skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Congrats on shipping Christos, Damien, and Nodar! I really like this idea. I have this problem at my company.

Two questions:

First, we’re using Postgres and some of our tables use JSON. Would Synth be able to generate realistic JSON? Sometimes this is configuration (which would need to be straight copied) and other times it would be data (which would need to keep the same keys but have generated values). Is this use case supported?

Second, I’m concerned about giving Synth access to my data as much of it is sensitive. I understand that you need access to production data to offer the service. What can you tell me about your data security to help me feel more comfortable? (i.e. What kind of data would you have stored on your end? How does the CLI work? etc)

Congrats again and good luck!
If true, that is absolutely hilariously sad.
I'd even say well-suited for the web!

KotlinJS feels so much more natural, safer and faster to write (in IntelliJ especially) than writing plain JS does.
Much as this is bad, I will address the "GPG secret key" angle: if (like me) you only store your secret keys on a physical device, as described for example here: https://github.com/drduh/YubiKey-Guide, then you have nothing to worry about, because your secret key does not reside anywhere where it's accessible.
> This hasn't been true for the income tax

Well that's false, the income tax in the United States originally was promised only to ever apply to the ultra-rich. Now every tax payer pays it.
I honestly think your underestimating the amount of wealth stored in private companies, real-estate, art and other il-liquid assets
Switzerland can afford taxing based on wealth because other taxes are very low (e.g. only ~20 % of tax on your salary).
I think it’s hard to get people to vote for a tax that will take money they have already acquired away from them. Reducing their potential for future earnings seems a lot more realistic to me.
Machine generated blog made it to the top of HN
Does this say that machine learning is good enough to fool people, or that your average blogger giving life advice is about as good as computer generated text? :)
You can attach custom ICC profile to JPEG, also to TIFF or PNG. But still you need to normalize data from different kind of sensors before you feed any ML engine with it. sRGB or AdobeRGB are most common color space profiles you can get with varied content.
Quite a big discussion a few days ago of another source, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24167691 (80 points, 3 days ago, 54 comments)but I think this article is better and has a good discussion about the chaos and the problem.

But as I said in a previous comment, they did't show that all quantum systems have no butterfly effect, they only show that in one quantum system the butterfly effect is small.
They've been running Beats 1 for the last 5 years (now rebranding to just Apple Music 1). I like the idea of a pop & pop-adjacent radio station with a lot of different shows for different subgenres (it's obviously patterned after BBC Radio 1), but it never seemed to have the "right" mix of variety, and unlike Radio 1 it didn't really have any tentpole stuff to center around (like e.g. Essential Mix), just a lot of random short-lived celebrity-presented shows. Adding country and pop hits stations isn't exactly going to improve it, but I assume that's for people who found it a bit too left-field.

Kind of astonished it's quietly been on air for so long, and I wonder if the rebranding means they're actually going to revitalize it in some way or if this is just going to lead to them quietly dropping the more interesting aspects of it.
> proposals I've seen don't kick in until $50 million or $100 million.

That's how the income tax started in the US.
This feature is probably from a more innocent time. Back then, things like automatically executing a macro with unrestricted filesystem access when opening a text document were treated as useful features.
I would recommend skipping anything google recommended and finding courses made by people with real android development experience.

Google has it's own way of doing things - boilerplate, overengineered and full of ugly practices. Anyone will be better of learning from a source that isn't a bunch of interns that got thrown into the Android team.
Curiously, nothing is said about how this 'life-changing' love actually changed his life and work.
I had not heard of this rule before, but I'm guessing data sourced from the FAA is delayed by five minutes.

Most data on FlightAware, for instance, is from ADS-B feeders run by average folks. FlightAware takes this data and turns around to sell it for a boatload of money to people that manage fleets and want to know exactly where their plains are at. In order to ensure there isn't dropouts in coverage, FlightAware pays the FAA to feed them data that they can't get from ADS-B feeders, for example when a plane is not in range of any feeder. As a condition of the FAA giving them access to this data they must abide by the FAA's rules, one of which is filtering planes in which the owner has requested their tracking data not be made public.

Interesting fact, if you feed then you like contribute to FlightAware locating the position of an aircraft not emitting ADS-B, but with a Mode S (?) transponder. This is known as M-LAT, or multilateration. Because of FlightAware getting FAA data and being bound by FAA terms they won't return the position of the plane that you helped them locate, assuming the owner of that aircraft requested privacy. So essentially you help provid them the data that they can sell access to the owner of that aircraft, but you don't get to see that same data. Sites like ADSBExchange, which the OP app uses, do not source FAA data, and so are not bound by such crappy terms.
> Investor: So, 0.1% of your ($10M) company works out to $100,000

Isn't that actually $10,000, or is there some startup valuation math that I'm not aware of?

EDIT the article has since been updated with new numbers, and the math now works out as expected
>>From the largest prison population per capita (25% of the worlds inmates for 4% of the worlds population)

Some of that is because many nations massively under report their prison population (aka China).

I agree that the US has over criminalized Society, namely in the failed attempt to curb drug abuse by criminal enforcement

>>to slavery

yes yes, the US is the only nation to ever have slavery in all of history... ::rolleyes::

>> Jim Crow, redlining, seggregation until 1970s, Japanese interment camps, the only country dropping atomic bombs (and to civilians nonetheless), McCarthyism, mass surveillance, and so on, all the way to Bush, Trump, and co (including the multi-war supporter Obama), plus constant meddling on foreign countries, invasions and occupations, etc., all the way to waterboarding, and such, yeah, I'd take "socialist" Denmark over it...

I guess that depends on where you place your personal freedoms, All of those things are terrible, most of them are historic atrocities that many nations unfortunately have in their past, or the more modern ones impacted a small number of citizens, and they all universally hated by the population.

However with socialism even Denmark style socialism my Income would be massively stolen errr "taxed", I would not have many of my core freedoms (aka Self Defense / gun rights), I would not have the same free speech protections as the US, etc.

These all do impact me directly...
As a simple example of this problem:

In java7, the concept of 'I want to typecheck this expression, and if it is of the type I want, I want to do things to it based on that fact' was unwieldy in java:

-- JAVA 7 CHECK-AND-USE --

if (x instanceof String) {
String y = (String) x;
y.toLowerCase();
}

kotlin decided to address that:

-- KOTLIN CHECK-AND-USE --

if (x is String) {
x.toLowerCase()
}

within the 'if', x 'updates its type' automatically. Note that if java were to copy this, method dispatch depends on the compile-time type of the arguments, so if java were to apply this behaviour to its instanceof operator, that would break backwards compatibility (existing java code would mean something else just because you updated java versions). The obvious thing happened: Oracle / the JCP rejected this outright. Hence, it doesn't work that way in java and never will.

But this problem WAS tackled by java, and in a much different way: Java has generalized this concept as pattern matching and went all in on that.

-- ACTUAL FUTURE-JAVA --

// preview feature in 14, will be in 15.
if (x instanceof String y) {
y.toLowerCase();
}

// -OR--

if (!(x instanceof String y)) throw new IllegalArgumentException();
y.toLowerCase();

and, taking pattern matching to the next level:

// will likely be preview in 15 or 16.
// Given:

value class Point {int x, y; }

if (p instanceof Point(x, y)) {
// you can use x and y (both int) here
}

Which goes much further than kotlin and is quite different. So now kotlin has 3 options and they are all bad:

1. Also adopt this syntax. But now there are 2 different ways to do the same thing, so kotlin is now the language that feels like a jumbled mess that needs cleaning up, with pointless style debates and an increased learning curve for no good reason.

2. Ditch their existing syntax and adopt this syntax. That means kotlin breaks their own backwards compatibility, and everybody needs to either accept they can never update their kotlin, or they need to find all spots in their codebase that uses the old construct and update it.

3. Don't adopt this, and be in the situation that java has _more_ language features that kotlin. Or adopt pattern matching differently, at which point the idea that it's 'easy' to switch from java to kotlin starts taking a hit... and likely kotlin's design will start to feel jumbled because features are spliced on ad-hoc and mostly informed by dueling concerns.
WeBull does. Their Asian (?) competitor that offers accounts to US-based customers.
I've been using Kotlin for a long time for backend/server dev personally and professionally. I've been feeling this more and more recently. I've said a couple times to my colleagues I've backed the wrong horse.

I had been making strong use of multi platform features. The end goal had been to easily move a piece over to a native image for server less if need be. Or output SDKs for Java script libraries. As an example I'm working on a multi platform micro-orm. But due to lack of cohesive reflection. I have to store the class package name in a map to reflect the type on all three platforms.

As to the note about inline types and Valhalla. Or loom for that matter. I have a feeling that will be buried as a compiler option. That needs to be amended in a build file. I have had to do this with JS, native, and a JVM

I'm finding that multi platform out side of mobile and JVM. Are not well polished. Additionally you're carrying a lot of baggage over from the JVM. In regards to it's type limitations and memory management. At the same time it's very impressive to easily target all three platforms. But it's a very difficult task.

Combine this with the few back-end places I've seen using Kotlin for the back end. Limit the features that can be used. To the end that the next Java version can primarily satisfy their needs. I've seen more effort coercing developers not to use sealed classes, null coalescing, co-routines etc. That could just be avoided by staying on Java.

I think it's a good language. It feels like a commonality of a number of the best practices. I've been able to migrate python, ruby, and typescript devs to a ktor setup and have them productive in a week or two. Gradle for all it's warts, I think is a pretty good build system. There is a rich eco-system of existing libraries. It has good performance, easy type semantics to grasp without getting in the user's ways. I feel like it's Typescript with a better build system (opinionated), and light pattern matching. The biggest API stability issue I've had is Gradle. I've carried projects from 0.11 to 1.4 with just nominal code base changes, but big build file changes.

The biggest focus is mobile, followed by Spring back-end. I have been very critical of Spring in my prior posts. There is a road map of Ktor, their in house web frame work coming soon. I'm curious to see where the language goes next. I'm finishing up one project in Kotlin but am eyeing Rust as a possible replacement
I remember my undergrad graphics class in 1991 or so. We did it in C and X11 on Sun and DEC workstations, and we had to learn X as an implementation detail. Our final project was animated 3-d wireframe models of objects, written in Xlib primitives. No toolkits or modern libraries. One of the assignments was a "game", and I wrote a tetris-like typing game. The projects in that class were insanely hard compared to any other class I'd taken.

The amazing thing is that, at least as of 10 years ago, my projects for that class STILL compiled on 32-bit FreeBSD and Linux.

Oh, and to learn X11, we used https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0134999975/ref=x_gr_w_bb_s...
I still remember sitting on a bench outside the college bookstore, cracking that book open and feeling both excited and hopelessly lost.
You may be interested in Lobsters: https://lobste.rs/about
All the best for them, as long as the community takes the attitude to appreciate JVM and Java for giving birth to Kotlin, instead of bashing Java as if Kotlin could stand on its own.
Worry about Firefox and web browsers for Linux
I learned more about how to use man pages in the 3 (4?) hours of LFCS exam than I did in nearly 10 years of using unix/linux every day. It's amazing what being forced to work without a web browser to hand can do.
Yes. On the first run it will take you to a wizard to set it up.
A fake, AI-generated blog reached the top of Hacker News
There are common arguments the other way.

Do you remember how hard it was to memorize, or at least become familiar with, all of the API function names? Or with various language syntax, like generator comprehensions and decorators? Over the years, and with practice, it's much easier to remember the details. The same is true with the terse notations of the APL-like languages - once you learn them, they are not hard.

And there aren't all that many symbols. Some of what you see are composeable combinations of basic symbols.

Or, think of shorthand, which takes time to learn, but makes it possible to, for example, take dictation at a speed that longhand cannot manage. While I don't think most programming is limited by typing speed, I do think that for some sorts of exploratory research it is. For a related essay, see https://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/09/programmings-dirtie... .

Finally, APL fans will (correctly, IMO) point out that (in)visibility is part of what makes something hard. That is, code which fits on the screen is easier to read than code which flows over several pages. Thus, the effort of learning a more concise language may pay off in the long-run.

(Note that I don't work with numeric arrays and have little experience even with NumPy - I've just read about this debate often.)
Do you have a notification daemon for every HN comment that mentions Rust? :)
Right now, they piss that money away on fast cars and lose <insert partner preference>. So we could divert that money to pay for infrastructure or cut income taxes or whatever, and aside from fast car dealerships, everyone should be happier.
You are right of course, but since we are talking in the context of successful founders, I figured the relatively small exemption wasn't that important.
"in just a few generations". One generation with an inheritance tax.

With a land tax many wouldn't get rich in the first place, let's address the root cause.
Thanks but it only shows the first part of it.
+1 to https://goatcounter.com/ o use it for my personal blog https://dannysalzman.com . This is a good reminder to donate.
I mean, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychic_detective#In_the_Unite...
Yeah it has changed a lot last years and definitely a different world than Tampa or Clearwater in terms of traffic and culture options
Yep, there was no income tax till 1913.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_taxation_in_the_Uni...
Do you have any case history supporting this interpretation of copyright law?

While it is true that copyright protects the right to create derivative works, that is, in practice, usually applied to creating such derivative works and distributing them. Otherwise, scribbling with a pen on a book you bought would be a copyright violation.

Similarly, while technically running a program requires copying it into memory (and thus requires a license), no court in this day and age is likely to rule that running software which was acquired legally, but which does not come with a license to run it, is a copyright violation.
Both, given that 80% of most JVM implementations are Java as well.
>I think JetBrains thinks too much of themselves, fueled with Google wind, they are now trying to turn Kotlin into a platform of their own

Given that you champion so many niche (and often commercial) languages/platforms with 1/1000th the devs and reach, isn't this a little contradictory?

>and as proven by Kotlin/Native, their expertise is really just making IDEs.

What exactly did "Kotlin/Native" has proven and in what way?
Would awstats meet this criteria? Not PHP but even simpler. I have data from it going back to 2006 (maybe 2002 if I dig up backups), which is a lot of fun.

https://www.awstats.org/
Early Startup Employees and Company Growth
> I can't see many people that have already accrued personal wealth of $50M but choose to keep working suddenly being turned off because of a wealth tax.

That's not the argument. If you accrue a wealth of $50M because you own half of your $100M company (or 100% of your $50M company), then a wealth tax will — over time — force you to give up ownership in your own company.

An income tax or a capital gains tax on the other hand, has the effect that you describe: if you already have $50M, then any tax on more money than could possibly have close to 0 negative impact on productivity.
That effect would make startups more attractive. But it would be completely cancelled by a countervailing effect: the wealth tax strongly incentives liquid investments. Which of course heavily penalizes investing in startups as they're small, speculative privately-held, hard-to-value companies.

Currently investment is only taxed on a "realized basis". No tax bill is due until the investor realizes a cash profit, either by receiving a dividend or harvesting capital gains on sale of the asset. In contrast a wealth tax is assessed every year, regardless of whether the investor has actually earned any actual income.

Under current tax law, an investor is not penalized for continuing to hold a high-value asset. In contrast under a wealth tax regime, an investor would be forced to sell some portion of his portfolio every year just to pay his tax bill. That heavily favors large, liquid, public companies over startups. Selling a million dollars of Amazon shares is as easy as pressing a button. Selling a million dollars of a Series-A startup, especially at a fair price, is really hard.

This would especially impact early-stage employees, who usually hold a very high fraction of their net worth in their stock options. At least VC investors usually have other holdings that they could liquidate to pay their annual wealth tax.

Imagine you own 20% of a company with a $50 million valuation. On paper, you're a deca-millionaire. But in reality you could easily have an overdrawn checking account. How do you get your hands on $100k in cash to pay your tax bill? There's no real market to sell your shares, and very likely you can't even do so without board approval. You could borrow the money, but if the company fails, you're now left with huge debt and worthless equity.

In all likelihood a wealth tax would pretty much destroy the Silicon Valley startup ecosystem. Or at least remake it into something totally unrecognizable.
Apple allows bullies to shut down my app
After having my app in the App Store for years, Apple took it down because of a couple of false complaints. Apple hasn't said that the app breaks any rules, just that all complaints must be resolved "to the satisfaction of the complainant."

It's insane that Apple gives this kind of power to a few people. I don't think Apple has even really read the complaints or looked into the app at all.

I have written an open letter to Tim Cook www.copymethat.com/open-letter-tim-cook/ that explains everything as well as a tweet twitter.com/copymethat/status/1295418273065046016/.

I'd love the support of app developers who think this is not OK behavior from Apple. Please reply to the tweet.
The problem is that most replication setups will replicate deletes (and other modifications) as well. So if misbehaving software deletes (or corrupts) things, those deletes (or corruptions) will be replicated, and the replication does not give you a way to actually recover from a mistaken delete.
There are 1001 loopholes. They should all be closed just like they are for earned income...
I don't think he forgot; he's being intentionally misleading.

What about dividends? Starting another company? Working as a CEO or board member?

The article has a terrible foundation because he's intentionally misleading the reader.
See also: Elton John
Of course I updated my OP.
Here is an article that directly contradicts your assert. It discusses how congress promised to only tax the really rich and then through drift and power grab we’re all paying taxes. https://soundmindinvesting.com/articles/view/promises-made-p...
Best SaaS Marketing Examples of 2020
I disagree with a wealth tax, but for a completely different reason[1]: it's very hard to value assets and any attempt to do so will lead to weird distortions of the market.

Let's say I'm a billionaire looking to avoid paying higher taxes. Well, first thing I'll do is avoid having my money in public stocks, because those are inherently easy to value. So I'll try to keep my money in private investments and then hire plenty of accountants and lawyers to argue that those private investments are worth as little as possible.

If I really want to get crafty, I go out and buy hard-to-value assets like paintings and Romanian forest land. Valuing a company with cash flow is hard enough, but certainly my team of experts can find a way to say that I vastly overpaid on my new picasso and that it's now worth much much less (even if that's not true). And in any case, are we really gonna have tax assessors enter people's homes to evaluate their art collections? And if not, what's to stop me from claiming that the painting got damaged and isn't worth much anymore?

To take another example, let's use WeWork as an example. At it's height, WeWork was "valued" at $47 billion. That means that Adam Neumann, as 30% owner, was "worth" ~$16 billion. With a 1% wealth tax, he'd owe $160M in taxes on a valuation that was probably 10x higher than reality. Of course, in a world with wealth taxes, you'd always find a way to structure a deal so that you can effectively claim that it's worth less, but the point is that any wealth tax is inevitably going to be unfairly applied because of the shenanigans some people will go to to pretend that their wealth is worth much less.

[1] I'm not inherently against higher taxes on the wealthy, particularly estate/inheritance taxes, but I do want to see them applied reasonably.