skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This type of article comes up from time to time, and is generally wrong on many points.

* Corporate Labs are not for primary research, at least in the United States. In the U.S., any primary research is done at universities, developed from research to prototype and patent at NASA, and then licensed to a U.S. company to go to product. For non-primary research, prototypes are developed by corporations via grants from government agencies.

* Bell Labs, before AT&T monopoloy breakup, was a special business case. Its funding existed in a game of legislation maneuvering. It is not an exemplar.

* Think of labs as "tier 5 tech support, when the engineers are stumped".

Most labs are holding areas for smart people to solve sudden business problems. For those who read the famous analysis of criticality accidents in non-military settings, you need some smart folk hanging around to prevent disasters.

For example, Sun Labs had people working (forever) on some hopeful breakthrough. Howard Davidson, a failure engineer, was pulled off task when server boxes started breaking (paper washers being glued in manufacturing) or card connections started failing (silver substituted for gold). These were high impact problems not solvable by line engineers.

Similarly Ricoh Labs had a day when everyone was pulled off to disassemble a large machine and figure out a feeding problem that had a hard solution. Intel keeps materials PhDs in the fab areas just in case something comes up that would slow throughput.

* Many labs have reputations no longer deserved. I worked at PARC and found some teams made magic and others made bloat. Look at the short term results, meaning the past decade, to rate a lab.
Unicomp sells APL keycaps...and the good type of 90’s keyboards.

https://www.pckeyboard.com/page/product/USAPLSET
If your 3rd party storage provider plays any role in your encryption strategy then I would suggest that you’re probably doing it wrong. Data should be encrypted before it leaves your world and not decrypted until it comes home. That way, I don’t care a whit what they do to my data so long as it’s there when I ask for it back.
What does a legal firm want with a social media company?
Show HN: Next-gen sweetener that removes willpower from healthy eating
Hello HN! Palate Pal is a next-generation natural sweetener that not only sweetens foods, but also enhances flavor. It doesn't have any bitter/"chemical" aftertaste like all other alternative sweeteners and also a single serving will last you 30-60 minutes REGARDLESS of how much food you eat with it.

It is made from miracle fruit. This fruit has been used for centuries by tribes in Western Africa to make their food more delicious. It contains a protein that safely and temporarily binds to your tastebuds to make sour foods taste sweet as well as remove unpleasant bitter and tart flavors. For instance, bite into a lemon and it will taste like lemonade. It allows you to discover flavors previously masked by those unpleasant tastes. A strawberry tastes even more "strawberry" and a plain greek yogurt now tastes much more creamy.

It is the first miracle fruit product that is convenient for daily use. Whereas competing products take 5-10 minutes to dissolve, mine takes 10 seconds to dissolve and contains only NATURAL ingredients. I believe miracle fruit has the potential to take willpower out of the equation of a healthy diet by making nutritious foods taste as indulgent as the junk foods that are otherwise killing us. No one has the patience to wait 5 minutes in the morning while they are rushing to school or work, so I knew this is what needed to be changed in order for miracle berry to go mainstream.

Please check out my website for more information and demos. Use the code "HN" at checkout for 10% off.

Feel free to ask me anything!
Love this! Curious, is this a California company or somewhere in flyover country? (I see this style often in Texas companies)
Planet Labs already has full coverage of the Earth, and with the latest SkySat (another 3 launched earlier today) they will have the ability to image the same point on earth 12x a day.

I think it's very unlikely that the USA and maybe others don't have this capability already.
Your absolutist statements ("based on nothing but emotion and ideology") do nothing but betray your own ignorance.

As an American living in Switzerland, a "good policy" (whatever that means) here has resulted in: 1) no capital gains tax, nor any capital losses and certainly no carryover loss shenanigans but 2) using a wealth tax in lieu of capital gains tax to collect any sort of tax on those who have presumably been using their capital to beget more capital.

Switzerland does not have any flight of capital, still actively is sought after for parking wealth (which is actually an economy-distorting problem as foreign investors seek to buy stable assets in the Swiss market), and definitely still has an ultra-rich class residing here or moving here.

So, if you thought wealth tax alone was bad policy, how does wealth tax plus removing everything-capital-gains (especially the carryover losses which the current US President likes to excessively utilize) sound as effective policy?
> That amount is different for every kind of business.

Yes it is, but we could define it algorithmically. Perhaps 5x the median of the last 5 years of operational expense? That would essentally say "you can run with no revenue for 5 years on this pile of cash, that's enough of a rainy day fund."

> Furthermore, putting cash into the market by force is basically just inflation isn't it?

No, you are perhaps thinking about "printing" money. Which is that money is injected into the economy instead of having it being generated by the economy.
$a is arbitrary. It doesn't matter how you arrived at it. As long as you provide a reasonable assessment to the IRS,
pg's original point (which you objected to) is completely correct: an f% wealth tax is an f% seizure of your shares.

And if you object that you can just lowball that assessment; well yes, and by the way you've just conceded nearly every point made by opponents of the wealth tax.
Powershell.

It's like telling normal users "just apt-get."
I think it comes down to accessibility. Requiring users to memorize a second keyboard layout is very demanding.
Same history.

You can take this approach further with Temporary Containers, where each tab is isolated from the rest e.g. if domains differ.

It's excellent for privacy.
There are two paths to compliance with GDPR.

Option 1: Accept that you're collecting Personal Data, and satisfy the obligations GDPR places on that. This means disclosing the use of analytics in your privacy policy (what data's being collected & why), listing retention periods, and figuring out how to satisfy requests like Access or Deletion (which may include "we can't identify you in the data we previously collected).

Option 2 is to "comply" with GDPR by finding a loophole that it technically doesn't count.

The Option 2 approach is more common when dealing with American data privacy laws. It doesn't work out so well with GDPR. It's very difficult to not be processing personal data at some point. Even if you fully anonymize your data before doing any non-trivial processing, the anonymization itself is still covered by GDPR. Which means you need to include it your privacy policy and provide opt-out.

It's also high-risk. If a court decides that you didn't quite thread the needle through the loophole in their country and GDPR therefore applies in full, then you haven't done any of the compliance groundwork.

For GDPR compliance, I would be much more inclined to trust a tool that describes how to opt users out of tracking than one that claims they're immune from obligations to opt-out.

As another commenter mentions, the ePrivacy Directive is a whole different kettle of fish. Strong consent needed to read or write any data not strictly necessary to provide the services requested by the user. That law should get updated with more sanity soon... it's been that way for a few years now.
> Yes it is, but we could define it algorithmically. Perhaps 5x the median of the last 5 years of operational expense? That would essentially say "you can run with no revenue for 5 years on this pile of cash, that's enough of a rainy day fund."

This is completely inadequate, and directly hurts the productivity of business (if for no other reason than forcing companies to account for it).

> No, you are perhaps thinking about "printing" money. Which is that money is injected into the economy instead of having it being generated by the economy.

Stagnant cash deflates the currency directly, like bitcoin on hard drives in the dump, or sunken pirate gold.
AmazonBasics is no better, they just slap the Amazon brand onto cheaply manufactured goods with no quality control. For instance, the sponsored AmazonBasics cable for the search "USB to USB C" [1] is an extreme fire hazard due to non-compliance with the USB-C spec, as demonstrated by some reviewers.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/AmazonBasics-Type-C-USB-Male-Cable/dp...
A lot of people forget just how young Palmer Lucky is.

I absolutely believe his post here. He was young and naive and believed the lies from the Facebook executives. Completely understandable and I hope this doesn't make people think he's a liar.
Racket uses λ for “lambda” and it’s pretty common in Racket code.
So every aliased used in the internet.
Having an effect is different from being able to sell a product based on that effect. For regulated fields like pharmacy, the FDA regulatory approval test requires proving efficacy against a placebo. A doctor may (under certain specific circumstances) treat a patient using a placebo (because medicine's aim is to do whatever that is necessary to alleviate the problem or reduce suffering, it is different from pure biological natural sciences/pharmacy where inferences must be backed up by scientific theory and validated by empirical evidence) but it does not necessarily mean that a placebo can be sold/marketed as a cure.
I was absolutely coding exactly the same pet project. This one is so much better than mine!

Kudos. Very good job.
Do you power cycle the disks during regular operations?

There is a failure mode in disks which can be modelled as something fails on the drive, but it continues to work fine for maybe months or years until the next power cycle, upon which it then won't work.

Obviously that's a problem for redundancy schemes because you think you have plenty of redundancy till there is a power outage and suddenly loads of drives fail at once.

I have never seen any of your reports measuring or reporting on these 'fail after power cycle' events, which is surprising.
That is true. And yet there aren't many good alternatives to voting if we want a free society.

This is one of the reasons why you have to lower the cost of voting as much as possible - in terms of time, money, and hassle - if you want broader participation.
>having a fundamental patent on it exposed the Bell System to great anti-trust scrutiny

I don't understand how this follows, having fundamental patents should lead to the breakup of basically every large US company by the government by this logic.

AT&T licensed the transistor to a number of companies, so even if the Bell system didn't have a use for the device (it did in fact, in order to reduce the size of telephone exchanges) so they derived revenue from the invention. How this translates into a 'disaster' for the Bell System is unclear since it was eventually broken up because of the decision that long distance and local service should be different markets long after the patent on the transistor had expired.
I completely agree with your assessment, except... Palmer was a kid and they just made him a multimillionaire. There’s no way he was in a headspace to rationally evaluate anything, let alone evaluate the long term weaseliness of a large corporation.
Absolutely. See Fantasque for example.
Don't people realize they're complaining at a billionare and have basically no leverage at all? This backlash should have come BEFORE Palmer got PAID, not YEARS LATER. I don't think Palmer even goes on reddit anymore.
Of course all "developed" countries (i.e. countries with the high levels of education, health, and safety that can support development of high-margin industries) will institute a wealth tax. And, for the lucky ones that thrive without one, they'll eventually adopt it, too.
There is a good recent conversation with Nora Bateson on the Team Human podcast.
Ask HN: Would you mentor a beginner dev?
Are you currently mentoring? If not, would you see value in spending 30 mins or 1 hour per week dedicated to helping a qualified, passionate beginner dev make the right choices to advance their career?

I have noticed beginner after beginner get completely stuck on advancing their side projects, wind up in tutorial hell, and ultimately feel hopeless when it comes to pursuing this profession.

I am curious if there would be enthusiasm from the side of experienced developers to offer mentorship and give back to the community in this fashion.
That's a non sequitur and your viewpoint is vindictive, uncharitable, and unreasonable.

Palmer Luckey was in his very early 20s and had never been involved in an acquisition before. He acknowledged his mistake and his explanation makes complete sense. Even much more experienced people are prone to making this kind of mistake in the honeymoon period of an acquisition.
I don't see why. There's a huge body of work that shows that taxing wealth versus capital income is likely to increase productvity while reducing income inequality, which is a hug source of our current economic problems and polarization: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3454385. Two MIT economists just won a Nobel prize for showing the benefits not just in a developed economy but globally.
Yeah I mean for $1 I expect a shed without running water but I expect most of the cheapness to be due to high fixed costs and low demand, e.g. because of a non-existent job market.

Now that tons of people with good tech jobs can work from almost anywhere, I expect some of these remote locations to become quite poopular. I wouldn't mind spending summers in a shed in a remote part of Italy, for example.
It seems to me we have only solved one part of the puzzle. Solved is possibly too strong a word, but the basic method seems to be to take a guess at what sort of network works best (flat / rrn / convolution / ltsm), throw a lot of data at it and with luck you get a good result. Sometimes as happened with AlphaZero a better result than the planet has seen to from man or machine to date. I suspect we have a fair bit to learn on the "best network design for a particular task" front, but it looks like that will happen over time.

I don't think that's too different to how nature does it in worms, as you say. However, our brains also have a different method of operation. We can see something just once, and learn from it. The small child scalds herself on the room heater, and never goes near it again.

So the child has learnt from a single example. We have no idea how to do that. At some level it's probably a complex mechanism that involves memorising it, replaying the memory over and over again till, as you put it, the brain hits a satisfactory p-level. As far as I know no one has built such a mechanism yet. However, that's probably because even if you did build it, the fact remains the brain has learnt from a single example and we have no idea how to learn near perfectly from a single example. Let alone do as the child did and learn the lesson in the space of seconds or at most minutes.
This is some bullshit. I would blackhole whatever fucking API they are using... just limit the incoming, but allow outgoing so their ad networks begin counting it as a non-shown ad.
That doesn't explain what the OP said. How does the 1/4 non-nuclear solve it, and the 3/4 nuclear not?
That doesn’t make it a first amendment problem. There’s only one legal case where private property was ruled to be subject to the 1st amendment - a company town where even the roads and sidewalks were owned by the company.

In contrast, if you don’t want to use or get banned from facebook, you can still communicate via SMS/MMS, google chat, email, GnuSocial/ActivityPub, twitter, and dozens of other options.

Actually, banning companies from moderating is probably a first amendment problem in the opposite direction - you’re forcing them to associate with you.
Atomic Tank survived a nuclear test, then went to war (2014)
Good point, that being said market pressure can sometimes influence that.

Sonos was a hair short of bricking their old devices a few months ago, then backtracked after getting a lot of fire from their customers.

I'm wondering if this would be true for larger companies / acquisitions though. Would they have done the same if purchased by Google or Facebook?
Agreed, saying it's a one to one alternative to Google Analytics is probably a misnomer. I think a lot of people, myself included, used GA because there were no simpler alternatives and better overkill than nothing.
60% of Americans agree that high coronavirus case numbers mean virus spreading
My Panasonic smart TV used to have an app for Hulu. It doesn't anymore. Same for a bunch of other apps. The app list is full of holes now.
Millionaires? Not even in the ballpark of the group of people we're talking about here.

Also, US$1M is not what it used to be (even though it's more than most people will earn in 20 years).
I believe those are the "preferred shares" that the founder in the article declined to offer to the investor protagonist.
Great, there is a phone for you. It's based on Android.
They got bailed out due to lack of savings, but it doesn't mean the savings needed to be in cash. The issue took months to resolve - enough to take money out of various investments.
Word. Graham jumped the shark quite a few essays ago. He's veered quite far from his "Hackers and Painters", circa 2004.
(Shrug) They're dead, and don't need their stuff back. I'm not.
I imagine there could be more spent on improving the condition of the roads, public housing and health provisions, school budgets could be larger, any number of things.

I don't imagine tax take would double, however many billionaires got fleeced, but the premise that the government would necessarily be worse at disbursing the funds than private individuals is laughable.
Inflation was not intentionally invented as a tax. It is a characteristic of a monetary economy. Economists prefer it to deflation because it deflation is worse, but that doesn't mean that we invented inflation on purpose as some kind of social engineering tool.
Basic research is one of the riskiest aspects though. It is much easier to justify internal research on a product where basic research shows that it works and suggests it will scale. MUCH harder when it is a moonshot. You'll notice there's a difference in capital between companies that do the former vs the latter.
Search for XPRA.
It makes sense... we've sold our data for the ability to tell 'Alexa set a timer'
You can set the DNS on the TV to NextDNS to block the ads and tracking, so you can use the internet again.
Lump-sum tax only applies to foreigners, not Swiss nationals. Swiss wealth tax might be somewhat leaky, but still accounts for a non-trivial amount of tax revenue. https://voxeu.org/article/wealth-taxation-swiss-experience

I'm aware of Swiss taxation differences between different cantons, as well as the ability to negotiate your taxes. The OP mentioned wealth tax in Europe and my comment was in reference to that.

I'm personally not sure wealth tax is the best way to tax capital, but I wouldn't rule it out either.

I must have hit a nerve to warrant accusation of ignorance.
It's not that simple, and I hate it when it's inconsistent.

For example, even in the US, courts have established that Twitter is a public forum with respect to what politicians (such as Trump) say. But do other people get such protections?

In my country, Romania, the supreme court declared that Facebook is a public space, so if you say something like "the police can blow me" you'll get a letter from the police telling you so show up at the station so that they can fine you (swearing is illegal in Romania).

But Facebook can take down something I can say in public, meaning I'm not allowed free speech. It's not fair that I suffer all the consequences of a "public space", but none of the rights.
They're all interconnected and in no specific order.

1. Water - Access to clean, safe water is an increasing concern in some highly populated areas. We will see a serious water issue in the US plains in 30 years, jeopardizing agriculture in that area.

2. Food - Currently we produce enough food but it's not evenly distributed. We also have some concerns over sustainability and environmental impact. Estimates say we can feed 8-12 billion people depending on advances in technology.

3. Waste Management - Feces and trash are a major concern. Gates is sponsoring research on toilets that don't require much water and don't require expensive treatment plants. Composting toilets could save a lot of water and possibly allow for cheaper, more water efficient greywater systems. This tech can also allow you to build in areas that skeptics were not traditionally possible. Compostable materials like cellophane, mycelium, or plastic substitute made from cassava or corn would help with the trash issue.

4. Housing/Land Management - I'm too dumb to explain this. Maybe Mark Twain said it best with his statement about buying land since they don't make it anymore. This especially plays into agricultural with the shrinking amount of land suitable for agriculture.

5. Education - No, I'm not talking about college. Basic logic/philosophy, personal finance, and civics need to be prioritized in school. To overcome the other issues we need a cohesive effort to make a meaningful impact.
I think part of it is a scale question--there are a number of discoveries that require a huge investment in both manpower and equipment. Beyond the work of corporate research labs, there are some discoveries that don't have immediate payoff--think for example general relativity. Yet, attempts to measure it led eventually to atomic clocks and to GPS.
Stability is one thing. But super rich like growth opportunity even more.

Now what about you can grow your wealth a lot faster if some laws change, would it justify a lobby campaign? Stability is one, but favourable laws for super rich have been passed and are upheld for so long.

The fact that fines are not wealth and/or income dependent is a testimony to the dysfunction of democracy. The absolute fines implemented in most countries enable certain "high net worth individuals" to ignore fine all together.
Imagine they were so advanced that they had the ability to 3D-print really everything in high volumes from the quantum level up. From large scale building materials analog to our concrete and steel to metamaterials, isomers, Nano/Synbio, whatever.

What to do about the rat-race/treadmill?

Of course artificial scarcity by ubiquitous DRM embedded at quantum-level in absolutely everything!

Which after a while of missed payments self-destroys into ecologically safe mono-fractions.

Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, gone with the wind...

edit: or instead of missed payment a simple countdown/timeout, because why have old things at all?
I think social interaction is just us donning a series of different masks anyway, so the concept of authenticity seems to be point at something nebulous at best.

Am I less authentic when I’m on an antidepressant that helps me cope with life? Am I less authentic if I’m forcing myself to be polite to a coworker I don’t like? Am I more authentic when I’m alone and dancing to some song I like?

This reminds me of some content analysis research done on leaders. It basically splits the private life (journals, etc), public life (meetings, conversations) and the performative life (speeches, etc). I guess one could argue that the only time we approach authenticity is when speaking to ourselves...