or both of the participants being maimed or killed --- it's difficult and requires commitment to really cause horrific damage if you're just hitting each other.

If you introduce a (supposedly value-neutral) tool, like a gun, into the situation, the outcomes become much more strongly weighted towards someone being maimed or killed.

Even though it's always a human using the tool, the tool itself can be seen as having an ethical character.
>> I really have no idea what “computer scientists” in current year get up to. Seems like it should be what they’re doing! I guess they’d rather pay theorists to tell them new architectures aren’t worth doing, than pay people to innovate.

I liked the article. But the reason we have shit solutions for the problems the article lists is because they are really hard to attack with our current technology and knowledge. Who's going to develop a new science of computation? If it's so easy to do - why doesn't the author do it?

The article is right. We're stuck at a primitive stage of computer science where pointless dithering like GPT-3 is causing huge hype because it remotely resembles something that our computers can't do.

But we're stuck anyway. Bashing computer scientists for being mere humans won't change that.
why would you say it fails that lower income population?
Yes, and extermely widely used, despite its bitter flaws.
The way I see it, pride is noise.

By staying truly humble in the face of non-science, science provides a calm even backdrop, against which it is more manageable to evaluate worthwhile findings from bullshit.

This is orthogonal to conflict. A conflict could be handled humbly (Rapoport’s rule and all), or the opponents could drown the signal of their arguments in the noise of pride.

To abandon humility would be to fight noise with more noise.
They legislate all walks of life. It is their job to comprehend the abstraction of each issue and seek advice in the right places, not to be knowledgeable in all professions and subjects of interest.
Machine learning uncovers best self-report predictors of relationship quality
A fantastic podcast - interview with the author:

Andrés Gómez Emilsson on Solving Consciousness and Being Happy All the Time

https://mostinterestingpeople.podbean.com/e/16-andres-gomez-...
I just cannot shake the feeling that everything Containers have promised us, I was promised back in 1991 with pre-emptive multitasking and protected memory.

I also can't help but think we're going to end up with a microkernel with some sort of nested cgroups for user processes. Which is itself going to look a little bit like Erlang...
Interestingly you also can't purchase kindle ebooks on Apple devices at all, which I beleive is to skip the apple tax.
Patreon has the same issue described in the OP: the marginal cost (both psychological and financial) of supporting additional creators is too high. Since YouTube Premium distributes payments automatically based on watch time it doesn't suffer from that issue.