skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'll point out that while California's public college system isn't as cheap as it was 40 years ago when I got my degree. And there is a lot of competition to get into certain schools. The state never has discriminated against students by age. So pigeonholing people early on is wholly a shitty European thing that has nothing to do with public funding.
Not sure why you're throwing Google in with Apple, on Android you can install third party apps if you so desire, including third party app stores.

On ios you can't.
> why a company like that would have a cash stockpile so gigantic (around 200 billion USD) for so long without a long-term plan shared with stakeholders?

In the past 10 years, Apple has bought back over $400B worth of Apple stock, mostly at under $200/ share. This has massively reduced the number of shares on the market and been hugely rewarding to shareholders. They have shared their plan with shareholders, pretty much every quarter they put updates on how it's going.

They have a good summary of how they are performing on their plan on their site: https://s2.q4cdn.com/470004039/files/doc_financials/2020/q3/...

I'm not sure what kind of plan you had in mind, but what Apple has done has been spectacularly good for shareholders.
My Vision for the future of humanity (2018)
Cherry ML are terrible. I'd prefer rubber domes.
I can’t imagine anything that I would want from Best Buy where I would need to ask an employee anything besides “do you have it in stock.”
The same happens on Macs. Starting Safari on an HD-based Mac is painfully slow.
Another attempt got to 7 points before being flagged and marked as dead:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24015300
This is such a weird hill to die on
I had a COBOL class and sort of liked it. The debugging wasn't great and the JCL can be tricky, but it wasn't bad.

The real problem is that companies/goverments didn't anticipate the retirement of COBOL resources. Nobody wants to train anyone or give them a career. They all want to hire senior people.

I see a similar trend emerging in other technologies. I see tons of senior positions but very few positions where the company will provide training. Even internal transfers at my company provide zero training.
Actually what they were prosecuted for was mainly threatening to blacklist Compaq from buying OEM licenses. Thus they not only had a monopoly (with 90%+ of desktops at the time), but used that monopoly position to coerce another company, engaging in anticompetitive behavior.
It did to Adrian Lamo.
Based on everything I've read, it isn't an idle thought experiment at all. The artists are genuinely trying to take down Google. Check out the press links:

https://www.theregister.com/2008/08/13/google_will_eat_itsel...

Reading more, it actually gets even worse. Apparently the artists were using a bunch of click bots to inflate their ad revenue, and they were boasting about gaming Google's anti-fraud systems to do so.
Does the game still start at Meiggs Field in Chicago?
These and other examples you mentioned are improbable and low harm possibilities.

Average damage per user is several orders of magnitude smaller than the average benefit of targeted advertising: for the company, for businesses and even for users of the platform.

The similar arguments can be applied to convince people that cars are harmful:
* cars kill quite a lot of people
* if you drink and drive, you can get to jail
* gazoline is expensive
* cars pollute the air
* cars produce noise which reduces quality of life

A hundred years ago one could convince a lot of people that cars need to be prohibited. And they were quite successful:

> The most draconian restrictions and speed limits were imposed by the 1865 act (the "Red Flag Act"), which required all road locomotives, which included automobiles, to travel at a maximum of 4 mph (6.4 km/h) in the country and 2 mph (3.2 km/h) in the city, as well as requiring a man carrying a red flag to walk in front of road vehicles hauling multiple wagons.

The arguments you are suggesting, all of them are true. Companies need to be more transparent about tracking, perform external audit etc., stricter laws regulating personal data is needed to make sure data is not misused, strict laws regulating what can be advertized.

But killing all of tracking would be similar to restricting speed limit to 3 mph. Well, it will definitely be safer.
My point was of course they're going to go with one interpretation. I myself can't figure out what the hell he actually meant to say.
Ask HN: What's your worst production issue or outage?
What went wrong, why did it happen, how did you fix it and how did you prevent it happening again?
Overpriced iCloud storage, for starters. Or their 30% cut from all the apps sold in the App Store.

Even if they sold zero iPhones next year, there's still a lot of iPhones in the world that need services and apps.
VR will make flight and driving simulators much more immersive and fun. I've been hoping for this for years (as I was a fan of Microsoft Flight Simulator).
Building an Electron App with Bazel
> What would they actually sell?

iPhones produced in India, presumably.

https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Technology/Made-in-India-iP...

Or in any other place.
> The claim that nvidia is bad at open source because it does not open source its Linux driver is also quite wrong, since NVIDIA contributes many many hours of paid developer time open source, has many open source products, donates money to many open source organizations, contributes with paid manpower to many open source organizations as well...

Out of curiosity, is there any large open source product from NVidia? I can't think of any.
And then you end up with Best Buy crapware on your computer and usually they have worse specs. I have never seen as many 14 and 15 inch laptop screens with less than 1080p in my life.
Hi everyone. This is a tool I wanted to build for a while and last night I finally did it. Hope some of you find it useful. Let me know if you have any questions.
Obviously what they did is wrong but the kid is 17. To me this is a prime example of where a short sentence or community service should be used. Don't ruin his life - he could be a useful employee for a tech company.
Yes and so am I supposed to give him a pass? He's going to keep going in the wrong direction until his addiction and it's action lands him in jail or something bad to teach him a lesson. Not sure I can teach him that lesson myself minus cutting him out of my life and all my family's life (he grew up around my family).

Also, when you put out he's doing wrong and going in a horrible direction he says i am horrible for judging him. He already almost got thrown in jail once, yet didnt get time. Maybe time in jail is what he needs to wake himself up from his addiction. Unfortunately, both his parents died early due to drug addiction.

Hard to forgive and reach out when all i can see is he will do the same until he works on quitting his addiction.

What would others do?

*im here in the mid-Atlantic area of the US. Didnt watch the Sopranos that much, but on a different note running that business with him was the best job I ever had. Customers loved what we offered and not only paid us but would write reviews on Facebook without asking. As well I was selling a service I loved and working with friends outside. It could definitely could have become a 100k summer business and more, but he ran the business like a Soprano and I ran it like Walt Disney. The latter is still blossoming decades later ... mob bosses not so much.
In general I agree, but once a business becomes powerful enough it may be able to reduce competition in what otherwise might be competitive markets.

Lets say at some point drivers of GM vehicles buy 60% of the gas sold. Gas stations must agree to use proprietary connectors to service GM cars. Because of GM's market share, the majority of gas stations decide to use GM-only connectors, which then sells more GM cars...

Such a cycle is great for GM but probably not good for consumers if you think competitive markets are pro-consumer. And it affects people who don't even buy GM cars, because it influences what 3rd party business are viable. I think that's a key difference between companies with enormous market share engaging in anti-competitive behavior and companies with minority market share (like BMW) doing it.

As another example, I think it would have been unfortunate if home internet service providers (of which many people have a choice of only one or two, and it's a big hassle to change) became a bottleneck for other types of services such as online streaming (perhaps by charging exorbitant bandwidth costs to competitors). Luckily I think that ship has mostly sailed, and even in the absence of regulation abuses are probably somewhat kept in check by the very real possibility that regulation will happen if things go too far.

I think there's an argument to be made that it would be bad for a duopoly in the mobile OS market (Apple/Google) to lead to a reduced level of competition in app stores, payment processing, and possibly computer software in general (because of the approval process). And even though Apple may not have an absolute majority on market share, the percent of software revenue is probably more important and Apple's share of that is probably quite high.

There's probably reasonable ways to address this too. Maybe by allowing other app stores (that follow the same sandboxing / security rules), which seems to work out fine on platforms like Windows with options like Steam. And maybe they could let Apple continue to require support for a common payment method, but not let them prohibit other payment methods or require that those other payment methods are the same price (when the fees on the other payment methods may be much less than 30%).
Adjusting for the wrong confounders is one of the ways to create spurious correlations. For example, consider the causal system

X -> Z <- Y

in which X and Y are random coin tosses (heads=0, tails=1) and Z is their sum. Even though X and Y independent, they will be correlated if you control for Z.

If you want to see it yourself, let's simulate this system in R:

# Simulate 1000 trials in which X and Y are random coin tosses (T or F)
# and Z is their sum.

> X <- rnorm(1000) < 0.5
> Y <- rnorm(1000) < 0.5
> Z <- X + Y

# As expected, X and Y are not correlated:

> summary(lm(Y ~ X))

Call:
lm(formula = Y ~ X)

Residuals:
Min 1Q Median 3Q Max
-0.6947 -0.6893 0.3053 0.3108 0.3108

Coefficients:
Estimate Std. Error t value Pr(>|t|)
(Intercept) 0.694704 0.025816 26.910 <2e-16 ***
XTRUE -0.005455 0.031330 -0.174 0.862 <<< No correlation.
---
Signif. codes: 0 ‘***’ 0.001 ‘**’ 0.01 ‘*’ 0.05 ‘.’ 0.1 ‘ ’ 1

Residual standard error: 0.4625 on 998 degrees of freedom
Multiple R-squared: 3.038e-05, Adjusted R-squared: -0.0009716
F-statistic: 0.03032 on 1 and 998 DF, p-value: 0.8618

# However, if we include Z as a possible confounder, we create a
# spurious correlation between X and Y:

> summary(lm(Y ~ X + Z))

Call:
lm(formula = Y ~ X + Z)

Residuals:
Min 1Q Median 3Q Max
-2.45e-14 -8.40e-18 2.04e-17 2.04e-17 3.59e-15

Coefficients:
Estimate Std. Error t value Pr(>|t|)
(Intercept) -3.370e-16 6.292e-17 -5.356e+00 1.05e-07 ***
XTRUE -1.000e+00 8.241e-17 -1.213e+16 < 2e-16 *** <<< Oops!
Z 1.000e+00 5.873e-17 1.703e+16 < 2e-16 ***
---
Signif. codes: 0 ‘***’ 0.001 ‘**’ 0.01 ‘*’ 0.05 ‘.’ 0.1 ‘ ’ 1

Residual standard error: 8.582e-16 on 997 degrees of freedom
Multiple R-squared: 1, Adjusted R-squared: 1
F-statistic: 1.449e+32 on 2 and 997 DF, p-value: < 2.2e-16
Apple TV+, Apple Music, Apple Arcade, Apple News+, purchases of books, movies, TV shows, music their 30% cut of App Store revenues and subscriptions; the $99 developer fee for the App Store; Final Cut and Logic; Apple Card interest fees, iCloud subscriptions, probably other smaller scale things.
If you want a _good_ life, DO something you are GOOD at.

That really is all there is to it. People recognize value and, guess what, they'll gladly _pay_ you for your skill.

Happiness is up to you. The only thing I'd send your way to think about: "In order to get love, you have to give love."
The accusations against China is that they do not follow the rules. Stealing IP is very illegal in the US but that didn't (allegedly) stop Waweii. So just saying "make more rules" is not a valid solution if the accusations are true. Byte dance already does store data in the US, but the only way to 100% prove they aren't sending data to China is to regularly audit ISP logs.
The rest of the software world hasn't collapsed into class action hell because people installed stuff they shouldn't have on their equipment, and it's had a few decades to try. Why would we expect the iDevice ecosystem to do so now?

The hypothetical lawsuits you describe don't seem very likely to succeed. No doubt a few people will complain, and then they'll discover the hard way that there is no technological cure for carelessness and whatever other platform they go to next will similarly be compromised if they are similarly careless about what they install on their equipment.
You make that sound bad? People have historically upgraded and modified their cars, their computers, their electronics, and their homes.
2 more convictions than the great financial crash!
So if there are scenarios where you need a fall back, why not just use the fall back?
I was going to make a similar comment, but I think your comment is a little exaggerated. Freedom of speech is still differentiates the US and China.
Using it is one thing. I'm wondering about ROI. Alexa has a whole ecosystem that built around buying stuff from Amazon. Google Home is a solid #2 in the home assistant space but what does Google get out of it?
ARM processors are also in pretty much any storage device like hard drives too.
My most important apps are installed outside of the App Store (on macOS) simply because many types of apps are just not allowed in the App Store, such as Little Snitch. Same thing for Nix and VirtualBox.

Recall also how Apple forced out Tumblr, a blog reader app (simply a window to UGC) on iOS because they didn’t like the UGC.
The author's main points are all centered around the assumption that GPT-3 related technologies are ready to create market-disrupting products, and that the key business challenges remaining are mostly around figuring out how to build a defensible moat.

However, that assumption is dead wrong.

We don't know how well GPT-3 "works out of the box" (hence OpenAI's api release), and it's stupendously premature to assume that it is ready for products.

We don't have a good understanding of what inputs the model handles well vs. doesn't (a key pre-requisite for building a safe product), and it has been shown to regurgitate authoritative but untrue statements.

[EDIT]: by construction, it also cannot store information provided by the user for later use, nor can it "look up" facts.

I agree with the high level statement ("starting a business around gpt-3 is a bad idea") but almost none of the generic business advice, because it's founded on an assumption of technical capability that simply isn't there yet. The article talks about GPT-3 in an abstract "super powerful AI" sense, which leads me to suspect that the author doesn't really understand the technical limitations of GPT-3 beyond the demos that have been shown.
At home.

If you entrust any of your valuables to a third-party, they own them, not you. That applies whether that third-party is your neighbor, the local branch of your favorite bank, or some very prestigious international organisation. Once those things leave your personal control, you have no control at all.

Imagine how you would feel if somebody "As Safe as the Bank of England" happened to hang on to something of yours:

Venezuela files legal claim with Bank of England over gold -https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-52733299
Cash is King

If you've got an 800 score and no money, no one will give you a loan. If you've got a trash credit score, but an extra $1000 that isn't going to loans, then you can 'afford' to get fleeced on 36% 72 month auto loans for 7 years until your credit is rebuilt.
You'd think so, but the history shows that this will only be a footnote in Twitters history. See Equifax; they have lost the personal finance data of basically everyone in the US and they're doing fine. Twitter is not going to suffer anything other than a few bad jokes at its expense.
I'll put it on the first level , because most Apple defenders say exactly same thing: "Why should Apple who created the iPhone sell it like it prefers to? If you don't like it buy another phone".

In fact, there was a business in US that did just that. Hollywood's Studio System. Movie studios were vertically integrated with theater chains, and you could only see Paramount or MGM movies in the theaters that that owned. And you know what? Customers were really unhappy, because studios made all kinds of bad tricks like forcing to buy a week pass to see just one movie. Of course, you could refuse to watch other 15 crap movies that were bundled with High Noon, or, like Apple defenders here say, go watch some other movie.

I imagined some arguments that some HN commenters could make:

"It's not a monopoly if you can watch other movies in other theaters"

"Paramount movie chain is just 15% of total number of theaters"

"They made this movie and they should decide how you are allowed to see it"

It all ended with an court decision [1] that ended this monopoly abuse.

[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Paramount_P....
For anyone looking for context, ARM has essentially lost control of its IP and IP licensing in China. This is largely a result of the US/China battle over Huawei; the ARM China CEO has repeatedly stated his willingness to continue working with Huawei despite the US ban. As a consequence, there will likely be a major chilling effect on hardware companies (or maybe all companies) that want to set up JV's in China.
I might generally agree, but there are some very cool applications of this feature. The rhythm game Rhythm Doctor moves the window in sync with the music. [1] Surprisingly it even worked on i3wm via Wine. I would be sad if similar things couldn't be done in the future, even if they aren't enabled by default.

[1] starts at 0:40 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-kZ1xcxhx4)
Dutch Gateway store was kept udder wraps until refit dug up computing history
Some people do find purpose on their own. Many do not. I recall a story about a guy in his 90's who got a job as a Walmart greeter. The reporter asked him why not just enjoy his golden years? The fellow said he needed a reason to get up in the morning. He worked at that Walmart until he died, living many more (by all reports happy) years.
Just goes to show capitalism is all about screwing your suppliers (developers), your customers, and using the government to enforce intellectual property.

Although I'd contend that the later is not capitalism.
I don't think this is correct, because competition hasn't created a better outcome.
I blame this on iTunes, not Spotify, when I first got into music because I didn’t want to spend all my cash on an entire album for just one or two tracks I really liked. Up until the last 5 or so years I rarely took the time to listen to a album of a song I heard on the radio or in a mix.
Definitely approaching real holodeck hours, with many implications for society at large. VR already has a reputation of being "uncool" and just being a way to vicariously experience things others actually do IRL (think of the "are ya winning son" meme). Wonder if that trend will continue as the tech gets more realistic.
Bing is accessible from China. FB and Twitter must comply with censorship rules and storage of user data in China, among other things, to operate in China. Google was operating and accessible in China until China made clear the rules for them to follow. Google decided it couldn't follow they they pulled out the search engine business from China. China didn't force Google to sell. Censorship is bad but that is another issue.

And to do personal attack doesn't make you look smart.
5.25% of $200 Billion is $10.5 Billion.

How much in taxes does the average worker pay over their lifetime?

Not to mention, this money was already taxed, just in another country where that money was earned. Seems like a good deal, to bring that money back into our economy and get it spent on goods and services domestically.

"We'll allow you to bring back $185 Billion and spend it here locally, helping the entire economy, but only if you pay us $10.5 Billion!"

I'd be OK with zero tax on this money. Get it flowing back into the economy where it can do real good things. The US Government isn't going to miss $10.5 Billion at the rate we're already giving it away to people.

The alternative is what we have already. Everyone loses; no one gets any piece of that money in the US.
OK so how it becomes 2 trillion? say the Reserve Requirement is 1% and 199 billion is loaned out
> solve problems in different domains with different tech stacks

I find this aspect most appealing.

> build relationships with people who can give you work or referrals
> I'd charge more and be more selective about projects

These are probably harder to do when just starting I assume. I have near 0 tech network other than old employers. But maybe that's a good place to start though.

Thanks for the comment. It gave me some new things to think about.
Would you feel the same way about counterfeit drugs? Motorcycle Helmets? (https://www.webbikeworld.com/a-look-at-dangerous-counterfeit...)

You really want regulators to design technology? That’s about like the EU forcing USB2 charging ports on phones when USB-C was a better standard.
Tips for remote team leaders on Slack
Yes, that's exactly the goal. Antitrust laws need to be updated for today's technology and businesses.
the convenience of not having 8 different game updater/launcher clients

Obligatory glance over at Steam goes here.

Apple’s App Store policies also limit 3rd party software’s ability to fuck up my devices in a myriad of ways.

It would be a much safer solution if Apple's operating system limited 3rd party software's ability to do things it shouldn't. Trying to filter malware at the app store level might improve your odds, but it's not a robust, scalable solution to malware and it never has been.
I don't see this playing out on Android where other stores exist. And lets take this to the brick and mortar model. 30 ish% of the end user price is not a lot, when many products are at least 100% markup.

But first, we know the App store isn't infallible, but it has an incentive to have more false negatives than positives. It is able to correct past mistakes and does do so.

But as far as competitive pressure, that argument is mute as long as there is no way for the "normal" owner/user of a device to evaluate the market. By the time the bad actor is exposed, it is often too late. The other side is that one only has to look at the Play store to see that there are so many copies of original apps that it is obfuscating them. One cannot find the legitimate app. So until most people are able to be informed and evaluate the apps, it isn't in their favor to want alternative stores.

Also, one has a choice, buy or don't buy the device. Apple does not have a majority of sales in phones, not even close. Also, you can side load any softare you want. It's a service that is paid for , but for free it's 7 days per install.
Trying to tell / explain to somebody (or even an imaginary someone) what I’ve read or studied. Most good insights or opinions happen at that moment for me.
National banks can not commercial banks