skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Just like you'd think a Trump sycophant would implement. Reducing services, removing equipment and cutting back on employee hours.

Mail is piling up in Iowa (where the person being interviewed is located) and from other reports all over the country.

Well maybe not in Texas or Florida where Trump depends on vote by mail.

Of course it all started as revenge against Amazon but it's nicely transitioned to manipulating the USPS for political benefits. In other words, business as usual.
Finally, we started receiving reports from multiple Techdirt visitors (including those who told us they had purposefully whitelisted Techdirt from their ad blockers) that ads being delivered by Google were causing their computers to run hot. Multiple reports of ads on Techdirt failing to load properly, and causing Techdirt to fail to load properly. And also causing fans to turn on.

"Ads being delivered by Google were causing their computers to run hot?" Anyone have more detail on this?
As PG recently shared, when an investor puts money into a company it is a calculated bet that the company is actually worth _more_ than the valuation they are investing at. No one invests $1 for a 10% chance of making $10. So if the valuation goes up, it basically eats into an investors expected “profits”.
Indeed, this has been my experience in the 1990s, in the UK I would be regularly cleaning dead squished bugs off the front of my car at the time. I very rarely see any of that nowadays. Maybe they have evolved ...
Yes, and taxi drivers have always been able to do that. As a consumer, it was nice using Uber because drivers couldn't do that.
Uber positions itself that way all over the place: Uber is a tech company that connects riders and drivers. It is not a taxi service.
Is the NetSurf rendering engine multi-core/multi-thread? It's not clear from the homepage, which makes me think that it's single-core only.
I think it's going to depend by area. The last time I tried to use Uber to get a ride from the airport, I had several drivers accept, then call me - "I'm all the way in midtown, it'll take me 45 minutes to get to you, you probably want to cancel this."

The incentives for drivers have always been fucked. I'd rather the drivers not accept my ride than try to play a weird game of chicken to get me to cancel when I'm trying to get somewhere.
This is exactly what I do. I use https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07SC1MWYL/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b... which is the least amount of mask I could find to wear over the N95.

I do seal the valve on my N95 masks with a sticker. The ones I have breath quite well with the valve sealed and I don't wear them for long enough for it to matter.

I also use the less effective mask for situations that are mask required, but not actually necessary such as Autocross.

I use Cambridge masks. They will still order and deliver in a reasonable (if long) amount of time. Claim to be lab tested N95, and have above average fit for my face.
Here in Germany proper Taxis have to pick you up (as far as I know, I almost never need one). That's apparently the main reason they offer why they should be protected against services like Uber.
I learned just the other day that a group of Utah cities have banded together to create such a network. It's called Utopia Fiber - https://www.utopiafiber.com/about-us/

They are also avoiding the GPON approach and running fiber direct from "fiber huts" to homes so that they can simply use standard networking equipment to service customers.

They have providers offering up to 10Gbps for $199! https://www.utopiafiber.com/residential-pricing/
> belorussian language, which is just redneck russian

along with the rest of the comment, this passage nicely emphasizes the common russian colonialist attitude towards belarus
This is really ironic considering Techdirt is on Google's public policy payroll (via "Copia Institute") on https://kstatic.googleusercontent.com/files/5a1907d78237ab17...

I suppose this suggests some manner of "fairness" to Google's widespread incompetence and inability to manage their platform effectively. If they can't keep things running smoothly for their paid shills, clearly nobody's getting an unfair advantage.
What are Income Share Agreements and how are they being used today?
What to do with this project? Your opportunity for feedback and suggestions. ·
CEOs of IT companies signed a letter asking for new election in Belarus
I am not Chinese and do think that the amount of accusations is much larger than the body of evidence to support them, I'd guess there are others of similar opinion, some of them Chinese, others not.

What I dislike is people generally assuming that I somehow agree with every single thing Huawei, or the CCP for that matter, has ever done.
It's a long time since I've met someone lucid about what's going on, thank you !

> We might have to begin to have to resort to samizdats.

Do you think we already have lost ?

Frankly I don't want to live in this Communist 2.0 world, I know I won't be able to shut my mouth and go with the flow : I already lost all hope of career evolution at work because of my sharp tongue and that was for things much less polarizing than politics.

I guess I'll probably be in the firsts to try the new gulags.

Or should I expatriate while it's time ? But where to go ? It seems I can either choose between a "traditional" 3rd world dictatorship or the new Communism 2.0
It is no surprise that the worse hit countries - US, Brazil, India, Russia - are led by populist governments. Virus is a technical issue and immune to the lip service of prayers and declarations.
Power is a nightmare! We just precariously string up more high voltage lines on poles because we can't figure out how to do street construction at a reasonable cost or on budget. These now cause massive wildfires every summer, as well as frequent outages from random things like balloons hitting the lines.

San Francisco had a plan and still has a tax in place to bury power lines, but they pre-spent all the money in 2007, made much less progress than expected, and haven't made any additional progress on it since.

More generally, infrastructure like trains and bridges are incredibly difficult, unpredictable, and expensive to build now. The California high-speed rail and Caltrain extension are effectively indefinitely postponed at this point. It's a perfect example of exactly what I was saying - it's a problem that has been solvable in the past, there are examples of other countries doing a much better job of it, but the US is completely unable to do it.

Where exactly do you look at infrastructure projects in the US in the past 2 or 3 decades and see this success story you're talking about?
I wonder how long it's going to be before we're able to run a significant portion of Youtube video (tourist videos, etc) through something like this, and generate a huge 3d mesh of the world. Combined with Street View data, you'd really have a ton of spaces covered.
I always look at these things from a parochial perspective, i.e. how does it apply to HN.

His first two points ("moderation is likely to end up pissing off those who are moderated" and "content moderation is always going to rely on judgment calls") are true of all moderation and certainly HN. They have nothing to do with scale though.

His third point is more interesting: at scale, even 99.9% accuracy is going to leave hundreds of thousands of mistakes a day. No one will care about the 99.9% you got right, only the things you missed. Reporters will call public attention to these.

That's a good point and not widely understood. But he stops there. All that shows is that content moderation is impossible to do perfectly, which we already know because of points 1 and 2. More interesting would be the part he didn't write: given that a large number of misses is inevitable and reporters will call attention to them, what follows next? Probably that the public image will be that moderation sucks. That's rough, but it doesn't necessarily follow that content moderation is impossible to do well.
> which leaves the drivers with less work overall.

...which is a positive feedback loop that should encourage them to pick up those previously declined routes. Or charge higher rates that better reflect their reluctance for those routes. Isn't that how supply & demand is supposed to work?
I would agree with it if Google results showed one page from that conservative media company, while dropping others as redundant.

Instead, from what I can tell, it heavily penalizes sources that compete with the mainstream media, while filling the gaps by doing looser search (like replacing 'estate' with 'property' and suddenly finding 'How Gavin Newsom plans to close California's huge budget gap').

So if you google for common divisive topics, you get an impression that the public unanimously supports the narrative pushed by the Democrats (that happens to actually cause more division), while in reality there are many critical voices calling it out, that Google conveniently omits.
Entering any kind of credentials or confidential information into a public computer is (or should be) a big no-no.
The number of legitimate uses isn't zero, but it has greatly decreased. How often do people do construction and hazardous work when no one else is nearby?
the new iphone SE is an absolute killer in that exact metric.
every mask has holes, otherwise they'd suffocate you, so taken to its logical conclusion, no masks should be allowed.

and please don't condescend and generalize:

> "It isn't reasonable to ask minimum wage, sometimes temp, untrained employees..."

it's impossible for anyone to see or know what size hole is the "right" one, especially when there isn't a right answer. stores just shouldn't sweat these details. masks have only marginal benefit over distance anyway, and such security theater in stressful times is unhelpful at best.
Honestly a shame.

Genuinely descent ideas in terms of building science and urban design. 11/10 chance the technology elements would have gone the way of the Google Grave yard after 10years, but at least it will leave a set of interesting buildings to draw lessons from. Now nothing. Lots will stay empty or be filled with generic condo developments with questionable longevity. The Google branding and Silicon Valley outreach style didn't help. Simultaneously, the inability for western societies to at least entertain rapid urban experiments is going to backfire. I'm not a big fan of Google, but they have fuck you resources and at least tried to direct it in prosocial designs with the expected cost of privacy. If they can't succeed in Toronto then it doesn't bode well for anyone else.

It also reveals a greater cultural problem...

On Cultures That Build
https://scholars-stage.blogspot.com/2020/06/on-cultures-that...

IT’S TIME TO BUILD
https://a16z.com/2020/04/18/its-time-to-build/
Brexit has been in the works for years and the economy was growing before COVID. The obsession with blaming all misfortune on Brexit is tiring.

The UK is hard hit because it went from a fairly moderate response to swinging hard into a deliberate policy of panicking the population as much as possible. The turning point was Imperial College / Ferguson predicting millions of deaths if there wasn't hard lockdown immediately. The UK's SAGE committee is largely responsible for the resulting devastation, including deaths: they literally told people they had a quasi-patriotic duty to stay away from hospitals. This is almost certainly why England is one of the few places in the world to report excess mortality amongst young adults. They have been opening and re-closing parts of the country with only hours of notice ... given on Twitter. Even Trump hasn't done that.

They even used imagery straight from 28 Days Later:

https://cdni0.trtworld.com/w960/h540/q75/76203_20200408T1313...

This was largely a consequence of SAGE "experts" telling the government they had to deliberately create fear in the population.

Is it any wonder the economy has been crushed when the government deliberately set out to make the population think COVID is the Rage virus?
I frequently find that, when refactoring especially, you find a lot of big ol' god objects that are incomprehensible. But when you break them down into 5-10 small objects, suddenly the operation they were trying to do makes perfect sense.
Git: Deletion of merged branches taken beyond shell hacks
are you earning more than a TSMC engineer now?
Offering a Safari job to someone from Mozilla probably hurts them more then getting fired.
Some evidence of that: https://meduza.io/en/feature/2020/07/29/belarus-arrested-33-...
> If central planning were a good way to run an economy, the Soviet Union would not have collapsed.

The Soviet Union put the first man into space and had severe shortages of food and consumer goods at the same time. Because that's what central planning does. It causes priorities to be distorted. Whatever the central planning committee is focused on happens and everything else withers and suffocates.

On net it's a massive catastrophic loss, but the places where resources are directed, get them in abundance. (This is also why it's extremely susceptible to corruption and favoritism.)
Google Chromium has won. Microsoft gave up on edgehtml, and from the recent layoffs it seems Firefox is giving up on Firefox's competitive edge. No more devtools investment, no more servo means more of us will be using the fantastic chrome dev tools. This in turn means we won't be actively ensuring our sites work on Firefox as well as they do on chrome. This means even more decline for Firefox.

With the recent layoff decision, I feel Mozilla CEO is pulling another death from the inside like Marissa Mayor did to Yahoo. You can't abandon the one thing that people actually like Mozilla for and chase a shiny egg.
The valuation is established by the person writing the check. It’s based on their perceptions of the market and how the team is tackling it. VCs don’t really care about dividends, they care about exits. They are trying to buy part of a startup for less than they can sell it to a buyer or the markets. The financial capacity of potential acquirers and their relative need for the startup’s business drives what that check writer is willing to pay. IE the market for a startup’s equity is the input, and the valuation is the output.
'revenue' from Firefox was never enough. It's only really just struck me that of course Google funding them made a dependency and 1) made the company grow beyond its needs, and 2) made it not seek self-sufficiency.

If Google are stopping the money then FF is like a person with no money taken in by Google and hooked on drugs; once they're kicked out they can't fund the habit and reliance on Google has meant they've not had to find ways to fund themselves.

I realised Google held the cards, but hadn't twigged on how the excessive nature of the funding made Firefox/Mozilla weaker.

Unless FF were aware of how that might go and put half of their Google money into investments?
The Fix The Internet incubator doesn't look like very much money is involved. A $2500 stipend for participants, a top prize of $25,000, not that much money. Whereas layoffs of 250 people will save maybe $50 - $100 million a year.

Of course, perhaps they will also cut future funding to this incubator, and it's just a different timing that they announce it.
In The Mythical Man Month Fred Brooks said "Show me your flowchart and conceal your tables, and I shall continue to be mystified. Show me your tables, and I won't usually need your flowchart; it'll be obvious."

I first read that on Guy Steele's site: http://www.dreamsongs.com/ObjectsHaveNotFailedNarr.html
I think companies run A/B tests because they don't know which option is the worse service.
Ask HN: Do you donate to Wikipedia? Is their donation request motivating?
Perseids
At some level though incompetence has to transition to malice.

Do we really believe Google does not have the resources to hire and retain competent people? or are they willfully incompetent as a shield or cover for their malice

How many times can they play "oops our bad it was just a mistake"
this is a nation state vs a private albeit important company. 'compete' isn't a word i'd use here no matter the multiplier as it implies the game is fair.
Any proof that these changes wouldn't affect Texas and Florida USPS services, or that any of these changes are for political benefit?
>> Often, you can find this in college towns. A monoculture of single-family homes is so obviously ill-suited for a population dominated by students

Not sure if that's a great example.

My aunt owned a home in Ann Arbor that she paid $45,000 for. Over the next 20 years, almost every other home around her turned into a rental units for students. Landlords made tons of money, who could blame them.

She was older and didn't like living in between parties and chaos, and let's not even get into Saturdays during football season.

She did sell the house for almost nine times what she paid for it, though. There's no more empty land there, and hasn't been in forever, so what do you do.

The neighborhoods makeup and appearance is very close to UW, you could swap the buildings in the article and never know the difference.
There are some kinds of careers and questions that can only be pursued in academia, so advising that grad students abandon ship really isn't a satisfactory answer in general. Academia needs to be reformed.
> The US National Science Foundation initiated the establishment of a network of Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) sites in 1980, and these now encompass a web of 25 monitoring locations across each of the country’s major ecoregions (Fig. 1).

The paper includes both source data and source code (R data analysis) [1].

[1] https://datadryad.org/stash/dataset/doi:10.5061/dryad.cc2fqz...
Sounds like a good problem, if we're one of the few shops offering Elixir jobs :P
Please feel free to privmail me and I will try to share some ideas.
What’s the likelihood that someone who goes to the trouble to source and wear an n95/n99 mask is infected with SARS-CoV-2, vs someone who decides to wear a glorified handkerchief?
Easily, and I am just doing EEng101/MEng101 level work in an engineering consultancy. The work I do now has nothing to do with actual IC fabrication.
Isn't the one time use thing only for particles? I thought you could sanitize the mask using alcohol if biologicals are the only concern.
Can you provide a working example?

I certainly block plenty of Google-controlled domains. I normally do not use Google search and even when I do I never seems to trigger any ads. Maybe I am just not searching for things people want to sell. In the rare event I do trigger an ad, because I am not using a "modern" browser to do searches, these ads are not distracting and I can easily edit them out of the text stream if I want to.
However there is no penalty for drivers refusing to take your to the airport once they show up. It's an absolutely infuriating experience. Drivers should be banned from the platform if they are not able to take people from downtown to the closest airport.
Link to mentioned open letter (in Russian) with a list of 500+ CEOs, founders, devs & investors who signed it already.[0]

In comments on this page signing still ongoing.

[0] https://dev.by/news/otkrytoe-pismo-it-kompanii
You realise that a huge number of US startups also sell out to big tech firms? These companies were at least all actually profitable (except DeepMind).

If selling to a bigger firm is the same thing as failure then Silicon Valley is drowning in failure.
Keep in mind that's likely not related to the dB sound pressure level in air that we're all familiar with. dB is a logarithmic ratio to pressure to a reference. In air, that reference is 20µPa, acoustic pressure in water typically uses a different reference (1µPa). There is also an adjustment of 36 dB to account for the higher impedance of water. So 235 dB in water is roughly 173 dB SPL -- still loud, but many orders of magnitude lower.

[0] https://fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/ship/acoustics.htm
With respect, I think you're missing a lot. Sit with an expert SQL guy and you'll learn a great deal. Maybe not enough to change your mind but certainly enough to realise you're blocking out a really valuable technology.

> but languages are just thin interfaces over technologies

No. Not at all. SQL is derived from a mathematical basis. The principle came first, then the language and tech together developed to fulfil it.
That's a very good point that the article didn't make clear. I had assumed that the exhaust is filtered. Since the airline agents don't have an easy way to visually identify which masks do or don't filter the exhaust, it seems that the airline decided to ban all of the vented masks.
Intel, STOP Focus on your core tech.
> The OP is not freelancing

> > Hi, I am a freelancer from a South Asian country
Considering the postal union is one of the strongest democrat supporting unions, can you point to any whistleblowers or leaked documents, or any proof that this is politically motivated?
> Whenever government thinks they know how to specify the best engineering method to solve a user requirement, they are generally wrong.

It's not that they're usually wrong, they simply aren't attempting to optimize towards that at all. Most The government tends to make decisions optimized against political merit, not engineering efficacy or solution fit. The reason they generally appear wrong is because generally engineering efficacy and solution fit have little if any positive correlation with political merit.
>Why can’t uber just position itself as a lead generation service for drivers?

A rideshare company could theoretically be just a pure lead generation platform but the economic forces preventing that is the nature of multi-sided platforms: The drivers don't hold all the leverage. The other actor in the multi-sided platform are passengers/customers who _pay the money_.

If Uber was only lead gen, they would be outcompeted by another company that offered all the following conveniences:

+ predictable fixed price to prevent customer anxiety of overcharging

+ integrated payment processing so no worry of drivers playing games such as, "my Square credit card processor doesn't work so you need to pay cash"

+ driver ratings for reputation

... because customers/passengers value those features.

If you create a rideshare platform that's too advantageous to the drivers (e.g. no ratings, can charge variable fare per mile, etc), it would end up being hostile to potential customers and it won't attract enough paying fares to be financially sustainable.
With a combination of local engineers, remote engineers in other countries, mechanical turk and some sleight of hand, I wonder if you could craft a nefarious project where nobody knows the whole picture.
I think that's absolutely true, and it's one of the reasons that society benefits from the idea of an "employee" relationship, where you can rely on a single corporation, beholden to some kind of public consensus, to enforce a uniform set of rules. A world where everyone is a "contractor" is one where everyone is subject to the tragedy of the commons. (e.g. "You can't get a ride in a poor neighborhood")

But part of the social contract is that employees, having given up that autonomy, need someone else to advocate for them collectively. Thus... labor rights and benefits legislation.

Frankly this whole thing seems silly. They knew where this was going when AB5 was passed. Those features aren't a good faith attempt to comply with the law, they were an attempt to evade it (something very much in keeping with Uber's culture).

The only real surprise here was that the final reckoning came sooner than expected via injunction.
I ran out of dish soap a few weeks ago, and I came across this same recipe. I found that my dishes were clean, but glassware and ceramic had a film on it. It wiped off easily with a towel.

Note that I tried this exactly 1 time.
we went off of the gold standard in 1971.
Id.heroku.com Down?
If a paper mask doesn't protect you very well, as in they let the virus in then why would it project others? If the virus can get it you can bet it can get out too